IT IS NOT our object, the reader is aware, to give here a history of Rome, or of its pontiffs, or of the tumultuous world of the Middle Ages in which a few figures of Popes and Princes stand out upon the ever-crowded, ever-changing background, helping us to hear among the wild confusion of clanging swords and shattering lances, of war cries and shouts of rage and triumph — and to see amidst the mist and smoke, the fire and flame, the dust of breached walls and falling houses. Our intention is solely to indicate those among the chiefs of the Church who are of the most importance to the great city, which, ever rebelling against them, ever carrying on a scarcely broken line of opposition and resistance, was still passive in their hands so far as posterity is concerned, dragged into light, or left lying in darkness, according as its rulers were. It is usual to say that the great time of the Church, the age of its utmost ascendency, was during the period between Gregory VII. and Innocent III., the first of whom put forth its claim as Universal Arbiter and Judge as no one had ever done before, while the second carried that claim to its climax in his remarkable reign — a reign all-influencing, almost all-potent, something more like a universal supremacy and rule over the whole earth than has ever been known either before or since. The reader has seen what was the effect upon his world of the great Hildebrand: how he laboured, how he proclaimed his great mission, with what overwhelming faith he believed in it, and, it must be added, with how little success he was permitted to carry it out. This great Pope, asserting his right as the successor of Peter to something very like a universal dominion and the power of setting down and raising up all manner of thrones, principalities, and powers, lived fighting for the very ground he stood on, in an incessant struggle not only with the empire, but with every illiterate and ignoble petty court of his neighbourhood, with the robber barons of the surrounding hills, with the citizens in his streets, with the villagers on his land — and, after having had more than once his independent realm restricted to the strong walls of St. Angelo, had at last to abandon his city for mere safety’s sake, and die in exile far from the Rome he loved.
The life of the other we have now to trace, as far as it is possible to keep the thread of it amid the tremendous disorders, disastrous wars and commotions of his time, in all of which his name is so mingled that in order to distinguish his story the student must be prepared to struggle through what is really the history of the world, there being scarcely a corner of that world — none at least with which history was then acquainted — which was not pervaded by Innocent, although few we think in which his influence had any such power as is generally believed.
This Pope was not like Hildebrand a man of the people. He had a surname and already a distinguished one. Lothario Conti, son of Trasimondo, lord of Ferentino, of the family of the Dukes of Spoleto, was born in the year 1161 in the little town of Anagni, where his family resided, a place always dear to him, and to which in the days of his greatness he loved to retire, to take refuge from the summer heats of Rome or other more tangible dangers. He was thus a member of the very nobility with which afterwards he had so much trouble, the unruly neighbours who made every road to Rome dangerous, and the suzerainty of the Pope in many cases a simple fiction. The young Lothario had three uncles in the Church in high places, all of them eventually Cardinals, and was destined to the ecclesiastical profession, in which he was so certain of advancement, from his birth; he was educated partly at Rome, at the school of St. John Lateran, specially destined for the training of the clergy, and therefore spent his boyhood under the shadow of the palace which was to be his home in later years. From Rome he went to the University of Paris, one of the greatest of existing schools, and studied canon law so as to make himself an authority on that subject, then one of the most engrossing and important branches of learning. He loved the “beneficial tasks,” and perhaps also the freedom and freshness of university life, where probably the bonds of the clerical condition were less felt than in other places, though Innocent never seems to have required indulgence in that respect. Besides his readings in canon law, he studied with great devotion the Scriptures, and their interpretation, after the elaborate and highly artificial fashion of the day, dividing each text into a myriad of heads, and building up the most recondite argument on a single phrase with meanings spiritual, temporal, scholastic, and imaginary. There he made several warm friends, among others Robert Curzon, an Englishman who served him afterwards in various high offices, not so much to the credit of their honour in later times as of the faithfulness of their friendship.
Young Conti proceeded afterwards to Bologna, then growing into great reputation as a centre of instruction. He had, in short, the best education that his age was acquainted with, and returned to his ecclesiastical home at Rome and the protection of his Cardinal-uncles a perfectly well-trained and able young man, learned in all the learning of his day, acquainted more or less with the world, and ready for any service which the Church to which he was wholly devoted might require of him. He was a young man certain of promotion in any case. He had no sooner taken the first orders than he was made a canon of St. Peter’s, of itself an important position, and his name very soon appears as acting in various causes brought on appeal to Rome — claims of convents, complaints among others of the monks of Canterbury in some forgotten question, where he was the champion of the complainants who were afterwards to bring him into so much trouble. These appeals were constantly occurring, and occupied a great deal of the time and thoughts of that learned and busy court of Rome, the Consistory, which became afterwards, under Innocent himself, the one great court of appeal for the world.
About a hundred years had passed between the death of the great Pope Gregory, the monk Hildebrand, and the entrance of Lothario Conti upon public life; but when the reader surveys the condition of that surging sea of society — the crowded, struggling, fighting, unresting world, which gives an impression of being more crowded, more teeming with wild life and force, with constant movement and turmoil, than in our calmer days, though no doubt the facts are quite the reverse — he will find but little change apparent in the tremendous scene. As Gregory left the nations in endless war and fighting, so his great successor found them — king warring against king, prince against prince, count against count, city against city, nay, village against village, with a wide margin of personal struggle around, and a general war with the Church maintained by all. A panorama of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, could it have been furnished to any onlooker, would have showed its minutest lines of division by illuminations of devastating fire and flame, by the clangour of armies in collision, by wild freebooters in roaming bands, and little feudal wars in every district: every man in pursuit of something that was his neighbour’s, perhaps only his life, a small affair — perhaps his wife, perhaps his lands, possibly the mere satisfaction of a feud which was always on hand to fill up the crevices of more important fighting.
With more desperate hostility still the cities in pairs set themselves against each other, all flourishing, busy places, full of industry, full of invention, but fuller still of rage against the brother close by, of the same tongue and race, Milan against Parma, Pisa against Genoa, Florence against all comers. Bigger wars devastated other regions, Germany in particular in all its many subdivisions, where it seems impossible to believe there could ever be a loaf of bread or a cup of wine of native growth, so perpetually was every dukedom ravaged and every principality brought to ruin. Two Emperors claiming the allegiance of that vast impossible holy Empire which extended from the northern sea to the soft Sicilian shores, two Popes calling themselves heads of the Church, were matters of every day. The Emperors had generally each a show of right; but the anti-popes, though they had each a party, were altogether false functionaries with no show of law in their favour, generally mere creatures of the empire, though often triumphant for a moment. In Gregory’s day Henry IV. and Rudolf were the contending Emperors. In those of Innocent they were Philip and Otho. There were no doubt different principles involved, but the effect was the same; in both cases the Popes were deeply concerned, each asserting a prerogative, a right to choose between the contending candidates and terminate the strife. That prerogative had been boldly claimed and asserted by Gregory; in the century that followed every Pope had reasserted and attempted with all his might to enforce it; but though Innocent is universally set forth as the greatest and most powerful of all who did so, and as in part responsible for almost every evil thing that resulted, I do not myself see that his interference was much more potential than that of Gregory, of which also so much is said, but which was so constantly baulked, thwarted, and contradicted in his day. So far as the Empire was concerned the Popes certainly possessed a right and privilege which gave a certain countenance to their claim, for until crowned by the ruling Pontiff no Emperor had full possession of his crown: but this did not affect the other Christian kingdoms over which Innocent claimed and attempted to exercise the same prerogative. The state of things, however, to the spectator is very much the same in the one century as the other. The age of storm and stress for the world of Christendom extended from one to another; no doubt progress was being made, foundations laid, and possibilities slowly coming into operation, of which the beginnings may be detected even among all the noise and dust of the wars; but outwardly the state of Europe was very much the same under Innocent as under Gregory: they had the same difficulties to encounter and the same ordeals to go through.
Several short-lived Popes succeeded each other on the papal throne after Innocent began to ascend the steps of ecclesiastical dignity, which were so easy to the nephew of three Cardinals. He became a canon of St. Peter’s while little more than twenty-one. Pope Lucius III. employed him about his court, Pope Gregory VIII. made him a sub-deacon of Rome. Pope Clement III. was his uncle Octavian, and made him Cardinal of “St. Sergius and St. Bacchus,” a curious combination, and one which would better have become a more jovial priest. Then there came a faint and momentary chill over the prospects of the most rising and prosperous young ecclesiastic in Rome. His uncle was succeeded in the papal chair by a certain Cardinal, old and pious but little known to history, a member of the Orsini family and hostile to the Conti, so that our young Cardinal relapsed a little into the cold shade. It is supposed to be during this period that he turned his thoughts to literature, and wrote his first book, a singular one for his age and position — and yet perhaps not so unlike the utterance of triumphant youth under its first check as might be supposed — De contemptu mundi, sive de miseriis humanæ conditionis, is its title. It was indeed the view of the world which every superior mind was supposed to take in his time, as it has again become the last juvenile fashion in our own; but the young Cardinal Conti had greater justification than our young prophets of evil. His work is full, as it always continues to be in his matured years, of the artificial constructions which Paris and Bologna taught, and which characterise the age of the schoolmen: and it is not to be supposed that he had much that was new to say of that everlasting topic which was as hackneyed in the twelfth century as it is in the nineteenth. After he has explained that “every male child on his birth cries A and every female E; and when you say A with E it makes Eva, and what is Eva if not heu! ha! — alas!” — he adds a description of the troubles of life which is not quite so fanciful.
“We enter life amid pains and cries, presenting no
agreeable aspect, lower even than plants and vegetables,
which give forth at least a pleasant odour. The duration of
life becomes shorter every day; few men reach their
fortieth year, a very small number attain the sixtieth....
And how painful is life! Death threatens us constantly,
dreams frighten us, apparitions disturb us, we tremble for
our friends, for our relations; before we are prepared for
it misfortune has come: sickness surprises us, death cuts
the thread of our life. All the centuries have not been
enough to teach even to the science of medicine the
different kind of sufferings to which man’s fragility
exposes him. Human nature is more corrupt from day to day;
the world and our bodies grow old. Often the guilty is
acquitted and the innocent is punished.... Every thought,
every act, all the arts and devices are employed for no
other end but to secure the glory and favour of men. To
gain honour he uses flattery, he prays, he promises, he
tries every underground way if he cannot get what he wants
by direct measures; or he takes it by force if he can
depend on the support of friends or of relations. And what
a burden are those high dignities! When the ambitious man
has attained the height of his desires his pride knows no
bounds, his arrogance is without restraint; he believes
himself so much a better man as he is more elevated in
position; he disdains his friends, recognises no one,
despises his oldest connections, walking proudly with his
head high, insolent in words, the enemy of his superiors
and the tyrant of his dependents.”
The young Cardinal spares no class in his animadversions, but the rich are held up as warnings rather than the poor, and the vainglory of the miserable sons of Adam is what disgusts him most. Here is a passage which carries us into the inner life of that much devastated, often ruined Rome, which nevertheless at its most distracted moment was never quite devoid of the splendours and luxuries it loved.
“Has not the prophet declared his anathema against luxury
in dress? Yet the face is coloured with artificial colours
as if the art of man could improve the work of God. What
can be more vain than to curl the hair, to paint the
cheeks, to perfume the person? And what need is there for a
table ornamented with a rich cover, and laid with knives
mounted in ivory, and vases of gold and silver? What more
vain again than to paint the rooms, to cover the doors with
fine carvings, to lay down carpets in the ante-chambers, to
repose one’s self on a bed of down, covered with silken
stuffs and surrounded with curtains?”
Some historical commentators take exception to this picture as imaginary, and too luxurious for the age; but after all a man of the time must have known better than even Muratori our invaluable guide: and we find again and again in the descriptions of booty taken in the wars, accounts of the furniture of the tents of the conquered, silver and gold vases, and costly ornaments of the table which if carried about to embellish the wandering and brief life of a campaign would surely be more likely still to appear among the riches of a settled dwelling-place. Cardinal Lothario however did not confine himself altogether to things he had intimate knowledge of, for one of his illustrations is that of a discontented wife, a character of which he could have no personal experience: the picture is whimsically correct to conventional precedent; it is the established piece which we are so well acquainted with in every age.
“She desires fine jewels and dresses, and beautiful
furniture without regard to the means of her husband; if
she does not get them she complains, she weeps, she
grumbles and murmurs all night through. Then she says,
‘So-and-so is much more expensive than I am, and everybody
respects her; while I, because I am poor, they look at me
disdainfully over their shoulders.’ Nobody must be praised
or loved but herself; if any other is beloved she thinks
herself hated; if any one is praised she thinks herself
injured. She insists that everybody should love what she
loves, and hate what she hates; she will submit to nothing
but dominates all; everything ought to be permitted to her,
and nothing forbidden. And after all (adds the future pope)
whatever she may be, ugly, sick, mad, imperious,
ill-tempered, whatever may be her faults, she must be kept
if she is not unchaste; and even then though the man may
separate from her, he may not take another.”
This sounds as if the young Cardinal would have been less severe on the question of divorce than his clerical successors. The book however is quite conventional, and gives us little insight into the manner of man he was. Nevertheless there are some actual thoughts in the perennial and often repeated argument, as when he maintains the sombre doctrine of eternal punishment with the words: “Deliverance will not be possible in hell, for sin will remain as an inclination even when it cannot be carried out.” He also wrote a book upon the Mass in the quiet of these early days; and was diligent in performing his duties and visiting the poor, to whom he was always full of charity.
When the old Pope died, however, there seems not to have been a moment’s doubt as to who should succeed him. The Cardinal Lothario was but thirty-seven, his ability and learning were known indeed, but had as yet produced no great result: his family was distinguished but not of force enough to overawe the Conclave, and nothing but the impression produced upon the minds of his contemporaries by his character and acquirements could account for his early advancement. Pope Celestine in dying had recommended with great insistence the Cardinal John Colonna as his successor; but this seems scarcely to have been taken into consideration by the electors, who now, according to Hildebrand’s institution, somewhat modified by succeeding Popes, performed their office without any pretence of consulting either priests or people, and still less with any reference to the Emperor. The election was held, not in the usual place, but in a church now untraceable, “Ad Septa Solis,” situated somewhere near the Colosseum. The object of the Cardinals in making the election there, was safety, the German troops of the Emperor being at the time in possession of the entire surrounding country up to the very gates of Rome, and quite capable of making a raid upon the Lateran to stop any proceedings which might be disagreeable to their master; for the imperial authorities on their part had never ceased to assert their right to be consulted in the election of a Pope. Lothario made the orthodox resistance without which perhaps no early Pope ever ascended the papal throne, protesting his own incapacity for so great an office; but the Cardinals insisted, not granting him even a day’s delay to think over it. The first of the Cardinal-deacons, Gratiano, an old man, invested him with the pluvial and greeted him as Innocent, apparently leaving him no choice even as to his name. Thus the grave young man, so learned and so austere, in the fulness of his manhood ascended St. Peter’s chair. There is no need to suppose that there was any hypocrisy in his momentary resistance; the papal crown was very far from being one of roses, and a young man, even if he had looked forward to that position and knew himself qualified for it, might well have a moment’s hesitation when it was about to be placed on his head.
When the announcement of the election was made to the crowd outside, it was received with cries of joy: and the entire throng — consisting no doubt in a large degree of the clergy, mingled with the ever-abundant masses of the common people, — accompanied the Cardinals and the Pope-elect to the Lateran, though that church, one would suppose, must still have been occupied by the old Pope on his bier, and hung with the emblems of mourning: for it was on the very day of Celestine’s death that the election took place. Muratori suggests a mistake of dates. “Either Pope Celestine must have died a day sooner, or Innocent have been elected a day later,” he says. After the account, more full than usual, of the ceremonies of the election, the brilliant procession, and the rejoicing crowd, sweep away into the silence, and no more is heard of them for six weeks, during which time Lothario waited for the Rogation days, the proper time for ordinations; for though he had already risen so high in the Church, he was not yet a priest, but only in deacon’s orders, which seems to have been the case in so many instances. The two ordinations took place on two successive days, the 22nd and 23rd of February, 1198.
When he had received the final consecration, and had been invested with all the symbols of his high office — the highest in the world to his own profound consciousness, and to the belief of all who surrounded him — Pope Innocent III. rose from the papal chair, of which he had just taken possession, and addressed the immense assembly. Whether it had become the custom to do so we are not informed. Innocent, so far as can be made out from his writings, was no heaven-born preacher, yet he would seem to have been very ready to exercise his gift, such as it was; it appears to have been his habit to explain himself in all the most important steps in life, and there could be no greater occasion than this. He stood on the steps of his throne in all the glory of his shining robes, over the dark and eager crowd, and there addressed to them a discourse in which the highest pretensions, yet the most humble faith, are conjoined, and which shows very clearly with what intentions and ideas he took upon himself the charge of Christendom, and supreme authority not only in the Church but in the world. He had been deeply agitated during the ceremonies of his consecration, shedding many tears; but now he had recovered his composure and calm.
There are four sermons existing among his works which bear the title In consecratione Romani Pontificis. Whether they were all written for this occasion, in repeated essays before he satisfied himself with what he had to say, is unknown. Perhaps some of them were used on the occasion of the consecration of other great dignitaries of the Church; but this is merely conjecture. We have at all events under his own hand the thoughts which arose in the mind of such a man at the moment of such an elevation: the conception of his new and great dignity which he had formed and held with the faith of absolute conviction: and the purposes with which he began his work. His text, if text was necessary for so personal a discourse, was the words of our Lord: “Who then is that faithful and wise steward whom his lord shall make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of meat in due season?” We quote of course from our own authorised version: the words of the Vulgate, used by Innocent, do not put this sentence in the form of a question. His examination of the meaning of the word “house” is the first portion of the argument.
“He has constituted in the fulness of his power the
pre-eminence of the Holy See that no one may be so bold as
to resist the order which He has established, as He has
Himself said: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this stone I will
build my Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it.’ For as it is He who has laid the foundations
of the Church, and is himself that foundation, the gates of
hell could in nothing prevail against it. And this
foundation is immovable: as says the Apostle, no man can
lay another foundation than that which is laid, which is
Jesus Christ.... This is the building set upon a rock of
which eternal truth has said: ‘The rain fell and the wind
blew and beat upon that house; but it stood fast, for it
was built upon a rock,’ that is to say, upon the rock of
which the Apostle said: ‘And this Rock was Christ.’ It is
evident that the Holy See, far from being weakened by
adversity, is fortified by the divine promise, saying with
the prophet: ‘Thou hast led me by the way of affliction.’
It throws itself with confidence on that promise which the
Lord has made to the Apostles: ‘Behold I am with you
always, even unto the end of the world.’ Yes, God is with
us, who then can be against us? for this house is not of
man but of God, and still more of God made man: the heretic
and the dissident, the evil-minded wolf endeavours in vain
to waste the vineyard, to tear the robe, to smother the
lamp, to extinguish the light. But as was said by Gamaliel:
‘If the work is of man it will come to naught; if it is of
God ye cannot overthrow it: lest haply ye should find that
you are fighting against God.’ The Lord is my trust. I fear
nothing that men can do to me. I am the servant whom God
has placed over His house; may I be prudent and faithful so
as to give the meat in due season!”
He then goes on to describe the position of the faithful steward.
“I am placed over this house. God grant that I were as
eminent by my merit as by my position. But it is all the
more to the honour of the mighty Lord when He fulfils His
will by a feeble servant; for then all is to His glory, not
by human strength but by force divine. Who am I, and what
is my father’s house, that I should be set over kings, that
I should occupy the seat of honour? for it is of me that
the prophet has said, ‘I have set thee over people and
kingdoms, to tear and to destroy, to build and to plant.’
It is of me that the Apostle has said, ‘I have given thee
the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatsoever thou bindest
on earth is bound in heaven.’ And again it is to me (though
it is said by the Lord to all the Apostles in common), ‘The
sins which you remit on earth shall be remitted; and those
you retain shall be retained.’ But speaking to Peter alone
He said: ‘That which thou bindest on earth shall be bound
in heaven.’ Peter may bind others but he cannot be bound
himself.
“You see now who is the servant placed over the house; it
is no other than the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Successor
of Peter. He is the intermediary between God and men,
beneath God, yet above men, much lower than God but more
than men; he judges all but is judged by none as the
Apostle says: ‘It is God who is my judge.’ But he who is
raised to the highest degree of consideration is brought
down again by the functions of a servant that the humble
may be raised up and greatness may be humiliated — for God
resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. O greatest
of wise counsels — the greater you are the more profoundly
must you humble yourself before them all! You are there as
a light on a candlestick that all in the house may see;
when that light becomes dark, how thick then is the
darkness? You are the salt of the earth: when that salt
becomes without savour, with what will you be seasoned? It
is good for nothing but to be thrown out and trodden under
foot of men. For this reason much is demanded from him to
whom much is given.”
Thus Innocent began his career, solemnly conscious of the greatness of his position. But the reader will perceive that nothing could be more evangelical than his doctrine. Exalting as he does the high claims of Peter, he never falls into the error of supposing him to be the Rock on which the foundations of the Church are laid. On the other hand his idea of the Pope as beneath God but above men, lower than God but greater than men, is startling. The angel who stopped St. John in his act of worship proclaiming himself one of the Apostles’ brethren the prophets, made no such pretension. But Innocent was strong in the consciousness that he himself, the arbiter on earth of all reward and punishment, was the judge of angels as well as men, and held a higher position than any of them in the hierarchy of heaven.
The first act of Innocent’s papacy was the very legitimate attempt to establish his own authority and independence at home. The long subsistence of the idea that only a Pope-king with enough of secure temporal ascendency to keep him free at least from the influence of other sovereigns, could be safe in the exercise of his spiritual functions — is curious when we think of the always doubtful position of the Popes, who up to this time and indeed for long after retained the most unsteady footing in their own metropolis, the city which derived all its importance from them. The Roman citizens took many centuries to learn — if they were ever taught — that the seat of a great institution like the Church, the court of a monarch who claimed authority in every quarter of the world, was a much more important thing than a mere Italian city, however distinguished by the memories and relics of the past. We doubt much whether the great Innocent, the most powerful of the Popes, had more real control over the home and centre of his supposed dominions at the outset of his career than Pope Leo XIII., dispossessed and self-imprisoned, has now, or might have if he chose. No one can doubt that Innocent chose — and that with all the strength and will of an unusually powerful character — to be master in his own house: and he succeeded by times in the effort; but, like other Popes, he was at no time more than temporarily successful. Twice or oftener he was driven by the necessity of circumstances, if not by actual violence, out of the city: and though he never altogether lost his hold upon it, as several of his predecessors had done, it was at the cost of much trouble and exertion, and at the point of the sword, that he kept his place in Rome.
He was, however, in the first flush of his power, almost triumphant. He succeeded in changing the fluctuating constitution of the Roman commonwealth, which had been hitherto presided over by a Præfect, responsible to the Emperor and bound to his service, along with a vague body of senators, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller in number, and swayed by every popular demonstration or riot — the very best machinery possible for the series of small revolutions and changes of policy in which Rome delighted. It was in every way the best thing for the interests of the city that it should have learnt to accept the distinction, all others having perished, of being the seat of the Church. For Rome was by this time, as may be said, the general court of appeal for Europe; every kind of cause was tried over again before the Consistory or its delegates; and a crowd of appellants, persons of all classes and countries, were always in Rome, many of them completely without acquaintance in the place, and dependent only upon such help and guidance as money could procure, money which has always been the great object of desire to most communities, the means of grandeur and greatness, if also of much degradation. It must not be supposed, however, that the Pope took advantage of any such mean motive to bind the city to himself. He guarded against the dangers of such a situation indeed by a strenuous endeavour to clear his court, his palace, his surroundings, of all that was superfluous in the way of luxury, all that was merely ostentatious in point of attendants and services, and all that was mercenary among the officials. When he succeeded in transferring the allegiance of the Præfect from the Emperor to himself, he made at the same time the most stringent laws against the reception of any present or fee by that Præfect and his subordinate officers, thus securing, so far as was possible, the integrity of the city and its rulers as well as their obedience. And whether in the surprise of the community to be so summarily dealt with, or in its satisfaction with the amount of the present, which Innocent, like all the other Popes, bestowed on the city on his consecration, he succeeded in carrying out these changes without opposition, and so secured before he went further a certain shelter and security within the walls of Rome.
He then turned his eyes to the States of the Church, the famous patrimony of St. Peter, which at that period of history St. Peter was very far from possessing. Certain German adventurers, to whom the Emperor had granted the fiefs which Innocent claimed as belonging to the Holy See, were first summoned to do homage to the Pope as their suzerain, then threatened with excommunication, then laid under anathema: and finally — Markwald and the rest remaining unconvinced and unsubdued — were driven out of their ill-gotten lands by force of arms, which proved the most effectual way. The existence of these German lords was the strongest argument in favour of the Papal sway, and was efficacious everywhere. The towns little and great, scattered over the March of Ancona, the duchy of Spoleto, and the wealthy district of Umbria, received the Pope and his envoys as their deliverers. The Tedeschi were as fiercely hated in Italy in the twelfth century as they were in recent times; and with greater reason, for their cruelty and exactions were indescribable. And the civic spirit which in the absence of any larger patriotism kept the Italian race in energetic life, and produced in every little centre of existence a longing for at least municipal liberty and independence, hailed with acclamations the advent of the head of the Church, a suzerain at least more honourable and more splendid than the rude Teuton nobles who despised the race over which they ruled.
That spirit had already risen very high in the more important cities of Northern Italy. The Lombard league had been already in existence for a number of years, and a similar league was now formed by the Tuscan towns which Innocent also claimed, in right of the legacy made to the Church more than a hundred years before by the great Countess Matilda, the friend of Hildebrand, but which had never yet been secured to the Holy See. The Tuscans had not been very obedient vassals to Matilda herself in her day; and they were not likely perhaps to have afforded much support to the Popes had the Church ever entered into full enjoyment of Matilda’s splendid legacy. But in the common spirit of hatred against the Tedeschi, the cruel and fierce German chiefs to whom the Emperor had freely disposed of the great estates and castles and rich towns of that wonderful country, the supremacy of the Church was accepted joyfully for the moment, and all kinds of oaths taken and promises made of fidelity and support to the new Pope. When Innocent appeared, as in the duchy of Spoleto, in Perugia, and other great towns, he was received with joy as the saviour of the people. We are not told whether he visited Assisi, where at this period Francis of that city was drawing crowds of followers to his side, and the idea of a great monastic order was rising out of the little church, the Portiuncula, at the bottom of the hill: but wherever he went he was received with joy. At Perugia, when the papal procession streamed through the crowded gates, and reached the old palazzo appropriated for its lodging, there suddenly sprang up a well which had been greatly wanted in the place, a spring of fresh water henceforward and for ever known as the Fontana di Papa. These cities all joined the Tuscan league against the Germans with the exception of Pisa, always arrogant and self-willed, which stood for those same Germans perhaps because their rivals on every side were against them. It was at this period, some say, and that excellent authority Muratori among them, that the titles of Guelf and Ghibelline first came into common use, the party of the Pope being Guelf, and that of the empire Ghibelline — the one derived from the house of Este, which was descended from the old Teutonic race of Guelf on the female side, the other, Waiblingen, from that of Hohenstaufen, also descended by the female side from a traditionary German hero. It is curious that these distant ancestors should have been chosen as godfathers of a struggle with which they had nothing to do, and which arose so long after their time.
Innocent, however, was not so good a Guelf as his party, for the Pope was the guardian and chief defender, during his troubled royal childhood, of Frederic of Sicily, afterwards the Emperor Frederic II., but at the beginning of Pope Innocent’s reign a very helpless baby prince, fatherless, and soon, also, motherless, and surrounded by rapacious Germans, each man fighting for a scheme of his own, by which to transfer the insecure crown to his own head, or at least to rob it of both power and revenue. The Pope stood by his helpless ward with much steadfastness through the very brief years of his minority — for Frederic seems to have been a married man and ambitious autocrat at an age when ordinary boys are but beginning their studies — and had a large share eventually in his elevation to the imperial throne: notwithstanding that he belonged to the great house which had steadily opposed the claims of the Papacy for generations. It must be added, however, that the great enterprises of Innocent’s first years could not have been taken up, or at least could not have been carried to so easy and summary a conclusion — whole countries recovered, the Emperor’s nominees cast out, the cities leagued against their constant invaders and oppressors — had there been a fierce Emperor across i monti ready to descend upon the always struggling, yet continually conquered, Italy. Henry VI., the son of Barbarossa, had died in the preceding year, 1198, in the flower of his age, leaving only the infant Frederic, heir to the kingdom of Sicily in right of his mother, behind him to succeed to his vast possessions. But the crown of Germany was, at least nominally, elective not hereditary; and notwithstanding that the Emperor had procured from his princes a delusive oath of allegiance to his child, that was a thing which in those days no one so much as thought of keeping. The inactivity of the forces of the Empire was thus accounted for; the holders of imperial fiefs in Italy were left to fight their own battles, and thus the Pope with very moderate forces, and the cities of Tuscany and Umbria, each for its own hand, were able to assert themselves, and drive out the oppressors. And there was a period of hopefulness and comparative peace.
Innocent, however, who had the affairs of the world on his hands, and could not long confine himself to those of St. Peter’s patrimony, was soon plunged into the midst of those ever-recurring struggles in Germany, too important in every way not to call for his closest attention. The situation was very much, the same as that in which Gregory VII. had found himself involved: with this great difference, however, that both competitors for the German crown were new men, and had neither any burden of crime against the Church nor previous excommunications on their head. Philip of Suabia, the brother of Henry VI., had been by him entrusted — with that curious confidence in the possibility of self-devotion on the part of others, which dying men, though never capable of it themselves, so often show — with the care and guardianship of his child and its interests, and the impossible task of establishing Frederic, as yet scarcely able to speak, upon a throne so important and so difficult. Philip did, it is said, his best to fulfil his trust and hurried from Sicily to the heart of Germany as soon as his brother was dead, with that object; but the princes of his party feared an infant monarch, and he was himself elected in the year 1199 to the vacant seat. There seems no criminality in this in the circumstances, for the little Frederic was in any case impossible; but Philip had inherited a hatred which he had not done anything personally to deserve. “So exasperated were the Italians against the Germans by the barbarous government of Frederic I. and Henry VI. his son, that wherever Philip passed, whether through Tuscany or any other district, he was ill-used and in danger of his life, and many of his companions were killed,” says Muratori. He had thus a strong feeling against him in Italy independent of any demerit of his own.
It is a little difficult, however, to understand why Pope Innocent, so careful of the interests of the little king in Sicily, should have so strongly and persistently opposed his uncle. Philip had been granted possession of the duchy of Tuscany, which the Pope claimed as his own, and some offence on this account, as well as the shadow of an anathema launched against him for the same reason by one of Innocent’s predecessors, may have prepossessed the Pope against him; but it is scarcely possible to accept this as reason enough for his determined opposition.
The rival emperor Otho, elected by the Guelf party, was the son of Henry the Lion, the nephew of Richard Plantagenet of England the Coeur de Lion of our national story, and of a family always devoted to the Church. The two men were both young and full of promise, equally noble and of great descent, related to each other in a distant degree, trained in a similar manner, each of them quite fit for the place which they were called to occupy. It seems to the spectator now as if there was scarcely a pin to choose between them. Nor was it any conflict of personal ambition which set them up against each other. They were the choice of their respective parties, and the question was as clearly one of faction against faction as in an Irish village fight.
These were circumstances, above all others, in which the arbitration of such an impartial judge as a Pope might have been of the greatest advantage to the world. There never was perhaps such an ideal opportunity for testing the advantage and the possibility of the power claimed by the Papacy. Otho was a young gallant at Richard’s court expecting nothing of the kind, open to all kinds of other promotions, Earl of Yorkshire, Count of Poitou — the first not successful because he could not conciliate the Yorkshiremen, perhaps difficult in that way then as now: but without, so far as appears, any thought of the empire in his mind. And Philip had the right of possession, and was the choice of the majority, and had done no harm in accepting his election, even if he had no right to it. The case was quite different from that of the similar struggle in which Gregory VII. took part. At the earlier period the whole world, that was not crushed under his iron foot, had risen against Henry IV. His falsehood, his cruelty, his vices, had alienated every one, and nobody believed his word or put the smallest faith even in his most solemn vows. The struggle between such an Emperor and the head of the Church was naturally a struggle to death. One might almost say they were the impersonations of good and evil, notwithstanding that the good might be often alloyed, and the evil perhaps by times showed gleams of better meaning. But the case of Philip and Otho was completely different. Neither of them were bad men nor gave any augury of evil. The one perhaps by training and inclination was slightly a better Churchman than the other at the beginning of his career; but, on the other hand, Philip had various practical advantages over Otho which could not be gainsaid.
Had Pope Innocent been the wholly wise man and inspired judge he claimed by right of his office to be, without prejudice or bias, nobly impartial, holding the balance in a steady hand, was not this the very case to test his powers? Had he helped the establishment of Philip in the empire and deprecated the introduction of a rival, a great deal of bloodshed might have been avoided, and a satisfactory result, without any injustice, if not an ideal selection, might have been obtained. All this was problematical, and depended upon his power of getting himself obeyed, which, as it turned out, he did not possess. But in this way, in all human probability, he might have promoted peace and secured a peaceful decision; for Philip’s election was a fait accompli, while Otho was not as yet more than a candidate. The men were so equal otherwise, and there was so little exclusive right on one side or the other, that such facts as these would naturally have been taken into the most serious consideration by the great, impartial, and unbiassed mind which alone could have justified the interference of the Pope, or qualified him to assume the part of arbitrator in such a quarrel. He did not attempt this, however, but took his place with his own faction as if he had been no heaven-sent arbiter at all, but a man like any other. He has himself set forth the motives and reasons for his interference, with the fulness of explanation which he loved. The bull in which he begins by setting aside the claims of his own infant ward, Frederic, to whom his father Henry had caused the German princes to swear fealty, as inadmissible — the said princes being freed of their oath by the death of the Emperor, a curious conclusion — is in great part an indictment of Philip, couched in the strongest and most energetic terms. In this document it is stated in the first place that Philip had been excommunicated by the previous Pope, as having occupied by violence the patrimony of St. Peter, an excommunication taken off by the legate, but not effectually; again he was involved in the excommunication of Markwald and the other invaders of Sicily whom he had upheld; in the next place he had been false to the little Frederic, whose right he had vowed to defend, and was thus perjured, though the princes who had sworn allegiance to the child were not so. Then follows a tremendous description of Philip’s family and predecessors, of their dreadful acts against the Popes and Church, of the feuds of Barbarossa with the Holy See, of the insults and injuries of which all had been equally guilty. A persecutor himself and the son of persecutors, how could the Pope support the cause of Philip? The argument is full of force and strengthened by many illustrations, but it proves above all things that Innocent was no impartial judge, but a man holding almost with passion to his own side.
The pleas in favour of Otho are much weaker. It is true, the Pope admits, that he had been elected by a minority, but then the number of notable and important electors were as great on his side as on Philip’s: his house had a purer record than that of Philip: and finally he was weaker than Philip and more in need of support; therefore the Holy See threw all its influence upon his side. Nothing could be feebler than this conclusion after the force of the hostile judgments. We fear it must be allowed that Innocent being merely a man (which is the one unsurmountable argument against papal infallibility) went the way his prepossessions and inclinations — and also, we have no doubt, his conviction of what was best — led him, and was no more certain to be right in doing so than any other man.
Having come to this conclusion, Innocent took his stand with all the power and influence he possessed upon Otho’s side — a support which probably kept that prince afloat and made the long struggle possible, but was quite inadequate to set him effectually on the throne, or injure his rival in any serious way. In this partisan warfare, excommunication was the readiest of weapons; but excommunications, as we have already said, were very ineffectual in the greater number of cases; for Germany especially was full of great prelates as great as the princes, in most cases of as high race and as much territorial power, and they by no means always agreed with the Pope, and made no pretence of obeying him; and how was the people to find out that they lay under anathema when they saw the offices of the Church carried on with all the splendour of the highest ritual, its services unbroken, however the Pope might thunder behind? Some of these prelates — such as Leopold of Mainz, appointed by the Emperor, to whom Innocent refused his sanction, electing on his own part another archbishop, Siegfried, in his stead, who was not for many years permitted even to enter the diocese of which he was the titular head — maintained with Rome a struggle as obstinate as any secular prince. They were as powerful as the princes among whom they sat and reigned, and elected emperors. Most of the German bishops, we are told, were on Philip’s side notwithstanding the decision of the Pope against him. In such circumstances the anathema was little more than a farce. The Archbishop of Mainz was excommunicated as much as the emperor, but being all the same in full possession of his see and its privileges, naturally acted as though nothing had happened, and found plenty of clergy to support him, who carried on the services of the Church as usual and administered the sacraments to Philip as much as if he had been in the full sunshine of Papal favour.
Such a chance had surely never been foreseen when the expedient of excommunication was first thought of, for it is apt to turn every claim of authority into foolishness — threats which cannot be carried out being by their nature the most derogatory things possible to the person from whom they proceed. The great prelates of Germany were in their way as important as the Pope, their position was more steadily powerful than his, they had vassals and armies to defend them, and a strong and settled seat, from which it was as difficult, or indeed even dangerous, to displace them as to overthrow a throne. And what could the Pontiff do when they disobeyed and defied him? Nothing but excommunicate, excommunicate, for which they cared not a straw — or depose, which was equally unimportant, when, as happened in the case of Mainz, the burghers of the cathedral city vowed that the substituted bishop should never enter their gates.
Thus the ten years’ struggle produced nothing but humiliation for Innocent. The Pope did not relax in his determined opposition, nor cease to threaten penalties which he could not inflict until nearly the end of the struggle; and then when the logic of events began, it would appear, to have a little effect upon his mind, and he extended with reluctance a sort of feeble olive-branch towards the all-victorious Philip — a larger fate came in, and changed everything with the sweeping fulness of irresistible power. It is not said anywhere, so far as we know, that the overtures of Innocent brought the Emperor ill-luck; but it would certainly have been so said had such an accident occurred under Pio Nono, for example, who, it is well known, had the evil eye. For no sooner had Innocent taken this step than Philip’s life came to a disastrous end. The Count Palatine of Wittelsbach, a great potentate of Germany, who had some personal grievance to avenge, demanded a private audience and murdered him in his temporary dwelling, in the moment of his highest prosperity. Thus in the twinkling of an eye everything was changed. The House of Hohenstaufen went down in a moment without an attempt made to prop it up. And Otho, who was at hand, already a crowned king, and demanding no further trouble, at once took the vacant place. This occurred in the year 1208 — ten years after the beginning of the struggle. But in this extraordinary and sudden transformation of affairs Innocent counted for nothing; he had not done it nor even contributed to the doing of it: though he had kept the air thunderous with anathemas, and the roads dusty with the coming and going of his legates for all these unhappy years.
Otho, however, did not at first forget the devotion which the Pope had shown him in his evil days, when triumph so unexpected and accidental (as it seemed) came to him. After taking full possession of the position which now there was no one to contest with him, he made a triumphal progress across the Alps, and was crowned Emperor at Rome, the last and crowning dignity which Philip had never been able to attain: where he behaved himself with much show of affection and humility to Innocent, whose stirrup he held like the most devoted son of the Church as he professed to be. There was much swearing of oaths at the same time. Otho vowed to preserve all the rights of the Church, and, with reservations, to restore the Tuscan fiefs of Matilda, and all the presents with which from time to time the former Emperors had endowed the Holy See, to the Pope’s undisturbed possession. Rome was a scene of the utmost display and splendour during this imperial visit. Otho had come at the head of his army, and lay encamped at the foot of Monte Mario, where now the little group of pines stand up against the sky in the west, dark against the setting sun. It was October when all the summer glow and heat is mellowed by autumnal airs, and the white tents shone outside the city gates with every kind of splendid cognisance of princes and noble houses, and magnificence of mediæval luxury. The ancient St. Peter’s, near the camp, was then planted, we are told, in the midst of a great number of convents, churches, and chapels, “Like a majestic mother surrounded by beautiful daughters” — though there was no Vatican as yet to add to its greatness: but the line of the walls on the opposite side of the river and the ancient splendour of Rome, more square and massive in its lingering classicism than the mediæval towns to which the German forces were more accustomed, shone in the mid-day sun: while towards the left the great round of St. Angelo dominated the bridge and the river, and all the crowds which poured forth towards the great church and shrine of the Apostles. There was, however, one shadow in this brilliant picture, and that was the fact that Rome within her gates lay not much unlike a couching lion, half terrified, half excited by the army outside, and not sure that the abhorred Tedeschi might not at any moment steal a march upon her, and show underneath those splendid velvet gloves, all heavy with embroideries of gold, the claws of that northern wolf which Italy had so often felt at her very heart. It is a curious sign of this state of agitated feeling that Otho published in Rome before his coronation a solemn engagement in his own name and that of his army that no harm should be done to the city, to the Pope and Cardinals, or to the people and their property, while he remained there. He had strong guards of honour at all the adjacent gates as a precautionary measure while the great ceremonies of his consecration went on.
It was not the present St. Peter’s, it need not be said, which, hung with splendid tapestries and lit with innumerable candles, glistening with precious marbles and gilding, and decorated with all the splendour of the church in silver and gold, received this great German potentate for that final act which was to make his authority sacred, and establish him beyond all question Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a dignity which only the Pope could complete, which was nothing, bringing no additional dominion with it, yet of the utmost importance in the estimation of the world. It cannot but have been that a sense of elation, perhaps chequered with doubt, but certainly sanctioned by many noble feelings — convictions that God had favoured his side in the long run, and that a better age was about to begin — must have been in Innocent’s mind as he went through the various ceremonies of the imposing ritual, and received the vows of the monarch and placed the imperial crown on his head. We are not told, however, whether there was any alarm in the air as the two gorgeous processions conjoined, sweeping forth from the gates of St. Peter’s, and across the bridge and by all the crowded ways, to the other side of the city, to the Lateran palace, where the great banquet was held. Otho with his crown on his head held the stirrup of the Pope at the great steps of St. Peter’s as Innocent mounted; and the two greatest potentates of earth, the head of the secular and the head of the spiritual, dividing, with the most confusing elasticity of boundary between them, the sway of the world, rode alone together, followed by all that was most magnificent in Germany and Italy, the great princes, the great prelates vying with each other in pomp and splendour. The air was full of the ringing of bells and the chanting of the priests; and as they went along through the dark masses of the people on every side, the officers of Otho scattered largesse through all the crowded streets, and everything was festivity and general joy.
But when the great people disappeared into the papal palace, and the banquet was spread, the German men-at-arms began to swagger about the streets as if they were masters of all they surveyed. There is no difference of opinion as to the brutality and insolence of the German soldiers in those days, and the Romans were excited and in no humour to accept any insult at such a moment. How they came to blows at last was never discovered, but after the great spectacle was over, most probably when night was coming on, and the excitement of the day had risen to irritability and ready passion, a fray arose in the streets no one knowing how. The strangers had the worst of it, Muratori says. “Many of the Teutons were killed,” says one of the older chronicles, “and eleven hundred horses;” which would seem to imply that the dregs of the procession had been vapouring about Rome on their charges, riding the inhabitants down. Nor was it only men-at-arms: for a number of Otho’s more distinguished followers were killed in the streets. How long it was before it came to the ears of the Emperor we are not informed, nor whether the banquet was interrupted. Probably Otho had returned to his tent (Muratori says he did so at once, leaving out all mention of any banquet) before the “calda baruffa” broke out: but at all events it was a startling change of scene. The Emperor struck his tents next morning, and departed from the neighbourhood of Rome in great rage and indignation: — and this, so far as Pope Innocent was concerned, was the last good that was ever heard of Otho. He broke all his vows one by one, took back the Tuscan States, seized the duchy of Spoleto and every city he passed on his way, and defied the Pope, to whom he had been so servile, having now got all from him that Innocent could give.
The plea by which Otho defended himself for his seizure of the States of Tuscany was worthy of that scholastic age. He had vowed, he said, it was true, to preserve St. Peter’s patrimony and all the ecclesiastical possessions: but he had vowed at the same time to preserve and to recover all imperial rights and possessions, and it was in discharge of this obligation that he robbed the Pope. Thus ended Innocent’s long and faithful support of Otho; he had pledged the faith of heaven for his success, which was assured only by accident and crime; but no sooner had that success been secured, than the Emperor deserted and betrayed the Pope who had so firmly stood by him. It is said that Innocent redoubled from that moment his care of the young Frederic, the King of Sicily, the head of the Hohenstaufen house and party, and prepared him to revenge Otho’s broken oaths by a downfall as complete as his elevation had been; but this is an assumption which has no more proof than any other uncharitable judgment of motives unrevealed. At all events it is very apparent that in this long conflict, which occupied so much of his life, the Pope played no powerful or triumphant part.
In France the action of Innocent was more successful. The story of Philip Augustus and his wives, which is full of romantic incidents, is better known to the general reader than the tragedy of the Emperors. Philip Augustus had married a wife, a Danish princess, who did not please him. Her story, in its first chapter at least, is like that of Anne of Cleves, the fortunate princess who had the good luck not to please Henry VIII. (or perhaps still more completely resembles a comparatively recent catastrophe in our own royal house, the relations of George IV. and his unlucky wife). But the French king did not treat Ingelburga with the same politeness which Henry Tudor exhibited, neither had she the discretion to hold her tongue like the lady of Flanders. The complaints of the injured queen filled the world, and she made a direct appeal to the Pope, who was not slow to reply. When Philip procured a divorce from his wife from the complacent bishops of his own kingdom on one of those absurd allegations of too close relationship (it might be that of third or fourth cousin), which were of so much use to discontented husbands of sufficient rank, and married the beautiful Agnes of Meran, with whom he was in love, Innocent at once interfered. He began by commands, by entreaties, by attempts at settling the question by legal measures, commissioning his legates to hold a solemn inquiry into the matter, examining into Ingelburga’s complaints, and using every endeavour to bring the king back to a sense of his duty. There could be no doubt on which side justice lay, and the legates were not, as in the case of Henry and Catherine, on the side of the monarch. It was the rejected queen who had the Pope’s protection and not her powerful husband.
Philip Augustus, however, was summoned in vain to obey. The litigation and the appeals went on for a long time, and several years elapsed before Innocent, after much preparation and many warnings, determined not merely as on former occasions to excommunicate the offender, but to pronounce an interdict upon the kingdom. Perhaps Innocent had learned the lesson which had been taught him on such a great scale, that excommunication was not a fortunate weapon, and that only the perfect subordination of the higher clergy could make it successful at all. The interdict was a much greater and more dreadful thing; it was dependent not upon the obedience of a great prelate, but upon every priest who had taken the sacred vows. Had he excommunicated the king as on former occasions, no doubt there would always have been some lawless bishop in France who would have enabled his sovereign to laugh at the Pope and his sentence. But an interdict could not thus be evaded, the mass of the clergy being obedient to the Pope whatever important individual exceptions there might be. The interdict was proclaimed accordingly with all the accessories of ritualistic solemnity. After a Council which had lasted seven days, and which was attended by a great number of the clergy, the bells of the cathedral — it was that of Dijon — began to toll as for a dying man: and all the great bishops with their trains, and the legate at their head, went solemnly from their council chamber to the church. It was midnight, and the long procession went through the streets and into the great cathedral by the wavering and gloomy light of torches. For the last time divine service was celebrated, and the canons sang the Kyrie Eleison amid the silence, faintly broken by sobs and sounds of weeping, of the immense crowds who had followed them. The images of Christ and the saints were covered with crape, the relics of the saints, worshipped in those days with such strange devotion, were solemnly taken away out of the shrines and consecrated places to vaults and crypts underground where they were deposited until better times; the remains of the consecrated bread which had sustained the miracle of transubstantiation were burned upon the altar. All these details of the awful act of cutting off France from the community of the faithful were performed before a trembling and dismayed crowd, which looked on with a sense of the seriousness of the proceedings which was overwhelming.
“Then the legate, dressed in a violet stole, as on the day
of the passion of our Lord, advanced to the altar steps,
and in the name of Jesus Christ pronounced the interdict
upon all the realm of France. Sobs and groans echoed
through the great aisles of the cathedral; it was as if the
day of judgment had come.”
Once more after this tremendous scene there was a breathing space, a place of repentance left for the royal sinner, and then through all the churches of France the midnight ceremonial was repeated. The voice of prayer was silenced in the land, no more was psalm sung or mass said; a few convents were permitted by special grace, in the night, with closed doors and whispering voices, to celebrate the holy mysteries. For all besides the public worship of God and all the consolations of religion were cut off. We have seen how lightly personal excommunication was treated in Germany; but before so terrible a chastisement as this no king could hold out. Neither was the cause one of disobedience to the Holy See, or usurpation of the Church’s lands, or any other offence against ecclesiastical supremacy: it was one into which every peasant, every clown could enter, and which revolted the moral sense of the nation. Matrimonial infidelities of all kinds have always been winked at in a monarch, but the strong step of putting away a guiltless queen and setting another in her place is a different matter. The nation was on the side of the Church: the clergy, except in very rare cases, were unanimous: and for once Innocent in his severity and supremacy was successful. After seven months of this terrible régime the king yielded. It had been a time of threatening rebellion, of feuds and dissensions of all kinds, of diminished revenues and failing prosperity. Philip Augustus could not stand against these consequences. He sent away the fictitious wife whom he loved — and who died, as the world, and even history at its sternest, loves to believe, of a broken heart, the one victim whom no one could save, a short time after — and the interdict was removed. One is almost glad to hear that even then the king would have none of Ingelburga, the woman who had filled the world with her cries and complaints, and brought this tremendous anathema on France. She continued to cry and appeal to the Pope that her captivity was unchanged or even made harder than ever, but Innocent was too wise to risk his great expedient a second time. He piously advised her to have recourse to prayer and to have confidence in God, and promised not to abandon her. But the poor lady gained little by all the misery that had been inflicted to right her wrongs. Many years after, when no one thought any more of Ingelburga, the king suddenly took her out of her prison and restored her to her share, such as it was, of the throne, for what reason no man can tell.
This, however, was the only great success of Innocent in the exercise of his papal power. It was an honourable and a just employment of that power, very different from the claim to decide between contending Emperors, or to nominate to the imperial crown; but it was in reality, as we think, the only triumphant achievement of the Pope, in whom all the power and all the pretensions of the papacy are said to have culminated. He had his hand in every broil, and interfered with everything that was going on in every quarter. Space fails us to tell of his endless negotiations, censures, recommendations and commands, sent by legates continually in motion or by letters of endless frequency and force, to regions in which Christianity itself was as yet scarcely established. Every little kingdom from the utmost limits of the north to the east were under this constant supervision and interference: and no doubt there were instances, especially among the more recent converts of the Church, and in respect to ecclesiastical matters, in which it was highly important; but so far as concerned the general tenor of the world’s history, it can never be said to have had any important result.
In England, Innocent had the evil fortune to have to do with the worst of the Plantagenet kings, the false and cowardly John, who got himself a little miserable reputation for a time by the temporary determination of his resolve that “no Italian priest, should tithe or toll in our dominions,” and who struggled fiercely against Innocent on the question of the Archbishopric of Canterbury and other great ecclesiastical offices, as well as in matters more personal, such as the dower of Berengaria, the widow of Coeur de Lion, which the Pope had called upon him to pay. John drove the greater part of the clergy out of England in his fury at the interdict which Innocent pronounced, and took possession, glad of an occasion of acquiring so much wealth, of the estates and properties of the Church throughout the realm. But the interdict which had been so efficacious in France failed altogether of its effect in England. It was too early for any Protestant sentiment, and it is extraordinary that a people by no means without piety should have shown so singular an indifference to the judgment of the Church. Perhaps the fact that so many of the superior clergy were of the conquering Norman race, and, therefore, still sullenly resisted by the passive obstinacy of the humiliated Saxons, had something to do with it: while at the same time the banishment of many prelates would probably leave a large portion of the humbler priests in comparative ignorance of the Pope’s decree.
But whatever were the operative causes this is plain, that whereas in France the effect of the interdict was tremendous in England it produced scarcely any result at all. The banished bishops and archbishops, and at their head Stephen Langton, the patriotic Englishman of whom the Pope had made wise choice for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, stood on the opposite shore in consternation, and watched the contempt of their flocks for this greatest exercise of the power of Rome; and with still greater amazement perceived the success that followed the king in his enterprises, and the obedience of the people, with whom he had never been so popular before.
We are not told what Innocent felt at the sight of this unexpected failure. He proceeded to strike King John with special excommunication, going from the greater to the smaller curse, in a reversal of the usual method; but this being still ineffectual, Innocent turned to practical measures. He proceeded to free King John’s subjects from their oath of allegiance and to depose the rebellious monarch; and not only so, for these ordinances would probably have been as little regarded as the other — but he gave permission and authority to the King of France, the ever-watchful enemy of the Plantagenets, to invade England and to place his son Louis upon the vacant throne. Great preparations were made in France for this congenial Crusade — for it was in their quality as Crusaders that the Pope authorised the invasion. Then and not till then John paused in his career. He had laughed at spiritual dangers, but he no longer laughed when the French king gathered his forces at Boulogne, and the banished and robbed bishops prepared to return, not penitent and humiliated, but surrounded by French spears.
Then at last the terrified king submitted to the authority of the Pope; he received the legates of Innocent in a changed spirit, with the servility of a coward. He vowed with his hand on the Gospels to redress all ecclesiastical wrongs, to restore the bishops, and to submit in every way to the judgment of the Church. Then in his craven terror, without, it is said, any demand of the kind on the part of the ecclesiastical ambassadors, John took a step unparalleled in the annals of the nations.
“In order to obtain the mercy of God for the sins we have
done against His holy Church, and having nothing more
precious to offer than our person and our kingdom, and in
order to humiliate ourself before Him who humbled Himself
for us even to death: by an inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
neither formed by violence nor by fear, but in virtue of
our own good and free will we give, with the consent of our
barons, to God, to His holy apostles, Peter and Paul, to
our mother the Holy Roman Church, to our Lord the Pope
Innocent and to his Catholic successors, in expiation of
our sins and those of our family, living and dead, our
kingdoms of England and Ireland with all their
accompaniments and rights, in order that we may receive
them again in the quality of vassal of God and of Holy
Church: in faith of which we take the oath of vassal, in
the presence of Pandulphus, putting ourselves at the
disposition of the Pope and his successors, as if we were
actually in the presence of the Pope; and our heirs and
successors shall be obliged to take the same oath.”
So John swore, but not because of the thunders and curses of Innocent — because of Philip Augustus of France hurrying on his preparations on the other side of the Channel, while angry barons and a people worn out with constant exactions gave him promise of but poor support at home. The Pope became now the only hope of the humiliated monarch. He had flouted the sentences and disdained the curses of the Holy See; but if there was any power in the world which could restore the fealty of his vassals, and stop the invader on his way, it was Innocent: or so at least in this last emergency it might be possible to hope.
Innocent on his part did not despise the unworthy bargain. Notwithstanding his powerful intellect and just mind, and the perception he must have had of the miserable motives underneath, he did not hesitate. He received the oath, though he must have well known that it would be so much waste paper if John had ever power to cast it off. Of all men Innocent must have been most clearly aware what was the worth of the oaths of kings. He accepted it, however, apparently with a faith in the possibility of establishing the suzerainty thus bestowed upon him, which is as curious as any other of the facts of the case, whether flattered by this apparent triumph after his long unsuccess, or believing against all evidence — as men, even Popes, can always believe what they wish — that so shameful a surrender was genuine, and that here at last was a just acknowledgment of the rights of the Holy See. Henceforward the Pope put himself on John’s side. He risked the alienation of the French king by forbidding the enterprise which had been undertaken at his command: he rejected the appeal of the barons, disapproved Magna Charta, transferred the excommunication to its authors with an ease which surely must have helped these unlikely penitents to despise both the anathema and its source. It is impossible either to explain or excuse this strange conduct. The easiest solution is that he did not fully understand either the facts or the characters of those with whom he had to deal: but how then could he be considered fit to judge and arbitrate between them?
The death of John liberated the Pope from what might have been a deliberate breach of his recommendations on the part of France. And altogether in this part of his conduct the imaginary success of Innocent was worse than a defeat. It was a failure from the high dignity he claimed, more conspicuous even than that failure in Germany which had already proved the inefficacy of spiritual weapons to affect the business of the world: for not only had all his efforts failed of success, until the rude logic of a threatened invasion came in to convince the mind of John — but the Pope himself was led into unworthy acts by a bargain which was in every way ignoble and unworthy. If the Church was to be the high and generous umpire, the impartial judge of all imperial affairs which she claimed to be — and who can say that had mortal powers been able to carry it out, this was not a noble and splendid ideal? — it was not surely by becoming the last resort against just punishment of a traitor and caitiff, whose oath made one day was as easily revoked the next, as the putting on or pulling off of a glove. It is almost inconceivable that a man like Innocent should have received with joy and with a semblance of faith such a submission on the part of such a man as John. But it is evident that he did so, and that probably the Roman court and community took it as a great event and overwhelming proof of the progress of the authority of the Church.
But perhaps an Italian and a Churchman in these days was the last person in the world to form a just idea of what we call patriotism, or to understand the principle of independence which made a nation, even when divided within itself, unite in fierce opposition to interference from without. Italy was not a country, but a number of constantly warring states and cities, and to Innocent the Church was the one sole institution in the world qualified and entitled to legislate for others. He accepted the gift of England almost with elation, notwithstanding all he had learned of that distant and strange country which cared not for an interdict, and if it could in any circumstances have loved its unworthy king, would have done so on account of his resistance to the Pope. And it would appear that the Pontiff believed in something serious coming of that suzerainty, all traditions and evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus Innocent’s part in the bloody and terrible drama that was then being played in England was neither noble nor dignified, but a poor part unworthy of his character and genius. His interference counted for nothing until France interfered with practical armies which had to be reckoned with — when the hand which had launched so many ineffectual thunderbolts was gripped at by an expedient of cowardly despair which in reality meant and produced nothing. Both sides were in their turn excommunicated, given over to every religious penalty; but unconcerned fought the matter out their own way and so settled it, unanimous only in resisting the jurisdiction of Rome. The vehement letters of the Pope as the struggle grew more and more bitter sound through the clang of arms like the impotent scoldings of a woman:
“Let women ... war with words,
With curses priests, but men with swords.”
Let Pope or prelate do what they might, the cold steel carried the day.
Not less complete in failure, though with a flattering promise in it of prosperity and advantage, was the great crusade of Innocent’s day — that which is called the Venetian Crusade, the immense expedition which seemed likely to produce such splendid results but ended so disastrously, and never set foot at all in the Holy Land which was its object. The Crusades were, of all other things, the dearest object to the hearts of the Popes, small and great. The first conception of them had risen, as the reader will remember, in the mind of Gregory VII., who would fain have set out himself at the head of the first, to recover out of the hands of the infidel the sacred soil which enshrined so many memories. The idea had been pursued by every worthy Pope between Hildebrand and Innocent, with fluctuations of success and failure — at first in noble and pious triumph, but latterly with all the dissensions, jealousies, and internal struggles, which armies, made up of many differing and antagonistic nationalities, could with difficulty avoid. Before Innocent’s accession to the papacy there had been a great and terrible reverse, which was supposed to have broken the heart of the old Pope under whom it occurred, and which filled Christendom with horror, woe, and shame. The sacred territory for which so much blood had been shed fell again entirely into the hands of the Saracens. In consequence of this, one of the first acts of Innocent was to send out letters over all the world, calling for a new Crusade, exhorting princes and priests alike to use every means for the raising of a sufficient expedition, and promising every kind of spiritual advantage, indulgence, and remission to those who took the cross.
The first result of these impassioned appeals was to fire the spirits of certain priests in France to preach the Crusade, with all the fiery enthusiasm which had first roused Christendom: and a very large expedition was got together, chiefly from France, whose preliminary negotiations with the doge and government of Venice to convey them to Palestine furnishes one of the most picturesque scenes in the history of that great and astute republic. It was in the beginning of the thirteenth century, the opening of the year 1201, when the bargain, which was a very hard one, was made: and in the following July the expedition was to set sail. But when the pilgrims assembled at Venice it was found that with all their exertions they had not more than half the sum agreed upon as passage money. Perhaps the Venetians had anticipated this and taken their measures accordingly. At all events, after much wrangling and many delays, they agreed to convey the Crusaders on condition only of obtaining their assistance to take the town of Zara on the Dalmatian coast, which had once been under Venetian rule, but which now belonged to the King of Hungary, and was a nest of pirates hampering the trade of Venice and holding her merchants and seamen in perpetual agitation. Whether Innocent had surmised that some such design was possible we are not told, but if not his instructions to the Crusaders were strangely prophetic. He besought them on no account whatever to go to war with any Christian people. If their passage were opposed by any, they were permitted to force their way through that like any other obstacle, but even in such a case were only to act with the sanction of the legate who accompanied them. The Pope added a word of sorrowful comment upon the “very different aims” which so often mingled in the minds of the Crusaders with that great and only one, the deliverance of the Holy Land, which was the true object of their expedition; and complained sadly that if the heads of the Christian Church had possessed as much power as they had goodwill, the power of Mahomet would have been long since broken, and much Christian blood remained unshed.
He could not have spoken with more truth had he been prophetically aware of the issues to which that expedition was to come. The Crusaders set out, in 1202, covering the sea with their sails, dazzling every fishing boat and curious merchantman with reflections from their shining bucklers and shields, and met with such a course of adventure as never had befallen any pilgrims of the Cross before. The story is told in the most picturesque and dramatic pages of Gibbon; and many a historian more has repeated the tale. They took Zara, and embroiled themselves, as the Pope had feared, with the Hungarians, themselves a chivalrous nation full of enthusiasm for the Cross, but not likely to allow themselves to be invaded with impunity; then, professedly in the cause of the young Alexis, the boy-king of the Greek Empire, went to Constantinople — which they took after a wonderful siege, and in which they found such booty as turned the heads of the great penniless lords who had mortgaged every acre and spent every coin for the hire of the Venetian ships, and of the rude soldiers who followed them, who had never possessed a gold piece probably in their lives, and there found wealth undreamt of to be had for the taking. There is no need for us to enter into that extraordinary chapter in the history of the Greek Empire, of which these hordes of northern invaders, all Christian as they were, and with so different an object to start with, possessed themselves — with no less cruelty and as great rapacity as was shown by the barbarians of an elder age in the sack and destruction of Rome.
Meantime the Pope did not cease to protest against this turning aside of the expedition from its lawful object. The legate had forbidden the assault of Zara, but in vain; the Pope forbade the attack upon Constantinople also in vain, and vainly pressed upon the Crusaders, by every argument, the necessity of proceeding to the Holy Land without delay. Innocent, it is true, did not refuse his share of the splendid stuffs and ornaments which fell into their hands, for ecclesiastical uses: and he was silenced by the fictitious submission of the Greek Church, and the supposed healing of the schism which had rent the East and the West from each other. Nevertheless he looked on upon the progress of affairs in Constantinople with unquiet eyes. But what could the Pope do in his distant seat, armed with those spiritual powers alone which even at home these fierce warriors held so lightly, against the rage of acquisition, the excitement of conquest, even the sweep and current of affairs, which carried the chiefs of the armies in the East so much further and in so changed a direction from that which even they themselves desired? He entreated, he commanded, he threatened: but when all was said he was but the Pope, far off and powerless, who could excommunicate indeed, but do no more. The only thing possible for Innocent was to look on, sometimes with a gleam of high hope as when the Greek Church came over to him, as appeared, to be received again into full communion with the rest of Christendom: sometimes with a half unwilling pleasure as when Baldwin’s presents arrived, cloth of gold and wonderful embroideries to decorate the great arches of St. Peter’s and the Lateran: and again with a more substantial confidence when Constantinople itself had become a Latin empire under the same Baldwin — that it might henceforward become a basis of operations in the holy war against the Saracens and promote the objects of the Crusade more effectually than could be done from a distance. Amid all his disappointments and the impatient sense of futility and helplessness which must have many a time invaded his soul, it is comfortable to know that Innocent died in this last belief, and never found out how equally futile it was.
There was, however, one other great undertaking of his time in which it would seem that the Pontiff was more directly influential, even though, for any reader who respects the character and ideal of Innocent, it is sickening to the heart to realise what it was. It was that other Crusade, so miserable and so bloody, against the Albigenses, which was the only successful enterprise which with any show of justice could be set down to the account of the Church. Nobody seems even now to know very well what the heresies were, against which, in the failure of other schemes, the arms of the defenders of religion were directed. They were, as Dissent generally is, manifold, while the Church regarded them as one. Among them were humble little sects who desired only to lead a purer and truer life than the rude religionists among whom they dwelt; while there were also others who held in various strange formulas all kinds of wild doctrine: but between the Poor Men of Lyons, the Scripture-Readers whose aim was to serve God in humility, apart from all pomps of religion and splendour of hierarchies — and the strange Manichean sects with their elaborate and confused philosophical doctrine — the thirteenth century knew no difference. It ranked them all under the same name of heretic, and attributed to all of them the errors of the worst and smallest section. Even so late as the eighteenth century, Muratori, a scholar without prejudice, makes one sweeping assertion that they were Manicheans, without a doubt or question. It is needless to say that whatever they were, fire and sword was not the way to mend them of their errors; for that also was an idea wholly beyond the understanding of the time.
When Innocent came first to the Papacy his keen perception of the many vices of the Church was increased by a conviction that error of doctrine accompanied in certain portions of Christendom the general corruption of life. In some of his letters he comments severely, always with a reference to the special evils against which he struggled, on the causes and widening propagation of heresy. “If the shepherd is a hireling,” he says, “and thinks not of the flock, but solely of himself: if he cares only for the wool and the milk, without defending them from the wolves that attack them, or making himself a wall of defence against their enemies: and if he takes flight at the first sound of danger: the ruin and loss must be laid to his charge. The keeper of the sheep must not be like a dumb dog that cannot bark. When the priesthood show that they do not know how to separate holy things from common, they resemble those vile wine-sellers who mingle water with their wine. The name of God is blasphemed because of those who love money, who seek presents, who justify the wicked by allowing themselves to be corrupted by them. The vigilance of the ministers of religion can do much to arrest the progress of evil. The league of heretics should be dissolved by faithful instruction: for the Lord desires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live.”
It may be curious also to quote here the cautious utterance of Innocent upon the pretension of the more pious sectarians to found everything on Scripture and to make the study of the Bible their chief distinction. The same arguments are still used in the Catholic Church, sometimes even in the same terms.
“The desire to know the Holy Scriptures and to profit by
their teaching is praiseworthy, but this desire must not be
satisfied in secret, nor should it degenerate into the wish
to preach, or to despise the ministers of religion. It is
not the will of God that His word should be proclaimed in
secret places as is done by these heretics, but publicly in
the Church. The mysteries of the faith cannot be explained
by every comer, for not every intellect is capable of
understanding them. The Holy Scriptures are so profound
that not only the simple and ignorant but even intelligent
and learned men are unqualified to interpret them.”
At no time however, though he spoke so mildly and so candidly, acknowledging that the best way to overcome the heretics was to convert and to convince them, did Innocent conceal his intention and desire to carry proceedings against them to the sternest of conclusions. If it were possible by any exertions to bring them back to the bosom of the Church, he charged all ecclesiastical authorities, all preachers, priests, and monastic establishments to do everything that was possible to accomplish this great work; but failing that, he called upon all princes, lords, and civil rulers to take stringent measures and cut them off from the land — recommendations that ended in the tremendous and appalling expedient of a new Crusade, a Crusade with no double motive, no object of restoration and deliverance combined with that of destruction, but bound to the sole agency of sheer massacre, bloodshed, and ruin, an internecine warfare of the most horrible kind.
It must be added, however, that the preachers who at Innocent’s command set out, more or less in state, high officials, ecclesiastics of name and rank, to convince the heretics, by their preaching and teaching, took the first part in the conflict. According to his lights he spared no pains to give the doomed sects the opportunity of conversion, though with very little success. Among his envoys were two Spaniards, one a bishop, one that great Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order, who filled so great a part in the history of his time. Amid the ineffectual legates these two were missionaries born: they represented to the other preachers that demonstrations against heresy in the cathedrals was no way of reaching the people, but that the true evangelists must go forth into the country, humble and poor as were the adversaries whom they had to overcome. They themselves set out on their mission barefoot, without scrip or purse, after the manner of the Apostles. Strange to think that it was in Provence, the country of the Troubadours, the land of song, where poetry and love were supreme according to all and every tradition of history, that the grimmest heresy abounded, and that this stern pair carried on their mission! but so it was. Toulouse, where Courts of Love sate yearly, and the trouvères held their tournaments of song, was the centre of the tragedy. But not even those devoted preachers, nor the crowd of eager priests and monks who followed in their steps, succeeded in their mission. The priesthood and the religion it taught had fallen very low in Provence, and no one heeded the new missionaries, neither the heretics nor the heedless population around.
No doubt the Pope, the man of so many disappointments, had set his heart on this as a thing in which for once he must not fail, and watched with a sore and angry heart the unsuccess of all these legitimate efforts. But it was not until one of the legates, a man most trusted and honoured, Pierre de Castelnau, was treacherously killed in the midst of his mission, that Innocent was fully roused. Heretofore he had rained excommunications over all the world, and his curses had come back to him without avail. But on this occasion at least he had a sure weapon in hand. The Pope proclaimed a Crusade against the heretics. He proclaimed throughout Europe that whoever undertook this holy enterprise it should be counted to him as if he had fought for Jerusalem: all the indulgences, blessings, hopes for heaven and exemptions for earth, which had been promised to those who were to deliver the Holy Sepulchre, were equally bestowed on those who went no further than the south of France, one of the richest districts in Christendom, where fair lands and noble castles were to be had for the conquest without risking a stormy voyage or a dangerous climate. The goods of unrepentant heretics were confiscated, and every one was free to help himself as if they had been Turks and infidels. In none of his undertakings was the Pope so hotly in earnest. There is something of the shrillness of a man who has found himself impotent in many undertakings in the passion which Innocent throws into this. “Rise, soldier of Christ!” he cries to the king of France; “up, most Christian prince! The groans of the Church rise to your ears, the blood of the just cries out: up, then, and judge my cause: gird on your sword; think of the unity of the cross and the altar, that unity taught us by Moses, by Peter, by all the fathers. Let not the bark of the Church make shipwreck. Up, for her help! Strike strongly against the heretics, who are more dangerous than the Saracens!”
The appeal came to a host of eager ears. Many good and true men were no doubt among the army which gathered upon the gentle hill of Hyères in the blazing midsummer of the year 1209, cross on breast and sword in hand, sworn to exterminate heresy, and bring back the country to the sway of the true religion; but an overwhelming number besides, who were hungry for booty however obtained, and eager to win advancement for themselves, filled up the ranks. Such motives were not absent even from the bosom of Simon de Montfort, their general, otherwise a good man and true. The sovereignty of Toulouse glimmered before him over seas of blood, which was as the blood of the Saracen, no better, though it flowed in the veins of Frenchmen; but the Provençaux could scarcely be called Frenchmen in those early days. They were no more beloved of their northern neighbours than the English were by the Scots, and the expedition against them was as much justified by distinctions of race as was the conflict of Bannockburn.
The chapter of history that followed we would fain on all sides obliterate, if we could, from the records of humanity, and we doubt not that the strictest Catholic as much as the most indignant Protestant would share this wish; but that, alas, cannot be done. And no such feeling was in any mind of the time. The remedy was not thought to be too terrible for the disease, for centuries after: and the most Christian souls rejoiced in the victories of the Crusade, the towns destroyed, the nests of heretics broken up. The very heretics themselves, who suffered fiercely and made reprisals when they could, had no doctrine of toleration among themselves, and would have extirpated a wicked hierarchy, and put down the mass with a high hand, as four hundred years later their more enlightened successors did, when the power came to them. There are many shuddering spectators who now try to represent to themselves that Innocent so far off was but half, or not at all, acquainted with the atrocities committed in his name; that his legates over-stepped their authority, as frequently happened, and were carried away by the excitement of carnage and the terrible impulse of destruction common to wild beasts and men when that fatal passion is aroused; and that his generals soon converted their Crusade, as Crusades more or less were converted everywhere, into a raid of fierce acquisition, a war for booty and personal enrichment. And all this is true for as much as it is worth in reducing the guilt of Innocent; but that is not much, for he was a man very well acquainted with human nature, and knew that such things must be.
As for Simon de Montfort and his noble companions, they were not, much less were the men-at-arms under their orders, superior to all that noble chivalry of France which had started from Venice with so fine a purpose, but had been drawn aside to crush and rob Constantinople on their way, only some seven years before. Baldwin of Flanders became Emperor of the great eastern city in 1204. Simon de Montfort named himself Count de Toulouse in 1215. Both had been sent forth with the Pope’s blessing on quite a different mission, both had succumbed to the temptation of their own aggrandisement. But of the two, at the end Simon was the more faithful. If he committed or permitted to be committed the most abominable cruelties, he nevertheless did stamp out heresy. Provence regained her gaiety, her courts of love, her gift of song. Innocent, for once in his life, with all the dreadful drawbacks accompanying it, was successful in the object for which he had striven.
It is a dreadful thing to have to say of the most powerful of Popes, in whose time the Papacy, we are told, reached its highest climax of power in the affairs of men: he was successful once: in devastating a country and slaughtering by thousands its inhabitants in the name of God and the Church. All his attempts to set right the affairs of the world failed. He neither nominated an emperor, nor saved a servile king from ruin, nor struck a generous blow for that object of the enthusiasm of his age, the deliverance of Jerusalem. All of these he attempted with the utmost strain and effort of his powers, and many more, but failed. Impossible to say that it was not truth and justice which he set before him at all times; he was an honest man and loved not bloodshed; he had a great intelligence, and there is no proof that his heart was cold or his sympathies dull. But his career, which is so often quoted as an example of the supremacy of the Papacy, seems to us the greatest and most perfect demonstration that such a supremacy was impossible. Could it have been done, Innocent would have done it; but it could not be done, and in the plenitude of his power he failed over and over again. What credit he might have had in promoting Otho to the empire fades away when we find that it was the accident of Philip’s death and not the support of the Pope that did it. In England his assumed suzerainty was a farce, and all his efforts ineffectual to move one way or the other the destinies of the nation. At Constantinople his prayers and commands and entreaties had about as much power as the outcries of a woman upon his own special envoys and soldiers. In France he had one brief triumph indeed, and broke a poor woman’s heart, a thing which is accomplished every day by much easier methods; though his action then was the only moral triumph of his reign, being at least in the cause of the weak against the strong. And he filled Provence with blood and misery, and if he crushed heresy, crushed along with it that noble and beautiful country, and its royal house, and its liberties. Did he ever feel the contrast between his attempts and his successes? Was he sore at heart with the long and terrible failure of his efforts? or was he comforted by such small consolations as fell to him, the final vindication of Ingelburga, the fictitious submission of the Greek Church, the murderous extinction of heresy? Was it worth while for a great man to have endured and struggled, to have lived sleepless, restless, ever vigilant, watching every corner of the earth, keeping up a thousand espionages and secret intelligences all for this, and nothing more?
He was the greatest of the Popes and attained the climax of papal power. He carried out the principles which Hildebrand had established, and asserted to their fullest all the claims which that great Pontiff, also a deeply disappointed man, had made. Gregory and Innocent are the two most prominent names in the lists of the Papacy; they are the greatest generals of that army which, in its way, is an army invincible, against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. Let us hope that the merciful illusions which keep human nature going prevented them from seeing how little all their great claims had come to. Gregory indeed, dying sad and in exile, felt it more or less, but was able to set it down to the wickedness of the world in which truth and justice did not reign. And there is a profound sadness in the last discourse of Innocent; but perhaps they were neither of them aware what a deep stamp of failure remains, visible for all the world to see, upon those great undertakings of theirs which were not for the Church but for the world. God had not made them judges and dividers among men, though they believed so to the bottom of their hearts.
It is perhaps overbold in a writer without authority to set forth an individual opinion in the face of much more powerful judgments. But this book pretends to nothing except, so far as it is possible to form it, a glance of individual opinion and impression in respect to matters which are otherwise too great for any but the most learned and weighty historian. The statement of Dean Milman that “He (Innocent) succeeded in imposing an Emperor on Germany” appears to us quite inconsistent with the facts of the case. But we would not for a moment pretend that Milman does not know a hundred times better than the present writer, whose rapid glance at the exterior aspects of history will naturally go for what it is worth and no more. The aspect of a pageant however to one who watches it go by from a window, is sometimes an entertaining variety upon its fullest authoritative description.
It will be understood that we have no idea of representing the reign of these great Popes as without power in many other matters. They strengthened greatly the authority and control exercised by the Holy See over its special and legitimate empire, the Church. They drew to the court of Rome so many appeals and references of disputed cases in law and in morals as to shed an increased influence over the world like an unseen irrigation swelling through all the roots and veins of Christendom. They even gave so much additional prestige and importance to Church dignitaries as to increase the power which the great Prelates often exercised against themselves. But the highest pretensions of the Successors of Peter, the Vicars of God, to be judges and arbiters of the world, setters up and pullers down of thrones, came to no fulfilment. The Popes were flattered by appeals, by mock submissions on the weaker side, even by petitions for the ever ready interference which they seem to have attempted in good faith, always believing in their own authority. But in the end their decisions and decrees in Imperial questions were swept away like chaff before the strong wind of secular power and policy, and history cannot point to one important revolution in the affairs of the world or any separate kingdom made by their unaided power.
The last great act of Innocent’s life was the council held in the year 1215 in Rome, known as the fourth Lateran Council. It was perhaps the greatest council that had ever been held there, not only because of the large number of ecclesiastics present, but because for the first time East and West sat together, the Patriarch of Constantinople (or rather two patriarchs, for the election was contested) taking their place in it, in subordination to the Pope, as if the great schism had never been. From all the corners of the earth came the bishops and archbishops, the not less important abbots, prelates who were nobles as well as priests, counting among them the greatest lords in their respective districts as well as the greatest ecclesiastics. Innocent himself was a man of fifty-five, of most temperate life, vigorous in mind and body, likely to survive for years, and to do better than he had ever yet done — and he was so far triumphant for the moment that all the kings of Christendom had envoys at this council, and everything united to make it magnificent and important. Why he should have taken for his text the ominous words he chose when addressing that great and splendid assembly in his own special church and temple, surrounded with all the emblems of power and supremacy, it is impossible to tell; and one can imagine the thrill of strange awe and astonishment which must have run through that vast synod, when the Pope rose, and from his regal chair pronounced these words, first uttered in the depths of the mysterious passion and anguish of the greatest sufferer on earth. “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer.” What was it that Innocent anticipated or feared? There was no suffering before him that any one knew, no trouble that could reach the chief of Christendom, heavy-hearted and depressed, amid all his guards, spiritual and temporal, as he may have been. What could they think, all those great prelates looking, no doubt, often askance at each other, brethren in the church, but enemies at home? Nor were the first words of his discourse less solemn.
“As to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain, I should
not refuse to drink the cup of suffering, were it presented
to me, for the defence of the Catholic Church, for the
deliverance of the Holy Land, or for the freedom of the
Church, even although my desire had been to live in the
flesh until the work that has been begun should be
accomplished. Notwithstanding not my will, but the will of
God be done! This is why I say, ‘With desire I have desired
to eat this passover with you before I suffer.’”
These words sound in our ears as if the preacher who uttered them was on the verge, if not of martyrdom, at least of death and the premature end of his work. And so he was: although there was as yet no sign in heaven or earth, or so far as appears in his own consciousness, that this end was near.
The discourse which followed was remarkable in its way, the way of the schoolmen and dialecticians so far as its form went. He began by explaining the word Passover, which in Hebrew he said meant passage — in which sense of the word he declared himself to desire to celebrate a triple Passover, corporal, spiritual, and eternal, with the Church around him.
“A corporal Passover, the passage from one place to another to deliver Jerusalem oppressed: a spiritual Passover, a passage from one situation to another for the sanctification of the universal Church; an eternal Passover, a passage from one life to another, to eternal glory.” For the first, the deliverance of the Holy Land and the Holy Sepulchre, after a solemn description of the miseries of Jerusalem enslaved, he declares that he places himself in the hands of the brethren.
“There can be no doubt that it ought to be the first object
of the Church. What ought we now to do, dear brethren? I
place myself in your hands. I open my heart entirely to
you, I desire your advice. I am ready, if it seems good to
you, to go forth on a personal mission to all the kings,
princes, and peoples, or even to the Holy Land — and if I
can to awaken them all with a strong voice that they may
arise to fight the battle of the Lord, to avenge the insult
done to Jesus Christ, who has been expelled by reason of
our sins from the country and dwelling which He bought with
His blood, and in which He accomplished all things
necessary for our salvation. We, the priests of the Lord,
ought to attach a special importance to the redemption of
the Holy Land by our blood and our wealth; no one should
draw back from such a great work. In former times the Lord
seeing a similar humiliation of Israel saved it by means of
the priests; for he delivered Jerusalem and the Temple from
the infidels by Matthias the son of the priest Maccabæus.”
He goes on to describe the spiritual passage by the singular emblem to be found in the prophecies of Ezekiel, of the man clothed in white linen who inscribed a Tau upon the foreheads of all those who mourned over the iniquities committed around them, the profanations of the temple and the universal idol worship — while the executors of God’s will went after him, to slay the rest. There could be no doubt of the application of this image. It had already been seen in full fulfilment in the streets of Beziers, Carcassone, and Toulouse, and many of those present had taken part in the carnage. It is true that the rumour went that the men marked with a mark had not even been looked for, and one of the wonderful sayings which seem to spring up somehow in the air, at great moments, had been fathered upon a legate — Tuez les tous. Dieu reconnaîtra les siens — a phrase which, like the “Up, Guards, and at them!” of Waterloo, is said to have no historical foundation whatever. Innocent was, however, clear not only that every good Catholic should be marked with the Tau — but that the armed men whom he identifies with the priests, his own great army, seated there round him, men who had already seen the blood flow and the flames arise, should strike and spare not.
“You are commanded then to go through the city; obey him
who is your supreme Pontiff, as your guide and your
master — and strike by interdict, by suspension, by
excommunication, by deprivation, according to the weight of
the fault. But do no harm to those who bear the mark, for
the Lord says: ‘Hurt not the earth, neither the sea,
neither the trees till we have sealed on their foreheads
the servants of God.’ It is said in other places, ‘Let your
eye spare no man, and let there be no acceptance of persons
among you,’ and in another passage, ‘Strike in order to
heal, kill in order to give life.’”
These were the Pope’s sentiments, and they were those of his age; how many centuries it took to modify them we are all aware; four hundred years at least, to moderate the practical ardour of persecution — for the theory never dies. But there is at the same time something savage in the fervour of such an address to all these men of peace. It is perhaps a slight modification that like Ezekiel it is the priests themselves, the dwellers in the Temple, who fill it with false gods and abominations, that he specially threatens. There were, however, so far as appears, few priests among the slaughtered townsfolk of those unhappy cities of Provence.
The Council responded to the uncompromising directions of their head by placing among the laws of the Church many stringent ordinances against heretics; their goods were to be confiscated, they were to be turned out of their houses and possessions; every prince who refused to act against them was to be excommunicated, his people freed from their vow of allegiance. If any one ventured to preach without the permission of the Pope he also was subject to excommunication. A great many laws for the better regulation of the Church itself followed, for Innocent had always acknowledged the fact that the worldliness of the Church, and the failure of the clergy to maintain a high ideal of Christian life, was the great cause of heresy. The Council was also very distinct in refusing temporal authority to the priests. The clergy had their sphere and laymen theirs; those spheres were separate, they were inviolable each by the other. It is true that this principle was established chiefly with the intention of freeing the clergy from the necessity of answering before civil tribunals; but logically it cuts both ways. The Jews, to whom Innocent had been just and even merciful, were also dealt with and placed under new and stringent disabilities, chiefly on account, it seems, of the extortions they practised on needy Crusaders, eager at any price to procure advances for their equipment. Various doctrinal points were also decided, as well as many questions of rank and precedence in the hierarchy, and the establishment of the two new monastic orders of St. Francis and of St. Dominic. It is needless to add a list of who was excommunicated and who censured throughout the world. Among the former were the barons of Magna Charta and Louis of France, the son of Philip Augustus, who had gone to England on their call and to their relief, a movement set on foot by Innocent himself before the submission of King John. As usual, neither of them took any notice of the anathema, though other combinations shortly arose which broke their alliance.
The great event of the Council, however, was the appeal of the forfeited lords of Provence against the leaders of the late Crusade. Raymond of Toulouse, accompanied by the Counts of Foix and of Comminges, appeared before the Pontiff and the high court of the Church to make their plaint against Simon de Montfort, who had deprived all three of their lands and sovereignties. A great recrimination arose between the two sides, both so strongly represented. The dethroned princes accused their conquerors with all the vehemence of men wronged and robbed; and such a bloodstained prelate as Bishop Fulk of Toulouse was put forth as the advocate on the other side. “You are the cause of the death of a multitude of Catholic soldiers,” cried the bishop, “six thousand of whom were killed at Montjoye alone.” “Nay, rather,” replied the Comte de Foix, “it is by your fault that Toulouse was sacked and 10,000 of the inhabitants slain.” Such pleas are strange in any court of justice; they were altogether new in a Council of the Church. The princes themselves, who thus laid their wrongs before the Pope, were not proved to be heretics, or if they had ever wavered in the faith were now quite ready to obey; and Innocent himself was forced to allow that: “Since the Counts and their companions have promised at all times to submit to the Church, they cannot without injustice be despoiled of their principalities.” But the utterance, it may well be understood, was weak, and choked by the impossibility of denouncing Simon de Montfort, the leader of a Crusade set on foot by the Church, the Captain of the Christian army. It might be that he had exceeded his commission, that the legates had misunderstood their instructions, and that all the leaders, both secular and spiritual, had been carried away by the horrible excitement and passion of bloodshed: but yet it was impossible to disown the Captain who had taken up this enterprise as a true son of the Church, although he had ended in the spirit (not unusual among sons of the Church) of an insatiable raider and conqueror. The love of gain had warped the noble aims even of the first Crusade: what wonder that it became a fiery thirst in the invaders of lands so rich and tempting as those of the fertile and sunny Provence. And the Pope could not pronounce against his own champion. He would fain have preserved Raymond of Toulouse and Simon de Montfort too — but that was impossible. And the Council decreed by a great majority that Raymond had been justly deprived of his lands, and that Simon, the new Count, was their rightful possessor. The defender of Innocent can only say that the Pope yielded to and sanctioned this judgment in order that the bishops of France might not be alienated and rendered indifferent to the great Crusade upon which his heart was set, which he would fain have led himself had Providence permitted it so to be.
There is a most curious postscript to this bloody and terrible history. Young Raymond of Toulouse, whose fate seemed a sad one even to the members of the Council who finally confirmed his deprivation, attracted the special regard — it is not said how, probably by some youthful grace of simplicity or gallant mien — of Innocent, who bade him take heart, and promised to give him certain lands that he might still live as a prince. “If another council should be held,” said the Pope with a curious casuistry, “the pleas against Montfort may be listened to.” “Holy Father,” said the youth, “bear me no malice if I can win back again my principalities from the Count de Montfort, or from those others who hold them.” “Whatever thou dost,” said the Pope piously, “may God give thee grace to begin it well, and to finish it still better.” Innocent is scarcely a man to tolerate a smile. We dare not even imagine a touch of humour in that austere countenance; but the pious hope that this fair youth might perhaps overcome his conqueror, who was the very champion and captain of the army of the Lord as directed by the Pope, is remarkable indeed.
The great event of the Council was over, the rumour of the new Crusade which the Pope desired to head himself, and for which in the meantime he was moving heaven and earth, began to stir Europe. If, perhaps, he had accomplished little hitherto of all that he had hoped, here remained a great thing which Innocent might still accomplish. He set out on a tour through the great Italian towns to rouse their enthusiasm, and, if possible, induce them, in the first place, to sacrifice their mutual animosities, and then to supply the necessary ships, and help with the necessary money for the great undertaking. The first check was received from Pisa, which would do whatever the Pope wished except forego its hatred against Genoa or give up its revenge. Innocent was in Perugia, on his way towards the north, when this news arrived to vex him: but it was not unexpected, nor was there anything in it to overwhelm his spirit. It was July, and he was safer and better on that hillside than he would have been in his house at the Lateran in the heats of summer: and an attack of fever at that season is a simple matter, which the ordinary Roman anticipates without any particular alarm. He had, we are told, a great love for oranges, and continued to eat them, notwithstanding his illness, though it is difficult to imagine what harm the oranges could do. However, the hour was come which Innocent had perhaps dimly foreseen when he rose up among all his bishops and princes in the great Lateran church, and, knowing nothing, gave forth from his high presiding chair the dying words of our Lord, “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer.” One wonders if his text came back to him, if he asked himself in his heart why his lips should have uttered those fateful words unawares, and if the bitterness of that withdrawal, while still full of force and life, from all the hopes and projects to which he had set his hand, was heavy upon him? He had proclaimed them in the hush and breathless silence of that splendid crowd in the ruddy days of the late autumn, St. Martin’s festival at Rome: and the year had not gone its round when, in the summer weather at Perugia, he “suffered” — as he had — yet had not, perhaps foreseen.
Thus ended a life of great effort and power, a life of disappointment and failure, full of toil, full of ambition, the highest aims, and the most consistent purpose — but ending in nothing, fulfilling no lofty aim, and, except in the horrible episode of bloodshed and destruction from which his name can never be dissociated, accomplishing no change in the world which he had attempted, in every quarter, to transform or to renew. Never was so much attempted with so little result. He claimed the power to bind and loose, to set up and to pull down, to decide every disputed cause and settle every controversy. But he succeeded in doing only one good deed, which was to force the king of France to retain an unloved wife, and one ill one, to print the name of Holy Church in blood across a ruined province, to the profit of many bloody partisans, but never to his own, nor to any cause which could be considered that of justice or truth. This, people say, was the age of history in which the power of the Church was highest, and Innocent was its strongest ruler; but this was all which, with his great powers, his unyielding character and all the forces at his command, he was able to achieve. He was in his way a great man, and his purpose was never ignoble; but this was all: and history does not contain a sadder page than that which records one of the greatest of all the pontificates, and the strongest Pope that history has known.
During the whole of Innocent’s Popedom he had been more or less at war with his citizens notwithstanding his success at first. Rome murmured round him never content, occasionally bursting out into fits of rage, which, if not absolute revolt, were so near it as to suggest the withdrawal of the Pope to his native place Anagni, or some other quiet residence, till the tumult calmed down. The greatest of these commotions occurred on the acquisition of certain properties in Rome, by the unpopular way of foreclosure on mortgages, by the Pope’s brother Richard, against whom no doubt some story of usury or oppression was brought forth, either real or invented, to awaken the popular emotion: and in this case Innocent’s withdrawal had very much the character of an escape. The Papa-Re was certainly not a popular institution in the thirteenth century. This same brother Richard had many gifts bestowed upon him to the great anger and suspicion of the people, and it was he who built, with money given him, it is said, from “the treasury of the Church,” the great Torre dei Conti, which for many generations stood strong and sullen near the Baths of Titus, and within easy reach of the Lateran, “for the defence of the family,” a defence for which it was not always adequate. Innocent afterwards granted a valuable fief in the Romagna to his brother, and he was generally far from unmindful of his kindred. All that his warmest defenders can say for him indeed in this respect is that he made up for his devotion to the interests of the Conti by great liberality towards Rome. On one occasion of distress and famine he fed eight thousand people daily, and at all times the poor had a right to the remnants left from his own table — which however was not perhaps any great thing as his living was of the simplest.
What was still more important, he built or perhaps rather rebuilt and enlarged, the great hospital, still one of the greatest charitable institutions of the world, of the Santo Spirito, which had been first founded several centuries before by the English king Ina for the pilgrims of his country. The Ecclesia in Saxia, probably forsaken in these days when England had become Norman, formed the germ of the great building, afterwards enlarged by various succeeding Popes. It is said now to have 1,600 beds, and to be capable, on an emergency, of accommodating almost double that number of patients, and is, or was, a sort of providence for the poor population of Rome. It was Innocent also who began the construction, or rather reconstruction, for in that case too there was an ancient building, of the Vatican, now the seat and title of the papal court — thinking it expedient that there should be a house capable of receiving the Popes near the church of St. Peter and St. Paul the tomb and shrine of the Apostles. It is not supposed that the present building retains any of the work of that early time, but Innocent must have superintended both these great edifices, and in this way, as also by many churches which he built or rebuilt, and some which he decorated with paintings and architectural ornament, he had his part in the reconstruction and embellishment of that mediæval Rome which after long decay and much neglect, and the wholesale robbery of the very stones of the older city, was already beginning to lift up its head out of the ashes of antiquity.
Thus if he took with one hand — not dishonestly, in the interest of his family, appropriating fiefs and favours which probably could not have been better bestowed, for the safety at least of the reigning Pope — he gave liberally and intelligently with the other, consulting the needs of the people, and studying their best interests. Yet he would not seem ever to have been popular. His spirit probably lacked the bonhomie which conciliates the crowd: though we are told that he loved public celebrations, and did not frown upon private gaiety. His heart, it is evident, was touched for young Raymond of Toulouse, whom he was instrumental in despoiling of his lands, but whom he blessed in his effort to despoil in his turn the orthodox and righteous spoiler. He was neither unkind, nor niggardly, nor luxurious. “The glory of his actions filled the great city and the whole world,” said his epitaph. At least he had the credit of being the greatest of all the Popes, and the one under whom, as is universally allowed, the papal power attained its climax. The reader must judge how far this climax of power justified what has been said.