SECOND DIVISION. (Continued.) (continued 2)

§ 96.7. Gregory VII., A.D. 1073-1085.―Hildebrand had at last brought the papacy to such a height of power that he was able now to put the finishing stroke to his own work in his own name, and so now he mounted the chair of the chief of the apostles, as Gregory VII., elected and enthroned by a disorderly mob. The Lombard and German bishops appealed to the emperor to have the election declared invalid. But he being on all sides threatened with wars and revolution, thought it advisable to forego the assertion of his rights and to win the favour of the pope by a letter full of devotion and humility. At the Roman Fast Synod of A.D. 1074, Gregory renewed the old law of celibacy and rendered it more strict, deposed all married priests or those who got office through simony, and pronounced their priestly acts invalid. The lower clergy, who were generally married, violently opposed the measure, but Gregory’s stronger will prevailed. Papal legates visited all lands, and, supported by the people, insisted upon the strict observance of the papal decree. At the next fast synod in A.D. 1075, the pope began the contest against the usual investiture of the higher clergy by the temporal princes, with ring and staff as symbols of episcopal office. Whoever should accept ecclesiastical office from the hand of a layman was to be deposed, and any potentate who should give investiture should be put under the ban of the church. Here too he thundered his anathema against the counsellors of Henry who should meanwhile prove guilty of the sale of ecclesiastical offices. Henry, whose hands were fully occupied with the rebellious Saxons, at first dismissed his counsellors, but after the close of the wars he reinstated them, and quite ignored the papal prohibition of investiture. Gregory had for a while quite enough to do in Italy. Cencius, the head of the nobles opposed to reform, fell upon him on Christmas, A.D. 1075, during Divine service, and made him prisoner, but the Romans rescued him, and Cencius had to take to flight. On New Year’s Day, A.D. 1076, there appeared at the royal residence at Goslar a papal embassy which threatened the king with excommunication and deposition should he not immediately break off all relations with the counsellors under the ban, and reform his own infamous life. The king burst out in furious rage. He heaped insults upon the legates, and at the Synod of Worms, on 24th January, had the pope formally deposed as a perjured usurper of the papal chair, a tyrant, an adulterer and a sorcerer. The Lombard bishops, too, gave their consent to this decree (§ 97, 5). At the next Roman Fast Synod on 22nd February, the pope placed all bishops who had taken part in these proceedings under ban, and at the same time solemnly excommunicated and deposed the king, and released all his subjects from the obligation of their oaths of allegiance. Moreover he had the king’s ambassadors, whose life he had preserved from the fury of those present at the meeting of synod by his personal interference, cast into prison, and then in the most contemptuous manner led through the streets. The papal ban made a deep impression upon the German people and princes. One bishop after another gave in, the Saxons raised a new revolt, and at the princes’ conference at Tribur, in October, A.D. 1076, the pope was invited to come personally to Augsburg on 2nd February, to meet and confer with the princes about the affairs of the king. It was resolved that if Henry did not succeed by 22nd February, the first anniversary of the ban, to get it removed, he should for ever forfeit the crown, but that meanwhile he should reside at Spires and continue in the exercise of all royal prerogatives.

§ 96.8. It was for the pope’s advantage to have the business settled upon German soil with the greatest possible publicity. Therefore he scornfully refused the humble petition of the king to send him absolution from Rome, and hastened his preparations for travelling to Augsburg. But Henry went forth to meet him on the way. Shortly before Christmas he escaped from Spires with his wife and child, and in spite of a severe winter crossed Mount Cenis. The Lombards protected him in defying the pretensions of the pope. But Henry’s whole attention was now directed to overturning the machinations of the hostile German princes. So he suddenly appeared at Canossa, where Gregory was staying with the Margravine Matilda, daughter of Beatrice, a princess enthusiastically attached to him and his ideal. This meeting was unexpected and undesired by the pope. There during the cold winter days, from 25th to 27th January, A.D. 1077, stood the son of Henry III. barefoot in the courtyard of the castle of Canossa, wearing a sackcloth shirt, fasting all day and supplicating access to the proud monk. With inflexible severity the pope refused, until at last the tears, entreaties, and reproaches of the margravine overcame his obduracy. Henry promised to submit himself to the future judgment of the pope in regard to his reconciliation with the German princes, and was absolved. Nevertheless the princes at the Assembly at Forcheim in March, with the concurrence of the papal legate, elected a new king in the person of Rudolph of Swabia, Henry’s brother-in-law. Roused to fury, Henry now hastened back to Germany, where soon he gathered round him a great army. Notwithstanding all pressure brought to bear upon him, Gregory maintained for three years a position of neutrality, but at last, in A.D. 1080, at the Roman Fast Synod, where the envoys of the contending kings presented their complaints, he renewed the excommunication and deposition of Henry. Then the bishops of Henry’s party immediately met at Brixen, and hurled the anathema and pronounced sentence of deposition against Gregory, and elected as anti-pope Wibert, formerly chancellor, then archbishop of Ravenna, who assumed the title of Clement III., A.D. 1080-1100. After the death of Rudolph in battle, at Merseburg, in A.D. 1080, Henry marched across the Alps and appeared at Pentecost before the gates of Rome, which were opened to him after a three years’ siege. Clement III. then at Easter, A.D. 1084, set upon him and his queen the imperial crown. Gregory had withdrawn to the Castle of St. Angelo. Henry, however, was compelled by the appearance of a new rival for the crown, Henry, Count of Luxemburg, to return to Germany, and Robert Guiscard, the Norman duke, hastened from the south to deliver the pope, which he accomplished only after Rome had been fearfully devastated. Gregory died in the following year, A.D. 1085, at Salerno. Gregory VII. also took the field against the dissolute and prodigal king of France, Philip I., and threatened him, because of simony, with interdict and deposition. His success here, however, was comparatively small. Philip avowedly submitted to the papal decree, but did not in the least alter his conduct, and Gregory felt that it was not prudent to push matters to an extremity. He showed himself more indulgent toward the powerful William the Conqueror of England, although this prince ruled the church of his dominions with an iron hand, pronounced all church property to be freehold, and was scarcely less guilty of simony than the kings of Germany and France. Yet the pope himself, who hoped to secure the aid of his arms against Henry IV., and sought therefore to dazzle him with the prospect of the imperial throne, winked at his delinquencies, and loaded him with expressions of his good-will. The primate of England, too, the powerful Conqueror’s right-hand supporter, Lanfranc of Canterbury, who bore a grudge against Gregory because of his patronage of the heretic Berengarius [Berengar] (§ 101, 2), showed no special zeal for the reforms advocated by the pope. At a synod held at Winchester in A.D. 1076, the law of celibacy was enforced, with this limitation, however, that those of the secular clergy who were already married should not be required to put away their wives, but no further marriages among them were to be permitted.275

§ 96.9. The Central Idea in Gregory’s Policy was the establishment of a universal theocracy, with the pope as its one visible head, the representative of Christ upon earth, who as such stands over the powers of the world. Alongside of it, indeed, the royal authority was to stand independently as one ordained of God, but it was to confine itself strictly to temporal affairs, and to be directed by the pope in regard to whatever might be partly within and partly without these lines. All states bearing the Christian name were to be bound together as members of one body in the great papal theocracy which had superior to it only God and His law. The princes must receive consecration and Divine sanction from the spiritual power; they are “by the grace of God,” not immediately, however, but only mediately, the church as the middle term stands between them and God. The pope is their arbiter and highest liege lord, whose decisions they are under obligation unconditionally to obey. Royalty stands related to the papacy as the moon to the sun, from which she receives her light and warmth. The church, which lends to the power of the world her Divine authority, can also withdraw it again when it is being misused. When this is done, the obligation of subjects to obey also ceases. Gregory began this gigantic work, not so much to raise himself personally to the utmost pinnacle of power, but rather to save the church from destruction. He certainly was not free from ambition and the lust of ruling, but with him higher than all personal interests was the idea of the high vocation of the church, and to the realizing of it he enthusiastically devoted all the energies of his life. On the other hand, he cannot escape the reproach of having striven with carnal weapons for what he called a spiritual victory, of having meted out unequal measures, where his interests demanded it, in the exercise of his assumed function as judge of kings and princes, and of having occupied himself more with political schemes and intrigues than with the ministry of the church of Christ. His whole career shows him to have been a man of great self reliance, yet, on the other hand, he was able to preserve the consciousness of the poor sinner who seeks and finds salvation only in the mercy of Christ. The strict morality of his life has been admitted even by his bitterest foes. Not infrequently too did he show himself in advance of his time in humanity and liberality of sentiment, as e.g. in the Berengarian controversy (§ 101, 2), and in his decided disapproval of the prosecution of witches and sorcerers.276

§ 96.10. Victor III. and Urban II., A.D. 1086-1099.―Gregory VII. was succeeded by the talented abbot of Monte Cassino, Desiderius, under the title of Victor III., A.D. 1086-1087. Only after great pressure was brought to bear upon him did he consent to leave the cloister, which under his rule had flourished in a remarkable manner; but now aged and sickly, he only enjoyed the pontificate for sixteen months. His successor was bishop Odo, of Ostia, a Frenchman by birth, and a member of the Clugny brotherhood, who took the name of Urban II., A.D. 1088-1099. For a long time he was obliged to give up Rome to the party of the imperial anti-pope. But the enthusiasm with which the idea of rescuing the Holy Sepulchre was taken up, which he proposed to Western Christendom at the Council of Clermont, in A.D. 1095 (§ 94), secured for him the highest position in his time, and made him strong enough to withstand the opposition of Philip I., king of France, whom he had put under ban at Clermont, on account of his adulterous connection with Bertrada. Returning to Italy from his victorious campaign through France, he was able to celebrate Christmas once again in the Lateran at Rome in A.D. 1096. His main supporters in the conflict against the emperor were the powerful Margravine Matilda, and the emperor’s most dangerous opponent in Germany, duke Welf of Bavaria, whose son of the same name, then in his seventeenth year, was married by the pope to the widowed Matilda, who was now forty years of age, whence arose the first of the anti-imperial and strongly papistical Welf or Guelph party in Germany and Italy. On the other side the margravine succeeded in stirring up Conrad, the son of Henry IV., to rebel against his father, and had him crowned king in A.D. 1087. At Cremona this prince held the pope’s stirrup, and took the oath of obedience to him. The emperor had him deposed in A.D. 1098, and had his second son elected and crowned as Henry V. Urban, who received on his death-bed the news of the destruction of Jerusalem, died in A.D. 1099, and his anti-pope Clement III., who had withdrawn to Ravenna, died in the following year.

§ 96.11. Paschalis II., Gelasius II., and Calixtus II., A.D. 1099-1124.―Urban’s successor, Paschalis II., A.D. 1099-1118, also a member of the Clugny brotherhood, at once stirred up the fire of rebellion against the excommunicated emperor, and favoured a conspiracy of the princes. The young king, at the head of the insurgents, took his father prisoner, and obliged him to abdicate in A.D. 1106. Six months afterwards the emperor died. The church’s curse pursued even his corpse. Twice interred in holy ground, first in the cathedral of Liège, then in the cathedral of Spires, his bones were exhumed and thrown into unconsecrated ground, until at last, in A.D. 1111, his son obtained the withdrawal of the ban. At the Council of Guastalla in A.D. 1106, Paschalis renewed the prohibition of Investiture. But Henry V., A.D. 1106-1125, concerned himself as little about this prohibition as his father had done. No sooner had he seated himself upon the throne in Germany than he crossed the Alps to compel the pope to crown him emperor and concede to him the right of investiture. The pope, who was willing that the church should be poor if only she retained her freedom, being now without counsel or help (for Matilda was old and her warlike spirit was broken, and from the Normans no assistance could be looked for), was driven in A.D. 1111, in his perplexity to offer a compromise, whereby the emperor should surrender investiture to the church, but on the other hand the clergy should return to him all landed property and privileges given them by the state since the times of Charlemagne, while the Patrimony of Peter should continue the property of the pope himself. On the basis of this agreement the coronation of the emperor was to be celebrated in St. Peter’s on 12th Feb., A.D. 1111. But when after the celebration had begun the document which set forth the compact was read, the prelates present in the cathedral raised loud cries of dissent and demanded that it should immediately be cancelled. The coronation was not proceeded with, the pope and his cardinals were thrown into prison, and a revolt of the Romans was suppressed. The pope was then compelled to rescind the synodal decrees and formally to grant to the king the right of investiture; he had also, after solemnly promising never again to put the emperor under ban, to proceed with the coronation. But Hildebrand’s party called the pope to account for this betrayal of the church. A synod at Rome in A.D. 1112 declared the concessions wrung from him invalid, and pronounced the ban against the emperor. The pope, however, remembering his oaths, refused to confirm it, but it was nevertheless proclaimed by his legate in the French and German synods. Matilda’s death in A.D. 1115 called the emperor again to Italy. She had even in the time of Gregory VII. made over all her goods and possessions to the Roman Church; but she had the right of free disposal only in regard to allodial property, not in regard to her feudal territories. Henry, however, now laid claim to all her belongings. At the Fast Synod of A.D. 1116 Paschalis asked pardon of God and man for his sin of weakness, renewed and made more strict the prohibition of investiture, but still stoutly refused to confirm the ban of the emperor. In consequence of a rebellion of the Romans he was obliged to take to flight, and he died in exile in A.D. 1118. The high church party now chose Gelasius II., A.D. 1118-1119, but immediately after the election he was seized by a second Cencius (see § 96, 7) on account of a private grudge, fearfully maltreated and confined in chains within his castle. The Romans indeed rescued him, but the emperor’s sudden arrival in Rome led him, in order to avoid making inconvenient terms of peace, to seek his own and the church’s safety in flight. The people and nobles in concert with the emperor set up Gregory VIII. as anti-pope. So soon as the emperor left Rome, Gelasius returned. But Cencius fell upon him during Divine service, and only with difficulty he escaped further maltreatment by flight into France, where he died in the monastery of Clugny after a pontificate of scarcely twelve months. The few cardinals present at Clugny elected archbishop Guido of Vienne. He assumed the title of Calixtus II., A.D. 1119-1124. Pope and emperor met together expressing desires for peace. But the auspiciously begun negotiations never got beyond the statement of the terms of contract, and ended in the pope renewing at the Council of Rheims, in A.D. 1119, the anathema against the emperor and anti-pope. Next year Calixtus crossed the Alps. He received a hearty greeting in Rome. He laid siege to the anti-pope in Sutri, took him prisoner, and after the most contumelious treatment before the Roman mob, cast him into a monastic prison. The investiture question, now better understood through learned discussions on civil and ecclesiastical law, was at last definitely settled in the Worms Concordat, as the result of mutual concessions made at the National Assembly at Worms, A.D. 1122. The arrangement come to was this: canonical election of bishops and abbots of the empire by the diocesan clergy and the secular nobles should be restored, and under imperial inspection made free from all coercion, but in disputed elections decisions should be given in accordance with the judgment of the metropolitan and the rest of the bishops, the investing of the elected with the sceptre in Germany before, in other parts of the empire after, consecration, should belong to the emperor, and investiture with ring and staff at the consecration should belong to the pope. This agreement was solemnly ratified at the First Œcumenical Lateran Synod in A.D. 1123.

§ 96.12. The contemporary English Investiture Controversy was brought earlier to a conclusion. William the Conqueror had unopposed put Norman prelates in the place of the English bishops, and had homage rendered him by them, while they received from him investiture with the ring and the staff. William Rufus, the Conqueror’s son and successor, A.D. 1087-1100, a domineering and greedy prince, after Lanfranc’s death in A.D. 1089 (§ 101, 1) allowed the archbishopric of Canterbury to remain vacant for four years, in order that he might himself enjoy the undisturbed possession of the revenues. It was not till A.D. 1093, during a severe illness and under fear of death, that he agreed to bestow it upon Anselm, the celebrated Abbot of Bec (§ 101, 1, 3), with the promise to abstain ever afterwards from simony. No sooner had he recovered than he repented him of his promise. He resumed his old practices, and even demanded of Anselm a large sum for his appointment. For peace sake Anselm gave him a voluntary present of money, but it did not satisfy the king. When, in A.D. 1097, the archbishop asked permission to make a journey to Rome in order to have the conflict settled there, the king banished him. In Rome Anselm was honourably received and his conduct was highly approved; but neither Urban II. nor Paschalis II. could venture upon a complete breach with the king. William the Conqueror’s third son, Henry I. Beauclerk, A.D. 1100-1135, who, having also snatched Normandy from his eldest brother Robert, needed the support of the clergy to secure his position, agreed to the return of the exiled primate, and promised to put a stop to every kind of simony; but he demanded the maintenance of investiture and the oath of fealty which Anselm now, in consequence of the decrees of a Roman synod which he had himself agreed to, felt obliged to refuse. Thus again the conflict was renewed. The king now confiscated the goods and revenues of the see, and the archbishop was on the point of issuing an excommunication against him, when at last an understanding was come to in A.D. 1106, through the mediation of the pope, according to which the crown gave up the investiture with ring and staff, and the archbishop agreed to take the oath of fealty.―In France, too, from the end of the 11th century, owing to the pressure used by the high church reforming party, the secular power was satisfied with securing the oath of fealty from the higher clergy, without making further claim to investiture.277

§ 96.13. The Times of Lothair III. and Conrad III., A.D. 1125-1152.―After the death of Henry V. without issue, the Saxon Lothair, A.D. 1125-1137, was elected, and the Hohenstaufen grandson of Henry IV. descended in the female line was passed over. Honorius II., A.D. 1124-1130, successor of Calixtus II., hastened to confer the papal sanction upon the newly elected emperor, who already upon his election had, by accepting spiritual investiture before temporal investiture, and a minimising of the oath of fealty by ecclesiastical reservations, showed himself ready to support the claims of the clergy. But neither ban nor the preaching of a crusade against Count Roger II. of Sicily (§ 95, 1) could prevent him from building up a powerful kingdom comprehending all Southern Italy. The next election of the cardinals gives us two popes: Innocent II., A.D. 1130-1143, and Anacletus II., A.D. 1130-1138. The latter, although not the pope of the majority, secured a powerful support in the friendship of Roger II., whom he had crowned king by his legate at Palermo. Innocent, on the other hand, fled to France. There the two oracles of the age, the abbot Peter of Clugny and Bernard of Clairvaux, took his side and won for him the favour of all Cisalpine Europe. Both popes fished for Lothair’s favour with the bait of the promise of imperial coronation. A second edition of the Synod of Sutri would probably have enabled a more powerful king to attain the elevation of Henry III. But Lothair was not the man to seize the opportunity. He decided in favour of the protégé of Bernard, led him back in A.D. 1133 to the eternal city, had himself crowned emperor by him in the Lateran and invested with Matilda’s inheritance, which was declared by the curialists a fief of the empire. But Lothair’s repeated demands, that what had been acquired by the Concordat of Worms should be renounced, were set aside, through the opposition not so much of the pope as of St. Bernard and St. Norbert (§ 98, 2). At the prayer of the pope, who immediately after Lothair’s departure had been driven out by Roger, and moved by the prophetic exhortations of Bernard, the emperor prepared for a second Roman campaign in A.D. 1136. Leaving the conquest of Rome to the eloquence of the prophet of Clairvaux, he advanced from one victory to another until he brought all Southern Italy under the imperial sway, and died on his return homeward in an Alpine hut in the Tyrol. Fuming with rage Roger now crossed over from Sicily and in a short time he reconquered his southern provinces of Italy. The appointment, however, of a new pope after the death of Anacletus miscarried, and Innocent was able at the Second Œcumenical Lateran Synod in A.D. 1139 to declare the schism at an end. The pope then renewed the excommunication of Roger and pronounced an anathema against the teachings of Arnold of Brescia (§ 108, 7), a young enthusiastic priest of the school of Abælard, who traced all ecclesiastical corruption back to the wealth of the church and the secular power of the clergy. He next prepared himself for war with Roger. That prince, however, waylaid him and had him brought into his tent, where he and his sons cast themselves at the holy father’s feet and begged for mercy and peace. The pope could do nothing else than play the rôle of the magnanimous given him in this comedy. He had therefore to confirm the hated Norman in the possession of the conquered provinces as a hereditary monarchy with the ecclesiastical privilege of a native legate, and, as some set off to comfort himself with, the prince was to regard the territory as a fief of the papal see. But still greater calamities befell this pope. The republican freedom, which the cities of Tuscany and Lombardy won during the 12th century, awakened also among the Romans a love of liberty. They refused to render obedience in temporal matters to the pope and established in the Capitol a popular senate, which undertook the civil government in the name of the Roman Commune. Innocent died during the revolution. His successor Cœlestine II. held the pontificate for only five months, and Lucius II., after vainly opposing the Commune for seven months, was killed by a stone thrown in a tumult. Eugenius III., A.D. 1145-1153, a scholar and friend of St. Bernard, was obliged immediately after his election to seek safety in flight. An agreement, however, was come to in that same year: the pope acknowledged the government of the Commune as legitimate, while it recognised his superiority and granted to him the investiture of the senators. Yet, though taken back three times to Rome, he could never remain there for more than a few months. He visited France and Germany (Treves) in A.D. 1147. In France he heard of the fall of Edessa. Supported by the fiery zeal of Bernard, the summons to a second crusade (§ 94, 2) aroused a burning enthusiasm throughout all the West. But in Rome he was unable to offer any effectual resistance to the demagogical preaching by which Arnold of Brescia from A.D. 1146 had inflamed the people and the inferior clergy with an ardent enthusiasm for his ideal constitution of an apostolic church and a democratic state. Since this change of feeling had taken place in Rome, both parties, that of the Capitol as well as that of the Lateran, had repeatedly endeavoured to win to their side the first Hohenstaufen on the German throne, Conrad III., A.D. 1138-1152, by promise of bestowing the imperial crown. But Conrad, meanwhile otherwise occupied, refrained from all intermeddling, and when at last he actually started upon a journey to Rome death overtook him on the way.

§ 96.14. The Times of Frederick I. and Henry VI., A.D. 1152-1190.―The nephew and successor of Conrad III., Frederick I. Barbarossa, A.D. 1152-1190, began his reign with the firm determination to realize fully the ideas of Charlemagne (§ 82, 3) by his pope Paschalis III., whom at a later period, in A.D. 1165, he had canonized. With profound contempt at heart for the Roman democracy of his time, he concluded a compact in A.D. 1153 with the papal see, which confirmed him in the possession of the imperial crown and gave to the pope the Dominium temporale in the Church States. After the death of Eugenius which soon followed, the aged Anastasius IV. occupied the papal chair for a year and a half, a time of peace and progress. He was succeeded by the powerful Hadrian IV., A.D. 1154-1159. He was an Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, son of a poor English priest, the first and, down to the present time, the only one of that nation who attained the papal dignity. He pronounced an interdict upon the Romans who had refused him entrance into the inner part of the city and had treacherously slain a cardinal. Rome endured this spiritual famine only for a few weeks, and then purchased deliverance by the expulsion of Arnold of Brescia, who soon thereafter fell into the hands of a cardinal. He was indeed again rescued by force, but Frederick I., who had meanwhile in A.D. 1154 begun his first journey to Rome, and on his way thither had humbled the proud Lombard cities struggling for freedom, urged by the pope, insisted that he should be surrendered up again, and subsequently gave him over to the Roman city prefect, who, in A.D. 1155, without trial or show of justice condemned him to be burnt and had his ashes strewn upon the Tiber. In the camp at Sutri the pope personally greeted the king who, after refusing for several days, at length agreed to show him the customary honour of holding his stirrup, doing it however with a very bad grace. Soon too the senatorial ambassadors of the Roman people, who indulged in bombastic, turgid declamation, presented themselves professing their readiness on consideration of a solemn undertaking to protect the Roman republic, and on payment of five thousand pounds, to proclaim the German king from the Capitol Roman emperor and ruler of the world. With a furious burst of anger Frederick silenced them, and with scathing words showed them how the witness of history pointed the contrast between their miserable condition and the glory and dignity of the German name. Yet on the day of the coronation, which they were not able to prevent, the Romans took revenge for the insults he had heaped upon them by an attack upon the papal residence in the castle of Leo, and upon the imperial camp in front of the city, but were repelled with sore loss. Soon thereafter, in A.D. 1155, the emperor made preparations for returning home, leaving everything else to the pope. The relations between the two became more and more strained from day to day. The Lombards, too, once again rebelled. Frederick therefore in A.D. 1158 made his second expedition to Rome. On the Roncalian plains he held a great assembly which laid down to the Lombards as well as to the pope the imperial prerogatives. Hadrian would have given utterance to his wrath by thundering an anathema, but he was restrained by the hand of death.

§ 96.15. The cardinals of the hierarchical party elected Alexander III., A.D. 1159-1181, those of the imperial party, Victor IV. A synod convened by the emperor at Pavia in A.D. 1160 decided in favour of Victor, who was now formally recognised. Meanwhile Milan threw off the yoke that had been laid upon her. After an almost two years’ siege the emperor took the city in A.D. 1162 and razed it to the ground. From France whither he had fled, Alexander, in A.D. 1163, launched his anathema against the emperor and his pope. The latter died in A.D. 1164, and Frederick had Paschalis III. († A.D. 1168) chosen his successor; but in A.D. 1165, Alexander returning from France, pressed on in advance of him and was acknowledged by the Roman senate. Now for the third time in A.D. 1166, Frederick crossed the Alps. A small detachment of troops that had been sent in advance to accompany the imperial pope to Rome under the leadership of the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, in a bloody battle at Monte Porzio in A.D. 1167 utterly destroyed a Roman army of twenty times its size. Frederick then himself hasted forward. After an eight days’ furious assault the fortress of Leo surrendered, and Paschalis was able to perform the Te Deum in St. Peter’s. The Transtiberines, too, after Alexander had sought safety in flight, soon took the oath of fealty to the emperor upon a guarantee of imperial protection of their republic. But at the very climax of his success “the fate of Sennacherib” befell him. The Roman malaria during the hot August became a deadly fever plague, thinned the lines of his army and forced him to withdraw. So weakened was he that he could not even assert his authority in Lombardy, but had to return to Germany in A.D. 1168. The emperor’s disaster told also unfavourably upon the fortunes of his pope, whose successor Calixtus III. was quite disregarded. In A.D. 1174 Frederick again went down into Italy and engaged upon a decisive battle with the confederate cities of Lombardy, but in A.D. 1176 at Legnano he suffered a complete defeat, in consequence of which he agreed at the Congress of Venice, in A.D. 1177, to acknowledge the freedom of the Lombard cities, abandoned the imperial claims upon Rome, and recognised Alexander III., who was also present there, as the rightful pope, kissing his feet and holding his stirrup according to custom. Rome, which he had not seen for nearly eleven years, would no longer shut her gates against the pope. Welcomed by senate and people, he made his public entrance into the Lateran in March A.D. 1178, where in the following year he gathered together 300 bishops in the Third Lateran Council (the 11th œcumenical), in order by their advice to heal the wounds which the schism of the church had made. Here also, in order to prevent double elections in time to come, it was resolved that for a valid papal election two-thirds of the whole college of cardinals must be agreed. The right of concurrence assigned by the decree of Nicholas II. in A.D. 1059 to the people and emperor was treated as antiquated and forgotten, and was not even alluded to.

§ 96.16. Even before his victory over the powerful Hohenstaufen, Alexander III. during his exile won a yet more brilliant success in England. King Henry II., A.D. 1154-1189, wished to establish again the supremacy of the state over church and clergy, and thought that he would have a pliant tool in carrying out his plans in Thomas à Becket, whom he made archbishop of Canterbury, in A.D. 1162. But as primate of the English church, Thomas proved a vigorous upholder of hierarchical principles. Instead of the accommodating courtier, the king found the archbishop immediately upon his consecration the bold asserter of the claims of the church. The jovial man of the world became at once the saintly ascetic. At a council at Tours in A.D. 1163, he returned into the pope’s own hand the pallium with which an English prince had invested him in name of the king, resigning also his archiepiscopal dignity, that he might receive these directly as a papal gift. Straightway began the conflict between the king and his former favourite. Henry summoned a diet at Clarendon, where he obtained the approval of the superior clergy for his anti-hierarchical propositions; Thomas also for a time withstood, promising at last, when urged on all sides, to assent to the constitutions, but refusing to sign the document when it was placed before him. The king now ordered a process of deposition to be executed against him, and Thomas then fled to France, where the pope was at that time residing. The pope released him from his promise, condemned the Constitutions of Clarendon, and threatened the king with anathema and interdict. At last, after protracted negotiations, in A.D. 1170 by means of a personal interview on the frontiers of Normandy, a reconciliation was effected; by which, however, neither the king nor the archbishop renounced their claims. Thomas now returned to England and threatened with excommunication all bishops who should agree to the Constitutions of Clarendon. Four knights seized upon an unguarded word of the king which he had uttered in passion, and murdered the archbishop at the altar in A.D. 1170. Alexander canonized the martyr to Hildebrandism, and the king was so sorely pressed by the pope, his own people and his rebellious sons, that he consented to do penance humbly at the tomb of his deadly sainted foe, and submitted to be scourged by the monks. Becket’s bones, for which a special chapel was reared at Canterbury, were visited by crowds of pilgrims until Henry VIII., when he had broken with Rome (§ 139, 4), formally arraigned the saint as a traitor, had his name struck out of the calendar and his ashes scattered to the winds.278―Thus by A.D. 1178 Alexander III. had risen to the summit of ecclesiastical power; but in Rome itself as well as in the Church States, he remained as powerless politically as before. Soon, therefore, after the great council he again quitted the city for a voluntary exile, and never saw it more. His three immediate successors, too, Lucius III. († A.D. 1185), Urban III. († A.D. 1187), and Gregory VIII. († A.D. 1187), were elected, consecrated and buried outside of Rome. Clement III. († A.D. 1191) was the first to enter the Lateran again in A.D. 1188, on the basis of a compromise which acknowledged the republican constitution under the papal superiority. Meanwhile Frederick I., without regarding the protest of the pope as liege lord of the Sicilian crown, had in A.D. 1186 consummated the fateful marriage of his son Henry with Constance, the posthumous daughter of king Roger, and aunt of his childless grandson William II. († A.D. 1194), and thus the heiress of the great Norman kingdom of Italy. From the crusade which he then undertook in A.D. 1189 Frederick never returned (§ 94, 3). His successor, Henry VI., A.D. 1190-1197, compelled the new pope Cœlestine III., A.D. 1191-1198, to crown him emperor in A.D. 1191, conquered the inheritance of his wife, pushed back the boundaries of the Church States to the very gates of Rome, and asserted his imperial rights even over the city of Rome itself. He pressed on to the realizing of the scheme for making the German crown together with the imperial dignity for ever hereditary in his house. The princes of the empire in A.D. 1196 elected his son Frederick II., when scarcely two years old, as king of the Romans. He then thought under the pretext of a crusade to conquer Greece, to which he had laid groundless claims of succession, but while upon the way his plans were overthrown by his sudden death at Messina.

§ 96.17. Innocent III., A.D. 1198-1216.―After the death of Alexander III. the power and reputation of the Holy See had fallen into the lowest degradation. Then the cardinal deacon, Lothair Count of Segni in Anagni, succeeded in A.D. 1198 in his 37th year, under the name of Innocent III., and raised the papacy again to a height of power and glory never reached before. In point of intellect and power of will he was not a whit behind Gregory VII., while in culture (§ 102, 9), scholarship, subtlety and adroitness he far excelled him. His piety, too, his moral earnestness, his enthusiasm and devotion to the church and the theocratical interest of the chair of St. Peter, were at least as powerful and decidedly purer, deeper and more spiritual than Gregory’s. And in addition to all these great endowments he enjoyed an invariable good fortune which never forsook him. His first task was the restoration of the Church States and his political prestige in Rome. In both these directions he was favoured by the sudden death of Henry VI. and the internal disorders of the Capitoline government of that time. On the very day of his enthronement the imperial prefect tendered him the oath of fealty and the Capitol did homage to him as the superior. And also before the second year had passed the Church States in their fullest extent were restored by the expulsion of the greater and smaller feudal lords who had been settled there by Henry VI. Rome was indeed once more the scene of wild party conflicts which forced the pope in A.D. 1203 to fly to Anagni. He was able, however, to return in A.D. 1204 and to conclude a definite and decisive peace with the Commune in A.D. 1205, according to the terms of which the many-headed senate resigned, and a single senator or podestà nominated by the pope was entrusted with the executive authority. Meanwhile Innocent had been gaining brilliant successes beyond the limits of the States of the Church. These were won first of all in Sicily. The widow of Henry VI. had her son Frederick of four years old, after his father’s death, crowned king in Palermo. Unadvised and helpless, pressed upon all sides, she sought protection from Innocent, which he granted upon her renouncing the ecclesiastical privileges previously claimed by the king and making acknowledgment of the papal suzerainty. Dying in A.D. 1198, Constance transferred to him the guardianship of her son, and the pope justified the confidence placed in him by the excellent and liberal education which he secured for his ward, as well as by the zeal and success with which he restored rest and peace to the land. In Germany, Philip of Swabia, Frederick’s uncle, was appointed to carry on the government in the name of his Sicilian nephew during his minority. The condition of Germany, however, demanded the direct control of a firm and vigorous ruler. The princes, therefore, insisted upon a new election, for which Philip also now appeared as candidate. The votes were split between two rivals; the Ghibellines voting for Philip, A.D. 1198-1208, and the Guelph party for Otto IV. of Brunswick, A.D. 1198-1218. The party of the latter referred the decision to the pope. For three years he delayed giving judgment, then he decided in favour of the Guelph, who paid for the preference by granting all the demands of the pope, and calling himself king by the grace of God and the pope. The States of the Church were thus represented as including the Duchy of Spoleto, and in the election of bishops the church was freed from the influence of the state. By A.D. 1204, however, Philip’s power and repute had risen to such a pitch that even the pope found himself obliged to take into account the altered position of matters. A papal court of arbitration at Rome to which both claimants had agreed to submit, was on the point of giving its decision unequivocally in favour of the Hohenstaufen, when the murder of Philip by Otto of Wittelsbach, in A.D. 1208, rendered it void. Otto IV. was now acknowledged by all, and in A.D. 1209 he was crowned by the pope after new concessions had been made. But as Roman emperor he either would not or could not perform what he had promised before and at his coronation. He took to himself the possessions of Matilda as well as other parts of the States of the Church, and was not prevented from pursuing his victorious campaign in Southern Italy by the anathema which Innocent thundered against him in A.D. 1210. Then Innocent called to mind the old rights of his former pupil to the German crown, and insisted that they should be given effect to. In A.D. 1212, Frederick II., now in his eighteenth year, accepted the call, was received in Germany with open arms, and was crowned in A.D. 1215 at Aachen. Otto could not maintain his position against him, and so withdrew to his hereditary possessions, and died in A.D. 1218.

§ 96.18. King Philip Augustus II. of France, had in A.D. 1193 married the Danish princess Ingeborg, but divorced her in A.D. 1196, and married the beautiful Duchess Agnes of Meran. Innocent compelled him in A.D. 1200 to put her away by issuing against him an interdict, but it was only in A.D. 1213 that he again took back Ingeborg as his legitimate wife.―From far off Spain the young king Peter of Arragon went in A.D. 1204 to Rome, laid down his crown as a sacred gift upon the tomb of the chief of the apostles, and voluntarily undertook the payment of a yearly tribute to the Holy See. In the same year a crusading army, by founding a Latin empire in Constantinople, brought the schismatical East to the feet of the pope (§ 94, 4). In England, when the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant, the chapter filled it by electing their own superior Reginald. This choice they had soon cause to rue. They therefore annulled their election, and at the wish of the usurping king John Lackland made choice of John, bishop of Norwich. Innocent refused to confirm their action, and persuaded certain members of the chapter staying in Rome to choose the cardinal priest Stephen Langton, whose election he immediately confirmed.279 When the king refused to recognise this appointment, and on an interdict being threatened swore that he would drive all priests who should obey it out of the country, the pope issued it in A.D. 1208 against all England, excommunicated the king, and finally, in A.D. 1212, released all his subjects from their oath of allegiance and deposed the monarch, while he commissioned Philip Augustus of France to carry the sentence into effect. John, now as cringing and terrified as before he had been proud and despotic, humbled himself in the dust, and at Dover, in A.D. 1213, placed kingdom and crown at the feet of the papal legate Pandulf, and received it from his hands as a papal fief, undertaking to pay twice a year the tribute imposed. But in A.D. 1214 the English nobles extorted from their cowardly tyrant as a safeguard against lordly wilfulness and despotism the famous Magna Charta, against which the pope protested, threatening excommunication and promising legitimate redress of their grievances, though in consequence of confusion caused by the breaking out again of the civil wars he was unable to enforce his protest. And now his days were drawing to an end. At the famous Fourth Lateran Council of A.D. 1215, more than 1,500 prelates from all the countries of Christendom, along with the ambassadors of almost all Christian kings, princes and free cities, gave him homage as the representative of God on earth, as visible Head of the Church, and supreme lord and judge of all princes and peoples. A few months later he died.―As in Italy and Germany, in France and England, he had also in all other states of the Christian world, in Spain and Portugal, in Poland, Livonia and Sweden, in Constantinople and Bulgaria, shown himself capable of controlling political as well as ecclesiastical movements, arranging and smoothing down differences, organizing and putting into shape what was tending to disorder. Some conception of his activity may be formed from the 5,316 extant decretals of the eighteen years of his pontificate.

§ 96.19. The Times of Frederick II. and his Successors, A.D. 1215-1268.―Frederick II.,280 A.D. 1215-1250, contrary to the Hohenstaufen custom, had not only agreed to the partition of Sicily from the empire in favour of his son Henry, but also renewed the agreements previously entered into with the pope by Otto IV. He even increased the papal possessions by ceding Ancona, and still further at his coronation at Aachen he showed his goodwill by undertaking a crusade. He also allowed this same Henry who became king of Sicily as a vassal of the pope, to be elected king of the Romans in A.D. 1220, and then began his journey to Rome to receive imperial coronation. The new pope Honorius III., A.D. 1216-1227, formerly Frederick’s tutor and even still entertaining for him a fatherly affection, exacted from him a solemn renewal of his earlier promises. But instead of returning to Germany, Frederick started for Sicily in order to make it the basis of operations for the future carrying out of the ideas of his father and grandfather. The peace-loving pope constantly urged him to fulfil his promise of fitting out a crusade. But it was only after his successor Gregory IX., A.D. 1227-1241, a high churchman of the stamp of Gregory VII. and Innocent III., urged the matter with greater determination, that Frederick actually embarked. He turned back, however, as soon as an epidemic broke out in the ships, but he did not himself escape the contagion, and died three days after. In A.D. 1227 the pope had in a senseless passion hurled an anathema against him, and, in an encyclical to all the bishops, painted the emperor’s ingratitude and breach of faith in the darkest colours. The emperor on his part, in a manifesto justifying himself addressed to the princes and people of Europe, had quite as unsparingly lashed the worldliness of the church, the corruption, presumption and self-seeking of the papacy, and then in A.D. 1228 he again undertook the postponed crusade (§ 94, 5). The pope’s curse followed “the pirate” to the very threshold of the Holy Sepulchre, and a papal crusading force made a raid upon Southern Italy. Frederick therefore hastened his return, landed in A.D. 1229 in Apulia, and entered into negotiations for peace, to which, however, the pope agreed only in A.D. 1230, when the emperor’s victoriously advancing troops threatened him with the loss of the States of the Church. In consequence of the pope’s continued difficulties with his Romans, who drove him three times out of the city, Frederick had frequent opportunities of showing himself serviceable to the pope by giving direct aid or mediating in his favour. Nevertheless he continually conspired with the rebellious Lombards, and in A.D. 1239 renewed the ban against the emperor. The pope who had hitherto only charged Frederick with a tendency to freethinking, as well as an inclination to favour the Saracens (§ 95, 1), and to maintain friendly intercourse with the Syrian sultans, now accused him of flippant infidelity. The emperor, it was said, had among other things declared that the birth of the Saviour by a virgin was a fable, and that Jesus, Moses and Mohammed were the three greatest impostors the world had ever seen,―a form of unbelief which spread very widely in consequence of the crusades. Manifestoes and counter-manifestoes sought to outdo one another in their violence. And while the wild hordes of the Mongols were overspreading unopposed the whole of Eastern Europe, the emperor’s troops were victoriously pressing forward to the gates of Rome, and his ships were preventing the meeting of the council summoned against him by catching the prelates who in spite of his prohibition were hastening to it. The pope died in A.D. 1241, and was followed in seventeen days by his successor Cœlestine IV.

§ 96.20. For almost two years the papal chair remained vacant. Then this position was won by Innocent IV., A.D. 1243-1254, who as cardinal had been friendly to the emperor, but as pope was a most bitter enemy to him and to his house. The negotiations about the removal of the ban were broken off, and Innocent escaped to France, where at the First Lyonese or 13th Œcumenical Council of A.D. 1245, attended by scarcely any but Frenchmen and Spaniards, he renewed the excommunication of the emperor, and declared him as a blasphemer and robber of the church deprived of his throne. Once again with the most abject humility Frederick sued for reconciliation with the church. The pope, however, wished not for reconciliation, but the destruction of the whole “viper brood” of the Hohenstaufens. But the rival king, Henry Raspe of Thuringia, set up by the papal party in Germany, and William of Holland, who was put forward after his death in A.D. 1247, could not maintain their position against Frederick’s son, Conrad IV., who as early as A.D. 1235 had been elected in place of his rebel brother Henry as king of the Romans. Even in Italy the fortune of war favoured at first the imperial arms. At the siege of Parma, which was disloyal, the tide began to turn. The sorely pressed citizens made a sally in A.D. 1248, while Frederick was away at a hunt, and roused to courage by despair, put his army to flight. His brave son, Enzio, king of Sardinia and governor of Northern Italy, fell in A.D. 1249 into the hands of the Bolognese, and was subjected to a life-long imprisonment. Frederick himself in A.D. 1250 closed his active life in the south in the arms of his son Manfred. The pope then returned to Italy, in order to take possession of the Sicilian kingdom, which he claimed as a papal fief. But in A.D. 1251 Conrad IV., summoned by Manfred, hasted thither from Germany, subdued Apulia, conquered Naples, and was resolved to lay hands on the person of the pope himself, who had also excommunicated him, when his career was stopped by death in A.D. 1254, in his twenty-sixth year. On behalf of Conrad’s two-year-old son, Conradin, who had been born in Germany after his father’s departure, Manfred undertook the regency in Southern Italy, but found himself obliged to acknowledge the pope’s suzerainty. Nevertheless the pope was determined to have him also overthrown. Manfred, however, escaped in time to the Saracenic colony of Luceria, and with its help utterly defeated the papal troops sent out against him. Five days after Innocent IV. died, Alexander IV., A.D. 1254-1261, although without his predecessor’s ability, sought still to continue his work. He could not, however, either by ban or by war prevent Manfred, who on the report of Conradin’s death had had himself crowned, from extending the power and prestige of his kingdom farther and farther into the north. Urban IV., A.D. 1261-1264, a Frenchman by birth, son of a shoemaker of Troyes, took up with all his heart the heritage of hate against the Hohenstaufens, and in A.D. 1263 invited Charles of Anjou, the youngest brother of Louis IX. of France, to win by conquest the Sicilian crown. While the prince was preparing for the campaign Urban died. His successor, Clement IV., A.D. 1265-1268, also a Frenchman, could not but carry out what his predecessor had begun. Charles, whom the Romans without the knowledge of the pope had elected their senator, proceeded in A.D. 1265 into Italy, took the vassal oath of fealty, and was crowned as Charles I., A.D. 1265-1285, king of the two Sicilies. Treachery opened up his way into Naples. Manfred fell in A.D. 1266 in the battle of Benevento; and Conradin, whom the Ghibellines had called in as a deliverer of Italy, after the disastrous battle of Tagliacozzo in A.D. 1268, died on the scaffold in his sixteenth year.

§ 96.21. The Times of the House of Anjou down to Boniface VIII., A.D. 1288-1294.―The papacy had emerged triumphantly from its hundred years’ struggle with the Hohenstaufens, and by the overthrow of this powerful house Germany was thrown into the utmost confusion and anarchy. But Italy, too, was now in a condition of extreme disorder, and the unconscionable tyrants of Naples subjected it to a much more intolerable bondage than those had done from whom they pretended to have delivered it. After the death of Clement IV. the Holy See remained vacant for three years. The cardinals would not elect such a pope as would be agreeable to Charles I. During this papal vacancy Louis IX. of France, A.D. 1226-1270, fitted out the seventh and last crusade (§ 94, 6), from which he was not to return. As previously he had reformed the administration of justice, he now before his departure introduced drastic reforms in the ecclesiastical institutions of his kingdom, which laid the first foundations of the celebrated “Gallican Liberties.” Clement IV. gave occasion for such procedure on the part of the monarch who was a model of piety after the standard of those times, by claiming in A.D. 1266 for the papal chair the plenaria dispositio of all prebends and benefices. In opposition to this assumption the king secured by a Pragmatic Sanction of A.D. 1269 to all churches and monasteries of his realm unconditional freedom of all elections and presentations according to old existing rights, confirmed to them anew all privileges and immunities previously granted them, forbade every form of simony as a heinous crime, and prohibited all extraordinary taxation of church property on the part of the Roman curia.―At last the cardinals took courage and elected Gregory X., A.D. 1271-1276, an Italian of the noble house of Visconti. The desolating interregnum in Germany was also put an end to by the election of Count Rudolf of Hapsburg, A.D. 1273-1291, as king of the Germans. At the Second Lyonese or 14th Œcumenical Council of A.D. 1274, the worthy pope continued his endeavours without avail to rouse the flagging enthusiasm of the princes so as to get them to undertake another crusade. The union with the Greek church did not prove of an enduring kind (§ 67, 4). The constitution, too, sanctioned at the council, which provided, in order to prevent prolonged vacancies in the papal see, that the election of pope should not only be proceeded with in immured conclaves in the place where the deceased pope last resided with the curia, but also (though this was again abrogated in A.D. 1351 by a decree of Clement VI.) should be expedited by limiting the supply of food after three days to one dish, after other five days to water, wine, and bread. Yet this completely failed to secure the object desired. More successful, however, were the negotiations carried on at Lyons with the ambassadors of the new German king. Rudolf, in entering upon his government, renewed all the concessions made by Otto IV. and Frederick II., renounced all imperial claims upon Rome and the States of the Church, with the exception of the possessions of Matilda, and abandoned all pretension to Sicily. The pope on his part acknowledged him as king of the Romans and undertook to crown him emperor in Rome, where this agreement was to be formally ratified and signed. But Gregory died before arrangements had been completed.

§ 96.22. The three following popes, Innocent V., Hadrian V., and John XXI., died soon after one another. The last named, previously known as Petrus [Peter] Hispanus, had distinguished himself by his medical and philosophical writings. He was properly the twentieth Pope John, but as there was a slight element of uncertainty (§ 82, 6) he designated himself the twenty-first. After a six months’ vacancy Nicholas III., A.D. 1277-1280, mounted the papal throne. By diplomacy he secured the ratification of the still undecided concordat with the German kingdom, and Rudolf, who had enough to do in Germany, immediately withdrew from Italian affairs, even abandoning his claims to imperial coronation. The powerful pope, whose pontificate was marked by rapacity and nepotism, and who is therefore put by Dante in hell, did not live long enough to carry out his plans for the overthrow of the French yoke in Italy. But he obliged Charles I. to resign his Roman senatorship, and secretly encouraged a conspiracy of the Sicilians, which under his successor Martin IV., A.D. 1281-1285, a Frenchman and a pliable tool of Charles, broke out in the terrible “Sicilian Vespers” of A.D. 1282. The island of Sicily was thereby rent from the French rule and papal vassalage, and in a roundabout way the Hohenstaufens by the female line regained the government of this part of their old inheritance (§ 95, 1). Rome now again in A.D. 1284 shook off the senatorial rule which Charles I. had meanwhile again assumed, and after his death and that of Martin, which speedily followed, they transferred this dignity to the new pope Honorius IV., A.D. 1285-1287, whose short but vigorous reign was followed by a vacancy of eleven months. The Franciscan general then mounted the papal throne as Nicholas IV., A.D. 1288-1292. He filled up the period of his pontificate with vain endeavours to revive the spirit of the crusades and secure the suppression of heresy. Violent party feuds of cardinals of the Orsini and Colonna factions delayed the election of a pope after his death for two years. They united at last in electing the most unfit conceivable, Peter of Murrone (§ 98, 2), who, as Cœlestine V. changed the monk’s cowl for the papal tiara, but was persuaded after four months by the sly and ambitious Cardinal Cajetan to resign. Cajetan now himself succeeded in A.D. 1294 as Boniface VIII. The poor monk was confined by him in a tower, where he died. He was afterwards canonized by Pope John XXII.

§ 96.23. Temporal Power of the Popes.―During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the spiritual power of the papacy had reached its highest point, the pope came to be regarded as the absolute head of the church. Gregory VII. arrogated the right of confirming all episcopal elections. The papal recommendations to vacant sees (Preces, whence those so recommended were called Precistæ) were from the time of Innocent III. transformed into mandates (Mandata), and Clement IV. claimed for the papal chair the right of a plenario dispositio of all ecclesiastical benefices. Even in the 12th century the theory was put forth as in accordance with the canon law that all ecclesiastical possessions were the property not of the particular churches concerned but of God or Christ, and so of the pope as His representative, who in administering them was responsible to Him alone. Hence the popes, in special cases when the ordinary revenues of the curia were insufficient, had no hesitation in exercising the right of levying a tax upon ecclesiastical property. They heard appeals from all tribunals and could give dispensations from existing church laws. The right of canonization (§ 104, 8), which was previously in the power of each bishop with application simply to his own diocese, was for the first time exercised with a claim for recognition over the whole church by John XV., in A.D. 993, without, however, any word of withdrawing their privilege from the bishops. Alexander III. was the first to declare in A.D. 1170 that canonization was exclusively the right of the papal chair. The system of Gregory VII. made no claim of doctrinal infallibility for the Holy See, though his ignorance of history led him to suppose that no heretic had ever presided over the Roman church, and his understanding of Luke xxii. 32 made him confidently expect that none ever would. Innocent III., indeed, publicly acknowledged that even the pope might err in matters of faith, and then, but only then, become amenable to the judgment of the church. And Innocent IV., fifty years later, taught that the pope might err. It is therefore wrong to say, “I believe what the pope believes;” for one should believe only what the church teaches. Thomas Aquinas was the first who expressly maintained the doctrine of papal infallibility. He says that the pope alone can decide finally upon matters of faith, and that even the decrees of councils only become valid and authoritative when confirmed by him. Thomas, however, never went the length of maintaining that the pope can by himself affirm any dogma without the advice and previous deliberations of a council.―Kissing the feet sprang from an Italian custom, and even an emperor like Frederick Barbarossa humbled himself to hold the pope’s stirrup. According to the Donation of Constantine document (§ 87, 4), Constantine the Great had himself performed this office of equerry to Pope Sylvester. When the coronation of the pope was introduced is still a disputed point. Nicholas I. was, according to the Liber pontificalis, formally crowned on his accession. Previously the successors of the apostles were satisfied with a simple episcopal mitre (§ 84, 1), which on the head of the crowned pope was developed into the tiara (§ 110, 15). At the Lateran Council of A.D. 1059 Hildebrand is said to have set upon the head of the new pope Nicholas II. a double crown to indicate the council’s recognition of his temporal and spiritual sovereignty. The papal granting of a golden rose consecrated by prayer, incense, balsam and holy water to princes of exemplary piety or even to prominent monasteries, churches, or cities, conveying an obligation to make acknowledgment by a large money gift, dates as far back as the 12th century. So far as is known, Louis VII. was the first to receive it from Alexander III. in A.D. 1163.―The popes appointed legates to represent them abroad, as they had done even earlier at the synods held in the East. Afterwards, when the institution came to be more fully elaborated, a distinction was made between Legati missi or nuntios and Legati nati. The former were appointed as required for diplomatic negotiations, visitation and organization of churches, as well as for the holding of provincial synods, at which they presided. They were called Legati a latere, if the special importance of the business demanded a representation from among the nearest and most trusted councillors of the pope, i.e. one of the cardinals, as Pontifices collaterales. The rank of born legate, Legatus natus, on the other hand, was a prelatic dignity of the highest order conferred once for all by papal privilege, sometimes even upon temporal princes, who had specially served the Holy See, as for example the king of Hungary and the Norman princes of Italy (§ 96, 3, 13), which made them permanently representatives of the pope invested with certain ecclesiastical prerogatives.―Among the numerous literary and documentary fictions and forgeries with which the Gregorian papal system sought to support its ever-advancing pretensions to authority over the whole church, is one which may be regarded as the contemporary supplement to the work of the Pseudo-Isidore. It is the production of a Latin theologian residing in the East, otherwise unknown, who, at the time of the controversies waged at the Lyonese Council of A.D. 1274 between the Greeks and Latins (§ 67, 4), brought forth what professed to be an unbroken chain of traditions from alleged decrees and canons of the most famous Greek Councils, e.g. Nicæa, Chalcedon, etc., and church fathers, most frequently from Cyril of Alexandria, the so-called Pseudo-Cyril, in which the controverted questions were settled in favour of the Roman pretensions, and especially the most extreme claims to the primacy of the pope were asserted. It was presented in A.D. 1261 to Urban IV., who immediately guaranteed its genuineness in a letter to the emperor Michael Palæologus. On its adoption by Thomas Aquinas, who diligently employed its contents in his controversies against the Greeks as well as in his dogmatic works, it won respect and authority throughout all the countries of the West.

§ 97. The Clergy.

By tithes, legacies, donations, impropriations, and the rising value of landed estates, the wealth of churches and monasteries grew from year to year. In this way benefit was secured not only to the clergy and the monks, but also in many ways to the poor and needy. The law of celibacy strictly enforced by Gregory VII. saved the church from the impoverishment with which it was beginning to be threatened by the dividing or squandering of the property of the church upon the children of the clergy. But while an absolute stop was put to the marriage of the clergy, it tended greatly to foster concubinage, and yet more shameful vices. Yet notwithstanding all the corruption that prevailed among the clerical order it cannot be denied that the superior as well as the inferior clergy embraced a great number of worthy and strictly moral men, and that the sacerdotal office which the people could quite well distinguish from the individuals occupying it, still continued to be highly respected in spite of the immoral lives of many priests. Even more hurtful to the exercise of their pastoral work than the immorality of individual clergymen was the widespread illiteracy and gross ignorance of Christian truth of those who should have been teachers.

§ 97.1. The Roman College of Cardinals.―All the clergy attached to one particular church were called Clerici cardinales down to the 11th century. But after Leo IX. had reformed and re-organized the Roman clergy, and especially after Nicholas II. in A.D. 1059 had transferred the right of papal election to the Roman cardinals, i.e. the seven bishops of the Roman metropolitan dioceses and to the presbyters and deacons of the principal churches of Rome, the title of cardinal was given to them at first by way of eminence and very soon exclusively. It was not till the 13th century that it became usual to give to foreign prelates the rank of Roman cardinal priests as a mark of distinction. Under the name of the holy college the cardinals, as the spiritual dignitaries most nearly associated with the pope, formed his ecclesiastical and civil council, and were also as such entrusted with the highest offices of state in the papal domains. Innocent IV. at Lyons in A.D. 1245 gave to them as a distinction the red hat; Boniface VIII. in A.D. 1297 gave them the purple mantle that indicated princely rank. To these Paul II. in A.D. 1464 added the right of riding the white palfrey with red cloth and golden bridle; and finally, Urban VIII. in A.D. 1630 gave them the title “Eminence.” Sixtus V. in A.D. 1586 fixed their number at seventy, after the pattern of the elders of Israel, Exod. xxiv. 1, and the seventy disciples of Jesus, Luke x. 1. The popes, however, took care to keep a greater or less number of places vacant, so that they might have opportunities of showing favour and bestowing gifts when necessary. The cardinals were chosen in accordance with the arbitrary will of the individual pope, who nominated them by presenting them with the red hat, and installed them into their high position by the ceremony of closing and opening the mantle. From the time of Eugenius IV., A.D. 1431, the college of cardinals put every newly elected pope under a solemn oath to maintain the rights and privileges of the cardinals and not to come to any serious and important resolution without their advice and approval.

§ 97.2. The Political Importance of the Superior Clergy (§ 84) reached its highest point during this period. This was carried furthest in Germany, especially under the Saxon imperial dynasty. On more than one occasion did the wise and firm policy of the German clergy, splendidly organized under the leadership of the primate of Mainz, save the German nation from overthrow or dismemberment threatened by ambitious princes. This power consisted not merely in influence over men’s minds, but also in their position as members of the states of the empire and territorial lords. Whether or not a warlike expedition was to be undertaken depended often only on the consent or refusal of the league of lords spiritual. It was the policy of the clergy to secure a united, strong, well-organized Germany. The surrounding countries wished to be included in the German league of churches and states; not, however, as the emperor wished, as crown lands, but as portions of the empire. Against expeditions to Rome, which took the attention of German princes away from German affairs and ruined Germany, the German clergy protested in the most decided manner. They wished the chair of St. Peter to be free and independent as a European, not a German, institution, with the emperor as its supporter not its oppressor, but they manfully resisted all the assumptions and encroachments of the popes. One of the most celebrated of the German dignitaries of any age was Bruno the Great, brother of the Emperor Otto I., equally distinguished as a statesman and as a reformer of the church, and the unwearied promoter of liberal studies. Chancellor under his imperial brother from A.D. 940, he was his most trusted counsellor, and was appointed by him in A.D. 953 Archbishop of Cologne, and was soon after made Duke of Lorraine. He died in A.D. 965. Another example of a German prelate of the true sort is seen in Willigis of Mainz, who died in A.D. 1011, under the two last Ottos and Henry II., whom he raised to the throne. The good understanding that was brought about between this monarch and the clergy of Germany was in great measure owing to the wise policy of this prelate. Under Henry IV. the German clergy got split up into three parties,―the papal party of Clugny under Gebhard [Gebhardt] of Salzburg, including almost all the Saxon bishops; an imperial party under Adalbert of Bremen, who endeavoured with the emperor’s help to found a northern patriarchate, which undoubtedly tended to become a northern papacy; and an independent German party under St. Anno II. of Cologne (§ 96, 6), in which notwithstanding much violence, ambition, and self-seeking, there still survived much of the spirit that had characterized the policy of the old German bishops. Henry V., too, as well as the first Hohenstaufens, had sturdy supporters in the German clergy; but Frederick II. by his ill treatment of the bishops alienated their clergy from the interest of the crown. The rise of the imperial dignitaries after the time of Otto I., and the transference to them under Otto IV. of the election of emperor raised the archbishops of Mainz, Treves, and Cologne to the rank of spiritual electoral princes as arch-chaplains or archchancellors. The Golden Bull of Charles IV., in A.D. 1356 (§ 110, 4), confirmed and tabulated their rights and duties.

§ 97.3. The Bishops and the Cathedral Chapter.―The bishops exercised jurisdiction over all the clergy of their diocese, and punished by deprivation of office and imprisonment in monasteries. Especially questions of marriage, wills, oaths, were brought before their tribunal. The German synodal judicatures soon gave way before the Roman judiciary system. The archdeacons emancipated themselves more and more from episcopal authority and abused their power in so arbitrary a way that in the 12th century the entire institution was set aside. For the discharge of business episcopal officials and vicars were then introduced. The Chorepiscopi (§ 84) had passed out of view in the 10th century. But during the crusades many Catholic bishoprics had been founded in the East. The occupants of these when driven away clung to their titles in hopes of better times, and found employment as assistants or suffragans of Western bishops. Thus arose the order of Episcopi in partibus (sc. infidelium) which has continued to this day, as a witness of inalienable rights, and as affording a constant opportunity to the popes of showing favour and giving rewards. For the exercise of the archiepiscopal office, the Fourth Lateran Council of A.D. 1215 made the receiving from the pope the pallium (§ 59, 7) an absolutely essential condition, and those elected were obliged to pay to the curia an arbitrary tax of a large amount called the pallium fee. The canonical life (§ 84, 4) from the 10th century began more and more to lose its moral weight and importance. Out of attempts at reform in the 11th century arose the distinction of Canonici seculares and regulares. The latter lived in cloisters according to monkish rules, and were zealous for the good old discipline and order, but sooner or later gave way to worldliness. The rich revenues of cathedral chapters made the reversion of prebendal stalls the almost exclusive privilege of the higher nobility, notwithstanding the earnest opposition of the popes. In the course of the 13th century the cathedral clergy, with the help of the popes, arrogated to themselves the sole right of episcopal elections, ignoring altogether the claims of the diocesan clergy and the people or nobles. The cathedral clergy also made themselves independent of episcopal control. They lived mostly outside of the cathedral diocese, and had their canonical duties performed by vicars. The chapter filled up vacancies by co-optation.

§ 97.4. Endeavours to Reform the Clergy.―As a reformer of the English clergy, who had sunk very low in ignorance, rudeness and immorality, the most conspicuous figure during the 10th century was St. Dunstan. He became Archbishop of Canterbury in A.D. 959 and died in A.D. 988. He sought at once to advance the standard of education among the clergy and to inspire the Church with a higher moral and religious spirit. For these ends he laboured on with an energy and force of will and an inflexible consistency and strictness in the pursuit of his hierarchical ideals, which mark him out as a Hildebrand before Hildebrand. Even as abbot of the monastery of Glastonbury he had given a forecast of his life work by restoring and making more severe the rule of St. Benedict, and forming a brotherhood thoroughly disciplined in science and in ascetical exercises, from the membership of which, after he had become bishop of Worcester, then of London, and finally primate of England and the most influential councillor of four successive kings, he could fill the places of the secular priests and canons whom he expelled from their cures. As the primary condition of all clerical reformation he insisted upon the unrelentingly consistent putting down of marriage and concubinage among the priests.281―In the 11th century St. Peter Damiani distinguished himself as a zealous supporter of the reform party of Clugny in the struggle against simony, clerical immorality, and the marriage of priests. This obtained for him not only his position as cardinal-bishop of Ostia, but also his frequent employment, as papal legate in serious negotiations. In A.D. 1061 he resigned his bishopric and retired into a monastery, where he died in A.D. 1072. His friend Hildebrand, who repeatedly called him forth from his retreat to occupy a conspicuous place among the contenders for his hierarchical ideal, was therefore called by him his “holy Satan.” He had indeed little interest in pressing hierarchical and political claims, and was inclined rather to urge moral reforms within the church itself. In his Liber Gomorrhianus he drew a fearful picture of the clerical depravity of his times, and that with a nakedness of detail which gave to Pope Alexander II. a colourable excuse for the suppression of the book. For himself, however, Damiani sought no other pleasure than that of scourging himself till the blood flowed in his lonely cell (§ 106, 4). His collected works, consisting of epistles, addresses, tracts and monkish biographies, were published at Rome in A.D. 1602 in 4 vols. by Cardinal Cajetan.―In the 12th century St. Hildegard (§ 107, 1) and the abbot Joachim of Floris, (§ 108, 5) raised their voices against the moral degradation of the clergy, and among the men who contributed largely to the restoring of clerical discipline, the noble provost Geroch of Reichersberg in Bavaria, who died in A.D. 1169 (§ 102, 5) and the canon Norbert, subsequently archbishop of Magdeburg (§ 98, 2), are deserving of special mention.―In the 13th century in England Robert Grosseteste distinguished himself as a prelate of great nobility and force of character. After being chancellor of Oxford he became bishop of Lincoln, energetically reforming many abuses in his diocese, and persistently contending against any form of papal encroachment. He died in A.D. 1253.282

§ 97.5. The Pataria of Milan.―Nowhere during the 11th century were simony, concubinage and priests’ marriages more general than among the Lombard clergy, and in no other place was such determined opposition offered to Hildebrand’s reforms. At the head of this opposition stood Guido, archbishop of Milan, whom Henry III. deposed in A.D. 1046. Against the papal demands, he pressed the old claims of his chair to autonomy (§ 46, 1) and renounced allegiance to Rome. The nobles and the clergy supported Guido. But two deacons, Ariald and Landulf, about A.D. 1057 formed a conspiracy among the common people, against “the Nicolaitan sect” (§ 27, 8). To this party its opponents gave the opprobrious name of Pataria, Paterini, from patalia, meaning rabble, riffraff, or from Pattarea, a back street of ill fame in Milan, the quarter of the rabble, where the Arialdists held their secret meetings. They took the name given in reproach as a title of honour, and after receiving military organization from Erlembald, Landulf’s brother, they opened a campaign against the married priests. For thirty years this struggle continued to deluge city and country with blood.

§ 98. Monastic Orders and Institutions.

In spite of the great and constantly increasing corruption the monastic idea during this period had a wonderfully rapid development, and more persistently and successfully than ever before or since the monks urged their claims to be regarded as “the knighthood of asceticism.” A vast number of monkish orders arose, taking the place for the most part of existing orders which had relaxed their rules. These were partly reformed off-shoots of the Benedictine order, partly new organizations reared on an independent basis. New monasteries were being built almost every day, often even within the cities. The reformed Benedictine monasteries clustered in a group around the parent monastery whose reformed rule they adopted, forming an organized society with a common centre. These groups were therefore called Congregations. The oldest and, for two centuries, the most important, of these congregations was that of the Brethren of Clugny, whose ardent zeal for reform in the hierarchical direction was mainly instrumental in raising again the church and the papacy out of that degradation and corruption into which they had fallen during the 10th and 11th centuries. The otherwise less important order of the Camaldolites was also a vigorous promoter of these movements. But Clugny had in Clairvaux a rival which shared with it on almost equal terms the respect and reverence of that age. The unreformed monasteries of the Benedictines, on the other hand, still continued their easy, luxurious style of living. They were commonly called the Black Monks to distinguish them from the Cistercians who were known as the White Monks. In order to prevent a constant splitting up of the monkish fraternities, Innocent III. at the Lateran Council of A.D. 1215 forbade the founding of new orders. Yet he himself took part in the formation of the two great mendicant orders, and also the following popes issued no prohibition.―The papacy had in the monkish orders its standing army. It was to them, in a special manner, that Gregory’s system owed its success. But they were also by far the most important promoters and fosterers of learning, science, and art. The pope in various ways favoured the emancipation of the monasteries from episcopal control, their so-called Exemption; and conferred upon the abbots of famous monasteries what was practically episcopal rank, with liberty to wear the bishop’s mitre, so that they were called Mitred Abbots (§ 84, 1). The princes too classed the abbots in respect of dignity and order next to the bishops; and the people, who saw the popular idea of the church more and more represented in the monasteries, honoured them with unmeasured reverence. From the 10th century the monks came to be considered a distinct religious order (Ordo religiosorum). Lay brethren, Fratres conversi, were now taken in to discharge the worldly business of the monastery. They were designated Fratres, while the others who received clerical ordination were addressed as Patres. The monks rarely lived on good terms with the secular clergy; for the former as confessors and mass priests often seriously interfered with the rights and revenues of the latter.―Besides the many monkish orders, with their strict seclusion, perpetual vows and ecclesiastically sanctioned rule, we meet with organizations of a freer type such as the Humiliati of Milan, consisting of whole families. Of a similar type were the Beguines and Beghards of the Netherlands, the former composed of women, the latter of men. These people abandoned their handicraft and their domestic and civic duties for a monastic-like mode of life retired from the world. The crusading enthusiasm also occasioned a combination of the monastic idea with that of knighthood, and led to the formation of the so-called Orders of Knights, which with a Grandmaster and several Commanders, were divided into Knights, Priests, and Serving Brethren.―Continuation, § 112.

§ 98.1. Offshoots of the Benedictines.

The Brethren of Clugny. Among the Benedictines, since their reformation by the second Benedict (§ 85, 2) many serious abuses had crept in. After the Burgundian Count Berno, who died in A.D. 927, had done useful service by restoring discipline and order in two monasteries of which he was abbot, the Duke William of Aquitaine founded for him a new institution. Thus arose in A.D. 910 the celebrated monastery of Clugny, Cluniacum, in Burgundy, which the founder placed under immediate papal control. Berno’s successor Odo, who died in A.D. 942, abandoning the life of a courtier on his recovery from a severe illness, made it the head and heart of a separate Clugny-Congregation as a branch of the Benedictine order. Strict asceticism, a beautiful and artistic service, zealous prosecution of science and the education of the young, with yet greater energy in the promotion of a hierarchical reform of the church as a whole, as well as an entire series of able abbots, among whom Odilo († A.D. 1048), the friend of Hildebrand, and Peter the Venerable († A.D. 1156) are specially prominent, gave to this congregation, which in the 12th century had 2,000 monasteries in France, an influence quite unparalleled in this whole period. The abbot of Clugny stood at the head, and appointed the priors for all the other monasteries. Under the licentious Abbot Pontius, who on account of his base conduct was deposed in A.D. 1122, the order fell into decay, but rose again under Peter the Venerable. Continuation, § 164, 2.

The Congregation of the Camaldolites was founded in A.D. 1018 by the Benedictine Romuald, descended from the Duke of Ravenna, at Camaldoli (Campus Maldoli), a wild district in the Apennines. In A.D. 1086 a nunnery was placed alongside of the monastery. The president of the parent monastery at Camaldoli stood at the head of the whole order as Major. The order carried out enthusiastically the high church ideal of Clugny, and won great influence in its time, although it by no means attained the importance of the French order.

Twenty years later, in A.D. 1038, the Florentine Gualbertus founded the Order of Vallombrosa, in a romantically situated shady valley of the Apennines (Vallis umbrosa), according to the rule of Benedict. This was the first of all the orders to appoint lay brethren for the management of worldly business, in order that the monks might observe their vow of silence and strict seclusion. The parent monastery attained to great wealth and reputation, but it never had a great number of affiliated institutions.

The Cistercians. In A.D. 1098 the Benedictine abbot Robert founded the monastery of Citeaux (Cistercium) near Dijon, which as the parent monastery of the Congregation of the Cistercians became the most formidable rival of Clugny. The Cistercians were distinguished from the Brethren of Clugny by voluntary submission to the jurisdiction of the bishops, avoidance of all interference with the pastorates of others, and the banishing of all ornaments from their churches and monasteries. The order continued obscure for a while, till St. Bernard (§ 102, 3), from A.D. 1115 abbot of the monastery of Clairvaux (Claravallis), an offshoot of Citeaux, by his ability and spirituality raised it far above all other orders in the esteem of the age. In honour of him the French Cistercians took the name of Bernardines. The hostility between them and the Brethren of Clugny was overcome by the personal friendship of Bernard and Peter the Venerable. By the statutory constitution, the so-called Charta charitatis, drawn up in A.D. 1119, the administration of all the affairs of the order was assigned to a general of the order, appointed by the abbot of Citeaux, the abbots of the four chief affiliated monasteries, and twenty other elected representatives forming a high council. This council, however, was answerable to the general assembly of all the abbots and priors, which met at first yearly, but afterwards every third year. The affiliated monasteries had a yearly visitation of the abbot of Citeaux, but Citeaux itself was to be visited by the four abbots just referred to. In the 13th century this order had 2,000 monasteries and 6,000 nunneries.

The Congregation of Scottish Monasteries in Germany owed its origin to the persistent love of travel on the part of Irish and Scottish monks, which during the 10th century received a new impulse from the Danish invasions (§ 93, 1). The first monastery erected in Germany for the reception exclusively of Irish monks was that of St. Martin at Cologne, built in the 10th century. Much more important, however, was the Scottish monastery of St. James at Regensburg, founded in A.D. 1067 by Marianus Scotus and two companions. It was the parent monastery of eleven other Scottish cloisters in South Germany. Old Celtic sympathies (§ 77, 8), which may have originally bound them together, could not assert themselves in the new home during this period as they did in earlier days; and when Innocent III., at the Lateran Council of A.D. 1215, sanctioned them as a separate congregation bound by the Benedictine rule, there certainly remained no longer any trace of Celtic peculiarities. They were distinguished at first for strict asceticism, severe discipline and scientific activity, but subsequently they fell lower than all the rest in immorality and self-indulgence (§ 112).

§ 98.2. New Monkish Orders.―Reserving the great mendicant orders, the following are the most celebrated among the vast array of new orders, not bound by the Benedictine rule:

The Order of Grammont in France, founded by Stephen of Ligerno in A.D. 1070. It took simply the gospel as its rule, cultivated a quiet, humble and peaceable temper, and so by the 12th century it had its very life crushed out of it by the bold assumptions of its lay brethren.

The Order of St. Anthony, founded in A.D. 1095 by a French nobleman of Dauphiny [Dauphiné], called Guaston, in gratitude for the recovery of his son Guérin from the so-called St. Anthony’s fire on his invoking St. Anthony. He expended his whole property upon the restoring of a hospital beside the church of St. Didier la Mothe, in a chapel of which it was supposed the bones of Anthony lay, and devoted himself, together with his son and some other companions, to the nursing of the sick. At first merely a lay fraternity, the members took in A.D. 1218 the monk’s vow. Boniface VIII. made them canons under the rule of St. Augustine (§ 45, 1). They were now called Antonians, and devoted themselves to contemplation. The order spread greatly, especially in France. They wore a black cloak with a T-formed cross of blue upon the breast (Ezek. ix. 9) and a little bell round the neck while engaged in collecting alms.

The Order of Fontevraux was founded in A.D. 1094 by Robert of Arbrissel in Fontevraux (Fons Ebraldi) in Poitou. Preaching repentance, he went through the country, and founded convents for virgins, widows and fallen women. Their abbesses, as representatives of the Mother of God, to whom the order was dedicated, were set over the priests who did their bidding.

The Order of the Gilbertines had its name from its founder Gilbert, an English priest of noble birth. Here too the women formed the main stem of the order. They were the owners of the cloister property, and the men were only its administrators. The monasteries of this order were mostly both for men and women. It did not spread much beyond England, and had at the time of the suppression of the monasteries twenty-one well endowed convents, with orphanages and houses for the poor and sick.

The Carthusian Order was founded in A.D. 1086 by Bruno of Cologne, rector of the High School at Rheims. Disgusted with the immoral conduct of Archbishop Manasseh, he retired with several companions into a wild mountain gorge near Grenoble, called Chartreuse. He enjoined upon his monks strict asceticism, rigid silence, earnest study, prayer, and a contemplative life, clothed them in a great coarse cowl, and allowed them for their support only vegetables and bran bread. Written statutes, Consuetudines Cartusiæ, which soon spread over several houses of the Carthusians, were first given them in A.D. 1134 by Guido, the fifth prior of the parent monastery. A steward had management of the affairs of the convent. Each ate in his own cell; only on feast days had they a common meal. At least once a week they fasted on salt, water and bread. Breaking silence, permitted only on high festivals, and for two hours on Thursdays, was punished with severe flagellation. Even the lay brethren were treated with great severity, and were not allowed either to sit or to cover their heads in the presence of the brothers of the order. Carthusian nuns were added to the order in the 13th century with a modified rule.

The Premonstratensian Order was founded in A.D. 1121 by Norbert, the only German founder of orders besides and after Bruno. A rich, worldly-minded canon of Xanthen in the diocese of Cologne, he was brought to another mind by the fall of a thunderbolt beside him. He retired along with several other like-minded companions into the rough valley of Prémontré in the bishopric of Laon (Præmonstratum, because pointed out to him in a vision). In his rule he joined together the canonical duties with an extremely strict monastic life. He appeared in A.D. 1126 as a preacher of repentance at the Diet of Spires, was there elected archbishop of Magdeburg, and made a most impressive entrance into his metropolis dressed in his mendicant garb. His order spread and established many convents both for monks and for nuns.

The Trinitarian Order, ordo s. Trinitatis de redemptione captivorum, was called into existence by Innocent III., and had for its work the redemption of Christian captives.

The Cœlestine Order was founded by Peter of Murrone, afterwards Pope Cœlestine V. (§ 96, 22). Living in a cave of Mount Murrone in Apulia, under strict penitential discipline and engaged in mystic contemplation, the fame of his sanctity attracted to him many companions, with whom in A.D. 1254 he established a monastery on Mount Majella. Gregory X., in whose presence Peter, according to his biographer, hung up his monkish cowl in empty space, upon a sunbeam which he took for a cord stretching across, instituted the order as Brethren of the Holy Spirit. But when in A.D. 1294 their founder ascended the papal throne, they took his papal name. This order, which gave itself up entirely to extravagant mystic contemplation, spread over Italy, France and the Netherlands.

§ 98.3. The Beginnings of the Franciscan Order down to A.D. 1219.―The founder of this order was St. Francis, born in A.D. 1182, son of a rich merchant of Assisi in Umbria. His proper name was Giovanni Bernardone. The name of Francis is said to have been given him on account of his early proficiency in the French language; “Francesco”―the little Frenchman. As a wealthy merchant’s son, he gave himself to worldly pleasures, but was withdrawn from these, in A.D. 1207, by means of a severe illness. A dream, in which he saw a multitude with the sign of the cross, bearing weapons designed for him and his companions, led him to resolve upon a military career. But a new vision taught him that he was called to build up the fallen house of God. He understood this of a ruined chapel of St. Damiani at Assisi, and began to apply the proceeds of valuable cloth fabrics from his father’s factory to its restoration. Banished for such conduct from his father’s house, he lived for a time as a hermit, until the gospel passage read in church of the sending forth of the disciples without gold or silver, without staff or scrip (Matt. x.), fell upon his soul like a thunderbolt. Divesting himself of all his property, supplying the necessaries of life by the meanest forms of labour, even begging when need be, he went about the country from A.D. 1209, sneered at by some as an imbecile, revered by others as a saint, preaching repentance and peace. In the unexampled power of his self-denial and renunciation of the world, in the pure simplicity of his heart, in the warmth of his love to God and man, in the blessed riches of his poverty, St. Francis was like a heavenly stranger in a selfish world. Wonderful, too, and powerful in its influence was the depth of his natural feeling. With the birds of the forest, with the beasts of the field, he held intercourse in childlike simplicity as with brothers and sisters, exhorting them to praise their Creator. The paradisiacal relation of man to the animal world seemed to be restored in the presence of this saint.―Very soon he gathered around him a number of like-minded men, who under his direction had decided to devote themselves to a similar vocation. For the society of “Viri pœnitentiales de civitate Assisii oriundi” thus formed Francis issued, in A.D. 1209, a rule, at the basis of which lay a literal acceptance of the precepts of Christ to His disciples, sent forth to preach the kingdom of God (Matt. x.; Luke x.), along with similar gospel injunctions (Matt. xix. 21, 29; Luke vi. 29; ix. 23; xiv. 26), and then he went to Rome to get for it the papal confirmation. The pope was, indeed, unwilling; but through the pious man’s simplicity and humility he was prevailed upon to grant his request. In later times this incident was in popular tradition transformed into a legend, representing the pope as at first bidding him go to attend the swine, which the holy man literally obeyed. Innocent III. was the more inclined to yield, owing to the painful experiences through which the church had passed in consequence of its unwise treatment of similar proposals made by the Waldensians thirty years before. He therefore gave at least verbal permission to Francis and his companions to live and teach according to this rule. At the same time also Francis heartily responded to the demand to place at the head of his rule the obligation to obey and reverence the pope, and to conclude with a vow of the most rigid avoidance of every kind of addition, abatement, or change. There was no thought of founding a new monkish order, but only of a free union and a wandering life, amid apostolic poverty, for preaching repentance and salvation by word and example. On entering the society the brothers were required to distribute all their possessions among the poor, and dress in the poor clothing of the order, consisting of a coarse cloak bound with a cord and a capouch, to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God wherever their master sent them, and to earn their livelihood by their usual occupation, or any other servile work. In case of need they were even to beg the necessaries of life. Thus mendicancy, though only allowed in case of necessity, soon came to be transformed by the lustre of the example of the poverty of Jesus and His disciples and mother, who all had lived upon alms, and by the idea of a twofold merit attaching to self-abnegation, inasmuch as not only the receiver, by voluntarily submitting to the disgrace which it involved in the eyes of the world, but also the giver of alms, obtained before the judgment seat of God a great reward. But neither as wages for work nor as alms were the brothers permitted to accept money, but only the indispensable means of life, while that which remained after their own wants had been supplied was divided among the poor. From time to time they withdrew, either singly or in little groups, for prayer, contemplation, and spiritual exercises into deserts, caves, or deserted huts; and annually at Pentecost they assembled for mutual edification and counsel in the small chapel at Assisi, dedicated to “Mary of the Angel,” given to St. Francis by the Benedictines. This church, under the name of the Portiuncula, became the main centre of the order, and all who visited it on the day of its consecration received from the pope a plenary indulgence. The number of the brothers meanwhile increased from day to day. When representatives of all ranks in society and of all the various degrees of culture sought admission, it soon became evident that the obligation to preach, hitherto enjoined upon all the members of the order, should be restricted to those who were specially qualified for the work, and that the rest should take care to carry out in their personal lives the ideal of poverty, joined with loving service in institutions for the poor, the sick, and the lepers. A further move in the development of the order, tending to secure for it an independent ecclesiastical position, was the admission into it of ordained priests. Their missionary activity among Christian people was restricted at first to Umbria and the neighbouring districts of central Italy. But soon the thought of a missionary vocation among the unbelievers got possession of the mind of the founder. Even in A.D. 1212 he himself undertook for this purpose a journey to the East, to Syria, and afterwards to Morocco; in neither case, however, were his efforts attended with any very signal success. In A.D. 1218, Elias of Cortona, with some companions, again took up the mission to Syria, with equally little success; and in A.D. 1219 five brethren were again sent to Morocco, and there won the crown of martyrdom. In that same year, A.D. 1219, the Pentecost assembly at Assisi passed the resolution to include within the range of their call as itinerants the sending of missions, with a “minister” at the head of each, into all the Christian countries of Europe. They began immediately, privileged with a papal letter of recommendation to the higher secular clergy and heads of orders in France, to carry out the resolution in France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany; while at the same time Francis himself, accompanied by twelve brethren, again turned his steps toward the East.