Volume 2, Chapter 5

THE SIEGE OF CHRISTENDOM, 814-1046

Section 1: THE BREAK-UP OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE, 814-888

Section 2: CAROLINGIAN CATHOLICISM: PIETY, LEARNING, MISSIONS

Section 3: EASTERN CATHOLICISM: THE END OF ICONOCLASM: THE SCHISM OF PHOTIUS: 813-925

Section 4: THE ROMAN SEE AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EMPIRE, 814-900

Section 5: THE ROMAN SEE AND THE ANARCHY, 900-1046

Section 6: CATHOLIC LIFE DURING THE ANARCHY: ABUSES, REFORMERS, MISSIONARY CONQUESTS

THE BREAK-UP OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE, 814-888

CHARLEMAGNE'S mighty administrative achievement was fated soon to perish. It could indeed hardly have been otherwise. In the very heart of the empire he established, forces violently hostile to the new political unity wrestled from the beginning. The social change by which the great landowners attracted to themselves the domains of their smaller neighbours, and with the domains their service and loyalty; the political change which, next, made these great men the lords of their dependants, and the system by which the domains of these lords were exempted from the authority Or the king's officers; -- all these had continued to develop through the fifty years of Charlemagne's reign. They were now developed deliberately and systematically, as the natural and traditional way of government. The care and the expense of government was transferred from the central authority, king or emperor, to the local lord. The day was fast approaching when the king would have no subjects directly obedient to him but the handful of great men -- counts, bishops, abbots -- and in that day all would depend on the power of the king to compel these great men to obey.

Another tradition that lived on through Charlemagne's great reign was the idea of the kingdom as the king's personal possession something to be divided and bequeathed like any other estate. Charlemagne so divided the empire among his sons in 806; Louis the Pious, his surviving son and successor, did the same in 817, in 829 and in 835. From all these partitions flowed a series of hitter family feuds and civil wars.

The empire was artificial in another respect. Its peoples were too varied and too different and, as yet, too little catholicised- despite the conversions and the work of the missionary monks -- to form a real unity. It is too early perhaps to speak of French and Germans and Italians, but the ancestors of these modern nations were, in Charlemagne's time, by no means a single united people. The empire was a mosaic of a thousand motley pieces. One thing alone kept it together -- the genius of the first emperor.

The really violent troubles began in 829, when Louis the Pious, in order to give the son of his second marriage -- Charles, afterwards called the Bald -- a share in the empire, revised the partition of 817. There followed ten years of civil war. The sons of the first marriage revolted, and were crushed. They revolted a second time and, the great churchmen assisting them, who stood by the old unitary traditions of their master Charlemagne, Louis was defeated and forced to resign. A little later he came back; there were new partitions, new wars; and finally, in 840, he died, leaving the imperial title to his eldest son and the empire divided among all three.

The fighting still went on, this time between the brothers -- the new emperor, Lothair, showing himself weaker even than his father. Finally, in 843, the unity of the empire was once and for all definitely broken by the treaty of Verdun. One brother took the west -- roughly France; another the German lands east of the Rhine; and Lothair took Italy and the middle lands between France and Germany, from the North Sea to the Alps, called henceforth, from his name, Lotharingia (Lorraine). Twelve years later (855) Lothair died, prematurely; and Lotharingia was itself divided to make kingdoms for his three sons. By 870 two of these had died, and though the eldest brother, Louis II, managed to retain, with the title of emperor, the kingdom of Italy, the greater part of the lands of his brothers was seized by his uncles, the two surviving sons of Louis the Pious -- Louis the German and Charles the Bald. The Treaty of Mersen, made in that year between these three princes, marks the beginning of France and Germany as separate and consciously different kingdoms.

The main feature of the history of Charlemagne's family in the twenty years following this important treaty (870-888) is the rapid disappearance of all its leading members. By 885 three only were left of all the army of Carolingian princes: Charles the Fat (a son of Louis the German), Charles the Simple (a grandson of the same prince), and Arnulf, a third grandson who, but for his own illegitimacy should have been the heir, since he was the son of the eldest son, Carloman. When Charles the Fat died in 888, Charles the Simple was little more than a baby and chaos complete and entire descended on what remained of Charlemagne's tradition. It was just seventy-four years since his death.

During these seventy-four years the frontier wars which the Franks had waged for centuries went on unceasingly: with the Slavs, in furthest Germany, with the Avars and, in southern Gaul, with the Mohammedans from Spain. And this century of political dislocation brought with it new enemies, more ferocious and destructive than any western Europe had known since the Vandals. these were the pirates from the fiords of Norway and from Denmark. It was in the last years of Charlemagne's reign that the flotillas of their long, light boats, drawing little water. easily able to sail up the rivers, began to harry the coasts of the empire. The hope of plunder, animal lust, and elementary bloodthirstiness seem to have chiefly inspired these first descents. The Northmen were also savagely anti-Christian, the monasteries and churches the especial objects of their ferocity. In 793 they sacked Lindisfarne, and in 795 made their first raids on Ireland. Gradually their policy changed. They began to winter in fortified camps, off the coasts where they operated, or on islands in the rivers. Soon no river from the Elbe to the Guadalquivir was safe from these pests. England was especially their prey. They took possession of Sheppey in 835, they made themselves masters of East Anglia, destroying monasteries and massacring the monks. Amongst others they put to death for the faith was the King of East Anglia, St. Edmund. They next turned to Wessex, and they ravaged Mercia, and finally, by the Treaty of Wedmore (878), Alfred, the greatest of the English kings, was compelled to recognise them as the rulers of all the north and east of the island.

In the empire of the Franks the Northmen established three great centres: on the Scheldt, the Seine and the Loire. Antwerp, Utrecht, Tongres, Cologne, Mainz, Metz and even Aix itself, the capital, felt their power until, after fifty years of this reign of terror, Arnulf, the last fighting man of Charlemagne's family, destroyed their camp at Louvain in the great battle of 891. Just five years before this, the pirates of the Seine had met their great check at Paris, the siege of which they had been forced to abandon after a stubborn twelve months of fighting. The emperor essayed to buy them off with money and an annual tribute, but vainly. As in Germany, town after town fell to them. The west of France suffered even more than the north. From their settlements at the mouth of the Loire, Nantes, Blois, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and as far as Tarbes, were burnt out time and again, the countrysides ravaged, and monasteries sacked until the country was little more than a desert. In Spain they had less success, thanks to the military organisation both of the tiny Catholic kingdoms and of the Arab States. But they penetrated and vexed the Mediterranean even as far as Pisa and Lucca.

A century of such savage destruction, added to the desolation of civil war and the absence of organised government, was enough to reduce Charlemagne's reign of order to a chaos such as Europe had never before known. Christendom was fast becoming a waste with, here and there, little islets where a handful of scared and terrified survivors strove to maintain the tradition of ordered life.

There remains to be noted yet a second external scourge which, in this same century, menaced the existence of what had once been the Roman Empire and was again to he European civilisation. This was the maritime empire of the Mohammedans of Africa. Here, towards the end of Charlemagne's reign, the internal rivalries which, for half a century, had occupied all the fierce energy of the State, yielded before the family of the Aghlabites. Soon the new order was visible in the appearance of a fleet, the conquest of Sicily and an endless harrying of the coasts of Italy and southern Gaul. Like the northern invaders, the Saracens made settlements and even, through their occupation of the passes of the Alps, they for years made communication between Italy and France a matter of the greatest difficulty and peril.

The century that followed Charlemagne's death was thus a century in which his empire -- Latin Catholicism -- was continuously besieged, and, under the stress of the siege, was steadily broken and wasted.

CAROLINGIAN CATHOLICISM: PIETY, LEARNING, MISSIONS

For the first thirty years or so of the period, Carolingian Catholicism continued to advance: the reform of Catholic life, the activity of the missionaries, and the fundamentally important work of intellectual revival. Louis the Pious did not share his father's failure to understand the real importance of monasticism. For him the monasteries were not merely centres of civilisation and intellectual life: they were primarily settlements of monks, sanctuaries wherein the primitive ideals of the Gospel, the perfect following of Jesus Christ, the life of prayer, were cherished and the best of opportunity provided for their realisation. Louis was the friend as well as the patron of St. Benedict of Aniane, and seconded the efforts of that great monastic reformer, as also those of his successors Arnulf of Marmoutiers and Jonas of Orleans. An imperial decree of 817 made the rule of St. Benedict obligatory on all monasteries, and laid especial emphasis on the necessity of manual labour and ascetic practices. In the same year the emperor issued, also, a rule for the canons regular and one for the nuns.

Alcuin's work for liturgical uniformity was continued by his pupil Amalric, Bishop of Treves (811-850). It is from his antiphonary, and the treatises which he wrote to explain and defend it -- a combination of the Roman antiphonary and that of the church of Metz -- that the modern Roman rite largely derives. In the countrysides, the movement to establish parishes independent of those in the towns continued to make headway and, despite inevitable opposition, the movement to free these parishes from the power of the local lord. On the other hand the king, more than ever, kept the nomination of bishops in his own hands. and, for all his patronage of the monastic life, he continued, as the needs of policy dictated, to make over the abbeys to laymen.

Nor did the missionary movement die with Charlemagne. Ebbo, Archbishop of Rheims, and foster brother of Louis the Pious, turned from his labours for the State to initiate the conversion of Denmark (822), whose king he baptised in 826. But the great name here is that of yet another Benedictine, Ansgar, a monk of Corbie. He was scarcely twenty-five when he went north to take up Ebbo's work and for nearly seventy years he spent himself to do for Denmark and the north of Germany what Boniface had done for the centre, and the Irish monks for the south. Like St. Boniface he was the pope's legate; and in Hamburg he created a second Fulda, cathedral, monastery, library and school. The apostolate in Sweden was at the same time given to Ebbo's nephew, Gauzbert.

The intellectual life of this second generation of Carolingian Catholicism, the fruits of Alcuin's genius, was richer and more striking than that of the first. One of its leaders was the most famous of all Alcuin's pupils, Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda in 822 and Archbishop of Mainz from 847: no original thinker certainly, but a trained mind and a lover of learning of the type of Isidore of Seville, concerned to re-edit for his own generation, and to save for the future lest it should perish, the thought of the Christian past. He wrote Manuals of Grammar and Philosophy, commentaries on Holy Scripture, on the Canon Law, controversial writings on Predestination against Gottschalk, and an encyclopaedia that left no knowledge unexplored. As Abbot of Fulda, Rabanus Maurus formed Walafrid Strabo, the poet of the century and yet another commentator on Holy Scripture; and he formed Gottschalk too. Fulda, in his time, was the greatest of all the schools of the continent. Elsewhere, too, the work went on: lectures on the Bible, St. Augustine, Boethius, discussions of the old questions of Grace and Free Will, of the Infinite and the Finite, the existence and nature of Universals.

In the political struggles which filled this unhappy century, churchmen had as prominent a place as they had occupied in the routine administration of the previous generation. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, and Ebbo of Rheims were the chiefs of the party that fought against the partition policy of Louis the Pious. When this finally triumphed, the bishops again worked strongly to set up, in place of the now destroyed unity of the single emperor, a system of permanent alliances based on the Gospel principles of brotherly love. They were successful up to a point. The kings solemnly swore to keep inviolate the rights of charity and brotherhood, and their fraternal pacts were ratified as such by the assemblies of the notables. From the royal alliances. thus inspired by the teaching of the Gospel, the peace of Christ would descend to nobles and people alike. The City of God on earth seemed a long step nearer to realisation. St. Augustine, the new age's greatest prophet, had come into his own.

The idea, and these practical policies that enshrined it, provoked a new interest in the morality of politics, and produced a whole new literature -- the De Institutione Regia of Jonas of Orleans, the Via Regia of Smaragdus, the De Rectoribus Christianis of Sedulius Scottus and, above all, the De Regis Persona of Hincmar, Ebbo's successor at Rheims after 845. Not since the days of St. Ambrose had the claim for the Church's moral supremacy in life been so insistently set forth, and never, even then, had the practical conclusions of the doctrine been proclaimed more bluntly. Political duties are moral duties; kings are as much bound to keep the moral law in their public life as ordinary men in their private lives; the Church is the divinely appointed guardian of morality, and thereby the chief power in the State. "Bishops, " said Hincmar, "are the equals of kings. More, they are superior to the king since it is they who consecrate him. As it is their privilege to anoint him, so it is their right to depose him. " So far had theory travelled since the introduction into Gaul, a hundred and twenty years earlier, of the practice of consecrating the ruler. In the Christendom of Charlemagne's successor, where Church and State continued to be one, the roles were now apparently to be reversed. The king might name the bishops, but they were to be the judges of his activities. The same ideas, but expressed with far greater force and related to the most powerful tradition in Christendom, are to be seen at work in the activities of the greatest of the contemporary popes, St. Nicholas I (858- 867).

With the papacy of Nicholas I there reappears the explicit assertion of the Roman See's primitive claim to a universal primacy of jurisdiction over the Church as the consequence of Our Lord's promise to St. Peter. Thence derives Rome's unique power of summoning synods and of giving life and real value to their acts. The pope is the supreme judge of all ecclesiastical suits and the only judge in such greater causes as those to which a temporal sovereign is a party or those that concern the deposition of a bishop. In this last matter Nicholas I develops the earlier practice, according to which the popes, while reserving to themselves decisions that touched patriarchs, primates and metropolitans, left the deposition of bishops to their immediate superiors. A bishop may still be deposed by the provincial council, but the pope is insistent that the council's decision, to be effective, must have his confirmation. Not on appeal alone, does the pope show himself the immediate superior of the local episcopate.

This restorer of the idea of the papal monarchy within the Church faced 110 less boldly the great contemporary difficulty of the relations of the Church with its defender: the consecrated, Church-created empire. In the fifty years that followed Charlemagne's death the Church slowly but steadily reacted against his implied relegation of the bishops -- and the pope -- to the sanctuary. The conception that the cleric s sole clerical duty was prayer and study, while the emperor would take on himself the actual management and direction of Church affairs, was increasingly challenged. In this reaction the local episcopate led the way. It was not until Nicholas I that the papacy began to dominate the reaction. Church and State for this pope are definitely not one thing, and he urges this insistently, against the ideas implicit in the actions of Carolingians in the west and of the Byzantine emperor in the east. In its own domain each of these powers is sovereign. The State, therefore, must not interfere in Church matters. It is, however, the State's duty to assist the Church -- a principle which in a few centuries will be developed as far as the theory that the State is an instrument in the Church's hands for the realisation of the Christian ideal. Nicholas I, however, does not go so far. Nevertheless, quoting frequently the forty-fourth psalm, "Thou hast set them princes over all the earth, " he is conscious of the pope's duty to correct even kings should they break God's law. They, too, are subject to the penalty that shuts them out of the divine society. But while excommunication remains for princes, too, a possible ultimate sanction, it is not an excommunication to which any temporal consequences are attached; there is no hint that the pope may, or must, depose the excommunicated prince; and, of course, none at all of the later idea of a holy war to drive him forth.

The question has been raised as to the sources of Nicholas I's doctrine and as to his own share in its formulation. The main ideas are, of course, not his own at all. They are the traditional policy of the Roman See and he could find the classic texts that express it in the collection of canons of Denis the Short, [133] the decretals, that is to say, of the popes of the fourth and fifth centuries and the canons of the earlier councils. He had, too, in the well-stocked armoury of the archives of his see the letters of later popes, among which the decisions of Pelagius I (556-561) and St. Gregory the Great had a special importance. Was the contemporary collection which we call the False Decretals, among the sources Nicholas I employed? The question has, apparently, never been settled absolutely. M. Fournier speaks of "un certain parfum isidorien" as discernible in his writings after 865. At the most these fabrications did no more than give new support to ideas already traditional and formed from other sources. No one, certainly, will ever again accuse the great pope of being, through his possible use of them, " a conscious liar. " The material was not, then, of the pope's own creation. But he so used it to meet the particular problem of the day, and he restated it in forms so precise and so useable that, through his letters, something of his personality passed into all the collections and thereby did much to form the mind of all the later Middle Ages.

There is a further aspect of the Carolingian attempt to restore the institutions of civilised government which must be noticed, namely the desire of the scholars who were the agents of Charlemagne and his son to relate their work to something more enduring than expediency, than the necessity of the moment or the convenience of the prince. The ultimate object of all their endeavours was the restoration of the rule of Law, and their first task, here, was to rediscover the Law. This was especially true of the movement to reform the Church, its clerics and laity alike. In the enthusiasm of these eighth- and ninth-century reformers, and in their desire to strengthen their case by the adducing of the best authority, are to be found the beginnings of the new science of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. These clerics are the ancestors of the systematised Canon Law of the later Middle Ages.

By the time of Charlemagne's accession (768) the confusion in the minds of ecclesiastics as to the detailed rights deriving from, what all accepted, the Church's universal commission to save men's souls, was complete and entire. Three hundred and fifty years of continuous war and civil disturbance -- of a general breakdown of civilisation in fact -- had done their work. To the question what powers did the Church claim to possess according to the canons, or what powers had the Church exercised in the past, no one, anywhere, could give a satisfactory reply.

Nearly three hundred years earlier, by the end of the fifth century, that is to say, in the time of Pope Gelasius I (492-496), there had been formed a carefully noted collection of all the canons of the councils so far, and of the decrees of the different popes deciding cases and enunciating thereby the principles by which future cases would be decided. Then came the complete break up of the old political unity. For the next two hundred and fifty years, Spain and Gaul went their own way. In Gaul this patrimony of the law was scattered, and in great part lost to sight. In Spain, on the other hand, where alone in these outlying lands the centralisation of the hierarchy round a single primatial see -- Toledo-survived, the collection continued to grow through the seventh century. But by 720 Spain, as an effective influence in Christendom, was dead, thanks to the Mohammedans; and Africa, the first real home of the collection of the canons, had, from the same cause, ceased to matter. The Church in Gaul was entering upon the most chaotic period of its history, and to the confusion from internal causes there was now added -- in this matter of the difficulty of knowing what was the Church's authentic tradition of law -- a new confusion from outside. This was the introduction into Gaul, through the monk-missionaries from Ireland and England, of the innumerable Penitentials -- privately compiled lists of offences and sins with arbitrarily decreed penances assigned to each.

Again, from the time of St. Boniface the movement had never flagged that aimed at a complete renovation of the discipline of Christian life, in both clergy and laity, a renovation based on a reorganisation of the hierarchy; from 742 councils began to be held once more, and frequently: whence innumerable new canons of discipline and, thanks to the caesaro-papism of the Frankish kings, innumerable royal capitularies to supplement them.

The confusion of laws was thus, ultimately, greater than ever. The idea still, however, persisted that the new laws were but attempts to restore the ancient discipline -- as the one means to restore the ancient world-unity -- and, in the minds of those who made these new laws, more important by far was the old law which lay preserved in some of the ancient collections. In these it was realised, lay salvation from the chaos. The practical problem was to decide which of the several collections of the old law was to be taken as official.

It was under these circumstances that Charlemagne asked for, and received from, Pope Adrian I (772-795) the official collection used by the Roman Church itself. The book sent to Charlemagne -- which we call the Hadriana -- was made up of an early Roman collection, as arranged by Denis the Short for Pope Hormisdas (514-523), and the texts of the later African collection. It now spread rapidly through the empire, its prestige easily outdistancing that which any other collection could claim. The reformers had in it a code and precedents that put all lesser codes out of court. The Penitentials, for example, began to be condemned in one council after another. As the ninth century went by, the influence of the Hadriana, in conjunction and combination with the Spanish collection (the Hispana), grew steadily. But although much of the old confusion was thereby lessened, this ancient law was not sufficient to serve as a basis for the correction of later-day wrongs, nor to defend the Church against the new kinds of abuses which. in ninth-century Gaul, threatened its very nature. Particularly was the old law deficient in means to stem the development by which the Church's property was gradually passing into lay hands. Charles Martel, in the eighth century, had looted the Church to finance the State; his grandson, Charlemagne, in the ninth, had turned the abuse into a legalised form of government. Deriving from the scandals was a wholesale anarchy in nomination to abbeys and sees that was still more shocking. The most pressing problem, for the reformers of the time of Charlemagne's own grandchildren (for example Charles the Bald, 840-877), was how to defend the Church from the new danger of legalised secularisation.

In the first place the bishops protested, and as their motives were open to the imputation that they sought their own aggrandisement, they turned for support to the impersonal argument of Sacred Scripture. To the new growing law of the State the Church must, ultimately, oppose its own older law -- the law that must exist, since the Church's claim was just and, in this matter, the State a usurper. The law must be fully stated; it must not be mere generality but deal with particular cases; most important of all it must possess a prestige greater than anything that the Carolingian State and the Church in Gaul could create; to serve its purpose it must be Roman, decrees of the ancient popes dealing with these very abuses in times gone by and expressing in legal form the Church's rights and claims.

Here we approach a most extraordinary happening -- extraordinary to us, but hardly so, to such a degree, in a time which had other literary habits. The collection desiderated by the Carolingian reformers did not exist. Whereupon some of them deliberately created it; they composed, that is to say, of set purpose -- probably in the diocese of Le Mans, about the year 850, and for the defence of the rights of that see -- a whole body of law, assigning each decree to a particular council or pope, going as far back as the second century in their desire to heighten the prestige of what they produced. These are the famous False Decretals, once -- when all that was known about them was that they were forgeries -- a powerful weapon in the quiver of the anti-Roman controversialist.

They served their purpose sufficiently for knowledge of them to spread. In an age that was enthusiastic for whatever bore the mark of the ancient Roman unity -- an age that knew not the science of criticism -- they were accepted for what they professed to be. Gradually they came into use at Rome too, and by the middle of the eleventh century were accepted there in their entirety.

The real importance of the False Decretals is the new detail they bring in support of the already existing acceptance of the Roman Primacy. They were devised to help Le Mans, and the best way in which Le Mans could be helped was by the invocation of Rome -- magni nominis umbra. The invention, of its own nature, turned ultimately to help Rome. It showed the Roman primacy in function in numerous detailed ways and it expressed the rights of the primacy so functioning in apt legal formulae; it undoubtedly assisted the development of systematic routine appeals to Rome in cases that involved the bishops; it developed a new system in which the importance of the metropolitan declined; it assisted the extension of the Church's privilege to try delinquent clerics in her own courts; and it did very much indeed to secure recognition of the sacred character of ecclesiastical property.

On the other hand, the general effect of the acceptance of the False Decretals, the effect of them as an agent to resolve the existing confusion of the law, was slight. The differences continued: differences between the cited authorities, differences between the books which inspired the reformers in different parts of the empire. As the ninth century drew to its close the Carolingian empire disappeared, and in the dreadful anarchy that ensued, the chances of the effective functioning of a central authority in the Church seemed as hopeless as the chances of the imperial authority itself. With the eleventh century the work of restoration had to begin yet once again.

But this work of preserving the existing knowledge, the careful encyclopaedic surveys of Rabanus Maurus, the bold revival of St. Ambrose in Hincmar and St. Nicholas I, by no means exhaust the intellectual life of this renaissance doomed to disappear so soon. In the second half of the century, the years that saw the Northmen established on every frontier of the empire, and even in his own native country, there appeared in Gaul an Irishman of genius, the greatest speculative mind since Boethius three hundred years before. This was John Scotus Erigena.

Erigena's learning was in its origin not Carolingian but Irish. [134] Of his early life we know nothing. He makes his first appearance at the court of Charles the Bald in 847, and for thirty years he is the chief figure of this last generation of Carolingian culture. Then, after 877, history loses all trace of him. He had the advantage over all his contemporaries of a superior understanding of Greek, and he was the Catholic West's one really constructive mind between Boethius and St. Anselm. His influence on the first development of medieval philosophy was very great indeed.

It is not hard to trace the intellectual pedigree of this Irish thinker: the two most philosophical of all the fathers, St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa -- Neoplatonists both -- St. Maximus the Confessor and, above all, the anonymous writer for so long called -- and thought to be -- Denis the Areopagite.

This writer, who now for the first time begins to be a power in Western thought, had long been known in the East. [135] The literary device behind which he hid caused him to be identified with that Athenian whose conversion was almost the sole recorded fruit of St. Paul's famous visit. [136] This identification -- whose truth the Middle Ages took for granted -- gave an immense prestige to the doctrines his works contained. Here was a contemporary of the apostles, no less, using the philosophy of Plato to expound his new faith. It had almost the effect of an apostle himself philosophising. The reality was very different. The author of these various books -- pseudo-Denis so to call him - - was no Athenian but a Syrian, not a contemporary of the apostles but a monk of the late fifth century. Nor was he a Catholic, though a convert from Paganism, but a Monophysite. He was a contemporary of Proclus (411-485) and of the furious controversies that were the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon. [137]

The first reference to his works that has come down is, in fact, from the arch-heretic Severus in his controversial writings against the Church in the early sixth century. Later the Catholic theologian Leontius of Byzantium also cites him and in the next century, thanks to the prestige resulting from his glorious pseudonym, he has passed into the corpus of Catholic writers, and is used extensively as a witness against heresy. He is known and used by St. Gregory the Great, St. Sophronius of Jerusalem and St. Maximus the Confessor. It was probably the last named saint whose use of pseudo-Denis gave to these writings the last needed touch of orthodox warrant. For the pope St. Martin I at the Lateran Synod of 649 he is " Denis of blessed memory. " Pope Agatho cites him, too, in his letter to the General Council of

680; and the next General Council (Nicea II in 787) quotes Denis against the Iconoclasts. It was through the Greek monks in Rome that a knowledge of these books first began to spread in the West. Pope Paul I (757-767) sent a copy of them to Pepin; and Hilduin, abbot of St. Denis and arch-chaplain to Louis the Pious, translated them into Latin. But it was the translation, annotated, of John Scotus Erigena that was the real beginning of their striking effect on medieval thought. [138]

To translate Denis into Latin was one of the greatest things Erigena ever did. His other great achievement was to provide the first generation of medieval thinkers with a completed system which explained Catholicism as a philosophical whole. The inspiration of all this work was Neoplatonic, and, except for his use of Aristotle's dialectic, Erigena was himself nothing if not a Neoplatonist. Medieval philosophy had made its great start, and had made it with the initial confusion that it was not to work out of its system for centuries. The weakness and the strength were apparent in Erigena's own contribution to that philosophy, the De Divisione Naturae which appeared after his translation of Denis, somewhere about 867. In this book we are presented with the most ambitious effort of the Catholic mind since St. Augustine himself, a philosophical discussion of the whole vast subject of God and His universe. [139] This elaborate attempt to explain the Catholic view of the universe through Neoplatonism was a rock of offence to Erigena's contemporaries, and to the orthodox of later generations. Its author's confidence in the power of reasoning to explain the date of Revelation is boundless. His own use of logic is as strong as it is subtle. But, too often, he is ruined by a love of paradox, by an artist's delight in phrase-making, and by an exuberance of language that, at times, does grave injustice to his thought. It is not difficult to understand how, for all his good intentions, he was criticised and condemned as a Pantheist. The universe, as Erigena conceives its origin, is not too easily distinguishable from its Creator. The well-worked-out scheme of the flux and reflux of creation from the Creator leaves no place for the fact of evil and its eternal consequences. His theory of human knowledge breaks under the criticism of facts, and his claim for reason as the all-availing expounder of mystery can again only lead to disaster. It is not to be wondered that Erigena was repeatedly condemned, at Valence and at Langres in his own lifetime and later, in 1050, with Berengarius whom to some extent he inspired.

Erigena, nevertheless, had not lived in vain. He had stated the problems that were to occupy all the thinkers of the next four hundred years, the relations of faith and reason, the rational exposition of the data of faith, of the universe and its relation to God. He had produced, in his unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem, the first ordered systematic work of this kind that Latin Catholicism had so far seen. [140]

The intellectual revival had, in the main, been a work of restoration. Alcuin and the lesser men had been chiefly concerned first to amass themselves, and then to transmit to their pupils, whatever could be found of the erudition of the ages before the barbarian invasions. Grammar, rhetoric, the rules of reasoning, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, medicine, the meaning of the Scriptures, the theological work of the fathers, particularly of St. Augustine and St. Gregory -- of all that these had to offer they made themselves living encyclopaedias. They were essentially schoolmasters; facts rather than ideas were their chief interest, and their writings inevitably tended to be compilations and manuals for the instruction of those less learned than themselves. The revival, in its first generation, could hardly do more. And before, in the next generation, scholars could, from this erudition, develop an interest in ideas, in intellectual speculation and the beginnings of a philosophical revival, the new invasions and the collapse of Charlemagne's political system had brought the whole movement to an end.

EASTERN CATHOLICISM: THE END OF ICONOCLASM: THE SCHISM OF PHOTIUS: 813-925

The General Council of 787, though it marked a definite victory of tradition over the Iconoclasts, hardly weakened the party's hold in those sections of the national life where for nearly a century now it had been all powerful. One stronghold of the party was the army; and the army's attachment to the religious fashions of the great military heroes of the century was possibly strengthened when the sovereigns of the Catholic restoration showed themselves, through twenty years and more, weak and incompetent rulers. The successful military revolution of 813 brought with it a vigorous Iconoclast reaction in the religious world.

The emperor who then came to the throne, Leo V, was a soldier, an Armenian by birth. He began by commissioning the publication of a catena of texts from Holy Scripture and the Fathers which, apparently, favoured the practice of his sect. The next stage in the plan was that the Patriarch of Constantinople-Nicephorus I (806-815) -- should give the book an official approbation. But the patriarch remained true to the faith, and instead of approving what was, in effect, an Iconoclastic manifesto he summoned a council of 270 bishops and abbots in which the decisions of the General Council of 787 were renewed. The emperor bided his time and a few months later (March, 815) Nicephorus was sent into exile and a more tractable personage installed in his see. Almost immediately the new patriarch, in his turn, called a council. This time it was the Council of 753 that was re-enacted, and the canons of Nicea II were declared null and void. But the bishops were by no means unanimous in their support of this attempt to revive the heresy. They showed a much better spirit than their predecessors of sixty years before, and to subdue them the old edicts of persecution were put in force anew. The number of victims soon exceeded those of the persecution under Constantine V. Monasteries were sacked yet once again, the religious expelled and turned adrift. Many of the abbots were imprisoned and flogged, others sewn up in sacks and flung into the sea. So for five years the new reign of terror lasted, until Leo V died, assassinated, on Christmas night, 820.

His successor, Michael II, and his successor's son, Theophilus, maintained the Iconoclast tradition and were also, in their measure, persecutors. Theophilus, towards the end of his reign (834-842), showed himself the most cruel of all. When he died (January 20, 842) the government of the empire, for the second time in sixty years, fell to a woman, for the new emperor was a baby two years old. Like her predecessor Irene, the new empress- mother, Theodora, was a Catholic, and the persecution ceased immediately. But, as in 784, while this was easy to accomplish, it was quite another matter to reverse the anti-Catholic development of the last thirty years and restore Catholicism officially.

The position of the Empress Theodora was all the more difficult in that the patriarch was fanatically Iconoclast. However, within little more than a year she had negotiated the chief obstacles. The patriarch was removed and the abbot Methodius installed in his place. Methodius -- St. Methodius -- was the character for whom the circumstances called. He was a saint, he was a man of learning, firm in his principles and charitable in application of them. He gradually replaced the Iconoclast bishops, and while he made matters easy for those who abjured the heresy, he sternly repressed the tendencies towards an extravagant reaction favoured by one section of the Catholic party.

So ended, after more than a hundred years of trouble and persecution, the movement to abolish the cult of images. It was just five hundred and twenty years since Constantine's victory over Licinius had delivered the churches of the East from the last of their pagan persecutors. For a great part of that time those churches had been racked by heresy. Arians, Nestorians, Monophysites, Monothelites and Iconoclasts -- each century had added to the list of these disturbers of ecclesiastical peace and unity. Eastern Catholicism, spared the material destruction which in the West was part of the social and political transformation of the fifth and sixth centuries, had been tested in a far more fundamental way. In no case had the trial of heresy gone by unaggravated by the action of the omnipotent emperor. Sometimes, as in the Arian troubles, the emperor was himself a heretic and strove to impose on the Church the errors it had solemnly condemned. At other times, for all that he adhered to the traditional belief, the emperor did his utmost to reunite Catholic and heretic by means of vague formulae that sacrificed the truth defined. Whence again, inevitably, a breach of communion with Rome. From one cause or another, and always, ultimately, from the emperor's hold on Eastern ecclesiastical life, the churches of the East had, out of those five hundred and twenty years, spent some two hundred and three years in schism. The reign of the emperor, Michael III, that opened with the final defeat of the Iconoclasts was to close with the beginning of the most serious breach of all.

The occasion of this schism was, it is true, less important than any of the earlier occasions, and the schism lasted only a matter of ten years. But thanks to the fact that its leader, Photius, was a personality of the first rank, and thanks to his formulation of a definite case against the papal primacy, this breach in the ninth century left wounds that have never healed. The schism was indeed patched up; but during the time it lasted, a new mentality had begun to develop. The militant and aggressive anti-Roman spirit, already in evidence at the Council in Trullo a hundred and seventy years before, [141] crystallised now into unforgettable formulae; it allied itself with the congenial principle of Byzantine superiority over the barbarised Latin West. During the century and a half that followed the final disappearance of Photius there was an apparent restoration of normal relations between Rome and the East. But below the surface the events of 858-869 had effected a permanent change, and it needed only the appearance of a second, able and ambitious personality to create anew the anti-Roman schism of Photius, in a bitter offensive, at a time when no shade of dissentient teaching troubled any of the churches in East or West.

The patriarch of the restoration of the images, St. Methodius, died ill 846. His successor, Ignatius, was the youngest son of the Emperor Michael r, forced to become a monk when Leo V deposed his father in 813. Ignatius was a good man but autocratic, something of a martinet indeed, and presently his zeal to cleanse God's house began to make enemies for him in more than one quarter. There was already a strong anti-Ignatian party at Constantinople when, in the tenth year of his occupation of the patriarchal see, Ignatius came into conflict with the court. That party was led by Gregory Asbestos, an archbishop whom Ignatius had deposed, but whose deposition Rome had refused to confirm -- despite the patriarch's demand -- until it had heard both sides of the case. To the repeated requests from Rome to state his case, Ignatius, even so late as 858, had returned no answer.

The empress-mother, Theodora, had by this time retired; the emperor, Michael III, was still only in his teens, and it was Theodora's brother, Bardas, who acted as regent with the title of Caesar -- a man of great ability, cultivated, but a loose liver. Michael III has gone down to history as Michael the Drunkard, and the Caesar, his wife turned out, was in 856 living with his daughter-in-law Eudokia. The circumstance is not, of course, unique in the history of courts, but Ignatius was not the man to let scandal go unrebuked simply because to rebuke it was to affront the man who had power of life and death over him.

Remonstrances, however, were in vain; and on the feast of the Epiphany, 858, Bardas crowned all by presenting himself for Holy Communion at the patriarch's mass. Ignatius refused to administer to him. The emperor protested that this was an insult to his uncle, but Ignatius held firm. Later in that same year the emperor and the Caesar planned to rid themselves of Theodora by locking her up in some convent. But Ignatius refused to be a party to the scheme. The thing could not be decently done without his co- operation and now, weary of his continual interference, it was arranged that he should go. He was suddenly arrested, November 23, 858, and deported to the island of Terebinthos.

The patriarchal see was declared vacant, and Bardas looked around for a likely man to fill it. Photius, upon whom his choice fell, was a candidate in every way unexceptional. He came of a great family which had suffered much for orthodoxy in the time of the Iconoclast emperors -- he was, in fact, a kinsman of the great patriarch Tarasios who had been the chief agent in the restoration of 787. Moreover, Photius had a distinguished record in the imperial service as counsellor and secretary; and he gave every sign, already at thirty, of what he was later to become-one of the most learned men who have ever lived. He was unmarried and his life was religious and beyond reproach. Had the see been really vacant Photius could hardly have been bettered as a candidate for it: save for the fact that he was a layman. But vacant it was for Bardas -- Ignatius having signed some kind of abdication, whether absolute or conditional is not clear -- and Photius accepted the nomination. On Christmas Day, 858, he was consecrated by Gregory Asbestos.

Throughout the empire, however, a considerable party of bishops stood loyally by Ignatius. Whence there began a campaign to unite the episcopate in support of Photius. The Ignatian bishops met, declared the election of Photius null and void, and excommunicated him. Photius, in reply, held a council (spring of 859) which declared Ignatius and his partisans deposed. Next the government intervened, to carry out the sentences of Photius' synod. Soon the supporters of Ignatius were, like him, locked up in prisons, where they were maltreated and tortured.

Rome, so far, had not come into the matter at all; but in 859, with the hope that the Roman prestige would reduce the opposition, both Photius and the emperor approached the pope-Nicholas I. They explained that Ignatius, broken by age and ill-health, had resigned; Photius, with extreme reluctance, had accepted the promotion in his place; there were still remnants of Iconoclasm in the capital, and Ignatius, in his retirement, had entangled himself in political matters; he had, also, been guilty of transgressing several papal decrees. For this reason Photius had been compelled to excommunicate him.

Nicholas I was determined not to recognise Photius until he had gathered independent information about the whole affair He decided that an enquiry was called for and sent to Constantinople as his legates the Bishops of Porto and Anagni. They were sent to enquire into the circumstances in which Ignatius had ceased to be patriarch -- to report and not to judge. But, exceeding their commission, they went into the history of Ignatius' own election fourteen years before, and into the history of his treatment of the Roman requests in the matter of Gregory Asbestos. Then, in May 861, they presided at a synod where Ignatius was again deposed -- because his own election was irregular, and because of his illegal procedure with Gregory. Ignatius, thereupon, appealed to the pope.

The affair dragged on very slowly. First of all the legates returned with their official report, and with more lying letters from Photius and the court. In March, 862, at a synod in Rome the whole matter was examined. The blundering of the legates was made clear: the pope disavowed them and ordered their punishment; as to Photius, he refused to recognise him as a bishop, holding Ignatius to be the holder of the see until the case against him should be established. Then, at last, there arrived in Rome the appeal of Ignatius against the synod of 861 and the legates, telling, for the first time, the story of the share of the palace in his original deposition. In a new synod (April 863) the pope, with the statements of all parties before him, now definitely decided for Ignatius; the legates were deposed; Photius was excommunicated, should he not surrender the place he had usurped; Ignatius and his supporters were solemnly restored. To the emperor the pope wrote "advising and commanding" him to restore Ignatius; while to the other patriarchs he gave the reasons for his case against Photius and the imperial court: they had condemned Ignatius without a fair trial; they had installed a successor before his case was canonically terminated; at the trial, when this did take place, Ignatius was judged by his own subjects; and finally Photius, a layman, had been consecrated patriarch without observance of the necessary canonical intervals between his receiving the successive orders of deacon, priest and bishop.

The emperor replied in a letter which the pope described as "filled with insult and blasphemy". He utterly refused to accept the Roman decision, and threatened to send an army to bring the pope to his senses. Photius struck the pope's name out of the mass -- an action tantamount to excommunication. To all of which Nicholas replied in a famous letter, (September 28, 865) as long as a treatise, [142] in which, while he reminds the Easterners again and again that the primatial rights of the Roman Church are of divine institution, he offers, if it will satisfy them, to have the whole case tried anew.

The next two years saw no change in the situation save an additional aggravation due to the mission in Bulgaria. The Bulgarians had first made appeal for missionaries to Constantinople about the time when Photius had been intruded into the see. He had sent missionaries as they asked, and Michael III had stood sponsor to their king, Boris, at his baptism (864). But the mission had not been too successful. Boris wanted a hierarchy of bishops that would be independent of Constantinople. Photius made difficulties. And so, in 866, the Bulgarian king, influenced partly at any rate by political considerations, turned to Rome; and in answer Nicholas I sent two Latin bishops, one of them destined, in time, himself to be pope. This was Formosus, then Bishop of Porto, successor to the bishop deposed by the synod of 863.

At the same time the pope sent legates to Constantinople to explain and defend his sending a mission into Bulgaria. They carried despatches of an even more violent tone than the letter of 865, the emperor being now bidden to burn publicly the "blasphemous" letter of 863. But the legates were turned back at the frontier, and Photius made the Latin "aggression" in Bulgaria the occasion for the most effective thing he ever did. This was a long and violent anti-Roman manifesto, set forth in an encyclical letter to the other patriarchs. It was destined to be, and it still remains, the charter of the separate status of Constantinople and its dependent churches. The Latin "invasion" of the Greek missionary territory is described, and the danger to the faith of the neophyte from the Latin ignorance and errors. These are listed: the Latins fast on Saturdays; they eat milk foods in the three days between Quinquagesima Sunday and Ash Wednesday; they look down on married clergy; they reject the Confirmation given by a priest; and they have corrupted the Creed by adding the words "and from the Son" to the clause which, speaking of the Holy Ghost, says " Who proceeds from the Father". For which reasons Photius summons all the bishops of his patriarchate to a council which shall discuss and condemn these errors. Of that council we know little, save that it met and declared Nicholas I deposed, and that it deposed, too, all who supported him, "forerunners of apostasy, servants of Antichrist. . . liars and fighters against God" as the encyclical proclaimed them to be. Also, it is to be noted, Photius endeavoured to win over the emperor in the West, Louis II.

There is nothing new in Photius' refusal to accept the Roman sentence after invoking Rome's authority. What is new, and unprecedented, in a Patriarch of Constantinople, is his attack on the papacy as such, and on its hitherto universally recognised right.

It was, apparently, in the summer of 867 that these last events took place, and it is hard to say if Nicholas I ever knew of them. His health was failing all through that year and on November 13 he died, making efforts to the very end to mobilise the scholarship of the West in opposition to an opponent whom he recognised to be a man supremely learned. By the time the pope died, and before he could have known of it, that able and learned, hut shifty adversary had, however, himself been removed. But not by death. One of the imperial equerries, Basil the Macedonian, had been gradually creeping nearer to the throne. In 866 he had had Bardas murdered, and had succeeded to his place. On September 23, 867, it was the turn of Michael III; and Basil was proclaimed emperor. A wholesale reversal of his predecessor's acts followed. Among the favourites who fell was Photius, a long-standing rival of Basil at the court; and on November 23 Ignatius was solemnly restored to the patriarchal throne. Photius was sent into exile.

Between these events and the General Council of Constantinople which solemnly accepted the Roman judgement about them, there is the long interval of nearly two years -- an interval which is not merely practical testimony to the very real obstacle of geographical distance that now separated the two great centres of Christian life, but which also symbolises the distance which separated the Roman idea of the task before the council from what the new emperor, and his patriarch, had envisaged when they proposed it to the pope. Once more the meeting of a general council in the East was to be the occasion of new serious difficulties between pope and emperor, and, as on so many previous occasions, it was to leave behind memories whence would spring new, lasting troubles.

For the new emperor, Basil I, the thing that really mattered, in these years 867-870, was the very urgent problem of reconciling the two factions of ecclesiastics and their followers into which the churches of his empire had been, for ten years now, divided- "Ignatians and Photians". If the pope would consent to judge between them, on the basis of the events of 858, and if both parties would appear before him to plead their case, such a Roman decision might very well end the troubles. And what the pope decided in Rome it would be well that a council, meeting at Constantinople, should ratify.

But for the pope, these domestic troubles of the church of Constantinople were only one element of the affair. Since the original mischief arising out of the substitution of Photius for Ignatius in 858, there had occurred two events of the utmost gravity, and of far greater importance than the question, even, which of the two men was the lawful Patriarch of Constantinople. Photius, in his capacity as patriarch, had, in fact, denied the papacy's right as the divinely instituted primate of the Church of Christ; he had done this in the most solemn way, in a great council. And a host of Eastern bishops had supported his action. That Rome should, and would, forgive the now repentant bishops was very desirable and all to the good, but the pope in this reconciliation, could not, without betraying his primacy, ignore an event of such magnitude as the recent wholesale denial of its existence.

When then, in June 869, the pope -- Adrian II -- considered with his council the letters sent by the emperor and Ignatius, the main question that occupied his mind was the Photian council of 867 and the patriarch's encyclical letter that had preceded it. This was the main subject of the Roman deliberations, and while an amnesty was offered to the Eastern bishops who repented their share in the event, the council of 867 was condemned and Photius again excommunicated, with the severe proviso that, even should he repent, he was not, ever again, to enjoy more than a layman's status in the Church. The emperor had asked the pope to take part in the council planned to assemble at Constantinople, and Adrian II agreed. The three legates he sent to preside in his name carried with them letters for the emperor and for Ignatius. The pope made it clear in his instructions to the legates -- and the legates faithfully obeyed his instructions -- that the council was not to reopen the questions he had already decided at Rome, but to accept his decisions, and give them a solemn public promulgation.

The council reckoned as the Eighth General Council -- opened on October 5869. Besides the legates, and the patriarchs and their representatives, there were barely a dozen bishops present. Nor did the numbers greatly increase as the weeks went by. There were 21 bishops at the fifth session, at which Photius made his first appearance; 38 at the eighth, on November 8; 65 at the ninth and, for the solemn session which closed the council, February 28, 870, 103 -- of whom 37 were metropolitans.

There was no difficulty about the condemnation of Photius, who maintained a haughty silence before his judges. But when it came to the trial of his supporters among the bishops, and to the testimony of those who professed repentance, there were occasional scenes. Adrian II's instructions were that all were to sign the famous formula drawn up three hundred years before by Pope Hormisdas (514-523), [143] and used by him as a test of orthodoxy in the reconciliation which ended the schism of Acacius. "The first condition of salvation" the formula declared "is to keep the rule of the true faith and in no way to deviate from the laws of the Fathers. And because the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ: 'Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I will build My Church, etc., ' cannot be passed over. What things were thus said are proved by the resulting events, [144] because in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has always been kept free from blemish. We then, wishing to be by no means parted from that hope and faith. . . anathematise all heresies. . . . And therefore I hope that I may deserve to be with you in that one Communion, which the Apostolic see teaches, in which [Communion] is the whole, real and perfect solidity of the Christian religion. And I promise that in future I will not say in the holy Mysteries the names of those who are banished from the Communion of the Catholic Church, that is who do not accord with the Apostolic See. " [145]

One bishop began to argue that this Roman assertion of an indefectible faith was not historically true, and the emperor showed signs of wanting the point argued. But the legates insisted. The bishop must sign or be condemned. Nor was this the only dissension. Basil, as though to forestall any action by the legates which might endanger his own plan, namely not so to antagonise the party of Photius that it would be impossible to reconcile them with Ignatius, had sent one of the high officials of the court to control the debates, and between this personage and the legates there was more than one lively incident. Finally there was the mysterious "suspension" of the council which, suddenly, did not meet at all for two whole months [146] -- part of which period, according to one account, was spent by the chief of the legates, Marinus, under arrest, for resisting the emperor's wishes.

But whatever the differences and difficulties the papal will was finally carried out, as the series of twenty-seven canons shows, promulgated at the final session February 28, 870. In these the Iconoclasts were again condemned. The interference of the State in episcopal elections was condemned too; elections where the State has interfered are to be held null and void: those so elected are to be deposed, even if consecrated. Synods, it is declared, do not need the presence of the emperor or his legate for the validity of their acts. No one is to presume to depose any of the patriarchs; and especially no one is to do what Photius has done of late, and what Dioscoros did of old, [147] that is to say write and put into circulation calumnies against the pope. Should anyone so presume he is to be punished with the punishment meted out to them. Any prince who attempts to coerce the freedom of the pope, or of any of the patriarchs, is anathema. Should any doubt or controversy touching the Holy Roman Church come before a general council the matter is to be examined with becoming reverence. In no case is sentence to be defiantly given against the Supreme Pontiffs of the elder Rome. [148] In this last session the emperor, too, intervened: with a speech urging the Church's right freely to manage its own affairs.

Nevertheless, the tension in which the council had done its work continued to the end, and survived its close. In the last few days the legates had to complain of the theft from their baggage of the retractations signed by the bishops of Photius' party. And, a much more serious matter, in those same last days there arrived at Constantinople a mission from the Bulgarian king. He was finally determined not to link himself with Rome, since the pope resolutely refused to let him have Formosus as bishop. Once more, then, Boris besought the Patriarch of Constantinople to provide him with bishops and priests. The Roman legates protested vigorously; and there was a tense period when a new schism, with Ignatius as the papal adversary, seemed not unlikely. It ended by the legates formally forbidding Ignatius, in the pope's name, to send missionaries to Bulgaria, and in Ignatius making a dutiful, but very general, declaration of submission to the pope. Then the legates departed -- but by the time they had reached Rome the patriarch had equipped the Bulgarian Church with a complete hierarchy, an archbishop and twelve bishops.

The legates were a long time on their way home. They left Constantinople in the spring of 870, but did not reach Rome until some time in June 871. The news of the council's proceedings, and of the legates' difficulties, had preceded them; and Adrian II, instead of any formal ratification of the decrees, sent, along with a complimentary letter to the emperor, a strongly worded complaint to the patriarch about his new activities in Bulgaria, threatening him with excommunication, and actually laying the sentence upon those now usurping in Bulgaria the episcopal jurisdiction.

The situation had not at all improved when, twelve months later, Adrian II died. His successor, John VIII, was a man of like views, but stronger and more vigorous in action. He had been archdeacon of the Roman Church for many years, and was thoroughly conversant with the complications of the problems before him. From the beginning of his reign this new pope took a strong line about the Byzantine "invasion" of Bulgaria. "If the treacherous Greeks do not depart, " he wrote to King Boris, "we are determined to depose Ignatius. " And, Ignatius proving obstinate, John VIII, in April 878, sent legates to offer him the choice between the faithful carrying out of his promises and deposition. But when the legates reached Constantinople they found that Ignatius was dead -- that he had died, indeed, six months before they set out. A new patriarch reigned in his place: it was Photius.

The appointment was natural enough from the emperor's point of view. The main problem in the religious life of the day was still the division, now twenty years old, that had begun with Michael III's deposition of Ignatius in 858. Photius, at the time of this second nomination as patriarch, had himself long been reconciled with Ignatius, and had been set at liberty. His diplomatic gifts had erased from the emperor's mind the memory of their old rivalry, and he had been appointed tutor to Basil's heir, the future emperor, Leo the Philosopher. There was every hope that the appointment of Photius as successor to Ignatius would finally rally all but the most fanatical of the dissidents. But what about the pope? Upon Photius there still lay the terrific sentences of the council of 869 and, above all, the pope's decision that henceforth he was to be no more than a layman in the Church.

The legates had no competence to deal with any element of this new problem. But they did not return to Rome. Instead they wrote to John VIII, telling him of the great event and, it would seem, endeavouring to win him to sympathise with the emperor's solution. The emperor also wrote, and so did Photius. And the pope showed himself very favourable.

It needs to be said that John VIII had other worries, very practical questions of life and death, which at this moment inclined him to take an easy view of the latest events at Constantinople. The Carolingian empire was now in the last stages of disintegration. It was only with difficulty that the pope could persuade one of the great family to take upon him the name of emperor: and this at a moment when the Saracens threatened to be masters, not only in southern Italy, but even in Rome itself! If the emperor at Constantinople could not be persuaded to defend the pope against the Saracens, Rome's case was desperate indeed. This political anxiety was, indeed, one of the matters with which the legates despatched to correct Ignatius in 878 had originally been charged; and in their letters reporting the re-appearance of Photius they were able to tell the pope of the emperor's sympathetic dispositions towards the problem of the safety of Rome.

It was, then, in the happiest mood towards the emperor, and Photius, that John VIII, in the spring of 879, summoned his Roman council to consider the new aspect of the patriarch's career. He determined to recognise Photius as lawful patriarch and he cancelled and quashed all the sentences of the council of 869-870, and forbade anyone, ever again, to cite them against Photius. But Photius was to give some sign of repentance for his actions in the bad days of 867, and he was to pledge himself to withdraw the missionaries sent to Bulgaria.

Once again the Roman decisions were to be given the publicity of acceptance and promulgation in a council at Constantinople and this took place the following winter, November, 879-March 880. Photius was now all that any pope could desire. He made all the prescribed promises, even about the Bulgarian mission, and the legates solemnly granted him acknowledgement, and robed him in the handsome vestments sent by the pope as a special mark of affection.

There was, however, less agreement about the Roman demand that laymen were not to be promoted to the episcopate without the usual intervals between the various sacred orders received. And, according to one account, there was a tense moment when the question of the Filioque clause in the Creed was raised. This crisis, however, was resolved by the diplomacy of Photius -- so this same account -- and all the more easily since, so far, the popes too had refused to insert the words -- even Leo III when asked by Charlemagne. John VIII confirmed all that the council had done and for the short remainder of his reign -- he died, murdered in 882 -- the peace between Rome and Constantinople continued undisturbed.

When Pope John VIII recognised Photius in 879 as the lawful patriarch of Constantinople, it was, however, an unfortunate by- product of his action that the party traditionally associated with the cause of the dead patriarch, Ignatius, the pro-Roman party of the crises of 858 and 867, now became the party whose policy was schism "on principle". The great council of 879 was to them an abomination; and their account of it, wholly misrepresenting what took place -- stating, indeed, the very contradictory of the fact -- not only served their party needs in the next generation, but continued to mislead all the Western historians until our own time. [149] According to that false account, the pope repudiated the council of 879 and from this there resulted a renewal of the schism on the part of Photius.

Behind the screen of the falsehood and the forgeries there lies this much of the truth, namely that John VIII's action did not have the universal approval of the high officials of the Roman Curia. Among those who, at Rome, still eyed Photius askance was the one-time legate to the council of 869, Marinus; and it was Marinus who succeeded John VIII as pope in 882. Stephen V, too, in whose time Photius was deposed by the emperor Leo VI (886), was of the same mind; as was also the next pope, Formosus, a strong personality seemingly, and a strong opponent of all John VIII's policies. There followed, then, upon the pro-Photius decision of 879, a period when it might seem that the anti-Photius party at Constantinople could still look to Rome for support. The imperial deposition of Photius, in 886, was an opportunity for the party to invoke it.

But the popes were too wary to act on the first scanty statements of the events that came to them. Before granting recognition to the new patriarch Stephen -- a boy of sixteen, the emperor's own younger brother -- they asked for more information about the circumstances in which Photius had ceased to reign. In the end, it would seem, Stephen V granted the recognition. Then his successor, Formosus, intervened -- sending legates to state the Roman view about the validity of the orders conferred by Photius. This intervention, it is held, probably contented neither of the rival parties. It was not until the stormy reigns of Formosus (891-896) and his next five short-lived successors (896-898) were over that John IX, in a rare interval of peaceful papal possession of Rome, brought about a reconciliation between "Ignatians" and "Photians", and between the patriarchate and the Holy See (899).

The peace lasted just eight years. What broke it up was a furious controversy about the legitimacy of the fourth marriage of the emperor -- Leo VI. His first wife had died in 893, and his second in 896. In 899 he had married a third time, and in 900 this wife too had died. None of these wives had brought him an heir and Leo, not venturing upon a fourth alliance -- so strong was the tradition in the Eastern churches against re-marriage-was living in notorious concubinage when, in 905, a son was born to him. He now approached the patriarch, anxious for some means to be found whereby this child should be recognised as his heir. The patriarch was Nicholas, called Mystikos, one of the major personalities of his line, who by his ability and his learning and his early career in the imperial service -- as well as by kinship -- was another Photius. Nicholas proposed that he should baptise the child with all the ceremonial appropriate to the emperor's heir, but that the emperor should separate from his mistress, Zoe. To this Leo agreed. But, the baptism over, he not only brought back Zoe, but himself crowned her as empress (906) and persuaded a priest to bless their marriage.

And now, while the patriarch buried himself in his study to think out a canonical solution for the problem, the emperor bethought himself to consult, and to beg a dispensation from, the other three patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch and Jerusalem, and from the pope. Upon this Nicholas hardened his heart. The quasi- independence of his administration seemed threatened, and when the Roman legates arrived from Sergius III with what he knew would be a reply favourable to the emperor, Nicholas refused to receive them; and he organised his own metropolitans to swear to die rather than agree that a fourth marriage could be lawful (906).

In February, 907 Nicholas was suddenly arrested, an obedient synod declared him deposed, and some kind of acceptance of his fate was obtained from him. The synod chose in his place one of the great ascetics of the day, the monk Euthymos, and it granted the emperor the permission he sought; the priest who had actually married Leo and Zoe was however deposed, for having done this without authorisation. Finally, when the emperor proposed to legalise fourth marriages the synod declared that not only fourth marriages but third marriages too were unlawful; and the new patriarch steadfastly refused to crown the empress, or to allow her to be publicly prayed for as empress. The emperor's personal problem was solved, but no more than this; and there were now new divisions throughout the East, between the partisans of Nicholas, and those who recognised Euthymos.

Five years after these events when Leo the Philosopher died (912), there was a "palace revolution"; Nicholas was brought back and Euthymos deposed. In the general "revenge" Nicholas did not forget his score against Rome; and he sent the pope, Anastasius III, an ultimatum demanding that the decision given in 906 be reversed and the legates who bore it punished; otherwise he would strike the pope's name out of the mass. The Roman reply has not survived, but presently the threat was carried out. Once again the church of Constantinople was in schism, while in the capital the patriarch and the empress-mother Zoe fought for supremacy in a maze of palace intrigues. These came to an end when, in 919, the grand- admiral, Romanus Lecapenus, forced his way to the throne, marrying the boy emperor, Constantine VII, to his daughter and compelling recognition of himself as joint-emperor. In a great council at Constantinople in 920 Romanus forced upon the various religious factions a skilfully arranged compromise; and three years later the quarrel with Rome was also healed. No details of the reconciliation have come down to us. We know of two letters from Nicholas to the pope, John X, and that the legates he asked for were sent to Constantinople. We also possess the account which Nicholas gave of the affair to the King of the Bulgarians, Simeon. It is a curious document, and ominous for the future. The patriarch, who is sending with it a letter from the pope designed to lessen the Bulgarian king's hostility to the emperor, warns Simeon that "to despise the authority of the pope is to insult the prince of the apostles". And then he tells, in his own fashion, the story of the conflict about the lawfulness of fourth marriages, of the great scandal, and of how the Roman See has finally ratified all the condemnations issued by Nicholas. " Like Photius in 880, Nicholas came out of the fight with all the honours of war. " [150] If there was a surrender anywhere, it was -- according to his version -- on the part of Rome. The letter is, by implication, yet another assertion of Constantinople's claim to autonomy, to a jurisdiction practically sovereign. And herein lies, no doubt, the main importance in history of this long-drawn- out, and not too well-known, Byzantine aggression.

THE ROMAN SEE AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EMPIRE, 814-900

The genius of Catholicism continued, then, to transcend the weaknesses of its members even in this dying world. The weaknesses were as evident as in the days of St. Boniface -- ignorant clergy, worldly lords and successful brigands masquerading as prelates, a greedy laity taking every occasion the times offered to lay hands on ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction for their own profit. Nowhere is the struggle that shook the whole Church better seen than in the history of its primatial see, in the story of the development of the Frankish protectorate during the eighty or ninety years that followed Charlemagne's death. It is the story of the ever-increasing hold of the emperor on the papacy, and of the gradual disappearance of the principle of free election. The idea grows that the papacy, a thing eminently profitable, is worth much violence to secure, and at Rome there are soon rival factions traditionally hostile, to whom every vacancy presents an opportunity for fraud, violence, and sacrilege. These factions outlive the empire, and once the strong hand of the emperor has gone the papacy is at their mercy.

Charlemagne was scarcely dead when the faction which, in 799, had tried to murder Leo III, seized its opportunity. But now the plot was discovered in time, and arrests and executions were the order of the day. Protests went to the emperor. The death penalty, the punishment of the Roman Law for the outrage on the Roman maiestas, seemed to the Franks unnecessarily harsh. And, since the emperor was emperor of the Romans, should he not have been consulted? So Louis the Pious sent a commission to Rome to enquire, and the pope explained himself. The plots continued and the next year, 816, an insurrection broke out. It was suppressed by the Franks -- just in time to save the pope. Then, in June 816, Leo III died.

The election was made, in conformity with the decree of 769, by the clergy alone. They elected the deacon Stephen, who, like' Leo's predecessor Adrian I, was a noble and therefore qualified to unite the contending parties. He reigned only six months, but in that short time he recalled the exiles of 799 and 814, saw to it that all his people swore allegiance to the emperor, and, in October, 816, solemnly crowned Louis at Rheims.

With the unexpected death of Stephen IV (January 25, 817) the forces that had ruled during the twenty-one years of Leo III's reign returned to power, in the person of the new pope, Pascal I. The reign was as troubled as that of Leo III. It began with the now customary announcement to the emperor of the pope's election and with a confirmation of the pact of amity between the two powers. The text of the pact of 816 is the earliest that has survived. The emperor guarantees the pope's sovereignty over the Italian territories, which arc specified in detail, and he guarantees also that the papal election shall be free and unhindered. On the other hand, he reserves the right to receive appeals from the pope's subjects. In 822 there was a notable instance of the exercise of this right when Louis' son, Lothair -- whom Louis had himself crowned King of Italy, as he himself had been crowned by Charlemagne -- decided an appeal of the nobility against the pope. The next year there were more serious troubles. Some of the appellants of 822 were murdered, and the pope was accused of being privy to the deed. He protested his innocence and, following the precedent of Leo III, solemnly purged himself by oath.

Twelve months later the unhappy pope was dead, and the internal dissensions precipitated in a double election. Thanks to the influence of the monk Wala who was Lothair's chief adviser, and who chanced to be in Rome, one party gave way and the archpriest Eugene was unanimously acknowledged -- the candidate of the nobility. The emperor, weary of the endless scandals that resulted from the Roman factions, determined to end them by a careful, systematic and official delimitation of powers. A mission was sent to Rome under the nominal presidency of the young king, Lothair, after whom the pact in which it issued was called the Constitution of Lothair. On the whole the balance of the new arrangement was unfavourable to the pope. The pope, henceforth, must not put to death anyone who enjoyed the emperor's protection, nobles that is to say and dignitaries Romans accused of serious crimes were to have a choice by which law they would be judged, Roman or Frank or Lombard. The magistrates were to be nominated by the emperor, who was now to be represented at Rome by two permanent commissioners, one of them nominated by the pope. They were to make an annual report to the emperor on the papal government, and to receive appeals against its action. Should the pope refuse to do justice to such appeals the commissioners were to send them on to the emperor. Finally, the Constitution regulated the papal election. None but Romans were to take part in the election, and -- a notable reversal of existing law -- the laity were to have a share in it. And the newly-elect was to swear an oath to the emperor in the presence of the commissioners and the people. The history of the next few elections interprets the new arrangement. The emperor is very definitely the overlord of Rome, and the pope is not consecrated until the emperor's representative is satisfied that the election has been made in accordance with the prescribed form.

Eugene II accepted the Constitution, and in a council of the bishops of the Roman province he promulgated the new regulations for the election of the pope. Then, only a few months later, in August, 827, he too died. His successor, Valentine, lived for a few weeks only. The next effective pope was Gregory IV, elected in October, 827, but not consecrated until after the imperial commissioners, six months later, had come to Rome and confirmed the election. The new system was an established fact, and the nobility had been given a new hold on the papacy, a hold which tended, from the first, so to increase that the clergy's part in elections was, often enough, to be by comparison a very secondary affair indeed.

Gregory IV was an exceptionally long-lived pope. His sixteen years' pontificate saw the beginning of the disastrous civil wars between Louis the Pious and his sons, in which the pope in the interests of unity and peace opposed the emperor's schemes of partition. It saw, too, the establishment of the Mohammedans in Sicily and the beginning of their attacks on Italy itself. The duchy of Benevento was at this time disputed between rival claimants, both of whom called in bands of Saracens as auxiliaries. In every new event the end of the Carolingian peace was already beginning to be proclaimed when, in the beginning of 844, Gregory died.

The election of his successor showed once more the reality of the new imperial suzerainty. As in 824, there was a double election. The candidate of the nobility, Sergius, managed to expel his rival from the Lateran and was himself, thereupon, consecrated and enthroned. The emperor, Lothair, had not been consulted, and to maintain his right, now sent his son, the future emperor, Louis II, with an army, to examine into the election. There was an enquiry, much questioning of all who took part, and finally Sergius was recognised as pope. He proceeded, thereupon, to consecrate the young king and to swear fidelity to the emperor his father. Furthermore, it was again carefully stipulated that no one was to be consecrated pope without the sanction of the emperor or his representative.

Sergius II was elderly, gouty, and lacking entirely in the gift of ruling. His one title to consideration was his noble birth, that he came from the family that had given Eugene II to the Church, and was later to give Adrian II too. The pope's brother, Benedict, a nobleman of shifty ways and dissolute life, was soon installed as Bishop of Albano and his chief adviser. Soon it was known that the one thing necessary under the regime was money. Offices, benefices, appointments and favours of every sort, were on sale; and to supplement where these means fell short, the pope and his brother set themselves to pillage the monasteries. Then, a divinely appointed chastisement, men said, for the election of so worthless a pope, on August 23, 846, the Mohammedans landed at Ostia and making their way along the Tiber sacked and pillaged the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul. Against Rome itself they were powerless; the old walls were an obstacle such an expedition could not hope to force. But the whole of the Christian West shivered at the sacrilege, and the emperor was moved by the general indignation to raise funds to fortify the basilica of St. Peter, and to organise an expedition and drive the Saracens from Italy. The miserable old pope did not long survive the indignity He died in January, 847.

In his place the Romans elected Leo, the priest of the church of the Four Crowned Martyrs. With the money which the imperial tax brought him, with offerings from all over Christendom, and with taxes on his own domains he fortified the district round St. Peter's -- the district called ever since, in memory of him, the Leonine City. It was no luxury of building, for the Mohammedans continued to molest the coast and the districts at the mouth of the Tiber during all the rest of the reign. Leo IV's relations with the emperor never attained to cordiality. He had been consecrated without the emperor's permission -- though this had been put right by a declaration that the pope in no way denied the emperor's rights -- and when, in 850, the young Louis II, associated now with his father as emperor, came to live in Italy as its king the delicacy of the situation was greatly increased The pope complained of the emperor's representative at Rome and the emperor seems to have supported discontented papal functionaries against the pope. Leo IV, from the point of view of imperial policy, fell very short indeed of perfection as pope. The emperor began to make plans for the future. A new departure was at hand. The emperor, at the next vacancy, would have his own candidate and, an imperialist pope elected, harmony would reign between the two powers.

The priest Anastasius on whom, for this dubiously honourable promotion, Louis II cast his eyes was a mall of no small distinction. He was the son of the Bishop of Orte, [151] a strong imperialist, whom the emperor had more or less compelled the pope to choose as the papal member of the commission of superintendence. Anastasius was unusually well educated. In addition to a wide knowledge of ecclesiastical literature, for example, he had a good command of Greek. Now he suddenly disappeared from Rome and the next news was that he was living in the neighbourhood of the imperial court. The pope, suspecting an understanding with the emperor, and fearing perhaps a schism, ordered him to return. He refused, and thereupon, after a succession of warnings, the pope excommunicated him and specifically deprived him of any right to be elected pope in the future, laying an excommunication on whoever should presume to vote for him. The relations of pope and emperor were in this state when, July 17, 855, Leo IV died.

The sequel to the emperor's plans was curious. Anastasius was of course still absent from Rome, and unanimously the Romans elected Benedict, the priest of St. Cecilia. This election the emperor refused to ratify. His commissioners appeared at Rome with an escort and with them came Anastasius, the emperor's candidate. The number of their partisans increased as they journeyed, Benedict was arrested, and Anastasius took possession of the papal palace. But the clergy held firm. Anastasius lay under sentence of deposition and by Church Law no deposed ecclesiastic could receive promotion. The commissioners had to yield; and in a solemn assembly at St. Mary Major's, Benedict, released now, was re- elected and the election confirmed.

The sentences against Anastasius were renewed. He was reduced to the lay state and made Abbot of Sta. Maria in Trastevere. There, in studious retirement, he remained, preparing himself for the next office to which the emperor destined him, that of permanent imperial commissioner at Rome charged to keep watch on the pope. His father still held office as the papal nominee on the Commission, and so Anastasius would triumph, despite Pope Benedict's re-election ! But before the scheme matured Benedict III died (April 17, 858). This time the emperor himself assisted at the election. He did not repeat the mistake of 855 and suggest an ineligible candidate, but proposed, and succeeded in carrying, the election of a very distinguished man indeed. This was St. Nicholas I, the greatest pope between St. Gregory and Hildebrand, one of the three popes whom alone of the two hundred and sixty posterity has agreed to call "the Great. " He owed his election, none the less, to Louis II, for the Roman clergy had had another in view.

The new pope managed to keep on good terms with the emperor. Anastasius he disarmed by making him, to use a modern term, his secretary of state, in which capacity the forthcoming schism of Photius and the struggle with Hincmar of Rheims, soon gave him ample scope to show himself one of the great defenders of papal rights. When Louis II demanded the reinstatement of the Archbishop of Ravenna, excommunicated for his misgovernment, the pope held firm despite the emperor's personal intervention; and, carrying the war into the other camp, he renewed the decree of 769 forbidding non-Romans -- the emperor's envoys for example -- to interfere in papal elections. Nicholas was no mere statesman, but a man of saintly life, and his natural courage was reinforced by the invincible prestige of personal holiness. The emperor withdrew his support from the excommunicated prelate, while the pope descended on Ravenna and saw personally to the restoration of order. Finally the archbishop submitted.

This dispute was but a preliminary skirmish. In 863 a battle royal developed between pope and emperor. The cause was the annulment of the marriage of the emperor's brother, Lothair II of Lorraine, and his re-marriage. The bishops of Lorraine had sanctioned the re- marriage twice in synod. It was once more sanctioned in a great council at Metz, presided over by the pope's legates and then, in the October of the same year, the pope quashed the decisions of the councils, and since both the law and the facts were so evident that no honest man could be in doubt, deposed the Archbishops of Cologne and Treves for their share in the scandal and recalled his legates to take their trial. The decision was a signal for all the discontented to combine: the King of Lorraine of course, the emperor, still sore over the Ravenna defeat, the Archbishop of Ravenna, -- even the schismatic Photius, in distant Constantinople, was approached. Presently a great army, led by the brother sovereigns, moved on Rome. The pope gave himself to prayer. Processions filled the streets, the people prayed and fasted. For two whole days the pope prayed before the tomb of St. Peter. Then the tide began to turn. The emperor fell ill. He asked nothing better than a reconciliation. The great combination broke up and the affair ended with the pope stronger than ever.

Nicholas I died, all too soon, after a reign of only nine years (858-867). His successor, Adrian II, elected without difficulty, was again not consecrated until Louis II had approved. He was soon involved in serious difficulties with the family of Anastasius. Adrian, to begin with, without reversing the decisions of his predecessor, tended towards a policy of leniency to some of the malcontents of the late reign. Anastasius persisted in the contrary sense, and in the end had his way. Between the son, who thus dominated the spiritual administration, and his father the aged Arsenius who controlled the temporal, the papacy, with a weak pope, was very much what this family chose to make it. And behind them was the emperor. A new manoeuvre which would have extended their power still further failed however. It ended in a fearful crime -- symptomatic of the more sinister tendencies of the time and prophetic of the future -- and this ruined all. Adrian II, while as yet in minor orders, had married and his wife and daughter were still alive at the time of his election. Arsenius now planned a marriage between the pope's daughter and his own younger son Eleutherius. But the pope had other views. As in other states, so in the papal state, a matrimonial alliance could be of high political importance. This new, and unecclesiastical, novelty, had shown itself already when Adrian's two predecessors, Benedict III and Nicholas I, had been careful to marry off their nieces to important members of the local nobility as a means to secure their loyalty. Adrian had made similar plans for his daughter. Eleutherius, however, would take no denial, and finally kidnapped both mother and daughter.

The pope appealed to the emperor and presently the imperial officers were hot in pursuit. Eleutherius, surrounded, murdered both the girl and her mother. He was taken and himself put to death. Meanwhile the pope denounced Anastasius as the author of the plot and, in his anger, renewed against him all the old sentences of twenty years before and deprived him of the post of librarian (868). Later he managed to prove his innocence and Adrian reinstated him. The incident is yet another instance of the speed with which the papacy was being forced along the road of secularisation, and of what it had to fear from the brutal Roman nobility against whom the emperor was its sole defence.

On April 12, 875, the emperor Louis II died, the last effective ruler to hold undisputed sway in Italy. Adrian II had predeceased him by three years. In his stead ruled yet a fourth nominee of Louis II. This was John VIII, and to him there now fell the delicate task of deciding, since Louis II had no male heirs, to which of his uncles, Charles the Bald of France or Louis the German of Germany, the imperial title should now descend. For the first time there was a France and a Germany between which the papal diplomacy must needs choose. For the first time it depended 011 the pope whether a King of France or a King of Germany should be the dominant force in Italian politics. The emperor, for the last fifty years, had chosen the popes. Now it was for the pope to choose the emperor. Whichever prince he chose, the empire of Charlemagne was beyond all possibility Of r salvation. The imperial title, already, was become a mere decoration.

The pope chose the King of France -- the weaker of the two brothers, but the ruler of the more civilised kingdom, an intellectual, and a prince devoted to the fortunes of the Church. The choice was the signal for his rival to put all possible obstacles in his way; Louis the German and his three sons took the field. Charles, partly by arms, partly by diplomacy, circumvented them, and on Christmas Day, 875, just three-quarters of a century after the first coronation that had founded the empire in his grandfather, he too was crowned at St. Peter's. Then, disregarding the pope's appeal for aid in the holy war against the Mohammedans, he hurried back to defend his own realm against his brother and nephews.

While, beyond the Alps, the new civil war continued -- the death of Louis the German in 876 only providing an occasion for new quarrels -- the pope was occupied once more with the problem of the Mohammedans, and with the chronic discontent of his own factious subjects. From Bari and Tarentum the Saracens had been lately expelled by the fleet of the eastern emperor -- the beginning of a Byzantine restoration in southern Italy that was to last for another two hundred years -- but they now found new employ in the service of the rival petty princes. Soon there was a Mohammedan garrison at Naples, another at Gaeta. The Campagna was never free from their raids and Rome itself was menaced now from the land. The pope, a man of unusual vigour and invincible spirit, organised a fleet in addition to his army. He turned admiral, and successfully: defeating the Saracens several times, destroying a fleet, and liberating hundreds of Christian captives. Also he fortified St. Paul's as Leo IV had fortified St. Peter's.

In Rome itself there was a strong faction which viewed the policies of John VIII with deep misgiving -- the high officials whom the influence of the late emperor had forced upon the popes of the last twenty years. With the death of Louis II the opportunity had come to the pope to be rid of them. They preferred flight to the risk of what possibly awaited them, in that time where the unsuccessful politician so frequently ended his career blinded and lacking a tongue. Whereupon the pope, after in vain exhorting them to return, solemnly condemned them. Among these eminent fugitives one at least, Formosus, the Bishop of Porto, was a man of real distinction and great austerity of life. Nicholas I had employed him on a mission to Bulgaria, and the Bulgarians had wished to keep him as their primate. This the pope -- Adrian II, by this time -- refused, whereupon the disgusted Bulgarians had turned to Constantinople. As Adrian neared his end there was talk of Formosus as his successor. But another school of thought had prevailed, and the distinguished Bishop of Porto could hardly hope for favours from the candidate it succeeded in electing -- John VIII.

At this juncture, while the exiles, returning with an army, invested Rome, Charles the Bald suddenly died (October 6, 877) and the pope, for the second time in two years, had to choose an emperor and a protector. While he hesitated, his enemies took the Leonine City and held him prisoner for thirty days, using all possible pressure to induce him to name Carloman, the senior prince of the German branch of the family. But the pope held his ground, refusing to make a decision, and finally they made off.

Next, in despair, the pope made peace with the Mohammedans and sought to arrange a league of perpetual peace between the warring Carolingians. But nothing came of his great scheme; the dislocation of the ancient empire went on apace; each of the princes had more than he could successfully accomplish in the task of keeping order within the kingdom nominally subject to him; and the pope's final decision to crown as emperor Charles the Fat, the senior surviving member of the German branch of the imperial house [152] (February 12, 881), did nothing to strengthen his own position in Rome. There his enemies were finally too much for him and on December 15, 882, they made away with him, battering him to death when the poison acted too slowly. John VIII is the first pope whom history records to have been murdered. In the next eighty years he was to have, in the manner of his death, not a few successors. The event was yet another proof how speedily the Carolingian civilisation was falling back into barbarism, proof too of what the Roman nobility were capable.

John VIII's successors -- the short lived Marinus (882-884) and Adrian III (884-885) -- recalled the exiles, and with them Formosus, absolved now from the censures laid on him and from the oath he had sworn never to return to Rome. With Stephen V (885- 891) the political problem of the empire returned for, in X87, Charles the Fat was deposed, to die a few months later. Three candidates disputed the succession to his title of emperor-Arnulf the Carolingian King of Germany; Berengar, another Carolingian who ruled Italy; and Guy, the powerful anti-imperialist Duke of Spoleto in whom the old anti-Roman, anti-papal tradition of the Lombards came to life again. Guy defeated Berengar, and Stephen V, without the safeguard of any treaty, without any guarantees for the future of the papal State, had perforce to crown him emperor (891).

The papacy's real hopes centered in Arnulf, a safer protector because more distant; and for the next five years all the Roman diplomacy was directed to induce Arnulf to invade Italy and dispossess Guy. It was a dangerous game, but one that Stephen's successor, too, continued to play. This was no other than Formosus himself (891-896). Arnulf, however, was kept in the north by the problem of Germany. Not until 896 did he come, and on February 22 of that year he was solemnly crowned emperor by Formosus, who had already crowned his rival Guy and, on Guy's death in 894, Lambert his son. It only remained for Arnulf to conquer Lambert and then, the papacy freed from the new political slavery, to retire to Germany. The campaign had hardly opened however when paralysis struck down Arnulf, as it had stricken his father Carloman. The papacy was once more at the mercy of an emperor from whose inevitable vindictiveness no mercy could be hoped. The shock of the news was too much for Formosus and, just seven weeks after his coronation of Arnulf, he died (April 4, 896).

While Arnulf was slowly carried into Germany, Lambert marched to his triumph. By the end of the year he had taken i Rome. Formosus was no longer alive, but there yet remained ways to inflict exemplary punishment. The new pope -- Stephen VI -- was bidden to try the dead pope for the alleged ecclesiastical, irregularities of his election, and, that the ceremony might lack nothing, the corpse of Formosus was disinterred and, vested in the pontifical robes, set before the assembled bishops. He was condemned, and according to the ritual the body was stripped of all its insignia. Underneath the splendour they found a hair shirt. Finally they threw the remains into a disused grave, whence the mob next took them to tip them into the Tiber.

Stephen had himself been consecrated bishop by Formosus, the most serious irregularity urged against whom had been his own previous occupancy of the see of Porto. As the law then stood, no bishop could pass from one see to another. Stephen VI, then, suffered from the same irregularity as the man he now condemned. He solved the difficulty by declaring that the ordinations performed by Formosus were all null and void-including therefore his own -- since Formosus was not pope but a usurper.

Stephen VI, too, had his enemies, or perhaps his share in the frightful horror of the recent trial pointed him out as the most appropriate scapegoat once the city had come back to its senses. Be that as it may, an insurrection soon dispossessed him. In his turn he, too, was degraded and thrown into prison where, in a short time, he was strangled. Romanus, who followed him in the chair of St. Peter, lasted for four months only; Theodore II, who came next, for only twenty days. Formosus, or rather his remains, no-v reappeared, thrown up by the river. Theodore, with all possible ceremony, restored them to their original resting place in St. Peter's; and, so it is said, as the body was borne in, the images of the saints placed there by the dead pope bent in reverence before him. Theodore also restored all the clerics whom Stephen had deposed.

But if Theodore made amends for the sacrileges of his predecessor, he did not live anything like long enough to lay the old spirit of faction. When he died there was once more a double election. The party of Formosus elected John IX, their opponents Sergius III. The emperor intervened in favour of the first and Sergius, for the moment, retired.

John IX (898-900) was a reformer. The acts of Stephen VI were once more annulled. It was decreed that never, for the future, were corpses to be digged up for trial, and, a kind of recognition of the apparent truth that without the emperor there was small chance of order, the imperial rights in the matter of papal elections were again solemnly confirmed. How the new alliance would have worked it is impossible to say, but within two years Lambert had died without heirs and John IX was dead too.

THE ROMAN SEE AND THE ANARCHY, 900-1046

So far as the Papal State was concerned, the death of John IX was the end, for nearly a century, of even the elementary decencies of life. Berengar, who claimed now to be emperor, was wholly taken up with the war against his rival Louis the Blind, of Provence. The empire had at last ceased to matter anywhere at all. The huge state of Charlemagne was now everywhere at the mercy of the local great man -- bishop, abbot or count -- all, or almost all, jealously disputing jurisdictions and territory, endeavouring in the general chaos to annex rights long coveted and to extend their existing possessions. The plague of the Scandinavian invasions had indeed for the moment been broken, but in their place there appeared a new horde of ferocious nomads from the steppes of Asia -- the Hungarians. Arnulf had used them as auxiliaries in his wars, but in 895 the whole nation, a million in all, was streaming into central Europe. For the next sixty years, almost unhindered, their disciplined cavalry swept over central and southern Europe, Italy, Provence, Lorraine and, especially, Germany, the most terrible affliction that even these centuries had seen.

These years between the disappearance of the empire and the emergence of the German King Otto I (936-973) are, except in England, perhaps the darkest in all known European history. Nowhere are they darker than in Rome, where, for sixty years a single noble family dominated, making and unmaking popes at its pleasure. The details of this story are so grotesque that they lose all relation to reality. They have scarcely any power to shock, so great is their incredibility. The head of this family was the nobleman charged with the government of Ravenna, who was also something like the commander-in-chief of the army, Theophylact. In the reign of John IX's short-lived successor, Benedict IV (900-903), another reforming pope, Theophylact plays no part. To Benedict there succeeded Leo V, whom after a few months another priest, Christopher, managed to overthrow. Christopher was in turn deposed (904) by the disappointed candidate of the election of 898, Sergius III, and sent to the prison that still held Leo V. A few weeks later the two ex-popes were murdered " out of pity" ! Sergius, a blackguardly ignoramus, was now supreme. Theophylact's hour had come.

Sergius renewed all the censures against Formosus, and honoured the tomb of the vile Stephen VI with an epitaph that exalted the infamous trial in words that defy translation. Next, annulling all the ordinations made by Formosus and the " Formosan" popes, John IX and Benedict IV, he threw the whole of Italy into indescribable confusion. Theophylact, through his wife, Theodora, slipped into the new post whence he came to control the whole papal administration, while his daughter, Marozia, there is reason to believe, became the pope's mistress. Of Anastasius III, and of Lando, who succeeded Sergius and, together, reigned for little more than two years (911-914) ] we know hardly anything save that the principate of Theophylact was in no way interrupted. Next came John X (914-928) alleged to be the lover, not of Marozia, but of her mother. He, too, was of the party of Stephen VI and Sergius III, but he showed himself a strong ruler and a capable soldier, organising a league of princes against the Saracens, defeating them in a great battle in 916 and routing them from their stronghold on the Garigliano. John X was long-lived, but towards the end of his reign he broke with the Theophylact clan. Its chief was now Marozia. She had married, in 915, one of the heroes of the war with the Saracens. Her husband soon died and it was her two sons, Alberic and John, who were, for the next few years, to play the leading parts in political life. Civil war broke out in the Papal State, between John X and Marozia. The pope called in the Hungarians, but before long a riot in Rome brought his reign to an end and in 928 he died in prison, smothered, it is said, at Marozia's orders. The next three popes were nominated by Marozia - - Leo VI, who lasted six months, Stephen VII for two years, and finally, in 931, her own son, John XI, a young pope, certainly, since his mother was scarcely forty!

Marozia's supremacy was fated soon to disappear. She now married, as her third husband, Hugh, the King of Italy. Her son, the pope, officiated at the marriage and all seemed well. But Marozia's elder son, Alberic, aspired to the mastery of Rome. Between him and Hugh, who hoped for the same prize through a revival of the empire in his favour, there could be nothing but enmity. The troubles soon came to a head; Hugh was driven back to Pavia, Marozia imprisoned, and Alberic was master as Theophylact, his grandfather, had been. During the next twenty years he was all powerful, the real ruler of the Papal State and the decisive factor in what passed for papal elections. His brother, John XI, died in 935: the next four popes [153] were all Alberic's nominees.

A double aim inspired Alberic's policy as ruler of the Papal State (931-954). He desired to render permanent the family hold on the State, and to prevent any revival of the empire; for, whoever was crowned as emperor, this family ambition would find in him, inevitably, an opponent; the official protector of the Holy See could not allow any other master of the Roman See but himself. The danger of such revival came in the first place from Alberic's father-in-law, King Hugh. He made a series of attempts to capture Rome -- an event which would of course have been followed by his coronation as emperor -- in 933, In 936 and in 941. Each time Alberic was too strong for him and Hugh died his ambition unachieved. His son and heir, Lothair, did not live long enough to be a danger to Alberic; but a more serious competitor by far was the King of Germany, Otto I, whom Lothair's widow, Adelaide, now called in to deliver her from Berengar of Ivrea who had usurped her rights.

So, in 951, the German king descended on Italy. He took Pavia, liberated Adelaide, and married her. Then he turned towards Rome. But Alberic, once more, successfully warded off the Charlemagne- to-be; and Otto made his way back to Germany.

As ruler of Rome, Alberic was at least satisfactory. The four popes of his choice were men of good life, and the period was one of religious restoration, thanks very largely to the influence of St. Odo of Cluny. It came to an end all too soon, in the most singular departure from tradition that the century produced. Alberic's health failed prematurely. He was scarcely forty when, in 954, death claimed him, while his heir Octavian was still in his teens. Octavian, despite his age, succeeded peacefully to his father's power, and to the hope of something more, for before Alberic died he had extracted a promise on oath from the electors that, when the pope died, they would choose Octavian. So it fell out. Octavian succeeded his father in the temporal sovereignty of Rome, with its new tradition of naming the pope, and a few months later he also succeeded the pope, Agapitus 11 (956). He was then sixteen years of age.

There was this to be said for the scheme that it ended, for once, the rivalry of nobility and clergy, of the temporal and spiritual interests, since John XII -- Octavian's new style -- combined them, eminently, in his person. The pope was once more supreme in his State, and supreme because, before he was pope, he happened to be, like his father before him. "prince and senator of all the Romans. "

It was already a serious disadvantage that the person in whom these offices were combined was so young; it was another that he did not in the least realise the obligations which his spiritual rank entailed. The most serious thing of all was that the older he grew the less he seemed to care. He was master as no pope had been master since the Papal State began. How he used his power is most decently told in the spare and reticent lines of Mgr. Duchesne. [154]

" We know, too, in what other fashion his youthful spirits overflowed, and how Rome was soon the witness of truly appalling scandals. The young pope took little pleasure in the ritual ceremonies of the Church. Matins scarcely ever saw him present. His nights, no less than his days, were spent in the company of women and young men, in hunting and in banqueting. His sacrilegious love affairs were flaunted unashamedly. Here no barrier restrained him, neither the rank of the women for whom he lusted nor even his kinship with them. The Lateran was become a bad house. No decent woman was safe in Rome. This debauchery was paid for from the Church's treasury, a treasury filled by a simony utterly regardless of the character of those who paid. We hear of a boy of ten consecrated bishop, of a deacon ordained in a stable, of high dignitaries deprived of their eyes or castrated. Cruelty crowned the debauchery. That nothing might finally be lacking, impiety, too, was given its place, and men told how, in the feasting at the Lateran, the pope used to drink to the health of the devil. "

None the less the administrative machine continued to work. What occasion the almost universal breakdown of communications left to these popes for the exercise of their primacy was not neglected. Even John XII could regulate the lives of the monks of Subiaco recently restored by his father.

The regime went on for six years. Then, driven by dire necessity, for the young pope had none of his father's political gifts, an appeal was sent to the German king. Otto, barred from Rome in 951 by Alberic, needed no second invitation from Alberic's son. As in 951, he met with little resistance in the Italian kingdom. He entered Rome, and on the Feast of the Purification, 962, John set the imperial crown on his head. This time the pope himself had knotted the rope that was to hang him.

The emperor swore to defend the pope and the pope swore to be loyal to the emperor. Once more the imperial rights in papal elections were carefully set out. In practice the only difference was to be that a German prince would now choose the pope where, for the last sixty years, he had been chosen by an Italian.

The emperor was soon called upon to exercise his privilege. Scarcely had he left Rome (February, 963) than John XII began to plan an anti-imperialist league with the defeated King of Italy. Otto returned. A hastily gathered council listened to the numerous complaints of the pope's scandalous life. He was summoned to appear and then, after a month's delay, solemnly deposed (December 4, 963). In his place, with the emperor's consent, they elected one of the lay officers of the State -- Leo VIII. The new pope lasted just as long as Otto remained in Rome. When the emperor left, John XII reappeared with his partisans and Leo fled. A new council now pronounced Leo's election invalid, since no council was competent to pass sentence on the pope and since Leo, at the moment of his election, was a layman. A few months later John XII died, in circumstances as scandalous as those in which most of his life had passed. In his place, ignoring Otto's pope, the Romans elected Benedict V (May 22). But Otto returned and, a month later to the day, Leo VIII was reinstated while Benedict was transported to Hamburg to live there as the prisoner of the archbishop.

The ascendancy of the house of Theophylact was ended. Henceforth they had a powerful rival, in their schemes to dominate the papacy. But this powerful rival, none the less, was not all- powerful and to the regime of 904-963 there succeeded a period of confusion where the emperor or the great Roman family chose the pope, according to the opportunity of the moment. It was Otto I who appointed John XIII (965-972) -- a relative of John XII, for he was the son of Marozia's younger sister -- and then, on John XIII's death, Benedict VI. The next year (973) the Roman family came once more to the fore, in the person of Crescentius, brother to the dead pope John XIII. Benedict VI was now deposed; and, through the influence of Crescentius, Boniface VII was elected in his place. At his orders Benedict was, apparently, strangled Boniface was now (June 974) driven out in his turn by the imperial commissioners, who chose as pope Benedict VII. This pope -- a reformer who, as Bishop of Sutri, had been a friend to the new monastic reform of Cluny -- reigned for nine years. When he died the emperor, Otto II, [155] chose for pope his own chancellor, who took the name of John XIV (983). Then, prematurely, a few weeks later, Otto II died, leaving for successor a baby three years old. It was the opportunity for Boniface VII -- murderer of Benedict VI -- to return from Constantinople where, since 974, he had found shelter. John XIV was overthrown, and imprisoned in St. Angelo; where he died miserably a few months later (August 20, 984).

Boniface thenceforth reigned peaceably until his sudden death, eleven months later. His patron, Crescentius, had predeceased him. It was, then, this man's son who "managed" the new pope, John XV. When, in 996, this pope died, Otto III, now of age, was himself in Italy. Crescentius "II" dared not ignore the emperor;. and, on the Roman petition for a new pope, Otto named one of his own cousins, Bruno of Carinthia, who took the name of Gregory V: he was the first German pope. [156] The emperor had no sooner left Rome than, as before in 963, the pope imperially imposed was expelled; and Crescentius installed a pope of his own -- John XVI. Otto however returned in the spring of 998. Crescentius was beheaded; and John XVI, his ears and nose slit, his eyes and tongue torn out, was solemnly deposed.

Gregory V did not long survive his restoration. In February, 999, he died -- poisoned, it is likely, by some henchman of the rival faction. The emperor, since the victory over Crescentius, had made Rome his residence -- the only detail he was destined to realise of his dream of really restoring the empire of Augustus. He now appointed to succeed his cousin his old tutor Gerbert, Archbishop successively of Rheims and Ravenna -- the first French pope, in immediate succession to the first German. This new pope, Silvester II, was the most distinguished scholar of the time. But the learning which made him almost a legend even to his own contemporaries, could not supply for the weakness of the young emperor; nor could it exorcise the brutal determination of the factions to regain their century-old supremacy in Rome. Otto III was driven out, two years after Silvester's succession, to die a wanderer at the foot of Soracte in January, 1002. Nor were his followers, nor the pope, strong enough to secure the burial in Rome of this last emperor to dream of making the ancient city once more the capital of the world.

Otto, twenty years of age, was not yet married. The succession passed to his kinsman Henry, Duke of Bavaria. In Rome another Crescentius had appeared -- the son of the victim of Otto's justice. It was he who, in Rome, was Otto's effective successor. The rivalry for supremacy, and for what went with this -- the power of naming the pope -- between the house of Theophylact and the foreign kings seemed ended. It was just a hundred years since the first Theophylact had arisen to power through Sergius III; and his family still maintained their hold. But it was to last only a few years longer. A rival clan was to wrest it from them; and then, after scandals that recalled John XII, a king from Germany was again to interfere. For yet another fifty years the Holy See was to remain enslaved to one lay master or another.

Silvester II died peaceably, at Rome, in 1003. John XVII who followed him reigned only for six months. Next came John XVIII (1003-1009) and Sergius IV (1009-1012). All these were the choice of the third Crescentius, and good men. Crescentius "III" predeceased his last nominee by a matter of months, and when Sergius IV died (May 12, 1012) there was a double election. The faction of Crescentius elected Gregory; while another and equally powerful band of the same old family, represented by the Count of Tusculum, supported Theophylact, one of the count's own younger sons. It was Theophylact who was finally installed -- under the style of Benedict VIII -- and Gregory carried his case, as usual, outside Italy to the German king, Henry II. Henry, however, decided for Benedict, and in 1014 received from him in St. Peter's the imperial crown.

Once again the empire of Charlemagne had been revived to honour the king of the Germans. But this time it was no mere forced compliment on the part of the pope. Benedict VIII was a strong pope who set himself to the task of repairing the damage wrought by the upheavals of the past century and a half. The invasions had finally ended. Missionaries were at work converting the Northmen in the country coming to be called Normandy and the Magyars in Hungary. At a great council at Pavia the pope opened the campaign for a religious restoration by an attack on the most serious of the novelties that had developed during the chaos -- clerical marriage. To the end of his reign he remained on the best of terms with the emperor, who, indeed asked nothing better-himself a man of saintly life [157] -- than to co-operate in the revival.

Another powerful auxiliary was the pope's brother, Romanus, who was in practice the ruler of the State -- much as Alberic had been, eighty years before, in the time when his brother, John XI, was pope. When Benedict died, in 1024, Romanus, for all that he was a layman, took his place. He called himself John XIX, and, alas, continuing to be the secular noble, revived the worst traditions of his tenth-century predecessors. St. Henry II also had died in 1024. The new emperor, Conrad II (1024-1039), was too interested in his chances of making money out of abuses to regret the appearance of a pope in whom abuses found the highest of sanctions.

John XIX was sufficiently scandalous. His successor outdid even the scandals of John XII. John XIX died in 1032. He had still a third brother living, Alberic. This man had two sons, Gregory and Theophylact. Gregory was made ruler of the Papal State, with the title of Consul, and Theophylact became pope as Benedict IX. The emperor, Conrad II, found the arrangement excellent. The new pope was treacherous and dissolute, but he lent himself easily to the emperor's schemes. He lasted twelve years, until, in 1044, the Romans rose and drove him out, possibly with the aid of the Crescentius faction; and then, lavishly. thereto, they elected as pope the Bishop of Sabina, Silvester III (January 1045). Benedict's party, however, speedily restored him, and Silvester returned to his old see (March 10). On May 5 Benedict suddenly resigned in favour of his godfather, the archpriest of St. John- before-the-Latin-Gate. The new pope took the title of Gregory VI, and all that was healthy in Italy hailed his accession with relief. St. Peter Damian wrote to congratulate him and, from a Benedictine monastery on the Aventine, Gregory called one of the monks to be his secretary, Hildebrand. It was the entry into the history of the Church and of Europe of a man so great that it is hard to characterise him. But it was not yet his hour. There remained the Crescentius' pope, Silvester III; there remained Benedict IX, soon to return, and backed by his powerful clan; there remained, too, the question of Gregory VI's own election. [158] In all these stirring events of the past year all parties had ignored the emperor. It was obvious, given the tradition since Charlemagne's time, that the ultimate decision between the three claimants would lie with him; and Benedict IX stood for a family always strongly imperialistic. What would the emperor -- Henry III -- do?

Throughout what was the empire of Charlemagne the same causes produced, during this century, the same effects: ecclesiastical discipline in decay, simony rife and clerical