BOOK VI.

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

CHAPTER VI.

FROM THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR HENRY IV TO THE CONCORDAT OF WORMS. A.D. 1106-1122.

 

 

So long as his father lived, Henry V had been unmeasured in his professions of obedience to the Roman see; and, now that the elder emperor was removed, the pope supposed that he might make sure of compliance with the claims which from the time of Gregory had been advanced on behalf of the church. In October 1106, Paschal held a council at Guastalla, which renewed the decrees against lay investiture; while, with a view to the restoration of peace, it was provided that such bishops and clergy of the imperialist party as had received ordination from schismatics, should, unless guilty of simony or usurpation, be suffered to retain their preferments. Before the opening of the council, envoys had arrived from Henry, requesting the papal confirmation of his title, and inviting the pope to spend the Christmas season with him at Augsburg. The message appeared to promise the fulfillment of all Paschal’s wishes; but, as he proceeded towards Germany, some expressions reached him which suggested a suspicion as to Henry's designs, and induced him to turn aside into France, in the hope of engaging Philip and his son Lewis, who for some years had been associated in the kingdom, to take part with him against the German sovereign. He was, however, unable to obtain from the French princes anything beyond vague promises, and was to pay severely for the encouragement which he had given to Henry's rebellion against his father. The new king was bent on recovering all the authority which his crown had lost or risked in the contests of the preceding years, and for this purpose he was ready to employ all the resources of a character bold, crafty, persevering, and utterly unprincipled.

In April 1107, a conference was held at Châlons on the Marne between the pope and some ambassadors of Henry, headed by Bruno, archbishop of Treves, and Welf, duke of Bavaria. The king had now thrown off all disguise, investing bishops and compelling the prelates of Germany to consecrate them. The envoys, emboldened by Paschal’s late concessions to Henry of England, demanded, with a confident air, that the right of investiture should be acknowledged, and, with the exception of the archbishop of Treves, are said to have behaved as if they intended rather to frighten the pope by clamour than to discuss the question—especially Welf, the nominal husband of Matilda, a large, burly, noisy man, who always appeared with a sword carried before him. The argument on the imperial side was left to archbishop Bruno, who eloquently and skillfully contended that from the time of Gregory the Great it had been customary that the vacancy of a bishopric should be notified to the sovereign, and that his leave to elect a successor should be obtained; after which the new bishop was to be chosen by the clergy and people, and invested by the sovereign with ring and staff. The bishop of Piacenza replied, on the part of the pope, that this reduced the church to the condition of a handmaid, and annulled the effect of the Redeemer's blood. At this speech the envoys gnashed their teeth and declared that they would waste no more words; that the question must be determined at Rome and with the sword. A few weeks later a council was held at Troyes, where the pope condemned simony and investitures, but Henry's representatives declared that their master would not be bound by the judgment of a synod assembled in a foreign kingdom.

It was not until 1110 that the internal troubles of Germany, and the wars in which he was engaged with his neighbours of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, allowed Henry to attempt the fullfillment of his threat. He then, after having concluded a treaty of marriage with the princess Matilda of England, crossed the Alps at the head of 30,000 cavalry, with a great number of infantry and other followers; and for the purposes of controversial warfare he was attended by a body of learned men, while a chaplain named David, a Scotsman by birth and afterwards bishop of Bangor, was charged with the task of writing the history of the expedition. The cities of Italy, which had shown an insubordinate spirit, submitted, with the exception of Novara and Arezzo, which paid dearly for their resistance. Even the countess Matilda did homage by proxy for the fiefs which she held under the crown, and promised to support the king against all men except the pope. Paschal, who in the two preceding years had sent forth fresh denunciations of investiture as a sacrilege, had engaged the Normans by a special promise to assist him; but, dispirited as they now were by the recent deaths of their leaders Roger of Apulia and Bohemund, they were altogether unable to cope with so overwhelming a force. They answered the pope's supplications with excuses, and were even afraid lest they should be driven out of their Italian conquests. From Arezzo Henry sent envoys to the pope, requiring him to bestow on him the imperial crown and to allow the right of investiture. In reply he received a startling proposal of a compromise— that, in consideration of his relinquishing investiture, the bishops and abbots should resign all the endowments and secular privileges which they had received from his predecessors since Charlemagne, and on which the royal claim was founded. The pope expressed an opinion that, as the corruptions of the clergy had chiefly arisen from the secular business in which these privileges had involved them, they would, if relieved of them, be able to perform their spiritual duties better; while he trusted for their maintenance to the tithes, with the oblations of the faithful, and such possessions as they had acquired from private bounty or by purchase. The sincerity of this offer, so prodigiously favourable to the king, has been questioned, but apparently without reason, although it is difficult to imagine how the pope could have expected to obtain the consent of those whose interests were chiefly concerned. Henry foresaw their opposition—more especially as the pope, instead of employing clerical commissioners, had entrusted the proposal to a layman, Peter, the son of a convert from Judaism named Leo; and at Sutri he accepted the terms on condition that the cession of the "royalties" should be ratified by the bishops and the church. The engagements were to be exchanged at the imperial coronation, which the pope was to perform at Rome.

Henry reached the city on the 12th of February 1111, and was received with great magnificence. In St. Peter’s, as if to throw all the odium of the proposed arrangement on the pope, he declared that it was not his wish to deprive the clergy of anything which his predecessors had given them. On this the German and Lombard prelates broke out violently against Paschal, whom they charged with sacrificing their rights, while he had taken care to secure his own lordship not only over the patrimony of St. Peter, but over Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily. The nobles, alarmed at the prospect of losing the fiefs which they held under the church, were furious. Long conferences and delays took place. The king said that, as the pope could not fullfill his part of the compact, it must be given up, and required to be crowned at once. A German started forth and roughly told the pope that there was no need of further words; that the Germans would have their master crowned, like Pipin, Charlemagne, and Lewis. The day had worn away, and, as night was coming on, Henry, by advice of his chaplain Adalbert, arrested the pope and cardinals, with a number of clergy and others, and the palaces of the high ecclesiastics were plundered by the soldiery. Immediately Rome was in an uproar; the people murdered such of the Germans as were found straggling about the streets; and on the next day bloody fights took place. The king himself, after having slain five Romans with his lance, was unhorsed and wounded in the face; a Milanese noble, who gave up his horse to him, was torn in pieces, and his flesh was cast to dogs. Exasperated by these scenes, Henry carried off the pope and cardinals, and for sixty-one days kept them prisoners in the castles of the neighbourhood, while the country was fearfully devastated by the German troops. Henry was master only of the quarter beyond the Tiber; the rest of Rome was held out by the inhabitants, whom John, cardinal bishop of Tusculum, animated to resistance by the offer of forgiveness for all their sins. By some it is said that the pope was treated with personal respect; by others, that he was stripped of his robes, chained, and threatened with death unless he would comply with Henry's desires. It was in vain that the king endeavoured to bend him by representing that, in granting the right of investiture, he would not bestow offices or churches, but only royal privileges. But the cardinals who were with Paschal urged also that investiture was a mere external ceremony; the Romans, distressed by the ravages of the troops, and dreading the capture of their city, earnestly entreated him to make peace; and at last he yielded, declaring that for the deliverance of the church and of his people he made a sacrifice which he would not have made to save his own life. He swore, with thirteen cardinals, to allow investiture by ring and staff, after a free election and as a necessary preliminary to consecration; never to trouble the king either on this subject or as to his late treatment of him; and never to excommunicate him. Henry then released his prisoners, and on the 13th of Aprils was crowned emperor in St. Peter’s—the gates of the Leonine city being shut from an apprehension of tumults. The pope was reluctantly obliged during the ceremony to deliver to the emperor with his own hand a copy of his engagement, as evidence that he adhered to it after the recovery of his liberty. At the celebration of the Eucharist he divided the host into two parts, of which he himself took one, and administered the other to Henry, with a prayer that, as that portion of the life-giving body was divided, so whosoever should attempt to break the compact might be divided from the kingdom of Christ and of God. The courtly historiographer David found a precedent for his master's treatment of the pope in Jacob’s struggle with the angel, and in the speech, “I will not let thee go except thou bless me”.

The emperor returned to Germany in triumph, and on the way spent three days with the Countess Matilda, whom he treated with high respect and appointed governor of Lombardy. He signalized his victory by nominating and investing his chaplain Adalbert to the archbishopric of Mainz; and he proceeded to celebrate the funeral of his father. Urged by the general feeling of the Germans, he had endeavoured at Sutri to obtain the pope’s consent to the interment; but Paschal refused on the ground that it was contrary to Scripture, and that the martyrs had cast out the bodies of the wicked from their churches. The pope, however, afterwards found it convenient to believe an assertion of the late emperor’s repentance : and the body, which for five years had been excluded from Christian burial, was now laid in the cathedral of Spires with a magnificence unexampled in the funeral of any former emperor.

No sooner had the terror of Henry's presence been removed from Italy than voices were loudly raised against the pope’s late compliances. The Hildebrandine party, headed by Bruno, bishop of Segni and abbot of Monte Cassino, reproached him with a betrayal of the church, and urged him to recall his unworthy act; at an assembly held in his absence they renewed the decrees of his predecessors against investiture, and declared the compact with the emperor to be void. The feeble pleas which Paschal advanced, in conjunction with the cardinals who had been his fellow-prisoners, were disallowed, and in a letter to the cardinal bishops of Tusculum and Velletri, who, as they had themselves escaped captivity, were conspicuous in the agitation against him, he promised to amend what he had done. An envoy whom he sent into Germany, to request that Henry would give up investitures, returned, as might have been expected, without success; and at the Lenten synod of 1112, which was held in the Lateran, the pope found himself obliged to condemn his own engagement, to which he said that he had consented under constraint, and solely for the peace of the church. He asked the advice of the prelates as to the means of retrieving his error. They loudly declared the compact to be condemned and annulled, as contrary to the Holy Ghost and to the laws of the church; but even this was not enough for the more zealous members of the assembly, who urged Paschal to annul it by his own authority. It seemed as if the papacy were to be set up against the pope. Paschal, in the hope of weakening Bruno’s influence, obliged him to resign the great abbacy which he held in conjunction with his see; but such were the strength and the clamour of the party that the pope thought of hiding his shame in a hermitage, and withdrew for a time to the island of the Tiber, from which he only returned to resume his office at the urgent entreaty of the cardinals. While thus pressed on one side by the high ecclesiastical party, he had to resist, on the other side, the desire which the king of England and other princes manifested, that the same privileges which he had granted to the emperor might be extended to themselves.

Paschal was determined to observe his engagement not to excommunicate Henry, although he complained that the emperor had not been equally scrupulous; and on this head he withstood all importunities. But Guy, archbishop of Vienne, who in the end of 1111 had obtained from him a letter annulling the compact, and had since attended the Lateran synod, drew him into an extraordinary proceeding. In a council held at Vienne, within Henry’s own kingdom of Burgundy, in September 1112, the archbishop declared investiture to be a heresy, renewed the Lateran condemnation of the compact, and anathematized the emperor for extorting it and for his other outrages against the pope. He then wrote to Paschal, asking him to confirm the decrees, and announcing that, in case of his refusal, the members of the synod must withdraw their obedience from him. Thus threatened, the unfortunate pope answered by granting the required confirmation; yet while by this sanction he made the excommunication his own, he considered that, so long as he did not directly pronounce it, he was not guilty of violating his oath.

In the meantime Germany was a scene of great agitation. Henry, as if the cession proposed at Sutri had taken effect, seized on the revenues of many churches and monasteries, assumed an entire control over ecclesiastical affairs, and excited the general detestation of the clergy. Conon, bishop of Palestrina, a cardinal and legate, who was at Jerusalem when he heard of the pope’s captivity, immediately pronounced an anathema against the emperor, which he repeated in many cities of Greece, Hungary, Germany, and France. The new primate, Adalbert, the creature of Henry and the adviser of his outrage against the pope, turned against his master under pretence of his being excommunicate, and craftily endeavoured to undermine him. For this Adalbert was imprisoned on a charge of treason, but, after he had been kept in confinement nearly three years, the emperor was obliged to give him up to the citizens of Mainz, when his miserable appearance bore witness to the sufferings and privations which he had endured, and excited general indignation. The archbishop was bent on vengeance; although he had sworn and had given hostages to answer to a charge of treason, he cast off the obligation, and became the soul of the anti-imperialist party. Germany was distracted by a civil war, and such was the exasperation of feeling that when, in 1115, the emperor was defeated at Welfesholz, the bishop of Halberstadt refused to allow the burial of his fallen soldiers, under the pretext that they had fought in the cause of an excommunicate person.

In 1116 Henry again crossed the Alps, in order to take possession of the inheritance of Matilda, who had died in the preceding summer, and to counteract some negotiations which aimed at the acknowledgment of Alexius Comnenus, or of some prince of the Byzantine family, as emperor of Rome. His appearance put an end to this scheme, and he seized on all that had belonged to the great countess—on the fiefs in his character of suzerain, and on the allodial territories as heir,—while the pope did not venture even to raise a protest in behalf of the donations by which her possessions had been twice bestowed on the Roman see.

While the emperor was at Venice, in March 1116, Paschal held a council in the Lateran, at which he desired the bishops to join with him in condemning the compact which he had executed while Henry's prisoner. On this Bruno of Segni burst forth into triumph at the pope's having with his own mouth condemned his heretical act. “If it contained heresy” exclaimed a member of the council, “then the author of it is a heretic”. But cardinal John of Gaeta and others of the more moderate party reproved Bruno for the indecency of his speech, and declared that the writing, although blamable, was not heretical. Conon of Palestrina detailed the anathemas which he had pronounced against the emperor from Jerusalem to France, and asked the approbation of the pope and of the council, which was granted.

On his way to Rome Henry made overtures to the pope—partly in consequence of the impression produced by a dreadful earthquake which took place at the time. Paschal replied that he would himself observe his oath not to excommunicate the emperor; that he had not authorized the excommunications which Conon and another legate had pronounced in Germany; but that decrees passed by the most important members of the church could not be annulled without their consent, and that the only means of remedy was a general council. At the emperor’s approach he fled from Rome, and took refuge at Monte Cassino.

Henry arrived at Rome in March 1117. The people received him with acclamations, but the cardinals and clergy stood aloof, and the attempts to negotiate with them were unsuccessful. At the great ceremonies of Easter, the only dignified ecclesiastic connected with the pope who could be found to place the crown on the emperor’s head was Maurice Burdinus or Bourdin, a Limousin by birth, and archbishop of Braga in Portugal, who had formerly been employed by Paschal on a mission to the German court. For this act Burdinus was deposed and excommunicated by the pope in a synod at Benevento. But although the clergy in general remained faithful to Paschal, the Romans were discontented with him on account of an appointment to the prefecture of the city, and on his return, after Henry’s departure, they refused to admit him. He was only able to get possession of the castle of St. Angelo, where he died on the 2ist of January 1118.

The cardinals chose as his successor one of their own number, the deacon John of Gaeta, who had been a monk of Monte Cassino, and had held the chancellorship of the Roman church since the pontificate of Urban. But as the new pope, who took the name of Gelasius II, was receiving homage in the church of a monastery on the Palatine, Cencius Frangipani, one of the most powerful among the Roman nobles, broke in with a troop of armed followers, seized him by the throat, struck and kicked him, wounding him severely with his spurs, dragged him away to his own house, and loaded him with chains. By this outrage the Romans of every party were roused to indignation. Frangipani, like the Cencius of Gregory VII’s time, was compelled to release his prisoner, and to cast himself at his knees with an entreaty for pardon; and Gelasius, mounted on a horse, was escorted in triumph to the Lateran. Some weeks later, however, in the dead of night, the rites of his ordination to the priesthood were interrupted by tidings that the emperor was in Rome, and had possession of St. Peter’s. The news of pope Paschal’s death had recalled Henry in haste from the north of Italy, with a view to the exertion of the prerogative which he claimed in appointments to the apostolic chair. Gelasius fled, and, after serious dangers both by land and by sea, reached his native city of Gaeta, where the ordination and consecration were completed. The emperor endeavoured to draw him to a conference; but Gelasius, who had been a companion of Paschal’s imprisonment, regarded the proposal as a snare, and suggested that their differences should be discussed in a council at Milan or Cremona, where he had reason to hope that he might be safe. The proposal to transfer the important business to these northern cities excited the jealousy of the Romans, to whom Henry caused the pope’s letter to be read in St. Peter’s; and their spirit was fostered by the celebrated jurist Irnerius, the founder of the law-school of Bologna, who urged them to exert their rights in the election of a pope, agreeably to the ancient canons, which were publicly recited from the pulpit. Under the advice of Irnerius and other lawyers, Burdinus was chosen by the people, and was confirmed by the emperor, on whose head he again placed the crown at Whitsuntide.

Gelasius, at a synod at Capua, anathematized the emperor and the antipope, who had assumed the name of Gregory VIII. On returning to Rome he found the people turbulent, and, while celebrating mass in the church of St. Praxedes, was again attacked by the Frangipanis. He declared that he would leave the bloody city—the new Babylon and Sodom; that he would rather have one emperor than many; and his words were hailed with applause by the cardinals. The pope made his way into France, where he was received with honour; and, after having visited several of the principal cities, he was about to hold a council at Reims, when he died at the abbey of Cluny on the 29th of January 1119.

Conon of Palestrina had been selected by Gelasius as his successor, but had suggested to him that Guy, archbishop of Vienne and cardinal of St. Balbina, should be preferred, as more likely, from his character and position, to serve the church effectually. Guy was son of a duke or count of Burgundy, and was related to the sovereigns of Germany, France, and England. The zeal which he had displayed in excommunicating the emperor, and the skill for which he was noted in the conduct of affairs, marked him out as a champion to whom the Hildebrandine party might look with hope and confidence. In consequence of Conon’s suggestion, the archbishop was summoned to Cluny; but he did not arrive until after the death of Gelasius. The cardinals, five in number, who had accompanied the late pope from Italy, were unanimous in choosing Guy for his successor; but it was with the greatest unwillingness, and only under condition that his election should be ratified by the Romans, that he was persuaded to accept the office; and when the result of the election became known, the conclave was invaded by a body of his kinsmen, retainers, and soldiery, who tore off his pontifical robes, and dragged him away, crying out that they would not part with their archbishop—the Romans might find a pontiff for themselves. The violence of these adherents, however, was, with some difficulty, appeased; the consent of the Romans was readily obtained, and Guy was inaugurated as pope Calixtus II in his own cathedral at Vienne.

Calixtus spent the spring and the summer of 1119 in France, and on the 20th of October he opened at Reims the synod which his predecessor had projected. Fifteen archbishops and more than two hundred bishops were present; among them was the German primate Adalbert, with his seven suffragans and a brilliant train of three hundred knights. There were four bishops from England, whom the king, in giving them permission to attend, had charged not to complain against each other, because he was resolved to do full justice to every complaint within his own kingdom, and had warned not to bring back any “superfluous inventions”. The pope, although elected by a handful of exiles, appeared in splendid state, and in all the fullness of his pretensions. Lewis the Fat, who since 1008 had been sole king of France, brought charges before the council against Henry of England for violations of his feudal duty as duke of Normandy, and for his treatment of his brother Robert; and these charges, relating purely to matters of secular policy, he referred to the pope as arbiter. The Norman primate, Godfrey of Rouen, attempted to justify his sovereign, but was put down by the general disapprobation of the assembly.

During the emperor’s absence in Italy, Germany had been a prey to anarchy and confusion, and since his return it had been immersed in the horrors of civil war. Conon, after having passed in disguise through the territories occupied by the imperialists, had again appeared, denouncing excommunications against Henry and deposition against all prelates who refused to obey his citations; while Adalbert of Mainz stirred up the Saxons, and consecrated bishops in contempt of the imperial claims. Henry had made overtures for a reconciliation with the pope, and William of Champeaux, bishop of Châlons on the Marne, with Pontius, abbot of Cluny, had been sent by Calixtus to confer with him at Strasburg. The bishop assured the emperor that he need not so strongly insist on the privilege of investiture, since in France no such ceremony was then used, and yet he himself performed the duties of feudal service as faithfully as any of his German brethren. The cases were not indeed parallel; for the French sovereigns had always retained a control over the church, which rendered the position of their bishops very unlike that of the great German prelates since the minority of Henry IV. But the emperor professed himself satisfied, and a second commission arranged with him the terms of an accommodation—that he should give up investitures, that bishops should do homage for their royalties, and that he should be released from his excommunication.

The pope left Reims with the intention of meeting the emperor, and sent commissioners before him for the conclusion of the treaty. But the report that Henry had with him a force of 30,000 men raised a feeling of distrust, and Calixtus halted at the castle of Mousson to await the result of the negotiations. A dispute arose between Henry and the commissioners as to the sense of certain articles. The emperor, finding himself strong, was disposed to evade his engagements; he pretended a wish to consult the princes of Germany, and declared that he would not stand barefooted to receive absolution. The commissioners promised to do their utmost that this point might be waived, and that the ceremony should be as private as possible. But on their reporting the negotiations to the pope, he left Mousson in indignation at Henry’s conduct, and returned to Reims, where he signalized his arrival by consecrating a popularly-elected bishop for Liège, in opposition to one who had been invested by the emperor. The council passed the usual canons against investiture, simony, and clerical marriage; and on the sixth and last day the church’s curse was denounced in the most solemn manner against the emperor and the antipope—each of the bishops and abbots, 427 in number, standing up, with his pastoral staff in one hand, and with a lighted taper in the other. Henry's subjects were declared to be absolved from their allegiance until he should be reconciled to the church.

In fullfillment of an intention which he had announced at the council, the pope proceeded into Normandy, and held an interview with Henry of England at Gisors. One subject of discussion between them related to the employment of legates. Calixtus himself, while archbishop of Vienne, had been sent by Paschal with the character of legate for all England in 1100, within a few months after Anselm’s return from his first exile. His visit caused a great excitement; for, although legates had before appeared in this country, their visits had been very rare, and their authority had been limited to special business, so that an outcry was raised against the new commission as a thing without example, and it was declared that no one but the archbishop of Canterbury could be acknowledged as a representative of the pope. Anselm asserted the privilege of Canterbury; the legate returned without obtaining a recognition of his power; and the primate procured from the pope, although for his own person only, a promise that no legate should be sent to supersede him. At a later time, the independent character of the English church, and its disposition to settle its own affairs without reference to Rome, were complained of by Paschal II on the translation of Ralph from Rochester to Canterbury; while the king was offended at Conon’s having ventured, as papal legate, to excommunicate the Norman bishops for refusing to attend a council. William of Warelwast, now bishop of Exeter, was once more sent to Rome to remonstrate against Conon’s proceedings; and the pope despatched a new legate into England—the abbot Anselm, who was chosen as being nephew of the late archbishop, and as being himself known and popular among the English. But although Henry ordered that the legate should be treated with honour in Normandy, he would not permit him to cross the sea, and sent Ralph himself to Rome, to assert the rights of his primacy. The archbishop was prevented by illness from following the pope, who had withdrawn to Benevento; but he returned with a general and vague confirmation of the privileges of Canterbury.

Another question related to the pretensions of the see of York. Anselm, in the beginning of the reign, had exacted from Gerard, on his translation to the northern archbishopric, a promise of the same subjection to Canterbury which he had sworn when consecrated as bishop of Hereford. The next archbishop of York, Thomas, renewed the pretensions which his predecessor of the same name had raised in opposition to Lanfranc; but the measures which Anselm took to defeat him were successful, although Anselm did not himself live to witness their success. Thurstan, who was nominated to York in 1114, declined to receive consecration at Canterbury, from an unwillingness to swear subjection to the archbishop; and, in violation both of his own solemn promise and of assurances which the pope had given to Henry, he contrived to get himself consecrated by Calixtus at Reims, before the arrival of a bishop who was specially charged to prevent his consecration, although the English bishops who were present protested against it.

The pope was easily satisfied with the explanations which Henry gave of his behaviour towards Robert and the king of France. He promised that no legate should be sent into England except at the king's request, and for the settlement of such things as could not be settled by the English bishops; and he requested that Thurstan might be allowed to return to England. The king replied that he had sworn to the contrary. “I am apostolic pontiff”, said Calixtus, and offered to release him from the oath; but Henry, after consideration, declined to avail himself of the absolution, as being unworthy of a king, and an example which would tend to produce universal distrust between men; and he refused to readmit Thurstan, except on condition that he should make the same submission to Canterbury which had been made by his predecessors.

Having established his authority to the north of the Alps, the pope proceeded into Italy. His rival Burdinus, abandoned by the emperor, fled from Rome at the approach of Calixtus and took refuge within the walls of Sutri. St. Peter’s, which had been strongly fortified, was given up to the friends of Calixtus in consideration of a sum of money. Burdinus himself was betrayed into the hands of the pope, and, after having been paraded about Rome, mounted on a camel, arrayed in bloody sheepskins by way of a pontifical robe, and holding the camel’s tail in his hands, he was thrust into a monastic prison. He lived to an advanced age, but his remaining years were varied only by removals from one place of confinement to another.

In the meantime the discords of Germany were unabated. Hostile armies moved about the country—the one commanded by the emperor, the other by the primate Adalbert, to whom the pope had given a commission as legate : and it seemed as if their differences must be decided by bloodshed. But circumstances had arisen which tended to suggest a compromise. The contest of fifty years had exhausted all parties, and a general desire for peace began to be felt. The princes of Germany had come to see how their own interest was affected by the rival pretensions of the papacy and the crown. While desirous to maintain themselves against the emperor, and to secure what they had won for their order, they had no wish to subject him, and consequently themselves, to the pope—to degrade their nationality, to lose all hold on the offices and endowments of the church. Thus patriotic and selfish motives concurred in rendering the leaders of the laity desirous to find some means of accommodation. And from France, where the difficulty as to investiture had not been felt, persuasives to moderation were heard. There the learned canonist Ivo, bishop of Chartres, had throughout maintained the lawfulness of investiture by laymen, provided that it were preceded by a canonical election. He held that the form of the ceremony was indifferent, inasmuch as the lay lord did not pretend to confer any gift of a spiritual kind; that, although it was schismatical and heretical to maintain the necessity of lay investiture, yet such investiture was in itself no heresy. Ivo strongly reprobated the agitation excited by the Hildebrandine party against Paschal, and he was able to persuade the archbishop of Sens, with other prelates, to join him in a formal protest against the councils which took it on themselves to censure the pope. Hildebert, bishop of Le Mans, Hugh, a monk of Fleury, and other eminent ecclesiastics gave utterance to somewhat similar views; and at length abbot Godfrey of Vendome—who had been long known as one of the most uncompromising asserters of the ecclesiastical claims, and had published two tracts in which he declared lay investiture to be heresy—sent forth a third tract, composed in an unexpected spirit of conciliation. Laymen, he said, may not confer the staff and the ring, since these are for the church to give; but there are two kinds of investiture—the one, which makes a bishop, the other, which maintains him; and princes may without offence give investiture to the temporalities by some symbol, after canonical election and consecration. Godfrey speaks strongly against the mischief of contentiousness on either side, and (in direct contradiction to the Hildebrandine principle that kings ought to be treated by the church as freely as other men) he quotes St. Augustine’s opinion that one ought seldom or never to be excommunicated who is backed by an obstinate multitude, “lest, while we strive to correct one, it become the ruin of many”.

The effect of such writings was widely felt, and contributed to swell the general eagerness for peace. As the hostile armies of the Germans were encamped in the neighbourhood of Wurzburg, negotiations were opened between them. The preliminaries were settled in October 1121; a formal compact was then drawn up by commissioners at Mainz; and on the 23rd of September 1122, the terms of the agreement between the empire and the hierarchy were read before a vast multitude assembled in a meadow near Worms. On the pope’s part, it was stipulated that in Germany the elections of bishops and abbots should take place in the presence of the king, without simony or violence; if any discord should arise, the king, by the advice of the metropolitan and his suffragans, was to support the party who should be in the right. The bishop elect was to receive the temporalities of his see by the sceptre, and was bound to perform all the duties attached to them. In other parts of the emperor’s dominions, the bishop was, within six months after consecration, to receive the temporalities from the sovereign by the sceptre, without any payment, and was to perform the duties which pertained to them. The emperor, on his part, gave up all investiture by ring and staff, and engaged to allow free election and consecration throughout his dominions; he restored to the Roman church all possessions and royalties which had been taken from it since the beginning of his father's reign, and undertook to assist towards the recovery of such as were not in his own hands. These conditions were solemnly exchanged at Worms; the legate, Lambert, cardinal of Ostia, celebrated mass, and gave the kiss of peace to the emperor; and in the following year, 1123, the concordat of Worms was ratified by the first council of the Lateran, which in the Roman church is reckoned as the Ninth General Council. The contest, which for half a century had agitated Italy and Germany, was ended for a time.

The apparent simplicity of the solution—although, indeed, its terms contained the seeds of future differences as to their interpretation—strikes us with surprise, as contrasted with the length and the bitterness of the struggle. But in truth circumstances had disposed both parties to welcome a solution which at an earlier time would have been rejected. The question of investitures had on Gregory’s part been a disguise for the desire to establish a domination over temporal sovereigns; on the part of the emperors, it had meant the right to dispose of ecclesiastical dignities and to exercise a control over the hierarchy. Each party had now learnt that its object was not to be attained; but it was not until this experience had reduced the real question within the bounds of its nominal dimensions that any accommodation was possible.

The emperor ceded the power of nomination to bishoprics, and, as to those which were beyond the limits of Germany, he appears to have given up all control over the appointments. But in Germany it was otherwise. The imperial claim to nominate was, indeed, acknowledged to be unlawful; but as this had never been defended on grounds of law, and as the provision that bishops should be chosen in the presence of the emperor or of his commissioners allowed the exercise of an important influence in the choice, the emperor’s legal prerogative was really rather increased than lessened. And as, in the case of German bishops, the investiture was to precede consecration, there was thus an opportunity of interposing a bar to the promotion of any person unacceptable to the sovereign. The right of exacting homage was unquestioned, and, by a mere change in the outward symbol, the emperor secured the substance of the investiture that the bishops should be vassals of the crown, not of the papacy; that they should be subject to the feudal obligations, and that the connection of the church with the state should be maintained.

On the part of the pope, the concordat appears to be a serious sacrifice. Urged by the representations of the German estates, both lay and ecclesiastical, who told him that, if peace were not made, the responsibility would rest on him, he had ceded the pretensions of Gregory and Urban as to investitures and homage; the condition on which Godfrey of Vendome had insisted in his conciliatory proposals—that consecration should precede investiture—was relinquished as to German bishoprics; and the party of which Calixtus had hitherto been the foremost representative was deeply dissatisfied with the terms of the compromise. But his consent to these terms is to be explained by the change which had taken place in the position of the papacy since Hildebrand entered on his career. The imperial claim to control elections to St. Peter’s chair was abandoned, and whereas Henry III had aimed at making himself master of the hierarchy, his son and his grandson had found it a sufficient labour to defend themselves against its encroachments. The bold assertions of Gregory, continued by his successors, and, above all, the great movement of the crusades, had raised the pope to a height before unknown; and, when on the whole his substantial gain had been so great, he could afford to purchase the credit of moderation by yielding in appearance and in matters of detail.

 

CHAPTER VII.

MONASTICISM—NEW ORDERS—THE TEMPLARS AND HOSPITALLERS.