CHAP. IX. Conrad II, 1039. Henry III, 1056. ing under the sceptre of Constantinople. As the weakness of the East Roman monarchs in the South favoured the rise of the Apulian kingdom which the Norman Robert Wiscard established (A.D. 1024-1039), so did the liberties of the Northern cities shoot up in the absence of the Germanic Emperors and the feuds of the territorial magnates. Milan, Pavia, Cremona, were only the foremost among many populous centres of industry, some of them already self-governing, all quickly absorbing or repelling the rural nobility, and not afraid to display by tumults their aversion to the Germans. The reign of Conrad II (usually called the Salic), the first Emperor of the great Franconian line, is remarkable for the accession to the Empire of Burgundy, or, as it is after this time more often called, the kingdom of Arles." Rudolf III, the last king, had proposed to bequeath it to Henry II, and the states were at length persuaded to consent to its reunion to the crown from which it had been separated, though to some extent dependent, since the death of Lothar I (son of Lewis the Pious). On Rudolf's death in 1032, Eudes, count of Champagne, endeavoured to seize it, and entered the North-western districts, from which he was dislodged by Conrad with some difficulty. Unlike Italy, it became an integral member of the Germanic realm its prelates and nobles sat in imperial diets, and long retained the style and title of Princes of the Holy Empire. The central government was, however, seldom effective in these outlying territories, exposed always to the intrigues, finally to the aggressions, of Capetian France. Under Conrad's son Henry the Third the Empire attained the meridian of its power. At home Otto the Great's prerogative had not stood so high. The duchies, always See Appendix, Note A. the chief source of disquietude, were allowed to remain CHAP. IX. vacant or filled by the relatives of the monarch, who himself retained, contrary to usual practice, those of Franconia and (for some years) Swabia. Abbeys and sees lay virtually in his gift. Intestine feuds were repressed by the proclamation of a public peace. Abroad, the feudal superiority over Hungary, which Henry II had gained by conferring the title of King with the hand of his sister Gisela, was enforced by war, the country made almost a province, and compelled to pay tribute. In Rome no German sov- His reform ereign had ever been so absolute. A disgraceful contest of the popedom. between three claimants of the papal chair had shocked even the reckless apathy of Italy." Henry deposed them all, and appointed their successor: he became hereditary patrician, and wore constantly the green mantle and circlet of gold which were the badges of that office, seeming, one might think, to find in it some further authority than that which the imperial name conferred. A Roman synod granted to Henry the right of nominating the supreme pontiff; and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited the respect of the world even more by habitual simony than by the flagrant corruption of their manners, were forced to receive German after German as their bishop, at the bidding of a ruler so powerful, so severe, and so pious. But Henry's encroachments alarmed his own nobles no less than the priesthood, and the reaction, which might have At a provincial synod held near Rheims in 991, Arnulf bishop of Orleans had delivered a vehement condemnation of the conduct and pretensions of recent pontiffs, going so far as to declare the Pope to be Antichrist, 'sitting in the temple of God and setting himself forth as God' (2 Thess. ii. 4). As Ranke remarks (Weltgeschichte, vii. p. 48), Arnulf and other opponents of papal claims were sadly hampered by the power ascribed to the Pope in the Pseudo Isidorian decretals, which they did not know to be forgeries. CHAP. IX. 1106. been dangerous to himself, was fatal to his successor. A mere chance, as some may call it, determined the course of history. The great Emperor died suddenly in A.D. 1056, and a child was left at the helm, while storms were gathering that might have demanded the wisest hand. t The Abbey of Cluny was already the centre of a monastic movement in favour of the deliverance of the clergy from secular control. CHAPTER X STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY REFORMED by the Emperors and their Teutonic nomi- CHAP. X. nees, the Papacy had resumed in the middle of the eleventh century the ambitious schemes shadowed forth by Nicholas I, and which the degradation of the last age had only suspended. Under the guidance of her greatest mind, Hildebrand, the archdeacon of Rome, she now advanced to their completion, and proclaimed that war of the ecclesiastical power against the civil power in the person of the Emperor, which became the centre of the subsequent history of both. While the nature of the struggle cannot be understood without a glance at their previous connection, the vastness of the subject forbids an attempt to draw even its outlines, and restricts our view to those relations of Popedom and Empire which arise. directly out of their respective positions as heads spiritual and temporal of the universal Christian state. power. The eagerness of Christianity in the age immediately Growth of following her recognition as the religion favoured by the the papal state to purchase by submission the support of the civil power, has been already remarked. The change from independence to supremacy was gradual. The tale we smile at, how Constantine, healed of his leprosy, granted the West to bishop Sylvester, and retired to Byzantium that no secular prince might interfere with the jurisdiction or profane the neighbourhood of Peter's chair, worked great effects through the belief it commanded for many centuries. Nay more, it had a sort of groundwork in fact. CHAP. X. a Through the removal of the seat of government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus the Pope grew to be the greatest personage in the city, and in the prostration after Alarich's invasion he was seen to be so. Henceforth he alone was a permanent and effective, though still unacknowledged. power, as truly superior to the senate and consuls in the revived municipal republic after the ninth century as Augustus and Tiberius had been to the faint continuance of their earlier prototypes. Pope Leo the First asserted the universal jurisdiction of his see, and his persevering successors slowly enthralled Italy, Illyricum, Gaul, Spain, Africa, dexterously confounding their undoubted metropolitan and patriarchal rights with those of oecumenical bishop, in which they were finally merged. By his writings and the fame of his personal sanctity, by the conversion of England and the introduction of an impressive ritual, Gregory the Great did more than any other pontiff to advance Rome's ecclesiastical authority. Yet his tone to Maurice of Constantinople was deferential, to Phocas adulatory; his successors were not consecrated till confirmed by the Emperor or the Exarch; one of them was dragged in chains to the Bosphorus, and banished thence to Scythia. When the Image-breaking controversy and the intervention of Pipin weakened and ultimately broke the allegiance of the Popes to the East, the Franks, as patricians and Emperors, seemed to step into the position which Constantinople had lost. At Charles's coronation says the Saxon poet, 'Et summus eundem Praesul adoravit, sicut mos debitus olim a Roma per sedem Beati Petri caput orbis effecta.' - See note p. 31. bClaves... vobis ad regnum dimisimus.' - Pope Gregory III to Charles Martel, in Codex Carolinus, ap. Muratori, S. R. I. iii. part ii. p. 76. Some, however, prefer to read 'ad rogum.' |