READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
BOOK VII.
FROM THE ELECTION OF INNOCENT III TO THE DEATH
OF BONIFACE VIII,
CHAPTER I.
INNOCENT III. A.D. 1198-1216
I
AFFAIRS OF GERMANY.
At the death of Celestine the Third, the urgency of
affairs appeared to supersede the observance of the rule which prescribed that
the election of a pope should be deferred until after the funeral of his
predecessor. On the same day on which Celestine breathed his last, a meeting of
cardinals, attended by all but four of the twenty-eight who then formed the
college, was held in a church near the Colosseum—probably the monastic church
of St. Gregory, on the Coelian hill. Of three names proposed for the vacant
dignity, that of John, bishop of Sabina, found the greatest favor;
but this cardinal himself, and the aged Octavian of Ostia, whose influence was
powerful in the consistory, exerted themselves that the votes should be united
in favour of Lothair, cardinal of SS. Sergius and Bacchus; and Lothair,
although he endeavoured by tears and struggles to decline the papacy, was
elected by his brethren, invested with the mantle, presented to the expectant
people, and enthroned in the Lateran as Innocent the Third.
Innocent was of the family of the Counts of Segni, who took from their rank the surname of Conti. The
Conti had mixed deeply in the feuds of their neighbourhood, and had usually
been arrayed in opposition to the late pope’s family, the Orsini. Innocent had
studied at Paris, a circumstance to which he refers with interest in a letter
addressed to Philip Augustus; and he had displayed and strengthened his hierarchical
feeling by a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas the Martyr at Canterbury.
After having further prosecuted his studies at Bologna, where he acquired a
profound knowledge of ecclesiastical law, he returned to Rome, was ordained
sub-deacon by Gregory VIII, and soon after became a canon of St. Peter’s. In
the twenty-ninth year of his age, he was advanced to the dignity of cardinal by
Clement III, to whom he was nearly related; and under this pope, as under his
predecessor, Lucius, he was employed in important missions. The papacy of Celestine,
to whom he was obnoxious on account of the hostility between their families,
condemned him for a time to inaction, and he employed himself chiefly in study,
which produced its fruit in a treatise “On the Contempt of the World”, and in
other writings. The general tone of these is that of a rigid ascetic, withdrawn
from the world and despising it—a tone seemingly very alien from the vigorous
practical character which the author was soon to display. His sermons are remarkable
for the acquaintance with Scripture which appears in them, and for his
extraordinary delight in perverting its meaning by allegory—a practice which in
later times enabled him to produce scriptural authority for all his pretensions
and for everything that he might desire to recommend. And in his books “On the
Sacred Mystery of the Altar”, he had laid down the highest Roman doctrine as to
the elevation of St. Peter and his successors over all other apostles and
bishops.
At the time of his election, Innocent was only
thirty-seven years old, and on this account fears were entertained by some that
he would not prove equal to the burden of the papal office. But all such
apprehensions were speedily dispelled by the display of a character which
united the boldness of Gregory VII with the politic caution and patience of
Alexander III, and under him the papacy attained its highest elevation. The
vast, although imperfect, collection of his letters attests that immense and
varied activity which justified him in saying of himself—“Not only am I not
allowed to contemplate, but I cannot even get leave to breathe; I am in such a
degree made over to others that I almost seem to be altogether taken away from
myself”. In what degree these letters may be regarded as his own compositions,
it may be impossible to say; but there is in them a remarkable unity not only
of character but of style. With much redundancy of words, and with that
systematic abuse of Scripture which has been already mentioned as
characteristic of him, they are marked throughout by the impress of his clear
mind and of his powerful will. Yet stern as Innocent was in principle, fully as
he upheld the proudest claims of the papacy—and not the less so for his
continual affectation of personal humility—he appears to have been amiable in
his private character. His contemporary biographer describes him as bountiful
but not prodigal, as hot in temper, but easily appeased, and of a magnanimous
and generous spirit. He is said to have been even playful in intercourse; he
was a lover of poetry and of music, and some well-known hymns of the church
have been ascribed to him. Among his defects is noted the common papal failing
of a too great devotion to the interest of his own family; he erected a
principality for his brother Richard, and provided for other kinsmen with a
care which exposed him to reproach.
Innocent when chosen to the papacy was as yet only a
deacon. Out of scrupulous regard for the laws of the church, he deferred his
promotion to the order of priesthood until the next ember season; and, having
then been duly ordained, he was consecrated and enthroned in St. Peter’s on the
festival of the apostle’s Chair.
The pope immediately set on foot a reformation of his
own household. The luxury of the court was exchanged for a rigid simplicity.
The multitude of nobles who had lately thronged the palace were discarded,
except on occasions of high ceremony, and the ordinary services were committed
to ecclesiastics. The high-born pages were dismissed, but each of them was
presented with a gift sufficient to pay the expenses of knighthood, and an
attempt was made to extend to the general administration of the curia that freedom
from corruption by which Innocent himself had been honourably distinguished as
cardinal. A moderate table of fees for the preparation of bulls and for other
official acts was established, and it was ordered that no officer should demand
anything of suitors; but the permission to accept voluntary offerings may perhaps
have been enough to frustrate in a great degree the effect of this salutary
measure. By dismissing most of the doorkeepers Innocent rendered access to his
own person more easy. He sat often in his consistory, where the clearness and
equity of his judgments were greatly admired, so that lawyers and men of
learning were in the habit of frequenting the court in order to hear him.
At the election of the pope, the Romans were clamorous
for the donative with which they had been usually gratified on such occasions.
Innocent thought it well to comply with their wishes, although he put off the
payment until after his consecration; and thus he secured the support of the
multitude for the important changes which he intended to effect. Hitherto the
prefect of the city had held his office under the emperor. But Innocent
abolished this last vestige of the imperial sovereignty, by compelling the
prefect to take an oath of fidelity to himself, and to receive investiture at
his hands, not by the secular symbol, a sword, but by a mantle and a silver
cup. The citizens were also required to swear obedience to the pope. The power
of the senate had centered in a single person, who
bore the title of senator or consul. Innocent persuaded the senator, Scoto
Paparone, to retire, and substituted another, who was bound by an oath to him,
and whose tenure of office was annual. Thus the exclusive authority of the pope
was established in Rome, although the pontificate of Innocent was not free from
serious troubles in the municipal government, or from those outbreaks of the
Roman factions which had so often disquieted his predecessors.
2
A.D. 1198. AFFAIRS OF SICILY.
Next to the affairs of his own city, those of central
and southern Italy and of Sicily demanded the pope’s attention. The late
emperor had established his military officers as dukes and counts, and these
with their troops held possession of the country, even to the gates of Rome. In
order to rid himself of his dangerous neighbours, Innocent was able to take
advantage of the hatred which the Italians felt towards the Germans—an ancient
hatred which had lately been rendered more intense by Henry’s violence and
cruelties—and of the jealousies and rivalries by which the German chiefs were
divided among themselves, each labouring for his own interest alone, while
during the infancy of the young Frederick there was no power that could control
or unite them. Conrad of Lützenburg, duke of Spoleto,
whose wild and unsteady character had got for him from the Italians the name of Moscancervello, was persuaded to swear that he would
obey the pope’s commands, and then, notwithstanding all that he could offer for
leave to remain in Italy, was compelled to return to Germany. Greater
difficulty was found in the case of Markwald of Anweiler, duke of Ravenna and
seneschal of the empire—a bold, ambitious, and perfidious man, who was believed
to have instigated his late sovereign to some of his worst
excesses. Markwald professed to have been nominated by Henry on his
death-bed as executor of his will and regent of Sicily. He had been expelled
from Sicily by the emperor’s widow, Constance, who heartily espoused the cause
of her own countrymen against the detested Germans; but he held possession of
the Romagna with the march of Ancona, and was formidable from his power and
wealth. Markwald, on being required by the pope to give up the patrimony of the
church, attempted to draw Innocent into his interest—offering, on the strength
of the late emperor’s testament, to raise the church to a grandeur such as it
had never enjoyed since the days of Constantine. The pope, however, withstood
this and all Markwald’s offers, whether of money or
of other things, and compelled him, after having been excommunicated by two
cardinals, to withdraw from the marches into the Apulian kingdom. The pope went
about from city to city, receiving the allegiance of one after another. He got
possession of many fortresses in the Campagna, and reduced its robber-nobility
to order. The cities of Tuscany and of the duchy of Spoleto (with the exception
of Pisa, which was excommunicated for its adherence to the Ghibelline party)
were united in a league resembling that of the Lombards, under the patronage of
the pope, to whom they took an oath of fidelity; and Innocent found that he
could afford to refrain for a time from pressing the claims of the Roman church
as to the countess Matilda’s donation, the exarchate of Ravenna, and the
territory of Bertinoro—leaving these in the hands of
their actual possessors, with an acknowledgment of the papal suzerainty. Among
the acquisitions made during this rapid progress, although all were claimed as
the ancient possessions of the church, there were many which really belonged to
the empire; and these, when the imperial throne had again found an occupant,
became subjects of dispute.
By a document which professed to be the will of the
late emperor, it was directed that his widow and son should perform to the pope
all the services that had been done by former kings of Sicily; that, in case of
Frederick’s dying without an heir, the kingdom should devolve to the pope; that
the pope should confirm to Frederick the empire and the kingdom of Sicily, and
that in consideration of this certain territories, including almost the whole
of the countess Matilda’s inheritance, should be given up to the Roman church.
The genuineness of this document, however, has been much questioned, partly on
the ground that it was never displayed by Markwald while it was in his
possession; and that the deed on which Innocent afterwards rested his claims to
Sicily was not this, but the will of the empress Constance. Constance, soon
after her husband’s death, caused her son, then four years old, to be taken
from the custody of the duchess of Spoleto (wife of Moscancervello),
and conveyed to Sicily, where he was crowned as king in May 1198. In order to
secure herself against the Germans, she opened negotiations with the pope,
proposing to place the kingdom and its young sovereign under his especial
protection; and Innocent took the opportunity to make favourable terms for the
papacy, by requiring a renunciation of the privileges which had been granted to
the Sicilian kings by Adrian IV, and confirmed by Clement, as to the election
of bishops, and the matters of legations, appeals, and councils; he also
required a yearly tribute of 600 tarenes for
Apulia, and of 400 for Marsia. Constance’s envoys were forced, after a
struggle, to submit; but before the treaty could reach Sicily, the empress
died, leaving the pope as chief guardian of her son. Sicily and Apulia were for
years a scene of anarchy, violence, bloodshed, and ceaseless intrigues. The
pope provided Frederick with a tutor, Cencio Savelli, and endeavoured to
exercise authority by means of a legate. But the chancellor, Walter of
Pagliara, bishop of Troia, who contrived also to possess himself in an
irregular way of the vacant archbishopric of Palermo, compelled the legate to
leave Sicily; and the kingdom was distracted and ravaged by the movements of
Markwald, and of another German soldier, Diephold (or Theobald), count of
Acerra, whom the pope ineffectually denounced with all the thunders of the
church. With these two the chancellor Walter was sometimes at enmity, and
sometimes in intimate alliance. At one time he held nearly absolute power,
which he abused by a profligate disposal of dignities, and by selling part of
the royal demesnes; at another time he was driven from Sicily, and reduced to
wander about Apulia in poverty and contempt; and yet again he was able to
recover his authority. He was deposed and excommunicated, defied the sentence,
sued humbly for absolution, was admitted to mercy, and incurred a fresh
excommunication. In July 1200, Markwald was defeated in Sicily by the pope’s
cousin and general, James; his baggage was captured, and in it was found the
alleged testament of Henry VI. Yet Markwald contrived once more to regain the
ascendency, and got possession of the young king’s person; but in 1202 his
career was cut short by death in consequence of a surgical operation.
A new turn was given to Sicilian affairs by Walter of
Brienne, a noble and gallant Frenchman, who had married one of king Tancred’s
daughters after her release from her German prison, and in her right claimed
the county of Lecce and the principality of Taranto, the original possessions
of Tancred, which the late emperor had promised to restore to his family.
Walter’s determination to attempt the recovery of these territories was
sanctioned by the pope, on condition of his swearing before the college of cardinals
that he would be faithful to Frederick, and would aid him against all his
enemies. In order to raise money for the enterprise, Innocent authorized Walter
to pledge his security for a large sum, and even assisted him with gifts; and
Walter appeared in Apulia at the head of a French force which he had been able
to enlist by means of pay and of promises.
The chancellor, Walter of Pagliara, after the death of
Markwald, again entreated that he might be released from his excommunication;
but, although this was granted, his petitions for restoration to the sees of
Palermo and Troia were unsuccessful. The legate who pronounced his absolution endeavoured
to exact a promise that he would not oppose Walter of Brienne; but his answer
was that he could not make such a promise, even if St. Peter himself required
it, and if he knew that his refusal would involve his damnation. He therefore
joined Diephold, who was the chief antagonist of the new adventurer. For a time
Walter of Brienne was successful; he repeatedly defeated Diephold, and for four
years the advantage of the war was on his side. But his successes produced an
overweening confidence in the prowess of the French, as compared with the
Germans; and in consequence of this he was surprised, defeated, and taken
prisoner by Diephold in 1205. He died of the wounds which he had received in
battle.
In 1207, while Frederick was in the hands of the
chancellor Walter, a letter complaining of the durance in which he was held was
circulated in his name. While the Germans were wholly bent on securing for
themselves some advantages from the prevailing anarchy, Innocent, although
mainly intent on keeping up the papal suzerainty over Sicily, was sincerely
desirous to preserve Frederick’s royalty, and appears to have performed his
duties as guardian with fidelity. In 1208, when the king had reached the age of
fourteen, the guardianship expired, and in the following year, through
Innocent’s mediation, Frederick married a daughter of the king of Aragon.
3
FREDERICK II
With regard to the greater dignity which had lately
been connected with the kingdom of Sicily, Innocent was resolved to take
advantage of circumstances for the enforcement of his theory as to the
superiority of ecclesiastical over temporal power. Ever since the death of
Henry III of Germany, the papacy had been gaining on the empire; for, although
the Hildebrandine doctrine as to the supremacy of the church had been
confronted by the despotic theory of the imperial power which had been
propounded by the civil lawyers under Frederick Barbarossa, this had never been
much more than a theory. And now that the representative of the imperial family
was an infant, the time appeared to be come when the Hildebrandine claims might
be successfully asserted in their fullest extent. Frederick had, indeed,
already received the homage of the Germans as his father’s successor. But the
inexpediency of a minor’s reign was strongly impressed on the minds of all by
the remembrance of the troubles of Henry IV’s youth, and the obligation to
Frederick was set aside under the pretext that it had been wrongfully extorted;
that when it was exacted, he was but an infant, and even unbaptized; and that
his father’s death, at a time when the son was too young to assume the
government, had altered the conditions of the case. Philip, duke of Swabia, the
youngest son of Frederick Barbarossa, on hearing of his brother’s death,
hurried from Tuscany, of which he had been governor, to check by his presence
the disorders which were certain to break out in Germany, and to secure the
interest of his young nephew. But he found the feeling of opposition to the
election of the child as king to be irresistibly strong, and the adherents of
the Hohenstaufen interest entreated him to become himself the representative of
his family in opposition to the other candidates who were set up for the crown.
Of these, Berthold, duke of Zähringen, after having spent a large sum, shrank
from further outlay, and was persuaded by an ample bribe to give in his
adhesion to Philip; and Bernard of Saxony withdrew, partly from a dread of
expense, and partly because he felt his health unequal to the labours of the
office. The choice of the party opposed to the Swabian family—headed by
Adolphus of Altena, archbishop of Cologne, a man of great ability, but
ambitious, artful, and rapacious,—fell on Otho, a younger son of Henry the
Lion, duke of Saxony, and nephew by his mother’s side of Richard king of
England, by whom he had been created duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou.
Otho, who in childhood was involved in his father’s banishment, had grown up in
England, and had been employed by his uncle as viceroy of Poitou; and Richard,
who could not forget his German captivity, although he declined to attend an
election, to which he was summoned in right of the titular kingdom of Provence,
bestowed on him by the late emperor, sent commissioners to represent him, recommended
the cause of his nephew to the pope, and aided Otho with money which he levied
by additional taxes on his subjects. Philip was chosen defender of the kingdom
by an assembly of princes and prelates, mostly from the eastern part of
Germany, at Arnstadt, near Erfurt, on the 6th of
March 1198; Otho, whose strength lay along the Rhine and in the north-west of
the country, was elected about Easter by a rival assembly at Andernach, but did
not arrive in Germany until Philip had appeared for ten weeks to be without a
rival. Each of the competitors was in the earliest manhood—Otho, twenty-three
years of age, and Philip younger by a year. In personal character, in wealth,
and in the number of his adherents, Philip had the advantage. The chroniclers
praise his moderation and his love of justice; his mind had been cultivated by
literature to a degree then very unusual among princes,—a circumstance which is
explained by the fact that he had been intended for an ecclesiastical career,
until the death of an elder brother diverted him from it; and his popular
manners contrasted favourably with the pride and roughness of Otho. But Otho
was the favourite with the great body of the clergy, to whom Philip was
obnoxious as the representative of a family which was regarded as opposed to
the interests of the hierarchy. Philip was said to have been excommunicated by
pope Celestine for invading the property of the Roman church; and Innocent
insisted on this, although Philip himself declared that he had never had any
knowledge of having incurred such a sentence. The truth seems to be that he had
either done so by holding intercourse with his excommunicate brother Henry, or
had fallen under some general denunciation against all who should interfere
with ecclesiastical property; and, without admitting all that was said against
him, he was now desirous of reconciliation with the church. The pope sent the
bishop of Sutri, a German by birth, into Germany,
with instructions to demand the release of Tancred’s wife and daughters, and of
the archbishop of Salerno, who had been carried off as a captive by the late
emperor; and he authorized him to absolve Philip on his surrendering these
prisoners and swearing to obey the papal judgment as to all the matters for
which he had been excommunicated.
But although the release was effected, the bishop
incurred his master’s censure by pronouncing the absolution without
insisting on the terms which had been prescribed. On the 12th of July, Otho was
crowned by the archbishop of Cologne at Aix-la-Chapelle, which he had gained
from Philip by winning over the officer who commanded the garrison. He swore to
maintain the Roman church, and to relinquish the abuses of his predecessors,
especially the jus exuviarum; and a
similar oath was taken by the electors who were present. Philip, who, although
excluded from Charlemagne’s city, was in possession of the insignia of the
kingdom, and was supported by all the great officers of the imperial court, was
crowned at Mainz on the 8th of September, and was hailed as the second of his
name—the first having been the Arabian Philip, in the middle of the third
century, who had come to be erroneously regarded as the earliest Christian
emperor. Although the archbishop of Treves, a vacillating man, who had left the
party of Otho, was present, he did not venture to deviate from the tradition in
favour of Aix by performing the coronation, and the archbishop of Tarentaise officiated; for which he was cited to answer by
the pope. The bishop of Sutri was also present, and
in punishment of this and of his other offences, was deposed and was banished
to a monastery in an island, where he soon after died.
Innocent, even if he had not wished to interfere, was
called on to do so by applications from both parties. The king of England sent
an embassy to him in behalf of Otho, who himself wrote to him, making great
offers of privileges for the churchy and Philip Augustus of France exerted his
interest for Philip. The pope wrote to the princes of Germany, telling them
that Philip’s coronation was invalid. It had not been performed at the right
place or by the right person; his absolution had been pronounced without regard
to the conditions prescribed, and was therefore null; he had been crowned while
excommunicate, so that the oaths to him were of no force; to have him for
king would be to forfeit the right of election, and to admit that the kingdom
was hereditary. To Philip’s envoys he addressed a warning from Scripture and
history, that the empire had no chance of success in opposition to the
priesthood; but he added that he would consider of the question; and he drew up
a formal statement of the case under the title of a “Deliberation on the Three
Elect”. In this paper, after laying down (as he had already done in his speech
to the envoys) that to the papacy belongs “principally and finally” the
disposal of the empire—inasmuch as by the pope it had been transferred from the
Greeks to the West, and it was the pope who bestowed the crown—he discussed
successively the claims of Frederick, Philip, and Otho. In favour of Frederick
were the oath which the princes had taken to him during his father’s life, and
his connection with the pope as his guardian. Innocent, however, pronounces the
oath to be invalid, inasmuch as it was taken when Frederick was an infant and
unbaptized, and because the unforeseen death of his father had occasioned the
necessity of choosing another king at a time when Frederick was unfit to
perform the duties of the office. The papal guardianship he declares to relate
to the kingdom of Sicily only, not to the empire; and he points out the
inconveniences which would result from the union of the Sicilian kingdom with
the imperial dignity. As to Philip it is admitted that he had been elected by a
greater number than Otho; but numbers, it is said, are not the only thing to be
regarded; and the objections to Philip are insisted on—his excommunication, the
irregularity of the absolution pronounced by the bishop of Sutri,
his alleged connection with Markwald and Diephold, the offences of his family
against the church, the danger of appearing to substitute the principle of
hereditary right for that of election. And the judgment concludes in favour of
Otho, as having been chosen by the more judicious, if not the larger, party, as
descended on both sides from ancestors devoted to the church, and in himself
possessing the qualities requisite for the empire. The pope is said to have
declared that either he must take the crown from Philip, or Philip must take
from him the ensigns of apostolical dignity.
War immediately broke out along the Rhine, and for ten
years it was carried on with extraordinary ferocity—the Bohemians, as in former
wars, being branded as guilty of atrocities surpassing those of the Germans.
Among the disastrous effects of this war on religion, it is noted that in the
choice of bishops regard was chiefly had to their martial qualities, and that
this contributed greatly to swell the general disorder of the German
church.
From both the contending parties Innocent received
frequent applications for his support. Conrad, archbishop of Mainz and primate
of Germany, who had been engaged in the crusade during the earlier proceedings,
in returning from the Holy Land in 1199, had frequent interviews with the pope,
who entreated him to use the influence of his high dignity, his age, his great
experience, and his revered character, for the reestablishment of peace. But
the archbishop, on reaching his own country, found the undertaking beyond his
power, and withdrew into Hungary, where he attempted to mediate between two
rival claimants of the Hungarian crown. In returning from this mission, Conrad
died at Passau, in October 1200, leaving his see to become the object of a
contest between representatives of the parties of Philip and Otho. The
anti-papal candidate, Leopold, bishop of Worms, a man of resolute character,
who had taken part in the affairs of Italy both as a negotiator and as a
warrior, is said to have gone so far as to retaliate the pope’s excommunication
of him by pronouncing with all the most solemn forms an anathema against
Innocent himself. Of the other great Rhenish prelates, John of Treves continued
to waver from one party to the other, while Adolphus of Cologne, the chief
author of Otho’s elevation, forsook his interest, and in November 1204 did
homage to Philip. The pope threatened him, and appointed in his stead another
archbishop, who for a time got possession of Cologne, and was supported by the
citizens. It was remarkable that, of the German bishops, many sided with what
was supposed to be the national cause, notwithstanding the terrors of spiritual
censure; while the abbots, from their greater dependence on Rome, were
generally in favour of Otho. Everywhere there were contests for churches, and
appeals to Rome for a decision between rivals; and it is said that, in
consequence of the dissensions which prevailed, many members of monastic
societies fell away from the communion of the church.
In 1201 legates were sent into Germany, carrying with
them the “Deliberation on the Three Elect”, as their instructions. It would
seem that, from whatever reason, their intercourse was almost wholly with
Otho’s party, and that they listened to its representations exclusively. They
published the pope’s judgment at Cologne, declared Otho to be king and “semper
Augustus”, and reported to their master that Otho had almost all Germany with
him, that he had 100,000 men ready to take the field, while Philip was reduced
so low that he could not venture to show himself.
The pope wrote letters in all directions, zealously
recommending the cause of Otho; but, although he was careful to enforce his
lofty hierarchical doctrines by considerations of temporal advantage, his
exertions had but little success. Richard of England, who had warmly supported
Otho, was succeeded in 1199 by John, and Innocent repeatedly urged the new king
to give his nephew effectual assistance. But John was indifferent in the
matter; in 1200 he concluded a treaty with France, by which he swore to refrain
from helping Otho; and he even alleged this treaty as a reason for withholding
payment of a legacy which Richard had bequeathed to his nephew. The pope
annulled the oath; but it was with difficulty that he persuaded John to pay
even a portion of the legacy; and, although Otho received some money from
England in 1202, it was either too little or too late to be availing. To Philip
Augustus, Innocent urged the dangers which might be apprehended from the union
of Sicily with Germany, as a reason for opposing the Swabian house; but he
found that the French king was more powerfully swayed by his jealousy of
England, which inclined him to make common cause with Philip against Otho. He endeavoured
to secure Ottocar of Bohemia to the cause of Otho, by
confirming the royal title which he had received from Philip, and by favourably
entertaining a proposal to erect a metropolitical see, so as to render the
Bohemian church independent of the primate of Mainz. He reminded the Lombards
of the ancient enmity between them and the Hohenstaufen family. He urged again
and again on the princes and prelates of Germany the misdeeds of the Swabian
house, the personal demerits of Philip, the danger of allowing the principle of
inheritance to supersede their electoral rights, while he disclaimed for
himself all wish to interfere with these rights, or to overrule their decision;
it is not, he said, the man that is to be provided with an empire, but the
empire that is to be provided with a man worthy to govern it. He declared all
oaths which had been taken to Philip to be null and void; and he showered
privileges and immunities of all sorts on the bishops and the monastic
societies who espoused the party of Otho. Yet, notwithstanding the pope’s
strenuous opposition, Philip’s strength increased from year to year. His arms
prevailed in the held, and he was able to gain some of his rival’s chief
partisans—such as Adolphus of Cologne, king Ottocar,
and Henry, duke of Lorraine and Brabant—so that at length Otho had hardly any
other support than that of the people of Cologne; and even this city, the most
important in Germany, which had been long the great mart of northern commerce,
and had lately acquired a new religious significance through the possession of
the relics of the holy Three Kings, was compelled to forsake Otho’s party for
that of Philip, in October 1206. In order that the defects of form in his
earlier election might be remedied, Philip in 1205 resigned the crown at Aix-la-Chapelle,
in the presence of a great assemblage of princes; he was enthusiastically reelected, and was crowned in Charlemagne’s minster by his
new adherent Adolphus of Cologne.
Each of the rivals from time to time endeavoured to
propitiate the pope by large offers of concession as to the subjects which had
been disputed between the ecclesiastical and the secular powers—the election of
bishops and abbots, the jus exuviarum,
and the like; by promising to employ the secular authority for the enforcement
of ecclesiastical and monastic discipline, and for the protection of the
church’s property. Philip offered to submit to the judgment of the Roman church
in all points as to which he might have offended; to restore all that his
predecessors or himself had taken from the church; to assume the cross, and to
use the influence of his connection with the imperial family of Constantinople
for the subjection of the Greek church to Rome.
The course of events in Germany told even on
Innocent’s resolution. In August 1207, his legates were commissioned to absolve
Philip, although without any acknowledgment of his title as king, and to endeavour
to procure a peace, or at least a truce for two years. The absolution was
pronounced at Worms, while Philip agreed to give up Bruno, the papal archbishop
of Cologne, who was his prisoner, to admit Siegfried as archbishop of Mainz,
and to send the antipapal claimant of that see, Leopold, with Adolphus of
Cologne, to the pope for his judgment. It seemed that Innocent, in despair of
Otho’s success, was about to abandon his cause; even a matrimonial connection
between the pope’s family and that of Hohenstaufen was projected. But on the
21st of June 1208, Philip was assassinated at the castle of Altenberg, near
Bamberg, by Otho of Wittelsbach, count palatine of Bavaria, in revenge, as was
supposed, for having retracted a promise of giving him his daughter Beatrice in
marriage. The news of this crime—which excited general horror, and made the
perpetrator an outcast until, some months later, he was discovered in a stable
and slain by one of his victim’s officers—overtook the legates on their return
from Germany; and Innocent hastened to write to the German princes, charging
them to acquiesce in the manifest declaration of Divine Providence in favour of
Otho, by refraining from all opposition to him. He exhorted Otho to moderation
and conciliation, and for a time this advice was followed. Philip had left no
son, and the only male representative of the Hohenstaufen family was the young
Frederick of Sicily. On both sides there was an ardent desire for peace after
the troubles which for ten years had desolated Germany; and a proposal that
Otho should marry the daughter of his rival, which had in vain been urged on
Philip, was now renewed with better success. In a great assembly at Frankfort,
on St. Martin’s day, Otho was invested with the diadem and the holy lance; and
the princess Beatrice, a child of twelve years of age, was led in by the bishop
of Spires, who in her name demanded punishment of her father’s murderers. She
avowed her consent to the proposed marriage, and the canonical objections,
which existed in this as in most other cases of princely marriages, were
overruled by the pope’s dispensation, on condition that Otho should rule with
justice, should protect widows and orphans, monasteries, and the church, and
should go in person on the crusade. In March 1209, Otho executed at Spires a
document by which he renewed his promises to the pope as to the freedom of
appeals and elections, the property of deceased bishops, and respect for the
rights of the church, and engaged himself to give effectual aid for the
extirpation of heresy, and to assist the pope in recovering all the territory
which rightfully belonged to the see of Rome. The betrothal with Beatrice was
celebrated at Wurzburg on the octave of Pentecost; and in the middle of July
Otho set out, with an imposing train of nobles and prelates, at the head of a
powerful army, to receive the imperial crown.
In the north of Italy, the feuds of the imperialists
and the papalists had raged with great fury. Not only was city opposed to city,
but each city was distracted between the two embittered factions—Guelfs and
Ghibellines, as they were now called—which divided every class of society, and
were outwardly distinguished from each other not only by varieties of dress,
but even by the architecture of their houses, and by differences in the
minutest habits of life. Some of the cities which had achieved independence,
had already fallen under the dominion of lords or tyrants. The first of these
was Azzo, marquis of Este, who was chosen by Ferrara, and other nobles after
his example made themselves masters of towns in their neighbourhood. Otho, in
his progress southward, found much to do in endeavouring to reconcile the
enmities of the Italians. The statement of some writers, that he received the
Lombard crown either at Milan or at Monza, appears to be mistaken; indeed, it
is very questionable whether he even visited Milan at this time. After a succession
of festive receptions at Bologna and other cities, he was met by the pope at
Viterbo; on the 4th of October, he was crowned as emperor by the hands of
Innocent in St. Peter’s at Rome, renewing by an oath the promises which he had
subscribed at Spires; and for the first and last time an emperor professed to
hold his dignity “by the grace of God and the apostolic see”. But hardly was
the ceremony completed by which Innocent raised to the temporal headship of
Christendom a prince of his own choice, when differences began to show
themselves. Otho, hitherto so profuse of offers and promises, now felt himself
in a new position, and bound to maintain the prerogatives of his crown against
the encroachments of the spiritual power. He was assured by jurists that such
promises as he had made to the pope in ignorance were not binding; and perhaps
a knowledge of Innocent’s late negotiations with Philip may have set his mind
at ease as to any obligations of gratitude.
Immediately after the coronation, the quarrels which
had become customary on such occasions were renewed between the Romans and the
emperor’s troops, and many of the Germans were slain. Otho demanded
compensation for his loss in men and horses, and on the pope’s refusal, retired
from the city; but, on being requested to withdraw his troops from the neighbourhood,
he declared that he would remain until they should have exhausted its
provisions. He refused to pay the donative which the Romans claimed at imperial
coronations, and enriched himself by the plunder of pilgrims whom his soldiery
intercepted on their way to Rome. He seized on some towns and fortresses which
the pope had occupied during the vacancy of the empire, and which partly
belonged to the inheritance of the countess Matilda; and when Innocent
remonstrated, and reminded him of his oath to respect the property of the
church, he replied that he had also taken an oath, imposed by the pope himself,
to maintain the rights of his crown; that, while he owned the authority of the
pope in spiritual things, he was himself supreme in the affairs of this world.
After having spent about twelve months in Tuscany and Lombardy, Otho, in
November 1210, proceeded into Apulia, where he received the adhesion of
Diephold, and invested him anew in the duchy of Spoleto. On this invasion
of a territory which was under the special guardianship of the apostolic see,
Innocent issued a sentence of anathema against the emperor and his adherents,
interdicted the clergy of Capua for having celebrated divine offices in his
presence, and declared his subjects to be released from the duty of obedience;
and, after having made fruitless attempts by the offer of large concessions to
reconcile Otho and Frederick—for which purpose the abbot of Morimond visited the emperor five times in his winter quarters at Capua—he renewed the
anathema on Maundy Thursday 1212. Innocent took active measures to make this
sentence generally known, and to stir up against Otho those whom he had
formerly laboured to enlist in his favour, and, in allusion to the
disappointment of his policy, he quoted the text—“It repenteth me that I have
made man on the earth”.
Otho was recalled from his career of success in Italy
by tidings of serious disturbances in Germany, which he endeavoured to quell by
arms and by negotiation. On the 7th of August 1212, his marriage with the
daughter of his late rival was celebrated at Nordhausen; but within four days
Beatrice suddenly died. Her death was popularly ascribed to poison, supposed to
have been administered by one of the mistresses whom the emperor had brought
with him from Italy; and the result was disastrous for Otho. The feelings of
attachment to the Swabian house, which he had hoped to secure for himself by
his late marriage, were now centred on the undoubted and only heir of the Hohenstaufens, Frederick of Sicily, who was already on his
way to claim the German kingdom. Otho had made himself unpopular by his pride,
by the roughness of his manners, by his illiberality as to money, which was unfavourably compared with the remembrances of Philip’s
generosity, and by the heavy taxation which he found it necessary to lay on his
subjects The great prelates,—among them Adolphus of Cologne, whom Innocent, in
disgust at Otho, now allowed to resume his see, had turned against him, and had
been followed by the clergy in general, who were offended by the rudeness with
which he treated the highest members of the hierarchy, and by his proposing to
reduce their state and their revenues; and some of the chief personages who had
by turns sided with both parties in the late contest, such as the king of
Bohemia and the duke of Austria, with many of those who were specially attached
to the imperial service, had joined the movement of opposition. Otho was
declared by the princes to have forfeited the empire, and in the end of 1211
envoys were sent in their name to invite Frederick to Germany.
To the pope the election of Frederick could not be
altogether pleasing. He was yet but a boy of sixteen; his claims were founded
on that principle of inheritance which Innocent had always striven to exclude
from the election; he was the representative of a family which the pope had
continually denounced, and already he had shown symptoms of having inherited
the traditions and the feelings of his race. But no other policy than that of
supporting Frederick seemed possible; and Innocent gave his approval of the
choice. By Frederick himself the invitation of the Germans was eagerly
welcomed. The promptings of ambition, the desire to emulate the renown of his
forefathers, to find a wider scene for himself than the kingdom of the Sicilian
Normans, prevailed over the advice of his southern counsellors and the
entreaties of his wife; and, having seen his infant son Henry crowned as his
successor, he set out from Palermo on his bold enterprise on Palm Sunday 1212.
In April he arrived at Rome, where he had frequent conferences with the pope,
and received from him a large supply of money. He then proceeded by sea to
Genoa, where he remained nearly three months; and, as the Alpine passes were in
the hands of Otho’s partisans, he made his way across the north of Italy to
Trent, under the escort of cities which were friendly to him, and not without
occasional danger from those of the opposite party, such as Milan and Piacenza.
From Trent, with a handful of companions, he crossed the mountains to the great
monastery of St. Gall, where the abbot received him with honour, and secured to
his interest the wavering bishop of Constance. On reaching that city, he was
informed that Otho was at hand, and that his culinary train was already within
the walls; but the emperor, on arriving three hours later, found that the gates
were shut against him, and that the citizens had declared for his rival. As
Frederick proceeded down the Rhine, accessions of strength continually poured
in on him, and the general disposition in his favour was increased by his
popular manners and by his bountiful largesses. On
the 12th of November, he was met at Vaucouleurs in
Lorraine by the dauphin, Lewis, who in the name of his father, Philip Augustus,
assured him of support; and a week later a formal alliance with the French king
was concluded at Toul. In the meantime Otho was so deeply engaged in a war with
France, that he was unable to check the progress of Frederick. At the great
battle of Bouvines, near Tournay, on the 27th of July
1214, Philip Augustus was victorious over Otho and his allies; and for the
remaining five years of his life the emperor was forced to confine himself
within his hereditary territory of Brunswick. On St. July 25, James’s day in
the following year, Frederick received the German crown at Aix-la-Chapelle,
from the primate Siegfried of Mainz; and, in the enthusiasm of the moment, he,
with many others, took the badge of the crusade, to which he afterwards more
fully pledged himself by oath at Nuremberg, in the presence of a Roman legate.
The ambition to emulate the fame of Frederick
Barbarossa and his other ancestors prevailed over the advice of counsellors who
represented to the young prince that the difficulties of Germany required his
presence at home; but the result of the engagements into which he thus rashly
entered was such as he little expected. In the same year, the question of the
empire was considered in the great council of the Lateran, and the pope, after
having once adjourned the meeting on account of the heat of the discussion,
pronounced in favour of Frederick.
On the other hand, Frederick repaid the pope for his
support by large promises in favour of the hierarchy and of the Roman see. In
July 1213, he pledged himself at Eger, in Bohemia, in the very words of the
oath which Otho had taken and had broken, to allow freedom of elections and
appeals, to renounce the jus exuviarum,
to labour for the suppression of heresy, and to do all that might be in his
power towards recovering for the papacy all the territories which it claimed
tinder the donation of Matilda or otherwise. In May 1216, he granted fresh
immunities to the church, and in the same year he executed at Strasburg an act
by which he promised that, on his coronation as emperor, his son Henry should
be emancipated from the paternal control, and should alone hold the kingdom of
Sicily, both beyond and within the Strait, under the Roman church; that during
his minority, he should be under the care of a governor responsible to the
pope; and that the Sicilian kingdom should always be separate from the empire.
4
PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND INGEBURGA.
With Philip Augustus of France Innocent was drawn into
a contest which lasted many years. In this contest the pope appeared as the
protector of innocence against wrong; nor is there any reason for supposing
that he was influenced by a mixture of lower motives, although his conduct was
marked by much of the assumption which had become characteristic of the papacy.
Philip, an able, ambitious, prudent, and unscrupulous prince, under whose reign
the kingdom of France was doubled in extent, and the power of the crown was
much strengthened as against that of the great feudatories, had lost his first
wife while preparing to set out on the crusade in 1190. On his return from the
East, he was attracted by the fame of the beauty and virtues of Ingeburga,
sister of the king of Denmark, a country which at that time had much intercourse
with France, as appears from the fact that in the University of Paris there was
a special college for Danish students. It is said that, on being sounded by the
Danish king as to his expectations of dowry, Philip answered by asking for a
transfer of the claims on the crown of England which Denmark had derived from
the great Canute, with a year’s service of a Danish fleet and army for the
assertion of them; but that Canute VI, from unwillingness to involve himself in
a war with the formidable Richard of England, preferred to portion his sister
in money. In 1193 the princess was conducted to Amiens, and her marriage with
Philip was celebrated on the day of her arrival. Next day the royal pair were
crowned; but during the ceremony Philip was observed to look pale and to
tremble. It was found that since the preceding day he had conceived an
unconquerable aversion for Ingeburga, which, as the real cause of it was not
disclosed, was popularly ascribed to sorcery. The Danish nobles who had
escorted the queen refused to take her back to her native country, and she
herself was determined to remain in France. Philip knew, by the experience of
some of his predecessors, that he could not hope for peace unless a divorce
could be obtained in regular form. The usual objection of relationship within
the forbidden degrees between Ingeburga and his former wife was therefore set
up against the marriage; and a council at Compiegne, composed of bishops
devoted to the king, pronounced for a separation on this ground. Ingeburga, who
was present, was filled with astonishment and grief when the sentence was
explained to her. In her scanty knowledge of French, she could only give notice
of an appeal by crying out—“Wicked France! Rome! Rome!” and the suit was
earnestly urged by her brother on Celestine III. The pope declared the sentence
of the late council to be annulled by apostolical authority, reproved the
French bishops for the part which they had taken in the matter, and charged
them to prevent the king from contracting another marriage. But it was in vain
that he desired Philip to restore his queen to her rights. Ingeburgawas shut up in a convent at Beaurepaire, in the diocese
of Arras, where her piety and gentleness won the respect of all who approached
her; and Philip, after having met with refusals in other quarters, married
Agnes, the beautiful daughter of the duke of Merania,
who ruled over a large territory in Istria, the Tyrol, and Bohemia.
The aged Celestine’s interest in the matter appears to
have cooled, and no decided step was taken during the remainder of his
pontificate. But Innocent, on succeeding him, took up the question with
characteristic vigour. Even before his consecration, he wrote to the bishop of
Paris, desiring him to admonish the king to put away Agnes and to restore
Ingeburga; he soon after addressed to Philip himself a letter in which
arguments of all sorts were enforced by threats of the heaviest ecclesiastical
penalties; and he sent Peter, cardinal of St. Mary in the Via Lata, as legate
into France, with authority, in case of the king’s obstinacy, to lay his
dominions under an interdict. The legate held a council at Dijon, from which the
king, by his representatives, appealed to Rome; and the legate—(“not out of
deference to the appeal, but that he might find a more convenient time and
place for fulfilling his commission”)—put off the sentence to another council,
which he held at Vienne, then within the imperial territory. There the
interdict was proclaimed, and, as the king showed no sign of repentance, it was
generally published by the bishops in the beginning of February 1200. Some
bishops who at first refused, were compelled by the pope to carry out his
orders, although a few still continued to celebrate the offices of
religion as usual.
The innocent—such was the theory of the interdict—
were to suffer for the guilty sovereign, in order that his heart might be
softened either by pity for their misery, or by fear of their discontent. And
the sentence of general interdict was one which had never before been felt in
France; for that against Robert and Bertha had been limited to their persons,
and that against Philip I and Bertrada had been of force only in the places
where the sinful pair should be found. The misery now inflicted was extreme. “Awful
and wonderful it was”, says Ralph of Coggeshalle, “to
see in every city the doors of the churches locked, Christians debarred like
dogs from entering them, a cessation of divine offices, no consecration of the
sacraments of the Lord’s body and blood, no flocking of the people, as had been
usual, to the high solemnities of the saints, the bodies of the dead not
committed to burial with Christian rites; but the stench of them infected the
air, while the frightful sight of them struck horror into the minds of the
living”.
For a time Philip met the interdict with defiance. He
expelled from their sees some of the bishops who had published it, and
reproached them with their indifference to the sufferings of the people.
Instead of restoring Ingeburga, he removed her to the castle of Etampes, where she was treated with greater severity than
before; and he declared himself ready to turn Mussulman, and professed to envy
Saladin for having no pope to annoy him. But after a time the fear of personal
excommunication induced him to send envoys to Rome; and there were
circumstances which tended to procure for them a favourable hearing. Bishops
who had not shrunk from a conflict with the secular power began to fear that
their people might learn to despise the ordinances of religion which were
denied to them, and might thus fall a prey to heresy; Innocent himself, too,
had reason to foresee a contest with England, and was thus disposed to
conciliate the king of France. Cardinal Octavian, of Ostia, was therefore sent
into France, with orders to require that Philip should receive Ingeburga as
queen, should send Agnes out of his dominions, and should make compensation to
the clergy for the damages which they had suffered; if the king should wish to
impugn the validity of his marriage with the Danish princess, he must begin the
proceedings within six months. The legate had an interview with Philip at Sens,
where he reproved him for his misdeeds, and Philip with tears promised to obey
the pope’s commands. The king and queen afterwards met in Octavian’s presence;
Ingeburga was treated with royal pomp, and was publicly displayed as queen; and
on this the interdict was taken off, after having weighed on the people of
France for upwards of seven months, and the bishops who had been suspended for
refusing to publish it were released from their suspension, on swearing to
go to Rome and to obey the pope’s commands.
But although Philip complained to the pope that
Octavian had dealt hardly with him, the cardinal had contented himself with
receiving promises which were not to be performed. Ingeburga was again sent
back to her prison-like seclusion at Etampes, until
the question of the marriage should be tried before Octavian and another
legate. For this purpose a council was held at Soissons in Lent 1201. The
king’s lawyers began by arguing the objection on the ground of affinity; but
the advocates who had been sent from Denmark for the queen’s cause appealed to
the pope, on the ground that Philip had not treated her as his nobles had sworn
for him that he would treat her, and also because Octavian, as being related to
the king, and for other reasons, was suspected of partiality in the case. The
legate desired them to wait for the arrival of his colleague, cardinal John of
St. Paul; but they refused and withdrew. Ingeburga was left alone and
friendless; but after a discussion of several days, in which Philip’s counsel exhausted
the resources of their learning, an unknown clerk stood forward, and, having
asked leave to speak in the queen’s behalf, argued her cause with a skill and a
power which extorted admiration even from the king himself. Philip saw that the
judgment of the council, which cardinal John was about to pronounce, would be
against him, and resolved to prevent such a result. He announced his intention
to treat Ingeburga as a wife and a queen; and, proceeding to the convent where
she lodged, after a long interview with her, he placed her behind him on his
horse and carried her away. On being informed of this, the council broke up.
But when Philip’s object had been gained by averting a sentence, the
unfortunate Ingeburga was again removed to the castle of Etampes,
where she was treated with increased rigour.
Agnes of Merania, while the
interdict was in force, had implored the pope to let her enjoy the society of
Philip as a husband; for the crown she declared that she did not care. The
French nobles had advised the king to send her out of the country; but it was
impossible to act on this advice after the council of Soissons, as she was then
far advanced in pregnancy; and she soon after died of grief, having given birth
to a son, on whom she bestowed the significant name of Tristan. This child did
not long survive his mother; but at the earnest suit of Philip, who represented
that the divorce pronounced by the council of Compiegne had led him to think
himself free to marry—and perhaps also from motives of policy—Innocent
consented to acknowledge the two elder children of Agnes as legitimate, and
capable of inheriting after their father. Agnes was buried at Nantes with great
splendour, and in memory of her Philip erected and endowed a convent for a
hundred and twenty monks.
From time to time Ingeburga addressed to the pope
complaints of the treatment which she received, and entreaties that he would
interfere in her behalf. It is represented that she was kept in close
seclusion, seeing no one except occasionally a priest; that her character was
aspersed by slander; that she was denied the opportunity of confessing, and was
rarely admitted to the mass; that she was cut off from all communication with
her native land, and that even her two Danish chaplains were not allowed to speak
with her except in French and in the presence of Frenchmen; that her guards
were persons of low condition and of rude behaviour; that she was ill supplied
with food and clothing, so as to be reduced even to accept charitable gifts for
her comfort; that she was denied the use of the bath and of medical attendance;
and she prays that any concession which may be wrung from her by such treatment
may not be allowed to prejudice her rights. The pope in consequence of these
letters often wrote to Philip, exhorting him to fulfill his promises to
Ingeburga, or, if he could not love her, at least to show her outward respect.
Philip endeavoured by various means to procure a divorce; by ascribing his
aversion to the influence of magic, by endeavouring to induce Ingeburga to
become a nun, or to make such statements as should agree with his own account
of their conjugal connection. But the pope steadily adhered to his
purpose—exhorting Philip, if he believed himself to be under magical influence,
to strive against it by fasting and prayer, and telling him that compliance
with his wishes was unlawful and impossible.
At length, in the year 1213—twenty years after the
repudiation, and seventeen years after Ingeburga had been committed to
seclusion—Philip, after consultation with the cardinal-legate, Robert Curzon,
and probably with a view to popular support in his quarrels with England and
Flanders—consented to receive her as queen. They lived together until his death
in 12233 and Ingeburga founded at Corbeil, where she spent her fourteen years
of widowhood, a college of priests in connection with the military order of St.
John, for the benefit of her husband’s soul.
5
AFFAIRS OF ENGLAND
The sovereign of England, during all but the first
year of Innocent’s pontificate, was one whose character—sensual, faithless,
cruel, violent and weak, without religion, but not without
superstition—afforded ample opportunities for the encroachment of the papacy on
the secular power. John, after having been forgiven by his brother Richard for
many offences, had been declared by him his heir, in preference to Arthur, the
son of an elder but deceased brother. The crown of England, although limited to
one family, had hardly ever since the Norman conquest descended according to
the strict rule of inheritance; and it is said that at John’s coronation the
archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, addressed the assembled nobles in
words which declared it to depend on election. John had already given general
scandal by carrying off the betrothed bride of the count of la Marche, while he
himself had another wife living; he was believed to have instigated the murder
of his nephew Arthur, or even to have murdered him with his own hand. For
this he was cited by Philip Augustus, as suzerain of his continental
territories, to answer before the peers of France—a court of fabulous origin,
and of which this is the first mention in authentic history. In default of
appearing, he was condemned to forfeiture; and, through the disaffection which
his vices and his extravagant taxation had excited among his subjects, Philip
was enabled to wrest from him within a few months the great inheritance of
Rollo. His matrimonial irregularities, although really as criminal as those of
Philip Augustus, had passed without censure from the pope. But he had already
been involved in serious differences with Innocent on account of his disposal
of sees, his taxation of monasteries, and other offences, when a question as to
the appointment of a primate brought him into direct collision with the
papacy.
On the death of Archbishop Hubert, in 1205, the
younger monks of Canterbury hastily assembled by night and elected the
sub-prior, Reginald, placed him on the high altar, seated him in the
archiepiscopal chair, and sent him off to sue for the pall at Rome, under an
obligation to keep his election secret until he should appear in the pope’s own
presence. But Reginald’s vanity was too strong for this promise, and
immediately on landing in Flanders he proclaimed his new dignity. When this was
known in England, the monks—even those who had elected him—became ashamed of
their choice, and, in order to disarm the king’s indignation, they applied to
him for leave to proceed to a fresh election. John recommended one of his chief
counsellors, John de Grey, bishop of Norwich, who was accordingly chosen,
invested with the temporalities of the see, and sent to Rome with a statement
on the king’s part that he had been unanimously elected, and with a protest
against any claims which might be set up in favour of a rival. The bishops of
the province, however, who had been disregarded in the affair, sent envoys to
assert their customary right to a share in the election; and Innocent saw in
these circumstances an opportunity for effectually interfering with the
Anglo-Norman system, by which, wherever the choice of bishops might nominally
be lodged, it was really in the hands of the sovereign. He therefore disallowed
both the elections, denied the claim of the suffragan bishops to a share in the
appointment of their metropolitan, and desired that fifteen monks of
Christ-church should be sent to Rome by a certain day, as representatives of
the convent, to choose on the spot an archbishop of his own nomination. The
person whom the pope recommended was Stephen Langton, an Englishman, who had
been his fellow-student at Paris, and, after having taught in that university
with great distinction, had lately been promoted to the cardinalate of St. Chrysogonus. It was in vain that the representatives of the
Canterbury monks urged the necessity of the king’s approval. Innocent
peremptorily declared that such was not the case when an election was made at
the place of the pope’s own residence; and, with the protest of a single monk,
on the part of the king and of his candidate, Langton was elected by the
deputies of Christ-church, and was thereupon consecrated by the pope.
Such an interference with the rights of the national
church, in entire disregard of the crown, was wholly new in England, and might
reasonably have awakened the king’s resentment. But through the unpopularity
and folly of John, the high reputation of Stephen Langton, and the energy with
which Innocent carried out his policy, the result was very different from what
it might otherwise have been.
On receiving an account of the late proceedings from
Innocent, with a request for his approval (although the pope intimated that
this was unnecessary), John violently objected to Langton as one who, although
by birth an English subject, was personally unknown to him, and had lived among
his “public enemies” in France. He reminded the pope that England contributed
more to the income of the Roman church than all the other countries north of
the Alps; he declared himself resolved to carry through the promotion of the
bishop of Norwich, and, in case of the pope’s refusal, to cut off all
communication between his dominions and Rome. In the meantime he turned his
rage against the monks of Canterbury, whom two of his officers, with the
assistance of mercenary soldiers, ejected from their convent; and he seized
their lands, together with those belonging to the archbishopric. The monks,
however, as had been usual in the case of ecclesiastics driven from England for
opposition to the royal will, found an eager welcome abroad, and were
entertained at St. Bertin’s and in other foreign monasteries. The pope
continued the correspondence for some time. He remarked that John could not
well be unacquainted with Langton’s character, inasmuch as he had congratulated
him on his advancement to the cardinalate, and, in disregard both of the king’s
threats and of the money with which the English envoys were furnished, he
bestowed the pall on Langton with his own hands at Viterbo.
Innocent, after some further exchange of letters,
empowered the bishops of London, Ely, and Worcester to interdict the kingdom of
England, without excepting even the churches of monastic or military orders, if
John should obstinately refuse to hearken to the admonitions which they were
charged to deliver. On the announcement of this, John burst out in a paroxysm
of rage, uttering violent abuse against the pope, with threats against the
clergy and all who should bring any message from the Roman court; and he drove
the bishops from his presence. The interdict was therefore published in Lent
1208, and John met it by putting his threats into execution. At first, he was
disposed to deny the clergy the protection of the laws, so that, when a man was
charged with the murder of a priest, the king exclaimed: “He has slain one
of my enemies; let him go free”. But he afterwards changed his policy in this
respect, and ordered that anyone who should outrage a clerk should be hanged on
the nearest oak. A general order was issued for the banishment of all
clergymen; and, as many of them would not leave the country, it was directed
that their property should be seized, but that enough to sustain life should be
allowed them. Severe measures were also taken against the wives or concubines
of the clergy. The bishops who had published the interdict fled across the sea,
and were followed by all their brethren except those who enjoyed the king’s favor; and a chronicler strongly blames them for leaving
their flocks to the wolf, while they themselves lived “in all manner of
delights abroad”. At length Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, was the
only member of his order who remained in England, and he, says a chronicler,
remained, not as a defender of the church, but as a minister of the king. The
Cistercians at first continued to celebrate their rites, in neglect of the
interdict, but were compelled by the pope to refrain; and when, at a later
time, some other societies of monks were allowed at the primate’s intercession
to celebrate, the Cistercians were punished by exclusion from this favour. It
was in vain that the king’s nephews, the duke of Saxony and Otho of Germany,
entreated him to make peace with the church; but, although the sufferings of
the English during the time of the interdict were great, they were far less
severe than the misery which had lately been produced by a like sentence in
France. For it was found impossible to enforce the interdict in all its rigor;
the nobles, who at other times stoutly opposed the crown, had no wish to see
the hierarchy supreme, and even among the clergy there was a strong feeling of
nationality. And thus it was that, while the powerful and able Philip Augustus
was reduced to submission by an interdict in seven months, the weak,
pusillanimous, and unpopular John was able to hold out against the pressure of
a like censure for upwards of six years, even although an excommunication of
his person was added to the general sentence. In 1209 the bishops of London,
Ely, Worcester, and Arras were authorized to pronounce the anathema; but they
did not venture into England for the purpose, and John took all possible means
to prevent the introduction of letters conveying the sentence, as it was
considered that a formal delivery of such a document was necessary to its
taking effect. But reports of the excommunication reached England, and were
acted on by the more scrupulous of the ecclesiastics who remained in the
country. Geoffrey, archdeacon of Norwich, resigned a judgeship in the Exchequer
on the ground that he could not serve an excommunicated sovereign; whereupon he
was imprisoned, loaded with a leaden cope, and scantily fed; and under these
severities he died. Hugh of Wells, a royal chaplain who was much employed in
the king’s affairs, having been elected to the bishopric of Lincoln in 1209,
obtained leave to go abroad that he might be consecrated by the archbishop of
Rouen; but on landing in France, he took his way to Pontigny,
where Langton, like his predecessor Becket, had found a refuge, and there he
received consecration from the banished primate. In punishment of this, the
revenues of Lincoln were confiscated, and the bishop was compelled to remain in
exile. In the meantime John endeavoured to obtain supplies of money by taxing
the monasteries excessively, and the Cistercians, as they were longest spared,
had at last to pay heavily in proportion. In 1210 the pope absolved all John’s
subjects from their oath of fealty; and it is said that the king, on his part, endeavoured
to strengthen himself by sending a mission to seek an alliance with the Mahometans of Africa.
In 1212 Langton went to Rome, in company with the
bishops of London and Ely, to represent to the pope the crimes of John against
the church, and the sufferings which the bishops and clergy had endured.
Indignant that his spiritual thunders should have been so long spent without
effect, Innocent resolved to employ means of another kind, and the archbishop
on his return to France was authorized to pronounce the deposition of John, and
to invite Philip Augustus to an invasion of England, promising to all who should
take part in this enterprise the privileges of crusaders. Philip eagerly caught
at the hope of adding England to the territories which he had already wrested
from John; the crusade was resolved on at a national assembly at Soissons, and
preparations were made for a speedy and formidable descent on England, while
John endeavoured to prepare for meeting it by assembling a fleet at Portsmouth,
and an army on Barham Downs, near Canterbury. John’s superstitious mind had
been much alarmed by a prophecy of one Peter, a hermit of Pontefract or
Wakefield, that he would cease to reign before Ascension-day, the anniversary
of his coronation; and this prediction, with others of the same person, or
feigned in his name, had become generally current, and had produced a strong
impression on the people, although Peter, on being questioned by the king,
professed himself unable to explain in what manner the fullfillment was to take
place. While men’s minds were in general alarm, and while the forces on either
side were mustering, Pandulf, a Roman sub-deacon of great experience in
affairs, arrived in England, with two knights of the Temple, and had a meeting
with the king at Dover. They represented to him the imminent danger in which he
was from enemies both abroad and at home, and Pandulf suggested that there was
but one way of safety possible—namely, through reconciliation with the
church—through resigning the kingdoms of England and Ireland to St. Peter, and
consenting to hold them in vassalage, and on condition of a yearly tribute,
under the Roman see. To this proposal—not the less degrading because in other
kingdoms and in other circumstances some similar tenure had been admitted in
consideration of special benefits and privileges—John was fain to consent. He
promised to submit to the pope’s judgment as to all the matters which had
caused his excommunication; to recall the banished bishops and clergy, and to
pay them a compensation for their losses; and on the eve of Ascension-day, at a
house of the templars near Dover, he formally yielded up the crowns of England
and Ireland, and did homage for his kingdoms to the papal envoy. The Yorkshire
hermit’s prophecy was popularly regarded as fulfilled; and whether in
acknowledgment or in denial of its truth, John caused Peter and his son to be
dragged at the tails of horses from Corfe Castle (where he had imprisoned them)
to Wareham, and there to be hanged. The interdict was relaxed, and
Pandulf, on his return to France, charged Philip in the pope’s name to refrain
from carrying out his designs against England, as the king had become the
vassal of St. Peter. Philip indignantly exclaimed against the pope for having
lured him by deceitful hopes to incur vast trouble and expense in preparing for
the expedition which his representative had now forbidden. In the meantime John
summoned his liegemen to attend him on an expedition into Poitou, and, on their hesiting to comply, under the pretext that he was not
yet formally absolved, he invited Langton and the other banished bishops to
return. The primate was received with great honour, and on St.
Margaret’s day, in Winchester Cathedral, the king swore in his presence to do
justice in his courts to all men, keep the ancient laws, (especially those of
Edward the Confessor,) to restore all church property, and to compensate the
owners for all that they had lost. With a view to the settlement of all
remaining difficulties, as well as to the preaching of a crusade and summoning
a general council, Nicolas, cardinal-bishop of Tusculum, arrived in England as
legate about Michaelmas; and at a council which was held at St. Paul’s in
October, John again went through the humiliation of doing homage for his
kingdom to the representative of Rome, and paid the first portion of the
stipulated tribute.
In the beginning of February 1214, John set out for
his campaign in Poitou, where his army met with considerable success. But
he was recalled by the tidings of the great victory gained by Philip at Bouvines, where among Otho’s allies was a large force of
English under the earl of Salisbury, who himself was struck down and taken
prisoner by the martial bishop Philip of Beauvais. On hearing of this defeat,
John passionately exclaimed that since his reconciliation with God and the
church everything had gone ill with him.
The removal of the interdict was delayed by negotiations
as to the indemnity which was to be paid to the clergy. But Innocent was now
disposed to take part with his new vassal, and the legate Nicolas disgusted the
English clergy by insisting on a compromise which was far short of their
demands. When this had at length been settled, the interdict was formally
taken off on St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s day 1214.
The barons of England felt deeply the degradation
which John’s abject submission to the pope had inflicted on them and on the
whole kingdom; and his long misgovernment, his reckless indulgence in excesses
of tyranny and lust, had excited a general desire for the privileges and the
control of settled law. It was therefore resolved to insist on the fullfillment
of the king’s solemn promise to observe the laws of king Edward; and in this
movement the primate took the lead, with the intention of guiding it according
to equity and to written right. At a meeting held at St. Paul’s, London, in
August 1213, he announced to the assembled nobles that he had found a charter
of liberties, granted by Henry I at his coronation, and confirmed by Henry II;
and on this it was determined by the bishops and barons that they would take
their stand. The spiritual and the lay chiefs swore to support
each other in the attempt, and the compact was renewed in a later meeting at
Bury St. Edmund’s. It was in vain that the legate Nicolas threw all his
influence into the opposite scale; that the king raged, and swore never to
consent to a claim of liberties which would reduce him to the condition of a
slave; that he tried to detach the bishops from their alliance with the barons
by offering entire freedom of election to sees; that he took the cross at the
hands of the bishop of London, in order to secure the privileges of a crusader;
that he surrounded himself with foreign mercenary soldiers. He found himself
deserted by all but the nobles of his court; the barons pressed steadily
onwards, possessed themselves of the capital, and on the 15th of June, 1215,
extorted from the king at Runnymede the signature of the Great Charter—a
document intended to record with unquestionable certainty, and thereby to
secure, the rights to which English subjects were already entitled on the
ground of earlier laws, with such new provisions as were necessary to
counteract new dangers and usurpations. In the first article of this it is
declared, with a reference to the king’s spontaneous grant of freedom of
election, that the church of England shall be free, and shall have her rights
entire and her liberties uninjured.
John reckoned on evading his obligations under the
pretext that, as the pope was now suzerain of England, the charter could have
no validity without his consent. It is said that Innocent, on
hearing of the meeting at Runnymede, burst out into an indignant exclamation,
swearing by St. Peter to punish the barons for attempting to dethrone a king
who had taken the badge of a crusader, and had placed himself under the
protection of the Roman church; and on the 24th of August he issued a bull by
which he condemned and annulled the charter, released all men from their
obligations to observe it, and severely censured the English primate for the
part which he had taken in extorting it from the king. Against Langton, in whom
he had expected to find a submissive instrument of Rome, Innocent was
especially provoked, not only by his political conduct, but by his opposition
to the legate Nicolas, who had thrown himself wholly into the king’s interest,
and by claims as to patronage and other matters had frequently come into
collision with the ancient privileges of Canterbury. The bishop of Winchester,
the abbot of Reading, and Pandulf, who about this time was elected to the see
of Norwich, were charged to pronounce an excommunication against all who should
oppose the king, and to suspend any prelate who should refuse to publish the
sentence. Langton was on the point of setting out for the
Lateran council when he received notice from the commissioners that he was
suspended by the pope’s commands But, while professing obedience to the papal
authority, he declared that the order had been issued on false information,
declined to publish it until he should have had an opportunity of conferring
with the pope, and proceeded on his way to the council. At that great assembly
John had his representatives, who dwelt on the primate’s alleged offences, and the
pope declared himself unreservedly for the king. Excommunication was denounced
against all who should oppose John; Langton was severely censured by Innocent
for having taken part with the barons, and for having disregarded the notice of
suspension; and the election of his brother Simon to York was disallowed in favor of the king’s nominee, Walter de Grey, bishop of
Worcester. The primate’s suspension was removed in February 1216, but with the
condition that he should not return to England until peace should have been
concluded between the king and the barons, by a party of whom Lewis, eldest son
of the king of France, had been invited into England, as the only means of
successfully opposing the foreign mercenaries whom John kept in his pay. Lewis
had eagerly embraced the opportunity, in defiance of solemn and repeated
warnings and threats from the pope’s legate, Gualo—alleging
that John had never been rightful king, that he had been condemned for the
murder of his nephew, that he had violated his coronation-oath, that his
surrender of the kingdom was void, because unsanctioned by the barons. Philip
Augustus, although he professed to take no share in his son’s enterprise,
secretly encouraged it, and England was for a time a prey to the ravages of
three foreign armies—the French, the Scots, who took the opportunity to break
in on the north, and the king's Brabançons, or
mercenaries.
In the meantime Innocent endeavoured to support John
by spiritual denunciations against his chief opponents, and by interdicting the
city of London, which took part with the invaders. But these sentences were
generally disregarded, and John at his death, on the 16th of October 1216
(three months after that of Innocent), left to a boy only nine years old a
kingdom of which the soil was in great part occupied by a foreign invader.
6
AFFAIRS OF HUNGARY, SPAIN, ETC.
In his dealings with the less considerable states of
Christendom, Innocent displayed the same lofty conception of his authority, the
same vigor and firmness in asserting it, the same
skill in finding opportunities for intervention, which we have seen in his
policy toward the empire, France, and England. Thus in Hungary he took
advantage of a disturbed succession, when, on the death of Bela III, Andrew
employed against his brother Emmerich the forces which he had raised as if for
a crusade; and the pope, by persuading the rivals to lay down their arms, while
he restored peace to the country, established his own spiritual sway.
In the Christian kingdoms of Spain, he benefited by
the irregular marriages of sovereigns, which placed them at his mercy for the
employment of spiritual punishments, such as interdict and anathema, and
compelled them to submit to his decisions. The reigning family of Aragon had
risen from being counts of Barcelona to a degree of importance which seemed to
warrant the assumption of the royal title; but they had never been crowned, and
the young king Peter resolved to seek the papal confirmation of his dignity. In
1204 he received the crown from Innocent’s hands in the church of St. Pancras
without the walls of Rome, and then, accompanying the pope to St. Peter’s, he
laid his crown and sceptre on the altar. Having thus offered his kingdom to St.
Peter, he was reinvested in it by the symbol of the sword, and promised to hold
it as a fief of the apostolic see, paying a yearly tribute, and granting entire
freedom of election to bishoprics and abbacies, for the disposal of which the
consent of the sovereign had until then been necessary. On returning home,
Peter found that his concessions to Rome had excited some discontent among his
subjects; but the compact was observed, and although Peter himself, as we shall
see, was drawn into opposition to the cause which the pope sanctioned in the
religious war of southern France, it was not from any want of loyalty to the
papacy, but from sympathy with his own relations and allies, for whom he had
interceded with Innocent in vain.
Innocent earnestly exerted himself to persuade the
Christians of Spain to peace among themselves, and to combination against their
Moslem enemies. When a great invasion from Africa, under the miramolin Mahomet el Nazir, was
threatened in 1211, he authorized the raising of a crusading force from other
countries for the assistance of the Spanish Christians, and instituted solemn
prayers at Rome for the success of their arms. In 1212 the
invaders were overthrown by the kings of Aragon and Castile, with their allies,
in the battle of Navas de Tolosa—a victory which recalls that of Charles Martel
at Poitiers by its greatness both in itself and its results, inasmuch as it for
ever delivered Europe from the fear of invasion on the side of Africa. In
acknowledgment of the pope’s assistance, the victors sent the banner and the
lance of the Saracen leader to be hung up in St. Peter’s; and a solemn
thanksgiving was there celebrated, in which the king of Castile’s report of the
victory was publicly read, and the pope addressed the assembled multitude on
the deliverance which had been wrought for Christendom.
In Portugal, in Scotland, in the Scandinavian
kingdoms, and in Poland, the vigilance and the vigour of Innocent’s
administration made themselves felt, in inculcating the obligations of
Christian morality and religion, as well as in asserting the pretensions of the
Roman see. In countries where the claims of the Greek church conflicted with
those of the Latin, he laboured to secure the allegiance of the princes and of
their people to St. Peter; but, although he was successful in Dalmatia, and
in Bulgaria, where he conferred the title of king on the barbarian prince
Joannicius, it was in vain, that he attempted to conciliate the Russians by the
offer of a similar dignity, with the power of St. Peter’s sword. “Has your
master a weapon like this?” said the Russian prince Roman to the papal envoy,
laying his hand on his own sword—“If so, he may dispose of kingdoms and cities;
but so long as I carry this on my thigh, I need no other”. And when the
overtures were renewed after the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Russians
continued obstinately to hold to the Greek patriarch who had established
himself at Nicaea.
With Armenia Innocent was drawn into particular
communication by the connection of the crusaders with that country. The
differences of doctrine and usages which had divided the churches were smoothed
over; the Armenian patriarch accepted a pall from Rome, and promised to appear
either in person or by deputy at councils convoked by the pope, and to send a
representative to Rome every fifth year.
7
THE CRUSADES
The state of the Latin kingdom in the East engaged the
attention of Innocent from the very beginning of his pontificate. The late
attempt at a crusade had not only failed of its object, but had thrown
discredit on the western nations which had been concerned in it. Even before
the Germans had relinquished the expedition, the pope endeavoured to stir up
fresh volunteers to take their place in fighting the infidels. He attempted, by
correspondence with the emperor and with the patriarch, to draw the Greeks of
Constantinople into a new enterprise for the common cause of Christendom; and
in the last days of the year 1199, he issued letters summoning the west to the
deliverance of the Holy Land. He bound himself and the cardinals to give a
tenth of their income towards the cost of the expedition; from other
ecclesiastics a fortieth at least was required. For the Cistercians and
Premonstratensians, the Carthusians, and the order of Grammont, the demand was
only a fiftieth; but the Cistercians pleaded the privileges granted by former
popes, and it is said that a threatening vision of their patroness, the blessed
Virgin, terrified the pope into exempting them from all contribution, except
their prayers for the success of the crusade. The old privileges of crusaders
were renewed and extended; and this, we are told by Villehardouin, was an
inducement which persuaded many to take the cross. But the legates and the
preachers who were sent to publish the crusade in various countries, found in
general a lack of zeal for the cause. There was a prevailing suspicion that the
money contributed for the Holy Land was sometimes detained in the Roman
coffers; and Innocent condescended to counteract this suspicion, by announcing
that the funds for the new crusade would not pass through his hands—that in
every parish a chest with three locks was to be provided for the collection,
and that the keys were to be entrusted to the bishop of the diocese, with a
knight of the Temple, and one of the Hospital. Among those who enlisted
themselves for the crusade there was no prince of the highest rank. In Germany,
Philip and Otho were contending for the possession of the imperial crown. The
pope’s endeavours to unite the rival kings of France and England in a new
expedition to the East had been fruitless; and after the death of Richard,
Philip Augustus was engrossed by the interests of his kingdom at home, and by
the difficulties which had arisen out of his marriage. The highest in dignity
and importance of those who took the cross was Baldwin, count of Flanders and
Hainault, whose father, Philip, had died in the Holy Land.
In France, a remarkable excitement was produced by the
preaching of an ecclesiastic named Fulk, of Neuilly on the Marne. Fulk had been
for years a parish-priest of the ordinary kind, when he became impressed with
the desire of something higher and better than the life which until then had
satisfied him. Feeling his ignorance, he resorted to the lectures of Peter the
Chanter, a famous teacher of Paris and with the knowledge which he thus
acquired, a spirit and a fervour altogether new appeared to animate him. His
preaching became famous; he eloquently denounced the errors of heretics, the
subtleties of dialecticians and decretalists, and
reprobated the vices of all classes—especially those of usurers. He reclaimed
many women from a life of sin, and either persuaded them to enter into
convents, or portioned them for marriage. He sent disciples to preach in
various parts of France and in other countries—among them, Eustace of Flai,
whose visit to England has been already mentioned. After a time, the power of
Fulk’s preaching was reinforced by miracles; he cast out devils, he cured the
blind, the dumb, the deaf, and the lame—discovering by a special gift who were
likely to receive spiritual benefit from the bodily cures which he bestowed on
them; and those who refused to believe were delivered by him to Satan—a
sentence which was followed by the vengeance of heaven. Nor were the admonitions of Fulk confined to
the multitudes of low condition who flocked around him with such eagerness that
sometimes he was even in danger from their pressure; it was he, according to
some authorities, who reproved Richard of England for cherishing as his three
daughters, pride, covetousness, and luxury; to which the king replied that he
bestowed his pride in marriage on the templars, his greed on the Cistercians,
and his luxury on the prelates of the church. Yet in the midst of his success
Fulk incurred much suspicion by the difference of his habits from the
asceticism which was generally affected by such preachers; for he rode on
horseback, shaved his hair, and professed no austerity as to clothing or diet. By these suspicions the effect
of his sermons was impaired, so that many of his converts fell away; the
offence which he had given to many persons seemed to stand in the way of his
work; and it would seem that the freshness and energy of his discourse had worn
off, when he was commissioned to preach the crusade in the room of Peter the
Chanter, who had undertaken the task, but had died, and had bequeathed it to
his pupil. For this new object Fulk exerted his eloquence with
even more than his former vigour and effect. He presented himself at the
general chapter of the Cistercians, where he, with the bishop of Langres and others, solemnly took the cross. At Écry, a castle on the Aisne, he arrived at the time of a
great tournament given by the young count Theobald of Champagne, brother of
Henry, the late king of Jerusalem; and such was the effect of his fervid words,
that the count himself, with most of his guests, took the cross—among them,
Walter of Brienne (who, however, afterwards relinquished the crusade for his
attempt in southern Italy), Simon de Montfort, who had already been
distinguished as a crusader, and Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of
Champagne, who eventually became the historian of the expedition.
At meetings which were afterwards held, it was resolved
that the surest way to weaken the Mussulman power was by means of an attack on
Egypt; and with a view to this, as well as from a remembrance of the disasters
which had befallen former expeditions by land, it was resolved to proceed by
sea. Villehardouin was therefore dispatched, with five others, to Venice, in
order to negotiate for the means of transport.
Venice had by this time become the most important of
the Italian trading cities; excelling her rivals Genoa and Pisa, not only in
the number of her ships, but in their size and build, and in the boldness, the
skill, and the discipline of their crews. She was the great centre of commerce
between the East and the West, and had a factory or quarter of her own in all
the chief cities of the Levant. The Lateran council of 1179 had forbidden all
Christians to supply munitions of war to the Saracens, and
Innocent had endeavoured to put an end to all commerce with the infidels; but
the Venetians represented to him that, as they had no agriculture, a
suppression of their traffic would be ruinous to them; and the pope relaxed his
order by allowing them for a time to trade with “the kingdoms of Egypt and
Babylon” in everything but warlike stores, adding the expression of a hope that
this indulgence would render them more zealous to help Jerusalem. The
Venetians, although always respectful to the papacy, had been
accustomed—perhaps through some influence of their communication with the
infidels and the schismatics of the East—to behave with firmness in their
dealings with Rome, and had thus achieved for themselves a peculiar amount of
spiritual independence. Their relations with Constantinople had been for some
time unfriendly; their merchants had been plundered by the emperor Manuel,
their settlers had been massacred under Andronicus, and, although Isaac Angelus
had restored their privileges, the dethronement of that emperor by Alexius, in
1195, had produced a new and unfavourable turn in the state of affairs.
At Venice, Villehardouin and his companions found a
ready hearing. Henry Dandolo, the doge, who, although ninety-four years old,
and almost entirely blind, retained all his mental vigour, and even his martial
spirit, entered eagerly into the project, and after a solemn mass in St.
Mark’s, an agreement was ratified by the acclamations of 10,000 Venetians who
were present, and by mutual oaths on the holy Gospels. In consideration of a
certain sum, the Venetians were to provide, by the feast of St. John at
midsummer 1202, ships and provisions for the transport and maintenance of the
crusading force; they were to add at least fifty galleys of their own, and, so
long as the partnership should last, any conquests which might be made were to
be equally divided between the contracting parties. The pope sanctioned the
enterprise, with the significant condition that no attack should be made on any
Christian peopled
On returning to France, the envoys found the gallant
Theobald of Champagne dangerously sick, and he soon after died, at the age of
twenty-five. The command of the expedition was thus left vacant, and, after
having been declined by the duke of Burgundy and other princes, it was accepted
by Boniface, marquis of Montferrat, and brother of the famous Conrad. Boniface,
in consequence of an invitation to France, appeared at an assembly at Soissons,
where he was invested with the cross and with a general’s staff by the bishop
of the place and Fulk of Neuilly; and at a chapter which the marquis afterwards
attended at Citeaux, Fulk was able to declare that he had given the cross to
200,000 men.
At the appointed time, the crusaders appeared in great
numbers at Venice, and it was found that the Venetians, in their naval
preparations, had more than fulfilled their part of the engagement. But as many
of the crusaders, in the hope of finding cheaper terms of passage, had
preferred to embark at Marseilles, or at some port of southern Italy, those who
assembled at Venice were unable to make up the stipulated sum; and although
count Baldwin and other chiefs liberally contributed all that they had with them,
including plate and jewels, and even all that they could borrow, a large
deficiency still remained. Although the price had been calculated for a much
larger number, yet, as it had been promised in one sum, the Venetians were
peremptory in requiring full payment before they would consent to sail; and at
length, when the fullfillment of this condition was evidently hopeless, the
doge proposed to the Venetian council that, instead of insisting on further
money, or of using their right to seize as forfeit that which had already been
paid, they should persuade the crusaders to join them in an expedition against
Zara, in Dalmatia, which had been lately taken from the republic by the king of
Hungary. The crusaders were informed that, if this proposal
were accepted, the forces of Venice would go with them to the holy war; and at
a great assemblage in St. Mark’s, the doge announced from one of the lecterns
that he himself, although old, infirm, and needing rest, would gladly take the
lead of his countrymen in so glorious an enterprise. His words were received
with acclamations of joy, mixed with tears; and Dandolo, descending from the
lectern, proceeded to the altar, where, amidst intense excitement of the
multitude, he fell on his knees, weeping profusely, and received the cross.
On the 8th of October 1202, a fleet of 480 vessels
sailed from the port of Venice, and, after having reduced some of the small
islands of the Adriatic to subjection, the crusaders arrived off Zara. A
cardinal, whom the pope had sent to accompany the expedition, had returned to
his master, on finding himself refused by the Venetians as legate, although
they were willing to admit him as a preacher; and on his report Innocent had
threatened to anathematize the crusaders if they made war on any Christians. Guy,
abbot of Vaux-Cernay, who had accompanied Simon de
Montfort, now protested in the pope’s name against attacking a Christian city,
belonging to a king who himself had taken the cross. But Dandolo replied that
the king of Hungary’s crusading was only a pretence, and it was with difficulty
that Simon was able to save the zealous abbot from the fury of the Venetians. On
Martinmas day, siege was laid to Zara, and on the sixth day the defenders,
after having in vain appealed to the sympathy of the crusaders by displaying
crosses and sacred pictures from the walls, were forced to surrender. The
expedition was now joined by the marquis of Montferrat, who had been unable to
accompany it at the outset; but it was weakened by the departure of Simon de
Montfort and others, who had taken no part in the assault on Zara.
During the winter, which was spent at Zara, some
serious conflicts took place between the French and Venetians, and negotiations
were actively carried on with the pope. Innocent, after having severely
reproved and excommunicated the crusaders for their transgression of his
orders, was at length persuaded to accept their professions of repentance, and
to absolve them, charging them to restore Zara to the king of Hungary, and to
undertake no further expedition against Christians, but to go on to the Holy Land.
But a new object was now suggested for their
enterprise, and was rendered the more attractive by the necessities into which
a great part of them had by this time fallen. Alexius, son of the dethroned
emperor Isaac Angelus of Constantinople, and brother-in-law of Philip of
Swabia, had entreated their leaders while at Venice to help in
the recovery of his father’s throne. His first application had been fruitless,
and he had been unable to obtain any decided answer from the pope. But at Zara
the crusaders received envoys from Philip, who recommended the cause of his
Byzantine connections, and held forth on the part of the young Alexius tempting
offers of money and of cooperation towards their great object, with the hope of
reunion between the Greek and the Latin churches, if they would turn aside for
a short time to restore the rightful emperor to the throne of Constantinople.
Innocent again remonstrated through his representatives, and there was much
division of opinion among the crusaders. The French were inclined to obey the
pope, but the keen Venetians, who were animated not only by the desire of gain,
but by the feeling of national and even personal enmity, were for closing with
the new proposal, and prevailed.
About the middle of May 1203, forty thousand men
sailed from Zara, and, after having spent three weeks at Corfu, they came in
sight of Constantinople on St. John’s eve. “Much”, says Villehardouin, “did
those look at Constantinople who had never before seen it; for they could never
have believed that in all the world there could be a city so rich and so
beautiful; when they saw its high walls, and the fair towers wherewith it was
surrounded on all sides, and its sumptuous palaces and its lofty churches, whereof
there were so many as no man could believe unless he beheld it with his own
eyes, and the length and breadth of the city which was mistress of all others.
No one was there among them so bold but that his heart beat; and no wonder, for
never since the world began was so great an enterprise undertaken by a like
number of people”. The usurper, in his devotion to his pleasures, had neglected
to prepare against invasion, and the Greeks looked on with stolid or affected
contempt while the western armament passed along the quays, with Alexius the
son of Isaac conspicuously placed on the stern of one of the ships as the
rightful heir of the empire. On the 6th of July the grand assault was made; the
tower of Galata, which commanded the harbour, was taken, and the chain which
stretched across the Golden Horn was burst by the force of a Venetian ship
driven against it with the sails swollen by a strong wind. Dandolo appeared in
the prow of the foremost vessel, with the banner of St. Mark displayed before
him, and, after having been the first to land, exposed himself gallantly while
he cheered on his men to the fight. The usurper Alexius, after having been
roused with difficulty to show himself at the head of his troops, who were
tenfold as many as the assailants, deserted them. It was in vain that the
“axe-bearing barbarians” (as a Greek historian styles them)—the English
and Danes of the Varangian guard—fought manfully, and that the Genoese and the
Pisan settlers exerted themselves in defence of the privileges which they had
acquired in preference to the Venetians. Alexius ran off the following night;
the blinded Isaac was brought forth from his prison, hastily arrayed in
imperial robes, placed in a chair of state, and surrounded with the magnificence
of a court, that he might give audience to Villehardouin and another noble
Frank, who appeared as envoys from the crusaders, to offer him the restoration
of his crown on condition of his ratifying the terms of their compact with his
son. On hearing the statement of these terms, Isaac declared that he felt them
to be heavy and difficult, but that no recompense could be too great for the
allies to whom he owed his deliverance; he swore to the compact, sealed it, and
was then allowed to embrace his son. On the feast of St. Peter’s chains, Isaac
was again enthroned with great pomp, in St. Sophia’s, and the young Alexius was
anointed as his colleague in the empire.
The crusaders were now desirous to go on; but the
young emperor entreated them to remain at Constantinople until the following
Easter, for the purpose of securing his father’s throne, as the Greeks
were not to be trusted; and the offers of further benefits which accompanied
the proposal prevailed on them, although not until after some opposition had
been manifested. The payment of the stipulated money to the allies was begun by
instalments; but while the Greeks complained that in order to this they were
heavily taxed, and that churches were stripped of their precious ornaments, the
Latins cried out that the payments were irregular, scanty, and continually
diminishing, until at length they ceased altogether. Other causes of quarrel
speedily appeared. The reconciliation of the Greek and Latin churches, which
Innocent in the beginning of his pontificate had urged on the late emperor and
on the patriarch, and to which Isaac and his son had pledged themselves, was
hindered by the assumption of the Latins, and by the bigoted prejudices of
both parties. The Greeks saw with disgust that Alexius degraded the crown by
familiarly associating with the Franks, conforming to their manners, and
playing at dice in their tents; the Latins complained that the emperors were
estranged from them, and that their services were requited with ingratitude.
While Alexius and the marquis of Montferrat were engaged in an expedition to
reduce the country to subjection and order, a serious affray took place in
consequence of an attack which was made on the Mahometan mosque by some
Flemings, Pisans, and Venetians. In the defence of their building, the
Mussulmans were assisted by the Greeks; the mosque was set on fire, and a
conflagration ensued, which raged for two days, and is said to have destroyed a
fourth part of the city. By this calamity the hatred of the Greeks against the
Latins was further exasperated; continual skirmishes took place, and an attempt
was made to burn the crusading fleet. A deputation from the
crusaders, of which Villehardouin was a member, waited on the emperors, to
reproach them with their ingratitude, and insist on the fulfillment of their promises, with a threat that otherwise the Latins would hold
themselves released from their own engagements. Jealousies arose between the
elder and the younger emperors, and Isaac, whose misfortunes might have
bespoken pity, made himself hated by his vices, and ridiculous by his belief in
the flatteries of monks and astrologers, who lived luxuriously at his expense,
and repaid him by promising the recovery of his sight and vigour. An attempt to
set up one Nicolas Cannabus as emperor proved futile;
but soon after this a more dangerous design was matured and executed by Alexius
Ducas, a prince of the blood, who, from the meeting of his bushy eyebrows, was
commonly called Murzuflus. Having failed to draw the
Latins into a scheme for the dethronement of the princes whom their arms had
restored, Murzuflus decoyed Alexius into a prison,
where it is believed that the young emperor was murdered, although the usurper
pretended that his death was natural, and honoured him with a costly funeral;
and Isaac soon after died of grief.
By these unexpected events all terms of peace were
necessarily brought to an end, and the Latins, after some fruitless
negotiation, and many slight encounters both by sea and land, resolved to take
possession of Constantinople for themselves. Their first assault was repulsed
with heavy loss; but three days later they again made an attempt; Murzuflus, after calling all the holiest relics to his
assistance, and after having vigorously withstood the enemy for a time, was
driven to flight, and the imperial city fell into their hands. A great
slaughter followed; but the cruelties which were inflicted on the Greeks were
not so much the work of the crusaders as of the Latin settlers, who had lately
been plundered and driven out of the city to seek a refuge in the camp of the
besiegers. In the wildness of their triumph acts of profanity were committed by
the crusaders, which not only revolted the feelings of the Greeks, but drew
down the indignant reproof of the pope. Pictures of the Redeemer and of the
saints were torn from the walls of churches, and were scattered on the ground
or used as seats and benches; sacred relics were thrown into filthy places, and
the consecrated host was trodden under foot; hallowed vessels were used as
plates and drinking-cups; the imperial tombs—among them that of the great
Justinian—were violated and rifled; the splendid ornaments of St. Sophia’s and
other churches were stripped off and sold to pedlars; a prostitute was seated
on the patriarchal throne, and indecent songs and dances were performed around
her. No wonder that the historian Nicetas, who himself was a sufferer by the
capture of Constantinople, apostrophizes the crusaders as to the inconsistency
of such things with their profession, or that he holds up by way of contrast
the humane and decent conduct of the Saracens on getting possession of
Jerusalem.
The spoil of Constantinople was of immense value, but
much that was precious perished. Bronze statues, the masterpieces of ancient
art, were melted down for coinage. The Venetians alone among the conquerors had
an eye for art; and thus, while others carried home with delight such treasures
as Jacob’s stone pillow, fragments of the true cross, one of the heads of St.
John the Baptist, which forms the glory of Amiens cathedral, and other relics
of holy personages, from those of Scripture down to the martyrs and confessors
of the iconoclastic controversy, the Venetians secured the famous bronze
horses, which, after having within the present century served as trophies of a
later conquest, have been restored to their place on St. Mark’s.
It had been resolved before the attack on
Constantinople, that, in case of success, the imperial crown should be awarded
by six representatives of the French and six of the Venetians, who should swear
to choose the fittest man. The claims of Dandolo might have seemed preeminent
before all others; but his own countrymen dreaded such an elevation of one
Venetian family above the rest, and perhaps apprehended that under a Venetian
emperor of the east, Venice itself might sink into an inferior position. To them
too Boniface of Montferrat was objectionable, as a near neighbour, whose
interests might possibly clash with their own. The electors, therefore, on the
9th of May, made choice of count Baldwin of Flanders, a man of Carolingian
descent, of high character, and in the full vigor of
manhood. The marquis of Montferrat was the first to do homage; and a week
later Baldwin received the crown from the bishop of Bethlehem, a papal legate
who had lately arrived from Palestine.
It had been agreed that the patriarchate should be
given up to that division of the allies which should not obtain the empire; and
agreeably to this, the Venetians chose Thomas Morosini, a man of noble Venetian
birth, a subdeacon of the Roman church, and one whose personal acquaintance
with Innocent might be expected to bespeak the pope’s approval of the choice.
Innocent had received from Baldwin a letter announcing the conquest, asking for
the assistance of clergy from the west, and proposing a general council with a
view to a reconciliation of the churches. It seems as if the brilliancy of the
exploit, and the prospects which it opened for the Latin Church, in some
measure overpowered his objections to the diversion of the crusade from its
proper object. He therefore replied favourably; he reproved the crusaders
severely for their excesses in the capture of Constantinople, especially for
their sacrilegious plunder of holy things, which, he said, would make the
Greeks hate the Latins worse than dogs, and so must hinder their return to the
unity of the church; he disallowed the absolution which had been pronounced by
the bishop of Bethlehem, as having been given without proper authority; he
declared the compact between the French and the Venetians as to the disposal of
the ecclesiastical property to be null, and the election of a patriarch to be
informal, while, in consideration of Morosini’s merits, he appointed him to the
patriarchate as if by his own authority. Morosini had been
compelled by the Venetians to swear that he would bestow the dignities of St.
Sophia’s and the chief offices of the hierarchy exclusively on Venetians or on
persons who should have resided ten years at Venice. But on his appearance at Rome,
the pope pronounced this oath to be void, and made him swear that he would not
observe it. Morosini was then ordained deacon, priest, and bishop, and took the
usual oath of metropolitan to the pope, who affected to bestow on the church of
Constantinople precedence next to that of Rome, declaring that the precedence
of “new Rome” in former times had been granted through the favor of the elder Rome. But the patriarch, in returning by Venice to Constantinople,
found his fellow-citizens bent on exacting from him a renewal of his former
oath as the only condition on which they would agree to show him due honor; and the pope, on being informed of the new oath,
again declared it invalid. Innocent furnished the patriarch with instructions
for the administration of his church: in places where the population was Greek,
he was to place Greek bishops whose fidelity to Rome might be relied on, if
such could be found; where it was mixed, the bishops were to be Latins. But it
was soon found that, instead of forwarding the conversion of the Greeks, this
and other measures conceived in a like spirit tended only to increase their
alienation from the Latin church. Even among the Latins, the patriarch was
unable to obtain submission to his authority. The French clergy charged him
with having gained his office by trickery and by imposing on the pope; he was
brought into conflict on questions of jurisdiction and patronage with the
secular power, and with the patriarch of Grado; and the pope, although he endeavored to support him as far as possible, had to
reprove him for his exclusive patronage of Venetians in appointments to
ecclesiastical dignities, and for other acts inconsistent with Innocent's view
of his duty.
The new empire was from the beginning sickly, and,
instead of strengthening the Latin power in the east, was a burden on it.
Baldwin invited Christians from all countries of the west to join the
settlement, and the pope exhorted both laity and clergy to reinforce the
crusaders; but those who
acted on these invitations were for the most part grievously disappointed. An
attempt was made, as in the kingdom of Jerusalem, to establish the feudal
system, which was here the more unsuitable on account of its unlikeness both to
the republican institutions of the Venetians, and to the old traditions of the
empire. The partition of the conquests produced much disagreement among the
Franks. Baldwin soon quarrelled with Boniface of Montferrat, and in 1205, on a
disastrous expedition, he fell into the hands of Joannicius, a perfidious
savage to whom the pope had confirmed the title of king over Bulgaria and
Wallachia, and whom the crusaders had provoked by scornfully refusing his
offers of alliance. It is believed that Baldwin was put to death in prison,
with circumstances of great cruelty, and to the pope’s intercessions for him
Joannicius answered that they were too late. Two years afterwards, Boniface was
killed in action against the same enemy, whom the pope in vain solicited to be
at peace with the Latins of Constantinople; but in the same year they were
delivered from the fear of Joannicius, who died by some unknown means. Henry,
the brother of Baldwin, who had acted as regent since the emperor’s capture,
was crowned as his successor in August 1206, and for ten years administered the
empire with vigor and skill, contending on the one
hand against the Bulgarians, and on the other against the Byzantine princes who
furnished rallying points for their countrymen by founding little
principalities in Asia and Epirus. Murzuflus, who had
for a time combined with the dethroned usurper Alexius, might perhaps have been
a dangerous enemy; but having been blinded by Alexius, he fell into the hands
of the Latins, and, after a trial, was thrown from the top of the pillar of
Theodosius at Constantinople. Alexius was also caught, and was shut up in a
monastery. Henry wisely endeavoured to conciliate the Greeks, both by checking
religious persecution and by relaxing that rule of exclusion from all public
employments which had branded them as a servile race. The pope also after a
time mitigated the rules which he had laid down as to the preference of Latin
over Greek clergy; but such concessions, even if they had been greater, would
have come too late.
The people, who most substantially and lastingly
profited by the Latin conquest of Constantinople were the Venetians. To them it
brought a vast increase of the trade by which they flourished; and, while they
declined to set up one of their own citizens as a candidate for the empire,
they allowed them to make private conquests, so that the islands of the Levant
became filled with petty Venetian princes. Henry Dandolo had become lord of
Romania, and the dignity continued in his family for more than a century and a
half. The aged doge himself died in June 1205, and was buried with great
splendour in the church of St. Sophia.
While the main body of the crusaders had turned aside
for the expedition against Constantinople, a part of them had gone on to the
Holy Land, where other adventurers arrived by way of Marseilles and from
northern ports; but these were not enough to engage in any great attempts
against the infidels, and many of them, on hearing of the successes of their
companions, had rejoined them in the new Latin empire. Innocent, however,
although deeply grieved by the result of the expedition which had been undertaken
for the deliverance of the Holy Land, abated nothing of his zeal for the cause,
and throughout the remainder of his pontificate we find him repeatedly pressing
on the sovereigns and people of the west the duty of a new crusade. For some
years, indeed, the state of southern France was such that he thought it well to
extend the privileges of crusaders to the men who were there warring for the
extirpation of heresy; and during this time it was obviously inexpedient that
those who were disposed to fight in behalf of the faith should be distracted
between rival objects. But in 1213, when the Albigenses appeared to be
effectually defeated, he recalled the indulgences for southern France, and sent
Robert Curzon—an Englishman who had been his fellow-student, afterwards a
preacher under Fulk of Neuilly, and was now cardinal of St. Stephen’s on the
Coelian hill—to preach in France an expedition for the recovery of the Holy
Land. Orders were issued that solemn monthly services should be instituted for
the success of the crusade; and all who should take part in it were encouraged
by the declaration that the religion of the false prophet must be near its
fall, since of the 666 years allotted to it more than 600 were already
completed. But Curzon showed himself indiscreet in the fullfillment of his
commission. In order to win the popular ear, he inveighed bitterly and
unscrupulously against the ordinary clergy; and by giving the cross to
multitudes of inefficient persons—old, blind, deaf, lame, lepers, women and
children—he rendered those who were fit for war unwilling to undertake an
enterprise in which they were to be encumbered by such associates. The king and
the clergy of France appealed to the pope against the legate; but Innocent
approved of his proceedings, on the ground that those who were personally
incapable of fulfilling their vow might help the crusade by paying a
commutation.
About the same time many were enlisted for the holy
war in England and in Germany; and a strange independent movement was set on
foot by one Stephen, a shepherd boy at the village of Cloies,
near Vendome, who professed to have been charged by the Saviour in a vision to
preach the cross. By this tale he gathered some children about him, and they
went on through towns and villages chanting, “O Lord, help us to recover thy
true and holy cross!”. Their numbers swelled as they advanced, so that when
they reached Paris, they are said to have amounted to 15,000; they displayed
banners, crosses, and censers. We are told that all the efforts of parents to
restrain their children from joining the party were unavailing; nay, it is said
that, when some of them were privately shut up, bars and locks gave way for
their escape. Philip Augustus, after having consulted the university of Paris, endeavoured
to check the movement, but without success. Stephen had acquired the reputation
of miraculous power; threads of his dress were treasured up as precious relics;
and the number of his followers continually increased, so that it is said to
have amounted to 30,000 when they arrived at Marseilles, which Stephen entered
in a triumphal car, surrounded by a body-guard. Some shipmasters undertook to
convey them gratuitously to Egypt and Africa; but these wretches were
kidnappers, and their unfortunate victims were either wrecked on a rock of the
Mediterranean, or, on reaching the African coast, were sold into slavery. In
Germany a similar movement was set on foot by a boy named Nicolas, who, after
having lost many of his companions through hunger and fatigue, arrived at Genoa
with 7000 of them, among whom were many grown-up persons, and not a few women
of bad reputation. Thence they struggled onwards to Brindisi, where the bishop
of the place discovered that the father of Nicolas had a design of selling them
into slavery. By this discovery the crusade was broken up; the unfortunate
children tried to return home, but the greater part of them fell victims to the
hardships of the way. The father of Nicolas was executed at Cologne.
Innocent, although he had taken no share in these
insane and calamitous expeditions, declared that the zeal manifested by the
children put to shame the listlessness of their elders; and the question of a
new crusade was one of the subjects proposed for the great council which he
assembled in 1215.
8
THE ALBIGENSIAN WAR
Innocent was zealous and indefatigable in his
exertions against the heresies of his time. Among the most remarkable of these
(although from its nature it was not likely to win much popular acceptance,
even if free course had been allowed it) was the doctrine taught by a clerk
named Amalric, a native of Bène, in the diocese of
Chartres, who is described as a man of very subtle, but perverse and
paradoxical mind. Amalric had been eminent as a teacher of logic and the
liberal sciences at Paris before he betook himself to the study of theology. He
is accused by his contemporaries of paying greater regard to Aristotle than to
Holy Scripture; but later inquirers suppose that his errors are rather to be
traced to the Arabian commentators than to Aristotle himself, and yet more to
the influence of Plato and of Scotus Erigena’s book “On the Division of
Nature”. His doctrine was pantheistic—that God is all, and that all is God;
that everything issues from the All and will return to it. Hence he inferred
that God was as truly incarnate in Abraham as in Christ; that the Holy Spirit
spoke as really through Ovid as through Augustine. He is said to have
maintained that the Trinity denotes three forms of the Divine manifestation,
connected with the same number of stages in the history of mankind; that the second
stage, under the Son, was nearly at an end, and that the third, under the Holy
Ghost, would follow; that every Christian must believe himself
to be a member of Christ, and that this was the only way of salvation. In
consequence of a complaint from the University of Paris, Amalric was summoned
to appear before the pope, who, after having heard him, pronounced against him.
The university required him to retract his errors; and, having submitted to
this humiliation, he soon after died of shame and grief.
After Amalric’s death his doctrine was taught by David
of Dinant, although apparently in a coarser form and with new developments.
Whereas Amalric had said that God is the source and the end of all things,
David declared Him to be the material principle of all things. He
asserted that the reign of the Holy Ghost was already come; that outward rites
were needless; that acts done in the body were no sins, forasmuch as nothing
could be sinful if it were done in love. Every one, he said, carries hell
within, him, “like a bad tooth in the mouth”. And he held that the soul could
by contemplation exchange its separate existence for that which it has in the
Divine soul.
In 1209 an inquiry into the tenets of this sect was
held by the bishop of Paris, in the presence of some lay magistrates. Fourteen
of the sectaries were made over to the secular arm as guilty, and of these ten
were burnt, and the others were committed to close confinements. It was ordered
that Amalric’s bones should be disinterred and burnt; and his books were also
condemned to the flames, with some of Aristotle’s writings, which had lately
been brought from Constantinople and translated into Latin. The doctrines of
Amalric were again condemned at the Lateran council of 1215; and in 1225 the
work of Scotus, to which Amalric and his followers had directed attention, was
proscribed by Honorius III. The last teacher of the party is said to have been
one Godin, who was burnt at Amiens.
Notices are occasionally found of sectaries professing
the Waldensian opinions. Thus, in 1199, Innocent wrote to the bishop and the
faithful of Metz, in denunciation of a party of laymen and women who used
French translations of the Scriptures, and on the strength of their
acquaintance with these despised the clergy and their ministrations. The pope
admits that a desire to know the Scriptures is not only innocent but
praiseworthy; but he censures the party at Metz for their sectarian spirit, for
imagining that the mysteries of the faith are open to the unlearned, and for
their behaviour towards the clergy—as to which he is careful to deprive them of
such warrant as they might allege from the parallel of Balaam’s ass rebuking
the prophet. He desires the bishop to inquire into the authorship and character
of the vernacular translations; and in the following year he commissioned some
Cistercian abbots to labour in conjunction with the bishop for the suppression
of the heresy at Metz. In consequence of this appointment, it is said, the
vernacular Scriptures were burnt, and the Waldensian opinions were
extinguished.
There is mention of heretical, and seemingly Waldensian,
teaching at Auxerre and in the neighbouring dioceses; and in 1210 Innocent records the form in which some
Waldenses abjured their errors, among which that of regarding ordination as
unnecessary for the ministers of Christ is especially dwelt on. The presumption
of preaching without a regular mission is also denounced by the Lateran council
of 1215, in which those who should be guilty of it “under the appearance of
piety”, are threatened with excommunication, and, in case of obstinacy, with
yet heavier punishments.
Of all sectarian parties in this time the cathari were by far the most numerous and the most widely
spread. Even within the papal territory they abounded. At Orvieto the opinions
of this sect were especially rife among the female sex. A bishop, named
Richard, endeavoured to suppress them by severe punishments, such as
banishment, and even death; but during his absence from the city, and through
the influence of a new teacher, the cathari became so
strong that they threatened to expel their orthodox fellow-citizens. On this
the orthodox applied to the Romans for a leader, and, with the pope’s consent,
a young man of high courage and ardent zeal, named Peter Parenzio,
was sent to them in February 1199. Peter at once proceeded to take strong
measures for the repression of the opposite party, and, after having proceeded
in this course until the approach of Easter, returned to Rome for the festival.
The pope, at an interview in a street near the Lateran, told him that he must
now take an oath of fidelity as governor of Orvieto; to which Peter replied
that he was willing to do so, but added that the heretics were so much
exasperated as to threaten his life. He received full absolution from the pope,
as if in prospect of death; settled his worldly affairs; and, notwithstanding the
entreaties of his mother and wife, returned to his government, ready and eager
for martyrdom. Three weeks later he met with the fate which he had
expected—being dragged out of the town and murdered by some sectaries, who had
gained admission to his house through the treachery of a servant. His death is
said to have been followed by judgments on the murderers, by miracles at his
tomb, and eventually by the suppression of heresy in Orvieto.
At Viterbo the heretics had gained such influence that
an attempt was made to elect two of the “believers” as consuls, and the chief
of the sect as chamberlain of the city, although he had been formally
excommunicated. Innocent desired the bishops of Viterbo and Orvieto to eject
these magistrates; and in 1207 he himself proceeded to Viterbo for the purpose
of rooting out the heresy. The patarenes took flight;
but this did not prevent the pope from inquiring into the matter, and he
ordered that their property should be confiscated, that their houses should be
demolished, and that all heretics, especially the members of this sect, should
be “delivered to the secular arm”—a phrase which now occurs for the first
time—in order to punishment. In the same spirit Innocent wrote to the
authorities at Faenza, Bologna, Florence, Verona, Treviso, and
other places. He severely censures the Milanese for their encouragement of the
sectaries; that they not only did not “take the little foxes”, but cherished
them until the foxes grew into lions, and the locusts into horses ready to
battle; and he tells them that he had been urged to send a crusade to Milan as
well as into Provence. Beyond the bounds of Italy we read of heretics in
Dalmatian Bosnia, and the Tyrol; at Strasburg, where about eighty were put to
the trial of hot iron, and most of them were convicted and burnt; and of
similar executions at Paris, Troyes, Rouen, Langres,
and in various parts of northern France and Belgium, where a Dominican friar
named Robert earned by his severities the glorious name (as the annalist
Rinaldi considers it) of “the hammer of heretics”.
But it was in the south of France that the catharist doctrines chiefly prevailed. In this region they
had become so general that the church and the clergy had fallen into the
greatest contempt. The nobles and knights no longer allowed their younger sons
to be trained for the ministry of the church, but put sons of their serfs into
benefices, of which they themselves appropriated the tithes, while the priests
were obliged to be content with a miserable pittance. As an instance of the
disrepute into which the clergy had sunk, we are told that, instead of the
expression “I would rather be a Jew than do such a thing”, it was now customary
to say “I would rather be a chaplain”. They themselves were so sensible of
their ignominy, that they were fain to hide their tonsure by drawing the hair
from the back of the head over it. The heretics were so audacious that in the
sight of the bishops and clergy they defiled the chalices and other sacred
vessels, and threw the holy Gospels into the dirt. The princes of southern France
were for the most part ill-affected to the hierarchy. Raymond VI, count of
Toulouse, the most powerful of them next to the king of Aragon, had in early
life associated much with heretics, and was suspected of inclining to their
opinions, although rather on account of his roughness towards the clergy than
of any expression of his belief. He had been excommunicated by Celestine for
his aggressions on the abbey of St. Gilles; but he was able to obtain
absolution from Innocent. The laxity of his life was notorious; of his five
wives, three were living at the same time; he is even charged with incest by
the unscrupulous writers of the orthodox party. The count of Foix was married
to a Waldensian; of his two sisters, one was said to be Waldensian and the other
a catharist; and, in common with the counts of Béarn and Comminges, the viscount of Beziers, and other
princes of the neighbourhood, he is described as an oppressor of the bishops
and clergy.
Innocent, in the first year of his pontificate,
addressed a letter to the prelates and nobles of southern France, exhorting
them to take vigorous measures for the suppression of heresy. Patarenes, Waldensians, and others were to be anathematized
and banished; but there is no distinct mention of death as a penalty, although
it may perhaps be implied in the declaration that heresy is murder of the soul.
But this letter met with little attention. To Raymond of Toulouse and his
subjects, the requisition to persecute those whom they respected as peaceable neighbours
was unwelcome. “We have been brought up with them”, they said; “we have
relations among them, and we know that their life is honest”.
The pope in his letter had announced that two
Cistercians, Rainier and Guy, were sent as legates into the country affected
with heresy. Rainier soon after fell sick, and was succeeded by Peter of
Castelnau, archdeacon of Maguelone, who, after having been a teacher of
theology at Paris, had become a member of the Cistercian order. In 1204, the
power of these envoys was extended; the cognizance of questions of heresy was
transferred to them from the bishops, and they were authorized to suspend such
bishops as should be found lukewarm in the cause; and on this they acted in
some cases, although they found among the members of the episcopal order a
general disinclination to submit to two monks, however specially empowered by
the pope. At Peter of Castelnau’s request, the cardinal of St. Prisca was fixed as legate at Montpellier; and in
1204, Arnold Amalric, abbot of Citeaux, a bitter and unsparing enemy of heresy,
with twelve members of his order, was added to the mission. Yet the work made
little progress. The envoys held conferences with the heretics, but found
themselves continually baffled by objections drawn from the evil lives of the
clergy. In May 1205, they were strengthened by the appointment of a new bishop
to Toulouse—Fulk or Folquet of Marseilles—a man who,
as a famous troubadour, had formerly been among the ornaments of gay and
licentious courts, but had lately been turned to a different career, had
entered the Cistercian order, while his wife became a nun, and had taken up
with a fervour natural to such converts an extreme zeal for the orthodox faith,
with a fierce hostility against heresy. Still, the efforts of the missionaries
were attended with little success; and they were almost in despair, when they
fell in at Montpellier with Diego (Didacus) bishop of Osma, and Dominic, the
sub-prior of his cathedral, who were returning from Rome with a commission to labour
against heresy.
The legates, in conversation with the Spaniards,
lamented their want of success; whereupon Diego told them that mere words would
not be of any avail; that the only hopeful course for them was to counteract
the professed simplicity of the heretics by putting aside their gold and
silver, their pomp and splendour, and going forth like the apostles, barefooted
and in poverty. The legates professed their willingness to follow this advice,
if they might have the example of any sufficient authority; and the bishop told
them that he would himself show them the way. Sending away his servants,
horses, and baggage, and retaining with him only a few clerks, of whom Dominic
was the chief, he remained in Languedoc, and provided by a large outlay of
money for the support of those with whom he had associated himself. The Cistercians,
according to their promise, sent away everything but their books of devotion
and study, and followed the course which Diego had pointed out. The
missionaries went barefooted, in companies of two or three, from place to
place, and engaged the heretics in conferences, one of which lasted fifteen
days; and in no long time the effects of the new system began to show
themselves.
Another Spaniard, Durand of Huesca, who had been
converted from Waldensianism, wishing to carry on the
ascetic life to which he had been accustomed, proposed to found a society of
“catholic poor”, who should be bound by a strict rule, as a means of
counteracting the profession of poverty which gave a strength to heresy; and,
having obtained the pope’s approval, he laboured for a time with good effect,
although his society soon disappears from view, having probably been superseded
by the rise of the two great mendicant orders. In the end of 1207, the bishop
of Osma returned to his diocese, where he died within a few months; and by the
temporary withdrawal of the Cistercians about the same time. Dominic was left
to carry on his work almost alone; but he persevered, and it is said that
miracles were wrought by him in support of his teaching.
Peter of Castelnau had distinguished himself by his
zeal, and had made himself especially obnoxious to the sectaries and those who favoured
them. In 1206, he excommunicated Raymond of Toulouse for refusing to turn his
arms against the heretics. His companions, fearing for his safety in
consequence of threats which had been uttered, sent him away for a time; but he
soon returned, declaring that the cause of orthodoxy would never prosper until
one of the preachers should be killed, and expressing a wish that he might
himself be the first martyr, Count Raymond submitted and was absolved, on
condition that he should take part in the persecution; and when Peter charged
him with breach of this promise, he was violently enraged, so as to utter
threats against the legate’s life. The magistrates and people of St. Gilles,
dreading some fatal consequences, escorted Peter as far as the place at which
he was to cross the Rhone; but next day, as he was about to embark, a man who
had lodged at the same inn entered into conversation with him, sought a
quarrel, and mortally wounded him. Peter’s last words were, “God forgive thee,
as I forgive thee!” Suspicion of having instigated the murder fell on Count
Raymond, to whose household the murderer belonged. The pope denounced him,
absolved his subjects from their allegiance, and urgently and repeatedly
exhorted the king and the nobles of France to take arms for the punishment of
his crime, and for the extirpation of heresy. Raymond (who seems to have been
really innocent of any share in the murder) feeling himself hardly pressed,
entreated the pope to send some other representative than the abbot of Citeaux,
whom he dreaded as his personal enemy; and Innocent affected to comply with
this request by joining in commission with Arnold his own secretary Milo, while
he strictly charged him to be guided in all things by the abbot. Cardinal Gualo was sent into France to proclaim a crusade for the
extirpation of heresy, with all the privileges which had been bestowed on the
warriors of the Holy Land, and the scheme (which had indeed been announced even
before the murder of Peter) was proposed at a great national assembly at Villeneuve
on the Yonne. Philip Augustus excused himself and his son, on the ground
that while they were threatened on each side by “two great lions”—the king of
England and the emperor—they could not leave their own territory undefended;
but he granted leave for his subjects to take part in the enterprise, and at
his own expense maintained 15,000 soldiers. The clergy were to pay a subsidy of
a tenth for the support of the crusade; and multitudes enlisted, not only from
religious enthusiasm, but partly from a wish to obtain the benefits of the
crusading indulgences more cheaply than by an expedition to Palestine; partly
from the northern hatred of the southern people, and in the hope of gaining
settlements in the lands which were to be conquered. Among the
leaders of the host were the archbishop of Sens, the bishops of Autan, Clermont, and Nevers, the duke of Burgundy, the
count of Nevers, and Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, who became the hero
of the Albigensian war.
Simon was now about sixty years of age, and was
regarded as a model of the chivalry of the time. In person he was tall, strong,
and active; as a leader, he was at once daring and skilfull;
and his affable and popular manners contributed to secure for him the
enthusiastic love and confidence of his followers. The sincerity of his
devotion to the church had been shown in the late crusade, when he resolutely
opposed the diversion of the armament from its proper object, and, refusing to
share in the attacks on Zara and Constantinople, held on his course for the
Holy Land. He was remarkable for his regularity in the exercises of religion,
daily hearing mass and the offices of the canonical hours; and
he was upheld by a lofty confidence in the protection of heaven. “Think you
that I am afraid?” he
said to one who attempted to encourage him while weakened by the withdrawal of
a great part of his force—“it is Christ’s cause that is at stake; the whole
church is praying for me, and I know
that I cannot be
beaten”. And it is told that a Cistercian, who prayed for him at the
consecration of the Eucharist, was interrupted by a voice from heaven—“Why pray
for him? there are so many praying for him that thy prayer is not needed”. But
with Simon’s better qualities were combined some of the vices which not
uncommonly seek their sanctification from high religious professions—a vast
ambition, a daring unscrupulousness as to the means of pursuing his objects, a
ruthless indifference to human suffering, and an unbounded and undisguised
rapacity.
Raymond, through the exertions of his envoys at the
papal court, had got a promise of absolution, if he could purge himself of the
murder of Peter of Castelnau, and would submit to certain conditions. Although
he complained of the terms imposed on him, he made his submission to the
legates at Valence; and on the 18th of June 1209 he did penance and received
absolution at St. Gilles, in the presence of three archbishops and nineteen
bishops. The legate Milo met him in the porch of the church where Peter of Castelnau
was buried, and, throwing a stole over his neck, led him by it into the
building. There the count, after having been stripped to the waist, knelt down,
submitted to flagellation, and swore obedience to the pope and the legate as to
all the matters for which he had incurred ecclesiastical censure; to give up
all interference in the appointment of bishops, to repair the wrongs which he
had done to some bishops, to dismiss his mercenary soldiers, to expel all Jews
from his dominions, to receive the crusaders, and to help them in their war
against heresy. By way of security, he was to give up seven fortresses, with
the county of Melgueil; and in case of his failing to
fulfill his oath he was to fall under excommunication, and these pledges were
to become forfeit to the Roman church. As the crowd blocked up the way by which
he had entered, the count had to leave the church by a side door, and in order
to reach this, he was obliged to pass close to the tomb of the man whose murder
he was accused of having contrived.
Raymond Roger, viscount of Beziers, a gallant young
man of twenty-four, and nephew of the count of Toulouse, waited on the legates
at Montpellier, and endeavoured to clear himself from suspicion of favouring
the heretics by throwing the blame on some of his officers, who had acted
without his orders. But his excuses were received with derision, and the
viscount indignantly withdrew, to put his territories into a state of defence.
The army of the crusaders speedily followed—a force which is very variously
reckoned as to numbers, and composed of men from all parts of France, Normandy,
and Flanders. At their head was Simon de Montfort, who had been
chosen as general after solemn invocation of the Holy Ghost; with him was the
legate Arnold of Citeaux, and Raymond of Toulouse had unwillingly joined the
army with a few followers. When the crusaders appeared before Beziers, the
viscount had gone onwards to Carcassonne. The bishop, who was in the army, was
allowed by Arnold to offer his advice to his people, and recommended a
surrender; but they relied on the strength of their city, and believed that the
besiegers would speedily be driven by want of provisions to withdraw. Catholics
joined with heretics in declaring that, rather than surrender, they would be
drowned in the sea—they would eat their wives and children. “Then”, said abbot
Arnold, on hearing this answer, “there shall not be left one stone upon
another; fire and sword shall devour men, women, and children”. On St. Mary
Magdalene’s day, a sally was made by the besieged and was repulsed. The
besiegers found their way into the town, mixed up with the retreating
inhabitants, and a butchery began, which was carried on to a literal fullfillment
of the abbot’s words. It was in vain that the canons of St. Mary Magdalene,
habited in the vestments of the altar, attempted to stay the bloodshed; men,
women, children, clergy, were indiscriminately slaughtered, while the bells of
the cathedral were rung until the massacre was completed. It is
said that, when abbot Arnold was asked how the soldiers might distinguish
Catholics from heretics, he answered, “Kill them all! The Lord knoweth them that are His”. The ordinary population of
Beziers had been greatly increased by fugitives; but the number of victims is
very variously estimated. Arnold himself reckons it at 20,000, while others
make it as much as 60,000 or even 100.000. The city was given
up to plunder, and was then set on fire.
The crusaders proceeded onwards to Carcassonne, where
the viscount of Beziers commanded in person. The late terrible example had
struck fear into all hearts; and as they advanced they found the country
desolate—villages, and even strong castles, abandoned by their inhabitants, who
had fled for refuge to the towns. Carcassonne stands on a steep
and lofty hill, and was surrounded by a double line of outworks, each with its
own wall and fosse; and the fortifications had lately been strengthened, partly
with materials from ecclesiastical buildings which were pulled down. The
crusaders speedily penetrated through the outermost walls, but the second
enclosure was obstinately defended. Simon de Montfort was foremost in the
assault; he was the first to plunge into the moat, and afterwards, at the risk
of his own life, rescued a wounded soldier who was struggling in it. On the
other side, the viscount Raymond-Roger was no less conspicuous, exposing
himself everywhere at the head of the defenders, and animating their courage by
words and example. The besiegers were repulsed with great loss, and retired
after having set fire to the outer suburb. A second assault, eight days later,
was also repulsed; and Peter, king of Aragon, then appeared to offer his
mediation—a work for which it might have seemed that he was well fitted, by his
connection with the princes of Languedoc on the one hand, and on the other, by
his friendly relations with the pope, whose favour he had earned by expelling
all heretics from his dominions. But the abbot of Citeaux would only allow that
the viscount and eleven others might withdraw in safety; all the rest must
surrender at discretion. On hearing this, the viscount declared that he would
rather be flayed alive than desert his companions, and the king withdrew in
disgust at the fruitlessness of his endeavours. The siege was closely pressed,
and the inhabitants, crowded within the walls from a wide surrounding country,
soon found themselves reduced to distress by excessive heat, by the scantiness
of water, and by the stench which arose from the bodies of dead men and beasts.
The viscount, having been decoyed into a conference by the assurance of a safe
conduct, was committed to prison, under the plea, advanced by abbot Arnold,
that no faith was to be kept with one who had been faithless to his God. The
people, dismayed by the loss of their chief, were no longer in a condition to
resist, and submitted to the terms imposed by the besiegers—that they should
leave the city half-naked, carrying with them nothing but their sins. But for
this extraordinary clemency the crusaders in some measure consoled themselves,
by hanging or burning more than four hundred victims for the common offence of
heresy.
The viscounty of Beziers was offered successively to
the duke of Burgundy, to the count of Nevers, and to the count of St. Pol; but
all refused to accept it in such circumstances; and the election of a viscount
was committed to two bishops, four knights, and the abbot of Citeaux, who
agreed in choosing Simon de Montfort. Simon, although free from any scruples as
to the mode of acquisition, thought it necessary to make a show of refusal; but
this was easily overcome, and he was hailed as viscount of Beziers and
Carcassonne, promising to hold his dignities and territory on condition of a
yearly payment to St. Peter. Within a few weeks, the deprived viscount,
Raymond-Roger, died in his prison, and, although dysentery was alleged as the
cause of his death, the guilt of it was popularly charged on Simon.
Simon soon found that his conquest was incomplete. On
requesting the king of Aragon, as suzerain, to invest him in his new
territories, he was met at first with delays, and afterwards with a refusal.
Peter had taken up the cause of the late viscount’s infant child, Raymond Trencavel, and was endeavouring to organize means for the
expulsion of the invaders. The count of Nevers and the duke of Burgundy
withdrew from the crusade, in disgust at the late proceedings of the dominant
party; and the great mass of the troops, having served the forty days which were
all that was required by feudal duty, and were sufficient to earn the crusading
privileges, likewise withdrew, leaving Simon with a very small force to
maintain his conquests through the winter. It was with difficulty that he was
able to hold his ground at all; many fortresses and other places fell away from
him, and an incessant war was carried on, marked by the fierce exasperation of
the contending parties, and by relentless cruelty on both sides. The pope,
while he confirmed the election of Simon, and wrote letters in his favour to
the emperor Otho and other sovereigns, expressed regret that the claims of the
eastern crusade prevented any more effectual aid to that against the heretics
of the West. In the spring of 1210, however, Simon received
large reinforcements, under the command of his countess; and, notwithstanding
the resistance of the count of Foix and others, his arms made considerable
progress.
Raymond of Toulouse, although he had given the
required securities, and had taken part in the crusade, had received such
treatment from Simon and his party that he resolved to carry his complaints to
Rome; and he was recommended to the pope by letters from the king of France,
the duke of Burgundy, and the count of Nevers. He found the pope disinclined to
listen to him, yet eventually succeeded in making a favourable impression; he
received a provisional absolution, and it was settled that he should be put to
canonical purgation before the legates in his own country; that, if he went
through this successfully, he should be acknowledged as orthodox, and as
guiltless of the death of Peter of Castelnau; and the pope dismissed him with
valuable presents. But on returning home, he found that the legates were
determined to deal harshly with him. Milo had lately died, and had been
succeeded in the commission by Theodisius, a canonist, who was deeply
prejudiced against the count of Toulouse, and was resolved, if possible, to
deprive him of the benefit of the pope’s concession. When, therefore, Raymond
appeared at St. Gilles, before the bishop of Riez and Theodisius, in order to
the proposed purgation, Theodisius told him that, since he had forsworn himself
by omitting to fulfill his former oaths as to lesser things, he could not be
admitted to clear himself by oath from such crimes as heresy and murder. On
this, Raymond began to weep, when Theodisius insultingly quoted the text—“In
the great water-floods they shall not come nigh Him”; and, instead of absolving
the count, he pronounced his excommunication afresh. Raymond was soon after
cited to another council at Arles, where his cause was pleaded by a famous
lawyer, Guy Cap de Porc. But the terms proposed—which
it is said that the legates communicated in writing, out of fear lest the
public reading of them should produce a tumult—were such as the count declared
that all his territory could not satisfy. He laughed aloud on the announcement
of them, and immediately, in defiance of the council’s order, rode away, in
company with the king of Aragon. At Toulouse he caused the document to be
publicly read aloud, and it was received with shouts of indignant derision. From
Toulouse he went on to other towns, everywhere proclaiming the intolerable
terms which had been offered to him, and everywhere exciting a determination to
resist the invaders. His allies, the counts of Foix and Comminges, with others,
joined their forces, and much of the conquered territory was wrested from the
crusaders. On the other hand, a force of Germans, Auvergnats,
Lombards, and others arrived to reinforce the crusading army, and the war was
actively carried on. The legates declared Raymond to be an apostate, and his
lands to be free for anyone who could seize them; and the pope confirmed their
proceedings. The capital, Toulouse, itself was divided between embittered
factions—the “white band”, formed by bishop Fulk for the extirpation of Jews, usurers,
and heretics, and the “black band”, composed of members of the more tolerant
party. At one time, the bishop excommunicated the citizens, and in obedience to
his orders the whole body of the clergy, barefooted and carrying the
consecrated host, went forth to the camp of the besiegers. Year
by year Simon de Montfort made progress. The crusade was actively preached in
Germany and northern France, and was joined by adventurers trained in the wars
of Germany and of the East. William, archdeacon of Paris, was the chief
engineer of the army, and by his mechanical skill contributed greatly to the
success of sieges and other operations. Yet the fluctuating nature of Simon’s
force prevented him from improving his advantages to the full, and his
successes were chequered by much of hardship, and by occasional reverses.
In 1210, Peter of Aragon consented to invest Simon in
the viscounty of Beziers and Carcassonne, and even connected himself with him
by marriage—perhaps in the hope of sheltering the count of Toulouse and his
son, who were married to two of the king’s sisters. But in this he was
disappointed; and he endeavoured to obtain from the pope redress for his
kinsmen against the rapacity of Simon—who, he complained, took advantage of the
king’s being engaged in fighting the Saracens, to oppress his vassals. In
consequence of this appeal, the pope wrote to his legates and to Simon; but the
local influence was, as usual, too strongly against Raymond, and the
intercessions of king Peter with a council at Pamiers,
in 1212, were unavailing. In the following year, Peter found himself set at
liberty by the great victory of Navas de Tolosa, to take more active measures
for the assistance of his kinsmen and allies on the other side of the Pyrenees.
His force was so much superior that Simon might well have endeavoured to
decline a combat. But the viscount, with that confidence in his mission which
never deserted him, was not to be daunted either by unfavourable
circumstances or by omens: “You have spoken like one of the foolish women”, he
said to his wife, on her telling him of an alarming dream; “for you fancy that
we follow dreams and auguries, like the Spaniards”. And when a priest expressed
some apprehensions, Simon replied by drawing from his pocket a copy of a letter
from king Peter to a married lady—most probably one of his sisters, although De
Montfort assumed that it was a paramour—telling her that for the love of her he
was coming to drive the French out of the country. “What do you say to this” he
asked; “So God help me, I do not fear a king who comes against God’s cause for
the sake of a strumpet”. On his way to the relief of Muret,
which the king and his allies were besieging, he entered the chapel of a
Cistercian monastery, and, laying his sword on the altar, declared that he took
it back as from God, to fight His battles. Next morning, at daybreak, he
confessed his sins and made his will. He then attended a solemn mass, at which
all the bishops who were with him excommunicated the count of Toulouse and his
son, the counts of Foix and Comminges, and all their partisans—among whom the
king of Aragon was supposed to be included, although, out of regard for a
privilege by which he had been exempted from excommunication by any one but the
pope himself, he was not named. Negotiations were attempted, but in vain; and
on the following day the armies engaged at Muret. When it was proposed to Simon
that his force should be numbered— “There is no need”, he replied; “we are
enough, by God’s help, to beat the enemy”. During the fight, seven bishops,
with other ecclesiastics, among whom was the preacher Dominic, were earnestly
praying in a neighbouring church. Peter of Aragon, after having done, prodigies
of velour, was slain, with many of his nobles, and the greater part of his army
perished on the field, or was driven into the Garonne. The gallant and
chivalrous character of Peter excited a general lamentation over his untimely
end; even De Montfort himself is said to have wept over him, “like another
David over another Saul”.
But of such generous feeling towards an enemy the
instances were very few in this war, which was shamefully remarkable for the
savage ferocity with which it was waged on both sides. The crusaders, wherever
they went, spread desolation over the country; they destroyed vineyards and
growing crops, burnt villages and farmhouses, slaughtered unarmed peasants,
women and children. Their cruelty towards prisoners was sanctified and
exasperated by the pretence of zeal for religion. Thus, when La Minerve, near
Narbonne, yielded after an obstinate defence, and it was proposed that the
besieged should be allowed to retire, if they would recant their heresy, one of
the crusaders protested that the terms were too easy. “We came to extirpate
heretics”, he said, “not to show them favour”. “Be not afraid”, replied Arnold
of Citeaux, “there will not be many converts”. And about a hundred and forty of
the “perfect” of both sexes were burnt—some of them rushing into the flames
with an appearance of exultation. At a castle called Bran, De Montfort cut off
the noses and plucked out the eyes of more than a hundred of the defenders,
leaving one of them a single eye that he might lead the rest—not, says Peter of
Vaux-Cernay, that the count took pleasure in such
things, “for of all men he was the mildest”, but because he wished to retaliate
on the enemy. At Lavaur, where the commander Almeric
and eighty nobles were led before Simon, he ordered that they should all be
hanged. But as the highest gibbet, which had been erected for Almeric, fell
down, the count ordered that the rest of the party should be put to the sword,
and the crusaders, “with the greatest eagerness”, despatched them. Almeric’s
sister, who, as being an obstinate heretic, was charged with complicated
incest, was thrown into a deep well, and overwhelmed with stones. By the
intervention of “a Frenchman, courteous and gay”, the other ladies of the
castle were saved, but four hundred of the “perfect were burnt with immense
joy”, according to the chaplain of the crusading army. The same phrase is used
by the same writer in relating the burning of some Waldenses who were taken at Marcillac. Nor were such cruelties confined to one party.
The heretics retaliated severely on such of the invaders as fell into their
hands after a victory. They wounded and mutilated the fallen; they hanged
prisoners, and afterwards mutilated their bodies; it is said that on one
occasion, after having promised some soldiers safety for life and limb, they
dragged them through the streets of Toulouse at the tails of horses, and at
last hanged them. As a proof of the unnatural exasperation produced by such a
war, it may be mentioned that Baldwin, brother of Raymond of Toulouse, having
forsaken the count’s party and having afterwards fallen into his hands, was
hanged by his brother’s orders or with his consent—the count of Foix and his
son acting as executioners, and denying him the consolation of the last
sacraments.
The clergy who took part in the crusade,—especially
the Cistercians, who were deeply concerned in it,—excited general indignation
by their bitterness, their cupidity, and sometimes by their treachery. Arnold
of Citeaux was especially conspicuous for his frequent displays of all these
forms of wickedness. Bishop Fulk of Toulouse is charged with having urged Simon
de Montfort to extremities, in opposition to the advice of his lay allies. Cardinal
Peter of Benevento, in 1214, affected to receive the counts of Foix and
Comminges, with other dispossessed nobles, into the favor of the church that he might gain time for De Montfort’s movements; and this
draws from the admiring historian who relates it an exclamation of “Oh the
pious fraud of the legate! oh his fraudulent piety!”. The preachers of the
crusade had provoked the ordinary clergy by inveighing against them as supine
and indifferent; and they now caused great scandal by the eagerness which they
showed to profit by the conquests of their associates. Thus, Arnold in 1212
became archbishop of Narbonne, and forthwith required De Montfort to do homage
for the viscounty. On Simon’s refusal, he excommunicated him, and interdicted
the churches of Narbonne. Simon treated this sentence with contempt, took away
some castles from the archbishop, and set his soldiers to annoy him in various
ways; and the quarrel was carried on into the pontificate of Honorius III.
Innocent, when reports of the real state of things reached him, showed himself
desirous to do right; but those who acted in his name were generally able to
sway him by their representations, in which he acquiesced without attempting to
ascertain the truth. The king of Aragon had induced him, in 1213, to reprove De
Montfort and the legates for their ambition and rapacity, to order restitution
of lands which they had unjustly seized, and to recall the crusading
indulgences; but in the following year, under the influence of Theodisius and some
bishops whom Simon had sent to the papal court, he again reversed his policy.
In the same year, the legate Robert Curzon consented that the crusade against
the heretics should take precedence of that against the infidels; he preached
it with zeal, and himself joined the army, which was now raised to the
formidable number of 100,000 men. Toulouse, where the surviving heretics from
other parts had found a refuge, was taken in 1215. The bishop, Fulk, was eager
that it should be destroyed; but De Montfort was unwilling to lose so valuable
a spoil, and contented himself with demolishing the fortifications. In
this campaign Prince Lewis of France took a part, but only for the forty days’
service which was required in order to the performance of a vow. The
apprehensions of the older crusaders, that he might interfere with their
conquests, proved to have been needless; but he and others carried back with
them a feeling of disgust at the conduct of the warriors of the cross.
Raymond and his son had submitted in 1214, and were
compelled to live privately at Toulouse, while bishop Fulk took possession of
their palace. A council at Montpellier, in January 1215, ordered a strict
inquisition after heretics, and chose Simon de Montfort as prince of the whole
subjugated territory; but as the legate, Peter of Benevento, had no authority
to invest him, a deputation was sent to the pope, who committed the lands to
Simon’s custody until the council of Lateran, which was about to meet, should
decide as to the disposal of them. At that council the two Raymonds and the
count of Foix appeared. The younger Raymond was recommended to the pope by John
of England; the favour which the dispossessed princes met with at the hands of
many members of the council was such as to raise the indignation of Simon’s
partisans; and the pope himself showed a disposition to befriend them. The
bishop of Toulouse urged their punishment with great bitterness; to which the
count of Foix replied in a vehement tone, telling Fulk that he was more like an
antichrist than a Roman legate and charging him with having caused the death of
ten thousand men. The precentor of Lyons spoke strongly in behalf of the
counts, and in reprobation of the acts by which the crusaders had
disgraced themselves; but the opposite party was too strong, and De Montfort
was confirmed in all his conquests, with the exception of Provence and the Venaissin, which were reserved for the younger Raymond, if
his conduct should appear to deserve them. The council enacted
that heretics of all sorts should be made over to the secular power, which was
bound, under pain of ecclesiastical censures, to do its part for the
extermination of heresy; that the bishops should visit twice or thrice a year
those parts of their dioceses which were suspected of heretical infection; and
that certain persons in each neighbourhood should be sworn to give information
against heretics and their congregations.
In 1216 Simon de Montfort returned to northern France.
In every town, as he went along, the champion of the faith was received with
the greatest honor—the clergy and the people meeting
him in procession, and welcoming him with shouts of “Blessed is he that cometh
in the name of the Lord!”, and he was invested by Philip Augustus as suzerain
in the territories of Toulouse and Narbonne, with his other recent conquests.
Yet while he was thus triumphant, a wide and deep feeling of dissatisfaction
had been produced by the misconduct of the crusaders of Languedoc, even among
those who favoured their cause. Thus, William of Puy-Laurens, one of the
historians of the war, remarks that, so long as the catholic army aimed at the
suppression of heresy, all went well with them; but that when Simon introduced
new and selfish objects, and when those who shared his conquests fell into evil
living, God made them to drink of the dregs of the cup of His anger.
9
A.D. 1215-16. MENDICANT ORDERS. DEATH OF INNOCENT III.
The pontificate of Innocent is remarkable in monastic
history for the rise of the great mendicant orders founded by Dominic and
Francis. The especial object of these societies was to counterwork the
influence which the heretics acquired over the poorer classes of people by
familiarly mixing with them and by preaching. For preaching suitable for the
humbler classes had been almost disused in the church. Sometimes, indeed, a
preacher was found to devote himself to the work of religious and moral
reformation, like Eustace of Flai and Fulk of Neuilly; but more commonly the
crusades were the only subject in behalf of which the clergy attempted to rouse
the multitude by the power of eloquence, while almost the only means of
religious instruction was the ritual, which, in so far as language was
concerned, had long ceased to be intelligible. The heretics, on
the other hand, had sedulously laboured to spread their doctrines among the
people. Their teachers had professed an apostolical poverty, while they, and
such reformers as Arnold of Brescia, had denounced the wealth of the clergy and
monks as an intolerable corruption. The new orders, therefore, brought to the
support of the church a severity of life which had before been employed against
it. They professed not only poverty, but beggary, forbidding the reception of
endowments; and their object was not, as with older orders, to cultivate a contemplative
piety apart from the world and its engagements, but to converse among men, and
by teaching and example of life to draw them to salvation. Each of these orders
had at the outset its distinctive character—the Dominicans, severely
intellectual, rigidly orthodox, and tinged by the sternness and the gloom which
had been impressed on the religion of the founder’s native land; the
Franciscans milder and more genial, addressing themselves less to the intellect
than to the sentiments and the affections.
Dominic was born about 1170, at Calaruega,
a village in the diocese of Osma. According to some writers (whose opinion,
however, is gravely questioned), he was descended from the illustrious family
of Guzman; and it is said that the effect of his eloquence was foreshown by his
mother’s dreaming that she gave birth to a whelp carrying in his mouth a
blazing torch, with which he set the world on fire. At the university of
Palencia, he distinguished himself by his ardour in study; and
in consequence of his reputation he was invited by Diego de Azevedo, bishop of
Osma, to become a canon of his cathedral, where he rose to the dignity of
sub-prior. His nature was tender and gentle; at the university, during a
famine, he sold his books, with his own comments, which made them more precious
to him, in order to relieve the distressed—saying that he would not study on
dead skins while the poor were dying of hunger. And at a later
time he would have sold himself to obtain the means of support for a man who
hesitated to avow his conversion from heresy lest he should forfeit the charity
on which he lived. But religious zeal steeled Dominic against the impulses of
his nature; and while, as we are told, he was amiable towards Jews and
infidels, he was unrelenting towards heretics. His life was rigidly ascetic; he
gave more of his hours to prayer than to sleep, and, although during the
day-time he was cheerful in his conversation, his nights were for the most part
spent in severe penitential exercises; he flogged himself nightly with an iron
chain, once for his own sins, once for the sinners in this world, and once for
those in purgatory.
Something has already been said of Dominic’s labours
in the Albigensian territory, where he spent ten years in endeavouring to root
out heresy. The power of his preaching is described as marvellous; he was
indefatigable in conferences and in private conversations; and a number of
miracles are related as having been wrought by him in attestation of his
doctrine. The amount of the part which he took in the Albigensian war, and in
the establishment of the Inquisition, has been the subject of controversy, not
so much between opposite parties, as between his earlier and his later
admirers. For whereas in some ages it was supposed to be for his honour that
the largest possible share in the persecution of heretics by the sword and by
torture should be claimed for him—whereas Cistercians and Dominicans have quarrelled
for the honour of having furnished the first inquisitors, and a pope has
thought to do Dominic honour by ascribing to him the origin of the
Inquisition,—Dominic’s eulogists of later days have been no less eager to clear
him from the imputation of acts which are no longer regarded as a title to the
admiration of mankind. It would seem in truth that during the Albigensian
crusade Dominic confined himself to the office of preaching. But if he is not
chargeable with any such atrocities as those which have made Arnold of Citeaux
infamous, there is, on the other hand, no reason for supposing that he ever attempted
to check the worst deeds of Simon de Montfort and his followers. And, although
it is certain that he did not found the Inquisition, it is yet possible that
that institution may in some degree have originated in his preaching, as it
certainly found among his brotherhood the most numerous and the most merciless
of its officials.
The first foundation of the Spanish missionaries in
Languedoc was a school at Prouille, intended for the
daughters of the poorer nobles, who were often obliged by their necessities to
commit their children to the free schools of the heretics for education. From
this, Dominic went on to the formation of a brotherhood devoted to preaching and
to the confutation of heresy. The new institution was patronized by bishop Fulk
of Toulouse, who, on going to the Lateran council in 1215, took Dominic with
him, and endeavoured to recommend it to the pope. Innocent was at first
disinclined to entertain the scheme; but it is said that he was warned by a
vision in the night, and he then professed his willingness to give his sanction
to it, if Dominic would comply with a canon by which the council, with a view
to check the too great multiplication of religious orders, had enacted that
persons who might wish to found a monastic society should place it under some
one of the rules which had already been approved. Dominic,
therefore, chose for his preaching fraternity the rule of the great preacher
St. Augustine, to which some additional severities were annexed. On returning
to Toulouse, Dominic received from the bishop a church in the city, with some
churches in other places, and a proportion of the tithes of the diocese by way
of endowment; he founded a convent, and began to send out his disciples into
various countries. But in the beginning of the next pontificate he again went
to Rome, where he eventually fixed the head-quarters of his order in the church
of St. Sabina, on the Aventine, which was bestowed on him by Honorius III. From
this pope the order received many charters, in one of which he speaks of them
by the title of “friars preachers”, which afterwards became distinctive of
them. On Dominic himself was conferred the mastership of the Sacred Palace—an office instituted with a view to the religious
instruction of the households of the pope and cardinals, but to which later
popes have attached more important functions, and among them the censorship of
books. This office has always been retained by the order.
The new brotherhood made rapid progress. In England,
they were patronized by archbishop Langton; at Paris (where they were known by
the name of Jacobins, from a hospital of St. James, which was bestowed on
them), they soon acquired an important influence in the
university. In 1220, and again in the following year, Dominic held general
chapters of his order at Bologna. At the first of these, he
expressed a wish to resign the mastership; and, as
the brethren would not consent to this, he insisted on the appointment of “diffinitors”, whose power should be supreme, even over the
master himself. In Languedoc he had been willing to accept endowments; but he
now adopted from the order lately established by Francis the principle of
absolute poverty or mendicancy—whether from a belief in its soundness, or from
perceiving that in it the Franciscans had a power against which his own order
could not otherwise hope to make head. At the second chapter, the order was
divided into eight provinces, each under a prior; and to these four others were
added at a later time.
In addition to the friars (whose dress of white, with
a black scapulary, was believed to have been shown to the founder by the
blessed Virgin), the order included nuns, and also a grade of
tertiaries—persons who continued to be engaged in the common occupations of the
world, but who, by entering into a connection with the Dominican brotherhood,
added greatly to its popularity and influence.
The death of Dominic, of which he had received
supernatural intimations, took place at Bologna in 1221. It is said that a
member of the order saw a golden ladder let down from heaven, and held at the
top by the Saviour and the blessed Virgin, who drew it up until a friar who was
at the bottom of it, and whose face was hidden by his cowl, had reached the
bright opening above, while jubilant angels ascended and descended on either
side; and it was afterwards found that the same hour in which this vision was seen,
was that of Dominic’s departure. He was buried with great pomp
by the cardinal-legate, Ugolino, bishop of Ostia
(afterwards pope Gregory IX); and,
after the miracles which he had done in his life had been far surpassed by
those which followed his death, he was canonized by Gregory in 1233.
The founder of the other great mendicant order,
Francis, was born at Assisi in 1182. His father, a rich
merchant, was then absent in France, and the mother gave the boy the name of
John; but for this his father, on his return, substituted the name under which
he has become famous. Francis, according to his biographers, had been foretold by
the Erythraean Sibyl, and typified in the Old Testament. St. John, in the
Apocalypse, had described him as an angel ascending from the east; he and
Dominic were the two staves, Beauty and Bands, of Zechariah's prophecy; and,
that the list of his conformities with the Saviour might begin with his birth,
it is said that his mother, by the direction of an unknown visitor, repaired to
a stable when about to bring him into the world.
Francis in his early years followed his father’s
occupation, and for a time he gave himself up to habits which are rather to be
described as idle and extravagant than as profligate. But he was sobered by a
captivity of a year at Perugia, with whose citizens those of Assisi had
gone to war, and, in consequence of some visions which were afterwards
vouchsafed to him, he resolved to change his course of life. The severity of
his religious exercises, the visions and raptures by which he was encouraged,
the eccentric manifestations of his awakened spirit, need not be here detailed.
He resolved to fulfill literally the precept “Give to every one that asketh thee”; and when money failed him, he gave away his
clothes. The condition of lepers struck him especially with pity. The
misfortune of these sufferers, whose frightful disease was then very common,
was aggravated by social disabilities which seem to have originated in the
religious view of the leprosy as typical of sin. There was a solemn service for
their seclusion from the world; they were shut out from intercourse with men,
and were treated as if dead. Many houses had indeed been founded for their
relief; but Francis resolved to show his charity in a different way. Overcoming
the natural loathing which he very strongly felt, he tended and kissed the
sores of the lepers, washed their feet, and consorted with them; and early in
this course it is said that he was rewarded by finding that a leper on whom he
had bestowed his compassion miraculously disappeared.
One day, as Francis was in the church of St. Damian,
in devotion before a crucifix, a voice from it addressed him by name—“Repair my
church, which is falling to ruin”. The real meaning, as he is said to have
afterwards discovered, related to the church of Christ; but Francis supposed
the old building of St. Damian's to be meant, and resolved to find the means of
restoring it. He sold a quantity of his father’s cloth at
Foligno, and, returning to Assisi, offered the price of it and of his horse to
the priest of St. Damian’s, who, however, was afraid to receive the money.
Francis then began to beg in behalf of the restoration, but his “intoxication
of Divine love” was taken for madness, and he was hooted and pelted by the mob.
His father cited him before the magistrates for having stolen the price of the
cloth which he had sold; but Francis refused to appear, on the ground that he
was now the servant of God only; and the magistrates admitted that the case
belonged to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The father was somewhat appeased
by the recovery of his money, which Francis had thrown into a hole; but he
summoned him before the bishop, that the young man might renounce his
inheritance. Francis gladly obeyed; in the bishop’s presence he stripped himself
of all his clothing, except a shirt of hair which he was found to wear next his
skin, and he declared that he
owned no other father but Him who is in heaven. Francis now put
on the dress of a hermit; he continued to sing and to beg round the neighbourhood
for the restoration of St. Damian’s, and afterwards for that of two other
churches; and his efforts were successful. His father, whenever he saw him,
loaded him with curses; but Francis, by way of antidote, took for his companion
a beggar whom he styled his father, and whose business it was at every curse to
utter a blessing, and to make the sign of the cross.
Hearing in church the Saviour’s charge to His
apostles, that they should go forth without staff or scrip or shoes or changes
of raiment, Francis exclaimed that this was what he had been seeking for; and,
throwing away his staff, his shoes, and all his clothes except a single coarse
frock, he girt himself with a rope, and set forth as a preacher of repentance
By degrees he gathered disciples, and when their number amounted to eleven, he
drew up a rule for them, and resolved to seek the pope’s approval. Innocent at
first hesitated, apparently from an apprehension that the proposed discipline
might be found too severe after the first enthusiasm of the brotherhood should
have passed away. But cardinal John of St. Paul’s strongly advocated the new
institution, and the pope eventually sanctioned it, in consequence, it is said,
of a dream, in which he saw the Lateran church in danger of falling, and
Francis propping it up. He conferred on Francis and his brethren the clerical
tonsure, and the authority to preach; and as they returned to Assisi their
addresses were everywhere heard by enthusiastic crowds, who pressed around
Francis and tore his dress to pieces in their eagerness to possess some relic
of him. It is said also that he performed a multitude of miracles. The church
of St. Mary in Portiuncula at Assisi—one of the three churches which Francis
had restored, and the original cradle of the order—was given up to them, and
the Franciscans speedily spread into all lands, their propagation being
accelerated by the principle of mendicancy, which rendered endowments needless.
Francis doubted for a time whether he should devote himself to prayer and
contemplation or to preaching; but the question was decided by an intimation
from heaven that it was his work to labour for the good of others. The
brethren, therefore, addressed themselves especially to the work of preaching
and teaching among the poorest classes; and thus they acquired an influence
which made the order very powerful and important.
In 1212 a sisterhood was founded in connection with
the order by Clara Sciffi, a noble maiden of Assisi,
who left her father’s house to place herself under the guidance of Francis. The
life of these sisters, who are commonly styled after the name of their
foundress, was very rigid; some of them, it is said, had become so accustomed
to silence, that, when compelled to speak, they could hardly form the words.
Clara herself, although she supported her excessive mortifications with
continual cheerfulness, is said to have never raised her head so high that the colour
of her eyes could be seen, except on the single occasion of receiving the papal
blessing. On her death-bed, in 1253, she was visited by Innocent IV, and in
1255 she was canonized by Alexander IV. To the friars and the sisters was added
in 1221 the class of tertiaries, or “Brethren of Penitence”,—persons who
without forsaking secular life, or even the marriage-tie, connected themselves
with the order by undertaking certain obligations, such as to dress plainly, to
live soberly, to carry no weapon of offence, and to perform stated devotions.
And, as in the case of the Dominicans, this link between the order and the
world was found a powerful means of strength and influence.
Francis studied humility in its extremest form, and enjoined it on his disciples. When the multitude expressed admiration
of his sanctity, he used to command one of the friars to load him with abuse.
It was revealed in a vision to a member of the order that the seat from which
an angel had fallen by pride was reserved as a reward for the humility of
Francis. His followers were charged to court contempt, and to be uneasy when
they met with usage of an opposite kind. They were not to be called brethren,
but little brethren (fraticelli)
they were to be minorites, as being less
than all others. They were not to accept ecclesiastical dignities; there was to
be no prior among them, but their superintendents were to be styled ministers,
as being the servants of all. To the clergy they were to show profound reverence—if
they met a priest riding, they were to kiss his horse’s feet. They were to be
content with the poorest dress; a coarse frock, patched and clouted again and
again, if necessary, a cord round the waist, and a pair of drawers, were all
that a friar ought to possess. Their food was to be of corresponding quality;
Francis stinted himself even in his allowance of water, although, when he mixed
in society, he conformed to the usages of those around him. Yet he forbade
extreme austerity. When a friar had almost starved himself to death, Francis
encouraged him by his own example to take food, and, in speaking of the case to
the rest of his companions, he told them to imitate not the abstinence but the
love. When some of his followers had injured themselves by their severities, he
forbade all “indiscreet inventions” by way of penance, such as the use of
cuirasses, chains, or rings confining the flesh, and all endeavours of one to
outstrip another in religion. Among the forms under which pride was to be
combated, Francis greatly dreaded the pride of learning. His own education had
been scanty, but it was supposed that the knowledge of Divine things came to
him miraculously, and he seems to have expected his followers to learn in the
same manner. When one of them expressed some difficulty as to parting with his
books, he told him that his books must not be allowed to corrupt the gospel, by
which the friars were bound to have nothing of their own. From another he took
away even a psalter, telling him that, if that book were allowed him, he would
next wish for a breviary, and then for other books, until he would become a
great doctor of the chair, and would imperiously thunder out to his humble
companion orders to fetch such books as he might require. He then astonished
the novice by scattering ashes on his head, rubbing them on it with his hand,
and telling him that he himself had been reclaimed from the temptation of wishing
for learning by opening the Gospels at the text—“To you it is given to know the
mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to others in parables that the knowledge
of Christ crucified was all in all”. To the sisters of St.
Clare, if they could not read, the permission even to learn was not given
without insisting on humility of mind as a condition. Yet when asked at a
general chapter whether men of learning might be admitted into the order,
Francis replied that they might, because learning was not without its uses.
Francis was remarkable for his love of animals, which
he treated as reasonable creatures. He often bought off lambs which were on
their way to the slaughter, and in the church of the Portiuncula he kept a
sheep, which, without any training (as we are told), used to take part in the
services by kneeling and bleating. He preached to attentive audiences of birds
on the benefits for which it was their duty to thank their Creator. Once, as he
was about to preach, and found that some swallows were making a noise, he
addressed them—“Sisters, you have spoken enough for the present, and it is my
turn; be silent, and listen to the word of God”. He spoke to the fishes, to the
worms, and even to the flowers. His love of personification embraced all sorts
of objects. His own body he spoke of as “Brother ass”, on account of the heavy
burdens which it was to bear and the hard usage which it was to experience;
when about to undergo an operation of cautery, he addressed the fire as his
brother, and begged it to deal gently with him; and it is said that in his last
moments he uttered the words, “Welcome, sister Death!”. He saw, says an early
biographer, the Creator in all His creatures; and it has been conjectured that
the pantheism with which the order was afterwards infected may perhaps be
traced to the founder’s love of nature, and to his fondness for personifying
it.
Francis was desirous to preach to the infidels, and,
if possible, to finish his life by martyrdom. With this view he embarked for
Syria in 1212, but was driven back by storms. In 1213 or the following year, he
set out with a like design for Morocco; but when he had gone as far as Spain, a
serious illness compelled him to give up the attempt. In 1219 he and twelve
companions sailed for Egypt, and joined the crusading force, which had just
taken Damietta. The sultan of Egypt treated him with much respect, but declined
to let the question between Christianity and Islam be decided by an ordeal, in
which Francis offered to go into a fire with some Mahometan teachers, or even
alone; and Francis returned to Italy after having foretold to the crusaders the
reverses which soon after came on them. About the same time when he went into
the east, five of his followers were sent into Morocco, where they were cruelly
tortured and put to death in the following year, and thus reflected on the new
brotherhood the glory of their martyrdom.
In the meantime the order was growing rapidly. In 1216
the first general chapter was held; and in 1219, before the founder’s departure
for the east, another general chapter was assembled, at which as many as 5000
friars were presents The devils, it is said, alarmed at the progress of the new
enemy, held equally numerous chapters in opposition; but their machinations
were revealed in visions, and were foiled by the devotion of Francis and his
brethren. At the Lateran council, in 1215, Innocent had declared his full
approbation of the order; but the first formal charter bestowed on it was given
by Honorius III, who in 1223, at the request of the founder, confirmed a
stricter rule which Francis had then drawn up, and appointed cardinal Ugolino (afterwards Pope Gregory IX) to be protector of the minorites.
In 1224 Francis is said to have received the stigmata
(or marks of the crucifixion), by which his conformity to the Saviour was
supposed to be completed. He had retired to a mountain called Alvernia, among
the Apennines, near Bibbiena, to keep a fast of forty
days in honour of the archangel Michael, when in an ecstasy of devotion he saw
a seraph with six wings, either crucified, or bearing between two of his wings
a figure of the crucified Saviour. The vision deeply affected him; and
forthwith he began to feel in his own body the likeness of the wounds which he
had seen. It is stated that in his hands and in his feet the flesh grew out
into the form of the nails by which the Saviour was fixed to the cross—the
heads appearing on one side, and the points, sharp and somewhat turned back, on
the other; while his side seemed as if pierced by a lance, and blood issued
from the wounds. We are told that, although he tried to conceal these marks,
they were seen by many persons while he was yet alive, and that the miracles
wrought by them after his death converted many who until then had doubted.
Francis survived the reception of the stigmata two years, during which he
suffered greatly from illness of various kinds. Finding his end approaching, he
desired that he might be carried into the church of the Portiuncula, where he
solemnly blessed his weeping brethren, and breathed his last, lying on a shirt
of hair and sprinkled with penitential ashes. His soul was seen in the form of
a star, more dazzling than the sun, which was conveyed on a luminous cloud over
many waters to the “abyss of brightness”. In 1228 he was
canonized by Gregory IX; and both by that pope and by some of his successors,
the story of the stigmata was affirmed as true. Alexander IV decreed that
anyone who should speak against it was to be excommunicated, and that the power
of absolving from the offence was reserved to the pope alone.
The later history of the Franciscans will come before
us hereafter. A temperate historian has pronounced that at the time of the
Reformation these were “perhaps the most profoundly corrupted of all the
orders”.
10
THE FOURTH LATERAL COUNCIL
A.D. 1215-16.
The fourth general council of the Lateran, to which
Innocent had long looked forward, met in November 1215. There were present at
it two claimants of the Latin patriarchate of Constantinople, the titular
patriarch of Jerusalem, seventy-seven primates and metropolitans, four hundred
and twelve bishops, and more than eight hundred abbots, with ambassadors from
Christian powers, and a multitude of deputies for bishops, chapters, and
monasteries: the whole number of persons entitled to attend the sittings is reckoned
at 2283. The business began on St. Martin’s day, when the pope preached on the
text “With desire I have desired to eat the Passover with you before I suffer”.
But the work of this great assemblage was hardly equal to the expectations
which had been raised by the laborious preparations for it, and by its
unequalled numbers and splendour. The part which it took in the affairs of
England and of southern France has been already mentioned. Arrangements were
made for a crusade to the east, which was to be carried out in the following
year; but, although Innocent himself declared his intention of taking part in
the enterprise, and wrote many letters in pursuance of this resolution, the
execution of it was frustrated by his death.
But the fourth Lateran Council is chiefly memorable
for two canons, relating to matters of doctrine and discipline respectively—the
1st, which for the first time laid down by the authority of the whole western
church the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Eucharist; and the 21st, which
prescribed for every catholic Christian the duty of confessing once a year at
least to his own priest, and of yearly receiving the holy Eucharist at Easter.
The words which Innocent had chosen as the theme of
his sermon before the council were speedily found to have had an undesigned
prophetical meaning. In the following summer, he fell sick at Perugia, when on
his way to reconcile the enmities of the Genoese and the Pisans. The
seriousness of his ailment was not suspected, so that he indulged freely in
eating fruit; and in consequence, as is supposed, of this imprudence, he died
on the 16th of July 1216, at the age of fifty-five.
In this great pope the power of the Roman see had been
carried to its utmost height; those who came after him, by endeavouring to
advance it yet higher, provoked a reaction which proved disastrous to it.
Innocent’s pontificate began at the early age of thirty-seven, and to the end
of it he enjoyed the full vigour of his powers. He was exempted from the rough
personal collisions, from the necessity of fleeing to the compassion of foreign
princes, and from the other humiliations which had befallen many of his
predecessors; in every quarter he appeared to be successful and triumphant; and
his character, in which generous and amiable dispositions mingled in an unusual
degree with the sterner qualities which tended to secure an ecclesiastical
despotism, was fitted to take off from the invidiousness of his success. “He was
dreaded by all”, says an English chronicler, “above all the popes who for many
years had gone before him”. Other writers express thankfulness to God that
under Innocent the catholic church triumphed over three kinds of enemies—the
schismatics of the east, the heretics of the west, and the Saracens of the
south. And he had carried out with a high hand in every country of western
Europe his policy of establishing the papal authority as paramount over that of
secular princes. Yet his success was more apparent than real; it was chequered
by important failures, and in some cases temporary success bore within it the
seeds of future reverses. As to Germany and the empire of the west, his policy
would have utterly failed but for the assassination of Philip of Swabia; the
emperor of his own choice turned against him, so that Innocent was obliged to
set up in rivalry to Otho the natural heir, whom he had before thrust aside,
and to consent to that union of Sicily with Germany under the rule of the
Hohenstaufen, which the papal policy had long laboured to render impossible.
And, although his guardianship of Frederick may not have been unfaithful, yet,
as being in the interest of the papacy only, it left impressions on the young
prince’s mind which were amply shown in his later history, to the detriment of
Innocent’s successors. The eastern Crusade, which Innocent had laboured to set
on foot, was diverted from its proper object to one which he found himself
bound to denounce; and, although the splendour of the immediate result
prevailed over his feelings of indignation, the power which the Latins thus
founded in the east was sickly from the first; it tended to increase, instead
of healing, the division between the Greek and the Latin churches; and after a
few years of wretched decay, it came to an end. The crusade against the
Albigenses, although successful, was attended with so much of cruelty and
injustice that Innocent’s connection with it has left a deep stain on his
reputation; and his eulogists find themselves driven to plead in his excuse
that he whose eye watched over all Christendom knew no better than continually
to choose unfit and untrustworthy agents; to be guided by their interested and
untrue reports, and, when warned of their misdeeds, and stirred to some
ineffectual attempts at redress, still to continue his reliance on them. His
sanction of the mendicant orders was contrary to his own first judgment, and,
notwithstanding the powerful help and support which the papacy derived from
those orders, there was more than enough in their later history to justify the
foresight of his original distrust. And in England, where the pope’s immediate
triumph was most signal, it proved in the end disastrous to the papacy. He
himself lived to find that the primate whom he had imposed against the will of
the king, and in contempt of the right of election, took the lead in asserting
the claims of the national church against the papal usurpations. And from the
surrender of the crown by the despicable John, the English spirit took a more
strongly anti-papal impulse, which, after continual provocation from the
assumptions, the corruptions, and the outrageous exactions of Rome, prepared
men’s minds for revolt against the dominion of the papacy.
CHAPTER II.FROM THE ELECTION OF POPE HONORIUS III TO THE DEATH OF INNOCENT IVA.D. 1216-1254
|
||