A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
47.RECALCITRANT PRINCES AND THE GREAT SCHISM
One very great weakness of the Roman Church in its struggle to secure the headship of all Christendom was the manner in which the Pope was chosen.
If indeed the papacy was to achieve its manifest ambition and establish one rule and one peace throughout Christendom, then it was vitally necessary that it should have a strong, steady and continuous direction. In those great days of its opportunity it needed before all things that the Popes when they took office should be able men in the prime of life, that each should have his successor-designate with whom he could discuss the policy of the church, and that the forms and processes of election should be clear, definite, unalterable and unassailable. Unhappily none of these things obtained. It was not even clear who could vote in the election of a Pope, nor whether the Byzantine or Holy Roman Emperor had a voice in the matter. That very great papal statesman Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII, 1073-1085) did much to regularize the election. He confined the votes to the Roman cardinals and he reduced the Emperor’s share to a formula of assent conceded to him by the church, but he made no provision for a successor-designate and he left it possible for the disputes of the cardinals to keep the See vacant, as in some cases it was kept vacant, for a year or more.
The consequences of this want of firm definition are to be seen in the
whole history of the papacy up to the sixteenth century. From quite
early times onward there were disputed elections and two or more men
each claiming to be Pope. The church would then be subjected to the
indignity of going to the Emperor or some other outside arbiter to
settle the dispute. And the career of everyone of the great Popes
ended in a note of interrogation. At his death the church might be
left headless and as ineffective as a decapitated body. Or he might be
replaced by some old rival eager only to discredit and undo his work.
Or some enfeebled old man tottering on the brink of the grave might
succeed him.
It was inevitable that this peculiar weakness of the papal organization
should attract the interference of the various German princes, the
French King, and the Norman and French Kings who ruled in England; that
they should all try to influence the elections, and have a Pope in
their own interest established in the Lateran Palace at Rome. And the
more powerful and important the Pope became in European affairs, the
more urgent did these interventions become. Under the circumstances it
is no great wonder that many of the Popes were weak and futile. The
astonishing thing is that many of them were able and courageous men.
One of the most vigorous and interesting of the Popes of this great
period was Innocent III (1198-1216) who was so fortunate as to become
Pope before he was thirty-eight. He and his successors were pitted
against an even more interesting personality, the Emperor Frederick II;
_Stupor mundi_ he was called, the Wonder of the world. The struggle of
this monarch against Rome is a turning place in history. In the end
Rome defeated him and destroyed his dynasty, but he left the prestige
of the church and Pope so badly wounded that its wounds festered and
led to its decay.
Frederick was the son of the Emperor Henry VI and his mother was the
daughter of Roger I, the Norman King of Sicily. He inherited this
kingdom in 1198 when he was a child of four years. Innocent III had
been made his guardian. Sicily in those days had been but recently
conquered by the Normans; the Court was half oriental and full of
highly educated Arabs; and some of these were associated in the
education of the young king. No doubt they were at some pains to make
their point of view clear to him. He got a Moslem view of Christianity
as well as a Christian view of Islam, and the unhappy result of this
double system of instruction was a view, exceptional in that age of
faith, that all religions were impostures. He talked freely on the
subject; his heresies and blasphemies are on record.
As the young man grew up he found himself in conflict with his
guardian. Innocent III wanted altogether too much from his ward. When
the opportunity came for Frederick to succeed as Emperor, the Pope
intervened with conditions. Frederick must promise to put down heresy
in Germany with a strong hand. Moreover he must relinquish his crown in
Sicily and South Italy, because otherwise he would be too strong for
the Pope. And the German clergy were to be freed from all taxation.
Frederick agreed but with no intention of keeping his word. The Pope
had already induced the French King to make war upon his own subjects
in France, the cruel and bloody crusade against the Waldenses; he
wanted Frederick to do the same thing in Germany. But Frederick being
far more of a heretic than any of the simple pietists who had incurred
the Pope’s animosity, lacked the crusading impulse. And when Innocent
urged him to crusade against the Moslim and recover Jerusalem he was
equally ready to promise and equally slack in his performance.
Having secured the imperial crown Frederick II stayed in Sicily, which
he greatly preferred to Germany as a residence, and did nothing to
redeem any of his promises to Innocent III, who died baffled in 1216.
Honorius III, who succeeded Innocent, could do no better with
Frederick, and Gregory IX (1227) came to the papal throne evidently
resolved to settle accounts with this young man at any cost. He
excommunicated him. Frederick II was denied all the comforts of
religion. In the half-Arab Court of Sicily this produced singularly
little discomfort. And also the Pope addressed a public letter to the
Emperor reciting his vices (which were indisputable), his heresies, and
his general misconduct. To this Frederick replied in a document of
diabolical ability. It was addressed to all the princes of Europe, and
it made the first clear statement of the issue between the Pope and the
princes. He made a shattering attack upon the manifest ambition of the
Pope to become the absolute ruler of all Europe. He suggested a union
of princes against this usurpation. He directed the attention of the
princes specifically to the wealth of the church.
Having fired off this deadly missile Frederick resolved to perform his
twelve-year-old promise and go upon a crusade. This was the Sixth
Crusade (1228). It was as a crusade, farcical. Frederick II went to
Egypt and met and discussed affairs with the Sultan. These two
gentlemen, both of sceptical opinions, exchanged congenial views, made
a commercial convention to their mutual advantage, and agreed to
transfer Jerusalem to Frederick. This indeed was a new sort of
crusade, a crusade by private treaty. Here was no blood splashing the
conqueror, no “weeping with excess of joy.” As this astonishing
crusader was an excommunicated man, he had to be content with a purely
secular coronation as King of Jerusalem, taking the crown from the
altar with his own hand—for all the clergy were bound to shun him. He
then returned to Italy, chased the papal armies which had invaded his
dominions back to their own territories, and obliged the Pope to grant
him absolution from his excommunication. So a prince might treat the
Pope in the thirteenth century, and there was now no storm of popular
indignation to avenge him. Those days were past.
In 1239 Gregory IX resumed his struggle with Frederick, excommunicated
him for a second time, and renewed that warfare of public abuse in
which the papacy had already suffered severely. The controversy was
revived after Gregory IX was dead, when Innocent IV was Pope; and again
a devastating letter, which men were bound to remember, was written by
Frederick against the church. He denounced the pride and irreligion of
the clergy, and ascribed all the corruptions of the time to their pride
and wealth. He proposed to his fellow princes a general confiscation
of church property—for the good of the church. It was a suggestion
that never afterwards left the imagination of the European princes.
We will not go on to tell of his last years. The particular events of
his life are far less significant than its general atmosphere. It is
possible to piece together something of his court life in Sicily. He
was luxurious in his way of living, and fond of beautiful things. He
is described as licentious. But it is clear that he was a man of very
effectual curiosity and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem as well
as Christian philosophers at his court, and he did much to irrigate the
Italian mind with Saracenic influences. Through him the Arabic
numerals and algebra were introduced to Christian students, and among
other philosophers at his court was Michael Scott, who translated
portions of Aristotle and the commentaries thereon of the great Arab
philosopher Averroes (of Cordoba). In 1224 Frederick founded the
University of Naples, and he enlarged and enriched the great medical
school at Salerno University. He also founded a zoological garden. He
left a book on hawking, which shows him to have been an acute observer
of the habits of birds, and he was one of the first Italians to write
Italian verse. Italian poetry was indeed born at his court. He has
been called by an able writer, “the first of the moderns,” and the
phrase expresses aptly the unprejudiced detachment of his intellectual
side.
A still more striking intimation of the decay of the living and
sustaining forces of the papacy appeared when presently the Popes came
into conflict with the growing power of the French King. During the
lifetime of the Emperor Frederick II, Germany fell into disunion, and
the French King began to play the rôle of guard, supporter and rival to
the Pope that had hitherto fallen to the Hohenstaufen Emperors. A
series of Popes pursued the policy of supporting the French monarchs.
French princes were established in the kingdom of Sicily and Naples,
with the support and approval of Rome, and the French Kings saw before
them the possibility of restoring and ruling the Empire of Charlemagne.
When, however, the German interregnum after the death of Frederick II,
the last of the Hohenstaufens, came to all end and Rudolf of Habsburg
was elected first Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of Rome began to
fluctuate between France and Germany, veering about with the sympathies
of each successive Pope. In the East in 1261 the Greeks recaptured
Constantinople from the Latin emperors, and the founder of the new
Greek dynasty, Michael Palæologus, Michael VIII, after some unreal
tentatives of reconciliation with the Pope, broke away from the Roman
communion altogether, and with that, and the fall of the Latin kingdoms
in Asia, the eastward ascendancy of the Popes came to an end.
In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian, hostile to the
French, and full of a sense of the great traditions and mission of
Rome. For a time he carried things with a high hand. In 1300 he held
a jubilee, and a vast multitude of pilgrims assembled in Rome. “So
great was the influx of money into the papal treasury, that two
assistants were kept busy with the rakes collecting the offerings that
were deposited at the tomb of St. Peter.” [1] But this festival was a
delusive triumph. Boniface came into conflict with the French King in
1302, and in 1303, as he was about to pronounce sentence of
excommunication against that monarch, he was surprised and arrested in
his own ancestral palace at Anagni, by Guillaume de Nogaret. This
agent from the French King forced an entrance into the palace, made his
way into the bedroom of the frightened Pope—he was lying in bed with a
cross in his hands—and heaped threats and insults upon him. The Pope
was liberated a day or so later by the townspeople, and returned to
Rome; but there he was seized upon and again made prisoner by the
Orsini family, and in a few weeks’ time the shocked and disillusioned
old man died a prisoner in their hands.
This series is from casts in the Victoria and Albert Museum of the
original brass statuettes in the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam
The people of Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose against
Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni was the Pope’s native
town. The important point to note is that the French King in this
rough treatment of the head of Christendom was acting with the full
approval of his people; he had summoned a council of the Three Estates
of France (lords, church and commons) and gained their consent before
proceeding to extremities. Neither in Italy, Germany nor England was
there the slightest general manifestation of disapproval at this free
handling of the sovereign pontiff. The idea of Christendom had decayed
until its power over the minds of men had gone.
Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing to recover its
moral sway. The next Pope elected, Clement V, was a Frenchman, the
choice of King Philip of France. He never came to Rome. He set up his
court in the town of Avignon, which then belonged not to France but to
the papal See, though embedded in French territory, and there his
successors remained until 1377, when Pope Gregory XI returned to the
Vatican palace in Rome. But Gregory XI did not take the sympathies of
the whole church with him. Many of the cardinals were of French origin
and their habits and associations were rooted deep at Avignon. When in
1378 Gregory XI died, and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected, these
dissentient cardinals declared the election invalid, and elected
another Pope, the anti-Pope, Clement VII. This split is called the
Great Schism. The Popes remained in Rome, and all the anti-French
powers, the Emperor, the King of England, Hungary, Poland and the North
of Europe were loyal to them. The anti-Popes, on the other hand,
continued in Avignon, and were supported by the King of France, his
ally the King of Scotland, Spain, Portugal and various German princes.
Each Pope excommunicated and cursed the adherents of his rival
(1378-1417).
Is it any wonder that presently all over Europe people began to think
for themselves in matters of religion?
The beginnings of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, which we have
noted in the preceding chapters, were but two among many of the new
forces that were arising in Christendom, either to hold or shatter the
church as its own wisdom might decide. Those two orders the church did
assimilate and use, though with a little violence in the case of the
former. But other forces were more frankly disobedient and critical.
A century and a half later came Wycliffe (1320-1384). He was a learned
Doctor at Oxford. Quite late in his life he began a series of
outspoken criticisms of the corruption of the clergy and the unwisdom
of the church. He organized a number of poor priests, the Wycliffites,
to spread his ideas throughout England; and in order that people should
judge between the church and himself, he translated the Bible into
English. He was a more learned and far abler man than either St.
Francis or St. Dominic. He had supporters in high places and a great
following among the people; and though Rome raged against him, and
ordered his imprisonment, he died a free man. But the black and
ancient spirit that was leading the Catholic Church to its destruction
would not let his bones rest in the grave. By a decree of the Council
of Constance in 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burnt,
an order which was carried out at the command of Pope Martin V by
Bishop Fleming in 1428. This desecration was not the act of some
isolated fanatic; it was the official act of the church.