[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 nobles 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 title 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 nobles 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 investiture 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 investiture 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 investiture 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 nobles 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 investitures, 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 nobles brought about a conference of envoys from both sides at Wurzburg, where in addition to an universal peace it was arranged that the investiture 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 investiture 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 investiture of temporalities by the lay power. But the German nobles 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 vassals 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 classed 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 banishing 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 constitutional 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. Hence we may begin by enquiring how far they had succeeded in freeing episcopal elections from lay control.

[Sidenote: Episcopal appointments.]

There were three several acts of the lay authority in connection with the appointment of bishops to which the Church reformers took exception. The King or, by usurpation from him, the great feudal lord had acquired the right of nominating directly to the vacant see, to the detriment, and even the exclusion, of the old electoral rights of clergy and people; and while in some cases nobles nominated themselves without any thought of taking Holy Orders, frequently they treated the bishoprics under their control as appanages or endowments for the younger members of their family. Then, before the consecration, the bishop-nominate obtained investiture from the lay authority by the symbolic gifts of a ring and a pastoral staff or cross, not only of the lands and temporal possessions of the see, but also of the jurisdiction which emanated from the episcopal office. Finally, the prospective bishop took an oath to his lay lord, whether King or other, which was not only an oath of fealty such as any subject might be called upon to take, but was also an act of homage, and made him an actual feudal vassal and his church a kind of fief.

[Sidenote: Right of election.]

The result of the long struggle was that in the matter of episcopal appointments, speaking generally, the right of election was not restored to clergy and people, in whom by primitive custom it had been vested, but that the laity, with the possible exception of the feudatories of the see, were banished altogether, the rural clergy ceased to appear, and, after the analogy of the papal election by the College of Cardinals, the canonical election of the bishop in every diocese tends to be concentrated in the hands of the clergy of the cathedral. It was a long time, however, before the rights of the cathedral chapters were universally recognised. Henry I of England in his Concordat with Anselm (1107) and the Emperor Henry V in the Concordat of Worms (122) both promised freedom of election. Philip I and Louis VI of France seem to have conceded the same right without any formal agreement. But many of the great French feudal lords clung to their power over the local bishoprics, and in Normandy, in Anjou, and in some parts of the south nearly a century elapsed before the duke or count surrendered his custom of nominating bishops directly. But the freedom of election by the Canons of the cathedral, even when it was conceded, was little more than nominal. In England, France, and the Christian kingdoms of Spain no cathedral body could exercise its right without the King's leave to elect, nor was any election complete without the royal confirmation. By the Concordat of Worms elections were to take place in the presence of the King or his commissioners. By the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) English bishops must be elected in the royal chapel. King John tried to bribe the Church over to his side in the quarrel with the barons which preceded Magna Carta, by conceding that elections should be free—that is, should take place in the chapter-house of the cathedral; but even he reserved the royal permission for the election to be held, and the conge d'elire in England and elsewhere was accompanied by the name of the individual on whom the choice of the electoral body should fall. It was not the rights of the electors but the all-pervading authority of the Pope which was to prove the chief rival of royal influence in the local Church.

[Sidenote: Investiture.]

The quarrel between Church and State had centred round the ceremony of investiture, because in the eyes of the reformers the most scandalous result of the feudalisation of the Church was the acceptance at the hands of a layman of the spiritual symbols of ring and crozier. But as Hugh of Fleury had acknowledged in his tract on "Royal Power and Priestly Office," investiture there must be so long as ecclesiastics held great temporal possessions. Here again some of the French nobles clung to the old anomalous form of investiture, but otherwise the example of the imperial lands, of the royal domain of France and of England was generally followed, the gifts of ring and staff were conceded to the Metropolitan, and where no special form of investiture by the sceptre was retained it was confused with the ceremony of homage. But in Germany and England investiture with the lands of the see preceded consecration, so that while on the one hand it was not a bishop who was being invested by a layman, on the other hand the refusal of investiture would practically prevent the consecration of any one obnoxious to the Crown.

[Sidenote: Homage and fealty.]

With regard to the feudal ceremony of homage a distinction came to be drawn by writers on the Canon Law between homage and fealty, and ecclesiastics were supposed to limit themselves to the obligations of the latter, which were those of every subject. The ceremony was not precisely the same as in the case of a lay noble being invested with a fief; but in France, at any rate, the Crown never really abandoned its claim to a feudal homage, and in any case ecclesiastics were expected to fulfil their feudal obligations. Even Innocent III acknowledged this in a decree (S43) of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and in interceding with Philip II of France on behalf of two bishops who had been deprived of their temporal possessions for some neglect of military duty, he argues that they were "ready to submit to the judgment of your Court, as is customary in such matters."

[Sidenote: Regale.]

Arising out of these feudal relations certain rights over the possessions of ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical bodies were claimed by the Crown, which were the cause of serious oppression. According to the Canon Law, the bishop was only the usufructuary of the lands and revenues belonging to his see. The lands and revenues belonged to the Church. But inasmuch as these had been originally in most cases the gift of the Crown, the King claimed to deal with them in the method applied to feudal holdings. By the right of regale, on the vacancy of a see through death, resignation, or deprivation of the bishop, the royal officers took possession of the temporalities, that is, the land and revenues, and administered them for the profit of the Crown so long as the see was vacant. The Crown did not hesitate to use the episcopal patronage and to fill up vacant canonries and benefices with its own followers, and it often took the opportunity to levy upon the inhabitants of the diocese a special tax—tallagium, tallage, or taille—which a landlord had a right of exacting from his unfree tenants. It was to the interest of the Crown to prolong a vacancy, and attempts to limit the exercise of the right were of little practical effect.

[Sidenote: Right of spoils.]

An even more extraordinary claim was to the right of spoils (jus spolii or exuviarium). The canonical law forbidding the bishop to deal by will with the property attached to his see, was interpreted as applying to everything which he had not inherited. Thus the furniture of his house and the money in his chest were claimed as of right by the canons of his cathedral, but were often plundered by the crowd of the city or by the local nobles. These lawless proceedings provoked the interference of the royal officers, who succeeded in most cases in establishing the right of the Crown to all movables that the bishop left. The earliest notice of this royal claim in Germany is found in the reign of Henry V. It was in full use under Frederick I. William II is probably responsible for introducing both the regale and the jus spolii from Normandy into England. In France these were claimed by the feudal nobles as well as by the King. Bitter were the complaints made by the Church against the exercise of both rights. Kings and nobles clung to the regale as long as they could, for it meant local influence as well as revenue. In most cases, however, the right of spoils had been surrendered before the thirteenth century. It is to be remembered that ecclesiastics themselves exercised this right, bishops, for example, claiming the possessions of the canons and the parish priests in their dioceses. The Popes in relaxation of the Canon Law gave to certain bishops the right of leaving their personal property by will, and the canons also are found encouraging their bishop to make a will.

[Sidenote: Claims of the Clergy.]

As a set-off against these claims of the Crown upon the Church, the clergy also advanced certain claims. These touched the two important matters of taxation and jurisdiction. The Church claimed for her members that they should not be liable to pay the taxes raised by the secular authorities, nor should they have causes to which any ecclesiastic was a party tried in the secular courts.

[Sidenote: Immunity from lay taxation.]

In seeking freedom from lay taxation the Church did not ask that her members should escape their feudal obligations, nor even that they should contribute nothing to the exigencies of the State. The desire was merely that the clergy should be free from oppression and that the Church should be so far as possible self-governing. Thus Alexander III decreed in the third Lateran Council (1179), that for relieving the needs of the community, everything contributed by the Church to supplement the contributions of the laity should be given without compulsion on the recognition of its necessity or utility by the bishop and the clergy. Innocent III, in the fourth Lateran Council (1215), provided a further safeguard against lay impositions in demanding the permission of the Pope for any such levy. This does not mean that the clergy escaped taxation at the hands of the State; it merely means that while the Popes themselves heavily taxed them for purposes which it was often difficult to describe as religious, the price paid by the Crown for leave to tax the clergy was that a large portion of the money should find its way to Rome.

[Sidenote: Tithes from the laity.]

The clergy were not content with this merely negative position. Besides the right of self-taxation, they claimed that the laity should contribute to the needs of the Church. The chief permanent source of such contribution was the tithe, both the lesser tithes on smaller animals, fruits, and vegetables, and the greater tithes on corn, wine, and the larger animals. The Church also claimed tithes of revenues of every kind, even from such divers classes as traders, soldiers, beggars, and abandoned women. Much of the regular tithe had fallen into the hands of laymen by gift from Kings to feudal tenants, or from bishops to nobles and others, in return for military protection. These alienated tithes Gregory VII tried to recover; but his need for the help of the nobles against the Emperor forced him to stay his hand. The third Lateran Council (1179) forbade, on pain of peril to the soul, the transfer of tithes from one layman to another, and deprived of Christian burial any one who, apparently having received such a transfer, should not have made it over to the Church. This was a definite claim for tithes as a right of which the Church had only been deprived by some wrongful act. But in the very next year (1180) Frederick I, at the Diet of Gelnhausen, declared that the alienation of tithes as feudal fiefs to defenders of the Church was perfectly legitimate. Religious scruples, however, seem to have caused the surrender of tithes by many lay impropriators, especially to monasteries.

[Sidenote: Bequests.]

There were many other sources of wealth to the Church. An enormous quantity of property was bequeathed to pious uses by testators. The attendance of the clergy at the death-bed gave them an opportunity of which they were not slow to make use. The bodies of those who died intestate, as of those unconfessed, were denied burial in consecrated ground; all questions concerning wills were heard in the ecclesiastical courts. The civil power attempted to check the freedom of death-bed bequest, especially in Germany, where it was held that a valid will could only be made by one who was still well enough to walk unsupported. Another common source of revenue came from purchases or mortgages or other arrangements made with crusaders, in which advantage was taken of the haste of the lay men to raise funds for their expedition.

[Sidenote: Wealth of the Church.]

From these and other sources the wealth which poured in upon the Church was enormous. Individual gifts in money or in kind as thank-offerings on all sorts of occasions reached no small of the total; while no religious ceremony, from baptism to extreme unction and burial, could be carried out apart from the payment of an appropriate fee. The clergy constantly complained of spoliation, and no doubt individuals suffered much. The very laymen who, with the title of advocates, undertook to defend a cathedral or a monastery were often its worst robbers. But the endowments and revenues of the Church were so extensive as to raise in the minds of many reformers the question whether they were not largely responsible for her corruptions.

[Sidenote: Immunity from lay jurisdiction.]

The clergy also sought freedom from the jurisdiction of the secular courts; in other words, the Church claimed exclusive cognisance in her own tribunals of all matters concerning those in Holy Orders. The Decretiun of Gratian—the text-book of Canon Law—laid it down that in civil matters the clergy were to be brought before a civil judge, but that a criminal charge against a clerk must be heard before the bishop. Urban II, however, declares that all clergy should be subject to the bishop alone, and the Synod of Nimes (1096), at which he presided, stigmatises it as sacrilege to hale clerks or monks before a secular court. Alexander III (1179) threatens to excommunicate any layman guilty of this offence; while Innocent III points out that a clerk is not even at liberty to waive the right of trial in an ecclesiastical court in a matter between him and a layman, because the spiritual jurisdiction is not a matter personal to himself, but belongs to the whole clerical body. Finally Frederick II, on his coronation at Rome in 1220, forbade any one to dare to indict an ecclesiastic on either a civil or a criminal charge before a secular tribunal. But meanwhile the frequent perpetration of violent crimes by those who wore the tonsure made it imperative in the interests of social order that the Church should not be allowed to defend these criminals in order to save her own interests.

The fiercest struggle took place in England. Henry II did not deny the right of the Church to jurisdiction over her members; but he demanded that clerks found guilty of grave crime should be unfrocked by the ecclesiastical court, and that then, being no longer clerks, they should be handed over to the royal officers, by whom they should be punished according to their deserts. Archbishop Thomas Becket answered that it was contrary to justice and the Canon Law that a man should be punished twice for the same offence; that the punishment by the Church involved the offender's damnation and was therefore quite adequate; and that finally he himself was officially bound to defend the liberties of the Church even to the death. Henry II attempted to solve the difficulty by issuing the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), the third clause of which decreed that the royal officer should determine whether any matter in which a clerk was concerned should be tried in the secular or the ecclesiastical court, and that even if it went to the latter, the King's officer should be present at the hearing. As the price, however, of his reconciliation with the Papacy after Becket's death, Henry was obliged to withdraw the Constitutions.

The position of the Church on this question was clearly stated by Pope Celestine III in 1192. If a clerk had been lawfully convicted of theft, homicide, perjury, or any capital crime, he should be degraded by the ecclesiastical judge; for the next offence he should be punished by excommunication, and for the next by anathema; then, since the Church could do no more, for any subsequent offence he might be handed over to the secular power to be punished by exile or in any other lawful manner. This, of course, was a direct licence to the ill-disposed clergy to commit more crimes than were allowable for a layman; but the laity had to proceed cautiously in opposing it. In 1219 Philip II of France demanded that a clerk who had been degraded should not be protected by the Church from seizure outside ecclesiastical precincts by the royal officers with a view to his trial in a secular court. But here again, both at his coronation as Emperor in 1220 and again in the code of laws drawn up for his kingdom of Sicily in 1231, Frederick II confirmed the privileges of the Church in the matter of jurisdiction. On the latter occasion, however, he did reserve cases of high treason for the royal court. Almost the only immediate effect of these protests on the part of the State was that Popes and Councils enjoined on the ecclesiastical courts greater severity of treatment of offenders, even to the extent of perpetual imprisonment in the case of those whom the lay tribunals would have condemned to death.

[Sidenote: Increase of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.]

But this exclusive jurisdiction in all matters that concerned her own members was only a part of the authority claimed and exercised by the Church in the sphere of justice. Synods of the clergy did not hesitate to take part in the enforcement of civil law and order, and threatened with severe ecclesiastical penalties all who did not observe the Truce of God, or who were guilty of piracy, incendiarism, or false coining. At one time they attempted thus to suppress usury and trial by ordeal, which at other times they allowed. They even legislated against tournaments and against the use of certain deadly weapons in battle by one Christian nation against another. But apart from the special circumstances which called out and so justified the legislation, the Church claimed at all times jurisdiction over certain classes of lay persons and in certain categories of cases. Thus all persons needing protection, such as widows, minors, and orphans, came under the cognisance of the ecclesiastical courts, and to these the Popes added Crusaders. Furthermore, all cases which could be regarded as in any way involving a possible breach of faith were also claimed as belonging to the jurisdiction of the Church, and these included everything concerning oaths, marriages, and wills. Naturally the Church had cognisance of all cases of sacrilege and heresy. These excuses for interference in the transactions of daily life were susceptible of almost indefinite extension, especially since the Church asserted a right to hear cases of all sorts in her courts on appeal on a plea that civil justice had failed. Even so stout a champion of the Church as St. Bernard complains bitterly that all this participation in worldly matters tends to stand between the clergy and their proper duties. The secular powers constantly protested. Even when Alfonso X in his legal code allowed that all suits arising from sins should go to ecclesiastical courts, the Cortes of Castile constantly protested. The chief attempts to check the growth of ecclesiastical jurisdiction were made in France. Even under Louis IX the barons combined to resist the encroachments of the Church, and resolved that "no clerk or layman should in future indict any one before an ecclesiastical judge except for heresy, marriage, or usury, on pain of loss of possessions and mutilation of a limb, in order that," they add with a justifiable touch of malice, "our jurisdiction may be revived, and they [the clergy] who have hitherto been enriched by our pauperisation may be reduced to the condition of the primitive Church, and living the contemplative life they may, as is seemly, show to us who spend an active life miracles which for a long time have disappeared from the world."

[Sidenote: Simony.]

The result, then, of the efforts of the Church reformers to free the Church from the State had been an enormous increase in the power of the Church. But these efforts were in the beginning only a means to an end, and that end was the purification of the Church itself. We have, therefore, to ask how far the attempts to get rid of simony and to enforce the celibacy of the clergy had met with permanent success. Before the movement in favour of reform the traffic in churches and Church property was indulged in by laity and clergy alike. Not only Kings and nobles but bishops and abbots received payments from those who accepted ecclesiastical preferment at their hands, and were by no means always careful that ecclesiastical offices were acquired by those in Holy Orders. Church property, in fact, was treated by those who represented the original donors as if it were the private property of the patron. The reform movement of the eleventh century, at any rate, succeeded in making a distinction between the right of ownership and the right of presentation, and in limiting the power of the patron to the latter. Beyond this nothing much was permanently effected in checking the traffic in things ecclesiastical. Preferment continued to be used as patronage: offices and dignities in the Church were given to children, and preferments were accumulated upon individuals until pluralities became a standing grievance. Councils and Popes still thundered against simony, but with the extending authority of Rome the staff of the papal curia was increased, and the traffic in things ecclesiastical at Rome was notorious.

[Sidenote: Clerical marriage.]

The efforts of the reformers in checking clerical marriage had not been much more successful. The law now stood as follows: the first two Lateran Councils (1123, 1139) prohibited matrimony to priests, deacons, and sub-deacons; but to those only in one of the three minor orders of the Church it was still allowed, although Alexander III ultimately decreed that marriage should cause them to forfeit their benefice. It was some time, however, before these decrees could be enforced, and even the Popes found themselves compelled to deal leniently with offending clergy. Thus Pascal II allowed to Archbishop Anselm that a married priest not only might, but must, if applied to, minister to a dying person. Attempts were made to forbid ordination to the sons of priests, at least as secular clergy, but such regulations were constantly relaxed or ignored. Pascal II actually allowed that in Spain, where clerical marriage had been lawful, the children should be eligible for all secular and ecclesiastical preferment. In the remoter countries of Europe—the Scandinavian lands, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland—the decrees against clerical marriage were not accepted until far into the thirteenth century. Even in part of Germany, notably the diocese of Liege, the clergy continued openly to marry until the same century. But even in countries where the principle was nominally accepted it triumphed at the expense of morality. For example, in England the decree was published in Council after Council throughout the twelfth century and was undoubtedly accepted as the law. But in 1129, after the death of Anselm, who had opposed the expedient, Henry I imprisoned the "house-keepers" of the clergy in London in order to obtain a sum of money by their release. Furthermore, both in England and elsewhere, bishops finding it impossible to enforce the decree, frankly licensed the breach of it by individual clergy in return for an annual payment. It is interesting to note that several important writers of the age speak with studied moderation on this question. The great lawyer Gratian admits that in the earlier period of the Church marriage was allowed to the clergy. The Parisian theologian, Peter Comestor, publicly taught that the enforcement of the vow of celibacy on the clergy was a deliberate snare of the devil. The English historians, Henry of Huntingdon, Matthew Paris, and Thomas of Walsingham, speak with disapproval of the attempts to enforce it, and even St. Thomas Aquinas holds that the celibacy of the secular clergy was a matter of merely human regulation. Thus the protest of the reformers of the eleventh century in favour of purity of life among the clergy had met with the smallest possible success, but like all such protests, it helped to keep alive the idea of a higher standard of personal and official life until such time as secular circumstances were more favourable.



CHAPTER V

CANONS AND MONKS

[Sidenote: Secular canons.]

So far, in speaking of the attempted purification of the Church in the eleventh century, we have dealt merely with the bishops and the parochial clergy. But a movement which emanated from the monasteries had a message also for those ecclesiastics who were gathered into corporate bodies, and whom we have learnt to distinguish respectively as canons and monks. Of these the canons were reckoned among the secular clergy; for although they were supposed to live a common life according to a certain rule, their duties were parochial, and they were not bound for life to the community of which they were members. The body of canons was called a chapter, and of chapters there were two kinds—the cathedral chapter, whose members served the Mother Church of the diocese, and, as we have seen, ultimately obtained the nominal right of electing the bishop; and the collegiate chapter, generally, though not always, to be found in towns which had no cathedral, the members of which, like those of a modern clergy-house, served the church or churches of the town. In the eighth century these communities were subjected to a rule drawn up by Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, in accordance with which they were required to sleep in a common dormitory, feed at a common table, and assimilate themselves as far as possible to monks. But in the two succeeding centuries there was no class of clergy which fell so far from the ideal as the capitular clergy. They were important and they were wealthy, for the cathedral chapters claimed to share with the bishop in the administration of the diocese, and both kinds of chapters owned extensive lands. In some of the more important chapters great feudal nobles had obtained for themselves the titular offices; in nearly all such bodies some, if not most or even all, of the canonries came to be reserved for younger members of the noble families. The common property was divided into shares, between the bishop and the body of the canons and between the individual canons: many of the canons employed vicars to do their clerical duty, and some even lived on the estates of the capitular body, leading the existence of a lay noble. Even those who remained on the spot had houses of their own round the cloister, where they lived with their wives and children, using the common refectory only for an occasional festival.

[Sidenote: Canons Regular.]

Thus no body of ecclesiastics stood in need of thorough reform more than the capitular clergy, and no class proved so hard to deal with. Attempts to substitute Cluniac monks for canons roused the opposition of the whole body of secular clergy. More successful to a small degree was the plan of Bishop Ivo of Chartres and others to revive among the capitular bodies the rule of common life. But it was difficult to pour new wine into old bottles, and the reformers found it more profitable to leave the old capitular bodies severely alone, and to devote their efforts to the foundation of new communities. To these were applied from the very first a new rule for which its advocates claimed the authority of St. Augustine. It laid upon the members vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and placed them under an abbot elected by the community of canons. Such was the origin of the Augustinian or Austin Canons, who came to be distinguished as Regular Canons, and are to be reckoned with monastic bodies, in comparison with the old cathedral and collegiate chapters, who were henceforth known as Secular Canons. These bodies of clergy, who combined parochial duties with what was practically a monastic life, became exceedingly popular; and by degrees not only were Secular Canons of collegiate churches, and even of some cathedrals, transformed into Regular Canons, but even some monastic houses were handed over to them. Instead of existing as isolated bodies, like the old Benedictines, they took the Cluniac model of organisation and formed congregations of houses grouped round some one or other of those which formed models for the rest. Of these congregations of Regular Canons the most celebrated were those of the Victorines and the Premonstratensians.

[Sidenote: Victorines.]

The abbey of St. Victor at Paris was founded in 1113 by William of Champeaux, afterwards Bishop of Chalons. The Order came to consist of about forty houses, and its members strove to keep the Augustinian ideal of a parochial and monastic life. But the chief fame of the abbey itself comes from its scholastic work, and it became known both as the stronghold of a somewhat rigid orthodoxy and as the home of a mystical theology which was developed among its own teachers.

[Sidenote: Premonstratensians.]

But by far the most important congregation of Canons Regular was that of the Premonstratensians. Their founder, Norbert, a German of noble birth, in response to a sudden conversion, gave up several canonries of the older kind with which he was endowed; but finding that a prophet has no honour in his own country, he preached in France with astonishing success, and ultimately, under the patronage of the Bishop of Laon in 1120, he settled with a few companions in a waste place in a forest, where he established a community of Regular Canons and gave to the spot the name of Premontre—pratum monstratum—the meadow which had been pointed out to him by an angel. Almost from its foundation the Premonstratensian Order admitted women as well as men, and at first the two sexes lived in separate houses planted side by side. The Order also began the idea of affiliating to itself, under the form of a third class, influential laymen who would help in its work. The Premonstratensian houses assimilated themselves to monastic communities more than did the Victorines: their work was missionary rather than parochial. The Order spread with great rapidity not only in Western Europe, but, even in its founder's lifetime, to Syria and Palestine, and for purposes of administration it came to be divided into thirty provinces.

[Sidenote: St. Norbert in Germany.]

Meanwhile Norbert had come under the notice of the Emperor Lothair II, who forced him into the archbishopric of Magdeburg. Here he substituted Premonstratensians in a collegiate chapter for canons of the older kind, and he eagerly backed up Lothair's policy of extending German influence upon the north-eastern frontier by planting Premonstratensian houses as missionary centres and by founding new bishoprics. Norbert, in fact became Lothair's chief adviser and was an European influence second only to that of St. Bernard in all the questions of the day.

[Sidenote: Knights Templars.]

It was upon the model of the Canons Regular that the great military Orders of the religious were organised. In the year 1118 a Burgundian knight, Hugh de Payens, with eight other knights, founded at Jerusalem an association for the protection of distressed pilgrims in Palestine. From their residence near Solomon's Temple they came to be known as the Knights of the Temple. They remained a small and poor body until St. Bernard who was nephew to one of the knights, took them under his patronage and drew up for them a code of regulations which obtained the sanction of Honorius II at the Council of Troyes in 1128. From that moment the prosperity of the Templars was assured. Their numbers increased, and lands and other endowments were showered upon them in all parts of Europe. As monks they were under the triple vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and the regulations of the Order which governed their daily life were among the most severe. As knights it was their duty to maintain war against the Saracens. For administrative purposes the possessions of the Order were grouped in ten provinces, each province being further subdivided into preceptories or commanderies, and each of these into still smaller units. Each division and subdivision had its own periodical chapter of members for settling its concerns, and at the head of the whole Order stood the Grand Master with a staff of officers who formed the general chapter and acted as a restraint upon the conduct of their head. In addition to the knights the Order contained chaplains for the ecclesiastical duties, and serving brethren of humble birth to help the knights in warfare. Their possessions in Western Europe were used as recruiting-grounds for their forces in the East; but it was only in towns of some importance that they erected churches on the model of the Holy Sepulchre in connection with their houses.

[Sidenote: Knights Hospitallers.]

The Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem was a reorganisation of a hospital dedicated to St. John the Baptist. This had been erected for poor pilgrims by the merchants of Amalfi before the Crusades began. But it remained merely a charitable brotherhood living under a monastic rule and attracting both men and endowments, until the example of the Templars caused the then master, Raymond du Puy, to obtain papal sanction some time before 1130 for a rule which added military duties without superseding the original object of the Order. Their possessions were divided into eight provinces with subdivisions of grand priories and commanderies, and the other administrative arrangements differed in little, except occasionally in name, from those of the Templars.

[Sidenote: Privileges of the military Orders.]

Both these Orders obtained not only extensive possessions from the pious, but wide privileges from the Pope. They were subject to the spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope alone; they could consecrate churches and cemeteries on their own lands without any interference of the local clergy; they could hold divine service everywhere. Interdicts and excommunications had no terrors or even inconveniences for them. They were free from payment of tithes and other imposts levied on the clergy. There is no doubt that but for these Orders the Crusaders would have fared far worse than they did. The Templars and Hospitallers were the one really reliable element in the crusading forces. This is no very high praise, and their effectiveness was largely discounted by their bitter quarrels with each other and with the local authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, alike in the east and the west. They scandalously abused the extensive privileges accorded to them, by such acts as the administration of the Sacrament to excommunicated persons, to whom they would also give Christian burial. In 1179, at the second Lateran Council, Alexander III was moved by the universal complaints to denounce their irresponsible defiance of all ecclesiastical law, and subsequent Popes were obliged to speak with equal vigour. After the destruction of the Latin power in Palestine (1291) the Hospitallers transferred their head-quarters to Cyprus till 1309, then to Rhodes, and finally to Malta. The Templars abandoned their raison d'etre, retired to their possessions in the west, and placed their head-quarters at Paris, where they acted as the bankers of the French King. Their wealth provoked jealousy: they were accused of numberless and nameless crimes, and their enemies brought about their fall, first in France, then in England, and finally the abolition of the Order by papal decree in 1313. Such of their wealth as escaped the hands of the lay authorities went to swell the possessions of the Hospitallers.

[Sidenote: Teutonic Knights.]

There were many other Orders of soldier-monks besides these two. The best known are the Teutonic Knights, who originated during the Third Crusade at the siege of Acre (1190) in an association of North German Crusaders for the care of the sick and wounded. The Knights of the German Hospital of St. Mary the Virgin at Jerusalem—for such was their full title—gained powerful influence in Palestine; their Order was confirmed by Pope Celestine III (1191-8), and in 1220 Honorius III gave them the same privileges as were enjoyed by the Hospitallers and Templars. Their organisation was similar to that of the older Orders. Their prosperity was chiefly due to the third Grand Master, Herman von Salza, the good genius of the Emperor Frederick II, and a great power in Europe. Under him the Order transferred itself to the shores of the Baltic, where it carried on a crusade against the heathen Prussians, and here it united in 1237 with another knightly Order, the Brethren of the Sword, which had been founded in 1202 by the Bishop of Livonia for similar work against the heathen inhabitants of that country.

[Sidenote: Other military Orders.]

The Knights of the Hospital of St. Thomas of Acre was a small English Order named after Thomas Becket and founded in the thirteenth century. They, together with those already mentioned as founded for work in Palestine, belonged to the Canons Regular. For convenience, however, mention should be made here of the great Spanish Orders which were affiliated to the Cistercian monks. These were founded in imitation of the Templars and Hospitallers for similar work against the Saracens of the Peninsula. The Order of Calatrava, founded by a Cistercian abbot when that city was threatened by the Saracens in 1158, and the Order of St. Julian, founded about the same time, which ultimately took its name from the captured fortress of Alcantara, were amenable to the complete monastic rule; while the Portuguese Order of Evora or Avisa, founded a few years later, was assimilated rather to the lay brethren of the Cistercians, and its members could marry and hold property. There was one of the Spanish Orders, however, which was not connected with the Cistercians. The Knights of St. James of Compostella originated in 1161 for the protection of pilgrims to the shrine of Compostella. Their rule was confirmed by Alexander III in 1175, and the Order of Santiago became the most famous of the military Orders in the Peninsula.

[Sidenote: New Monastic Orders.]

The revival and reorganisation of the common life among cathedral and collegiate bodies roused the jealousy of the monastic houses. The absolute superiority of the monastic life over any other was an article of faith to which the obvious interests of the monks could allow no qualification; and the close imitation of the monastic model adopted by the Regular Canons was sufficient proof that the Church generally acquiesced in this view. The great reform movement of the eleventh century had emanated from the monks of Cluny; but just as the degradation of the monastic ideal by the Benedictines had called into existence the Order of Cluny with its reformed Benedictine rule, so now the failure of the Cluniacs to live up to the expectations and to minister to the needs of the most fervent religious spirits caused the foundation of a number of new Orders. In each such case the founder and his first followers strove, by the austerities of their personal lives and by the severity of the rule which they enjoined, to embody and to maintain at the highest level that ideal of contemplative asceticism which was the object of the monastic life. Such was the origin of the Order of Grammont (1074) and of Fontevraud (1094) and of the better known Orders of the Carthusians (1084) and the Cistercians (1098).

[Sidenote: Grammont.]

Thus Stephen, the founder of the Order of Grammont, was the son of a noble of Auvergne, who, in the course of a journey in Calabria, was so impressed by the life or the hermits with which the mountainous districts abounded, that he resolved to reproduce it, and lived for fifty years near Limoges, subjecting himself to such rigorous devotional exercises that his knees became quite hard and his nose permanently bent! Gregory VII sanctioned the formation of an Order, but Stephen and his first followers called themselves simply boni homines. After his death the monastery was removed to Grammont close by, and a severe rule continued to be practised; but the management of the concerns of the house was in the hands, not of the monks, but of lay brethren, who began even to interfere in spiritual matters, and the Order ceased to spread.

[Sidenote: Carthusians.]

The founder of the Carthusians, Bruno, a native of Koln, but master of the Cathedral school at Rheims, also took the eremitic life as his model for the individual. To this end he planted his monastery near Grenoble, in the wild solitude of the Chartreuse, which gave its name to the whole Order and to each individual house. In addition to a very rigorous form of asceticism his rule imposed on the members an almost perpetual silence. The centre of the life of the Carthusian monk was not the cloister, but the cell which to each individual was, except on Sundays and festivals, at the same time chapel, dormitory, refectory, and study. The Carthusian rule has been described as "Cenobitism reduced to its simplest expression"; but despite the growing wealth of the Order, the rigour of the life was well maintained, and of all the monastic bodies it was the least subjected to criticism and satire.

[Sidenote: Fontevraud.]

A different type of founder is represented by Robert of Arbrissel, in Brittany, who, although he attracted disciples by the severity of his life as a hermit, was really a great popular preacher, whose words soon came to be attested by miracles. He was especially effective in dealing with fallen women, and the monastery which he established at Fontevraud, in the diocese of Poitiers, was a double house, men and women living in two adjacent cloisters; but the monks were little more than the chaplains and the managers of the monastic revenues, and at the head of the whole house and Order the founder placed an Abbess as his successor. The rule of this Order imposed on the female members absolute silence except in the chapter-house.

[Sidenote: Cluniac Congregation.]

The foundation of these Orders, greater or less, did not exhaust the impetus in favour of monasticism. Single houses and smaller Orders were founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of which many attained a merely local importance. The common feature of the great Orders was that each of them formed a Congregation, that is to say, an aggregate of numerous houses scattered over many lands, but following the same rule and acknowledging some sort of allegiance to the original home of the Order. The invention of this model was due to Cluny, although even among the Cluniacs the organisation of the Congregation, with its system of visiting inspectors who reported on the condition of the monasteries to an annual Chapter-General meeting at Cluny, was not completed until the thirteenth century. From the first, however, the Abbot of Cluny was a despot; with the exception of the heads of some monasteries which became affiliated to the Order he was the only abbot, the ruler of the Cluniac house being merely a prior. All the early abbots were men of mark, who were afterwards canonised by the Church. The fourth abbot refused the Papacy; but Gregory VII, Urban II, and Pascal II were all Cluniac monks. The real greatness of the Order was due to its fifth and sixth abbots, Odilo who ruled from 994 to 1049, and Hugh who held the reins of office for an even longer period (1049-1109); while the fame of the Order culminated under Peter the Venerable, the contemporary of St. Bernard.

[Sidenote: Its decay.]

But the history of the abbot who came between Hugh and Peter shows the strange vicissitudes to which even the greatest monasteries might be subjected. Pontius was godson of Pope Pascal II, who sent to the newly elected abbot his own dalmatic. Calixtus II visited Cluny, and while reaffirming the privileges granted by his predecessors, such as the freedom of Cluniac houses from visitation by the local bishop, he made the Abbot of Cluny ex officio a Cardinal of the Roman Church, and allowed that when the rest of the land was under an interdict the monks of Cluny might celebrate Mass within the closed doors of their chapels. But as a consequence of these distinctions Pontius' conduct became so unbearable as to cause loud complaints from ecclesiastics of every rank. Ultimately the Pope intervened and persuaded Pontius to resign the abbacy and to make a pilgrimage to Palestine. Meanwhile another abbot was appointed. But Pontius returned, gathered an armed band, and got forcible possession of Cluny, which he proceeded to despoil. Again the Pope, Honorius II, interfered, and Pontius was disposed of.

[Sidenote: Criticism of St. Bernard.]

But such an episode was only too characteristic of the decay which seemed inevitably to fall on each of the monastic Orders. The wealth and privileges of Cluny made its failure all the more conspicuous. A few years after the expulsion of Pontius, St. Bernard wrote to the Abbot of the Cluniac house of St. Thierry a so-called apology, which, while professing a great regard for the Cluniacs Order and pretending to criticise the deficiencies of his own Cistercians, is in reality a scathing attack upon the lapse of the former from the Benedictine rule. He attacks their neglect of manual work and of the rule of silence; their elaborate cookery and nice taste in wines; their interest in the cut and material of their clothes and the luxury of their bed coverlets: the extravagance of the furniture in their chapels, and even the grotesque architecture of their buildings. He especially censures the magnificent state in which the abbots live and with which they travel about, and he declares himself emphatically against that exemption of monasteries from episcopal control which was one of the most prized privileges of the Cluniac Order. Something may perhaps be allowed for exaggeration in this attack; but that there was no serious overstatement is clear from the letters written some years later by Peter the Venerable to St. Bernard, in answer to the accusations made by the Cistercians in general. He justifies the departure from the strict Benedictine rule partly on the ground of its severity, partly because of its unsuitability to the climate; but his defence clearly shows how far, even under so admirable a ruler, the Cluniacs had fallen away from the monastic ideal.

[Sidenote: Cistercians.]

The Cistercian Order, no less than the Orders already mentioned, owed its origin to the desire to revive the primitive monastic rule from which the Cluniacs had fallen away. The wonderful success which it met with made it the chief rival of that Order. The parent monastery of Citeaux, near Dijon, was founded by Robert of Molesme in 1098 under the patronage of the Duke of Burgundy. But the monks kept the rule of St. Benedict in the strictest manner, and their numbers remained small. In 1113, however, they were joined by the youthful Bernard, the son of a Burgundian knight, together with about thirty friends of like mind, whom he had already collected with a view to the cloister life. At once expansion became not only possible but necessary, and the abbot of the day, Stephen Harding, by birth an Englishman from Sherborne in Dorsetshire, sent out four colonies in succession, which founded the abbeys of La Ferte (1113), Pontigny (1114), Clairvaux and Morimond (1115). The first general chapter of the Order was held in 1116: the scheme of organisation drawn up by Stephen Harding was embodied in Carta Caritatis, the Charter of Love, and received the papal sanction in 1119. By the middle of the century (1151) more than five hundred monasteries were represented at the general chapter, and despite the resolution to admit no more houses, the number continued to increase until the whole Order must have contained upwards of two thousand.

[Sidenote: Mode of life.]

The entire organisation of the Cistercian Order made it a strong contrast to the Cluniacs, both in the mode of life of its members and in the method of government. The Cluniacs had become wealthy and luxurious: their black dress, the symbol of humility, had become rather a mark of hypocrisy. In order to guard against these snares the Cistercians, to the wrath of the other monastic Orders, adopted a white habit indicative of the joy which should attend devotion to God's service. Their monasteries, all dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, were built in lonely places, where they would have no opportunity to engage in parochial work. This indeed was strictly forbidden them as detracting from the contemplative life which should be the ideal of the Cistercian. For the same reason they were forbidden to accept gifts of churches or tithes. The monastic buildings, including the chapel, were to be of the simplest description, without paintings, sculpture, or stained glass; and the ritual used at the services was in keeping with this bareness. The arrangements of the refectory and the dormitory were equally meagre. Hard manual work, strict silence, and one daily meal gave the inmates every opportunity of conquering their bodily appetites.

[Sidenote: Organisation.]

The method of government adopted for the Cistercian Order is also a contrast by imitation of the Cluniac arrangements. It was an essential point that a Cistercian house should be subject to the bishop of the diocese in which it was situated. The episcopal leave was asked before a house was founded, and a Cistercian abbot took an oath of obedience to the local bishop. The actual organisation of the whole Order may be described as aristocratic in contrast with the despotism of the Abbot of Cluny. The Abbot of Citeaux was subject to the visitation and correction of the abbots of the four daughter houses mentioned above, while he in turn visited them; and each of them kept a similar surveillance over the houses which had sprung from their houses. In addition to this scheme of inspection, an annual general chapter met at Citeaux. The abbots of all the houses in France, Germany, and Italy were expected to appear every year; but from remoter lands attendance was demanded only once in three, four, five, or even seven years.

[Sidenote: Decay.]

The Cistercians certainly wrested the lead of the monastic world from Cluny, and until the advent of the Friars no other Order rivalled them in popularity. But no more than any other Order were they exempt from the evils of popularity. The very deserts in which they placed themselves for protection, and the agricultural work with which they occupied their hands, brought them the corrupting wealth; in England they were the owners of the largest flocks of sheep which produced the raw material for the staple trade of the country. They accepted ecclesiastical dignities; they became luxurious and magnificent in their manner of life; they strove for independence of the ecclesiastical authorities, until in the middle of the thirteenth century one of their own abbots quotes against them the saying that "among the monks of the Cistercian Order whatever is pleasing is lawful, whatever is lawful is possible, whatever is possible is done."

[Sidenote: Grant of privileges.]

This degeneracy of the monastic Orders was due in no small measure to the policy of the Papacy. The monasteries, in their desire to shake themselves free from the jurisdiction of the bishop of the diocese, appealed to Rome; and the Pope, in pursuit of his policy of superseding the local authorities, encouraged the monks to regard themselves as a kind of papal militia. Thus from the time of Gregory VII, at all events, all kinds of exemptions and privileges were granted to the monastic communities in general and to the abbots of the greater houses in particular. Exemption from the visitation of the local bishop was one of the most frequent grants, until the great Orders became too powerful to be afraid of any interference. This carried with it the right of jurisdiction by the abbot and general chapter over all churches to which the monastic body had the right of presentation. This was an increasingly serious matter, for pious donors were constantly bequeathing churches and tithes to favourite Orders and popular houses, and the abbot attempted with considerable success to usurp the definitely episcopal authority by instituting the parish priest. Nor was this the only matter in which the abbot substituted himself for the bishop. The monastic community might build a church without any reference to the local ecclesiastical authority, and the abbot might consecrate it and any altar in it. It is true that if any monk of the house or secular clergyman serving one of the churches in the gift of the house desired ordination to any step in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the abbot was limited to choosing a bishop who might be asked to perform the duty; but in the course of the thirteenth century, in some cases at least, the Popes gave to certain abbots the privilege of advancing candidates to the minor Orders. Probably Gregory VII began the grants of insignia which marked the episcopal office to abbots of important houses. The Abbot of St. Maximin in Trier certainly obtained from him permission to wear a mitre and episcopal gloves. Urban II granted to the Abbot of Cluny the right to appear in a dalmatic with a mitre and episcopal sandals and gloves.

[Sidenote: Forged claims.]

What could be gained by favour could also be obtained by payment or claimed by forgery. The expenses of the Roman Curia increased; the monastic Orders were wealthy. Moreover, the critical faculty was slightly developed. Certain monasteries became notorious for the manufacture of documents in their own favour, St. Augustine's at Canterbury being especially bad offenders; and certain individuals from time to time supplied such material to all monasteries which would pay for them; while, finally, in return for well-bestowed gifts, the Roman Curia was often willing to recognise the authenticity of a spurious claim.



CHAPTER VI

ST. BERNARD

[Sidenote: Honorius II.]

Calixtus II died in December, 1124, and in a few months (May, 1125) Henry V followed him to the grave. The imperial party at Rome had disappeared, but, on the other hand, Calixtus had established only a truce between the Roman factions. The Frangipani and Pierleoni families each nominated a successor to him, but the former forcibly placed their candidate in the papal chair. The six years of the pontificate of Honorius II (1124-30) are unimportant.

[Sidenote: Lothair II.]

It was perhaps fortunate for the Papacy that the allegiance of Germany was also divided. With Henry V expired the male line of the Salian or Franconian House. He had intended to secure the succession for his nephew, Frederick the One-eyed, Duke of Suabia and head of the family of Hohenstaufen. But the anti-Franconian party procured the election of Lothair, Duke of Saxony, who had built up for himself a practically independent territorial power on the north-eastern side of Germany, and had taken a prominent part in opposition to Henry V.

[Sidenote: Lothair and the Concordat.]

Lothair's election, then, was a triumph for the Papacy, and the Church party could not let pass so good an opportunity of revising the relations of State and Church in Germany. They had maintained from the first that the Concordat of Worms was a personal arrangement between Calixtus II and Henry V. But the exact nature of Lothair's promise on election is a matter of great dispute. According to the account of an anonymous writer, he undertook that the Church should exercise entire freedom in episcopal elections without being controlled, "as formerly" (an obvious reference to the Concordat of Worms), by the presence of the lay power or by a recommendation from it, and that after the consecration (not before, according to the terms of the Concordat) the Emperor should, without any payment, invest the prelate with the regalia by the sceptre and should receive his oath of fealty "saving his Order." Lothair's actual conduct, however, in the matter of appointments seems to have been guided by the terms of the Concordat.

[Sidenote: Lothair and the Hohenstaufen.]

Frederick of Hohenstaufen did homage with the rest of the nobles to Lothair, but not unnaturally Lothair distrusted him. Frederick was heir to all the allodial possessions of the late Emperor; but Lothair persuaded to a decision which would have deprived Frederick of a large portion of these, and thus have rendered him and his house practically innocuous. When Frederick refused to accept this decision he was put to the ban of the Empire. The Hohenstaufen party challenged Lothair's title to the throne, and put up as their candidate Frederick's younger brother Conrad, Duke of Franconia, who, having been absent in Palestine, had never done homage to Lothair. Conrad was crowned King in Italy, but he was excommunicated by Pope Honorius, and neither in Germany nor in Italy did the Hohenstaufen cause advance.

[Sidenote: Schism in the Papacy.]

Meanwhile a crisis at Rome quite overshadowed the German disputes. Honorius II died in February, 1130. Immediately the party of the Frangipani, who had stood around him, met and proclaimed a successor as Innocent II. This was irregular, and in any case the act was that of a minority of the Cardinals. It must have been, therefore, with some confidence in the justice of their cause that the opposition party met at a later hour, and by the votes of a majority of the College of Cardinals elected the Cardinal Peter Leonis, the grandson of a converted Jew and formerly a monk of Cluny, as Anacletus II. There was no question of principle at stake; it was a mere struggle of factions. The partisans of Innocent charged Anacletus with the most heinous crimes. Clearly he was ambitious and able, wealthy and unscrupulous. Moreover, for the moment he was successful. By whatever means, he gradually won the whole of Rome; and Innocent, deserted, made his way by Pisa and Genoa to Burgundy, and so to France. His reception by the Abbey of Cluny was a great strength to his cause, and he there consecrated the new church, which had been forty years in building and was larger than any church yet erected in France. In order that the schism in the Papacy should not be reproduced in every bishopric and abbey of his kingdom, Louis VI of France summoned a Council at Etampes, near Paris, which should decide between the respective merits of the rival Popes.

[Sidenote: Bernard of Clairvaux.]

To this Council a special invitation was sent to the great monk who for the next twenty years dominates the Western Church and completely over-shadows the contemporary Popes. We have of seen that it was the advent of Bernard and his large party at the monastery of Citeaux in 1113 that saved the newly founded Order from premature collapse. Although only twenty-four years of age, Bernard was entrusted with the third of the parties sent forth in succession to seek new homes for the Order, and he and his twelve companions settled in a gloomy valley in the northernmost corner of Burgundy, which was henceforth to be known as Clairvaux. Here the hardships suffered by the monks in their maintenance of the strict Benedictine rule and the entire mastery over his bodily senses obtained by their young abbot built up a reputation which reacted on the whole body of the Cistercians, and soon made them the most revered and widespread of all the monastic Orders. Bernard himself became the unconscious worker of many miracles: he was the friend and adviser of great potentates in Church and State, and without the least effort on his own part he was gradually acquiring a position as the arbiter of Christendom.

[Sidenote: Acceptance of Innocent II.]

As yet he had confined his interferences in secular matters to the kingdom of France and some of its great fiefs; he had rebuked the King of France for persecution of two bishops; he had remonstrated with the Count of Champagne for cruelty to a vassal. Now he was called upon to intervene for the first time in a matter of European importance. The whole question of the papal election was submitted to his judgment, and his clear decision in favour of Innocent carried the allegiance of France. Advocates of Innocent could not base his claims on legal right, and Bernard led the way in asserting his superiority in personal merit over his rival. At Chartres Innocent met Henry I of England and Normandy, and again it was Bernard's eloquence which won Henry's adhesion. A Synod of German clergy at Wurzburg acknowledged Innocent, and Lothair accepted the decision. But when Innocent met the German King at Liege in March, 1131, fortunately for the Pope Bernard was still by his side. It is true that Lothair stooped to play the part of papal groom, which had been played only by Conrad, the rebellious son of Henry IV; that he and his wife were both crowned by the Pope in the cathedral; and that he promised to lead the Pope back to Rome. But in return for his services Lothair tried to use his opportunity for going back upon the Concordat and claiming the restoration of the right of investiture. Bernard, however, came to the help of the Pope, and, backed by the general indignation and alarm at the meanness of Lothair's conduct, forced the Emperor to withdraw his demands. Innocent spent some time longer in France, among other places visiting Clairvaux, where the hard life of the inmates filled him and his Italian followers with astonishment.

Throughout these wanderings since the Council of Etampes Bernard had been the constant companion of the Pope, and had ultimately become not merely his most trusted but practically his only counsellor. As a matter of form questions were submitted to the Cardinals, but no action was taken until Bernard's view had been ascertained. In April, 1132, Innocent once more appeared in Italy. Meanwhile Anacletus, having failed to obtain the support of any of the great monarchs of the West, turned to the Normans, and by the grant of the royal title gained the allegiance of Roger, Duke of Apulia and Count of Sicily. A few other parts of Europe still acknowledged Anacletus. Scotland was too distant to be troubled by Bernard's influence; but in Lombardy the great abbot worked indefatigably; and the Archbishop of Milan, who had accepted his pallium from Anacletus, was driven out by the citizens, who subsequently welcomed Bernard with enthusiasm and tried to keep him as their archbishop. Duke William X of Aquitaine also continued to acknowledge Anacletus, and when at length Bernard accompanied the legate of Innocent to a conference at his court, the saint had recourse to all the methods of ecclesiastical terrorism at his command before he gained the fearful acquiescence of the ruler.

[Sidenote: Lothair at Rome.]

At length Lothair felt himself sufficiently free to fulfil his promise to Innocent. But the turbulent condition of Germany prevented him from bringing a force of any size, and, despite the vehement eloquence of Bernard, among the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany the friend of Innocent was still the German King and was viewed with much suspicion. Fortunately, however, Roger of Sicily, the one strong supporter of Anacletus, was engaged in a struggle with his nobles and could give no help. But Lothair desired to avoid bloodshed if possible. He made no attempt, therefore, to get possession of St. Peter's and the Leonine city, which were in the hands of Anacletus and his followers, but contented himself with the peaceful occupation of the rest of Rome. He and his wife were crowned in the church of St. John Lateran by Innocent (June, 1133). Lothair seems again to have used his opportunity to attempt a recovery of the right of investiture from the Pope; but on this occasion the opponent of the Emperor was his own favourite counsellor, Archbishop Norbert of Magdeburg, the founder of the Premonstratensian Order. A few days later, however, Innocent published two bulls dealing with the questions at issue between himself and the Emperor. The first merely confirms the arrangements of the Concordat, although it certainly omits all mention of the presence of the King at the election. The second bull deals with the inheritance of the Countess Matilda. Henry V had never recognised the donation of the Countess to the Papacy, and consequently, as a lapsed fief and part of the late Emperor's possessions, the lands could be claimed by his Hohenstaufen heirs. This perhaps accounts for Lothair's readiness to accept the conditions imposed by the Pope. Innocent invested him by a ring with the allodial or freehold lands of the Countess in return for an annual tribute and on the understanding that at Lothair's death they should revert to the Papacy. Lothair took no oath of fealty for them, but such oath was exacted from his son-in-law, Henry the Proud of Bavaria, to whom the inheritance was made over on the same conditions. Lothair had perhaps saved the much-coveted lands from being lawfully claimed by the Hohenstaufen; but it was the Pope who had really gained by these transactions, for he had obtained from a lawfully crowned Emperor the recognition of the papal right to their possession. Indeed, the whole episode of Lothair's coronation was treated as a papal triumph, and by Innocent's direction a picture was placed in the Lateran palace in which Lothair was represented as kneeling before the throned Pope to receive the imperial crown, while underneath as inscribed the following distich:—

"Rex stetit ante fores, jurans prius urbis honores, Post homo fit papae, sumit quo dante coronam."

Lothair, however, never saw this record of his visit. He returned to Germany, having secured, at any rate for himself, the right of investing his ecclesiastics with their temporalities, the lands of the Countess Matilda, and, most important of all, the imperial crown bestowed at Rome by a Pope who was recognised practically throughout the West. So strengthened, he intended to crush the still opposing Hohenstaufen. But the intercessions of his own Empress and the papal legates were backed up by the fiery eloquence of the all-powerful Bernard, who appeared at the Diet of Bamberg (March, 1135). Lothair was overruled and terms were granted, which first Frederick of Suabia and, later on, Conrad were induced to accept. Frederick confined himself to Suabia, but Conrad attached himself to Lothair's Court, and became one of the Emperor's most honoured followers.

After Lothair's return to Germany, Roger of Sicily gradually recovered his authority in Southern Italy, and he even made use of his championship of Anacletus to annex unopposed some of the papal lands. Finally, to the scandal of Christendom, the abbey of Monte Cassino, the premier monastery of the West, declared for Anacletus. Both Innocent and the Norman foes of Roger appealed to Lothair, who crossed the Alps, for a second time, in August, 1136, this time, accompanied by a sufficient force. He did not delay long in Lombardy: he ignored Rome, which apart from Roger was powerless. One army, under Lothair, moved down the shores of the Adriatic; another, under Henry of Bavaria, along the west coast. The fleets of Genoa and Pisa co-operated, and Roger retired into Sicily. But both Emperor and Pope claimed the conquered duchy of Apulia, and the dispute was only settled by both presenting to the new duke the banner by which the investiture was made. It did not help to soothe the quarrel when the recovered monastery of Monte Cassino was handed over to the Emperor's Chancellor. Lothair could remain no longer in Italy; but he fell ill on his way back, and died in a Tyrolese village on December 3rd, 1138.

[Sidenote: The end of the schism.]

Lothair had done nothing to end the schism. Innocent was back in Rome, but Anacletus had never been ousted from it. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1137, Bernard had also responded to the appeal of Innocent and returned to Italy. While Lothair was overrunning Apulia Bernard was winning over the adherents of Anacletus in Rome. When Lothair retired Roger immediately began to recover his dominions; but when Bernard made overtures to him on behalf of Innocent, he professed himself quite ready to hear the arguments on both sides. A conference took place between a skilful supporter of Anacletus and this "rustic abbot"; but although Bernard convinced his rhetorical adversary, Roger had too much to lose in acknowledging Innocent, for he would be obliged to surrender the papal lands which he had occupied and, perhaps, the royal title, the gift of Anacletus. The end, however, was at hand. Less than two months after Lothair's death Anacletus died (January 25, 1138). His few remaining followers elected a successor, but this was more with the desire of making good terms than of prolonging the schism. Innocent bribed and Bernard persuaded, and the anti-Pope surrendered of his own accord. Bernard, to whom was rightly ascribed the merit of ending the scandal of disunion in Christendom, immediately escaped from his admirers and returned to the solitude of Clairvaux and his literary labours. These were not all self-imposed. Among his correspondents were persons in all ranks of life; and his letters, no less than his formal treatises, prove his influence as one of the most deeply spiritual teachers of the Middle Ages.

[Sidenote Roger of Sicily.]

Roger of Sicily alone had not accepted Innocent; but a foolish attempt to coerce him ended in the defeat and capture of the Pope. In return for the acknowledgment of papal suzerainty, which involved oblivion of the imperial claims, Innocent not only confirmed to Roger and his successors both his conquests in Southern Italy and the royal title, but even, by the grant of the legatine power to the King himself, exempted his kingdom from the visits of papal legates. Roger was supreme in Church and State. A cruel yet vigorous and able ruler, he built up a centralised administrative system from which Henry II of England did not disdain to take lessons. His possession of Sicily carried him to Malta and thence to the north coast of Africa; and before his death in 1154 Tunis was added to his dominions. He was thus one of the greatest among the early Crusaders, and perhaps the most notable ruler of his time.

[Sidenote: Conrad III.]

Lothair hoped to leave in his son-in-law a successor with irresistible claims. But the very influence to which Lothair owed his own election was now to be cast into the scale against the representative of his family; while the grounds of objection to the succession of Frederick of Hohenstaufen to Henry V now held good against Henry of Bavaria, Saxony, and Tuscany. The Pope and the German nobles were equally afraid of a ruler whose insolent demeanour had already won him the title of "the Proud." They took as their candidate the lately rejected Hohenstaufen Conrad, whose behaviour since his submission had gained him favour in proportion as the conduct of Henry of Bavaria had alienated the other nobles. Conrad was crowned at Aachen by the papal legate, and Henry made his submission. But Conrad, like Lothair, felt himself insecure with so powerful a subject. Accordingly he took away from him the duchy of Saxony, and gave it to the heir of the old dukes in the female line. When Henry refused to accept the decision Conrad put him to the ban of the Empire and deprived him of Bavaria also, which he proceeded to confer upon a relative of his own. But Conrad's obvious attempt to advance his own family offended the nobles, and the death of Henry the Proud in 1139 opened the way for a compromise. Saxony was made over to Henry's youthful son, known in history as Henry the Lion, while Bavaria was to be the wedding portion of Henry the Proud's widow if she married Conrad's relative, who was already Margrave of Austria.

[Sidenote: Arnold of Brescia.]

But despite this elimination of all rivals Conrad was so much occupied elsewhere that he never managed to reach Italy. And yet his presence there was eagerly desired. It was under the guidance of their bishops that the cities of Lombardy had freed themselves from subjection to the feudal nobles. But with the growth of wealth they resented the patronage of the bishops and were inclined to listen to those who denounced the temporal possessions of the Church. The movement spread to Rome. Here the municipality still existed in name, but it was quite overlaid by the papal prefect and the feudal nobles of the Campagna; and the Roman people had no means of increasing their wealth by the agriculture or the commerce which was open to the cities of Tuscany or Lombardy. A leader was found in Arnold of Brescia (1138). He seems to have been a pupil of Abailard, who devoted himself to practical reforms. He began in his native Lombardy to advocate apostolic poverty as a remedy for the acknowledged evils of the Church. Condemned by the second Lateran Council (1139), he retired to France, and in 1140 stood by the side of Abailard at the Council of Sens. After Abailard's condemnation Arnold took refuge at Zurich, where, despite the denunciations of Bernard, he found protection from the papal legate, who had been a fellow-pupil of Abailard. Arnold returned to Italy in 1145, and was absolved by the Pope.

[Sidenote: The Roman Republic.]

The course of affairs in Rome brought him once more to the front. In 1143 Innocent II had offended the Romans, who in revenge proclaimed a republic with a popularly elected senate and a patrician in place of the papal prefect. Innocent died (September, 1143); his successor survived him by less than six months, and the next Pope, Lucius II, was killed in attempting to get possession of the Capitol, which was the seat of the new government. The choice of the Cardinals now fell upon the abbot of a small monastery in the neighbourhood of Rome, who took the title of Eugenius III (1145-53). He was a pupil of Bernard, who feared for the appointment of a man of such simplicity and inexperience. But Eugenius developed an unexpected capacity, and forced the Romans to recognise for a time his prefect and his suzerainty. But Arnold's presence in Rome was an obstacle to permanent peace. Both Arnold and Bernard eagerly sought the same end—the purification of the Church. But in Bernard's eyes Arnold's connection with Abailard convicted him of heresy, and his doctrine of apostolic poverty was construed by the ascetic abbot of the strict Cistercian Order as an attack upon the influence under cover of the wealth of the Church. Nor was Arnold a republican in the ordinary sense. He expelled the Pope and organised, under the name of the Equestrian order, a militia of the lesser nobles and the more substantial burgesses, such as existed in the cities of Lombardy. But he did not desire to repudiate the Emperor; and at his instigation the Romans summoned Conrad to their aid and to accept the imperial crown at their hands. Eugenius spent almost his whole pontificate in exile; his successor, Anastasius IV, during a short reign, accepted the republic, but Hadrian IV (1154-9) took the first excuse for boldly placing the city for the first time under an interdict. The consequent cessation of pilgrims during Holy Week and the loss of their offerings caused the fickle Romans to expel their champion, and Arnold wandered about until a few months later Frederick Barbarossa sacrificed him to the renewed alliance of Empire and Papacy (1154).