sees lay entirely 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 sovereign had ever been so absolute. A disgraceful contest 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. The synod passed a decree granting 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 Italians, and the reaction, which might have been dangerous to himself, was fatal to his successor. A mere chance, as some might 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.

CHAPTER X.

STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY.

REFORMED by the Emperors and their Teutonic nominees, the Papacy had resumed in the middle of the eleventh century the schemes of polity 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 warns one from the 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.

The eagerness of Christianity in the age immediately following her political establishment 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,

CHAP. X.

Growth of

the Papal

power.

CHAP. X.

healed of his leprosy, granted the West to bishop Syl-
vester, and retired to Byzantium that no secular prince
might interfere with the jurisdiction or profane the neigh-
bourhood of Peter's chair, worked great effects through
the belief it commanded for many centuries. Nay more,
its groundwork was true. It was the removal of the seat
of government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus that
made the Pope the greatest personage in the city, and in
the prostration after Alaric'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 revived senate and consuls of the phantom republic 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 a, and his persevering
successors slowly enthralled Italy, Illyricum, Gaul, Spain,
Africa, dexterously confounding their undoubted metro-
politan and patriarchal rights with those of œcumenical
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 im-
pressive ritual, Gregory the Great did more than any
other pontiff to advance Rome's ecclesiastical authority.
Yet his tone to Maurice of Constantinople was deferen-
tial, to Phocas adulatory; his successors were not con-
secrated 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 iconoclastic con-
troversy and the intervention of Pipin broke the alle-
giance of the Popes to the East, the Franks, as patricians

a

P. 32.

'Roma per sedem Beati Petri caput orbis effecta.'-See note i,

I

८

and Emperors, seemed to step into the position which Byzantium had lostb. At Charles's coronation, says the Saxon poet,

If

of

Their relations were, however, no longer the same.
the Frank vaunted conquest, the priest spoke only
free gift. What Christendom saw was that Charles was
crowned by the Pope's hands, and undertook as his
principal duty the protection and advancement of the
Holy Roman Church. The circumstances of Otto the
Great's coronation gave an even more favourable opening
to sacerdotal claims, for it was a Pope who summoned
him to Rome and a Pope who received from him an oath
of fidelity and aid. In the conflict of three powers, the
Emperor, the pontiff, and the people-represented by
their senate and consuls, or by the demagogue of the
hour-the most steady, prudent, and far-sighted was sure
eventually to prevail. The Popedom had no minorities,
as yet few disputed successions, few revolts within its own
army-the host of churchmen through Europe. Boni-
face's conversion of Germany under its direct sanction,
gave it a hold on the rising hierarchy of the greatest
European state; the extension of the rule of Charles and
Otto diffused in the same measure its emissaries and pre-
,tensions. The first disputes turned on the right of the
prince to confirm the elected pontiff, which was after-
wards supposed to have been granted by Hadrian I to

b Claves tibi ad regnum dimisimus.'-Pope Stephen to Charles Martel, in Codex Carolinus, ap.

Muratori, S. R. I. iii. Some, how-
ever, prefer to read 'ad rogum.'

CHAP. X.

Relations of the Papacy and the

Empire.

СНАР. Х.

tust disgente turmed on night of emperor to

confirm pape

Charles, in the decree quoted as Hadrianus Papac! This ius eligendi et ordinandi summum pontificem,' which Lewis I appears as yielding by the 'Ego Ludovicusd,' was claimed by the Carolingians whenever they felt themselves strong enough, and having fallen into desuetude in the troublous times of the Italian Emperors, was formally renewed to Otto the Great by his nominee Leo VIII. We have seen it used, and used in the purest spirit, by Otto himself, by his grandson Otto III, last of all, and most despotically, by Henry III. Along with it there had grown up a bold counter-assumption of the Papal chair to be itself the source of the imperial dignity. In submitting to a fresh coronation, Lewis the Pious admitted the invalidity of his former self-performed one: Charles the Bald did not scout the arrogant declaration of John VIIIe, that to him alone the Emperor owed his crown; and the council of Paviaf, when it chose him king of Italy, repeated the assertion. Subsequent Popes knew better than to apply to the chiefs of Saxon and Franconian chivalry language which the feeble Neustrian had not resented; but the precedent remained, the weapon was only hid behind the pontifical robe to be flashed out with effect when the moment should come. There were also two other great steps which papal power had taken. By the invention and adoption of the False

c Corpus Iuris Canonici, Dist. ad ann. 876. lxiii. c. 22.

d Dist. lxiii. c. 30. This decree is, however, in all probability spurious.

e Nos elegimus merito et approbavimus una cum annisu et voto patrum amplique senatus et gentis togatæ,' &c., ap. Baron. Ann, Eccl.,

f 'Divina vos pietas B. principum apostolorum Petri et Pauli interventione per vicarium ipsorum dominum Ioannem summum pontificem ad imperiale culmen S. Spiritus iudicio provexit.'— Concil. Ticinense, in Mur., S. R. I. ii.