The Age of Reason by D. J. Medley (best manga ereader .txt) 📕

[Sidenote: Henry's difficulties.]

Henry's right policy would no doubt have been to compel the Pope to observe the agreement. But it was more than three years before he could return to Italy. For revolt had broken out again in Germany. The nobles had their own grievances; the Saxons were always ready to take arms; the Church was roused because Henry dealt with ecclesiastical property as if the Pope's original proposal had been allowed to stand. The royal bailiffs acted in such a manner with the cathedrals that of a house of prayer they made a den of thieves.

Henry's forces were worsted in battle and he had recourse to his father's tactics, seeking in Italy, by personal dealings with the Pope, to recover the moral prestige which he had lost in Germany. He had a pretext in the death of the Countess Matilda (1115); for the Papacy was claiming not only her allodial lands, which she might have a right to bequeath, but also her imperial fiefs, which were not hers to dispose of. Henry occupied the dominions of Matilda without opposition. His presence in Italy caused Pascal still to refrain from personal condemnation of the Emperor, and a year later a party friendly to Henry opened the gates of Rome to him. Pascal fled to Albano, and only returned to Rome on Henry's departure, a dying man (January, 1118). His successor, Gelasius II, refused Henry's advances, and the Emperor resorted to the old and discredited policy of setting up an anti-Pope in the person of the Archbishop of Braga, in Portugal, who took the name of Gregory VIII. Gelasius excommunicated Henry and his Pope; but finding himself threatened in Rome, fled to Burgundy, and died at Cluny a year after his election (January, 1119). So far Henry's attempts to deal with the Pope had failed, and the publication of the new Pope's excommunication in Germany made the opposition so strong that Henry found it advisable to return.

[Sidenote: Calixtus II (1119-24)]

Gelasius' successor chosen at Cluny was Archbishop of Vienne, who took the title of Calixtus II. He was the first secular priest who had occupied the papal chair since Alexander II, and he was related to the royal families of France and England. Thus he had a wider outlook than the monks who preceded him, and the nobles would be likely to listen to a man of their own rank. He had been the most uncompromising of all Henry's opponents; but this was a guarantee to the Church that her position and power would not again be placed in jeopardy, for events were at length tending towards a conclusion of the weary strife. The views of the reformers had gained general acceptance as the doctrine of the Church. The obligation of clerical celibacy was acknowledged: simony had much diminished; Henry was the only King in Western Europe who still claimed to invest his prelates. Although it was some time before all the great French feudatories yielded to the spirit of reform, the French King himself had abandoned the practice of investiture for those bishops who were under his control. He retained, however, certain of his rights. The election could not take place without his permission, the newly elected bishop took an oath of fealty to the King, and during the vacancy of the see the revenues were paid to the Crown. It was more important still that in England the question of investiture had been settled by a compromise which recognised the twofold nature of the episcopal office, and that this compromise had received the sanction of the Pope. Henceforth it was practically impossible for the Church to maintain the position of the extreme reformers. When Pope Pascal was forced to grant the right of investiture to the Emperor, Henry I of England, as Anselm complained to Pascal, threatened to resume the practice. Already William I of England had defined the limits of papal power in his dominions without a protest from Rome, and Urban II had actually found himself obliged to endow Roger of Sicily and his successors with the authority of a papal legate within their own dominions. It was clear that the papal authority could do little against a really strong lay ruler. Moreover, the influence of the Church had greatly diminished. There was scarcely a see or abbey to which, during the last forty years, there had not been rival claimants: King and nobles alike had not only ceased to increase the endowments of the Church, but had caught at almost every opportunity of encroaching on them.

[Sidenote: Concordat of Worms.]

The accommodation was very gradual, for much suspicion of insincerity on both sides had to be overcome. The first step was taken in October, 1119. After the failure of direct negotiations between Pope and Emperor, a Council at Rheims, presided over by the Pope, renewed the anathema against Henry and his party, but only consented to a modified prohibition of investitures, since the office alone was mentioned and all reference to the property of bishop or abbot was omitted. It was two years before the next stage was reached, and meanwhile the anti-Pope had fallen into the hands of Calixtus, and Henry was still in difficulties in Germany. Finally, in October, 1121, the German nobles brought about a conference of envoys from both sides at Wurzburg, where in addition to an universal peace it was arranged that the investiture question should be settled at a General Council to be held in Germany under papal auspices. The Council met at Worms in September, 1122, and the papal legates were armed with full powers to act. The result was a Concordat subsequently ratified at the first Council of the Lateran in March, 1123, which is reckoned as the ninth General Council by the Roman Church. By this agreement the Emperor gave up all claim to invest ecclesiastics with the ring and staff. In return it was allowed by the Church that the election of prelates should take place in presence of the Emperor's representatives, and that in case of any dispute the Emperor should confirm the decision arrived at by the Metropolitan and his suffragans. The Emperor on his part undertook that the prelate elect, whether bishop or abbot, should be invested with the regalia or temporalities pertaining to his office by the sceptre, in Germany the investiture preceding the ecclesiastical consecration, whereas in Burgundy and the kingdom of Italy the consecration should come first.

[Sidenote: Results of struggle in Empire.]

We are naturally tempted to enquire who was the gainer in this long struggle? Writers on both sides have claimed the victory. It is clear, however, that neither side got all that it demanded. Considering the all-embracing character of the papal claim, the limitation of its pretensions might seem to carry a decided diminution of its position. Calixtus' advisers strongly urged that all over the imperial lands the consecration of prelates should precede the investiture of temporalities by the lay power. But the German nobles would not budge. In Burgundy and Italy conditions were different: in the former the power of the Crown had been almost in abeyance; in Italy the bishops had found themselves deserted by the Crown and had submitted to the Pope. The Crown had therefore to acquiesce in a merely nominal control over appointments in those lands. But in Germany the King perhaps gained rather than lost by the Concordat. His right of influence in the choice was definitely acknowledged, and by refusing the regalia he could practically prevent the consecration of any one obnoxious to him. The prelates of Germany, therefore, remained vassals of the Crown.

[Sidenote: on Papacy.]

On the other hand, the Papacy had definitely shaken itself free from imperial control. Henry III was the last Emperor who could impose his nominee Papacy upon the Church as Pope; the protégés of his successors are all classed among the anti-Popes. At the same time the papal privilege of crowning the Emperor and the papal weapon of excommunication were very real checks upon the German King; while the success of those principles for which the Cluniac party had striven established the theoretical claim of the Pope to be the moral guide, and the part which he played in starting the Crusades put him in the practical position of the leader of Christendom in any common movement. It was no slight loss to the Emperor that he had been the chief opponent of the Pope and the reformers, and that in the matter of the Crusades he and his whole nation had stood ostentatiously aloof.

[Sidenote: The work of the Church reformers.]

The great movement in favour of Church reform, which had emanated from Cluny, had worked itself out along certain definite lines. It is important to ask how far it had succeeded in achieving its objects. We have seen that it was a movement of essentially monastic conception aimed at the purification of the secular clergy. And we have seen that the evil to be remedied had arisen from the imminent danger that the Church would be laicised and feudalised. From the highest to the lowest all ecclesiastical posts were at the disposition of laymen who treated them as a species of feudal fief, so that the holders, even if they were in Holy Orders (which was not always the case), regarded their temporal rights and obligations as the first consideration and, like all feudal tenants, tried to establish the right of hereditary succession in their holdings. Thus the work of the reformers had been of a double nature; it was not enough that they should aim at exorcising the feudal spirit from the Church, at banishing the feudal ideal from the minds of ecclesiastics: it was necessary to effect what was indeed a revolution, and to shake the whole organisation of the Church free from the trammels which close contact with the State had laid upon it. It began as a reformation of morals; it developed into a constitutional revolution. There was involved in the movement both an interference with what might be distinguished as private rights and also a readjustment of public relations. The reformers headed by the Pope ultimately decided to concentrate their efforts on the latter. Hence we may begin by enquiring how far they had succeeded in freeing episcopal elections from lay control.

[Sidenote: Episcopal appointments.]

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

[Sidenote: Right of election.]

The result of the long struggle was that in the matter of episcopal appointments, speaking generally, the right of election was not restored to clergy and people, in whom by primitive custom it had been vested, but that the laity, with the possible exception of the feudatories of the see, were banished altogether, the rural clergy ceased to appear, and, after the analogy of the papal election by the College of Cardinals, the canonical election of the bishop in every diocese tends to be concentrated in the hands of the clergy of the cathedral. It was a long time, however, before the rights of the cathedral chapters were universally recognised. Henry I of England in his Concordat with Anselm (1107) and the Emperor Henry V in the Concordat of Worms (122) both promised freedom of election. Philip I and Louis VI of France seem to have conceded the same right without any formal agreement. But many of the great French feudal lords clung to their power over the local bishoprics, and in Normandy, in Anjou, and in some parts of the south nearly a century elapsed before the duke or count surrendered his custom of nominating bishops directly. But the freedom of election by the Canons of the cathedral, even when it was conceded, was little more than nominal. In England, France, and the Christian kingdoms of Spain no cathedral