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CHAP. X.

and maintained to the end of his sad and chequered life a power often depressed but never destroyed. Nevertheless had all other humiliation been spared, that one scene in the yard of the Countess Matilda's castle, an imperial penitent standing barefoot and woollen-frocked on the snow, till the priest who sat within should admit and absolve him, was enough to mark a decisive change, and inflict an irretrievable disgrace on the crown so abased. Its wearer could no more, with the same lofty confidence, claim to be the highest power on earth, created by and answerable to God alone. Gregory had extorted the recognition of that absolute superiority of spiritual authority which he was wont to assert so sternly, proclaiming that to the Pope, as God's Vicar, all mankind are subject, and all rulers responsible, so that he, the giver of the crown, may also excommunicate and depose. And he discovered a simile which played a great part in subsequent controversy, a simile so happily suited to the modes of thought of the Middle Ages that no one dreamt of denying that it expressed the meaning of Scripture and the purpose of the Creator. Writing to William the Conqueror, king of England, he says: "For as for the beauty of this world, that it may be at different seasons perceived by fleshly eyes, God hath disposed the Sun and the Moon, lights that outshine all others; so lest the creature whom His goodness hath formed after His own image in this world

* The castle of Canosa, of which only scanty ruins remain, stood on one of the northern outliers of the Apennines, some ten miles S.W. of Reggio (Modenese).

Lambert's account of the penitence, which he makes to last for three days, has recently been called in question: see Holder Egger, Studien zu Lambert von Herzfeld in Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde (vol. xix, 1894).

1 Letter of Gregory VII to William I, A.D. 1080.-Jaffé, Monumenta Gregoriana, p. 419.

should be drawn astray into fatal dangers, He hath pro- CHAP. X. vided in the apostolic and royal dignities the means of ruling it through divers offices. . . . If I, therefore, am to answer for thee on the dreadful day of judgment before the just Judge who cannot lie, the creator of every creature, bethink thee whether I must not very diligently provide for thy salvation, and whether, for thine own safety, thou oughtest not without delay to obey me, that so thou mayest possess the land of the living.'

m

Gregory was not the inventor or first propounder of these doctrines; they had been before his day a part of mediaeval Christianity, interwoven with its most vital doctrines. Six centuries earlier Pope Gelasius I had implicitly stated them in a letter enjoining obedience on the Emperor Anastasius. They were held by many others in Gregory's day, and expressed with a more militant vehemence by his contemporary and friend Alfanus of Salerno. But Gregory was the first who dared to apply them to the world as he found it. His was that rarest and grandest of gifts, an intellectual courage and power of imaginative belief which, when it has convinced itself of aught, accepts it fully with all its consequences, and shrinks not from acting at once upon it. A perilous gift, as the melancholy end of his own career proved, for men were found less ready than he had thought them to follow out with unswerving consistency like his the principles which all acknowledged. But it was the very suddenness and boldness of his policy that secured the ultimate triumph of his cause, awing men's minds and making that seem realized which had been till then a vague theory. His premises once admitted - and no one dreamt of denying them the reasonings by which he established the superiority of spiritual to temporal jurisdiction were un

m See as to Gelasius and Alfanus, and as to the view held by moderate churchmen, Note XI at end.

M

CHAP. X.

Results of the struggle.

assailable. With his authority, in whose hands are the keys of heaven and hell, whose word can bestow eternal bliss or plunge in everlasting misery, no earthly potentate can compete or interfere. If his power extends into the infinite, how much more must he be supreme over things finite? It was thus that Gregory and his successors were wont to argue the wonder is, not that they were obeyed, but that they were not obeyed more implicitly. In the second sentence of excommunication which Gregory passed upon Henry the Fourth are these words:

'Come now, I beseech you, O most holy and blessed Fathers and Princes, Peter and Paul, that all the world may understand and know that if ye are able to bind and to loose in heaven, ye are likewise able on earth, according to the merits of each man, to give and to take away empires, kingdoms, princedoms, marquisates, duchies, countships, and the possessions of all men. For if ye judge spiritual things, what must we believe to be your power over worldly things? and if ye judge the angels who rule over all proud princes, what can ye not do to their slaves?'

Doctrines such as these do indeed strike equally at all temporal governments, nor were the Innocents and Bonifaces of later days slow to apply them so. On the Empire, however, the blow fell first and heaviest. As when Alarich entered Rome, the spell of ages was broken, Christendom saw its stateliest and most venerable institution dishonoured and helpless; allegiance was no longer undivided, for who could presume to fix in each case the limits of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions? The potentates of Europe. beheld in the Papacy a force which, if dangerous to themselves, could be made to repel the pretensions and baffle the designs of the strongest and haughtiest among them. Italy learned how to meet the Teutonic conqueror by gaining papal sanction for the leagues of her cities. The Ger

man princes, anxious to narrow the prerogative of their CHAP. X. head, were the natural allies of his enemy, whose spiritual thunders, more terrible than their own lances, could enable them to depose an aspiring monarch, or extort from him any concessions they desired. Their altered tone is marked

by the promise they required from Rudolf of Swabia, whom, A.D. 1077. at the Pope's suggestion, they set up as a rival to Henry, that he would not endeavour to make the throne hereditary.

It is not possible here to dwell on the details of the great struggle of the Investitures, rich as it is in the interest of adventure and character, momentous as were its results for the future. A word or two must suffice to describe the conclusion, not indeed of the whole drama, which was to extend over centuries, but of what may be called its first act. Even that act lasted beyond the lives of the original performers. Gregory the Seventh passed away at Salerno in A.D. 1085, exclaiming with his last breath, 'I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.' Twenty-one years later Henry IV died, dethroned A.D. 1106. by an unnatural son whom the hatred of a relentless pontiff had raised in rebellion against him. But that son, the Emperor Henry the Fifth, so far from conceding the points in dispute, proved an antagonist more ruthless and not less able than his father. He claimed for his crown all the rights over ecclesiastics that his predecessors had ever enjoyed, and when at his coronation in Rome, A.D. III, Pope Paschal II refused to complete the rite until he should have yielded, Henry seized both Pope and cardinals and compelled them by a rigorous imprisonment to consent to a treaty which he dictated. Once set free, the Pope, as was natural, disavowed his extorted concessions, and the struggle was protracted for ten years longer, until nearly half a century had elapsed from the first quarrel between Gregory VII and Henry IV. The Concordat of Worms, con

CHAP. X. Concordat of Worms,

A.D. 1122.

The Crusades.

cluded between Pope Calixtus II and Henry V, provided for the freedom of ecclesiastical elections and the renunciation by the Emperor of investiture by the ring and the crozier, but it left to him the right of investing the clergy with all temporalities by the sceptre, and the right to require from them (except those who held directly from the Pope) the performance of their duties as feudal vassals. This settlement was in form a compromise, designed to spare either party the humiliation of defeat. Yet the Papacy remained master of the field. The Emperor retained but one-half of those rights of investiture which had formerly been his. He could never resume the position of Henry III; his wishes or intrigues might influence the proceedings of a chapter, his oath bound him from open interference. He had entered the strife in the fullness of dignity; he came out of it with tarnished glory and shattered power. His wars had been hitherto carried on with foreign foes, or at worst with a single rebel noble; now his former ally was turned into his fiercest assailant, and had enlisted against him half his court, half the magnates of his realm. At any moment his sceptre might be shivered in his hand by the bolt of anathema, and a host of enemies spring up from every convent and cathedral.

Two other results of this great conflict ought not to pass unnoticed. The Emperor was alienated from the Church at the most unfortunate of all moments, the era of the Crusades. To conduct a great religious war against the enemies of the faith, to head the church militant in her carnal as the Popes were accustomed to do in her spiritual strife, this was the very purpose for which an Emperor had been called into being; and it was indeed in these wars, more particularly in the first three of them, that the ideal of a Christian commonwealth, embodied in the theory of the mediaeval Empire, was

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