The Power Of The Popes Part 9

Heniy IV. shut up in Louvain, saw an army of faithful subjects a.s.semble around him. At their head he obtained a victory over the rebels; but, vanquished without resource, in a second combat, he fell into the hands of his enemies, who loaded him with insults. "The hatred of the popes,"

writes this unhappy sovereign to Henry the I. King of France,75

74 Otho Friging. Chron. 1. 7, c. 8, 12.-Abb. Ursperg. Chron. p.

243.-Sigon. de Regno Italico. 1. 19.

75 Sigeb. Gemblac. apud Stras, vol. 1, p. 866.-Otho Fris. Chron. 1.

7, c. 12.-Fleury's eccles. Hist. vol. 66, n. 42.

"the hatred of the popes, has carried "them so far as to violate the laws of nature; they "have armed my son against me; this son, in con- "tempt of the fidelity he had sworn to me as my "subject, comes to invade my kingdom; and what "I would I could conceal, he has even practised "on my life."

Escaped from prison, but plunged into extreme misery, the old emperor was reduced to solicit in a church, formerly built by his cures, a subaltern employment, which he did not obtain. He died; they disinterred him; Pascal II. would not allow an excommunicated corpse to repose in peace; five years, the remains of an emperor who had distinguished himself in sixty-six battles, remained without burial; the clergy of liege, who ventured to collect them, was punished for it by anathemas, and almost in our own days, a Jesuit named Longueval76 has adjudged the fidelity and boldness of this clergy to have been inexcusable.

76 Hist, of the Gall. Church, vol. 8, p. 187.

The best authenticated history has almost the air of a moral fiction, when after 1106, it represents Henry V. and Pascal occupied in avenging one upon the other, their common outrages on the rights and repose of Henry IV. Henry V. came to Rome, kissed the pope's feet, and desired to be crowned emperor. Pascal deemed the conjuncture a favourable one for regaining a formal renunciation of the invest.i.tures, which he had just condemned in a council held at Troyes. But he had hardly mentioned this pretension, when he was arrested, carried off to the Sabine, and confined in a fortress. There such a terror seized the Holy Father, that he, with sixteen cardinals; signed a treaty, in which he secures to the emperor, the right of invest.i.ture, provided he mingles with it no simony; he did more, he bound himself never to excommunicate Henry V.

and consented to the inhumation of Henry IV. To seal this compact on the faith of the most awful mysteries, a host is divided between the pope and the emperor: "As these are divided into two parts, said the pontiff, so may he be separated from the kingdom of Jesus Christ, who shall violate this treaty." Such was the oath which Pascal took, and which he renewed after he had recovered his liberty.

From this period he had no resource from the reproaches addressed to him by the Roman clergy, and which were redoubled in proportion as the emperor and his army removed from Rome. Behold, then, the head of the church, who permits himself to be taxed with prevarication, who retires to Terracina to weep his error, who suffers cardinals to annul his decrees and his promises! he was about, he said, to abdicate the tiara; happily they opposed this design; and such is the docility of the holy pontiff, that he constrains himself to preserve power, in order to make a better use of it. Finally, he revokes, in a council, the treaty he had the misfortune to subscribe; he declines, however, to excommunicate Henry him-himself, so scrupulous is he still of violating his engagement! It was the Cardinals who p.r.o.nounced this anathema in the presence of Pascal II. Not only did this Council condemn invest.i.tures, but furthermore, it termed all those heretics who did not condemn them.

Henry V. conceived little danger from it. He came into Italy in 1116, to take possession of the rich inheritance bequeathed by Matilda to St.

Peter. She had not transferred either sovereign rights or prerogatives, nor yet fiefs, but merely landed property, which the Roman Church was to enjoy as the proprietor, 'jure proprietario'.77 It matters not-the emperor pretends that the countess had no power, even on these grounds, to dispose of those domains; and during the whole of the 12th century, the popes remained deprived of this inheritance. After having taken possession, Henry advanced towards Rome; a sedition had burst out there against Pascal, whose long pontificate displeased the great, and whose person every one. While the pope fled to Monte Cas-sino, and shut himself up in Beneventum, the excommunicated monarch entered Rome, as if in triumph, and there received the imperial crown from the hands of Bourdin, archbishop of Bruges. Pascal excommunicated Bourdin, endeavoured to raise up against Henry, now France, now the Normans established in Lower Italy, and, finally, terminated his career, rather ingloriously, in the month of January, 1118.

77 Chartula comittissae Matbildia super concessione bono-rum suorum, Roman, eccles. vol. 6, p. 384. Script, rer. Italic.

His partisans gave him for successor, Gelasius II. whom the Frangipani, a family devoted to the emperor, were unwilling to recognize. Gelasius, arrested, released, and pursued, took the determination to fly to Gaeta, his country, from the time he was aware that Henry approached Rome.

Henry had Bourdin raised to the papacy, who, having taken the name of Gregory VIII. crowned the new emperor. But the moment the latter quitted Rome, Gelasius entered it secretly. Driven out by the Frangipani he fled, returned, fled again, retired into Provence, and died at Cluni. He had reigned but one year, if, indeed, it can be said he reigned at all.

From the time of Gregory VII. to Gelasius II. inclusive, almost all the popes, drawn from the shade of the cloister, had borne to the throne the obstinacy and asperity of the monastic spirit. Calixtus II. who replaced Gelasius, sprung from the house of the counts of Burgundy. The relative of the emperor, and of many other monarchs, he possessed at least some idea of the art of governing, and of reconciling great interests. He had the honour of terminating the disputes about invest.i.tures. A diet at Worms ruled, that for the future the prelates should be elected only in the presence of the emperor, or of his lieutenants:-that in case of misunderstanding, the matter should be referred to the emperor, who should take the opinion of the bishops: that, finally, the emperor should bestow invest.i.ture by the sceptre, and not by the crozier and ring78 Calixtus ratified this treaty in the midst of the general Lateran Council of 1123. We may also applaud this pontiff for saving the life of his rival Bourdin; he contented himself with exposing him to the jests of the populace, consigning him for ever to the depths of a dungeon, and with causing himself to be represented trampling this antipope under his feet.7? Such was the generosity of this friend!

Calixtus pressed the king of England to restore a deposed bishop. 'I have sworn,' replied the king, 'never to suffer him to re-ascend his seat.' 'You have sworn,' said Calixtus, 'very well, I am pope, and I release you from your oath.' 'How, replied the monarch, 'shall I confide in this bishop's oaths, or in your's, if your will alone is necessary to cancel them.'

78 Concilior. vol. 10, p. 883.-Abb. Ursperg. Chron. p. 204.

-Muratori's Antiquities of Italy, med. aevi. vol. 6, p. 72.

-Schill. de libertate eccles. German. 1. 4, c. 4, p. 545.

7? Art of verifying dates, vol. i. p. 283, 284.

Honorius II. who filled the Holy See from 1124 to 1180, is only remarkable for his disputes with Roger, Count of Sicily, whom he wished to prevent uniting Apulia and Calabria, an inheritance left him by William II. his father, to his States. The pope fearing that Roger might become powerful enough to invade the Ecclesiastical States, sent an army against him, which was defeated. The king of France, Louis le Gros, was then exposed to the censures of the bishops of his own kingdom: the seditious conduct of the bishop of Paris having required repressive measures, this prelate, whose temporalities were seized, dared to place his own diocese, and the possessions of the king, under interdict. The most praiseworthy action of Honorius is the removal of this interdict, and the having coldly seconded the ardent zeal of St. Bernard, when this pious abbot, treating his king as an infidel, a persecutor, a second Herod, solicited the pope to bring this affair before the Holy See.

Louis was indebted for the tranquillity of the last ten years of his reign; to the prudence of Honorius, whom St, Bernard accused of weak-ness.8

It was in the pontificate of this Honorius, that the two factions, the imperial and the papal, originating as we have seen, in the tenth centuiy,8 took, in a more decided form, the distinctions of Guelphs and Ghibeli-. nes. These two appellations are the names of two German houses, which in 1125, when Henry V. died, disputed the imperial crown.

One of these families, sometimes called* Salique, sometimes Guiebelinga or Waiblinge, reigned in Franconia, and had furnished the four last emperors; it was distinguished by its long disputes with the Church: the other family, originally of Allfort, possessed Bavaria; and many of its heads, devoted to the popes, had borne the name of Welf or Guelpho.

8 Velly's Hist, of France, vol. iii. p. 73, 74.

8 Ibid. p. 88, 89.

The duke of Saxony, Lothaire, chosen at Mayence, as successor to Henry, was impatient to manifest his attachment to the house of Guelph, by espousing the heiress of Henry duke of Bavaria. The duke of Franconia, Conrade, was then in Palestine; he hastened to combat Lothaire, re-animated the partisans of the house of Ghibeline, and caused himself to be crowned emperor, by the archbishop of Milan, while Honorius II.

declared himself in favour of the confederate of the house of Guelph.8

8 Otto Frising. Chron. 1. 7, c. 17.-De Gestis. Fred. 1. 2, c.

2.-Mase. Comment, de rebus imperii sub Lothario ET. 1. 1, 8. 1. 9.

23; sub Conrade III. 1. 3, p. 141.-Chron. Weingen-tense de Guelfi principibus, apurt Leibnitz, v. 1, p. 781.

At Rome, another powerful family, the Frangipani, had for rivals the children of a Jew named Leo, who, opulent, and a convert, had become, under these two qualifications, as formidable as famous. Peter de Leon, the son of this Jew, sought, under the name of Anaclet, to succeed Honorius II. to whom the Frangipani gave for a successor, Innocent IT.

The two popes were enthroned and consecrated at the same time in Rome: but Anaclet proved the strongest there; Innocent took refuge in France, where St. Bernard had him acknowledged, and held many councils up to the year 1133. Returned to Rome, he crowned the Guelph, Lothaire, emperor, in ceding to him the usufruct of Matilda's domains. Anaclet died; his successor Victor abdicated the tiara; the schism was extinguished; and Pope Innocent II. considered himself sufficiently firm upon the pontifical throne, to menace Count Robert, and the king of France, Louis the Young. Roger defeated the troops of Innocent, who, fallen into the hands of the conqueror, saw himself compelled to confirm the t.i.tle of king, given to Roger by Anaclet. Louis VII. defended himself with less success: exercising the right which all his predecessors had exercised, he had refused to ratify the election of an archbishop of Bourges.

Innocent received the pretended archbishop, consecrated him, and sent him to take possession, spoke of the king as of a young man whom it was necessary to instruct, that it was not proper he should in anywise accustom himself to meddle in the affairs of the church,-and, enraged with the opposition of this prince, he laid his kingdom under an interdict: a sentence then so much the more terrible, as, echoed by the French prelates supported by St. Bernard, it presented to Thibault, Count of Champagne, a turbulent and hypocritical va.s.sal, the opportunity of exciting a. civil war. Louis armed himself against Thibault, entered Vetry, and tarnished his victory by delivering thirteen hundred of its unfortunate inhabitants to the flames. This excess was subsequently expiated by a crusade which had itself needed expiation.

Celestine III. the successor of Innocent II. took off the interdict laid on France, refused to confirm the treaties entered into by his predecessors with Roger, king of Sicily, and declared himself against Stephen, who had taken possession of the English throne. The pontificate of celestine II. and that of Lucius II. who followed him, scarcely completed two years; but these are memorable from the disturbances which agitated the city and environs of Rome.

Arnauld of Brescia, an austere monk, but eloquent and seditious, had denounced the ambition and the despotism of the clergy. To maxims of independence, which were qualified political heresies, he united certain less intelligible errors, which he adopted of Abelard, his master and his friend. From 1139, Arnauld, condemned by the second Lateran council, had left Italy, and had taken refuge in the territory of Zurich. During his exile the Romans, discontented with Innocent II. restored some semblance of their former liberty; and these attempts, more bold under celestine II. became, under Louis, serious undertakings. They created a patrician, popular magistrate, and president of a senate composed of fifty-six members. The patrician was a brother of the antipope Anaclet; the thirteen districts of Rome concurred in the choice of these fifty-six senators. Deputies were sent by this senate to Conrade III.

whom the death of Lothaire had left in full possession of the empire.

The Romans invited Conrade to come and take in the midst of their city the imperial crown:

"Let your wisdom, said they to "him, call to mind the attempts undertaken by the "popes against your august predecessors. The "popes, their partisans, and the Sicilians, at the pre- "sent time in league with them, prepare for you "still greater outrages. But the senate is restored, "the people have resumed their vigour; this "people and this senate, by which Constantine, "Theodosius, and Justinian governed the world, "and whose vows, prayers and exertions, call you "to a similar degree of power and glory."

Conrade was perfectly aware of the projects of independence which this language harboured, and did not think it prudent to imitate Lucius, who also had addressed an epistle to him. Bold against enemies whom Conrade had abandoned, and whom Roger threatened, Lucius advanced towards the capital; he marched surrounded by priests and soldiers. This parade of all his temporal and spiritual arms, however, was useless; a shower of stones crushed the double army of the pope, and he himself received a mortal wound. His party very hastily gave him a successor; but this person, who was named Eugenius III. hastened to quit Rome, lest he should see himself compelled to ratify the re-establishment of the popular magistracy8

8 Otho. Frising. Chron. 1. 7. c. 22,27,31.-De Gest. Frid. re. 1. 1.

e. 21, 22, 27,26.-Moscow de reb. imperii sub Con rado HI. 1. 3, pa. 114.

Eugenius armed against the Romans the inhabitants of Tivoli, and nevertheless re-entered Rome only by recognizing the senate. He obtained but the abolition of the dignity of patrician, and the re-establishment of the prefect. These transactions did not lead to a permanent peace; Eugeni us again took flight and pa.s.sed into France, where he seconded as far as possible St. Bernard, the apostle of the fatal crusade of 114784 During the absence of Eugenuis, Arnauld of Brescia returned to Rome, followed by two thousand Swiss85 he proposed restoring the consul, the tribunes, the equestrian order of the ancient Republic of Rome, to allow the pope the exercise of no civil power, and to limit the power they were obliged to leave in the emperor's hands. Eugenius re-appeared in the capital in 1149, quitted again almost immediately, again returned in 1153 to quit it no more. Imploring the a.s.sistance of Barbarossa, who had been elected emperor, he offered to crown him, and obtained from this prince a promise to receive the pontifical authority at Rome. Louis VII.

broke at this time his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitain: this divorce, the only one perhaps which has had fatal consequences for France, is also the only one which has not experienced on the part of the church, any sort of opposition. Neither the pope, nor the bishop, nor St.

Bernard complained of it.

84 This expedition is connected with our subject, only by general considerations, which we have already laid before oar readers-see page 116.

85 Chron. Corbeiens.

Suger, who had advised against it, no longer lived; the French prelates, whom Louis condescended to consult, expressly approved of it; and the heiress of Guienne and Poictou, repudiated under the usual pretext of distant consanguinity, disinherited the daughters whom she had by the king of France, married Henry Plantagenet, and added two large provinces to Maine and Anjou, already possessed by Henry, who became afterwards king of England. Here we behold one of the princ.i.p.al causes of the long rivalry of these two kingdoms; and if the clergy, for a long time accustomed to pa.s.s the limits prescribed by their profession, had attempted to trangress them on the present occasion, for once, at least, we should have been enabled to bless the abuse of their ecclesiastical functions.

That which must render the pontificate of Eugenius III. memorable in the History of the Power of the Popes is, the approbation which he bestowed on Gratian's Decree. The name of 'Decree' designates in this place, a canonical compilation at first ent.i.tled 'Concord of the Discordant Canons,' which was completed in 1152, by the aforesaid Gratian, a Benedictine monk bom in Tuscany. The then recent discovery of Justinian's Pandects, caused the revival in Italy of the study of civil jurisprudence: the collection of Gratian, became the 'text' of ecclesiastical jurisprudence; and the first of these studies, soon subjected to the other, appeared only as its appendage. This collection is divided into three parts, of which one treats of general principles and ecclesiastical persons, the second of judgment, and the third of sacred things. The tautology, the impertinencies, the irregularity, the errors in proper names, the disregard of correctness in the quotations, are the smallest faults of the compiler; mutilated pa.s.sages, canons, false decretals, every species of falsehood, abound in this monstrous production. Its success was only the more rapid; they began to expound it in the schools, to cite it at the tribunals, to invoke it in treaties; and it had almost become the general law of Europe, when the return of learning slowly dissipated these gross impostures. The clergy withdrawn from the secular tribunals; the civil power subjected to the ecclesiastical supremacy; the estates of individuals, and the acts which determined them, sovereignly regulated, confirmed, annulled, by the canons, and by the clergy; the papal power freed from all restriction; the sanction of all the laws of the church conferred on the Holy See, itself independent of the laws published and confirmed by it: such are the actual consequences of this system of jurisprudence. Some churches, and that of France in particular, have modified it; but it is preserved pure and unaltered in the Roman Church, which has availed itself of it in the succeeding centuries to trouble the world. From the end of the eighth century the decretals of Isidore had sowed the seeds of the whole pontifical power. Gratian has compiled and enriched them. Represented as the source of all irrefragable decisions, the universal tribunal which-determines all differences, dissipates all doubts, clears up all difficulties, the Court of Rome beholds itself consulted from all parts, by metropolitans, bishops, chapters, abbots, monks, by lords, by princes, and even by private individuals. The pontifical correspondence had no limits but in the slowness of the medium of communication; the flow of questions multiplied bulb, briefs and epistles; and from these fict.i.tious decretals, attributed to the popes of the first ages, sprung up and multiplied, from the time of Eugenius III. millions of responses and too well authenticated sentences. Matters, religious, civil, judicial, domestic, all at this period more or less clogged with pretended relations to the spiritual power; general interests, local disputes, quarrels of individuals, all was referred as a 'dernier resort', sometimes in both first and last instance, to the Vicar of Jesus Christ; and the Court of Rome obtained that influence in detail, if we may so term it, of all the most tremendous, precisely for this reason, that each of its consequences, isolated from the rest, appeared the more unimportant. Isidore and Gratian have transformed the pope into a universal administrator.

Frederick Barbarossa was then the princ.i.p.al obstacle to the progress of pontifical power. Young, ambitious and enterprising, he was connected, by the ties of blood, with the families of Guelph and Ghibeline. He seemed destined to extinguish, or at least to suspend, the fury of the two factions. He announced the design of confirming in Italy the imperial power; and it could not have been antic.i.p.ated, that a new crusade should divert him as speedily from it, after the misfortunes attendant on that of 1147.

In the mean time, Adrian IV. born in a village in the neighbourhood of the abbey of St. Alban, mounted the chair of St. Peter in the month of December 1154.86 The king of England, Henry II. congratulated himself on seeing an Englishman at the head of the Church, and asked his permission to take possession of Ireland, in order to establish Christianity there in its primitive purity. Adrian consented to it, with this observation, that all the isles, in which the Christian faith had been preached, belonged indubitably to the Holy See, even as Henry himself acknowledged. The pope, then, did consent to dispose of Ireland in favour of the king of England, on condition that the king should cause the Roman church to be paid an annual tax of one penny out of each house in Ireland. Fleury87 supposes that John of Salisbury was one of the amba.s.sadors sent by the king to the pontiff to solicit Ireland from him; but Matthew Paris88 names the deputies without mentioning John of Salisbury; however, the latter might have been commissioned to second the application to Adrian, whose intimate friend he was.-They pa.s.sed three months together at Beneventum. There it was that Adrian, having asked John what they said of the Roman Church, was answered, that she pa.s.sed for the step-mother rather than the mother of other churches, that the Pope himself was a great expense to the world, and that so many violences, so much avarice, and so much pride disgusted Christendom. Is that, said the pope, your own opinion of the matter? "I am really puzzled," replied John; "but since the Cardinal Guy Clement joins the public on this point, I cannot be of a different sentiment. You are most Holy Father out of the right way; wherefore exact of your children such enormous tributes? and that which you have received freely, why not freely bestow it8? ?" The pope, says Fleury,? began to laugh, and to exculpate Rome, alleged the fable of the stomach and the other members.

But in order that the application should be correct, says the same historian, it would have been requisite that the Roman Church should have extended to other churches similar benefits to those she derived from them.

86 Guill. Neubrig, Rer. Angl. 1. 2. c. 6. et 9,-Ciacon. de Vitis pont. Rom. Hadr. 4.

87 Petri Bles. Op. p. 252, 263.-Concilior. v. 9. p. 1143. Hist, eccles. 1. 70. n. 16.

88 Hist. Angl. anno. 1155.

8? Joann. Sarisb: Polycrat. 1. 6. c. 24; 1. 8. c. 22.

? Hist, eccles. 1.70. n. 15.

At the above period, reigned in Sicily, William sumamed the Bad, who enraged at receiving from the pope only the t.i.tle of lord, in the place of that of king, carried hostilities into the ecclesiastical states.?

Adrian, after having excommunicated him, raised against him the n.o.bles, va.s.sals of this prince, promising to support their privileges with an invincible constancy, and to have them restored to the heritages of which they had been deprived. However, the pope shut up in Beneventum, saw himself obliged to capitulate, and to sacrifice the Sicilians who had armed themselves in his defence. William of Tyre has blamed him for it;? but according to Baronius,? we must only pity him, for he lacked the means of remaining faithful to his engagements; and he was so far from free, that he was constrained to acknowledge, by authentic deed, that he enjoyed a perfect liberty. However it was, William the Bad, and the pope were reconciled; and there were none discontented save the barons, who, on the word of the holy father, had expected never to be abandoned.