CHAP. XIII. the law, and that the priesthood have no right to judge, much less to punish, heresy, since each man is answerable for his speculative opinions to the judgement of Christ only. Marsilius denies to the clergy the right to hold property (except what is needed to support life), as also any immunities or privileges outside their purely spiritual sphere of action, declares that Christ did not come on earth to establish any worldly power (regnum meum non est de hoc mundo), that the Pope ought not to have any such power, the power of the keys does not imply it, for God alone can remit sins, remit sins, that the distinction of bishops and priests has no basis in the New Testament. He argues that St. Peter had no pre-eminence over the other apostles, that it is doubtful whether he was ever bishop of Rome, or even came to Rome at all, and that such authority as the Pope enjoys is due solely to the fact that Rome had been the old imperial city. No wonder that Pope Clement VI observed, after perusing the Defensor Pacis, 'Never have I read a worse heretic.'

These doctrines struck at the root not merely of the particular claim made by John XXII, but of the whole sacerdotal system of the Middle Ages. Their enunciation coincided with the most extreme assertion of high Papalist doctrine ever made. Agostino Trionfo's book on the Power of the Pope, dedicated to John XXII as the book of Marsilius had been to Lewis IV, claims for the Holy See absolute power over all secular sovereigns in all matters, temporal as well as spiritual. There is no appeal from him even to God, much less to a council, for his judgement is God's. He may conceivably lapse into heresy, and, if so, he ceases ipso facto to be Pope, because spiritual life resides in faith, without which he is spiritually dead, as a corpse is not a man. But he is bound by no law except the Divine.

Не

stands higher than the angels, and may receive the same CHAP. XIII sort of adoration as is rendered to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. He can at his pleasure depose an Emperor, appoint another, withdraw their functions from the electors, cancel any law issued by an Emperor or king, because he represents God upon earth with the plenitude of God's authority.

In these propositions laid down by Trionfo, with the hearty approval of the Papal Curia, ecclesiastical pretensions may be deemed to have reached their highwater mark; and it presently appeared that the tide was beginning to turn. As the view which placed the Vicar of God little below God Himself came rather too late, for it went further than the opinion of Europe was now disposed to follow, so on the other hand the book of Marsilius came too early to have its full effect. Two centuries were to pass before the soil was ready to receive the seed which this precursor of Luther and Zwingli had sown. During those two centuries the Popes steadily declined in reputation and authority. Some of

a Papalists used to quote the text, 'All power is given me in heaven and on earth,' as proof of the temporal authority of the Pope, for Christ's power was Peter's, and Peter's passed to his successors.

b A reason why the assaults of Marsilius and Ockham, as indeed of earlier impugners of the claims of the Papacy, did not make a deeper impression may perhaps be found in the fact that there was one doctrine, that relating to the Eucharist, which they did not dispute. Sacerdotalism stood deep-rooted in sacramentalism, and it was the denial of the dogma of the Real Presence that in the sixteenth century undermined the foundation whereon the power of the priesthood and Peter's see rested.

Upon the struggle of Lewis IV and the Popes, see besides Gregorovius (History of Rome in the Middle Ages), Friedberg, Die mittelalterlichen Lehren über das Verhältniss von Staat und Kirche (1874), and Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwig des Baiers (1874), both of whom deal fully with Marsilius and Ockham. Some excellent observations may also be found in Mr. R. L. Poole's Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought (1884), chaps, viii and ix.

CHAP. XIII. their moral sway over men's minds was lost while they dwelt at Avignon under the shadow of France. Still more was lost in the Great Schism which divided the Church for more than a generation (A.D. 1378-1417); and most of all was lost by the avarice and extortion a cause of irritation to the clergy almost as much as to the laity - of which not a few pontiffs were guilty during this long period. After the middle of the fifteenth century the Popes, by this time firmly re-established in Rome, became more occupied with the building up of a temporal dominion in Italy than with the assertion of their authority over emperors and kings. So far indeed as the Emperor was concerned, they had the less need to trouble him, because Charles the Fourth had (A.D. 1355) abandoned to the Pope those territorial rights over Rome and Italy for which his predecessors had fought. No succeeding Emperor tried to make them good. The great Council of Constance, in which Western Christendom assembled under the auspices of the Emperor Sigismund, deposed two rival Popes, and obtained the resignation of a third, offered an opportunity which a man with the vigour and loftiness of Henry the Third might have seized to recover the influence of the imperial office and to use it for the benefit of the Church. But Sigismund was no Henry the Third; nor did any one after him essay the perhaps impossible task of correcting the abuses of ecclesiastical power. The Hapsburg Frederick the Third, timid and superstitious, abased himself before the Romish Court; and the long line of his Austrian successors has generally adhered to the alliance then struck.

That this Schism did not shake the authority of the Pope even more seriously shews how firm was the hold which the idea of the unity of Christendom in Church and State had upon the mediaeval mind.

CHAPTER XIV

THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION: THE SEVEN ELECTORS

of the Princes.

THE reign of Frederick the Second was not less fatal to CHAP. XIV. the domestic power of the German king than to the Euro- Territorial Sovereignty pean supremacy of the Emperor. His two Pragmatic Sanctions had conferred rights that made the feudal aristocracy almost independent, and the long anarchy of the Interregnum had enabled them not only to use but to extend and fortify their power. Rudolf of Hapsburg had Adolf, striven, not wholly in vain, to coerce their insolence, but 1292–1298. the contest for the crown between his son Albert and Albert I, Adolf Count of Nassau which followed his death, the 1298-1308. short and troubled reign of Albert himself, the absence

Lewis IV,

1314-1347.

of Henry the Seventh in Italy, the civil war of Lewis of Henry VII, Bavaria and Frederick duke of Austria, rival claimants of 1308-1314. the imperial throne, the difficulties in which Lewis, the successful competitor, found himself involved with a succession of Popes all these circumstances tended more and more to narrow the influence of the crown and complete the emancipation of the turbulent nobles. They now became virtually supreme in their own domains, enjoying full jurisdiction (certain appeals excepted), the right of legislation, privileges of coining money, of levying tolls and taxes: some had scarcely even a feudal bond to remind them of their allegiance. The numbers of the nobility who held directly of the crown had increased prodigiously by the extinction of the dukedoms of Franconia and Swabia, and the reduction in area of that of Saxony: along the Rhine

CHAP. XIV. the lord of a single tower was often almost an independent prince. The petty tyrants whose boast it was that they owed fealty only to God and the Emperor shewed themselves in practice equally regardless of both powers. Preeminent were the three great houses of Austria, Bavaria, and Luxemburg, this last having acquired Bohemia, A.D. 1309. Next came the electors, already considered collectively more important than the Emperor, and forming for themselves considerable principalities. Brandenburg and the Rhenish Palatinate are strong states before the end of this period; Bohemia and the three archbishoprics almost from its beginning.

The chief object of the magnates was to keep the monarch in his present state of helplessness. The Hohenstaufen had been strong by their hereditary dominions as well as by their imperial authority: Frederick I is said to have been lord of four hundred castles. Unfortunately the Emperors who followed that great house had not similar patrimonial possessions; and indeed Rudolf was chosen because his private resources were too slender to make him an object of disquiet. Till the expense which the crown entailed had begun to prove ruinous to its wearer, the electors preferred to confer it on some petty prince, such as were Rudolf and Adolf of Nassau and Günther of Schwartzburg, seeking when they could to keep it from settling in one family. They bound the newly elected monarch to respect all their present immunities, including those which they had just extorted as the price of their votes; they checked all his attempts to recover lost lands or rights they ventured at last (in 1399) to depose their anointed head, Wenzel, king of Bohemia, whose dissipated life and neglect of his duties certainly justified their displeasure. Thus fettered, the Emperor sought only to make the most of his short tenure, using his position to