Front matter (continued 4)

At the Lenten synod of the year 1080 representatives of both princes came before Gregory and his bishops, and the great decision was taken. Henry was found guilty of "disobedience," and, after a long and eloquent speech, Gregory excommunicated him once more and confirmed Rudolph in the kingdom of Germany. Bishop Bonitho[235] tells us that Henry had sent an ultimatum: if Gregory did not at once condemn Rudolph he would appoint another Pope. This is, apparently, the real inspiration of the synod and of Gregory's fiery speech.[236] Henry's partisans retorted by excommunicating Gregory and consecrating Guibert of Ravenna as Anti-Pope, and, as Rudolph fell in battle in October, the Gregorian cause was in a lamentable plight. Gregory had, in his extremity, overlooked all the crimes of Robert Guiscard—"for the present" he quaintly said in the treaty—and made an alliance with him, but Robert was still engaged in the East, and Henry's troops made great havoc in Mathilda's dominions. Yet Gregory repeated his excommunication of the King, and wrote letters all over Europe to defend his action and obtain money and troops.

Several years passed in this indecisive warfare, Henry wearing down the Tuscan troops and cutting off supplies from Rome. At length, toward the end of March, 1084, the Romans, weary of the long siege, opened their gates to Henry, and Gregory shut himself in the impregnable fortress of Sant' Angelo. From the windows, for two dreary months, Gregory had to watch the progress of the victorious Imperialists and the triumph of the Anti-Pope, Clement III. In May he was elated by the message that Henry had fled and Robert Guiscard was marching to Rome with a large force. But his joy was brief. A brawl with the Romans let loose the half-barbaric Normans, and the city was visited with one of the most pitiless raids in its eventful history. Thousands of the Romans were sold into slavery: sacred virgins and matrons were savagely raped: large districts of the city were burned to the ground. For this the infuriated Romans cast the whole blame on the Pope, and he was forced to retire with Robert. In penury and impotence he rode into the abbey of Monte Cassino, where Abbot Didier would hardly fail to remind him that they who appeal to the sword are apt to perish by the sword, and then on to Salerno. Surrounded by the shrunken remains of his supporters he made a last appeal to the Christian world to espouse his cause, and he feebly cast forth his last anathemas. But the fight was lost, and he wearily drew his last breath on May 25, 1085. "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile," he said. It was not wholly true. He was exiled by the people of Rome, whose devastated homes made them heap curses on his iron policy. History honours the purity of his ultimate aim, the heroism with which he pursued it, the greatness, with all its defects, of his character; it sternly condemns the means he employed, the tortuous and dangerous character of his reasoning, the appalling claim that kingdoms were toys in his hand. He failed; but he had, in reality, so strengthened the frame of the Papacy that it would take an earthquake to shake it.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IX

INNOCENT III.: THE PAPAL ZENITH

That Papal policy or ideal of which we have traced the development in the minds of the greater Popes attains its fullest expansion during the Pontificate of Innocent III. Historians usually assign the year 1300 as the date of the culmination of the Papal system, but it had in reality attained its full stature under Innocent III. It did indeed make its last impressive display of world-power under Boniface VIII., but there had been no material contribution to its frame since the death of Innocent, and the thirteenth century had fostered the growth of the influences which were destined to undo it. In the fourteenth century came the demoralizing residence in Avignon and the Great Schism: in the fifteenth century the renaissance of culture and development of civic life, which enfeebled the Popes and strengthened their subjects, were completed: in the sixteenth century Luther and Calvin smote the colossus. Innocent III. is the last great maker of the Papacy.

The work of the eighteen Popes who occupied the throne between the death of Gregory VII. and the election of Innocent might not ineptly be described in a line: they sought, and failed, to wield the heavy weapons of Hildebrand. In virtue of the falsified letters, canons, charters, and chronicles which were now accepted throughout Europe, they proclaimed that they had the disposal of earthly kingdoms no less than of seats in heaven, and they thus brought on themselves a century of strife in which only the stronger men could find much time for strictly Pontifical duties. They were men of sober life and, generally, high character, yet the very nature of their ideal involved such struggles that the Papacy had to await a fortunate conjunction of circumstances before the ideal could be realized. The conflict with Henry IV. continued until, his two sons having been persuaded to rebel against him and his second wife encouraged to besmirch his reputation, before the assembled prelates of Christendom, with charges as foul as they were feeble in evidence, he, in 1097, quitted Italy for ever. Then Urban II., who was responsible for this gross travesty of spiritual justice, cleared Rome by means of Norman swords and rallied Christendom about him by a declaration of the First Crusade. But so tainted a legacy of peace could not last. Henry V. proved more exacting than his father, and another prolonged struggle absorbed the energy of the Popes until the fifty years' war over investiture was settled by a compromise at Worms in 1122.[237]

Bernard of Clairvaux, rather than the successive Popes, was the spiritual master of Europe in the comparative peace after Worms. During nearly the whole of the second half of the twelfth century the Papacy was distracted by the incessant revolts of the Romans. The streets, even the churches, of Rome were stained with blood, year after year, and the Popes repeatedly fled. The rise of Frederic Barbarossa complicated the struggle, and the Popes had little opportunity to exercise the powers they had won, without thinking of any extension of their claims. At last, in 1198, the Papacy once more fell to a man of commanding personality and was lifted to the zenith of its power.

Lothario de'Conti di Segni was born about the year 1160. His father was Count Trasimondo of Segni: his mother belonged to the noble Roman family of the Scotti, which included several cardinals of the anti-Imperialist school. After receiving an elementary education at Rome, he was sent to Paris for theology, and to Bologna for law. The scholastic movement was now stimulating Europe and creating great schools; indeed Pope Alexander III. had, though not from cultural motives, fostered the movement by favouring the activity of free teachers. Profane letters were, however, still little cultivated. Lothario took a degree in the liberal arts, but he was soon wholly absorbed in theology and canon law; the correct and virile Latin of his letters is very far from the classical models. Under the Pontificate of his maternal uncle, Clement III., he returned to Rome a young man of the most ascetic character and most finished ecclesiastical culture. He was made a canon of St. Peter's, and, in his twenty-ninth year, a cardinal of the Roman Church.

The Pontificate of Clement ended, apparently, the long struggle of the Popes and the Romans. The Roman nobles were as turbulent as ever, but one finds a more respectable element of dissension in the city at this time. The democratic ideas of that brilliant and too little appreciated thinker, Arnold of Brescia, had taken root in Rome, and a Republic, with a Senate of fifty-six members, had been established in the Capitol. Hadrian IV. had blighted this premature experiment by an interdict in 1155, but the struggle continued and the Popes lived little in the capital until the year 1188. Clement, a courtly and diplomatic Roman, made peace with his countrymen, and damped the democratic ardour by a shower of gold and of ecclesiastical favours. The Papacy resumed the government of the city, and the nominal power of the Senate was allowed to pass into the hands of one man, "the Senator." Clement died in 1190, and, as his successor, Celestine III., was a member of the Orsini family, which was bitterly hostile to the Scotti, there was no room in the Lateran for Lothario Conti. Nepotism was now so far accepted in the Papal palace that we shall find Innocent himself following the tradition. The leisure was fortunate in one respect, as Lothario used it for the purpose of writing a book, On Contempt of the World, which gives us a most interesting revelation of his innermost thoughts at the time when he became Pope. The book is a distillation of the extreme monastic views of the time; it is full of fables, and it depicts man as the very vilest thing in a world which was made solely for the disdain of the ascetic. It was from this morbidly tinted sanctuary that Lothario Conti surveyed the life of his time, which he was soon summoned to rule. In September, 1197, Henry VI., who had duly incurred the imperial legacy of excommunication, died and left his kingdom to his baby-boy Frederic: and on January 8, 1198, Lothario Conti, in the prime of life and the most sombre stage of his meditations, became Innocent III.

Although he occupied the Papal throne only eighteen years, we have more than five thousand letters, or parts of letters, dispatched by him to all parts of Christendom: more than five hundred of them were written in the first year of his Pontificate. Their range stretches from Ireland and Scandinavia to Cairo and Armenia. In that vast territory nothing of importance happened in which he did not intervene; and there was hardly a prince or baron whom he did not excommunicate, or any leading country which he did not place under interdict. His ideal was that of Gregory VII.: the Papal States of Europe—he wanted to add nearer Asia—trembling under the Roman rod. Writing to the Emperor of Constantinople he elaborated his famous conception of earthly empire as the moon, shining faintly by light borrowed from the spiritual power. The Papal theory had reached its culmination, and we may proceed at once to attempt to compress the portentous activity of Innocent III. into a few compartments.[238]

One naturally inquires first how this spiritual autocrat confronted the democratic faction at Rome. At the outset he showed a little of the accommodating temper which he always held in reserve behind his profession of rigour. His attendants flung showers of coin on the greedy people when he first passed between them, and, reluctantly, and on the lowest known scale, he distributed the backsheesh with which each incoming Pope had to win the smiles of every official in the Palace and the city. There were murmurs, and they increased when he proceeded to compel the Prefect (who was understood to represent the Empire) and the Senator (who represented the Romans) to take oaths of allegiance to himself. By this stroke he expelled the last bit of reality out of the "free commune" of Rome, and cast off the last trace of an imperial yoke. He abolished the Noble Guard and the lay officials of the Palace: he deposed the judges appointed by the Senator and appointed less corrupt men: he drove the money-changers and merchants out of the Lateran courtyard, stamped on the parasites who fed on foreign pilgrims, and drew up a strict tariff of fees for the Papal services. He was by no means indifferent to money, as his fighting policy demanded enormous sums. No Pope could be keener on Peter's Pence, and no abbot or bishop dare approach him with a gift not proportionate to his wealth. But it is almost superfluous to say that he was a man of the most rigorous sentiment of justice, and, as long as he lived, the more selfish kind of rapacity at Rome was repressed.

The nobles who led the democratic party, chiefly Giovanni Pierleone and Giovanni Capocci, looked with concern on his tendency and, when he put a Papal governor over the Maremma and the Sabina, instead of the one appointed by the Senate, they pressed the Romans to see that their privileges were being stolen. In 1200 Innocent extricated himself from a difficult situation. Vitorchiano was threatened by Viterbo and declared itself a Papal fief. As Viterbo also was part of the patrimony, and the Romans hated it, Innocent was perplexed. The Romans took the field in spite of him, and won; but, as he happened to be saying mass at the time of the victory, it was ingeniously ascribed to his prayers. In the following year, however, there was more serious trouble. Two small provincial nobles took possession of some estates on the Campagna, and, when Innocent ordered them to restore, they said that they held them of the democratic leaders, Pierleone and Capocci. There was an outcry, but Innocent sent his troops to lay waste the properties of the two nobles in the grimmest mediæval manner, and, in an eloquent speech at Rome, completely vanquished his critics. Then in 1202, during his customary summer absence, the feud of the Scotti and the Orsini broke out with frightful violence, and in the following year the antagonism to the Pope reached its height.

Innocent had, for his own protection, greatly enriched his brother Ricardo, and Ricardo had purchased the mortgages on the estates of one of the democrats, Oddo Poli. As far as we can see, Ricardo acted with legal correctness, but Rome was soon aroused by the sight of Poli and his friends coming naked to church, as a symbol of the "spoliation," and democratic rhetoric rose to white heat. There was a popular rising; Ricardo's towering mansion was burned, and Innocent himself had to fly to Ferentino (May, 1203). The Romans restored their Senate, and swore to have no more of this Papal nepotism and despotism, but from his retreat Innocent fostered the intestine quarrels of the victorious people, and before long the city was in a state of murderous anarchy. The two hundred mansions of its wealthier citizens were, and had been for ages, real fortresses, and during the whole summer of 1203 their castellated walls were lined with archers, and bands issued forth, with all the engines of war, to assault and burn the fortress of some neighbour. It still remains for some historian of the Papacy to explain this chronic violence and vice in the centre of Christendom during so many centuries. The trouble ended in the Pope resuming the government of the city, and his rule was further disturbed only by one of these popular revolts, in 1208.

We do not fully appreciate the strength of Innocent unless we realize how, while his eyes wandered over the globe, Rome itself demanded so much attention. But he was not merely concerned with its misconduct. He organized the work of charity in the city and did something to promote its commerce. He built a foundling hospital, trusting to reduce the infanticide which he found so common at Rome, and was very generous to the churches and the clergy. From his time the Popes began to use more and more the Palace beside St. Peter's, which he enlarged and fortified, and he spent large sums in adorning other churches and enhancing the splendour of the worship. But these and the other Roman reforms I have mentioned are the mere incidents of his domestic life, so to say. His work was the ruling of the world, and assuredly we must recognize a mind of high quality and prodigious energy when we read the volumes of letters that poured from the Lateran during those eighteen years, and imagine the vast crowds that came from every part of the world to do homage, to ask counsel, and to report the minutest circumstances of their abbeys or bishoprics or principalities.

Italy alone might have absorbed a weaker man during his earlier years. Papal rule was acknowledged—in the manner we have seen—only in the immediate neighbourhood of the city. Over the south and Sicily the widow of Henry VI. ruled in the name of her child: in the north were the leagues of free cities, and the isolated free cities, which had won independence: and the whole country apart from these was falling into the hands of the German generals whom Henry VI. had left there at his death. Innocent, like all the Popes after Hadrian, believed in the Donation of Constantine, to say nothing of the Donations of Pippin and Charlemagne and Otto and Mathilda. Italy belonged almost entirely to the Papacy, and must be recovered. Some historians hail Innocent as a great apostle of the "Italia Una" ideal, and he sometimes presses on particular towns "the interests of the whole of Italy." It is, however, absurd to associate his feeling with the later ideal of Italian unity. He cared for the unity of Italy only in the sense that the Pope was to be its unique ruler. Those Germans—he scorns them—must be driven out. Those free cities, always at war with each other, must be persuaded that the Papal seal will be their best protection. Even that kingdom of Naples and Sicily must somehow pass under Rome; in spite of the fact that Innocent had solemnly accepted the guardianship of the young king.

It is commonly said that the German generals in Italy, like Markwald of Anweiler, were ferocious adventurers eager only to carve little principalities for themselves out of the helpless country. This is the partisan version left us by Innocent's anonymous biographer. They were, with German troops, guarding the Empire for the successor of Henry VI.; they acknowledged Philip of Swabia; and Innocent was at a later date "warned" by an influential group of German prelates and nobles not to interfere with them. But Innocent had several advantages. Henry VI. had treated Italy with barbarity, and numbers of cities threw off the German yoke when he died; on the other hand, Markwald and his colleagues were under standing sentence of excommunication for occupying Papal fiefs like Tuscany. Innocent began by sending men and money to the revolted cities, and inviting them to put themselves under Rome's sacred banner. He travelled through central Italy in 1198, and received the allegiance of many towns. Markwald, the chief enemy, was driven to the south, and Innocent pressed the southerners to rise against him.

Here the Pope had the familiar advantage of Papal policy—a woman on the throne—and he made a use of it that cannot very well be defended. Henry's Norman widow, Constance, was not unwilling to break her connection with Germany, and she seems to have had little appreciation of the political meaning of making Sicily a fief of the Roman See. She was very ill and distracted, and no doubt felt that she was consulting the interest of her son in putting him and the kingdom (of Sicily and Naples) under Papal charge. She did indeed hesitate when Innocent told her the price of his protection. Sicily was to sacrifice all the privileges which William I. had wrung from the Papacy, to pay an annual tribute to Rome, and to render feudal service whenever required.[239] But Constance was forced to yield, and she died soon afterwards (November 27, 1198), appointing Innocent the guardian of her son and allotting him an annual fee of thirty thousand gold pieces.

Innocent accepted the guardianship of Frederic, and historians comment severely on his next step. In spite of all his fiery letters to the southern clergy and people—even to the Saracens[240]—inciting them to resist the Germans, Markwald made considerable progress. Then there came to Rome a certain French adventurer named Walter de Brienne, who had married a daughter of Tancred of Sicily. Tancred had, on resigning Sicily, retained Lecce and Tarentum, and Walter claimed these as his wife's inheritance. Whether or no Innocent had actually promoted the marriage and invited Walter to Italy[241] we cannot confidently say, but it was assuredly dangerous to let such a man get a footing in southern Italy; it was probable enough that he would eventually claim the whole kingdom taken from Tancred. However Innocent blessed and financed his enterprise, on the formal condition that he would respect the rights of Frederic, and soon had a French troop waging more effective war upon the Germans. The struggle ceased with the death of Markwald in 1202, and of Walter in 1205, and Innocent then pressed a design of marrying the young Frederic to Constanza of Aragon. For the time Frederic's rights were respected, but there can be no doubt that these early years spent amidst intrigue and treachery contributed to the development of his anti-clerical spirit.

There was, in fact, a good deal of anti-clericalism growing in Italy. The development of civic and communal life and the comparative enlightenment which was spreading turned many critical eyes on the Roman system. Heresy descended the Alps and found favour in the free cities; even, at times, in Papal cities. I have described how Viterbo was crushed by the Roman troops. Innocent intervened in its favour, after its defeat, and he was then outraged to learn that Viterbo was, like many other cities, appointing heretics (the Cathari) to high places. He spent the summer of 1207 in Viterbo, and enforced very stringent rules for the repression of heresy. These laws were extended to all the Papal dominions, but we shall see the Pope's attitude more clearly when we deal with the crusade against the Albigensians. Innocent was not less emphatic in denouncing the incessant wars of the rival cities, and his correspondence is largely occupied with his endeavours to secure their feudal allegiance to Rome.

A graver problem, in the solution of which his character is often obscured, was presented by the struggle of Ghibellines (or followers of Philip of Swabia) and Guelphs (supporters of Otto of Brunswick) for the imperial crown. Frederic, the son and heir of Henry, being still a boy of tender years, his uncle Duke Philip of Swabia desired to keep the crown securely in the Hohenstauffen family by wearing it himself. Otto of Brunswick also made a fantastic claim to it, got himself proclaimed Emperor at Cologne in 1198, and sought the support of the Pope. Innocent undoubtedly favoured from the start the baseless claim of Otto. The Papacy had come to regard the Hohenstauffens almost as hereditary foes, and Philip actually lay under sentence of excommunication for holding the territory bequeathed by Mathilda to the Papacy; while Otto flattered the Pope by professions of loyalty and docility. But Philip had the better prospect, if there was an appeal to the sword, and Innocent refused for some years to commit himself. He summoned Philip to surrender the Italian prisoners and the Papal provinces taken by Henry, and sent the Bishop of Sutri to absolve him if he complied. To his extreme annoyance the not very clear-headed Bishop gave Philip an unconditional absolution—for which Innocent promptly imprisoned the Bishop for life in a monastery—and thus surrendered the Pope's chance of profiting by the situation.

The rivals appealed to the sword, and Innocent bitterly complained that Philip did not ask his arbitration.[242] He alone, he declared to the princes and prelates of Germany, was the judge of such high causes: to which the princes and prelates replied, in very firm and dignified language, that they would have no Papal interference in the secular concerns of Germany.[243] As the war proceeded, Innocent made it clear that he favoured Otto. He warned the German prelates not to choose an Emperor on whom he could not bestow the crown, and in a letter to the Eastern Emperor he afterwards boasted that he alone kept Philip from the throne. But the war went in favour of Philip, and even when, in 1200, both men sent representatives to Rome, Innocent would not commit himself to more than an eloquent proof that priests were exalted above kings.[244] At the beginning of the following year, however, he declared openly for Otto. He sent Cardinal Pierleone to Germany with the Bull Interest Apostolicæ Sedis, in which he drew up a violent and unjust indictment of Philip and awarded the crown to the loyal and virtuous Otto. The Bull is painfully casuistic, and would have been better if it had stopped at the bold declaration that the Papacy had created the Empire and could bestow it according to its pleasure. While, for instance, it charges Philip with treachery to the interests of his young nephew, it exonerates all others from the oath of fidelity to Henry's son on the ground that an oath to an unbaptized infant was invalid.[245] The imperial crown was, in plain terms, allotted in the interests of the Church, in defiance of the wishes of the majority of the German nation. Otto hastened to swear that he would defend the Papal possessions (including Sicily), and was proclaimed by a Papal Legate in Cologne cathedral on July 3, 1201.

Innocent now sent out a flood of letters on behalf of his candidate, but the result was irritating. Philip of France roughly refused to recognize Otto; and a letter signed by two German archbishops, ten bishops, and other clerics and nobles, sternly rebuked the Pope for his "audacity" in meddling with things which did not concern him.[246] Innocent's Legates vainly scattered threats of excommunication in Germany. Hardly a single prelate recognized Otto, and, after seven years of the most brutal civil warfare, he was driven out of the country. We are not impressed by the Pope's feverish protests that he was not responsible for this desolation. In 1208, however, Philip, who had been reconciled with Rome in the previous year, was assassinated, and Otto, with Innocent's approval, mounted the throne. To the intense indignation of the Pope, the new Emperor at once cast his oaths of fidelity to the wind and told Innocent to confine himself to spiritual matters. He annexed Tuscany and Spoleto, in spite of all the Pope's entreaties and threats, and was about to march against Naples and Apulia when Innocent launched against him a sentence of excommunication and deposition. Otto was, for the time, an excellent ruler: he had been educated in the English ideas of government. But he had refused to be subservient to the clergy, and the German prelates now summoned Frederic from Sicily. Innocent approved the election of Frederic as easily as he had approved that of Philip and of Otto, but he did not live to see how that Emperor in turn defied the Papacy and scorned its political pretensions.[247]

Next in interest and importance were Innocent's relations with England. With Richard the Lion-Heart the Pope maintained a friendly correspondence, nor did he annoy the English prelates by any inconvenient censure of the condition of the English Church. In 1199 John Lackland succeeded his brother, and Innocent was even more indulgent to that barbarous and unscrupulous monarch. Into the death of Prince Arthur he made no indiscreet inquiry; he confirmed the dissolution of John's marriage, and, for his shameful theft of the love of the betrothed of the Count de la Marche, imposed on him only the light and useful penance of a general confession and the equipment of a hundred knights for Palestinian service. During the war which followed he made earnest efforts to mediate, though even these were at times marred by his temporizing policy and his determination not to alienate the kings. When the bishops of Normandy, after the capture of that province by Philip, asked him how they were to adjust their allegiance, he weakly replied that Philip seemed to rely on some claim which he could not understand and they must judge for themselves.[248] At length a famous quarrel about the archbishopric of Canterbury drew him into a stern and triumphant conflict with John.

The Archbishop, a worldly-minded courtier of the familiar type, died in 1205, and the Canterbury monks, who claimed the right of nomination, met hastily, by night, without awaiting the royal license to proceed to an election, and nominated their sub-prior Reginald. They sent Reginald at once to Rome, enjoining on him the strictest secrecy until he was consecrated, but the monk made a parade of his high condition as soon as he reached the continent and there was great indignation in England. The Chapter, which disputed the arrogant claim of the monks, elected the Bishop of Norwich, and many of the monks, alarmed at their action or disgusted with their sub-prior, joined in the election. Sixteen monks accompanied the second deputation to Rome, and they supported the declaration of the Court and the Church that Reginald's election was invalid. As, however, the Bishop of Norwich was one of the indulgent prelates, Innocent casuistically annulled both elections and imposed Stephen Langton on the English. John furiously protested that the Pope had insulted his state and threatened to withdraw the English Church from his jurisdiction; shrewdly reminding the Pope that he received more money from England than from any other country.

John seems to have misunderstood the earlier complaisance of the Pope. Innocent was not the man to yield to a threat of financial loss, and he at once consecrated Langton and laid England under an interdict. For some years the affrighted people saw the doors of their churches closed against them and imagined the jaws of a mediæval hell gaping wide for their souls. There was no Christian marriage for their sons and daughters, no Christian burial for their aged; and only to dying persons could the consoling sacrament be administered. In his fury John drove priests and prelates out of his kingdom, but his cruel and extortionate government had lost him the compensating strength of the affection of his people. In 1211 he was forced to seek terms, and a Papal Legate reached England. Between the arrogance of Legate Pandolpho and the passion of the King the negotiation failed, and John was deposed by the Pope. England, Rome repeated, had been a fief of the Apostolic See since William the Conqueror; it was now open to any Christian monarch to invade and possess it. This was a direct invitation to Philip of France to renew those horrors of warfare which Innocent had so eloquently denounced,[249] and, to the intense mortification of the French King, John abjectly submitted (1213). He even handed to the proud Legate a solemn declaration that England and Ireland were fiefs of the Apostolic See, and that he would pay a thousand marks a year for vassalage. The clergy were recalled and compensated, the interdict was raised, and Legate Pandolpho stalked the land with the insufferable air of a conqueror.

If, however, this conflict gives an honourable prominence to the sterner qualities of Innocent, its sequel no less illustrates the weakness which seemed inseparable from the Papal policy, even when it was embodied in a lofty character. Pandolpho behaved so wantonly in resettling the clergy that he presently fell foul of the high-minded Langton: John behaved with a ferocity which drove nobles and commoners to the step of rebellion. Yet Innocent maintained his mischievous Legate against Langton, and laid a Papal malediction on the just aspirations of the people. He rebuked the barons for their "nefarious presumption" in taking arms against a vassal of the Roman See; he denounced Magna Charta as a devil-inspired document, and forbade "his vassal" to accede to its unjust demands. He excommunicated the barons when they refused to lay down their arms, and suspended Langton when that prelate refused, on the ground that it was dictated by false representations, to promulgate his sentence. When the barons offered the crown to Louis, son of Philip of France, he issued an anathema against Louis; and in 1216 he issued a sentence of excommunication against Philip himself for encouraging his son. He died before his sombre use of his spiritual weapons, in a carnal cause, was completed. He had, within ten years, raised Papal power in England to its supreme height and then dealt it a blow from which it would never recover. It is futile to plead that he was ill informed on the situation. He knew John, and he knew Langton; he ought to have known Pandolpho. In point of fact, there is no reason to think that he was radically misinformed. His whole action is plainly inspired by the interest, as he conceived it, of the Papacy.[250]

I must dismiss very briefly his relations with other Christian countries. Philip of France had, like John of England, discarded his wife and married a woman he loved. But the Papal microscope refused, in his case, to discover the remote affinity which, Philip said, made his first marriage void, and an interdict was laid on his kingdom. The terrified priests and people tore Philip from the arms of Agnes de Meran, the mother of three of his children, and forced him to submit. Only under the later pressure of his conflicts with Otto and John did Innocent discover that there was sufficient prima facie evidence to spend several years in negotiation about a divorce, and, by an extraordinary use of his high powers, he declared the children of Agnes legitimate.

In Spain and Portugal, Innocent found irregular marriages almost as numerous as regular, and his interventions show the same unedifying mixture of priestly rigour and political compromise. Sacerdotal legislation had by this time surrounded marriage with a portentous series of obstacles—forbidden degrees of spiritual and carnal affinity—which sacerdotal power alone could remove, yet the isolated princes of the Peninsula were compelled to marry constantly into each other's families and did not always ask the costly blessing of the Papacy. That this legislation did not improve the sex-morals of Europe, which were at least no better than they had been in pagan times, is well known. Spain was particularly lax, having contracted the gaiety of neighbouring Provence, and her kings may have felt that where unwedded love was so genially tolerated, these academic restraints on wedded love might be disregarded.

Innocent placed the kingdoms of Leon and Castile under an interdict because the King of Leon had married his cousin, Berengaria of Castile, and, when the court of Leon ignored his censures, he predicted that there would be a horrible issue of the unhallowed union. Its first fruit was St. Ferdinand; but Berengaria nervously retired after a few years and left the King to bear his excommunication with Spanish dignity. The King of Castile soon obtained the removal of the interdict, on the ground that it favoured the growth of heresy, but he was then threatened with excommunication because he permitted the Jews to become rich while the Church was poor. Pedro of Aragon was more fortunate. In the course of a journey to Rome he married the wife of the Count de Comminges, and the Pope at once accepted her assurance that the Count had two wives living when he married her, and blessed the union. Pedro, it should be added, swore fealty and an annual subsidy of two hundred gold pieces to the Pope. The King of Navarre incurred an interdict for allying himself with the Moors. All that one can seriously put to the credit of Innocent is that he greatly aided the unification of Spain by spurring its kings to a common crusade against the Moors; if we may assume that the crusade favoured the progress of civilization in the country. Sancho of Portugal also felt, and disdained, the touch of the Papal whip. When Innocent complained of his oppression of the clergy, he threatened—in a letter which Innocent describes as the most insolent ever written to a Pope—to strip his corrupt priests of all their wealth. Innocent at once temporized, but a dangerous illness and fit of repentance soon put Sancho and the kingdom of Portugal at his feet. At his death Sancho left the kingdom wholly subject to Rome and the clergy, though it was not many years before the quarrels of his children again drew upon it the spiritual blight of an interdict.

It would be tedious to describe in detail all the similar interventions of the Pope in other countries. He refused to let Marie of Brabant marry the Emperor Otto, and refused to dissolve the marriage of the King of Bohemia; indeed, he sternly rebuked the King of Bohemia for receiving his crown at the hands of Philip of Swabia. In Hungary he scolded Prince Endre for rebelling against his brother, and he raised Bulgaria to the rank of a kingdom, on condition that it recognized Roman supremacy. He claimed, in a word, to be the king of kings, the temporal as well as religious master of Europe. But we shall more clearly appreciate the qualities of his character and shades of his standard of action if we examine more fully his connection with the Fourth Crusade and the crusade against heresy.

Tripoli, Antioch, and a few small Palestinian towns were all that remained of the European conquests from the Saracen, and Innocent's constant correspondence with the Christian prelates who lingered in the East made him eager, from the beginning of his Pontificate, to inspire Europe to make one more grand attempt to rescue the holy places. For several years he sought, by letters and Legates, to fire the Christian princes, to divert the swords of France and England to the breast of the Mohammedan, and to melt the cold calculations of Venice. But the memory of the last colossal failure—of all the blood and treasure that had been expended on the stubborn task—was too fresh in Europe. In vain he promised, to all who took the cross, a sure entry into Paradise, and hinted not obscurely at the damnation which awaited those who refused. Thin bands of zealots responded to the call, and a larger multitude were induced to take the cross by Innocent's princely declaration that the earthly debts of all who joined the Crusade would be cancelled, and the Jews would be forced to forswear their legitimate interest. The knights of Europe, to his fiery indignation, still wasted their spears on each other, or continued the more pleasant pastimes of the chase and the tournament. Innocent, in a flood of eloquent letters, taxed the clergy, confiscated the funds of erratic monks, and forbade the lay nobles to wear costly furs or eat costly dinners or indulge in tournaments. There were murmurs that the Christians of the East needed no aid, since they were on excellent terms with the Saracens, as the Pope was painfully aware; and that the only sure effect of Crusades was to increase the power and the wealth of the Papacy which organized them. Even the clergy and the monks refused the subsidies he demanded, and he was compelled to sanction a practice which would in time prove the most terrible and destructive abuse of the mediæval Papacy: the penance imposed on confessing sinners was to take the form of a money-contribution. To this day the indulgences which are sold in Spain trace their origin to the Crusades, as the printed bula declares.

At length, in the year 1200, Baldwin of Flanders and a few bishops and nobles formed the nucleus of a Crusade, and the astute Venetians were invited to provide for the transport of an army. In the spring of 1202 the streams of soldiers and priests converged upon Venice, and an army of 23,000 assembled for the fourth assault on the Saracens. But the Pope's joy was soon overcast, and the Crusade proved to be the second most lamentable occurrence of his Pontificate.

When the army assembled near Venice, it was discovered that neither the soldiers nor the Pope had money enough to pay their passage to the East. Venice had by that time fully developed its hard commercial spirit, and its famous blind Doge proposed to remit the debt if the Crusaders would, on their way, retake Zara (in Dalmatia) from the Hungarians for the Venetians. Innocent made the most violent opposition, but the Venetians, disdaining his threats, compelled the impoverished soldiers to consent, and on October 8th they set sail, under threat of excommunication, to begin their Crusade by the shedding of Christian blood. They took Zara, and incurred excommunication; but Innocent could not reconcile himself to the complete failure of his grand plan. He withdrew the censures they had so flagrantly defied, and admitted, or stated, that they had acted under "a sort of necessity." They were to make some vague "satisfaction" for their misdeed, and push on, with clean souls, to the East. The Venetians alone were not relieved of the censure, but, though knights of a more tender conscience were painfully perplexed to find themselves in the same galleys with excommunicated men, the Venetians showed no concern. They had another check in reserve for the Pope.

Before they left Italy, Alexis Comnenus had arrived from Constantinople to ask their aid in restoring his father to the throne he had just lost, and they were disposed to assist him. One could not, of course, expect the Pope to show the same concern for the blood of schismatics as for the blood of the Hungarians, yet his consent to this fatal and lamentable enterprise is a stain on his record. The sordid squabble of the Comneni family did not deserve the sacrifice of a single knight, and the part of Isaac Comnenus was espoused by the Crusaders and the Pope only because the young Alexis promised money and provisions to the troops and the subjection of the Greek Church to the Lateran. The issue is well known. The Crusaders took Constantinople, sacked the city, and desecrated the churches with a brutality that must have shocked the Saracens; and they then settled down to divide its territory between themselves and the Venetians. The letters which Innocent sent, as the successive news arrived, are painful reading. He must blame their excesses, he says at first, but, after all, these outrages had been merited by the sins of the Greeks; let the Crusaders inform him that the submission of the Greek Church has been secured. At last they send him, for his confirmation, a treaty from which he learns that they have arranged all the affairs, spiritual as well as secular, of the new Empire without consulting him, and he writes more warmly. To the outrage they have committed he is still almost insensible; it is their audacity in ruling the new Church—in permitting the hated Venetians to select a Patriarch—which excites his anger.

The last phase of the enterprise caused him grave distress. Instead of proceeding to the East, the Latins set up an Empire and several petty princedoms, and the Greeks disdainfully watched their quarrels and awaited their own opportunity. Monks and priests were summoned from France, but the people were secretly wedded to their old religion and the new Church was a hollow sham. For years Innocent had to maintain a fretful correspondence, settling quarrels about jurisdiction and property, and scolding his Crusaders for their oppression and spoliation of the clergy. But it is needless to recount all the details of that historic failure. The weariness of Innocent may be appreciated from the fact that in 1213 he naïvely wrote to the Khalipha himself, beseeching him "in all humility" to restore to the Christians the land which they had not the courage or the interest to win by the sword.

The crusade against the Albigensians was more successful, and even more lamentable, and I need do no more here than elucidate Innocent's relation to that monstrous crime. The degradation of morals and of religious practice, the corruption of the clergy, and the stupendous claims of the Papacy, had already provoked in Europe the beginnings of protest. A somewhat modified form of Christianity's old rival, Manichæism, had lingered in the East and had in time mingled with the austere Christianity of the Pauline Epistles. From the Eastern Empire it had spread to Bulgaria, and from there, in the thirteenth century, it passed rapidly over Europe, assimilating all the anti-clerical and anti-ritualist feeling which the corruption of the time inspired. In one or other form it obtained considerable strength in Switzerland, Piedmont, and the south of France, and it was fast gathering recruits in Italy and Spain. The light-living princes of Languedoc had little inclination to persecute; nor would they think that, if one might sing ribald contempt of the ecclesiastical system in the tavern and the monastery, this disdain was less respectable in the mouths of a generally sincere and upright body of fanatics.

In the first year of his Pontificate Innocent sent two Cistercian monks, Guy and Renier, to convert the heretics and incite the civil and religious authorities to enforce the law. Of corporal persecution he assuredly did not dream at that time, and indeed his letters made it clear that he preferred persuasion to coercion of any kind. The monks failed either to convert the heretics or to induce the bishops and princes of the south of France to persecute (by confiscation and exile), and they were replaced by the more vigorous monk-legates, Pierre de Castelnau and Raoul, to whom the resolute Abbot Arnold of Citeaux was afterwards added. Their powers set aside all ordinary episcopal jurisdiction, and, in pursuance of their policy of displacing lax and reluctant prelates, they put the fanatical Foulques of Marseilles in the bishopric of Toulouse. For eight years these energetic apostles worked almost in vain among the heretics. Apparently at the suggestion of St. Dominic, who was just entering the history of Europe, the Pope directed them to raise a corps of Cistercian monks who should live and preach on the model of the coming mendicant friars, but even this device made little impression on the heretics or the light-living Catholics. Arnold and Foulques, in particular, became desperate, and the lamentable policy of persecution began to grow in their minds and that of the Pope.

The principle of persecution had, as we saw, been established in the Lateran centuries before, and the only thing that restrained Innocent from applying it, in its bloodless form, was the refusal of the secular rulers to co-operate. Raymond of Toulouse was too healthily Epicurean to favour either the sombre creed of the heretics or the more sombre creed of the persecutor. Apologetic writers speak with horror of the number of his wives and fair friends, but we do not find that his conduct in this regard, or the similar conduct of other princes and prelates, attracted the attention of the Pope. When, however, he slighted a sentence of excommunication and still refused to persecute his excellent but unorthodox subjects, he received a withering letter.[251] "Who does he think he is?" the Pope asks scornfully, to disobey one before whom the greatest monarchs of the earth bow. Let him cease to "feed on corpses like a vulture"—to break a lance with his neighbours—and obey the Legates, or the Pope will invite a more powerful prince to displace him. As early as November 17, 1207, Innocent bade the King of France, the Duke of Burgundy, and other nobles, prepare for an expedition to Toulouse; and the privileges of Crusaders were promised to all who joined it.

Raymond was more moved by the political threat than by the spiritual censures, but there was sullen anger amongst his followers, and on January 15, 1208, the Legate Pierre de Castelnau was assassinated. There is not a tittle of evidence to incriminate Raymond, and it is in the highest degree improbable that he would thus open the gates to his greedy neighbours, but Innocent chose to believe that he had directed the murder. Without trial, he declared that Raymond had forfeited the allegiance of his subjects, and his dominions might be seized by any Christian prince. He spurred Philip of France—who must have been flattered to find himself now described as "exalted amongst all others by God"—to the attack.[252] He addressed a fiery summons to "all the nobles and people of France" to "avenge this terrible insult to God."[253] Philip wanted Toulouse, but he overreached himself in making terms and he dreaded England. There were, however, plenty of nobles willing to lead their men to the plunder of prosperous Provence, and the clergy had become seriously alarmed at the spread of the heresy in France. A vast army, joyous at the rich prospect of loot, converged upon the southern State. Innocent III. knew better than we know the forces he had set in motion. The end sanctified the means.

The next phase was pitiful: the issue is one of the most horrible pages of mediæval history. Raymond sent representatives to Rome to offer submission, and the Pope and his Legates were embarrassed and behaved abominably. When Raymond justly complained of the bitterness of Arnold of Citeaux, the Pope sent a peaceful notary from the Lateran; giving the man secret instructions to take no step without the directions of Arnold, who was to be in the background, and writing to Arnold that this Legate Milo is to be only "the bait to conceal the hook of thy sagacity." Arnold, meanwhile, went to organize the crusade, for they intended to impose on Raymond terms which seemed impossible. The helpless Raymond licked the dust: he was stripped and scourged, he had to surrender seven of his chief castles as hostages, and he was forced to promise to lead the troops against his own subjects. Innocent sank deeper into his awful policy. In an amazing letter to his Legates[254] he reminded them of the words of Paul (II. Corinthians, xii., 16); "Being crafty, I caught you with guile." They were to affect to regard the repentance of Raymond as sincere, and, "deceiving him by prudent dissimulation, pass to the extirpation of the other heretics." In other words, they were to crush Raymond's chief nobles and then, if he winced, crush him. Raymond did not wince, yet the army, with Abbot Arnold as Captain General, moved southward to that historic butchery of the Albigensians.

The modern plea that Innocent could not arrest the avalanche is as wanton as the idea that he was moved by "social considerations." A sentence of excommunication, promulgated by Arnold of Citeaux, would have reduced the army to impotent proportions. Innocent would not disappoint Arnold and Foulques, and those who had responded to his summons; and he felt more sure of success this way. After the first two months of butchery and seizure of cities, he sent his blessing to the ambitious de Montfort. He was, however, superior to his Legates. The ferocious Arnold made every effort to goad Raymond to rebellion, and at last excommunicated him again on the plea that he had not fulfilled his promises. Innocent tried—rather tamely—to restrain Arnold, refused to confiscate Raymond's castles (as Arnold demanded) until he had a just trial, and received him courteously at Rome. At last, utterly revolted by the baseness of the Legates, Raymond winced. He was denounced to Rome, was confronted with terms which no man with a spark of honour could accept, and, when he refused, was excommunicated: the Pope confirming the sentence. Raymond's dominions were transferred to "the Blessed Peter," and de Montfort was to levy an annual tax—on which Innocent is painfully insistent—for the Papacy.

Two years butchery of men, women, and children had not yet broken the spirit of the Albigensians, and at the beginning of 1213, the Legates and Simon were dismayed to hear from Innocent that the crusade was over, and the troops had better proceed against the Saracens; that Raymond had not yet been legally convicted of heresy and murder, and had not therefore forfeited his fief; that, in any case, Raymond's sons, rather than Simon de Montfort, were his natural successors. Two Bulls (January 17 and 18, 1213) and four letters in quick succession apprised the miserable group that Innocent—largely owing to the intervention of Pedro of Aragon—at length appreciated their misconduct or had the courage to consult his better feelings. Unhappily, his courage did not last long. They stormed Rome with their remonstrances, and Innocent yielded. As, moreover, the King of Aragon failed in his attempt to reduce them by arms, the cause of Raymond was utterly lost and his territory was made over to Rome. To the end Innocent wavered between his more humane feeling and the policy he had so long countenanced. He refused to confirm the appointment of Simon as sovereign (under Rome) of the whole territory, and when Arnold (who was now Archbishop of Narbonne) quarrelled with Simon over the title of Duke of Narbonne, he supported Arnold. At the Lateran Council, which was to decide the issue, he made a plea for leniency to Raymond and justice to his heirs, but he yielded to the truculent priests, and the unhappy prince was cast aside with an annual pension of four hundred marks. Innocent did not live to see the arrogant Arnold excommunicate de Montfort, and the two Raymonds return and win back much of their estate.

Causa causæ est causa causati, the schoolmen used to say. The Pope who maintained Arnold of Citeaux, Foulques of Marseilles, and Simon de Montfort in their positions when their characters were fully revealed, and the whole of Europe knew the atrocities they committed, bears the guilt of the massacre of the Albigensians.

The fourth Lateran Council was his last work, and one of the most important Councils of the Middle Ages. He summoned all the bishops, abbots, and priors of Christendom to come, on November 1, 1215, to discuss the reform of the Church, the suppression of heresy, and the recovery of Palestine. A vast audience listened to his opening sermon on November 11th, and for nineteen days they framed laws against heretics, Jews, and schismatics: vainly thundered against the vice, sensuality, and rapacity of the clergy: reduced the forbidden degrees of kindred (in marriage) to four—since there were only four humours in the body: imposed on all Christians a duty of confessing at least once a year: and fixed the next Crusade for June 1, 1216. But Innocent, if he marked with pride the contrast of that gorgeous assemblage to the little group of Christians who had met in an inn in the Transtiberina a thousand years earlier, cannot have been content. Not a single Greek had responded to his summons: grave murmurs at his hard policy and despotic action arose in the Council itself: half the prelates, at least, were unfit to impose reforming measures on their priests: and the ghastly mockery of his last Crusade gave little hope for the future. He did not even appreciate the new forces for good which were rising. He had coldly received, if not actually discouraged, Dominic and Francis. His ideal was power: of love he knew nothing. He flung himself ardently into the preparation for the new war on the Saracens, and died, on June 16, 1216, with the call to arms on his lips. He sacrificed himself nobly in the interest of his high ideal, and was one of the greatest makers of the Papacy, but he sacrificed also much that men inalienably prize, and he began the unmaking of the Papacy.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER X

JOHN XXII.: THE COURT AT AVIGNON

In maintaining that the power of the Papacy waned after the Pontificate of Innocent III., I do not mean that there was such visible decay as even the most acute contemporary observer might have detected. The thirteenth century must have seemed to the statesmen of the time to strengthen the Papacy. The Dominican and Franciscan friars, quickly recognized by Innocent's successors, impressed on Europe the duty of implicit obedience. The great canonists began to make an imposing body of law out of the decrees of the Popes. Art developed in close association with religious sentiment. The hereditary feud with the Hohenstauffens ended, fifty years after the death of Innocent, with the complete overthrow of the son and grandson of Frederic II. Yet most historians now recognize that the thirteenth century was, for the Papacy, a period of slow and subtle decay. The mighty struggle with Frederic, Manfred, and Conradin exhausted the high-minded, but not heroic, successors of Innocent, and it ended only when, by summoning Philip of Anjou, they substituted French for German predominance and inaugurated another exacting period of conflict. The alternative was a period of comparative impotence and flabby parasitism. Into this the Papacy passed; and, unfortunately for it, the degeneration occurred just when the eyes of Europe were growing sharper. It was the date of the early renaissance of culture, inspired by the Moors: it was a rich period of civic development and prosperity: it was the time when castes of keen-eyed lay lawyers and scholars were growing. Arms were yielding to togas in the work of restricting the growth of the Papacy.

Boniface VIII. (1294-1303) is the last great representative of the Papal ideal in its earlier and more austere mediæval form. His Bull Clericis laicos (1296) which declared all clerical and monastic property in the world to be under his protection and sternly bade secular rulers respect it, was one of the last Olympic fulminations; and it was defeated by England and France. Then, in 1300, he declared the Jubilee; and some historians see in that prostration of Christendom at the feet of the Papacy the last notable expression of its world-power. Men said at the time—I am not pressing it as fact—that Boniface was so exalted by the spectacle that he put on the imperial crown and sandals. No one questions that the Papacy decayed from that year. Under the banner of Papal absolutism Boniface made war on the great Ghibelline family of the Colonnas, and on Philip the Fair and his lawyers, and he ignominiously fell. The blameless and gentle Dominican, Benedict XI., who succeeded him, could not sustain for more than a few months the struggle he had inherited, and the Gascon Clement V. then inaugurated what has been too forcibly called "the Babylonian Captivity."

After a secret compact with Philip, after a complete sacrifice of his ideals, and after the distribution of much French gold among the cardinals, he obtained the tiara (1305). In 1309 he settled at Avignon, basely surrendered the Templars (after an appalling travesty of justice) to the cupidity of the King, and settled down, in the company of his sister and niece and dear friend the Countess of Talleyrand-Périgord, to a life of sensuous luxury and the accumulation of wealth. He died on March 12, 1314, leaving 1,078,800 florins (about £500,000) nearly the whole of which went to his family and friends, and the cardinals gathered anxiously to choose his successor.

Clement had died near Carpentras, about fifteen miles from Avignon, and the cardinals met in the episcopal palace of that town. The austere Gregory X. had decreed in 1274 that the cardinal electors should be walled into their chamber (or Conclave) until they had chosen a Pope, and the twenty-three princes of the Church prepared for a desperate encounter in their isolated quarters. There were six Italians, eager to tell a pitiful story of the ruin of Rome and the patrimonies because of the absence of the Pope from Italy. But there were nine Gascons—three of them nephews of Clement, all creatures of Clement—and, as two of the eight French cardinals supported the Gascons, they made a formidable majority and demanded an Avignon Pope: in fact, a Gascon Pope. Day followed day in angry discussion, and the cries of the infuriated followers of the Gascon cardinals without grew louder and louder. At last, on July 23d, there came a thundering on the doors, and the terrified cardinals, breaking through the wall, fled from the town and dispersed. For two years, to the grave scandal of Christendom, they refused to agree on a place of meeting, until at last Philip of Valois enticed them to Lyons, entrapped them into a monastery, and told them that they were prisoners until they made a Pope.

Under these auspices Jacques de Cahors, Cardinal of Porto, became John XXII. He was a little, dry, bilious old man of seventy-two: but an able lawyer and administrator, and a man of wonderful vigour for his age. In his case the more careful research of modern times and the opening of the Vatican Archives have tended to give him, in some respects, a more honourable position in history than he had hitherto occupied. The reader will hardly find him morally and spiritually attractive, but he had a remarkable and powerful personality, and he achieved more than has been supposed. His "Register" in the Vatican Archives contains 65,000 letters. Most of these are very brief notes written by the Papal clerks, but there are many of interest and they enable us at times to correct the anecdotists of his age. He had virulent enemies, and they must be read with reserve.[255]

Jacques d'Euse, of Cahors, is said by unfriendly writers of the time to have been the son of a cobbler (or, according to others, a tailor). As he had relatives in good positions, and received a good schooling, this is probably a legend. But his early life is obscure. He studied under the Dominicans of Cahors, and then attended the lectures at Montpellier and at Paris. The story of Ferretti di Vicenza, that he went with a trading uncle to Naples and became tutor to the sons of Charles II., does not harmonize with these facts, and we must therefore reject the further charge that he obtained his bishopric by forging a letter in the name of Charles. He seems rather to have taught civil law for a long period at Cahors, and then at Toulouse, where he earned the friendship of the Bishop, St. Louis, and was thus brought to the notice and favour of the Bishop's father, the King of Naples. Charles secured the bishopric of Fréjus for him in 1300, and made him his Chancellor in 1307. When Charles died, his son Robert continued the patronage and got for him the bishopric of Avignon. Clement V. found him a useful man and pliant lawyer. It was he who did the most accommodating research for Clement in the suppression of the Templars, and he was rewarded with a red hat in 1312. He was a sober man, liking good solid fare and regular ways, and kept his energy and ambition in his eighth decade of life.

Robert of Naples pressed his candidature for the Papacy when Clement died, and the Gascons adopted him. He won the vote of Cardinal Orsini—this statement of his critics is confirmed by later events—by professing a most determined intention to transfer the Papacy to Rome. The anecdotists say that he swore never to mount a horse until he was established at the Lateran; and, after a gorgeous coronation-ceremony at Lyons on September 5th, he at once proceeded by boat to Avignon. The Italian cardinals left him in disgust, and he promptly promoted ten new cardinals, of whom nine were French (and three, including his nephew, from Cahors). Of his later seventeen cardinals, thirteen were French, three Italian, and one Spanish. The Papacy was fixed at Avignon.

The little town which Clement had chosen as the seat of the Papacy had the advantage, in John's eyes, of being separated from Philip's territory by the Rhone and being under the suzerainty of Robert of Naples. It was still a small, poorly built town. Clement had found the Dominican monastery large enough for his Epicurean establishment. John returned at first to his old episcopal palace, but the great rock on which the Papal Palace now stands soon inspired his ambition and he began assiduously to nurse the Papal income. Much of Clement's money had been removed and stored by his clever and unscrupulous nephew, the Viscount Bertrand de Goth, who would not easily disgorge it. After a time John asserted his spiritual power, and summoned the Viscount to present an account. Three times the noble ignored his summons, and then, when John was about to proceed against him, he judiciously distributed some of the money among the cardinals and had the case postponed. At length he rode boldly into Avignon to give his account. He had, he explained, with a most insolent air of simplicity and candour, received 300,000 florins from his uncle. This sum was destined to be used in the next Crusade, and he had sworn on the Gospels not to yield it for any other purpose. John was baulked and was compelled to compromise. They agreed to divide the money, and a receipt preserved at the Vatican shows that 150,000 florins were all he obtained of Clement's huge fortune. Clement had left only 70,000 florins directly to his successor, and half of this had to go to the cardinals. All the rest Clement regarded as private fortune and distributed among his friends and servants.

John turned to the organization of the Papal income, and his success in this direction is notorious. Villani says in his Florentine History[256] that at his death John left a fortune of 25,000,000 florins[257] in coin and jewels. Villani is hostile, but he affirms that he had this information from his brother, who was one of the bankers appointed to appraise the sum. Other chroniclers give different figures. It happens, however, that John's ledgers are still preserved in the Vatican archives, and as in this case they completely refute the anti-Papal chroniclers—a point certainly to be carefully noted by the historian—they have been published.[258] Some of the ledgers are "missing," but there are general statements (tallying with the separate ledgers), and from these it appears that the entire income of the Papacy during the eighteen years of John's Pontificate was about four and a half million florins (or about £120,000 a year), and that the greater part of this was spent on the Italian war. There is an expenditure of nearly three millions under the humorous heading of "Wax, and certain extraordinary expenses," and the items show that the Italian campaign to recover the Papal estates absorbed most of this. At the same time the ledgers do not quite confirm the edifying tradition of John's sober and simple life. His table and cellar cost (in modern terms) nearly £3000 a year; his "wardrobe" nearly £4000 a year: and his officials and staff about £15,000 a year. Immense sums seem to have been given to relatives—there is one item of 72,000 florins paid to his brother Peter for certain estates—and we know that in 1339 he began to build the famous Papal Palace.

In sum, the editors of John's accounts conclude that the Papal treasury would, at his death, have shown a deficit of 90,000 florins but for a loan of half a million from his private purse; and that the total amount left behind by him (besides his valuable library of 1028 volumes, his collection of 329 jewelled rings, etc.) was only about 800,000 florins. It is true that, in spite of the businesslike appearance of the ledgers, we must not take this as a statement of the Pope's entire estate. Vast sums were collected which did not pass through Avignon, but went straight to the Legate in Italy (and possibly elsewhere). Moreover, the "private purse" of the Pope is an interesting and obscure part of his system. It was discovered at his death that he had a secret "little chamber," over one of the corridors, into which a large part of the income went. There are historical indications that he diverted to his private account large sums for military and special political purposes. He did not foresee how Clement VI. would genially dissipate it, with the words: "My predecessors did not know how to live." This account was not entered in books, and we have to be content with the assurance that he left at his death rather less than a million florins in all.

Yet an income of—if we make allowance for the unrecorded sums—something like £200,000 a year, at a time when the patrimonies were mostly alienated, was enormous, and there is no reason to doubt the statement of all historians that it came largely from tainted sources. John's fiscal policy is a stage in the degeneration of the Papacy. Clement IV. had, in 1267, reserved to the Pope the income of the benefices of clerks who died at Rome, and Boniface VIII. had enlarged this by including all who died within a two days' journey of Rome. John extended the law throughout the Church and demanded three years' revenue for each that fell vacant. By his Bull Execrabilis he ordered all clerks (except his cardinals) who held several benefices to select one and surrender the rest to the Apostolic See. He created bishoprics—he made six out of the bishopric of Toulouse—by subdividing actual sees (on the plea, of course, that the duties would be better discharged), and by an astute system of promotions he, when a see fell vacant, contrived to move several men and secure the "first fruits" on their appointments: a vacant archbishopric, for instance, would be filled by a higher bishop, the higher bishopric by a lower bishop, and so on. It was possible to put a complexion of reform on all these measures, but clergy and laity muttered a charge of avarice. Then there were the incomes from kingdoms and duchies (England, Aragon, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and Spoleto) which owed an annual tribute, the yield of the surviving patrimonies, the taxes on dispensations and grants, and a certain beginning of the sale of indulgences which, unfortunately, we cannot closely ascertain.

John was not wholly immersed in finance and insensible of higher duties. He created universities at Cahors and Perugia, regulated the studies at Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris, and even (as we shall see) concerned himself with the state of the East. But the only council we trace under his control (held at St. Ruf, in 1326) was almost entirely concerned with ecclesiastical property and immunities, and his correspondence is, in effect, almost wholly fiscal and political. He greatly enlarged the Rota (or legal and business part of the Curia), and filled it with a cosmopolitan staff of clerks, to deal with this large and lucrative side of his affairs. It is pleaded that the Papacy could not discharge its duties without this wealth and power; and it must seem unfortunate that the acquisition and maintenance of the wealth and power left so little time for the duties they were to enable the Pope to discharge.

Watered by this stream of gold, Avignon flourished. John was generous to his family and his cardinals: palaces began to rise above the lowly roofs of the town: a gay and coloured life filled its streets. A Papal household costing £25,000 a year would of itself make an impression. We know Avignon best in the later and even richer days of Benedict XII. and Clement VI. who followed John. Not far away, even in the days of John, dwelt a writer who was destined to immortality, and he passed scathing criticisms on Avignon. Petrarch is a rhetorician and poet, as well as a fierce opponent of the Avignon Papacy, but one cannot lightly disregard his assurance that Papal Avignon was "Babylon," "a living hell," and "the sink of all vices."[259] He is chiefly describing Avignon under Clement VI., but he says that it is only a change "from bad to worse" since John's days.

An episode that occurred soon after John's elevation is, perhaps, more convincing than Petrarch's fiery rhetoric, since its features were determined in a legal process. Hugues Géraud, a favourite of Clement V., had obtained from that Pope the bishopric of Cahors, paying the Papal tax of a thousand florins for it. He proceeded to make his possession as lucrative as possible and live comfortably on the revenue his clerks extorted for him. John's townsfolk appealed to him, as soon as he settled in Avignon, and he summoned the Bishop to his court. Hugues Géraud sealed the lips of his priests by an oath of silence, but, of course, a Pope could undo that seal, and the inquiry revealed enormities on the part of the Bishop. Toward the close of the inquiry certain men were arrested bringing mysterious packages into the town. They had with them various poisons and certain little wax images concealed in loaves. The Bishop and his chief clerks were at once arrested, and, although the Papal officials used torture to open their lips, the substance of their story seems reliable. Fearful of the issue, Hugues Géraud had applied to a Jew at Toulouse, and to others, for these poisons and wax images. It was proved in court that members of the Papal household, including a cardinal, were bribed to facilitate the poisoning, and that the wax images, which were not effective without the blessing of some prelate, were actually blessed by the Archbishop of Toulouse. The Archbishop pleaded that he had no suspicion of the awful purpose of these images—familiar as they were in the Middle Ages—but he soon fled from Toulouse, and it is conjectured that he had hoped that the death of the Pope would save his diocese (and income) from the threatened dismemberment.[260]

Some of these images had already been smuggled into Avignon and the Bishop and his archpriest had, in the well-known mediæval manner, set up one of them as representative of the Pope's nephew, Cardinal Jacques de Via, and stabbed it in the belly and legs with silver styles, while the wicked Jew repeated the suitable imprecations. John XXII. fully shared the views of his age in regard to these magical practices, and we can imagine how he and others were confirmed in that belief when, in the course of the trial, Jacques de Via sickened and died. The trial came to a speedy conclusion. The Bishop of Cahors was dragged by horses through the town and burned at the stake: his numerous clerical and lay accomplices were adequately punished: and John spurred the Inquisitors to a deadly campaign against magicians throughout the country. Some of the cardinals were involved in this or a similar plot, but John shrewdly disarmed them with gold rather than make powerful enemies.

These details will suffice to make clear the state of the clergy and laity at the close of a century which some writers appraise as one of profound inspiration, and we must go on to consider the large policy which John's wealth was intended to support. The central theme is, once more, the political struggle with the Emperor—the undying curse which temporal power had brought with it—but we cannot understand this aright unless we first regard a spiritual struggle of great interest.

The followers of Francis of Assisi had branched into the customary parties of rigourists and liberals. On the one hand were the great body of the friars, living in large comfortable monasteries, raising a stupendously rich church over the bones of their ascetic founder. On the other hand were the faithful minority, the genuinely ascetic, casting withering reproaches on the liberals, assimilating much of the mystic and—we may justly say—protestant feeling which was growing in Europe. There were bloody conflicts as well as highly seasoned arguments. The "Spirituals" and "Fratricelli" could not but regard the wealth and sensuality of the higher clergy as an apostasy from the Christian ideal, and they had become one of the most pronounced "protestant" sects of the time and were anathematized repeatedly by the Popes. During the Papal vacancy the Spirituals had prospered and become more strident. Christendom had apostatized, and they were the heralds of a new religion, revealed to Francis of Assisi. This arrogant Papacy and priesthood must disappear before true religion can flourish.

In the spring of 1317 John condemned them, and, when they still preached revolt, summoned about sixty of them to Avignon. They used very plain speech and received a very plain reply. The Papacy had now discovered that persistent or "contumacious" disobedience amounted to heresy, and the Inquisitors belonged to the rival Dominican order. So several sons of St. Francis were burned at the stake—four were burned at Marseilles on May 7, 1318—and many were cast into prison. But John went too far. He ordered the Franciscan authorities to consider whether absolute poverty was the genuine basis of their rule, and they decided that it was: in the sense of a Bull (Exiit qui seminat) of Nicholas III., which allowed them "the use" of things without the actual "ownership." John revoked the Bull, and in a Decretal of December 8, 1322 (Ad Conditorem), declared that this was impossible nonsense. When the friars retorted that such poverty had actually been practised by Christ and his Apostles, John consulted the learned doctors of Paris and, in the Decretal Cum inter nonnullos (November 12, 1323), pronounced this thesis heretical. The "Spirituals" were now reinforced by abler men, who fled to Italy and joined the anti-Papal campaign of Louis of Bavaria. Michael de Cesena, the General of the Order, nailed to the door of Pisa cathedral a document in which he impeached John for heresy. William of Ockham, the English friar, one of the most acute of the later schoolmen, and others, discharged a shower of invectives which would have made the fortune of a sixteenth-century Reformer. John was "Anti-Christ," the "Dragon with Seven Heads," and so on. They induced Louis of Bavaria to declare John's Decretals heretical, and fought shoulder to shoulder with the learned Paris doctors, Marsiglio of Padua and Jean of Jandun, whose Defensor Pacis (1324) was a crushing indictment of the Papal pretensions and vindication of the secular power. All over Italy and Germany there was a fierce scrutiny of the bases of the Papal claims. The Reformation was commencing, two centuries before Luther.

The spiritual struggle had thus merged in the political struggle, owing to the common opposition to John XXII., and this must now be considered. Frederic of Austria and Louis of Bavaria were both chosen King of the Romans, and, as neither had had the full number of votes, there was the not unfamiliar struggle for recognition. They disregarded John's summons to his tribunal, took to the sword, and Frederic was beaten and imprisoned in 1322. John coldly acknowledged Louis's letter announcing his victory; unquestionably he from the first wanted the imperial crown to pass to France and the imperial rule to vanish from Italy. Then Louis invaded Italy, and John declared war.

Italy already gave the Pope concern. The Ghibellines, or Imperialists, had grown powerful in the Pope's absence, and their chief leader, Matteo Visconti of Milan, a ruthless and exacting ruler, was "Imperial Vicar" in the country. When Visconti, in defiance of the Pope's commands, gave aid to the Ghibellines of Genoa, John, who claimed to represent the Empire during the "vacancy," withdrew his title of Vicar and awarded it to Robert of Naples. Robert went to consult John at Avignon, and a campaign followed. Cardinal Bertrand de Poyet—who was, says Petrarch, so much like John "in face and ferocity"[261] that one could easily credit the rumour that he was John's son—was sent to direct the Papal cause and to denounce the Viscontis to the Inquisition. Matteo was found guilty of heresy (or contumacious refusal to abandon the title of Vicar), and he and his son were charged with oppression of the clergy (which is plausible enough) and with a quaint and amusing mixture of magic and other devilry.[262] Possibly John relied more confidently on the troops of Philip of Valois and Henry of Austria, whom he successively summoned to Italy; but they retired almost without a blow. Matteo repented and died, but his sons and their associates continued the war.

At this juncture Louis conquered Frederic and sent word to the Legate to keep his troops out of imperial territory. When the Legate refused, he joined the Ghibellines and drew from John a vigorous denunciation. He was to abandon the "heretics" and come to Avignon for the examination of his claim to the Empire. Louis, retorting (under the inspiration of the friars) that there were heretics at Avignon as well as in Italy, went his way, and John turned to France. Charles the Fair, the new King, had discovered that, when Clement V. had authorized his marriage with Blanche of Burgundy, a remote godmothership had been overlooked, and he was in the painful position of living with one to whom he was not validly married. John declared the marriage void, allowed Charles to marry another lady, and was soon in conference with Charles and with Robert of Naples. Germany took alarm at this plain hint of an intention to make Charles Emperor; the Italian spiritual war upon the Pope was vigorously repeated in that country, and the Diet of Ratisbon rejected John's authority and called for a General Council.

Louis, in 1326, became reconciled with Frederic of Austria and was recognized in Germany as sole Emperor, but John had gone too far to withdraw, or was too deeply involved with Charles of France and Robert of Naples. In alliance with the Ghibellines, Louis made a triumphant tour over Italy, and on April 18, 1328, to the immense joy of his throng of rebel supporters, solemnly declared, in St. Peter's, that "James of Cahors" was guilty of heresy and treason.[263] Friar Peter of Corbara was substituted for him, with the name of Nicholas V., and Rome exulted in the restoration of the Papacy. But the drama ended as it had often ended before. Louis oppressed the country and alienated his supporters; and before the end of the year Friar Peter was, with a halter round his neck, at the Pope's feet in Avignon and Louis was back in Germany. John refused to compromise honourably with Louis, and the agitation against the Papacy in Germany, whither all the rebels had now gone, was more bitter than ever.

The next phase of the struggle is not wholly clear. John of Bohemia intervened and overran Italy. It seems probable that the Pope had nothing to do with this invasion, and at first suspected that John was in league with Louis; but that, as John made progress and had friendly communication with Avignon, the Pope began to hope that the new development offered him a stronger King of Italy (under Papal suzerainty) than Robert and a less oppressive protector than Philip VI. of France.[264] Philip and John visited the Pope at Avignon, and it was announced that John was to be recognized as King of part of Italy. The curious alliance of the three reveals some miscalculation. Philip must have trusted that John of Bohemia would work for him, but the Pope had assuredly no idea of abandoning his claim to Italy. The issue was singular. The Italians, in face of this alliance, united under Robert of Naples and overcame the Papal and Bohemian troops. John had, as part of the campaign, announced his intention of transferring the Papal Court to Bologna, and the Legate actually began to erect a palace for him. When the Bolognese realized that John had no serious intention of coming, they joined the Imperialists and cast out the Legate and his troops. It is said that the collapse of his costly Italian campaign weighed so heavily on the Pope that he did not leave his palace during the year of life which still remained.

John's relations with other countries are not of great interest. He was almost the master, rather than the slave, of the three French monarchs who ruled during his Pontificate, and some of his letters paternally chide them for such defects as talking in church. In letters to Edward of England he tried to reconcile that monarch with Robert Bruce, and he begged more humane treatment of the Irish, who had appealed for his intervention. In Poland he excommunicated the Teutonic knights for taking Danzig and Pomerania from King Ladislas. His eye wandered even farther afield. He was genuinely interested in the fate of Christians in the East, and sent a mission to the Sultan, who sharply dismissed it. No Pope had, in a sense, a wider horizon, for John not only sent friars to preach in Armenia and Persia, but actually appointed a Legate for India, China, and Thibet. Yet his ruling of the Christian world was singularly slender in comparison with that of his great predecessors. His energy was absorbed in fiscal and political matters. In co-operation with Philip he sent a fleet against the Saracens, and it won a victory, but the Crusade he announced on July 26, 1333, never went beyond that naval success. On the other hand, when the Pastoureaux, a wild rabble, marched over France proclaiming a popular Crusade, John excommunicated them for taking the cross without his permission; of their appalling treatment of the Jews he made no complaint, nor did he move when the lepers of France were brutally persecuted on some superstitious charge of the time. He was oppressive to the Jews, and ordered the burning of the Talmud.

He has, in fine, the distinction of putting forward a doctrine which his Church condemns as heretical. Preaching on All Saints' Day in 1331, he suggested that probably the saints did not enjoy the direct vision (or Beatific Vision) of God in heaven, and would not do so until after the Day of Judgment. There is no doubt whatever that he held this as an opinion, though he made no effort to impose it on others; beyond a certain liberality in bestowing benefices on clerics who supported him. There was a violent agitation in France. The Dominican friars and the universities strongly opposed the view, and, when the General of the Franciscan Order thought it advantageous to support the Pope, the King of France swore that he would not have his realm sullied by the heresy. This agitation, and John's correspondence with Philip VI., make it quite clear that the Pope held the heresy, as an opinion. A few days before he died, however, he wrote a Bull—at least, such a Bull was published by his successor—endorsing the received doctrine and declaring that he had put forward his theory only "by way of conference."

He died on December 4, 1334, bowed with age and saddened by the failure of his work. A more complete study of his letters than has yet been made may in some measure enlarge our knowledge of his properly Pontifical action, but there can be little doubt that money and politics chiefly engrossed his attention. The chief interest of his Pontificate is the light it throws on the preparation for the Reformation. John's fiscal policy, however much open to censure, was unselfish; but he opened to his even less religious successors the road to disaster.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XI

JOHN XXIII. AND THE GREAT SCHISM

The next important stage in the devolution of the Papacy is the Great Schism, the spectacle of which moved the increasing body of cultivated laymen and the better clergy to examine critically the bases of the Papal claims and seek an authority which should control the wanton conduct of the Popes. The essential mischief of the long stay of the Papal Court at Avignon is obscured when it is called a Babylonian Captivity. Few of the Popes were servile to France, and it was not France that detained them on the banks of the Rhone. The gravest consequences of their voluntary exile were, that the isolation from their Italian estates led them to pursue a corrupt and intolerable fiscal policy: that the College of Cardinals degenerated and became less scrupulous in the choice of a Pope: and, especially, that the rival ambition of French and Italian cardinals to control the Papacy led to an appalling schism. This phase will be best illustrated by an account of the antecedents and the remarkable Pontificate of John XXIII.

The return of the Papal Court to Rome was mainly due to political causes. Clement VI. (1342-1352), whose voluptuous indolence ignobly crowned the fiscal system of John XXII., was followed by three Popes who at least desired reform. The third of these, Gregory XI., was too weak or resourceless to curb the ruthless action of his Legates in Italy, and the sight of wild Breton mercenaries and hardly less wild English adventurers (of Hawkwood's infamous company) spreading rape and rapine under the Papal banner, disgusted the cities and states of the Peninsula. Under the lead of Florence, they proceeded to affirm and establish the independence of Italy. It was this threat, rather than the romantic rebukes of a young nun (Catherine of Siena), which drew Gregory XI., in 1376, from the safe and luxurious palace-fortress at Avignon. A month after his arrival at Rome the Breton hirelings under Cardinal Robert of Geneva committed a frightful massacre at Cesena, and Gregory was almost driven back to Avignon by the storm which ensued. But he died on March 27, 1378, and the cardinals met nervously at Rome to choose a successor.

The din of the bloody encounter of Gascon, Breton, and Roman troops in the streets reached the cardinals in the privacy of the Conclave. One day, indeed, the armed Romans burst into the sacred chamber, and brandished their weapons before the eyes of the terrified French cardinals. Yet it is generally agreed that there was not such compulsion as to invalidate the election, and Urban VI. became the legitimate head of the Church. In the circumstances a delicate and tactful policy was required, and the austere Neapolitan, of humble birth, who secured the tiara was in this respect the least fitted of the cardinals. He violently and vituperatively denounced the wealth and luxury of his colleagues, and he alienated Italians no less than French by the grossness of his manners. Within a few months the French cardinals retired to Fondi, discovered that the election was invalid on account of intimidation, and set up Robert of Geneva, a ruthless soldier and entirely worldly-minded priest, as Anti-Pope, with the title of Clement VII. So the schism began, and Christendom split into two bitterly hostile "obediences." Clement retired to Avignon, and preyed on France more avariciously than John XXII. had done: Urban's impetuous rudeness wrapped Italy in a flame of war once more. In 1389 another Neapolitan, Boniface IX., succeeded Urban, and it is during his Pontificate that there came upon the scene Baldassare Cossa, the unscrupulous adventurer who became John XXIII.

Cossa was a Neapolitan, and is said by his hostile contemporary Dietrich von Nieheim to have been a pirate in his youth.[265] Many recent historians reject this statement, but as it is certain and admitted that Cossa's two brothers were condemned to death for piracy by Ladislaus of Naples, and it is clear that in his youth Cossa took some part in the Angevin-Neapolitan war, it is not improbable that Baldassare was himself engaged in raiding the Neapolitan commerce. He was born about 1368, of a noble but impoverished Neapolitan house, and he seems to have been known to the Neapolitan Pope. In his early twenties he forsook the army or the sea, for which alone he was qualified, and went to study law at Bologna. In 1392 Boniface made him Archdeacon at Bologna: in 1396 he was summoned to the office of Private Chamberlain at Rome, and his career began.

He was a typical Neapolitan—dark-eyed, keen-witted, of very robust frame and very frail moral instincts—and the Pope needed such men. During the first seven years of his Pontificate Boniface was kept in check by the older cardinals, but, as they died, he sought money by fair or foul means for the recovery of Italy. France and Spain sent their gifts to Avignon, and England and Germany were not generous. Benefices, from the highest to the lowest, were sold daily, and the "first fruits" were demanded in advance. As the system developed, spies were employed over Italy and Germany to report on the health of aged beneficiaries, and there was a sordid traffic in "expectations." Baldassare Cossa, the chief instrument of this gross simony, had various scales of payment, and the purchaser of the "expectation" of a benefice might find it sold over him to a higher bidder for a "preference." A Jubilee had been announced for the year 1390, and Boniface got the fruits of it, but this did not deter him from reaping another golden harvest from a Jubilee in 1400. As, moreover, many pilgrims, especially in Germany and Scandinavia, were deterred from coming to Rome by the bands of robbers and ravishers who infested the Papal estates, Boniface generously enacted that Germans might obtain the same pardon by visiting certain shrines nearer home and paying to Papal agents the cost of a journey to Rome.

These simoniacal practices are established and admitted, quite apart from the testimony of Dietrich. We must, indeed, admit the evidence of Dietrich when he tells us that he saw these Papal agents spread their silk curtains and unfold their Papal banners in the churches of Germany, and heard them declare to the ignorant people that St. Peter himself had not greater power than they. We may also easily believe his assurance that many of the German clergy denounced this traffic in indulgences[266] and that it brought enormous sums to the Papacy. But the precise sums, and the romantic stories, which Dietrich gives on hearsay, especially in regard to Cossa, must be regarded with reserve. He says that Cossa, when Legate at Bologna, arrested one of these monk-agents returning to Rome with his bags of gold and relieved him; and that the monk hanged himself in despair. These are fragments of foolish rumour. We cannot deal so summarily with his statement that the Chamberlain had his percentage of the profits and let it grow in the hands of the usurers; and that he extorted money from prelates by mendaciously representing that Boniface was angry with them and offering to mediate. All that we can say with confidence is that Cossa was the chief instrument of the Pope's nefarious system, and that, although he had no private means, he amassed an enormous fortune. The Council of Constance established this charge against him, as we shall see.

In 1402, Cossa became Cardinal-deacon of St. Eustace—the Council of Constance found that he bought that dignity—and in the following year he was made Legate at Bologna. We cannot control Dietrich's statement that the Pope wished to put an end to a scandalous liaison of Cossa's at Rome. It is not improbable, and would not be very unusual at Rome, but the fact is that he knew Bologna and was a soldier, and Boniface needed a soldier-legate in the north. In a very short time Cossa won Bologna from the Milanese troops and made it a prosperous and profitable Papal possession. He fortified it and restored its institutions, even establishing a university of a very liberal character. But he ruled it with an iron hand and ground it with taxes. Even its gamblers and prostitutes had to pay the tithe of their earnings, and the grumblers who constantly revolted or attempted to assassinate Cossa were mercilessly punished. Dietrich boldly accuses him of violating two hundred maids and matrons of the city, but we can do no more than suspect that there must have been some foundation for so large a repute. Again the Council of Constance sustains the substance of the charge.