# The Vatican as a World Power/Chapter 4

​TWO SWORDS
The Germans overpowered the weak Roman Empire, but the heart o that Empire, the Christian Church, in turn conquered the Germanic world. Gregory the Great, farseeing captain of his ship, had cast anchor far off in the British Isles, where his legates established them- selves firmly in a soil that was fertile and nourishing. Then he had carefully tried also to anneal the Prankish Christian kingdom more firmly to the Roman rule. Two hundred years after Gregory was laid to rest in the Vatican, Charlemagne erected his Roman palace next to St. Peter's; but on the tower of his redoubt in Aachen, there hovered a mighty eagle with gilded wings flung wide. This was reminiscent, it is true, of the eagles of the oriental sovereigns, of Job's eagle, of the eagle of the Roman Emperors, which according to Dante's image flew down into the tree of young Christianity and destroyed leaves and blossoms. But it was also like unto the eagle of the Evangelists, a symbol of power to behold the things of God and to ascend unto them. There followed (to use a more modern expression) the translatio im~ perii ad Francos the passing of the West Roman Imperial author- ity to the Franks, who were now to restore it and give it added vigour.
The New Eagle hovering over that northern city looked down on buildings ercted in the styles of the East and the South. The ro- tunda of the dome, Roman in conception and Byzantine in construc- tion, arched itself like a kind of Pantheon over relics of many saints of the One God. The city hall was copied from models in Constanti- nople; and everywhere pillars and blocks of marble taken from the ruins of Roman Trier, from Rome itself or from Ravenna, were em- ployed. But this new Empire which took over from the old its idea, its law, and many treasures of the mind, was not the same in so far as extent and territorial possessions were concerned. Ancient Rome had been divided into three parts Byzantine, Arabian, and Latino- Germanic. Proceeding from the last, a new correlation of energies could be effected round the ancient centre, the Rome of the Church. That which now arose and lasted for centuries despite all vicissitudes of temporal and spiritual power was the idea and the actual realiza- tion of a religious super-state. This had only one aim: the sancti-
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7 ​6 THE TWO SWORDS
fication o human existence. But in this aim there was necessarily latent a conflict between two elements: the world as it is, and the super-world which is to absorb the other, change it, and desecularize it. Therewith history was given a dramatic motif having no parallel. In the distance Scylla and Charybdis, dual dangers, threatened the "no" which is said to the world for the sake of the super-world, and the "no" that is spoken to the super-world as the deepest cause of all the unrest and the inner estrangement that seep into human life.
Naturally the originators of these great adventures of the eighth and ninth centuries could not see so far into the future. But their deeds were concatenated in rapid succession into a prelude crammed with meaning a prelude in which there are motifs that, however varied and repeated, have governed the whole subsequent history of Europe. That which remained the same throughout all rising and falling accents, that which merely developed, throughout all varia- tions, a form established at the beginning, was the Church. And the support upon which this persistent unity rested was the Roman See.
If one were asked to characterize the history of the Papacy from 600 to 900 in a few words, the answer would be: Islam, Byzantium, France, the German mission, the Lombards, the Italian people, the Roman no- bility. Not all of these implied good fortune for the cathedra Petri. But taken together they meant the rise of a power which found the winning of all the world and its greatness no longer profitable because it had suffered loss to its own soul.
About the rime of Gregory the Great's death, Mohammed saw in a vision the terrible power of God and heard on Mount Hera the sum- mons to be a prophet. Islam, feverishly driven on to carry out its boundless mission, first overthrew the neo-Persian kingdom of the Sassanids. Next it severed from Eastern Rome Palestine, Syria, Egypt and the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Then during the eighth century it reached out to northern Africa and Spain. Mo- hammed died in Modena during 632. A hundred years later, his Arabian followers invaded southern France. It was a tense moment in human history, for Christianity, Germanic and Roman culture were in the balance. Then Charles Martel, the "Hammer," and his Franks defeated the Mohammedans in the Battle of Tours. The greatest
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gain which a rescued Europe derived from this victory was a con- sciousness of unity, a consciousness which implied a summons to unite against the alien, and yet so related, world power. This it also was which, despite all the weakening relapses that followed, gave the spir- itual monarchy of the Papacy new strength and the chance to carry out more easily the plans to bring about Christian solidarity.
About this time Rome was involved in a complicated struggle be- tween varied forces. Though the Lombards had become Catholic, they had nevertheless twice taken the field against the Eternal City within ten years. In 729, Gregory the Second induced their king Liutprand to depart, but in 739 the Lombards sacked St. Peter's Ca- thedral. No help could be expected from Constantinople, for there the Iconoclasts had been in rebellion since 726 and Rome was strongly opposed to the Emperor's view of Iconoclasm. Then Gregory III, a Syrian, turned for help to Charles Martel. One urgent letter fol- lowed the other, but the Prankish king also would not help because Liutprand was his only ally in the new wars against the Arabs in the Provence. When Pope Zacharias ascended the throne during the year Charles died, he made some progress but could not reach a lasting peace with his assailants. Suddenly, however, Franconian policy needed the spiritual aid of Rome; and now everything on both sides of the Alps took a new turn.
Charles Martel had risen to the dignity of a royal major-domo in Austria, his part of the Empire; and the Prankish dominion had been extended over the Frisians, Saxons, Bavarians, Allemans and Aqui- tanians. Support came from the nobility from which Charles him- self had risen. Soon the real power no longer lay with the exhausted Merovingian dynasty but was in the hands of the major-domo. Nev- ertheless, the last shadow of this dynasty still called himself king when Charles MarteTs son Pepin took over the whole Empire after his co- heir and brother Carloman became a monk in 747 and renounced the throne. Who was the king? He who had the power or he who bore the name? Pepin was determined to rule and sent two ecclesias- tical prelates to Rome with these questions. Pope Zacharias, a Greek, a learned man, a strong mind, a person of noble distinction, was then in office. Throughout the decade of his reign (741^752) Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon missionary, proceeded with his reform of the Church
7 ​8 THE TWO SWORDS
within the Prankish realm. From the beginning this had stood only in loose relationship with Rome and had fallen a victim half to its own riches and half to the passions of the Merovingian dynasty or of the nobility. Charles Martel had helped to rid it of earthly goods by making presents to his vassals, but he had done nothing to free it from the pressure and whims of the state. Even Pepin, who had gone to school to the monks of Saint-Denis, considered himself elected the ruler of the Church, though he based his view on what he con- sidered the duties of a prince. Boniface and the Pope taught him otherwise. He was willing to listen (as was his brother Carloman, die lord of Austrasia) doubtless because he had seen for himself that only the Church could save the state from complete collapse. This Church could not be the Prankish Church as it was, since this had become no more than a function of the state and was therefore equally sick unto death, but only the full power of living religion as the Anglo- Saxons, acting hand in hand with Rome, were awakening it in the people. The reform passed from Carloman's German Austrasia to the region governed by Pepin. But Pepin seemed none too eager to welcome the new system. Though he asked the Pope countless ques- tions, he obeyed instructions sent from Rome only when they suited him. Meanwhile Pope Zacharias did not cease to insist that his in- structions be followed. If the work of building up the unified Ger- man Church under the leadership of Rome was to succeed, the power and the authority of the Lord of the Empire were needed.
The question which Pepin had originally sent to the Pope was supported by the nobles and the people, for this chieftain undertook nothing of importance without assurance of the people's support. It testifies to the high regard in which the Roman See was then held. The pioneer in the effort to restore Papal influence was Boniface, who was actuated by a profound faith in the Papacy and its divine origin. This faith he had brought with him to Europe from the British Isles. As a monk of the Order of Benedict, he belonged to the Anglo- Saxon Church which under Gregory the Great had again united itself most intimately with Rome, gradually overcoming that ancient Brit- ish individualism that had grown up during the time when England was cut off from the Empire by the Germanic invasions. Wynnfrith, for that was Boniface's original name, completed in more than thirty
SAINT ​BONIFACE 79
years of labour a task with which everyone is familiar. As a mis- sionary and organizer, he welded together the peoples that spoke the German language in national unity, and at the same time subordi- nated this unity to Rome. He rendered the greatest possible service to the Church and the peoples of his time: everything said to the contrary later on is mere idle talk. His work proceeded under the protection of Prankish rulers and Roman Popes, and so prepared the way for a union between Church and State and for the major trends of political and ecclesiastical history during the Latino-Germanic Mid- dle Ages. His genius suffered guidance, but he was also able to act as guide towards the city to which all roads lead. The Papacy never had an assistant to whom it owed more. To it he was a pupil, but also a teacher. He served the universal Church, but when he died his last words were in the English tongue. He was a master of politi- cal policy, but when the Frisian sword was lifted to deliver the death blow, the martyr Boniface held the New Testament above his head as a shield.
Pope Zacharias saw that the Church of the Franks had derived new strength from the reform. He was under pressure from the Lom- bards under Aistulf' s command, and he had sundered relations with the iconoclastic East. Accordingly he answered Pepin's question thus: the name "king" belongs to him who is able to be a king. The Prank- ish ruler now felt that his conscience was clean before God and the people. He termed himself a king Dei Gratia, by the grace of God, and was anointed by Boniface. The last Merovingian was sent off to a monastery.
After writing that answer Zacharias died, and now the Lombard danger reached its zenith. Aistulf occupied Ravenna, and his armies appeared outside Rome. Stephen II, a genuine man of the people, walked barefoot with the Cross in his hands at the head of a procession which prayed that the danger might be warded off. The Eastern Emperor was still the Pope's sovereign, and all the possessions of the Church lay within the territories of the old Empire. But the hour was at hand when Stephen had perforce to repeat Gregory Ill's sum- mons for aid. He entrusted a pilgrim with a letter in which he asked Pepin to send an ambassador across the Alps with a request that the Pope visit him. This Pepin did. Under Prankish protection, the
8o ​THE TWO SWORDS
Pope met Aistulf in Pavia and demanded that the lost territories be restored. The Lombard refused assent, but he dared not prevent Stephen from travelling farther. In midwinter the Pope reached Pon- thion, the Prankish encampment not far from the Marne. He re- quested and accepted protection from the Prankish king. Pepin made a promise in the form of a vow to St. Peter, to protect the Church and its rights. Two congresses, at which a certain amount of resist- ance from the nobles had to be overcome, brought into being the doc- ument incorporating the "Promise of Pepin." It stated that, in case of a victory over the Lombards, the Church would receive a free grant of the acquired territory, would be given dominion over the Duchy, would regain its patrimonies, and would not be obliged to surrender Rome. As protector of Italian territory, Pepin was now in a danger- ous relationship to his Imperial overlord. He received from the Pope the tide of Patricias Romantts, which implied an office in which there lay a temptation to become master of the Church after having been its protector. His new title confirmed the advantages and disadvan- tages Rome was destined to derive from the pact; for although this Prankish monarch kept his promise, made real the "Donation of Pepin" in two military campaigns, and therewith founded the Papal States, he was henceforth not only lord of the Franks but also su- preme master of Italy and co-director of ecclesiastical affairs. During 754, Stephen again anointed Pepin as well as his sons (among them the young Charlemagne), in the Church of Saint-Denis in Paris. Henceforth the Roman liturgy was to be followed at German masses; but on the other hand the Pope in Rome swore allegiance not only to St. Peter, but also to the Prankish king!
Pepin's declaration spoke of "giving back" not of "giving." This expression is surprising when one considers the actual facts. Never previously had the Roman See claimed to be the owner of the regions occupied by the Lombards. It is possible that the new Papal con- ception of a "state of St. Peter and of God's Holy Church" presup- posed a legendary basis for this new enlargement of power, such as we shall soon meet as the "Donation of Constantine." Yet it was not merely the Roman See's craving for an enlargement of its powers, or revival of ancient ambitions of the res publica Romanorum for which the Papacy (sole surviving organ of Roman national feeling) was the
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mouthpiece, that gave the Prankish king a basis in law for "restora- tion" when in 756 he concluded a second peace with the Lombards in Pavia, by which he became the patricius of a realm he far preferred to see in the hands of the Pope than in those of the Lombards or even of the Eastern Emperor.
This step toward separation from Byzantium just one more re- mained to be taken brought the Papacy everything else but free- dom, for Charlemagne followed Pepin. The son resembled the fa- ther in that he felt an urge toward universalism, toward transcending national boundaries; and he was like him also in fostering the idea that temporal power must be sanctioned by spiritual power. The holy oils of the Pope, whom he had ridden out to meet as a boy, had touched his young forehead in Saint-Denis. It mingled more deeply with his blood than the Popes may afterward have wished.
There is a basic religious trend in the political thinking of all times. Again and again in both East and West, philosophers and rulers seek to transform a policy of benevolence into a policy o redemption from the deepest causes of upheaval. The leadership of empires and states must not only make kings mighty or subjects happy and well fed. A feeling that all transitory things are mere symbols, a desire to dispose human affairs according to the Divine plan, sent Asiatics, Greeks and Romans on a quest for a practical politic of the highest kind the realization of an innermost world law believed and known to be good, and the attainment of dimly visualized possessions of unchanging value and permanence. From Isaias to Dante and on to Kant, all wise men and all kings worthy of their name have striven to give peace to the world. In this sequence of efforts, more or less spiritual in character, to order human society in consonance with eternity, there stand Au- gustus, Hadrian, Constantine and Justinian. There Charlemagne also stands. He was given to reflecting upon Augustine's books con- cerning the City of God; and when passages from them were read to him the words fell upon the receptive mind of a German whose race had from time immemorial attributed a sacred character to kingship. But whether or not he realized it, this magic, perhaps even mystical, conception of his dignity was in conflict with the sphere of the spirit- ual monarch of Rome the older ruler in the name of God, whose
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tide was incomparably better established and who had been deprived of nothing by his Lord save only evil and the sword.
But despite all specious reasons for assuming the contrary, Charle- magne was much more important to the Papacy than it was to him. When he took over the reigns of government, Roman factions were fighting for possession of the Holy See. It almost seemed a law of the time that the supernatural dignity of this much coveted office was to be demonstrated by weakening it in every temporal sense. In ac- cordance with Roman requests, Charlemagne sent bishops from his Prankish Empire to the Lateran Synod (769). Immediately the congress decided that henceforth only the clergy were to have the right to vote, and that no layman could be elected. As a consequence the ruler laid hands on everything on Italy and its Pope. Stephen III was greatly alarmed when he confronted a new union of the Prankish and Lombard dynasties. He protested in vain. In 770, Charle- magne was betrothed to the daughter of Desiderius. Therewith he forced the Pope to make a sham peace with the Lombard king, who was sure his new hopes for Italian possessions had the support of a strong faction in Rome. Then there followed a sudden change in the situa- tion which liberated the Papacy from the Lombards forever, but at the same time made it dependent upon the liberator. Charlemagne an- nulled his marriage and sent the young wife back to her father. De- siderius now tried to enkindle a rebellion in the Prankish territory of his mortal enemy. He sought to induce Pope Hadrian I to anoint with the oils of kingship the disinherited children of Charlemagne's brother, who together with their mother had found a place of refuge at the Lombard court. But in Rome he met the revenge of a Prankish faction whose leader he had blinded and put to death in order to gain a victory for the Lombard faction under Paul Asiarta. Pope Hadrian clung firmly to the policy of alliance with the Franks and reinforced this decison by turning over Asiarta to the courts, which condemned him to death on a charge of murder. Thereupon Desiderius occupied cities in the Papal territory and vowed that he would take Rome by storm.
Summoned by Hadrian, Charlemagne destroyed the tottering kingdom of Desiderius and proclaimed himself ruler o the Lombards. In 774 he concluded his victorious campaign with an Easter pilgrimage
CHARLEMAGNE ​83
to Rome. The frightened city opened its gates only after he had promised it security. There followed a day of rejoicing. He was welcomed with all the banners of the militia and the city organizations. Young people swarmed about him, carrying palms and olive branches. On the steps of St. Peter's Church, Pope and King met and embraced. The singing of Benedicts qui venit in nomine Domini filled the nave as they entered. A few days later the "Donation of Pepin" was re- affirmed in the basilica, and the deed incorporating it was signed by Charlemagne and laid at the grave of Peter. It gave the Pope no new advantage other than security, and even this took the form of con- firmation from the hand of him who was the master of what had been given. Though both parted good friends, this first expression of German romantic feeling for Rome implied as little concerning Charle- magne's relations to the Papacy as did his later visits and meetings with the Pope.
Everyone knows how he cleared a path for the Cross with his sword during the years that followed. This conqueror was a missionary and an educator. As a king he added steadily to the dominions of the Church, which seemed to this passionate friend of progress the supreme thought and the primal force behind everything done to strengthen either the Empire or the activities of the human mind. In the spirit of the ancient Prophets, he unearthed the ethical element in religion and therewith imbued the Romanism, of which he himself had so deep an experience, with German seriousness on German soil. On the other hand he bound the strong moral treasure of his Germans to the world of ecclesiastical symbols and laws, stemming the dangers of the trend ad intra (which Schiller terms a German trait) by es- tablishing religious dogma as the barrier to endless roaming amid the infinite.
Men's feelings had been dominated by the Christian message long before his time; and even in times of Merovingian worldliness men had wanted to feel the breath of the Church upon them in difficult hours. The dying had put on penitential robes after their final con- fessions, had asked to lie on beds of ashes, and had received the Eu- charist before "joining the wild army' 1 or riding "to the old company." But the kind of religion which Charlemagne spread in the wake of Willibrord and Wynnfrith was a greater moral force, was of a more
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lucid intellectual substance. Through the artists and scholars who lived at his court he fostered the work of the Carolingian renaissance, about which so many debates have been held. It was an attempt to make available to the present surviving remnants of antique culture. Undoubtedly it had a dash of pedantry, of awkward ceremoniousness before strange gods. It can be criticized for having prevented or at least staved off the birth and growth of a native, national culture. All this, however, is useless fault-finding with history, and obscures one's insight into the true mission of that epoch. Had it not been for the broad vision of a ruler who did not cease to be Franconian with his whole heart when he raised antique culture out of oblivion, there would have been no mediaeval age of German minsters, no second Renaissance, no culture at the French courts, no baroque art and no German clas- sicism. The alien Latin mind to which he played the nurse fostered the European universalism of the Church and therewith also the Euro- pean consciousness. Beyond that he strengthened the vision of the inner unity of culture when he placed it under the aegis of Christen- dom. Charlemagne must be given his full share of credit whenever after his time the lyre and the sword are in harmony and when both of them consort with the Cross. For him everything was so unques- tionably subordinate to the idea of the One Kingdom of God, whom all that is earthly must serve, that he was not conscious of a sharp conflict between the worldly and the spiritual. "The monks at his court also say without hesitation: it is immaterial for the salvation of a man whether he live in a monastery or in the world." It seems that many of his people were rendered happy by a feeling that they dwelt in the peace of a theocratically ordered existence. A poet of his day wrote that though elsewhere in the world men praised the ages of gold, everybody in the kingdom of the Franks held that the present was far superior to the past.
Charlemagne's kingdom was theocratic and it is in this sense that the position of its ruler must be understood. In his first edict he referred to himself as anointed through the grace of God; and these words possessed for him all the ancient significance. He knew that he was the leader of Christendom, not merely of his own people; and the theologians in his circle called him the new David, viceroy of God, or viceroy of Christ. He made the law of the Church the law of
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the realm. He required his subjects to swear an oath of allegiance to their ruler, in which at the same time they vowed to live a life ac- cording to God's commandments. Sternly and gently alike he im- posed his will as rector ecclesiee upon minds throughout his kingdom, and so provided for the education of clergy, the monks and people. His broad regulations for the conduct of the ecclesiastical and worldly estates formed a program binding his peoples to the divine law. There is, for example, his famous message of 789, which a thousand years before the proclamation of the rights of man by the Paris assembly, called itself a warning of love and looked upon kingship by the grace of God as a duty in which arrogance has no part. In this message Charlemagne termed himself the humble protector of the Church and the supporter of the Apostolic See in all things. In reality he regarded himself as the divinely appointed monarch of an Empire to which a theocratic authority of the Imperial Church gave the character of an ecclesiastical Empire. In this conception there was no room for a powerful, or even an independent Papacy. Charlemagne did not question the Roman primacy, indeed he saw in it the source and safe- guard of true doctrine. He clung strictly to the dogma of the Roman Church, made the divine service he attended conform more and more fully to the Roman model, and insisted upon a similar conformity in outward things, even to the kind of shoes his clergy wore. Yet in spite of this unconditional recognition of Rome as the religious norm, he beheld in the Pope merely the first among all the bishops the praying Moses, for whose sake God granted success to the conquering, law-giving arm of the Imperial master.
The Popes were forced to put up with not only the political su- premacy of the patricius in so far as the worldly possessions of the Roman See were concerned but also with what he desired in his capacity as sovereign within the Church. A conflict concerning images re- vealed the deep inner contradictions and the fragility of the new rela- tionship which had been established between Rome and the Empire of the Franks. It was a religious struggle fought out between two camps, but it was also a political struggle in which three powers clashed.
Emperor Leo III, the founder of the Isaurian dynasty, had gained a victory over the Mohammedan Saracens and then set about reforming his decaying Byzantine Empire. A tendency to look upon matters
86 ​ of the cult with a sensitive Semitic rigour appeared in reaction against the boundless, superstitious veneration of holy images, against which Gregory the Great had already warned the West. The Emperor, who was won over to this point of view, loosed a destructive wave of Iconoclasm, possibly because he wished to curry favour with his Iconoclastic Islamic neighbours. The consequence was that during the reign of his son, Constantine Copronymus, there followed a cruel persecution of the monastic opposition. It was not until the widowed regent, Irene, intervened that a temporary truce was established. Under her regency the Second General Council of Nice restored the Catholic rule in 787, and the veneration of images was again declared legitimate in the East.
At this Council two Roman legates also spoke in the name of Pope Hadrian. His predecessors had already defended the old custom against the East, fully conscious as they were that the Church of the West was gaining new political strength and that there was a general trend toward separation from Imperial territories so overburdened with taxes. But now decisions of the Council met with resistance from the Franks. Charlemagne, through his theologians, fought against the Eastern way of venerating religious images. The reason was not merely that wholly misleading translations of the documents set before him had given him to understand that not merely veneration, but actual worship of the images had been permitted. It was also and primarily an attitude of jealousy toward Byzantium as well as a goodly measure of annoyance at the role which the Pope had played in this matter. While Prankish ambassadors resided in Constantinople to promote the betrothal of Charlemagne's daughter to the son of Irene, preparations for the Council were under way. This circumstance and the fact that he was the powerful lord of Western Christianity sufficed to make him certain that he would be asked to share in the synod, which was of a universal character. But Irene did not extend an invitation to the Prankish Church, obviously because Pope Hadrian had sought to keep Charlemagne out. This and in all probability other incidents that had followed the engagement, induced Charlemagne to break it off and thereupon to adopt an openly hostile attitude towards Byzantium. When the Council announced its decisions, he answered with a statement of opposing views drawn up by his theologians. A ​CAROLINI 87
biting north wind blows through the pages of these Libri Carolini, Charlemagne demanded that the Pope repudiate a Council which, not having consulted him who by the grace of God was King of the Franks, ruler over Gaul, Germany, Italy and the neighbouring prov- inces, and to whom there had been entrusted the guidance of the Church through the stormy seas of this world, had thus gone utterly astray. There could be no doubt (the Libri said) , that the Franks were in agreement with the true teaching of the Roman Church, whose primacy they had always recognized; but the Greeks had deviated from the truth. The situation was ominously grave. Pope Hadrian, resorting to a moderate position, defended the Council against Charle- magne's attack and warded off his interference in the teaching office of the Church. But he himself weakened the force of his argument by making the quite improper suggestion that if the King so willed, he would nevertheless declare the Emperor a heretic if he refused to restore certain possessions of the Church. Charlemagne thus obtained the last word in this struggle, and he used it as a telling trump card against the Pope. Insisting upon his authority to guide the Church aright, he summoned a General Council of the West to Frankfort in 794. This repudiated what had been done at Nice and opposed to the decisions of the Greeks concerning which, of course, he was grievously in error new decisions by the Prankish Church.
Hadrian died during the following year. The coins which he had struck after Charlemagne's second visit to Rome in 781 as well as the new practice adopted by the Papal chancellery of reckoning years from the beginning of Charlemagne's reign, proved to the East that it had lost the battle of the images, the last test of strength between the Em- peror and the Church, and that the Prankish kingdom was now quite as powerful as the Byzantine realm. Soon the new Pope Leo III found out how wisely his predecessors had acted when they avoided a breach with the Franks. He sent the king a copy of the electoral returns together with a vow of loyalty, added the keys to the grave of Peter and the banner of Rome, and requested in return that Charle- magne send ambassadors to receive proofs of Rome's goodwill. Char- lemagne acceded and sent Leo gifts consisting of parts of the booty taken in the wars against the Avars. The Pope caused a new mosaic to be placed in the rectory of the Lateran Palace, portraying his con-
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ception of the harmony existing between the two powers. Above the niche picture depicting the sending of the apostles by the Master, one saw on the left hand Christ giving the keys to Peter, and the banner with the cross to Constantine. On the right hand, Peter was shown giving the kneeling Pope the pallium and the likewise kneeling Prankish king a pointed flag shaped like a lance. But soon afterward, during the spring of 799, a conspiracy organized by relatives of Hadrian brought Leo into dire straits. According to an ancient custom, he was on horseback at the head of the St. Mark's Day procession; and he was set upon by his enemies, who tore off his robes and dragged him away to a monastery. With the help of his companions he escaped by climbing down a rope and went back to St. Peter's. Worse than the attack itself was the reason advanced for it that the Pope had been guilty of adultery and perjury.
Leo fled to Charlemagne's court at Paderborn. There the whole incident was already known. Soon there also appeared legates of the attacking party. The King s circle held diverse opinions regarding what should be done. Some believed that the accused pontiff was innocent and others doubted it. But was it legitimate to sit in judg- ment over the Apostolic See? What Pope would be secure if Roman factions were allowed to dethrone a Pontiff they disliked? Would it not be best to induce Leo to retire quiedy? Or ought one to demand that the Pope swear an oath to prove his innocence, since the reproaches made against him were so grave and so specific? Charlemagne could not make up his mind and mistrusted both sides. He demanded that an investigation be made in Rome and sent the bishops and nobles who were to undertake that investigation back to the city with Leo. The inquiry could prove so little that the German judges refused to commit themselves. The leaders of the rebellion were not executed but were sent across the Alps to Charlemagne. Then he himself made the journey to the Eternal City during November of 800. Anxious to rescue the Pope, if that were possible, he presented him with the alternative of retiring or cleansing himself by swearing a solemn oath. Thereupon Leo vowed his innocence in the pulpit of St. Peter's, and this action was accepted as a vindication. The de- feated antagonists were condemned to death by Charlemagne, but he thereupon pardoned them. Thus he protected the highest office on
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earth from the gravest attacks that had been made upon it, transferred the moral responsibility for the solution of this dark affair to the person of the accused, treated the plaintiffs justly and mercifully alike, and stood before the humbled Pope as his judging sovereign.
On the same day, the 23d of December, monks of Jerusalem (where the Caliph of Bagdad now lorded it over the Christians) paid homage to the King of the Franks and in the name of the Patriarchs of Con- stantinople sent him a flag and the keys of Jerusalem and the holy places. Therewith the Church of the East requested the protection of the bulwark of all Christendom. What more did Charlemagne need to become all-powerful in lands professing the Christian name? Two days later the Pope surprised him with a Christmas gift just as he was rising from prayer at the grave of the Apostles: it was the Im- perial crown. The jubilant acclamation of the people was directed to this most pious Augustus, the great Emperor, whom God had crowned and who would bring peace. Before him Leo genuflected in homage, according to the Byzantine custom. Through this sudden occurrence the Roman-German Empire came into being.
We of the present do not know what caused the Pope to act thus or what role the ruler who was crowned played in the matter. There are witnesses who assert that Charlemagne had not wanted such a crown at all. It is usually said that neither Pope nor Emperor was accorded a status essentially different, and that die balance of power remained what it had been. That may be true, but the strongest force in history is not the mere event but the response which men make to that event. Though Charlemagne did not actually possess more or consider himself more after he had obtained the Imperial crown, Christendom as a whole received, because of that crown, a deeper con- ception of the dignity of its protector and a new reason for believing that the old Empire had been transferred to the Franks in accordance with the will of Providence. Certainly the Papacy gained whether the monarch did or not. The fact that the Pope acted as one who bestowed the crown surrounded him with an aura of supernal power regardless of whether the monarch was informed in advance of the coronation or whether it came as a surprise to him. In the eyes of the world the Papacy was now identified with the idea that the temporal power received its loftiest consecration and confirmation from the
9 ​o THE TWO SWORDS
spiritual power. Possibly the Pope did not act so subtly, but the fact remained that the Lateran mosaic which pictures the two powers kneeling in equal rank before Christ and Peter had already been ren- dered obsolete. Just a few days previous Leo had awaited the verdict of his judge. Now that judge was of lower rank than he.
As Emperor, Charlemagne continued to govern the Church as he had governed it when he was only a king. He brought to it a pros- perity so great that since his time the Papacy has seldom been able to achieve anything comparable. He ploughed the Roman field and sowed the seed of its future greatness. But the unification of powers which he assumed proved no unmingled blessing in this theocracy. By enlisting his clergy, particularly the prelates, for the business of the state on equal terms with the other officials, and by conferring on them especial rights and privileges, Charlemagne unwittingly paved the way for a worldliness that would seriously impair the social structure. Indeed the disease would have become incurable later, had there not been a Papacy not subservient to an Emperor.
Hardly had Charlemagne been laid in his grave than the Empire and the Imperial authority weakened in the hands of his quarrelling heirs. A party of spiritual and temporal nobles was gradually or- ganized on the basis of common conviction that only across the Alps was there a centre where the conception of universal unity remained alive amidst the all-surrounding decay. Another faction clung to the spirit of Charlemagne and bluntly opposed the Pope when he refused to do the Imperial bidding. But Rome gradually rose from its position of subservience; it had only drawn back in order to prepare for a resurgence soon to follow. The Popes who ruled during the first half of the ninth century were not great men but they were con- scious of the duties incumbent on their office.
In all probability the notorious document known as the "Donation of Constantine" dates from the first years of the reign of Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne by Hildegarde. It is a forgery which purports to be a document executed by Constantine the Great in favour of Pope Sylvester I and the Roman Church. It states that out of gratitude to the Pope, who had converted, baptized and healed him of the plague, the Emperor had confirmed the subservience of all the churches of the world, including the four Oriental Patriarchies,
THE " ​DONATION" OF CONSTANTINE 91
to the Roman See. It adds that he had given Sylvester and his suc- cessors the Lateran Palace, the City of Rome, Italy and indeed the whole of Europe. Furthermore he had granted Imperial privileges, insignia and honours to the Pope, and had conferred the senatorial dignity on the Roman clergy. According to Max Biichner, the spuri- ous document may have been fabricated by Prankish groups anxious to promote their own ends in Prankish politics when Louis met Pope Stephen IV at Rheims, though Rome and the Papacy may also have had a hand in the matter. The effect of the "Donation" on world history is not affected by the multiform attacks made by anti-curialistic writers on its validity as law. The Popes themselves began to regard it as a basis for extensive claims to power only after the middle of the eleventh century. Its importance had by no means ceased when secular and religious scholars of the fifteenth century realized that the document was a forgery, executed long after Constantine's time.
After the Empire was divided into three kingdoms by the Treaty of Verdun (843), the Papacy had a clear path to a stronger position above the ruins of the once proud imperial unity. The mission to the Swedes, Danes and Slavs was begun. In order to ward off maraud- ing bands of Saracens who in 846 pillaged the basilicas outside the walls of Rome, Leo IV fortified the Vatican Quarter and himself assisted in the destruction of the enemy fleet. It was symbolic of the restoration of the spiritual power to its former status when, in official correspondence, this same Pope used the Papal reckoning of dates side by side with the Imperial reckoning. But though the sense of independence was stronger in Rome, it was contemporaneous with the growth of ambition of the prelatical party in Western France, where the episcopacy was freeing itself from the bonds of the state establish- ment. A juridical situation which made it far too completely con- tingent upon local authorities, metropolitan sees and national synods, seemed unendurable to this group. Yet it could attain independence only if a new legal foundation was established. Lacking any other recourse, the clergy undertook in its own right to amend die Prankish canon law. About 850 canonists of Rheims collected legal sources which professed to be the work of the great Isidore of Seville, an encyclopedic scholar of the seventh century. These "Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore," which were regarded as genuine up until the fifteenth
92 ​THE TWO SWORDS
century, are as a matter of fact fraudulent and contain genuine, doc- tored and invented sources. From the beginning it ?vas not meant to be an enterprise beneficial to the Papacy; it was rather designed to strengthen episcopal authority. Yet its most definite characteristic was a tendency to bind the offices of the Church more closely to the Roman See, and so it became a weapon upon which the Papal Primacy heavily relied.
The counter-attack of the universal Church against the German Im- perial Church was led by Pope Nicholas I. He was one of the great Popes, and every subsequent illustrious pontiff has borne some of the features of this veritable ruler. Like Leo I and Gregory I, he combined personal superiority with the majesty of office. The devotion of his fiery soul to his cause was just as uncompromising as his belief in the sacredness of that cause. He led a life of strict purity, and the moral nobility of his official acts would have remained unquestioned if he had never succumbed to the temptation or the tragic necessity that lies in all vigorous political action. This is the temptation to achieve holy purposes through less holy means; and the Pope suc- cumbed to it when he declared that the principles contained in Pseudo- Isidore were ancient laws preserved in Roman archives. It is, of course, true that the collection mingled truth with falsehood. He needed these decretals when the dirty romance of Lothar I V's marriage- bargain revealed the great evils of a situation in which authority lay neither with the Church nor with the state because each had suc- cumbed to the other and to the lowest instincts.
From youth Lothar had been enamoured of Walrada, and had had children by her. But when he ascended the throne, he wedded Thict- berga because he hoped to attain some political advantage through her brother, the corrupt priestly Count Hucbert of St. Maurice, who ruled over the Rhone valley. After a year she had still borne him no child and so he cast her off, accusing her of having committed sodomy with her brother. The trial of this defenseless creature saw princes and prelates, perjurers and receivers of bribes, vie with one another in meanness. It was a long series of torments for the victim of Lothar, who was now once more living with Walrada. The Queen turned
NICHOLAS ​I 93
to the Pope for aid; a synod of Lorraine bishops had shielded the adulterer and .sanctioned his marriage with Walrada, who became queen. Lothar also tried to win Nicholas over to his side with fawn- ing letters; and his brother, Emperor Louis, threatened Rome with an army. The only powerful defender of the inviolability of Thiet- berga's marriage was Hinkmar, Archbishop of Rheims and one of the illustrious men of the time. In all other respects a deep gulf lay be- tween the Pope and this protagonist of an episcopacy welded to the state. In one tract he spoke in behalf of the persecuted queen, and also referred to Rome as the seat of a judge who ranked above archbishops and kings. And indeed Nicholas was not to be cowed by royal threats. He condemned the dual marriage as a crime and excom- municated the bishops involved in the affair from their offices, their priestly functions and the Church. Once again Lothar was united with Thietberga, and again he broke the troth. Then the Pope im- posed the ban on Walrada, forbade the broken-hearted queen to give way to her rival, and threatened to excommunicate the guilty tor- mentors. It is true that he died before the close of what he himself termed "this sad drama*'; but his granite-like firmness had won a moral victory for the Papacy over the state church, and had sealed the triumph of a religious ideal over the demands of the flesh.
All the actions of this inflexible Pontiff were based upon a profound desire to transform the Imperial Church into a Papal Church. Whether he fought against Hinkmar of Rheims as the exponent of Gallican ecclesiastical individualism, whether he banned die Arch- bishop of Ravenna for having been guilty of rude excesses, or whether in a Byzantium long since the prey of jealousy he repelled the base flattery of Patriarch Photius, so anxious to secure the recognition of Rome, and removed his own papal legates from office for having taken bribes the point was always that even in his most daring utterances he was very much in earnest. He realized that he must be the con- science of his time, and literally made himself that conscience. To him the Papacy was the representative of God on earth, the founda- tion and norm of all order in human society. The Pope could, he held, judge all men, but could be judged by none save God, who would judge him more sternly than the rest. It is no wondet that his own
94 ​THE TWO SWORDS
rime said of him: since the days of St. Gregory there had been no Pope like this. He issued commands to kings and tyrants as if he were the master of all the world.
But the building he erected soon began to totter, and the fall thereof was great.
PETER