THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES

VI

THE PAPAL POLICY

 

WE shall fail to appreciate the inception of the crusades if we overlook the influence of the papal policy in the middle ages. These movements of Europe against Asia, being under the direct patronage of the popes, facilitated the plans of Rome to consolidate and universalize the ecclesiastical empire. To understand this policy we must recall the condition of the church in its relation to popular life and the secular powers.

We have referred to the fact that the year 1000 had been looked forward to as that which should mark the end of the world. So common was the expectation of this termination of human affairs that many charters, which have been preserved from this period, begin with the words: "As the world is now drawing to its close." When, however, the fatal clay passed without any perceptible shock to the universe, the popular credulity added the thirty-three years of the life of our Lord to the calculation, and prolonged the gruesome foreboding. But if the chronological interpretation of the prophecy of the Book of Revelation was a mistaken one, there was not wanting an apparent fulfillment of the descriptive prediction: "Satan shall be loosed out of his prison." The falsity and viciousness of men certainly took on fiendish proportions.

The worst feature of the general demoralization was that the millennial fear had driven all sorts of men into church orders. The priesthood and monasteries were crowded with wretched characters, whose imagined immunity in their sacred refuges gave license to their carnal vices. The clergy were no longer the shepherds, but the bell-wethers of the wayward flock. Priests lived in open concubinage. When Hildebrand, previous to his elevation to the Papacy, took charge of the monastery of St. Paul in Rome, his first work was to drive out the cattle that were stabled in the basilica, and the prostitutes who served the tables of the monks. Courtesans reigned even in the palaces of the popes with more effrontery than in the courts of the secular princes. The offspring of such creatures as the infamous Theodora, and of her daughters Theodora and Marozia, had, in the tenth century, purchased the tiara with their vices. In those days the papal staff was wrenched by violence from the hands that held it with more frequency than the old Roman scepter had been stolen in the worst days of the empire. It may well be credited that men began to pray again to pagan deities in sheer despondency under the darkness which veiled the Christian  truth. The surviving religious sentiment was voiced in the solemn utter­ance of the Council of Rheims, which declared that the church was "ruled by monsters of iniquity, want­ing in all culture, whether sacred or profane".

If the tenth century closed with a gleam of hope in the elevation of Gregory V (996-999) and Sylvester II (999-1003) it was quickly remembered that the learning of the latter had been acquired among the Saracens; and his biographer attributed his attainments to magic and undue familiarity with the fiends in hell.

In the early part of the eleventh century the papal chair was filled with the nominees of politicians, and from 1033 to 1045 disgraced by Benedict IX, who at the age of twelve was selected to pose as the Vicegerent of God. The lowest vices and caprices of unconscionable youth were enthroned in the place that was most sacred in the thoughts of men. One of his successors, Victor III (1086-87), said of Benedict that he led a life so shameful, so foul and execrable, that it made one shudder to describe it. A man of such groveling appetites naturally wearied with even the slight usages of decency which had come to be regarded as necessary in the papal palace; and after twelve years of irksome attempt to support its lessened dignity, he sold his tiara to Gregory VI. An unknown writer, about the middle of the eleventh century, attempting a review of the passing age, exclaimed: "Everything is degenerate and all is lost. Faith has disappeared. The world has grown old and must soon cease altogether."

As the debasement of the church could go no lower, a reaction was natural and inevitable, if virtue was not altogether decayed at the roots. The sentiment of human decency reasserted itself, and, since there was no power at Rome to inaugurate reform, an appeal was made to the German emperor. Henry III, in response to the call, deposed by force three rival claimants to the papal throne, and secured the ascendency of a line of German popes. It was not without the suspicion of poison that two of them died after brief power: Clement II within the year, and Damasus II in twenty-three days.

With Leo IX (1049) came a better era. The year 1033, the ultimate date set by the prophecy-mongers for the end of the world, being clearly past, and men becoming again possessed of hope in the continuance of mundane affairs, the best spirits dared to labor for the renovation of society, that the earth thus saved as by fire might become indeed "a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."

From this time the commanding genius and pure purpose of Hildebrand guided, if he did not select, the occupants of the seat of St. Peter, until, in 1073, the great counselor himself assumed the sacred scepter. History, while it severely condemns the methods by which Hildebrand sought to attain his ends, credits him with rigid honesty and devotion to what he believed to be the will of Heaven. While it writes into his epitaph the charge of most inordinate ambition, it does not erase from it the record of his utterance as he lay dying, a fugitive at Salerno: "I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile."

The religious degradation of Christendom afflicted the soul of this truly great man; but whence could come reform? The age was too far gone in its demoralization to wait for recuperation through the slow process of education. Society could not endure another generation of its own putridity. The secular powers were utterly impotent to cope with the gigantic evils that were abroad in every land. Even had they possessed the disposition to champion the virtues, such sovereigns as the King of France, the Emperor of Germany, the new Norman King of England, were altogether engrossed in holding their precarious crowns, surrounded as they were by a multitude of feudal lords, some of whom could collect in their own names a larger force than that which would rise to defend the throne.

To Hildebrand but one course seemed open, a desperate one, whose hazard showed the audacity of the genius that conceived it. It was nothing less than to declare the Papacy a world monarchy, and to force universal reform by the combined power of the secular and spiritual scepter held in his own hand. In his bull against the Emperor Henry IV he used these words: "Come now, I pray thee, O most holy Father, and ye princes [St. Peter and St. Paul], that all the world may know that if ye are able to bind and loose in heaven, ye are able on earth to take away, or to give to each according to his merits, empires, kingdoms, duchies, marquisates, counties, and the possessions of all men ... If ye judge in spiritual affairs, how great must be your power in secular! and if ye are to judge angels, who rule over proud princes, what may ye not do to these their servants! Let kings, then, and all the princes of the world learn what ye are and how great is your power, and fear to treat with disrespect the mandates of the church."

To practicalize this enormous claim, the Pope made two demands, which threw Europe into a state of turmoil.

(1) He ordered the renunciation of all investitures of religious office by secular potentates. The clergy held of the empire cities, duchies, entire provinces, rights of levying taxes, coinage, etc., amounting to one half of all property. The sees thus held Hildebrand declared to be vacated until their occupants should again receive them from his hand under pledge of absolute obedience to the papal, as opposed to the imperial, authority. By this stroke the Pope would gather to himself the practical control of all countries.

(2) Hildebrand forbade the marriage of the clergy—a custom widespread at the time—and commanded those who had entered into matrimony, however innocently and legally, to forsake their wives, as having been but concubines, and their children, since logically they were but bastards. By enforcing the celibacy of the clergy, he would have at his call an army of men without domestic ties, care, or encumbrance, and, so far as possible to human nature, divested of individuality, and thus the pliant agents of his single will.

The audacity of Hildebrand's scheme will be noted by comparing it with the attitude of the most devoted adherents to the papal authority previous to his time.

The capitularies of Charlemagne contain many rules for the regulation of religious duties. The emperor himself (794) presided at the Synod of Frankfort, though a papal legate was in attendance. While he brought the church all possible help as an ally, and yielded to it all obedience as a private Christian, he never allowed his imperial authority to be under so much as the shadow of control by the papal. He suffered but one religion in his domains, that which had the Pope for its chief administrator; but he held with equal strenuousness that the emperor was the vicar of God in things temporal.

From 964 to 1055 the popes had been the direct nominees of the emperor. In 1059 the papal election devolved for the first time upon the conclave of cardinals; but the Lateran Council decreed that the imperial confirmation must follow. Though in 1061 Alexander II was chosen without imperial sanction, yet in 1073 Hildebrand himself, becoming Pope as Gregory VII, did not venture to discharge the duties of the office without first asking and obtaining the emperor's assent.

But this outward deference to the secular power was only that he might grasp more securely the weapon with which he would beat that power to pieces. When the Emperor Henry IV resented the sweeping claim of the Pope, Hildebrand launched against him all the terrors of the pontifical throne. His bull reads as follows: "Henry and all of his adherents I excommunicate and bind in the fetters of anathema; on the part of almighty God, I interdict him from the government of all Germany and Italy; I deprive him of all royal power and dignity; I prohibit every Christian from rendering him obedience as king; I absolve all who have sworn or shall swear allegiance to his sovereignty from their oaths".

This policy of the Papacy to make itself the world monarchy had a direct bearing upon the crusades and facilitated the enterprise. The astute mind of Hildebrand saw that a movement which should combine the Catholics of all countries in Europe under his command would immensely augment his prestige as their great overlord. During his pontificate there opportunely arrived at Rome messengers from the Greek emperor at Constantinople, beseeching the aid of Western Christendom in expelling the Turks, who were menacing the capital of the East. Hildebrand, consistently with his policy, prescribed as the condition of such aid the recognition on the part of the Greek Church of the headship of the Roman pontiff. But in this demand he overshot the mark, while at the same time the apathy of the Latin Christians towards their Greek brethren, and his own controversy with the German emperor, left him no opportunity to launch the movement. It was left to Urban II, his second successor in the pontificate, to undertake the great adventure. As Dean Milman remarks: "No event could be more favorable or more opportune for the advancement of the great papal object of ambition, the acknowledged supremacy over Latin Christendom, or for the elevation of Urban himself over the rival Pope [Guibert] and the temporal sovereign, his enemies."