Volume 2, Chapter 10

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY: ACHIEVEMENT AND PROBLEMS, 1216-1274.

Section 1: THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (3) THE EMPEROR FREDERICK II.

Section 2: THE CRUSADE OF ST. LOUIS IX, 1247-1254

Section 3: INNOCENT IV AND THE PAPAL MONARCHY

Section 4: THE END OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN: URBAN IV, CLEMENT IV AND CHARLES OF ANJOU

Section 5: THE INQUISITION

Section 6: THE TRIUMPH OF THE CATHOLIC INTELLIGENCE: ST. BONAVENTURE, ST. ALBERT THE GREAT, ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (3) THE EMPEROR FREDERICK II.

HONORIUS III, elected pope two days after the death of Innocent III, was by no means another Innocent, for all that his life had been spent in his predecessor's service. He had indeed been a personage of importance in the Roman Church for now thirty years. As the head of the Treasury he had done much to reorganise the whole financial administration, and the Liber Censuum, a kind of ecclesiastical Domesday Book, is his work. He was also the compiler of the twelfth Ordo Romanus and the author of a life of St. Gregory VII. It was this trained, careful, mild-mannered official whom Innocent had chosen to tutor the early years of the new Emperor Frederick II, and possibly this close association played a part in his election. But Honorius was now an old man, and the event was to show very speedily how mistaken were any hopes of future co-operation between pope and emperor based upon their years of intimate association. It is questionable whether even Innocent himself could have controlled his ward now arrived at man's estate.

Frederick II, twenty-two years old when Innocent's death deprived him of his guardian, and set his tutor on the papal throne, was the wonder man of his generation. A dozen strains and influences mingled in his blood: the force of his grandfather Barbarossa, the political craft of his father Henry VI, the military gift of his mother's Norman blood, a passion for learning, and all the rich amalgam of the old long-civilised state where so far he had passed his life, that Sicily which, even after one hundred and fifty years of Norman rule, was still more Oriental than European, as much Moslem as Christian. Competent, determined, crafty, and altogether without scruple, Frederick awaited only the opportune moment In this ward of the popes the independence of religion was to meet, yet once again, an enemy who could not triumph and the Church survive.

For the eleven years during which Honorius ruled, his indulgence to the young man he had fathered masked the danger. Frederick's vow to lead a crusade went unfulfilled, and the old pope contented himself with admonitions and reproaches. Seven times in ten years the farce was re-enacted, the emperor first fixing a date, and then offering his excuses which the pope, with inexhaustible faith in his goodwill, was paternally content to accept. Frederick had pledged his word -- as the condition of his election to the empire -- that he would never unite to it the crown of Sicily. Sicily he had made over to his son Henry. In 1220, however, Henry was elected King of the Romans, emperor-to-be. The pope protested, and Frederick explained that it had been done without his knowledge. He renewed all the lavish promises of restitution of the long-lost Matildine lands, took the cross once again, annulled all laws that encroached on clerical privileges, and Honorius was satisfied. Meanwhile, during these eleven years, Frederick built up a new scientific despotism in Sicily, and planned to renew his grandfather's attempt to make himself master of Lombardy (1226, Diet of Cremona). This was too much, even for Honorius, and a breach seemed imminent when, in 1227, the old pope died. In his place was elected the Cardinal Ugolino. He took the name of Gregory IX -- significantly.

Gregory IX, as the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, had been, since the election of Innocent III, one of the most prominent figures in the Curia. He was a near relative of that pope who had created him cardinal in the year of his accession (1198). He had also chosen Ugolino as one of the legates to whom was committed the delicate task of reconciling Philip of Swabia in 1207. Two years later Ugolino was once more in Germany as legate, in connection with the re-election and coronation of Otto IV. He had played a great part in the conclave of 1216, and under Honorius III he had been legate in Lombardy and Tuscany, and then charged with the preaching of the crusade of 1217-1221. He was himself no mean scholar, trained in the schools of Paris and Bologna and especially versed in the new Canon Law. His own life was mortified and exemplary. He had been a personal friend of St. Francis, whom he had advised in the composition of the definitive rule, and he had had much to do with the first approbation of the Order of Preachers also. His career reveals him as a man of exceptional strength of will, impulsive, passionate, and yet able to forbear. For the eleven years of his predecessor's pontificate he had had to look on while the enemy grew in strength and prepared the positions from which he would attack. Now, after all these years of Frederick's successful dalliance, the Church had once more for pope a man with character and strength of will.

It was in the March of 1227 that Gregory IX was elected. Frederick was now, by right of his wife, King of Jerusalem; a crusade was once more in preparation and the troops converging on Brindisi. On September 8 Frederick set sail. A few days later he had returned. The long delay that had kept the army in camp through the southern Italian summer had bred a pestilence; thousands of the troops had perished; Frederick, so it was announced, had contracted some kind of fever- hence his return. The crusade, the greater part of it, returned with him; the armies broke up, the men made their way home. Was Frederick's illness real? It is not possible to say. Certainly the pope thought it feigned, the latest, merely, of a series of ingenious devices to escape his duty as emperor and the obligations to which he had repeatedly pledged himself by oath. The crusade was at an end, and much of its army destroyed by Frederick's negligence. On September 29 the pope solemnly excommunicated him for his breach of the crusader's vow, and two weeks later in a letter to the Christian world he pointed out the repeated pledges and perjuries of Frederick since his election to the empire in 1215. The pope wrote a private letter, at the same time, to the emperor explaining that public opinion, already outraged by Frederick's plunder of sees, abbeys, and hospitals in his kingdom of Sicily, had a right to some satisfaction and that Frederick's last exploit had left him no choice but to act; nevertheless the pope was being merciful; he had not, for example, deprived Frederick of Sicily: let Frederick respond in the same spirit.

The emperor replied by a denunciation of the pope for the lack of charity with which he had stirred up hatred against him throughout the world. On March 23, 1228, Gregory issued a second excommunication because the emperor had ignored the first, and with it an interdict that was to operate in every place where Frederick halted. Furthermore, if Frederick continued in his evil course, he should be deprived of Sicily. This was on Maundy Thursday, and by the Wednesday of Easter Week the emperor's partisans in Rome had driven the pope forth.

Frederick ignored this sentence too, and renewed his preparation to accomplish that lay conquest of the East which had been the ambition of the last two Hohenstaufen Princes also. He set sail from Brindisi on June 18, 1228, with a curiously mixed force which included, besides Germans and Italians, some of his own Mohammedan subjects. In July he took possession of Cyprus as regent for the young king, who did him homage, and in September he landed at St. Jean d'Acre.

The Mohammedan world was passing through one of its periods of disunion. The Prince of Damascus and the Sultan of Egypt had been lately in conflict, and for a long time now the sultan's need had driven him to diplomatic relations with the emperor. By the time Frederick arrived the sultan's enemy was no more, and the sultan's promises of Jerusalem to Frederick worth correspondingly less. But Frederick knew the Mohammedan world as few Western princes, and it was possibly an advantage to him in the negotiations now beginning that he was known to be under the pope's ban, officially not a Christian at all, with the Patriarch of Jerusalem renewing the interdict, the military orders holding aloof from him and every Dominican and Franciscan in Palestine preaching openly against him.

The emperor's diplomacy was successful. On February 4, 1229, the treaty of Jaffa made over to him Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth with the roads thence to Acre and the villages through which they passed. On the other hand, the Mohammedans living in the ceded territory were to remain the sultan's subjects, to enjoy the full exercise of their religion, and to retain possession of the great mosque of Omar that stood upon the traditional site of the Temple. Also, Frederick pledged himself to prevent any attack from the West for ten years. It was for Frederick a diplomatic victory of the first order. On the other hand, the old crusade principle of restoring the one-time Christian lands to Christian rule was abandoned entirely. Catholicism, under this new arrangement, no longer aspired to drive out the infidel.

Frederick's triumph was consummated when, on March 11,] 229, accompanied by his nobles and knights and his Saracens without any kind of religious ceremonial, he took the crown of Jerusalem from the high altar of the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre and crowned himself king. The clergy held aloof, the patriarch refusing even to enter the city. The faithful were no less hostile and when, six weeks later, the emperor made his way to the ships that were to take him back to Europe, the butchers of Acre pelted him and his escort with offal.

On June 10, 1229, Frederick landed at Brindisi. During the year of his absence in the East, the war had developed in Sicily between his forces and those of the pope. The Sicilians had begun by invading the Papal State. Later Gregory had gained the upper hand. But the emperor's return was the beginning of a general rout; the papal troops retired, and Frederick took a terrible revenge on those of his subjects who had recognised the excommunication and fought against him. There were wholesale executions, some hanged and others skinned alive. The pope launched a new excommunication against the emperor (August 29, 1229) and made a new appeal to Christendom for assistance.

The response was, perhaps, poor; but Frederick desired peace at least as eagerly as the pope, and after months of negotiation it was concluded at San Germano (July 23, 1230). On all points Frederick yielded. He promised to evacuate all papal territories, to restore the confiscated Church property, and to recall the bishops he had exiled; the partisans of the pope were to be granted an amnesty; the Church's rights in Sicily were confirmed anew; an indemnity was promised to the Templars and Hospitallers

For Frederick the peace of 1230 was simply the first move in his elaborate plan to achieve world dominion. It would give him time to reorganise his forces, and to make himself master of Italy before finally reducing the papacy. To the success of his scheme the open enmity of the pope would be fatal -- as would be any distraction from troubles in Germany. The next few years saw Frederick pursuing apparently contradictory policies in Germany and Italy. North of the Alps he lavished exemptions and privileges upon the Princes, frittering away all that imperial hegemony which his father and grandfather had done so much to construct. In Italy, with as much skill as strength, he was, at the same time building up a strong, highly centralised despotism -- first of all in his kingdom of Sicily. Then, to the anxiety of the pope, he openly declared his policy of extending the system to northern Italy; the Lombard cities were finally to lose their rights. The diet of Ravenna (November 1, 1231) which saw this proclamation made, saw the emperor also in the role of the persecutor of heretics and the protector of the Dominicans because they were inquisitors. The plea that his enemies -- in Lombardy and in Germany -- were heretics would ultimately be one of Frederick's justifications. The time would come when he would denounce the pope himself as the protector of heretics.

If Frederick had need of some measure of papal support -- of papal neutrality certainly -- during these crucial years, the pope stood equally in need of Frederick's aid. Time and again the hostility of the Romans drove the pope from his city. Each time the pope appealed to Frederick to fulfil his role of protector and reinstate him. Each time Frederick was lavish in his promises but left the pope to his own devices.

So the years of this uneasy truce went by. In 1235 Frederick was occupied with a revolt in Germany led by his son, the youthful Henry VII. This put down, in July-, 1236, he appeared once more in Italy, with a huge army, to end the independence of the Lombard cities once and for all.

The pope did his best to stave off the war. He explained to Frederick that the Lombards were the victims of calumny, that truth and peace were his own one, sole aim. He complained of the way in which Frederick had neglected to carry out the treaty of 1230. Frederick, however, pressed on resolutely, sending the pope evasive and, as the pope complained, highly disrespectful messages in reply. On November 1, 1236, he took Vicenza, sacking the town and massacring the inhabitants. A year later the great victory of Cortenuova (November 27, 1237) reversed his grandfather's defeat at Legnano. Save for Milan, Alessandria and Brescia he was now master of northern Italy. As he prepared to lay siege to Alessandria, Gregory approached him once more with proposals for peace. The emperor's only reply was to imprison the legates who had brought them (May, 1238). He next attempted to break the understanding between the pope and the Lombard League, but at the very time his envoys were opening the negotiations at Anagni with Gregory, he dispatched an army to capture Sardinia -- a papal fief.

Gregory IX, for all his natural fire, had shown himself as patient as his predecessor. Certainly Innocent III had taken a shorter way with the shiftiness of Raymond of Toulouse. By 1239 Gregory had come to the end of his long-suffering, and on March 20 of that year he renewed the excommunication against Frederick in a document which listed his crimes for the information of Christendom. The emperor had imprisoned papal legates; he had been the cause of the seditions in Rome; he had kept sees vacant in Sicily and imprisoned and murdered the clergy there, he had for years plundered sees and churches, and had usurped Church territories; he had robbed the Templars and the Hospitallers; he had laid unjust taxes on sees, monasteries and the clergy generally; he had broken the pledge of 1230 to grant an amnesty, and he had thwarted the efforts of the pope to renew the crusade. As to the common opinion that Frederick was a heretic, the pope for the moment reserved himself. Meanwhile, the emperor was put out of the Church, and all places where he halted were laid under interdict. The clergy who ignored this sentence and officiated in despite of it, incurred suspension for life.

This was far more serious for the emperor than anything which had happened so far. He retorted to the pope that he would speedily be revenged, and he prepared, in his turn, an encyclical to the princes of Europe denouncing the "wickedness enthroned in the Lord's seat." All mendicant friars -- Dominicans and Franciscans - - of Lombard birth were expelled from his kingdom of Sicily and, a short time later, all friars indiscriminately -- so closely were the new orders as such seen, already, as attached to the service of the Roman Church. All who brought papal documents into the kingdom were to be hanged.

The pope replied in a still more eloquent condemnation, filled with phrases from the Apocalypse. "A great beast has come out of the sea. . . this scorpion spewing passion from the sting in his tail. . . full of the names of blasphemy. . . raging with the claws of the bear and the mouth of the lion and the limbs and the likeness of the leopard, opens its mouth to blaspheme the Holy Name. . . behold the head and tail and body of the beast, of this Frederick, this so-called emperor. . . ." It recapitulated the emperor's crimes; it exposed his calumnies; it condemned him as a heretic for his denial of the pope's authority and for his assertion that the world in its time had been led astray by three impostors, Moses, Mohammed and Jesus Christ, for his mockery of the mystery of the virgin birth and his declaring that nothing is to be believed that cannot be proved by the natural reason.

To this terrible indictment Frederick replied in the language of a Father of the Church, pained at the pope's lack of charity-"the pharisee who sits on the plague-stricken seat, anointed with the oil of wickedness. . . ." He makes a most pious profession of faith and retorts that the pope is a liar. It is he who is the sole cause of the trouble and, quoting in his turn from prophecy, the pope is "the great dragon, the rider on the red horse, the universal destroyer of peace, Antichrist himself."

The war was now on indeed. Truce between such adversaries was impossible. Writers on both sides flooded Europe with their pamphlets, and while Frederick gained steadily in the field through 1239 and 1240, the pope strove to form an anti-imperial party in Germany, and called a general council to meet in Rome for the Easter of 1241. He persuaded the Genoese to provide an escorting fleet for the prelates, and the Venetians to invade Apulia. Frederick issued a general order that all bishops and prelates en route for the council were to be arrested, and licensed his subjects to rob them. He made desperate efforts to detach Genoa from the pope and even to win over the Order of Preachers. Then, on May 5, 1241, his fleet met, and defeated, the Genoese fleet as it neared the end of its voyage convoying the fathers of the council. Three ships were sunk and twenty-two captured with something like a hundred bishops, two of the cardinals, the Lombard deputies and four thousand Genoese. The emperor prepared to march on Rome.

Three months later, with the crisis at its full, Gregory IX died (August 21, 1241). Frederick had reached Grottaferrata just nine miles away.

There were at the moment twelve cardinals in all, two of them Frederick's prisoners. The ten at liberty were closely guarded by the real ruler of Rome, the Senator Matteo Orsini, and, in a seclusion that was little better than an imprisonment, for two months they hesitated and debated whom to elect. To hasten the decision the senator inflicted on them all manner of hardships. In the end three of the cardinals died of disease contracted in the filthy and insanitary hole where, for two whole months of the Roman summer, they had been huddled. Finally they agreed on the Milanese cardinal, Godfrey. He accepted, and took the name of Celestine IV. He was advanced in years, sick as a result of the conclave, and seventeen days later, before he was consecrated, he died.

The confusion was now greater than ever. Three of the cardinals, rather than face a renewal of the horrors they had recently under gone, fled to Anagni; three remained behind in Rome; Frederick still held to his prisoners. Three of the cardinals were partisans of Frederick; the others refused to leave Anagni unless Frederick consented to release his prisoners and to withdraw his army from the neighbourhood of Rome; Frederick refused utterly, and the deadlock was complete. From October 1241 to June 1243 it continued. Finally, St. Louis IX of France intervening, the emperor released his prisoners, and on June 25, 1243, the Cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi was elected and took the name of Innocent IV.

The new pope, by birth a nobleman of Genoa, was already known as an expert canonist. He had taught Canon Law at Bologna and for the last twenty years he had been employed in the most important posts of the Roman Church. Gregory IX had made him a cardinal in 1227; he had been Vice-Chancellor; and from 1235 he had filled, for the most critical years of all, the difficult post of Papal Legate in Lombardy. He was, then, as well acquainted with the personalities engaged in the controversy as with the principles around which it raged. It was now evident that the pope was not merely fighting another Henry IV, or Barbarossa, but an anti-ecclesiastical theory of world organisation, aggressive and fully armed. No wiser choice of a champion against it could have been made than that of this calm unmoved Genoese, trained lawyer and practised administrator. Nor had Innocent IV the disadvantage of being known as an intransigent. Whatever the origin of the idea, he passed popularly for being favourable to an understanding with Frederick. His nearest relatives had fought at Frederick's side, and his election was hailed as a triumph for the emperor. Frederick, if the story is true, knew better. "I have lost a friend," he said. "No pope can be a Ghibelline."

The history of the interregnum and of the two years that went before, made it evident beyond all doubt that Frederick would never rest until the pope was his chaplain, and himself as great a power in the Church as in his own kingdom of Sicily. It was not the least of the new pope's merits that he realised this from the beginning and acted accordingly. His first messages to Frederick were peaceful, and to his request for a conference the emperor replied by sending to him his two chief advisers, the legists Piero della Vigna and Thaddeus of Suessa.

The negotiations ended with Frederick renewing all his old pledges to restore the papal territory he occupied, and granting an amnesty to all who had recently fought against him, even the Lombards being included. This was on Holy Thursday, 1244, but before April was out the pope had to protest that Frederick was once again breaking his sworn word. Frederick, in reply, suggested a personal conference between himself and Innocent. The pope, with the memory of the last two years fresh in his mind, was, however, too wary to be caught. This time he would retain his freedom and use it to attack. Disguised as a knight he fled to Genoa, and thence crossed the Alps to Lyons, a city where the sovereign was the archbishop and his chapter -- nominally within the emperor's jurisdiction, but close to the protective strength of the King of France, St. Louis IX.

The council which Gregory IX had planned, Innocent realised. It met at Lyons in the July of 1245, two hundred bishops and abbots attending. This first General Council of Lyons is unique in that its main purpose was a trial. The emperor was making it his life's aim to restore the ancient subordination of religion to the State. The pope was determined to destroy him, to end for all time this power which had once, for so long, enslaved the Church and which, for a good century now, had never ceased its attack on the Church's restored independence. There was to be no return to the bad days which had preceded St. Leo IX and St. Gregory VII. Since none but a fool would place any reliance on Frederick's oaths, Frederick should be deposed.

On July 7, 1245, the council, in solemn public session, listened to the recital of the emperor's crimes and shifty, insincere repentances. Then, despite the pleading of Thaddeus of Suessa, it accepted the decree of deposition.

Frederick, in reply, circularised the reigning princes of Europe. If the decree of deposition is perhaps the clearest expression yet of the theory of the papal power over temporal rulers as such, Frederick's riposte may be read as the first manifesto of the "liberal" state. For it sets out, against the papal practice, a complete, anti-ecclesiastical theory. All the anti-sacerdotal spirit of the heresies of the previous century finds here new, and more powerful, expression. The supremacy of the sacerdotium is denounced as a usurpation, and anti-clericalism, allied now for the first time to the pagan conception of the omnipotent state-a doctrine popularised through the rebirth of Roman Law-offers itself as a world force with the destruction of the sacerdotium as its aim. Thanks to the imperial legists, and especially to the genius of the two already mentioned, the new point of view is set forth imperishably in this manifesto, and the princes of Christendom are invited to join with the emperor in his attempt to destroy the common enemy. The Church, they are told, is part of the State, and, for all that Frederick guards against any overt denial of the pope's authority, the Catholic prince is, for him, inevitably a kind of Khalif. It is this prince's mission to keep religion true to itself, to reform it whenever necessary, and to bring it back to the primitive simplicity of the gospel. Frederick had indeed revealed himself. The theory is the most subversive of heresies, and it is the emperor, the pledged defender of orthodoxy, the prince the very raison d'etre of whose office is orthodoxy's defence, who is its inventor and patron. His reply to the excommunication more than justified the attitude of Gregory IX, and Innocent's initiative.

Frederick, then, proposed to free the Church from sacerdotalism, from clerical ambition and greed. He planned to take Lyons and to imprison pope and cardinals as he had done the prelates taken at La Meloria in 1241. Through 1246 the scheme went forward until the emperor's army was ready.

Two things saved the pope. The King of France -- St. Louis IX -- to whom he appealed, for all that he had not offered to share in the war against the emperor and had not broken off relations with him since his deposition, made it known to Frederick that should he march on Lyons, French armies would bar his way. Secondly, at Parma, on June 6, 1247, Frederick's forces suffered a severe defeat.

Innocent had been as busy as Frederick since the council. His diplomacy had brought about the election of a successor to Frederick in Germany -- Henry Raspe first of all and then, on his death, William of Holland. Round the new emperor the pope sought to organise an anti-Hohenstaufen crusade as, fifty years earlier, Innocent III had organised a crusade against Raymond of Toulouse. To all who went to Germany to fight the enemy of religion all the usual crusade indulgences and privileges were granted, and the pope found a host of preachers in the new orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis. It was not, however, in Germany that the issue was to be decided. Italy, the real centre of Frederick's policy, was the battlefield where the main fight went forward. In February, 1248, the papal troops gained a second victory at Parma, and although in Sicily their success was less, in the Duchy of Spoleto and the March of Ancona they carried all before them, capturing in 1249 Enzio, the most gifted of all Frederick's sons.

Frederick, his head still unbowed, set himself to find new friends, and he was in the midst of preparations to renew the attack when death struck him down (December 13, 1250). The wildest stories circulated as to the manner of his passing. One and not the least unlikely, is that he asked for the habit of the Cistercian order, to which he had always shown an attachment For Innocent and the Church it was deliverance from the greatest of perils, and the bull (Laetentur Coeli -- January 25, 1251) in which the pope announced the news, testifies to the degree of the strain. Nevertheless, although Frederick was dead the Hohenstaufen survived, in the two sons of the emperor who continued the fight - - Conrad in Germany and Manfred in Sicily. The way was, however, open for the pope to return to Italy. He left Lyons in April, 1251, reached Perugia in November and stayed there another year and a half. In October, 1253, after an absence of nine years, Innocent re-entered his see.

While the war continued, the pope looked for a new vassal on whom to confer the forfeited throne of Sicily. His first thought was the Earl of Cornwall, brother to the English king, Henry III. On his refusal he turned to the brother of St. Louis -- Charles of Anjou. By June, 1253, the first negotiations were ended and the pope presented the conditions under which the crown of Sicily would be granted. The king was to do homage to the pope; he was to pledge himself not to hinder the Church's full exercise of its exclusive jurisdiction over clerics, and in ecclesiastical matters, not to tax the clergy, and to leave the administration of vacant sees entirely to the Church. Charles now drew back, and while he hesitated news arrived from Germany which revolutionised the situation. Conrad was dead (May 21, 1254) and, like his grandfather Henry VI, sixty years before, this born enemy of the popes had named the pope as guardian for his infant heir Conradin.

The pope's first thought was to make what use the opportunity offered of strengthening his hold on Sicily. He called on the regent, Berthold, Archbishop of Palermo, to hand over the government to him as overlord and marched south with an army. Before Innocent would come to an understanding he intended to be in possession, acknowledged as suzerain. The regent refused to surrender and was excommunicated. 011 September 8 the papal army took San Germano, and the regency collapsed. Berthold resigned and Manfred accepted the pope s terms. He was confirmed in the fiefs his father had bequeathed him and granted recognition as regent for certain territories on the mainland. Conradin's titles as King of Jerusalem and Duke of Swabia were recognised. His claims to succeed in Sicily were left undecided.

The pope was now (October, 1254) master of the situation. The kingdom of Sicily was, for the moment, as much his possession as the Papal State itself. What were his plans for the future? Did he intend to rule it directly until such time as he thought fit to confer it on Conradin? Did he intend to annex it to the Papal State? Was he likely to carry out the project that would have made the Earl of Lancaster king? There is room here for differences of opinion, and historians are by no means agreed as to the pope's intentions. Whatever plans had taken shape in his mind, a sudden change on the part of Manfred threw everything into confusion once more. In an affray in which Manfred's responsibility was engaged, the Count of Borello was murdered. Manfred fled to raise supporters among his father's Saracens at Lucera, and by November the war was on once more. On December 2, 1254, he defeated the papal army and took Foggia. Five days later, at Naples, Innocent died.

Historians -- Catholics equally with the rest -- have not spared bitter words for Innocent IV. His inflexibility and determination in the long struggle, and the rigidity they developed, are set side by side with the more seductive and picturesque traits of his treacherous enemy. The treachery is forgotten, and the menace too, which the family tradition presented, in pity for the tragic end of the dynasty. But Innocent IV was one of the greatest of the popes none the less, a man whom nothing short of the high ideals of St. Gregory VII inspired. His tragic pontificate knew few peaceful days; his greatest achievement, like all violent victories, left a mixed legacy to his successors. But again, the achievement was great; and it sets him at least as high as the predecessor and namesake who, in popular fancy, has altogether overshadowed him. One of the writers best qualified to judge Innocent IV, the scholar who edited his registers, sums it up thus: [281] "The Holy See had survived one of the most terrible crises it had ever faced, thanks to the sang-froid, the decision and the incomparable tenacity of this great pope."

The activities of Innocent IV were not wholly absorbed by the struggle with the Hohenstaufen. His vassal the King of Portugal he deposed for his encroachments on ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and in his place appointed his brother. One of the kings in Russia made over his kingdom to him. In all the far Eastern territories where heathenism still survived -- Prussia, Livonia and Esthonia - - he created sees, and in several embassies he did what he could to win over to the faith the new hordes from the East, the Tartars, who for a moment seemed about to throw Europe back into the savagery and chaos of the tenth century. There was not any aspect of Christian life that Innocent failed to support. but very often his support could go little further than sympathetic words, so greatly was he occupied with the battle for life against Frederick.

This preoccupation with the theologico-political problem told nowhere more unfavourably than in the affairs of the Latin East.

THE CRUSADE OF ST. LOUIS IX, 1247-1254

Pope Gregory IX had, in August, 1230, ratified Frederick II's treaty with the sultan as part of the peace of San Germano, and Frederick had thereupon sent out one of his marshals, Richard Filangieri, to rule the new acquisition. Filangieri proceeded to centralise the administration, and ignored the old feudal constitution that made the barons the real rulers of the kingdom. The result was a civil war, which spread to Cyprus too, and occupied the next few years. When Frederick once more fell foul of the pope, after 1236, this struggle, too, passed into the East.

In 1243 Frederick's son Conrad, the child of the marriage with the heiress of Jerusalem, came of age and the barons seized the opportunity to proclaim that the regency of Frederick was at an end. As Conrad was an absentee, a regency was, however, inevitable and the barons conferred this on the Queen of Cyprus, the next-of- kin to Conrad's mother. The imperialist garrison at Tyre resisted, but was speedily forced to surrender. A year later the Sultan of Egypt attacked, his forces swelled by the sudden addition of ten thousand Mohammedans -- the Kharis -- in flight before the new Mongol victories of the successors of Genghis Khan. In September, 1244, Jerusalem was once again in the hands of the Mohammedans.

The news caused throughout Europe something considerably less than the universal dismay that had been the effect of Saladin's victory in 1187. There was, however, enough of the crusading spirit still alive to make the question of the recovery of Jerusalem one of the main questions before the Council of Lyons in the following June (1245). Innocent IV spoke of the state of the Latin East as one of the five wounds that afflicted the Church, and it was decided that yet once again an attempt should be made to rouse all Christendom, through the now traditional means of sermons and special embassies to the princes. The clergy were to contribute a twentieth of their revenues, the crusaders to be free of all taxes for three years, and tournaments were once more forbidden in the interests of the crusade. At the same time the pope planned a new offensive against the Mohammedans through an alliance with the ferocious Mongols, who, descending on the Near East from the all but legendary country of China, seemed, from their victories of the last few years, about to destroy Mohammedanism for ever.

In the vast army of the Mongols all the peoples, and all the religions, of the vast continent between the Urals and the wall of China were represented. Among them were the Nestorians -- Christians lost to the sight of the popes for eight hundred years, who, in that time, albeit heretics, had built up a flourishing Church that included in its ranks Chinese and even Turks! The grandson of Genghis Khan was himself married to a Nestorian, and daily in his camp the religious offices of the Church, mass and the rest, were celebrated and officially announced. It was no doubt through the Venetians, informed of this through the commercial relations that took them everywhere, that the pope knew of the favourable disposition of the Mongols, and in 1245 he dispatched Franciscans and Dominicans to the East in the hope of converting the Mongol princes.

None of these negotiations had, however, any effect on the fortunes of the crusade. The task of retrieving the disaster of 1244 was taken up once more by the French and by their king in person, St. Louis IX. Alone of the princes of Christendom, he set all his energy to the task. In England the preaching of the crusade had produced chiefly a flood of new protests against the financial levy that accompanied it; the King of Norway was allowed to turn his forces against the pagans of the north; the Spanish princes were occupied with the Saracens on their very threshold, the Catholics of Germany were bidden gain the indulgence by fighting the pope's battles against Frederick II. It was left to the King of France to recover the holy places.

He set out in June, 1248. At Cyprus, envoys from the Mongols, who were at the moment preparing to attack the Caliph of Baghdad, met him, proposing an alliance. By the time St. Louis's acceptance reached the camp the Khan was dead, and it was three years before the saint learnt the news of this failure (1251). By that time the crusade of 1248 had ended in disaster

Like the crusaders of 1219, St. Louis directed his attack on Egypt. On June 7, 1249, he took Damietta and then halted until reinforcements arrived from France. His army was as lacking in discipline as it was short in numbers. The reinforcements, Templars, Hospitallers and French crusaders under the King's brother Alphonse de Poitiers, brought the forces up to twenty thousand cavalry and forty thousand foot, and the army prepared to attack Mansourah. The first successes of the fight (February 8, 1250) were thrown away through the foolhardy recklessness of another of St. Louis's brothers, the Comte d'Artois. St. Louis's heroism finally drove back the Saracen attack, but the victory left the crusading army exhausted. The Saracens now blockaded the camp, dysentery and enteric fever set in, and on April I the order to retreat on Damietta was given. As the broken forces retired the Saracens attacked yet once again. It was a massacre rather than a battle, the greatest loss of the whole crusading movement. The knights and nobles were spared for the sake of what ransoms they might bring, but something like thirty thousand of the army were slain, and St. Louis was captured. He obtained his release by the promise to surrender Damietta and to pay 1,000,000 gold besants. The Saracens, in return, promised to free all the Christian prisoners in Egypt.

For another four years St. Louis remained in the East, negotiating for the release of the Christian captives, strengthening the defence of what places in Palestine were still in Christian hands, Acre, Jaffa, Sidon, Cesarea. He was, however, never able to reorganise the offensive, and finally the news of the death of his mother, who was governing France in his absence, forced him to return (April 24, 1254).

INNOCENT IV AND THE PAPAL MONARCHY

It remains to note the contribution of Innocent IV to that corpus of theologico-political doctrine in construction since the time of St. Gregory VII. Here the finished canonist Sinibaldo Fieschi shows himself, as pope, the scholarly equal of the other pontifical jurists, Roland Bandinelli and Lothario Conti. [282]

The theory, as it left Innocent III, he strengthened considerably, from the point of view of its defence in an age increasingly hostile, by insisting on the authority of the Church rather than that of the pope. There is not so continual an emphasis on the rights of the pope's personal authority, in this matter of the duty of mankind universally to acknowledge the supremacy of the sacerdotium. Here Innocent IV prefers to appeal to the divinely instituted right of the Church. A striking example of this is his bull Agni sponsa nobilis of March, 1246 -- incidentally a singularly moving piece of papal eloquence. His claims for the papal authority are of course not less extensive than those of his predecessors. The pope has power to bind and to loose universally. Not only all Christians, but all their affairs come within his scope. This authority he has the right to exercise universally, at any rate occasionally (saltem causaliter) and especially by reason of the moral aspect of a question (maxime ratione peccati). [283] Both the swords, then, are in the Church's keeping. An important distinction makes clear the different position of the emperor -- the man who fills the papally created office -- and the different hereditary monarchs. who are not, by virtue of their consecration, by any means subject to the prelates who consecrate them in the way in which the emperor, from his consecration, is subject to the pope.

These theologico-political theories did not meet with universal approbation from the princes of the time. Not only the revolutionary half-heretic Frederick II, but such excellent Catholics as St. Louis IX of France and his mother the famous Blanche of Castile resisted stoutly on occasions. There were two spheres especially where the claims of pope and kings overlapped and where, from now onwards for centuries, friction between the two jurisdictions was chronic. There was, first of all, the matter of the: Church's judiciary power. For centuries the Church alone had tried accused clerics; and, in some matters, laymen, too, were answerable before its courts. The new legal renaissance which, through all western Europe, was now beginning to transform the organisation of the different States was bound to challenge the older institution. Especially in France were the protests in this matter strong.

In England the martyrdom of St. Thomas of Canterbury had fixed public opinion on this question in an anti-royal sense, but England was the chief centre of the protests in the second of the spheres where Church and State overlapped. This was the matter of taxation. The great characteristic of the external activity of the Roman Church, since the time of St. Leo IX, is the rapidity with which, after the forced inertia of centuries, it centralised the administration of its primacy. That centralisation was the secret of its strength in the later battles with Barbarossa and with his grandson Frederick II. The Roman Church had reformed itself; it had reformed and liberated the other Churches too. Under a succession of indomitable popes it had fought off every attempt to enslave religion once again. But the process had been expensive. The vast administrative machine, the endless procession of legates and popes perpetually in motion from one end of Europe to the other, and finally the armies and the fleets -- all these made demands on the treasury which the resources of the Roman See alone could never meet. That the whole Church should help to finance the battles fought by Rome on its behalf was only just. With the increased centralisation there spread, ever and ever more widely, the new Church taxation. [284]

Within this elaborate financial machine, inevitably -- or quasi- inevitably -- there had grown up abuses of a very grave kind. The protests heard so early as the time of Alexander III, were almost. by the middle of the thirteenth century, a permanent feature of Catholic life. In Innocent IV's reign, especially, they came in thick and fast, and from no country so violently as from England.

To the presence of these two sources of complaint among good Catholics Frederick II had already appealed. He was not indeed successful, but his intensive propaganda, the way in which he drew the world's attention to the matter, did much to fix the trouble in very concrete fashion in Catholic life and tradition. Henceforward the anti-clericalism of orthodox Catholics is a steadily growing menace to the future of religion.

THE END OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN: URBAN IV, CLEMENT IV AND CHARLES OF ANJOU

Innocent IV had died at a moment when it was just his courageous, patient strength that the cause of the Church most needed. On his successor's handling of the incipient revolt of Frederick's son Manfred the whole history of the next fifty years -- and of how much else? -- would depend. This time the interregnum was short -- thanks to one of Innocent's kinsmen who locked up the cardinals at Naples before they had time to disperse. After a very brief discussion they elected, on December 12, 1254, the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, Rinaldo Conti, yet a third pope in fifty years from the family of Innocent III and Gregory IX. He was a man of holy life, learned, a great patron of the Franciscans, an experienced administrator and diplomatist, a cardinal for twenty-seven years and one of the four who, during the long absence of Innocent IV, had acted as papal commissaries in Italy (1244-1254). It was a career which, to all appearance, promised well for the new reign. Alexander IV, however -- such was the new pope's style -- was yet again to prove how often an excellent counsellor proves a bad ruler. The seven years of his rule were, politically, years of continuous disaster, and his death in 1261 found the Holy See weaker in Italy than for seventy years.

Manfred steadily regained all he had lost in Sicily. Conradin's guardians he won over to make common cause with him, and the pope, resourceless, was driven to Innocent IV's first plan, of delivery through foreign aid. Once more Henry III of England was approached (April, 1255) and after six months of negotiation the thing was arranged and Henry's younger son, Edmund of Lancaster, invested as King of Sicily and the pope's vassal. The conditions accepted were that Henry should pay all the expenses so far incurred by the Holy See (135,000 marks) and the arrears of interest on that sum, and that he should provide an army and a general. He was licensed to take for the expedition all monies collected in England for the crusade, and his own vow to go on the crusade was commuted into a vow to drive Manfred out of Sicily. Should Henry neglect to fulfil his part of the contract, he was to lose all monies hitherto advanced, and to be excommunicated, while England was to suffer an interdict.

Manfred continued to gain ground. Thousands went over to him, even from the pope's own army, which was so weakened by desertions that, in 1255, it had to retire across the frontier. The pope thereupon sent urgent messages to England bidding the king hasten his preparations. When, in January, 1256, the pope's candidate for the vacant empire died, Alexander forbade the electors, under pain of excommunication, to choose Conradin and pressed the election of Henry III's brother, Richard, the Earl of Cornwall who had refused Innocent IV's offer of Sicily two years before. But not all this show of papal favour could move Henry to any activity beyond promises. He was, of course, at this very time, on the verge of a political crisis at home of the first magnitude. Not all the popes, nor all their threats, could have won another penny from the barons of England, or from the bishops.

So for seven years it went on, Henry continually begging an extension of the time limit: the pope, now bankrupt and with no choice but to assent -- for of all the princes of Christendom, Henry III was the only one to be interested in the affair: and Manfred steadily consolidating his gains. In August, 1258, Manfred felt himself so secure that he threw off the mask, and, disregarding whatever claims Conradin might have -- who was, at any rate, of legitimate birth -- he had himself crowned King of Sicily at Palermo.

Alexander could do no more than plead with Henry and in September, 1260, Manfred, by a great victory at Montaperto, became the dominating power in Tuscany, too. He was once again excommunicated and, of course, he again ignored the sentence. He was well on the way to being master of Italy when, May 25, 1261, Alexander IV died.

His disastrous reign formed an interlude between two great anti- imperial offensives. The drama of Innocent IV's reign was now to be resumed. The irresolute Alexander was to be followed, in swift succession, by two hard-headed Frenchmen, shrewd, practical realists thanks to whom the dream of Innocent was accomplished and the Hohenstaufen razed from the land of the living.

The first of these was Jacques Pantaleon, who at the time of his election was Patriarch of Jerusalem. He was not a cardinal, but an experienced ecclesiastic whom urgent affairs had brought at this time to the papal court. After a three months' conclave, in which an English Cistercian and a French Dominican had both declined the terrifying splendour, the eight members of the sacred college were still undecided, and then the patriarch's name was suggested. and unanimously they elected him (August 29, 1261). He took the name of Urban IV.

The new pope was a man seventy years of age or more. He was a canonist, trained in the University of Paris, and he had spent most of his life in administrative duties at Laon and Liege. When Innocent TV had noticed him at the Council of Lyons and taken him into the papal service he was already elderly. That pope sent him into Germany, as legate, in 1247 and again in 1252 to organise a party and raise money for William of Holland. In 1253 he was made Bishop of Verdun and in 1255 Patriarch of Jerusalem. After his five years of service in the debris of the Latin realms of the East, given over now to civil war between Venetians and Genoese, between Hospitallers and Templars, the shrewd old Frenchman can have needed no further instruction on the need for a strong hand at the centre of things. As pope he proceeded to apply himself with an energy and a ruthlessness that give him, with Julius II, a place apart in papal history. A contemporary diplomat set him down as the ablest pope since Alexander III.

Urban IV turned first to set his own administration in order. In twelve months he had created fourteen cardinals, seven of them his fellow countrymen, all of them men of distinction. A thorough examination was made of the whole financial system. The accounts of all creditors were scrupulously investigated, and all over Christendom the kingdoms, sees, abbeys and churches on which the Roman Church had claims were reminded of their obligations and were induced to pay at least in part. As the pope thus collected the debts due to him so, in the same systematic way, he set himself to pay what he owed. Church property that was pledged he gradually redeemed, and slowly he began to refortify the Papal State. His greatest feat, however, was to build up a pro-papal party among the bankers of Florence and Siena -- a measure which was to bring forth its fruit in the time of his successor.

By 1263 the pope had more or less restored the reality of his rule in his own State, and he had rescued his cause from the perilous isolation into which, under Alexander IV, it had drifted At the same time he had begun to provide for the danger which Manfred presented.

Manfred had begun by a bid for recognition that an offer of money accompanied. Urban had, however, no intention of reversing the policy of years, and of recognising this illegitimate Hohenstaufen. He had already determined to set up in Sicily the French prince Charles of Anjou, and until that delicate scheme was safe he had to use all his skill to keep Manfred from a new offensive.

It was in December, 1261, three months after his election, that Urban made the first offer to the French. St. Louis hesitated, halted by the thought of Conradin's possible claims and of the claims of Edmund of Lancaster -- to the irritation of the pope who insisted that he was hardly likely to risk St. Louis' salvation by proposing to him something that was sinful. Finally, the pope won the king over, and he allowed the offer to be made to Charles of Anjou, his brother. The conditions were laid down (June, 1263), Edmund of Lancaster was formally notified that the offer made to him was withdrawn (July, 1263) and on August 15 the treaty between Charles and the pope was concluded. It contained all the usual safeguards. Charles was to do homage to the pope as overlord, to pay an annual tribute, to pledge himself not to usurp the rights of the Church and to preserve the rights of the nobles and people of Sicily. Meanwhile (August, 1263) Charles had been elected Senator -- an appointment that made him, to all intents and purposes, the civil ruler of Rome where, since the time of Honorius III, none of the popes had been able to live, save for short and infrequent intervals. Not only was Charles elected but, an unheard-of thing, he was elected for life. The pope at once protested. It would have been impossible for him to do otherwise. To consent to see ruling Rome, independently of himself, the man who would soon be ruler, too, of all Italy from Naples downwards, would be to exchange the menace of the Hohenstaufen for a danger still more real.

Manfred still more than held his own, despite Urban IV's diplomacy. Charles, on his side, realised the pope's dilemma and profited by it. Much of the annual tribute was remitted, and the pope accepted him as Senator. So matters stood when, on October 2, 1264, Urban IV died.

It was five months -- despite the urgency of the position -- before the cardinals could agree on his successor. Then, February 5, 1265, they elected another Frenchman, the Cardinal Guy Fulcodi -- a choice that crowned the most rapid career in all papal history, for the new pope, less than ten years before, had been a happily married jurist in the service of the French King without ever a thought of Holy Orders. He was a noble, and the son of one of the chief advisers of Raymond VI of Toulouse. Like Urban IV he was a product of the University of Paris, where he had made a name as an expert in both civil and canon law. He followed his father's profession, grew famous as an advocate and was appointed to the council of Raymond VII. He married and had two daughters. Then he passed into the service of St. Louis IX of France, who ultimately made him a member of his private council. Somewhere about 1256 his wife died, and like his father before him -- who on his wife's death had become a Carthusian-Guy Fulcodi turned to the Church. He rose rapidly, named Bishop of Le Puy within a year and Archbishop of Narbonne in 1259. As a prelate he kept his place in the French king's service, and was employed very largely in arbitration. Much of his time was spent in hearing appeals that concerned the inquisition of Languedoc, and he was responsible for a noteworthy decision on the degree of proof required before a man was condemned for heresy. It should, he declared, be "clearer than the day itself." He was one of Urban IV's first cardinals (1261) and in 1263 that pope sent him as legate to England, on which mission he was still absent when he was elected pope.

The new pope thus had an experience of administration and of dealing with men that could scarcely have been bettered. He was, too, a man of extremely ascetic life, modelled, apparently, on the lives of the Order of Preachers to which indeed he was very greatly attached. As pope, he took the name of Clement IV.

It was natural, if not inevitable, that Clement IV should continue the policy of his immediate predecessor. It is possible, since he had been one of the negotiators between Urban and Charles of Anjou, that he was elected pope for that very reason. Nevertheless, there was a shade of difference between the political atmosphere of the two reigns. It was due entirely to the fact that, in the second, Charles himself at last appeared in Italy.

Clement's first act was to renew the notification to Henry III of England that his claims had lapsed, and the next was to confirm Charles in all his rights, renewing the conditions laid down two years before. The crusade against Manfred, "the virulent offspring of a poisonous race", was renewed and new efforts made to raise money. By June, 1264, Urban IV had spent 200,000 pounds (Sienese money) and the treasury was nearly empty. Nor was there much to hope for from the interest of Christendom. "In England," said the pope himself, "there is opposition, in Germany hardly anyone obeys, France groans and grumbles, Spain suffices not for itself, Italy gives no help but plays one false." [285]

However, on May 21, 1265, Charles of Anjou arrived in Rome with a small force. The main body of his army was still in France and preparing to make its way overland through Lombardy. Charles had few men, he had no money. Manfred was as strong as ever, and before the French could pass through Lombardy the papal diplomacy must defeat Manfred in the courts and cities of the north of Italy.

The pope's one real asset was the character of Charles of Anjou -- haughty, ambitious to the point at times of mania, but the great captain of the day, a capable organiser, brave, and as energetic as Manfred was indolent. Charles of Anjou has gone down to history with the memory of his virtues forgotten in the clamour aroused by his undoubted pride and cruelty. It is one of the ironies of things that it is for precisely these vices that the conqueror of the Hohenstaufen has been damned by writers of Hohenstaufen sympathies. Charles of Anjou compares more than favourably with any one of the five generations of that treacherous race with which the Roman Church had to contend, from Barbarossa to Conradin, his great-great-grandson.

The financial crisis was surmounted thanks to the papacy's understanding with the bankers. The following of Charles was costing daily two thousand livres tournois before 1265 was out, and the revenue and property of the Roman churches were given in pledge. In December the army from France arrived. On January 6, 1266, Charles was crowned in St. Peter's as King of Sicily. A few days later he set out to crush Manfred. The battle took place, January 20, 1266, outside Benevento. Manfred's army was defeated, with great slaughter, and he himself was slain. With that disaster the Hohenstaufen ceased for ever really to trouble the papacy. The menace that had hung over its spiritual independence since Barbarossa's declaration at Besancon, a hundred and nine years before, seemed at last destroyed.

It remained to be seen how Charles of Anjou would develop. Already, in the matter of senatorship, there had been a hint that the pope feared lest his new champion should prove a master. Was the chronic problem of the papacy merely about to enter on a new stage of its long vexatious history?

Four months after Benevento, Charles resigned the senatorship, and while Clement gave himself to the double task of rousing an indifferent Christendom to the needs of the Holy Land and of paying off his debts, the King of Sicily took possession of his conquest. The Sicilians found his rule oppressive. Some of the greater nobles were dispossessed. French officials were imported. There were new heavy taxes. Soon there were complaints, and from the pope strongly worded remonstrances such as that provoked by the terrible sack of Benevento after the victory in January. "You respect nothing," he had then written to Charles, " neither the goods of the Church nor of others, not age nor sex. You are crusaders, and you have looted the churches and convents that you should have protected; you have destroyed the sacred images, you have violated women consecrated to God. These thefts, these murders, these appalling sacrileges were not committed during the fight but for the whole week that followed, and you did nothing to restore order."

Gradually, throughout the kingdom, a party began to form and a name to be whispered as its leader -- Conradin. The grandson of Frederick II was now a youth of seventeen, still in Germany, King of Jerusalem and Duke of Swabia. He was won over to patronise the coming revolt, and in a flaming manifesto he denounced, as King of Sicily, the popes, Innocent IV and Alexander IV, who had refused him his father's kingdom and announced his intention of conquering it himself. The action had all the old Hohenstaufen spirit, and the pope retorted by excommunicating Conradin and by a reminder to the princes of Germany that Charles of Anjou was the lawful King of Sicily and that if Conradin persisted he would be deprived of his title to Jerusalem as his grandfather had been stripped of the empire and Sicily.

Conradin, nothing deterred, set out in September, 1267. In October his banner was hoisted in Rome, where the new senator had gone over to his cause, and on the 21st of that month he was at Verona with ten thousand men.

The pope renewed the excommunication on all who supported him, including the Romans; he named Charles of Anjou imperial Vicar for Tuscany; he despatched legates into Germany to prevent the movement spreading there.

In January, 1268, the invader was at Pavia, in April at Pisa. Charles failed to capture Rome; the Saracens at Lucera were in revolt; and when Conradin, making for Rome, passed by Viterbo -- where Clement IV still dwelt -- the pope might well have despaired. Rome received Conradin with enthusiasm and on August 18 he set out for Lucera. Charles, however, intercepted him near Tagliacozzo (August 23, 1268) and after a fierce fight routed his army. A week later he entered treacherous Rome in triumph, while Conradin fled, a forlorn fugitive, from one place to another. In the end he was captured and handed over to Charles, who thereupon proceeded to the act which has damned him for ever with posterity. He summoned a commission of legists to advise him whether Conradin could be put on his trial as a disturber of the peace. They were divided in their opinion. A minority advised Charles he had the right. Conradin was thereupon tried and condemned to death. Absolved from his excommunication and fortified with the Mass and the Holy Eucharist, on October 29, 1268, he was beheaded publicly at Naples. So ended the Hohenstaufen.

Just a month later, to the day, Clement IV too died. It was twenty-three years since Innocent IV had deposed the last emperor, nineteen years almost since the last emperor had died. Not for three years more did the cardinals manage to give a successor to Clement IV. Now for three years Christendom was to have neither emperor nor pope.

THE INQUISITION

The troubles, civil and religious, of the unhappy provinces of the south of France were not ended by the decisions of the Lateran Council of 1215. Raymond VI soon renewed the war, in the hope of dispossessing Simon de Montfort, and de Montfort himself quarrelled with the papal legate. In 1218 Simon was killed as he besieged Toulouse. His son, Amaury, who succeeded to his rights, was not so strong a character as his father. In the next six years Raymond won back some of his lost territories, and Amaury endeavoured to check his recovery by bringing in the King of France. He made an offer of his lands to Philip II in 1222 but the king refused. Two years later, after Philip's death, the offer was repeated to his son, Louis VIII. The new king accepted, and there now began a purely political war in which the French aimed at the annexation of Languedoc to the royal domain.

The pope could not be indifferent to all the fluctuations of these eight years (1216-1224). Whatever the political ambitions of the French kings, the fact remained that the Counts of Toulouse were not to be trusted in the matter of repressing a singularly menacing anti-Catholic force. The French kings, on the other hand, would show it no mercy. Hence, on Louis VIII's determination to make himself master of Languedoc, Honorius III gave his expedition all the status of a crusade, with the usual indulgences and privileges for the crusaders. He also sent a subsidy in money. The English court, on the other hand, preferred to have Raymond VII [286] -- first cousin to the English king -- ruling the province which bordered Gascony, the one remaining possession of England in France, and at Rome the English worked hard to persuade the pope of Raymond's complete orthodoxy. The legate in Languedoc, too, was brought round to this opinion and, withdrawing the crusade privileges, he certified Raymond to the pope as a good Catholic. Louis VIII, thereupon, drew back. The Council of Montpellier (June, 1224) should have ended the affair. But the old story was repeated. Raymond, for all his oaths, did nothing to repress the heresy. The pope decided against him, and when Louis VIII, in 1226, marched south it was the end of the independence of Languedoc. City after city fell before the French advance. Louis himself died in the November of that year but his widow, regent for the boy king Louis IX, continued the policy. Raymond was forced to surrender.

On Holy Thursday, 1229, like his father twenty years earlier, he appeared before the legates, outside the great door of Notre Dame at Paris, barefoot, clad only in his shirt, to be reconciled. He promised yet once again, to pursue heretics, to dismiss the brigands he employed, to restore the stolen Church property; he promised also to endow ten chairs in the University of Toulouse, two of theology, two of canon law and six of the liberal arts; he promised to take the cross and to spend five years crusading in Palestine. As to his dominions, part was made over at once to the crown. The remainder was to go after his death to his daughter Jeanne, and Jeanne was betrothed to the French king's brother, Alphonse of Poitiers. It was the end. Raymond gave no more trouble. He died in 1247. Twenty-five years later Jeanne, too, was dead and her husband. They had no heir, and the whole of the possessions of the Counts of Toulouse reverted to the French crown.

It remains to be told how the pope, upon the surrender of 1229, provided for the extinction of heresy in the territory wrested from Raymond VII. This is the story of the origin of the Inquisition.

The Inquisition was simply a reorganisation of existing institutions. The history of the repressing of heresy goes back to the first Christian emperors. Heresy meant civil commotion in addition to being an act of rebellion against the truth of God revealed through the Church. Whence a double reason for the prince -- zealous in God's service and bound by his office to maintain peace -- to restrain the heretic. The first ecclesiastical reference of any importance to the repression of the neo- Manicheans whom we call Albigenses, is the canon of the General Council of 1139, which calls on the civil power, in a general way, to repress them. Mobs, and the civil power itself, had already shown a disposition to deal severely with these heretics. Robert II of France had burnt them, and Henry II of England had them branded on the forehead. It was, apparently, the joint representation of Henry II and Louis VII of France that induced Alexander III to the next step. The pope began by deprecating undue severity in the matter. "It is better to absolve the guilt than to attack innocent life by an excessive severity. . . ." Scripture bids us beware of being more just than justice. [287] The King of France was not convinced. He asked for the Archbishop of Rheims, whose extensive diocese was greatly troubled by the sect, complete freedom of action. The outcome of these representations was the decree of the Council of Tours in 1163. The four hundred and more prelates who, under the pope's presidency, took part in this council, declared that heretics were to be tracked down and that the princes should imprison them and confiscate their property. In England, about the same time, it was enacted -- by the civil authority -- that their houses should be destroyed. Sixteen years after this decree of Tours, the General Council of 1179 renewed the exhortation to the Christian princes. The great step forward in the matter was, however, the decree Ad abolendam of 1184, the outcome of the meeting of Frederick Barbarossa and the pope Lucius III at Verona. Once again we note the intervention of the State, and in the decree a new, and ordered, severity. This decree the Lateran Council of 1215 made its own, adding somewhat to its detail, and what it laid down was the law as Gregory IX found it when, after the French occupation of Languedoc, he called the Inquisition into being.

By this law [288] all heresies contrary to the profession of Faith set out in the first canon [289] and those who professed them were condemned. The civil authority was charged to see to their suitable punishment. If they were clerics they were to be deposed, and their goods to be given to the church they served. If they were laity, their goods were to go to the State. Those suspected of heresy were to prove themselves innocent. Should they neglect to do so they were excommunicated; and if they persisted in the excommunication for twelve months they were to be condemned as heretics. The princes were to be admonished, persuaded, and if necessary compelled by ecclesiastical censures -- excommunication for example or interdict -- to swear that they would banish all whom the Church pointed out to them as heretics. This oath, henceforward, they must take on first assuming power. Princes who, after due warning, refuse to take this oath, or to purge their realms of heretics, are to be excommunicated by the metropolitan and his suffragans. If their refusal continues beyond a year, they are to be reported to the pope, that he may declare their vassals absolved from their oaths of allegiance and offer their territories for occupation to Catholics who will drive out the heretics -- saving always the right of such a prince's suzerain. Catholics who thus take up arms to fight the heretics are assimilated in all things to the crusaders in the Holy Land.

Those who, in any way, support heretics are excommunicated. If within twelve months they have not made their submission, they become iure infames, lose all power of testifying in law suits, of sitting in councils, of electing others, of holding public office; they cannot make a valid will nor inherit; if they are judges their sentences are null and void; if notaries the instruments they draw up are invalid; if clerics they lose both office and benefice. They are not to be given the sacraments, nor, should they die, Christian burial. Their alms and offerings are not to be accepted and clerics who do not observe these laws are to be deprived. Clerics deprived for this particular negligence need a special dispensation from the Holy See before they can be reinstated.

As to the detection of heretics, there is now laid upon all archbishops and bishops the duty of a periodical visitation, at least once a year, personally or by commission, of all those places within their jurisdiction where heresy is rumoured to exist. They are to take the sworn testimony of three or more witnesses of good standing -- if necessary the whole population is to be put upon oath. Those who know of heretics, of their secret meetings, or of any who differ in life or manners from the generality of the faithful, are to report the matter to the bishop at these visitations. He is to convoke the persons accused, and they are to prove their innocence. If they have already been accused, and have since then relapsed, they are to be punished canonically. If they refuse to put themselves on oath they are to be presumed heretics. Bishops who neglect this important duty are to be denounced to the Holy See and deposed.

To the will to repress heresy and to fight the menace of the new paganism, as it shows itself in this legislation, nothing could be added. The weak point was that this legislation depended for its execution upon the local bishop, and it was impossible for the pope to supervise, as thoroughly as the state of things required all the activities of the Catholic episcopate throughout the world. Gregory IX solved the problem by substituting for the local bishop official inquisitors, sent out by himself from Rome, to whom, as the pope's representatives, the local bishop, in this matter, must give place. This was the novelty of the Inquisition. From this moment there began to develop around the Inquisitor a defined, ordered system of legal practice, which succeeding popes sanctioned and corrected.

It was in 1233 that Gregory IX thus made the defence of the Faith in Languedoc his personal care, and appointed as his agents the Dominicans of that province. They were reluctant to take on the work, and, apparently, did not relish the prospect that the order would become identified with the Inquisition. Whereupon the pope called upon the order of St. Francis to share the burden.

We have a fairly detailed knowledge of the procedure of the new institution, based on such of its own records as have survived, and also on the manuals written for the guidance of the Inquisitors. The popes were very exacting as to the qualifications of the Inquisitors themselves. They were to be men of mature years, of unimpeachable character, skilled in Theology and in Canon Law. Their conduct was strictly supervised, and there are sufficiently numerous instances of their deposition for breach of the rules to prove that the popes really had a care for the rights of those whom the Inquisitors pursued. Gregory IX, for example, condemned the French Inquisitor to lifelong imprisonment for cruelty to his prisoners. Over the Inquisitor there hung a sentence of excommunication that fell automatically if he used his extensive powers for any but their destined purpose. The manuals enable us to see the whole functioning of the machinery. The Inquisitors, arrived in a town, showed their credentials to the magistrates. The proclamations were made that all Catholics must denounce whatever they knew of heresy in the town, and the heretics given a set time in which to confess and abjure. The trials were conducted with great care. Those accused were allowed counsel [290] and after their trial they had the right to appeal to the pope. They were not, it is true, given the names of their accusers, but they had the right to give in a list of their enemies, and if any of the witnesses against them appeared on this list their testimony was struck out.

According to the gravity of the offence -- whether the accused was one of the Perfect or only a Believer, whether he was actually a heretic or merely a Catholic who had protected or sheltered heretics -- and according to whether the accused confessed or persisted in his heresy, the penalties differed widely. At the lightest they were purely spiritual, the obligation of additional prayers over a fixed time. The most severe were confiscation of property, imprisonment and, as the years went by, death by burning.

These more severe penalties the Church did not invent, any more than it invented the practice of torturing the accused and witnesses. It took them over from the civil jurisprudence of the day, and the civil jurisprudence found a model and a warrant for them in the law of the Roman Empire, the revival of which had gone hand in hand with the growth of the Canon Law for now nearly a century. Torture, Pope Nicholas I had declared to be forbidden by all law, human and divine. Gratian had followed him in this. It was Frederick II who restored torture to its place in legal practice, in the Sicilian Constitutions of 1231. Twelve years later there is a record of the use of the rack by Inquisitors, and in 1252 it was formally prescribed by Innocent IV. [291] It is to be noted that the use of torture was not left merely to the whim of the Inquisitor: the conditions for its use were carefully regulated. Nor does its use seem to have been an everyday matter. The Inquisitors whose writings survive express themselves sceptically as to the value of the confessions thus obtained. But torture was an approved part of the procedure, and from the time of Alexander IV the Inquisitor was present while it took place.

It was apparently Gregory IX who, first of the popes, consented to accept the extreme penalty of death by burning, as the "due punishment" decreed by one after another of his predecessors. [292] The Canon Law said the State must give the heretic "due punishment" [293] and the State, from the last years of the twelfth century, began to interpret this, following perhaps the tradition of the Roman Law in cases of Manicheeism, as death by fire. Frederick II put that penalty into his Lombard Constitutions in 1224. It was applied by the Bishop of Brescia in 1230, and in that year or the next Gregory IX, perhaps under the influence of that bishop, with whom he was in very close relation, incorporated the imperial constitution in the register of his own acts. [294]

Such was the formidable weapon which the popes devised to root out the last traces of Manicheeism in Languedoc. Of the details of its operation in the thirteenth century we do not know very much. Certainly it succeeded. The Albigenses ceased to be a menace. But it is not possible to say with anything like exact statistics what proportion of the accused were proved guilty, what proportion of these remained true to their heresy, what proportion of them were punished and how many suffered death. [295]

THE TRIUMPH OF THE CATHOLIC INTELLIGENCE: ST. BONAVENTURE, ST. ALBERT THE GREAT, ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

The terrible conflict of the papacy with the Hohenstaufen emperors, for all the demands it made on the attention of the popes, was not the only, nor the most important, business o f the generations that witnessed it. There was proceeding simultaneously, in the university, a stubborn intellectual contest to preserve the traditional belief of the faithful threatened with destruction in the cyclone of new philosophical ideas. Not the victory of popes over emperors, not the preservation of the sacerdotium from the regnum, but the victory of Catholicism over Averroism was perhaps the most signal achievement of all this famous thirteenth century. Will the Christian intelligence, brought up at last against the more or less complete achievement of the intellect of Antiquity, find a means of using it, or will it be itself transformed by that achievement? Such is the doubt that the conflict will resolve, such the essence of the crisis of the years 1230-1277, the most dramatic of its kind since that of the second century. The revelation of God through the traditional teaching of the Church, the spiritual appeal of Plato, the scientific strength of Aristotle, these are the forces. What the new thought held of menace for Catholicism, and what it held of promise, has already been explained. It remains to describe the battle which filled the middle years of the century, and in the short space of a general history this is perhaps best done by a few words about the leading Averroists, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, and by analysing, with reference to this matter, the teaching of the great thinkers on the Catholic side, the Franciscan Bonaventure, the Dominicans, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

History is, no doubt, full of surprises that should not surprise us; and one of these discoveries that never ceases to be a shock is that, in past ages, human life was just as complex as in our own. What more and more dominated the life of that primary organ of Catholic thought, the University of Paris, as the thirteenth century drew towards its end, was the Aristotelian philosophy as interpreted by Averroes. "Do we not read in [Averroes'] works that nature shows us in Aristotle the pattern of the final perfection of human nature? that Providence gave him to us in order that we might know all that can be known?. . . Aristotle's writings are a whole, to be taken or left; they form the system of the written reason, so to say. . . all that we now need to do is to study again the master's theses as Averroes interprets them." [296] These words, of a modern authority, describe very well what was then happening to many. Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia were, in their own time, much more important than later ages have grasped. [297]

Not the least curious feature about this situation is that it was in the theologians that the philosophers, now troubling the peace of the schools, had made their first acquaintance with Averroes. William of Auvergne (1180-1249), William of Auxerre (d. 1231) and Philip the Chancellor (d. 1236) show an understanding of the new doctrines, and a philosophical ability to deal with them, that is far beyond what any philosopher of the Faculty of Arts then possessed. It is this knowledge derived through the theologians that will be the first capital of the new Averroism -- and Siger will be largely debtor (for his basic information) to St. Thomas himself.

Once the masters in the Faculty of Arts began to use the commentaries of Averroes on their own account, that is to say, as an aid in their own philosophical task of lecturing on the text of Aristotle, some of them speedily fell before the dual temptation to identify the Arab's interpretation with the thought of the Philosopher, and to equate Aristotle's teaching with philosophic truth itself. These masters were, it seems, clerics teaching Logic and Physics; and once they began to teach their Averroistic Aristotle without any regard either for the natural hierarchy of the sciences, or for the natural law that each science is a world of its own, once they began (in other words) to repeat the ancient error that seems eternal, and to invade the territories of other sciences, confusion was certain, and discussions that were violent; most of all were the results explosive when, in the name of philosophy, it was the territory of the theologians that was invaded.

Siger of Brabant (1235-1281,4) is the Averroist of whose work, thanks to some recent discoveries, we know most. At the time of his first defeat -- the condemnation of his theories by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, December 10, 1270 -- Siger was still quite a young man, ten years junior to St. Thomas perhaps. The theses then condemned are statements of particular Averroist doctrines: that the intellect of all mankind is, numerically, the one same intellect; that the human will wills and chooses of necessity; that the world is eternal; that there never was a first man; that the soul is not immortal; that there is no divine Providence so far as the actions of individual men are concerned. In he later condemnation, of March 7, 1277, theses are singled out which describe the Averroist "approach" to philosophy and the Averroist ideas about its place in a Catholic's life -- for all these Averroists claimed to be both "philosophers" and Catholics; [298] such theses, for example, as that: the Catholic religion is a hindrance to learning; there are fables and falsities in the Catholic religion as in other religions; no man knows any more from the fact that he knows theology; what theologians teach rests on fables; the only truly wise men are the philosophers; there is not a more excellent way of life than to spend it studying philosophy.

Siger may stand for the common enemy, against which a variety of spirits no less ardent or competent were now debating -- spirits far from agreement among themselves about the reply to some of the fundamentals under discussion. [299]

An apostolate of thought was no part of the plan of St. Francis of Assisi. The obstacles to man's return to God which he fought were of another order. The world which he planned to save was astray, not so much in belief as in practice; the audience to which his message went was made up of Catholics whose belief was as sound as his own, but Catholics whose spiritual progress a practical cult of self, worldliness, ambition and the attendant envy, jealousy and hates were paralysing. Nevertheless it was inevitable that, as the years went by, the apostle whom the universal charity of St. Francis inspired should turn also to the other type of Catholic whose first peril came from a constant intellectual malaise with regard to the mysteries of his faith. No less than the Preachers, the Friars Minor -- for all that their organisation was by no means so favourable to this work -- turned to the new world of the universities in their passion to work for the salvation of souls. The most gifted, and the most influential, of all their early professors was undoubtedly John of Fidanza, called in religion Bonaventure. An outline of his career and of his teaching, in its affirmations and in its denials, will show how far the Catholic intellectual movement had developed since those closing years of the twelfth century when the new thought began to gain a hold on it. [300]

St. Bonaventure was born in 1221, five years before the death of St. Francis, at Bagnorea near to Viterbo. He entered the Friars Minor at the age of seventeen and at Paris he was the pupil of the very first of the Franciscan doctors, the Englishman Alexander of Hales who, in his old age, had crowned a triumphant career in the schools by abandoning all for the Lady Poverty. In 1248 St. Bonaventure took his licentiate's degree and for the next seven years taught in the university. His course was interrupted by the fierce attack made on the Friars' position in the university by the Masters of Arts, which was also in some measure an attack by the Aristotelians on the Traditionalists. The pope intervened, and when he confirmed the Friars' rights he named St. Bonaventure to be the occupant of the chair assigned to his order. A year later he was named general of the Friars Minor (1257) and his career as a professional theologian came to an end.

The object of all St. Bonaventure's teaching is practical. Through theology, through philosophy, too, he will lead man to attain God and to attain Him as the Being who is supremely lovable. It is love of the object which is the motive that urges the assent of Faith. The knowledge of God we have through Faith is surer than any other knowledge, surer than the philosophical knowledge that comes through reasoning. Philosophy is, none the less, most useful to explain the truths of Faith and to justify our assent to them. Man's life is a pilgrimage towards God, and in the saint's treatment of theology from this point of view we see revealed all the simple charm of the piety of his order. In him St. Francis lives again. Everything that meets man on the road cries God to him, if man is but attentive. Faith: helped by reason reveals God in all. True it is that man does not read the message as readily as God had intended. It is the penalty of the fall that man's perceptive powers are dimmed. A special grace is necessary that man, as he now exists, may discover God. He must be formed again, purified, enlightened. Nevertheless, it remains true that the whole universe is formed to express God and God's infinite love, to be a book in which all may read its author the Trinity. The saint is not over-concerned to elaborate these proofs of God's existence from the things He has created. "The splendour of creation reveals Him, unless we are blind. His works cry ' God' to us and, unless we are deaf, must awaken us. The man must be dumb who cannot praise God in all that He has caused; he must be mad not to recognise the first origin of all, where so many signs abound."

God is equally discernible, to every man, in his own soul if he will but look into it. Here it is not a mere reflection of God that meets the believer's gaze, not a mere trace of His power, but His very image. For the idea of God is bound up with the very simplest of our intellectual operations. Unless the idea of a self-existing being were present to the mind, man could not know anything. The image of God is naturally infused into the soul, and whoever will gaze into its depths must find God. Note, however, that it is not any understanding of God's essence, that comes in this way to the searcher of his own soul, but merely the realisation that God exists.

In his solution of the problem how we know, the saint makes use, at the same time, of ideas that are Plato's and of others taken from Aristotle. Corporal things we know through the senses, universal truths by the intellect. The senses are necessary for all knowledge of things below the soul. To know the soul, and whatever is above it, is the function not of the senses but of the intellect and an interior light, namely the principles of knowledge and of natural truths innate in the soul. For each of the orders of knowledge there is thus its own mechanism, and if Aristotle is the distant author of the saint's explanation of our knowledge of corporal reality, for his theory of the higher knowledge he is indebted to Plato -- to Plato through St. Augustine, and to St. Augustine for the idea of this synthesis of the two. Natural knowledge has, then, a double aspect, as man is intermediary between God and things. The things that are below him he knows with relative certainty, the things above with absolute certainty, and yet in a confused way only, knowing them as he does -- not in the Divine ideas themselves -- but in the reflection of these external ideas that he finds in his own soul.

It is then from creatures that we come to God. Our first knowledge of God is as Creator and, for St. Bonaventure, to admit the eternity of the world is to admit a contradiction. All things are created, and in all created reality matter and form are to be distinguished, in the angels, in the human soul too. The soul is thus a complete substance, and upon this doctrine the saint builds his proof of its immortality. There is not only one substantial form to each being, but several forms according to the properties of the being, several forms hierarchically subordinated to the general form and thereby saving the unity of the being.

The work in which St. Bonaventure's thought finds its fullest exposition is his Commentary on Peter Lombard, composed about 1249-1250. Its frontal attack on the main theses of the Averroists is almost the first evidence we possess of the extent to which, by this time, they had captured the University of Paris. St. Bonaventure insists on the origin of the universe through the creative act of God. The Aristotelian theory, of a universe that is eternal, he even thinks contradictory to reason. The Aristotelian teaching on the unicity of form -- as dear to the Averroists as the theory last named -- he rejects, and he rejects with it two other tenets of that school, namely the doctrine that places the principle of individuation in matter and the doctrine that spiritual substances are simple. His general position has been summed up thus by a modern writer: [301] "The seraphic doctor would have it that all human knowledge is profoundly religious. He admits the role of the senses and of the intellect in the process of knowing. He recognises their necessity and their value, but he considers that intellect and sense are by themselves insufficient if we are to know with a knowledge that is absolutely sure, perfect and certain. That is why he strengthens their value by this ray of divine light which burns in our mind and which comes to us from Christ the Word, the God-man."

St. Bonaventure's approach to the burning question of the defence of revealed truth against the new danger is extremely important. He is, in time, the first great opponent of Averroism; and in his attack he includes, from the beginning, several of the Averroistic theses which derive from Aristotle, and which another school of the Faith's defenders will accept as fundamental to their philosophy and to the defence of the Faith. The struggle around the Aristotelian corpus of doctrine as Averroes presents it, will soon be complicated by this inner struggle between the Catholic critics of Averroes themselves. St. Bonaventure's opponent here is St. Thomas Aquinas.

It was St. Bonaventure's fate that he was not only a thinker. The university professor had in him talents of another kind and, in 1257, ere his courses had done much more than reveal his genius, he was taken away to rule and re-model his order at one of the greatest crises in its history. He was but thirty-six, and for the seventeen years of life that remained to him he had other cares to occupy him as well as that of the defence of the traditional belief against the forces that now menaced it. His disciples in Paris, however, kept his teaching alive, and never did St. Bonaventure himself cease to be even passionately interested in the debate, from time to time even returning to Paris to lead his party. But from the time of his election as general it ceased, inevitably, to be his first preoccupation; and, to that extent, his knowledge of the situation was no longer first hand, his opportunities less than those of one who, like St. Thomas, never ceased through all those critical years to form one of the corps of teachers and disputants.

St. Bonaventure's doctrine had the advantage -- relative to the contest now drawing on -- that it was first in the field. Also it was in keeping with the spirit that so far characterised, not merely the Franciscan school at Paris, but the general theological teaching of the university. It was, that is to say, a faithful critique of the new philosophical world in the spirit of St. Augustine, and it reflected all the Platonic spirit that showed in the greatest of the Fathers himself. That it had, on the surface at least, a something in common with Avicenna, [302] through Avicebron, none as yet had seen, nor does St. Bonaventure himself seem ever to have known, at any rate, the latter. The Franciscan critique was first in the field. It was, however, insufficient; and it had the further disadvantage that it was tied to psychological and metaphysical doctrines that would not stand if scientifically criticised. There had lately left Paris, at the time when St. Bonaventure's Commentary on the Sentences was in composition, the Catholic who was to answer Averroes, reconcile Aristotle and, at the same time, expose Avicenna and Avicebron too. But to understand something of the qualities that make St. Thomas Aquinas different, not in degree only but in kind, from every other Catholic thinker of his own and every century, a little must be said of his formation, and of the principal force in it, Albert of Cologne.

Albert -- canonised so recently as 1929 -- has, ever since his own time, been unanimously styled "the Great", and this for his own achievement. [303] Had there never been a St. Thomas to profit by his genius, he would still have been " the Great". Apart altogether from the high place he occupies by reason of his association with the more original thinker who was his pupil, St. Albert has an immense claim on the attention of history. He was, unquestionably, the most learned man of the whole Middle Ages, one of the most learned men who have ever lived. He was born in Germany, the son of one of the emperor's vassals, a generation or so earlier than St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure. Padua was the centre where his first studies were made and by the time he applied for admission into the Order of Preachers he was already known as a scholar of unusual erudition. His interests were already fixed -- the study of the natural world in all its aspects-and his wide reading made him master of all that vast GrecoArab literature pouring into France and Italy for now nearly a hundred years. Albert's mind was of the same cast as that of Averroes or of Aristotle himself. It was the world of external reality that primarily attracted his attention, and about that world he made himself, finally, as well informed as either of his predecessors. He was to be the Catholic Averroes, the Catholic Aristotle, knowing all, explaining all. This indeed was his ambition and his aim "to make all these things understandable to the Latins". In the crucial moment of the intellectual struggle the Catholic tradition received in Albert a scientist, a physicist, sympathetic not only to the metaphysical and psychological doctrines of the new learning but to its astronomy, its astrology too: no mere repertoire of carefully arranged learning, however, but an alert, critical mind, ambitious to relate the whole truth about nature known through science with the truth about God and creation revealed through the traditional teaching of the Church. Albert was that rarity indeed, the complete theologian who is also the complete scientist.

It was in 1223 that he became a Dominican, received into the order by St. Dominic's successor, Jordan of Saxony, who, incidentally, was the great mathematician of the day. For the next twenty-two years Albert studied and taught in one convent or another of his order -- not without opposition from those less enlightened brethren whom he somewhere stigmatises as bruta animalia blasphemantes in iis quae ignorant. When in 1245 -- the year in which at Lyons Frederick II was condemned and deposed -- he appeared as professor in the University of Paris the effect was extraordinary. The combination of such secular learning and of theology had about it something of the miraculous. No hall in Paris could hold the thousands who flocked to his lectures. They were given finally in the open air, in the great space which is to-day the Place Maubert -- a name which itself is, it is said, nothing but a corruption of Place Maitre Albert.

St. Albert's written work is contained in some dozens of huge volumes -- many of them, after all these centuries, still in manuscript. Their titles give an idea of the universality of this German Dominican's scientific interests. In St. Albert, then, there appears for the first time, what so far the intellectual development of the Middle Ages had lacked, namely a view of knowledge as a whole related to the whole universe of fact and experience. He is not just another commentator, the best equipped so far. His work is a new explanation of the universe, made in Aristotle's spirit, and according to Aristotle's method. But the explanation is St. Albert's and it won him, immediately, the rare distinction that his books were used as texts. For the schools of his own day St. Albert ranked, with Aristotle himself, as an authority.

What of his attitude to the burning questions of the hour? It would seem that St. Albert was primarily a scholar, and not a polemist. The discovery and exposition of truth, the instruction of those who as yet did not possess truth, was the one concern of his life. Direct criticism of the leaders of opposing schools of thought, even of the errors they propagated, formed no part of his scheme of things. Truth in the end is victorious by its own sheer nature. It needs but to be known and error disappears. None the less, the discussion going on around finds an echo in his work, and on all the problems he gives his opinion.

His first great service is his insistence that Philosophy and Theology are distinct sciences. More accurately than anyone so far, does he define and defend the rights of reason in theological studies, and analyse its role with regard to mysteries. Reason is not omni-competent. There are things beyond its power of knowing, of understanding, of proving. The domains of faith and reason are separate; in its own domain reason is free; Aristotle may reign there without any danger to faith. With regard to the possibilities of man's knowledge of God in this life, and to the way in which man comes to what knowledge is possible, St. Albert is most reserved, thanks here to the double influence of his understanding what knowledge is, and of the teaching of the so- called Areopagite. In this life man can never know God save "through a glass in a dark manner". God cannot be directly intelligible. What man's intellect can perceive directly, is the trace of God. God is not then directly intelligible to mall in His created works.

What of the divine in man's own soul, and of the divine role in that intellectual operation which is the essential characteristic of the human soul? For Averroes that intellectual operation was ultimately the operation of a being that transcended the individual soul -- the soul, considered as "intelligent," really ceased to be individual. In Avicenna's theory it was only a special divine intervention that made intellection possible. The Augustinian explanation, and that of its greatest champion in the time of Albert, St. Bonaventure, was, in its effect, closely allied to that of Avicenna. St. Albert, although he rejects Averroes in the matter of the soul's mortality, yet differs in this solution of the problem of its essential activity, from Avicenna. He will not abandon the individuality of the soul; nor can he, yet, wholly reject Averroes' arguments for the singleness of the active intellect. For Albert the Great, the soul as the principle of sense life and of vegetative life is united to the body and individualised: as the principle of intellectual life it is separated from the body, for it cannot, as an individual, think in universals.

Such is the saint's first position, the first essay in reconciling the newly-discovered psychology as to the nature of the soul with the truths of faith on the same subject. It is the work of a thinker who, if he understands the supernaturally taught truths of his faith, understands also, and to the full, the compelling force of a coherent logical doctrine of natural science. It is not, however, in the name of truths acquired through faith that St. Albert modifies Averroes. Averroes, though the greatest of commentators, is but a commentator. The saint is another, and steadied, as he studies his Aristotle, by his firm grasp of the truth that man's will is free, refusing to the heavenly intelligences any power to determine the inner workings of man's spirit, he perceives that the intellect is not so distinct from the soul as Averroes' theory presupposes. In Aristotle, individualism has a more important place than the classic commentator allows. For the moment [304] St. Albert's thought is content to halt the march of Averroes.

Albert's first reward, apparently, was that he was regarded in some quarters as responsible for the spread of Averroism, among the signs of which are the decision of the faculty of Arts in 1252 making obligatory the study of Aristotle's De Anima, or that which, three years later, made Aristotle as a whole the staple matter of its studies: two revolutionary changes which, in the then state of things, were tantamount to basing the whole teaching of the faculty on Averroes. By this time (1256) St. Albert had long left Paris. In 1248 he had been charged to organise the studies of his order at Cologne. The pope, Alexander IV, alarmed at the dissensions in Paris which threatened to end the university's usefulness -- dissensions between the secular masters-of-arts and the friars, related dissensions between the advocates and the opponents of the new learning -- ordered an enquiry. St. Albert at the moment was at the Curia and, as a leading authority on the question, he was commissioned by the pope to refute the theory of Averroes that was the root of the trouble. Hence in 1256 his book De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroem. The book did not however, end the greatest of St. Albert's troubles, that in his absence from Paris (1248-1255) some of those whom he had trained had developed into Averroists of a most radical kind, and were justifying the development by a reference to his teaching. Whence a resolve on the part of the philosopher to leave the academic life. The pope had desired to use him in Germany and, the saint now consenting, he was named Bishop of Ratisbon.

At Paris meanwhile the struggle continued to rage. Not all ofAlbert's followers had gone astray. The greatest of them all, Thomas Aquinas, was once more in Paris, teaching now, and developing his own thought, no less than that of his master, to criticise Averroes and to refute the Averroists completely. There were now three parties in the arena. The Averroists; the Traditionalists who clung to St. Augustine; and the anti-Averroist disciples of St. Albert. The first worshipped at the shrine of Aristotle. The second fought the first, as Catholics on the points where the Averroist theories clashed with revealed truth, and as Platonists on the differences in philosophy. The third group was the one really critical party. It fought the Averroists with their own weapons. It used Aristotle as it used Plato and the Neoplatonists, that is to say as far as reason justified the use. Whence a certain suspicion of this group on the part of the Traditionalists -- a suspicion that was by no means lessened when the group criticised and attacked the fallacious Avicennianism latent in the Traditionalist exposition of Catholicism. This three-cornered contest filled the next twenty years (1257-1277) from the time when St. Thomas received his master's degree to the famous condemnation of his theories by the Bishop of Paris.

St. Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 at the castle of Roccasecca, a fortress of the Terra Laboris, half-way between Rome and Naples. Like St. Albert he was the son of one of the emperor's vassals, a baron of the kingdom of Sicily, the powerful Count of Aquino. [305] The war between pope and emperor was to be renewed before St. Thomas was out of the nursery, and it was to divide his family. Frederick 11, St. Thomas' sovereign and kinsman, influenced his early years in another way too, for after a boyhood spent at Monte Cassino (1230-1239) it was to the emperor-king's newly-founded University of Naples that he was sent. Not the least of the kingdom's debts to the genius of Frederick was this well- equipped centre of studies in which he designed that all his subjects should be trained. Frederick's own court was something of an academy where reigned one of the leading scientists of the time. This was Michael Scot, Averroist and astrologer, learned in the new Arab learning, translator of Aristotle, of Averroes and of Avicenna and, Roger Bacon bears witness, a commentator of great authority. This academic court has been described as the earliest centre of Italian scepticism, and Frederick II was one of its first propagandists. The royal foundation at Naples, it need not be said, was of a like spirit. Here St. Thomas had for his initiator into higher studies yet another Averroist, Peter of Ireland.

In this half-Arab school he remained until 1244 in which year he offered himself as a novice to the Friars-Preachers and was accepted. As he made his way to Paris, his brothers, disgusted at this waste of opportunity on the part of the clerical younger son through whom the Church offered boundless- prospects to the family influence, kidnapped him and locked him up in the dungeon at Roccasecca. There he remained for a year with the Bible and Aristotle to while away the time. In 1245 the pope intervened and the saint was allowed to follow his vocation. The order sent him to Paris where (1245-1248) he studied under St. Albert. In 1248 he accompanied his master to Cologne. After four more years of Albert's tuition he returned to Paris where for the next seven years (1252-1259) he studied and taught and gained his degrees. From 1259 to 1268 he was at the papal court -- Anagni, Orvieto, Rome and Viterbo -- still teaching and writing. He returned to Paris, for four years, in 1268, and after a short period in Naples he died in 1274, in the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova near to Roccasecca and to Aquino, on his way to the General Council of Lyons to which he had received from the pope a personal summons.

St. Thomas was, then, no cloistered solitary. From the day when, a boy of fourteen, he left Monte Cassino, he lived continuously in the great centres of the agitated life of the time. It was in the very midst of a turbulent academic crisis that he taught and wrote, the crisis of 1256 that threatened his order at Paris, the later crisis of 1270 when before riotous and hostile audiences he had to defend the orthodoxy of his teaching. To few indeed of the saints has there fallen so violently active a setting for their contemplation.

The output of St. Thomas, who died before he was fifty, is enormous. In the Paris edition his complete works run to thirty- five volumes quarto. Roughly his writings lend themselves to a triple classification. First of all there are his Commentaries, the inevitable commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a commentary on Aristotle, a third on the self-styled Denis the Areopagite, and others on Sacred Scripture. In the second class are the two best known of his works: the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica. Thirdly there is the mass of miscellaneous writings, among them the very important treatises on special questions, the Quaestiones Disputatae and the Quodlibetales.

The saint is, of course, vastly learned in all the traditional literature: Holy Scripture, the Fathers -- and especially St. Augustine whom he mastered as no one else before him and, probably, as no one since, and whose greatest disciple he assuredly is -- his scholastic predecessors, his contemporaries. In the matter of the new learning, thanks to St. Albert and, perhaps to Peter the Irishman, he gives evidence time and again of a really unusual erudition. He knows all these authors in their own works -- a circumstance which differentiates him immediately from the mass of his contemporaries and, among them, from St. Bonaventure. It is not, however, to the mere weight of learning that St. Thomas owes his hard-won supremacy. His tranquil, ordered mind never ceased to grow, and, despite the racket of the never ceasing controversy, it grew in ordered peace. As a writer he is impersonality itself -- if the phrase be allowed. Never, hardly ever, in all the vast literature that is his work, can there be discovered any trace of the disputes. All is set down in a cold clear style where the words are wrung dry of any but the exact meaning they are chosen to express. The poetry of his soul, its never ceasing aspiration to God, the fire of his love for God -- these things are only to be discerned in the saint's clear exposition of the truth whence they all derived. Not Euclid himself is more distant-nor more adequate. In St. Thomas the mot juste meets the genius for whom it exists.

The immensely valuable body of neo-Aristotelian learning as dangerous, apparently, as it was valuable, impossible to ignore as it was impossible to suppress, had found in St. Albert the erudit who was also a thinker, the erudit and thinker who was a theologian too. In St. Thomas it found still more: it found the prince of ordered thought and a thinker who, if less of an erudit than St. Albert, was supremely critical, admirably fitted to assess the materials that awaited him, and with these, and with others of his own devising, to build a new system which should finally succeed in relating philosophically God and His universe, the data of His revelation and the fruits of man's reasoning.

The difference could not be greater between the genius of the two great minds with a sketch of whom this volume opens and closes, the intensely personal, rhetorical, psychological Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, detached, metaphysical, transparent; St. Augustine who cries his message in a hundred tongues, and St. Thomas through whose transparency Truth unmistakable peacefully looks, with final reassurance, upon those who seek.

When St. Thomas began to write, as a young man of thirty, the tendency was universal, among all his contemporaries, to minimise the place of man in the universal scheme of things. For the Averroists it was Nature that was everything, and Nature was wholly material. For the traditional Augustinians the all- important spirit was something isolated from matter. All, for one reason or another, agreed that what worked intellectually in man was not a power proper to man as such, but a single force outside mall and common to all. The new professor at first notes the quasi-unanimity, and although he does not accept the current doctrine he does not as yet see his way to reject it as erroneous. Three years or so after his first major work -- the Commentary on the Sentences -- he wrote the Summa Contra Gentiles (1259) and now his attitude changes altogether. A closer study of Aristotle's De Anima compels him to declare that the current theories of the singleness of the active intellect do not derive from Aristotle. At the same time that he deals this blow to the contemporary Averroists, he rejects also the Avicenna-Gundissalinus explanation -- to which, by now, the patronage of the mystics and Traditionalists has given enormous prestige -- that the single active intellect is God. Both theories jeopardise, if they do not destroy, the autonomy of man's thought.

St. Thomas, knowing Avicenna through and through, knows by this time that he is really a Neoplatonist, filling up the gaps in the Aristotelian theory with deductions inspired by Neoplatonic ideas. Avicenna, quoted so often and so respectfully, in the earlier work, is now seen to be the enemy as truly as Averroes, and is treated as such. Even more sternly does St. Thomas deal with Avicebron, whom, unlike some of his contemporaries, who approve him, he knows to be a Jew. No writer is more mischievous than this last, whose mystical attraction is blinding a whole school to the consequences latent in his theory of the absolute passivity of matter. Avicebron, sacrificing man's intellectual autonomy more than most, is ultimately a pantheist and a determinist, and the more dangerous because, thanks to Gundissalinus, given so Christian a disguise.

The great opponent for all the theologians was, of course, Averroes and, from the beginning, he is the great opponent for St. Thomas, too, who stigmatises his theories as heretical, even when he will say no worse of Avicenna than that he is erroneous, None the less, in its make-up, the mind of St. Thomas is of the same kind as that of the Spanish Moor. There are many points where the two agree -- and where they are alike opposed to the Traditionalist Augustinians whom Avicenna and Avicebron are; leading into unsuspected difficulties. They agree, for example, that matter is the principle of individuation; and that it is impossible to demonstrate the non-eternity of the world. They agree, too, in the method of their commentaries. Here St. Thomas follows Averroes, and not his own master, St. Albert -- a very notable instance of St. Thomas' independence. St. Thomas is not, as from a principle, Averroist or anti-Averroist. He is strongly opposed to the peculiar contribution of the Moor to the debate -- his radical theory of the singleness of the intellect, passive and active -- but he knows Averroes as well as his most enthusiastic follower, he understands his value and he uses him scientifically, critically. [306] A further point in connection with Averroes illustrates St. Thomas' independence of his own master. Far more strongly than St. Albert does he dissociate himself from the Averroist Physics and Astrology, source of a determinism which St. Thomas opposed more strongly still

The Contra Gentiles is, however, much more than a masterly critique of contemporary tendencies. It contains the first sketch of St. Thomas' own philosophy; a system which shows him as less influenced by the Arabs than any man of his time, and in strong reaction against them all. It is to end in a discovery that is all his own

This discovery -- by virtue of which " What Lavoisier is to chemistry, that St. Thomas is to all science, to all philosophy, to all morals" [307] -- is the simply expressed truth that the active intelligence is not single but multiple, and there is an individual active intelligence proper to each individual man, that his individual active intelligence is an essential element in each man's personality. Nay more, the soul of man, the form of man, is precisely his active intelligence. It is his active intelligence all his own, personal to himself, that makes man man. Here is indeed a basis offered to individualism! Man, each man, is a world complete in himself, and each man is a thing apart, unique, in the created universe. The theory opens out limitless fields of human rights, human responsibilities, human possibilities, to the psychologist and to the moralist. The study of man must reveal a richness and variety of life that is limitless. Routine, the inevitable routine of a mass-produced human activity, with all its deathly dullness, can never be truly characteristic, or be attributed as truly characteristic, as humanly characteristic, of man and of his effect in the universe. Of a world peopled by such creatures too much can never be hoped or expected. A deeper optimism must henceforward inspire the study of man. The creative act of God -- its wisdom, its ends-are seen in a newer light.

The determining influence that moves St. Thomas to the mighty step of this declaration is experience, observation of the fact of life, and hard rationalist analysis of the fact observed. The mystical traditionalist explained the universe by an a priori theory of God's universal action: the materialist by a similarly incomplete theory of matter. St. Thomas, the first fully to understand what exactly that third element -- man -- is, explains the universe through God and man and matter. He is thereby the greatest of all humanists, giving, for the first time, scientific form and philosophical demonstration to a truth that others had no doubt implicitly held for centuries, but whose metaphysical basis he, for the first time, lays bare and from which he, later, will make, scientifically, all the necessary deductions. With the exposition of this theory, that the individual active intelligence is the form of each human being and the source of his moral autonomy, a good half of the Contra Gentiles is taken up. In the Swnma Theologica, the fruits of another ten years of thought and experience, the discovery is explored and exploited to the full.

The Summa Theologica (1266-1272) is not a polemic directed against subtle erudite foes. St. Thomas, here, has not primarily in view the Arabs and their more or less conscious disciples. He is the Catholic theologian pure and simple, setting out the whole, theory of God and His universe -- and especially His creature man, -- as Holy Writ, the Catholic tradition, and human reason make it known. To the author's grasp of the nature of faith and the nature of human reason, and to his unerring delimitation of their spheres of operation, the work owes an utter and entire absence of confusion that makes it a thing apart; the hesitations, the ambiguities, the incoherency, the contradictions, that have dogged all attempts to relate philosophically God and His creatures, now at last disappear. And the saint's own great metaphysical discovery is related to ethics in a way that makes the new work a new kind of thing.

This is apparent if the Summa Theologica be compared, not with the work of St. Thomas' contemporaries merely, but with his own earlier book that is a commentary on Peter Lombard's classic text. Examination, even a cursory examination, of the table of contents of the Summa shows at once that St. Thomas has, in his book, added a whole series of entirely new chapters to the body of theological teaching. The end of the Pars Prima [308] is a very catechism on the metaphysics of the Active Intelligence. Then in the Prima- Secundae there are no less than seventy-one quaestiones where all is new, plan and detail alike, occupied with the psychological justification of the new theory, and through it giving a new scientific value to the theory of the morality of particular acts. There are, for example, the elaborate analyses of intention, choice, deliberation, and consent, [309] questions that St. Bonaventure, to take but one example, never touches at all, and in the discussion of which St. Thomas is a pioneer. Perhaps even more striking, and more eloquent at a glance, is the general comparison set out by Fr. Gorce between the scheme of the Commentary of 1255 and that of the Summa. Nothing so shows how greatly the study of human nature is enriched by St. Thomas' grasp of its fundamental reality, how rightly he might claim to be the very prince of humanists. In matter of Theodicy the Summa has seventy-three questions, as against the sixty-one of the Commentary; in the discussion of man's relation to God, one hundred and eighty-one against seventy-three; in the discussion of man, his psychology and his morality three hundred and twenty-nine against thirty-six. More particularly the saint has twenty-six questions, entirely new, in the Summa, on God's government of the world. Where the Commentary has seventeen distinctions [310] on the morality of particular acts, the Summa has two hundred and four. On the essence of the human soul and the foundations of moral philosophy -- the end of life, human acts, the passions, the virtues -- the Summa has again seventy questions where the Commentary has not a single distinction. St. Thomas is the creator of a new philosophical, theological humanism. He is indeed sui generis.

It is a theology where every aspect of being is envisaged from the point of its relation to intelligence. For St. Thomas God is the Being who is eminently Intelligence, the created universe the perfectly balanced production of the Divine Intelligence. Whence a new strength of optimism, that informs the whole of St. Thomas' outlook, as he describes and discusses God, His creation, the story of man, his origin, his turning away from God and the great system by which man returns to God. The creation, the fall, the incarnation and redemption, the Church, grace and the sacraments - - each is in its own place; and without the possibility of confusion the whole vast panorama of Revelation is surveyed scientifically and rationally.

The Summa Theologica is the greatest book ever written. It has about it the eternity of the metaphysical. It is as relevant to- day as it was to those who first read and studied in it. But, given the passionate discussion among all the saint's contemporaries on the theory that underlay the whole exposition, whether it is really man who thinks and acts, lives and is immortal, the Summa, for the generation in which it was written, should have been all-conquering, among the Catholics at least. It was, however, nothing of the sort. The supreme triumph of the Catholic intelligence was greeted by a storm of opposition and criticism which, inevitably, all but destroyed its usefulness, outside the saint's own order for years and even for centuries.

The source of this opposition was the theological faculty of the University of Paris. Here the methodology and the practice traditionally associated with the name of St. Augustine still reigned supreme. It was a tradition by no means ignorant, or scornful, or suspicious, of philosophy. But in philosophy it was anti-Aristotelian; and in so far as it had found anything sympathetic in the new Greco-Saracen [311] movement, it had found it in Avicenna and Avicebron. The naturalist, physicist and astronomical aspects of the movement -- a