Part 3 (1/2)
At present neither side in the Empire was sufficiently honest in its intentions to be willing to accept so reasonable a settlement. But the fact that the Pope had felt himself obliged to allow it in one case sensibly weakened his position and correspondingly strengthened that of the German King. It was typical of Pascal's position in general.
Though strongly Gregorian in principle, he was neither clever nor courageous, and was inclined to take up a position which he could not maintain. Intent on renewing the prohibition of lay invest.i.ture and afraid of Henry, Pascal determined to support himself upon France.
Here, at any rate, Philip I had gradually dropped the practice of invest.i.ture of bishops. The papal censures of his scandalous private conduct uttered by Gregory and Urban had had no effect. Pascal accepted professions of amendment and acts of humiliation, and ceased to trouble himself further about Philip's private affairs. A Council of French bishops was held at Troyes (1107), where the decrees against lay invest.i.ture were renewed. The one gleam of hope for the future appeared in Pascal's deliberate abstention from any p.r.o.nouncement against the King in person. Henry, occupied on the eastern border, could not pay his first visit to Italy until the beginning of 1111, and it was not without significance that on the eve of setting out he betrothed himself to the daughter of Henry I of England. He was more fortunate than his father had been in the moment of his visit. The Lombard cities quarrelling among themselves were quickly forced to submission; the Countess Matilda, grown old and tired of strife, sent her envoys to do homage for the imperial fiefs; the Normans had just lost their Duke. Pope Pascal, finding himself isolated, did not dare to meet by a simple negative Henry's demand for the right of invest.i.ture as well as for his coronation as Emperor.
[Sidenote: His proposal.]
By way of escaping from his difficulty he sent to the King an astonis.h.i.+ng proposal. The King was to renounce the right of invest.i.ture and all interference in the elections, in return for which the prelates should give up all imperial lands and rights with which they were endowed, retaining merely the right to t.i.thes, offerings, and private gifts: the papal rights over the Patrimony of St. Peter and the Norman lands were specially excepted. It has been pointed out that this was the policy which Count Cavour made famous as ”a free Church in a free State.” It seems almost impossible that Pascal should have thought that the German bishops would accept this solution: he may have hoped that they could be coerced into it. But in contracting himself out of the obligations to be imposed on all other ecclesiastical dignitaries, he practically renounced any claim to set the policy of the Church. Henry may have aimed at digging an impa.s.sable ditch between the Pope and the German bishops. It was an impossible agreement; for neither bishops nor lay n.o.bles would wish to see so large an addition to the King's resources, while Henry himself could not afford to surrender the right of invest.i.ture, since it would stultify his claim to a voice in the election of the Pope.
[Sidenote: Henry's success.]
The publication of the agreement at Rome caused great tumults, Henry contriving that all the odium should fall upon the Pope. Then, since Pascal could not fulfil the part of the agreement which he had made on behalf of the Church, Henry forced him, the successor of Gregory, to acquiesce in the exercise by the German King of the right of invest.i.ture with ring and staff. Henry was crowned Emperor, though with very maimed ceremonial, and returned in triumph to Germany.
[Sidenote: Pascal's withdrawal.]
But his triumph was short, for he was immediately threatened with danger from two quarters. On the one side the leaders of the Ultramontane party were naturally most wrathful at this betrayal of their cause, and Pascal, threatened with deposition, placed himself in their hands. At the Lenten Synod of 1112 he confirmed all the decrees of his predecessor against lay invest.i.ture, thus annulling his own agreement with Henry. But he avoided issuing any sentence of excommunication against Henry in person. His own legates, however, had no such scruples, and in France Cardinal Conon took advantage of the strong feeling among the clergy to launch excommunications against the Emperor in several ecclesiastical Councils during 1114 and 1115.
Guido, Archbishop of Vienne, presiding over a Council of Henry's own subjects at Vienne in 1112, had already condemned their sovereign and forced Pascal to acquiesce in the resolution.
[Sidenote: Henry's difficulties.]
Henry's right policy would no doubt have been to compel the Pope to observe the agreement. But it was more than three years before he could return to Italy. For revolt had broken out again in Germany. The n.o.bles had their own grievances; the Saxons were always ready to take arms; the Church was roused because Henry dealt with ecclesiastical property as if the Pope's original proposal had been allowed to stand.
The royal bailiffs acted in such a manner with the cathedrals that of a house of prayer they made a den of thieves.
Henry's forces were worsted in battle and he had recourse to his father's tactics, seeking in Italy, by personal dealings with the Pope, to recover the moral prestige which he had lost in Germany. He had a pretext in the death of the Countess Matilda (1115); for the Papacy was claiming not only her allodial lands, which she might have a right to bequeath, but also her imperial fiefs, which were not hers to dispose of. Henry occupied the dominions of Matilda without opposition. His presence in Italy caused Pascal still to refrain from personal condemnation of the Emperor, and a year later a party friendly to Henry opened the gates of Rome to him. Pascal fled to Albano, and only returned to Rome on Henry's departure, a dying man (January, 1118). His successor, Gelasius II, refused Henry's advances, and the Emperor resorted to the old and discredited policy of setting up an anti-Pope in the person of the Archbishop of Braga, in Portugal, who took the name of Gregory VIII. Gelasius excommunicated Henry and his Pope; but finding himself threatened in Rome, fled to Burgundy, and died at Cluny a year after his election (January, 1119). So far Henry's attempts to deal with the Pope had failed, and the publication of the new Pope's excommunication in Germany made the opposition so strong that Henry found it advisable to return.
[Sidenote: Calixtus II (1119-24)]
Gelasius' successor chosen at Cluny was Archbishop of Vienne, who took the t.i.tle of Calixtus II. He was the first secular priest who had occupied the papal chair since Alexander II, and he was related to the royal families of France and England. Thus he had a wider outlook than the monks who preceded him, and the n.o.bles would be likely to listen to a man of their own rank. He had been the most uncompromising of all Henry's opponents; but this was a guarantee to the Church that her position and power would not again be placed in jeopardy, for events were at length tending towards a conclusion of the weary strife. The views of the reformers had gained general acceptance as the doctrine of the Church. The obligation of clerical celibacy was acknowledged: simony had much diminished; Henry was the only King in Western Europe who still claimed to invest his prelates. Although it was some time before all the great French feudatories yielded to the spirit of reform, the French King himself had abandoned the practice of invest.i.ture for those bishops who were under his control. He retained, however, certain of his rights. The election could not take place without his permission, the newly elected bishop took an oath of fealty to the King, and during the vacancy of the see the revenues were paid to the Crown. It was more important still that in England the question of invest.i.ture had been settled by a compromise which recognised the twofold nature of the episcopal office, and that this compromise had received the sanction of the Pope. Henceforth it was practically impossible for the Church to maintain the position of the extreme reformers. When Pope Pascal was forced to grant the right of invest.i.ture to the Emperor, Henry I of England, as Anselm complained to Pascal, threatened to resume the practice. Already William I of England had defined the limits of papal power in his dominions without a protest from Rome, and Urban II had actually found himself obliged to endow Roger of Sicily and his successors with the authority of a papal legate within their own dominions. It was clear that the papal authority could do little against a really strong lay ruler. Moreover, the influence of the Church had greatly diminished. There was scarcely a see or abbey to which, during the last forty years, there had not been rival claimants: King and n.o.bles alike had not only ceased to increase the endowments of the Church, but had caught at almost every opportunity of encroaching on them.
[Sidenote: Concordat of Worms.]
The accommodation was very gradual, for much suspicion of insincerity on both sides had to be overcome. The first step was taken in October, 1119. After the failure of direct negotiations between Pope and Emperor, a Council at Rheims, presided over by the Pope, renewed the anathema against Henry and his party, but only consented to a modified prohibition of invest.i.tures, since the office alone was mentioned and all reference to the property of bishop or abbot was omitted. It was two years before the next stage was reached, and meanwhile the anti-Pope had fallen into the hands of Calixtus, and Henry was still in difficulties in Germany. Finally, in October, 1121, the German n.o.bles brought about a conference of envoys from both sides at Wurzburg, where in addition to an universal peace it was arranged that the invest.i.ture question should be settled at a General Council to be held in Germany under papal auspices. The Council met at Worms in September, 1122, and the papal legates were armed with full powers to act. The result was a Concordat subsequently ratified at the first Council of the Lateran in March, 1123, which is reckoned as the ninth General Council by the Roman Church. By this agreement the Emperor gave up all claim to invest ecclesiastics with the ring and staff. In return it was allowed by the Church that the election of prelates should take place in presence of the Emperor's representatives, and that in case of any dispute the Emperor should confirm the decision arrived at by the Metropolitan and his suffragans. The Emperor on his part undertook that the prelate elect, whether bishop or abbot, should be invested with the regalia or temporalities pertaining to his office by the sceptre, in Germany the invest.i.ture preceding the ecclesiastical consecration, whereas in Burgundy and the kingdom of Italy the consecration should come first.
[Sidenote: Results of struggle in Empire.]
We are naturally tempted to enquire who was the gainer in this long struggle? Writers on both sides have claimed the victory. It is clear, however, that neither side got all that it demanded. Considering the all-embracing character of the papal claim, the limitation of its pretensions might seem to carry a decided diminution of its position.
Calixtus' advisers strongly urged that all over the imperial lands the consecration of prelates should precede the invest.i.ture of temporalities by the lay power. But the German n.o.bles would not budge.
In Burgundy and Italy conditions were different: in the former the power of the Crown had been almost in abeyance; in Italy the bishops had found themselves deserted by the Crown and had submitted to the Pope. The Crown had therefore to acquiesce in a merely nominal control over appointments in those lands. But in Germany the King perhaps gained rather than lost by the Concordat. His right of influence in the choice was definitely acknowledged, and by refusing the regalia he could practically prevent the consecration of any one obnoxious to him. The prelates of Germany, therefore, remained va.s.sals of the Crown.
[Sidenote: on Papacy.]
On the other hand, the Papacy had definitely shaken itself free from imperial control. Henry III was the last Emperor who could impose his nominee Papacy upon the Church as Pope; the proteges of his successors are all cla.s.sed among the anti-Popes. At the same time the papal privilege of crowning the Emperor and the papal weapon of excommunication were very real checks upon the German King; while the success of those principles for which the Cluniac party had striven established the theoretical claim of the Pope to be the moral guide, and the part which he played in starting the Crusades put him in the practical position of the leader of Christendom in any common movement. It was no slight loss to the Emperor that he had been the chief opponent of the Pope and the reformers, and that in the matter of the Crusades he and his whole nation had stood ostentatiously aloof.
CHAPTER IV
THE SECULAR CLERGY
[Sidenote: The work of the Church reformers.]
The great movement in favour of Church reform, which had emanated from Cluny, had worked itself out along certain definite lines. It is important to ask how far it had succeeded in achieving its objects. We have seen that it was a movement of essentially monastic conception aimed at the purification of the secular clergy. And we have seen that the evil to be remedied had arisen from the imminent danger that the Church would be laicised and feudalised. From the highest to the lowest all ecclesiastical posts were at the disposition of laymen who treated them as a species of feudal fief, so that the holders, even if they were in Holy Orders (which was not always the case), regarded their temporal rights and obligations as the first consideration and, like all feudal tenants, tried to establish the right of hereditary succession in their holdings. Thus the work of the reformers had been of a double nature; it was not enough that they should aim at exorcising the feudal spirit from the Church, at banis.h.i.+ng the feudal ideal from the minds of ecclesiastics: it was necessary to effect what was indeed a revolution, and to shake the whole organisation of the Church free from the trammels which close contact with the State had laid upon it. It began as a reformation of morals; it developed into a const.i.tutional revolution. There was involved in the movement both an interference with what might be distinguished as private rights and also a readjustment of public relations. The reformers headed by the Pope ultimately decided to concentrate their efforts on the latter.