There was, first of all, the Crown of Thorns. This had been already pledged in Venice for the sum of thirteen thousand one hundred and thirty-four pieces of gold to the Venetians. As the money was spent and the relic could not be redeemed within the time, the Venetians were preparing to seize it. They would have been within their right. But Baldwin conceived an idea, so clever that it must have been suggested by a Greek, which, if successfully carried out, would result in the attainment of much more money by its means. He would give it to Louis IX of France. A relic of such importance might be pawned, it might be given, but it could not be sold. Therefore Baldwin gave it to King Louis. By this plan the Venetians were tricked of their relic, on which they had counted; the debt was transferred to France, which easily paid it; the precious object itself, to which Frederick II granted a free passage through his dominions, was conveyed by Dominican friars to Troyes, whither the French court advanced to receive it, and a gift of ten thousand marks reconciled Baldwin and his barons to their loss. After all, as the prospects of the State were so gloomy, it might be some consolation to them to reflect that so sacred a relic—which had this great advantage over the wood of the true Cross, that it had not been and could not be multiplied until it became equal in bulk to the wood of a three-decker—was consigned to the safe custody of the most Christian King of France.

This kind of traffic once begun, and proving profitable, there was no reason why it should not continue. Accordingly, the Crown of Thorns was followed by a large and very authentic piece of the true Cross. St. Louis gave Baldwin twenty thousand marks as an honorarium for the gift of this treasure, which he deposited in the Sainte-Chapelle. Here it remained, occasionally working miracles, as every bit of the true Cross was bound to do, until the troubles of the league, when it was mysteriously stolen. Most likely some Huguenot laid hands upon it, and took the same kind of delight in burning it that he took in throwing the consecrated wafer to the pigs.

And then more relics were found and disposed of. There was the baby linen of our Lord; there was the lance which pierced his side; there was the sponge with which they gave him to drink; there was the chain with which his hands had been fettered: all these things, priceless, inestimable, wonder-working, Baldwin sent to Paris in exchange for marks of silver. And then there were relics of less holiness, but still commanding the respect and adoration of Christians; these also were hunted up and sent. Among them were the rod of Moses, and a portion—alas! a portion only—of the skull of John the Baptist. Thirty or forty thousand marks for all these treasures! And it seems but a poor result of the conquest of Constantinople by the Latins that all which came of it was the transferrence of relics from the East to the West—nothing else. Such order as the later Greek emperors had preserved, changed into anarchy and misrule; such commerce as naturally flowed from Asia into the Golden Horn, diverted and lost; a strange religion imposed upon an unwilling people; the break-up of the old Roman forms; the destruction by fire of a third of the city; the disappearance of the ancient Byzantine families; the ruin of the wealthy, the depression of the middle classes; the impoverishment of the already poor; the decay and loss of learning: these were the things which the craft and subtlety of Dandolo, working on the Franks' lust of conquest, had brought about for the proud city of the East.

But the end was drawing daily nearer. Vatatces of Nicaea died. He was succeeded by his son Theodore, on whose death the crown of Nicaea devolved upon an infant. The child was speedily, though not immediately, openly dethroned by the regent, Michael Palaeologus. When at length the imperial title was assumed by the latter, Baldwin thought it advisable to attempt negotiations with him. His ambassadors were received with open contumely; Michael would give the Latins nothing. "Tell your master," he said, "that if he be desirous of peace, he must pay me, as an annual tribute, the sum which he receives from the trade and customs of Constantinople. On these terms I may allow him to reign; if he refuses, it will be war."

That was in the year 1259. Michael, no putter-forth of empty and boastful words, prepared immediately for the coming war; so in his feeble way did Baldwin, but his money was spent, his recruits were melting away, the Venetians alone were his allies, and the Genoese had joined the Greeks. And yet Michael did not know—so great was the terror of the Frank and Flemish name which the great Baldwin, Henry of Flanders, and John de Brienne had left behind them—how weak was the Latin empire; how unstable were the defences of the city.

Michael, in 1260, marched into Thrace, strengthened the garrisons, and expelled the Latins yet remaining in the country. Had he, the same year, marched upon Constantinople, the city would have been his. But the glory of taking it was destined for one of his generals.

The Greek Emperor, returning to Nicaea, sent Alexius Strategopoulos, his most trusted general, on whom he had conferred the title of caesar, to take the command of his armies in Europe. He laid strict orders upon him to enter the Latin territory as soon as the existing truce was concluded: to watch, report—act upon the defensive if necessary—but nothing more.

Now the lands round Constantinople had been sold by their Latin seigneurs to Greek cultivators, who, to defend their property, formed themselves into an armed militia, called "Voluntaries." With these voluntaries Alexius opened communications, and was by their aid enabled to get accurate information of all that went on among the Latins. As soon as the truce expired, he marched his troops across the frontier and approached the city. His force—doubtless the Latins were badly served by their spies—seemed too small to inspire any serious alarm, and the Latins, who had recently received succor from Venice which made them confident, resolved on striking the first blow by an attack on the port of Daphnusia. They accordingly despatched a force of six thousand men, with thirty galleys, leaving the city almost bare of defenders. This, then, was the moment for successful treachery. One Koutrilzakes, a Greek voluntary, secured the assistance of certain friends within the town. Either a subterranean passage was to be opened to the Greeks, or they were to be assured of friends upon the walls. Alexius, at dead of night, brought his army close to the city. At midnight, against a certain stipulated spot the scaling-ladders were placed, where there were none but traitors to receive the men; at the same time, the passage was traversed, and Alexius found himself within the walls of the city.[52] They broke open the Gate of the Fountain; they admitted the Greek men-at-arms and the Coman auxiliaries before the alarm was given; and by daylight the Greeks had complete command of the land wall, and were storming the imperial palace. There was one chance left for Baldwin. He might have betaken himself to the Venetians, and held their quarter until the unlucky expedition to Daphnusia returned, when they might have expelled the Greeks, or made at least an honorable capitulation. But Baldwin was not the man to fight a lost or losing battle. He hastily fled to the port, embarked on board a vessel, and set sail for Euboea. In the deserted palace the Greek soldiers found sceptre, crown, and sword, the imperial insignia, and carried them in mockery through the streets.

While Baldwin was flying from the palace to the port, behind him and around him was the tramp of the rude Coman barbarians, proclaiming that the city was taken. The houses, hastily thrown open as the first streaks of the summer day lit up the sky, resounded with the acclamations of those, yesterday his own subjects, who welcomed the new-comers with cries of "Long live Michael the Emperor of the Romans!" The house of Courtenay had played its last card and lost the game. Pity that it was thrown away by so poor a player.

It matters little about the end of Baldwin. He got safely to Euboea, thence to Rome, and lived twelve or thirteen years longer in obscurity. When he died, his only son, Philip, assumed the empty title of emperor of Constantinople, which, Gibbon says, "too bulky and sonorous for a private name, modestly expired in silence and oblivion." It took, however, a long time to expire. Two hundred and fifty years later one of its last holders was the inheritor of so many shadowy claims that his very name in history is blurred by them. Rene of Anjou gave himself, among other titles, that of emperor of Constantinople.

Constantinople was taken, and the Latin Empire destroyed at a blow. There were, however, still remaining the Venetian merchants, who had the command of the port, and who might, by holding out until the return of the ships from Daphnusia, undo all. Alexius set fire to their houses, but was careful to leave their communications with the vessels unmolested. They had therefore nothing left but to secure the safety of their wives, families, and movable property, which they did by embarking them on board the ships. And when the Daphnusian expedition returned, they found, to their surprise, that the Greeks held the whole city except a small portion near the port, and had manned the walls. A hasty truce was arranged; the merchants loaded every ship with their families and their property; the Latin fleet sailed down the Dardanelles, and the Latin Empire in the East was at an end.

It began with violence and injustice: it ended as it began. There were six Latin emperors, of whom the first was a gallant soldier; the second, a sovereign of admirable qualities, and an able administrator; the third, a plain French knight, who was murdered on his way to assume the purple buskins; the fourth, a weak and pusillanimous creature; the fifth, a stout old warrior; and the last, a monarch of whom nothing good can be said and nothing evil, except that which was said of Boabdil (called El Chico), that he was unlucky. As the Latins never had the slightest right or title to these possessions in the East, so the western powers were never impelled to assist them, and their downfall was merely a matter of time. In the interests of civilization their occupation of the city seems to have been unfortunate; they learned nothing for themselves, they taught nothing; neither East nor West profited. They destroyed the old institutions, so that the ancient Roman Empire was broken up by their conquest; they inflicted irreparable losses on learning and art; and perhaps the only good result of their conquest was that, for the moment, at least, it deflected the course of trade with the East from the Golden Horn, and sent it by another route to Venice, Genoa, and Pisa.



INNOCENT III EXALTS THE PAPAL POWER

A.D. 1208

T.F. TOUT



Under Pope Innocent III the example of Gregory VII (Hildebrand) was followed, with the result of still further strengthening and extending the pontifical sway. When Innocent became pope (1198), the holy see was engaged in a desperate contest for supremacy with the Hohenstaufen rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. Henry VI, son of Frederick Barbarossa, had but recently died, leaving his wife Constance, heiress of the kingdom of Naples or the "Two Sicilies," and a son, Frederick—afterward Frederick II—born in 1194, to be dealt with by the Pope.

While the imperial power under the Hohenstaufens was making head against the papal authority, Italy was overrun in parts by German subjects of the emperors, and in two expeditions (1194 and 1197) Henry VI recovered the Two Sicilies from the usurper Tancred of Lecce. In his dealings with the Sicilies Innocent therefore had to reckon with the German influence which played an important part in the new settlement of the kingdom. His triumphs in this field, as well as in his conflicts with Philip Augustus of France, Otto IV of Germany, and King John of England, and in the war which he made upon heretics, are set forth in the following article in their historical order, and the cumulative growth of his supremacy forms a subject of increasing interest to the end.

After the great emperors came the great Pope. Within four months of the death of Henry VI, Celestine III had been succeeded by Innocent III, under whom the visions of Gregory VII and Alexander III at last became accomplished facts, the papal authority attained its highest point of influence, and the empire, raised to such heights by Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI, was reduced to a condition of dependence upon it.

The new Pope had been Lothaire of Segni, a member of the noble Roman house of Conti, who had studied law and theology at Paris and Bologna, and had at an early age won for himself a many-sided reputation as a jurist, a politician, and as a writer. The favor of his uncle, Clement III, had made him cardinal before he was thirty, but under Celestine III he kept in the background, disliked by the Pope, and himself suspicious of the timid and temporizing old man. But on Celestine's death on January 8, 1198, Lothaire, though still only thirty-seven years of age, was at once hailed as his most fitting successor, as the strong man who could win for the Church all the advantages that she might hope to gain from the death of Henry VI. Nor did Innocent's pontificate belie the promise of his early career.

Innocent III possessed a majestic and noble appearance, an unblemished private character, popular manners, a disposition prone to sudden fits of anger and melancholy, and a fierce and indomitable will. He brought to his exalted position the clearly formulated theories of the canonists as to the nature of the papal power, as well as the overweening ambition, the high courage, the keen intelligence and the perseverance and energy necessary to turn the theories of the schools into matters of every-day importance.

His enunciations of the papal doctrine put claims that Hildebrand himself had hardly ventured to advance, in the clearest and most definite light. The Pope was no mere successor of Peter, the vicegerent of man. "The Roman pontiff," he wrote, "is the vicar, not of man, but of God himself." "The Lord gave Peter the rule not only of the Universal Church, but also the rule of the whole world." "The Lord Jesus Christ has set up one ruler over all things as his universal vicar, and as all things in heaven, earth, and hell bow the knee to Christ, so should all obey Christ's vicar, that there be one flock and one shepherd." "No king can reign rightly unless he devoutly serve Christ's vicar." "Princes have power in earth, priests have also power in heaven. Princes reign over the body, priests over the soul. As much as the soul is worthier than the body, so much worthier is the priesthood than the monarchy." "The Sacerdotium is the sun, the Regnum the moon. Kings rule over their respective kingdoms, but Peter rules over the whole earth. The Sacerdotium came by divine creation, the Regnum by man's cunning."

In these unrestricted claims to rule over church and state alike we seem to be back again in the anarchy of the eleventh century. And it was not against the feeble feudal princes of the days of Hildebrand that Innocent III had to contend, but against strong national kings, like Philip of France and John of England. It is significant of the change of the times, that Innocent sees his chief antagonist, not so much in the empire as in the limited localized power of the national kings. When Richard of England had yielded before Henry VI, the national state gave way before the universal authority of the lord of the world. But Innocent claimed that he alone was lord of the world. The empire was but a German or Italian kingdom, ruling over its limited sphere. Only in the papacy was the old Roman tradition of universal monarchy rightly upheld.

Filled with these ambitions of universal monarchy, Innocent's survey took in both the smallest and the greatest of European affairs. Primarily his work was that of an ecclesiastical statesman, and intrenched far upon the authority of the State. We shall see him restoring the papal authority in Rome and in the Patrimony,[53] building up the machinery of papal absolutism, protecting the infant King of Sicily, cherishing the municipal freedom of Italy, making and unmaking kings and emperors at his will, forcing the fiercest of the western sovereigns to acknowledge his feudal supremacy, and the greatest of the kings of France to reform his private life at his commands, giving his orders to the petty monarchs of Spain and Hungary, and promulgating the law of the Church Universal before the assembled prelates of Christendom in the Lateran Council.

Nevertheless, the many-sided Pontiff had not less near to his heart the spiritual and intellectual than the political direction of the universe. He had the utmost zeal for the extension of the kingdom of Christ. The affair of the crusade was, as we shall see, ever his most pressing care, and it was his bitterest grief that all his efforts to rouse the Christian world for the recovery of Jerusalem fell on deaf ears. He was strenuous in upholding orthodoxy against the daring heretics of Southern France. He was sympathetic and considerate to great religious teachers, like Francis and Dominic, from whose work he had the wisdom to anticipate the revival of the inner life of the Church. As many-sided as strong, and successful as he was strong, Innocent III represents it worthily and adequately.

Even before Innocent had attained the chair of Peter, the worst dangers that had so long beset the successors of Alexander III were over. After the death of Henry VI, the Sicilian and the German crowns were separated, and the strong anti-imperial reaction that burst out all over Italy against the oppressive ministers of Henry VI was allowed to run its full course. The danger was not so much of despotism as of anarchy, and Innocent, like Hildebrand, knew how to turn confusion to the advantage of hierarchy.

No real effort was made to obtain for the little Frederick the crowns of both Germany and Sicily, While Philip of Swabia, her brother-in-law, hurried to Germany to maintain, if he could, the unity of the Hohenstaufen empire, Constance was quite content to secure her son's succession in Naples and Sicily by renewing the homage due to the Pope.

Having thus obtained the indispensable papal confirmation, Constance ruled in Naples as a national queen in the name of the little Frederick. She drove away the German bandits, who had made the name of her husband a terror to her subjects. Markwald of Anweiler left his Apulian fiefs[54] for Romagna. But the Pope joined with Constance in hostility to the Germans. Without Innocent's strong and constant support she could hardly have carried out her policy. Recognizing in the renewal of the old papal protection the best hopes for the independence of Sicily, Constance, on her death in 1198, called on Innocent III to act as the guardian of her son. Innocent loyally took up her work, and struggled with all his might to preserve the kingdom of Frederick against his many enemies. But the contest was a long and a fierce one.

No sooner was Constance dead than the Germans came back to their prey. The fierce Markwald, driven from Romagna by the papal triumph, claimed the regency and the custody of the King. The Saracens and Greeks of Sicily, still numerous and active, joined the Germans. Walter, Bishop of Troja, Chancellor of Sicily, weaved deep plots against his master and his overlord. But the general support of the Church gave Innocent a strong weapon. Roffrid, Abbot of Monte Casino, a tried friend of Henry VI, declared for Innocent against Markwald, who in revenge besieged the great monastery, until a summer storm drove him baffled from its walls. But the purchased support of Pisa gave Markwald the command of the sea, and Innocent had too many schemes on foot and too little military power at his command to be able to make easy headway against him.

At last Innocent had reluctant recourse to Count Walter of Brienne, the French husband of Tancred's daughter Albina, and now a claimant for the hereditary fiefs of Tancred, Lecce, and Taranto, from which, despite Henry VI's promise, he had long been driven. For almost the first time in Italian history, Frenchmen were thus called in to drive out the Germans. But it was then as afterward a dangerous experiment. Walter of Brienne and his small French following invaded Apulia, and fought hard against Diepold of Acerra, another of King Henry's Germans. Meanwhile Markwald, now in open alliance with the Bishop of Troja, made himself master of Sicily and regent of the young King. His death in 1202 removed the most dangerous enemy of both Innocent and Frederick. But the war dragged on for years in Apulia, especially after Diepold had slain Walter of Brienne. The turbulent feudal barons of Apulia and Sicily profited by this long reign of anarchy to establish themselves on a permanent basis. At last Innocent sent his own brother, Richard, Count of Segni, to root out the last of the Germans. So successful was he that, in 1208, the Pope himself visited the kingdom of his ward, and arranged for its future government by native lords, helped by his brother, who now received a rich Apulian fief. It was Innocent's glory that he had secured for Frederick the whole Norman inheritance. It was amid such storms and troubles that the young Frederick grew up to manhood.

In Central and Northern Italy, Innocent III was more speedily successful than in the South. On Philip of Swabia's return to Germany, Tuscany and the domains of the Countess Matilda fell away from their foreign lord, and invoked the protection of the Church. The Tuscan cities formed themselves into a new league under papal protection. Only Pisa, proud of her sea power, wealth, and trade, held aloof from the combination. It seemed as if, after a century of delays, the papacy was going to enjoy the inheritance of Matilda,[55] and Innocent eagerly set himself to work to provide for its administration. In the north the Pope maintained friendly relations with the rival communities of the Lombard plain. But his most immediate and brilliant triumph was in establishing his authority over Rome and the Patrimony of St. Peter. On his accession he found his lands just throwing off the yoke of the German garrisons that had kept them in subjection during Henry VI's lifetime. He saw within the city power divided between the praefectus urbis, the delegate of the Emperor, and the summus senator, the mouthpiece of the Roman commune.

Within a month the prefect ceased to be an Imperial officer, and became the servant of the papacy, bound to it by fealty oaths, and receiving from it his office. Within a year the senator also had become the papal nominee, and the whole municipality was controlled by the Pope. No less complete was Innocent's triumph over the nobility of the Campagna. He drove Conrad of Urslingen back to Germany, and restored Spoleto to papal rule. He chased Markwald from Romagna and the March of Ancona to Apulia, and exercised sovereign rights even in the most remote regions that acknowledged him as lord. If it was no very real sway that Innocent wielded, it at least allowed the town leagues and the rustic nobility to go on in their own way, and made it possible for Italy to work out its own destinies. More powerful and more feared in Italy than any of his predecessors, Innocent could contentedly watch the anti-imperial reaction extending over the Alps and desolating Germany by civil war.

Despite the precautions taken by Henry VI, it was soon clear that the German princes would not accept the hereditary rule of a child of three. Philip of Swabia abandoned his Italian domains and hurried to Germany, anxious to do his best for his nephew. But he soon perceived that Frederick's chances were hopeless, and that it was all that he could do to prevent the undisputed election of a Guelf. He was favored by the absence of the two elder sons of Henry the Lion. Henry of Brunswick the eldest, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, was away on a crusade, and was loyal to the Hohenstaufen, since his happy marriage with Agnes. The next son Otto, born at Argenton during his father's first exile, had never seen much of Germany. Brought up at his uncle Richard of Anjou's court, Otto had received many marks of Richard's favor, and looked up to the chivalrous, adventurous King as an ideal of a warrior prince. Richard had made him Earl of Yorkshire, and had invested him in 1196 with the country of Poitou, that he might learn war and statecraft in the same rude school in which Richard had first acquainted himself with arms and politics. Even now Otto was not more than seventeen years of age. Richard himself, as the new vassal of the Empire for Aries and England, was duly summoned to the electoral diet, but his representatives impolitically urged the claims of Count Henry, who was ruled ineligible on account of his absence. Thus it was that when the German magnates at last met for the election on the 8th of March, 1198, at Muehlhausen, their choice fell on Philip the Arabian, who took the title of Philip II.

Many of the magnates had absented themselves from the diet at Muehlhausen, and an irreconcilable band of partisans refused to be bound by its decisions. Richard of England now worked actively for Otto, his favorite nephew, and found support both in the old allies of the Angevins in the Lower Rhineland and the ancient supporters of the house of Guelf. Germany was thus divided into two parties, who completely ignored each other's acts. Three months after the diet of Muehlhausen, another diet met at Cologne and chose Otto of Brunswick as King of the Romans. Three days afterward the young prince was crowned at Aachen.

A ten-years' civil war between Philip II and Otto IV now devastated the Germany that Barbarossa and Henry VI had left so prosperous. The majority of the princes remained firm to Philip, who also had the support of the strong and homogeneous official class of ministeriales that had been the best helpers of his father and brother. Nevertheless, Otto had enough of a party to carry on the struggle. On his side was Cologne, the great mart of Lower Germany, so important from its close trading relations with England, and now gradually shaking itself free of its archbishops. The friendship of Canute of Denmark and the Guelf tradition combined to give him his earliest and greatest success in the North. It was the interest of the baronage to prolong a struggle which secured their own independence at the expense of the central authority. Both parties looked for outside help. Otto, besides his Danish friends, relied on his uncle Richard, and, after his death, on his uncle John. Philip formed a league with his namesake Philip of France. But distant princes could do but little to determine the result of the contest. It was of more moment that both appealed to Innocent III, and that the Pope willingly accepted the position of arbiter. "The settlement of this matter," he declared, "belongs to the apostolic see, mainly because it was the apostolic see that transferred the Empire from the East to the West, and ultimately because the same see confers the Imperial crown."

In March, 1201, Innocent issued his decision. "We pronounce," he declared, "Philip unworthy of empire, and absolve all who have taken oaths of fealty to him as king. Inasmuch as our dearest son in Christ, Otto, is industrious, discreet, strong, and constant, himself devoted to the Church and descended on each side from a devout stock, we, by the authority of St. Peter, receive him as king, and will in due course bestow upon him the imperial crown." The grateful Otto promised in return to maintain all the possessions and privileges of the Roman Church, including the inheritance of the countess Matilda.

Philip of Swabia still held his own, and the extravagance of the papal claim led to many of the bishops as well as the lay magnates of Germany joining in a declaration that no former pope had ever presumed to interfere in an imperial election. But the swords of his German followers were a stronger argument in favor of Philip's claims than the protests of his supporters against papal assumptions. As time went on, the Hohenstaufen slowly got the better of the Guelfs. With the falling away of the North, Otto's cause became distinctly the losing one. In 1206, Otto was defeated outside the walls of Cologne, and the great trading city was forced to transfer its obedience to his rival. In 1207 Philip became so strong that Innocent was constrained to reconsider his position, and suggested to Otto the propriety of renouncing his claims. But in June, 1208, Philip was treacherously murdered at Bamberg by his faithless vassal, Otto of Wittelsbach, to whom he had refused his daughter's hand. It was no political crime, but a deed of private vengeance. It secured, however, the position of Otto, for the ministeriales now transferred their allegiance to him, and there was no Hohenstaufen candidate ready to oppose him. Otto, moreover, did not scruple to undergo a fresh election which secured for him universal recognition in Germany. By marrying Beatrice, Philip of Swabia's daughter, he sought to unite the rival houses, while he conciliated Innocent by describing himself as King "by the grace of God and the Pope." Next year he crossed the Alps to Italy, and bound himself by oath, not only to allow the papacy the privileges that he had already granted, but to grant complete freedom of ecclesiastical elections, and to support the Pope in his struggle against heresy. In October, 1209, he was crowned Emperor at Rome. After ten years of waiting, Innocent, already master of Italy, had procured for his dependent both the German kingdom and the Roman Empire.

Despite his preoccupation with Italy and Germany, the early years of Innocent's pontificate saw him busily engaged in upholding the papal authority and the moral order of the Church in every country in Europe. No consideration of the immediate interests of the Roman see ever prevented him from maintaining his principles even against powerful sovereigns who could do much to help forward his general plans. The most conspicuous instance of this was Innocent's famous quarrel with Philip Augustus of France, when to vindicate a simple principle of Christian morals he did not hesitate to abandon the alliance of the "eldest son of the Church" at a time when the fortunes of the papacy were everywhere doubtful. Philip's first wife, Isabella of Hainault, the mother of the future Louis VIII, had died in 1190, just before her husband had started on his crusade. In 1193 Philip negotiated a second marriage with Ingeborg, the sister of Canute VI, the powerful King of Denmark, hoping to obtain from his Danish brother-in-law substantial help against England and the Empire. Philip did not get the expected political advantages from the new connection, and at once took a strong dislike to the lady. On the day after the marriage Philip refused to have anything more to do with his bride. Within three months, he persuaded a synod of complaisant French bishops of Compiegne to pronounce the marriage void by reason of a remote kinship that existed between the two parties.

Ingeborg was young, timid, friendless, helpless, and utterly ignorant of the French tongue, but King Canute took up her cause, and, from her retreat in a French convent, she appealed to Rome against the wickedness of the French King and clergy. Celestine III proved her friend, and finding protestations of no avail, he finally quashed the sentence of the French bishops and declared her the lawful wife of the French King. But Philip persisted in his repudiation of Ingeborg, and Celestine contented himself with remonstrances and warnings that were utterly disregarded. In 1196 Philip found a fresh wife in Agnes, a lady of the powerful house of Andechs-Meran, whose authority was great in Thuringia, and whose Alpine lordships soon developed into the country of Tyrol.

Innocent at once proved a stronger champion of Ingeborg than the weak and aged Celestine. He forthwith warned Philip and the French bishops that they had no right to put asunder those whom God had joined together. "Recall your lawful wife," he wrote to Philip, "and then we will hear all that you can righteously urge. If you do not do this, no power shall move us to right or left, until justice be done." A papal legate was now sent to France, threatening excommunication and interdict, were Ingeborg not immediately reinstated in her place. For a few months the Pope hesitated, moved, no doubt, by his Italian and German troubles, and fearful lest his action against a Christian prince should delay the hoped-for crusade. But he gradually turned the leaders of the French clergy from their support of Philip, and at last, in February, 1200, an interdict was pronounced forbidding the public celebration of the rites of the Church in the whole lands that owed obedience to the King of France.

Philip Augustus held out fiercely for a time, declaring that he would rather lose half his lands than be separated from Agnes. Meanwhile he used pressure on his bishops to make them disregard the interdict, and vigorously intrigued with the cardinals, seeking to build up a French party in the papal curia. Innocent so far showed complacency that the legate he sent to France was the King's kinsman, Octavin, Cardinal-bishop of Ostia, who was anxious to make Philip's humiliation as light as possible. His labors were eased by the partial submission of Philip, who in September visited Ingeborg, and promised to take her again as his wife, and so gave an excuse to end the interdict. Philip still claimed that his marriage should be dissolved; though here again he suddenly abandoned a suit which he probably saw was hopeless. The death of Agnes of Meran in July, 1201, made a complete reconciliation less difficult. Next year the Pope legitimated the children of Agnes and Philip, on the ground that the sentence of divorce, pronounced by the French bishops, gave the King reasonable grounds for entering in good faith on his union with her. Ingeborg was still refused the rights of a queen, and constantly besought the Pope to have pity on her forlorn condition. The Pope was now forced to content himself with remonstrances. Philip declared that a baleful charm separated him from Ingeborg, and again begged the Pope to divorce him from a union based on sorcery and witchcraft.

The growing need of the French alliance now somewhat slackened the early zeal of Innocent for the cause of the Queen. But no real cordiality was possible as long as the strained relations of Ingeborg and Philip continued. At last, in 1213, in the very crisis of his fortunes, Philip completed his tardy reconciliation with his wife, after they had been separated for twenty years. Henceforth Philip was the most active ally of the papacy.

While thus dealing with Philip of France, Innocent enjoyed easier triumphs over the lesser kings of Europe. It was his ambition to break through the traditional limits that separated the church from the state, and to bind as many as he could of the kings of Europe to the papacy by ties of political vassalage. The time-honored feudal superiority of the popes over the Norman kingdom of Sicily had been the first precedent for this most unecclesiastical of all papal aggressions. Already others of the smaller kingdoms of Europe, conspicuous among which was Portugal, had followed the example of the Normans in becoming vassals of the holy see. Under Innocent at least three states supplemented ecclesiastical by political dependence on the papacy. Sancho, King of Portugal, who had striven to repudiate the former submission of Alfonso I, was in the end forced to accept the papal suzerainty. Peter, King of Aragon, went in 1204 to Rome and was solemnly crowned king by Innocent. Afterward Peter deposited his crown on the high altar of St. Peter's and condescended to receive the investiture of his kingdom from the Pope, holding it as a perpetual fief of the holy see, and promising tribute to Innocent and his successors. In 1213 a greater monarch than the struggling Christian kings of the Iberian peninsula was forced, after a long struggle, to make an even more abject submission.

The long strife of Innocent with John of Anjou, about the disputed election to the see of Canterbury, was fought with the same weapons which the Pope had already employed against the King of France. But John held out longer. Interdict was followed by excommunication and threatened deposition. At last the English King surrendered his crown to the papal agent Pandulf, and, like Peter of Aragon, received it back as a vassal of the papacy, bound by an annual tribute.

Nor were these the only kings that sought the support of the great Pope. The schismatic princes of the East vied in ardor with the Catholic princes of the West in their quest of Innocent's favor. King Leo of Armenia begged for his protection. The Bulgarian prince John besought the Pope to grant him a royal crown. Innocent posed as a mediator in Hungary between the two brothers, Emeric and Andrew, who were struggling for the crown. Canute of Denmark, zealous for his sister's honor, was his humble suppliant. Poland was equally obedient. The Duke of Bohemia accepted the papal reproof for allying himself with Philip of Swabia.

Despite his vigor and his authority, Innocent's constant interference with the internal concerns of every country in Europe did not pass unchallenged. Even the kings who invoked his intercession were constantly in conflict with him. Besides his great quarrels in Germany, France, and England, Innocent had many minor wars to wage against the princes of Europe. For five years the kingdom of Leon lay under interdict because its king Alfonso had married his cousin, Berengaria of Castile, in the hope of securing the peace between the two realms. It was only after the lady had borne five children to Alfonso that she voluntarily terminated the obnoxious union, and Innocent found it prudent, as in France, to legitimize the offspring of a marriage which he had denounced as incestuous. Not one of the princes of the peninsula was spared. Sancho of Navarre incurred interdict by reason of suspected dealings with the Saracens, while the marriage of his sister with Peter of Aragon, the vassal of the Pope, involved both kings in a contest with Innocent. Not only did the monarchs of Europe resent, so far as they were able, the Pope's haughty policy; for the first time the peoples of their realms began to make common cause with them against the political aggressions of the papacy. The nobles of Aragon protested against King Peter's submission to the papacy, declared that his surrender of their kingdom was invalid, and prevented the payment of the promised tribute. When John of England procured his Roman overlord's condemnation of Magna Charta, the support of Rome was of no avail to prevent his indignant subjects combining to drive him from the throne, and did not even hinder Louis of France, the son of the papalist Philip II, from accepting their invitation to become English king in his stead. It was only by a repudiation of this policy, and by an acceptance of the Great Charter, that the papacy could secure the English throne for John's young son, Henry III, and thus continue for a time its precarious overlordship over England.

For the moment Innocent's iron policy crushed opposition, but in adding the new hostility of the national kings and the rising nations of Europe to the old hostility of the declining empire, Innocent was entering into a perilous course of conduct, which, within a century, was to prove fatal to one of the strongest of his successors. The more political the papal authority became, the more difficult it was to uphold its prestige as the source of law, of morality, of religion. Innocent himself did not lose sight of the higher ideal because he strove so firmly after more earthly aims. His successors were not always so able or so high-minded. And it was as the protectors of the people, not as the enemies of their political rights, that the great popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had obtained their wonderful ascendency over the best minds of Europe.

The coronation of Otto IV did not end Innocent's troubles with the Empire. It was soon followed by an open breach between the Pope and his nominee, from which ultimately developed something like a general European war, between a league of partisans of the Pope and a league of partisans of Otto. It was inevitable that Otto, as a crowned emperor, should look upon the papal power in a way very different from that in which he had regarded it when a faction leader struggling for the crown. Then the support of the Pope was indispensable. Now the autocracy of the Pope was to be feared. The Hohenstaufen ministeriales, who now surrounded the Guelfic Emperor, raised his ideals and modified his policy. Henry of Kalden, the old minister of Henry VI, was now his closest confidant, and under his direction it soon became Otto's ambition to continue the policy of the Hohenstaufen. The great object of Henry VI had been the union of Sicily with the Empire. To the alarm and disgust of Innocent, his ancient dependent now strove to continue Henry VI's policy by driving out Henry VI's son from his Sicilian inheritance. Otto now established relations with Diepold and the other German adventurers, who still defied Frederick II and the Pope in Apulia. He soon claimed the inheritance of Matilda as well as the Sicilian monarchy. In August, 1210, he occupied Matilda's Tuscan lands, and in November invaded Apulia, and prepared to despatch a Pisan fleet against Sicily. Innocent was moved to a terrible wrath. On hearing of the capture of Capua, and the revolt of Salerno and Naples, he excommunicated the Emperor and freed his subjects from their oaths of fealty to him. But, despite the threats of the Church, Otto conquered most of Apulia and was equally successful in reviving the Imperial authority in Northern Italy.

Innocent saw the power that he had built up so carefully in Italy crumbling rapidly away. In his despair he turned to France and Germany for help against the audacious Guelf. Philip Augustus, though still in bad odor at Rome through his persistent hostility to Ingeborg, was now an indispensable ally. He actively threw himself into the Pope's policy, and French and papal agents combined to stir up disaffection against Otto in Germany. The haughty manners and the love of the young King for Englishmen and Saxons had already excited disaffection. It was believed that Otto wished to set up a centralized despotism of court officials, levying huge taxes on the model of the Angevin administrative system of his grandfathers and uncles. The bishops now took the lead in organizing a general defection from the absent Emperor. In September, 1211, a gathering of disaffected magnates, among whom were the newly made king Ottocar of Bohemia and the dukes of Austria and Bavaria, assembled at Nuremberg. They treated the papal sentence as the deposition of Otto, and pledged themselves to elect as their new king Frederick of Sicily, the sometime ward of the Pope. It was not altogether good news to the Pope that the German nobles had, in choosing the son of Henry VI, renewed the union of German and Sicily. But Innocent felt that the need of setting up an effective opposition to Otto was so pressing that he put out of sight the general in favor of the immediate interests of the Roman see. He accepted Frederick as emperor, only stipulating that he should renew his homage for the Sicilian crown, and consequently renounce an inalienable union between Sicily and the Empire. Frederick now left Sicily, repeated his submission to Innocent at Rome, and crossed the Alps for Germany.

Otto had already abandoned Italy to meet the threatened danger in the North. Misfortunes soon showered thick upon him. His Hohenstaufen wife, Beatrice, died, and her loss lessened his hold on Southern Germany. When Frederick appeared, Swabia and Bavaria were already eager to welcome the heir of the mighty southern line, and aid him against the audacious Saxon. The spiritual magnates flocked to the side of the friend and pupil of the Pope. In December, 1212, followed Frederick's formal election and his coronation at Mainz by the archbishop Siegfried. Early in 1213 Henry of Kalden appeared at his court. Henceforward the important class of the ministeriales was divided. While some remained true to Otto, others gradually went back to the personal representative of Hohenstaufen.

Otto was now thrown back on Saxony and the Lower Rhineland. He again took up his quarters with the faithful citizens of Cologne, when he appealed for help to his uncle, John of England, still under the papal ban. With English help he united the princes of the Netherlands in a party of opposition to the Pope and the Hohenstaufen. Frederick answered by a closer and a more effective league with France. Even before his coronation he had met Louis, the son of Philip Augustus, at Vaucouleurs. All Europe seemed arming at the bidding of the Pope and Emperor.

John of England now hastily reconciled himself to Innocent, at the price of the independence of his kingdom. He thus became in a better position to aid his excommunicated nephew, and revenge the loss of Normandy and Anjou on Philip Augustus. His plan was now a twofold one. He himself summoned the barons of England to follow him in an attempt to recover his ancient lands on the Loire. Meanwhile, Otto and the Netherlandish lords were encouraged, by substantial English help, to carry out a combined attack on France from the north. The opposition of the English barons reduced to comparative insignificance the expedition to Poitou, but a very considerable army gathered together under Otto, and took up its position in the neighborhood of Tournai. Among the French King's vassals, Ferrand, Count of Flanders, long hostile to his overlord Philip, and the Count of Boulogne fought strenuously on Otto's side; while, of the Imperial vassals, the Count of Holland and Duke of Brabant (Lower Lorraine) were among Otto's most active supporters. A considerable English contingent came also, headed by Otto's bastard uncle, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury. Philip himself commanded the chivalry of France, leaving his son Louis to fight against John in Poitou. On July 27th the decisive battle was fought at Bouvines, a few miles southwest of Tournai. The army of France and Church gained an overwhelming victory over the league which had incurred the papal ban, and Otto's fortunes were utterly shattered. He soon lost all his hold over the Rhineland, and was forced to retreat to the ancient domains of his house in Saxony. His remaining friends made their peace with Philip and Frederick. The defection of the Wittelsbachers lost his last hold in the south of Germany, and the desertion of Valdemar of Denmark deprived him of a strong friend in the North. John withdrew from Continental politics to be beaten more decisively by his barons than he had been beaten in Poitou or at Bouvines.

Frederick II, was now undisputed King of the Romans, and Innocent III had won another triumph. By the Golden Bull of Eger (July, 1213) Frederick had already renewed the concessions made by Otto to the Church, and promised obedience to the holy see. In 1216 he pledged himself to separate Sicily from the Empire, and establish his son Henry there as king, under the supremacy of the Church. But, like his other triumphs, Innocent's victory over the Empire was purchased at no small cost. For the first time, a German national irritation at the aggressions of the papacy began to be distinctly felt. It found an adequate expression in the indignant verses of Walther von der Vogelweide, protesting against the priests who strove to upset the rights of the laity, and denouncing the greed and pride of the foreigners who profited by the humiliation of Germany.

Amid all the distractions of western politics, Innocent III ardently strove to revive the crusading spirit. He never succeeded in raising all Europe, as several of his predecessors had done. But after great efforts, and the eloquent preaching of Fulk of Neuilly he stirred up a fair amount of enthusiasm for the crusading cause, and, in 1204, a considerable crusading army, mainly French, mustered at Venice. It was the bitterest disappointment of Innocent's life that the Fourth Crusade never reached Palestine, but was diverted to the conquest of the Greek empire. Yet the establishment of a Catholic Latin empire at Constantinople, at the expense of the Greek schismatics, was no small triumph. Not disheartened by his first failure, Innocent still urged upon Europe the need of the holy war. If no expedition against the Saracens of Syria marked the result of his efforts, his pontificate saw the extension of the crusading movement to other lands. Innocent preached the crusade against the Moors of Spain, and rejoiced in the news of the momentous victory of the Christians at Navas de Tolosa. He saw the beginnings of a fresh crusade against the obstinate heathen on the eastern shores of the Baltic.

But all these crusades were against pagans and infidels. Innocent made a much greater new departure when he proclaimed the first crusade directed against a Christian land. The Albigensian crusade succeeded in destroying the most dangerous and widespread popular heresy that Christianity had witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire, and Innocent rejoiced that his times saw the Church purged of its worst blemish. But in extending the benefits of a crusade to Christians fighting against Christians, he handed on a precedent which was soon fatally abused by his successors. In crushing out the young national life of Southern France the papacy again set a people against itself. The denunciations of the German Minnesinger were reechoed in the complaints of the last of the Troubadours. Rome had ceased to do harm to Turks and Saracens, but had stirred up Christians to war against fellow-Christians. God and his saints abandon the greedy, the strife-loving, the unjust worldly Church. The picture is darkly colored by a partisan, but in every triumph of Innocent there lay the shadow of future trouble.

Crusades, even against heretics and infidels, are the work of earthly force rather than of spiritual influence. It was to build up the great outward corporation of the Church that all these labors of Innocent mainly tended. Even his additions to the canon law, his reforms of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, dealt with the external rather than the internal life of the Church. The criticism of James of Vitry, that the Roman curia was so busy in secular affairs that it hardly turned a thought to spiritual things, is clearly applicable to much of Innocent's activity. But the many-sided Pope did not ignore the religious wants of the Church. His crusade against heresy was no mere war against enemies of the wealth and power of the Church. The new tendencies that were to transform the spiritual life of the thirteenth century were not strange to him. He favored the early work of Dominic; he had personal dealings with Francis, and showed his sympathy with the early work of the poor man of Assisi. But it is as the conqueror and organizer rather than the priest or prophet that Innocent made his mark in the Church. It is significant that, with all his greatness, he never attained the honors of sanctity.

Toward the end of his life, Innocent held a general council in the basilica of St. John Lateran. A vast gathering of bishops heads of orders, and secular dignitaries gave brilliancy to the gathering and enhanced the glory of the Pontiff. Enthroned over more than four hundred bishops, the Pope proudly declared the law to the world. "Two things we have specially to heart," wrote Innocent, in summoning the assembly, "the deliverance of the Holy Land and the reform of the Church Universal." In its vast collection of seventy canons, the Lateran Council strove hard to carry out the Pope's programme. It condemned the dying heresies of the Albigenses and the Cathari, and prescribed the methods and punishments of the unrepentant heretic. It strove to rekindle zeal for the crusade. It drew up a drastic scheme for reforming the internal life and discipline of the Church. It strove to elevate the morals and the learning of the clergy, to check their worldliness and covetousness, and to restrain them from abusing the authority of the Church through excess of zeal or more corrupt motives. It invited bishops to set up free schools to teach poor scholars grammar and theology. It forbade trial by battle and trial by ordeal. It subjected the existing monastic orders to stricter superintendence, and forbade the establishment of new monastic rules. It forbade superstitious practices and the worship of spurious or unauthorized relics.

The whole series of canons sought to regulate and ameliorate the influence of the Church on society. If many of the abuses aimed at were too deeply rooted to be overthrown by mere legislation, the attempt speaks well for the character and intelligence of Pope and council. All mediaeval lawmaking, civil and ecclesiastical alike, was but the promulgation of an ideal, rather than the issuing of precepts meant to be literally executed. But no more serious attempt at rooting out inveterate evils was ever made in the Middle Ages than in this council.

The formal enunciation of this lofty programme of reform brought Innocent's pontificate to a glorious end. The Pontiff devoted what little remained of his life to hurrying on the preparations for the projected crusade, which was to set out 1217. But in the summer of 1216 Innocent died at Perugia, when only fifty-six years old. If not the greatest he was the most powerful of all the popes. For nearly twenty years the whole history of Europe groups itself round his doings.



SIGNING OF MAGNA CHARTA

A.D. 1215

DAVID HUME



The Great Charter is one of the most famous documents in history. Regarded as the foundation of English civil liberty, it also stands as the historic prototype of later declarations of human freedom in various lands. In the Great Charter, as observed by Green, "the vague expressions of the older charters were exchanged for precise and elaborate provisions. The Great Charter marks the transition from the age of traditional rights to the age of written legislation, of parliaments and statutes, which was soon to come."

King John of England, although compelled to submit to the loss of his French provinces in 1204, never after lost sight of plans for the renewal of the war with France. A bitter controversy with Pope Innocent III began over an election for the archbishopric of Canterbury, and resulted in a bull deposing John, 1212, with a command to Philip of France to execute the deposition. John made terms with the Pope by agreeing to hold his kingdom in fief from the pontiff, and to pay an annual tribute of one thousand marks (1213).

John then invaded France, in alliance with Otho IV, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and others, but was defeated at Bouvines, near Lille, 1214. This ended John's endeavors to recover his lost power in France, and he could only think henceforth of ruling peaceably his own kingdom and preserving, to his own advantage, his now close connection with the Pope. But although the English King's reign had been full of unfortunate events, the last and most grievous of his trials still awaited him, and "he was destined to pass through a series of more humiliating circumstances than had ever yet fallen to the lot of any other monarch."

Under the feudal law of William the Conqueror, the ancient liberties of the Anglo-Saxons were greatly curtailed; in fact, the whole English people were reduced to a state of vassalage, which for the majority closely bordered upon actual slavery. Even the proud Norman barons themselves submitted to a kingly prerogative more absolute than was usual in feudal governments. A charter of comparative liberality had been granted by Henry I, renewed by Stephen, and confirmed by Henry II, but had never, either in letter or spirit, been made effective. And now came the great crisis in which the matters at issue—first between the King and his barons, but ultimately between the Grown and the subjects at large—were to be adjusted. The event was hastened by the exactions and impositions of John himself, and by personal as well as official conduct which rendered him odious to his people—these causes at length producing a general combination against him.

The effect of John's lawless practices had already appeared in the general demand made by the barons of a restoration of their privileges; and after he had reconciled himself to the Pope, by abandoning the independence of the kingdom, he appeared to all his subjects in so mean a light that they universally thought they might with safety and honor insist upon their pretensions.

But nothing forwarded this confederacy so much as the concurrence of Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury; a man whose memory, though he was obtruded on the nation by a palpable encroachment of the see of Rome, ought always to be respected by the English. This prelate—whether he was moved by the generosity of his nature and his affection to public good or had entertained an animosity against John, on account of the long opposition made by that prince to his election, or thought that an acquisition of liberty to the people would serve to increase and secure the privileges of the Church—had formed the plan of reforming the government. In a private meeting of some principal barons at London, he showed them a copy of Henry I's charter, which, he said, he had happily found in a monastery; and he exhorted them to insist on the renewal and observance of it. The barons swore that they would sooner lose their lives than depart from so reasonable a demand.

The confederacy began now to spread wider, and to comprehend almost all the barons in England; and a new and more numerous meeting was summoned by Langton at St. Edmundsbury, under color of devotion. He again produced to the assembly the old charter of Henry; renewed his exhortations of unanimity and vigor in the prosecution of their purpose; and represented, in the strongest colors, the tyranny to which they had so long been subjected, and from which it now behooved them to free themselves and their posterity. The barons, inflamed by his eloquence, incited by the sense of their own wrongs, and encouraged by the appearance of their power and numbers, solemnly took an oath, before the high altar, to adhere to each other, to insist on their demands, and to make endless war on the King till he should submit to grant them. They agreed that, after the festival of Christmas, they would prefer in a body their common petition; and in the mean time they separated, after mutually engaging that they would put themselves in a posture of defence, would enlist men and purchase arms, and would supply their castles with the necessary provisions.

The barons appeared in London on the day appointed, and demanded of the King, that, in consequence of his own oath before the primate, as well as in deference to their just rights, he should grant them a renewal of Henry's charter, and a confirmation of the laws of St. Edward. The King, alarmed with their zeal and unanimity, as well as with their power, required a delay; promised that, at the festival of Easter, he would give them a positive answer to their petition; and offered them the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Ely, and the Earl of Pembroke as sureties for his fulfilling this engagement. The barons accepted of the terms, and peaceably returned to their castles.

During this interval, John, in order to break or subdue the league of his barons, endeavored to avail himself of the ecclesiastical power, of whose influence he had, from his own recent misfortunes, had such fatal experience. He granted to the clergy a charter, relinquishing forever that important prerogative for which his father and all his ancestors had zealously contended; yielding to them the free election on all vacancies; reserving only the power to issue a conge d'elire, and to subjoin a confirmation of the election; and declaring that, if either of these were withheld, the choice should nevertheless be deemed just and valid.

He made a vow to lead an army into Palestine against the infidels, and he took on him the cross, in hopes that he should receive from the Church that protection which she tendered to everyone that had entered into this sacred and meritorious engagement. And he sent to Rome his agent, William de Mauclerc, in order to appeal to the Pope against the violence of his barons, and procure him a favorable sentence from that powerful tribunal. The barons, also, were not negligent on their part in endeavoring to engage the Pope in their interests. They despatched Eustace de Vescie to Rome; laid their case before Innocent as their feudal lord, and petitioned him to interpose his authority with the King, and oblige him to restore and confirm all their just and undoubted privileges.

Innocent beheld with regret the disturbances which had arisen in England, and was much inclined to favor John in his pretensions. He had no hopes of retaining and extending his newly acquired superiority over that kingdom, but by supporting so base and degenerate a prince, who was willing to sacrifice every consideration to his present safety; and he foresaw that if the administration should fall into the hands of those gallant and high-spirited barons, they would vindicate the honor, liberty, and independence of the nation, with the same ardor which they now exerted in defence of their own. He wrote letters, therefore, to the prelates, to the nobility, and to the King himself. He exhorted the first to employ their good offices in conciliating peace between the contending parties, and putting an end to civil discord. To the second he expressed his disapprobation of their conduct in employing force to extort concessions from their reluctant sovereign; the last he advised to treat his nobles with grace and indulgence, and to grant them such of their demands as should appear just and reasonable.

The barons easily saw, from the tenor of these letters, that they must reckon on having the Pope, as well as the King, for their adversary; but they had already advanced too far to recede from their pretensions, and their passions were so deeply engaged that it exceeded even the power of superstition itself any longer to control them. They also foresaw that the thunders of Rome, when not seconded by the efforts of the English ecclesiastics, would be of small avail against them; and they perceived that the most considerable of the prelates, as well as all the inferior clergy, professed the highest approbation of their cause. Besides that these men were seized with the national passion for laws and liberty, blessings of which they themselves expected to partake, there concurred very powerful causes to loosen their devoted attachment to the apostolic see. It appeared, from the late usurpations of the Roman Pontiff, that he intended to reap alone all the advantages accruing from that victory, which under his banners, though at their own peril, they had everywhere obtained over the civil magistrate.

The Pope assumed a despotic power over all the churches; their particular customs, privileges, and immunities were treated with disdain; even the canons of general councils were set aside by his dispensing power; the whole administration of the Church was centred in the court of Rome; all preferments ran, of course, in the same channel; and the provincial clergy saw, at least felt, that there was a necessity for limiting these pretensions.

The legate, Nicholas, in filling those numerous vacancies which had fallen in England during an interdict of six years, had proceeded in the most arbitrary manner; and had paid no regard, in conferring dignities, to personal merit, to rank, to the inclination of the electors, or to the customs of the country. The English Church was universally disgusted; and Langton himself, though he owed his elevation to an encroachment of the Romish see, was no sooner established in his high office than he became jealous of the privilege annexed to it, and formed attachments with the country subjected to his jurisdiction. These causes, though they opened slowly the eyes of men, failed not to produce their effect; they set bounds to the usurpations of the papacy; the tide first stopped, and then turned against the sovereign Pontiff; and it is otherwise inconceivable how that age, so prone to superstition, and so sunk in ignorance, or rather so devoted to a spurious erudition, could have escaped falling into an absolute and total slavery under the court of Rome.

About the time that the Pope's letters arrived in England, the malcontent barons, on the approach of the festival of Easter, when they were to expect the King's answer to their petition, met by agreement at Stamford; and they assembled a force consisting of above two thousand knights, besides their retainers and inferior persons without number. Elated with their power, they advanced in a body to Brackley, within fifteen miles of Oxford, the place where the court then resided; and they there received a message from the King, by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl of Pembroke, desiring to know what those liberties were which they so zealously challenged from their sovereign. They delivered to these messengers a schedule, containing the chief articles of their demands; which was no sooner shown to the King than he burst into a furious passion, and asked why the barons did not also demand of him his kingdom; swearing that he would never grant them such liberties as must reduce himself to slavery.

No sooner were the confederate nobles informed of John's reply than they chose Robert Fitz-Walter their general, whom they called "the mareschal of the army of God and of Holy Church "; and they proceeded without further ceremony to levy war upon the King, They besieged the castle of Northampton during fifteen days, though without success; the gates of Bedford castle were willingly opened to them by William Beauchamp, its owner; they advanced to Ware on their way to London, where they held a correspondence with the principal citizens; they were received without opposition into the capital; and finding now the great superiority of their force, they issued proclamations, requiring the other barons to join them, and menacing them, in case of refusal or delay, with committing devastation on their houses and estates. In order to show what might be expected from their prosperous arms, they made incursions from London, and laid waste the King's parks and palaces; and all the barons, who had hitherto carried the semblance of supporting the royal party, were glad of this pretence for openly joining a cause which they always had secretly favored. The King was left at Odiham, in Hampshire, with a poor retinue of only seven knights, and after trying several expedients to elude the blow, after offering to refer all differences to the Pope alone, or to eight barons, four to be chosen by himself, and four by the confederates, he found himself at last obliged to submit at discretion.

A conference between the King and the barons was appointed at Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines; a place which has ever since been extremely celebrated, on account of this great event. The two parties encamped apart, like open enemies; and after a debate of a few days, the King, with a facility somewhat suspicious, signed and sealed the charter which was required of him. This famous deed, commonly called the "Great Charter," either granted or secured very important liberties and privileges to every order of men in the kingdom: to the clergy, to the barons, and to the people. The freedom of elections was secured to the clergy; the former charter of the King was confirmed, by which the necessity of a royal conge d'elire and confirmation was superseded; all check upon appeals to Rome was removed, by the allowance granted every man to depart the kingdom at pleasure, and the fines to be imposed on the clergy, for any offence, were ordained to be proportional to their lay estates, not to their ecclesiastical benefices.

The privileges granted to the barons were either abatements in the rigor of the feudal law or determinations in points which had been left by that law or had become, by practice, arbitrary and ambiguous. The reliefs of heirs succeeding to a military fee were ascertained: an earl's and baron's at a hundred marks, a knight's at a hundred shillings. It was ordained by the charter that, if the heir be a minor, he shall, immediately upon his majority, enter upon his estate, without paying any relief; the king shall not sell his wardship; he shall levy only reasonable profits upon the estate, without committing waste or hurting the property; he shall uphold the castles, houses, mills, parks, and ponds, and if he commit the guardianship of the estate to the sheriff or any other, he shall previously oblige them to find surety to the same purpose.

During the minority of a baron, while his lands are in wardship, and are not in his own possession, no debt which he owes to the Jews shall bear any interest. Heirs shall be married without disparagement; and before the marriage be contracted, the nearest relatives of the person shall be informed of it. A widow, without paying any relief, shall enter upon her dower, the third part of her husband's rents; she shall not be compelled to marry, so long as she chooses to continue single; she shall only give security never to marry without her lord's consent. The king shall not claim the wardship of any minor who holds lands by military tenure of a baron, on pretence that he also holds lands of the crown by socage or any other tenure. Scutages shall be estimated at the same rate as in the time of Henry I; and no scutage or aid, except in the three general feudal cases—the king's captivity, the knighting of his eldest son, and the marrying of his eldest daughter—shall be imposed but by the great council of the kingdom; the prelates, earls, and great barons shall be called to this great council, each by a particular writ; the lesser barons by a general summons of the sheriff. The king shall not seize any baron's land for a debt to the crown if the baron possesses as many goods and chattels as are sufficient to discharge the debt. No man shall be obliged to perform more service for his fee than he is bound to by his tenure. No governor or constable of a castle shall oblige any knight to give money for castle guard, if the knight be willing to perform the service in person, or by another able-bodied man; and if the knight be in the field himself, by the king's command, he shall be exempted from all other service of this nature. No vassal shall be allowed to sell so much of his land as to incapacitate himself from performing his service to his lord.

These were the principal articles, calculated for the interest of the barons; and had the charter contained nothing further, national happiness and liberty had been very little promoted by it, as it would only have tended to increase the power and independence of an order of men who were already too powerful, and whose yoke might have become more heavy on the people than even that of an absolute monarch. But the barons, who alone drew and imposed on the prince this memorable charter, were necessitated to insert in it other clauses of a more extensive and more beneficent nature: they could not expect the concurrence of the people without comprehending, together with their own, the interests of inferior ranks of men; and all provisions which the barons for their own sake were obliged to make in order to insure the free and equitable administration of justice, tended directly to the benefit of the whole community. The following were the principal clauses of this nature:

It was ordained that all the privileges and immunities above mentioned, granted to the barons against the King, should be extended by the barons to their inferior vassals. The King bound himself not to grant any writ empowering a baron to levy aid from his vassals except in the three feudal cases. One weight and one measure shall be established throughout the kingdom. Merchants shall be allowed to transact all business without being exposed to any arbitrary tolls and impositions; they and all freemen shall be allowed to go out of the kingdom and return to it at pleasure; London and all cities and burghs shall preserve their ancient liberties, immunities, and free customs; aids shall not be required of them but by the consent of the great council; no towns or individuals shall be obliged to make or support bridges but by ancient custom; the goods of every freeman shall be disposed of according to his will; if he die intestate, his heirs shall succeed to them. No officer of the crown shall take any horses, carts, or wood, without the consent of the owner. The king's courts of justice shall be stationary, and shall no longer follow his person; they shall be open to everyone; and justice shall no longer be sold, refused, or delayed by them.

Circuits shall be regularly held every year; the inferior tribunals of justice, the county court, sheriff's turn, and courtleet shall meet at their appointed time and place; the sheriffs shall be incapacitated to hold pleas of the crown, and shall not put any person upon his trial, from rumor or suspicion alone, but upon the evidence of lawful witnesses. No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed of his free tenement and liberties, or outlawed, or banished, or anywise hurt or injured, unless by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land; and all who suffered otherwise in this or the two former reigns shall be restored to their rights and possessions. Every freeman shall be fined in proportion to his fault; and no fine shall be levied on him to his utter ruin; even a villein or rustic shall not by any fine be bereaved of his carts, ploughs, and implements of husbandry. This was the only article calculated for the interests of this body of men, probably at that time the most numerous in the kingdom.

It must be confessed that the former articles of the Great Charter contain such mitigations and explanations of the feudal law as are reasonable and equitable; and that the latter involve all the chief outlines of a legal government, and provide for the equal distribution of justice and free enjoyment of property; the great objects for which political society was at first founded by men, which the people have a perpetual and unalienable right to recall, and which no time, nor precedent, nor statute, nor positive institution ought to deter them from keeping ever uppermost in their thoughts and attention.

Though the provisions made by this charter might, conformably to the genius of the age, be esteemed too concise, and too bare of circumstances to maintain the execution of its articles, in opposition to the chicanery of lawyers, supported by the violence of power, time gradually ascertained the sense of all the ambiguous expressions; and those generous barons, who first extorted this concession, still held their swords in their hands, and could turn them against those who dared, on any pretence, to depart from the original spirit and meaning of the grant. We may now, from the tenor of this charter, conjecture what those laws were of King Edward, which the English nation, during so many generations, still desired, with such an obstinate perseverance, to have recalled and established. They were chiefly these latter articles of Magna Charta; and the barons who, at the beginning of these commotions, demanded the revival of the Saxon laws, undoubtedly thought that they had sufficiently satisfied the people by procuring them this concession, which comprehended the principal objects to which they had so long aspired.

But what we are most to admire is the prudence and moderation of those haughty nobles themselves who were enraged by injuries, inflamed by opposition, and elated by a total victory over their sovereign. They were content, even in this plenitude of power, to depart from some articles of Henry I's charter, which they made the foundation of their demands, particularly from the abolition of wardships, a matter of the greatest importance; and they seem to have been sufficiently careful not to diminish too far the power and revenue of the crown. If they appear, therefore, to have carried other demands to too great a height, it can be ascribed only to the faithless and tyrannical character of the King himself, of which they had long had experience, and which they foresaw would, if they provided no further security, lead him soon to infringe their new liberties, and revoke his own concessions. This alone gave birth to those other articles, seemingly exorbitant, which were added as a rampart for the safeguard of the Great Charter.

The barons obliged the King to agree that London should remain in their hands, and the Tower be consigned to the custody of the Primate till the 15th of August ensuing or till the execution of the several articles of the Great Charter. The better to insure the same end, he allowed them to choose five-and-twenty members from their own body as conservators of the public liberties; and no bounds were set to the authority of these men either in extent or duration. If any complaint were made of a violation of the charter, whether attempted by the king, justiciaries, sheriffs, or foresters, any four of these barons might admonish the king to redress the grievance; if satisfaction were not obtained, they could assemble the whole council of twenty-five; who, in conjunction with the great council, were empowered to compel him to observe the charter, and, in case of resistance, might levy war against him, attack his castles, and employ every kind of violence except against his royal person and that of his queen and children.

All men throughout the kingdom were bound, under the penalty of confiscation, to swear obedience to the twenty-five barons; and the freeholders of each county were to choose twelve knights, who were to make report of such evil customs as required redress, conformably to the tenor of the Great Charter[56]. The names of those conservators were: the Earls of Clare, Albemarle, Gloucester, Winchester, Hereford; Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk; Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford; William Mareschal, the younger; Robert Fitz-Walter, Gilbert de Clare, Eustace de Vescey, Gilbert Delaval, William de Moubray, Geoffrey de Say, Roger de Mombezon, William de Huntingfield; Robert de Ros, the Constable of Chester; William de Aubenie, Richard de Perci, William Malet, John Fitz-Robert, William de Lanvalay, Hugh de Bigod, and Roger de Montfichet. These men were, by this convention, really invested with the sovereignty of the kingdom; they were rendered cooerdinate with the King, or rather superior to him, in the exercise of the executive power; and as there was no circumstance of government which, either directly or indirectly, might not bear a relation to the security or observance of the Great Charter, there could scarcely occur any incident in which they might not lawfully interpose their authority.

John seemed to submit passively to all these regulations, however injurious to majesty. He sent writs to all the sheriffs ordering them to constrain everyone to swear obedience to the twenty-five barons; he dismissed all his foreign forces; he pretended that his government was thenceforth to run in a new tenor and be more indulgent to the liberty and independence of his people. But he only dissembled till he should find a favorable opportunity for annulling all his concessions. The injuries and indignities which he had formerly suffered from the Pope and the King of France, as they came from equals or superiors, seemed to make but small impression on him; but the sense of this perpetual and total subjection under his own rebellious vassals sank deep in his mind; and he was determined, at all hazards, to throw off so ignominious a slavery.

He grew sullen, silent, and reserved; he shunned the society of his courtiers and nobles; he retired into the Isle of Wight, as if desirous of hiding his shame and confusion; but in this retreat he meditated the most fatal vengeance against all his enemies. He secretly sent abroad his emissaries to enlist foreign soldiers, and to invite the rapacious Brabancons into his service, by the prospect of sharing the spoils of England and reaping the forfeitures of so many opulent barons who had incurred the guilt of rebellion by rising in arms against him. And he despatched a messenger to Rome, in order to lay before the Pope the Great Charter, which he had been compelled to sign, and to complain, before that tribunal, of the violence which had been imposed upon him.

Innocent, considering himself as feudal lord of the kingdom, was incensed at the temerity of the barons, who, though they pretended to appeal to his authority, had dared, without waiting for his consent, to impose such terms on a prince, who, by resigning to the Roman pontiff his crown and independence, had placed himself immediately under the papal protection. He issued, therefore, a bull, in which, from the plenitude of his apostolic power, and from the authority which God had committed to him, to build and destroy kingdoms, to plant and overthrow, he annulled and abrogated the whole charter, as unjust in itself, as obtained by compulsion, and as derogatory to the dignity of the apostolic see. He prohibited the barons from exacting the observance of it; he even prohibited the King himself from paying any regard to it; he absolved him and his subjects from all oaths which they had been constrained to take to that purpose; and he pronounced a general sentence of excommunication against everyone who should persevere in maintaining such treasonable and iniquitous pretensions.

The King, as his foreign forces arrived along with this bull, now ventured to take off the mask; and, under sanction of the Pope's decree, recalled all the liberties which he had granted to his subjects, and which he had solemnly sworn to observe. But the spiritual weapon was found upon trial to carry less force with it than he had reason from his own experience to apprehend. The Primate refused to obey the Pope in publishing the sentence of excommunication against the barons; and though he was cited to Rome, that he might attend a general council there assembled, and was suspended, on account of his disobedience to the Pope and his secret correspondence with the King's enemies; though a new and particular sentence of excommunication was pronounced by name against the principal barons—John still found that his nobility and people, and even his clergy, adhered to the defence of their liberties and to their combination against him; the sword of his foreign mercenaries was all he had to trust to for restoring his authority.

The barons, after obtaining the Great Charter, seem to have been lulled into a fatal security, and to have taken no rational measures, in case of the introduction of a foreign force, for reassembling their armies. The King was, from the first, master of the field, and immediately laid siege to the castle of Rochester, which was obstinately defended by William de Albiney, at the head of a hundred and forty knights with their retainers, but was at last reduced by famine. John, irritated with the resistance, intended to have hanged the governor and all the garrison; but on the representation of William de Mauleon, who suggested to him the danger of reprisals, he was content to sacrifice, in this barbarous manner, the inferior prisoners only. The captivity of William de Albiney, the best officer among the confederated barons, was an irreparable loss to their cause; and no regular opposition was thenceforth made to the progress of the royal arms. The ravenous and barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel and enraged prince, were let loose against the estates, tenants, manors, houses, parks of the barons, and spread devastation over the face of the kingdom.

Nothing was to be seen but the flames of villages, and castles reduced to ashes, the consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures exercised by the soldiery to make them reveal their concealed treasures, and reprisals no less barbarous, committed by the barons and their partisans on the royal demesnes, and on the estates of such as still adhered to the Crown. The King, marching through the whole extent of England, from Dover to Berwick, laid the provinces waste on each side of him, and considered every estate which was not his immediate property as entirely hostile and the object of military execution. The nobility of the North in particular, who had shown greatest violence in the recovery of their liberties, and who, acting in a separate body, had expressed their discontent even at the concessions made by the Great Charter, as they could expect no mercy, fled before him with their wives and families, and purchased the friendship of Alexander, the young King of Scots, by doing homage to him.

The barons, reduced to this desperate extremity, and menaced with the total loss of their liberties, their properties, and their lives, employed a remedy no less desperate; and making applications to the court of France, they offered to acknowledge Louis, the eldest son of Philip, for their sovereign, on condition that he would afford them protection from the violence of their enraged Prince. Though the sense of the common rights of mankind, the only rights that are entirely indefeasible, might have justified them in the deposition of their King, they declined insisting before Philip on a pretension which is commonly so disagreeable to sovereigns and which sounds harshly in their royal ears. They affirmed that John was incapable of succeeding to the crown, by reason of the attainder passed upon him during his brother's reign, though that attainder had been reversed, and Richard had even, by his last will, declared him his successor. They pretended that he was already legally deposed by sentence of the peers of France, on account of the murder of his nephew, though that sentence could not possibly regard anything but his transmarine dominions, which alone he held in vassalage to that crown. On more plausible grounds they affirmed that he had already deposed himself by doing homage to the Pope, changing the nature of his sovereignty, and resigning an independent crown for a fee under a foreign power. And as Blanche of Castile, the wife of Louis, was descended by her mother from Henry II, they maintained, though many other princes stood before her in the order of succession, that they had not shaken off the royal family in choosing her husband for their sovereign.

Philip was strongly tempted to lay hold on the rich prize which was offered to him. The legate menaced him with interdicts and excommunications if he invaded the patrimony of St. Peter or attacked a prince who was under the immediate protection of the holy see; but as Philip was assured of the obedience of his own vassals, his principles were changed with the times, and he now undervalued as much all papal censures as he formerly pretended to pay respect to them. His chief scruple was with regard to the fidelity which he might expect from the English barons in their new engagements, and the danger of intrusting his son and heir into the hands of men who might, on any caprice or necessity, make peace with their native sovereign, by sacrificing a pledge of so much value. He therefore exacted from the barons twenty-five hostages of the most noble birth in the kingdom; and having obtained this security, he sent over first a small army to the relief of the confederates; then more numerous forces, which arrived with Louis himself at their head.

The first effect of the young Prince's appearance in England was the desertion of John's foreign troops, who, being mostly levied in Flanders and other provinces of France, refused to serve against the heir of their monarchy. The Gascons and Poictevins alone, who were still John's subjects, adhered to his cause; but they were too weak to maintain that superiority in the field which they had hitherto supported against the confederated barons. Many considerable noblemen deserted John's party—the earls of Salisbury, Arundel, Warrenne, Oxford, Albemarle, and William Mareschal the Younger. His castles fell daily into the hands of the enemy; Dover was the only place which, from the valor and fidelity of Hubert de Burgh, the governor, made resistance to the progress of Louis; and the barons had the melancholy prospect of finally succeeding in their purpose, and of escaping the tyranny of their own King, by imposing on themselves and the nation a foreign yoke.

But this union was of short duration between the French and English nobles; and the imprudence of Louis, who on every occasion showed too visible a preference to the former, increased their jealousy which it was so natural for the latter to entertain in their present situation. The Viscount of Melun, too, it is said, one of his courtiers, fell sick at London, and, finding the approaches of death, he sent for some of his friends among the English barons, and, warning them of their danger, revealed Louis's secret intentions of exterminating them and their families as traitors to their Prince, and of bestowing their estates and dignities on his native subjects, in whose fidelity he could more reasonably place confidence. This story, whether true or false, was universally reported and believed; and, concurring with other circumstances which rendered it credible, did great prejudice to the cause of Louis. The Earl of Salisbury and other noblemen deserted again to John's party; and as men easily change sides in civil war, especially where their power is founded on a hereditary and independent authority and is not derived from the opinion and favor of the people, the French Prince had reason to dread a sudden reverse of fortune.

The King was assembling a considerable army with a view of fighting one great battle for his crown; but passing from Lynne to Lincolnshire, his road lay along the sea-shore, which was overflowed at high water; and not choosing the proper time for his journey, he lost in the inundation all his carriages, treasure, baggage, and regalia. The affliction of this disaster, and vexation from the distracted state of his affairs, increased the sickness under which he then labored; and though he reached the castle of Newark, he was obliged to halt there, and his distemper soon after put an end to his life, in the forty-ninth year of his age and eighteenth of his reign, and freed the nation from the dangers to which it was equally exposed by his success or by his misfortunes.



THE GOLDEN BULL, "HUNGARY'S MAGNA CHARTA," SIGNED

A.D. 1222

E.O.S.



During the century preceding the reign of Andrew II, King of Hungary, which began in 1205, that country had been engaged in frequent wars with Venice over the possession of Dalmatia, but no event of recent years had given much importance to Hungarian history. The reign of Andrew began in a time of great confusion in state and church, when the crusading spirit was still a power which both religious and secular rulers found it convenient to turn to the advancement of their own designs.

When Andrew deserted the cause of the crusaders in Palestine, after an unsuccessful attack upon a tower on Mount Tabor, he was doubtless piqued at the failure of the King of Jerusalem to render him any support in ordering his affairs at home, where, under his viceroy, the virtual absolutism of the government had become endangered. Out of the conditions which confronted him on his arrival in Hungary came the memorable event—forming one of the great chapters in his country's annals—faithfully and succinctly recounted in the following pages.

The reign of Andrew II, in Hungary, forms one of the most important epochs in the history of the country over which he reigned, since from him the nobles obtained their Golden Bull (Bulla Aurea), equivalent to the Magna Charta of England. The people of Hungary had, indeed, by their own determination and spirit of independence, and by the wisdom and virtue of the first kings of the race of Arpad, secured in their constitution the foundation of their liberties; but the power of the sovereign had in the mean time increased, so as to surpass those limits within which alone the office can be conducive to the happiness and welfare of the community. The ceremony of coronation was considered, indeed, a necessary condition for the exercise of the royal authority; but though this in some measure acted as a check upon his inordinate power, still all offices and dignities were in the gift of the King, few, if any, being hereditary, and even the magnates could not prevent the monarch giving away any part of his dominions.

Wars with Russia and Poland occupied the first years after the accession of Andrew, and much discontent was occasioned in the country by the imperious character of Gertrude his Queen, who ruled over her husband, and caused her relatives and friends to be raised to the highest places in the State. The marriage of the young princess Elizabeth to Louis, son of the Landgrave of Thuringia, was solemnized with great pomp at Presburg, in 1212. The period of prosperity to Hungary which had followed the birth of this child made the people look upon her as one favored by heaven, and her singular virtues helped to confirm the superstition; her life has formed the groundwork of one of the most beautiful of saintly legends, and after her death she was canonized as St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

At her nuptials, Queen Gertrude, assuming the authority of her husband, not only presented the ambassadors of the Landgrave with rich presents of gold, silver, and jewels, but bid them tell their lord that if a long life were granted to her she would send them still greater wealth. The following year Andrew accompanied his son Coloman into Poland, to celebrate his marriage with a daughter of the duke, and intrusted the regency during his absence to Gertrude and her relations. Time and opportunity favored a conspiracy against the imperious Queen, and the first attack was made on her brother, the Archbishop of Colocza. He, however, escaped with his life, and in revenge he induced the Pope (Honorius) to lay Hungary under an interdict.