BOOK VI.

FROM THE DEPOSITION OF POPE GREGORY VI. TO THE DEATH
OF POPE CELESTINE III, A.D. 1046-1198.
 

CHAPTER I.

THE PONTIFICATES OF CLEMENT II, DAMASUS II, LEO IX, VICTOR II, STEPHEN IX, NICOLAS II, AND ALEXANDER II. A.D. 1046-1073.

 

 

THE deposition of Gregory VI and his rivals by the council of Sutri left the papacy vacant. It was said that the Roman clergy were almost universally disqualified for the dignity by ignorance, simony, or concubinage, and Henry III resolved to bestow it on one of the prelates who had accompanied him from Germany—Suidger, a Saxon by birth, and bishop of Bamberg. The nomination of Suidger is said by some authorities to have taken place at Sutri; but his formal inauguration was, according to ancient custom, reserved to be performed at Rome. On Christmas-eve 1046, the day after his arrival in the city, Henry desired the Romans, assembled in St. Peter’s, to proceed to the election of a pope. They answered that they were bound by an oath to choose no other pope during the life-time of Gregory, but begged that the king would give them one who might be useful to the church; whereupon Henry was invested with the ensigns of the patriciate, and in the character of chief magistrate of Rome presented Suidger to the assembly. In answer to his question whether any worthier pope could be named from among the Roman clergy, no voice was raised by way of objection; and the king, leading Suidger by the hand, seated him in St. Peter’s chair, where he was hailed with acclamations as Clement the Second. On Christmas day, the anniversary of the day on which, nearly two centuries and a half before, Charlemagne had been crowned by Leo III—the imperial coronation of Henry and his queen Agnes was celebrated with extraordinary splendour and solemnity.

The emperor was earnestly bent on a reformation of the church, and had selected Suidger as a fit agent for the execution of his plans. Soon after his. election (Jan. 1047) the pope held a council with a view to the correction of abuses, and it was decreed that any one who had received ordination from a simoniac, knowing him to be such, should do penance for forty days. But beyond this little or nothing is known of Clement, except that he visited the south of Italy, and that after a pontificate of less than ten months he died at a monastery near Pesaro, in October 1047; whereupon Benedict IX, supported by his kinsmen, and by Boniface, the powerful marquis of Tuscany, seized the opportunity of again thrusting himself for a time into possession of the vacant see.

The emperor had returned to Germany in June 1047, carrying with him the deposed pope, Gregory. At a great assembly of bishops and nobles, which appears to have been held at Spires, Henry strongly denounced the simony which had generally prevailed in the disposal of church preferment. He declared himself apprehensive that his father's salvation might have been endangered by such traffic in holy things. The sin of simony, which infected the whole hierarchy, from the chief pontiff to the doorkeeper, had drawn down the scourges of famine, pestilence, and the sword; and all who had been guilty of it must be deposed. These words spread consternation among the prelates, who felt that they were all involved in the charge, and implored the emperor to have pity on them. He replied by desiring them to use well the offices which they had obtained by unlawful means, and to pray earnestly for the soul of Conrad, who had been a partaker in their guilt. An edict was published against all simoniacal promotions, and Henry solemnly pledged himself to bestow his ecclesiastical patronage as freely as he had received the empire.

But while the emperor projected a reformation of the church by means of his own authority, there was among the clergy a party which contemplated a more extensive reform, and looked to a different agency for effecting it. This party was willing for the time to accept Henry’s assistance; for his sincerity was unquestionable, his power was an important auxiliary, and his objects were in some degree the same with its own. Like the emperor, these reformers desired to extirpate simony, and to deliver the papacy from the tyranny of the Italian nobles. But their definition of simony was more rigid than his; with simony their abhorrence connected the marriage and concubinage of the clergy—offences which Henry (perhaps from a consciousness that his own character was not irreproachable as to chastity) did not venture to attack; and above all things they dreaded the ascendency of the secular power over the church. To the connection of the church with the state, to the feudal obligations of the prelates, they traced the grievous scandals which had long disgraced the hierarchy—the rude and secular habits of the bishops, their fighting and hunting, their unseemly pomp and luxury, their attempts to render ecclesiastical preferments hereditary in their own families. And what if the empire were to achieve such an entire control over the papacy and the church as Henry appeared to be gaining? What would be the effect of such power, when transferred from the noble, conscientious, and religious emperor to a successor of different character? The church must not depend on the personal qualities of a prince; it must be guided by other hands, and under a higher influence; national churches, bound up with and subject to the state, were unequal to the task of reformation, which must proceed, not from the state, but from the hierarchy, from the papacy, from heaven through Christ’s vicegerent, the successor of St. Peter; to him alone on earth it must be subject; and for this purpose all power must be centred in the papacy.

Henry had exacted from the Romans an engagement, for which he is said to have paid largely, that they would not again choose a pope without his consent. A depu­tation in the interest of the reforming party now waited on him with a request that he would name a successor to Clement. They would have wished for the restoration of Gregory VI; but, as such a proposal was likely to offend the emperor, they begged that he would appoint Halinard, archbishop of Lyons, who was well known and highly esteemed at Rome in consequence of frequent pilgrimages to the “threshold of the apostles”. Halinard, however, had no wish for the promotion, and sedulously abstained from showing himself at the imperial court. Henry requested the advice of Wazo, bishop of Liège, a prelate of very high reputation, whose wise and merciful views as to the treatment of heretics have been mentioned in a former chapter; the answer recommended the restoration of Gregory, whose deposition Wazo ventured to blame on the ground that the pope could not be judged except by God alone. But before this letter reached the emperor, his choice had already fallen on Poppo, bishop of Brixen, who assumed the name of Damasus II (Dec. 25, 1047). The new pope was conducted to Rome by Boniface, marquis of Tuscany, and Benedict fled at his approach; on the 17th of July, 1048, he was installed in St. Peter’s chair; and on the 9th of August he was dead. The speedy deaths of two German popes were ascribed by some to poison; the opinion of another party is represented by Bonizo, bishop of Sutri, who tells us, in the fierceness of national and religious hatred, that Damasus, “a man full of all pride”, was appointed by the patricial tyranny of Henry, and that within twenty days after his invasion of the pontifical chair he “died in body and in soul”.

The emperor was again requested to name a pope, and fixed on his cousin Bruno. More than twenty years before this time Bruno had been chosen as bishop by the clergy and people of Toul, had accepted that poor see against the will of the emperor Conrad, who had destined him for higher preferment; he enjoyed a great reputation for piety, learning, prudence, charity, and humility; he was laborious in his duties, an eloquent preacher, a skillfull musician, and was not without experience in public affairs. From unwillingness to undertake the perilous dignity which was now offered to him, he desired three days for consideration, and openly con­fessed his sins with a view of proving his unfitness. But the emperor insisted on the nomination, and at a great assembly at Worms, in the presence of the Roman envoys, Bruno was invested with the ensigns of the papacy. After revisiting Toul he set out for Italy in pontifical state; but at Besançon it is said that he was met by Hugh abbot of Cluny, accompanied by an Italian monk named Hildebrand; and the result of the meeting was memorable.

Hildebrand was born of parents in a humble condition of life near Suana (now Sovana), an ancient Etruscan city and the seat of a bishopric, between 1010 and 1020. From an early age he was trained at Rome for the ecclesiastical profession under an uncle, who was abbot of St. Mary’s on the Aventine. He embraced the most rigid ideas of monachism, and, disgusted by the laxity which prevailed among the Italian monks, he crossed the Alps, and entered the austere society of Cluny, where it is said that the abbot already applied to him the prophetic words, “He shall be great in the sight of the Highest”. After leaving Cluny he visited the court of Henry, and on his return to Rome he became chaplain to Gregory VI, whose pupil he had formerly been. On the deposition of Gregory, Hildebrand accompanied him into Germany, and at his patron’s death, in the beginning of 1048, he again withdrew to Cluny. There it may be supposed that, he brooded indignantly over that subjection of the church to the secular power which had been exemplified in the deprivation and captivity of Gregory; and that those theories became matured in his mind which were to influence the whole subsequent history of the church and of the world.

The character of Hildebrand was lofty and command­ing. His human affections had been deadened by long monastic discipline; the church alone engrossed his love. Filled with magnificent visions of ecclesiastical grandeur, he pursued his designs with an indomitable steadiness, with a far-sighted patience, with a deep, subtle, and even unscrupulous policy. He well knew how to avail himself of small advantages as means towards more important ends, or to forego the lesser in hope of attaining the greater. He knew how to conciliate, and even to flatter, as well as how to threaten and denounce. Himself impenetrable and inflexible, he was especially skilled in understanding the characters of other men, and in using them as his instruments, even although unconscious or unwilling.

In his interviews with Bruno, Hildebrand represented the unworthiness of accepting from the emperor that dignity which ought to be conferred by the free choice of the Roman clergy and people. His lofty views and his powerful language prevailed; the pope laid aside the ensigns of the apostolical office and, taking Hildebrand as his companion, pursued his journey in the simple dress of a pilgrims. It is said that miracles marked his way; that at his prayer the swollen waters of the Teverone sank within their usual bounds, to give a passage to him and to the multitude which had gathered in his train; and his arrival at Rome, roughly clad and barefooted, raised a sensation beyond all that could have been produced by the display of sacerdotal or imperial pomp. In St. Peter’s he addressed the assembled Romans, telling them that he had come for purposes of devotion; that the emperor had chosen him as pope, but that it was for them to ratify or to annul the choice. The hearers were strongly excited by his words; they could not but be delighted to find that, renouncing the imperial nomination as insufficient, he chose to rest on their own free election as the only legitimate title to the papacy. Nor was Bruno an unknown man among them; for yearly pilgrimages to Rome had made them familiar with his sanctity and his virtues and he was hailed with universal acclamations as Pope Leo the Ninth.

Hildebrand was now the real director of the papacy. Leo ordained him subdeacon, and bestowed on him the treasurership of the church, with other preferments. Among these was the abbacy of St. Paul’s, on the Ostian way, which he restored from decay and disorder, and to which he was throughout life so much attached that, whenever he met with a check in any of his undertakings, he used to send for some of the monks, and ask them what sin they had committed to shut up God’s ear against their intercessions for him. The party of which Hildebrand was the soul was further strengthened by some able men whom Leo brought from beyond the Alps, and established in high dignities—such as the cardinals Humbert, Stephen, and Hugh the White, Frederick, brother of Godfrey duke of Lorraine, and Azoline, bishop of Sutri. But above all these was conspicuous an Italian who was now introduced among the Roman clergy—Peter Damiani.

This remarkable man was born at Ravenna, in the year 1007. His mother, wrought to a sort of frenzy by the unwelcome addition to a family already inconveniently large, would have left the infant to perish; but when almost dead he was saved by the wife of a priest, whose upbraidings recalled the mother to a sense of her parental duty. Peter was early left an orphan, under the care of a brother, who treated him harshly, and employed him in feeding swine; but he was rescued from this servitude by another brother, Damian, whose name he combined with his own in token of gratitude. Through Damian’s kindness he was enabled to study; he became famous as a teacher, pupils flocked to hear him, and their fees brought him abundant wealth. His life meanwhile was strictly ascetic; he secretly wore sackcloth, he fasted, watched, prayed, and, in order to tame his passions, he would rise from bed, stand for hours in a stream until his limbs were stiff with cold, and spend the remainder of the night in visiting churches and reciting the psalter. In the midst of his renown and prosperity Peter was struck by the thought that it would be well to renounce his position while in the full enjoyment of its advantages, and his resolution was determined by the visit of two brethren from the hermit society of Fonte Avellano in Umbria. On his giving them a large silver cup as a present for their abbot, the monks begged him to exchange it for something lighter and more portable; and, deeply moved by their unworldly simplicity, he quitted Ravenna without the knowledge of his friends, and became a member of their rigid order. Peter soon surpassed all his brethren in austerity of life, and even gained the reputation of miraculous power. He taught at Fonte Avellano and in other monasteries, and was raised to the dignity of abbot. The elevation of Gregory VI was hailed by Peter with delight, as the dawn of a new era for the church, and, although his hopes from that pope were soon extinguished by the council of Sutri, he was able to transfer his confidence to Henry III, so that he even rejoiced in the emperor’s obtaining a control over elections to the papacy. He still, therefore, continued hopefully to exert himself in the cause of reform, and he was employed by Henry III to urge on Pope Clement the necessity of extirpating the simony which the emperor had found everywhere prevailing as he returned homewards through northern Italy.

The character of Peter Damiani was an extraordinary mixture of strength and of weakness. He was honest, rigid in the sanctity of his life, and gifted with a ready and copious eloquence; but destitute of judgment or discretion, the slave of an unbounded credulity and of a simple vanity, and no less narrow in his views than zealous, energetic, and intolerant in carrying them out. His reading was considerable, but very limited in its nature, and in great part of a very idle character. His letters and tracts present a medley of all the learning and of all the allegorical misinterpretations of Scripture that he can heap together; his arguments are seasoned and enforced by the strangest illustrations and by the wildest and most extravagant legends. The humour which he often displays is rather an oddity than a talent or a power; he himself speaks of it as “buffoonery”, and penitentially laments that he cannot control it. In our own age and country such a man would probably be among the loudest, the busiest, the most uncharitable, and the most unreasonable enemies of Rome; in his actual circumstances Peter Damiani was its most devoted servant. Yet his veneration for the papacy did not prevent him from sometimes addressing its occupants with the most outspoken plainness, or even from remonstrating against established Roman usages, as when he wrote to Alexander II against the decretal principle that a bishop should not be accused by a member of his flock, and against the practice of annexing to decrees on the most trivial subjects the awful threat of an anathema. In such cases it would seem that he was partly influenced by a strong and uncompromising feeling of right, and partly by his passion for exercising in all directions the office of a monitor and a censor. If Hildebrand under­stood how to use men as his tools, Peter was fitted to be a tool. He felt that Hildebrand was his master, and his service was often reluctant; but, although he vented his discontent in letters and in epigrams, he obeyed his “hostile friend”, his “saintly Satan”.

The superstitions of the age had no more zealous votary than Peter Damiani. His language as to the blessed Virgin has already been noticed for its surpassing extravagance. From him the practice of voluntary flagellation, although it was not altogether new, derived a great increase of popularity. He recommended it as “a sort of purgatory”, and defended it against all assailants. If, he argued, our Lord, with his apostles and martyrs, submitted to be scourged, it must be a good deed to imitate their sufferings by inflicting chastisement on ourselves; if Moses in the Law prescribed scourging for the guilty, it is well thus to punish ourselves for our misdeeds; if men are allowed to redeem their sins with money, surely those who have no money ought to have some means of redemption provided for them; if the Psalmist charges men to “praise the Lord on the timbrel”, then, since the timbrel is an instrument made of dried skin, the commandment is truly fulfilled by him who beats by way of discipline his own skin dried up by fasting. Cardinal Stephen ventured to ridicule this devotion, and induced the monks of Monte Cassino to give up the custom of flogging themselves every Friday, which had been adopted at the instance of Peter, but the sudden and premature deaths of Stephen and his brother soon after gave a triumph to its champion, who represented the fate of the brothers as a judgment on the cardinal’s profanity.

In addition to other writings, Peter contributed to the cause of flagellation a life of one Dominic, the great hero of this warfare against the flesh. Dominic had been ordained a priest; but, on discovering that his parents had presented a piece of goat-skin leather to the bishop by whom he had been ordained, he was struck with such horror at the simoniacal act that he renounced all priestly functions, and withdrew to the rigid life of a hermit. He afterwards placed himself under Damiani, at Fonte Avellano, where his penances were the marvel of the abbot and of his brethren. Next to his skin he wore a tight iron cuirass, which he never put off except to chastise himself. His body and his arms were confined by iron rings; his neck was loaded with heavy chains; his scanty clothes were worn to rags; his food consisted of bread and fennel; his skin was as black as a negro’s from the effects of his chastisement. Dominic’s usual exercise was to recite the psalter twice a day, while he flogged himself with both hands at the rate of a thousand lashes to ten psalms. It was reckoned that three thousand lashes—the accompaniment of thirty psalms—were equal to a year of penance; the whole psalter, therefore, with its due allowance of stripes, was equivalent to five years. In Lent, or on occasions of special penitence, the daily average rose to three psalters; he “easily” got through twenty—equal to a hundred years of penance—in six days; once, at the beginning of Lent, he begged that a penance of a thousand years might be imposed upon him, and he cleared off the whole before Easter. He often performed eight or even nine psalters within twenty-four hours, but it was long before he could achieve ten; at length, however, he was able on one occasion to accomplish twelve, and reached the thirty- second psalm in a thirteenth. These flagellations were supposed to have the effect of a satisfaction for the sins of other men. In his latter years, for the sake of greater severity, Dominic substituted leathern thongs for the bundles of twigs which he had before used in his disci­pline. He also increased the number of the rings which galled his flesh, and the weight of the chains which hung from his neck; but we are told that sometimes, as he prayed, his rings would fly asunder, or would become soft and pliable. The death of Dominic, who had become prior of a convent on Mount Soavicino (or San Vicino) in the march of Ancona, appears to have taken place in the year 1060.

The marriage of the clergy was especially abominable in the eyes of Peter Damiani. He wrote, preached, and laboured against it; his language on such subjects is marked by the grossest and most shameless indecency. Soon after Leo’s accession he presented to him a treatise, the contents of which may be guessed from its frightful title—The Book of Gomorrha. The statements here given as to the horrible offences which resulted from the law of clerical celibacy might have suggested to any reasonable mind a plea for a relaxation of that discipline; but Peter urges them as an argument for increasing its severity. He classifies the sins of the unchaste clergy, and demands the deposition of all the guilty. Leo thanked him for the book, but decided that, although all carnal intercourse is forbidden to the clergy by Scripture and the laws of the church, all but the worst and the most inveterate sinners should be allowed, if penitent, to retain their offices. A later pontiff, Alexander II, obtained possession of the manuscript under pretence of getting it copied; but he showed his opinion of its probable effects by locking it up, and the author complains that, when he attempted to reclaim it, the pope jested at him and treated him like a player.

The act of Leo in renouncing the title derived from the imperial nomination might have been expected to alarm and offend Henry. His kinsman, the object of his patronage, had become the pope of the clergy and of the people, and might have seemed to place himself in opposition to the empire. But the emperor appears to have regarded Leo’s behaviour as an instance of the modesty for which he had been noted. He made no remonstrance; and Hildebrand was careful to give him no provocation by needless displays of papal independence.

Leo found the treasury so exhausted that he even thought of providing for his necessities by selling the vestments of the churchy. But by degrees the rich and various sources which fed the papal revenue began to flow again, so that he was in a condition to carry on his administration with vigour, and to undertake measures of reform.

A synod was held (A.D. 1049) at which he proposed to annul the orders of all who had been ordained by simoniacs. It was, however, represented to him that such a measure would in many places involve a general deprivation of the clergy, and a destitution of the means of grace. The definition of simony had in truth been extended over many things to which we can hardly attach the idea of guilt. The name was now no longer limited to the purchase of holy orders, or even of benefices : it was simony to pay anything in the nature of fees or first-fruits, or even to make a voluntary present to a bishop or patron; it was simony to obtain a benefice, not only by payment, but as the reward of service or as the tribute of kindness. “There are three kinds of gifts”, says Peter Damiani; “gifts of the hand, of obedience, and of the tongue”. The service of the court he declares to be a worse means of obtaining preferment than the payment of money; while others give money, the price paid by courtly clerks is nothing less than their very selves. In consideration of the universal prevalence of simony, therefore, Leo found himself obliged to mitigate his sentence, and to revert to the order of Clement II, that all who had been ordained by known simoniacs should do penance for forty days. It would seem also that at this assembly the laws for the enforcement of celibacy were renewed—the married clergy being required to separate from their wives, or to refrain from the exercise of their functions, although it was probably at a later synod that Leo added cogency to these rules by enacting that any “concubines” of priests who might be discovered in Rome should become slaves in the Lateran palace.

Leo entered on a new course of action against the disorders of the church. The bishops were so deeply implicated in these that from them no thorough reformation could be expected; the pope would take the matter into his own hands, and would execute it in person. Imitating the system of continual movement by which Henry carried his superintendence into every corner of the empire, he set out on a circuit of visitation. On the way he visited Gualbert of Vallombrosa, an important ally of Hildebrand and the reforming party. He crossed the Alps, and redressing wrongs, consecrating churches, and conferring privileges on monasteries as he proceeded, he reached Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle. At Aix he effected a reconciliation between the emperor and Godfrey duke of Lower Lorraine, who for some years had disturbed the public peace. The duke was sentenced to restore the cathedral of Verdun, which he had burnt; he submitted to be scourged at the altar, and laboured with his own hands at the masonry of the church.

As bishop of Toul (which see he retained for a time, as Clement II had retained Bamberg) Leo had promised to be present at the consecration of the abbey church of St. Remigius at Reims. He now announced his intention of fulfilling the promise, and from Toul issued letters summoning the bishops of France to attend a synod on the occasion. The announcement struck terror into many—into prelates who dreaded an inquiry into their practices, and into laymen of high rank whose morals would not bear examination; and some of these beset the ears of the French king, Henry I. It was, they said, a new thing for a pope to assume the right of entering France without the sovereign’s permission; the royal power was in danger of annihilation if he allowed the pope to rule within his dominions, or countenanced him by his presence at the council. Henry had already accepted an invitation, but these representations alarmed him. He did not, however, venture to forbid the intended proceedings, but excused himself on the plea of a military expedition, and begged that Leo would defer his visit until a more settled time, when the king might be able to receive him with suitable honours. The pope replied that he was resolved to attend the dedication of the church, and that, if he should find faithful persons there, he intended to hold a council.

The assemblage at Reims was immense. The Franks of the east met with those of Gaul to do honour to the apostle of their race, the saint at whose hands Clovis had received baptism; and even England had sent her representatives. There were prelates and nobles, clergy and monks, laymen and women of every condition, whose offerings formed an enormous heap. All ranks were mingled in the crowd; they besieged the doors of the church on the eve of the ceremony, and thousands passed the night in the open air, which was brilliantly lighted by their tapers. The pope repeatedly threatened to leave the great work undone, unless the multitude would relax its pressure. At length the body of St. Remigius was with difficulty borne through the mass of spectators, whose excitement was now raised to the uttermost. Many wept, many swooned away, many were crushed to death. The holy relics were lowered into the church through a window, as the only practicable entrance, whereupon the crowds, excluded by the doors, seized the hint, and swarmed in at the windows. Instead of being at once deposited in its intended resting-place, the body was placed aloft above the high altar, that its presence might give solemnity to the proceedings of the council.

On the day after the consecration the assembly met. Some of the French bishops and abbots who been cited were unable to attend, having been compelled to join the royal army; but about twenty bishops and fifty abbots were present—among whom were the bishop of Wells, the abbot of St. Augustine’s at Canterbury, and the abbot of Ramsey. The pope placed himself with his face towards the body of St. Remigius, and desired the prelates to sit in a semicircle on each side of him. It was announced that the council was held for the reformation of disorders in the church and for the general correction of morals; and the bishops and abbots were required to come forward, and to swear that they had not been guilty of simony either in obtaining their office or in their exercise of it. The archbishops of Treves, Lyons, and Besançon took the oath. The arch­bishop of Reims requested delay; he was admitted to two private interviews with the pope, and at the second session he obtained a respite until a council which was to be held at Rome in the following April.

Of the bishops, all but four took the oath; of the abbots, some swore, while others by silence confessed their guilt. Hugh bishop of Langres (who, before the investigation of his own case, had procured the deposition of an abbot of his diocese for incontinence and other irregularities), was charged with many and grievous offences : witnesses deposed that he had both acquired and administered his office simoniacally; that he had borne arms and had slain men; that he had cruelly oppressed his clergy, and even had used torture as a means of exacting money from them; that he had been guilty of adultery and of unnatural lust. After having been allowed to confer with the archbishops of Lyons and Besançon, he requested that these prelates might be admitted to plead his cause. The archbishop of Besançon, on standing up for the purpose, found himself unable to utter a word, and made a sign to Halinard of Lyons, who acknowledged his client’s simony and extortion, but denied the other charges. The bishops of Nevers and Coutances professed that their preferments had been bought for them by their relations, but without their own knowledge or consent, and, on their submission, were allowed to retain their sees. The bishop of Nantes, who confessed that he had purchased the succession to his father in the bishopric, was degraded to the order of presbyter.

At the end of the first session it was asked, under the threat of anathema, whether any member acknowledged any other primate of the church than the bishop of Rome. The pope’s claim, and the lawfulness of his proceedings, were admitted by a general silence; and he was then declared to be primate of the whole church and apostolic pontiff.

At the second session it was found that the bishop of Langres had absconded during the night. The archbishop of Besançon acknowledged that his dumbness when he had attempted to defend the delinquent on the preceding day was the infliction of St. Remigius; the pope and the prelates prostrated themselves before the relics of the saint, add Hugh of Langres was deposed. The council lasted three days. Twelve canons were passed, of which the first declared that no one should be promoted to a bishopric without the choice of his clergy and people. Excommunications were pronounced against the archbishop of Sens and other prelates who, whether from fear of the pope’s inquisition, or in obedience to the king’s summons, had neglected the citation to the council; and we are told that within a year the judgments of heaven fell heavily on the counsellors who had influenced Henry against the pope. The bishop of Compostella was excommunicated for assuming the title of apostolic, and attempting to set up an independent Spanish papacy. The Breton bishops, whose church had long been separate from that of Rome, and whose chief styled himself archbishop of Dol, had been summoned to Reims, but as they did not attend, were charged to appear at Rome.

From Reims Leo proceeded to Mainz, where a council was held in the emperor’s presence and in this assembly Sibicho, bishop of Spires, purged himself of a charge of adultery by receiving the holy Eucharist.

The pope returned to Italy in triumph. He had assured himself of the support of Germany, and had crushed the tendencies to independence which had appeared in the churches of France and Spain. The system of visitations which he had thus commenced was continued throughout his pontificate, and its result was greatly to increase the influence of Rome. He practically and successfully asserted for himself powers beyond those which had been ascribed to the papacy by the forged decretals. The pope entered kingdoms without regard to the will of the sovereign; he denounced the curses of the church against prelates whose allegiance to their king interfered with obedience to his mandate. He was not only to judge, but to originate inquiries; and these were carried on under the awe of his personal presence, without the ordinary forms of justice. Bishops were required by oath to accuse themselves, and the process of judgment was summary. Yet, startling as were the novelties of such proceedings, Leo was able to venture on them with safety; for the popular feeling was with him, and supported him in all his aggressions on the authority of princes or of bishops. His presence was welcomed everywhere as that of a higher power come to redress the grievances under which men had long been groaning; there was no disposition to question his pretensions on account of their novelty ; rather this novelty gave them a charm, because the deliverance which he offered had not before been dreamt of! And the manner in which his judgments were conducted was skillfully calculated to disarm opposition. Whatever there might be of a new kind in it, the trial was before synods, the old legitimate tribunal; bishops were afraid to protest, lest they should be considered guilty; and, while the process for the discovery of guilt was unusually severe, it was, in the execution, tempered with an appearance of mildness which took off much from its severity. Offenders were allowed to state circumstances in extenuation of their guilt, and their excuses were readily admitted. The lenity shown to one induced others to submit, and thus the pope's assumptions were allowed to pass without objection.

Leo again crossed the Alps in 1050, and a third time in 1052. This last expedition was undertaken in part for the purpose of attempting a reconciliation between the emperor and Andrew, king of Hungary, who had become a Christian, and had reestablished the profession of the gospel in his dominions; but the pope’s mediation proved unsuccessful. Another object of the journey was to request the emperor’s aid against the Normans. These had now firmly established themselves in southern Italy; they warred against both empires, or took investiture from either, according to their convenience. As far as their enterprise could reach, there was no safety from their aggressions; they invaded the patrimony of St. Peter, assaulted the pope’s own train, and threatened Rome itself. They spared neither age nor sex; the pope was deeply afflicted by the sight of miserable wretches who crowded into the city from the Apulian side, having lost eyes or noses, hands or feet, by the barbarity of the Normans; while reports continually reached him of monasteries sacked or burnt, and their inmates slain or cruelly outraged. His grief and indignation overflowed, and, finding remonstrances, entreaties, and denunciations vain, he endeavoured to engage both the Greek and the German emperors in a league against his formidable neighbours.

The pope found that by allying himself with the Italian party he had excited the jealousy of his own countrymen—a feeling which was significantly shown at Worms, where he spent the Christmas of 1052 with the emperor. On Christmas-day, as Luitpold, archbishop of Mainz and metropolitan of the diocese, was officiating at mass in the cathedral, a deacon chanted a lesson in the German fashion, which was different from that of Rome. Leo, urged by the Italians of his train, commanded him to stop; and, as the order was unheeded, he called the deacon to him at the end of the lesson, and degraded him from his office. The German primate begged that he might be restored, but met with a refusal. The service then proceeded; but at the end of the offertory Luitpold, indignant at the slight offered to the national usage, declared that it should go no further unless the deacon were restored; and the pope found himself obliged to yields

A feeling of jealousy against Rome would seem also to have dictated the answer to a request which the pope made for the restoration of the bishopric of Bamberg, and of the abbey of Fulda, to St. Peter, on whom they had been bestowed by Henry II. Instead of these benefices, which might have given a pretext for interfering with his German sovereignty, the emperor conferred on the pope the city of Benevento, the adjoining territory having already been granted to the Normans.

The success of Leo’s application for aid against the Normans was frustrated by the emperor’s chancellor, Gebhard, bishop of Eichstedt. Whether from apprehension of danger on the side of Hungary, from overweening contempt of the Normans, or from German jealousy of the papacy, he persuaded Henry to recall the troops which had already been placed at the pope’s disposal; and Leo, on his return to Italy, was followed by only seven hundred men, chiefly Swabians and Lotharingians, but including many outlaws and desperate adventurers from other quarters. It was the first time that a pope had appeared as the leader of an army against a professedly Christian people. Although Leo, when a deacon, had led the contingent of Toul in the imperial force, his own synods had renewed the canons against warrior bishops and clergy, and Peter Damiani was scandalized at the indecency of the spectacle :—“Would St. Gregory, he asked, have gone to battle against the Lombards, or St. Ambrose against the Arians?”. But as Leo moved along, multitudes of Italians flocked to his standard, so that, when the armies met near Civitella, he had greatly the advantage in numbers, while his sturdy Germans derided the inferior height and slighter forms of the enemy. The Normans attempted to negotiate, and offered to hold their conquests under the apostolic see; but they were told that the only admissible terms were their withdrawal from Italy and a surrender of all that they had taken from St, Peter. No choice was thus left them but to fight with the courage of despair. The armies engaged on the 18th of June, 1053; the pope’s Italian troops ran away; his Germans stood firm, and were cut to pieces; he himself fled to Civitella, but the gates of the town were shut against him, and he fell into the hands of the Normans. But defeat was more profitable to the papacy than victory could have been. The victors—some probably from rude awe, and others from artful policy—fell at the captive’s feet; they wept, they cast dust on their heads, they poured forth expressions of penitence, with entreaties for his forgiveness and blessings An accommodation was concluded, by which Leo granted them the conquests which they had already made, with all that they could acquire in Calabria and Sicily, to be held under the holy see. Thus the Normans, who had hitherto been regarded as a horde of freebooters, obtained the appearance of a legal, and even a sanctified, title to their possessions; while the pope, in bestowing on them territories to which the Roman see had never had any right (except such as might be derived from Constantine’s fabulous donation), led the way to the establishment of an alliance which was of vast importance to his successors, and of a claim to suzerainty over the kingdom of Naples which lasted down to our own times.

Leo was carried to Benevento, where he was detained in a sort of honourable captivity. His hours were spent in mournful thoughts of the past and of the future. He engaged in the strictest practices of asceticism and devotion; he celebrated mass daily for the souls of the soldiers who had fallen on his side, and at length was comforted by a vision which assured him that, as having been slain for the Lord, they were partakers in the glory of martyrs. At the end of nine months, feeling himself seriously ill, he obtained leave to return to Rome. He caused his couch to be spread in St. Peter’s, and his tomb to be placed near it. To the clergy, who were assembled around him, he addressed earnest exhortations to be watchful in their duty, and to exert themselves against simony; he commended his flock to Christ, and prayed that, if he had been too severe in dealing the censures of the church on any, the Saviour would of His mercy absolve them. Then, looking at his tomb, he said with tears, “Behold, brethren, how worthless and fleeting is human glory. I have seen the cell in which I dwelt as a monk changed into spacious palaces; now I must again return to the narrow bounds of this tomb”. Next morning he died before the altar of St. Peter. Tales of visions and miracles were circulated in attestation of his sanctity, and the doubts which some expressed on account of the part which he had taken in war were overpowered by the general veneration for his memory”.

During the last days of Leo IX, important communi­cations were in progress between the churches of Rome and Constantinople. From the time of Photius these churches had regarded each other with coolness, and their intercourse had been scanty. But the eastern emperors were induced by political interest to conciliate the pope, whose hostility might have endangered the remains of their Italian dominion; and about the year 1024 a proposal was made to John XVIII, on the part of Basil II and of the Byzantine patriarch Eustathius, that the title of Universal should be allowed alike to the patriarch and to the bishop of Rome. The gifts with which the bearers of this pro­posal were charged made an impression on the notorious cupidity of the Romans, and the pope was on the point of yielding. But the rumour of the affair produced a great excitement in Italy and France. William, abbot of St. Benignus at Dijon, an influential ecclesiastic of Italian birth, addressed a very strong remonstrance to the pope. Although, he said, the ancient temporal monarchy of Rome is now broken up into many governments, the spiritual privilege conferred on St. Peter is inalienable; and, after some severe language, he ended by exhorting John to be more careful of his own duties in the government and discipline of the church. The pope yielded to the general feeling, and the negotiation came to nothing.

In 1053 Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople, and Leo, archbishop of Achrida and metropolitan of Bulgaria—alarmed perhaps at the progress of the Norman arms, which seemed likely to transfer southern Italy from the Greek to the Latin church—addressed a letter to the bishop of Trani in Apulia, warning him against the errors of the Latins. The point of difference on which they most insisted was the nature of the eucharistic bread.

It would appear that although our Lord, at the institution of the sacrament, used unleavened bread, as being the only kind which the Mosaic law allowed at the paschal season, the apostles and the early church made use of common bread. Such had continued to be the custom of the Greeks, nor had any difference in this respect been mentioned among the mutual accusations of Photius and his western opponents. But, whether before or after the days of Photius, the use of unleavened bread had become established in the west, and Michael inveighed against it, as figurative of Judaism and unfit to represent the Saviour’s death. The Greek word by which bread is spoken of in the Gospels signifies, he said, something raised; it ought to have salt, for it is written, “Ye are the salt of the earth”; it ought to have leaven, which a woman—the church—hid in three measures of meal, a symbol of the Divine Trinity. The other charges advanced against the western church were the practice of fasting on the Saturdays of Lent, the eating of things strangled and of blood, and the singing of the great Hallelujah at Easter only. The patriarch and his associate concluded by requesting that the bishop of Trani would circulate the letter among the western bishops and clergy.

Humbert, cardinal-bishop of Sylva Candida, one of the most zealous among the Roman clergy, who happened to be at Trani when this letter arrived, translated it, and communicated it to Leo; who was also soon after informed that Cerularius had closed the Latin churches and had seized on the Latin monasteries at Constantinople. On this the pope addressed from Benevento a letter of remonstrance to the patriarch. He enlarges on the prerogatives conveyed by St. Peter to the Roman see;  he cites the donation of Constantine, almost in its entire length. St. Paul, he says, had cast no imputation on the faith of the Romans, whereas in his epistles to Greeks he had blamed them for errors in faith as well as in practice. It was from the Greeks that heresies had arisen; some of the patriarch’s own predecessors had been not only patrons of heresy but heresiarchs; but by virtue of the Saviour’s own promise the faith of St. Peter cannot fail. He blames Michael for having shut up the Latin churches of his city, whereas at Rome the Greeks were allowed the free exercise of their national rites.

After some further communications, Leo in January 1054 despatched three legates to Constantinople—Humbert, Frederick of Lorraine, chancellor of the Roman church, and Peter, archbishop of Amalfi,—with a letter entreating the emperor Constantine Monomachus to join in an alliance against the Normans, and one to Cerularius, in reply to a letter which the patriarch had addressed to Leo. The tone of this answer is moderate, but the pope defends the Latin usages which had been attacked; he adverts to a report that the patriarch had been irregularly raised to his dignity; he censures him for attempting to subjugate the ancient thrones of Alexandria and Antioch; and he expresses disapprobation of the title Universal. It had, he said, been decreed to the bishops of Rome by the council of Chalcedon; but as St. Peter did not bear it, so his successors, to whom, if to any man, it would have been suitable, had never assumed it.

On arriving at Constantinople the legates were received with honour by the emperor, who was anxious to secure the pope’s interest, and had been annoyed at the indiscretion of his patriarch. Humbert put forth a dialogue between a champion of the Byzantine and one of the Roman church, in which the Greek retails the topics of the letter to the bishop of Trani, while the Latin refutes him point by point, and retorts by some charges against the Greeks. To this a Studite monk, Nicetas Pectoratus, replied by a temperately-written tract, which, in addition to points already raised, discussed the enforced celibacy of the western clergy. Humbert rejoined in a style of violent and insolent abused and ended by anathematizing Nicetas with all his partisans. But he did not leave the victory to be decided by the pen; the emperor, in company with him and the other envoys, went to the monastery of Studium, where Nicetas was compelled to anathema­tize his own book, together with all who should deny the prerogatives or impugn the faith of Rome. At the request of the legates Constantine ordered the book to be burnt; and next day the unfortunate author, of his own accord (as we are asked to believe), waited on the legates, retracted his errors, and repeated his anathema against all that had been said, done, or attempted against the Roman church. Humbert’s answers to the patriarch and to Nicetas were translated into Greek by the emperor’s order.

Michael, however, continued to keep aloof from the Roman envoys, declaring that he could not settle such questions without the other patriarchs. The legates, at length, finding that they could make no impression on him, entered the church of St. Sophia, and laid on the altar, which had been prepared for the celebration of the Eucharist, a document in which, after acknowledging the orthodoxy of the people of Constantinople in general, they charged the patriarch and his party with likeness to the most infamous heresies, and solemnly anathematized them with all heretics, “yea, with the devil and his angels, unless they repent”. Having left the church, they shook off the dust from their feet, exclaiming, “Let God look and judge!”; and, after charging the Latins of Constantinople to avoid the communion of such as should “deny the Latin sacrifice”, they set out on their return, with rich presents from the emperor.

A message from Constantinople recalled them, as Michael had professed a wish to confer with them. But it is said that the patriarch intended to excite the multi­tude against them, and probably to bring about some fatal result, by reading in the cathedral a falsified version of the excommunication. Of this the legates were warned by the emperor, who refused to allow any conference except in his own presence; and, as Michael would not assent, they again departed homewards. The further proceedings between the emperor and the patriarch are variously related by the Greeks and by the Latins. The points of controversy were discussed for some time between Michael, Dominic patriarch of Grado, on the Latin side, and Peter, patriarch of Antioch, who attempted to act as a mediator. A legation was also sent to Constantinople by Stephen IX (who had been one of the Roman legates); but it returned on hearing of Leo’s death, and the breach between the churches remained as before. Cerularius himself was deposed by the emperor Isaac Comnenus in 1059, and ended his days in exile.

On the death of Leo, which took place soon after the departure of his legates for the east, the clergy and people of Rome were desirous to bestow the see on Hildebrand, to whose care the dying pope had solemnly committed his church. But Hildebrand was not yet ready to undertake the administration in his own name, and was unwilling to forego the advantage of the emperor’s support. He therefore persuaded the Romans to entrust him with a mission for the purpose of requesting that, as no one among themselves was worthy, Henry would appoint a pope acceptable to them; and he suggested Gebhard, bishop of Eichstedt, the same by whom the emperor had been induced to withdraw his troops from Leo’s expedition against the Normans. The policy of this choice would seem to have been profound; for whereas Gebhard, as an imperial counsellor, was likely to use his powerful influence against the papacy, he could hardly fail, as pope, to be guided by the interests of his see. Henry, unwilling to lose him, proposed other names; but Hildebrand persisted, and the emperor felt himself unable to oppose the choice of a prelate who had long held the highest place in his own esteem. Gebhard himself made earnest attempts to escape the dignity which was thrust upon him, and is said to have shown his resentment of Hildebrand’s share in his promotion by a general dislike of monks during the remainder of his life. But he justified the expectation that his policy would change with his position. As a condition of accepting the papacy, he required of the emperor a promise to restore all the rights of St. Peter; and we are told that, whenever he found himself crossed in any of his undertakings, he regarded it as a just punishment for his undutiful opposition to Leo.

In April 1055 the new pope arrived at Rome, where Hildebrand took care that, like his predecessor, he should be formally elected by the clergy and people; and he assumed the name of Victor II. In principle his papacy was a continuation of the last. The system of reforming synods was kept up, but instead of being conducted by the pope in person, they were left to his legates. At one of these synods, which was held in Gaul by Hildebrand, a remarkable incident is said to have taken place. An archbishop, who was charged with simony, had bribed the witnesses to silence, and boldly demanded, “Where are my accusers?”. The legate asked him whether he believed the Holy Ghost to be of the same substance with the Father and the Son, and, on his answering that he believed so, desired him to say the doxology. On coming to the name of that Divine Person in whose gifts he had trafficked, the archbishop was unable to proceed. After repeated attempts he fell down before Hildebrand, acknowledging his guilt, and forthwith he recovered the power of pronouncing the whole form. Such a scene would perhaps be now explained by the ascendency of a powerful will, combined with the assumption of a prophetic manner, over a weaker mind disturbed by the conscious­ness of guilt. But it was then held to be a miracle, and the terror of it led many other bishops and abbots to confess their simony and to resign their dignities.

In 1056 Victor was invited by the emperor to Germany, where he was received with great honour. But soon after his arrival an illness from which Henry had been suffering became more serious : and on the 5th of October the emperor died in his fortieth year, at the hunting-seat of Bothfeld in the Harz. To the pope, from whom he received the last consolations of religion, he bequeathed the care of his only son, Henry, a child under six years of age; and, although the young prince had already been crowned as his father’s colleague and successor in the German kingdom, the good offices of Victor were serviceable in procuring a peaceful recognition of his rights from the princes, prelates, and nobles who had been gathered around the emperor’s death-bed. The virtual government of the empire seemed to be now vested in the same hands with the papacy. But the union was soon dissolved by the death of Victor, who, after having returned to Italy and presided over a council at Florence, expired at Acerra on the 28th of July, 1057.

 

FREDERICK OF LORRAINE.

 

The Romans had felt themselves delivered from restraint by the death of Henry, and now proceeded to show their feeling by not only choosing a pope for themselves, but fixing on a person who was likely to be obnoxious to the German court—Frederick, the brother of duke Godfrey of Lorraine. Godfrey, after his submission to Henry III, had gone into Italy, and had obtained the hand of the emperor’s cousin Beatrice, widow of Boniface, marquis of Tuscany, and mother of the Countess Matilda, who, by the death of her young brother soon after the marriage, became the greatest heiress of the age. The connection appeared so alarming to Henry, whose rights as suzerain were involved in the disposal of Tuscany, that it led him to cross the Alps in 1055. Beatrice waited on him in order to assure him that her husband had no other wish than to live peaceably on the territory which he had acquired by marriage; but the emperor distrusted his old antagonist, and carried off both Beatrice and her daughter as hostages to Germany, where they were detained until Godfrey succeeded in appeasing him by waiting on him in Franconia, and solemnly promising fidelity.

While Godfrey thus raised himself by marriage from the condition of a discredited adventurer to a position of great power, wealth, and influence, his brother was ascending the steps of ecclesiastical promotion. Frederick, a canon of Liège, had accompanied Leo IX to Rome after the reconciliation of Godfrey with Henry in 1049, and had been appointed chancellor of the holy see. He was a leader in the expedition against the Normans, and was one of the legates who excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople. The rumour of the wealth which he had brought back from his eastern mission excited the suspicions of Henry; and Frederick, apprehending danger from the emperor, became a monk at Monte Cassino. About two years after his admission into the monastery a vacancy occurred in the headship; when the monks, who claimed the right of electing their superior and presenting him for the papal benediction, made choice of one Peter as abbot. Pope Victor, however, was inclined to question their privileges, and sent Cardinal Humbert to inquire on the spot whether any defect could be found in the election. Four monks, supposing that the cardinal came to depose their abbot, raised the neighbouring peasantry to arms; and Peter felt that their unwise zeal had fatally injured his cause. He told them that it was they who had deposed him from a dignity of which he could not otherwise have been deprived; he resigned the abbacy, and the monks, under Humbert’s presidency, elected Frederick m his room. At the council of Florence, Frederick was confirmed in his abbacy by the pope, who also created him cardinal of St. Chrysogonus; and he was at Rome, engaged in taking possession of the cure annexed to that title, when he was informed of Victor’s death. The Romans, dreading the interference of the neighbouring nobles, took on them­selves the choice of a pope, and, in answer to their request that he would name some suitable candidates, Frederick proposed Humbert of Sylva Candida, with three other bishops, and the subdeacon Hildebrand; but the Romans insisted that he should himself be pope, and on August 2, 1057, he was hailed as Stephen IX, taking his name from the saint to whom the day was dedicated, Stephen the antagonist of St. Cyprian.

Stephen was a churchman of the stern and haughty monastic school. His behaviour at Constantinople is significant of his character, and the acts of his short pontificate were consistent with it. Synods were held which passed fresh canons against the marriage of the clergy.

Hildebrand’s influence continued unabated, it was probably by Stephen that he was ordained deacon, and was appointed archdeacon of Rome. And by Hildebrand’s recommendation Peter Damiani was raised to the bishopric of Ostia, the second dignity in the Roman church—his distaste for such preferment having been overpowered by a threat of excommunication in case of his refusal.

In addition to the interests of his see, it is supposed that Stephen was intent on advancing those of his own family—that he meditated the expulsion of the Normans from Italy, and the elevation of Godfrey to the imperial dignity. He had retained the abbacy of Monte Cassino, and, with a view to the prosecution of his designs, he ordered that all the treasures of the monastery should be sent to Rome. But when they were displayed before him, and he saw the grief of the provost and other monks who had executed his order, a feeling of compunction seized him; and the provost, observing his emotion, told him that a novice, who knew nothing of the intended transfer, had seen a vision of St. Scholastica weeping over the loss of the precious spoil, while her brother St. Benedict endeavoured to comfort her. The pope burst into tears, and ordered that the treasure should be restored.

Within a few months after his election Stephen felt that his health was failing, and resolved to provide for the future disposal of his offices. At Monte Cassino, where he spent the Christmas season, he procured the election of Desiderius as his successor in the abbacy and on his return to Rome he exacted an oath that no pope should be chosen without the advice of Hildebrand, who was then engaged in a mission to Germany, probably with a view of conciliating the empress-mother, to whom Stephen must have felt that neither he himself nor the manner of his election could be acceptable. From Rome the pope proceeded to Florence, the capital of his brother’s dominions; and there he died in the arms of Gualbert of Vallombrosa, on the 29th of March, 1058.

Immediately on receiving the tidings of Stephen’s death, the nobles of the Campagna, headed by Count Gregory of Tusculum, rushed into Rome, seized on St. Peter’s by night, plundered the church, and set up as pope John, cardinal-bishop of Velletri, a member of the Crescentian family under the name of Benedict X. That John’s part in this affair was forced on him appears even from a letter of Peter Damiani, who speaks of him as so stupid, ignorant, and slothful, that he could not be supposed to have planned his own elevation. But his reluctance may be more creditably explained. His moral character is unassailed; he was one of the five ecclesiastics whom Stephen IX, before his own promotion, had named to the Romans as worthy of the papacy and the charges of ignorance and dullness which are brought against him by the al­most blind enmity of Damiani may be the less regarded, since the pope of Peter’s own party is described by Berengar of Tours as grossly illiterate, and in both cases such charges seem to have been prompted rather by passion than by justice.

The chief of the Roman clergy refused to share in the election of Benedict. Damiani would not perform the ceremonies of installation, which belonged to his office as cardinal-bishop of Ostia; and the pope was installed by a priest of that diocese, who was compelled by force to officiate, and whom Peter describes as so ignorant that he could hardly read. The cardinals withdrew from the city, threatening to anathematize the intruder, and envoys were sent by a party at Rome to the empress-mother Agnes, with a request that she would nominate a pope. Hildebrand, in returning from Germany, met these envoys, and suggested to them the name of Gerard, bishop of Florence, a Burgundian by birth, who at their desire was nominated by the empress, while Hildebrand, in order that this nomination might not interfere with the claims which were now advanced in behalf of the Roman church, contrived that he should almost at the same time be elected by the cardinals at Siena. The pope, who took the name of Nicolas II, advanced towards Rome under the escort of Godfrey of Tuscany, whose interest had doubtless been consulted in choosing the bishop of his capital as the successor of his brother in the papacy. At Sutri Nicolas held a council, which condemned and excommunicated Benedict as an intruder. The antipope fled from Rome, but, after the arrival of Nicolas in the city, he returned, and submitted to him, saying that he had acted under compulsion; whereupon he was readmitted to communion, although degraded from the episcopate and the priesthood, and confined for the remainder of his days within the suburban monastery of St. Agnes.

Immediately on gaining possession of the papacy Nicolas found his attention drawn to the affairs of Milan. The Milanese church had long held a very lofty position, and it had gained in reputation by the contrast which it presented to the degraded state of the papacy. The archbishop was a great secular prince, and in the absence of the emperor was the most important person in northern Italy. Heribert had long ruled the church with great vigour; he had maintained his title to the archbishopric in defiance of Conrad II and Benedict IX, and had held it in peace after the accession of Henry III, until 1045, when he died, leaving among his flock the reputation of a saint. The clergy of Milan bore a high character in all that related to the administration of their office; there was a proverb—“Milan for clerks, Pavia for pleasures, Rome for buildings, Ravenna for churches”. Their learning was above the average of the time; their discipline was strict, their demeanour regular, their services were performed with exemplary decency; they were sedulous in their labours for the education of the young, and in the general discharge of their pastoral duties. The Milanese church differed from the Roman in allowing the marriage of the clergy under certain conditions. St. Ambrose, the great glory of Milan, and the author of its peculiar liturgy, was believed to have sanctioned the single marriage of a priest with a virgin bride and this had become so much the rule that an unmarried clergyman was even regarded with suspicion. The same practice was generally observed throughout Lombardy, and the effect of the liberty thus allowed was seen in the superior character of the clergy, which struck even those witnesses who were least able or least willing to connect the effect with its cause. Thus Peter Damiani acknowledged that he had never seen a body of clergy equal to the Milanese, and he also bestows a very high commendation on those of Turin, whose marriage was sanctioned by the bishop, Cunibert.

On the death of Heribert, who, according to some writers, had himself been a married man, the see of Milan was bestowed by Henry III on Guy of Velate, a clerk of humble birth, to the exclusion of four eminent ecclesiastics whom the Milanese had sent to him for his choice. The new archbishop appears to have been a man of mean and feeble character; he is described as deficient in learning, and he was charged with the practice of habitual simony—a charge which probably meant nothing worse than the exaction of fees from the clergy.

The first movement against the marriage of the Milanese clergy was made by Anselm of Baggio, a priest who had been proposed as successor to Heribert in the archbishopric. On Guy’s application to Henry III, Anselm was removed from the scene by promotion to the see of Lucca, but the work which he had begun was soon taken up by others. One of these, Ariald, was a deacon, who is said to have been convicted of some gross offence before the archbishop. He held a cure in his native village, near Como, where he began to denounce the iniquities of clerical marriage, but met with little encouragement from his parishioners, who told him that it was not for ignorant people like themselves to refute him; that he would do better to transfer his preaching to Milan, where he might meet with persons capable of arguing with him. Ariald went accordingly to the city, where his admonitions were unheeded by the clergy, to whom he first addressed himself but he gained an important ally in Landulf, a man of noble family, and with a great talent for popular oratory, who appears to have been in one of the minor orders of the ministry, and is said to have aspired to the archbishopric. Anselm, on revisiting Milan, was provoked by the admiration which the clergy of his train expressed for the eloquence of the Milanese; he saw in Ariald and Landulf fit instruments for carrying on the movement which he could himself no longer direct; and he bound them by oath to wage an implacable warfare against the marriage of the clergy.

The two began publicly to inveigh with great bitterness against the clergy, and their exaggerated representations were received with the greedy credulity which usu­ally waits on all denunciation of abuses. The populace, invited by means of tickets or handbills which were distributed, of little bells which were rung about the streets, and of active female tongues, flocked to the places where the oratory of Landulf and his companion was to be heard; and the reformers continually grew bolder and more unmeasured in their language. They told the people that their pastors were Simoniacs and Nicolaitans, blind leaders of the blind; their sacrifices were dog’s dung; their churches, stalls for cattle; their ministry ought to be rejected, their property might be seized and plundered. Such teaching was not without its effect; the mob attacked the clergy in the streets, loaded them with abuse, beat them, drove them from their altars, exacted from them a written promise to forsake their wives, and pillaged their houses. The clergy were supported by the nobles, and Milan was held in constant disquiet by its hostile factions, while the emissaries of Ariald communicated the excitement to the surrounding country. The followers of Ariald and Landulf were known by the name of Patarines—a word of disputed etymology and meaning, which became significant of parties opposed to the clergy, whether their opposition were in the interest of the papacy or of sectarianism.

Archbishop Guy, by the advice of Stephen IX, cited Ariald and Landulf before a synod, and, on their scornfully refusing to appear, excommunicated them; but the pope released them from the sentence. Stephen then summoned them to a synod at Rome, where they asserted their cause, but were opposed by a cardinal named Dionysius, who, having been trained in the church of Milan, understood the circumstances of that church, and strongly denounced the violence with which they had proceeded in their attempts at reform. Stephen, although his feeling was on the side of Ariald, affected neutrality between the parties, and sent a commission to Milan; but his short pontificate ended before any result appeared.

The intervention of Nicolas II was now requested by Ariald, and Peter Damiani was sent to Milan as legate, with Anselm, the original author of the troubles, as his colleague. They found the city in violent agitation. The Milanese, roused by the alarm that their ecclesiastical independence was in danger, were now as zealous on the side of the clergy as they had lately been against them. Loud cries were uttered against all aggression; the Roman pontiff it was said, had no right to force his laws or his jurisdiction on the church of St. Ambrose. Bells pealed from every tower, handbells were rung about the streets, and the clangour of a huge brazen trumpet summoned the people to stand up for their threatened privileges. The legates found themselves besieged in the archbishop’s palace by angry crowds; they were told that their lives were in jeopardy; and the popular feeling was excited to frenzy when, on the opening of the synod, Peter Damiani was seen to be seated as president, with his brother legate on his right hand, while the successor of St. Ambrose was on the left. Guy—whether out of real humility, or with the design of inflaming yet further the indignation of his flock—professed himself willing to sit on a stool at the feet of the legates, if required. A terrible uproar ensued, but Peter’s courage and eloquence turned the day. Rushing into the pulpit, he addressed the raging multitude, and was able to obtain a hearing. It was not, he said, for the honour of Rome, but for their own good, that he had come among them. He dwelt on the superiority of the Roman church. It was founded by God, whereas all other churches were of human foundation; the church of Milan was a daughter of the Roman, founded by disciples of St. Peter and St. Paul; St. Ambrose himself had acknowledged the church of Rome as his mother, had professed to follow it in all things, and had called in pope Siricius to aid him in ejecting that very heresy of the Nicolaitans which was now again rampant. “Search your writings”, exclaimed the cardinal, “and if you cannot there find what we say, tax us with falsehood”. Since Damiani himself reports his speech, it is to be supposed that he believed these bold assertions; at all events, the confidence and the fluency with which he uttered them, the authority of his position, and his high personal reputation, prevailed with the Milanese. The archbishop and a great body of the clergy forswore simony, bound themselves by oath to labour for the extirpation of it, and on their knees received the sentence of penance for their past offences. The result of the legation was not only the condem­nation of the practices which had been complained of, but the subjection of the Milanese church to that of Rome.

In April 1059 Nicolas held a council at Rome, which was attended by a hundred and thirteen prelates, among whom was Guy of Milan. The archbishop was treated with studious respect; he was seated at the pope’s right hand, and, on his promising obedience to the apostolic see, Nicolas bestowed on him the ring, which the archbishops of Milan had usually received from the kings of Italy. Ariald stood up to accuse him, but was reduced to silence by Cunibert of Turin and other Lombard bishops. It was enacted that no married or concubinary priest should celebrate mass, and that the laity should not attend the mass of such a priest; that the clergy should embrace the canonical life; that no clerk should take preferment from a layman, whether for money or gratuitously, that no layman should judge a clerk, of whatever order. The council also discussed the case of Berengar, a French ecclesiastic, who was accused of heresy as to the doctrine of the Eucharist. But its most important work was the establishment of a new procedure for elections to the papal chair.

The ancient manner of appointing bishops, by the choice of the clergy and people, had been retained at Rome, subject to the imperial control; but the result had not been satisfactory. The nobles and the people were able to overpower the voice of the clergy; to them were to be traced the ignominies and the distractions which had so long prevailed in the Roman church—the disputed elections, the schisms between rival popes, the promotion of scandalously unfit men to the highest office in the hierarchy. It was therefore an object of the reforming party to destroy the aristocratic and popular influences which had produced such evils. Independence of the imperial control, which had of late become an absolute power of nomination, was also desired; but the imperial interest was ably represented in the council by Guibert, the chancellor of Italy, and the Hildebrandine party were for the present obliged to be content with a compromise. It was enacted that the cardinal-bishops should first treat of the election; that they should then call in the cardinals of inferior rank, and that afterwards the rest of the clergy and the people should give their assent to the choice. The election was to be made “saving the due honour and reverence of our beloved son Henry, who at present is accounted king and hereafter will, it is hoped, if God permit, be emperor, as we have already granted to him; and of his successors who shall personally have obtained this privilege from the apostolic see”.

By this enactment the choice of pope was substantially vested in the cardinals. The term cardinal had for many ages been used in the western church to signify one who had full and permanent possession of a benefice, as distinguished from deputies, assistants, temporary holders, or persons limited in the exercise of any rights belonging to the incumbency. But at Rome it had latterly come to bear a new meaning. The cardinal-bishops were the seven bishops of the pope’s immediate province, who assisted him in his public functions—the bishop of Ostia being the chief among them; the cardinal-priests were the incumbents of the twenty-eight “cardinal titles” of chief parish churches in the city. By the constitution of Nicolas, the initiative in the election was given to the cardinal-bishops. The other cardinals, however, were to be afterwards consulted, and a degree of influence was allowed to them; while the part of the remaining clergy and of the laity was reduced to a mere acceptance of the person whom the cardinals should nominate. The imperial prerogative is spoken of in words of intentional vagueness, which, without openly contesting it, reserve to the pope the power of limiting or practically annihilating it, as circumstances might allow; and whatever might be its amount, it is represented not as inherent in the office of emperor, but as a grant from the pope, bestowed on Henry out of special favour, and to be personally sought by his successors. The time for venturing on this important innovation was well chosen; for there was no emperor, and the prince for whom the empire was designed was a child under female guardianship, the sovereign of an unruly and distracted kingdom.

In the same year Nicolas proceeded into southern Italy, and held a council at Melfi, with a view to extirpating the Greek usages and habits which prevailed among the clergy of that region—especially the liberty of marriage. But a more important object of his expedition was the settlement of his relations with the Normans, whose most considerable leader was now Robert, styled Guiscard—the Wise, or rather the Crafty—one of the twelve sons of Tancred, a banneret or valvassor of Hauteville in Normandy. Three of Tancred’s sons by his first marriage had in 1035 joined their countrymen in Italy, and had been gradually followed by seven half-brothers, the children of their father’s second marriage, of whom Robert was the eldest. These adventurers rose to command among the Normans of the south, and formed the design of expelling the Greeks from their remaining territories in Italy. The eldest and the second brothers died without issue; on the death of the third, Humphrey, in 1057, Robert set aside the rights of his nephews, the children of the deceased, and was himself raised aloft on a buckler, and acknowledged as Humphrey’s successor. Under this chief, who was distinguished for his lofty stature, his strength and prowess, his ambition, his rapacity, his profound and unscrupulous cunning, the Normans carried on a course of incessant and successful aggression on every side. Their numbers were swelled by large bands from Normandy, while the more spirited among the natives of Apulia and Calabria assumed their name and habits, and were enrolled in their armies.

The Normans had not spared the property of St. Peter. Guiscard had been excommunicated by Nicolas for refusing to give up the city of Troia, which he had taken from the Greeks, and to which the Roman church laid claim; but mutual convenience now brought the warrior and the pontiff together. Instead of the schemes which his predecessors had formed for driving the Normans out of Italy, Nicolas conceived the idea of securing them to his alliance. On receiving an application from Guiscard for the withdrawal of his excommunication, he proposed that a conference should take place at the intended synod of Melfi; and the conference led to the conclusion of a treaty. By this the pope bestowed on Guiscard the investiture of Apulia, Calabria, and such territories in Italy or Sicily as he might in future wrest from the Greeks or the Saracens; and he conferred on him or confirmed to him the title of duke. At the same time Richard of Aversa, the representative of the earlier Norman settlement, received the title of prince of Capua, a city which he had lately taken from the Lombards. On the other side, “Robert, by the grace of God and of St. Peter, duke of Apulia and Calabria, and, with the help of both, hereafter to be of Sicily”, swore to hold his territories as a fief of the Roman see, and to pay an annual quit-rent. He was never to give them up to any of the ultramontanes. He was to be faithful to the holy Roman church and to his lord the pope; he was to defend him in all things, and to aid him against all men towards establishing the rights of his see. He was to maintain the pope’s territories, to subject all the churches within his own dominions to Rome, and, in case of his surviving Nicolas, he was to see that the successor to the papacy should be legitimately chosen. For both parties this treaty was an important gain. The Normans acquired, far more than by the earlier treaty with Leo IX, an appearance of legitimacy—a religious sanction for their past and for their future conquests. The pope converted them from dangerous neighbours into powerful allies, obtained from them an acknowledgment of his suzerainty, and especially bound them to maintain his late ordinance as to the election of future popes. In fullfillment of their new engagements, the Normans advanced towards Rome, reduced the castles of the nobility of the Campagna, and, having thus established the pope in security, they resumed the career of conquest which had been authorized by his sanction. The acquisition of Sicily, however, which Guiscard, in the enumeration of his titles, had claimed by anticipation, was reserved for another member of his family. While the elder sons of Tancred of Hauteville were pursuing their fortunes in Italy, Roger, the youngest, had remained to watch over his father’s decline, until he was released from his duty by the old man’s death. He then followed his brethren to the south, where he soon gave proofs of his valour and daring; but he was unkindly treated by Guiscard, and, being left to his own resources, was reduced for a time to find a subsistence by robbing travellers and stealing horses—a fact which was afterwards preserved by the historian of his exploits, at Roger’s own desire. The brave and adventurous youth gathered by degrees a band of followers, which became so strong as even to be formidable to Guiscard. The brothers were reconciled in 1060, and combined for the siege of Reggio. After the taking of that city Roger carried his arms into Sicily under a banner blessed by Alexander II. His force at first consisted of only sixty soldiers; its usual number was from 150 to 300 horsemen, who joined or left him at their pleasure. Roger was often reduced to great distress, as an instance of which we are told that, when shut up in the city of Traina, he and his countess had but one cloak between them, in which they appeared in public by turns. But his indomitable courage and perseverance triumphed over all difficulties. The Saracens, effeminated by their long enjoyment of Sicily, and weakened by the division of their power, were unable to withstand him, even although aided by their brethren from Africa; and after thirty years of war, Roger was master of the island. He assumed the title of Grand Count, and his family became connected by marriage with the royal houses of Germany, France, and Hungary.

Nicolas, like Leo IX, had offended his own country­men by the zeal with which he devoted himself to the Italian interest. An opposition to him was formed in Germany, headed by Hanno, archbishop of Cologne, who, in conjunction with other prelates, drew up an act of excommunication and deposition against the pope. Nicolas was already ill when this document reached him; he is said to have read it with a great appearance of grief, and his death followed almost immediately, on the 27th of July, 106i.

Each of the Roman parties now took measures for securing the succession to the papacy. The nobles and imperialists, under the guidance of Cardinal Hugh the White, who had lately deserted the high ecclesiastical party in disgust at the superior influence of Hildebrand, despatched an embassy to the German court, under Gerard, count of Galeria, who had repeatedly been excommunicated by popes, and had lately incurred a renewal of the sentence for plundering the archbishop of York, with other English prelates and nobles, on their return from a visit to Rome. The ambassadors, who were instructed to offer the patriciate and the empire to the young king, were favourably received; while the envoys of Hildebrand and his friends waited five days without obtaining an audience of Henry or of his mother. Hildebrand, on learning this result, resolved to proceed to an election. By the promise of a large sum, he induced Richard, prince of Capua, to repair to Rome; the cardinals, under the protection of the Norman troops, chose Anselm of Lucca, who assumed the name of Alexander II; and, after a bloody conflict between the imperialists and the Normans, the pope was enthroned by night in St. Peter’s. In this election even the vague privilege which had been reserved by Nicolas to the emperor was set aside, in reliance on the weakness of Henry’s minority and on the newly-acquired support of the Normans.

The report of these proceedings reached Agnes at Basel, where a diet of princes and prelates was assembled, and among them some representatives of the Lombard bishops, who, under the direction of the chancellor Guibert, had resolved to accept no pope but one from their own province, which they styled “the paradise of Italy”. The tidings of Alexander’s election naturally raised great indignation. Henry was acknowledged as patrician of Rome; the late pope’s decree as to the manner of papal elections was declared to be null;  and, with the concurrence of the Roman envoys, Cadalous or Cadolus, bishop of Parma, was elected as the successor of Nicolas. The imperialist pope, who took the name of Honorius II, was, no doubt, favourable to those views on the subject of clerical marriage which distinguished the Lombard from the Hildebrandine party; but little regard is to be paid to the assertions of his violent opponents, who represent him as a man notoriously and scandalously vicious.

Honorius advanced towards Rome, where Benzo, bishop of Alba, a bold, crafty, and unscrupulous man, was employed to prepare the minds of the people for his reception. The talents of Benzo as a popular orator, his coarse and exuberant buffoonery, and the money which he was able to dispense, were not without effect on the Romans. On one occasion he had a public encounter with Alexander, whom (as he boasts) he compelled to retire amid the scoffs and curses of the mob. Honorius was received with veneration in many cities. At Tusculum, where he established his camp, he was joined by the count of the place, envoys from the patriarch of Constantinople waited on him, and his troops were successful in an encounter with the small force which was all that the Normans could then spare for the assistance of Alexander. But the appearance of Godfrey of Tuscany, with a formidable army, induced both parties to an accommodation. Cadalous was to retire to Parma, Anselm to Lucca, and the question between them was to be decided by the imperial court, to which Godfrey, who affected the character of a mediator, undertook to represent their claims. Honorius relied on the favour which he already enjoyed; Alexander, on the interest of Godfrey. But at this very time a revolution was effected which gave a new turn to affairs.

The upright and firm administration of the empress-mother was offensive to many powerful persons, who felt it as interfering with their interests; and the princes of Germany, who had been galled by the control of Henry III, especially during the last years of his reign, had conceived hopes of establishing their independence during the nonage of his son. Groundless slanders were spread as to the intimacy of Agnes with Henry, bishop of Augsburg, on whom she chiefly relied for counsel, and a plot was laid to remove the young king, who was now in his twelfth year, from her guardianship. Hanno, archbishop of Cologne, a severe, proud, and ambitious prelate, undertook the execution of the scheme. He caused a vessel to be prepared with extraordinary richness of ornament, and, while at table with Henry on an island of the Rhine, he described this vessel in such terms as excited in the boy a wish to see it. No sooner was Henry on board than the rowers struck up the river. The king, suspecting treachery, threw himself overboard, but was rescued from the water by Count Eckhardt, one of the conspirators; his alarm was soothed, and he was landed at Cologne. The people of that city rose in great excitement, but were pacified by the archbishop’s assurances that he had not acted from any private motives, but for the good of the state; and, by way of proving his sincerity, Hanno published a decree that the administration of government and justice should be vested in the archbishop of that province in which the king should for the time be resident.

Hanno had thus far supported the Lombard pope, but he now found it expedient to make common cause with the Hildebrandine party; indeed it is probable that his late enterprise had been known beforehand to Godfrey of Tuscany, if not to Hildebrand and the other ecclesiastical leaders. Peter Damiani, who had already, by letters written with his usual vehemence, urged Henry to put down the antipope, and Cadalous himself to retire from the contest, now addressed Hanno in a strain of warm congratulation—comparing the abduction of Henry to the good priest Jehoiada’s act in rescuing the young Joash from Athaliah, and exhorting the archbishop to take measures for obtaining a synodical declaration against Cadalous. Guibert, the chief supporter of the imperial interest in Italy, was deprived of his chancellorship; and in October 1062 a synod was held at Osbor, where Peter appeared, and presented an argument for Alexander in the form of a dialogue between an Advocate of the Royal Power and a “Defender of the Roman Church”. The Roman champion, as might be expected, is fortunate in his opponent. The advocate of royalty, ill acquainted with the grounds of his cause, and wonderfully open to conviction, is driven from one position after another. His assertion that popes had always been chosen by princes is confuted by an overwhelming array of instances to the contrary. The donation of Constantine is triumphantly cited. The royalist then takes refuge in the reservation which the late pope’s decree had made of the imperial prerogative; but he is told that, as the Almighty sometimes leaves His promises unfulfilled because men fail in the performance of their part, so the grant made by Nicolas to Henry need not be always observed; that the privileges allowed to the king are not invaded, if during his childhood the Roman church—his better and spiritual mother—exercise a guardian care like that which his natural mother exerts in the political administration of his kingdom.

The pamphlet was read before the synod, which acknowledged Alexander as pope, and excommunicated his rival. It was the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude, the anniversary of the antipope’s election; and a prediction which Damiani had confidently uttered, that, if he should persist in his claims, he would die within the year, was proved to be ridiculously false. The prophet, however, was not a man to be readily abashed, and professed to see the fullfillment of his words in the excommunication—the spiritual death—of Cadalous.

Peter had by this time withdrawn from the eminent position to which Stephen IX had promoted him. His reforming zeal had been painfully checked by the supineness of those with whom he was associated. His brother cardinals, to whom he addressed an admonitory treatise on their duties, continued to live as if it had never been written. His attempts to stimulate pope Nicolas to a thorough purification of the church were but imperfectly successful, although he cited Phineas as a model, and Eli as a warning. Moreover, in his simple monkish earnest­ness for a religious and moral reformation, he was unable to enter into Hildebrand’s deeper and more politic schemes for the aggrandizement of the hierarchy; he felt that Hildebrand employed him as a tool, and he was dissatisfied with the part. He had therefore repeatedly entreated Nicolas to release him from his bishopric, on the plea of age, and of inability to discharge his duties. The pope refused his consent, and Hildebrand, unwilling to lose the services of a man so useful to his party, told the cardinal that he was attempting under false pretences to escape from duty; but Peter persisted in his suit, and in the first year of Alexander's pontificate he was allowed to retire to his hermitage of Fonte Avellano. There he spent part of his time in humble manual works; among his verses are some which he sent to the pope with a gift of wooden spoons manufactured by himself. But he continued to exercise great influence by his writings; he was consulted by multitudes as an oracle; and from time to time he left his wilderness, at the pope’s request, to undertake important legations. The empress-mother Agnes, after the death of bishop Henry of Augsburg, placed herself under the direction of Damiani; and, having been brought by him to repent of her policy towards the church, she submitted to penance at the hands of Alexander, and became a nun in the Roman convent of St. Petronilla.

Hanno and his associates had loudly censured Agnes for the manner in which she educated her son; but when they had got the young king into their own hands, his education was utterly neglected. No care was taken to instruct him in the duties of a sovereign or of a Christian man. His talents, which were naturally strong, and his amiable dispositions were uncultivated; the unsteadiness of character which was his chief defect was unchecked; no restraint was opposed to his will; he was encouraged to waste his time and his energies in trifling or degrading occupations—in hunting, gaming, and premature indulgence of the passions. Hanno, finding that he himself was distasteful to Henry, both on account of the artifice by which he had obtained possession of the king’s person and because of his severe and imperious manners, called in the aid of Adalbert, archbishop of Bremen and Hamburg. The character of this prelate has been very fully depicted by the historian of northern Christianity, Adam, who, as a canon of his church, had ample opportunities of knowing him. Adalbert was a man of many splendid qualities. His person was eminently handsome; he was distinguished for eloquence and for learning; his morals, by a rare exception to the character of the age, were unimpeached; his devotion was such that he wept at the celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice. He had laboured with zeal and success for the spreading of the gospel among the northern nations—extending his care even to the Orkneys and to Iceland. He had conceived the idea of exalting Bremen to the dignity of a patriarchate, and it was a desire to promote the interest of his see which first led him to frequent the imperial court. He acquired the confidence of Henry III, whom he attended into Italy in 1046; it is said that the emperor even wished to bestow the papacy on him, and that Suidger of Bamberg, who had been a deacon of the church of Hamburg, was preferred by Adalbert’s own desire. The hope of erecting a northern patriarchate ended with the death of the archbishop’s patrons, Henry and Leo IX, and from that time he devoted himself to political ambition. The faults of his character became more and more developed. His pride, vanity, ostentation, and prodigality were extravagantly displayed. His kindness and his anger were alike immoderate. The wealth which he had before spent on ecclesiastical buildings was now lavished on castles; he maintained a numerous and costly force of soldiers; and to meet the expenses of his secular grandeur he oppressed the tenants of his church and sold its precious ornaments. He entertained a host of parasites,—artists, players, quacksalvers, minstrels, and jugglers; one was a baptized Jew, who professed the science of alchemy; others flattered their patron with tales of visions and revelations, which promised him power, long life, and the exaltation of his church. While engaged in the society of these familiars, the archbishop would refuse an audience to persons who wished to see him on the gravest matters of business; sometimes he spent the night in playing at dice, and slept throughout the day. His eagerness to extend the possessions of his see, and to render it independent of lay control, involved him in many quarrels with neighbouring nobles; and his favourite table-talk consisted of sarcasms on these powerful enemies—the stupidity of one, the greed of another, the boorishness of a third. At the same time he was proud of his own descent from the counts palatine of Saxony; he spoke with contempt of his predecessors in the archbishopric as a low-born set of men, and even claimed kindred, through the family of the Othos, with the emperors of the east. To the poor his behaviour was gentle and condescending; he would often wash the feet of thirty beggars; but to his equals he was haughty and assuming.

The young king was won by the fascination of Adalbert’s society, and after a time Hanno found it expedient to admit his brother archbishop to a share in the administration. The misgovernment of these prelates was scandalous. Intent exclusively on their own interest and on that of their partisans, they appropriated or gave away estates belonging to the crown, while they used the royal name to sanction their plunder of other property. The wealth of monasteries, in particular, was pillaged without mercy. To Hanno his rapacity appeared to be justified by the application of the spoil to religious uses; Adalbert was rapacious in order to obtain the means of maintaining his splendour. Hanno, a man of obscure birth, practised the most shameless nepotism in the bestowal of ecclesiastical dignities, while Adalbert disdained such expedients for enriching his kindred. The sale of church preferment was openly carried on; a historian of the time tells us that money was the only way to promotion. The feuds and insubordination of the nobles became more uncontrollable; nor were ecclesiastics slow to imitate their example. Thus, in consequence of a question as to precedence between the bishop of Hildesheim and the abbot of Fulda, a violent affray took place between their retainers in the church of Goslar, at Christmas 1062, and the quarrel was renewed with still greater fury at the following Whitsuntide, when the king’s presence was no more regarded than the holiness of the place. Henry was even in personal danger, and many were slain on both sides. The great monastery of St. Boniface was long disturbed by the consequences of these scenes, and was impoverished by the. penalties imposed on it for the share which its monks had taken in them.

Adalbert gradually supplanted Hanno. At Easter 1065, he carried Henry to Worms, where the young king, then aged fifteen, was girt with the sword, and was declared to be of age to carry on the government for himself. Thus the regency of Hanno ceased, while Adalbert, as the minister of Henry, for a time enjoyed undivided power. Under his administration the state of things became continually worse. Simony was more shamelessly practised than ever; the pillage of monasteries was carried on without measure; for the archbishop taught the young king to regard monks as merely his stewards and bailiffs. Adalbert’s private quarrels were turned into affairs of state, and he took advantage of his position to inspire Henry with a dislike of the Saxons and others who had offended him. The discontent of his enemies and of those who suffered from his misgovernment rose at length to a height, and at a diet which was held at Tribur, in January 1066, Henry was peremptorily desired by a powerful party of princes and prelates to choose between the resignation of his crown and the dismissal of the archbishop of Bremen. Adalbert was compelled to make a hasty flight; he was required to give up almost the whole revenue of his see to his enemies; and his lands were plundered, so that he was reduced to support himself by appropriating religious and charitable endowments, and by oppressive exactions which are said to have driven some of the victims to madness and many to beggary. Hanno resumed the government. His rapacity and nepotism were unabated, but sometimes met with successful resistance. A nephew named Conrad, whom he had nominated to the archbishopric of Treves, was seized by the people, who were indignant at the denial of their elective rights; the unfortunate man was thrice thrown from a rock, and, as he still lived, was despatched with a sword. And an aggression on the property of the monks of Malmedy was defeated by the miraculous power of their patron St. Remaclus.

The antipope Honorius had made a fresh attempt on Rome in 1063, when he gained possession of the Leonine city, and was enthroned in St. Peter’s; but many of his partisans deserted him as his money decreased, the Romans rose against him, and, after much fighting with a Norman force which Hildebrand had called in to oppose him, he was compelled to shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo, under the protection of Cencius, a disorderly noble who had made himself master of the place. For two years he held out in the fortress; but his condition became more and more hopeless. It was in vain that he implored the assistance of Henry and Adalbert; and at length he felt himself obliged to withdraw, paying three hundred pounds of silver for the consent of Cencius to his departure. Hanno, after the recovery of his power, proceeded into Italy with a view of putting an end to the schism. At Rome he held a synod, where Alexander appeared. The archbishop asked him how he had ventured to occupy the apostolical chair without the sovereign’s permission; whereupon Hildebrand stood forward as the champion of his party, and maintained that the election of the pope had been regularly conducted—that no layman had any right to control the disposal of the holy see. Hanno was disposed to be easily satisfied, and adjourned the consideration of the case to a synod which was to be held at Mantua in Whitsun-week. At this synod Alexander presided, and defended all his acts. Honorius, who had retired to his bishopric of Parma, refused to attend, unless he might be allowed to sit as president, and attempted, at the head of an armed force, to disturb the sessions of the council. But the attempt was put down by Godfrey of Tuscany, Alexander was formally acknowledged as pope, and in that character he was escorted by Godfrey to Rome. The antipope held possession of Parma until his death, but, although he continued to maintain his pretensions to the papacy, he made no further active attempts to enforce them.

The pacification effected by Peter Damiani at Milan had too much the nature of a surprise to be lasting. The promulgation of the decrees against the marriage of the clergy which were enacted by the Roman synod of 1059 became the signal for great commotions in northern Italy. Many bishops refused to publish them; the bishop of Brescia, on attempting to do so, was almost torn to pieces by his clergy. And in Milan itself disorders soon broke out again.

Landulf died, but his place as an agitator was taken by his brother Herlembald. The new leader had been a valiant soldier; his views as to the marriage of the clergy had been bitterly influenced by finding that his affianced bride had been guilty of levity with a clerk. On this discovery he broke off the match, went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and at his return would have become a monk, but that Ariald persuaded him to continue in secular life, and to serve the church by defending it. The character of Herlembald was bold, violent, and resolute; he was possessed of a fiery eloquence, and was devoted to his cause with the narrow, reckless, and intolerant zeal which not uncommonly marks the religious partisanship of men trained to martial professions. He now accompanied Ariald to Rome, where Alexander received them as old friends, and bestowed on Herlembald a consecrated banner, charging him to unfurl it against heresy. On returning to Milan, the two began a fresh course of aggression against the married and concubinary clergy. They excited the multitude by their addresses; they won the poor by large distributions of money, and the young by the skillfull use of flattery. A company of youths was formed, sworn to extirpate concubinage among the clergy, and with it was joined a rabble composed of low artisans and labourers, of men rendered desperate by want of employment, and of ruffians attracted by the hope of plunder. Some Manicheans, or adherents of the Monteforte heresy, are also mentioned as associates in the cause. For eighteen years Herlembald exercised a tyrannic power in Milan. Yet the populace was not entirely with him; for while he and Ariald, in their enthusiasm for Roman usages, went so far as to disparage the Milanese ritual, they furnished their opponents with a powerful cry in behalf of the honour of St. Ambrose. The reformers were very unscrupulous as to the means of carrying out their plans; Herlembald, when in want of money, proclaimed that any priest who could not swear that he had strictly kept the vow of continence since his ordination should lose all his property; and on this his adherents conveyed female attire by stealth into the houses of some of the clergy, where the discovery of it exposed the victims of the trick to confiscation, plunder, and outrage. The streets of Milan were continually disquieted by affrays between the hostile parties. Peter Damiani by his correspondence stimulated the reformers, and Gualbert of Vallombrosa sent some of his monks to aid them. The persecuted clergy, on the other hand, found allies in many Lombard bishops, who urged them to leave the city, and offered them hospitable entertainment. It is said that even Ariald was at one time touched by remorse, and expressed penitence on seeing the misery, and the destitution of religious ordinances, which had arisen from his agitations

A conference was held, at which a priest named Andrew especially distinguished himself by pleading for the marriage of the clergy. He rested the warrant for it on Scripture and on ancient usage, and spoke forcibly of the worse evils which had resulted from a denial of the liberty to marry. It was said that St. Ambrose had sanctioned the marriage of the clergy; that, by representing continency as a special gift of grace, he implied that it was something which ought not to be exacted of all. Ariald replied that marriage had been allowed in the times when babes required to be fed with milk, but that all things were now new. The conference was broken off by an attack of the mob on the clergy. The discomfited party alleged that miracles were wrought among them in behalf of clerical marriage, but their stories produced no effect.

In 1066, Herlembald, leaving Ariald to keep up the excitement of the Milanese, went again to Rome, and before a synod accused archbishop Guy of simony. The pope was unwilling to proceed to extremities, but Hildebrand persuaded him to pronounce a sentence of excommunication, which was conveyed to Milan by Herlembald. On Whitsunday the archbishop ascended the pulpit of his cathedral, holding the document in his hand. He inveighed against Herlembald and Ariald as the authors of the troubles which had so long afflicted the city. He complained of their behaviour towards himself and concluded his speech by desiring that all who loved St. Ambrose would leave the church. Out of a congregation of seven thousand, all withdrew except the two agitators and about twelve of their adherents. These were attacked by the younger clergy, with some lay partisans of the archbishop. Ariald was nearly killed; Herlembald fought desperately, and cut his way out of the church. The Patarines, on hearing of this, rose in the belief that Ariald was dead, and their numbers were swollen by a multitude of peasants from the neighbourhood, who had repaired to Milan for the festival; they stormed the cathedral and the archiepiscopal palace, dragged the archbishop out, handled him roughly, and left him hardly alive. Next day, when the peasantry had left the city, the nobles and clergy resolved to take vengeance for these outrages. Ariald fled in disguise, pursued by two clerks with a party of soldiers, while the archbishop laid an interdict on the city until he should be found. The unfortunate man was betrayed by a companion into the hands of a niece of the archbishop named Oliva, who directed five of her servants to conduct him to an island in the Lago Maggiore. On arriving there, his guards asked him whether he acknowledged Guy as archbishop of Milan. “He is not”, said Ariald, “nor ever was, for no archbishop-like work is or ever was in him”. The servants then set on him, cut off his members one by one, with words of savage mockery, and at length put an end to his life, and threw his body into the lake. Some months after the murder, the corpse was found, and Herlembald compelled the archbishop to give it up; it was carried in triumph to Milan, and miracles were reported to be performed by it. By these scenes the exasperation of Herlembald and his party was rendered more intense than ever.

In the following spring, the pope visited Milan, on his way to the council of Mantua, where he made some regulations as to discipline, and canonized Ariald as a martyr. Two Roman cardinals were soon afterwards sent as legates to Milan. They entered on their commission in a temperate and conciliatory spirit (Aug. 1, 1067).

It was decreed that the clergy should separate from their wives or concubines; that such of them as should persist in defying this order should be deprived of their office; but that no one should be deprived except on confession or conviction, and that the laity should not take the punishment of offending clergymen into their own hands. These orders, however, had little effect. Herlembald, dissatisfied with the moderation of the commissioners, again went to Rome, where Hildebrand joined him in maintaining the necessity of appointing a. new archbishop instead of Guy, whose title they declared to be invalid, as being derived from the imperial nomination.

Guy himself at length became weary of his uneasy dignity. He expressed a wish to resign, and sent his ring and crosier to the king, with a request (which is said to have been supported by money) that a deacon named Godfrey might be appointed as his successor; but, although Henry accepted the recommendation, and nominated Godfrey to the see, the Milanese refused to receive him. Nor were Herlembald’s party able to establish a young ecclesiastic named Atto, whom they set up as a rival archbishop; on the day of his consecration he was driven from the city, after having been compelled to forswear his pretensions. The church was in a state of utter confusion. Hildebrand declared the oath extorted from Atto to be null, and procured a like declaration from the pope. Godfrey was excommunicated by Alexander, and was persecuted by Herlembald, who, by intercepting the revenues of the archbishopric, rendered him unable to pay a stipulated pension to Guy; and the old man, in distress and discontent, allowed himself to be decoyed into a reconciliation with Herlembald. He was allowed to retain the title of archbishop, but was kept as a virtual prisoner in a monastery, while Herlembald wielded the ecclesiastical as well as the secular power in Milan. Guy died in 1071, but the troubles of his church were not ended by his death.

While these scenes were in progress at Milan, disturbances of a similar kind took place at Florence, where John Gualbert and the monks of Vallombrosa publicly accused the bishop, Peter, of simony, and declared the ministrations of simoniac and married clergy to be invalid. After much contention and some bloodshed, they proposed to decide the question by ordeal. The bishop refused to abide such a trial, and the pope, who had been appealed to, discouraged it; but a monk named Peter undertook to prove the charge. Two piles of wood were erected, ten feet in length, and with a narrow passage between them. The monk celebrated the Eucharist, and proceeded to the place of trial, clothed in the sacerdotal vestments. After praying that, if his charge against the bishop of Florence were just, he might escape unhurt, he entered between the burning piles, barefooted and carrying the cross in his hands. For a time he was hidden by flames and smoke; but he reappeared uninjured, and was hailed by the spectators with admiration and triumph. The bishop, a man of mild character, yielded to the popular clamour by withdrawing from Florence; but he retained his office until his death, and the diocese was administered in his name by a deputy. The zeal of the monk Peter, who acquired the name of “the Fiery”, was rewarded by promotion to high dignity in the church. Under Gregory VII he became cardinal-bishop of Albano, and was employed as legate in Germany.

Henry III had chosen as a wife for his son, Bertha, daughter of the marquis of Susa, whose powerful interest in Italy he hoped to secure by the connection. The princess was beautiful, and, as appeared in the varied trials of her life, her character was noble and affectionate; but the young king, from unwillingness to forsake his irregularities, was reluctant to fullfill the engagement. After recovering from an illness which his physicians supposed to be desperate, he was persuaded by the entreaties of his nobles to marry Bertha in 1066; but regarding her as forced on him by his enemies, he felt a repugnance towards her, and three years later he formed a design of repudiating her. With a view to this, he endeavoured to secure the interest of Siegfried, archbishop of Mainz, by a promise of aiding him in enforcing the payment of tithes from Thuringia to his see, and Siegfried willingly listened to the inducement. He wrote to the pope on behalf of the divorce, although in a tone which showed that he was somewhat ashamed of his part; he had (he said) threatened the king with excommunication unless some definite reason were given for his desire of a separation. Peter Damiani was once more sent into Germany, and assembled a synod at Mainz, from which city, at Henry’s summons, it was transferred to Frankfort. After a discussion of the matter, the legate earnestly entreated Henry to desist from his purpose, for the sake of his own reputation, if he were indifferent to the laws of God and man. He told him that it was an accursed project, unworthy alike of a Christian and of a king; that it was monstrous for one whose duty bound him to punish misdeeds, to give so flagrant an example; that the pope would never consent to the divorce, nor ever crown him as emperor if he persisted in urging it. The king submitted, although unwillingly, and soon resumed his licentious habits. But the character of Bertha gradually won his affection, and, so long as she lived, her fidelity supported him in his troubles.

About this time Adalbert, after a banishment of three years from the court, recovered his position, and for a time conducted the government with absolute power. He resumed his ambitious project of erecting his see into a patriarchate. The evils of his former administration were renewed, and even exceeded. Ecclesiastical preferments were put up to open sale in the court; and it is said that a general disgust was excited by the sight of the shameless traffic in which monks engaged, and of the hoarded wealth which they produced, to be expended in simoniacal purchases. Feuds, intrigues, discontent, abounded. The writer to whom we are indebted for the fullest account of Adalbert’s career describes his last years with a mixture of sorrow and awe—dwelling fondly on his noble gifts, relating his errors with honest candour, and lamenting his melancholy perversion and decline. It seemed as if the archbishop’s mind were disordered by the vicissitudes through which he had passed. His days were spent in sleep, his nights in waking. His irritability became intolerable; to those who provoked him he spoke with an indecent violence of language; or he struck them, and sometimes so as even to draw blood. He showed no mercy to the poor; he plundered religious and charitable foundations, while he was lavish in his gifts to the rich, and to the parasites whose flatteries and prophecies obtained an ever-increasing mastery over him. Yet his eloquence was still unabated, and gave plausibility to his wildest extravagances and to his most unwarrantable acts. His nearest relations believed him to be under the influence of magic, while he was himself suspected by the vulgar of unhallowed arts—a charge for the falsehood of which the historian solemnly appeals to the Saviour and to all the saints. His health began to fail; a woman, who professed to be inspired, foretold that he would die within two years unless he amended his life; but he was buoyed up by the assurances of other prophets, that he would live to put all his enemies under his feet, and almost to the last he relied on these assurances in opposition to the warnings of his physicians. Omens of evil were observed at Bremen: crucifixes wept, swine and dogs boldly profaned the churches, wolves mingled their dismal howlings with the hooting of owls around the city, while the pagans of the neighbourhood burnt and laid waste Hamburg, and overran Nordalbingia. The archbishop gradually sank. It was in vain that the highest dignitaries of the church sought admittance to his chamber; he was ashamed to be seen in his decay. The king alone was allowed to enter; and to him Adalbert, after reminding him of his long service, committed the protection of the church of Bremen. On the 16th of March 1072 the archbishop expired at Goslar—unlike Wolsey, with whom he has been compared, in the recovery of his power, and in the retention of it to the last; but, like Wolsey, lamenting the waste of his life on objects of which he had too late learnt to understand the vanity. His treasury, into which, by rightful and by wrongful means, such vast wealth had been gathered, was found to be entirely empty; his books and some relics of saints were all that he left behind him.

On the death of Adalbert, Henry, in deference to the solicitations of his nobles and to the cries of his people, requested Hanno to resume the government. The arch­bishop reluctantly consented, and, although his rapacity and sternness excited complaints, the benefits of his vigorous administration speedily appeared. Nobles were compelled to raze their castles, which had been the strongholds of tyranny and insubordination; justice was done without respect of persons; it seemed, according to the best annalist of the age, as if for a time the minister had infused into the indolent young king the activity and the virtues of his father. But Hanno was weary of his position, and under the pretext of age and infirmity, resigned it at the end of nine months; when Henry, feeling (according to Lambert’s expression) as if he were delivered from a severe schoolmaster, plunged into a reckless career of dissipation and misgovernment. He neglected public business; violences were committed against nobles, the property of churches and monasteries was bestowed on worthless favourites, the hills of Saxony and Thuringia were crowned with fortresses intended to coerce the inhabitants, and the garrisons indulged without restraint their love of plunder and destruction, their insolence and their lust. In Thuringia, the prosecution of Siegfried’s claim to tithes was used as a pretext for the military occupation of the country; it had been agreed that the king was to enforce the claim by arms, on condition of sharing in the spoil. Siegfried, by a letter in which he plainly hinted a bribe, endeavoured to draw Hildebrand into his interest. In March 1073 a synod met at Erfurt, in the king’s presence, for the consideration of the question; when the abbots of Fulda and Hersfeld appeared in opposition to the archbishop. The Thuringians made an appeal to the pope, but Henry threatened ruin and death against any one who should attempt to prosecute it; and when the synod agreed on a compromise unfavourable to the Thuringians, he forbade the abbots to report the result to Rome. Henry had incurred the general detestation of his subjects, which was swollen by exaggerated and fabulous tales of his misconduct; the Saxons, the Thuringians, and the Swabians, exasperated by the wrongs which they had suffered and by the dread of further evils, were ready to break out into rebellions

The cries of Germany at length reached Alexander, who summoned the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne, with the bishop of Bamberg, to Rome, and reproved them for their slackness in discouraging simony. Hanno was gently treated, and was presented with some precious relics; Siegfried’s offer of a resignation was declined; Otho of Bamberg confessed his guilt, but it is said that he appeased the papal anger by valuable gifts, and he received the honour of the pall. The greatest prelates of Germany were at the pope’s feet; the two metropolitans of England had just been compelled to appear before him—Lanfranc of Canterbury, that he might personally receive the pall which he had in vain endeavoured to obtain without such appearance; and Thomas of York, that he might refer to the successor of St. Peter and of St. Gregory a question as to the English primacy. By these triumphs over national churches, Alexander was encouraged to enter on a contest with the chief representative of the secular power. In October, 1072, he had held a conference at Lucca with Beatrice and her daughter Matilda on the means of reforming their royal kinsman; and, as it was agreed that gentle measures would be ineffectual, he proceeded, at a synod in the following Lent, to excommunicate five counsellors who were charged with exerting an evil influence over Henry, and summoned the king himself to make satis­faction to the church for simony and other offences. Hanno and the bishop of Bamberg, who were on the point of returning home, were charged with the delivery of the mandate; but on the 21st of April 1073, Alexander died, and it remained unanswered and unenforced.

Peter Damiani had died in the preceding year, on his return from a mission to Ravenna, where he had been employed in releasing his fellow-citizens from the excommunication brought on them by their late archbishop, as a partisan of the antipope Cadalous.

CHAPTER II. GREGORY VII.