[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]certain. Thrice in two hundred years the cry for freedom was raised against the Holy Roman Empire; and
three prolonged conflicts ended in the discomfiture of the most resolute and resourceful statesmen who ever
held that office-Henry IV (1056-1105), Henry V (1106-1125), Frederic Barbarossa (1152-1190), and
Frederic II (1212-1250). In the first of these great conflicts the question at issue was the reformation of the
national clergy and their emancipation from secular authority. Henry IV paid for his assertion of prerogative
and custom, both by the ignominious though illusory surrender at Canossa (1077), and by the unparalleled
humiliations of his latter days, when he was compelled, as the prisoner of his own son, not only to abdicate
but also to sign a confession of infamous offences against religion and morality. Henry V, reviving the plans
of the father whom he had betrayed and entrapped, was reduced through very weariness to conclude the
Concordat of worms (1122) a renunciation which only ended in something less than absolute defeat for the
Empire, because the imperial concessions were interpreted with more regard to the letter than the spirit. In the
second struggle the immediate issue was the freedom of papal elections, the ultimate question whether Pope
or Emperor should shape the Church's policy; and Frederic Barbarossa was compelled, after a schism of
seventeen years' duration to surrender claims which dated from the time of Charles the Great, and to make
peace with Alexander III, whom he had sworn that he would never recognise (Treaty of Anagni, 1176).
Henry VI, the son of Barbarossa, when he joined the kingdom of Sicily to the Empire through his marriage
with Constance, the heiress of the Norman throne, sowed the seed of a new conflict, and bequeathed to
Frederic II the perilous ideal of an Italy united under a Hohenstauffen despotism. Ecclesiastical freedom now
became a euphemism for the preservation of the temporal power, and for the project of a federal Italy,
owning allegiance to a papal suzerain. Frederic II, who came nearer to success in a more far-reaching policy
than any of his predecessors, was worn out by the steady alternation of successes with reverses, and left his
sons and grandson to reap the bitter harvest of a failure which he had barely realised.
The moral issue dwindles to smaller proportions in each successive stage of this titanic duel between the
titular representatives of State and Church; and from first to last the Papacy depended largely upon allies who
were pursuing their own objects in the Church's name. The German princes, the Normans of Lower Italy and
Sicily, the Lombard communes, all contributed in varying degrees to the defeat of the Henries and the
Frederics. The German princes brought Henry IV to his knees at two critical moments in the reign; the
majority of them held obstinately aloof from the Italian wars of Barbarossa; and Frederic II, who
endeavoured to buy their neutrality by extravagant concessions, found himself confronted by German rebels
and pretenders towards the close of his career (1246-1250), when the Italian situation appeared to be
changing in his favour. The Normans intervened more than once in the Wars of Investitures to shelter a
fugitive Pope or rescue Rome from German armies; the Lombards, as we shall relate elsewhere, were the
chief barrier between Rome and Frederic Barbarossa, between Frederic II and Germany. Charles of Anjou
was the latest and most efficient champion of the papal cause; and he lives in history as the forerunner of the
conscienceless and shameless statesmanship of the Renaissance epoch. And yet, when we have allowed for
the utility of these alliances, the question remains why radical communes, rebellious feudatories, and
adventurers in search of kingdoms, found it worth their while to enlist in the service of the Church, and to
VI. THE HILDEBRANDINE CHURCH 35
Medieval Europe
endure the restrictions which such a service inevitably entailed. The true strength of the Church lay in her
moral influence. It was a handful, even among the clergy, who devoted themselves heart and soul to the ideal
of society which she set up. Still her ideal was in possession of the field; it might be subjected to a negative
and sceptical criticism by an isolated philosopher, by a heretical sect, or by an orthodox layman smarting
under priestly arrogance; but when the forces of the Church were mobilised, the indifferent majority stood
aside and shrugged their shoulders. The way of Rome might not be the way of Christ; but if the Apostolic
misinterpreted the lessons of Scripture and tradition, from whom could a better rule of life be learned? An
erring Church was better than no Church at all. In the thirteenth century, when papal extortions were a subject
of complaint in every European state, Frederic II put himself forward as the champion of the common
interest, and appealed from the Pope to the bar of public opinion. It was his turn today, he said with perfect
truth; the turn of kings and princes would come when the Emperor was overthrown. His eloquence made
some impression; but his fellow-sovereigns could not or would not prevent the Pope from taxing their clergy
and recruiting their subjects for the Holy War against the secular chief of Christendom, the head and front of
whose offending was that he opposed the interests of the State to the so-called rights of the Church.
It is no mere accident that the heyday of sacerdotal pretensions coincided with the golden age of the religious
orders; that the Hildebrandine policy took shape when the Cluniac movement was overflowing the borders of
France into all the adjacent countries; that Alexander III was a younger contemporary of St. Bernard, and that
the death-grapple between Empire and Papacy followed hard upon the foundation of the mendicant
fraternities by St. Francis and St. Dominic. The monks and the friars were the militia of the Church. Not that
the medieval orders devoted themselves to a political propaganda with the zeal and system of the Jesuits in
the sixteenth century. The serviceswhich the Cluniacs and the Cistercians, the Dominicans and the
Franciscans, rendered to the militant Papacy were more impalpable and indirect. From time to time, it is true,
they were entrusted with important missions to raise money, to preach a crusade, to influence monarchs, to
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