GREGORY’S SYNOD AT ROME

[1Sidenote: [1073-1074 A.D.]]

2Almost the first public act of Gregory VII was a declaration of implacable war against these his two mortal enemies, simony and the marriage of the clergy. He was no infant Hercules; but the mature ecclesiastical Hercules would begin his career by strangling these two serpents--the brood, as he esteemed them, and parents of all evil. The decree of the synod held in Rome (March 9th, 10th, 1074) in the eleventh month of his pontificate is not extant, but in its inexorable provisions it went beyond the sternest of his predecessors.

3It absolutely invalidated all sacraments performed by simoniacal or married priests; baptism was no regenerating rite; it might almost seem that the eucharistic bread and wine in their unhallowed hands refused to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. The communicants guilty of perseverance at least in the sin shared in the sacerdotal guilt. Even the priesthood was startled at this new and awful doctrine, that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on their own sinlessness. Gregory, in his headstrong zeal, was promulgating a doctrine used afterwards by Wycliffe and his followers with such tremendous energy.

4And this was a fearless, democratical provocation to the people; for it left to notoriety, to public fame, to fix on anyone the brand of the hidden sin of simony, or (it might be the calumnious) charge of concubinage; and so abandoned the holy priesthood to the judgment of the multitude.[93]

5But the extirpation of these two internal enemies to the dignity and the power of the sacerdotal order was far below the holy ambition of Gregory; this was but clearing the ground for the stately fabric of his theocracy. If, for his own purposes, he had at first assumed some moderation in his intercourse with the empire, over the rest of Latin Christendom he took at once the tone and language of a sovereign. We must rapidly survey, before we follow him into his great war with the empire, Gregory VII asserting his autocracy over the rest of Latin Christendom.

6[Sidenote: [1074-1076 A.D.]]

7His letters to Philip I, king of France, are in the haughtiest, most criminatory terms: “No king has reached such a height of detestable guilt in oppressing the churches of his kingdom as Philip of France.” He puts the king to the test; his immediate admission of a bishop of Mâcon, elected by the clergy and people, without payment to the crown. Either let the king repudiate this base traffic of simony, and allow fit persons to be promoted to bishoprics, or the Franks, unless apostates from Christianity, will be struck with the sword of excommunication, and refuse any longer to obey him.

8Hildebrand’s predecessor (and Alexander II did no momentous act without the counsel of Hildebrand) had given a direct sanction to the Norman conquest of England. Hildebrand may have felt some admiration, even awe, of the congenial mind of the conqueror. He advances the claim to Peter’s pence over the kingdom. William admits this claim; it was among the stipulations, it was the price which the pope had imposed for his assent to the conquest. But to the demand of fealty, the conqueror returns an answer of haughty brevity: “I have not sworn, nor will I swear fealty which was never sworn by any of my predecessors to yours.” And William maintained his Teutonic independence--created bishops and abbots at his will, was absolute lord over his ecclesiastical as over his feudal liegemen.

9To the kings of Spain, in one of his earliest letters, Pope Gregory boldly asserts that the whole realm of Spain is not only within the spiritual jurisdiction of the holy see, but her property. No part of Latin Christendom was so remote or so barbarous as to escape his vigilant determination to bring it under his vast ecclesiastical unity. While yet a deacon he had corresponded with Sweyn, king of Denmark; on him he bestows much grave and excellent advice. In a letter to Olaf, king of Norway, he dissuades him solemnly from assisting the rebellious brothers of the Danish king. Between the duke of Poland and the king of the Russians he interposes his mediation. The son of the Russian had come to Rome to receive his kingdom from the hands of St. Peter.

10The kingdom of Hungary, as that of Spain, he treats as a fief of the papacy; he rebukes the king Solomon for daring to hold it as a benefice of the king of the Germans. He watches over Bohemia; his legates take under their care the estates of the church; he summons the archbishop of Prague to Rome. Even Africa is not beyond the care of Hildebrand. The clergy and people of Carthage are urged to adhere to their archbishop--not to dread the arms of the Saracens, though that once flourishing Christian province, the land of Cyprian and Augustine, is so utterly reduced that three bishops cannot be found to proceed to a legitimate consecration.

11[Illustration: A BISHOP OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY]

12But the empire was the one worthy, one formidable antagonist to Hildebrand’s universal theocracy, whose prostration would lay the world beneath his feet. The empire must acknowledge itself as a grant from the papacy, as a grant revocable for certain offences against the ecclesiastical rights and immunities; it must humbly acquiesce in the uncontrolled prerogative of the cardinals to elect the pope; abandon all the imperial claims on the investiture of the prelates and other clergy with their benefices; release the whole mass of church property from all feudal demands, whether of service or of fealty; submit patiently to rebuke; admit the pope to dictate on questions of war and peace, and all internal government where he might detect, or suppose that he detected, oppression. This was the condition to which the words and acts of Gregory aspired to reduce the heirs of Charlemagne, the successors of the western cæsars.

13As a Christian, as a member of the church, the emperor was confessedly subordinate to the pope, the acknowledged head and ruler of the church. As a subject of the empire, the pope owed temporal allegiance to the emperor. The authority of each depended on loose and flexible tradition, on variable and contradictory precedents, on titles of uncertain signification; each could ascend to a time when they were not dependent upon each other. The emperor boasted himself the successor to the whole autocracy of the cæsars, to Augustus, Constantine, Charlemagne: the pope to that of St. Peter, or of Christ himself.[e] But all-powerful as was the pope abroad, in Italy his authority was restricted.

14Even in Rome the prefect Cencius dared to lay hands on Gregory VII, to tear him from the sanctuary of a church during a riot, and afterwards held him some time a prisoner. At Milan the citizens expelled Herlembald and his tool Atto, who exercised actual tyranny in the city under pretext of carrying out the pope’s reforms, and demanded an archbishop of Henry IV, who sent them a noble from Castiglione. This was the commencement of the struggle between sacerdotal and imperial power that culminated in one of the greatest and most stirring dramas of all history.

15Events began auspiciously for Gregory, many points of support being promised him in Germany. Feudal rebellions had kept that country in a state of agitation during the minority of Henry IV, who was but six years old when his father died in 1056. The regency and even the person of the young king had been wrested from the empress Agnes by the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria. Once arrived at man’s estate, Henry IV set about suppressing the revolt that had, as usual, arisen among the Saxons.

16An important victory won in Thuringia seemed to promise him a continuance of success, when suddenly the voice of the pope thundered down upon him, ordering him, with unexampled audacity, to suspend all warlike operations, and to leave to the holy see the right of decision in his quarrel with the Saxons; furthermore, to abandon all pretensions to ecclesiastical investiture, under pain of excommunication. To this the legates joined the summons to appear at Rome to answer certain personal charges that had been brought against him. Henry IV replied to this furious attack with equal vigour, and in the synod of Worms, composed of eighteen prelates, his partisans, he caused sentence of deposition solemnly to be pronounced against Gregory VII (1076).

17[Sidenote: [1076-1077 A.D.]]

18This decree, instead of alarming the pope, but excited him to fresh aggression. No sooner was he delivered by a popular movement from the hands of his enemy, Cencius, the Roman prefect, than he began once more to thunder forth denunciations; he hurled a bull of excommunication at the emperor, in which he proclaimed him a rebel to the holy see, and declared his vassals free from all allegiance to him. This bull was mercilessly put into execution by the Saxons and Swabians, all enemies of the house of Franconia. At their head was Rudolf of Swabia and the Italian, Welf, of the house of Este, whom Henry himself had created duke of Bavaria. They convoked a diet at Tribur, suspended the functions of the emperor and menaced him with deposition if he did not win absolution from the curse of Rome. Henry acceded humbly, and promised to assemble a general diet at Augsburg, which he begged the pope to attend for the purpose of absolving him. Alive, however, to the danger of allowing his enemies to come together in a body, he resolved to anticipate the action of the proposed diet and went himself to Italy to implore pardon of the pope.

19The price Gregory set upon this absolution was such as no other monarch ever had to pay. The pope was inhabiting at the time the château of Canossa, in the domains of the celebrated countess Matilda, a devout adherent of the holy see and the most powerful sovereign in Italy, since she included among her possessions the marquisates of Tuscany and Spoleto, Parma, Piacenza, and several points in Lombardy, the Marches, etc. Henry IV came to this castle to solicit an audience, but was compelled to wait barefooted in the snow three days before he was received. At last on the fourth day he was admitted and given absolution.

20Gregory, however, too adroit to lay down arms at once, refused to decide the question relative to the German crown, and deferred all consideration of it to a special diet, thereby reserving to himself a means of throwing Henry into fresh embarrassment. Could the king do other than tremble before a man who was the acknowledged representative of divinity on earth, and who believed himself so secure in the favour of heaven that, taking half of a “host,” he adjured God upon it to annihilate him instantly if he were guilty of the crimes imputed to him? When he presented the second half of the “host” to the king, asking him to swear a similar oath, Henry shrank back affrighted (1077).

21By this timely bowing of the head Henry IV avoided the blow that was about to be aimed at him by a coalition of his enemies; the moment of danger once passed, he straightened up like a bow relieved from tension. Indeed he had no alternative save definitively to relinquish his hopes of the crown or again to risk all upon a single chance, since the German rebels had undertaken to answer the question left open by Gregory, and had appointed to the throne Rudolf of Swabia, who had purchased the protection of the legates by promising to abjure investiture (1077), and had been solemnly acknowledged by the pope.

22[Sidenote: [1077-1125 A.D.]]

23Having gathered around himself a body of partisans, Henry IV began to wage war with success. The battle of Wolksheim, in which Rudolf was slain by the hand of Godfrey de Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, who carried the imperial standard, made him master of Germany (1080). He determined to repeat this success in Italy, where a victory won by his son had already paved the way; and the countess Matilda was stripped of a part of her possessions, Rome was taken, and the archbishop of Ravenna was appointed pope under the name of Clement III. Gregory himself would have fallen into the hands of the man he had so deeply outraged, had not Robert Guiscard and his Normans, faithful allies of the holy see, come to his rescue. He died among them (1085) with the words: “For no other reason than that I have loved justice and pursued iniquity, I must die in exile.”

24Up to the final moment he appeared to believe that universal dominance was an inalienable right of the holy see, and his idea was certainly not devoid of logic.

25Gregory’s death came too soon; had he lived a few years longer he would have seen his enemy expire in a condition far more miserable than that in which he had been placed at Canossa. Urban II, made pope in 1088, found his main support in the Normans, and conferred upon Roger, duke of Sicily, the title of king. He revealed the papacy in all its grandeur on the occasion of the First Crusade, and revived most of Gregory’s old judgments against the emperor. After a transitory triumph Henry IV was successively attacked by his two sons, whom the church had armed against him, and after having been stripped of all the imperial insignia, was made prisoner by his younger son. In vain he invoked the succour of the king of France, who had been his “most faithful friend”; all help was refused him, and he was reduced to soliciting the post of under-choir-master in a church, “having a considerable knowledge of music.” He died in 1106 at Liège in the depths of poverty, calling down the “vengeance of God upon the parricide”; and his body remained five years without sepulture.

26It was, however, this very parricidal son Henry V who at last put a stop to the quarrels resulting from the vexed question of investitures. The decision was retarded some time by the opening of the succession of Countess Matilda, who had bequeathed all her estates to the holy see. Henry laid claim to the entire inheritance, to the fiefs as sovereign of the empire, to the allodial lands as the countess’ nearest heir, and succeeded in entering upon possession of them all. As can readily be believed, this was a cause for fresh dissension in the future.

27The opening dispute being provisorily settled, the two sides, recognising that a struggle would but weaken them while it confirmed the independence of the feudal lords and of the Italian middle classes, resolved to close the matter by an equitable and, as nearly as possible, an equal division of the rights under dispute. The Concordat of Worms (1122) was couched in the following terms: “I agree,” said Pope Calixtus II to the emperor, “that the elections of the bishops and abbots of the Teutonic kingdom shall take place without violence or simony in your presence, so that in case any difference shall arise you can give your sanction and protection to the side having greater holiness, according to the judgment of the metropolitan and the co-provincials.

28The elect shall receive from you the prerogatives of his office, and, except that duty that he owes the Roman church, shall render you obedience in all things.”

29“I remit to the pope,” said the king, “all right to confer investiture by ring and cross, and in the churches of my kingdom and my empire, I authorise canonical elections and free consecration.” This wise compromise, which vested the temporal and spiritual power respectively in the temporal and spiritual rulers, was accompanied by words of reconciliation. But the design of Gregory VII was not yet fulfilled; the tie of vassalage that united the clergy to the prince was by no means severed, and church remained a part of the state in its main portion at least, if not in its outlying members.

30The house of Franconia became extinct with Henry V (1125) after having, by a provisory issue, dissolved the rivalry that existed between the papacy and the empire. The reign of Lothair II, successor of Henry V, was like an interlude between two acts of a drama; during the pause the stage was cleared and reset for the scene that was to follow.[f]