LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

than he needed and so was expected to contribute to the king's treasury, which was generally empty.

      Simony corrupts the lower clergy.

      The evil of simony was, therefore, explicable enough, and perhaps ineradicable under the circumstances. It was, nevertheless, very demoralizing, for it spread downward and infected the whole body of the clergy. A bishop who had made a large outlay in obtaining his office naturally expected something from the priests, whom it was his duty to appoint. The priest in turn was tempted to reimburse himself by improper exactions for the performance of his regular religious duties, for baptizing and marrying his parishioners, and for burying the dead.

      So it seemed, at the opening of the eleventh century, as if the Church was to be dragged down by its property into the anarchy of feudalism described in a preceding chapter. There were many indications that its great officers were to become merely the vassals of kings and princes and no longer to represent a great international institution under the headship of the popes. The Bishop of Rome had not only ceased, in the tenth century, to exercise any considerable influence over the churches beyond the Alps, but was himself controlled by the restless nobles of central Italy. He appears much less important, in the chronicles of the time, than the Archbishop of Rheims or Mayence. There is no more extraordinary revolution recorded in history than that which raised the weak and demoralized papacy of the tenth century to a supreme place in European affairs.

      

      Three rival popes.

      61. One of the noble families of Rome had got the selection of the popes into its own hands, and was using the papal authority to secure its control over the city. In the same year (1024) in which Conrad II became emperor, a layman was actually exalted to the headship of the Church, and after him a mere boy of ten or twelve years, Benedict IX, who, in addition to his youth, proved to be thoroughly evil-minded. His powerful family maintained him, however, on the papal throne for a decade, until he proposed to marry. This so scandalized even the not over-sensitive Romans that they drove him out of the city. A rich neighboring bishop then secured his own election. Presently a third claimant appeared in the person of a pious and learned priest who bought out the claims of Benedict IX for a large sum of money and assumed the title of Gregory VI.

      The interference of Henry III in papal affairs and its momentous consequences.

      This state of affairs seemed to the emperor, Henry III, to call for his interference. He accordingly went to Italy and summoned a council at Sutri, north of Rome, in 1046, where two of the claimants were deposed. Gregory VI, more conscientious than his rivals, not only resigned his office but tore his pontifical robes in pieces and admitted his monstrous crime in buying the papal dignity, though his motives had been of the purest. The emperor then secured the election of a worthy German bishop as pope, whose first act was to crown Henry and Agnes his wife.[106]

      The appearance of Henry III in Italy at this juncture, and the settlement of the question of the three rival popes, are among the most important events of all mediæval history in their results. In lifting the papacy out of the realm of petty Italian politics, Henry unwittingly helped to raise up a rival to the imperial authority which was destined, before the end of the next century, to overshadow it and to become without question the greatest power in western Europe.

      

      Difficulties to be overcome in establishing the supremacy of the popes in western Europe.

      For nearly two hundred years the popes had assumed very little responsibility for the welfare of Europe at large. It was a gigantic task to make of the Church a great international monarchy, with its head at the old world-center, Rome; the difficulties in the way seemed, indeed, well-nigh insurmountable. The great archbishops, who were as jealous of the power of the pope as the great vassals were of the kingly power, must be brought into subjection. National tendencies which made against the unity of the Church must be overcome. The control enjoyed by kings, princes, and other feudal lords in the selection of church officials must be done away with. Simony with its degrading influence must be abolished. The marriage of the clergy must be checked, so that the property of the Church should not be dissipated. The whole body of churchmen, from the priest to the archbishop, must be redeemed from the immorality and worldliness which degraded them in the eyes of the people.

      Pope Leo IX, 1049–1054.

      It is true that during the remainder of his life Henry III himself controlled the election of the popes; but he was sincerely and deeply interested in the betterment of the Church and took care to select able and independent German prelates to fill the papal office. Of these the most important was Leo IX (1049–1054). He was the first to show clearly how the pope might not only become in time the real head and monarch of the Church but might also aspire to rule kings and emperors as well as bishops and abbots. Leo refused to regard himself as pope simply because the emperor had appointed him. He held that the emperor should aid and protect, but might not create, popes. So he entered Rome as an humble barefoot pilgrim and was duly elected by the Roman people according to the rule of the Church.

      Papal legates.

      Leo IX undertook to visit France and Germany and even Hungary in person, with the purpose of calling councils to check simony and the marriage of the clergy. But this personal oversight on the part of the popes was not feasible in the long run, if for no other reason, because they were generally old men who would have found traveling arduous and often dangerous. Leo's successors relied upon legates, to whom they delegated extensive powers and whom they dispatched to all parts of western Europe in something the same way that Charlemagne employed his missi. It is supposed that Leo IX was greatly influenced in his energetic policy by a certain sub-deacon, Hildebrand by name. Hildebrand was himself destined to become one of the greatest popes, under the title of Gregory VII, and to play a part in the formation of the mediæval Church which justifies us in ranking him, as a statesman, with Cæsar, Charlemagne, Richelieu, and Bismarck.

      Pope Nicholas II places the election of the popes in the hands of the cardinals, 1059.

      62. The first great step toward the emancipation of the Church from the control of the laity was taken by Nicholas II. In 1059 he issued a remarkable decree which took the election of the head of the Church once for all out of the hands of both the emperor and the people of Rome, and placed it definitely and forever in the hands of the cardinals, who represented the Roman clergy.[107] Obviously the object of this decree was to preclude all lay interference, whether of the distant emperor, of the local nobility, or of the Roman mob. The college of cardinals still exists and still elects the pope.[108]

      Opposition to further reforms.

      The reform party which directed the policy of the popes had, it hoped, freed the head of the Church from the control of worldly men by putting his election in the hands of the Roman clergy. It now proposed to emancipate the Church as a whole from the base entanglements of earth: first, by strictly forbidding the married clergy to perform religious functions and by exhorting their flocks to refuse to attend their ministrations; and secondly, by depriving the kings and feudal lords of their influence over the choice of the bishops and abbots, since this influence was deemed the chief cause of worldliness among the prelates. Naturally these last measures met with far more general opposition than the new way of electing the pope. An attempt to expel the married clergy from Milan led to a popular revolt, in which the pope's legate actually found his life in danger. The decrees forbidding clergymen to receive their lands and offices from laymen received little attention from either the clergy or the feudal lords. The magnitude of the task which the popes had undertaken first became fully apparent when Hildebrand himself ascended the papal throne, in 1073, as Gregory VII.

CHAPTER XIII

       Table of Contents

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN GREGORY VII AND HENRY IV

       Table of

Скачать книгу