HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. BOOK IV. CHAPTER II. THE FRANKISH CHURCH AND THE PAPACY. FROM THE DEATH OF LEWIS THE PIOUS TO THE DEPOSITION OF CHARLES THE FAT. A.D. 840-887.

BOOK V.

FROM THE DEATH OF CHARLEMAGNE TO THE DEPOSITION OF POPE GREGORY VI,

A.D. 814-1046.

CHAPTER II.

THE FRANKISH CHURCH AND THE PAPACY. FROM THE DEATH OF LEWIS THE PIOUS TO THE DEPOSITION OF CHARLES THE FAT. A.D. 840-887.

The history of the Carolingians after the death of Lewis the Pious is marked by a continuance of those scandalous enmities between the nearest kinsmen which had given so unhappy a character to his reign. Sometimes these enmities were carried out into actual war; but after the battle of Fontenailles, in 841, where the loss is said to have amounted to 40,000 on one side, and on the other to 25,000 or 30,000, they more commonly took the form of intrigues, of insincere alliances, and selfish breaches of treaties.

Charlemagne had found great difficulty in keeping together the various elements of which his vast empire consisted. As often as he led his troops into any quarter, for the purpose of conquest or of suppressing rebellion, an insurrection usually broke out behind him. In order to conciliate the nationalities which were united under his sceptre, he appointed kings to govern them, as in Aquitaine and in Italy. By his system, which was continued under Lewis, these kings were to be subordinate to the senior or head of the family; the whole empire was to be regarded as one, subject to the chief. But in the beginning of the period now before us, this system is broken up; the delegated government by kings is found to have been the means of organizing the different nations for resistance to the idea of unity, and for asserting their independence of each other. Language played an important part in the dissolution of the empire. From the time of the Frank conquest of Gaul, Latin had been the language of the church and of the state, while German had been that of the army. The king and the chiefs were familiar with both; but in the south the Latin—(or rather the rustic Roman, which differed from the more correct official Latin)—was native, and the German was acquired by learning, while the reverse was the case in the northern and eastern territories. The populations which used these different languages as their mother-tongues now became separate. At the treaty of Strasburg, in 842, Lewis of Bavaria took an oath in German, while Charles of Neustria swore in the Romance dialect, and they addressed their subjects in the same tongues respectively. The Romance oath is the oldest monument of French; the other is the oldest specimen of German after the baptismal renunciation of St. Boniface’s time. A like scene was enacted at Coblentz in 860, when, in pledging themselves to the observance of certain articles, Lewis and the younger Lothair employed the German language, and Charles the Romance.

The treaty of Verdun, by which the empire was divided in 843 between the three sons of Lewis, established each of them in entire independence. The portion of the second brother, Lewis, may be broadly spoken of as Germany; Charles the Bald’s share may with a like latitude be styled France; while Lothair, the emperor, had a territory lying between the two—long and for the most part narrow, reaching from the mouths of the Weser and the Scheldt to the frontier of the duchy of Benevento, and including the two imperial cities—Rome, the ancient capital of the world, and Aix, the chief seat of Charlemagne’s sovereignty. The Rhine served throughout a large portion of its course as the eastern boundary of this territory : but a deviation was made from it, in order that Lewis might include within his dominions Mayence, the see of Boniface and ecclesiastical metropolis of Germany, with the suffragan dioceses of Worms and Spires; while this cession was compensated to Lothair by a tract to the east of the river in the region of Berg and Cleves. Lothair’s kingdom, not being marked out by any older boundaries of population or language, was called from him Lotharingia. By a later partition, the portion of it north of the Alps was divided between Lewis and Charles the Bald, when Lewis added to his dominions the countries of the German and Belgic tongues, and Charles acquired those in which the Romance prevailed

The feeling of nationality also showed itself in the rebellion of the Bretons under Nomenoe, who compelled Charles to acknowledge him as king, and established a new hierarchy under the archbishop of Dol, independent of the Roman connection; in the revolts of the Saxons, who killed or drove out their governors, and resumed the profession of paganism and in the subdivision of France towards the end of the century into a great number of petty principalities, although other causes also contributed to this result.

Charlemagne had endeavoured to provide a defence against the northern pirates by fortifying the mouths of rivers; but this policy was now neglected. No longer content with ravaging the coasts, the fierce barbarians of the north made their way in their serpent barks up every river whose opening invited them, from the Elbe to the Adour. They repeatedly plundered the more exposed cities, such as Hamburg, Dorstadt, and Bordeaux; they ascended the Rhine to Mayence, and even to Worms; the Moselle to Treves; the Somme to Amiens; the Seine to Rouen and to Paris, once the Merovingian capital, and still the chief city of Neustria, rich in churches and in treasures, and having the royal monastery of St. Denys in its immediate neighbourhood. From Paris they made their way up the Marne to Meaux and Châlons, up the Yonne to Sens and Auxerre. The Loire gave them a passage to Tours, the city of St. Martin, and to Orleans; the Vienne, to Limoges: the Charente, to Saintes and Angouleme; the Garonne, to Toulouse. They sailed on to the Spanish peninsula, plundered Lisbon, passed the strait of Gibraltar, and successfully encountered the Arabs of Andalusia; even the coast of Italy felt their fury. Everywhere they pillaged, burnt, slew, outraged women, and carried off captives. After a time, growing bolder through impunity, they would leave their vessels on the great rivers, and strike across the unresisting country to pillage inland places of noted wealth—such as Ghent, Beauvais, Chartres, Bourges, Reims, Laon, and Charlemagne’s own city of Aix, where they stabled their horses in the imperial palace. They established permanent camps, often on islands in the great rivers, and ravaged in a wide circle around them. Many of these pirates were exiles or adventurers who had fled from other countries to the regions of the north; many were men who had suffered from the forcible means employed by Charlemagne for the conversion of the pagans, or were the offspring of such men. Their enmity against Christianity was therefore fierce and unsparing; there was religious hatred, as well as the lust of spoil, in the rage which selected churches and monasteries as its especial objects. Wherever the approach of the Northmen was reported, the monks deserted their abodes, and fled, if possible, leaving their wealth to the invaders, and anxious only to rescue the relics of their patron saints. The misery caused by these ravages was extreme. From dread of them, husbandry was neglected, and frequent famines ensued; even wolves were allowed to prey and to multiply without any check. The condition to which Aquitaine was reduced may be inferred from the fact that a bishop was translated from Bordeaux to Bourges on the ground that his former diocese had been rendered utterly desert by the pagans. Many monks who had been driven from their cells threw off the religious habit, and betook themselves to a vagabond life. And a striking proof of the terror inspired by the invaders is found in the insertion of a petition in the Gallican liturgies for deliverance “From the fury of the Northmen”

However divided by dissensions among themselves, the Northmen always acted in concert as to the course which their expeditions should take. They kept a watch on the movements of the Carolingian princes, and were ready to take advantage in every quarter of their discords and of their weakness. Sometimes, it would seem, they were not only attracted by the hope of booty, but were bribed by one of Charlemagne’s descendants to attack the territories of another.

The martial spirit of the Franks had been exhausted by the slaughter of Fontenailles. Many of the free landholders—the body on which the whole Frankish system mainly relied for national defence—sought a refuge from the miseries of the time by becoming serfs to abbots or nobles who were strong enough to protect them; and thus their military service was lost. The Franks were distracted by faction, and, instead of combining to resist the common enemy, each party and each class was intent on securing its own selfish interests. The nobles in general stood aloof, and looked on without dissatisfaction while the Northmen pillaged towns or estates which belonged to the crown or to the church. In a few cases the invaders met with a vigorous resistance—as from Robert the Strong, the ancestor of the Capetian line, and from his son Odo or Eudes, who, with the bishop, Gauzelin, valiantly defended Paris in 885. But a more usual course was that of paying them a large sum as an inducement to depart for a time—an expedient which pressed heavily on the people, who were taxed for the payment, while it insured the return of the enemy after a short respite. A better, although not uniform, success attended the attempt to appease the northern chiefs with grants of land. They settled on these estates; they and their followers were baptized and took wives of the country, by means of whom the northern language was soon extinguished among their offspring; they became accustomed to their new homes, and gradually laid aside their barbarian ferocity.

To the East, the Slave populations pressed on the German portions of the empire, and engaged its sovereigns in frequent wars; and in the south of France, as well as in Italy, the Saracens were a foe not less terrible than the Northmen on the other coasts of the empire. An expedition from Spain had made them masters of Crete in 823. Four years later they landed in Sicily, and by degrees they got possession of the whole island, although it was not until after half a century (A.D. 876) that Syracuse fell into their hands. They seized on Cyprus and Corsica, devastated the Mediterranean coast of France, sailed up the Tiber, carried off the altar which covered the remains of St. Peter, and committed atrocious acts of rapine, lust, and cruelty. The terror inspired by these adventurers—the offscourings of their race, which in Spain and in the east had become more civilized, and had begun to cultivate science and literature—drove the inhabitants of the defenseless towns to seek refuge in forests and among mountains. Some of the popes showed much energy in providing the means of protection against them. Gregory IV rebuilt and fortified Ostia, to which he gave the name of Gregoriopolis. Leo IV, who was hastily raised to the papal chair on an emergency when the Saracens threatened Rome, took very vigorous measures. He fortified Portus, in which he planted a colony of Corsican refugees; drew a chain across the mouth of the Tiber, and repaired the walls of Rome. With the approbation of the emperor Lothair, who contributed largely to the expense, he enclosed within a wall the Transtiberine district which contained the church of St. Peter and the English Burg; and to this new quarter he gave the name of the Leonine City. Nicolas I also contributed to the defence of Rome by strengthening the fortifications and the garrison of Ostia. But in the south of Italy the Saracens were triumphant. They established a sultan at Barih although after a time that city was recovered from them by the united forces of the western and eastern emperors, Lewis II and Basil the Macedonian.1Naples, Amalfi, Salerno, and other cities, finding resistance impossible, entered into alliance with them, and joined them in plundering. But for dissensions among themselves, the Moslems would probably have become masters of the whole Italian peninsula.

The royal power in France was greatly impaired by the changes of this period. Among the earlier Franks there had been no class of nobility, properly so called, but consideration had depended on wealth and power alone; nor had the counts originally been landholders, but officers of the sovereign, invested with a dignity which was only personal and temporary. But from the time of the civil wars between Lewis the Pious and his sons, the Frankish princes found themselves obliged to pay those on whom they depended for support by a diminution of their own prerogatives and property. The system was continued; at the diet of Quiercy, in 877, Charles the Bald, with a view of securing the consent of his chiefs to his projected expedition into Italy, granted that their lands should descend by inheritance, and only reserved to the sovereign the choice of a successor in cases where the tenant should die without male issue; nay, as we shall see hereafter, in his eagerness to gain aid towards the extension of his dominions, he even consented that his crown should be regarded as elective. The nobles, thus erected into a hereditary order, became more independent; they took advantage of the weakness of the sovereign; and, by the end of the century, the dismemberment of the empire had been so much imitated on a smaller scale that France was broken up into no fewer than twenty-nine independent states.

The Frankish clergy suffered severely in their property during the troubles of the time. Not only did Lewis and his sons habitually employ the old resource of rewarding partisans with gifts of ecclesiastical benefices, but they even carried it further than before, by extending it to religious houses which had hitherto been regarded as exempt from this kind of danger. The abbey of St. Martin’s itself—the most revered, as well as the richest, of all the sanctuaries of Gaul—was granted by Charles in benefice to Robert the Strong. Almost every council has its piteous complaint that the property of the church is invaded in a manner more fitting for pagan enemies than for her own sons; that the poor, the strangers, the pilgrims, the captives are deprived of the endowments founded for their relief; that hospitals, especially those of the Scots, are diverted from their object, so that not only are guests not entertained, but those who had dwelt in them from infancy are turned out to beg from door to door; that some lands are alienated in such a way as to cut off all hope of recovery; that the sovereigns grossly abuse their patronage by bestowing spiritual offices on laymen. The only weapon which the church could wield against the rapacious laity was excommunication; but neither spiritual terrors nor tales of judicial miracles were sufficient to check the evil. Another frequent complaint relates to the decay of letters among the Franks. Charles the Bald was a patron of learned men, and took pleasure in their society; but, while literature enjoyed this courtly and superficial encouragement, the institutions by which Charlemagne had endeavoured to provide for the general instruction of his subjects were allowed to fall into neglect.

But in other respects the clergy gained greatly. The sixth council of Paris, in 829, had asserted for them a right to judge kings. This power had been exercised against Lewis by the rebellious bishops at Compiègne, and his restoration had not been accomplished without a formal act of the church. Charles the Bald admitted it, as against himself, at the council of Savonnières, in 859; and in all the disagreements of the Carolingians each prince carried his grievances to the pope—thus constituting the Roman see a general court of appeal, and weakening the rights of all sovereigns by such submission. Ecclesiastical judgments were popularly regarded as the judgments of God. Bishops asserted for themselves an exclusive jurisdiction in all matters relating to the clergy, and, by the superintendence which they exercised over morals, they were able to turn every scandal of the royal house to the advantage of the church. They became more and more active in politics; they claimed the power of bestowing the crown, and Charles appears to have acknowledged the claim. Yet, although they endeavoured to gain for themselves an exemption from all secular control, that prince still kept a hold on them by means of his missi.

The most prominent among the French ecclesiastics of this time was Hincmar, a man of strong, lofty, and resolute character, of a mind at once subtle and eminently practical, of learning which, although uncritical and indifferently digested, raised him above almost all his contemporaries, and of great political talent. Hincmar was born in 806, of a noble family in Neustria, and at an early age entered the monastery of St. Denys, where he became a monk under Hilduin. He took an active part in restoring the discipline of the house, and to the end of his days he observed the monastic severity of life. His attachment to his abbot was shown by becoming the companion of Hilduin’s exile in 830; but notwithstanding this, and although his own feelings were no doubt in favour of the unity of the empire, he withstood all Hilduin’s attempts to draw him into rebellion, and to the last preserved the favour of Lewis, by means of which he was able to effect his superior’s recall. In 845 he was promoted to the archbishopric of Reims, which had not been regularly filled since the deposition of Ebbo, ten years before. He accepted the see on condition that the property which had been alienated from it to laymen during the vacancy should be restored; and he held it for thirty-nine years. His province, and even his diocese, were partly in Neustria and partly in Lotharingia—a circumstance which brought him into connection with the sovereigns of both countries. To him, as the successor of St. Remigius, it belonged to crown kings, and to take the chief part in state solemnities; and he gave full effect to his position. His political influence was immense; he steadily upheld the cause of the church against both the crown and the nobles, and in its behalf he often opposed the princes to whose interests in other respects he was zealously devoted. But most especially he was the champion of the national church and of the rights of his sovereign against the growing claims of the papacy.

The popes endeavoured to take advantage of the weakness of Charlemagne’s descendants in order to shake off the golden chains with which the great emperor had bound them, and in this endeavour they were greatly aided by the effect of the partition of the empire; inasmuch as they were thenceforth in no way subject to any prince except the one who held the imperial title and the kingdom of Italy, while they were yet brought into relation with all the Carolingian sovereigns, and became general arbiters between them.

On the death of Gregory IV, in 844, Sergius II, after some tumultuary opposition from a rival named John, was consecrated without waiting for the imperial confirmation. Lothair, indignant at the slight thus shown to his authority, sent his son Lewis to call the new pope to account. The prince was accompanied by Drogo, bishop of Metz, with a numerous train of prelates and counts, and was at the head of a large army, which is said, in its advance towards Rome, to have committed much wanton slaughter and devastation, and to have lost many of its soldiers, who, in punishment of their misdeeds, as was believed, were slain by lightning. Sergius received Lewis with the usual honours, but would not permit his troops to enter the city; nor would he allow the doors of St. Peter’s to be opened to him, until, in answer to a solemn adjuration, the prince had professed that he came without any evil intention, for the good of Rome and of the church. The pope crowned him as king of the Lombards, but resisted a proposal that the Romans should be required to swear allegiance to him, on the ground that such oaths were due to the emperor alone. He consented, however, that a fresh oath should be taken to the emperor. Drogo returned to France with a commission appointing him primate and papal vicar, and conferring on him in that character large privileges and jurisdiction; but on finding that some question was raised as to the reception of this instrument by a synod to which he exhibited it, he refrained from urging his pretensions.

Sergius died after a pontificate of three years, and Leo IV was chosen by general acclamation. The Romans were in great perplexity; the imminent danger with which they were threatened by the Saracens required them to proceed to an immediate consecration, while they were afraid to repeat their late offence against the Frank empire. They therefore fell on the expedient of consecrating Leo with an express reservation of the imperial rights, and it would seem that this course was allowed to pass without objection. Towards the end of Leo’s pontificate, Lothair, having been informed that a high Roman officer had expressed himself against the Frankish connection, and had proposed a revolt to the Greek empire, went to Rome, and held an inquiry into the case. The librarian Anastasius tells us that the charge was proved to be imaginary, and that the accuser was given up to the accused, from whom the emperor begged him. But the pope was required, probably in consequence of this affair, to promise obedience to the emperor and his commissioners. A remarkable innovation was introduced by Leo in his correspondence with sovereigns, by setting his own name before that of the prince to whom he wrote, and omitting the word Domino in the address—a change which intimated that St. Peter's successors no longer owned any earthly master.

Benedict III was elected as the successor of Leo; but he met with a very serious opposition from Anastasius,— probably the same with a cardinal of that name who under the last pontificate had been deposed, chiefly for his attachment to the Frankish interest. Anastasius got possession of St. Peter’s and of St. John Lateran, and (perhaps in the hope of recommending himself to the Franks, whom he may have possibly supposed to be iconoclasts) he is said to have broken and burnt the images which adorned the churches. He was aided by Frankish soldiers, and gained over the envoys who were sent to ask the imperial confirmation of his rival’s election; he stripped Benedict of his robes, insulted him, and beat him. But the clergy and people of Rome adhered to Benedict, and their demonstrations prevailed on the emperor's commissioners to sanction his consecration.

Benedict was succeeded by Nicolas I, who, according to a contemporary annalist, owed his elevation rather to the presence and favour of Lewis II, Lothair’s successor in the empire, than to the choice of the Roman clergy. At his consecration it has been commonly said that the new ceremony of coronation was introduced—a ceremony which may have had its origin in the fable that a golden crown had been bestowed on Sylvester by Constantine, and which was intended to assert for the pope the majesty of an earthly sovereign, in addition to that higher and more venerable dignity which claimed not only precedence but control over all earthly power. And when, soon after, Nicolas visited the camp of Lewis, the emperor, after the pretended example of the first Christian emperor, did him reverence by holding his bridle, and by walking at his side as he rode. Nicolas was one of those popes who stand forth in history as having most signally contributed to the advancement of their see. The idea entertained of him shortly after his death is remarkably expressed by Regino of Prum, who speaks of him as surpassing all his predecessors since the great Gregory; as giving commands to kings and tyrants, and ruling over them as if lord of the whole world; as full of meekness and gentleness in his dealings with bishops and clergy who were worthy of their calling, but terrible and austere towards the careless and the refractory; as another Elias in spirit and in power. He was learned, skillful in the management of affairs, sincerely zealous for the enforcement of discipline in the church, filled with a sense of the importance of his position, ambitious, active, and resolute in maintaining and advancing it. He took advantage of the faults or vices of the Frank princes—their ambition, their lust, or their hatred—to interpose in their affairs, and with great ability he played them against each other. His interposition was usually in the interest of justice, or in the defence of weakness; it was backed by the approbation of the great body of the people, who learnt to see in him the representative of heaven, ready everywhere to assert the right, and able to restrain the wicked who were above the reach of earthly law; and doubtless he was able to conceal from himself all but what was good in his motives. But those of his acts which in themselves were praiseworthy, were yet parts of a system which in other cases appeared without any such creditable veil—a scheme of vast ambition for rendering all secular power subject to the church, and all national churches subject to Rome.

Of the controversies or disputes of this time—which must be treated severally, since it is a less evil to sacrifice the display of their simultaneous progress than for its sake to throw the narrative into hopeless confusion—two related to important points of doctrine—the Eucharistic Presence, and Predestination.

We have already seen that, with respect to the Eucharist, there had been a gradual increase of mystical language; and that expressions were at first used rhetorically and in a figurative sense, which, if literally construed, would have given an incorrect idea of the current doctrine. In the west the authority of St. Augustine had generally acted as a safeguard against materializing views of the Eucharistic presence; but an important step toward the establishment of such views was now made by Paschasius Radbert, abbot of Corbie. Paschasius had been brought up in that monastery under Adelhard and Wala, whose biographer he afterwards became. He had been master of the monastic school, and had laboured as a commentator on the Scriptures. In 844 he was elected abbot; but the disquietudes which were brought on him by that dignity induced him to resign it in 851, and he lived as a private monk until his death in 865.

In 831, Paschasius, at the request of his old pupil Warin, who had become abbot of the daughter monastery of New Corbey, on the Weser, drew up a treatise on the Eucharist for the instruction of the younger monks of that society. Soon after his appointment to the abbacy of his own house, in 844, he presented an improved edition of the work to Charles the Bald, who had requested a copy of it. In this treatise the rhetoric of earlier writers is turned into unequivocally material definitions. Paschasius lays it down that although after the consecration the appearance of bread and wine remain, yet we must not believe anything else to be really present than the body and blood of the Saviour— the same flesh which was born of the blessed Virgin— the same in which He suffered on the cross and rose from the grave. This doctrine is rested on the almighty power of God; the miracles of Scripture are said to have been wrought in order to prepare the way for it and to confirm it; that the elements remain unchanged in appearance and in taste, is intended, according to Paschasius, as an exercise of our faith. The miraculous production of the Saviour’s body is paralleled with his conception as man. Tales are adduced of miracles by which the reality hidden under the appearance of the elements was visibly revealed. The doctrine afterwards known as Transubstantiation appears to be broadly expressed; but, contrary to the later practice of Rome, Paschasius insists on the necessity of receiving the cup as well as the eucharistic bread.

Paschasius had professed to lay down his doctrine as being that which was established in the church; but protests were immediately raised against it. Raban Maur, Walafrid Strabo, Florus, and Christian Druthmar all of them among the most learned men of the age, objected to the idea of any other than a spiritual change in the Eucharist, and denounced it as a novelty. Even among his own community, the views of Paschasius excited alarm and opposition. One of his monks named Frudegard expressed uneasiness on account of the abbot’s apparent contradiction to St. Augustine, so that Paschasius found it necessary to defend himself by the authority of earlier writers, among whom he especially relied on St. Ambrose. And the chief opponent of the doctrine was another monk of Corbie, Ratramn, who examined the abbot’s book at the request of Charles the Bald, and answered it, although, in consideration of his relation to Paschasius, he did not name the author. Ratramn divides the question into two heads : (1) Whether the body and blood of Christ be present in figure or in truth; (2) Whether it be the same body which was born of the Virgin, suffered, rose again, and ascended. He defines figure to mean that the reality is veiled under something else, as where our Lord styles himself a vine; and truth to mean, that the reality is openly displayed. Although, he says, the elements remain outwardly the same as before consecration, the body and blood of Christ are presented, in them, not to the bodily senses, but to the faithful soul. And this must be in a figurative way; for otherwise there would be nothing for faith, “the evidence of things not seen”, to work on; the sacrament would not be a mystery, since in order to a mystery there must be something beyond what is seen. The change is not material, but spiritual; the elements, while in one respect they continue bread and wine, are in another respect, by spirit and potency, the body and blood of Christ, even as the element of water is endued with a spiritual power in order to the sacrament of baptism. That which is visible and corruptible in them feeds the body; that which is matter of belief is itself immortal, sanctifies the soul, and feeds it unto everlasting life. The body of Christ must be incorruptible; therefore that which is corruptible in the sacrament is but the figure of the reality. Ratramn clears the interpretation of the passages which had been quoted from St. Ambrose in favour of the opposite view. He cites St. Augustine and St. Isidore of Seville as agreeing in his own doctrine; and argues from the liturgy that the Saviour’s presence must be spiritual and figurative, since the sacrament is there spoken of as a pledge, an image, and a likeness.

John Scotus, who will be more particularly mentioned hereafter, is said to have also written on the question, at the desire of Charles the Bald; but if so, his book is lost. His other works contain grounds for thinking that he viewed the Eucharist as a merely commemorative rite, and that on this, as on other points, he was regarded as heterodox. While the most learned divines of the age in general opposed Paschasius, his doctrine appears to have been supported by the important authority of Hincmar, although it is doubtful whether the archbishop really meant to assert it in its full extent, or is to be understood as speaking rhetorically; and Haymo, bishop of Halberstadt, a commentator of great reputation, lays it down as strongly as the abbot of Corbie himself. The controversy lasted for some time; but the doctrine of Paschasius, which was recommended by its appearance of piety, and by its agreement with the prevailing love of the miraculous, gained the ascendency within the following century.

Throughout the west St. Augustine was revered as the greatest of all the ancient fathers, and the chief teacher of orthodoxy; yet his system was not in general thoroughly held. The councils which had been assembled on account of the Pelagian doctrines had occupied themselves with the subject of Grace, and had not given any judgment as to Predestination; and the followers of Augustine had endeavoured to mitigate the asperities of his tenets on this question. The prevailing doctrine was of a milder tone; in many cases it was not far from Semipelagianism, and even where it could not be so described, it fell so far short of the rigid Augustinianism that a theologian who strictly adhered to this might have fairly charged his brethren with unfaithfulness to the teaching of the great African doctor.

Gottschalk, the son of a Saxon count, was in boyhood placed by his father in the monastery of Fulda. On attaining to man’s estate, however, he felt a strong distaste for the life of a monk, and in 829 he applied for a release from his vows to a synod held at Mayence under Archbishop Otgar. His petition was granted, on the ground that he had been devoted to the monastic profession before he could exercise any will of his own. But the abbot of Fulda, Raban Maur, the pupil of Alcuin, and himself the greatest teacher of his time, appealed to Lewis the Pious, arguing that persons offered by their parents, although without their own choice, were bound by the monastic obligations; and the emperor overruled the synod’s decision.

Although compelled to remain a monk, Gottschalk was allowed to remove from Fulda, where his relation to Raban would have been inconvenient, to Orbais, in the diocese of Soissons. Here he gave himself up to the study of Augustine and his followers; he embraced their peculiarities with enthusiasm, and such was his especial love for the works of Fulgentius that his friends usually called him by the name of that writer. It is a characteristic circumstance that one of the most eminent among these friends, Servatus Lupus, abbot of Ferrières, in a letter of this period, charges him with an immoderate fondness for speculation, and exhorts him to turn from it to matters of a more practical kind. Hincmar, on the report of the abbot of Orbais, describes Gottschalk while there as restless, changeable, bent on perversities, addicted to argument, and apt to misrepresent what was said by others in conversation with him; as scorning to be a disciple of the truth, and preferring to be a master of error; as eager to gain an influence, by correspondence and otherwise, over persons who were inclined to novelty and who desired notoriety at any price. With a view, no doubt, to qualify himself for preaching his doctrines, Gottschalk procured ordination as a priest from a chorepiscopus of Reims, during the vacancy of that see after the deposition of Ebbo. This act appears to have been a token of disaffection to the episcopal body, with which the chorepiscopi were then on very unfriendly terms; it was censured as irregular, inasmuch as Gottschalk belonged to the diocese of Soissons, and as the chorepiscopus had no authority from any superior to confer the priestly ordination at all.

The doctrine on which Gottschalk especially took his stand was that of Predestination. The usual language in the church had been, that the righteous are predestined, and that the wicked are foreknown, while the rigid Augustinianism spoke of the wicked as reprobate; but Gottschalk applied the term predestinate to both classes. There is, he said, a twofold predestination—a term for which he cited the authority of Isidore of Seville. In both cases predestination is to good; but good is twofold, including not only the benefits of grace but the judgments of justice. As life is predestined to the good, and they to it, so is evil predestined to the wicked, and they to it. His opponents usually charged him with maintaining that the wicked were irresistibly and irrevocably doomed to sin, as well as to its consequences. But it would seem, even by Hincmar’s own avowal, that Gottschalk did not admit this representation of his opinions; he maintained only that, as the perseverance in evil of the devil, his angels, and wicked men was foreknown, they were predestined to righteous punishment. He denied that Christ died for any but the elect, and explained the texts which speak of God’s willing all men to be saved as applicable to those only who actually are saved. And, unlike Augustine, he held that even the first human pair were subject to a predestination. The view which his adversaries took of his opinion may be in some degree excused by the violence with which he insisted on his difference from them, and by his zeal in condemning them—circumstances which could not but lead them to suppose the difference far greater than it appears to have really been.

Gottschalk was returning from a visit to Rome, in 847, when at the house of Eberhard, count of Friuli, a son-in-law of Lewis the Pious, he met Notting, who had been lately nominated to the see of Verona. He propounded his doctrine of twofold predestination, at which Notting was greatly startled. The bishop soon after mentioned it to Raban Maur, whom he found at the court of Lewis of Germany; and Raban, who had now become archbishop of Mayence, wrote both to Notting and to Eberhard, in strong condemnation of Gottschalk’s opinion, which he declared to be no doctrine of St. Augustine. Predestination, he said, could only be a preparation for grace; God foreknows evil, but does not predestine to it; all who yield their corrupt will to the guidance of Divine grace may be saved. Count Eberhard, on receiving the archbishop’s letter, dismissed his dangerous visitor, who then travelled slowly homeward through Southern Germany; and it would seem to have been on account of his proceedings in these already Christian lands that Hincmar speaks of him as having visited barbarous and pagan nations for the purpose of infecting them with his errors. In 848 Gottschalk appeared before a synod held by Raban at Mayence in the presence of King Lewis. His attendance was probably voluntary, and, as if prepared for a disputation, he carried with him an answer to Raban’s objections, in which he charged the archbishop with following the heresy of Gennadius and Cassian, and reasserted the doctrine of a double predestination. His opinions, as might have been expected, were condemned by the synod; he was obliged to swear that he would never again enter the dominions of Lewis; and he was sent to his own metropolitan, Hincmar, with a letter in which Raban styled him a vagabond,0 and recommended that, as being incorrigible, he should be confined.

In the following year, Gottschalk was brought by Hincmar before a synod at Quiercy on the Oise, where, according to the archbishop, he behaved like a possessed person, and, instead of answering the questions which were put to him, broke out into violent personal attacks. He was flogged severely, in the presence of King Charles,—a punishment for which the rule of St. Benedict and the canons of Agde were quoted as a warrant, although not without some straining of their application. When exhausted with this cruel usage, he was required to throw his book into the fire, and had hardly strength enough to do so. Hincmar long after told Pope Nicolas that he had been obliged to take the matter into his own hands, because the bishop of Soissons, Rothad, was himself infected with novelties; and for the same reason Gottschalk, who was condemned by the synod to perpetual silence, was removed to the monastery of Hautvilliers, within the diocese of Reims. His zeal was rather quickened than daunted by his imprisonment. He refused to subscribe a declaration sent to him by Hincmar, which would have had the effect of releasing him on condition of his admitting that there might be divine foresight without predestination. He denounced the opposite party under the name of Rabanists; and, in one of two confessions which he sent forth, he speaks of them as heretics whom it was his bounden duty to avoid. In these confessions he lays down his doctrine of a twofold predestination—predestination of good angels and men, freely, to bliss; of the evil to punishment, justly, on foreknowledge of their guilt. In the longer confession, which (probably in imitation of St. Augustine) is composed in the form of an address to God, he breaks out into a prayer that an opportunity might be granted him of testifying the truth of his opinions, in the presence of the king, of bishops, clergy, monks, and laity, by plunging successively into four casks of boiling water, oil, fat, and pitch; and lastly by walking through a blazing pile. This wish has been variously traced to humility and to hypocrisy—qualities which seem to have been alike foreign to Gottschalk’s character. It would accord better with the rest of his history, if we were to seek the motive in a proud and self-important, but sincere, fanaticism.

The doctrines for which Gottschalk was suffering now found champions of name and influence, although these varied somewhat among themselves, while all (like Gottschalk himself) disavowed the opinion of an irresistible predestination to sin. Among them were—Prudentius, a Spaniard by birth, bishop of Troyes; Servatus Lupus, abbot of Ferrières, an old pupil of Raban, who had great weight in the French church, and was highly esteemed by Charles the Bald; and Ratramn, who in this controversy, as in that on the Eucharistic presence, wrote at the king’s request and for his information. Hincmar found it necessary to seek for assistance against these writers. Raban, to whom he applied, excused himself, chiefly on the plea of age and infirmity, and added that in many points he agreed with Gottschalk, although he thought him mistaken as to the predestination of the wicked. But Hincmar found allies in Amalarius, an ecclesiastic of Metz, who was distinguished as a ritualist, and in Amulo, archbishop of Lyons, the pupil and successor of Agobard.

The most remarkable work in opposition to Gottschalk’s views, however, was that of John Scotus, whose name has already been mentioned in connection with the Eucharistic question. The circumstances of this celebrated man’s life are enveloped in great obscurity. The name Scotus, like that of Erigena, which was given to him at a later time, indicates that he was a native of Ireland, a country which furnished many others of the learned men who enjoyed the patronage of Charles the Bald. From his knowledge of Greek (in which language he even wrote verses, although with an utter disdain of prosody) it has been supposed that he had travelled in the east; but the supposition is needless, as Greek was then an ordinary branch of education in his native country and in Britain. That he was acquainted with Hebrew has often been said, but without sufficient proof. Like the scholars of his time in general, John appears to have belonged to some order of the clergy, although this cannot be considered as certain. He had for some years found a home in the court of Charles, and had restored the reputation of the palatine school, which had sunk during the distractions of the preceding reign; while, among other literary labours, he had executed a translation of the works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, which had been sent as a present by the Greek emperor Michael to Lewis the Pious. Scotus was better versed in Greek than in Latin theology, so that even as to the question of the Holy Spirit's procession he inclined to the oriental side. But in truth he had a far greater affinity with the ancient philosophers—especially the Neoplatonists—than with the theologians of his own age. His bold and rationalizing mind plunged into questionable, or evidently heretical, speculations; he startled his contemporaries by denying the literal sense of some parts of the scriptural narrative, and there are passages in his works which indicate an almost undisguised pantheism. Of his latter years nothing is known, except that Pope Nicolas, on the ground that his orthodoxy was suspected, requested Charles to send him to Rome, or at least to prevent his longer residence at Paris, where his teaching might do mischief. It would seem that, notwithstanding this denunciation, Charles continued to protect Scotus, and that the philosopher ended his days in France; although many writers have supposed that, after the death of his patron, he removed into England, and aided the great Alfred in his labours for the education of his people.

The controversy thus far had differed from those of the earlier ages in appealing exclusively to authority. Augustine and the other fathers had exercised their original thought in the definition of doctrine; but hitherto the question as to predestination did not relate to the truth of Christian doctrine, but to the manner in which that doctrine had been determined by St. Augustine. Scotus, however, took a different course from the theologians who had preceded him on either side. Like them, indeed, he professed to appeal to Scripture and the fathers—especially to the great teacher on whom the opposite party chiefly relied; but both Scripture and fathers (he said) had condescended to the weakness of their readers, and much of their language was to be figuratively understood. Thus a principle was laid down by which their most positive expressions might be set aside, and anything which seemed to disagree with the philosopher’s own speculations might be explained away.

Scotus wrote at the request of Hincmar, and inscribed his book to him and to his associate in the cause, Pardulus, bishop of Laon. He sets out with a somewhat ostentatious parade of philosophical method, and declares that true philosophy and true theology are identical. He treats Gottschalk as a heretic—a tool of the “old enemy”—and traces his errors to a want of liberal culture, especially to ignorance of the Greek language and theology. It is, he says, an impropriety to speak of “predestination” or “foreknowledge” in God, since to Him all time is present; but, admitting the use of such words, he holds that predestination is eternal, and is as much a part of God Himself as any other of his attributes. It can, therefore, only be one; we can no more suppose two predestinations in God than two wisdoms or two knowledges. He disallows Gottschalk’s distinction of one “twofold predestination”; the Divine predestination must be truly one, and must be to good only; and such (he maintains) is the use of the term, not only in Scripture, jut in Augustine’s own writings, if rightly understood. Yet the number both of those who shall be delivered by Christ and of those who are to be left to their wickedness is known, and may be said to be predestined; God has circumscribed the wicked by his law, which brings out their wickedness, while it acts in an opposite manner on the good. Scotus strongly asserts the freedom of the will to choose not only evil (to which Lupus had limited it), but good; free-will (he says) is a gift with which our nature is endowed by God—a good gift, although it may be employed for evil; whereas Gottschalk, by referring all virtue and vice to predestination, denies both the freedom of the will and the assistance of grace, and thus falls at once into the errors of the Pelagians and of their extreme opponents. Predestination and foreknowledge in God are one, and relate only to good; for God can foresee only that which has a being, whereas sin and punishment are not. Sin is, as Augustine had taught, only the defect of righteousness; punishment is but the defect of bliss. If the soul has the capacity of blessedness, the longing for bliss without the power of attaining it is the keenest possible torment; thus the true punishment is that which sin inflicts on itself, secretly in the present life, and openly in that which is to come, when those things which now appear to be the pleasures of sin will become the instruments of torment. That which is punished is not our nature (which is God’s work), but the corruption of our nature; nor is God properly the author of punishments; He is only so spoken of inasmuch as He is the creator of the universe in which they are; the wicked will be tormented by their own envy; the righteous will be crowned by their own love. The fire (whether it be corporeal, as Augustine thinks, or incorporeal, according to Gregory) is not needed for the punishment of the wicked—even of the evil, whose pride would suffice for its own chastisement; it is one of the four elements which form the balance and completeness of the universe. It is in itself good; the blessed will dwell in it as well as the wicked, and it will affect each kind according to their capacities even as light produces different effects on sound and on ailing eyes. “Forasmuch as there is no bliss but eternal life, and life eternal is the knowledge of the truth, therefore there is no other bliss than the knowledge of the truth. So, if there is no misery but eternal death, and eternal death is the ignorance of the truth, there is consequently no misery except ignorance of the truth”.

If Hincmar, in inviting Scotus to take part in the controversy, aimed at counteracting the influence of Lupus and Ratramn over Charles the Bald, he was in so far successful; for from that time the king was steadily on his side. But in other respects he found the philosopher a very dangerous and embarrassing ally, so that he even felt himself obliged to disavow him.

The excitement raised by the novelties of Scotus was very great. Wenilo, archbishop of Sens, whom Hincmar had studiously, and hitherto successfully, endeavoured to conciliate now sent a number of propositions, extracted from the book, to Prudentius, with a request that he would examine, and, if necessary, refute them. The bishop of Troyes thereupon wrote against Scotus with great asperity, and he was followed by Florus, a deacon and master of the cathedral school at Lyons. These writers charge Scotus with Pelagianism, to which Prudentius adds accusations of Origenism and Collyridianism. They complain of him for imputing imaginary errors to his opponents; they censure him for substituting philosophy for theology, and sophistical subtleties for arguments from Scripture and ancient authorities. Hincmar and Pardulus entreated Amulo of Lyons again to assist them; but he died in 852, and his successor, Remigius, answered the application by writing, in the name of his church, a book on the opposite side—taking up the case of Gottschalk more expressly than those who had preceded him, censuring the cruelty with which he had been treated, and defending the impugned opinions, with the exception of that which limited the exercise of free-will since the Fall to the choice of evil.

Finding that the literary contest was turning against him, Hincmar resolved to fortify himself with the authority of a council, and at Quiercy, in 853, four decrees on the subject of the controversy were passed. It is laid down that man fell by the abuse of his free-will; that God, by his foreknowledge, chose some whom by his grace He predestined to life, and life to them : but as for those whom He, by righteous judgment, left in their lost estate, He did not predestine them to perish, but predestined punishment to their sin. “And hereby”, it is said, “we speak of only one predestination of God, which relates either to the gift of grace or to the retribution of justice”. It is defined that our free-will was lost by the Fall, but was recovered through Christ; that we have a free-will to good, prevented and aided by grace, as well as a free-will to evil, deserted by grace; that God would have all men to be saved, and that Christ suffered for all; that the ruin of those who perish is to be ascribed to their own desert.

Prudentius, who was present when these decrees were passed, subscribed them, but afterwards put forth four propositions against them; and Remigius, who, as a subject of Lothair, felt himself independent of the influence of Charles the Bald, wrote, in the name of his church, a book against the articles of Quiercy. Of Scotus the archbishop says that he is ignorant of the very words of Scripture, and that, instead of being consulted on points of faith, he ought either to be pitied as a man out of his right mind, or to be anathematized as a heretic. Remigius, however, maintains the necessity of free-will in order to responsibility. Against the authority of the council of Quiercy was set that of one which met under the presidency of Remigius in 855 at Valence, in Lotharingia. This assembly condemned nineteen propositions extracted from Scotus, which, by a phrase borrowed from St. Jerome’s attack on Coelestius, it characterized as “porridge of the Scots”. It laid down moderate definitions as to free-will and as to the extent of the benefit of the Redeemer’s death. But it censured the four articles of Quiercy as useless, or even noxious and erroneous; and it forbade, in the name of the Holy Spirit, any teaching contrary to its own. The decrees of Valence were confirmed by a council held near Langres in 859, although, at the instance of Remigius, the offensive expressions against the articles of Quiercy were omitted. The subject was again considered by a greater council, to which that of Langres was preliminary, and which met a fortnight later at Savonnikres, a suburb of Toul. At this meeting Remigius acted in a spirit of conciliation, and the decision was adjourned to a future synod.

In the meantime Gottschalk was not inactive in his seclusion. Hincmar had altered an ancient hymn of unknown authorship, in which the application of the word trine to the Godhead seemed to suggest a threefold difference in the nature of the Divine Persons. But Ratramn defended the term, and Gottschalk—eager, it would seem, to provoke his powerful enemy in all ways—put forth in its behalf a tract in which he charged Hincmar with Sabellianism. The archbishop replied in a work of which the substance was shown to Gottschalk, in the hope of converting him, although it was not completed until after his death. He meets the charge of Sabellianism with one of Arianism; he exhorts monks to keep clear of novelties in a style which seems to intimate that his opponent had many adherents among that class; and he gives very significant hints of the bodily and spiritual punishments to which an imitation of Gottschalk would render them liable. Hincmar was not further molested about this affair; but the word to which he had objected, although his objection was supported by the authority of Raban, kept its place in the Gallican service.

In 859, a monk of Hautvilliers named Guntbert, whom Gottschalk had gained, privately left the monastery, and carried an appeal from the prisoner to Rome. It appeared as if the new pope, Nicolas, were disposed to take up the matter. Hincmar wrote to him, professing his willingness to act as the pope should direct—to release Gottschalk, to transfer him to other custody, or even to send him to Rome (although he spoke of the two synods which had condemned the prisoner as a bar to this course); but he refused to appear with him before the pope’s legates at Metz in 863, on an occasion which will be related hereafter. From a letter written by Hincmar to Egilo, archbishop of Sens, who was about to set out for Rome, we learn some details as to Gottschalk’s condition. It is said that in respect of food, drink, and fuel, he was as well treated as any of the monks among whom he lived : that clothes were supplied, if he would receive them; but that, ever since he was placed at Hautvilliers, he had refused to wash not only his body, but even his face and hands. From another writing of Hincmar it appears that the unfortunate man had become subject to strange delusions, and had visions in which the imagery of the Apocalypse was applied to foreshow the ruin of his chief enemy. His long confinement and sufferings, acting on his vain, obstinate, and enthusiastic temper, had partially overthrown his reason.

The synodal discussion of the predestinarian controversy, to which the council of Savonnières had looked forward, was never held. But a council at Toucy, near Toul, in October 860, which was attended by Charles the Bald, Lothair II, and Charles of Provence, by twelve metropolitans, and by bishops from fourteen provinces, adopted a letter drawn up by Hincmar, which is in part a general statement of doctrine, and in part is directed against the invasion of ecclesiastical property. In this letter the freedom of man’s will, the will of God that all men should be saved, the necessity of grace in order to salvation, the Divine mercy in choosing and calling men from out of the “mass of perdition”, and the death of Christ “for all who were debtors unto death”, are distinctly stated, but in such a manner as rather to conciliate than to repel those who in some respects had been the archbishop’s opponents. Hincmar, at the desire of Charles the Bald, employed himself at intervals, from 859 to 863, in composing a work of great length on predestination and the kindred subjects, chiefly in defence of the articles of Quiercy, which he had before maintained in a book of which the preface only is extant. He labours to bring the theology of Augustine, Fulgentius, and others into accordance with his own opinions, which are rather those of the time before the Pelagian controversy arose. He quotes very profusely; but most of the passages which he relies on as St. Augustine’s are from a work falsely ascribed to that father, which had already been employed by Scotus, and declared by Remigius to be spurious. He admits the expression of one twofold predestination, but differs from Gottschalk in saying that, while the righteous are predestined to life, and it to them, punishment is predestined to the reprobate, but they are not predestined to it; that God did not predestinate them, but forsook them. With this work the controversy ceased.

Gottschalk remained in captivity twenty years. In 869, the monks of Hautvilliers perceived that his end was approaching, and sent Hincmar notice of the fact, with an inquiry whether they should allow him to receive the last sacraments. It was replied that they might do so, if he would sign a confession embodying the archbishop’s views as to predestination and the Trinity. But Gottschalk was still unbending, and refused with much vehemence of behaviour and language. In consequence of this refusal, he died without the sacraments and under the ban of the church; he was buried in unhallowed earth, and was excluded from prayers for the repose of his soul.

On the question of Gottschalk’s orthodoxy or heterodoxy, very opposite opinions have been pronounced—a result rather of the opposite positions of those who have judged him than of any differences between them as to the facts of the case. Yet as to these facts there is room for an important question—whether his two confessions embody the whole of his doctrine on the subject of predestination, or whether he also held that opinion of an irresistible doom to sin, as well as to punishment, which his adversaries usually imputed to him. A moral judgment of the case is easier. Gottschalk’s sincerity and resolute boldness were marred by his thoroughly sectarian spirit; but the harshness with which he was treated has left on the memory of Hincmar a stain which is not to be effaced by any allowances for the character of the age, since even among his own contemporaries it drew forth warm and indignant remonstrances.

From controversies of doctrine we proceed to some remarkable cases in which questions of other kinds brought the popes into correspondence with the Frankish church.

In 855 the emperor Lothair resigned his crown, and entered the monastery of Prum, where he died six days after his arrival. While his eldest son, Louis II, succeeded him in the imperial title and in the kingdom of Italy, the small kingdom of Arles or Provence fell to his youngest son, Charles, and the other territory north of the Alps, to which the name of Lotharingia was now limited, became the portion of his second son, Lothair II.

Lothair II in 856 married Theutberga, daughter of the duke or viceroy of Burgundy, and sister of Humbert or Hucbert, abbot of St. Maurice. He separated from his wife in the following year, but Humbert, who was more a soldier than a monk, compelled him by a threat of war to take her back. In 859 Theutberga was summoned before a secular tribunal, on a charge of worse than incestuous connection with her brother before her marriage; and the abbot’s profession was not enough to disprove this charge, as the laxity of his morals was notorious.

It now appeared that, in desiring to get rid of his wife, Lothair was influenced by love for a lady named Waldrada, with whom he had formerly been intimate. Two archbishops—Gunther of Cologne, arch-chaplain of the court, and Theutgaud of Treves, a man who is described as too simple and too ignorant to understand the case—had been gained to the king’s side, and insisted that Theutberga should purge herself by the ordeal of boiling water : but, when she had successfully undergone this trial by proxy, Lothair declared it to be worthless. In the following year the subject came before two synods at Aix-la-Chapelle, in which Wenilo, archbishop of Sens, and another Neustrian prelate were associated with the Lotharingian bishops. Theutberga—no doubt influenced by ill-usage, although she professed that she acted without compulsion—acknowledged the truth of the charges against her, while she declared that she had not consented to the sin; whereupon the bishops gave judgment for a divorce, and, in compliance with the unhappy queen’s own petition, sentenced her to lifelong penance in a nunnery. A third synod, held at Aix in April 862, after hearing Lothair’s representation of his case—that he had been contracted to Waldrada, that his father had compelled him to marry Theutberga, and that his youth and the strength of his passions rendered a single life insupportable to him—gave its sanction to his marrying again; and on the strength of this permission his nuptials with Waldrada were celebrated, and were followed by her coronation. Gunther’s services were rewarded by the nomination of his brother Hilduin to the see of Cambray; but Hincmar refused to consecrate the new bishop, and Pope Nicolas eventually declared the appointment to be null and void.

The partisans of Lothair had represented Hincmar as favourable to the divorce; but in reality he had steadfastly resisted all their solicitations. A body of clergy and laity now proposed to him a number of questions on the subject, and in answer he gave his judgment very fully. There were, he said, only two valid grounds for the dissolution of a marriage—where either both parties desire to embrace a monastic life, or one of them can be proved guilty of adultery; but in the second case, the innocent party may not enter into another marriage during the lifetime of the culprit. Among other matters, he discusses the efficacy of the ordeal, which some of Theutberga’s enemies had ridiculed as worthless, while others explained the fact that her proxy had escaped unhurt by supposing either that she had made a secret confession, or that, in declaring herself clear of any guilt with her brother, she had mentally intended another brother instead of the abbot of St. Maurice. Hincmar defends the system of such trials, and says that the artifice imputed to her, far from aiding her to escape, would have increased her guilt, and so would have ensured her ruin. With respect to a popular opinion that Lothair was bewitched by Waldrada, the archbishop avows his belief in the power of charms to produce the extremes of love or hatred between man and wife, and otherwise to interfere with their relations to each other; and he gives instances of magical practices as having occurred within his own knowledge. He strongly denies the doctrine which some had propounded, that Lothair, as a king, was exempt from all human judgment; for, he said, the ecclesiastical power is higher than the secular, and when a king fails to rule himself and his dominions according to the law of God, he forfeits his immunity from earthly law. He says that the question of the marriage, as it is one of universal concern, cannot be settled within Lothair’s dominions; and, as it was objected that no one but the pope was of higher authority than those who had already given judgment on it, he proposes a general synod, to be assembled from all the Frankish kingdoms, as the fittest tribunal for deciding it.

Theutberga had escaped from the place of her confinement, and had found a refuge with Charles the Bald, who, in espousing her cause, would seem to have been guided less by any regard for its justice than by the hope of turning his nephew’s misconduct to his own advantage. She now appealed to the pope, whose intervention was also solicited by others, and at last by Lothair himself, in his annoyance at the opposition of Hincmar and the Neustrian bishops. In answer to these applications, Nicolas declared that, even if the stories against Theutberga were true, her immoralities would not warrant the second marriage of her husband; he ordered that a synod should be assembled, not only from such parts of the Frankish dominions as Lothair might hope to influence, but from all; and he sent two legates to assist at it, with a charge to excommunicate the king if he should refuse to appear or to obey them.

The synod was held at Metz in 863, but no bishops except those of Lotharingia attended. The legates had been bribed by Lothair; one of them, Rodoald, bishop of Portus, had already displayed his corruptness in negotiations with the Byzantine church. Without any citation of Theutberga, or any fresh investigation of the case, the acts of the synod of Aix were confirmed. Nicolas represents the tone of the bishops as very violent against himself, and says that when one bishop, in signing the acts, had made a reservation of the papal judgment, Gunther and Theutgaud erased all but his name. These two prelates set off to report the decision to the pope—believing probably, from what they had seen of Rodoald that at Rome money would effect all that they or their sovereign might desire. But in this they found themselves greatly mistaken. Nicolas, in a synod which appears to have been held in the ordinary course, annulled the decision of Metz, classing the council with the notorious Latrocinium of Ephesus, and ordering that, on account of the favour which it had shown to adulterers, it should not be called a synod but a brothel. He deposed Gunther and Theutgaud, and declared that, if they should attempt to perform any episcopal act, they must not hope for restoration. He threatened the other Lotharingian bishops with a like sentence in case of their making any resistance; and he announced his judgment to the Frankish sovereigns and archbishops in letters which strongly denounced the conduct of King Lothair—if (it was said) he may be properly styled a king who gives himself up to the government of his passions. Rodoald was about to be brought to trial for his corruption, when he escaped from Rome by night. It was evident from the manner of the pope’s proceedings that the indignation which he sincerely felt on account of Theutberga’s wrongs was not the only motive which animated him; that he was bent on taking advantage of the case to establish his power over kings and foreign churches.

Gunther and Theutgaud, in extreme surprise and anger, repaired to the emperor Lewis II, who was then at Beneventum, and represented to him that the treatment which they had received was an insult not only to their master, but to the whole Frankish church, and to all princes—especially to the emperor himself, under whose safe-conduct they had come to Rome. On this Lewis immediately advanced against Rome, and, without attempting any previous negotiation with the pope, entered the city. Nicolas set on foot solemn prayers, with fasting, for the change of the emperor’s heart. Penitents moved about the streets in long processions, and offered up their supplications in the churches; but as one of these penitential trains was about to ascend the steps of St. Peter’s, it was violently assaulted by some of the imperial soldiers. Crosses and banners were broken in the fray; one large cross of especial sanctity, which was believed to be the gift of the empress Helena to St. Peter’s see, and to contain a piece of the wood on which the Redeemer suffered, was thrown down and trodden in the mire, from which the fragments were picked up by some English pilgrims. Nicolas, in fear lest he should be seized, left the Lateran palace, crossed the river in a boat, and took refuge in St. Peter’s, where for two days and nights he remained without food. But in the meanwhile signs which seemed to declare the wrath of heaven began to appear. The soldier who had broken the precious cross died. Lewis himself was seized with a fever, and in alarm sent his empress to mediate with the pope. A reconciliation was thus effected, and, after having committed many acts of violence, the troops withdrew from Rome. The emperor ordered Gunther and Theutgaud to leave his camp and to return home, and it would seem that Nicolas had stipulated for freedom of action in his proceedings as to the case of Lothair.

Gunther had drawn up, in his own name and in that of his brother archbishop, a protest against their deposition, conceived in terms which Hincmar described as diabolical and altogether unprecedented. In this document Nicolas is charged with madness and tyrannic fury, with extravagant pride and assumption, with fraud and cunning, with outrageous violation of all the forms of justice and ecclesiastical law; the archbishops declare that they spurn and defy his accursed sentence—that they are resolved not to admit him into their communion, “being content with the communion and brotherly society of the whole church” ; and they conclude by asserting that Waldrada was not a concubine but a wife, inasmuch as she had been contracted to Lothair before his union with Theutberga. With this paper Gunther now sent his brother Hilduin to the pope, charging him, if it were refused, to lay it on the high altar of St. Peter’s; and Hilduin executed the commission, forcing his way into St. Peter’s with a party of Gunther’s adherents, who beat the guardians of the church and killed one of them who resisted. Gunther also circulated the protest among the German bishops, and sent a copy of it to Photius, of Constantinople, with whom Nicolas was by this time seriously embroiled. The other Lotharingian bishops, however, were terrified by the pope's threats, or were gained by his promises, and made submission to him in very abject terms.

Gunther had hurried from Rome to Cologne; in defiance of the pope’s sentence he had performed episcopal functions; and he had made a compact with his canons, by which, at a great sacrifice both of power and of revenue, he drew them into concurrence in his proceedings. The pusillanimous Lothair—partly influenced by the demonstrations of his uncles against him—now abandoned the cause of the deposed metropolitans. He gave up Gunther altogether, and expressed horror at his acts, while he entreated that Theutgaud, in consideration of his simple character, and of his obedience to the pope’s judgment, might be more leniently dealt with. As for himself, he professed himself willing to go to Rome, and to obey the pope like one of the meanest of men. Gunther, indignant at finding himself thus sacrificed, declared an intention of exposing all the king’s proceedings, and set out for Rome, carrying with him as much of the treasures of his see as he could lay hands on, in the hope that by such means he might be able to propitiate the pope. But he was again disappointed; Nicolas in a synod renewed the condemnation which had been passed both on him and on Theutgaud. In the meantime Lothair bestowed the archbishopric of Cologne on Hugh, abbot of St. Bertin’s, whom Hincmar describes as a subdeacon, but of habits which would have been discreditable to a layman. The preferment was probably a reward for the exertion of the abbot’s influence with Charles the Bald, to whom he was maternally related.

The meanness of Lothair’s behaviour served only to increase the contempt and disgust with which Nicolas had before regarded him. The pope wrote to the other Frankish princes, desiring them not to interfere in the matter, as it was for his own judgment alone; and it is remarked by Hincmar that in these letters he made no use of such terms of courtesy as had been usual in the letters of Roman bishops to sovereigns. He sent Arsenius, bishop of Orba, as his legate, with orders to visit Lewis of Germany and Charles; but it was declared that, unless Lothair would give up Waldrada, the legate must hold no communication with him, nor would the king be admitted to an audience if he should repair to Rome. Arsenius received Theutberga from the hands of Charles, and delivered her to Lothair, who, in terror at the pope’s threats of excommunication, swore on the Gospels and on a fragment of the true cross that he would always treat her with the honour due to a queen, imprecating on himself the most fearful judgments, both in this world and in the next, if he should fail. Twelve of his nobles joined in the oath, and the reunion of the royal pair was sealed by a new coronation. Waldrada was committed to the care of the legate; but in the course of his return to Rome both she and another royal lady of light character, Ingeltrude, wife of Count Boso, contrived to make their escape from him, and Waldrada rejoined Lothair, by whom her escape had been planned. The king had cast aside all regard for his oath almost immediately after having sworn it. His submissiveness towards the pope was forgotten. He ejected Hugh from Cologne, confirmed Gunther’s arrangement with the canons, and put Hilduin into the see as nominal arch, bishop, while both the power and the revenues were really in the hands of Gunther.

Theutberga now again escaped from her husband, and, worn out by the miseries to which she had been subjected, petitioned the pope for a dissolution of the marriage. She went so far as even to own Waldrada to be the rightful wife of Lothair, and she requested leave to repair to Rome and tell all her story. But Nicolas was firm in asserting the rights which the unhappy queen had been wrought on to abandon. He solemnly excommunicated Waldrada, and charged the Frankish bishops to hold Lothair separate from the church until he should repent of his misdeeds. He told Theutberga that he could not comply with a request which was evidently made under constraint; that, if Lothair’s marriage were to be dissolved, the precedent would enable any man to get rid of his wife by ill-usage; that she must consider herself as under the protection of the apostolic see; that, instead of travelling to Rome, she should persuade Lothair to send Waldrada thither for trial: and in all his letters he insisted on celibacy on Lothair’s part as a necessary condition of any separation. Lothair again attempted to pacify the pope by flattery; he assured him that he had not cohabited with Waldrada, or even seen her, since her return from Italy; but Nicolas was unmoved, and appeared to be on the point of pronouncing a sentence of excommunication against the king, when he was arrested by death in May 867.

The increase of the papal power under this pontiff was immense. He had gained such a control over princes as was before unknown. He had taken the unexampled steps of deposing foreign metropolitans, and of annulling the decisions of a Frankish national council by the vote of a Roman synod. He had neglected all the old canonical formalities which stood in the way of his exercising an immediate jurisdiction throughout the western church. And in all this he had been supported by the public feeling of indignation against Lothair and his subservient clergy, which caused men to overlook the novelty and the usurping character of the pope’s measures. The other Frank princes had encouraged him in his proceedings against Lothair. The great prelates of Lotharingia, strong in position and in family interest, had rendered themselves powerless before the bishop of Rome by espousing a discreditable and unpopular cause. The pope appeared, not as an invader of the rights of sovereigns and of churches, but as the champion of justice and innocence against the oppressors of the earth.

Adrian II, the successor of Nicolas, had already twice declined the papacy, and was seventy-five years of age at the time of his election. The partisans of the late pope apprehended a change of policy, by which the recent acquisitions might be lost. But in this they were mistaken. Adrian appears to have been urged on by a feeling that he was expected to show want of energy, and by a wish to falsify the expectation. He soon cast aside the air of humility and of deference towards the emperor which he had at first displayed. The losses which the papacy suffered under him arose, not from a reversal of his predecessor’s policy, but from the attempt to carry it on in an exaggerated form, without the skill of Nicolas, without understanding the change of circumstances, or the manner of adapting his measures to them.

The beginning of Adrian’s pontificate was marked by a tragedy among his own nearest connections. The pope, himself the son of a bishop, had been married—a circumstance which contributed to the alarm felt at his election, as Nicolas, like other chief agents in the exaltation of the papacy, had been strenuous for the celibacy of the clergy. Adrian’s wife, and a daughter, the offspring of their marriage, were still alive; but, within a few days after his election, the daughter, who had been betrothed to a nobleman, was carried off, together with her mother, by Eleutherius, a son of Arsenius of Orba. Eleutherius, on being pursued, killed both the women, but was himself taken prisoner. Arsenius, with whose intrigues this affair was connected, did not long survive. It is said that on his deathbed he was heard to discourse with friends, and that he departed without receiving the Eucharist. At the instance of Adrian, the emperor appointed commissioners for the trial of Eleutherius, who was put to death by their sentence.

Lothair conceived fresh hopes from the change of popes, and wrote to Adrian in terms expressive of high regard for his predecessor, while he complained that Nicolas had wronged him by listening to idle rumours. At his request, Adrian released Waldrada from her excommunication, and the king himself was invited to Rome. “Rome”, the pope wrote, “is never unjust, and is always willing to receive the penitent. If you are conscious of innocence, come for a blessing; if guilty, come for the remedy of a suitable repentance”. Theutberga was persuaded by Lothair to renew her application for a divorce. She went to Rome in person, and, in addition to the old grounds, alleged that she had ailments which rendered it impossible for her to perform the duties of a wife. But Adrian, like Nicolas, refused her request, on the ground that she was acting under constraint, and desired her to return home.

The absolution of Waldrada had included the condition that she should not keep company with Lothair. By artfully affecting to obey this order, she goaded his passion to madness, so that he resolved at all risks— even leaving his territories open to the restless ambition of his uncle Charles—to sue in person to the pope for a dissolution of his union with Theutberga. He was made to pay heavily for the means of approach to the pontiff, who, by the intervention of Ingilberga, wife of the emperor Lewis, was prevailed on to meet him at Monte Cassino, where it was supposed that Adrian might be more tractable than when surrounded by the partisans of Nicolas at Rome. Adrian refused to dissolve the marriage, but, in consideration of a large sum of money, agreed to administer the holy Eucharist to the king—a favour which Lothair desired in order to dissipate the popular opinion, which regarded him as virtually excommunicate. “If”, said the pope at the solemnity, “thou hast observed the charge of Nicolas, and art firmly resolved never to have intercourse with Waldrada, draw near, and receive unto salvation; but if thy conscience accuse thee, or if thou purpose to return to wallow in thine uncleanness, refrain, lest that which is ordained as a remedy for the faithful should turn to thy damage”. Lothair, in surprise and agitation, received the consecrated symbols. His nobles, after being adjured as to their consent or privity to any breach of his oath, communicated after him; and Gunther, the survivor of the deposed archbishops, who had once more repaired to Italy in the hope of obtaining a release, was admitted to communicate as a layman, on presenting a written profession of submission, and swearing that he would never again exercise any spiritual office unless the pope should be pleased to relieve him from his disability.

The king followed Adrian to Rome, but a change had come over the pope’s disposition towards him. Instead of being received with the honours usually paid to sovereigns, he found no one of the clergy to meet him when he presented himself at St. Peter’s, and he was obliged to approach the Apostle’s tomb unattended. On retiring to his lodging in the papal palace, he found it unfurnished, and even unswept; and when, on the following day, which was Sunday, he again repaired to the church, no priest appeared to say mass for him. Next day, however, he dined with the pope in the Lateran palace, and after an exchange of presents, in which the king's vessels of gold and silver were requited with a woollen cloak, a palm-branch, and a rod—they parted on friendly terms. The pope resolved to examine the case of the divorce in a council which was to be held at Rome in the following year. With a view to this investigation, he summoned the bishops of the three Frankish kingdoms to send representatives to the council; and he was about to send commissioners across the Alps for the purpose of inquiry, when he received tidings of Lothair’s death. The king had left Rome in the middle of July. At Lucca a fatal sickness broke out among his attendants. He himself died at Piacenza, on the 8th of August; and it is said that before the end of the year all who had partaken of the communion at Monte Cassino were dead, while the few who had abstained from it survived. Theutberga became abbess of a monastery, and bestowed large sums for the soul of the husband who had so cruelly injured her. Waldrada also took refuge in a cloister.

In the question of Lothair’s divorce, Nicolas and Hincmar were led by the common interests of justice and morality to act in harmony with each other. But in other cases, where the claims of Rome conflicted with the archbishop's attachment either to his sovereign or to the national church of France, the popes found in him a decided and formidable opponent.

One of these cases arose out of the conduct of Ebbo, who, as we have seen, had been deprived of the see of Reims for his acts of rebellion against Lewis the Pious. During the contests between that emperor’s sons, Reims for a time fell into the possession of the emperor Lothair, with whom Ebbo had ingratiated himself. The archbishop returned to his see, carrying with him, in addition to the imperial mandate for his restoration, the favourable judgment of a synod held at Ingelheim, under Lothair’s influence, and under the presidency of Drogo of Metz, who had also presided at his deposition. His penitential professions at Thionville were now explained away by the assertion that, in declaring himself “unworthy” of his see, he had meant nothing more than what was signified by the same word in the ordinary style of bishops; he had humbled himself (he said), and therefore had now risen in greater strength than before.

After the battle of Fontenailles, Ebbo fled from Reims in fear of Charles the Bald. He in vain attempted to obtain restitution by means of Sergius II; but the pope, overruling the ancient canons against the translation of bishops, sanctioned his appointment to Hildesheim, on the nomination of Lewis the German, in 844.

Hincmar, soon after his promotion to the archbishopric of Reims in 845, found that some clerks, of whom one Wulfad was the most prominent, had been ordained by Ebbo during his second occupation of the see. He denied the validity of orders conferred by one whom he regarded as an intruder, and, on the application of the clerks to a synod held at Soissons in 853, the case was investigated by a commission of bishops, who declared Ebbo’s restoration to have been uncanonical, and the orders which he had given to be void. Wulfad and his brethren would have been excluded even from lay communion, on the ground that, by charging some members of the synod with having received their consecration from Ebbo, they had incurred the sentence denounced by the council of Elvira against those who should slander bishops; but at the request of Charles the Bald they were released from this penalty. Hincmar, as being a party in the case, and as the regularity of his own appointment had been impugned, desired that the synod’s judgment might be fortified by the highest authority, and requested Leo IV to confirm it. The pope refused, on the ground (among other things) that the clerks had appealed to Rome; but Lothair, hitherto the archbishop’s enemy, interceded for him, and Leo sent him the pall, by which he was constituted primate of Neustria. Benedict III on Hincmar’s application confirmed the privileges thus bestowed on him, and declared that there should be no appeal from his judgment, saving the rights of the apostolic see; he also confirmed the deposition of Wulfad and his companions, provided (as he expressly said) that the facts of the case were as they had been represented to him. And Nicolas, in 863, renewed both the grant to Hincmar and the judgment as to the clerks, with the same condition which had been stated by his predecessor.

But three years later this pope professed to have discovered great unfairness in the statements on which the applications to Benedict and to himself had been grounded, and ordered that Hincmar should restore the clerks, or else should submit the matter to a council, with leave for them, if its judgment should be unfavourable, to appeal to the apostolic see. A second synod was accordingly held at Soissons. Hincmar handed in four tracts, in justification of Ebbo’s deposition, of his own appointment, and of the proceedings against the clerks—to whose restoration, however, he professed himself willing to consent, provided that it could be granted without prejudice to the laws of the church. The council decided that the deposition had been right in point of justice, but that it might be reversed by the higher law of mercy, according to the precedent of the Nicene judgment as to the Novatianists, and to the provisions of the African church for the reconciliation of the Donatists. But Nicolas, instead of confirming the acts, strongly censured the council for having omitted to cancel the judgment of that which had been held in 853; he blamed it for having sanctioned the promotion of Wulfad by Charles the Bald to the see of Bourges without requesting the papal consent; he told the bishops that they ought to have sent him all the documents relating to Ebbo, and that they must now do so; and in letters to them, to Charles, and to Hincmar, he charged the archbishop with falsehood, fraud, cunning, and injustice. At the same time he wrote to Wulfad and his brethren, exhorting them to pay due reverence to Hincmar.

The deposition of Ebbo and the appointment of his successor again came into question before a council assembled from six provinces at Troyes in October 867. The decision was in favour of Hincmar; but the council did an important service to the papal interest by requesting Nicolas to decree that no archbishop or bishop should be deposed without the consent of the apostolic see. Hincmar and Nicolas were at last brought nearer to each other on this question by their respective dangers from other quarters. The archbishop was afraid of the influence which Wulfad had acquired over Charles the Bald, while the pope, who was now engaged in a formidable struggle with the patriarch Photius and the eastern church, was unwilling to tempt the Franks to side with his opponents. On receiving the envoys whom Hincmar had sent to Rome after the synod of Troyes, Nicolas expressed approbation of his proceedings, and wrote to request that he and other learned men of France would assist in the controversy with the Greeks. With this request the archbishop complied; and Nicolas was soon after succeeded by Adrian, who confirmed Wulfad in the see of Bourges and bestowed the pall on him, but at the same time behaved with great respect to Hincmar.

Thus the dispute ended peacefully. But in the course of it much had been done to infringe on the independence of the Frankish church. Nicolas claimed that the Frankish synods should be called by order of the pope; that the parties in a cause might appeal from such synods to Rome either before or after judgment; that the synods should report to the pope before pronouncing the sentence; that the bishops who acted as judges should be compelled to go to Rome for the purpose of justifying their decision; that the pope should have the power of annulling all their acts, so that it should be necessary to begin the process anew. Hincmar and his party, while they had the ancient laws of the church in their favour, felt themselves unable to struggle against the complication of political interests; the archbishop found himself obliged to concede the principle of an appeal to Rome, according to the canon of Sardica, although Charlemagne had excluded that canon from his collection, and it owed its insertion among the Frank capitularies to the forger Benedict the Levite. And the petition of the council of Troyes—suggested, no doubt, by the punishments to which Ebbo and others had been subjected on account of their acts against Lewis the Pious—shows how, under the idea of securing themselves against other powers, the Frankish prelates contributed to aggrandize Rome by investing it with universal control in the character of general protector of the church.

At the same time with the affair as to Ebbo’s ordinations another controversy was going on between Nicolas and Hincmar, which exhibited in a yet more striking manner the nature of the new claims set up in behalf of the papacy.

Rothad, bishop of Soissons, in the province of Reims, had occupied his see thirty years, and had long been on unfriendly terms with the archbishop. The accounts which we have of the differences between the bishop and his metropolitan must be received with caution, as they come for the most part from Rothad, or from the Lotharingian bishops, who were hostile to Hincmar on account of his proceedings in the case of Theutberga; while they are in part directly contradicted by Hincmar himself.

Rothad, according to his own report, with the consent of thirty-three bishops, deposed a presbyter who had been caught in the act of unchastity. The man carried his complaint to Hincmar, who, after having imposed on him a penance of three years, restored him to his benefice, excommunicated and imprisoned the clerk whom Rothad had put into it, and persecuted the bishop himself for his share in the affair. Even by this account, it would seem that Rothad had ventured to invade the rights of his metropolitan by holding a synod independently of him. But in addition to this, Hincmar, while disclaiming all personal malice against the bishop of Soissons, charges him with long insubordination, with notorious laxity of life, and with dilapidating, selling, or pledging the property of his see. However their disagreement may have arisen, Hincmar in 861 suspended Rothad from his office until he should become obedient, and threatened him with deposition; whereupon the bishop appealed to Rome.

In the following year, Rothad appeared at a synod held at Pistres, as if no censure been passed against him. His presence was objected to, on which he again appealed to the pope, and asked leave to go to Rome, which Charles the Bald at first granted. But the case was afterwards, with the concurrence of Charles, examined by a synod at Soissons in the end of the same year, when Rothad, who had been imprisoned for his contumacy in refusing to appear, was sentenced to deposition, while an abbey was assigned to him for his maintenance, and another person was appointed to his see. According to Hincmar, he was content with this arrangement, until some Lotharingian bishops, wishing to use him as a tool against the great opponent of their sovereign's divorce, persuaded him to resume his appeal to the pope. Rothad’s own statement is, that Hincmar, having got possession of a letter in which he requested a continuance of support from some bishops who had befriended him at Pistres, wrongly represented this as an abandonment of his appeal, and a reference of his cause to those Frankish bishops.

Hincmar and the prelates who had met at Soissons, by way of obviating the pope’s objections to their proceedings, requested Nicolas to confirm their acts, while, in excuse for their disregard of Rothad’s appeal, they alleged that the old imperial laws forbade such cases to be carried out of the kingdom. But Nicolas had received representations of the affair from the bishops of Lotharingia, and replied by censuring the synod very strongly for the insult which it had offered to St Peter by presuming to judge a matter in which an appeal had been made to Rome. In consequence of that appeal, he declared its judgment to be null. Temporal laws, he said, are good against heretics and tyrants, but are of no force when they clash with the rights of the church. He tells the members of the assembly that they must either restore Rothad to his see, or within thirty days send deputies to assert their cause against him before the apostolical tribunal. With his usual skill, he assumes the character of a general guardian of the church by remarking that the same evil which had happened to Rothad might befall any one of themselves, and he points out the chair of St. Peter as the refuge for bishops oppressed by their metropolitans. At the same time Nicolas wrote to Hincmar in terms of severe censure. He tells him that, if Rothad had not appealed, he must himself have inquired into the matter—a claim of right to interfere which had not before been advanced by Rome. He asked with what consistency Hincmar could apply to the Roman see for a confirmation of his privileges as metropolitan, or how he could attach any value to privileges derived from Rome, while he did all that he could to lessen its authority; and, as the first letter received no answer, the pope wrote again, telling the archbishop that within thirty days he must either reinstate Rothad, or send him and some representatives of his accusers to Rome, on pain of being interdicted from the celebration of the Eucharist until he should comply. He also wrote to Rothad, encouraging him to persevere in his appeal unless he were conscious of having a bad cause; and, notwithstanding the importunities of Charles and his queen, who entreated him to let the matter rest, he desired the king to send Rothad to Rome. The second letter to Hincmar, and two which followed it, remained unanswered; and Nicolas then wrote a fifth, but in a milder tone, as he was afraid to drive the archbishop to extremities, lest he should join the party of Gunther.

In the beginning of 864, Rothad obtained permission to go to Rome. Hincmar also sent two envoys—not, he said, as accusers, but in order to justify his own proceedings. They carried with them a letter of great length, in which, with profuse expressions of humility and reverence towards the apostolic see, he admits the right of appeal as sanctioned by the Sardican canon, but says that, according to the African canons and to Gregory the Great, Rothad, by referring the case to judges of his own choosing, had foregone the right of carrying it to any other tribunal. He tells the pope that Rothad had for many years been unruly and had treated all remonstrances with contempt, so that he himself had incurred much obloquy for allowing a man so notoriously unfit and incorrigible to retain the episcopal office. He dwells much on the necessity that bishops should obey their metropolitans, and endeavours very earnestly to obtain the pope's confirmation of his past proceedings, assuring him that Rothad shall be well provided for.

Hincmar’s envoys were detained on the way by the emperor Lewis, but the letter was sent onwards and reached the pope. Rothad was allowed to proceed to Rome, and, six months after his arrival, presented a statement of his case. On Christmas eve, three months later, Nicolas ascended the pulpit of St. Mary Major, and made a speech on the subject. Even if Hincmar’s story were true, he said, it was no longer in the power of Rothad, after he had appealed to the apostolic see, to transfer his cause to an inferior tribunal; since Rothad professed himself willing to meet all charges, and since no accuser had appeared against him, the pope declared him to be worthy of restoration; and, after having waited until the feast of St Agnes, he publicly invested the bishop with pontifical robes, and desired him to officiate at mass before him.

As Rothad maintained that he had never abandoned his appeal, and as his accusers had suffered judgment to go by default, the proceedings of Nicolas thus far might have been justified by the Sardican canon, which suspended the execution of sentence against a bishop until the pope should have submitted the cause to a fresh examination; and Hincmar had failed in the observance of that canon by appointing another bishop to Soissons. But, in letters which he wrote on the occasion, the pope gave vent to some startling novelties—that the decretals of his predecessors had been violated; that the deposition of Rothad was invalid, because the council which had pronounced it was held without the apostolic permission, and, further, because the deposition of a bishop was one of those “greater judgments” which belong to the apostolic chair alone. He required Hincmar, under pain of perpetual deposition, either at once to restore Rothad unconditionally, or to reinstate him for the time, and to appear at Rome for the further trial of the question.

Nicolas had originally stood on the Sardican canon, but he now took very different ground; and the change was the more striking, because the new principles which he advanced were really unnecessary to his cause. These principles were derived from the pretended decretals of Isidore, which are for the first time mentioned as being known at Rome in the letter of Nicolas to the French bishops. In 860, Lupus of Ferrières, at the instigation of Wenilo, archbishop of Sens, had written a letter in which he hinted a reference to them by saying that pope Melchiades, the contemporary of Constantine, was reported to have laid down that no bishop could be deposed without the pope’s consent; and the abbot had requested that Nicolas would send a copy of the decretal as preserved at Rome. From the pope’s silence as to this point in his answer, it is inferred that he then knew nothing of the forged collection; and the same was the case in 863, when he spoke of the decretals of Siricius as the oldest that were known. But now—only one year later—he is found citing those of the Isidorian collection: and when some of the French bishops expressed a doubt respecting them, on the ground that they were not in the code of Dionysius Exiguus, he answered that on the same ground they might suspect the decretals of Gregory and other popes later than Dionysius — nay, they might even suspect the canonical Scriptures; that there were genuine decretals preserved elsewhere; that, as Innocent had ordered all the canonical books to be received, so had Leo ordered the reception of all papal decretals; that they themselves were in the habit of using these epistles when favourable to their own interest, and questioned them only when the object was to injure the rights of the apostolical see. It would seem, therefore, that Nicolas had been made acquainted with the forged decretals during Rothad’s stay at Rome—most probably by Rothad himself. That the bishop of Soissons was privy to the forgery, appears likely from the facts that he was already a bishop when it was executed, and that he was connected with the party from which it emanated. But we need not suppose that Nicolas knowingly adopted an imposture. The principles of the decretals had been floating in the mind of the age; on receiving the forgeries, the pope recognized in them his own ideal of ecclesiastical polity, and he welcomed them as affording a historical foundation for it. We may therefore, (in charity at least,) acquit him of conscious fraud in this matter, although something of criminality will still attach to the care with which he seems to have avoided all examination of their genuineness, and to the eagerness with which he welcomed these pretended antiquities, coming from a foreign country, in disregard of the obvious consideration that, if genuine, they must have all along been known in his own city.

Hincmar made no further active opposition, but acquiesced in the restitution of Rothad, although in his chronicle of the time he speaks of it as effected by might in defiance of rule, and argues that it was inconsistent with the Sardican canon. The act was performed by Arsenius, during the mission which has been mentioned in connection with the history of Lothair’s marriages, and Rothad appears to have died soon after, in the beginning of Adrian’s pontificate.

If even Nicolas had found Hincmar a dangerous antagonist, Adrian was altogether unequal to contend with him.

On the death of Lothair II, in 869, Charles the Bald immediately seized his dominions. Adrian felt that, after the part which his predecessor and he himself had taken to make the world regard the papal see as the general vindicator of justice, he was bound to interfere in behalf of the nearer heirs — the emperor Lewis, and his uncle the king of Germany. He therefore wrote in terms of strong remonstrance to Charles, to the nobles of Lotharingia, and to the Neustrian bishops; he sent envoys who, during the performance of divine service at St. Denys, threatened the wrath of St. Peter against the king; he wrote to Hincmar, blaming him for his supineness, desiring him to oppose his sovereign’s ambitious projects, and charging him, if Charles should persist in them, to avoid his communion; and, as his letters received no answer, he wrote again, threatening, apparently in imitation of Gregory IV, to go into France in person for the redress of the wrong which had been attempted. In the meantime Hincmar had placed the crown of Lotharingia on the head of Charles, who by the partition of Mersen had made an accommodation with Lewis of Germany, and consequently felt himself independent of the pope. The archbishop took no notice of Adrian’s first communication; but he returned a remarkable answer to the second. He disclaimed all judgment of the political question as to inheritance; his king, he says, had required his obedience, and he had felt himself bound to obey. He complains of it as a novel hardship that he should be required to avoid the communion of Charles : for the Lotharingian bishops had not been obliged to break off communion with their late sovereign, although he lived in adultery; the popes themselves had not broken off communion with princes who were guilty of crimes, or even of heresy; and Charles had not been convicted of any breach of faith which could warrant his bishops in refusing to communicate with him.

But the most striking part of the letter was where Hincmar professed to report the language held by the nobles of Lotharingia—a significant hint of his own opinion, and of the reception which the pope might expect if he were to follow out the line of conduct on which he had entered. He tells Adrian that they contrast his tone towards Charles with the submissiveness of former popes towards Pipin and Charlemagne; they recall to mind the indignities which Gregory IV had brought on himself by his interference in Frankish affairs; they loudly blame the pope for meddling with politics, and for pretending to impose a sovereign on them; they wish him to keep to his own affairs, as his predecessors had done, and to defend them by his prayers and by the prayers of the clergy from the Normans and their other enemies; they declare that a bishop who utters unjust excommunications, instead of excluding the objects of them from eternal life, only forfeits his own power of binding.

The pope was greatly incensed. He countenanced a rebellion raised against Charles by one of his sons, Carloman, who had been ordained a deacon; he forbade the French bishops to excommunicate the rebel prince when their sovereign required them to do so. But Hincmar and his brethren, in despite of this, pronounced sentence of degradation and excommunication against Carloman,0 who, on being taken, was condemned to death, but escaped with the loss of his eyes, and received the abbey of Epternach from the charity of Lewis the German. And Adrian, after having committed himself by threats and denunciations in a style exaggerated from that of Nicolas, found himself obliged to let these acts of defiance pass without taking any further measures against those who were concerned in them.

A yet more remarkable collision arose out of the conduct of Hincmar, bishop of Laon. The archbishop of Reims had in 858 obtained the see of Laon for his nephew and namesake, who is described as entirely dependent on him for the means of subsistence; but he soon found reason to repent of this step, which appears, from the younger Hincmar’s character, to have been prompted by family or political considerations rather than by a regard for the benefit of the church. The bishop of Laon received from Charles the Bald a distant abbey and an office at court. For these preferments he neglected his diocese; he made himself odious both to clergy and to laity by his exactions; and he treated his uncle’s authority as metropolitan with contempts. In consequence of a disagreement with the king, he was tried before a secular court in 868; he was deprived of his civil office, and the income of his see was confiscated. On this occasion, the elder Hincmar, considering that the cause of the church was involved, forgot his private grounds for dissatisfaction with his kinsman’s conduct, and came to the bishop’s support. In a letter to Charles (in which, among other authorities, he cites some of the forged decretals), he declared that bishops were amenable to no other judgment than that of their own order; that the trial of a bishop by a secular tribunal was contrary to the ancient laws of the church, to those of the Roman emperors, and to the example of the king’s predecessors; that it was a sign that the end of the world was at hand; that royalty is dependent on the episcopal unction, and is forfeited by violation of the engagements contracted at receiving it. At the diet of Pistres, in 868, the archbishop maintained his nephew’s interest, and the younger Hincmar, on entreating the king’s forgiveness, recovered the revenues of his see.

But fresh disagreements very soon broke out between the kinsmen, and the bishop of Laon involved himself in further troubles by the violence which he used in ejecting a nobleman who was one of the tenants of his church. The king, after citing him to appear, and receiving a refusal, ordered him to be arrested; whereupon he took refuge in a church and placed himself beside the altar. In April 869 he appeared before a synod at Verberie; but he declined its judgment, appealed to the pope, and desired leave to proceed to Rome for the prosecution of his appeal. The permission was refused, and he was committed to prison. Before setting out for Verberie, he had charged his clergy, in case of his detention, to suspend the performance of all divine offices, including even baptism, penance, the viaticum of the dying, and the rites of burial, until he should return, or the pope should release them from the injunctions The clergy, in great perplexity and distress, now applied to the archbishop of Reims for direction in the matter. Hincmar by letter desired his nephew to recall the interdict; on his refusal, he cancelled it by his own authority as metropolitan, and produced ancient authorities to assure the clergy that, as their bishop’s excommunication was irregular and groundless, they were not bound to obey it.

About the time of Charles’s coronation in Lotharingia, the bishop of Laon was set at liberty, his case being referred to a future synod. He forthwith renewed his assaults on his uncle, whom he denounced as the author of his late imprisonment; he espoused the cause of the rebel Carloman; and he sent forth a letter in which he asserted for all bishops a right of appealing to Rome — not against a sentence of their brethren (which was the only kind of appeal hitherto claimed), but in bar of the jurisdiction of local synods. For this claim he alleged the authority of the forged decretals. The archbishop replied, not by denying the genuineness of these documents—which, however he may have suspected it, he was not, after his own use of them, at liberty to impugn —but by maintaining that, as they had been issued on particular occasions, their application was limited to the circumstances which called them forth; that they were valid only in so far as they were agreeable to the ecclesiastical canons, and that some of them had been superseded by the determinations of councils later than their professed date. Such a view of the decretals was evidently even more prejudicial to the new Roman claims than an assertion of their spuriousness would have been.

While Charles was engrossed by the affairs of Lotharingia, the case of the younger Hincmar was postponed. But he was brought before synods at Gondreville and Attigny in 870, and pamphlets were exchanged between him and his uncle—one, by the archbishop, extending to great length, and divided into fifty-five chapters. At Attigny the bishop of Laon submitted to swear obedience to the authority of his sovereign and of his metropolitan; and, after having in vain renewed his request for leave to go to Rome, he asked for a trial by secular judges, who pronounced a decision in his favour. The elder Hincmar was indignant, both because his nephew had abandoned the clerical privileges in submitting to a lay tribunal, and on account of the result of the trial.

The bishop was again brought before a synod which met at Doucy, near Mousson, on the Maas, in August 871, when fresh misdemeanours were laid to his charge—that he had made away with the property of his see, that he had sided with Carloman, had refused to sign the excommunication uttered against the rebel, and had slandered Charles to the pope. It was not until after the third summons that the accused condescended to appear. He charged the king with having invaded his dignity; the archbishop of Reims with having caused his imprisonment : and on these grounds he refused to be judged by them. Charles repelled the charges against himself, and joined with the nobles who were present in swearing that the imputation against the archbishop was false. In reply to his claim of a right to appeal to Rome, the bishop was reminded of the canons which ordered that every cause should be terminated in the country where it arose, and was told that he could not appeal until after a trial by the bishops of his own province. Notwithstanding his persistence in refusing to answer, the synod proceeded to examine the matter; and the elder Hincmar, after having collected the opinions of the members, pronounced sentence of deposition against his nephew, reserving only such a power of appeal as was sanctioned by the council of Sardica. The synod then wrote to the pope, stating the grounds of their judgment, and expressing a hope that, in consideration of the bishop's incorrigible misconduct, he would confirm the sentence. They limit the right of appealing agreeably to the Sardican canon, and desire that, if the pope should entertain the appeal which had been made to him, he would commit the further trial of the cause to bishops of their own neighbourhood, or would send envoys to sit with the local bishops for the purpose; and they beg that in any case he would not restore Hincmar to his see without a provincial inquiry, but would proceed according to the canons.

Adrian replied in a very lofty tone. He censured the synod for having ventured to depose the accused without regard to his appeal, and charged them to send him to Rome, with some of their own number, in order to a fresh inquiry. The answer of the Frankish bishops was firm and decided. They professed that they could only account for Adrian's letter by supposing that, in the multiplicity of his engagements, he had been unable to read the whole of the documents which they had sent to him; they justified their proceedings, and declared that, if the pope should persist in the course which he had indicated, they were resolved to stand on the rights of their national church.

Adrian’s letter to the synod had been accompanied by one in a like strain addressed to Charles, who was greatly provoked by it, and employed the elder Hincmar to reply. The archbishop executed his task with hearty zeal. Charles, in whose name the letter was written, is made to tell the pope that the language which he had held was improper to be used towards a king, and unbecoming the modesty of a bishop, and desires him to content himself with writing as his predecessors had written to former sovereigns of France. For a pope to speak of “ordering” a king is said to be a new and unexampled audacity. It is denied that Adrian was entitled to evoke the case of the younger Hincmar to Rome for trial. The privileges of St. Peter depend on the exercise of justice; the king will not violate the principles of Scripture and of the church by interposing to defeat justice in a case where the offences of the accused are so many and so clear. He declines with indignation the office which the pope would impose on him by desiring him to guard the property of the see of Laon; the kings of the Franks had hitherto been reckoned lords of the earth—not deputies or bailiffs of bishops. He threatens, if the matter cannot be ended at home, to go to Rome and maintain the rightfulness of his proceedings. The pope had spoken of decrees; but any decree which would affect to bind a sovereign must have been vomited forth from hell. The letter concludes by declaring the king’s willingness to abide by the known rules of Scripture, tradition, and the canons, while he is determined to reject “anything which may have been compiled or forged to the contrary by any person”—the plainest intimation that had as yet been given of Hincmar’s opinion as to the Isidorian decretals.

Adrian again felt that he had committed a mistake in advancing pretensions which were thus contested; and a league which had just been concluded between Lewis the German and his nephew the emperor contributed to alarm the pope as to the consequences which might follow from a breach with the king of Neustria. He therefore wrote again to Charles, exchanging his imperious tone for one of soothing and flattery. After some slight allusions to the style of the king’s letter, he proceeds, (as he says)” to pour in the oil of consolation and the ointment of holy love”. He begs that he may not be held accountable for any expressions which might have seemed harsh in his former letters; and, knowing the intensity of the king’s desire for additional territory and power, he volunteers an assurance that, if he should live to see a vacancy in the empire, no other candidate than Charles shall with his consent be raised to it. The case of the bishop of Laon is treated as of inferior moment; the pope still desires that he may be sent to Rome, but promises that he shall not be restored unless a full inquiry shall have shown the justice of his cause, and that this inquiry shall be held in France. Adrian did not live to receive an answer to this letter; and Hincmar the younger was kept in prison until, by taking part in fresh intrigues, he exposed himself to a severer punishment.

Adrian’s conduct in this affair had been alike imprudent and unfortunate. The French bishops had set aside the false decretals; they had insisted on confining the papal right as to appeals within the limits which had been defined by the council of Sardica; they had denied that the examination of all weightier causes belonged to the pope alone; they had denied that he had the right of evoking a cause to Rome before it had been submitted to the judgment of a national synod, and would only allow him the power of remitting it, after such judgment, to be again examined by the bishops of the country in which it arose; and his lofty pretensions had ended in a humiliating concessions Yet the Roman see had gained something. Hincmar, in all his opposition to the papal claims, carefully mixes up professions of deep reverence for the authority of the apostolic chair; his objections to the Isidorian principles, being addressed to his nephew, were not likely to become much known at Rome, while, as he had not openly questioned the genuineness of the decretals, the popes might henceforth cite them with greater confidence; and a feeling that the power of the papacy was useful to the church restrained him in the midst of his opposition to it. Both bishops and princes now saw in the papacy something which they might use to their advantage; and the real benefit of all applications to Rome for aid was sure to redound to the Roman see itself.

The circumstances of John VIII’s election as the successor of Adrian are unknown; but he appears to have belonged to the Frankish party among the Roman clergy, and there is no reason to doubt that the emperor consented to his appointment. In 875 the death of the emperor Lewis II without issue opened up to Charles the Bald the great object of his ambition; and the time was now come for the pope to assume the power of disposing of the empire—an assumption countenanced by the fact that his predecessors had long acted as arbiters in the dissensions of the Carolingian princes. Setting aside the stronger hereditary claims of Lewis the German, John invited Charles to Rome, and on Christmas-day—seventy-five years after the coronation of Charlemagne—placed the imperial crown on his head. Although the pope afterwards declared that this was done in obedience to a revelation which had been made to his predecessor Nicolas, it would appear that influences of a less exalted kind had also contributed to the act. The annalist of Fulda, whose tone towards the “tyrant” of France is generally very bitter, tells us that, in order to obtain the empire, Charles had made a prodigal use of bribery among the senators, “after the fashion of Jugurtha”; nor did the pope himself fail to benefit on the occasion. A writer of later date d is undoubtedly wrong in saying that Charles ceded to him certain territories which are known to have then belonged to the Greek empire; but there is reason to believe that he gave up the control of elections to the papacy, released the pope from the duty of doing homage, and withdrew his resident commissioners from Rome, leaving the government in the hands of the pope, while the title of Defender still served to connect the emperor with the city, and entitled the Romans and their bishops to look to him for aid.

Charles now professed that he owed the empire to John, and during the remainder of his days he was solicitous to serve the author of his dignity. Proceeding northwards, he was crowned as king of Italy at Pavia, in February 876, when the estates declared that, as God, through the vicar of St. Peter and St. Paul, had called him to be emperor, so they chose him king. The acts of Pavia were confirmed in an assembly held some months later at Pontyon, where the Neustrian clergy and nobles professed that they chose him for their sovereign, as he had been chosen by the pope and by the Lombards. This change of title from a hereditary to an elective royalty appeared to hold out to the pope a hope of being able to interfere in the future disposal of the Neustrian and Italian kingdoms; but an attempt which was made in his behalf at Pontyon, although zealously supported by the emperor, met with a strenuous opposition from the Frankish clergy. The papal legate, John, bishop of Tusculum, read a letter by which Ansegis, archbishop of Sens, was constituted vicar apostolic and primate of Gaul and Germany, with power to assemble synods, to execute the papal orders by the agency of bishops, and to bring all important matters to Rome for decision. Hincmar and his brethren requested leave to examine the document; to which the emperor replied by asking them whether they would obey the pope, and telling them that he, as the pope’s vicar in the council, was resolved to enforce obedience. He ordered a chair to be set for Ansegis beside the legate; and at his invitation the archbishop of Sens walked past the metropolitans who had held precedence of him, and took his seat in the place of dignity. But Hincmar and the other bishops behaved with unshaken firmness. They repeated their request that they might be allowed to see the pope’s letter, and to take a copy of it. They protested against the elevation of Ansegis as uncanonical—as infringing on the primacy granted to the see of Reims in the person of Remigius, and on the privileges bestowed on Hincmar by Benedict, Nicolas, and Adrian; nor could they be brought to promise obedience to the pope, except such as was agreeable to the canons, and to the example of their predecessors. One bishop only, Frotair, was disposed to comply, in the hope of obtaining a translation from the diocese of Bordeaux, which had been desolated by the Northmen, to that of Bourges but his brethren objected to the translation as contrary to the laws of the church. The emperor, provoked by Hincmar’s opposition, required him to take a new oath of fealty in the presence of the assembly, as if his loyalty were suspected—an unworthy return for the archbishop’s long, able, and zealous exertions for the rights of the crown and of the national church. The council broke up without coming to any satisfactory determination, and Hincmar soon after produced a strong defence0 of the rights of metropolitans against the new principles on which the commission to Ansegis was grounded. Charles was induced by political reasons to act in a spirit of conciliation,0 and the pope got over the difficulty as to Ansegis by conferring the primacy of Gaul on the see of Arles, to which it had been attached before the Frankish conquest. But amid the commotions of the time this arrangement had no practical effect.

In the meantime the pope was greatly disquieted at home by the factions of his city, by the petty princes and nobles of the neighbourhood, and by the Saracens, who, since the death of Lewis II, carried on their ravages without any effectual check. Sometimes the nobles made alliance with the enemies of Christendom. Naples, Gaeta, Amalfi, and Sorrento, after having suffered much at their hands, entered into a league with them, and united with them in the work of devastation and plunder. Sergius, duke of Naples, made frequent incursions into the papal territory, and John, after having in vain employed gentler means, uttered an anathema against him. On this, the duke’s brother, Athanasius, bishop of Naples, took on himself the execution of the sentence, seized Sergius, put out his eyes, and sent him to the pope, who requited the bishop with a profusion of thanks and commendations, quoting the texts of Scripture which enjoin a preference of the Saviour over the dearest natural affections. Athanasius now annexed the dukedom to his spiritual office. But he soon discovered that he was unable to cope with the Saracens, whereupon he allied himself with them, harassed the pope after the same fashion as his brother, and obliged John to buy him off with a large sum of money, in consideration of which he promised to break off his connection with the infidels. But the promise was not fulfilled, and the pope, with a Roman synod, uttered an anathema against the duke-bishop. Beset and continually annoyed as he was by such enemies, John implored the emperor to come to his assistance, and Charles was disposed to comply with the entreaty; but the unwillingness of the Frank chiefs to consent to such an expedition may be inferred from the heavy price which the emperor paid for their concurrence, by allowing the office of his counts to be converted into an hereditary dignity at the council of Quiercy in 887. The pope, on being informed of his protector’s approach, set out to meet him, and on the way held a council at Ravenna, where he passed some canons by which, in accordance with the pseudo-Isidorian principles, the power of bishops was exalted, while that of metropolitans was depressed. He met the emperor at Vercelli, and proceeded in his company to Tortona, where Richildis, the wife of Charles, was crowned as empress. But the emperor, instead of prosecuting his expedition, retired before the advancing force of Carloman, the son and successor of Lewis the German; and he died in a hut on the pass of Mont Cenis. The concessions which this prince had made both to Rome and to his nobles had greatly weakened the power of the Frankish crown, and the policy which he had lately followed in ecclesiastical affairs was very dangerous to the rights of the national church. Yet although, for the sake of his private objects, he had in his latter days behaved with much obsequiousness to the pope, it is clear that he had no intention of allowing the principles of the decretals to be established in their fullness within his dominions north of the Alps.

After the death of Charles, the empire was vacant until 884. The pope, finding himself continually annoyed by Lambert, marquis of Spoleto, and other partisans of the German Carolingians,0 declared his intention of seeking aid in France, and, after some forcible detention, which he avenged by anathemas against Lambert and Adalbert of Tuscany, he had embarked on board ship, and landed at Genoa. The reception which he at first met with in France was not encouraging. He had offended the clergy by his attempts against the national church, and especially by the commission to Ansegis; while all classes were irritated on account of the costly and fruitless expedition which he had induced their late sovereign to undertake. John wrote letters to all the Frankish princes, urgently summoning them and their bishops to attend a council at Troyes; but the bishops of Gaul only appeared, and the only sovereign present was the king of France, Lewis the Stammerer, who was crowned anew by the pope, although, in consequence of an irregularity in his marriage, he was unable to obtain that the queen should be included in the coronation. At Troyes, as at Ravenna, John proposed and passed some canons which raised the episcopal privileges to a height before unknown, and he dealt about anathemas with his usual profusion. The bishops joined with him in condemning Adalbert, Lambert, and his other Italian enemies, and in return obtained from him a sentence against the invaders of their own property. But they resolutely stood out for their national rights, insisting on the Sardican canon which limited the power of the Roman see as to appeals, and on those ancient laws of the church which forbade translations such as that of Frotair. And when the pope produced a grant of Charles the Bald, bestowing the abbey of St. Denys on the Roman see, they met him with a positive denial that the king could alienate the possessions of the crown.

John was greatly provoked by Hincmar’s steady resistance to the pretensions of Rome; and some of the archbishop’s enemies now took advantage of this feeling to annoy him by bringing forward his nephew, who, after having been imprisoned and banished, had at last been blinded by order of Charles on account of his connection with an invasion from the side of Germany. The unfortunate man was led into the place of assembly, and petitioned for a restoration to his see. But the pope, besides that he may have been afraid to venture on a step so offensive to the metropolitan of Reims, was restrained by the circumstance that he had confirmed the deposition of the younger Hincmar, and had consecrated his successor, Hildenulf. He therefore only in so far favoured the petition as to give the deposed bishop leave to sing mass, and to assign him a pension out of the revenues of Laon, while he refused to accept the resignation of Hildenulf, who alleged that his health disqualified him for the performance of his duties. The enemies of the elder Hincmar, however, were resolved to make the most of the matter as a triumph over him; they arrayed the blind man in episcopal robes, and, after having with great ceremony presented him to the pope, led him into the cathedral, where he bestowed his benediction on the peopled. It does not appear what answer the pope obtained to his request for assistance; but it is certain that no assistance was sent.

John had conceived the idea of carrying his claim to the power of bestowing the empire yet further by choosing a person whose elevation should be manifestly due to the papal favour alone—Boso, viceroy of Provence, who had gained his friendship on occasion of his visit to France. The project, however, was found impossible, nor was the pope more successful in an attempt to secure the kingdom of Italy for his candidate. But, on the death of Lewis the Stammerer, Boso was chosen by a party of bishops and nobles as king of Provence, which was then revived as a distinct sovereignty; and it would seem that a belief of the pope’s support contributed to his election, although John soon after wrote to the archbishop of Vienne, reproving him for having used the authority of Rome in behalf of Boso, whom the pope denounces as a disturber of the kingdom. John died in December 882; it is said that some of his own relations administered poison to him, and, finding that it did not work speedily, knocked out his brains with a mallet.

In the same month died the great champion of the Frankish church. Towards the end of his life Hincmar had had a serious dispute with Lewis III as to the appointment of a bishop to Beauvais. In answer to the king’s profession of contempt for a subject who attempted to interfere with his honour, the archbishop used very strong language as to the relations of the episcopal and the royal powers. He tells him that bishops may ordain kings, but kings cannot consecrate bishops; and that the successors of the apostles must not be spoken of as subjects. “As the Lord said, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you’, so may I say in my degree, ‘You have not chosen me to the prelacy of the church, but I, with my colleagues and the other faithful ones of God, have chosen you to be governor of the kingdom, under the condition of duly keeping the laws’.” Hincmar was at length compelled to leave his city by the approach of a devastating force of Northmen. He set out m a litter, carrying with him the relics of St. Remigius, and died at Epernay, on the 21st of December. The Annals of St. Bertin, which are the most valuable record of the period, are supposed to have been written by him from the year 861 to within a month of his death.

The first and second successors of John in the papacy, Marinus (A.D. 882) and Adrian III. (A.D. 884), appear to have been chosen without the imperial licence, and by means of the German interests. On the death of Adrian, which took place as he was on his way to Germany in 885, Stephen V was consecrated without any application for the consent of the emperor, Charles the Fat; but Charles expressed great indignation at the omission, and had already taken measures for deposing the pope, when a Roman legate arrived at the imperial court, and succeeded in appeasing him by exhibiting a long list of bishops, clergy, and nobles who had shared in the election.

Charles the Fat, a younger son of Lewis the German, had received the imperial crown from John VIII in 881, and, by the deaths of other princes, had gradually become master of the whole Carolingian empire. But his reign was disastrous; in 887 he was deposed by Arnulf, an illegitimate son of his brother Carloman; and, after having been supported for some months by alms, he died in the following year—whether of disease or by violence is uncertain. The popular feeling as to this unfortunate prince, the last legitimate descendant of Charlemagne, may be inferred from the tone in which he is spoken of by the annalists of the time. They tenderly dwell on his virtues and amiable qualities; they express a trust that the sufferings which he patiently bore in this world may be found to have prepared his way to a better inheritance; it is even said that at his death heaven was seen to open, and to receive his soul.

READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH FROM THE APOSTOLIC AGE TO THE REFORMATION A.D. 64-1517