THE PAPACY AND THE EMPIRE.

25

ples; and such a person appeared in Nicholas I. (858867). Availing himself of a favorable juncture, he exercised the discipline of the Church upon Lothair II., the King of Lorraine, whom he forced to submit to the papal judgment in a matrimonial cause, while he deposed the archbishops who had endeavored to baffle his purpose. At the same time, Nicholas humbled Hincmar, the powerful Archbishop of Rheims, who had disregarded the appeal which one of his bishops, Rothad of Soissons, had made to Rome. Such exertions of power, for which the False Decretals furnished a warrant, seem to anticipate the Hildebrandian age.

Anxious to deliver themselves from the control which Charlemagne had established over them, the popes even fomented the discord among the Frankish princes; but the anarchical condition into which the Empire ultimately fell, left the Papacy, for a century and a half, the prey of Italian factions, by the agency of which the papal office was reduced to a lower point of moral degradation than it ever reached before or since.1 This era during a considerable portion of which harlots disposed of the papal office, and their paramours wore the tiara was interrupted by the intervention of the German sovereigns Otho I. and Otho III.; with the first of whom the Holy Roman Empire, in the sense in which the name is used in subsequent ages, the secular counterpart of the Papacy, takes its origin.2 The pontiffs preferred the sway of the emperors to that of the lawless Italian barons.3 This dark period was terminated by Henry III., who appeared in Italy at the head of an army, and, in 1046, at the Synod of Sutri, which he had convoked, dethroned

The degradation of the Papacy in this period is depicted in the darkest colors by the Roman Catholic annalist, Baronius. Annales, x. 650 seq. He even infers a special divine preservation of the Church and of the Holy See.

2 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 80. This admirable work deserves to be read by every student of history.

Von Rauner, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, i. 20.

three rival popes, and raised to the vacant office one of his own bishops.

The imperial office had passed into the hands of the German kings, and they, like their Carlovingian predecessors, rescued the Papacy from destruction. We have reached the period when Hildebrand (1073-1085) appeared with his vast reforming plan. While he aimed at a thorough reformation of morals and a restoration of ecclesiastical order and discipline, he coupled with this laudable project the fixed design to subordinate the State to the Church, and to subject the Church to the absolute authority of the Pope. The prosecution of this enterprise, in which good and evil were almost inseparably blended, by Hildebrand himself, and by a series of able and aspiring pontiffs who trod in his footsteps, occasioned the conflict between the Papacy and the Empire.

This conflict, with which medieval history for several centuries resounds, was an inevitable consequence of the feudal system. The dependence of ecclesiastical princes upon their sovereign, and hence his right to invest them. with the badges of their office, must be maintained; otherwise the kingdom would be divided against itself. On the contrary, such a relation on the part of bishops, independently of simony and kindred corruptions which were connected with the control of secular rulers over the арpointment of ecclesiastics, was naturally deemed fatal to the unity of the sacerdotal body. To fix the bounds of authority between the two powers, the Papacy and the Empire, to whom the government of the world was supposed to be committed by the ordinance of heaven, was impracticable without a contest. That the Emperor was commissioned to preside over the temporal affairs of men, while the Pope was to guide and govern them in things spiritual, was too vague a criterion for defining the limits

1 Gregory's system is well described by Voigt, Hildebrand als Papst Gregorius der Siebente, u. sein Zeitalter (Weimar, 1846), p. 171 seq.

STRUGGLE WITH THE EMPIRE.

27

of jurisdiction. The coördination, the equilibrium of the two powers, was a relation with which, on the supposition that it were practicable, neither party would be content. It was a struggle on both sides for universal monarchy. Consequently our sympathies can be given without reserve to neither party, or rather they must be given to each so far as each labored to curb the encroachments and prevent the undue predominance of the other. Neither aimed at the destruction, but each at the subjugation, of the other. It was a battle where society would have equally suffered from the complete and permanent triumph of either contestant.

The Papacy had great advantages for prosecuting the warfare against the Empire, even apart from the force of the religious sentiments which the head of the Church could more easily invoke in his favor. There was an incongruity between the station attributed to the Emperor and the fact that his actual dominion was far from being coextensive with Christendom. He could assert nothing more than a shadowy, theoretical supremacy over the other kingdoms of Western Europe. The Pope, on the contrary, was everywhere the acknowledged head of Latin Christianity. If a jealousy for their own rights might tempt other kings to make common cause with the Emperor against papal aggressions, this feeling would be neutralized by the danger to other sovereigns that would follow from the triumph and undisputed exaltation of the Empire. Few kings were possessed of the magnanimity of St. Louis of France, who exerted all the powers of peaceful remonstrance to protect Frederic II. from the implacable vindictiveness of Gregory IX. Moreover, the relation of the German emperors to the hierarchy of their kingdom was quite different from that held by Charlemagne, who acted the part of an ecclesiastical as well as a civil ruler. An indispensable and effective support the popes found in the German princes themselves,

the great vassals of the Empire, and in their disposition to put checks upon the power of their sovereigns. The same cause which impeded the emperors in acting upon Italy, aided the popes in acting upon Germany. The strength of the popes lay in the intestine divisions which they could create there. The attempt of Gregory VII. to dethrone Henry IV. would have been utterly hopeless but for the disaffection which the arbitrary conduct of Henry had provoked among his own subjects. On the contrary, the municipal spirit of liberty in the Italian cities, and their determined struggle for independence, provided the popes with potent allies against the imperial authority. The pontiffs were able to present themselves in the attractive light of champions of popular freedom in its battle with despotism. The crusades gave the popes the opportunity to come forward as the leaders of Christendom, and turn to their own account the religious enthusiasm which spread as a fire over Europe. The immediate influence of this great movement was seen in the augmented power of the pontiffs, and the diminished strength of the imperial cause.1

The Papacy was victorious in the protracted struggle with the Empire. The humiliation of Henry IV., whom Hildebrand kept waiting for three winter days, in the garb of a penitent, in the yard of the castle at Canossa, whatever might be the disgrace which it inflicted upon the imperial cause, was but the politic act of a passionate young ruler, who saw no other way of regaining the allegiance of his subjects (1077). When the lifting of the excommunication was found not to include the full restoration of his rights as a sovereign, he took up arms with an energy and success that showed how little his spirit was broken by the indignities to which he had submitted. The Worms Concordat which Calixtus II. concluded with Henry V. in 1122, and which provided both for a secular 1 See Gieseler, I. iii. 1, § 48.

HEIGHT OF PAPAL POWER.

29

and a spiritual investiture, was a marked, though not a fully decisive, triumph of the Papacy. It was a great step towards complete emancipation from imperial sway.1 But the acknowledgment which Frederic Barbarossa made of his sin and error to Alexander III. at Venice, in 1177, after a contest for imperial prerogatives which that monarch had kept up for nearly a generation, was an impressive indication of the side on which the victory was to rest. The triumph of the Papacy appeared complete when Gregory X. (1271-1276) directed the electoral princes to choose an emperor within a given interval, and threatened, in case they refused to comply with the mandate, to appoint, in conjunction with his cardinals, an emperor for them; and when Rudolph of Hapsburg, whom they proceeded to choose, acknowledged in the most unreserved and submissive manner the Pope's supremacy.

It was during the progress of the struggle with the Empire, that the papal power may be said to have culminated. In the eighteen years (1198-1216) in which Innocent III. reigned, the papal institution shone forth in full splendor.2 The enforcement of celibacy had placed the entire body of the clergy in a closer relation to the sovereign pontiff. The Vicar of Peter had become the Vicar of God and of Christ. The idea of a theocracy on earth, in which the Pope should rule in this character, fully possessed the mind of Innocent, who united to the courage, pertinacity, and lofty conceptions of Gregory VII., a broader range of statesmanlike capacity. In his view the two swords of temporal and ecclesiastical power had both been given to Peter and to his successors, so that the earthly sovereign derived his prerogative from the head of the Church. The king was to the Pope as the moon to the sun-a lower luminary shining with

1 Giesebrecht, i. 917.

1 Hurter, Geschichte Papst Innocent d. Dritten, 3 vols. (1841).