BOOK VII.

FROM THE ELECTION OF INNOCENT III TO THE DEATH OF BONIFACE VIII, A.D. 1198-1303.

 

CHAPTER II.

FROM THE ELECTION OF POPE HONORIUS III TO THE DEATH OF INNOCENT IV. A.D. 1216-1254

1

HONORIUS III AND FREDERICK II

 

THE successor of Innocent, Cencio Savelli, who was elected at Perugia on the 18th of July 1216, and took the name of Honorius III, was a man of mild and gentle character. He was bent on carrying out the project of a crusade, and within a few days after his election he issued a letter inviting the Christians of the west to take arms in the holy cause. No one who had bound himself by the crusading vow was allowed to excuse himself; but those who, being unable to undertake the expedition in person, should aid it by furnishing substitutes or money, were to share in the privileges of crusaders. The pope earnestly exhorted that all feuds and discords should be laid aside; and he strongly insisted on the necessity of concerted action as being more effective than isolated efforts. But it was found that a general apathy had succeeded to the enthusiasm with which such enterprises had once been hailed. The collection of money went on slowly, and not without suspicion as to the truth of the professed object; while the enlistment of men was yet slower. Many of the clergy refused to pay their contribution of a twentieth; the pope found it necessary to arm the collectors with additional powers, to repeat his exhortations again and again, to rebuke the supineness of his flock, and to threaten them with the censures of the church. In one of his letters he quotes by way of incitement an assurance from the grand-master of the templars that Mahometanism was in a state of unexampled weakness, that it was daily declining, and that now was the time to strike. The war against the heretics of southern France was still allowed to count in some degree as an equivalent for the war of the Holy Land; but Honorius refused to extend a like privilege to a crusade against the heathens of Prussia.

From the greater sovereigns of Europe no personal service was to be obtained for the projected holy war. Philip of France was not to be drawn into a second expedition to the east. Henry of England was a child; and the elect emperor Frederick, although he had taken the cross at Aix-la-Chapelle with an enthusiasm which at the time was probably sincere, was unable to leave Europe so long as his rival Otho yet lived, and as the state of his dominions on both sides of the Alps was in other respects unsettled. It was therefore in vain that Honorius urged him by repeated applications to the fullfillment of his crusading vow. The Latin empire of Constantinople was miserably weak. On the death of the second emperor, Henry, in 1216, Peter of Courtenay, count of Auxerre, was chosen as his successor, and on the 9th of April in the following year he was crowned by the pope in the basilica of St. Laurence, near Rome, as the Romans would not allow the ceremony to be performed within the walls, lest it should be construed as bestowing any sovereignty over their city. But, having been treacherously invited to take his way to Constanti­nople through Epirus, he was seized by the lord of that country, Theodore, and committed to prison, in which he died. The elder of his sons declined the Byzantine crown; the younger, Robert, who accepted it, degraded the empire by his stupidity and indolence, his cowardice and his dissolute life. The Greek and the Latin clergy continued to quarrel with unabated vehemence. The Frank laity refused to pay dues to their clergy, and resisted all attempts to enforce ecclesiastical discipline; the monastic communities boldly defied their bishops; while the patriarch, although unable to control his own flock, provoked the pope by claiming not only independence of the Roman see but equality with it, and the territory of the empire was continually diminishing through the successes of the Greek princes who had established themselves on its borders, both in Asia and in Europe. From Constantinople, therefore, it was certain that no help was to be obtained for the recovery of the Holy Land.

In 1217 Andrew II, king of Hungary, made his way by Cyprus to Acre, where a large force, including many German princes and prelates, was already assembled. But there was much discord and disorder among the host; and King Andrew, alarmed by the sickness and death of many around him, hastened to return home, in defiance of the ecclesiastical censures which were threatened, and after his departure were pronounced, by the patriarch of Jerusalem. From Cologne and the lower Rhine an expedition set out in three hundred vessels—in consequence, it is said, of the appearance of fiery crosses and other portentous signs in the sky. Some of these crusaders, on landing at Lisbon, yielded to the request of Alfonso II of Portugal, that they would assist him against the Saracens; and, after having gained a victory for their ally, a part of them entreated the pope that they might be allowed to remain a year for further service of the same kind. But Honorius replied that they had done enough for Spain, and at his command they proceeded to Acre.

Agreeably to the design of the Lateran council, the chief force of the crusaders sailed for Egypt, under the command of John, a brother of Walter of Brienne, and, like him, a brave and skillful warrior. John had married in 1210 Iolanthe, the daughter of Sibylla by Conrad of Montferrat, and by her had become the father of a daughter of the same name. The elder Iolanthe had died in 1212; and in right of her and of her daughter John of Brienne claimed the kingdom of Jerusalem. Among the other chiefs were the duke of Austria, the patriarch of Jerusalem, cardinal Robert Curzon, and a Portuguese ecclesiastic named Pelagius, who bore the commission of papal legate.  The first object of attack was Damietta, which, after a siege which detained them sixteen months, fell into the hands of the crusaders. The inhabitants had been so much reduced by famine, pestilence, and the sword, that out of 80,000 only 3000 wretches are said to have remained alive; the air was tainted by the smell of corpses—some of which were partly eaten by the miserable survivors; yet even in the midst of these horrors the captors could not restrain their cruelty and rapacity. The report of this conquest was received in Europe with exultation, and afforded the pope a fresh ground for exhorting to the crusade; but it was not followed by any further successes. The army became enervated and demoral­ized. King John and the legate quarrelled, and John for a time withdrew from the expedition to prosecute a claim in right of his second wife to the kingdom of Armenia. After his return, the crusaders, 1220. who had been reinforced by fresh arrivals, advanced towards Cairo, but found their way barred by an overwhelming force of infidels, and began to fall back towards Damietta. The legate by his obstinacy prevented the acceptance of favourable terms offered by the sultan, Malek al Kameel; and the crusaders were soon reduced to great distress. Many of them perished by pestilence, many by the sword, many were carried away by the opening of a sluice which let loose on them the waters of the Nile; their vessels were in great part destroyed by the enemy; and at length they were fain to accept a truce for eight years, by which Damietta was to be relinquished, unless in the meantime some sovereign of the west should take up the crusade. The prisoners on both sides were to be surrendered, and the sultan promised to give up the true cross, “not, however, that which had been lost at Tiberias”. The sultan behaved with great humanity to the crusaders, supplying provisions to those of them who were in want.

The pope was greatly distressed by the failure of this expedition, in which it is supposed that 35,000 Christians, and perhaps twice that number of Mussulmans had perished. He endeavoured to stir up Frederick, who had contributed to it by sending some ships, which arrived too late, and were unable to ascend the Nile; he attributed to him the disastrous result, and told him that all men blamed him for having caused it by his delay in the fullfillment of his vow.

Frederick had now been delivered from the fear of Otho, who died in May 1218, having, on his death-bed, expressed great contrition, and according to some writers having even submitted to flagellation, as a condition of absolution and of reconciliation with the church. But Frederick still had other causes to detain him from the crusade. He was bent on procuring the election of his son Henry as king of Germany, and for this purpose he endeavoured to conciliate the princes, both lay and spiritual, by concessions which in the event rendered them independent of the imperial authority. He relinquished the jus exuviarum, with all claim to the income of vacant sees, pledged himself to allow freedom of canonical election, and promised that sentences of excommunication, if not relaxed within six weeks, should be enforced by secular outlawry. Under the influence of these grants, the election of Henry was carried at Frankfort; but Honorius objected to it as a step towards that union of the German with the Sicilian crown which Frederick had promised that he would never attempt. In answer to his remon­strances, Frederick declared that the election had been the spontaneous act of the Germans; that the object of it was not to unite the crowns, but to provide for good administration during his own intended absence; and that, if he were to die, he would rather bequeath the kingdom of Sicily to the papacy than to the empire. The value of these professions has been variously estimated by writers in later times; but it seems hardly possible to believe that the emperor was sincere.

In September 1220 Frederick again crossed the Alps into Italy. Eight years had elapsed since the last appearance of a German force in that country; and in the meantime the feuds of Lombardy had been carried on with their usual bitterness. The Milanese, in consequence of neglecting the pope’s exhortations to peace, had been laid under an interdict, and had retaliated by measures which resembled the ecclesiastical censures as nearly as possible. The podestà had placed the archbishop under ban. At Parma and elsewhere the clergy were shut out from the benefits of the law; it was forbidden to do them any service, such as shaving them or baking for them; and it was decreed that any person who on his death-bed should be reconciled to the church should be buried in a dunghill. At length, a sort of peace was negotiated by cardinal Ugolino (afterwards Gregory IX), but discords still continued, and the authority both of the pope and of the emperor was unheeded.

Frederick wished to receive the iron crown of Italy at Monza; but the Milanese, in whose hands it was, refused to allow the use of it, and were therefore placed under the ban of the empire. Frederick, as he advanced towards Rome, held communications with Honorius, whom he endeavoured to propitiate; and on St. Cecilia’s day he received the imperial crown from the pope’s hands in St. Peter’s. The splendid ceremony was attended with great demonstrations of joy, and even the Romans appeared for the time to be contents  Frederick again took the cross from Honorius or from the bishop of Ostia; and in all respects he appeared desirous to gratify the pontiff. The territories of the countess Matilda were made over to the holy see, under pain of outlawry for all who should detain any part of them. Laws were enacted for the liberty of the church and of ecclesiastical persons; for the exemption of the clergy from taxes and from secular jurisdiction; for the enforcement of ecclesiastical censures by civil penalties; for the severe punishment of heretics, and of any who should show them favour or indulgence.

From Rome the emperor proceeded into southern Italy. The guardianship of Innocent had not been favourable to the crown, and during the civil distractions of Frederick’s minority, and in the years which had passed since he left his native kingdom at eighteen, pretensions had been set up which, if admitted, must have reduced the sovereign to utter impotence. Frederick set to work with vigour for the recovery and assertion of his rights. He compelled many persons who had got into their hands castles and lands belonging to the crown—among them, some relations of the late pope—to surrender these possessions. He claimed a share in the appointment of bishops; and he taxed all orders of the hierarchy for the maintenance of his armies. In consequence of these measures a correspondence with Rome began, and soon assumed an angry tone on both sides.

Again and again the pope urged the emperor to fulfill his crusading vow; but Frederick, although he sent forth letters in behalf of the enterprise, continually ad­vanced excuses grounded on the difficulties with which he had to contend at home. The two met at Veroli and at Ferentino in the following March. At Ferentino, where John of Brienne, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and the grand-master of the templars, were also present, it was resolved that Frederick, who had lately become a widower, should marry Iolanthe, the beautiful daughter of John and heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem—a match which was intended to bind the emperor more closely to the cause of the crusade. All agreed that it would be useless and mischievous to at­tempt the holy war without sufficient means, and it was resolved that the expedition should be deferred for two years, during which Frederick was to employ himself in the settlement of his dominions, while king John, with the grand-masters of the Temple and of the Teutonic order, was to visit the chief kingdoms of the west for the purpose of exciting them to the crusade. But although the titular king was received with honour, he and his associates found that in France, in England, and in Germany their cause was regarded with coolness; and John was obliged to report to the pope that the publication of the crusade was unsuccessful—a result which he mainly ascribed to the faults of the friars and others who preached it. Philip Augustus, who died in 1223, bequeathed 100,000 livres for the holy war; but it appears that this sum was never fully paid, and his successor, Lewis VIII, instead of prolonging his truce with England, plunged afresh into war, which called forth remonstrances from the pope. In no long time differences arose between John of Brienne and his imperial son-in-law. Frederick, immediately after his marriage, which was celebrated in November 1225, assumed the title of king of Jerusalem, declaring that it no longer belonged to John, who had held it only as husband of the elder Iolanthe, and afterwards as guardian of her daughter; to which John replied by calling Frederick the son of a butcher, and by charges of infidelity and neglect towards his bride.

The pope and the emperor met again at San Germano in July 1225, and a new compact was concluded. Frederick was released from the vow which he had made at Veroli, and he now bound himself to go on the crusade within two years from the following August, to furnish a certain number of ships and of soldiers, and to advance certain sums of money, which were to be repaid on his setting out for the East. He consented that, if he should fail in any respect, the Roman church should have full leave to pronounce its censures on him; but it was stipulated that he should be absolved immediately on redressing any wrong which he might have done. But, although there is no reason for supposing that Frederick wished to evade his engagements, the circumstances of his dominions continued to prevent the fullfillment of them. Engelbert, archbishop of Cologne, whom he had left as regent of Germany and guardian of his son Henry, was assassinated in June 1225 by one of his own kinsmen, whom he had deprived of the advocateship of a monastery on account of misconduct in the exercise of it. In 1226, when the emperor was expected in northern Italy, the Lombards at a great meeting renewed their league. His summons to a council at Cremona was unheeded, and, while he claimed the rights which had been secured for the empire by the treaty of Constance, the Lombards refused to supply him with provisions, and guarded the Alpine passes so as to prevent his son Henry from joining him in Italy. For these offences they were placed under the ban of the empire, and a numerous assembly of prelates at Parma, headed by the patriarch of Jerusalem, urged the bishop of Hildesheim, as the pope’s representative, to excommunicate them. The matter was referred by both parties to the pope’s arbitration; but, although Frederick had attempted to conciliate Honorius by yielding to him in a question as to some Apulian bishops, whom the pope had taken it on himself to nominate on the ground that the emperor had forfeited his patronage by delay, Frederick had just reason to complain that the decision in his controversy with the Lombards was substantially unfair to him. An angry correspondence, which had already taken place, was renewed with greater bitterness; and an open breach appeared to be at hand, when Honorius died on the 18th of March 1227.

The anti-imperialist party wished to raise to the papacy count Conrad of Urach, cardinal of Porto, a hereditary enemy of the Swabian house; but Conrad declined the dignity, and Ugolino Conti, a near relation of Innocent III, became pope under the name of Gregory IX. Ugolino had been made a cardinal by Innocent, and had been employed in many weighty affairs, in which he had shown great ability. Frederick himself had characterized him as a man of spotless reputation, eminent for religion and purity of life, for eloquence and learning. He was especially skilled in the canon law, to which (as will be noticed hereafter) he made important additions. His temper was warm and vehement; although he is said to have been already more than eighty years of age, his mental faculties were unimpaired, and he retained even his bodily vigour to an extraordinary degree. Both the papacy and the empire were now represented by able and resolute champions of their respective claims—each inclined to assert to the full the prerogatives which he supposed to belong to his office; and the struggle between the two powers was no longer limited to one or two points, but extended over the whole of their mutual relations.

Frederick’s character had now had time to develop itself, and displayed a remarkable mixture of good and evil qualities, which historians have amused themselves by tracing respectively to his ancestors on both sides. He was at once selfish and generous, placable and cruel, courageous and faithless. While growing up under the tutelage of the Roman see, he had learnt to dislike and to distrust it; he thought that Innocent, as his guardian, had allowed his rights to be invaded, not only by the church, but, for the church’s sake, by others, and in his dealings with Rome he employed a craft which he had learnt from Rome itself. His justice is celebrated for the fact that in matters of law the sovereign had no advantage over the subject. Of his religious opinions, it will be enough to say here that, having spent his youth in an island where a mixture of creeds existed side by side under a system of toleration, he had imbibed a spirit of latitude, which tended to render him indifferent to threats of papal censure; indeed it was always a charge against him that he showed undue favour to his Mussulman subjects, and was addicted to oriental habits of life. His personal accomplishments were remarkable; he could speak fluently the languages of all the nations which were reckoned among his subjects—Greek, Latin, Italian, German, French, and Arabic. He was curious in natural history, and delighted in using his friendly relations with eastern princes to form a collection of animals rarely seen in Europe—among them, the elephant, the camel, and the camelopard. A Latin treatise on falconry composed by him, or under his superintendence, is still extant. He cultivated the science of the Arabs, and among the learned men whom his patronage drew to his court was the famous Michael Scott, whom he employed in translating some of Aristotle’s works. He patronized astrology, and it is said that he at once mocked the predictions of his astrologers and entertained a superstitious belief in them. He was distinguished for his love and encouragement of literature; his court was the earliest home of Italian poetry, in which Frederick himself and his chancellor, Peter delle Vigne, were eminent. By birth and early training, the emperor was inclined to prefer the south to the ruder north; his court was the most brilliant in Europe, and its tone was probably determined by the notorious and excessive laxity of morals in which Frederick himself indulged. It is not to be wondered at that Gregory, soon after his election, addressed to the emperor a letter in which, after endeavouring to conciliate him by compliments, he remonstrates with him on the luxury and dissoluteness which prevailed around him, and adds serious warnings, such as a pope might without undue assumption have held himself entitled to address to the lay chief of Christendom, who had grown up under the guardianship of the apostolic see.

With Honorius, the advancement of the crusade had really been his chief purpose; but with Gregory it was subordinate to the exaltation of the papacy, so that the likelihood of a serious collision with the emperor was greatly increased. The pope sent forth a summons to Christendom; but the backwardness and apathy with which his predecessor’s exhortations had been received were still manifested on all sides. Frederick, although for political reasons he was unwilling to leave his dominions, collected men and ships, and on the 8th of September embarked from Brindisi. But a pestilence broke out which carried off many of his soldiers; many in alarm forsook the expedition; and the emperor himself, after having been three days at sea, withdrew at Otranto, under the plea of sickness, and repaired to the baths of Puzzuoli. On hearing of this, the pope was violently indignant. On St. Michael's day, at Anagni, he solemnly denounced Frederick excommunicate, in terms of the treaty of San Germano) he recounted the emperor’s dealings with the Roman court—charging him with ingratitude, with having endeavoured by a long series of delays to evade his crusading vows, with having by his negligence caused the failure of the Damietta expedition, with having protracted the later expedition until the heat of the season brought on the pestilence which had wasted the army, with having deserted the holy enterprise under a nugatory pretence of sickness, to return to his habitual indulgence in luxury. It was in vain that Frederick sent some bishops to plead his cause; the pope renewed the excommunication again and again, and required all bishops to publish it. Frederick, by way of reply, sent forth a letter addressed to all who had engaged themselves to the crusade. In this he appealed to God as a witness to his sincerity in desiring to carry out his vow, and to the reality of the sickness which had prevented the fullfillment of his design. The pope, he said, had hindered him by stirring up his enemies, and had spent in maintaining troops against him the money which ought to have been employed in the crusade; he repelled the charges of ingratitude—if Innocent had taken up his cause, it was as a means of opposing Otho. He declared himself to be still resolved on going to the east, and desired his subjects to help him with men and money for the expedition. The emperor’s justification was publicly read in the Capitol at Rome by a famous jurist, Roffrid of Benevento.

On Maundy Thursday the pope again pronounced Frederick excommunicate, declared him to have forfeited the Apulian kingdom, and added an interdict on all places where he might be; but on Easter Monday, as Gregory was engaged in the celebration of mass, the Romans, among whom Frederick had formed a strong party, broke into the church, and, almost with personal violence, drove him from the city to seek a refuge at Perugia. But Gregory, by the help of the mendicant friars, who penetrated into every class of society, had means of spreading his charges and denunciations far more widely than the emperor’s vindication could reach.

Frederick, however, was resolved to prove that he was sincere in his professions as to the crusade.  In the end of June 1228, he again sailed from Brindisi, and, after having visited Cyprus, he landed on the 7th of September at Acre, where he was received with great demonstrations of joy, although the clergy significantly refrained from offering the kiss of peace. To Gregory, this expedition, undertaken by an excommunicated prince, in defiance of ecclesiastical censures and prohibitions, was more offensive than anything that Frederick had yet done; and, instead of aiding the emperor, he determined to thwart him to the utmost of his power. Frederick’s ideas as to the objects which might be effected by a crusade were largely modified by the circumstances of his time from those which had been entertained by earlier crusaders. The vast armaments by which it had formerly been attempted to overwhelm the infidel power were no longer to be raised; nor was the emperor himself, although brave and active, fitted by nature to rival the fame which Richard of England had won by his personal prowess. He felt nothing of the deadly and irreconcilable hostility against the followers of Mahomet which had animated the older crusaders; he had already exchanged presents with the sultan; it seemed to him enough if the main objects of the holy war could be secured by treaty, instead of insisting on the extermination of the enemy. On the other side, too, there was a disposition to treat. Kameel had been alarmed by the reports which reached him from Europe as to formidable preparations, which were, doubtless, exaggerated by fame; he was pressed by rivalries and discords among the professors of his own creed, so that at one time he had even invited Frederick’s assistance; and he believed that, if the emperor could be brought to an accommodation, no fear need be entertained as to the other western powers. Negotiations, therefore, were opened; and on the 18th of February 1229 a treaty was concluded, by which Jerusalem was to be made over to the Christians, with the exception of the Temple, which although open to them, was to remain under the care of the Moslem, who professed to regard it with no less veneration. Nazareth, Bethlehem, Sidon, and other places were also to be given up; prisoners were to be surrendered on both sides; and it was stipulated that the emperor should aid in enforcing the articles in favour of the sultan, if any Frank should attempt to violate them. By this treaty the Christians had gained more than they had for many years ventured to expect as possible. Even the compromise as to the Temple was vindicated by Herman of Salza, master of the Teutonic order, a man whose character was respected by all, as expedient in the circumstances of the case. Kameel was accused by his own people of having yielded too much, and Frederick, in a letter to the pope, took credit for having done important service to the church.

When, however, the emperor had entered Jerusalem in triumph, with the intention of being crowned as king in the right of his late wife (who had died in childbirth while the expedition was preparing to set out), he found that the papal denunciations had stirred up serious difficulties against him.  The claim of right, without election, was in itself obnoxious to the clergy. The patriarch, the templars, and the knights of St. John, were prepared to oppose him in all ways; and, although some persons held that, by having done that for the delay of which he had been excommunicated, he had entitled himself to be regarded as absolved, his more discreet friends, such as Herman of Salza, advised him to respect the censures. Instead, therefore, of receiving the crown from the patriarch with the usual Sunday, solemnities, Frederick took it with his own hands from the altar, and wore it until he reached his throne, from which he addressed the assembled multitude, relating the course of his dealings with the pope, whom, however, he did not charge with any worse fault than that of having misunderstood him. His speech was received with loud applause; but next day the arch­bishop of Caesarea, in the name of the patriarch Gerold, interdicted the city and the holy places—even the Saviour’s sepulchre—on account of the pollution which they had contracted from the emperor's presence. An order was received from the pope, that all Christians should refuse to obey him, and in consequence of this the Genoese and the Pisans held aloof; but Frederick overcame the difficulty by issuing his orders in the name of God and of Christendom. The patriarch industriously supplied the pope with unfavourable reports of the emperor’s behaviour at Jerusalem; he had outraged the clergy and religious orders, he had held friendly intercourse with the infidels; he had received presents of singing and dancing girls from the sultan, and lived like a Mussulman rather than like a Christian; he had used language which showed a disbelief of the Christian faith, and an inclination to the falsehoods of Mahomet. A plot was laid by some templars for surprising him on an expedition to bathe in the Jordan; but he was informed of it by the sultan, and after this and other displays of hostility, he took stringent measures for controlling the religious orders. Again and again the pope renewed his denunciations of Frederick, publishing them everywhere by the agency of the friars, together with the gravest imputations against the emperor’s faith and morals. And the papal forces, headed by John of Brienne and cardinal John of Colonna, invaded the Apulian kingdom.

Frederick, recalled by the tidings of these movements, suddenly returned from the east, and surprised his enemies by landing near Brindisi. The general feeling in his favour was speedily manifested by large desertions from the hostile army; and those who remained true to the pope were reduced by want of pay to plunder churches for the means of support. Herman of Salza and two bishops were sent to the pope, with the offer of advantageous terms of peace; but Gregory obstinately held out, and renewed his anathemas. He attempted to raise all Europe, to collect money from France, England, and against the emperor, and to set up a rival king in Germany; but these attempts met with little response. The general unwillingness to pay money for crusades was exasperated by the object of the crusade which was now proposed; and an opinion was very commonly expressed that Frederick had effected in the east as much as was in his power; that he was not deserving of anathema and deposition for having imitated Richard of England and Philip of France in treating with the infidels. The vindications of his conduct which he himself sent forth made a strong impression on the minds of men in general, and the progress of his arms was such as to affect even the stubborn resolution of Gregory. On the other hand, Frederick was willing to pay dearly for reconciliation with the church; and in August 1230 an agreement was effected at Ceperano, by which he was released from ecclesiastical censures, on condition of submitting to the church as to all the matters for which he had incurred his excommunication, and of paying a large sum to the pope by way of compensation for his expenses. Immediately after his absolution, Frederick visited the pope at Anagni, and both parties in their letters express great satisfaction as to their intercourse on this occasion.

An interval of peace between the papacy and the empire followed. In November 1230, the Romans, alarmed by a great inundation of the Tiber, and by a pestilence which followed on it, entreated Gregory to return from Perugia. In 1232, however, he found himself obliged to request the emperor’s assistance against his subjects, when Frederick excused himself on the ground that he was engrossed by the affairs of Sicily; and in answer to the pope’s repeated urgency that the crusade should be renewed, he declared that, so long as heresy was rampant among the Italians, especially among the Milanese (the pope’s own allies)—it would be absurd to go in search of mote distant enemies of Christ. But, notwithstanding these and other differences, the relations of the two powers were on the whole peaceable; and when the pope, after having been recalled in i233, had been again expelled by the Romans in 1234, he was restored by the arms of Fredericks

During this time of peace both Frederick and Gregory engaged in the work of legislation. The code which the emperor promulgated for Sicily was intended to harmonize and to supersede the various systems of law which had been introduced into that island by its successive masters—Greeks, Romans, Goths, Lombards, Normans, and Germans—and the chief author of it was Peter delle Vigne (or de Vineis), a native of Capua, who had raised himself from the condition of a mendicant scholar to the chief place in Frederick’s confidence and in the adminis­tration of his government.  In this code, which was published at Melfi in 1231, the temporalities of the church were secured to it, although Frederick in his later days did not always respect them; but care was taken to control the pretensions of the hierarchy. They were subject to taxation and to the judgment of secular courts, nor had they any exclusive jurisdiction except in matrimonial causes. Appeals to the pope were not allowed except in matters purely spiritual, and were altogether forbidden if the sovereign and the pope should be at variance. The sale of land to the clergy was prohibited, on the ground that they declined the feudal duties attached to the possession of it; and it was enacted that, if land were bestowed on them, they should either sell it or provide for the discharge of the feudal services. It was declared that the king might legitimatize the children of a clergyman—a remarkable proof of the extent to which marriage prevailed among the clergy. Gregory vehemently remonstrated against the principles embodied in this code as to the relations of church and state; but the emperor replied that his power of legislation was independent of any other authority, and the difference would have been carried further, but that at that very time the pope was driven from Rome by his people.

On his own side, and in remarkable contrast with the imperial legislation, Gregory, who had been noted for his skill in canon law, put forth a body of Decretals, in which the principles of Hildebrand and Innocent III were carried to their greatest height. According to this code, the clergy were to be wholly exempt from taxes and from secular judgment; all secular law was to be subordinate to the law of the church; and the secular power was bound to carry out obediently the church's judgments. There was, however, one subject as to which the rival systems of law were in accordance with each other. While Gregory was severe in his enactments against heresy, Frederick was no less so—declaring heresy to be worse than treason, and in this and his other legislation condemning heretics to be burnt, or, at least, to have their tongues cut out, while he denounced heavy penalties against all who should harbor or encourage them. In explanation of such laws, it has been supposed that the emperor wished to benefit his own reputation for orthodoxy at the expense of others; and that, as they were chiefly directed against the sectaries of Lombardy, he regarded the religious errors of these as connected with the political disaffection which prevailed in the same province.

While Frederick, induced alike by natural inclination and by the political expediency of remaining on the scene where the contest with his chief opponent was to be waged, continued to reside in his southern kingdom, his son Henry, whom he had left in Germany, was persuaded to listen to counsellors who dwelt on the grievances of his dependent and subordinate condition, and on the dishonour done to Germany by the emperor’s preference of Apulia and Sicily. In the end of 1234, Frederick was startled by intelligence that Henry had allied himself with the cities of Lombardy, and had set up the standard of rebellion.  At Easter 1235, after having restored the pope to Rome, he set out for Germany, where he put down the rebellion without difficulty, and, on Henry’s submission, admitted him to forgiveness. It has been supposed that the pope was concerned in instigating this rebellion; but, as Frederick, in the most unmeasured of the manifestoes which he issued in their later quarrels, never taxed him with any share in it, there can be no reasonable doubt that the strong disapproval which Gregory pronounced against Henry’s courses—even authorizing bishops to excommunicate him if he should not surrender—was sincere. During this visit to Germany, the emperor strengthened his family alliances by marrying,  July 15, at Worms, Isabella, the beautiful sister of the king of England—a match which appears to have been suggested by the pope; and he took part in the translation of the body of St. Elizabeth, widow of the landgrave of Thuringia, which was performed with great solemnity at Marburg in the presence of a vast concourse of people.

The reconciliation with Henry did not last long; the prince, by breaking his engagements, provoked his father to severer measures, and, after having been confined successively in several fortresses of southern Italy, threw himself from his horse, while on his way from one prison to another, and died in consequence of the fall.

For some years the emperor’s relations with the Lombards had been uneasy. On his summoning a diet to Ravenna in 1231, they repeated their conduct as to the diet of Cremona—absenting themselves from the meeting, and preventing Henry (who was yet faithful to his father) from joining him with the princes of Germany. Gregory, like his predecessor Honorius, had been accepted by both parties as arbiter of their differences; but, while his decision was not satisfactory to the Lombards, Frederick, not without reason, complained of it as too favorable to them. The Lombards, although divided among themselves by furious enmities of city against city, and of faction against faction within the cities, renewed their league in 1235, advancing claims beyond those which had been conceded by the treaty of Constance; and in the following year Frederick resolved on war, for which he adroitly assigned as a motive the desire to put down the heresy which was rife in Milan and throughout the north of Italy. While engaged in the siege of Mantua, he addressed to the pope a long letter in refutation of the charges which were brought against him; but Gregory continued to insist on them, blaming him for his cruel treatment of monks and friars, for his invasions of the church’s property, and his aggressions on her rights, and holding up, by way of contrast, the devout submission of Constantine, Charlemagne, and other pious emperors.

Frederick’s arms were everywhere triumphant. In the midst of his successes against the Lombards, he was recalled to Germany in the winter of 1236, by the tidings that duke Frederick of Austria had attacked and defeated an imperial army; but the duke was speedily put down; his capital, Vienna, gladly received the conqueror; and in that city the emperor was able to procure from the assembled princes the election of  Conrad, his son by the daughter of John of Brienne, as king of the Romans in the room of Henry. The choice was soon after confirmed at Spires; and in November 1237 Frederick’s prosperity was  crowned, at the battle of Corte Nuova, by a victory so signal that it seemed to compensate the imperial power for the loss of Legnano in a former generation. The Lombards, after having obstinately defended until nightfall the carroccio which bore the standard of Milan, withdrew from the field with heavy loss, and the car itself fell into the hands of Frederick, who, after having paraded it triumphantly at Cremona, with the podestà of Milan exhibited on it as a captive, sent it to Rome for the ornament of the Capitol. In Rome itself the emperor’s interest was maintained by partisans who made the pope’s position uneasy, and for a time expelled him. But by the execution of his prisoner, the podestà of Milan, Peter Tiepolo, son of the doge of Venice—although the act had been provoked by some attacks on the part of the Venetians—Frederick drew on himself the especial enmity of the great maritime republic, which was bitterly shown in the sequel.

After having attempted without success to bring Frederick to submission by a mission of some bishops, who were charged to represent to him his offences against the church, and having assured himself of the support of the Genoese and the Venetians, the pope proceeded on Palm Sunday 1239 to pronounce a sentence which was more publicly proclaimed on the following Thursday. In this sentence the emperor's misdeeds were recited—that, in breach of his solemn oaths, he had plotted seditions at Rome against the pope, and had attempted to assail his power; that he had hindered the journeys of papal emissaries and the access of persons who were on their way to the papal court; that he had kept many bishoprics and abbacies vacant, to the great injury of religion; that he had seized, imprisoned, and slain members of the clerical order; that he had occupied territories belonging to the apostolic see; that he had plundered churches and had oppressed the Cistercians, the Templars, and the Hospitallers; that he had prevented the recovery of the Holy Land. For these and other offences he was declared to be excommunicated and anathematized; he was “delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord”; his subjects were released from their allegiance, a curse was laid on every place in which he should be, and all ecclesiastics who should officiate in his presence or hold intercourse with him were deposed. And the pope issued letters by which it was ordered that this sentence should be generally published on Sundays and festivals, with ringing of bells and lighting of candles.

Frederick was keeping Easter with great pomp at Pavia when the news of his excommunication reached him; and he resolved to publish it himself, together with his solemn protest against it. He appeared in the fullest splendour of the imperial attire before a vast multitude, and, after the papal sentence had been read aloud, the chancellor, Peter delle Vigne, made a speech in vindication of his master from all the charges contained in it. The emperor himself then rose and addressed the assembly, declaring that, if the sentence had been pronounced on just grounds, he would have submitted; but that, as it was without any such foundation, he repelled it as a grievance and an insult. He addressed letters to the cardinals, to all Christian princes, and to the people of Rome, recounting the whole history of his dealings with the popes, professing a deep respect for their office, but denouncing Gregory as having wronged him, and offering to justify himself before a general council. He also issued severe orders against such of the clergy and monks as were likely to take part against him. All friars who were “of the land of the unbelievers of Lombardy” were to be expelled from the Sicilian kingdom, and security was to be taken of other friars that they would not offend the emperor. The monks and clergy were heavily taxed. Such of Frederick's clerical subjects as were in the papal court were required to return by a certain day under severe penalties, and it was forbidden under pain of death to introduce any letters from the pope against the emperor. In the following year all Dominicans and Franciscans were compelled to leave the kingdom, except that two, of native birth, were allowed to remain in each of their convents.

The pope met Frederick’s protests by a letter of extraordinary violence, in which he spoke of the emperor as a man utterly false and untrustworthy. He reproaches him with ingratitude to the Roman church, declares the pretext of illness in his first attempt at a crusade to have been untrue, and reflects severely on his administration. But the most remarkable part of this letter was that in which, after having compared Frederick to the apocalyptic beast which rose out of the sea with the name of blasphemy on his forehead, he charged him with having said that the world had been deluded by three impostors, of whom two had died in honour, but the other had been hanged on a tree; and with having ridiculed the idea that the Almighty Creator of the world could have been born of a virgin. The truth of these charges has been vehemently debated. Frederick, educated in Sicily, had grown up in a laxity of religious opinion, which naturally resulted from the extraordinary mixture of races and creeds around him; his views as to many subjects were, no doubt, different from those which were sanctioned by the authority of Rome; and very possibly the stories as to his levity of speech on sacred or serious matters, may have at least some foundation of truth, while it is probable that his constant hos­tilities with popes, and his keen sense of the injustice which he supposed himself to have met with at their hands, may have affected unfavourably his belief in the doctrines which they taught. But that he had come to deny the great verities of the Christian faith, is an accusation advanced by his bitter and unscrupulous enemies, hardly credible in itself, and one which he himself strongly and steadily repelled. In answer to Gregory’s letter, he sent forth one in which he denies the imputations on his faith, and strongly asserts his orthodoxy. He allows the pope’s power of binding and loosing, but says that it has its limits, and if wrongly exercised is null; and he distinguishes between the church and the person of Gregory, whom he attacks with unmeasured vehemence, retorting on him the imagery of the Apocalypse by styling him the great dragon, and that Antichrist of whom the pope had pronounced Frederick himself to be the forerunner. He declared the real cause of the pope’s enmity to be his refusal to sanction the marriage of his illegitimate son Henry or Enzio, king of Sardinia, with one of Gregory’s nieces.

The charge of infidelity, advanced by the successor of St. Peter, would perhaps in other circumstances have been fatal to his opponent. But at this time the minds of men were so violently exasperated by the rapacity of the popes, that they were not disposed to receive with implicit belief such an accusation from such a quarter. This rapacity had been carried far beyond all precedent. In England, the exactions for the crusades, although sanctioned by the feeble Henry III, had caused deep and general disgust, not only among the laity but among the clergy. It was complained that the money collected for the Holy Land disappeared without any result; that the efforts which ought to have been limited to the original sacred purpose of the crusade were prostituted by being turned against the emperor; that although the pope, after having gathered funds for his crusade against the emperor, speedily made peace with him, no part of the contributions had been repaid; that the mendicant friars, who had been the chief agents in raising this money, took state on them, in violation of their professions of evangelical poverty and humility, and spent it freely on themselves. Italians occupied the benefices of the church in vast numbers, and sucked the wealth of the land, while they disregarded all the duties of residence, hospitality, and charity. And in the discontent produced by these grievances, men were struck by the inconsistency of the charge as to placing the three chief religions of the world on the same level of imposture, with that other charge of inclination to the religion of Mahomet which had formerly been brought against Frederick, and was still repeated. The emperor’s manifestoes made a deep impression, and the accusation of infidelity was generally disbelieved.

In France, too, even under the reign of the saintly Lewis IX, the clergy had been provoked by the Roman exactions, and there was a feeling that the pope had proceeded too rashly. It was said that the greatest prince in Christendom ought not to have been excommunicated without a general council; Frederick’s services in the holy war were remembered as a ground for discrediting the imputations against his faith; it was resolved that a mission should be sent to inquire of him directly as to the truth of the matter: and he was believed, when, with tears of anger, he thanked the envoys for having referred the question to himself, and met the charge by an indignant denial.

It was in vain that Gregory endeavoured to stir up opposition in Germany by desiring the electors to choose another king instead of the excommunicated and deposed Frederick; they answered that it was for them to elect, and that the pope had no other part in the matter than to crown the prince whom they had chosen. In Germany, too, the assumption of the papal agents—among whom Albert of Beham, archdeacon of Passau, was the most conspicuous—excited a general spirit of revolt against the authority of Rome, so that even bishops were found to declare that the Roman pontiff had no jurisdiction in Germany except by their consent; to protest loudly against the spirit of aggression and usurpation by which the policy of Rome was directed, and to proclaim their adhesion to Frederick, as the best hope of deliverance from the Roman oppression. The duke of Bavaria wrote to the pope, in April 1241, that the greater part of the German prelates and princes might be expected in autumn to appear in Lombardy for the assist­ance of Frederick; and about the same time Gregory received other letters from Germany, as well as from France and Denmark, entreating him to make peace.

Although the pope exerted himself to the utmost to raise up opposition to the emperor in Italy—even inciting monks and clergy to fight against him as if he were a Saracen—Frederick’s arms made continual progress. In 1240, he had taken Viterbo, and approached the walls of Rome, when the pope, in the extremity of danger, had recourse to extraordinary measures. He held a solemn procession, in which a part of the true cross and the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul were displayed; and, taking the crown from his own head, he placed it on the relics of the apostles, to whom he addressed a prayer that they would defend the city, since the men of Rome hung back from its defence. The people, moved by this and by the force with which Gregory dilated on the emperor’s offences, took the cross with an unanimity which had long been unknown; and Frederick thought it well to pass on into southern Italy, without attempting an assault on Rome. The success of his arms, however, was continued, and among his allies appear some whose names would not have been expected to occur in such a connection. Thus Elias, minister-general of the Franciscan friars—the most effective agents of the papacy—joined the emperor, although it was soon found that the deposition and excommunication with which this step was visited destroyed all his influence in the order. And John Colonna, the pope’s ablest general, and the most important member of the college of cardinals, on being desired by Gregory to break off a truce which he had negotiated, refused. “If you will not obey me”, said Gregory, “I no longer acknowledge you as cardinal”. “Nor do I acknowledge you as pope”, replied Colonna; and he carried over his troops to the emperor.

Gregory had summoned a general council to meet at Easter 1241. At an earlier time, the expedient of a general council had been much in favor with Frederick; but he saw that such a council as was now proposed—an assembly packed by his enemy with persons who had already declared themselves against him—was not likely to do him justice.   He protested that popes had no right to summon general councils without the imperial sanction—especially such a pope as Gregory, who was leagued with the heretical and rebellious Milanese, and used the prelates who were at his beck to overrule the rights of princes who were subject to no earthly judgment. And he also dwelt on other objections —such as that the notice was too short for those who, on account of their distance from the scene of contention, were most likely to be unprejudiced in the quarrel. He endeavoured to persuade sovereigns to restrain their bishops from attending; while the bishops themselves were plied with alarming arguments from the difficulties of the journey, from the emperor's power, which rendered it unsafe to travel without his passport, and from the notorious greed of the Roman court. On hearing, however, that a number of bishops were assembled at Genoa, Frederick offered them a safe passage by land, with the intention of meeting them on their way to Rome, and of setting before them a vindication of his conduct. But the pope’s representatives prevented the acceptance of this offer, and the members of the intended council embarked on board a fleet hired from the republic of Genoa. Off Meloria, a rocky island nearly opposite Leghorn, they were unexpectedly attacked by a combined fleet from Sicily and Pisa, under the command of Frederick’s son, king Enzio, which sank three galleys, and took twenty-two, with many smaller vessels. The number of prisoners amounted to about 3,000, among whom were three papal legates,—one of them, cardinal Otho, laden with the spoils of England—many archbishops and bishops, the abbots of Cluny and Citeaux, and the deputies of the Lombard cities. These were all carried to Naples, and were distributed among the fortresses of Apulia, from which after a time the French bishops were released at the intercession of their sovereign.

Gregory on hearing of this disaster was greatly exas­perated, and sent forth letters in which he vehemently denounced Frederick for having captured the ecclesiastics who were on their way to a general council, after having himself often expressed a wish for such an assembly. The emperor now advanced into the neighbourhood of Rome, and was laying waste all around him, when in his camp at Grotta Ferrata he received the tidings that Gregory had died on the 21st of August—partly, it would seem, from mental agitation, partly in consequence of being confined within the walls of his city during the excessive heats of summer. Frederick professed to see a fitness in the circumstance that August had proved fatal to the enemy of the Augustus, and expressed a hope that a successor of more peaceful character might be found. With some difficulty eight cardinals were brought together in the Septisolium at Rome—some of them having been allowed by Frederick to leave their prison for a time in order to choose a pope. But their votes were divided, and a second election was necessary before they could agree in choosing Gregory Castiglione, bishop of Ostia, a nephew of Urban III. The new pope took the name of Celestine IV; but within eighteen days the papacy was again vacant by his death, and the vacancy was prolonged almost two years by the dissensions of the cardinals among themselves.

 

THE TARTARS IN EUROPE

 

Frederick now felt himself at liberty to turn his attention to an enemy of a different character from the popes with whom he had been long contending. The Mongols or Tartars, after the death of Genghis, the founder of their empire, in 1237, had continued to push their conquests in all directions. In 1226 a vast horde of them, which was believed to extend twenty days’ journey in length, and fifteen in breadth, had over­whelmed Russia; and Europe was alarmed by the reports of their prodigious numbers and of their savage character. They overran Poland without difficulty; but in Silesia they were encountered, near Liegnitz, by a force of Germans under the duke of the country, Henry the Pious. The inequality of numbers—30,000 against 450,000—and the death of the German leader gave the victory to the invaders; but by this resistance western Europe was saved, and the Tartars, instead of advancing further, turned their course into Hungary, where they overcame king Bela IV, and displayed great barbarity and cruelty. While the emperor’s enemies, with the usual extravagance of party-hatred, charged him with having brought this terrible scourge on Christendom, Frederick, in answer to all cries for aid to repel them, had alleged the danger of giving the pope an advantage against him, and the pope had been loudly blamed for detaining him in Italy. But it would seem that the emperor now dispatched Enzio, with such forces as he could spare, to the aid of Conrad in Germany, and thus contributed to the repulse of the barbarians, who, after having been defeated with great slaughter, retreated towards the Volga.

The long vacancy of the papal see was popularly charged on Frederick, who may, indeed, be fairly supposed to have been very willing to see it protracted. The English clergy sent to him a mission of remonstrance on the subject, and the French threatened that, unless a new pope were speedily chosen by the cardinals, they themselves would set up a pope of their own, by virtue of a privilege which the apostolical pope Clement was said to have bestowed on St. Denys the Areopagite. Thus urged from various quarters, the emperor wrote to the cardinals, reproving them for their corruption, ambition, and other faults, complaining that he was defamed on their account, and urging them to proceed to an election. With a view to this, they were released from prison, and were allowed to meet at Anagni; but their factious divisions still continued, and it was not until after Frederick had let his soldiery loose to ravage their estates that they agreed in choosing Sinibald Fiesco, cardinal of St. Laurence in 1243. Sinibald, a noble Genoese of the family of the counts of Lavagna, and eminent for his legal and theological learning, had hitherto adhered to the imperialist politics of his family; but Frederick, when he was congratulated on the result of the election, answered that, instead of having gained a friendly pope, he had lost a friendly cardinal—that no pope could be a Ghibelline. By styling himself Innocent IV, Sinibald seemed to announce a design of following the policy of the great pope who had last borne the name of Innocent; and this design he steadily carried out. In some re­spects his pretensions exceeded those of any among his predecessors; he aimed at a power over the church more despotic than anything before claimed; and the vast host of the mendicant friars, who were wholly devoted to the papacy, enabled him to overawe any members of the hierarchy who might have been disposed to withstand his usurpations. Yet, although he was less violent than Gregory IX, his pride, his rapacity, and the bitterness of his animosity against those who opposed him, excited wide dissatisfaction, and many who were well affected to the papacy were forced to declare that the pope’s quarrels were not necessarily the quarrels of all Christendom.

Frederick, notwithstanding the misgivings which are imputed to him, sent his congratulations to the new pope, and asked for absolution from the censures which, as he said, had been wrongfully pronounced by Gregory; and in a public document he expressed a belief in Innocent’s fitness for his office, and in his zeal for peace and justice. Innocent, on the other hand, from the beginning of his pontificate, encouraged the spreading of rumours discreditable to the emperor, which were busily carried about by the mendicant friars—that he neglected the exercises of religion, that he was unsound in the faith, that he lived with Saracen mistresses, who were guarded in eastern fashion by eunuchs, that he favoured Mahometanism and its professors in all possible ways. These rumours produced no small impression, and about this time events seemed to tend in favour of the pope. Viterbo drove out its  imperialist garrison, and Frederick’s attempts to retake it were baffled by the desperate valour which the inhabitants of all ages and of both sexes displayed in the defence; other defections from the  imperial party followed, and Innocent was received into Rome with great demonstrations of joy. Negotiations were opened between the emperor and the pope, and were protracted until the holy week  of 1244, when a treaty very disadvantageous to Frederick was agreed on.   But as to the fullfillment of this, serious difficulties arose.   As sacrifices and concessions were required on both sides, which party was to begin,—the pope by absolving Frederick, or the emperor by giving up the cities which he had promised to sur­render? Each was inclined to charge the other with bad faith. With a view to a conference, the emperor had advanced to Civita Castellana, and the pope to Sutri; but on the 28th of June, Innocent suddenly disappeared. On hearing of his flight, Frederick exclaimed, “The wicked fleeth when no man pursueth”, and sent 300 Tuscan cavalry after him; but the pope, who was attired in a military disguise, reached Civita Vecchia by outriding all his train, and was received on board a fleet, which he had arranged that his Genoese countrymen should dispatch for his deliverance in case of need. After some danger at sea, he reached his native city, where he was received with great magnificence and with general enthusiasm. The air was filled with the chant “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!” and with the response, “My soul is escaped, even as a bird from the snare of the fowler”. The fugitive was visited by the marquis of Montferrat, by deputies from the Lombard cities, and by envoys of Frederick who urged him to return; but to these last he answered that it was useless to listen to the offers and promises of one who had been guilty of so many deceptions as their master.

Genoa, however, was only to be a temporary resting-place, and, notwithstanding a severe illness which added to the difficulties of the way, the pope crossed the Alps, and continued his journey to Lyons. At Lyons—a city nominally belonging to the imperial kingdom of Burgundy but practically independent under its archbishop, who was his zealous adherent— Innocent found himself safe. But when he made overtures to be invited into other kingdoms, he met with no welcome. Before leaving Genoa, he had been informed of the failure of an attempt on France—that when king Lewis, who was a confrater of the Cistercian order, visited Citeaux at the time of a general chapter, he was implored with great solemnity to allow the Michaelmas pope to settle at Reims, but that by the 1244. advice of the French estates he declined the request. When some cardinals wrote to Henry of England that the pope was desirous to see “the delights of West­minster and the riches of London”, and suggested that the king should invite him, the English cried out that they had been sufficiently pillaged by Rome without entertaining the pope in person; and from Aragon the answer was not more encouraging. About the same time a papal collector was driven from England by the general indignation at his rapacity—the king not daring to protect him; and on his reporting his adventures to the pope, Innocent, smarting at the recollection of the late refusals, exclaimed, that it would be well to make peace with the emperor, “for when the great dragon is crushed or quieted, the little serpents will soon be trodden down”. But although he attempted to open negotiations with Frederick, it soon became apparent that they were hopeless.

From Lyons, in January 1245, Innocent issued citations to a general council, to be held in that city at the feast of St. John the Baptist ensuing, for the consideration of the discord between the emperor and the church, of the danger from the Tartars, and of the differences between the Greek and Latin churches. Frederick was invited to attend, or to send representatives; but in the meantime the pope—in consequence, as he asserted, of fresh offences—renewed his excommunication. This sentence was received with very various feelings; we are told, for instance, of a priest at Paris, who in publishing it declared to his congregation that he did not know the right of the matter, but that one of the parties must have greatly wronged the other; and therefore that he, as far as he had power, excommunicated the guilty person, and absolved him who had suffered wrong. After a preliminary meeting in the monastic church of St. Just, the council assembled in the Cathedral on St. Peter’s eve. It was attended by the Latin emperor of Constantinople, by the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, and Aquileia, and by a hundred and forty archbishops and bishops, of whom the archbishop of Palermo was almost the only prelate from the emperor's dominions. But Frederick, although he considered the synod to be unfairly composed, felt that, as he had often expressed a desire for a general council, he ought not to be unrepresented in it, and, in addition to the archbishop, had sent some envoys, headed by Thaddeus of Sessa, a doctor of laws and judge of the sacred palace—a man of eloquence, prudence, and courage, eminent both in council and in war. At the outset, a disturbance was caused by the attempt of the patriarch of Aquileia to seat himself as an equal with the eastern patriarchs; but at their remonstrance his seat was thrown down, although the pope afterwards allowed it to be re-erected.

After the council had been opened with the usual solemnities, the patriarch of Constantinople brought forward the dangers and difficulties which beset his church and the Latin power in the east. The English bishops next urged the canonization of their late primate Edmund; but the pope allowed both these subjects to pass without any satisfactory reply. Thaddeus of Sessa then rose, and, after apologizing for the emperor’s absence on the ground of sickness, offered in his name peace with the church, restoration of the Latin empire in the east, aid against the Mongols, deliverance of the Holy Land, and satisfaction for all offences and aggressions against the church. The pope admitted that these promises sounded fairly, but asked who would be sureties for the performance of them. “The kings of France and England”, answered Thaddeus. “Then”, rejoined the pope, “if he fail, I shall have three enemies instead of one”

The second session, four days later, was opened by the pope with a speech in which he allegorized the Saviour’s five wounds as figuring the present dangers of the church—the Tartars, the schism of the Greeks, the heresies of the patarines and others, the state of the Holy Land, and the enmity of the emperor. The falsehood of Frederick’s pretence that his quarrel was not with the papacy but with individual holders of it, was (he said) sufficiently proved by his proceedings during the vacancy of the see. He enlarged on Frederick's misdeeds—the favour which he showed to Saracens, his entertainment of Saracen mistresses with their attendant eunuchs, the bestowal of his daughter on the heretical Greek Vatatzes, and the like; yet amid all this invective it is remarkable that there was no mention of the old charge as to the “three impostors”. Again Thaddeus of Sessa stood forward, and defended his master at all points, meeting some of the accusations by the evidence of papal letters which he produced. But the pope declared that for his innumerable offences Frederick deserved an ignominious deposition. The intercession of the English envoys was disregarded; but those of France were able to obtain a short delay, and the emperor was invited to appear in person within twelve days—a time hardly sufficient to allow of his compliance. Instead of this, he dispatched Herman of Salza, grand-master of the Teutonic order, the bishop of Freising, and the chancellor Peter delle Vigne to reinforce his representatives who were already at Lyons; but the pope refused to wait even three days for their arrival, and on the 17th of July proceeded to hold the third and last session of the council. At this session the appeal of Thaddeus to a future pope and to a more general and more impartial synod was unheeded. The representatives of England, who interposed by presenting a long list of grievances as to the oppression of their national church by Rome, were put aside by being told that the matter required deliberation. Innocent again vehemently dilated on the emperor's offences—his aggressions on the church, his suspected heresy, his seizure of prelates on their way to a general council, his relapse after a relaxation of former censures, his Saracen connections and habits; and to these charges it was added that he had caused the assassination of his own kinsman the duke of Bavarian For these crimes, it was declared that Frederick was deposed; his subjects were released from their allegiance, and the German princes were desired to choose another king, while the pope reserved the disposal of the Sicilian kingdom for consideration with his cardinals. Again Thaddeus implored that the sentence might be deferred, and the representatives of the English and French kings, with the patriarch of Aquileia, joined their intercessions; while on the other hand Frederick's enemies urged the pope to proceed, and the sentence was solemnly pronounced, with the extinction of candles, and the other symbolical forms provided by the ritual, while the general awe was heightened by the appearance of a meteor which, as the words were uttered, shot across the sky. On hearing the judgment, Thaddeus of Sessa burst out into sighs and tears. “This is a day of wrath!” he exclaimed; “truly the Tartars, the Chorasmians, and the heretics have cause to triumph and exult in what is done”. In the name of their master, he and his companions pro ­tested against it, appealing to a future pope, to a general council, to the princes of Germany, and to all sovereigns, and declaring Frederick's willingness to refer the whole question between himself and the church to the arbitration of king Lewis of France.

Frederick was at Turin when he received the news of his deposition. “Where are my caskets?” he indignantly exclaimed; “let us see whether I have lost my crowns”. Then, taking one of the crowns from its case, he placed it on his head, and, with an air of intense defiance, declared that neither pope nor council should deprive him of his crown except at the cost of a bloody struggle; that he now felt himself released from all obedience, reverence, love, or other duty towards the pope. He issued, accordingly, a protest against the sentence, as being null for many reasons : as contrary to the facts of the case, as pronounced in the absence of the accused, and by a person who had no competent authority, forasmuch as the emperor was the source of all law, and was subject to God alone. And with this protest were combined a vindication of his own orthodoxy, and a vehement attack on the pope for his wealth and luxury, for neglect of pastoral duty, for blood-guiltiness, for his extravagance in building a sumptuous palace at Anagni, while he allowed Jerusalem to be “a bondmaid to dogs and tributary to Saracens”. The pope replied by a letter in which Frederick’s behaviour was compared to that of a sick man who complains that, after having refused milder means of cure, he is subjected to the knife and to cautery, and it was enounced that the Saviour bestowed on St. Peter the kingly as well as the priestly power. The violence of Frederick’s language startled and shocked his contemporaries, who interpreted it as an avowal of an intention to destroy the church; and the effect of the pope’s sentence was partly seen in the refusal of the duke of Austria’s daughter to marry an excommu­nicated emperor. The imperial theory had, indeed, been of late shaken by many things,—among them, by the papal deposition of Otho and by the choice of Frederick in his stead,—nor did the princes of Christendom understand that it was their interest to make common cause with the empire.

In the north of Italy, Frederick began a war which was carried on with extreme bitterness and with a neglect of the ordinary humanities. An eye-witness, Salimbene, tells us that during these hostilities beasts and birds of prey were allowed to multiply unchecked—that wolves howled around the walls of cities, and sometimes were able to find an entrance, when they killed and ate those whom they found asleep under porticoes. In Sicily a revolt was stirred up by papal emissaries, who were authorized to offer the privileges of crusaders to all who should take arms against their sovereign.

Frederick, instead of attempting to strengthen himself by alienating a portion of the clergy from the pope, was tempted by his anger to the unjust and impolitic course of attacking the whole clerical order. He charged them with fattening on the alms which were intended for the relief of the poor, inveighed against them as luxurious, and declared an intention to relieve them of their superfluous wealth. His officials were ordered to exact a third of all their revenues for the support of the imperial cause; and to punish by deprivation and banishment any ecclesiastics who should comply with the pope’s or­ders by refraining from the celebration of religious offices. He declared that there were too many bishoprics and canonries, and among the impieties which the pope charged against him it is stated (probably not without exaggeration) that he kept fifty sees and innumerable parish churches vacant. The mendicant orders, whom he styles the pope’s “evil angels”, were let loose against him, to inflame the people, down to the very lowest, by their unscrupulous denunciations; and he ordered that not only such of them as should be caught in spreading the letters of excommunication and interdict, but any other persons who should carry or receive such letters, should be burnt. On both sides there were charges of intended treachery—that Innocent had employed some members of the emperor’s household to poison him; that Frederick had hired ruffians to assassinate the pope. The accusations against Frederick were strongly denied by him, and are utterly improbable; and although it is very possible that some fanatical monk may have conceived the idea of ridding the world of an excommunicated emperor, it is not to be supposed that the head of the church himself was privy to any such atrocious design. In order to meet the imputations of heresy or unbelief, which he found to be the most dangerous weapons against him, Frederick desired the archbishop of Palermo, with two Dominican friars and some abbots, to examine him as to his religious opinions, and, when they had satisfied themselves of his orthodoxy, to state the result in a paper, which they were to present to the pope. But Innocent, instead of receiving their testimony, rebuked them for having held intercourse with an excommunicate person, and for speaking of him as emperor after his solemn deposition by apostolical authority. He objected to them as partial judges in the matter, and, with reflections on Frederick as untrustworthy, he gave but little encouragement to his offer to appear in person for the purpose of clearing his orthodoxy. The intercession of King Lewis, and the offers which Frederick made through him—to devote the remainder of his days to the war in the Holy Land, if he might secure absolution for himself and the succession to the empire for his son—were also fruitless, and Lewis made no secret of his indignation and disgust at finding this implacable hardness and pride in one whose business it should have been to unite all Christian princes for the defence of their common faith.

In Germany, the pope had great difficulty in finding any one who would allow himself to be set up as king in rivalry to the Hohenstaufen. At length, however, the offer of the crown was accepted, with much unwillingness, by Henry Raspe, landgrave of Thuringia, a brave warrior, but one whose harshness towards his widowed sister-in-law, the saintly Elizabeth of Hungary, had not prepared men to see him chosen as the special champion of the church. The election was May 22, made almost entirely by the great prelates 1246. of the Rhine, while the lay electors in general held aloof, and Henry was derided as the “clergy’s king”. Supported in part by money from the pope, Henry carried on war with Conrad the son of Frederick, whom he defeated near Frankfort in August 1246. But at a later battle near Ulm, in February 1247, the result was reversed; and Henry withdrew to the Wartburg, where he died of shame and grief. The difficulty of finding an opponent to the Hohenstaufen emperor was now even greater than before. After various attempts in other quarters, William count of Holland, a youth of twenty, was chosen by the Rhenish archbishops and some other electors; but the want of support from the princes made his royalty little more than a shadow, although the pope exerted himself to the utmost in his behalf, and commuted the vow of crusaders for the engagement to fight against Frederick. Aix-la-Chapelle refused to admit the new pretender within its walls, and, although laid under interdict by a cardinal, did  not yield until after Frederick's death, when William at length received the German crown in Charlemagne’s minster; but he was still engaged, as before, in a struggle with Frederick’s son and successor Conrad.

In Italy, the war between the emperor and his enemies was carried on with unrelenting ferocity. Early in 1247, king Enzio hanged one of the pope’s relations who had fallen into his hands; and partly in consequence of this provocation, the pope on Good Friday renewed his excommunication of the emperor in a manner which impressed those who were present with more than the ordinary awe. In order to raise money for the expenses of the struggle, Innocent now openly practiced abuses which at another time would have incurred the heaviest reprobation of the church—excessive taxation of ecclesiastical property, sale of indulgences, relaxation of deserved censures, bestowal of sees without canonical election, and the diversion of money intended for the Holy Land to the purposes of his quarrel with the first prince of Christendom.

Frederick was still desirous of peace, and renewed his offers of terms. He had received the submission of the Milanese, whose city he had vowed to destroy, as his grandfather had done, and was on his way to seek a conference with Innocent at Lyons, when he was recalled by the tidings that an insurrection had broken out at Parma. With a view of reducing the place, he built and fortified a town over against it, which, in the confident anticipation of success, he gave the name of Victoria; and it is said that, in order to strike terror into the besieged, he every day beheaded some of his prisoners in their sight  The  siege lasted nearly seven months, and the Parmesans were reduced to great distress;  but their spirit was unbroken, and after solemn prayers, in which all classes and ages joined, a sally was made against Victoria on Frederick’s birthday. The buildings, mainly composed of wood,   were set on fire; and the emperor, who had been engaged in hawking at some distance, found on his return that Victoria was destroyed, that 1500 of his men were slain, and that the Parmesans had carried off 3000 prisoners, with booty of immense value, including crowns, precious jewels, and his imperial seal. But above all he had to lament the deaths of two of his most valuable adherents, the marquis Lancia and Thaddeus of Sessa; Thaddeus, after having lost both his hands in the fight, was taken prisoner, and, in revenge for the supposed crime of having advised his master to measures of severity, was barbarously hacked to pieces,

To the loss of these faithful adherents was soon added the treachery of Frederick’s minister and confidant Peter delle Vigne. Peter had not been able to bear his elevation without provoking complaints of his pride, assumption, and rapacity; and it would seem that his sudden and miserable downfall excited more of terror than of pity. The history which is given of this is mysterious and romantic; yet if we hesitate on this account to accept it, we are left without any explanation of his fate. It is said that Peter had been suspected of treachery in holding intercourse with the pope at the council of Lyons, where he had arrived after the sentence of deposition against his master had been pronounced; yet for three years after that council he retained, outwardly at least, the imperial favour. At last, according to the chroniclers, he caught at an opportunity of carrying out his treacherous designs by recommending a physician to the emperor when sick. Frederick, suspecting evil, desired the physician to taste a potion which he had prescribed for him. The physician affected to stumble, and spilt the greater part of the draught; but the remainder was enough to kill a condemned criminal to whom it was administered. The chancellor was arrested at Cremona, where his life was with difficulty saved from the violence of the exasperated people; his eyes were torn out, and in this miserable state he was, by the emperor's order, paraded through several Italian towns. At length it was announced to him that he was to be given up to the Pisans, whom he regarded as his especial enemies; and on hearing this doom, he pre­vented the execution of it by dashing out his brains against a pillar to which he was chained. Frederick also charged the pope with having instigated his physician to poison him; and in a letter addressed to all princes, he exhorted them to check the ambition of priests who, not content with spiritual power, aimed at engrossing temporal dominion by unscrupulous means.

But of all the calamities which at this time were accu­mulated on the emperor, that which touched him most deeply was the capture of his illegitimate son Enzio, a handsome, brave, and accomplished youth, to whose valour he had been greatly indebted in the contests of the last years. Enzio fell into the hands of the Bolognese, who refused to yield him up either to threats or to offers of ransom. From the age of twenty-four to that of forty-seven he was kept in the palace of the podestà, in a captivity which, although not severe, was strictly guarded and hopeless; and on his death in 1272, he was buried with honour by the Bolognese in the church which contained the body of St. Dominic.

The emperor was sick both in body and in mind. He suspected all men; his temper became more violent than before; and the cruelty which he may be said to have inherited from his father, was more and more displayed in the treatment of such enemies as fell into his hands. His illness was aggravated by a stroke of palsy, and on the thirteenth of December 1250 he died at Castel Fiorentino, in the Capitanata, having directed by his last testament that all the rights of the church should be restored, on condition that the church should restore the rights of the empire. On his death-bed he was reconciled to the church, and received the last sacraments from the hands of the archbishop of Palermo; and, agreeably to the directions of his will, his body was laid beside those of his parents in the cathedral of that city, to which he had left a large bequest.

Of Frederick’s character something has been already said, and little need be here added.  The writers in the papal interest have painted him, as its resolute and persevering enemy, in the darkest colours; yet even they are obliged to admit that he was a man of high talents, of many graces and accomplishments, endowed with an irresistible charm of manner, a patron of learning and of all liberal arts, and that “if he had been a good catholic he would have had few equals among sovereigns”. On the other hand, although there can be little doubt that his religious opinions have been misrepresented by his enemies, it seems certain that he indulged in a dangerous laxity of belief and levity of expression; and the facts of his life bear out in great measure the charges which are made against him, of excessive licentiousness, of cruelty, cunning, treachery, and falsehood. It is said that his favour could not be relied on, but was rather a token of eventual ruin, and that in such cases he did not scruple to employ feigned accusations against his victims; but, if this may seem to be countenanced by the fate of Peter delle Vigne, we must remember that the emperor retained to the last the warm affection and the zealous service of men so highly respected by their contemporaries as Thaddeus of Sessa, Herman of Salza, and Berardo, arch bishop of Palermo.

In his great struggle with the papacy, Frederick, notwithstanding the calamities of his last days, had not to undergo any such humiliation as the appearance of Henry IV before Gregory VII at Canossa, or the submission of his own grandfather Barbarossa to Alexander III; he was not guilty of any such acts of violence as that which Henry V committed in the seizure of pope Paschal; and he avoided the error of setting up an antipope in opposition to the popes who ineffectually declared him to be deposed and charged all Christians to avoid him. He regarded the struggle as one of principle, as involving the rights of all Christian princes and in this he was justified by the extravagant language and by the violent acts of Gregory IX and Innocent IV. In taking up the cause of “the boy of Sicily” as a claimant of the German kingdom and of the empire, Innocent III committed a mistake like that which Henry V of Germany had made as to Adalbert of Mainz, or that which Henry II of England had made in the promotion of Becket. Instead of a pliant tool, the pope and his successors found in Frederick a man who was strongly convinced of the imperial rights and believed them to be incompatible with the pretensions of the papacy. When the knowledge of their mistake had been forced on them, they attempted to hold him to the fullfillment of his crusading vow, in disregard of all his political and personal interests. They throughout treated his excuses, however reasonable, as mere pretences; they thwarted him in his expedition to the Holy Land, misrepresented his proceedings there, invaded his territories while he was engaged in the cause of the cross, employed the most unmeasured calumnies against him, and circulated these by the agency of the friars, which penetrated to all places and to every class of society; and they had recourse to the extreme measures of declaring him excommunicate and deposed, of releasing his subjects from allegiance, and of setting up pretenders to his throne. Whatever, therefore, the faults of Frederick’s character may have been—however he may have erred in some of his measures of resistance to the papal policy—we can hardly refuse him, in the main, our sympathy in his contest with Rome, unless we be prepared to admit a theory which would make all power, both religious and secular, centre in the papacy alone.

Frederick by his will appointed Conrad, his son by Iolanthe, heir both of the empire and of the Sicilian kingdom, and directed that Manfred, the child of a connection with a daughter of the marquis Lancia, should in Conrad’s absence be governor of Sicily and Italy. Innocent wrote to the Germans that, although Herod was dead, Archelaus his son reigned in his stead. He renewed the excommunication of Conrad, and, not content with supporting William of Holland in his pretensions to the crown, endeavoured even to deprive Conrad of the hereditary dukedom of Swabia by declaring that any one was at liberty to seize his lands. A frightful scene of confusion followed, every one being intent on his own selfish objects, with an entire disregard of all patriotic feeling. The primate, Christian of Mainz, was deposed by a legate for refusing to take part in the crusade against the Hohenstaufen, and it was in vain that he appealed to those canons of the church by which ecclesiastics were forbidden to fight.

The pope was bent on setting up a rival to Conrad in the southern kingdom as well as in Germany. After an unsuccessful attempt to make use of Henry, the son of Frederick by his English wife, Isabella, overtures were made to Charles of Anjou, brother of king Lewis of France. But at this time the pope was unpopular with the French, who attributed in part to his implacable enmity against Frederick the disasters which had made their king a captive in the East. The friars who were commissioned to preach a crusade against Conrad were forbidden to exercise their office in France, and the queen-mother, Blanche, is reported to have said that those who served the pope in war ought to be maintained by the pope. Charles of Anjou, therefore, was not as yet ready to accept the offered crown, and Innocent next applied to Richard, earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III, a prince who had won fame as a crusader and was reputed to be very wealthy. But Richard was not to be dazzled by an offer which he declared to be much as if the pope should profess to give him the moon, with leave to climb up and get possession of it for himself. The weak Henry, however, was captivated by the idea of acquiring a new crown for his family, and eagerly closed with, if he did not even solicit, an offer of the Sicilian kingdom for his son Edmund, then only nine years old. He gave the boy the royal title, displayed him before the assembled parliament and elsewhere as king of Sicily, laid heavy taxes on his subjects in order to defray the expenses of the war against Conrad, borrowed money from his brother Richard and from the Jews, and authorized the pope to raise a loan on the security of the English crown.

The pope, on hearing of Frederick’s death, had resolved to return to Italy. He left Lyons on the 16th of April 1251, in company with William of Holland, who had visited him there and, after passing through Genoa and Milan, arrived at Perugia, from whence, after a stay of some months, he removed to Assisi in the spring of 1252. The Romans, in somewhat rude terms, reminded him that he was pope of Rome, not of any provincial town; and in consequence of a second invitation, even less courteous than the first, he returned, apparently in the beginning of 1254, to his own city. But, although he was received with honour, he found much difficulty in appeasing the clamours of his people, who demanded compensation for the losses which they had sustained through the long absence of their sovereign pastor.

Conrad in the meantime crossed the Alps, and made his way by the Adriatic to Siponto, where he was received by Manfred.  It was in vain  that he offered to make peace with the church by giving up to it all that it had ever possessed, and that he attempted to clear himself from the charges which the pope accumulated in reckless profusion against him. His arms, however, had considerable success, and after a siege of four months he was able to reduce the city of Naples, where he  treated his vanquished enemies with a severity which recalled the memory of his father and of his grandfather.  But his career was cut short by death, at the age of twenty-six, on the 20th of May 1254; and as the papal party ascribed the death of his brother Henry, in the preceding year, to Conrad, and that of Conrad to Manfred, so the opposite party attributed both to the machinations of the pope.

Conrad left no other child than a boy of two years old, who bore his father’s name, but is more commonly known by the diminutive Conradin. The guardianship of the young prince had been given to Berthold, marquis of Hohenburg; but Berthold soon found himself in such difficulties that he was fain to request the assistance of Manfred, who reluctantly accepted the regency. On hearing of this, the pope denounced both Berthold and Manfred; he declared the Sicilian kingdom to have lapsed to the Roman church, and would not allow Conradin any other titles than the dukedom of Swabia and the shadowy royalty of Jerusalem. After a time, Manfred appeared to have made a somewhat more favourable impression, so that he was not only released from his excommunication, and allowed to hold the pope's bridle as he crossed the Garigliano, which formed the boundary of the Apulian territory; but Innocent, notwithstanding his own engagements to England, gave him the princi­pality of Taranto, and appointed him lieutenant over some part of the kingdom. But soon after this a noble­man named Borello, who had always been troublesome and insolent to Manfred, was slain through mistake by the prince's soldiers, and Manfred felt himself in the greatest danger, as being held accountable for the act. He offered to undergo an investigation before the pope, on condition of receiving a safe conduct; but no satis­factory answer was returned. Berthold, whether from faithlessness or from timidity, had turned against him, and Manfred’s condition appeared to be desperate if he remained within reach of his enemies. He therefore resolved to save himself by flight, and, after many ad­ventures and dangers, he reached Luceria, which was garrisoned by Saracens and Germans. By these adherents of his family he was received with enthusiasm; the treasures which his predecessors had laid up within the strong fortress supplied him with money, and he soon found himself in a condition to cope with and to overthrow the forces of Berthold and the pope.

Innocent continued his progress towards the south, meeting with a welcome from the people, who were tired of Saracen and German rule, until on the 27th of October he entered Naples. Thus far his policy had been almost everywhere triumphant; but the tidings of Manfred’s victory at Foggia, on the 2nd of December, proved fatal to him, and five days after that battle he died. It is said by a Guelfic chronicler that in his last hours he often repeated the peni­tential words, “Thou, Lord, with rebukes hast chastened man for sin”. A story of different character is told by Matthew Paris—that, as the pope lay on his death-bed, surrounded by his weeping relations, he roused himself to rebuke them by asking “Why do you cry, wretches? Have I not made you all rich?”

At Rome the pope had not been able to establish his temporal government. In 1252 the citizens chose as their senator for three years a Bolognese nobleman of Ghibelline family, named Brancaleone degli Andolò, who by his severe justice, and by the vigour which he showed in demolishing the strongholds of the nobles within the city, reduced it to quietness and order. But his impartiality and strictness gave offence to the great families, by whom he was seized and imprisoned at the expiration of the term for which he had stipulated that his office should last; and he owed his life to the fore­sight with which he had required, before accepting the senatorship, that thirty noble Roman youths should be delivered to the Bolognese as hostages. On his arrest, his wife hurried to Bologna, where the hostages were committed to prison by way of retaliation; and when the pope interdicted Bologna, the citizens, instead of sur­rendering the hostages, replied by imprisoning two of his near relations. After a time Brancaleone was released, and was recalled to Rome, where he resumed the stern policy of his earlier days. It seemed as if the Roman republic were restored in its independence; Brancaleone entered into friendly relations with Manfred, and his strong remonstrances compelled Innocent's successor, Alexander, who had retired to Anagni, to return to the capital. A second overthrow of Brancaleone was followed by a second restoration; and on his death, in 1258, of an illness caught at the siege of Corneto, the Romans showed their veneration for him by enclosing his head in a precious vase, which was placed on the top of a column, and by electing one of his kinsmen in his room.

 

2

ENGLAND—PAPAL EXACTIONS.

 

Henry III of England had been left by his father to the guardianship of the pope and the Roman church; and in his early years the legate, Gualo, although not unmindful of his own interest, discharged this office well, until, in 1218, he was succeeded by Pandulf, then bishop of Norwich. But the kingdom was to pay dearly for the benefits which the papacy had conferred on its sovereign. The exactions of Rome in this age far exceeded anything that had before been known, and England was the country on which they lay heaviest. In addition to the Peter’s pence of former times, and to the tribute promised by the late king, demands of money to a large amount were continually made under pretence of crusades; and monks and clergy joined with the laity in complaining that the sums thus wrung from them were often spent, not on any attempt to deliver the Holy Land from the infidels, but in the quarrels of popes with Christian princes at home. The system of provisions was carried to a great length by Gregory IX, and still further by Innocent IV. It was complained by the English that the benefices possessed by foreigners amounted to 70,000 marks yearly—more than thrice the revenue of the crown; and that these foreign incumbents performed no duties of residence, hospitality, or pastoral care. The legates and other emissaries of the pope very commonly added to the dislike which necessarily attached to their office by their arrogance, ostentation, and personal rapacity;  and the people were fleeced yet more through the arts of the Caursins or money-lenders, who, although their trade was in direct defiance of the church’s canons, now settled in England under the title of “papal merchants”.

The English were not passive under these oppressions, which produced a general disaffection to the papacy. The clergy and the national parliaments often remonstrated; an English deputation, as we have seen, presented a representation of grievances to Innocent at the council of Lyons; and in the following year the bishops of the province of Canterbury sent him an entreaty that he would abstain from continuing a system which the English declared to be more intolerable than death itself. Sometimes the resistance took a more violent form. Messengers from the pope were beaten or killed; foreign ecclesiastics were attacked when travelling, or their houses and granaries were set on fire; and such deeds were traced to an association formed for the purpose, whose proceedings were sup­posed to be even connived at by persons in authority. The chief of this association, who styled himself William Wither, on finding himself hardly pressed, avowed him­self to the king as Robert of Twenge, a Yorkshire knight. He was sent by Henry to Rome, with a representation of the church’s complaints, but was obliged to content himself with the redress of his own especial grievance, the invasion of a parish in his gift by a papal nominee.

The king sometimes took part with his subjects in resisting the oppressions from which they suffered; more commonly he stood helpless between the two parties, or weakly succumbed to the fear of Rome. The popes were indifferent to all the misgovernment of England, whether in church or in state, provided that they could extort money from the people.

The old evil of long vacancies in sees was unabated, and the contests as to the appointment of prelates were frequently renewed. Royal nomination clashed with capitular election, and both were in many cases forced to give way to the papal despotism which conferred the disputed see on a nominee of its own. Thus, when the primacy of Canterbury was vacant in 1231, Gregory IX set aside three persons who had been elected to it in succession, and at last desired the Canterbury monks who had been sent to him as representatives of their brethren, to elect Edmund Rich, treasurer of Sarum. The archbishop thus appointed was an honest and single-minded man, greatly revered for his sanctity and learning; but he soon found himself involved in troubles with the court, with the legate, who overruled his sentences, with the monks of his own cathedral, and with those of Rochester, which rendered his position intolerable. He therefore resolved to carry his difficulties to the pope; but Gregory, although he heard him favourably, was afraid to give him any substantial aid, and Edmund, finding on his return to England that his opponents were too strong for him, withdrew to Pontigny, where his predecessors Thomas Becket and Stephen Langton had formerly found a refuge. After his death, which took place in 1240 pope was requested to canonize him on account of his sanctity, and many miracles were alleged in support of the petition. Some delay was occasioned by the influence of those who had opposed the archbishop during his lifetime; but he was enrolled in the catalogue of saints by Innocent IV in 1246.

The successor of Edmund, chosen by the monks in accordance with the king’s wishes, was Boniface, a young prince of Savoy and uncle of the queen. Boniface, finding his church in debt, made this a pretext for spending the first six years of his archiepiscopate abroad, impoverishing his see while he enriched himself by cutting down the woods on the estates, and, although the pope allowed him to add to the primacy of England the administration of the bishopric of Valence, devoting himself chiefly to warlike occupations. When he reap­peared in England, his arrogance, assumption and violent temper, which were especially displayed in a visitation of his province, produced a general feeling of indignation; and at length, after having gathered all the money that he could collect by dilapidating his see and exhausting its tenants, he withdrew to his native country, where the revenues of the English primacy were spent in maintain­ing the political interests of his family.

Among the English prelates of this time, Robert Grossetete was especially distinguished both for his learning and for his pastoral labours. Grossetete was born in Suffolk about the year 1175, and, after having studied at Oxford and Paris, became bishop of Lincoln in 1235. His acquaintance with the ancient tongues is said to have included not only Greek (which he studied under a native Greek named Nicolas),but Hebrew; and, as in other cases, his learning drew on him from some of his contemporaries the suspicion of magic. In his episcopal office, Grossetete displayed an indefatigable activity, with an earnest and somewhat intolerant zeal for the reformation of his own flock and of the church at large. In him the new orders found a hearty patron; he employed them in his vast diocese, as instruments for reaching those classes which were neglected by the secular clergy; and in the university of Oxford, of which he was chancellor, his favor encouraged them as teachers. Yet the especial principle of these orders was not unreservedly approved by him; for we are told that, after having cried up mendicancy as the highest step of the ladder which leads to heaven, he added privately that there is one step yet higher—namely, to live by the labour of one’s own hands. And it is said that in his last days he strongly reprobated the change by which the friars, instead of being censors of the great, had become their flatterers.

Among the evils against which Grossetete struggled were the rapacity of the Roman court, the abuse of indulgences, the bestowal of patronage on unfit and undeserving persons, the employment of ecclesiastics in secular business; the subjection of the clergy to secular tribunals (for as to this he held the principles of Becket), the admission of persons who were not priests to benefices, the marriage and concubinage of the clergy. He remonstrated very strongly against the presentation of one of the pope’s near relations, a boy who knew nothing of English, to a canonry of Lincoln; and when archbishop Boniface had insisted on testing the fitness of Robert de Passelewe, a favourite of the king, whom the chapter of Chichester had been persuaded to elect as bishop, Grossetete undertook the part of examiner, and set him aside on the ground of ignorance. That a man so impetuous and even imprudent, so zealous, active, fearless and unsparing, should have made many enemies, was natural. He was deeply involved in quarrels with the dean and chapter of his cathedral, who questioned his right of visitation; with monks and clergy, with Templars and Hospitallers, with some of the laity, whose morals he searched into with a scrutiny which Matthew Paris censures as inexpedient, and which was checked by a prohibition from the king. In political affairs, he allied himself with the party opposed to the foreign influence which prevailed at court; he was tutor to the sons of the younger Simon de Montfort, and is said to have counselled the earl that the English church could not be saved except by the material sword. By his opposition to the abuses of the papal system he excited the strong dislike of Innocent, who treated him with slight on his going to Lyons in 1250, and, although miracles were reported in connection with the bishop’s 1253. death, is said to have intended that his body should be cast out of the cathedral, in which it was buried. But Grossetete appeared to the pope by night, arrayed in full pontificals, and, driving his pastoral staff into Innocent’s side, so that he cried out for pain, declared himself to be exempt from his power. After that terrible vision, it is added, the pope never was well again. Yet Grossetete, notwithstanding his violent collisions with the papacy, was not a reformer in the sense of the sixteenth century. He adhered to the strictest ortho­doxy of his time; his views of reformation extended only to the discipline and administration of the church; and, while he did not hesitate to speak of an individual pope as antichrist on account of his blameable actions, he very strongly held a high view of the papacy, from which and through which he considered that all bishops must derive their commission and their spiritual power.

 

3

ALBIGENSIAN WAR.

 

Although the Lateran council had decided against the counts of Toulouse, the younger Raymond was determined to regain, if possible, the territories of which his father had been deprived. On returning from the council, he was received with great enthusiasm at Avignon. A general abhorrence had been excited by the severities of the crusaders; nobles, knights, soldiers, flocked to his standard; even Marseilles, which had never acknowledged the lordship of his family, now offered him its keys. It was in vain that pope Honorius endeavoured to discountenance the enterprise; war was again commenced, and Raymond gained some successes, even against Simon de Montfort himself. Simon, although hardly pressed, resolved to attempt the capture of Toulouse before abandoning the country; and, after having for some time besieged it, he reduced the inhabitants to sue for mercy, which his brother Guy and others advised him to grant. The bishop, Fulk, entered the city, and persuaded the people to go out to the besieger’s camp in the hope of appeasing his anger; but one party after another, as they reached the camp, were seized and hanged. Reports of this treachery were speedily carried into the city by fugitives, and an immediate rising took place. Fulk was driven to save himself by flight, there was long and furious fighting in the streets, and at length Simon gave orders that the houses should be set on fire. The bishop afterwards proposed that the defenders should place themselves at De Montfort’s mercy, on receiving a solemn guarantee by oath for the safety of their persons and property. But when this promise had served its purpose, it was broken; the churches were spared, but the fortified houses and other chief buildings were demo­lished, and the inhabitants had to pay excessive taxation as the price of what was left to them. Soon after this the citizens, taking advantage of Simon’s absence, again rose in revolt, in concert with count Raymond, and endeavoured to restore their fortifications. The news of this insurrection reached Simon on the east of the Rhone, and he immediately set off on horseback, swearing by the holy chrism of his baptism that he would keep up the siege until he should either be victorious or perish. He himself remained before Toulouse throughout the winter, while bishop Fulk and others were actively recruiting for him in northern France, and the besieged were strengthened by assistance from Provence and from Spain. The campaign of 1218 was opened with increased vigour on both sides, and on the 25th of June a grand assault was made on the city. As Simon was at mass, he was informed that an engine, on which he had greatly relied, had been attacked by a sallying party of the besieged; but he refused to go forth until the end of the sacred office. In the fight which ensued, his brother Guy’s horse was pierced by an arrow, and Guy himself, as he fell, was severely wounded by another arrow. On seeing this, Simon dismounted, and rushed to his brother; and, while bending over him, and endeavouring to utter words of comfort, he was slain by a stone from a mangonel. The crusaders, disheartened by the fall of their great leader, immediately raised the siege, and withdrew from the country, pursued by the exasperated people.

Pope Honorius, notwithstanding the younger Raymond’s professions of orthodoxy, and his offer to give satisfaction on all points, felt himself bound to carry out the policy of Innocent as to southern France. He took up the cause of Amaury de Montfort, the son of Simon, encouraged the raising of troops by the offer of indulgences for crimes to those who should take part in the expedition, allowed a part of the funds raised for the Holy Land to be applied to the Albigensian war, and founded in 1221 a military order “of the Holy Faith” for the purpose of fighting against the heretics. In the meantime the cathari, who had been driven from the country, took encouragement from the death of Simon to return, and the war, from having for some time been a national struggle, took again the character of a crusade for the suppression of heresy. The elder Raymond died in 1222. Although his son offered ample evidence that he had died in the orthodox faith, the legate, to whom the pope referred the question of his Christian burial, decided against him; and for three hundred years his body was kept unburied in the house of the knights Hospitallers at Toulouse.

Attempts were made to draw Philip Augustus into the war of the south. But although Honorius urged him repeatedly, and Amaury de Montfort was willing to make over to the king the rights which he himself was not strong enough to assert  the decay of Philip’s health withheld him from sharing in such an enterprise. At his death, however, which took place in July 1223, he bequeathed a sum of money for the extirpation of heresy in the south, as well as for the holy war in Palestine; and his son, Lewis VIII, took up the cause with zeal. In February 1224, Amaury de Montfort, who had just been driven from Languedoc with the scanty remains of his army, ceded to the king of France the privileges which had been bestowed on his father Simon, and received a promise of the office of constable of France. The attempts of Raymond to save himself from the threatened danger by offering, before a council held by a legate at Bourges in 1225, to submit to the church in everything and to devote himself to the extirpation of heresy, were fruitless. The crusade was actively preached, and in the spring of 1226, Lewis at the head of a vast force set out for the south. Avignon, which had been faithful to the counts of Toulouse, and for ten years had shared their excommunication, offered him a passage across its bridge, on condition that he should pass on without entering the town; but he angrily rejected this offer, and swore that he would not advance further until he should have reduced the place. A siege was therefore commenced, which lasted from the early part of June to September; and during this time a sick­ness broke out in the army, which carried off many, and fatally shattered the health of Lewis himself. Avignon was taken, and was condemned to lose its walls, with forty of the best houses; but the king's further progress was unattended with any considerable triumphs. The siege of Toulouse was deferred until a future campaign, and on his return Lewis died at Montpensier, leaving his crown to a son only twelve years old.

The war was continued; Raymond, according to one chronicler, disgraced himself by the barbarities which he committed after a success gained over the invaders in 1228; and perhaps the indignation excited by this impolitic cruelty may have tended to swell the ranks of the crusaders. In 1229, Raymond was glad to conclude a treaty by which a part of his territories was given up at once to France, and provision was made that the rest should eventually devolve to the crown—a treaty which proved that in the estimation of the crusaders the question of territory was more important than that of heresy. Raymond himself was allowed to appear in the dress of a penitent, and received absolution from a legate in the cathedral of Paris on Good Friday. The cession of Amaury de Montfort’s claims was renewed, and in the following year he was rewarded with the promised constableship, which had then become vacant by the death of its holder.

But measures were taken for the suppression of heresy. It was a condition of the treaty with count Raymond that an university should be founded at Toulouse, in order to the counteraction of heretical teaching; and thus the spirit of southern literature was put down by the scholasticism of the north. At a council held at Toulouse in the same year, canons of excessive strictness were enacted—that no one should read the Scriptures in the vernacular tongue (a prohibition of which there had been no earlier example); that no one suspected of heresy should be allowed to practice as a physician, or to have access to the dying; that all male persons from the age of fourteen, and females from the age of twelve, should be required to abjure heresy; that all persons should communicate thrice a year, under pain of being suspected as heretics. Severe disabilities were inflicted on all who should in any way favour heretics; and it was ordered that in every parish two, three, or more laymen of good repute should be sworn to search out all suspicious persons, and to denounce them to the bishop, or to the lord of the place. But this machinery, which was subject to the bishop in each diocese, was shortly after superseded by the Inquisition, which the pope committed into the hands of the Dominicans. In the proceedings of this tribunal, the ordinary rules of judicial fairness were utterly set aside. The names of witnesses were not disclosed; all manner of persons, however criminal or infamous, and even although partakers in the same guilt, were admitted to give evidence, and their evidence was believed against the denials of the accused. The accused were not allowed to benefit by the assistance of advocates or notaries; ensnaring questions were put, and torture was employed to wring out not only avowals of heresy from the accused, but testimony from unwilling witnesses. The dead as well as the living were brought to trial, and were sentenced to be burnt. The iniquitous proceedings and cruelties of the inquisitors soon produced a general exasperation. At Toulouse, Narbonne, Albi, Avignonnet, and other places, the inquisitors were driven out, or even murdered, by the infuriated peopled In order to mitigate this feeling, the pope in 1237 ordered that the less stern Franciscans should be associated with the Dominicans, and from that year to 1241 the inquisition was suspended. The disturbances of Languedoc long continued to break out afresh from time to time, councils renewed their enactments for the detection of heresy, and Raymond in 1234 issued a code of regulations for the same purpose. In the hope of preserving his credit for orthodoxy, the count often found himself compelled to share in acts which he abhorred, while his position was made uneasy by the watchfulness of bishop Fulk and his successor, who were always ready to tax him with lukewarmness in the cause of the church. A fresh insurrection in 1242 ended in his being obliged to throw himself on the mercy of Lewis IX, by whom he was generously treated. The pope, Gregory IX, released him from a crusading vow which he had been compelled to make, and bestowed on him the marquisate of Provence; and in his last years he was much employed in attempts to reconcile Innocent IV with Fredericks Raymond VII died in 1249, having a short time before signalized his orthodoxy by presiding at the execution of eighty “perfect” cathari at Agen.

 

4

CRUSADE OF LEWIS IX.

 

In the meantime, Lewis IX of France grew up under the careful guardianship of his mother, Blanche of Castile, who administered the affairs of the kingdom through a time of no ordinary difficulties with signal ability and energy. The strong and stern character of Blanche—in which the love of influence and domination put on the appearance of religious strictness, although even this was not enough to exempt her from the assaults of scandal—maintained its mastery over her son to the end of her life; and her tyranny was remorselessly exercised towards his queen, Margaret of Provence, to whom she married him in 1234. The contrast between Lewis and his contemporary Frederick was very remarkable. While the emperor was sceptical in his opinions and lax in his morals, Lewis was rigorously strict in everything that was regarded as belonging to the saintly character. He daily heard mass, twice at least, on some days three or four times; he attended the canonical hours, and, when informed that his nobles found fault with this, he defended himself by saying that no one would have blamed him if he had spent twice as much time in dicing or hunting. His private devotions were frequent and fervent; every day he read, or caused to be read to him, some portion of the Scriptures with a commentary, and some part of the writings of St. Augustine; every Friday he confessed his sins, and received the discipline from his confessor. He was rigidly ascetic as to food and drink ; he refrained from all worldly sports and pastimes, and, as far as was possible, from the outward pomp of royalty; he was careful as to his language, avoiding all oaths, and enacting severe penalties against the use of them; he diligently exercised himself in acts of charity and pious bounty, and in personal ministrations to the sick, the needy, and the afflicted. He treated the clergy, and especially the new orders of friars, with reverence; he was connected with the Franciscan order as a tertiary, and is reported to have said that, if he could divide himself into two, he would give one half to the Dominicans and the other to the Franciscans. He devoted some of his children to the monastic life, and it is said that he was at one time desirous of entering one of the mendicant orders, when he was dissuaded by his queen’s representation that he would better fulfill his duty by striving as a king to keep his realm in peace, and to benefit the church. His justice was such, that of his own accord he gave up to the English king some terri­tories which had once belonged to England; and from a like motive he caused an inquiry to be made as to the possessions acquired by the crown during the last three reigns, and restored those which had been unjustly obtained. The reputation of this virtue induced Henry III and the insurgent barons of England to choose him as arbiter of their differences. Among the popular superstitions of the age, the reverence for relics was that to which Lewis was especially addicted, and the capture of Constantinople by the Latins enabled him to gratify his taste by acquiring many objects of very high pretensions. To this we are indebted for the beautiful “Holy Chapel” of Paris, which was built by Peter of Montreuil at his expense, and richly endowed by him, for the reception of the crown of thorns, a piece of the true cross, and other memorials of the Saviour’s passion. But when, on his setting out for the crusade, the monks of Pontigny offered to give him a portion of the body of St. Edmund of Canterbury, he replied with characteristic self-denial, “Christ forbid that that which God hath so long preserved in its entireness, should in any way be mutilated by a sinner like me!”

Yet although the religion of Lewis had much in it that must appear to us weak, he was not a slave of the clergy. High as was his regard for the papacy, he had learnt from Scripture lessons of right which enabled him to look above the will of popes. That principle of the equality of clergy and laity before the law of the land, by the assertion of which Henry II of England had provoked the indignation of the hierarchy, and in opposition to which Becket had endured exile and death, was firmly established in France by the saintly king, whose very reverence for the clergy induced him to refuse them immunity from the punishment of crime. He was careful to guard his prerogative against ecclesiastical encroachments; and by his “Pragmatic Sanction”, which will be more particularly noticed hereafter, he laid the foundation of those “liberties” which for centuries were the distinctive privilege of the Gallican church. And while Frederick was engaged in a deadly struggle with the popes, the saintly character and high reputation of Lewis enabled him to assert the royal and the national rights without exciting the opposition of Rome. At home these qualities tended greatly to increase the influence of the crown, and under Lewis the royal territory was extended by important additions, while the example of such a character was more powerful than anything else to win back for religion that respect of mankind which was endangered alike by the scepticism of Frederick and by the gross worldly ambition of his papal opponents.

Lewis held religious error in abhorrence, and believed the use of the sword to be lawful as a means of suppressing it. “No one”, he said, “ought to dispute with Jews unless he be a very good clerk; but the layman, when he heareth the Christian law spoken against, ought not to defend it save with the sword, which he should thrust as far as it will go into the unbeliever’s belly”. Yet while Frederick, by way of vindicating his own orthodoxy, exercised cruel severities against his heretical subjects, it does not appear that Lewis, although he invited the establishment of the Inquisition throughout France, took any part in directing its operations. The persecutions which in the earlier part of his reign were carried on in Languedoc were done without his consent, and it was not in his territory, but in that of his vassal Theobald of Champagne, that one hundred and eighty-three cathari (of whom only one belonged to the class of perfect) were burnt at Montvimer, in 1239, under the authority of Henry, archbishop of Reims.

The popes had always endeavoured to keep the idea of a crusade before the eyes of the western nations, but with little effect; indeed, the chief hindrance, to a general armament for the recovery of the Holy Land was to be found in that policy by which they gave the character of a crusade to the wars against the heretics of Languedoc and the pagans of northern Europe, and to their own wars against the Hohenstaufen princes, so that these nearer and less formidable enterprises diverted and dispersed the forces which might otherwise have been combined in the cause of Palestine. From time to time small expeditions were made—as that of Richard of Cornwall, in 1240; but, if the Mussulmans had been united among themselves, they might easily have driven the Christians out of the land. The sultans of Damascus and of Egypt, however, were in bitter hostility to each other, and, while the one allied himself with the Templars, the other entered into a connection with the knights of the hospital. The Templars, in 1243, besieged the Hospitallers in their house at Acre, and, in order to insult the emperor Frederick, they turned the Teutonic order out of their possessions, to the weakening of the Christian cause and to the encouragement of the infidels.

Soon after this, however, a new power appeared on the scene. The Chorasmians, who had gained possession of Persia, were driven from that country by the advance of the Mongols, and their barbarous hordes poured into Syria and the Holy Land. In September 1244, Jerusalem fell into their hands. A great slaughter of the inhabitants took place; the churches were robbed of their ornaments, the holy sepulchre and the royal tombs were violated; places and things which the Saracens had respected, either from a common feeling of their sanctity or in observance of conventions with the Christians, were now exposed to brutal profanation.  The Christians, when it was too late, allied themselves with the Moslems against this new enemy, but their joint forces were defeated with great loss in October and urgent requests for help, such as had been only too frequent on former occasions, were sent to the west, and the subject of a crusade was discussed at the council of Lyons. But in answer to the proposal of a contribution, it was said that the misappropriation of money collected under the pretext of a crusade had produced a general distrust; and when preachers were sent to stir up the western nations for the holy cause, they met in many quarters with no favourable response. The Christians of Spain were, as at other times, engaged with their own Moorish neighbours; Germany and Italy were distracted by the disputes between the emperor and the pope; and when the bishop of Beyrout visited England, he was told by king Henry that, after having been so often deceived in such matters, the English would not join in the undertaking. “The king of France may go”, said Henry; “for his people will follow him; but I am uneasy as to the French, the Scots, and the Welsh, and the pope protects those who rise against me”

In the autumn of 1244, while Innocent IV was on his way from Sutri to Lyons, Lewis fell dangerously ill at Pontoise. The most urgent means of intercession were used in his behalf; sacred relics were exposed, in the hope of adding fervency to the prayers of the faithful; but recovery seemed to be hopeless. At length, after the king had been long speechless, and was even supposed by some of his attendants to be already dead, he sent for the bishop of Paris, and asked that the cross might be given to him. From that hour he recovered; but when he spoke of the engagement which he had contracted to the crusade, his wife and mother, with other advisers both secular and spiritual—even the bishop himself, the famous schoolman William of Auvergne—endeavoured to dissuade him from the enterprise by urging that his duties to his kingdom required him to stay at home: that the promise, made when he was not fully master of himself, was not to be regarded as binding; and that he might help the holy war as effectually by sending troops to the east as by going in person. Lewis, however, adhered to his resolution, nor was it shaken by the discovery that he must expect but little cooperation from other countries, and that even among his own subjects his zeal met with little sympathy.

It was the custom of sovereigns at high festivals to bestow dresses on their courtiers; and on Christmas-day, when a solemn service was to be held at the “holy chapel” before daybreak, Lewis caused a number of garments to be distributed among the nobles who were in attendance on him. On passing from the dimness without into the fully-lighted chapel, the receivers were astonished to find that these garments were marked with the cross, so that, according to the ideas of that time, they had unwittingly bound themselves to the holy war, and it was impossible to draw back. The preparations for a crusade were therefore actively carried on, and on the 12th of June 1248, the king, having settled a regency, of which his mother was the head, took the oriflamme from the altar of St. Denys, and set out on the expedition. From that time he laid aside all the ensigns of royalty, and all luxury of dress; and, as he went along, he visited the chief monasteries which lay in his way, edifying the inmates by his piety and self-denial, and entreating the assistance of their prayers. At Lyons he had interviews with the pope, whose quarrel with the emperor he had found to be the great obstacle to the crusade; and he was deeply grieved and disgusted at finding that he was unable to produce any effect by exhorting him to peace for the general sake of Christen­dom. But, notwithstanding these feelings as to Innocent, he showed his reverence for the papal office by confessing his sins to him very minutely, and devoutly receiving his absolution.

From Aigues Mortes—his only Mediterranean port, which he had done much to improve—Lewis sailed to Cyprus, which had been chosen as the place of meeting for the expedition; and from the irregularity with which his recruits arrived, it was found necessary to remain there for the winter. During this time many of the crusaders sickened and died, and the army would have been in great distress for provisions, had it not been largely relieved by the friendship or policy of the excommunicated emperor. The empress of Constantinople, a daughter of John of Brienne, arrived to solicit the king’s aid for the sinking power of the Latins; but Lewis, although he expressed a hearty sympathy with her misfortunes, would not be diverted from the proper object of his expedition. An embassy also appeared in the name of the khan of the Mongols, who was represented as offering his alliance, and as professing to have derived a favourable disposition towards Christianity from a Christian mother. Lewis received the ambassadors with courtesy, and dismissed them with gifts for their master; but in the event it appeared as if they had acted without authority, and the communication with the khan led to no result.

On the 19th of May 1249, the crusading force set sail for Damietta, where it effected a landing on June 5th. The city was taken with ease, as the defenders deserted it by night; but this was almost the only success which the crusaders had to boast. The remembrance of the misfortunes endured by the former expedition to Egypt, and the necessity of waiting for their companions, who had been scattered by a violent storm, and for other expected accessions, delayed their advance until the rising of the Nile should have subsided; and thus the enemy had time to recover from the first alarm produced by the invasion, while the inaction of the army resulted in a general demoralization, so that the camp of the saintly king became full of gross and open profligacy. At length, on the 20th of November, the advance towards Cairo was commenced; but it proved to be a series of disasters. In a battle near Mansurah Lewis was victorious; but he had to mourn the loss of his brother Robert of Artois, of the earl of Salisbury with almost all his English followers, and of a great number of other soldiers, including many knights of the religious-military orders. Pestilence and famine began to do their work on the Franks, and it soon became evident that the conquest of Egypt was hopeless. The sultan’s offer of Palestine in exchange for Damietta had before been refused; but when it was now proposed by the Christians to exchange Damietta for Jerusalem alone, the sultan declared that Lewis must become a hostage for the performance of the bargain. The distress increased; the Christians found themselves reduced to eat their horses, disregarding the prohibitions of Lent; their fleet was destroyed; the Saracens surrounded the army in vast numbers; the sluices of the river were opened with fatal effect; many crusaders apostatized; and Lewis himself was so ill that his life was in danger. Against such difficulties and perils he found it impossible to struggle any longer, and on the 8th of April he surrendered to the mercy of the Saracens.

But even in captivity his dignified and saintly bearing, and the constancy with which he performed his devotions, impressed the Mussulmans with reverence. The sultan, Turan-shah, to whom he had become prisoner, was assassinated, in revenge for some slights by which he had provoked his Turkish Mamelukes, and the murderers, rushing into the presence of Lewis with their bloody weapons in their hands, asked what he would give them for having delivered him from an enemy who had intended to put him to death. Their leader is said to have demanded of him the degree of knighthood, to which the king answered that it could not be conferred, unless on condition of his becoming a Christian. Finding that he was unmoved by their threats, it is said that the infidels thought of choosing the king himself to fill the vacant throne.

The dealings for ransom were difficult, and the collection of the money was slow; and in the meantime the Saracens got rid of many of their prisoners, especially the sick, by killing them in cold blood and throwing their bodies into the Nile. Lewis, with characteristic integrity, refused to enter into any arrangement for his own liberation, unless it should include all his companions  he refused to leave his captivity until the covenanted sum was made up, although the means of doing so were offered to him; and when some of his followers boasted that in paying the ransom they had put a trick on the enemy, he indignantly ordered that the deceit should be amended. The new sultan, struck with his behaviour, voluntarily remitted a large portion of the ransom; but Damietta, the sole conquest which the Christians had made, was to be given up. The Saracens stipulated that, if they should fail in performing their part of the treaty, they would abjure the religion of Islam, and wished the king to bind himself by a similar oath, that in case of failure as to his engagements he should be disgraced as a renegade, “as one who spits and tramples on the cross”; but he refused with horror to admit such words even by way of supposition.

On recovering his liberty, Lewis sailed for Acre, and there rejoined his queen, who had left Damietta after having given birth to a son, to whom she gave the ominous name of Tristan. The king resolved to remain in the Holy Land in order to watch over the execution of the treaty by the Saracens; he repaired the fortifications of Acre, Sidon, Caesarea, and other places which were still in possession of the Christians, and endeavoured to reconcile their divisions. But although he ardently desired to see Jerusalem, and although the sultan of Damascus was willing to permit him, he refrained out of deference to the suggestion of his counsellors, that, if the first of Christian kings were to visit the holy city without delivering it from the infidels, the desire to deliver it would die away among Christians. The only gratification, therefore, which he allowed himself was a pilgrimage to Nazareth, which he performed with deep devotion.

Innocent IV wrote from Lyons a letter of consolation to the king, and ordered that prayers should be put up throughout France for his deliverance. But the pope’s conduct in stirring up war at home, while the champion of the cross was in captivity—in diverting to a crusade against Frederick and Conrad the money which should have served for the ransom of Lewis, and the forces which might have delivered him—produced a strong feeling of indignation, which became more vehement as it penetrated deeper into the lower ranks of society. And out of this feeling grew a strange movement, beginning in the north of France among some shepherds and others of the poorest class, who styled themselves Pastoureaux. These professed to have for their object the deliverance of the king, and to believe that that which other means had failed to effect would be granted to their simplicity. As they went along, their numbers swelled, and among the recruits were many lawless ruffians, who were bent on profiting by the enthusiasm of the time. At their head was a mysterious personage about sixty years of age, who spoke French, German, and Latin. This personage was styled the Master of Hungary—a title which would seem to indicate a connection with the Manicheans about the Danube; but wonderful stories were told of him—that he possessed a charm which irresistibly drew all men to follow him that he was an apostate Cistercian monk; that he was the same who forty years before had been the leader of the children’s crusade; that he was a Mahometan and a sorcerer, who had engaged for a certain price to deliver a multitude of Christians into the hands of the sultan of Babylon.

On reaching the capital, the Pastoureaux were favourably treated by the queen-mother, who admitted their chief to an interview with her, and bestowed presents on them; but even at Paris they began to display the real character of the movement, and as they proceeded further towards the south it became more and more manifest. They abused, assaulted, and even killed clergy and especially friars; they vented wild and blasphemous doctrines, and usurped priestly functions—the master of Hungary appearing with a mitre on his head. At Orleans, as the master was preaching, he was interrupted by a student of the university, who told him that he was a heretic and a deceiver. The student’s skull was immediately cleft by one of the fanatics; a general attack was made on the clergy; and a tumult arose which was attended with much slaughter on both sides. The bishop interdicted the city, and the queen-mother, on being informed of these scenes, withdrew her protection from the pastoureaux. At Bourges they pillaged the synagogue and the houses of the Jews, and committed great outrages of other kinds, which provoked the inhabitants to rise against them and drive them out of the town. The master of Hungary was pursued and slain, and many of his followers were hanged. Some of the party strag­gled on to Bordeaux, but Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, who commanded there for the king of England, refused to admit them into the town, and compelled them by threats to withdraw from the neighbourhood. Many of them were drowned in the Gironde. Another division made for Marseilles, where they arrived with numbers greatly reduced. Some of them were hanged and the rest dispersed, and thus this movement came to an end.

Blanche had often urged her son to return from the East, on the ground that a man was needed for the conduct of the government. A war broke out with Flanders, in which the French suffered severely; and on the 1st of March 1252, the queen-mother died, leaving the regency in the hands of her sons Charles, count of Anjou, and Alphonsus. Lewis was deeply affected by the news of her death; and, after having consulted his advisers, he resolved to return home. A few days after Easter 1254 he embarked at Acre. His vessel was furnished with a chapel in which the canonical hours were regularly performed; there were three sermons weekly, and a course of religious instruction was established for the sailors, whose lack of opportunities for learning had excited the king’s compassion. After a stormy voyage of ten weeks, Lewis landed at Hyeres, and on the 7th of September he reached Paris, after an absence of more than six years. All who saw him were struck with the appearance of profound grief and dejection which he wore. He had lost much, while he had gained nothing for Christendom; he had failed in a manner which would have been ignominious but for the saintly virtue and the patient courage which he had displayed throughout his reverses and sufferings. He ascribed to his own sinfulness the disasters which had befallen the Christian force; and he did not consider his crusading vow to have been fulfilled by the expedition which had cost him so dear.

 

CHAPTER III.

FROM THE ELECTION OF POPE ALEXANDER IV TO THE DEATH OF LEWIS IX OF FRANCE.

A.D. 1254-1270.