# The Vatican as a World Power/Chapter 7

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The text in St. Luke which reads, "See Lord, here are two swords,** had long ago been interpreted as a divine counsel that the sword of worldly power was to serve the Church. The Papacy continued to think and act in the spirit of Hildebrand's testament, which it wished to fulfil to the last letter by making real what had long been an ideal. Then in 1300 the too tautly drawn bow was broken. In a sense one can say that the time which intervened between the Concordat of Worms and this catastrophe was the period of a triumphant Papal temporal power. But with deeper justice one can term it the hour when, voluntarily or otherwise, the modern spirit was severed from the spirit of the Papacy. The word "mediaeval" is vulgarly associated with any number of things, but it cannot, if one looks more deeply, obscure the truth that the supposed unity of the Middle Ages was full of vivid contradictions and gaping breaches. On this stage there is missing no sharp conflict between intellects, no character in the wholly natural drama born of the fact that men are of different kinds, no form of social organization. Here are all the ideas which, it would seem, permanently recur to the human race. In the midst of the conflict between time and eternity, which involves the innermost rhythm of the life of man wrestling both with himself and the world about him, the Papacy, too, battles with the Demon whose three temptations could not prevail over the Master but who could so weaken even that one of His disciples who had been elected Rock of the Church that three times he denied Him in the night.
The first Crusade ended victoriously. The conquest of the Eastern coast lands of the Mediterranean had broadened the field of history and had given the Empire greater power and a new reason for being. The people looked upon themselves as the constituents of Christendom as a mystically formed whole, the unity of which also demanded unified leadership. Pope or Emperor: which was to be the master? No answer had been given by the Concordat of Worms. That had opened up a gap in the German monarchical authority, but at the same
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rime had not wholly liberated the troops of the Church. The tragic dissonance between the two bearers o one theocratic state idea lived on. But a third element slowly presented itself and was destined to give the struggle another meaning.
Nationalistic powers, the communes eager for self-rule, lay culture, and theories of the autonomous state, were directed just as much against the Empire (which, having once more been confirmed in its rights, was likewise anxious to confirm its power as well) as against the Gregorian Papacy * (which by reason of the fact that it was both a Civitas Dei and a state owning worldly possessions was tending toward temporal rule) . Present also was the father of all change not merely the crude stroke and counter-stroke of armed forces, but also the intellectual warfare of right against right. Legality in the juridical sense likewise increased the tension incident to the decisive struggle be- tween these great forces. The Roman science of law, resurrected in Bologna, drew the attention of both sides to the ancient imperittm; and in this city a new codification and exigesis of ecclesiastical law began to be differentiated from theology as an independent science. Those who looked back upon the past could also, it is true, suppose that the polis of antiquity and the republic of a newer time desirous of innovation were commendable forms of the common life. If now in the temporal sphere Empire and nationalistic spirit imperium and city state struggled for control of the future, the fact remained that the Church reposed upon a social form decreed by its own law; and therefore it did not need to feel that its innate significance as the community of the Kingdom of God would suffer, regardless of what happened in the world around. Indeed the Church was really threatened only by the serious danger that she would lose sight of her real destiny. Her religious world-dominion was not based upon a political world rule by the Bishop of Rome, but on guidance from a Papacy which would not desert the Church however politically strong or weak. If one were now to ask whether the political world dominion of the Popes has been beneficial to mankind, one could answer only if one were able to look across time and space and see history which to the human eye is always an incomplete happening as a perfect whole. That the Papacy erred is proved sufficiently by the voices of con- temporaries who drew from their own Christian strength the right to
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issue warnings against estrangement from the innermost meaning and spirit of the Church.
The freedom of the clergy, the liberation of the bishops from im- plication in the political aspects of their benefices, constantly remained the imperative concern of the Curia. In addition it struggled to free its celibate vassals from dependence on secular justice and from the obliga- tion to pay secular taxes and tithes. The centralistic administration became more and more marked; and the growing resemblance be- tween the Curia and a state compelled it to reckon 'with the most ele- mentary obligation that rests on every political organism the ad- ministration of finances. The income from patrimonies, other revenue, the taxes levied after the close of the twelfth century for the Crusades, the interest received from benefices, the tithes from monasteries and dependent churches, and the gifts which the whole of Christendom had to offer in response to various Papal claims, exacted a well-planned, centralistic management by the Camera Apostolica. Toward the close of the thirteenth century, this well-organized but also well-hated system of assessments and assessors, which took precedence over the bishops and other local dignitaries, rendered the Papacy financially superior to the great European states. During this time the tithe, which was levied universally throughout Christendom, alone brought in three times more than the income of the French crown. In part the money was paid out for expenditures incurred during the Crusades by spiritual and temporal princes, who meanwhile thought as little about how they spent the money as did the Popes themselves, who made use of their riches as they saw fit in carrying out their political plans, however opposed these might be to the tax-payers' interests. The great role played by the Papacy in the history of medieval bank- ing and credit met its appointed end in the catastrophe of 1300, when the bankrupt Curia was transferred into the realm of its French fore- closer, who had felt that its tax policy was injurious to his government.
The Papacy needed stronger forces than jurisprudence and politi- cal economy if it hoped to bind the world to its throne. These forces were: the inner vitality of the Church, and its power to breathe a soul into the spiritual, intellectual and actual work of Christendom. These forces were missing at no time during the Middle Ages; and though
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some elements of society might separate themselves inwardly from the Papacy, view it with indifference, worldliness, scepticism, criticism and contempt, or might, having adopted a heretical point of view, fight a violent, bitter, and despairing struggle with it to the death, the religious energies of the Church and her faithful really grew stronger. New Orders gained ground, took a part in pastoral labour, stiffened discipline, did missionary and colonization work, battled against heresy and heretics, laboured to effect the social reconstruction of society, delved into the sciences, fostered the arts, and as protectors of the re- ligious ideal influenced also the political outlook of the Papacy.
One single monk of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux, gave his whole era its name; and from the dawn of the reign of Lothar III of Saxony, who had succeeded the last Salian monarch, to the days of Barbarossa, his shadow lay on all the Emperors and Popes. When, after the death of Calixtus II, the Frangipani Pope Honorius II ascended the Roman throne in 1124, the young Abbot Bernard was already deemed the "light of France." Six years later, when states and peoples were in an uproar by reason of the schism between In- nocent II, candidate of the Frangipani, and Anaclete II, the anti-Pope sprung from the once Jewish banker family of Pierleoni, Bernard be- came the main actor on the European stage and he dominated the scene for two decades. If one were to narrate his life one should have to recount in detail the drama of a whole epoch the vivid, virile drama of the whole Middle Ages. This Burgundian came from near Dijon, was born in 1 190, was of knightly blood, and doubtless inherited a Celtic temperament from his mother. Already as a child he com- bined traits of shyness and violence. To his own time and the times which followed him he was known as the "teacher from whom honey flowed" (Doctor Mellifittus) but also as a "man of iron will" (Ze- lotypus) . To himself he seemed the chimera of his century. As he neared maturity his youth witnessed the departure and homecoming of the first Crusaders. The dreams, the feverish activity, the deeds and misdeeds of the knights aroused his feelings. Meanwhile, however, the new science taught at the French schools had fascinated his mind. Soon his natural religious bent presented both ideals, knighthood and theology, to him from their religious side; and he buried them in his own soul. As a novice of the new monastery in Qsterce, which a
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Frenchman had founded in order to defend the old harsh monastic spirit against the deterioration of Cluny, and then as the youthful Abbot of a new foundation in Claraval (Clairvaux) for this young heroism spread like wildfire Bernard transformed the knightly in- tention of doing battle for every just cause into spiritual purposive- ness. The conquest of the world, which he practised and proclaimed, embraced manifold forms of living at the same time. It meant re- nouncing the world in order to conquer and rule that world for God's sake. It was humanistic in the sense that it led a quiet spiritual life, and it was political in so far as it was strongly determined to bring into the here and now the perfection of the world beyond.
The simple root of this manifold creative activity was a personality which made itself selfless in order to be free for the obedience of service to higher super-personal ends. The true monk was to practice the strictest self-discipline in food, drink and sleep; to achieve the most rigid concentration of his energies on the task of the moment, whether that were a learned text, a political communication, a chore in the field, or dishwashing in the kitchen; to control the senses perfectly, being not even allowed the sight of the cold Church entered at dawn, and need- ing none because the images which issued from within his soul were so much more fascinating; to draw away from the surrounding world to such an extent that he would not notice the surface of the water, though he were to ride all day along the Lake of Geneva; to study of the Bible so painstakingly that he could quote freely innumerable passages; and finally to surrender to the inner voice amidst the peace of the woodland. These traits of the true monk were associated marvellously with those of the active knight, the conqueror, the resister of princes in the Empire and the Church. Because Bernard was all this and stood apart from the world, he could summon up enormous energy to attack that world. Therefore he never exchanged his white habit for the pallium or the purple, and so retained the freedom of a prophet not chained to hierarchical tasks. Perhaps he also realized that every kind of tie to those in power could prove dangerous to his mystical servitude for Christ's sake, who was to him the King who rules the world and ordains what happens therein. In his deepest being this devout religious felt subservient only to the wholly personal law of the religious superman. Whenever he indulges in a rare mo-
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ment of restrained and hesitant comment on his own innermost ex- periences, he helps us to understand his sense of power and also his persistence in standing aside a true "splendid isolation." As a mystic he knew "the sweet wounds of love." It was not from books alone that he derived the comparison between the man who awakes from a realization, a startling realization, of having been given divine Grace, and a boiling kettle taken from the fire. His own later confes- sion that to him, too, the Word had come, explains everything. To him any theology, that did not speak to the heart was unintelligible. His personality and preaching of the imitation of Christ, his subjective piety, which for that time was "modern" and not just accidentally contemporaneous with the first stirring of the Gothic impulse in the style of the choir erected by his friend Suger in Saint-Denis these introduced into young Scholasticism an insistence upon inner mystical experience and thus also upon the whole man, who acquires knowledge also through his feelings.
Bernard, to whom it was more important to feel ardently than to know, was a mystic not because of weariness, but because of an excess of energy. He wished to set the whole world afire with the sacred flame he sensed so marvellously in his own life. A hot glimmer lies on the rushing lava which as an orator and a writer of letters he poured down on Christendom in the form of meditations and political tracts. A half century before the beginnings of the Inquisition, he was driven by his impulse to convert men by overwhelming rhetoric and burning, apostolic zeal; to adopt the principle that faith must be instilled by persuasion, not by force. Nevertheless the passion with which he opposed men who would not be persuaded for instance, Abelard the rationalist, and Arnold of Brescia, the heretical social demagogue showed him at odds with the wisdom of his own maxim. What he could least endure was the self-esteem of the human mind, and its frivolous penetration into the world of religious mystery. What could philosophy mean to Christendom? What purpose would be served by Plato and Aristotle? Does not the believing heart receive counsel from a higher world, and learn all that is needful from being alone with its God? What other purpose can human effort serve except that, dwelling in a living communion with the God-man, it should garner from the fields of the world the harvest of eternal values?
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Just as the individual human being is summoned to aid the Deificatio the renewal of all things in God so is culture as a whole sum- moned to effect the metamorphosis by which God is revealed in the things o earth while these are manifest in Him. Therefore there is given to us all the Holy Spirit, who is God's Counsellor in the heart of man as well as man's Counsellor in the heart of God.
It was the spiritual knighthood which Bernard first influenced. To the homo legdis, the loyal steward, who as a knight of Christ was both a hero with the sword and a Christian with the Cross, he dedicated a new task governed by the Rule which he wrote in 1128 for the Knights Templar. He was able to supply the little band which dwelt in the shadow of Solomon's Temple with money and men in abundance; and according to the example set by this knightly Order, other groups then wrote their constitutions. His second achievement was to extend his Order internationally. With this there went hand in hand a third achievement: the struggle against schism and the win- ning of support for Innocent II, whom Bernard deemed a worthy Pope. The events which occurred at this hasty election of two Popes had bequeathed to Christendom a thorny problem of law which Bernard, too, could not easily solve. On journeys to Italy and Germany, which incidentally meant that as a result of popular esteem he could make "miraculous drafts of fishes" for his Order, he urged the cause of the noble exile, Pope Innocent, whom the supporters and the money of the fantastically rich Pierleoni, Pope Anaclete, had driven to France. When Bernard claimed for Innocent the sanior pars the better elec- tion by better electors he was merely stressing the dubious reputa- tion of Anaclete, and taking advantage of the general antipathy to a Pope of Jewish blood.
Although Anaclete had the support of Roger II's Norman kingdom, the Pope favoured by Bernard gained ground after the famous day of deliberation at Etampes. Sermons, letters asking assistance, daring propaganda measures like the pastoral attack on Henry I of England (whom Bernard met in Normandy) and on the Duke of Aquitania (toward whom he strode with flaming eyes, during Mass, carrying the uplifted Host, and looking for all the world like the Eternal Judge in person) and doubtless also the mobilization of the innumerable troops of his Cistercian state were weapons with which he won a victory
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for Innocent's cause in France, Germany, Spain and northern Italy. The coalition against the Norman state thus brought about, above all the League between Genoa and Pisa against their Sicilian rival, he managed to keep intact, despite the efforts of the South to disrupt them. He accompanied the Pope on all his journeys, and so his cortege became a second travelling Curia. This monastic politician possessed spiritual powers also, which manifested themselves in Milan, for example, where he worked a miraculous cure before an awe-struck multitude. But the ties which now bound him to the world some- times seemed to him treason to his habit.
A magic influence seemed to emanate from this haggard, emaciated man. It was only Roger who, in accordance with the Pierleom Pope, sought to place his hand on the patrimonium Petri, withstood this magical influence when the prophet confronted him. Bernard and Cardinal Peter of Pisa, Anaclete's legate, had come to Salerno in re- sponse to the King's invitation. The expedition which the German King had undertaken against the Normans had failed, and now only Bernard could win over to Innocent's side the last prince who opposed him. Roger sat on the throne with his knights around him and listened to the dispute which he had instigated. His hopes were centred on Cardinal Peter, who being so learned in the law and so gifted in oratory would surely overpower this simple Abbot! The King did not succumb to the ardour with which Bernard used spiritual satire in the political debate, in which he glorified the ambitious worldling of Rome who called himself Pope as the one just Noah in the Ark of die Church. But the Cardinal was overwhelmed. Reduced to complete silence by his opponent, he permitted the Abbot to lead him out of the room by the hand. Roger forbade him to have any- thing to do with the Saint, but even so this mighty furthercr of the Pierleoni cause went over to Innocent's side in Rome. Bernard also stayed in the city for some time during this same year, 1138. Then Anaclete died, and the cardinals of his faction elected the aged Victor IV. Soon afterward Bernard induced him, too, to recognize Inno- cent. Thus he brought to an end a schism lasting eight years the longest in Church history since that of Vibert; and while the en- thusiastic feast of reconciliation was still in progress, he left Rome, which he detested from the bottom of his soul, and went back to
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Clairvaux, his pleasant valley. All praised him as the Father of the Fatherland. A letter to his monks preceded him, closing with a cry of joy: "So then we are coming! We are coming in joy, in the raiment of peace. Surely these are beautiful words, but the reality is still more beautiful. It is so beautiful that anyone who does not rejoice in it must be a fool or a scoundrel." A year later he was to sense the fate of all political master-minds. Letters from the Pope he had protected let him feel how deeply the Curia resented his inter- ference in its activities. But doubtless it is only a glowing fragment of his always very emotional style which one sees in his reply that now he has been completely and unexpectedly cast off. His courage and zeal did not leave him, nor did the power fade from the mission with which his soul was aglow.
In 1139 Innocent II assembled a General Council in the Lateran and hurled the ban against Roger, his unflinching opponent. Then he himself took the field against the Normans, because there was no help to be expected from the Hohenstaufen King, Conrad III, who had succeeded Lothar in 1138, and who was now hard pressed by the warring Guelphs. The expedition failed as miserably as had that which Leo IX once led against the Normans. The Pope was made a prisoner. He had to free the Sicilian from the ban and recognize his right to the crown.
Signs that Rome was strengthening its opposition to the German Imperial idea were visible during the final year of this eventful pontifi- cate. The city was not uninterested in the powerful Lombard move- ment in favour of municipal freedom and civil autonomy. This demo- cratic struggle against feudal powers now began to alarm both the Empire and the Papacy because it was a threat to undermine their common basis the theocratic conception of the two powers, an ecclesiastical hierarchy and a dependent secular hierarchy. This was a real innovation in the life of mediseval society, cutting deeper than any previous change, and the Romans joined forces with it, though to be sure they merely trotted along far in the wake of the Lombard revolu- tion. They rebelled against the Papal rule of the city, and against Innocent's refusal to permit the destruction of Tivoli, the most im- portant southern bulwark of Rome, in punishment for a rebellion which had broken out there. To the indignation of the Romans, the
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ancient episcopal city then surrendered to Innocent. In the midst of these events the Pope died. The second of his short-lived succes- sors was slain when a stone was hurled at him during an uprising. On the Capitoline Hill there had resided since the autumn of 1 144 the officials of a new Roman Republic. They proudly called themselves the Senate and sealed their letters with S.P.Q.R. in memory of the Senate of a thousand years previous.
This Roman communal movement was a source of trouble from the beginning of the very active pontificate of Pope Eugene III. Born in Pisa, he was a disciple of Bernard, and had also been a Cistercian Abbot. He was consecrated outside the city in the two-choired basilica of the Sabine Imperial Monastery at Farfa. Because he was often forced to flee by the Roman Senate and by Arnold of Brescia, the restorer of the Republic, Pope Eugene lived in Viterbo, France and Trier, more than he did in Rome. Bernard said that now his son had become his father; but he could not change the universal opinion that he and not Eugene was the real Pope.
The teacher and master could permit himself to send his disciple, the Pope, an ever memorable essay on the ideals of the Papacy (De Consideratione) . In this mirror for spiritual princes, Bernard the mystic and Bernard the political theoretician are strangely interwoven. The one demands that the Pope, indeed the Papacy as such, should steep itself in the consciousness of its religious mission, harangues like a prophet of old against the secularization of the Divine office, and as if the object were to keep off a black and burdensome future em- phasizes over and over again as the ideal of spiritual dominion a dominion of the mind and of a humanism perfect in the Christian sense. Bernard's Pope has not unrightiy been compared with Plato's Philosopher King. Yet there is another Bernard in this treatise who, despite all his insight into the fact that lust for power is worse than poison and the dagger and all his conviction that not force but the Word alone is the true weapon of the Good Shepherd, encourages the Pope to cling to the teaching of the two swords, one of which the priest himself should use and the other of which was to be drawn by a secular soldier at the bidding of the Emperor to whom the priest gives a sign. Therefore this majestic program of ecclesiastical administration, de- rived though it be from the spirit of the Scripture, reveals the con-
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tradiction that lies in all attempts to remove the disparateness of might and right, sword and cross, service and command. But it raises such a host of demands that what is reasonable be made real, that might be used rightly, and that the throne be sanctified, that it remains a glow- ing appeal of imperishable significance to a Curia threatened by worldliness.
This tragic character of a philosophy of the Papacy in which the word "reason" plays a more prominent part than it does in any of the other writings of the mystical Bernard, is not without resemblance to the personal tragedy of Bernard as an active statesman. While he was writing it, news of the catastrophic finale of the Second Crusade reached him. Louis VII of France had instigated this Crusade. When Bernard was asked for his opinion, he seemed to have a premoni- tion of the fateful onslaught of the forces of dissension and worldliness which the beleaguered East was soon to lead against the West. At kast he insisted that the matter be referred to the Pope for his decision. Eugene assented and entrusted to Bernard the preaching and organiza- tion of the Crusade. The Abbot set out, kindled waves of enthusiasm in Burgundy and in France as well as up and down the Rhine in Ger- many, protected the Jews against the fury of those who were afire with zeal for the Cross, worked miracles which astonished him as much as they did those who were healed, and in Speyer persuaded even Conrad of Hohenstaufen to rally to the cause.
The undertaking ended unfortunately. This defeat of Christen- dom was due above all else to the unromantic and firm policy of Roger who estranged Byzantium from the crusading armies. But public opinion attributed it to the "anti-Christ," saying that he had worked only sham miracles. Bernard bore these insults with greatness and strength of soul. He felt confident that good would result from the misfortune, and placed himself between God and the muttering of men. So far as he was concerned, he had said all that was necessary in the treatise written for the Pope: "Every man must depend on the witness of conscience for a perfect and unconditional exoneration. What can it mean to me if those judge me who term good evil and evil good; who mistake darkness for light, and light for darkness? But if it must be that either God or I be accused, I prefer that it should be L How well it is for me if He has used me for His shield!"
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The middle years of this century were everywhere restless and turbulent. It is difficult to say whether new teachings were bringing to light a new attitude toward life, or whether on the other hand a new trend toward the secular, toward the independence of secular culture, created its own new dicta. As is always the case in periods of transition, doubtless both things happened, for they have a common root and the hour was ripe for this to send up shoots. The intimate relationship between thought and deed was no secret to men of that time; and the passion with which they warred against heresy which after this would never cease to exact the energies of the Popes is explained by their realization that false teachings or erroneous tenden- cies of thought are immeasurably more seriously evil than all the sins of concupiscence. For they distort life, nature and society at their roots. From the beginning until now the Catholic Church has con- sistently termed freedom of the intellect, when interpreted to mean freedom to have any opinion one wishes, the sin above all sins. In times when the Church had full authority over men, she punished destructive teaching by destroying the teacher. Augustine's heritage had not been forgotten either in the philosophy dominant in those times or in Church discipline. When the ideas and the moods which during the course of a human life he had seen strike at the heart of the Church appeared once again in the Middle Ages (the ideas and moods are not numerous, they are constantly the same) the Papacy under- took in the name of the Church the defense of its endangered being.
But it was not the Curia, it was the real Pope of this troubled rime who led the struggle against Abelard. This time also he would not heed the opinion of those who thought his policy mistaken. Saints, they said, existed for the purpose of influencing souls and of receiving honours after their death; they were ill-advised when they attempted to counsel the world. Now the man for whom Christianity was not a garment but the blood of life, and for whom earthly things were merely iron which the fire of God could transfix, stood opposed to a dialectician and a moralist, who seems to have anticipated the rimes of Pierre Bayle, and Rousseau who admired him. To this antagonist of Bernard, God and truth were eternally beyond the "earthly pole." Man seemed to him the only object with which one could deal directly. The divine, which to the mystic Bernard was alone real and near,
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dwelt in the region of everlasting interrogation. At the Synod of Sens, which met (1141) during the year preceding Abelard's death, the born saint and the born logician clashed headlong. It was one kind of man against another kind of man. The thinker was van- quished by the genius of the believer, and perhaps also by the weighti- est of the arguments he advanced: how are you to know the truth, when you do not possess the true spirit and that spirit does not possess you? He concluded by saying: "What you affirm proceeds, accord- ing to your own teaching, entirely from you and your human nature. It is your opinion merely opinion, and merely yours. How shall it, how dare it, become the opinion of those who possess the spirit that you do not possess?" Abelard was unable to ward off the onslaught of the Abbot. Indeed he seemed almost like a puzzled boy. The two made their peace, but their spirits confront each other in battle throughout history because there was truth and strength in both. When the heritage of the erring philosopher was bequeathed to them, the teachers of the Church knew (as their peers have always known) how to separate the wheat from the chaff and how to use that wheat. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest among them, was the unflinching an* tagonist of heresy, but to Rome we owe the honest dictum that error also helps the discovery of truth, and that all who set the mind in morion earn the gratitude of the philosopher.
In addition to Roger II and Abelard, it was the second's pupil, Arnold of Brescia, who caused Bernard and the Popes of his time the greatest concern. This Lombard canon was a symptom of impending change, taking a leading part in what was then a debate between the present and the past. But the retrospective time-spirit which im- pelled some to take a mere inventory of tradition which they were content to catalogue, and spurred others on to revive the traditions of antiquity be it that of the self-governing city-state, of the Roman republic, or of the Empire drove Arnold, the morally rigorous suc- cessor to the Pataria, into conflict with both the historical development of the Church and the contemporary state of his time. Bernard, too, attacked the Curia and the self-centred prelates of the age, and heaped scorn on the luxury of Cluny its menus, its table manners, and its modes of travel. But Arnold's preaching was more than criticism and reform. It was revolution. Like Tertullian the Montanist, he
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declared that all the hieratic actions of a priest who did not lead a life in conformity with the strictest apostolic rule were invalid and worth- less* It was better, he said, that the laity should tell their sins to one another than to such a priest. He repudiated the temporal power and the temporal possessions of the Church. A powerful orator, he thundered in Rome against the kingship of Priest and Pope, bidding the Eternal City to voice its right to world-dominion and to free elec- tion, wholly independent of Papal control, of an Emperor by the Roman people. Eugene III, more conciliatory than the far-sighted Abbot of Clairvaux, who had driven the rebel Arnold out of France and then out of Zurich, was nevertheless finally forced to exile him as a schismatic, and to curb all priests who consorted with him with a threat of removal. But the Senate protected its prophet who was the true master of the young republic; and so there was postponed a decision which neither the Pope nor the Abbot lived to see. Frederic Barbarossa was unanimously elected Emperor after Conrad's death, and signed the Treaty of Constance in which he ignored the Senate's loudly profferred invitation to accept the crown from its hands; he promised to make no peace either with the Normans nor with the Romans without the Pope's concurrence, and to restore to the Holy Sec the control of Rome and the Papal states. Shortly afterward, during the summer of 1153, Eugene and Bernard died within a few weeks of each other.
Now there ensued a long, difficult struggle between the Papacy and die Hohenstaufens. Against the iron-willed defenders of die spirit of Hildebrand there was arrayed an Imperial power with a firmer basis in law and a new awareness of its historical mission. The Emperor was a strong, virtuous man. Meanwhile, however, the new forces of nationalist independence and civic self-government had arisen. It was the Papacy which understood more deeply what this trend signi- fied and which welcomed it as a new world of the spirit into its empire. But later on alien reality, a secular culture and an autonomous state, developed out of these trends. Changing peoples gave this reality new forms, according to political and spiritual circumstances, while trying to convert to their points of view a Church unable to surrender its theocratic claims.
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Frederic was a splendid Emperor, distinguished, right-minded, cul- tured and brave. He was a genuine Christian of temperate mind who looked backward toward the splendour of Charlemagne's rule. Ger- man dissatisfaction with the weakness of the monarchy and German sorrow over all the blood and treasure which had perished in the Syrian deserts made it easier for him to conjure up a vision of a greater past. The spiritual aristocracy, too, was more than willing to recover inside the prosperous Imperial Church the position it had lost. Archbishops like Reinald von Dassel of Cologne, who was the Chancellor, or Christian of Mayence, who was the General, spoke and fought for the dominance of the German Church. The resurrection of Roman law and the new emphasis placed upon the great Justinian, the C&sar Papa, supplemented the lofty conception which had been formed of the Emperor and his sovereign authority. But the Popes of this era were no less able to look back upon the past greatness of the Papacy; and they looked also into a future already discernible in the omens of the present. It was not the movement towards municipal liberty which Rome had to fear, for this did not interfere in essential functions of the Church; it was the Emperor, for whoever he might be was the enemy. If Frederic said, as he already did in the first years of his rule, that in his hands had been placed the government of Rome and the wide world, urbis et orbis, that his Imperial authority proceeded from God, that he had been appointed by the Holy Spirit and placed above all men, as the viceroy of the King of Kings, then the Pope (and not he alone) was forced to issue a challenge.
This conflict of ideas, which at bottom was only a conflict between battlers for the same idea who lived in different orders of being, was necessarily followed by a political struggle over power, property and sovereign rights. The contest was concerned first and last with Italy. If the Emperor was to give his dominion world-wide significance he needed Italy, which since the First Crusade had once again become a land of central importance. The Pope needed it too, if he was not to be merely a vassal or an official of the Emperor, like any of the bishops of the Empire. As a result of its whole history the spiritual freedom and influence of the Papacy were so fatefully bound up with the exercise of worldly power that any increase of the majesty of the Ger- man Imperial authority necessarily implied a weakening of the Pope's
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secular dominion. The rise of the municipalities was the factor needed to effect a solution of what would otherwise have been an unending conflict. The democratic spirit, especially in Lombardy, slowly but surely undermined the basis of the universal monarchy the feudal system. By joining forces with the new spirit of the communes, the Papacy escaped from the toils of worldly empire and harnessed the liberated energies to the work of building up its spiritual reign. Only the national kingdoms, France and England in particular, remained aloof.
Hadrian IV (1154-1159) was an Englishman of humble origin the only one of his countrymen ever to have worn the tiara. As or- ganizer of the Norwegian Church, he had demonstrated his energy and prudence. The first action of this Pope was to call upon die city of Rome to establish order. When the followers of Arnold slew a cardinal in the street, he imposed the interdict in order to force Arnold to leave the city. The Emperor, who had set off on his first trip to Rome, seized the "Apostle of the masses" in Tuscany and upon request of the Curia turned him over to the Papal prefect. There the first herald of the awakening self-consciousness of the poor paid on the gallows for the violence of the passion with which he had preached a Church of the spirit that would go about clad as a beggar. When his corpse had been burned, the mob which had followed Arnold plundered the treasury of the Papacy.
In June 1155, Frederic met Hadrian in Sum. He was annoyed to find that in accordance with a hallowed custom inaugurated in Carolingian rimes, he was required to hold the stirrup when the Pope mounted his horse. In retaliation the Pope refused to give Frederic the kiss of peace. The Emperor was furthermore displeased with a picture in the Lateran because this, in representing the acquisition by Emperor Lothar of the right over territories of Mathilda, bore an in- scription which called the German Emperor a vassal of the Pope. But in spite of all these difficulties, Barbarossa vastly preferred receiving the crown from the hands of Hadrian to getting it from the Romans, who had offered it to him for a goodly sum of money.
The peace was not destined to last long. When the Emperor was forced by the situation in Germany to go back home, and so could not fulfill the promise given Pope Eugene at the Treaty of Constance
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that protection would be accorded against the Normans, the Pope decided to act in his own right. Roger's successor, William I, was even a more ominous threat to the Papal states. Without taking counsel with Barbarossa, Hadrian had concluded with this common enemy of Empire and Roman See the Treaty of Benevent which greatly strengthened the Norman power. The tension grew still more marked when the Emperor delayed in obtaining the freedom of Archbishop Eskill, of Lund, who had been attacked and robbed in Burgundy on his return homeward, and did not avenge the mis- deed. A Papal letter which two cardinals, one of whom was Hadrian's Chancellor Roland Bandinelli, a future Pope, delivered into Frederic's hands at the Reichstag of Besangon in 1157, aroused the anger of the ruler as well as that of the assembled dignitaries by phrases which im- plied that the Imperial dignity was a grant from the Pope. Reinald of Dassel and Roland Bandinelli, representing as they did the Ger- man Church and the Roman Curia, opposed each other like generals of fighting armies. The Cardinal, who had previously been a cele- brated professor of law at Bologna, left no one in doubt that the spirit of Hildebrand, which had hovered over the peace signed with the Normans, lived on unabated. He asked from whom else the Emperor had obtained the Empire if not from the Pope? The Pfalzgrave Otto of Wittelsbach drew his sword against Roland in a fit of anger, and Frederic himself was compelled to intervene lest worse things happen. After he had ordered out of the Imperial territory delegates sent to make a visitation of the German Church (Roland too was among them) he protested in a letter to his people against the arrogance of the Curia* Then the Pope took umbrage at this; the Bishops of Germany, where circles favouring the Emperor were already fostering the idea of an independent National Church severed from Rome, with Trier as the See of its Primate, rejected Hadrian's complaint unani- mously. Two things, they said, dominated the Empire: the sacred laws of the Emperor, and the good customs of their ancestors; and they were unwilling as well as unable to disregard the boundaries thus set to the Church's authority. The free crown of the Empire was, indeed, to be ascribed to divine grace alone: "We will not permit, we will not endure" that Papal letters such as the one now under debate be given the status of law.
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The quarrel also divided the College of Cardinals, in which the friends of the Empire had already protested against the peace with the Normans; and Hadrian could not do otherwise than send a second letter to the Augsburg Reichstag in 1158, which softened what had been said in his first communication. During this same year Frederic crossed the Alps for the second time, to build up his rule in Italy. He subdued Milan; and on the fields outside Piacenza he avowed his claim to world sovereignty. On the advise of his lawyers he took the Csesaristic idea quite seriously. His decrees and his deeds raised the monarchical state power to a Byzantine perfection of authority. They undermined all the individual rights of the communes, made inroads into the rights of the Church, and brought to life again long- sleeping claims of dominion over Rome and the Papal states. Deaf to the protests of the Curia, Frederic negotiated with the Roman Senate and thus forced the Pope to look for support in the rebellious cities of Lombardy.
Hadrian IV died just as he was about to impose the ban on the Emperor, The majority of the Cardinals were willing to fight and elected Roland, who called himself Alexander III (11591181). An Imperial minority elected Cardinal Octavian as Victor IV (1159 1 164) , though the choice was made to the accompaniment of ludicrous incidents. Thus there began a schism which was to last seventeen years. The Emperor's power assured the anti-Pope of German and Lombard support. Alexander, unquestionably the rightly elected Pope, was upheld by France, England, Spain, Hungary, Ireland and Norway. Anathemas were mutual, as they had so often been. Pope Alexander betook himself from the perils of the Papal states to the country which had of old afforded refuge to beleaguered Popes. There he was not inactive and waited for events that would give him the advantage. Meanwhile he imposed the ban on Barbarossa, who then took a terrible toll at Milan.
Another occurrence beyond the Canal proved the inception of a tragic drama which soon darkened the Papal horizon. When Victor died in 1164, Reinald of Dassel had himself elected Pascal III during the same year, despite the readiness of Alexander and Frederic to make a peace. Suddenly the English Church was disrupted with strife.
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Henry II, whose kingdom included Normandy and western France, found in his former Chancellor Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, a powerful opponent of royal plans to make the Church subservient to the state. At a Congress in Clarendon the King en- acted a number of decrees under the pretext that he was restoring "age old customs/' In reality they undermined traditional rights and institutions. The first point was that the clergy was to be subject to secular tribunals. Unless the King so permitted, no summons to Rome was to be obeyed and no journey out of England was to be undertaken. The election of bishops was to take place only in the King's Chapel and in accordance with his wishes. Ecclesiastical property was to be subject to the King's right of disposal. Threatened and deceived, the Primate and other bishops assented to these demands after a hard fight. When the Curia then condemned these new decrees the Primate withdrew his assent and escaped the wrath of the King by fleeing to France and to the Pope. Alexander paid no attention to the English demand that he be deposed, but was soon compelled to realize that at the Reichstag of Wiirzburg (1165) , Eng- land and the Emperor (acting under English influence, which em- bittered a great part of Germany) had joined the party of the anti- Pope. Bishops and priests in attendance joined with Barbarossa in swearing that they would sever themselves "forever from the schismatic Roland." The moving spirit in this was Reinald, the Chancellor. Alexander did not tremble at this broadside, for the English Church as a whole was on his side; and the English King, Frederic's new ally, disavowed the oaths sworn by his legates at Wiirzburg.
Meanwhile the Imperial power in Italy had rapidly declined. In the^spring of 1 144 it was opposed by a league between the enslaved cities of the Veronese district and Venice, the city republic which the Emperor had threatened to subjugate. In the autumn of 1 165, Alex- ander returned to Rome; but new problems, above all the death of William of Normandy, to whose throne a boy succeeded, again brought the Emperor to Italy on a mission of destruction. Milan gave him only a sombre welcome; and as soon as he left the disaffection of Lombardy grew stronger. The armies commanded by his faithful generals Christian and Reinald cleared a path to Rome for Frederic. Clad as a pilgrim, Alexander fled to Benevent and could see St. Peter's
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burning in the distance. The frightened Romans submitted to the master of the Empire, and Pascal crowned the Emperor and Empress once again. Barbarossa's next objective was the destruction of the Norman power. But suddenly death threw itself across the path o the army. Thousands died in a few days of the pest and among them were the best of Frederic's loyal retainers. The foremost victim was Reinald of Dassel, who, falling at the height of his power, left behind him no comparable advocate of German Imperialism. The people maintained that this was God's judgment on the burning -of St, Peter s. Barbarossa, almost alone and disguised like the Pope he had put to flight, hurried back to Germany over difficult roads. That was the year 1168. Milan rebuilt itself from its ruins, and the Lom- bard League created a new army of defense which was called "Alles- andria" in honour of the Pope and in spite of the Emperor.
Pascal died during the same year and Calixtus III (11681178) followed him as anti-Pope. In England the war upon the Church came to a bloody end. Thomas a Becket returned after six years of exile, and made his peace with the King. But the monarch di- rected a word of censure at the Primate the occasion was the ex- communication of three bishops who had exceeded their rights and a few knights took it upon themselves to avenge the ingratitude shown their master. They slew Thomas in his Cathedral. Christendom was frightened, but it had been given a new martyr. Alexander him- self raised Thomas a Becket to the altar. Horrified at what had hap- pened, the king assured the Pope that he had not ordered this murder done, and sought to come to terms with the Roman See. The Church won a complete victory when Henry was obliged by the troubles and scandals incident to his family life and by the angry mood of his people to make a penitential pilgrimage to the grave of the Saint. He went barefoot and insisted that the monks scourge him with reeds.
Before these events had taken place, Frederic had already begun to negotiate with the Pope; but the effort came to naught, and he was compelled to resort to arms once more when England's alliances with Castile and Sicily hinted at imperialistic ambitions. His action was aided by dissension among the cities of upper Italy, and also by the secession o Venice from the League. Moreover Frederic laid a new foundation for the Imperial power in the South when he bought the
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rights to new possessions in Italy from the old Duke Guelph. Nev- ertheless these advantages were counterbalanced by the opposition of the Guelph-English ambitions of Henry the Lion, who was annoyed by Frederic's purchases (among other things) , and therefore did not come to his assistance during the negotiations which took place on the shores of Lake Como. Frederic marched to battle outside Al- lesandria and Legnano in 1176 with insufficient forces; he was de- feated and barely managed to escape with his life. Now he suddenly altered his policy, broke the fateful oath he had sworn at Wiirzburg, and sought to negotiate with the Curia. There, too, peace was de- sired. Alexander was old and tired of fighting. He saw that the financial situation of the Holy See was chaotic, that Rome and the Papal States were shaken by schism, and that great damage had been done to faith and discipline.
After a preliminary Treaty at Anagni, peace was signed in Venice during 1177. Alexander was surrounded everywhere by jubilant crowds when he went to the City of the See and sent to the Emperor's residence legates announcing that the ban had been lifted. Frederic rode in the Gondola of the Doges to St. Mark's Square, which had been festively adorned. There Alexander awaited him on a throne erected at the entrance to the Cathedral. Frederic fell at his feet, and the Pope embraced him, giving him the kiss of peace. When they entered the Cathedral together the Germans intoned the Te Deum. After Mass Barbarossa held the stirrup for the Pope, who was about to ride away, and begged leave to accompany him to his distant residence. This, however, the Pope courteously refused. Thus a struggle of seventeen years ended in a second Canossa. Frederic abandoned the anti-Pope and recognized Alexander, who dealt mag- nanimously with Calixtus. Then he restored the Papal States as well as the treasures that had been removed, and guaranteed to the Pope dominion over the City of Rome and veritable sovereignty in his domain. For his part the Pope did not interfere in the affairs of the independent German Church, nor did he challenge the German idea of monarchy. Therewith he abandoned the idea of carrying out the whole of Hildebrand's reform.
The third great Lateran Synod of 1 179 confirmed the peace. There a decree sought to forestall all future danger of a schism by deciding
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that if the Cardinals disagreed he was to be considered a lawfully elected Pope who obtained two-thirds of the votes. Since that time schisms have not resulted from disagreement inside the College of Cardinals. Other decisions reached by the Council were omens of that coming intellectual apostasy from the Church which was to prove so profoundly disturbing during the near future. Not long after this solemn finale, during the summer of 1181, Alexander, once again driven from a Rome still rocked by inner dissension, died in Civita Castellana.
This peace had been a peace between men, not between powers. Between 1180 and 1183 Frederic destroyed the power of Henry the Lion in Germany, and made a peace with Lombardy by which the latter was given the right to control its own political affairs on the con- dition that it recognized the Emperor as its supreme master. Thus Frederic saved the honour of the crown. Then he married his son Henry to Constance, posthumous daughter of the great Roger and hereditary princess of the Norman kingdom. The wedding took place in a reconciled Milan during the early months of 1 186. Henry received the Crown of Italy from the Patriarch of Aquileia, and called himself Csesar. The Empire thus faced the fortune and misfortune attendant upon incorporating within its boundaries a mighty and flourishing state. But Germany was soon to see that it had lost as much as the Empire had won that at the end the House of the Hohenstaufens would sink into the soil of the most splendid of its conquered lands.
The Papacy was now threatened by the grip of the Empire from the North and the South. Rome itself had room for the warring Imperial factions and the sovereign people, but not for the Popes. Lucius III spent only a few months there during the four years of his pontificate; Urban III and Gregory VIII never resided in the city; Clement III (1187-1 191) was the first Pope who could effect a recon- ciliation with the Senate and return. After many difficulties and defeats in attempting to carry on the policy of his predecessors he was given a new objective, which it is true, had already presented itself to Gregory VTII. This was a Crusade against Saladin, who in 1184 had decimated the Christian army and conquered Jerusalem. The Pope won over Genoa and Pisa as well as the Kings of France and
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England, and sent his preachers throughout all Christendom. A new crusading army was formed, but the results gained from this under- taking did not repay the cost. Barbarossa lost his life on the expedi- tion; the leaders disagreed and only an unsatisfactory treaty with the Sultan remained as the mutilated part of the achievement that had been planned.
Henry VI was now lord of the Empire. He did not possess the pathos or the sympathetic personality of his father, but his ambitions were the same. Indeed they were even more daring. This young, sombre Hohenstaufen, unscrupulous in the sense in which that word is usually employed when speaking of great politicians, seemed des- tined therefore to build up a world monarchy. The Papacy had rea- son to be afraid of him. His reign did not open auspiciously: when William II of Sicily died without heirs in 1189, it became necessary to determine upon a successor. The lords of the kingdom sponsored, possibly not without the connivance of the Pope, the candidacy of Count Tancred of Lecce, an illegitimate scion of the Norman house. Henry marched on Rome with an army and in 1191 received from Celestine III (1191-1198) the Imperial crown that had long since been promised him. The first attack upon his heritage failed. An international league, which of necessity the Pope was compelled to favour, threatened to hedge in the Emperor; its members were Sicily, the Guelphs and England. In this situation he was aided by fortune. Richard of the Lion Heart, then King of England, had fallen into the hands of his personal enemy the Duke of Austria, while returning from the Crusade. Fostering his own ends, Henry ransomed the King and then gave him freedom after he had paid a large sum of money, had withdrawn from the league with Tancred, and had promised to aid the Emperor as his vassal in all dealings with the Guelphs. Then Tan- cred died and the Emperor could occupy the Sicilian Kingdom un- opposed.
While the coronation was taking place at Christmas, 1194, Con- stance, then forty years old, bore him a long desired son and heir who was christened Frederic Roger. The aged Pope Celestine, then ninety, faced a troubled future. He and his Curia were so powerless that they could consider only a policy based on secret diplomacy. It
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was not with unmixed joy that he beheld the Emperor arming for a new Crusade; for while the preparations (which were not under- taken to please the Papacy) were in progress, the Pope was shown the true nature of this new Crusader. Henry took vengeance on the Sicilian barons who had conspired against him and all the Germans in their land. He ordered that the eyes of the guilty should be put out; then they were to be placed on seats of glowing iron and given red-hot crowns or sceptres. After the fleet had gone out to sea fol- lowing the battle of Acre, the avenger died of the fever in Messina at the age of thirty-two and was buried in Palermo. The Pope was laid to rest during the same year, 1 198. Henry's widow Constance made common cause with the national Sicilian party and before she died which was in that same year she decreed that the new Pope Innocent III should be Imperial administrator of Apulia and Sicily as well as the guardian of her child, who had been elected German King before his father's death.
That death had shaken, more severely than the dying Emperor himself had foreseen, the Hohenstaufen system, the greatness and power of which depended so much upon the ability of a given ruler. When two Emperors were elected, the Hohenstaufen Philip of Swabia, Henry's brother, and the Guelph Otto IV, son of Henry the Lion, civil war broke out in Germany and with it came the destruction of the monarchy. Italy, which coveted national independence, breathed freely as the power of the German strangers weakened. England was no longer dependent upon the Empire, and the realm of the Normans was governed by the Pope as regent. The hour was auspicious for a strong Pope able to extend the influence of Hildebrand's ideas.
The throne to which the third Innocent (11981216) ascended was in truth the throne of the world. For there was no other visible centre of authority; and to its power the rulers of earth bowed as to that which was superior to themselves. Nevertheless in the world embraced by this spiritual Empire there began to appear fissures deeper than had ever before appeared since the Christian name gained dominion over Europe. Even during the first half of the century which began under this Pope, there were manifested all the contradictions of which hu- man nature is capable and all the varieties of tension and conflict that
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can affect society. Innocent III, Honorius III, Gregory IX and In- nocent IV are the Popes who figure in the bitter final struggle with the Empire and its revolutionary master, Frederic II; but they were also spectators and actors in a drama that ushered in a new epoch of the Papacy.
Count Lothar, of the Roman family of the Conti, was born in Anagni and was still in early manhood when he became Pope. To him the words of Walther von der Vogelweide were directed: "Alas, the Pope is too young; Lord help Thy Christendom!" He was elected unanimously and was more mature than the poet who was so con- cerned lest the world might suffer because of his youth. Clement III had educated him in the political business of the Holy See; and under Celestine III, the enemy of his family, he had found time to write. The most interesting of his books to later rimes is De Contempts Mundi, which portrays a puzzling soul full of fire and pride, a man who had a penetrating wit and nevertheless practised stern ascetic self-discipline, who proved himself a man of action as well as of deep culture, and who nevertheless could complain so bitterly about the misery of human existence. The riddle is not more baffling than is the vanitas vanitatttm of Solomon, with whom this Conti was allied in spirit. To comb one's hair, to have colourfully embroidered napkins and ivory knives on one's table, pictures on the walls, rugs on the floors, bulging pillows on one's bed, to have in one's breast sensual urges and to feel a desire for renown and glory all this he views with feelings which arise out of Weltschmerz rather than out of joy- ful following of Him who preached the Sermon on the Mount. His own inner struggles are apparent and so he seeks desperately to hide them. But the Idea in which he believes enkindles him to renuncia- tion, and curbs the damon by which that Idea is threatened. To him real freedom from the world lies in true mastery in control of one- self but not of oneself alone. On the day when he was crowned Pope, he voiced, as had Leo I and all great Popes, the conviction that the Papacy is the primacy of the Roman and universal Church in the everliving Peter. Nevertheless his words sound more personal, more related to himself, than do those of the Pontiffs who preceded him: "But who am I, that I should sit aloft above the kings and occupy this throne of splendour? To me are the words of the prophet spoken,
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'I have placed thee above the peoples of the kingdom in order that thou mightest attack and tear down, destroy and scatter, plant and build up anew!' . . . For you see who the servant is who has been placed above the household the viceroy of Jesus Christ, the follower of Peter, the anointed of the Lord God of Pharaoh, placed as a mediator between God and men, under God and yet above men, lesser than God, but greater than man. . . Thus is Peter lifted up unto the full- ness of power."
The man of slight build who spoke these words was to develop to the full the heritage of Gregory VII. With all his energy he lived according to the principle that nothing which happens in the world must escape the regard and the power of the Roman Pontiff. He, a scholastic thinker and a dialectician, a jurist and a theologian, looked upon his culture, acquired in Paris and Bologna, as a great good. He wrote to the King of France that he owed everything he had of science, after the grace of God, to the University of Paris. As long as he lived he protected this young foundation and defended its teachers and students against the tyranny of the Bishop of Notre-Dame.
Innocent gained the upper hand in Rome with great effort and after many setbacks. The resistance of the city to him who was really its Papal national politician lasted a long while. The nobles chose the psychological moment in which to make a pact with the people, who had not forgotten their Arnold of Brescia. The battle-towers of re- bellious barons arose in the Colosseum, in the Theatre of Marcellus, and in the Baths of Caracalla. What the mob thought of Popes was demonstrated anew on the day when the body of Alexander III was brought home from exile for burial. Stones and mud were hurled at the coffin. During many a day and many a night, Innocent sat in the Lateran Palace listening to the bells on the Capitol summon men to civil war. Long after the city prefect and the Senate had sworn him an oath of allegiance, "the ill-tempered mare" as Dante called Rome rebelled again. During the spring of 1203, the Pope fled from the burning city. After ten months he returned, silenced the demagogues and bribed the leaders of the people with money. This rime he secured everything he wanted, including the right to name and remove the fodesta, who was the administrator of Roman executive power. Innocent, who termed himself fatherly protector
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of Italy, also gained back again for the Roman See some parts of the Papal States, which had become Imperial territory during the wars with the Hohenstaufens. There he replaced the Imperial authorities with Papal rectors. Whenever that was possible, he assumed the role of protector of the Italian communes and opposed the Empire, which he hated as much as Augustine had hated the ancient Empire, because it was built on force. But these communes became states within the state, and thus social entities in their own right. Science in the universities began to be autonomous, just as did politics in the chancellories of kings and princes, or poetry and aesthetic culture at the courts. All these things together hollowed out from within the Imperial idea, which had embraced within itself all aspects of earthly activity; and in the same way the times of Innocent and the Popes who immediately followed him confronted the Church with a trend away from Imperial to state authority, from a prophetic, creative atti- tude of mind to an intellectual, methodical attitude, and from divinely given inspiration to Church law.
The theocratic consciousness of Hildebrand, who felt as he wrote his epistles that Peter himself was looking over his shoulder, was not to be acquired in Bologna and Paris. More than ever before ques- tions of law were decided by a Papacy which studied the juridical and ethical implications of the corpus juris. Innocent, the "apostolic oracle," answered all questions magnanimously and without bias as wisely as if he were a second Solomon. A Geneva monk who was expert in surgery had operated on a peasant woman for goitre and had ordered her to stay in bed. But the woman went to work and died as a result. The question now arose: dare a man who has com- mitted a murder unwillingly, continue to exercise the priestly func- tion? Yes, said Innocent, it is true that the religious was at fault in practising such a craft, but since he acted in the spirit of human sympathy and not for money and was a conscientious medical practi- tioner he cannot be held responsible for the death of a woman who did not do his bidding. Therefore, after he has performed his pen- ance, he may say Mass again. May sick persons eat meat in Lent if they do not give alms? Yes, replied the Pope, necessity is here the law. May a bastard become a bishop? This was forbidden by the traditional law. Innocent sent the chapter of Lincoln this reply:
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One can make an exception when the man in question is able and has rendered real service, when circumstances compel it, and when all the electors are in agreement. In Palestine Moslem converts came breez- ily to the baptismal font with the four wives the Koran permitted them and their bounteous offspring. Could they become Christians? This time Innocent hesitated; but then he bethought himself of Abraham and the other fathers who had lived no differently from the Turks. The Gospel itself, he said, contains no page in which po- lygamy is expressly forbidden. And since it seems that the heathens can lawfully have several wives according to the laws of their own cults, they may keep them in accordance with the custom of the Pa- triarchs when they become Christians. His principle that mercy stood higher than the law did not prevent the Pope from insisting upon an upright juridical practice, nor did it keep him from exercising mer- ciless sternness when judges were found to sponsor dubious interpreta- tions of the law.
The greatest successes of Innocent's policy were obtained outside the scope of the German problem. In England John Sansterre, whom his own brother Richard of the Lion Heart had excluded from the succession in his testament, came under suspicion as having murdered the heir apparent and was summoned to appear in France for trial by the Breton nobles. When he did not respond, he was deprived of his lands in France. England appealed to Innocent for a decision, but Philippe Auguste forbade the Church to interfere in this quarrel be- tween kings; for he himself had run afoul of the Pope by reason of his marital troubles. Innocent did not abandon his right and duty to either side. When the election of a bishop to the See of Canterbury resulted in a dual choice, the chapter appealed to him and he charged an English commission with conducting a free election in Rome. John, however, refused to recognize the Archbishop-elect, Cardinal Stephen Langton, took action against the monks of Canterbury, con- fiscated their property and berated the Pope. When all means of spiritual influence were exhausted, Innocent placed England under the interdict in 1208. No divine service was held in the churches, no candle burned, the Cross and every statue were veiled. The dead were borne along the streets without prayer or benefit of clergy. Only children were baptized, and the dead were given the Viaticum.
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Anger and dejection spread among the people. John swore venge- ance, and carried out his oath with terrible cruelty. Well-nigh the whole clergy disappeared from England, churches and monasteries were sacked, and the Jews were either tortured until they gave the King their money or driven to suicide when they could not flee the country. In 1209 Innocent went further and imposed the ban on John; but even then the persecution of the Church did not cease. Then in 1211 the Pope declared the Plantagenet deposed from his throne, and released his subjects of their oath of loyalty. The King of France was to carry out this verdict in so far as John's possessions on the Continent were concerned.
Philippe Auguste of France had already come to grips with the Papacy under Celestine III. Soon after his marriage with Ingeborg, he had put her aside and wedded Agnes de Meran. Ingeborg sum- moned Innocent as well as Celestine to aid her cause, and they cham- pioned her right by imposing the ban and the interdict on the King, whom intimated prelates had helped to have his will. Philippe finally gave way to popular feeling and separated himself from Agnes, who died soon thereafter. Nevertheless Ingeborg remained under arrest and continued to beseech Innocent to obtain justice for her. Events in England now induced the Pope, who during the struggle for power between the two countries, had hitherto protected the lands of the Lionheart against the Capetian monarch's desire of conquest, to pit the strength of France against John. During twelve years he had ceaselessly besought Philippe to set his marriage in order, gradually sub- stituting persuasion for command. Now, when he formally sum- moned the king to undertake a crusade against John, he found in him who had chronically berated the Papacy a zealous advocate of Papal authority. For he had long since cherished a dream of landing a force in England. Now the banished Ingeborg was once more attractive to her husband. He declared that she was his lawful wife, received absolution from Innocent and prepared to take the field against John. Meanwhile the Papal Legate suggested to the English monarch that his only salvation lay in submitting to the Pope. John, who was also menaced by foes in England, knelt before the Legate, took his hand and swore that he would obey the Pope. He restored peace to the Church and ruled that the Kingdom of England and Ireland, as a
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dependency of Rome, had to pay tribute. The King of France was now compelled to abandon his English Crusade. Innocent threatened him with the ban if he laid hands on the newly acquired dominions of the Holy See.
The year following, 1214, Philippe Auguste defeated the German King Otto, who had formed an alliance with John Sansterre, in the Battle of Bouvines in Flanders. Then the spiritual and temporal nobles of England, under the leadership of Stephen Langton, pro- tected themselves against the autocratic dictates of their King, misrule and spoliation of the churches, by compelling him to sign the Magna Charta Libertatum in 1215. This basic law establishing the state as an aristocracy supported by the people became England's charter of liberal constitutional government and public law. Then Pope In- nocent, acting as protector of his vassal, repudiated the bill of rights thus obtained by "rebels who had had recourse to arms." Unmoved by the bitterness felt by all those involved, he hurled the anathema at them. Even the Primate was affected. The Pope had reason to fear that a people which obtained independence might dispense with his temporal power. In Shakespeare's King John one can still hearken to the echo of the storm the Pope aroused in England. It was only when the Barons called the armies of the Dauphin Louis VIII (whom Innocent also banned), and when John Sansterre died of hardships incurred during a gruesome flight, that his son Heniy III confirmed the Magna Charta. England remained a fief of the Pope until this relationship was formally abrogated by Parliament under Edward III in 1366.
In much the same way, the Pope took a hand in the politics of all other European countries. He compelled the Kings of Leon and Aragon to obey the marriage laws of the Church; he imposed on Aragon and Portugal the duty to pay tribute; he gave the Bulgarians and the Wallachs their kings; and he acted as arbitrator in Poland, Hungary, Dalmatia and Norway. He called the nations to a new Crusade, but against his will this ended in a siege of Constantinople. The leader of the fleet was the blind, nineteen-year-old Doge of Ven- ice, who was much more concerned with conquering the city than with wresting the Holy Land from Islam. Therewith the Byzantine Em-
FREDERIC ​II . 175
pire came to an end in Europe, and for sixty years a Latin Empire kept watch on the Bosphorus.
The Papal guardian of Frederic met with no success in carrying out his German policy. At first he maintained neutrality in the struggle for the throne between Philip of Swabia and Otto the Guelph, Then, because Philip in his capacity as administrator of the Mathildan do- main had interfered with the rights of the Church, and also because the entire Hohenstaufen faction did not recognize the Papal gains in the Papal States, Innocent went over to the side of Otto, who was rich in promises. He imposed the ban on Otto's opponents and in an- swer to their protest declared that, though the German princes un- questionably had the right to elect their King, it was the Pope's priv- ilege to examine the king elected before crowning him Emperor, and, in case that two candidates were chosen, to decide in favour of the one who appeared most likely to perform his royal duties. Philip gained the larger number of supporters and had already succeeded in inducing Innocent to free him from the ban, when he was murdered by a Wittelsbach assassin in 1208. Otto, who was betrothed to Phil- ip's daughter, was now unquestionably King and renewed all the golden promises he had made to the Pope. But once crowned Em- peror (1209) he was no longer anxious to keep them. What was still worse, he wrecked the political plan on which the Curia had staked its greatest hopes. It sought to prevent once and forever the union under one rule of the Neapolitan Sicilian Kingdom and the Empire, since this would have placed the Italian Church states anew under the control of the Empire. When Otto, who had already sub- jugated the mainland, wanted to conquer Sicily also, the Pope first imposed the ban on him and then induced the German princes to depose him and elect a new ruler. The choice fell on Frederic, as Henry VI had already foreseen, and Innocent approved. The reason was that Frederic recognized the Pope's right to determine the fate of Sicily, and obediently conveyed the Sicilian crown to his infant son. The Hohenstaufen monarch was then seventeen years old and was received with enthusiasm in the land of his ancestors. He became King of Germany; and by the Golden Bull of Ager he promised, with the assent of the princes, to fulfill all the spiritual and temporal requests,
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of the Pope, The year following Otto lost the Battle of Bouvines, and neither he nor his English ally recovered from the blow. The Papacy had thus pressed to its bosom a young and beautiful viper who would soon prove (as Voltaire was to say later on) "un modele de la plus parfait politique."
These events were followed by the Council of the Lateran (1215) which was the greatest assemblage of churchmen the world had ever seen. Many more than a thousand ecclesiastics, including the Patri- archs of Constantinople and Jerusalem, delegates from Alexandria and Antioch, and legates of the temporal rulers assembled. Archbishop Roderic of Toledo delivered in Latin, French, German, English and Spanish a greatly admired address on the extent of the Papal powers. To this spiritual glorification the Bishop of Liege appended a symbol of the temporal power of the Church by appearing on the first day as a Count clad in scarlet, on the second day as a Duke dressed in green, and on the third day as a Bishop arrayed in violet garments.
Innocent opened the sessions with a feeling that he was soon to die: "I have desired with a great desire to eat this Pascal Lamb with you before I go." The situation then existing throughout the world entitled him to liken the authority of the Papacy to the Sun and the power of Kings to the Moon, which bears its light as a loan from the day star. A man who despised the world sat on a throne from which he ruled the world; and the just steward (whom the press of business he so much deplored had never robbed of a deep earnestness of thought or of the gravity so characteristic of the true Roman statesman) , had proved himself a frugal householder who knew how to garner but also how to give, and who lived as simply as Cincinnatus himself. He had been loyal to the sentiments he had uttered on the day of his coronation: "If I wished to teach and not to do, you would rightly say to me 'Doctor, cure yourself!' One has every reason to despise the sermon of a man who himself gives scandal." The hostile lyrics of Walther von der Vogelweide "Aha, how Christlike is now the Pope's laughter" had missed their target. The Council discussed steps to be taken in order to regain the Holy Land, and the Reforma- tion of the Church. Seventy canons on matters of faith, law and discipline gave a new expression to ancient binding legislation. They dealt with the act of consecration, the Mass, indulgences and their
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misuse, Easter duty, the curbing of a monasticism grown too luxuriant, and the uprooting of heresy. The ban was once more imposed on Otto IV, and Frederic the Hohenstaufen was recognized as the duly elected Emperor.
During the next year Innocent set out for Lombardy with the ob- ject of settling the war between Genoa and Pisa. But he died in Perugia and was buried there. Soon a German chronicler set down the legend that the restless soul of the dead Pope had appeared again on earth, surrounded by the flames of Purgatory: driven by the whips of the Devil through the world, it finally reached the foot of the Cross and cried aloud for the prayers of the faithful. This story enshrined the truth that the Popes remained as conscious of the dan- gers and temptations latent in the temporal power of the Church as were the early Christians. During the nineteenth century, Leo XIII erected a monument to the Pontiff of the thirteenth century who served him as a revered model: in the semidarkness of the basilica, Innocent sleeps with hands folded and with the tiara on his head, looking as young as when Giotto had drawn him in his pictures of St. Francis.
The great concerns of Innocent's pontificate had been Emperor and Empire, Mendicant Orders and heresy. The same things were to bring joy and sorrow to his successors. The cosmos of the Catholic Church is a perfect co-ordination of antitheses which hover in constant tension, maintaining themselves and mutually softening one another. In it the rights of the divine and the human, of the temporal and the timeless, of the material and the spiritual, of the soul and the intellect, of freedom and subservience, of mastery and service, tend like spokes of a wheel towards the point of rest at the centre, in which all the energies moving in and out part company and join forces alike. It is just this fullness of life in balance which makes the Church a cosmos. But the separate energies which it embraces and fosters, harnessing each to the rest, are always in conflict when seen as historical realities. Each wishes to be alone and to dominate. In addition it always seems right at any given moment that one certain idea should be emphasized above all others. Therefore it is eminently natural that as a rule the richest and most active eras are those which most violently oppose the Church's system of doctrine and life. The Church of the thirteenth
i ​7 8 THE THRONE OF THE WORLD
century received in the Samma of St. Thomas Aquinas, grand-nephew of Barbarossa and heritor of both German and Latin blood, a marvel- lously harmonious reflection of its inner structure. At the same time, however, it witnessed efforts of unparalleled vigour to effect emanci- pation from its religious and spiritual communion. To live in the Catholic state of tension was unendurable to many spirits; and both good and evil men found in the administration of the Church an excuse, or even an incentive, for separating themselves from it. To one who looks closely the whole Middle Ages are like a landscape shot through with fissures and chasms in spite of all these cleavages. The fact that Europe held together out of a sense of devotion to the ulti- mate highest things can hardly be understood unless one has recourse to the mysterious law which governs the throne of Peter. Again and again it has learned the truth of salus ab inimicis; and this was also to be the case during the storms of the turbulent thirteenth century. The fact that many who opposed the Church were subjectively right and in conformity with Christian principle, compelled the Popes to be on guard and despite everything to guide the wild waters at last behind the dams of the universal Church. Generally they achieved it with spiritual means, as for instance through the movement which fostered poverty. Where these failed, sometimes through the fault of those who applied them, the result was a baneful recourse to force, as in the Albigensian Wars.
The Mendicant Orders of Franciscans and Dominicans had been founded under Innocent III. Legend has it that in a dream the Pope had seen the two founders, the Umbrian and the Spaniard, supporting the tottering Lateran Basilica. This story enshrines the historical truth that the best men of the time entertained dark fears when wide- spread apostasy proved a reality in France. The long and tedious process by which the spiritual world-state was eventually to be dis- rupted had already begun. Prophecies of the Calabrian Abbot Joachim di Fiore, who died in 1202, declared that a great judgment would be held over "the Church which anti-Christ ruled." An age of the Eternal Gospel that is of deeper spiritual understanding of the Bible was to begin. Joachim preached of a coming new Or- der which would substitute a Church of the spirit for a Church of the flesh. At the same time the call to penance and poverty preached
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by the Lyonnaise merchant Peter Waldes, and his French or Lombard followers, offered further proof that a revolution of the spirit was in progress.
This revolution was quiet and peaceful at first. In Southern France, however, a rival of the Church began to emerge. This, the richest and most fruitful country of Europe, had been of old a fertile soil for Gnostic rebellion against Christendom. Its spirited, sense-loving population has often wavered between unlimited devotion to pleasure and a nihilistic renouncement of life. Nowhere else in any Christian land did the Manichean dualism of the Cathari flourish as it did here. Before the year 1000 this doctrine had spread westward from the Bal- kans to the Champagne district and had erected its first chapels in Lombardy. In the French south, Albi was its headquarters; and from this city the sect took its name. Lust of life and hatred of life were peculiarly or rather very naturally mingled in the activity and teachings of the group. The "perfect" and the "comforted" carried asceticism to the point of suicide; but the "simple" lived mer- rily and gaily, scoffed at eternity and followed the counsels of the troubadours concerning women. When death came it was merely to open to them the door of Paradise by reason of the imposition of hands, the consolamentum by one who was "perfect." If the body was created by the Devil just as the soul is created by God, what dif- ference could it make whether the body had offered homage to pleas- ure or to flagellation? Complete pessimism regarding marriage, the family, and social obligations were contrasted with the edifying exam- ple given by the truly saintly conduct of the strict observer, which con- duct the people then compared with the scandal so frequently given by priests, monks and prelates of the Church. Since the Albigensians hated Rome, which they termed the Church of temporal power, of darkness and of the Devil, the nobles encouraged the Cathari in every possible way. Not unjustly had Innocent said at the Lateran Coun- cil that all the deterioration of the people proceeded chiefly from the clergy. And now a new spirit of purity, discipline and strict observ- ance spread as the new Orders gained strength.
The Albigensian War broke out in 1209 and lasted through twenty years of manifold cruelty. Innocent tried in every possible way to gain the upper hand over the rival church by peaceful means, but his
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legates and the Cistercian missionaries failed miserably. It was their fault that armed conflict ensued. Then the Crusade, which the Pope endorsed only on the provision that it would merely dispossess and drive out the heretics, became, despite the religious earnestness of many knights, a deplorable war of conquest carried on by French barons against the landed nobility of the south. While its devilish work was proceeding in the name of Christ, Dominic Guzman, who had crossed the Pyrenees 'with his Bishop Diego, organized spiritual resistance. In conformity with a religious ideal of poverty which had made an increasingly deep impression on Catholic countries since the close of the twelfth century, he opposed to the successful educa- tional work done by the Albigensian women a new Catholic force, the nucleus of which was the Society of cloistered women of Prouillc (1206). Later (1215) he founded in Toulouse a company of thor- oughly educated preachers, whose function it was to train the people to combat heresy. This work was authorized during the following year by Pope Honorius III, but not until 1220 did Dominic's group follow the example of the Franciscans and become a Mendicant Order. This Spaniard of German ancestry had a worthy companion in his apostolic labour Francis, the son of an Umbrian merchant. Mod- em times, which derive a picture of Francis from the Fioretti alone, do not quite know him. He was more than a troubadour of heavenly love and a gentle friend to all living creatures. Under the cover of gold and azure paint which later rimes have laid over him, there is hidden the original a strong, unflinching man of action who con- fronted the Church and the uncouth feudalism of his time with the simple, uncompromising force of the Gospel. Courageously he read the Sermon on the Mount to Popes and prelates, insisting that decre- tals and texts of canon law must not consign it to oblivion. The Wolf of Gubbio, whom he forbade to plunder, is only a symbol of the barons to whom he preached his sermon of justice with burning pas- sion. He lived for the Church which had forgotten the humble and all those oppressed by feudal rules. For the sake of these disinherited ones as well as for that of their brutal masters, he himself lived the poor life of Christ. His rule sundered him and his "company" from the evil powers of the time, from money, sensuality, arrogance, barbarism, sloth and forgetfulness of God. "The rule and life of these brethren"
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he proclaimed, "is this: to live under obedience, in chastity and with- out property so that they may follow the teachings and the footsteps of Our Lord, Jesus Christ." One who demands much of men can always win them over to his side; and so Francis' ideals spread as rapidly as does bread among the hungry. He established an Order for men in 1209, and one for women in 1212. To this there was added in 1221 a Third Order for those living in the world. In addi- tion to fostering the especial duties of charity and devotion, he brought about a memorable social renaissance. The craftsmen and workers among his tertiaries were to pay a small tax wherewith a capital was to be formed that would serve their needs, enable them to establish an industry, or make possible the purchase of a bankrupt nobleman's land.
When the politicians around Frederic II began to understand the import of this self-help to which the working population was resort- ing; when the Emperor looked upon the tertiaries as rebels like the Manicheans and the Paterena; when the Franciscan world itself pro- duced a schismatic trend which sought to declare the ideal of poverty in its full strictness a dogma; when its martyrs died by fire or sat be- hind the prison walls of the Inquisition yearning for the dawn of the day of God Francis of Assisi had long since departed from the scene of the troubles. And though men spoke of him over his grave as "the second Christ," they misused or misunderstood his words. His saintly, wholehearted desire had been to serve the Church, which through its Popes Innocent III and Gregory IX (Cardinal Ugolino) had served him and his work. His rule of 1210 began: "This is the life according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which Brother Francis requested the Lord Pope Innocent to allow unto him and to confirm; and the Lord Pope permitted it and confirmed it for him and the brethren whom he had and would have. Brother Francis, and who- ever after him shall be head of this association, promise obedience and loyalty to Lord Innocent, the Pope, and his successors. And all other brethren are bound in duty to obey Brother Francis and his successors."
The two great founders were not more like each other than are heart and mind. Francis, the Lover, at the end rose from earth to meet the Master whom he had seen with arms opened out wide on the Cross, and whose own Wounds he had received. The studious
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Dominic was like a cherub standing at the gates of Paradise with a sword, so that he might sift, receive, or ward off those who came in accordance with their knowledge of the password or their profession of the true faith. Both Orders attained immeasurable significance. In the cities they were a social force making for distributive justice. In the universities they wrestled either in company or against each other over the fundamental problems of thought; and by reason of their readiness to give batde they kept living intellectual effort astir in the Church. To the Papacy they offered soldiers light of foot for the decisive struggle with the Empire and for the bloody surgical opera- tion of the Inquisition, which it was believed would heal the sores of the social structure.
Honorius III was a mild, patient man, ill designed to keep the Hohenstaufen monarch in check. In spite of the promise he had given to Innocent, Frederic in 1220 secured for his son Henry VII the German kingly crown in addition to the Sicilian crown. Then he himself received the Imperial crown from the Pope in the self-same year, because in view of the heavy losses that had been suffered at Cairo, Honorius hoped to persuade Frederic to fulfil at last his vow to lead a Crusade. The Papal States were at the mercy of the Empire; and nevertheless the Emperor, who did not wish to undermine the Papacy as such, looked upon those states as a barrier between the two parts of his realm. A new batde of giants over Imperial Italy was unavoidable; and the spiritual background which that struggle revealed rendered it quite different from all earlier contests between the same powers. The Emperor now desired to fashion his kingdom after the model of the Pope's kingdom, as an autonomous universal state. He realized that he was a changer of eras, an immutator tern- forum, and was not frightened (indeed he regarded it a title to fame) when his opponents recognized in him the "anti-Christ" and said as much. His ultimate purpose was not merely to establish world do- minion in the half naive, heroic sense of Barbarossa, but also to create an Empire wholly secular in character. As a politician who com- bined state and cultural objectives, he anticipated what a later time sought to describe with the meaningless phrase "religion of the here and now." The autocratic God of die Old Testament whom he ven-
THE ​SUPERMAN 183
crated and ordered his political scholars to venerate, his Messianic char- acterization of himself as the Anointed of the Lord, as well as other Biblical masks behind which he hid these things revealed more than they concealed. His game became entirely obvious when he sought to supplant the mythological attitude toward the devotional practice of Christendom with a popular religion of the goddess For- tuna. The super-prince "who as a ruler is bound by no law," put himself in the place of Christ, whom he considered as being, in com- pany with Moses and Mohammed, one of the greatest defrauders of mankind! He denied having said this, but his deeds were everything else but a denial* A new wind blew out of Bagdad and Cordova, and filled the German son of a Semitic and Islamic culture, so sensitive to the perfumes it bore, with ideals by reason of which he would be proclaimed the ideal German by later Nordic generations.
In order not to lose the good will of Christendom, the Emperor signed the Treaty of San Germano (122,5) * n which he promised that if he did not go on a Crusade he would submit to the imposition of the ban. Two years later he went to sea, but was forced by a fever to return to port. Gregory IX (1227-1241) was a blunt* irascible old man. He mistrusted the Emperor and imposed the ban on him. When Frederic replied to the "anti-Christ Pope" with insults, he im- posed it a second time and placed the interdict upon whatever place harboured him. The Emperor instigated a Roman rebellion, which forced the Pope to flee. The Hohenstaufen armies occupied the Papal States. The banned Emperor then took up the Cross, and won a victory over his Islamic foe. When he returned, he defeated Gregory's troops which had invaded Apulia with Lombard allies, and drove them from the land. In 1230 the Pope concluded peace with him and freed him from the ban.
After some years of comparative calm, the storm broke out anew. Frederic's battles and victories in Lombardy; his constitutional and administrative reforms, which sought to make Qesaristic seignories out of the autonomous communes, and the threat which such successes constituted to the Papal States: all these compelled the Pope to form an alliance with Lombardy in 1239. If Italy was to be unified under one or the other master the one who lost would be forced to occupy the position of servitor. Frederic saw no way out excepting to do-
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stroy the temporal power o the Pope. This seemed to him impera- tive also by reason of the development in Germany. True enough, he suppressed the revolt of his son Henry. But die growing partic- ularism of the territorial princes, their opposition to the municipal bourgeoisie which the Emperor had sought all too late to aid, and the estrangement of the episcopacy over which the Curia had gained the upper hand in so far as it had not joined forces with the princes, undermined the medieval Imperial idea in the north while it was being automatically hollowed out in the south by the antique character of Frederic's own idea of the state. The victor over Milan warmed himself in the light of an already sinking sun. There was not room enough, he said, to bury the enemies he had conquered. He bestowed upon himself the aura of a just judge of heretics, and in his letters vented all his spleen upon the Pope and the car-dinals. Gregory, long since irritated by the fact that the Papal fief of Sardinia had been bestowed on Enzio, one of Frederic's bastard sons, renewed the ban over the "beast, the so-called Emperor," and declared him deposed. There followed a ghastly literary row between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Finally, after Frederic had conquered the Papal States, the issue was fought out with arms. Gregory induced the Venetians to attack Apulia, but the Hohenstaufen gained the victory. He made the Pope a prisoner and ordered crosses cut on his breast and on his brow. The tonsures of the Papal priests were similarly adorned with crosses. The Pope, now threatened in his own city, which Fred- eric hoped to declare the metropolitan See of his Sicilian State, also made no headway in his efforts to find a German anti-king. Then he summoned a General Council to Rome. The Emperor himself had previously suggested this as a way out, but now he ordered Enzio to seize a hundred prelates who came on Genoese ships, drag them to Naples, and subject them to the torture of imprisonment. When Frederic himself stood before Rome with his army, the Pope died, in 1241.
Celestinc IV, a sick man, succeeded Gregory and reigned only fif- teen days. With the aid of the Roman Senator Mattheus Rubeus, Frederic succeeded in keeping two cardinals imprisoned and so de- layed the election for twenty months. Fieschi, Count Lovagna, a Genoese, was then chosen as Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) . This
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new Pontiff was a brave and able man. As a cardinal he had been the Emperor's friend, as a Pope he was to become the Emperor's enemy. Negotiations were begun and a treaty of peace was drawn up, but when the time came to put this into force everything went wrong. The Pope was willing to release the Emperor from the ban if the Papal States were restored to him. The Emperor was willing to evacuate, but only after he had been freed from the ban. The Lombard question also remained unsettled. Frederic suggested a personal meeting, but when the Pope came to this he found that Frederic had gathered three hundred knights to lend emphasis to what he said. Innocent fled to Genoa and thence to Lyons. There he spent the next six years, and in 1245 summoned a great Council to the city. Frederic's supreme justice, Thaddeus of Suessa, defended his master. The Emperor was ordered to appear personally or to send a plenipotentiary within a given it was far too brief length of time. At the third session the curse of the ban was renewed in the cathedral and Frederic's removal from the throne was decreed. The Council declared that he had broken his oath, that he was guilty of heresy and of having scoffed at ecclesiastical punishments, that he had robbed property devoted to the service of God, that he had ex- ercised cruelty in the treatment of cardinals, that he had tortured priests inhumanly, and that he had broken his oath of loyalty to his Liege Lord. Therefore he was deprived of all honours and dignities, and his subjects were freed from the oath. The clergy threw their candles on the floor and extinguished them as a sign that the Emperor, too, was extinguished.
Frederic took up the gauntlet. A manifesto publicly revealed his determination to separate the Church from the State, to secularize Church property, and to make easier for the Church the way that led to the apostolic condition of poverty. He realized that he was the champion of the independence of every form of secular power, and warned the kings and princes that he was merely at the head of a list on which their names would eventually figure. Therein the Pope was at one mind with him. Once the dragon has been bound or destroyed, he said, then the lesser reptiles must be trodden under foot as well. In spite of the French King's attempt to bring about a re- conciliation, Innocent sent the Mendicant Orders to preach a cm-
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sade against Frederic and established a rival German kingdom. But then he realized that the Hohenstaufen monarch would oppose him to the end. Many a misfortune darkened the last years of Frederic and fanned his desire for revenge, but nothing could alter his will to obtain power. Even that, however, aided him no longer. His star declined. A struggle with the Guelphs in Parma ended in his de- feat. He lived to witness the treason of his Chancellor and council- lor, Peter of Venea, who despite all that he had done to glorify the new superman, paid for his disaffection by having his eyes put out. The blind prisoner dashed his skull against the walls of a dungeon. When Enzio, his most loyal aid against the Popes and the Guelphs, was made a prisoner in Bologna, Frederic stood quite alone. He was mastering a new army when he died in the arms of his illegitimate son, Manfred, in Apulia during 1250. The friendly Archbishop of Pa- lermo gave him absolution.
Innocent returned to Italy. Frederics son and heir, Conrad IV, carried on the policy of his father with Manfred's assistance. After a few years he died and Manfred became regent for the infant boy Conradin. The Pope's attempt to gain control of his Sicilian fief ended in a severe defeat. No blessing had ever rested on a Papal war. The message of that disaster broke Innocent's heart.
The idea of force, which had borne the Papacy a long way and boded no good ending, had meanwhile also gained the upper hand in the realm of morals. Saints of the fourth century had voiced their horror at the execution of Spanish pantheists; and though Augustine had appealed to the secular arm for help against the heretics, he had insisted that these must not be put to death. Bernard of Clairvaux had still believed that the utmost which could lawfully be done against intractable heretics was to shun them absolutely. The canonists and Popes who followed these saints agreed with the temporal rulers that heresy was a crime against the Church and culture which must be rooted out of the world by force. Every form of heresy is based upon the right o man to form his religious life and thought according to the dictates of his own conscience; and this right was considered by the medieval world to mean apostasy from the order established on earth. Those desiring that all things human be arranged in a cosmos specifically their own, noted with horror the stir of chaos in the spirit-
THE ​INQUISITION 187
ual roots from which that cosmos arose. Principtis obsta! Not evil deeds merely but false, erroneous ideas also, must be punished. It was not merely the public heretic who must be punished: the con- cealed unorthodox must be ferreted out and turned over to the courts; and those who persisted in their errors must be handed over to the secular arm to be exterminated.
Lucius III, Innocent III, and Gregory IX, the friend of that Saint who bought lambs to save them from slaughter and who reverenced every drop of water as being an image of the divine purity, step by step became the instigators of the Inquisition. Innocent IV broad- ened ks scope and perfected it with the fateful introduction of the torture. More brutal by far than any persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, the Inquisition became the scandal of the Papacy and of its spiritual and temporal aids. It is true that few great men were among the victims; and it is also correct to see in the spiritual self-defense of society a great good, and in the test of martyrdom a proof of permanently significant ideas. Yet what evil does not con- tain a good when it is viewed from a distance? Measured by the mission of the Church and the laws of its Founder, the irreligiousness of the Inquisition lies in human failure to rely confidently in the spirit which He, the Proclaimer of the Eight Beatitudes, had be- queathed to His foundation when He promised that He would be with it all days. There is not an iota of His law which affords an excuse for the barbarities of five long centuries, however true it may be that principles and acts of violence sponsored by the Reformers, such as the burning of Servetus by order of Calvin, were equally deplorable.
The Papacy and the Empire alike were striving for the fullness of power, and each was the boundary beyond which the other could not go. The war in which they destroyed each other proved the matrix of new situations in Western Europe. The two powers verified the ancient truth of Greek thought, that one who strives toward great ends must also suffer greatly. The Hohenstaufens approached the close of their reign; and the forces which the Papacy set in motion against them were in turn to prove baneful to the Popes,
During the great German interregnum (1245-1273) every count
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and prince, every captain and robber baron, could become a king in his own right; and the splendour of the German throne dwindled also in the south. Alexander IV proved a weak Pope, and Manfred ignored the claims of Conradin by proclaiming himself King of Sicily in 1258. But Urban IV (1261-1264), a French Pope, made use of his power as Liege Lord to induce Charles of Anjou, the brother of his saintly king, to accept the crown which Innocent IV had already offered him. The Pope who then conferred Milan upon Charles and crowned him king, was Clement IV, also a Frenchman, who had formerly been Louis DCs minister, and had taken orders after the death of his wife. Though his reign was short, he lived to see the death of the last scion of the house of the Hohenstaufens. Manfred was slain in the battle of Benevent, 1266. Summoned by the Ghibel- lines of Italy, Conradin, who was still hardly more than a boy, hurried from his Bavarian realm to drive off him who had stolen his heritage. When he drew near Rome, the Pope, who himself dared not come near his city, stood on the walls of Viterbo and predicted the defeat of Conradin. The Romans received the Suabian ruler with enthusiasm. He lost a battle against Charles, was captured as he fled, and was beheaded in the market place of Naples in 1268. His executioner, heir to the Hohenstaufen power in Italy, now revealed his true coun- tenance to the Popes, The See of Peter became the booty of the French, and the Pope was their vassal. Italy was hardly more than the spoils over which alien princes quarrelled, and for centuries after- ward it remained in a state of upheaval brought about by inner divi- sions and the ceaseless depredations of other countries. Clement IV substituted a Gallic yoke for the burden the Germans had laid upon the Papacy.
Soon the Anjou monarch was taking a hand in the affairs of the Church in his realm, and gaining for himself a strong following in the College of Cardinals, The camps in this College were so deeply opposed that after Clement's death three years passed before Greg- ory X (12711276) could be elected. This Pope was a scion of the Visconri family, with whose blessings and recommendations Marco Polo had journeyed to Eastern Asia. Soon he had tired of his French protector; and in 1273, when the Germans met to elect an Emperor, he insisted on the choice of Rudolph of Habsburg, despite the fact that
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Charles had openly voiced the wish that his nephew be given the Imperial crown. Yet it was France, the ancient magnet o the Pa- pacy, which welcomed the great Council which Gregory summoned to Lyons in 1274. This assembly discussed among other things how peace and reunion might be affected with the Church of the East, where the Imperial power was once more in the hands of the Greeks, who desired Western allies in the face of Charles' threatened attack. Many burning questions were answered in a spirit of harmony and the Greek legates even recognized the Primacy of the Roman See. But though from a political point of view all this was excellent, those who participated in the Council did not devote their whole energies to the task. Solemn decisions were unable to enkindle a love for Rome in the people and the clergy of the East. The peace was there- fore soon broken.
In order to prevent the scandal of long interregna in the future, the Council introduced the Conclave for Papal elections. The Cardinals were to live in a common dwelling, to be shut off from all personal contact with the outer world, and to be fed on a progressively more meagre diet as the sessions went on so that they might reach a decision more rapidly. This rule had a good effect after the death of Gregory, but it soon met with violent opposition from the College.
After the short pontificates of the years 1276 and 1277, the elections once more seemed never to reach an end. But against the will of Charles of Anjou and his faction, an energetic Roman of the house of Orsini was chosen as Nicholas III (12771280). His hope was to balance the power of the Habsburgs against that of the Anjou rulers. He succeeded in inducing Charles to surrender the dignity of Roman Senator and Imperial administrator of Tuscany. Rudolph, who was easy to handle, concluded a lasting peace with the Pope and conferred on him all Imperial rights inside the boundaries of the Papal States. In addition, Nicholas succeeded in conciliating many factions, and called back the exiled Ghibellincs. But if one reads the nineteenth canto of Dante's Inferno one finds that this peace-loving Pope, uttering self-accusations and restlessly paying the penalty of his sins, finds no peace. Dante says that this "true son of the Bear" was greedy ID improve the fortunes of the "little Bears" (Orsini), and therefore gave his family the money for which he was atoning in hell. Villani,
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the Florentine historian, is also ruthless in his description of the Pope. According to him, Nicholas, full of zeal for his own kindred, carried out many exploits to secure affluence for them. He adds that Nicho- las was the first Pope at whose court simony was openly practiced in behalf of relatives who were showered with land, gold and castles.
Another French Pope, Martin IV (1281-1285), followed the Roman. So scrupulously did he avoid the vice of his predecessor that when his brother came from France to visit him he hastily sent him back home with a small present of money. The Pope declared that whatever he possessed belonged not to him but to the Church; yet he was the creature of Charles and remained an instrument in his hands. He could not muster up courage to listen as a free sovereign to the complaints of the Sicilians, or to take up their cause as a just Pope. There followed the terrible judgment of the year 1282. The Sicilian Vespers, which broke out in Palermo on Easter Monday, ended the Island's woes. Peter of Aragon, Manfred's son-in-law, whom Con- radin had named in his testament Master of Apulia and Sicily, ac- cepted a call for help which had long since come from the Sicilian Ghibellines, and received the crown in Palermo. Charles could no longer be saved by anything that Roman friends could do for him. In spite of French and Papal intrigues against Aragon, he and his followers had to content themselves with the Papal fief of Naples. Henceforth Sicily belonged to the Spanish King until the wars of the Spanish Succession.
In Rome the Colonna and Orsini began to fight for possession of the Holy See. A third power, that of the House of Anjou, also sought to acquire it. Nicholas IV was a partisan of the Colonna. When he died, the College of Cardinals went on wrangling for more than two years. Charles II of Naples recommended a man who was looked upon also by the strict Franciscans and by all friends of a religious, non-political Papacy as the long awaited Pa fa Angelica. He was not a lawyer, nor a diplomat, nor a warrior, nor a builder and Maecenas. He was a poor hermit from the Abruzzi. Peter of Maroni was persuaded to wear the tiara. Even the kings of Naples and Hungary themselves visited his wilderness resort and begged him on their knees to become Pope and thus bring peace to the Christian world. He followed them amidst tears, and allowed himself to be
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crowned as Celestinc V. But he lived in Naples, and there Charles proved his master. The Saint was not able to shoulder the responsi- bilities of the Papacy. Hounded by his enemies and soon also by his friends, driven most by his own conscience, he abdicated after a few months and went back to the lonely spot from which he had come. But the Pope who followed him had reason to fear a schism. He therefore sent emissaries in pursuit of the fleeing monk, but Celesrine had already traversed the woods of Apulia and come to the Sea. There he tried to reach Dalmatia in a skiff, but a storm threw him back upon the shore and he was imprisoned in a tower by the new Pope. The quarrel about whether this unparalleled abdication was lawful or unlawful continued to excite people long after the poor Papa Angelica was dead. Dante pictures him suffering in Purgatory, be- cause he had not possessed the energy and the determination which even the holiest of men must have if he is to rule as Pope.
CATASTROPHE