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EUROPE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT SCHISM.
XIVTH CENTURY
by
EUSTACE J. KITTS
I
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
By our forefathers
the whole world was divided into Christendom and Heathenness, and when
Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christendom
practically meant the whole of that Empire as distinct from the rest of the
world. The Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire were thus two different
phrases, signifying the same body of people, viewed from their spiritual or
their temporal side. In 327 Constantine the Great moved the seat of Empire to
Byzantium, which we call Constantinople, but which was then called Rome, which
is still called Rome to this day by Mussulmans all
the world over. The Rome on the Bosporus instead of the Rome on the Tiber, the
eastern Rome instead of the western Rome, became the seat of Empire, and it
remained the sole seat until the death of Theodosius. Then the Empire was
divided; Arcadius received the Eastern and Honorius the Western provinces. In
476 the last Emperor of the Western provinces, Romulus Augustulus,
was deposed; the Senate sent the regalia to the Emperor Zeno at Rome on the
Bosporus, and informed him that they no longer required a separate royalty,
that Zeno himself would suffice as sole Emperor for both ends of the earth.
Thus the Western provinces were reunited with the Eastern, and there was again
a single undivided Roman Empire. This continued until the end of the eighth
century, when a wonderful change occurred. The Emperor Constantine the Sixth was
in 797 blinded and deposed by his mother Irene, who aspired to seat herself on
the imperial throne. There had before this been female regents who had ruled
while their sons or wards were minors, and even after : Theodora had been
crowned Empress when her husband, Justinian, was crowned Emperor; but no woman
had ever reigned alone, and in her own right, as Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empire. In 799 Charles the Great, Charlemagne, the Teuton King of the Franks, was called upon to aid Pope Leo the Third, who had been
brutally assaulted in a procession, and had been left for dead after his
enemies had, as they thought, deprived him of sight and speech. Charles had
already delivered Italy from the Lombards; he now came to Rome for the fourth
time, the charges against the Pope were heard and his innocence pronounced in
full synod, and on Christmas Day Charles, robed in the chlamys and sandals of a Roman patrician, heard Mass in the Church of Saint Peter.
After the celebration of the holy mysteries, Leo suddenly placed a precious
crown on his head, and the dome resounded with the acclamations of the people,
“Long life and victory to Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned by God the
great and pacific Emperor of the Romans”. In that shout, says Mr. Bryce,
“echoed by the Franks without, was pronounced the union, so long in
preparation, so mighty in its consequences, of the Roman and the Teuton, of the memories and the civilization of the South
with the fresh energy of the North, and from that moment modern history begins”.
The throne at
Constantinople was vacant through the death of the Emperor without male
successor; Charles was therefore regarded as sole Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empire. His dominion was so wide, his conquests so extensive, that in his day
it was almost as it had been in the earlier days of the Empire—to be a Roman
was to be a Christian, and to be a Christian was to be a Roman. The successors
of Constantine at the Rome on the Bosporus were looked upon as nothing more
than mere kings of Greece; and if the continued existence of the Eastern Empire
be granted, it virtually came to an end with the Fourth Crusade, for the Paleologi were feeble representatives even of the Comneni, and their Byzantine Empire was a mere shadow of
the old Empire of the East. The Holy Roman Empire, as a mighty all-embracing
monarchy in which the rule of one man was felt and acknowledged to the ends of
the civilized world, was the Empire of Charles and his successors who were
crowned at Rome. The terms of the union between Pope Leo and the Emperor
Charles were not set forth in words, but they were well known; they were that
the Pope should rule the souls, and the Emperor the bodies, of their common
subjects in righteousness, the rulers acting together in harmony, to the end
that all men might inherit eternal life. It was a noble theory, but impossible
of realization in practice. It required a complete accord of the papal and
imperial powers; and this accord was attained under Charles and Pope Leo the
Third, under Otto the Third and Popes Gregory the Fifth and Sylvester the
Second, under Henry the Third, but certainly never thenceforth.
The Emperors came to
Rome merely to be crowned with the golden crown; the Popes resided in Rome;
theirs was the enduring power in Italy. At first simply the Bishop of Rome,
then the sole Patriarch of the West, the Pope had gradually attained to be
acknowledged as the spiritual head of Christendom. The Emperor being the
temporal head, it was natural that the relation of the two powers should come
to be defined. About the middle of the eighth century there appeared the
document known as the Donation of Constantine, which was probably composed by
one of the priests attached to the Church of the Lateran. This set forth that
Constantine, on being baptized by Pope Sylvester, had in his gratitude
conferred on the Pope and his successors Rome, Italy, and the Western
provinces—that is Lombardy, Venice, and Istria—in order that the lamps of the
Roman churches might be supplied with oil. After the death of Charles the Great
his dominions were divided among his heirs, and their discord and wars speedily
enfeebled the might of the Empire. The strength of the Church was meantime
growing owing to the fact that the bishops had hitherto been the main supports
of civil and orderly government. A clerical tribunal, an irregular convention
of certain Bishops of the Gauls, assembled without proper sanction, deposed
Louis the Pious in 833; bishops and clergy, convened in Council at
Aix-la-Chapelle, pronounced that the throne of Lothair was vacant in 842. From 858 to 867 there reigned at Rome Pope Nicholas the
First, the greatest of the Popes since Gregory the Great. He took up the work,
afterwards consummated by Hildebrand, of welding the Church into one vast
monarchy subject to the Pope and independent of the civil powers. He insisted
on the right of appeal to Rome against the decrees of metropolitans; he put
forward this claim, not only in the interest of the clergy, but in order that
those of every condition might have recourse to the Roman Church as to their
universal Mother, seeking from her the safety of their bodies and their souls.
He upheld the primacy of the Papacy against the Emperor and the Patriarch at
Constantinople. He interfered on the ground of morality in the divorce of Lothair. He insisted, in the matter of the Bishop Rothade, that the rights of the Church could not be
invalidated by the decrees of Emperors. He corresponded with the three sons of
Louis the Pious in their separate kingdoms, with Salomon of Brittany, with the
King of the Bulgarians, with the King of Denmark, with the Emperor at
Constantinople. He led the way to Pope Gregory the Seventh. Shortly before his
pontificate there burst forth on Christendom that wonderful forgery known as
the Decretals of Isidore.
It was an age of forgery, but Nicholas himself made no use of the false Decretals; they were introduced at Rome in the pontificate
of John the Eighth (872-882), and thenceforward they formed the armoury from which the Popes drew their arms to enforce the
theory of the papal sovereignty. This knavery, says Dollinger,
brought about slowly and gradually the complete transformation of the
constitution and government of the Church.
The Carolingian line
of Emperors ended with Charles the Fat, who died in 888. Then followed certain
phantom Emperors in Italy, the last of whom was Berengar,
who died in 924. Meantime war and confusion reigned everywhere. The Papacy was
disgraced by the Reign of the Harlots; it had lost all authority within Italy;
it had lost all respect without; it looked as if the Church Universal were
about to split up into a number of merely national churches. The Empire was in
suspense; everything demanded its revival. In a time of disintegration,
confusion, strife, all the longings of every wiser and better soul for unity,
for peace and law, for some bond to bring Christian men and Christian states
together against the common enemy of the faith, were but so many cries for the
restoration of the Roman Empire. In Germany, Henry the Fowler had been
succeeded by his son Otto the Great; and the golden crown was now offered by
the Pope to Otto if he would revisit and pacify Italy. He descended from the
Alps with an immense army, marched to Pavia, where he was acknowledged King of
Italy, and on the 2nd February 962 was crowned Emperor in the Church of Saint
John Lateran by Pope John the Twelfth. His Empire was not so vast as that of
Charles the Great; it included Germany and two-thirds of Italy, Lorraine and
Burgundy, Bohemia and Moravia, Poland and Denmark, perhaps Hungary: there were
important differences in its inner structure and character; that kingdom of
France, which had its centre at Paris, no longer
acknowledged its sway, nor did England. Otto must therefore be considered, not
as the successor of Charlemagne, but as the second founder of the Empire, of
that Empire which denotes the sovereignty of Germany and Italy vested in a
Germanic prince. During the century which succeeded the coronation of Otto the
Great the Empire attained the zenith of its power, and held itself highest with
regard to Rome.
It was the Age of
Feudalism. Before the second half of the thirteenth century there was no
political thought; but Rome had taught men to believe in a World-Empire, and
Christianity had taught men to believe in a World-Religion; and these two being
allied and conterminous, their alliance and interdependence was assumed to be
necessary and eternal. The clergy and the realist philosophers alike believed
in one universal temporal State and one visible catholic Church. The underlying
notion of that portentous fabrication, the Donation of Constantine, is that the
Pope must in every point represent his prototype the Emperor; the spiritual
power was to imitate and rival the temporal, which was its necessary complement;
hence the part which the Holy See played in transferring the crown to Charles,
the first sovereign of the West capable of fulfilling its duties; hence the
grief with which its weakness under his successors was seen, the gladness when
it descended to Otto as representative of the Frankish kingdom.
The relation of the
papal and the imperial powers is represented at this time under the emblem of
the soul and the body. Just as God ruled over blessed spirits, so did the Pope
rule over the souls of men; just as God was Lord of Earth as well as of Heaven,
so was he represented in temporal matters by the Emperor; “le Pape et l’Empereur, les deux moitiés de Dieu”. It was this belief in the necessary existence of a
conterminous world-empire and world-religion which made the earlier crusades so
popular and universal; it was its decadence which rendered the later crusades
so petty and abortive. When Otto the Great was crowned he promised to protect
the Church against all her enemies, and the Pope and the people of Rome in
their turn took an oath of allegiance to him and covenanted not to elect any
future pontiff without his sanction. The Saxon and Franconian Emperors thenceforward either nominated the Popes or approved their election;
they exercised the right of deposition and of trial of the Head of the Church.
They did more; they set to work to cleanse the Augean stable : Pope John the
Twelfth, ‘the apostate’, was deposed; Pope Benedict the Ninth, who led a life
foul, shameful, and execrable, was degraded; German Popes were appointed. The
Papacy was reformed. But the reformed Papacy proved mightier than the Empire; a
change in their relative positions ensued. If the might of the Empire was at
its zenith during the reigns of the Saxon and Franconian Emperors, the moral glory and influence of the Papacy were at their height
during the reigns of the greatest and grandest, the most high-minded and
politic Popes, from the days of Hildebrand to the pontificate of Innocent the
Third.
Hildebrand himself
has been well described as the man in whom were summed up all the grandeur and
audacity of the Papacy. From his early days he was imbued with the notion that
on the Pope, as the successor of Saint Peter and the representative of the
Deity in this world, was conferred the mission of directing humanity; Christ
had commanded Peter to feed His sheep, and Gregory took the command to himself.
The clergy were sunk in moral degradation; they were stained with simony and concubinage; the Church was in the hands of the German
Emperors. Gregory’s life-work was to elevate the clergy, to make them fit to be
the guides and rulers of mankind, and to free the Church entirely from lay
control. The task was so great that for long he shrank from undertaking it
himself. He had left Rome with Gregory the Sixth in 1047, he returned two years
later with Leo the Ninth; from the pontificate of Victor the Second (1054-1057)
onwards, his was the ruling spirit at Rome. It was he who recommended Victor to
the Emperor; Victor’s successor, Stephen the Tenth, was elected at Rome without
the participation of Germany. When Stephen died, Hildebrand assembled the
cardinals and the principal Romans and elected Nicholas the Second; the
election was notified to the Empress, but one of the first acts of the new pontificate
was the Bull which provided that in future the Pope should be elected by the
College of Cardinals—a deadly blow to the influence of the Emperors. The next
Pope, Alexander the Second, was elected without any reference to Germany. The
Emperors henceforth lost all authority in the election of Popes. All this time
Hildebrand had stood in the background; he was the man behind the papal throne
: his influence was universally acknowledged. When Alexander was Pope, Peter Damiani indited to Hildebrand the
well-known couplet—
Papam rite colo, sed te prostratus adoro;
Tu facis hunc Dominum, te facit ipse Deum.
On the death of
Alexander, Hildebrand in his own despite was raised to the chair of Saint
Peter; two days later he was prostrate with trouble and anguish at his
elevation.
Pope Gregory the
Seventh lost no time in rising to the height of his great mission. Filled with
a fiery zeal, he waged unceasingly a holy war for papal supremacy. He aimed to
subdue the civil world to the clergy, the clergy to the Papacy, to transform
the whole of Europe into one vast theocracy. The bishops were to be his
faithful henchmen; he would have no bishop whom he did not know and trust; he
did not abrogate the old custom that a bishop should be chosen from the diocese
by the clergy and people, but where a fitting man could not be so found, he was
ready to recommend an outsider. Almost his first public act, in a synod at
Rome, was a declaration of war against simony and the marriage of the clergy.
In some countries, certainly in England, in Germany, and in Italy, the majority
of the clergy were then married, and the clergy were as a consequence fast
degenerating into a closed caste. It was a choice of evils : on the one side
was the temptation to illicit connections; on the other, the hereditary
succession and the degeneracy of the order. Gregory’s action stirred up strife
in the Church and widespread discontent; but he was firm; he stood on the old
ways, the weight of authority was on his side. Not that this would have
mattered, when once he was satisfied as to his own righteousness; if he unto
himself was true, he was ready to use forged decretal or papal letter to explain and impress his meaning on others. He was persuaded
that the power of the Pope was ordained of God, that the civil powers took
their origin from evil; that it was his mission, therefore, to see that the
kings of the earth ruled in righteousness. He sent his legates into every
country of Europe; he exacted passive obedience from them toward himself,
passive obedience from the clergy toward them. Before he had been two years
Pope he excommunicated Italian dukes, he sent an embassy demanding
unquestioning obedience from the Emperor in Germany, he threatened to
excommunicate the King of France. His quarrel with Henry the Fourth led that
monarch to the Humiliation of Canossa (1077); it brought about the long, weary
strife of the Investitures. At the synod of Rome, held in Lent 1075, the Pope
abrogated the right of the investiture of bishops and abbots by the temporal
sovereign; their endowments were to be withdrawn from the nation to the Church;
the Pope was to become liege lord of one half the world. The dispute was not
settled until long after Pope Gregory had closed his weary eyes, an exile from
Rome at Salerno; he had fought valiantly for the Church, but was not conscious
of victory. “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in
exile”, were the last words of Hildebrand.
Nevertheless the
Empire had been abased, the Papacy had been exalted; for three days in the snow
had the supreme Lord of the Holy Roman Empire awaited the beck of the
carpenter’s son. Literary proofs to support the Pope’s pretensions were now
forthcoming; not merely the False Decretals, but the Dictatus Papae, the
works of Anselm of Lucca and of Cardinal Dieudonne,
the Liber ad Amicum of Bonizo,
followed later by the Polycarpus of Gregory of Pavia,
all upheld the doctrine of papal supremacy. The Donation of Constantine had
been supplemented by the Donation of Charlemagne. All these falsifications were
subsequently (1142) adopted by Gratian and were embodied in his Decretum, or more
accurately the Concordantia discordantium Canonum, which swept all its predecessors out of the
field and soon won something of the authority that belonged to a definite
codification of previous ecclesiastical jurisprudence. The Pope’s claim to the
supreme power over king or emperor, power even to depose him if circumstances
required, could not, however, have been set forth in more uncompromising terms
than were used by Gregory himself to Bishop Hermann of Metz. But Pope Gregory
the Seventh, being a politic statesman, was careful how he practised what he preached. The strife as to investitures continued after both he and
Henry were dead. The Emperor died excommunicated, and his successor proposed
(1111) to resign the right of investiture, provided the bishops and abbots
resigned their temporalities. The Pope, Paschal the Second, consented, but the
prelates themselves would by no means agree to such a course. Rome was
besieged, the Pope yielded the right of investiture, but the Lateran Council
went back on his concession, and the Council of Vienne excommunicated the
Emperor. Finally the dispute was settled in 1122 by the Concordat of Worms :
bishops and abbots were to be elected freely in the presence of the Emperor or
his commissioners; the right of investiture by the ring and pastoral staff was
to be performed by the Pope, but they were to receive their temporalities from
the Emperor by the touch of the scepter. They were to obey the Pope in matters
spiritual, and they were faithfully to discharge to the Emperor all duties
incident to their principalities. The Pope had been constrained to abandon his
contention to make the Church absolutely independent both as to election and as
to the possession of vast feudal rights without the obligations of feudal
obedience to the Empire.
In the second half of
the twelfth century, with the advent of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, the strife
between the Empire and the Papacy entered on a new phase. Frederic Barbarossa
was to the Empire what Hildebrand and Innocent were to the popedom.
He was assured that his temporal superiority obtained over all other powers,
even over that of the Pope. His power was of God alone; to assert that it is bestowed
by the successor of Saint Peter was a lie, and directly contrary to the
doctrine of Saint Peter. To him, as Freeman says, the rights of the Roman
Empire were a sacred cause, in whose behalf he was ready to spend and be spent.
For thirty years out of the thirty-eight of his reign he was fighting to
maintain his rights as King of Italy against the municipalities of Lombardy,
which were fast growing into sovereign commonwealths. He was defeated at the
battle of Legano (1176); he was obliged to make the
peace of Constance (1183), whereby, although the supremacy of the Empire was
nominally saved, still the Lombard republics practically became self-governing
city-states. In 1159 two Popes had been elected, and the Emperor convened a
council at Pavia to decide between rival claims; but Alexander the Third
declined to acknowledge the authority. “No one”, said he, “has the right to
judge me, since I am the supreme judge of all the world”. Thus began the
warfare between the Hohenstaufen and the Papacy which, one way and another, lasted
for more than a century.
Frederic Barbarossa
made his peace with the Pope at Venice just one hundred years after the
Humiliation of Canossa; he took the lead in the Third Crusade, and was drowned
in a little river in Cilicia. He was succeeded by his son Henry the Sixth,
whose overlordship Richard of the Lion Heart was
constrained to acknowledge as he lay a prisoner in the Castle of Trifels. After his death the majority of the electors chose
his brother, Philip of Swabia, but the minority chose Otto of Brunswick (1197).
The next year was marked by the advent to the papal throne of that Pope whose
pontificate marks the culminating point of theocratic power. Innocent the
Third, elected when he was thirty-eight years of age, reigned for eighteen
years : a consummate lawyer, both in the civil and the canon law; well read,
and possessing an excellent memory; prudent and methodical, persevering and
laborious, he brought the Papacy to the apogee of absolute power. He expected
that the disputed election would be referred to him for his decision: it was
not referred. Innocent therefore determined to interfere, and he pronounced for
Otto of Brunswick, but it was not until the dastardly assassination of Philip
of Swabia in 1208 that the Pope’s nominee obtained the throne, and then he soon quarrelled with the Pope. In 1212 Innocent accepted
Frederic, the grandson of Barbarossa, as Emperor; two years later Otto was
defeated at the battle of Bouvines, and Frederic was
thenceforth undisputed King of the Romans. The Pope had triumphed for the
moment. But the turning-point had been reached. The King of France drew a sharp
line of distinction between matters spiritual and matters temporal. In his
relations to his vassals, in his relations to other kings, he would admit no
superiority in the Holy See. The crusaders in the Fourth Crusade were equally
deaf to the instructions of the Pope; they turned their arms against a
Christian city; they besieged Constantinople itself for the benefit of the
Venetians. The Pope tried to start another crusade, but he preached to deaf
ears. His letters are measured and circumspect, never imperious.
In spite, however, of
this divergence in political ideas, in spite of the divergence in religious
ideas which he tried to combat in his crusade against the Albigenses,
Innocent pushed the doctrine of papal supremacy to its height. The old symbol
of the soul and the body, to exemplify the relationship of the spiritual and
temporal powers, was replaced by that of the sun and the moon; the Pope was the
greater orb, the Emperor was the less. Their authority was exemplified by a
reference to the two swords. When the Son of God came down on earth to save
sinful man and to establish His own rule over the kingdoms of the world, He
entered, as the time for redemption drew nigh, the garden which is beyond the
brook Kedron, and told His disciples that he among
them who had not a sword should sell his coat and buy one; to which they
answered that they had already two swords. And the Lord answered that the two
swords were enough. These two swords are the emblems of spiritual and temporal
authority. Both alike belong to the Pope as the successor of Saint Peter : he
wields the one sword himself; the second sword is wielded by the temporal
authorities for the Church and under the direction of the Pope.
Under Innocent the
Third also the famous fiction of the Translation of the Empire was put into
authentic form by the decree Venerabilem. It was alleged that the Empire of Charles the
Great was the continuation of that universal Empire whose seat Constantine had
established at Byzantium, which had become vacant by the succession of the
woman Irene, which had reverted therefore to its rightful seat, its title
devolving on Charles. The Empire had been transferred from the Greeks to the
Franks by the official act of Pope Leo the Third, so that the event of the year
800 was nothing less than a supreme example of the power inherent in the
successor of Saint Peter to displace and create Empires.
Frederic the Second,
the most wonderful man of his own or perhaps of any age, Stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis, as
Matthew Paris styled him, the mightiest and most dangerous adversary that the
Papacy ever had, as he is described by Freeman, was when eighteen years of age
crowned King of the Romans in 1212, and had taken the Cross; on the 22nd
November 1220 he was crowned Emperor by Pope Honorius the Third at Saint
Peter’s, and again received the Cross from the hands of Cardinal Ugolino. By his fathers marriage
with Constance of Sicily, Frederic was King of Lower Italy and Sicily, but
political affairs prevented him from fulfilling his vow before the death of
Honorius in 1227. Then Cardinal Ugolino, eighty years
of age, became Pope, and took the style of Gregory the Ninth. The Papacy was
then at the height of its power; it was, in the words of Hallam,
the noonday of papal dominion. The Pope was backed by the league of Lombardy,
the Templars and Hospitallers were his sworn
champions in the battlefield, the Dominicans and Franciscans were his powerful
adherents in peace. Gregory had all the fire, the energy, the ambition of
youth; he was a skilled canon lawyer; he knew men and manners; his heart was
set on recovering Jerusalem from the Mussulman; he
would abate none of the pretensions of Innocent the Third. The Emperor was in
character, in aim, in object the exact opposite of his grandfather. Frederic
Barbarossa had exhibited the ordinary character of his time in its very noblest
shape; but it was still only the ordinary character of the time. Frederic the
Second was in every point extraordinary. A sensualist, yet also a warrior and a
politician; a profound lawgiver and an impassioned poet; in his youth fired by
crusading fervour, in later life persecuting heretics
while himself accused of blasphemy and unbelief; of winning manners and
ardently beloved by his followers, but with the stain of more than one cruel
deed upon his name, he was the marvel of his own generation, and succeeding
ages looked back with awe, not unmingled with pity, upon the inscrutable figure
of the last Emperor who had braved all the terrors of the Church and died
beneath her ban, the last who had ruled from the sands of the ocean to the
shores of the Ionian Sea. Between such an Emperor and such a Pope there was
bound to be war to the knife. The fight was for supremacy. Like Constantius, the son of Constantine the Great; like
Justinian, like the Emperors of the East, the new Emperor would have the Church
obedient to the Empire. Frederic was determined to have the Pope his inferior;
he was ready, if need were, himself to ordain a much better rule of life and
belief to all the nations. He had the credit for being a freethinker and a
misbeliever; his jests scandalized the world; he described Moses, Christ, and
Muhammad as the three great impostors; he said that if God had seen fertile,
smiling Sicily, He would never have given the barren land of Judaea to His
chosen people. Pope Gregory excommunicated the Emperor for not going on
crusade; he excommunicated him again when he went, he excommunicated him again
when he returned. Frederic went; he won Jerusalem for the Christians, he was
obliged himself to put the crown on his own head in the Holy City, for no
priest would officiate. His offence was that he had won by diplomacy what
others had been unable to win by arms; he had made terms with the misbeliever,
and was suspected of being a misbeliever himself. After his return from the
Holy Land he managed to make terms with the Pope; there was a hollow peace
between Gregory and Frederic for nine years (1230-1239). Then war broke out
again; the Empire and the Papacy met in implacable strife; the Pope
excommunicated the Emperor; the Emperor called on all the sovereigns of
Christendom to make a league against the oppression of the Pope and the
hierarchy. Pope Gregory the Ninth died in 1241; and Frederic addressed a
circular letter to the sovereigns of Europe, informing them that the Pope had
been taken away from this world, and had so escaped the vengeance of the Emperor,
of whom he was the implacable enemy. Innocent the Fourth was obliged to flee to
France, and held at Lyons, 1245, the Council at which the Emperor was declared
deposed; but in spite of all attempts to raise Germany against him, Frederic
reigned on undisturbed until his death in 1250.
He was succeeded by
his son Conrad in Germany, by his illegitimate son Manfred in Sicily. Still the
war between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufen continued. At length Pope Urban the
Fourth conceived the idea of a league between the Papacy, France, and Naples:
he offered the kingdom of Naples in the first instance to Louis the Ninth; it
was accepted by the King’s brother, Charles of Anjou. The triple alliance
succeeded; Charles of Anjou came and conquered; Conradin,
the last of the Hohenstaufen, the grandson of the Great Emperor, was defeated
at Tagliacozzo, and was executed in the market-place
at Naples. Thus fell the Hohenstaufen before the Popes. The Holy Roman Empire
might, and so far as its practical utility was concerned ought, now to have
been suffered to expire; nor could it have ended more worthily than with the
last of the Hohenstaufen But it was not so to be. After the fall of the Hohenstaufens the prostrate Empire recognized in principle
the supremacy of the Pope; the Habsburgers confirmed
the theory that the Pope was the light-giving sun, the Emperor only the pallid
moon or lesser light. As the Popes had formerly sent their decrees of election
for examination to the Emperor, so the Emperors now sent their decrees of election
to the Popes, implored the latter to ratify them and to award them the crown of
Charles the Great, which they patiently submitted to receive as a favor from
the Pope after he had examined them in person. The triumph of the Church was
consequently complete. The Imperial power lay at the
feet of the Popes, who, after a memorable trial of more than two hundred years,
had scored one of the greatest victories known to history.
After the ruin of the
greatest of the German houses, there came the Kaiserless time, the Great Interregnum, during which there was no king in Germany, and the
election was disputed between Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso of Castile.
Anarchy everywhere prevailed; the great lords, spiritual and temporal, to whom
Frederic had granted extensive charters, made war openly to increase their
domains; the commercial leagues and the cities, on whose rising fortune he had
looked coldly, were forced to protect themselves; the rivers and the highways
were infested with robber-knights. With the accession of Rudolf of Habsburg in
1273 the Empire entered on the third stage of its existence : it was shattered,
crippled, degraded; but it still remained in the eyes of all a necessary part
of the world’s order; and it had furthermore become indissolubly connected with
the German kingdom. It had been mighty as a fact, it was still mighty as an
idea; it was to inspire Dante and Petrarch; kings were still to cross the Alps
to take the iron crown of Lombardy and the golden crown of Empire. But the
kingdom of Germany was henceforth terribly overweighed by the burden of the
Holy Roman Empire.
The Papacy meantime
enjoyed the noonday of its triumph. Gregory the Ninth had affirmed that the
Pope was sovereign master of all in the world, and of all their possessions;
whatever he might have delegated to emperor or king, his proprietary right
remained intact. Innocent the Fourth pointed out that the Donation of
Constantine was merely a restitution of what had formerly been given him, that
Christ had transmitted to Saint Peter the empire of this world when He bestowed
on him the two massy keys of metals twain. Boniface the Eighth, in the Bull Unam Sanctam (1302), again derived the omnipotence of the Pope from the giving of the two
swords, one to be used by the Church, the other under its orders, and declared
that whosoever did not believe that every human creature was subject to the
Pope would be damned everlastingly. It was this same Pope who showed himself to
the crowding pilgrims at the jubilee of AD 1300, seated on the throne of
Constantine, arrayed with sword and crown and scepter, shouting aloud, “I am
Caesar! I am Emperor!”
These far-reaching
claims to temporal overlordship at the expense of the
temporal powers were for the time successful. Gregory the Seventh had claimed
that the Church was entirely free from all bonds of the State, and that the
civil power needed not only the assistance, but also the authority, of the
Church. Up to the end of the thirteenth century this theory remained
practically unquestioned. It was upheld by John of Salisbury, by Saint Thomas
Aquinas. Under Gregory and Innocent the Papacy had won for itself the respect
of mankind by its moral superiority, by the fair and unimpassioned manner in
which it decided disputes among the lay powers of the earth, by its rectitude
of purpose and its nobility of principle. It had at this time no temporal power
to back its decisions; it rested for the enforcement of its orders on the moral
approbation and support of mankind. It was secure above all in the high character
of the Popes, in their political ability and discretion no less than in their
conscientiousness and virtue. When these qualities failed the Popes the hour of
danger came. The high claims of the Papacy required the best, the most
virtuous, the wisest of men to enforce them successfully; when lesser men came,
who failed to comprehend and to rise to the height of their great mission, then
the nature of their pretensions was questioned and disputed. Gregory and
Innocent, though the greatest of the Popes, had been alike politic and
circumspect; Gregory had given way to William the Conqueror; the Kings of
France had been invariably treated with deference. Both these Popes had
required the obedience of kings, but they sought not to abase them; they upheld
the royal dignity against all save themselves. But it was otherwise with their
successors, Boniface the Eighth and John the Twenty-second; they were men of
smaller political ability, who failed to read the signs of the times; they were
intoxicated with the sense of their own high position; they inherited the
pretensions of their predecessors, and rashly and unwisely resolved to push
them to their very uttermost limits.
On Christmas Eve,
1294, Benedict Gaetani became Pope Boniface the
Eighth; fourteen months later he was at war with the eldest son of the Church.
Philip the Fair had diverted to his war against England the tithes levied for
the crusade against Aragon. The Pope, on 24th February 1296, fulminated the decretal Clericis Laicos, forbidding the clergy to pay any taxes to the
civil power without previous permission of the Pope. Neither Philip of France
nor Edward of England paid the slightest attention to the decretal.
Philip retorted by forbidding the exportation of any money to Rome. Boniface
was at this time at strife with the Colonnas in Rome
and with the Aragonese in Sicily. He therefore agreed
with his adversary Philip quickly. But in 1301 a second cause of dispute arose,
the matter of the Bishop of Pamiers. The Pope sent a
fresh Bull, Ausculta Fili, to
Philip, which the King burned. Then the French clergy were summoned to Rome for
council. But the Popes had, by their excessive centralization and by their
favoring the regulars, utterly broken the power and cowed the spirit of the
secular clergy, and they with one accord began to excuse themselves. Philip,
beaten by the Flemish at the battle of Courtrai, hesitated a little, but then
plucked up spirit, and defended himself in his Responsiones. Boniface refused to
accept the King’s excuses, declared them frivolous, and threatened him with
pains spiritual and temporal. The direction of the matter was left by Philip to Nogaret. Boniface was at his birthplace, Agnani. Nogaret proceeded there,
and was joined by Sciarra Colonna and others. Then
followed the Outrage of Agnani, two centuries and a
quarter after the Humiliation of Canossa. Boniface died shortly after (11th
October 1303). Thus it was that the conqueror of the Empire fell beneath the
defiance of the French King, Philip the Fair, or more truly beneath the
irresistible opposition of a strong national spirit in the kingdoms of Europe.
Boniface was unable to see that the pretension to temporal lordship which he
put forward had outlived its time, that a spirit was born in the countries of
Western Europe which would no longer suffer the Pope’s dominion in matters
temporal. The Popes had pretended to spiritual and to temporal lordship; the
fourteenth century was to teach them that they had no temporal dominion over
the kingdoms of Europe; it was also to contest their spiritual claims. Nearly
all the literature hitherto had been on the side of the Papacy, exalting its
claims. Now the tide had turned. The claims of the Papacy were to be brought
low; the claims of the Empire were to be exalted.
The opposition to the
temporal claims of the Papacy naturally first became prominent in France during
the strife between Philip the Fair and Boniface the Eighth; there had been very
few jurists or political philosophers able to take up the cudgels in Germany
for the Hohenstaufen. But in the University of Paris intellectual life and
discussion were vigorous. Pierre du Bois, a royal advocate in the bailliage of Coutances, published
his treatise, the Quaestio de Potentate Papae,
and probably four other treatises also, about the year 1303; John of Paris
published his Tractatus de Potestate regia et papali at the same
time. Both writers start with the assumption that France forms no part of the
Empire, and hence they are able to treat their subjects in a philosophical
spirit. Their arguments are derived from the Bible and Aristotle, but passages
from the Bible which had previously been understood in a mystical sense are now
taken literally. In the Dispute between the Soldier and the Clerk, the former
relies on Christ’s words, “My kingdom is not of this world”. “Christ”, he says,
“ordained Peter to be priest and bishop, but never dubbed him knight nor
crowned him king”; he draws a sharp distinction between spiritual and temporal
matters; it is for the Pope to punish sins, for the king to punish crimes; for
the latter to enforce civil rights, for the former spiritual; the servants of
the Lord should take thought only for what is necessary, they should devote
their superfluities to good works; since the King has to take thought for the
general safety, he can tax the clergy as well as the laity; he can alter the
laws, customs, and privileges of his kingdom as necessity may require. Pierre
du Bois regarded the Papacy merely as a state, possessing no temporal authority
over France, as a state with which the French King could treat just as he
treated with any other state. John of Paris was no less outspoken. He admitted
that the Church might own property, but she held it not by virtue of any vicarship of apostolical succession, but simply by way of grant from princes or other persons, or by
similar titles of succession. He defines the temporal power as the rule by one
of many for the common good; the spiritual power he describes as that conferred
on the Church by Christ for the dispensation of the sacraments to the faithful.
It is necessary that there should be one spiritual authority over the whole
world, but it is not necessary that there should be one temporal power. As Head
of the Church the Pope has a limited control over the goods of the clergy, but
he has none over the goods of the laity, for Christ had none; if the
destruction of the swine be alleged, they were probably wild pigs, and at any
rate were not good for the Jews to eat. Christ only gave spiritual power to
Peter; He gave him no temporal power; if so, what was the good of the Donation
of Constantine? The Emperor possesses a temporal jurisdiction, the Pope a
spiritual. If the former falls into sin or unbelief, the Pope can warn him or
excommunicate him; if the Pope, on the other hand, practises usury, or otherwise breaks the temporal law of the Empire, the Emperor can warn
and punish him, as the examples of Constantine the Second and John the Twelfth
prove. The Pope possessed no temporal overlordship;
the delivery of the two swords to Peter, which the Papacy had always
interpreted in a literal sense, was taken by their opponents in a mystical or
figurative sense only, from which no argument could be drawn.
Rather earlier than
these works is that of Jordan of Osnabruck, probably about 1285, on the Holy
Roman Empire; rather later, about 1307-1310, is the work of the Abbot of Admont; then a year or two after this appeared Dante’s
well-known De Monarchia. These writers believed in a
world-monarchy as essential for the welfare of the world; they held the
existing Empire to be a continuation of that of Rome, and traced it back
through Aeneas the Trojan to the fourth great beast spoken of by Daniel the
Prophet. The Empire, therefore, dated from a time when Popes and Bishops were
unheard of; it was universal; other kingdoms—Spain, France, Hungary, and the
like—might be independent of it; but their position established no common law;
an Empire was necessary to fight the unbeliever. After Charles the Great had
restored to the Church the temporalities rent away by the Lombards, after he
had bestowed on it the Duchies of Benevento and Spoleto, Pope Hadrian, in a
Council at Rome, had formally acknowledged the King’s right to choose the Pope;
and Pope Leo the Third had adored Charles after he had been crowned Augustus
Imperator in 800. Christ’s promise to Peter, that whatsoever he bound on earth
to be bound in heaven, Dante refers entirely to the spiritual jurisdiction of
the Popes ; he rejects the simile of the sun and the moon, and also that of the
two swords.
Lupold of Bebenburg took up the theory of Dante, and pressed it to its limits. He began by showing
that Charles the Great was a Teuton, that France was
one of the countries subject to the Teuton Emperor,
and that the translation in the time of Otto was merely a renewal of that in
the time of Charles. The Empire had been transferred, not by the Pope, but by
the Roman people. The Donation of Constantine was a fiction; all that
Constantine had done was to choose a Pope, in order to be anointed by him, and
to appoint Rome for his dwelling, while he himself went to Byzantium; but he
divided the Empire, east and west, between his sons. The right to elect the
Emperor had been derived, not from the Church, but from the princes and people,
who had transferred it to the Electors in the time of Otto the Third. Their
election gave full right to the King; the Pope’s investigation, prior to
anointing and crowning, might in the case of a King who had committed sin and
refused to do penance, result in excommunication, and even in his consequent
deposition by the Electors. The anointing and crowning by the Pope was not
indeed an empty form, for it invested the Emperor with the rightful sway over
lands which he had not yet subdued; for the sway of the Emperor extended to the
whole world. It was unfortunate that these elaborate theories as to the
worldwide extension of the Empire should only have been perfected when the
Empire itself was in decadence. Dante’s book was an epitaph instead of a
prophecy : so, too, were the works of Lupold of Bebenburg.
After the Outrage of Agnani, and the short pontificate of Benedict the Eleventh,
the new Pope, Clement the Fifth, was elected on the 5th June 1305. He was a
Frenchman, Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux; he was crowned at Lyons,
and never set foot in Italy. Now followed the Babylonish Captivity at the “sinful city of Avignon”; for seventy years the Popes dwelt in
the wide windy plain between the Alps and Cevennes; they steadily lost their
prestige in the eyes of Europe, and were regarded as the obedient henchmen of
the French King. Seven Popes in succession were Frenchmen; all, without
exception, were more or less dependent on France. Several of them were
excellent administrators; they also pushed missionary effort in the East, and
endeavored thus to enlarge the borders of Christendom. But their situation
damaged them in the eyes of other countries; the College of Cardinals became preponderatingly French; the Curia was largely officered by
Frenchmen; the Pope was compromised in the eyes of the world; he was no longer
regarded as the impartial judge, as the supreme Father of Christendom, to whom
kings and litigants might look for arbitration and justice. There arose a
feeling of antagonism to the Papacy which had thus become of one nation. If the
long strife between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen had shaken the belief in the
concord and connection of the Empire and the Papacy, the feeling was
strengthened when men saw the Papacy become little better than the mere
ecclesiastical department of a kingdom notoriously at variance with the Empire.
And yet the Popes at Avignon were much more independent in their policy than
they were popularly credited with being. The most submissive Pope, Clement the
Fifth, by his policy of masterly inactivity, thwarted the wishes of the King of
France in the very matter of the Empire. Damaged and battered as the imperial
crown might be, the old belief in a world-empire was still strong; it was
supported by the clerical character of all culture and by the study of Roman
Law. The practical question was now not so much the mere existence as the
practical exercise of this empire; was it necessary that it should be always
German? If an Englishman and a Castilian had been, might not a Frenchman be
elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and with more power, gain a wider and
more real sway? Albert of Austria, King of the Romans, was assassinated on the
1st May 1308; Charles of Valois, the French King’s brother, was a candidate for
the Empire. Clement saw the overwhelming power which such a choice would give
France; he prevaricated and delayed; he would not in so many-words recommend
Charles to the Archbishops of the Rhine. The secular electors were equally
averse to the choice of a Frenchman. Baldwin, Archbishop of Trier, suggested a
compromise: his brother, Henry of Luxemburg, was elected, and France was
checkmated (1308). He was crowned Emperor at Rome in 1312; he died in Italy in
1313. Next year there was a double election in Germany.
Clement the Fifth died
in 1314; his successor was not elected until 1316. John the Twenty-second
determined to urge against the Empire the most extreme claims of the Papacy. He
pushed his pretensions further even than Boniface the Eighth. Since Christ had
invested Peter with the temporal no less than with the spiritual kingdom of
this world, it followed that what the Pope had given, in the Translation of the
Empire, the Pope could also take away; and that when the Emperor died the
jurisdiction of the Empire reverted to the Pope, and that it was for him to
appoint the new Emperor. The Pope, says Augustinus Triumphus, who dedicated his treatise Summa de Potestate Ecclesiastica to Pope John between 1324 and 1328, may choose an Emperor at his own
discretion, depriving the established Electors of their privilege, and thus
altering the constitution of the Empire. This was the contention of Pope John,
and this was the crux of the quarrel between the Popes and Louis of Bavaria.
The Germans contended that it was for the Electors to choose the future
Emperor, and for the Pope to crown the object of their choice; that in the
event of a contested election, it was for the God of Battles to decide between
the rival candidates.
Louis of Bavaria had
been elected by five Electors, Frederic of Austria by two; and the God of
Battles at Muhldorf had decided in favor of Louis.
The claim of the Pope was not one which the Electors could pass over in
silence. They met at Rense and at Frankfurt in 1338,
and resolved that the prince elected by them became King of the Romans without
further ceremony, without need for Papal confirmation. Eighteen years later
this position was upheld by that good Son of the Church, Charles the Fourth;
the Golden Bull passed over in complete silence the Papal claims to veto or
confirm an election, or to administer the Empire during a vacancy. Pope John
the Twenty-second, however, who even went so far at one time as to determine to
oust the Empire from all claim to overlordship or
concern in Italy, was firm to obstinacy in his quarrel with the Emperor, and
demanded that Louis should resign his crown. This advance in the Papal
pretensions took place at a critical time. The Empire had lost its old
prestige. France, England, Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia, no longer acknowledged
any German overlordship; early in the fourteenth
century French jurists had denied in express terms that France formed any part
of the Empire. There were reasons, they said, which warranted the Pope’s
interference in Germany, which were inapplicable to France or to England,
seeing that these countries had not been included in the Donation of
Constantine. The Germano-Roman Empire was already in
the eyes of foreigners dwindling into a mere German kingdom. It was at this
time, when the power of Germany was thus diminished, when the Pope at Avignon
was regarded as a virtual dependant of the King of
France, that these extraordinary claims were put forward. So vast, so unlimited
were the pretensions of John, as of Boniface, that in the countries where a
feeling of nationality was gradually rising into existence, where the modern
consciousness of patriotism was then taking birth, these pretensions naturally
caused revolt, and a serious diminution of the actual power of the Pope
necessarily ensued.
The gradual disappearance
of the old feeling of citizenship in a world-empire, which was a very different
sentiment from modern cosmopolitanism, had allowed room for the growth of the
new feeling of nationality. So long as the older and wider sentiment existed,
the newer and more local pride in one’s own country could not commence; but
with the gradual disappearance of the former, the latter feeling, in countries
where the different parts and peoples cohered sufficiently, gradually took its
place. In such countries it began naturally where they had been longest
separated from the Empire. England was the first country to become distinctly a
nation with an independent, self-centred life and
policy; Saxons and Normans and Britons had coalesced into one people, and that
people had become a nation with a patriotism of its own. The acquisition of the
large kingdom of Toulouse toward the close of the thirteenth century allowed a
similar feeling to develop in France, but Brittany, and to a lesser extent
Guyenne, was still a land apart; and it was not until the time of Joan of Arc
that the sentiment of nationality became general. La Pucelle was the godmother of modern France.
In 1344 King Peter of
Aragon told Pope Clement the Sixth that in worldly matters he recognized no
superior save God; and the same feeling prevailed in Scandinavia and in
Hungary. In Italy, however, although loyalty to the Empire was cold and
interested, no feeling of nationality took its place; it was supplanted by a
narrower sentiment of pride in one’s own city or republic; a man was proud of
being a citizen of Florence, Bologna, or Perugia, but he felt no pride in being
an Italian. In Germany disruption was general : the man of Bremen had no
sympathy with the man of Frankfurt, the Westphalian had nothing in common with the Saxon or the Bavarian. But although Louis of
Bavaria had no patriotism at his back to help him in his struggle with the
Papacy, he had other and very formidable allies.
The new quarrel
between the Empire and the Papacy began in 1323. A year or two later, between
the summer of 1324 and the autumn of 1326, Marsiglio of Padua, with the help of John of Jandun, published
his Defensor Pacis, a work
startlingly modern in its thought and reasoning. So utterly divergent is it
from mediaeval sentiment that it is small wonder that Pope Clement the Sixth,
when he read it, exclaimed that he had never come across a worse heretic than
this Marsiglio. The Italian physician, rector of the
University of Paris, was forty-five years of age at this time, a man imbued
with the Politics of Aristotle and with the arguments of the French apologists
for Philip the Fair; he was in the Middle Age but not of it; a cold-blooded
political philosopher, he was of the eighteenth, or of the twentieth, century
rather than of the fourteenth. Some of his theories were realized at the
Reformation, some in the political revolutions, some are still on the anvil of
Time. His work is a defence of the State against the
Church. The State is a community to ensure a good life in this world and in the
next. The sovereign body is the community of the citizens or the majority of
them; and if it be alleged that most men are fools, still a man often grasps an
idea when it is put forth by another, and thus understands what he himself
could neither have initiated nor discovered. One duty of the sovereign body is
to make the laws necessary for the enforcement of right; a law is a rule, by
whatever name known, enforced by a sanction. All are entitled to participate in
the making of laws except minors, bondsmen, strangers, and women. Laws are best
prepared by the old and experienced rather than by handicraftsmen; by them they
should be presented to the assembly for discussion, before being passed,
amended, or rejected. Another duty of the sovereign body is to appoint their
ruler; he should be one who will conduct himself according to their will; he
must be clever and capable, and supported by a sufficient body of troops to
enforce obedience but not to usurp authority; it is for him to enforce the laws
of which the sovereign body or their representatives declare the meaning; his
correction and his removal rest with the sovereign body, but his slight
deviations from the law should be winked at. All this was fine theory, far
ahead of the tildes; it would have been passed in silence by the Church.
The head and front of Marsiglio’s offending was when he came to deal with
the relations between Church and State. It is to the interference of the Popes,
of Clement the Fifth with Henry the Seventh, of Boniface the Eighth with Philip
the Fair, of John the Twenty-second with Louis of Bavaria, that he attributes
the trouble and unrest in the world. The Pope has assumed a primacy which Saint
Peter never possessed over the other apostles; he bases his claim on the
Donation of Constantine, which is vague and obsolete and restricted; on the plenitudo potestatis,
which is not warranted by Scripture as pretended. The Emperors formerly
regulated the election of Popes; and if they allowed themselves to be
consecrated by the Pope, this gave him no more right over them than the
Archbishop of Rheims has over the King of France. Christ bestowed on His
apostles spiritual powers, but no coercive jurisdiction enabling them to
interfere in temporal affairs; His kingdom was not of this world; He ordained
His followers to teach His gospel and to administer the sacraments. The power
of the keys, the power to loose and to bind, refers only to the sacrament of
penance; and here the forgiveness of sins belongs to God alone; the priest
cannot forgive a hypocrite nor refuse absolution to a penitent; he is merely
the turnkey carrying out the orders of the Divine Judge. The Church is the
community of all believers; the laity have as good a right as the priests to be
styled viri ecclesiastici;
all alike are subject to the temporal law, though bishops and priests ought to
be punished more severely than others because they are more enlightened. Sins
are to be admonished by the clergy, but their punishment belongs to God, and is
reserved for the next world; even heresy can only be punished on earth so far
as it is contrary to the temporal law. Excommunication, again, cannot be
pronounced by any single priest or bishop; it is reserved for the community or
for a general council; for Christ commanded not, when thy brother sin against
thee, to tell it to the bishop or priest or the College of Cardinals, but to
tell it to the Church. Moreover, all priests should follow their Master in
apostolic poverty and in contempt of this world; they should possess no real
property; they should have no right to follow personal property into the hands
of others; benefices belong to the patrons, not to the Church. The Catholic
Faith rests on the Bible only, not on decrees or decretals of Popes or Cardinals; doubts as to the interpretation of the Scripture should
be settled by a general council, on which laity and clergy alike sit; the
council is convoked by the sovereign body, the Pope as Bishop of Rome presides,
but has no coercive jurisdiction beyond what is conferred by the council.
The pretensions of
the Popes against the Empire are then discussed. The shortsightedness of the
Emperors in allowing themselves to be crowned and anointed had engendered in
the Popes the pretension that their confirmation of the choice of the Electors
is necessary, thereby making the seven Electors of as little account as if they
were seven barbers or seven blind men; the authority of the King is derived
from the sovereign body or their proctors. As a matter of fact, such papal
confirmation is entirely unnecessary; the right conferred by election is
complete and needs no recognition or confirmation by the Pope to supplement it.
“This remarkable work
of Marsiglio”, says Creighton, “stands on the very
threshold of modern history as a clear forecast of the ideas which were to
regulate the future progress of Europe”. With this work in their hands the two
students appeared at the Court at Nurnberg. “By God!” said King Louis, “who can
have induced you to leave that land of peace and quiet for this warlike kingdom
of uproar and trouble?”. They explained. There was a consultation. Finally the
King received them with open arms, appointed Marsiglio his physician, and soon installed him as his counsellor.
“I am a man of war”, said Louis, “and understand nothing of sciences and
learned subtleties”. In 1327 the King entered Italy, and Marsiglio,
who was allowed to preach against the Pope, was soon in a position to carry his
theories into practice.
On the 17th January
1328, Louis was chosen to be Emperor by the acclamation of the Roman people,
and Sciarra Colonna, who twenty-five years earlier
had stood in the burning palace of Agnani, his sword
pointed at the Pope’s breast, placed the crown of Empire on his head. It was
the realization of the theory of Marsiglio; it was
also the first time a German King had ever received the sacred diadem from the
people of Rome. A public parliament was held on the 18th April, and the Pope
was deposed; Peter of Corbara, a Franciscan friar,
was elected Pope by the people of Rome on the 12th May, and the Emperor set the
crown on his head. Louis, however, was but a pinchbeck Emperor, a mere parody
of Frederic the Second; and the proceedings at Rome must have appeared
ridiculous in the eyes of all sober Christians. Frederic the Second was a man of
moderation when compared with the rash revolutionary Louis of Bavaria. The
revulsion soon came. The King was unable to make any headway against Robert of
Naples. The fickle Romans turned against him. Louis, the anti-Pope, the
anti-cardinals left Rome amid showers of stones, and the dominion of the
rightful Pope was at once restored. Disaster dogged the Emperor’s footsteps :
his troops mutinied; his adversaries in Germany threatened to set up a new
king; he was compelled to leave Italy; his journey to Rome had been utterly
unsuccessful; its actual result was the extinction of the last shadow of
respect enjoyed by the Empire, and the entire destruction of the dream of Dante
and the Ghibelines, who had expected the salvation of
Italy at the hands of the Roman Emperor.
Louis had failed
disastrously in his Italian expedition, but to his court at Munich there
flocked all the most influential thinkers and writers of the day. Michael of
Cesena, the General of the Franciscan Order, who counted Pope John a heretic because
he exposed the absurdity of their theory of apostolic poverty, composed a
Tractate against the errors of the Pope. Like Marsiglio,
he upheld a general council as superior in authority; a Pope may err, as many
have erred, in faith and morals, but a council representing the Universal
Church is free from error. Bonagratia of Bergamo, Ubertino of Casale, Francesco of
Ascoli, and his namesake of Marca, Heinrich of Thalheim, Parisian And Italian professors, English and
German Franciscans—all were found at the Bavarian court. The most famous of all
was the Englishman, William of Ockham, the nominalist leader who had finally
settled the controversy of the schools. “Defend me with your sword, and I will
defend you with my pen”, was his greeting to the monarch—a greeting which was
repeated three hundred years later by a much smaller divine to our own King
James the First. Ockham took part in the active resistance to the Pope, and his
writings are his defence and justification. He wrote
as a mediaeval philosopher, and hence his works, though they lack the modern
thought and brilliance of Marsiglio, had much more
influence with his contemporaries. He handed down a light which was never
suffered to be extinguished, and which served as a beacon to pioneers of reform
like Wycliffe and Hus. He also holds that the Pope is fallible, but even a
general council, to which women as well as men should be admitted, may also
err. Like Marsiglio, William of Ockham was not really
in love with the imperial idea; all that is of importance to them is to erect
the estate into an organic, consolidated force independent of, and in its own
province superior to, that of the spirituality; and this done, they
circumscribe even the spiritual part of the papal authority by making it in all
respects subject to the general voice of Christendom.
The writings of the
refugees, the declarations of the German Electors at Rense and the German Estates at Frankfurt, had shattered the Hildebrandine doctrine of the civil supremacy of the Papacy. Not merely the religious
dissidents and the speculative philosophers, but those who were dissatisfied
with the moral conditions of the Curia and the clergy, those who were shocked
by the pomp and simony, the extortion and sensuality which disfigured the
Church, were inclined to group themselves under the aegis of the Empire, its
former associate but now its rival. The Empire was still the centre of knighthood, the maker of kings; it had been ruled
uniformly for four centuries, from Henry the Fowler to Charles the Fourth, by
men of character and energy, who spent themselves freely in the service of the
State.
John the
Twenty-second died in 1334, just as he was to be summoned before a council for
a fresh heresy; Benedict the Twelfth, who would have given his soul to reconcile
the Emperor, if he had had another soul in addition to that which was already
pledged to the King of France, died in 1342; and at this time Louis took a step
which proved fatal to him. Margaret Maultasch, of the
Tirol, who had married a son of King John of Bohemia, grew tired of her
husband, discarded him, and threw herself on the protection of the Emperor.
Louis pronounced her divorce, and according to the theories of Marsiglio of Padua and William of Ockham, he was able to
justify this step; but his glaring self-seeking was apparent when he married
pock-mouthed Meg to his own son, Louis of Brandenburg. The clergy were up in
arms at his assumption of clerical powers, the lay princes were disgusted at
the addition of the Tirol to the House of Bavaria. Pope Clement the Sixth was
now able to raise an anti-imperial party in Germany; he deposed the Archbishop
of Mainz, who adhered to Louis, and appointed Gerlach of Nassau in his place; the three Archbishops, the King of Bohemia, and Rudolf
of Saxony then formally elected Charles of Bohemia as King of the Romans. War
between the rival monarchs was averted by the death of Louis, while
boar-hunting near Munich, on the 11th October 1347.
Charles, the Pfaffen-Kaiser or parson’s Emperor, was now King of the
Romans. His succession, however, was not undisputed. The deposed Archbishop of
Mainz, and three others who claimed electoral votes, offered the crown to
Edward the Third, to Louis of Brandenburg, to Frederic of Meissen, all of whom
declined the honor. They finally elected Gunther of Schwartzburg,
who accepted it, but died on the 14th June 1350, leaving Charles undisputed
King. The new monarch was a man of rare diplomatic ability and of no illusions.
He had been with his father in Italy, and knew that Italy was only a clog on
Germany. Rudolf of Habsburg had abandoned to the Pope the territories of
Matilda of Tuscany. Charles, when he went into Italy, appointed existing rulers
to be vicars of the Empire, in the hope that they might thereby acknowledge its
shadowy feudal superiority, but he renounced all those territorial rights for
which his predecessors had fought. He had also lived in France, and knew the
danger of territorial encroachment on that side, and got himself crowned King
at Aries in consequence. But his main endeavor was to build up a strong kingdom
to serve as a territorial basis for the Empire, which he hoped to make
hereditary in the House of Luxemburg; he failed to make the Empire hereditary,
but his policy was later successfully pursued by the House of Habsburg and was
essentially sound. He won over the imperial cities to his side by the
concession of privileges; he won over the House of Habsburg by the marriage of
his eldest son Rudolf; he won over the House of Wittelsbach by his own marriage with the daughter of the Elector Palatine; he won over the
House of Brandenburg by disowning the false Waldemar.
He attempted to make Bohemia the corner-stone of the Empire, transferring the
sovereignty from the west to the east; he founded the University of Prague, the
first university in Germany, and attracted there thousands of students from all
Christendom. He supported the claim of his brother Wenzel to the Duchies of
Brabant and Limburg against the pretensions of the Count of Flanders; he
secured the succession to the Duchy of Brandenburg and the reversion of the
Tirol. The great weakness of Germany was its utter want of political union; the
princes had become independent; the spiritual lords were more formidable from
their possessions than those of any other European country, and enjoyed far
larger privileges; the cities tended to become independent republics, and were
always ready to make leagues among themselves regardless of the imperial
sanction or interest. Little was now left of the crown lands; the regalian rights had been mostly seized or granted away; the
Emperor had the mines in Bohemia and an inglorious traffic in honors and
exemptions as his main fiscal resource. Yet with all these disadvantages
Charles the Fourth made the Empire stronger and more respected, and he
succeeded in leaving it to his eldest and dearly loved son, Wenzel. The
greatest achievement of his reign was the Golden Bull.
It was patent to all
that the disputed elections caused continual disorder, and that one cause for
the disputes was the uncertainty as to the rules of election. This uncertainty
Charles rectified by the Golden Bull. Although he himself had admitted the
necessity for confirmation of the election by the Pope before the King of the
Romans could be crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, yet the papal claims
were passed over in complete silence and the electoral resolution of Rense became the law of the Empire; on this point the Pope
showed his displeasure, but Charles remained firm. The number of the Electors
was to be seven. In the first place were the three great Archbishops of the
Rhine: the Archbishop of Mainz, arch-chancellor of Germany; the Archbishop of
Cologne, arch-chancellor of Italy; and the Archbishop of Trier, arch-chancellor
of Burgundy,—these three represented the German Church. Then came the King of
Bohemia, cupbearer of the Emperor; the Count Palatine, who was grand seneschal;
the Duke of Saxony, who was grand marshal; and the Markgraf of Brandenburg, who was grand chamberlain. The territories of the Electors were
to be indivisible, and were to descend by the law of primogeniture in lineal
agnatic succession. The Habsburgs and the Bavarian Wittelsbachs were weakened by the Bull, as also were the cities, which were forbidden to
form confederations without the permission of their territorial lords or to
admit outsiders to their citizenship. There were defects and omissions in the
Golden Bull; there was little that was new; but it crystallized into a
constitutional law of the Empire much that was aforetime in part matter of
custom, in part matter of dispute. In transferring the balance of power and of
civilization to the east of Germany, Charles was influenced by his desire to
unite the eastern Slavs with Bohemia and to pave the way for a union between
the Latin and Greek Churches. He was harshly described by Maximilian the First
as the father of Bohemia, but the stepfather of the Empire; but if his first
thought was for Bohemia, he also did his duty by the Empire. He had none of the
romantic enthusiasm of his father or his grandfather, but he had what was far
better—a strong sense of the practical duties of government, and a strenuous
business capacity which enabled him to carry them out. It is true that he
failed to maintain the Ghibeline cause in Italy, but
he preferred the more solid and substantial aim of building up a territorial
monarchy in Germany. He was distinguished among contemporary monarchs for his
preference of diplomacy to force, for his strong legal sense and his love of
order. Like Edward the First of England and Philip the Fourth of France, he
marks the transition from mediaeval to modern ideals and methods of government.
Two months before
Charles died (1378) there commenced the great Schism of the West.
II
THE HOLY ROMAN CHURCH
(1)
Its Popular Side
“The two great ideas
which expiring antiquity bequeathed to the ages which followed”, says Mr.
Bryce, “were those of a World-Monarchy and a World-Religion”. These two ideas
were intimately connected. God had entrusted the care of men’s bodies to the
Emperor, His vicar on earth in matters temporal; and the care of their souls to
the Pope, His vicar on earth in matters spiritual. The Holy Roman Empire and
the Holy Roman Church thus represent two aspects of the same world-wide
coextensive rule. In the preceding chapter a brief survey of the Empire at the
time of the commencement of the Great Schism has been given; and we have seen
how it had shrunk and contracted until it was now merely the Romano-Germanic Empire,
with hardly a foothold outside Germany, but with much of the glamour of the old
title still attaching to the person and the office of the Emperor. Up to the
time of the Schism the Church had preserved its title as the world-religion;
Christians everywhere were still united in one religion under one father, the
Pope.
Another tie that
bound all Christians together was the fact that in their services and worship
they all used one language—the language of the Holy Roman Church, which she
used then and uses still today. Not only was Latin the language of the Church,
it was the language of all educated people throughout Europe. The clergy
everywhere talked Latin and wrote Latin; it was the one language of education.
At Paris or at Prague, at Oxford or at Bologna, the student heard lectures in
Latin, took his notes in Latin, read Latin, wrote Latin, spoke Latin.
International intercourse was immensely facilitated by this use of a common
tongue. A scholar went from one university to another; he exchanged kindly
greetings with the clergy on the way; he was welcomed at the parsonages and
monasteries; the use of the lingua franca paved the way for him everywhere. And
it was the outward mark of men’s common belief; it enabled the stranger to take
his part in the church service ; even the peasant might learn his Pater Noster and Ave Maria. The nations grew up
and gradually used their national tongues, dropping the use of Latin; but the
Church remained one and indivisible, using the language which had been her own
from the beginning.
From the days of the Ottos onwards, the Papacy had been growing in influence and
esteem until it reached its zenith in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The
greater Popes had striven to realize their high calling as being set in authority
over princes and kings who were warring on all sides; they had kept themselves
above the smoke and stir of European strife and warfare; they had endeavored to
establish an authoritative council of unimpassioned aim and high morality,
aloof from the selfish plans and lustful passions of secular princes. Such a
tribunal was then sorely wanted, and such a tribunal the Papacy did to some
extent supply, enforcing its decrees by spiritual sanctions. The Church in the
days of her greatest glory had no military force to support her. The years that
lie between the rise of the monks of Cluni and the
coming of the Friars, the years from Hildebrand to Innocent the Third, form for
the Holy Roman Church an epoch of splendour and
glory, an epoch during which her power over the secular lords of the earth was
the mightiest, during which her influence for good was most strikingly
exercised. Her spiritual claims were justified by the beneficial uses to which
they were applied. It was not orthodoxy alone that the Church represented; it
asserted also the moral conscience of humanity. It waged war not only with
heretics such as the Patarines and the Albigenses; it waged war also with the tyrant, the
adulterer, the oppressor. The worst of our Plantagenet kings, the only king thoroughly
despicable and contemptible, was John Lackland :
Innocent the Third excommunicated him. The most inhuman and barbarous of
Italian tyrants was Eccelino da Romano : Alexander
the Fourth preached a crusade and sent an army against him. When Philip Augustus
deserted his wife, Ingeburg of Denmark, for the
beautiful Agnes of Meran, Innocent the Third did not
hesitate to excommunicate him. But until the time of this pontiff the Church
had no temporal power. She was strong only in the moral force which is given by
public approbation. Her voice was effectual only so far as it was re-echoed by
public opinion. Her penalties were enforced only where their justice was
recognized. With all its defects the Mediaeval Church uttered the only possible
protest against the tyranny of an unruly oligarchy ... The authority of the
Pope was a useful refuge against the overweening power of the King and lords.
And if the Church was thus, for the mighty ones of the earth, a court of equity
and good conscience, a tribunal whose decrees were usually respected and
obeyed, to the people at large she was a haven of shelter and peace. In the age
of feudal warfare, an age of unbridled tumult and ferocity, the highest and
holiest aspirations of all were for peace and rest, for quietude and order; and
it was because the Church offered a haven of rest to the rich, a haven of
refuge to the poor, that she obtained such a firm hold on the affection of the
Middle Ages. The high-born lord or lady did not disdain the shades of the
cloister; King Rudolfs daughter, Euphemia,
became a nun; his son-in-law, Otto, became a monk. In Germany, where the right
of private war was universally exercised, many a warrior, weary of strife, must
have looked forward to end his days in the peaceful seclusion of the convent
walls—
For if heven be on this erthe and ese to any soule,
It is in cloistere (says William Langland),
For in cloistere cometh no man to chide ne to fighte,
But all is buxomness
there and bokes to rede and
to lerne.
To the men of low
estate the Church was their only efficient protector. In dealing with the bulk
of the peasantry, and to some extent with the townfolk also, might was right, and the power of the strongest was tempered only by
custom. When king or lord oppressed them, if they could not plead custom in
their favour, and sometimes if they could, they were
bound to submit; the Church alone could help them. While to the man of learning
and influence it opened a wide field for ambition, to the poor man of intellect
it was the only refuge, the only home, in which he could hope to pursue his
study unmolested and to reap some reward of his labour.
Eight at least of our own Archbishops of Canterbury, in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, were of humble parentage. The Church was open to all
alike; any man of free birth could become a clerk; and there are numberless
instances in which serfs paid fine to their lords for permission to send their
sons to school in order that they might be admitted to the ranks of the clergy.
Once admitted all were theoretically equal; and although in Germany the higher
posts in the Church were closed against all who were not of noble birth,
although in England there was a prejudice against cobblers' brats becoming
priests and bishops—
For shold no Clerk be crouned bote yf he ycome were
Of franklens and free men and of folke yweddede,
says Langland, still
there was a wide field practically open to merit and ability. The highest
offices and dignities of the Church were open to all the sacred orders, to
every Christian clerk alike. Pope Gregory the Seventh was the son of a
carpenter, Benedict the Twelfth of a baker, Nicholas the Fifth of a poor
doctor, Celestine the Fifth of a peasant, Urban the Fourth and John the
Twenty-second of cobblers, Benedict the Eleventh of a shepherd, and Alexander
the Fifth and Adrian the Fourth were beggars. In those iron ages, when brutal
force was everything, it was surely much, as M. Sabatier has said, that the
Church could point to peasants and workmen receiving the humble homage of the
lords of the earth, simply because they were seated on the chair of Saint Peter
and represented the moral law. Moreover, the influence of the Church over all
Christian souls was very thorough, very impressive, very far-reaching. In those
days, when in matters of faith all were of one belief, when in matters of
ceremony all were of one observance, the Church breathed a spirit of common
brotherhood which it is well-nigh impossible for us nowadays to comprehend. We
have no horror of schism; we live amid a thousand jarring sects; religious and
political strife and variety are to us as the breath of our nostrils; but in
the Middle Ages it was not so, neither in politics nor in religion. The men of
today, therefore, find it difficult to sympathize with those who lived then;
they cannot understand the fascination which the idea of one all-embracing,
all-pervading church exercised upon their mediaeval forefathers. A life in the
church, for the church, through the church; a life which she blessed in Mass at
morning and sent to peaceful rest by the vesper hymn; a life which she
supported by the constantly recurring stimulus of the sacraments, relieving it
by confession, purifying it by penance, admonishing it by the presentation of
visible objects for contemplation and worship—this was the life which they of
the Middle Ages conceived of as the rightful life for man; it was the actual
life of many, the ideal of all. Thus, in the days of its greatest splendour and glory, the influence of the Holy Roman Church
was beneficent, and was felt by all to be so; it represented what people
wanted. There never was a power which could claim more entirely to rest upon
public opinion than could the papal power at its best.
But toward the end of
the fourteenth century the papal power was no longer at its best. It had
formerly been a purely spiritual power, enforcing its decrees by spiritual
sanctions alone; but since the beginning of the thirteenth century it had
altered its position, and had become a temporal power also, having acquired the
States of the Church. The two great world-powers, the Empire and the Papacy,
had very little force of their own to back up and carry out their decrees. They
were dependent on public opinion, on the might of others. The Emperor might
issue his ban, the Pope might issue his interdict, but the carrying into effect
of these punishments depended on the will of the subordinate powers on the
spot. The might of the Empire rested on the goodwill and obedience of its
dignitaries, just as the might of the Papacy rested on the goodwill and
obedience of the countries of Christendom. In proportion as the obedience of
its subordinates became more precarious, so each world-power came to feel the
need for some more constant and trustworthy support; each Emperor, Salian or Swabian, Habsburg or
Luxemburg, tried to fashion for his family some secure territorial basis on
which its permanent power might be indefeasibly grounded. Just in the same way,
and for the same reason, did the Popes seek to secure territorial sovereignty
by the acquisition of the States of the Church. This, however, necessarily
brought the Papacy down to a lower moral level: a Pope fighting for his own
territorial sovereignty or aggrandizement was a different matter, and no longer
appealed to the imagination and sympathy of mankind as did a Pope fighting for
the higher policy, the liberal ideas, the moral aims of the Church. In other
respects it may have been a matter of comparatively small moment at the end of
the fourteenth century that the Papacy had become a temporal power, although
later, in the sixteenth century, in the storm and stress of the Reformation, it
was the possession of the Papal States which probably saved the Papacy from
being reduced once again to its original condition of a mere Italian bishopric.
For good and for ill the Papacy had taken rank among the temporal powers of
Europe, and had its temporal as well as its spiritual aims to pursue.
While it had thus
become a temporal power, the Church had already become the greatest landowner
in Christendom. Religion, which had at first been a question of morals and had
then been a question of orthodoxy, had, from the seventh century onwards,
become in the main a matter of munificence to convents. The early Kings of
England, the Merovingians and the Carlovingians in France, the Saxon Emperors in Germany, the Kings of Leon, had all been
prodigal in their gifts of land; the abbeys had profited even more than the
cathedrals. Men believed in Hell in those days, in a “Hell where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched”; and many a dying
man was ready to secure a better chance after death, many a widow was ready to
improve the fate of her husband, by diverting part of his worldly wealth into
the coffers of the Church. Purgatory was the lot of all true believers, and the
fires of Purgatory, necessary though they might be, were as bad as the fires of
Hell. But the pains of the dead could be shortened by the prayers and good
works of the living; hence in all monasteries, whenever any
one belonging to it died, the death-knell was rung, and though it were
the depth of night, no sooner had they heard that well-known bell swinging
forth slowly and sadly its mournful sounds, than all the inmates of that house
arose and knelt down by their bedsides, or hurried to the Church, and prayed
for the soul of the brother or sister that moment gone. Kings founded
monasteries for their ghostly weal; cathedrals and parish churches pledged
themselves that a certain number of Psalms should be sung and a certain number
of Masses be said; chantries were endowed in perpetuity or for a limited period
for the offering up of the Mass after the founder's death. Indeed, so universal
did the practice become of leaving a part of one's goods to the Church, that
mere intestacy was regarded by the clergy as a fraud, and the Bishop of Lisbon
and his subordinates in the days of Saint Francis actually refused to perform
the funeral services for any one who had not left
one-third of his wealth to the Church.
But for the fiefs which
abbeys paid to their lay advocates for protection, and but for the rapacious
spoliations to which they were subject at the hands of brutal and unprincipled
warriors, it seemed as if the Church would gradually engulf all the lands of
the kingdoms of Europe. As it was, the proportion of lands held by the Church
was in some countries more than one-half, and in all not less than one-third.
The end of the twelfth century was the time of most profuse liberality; after
that, as the mendicant friars rose in favour and the
monks gradually lost their popularity, the tide of generosity fell lower and
lower; but at the close of the fourteenth century the Church was still the
greatest landowner in every country of Christendom. The wealth of the Church in
Germany was conspicuously great. In 1111, King Henry the Fifth had proposed to
the Pope to end the strife about investitures by taking from the German
prelates their landed estates, and leaving them only their tithes and
offerings; Paschal the Second had consented; but the German clergy, through
their primate the Archbishop of Salzburg, declared that anything was preferable
to seeing the Church thus spoiled of her inheritance. The proposal therefore
came to naught; the prelates still continued to be feudal lords. The three
great Archbishops of the Rhine not only thus held their vast estates, but were
ever on the lookout to add to their strength; their position as Electors of the
Empire enabled them at the time of elections to drive unconscionable bargains
with the candidates for Empire. Perhaps the hardest bargains of all were those
which the Archbishops of Cologne and Mainz made with Adolf of Nassau and his
two successors. The Bishops also, almost universally throughout the Empire,
donned coat of mail as readily as cassock; they were ever ready to enlarge
their sees, their privileges, their immunities. The position of an exalted
ecclesiastic was eagerly sought for by the German nobles; and it was part of
the policy of successive Emperors to prevent two of the great archbishoprics
being held by members of the same noble family. They were not always able to
hinder such an accumulation of influence in the hands of a single house : when Kuno of Falkenstein was
Archbishop of Trier in the days of King Wenzel, his nephew, Frederic, was
Archbishop of Cologne. The German prelates again, unlike those of England and
France, when once they were in secure possession of their sees, frequently
wavered in their allegiance to their feudal lord paramount; while their
obedience to their spiritual father, the Pope, was equally precarious and
uncertain. Innocent the Sixth failed to procure any pecuniary assistance for
his wars in Italy from the three Archbishops of the Rhine or from the
Archbishop of Salzburg. When Pope Boniface the Ninth granted two-tenths to King
Rupert, he found it impossible to levy the tax. And the clergy of Germany were
often as refractory to their bishops as were the bishops to the Pope.
Before noticing the
state of the Church at the end of the fourteenth century, it will be well to
form some idea of its extent, and of the principal points in which it differed
from the Church of the present day. In extent, taking the term in its widest
signification, the Church coincided with the Empire : it embraced the whole
body of the faithful, the whole Christian world considered on its spiritual
side. Taken in its narrower sense, as including the pastors and not the people,
the Church still embraced the whole body of clerks or clergy, practically the
whole of the population which earned its bread by its brains rather than by the
sweat of its brow; the whole body, with some exceptions, and those chiefly in
Italy, of what we now call the learned professions. “In the North of Europe”,
writes Mr. Rashdall, “the Church was simply a synonym
for the professions. Nearly all the civil servants of the Crown, the
diplomatists, the secretaries or advisers of great nobles, the architects, at
one time the secular lawyers, all through the Middle Ages the then large tribe
of ecclesiastical lawyers, were ecclesiastics”. The distinction meant much, for
it corresponded to a cleavage in jurisdiction. Every clerk was personally
outside the jurisdiction of the secular courts. In every country of Christendom
alongside the secular courts were the courts spiritual. The jurisdiction of
these courts extended to the persons of all clerks, to every
one who wore a tonsure; it extended also to all spiritual causes, not
only to those strictly concerned with matters of faith and discipline, but also
to all cases in any way connected with marriage, with church property, with
wills, or with perjury; it extended also to crimes against religion, to crimes
committed in holy places, to violations of the edicts against taking interest,
and to breaches of the Truce or Peace of God. The spiritual courts were far
more popular than the secular courts; the judges were more learned, the
procedure was more reasonable, justice more easily obtainable, and the
punishments milder; consequently contracts were made binding by oath in order that
their non-obervance might be treated as a case of
perjury, and laymen got barbers to give them the clerks crown in the hope of
coming within the jurisdiction of the spiritual rather than of the secular
court. The canon law was everywhere the personal law of the clerk, and it had
the advantage of being accompanied by a procedure simpler, milder, and more
rational. Whether there was or was not much to choose between the substantive
law of the systems, the adjective law of the one was civilized, while that of
the other was semi-barbarous. We have to take ourselves back to a state of
society in which a judicial trial was a tournament and the ordeal an approved
substitute for evidence, to realize what civilization owes to the Canon Law and
their Canonists with their elaborate system of written law, their judicial
evidence, and their written procedure. In those days, as in the civil courts
now, a man could not get justice without paying for it; and the battle between
the rival jurisdictions was to some extent a battle for fees and fines. Perhaps
the most important point in the great share which the Church then took in the
purely judicial work of a country was that the ultimate appeal in all spiritual
causes lay to the Pope.
“Religious life in
the Middle Ages”, writes M. Jusserand, “had not the definite visible boundaries
which we see today; now a man either belongs to the Church or he does not; but
there was nothing so sharply cut then. Religious life stretched across society
like an immense river without banks, with numberless affluents,
with underground streams, impregnating the soil even where it did not wash it”.
“In the Middle Ages”,
writes Mr. Trevelyan, “the Church administered whole sides of life which have
since been put into the hands of the secular government or left to the
discretion of the individual” (England in
the Age of Wycliffe). It was necessarily so when all the educated classes
of the country other than those engaged in war, in commerce and industry, were
practically confined to the ranks of the clergy. Wherever the services of an
educated man were required, a clerk must be taken. The clergy were in request
in business houses as clerks and scriveners, and on estates as stewards and
accountants. The household of a great noble, like John of Gaunt, included
scores of their number: his chancellor was the Bishop of Salisbury, his chief
physician was Appleton, a Franciscan Friar. There were numbers of clerks
everywhere in the royal service—
Bischopes and bachelers bothe maistres and doctours, . . .
Some serve the Kyng and his silver tellen,
In cheker and in chancerye chalengen his dettes . . .
And some serve as
servants lordes and laydes,
And in stede of stuwardes sytten and demen.
The Roman Catholic
religion has always maintained a close hold on the everyday life of its people;
but in the Middle Ages, when the proportionate number of the clergy was so very
much greater, there was necessarily much more intimate friendship and
intercourse between the lower ranks of the clergy and the mass of the people
than is possible now. Church festivals, and the village rejoicings connected
with them, were more numerous; some of those which were then of most
significance, such as the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14th
September), have now lost their first importance. In the Middle Ages a
religious feast was above all else a representation, more or less faithful, of
some Bible story or some saintly legend; others were of half-pagan,
half-religious origin; but into them all the sub-deacons and deacons entered
with boyish glee. Numerous are the instances in which they are reproved by
their bishop or even by the Pope for leading the van in some such ceremony
which tended to throw discredit on the Church, but which was dear to the souls
of the people and to the ranks of the lower clergy. A short reference to some
of those feasts which have now fallen more or less into disuse will not be out
of place.
In the first half of
the fourteenth century, when the peasantry everywhere were prosperous, there
was much jollity and happiness in their lives, so long as the piping days of
peace were on, for all religiously took part, and the children often took a
special part of their own, in the round of festivals which marked the course of
the year. Some of these merry observances have altogether disappeared, others
have fallen more or less into disuse and forgetfulness. The ‘Liberty of
December’ was in France and other countries a time of universal feasting and
merriment, of dance and song. Then were held the ‘Feast of Fools’, derived from
the old heathen festival of the Kalends of January;
and the ‘Feast of Asses’, in which ‘little brother Francis’ took such innocent
delight. At the Feast of Fools, songs not the most decorous were sung; men
dressed up as old women, or as calves or stags, bishops and archbishops, joined
in the Christmas games in the monasteries; a Pope of Fools and two cardinals
were elected and endued with the sacred robes, the matins were travestied; they
danced in the choir, they diced on the church-floor. This feast, which was
sometimes called the Feast of the Sub-deacons, was held on the Day of the
Circumcision. The Feast of the Ass was originally held on Christmas Day. In
this also masks predominated : Jews and Gentiles, Moses, Aaron, and the
Prophets, Vergil and Nebuchadnezzar, but the most popular figure was Balaam on
his Ass. Nebuchadnezzar delivered over the three children to be burned in a
fire made of tow and linen in the nave of the church. Balaam was met by a young
man with a drawn sword; a man under the donkey called out ‘Cur me calcaribus miseram sic laeditis?’ and the angel bade Balaam ‘Desine Regis Balac praeceptum perficere’. In the diocese of Beauvais the feast was held
on the 14th January. The finest donkey that could be found was led in procession
through the town, superbly caparisoned; a young girl, richly dressed, with a
child in her arms, was seated on it, to symbolize the Flight into Egypt; they
were met by the clergy and conducted to the door of the church or cathedral,
and High Mass was said with great pomp. A Latin hymn was sung to announce the
object of the festival—
Today is the day of
gladness,
Away all thoughts of
sadness,
Envy and grandeur
away;
We will rejoice with
heart and voice
For we keep the Ass's
Feast today.
The donkey was then
led to the high altar, having been taught to kneel at the proper place, and the precentor chanted a Latin refrain—
Orientibus partibus,
Adventavit Asinus,
Pulcher et fortissimus,
Sarcinis aptissimus,
Hee haw! Sir Ass! Hee haw!
Hie
in collibus Sichen,
Enutritus sub Ruben,
Transiit per Jordanem,
Salut in Bethleem,
Hee haw! Sir Ass! Hee haw!
Then the whole
congregation joined in the chorus, very likely the ass himself taking up the
refrain—
Hee haw! Sir Ass! Hee haw!.
When the ceremony was
ended, the priest, instead of the usual words with which he dismissed the
people, brayed three times like an ass, and the people, instead of the usual
response, “We bless the Lord”, brayed three times in the same manner.
The Feast of the Ass
has now entirely disappeared, and of the Feast of Fools nothing but the
Christmas-boxes and the holly and ivy at Yule Tide now remain. The Christmas
rejoicings in German villages nowadays retain but a faint reminiscence of the
time when festivities began three days before Christmas with the children going
round from house to house, singing and telling the glad tidings of the coming
birth of Our Lord, when the festivities continued day after day, each with its
appropriate festival, over Saint Stephen’s Day, over the Day of Saint John the
Evangelist, until on the Day of the Holy Innocents a troop of mock devils
scampered through the streets on the lookout for any pretty child or maiden. On
New Year's Eve boys sang in the streets, ringing bells and making merry all through
the night, and collecting much money withal; and on New Year's Day presents
were given to the female members of the family and to the women servants and
their children. During the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany the
houses were fumigated to scare away evil spirits, and the weather was carefully
noted as prognosticating that for the coming twelve months. The rejoicings
peculiar to Christmas came to an end at Epiphany, when the Feast of the Three
Kings was kept with great merriment throughout Germany: every house chose its
king by a pfennig dropped in the honey-cake after the manner of the coins and
thimbles dropped into our plum-puddings; a bean-feast was held at which every one drank his fill at the expense of the king of the
feast; the schoolboys carried lights to ward off misfortune of Saint Blasius’s Day. Another incident peculiar to our own
Christmas was then observed on Saint Nicolas's Day (December 6th), before which
the children used to invoke the Saint's favour by
fasting so rigorously that their parents were often afraid lest they should do
themselves an injury; for it was Saint Nicolas, our own Santa Klaus, who put
presents into their little shoes. On this same day, too, was selected the
Boy-Bishop, who donned cope and mitre and collected
his revenues until he preached his sermon and gave up his crozier at the Feast
of Holy Innocents.
It was but natural
that the times of chief observance should be those of Our Lord's birth and of
His death and resurrection; but there were many other seasons of joy and mirth
through the year. Of these the principal was the Carnival, just before Lent.
Italy was then, as now, celebrated for the gorgeous pageantry of its
processions; Germany was satisfied with an occasional sledge or a 'ship of
fools', but there was no end to the masking and mumming. Men dressed as women,
women as men; some disguised themselves with red lead and ink as satyrs or
devils; every one sought to invent some new device; they Aasted,
they drank, they danced, they held long processions, they bantered the girls;
they played the good old game of the Blind Men and the Pig. Twelve blind men,
well primed with food and drink, were introduced, armed in old armour, with helmets awry and cudgels in their hands, into
an enclosure, and a sturdy pig was let loose among them; they tried to belabour the pig, which rushed hither and thither, knocking
them down and causing universal confusion; then a bell was put round its neck,
and finally the porker, more tired out by heat and exertion than by the blows,
was captured and killed. In some parts of Swabia on Ash Wednesday a harrow was
dragged through the Danube by the young men and maidens. In Franconia the girls
were yoked to a plough by their swains, and a piper drove the team into the
river, to give them a salutary ducking for their levity during Carnival. At
Whitsuntide in Germany the custom, observed during the Rogation Days in
England, was kept up; a procession, singing the Litany, started from the church
and proceeded round the fields, the priest carrying the Host in front and
praying to God to ward off all danger from the crops. In England a dragon with
a formidable tail was earned the first two days in front of the procession, and
on the third day, without its tail, in the rear. The eve of Saint John the
Baptist's Day was an occasion for bonfires, for singing and dancing; young men
and maidens crowned their heads with mugwort and
verbena, and carried larkspur in their hands pines were brought from the forest and planted
in the village green; the girls procured clay vessels, full of holes, filled
them with rose-leaves, put a light in them, and hung them at their gables. On
Corpus Christi Day there was another procession of the Host, and mummery almost
amounting to a miracle-play, in which devils and saints, male and female, took
part, and the streets were strewn with roses and hung with may-blossom; the
whole concluding with a procession round the corn-fields, headed by the priest,
who sang the gospel over the new corn. On the Day of Saint Vitus hens were
offered to ward off cramps and poison; on the Day of Our Lady's Ascension,
fruits and herbs to keep away sickness and plague; on Saint Martin's Day it was
the custom to eat a goose. There were special observances connected with the
vintage. On Saint Urban’s Day (May 25th) the growers
set a table in the market-place, adorning it with leaves and sweet-smelling
herbs and putting a small statue of the Pope thereon. The weather on this day
was taken as a prognostic of the coming summer : if it was fine, the statue was
crowned with leaves and obeisance done to it; but if it was rainy, it was
bedaubed with mud and soused with water. Then, when the grapes were ready, not
a husbandman thought of beginning his picking until he had been authorized by
the lord of the tithe, and due provision had been made for the collection of
God's tenth of the produce; the grapes then were picked, and finally the
children came with their torches to cleanse the fields and burn out the old
harvest. Every one was expected to taste the new
wine—even the poor had their share. When the agricultural operations of the
year were thus connected with religious observances, when Church festivals
constantly recurring called for the participation of all the villagers, when
the social and political life of the town or village centred in the Church, when there was one form of devotion for all alike, when every
man attended the Church to which he belonged and was restricted to that Church,
it is evident that the Church must have been much more constantly before men's
minds and in their hearts, that it must have been much more intimately bound up
with their daily lives, that its welfare must have formed a much more important
consideration to them and have meant much more to them in the Middle Ages than
it does today.
The Church was
emphatically the Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages. During the Dark Ages, from
the time of Charles the Great to the eleventh century, education was in the
hands of the Benedictine monks, and every famous monastery had two schools, one claustral, for the young religious, and the other for
outsiders. Then came the dawn of a brighter time. Not only every abbey, but
every cathedral also, and many of the larger churches, had each its own school.
The famous cloisters of France, before the rise of the University of Paris,
were frequented by scholars from Germany, Denmark, Italy, and England; the
University itself sprang from the Cathedral School of Paris. The smaller
schools taught only reading, writing, and a little singing; song-schools were
attached to every cathedral for the instruction of the choristers. The aim of
instruction for the lower ranks of the clergy was to enable them to read the
Bible and the Fathers, and to meditate thereon. But education at the larger, or
Latin, schools was more ambitious; the course, which might in these days be
termed the first and the second Arts course, was then known as the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium comprised grammar, rhetoric, and logic; the Quadrivium comprised arithmetic and astronomy, necessary to
the clergy for the determination of Easter, music, a half-mystical doctrine of
numbers and the rules of plain-song, and geometry, a selection of propositions
from Euclid without the demonstrations. Grammar included the study of the classics;
under rhetoric certain treatises of Cicero were largely read; but the heart and centre of the secular education of the time in
Northern Europe was the study of dialectic or logic, the science of right
reasoning, which took a wide range and introduced the student to the
ever-engrossing controversy between the Realists and the Nominalists. After the
days of Anselm the monasteries began to close their doors to lay students, and
to provide for their own people alone; the care for education was transferred
from the regular to the secular clergy, a change which was helped by the advent
of the friars and by the rise of the universities; although even in the first
half of the fourteenth century every son of the soil in France, who made his
way to name and fame, had received his early education at some monastic school.
The cathedrals and churches took up the work which the monks, in their
selfishness, were dropping; the chancellor of a cathedral was responsible for
the appointment of the schoolmaster and for the regulation of the studies.
Priests were enjoined to establish schools for gratuitous instruction in the
villages; in these the children learned their catechism, reading, writing, a
little arithmetic and grammar; such schools were in England often held by
chantry priests. In this way, up to the end of the thirteenth century, the
education of the people, save in Italy, remained almost entirelv in the hands of the clergv; boys were sent to school,
girls were sent to a nunnery, or had private teachers. In Italy, however,
although church schools existed, the old race of lay teachers never died out,
even in the Dark Ages, and when the revival came, its effects were most
conspicuous in the schools of the independent lay teachers. In Germany and
Holland also, during the fourteenth century, lay masters established schools in
many of the cities, where the demand of the merchants and artisans for
education was greatest. But with such occasional exceptions the Church did the
whole work of education.
If the Church was the
Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages, she was, for the great majority of the
population, the Physician also, although in this good work they had for rivals
the Jew and Arab physicians at one end of the profession and the
barber-surgeons at the other. From the fourth century onward the Church had
taught and practised the art of healing : when the
temples of Esculapius, Hygeia, and Serapis were closed, Christianity opened its churches and
monasteries to the sick. The monks possessed a large number of traditional
recipes; they made use of medicinal herbs for wounds and bruises. The
competition with the Arabs and Jews compelled them to further study; they
travelled to acquire practice and knowledge; they accompanied crusades and
armies as doctors. Hospitals were attached to the monasteries and large
churches; hospitallers, brothers and sisters, were
trained to tend the sick; a code of hygiene was formed. The Emperor Henry the
Second went to the monastery of Monte Casino to be treated for stone. The
eleventh century had seen a large increase in the number of hospitals and
lazar-houses; it had also seen the rise of different orders devoting themselves
to special diseases : the Brothers of Saint Antony applied themselves to bowel
complaints and cases of dysentery; the Knights of Saint John and the Brethren
of the Holy Spirit treated especially those who had fallen victims to
pestilential epidemics; the Brethren of Saint Lazarus held sovereign specifics
against small-pox and leprosy; the Templars tended warriors, pilgrims, and travellers suffering from ophthalmia,
scurvy, or dangerous wounds. Surgeons, trained in the monastic schools, were
engaged in the Low Countries, in Italy and Germany, by the richer and larger
towns for the service of charity. In France, in the thirteenth century, it was
no longer necessary for a student of medicine or surgery to be a clerk; the
profession was opened, and the minor surgery fell into the hands of the
barber-surgeons. The barbers gradually usurped the functions which had
previously been reserved to the clergy, and at the end of the fourteenth
century there were three recognized orders of practitioners in France; the
physicians ‘of the long robe’, the surgeons ‘of the short robe’, and the
barbers; and the latter were allowed to wear swords, and were excused all duty
on the night-watch. The medical schools of Montpellier and Paris were by this
time formidable rivals of Salerno and Bologna; France and Italy were far ahead
of Germany and England in medical science. John of Bohemia was so unskillfully
treated that he flung his physician into the river Oder, being righteously
determined that he should do no further harm to any man. Sigismund of Hungary,
like Albert of Austria and Wenzel of Bohemia before him, and like another
Albert of Austria his contemporary, was hung by the heels for twenty-four hours
to allow poison to trickle out of him; Edward the Third of England, when a boy,
was wrapped in red cloth to cure small-pox; and the court physician who treated
him prescribed an ointment made of crickets, beetles, and common oil to cure
the stone. Another recipe for the same complaint was to take gromel, parsley, red nettle, violets, incense, and
cherry-stone kernels, to bray them together and to mix them with stale ale as a
healing-draught. A third method of dissolving stone was to take the white
stones from the maw of a cock twelve months old, to bray them in a mortar with
an iron pestle, and to mix them with wine. Some of the recipes were harmless
enough, and perhaps not the less efficacious : sore throats were steamed with
boiling cinquefoil water; excessive sweating was cured by binding linseed and
lettuce, stamped well together, on the stomach; while a sufferer from tertian
ague was directed to eat a hot barley-cake and to drink copiously of good wine
when the fit was coming on, then to drink a decoction made of plantains brayed
in wine and water, and to compose himself to sleep. A hare's gall in pottage
would make a man sleep for three days; southernwood brayed in wine would stop
him from talking in his sleep; violet-water would cure his broken bones;
centaury brayed and mixed with wine and water would cure snake-bite; while
goats' claws burned to powder in a new pot and eaten with pottage were a
sovereign remedy against incontinence of urine. Some of their recipes were
sufficiently fanciful : barley-bread and mustard-soup eaten with sage fasting,
were prescribed for palsy; aloes and opium, brayed and mixed with the milk of a
woman who was suckling a man child, formed an ointment for blindness; pig's
fat, hen’s fat, white of an egg, and darnel meal were the ingredients for an
ointment for white faces; and any one who had red
eyes was recommended to take a large red snail, to prick his back all over and
rub salt in, to catch the liquor which exuded, and to use it as a salve. Those
who suffered from worms were instructed to make a candle of virgin wax, with
which henbane, wild celery, and pimpernel had been mixed, to light the candle
and hold it in the mouth until the teeth got hot, when the worms would surely
drop out. A costive man had a parlous time: mallows and mercury were seethed
under a gobbet of pork, and he was required to eat the pottage made thereof,
and to drink therewith white wine or whey, ‘and he shall be soluble’. The
foregoing examples give some idea of the state of medical science and skill in
England at this time. Chaucer’s Doctour of Physick, “a very parfit practisour”, clad in sangwin and
in pers, worked by the rules of natural magic and
astrology. It was to the careful tending and patient nursing that they
bestowed, to the hygienic treatment and simple drugs and herbs which they used,
that the monks owed most of their success in the science of medicine.
Thus far we have
noticed the Church of the Middle Ages only in some of its wider aspects; we
have seen how largely it bulked on the horizon, how intimately it was connected
in various ways with the life and welfare of the people. But we have not yet
considered the different orders, secular and regular, of which it was composed,
nor the abuses which had gradually risen in its midst, impairing its
efficiency, and arousing a widespread feeling of unrest in the minds of its
most earnest followers. They recognized that the clergy were the salt of the
earth; but if the salt were to lose its savour,
wherewith should the world be salted?
(2) Seculars and Regulars
We have glanced at
the position of the Holy Roman Empire at the commencement of the Great Schism
of the West; we have now to consider the state of the secular and regular orders
in the Holy Roman Church at the same time.
The most glorious
years of the Papacy extended, as has been said, from the days of Hildebrand to
the pontificate of Innocent the Third. These mighty pontiffs endeavoured to establish the Church in the beauty of
holiness, to make it a guide and exemplar to all, a centre of purity bringing peace and healing on its wings; they sought to bring all the
kingdoms of the world in subjection to themselves in order thereby to induce a
universal reign of holiness. But they had aimed too high; they had not made
sufficient allowance for the frailty of human nature. They were able almost
everywhere to enforce a nominal rule of celibacy on the clergy, but they were
unable to procure their chastity; it was celibacy tempered with concubinage; it was a common thing for the priest to pay to
his bishop the tribute known as cullagium to be allowed to keep his concubine in peace. The
Pope was rightly the supreme judge in matters of faith and doctrine, but in
matters of discipline they had centralised too
strictly. They had rendered the bishops so subservient, that they had lost all
respect and authority in their own dioceses; the abbots also would decide
nothing for themselves. The veriest trifles of
discipline were submitted to Innocent the Third for decision: points of
grammar, the correct attitude in the choir, the refectory, the dormitory, the
shape and size of a bed coverlet—all such matters the Pope willingly took upon
himself to consider and decide. The Popes, moreover, collated to all the more
important benefices, and decided all cases of contested elections. Finally,
when Innocent acquired the States of the Church, the work of practical
government also fell to be executed; but this very acquisition, while it marked
the summit of Papal influence, marked also the commencement of its decline. A
firm territorial basis might be advantageous or even necessary for the Papacy;
but a Pope fighting for his temporal possessions no longer appealed to men’s
sympathies as he did when, in the days of feudal oppression, he had fought for
his purely spiritual dignity and importance.
The thirteenth
century, from the days of Innocent the Third to those of Boniface the Eighth,
has been styled the noonday of papal dominion, the century during which Rome
inspired all the terror of her ancient name, during which she was once more
mistress of the world and kings were her vassals. It was in many ways the most
wonderful time since the birth of Christ: the world had renewed its youth;
there was a renaissance of learning and intellect which has made many wonder
why the Protestant Reformation did not come three hundred years earlier than it
actually did. It was an epoch of great sovereigns, great statesmen, great
lawyers, great men of science, great philosophers and divines, great
architects, great poets and painters. It was a century marked by a decline in
the spiritual efficacy, but by an increase in the temporal pretensions of the
Papacy; never had any Pope set these so high as did Benedict Gaetani when he became Pope Boniface the Eighth. But the
glorious promise of the thirteenth century was not fulfilled; the renaissance
came to naught; no summer followed the wonderful spring; instead thereof, a
winter of corruption and decay set in. Persecution, bribery (in the shape of
patronage), the natural tendency of any unusual stimulation of intellectual
activity to wear itself out, and above all the genius of the great orthodox
Schoolmen, prevailed. It was the theological dictatorship of the cosmopolitan
University of Paris which more than all else blasted the fair prospects of the
twelfth-century illumination, though at the same time it saved Northern France
from the ravages of the Holy Inquisition. The University of Paris aspired to a
theological dictatorship, and hence ran counter to the Popes. For the Popes
were not theologians; they were canon lawyers; they had all the lawyer's desire
to stand on the ancient ways, they had all the lawyer’s dislike for radical
reform. Clement the Fifth openly professed his contempt for the theologians of
Paris. Jean Gerson, on the other hand, who tried to
arrogate to the Theological Faculty the control of negotiations during the
Great Schism, was never tired of reiterating that the Canon Law must give way,
when occasion demanded, to the Divine Law and the welfare of Holy Church. From
their education and training the influence of the Popes was averse from all
radical reform of the Church and its members. The close of the thirteenth
century was marked by a fearful catastrophe for the Church. The Popes had come
victorious out of their strife with the Hohenstaufen; they were worsted in
their strife with France. Boniface fell before Philip; he died very shortly
after the sacrilegious outrage at Agnani.
An immense change was
marked by the transfer of the Papacy to Avignon. It wrought woe in many ways.
It wrought woe to the Papacy itself, inasmuch as it deprived the Pope of the
consideration and respect which he had hitherto enjoyed as the impartial,
international arbitrator, the supreme head of Christendom, the common Father of
all nations. It wrought woe to both England and France, inasmuch as it rendered
futile all the efforts of Benedict the Twelfth to avert the Hundred Years' War,
a conflict which wasted the resources though it increased the glory of England,
which brought incalculable desolation and misery on the fair realm of France.
It wrought woe to Germany, inasmuch as there ensued the long strife between
Louis of Bavaria and the Popes, which brought with it the revolt of the Franciscan
Friars and the consequent alienation of much of the German peasantry. It
wrought woe also to Italy, which lapsed into anarchy as soon as the Pope had
departed from Rome,—the city fell into ruins, and cattle grazed at the foot of
the altars in St. Peter's and the Vatican. It saw the rise of the Tribune
Rienzi, the tragic actor in the tattered purple of antiquity; the state of the
peninsula grew worse and worse, until Florence and Bologna threw off their
allegiance and declared war on the Papacy, a war which was aggravated and
stained by the bloody massacre of Cesena under the orders of Cardinal Robert of
Geneva. Finally the Captivity rendered possible and probable the Great Schism,
which went far toward completing the baleful work which the residence in the “sinful
city of Avenon” had begun.
The transfer of the
Papacy, moreover, initiated a period of social decadence and gloom, during
which the corruption of morals everywhere made frightful progress. Through all
Europe save Italy, says Renan, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a
stagnant time, during which thought existed no longer, literature was dead, art
was dying, and poetry was mute. The description, though overcharged, is true in
the main outlines. Corruption seized on the body ecclesiastic and spread
through every part, from the head downward. Simony was openly practised, and was excused in Rome on the ground that
everything belonged to the Pope, who was only dealing with his own. Spiritual
offices everywhere were sold and bartered, for gold, for love, for gaming; the
Pope's palace was a nest of money-changers and usurers. Men's hearts failed
them for the sins which they saw in high places. Among the masses of the people
superstition and ignorance prevailed; every one believed in omens and portents,
in ghosts and demons, in magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. Signs and wonders were
of daily occurrence. Sacred pictures exhibited signs of life; drops of
sacramental wine, Christ's blood, worked marvels of healing; relics were
purchased, even by hard-headed mercantile men like the Venetians, for fabulous
sums, and were feared and venerated as if they were talismans; confession was
equivalent to incantation; the Devil intervened actively in everyday life; the
sheeted dead sighed plaintively at night along the streets when danger impended
in the city. Rustics held their Feast of Fools in churches and cathedrals; in
Italy food was every year set out for the dead during the four days before the
Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter; in England the villagers peeped in from the
churchyard on Sundays to catch sight of the priest waving the Host, and ran
home delighted, exclaiming that they had said their Mass, that they had seen
their Lord; while those who partook of the Holy Communion saved bits of wafer
to rub their sick cattle withal, or watered their cabbages with the crumbs to
keep off caterpillars. Of miracles there were enough and to spare; a temporary
lack was set down to want of piety, for sorry monks worked no wonders. There
was everywhere gross spiritual neglect; parish priests were admonished to teach
their flocks once every three months all the cardinal points of the Christian
doctrine, but teaching was scanty and preaching, practically confined to the
bishops, was scantier still.
The temporal
possessions and political wars of the Pope had introduced, had indeed almost
necessitated, the sale of offices. Money was wanted; and the Peter’s Pence
contributed by the northern nations of Europe, and the tribute paid by the
States of the Church and occasionally by other countries, such as England and
Portugal, were utterly insufficient to provide the needful sums. The expense to
which the Pope was put for an establishment was enormous. In addition to the
determination of points of doctrine and discipline, to the granting of
dispensations, to the confirmations and collations to benefices, to the
manifold external relations with foreign courts, there came an immense mass of
work to the Pope as to the spiritual court of ultimate appeal. This facility of
appeal had been made matter of reproach by Hildebert of Tours and by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, but it had continued and increased;
and in the time of Gregory the Twelfth cases came in for settlement at the rate
of two thousand a week. The huge amount of work with which the Pope had to
contend was far greater than that which came before any other chancery in
Christendom. Whenever an order on any of these matters was given, a minute had
to be made, a Bull or other formal order engrossed, and an office copy of it
transcribed. It necessarily followed that the Pope had to maintain an enormous
staff of clerks and other officials in the Curia, in addition to the officers
of his own household, and this implied the need for a correspondingly large
revenue.
But while the expenses
of the Curia were very large, its revenue was fluctuating and precarious.
Peter's Pence and tribute have already been mentioned. When a crusade was on
foot, a tenth was levied on the clergy; and the same tax was imposed on other
occasions resembling a war against the unbeliever; and although the proceeds
were supposed to be devoted to the crusade, for the help of those warriors who
could not pay their own way, it was commonly believed that a certain part of
the money never got beyond the papal treasury; there were all the expenses and
the inevitable peculation involved in the collecting. Then again the Pope
claimed, though he was not always successful in appropriating, the revenues of
all vacant benefices; and benefices might be vacated by transfer as well as by
death; the revenues might, on the other hand, be annexed by the sovereign. The
most considerable source of revenue after this was the first-fruits, or annates, levied on the confirmation of an appointment to a
benefice, whether vacated by death or by transfer; the Pope was entitled to the
first year's income from all dignities and benefices in his gift, and
frequently a vacancy was accompanied by three or four transfers, each bringing
in its crop of first-fruits. Letters of reversion and expectancies also
produced a goodly revenue; and to these were added the tithes from the clergy
and the offerings of the faithful. Pope John the Twenty-second drew up a
regular tariff for collation to different benefices : three thousand gulden
were charged for the Bishopric of Munster, thirty thousand for the
archiepiscopal pallium of Mainz, twenty thousand for
that of Trier, and the like. Absolution for a city, taking off the interdict, reconsecrating the cemetery, cost forty, fifty, or sixty
gulden. Every appointment, however humble, was sold. By these means John, being
a careful and thrifty man, one naturally opposed to any such doctrine as that
of Apostolic Poverty, managed to amass the enormous sum of twenty-five millions
of gold florins, which his successor, Benedict the Twelfth, another careful and
thrifty Pope, managed to double; the entire sum was most royally squandered by
Benedict’s successor, Clement the Sixth. The Popes after John the Twenty-
second usually adopted the simpler plan of taking all they could get,
preferring a higher bid to the lower. Archbishop William of Cologne paid
Clement the Sixth seventy thousand florins; Archbishop Friedrich paid Urban the
Fifth one hundred and twenty thousand florins; the Archbishopric of Mainz cost
John of Nassau fifty thousand; and other German prelates paid more than twice
that sum. England was esteemed a veritable gold-mine, and Englishmen had to pay
accordingly. De Grey paid ten thousand pounds for the Archbishopric of York,
and others the like or even larger sums; his bishopric cost Robert de Oxford
fifteen thousand pounds. Every new prelate was bound to start within a month of
election on his journey to Rome for collation; he frequently returned crippled
for years by his debt to the Lombards or the Jews. Pope Clement the Sixth,
while his favourite the Countess of Turenne dispensed
places and preferments for a price, while he himself
provided for his nephews and his court by imposing taxes which irritated Teutons and Italians alike, laughed, and said that none of
his predecessors had known how to be Popes. At the same time, he was careful to
keep in touch with the royal courts; he told his cardinal that if the King of
England wanted to give a bishopric to an ass, he must be humoured;
and in 1349 a donkey did make its way into the consistory with a petition round
its neck that he, too, might be made a bishop. The Popes also exacted more
direct patronage than formerly. In 1226 two prebends in each cathedral were demanded. In 1265 the Pope claimed to deal directly with
all vacancies occurring in benefices while the holders were in Rome; and as all
bishops came to Rome for collation, and many prelates of high degree came there
to push their litigation, the number of death vacancies thus arising was not
small. When a bishop was translated or made cardinal, the Pope dealt directly
with the vacancy thus caused, for he alone could loose the tie which bound a bishop to his see. In the fourteenth century the right of
direct nomination of bishops was claimed, and the system of reservation and
provision was extended to the episcopate. Many Italians were thus provided with
livings both in England and in France and they were usually non-residents and
pluralists. At the beginning of the Great Schism, Clement the Seventh leagued
himself with the Duke of Anjou to spoil the Gallican Church : he doubled the tithes; he reserved the collation of all benefices; his
collectors seized the personal property and the cash left by deceased bishops
and abbes; benefices were put up for sale to the highest bidder. It is no
wonder that churches became deserted, that clerks were reduced to beggary, that
the revenues of colleges and hospitals were plundered, that scholars were
dispersed, that the University of Paris saw her children abandoning her maternal
breast, which had no longer the wherewithal to nourish them. At Rome corruption
reached its climax under Pope Boniface the Ninth. Simony, forbidden to others,
was rampant at Rome itself; everything could be bought at the papal court for
money, and without money no justice or redress was to be had; full many a
devout ecclesiastic re-echoed the words of Grosseteste : “Ah! money, money, how infinite is thy power, most of all in the court of
Rome!”. The Commons of England complained that no king in Christendom had
one-fourth of the revenue that went from England alone to the Pope.
Bad as was the
reputation of the Curia for simony, the moral repute of the Pope's court was
not much better. The majority of the Popes at Avignon were indeed themselves
men of pure livelihood; but the court of Clement the Sixth became renowned for
its voluptuousness and sensual luxury, and the “sinful city of Avenon” became a byword in Europe. The ladies, the sisters
and nieces of great prelates, held their courts of the “gaie science”; their salons were the recognized avenues of promotion. Those who
wanted rich benefices in the time of Clement the Fifth laid their petitions on
the white bosom of the beautiful Brunisand de Foix; in the time of Innocent the Sixth they paid their
court to Enemonde de Bourbon. Great churchmen might
be celibate, but many of them were not chaste, and female honour was a thing of little worth in their eyes. When Butillo,
in the time of his uncle, Urban the Sixth, broke into a convent and ravished a
beautiful high-born nun, the Pope excused his nephew, who was more than forty
years old, by ascribing his sin to the fire of youth; and when the nephew of
Gerard de Puy, Cardinal Legate at Perugia, committed
the like offence against a noble lady, whereby she in her haste to avoid his
brutality slipped, fell from her window, and died, the Cardinal placidly
inquired of the enraged Perugians whether they
thought that all the French were eunuchs!
The papal court,
instead of being a model of virtue for mankind, was under too many of the Popes
a hotbed of vice. The riotous licence of the younger
cardinals, says Petrarch, was matched by the senile debauchery of their elders. Every one has read the story of the Jew Abraham, who
visited the papal court. He began circumspectly to acquaint himself with the
ways of the Pope and the cardinals and the other prelates and all the
courtiers; and from what he saw for himself, being a man of great intelligence,
or learned from others, he discovered that without distinction of rank they were
all sunk in the most disgraceful lewdness, sinning not only in the way of
nature, but after the manner of the men of Sodom, without any restraint of
remorse or shame, in such sort that, when any great favour was to be procured, the influence of the courtesans and boys was of no small
moment. Moreover, he found one and all gluttonous, wine-bibbers, and next after
lewdness most addicted to the shameful service of the belly, like brute beasts.
Saint Catherine of Siena, as will be seen later on, is as scathing in her
denunciation as is Boccaccio in the Decameron.
The cardinals, says
Nicolas de Clamanges, look down upon primates and
patriarchs; they make themselves the equals of kings. They were judged very unfavourably, however, by the outside world; they stank in
the nostrils of Christendom for their avarice and corruption. Henry of Hesse,
vice-chancellor of the University of Paris, censured in scathing terms their
simony, pomp, and libertinage. They were of all clerks the most noted
pluralists. "Not two or three, nor ten or twenty, but one or two hundred
benefices, sometimes even four or five hundred, do they accumulate" says
Nicolas de Clamanges, “and these, too, not mean or
small ones, but the best and fattest”. The Popes heaped on them pluralities
with unstinted hand, so that in 1385 Charles the Sixth of France asserted in an
ordinance that the cardinals had absorbed all the preferments in the kingdom—benefices, abbeys, orphanages, hospitals, etc.—exacting revenue
to the utmost and leaving the institutions disabled and the fabric to fall into
ruin. The Doctor already quoted makes the same charge against them—nothing
could equal their overbearing pride and arrogance, but their private lives were
a scandal : “I pass over their simoniacal interviews
with the Pope, I pass over their venal patronage, I pass over the most
disgraceful and damnable corruptions and promotions almost entirely due to
them; I pass over the pay and rewards they received from temporal powers for
abetting them in church matters wrongfully. Nor will I mention the adulteries,
the lewdness, the fornications with which they now defile the Roman curia.
Their usury and trading and many other more grievous sins are omitted by this
dutiful son of the Church”. Pope Urban the Sixth had some grounds for his
public reproach, he preached in open consistory on the text, “I am the Good
Shepherd”, and descanted on the manifold failings of the lord cardinals. It is
small wonder that they took it ill; the truth was a bitter pill to swallow, and
in this instance this bit of bitter truth had its effect in producing the Great
Schism. When they were sent abroad on affairs of State, they lived on the
country to which they were deputed at the rate of a hundred golden gulden a
day; and when complimentary visits were paid to them at the papal court, it was
useless for the visitor to come empty-handed. William Langland spoke but the
common conviction when he declared that
'The country is the curseder that cardinals come in,
And where they lie
and linger most, lechery there reigneth.
Nicolas de Clamanges is no less severe in his strictures on the French
bishops: “there are many of them, he says, who have never visited their
dioceses, who have never seen the faces nor heard the voices nor felt the
wounds of their flocks : luxury, pomp, and avarice are the three Harpies who
rule their lives. The bishops delight in wine, banquet, and games; in lofty
houses and wide palaces; in heaping up money; they are given up to drinking,
fornication, and gambling; they spend their days in hunting, fishing, and
tennis; their nights in feasting, dancing, and debauchery”. The German bishops
were on their part “wolves and hirelings”, elected for the sake of their birth
and breeding by worldly chapters who drove hard bargains with them their sees were liable to be taxed both by the
temporal and the spiritual powers; the elections were all subject to the Pope's
confirmation, the donation of the regalia by the civil power being but an
empty form.
The bishops were the
connecting link between the generalissimo and the rank and file of the Church,
though some of the bishoprics were of so wide an extent—that of Utrecht, for
example, which covered the whole of Holland—that it was impossible for the
bishop to become acquainted with the whole of his diocese or the whole of his
parish clergy. Nor did they attempt the task, for, as a general rule, they were
absorbed in the temporal interests of their sees. They were the spiritual
landed nobility, corresponding to the dukes, earls, and counts among the lay
nobles. They were almost invariably warriors and statesmen rather than mere
ecclesiastics. The idea of making a man a bishop or an archdeacon on account of
his zeal, his energy, his success in the humble round of parochial duty, is one
which would hardly have occurred to sensible men in mediaeval times. Since land
alone gave social distinction, the wide possessions of the Church were coveted
by German princes and nobles as a welcome means of procuring riches and honour for the younger sons of their families. As early as
1139 Pope Innocent the Second applied the feudal system to the Church by
declaring at the Lateran Council that all ecclesiastical dignities were
received and held of the Popes like fiefs; and like fiefs, church dignities
were too often conferred as a reward for past services without thought of the
attendant duties. Bishops and abbots were, above all else, the spiritual lords
and princes of the Empire; pious men might occasionally be inducted, but the
possession and defence of land was the leading motive
in the strife after the higher church dignities.
Under these
circumstances simony, notwithstanding the efforts of Pope Gregory the Seventh
and his successors, became almost universal. Certain of the kings of France
were notorious as vendors of bishoprics, and where money was not paid,
promotion commonly went by favour or relationship.
The worthier bishops who occasionally appeared could do little to enforce
respect for religion and morality ; in those days of violence the prizes were
for those whose martial prowess won respect for the rights of their churches
and vassals. All this was in some sort a necessity of the incongruous union of
feudal noble and Christian prelate, and though more marked in Germany than elsewhere,
it was to be seen everywhere. The bishops of Normandy fought under Philip the
Bold : the Bishop of Beauvais was captured by Richard of the Lion Heart, and
his coat of mail sent to the Pope with the inquiry : “Know now whether it be
thy son’s coat or not?” The same question was asked by the Marquis of
Montferrat when he captured Aymon, Bishop of
Vercelli. In 1265 the troops of Manfred of Sicily captured the Bishop of
Verona. Such was the worldly, turbulent character of bishops generally that
pious souls believed that no bishop could enter the kingdom of heaven. The good
prior of Clairvaux, on being told that he was elected Bishop of Tournay, cast himself on the ground, offering to become a
vagrant monk, but a bishop never. An ecclesiastic in Paris declared that he
could believe all things except that any German bishop could be saved. Nor was
the moral character of certain of the French archbishops and bishops above
suspicion. Gerard de Rougemont, Archbishop of Besançon, lived in incest with the Abbess of Remiremont and other holy women; the Bishop of Toul, Maheu de Lorraine, was
abandoned to debauchery, his favourite concubine
being his own daughter by a nun; Berenger was
eventually removed from the archbishopric of Narbonne because of his scandalous
life and character.
In England the archbishops and bishops were
generally educated and capable men. There were, of course, exceptions. Walter
Reynolds, Archbishop of Canterbury under Edward the Second, was said to be so
illiterate that he could not spell his own name aright; Lewis de Beaumont,
Bishop of Durham, who for days before his consecration tried to learn the Latin
formula which he had to repeat, finally stuck at one long word and said, “Let
it be taken as said”, and when he came to another troublesome phrase muttered, “By
Saint Louis, he is an ill-mannered fellow who put in that word here”. In
England also it was held somewhat of an anomaly for a bishop, such as Henry Despenser of Norwich, to be a man of war; but when Henry
the Fourth sent to Innocent the Seventh the armour of
the traitor Bishop Scrope, with the old request that
he would know whether this was his son’s coat or not, the Pope innocently
answered, “An evil beast hath devoured him”. The bishops generally were able
men, and the chief charge brought against them was that they were the servants,
not of God, but of the King. The employment of bishops in the civil
administration of the State was no new system; it had been adopted in every
country of Christendom for several hundreds of years, and its effects have been
aptly described in its inception in words which are equally applicable to the
close of the fourteenth century: “With power and great place came in
worldliness and corruption in increasing proportion as time went on, and though
as statesmen these great bishops were probably not worse councillors,
and often were more intelligent ones, with a natural leaning to order and
peace, than the rough dukes and counts with whom they acted, yet the meaning
and consciousness of their religious office became more and more lost in their
secular greatness”. Wycliffe and other reformers who held the impracticable
Utopian doctrine that the clergy should practise apostolic poverty were very severe on “Caesarean clergy”; they took no heed of
the needs of the kingdom. For the civil administration the king needed the
services of a certain number of able, educated, and trustworthy men, and he
could find many more of the class he wanted among the clergy than among the
nobility. These men must be recompensed. The King lived of his own; taxes were
exceptional, and were levied for special purposes. The ordinary mode of
recompense was by giving a man land on which he could live; and as the grant of
baronies in fee-simple was out of the question, the only resource was the gift
of ecclesiastical preferments, which were at best
merely estates for life. This was the attitude taken by such able kings as
Philip the Fair and Edward the First. In Germany, Bishops Raban of Speier, Matthew of Worms, and Conrad of Verden served King Rupert as diplomats. “There was much to
be said”, remarks the Rev. W. W. Capes, “for the King's desire to reward his
ministers with ecclesiastical preferment, and to relax the rules of discipline
in their behalf. Only in their order could he find the trained lawyers with the
literary skill he needed for his work. His own resources were too scanty to
reward them fitly”. The Chancellor and Treasurer were nearly always dignitaries
of the Church. Promotion to a bishopric could easily be arranged with the Pope,
and was a convenient reward for services rendered. The system was advantageous
for the State, but disastrous for the Church. Many of the bishops thus became
engrossed in civil pursuits; they filled important offices of State, and played
a foremost part in diplomacy and politics. But their episcopal duties suffered,
and the Courts Christian went by the board; these things were either left
undone altogether, or were performed imperfectly by deputy; the Church was thus
starved for the sake of the State. Yet there were many bishops, after the
fashion of Bishop Grosseteste, who were engaged
solely in their episcopal duties. Many remained at their posts and did their
duty manfully during the Black Death. But their sympathies again were with the
beneficed clergy rather than with the poorer parish priests, whom they were
ready to suspend if they received more than six marks a year, little more than
a pittance absolutely needful for a yeoman’s family, while some ministers with
cure of souls received less than the pay of a common soldier. The unfeeling
language used by these bishops in their pastorals rankled in men’s minds, and
from this time we may note the growing sense of jarring interests and divided
sympathies between the higher and the lower clergy, as in the country at large
between the landowners and the peasants. Like the bishops on the Continent, the
English bishops also were not ashamed to increase their incomes by the levy of
a tax from priests whom they allowed to keep concubines.
In Germany the
bishops were often not statesmen, much less ecclesiastics; they were warriors
pure and simple, fighting to defend or to increase the lands of the Church.
When the newly elected Bishop of Hildesheim inquired for the library of his
predecessors, he was taken to the armoury and was
shown the coats of mail and the arms hanging on the walls; these were the
books, he was told, with which the rights of the diocese had been won and by
which they must be maintained. Around the bishops’ churches there had gradually
arisen, especially during the Kaiserless time of the
Empire, wealthy states with an industrial population, devoid of landed
property, but naturally desirous of political position. These burghers were the
natural enemies of the bishops, and with them they were constantly at war. In
Worms there was strife between the bishop and the citizens : King Wenzel
declared for the latter, King Rupert for the former. In Magdeburg the burghers
fell upon the houses of the canons, burned two of them, drove the clergy out of
the city (1402); they were brought back next year by the Count of Schwartzburg; the old archbishop, Albert of Querfurt, known for his greed, died, and the count’s son,
twenty-one years of age, was elected archbishop,—he never read a Mass for the
next thirty-three years. In Brunswick there was war between the clergy and the
burghers, and the Mendicant orders backed up the citizens. The Bishop of Halberstadt laid his city under an interdict, but he
himself died in 1404, and long lay unburied since he was himself excommunicated
for throttling a canon with his own hands. Bishop Gerhard of Hildesheim,
successor to the bishop mentioned above, fought with and took prisoners the
Duke of Brunswick, the Archbishop of Magdeburg, and the Bishop of Halberstadt; he spent their ransoms in providing a golden
ceiling to the tower of the Church of the Virgin Mary. In Minden there were
disputed elections at the end of the century; the citizens arose, turned out
the clergy, and burned the chapter-house. The Bishop of Paderborn waged war
against the association of knights. The Bishop of Wurzburg seized his own
chapter in their copes and hoods, imprisoned them, and held them to ransom.
Bishop Brunlow quarrelled with the citizens of Stralsund because they had cut down the funeral-fees,
robbed them of their cattle, and hacked the hands and feet off their workmen;
the burghers retaliated by binding three priests to ladders and throwing them
in the fire. The moral character of some of the bishops was often sufficiently
shocking. John of Liege, like young Gunther of Schwartzburg,
never got himself ordained; they were both lusty, wild warriors, who did their
work by deputy. Bishop Otto, appointed by the Pope to Minden in 1404, was a man
whom no one would believe on his oath, a debaucher of nuns. In Augsburg clergy
and laity were alike addicted to unnatural offences; the city council visited
the laity with severe punishment, but the bishops delayed to do the like with
the clergy, whereupon three seculars and a Dominican were caught, stripped,
bound hand and foot and placed in a cage; one was hanged, and the other three
starved to death. With such scenes disgracing the whole Empire at the end of
the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was little wonder
that when any man inquired who was at the bottom of any new war or villainy, he
was invariably told it was some bishop, provost, dean, or priest. The real
cause of the constant strife was that Germany was then intent 011 winning back
from the clergy the rights and possessions which the clergy had acquired from
the laity.
The archdeacon was
the delegate of the bishop in judicial work; he was a veritable Mr. Worldly
Wiseman, learned in the law and cunning to profit thereby; it was his function
to suck the marrow from the bones of all bodies committed to the spiritual
charge of his lord the bishop. As soon as he obtained his post, he usually got
a dispensation, and hurried off to Bologna to fit himself for his work. There
he became acquainted with all the intricacies of the canon law, he fell in love
with beauteous Italian ladies, he gambled and got into debt, he learned the
arts of poisoning and the other faculties which went to make up the virtue of
the average Italian churchman. When they returned from Bologna, the archdeacons
began to exercise their abilities for the benefit of one at the expense of the
many. In England, as in France, they hurried through their visitations, hurling
excommunications right and left, claiming from every parish a fixed charge,
known as the “archdeacon’s pig” or the “larder gift”. Chaucer’s Archdeacon was—
a man of heigh degree,
That boldly did execution
In punishing of fornication,
Of witchcraft, and
eek of bauderye,
Of defamation, and avoutrye,
Of chirche-reves, and of testaments,
Of contracts, and of
lack of sacraments,
And eek of many
another manner crime
Which nedeth nat rehercen at this tyme;
Of usury, and of simony
also.
But certes, lechours dide he grettest wo;
They sholde singen, if that they were hent;
And smale tytheres weren foule y-shent . . .
For small tithes and
for small offering,
He made the people piteously
to singe.
For er the bishop caught hem with his
hook,
They were in the erchedeknes hook.
Thanne hadde he, thurgh his Jurisdiccioun,
Power to doom on them
correction.'
It is little wonder that
pious souls, accused of giving too small tithes or offerings, should have
puzzled themselves, from the time of John of Salisbury onwards, as to whether
it were possible that an archdeacon could be saved.
Like the archdeacons,
their subordinates, the rural deans, the archipretres of France, were accused of avarice and rapacity; the Bishop of Exeter
complained, moreover, that they gave their official seals to substitutes, “men
of low character, who falsified official registers and by their fraudulent acts
brought the office into disrepute”.
Discipline within the
Church was hard to maintain, not only because of the frequent spirit of
insubordination, but also because of the right of freedom of control which was
too often purchased from Rome for a price. Grandisson,
Bishop of Exeter, drew up armed retainers in front of his cathedral to prevent
the visitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury; Antony de Bek,
Bishop of Durham, threw into prison the notaries and clerks who served on him
the citation of the Archbishop of York; a rector of Bromley sent a chaplain in
full canonicals to excommunicate his own bishop for passing sentence of
deprivation against him. Cathedral chapters quarrelled with their bishops, pleading ancient precedent, raising technical points of law,
and appealing to King or to Pope to protect their vested rights. There was
something to be said for Wycliffe’s contention that wealth had introduced vice
into the Church, that the clergy should follow their master, Christ, who for
our sakes became poor, that “it belongeth not to
Christ's vicar nor to priests of Holy Church to have rents here on earth”.
Among the parish
priests it is necessary to distinguish the beneficed from the unbeneficed clergy. The rectors were
commonly men of good birth, enjoying the greater and the lesser tithes, and
possessing comfortable houses. The parsonages usually had guest-chambers, for
it was the recognized duty of the beneficed clergy to be “given to hospitality”,
and to entertain not only their own ecclesiastical superiors, who were often
more dreaded than welcome, but strangers of every degree. The rector had a
pewter platter and a horn drinking-cup placed for any chance guest, and gave
him a bed of clean straw or perchance a flock mattress for the night. When in
1240 the Papal Legate assembled the rectors of the churches in Berkshire, one
of the arguments of the rectors for refusing to contribute as the Legate
desired was that their churches had been endowed and enriched with lands and
revenues for the especial purpose that the rectors of them should receive
guests rich as well as poor, and show hospitality to laity as well as clergy,
according to their means, as the custom of the place required.
Rectors, however,
were comparatively few in the land, and vicars were many. Many churches were
appropriated to cathedrals, very many more to monasteries. The monks had
acquired a large number of advowsons; they scamped their duties, getting as much and doing as little
as possible. The Benedictines had formerly been model landlords and had
restored agriculture; the Cistercians had maintained model farms and were
successful sheep-breeders, but the Black Death had brought them into difficulty;
they had been obliged to let their farms on stock and land leases, and being in
straits they paid their vicars as low as possible. “The monks”, said Thomas
Gascoigne, “do nothing for the poor parishioners whose tithes they get, though
they say they pray for them, and provide an ill-paid vicar. Not content with
the tithes, they try to get the fees and offerings in the churches, refuse even
to allow parish churches to have fonts, that they may force parents to bring
their children to be baptized within the abbey walls”. Wycliffe also was very
severe on the worldly-rich bishops and abbots to whom parish churches were
appropriated, and not less severe on the monks and Austin Canons who neglected
their spiritual duties. ' They do not the office of curates neither in teaching
nor preaching, nor giving of sacraments, nor receiving of poor men in the parish,
but set an idiot for vicar or parish priest that cannot do the office of a good
curate, and yet the poor parish maintains him. Nicolas de Clamanges complains that the Popes appointed parish priests who were not taken from the
schools or universities, but from the plough or from the vilest callings,
priests who knew no more Latin than they did Arabic, who could not tell one
letter of the alphabet from another, who spent their time in indecency,
debauch, gambling, and quarrels. His tutor, Pierre d'Ailly,
in one of his earliest sermons, complains of the priests for the anxious
thought they bestowed on their dress, on their boots, on their hair, on their
rings; very many, he says, are stained with indecency from head to foot; they
are gluttonous in their meals, drunken in their drink, luxurious in their unchastity, wantonly following their lusts, fond of
disreputable society, frequenting taverns and keeping concubines; they hurry
from the bed of fornication to the holy altar, and receive the body of Christ
with those lips which have just been kissing a harlot.
Saint Catharine of
Siena gives a picture of the Italian priests and prelates, whose lives are
founded in self-love, and “who perform the office of devils. Avarice, lust, and
pride are the masters that they serve. The table of the Cross is deserted for
the sake of the tavern; the poor are left destitute, while the substance of the
Church is squandered on harlots. Nay, more, the leprosy of unnatural vice, the
sin from which even the devils flee in horror because of their angelical
nature, has contaminated their minds and bodies”.
The priests celebrate
Mass after a night of sin, and often their mistresses and children join the
congregation; others use the Blessed Sacrament of the altar to make love-charms
to seduce the little sheep of their flock, or persuade them to commit
fornication under pretext of delivering them from diabolical possession. Jean Gerson is very fervent against the unnatural vices of the
clergy, as also against those priests who threatened, if their concubines were
taken from them, to fall on the wives and daughters of their parishioners. So
scandalous were their lives that in some parts of France a priest was held
viler than a Jew. Marsiglio of Padua complained of
the parish priests as unlearned and ignorant of grammar : they were generally
men of humble birth, poor, and uneducated; but the majority probably knew some
Latin, for they could not have done their work otherwise. They were usually
underpaid, and in Germany some abandoned their flocks and took to beggary as
more lucrative. It is small wonder that the parish priest, considering his
wretched lot, too often filled up his time with dice and drinking. The cure of
souls was commonly regarded as a mere source of income, and the temptation was
strong to desert the dull parish, with its houses far asunder, and to resort to
some large town, there to sing private masses or to act as chantry priests.
This tendency was increased by the distress consequent on the Black Death.
In our own country it
is clear that the parish priests were both good and bad. Some were of holy
thought and work, like Chaucer’s poor parson, whose business it was “to drawen folk to heven by fairnesse by good ensample”.
He wayted after no pompe and
reverence,
Ne maked him a spyced conscience,
But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve,
He taughte, and first he folwed it himselve.'
On the other hand,
there were many others who failed to give example by their own cleanness how
their sheep should live; who left their flock encumbered in the mire, while
they “ran to London, unto seynt Poules”,
to look for one of the thirty-five chantries there established. There were full
many priests like Sloth in the Vision, who knew not his Paternoster nor the
history of Our Lord and Our Lady, but who knew the rhymes of Robin Hood and of Randolf, Earl of Chester; who made forty vows today and
forgot them all on the morrow, who were never right sorry for their sins, but
spent each day at the ale, full seldom thinking of “Goddes peyne and his passioun”.
This parson boasts of his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his ingratitude, his
lechery.
The parochial system
in England on its religious side was clearly in a parlous state. To us nowadays
it is no less clear that the whole secular side of the Church called for urgent
reform. Today we attack systems, but are chary of attacking individuals; five
hundred years ago the reverse was the case. Men were never tired of exposing
the vices, the sensuality, the utter unworthiness of the clergy, but they dared
not attack the priesthood nor the papal system; there was but one Church, and
the only hope of salvation lay through its portals.
The monasteries also
by the end of the fourteenth century had fallen on evil times; they had
outgrown their original sphere of utility and had lost much of their original
good repute. Intended as a home of refuge from the murder, rapine, and bloody
war around, for those peaceful souls who were content in choir, chapter, and
cloister to observe the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, to live by
the rule of the order, to seek after righteousness and godliness, their very
success had been their bane. They had flourished, and had manifestly come near
attaining the ends for which they were started; whereupon kings had endowed them,
nobles had made over to them lands and churches, death-bed donations and
legacies had enriched them until they became possessed of one-third or one-half
of the vicarages in the kingdom. The vow of poverty was lost sight of; that of
obedience followed suit. The monasteries everywhere got themselves for a price
emancipated from episcopal control and put immediately under the aegis of the
Pope; before this time Bishop Grosseteste had much
trouble with the Gilbertines and the Austin Canons,
the Cistercians having already escaped from his jurisdiction.1 The vow of
chastity might be observed, although Saint Catharine complained that prelates
connived at infamous monks corrupting the nuns in the monasteries under their
charge. Even at the beginning of the fifteenth century the monasteries were
generally of good moral repute; but they had become social homes, and the best
monks were “good clubbable men”. They had naturally fallen in popular esteem,
and the tide of popular benevolence no longer flowed as formerly; the time when
they were noted for their learning and influence, the days of Lanfranc and
Anselm, had long since passed; no new endowments came in, and gifts of money
became scantier and scantier. Some of the convents had overbuilt themselves,
others had overbought; some had indulged too freely in litigation, others
complained that their hospitality cost them too dear. The fact was that the
monks themselves had fallen from their former high estate; the Carthusians, with their strict rule, still maintained model
monasteries, and the Austin Canons came next to them ; but the conventual life generally had become more earthly and self-centred. The monks said openly that the old
Benedictine rule was no longer possible of observance; the Cluniac revival had degenerated into laxity and outward splendour;
the Cistercians, formerly the “sour Puritans of the cloister”, had long ago
become high-minded and purse-proud. In Germany the Benedictine abbeys, ever the
most popular, were largely used as resting-places and harbours of refuge for those unfit for the war of life. Merchants sent their paralytic
or maimed children, the idiots and the half-wits, the idle and the thriftless,
those for any reason unfit for marriage, to the convent, and supported them
while there; nobles in similar fashion got rid of those members of their
households who were weak in body or in mind. Indeed so thoroughly was the good
old rule, of making due provision for the fool of the family, observed, that
some of the convents became little better than lunatic asylums, and there
remained in them no one capable of continuing the history of the abbey. The
Cistercians and the Austin Canons in Germany were, however, in better case. In
England married men, wearied of matrimony, occasionally left their wives and
betook themselves to monasteries to end their days in peace. The monks still
taught in their schools, but their own younger members only; they still
maintained their hospitals, but they received no sick folk from outside; they
copied and illuminated manuscripts, but their interest in history was dying
out. Their lands were leased to tenant farmers, and they no longer tried new
methods of agriculture or imported fresh products; “their hospitality was being
shifted on the shoulders of the neighbouring inns;
their almsgiving took the most wasteful and unwise forms of indiscriminate
doles”. The monks lived a thoroughly selfish life, removed from the haunts of
men; they loved their ease and preferred their own comfort even to the good
name and fame of their abbey. When the first Prior of Grammont died and his body began to work miracles, his successor, who could not abide
the crowds of unmannerly louts attracted round the quiet convent walls,
threatened to dig him up and throw his bones in the river, if he did not cease
his idle miracles; the threat worked, the miracles ceased, the monks lived in
quiet peace again. The monks in France were worse than those in Germany. Henry
of Hesse alleges that they were debauched, and that their monasteries were no
better than inns and brothels. Nicolas de Clamanges states that so far from being examples to the secular clergy they were in every
way more worldly, more abandoned, more immoral; that there was nothing they
hated so much as their cloister and the rule of their Order. In England the
abbot loved hunting and kept hounds, he loved hawking and kept falcons; the
monks loved good cheer and good wine. The monk among the Canterbury pilgrims,
to been an abbot able, was “full fat and in good point”; he loved venery—
Grehoundes he hadde, as swifte as fowel in flight;
Of priking and of hunting for the hare
Was al his lust, for
no coste wolde he spare.
The nunneries in
Germany, although they shared many of the faults of the monasteries, were
generally superior to them both in morality and intelligence. No attempt,
however, was made to keep up the vow of poverty; in most cloisters a noble’s or
a citizen’s daughter was only admitted on payment of a fixed sum; in others she
brought her kitchen and table with her; in others no vows were taken. There were,
however, many exceptions. The frivolity of the nuns of Cologne shocked a French
observer. The nunneries in some parts had an evil reputation: their inmates
wore costly clothes, took part in all merriments, danced round dances in the streets
and at the drinking-houses : their doors stood open, day and night, to clerk
and layman alike. The nuns of Bologna were notoriausly light of love; they condescended to rag-pickers and carders. Saint Brigitta complained that the nunneries were rather brothels
than holy retreats.
But the chief
offenders were the friars of the Four Orders; Gerhard Groot and Wycliffe alike
condemned them : they had been beautiful in their inception, they were baneful
in their decay. They afforded a marked example of the rule, which has so often
been exemplified in the history of the Church, that “it is the reforming organizations
which have lost their meaning that become the chief abuses in the world's
history”. Two hundred years had not elapsed since Dominic first sent forth his
preachers to teach the truth, since Francis sent forth his disciples with
messages of love to the poor and outcast, the sick and leprous. They had dwelt
among the poorest and meanest in the towns, in a “dense slough of stagnant
misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull despair such as the worst
slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know nothing of”; or outside the city
walls in pestilential marshes where the refugees from the country pitched their
huts. They had lived with the lowliest; they had won the hearts of all. But as
their influence increased, so did their prosperity. Peckham and Bradwardine, Archbishops of Canterbury, were
Franciscan and Dominican; the Franciscans, nourished by Grosseteste,
won over Simon de Montfort to become an English patriot. The celebrated Doctor
Albert the Great was a Dominican; Alexander of Hales was a Franciscan; Saint
Thomas Aquinas, the greatest glory of the schoolmen, was a Dominican. But the
friars of the latter part of the fourteenth century were not as those of the
thirteenth. In the early part of the century indeed they maintained their hold
over all classes. The marked contrast which their renunciation and shabby dress
exhibited to the worldliness, the gambling, the hunting of the secular clergy, the
greater influence over the lives of the citizens which the friaries amid their
busy haunts of men exercised as compared with the secluded convents of the
Benedictines and Cistercians, above all, their gospel of the holiness of
poverty, endeared them to the lower ranks of society. At the General Congregation
of the Franciscans in Paris in 1329, whenever a barefooted friar arose to
preach the doctrine of Apostolic Poverty, the common people heard him gladly.
During the terrible time of the Black Death in England, in Languedoc and elsewhere,
the friars stuck to their work manfully, and thousands of them died at their
posts. They were the spiritual guides of the Flemish artisans at Courtrai and Roosebeke, as they were of the English peasantry who rose
in the insurrection of 1381. But the majority of the friars gradually abandoned
their early ideals, they sank to a lower level of life and morality. In
Bohemia, where education was more widely diffused than in most other countries,
the popular feeling against the Mendicants was probably more bitter than
elsewhere. The Dominicans fell into disrepute with the orthodox because they
denied the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, the Franciscans because
they set themselves up against the Pope and ordinary Christians as the
champions of Apostolic Poverty. The Spiritual Franciscans throughout, and the Observants from 1373, held to the stricter vow of poverty
and to the poorer and more squalid form of dress; but the great bulk of the
Franciscan Friars made no difficulty in accepting property ; while in dress, if
their circumstances allowed, they made no shame to assume a garb “full and
double and resplendent and of the finest stuff, and of a fashion goodly and
pontifical”. The lewd fellows of the baser sort among them were always ready to
brawl and quarrel, drawing their knives with fatal results; fourteen were thus
killed in a brawl at Assisi itself.
With the secular
clergy the regulars were everywhere in hopeless conflict; if the monks had
tried to shift too much work to the shoulders of the seculars, the friars tried
to take too much from them; they encroached on their preserves, and filched
from them the offerings of the faithful. They had obtained the right to carry
about portable altars for the celebration of the Mass, the right also to preach
in parish churches and to hear confessions. Their sermons often contained
little but spicy jests and humorous anecdotes; and their confessionals were the
resort, as Wycliffe complained, of every accursed perjurer, extortioner,
and adulterer who was afraid to go to his own curate to be shriven. The
temptation to a wealthy man was great to forsake his own parish priest, who
knew too much of his livelihood, and to go to a wanton, merry friar who would
certainly have given him absolution for a consideration; for the friar
'Ful swetely herde confessioun,
And plesaunt was his absolucioun;
He was an esy man to yeve penaunce
Ther as he wiste to han a good pitaunce.
The friars owned no
superior but the Pope, with whom their Minister-General resided in close
connection ; they were the most powerful agents of the Papacy, its deftest,
ubiquitous agents. On their behalf it must be remembered that they did not live
in seclusion like the monks; they dwelt amid the hum and stress of men, within
the towns and cities, or close outside the walls, open to the censure of the
municipal fathers, exposed to the prying gaze of a thousand curious eyes; their
vices, as their virtues, were seen and known of all men. As they fell off from
their primitive simplicity and became engrossed in piling up money for the Pope
and their order, as the truth which they preached became gradually mere dead
words uttered by rote, so did their influence turn to evil and increase until
it became overpowering. The Franciscans had always been the newsmongers in the
village, and welcome in every tavern; they soon began to haunt the inns and to
leave the poor unheeded; they
Knew the tavernes wel in every toun,
And everich hostiler and tappestere
Bet than a lazar or a beggestere.
By the close of the
fourteenth century they had become contemned and hated by all classes in all
countries alike. In Italy they were despised as cheats, thieves, fornicators,
and workers of sham miracles; everywhere they emptied the parish churches and
corrupted the holy Catholic religion. They played on the follies and weaknesses
of the rustic and the ignorant; their sale of spurious relics fostered superstition,
and the easy terms on which they granted absolution encouraged crime. As a
song-writer said—
All wickedness that
men can tell
Reigneth them among ;
There shall no soul
have room in hell,
Of friars there is
such throng.'
They had originally
been the evangelists of truth and goodwill; they had sunk to be propagandists
of superstition and crime.
(3) Heresy and Reform
Already in the
twelfth century, although there was much blind faith and superstition on the
Continent, there was much heresy, which was fostered, if it was not created, by
the vices of the clergy. It appeared not in the schools and among the learned,
but among men and women of humble origin and of plain living and thinking. In
almost every case it was anti-sacerdotal; the leading arguments of the heretics
were drawn from the pride, the avarice, the unclean lives of their spiritual
masters; they held the old Donatist tenet that the
sacraments are polluted in polluted hands; they refused to accept the decision
of Pope Gregory the Ninth distinguishing between the offices of the priest in
mortal sin as regards himself and as regards others. This article of their
creed had a long and stubborn life, for it was common to the followers of Peter
Waldo, of John Wycliffe, and of John Hus. There were scores of heretical sects
in Italy. In the north of Germany false Christs and
false prophets appeared; the Publicani or Paulicians were sent over thence by King Henry the Second
to Oxford for examination. In Brittany arose Eon of the Star, “he who should
come to judge the quick and the dead”, who was worshipped by his followers as
the Deity incarnate; he, however, was probably mad. Pierre de Bruys preached in Vallonise and
in Gascony; Henry, the Monk of Lausanne, at Le Mans; the influence of the
Italian, Gundulf, extended to Arras. Arnold of
Brescia, like Wycliffe after him, preached the doctrine of apostolic poverty;
the clergy should have no possessions, the Church should have no civil
jurisdiction, but should confine itself strictly to its spiritual functions.
The Albigenses, known in Italy as the Patarines and elsewhere as the Cathari, can hardly be called a
Christian sect; they were the descendants of the Paulicians,
and were of Manichaean tendency. Paul of Samosata had
lived in the seventh century; his followers had been established in Armenia,
Pontus, and Cappadocia. They had resisted the persecution of Leo the Armenian
and the “sanguinary devotion of Theodora”; in the middle of the ninth century
they had been transferred “from the banks of the Euphrates to Constantinople
and Thrace”, where they were allowed to live in peace and to serve in the
armies of the Eastern Empire. In the beginning of the thirteenth century their
Pope or Primate resided on the confines of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Dalmatia, and
governed by his vicars the filial congregations of Italy and France. They
believed in the New Testament, but disbelieved the Old; Jehovah was Satan, and
the prophets and patriarchs were robbers. The spiritual world and the mind of
man were made by God, but Satan made the temporal world and matter. The Albigenses therefore refused to eat flesh; they rejected
the doctrine of the Mass; they held that baptism profited nothing; and they
disbelieved utterly in carnal marriage. As regards the Saviour of mankind, many of them reverted to the old heresy of the Docetes,
that Christ, the imperfections of matter being incompatible with the purity of
a celestial substance, had never issued from the Virgin’s womb; that “He had
imposed on the senses of His enemies and of His disciples”; and that the
ministers of Pilate had wasted their impotent rage on an airy phantom, who
seemed to expire on the Cross and after three days to arise from the dead.
Catharism discarded all the
machinery of the Catholic Church, replacing it by a simple daily benediction of
the bread and wine, by a monthly ceremony of confession, and by the Baptism of
the Holy Ghost, which reunited the soul to God, absolved it from sin, and
distinguished the “perfected” from the ordinary Christian. This ceremony
consisted merely in the imposition of hands, and, except in the case of those
who proposed to become ministers of the faith, it was usually postponed until
death drew very nigh. The sick man then generally remained without food for
three days, and this “privation” was usually equivalent to suicide. Through
Provence and Lombardy these latter-day Manichaeans abounded. It may seem strange that so sad a creed should have won so many
converts, should have induced so many to lead lives of truth and purity; but
the Cathari had rejected Catholicism because its
precepts and practice were to them irreconcilably at variance, while their own
simple dualistic creed fitted in with and explained the facts of their own
dull, hard lives. Not happiness, but truth, they held, should make them free.
There were other
heretics whose chief desire and aim it was to remain faithful to the spirit of
Christ and to revert to the simplicity of the primitive Church. Chief among
these were the Waldenses, the followers of Peter Waldo, who were known as the
Poor Men of Lyons. Originally of no heretical tendency, they were enamoured of the beauty of poverty and of the simplicity of
the Gospel. They translated several books of the Old and New Testaments; they
produced in the Gallo-Roman language a text and a gloss on the Psalter. Armed
with these, two of the Waldenses presented themselves in the Lateran Council
before Pope Alexander the Third. He, less wise than Innocent the Third after
him, while he approved of their poverty, refused them permission to preach
without the consent of their clergy, and condemned their interference with the sacred
functions of the priesthood. They were thus driven into hostility and
opposition to the Church. They had formed the conviction that it was the sanctity
of a man’s life, and not his spiritual office, which gave validity to his
administration of holy rites; a virtuous layman, or even a virtuous woman,
could officiate, while the offering of a vicious priest was of no avail. Tran-
substantiation, they held, takes place only in the soul of the believer. They
rejected prayers for the dead, purgatory, and indulgences. No fairer testimony
to their moral worth could be given than that of an inquisitor who knew them
well. “Heretics”, he says, “are recognizable by their customs and speech, for
they are modest and well regulated. They take 110 pride in their garments,
which are neither costly nor vile. They do not engage in trade, to avoid lies
and oaths and frauds, but live by their labour as
mechanics—their teachers are cobblers. They do not accumulate wealth, but are
content with necessaries. They are chaste and temperate in meat and drink. They
do not frequent taverns or dances or other vanities. They restrain themselves
from anger. They are always at work ; they teach and learn, and consequently
pray but little. They are to be known by their modesty and precision of speech,
avoiding scurrility and detraction and light words and lies and oaths”. The
modesty, frugality, honest industry, chastity, and temperance of the Poor Men
of Lyons were universally acknowledged.
It is very probable
that some account of the teaching of the Waldenses may have been transmitted to
Saint Francis of Assisi by his father, who was a travelling merchant of
considerable wealth and intelligence. The “little brother” Francis was perhaps
the most saintly man who had trod this earth since the death of his Elder
Brother on the Cross. He believed in absolute poverty and the love of Christ,
and through the whole of his short life—for he died in 1226— he carried his
belief in the holiness of poverty to its logical conclusion. He preached the love
of God; he did not argue; he detested polemics; his life was his gospel. The
truth, says M. Sabatier, needs no proof; it forces itself on you. So it was
with Saint Francis; his life and example converted men from the error of their
ways. For a time it seemed as if heresy would disappear. But his gospel in its
purity did not retain the undisputed field long. When the Little Brother
presented his rule to Innocent the Third, the Pope warned him that it would be
too hard for those who should come after him. The warning proved true. Scarcely
was the Saint dead than his followers divided into two sects— the Spiritual
Franciscans, who desired to adhere to the letter of the rule as to utter
poverty; and the Conventuals, who saw how much could
be done with property rightly administered. For more than a century the strife
between these sects continued. One general of the Order was a Spiritual, the
next was a Conventual; the Popes now favoured one sect, now the other. Nicholas the Third
promulgated a Bull, Exiit qui seminat,
laying down that property should be vested in the Roman Church, the usufruct
remaining with the friars. About the middle of the thirteenth century the
Spiritual Franciscans adopted the mystical teachings of the Calabrian prophet, Joachim of Flora. His three treatises were styled The Everlasting
Gospel, and to them the Franciscan, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, published an Introduction. Joachim’s
speculative prophecies had been mystical and vague; those of Gerard were clear
and precise. The reign of the Father was over; the reign of the Son was closing;
the reign of the Holy Ghost was to begin in the year 1260. The Roman Church,
which was further from the truth than were the Greeks, the Jews, or the Mussulmen,
would be swept away in favour of an order of monks.
This was rank heresy. Persecution, spasmodic and intermittent, followed; John
of Parma was disgraced, Gerard was imprisoned underground. But the sect, with
its mystical teachings, taken often from works falsely attributed to Joachim of
Flora, held its ground throughout the fourteenth century up to the days of the Calabrian hermit, Telesphoro of
Cosenza, and of Thomas of Apulia, and even later. The tertiary order of the
Franciscans continued to be the breeding-ground for all manner of strange heresies,
which lived their little day and died. Wilhelmina of Bohemia appeared at Milan;
she was held to be an incarnation of the Holy Ghost; her followers believed
that she would reappear on earth at the year of Jubilee, 1300. She died in the odour of sanctity, but twenty years later her bones were
dug up and burned. In 1260, the year of the new dispensation, was born Segarelli, who founded the sect of the Apostolic Brethren,
and who strove to surpass Saint Francis himself in his imitation of Christ. He
got himself circumcised, was wrapped in swaddling-clothes, was rocked in a
cradle and suckled by a woman. When he had perished at the stake, his work was
taken up by Fra Dolcino of Novara, who published his
three epistles, and who declared the Papacy to be the Scarlet Woman of the
Revelation. He had a spiritual sister, the beautiful Margarita of Tirol, with
whom he claimed to live in unblemished chastity. Clement the Fifth issued a
Bull against them; Dolcino and his followers took to
the mountains; four crusades in four successive years were sent against them in
Mount Saint Bernard and the neighbouring Alps. At
length, on Holy Thursday of Passion Week, 1307, Fra Dolcino was captured and was put to death with the most atrocious tortures. But the
sect of longest life which sprang from the Franciscans was that of the Fraticelli, who wore the small hoods and the short narrow
gowns of the Spiritual Franciscans, and who, like them, preached the doctrine
of utter poverty. Pope John the Twenty-second did his utmost to suppress them,
for, although his was the golden age of missions in the East, the doctrine of
the poverty of Christ and His apostles was hateful in his nostrils. He
contradicted the decisions of his predecessors, and promulgated a Bull in which
he proved that the Franciscan doctrine of poverty was a perversion of
Scripture, and in which it was denounced as heretical. The Franciscan friars,
headed by their general Michael de Cesena, rose against him and ranged
themselves under the banner of his enemy, the Emperor Louis of Bavaria. The
narrow Franciscan dogma thus became of imperial importance. John’s successor,
Benedict the Twelfth, and Clement the Sixth after him, were unable to suppress
these Brethren of the Poor Life, as they called themselves; they swarmed through
Italy. Cola di Rienzo, when he fled from Rome, took
shelter with the Fraticelli of Monte Maiella; Luigi di Durazzo, when he
rebelled, proclaimed his sympathy with them; the Archbishop of Seleucia in 1346
belonged to their order; so too did the Bishop of Trivento in 1362. The Fraticelli continued to be numerous in
Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Meantime the
merciless crusade of De Montfort, the preaching of Saint Dominic and his
followers, and the pitiless persecution of the Inquisition during the
thirteenth century, practically annihilated the sect of the Albigenses in Southern France. The country was impoverished, its industry was shattered
and its commerce ruined; the estates of the nobles and the goods of the wealthy
were wrung from them; but, with the exception of a few poverty-stricken
Waldenses, heresy was stamped out of France. The subtleties of Abelard and the
schoolmen were refuted by the erudition and arguments of that noble Dominican,
Thomas Aquinas ; and thus it came about that, as Sismondi says, whether there
were an honest man or not, there was certainly at the end of the fourteenth
century not a heretic in the whole realm of France.
In the Spanish
peninsula also there was very little heresy. A few Cathari escaped from Languedoc and penetrated as far as Leon; a few Fraticelli and Waldenses troubled the universal orthodoxy. The Inquisition was established
in Aragon, and worked in the early part of the thirteenth and again in the
opening years of the fourteenth century, but was never really effective; and
when, in 1401, Vincente de Lisboa was appointed Inquisitor over all Spain, the only heresy specifically mentioned
in the Bull is the idolatrous worship of plants, trees, stones, and altars—a
mere superstitious relic of paganism.
In Italy, however,
Lombardy, with Milan as its centre, continued
throughout to be the home of heresy. Not only did the heretical sects of the
Franciscans flourish there, but other heretics also. The Waldenses retreated to
the Cottian Alps. The Cathari, when they fled from
persecution in Languedoc, were able to find a shelter in any large town of
Northern Italy. Ezzelino da Romano would permit n
persecution for heresy in his dominions, nor would his conqueror, Uberto Pallavicino, after him.
Heresy spread to Central Italy, but political faction and party spirit were
everywhere dominant; and when Saint Peter Martyr won two bloody battles in
Florence for the Church in 1245, the victories were as much those of Guelfs
over Ghibelines as of orthodoxy over heresy. After
the victory of Charles of Anjou at Benevento in 1268, and the consequent
revival of the papal power through Italy, the inquisitors were able to set to
work with more gusto, and by the end of the century heretics were no longer
able to live securely in Lombardy or in Central Italy. But the Inquisition was
ineffective in Naples; it was merely nominal in Sicily ; it never gained a hold
in Venetian territory. In Italy as in France, says Mr. Lea, the history of the
Inquisition during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is one of decadence.
It had in fact for the time done its work. The pessimistic doctrines of Catharism gradually became extinct, although the simple and
hopeful creed of the Waldenses continued to flourish amid the mountain fastnesses of Piedmont.
There was never a
heretic in England before John Wycliffe, and it is not necessary to speak of
him at length here, for his writings before the Great Schism had mainly a
political character and tendency, and were thus utilized by John of Gaunt.
Other political philosophers had based their theories on “the Bible of the
Christians or the Bible of the philosophers, the Scriptures of Aristotle”. Wycliffe
based his on the feudal system. His treatises Of the Lordship of God and Of Civil Lordship were published by
1372. Lordship and service linked man to God; God was the universal lord
paramount of every man; and every individual man was dependent on God alone,
and was bound to do Him faithful service. Lordship is founded in grace; “no one
in mortal sin has any right to any gift of God, while on the other hand, every
man standing in grace has not only a right to, but has in fact, all the gifts
of God; ... the righteous has all things ; the wicked has nothing, only
occupies for the time that which he has unrighteously usurped or stolen from the righteous”. If the righteous man has not all things
in this present life, if the wicked man has that which he should not, their
recompense will come after death. Wycliffe’s doctrine of Apostolic Poverty was
the result of his veneration for the spiritual dignity of the Church, which led
him to sever its sphere of action entirely from that of the world. At this
period of his life he might indeed, like many another true son of the Church,
expose “the political abuses of the hierarchy, but in his dogmatic theology he
was without blemish”. He had not broken loose from the Papacy when King Edward
the Third died; it was the Great Schism which made him a notorious heretic.
Except by reason of their political influence, his followers in England indeed
were but a feeble folk; the dawn of Reformation here was but a false dawn.
Wycliffe’s great work in the religious world was wrought through John Hus of
Bohemia; and it is somewhat curious that, just as there had been no heresy in
England before the time of John Wycliffe, so John Hus boasted that there had
never been a heretic in Bohemia.
If England, France,
and Spain at the outbreak of the Great Schism were free from heresy, very
different was the state of religious life in Germany, where speculation always
simmered, where the prelates resented papal interference, where they and also
the whole of the secular clergy hated the Mendicant Orders, and resented
anything like the introduction of the Inquisition. All through the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries pantheistic teachers arose, for Northern
Germany had no sympathy with the Catharism which took
its rise in the Slavic countries, in Servia and
Bosnia. The troublous times led to the predominance of sentiment over intellect.
Among the people associations were formed, providing quiet retreats in which
inmates, male or female, might live secluded from the world, bound only by the
vows of chastity and obedience, enjoying the blessedness of inward peace. David
of Dinant, Amalric of Bena, and Eckard of Cologne
promulgated a pantheism which became more and more removed from Deism and from
the historical foundation of Christianity. Hence arose the Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods
of the Free Spirit. They held that God is everywhere, that everything emanates
from Him and returns to Him; that all souls return to Him at death, and that
there is neither purgatory nor hell; that sacerdotal observances and the
sacraments are useless; since the divine and human spirits are in nature identical,
every act of a godly man is good; perfection consists in absolute unity with
God, and thenceforth all outward actions are indifferent, for “that which God
wills in man is that which man has the strongest inclination to do, and to
which he inwardly feels himself most forcibly impelled, and hence man requires
only to follow the voice within to execute the divine will”. The Brethren of
the Free Spirit claimed that being led by the Spirit they were no longer under
the Law, they were free from its trammels; they alleged that no man was perfect
in whom the sight of a naked man produced shame, or the sight of a naked woman
produced passion. Every kind of indulgence and excess was permissible to the
godly and pure in heart—a doctrine most attractive to the ungodly and the
impure; and there is little wonder that the carnal indulgence and licence of many of the sectaries shocked the ordinary lay
mind. One curious sect of pantheists, the Luciferans,
maintained that inasmuch as God was the essence of all things, therefore Satan
himself must be divine, and the devil and his angels must ultimately be
reunited with the Deity. Fearful stories were told as to their hideous rites
and initiatory ceremonies. The Church was not idle. There was a most cruel
persecution of the Beguines at the beginning of the fourteenth century :
Archbishop Henry was very severe 011 the Beghards of
Cologne. On one occasion a jealous husband tracked his wife to an earthly
paradise, witnessed the sensual orgies which were customary there, and gave
information; many of the leaders were either burned or drowned in the Rhine.
This was about 1325; but through the whole of this century these Antinomians,
Beguines, Beghards, and Lollards were in opposition to the Church, and the Church was engaged in an
exterminating war against them.
The strife between
Pope John the Twenty-second and Louis of Bavaria was naturally favourable to the growth of heresy; and no sooner had his successor,
Charles the Fourth, “the priests emperor”, been recognized, than there appeared
that most fearful scourge of suffering humanity, the plague known as the Black
Death. Although it was not so virulent in Germany as in many parts, still
one-fourth of the population died; and then in the midst of the universal
misery arose the sect of the Flagellants. They are said to have first appeared
in Perugia in 1260. It was, as it were, an extraordinary effort of propitiation
to avert the destroying wrath of God; it
responded so thoroughly to the vague longings of the people, and it spread so
rapidly, that it seemed to be the result of a universal consentaneous impulse.
They held that except by the shedding of their own blood there was no remission
of sin. Their leader displayed a mysterious letter which had fallen from heaven
and had been found in the church of Saint Peter at Jerusalem; in this Jesus
Christ had promised to be very gracious to all penitents in their processions,
because the blood of the Flagellants was mingled with His own. Vast herds of
them congregated together— men, women, and children—with veiled faces, but the
men bare to the waists; they marched in bands of moderate size, each under a
leader and two lieutenants; they sang penitential songs as they entered the
towns, weeping, groaning, and lamenting; they required everyone who joined them
to remain with them for thirty-three days, one day for every year of our Lord’s
life on earth; they scourged one another lustily with scourges knotted with
four iron points until the blood ran down their backs. From Poland to the Rhine
they spread, but they flourished mostly in Thuringia, where Conrad Schmidt was
their prophet Elias, and one of his companions their prophet Enoch. They
professed that the blood with which they bathed themselves washed away their
sins and avoided all necessity for the mediation of Holy Church ; they held
that Pope and clergy had no power to loose or to bind; that churches were mere
houses of stone and dens of robbers; that the Mass was a howling of dogs, and
the sacrament a vain babble of the priest; that vows, Purgatory, the adoration
of the Cross and of saints were outworn, useless creeds. Clement the Sixth
would have none of them, and his severe measures repressed them for a time.
Charles the Fourth
did little to aid the Church in its war against heresy until his expedition
into Italy in 1368, when, however, he issued two edicts of unparalleled
severity, intended for the support of Walter Kerlinger,
the papal inquisitor. The Waldenses swarmed all over Germany; in Thuringia, Misnia, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, and in Hungary they
appeared in their thousands. They were poor folk, viewed with no ill-will even
by the local priesthood; they conformed outwardly in every way to the orthodox
observances. A sect closely akin to them were the Winkelers.
Another sect which sprang up in the lower Rhineland was that of the Dancers :
they also were poor and simple. They danced and sang until they fell to the
ground in convulsions; they were generally regarded as possessed by the devil;
they had not been properly baptized, folk said, seeing that so many of the
priests kept concubines. The sect spread over a large part of Germany and
lasted for some years. But the Inquisition directed its labours more especially to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, to the Beghards and Beguines, where there was spoil to be gathered. The Beghards begged their bread to a monotonous cry of Brod durch Gott,
but they and the Beguines possessed property. The royal edicts had ordered the
confiscation of all their houses; those of the male recluses were to be handed
over to the Inquisition to serve as prisons; those of the Beguines were to be
sold, part of the proceeds being devoted to public purposes, part being handed
over to the Inquisitors for pious uses. In Saxony, Hesse, and Thuringia a rich
harvest was reaped. Nicolas of Basel, the “Friend of God”, the invisible Pope
of an invisible Church, a wandering missionary who had for years propagated the
doctrines of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and who had deceived many by his
visions and revelations, was tracked by the Inquisition. He fled to Vienna with
two of his disciples; they were discovered and seized; Henry of Langenstein laboured to convert
them and flattered himself that he had succeeded, but they all three relapsed,
and were burned. Another disciple of Nicolas, Martin of Mainz, who had formerly
been a Benedictine monk, was burned at Cologne. Other heretics there were who
attacked auricular confession, extreme unction, indulgences, the veneration of
relics, and masses for the dead. Heretics were to be found all over Germany;
they were most thickly scattered over the Upper Rhine, in Switzerland, and in
Swabia, from Regensburg to the Austrian frontier, throughout Franconia, Hesse,
and the Thuringian Forest. They were usually ready to
seal their faith with their blood ; hundreds were burned at the stake, and the
goods of the wealthy were confiscated. But with the advent of the Great Schism
and the reign of King Wenzel, who, Gallio-like, cared
for none of these things, persecution in great measure subsided, and the
heretics were left free to believe and to propagate their heresy.
But while there was
thus much pestiferous heresy and revolt against the Papacy, there were also
many devout men whose sincere desire it was to remain within the obedience of
the Church, but whose pious aim at the same time was to bring about an internal
reform which should sweep away the worst abuses which discredited and disgraced
the present system. Such were the German mystics. The chief of these, theistical but not pantheistical, was John Ruysbroek (1293-1381), the spiritual father of John Tauler, the foremost preacher of his day, and of Gerard
Groot. Ruysbroek was a priest for sixty-four years of
his life; he lies interred in the church of his monastery at Gruenthal. His system, of the ecstasy of contemplation,
which has been criticized on the ground that it has no distinct and necessary
place for the general fact of sin, is based on the principle that man has
proceeded from God, and returns to Him again. Man does not, however, become in
all points one with God, for God always remains God, and the creature always
remains a creature; but when man gives himself up with perfect love to God, he
feels that he is in union with God; but when he acts he feels that he is a
separate being, distinct from God. Man attains to this unity with God through
the active, the inward, and the contemplative life. The active life consists in
God's service in abstinence, penitence, morality, and holy action ; the inward
life consists of love toward God, oneness of heart with Him, the conquest of
the senses, the guidance of the desires and senses to unity. The contemplative
life consists in free communion with God, a going out of ourselves and becoming
one spirit with God; its peculiarity lies in its ever satisfying, simple, but
blessed repose. “This—the eternal repose—is the existence which has no mode,
and which all deep spirits have chosen above all things. It is the dark
silence, in which all loving hearts are lost”.
The mystics were
rebels against the system of scholastic philosophy. They circumscribed the
domain of reason to enlarge that of faith. Reason, says Achard,
is ignorant, but faith begins by believing that which reason does not conceive;
from the imperfection of reason proceeds the perfection of faith. By grace,
faith knows that of which reason can acquire no certitude by experience. It is
the province of reason to follow faith, not to precede her, to enable us to understand
what we believe. Man’s business in this world is not to reason, but to pray; he
ought to give himself up wholly to God, who will make him perfect; he ought to
set up the sublime ladder of contemplation, and, like the eagle, taking flight
from the things of earth, to soar into the infinite. Intelligence guided by
reason is no infallible guide; the true guide is conscience illuminated by
grace. To attain true knowledge, one must leave the study of these vain things
on which the mark of their celestial origin is scarce apparent; one must
believe, one must love, one must intoxicate oneself with that love which
communicates to the faithful soul a holy ecstasy, which transports it far away
from matter to the bosom of God. The mystics longed by serene contemplation to
lose themselves in God until they found Him; they sought to work out their own
salvation by a closer walk with God, by communion with the Infinite. In this
they resembled the early monks. The votaries of this Divine Philosophy aspired
to imitate a pure and perfect model. They trod in the footsteps of the prophets
who had retired to the desert; and they restored the devout and contemplative
life, which had been instituted by the Essenians in
Palestine and Egypt.
Other reformers there
were who more nearly resembled the early friars. Filled with a like consuming
love for God, with a like disdain for vain philosophy, and with a like hatred
for polemics, they aspired rather to live for others than for themselves; they
sought to tread in the footsteps of their master, Jesus Christ, and of sweet Saint Francis,' who, like the Master,
went about doing good. A life of holy contemplation had been the ideal of John Ruysbroek; a life of holy activity was the ideal of Gerhard
Groot during his short existence (1340-1384). He was the son of the burgomaster
of Deventer: born in a house upon the Brink; weak and feeble in body, but
active of mind from his youth up. He studied at the University of Paris from
1355 to 1358 under Henry of Kalkar, who was
distinguished for his works on rhetoric and music and for a history of the Carthusian monks. Gerhard obtained his master’s degree in
his eighteenth year, and then went for further study to the University of
Cologne, where he first appeared as a professor. Being a man of good family, he
soon obtained, in those days of pluralities, several prebends,
and was made Canon of Utrecht and of Aix. He was a young prelate of the world;
he ate and drank of the daintiest, he clothed himself in fine raiment, he
dressed his hair with care, he enjoyed himself thoroughly in his own way, he
went to all the public amusements. As he was looking on at some games in
Cologne, some one said to him, “Why standest thou here intent on these vanities? Become another
man”. His old tutor, Henry of Kalkar, now prior of
the Carthusian monastery at Monchhuysen,
met him at Utrecht; he admonished him on the vanity of this world, on death, on
eternity. His words sank into Gerhard’s heart; he was overcome with emotion; he
promised with God’s help to renounce the world and to lead a new life.
He began by retiring
into his friend’s monastery, where he spent three years in seclusion and
reflection, in penitential exercises, and in the study of the Scriptures. Then
he returned to active life. He became a deacon, but refused to become a priest,
saying that not for all the gold of Araby would he
undertake the care of souls for a single night. He obtained from his friend Florentius, the Bishop of Utrecht, a licence to preach. He preached in the language of the people, in Low Dutch; with an
easy flow of eloquence, out of the deep zeal of his love, with intense anxiety
and concern for their souls, he preached to them the repentance of sin and the
Gospel of Christ. “Christ died for us; we must live for Christ. Christ as
delineated in the Gospels, Christ the root and the mirror of life, Christ the
sole foundation of the Church”, was Gerhard’s faith; the primitive apostolic
Church shone in his eyes as the model of perfection. Forsaking scholastic
disputations, the “new apostle of Germany” was a revivalist of the modern type.
Multitudes thronged to hear him, so that the churches were not able to contain
them ; he was compelled to bring his hearers into the open air. Like Saint
Francis, he eschewed scholasticism and polemics; his erudition was not great;
his Latin was faulty and his Greek a negligible quantity. But he was instant in
season and out, with his fellow travellers, with
those who sat with him at meat, with the scholars to whom he gave books to
copy; in loving humility he called upon all alike, for their souls’ sake, to
flee from the wrath to come. He preached against sin, by whomsoever practised : when the Bishop of Utrecht wished to suppress concubinage among the clergy, Gerhard Groot was
commissioned to preach the sermon in the General Synod in the Cathedral at
Utrecht. His Sermo de forcaristis, factus in domo capitulari Trajectensi,
has come down to us; it was delivered in the summer of 1383. He was no fautor of heresy; in fact, he was a malleus haereticorum. Especially inimical
was he to the sect of the Free Spirit, who contemned all the holy sacraments;
he pursued relentlessly the Austin friar, Bartholomaeus of Dordrecht, whose sermons smacked of this heresy. It was at this time that
the strife between the regular and the secular clergy was fiercest; and Bartholomaeus had influential friends among the magistrates
of Kampen. The Bishop of Utrecht was constrained to
interfere; to make the blow as light as possible for his friend, he forbade all
deacons to preach in his diocese. Gerhard refused to appeal against the order;
until the last year of his life he never preached again. His energy was not
quenched; it was diverted into another channel.
Shortly before this,
in 1378, Gerhard had visited John Ruysbroek, the
Prior of the Canons in the monastery at Gruenthal ;
he was deeply impressed by the edifying and simple life of the mystic, and was
no less impressed by the brotherly spirit which pervaded the social life of the
Canons of Gruenthal; they formed a true brotherhood.
Gerhard pushed 011 as far as Paris to purchase books important for the instruction
of youth. When he returned to Deventer he set himself to the education of the
young, and to the transcribing of good books. He employed young men as copyists;
and the circle of his young friends, his scholars, and his copyists grew larger
every day and soon became a regular society. One of these was Florentius Radewin, then vicar of
Deventer. “Dear master”, said Florentius one day, “what
harm would it do were I and these copyists to put our weekly earnings into a
common fund and live together?”. “The mendicant monks would never allow it”,
answered Gerhard. “But what is to prevent us trying? Perhaps God will grant us
success”. “Well, then”, said Gerhard, “in God’s name begin. I will be your
advocate and will faithfully defend you against them”. Thus arose the first
Society of the Common Lot, soon to be followed by many other brotherhoods of
the same description.
The Brethren of the
Common Lot or of the Common Life, or the Brethren of Goodwill, as they
sometimes styled themselves, shared their goods in common; they lived partly by
their manual labour, they received but never
solicited voluntary donations. Their object was, by the simplicity of their
life and by religious exercises, to promote the growth of practical Christianity.
Even during the life-time of Gerhard these houses of the Brethren spread as far
as Saxony. Each house, as a general rule, consisted of about twenty members,
four priests, eight clerks, and the rest laymen on probation. Only after a year
of rigorous probation was a layman admitted as a clerk ; even then no vow was
taken from him, and he was at liberty to leave at any time on settling
accounts. The brethren dressed in grey; they had fixed hours for devotional
exercises and for labour; they dined together. A
rector and a vice-rector presided over each house; and certain of the brethren
were entrusted with the offices of steward, of head copyist, of librarian, of
master of the novices, of keeper of the infirmary or hospital; but no hard and
fast rule was established; each house made its own arrangements. The same was
the case with the trades practised; the transcribing
and dissemination of holy books was the chief end for which the houses existed;
but the industry of each house depended upon its special aptitude. The house at
Hildesheim was a manufactory of mass-books and of clerical garments; the
Convent of St. Mary at Beverwijk traded in parchment,
honey, wax, and salt-fish; the house at Hattem practised only agriculture and weaving.
The house of the
Brethren at Deventer, being the earliest, was regarded as the parent-house, and
its rector was looked upon as the common father of the Brethren. When Gerhard
Groot died of the plague in 1384, he appointed Florentius Radewin to be his successor; and when Radewin died he appointed Emilius van Buren. Next to the dissemination of the Scriptures, the education of the
young was the principal work of the brethren. Gerhard Groot’s scheme was
simplicity itself: he aimed to teach a godly life; he eschewed arithmetic,
geometry, logic, rhetoric, grammar, and the like. First he taught the Gospel,
then the lives of the saints, then the Epistles of Saint Paul and the Acts of
the Apostles, then the works of Bernard, Anselm, and Augustine. Reading, writing,
singing, Latin spoken and written, and religion were the subjects taught at the
schools of the Brethren. The teaching was not so superficial as in the conventual schools; it was not confined only to those who
could pay, as in the town-schools of Holland at this time. The instructs was
not generally gratuitous, but poor students were given their subsistence and
the means of study. The schools of the Brethren flourished exceedingly: that at Groeningen was frequented by extraordinary numbers;
that at Herzogenbusch numbered twelve hundred
scholars. Wherever a large number of pupils was assured, the services of more
distinguished teachers were permanently retained; classics were put into the
hands of the scholars and improved grammars were introduced; scholastic Latin
was superseded by Latin which Cicero could have understood. Their preaching
also was in the vulgar tongue, so as to be understood by the people. Some
preached only for a quarter of an hour, others for three or even six hours; the
people listened eagerly. They also gave collations, “a sort of edifying private addresses”.'Preaching, except in Latin, was almost a
lost art; but now a succession of distinguished men made their appearance in
Holland. John Binkerink, John Gronde, Wermbold, William Henrici,
Henry Gronde, Hugo Aurifaber, Giesebert Don, and Brother Paulus, all, there is
reason to believe, preached in the style and spirit of Gerhard and Florentius. In the next century, from the monastery on
Mount Saint Agnes, came one Thomas à Kempis, “the ablest expounder and most
successful propagator” of the Christian mysticism of the Brethren, the author
of that wonderful work which has had more influence than any other book save
the Bible on the religious life of Christendom.
The communities of
the Brethren and of the Sisters of the Common Life gave latitude without
coherence, and their founder felt that something more was needed to perfect his
scheme. A backbone was wanted for the system, some central organism to which
these outlying members would be articulated, something which should provide a
rule and example for their life, and a safeguard for their wellbeing and
protection. Gerhard recognized that some central authority was needed for
counsel, support, and guidance; he saw that if this supreme power were centred in some well-ordered and regularly sanctioned body,
it would help to keep the Brethren together, to protect them from external
corrupting influences, to shelter them from the malicious machinations of the
mendicant orders, and from others who wished them ill.
For some years Groot
had to this end designed to establish an order of Canons, but death came to him
before he had carried out his scheme. As he lay a-dying, he called Florentius and others to him and charged them to form such
a monastery as he described. He did not wish his order to be of the severe and
secluded Carthusian or Cistercian pattern; he desired
a monastery of Canons Regular of the Order of Saint Augustine. There was a
waste piece of ground on the bank of the Yssel,
between Deventer and Zwolle, which he designated as suitable for the purpose.
Here, two years after the death of Gerhard Groot, the monastery of Windesheim was founded. The Duke of Guelders countenanced the undertaking. Bertholf ten Hove and
Lambert Stuerman gave the land; several rich men
endowed the institution; the Bishop of Utrecht sanctioned and approved. Six
years later, in 1392, a second monastery, the Fountain of the Blessed Mary, was
founded at Arnheim; to be followed by the monastery
of the New Light, near Hoern, and by that of Mount
Saint Agnes, the site of which had been chosen by Gerhard long years before,
though it was not founded until 1398. Eventually the number of monasteries in
Germany, the Low Countries, and the north and centre of France, increased to four score. The Canons took the vows of poverty, chastity,
and obedience; they provided leaders for the brotherhoods; they disseminated
the knowledge of the Gospel; they enlarged the area and extended the scope of
popular education. But the greatest glory of the Brotherhoods of the Common
Life is to have produced such humanists as Agricola and Hegius,
Busch and Lange, Wessel and Erasmus, and to have indirectly by their criticism
of sacred and secular works prepared the way for the Reformation.
A spirit of reform,
akin to that which animated the Brothers of the Common Life, manifested itself
in the fourteenth century in Bohemia, where the fostering care of the Emperor
Charles the Fourth had raised the clergy generally in education and morality to
a higher level than their brethren in the rest of the Empire. Here also the
quarrel was with the Friars. Conrad Waldhauser, an
Augustine Canon, was invited by the Emperor from Austria to Prague, and began
his ministrations in 1360. In his sermons he scourged the arrogance, avarice,
and sensual luxury of his listeners; the multitudes thronged to hear him, so
that there was no room for them in any church, and Conrad had to preach in the
open squares. Usurers ceased their usury and offered to restore their
ill-gotten gains; men ceased to molest merchants' daughters in the churches;
women sacrificed their finery, their costly veils, their robes decked with gold
and pearls. Could the founders of the Friars return to the earth, said Conrad,
their present disciples would stone them. The Augustinian Hermits and the
Dominican Friars tried to convict him of heresy, but their efforts failed :
Conrad’s influence in Prague remained unabated until his death in 1369.
Conrad preached in
the German language, in a style noted for simplicity, clearness, and accuracy; Milic preached in the Bohemian tongue, and his poetical
rhapsodies appealed to the emotions and passions of his hearers. He was Prebendary of the Prague Cathedral and Vice-Chancellor to
the Emperor, but in 1363 he gave up place and power in order to follow Christ
in poverty and to preach His word. The “son and image of our Lord Jesus Christ”,
he meditated on the old prophecies and the Revelation until Antichrist became
an obsession to him; he saw its influence in everything, in the clergy from the
archbishops down to the friars; he discovered that Antichrist would appear in
person in the world in 1366. He went so far as on one occasion to attack
Charles the Fourth himself, and was thrown into prison by the archbishop; but
the Emperor did not remove his favour from him, and Milic appealed to Rome. He went to Rome and there got again
thrown into prison, but when Urban the Fifth came back from Avignon, Milic was released and returned to Prague and his preaching
again. Antichrist retired into the background; Milic attacked immorality with such fervour and effect that
the Venetian quarter in Prague, where the women of evil fame lived, became
deserted by its inmates and was pulled down to build a penitentiary, known as
Jerusalem. Milic supported on a voluntary system both
this institution and his house for converts, and was often hard pressed for
funds; but he devoted to the work all the rich gifts which came to him, for he
was confessor and spiritual director to hundreds. His influence was enormous.
The Mendicant Friars attacked him, and brought twelve charges of heresy against
him ; Milic set out for Avignon, cleared himself of
every suspicion of heresy, but fell ill and died in 1374, before judgment was
pronounced.
What Waldhauser and Milic had endeavoured to effect by the living voice, Mathias of Janow, the son of a Bohemian knight, did by his writings.
He had studied in Paris, had lived in Home and Nuernberg,
and was appointed by Pope Urban the Sixth to be Prebendary of Prague. His chief work, on the Maxims of the Old and New Testaments, exercised
an immense influence in his own time, though subsequent ages found it
insufficient; he deducted four fundamental principles from the Old and eight
from the New Testament, troubling himself but little about the dogma but much
about the practice of Christianity, the love of God and one’s neighbour, meekness and self-sacrifice, the imitation of
Christ in all things. He was a great advocate for frequent communion by the
laity, as were others of the more learned among his Bohemian contemporaries;
but he was always an obedient son of the Church, and gave up his advocacy of
daily communion and of communion in both kinds at her bidding, and also
recanted his condemnation of the veneration of shrines and relics. Janow died in 1394; but many professors and preachers in
Prague carried on the work begun by Waldhauser, Milic, and Janow. They resembled
the school at Deventer in their efforts toward a reformation of life and
morals, in their teaching and preaching in the vulgar tongue, in their
promulgation of the Holy Scriptures ; but they differed from that school in so
far that they established no brotherhoods nor monasteries, and so left no
settled organization to carry on the work of internal reformation. In Western
Germany and in Bohemia alike the reformers were faithful children of the
Church, and were bitterly opposed to and opposed by the Friars.
These efforts at
internal reform, unlike the movements of Wycliffe and of Hus, which have
largely a political character, were free from all taint of heresy. The promoters
were indeed accused of heresy by the Friars, but they had no difficulty in
clearing themselves. They were always ready to submit all points of doctrine to
the arbitrament of the Pope, and they desired nothing
so much as to remain in the bosom of the Holy Roman Church.
In the internal
reform of the Church in matters of pure theology a predominating influence was
exercised by the University of Paris, the “eldest daughter of the King”, which
in the sphere of ecclesiastical politics had acquired a unique position in
Europe. Its scholars were citizens of the world : though almost all the greatest schoolmen from
the time of Abelard onwards taught in Paris at one period or another of their
lives, hardly one Parisian Scholastic of the very first rank was a Frenchman by
birth. The University owed its importance, partly to its position in the
capital city of France, in which it differed from the English Universities, and
partly to its organization, by which its judgment in matters theological was backed
by the weight of numbers—by its hundreds of Masters of Arts and its thousands
of students, wherein it differed from the Universities of Italy. It became the
tribunal of orthodoxy. In opposition to the Franciscans it condemned their
doctrine of Apostolic Poverty; in opposition to the Dominicans it upheld the
Franciscan doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin; in opposition
to the Franciscans and the Pope it condemned the doctrine of the Retardation of
the Beatific Vision, so that John the Twenty-second apologized for expressing
an opinion when he was not a Doctor of Divinity; in opposition to the Dominicans
and Franciscans alike it upheld the rights of the secular clergy. It was
abundantly clear that in the dissensions and discussions consequent on the Great
Schism the voice of the University of Paris would be one of the clearest and
most authoritative.
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT SCHISM
The Seventy Years’
Captivity of the Popes at Avignon came to an end in 1377. Urban the Fifth had
returned to Rome ten years earlier, but he had again deserted the Eternal City
for Avignon; he died three months after his return, and his death was regarded
as the judgment of God upon him in abandoning Rome. It had been foretold by
Saint Brigitta of Sweden. “If he should return” she
had said, “he will in a brief while receive such a stroke that his teeth will
gnash, his sight will be darkened and grow dim, and all the limbs of his body
will tremble, . . . and he will render account before God of the things which
he has done”. Gregory the Eleventh, stimulated by Saint Catharine of Siena, the
successor of the Swedish prophetess, returned to Rome at the end of 1377; he
meditated a like treachery with Urban, but his return to Avignon was prevented
by his death (March 27, 1378).
The return of Gregory
was indeed a political necessity if the Papal States were to be saved to the
Church. Gerard du Puy had in 1372 succeeded Cardinal
d'Estaing as Vicar Apostolic of Perugia, and in 1374 Guillaume de Noellet was appointed Papal Legate of Bologna. These two
rulers exasperated their subjects by their ruthless cruelty, and a spirit of
opposition to papal oppression blazed out and spread through the surrounding
country; they excited the hatred of their own people and the distrust of their neighbours. Florence, suffering from pestilence and famine,
expected the usual convoys of grain from Bologna; the Legate not only stopped
the export, but sent soldiers to ravage the Florentine fields in which the new
grain was ripening. This was the culminating outrage. Florence took the lead in
a war of Liberty, to free the people who were groaning under the hated yoke of
the French Legates. The movement spread like wildfire. In ten days eighty towns
and castles threw off the yoke of the Church. The Pope put Florence under an
interdict, and procured the confiscation of Florentine goods through France and
England. In 1376 Bologna joined the league against the Church. Cardinal Robert
of Geneva was sent as Legate of the Romagna and the March of Ancona; he took over charge of the Company of the Bretons,
well known for their savage and brutal ferocity, and made his way to Ferrara.
He tried to provoke the men of Bologna to battle, but they refused to come
forth from behind their walls. Robert of Geneva announced his intention of not
leaving Bologna until he had washed his hands and his feet in the blood of her
citizens. He was constrained to go into winter quarters, however, in the
friendly town of Cesena. The Bretons treated the town as if they had taken it
by assault; they plundered the houses of the citizens, they ravished their
wives and daughters. On the 1st February 1377 some of the townsfolk attacked
the Bretons and killed three hundred of them; the Cardinal acknowledged that
his soldiers were in the wrong, and promised a complete amnesty to Cesena if
the citizens would again open their gates to him. They believed him, and did
so. The Cardinal thereupon ordered a general massacre. He hounded on his
troops, crying out for “Blood, Blood : Kill them all!” he shouted. The bloody massacre of Cesena sent a thrill
of horror through Italy : it necessitated the return of the Pope to Rome.
Bologna, which had
been the last to join, was the first to abandon the league, and to return to
her allegiance to the Pope; she was to have the right of free government, and
consented to receive a Vicar Apostolic. Vico followed
suit. Florence, being abandoned by her most powerful allies, herself opened
negotiations with Gregory. A peace conference was held at Sarzana,
under the presidency of Bernabo Visconti. Before the
terms had been arranged, on the evening of March 27, 1378, there came a
knocking at the city gate, and a cry, “Open quickly to the messenger of Peace”.
The gate was opened, but no one was there. Then a cry ran through Sarzana, “The Olive has come, the Peace is made”. It was at
this day and hour that Pope Gregory the Eleventh died.
The election of the
new Pope was everywhere expected with the utmost anxiety; it was universally recognized
as a momentous event. Gregory himself had been filled with the gloomiest
forebodings. From his death-bed he had issued a Bull ordering the cardinals
then in Rome to proceed at once to the new election without awaiting the
arrival of their absent colleagues. There were sixteen cardinals then in the city
: ten of them were Frenchmen, four were Italians. Six of the French cardinals
were of the Limousin faction, connected by birth or
otherwise with the families of the last three Popes; the other four French
cardinals constituted the Gallican faction, and were
bitterly opposed to the Limousins. With the Gallicans acted the two remaining cardinals, Pedro de Luna,
the favourite of Saint Catharine, and Robert of
Geneva, who only a year earlier (3rd February 1377) had perpetrated the bloody
massacre of Cesena. A majority of two-thirds was necessary for election : the
French or Gallican party was resolved that there
should be no fresh Limousin Pope; they would have
preferred one of themselves, but recognised that of
this there was no chance. The young Roman Cardinal, Jacopo Orsini,
counting on the aid of the nobles and the populace, dreamed that the tiara
might fall to him. The Gallicans would have preferred
Pierre Flandrin or Guillaume de Noellet.
Rome itself was in a
turmoil: the nobles and high officials of the Church were expelled from the
city; the Romans themselves were in a state of frantic excitement. They were
determined that the divorce of the Papacy from their city should no longer
continue, that the profits which pilgrims and others brought to the dwelling-place
of the Pope should be theirs; they were decided that no Frenchman should be
Pope; they desired a Roman, or at all events an Italian. Popular feeling ran to
fever-heat. Each division of the French cardinals was ready to side with the
Italians rather than vote for the candidate of the opposite faction; and the
hopes of Orsini began to run high.
In this state, on the
7th April, with dissensions in their own body and with a violent tumult raging
outside, the cardinals entered the upper story in which the conclave was held.
Nature itself seemed to take part in the strife; a storm of thunder and
lightning came on; men said that the lightning struck the cells of Robert of
Geneva and Pedro de Luna, the future anti-popes. The multitude howled without: “Romano, Romano volemo lo Papa, o almanco Italiano!”.
They swore to make the heads of the cardinals as red as their hats; they piled
with faggots the room over which the conclave was held; they threatened death
to the cardinals if their wishes were not consulted. Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, said to a friend, “He who is
elected in such a tumult can never be Pope; nobody will recognize him”. All
through the night the populace kept up the din; peasants from the hills broke
into the Vatican cellars and drank up the good papal wine; men beat against the
floor under the conclave with their pikes and halberds; they rang all the
church bells of the city and sounded the tocsin of the Capitol; in the morning
they forced the doors of the conclave. Three cardinals came out to parley with
the ringleaders, who threatened to tear them in pieces if they did not at once
elect a Roman or an Italian. It was necessary to do something, and that
speedily. The cardinals promised to satisfy the wishes of the multitude, and
consulted together. Divers plans were suggested. Finally Jean de Cros, Cardinal of Limoges, of the Limousin faction, proposed that no one of the cardinals should be elected, but that one
outside the sacred college should be chosen, and he named the Archbishop of
Bari as future Pope : he was an Italian, a Neapolitan, and his election would
satisfy those who insisted on an Italian as Pope. Moreover, the archbishop “had
lately bought himself a house and a vineyard in Rome, in order to qualify as a
Roman citizen”. The Limousin faction also secretly
comforted themselves with the reflection that Bartolommeo Prignano had risen to his present position through the patronage of the Cardinal of Pampeluna, who was a Limousin, so
that if elected they judged and hoped that he would be grateful to the Limousin party. All the cardinals thought that they would
find in the Archbishop of Bari, who had lived for some years at the court at
Avignon, a ready and subservient tool. Bartolommeo Prignano was accordingly elected Pope. The name of “Bari, Bari”, was called out to the
Roman crowd; they mistook it for the name of the Limousin,
Jean de Bar, and rushed into the conclave, threatening death to the traitor
cardinals. Then old Tebaldeschi, the Cardinal of
Saint Peter’s, was presented to the mob; but the aged prelate’s cries,
protestations, and curses at length undeceived them. The cardinals fled from
the palace. Two days later, to the intense joy of the populace, the Archbishop
of Bari was crowned Pope, and took the name of Urban the Sixth. The cardinals
wrote to those of their number who had remained behind at Avignon, announcing
to them that under the guidance of the Holy Spirit they had unanimously elected
the Archbishop of Bari to be Pope, that he had duly taken his seat on the
apostolic throne, and that he had been crowned on the day of Our Lord’s
Resurrection.
The new Pope was a
short, fat man, a dark-faced Neapolitan, filled with a certain monkish piety,
with a hatred of pomp and of simony, but brusque and impetuous, utterly devoid
of tact and self-restraint, and without any knowledge of the world. Had he known
how to appreciate the circumstances aright, he would have seen a great future
opening before him. There is no doubt that his election, though it may have
been tainted with irregularity, was canonically valid. It had been held in the
midst of a tumult, and the cardinals had not been bricked up according to
custom. But they had solemnly declared that they had elected him freely and
advisedly; they had appeared at his coronation; nay, more, they stood by him,
obeyed him, accepted and solicited favours from him not
only immediately after his election, but for the first three months of his
reign. Their conduct during this time confirmed, if any confirmation were
necessary, the canonicity and regularity of his election. The new Pope was recognized
by the cardinals, was recognized through Christendom, as being the true and
canonical Pope. Up to the end of July not a breath of suspicion tainted the
validity of the election. But Urban himself knew as well as any man the
peculiar circumstances which had attended his elevation. He was fully aware of
the contentions which divided the sacred college, of the motives which had led
the cardinals to give their suffrages to an outsider. Had he been of politic
mind, he would have given some thought to the conciliation of the cardinals, at
any rate during the first months of his pontificate, in order to consolidate
his position. Though not a cardinal, he had lived at Avignon, and was aware of
the weight and influence of the College; he knew that the cardinals considered
themselves the equals of kings, and that they were everywhere treated with the
utmost respect and ceremony. He knew also that many of them expected him to
return to Avignon. He was resolved not to return, and herein he was right; but
he might have shown consideration and sympathy for the lofty dignitaries whose
wishes he was thwarting, who had raised him to be the spiritual Lord of
Christendom. He showed none; he was habitually rude and insulting to the members
of the sacred College; he abused and stormed at them; he called them fools and
liars; he sprang from his seat, intending to attack one of them; he threatened
to swamp their influence by creating new Italian cardinals. They had thought
that he would be their creature, ready to do whatever they wished; but he, on
the other hand, relying on the sympathy of the Romans, soon showed that he had
played a humble part long enough, that he was now Pope and was determined to be
absolute master. He was brutally overbearing and insolent to the Cardinal of Amiens,
who had taken no part in the election, but who returned on Low Sunday, April
25th, to report the result of the negotiations which he had conducted with
Florence, after the war of the republics against Holy Church. The Pope charged
the Cardinal with destroying the peace of the world by his treacherous
diplomacy; the angry Cardinal retorted that had it been merely the Archbishop
of Bari who said so, he would have told him that he lied in his throat. The
insult to his honour rankled in the proud Frenchman’s
breast; it was he who afterwards first suggested to his colleagues that the
election of Urban might be declared void.
Nevertheless, from
April on to July the cardinals recognized Urban as Pope, and breathed not a
word of doubt as to the validity of their choice. In electing him they had made
a mistake, and too late they discovered their error. To repair it, they
resolved willfully to sacrifice the welfare of Christendom. Under the pretext
of escaping from the heat they obtained permission to leave Rome, and betook
themselves to Agnani. The chamberlain, Pierre de Cros, who had charge of the tiara and the papal ornaments,
took them with him and accompanied the cardinals. Pedro de Luna, who had backed
up Urban all through, was the last to go. From Agnani they wrote to the four Italian cardinals who still remained at Rome, pointing
out that the recent election had been forced and irregular, and was therefore
void. Three of the four joined them; old Tebaldeschi died. Urban, utterly abandoned, wept and recognized his own folly now that it
was too late. All the cardinals who had elected him were now banded together
against him. He determined, if possible, to checkmate them, and on the 18th September
he created twenty-six new cardinals, several of whom refused the proffered honour. Two days later the old cardinals, who had meantime
moved to Fondi for greater security—Urban having quarrelled with the Count of Fondi—elected
Robert of Geneva, the perpetrator of the bloody massacre of Cesena, as Pope. He
took the style of Clement the Seventh. Thus arose the Great Schism.
To us at the present
day, as we read the history and consider the circumstances of the time, it may
not be surprising that there should thus have arisen two rival Popes; but to
the ordinary unlettered man of the Middle Ages it was incomprehensible and
inexplicable, a thing of wonder and amazement. There had been anti-popes
before, but never before had there been two Popes elected by the same, or
practically the same, body of cardinals. The unity of the Holy Roman Empire,
considering the portions that had been reft from it,
considering also the growing rivalry of independent nations, might have become
almost a lost idea; but the Unity of the Papacy had hitherto remained secure
and unshaken, a fixed rock on which the faith of Christendom was founded. There
could, men thought, be but one head of the Church on earth, even as there was
but one head in Heaven. The clergy everywhere acknowledged the over-lordship of
one Pope. Bishops everywhere were collated, many were directly appointed by
him. Peter’s Pence still flowed in from the northern nations of Europe, the
tribute of the humblest Christians to their one Father. The regular clergy
acknowledged the one Pope as their head, and knew no other superior outside
their convent walls. Pardoners traversed all countries selling indulgences
which they claimed to have obtained direct from the Pope. The wandering friars
brought his name home to the poorest and meanest. Every man in Christendom knew
that there was one Pope, one supreme Father over the hearts of all true
believers. But now that the Schism had begun, now that there were two Popes,
the prospect to a lowly Christian soul must have been awful in its perplexity.
Each of the rival pontiffs hurled his thunders of anathema against the other,
each excommunicated the other and all who adhered to him. That the rightful
Pope had the power of consigning the victims of his denunciations to
everlasting damnation no true Christian ventured to doubt. But who held this
power? who was the rightful Pope? In the heart of a kingdom a man might be
content to follow without question the faith of his ruler; the German and the
Englishman would believe in Urban, the Frenchman and the Scot would believe in
Clement, but on the borders, where one village owned one obedience and the next
owned another, the doubt and dismay must at times have been heartrending. Even
where one Pope was generally acknowledged, there was always1 some town or
community which held for his rival; often there was a division in the same town
or even in the same house; so that no one could find peace or rest on either
side, and men's consciences were troubled by doubt as to which was the true
Head of the Church, and on which side one could render to God real and acceptable
service.
In the political and
ecclesiastical worlds the Great Schism introduced a new element of discord.
France held for Clement, England for Urban. Scotland precipitately, Castile,
Aragon, and Navarre more deliberately and independently, followed the lead of
France. Portugal, vacillating with the event of war, eventually embraced the
cause of Urban. In the Levant the powerful influence of Venice and of Genoa was
exercised for the Pope at Rome; but Clement was not without followers in Corfu,
in Albania, in Morea, in the Island of Cyprus, and
among the cavaliers of Saint John of Jerusalem. Charles the Fifth had fondly
hoped to gain the adherence of Germany for Clement, but to King Wenzel and to
Germany generally the legitimacy of Pope Urban was as clear as the sun at
noonday : Prokop of Moravia, however, thought
otherwise; so too did the Duke of Juliers, the Count
de la Marck, the Count of Cleves, possibly also
Albert of Bavaria. Flanders consulted the doctors of Bologna and pronounced for
Urban; then followed the indecisive crusade of Bishop Despenser of Norwich (1383), when the Urbanists donned the
white bonnet with the red cross; this was succeeded next year by the death of
Louis de Male, Count of Flanders, and the accession of the Duke of Burgundy :
Philip the Bold was a Clementist, and used his
influence for Pope Clement, but he left his new subjects free to follow their
own convictions.4 Duke Leopold of Austria sold himself for a price to Pope
Clement; but the fatal day of Sempach (9th July 1386)
restored his dominions, Styria, Carinthia, the Tirol, Austria, Switzerland,
Swabia, and Alsace, to the obedience of Pope Urban. Holland, Luxemburg,
Brabant, Hainault, Lorraine, and Savoy all acknowledged Clement as the rightful
Pope. King Louis the Great of Hungary was on the side of Urban; his
sister-in-law, Joanna of Naples, soon took that of Clement. The Duke of
Mecklenburg and the King of Norway were contending for the crown of Sweden and
Denmark; Norway adhered to Clement, his opponent to Urban. In Naples, where the
childless queen Joanna had married her fourth husband, Pope Urban the Sixth,
who had no desire to see the country pass into German hands, refused to crown
Otto, Duke of Brunswick, and treated him with studied insolence. This alienated
the queen, who passed over to the Clementine faction, and subsequently adopted
the Duke of Anjou. Urban favoured at first the party
of her rival, Charles of Durazzo, until he quarrelled with him and excommunicated him; in Naples the
party of Ladislas, son of Charles of Durazzo, became ultimately the Roman party, while that of
the Duke of Anjou remained throughout Clementine. In ecclesiastical
appointments the same division occurred. Adolf of Nassau, Archbishop of Mainz,
declared at first for Clement; the Archbishops of Cologne and Trier declared
for Urban. Where an election was disputed, it goes without saying that one
candidate was on the side of one Pope and his rival on the side of the other :
this was the case in Liege, in Basel, in Metz, in Constance, in Chur, in Lübeck, and in other bishoprics.
France, more than any
other country, had been responsible for the Schism. Urban the Sixth was crowned
on Easter Sunday 1378; before the end of May a sergeant-at-arms and four of his
secretaries brought the news to King Charles the Fifth; they were followed next
month by four persons attached to certain of the cardinals; and shortly
afterwards the discontented cardinals themselves, and among them the King’s old counsellor, Jean de la Grange, Cardinal of Amiens,
who had been so grossly insulted by Urban, wrote to Charles warning him to give
no credence to the official account of the Pope’s election. Urban himself sent
two messengers, Francesco Tortello and Pierre de Murles; but the latter was a secret envoy of the cardinals.
In August the cardinals sent from Agnani a messenger,
Jean de Guignicourt, to announce officially to the
King that the election of Urban had been null and void. Charles sent the sum of
twenty thousand francs for their assistance; he wrote also to Queen Joanna of
Naples to offer them shelter in case of need; he assured the cardinals
themselves of his goodwill, and his letter reached them two days before they
elected Robert of Geneva. All this was done by the King before the clergy of
France were consulted, before any official declaration of policy was made. For
several months the entire kingdom of France, like the rest of Europe, had recognized
Urban the Sixth as the true Pope; and the subsequent recognition of Clement the
Seventh was not universal in France, and met with special opposition in Normandy.
If the King of France did not exercise any direct pressure on the cardinals, if
independently of his action the Schism would certainly have occurred, still he
was undoubtedly an accessory after the fact. There can be no doubt that Charles
the Fifth, being persuaded of the validity of Clement’s election, hoped to get him recognized not only by the Celtic nations, but by
nearly all the Christian nations of Europe, and that he counted in particular
on his good relations with the German Empire : had he lived to continue his
cautious, able, and persevering policy, the result might possibly have been
eventually other than it was. But Charles died on the 16th September 1380, and
the Schism became established. In the eyes of the other nations of Europe too,
France was responsible for the Schism. To them the captivity of the Popes at
Avignon had rendered the Pope the confederate, the willing servant, almost the
tool, of the King of France. The later Avignonese Popes had indeed been much more independent than they had had popular credit
for; but their position in the Provencal country, within easy access of France,
and far removed from the influence of Italy and Germany, was fatal to their
credit as the impartial head of Christendom. When they removed to Rome again,
the French influence was necessarily and visibly diminished; and men generally
believed that it was to regain the lost influence that France had fostered the
Schism.
The real authors of
the Schism were the cardinals. To excuse themselves they accused themselves of
a pitiful cowardice which Cardinal Orsini, Pedro de
Luna, and others of their number certainly never felt. To attribute the election
of Urban to coercion and intimidation was absurd, in the case of fighting men
like Robert of Geneva and Gerard de Puy. The great
majority of the cardinals were Frenchmen, and the old pleasant days at Avignon
beckoned them back to the sinful city. The prospect of a life in Italy, in a
ruinous city, amid a turbulent populace, under the thumb of an unmannerly,
overbearing pontiff who might at any moment treat any of them with the brutal
harshness which he manifested subsequently in the case of the six cardinals
whom he accused of conspiracy,1 was not alluring. There had been enough
violence and tumult to give colour to the plea that
the election was forced and not free, and they determined to avail themselves
of this plea. To their own greed and welfare they sacrificed the interest of
the Church, and brought on her a grievous affliction of which no one could
foresee the issue. The cardinals were the real, France was the ostensible,
author of the Great Schism.
While the Great
Schism, the greatest affliction which had ever befallen her since the degenerate
days of the Harlots, was thus beginning to desolate the Church, there were
everywhere apparent through the countries of Western Europe the signs of
conflict and distress. The prosperity which had attended the close of the
thirteenth century had disappeared much
of the Continent was in a state of very slow recovery from long-continued
war—from war which meant the burning of churches and homesteads, the
destruction of crops, the houghing and harrying of
cattle, the murder of peasants and burghers from whom no ransom could be
expected. By the end of the century England, France, Spain, and the Scandinavian
countries had all been troubled by wars of succession. Black Margaret, the
daughter of King Waldemar, in 1397 succeeded in
uniting Norway, Sweden, and Denmark under her single rule. In the Spanish
peninsula the struggle was of older date and of longer continuance. Alfonso the
Eleventh of Castile at his death left a legitimate son, Pedro the Cruel, by his
wife Mary of Portugal, and an illegitimate son, Henry of Trastamara,
by his leman, the beautiful Eleanor de Guzman. In Spain a bastard always stood
a better chance of recognition and succession than in the Teutonic lands, and
although Pedro won the crown of Castile for his own lifetime, Henry of Trastamara succeeded him. On his death, however, in 1379, a
fresh war broke out, in which the title of Henry's son, John, was contested by
the King of Portugal and by the Duke of Lancaster. One of John of Gaunt’s daughters was married to the King of Portugal, but
the ambitious duke did not scruple to desert his son-in-law, to marry another
daughter to the son of the reigning King of Castile, and to conclude peace
(1387). Aragon was spared for the present its war of succession; it was soon to
come. Navarre was ruled by the French prince Charles the Bad, a traitor to his
own country, a friend to Edward the Third; he died in 1387. On the east of the
Empire the Teutonic Order of knights had by the force of the sword converted to
the true faith much of heathen Prussia; and the Poles and Lithuanians had
nominally embraced Christianity when their king, Jagello,
christened Ladislas at his baptism, had married the
beautiful Hedwig, the youngest daughter of the late mighty King of Hungary,
Louis the Great, who died in 1382.
The three most
powerful kingdoms of Western Europe, England, France, and Germany, had by the
year 1380 fallen to three boys, each of whom succeeded a firm and powerful
sovereign who had done much to win for his country the position which it held
and the respect which it inspired. In 1377 Richard the Second, born without a
skin, and nourished in the skins of goats, had succeeded his grandfather at the
age of ten; in Germany, Wenzel had at the age of sixteen, in 1378, succeeded
his father Charles the Fourth; and in France, two years later, Charles the
Sixth had succeeded his father Charles the Fifth, deservedly known as Charles
le Sage. Edward the Third of England was a warrior who had brought great gain and
glory to his own country, and who had wrought untold woe on France by
prosecuting his claim to the French crown; but the war had languished since the
Peace of Bretigny (1360), and Charles the Fifth, by
his policy of masterly inactivity and his care and economy, had done much
toward the recovery of France. Even after his death and up to the close of the
century peace continued for the most part unbroken; and the untiring industry
and patient thrift, which then as now characterized the French peasant, began to
work an improvement; agriculture and industry recovered, the barns which had
been burned down were rebuilt, the vines were replanted, the fields were again
covered with crops. But the improvement was not for long; the old reign of
misery was to recommence with the cruel civil war which broke out between the Orleanists and the Armagnacs.
The three young kings
had each a hard game to play. Richard and Charles were left under the tutelage
of their uncles, and each of their uncles had his own separate selfish policy.
Each of the three boys was handsome and lovable; each at times displayed a
kingly vigour; but each was doomed to give way to
periods of inaction and to bouts of self-indulgence. Richard the Second was
beautiful and pleasure-loving, like his mother, the Fair Maid of Kent. Charles
the Sixth loved his people, and was loved by them his whole life through; but
he was ruined and maddened by sensuality and voluptuousness, by the nights and
days of feasting and debauchery into which he was plunged by his uncles.
Marriage produced no improvement, but rather deepened the evil. His wife’s
court was described by the Augustine monk, Legrand,
as the court of Venus, served by drunkenness and debauchery, and where night
was turned into day by the most dissolute dances. The continued tax on his
strength broke him down. A melancholy madness seized the King in 1392, which
rendered him incapable of government for lengthened intervals thereafter; it
was attributed by the people to sorcery. It was recognized by all that the King
of France was but a madman with lucid intervals. He was betrayed by his wife,
the beautiful, but soon somewhat corpulent, Isabel of Bavaria, but was so
fairly entreated by his “sweet sister”, Valentine Visconti, that all men deemed
that she by sorcery had bereft him of reason. The King's madness not only
delivered the kingdom to the selfish intrigues of his uncles, but also
introduced to active life his younger brother, the handsome Louis of Orleans,
the inconstant husband of the beauteous Milanese, a far more attractive and
brilliant figure than the Duke of Berri or the Duke
of Burgundy, but equally devoted to his own selfish aims, and equally
regardless of the welfare of France. From this time the kingdom was a prey, in
the intervals of Charles’s insanity, to his uncles and his brother, and the
factions were already forming which were to become notorious as the Burgundians
and Armagnacs.
In Germany the astute
Emperor Charles the Fourth had been preeminently a peacemaker, and had
succeeded in establishing the imperial authority over the numberless particles
which made up the grand, but ill-assorted, Holy Romano-Germanic Empire. When
Charles died, his son Wenzel reigned well and tolerably wisely for the first
ten years, although he sacrificed his own interest and the interest of the
Empire in helping his half-brother Sigismund, whom he loved, but who repaid his
love and sacrifice with the basest ingratitude; it was after the first ten
years of his reign had elapsed that Wenzel gave way to slothfulness and drink.
It was while he was thus inefficient that, at the further side of Europe, the Osmanlis had entered the continent, and the Greek Empire
was tottering to its fall; the Emperor Manuel was a suppliant for aid at the
courts of Venice, Paris, and London. It was the recognized task of the Emperor
of the Holy Roman Empire to defend Christendom against the Turk; but the work
now fell on the shoulders of the stalwart young warrior, Sigismund of Hungary.
He tried to make headway against the misbelievers; a crusade was preached, and
the King raised a mighty army; he was joined by the flower of the French
chivalry under John of Nevers, eldest son of the Duke
of Burgundy; by the Germans under Count Rupert of the Palatine, Count Hermann
of Cilly, John of Nuernberg,
and others; by contingents from Poland and Wallachia; by crusaders from England
under their future king; by the fleets of Venice and the Chevaliers of Rhodes.
Through the impetuous folly and vanity of the French, who set at nought the superior knowledge and advice of Sigismund, the
whole of this magnificent army was defeated at the battle of Nicopolis (1396) with such overwhelming loss that Eastern
Europe appeared to lie at the mercy of the infidel.
Four years later the
succession to the Holy Roman Empire, the highest temporal power then known to
the civilized world, was in dispute. The story will be told more in detail
later on. It is only necessary to refer to it here to complete a brief sketch
of the state of Europe at the end of the fourteenth century. Wenzel’s apathy
and disregard of the affairs of the Empire had disgusted certain of the
Electors; he had neglected imperial interests in Flanders, he had sold the
duchy of Milan for a price, he had not terminated the Great Schism which
afflicted the Church; therefore the four Electors of the Rhine, the other three
holding aloof, called upon him to appear and to answer these charges. It was
true that Wenzel had fallen woefully from his first estate. Originally of a
good disposition and most carefully educated by his father, he had allowed
himself to fall under the influence of low-born favourites,
and had given way to sloth and indecision; he had become a sot, plagued with a
thirst which was popularly attributed to the dregs of poison lurking in his
system; he had sold the freedom of a city for four hundred tons of wine
annually; he had loved with an engrossing, inordinate love Bohemian lasses and
Bohemian beer; he had proved himself, and he was conscious that he was, utterly
incapable of managing the affairs of a great Empire. But he was tenacious of
his dignity, and he could appoint a regent to do the work. The three
archbishops of the Rhine and the Count Palatine met at the little white chapel
which still overlooks the confluence of the Lahn and
the Rhine, and they solemnly deposed Wenzel; next day the three archbishops,
one holding the proxy of the Count Palatine, crossed the river to Rense, and at the Koenigstuhl under the walnut-trees, on the left bank of the Rhine—the platform which had
been built by Charles the Fourth as being within call of four electorates, the
platform which was used on this occasion and never again— they proclaimed
Rupert, Count Palatine, to be henceforth King of the Romans and future Emperor
of the Holy Roman Empire. Wenzel refused to recognize the deposition or to give
up the regalia; there were henceforth two kings in Germany, and a schism was
produced which lasted through the first ten years of the fifteenth century.
Italy was a land
apart, utterly different from every other country in Europe. In culture, in
intellect, in imagination she was far ahead of them all. The old classical
authors were read, loved, and imitated. Where other countries were making puny,
childlike efforts toward art and culture, the endeavours of Italy were great, almost Titanic. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, three
names to resound for ages, had appeared and had passed away, taking their seats
among the immortals. Cimabue and Giotto had founded the modern school of
Italian painting. Nicolo Pisano had carved the famous
pulpit in the Baptistery at Pisa and had left a school of sculptors behind him.
In architecture, in which the preeminence of Italy was perhaps less marked, it
is enough to mention such buildings as the Duomo at
Florence, the Cathedral of Milan, the Doges’ Palace at Venice, the Palazzo Municipale of Piacenza. But if the upper classes of Italy
were far in advance of those of other countries in culture and intellect, they
fell far behind them in morality and their conduct of life. Public and private
morality alike were utterly dissociated from religion among the upper classes,
from superstition among the lower, and had practically ceased to exist.
Political assassination, which roused such horror and called for such
long-winded defence in France, whence it was
ultimately referred to the Council of Constance, was taken as a matter of
course in Italy; if a man was in the way, it was only natural, if it were
possible, to remove him by poison or the stiletto. Treachery was of common
occurrence, both in public and in private life; loyalty was a plant of slow
growth in Italian soil. Female honour was lightly
esteemed in many nations, but nowhere more lightly than in Italy; rape was an
ordinary incident of everyday life. The Italian nobility unhappily lacked two
motives which were all-powerful in other nations, the point of honour and the fear of God. Chivalry had never struck root
in Italy, and the chivalrous sense of honour was
unknown. Nor did their men of thought turn to religion; art, scholarship,
political science, and philosophy occupied their minds, but towards religious
questions they evinced an intellectual apathy; they feared to sin against the
law of culture more than against the law of Christ. It is not wonderful that
under these conditions vice was rampant. It was as easy to sin in Italy as to
put on your shoes or slippers in London. State officers maintained brothels;
priests acted as panders and kept houses of bad repute. The courtesans of
Venice were noted through Europe for their numbers, their beauty, their grace
and accomplishments, their manifold arts of dalliance. The Italian required the
fascination of the fancy to be added to the allurement of the senses; he endeavoured to spiritualize abominable vices. But while in
all these points Italy was the shame of Europe, in other points she was its
exemplar. The middle-classes believed before all things in money and in
money-making. They were shrewd men of business; and the nobles did not disdain
to take their part in commerce, navigation, and industry. The merchants of
Venice and Genoa traded not only with the Levant, but also with South Germany
and other parts of inland Europe. Ancona and Rimini
on the eastern coast, Pisa and Amalfi on the western,
were merchant ports of considerable importance. Milan and Florence were noted
for their banking-houses; the Bardi, the Peruzzi, and
others financed Edward the Third of England and the King of Sicily as the same
houses had financed Charles of Anjou. The commercial integrity of the Italian
bankers stood very high throughout Europe. It is unnecessary to do more than
mention the industrial guilds of Florence, the silk- weavers of Lucca, the armourers of Milan, the workers in oil and in wool, and the
like. The Italian cities had succeeded in doing what the German cities were
striving hard to accomplish : they had won a right of independent
self-development, but the right was marred by the despotisms and tyrannies
under which they had in many instances fallen; it was also distinguished by the
fact that the Italian cities had absorbed into their rule the surrounding
country in a manner which the German Free States never attempted. The people
had thus enjoyed centuries of wealth and civilization in great cities while the
northern races had remained in a state of comparative poverty and barbarism.
With respect to the lower classes, the dictum of a celebrated scholar may
safely be accepted, that if the artists of Italy, “not few of whom were born in
cottages and educated in workshops, could feel and think and fashion as they
did, we cannot doubt that their mothers and their friends were pure and pious,
and that the race which gave them to the world was not depraved. . . . Italian
art alone suffices to prove”, says Symonds, “that the immorality of the age
descended from the upper stratum of society downwards”. Italian soldiers and
the lower classes generally were not so ignorant and gross as those of England;
they were less cruel and inhuman than those of Spain ; they were not gluttons
and drunkards as were those of Germany ; they took no delight in brawls and
bloodshed as did the Switzers; they were more sober
and courteous than the French.
In its political
development also Italy differed from the rest of Europe. In the twelfth century
the whole of Upper and Central Italy was split up into a number of little republics,
somewhat resembling the cities of ancient Greece or the free states of Germany.
The passion for self-development was everywhere the ruling motive. They were
impatient of control by Pope or Emperor; they recognized that they formed part
of the Holy Roman Empire, and they sought no other or closer bond of union.
Each city desired to develop its own particular industry or commerce, to organize
itself on its own social lines, to expand on its own political type; availing
itself of its existing municipal machinery, it sought to secure independence
and to place the government in the hands of its own citizens. But disturbing
forces, factions within and wars without, entered and played havoc, until
little by little each republic in turn became weaker, more confused in policy,
more mistrustful of itself and its own citizens, more subdivided into petty but
ineradicable factions, until at last it fell a prey either
to some foreign potentate or to the Church, or else to an ambitious family
among its members.
By the end of the
fourteenth century the ruling powers in Italy had become reduced to five in
number. The Republic of Genoa, through fear of the Visconti of Milan, had in
1396 surrendered its liberty to the King of France, and was no longer
independent ; the French Constable Boucicaut was lord
of Genoa and of the sea front from the Western Riviera round to Livorno
(Leghorn). The Duke of Milan and the Republic of Venice divided between them
the northern part of Italy; the Republic of Florence and the Papal States
occupied the centre; the Kingdom of Naples formed the
south of the peninsula.
Naples also had been
and still was the scene of a disputed succession. Charles of Anjou had been
called in by the Pope nearly a century and a half earlier (1262) to expel the
Hohenstaufen; he had won for himself the kingdom of the Two Sicilies;
but his oppression and cruelty had driven the Sicilians to revolt, and after
the “Vespers” (1282) Sicily was lost and Naples alone remained to the House of
Anjou. In the city of Naples itself, Frederic the Second, the grandson of
Barbarossa, had built him a lordly palace, and here Charles of Anjou, and his
son and grandson after him, reigned in undisputed succession. The grandson,
Robert, left a granddaughter, Joanna, who succeeded him. She married her
second cousin, Andrew; but Andrew, not content with the position of a
prince-consort, claimed the crown in his own right, on the ground that his
grandfather, Charles Martel, had been the elder brother of his wife’s
grandfather, Robert. This unfortunate claim cost Andrew his life; and Joanna
married Louis of Tarentum, her father’s first cousin, who was suspected with
Joanna herself of having murdered the luckless Andrew. Sixteen years later
Louis died, and Joanna married again; and finally, in 1376, she married for the
fourth time, but she had no children by any of her husbands. Her
heir-presumptive was her second cousin, Charles of Durazzo;
but the Papal Schism had now commenced, dividing Christendom, and often royal
families, into two contending families. This had happened in the case of the
Anjou family; the opposition of Pope Urban to Queen Joanna had caused an
important change in Neapolitan politics. The Queen, when the Pope insulted her
husband, went over to the French side; whereas Charles of Durazzo was an adherent of Urban. To spite Charles and to defeat his expectations,
Joanna, on the 29th June 1380, made a will, whereby she adopted Louis, Duke of
Anjou, brother of Charles the Fifth of France, as her heir in Italy, in Sicily,
and in France. Clement the Seventh lost no time in confirming her donation. The
King’s death prevented the Duke from starting at once to take possession of his
new kingdom; he had first of all to rob France of the necessary funds for the
enterprise. Pope Urban wrote to Louis of Hungary, urging him to punish Joanna
for the murder of her former husband; the aged monarch passed the task on to
his nephew, Charles of Durazzo. The adoption by
Joanna, letting in the second house of Anjou, provided abundant trouble for
Italy both in the near and in the distant future. Charles accepted his task
with alacrity; he invaded Naples, defeated the Queen’s husband, captured Joanna
herself—she was murdered shortly afterwards—and was crowned King of Naples in
1382, to the joy of the Neapolitans, who preferred their own countryman as
Pope to the Butcher of Cesena. In the same year Duke Louis of Anjou, having
provided himself with money and men, brought a formidable army to support his
claim; but delay, disease, and starvation played havoc with his troops, and in
1384 the Duke himself died. Charles of Durazzo was
now firmly established as King of Naples. Unfortunately he was offered the
crown of Hungary; he went to that country, gained the crown, but was
assassinated in June 1386. This left the claim to the crown of Naples to be
fought out between two boys, Ladislas, the son of
Charles, who was ten years old when his father died, and Louis the Second of
Anjou, who was three years the junior of Ladislas.
Louis was represented by his mother, Marie de Bretagne, who was unable to do
anything for the time to advance her son's claim, which remained in abeyance.
The foregoing sketch
of the state of Europe at the time of the Great Schism has shown that the
predominant place throughout was taken by war. War, bloodshed, and rapine,
violence and disorder, were the glaring evils of the time; all classes
suffered, but the lowest suffered more terribly than others. Peace and quietude
was what they coveted, but what they found it difficult to obtain. The clerical
greeting, “Pax Vobiscum”
whose full meaning we in this country find it difficult to realize, sounded a
mockery to those poor souls, whose crops were pillaged, whose cattle were
harried or maimed, whose houses were burned over their heads. War was the
occupation and the sport of the knightly class; when real war was not to be
had, they delighted in the mimic war of the joust and the tournament. But the
knights formed only one class of the community.
Society in the Middle
Ages was divided, roughly speaking, into four main divisions or classes. There
were the knights and their retainers, who dwelt in castles and strongholds;
there were the merchants and tradesmen, with their dependants,
in the walled towns and cities; there were the agriculturists, with their labourers, who lived for the most part in wattled huts, clustered around the church in walled
villages, or gathered together close under the protection of their lord,
spiritual or temporal; and there were the clerks (clerici)
or clergy, who dwelt partly in clergy-houses, monasteries, or other buildings,
protected by their sanctity, and partly also in the larger cities and towns. To
this rough classification there were many exceptions, such as the Jews, the lay
lawyers, the sea-going folk, the wayfarers, and others; but for the population
generally the division holds good. Men were born into the first three classes
and took their places therein by right of birth. But with the clerks it was
otherwise. A man was sometimes called a clerk because he was a scholar; but the
clergy, properly speaking, were men who had received orders, minor or sacred.
The minor orders1 were those conferred on acolytes, readers, doorkeepers, and
exorcists; the greater or sacred orders began with the sub-diaconate; and upon
all those who had received them the rule of celibacy was, from the time of
Gregory the Seventh, enforced. This rule was not of divine institution, it was
a rule of the Church, and it was bitterly opposed at first; but long before the
end of the fourteenth century it had ceased to be contested. The ranks of the
clergy were therefore recruited by voluntary enlistment from the other three
classes. Voluntary enlistment implies deliberate choice, generally of the
volunteer, sometimes of his forebears; and a deliberate choice implies a
certain amount of intelligence. For this reason, and because of their education
and the demands which their duties cast upon them, the clergy formed everywhere
the intelligent class in the State.
Among the population
generally the grossest ignorance abounded; superstition trenched on idolatry;
the time might almost be fitly called “the Devil's Reign”. Men of light and
leading did things then which would be incomprehensible now. Popes and
condottieri generals consulted the stars; magicians baptized their books in the
lake at the foot of Mons Pilatus; the learned and reverend doctors of the
University of Paris, when at their wits’ end, hesitated not to consult certain
wise women, foolish simpletons who saw visions and dreamed dreams. But although
there was much that was ignoble and debasing, there was much also of the
childlike and picturesque, much that found great joy in the mystery plays and
in that spirit of mimicry and imitation necessary for the education of an
unlettered people, much that still lingers among the peasantry of Europe
everywhere. In the early part of the century there had been a considerable
amount of prosperity even among the peasantry. In France the agriculturists had
been exceptionally numerous and exceptionally well off; they fared well and
their farms were well stocked; the beggars had white bread given them, and the
peasantry spread clean napery for their friends and ate their fowls larded. In
Germany also, when there was no war in his vicinity, the peasant was
well-to-do; he dressed respectably and had money in his pocket; he became the
laughingstock of his city compeers because of his bearing and his independence.
In England a little later the beggars were no longer content with their former
rations; they demanded bread of clean wheat and beer of the best and brownest;
the landless labourer despised penny-ale or cabbage
that was a night old, and asked for fresh meat and for fish freshly fried. And
together with plenty of this rough comfort and coarse enjoyment there was among
all classes, in those days when all the world was one religion, much good
fellowship, much cheery intercourse and camaraderie. Men crossed and greeted
one another at their daily avocations, they mingled in friendly rivalry in
their sports and games, they prayed together in one church, they met in the
evening at the alehouse; quite apart from guilds and fellowships, there reigned
a spirit of goodwill and brotherhood. Rudolf of Habsburg would drink, mug in
hand, to the burghers of Thuringia; Edward the Third would dance with the
citizens1 wives at Guildhall; Saint Louis of France would dispense justice
under an oak at Compiegne.
In the middle of the
century came the Black Death, the most terrible scourge which has ever desolated
humanity in historic times; it swept through nearly every part of Europe, and
carried off here one-third, there one-half, in some places two-thirds of the
inhabitants. The fearful depopulation went far to revolutionize society; the
Black Death shook the bonds of custom and introduced the reign of contract. The
shortness of labourers after the calamity gave to
every workman, agricultural or other, a market value; and he soon learned no
longer to be content with the old customary valuation placed on his services.
There was everywhere a demand for labour, and he
could leave his old home and get work at better wages elsewhere. In England wages
doubled; they were everywhere in excess of the statute rate, but employers were
willing to risk the liability and to go on paying: the labourers worked only eight hours a day; they throve under their guilds and
trades-unions; the peasants began gradually to acquire land. Very different was
the state of things in France. That country had sunk from the height of
prosperity to the depth of misery. The Hundred Years’ War had begun, and in the
intervals of the war the country suffered from the ravages of the Free Companies.
The English and their allies among the Bretons and the Navarrese had committed frightful atrocities, but Frenchman and foreigner alike, clerk
and layman, combined to pillage the unhappy land of France. The grandes compagnies were composed of miscreants of all nations, bands with the discipline of an
army and the instinct of brigands, commanded by chiefs like Robert Knolles or Hugh Calverley, like
Olivier de Clisson or Eustache d'Anberchicourt,
or even by the priests like Jacques d'Aigregeuille,
the curé of Mesvres, or the
Archpriest Arnaud de Cervolles. These ruffians spared
neither man, woman, nor child in their fury and lust; they burned and despoiled
houses, sacred and profane : indeed, after the castles, the buildings most
capable of fortification and defence were the
cathedrals, churches, and abbeys, and these were therefore invariably the
object of attack. King Charles the Fifth, by his wise economy and his policy of
masterly inactivity, had done much to restore the credit of his country, but he
could not recompense his peasantry for the sufferings they had endured. After
the insurrection of the Jacques had been quelled, the country abode in
comparative peace. In Germany also the Emperor Charles the Fourth did his best
to keep the peace among the numberless heterogeneous elements of which the
Empire was composed, and for the most part he succeeded. But everywhere through
Western Europe toward the end of the fourteenth century a spirit of popular
discontent had been rising among the people, and it gradually culminated in
insurrections and outbreaks. In 1378 the “Ciompi” or
wooden shoes, the proletariat of Florence, rose in a half-revolution,
half-strike, to obtain reduction of taxes and better terms of employment: they
burned the palaces of the nobles and introduced a reign of terror, during which
the city was given over to outrage and pillage. In Flanders the “white bonnets”,
the democratic party, rallied in Ghent around the bourgeois Philip van
Artevelde; they marched victoriously against Bruges, but were mown down in
their thousands by the French at Roosebeke (1382). In
England the peasants throughout the eastern counties, from Norfolk round to Sussex,
revolted, thousands of them marched on London, and demanded from their King the
abolition of serfdom (1381). At Rouen the coppersmiths and others rose; they
elected as their king a rich draper, a big man but poor of spirit; they opened
the gaols, pillaged the houses of former mayors, tore
up charters (1382). In the same year the Parisians rose against the
tax-gatherers and the Jews; they seized twelve thousand leaden mallets from the
Hotel de Ville, and for three days the Maillotins were masters of the city. In Auvergne the “Tuchins”,
or dog-killers, appeared; they were recruited from the poorest of the poor, and
nothing was safe from them. In Languedoc the peasants and the men of the faubourgs, reduced to the utmost misery by the war and
taxation, rose in fury against the nobles and the priests, killing all who had
not hard and horny hands like their own (1382). Something resembling an
international feeling of sympathy among the working classes had sprung up; for
the first time, says Henri Martin, the populace in the different nations of the
West experienced the instinct of the identity of their cause, and an electric
movement of sympathy ran from the banks of the Seine and the Scheldt to those
of the Thames. In 1386 the Swiss peasants defeated Leopold of Habsburg in the
disastrous battle of Sempach; and next year the war,
simmering since 1379, broke out between the Swabian cities and the Dukes of Bavaria, and between the towns on the Rhine and the
Count Palatine. Most sad were the results: for miles round the cities and
fortresses the villages were utterly destroyed, and not a church nor a house
remained standing. There was at this time, as Michelet has said, the
profoundest trouble throughout Christendom; it seemed as if universal war were
commencing between the low and the great.
It was in the middle
of all this horror and misery that the Great Schism had begun. Its existence
was universally admitted and universally deplored. It was everywhere felt to be
necessary in the interest of Christendom to put an end to the disunion as
speedily as possible. “Divine Providence”, Frederic Barbarossa had once said, “has
specially appointed the Roman Empire to prevent the continuance of schism in
the Church”. The Emperor, when he uttered this axiom, was undoubtedly the most
powerful monarch in Europe. But when Charles the Fourth died there was no
Emperor; the King of the Romans was a mere boy of sixteen. Charles had recognized
Urban; he had commended his cause to his son; and all Europe expected, and the
Pope at Rome most anxiously hoped, that Wenzel would forthwith proceed to Rome
to be crowned Emperor, and that the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire would thus
proclaim to all Christendom that Urban the Sixth was the rightful and
legitimate Pope and that Clement was a usurper. But there were obstacles in the
way. In 1381 indeed, Wenzel and King Louis of Hungary sent an embassy to Paris
to endeavour to convert the French court to the Roman
obedience; but the result was a foregone conclusion, as was that of the
counter-embassy sent two years later from Paris to Prague. The journey to Rome
was imperative in the interest of Urban. Difficulties in the Empire,
negotiations with Hungary and Austria, the strife over the archbishopric of
Mainz and over the Swabian League, occupied Wenzel in
the earlier years of his reign ; and when in 1382 he announced his intention of
making the journey to Rome, the death of Louis of Hungary and the consequent
advancement of the claims of his half-brother Sigismund to the crowns of
Hungary and Poland delayed the project for some years further. At this time in
his reign Wenzel practically gave up his chance of wearing the golden crown in
order to further the interests of Sigismund, and bitterly he was repaid for his
sacrifice. The coronation of Wenzel and his acknowledgment of Urban were not
to be. An Emperor was not thus to put an end to the Schism. Some other means
must be sought.
From the very
beginning the plan of a general council had been broached. Before the election
of Clement, the Italian cardinals, with the assent of Urban, had proposed that
the question of the validity of his election should be referred to a council;
two of them repeated the suggestion afterward at Nice. The Florentines, when
the Duke of Anjou tried to win them to Clement, replied that they had already recognized
Urban as their Pope, and that they must stand by their decision until a general
council decided that they were wrong. King John of Castile, in his letter of
the 20th September 1379; advised Charles the Fifth of France to refer the
matter to a general council, this being the plan, he said, which all
Christendom approved. The most eloquent and persuasive advocate at this time of
a general council was undoubtedly Henry of Langenstein,
the vice-chancellor of the University of Paris, who (1381) held that God had in
His mercy permitted the Schism in order to bring about the much needed reform in
the Church, for which a general council was necessary. He was the first to urge
that the divine right of the Pope must itself be subordinate to the welfare of
the Church; his teaching fashioned the thoughts of Jean Gerson,
who when Pierre d'Ailly was promoted to a bishopric,
succeeded to the chancellorship of the University in 1390. King Charles the
Fifth was himself in correspondence with the warmest adherents of the scheme of
a council; but despite the embassy of the Duke of Luxemburg, despite the arguments
of Henry of Langenstein and Conrad of Gelnhausen, the King of France died with the assertion on
his lips that he still believed Clement the Seventh to be the true shepherd of
the Church, although he so far wavered as to admit that he would have obeyed
the finding of a general council had it gone against him.
But the chief
argument against a council was that neither Urban nor Clement nor the cardinals
would hear of it. There were indeed almost insuperable difficulties in the way
of its adoption at that time. There was the difficulty as to the place of
convocation amid the wars and jarring interests of Europe. There was the
difficulty as to the mode of convocation : it was the duty of the Emperor of
the Holy Roman Empire to convoke a council, but Wenzel had not yet received the
golden crown; and if a council could not meet without the consent of the Pope,
then both Popes and cardinals refused to act. There was the further difficulty of
enforcing the decrees of the council when they had been made. The project was,
at the commencement of the Great Schism, repeatedly made; it was as often,
because of the manifest difficulty and dilatoriness attending its execution,
deliberately discarded. The plan was especially favoured by the Universities of Paris, Oxford, and Prague; and the year after the death
of King Charles the Fifth, the University of Paris returned to their scheme.
Pierre d'Ailly received a respectful hearing, but
when Jean Rousse, a Doctor of Abbeville, was commissioned by the University to
lay the matter formally before the royal council, the Duke of Anjou, who had
welcomed the election of Clement far more heartily than his brother, and who
looked to the new Pope to finance him in his design on the crown of Naples, not
only did not allow the orator to speak, but sent armed men by night to seize
him in his bed, and consigned the Doctor to the blackest cachot of the Chatelet. For several years the University was
reduced to ignominious silence. The way of fact, the expulsion of the opponent
by brute force, was at this time the only solution of the difficulty which found favour at any court of Europe.
On Christian Europe
the Schism produced its natural result. Scholars began to doubt and inquire;
divisions of opinion and heresy speedily appeared. The spirit of scepticism as to the Pope’s authority and infallibility had
indeed appeared in Germany in the days of Louis of Bavaria, when Pope John the
Twenty-second, in his quarrel with the King, had laid the land under interdict
and had introduced strife into many bishoprics, when he had fallen foul of the
Franciscans because of their doctrine of the poverty of Christ and had himself
come under suspicion because of his theory of the Beatific Vision, when the
sect of the Free Thinkers gained ground and the Mystics taught personal
communion with God—all these things turned men’s eyes toward the shortcomings
of the Church and opened their minds to inquiry and scepticism.
The critical spirit dated from the days of the Babylonish Captivity at Avignon. Michael of Cesena had taught that the Pope may err, but
that a Council of the Universal Church cannot err. William of Ockham believed
that the Pope may err, that a general council may also fall into error, and
that infallibility is to be found only in the Scriptures and the beliefs of the
Universal Church. Marsiglio of Padua had published
the Defensor Pacis, a work
which in many points might be accepted almost without reserve by a Protestant
today : its teaching was, as has been already shown, that the domains of the
spiritual and civil powers were separate, that the former had no coercive
jurisdiction, that the Catholic Faith rests on Holy Scripture alone, that when
doubts arise as to the meaning of the sacred Word, these can only be settled by
a general council of the faithful, on which clergy and laity alike have seats.
The Schism profoundly shocked John Wycliffe; he saw each rival Pope fulminating
excommunications against the other; and he speedily came to the conclusion that
the Papacy itself was the great evil, that it was the poison of the Church.
Like the Spiritual successors of Francis of Assisi, he believed in the absolute
poverty of the clergy; he believed also in dominion founded on grace. These
were doctrines which, carried to their logical conclusions, might have
important political bearings; his opposition to the Church was most clearly
evinced by his theory as to transubstantiation; he denied the orthodox
doctrine, he refused to believe that a priest could by a daily miracle
transform the wafer and wine into flesh and blood. Wycliffe thus became a
heretic, and a dangerous heretic. But heresy, if not engendered, had been
fostered and increased by the Schism. As a German historian has put it, the
Captivity at Avignon, followed by the Schism, brought on the Reformation.
Furthermore, it was the Schism which discredited the papal dignity and tended
to destroy all reverence for the supreme head of the Church. In England it
strengthened immensely the reforming movement, and made entire distrust,
defiance even, of a Pope seem not merely a patriotic but a religious duty.
Christ’s vineyard in England had been beautiful and fruitful, sang an old Latin
poet, but now the Lord’s vineyard was laid waste; “O now, plague-stricken land,
that didst team with all sound learning free from the taint of heresy, stranger
to all error, exempt from all deception : now thou rankest as the chief in all
schism, discord, madness”. Wycliffe had sown the seed; the fruit soon appeared.
Oxford, London, Leicester, and Bristol became centres of Wycliffite influence. Nicholas of Hereford, Philip Repyngdon, and John Aston were summoned before the
archbishop to answer for their advocacy of the new doctrines. A few years later
several fellows were expelled from Queen’s College, Oxford, because of their
sympathy with the teaching of the reformer. Even at court the gentle Queen
Anne, elder sister of Sigismund, was not unfriendly to the new teaching; she
encouraged the use of the open Bible. The Bohemian scholars who followed her to
the English Court took back with them afterwards to their native land the books
and teaching of John Wycliffe.
Far more important to
the Popes than any such downright heresy, which could be met with and fought
outright, was the anti-papal, almost latitudinarian, spirit which had taken possession
of that stronghold of orthodoxy, the University of Paris. The sight of two Popes
in Christendom raised the question whether the Pope was after all the real head
of the Church, whether the real head was not Christ; if the Pope was merely His
earthly representative, might there not be two or three, or ten or twelve
Popes, an independent Pope for every different country, with its own
independent Church? Such speculations indulged in by theologians were fatal to
an undivided papal supremacy, but luckily they found no response in the civil
powers. In the University of Paris itself, however, they were rife, and she was
the acknowledged champion of the faith, to whose dictates kings, and even
Popes, were wont to defer. For the University of Paris was the first seminary
of theology in Europe, she was a cosmopolitan institution, with scholars from
all countries, speaking the cosmopolitan tongue, Latin; and at this time she,
the venerated mother of Saint Thomas Aquinas and of William of Ockham, had in
her midst a crowd of eminent theologians. There was Henry of Hesse of Langenstein, the great advocate of the scheme for a general
council, who left Paris in 1382; there was Matthias of Janow,
who was later Prebendary of Prague ; there was Pierre Plaoul, who was sent on an embassy to Germany; there
was the celebrated Pierre d'Ailly, who regarded the
person of neither Pope, who was also an advocate for a general council, but
who, in his advocacy thereof, bided his time, waiting until 1407 for a favourable opportunity; there were the three noted
disciples of Pierre d'Ailly, Gilles des Champs, the
sovereign Doctor of Theology, Jean Charlier de Gerson, the Christlike teacher,
and Nicholas de Clamanges, the Cicero of his time.
These were men who would exert a profound influence on the progress of
negotiations during the Schism; and it is important, therefore, to grasp the
nature of their thoughts and predilections. Perhaps the most noteworthy phase
was the revolt in the bosom of the University itself of the despised and
neglected theologians against the canon and the civil law. This revolt was
necessarily anti-papal, for the Popes were almost invariably lawyers, doctors
of the canon or of both civil and canon law, with a lawyer's liking for the
clear-cut intelligible wording of the decretals, with
a lawyer's dislike for the subtle metaphysical distinctions of the mediaeval
scholastic theology. Moreover, Clement the Seventh, when he became Pope at
Avignon, took no thought for the Church but to suck the marrow from her bones,
and troubled not at all about the professors at Paris. It is small wonder,
then, that an anti- papal spirit grew among them. Its position as the champion
of orthodoxy gave the University prominence, and lent to the teaching of its
professors an importance and a weight which did not attach to those of Wycliffe
or of Hus. Hence arose during the continuance of the Schism the preponderating
influence of men such as D'Ailly and Gerson, whose views it is important to understand. The
theology of D'Ailly may serve as an example.
Born in 1350, the son
of humble but honest parents, Colard and Petronilla, a patriotic Frenchman all his life through,
Pierre d'Ailly went to the College of Navarre at the
University of Paris; when he was twenty-two years of age, he was chosen proctor
for the French Nation at the University, and took his degree as Doctor in 1380.
It was then that he published his theological tractate on the Church. He was a
middle man, standing cautiously between the two parties; he had imbibed the
teaching of Pierre Dubois and John of Paris, of Marsiglio of Padua and William of Ockham; but he saw that the Church had not been utterly
overthrown by Philip the Fair, and his liberalism was moderated. Above all, he
was a Frenchman and a Gallican, a Gallican before the time of Bossuet, a Gallican before the
Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. He was too conservative to belong to the party
directly opposed to the Church, and too close a follower of the new philosophy
to belong to the orthodox. In philosophy he was a nominalist, and nominalism
had the advantage of drawing a sharp line between matters of the faith and of
the intellect, of confining the reason to the things of which consciousness was
taken, mediately or immediately, through the senses
and the intellect, and of relegating the higher truths of religion to a
supernatural mysticism. But through it all D'Ailly was essentially anti-papal. The Church, in his view, was built on Faith, Hope,
and Charity. Faith, inspired faith, infusa fides, was
the evidence of things not seen, the intellectual assent to the catholic
verities; it provided the set stones of the building, of which Hope raised the unsurmountable walls, and to which the Love of God and one’s neighbour formed the all-embracing roof: the truly
spiritual were the inner walls, the preachers and teachers were the windows of
the building, the portals were the truth of God’s word, and the pillars were
the men of action, the shepherds and leaders. Thus was Holy Church an organized
whole, the fellowship of Christians based on Holy Writ, perfect but not yet
perfected, for believers are still united with Christ in building up the House
of God. There is no mention of the Pope here; it is the Church which is
all-important; she is the Holy Mother who reconciles men with God; her priests
administer the sacraments which build up inspired faith; and when the sinner
through fear dare not betake himself directly to Christ, he turns trustfully to
the arms of the merciful mediator, the Church. D'Ailly set a high value on the written word of the Bible, he was energetic in favour of a correct translation of the original; but he did
not accept the written word as his criterion, he regarded it as merely a sign
or symbol of the true law, and as a nominalist he looked through the word to find
the underlying idea; he found his touchstone in inspired faith, backed by
conclusive argument. “The law of Christ”, he says, “may be most properly
defined as inspired faith, or its action, by which rational man assents to the
truths of Christian doctrine”; the law may indeed be enunciated in words, but
it may also be known inwardly as the knowledge of good and evil. Holy Church he
takes to be the community of believers; its foundations are the words and
promises of Christ, who is the true Head of the Church. The Church is not
founded on timid, frightened Peter, but on Christ; “for other foundation can no
man lay than that is laid, which is Christ Jesus”. There are pillars of the
Church of the second order, among which is Peter, the rock on which Christ
built His Church, so that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. But
Peter obtained thereby no pre-eminence, seeing that all believers rest equally
on Christ's words; nor was the promise that his faith should not fail made to
him personally, but to the Church committed to him. So, too, Christ’s promise
to His disciples to be with them to the end of the world is a promise made to
the Church of faith for believers. D'Ailly did not believe
in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope, any more
than did Saint Bernard of Clairvaux or the Electors at Rense,
or John the Twenty-second when he claimed to correct the errors of his
predecessors. He pointed out how the Decretal of
Gratian had been corrected by Gregory the Ninth on the ground that some of the
contents were superfluous and others contradictory, and how Boniface had made
further additions, bolstering up some parts and cutting down others; he urged
that the Canon Law was not necessary to the Church’s existence, for it had been
said long before decretals were known that Christ was
the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. In his view as to a general council D'Ailly resembled William of Ockham; he avoided the recognition of its infallibility
even in matters of faith; he thought it possible that such a council might err,
and that the knowledge of the truth might be restricted to a few poor simple
souls, as at the time of the Crucifixion it had been restricted to the Virgin
Mary. In practice, however, D'Ailly was not troubled
by these subtle distinctions; he was ready to refer the termination of the
Schism to a select committee chosen from both obediences—an
impracticable scheme which he soon abandoned. He was clear above all things on
the two points that neither the Church at Rome nor the Pope was essential to
salvation. Frenchmen who had embraced the cause of Clement were unanimous on
the former point; and as to the latter, D'Ailly,
while admitting that a human body without a head is dead, contended that the
Church was the mystical body of Christ, and that even without an earthly head
She would remain alive through faith and grace, seeing that She had a high
priest in heaven, even Christ, who was head over all things to the Church.
There is much that is mystical in the reasoning, there is much that is
apparently capricious in the way in which a text is taken now literally and now anagogically, but the trend of the theology of D'Ailly and also of Jean Gerson was distinctly anti-papal.
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