Volume 2, Chapter 6

THE RESTORATION OF SPIRITUAL INDEPENDENCE, 1046-1123

Section 1: THE MOVEMENT OF REFORM AND ST. GREGORY VII, 1046-1123

Section 2: THE SCHISM OF CERULARIUS

Section 3: THE OFFENSIVE AGAINST ISLAM: SICILY, SPAIN, THE EAST. 106-1099

Section 4: THE MONASTIC RENAISSANCE: CHARTREUSE, CITEAUX, PREMONTRE

Section 5: THE RENAISSANCE OF CATHOLIC THOUGHT

Section 6: THE FIRST GENERAL COUNCIL IN THE WEST

THE MOVEMENT OF REFORM AND ST. GREGORY VII, 1046-1123

If there was any province of Christendom which had suffered less than another from the debacle of the tenth century it was Germany Its conversion might as yet be incomplete, but Catholicism was too powerful a factor in the hold of the Carolingian kings on their conquest for them to be wholly indifferent to its quality. It was a newer thing there than in France. It had come in with the conqueror from the West -- and very largely owing to his protection. In Germany, too, the political organisation had never been sufficiently settled for the country to suffer from the disintegration of the central government as Italy, and France especially, were suffering. The Carolingians, who survived in a weak fashion to delay the recovery of France for yet another seventy years, disappeared from Germany in the first years of the tenth century. The German kings who took their place had all the freshness, and some of the strength, and even the genius, of Charlemagne himself. From 918 to 983, under Henry I, Otto I and Otto II, the Church in Germany had all the advantages, rare in that century, that come of a strong, purposeful government. Scandals were by no means lacking, but there never came upon religion that chaos which paralysed its action in other places.

The chief feature which, in this comparatively united German Catholicism, gave cause for real anxiety was its integration in the new political unity, and the contentment of so many churchmen that it should be thus integrated. It was the monarchy that had brought the Faith to Germany, and the Church tended to be, more completely than elsewhere, an instrument in the hands of the kings. They appointed and dismissed bishops and abbots at their will; they employed them in the great affairs of State; they named mere statesmen to the sees; all the abuses and usurpation systematised by Charlemagne continued to flourish in tenth-century Germany, part of the systematic royal protection and promotion of the interests of religion.

The general contentment Or even good churchmen with this state of things, the fact that they tended only to complain when, under a bad ruler, it was used to nominate unworthy prelates, is striking evidence how far abuse had passed into a system. It was indeed, as a system, a very important part of the whole social order. In the bishopric (or abbacy -- for both were affected by the development, entities wholly different in kind, the spiritual function, the territory over which the prelate had spiritual jurisdiction, the temporal principality and the mass of property attached to this -- the lands, the buildings, the serfs, the various kinds of tenants, the rights, the privileges, the jurisdictions, the social and political obligations -- all these had for a long time now (that is by the opening years of the eleventh century) become, in the general view, a single, indissoluble whole. Like the countship, the bishopric was, in feudal language, an honor, a beneficium granted by the king. The cleric who received it became thereby the man, the vassal, of the prince who gave it; and he became, at the same time, the lord of other men. In the national scheme of things the system of bishoprics was parallel to, and counterbalanced, the system of countships, as a means whereby the country was governed; it balanced the system of countships in this important respect, that the countships had become hereditary, so that -- and this was especially true of Germany -- the royal interest in nominations to sees and abbeys was, fundamentally, a real concern that one of the main checks on the tendency of the feudal nobility to nullify the royal power should really function.

When the bishop died (or was translated to another see) the honor was in the position of that of a lord who had died without heirs - - it reverted, de plein droit, to the lord who had given it. And, like every other honor, the ecclesiastical beneficium was conveyed to the recipient through a ceremony -- this was the Investiture, about which the famous controversy was now about to begin. The Investiture was not a mere ceremony, but an act which really and actually transferred the honor, from the lord to the man on whom he meant to confer it; and the act consisted in the presentation by the lord of an object that symbolised what was conferred. From about the year 899 the custom grew, first in Provence and then in the Empire, that kings granted bishoprics by handing to the cleric the crozier or pastoral staff. This practice began to appear in France about a century later; and then, in Germany, the emperor Henry III (1039-1056) added the ceremony of placing a ring on the cleric's finger. To these new developments to this use by the lay lord of ceremonials already used in the religious rite called the consecration of a bishop, no objection ever seems to have been raised for the first hundred and fifty years.

What was it now considered that such Investiture by the lord conferred upon the cleric? Nothing else than that one juridical whole the episcopatus, in which spiritual and temporal were, for this mid-eleventh century, indissolubly conjoined -- not, of course, the sacramental powers conferred through the act of consecration, [161] but everything else, including as well- the cura pastoralis.

So universal was this view of the indissoluble character of that socio-religious complex the bishopric, that all the first generations of reformers held it too. [162] But while the kings, looking first to the social role of the bishops, based upon this idea of the episcopatus as a unity their claim to a final say who should be bishops, the new clerical reformers drew from the fact of the unity a very different conclusion. The bishop was primarily a spiritual personage -- therefore the layman could not lawfully appoint him to the episcopatus and must not invest him with it, using those symbols (acts and words) by the handing over of which the bishopric was considered conferred. The two views were diametrically opposed; and in the first, hot, fifty years of the conflict the aim of each of the parties was, necessarily, the unconditional surrender of the other. None, as yet, saw the distinction, which existed in fact, between the bishop as the spiritual ruler of men's consciences and the bishop as a kind of count who happened also to be a cleric. Only as the war continued, and as the theorists began to study the institution historically, did the reality of this distinction emerge, and with it the possibility of a lawful compromise between Church and State based upon it.

The great name in the history of this development is that of St. Ives, Bishop of Chartres, [163] one of the founders of the new scientific Canon Law; the country where a solution on these lines was first attempted was England, and its ecclesiastical patron was the Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm. [164]

The danger is evident how easily a confusion might arise in an ordinary man's mind between the prince's right to transfer his own temporal authority over his subjects and, what belongs to quite another order of reality, the right to confer on a man spiritual authority over other men. But this danger was far from evident to the generations that saw the system of such investiture slowly develop and expand. Once the danger began to be evident to ecclesiastics, revolt was inevitable; and before such a revolt became general there was bound to be a transition period when ecclesiastics who were no less pious than the reformers continued to stand by the old system because they were not clear headed enough to see how dangerous the confusion was which it always implied and was now producing. For many years the reform party was therefore divided. About such evils as simony, and clerical incontinence, and clerical marriage, it was indeed always united. But it was not until the pontificate of Nicholas II (1059-1061) that the war on lay investiture as the main source of all these evils, began really to be waged by the popes, on a principle, and with any consistency. From the time of St. Gregory VII (1073-1085) this is the main object with all the party. The vision of how a good prince might use such authority in church appointments to repress clerical abuses, the memory of what, in the past, good princes had in fact accomplished -- these seem ever to have haunted many minds among the reformers. The boldness of St. Gregory VII, bent on extirpating a custom now well nigh universal, and established for the best part of two centuries was, to such men, something of a scandal.

The situation of the Church under this regime, now about to be attacked and destroyed, is seen at its best in the reign of Henry II (king from 1002, emperor in 1012, died 1024). In his own life he was a model of evangelical virtue, given to prayer and mortification, a generous almsgiver and a promoter of good works. [165] He was, none the less, the effective administrative head of the Church in Germany, reforming monasteries, enforcing Catholic tradition against divorce -- always a difficult matter with these half-converted Barbarians -- deposing unworthy bishops, creating new sees, convoking synods and presiding at them: even, on one occasion, forbidding a bishop to say mass until he had cleared himself of an accusation. His use of the powers he usurped was admirable; and the new and growing tradition of which he is the best example finds its way into the writings of one of the earliest of the canon lawyers, Burchard, Bishop of Worms, who during this reign began to compile his famous collection.

The pope who crowned St. Henry, Benedict VIII, died, in 1024, to be succeeded by his deplorable brother, John XIX. How St. Henry would have dealt with such a pope may perhaps be inferred from the way in which Otto I had dealt with John XII. The contingency did not now arise, however, for, in that same year, 1024, St. Henry also died. He left no heir and the kingship, with the empire, passed to Conrad, the Duke of Franconia.

Conrad II was an emperor whom the new regime at Rome suited sufficiently well. For all his personal generosity to the churches he favoured, he was never hampered in his dealings with them by any interest in reform. The old abuses of simony and the marriage of clerics began to creep back. The reform movement, where it continued, did so thanks to the zeal of individuals, notably to the three bishops of Liege, Utrecht and Cambrai. Nor did the reformers find any difficulty in accepting this, by now, customary hold of the emperor on the administration of the Church.

Conrad II reigned for fifteen years. His son, Henry III, who succeeded him in 1039, was a personage of a very different order. A strong ruler, studious, reserved in manner, correct where his father had been a loose-liver, he halted the growing decadence of German Catholicism. The Church was too valuable an instrument in the work of uniting Germany for him to suffer the weakness and the wickedness of its subjects to harm it. So, while the canon law was strictly enforced that barred the sons of priests from an ecclesiastical career, and the whole force of the Church enlisted to enforce the " Truce of God," [166] the king, more than ever, kept his hold on the nomination of bishops and abbots, investing them, on appointment, with the symbols of their spiritual authority. How such a man would deal with the Roman scandal no one could doubt. The opportunity for his intervention was the fall of the wretched Benedict IX, whose family owed the papacy very largely to the patronage of the German kings. It was, in some sense, to revenge an outrage on his crown that, in the autumn of 1046, Henry III crossed the Alps with an army.

Everything went according to the traditional programme. The emperor met Gregory VI and, with the threat of deposition, persuaded him to abdicate. [167] This was effectuated at the Council of Sutri (December 20, 1046). Silvester III was deposed and,. making no opposition, retired to a monastery. On Christmas Eve, in the inevitable fashion of these German protectors of the Church, like Otto I in 963, and Otto III in 996, Henry III named his pope. It was, of course, one of his own German bishops: Suidger, the experienced reformer who for six years had ruled the see of Bamberg created by Henry II. He took the name of Clement II, and on Christmas Day crowned his sovereign Emperor. The coup d'etat ended, as always for now two centuries, with a renewed acknowledgement of the emperor's rights in the matter of papal elections; it was set out, this time, in the clearest possible terms.

Clement II, whatever his title to be pope, was a good man and promised an era of better things. But the foundation on which his power rested was the emperor. When the emperor withdrew, the Roman nobility, from whose hands he had rapt the papacy, emerged once more; Clement died, after a nine-months' reign, apparently poisoned (October 10, 1047) and Benedict IX reappeared. Benedict survived for another eight months. On Christmas Day, 1047, the emperor named yet another of his German bishops, Poppo of Brixen, who took the name of Damasus II. This pope's reign was shorter even than that of Clement II; it was not until July 17, 1048, that he came to Rome and was installed, and twenty-three days later he too was dead. It was another six months before the emperor filled the vacancy and meanwhile, to the easing of this complicated problem of legitimacy, Benedict IX finally disappeared. At Christmas, 1048, the emperor named his third pope, Bruno, Bishop of Toul. He took the name of Leo IX, and with his accession the leadership of the reform passed to the Holy See.

Leo IX was, at this time, forty-seven years of age. He was of mixed blood, partly Alsatian, partly Burgundian and French, and a near relative of Henry III. He had begun his career in the imperial service under Conrad II and, although in holy orders, he commanded a troop of horse in that emperor's Italian expedition of 1027. The accident that, on his return, the see of Toul was vacant, changed his whole life. After much hesitation Bruno consented to be its bishop; and thenceforward, for twenty years, he gave himself to the work of reform. The evils of the Roman situation he knew well, for, since his consecration, he had often visited the city as a pilgrim. But, unlike his two immediate German predecessors, this third choice of Henry III did not-the thing seems certain -- consider that the emperor's nomination alone sufficed to make him pope. There still remained the all- important matter of the consent of the Roman Church; and it was as the Bishop of Toul, and in a pilgrim's dress, that he arrived in Rome. [168] He was enthroned on the first Sunday of Lent, 1049 (February 12).

The new pope took with him from Lorraine a number of experienced reformers destined, in the next ten years, to make the new tendencies the one stable feature of the papal policy. Humbert, Abbot of Moyenmoutier, one of the monasteries which Bruno had reformed, a learned and able controversialist, was the chief of them; Frederick of Lorraine (brother to the Duke of Lorraine, Godfrey) was another; Hugh the White, Abbot of Remiremont, was a third; and Halimard, the monk who had recently been made Archbishop of Lyons, a fourth. Finally there was Hildebrand, the secretary of the recently deceased expope Gregory VI, who now returned to the city whence he was one day to organise and direct the whole great movement. He was as yet, however, only one, and that the youngest, [169] of this band of able counsellors, the picked instruments through whom Leo IX proposed to rule.

Leo IX was himself a man of great learning -- in the last month of his life, while the prisoner of the Normans, he set himself to acquire a knowledge of Greek -- and he was a saint. He had lost none of his old military skill, and his short reign was a well- planned and well-executed campaign that took him through every one of the diseased and sickly provinces of Christendom. Everywhere he went the pope presided personally at the council summoned to examine local conditions, deposing unworthy prelates, restoring the practice of elections, forbidding lay interference, and particularly the practice of selling the rights of nomination, forbidding the clergy to make war, restoring the old discipline of celibacy and enacting the most stringent penalties against simony. The list of these councils is imposing. They took the pope to the very confines of settled Christianity. They began with one at Rome in 1049; then, in the same year, the pope is at Pavia, Rheims and Mainz. In 1050 he is at Rome again, tours southern Italy and crosses the Alps to Langres. Treves is visited in 1051, Pressburg and Ratisbon in 1052, Augsburg and Mantua in 1053. By the time the pope died, the whole of the Church knew that reform was now the papacy's own concern, and its main concern. The Roman Church had been brought into direct touch with the dependent bishops in so striking a way that none could now be unaware of this.

These apostolic journeyings were the foundation upon which all the later effort of the Church as a united whole was built. The new condemnations of lay control over appointments may not yet have sounded with all the needed clearness. They were lost perhaps, for the moment, in the condemnation of more striking and more openly scandalous anomalies such as clerical marriage, clerical brigandage and simony. But already Leo IX had singled out the root cause of all the disorder. He had set in motion a force which, since the lay hold was universal, must ultimately shake all Christendom, and which must, assuredly, strain the new relations between pope and emperor. So far, and for St. Leo, too, the imperial control of papal nominations was an undiscussed feature of ordinary procedure -- the very means, indeed, by which the papacy had been transferred from the control of blackguards to men of goodwill. St. Leo was himself its creation. His own relations with the emperor were excellent, and the question did not arise.

The pontificate ended, for all that, in storm. In 1040 the Normans had invaded southern Italy, from that kingdom of Sicily which ten years earlier they had wrested from the Arabs. For all that they were Catholics, the new conquerors speedily showed themselves as great a scourge as earlier invaders. Church lands were ravaged with the rest, and in the course of his reform campaign in the summer of 1052 the pope was brought up against the Norman atrocities. There ensued a series of events that was to be of very great importance in the future development of the papacy's relation to the empire. The pope gathered an army-the German contingent for which the emperor, at the last moment, refused to let go, thanks to the Bishop of Eichstadt -- and in the summer of 1053 the campaign opened. It ended abruptly in the rout of the papal army at Civitate (June 18, 1053). The pope was captured, the Normans besought absolution for their crimes, swore fidelity and were absolved. But they held the pope prisoner for another nine months none the less. A few days after his release he died (April 19, 1054).

The first result of the short war was a strong reaction against St. Leo and his policies. The leading Italian reformer, St. Peter Damian, denounced in unmeasured language the pope's recourse to arms. The battles necessary for the Church should be fought by the emperor. The only sword a priest should know is the sword of the word of God. At the imperial court. too, there was a reaction and when, finally, after an interregnum of almost twelve months, the emperor prevailed on a German bishop to take up the unattractive responsibilities or the papacy, it was that Bishop of Eichstadt who had opposed St. Leo that he appointed. The circumstances of the "election" are curious. St. Leo's "cabinet" was scattered at the moment of his death; Humbert and Frederic of Lorraine were at Constantinople, [170] Hildebrand in France. In September (1054) a delegation from the Roman clergy and people met the emperor at Mainz and agreed to accept his candidate. It was not until the following March that the Bishop of Eichstadt accepted, and he made it a condition that the emperor should assist him against the Normans; he styled himself Victor II.

As well as the Normans another problem called the emperor into Italy. Godfrey of Lorraine, already a troublesome and rebellious vassal, had recently, without the emperor's leave married the widow of the Marquis of Tuscany [171] and become thereby lord of a territory of immense strategical importance that stretched across the Apennines and was a formidable obstacle to communications between Germany and Rome.

Henry III came down into Italy, to find that Duke Godfrey had managed to escape. His wife was arrested; and his brother, Frederic, chancellor now of the Roman Church and just returned from his mission to Constantinople, also judged it more prudent to take to flight. The Norman troubles continued to be the subject of negotiations without any decision being arrived at, and the proposed expedition that was to destroy them was abandoned; revolts in Germany had called the emperor home. The pope, after acting for some months as Henry's lieutenant in Italy combining the work of reform with that of policing the imperial vassals, followed him in September, 1056. A month later he was assisting at Henry III's deathbed (October 5, 1056) and securing the recognition of his heir [172] from the great lords and bishops. Then, shortly after his return to Rome, Victor II died too, at Arezzo (July 28, 1057), reconciled in the last months of his reign with Godfrey and with his brother Frederic, now, thanks largely to the pope, Abbot of Monte Cassino (May 18, 1057) and a cardinal (June 3).

Victor II was to be the last of the imperially nominated popes. This time the vacancy was of short duration. The news of the death of Victor II no sooner reached Rome than, on August 2, the clergy elected Frederic of Monte Cassino who was consecrated and installed as Stephen IX. For the first time for centuries the I Church had a pope whom neither the emperor nor the local aristocracy had appointed. An embassy was, it is true, sent to ask the consent of the empress regent, but sent only when the new pope had been consecrated and was already acting as pope. All the pacts conveying to the emperor rights, privileges, and powers of veto had been ignored; the policy of Leo IX was carried to its logical conclusion. Meanwhile the reforms continued. Then, only eight months after his election, the new pope died (March 29, 1058) after laying a command on the Roman clergy not to: elect his successor until the return of Hildebrand, then away at the imperial court. How little progress, in one direction at least, all the labours of the three last popes had as yet accomplished was shown immediately when, without waiting for Hildebrand,: the Counts of Tusculum elected their first pope for nearly thirty years -- the Cardinal-Bishop of Velletri, John Mimicius, who took the ominous name of Benedict X (April 5, 1058). The Roman clergy, led by Humbert, refused him recognition, and so too-influenced no doubt by Hildebrand -- did the empress regent. The court fixed on Gerard, the Bishop of Florence; [173] Hildebrand won him over to consent; Godfrey of Lorraine was commissioned to see to the expulsion of the anti-pope; and, in December, 1058, Gerard was proclaimed as Nicholas II. It was a return to the procedure which had produced Victor II.

With a mixed army, in which the forces of Godfrey of Lorraine were conspicuous, the new pope marched on Rome. Hildebrand's diplomacy had won over one of the factions, after a little street fighting Benedict X fled, and, on January 24, 1059 -- ten months after the death of Stephen IX -- Nicholas was solemnly enthroned. He was the sixth pope in twelve years, and destined to reign for little more than the average of his recent predecessors, for he died at Florence in July, 1061. His reign is, nevertheless, immensely important. For Nicholas II is the author of the law governing papal elections that is still in force; and to secure the freedom of the election from those out of whose hands the new law took it -- the Roman nobility and the emperor -- this pope made an alliance with the Normans. This was indeed a departure, for the Normans were little better than a pirate state, nowhere recognised as anything else. Here Nicholas II's adviser was, probably, the new Abbot of Monte Cassino, Didier, lately created cardinal and one day to be pope himself as Victor III.

The new electoral law was promulgated in the decree of a council held in the Lateran in April, 1059. A hundred and thirteen bishops took part in it, and after the usual condemnation of simony, of clerical marriage -- it was now forbidden to hear mass said by a priest who was not celibate -- and of lay investiture, [174] a decree was passed making the rule of life of the canons-regular obligatory on all clerics bound to celibacy. The decree on the papal election laid down that, henceforth, the only electors were the cardinal bishops and the cardinal clergy of Rome; they are to elect, by preference, a cleric of the Roman Church; the emperor is not accorded any rights, but whatever is done is to be done "with due regard and honour to our son Henry the present king. . . in accordance with the concession we have made, and likewise to those of his successors who personally shall have received the like right from the apostolic see."

The decree [175] fixed the law for all future times, giving to the chiefs of the Roman clergy, the cardinal bishops, priests and deacons, a new importance and practically founding their corporate existence as the College of Cardinals. It was by no means anti- imperialist in intention. The enemy against which it was directed was the anarchical influence of the Roman aristocracy, responsible for two centuries of scandal and sacrilege, and still powerful enough to force the election of their man. The emperor, nevertheless, was removed from the centre of the action. His honour was to be secured, but the decree does not confirm any one of the innumerable acts by which the consecration of the pope was made to depend on the emperor's consent to the election; a whole collection of imperial rights that had developed since Charlemagne was silently set aside. The court, naturally, was displeased. The legates who came from the council with the official communication of its decrees, were refused a hearing, and a council of German bishops condemned the pope and declared his laws null and void. Nor was the new alliance between pope and Normans to the imperial liking. Their duke, Robert Guiscard, swore fidelity to the Church, swore to assist the pope to recover his rights, made over his lands to St. Peter and received them back as St. Peter's vassal, pledging himself to pay an annual tribute in acknowledgement of suzerainty. The new, independent papacy was provided with a strong ally, should either of its ancient masters seek to re-establish his hold.

While Nicholas II lived all was well. The anti-pope, Benedict X, submitted. The German court remained passively hostile. But with the pope's death (July 27, 1061) the various hostilities fused. It remained to be seen whether the court, the defeated Roman aristocracy, and the innumerable opponents of the new reforms from among the dignitaries of the Church in northern Italy, could be united and unite on a pope. Nicholas II was at Florence when he died. When the news reached Rome there was a small-scale insurrection, and presently two missions were on their way to the court, one from the Roman aristocracy, the other from the unreformed bishops of Lombardy. There seemed small chance of the statute of 1059 being carried into effect on this the first occasion that called for its application.

It was Hildebrand who saved the situation. He was now archdeacon of the Roman Church, the first dignitary after the pope himself; and the pope's death left him in full charge. He had his candidate ready, persuaded him to allow his name to go forward, and brought him to Rome. This was Anselm of Baggio, Bishop of Lucca, who had in recent years made a name for himself as the militant leader of the reform party in Lombardy. He was a Lombard himself, a friend of St. Peter Damian and well known at the court where he had served in recent years as ambassador. He was by no means an intransigent, and represented a school of reform less drastic in its procedure than that which had bred Nicholas II. [176]

Meanwhile Hildebrand had also won over one of the Roman factions, and had called in the Normans [177] who were, by this, camped outside the gates of the city. On October 1, 1061 Anselm was installed as Alexander II.

Four weeks later the court declared itself, and at Basel, in the presence of the boy emperor, Henry IV, an assembly of German and Lombard bishops chose as pope the Bishop of Parma, the candidate favoured by the Roman nobility; he called himself Honorius II. The emperor ratified the election and, with an army, the imperialist pope descended on Italy. On April 14, 1062, he defeated the troops of Alexander II in the fields by the castle of St. Angelo, took possession of Trastevere and St. Peter's. Two things saved Alexander: the arrival of Godfrey of Lorraine Marquis of Tuscany - - actually a check on Honorius rather than an aid to Alexander, for Godfrey recommended both to retire to their former sees and submit their claims to a council -- and, secondly a palace revolution in Germany. The new regent, Anno, Archbishop of Cologne was a zealous reformer. He was however too much of an imperialist to acknowledge Alexander immediately and he, too, was possessed with the idea that both Alexander and Honorius should submit their claims to a council. As regent he summoned a diet to discuss the question at Augsburg.

To this diet Alexander sent as his advocate St. Peter Damian, who, zealous reformer though he was, now gave away the principle of all that the last two popes had accomplished for the freedom of religion when, confident of Alexander's legitimacy, he declared that it was for the emperor and his bishops to decide which of the rivals was really pope. [178] The German nobles and bishops voted for an enquiry into the case against Alexander. The pope made no protest against this and, when the diet recognised him as pope, he returned to Rome, in the spring of 1063.

And now St. Peter Damian, from France, whither he had gone as legate, once again threw the pope's case into grave confusion. For, ignorant of the Augsburg act of recognition, he wrote to Anno demanding that the regent summon a general council. Alexander II was still too insecure to make the kind of reply to Anno that Nicholas II might have sent; and when the council met, at Mantua, (Pentecost 1063) the pope, although his demand that he should preside had been bluntly refused, [179] consented to appear before it and to make a solemn protestation that his election was not simoniacal, and was according to the ancient form. As to the Norman alliance, concerning which he had to submit to a lecture from Anno of Cologne, that was his own affair. The council ended by acknowledging Alexander and it condemned Honorius. The schism was ended. Alexander had triumphed, but not without the emperor. The principle that the laity have no rights in papal elections -- to which Nicholas II had lately given so much importance -- had suffered something of an eclipse.

Alexander II had, however, by no means waited for the council's decision before beginning to rule the Church. The explanation which he made to the council at Mantua was a simple act of policy to end the schism. Ever since his election he had, in fact, continued the work of his predecessors, by synods, despatch of legates, and correspondence, working the reforms into every corner of Christendom. The direct influence of the Roman Church was beginning to be felt throughout the universal Church more continuously than ever before in its history. Southern and central Italy were now comparatively well in hand. In France the new Capetian rulers, still hardly more than nominal kings, oscillated; but legates from Rome toured the country unceasingly, preaching the new principles, and, in synods and councils, insisting on the punishment of those who contravened them. Spain, too, felt the new vigour. In Germany the chief interest, during these years, was the gradual revelation of the young emperor as another Conrad II. Like his grandfather before him Henry IV continued to traffic in sees, and he showed every sign of resentment against the new limitations on his power. He was not yet crowned as emperor, and the fear that the pope would refuse to crown him acted, for the moment, as a restraint. Nevertheless, despite the growing difficulty of Henry's hostility, the reform continued to penetrate Germany too. Alexander was even able to compel such chiefs of the German episcopate as the Archbishops of Cologne and Mainz and the Bishop of Bamberg to come to Rome and stand their trial.

One of the chief interests of this reign is that it saw the introduction of the reform into England. William of Normandy who, two years after the end of the schism. had conquered England, was a prince who had always enjoyed the confidence of the popes of the reform. He was himself the more enthusiastic for the reform in his new kingdom, since he found it a means of strengthening his own authority. When, on the death of St. Edward the Confessor (January 5, 1066), Harold succeeded to the English throne, William sent off a mission to Rome denouncing Harold as a perjurer, and the Archbishop of Canterbury who had crowned him, as schismatic -- Stigand having received his pallium from Benedict X, and having never since made his submission to the lawful pope. Alexander blessed the expedition, despite opposition from some of his cardinals, and sent William a consecrated banner as a pledge of support. Hildebrand was the main mover in this policy, and after the Conquest he reaped his reward. In 1070 two papal legates presided over a great council at Winchester. Stigand and several other bishops were deposed; Lanfranc, now abbot of Bec, was appointed archbishop, and the Church in England, too, was opened to the full tide of the new vigorous life.

When, in 1073, Alexander II -- not the least of whose merits was that he survived to rule for more years than his six predecessors put together -- came to die, the reform movement had been, for a quarter of a century, the primary occupation of the popes. They had gradually organised it throughout the whole Church, and where, in the beginning, it had depended for its success on the lucky chance that the reigning emperor was himself a good man and interested, it had now for sixteen years been independent of any temporal authority, captained by the pope himself. The imperial suzerainty over the Church, accepted without reflection, by good men no less than bad, as one of the ordinary facts of life, had been set aside. For a short sixteen years the papacy, for the first time in five centuries, had been politically free. There was now to begin the desperate fight to maintain that freedom, a fight that was begun with the freedom barely gained and the gain in no way consolidated.

The Emperor Henry IV was now twenty-three -- intelligent, cultured, an artist, but selfish and sensual. To anyone who knew his character, and the history of the popes' successful attack on the privileges which his line had so long enjoyed, conflict must have seemed inevitable. Rather than surrender to the new idea, that lay control of ecclesiastical appointments was the main cause of all the ills that afflicted religion, the emperor would throw in his lot with the anti-reform forces. The pope, just as inevitably, would, in defence of what had been won, increase the growing centralisation, tightening the links that bound bishops to the metropolitans, and metropolitans to the Roman Church. The time for compromise and half measures was gone. The moment had come when to attack abuses yet more violently was a very necessity of life. The time called for a pope who should be perfectly informed of every element in the complicated game, who should possess a will of iron, political subtlety, unshakable courage, and also, if these were not to damage himself and his cause once the spirit breathed life into the terrifying combination, a pope who should possess the heroic disinterestedness that comes of supernatural charity. It was the ultimate secret of Hildebrand's lasting success -- for he it was upon whom the burden fell -- that he remained the monk first as last, the ascetic and the man of prayer.

As in 1061, the vacancy found Hildebrand in charge. The decree of 1059 was to be applied for the second time, and in circumstances more menacing than before. Hildebrand ordered a three days' fast in preparation for the election, and proceeded with the dead pope's funeral. There was only one possible candidate, and at the very funeral, apparently, he was spontaneously, tumultuously, hailed as pope, clergy and people shouting together and bearing down his unwillingness. A month later he was ordained priest, and on the feast of SS. Peter and Paul consecrated bishop.

Hildebrand -- St. Gregory VII -- was at the time of his election a man in the middle fifties. [180] His youth had known the Rome of the last of the popes of the House of Theophylact. He had been the secretary of the first of the reformers, and in the days of Gregory VI's exile he had come into close contact with the leaders of the reform movement in Burgundy and Lorraine. He had perhaps known Cluny, [181] and he had certainly known Liege, the one centre, [182] at that time, of a reform movement which was also anti-imperialistic. The Bishop of Liege it was who, alone had protested when Henry III had disposed of the popes at Sutri, who alone had ventured to oppose to the emperor the tradition that the pope has no judge on this earth. [183] From the north St. Leo IX brought Hildebrand back to Rome, ordained him to be one of the sub-deacons of the Roman Church and set him in charge of its finances. Later he had served as legate in France at the time of the great controversy on the Holy Eucharist, and under Victor II he had returned to France, again as legate and reformer, presiding at great councils, such as that of Lyons and that of Chalons, where simoniacal bishops were deposed. He had gone as legate to the imperial court and, under Nicholas II, with Anselm of Lucca to the place where the conflict raged most violently between the reform and the old regime -- Milan. When Anselm succeeded as Alexander II, he remained at Rome to be that pope's alter ego. By the time of his own election, in 1073, he knew by personal experience every phase of the vast movement, knew, too, every personality engaged in it. Few popes have come to their task so well prepared.

The principle that gives unity to the whole of Gregory VII's varied activity, is his ever present realisation that he is responsible to God for all the souls entrusted to him. Political activity may be a necessary means, but the end in view is always wholly supernatural. The pope must answer to God for the souls of kings no less than for those of priests and peasants; for kings too must keep God's law, or find themselves in hell for all eternity. And to William the Conqueror Gregory VII wrote this explicitly, "If then, on that day of terrible judgement it is I who must represent you before the just judge whom no lies deceive and who is the creator of all creatures, your wisdom will itself understand how I must most attentively watch over your salvation, and how you, in turn, because of your salvation and that you may come to the land of the living, must and ought to obey me without delay." There is nothing new in this: it is but a particular application of the general principle that the shepherd is charged to guide the whole flock which Gelasius I, for example, had stated no less explicitly to the emperor Anastasius six hundred years before St. Gregory VII. [184] Nor, despite the ingenuity of later, anti-papal, historians -- was this meant as a thinly-disguised means of bringing about a political system in which the pope should rule all the affairs of the Christian world. Nowhere in the pope's own declarations is there any hint that he hoped for such a position, nor in the multitudinous writings of his supporters, whether publicists or canonists, that argue for the rights he did claim; nor is there any sign that the emperor believed this to be Gregory's aim, or any of the emperor's men. To none of the pope's contemporaries, to none of those who were at the heart of the struggle, did it ever occur, even to allege, that what Gregory VII was aiming at was to be the emperor of a Christian world state. [185]

Henry IV, too, had his problems, and chief among them that of recovering what the crown had lost during his own long minority. [186] Appointments to sees, and the accompanying simony, were at the moment important political expedients. This return to the evil ways of his grandfather had already, in the last years of Alexander II, led to difficulties between Henry and the Holy See; and the candidate to whom the king had sold the see of Constance was, thanks to the pope, denied consecration. Despite the king, a council, presided over by papal legates, was held at Mainz (1071) and the bishop-elect of Constance was compelled to resign. In another dispute, which divided the bishops and abbots of Thuringia -- where the allocation of tithes was in question -- the king had intervened to prevent an appeal to Rome. It was already more than evident that, in Henry IV, the reform movement faced the most serious opponent who had so far arisen. In Germany itself his determination to dominate the great feudatories could only end in war, and in 1073 a general revolt broke out which came near to sweeping him away altogether. In his despair Henry appealed to the pope, acknowledging his simony and his many usurpations in the matter of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, asking for aid and humbly promising amendment of his life. Gregory VII had already planned his policy with regard to the German king. He was not by nature an intransigent. [187] He would do his best, by kindly warnings, to turn Henry from an opponent into an ally of the reform. Only when he proved obdurate did the pope return to the drastic remedies of Cardinal Humbert and Nicholas II in order to secure the freedom of religion. Already, in September, 1073, he had forbidden the new Bishop of Lucca to receive investiture from the king, and now came the king's submission and appeal.

The pope's reply was to despatch two legates, to reconcile Henry and his subjects and to settle the details of the dispute between king and pope still hanging over from the last pontificate. By May, 1074, the war seemed practically over, and the pope and king were reconciled. The pope resumed his activities on behalf of reform in the great German sees. It was, very largely, to these great bishops, of Cologne, Mainz, Augsburg, and Hamburg, that the ruling of Germany during the minority had fallen. The accession of Gregory VII found them as little subordinate to the pope as they were to the king. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the pope's legates were able to bring together the council he desired, and strong protests came from the German clergy against the new discipline and especially against the newly enforced clerical celibacy. There was not too much hope that, in any conflict between Rome and Henry IV, the churches of Germany would make common cause with the pope.

That conflict was not long in coming. Gregory VII had begun by renewing the decrees against simony and clerical ill-living (Roman Council of March, 1074). By the Lent of 1075 it was evident to him that, almost nowhere, had the legates despatched to enforce these decrees, met with any general support from the bishops. The pope now determined to strike at the two chief causes of this failure on the part of the bishops. The abuse that appointments to sees had everywhere fallen into the hands of the lay lord, Gregory met by a solemn renewal of Nicholas II's decree of 1059, which had never been enforced. No prelate must, henceforth, receive an abbey or a see from any lay lord; no lay lord must, for the future, make such grants. And in the Dictatus Papae the pope reminded disobedient bishops that his authority was of divine institution, and that it extended to a power of deposing bishops and, if need be, of the emperor too.

This decree of February, 1075, against lay investiture was not intended, the thing seems certain, as an aggressive move against the princes -- still less was it an act which especially envisaged Henry IV; the pope was in no hurry to promulgate the decree to princes generally, and his policy in applying the law varied greatly. In the English kingdom of William the Conqueror, for example, where simony had no place in the royal appointments, and where king and bishops were at one with the pope in the work of reform, Gregory VII never raised the question at all. The new law was, indeed, " a preventive weapon designed to assist the struggle against simony". [188] In a country where simony on the part of the king was systematic, and the king hardened in his resolve to maintain the system, conflict -- speedy conflict -- was inevitable; and such was the case with Henry IV. And, as the decree was a challenge to Henry IV so too were the blunt declarations of the Dictatus Papae a challenge to the feudalised ecclesiastical princes who occupied the sees of Germany. In these twenty-seven terse propositions king and bishops were warned that the pope's laws against simony, clerical ill-living, and the usurpation of rights to appoint were no dead letter, and that none, whatever his rank, would escape the sanctions enacted against those who broke these laws. [189]

The war in Germany, that still dragged on despite the papal intervention of 1074, came to an end in September, 1075, with Henry IV completely victorious. Master, at last, in his own house, the king was now to show his hand against the papacy. The troubles of the see of Milan gave the king his opportunity. In March, 1075 the party of reform had suffered there a great defeat and their leader had lost his life. Whereupon their rivals had begged King Henry to appoint a new archbishop -- despite his recent acknowledgement of the archbishop, Atto, whom the pope had recognised at the council of 1074. The German king consented and nominated Tedaldo, a deacon of the Milanese church. And it was with this incident that the great struggle began between the sacerdotium and the imperium that was to be a main feature of European history for the next two hundred and fifty years.

Gregory VII answered the challenge with a solemn warning, December 8, 1075, that the decrees of the last council bound the king no less than the rest of the Church, and with a private message that if Henry persisted he should himself be excommunicated and deposed. Henry's reply was to organise against the pope all the discontented ecclesiastics of Germany and Lombardy; with them there rose, also, the anti-papal Roman aristocracy. It was not yet thirty years since Henry's father had despatched three popes in as many weeks.

It was the Romans who moved first, and as the pope sang the Midnight Mass of Christmas in St. Mary Major's he was attacked and carried off by one of the leading Roman nobles, Cencius, to be delivered however, after a few hours. Next, in January, 1076, a council of German bishops at Worms -- twenty-seven in all- denounced the pope as a usurper, elected without the king's authorisation, a mischief maker who for two years had sown dissension and trouble throughout the Church. The king added to their official decree letters of his own, inviting the Romans to expel the pope and bidding Gregory VII himself, "no pope but a false monk," abandon the see he had dishonoured. " Come down then, leave the see thou hast usurped, that another may take the place of blessed Peter. I, Henry, king by the grace of God, and all the bishops, we say to thee 'Come down, come down, thou whom all the ages will condemn." [190]

The envoys from the German council halted on their way to Rome, to hold a council at Piacenza, where the Lombard bishops swore to refuse obedience to the pope. At Rome the pope gave the envoys a hearing -- and proceeded to excommunicate the Archbishops of Mainz and Cologne, the presidents of the German council, and with them the king himself (February 14, 1076). This last decree was promulgated in terms of unusual solemnity, which reveal the new development given by the reformers to Our Lord's promises to St. Peter. "Hearken, O Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, to the prayer of thy servant, whom thou hast nourished since infancy, whom, to this day, thou hast protected from the power of the wicked. Thou art my witness, and Our Lady, God's mother, and thy brother the blessed Paul, that it was thine own holy Roman Church which set me, for all my unwillingness, at the helm. . . By thy favour it is, and not by any works of mine, that the Christian people obey my ruling. . .

In thy place, and by thy favour, God has given me authority to bind and to loose upon earth. Wherefore, filled with this confidence, for the honour and defence of thy Church, in the name of God Almighty, by thy power and thy authority, I deprive Henry the king, son of Henry the emperor, who with unheard-of pride has risen against thy Church, of all authority in the kingdom of the Teutons and in Italy. I release all Christians from their oaths of fidelity sworn to him or that they shall swear to him. I forbid any person to do him any of the service due to kings. . . . I bind him with the chain of anathema so that the whole world may know that upon this rock the Son of the living God has built his Church and that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

This act of unprecedented boldness, the culmination of the efforts of the reformers since 1049, was the culmination, too, of Gregory's reign, a focal point indeed of all the long history of the relation of the Catholic Church and the Catholic kings, towards which much previous history tended, to which all later history looks back. Gregory VII was to meet disaster upon disaster, to die with the Church divided, with the reformers defeated and scattered. But, because of the setting he gave it, this first papal excommunication and deposition of a king never left the Catholic memory. It fixed for all time, upon all subsequent popes and bishops. the elementary nature of their duty to secure the rights of religion and in securing them to make no distinction of persons. Imperator intra ecclesiam non supra ecclesiam est, so St. Ambrose had admonished Valentinian II seven hundred years earlier. St. Gregory VII's excommunication of the German king stamped that truth so deeply into Catholic practice that, henceforth, it ceased to be matter for discussion.

At first all went well and a great victory for the reformed papacy seemed assured. Around the papal decision all the recently quelled rebellion rose again. The great feudatories gladly renewed, under the new papal sanction, their old war on Henry. As the summer of 1076 came on his bishops, too, left him for the pope. At an assembly at Tribur (October 16, 1076) his deposition was proposed and it was agreed that this should be left to the pope who should come, in the following February, and hold a great council at Augsburg. Henry, apparently, was irrecoverably lost.

As in 1073, he resolved to save himself by submission. The pope had already left Rome for Germany when, with a few attendants, Henry crossed the Alps. He met the pope at Canossa, a fortress belonging to the pope's ally the powerful Countess Matilda, ruler since her father's death of the important marquisate of Tuscany. The pope, convinced most unwillingly that Henry's repentance was sincere, could not refuse him the absolution he sought (January 28, 1077). The king might stand, for three days, as he has ever been painted, clad only in his shirt, barefoot in the snow, beseeching the inflexible pope. It was he, nevertheless, who triumphed, staving off disaster at the last moment of the last hour, and breaking the entente between the pope and the German opposition before it had had time to take diplomatic shape. [191]

In Germany, meanwhile, the opposition had elected another king, Rudolf of Swabia, Henry's brother-in-law (March 13, 1077). As between the two rivals the pope declared himself neutral, offering to arbitrate and judge between them. Both kings accepted, at least so far as to send ambassadors to plead their case before a great council of a hundred bishops which the pope assembled at the Lateran in the April of 1078. Once again, however, for lack of convincing evidence, the pope refused to decide. contenting himself with sending to Germany a commission of investigation. When it was clearly shown where the right lay, he would condemn the usurper.

The mission achieved very little. The war went on despite the endeavours of the legates, and presently Henry, disregarding the explicit oaths he had sworn at Canossa, was once more disposing of abbeys and sees in the old fashion. When, in the first weeks of 1080, he demanded that Gregory should excommunicate Rudolf, he merely applied the last stimulus to force the punishment that had been accumulating. At a council summoned in March of that year the pope recalled the previous decrees and renewed the excommunications of the disobedient and rebellious prelates. The rules for episcopal elections were again set forth, and finally the question of the German kings was dealt with. Henry, his bad faith since Canossa set forth in detail, was once more excommunicated and deposed, Rudolf acknowledged as lawful king.

Henry, however, was in a strong position. His nobles stood by him, his bishops too. Except in the far north he was master everywhere. The bishops of Germany, first at Bamberg (April 12, 1080) and then at Mainz, (May 31) the bishops of Lombardy at Brixen, (June 25) renewed the denunciations of the earlier council at Worms. The pope was a magician, a sorcerer, the protector of heretics, a poisoner who had made away with his four predecessors; his deposition was decreed, and in his place was "elected" the Archbishop of Ravenna who for ten years had led the anti-papal movement in Italy. He styled himself Clement III.

In October, Rudolf was slain in battle and Henry, master now in Germany, was free to invade Italy, execute the sentence of his bishops, and enthrone "Clement III." The independent papacy had endured just twenty-three years. The king was now in a position to regain what his father had held in 1046, Otto III in 996, Otto I in 963.

Before the new danger the pope was helpless. Although the Countess Matilda was as loyal as before, her energies were wholly absorbed in defending herself against her own vassals and against the towns which resented her claims; the invasion would be the signal for a general revolt throughout her territories. The Normans again had, in recent years. shown themselves so eager to raid the pontifical territory that it was extremely doubtful if they would now defend it. But finally, through the diplomacy of the Abbot of Monte Cassino, their two chiefs, Richard of Capua and Robert Guiscard, were reconciled to the pope. Further treaties were made with the petty barons of the Campagna.

Early in 1081 Henry began his march. Verona, Milan, Pavia, Ravenna, opened their gates to him in turn. Everywhere the local discontent rallied to him. On May 21 he appeared before Rome. His forces were, however, too slight to take the city, and the summer heat soon put an end to his attempted blockade. In the spring of 1082 the king made a second appearance before the walls -- but with no better fortune. In June 1083 he was, however, able to occupy the Leonine city and the pope agreed to call a general council on the condition that Henry would guarantee the safety of the bishops coming and going. This plan failed; and then, in 1084, upon a fourth military demonstration, the king was successful -- with the help of the funds sent by the emperor at Constantinople for an expedition against the Normans, and the connivance of war- weary traitors within the city. Thirteen of the very cardinals had, in fact, deserted Gregory VII when, on March 21, Rome fell to Henry. Three days later his anti-pope was enthroned at the Lateran, and on March 31, Easter Sunday, " Clement III " crowned Henry IV as emperor in St. Peter's, saluting him as Patrician of the Romans, while the old oaths were sworn anew that guaranteed the emperor's rights in the election of the popes. The old regime had been restored: the German king was once more master of the Roman Church.

His triumph was of short duration. The pope, still besieged in St. Angelo, managed to get a message through to the Normans and soon Robert Guiscard, with a huge army, was marching north to relieve him. The emperor did not await his coming but fled (May 21, 1084). Six days later the Normans arrived, and, treating the Romans as rebels, put the city to the sack. The pope was released, to become little else but the prisoner of his ferocious allies. Without them his life was not safe; when they retired with their booty he had no choice but to accompany them, to Monte Cassino, to Benevento, and finally to Salerno.

As the Normans retired, the imperialists recovered their hold "Clement III" once more reigned in the Lateran, while Gregory; protected by the Normans, passed the last three months of his life at Salerno. Isolated in southern Italy, cut off from all effective communication with the rest of Christendom, he launched a last appeal for help to all who believed "that the blessed Peter is the father of all Christians, their first shepherd after Christ, that the holy Roman Church is the mother and the mistress of all churches." The pope was broken, and in a short few months he died (May 25, 1085). [192]

For the moment it seemed as though his work must die with him. It was a year before the cardinals could come to an agreement as to his successor, and another year before that successor would take the decisive step and seal his acceptance by receiving episcopal consecration. It was a curious choice that the sacred college had made, for the new pope -- Victor III -- was no other than the Abbot of Monte Cassino, the patron of the Normans, the negotiator of their peace with Gregory VII, and also, in the last days of St. Gregory, threatened with excommunication for his dealings with Henry IV. Victor III [193] reigned for a matter of weeks only. On September 16, 1087, he died, and confusion descended once more on the followers of Gregory VII. Finally, on March 12, 1088. the cardinals elected Odo, the Bishop of Ostia. After three years of leaderless chaos the work of St. Gregory was to go forward once more.

The new pope was French by birth. He had made a name for himself at the school of Rheims, and had risen to be archdeacon of that see. Then he had gone to Cluny, and once again his gifts had raised him. He was prior of Cluny when, in the early days of Gregory VII, he accompanied his abbot -- Hugh -- to Rome. The pope kept him there, creating him cardinal and making him Bishop of Ostia. Thenceforward he was one of the most active of the pope's lieutenants in the work of reform. When Gregory VII, in the last days of his life, was asked whom he would prefer to succeed him, the Cardinal Odo was one of those whom he named. Odo by no means approved of Victor III, though he did not -- like some of the party -- refuse to acknowledge him as pope, and in the end he was so far reconciled to him that Victor III even recommended him as his successor.

It is the glory of Urban II -- for so the new pope styled himself- that in the ten years he reigned he made good the immense damage which the cause of reform had suffered since the excommunication of 1080. He did more; for, as devoted as Gregory VII and as determined, he supervised personally the progress of the movement as Leo IX had supervised its beginnings. [194] The history of his pontificate divides easily. During the first five years the anti- pope and the imperialists continued to hold Rome and northern Italy: Urban II had no choice but to live under the protection of the Normans in the south. In 1090 the emperor himself again descended on the country, and for six years more the struggle went on between his forces and those of the Countess Matilda, aided now by the league of Lombard towns. But gradually the imperialists were forced out; Henry's son, Conrad, joined the rebels, was accepted by them as king, and went over to Urban II; in Germany itself, thanks to Urban's legate the Bishop of Constance, the reform party was slowly reunited. The monastery of Hirschau -- a German Cluny -- began to be a new source of strength, and even in the episcopate (now for fifteen years filled with Henry's nominees) bishops began to desert "Clement III" for the successor of Gregory VII. Urban's own personal tact, his diplomatic combination of inflexibility in principle with the traditional mildness of the Roman Church to repentant schismatics, did much to hasten these reconciliations. After 1093 he was able to live safely in Rome, where, so far, he had spent but an occasional, hazardous few weeks. .

The years of his "exile" among the Normans Urban II had -devoted to the reorganisation of that much tried land, where for the best part of a century Norman, Byzantine and Saracen had fought for the mastery. Now he turned his attention to the north. In March, 1095, he presided over an immense assembly at Piacenza, an international congress to which the loyal supporters of the policies of Gregory VII came in from all over western Europe, bishops from Germany, France and Spain, ambassadors, too, from the old empire of the East, clerics to the number of 4,000 and, it was estimated, 30,000 laity. This unprecedented success marked very definitely the end of the crisis in which the work of Hildebrand seemed fated to perish. The council also marks a definite change in the tone of Urban II's government of the Church. The pope is, once more. free of political anxieties; the canons of the council are a declaration to the world that the reform of Christian life is, once again, the sole task that occupies his mind. And from now on Urban II shows himself more and more of a rigorist in his attitude to lay investiture.

From Piacenza the pope moved slowly through Lombardy to his native France. Here many matters awaited his decision. The Church in France had, in fact, suffered cruelly from lack of leadership since Gregory VII's death, now ten years ago. There were controversies over jurisdiction between different bishops, disputes between metropolitans as to precedence and, finally, there was the scandal of the repudiation of his wife by the king, Philip I (1060-1106), and his subsequent remarriage.

Philip I was another, but less able, Henry IV. He had already incurred the wrath of Gregory VII for his crimes against the Church and his cruel oppression of his subjects. The same pope had also chastised the French bishops for the servility which kept them from protecting the weak against the king's tyranny. Now the king had turned his wife out, married another, and the Bishop of Senlis had blessed the second marriage. The Archbishop of Rheims and the other suffragans had approved, and the Bishop of Chartres, the famous canonist St. Ives, who alone had protested. was thrown into prison. For all this, Philip had recently (October 16, 1094) been excommunicated by the Archbishop of Lyons acting as papal legate.

The pope reached France in July, 1095, and for four months he moved about the valley of the Rhone, occupied in a general mission of restoring peace and unity, everywhere deciding, with authority, the disputes and controversies which, for lack of decision, had degenerated into feuds. On August 15, he was at Le Puy, to discuss the coming crusade with its bishop, Adhemar, who was something of an authority on affairs in the Holy Land. A fortnight later, at St. Gilles, Urban was in consultation with the count, Raymond, whose experience of the wars against the Saracens in Spain suggested him as the leader of the expedition which Urban had in mind. In October he consecrated the new abbey church at Cluny, where twenty years before he had ruled as prior, and in November he moved to Clermont to preside over the council summoned in the previous August.

This Council of Clermont (November 18-28, 1095) was an even greater success than that of Piacenza. Once more, although it was summoned as a council of French bishops, prelates, monks and laity came in from all parts. Accounts speak of between three and four hundred bishops and abbots. The total number of those whom the council drew to the town may have reached 100,00 () It was a second stupendous testimony, within a few months, to the hold of the papacy on the mind of Christendom, and, necessarily, an immense aid in the struggle still going on in Germany. The usual decrees on reform recently renewed at Piacenza, were explained and published once more; new decrees emphasised the cleric's independence of the lay lord and protected church property against lay usurpation; the Bishop of Cambrai was deposed for simony and for receiving investiture from the emperor, the King of France was solemnly excommunicated, and the Truce of God was officially adopted as of obligation universally throughout the Church. Finally, Urban II, on his own initiative, launched the scheme for the first Crusade.

In 1096 the pope returned to Italy. He held yet another council at Rome in 1097, one at Bari in southern Italy in 1098 and, a few months before his death, a last council in Rome, to which a hundred and fifty bishops came.

On July 29, 1099, Urban II died. The long fight for independence was by no means won, but, by comparison with the situation in 1088, victory and release might seem, were there no set-back, to be no more than a matter of time. Set-backs, however, there were to be, and the chief of them was the personality of the new pope - - Pascal II (elected August 13, 1099). His loyalty to the reform was beyond all doubt. It was Gregory VII who had made him a cardinal, and he had stood by the cause through its darkest days. Like Urban II he was a monk, an Italian, and a man whose life was a model of austerity. He was, however, of that large number of whom, sorrowfully, their friends can but regret capax nisi imperasset. A good counsellor, he showed himself as a ruler uncertain and vacillating, and he afflicted the Church for eighteen years.

The first years of his reign, however, saw one obstacle after another disappear. " Clement III " died in 1100, and left no effective successor. Philip of France made his submission in 1104. The investiture struggle which St. Anselm of Canterbury had waged in England with William II and Henry I was settled. in 1107, by a pact which recognised the Church's freedom of election. [195] Finally, in 1105, Henry IV, defeated and crushed, was compelled to abdicate in favour of his son, the leader since 1100 of the party in opposition. And to all this series of important gains must be added the new prestige accruing to the papacy from the Crusader' capture of Jerusalem (July, 1099). The pope's position when the young Henry V, his succession secured, broke through his promise and renewed his father's policies, was already stronger than that of any pope for centuries.

Henry, inevitably, was excommunicated. He replied by invading Italy (1110). As he approached Rome Pascal II, possibly through fear that the capture of the city would entail the creation of another anti-pope and the renewal of the schism, prepared to treat. He offered, if Henry solemnly undertook to abandon the practice of investiture, to renounce all the Church's feudal rights within the empire, to make over to the king the whole vast amount, lands, privileges, temporal jurisdiction. Had it been possible to carry out, the treaty would have revolutionised the social structure of half Europe. To the king it would have conveyed immediately an immense increase of wealth and power. The Church -- bishops, abbots, schools, hospitals, pious foundations, the whole vast movement before which still lay the task of Christianising the Germans and converting the heathen -- would just as suddenly be stripped of all its material equipment and its public status while there still lay upon it the burden of maintaining all the life it had called into being in the course of seven centuries; and it would once more, inevitably, have fallen into the lay lords' power. [196]

If the pope showed a dove's simplicity in making such an offer his bishops and abbots lacked none of the wisdom that should be its complement. When, in the presence of the emperor-to-be, on February 12, 1111, the proposals were announced in St. Peter's, there were violent scenes and presently a wild riot. The king thereupon arrested the pope, sixteen of the cardinals, and a number of the Roman nobility. When they were released it was announced that Pascal II had surrendered. All that Gregory VII had fought for was abandoned. Henry was lo be crowned as emperor, and the pope had made over to him all the rights of investiture he claimed. "What I would not have done to save my life," said the lamentable pope, "I have done for the peace of the Church."

The hard toil of the last sixty years, the labours and sacrifices of his predecessors, saved Pascal II. They had created such a spirit in the Church that he was powerless before it. The personal activity of the papacy, felt in every see of Christendom for the last two generations, the innumerable councils, the continual tours of the papal legates, the constant intervention of the popes in the local crises of so many sees, those journeys which had familiarised so many of the faithful with their very presence, all had contributed to build up an enthusiasm that would not tolerate such a surrender. Soon from all sides, and nowhere more strongly than from France, protests began to pour in. The Abbot of Monte Cassino, ordered personally to surrender his rights, refused. "I love you," he wrote, "as my lord and as my father, and I have no desire for another as pope. But the Lord has said 'Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.'. . . As for this outrageous treaty, wrung from you by violence and treachery, how can I praise it? Or indeed how can you?. . . Your own laws have condemned and excommunicated the cleric who submits to investiture. . . ." Another sturdy prelate the Archbishop of Lyons, urged the pope in still stronger terms. "Detestable pilot that you are, in times of peace a bully and before the storm a coward." The Archbishop of Vienne, Pascal's own legate in France, called a council, declared lay investiture to be heretical, and excommunicated the emperor. He, too, wrote to the pope, begging him to confirm the council's sentence and to break with Henry. "If you hearken to our prayer and break with King Henry we shall be your faithful and devoted sons. If you remain union with him, we pray God be merciful to us for we shall withdraw ourselves from your obedience." Cluny took the same line; and another abbot wrote bluntly to Pascal that he was a heretic. In Germany the bishops of the great sees who had so far fought the emperor -- Cologne, Mainz, Halberstadt, Magdeburg and Salzburg -- took up arms once more. The war was on again and the pope, after a temporary retirement, in which he even thought of abdicating, yielded. To the legate in France he wrote that he had withdrawn the concession, and in a great council at Rome (March, 1112), acknowledging that it was contrary to justice, he annulled the grant and confirmed once more the legislation of Gregory VII and Urban II. Four years later, in the council of 1116, Pascal was more explicitly repentant. "I confess that J failed," he said, "and I ask you to pray God to pardon me. As for the cursed privilege. . . I condemn it with an everlasting anathema, and I will that its memory be for ever hateful." [197]

In February, 1115, Henry was badly defeated at Welfesholze, and though he attempted to renew the schism -- setting up the Archbishop of Braga as "Gregory VIII" and even, master of Rome again, having a second coronation -- the days of his power were numbered. Pascal II died in 1118, his successor, Gelasius II, lived only a year; and then (March 1, 1119 the cardinals elected as pope the Archbishop of Vienne who had, in 1111, led the Catholic movement against Pascal's concessions. He it was who now, as Calixtus II, was to arrange the treaty which ended the long struggle.

In a council at Worms (September 23, 1122) they were finally arranged. Henry conceded, once and for all, the Church's right freely to elect and consecrate its bishops, and he forswore the investiture with ring and crozier, the act by which he had created his bishops. The pope, for his part, conceded that the elections should take place in the king's presence so long as they were free and without any simony. The bishop-elect was to receive investiture of the temporalities of the see by the touch of the king's sceptre.

The Concordant of Worms was a compromise, [198] hut a compromise which registered the victory of the principle for which the popes, during eighty years of controversy, had contended, namely that bishops should not, as of right, owe their promotion to the lay sovereign. It was more than six hundred years since, with the first of the Barbarian kings who was a Catholic, the disastrous custom had first taken root. Now, thanks to the unremitting warfare of three generations of popes, bishops, monks and faithful people, the ancient principle was re-established, to he in practice often enough ignored, but never again to he denied by churchmen or treated as non-existent. [199]

THE SCHISM OF CERULARIUS

The century that follows the reconciliation of Rome and Constantinople when Nicholas Mystikos was patriarch, is one of the greatest in all the long history of the East Roman Empire; and yet it is a time whose ecclesiastical history has gone unrecorded. Great soldiers now rule, like Nicephorus Phocas (963-969) and Basil II (963-1025), who reform the State, throw back the Bulgarians and the Saracens, and regain the ancient hold on southern Italy too. It is now that the Byzantine conversion of Russia begins, and wherever the imperial arms are victorious the prestige and jurisdiction of the see of Constantinople also gain. But of the relations between the ten patriarchs who, in these hundred years, successively rule the see and the twenty-one popes who were their contemporaries, we know very little. For the Greek chronicles of this time, the West hardly exists. So far as the Byzantine literature is concerned the East has already broken away, in this century of Marozia and John XII, of Otto I and Otto III -- himself the son of a Byzantine princess -- and of the first French and German popes.

There is, indeed, record of an embassy from Constantinople in 933 begging the support of the pope John XI for the newly-named patriarch Theophylact, a boy of sixteen, son of the emperor Romanus Lecapenus; he was to rule for twenty-three years, and to prove himself a Byzantine John XII. In the next generation there are the long negotiations for the marriage of Otto II to Theophano, a sister of the boy emperor Basil II -- negotiations rendered all the more arduous by a tactless letter from the pope, John XIII, which speaks of the German king as the Roman Emperor? and treats the princes of Constantinople as mere "emperors of the Greeks". Not only were the negotiations now broken off, but the Greeks spoke of abolishing the Latin rite in Byzantine Italy, and of annexing all these sees to the jurisdiction of the patriarch at Constantinople. It was Nicephorus Phocas who made this stand, and it was doubtless only the revolution in 969 which staved off a new schism. In that year Nicephorus was murdered, and his assassin, John Zimisces, took his place as emperor-regent for the boy emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII. Zimisces managed to Will some kind of consecration from the patriarch, and he re-opened the conversations with Otto. On Low Sunday, 971, the future king Otto II and the Byzantine princess were married in St. Peter's by the pope, John XIII.

Three years later Zimisces was offering hospitality to one of John's successors -- though that is hardly a correct description of the ruffian Franco who, in June 974, brought about the murder of Pope Benedict VI and for a few short weeks reigned in his place as Boniface VII. It was the power of the German king that brought about Franco's expulsion, and since the Germans were still the main obstacle to the Byzantine re-conquest of Italy, "Boniface VII" was made much of in Constantinople, where the lawful popes Benedict VII (974-983) and John XIV were not recognised.

Otto II died, all too soon, at the age of twenty-eight, in the first weeks of this last pope's reign, leaving a child of three to succeed him, and the mutually hostile Byzantine empress-mother Theophano, and the Burgundian grandmother, Adelaide, to share the reality of power. It was a great opportunity for Theophano's brother Basil II, now come to man's estate and about to begin his great career, and it was an opportunity for "Boniface VII", who, with Byzantine assistance, appeared in Rome again, to add the murder of a second pope to his crimes and to reign himself for a brief fifteen months (April 984-July 985).

Towards the end of the long reign of Basil II the Eastern empire and the popes were once more in contact, and in conflict, and although the facts are far from certain the troubles seem to have been wholly political. Once again the pope had reason to fear the growing Byzantine power to the south of the papal State, and once again he strove to protect himself by an alliance with the German king. Benedict VIII (1012-1024) and Henry II (1002-1024) were now allied, as John XIII and Otto the Great had been allied forty years earlier. In those forty years the heel and toe of Italy -- Apulia and Calabria -- had been conquered by Basil, and much other territory too, until now he menaced the Campagna. From the first years of the new century, however, there had been a series of revolts against the new Byzantine ruler, and Benedict VIII had given them what support he could. He had also made use of the chance presence, in the country between Rome and Naples, of a band of Normans returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The new papal-imperial alliance against Byzantium did not however achieve very much; it was the death of Basil II, in 1025, and the utter incapacity of his successors, which really saved the situation for the popes.

But the crisis had given new motives to the separatist tendencies at Constantinople, and, bringing in the Normans, it had produced the force that would not henceforth rest until the Byzantine power in Italy was wholly destroyed. That destruction the Normans were to accomplish, in part, as allies of the popes. The old scorn of the Byzantines for the Latin barbarians was, from now on, reinforced by a new hatred of the victorious Normans, and, as the empire grew ever weaker, by a new, very real fear. When Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of the new schism -- the schism which still endures -- began his attack in 1052, thirty years nearly after the last encounter between Basil II and the pope, the Greeks had a host of natural, political, and cultural reasons for wishing well to whoever proposed finally to defy and repudiate the religious supremacy of the Roman See.

Those thirty years are a lamentable chapter in Byzantine history. Basil II was succeeded by his seventy-year-old brother Constantine VIII (1025-1028), and Constantine by his daughter Zoe, a pale, and wholly incompetent version of Catherine the Great. It is around the disreputable history of this elderly lady's successive husbands, the series of marriages and murders and re-marriages, that most of the story turns. When Cerularius appears, in 1043, he tells immediately as the strongest man in public life for almost a generation. And by this time all contact with Rome -- the fact seems certain -- had ceased. The patriarchs no longer advised the popes of their election; the pope's name had ceased to figure in the list of personages officially prayed for at mass. If there was not actually a state of war between the two sees there was, at any rate, a rupture of diplomatic relations. Very possibly it went back to the days of the political troubles between Basil II and Benedict VIII. It was the achievement of Cerularius that, intent on maintaining this quasi-independence of the papacy which he found on his accession, he transformed it into the reality of formal schism.

Cerularius, like Photius, had come into the ecclesiastical world as it were by accident. Following the tradition of his family he had built up a career in the imperial court. Then, about 1040, he was involved in a conspiracy to depose the emperor, Michael IV, Zoe's second husband. Had the plot succeeded, Cerularius might himself have become emperor. When it failed, Michael IV, in order to safeguard himself against further danger from Cerularius, endeavoured, in the traditional Byzantine fashion, to make a monk of him. Cerularius, however, resisted; and then the suicide of his brother wrought a change: of his own will he entered a monastery. Three years later, Constantine IX became emperor -- as Zoe's third husband. He was an old friend of Cerularius who, once more, became a power at court. When, in 1043, the patriarch, Alexis, died, Constantine nominated Cerularius to succeed him. He was now the second personage in the empire and, since the emperor was a paralytic, there seemed no limit to what his powerful personality might achieve.

What first moved Cerularius to action was a remarkable change in the political situation in Italy which, so he was afraid, might weaken the position of his see. The feats of the Normans were now bringing pope and emperor together, where, a generation earlier, they had been a main cause of their antagonism. The Normans had, in fact, been too successful in Italy for the popes' liking. They were now, indeed, as great a menace as the Byzantines had once been; and when the chief Byzantine official in Italy, Argyros, approached the pope St. Leo IX, somewhere about 1050, with a project of alliance against the Normans, he found the pope more than agreeable to it. His own sovereign, still Constantine IX, was no less willing, and to make the alliance complete the pope went in person to Germany to win over the emperor Henry III (1052). How St. Leo's diplomacy succeeded, and what the fortunes of his army in the campaign that followed, has been already described. At the battle of Civitate (June 18, 1053) the Normans defeated the pope, decisively, and took him prisoner.

Now to all this policy of alliance with the pope Cerularius offered strong opposition. He feared that, with the closer and more friendly relations between pope and emperor which the new political necessity had bred, the papacy would re-appear as an active element in the ecclesiastical life of the empire, to the great detriment of the new autocephaly of his see. He fought Argyros in the imperial council and, when he failed to win over Constantine IX, revenged himself by excommunicating Argyros. Henceforth the patriarch and the general were desperately hostile- and the fact was soon to affect very seriously the relations of Constantinople and Rome. Next the patriarch made an attack on the Latins who lived within his immediate jurisdiction. He closed their churches, forbade all use of the Latin rite in them, and, alleging that the consecration of unleavened bread was no consecration at all, he had the Blessed Sacrament thrown out of the Latin pyxes and systematically trodden underfoot.

This took place, seemingly, in the year 1052, and some months later, in the spring of 1053, Cerularius, through the agency of one of his own clerics from Constantinople whom he had set to preside over the chief Bulgarian see -- Achrida -- despatched what was, in intention, a summons to the pope to remodel Latin ways according to the pattern of Constantinople. This letter -- of Leo of Achrida to John, Bishop of Trani [200] -- is not a mere statement of grievances, or a declaration of independence, but an ultimatum, a monition as from a superior, a correction as from the only true believer to others who have fallen away from truth and corrupted the faith. It is another important feature of this letter that it speaks as though the union with Rome had already, and since a long time, ceased to be. Leo of Achrida, in fact, purports to set out for the Latin bishop's consideration the customs which the Latins must give up if East and West are to come together again: such are, for example, the Latin use of unleavened bread in the mass, the eating of flesh meat not killed in the Eastern manner, fasting on Saturdays, the suppression of the Alleluia in Lent. [201]

The Bishop of Trani sent the letter on to the pope. The reply of St. Leo IX was drafted by his chief adviser, the Cardinal Humbert, that abbot of Moyenmoutier whom we have seen as a reformer of ecclesiastical life famous for his vigour, the leader indeed of the most radical of all the reforming groups, whom the Alsatian pope had brought with him to Rome in 1049. Humbert was a man of rare learning, one of the few skilled in Greek as in Latin, and a personality, therefore, whose influence on the approaching crisis was to be all but decisive; he was, in all things, active, combative, impetuous, a man without subtlety, inclined to favour drastic decisions as the way to lasting solutions.

The long letter which Humbert now sent, in the pope's name, to Cerularius is a theologian's reminder of the facts about the Roman primacy over the Church of Christ, about the divine origin of this primacy, and the indefectibility of the faith of the Roman see. It reminds Cerularius, also, that the pope has no judge in this world, and that by the very fact of judging the pope he has himself incurred a sentence of anathema which all the ancient councils would confirm. Whether Cerularius ever received this letter is doubtful. [202] And now the disaster to the papal arms seemed likely, for the moment, to change even the patriarch's hostility. The news of Civitate was brought to the capital by John of Trani himself, sent by Argyros. Its effect was to convince the emperor, even more strongly, that it was his first political interest to develop the new friendship with the pope. He wrote to Leo promising help, and declaring his resolve to re-establish peaceful relations with the Holy See. And Cerularius also wrote, a very moderate letter, in which he stated his own wish to see peace restored with Rome. The only really ominous phrase in this letter is the patriarch's insistence -- seemingly exaggerated -- on the length of time the two sees have been in separation, as though hinting that separation was the normal state of things. He promises, however, to put back the pope's name into the mass, St. Leo -- so he presumes -- reciprocating this gesture of reconciliation.

These two letters came to the pope at Benevento, where he was still a prisoner of the Normans, about the turn of the year, 1053- 1054. He decided to send an embassy to Constantinople, and chose as his legates Humbert, another cardinal, Frederick of Lorraine, [203] and Peter the Archbishop of Amalfi. [204] Also he sent a reply to the two letters. Again it was Humbert who wrote for the pope, and once again the temperament of the Burgundian cardinal was only too evident in what he wrote. The tone of the letters was not only fatal to a mission of reconciliation, but Humbert fell into a serious historical blunder, and, in fact, from the beginning he played into the hands of his much more subtle adversary. The emperor was told that the recent acts of Cerularius made the pope fearful for the chances of future peace, and nowhere, in this letter, was Michael styled "patriarch": he was "the archbishop" only; the only patriarchs the letter spoke of were those of Alexandria and Antioch, and the letter counted as a blame against "the archbishop" his usurpation of their jurisdiction. This was to ignore (or to be ignorant of) a state of things which the earlier popes had recognised for centuries; it was to repeat the errors with which, in the days of Photius, the learned but not omniscient Anastasius the Librarian had misled Adrian II. The same errors appeared in the letter to Cerularius himself; and not only was his sacrilegious violation of the Blessed Sacrament rebuked but the validity of his own possession of his see was questioned: he was told he was no archbishop because when he was elected to the see he was only a layman, a repetition of the charge made against Photius but in no way true of Cerularius. As for Michael's offer to restore the pope's name to the diptychs, this was noted as his simple duty in the matter: the only alternative to such recognition of the papal supremacy was to be joined with the heretics and the synagogue of Satan.

These letters would, of themselves, it may be thought, have sufficed to endanger the success of the mission. When the legates took in Apulia, en route for Constantinople, and there took counsel with Argyros, they settled its fate once and for all. It was this consultation which determined the legates to deal first with the emperor, and not to negotiate at all with the patriarch but to present him with an ultimatum; and the consultation gave Cerularius his opportunity to deny absolutely the papal character of the mission, and to assert that it was a mere trick on the part of the excommunicated Argyros. The situation was worsened by the calamitous fact that barely had the legates reached Constantinople when St. Leo IX died (April 19, 1054), and the Holy See was effectively vacant for twelve months.

At Constantinople, then, the legates found the old emperor as favourable to their mission as they had hoped. The patriarch ignored them and, as yet, they ignored him. Then a violent controversy developed between Humbert and a learned monk of the Studion monastery, Nicholas Stethatos, which turned upon a pamphlet written six months earlier by Humbert. [205] Nicholas had written, in reply, an attack upon the Latin practice of using unleavened bread, the Saturday fast and the celibacy of the clergy. Humbert now took the opportunity to make a violent assault on Nicholas. The controversy raged for some time, and it ended, so far as Nicholas was concerned, in a debate in the emperor's presence, at which the Latins were victorious, whereupon Nicholas submitted.

This was at the end of June, 1054. The patriarch still held aloof from the whole affair, steadily refusing the emperor's pleas to meet the legates. Very evidently the mission had come to the end of its usefulness. It might as well, now, return to Rome. But the legates, before they departed, resolved to excommunicate the patriarch. They prepared the bull and, on Saturday, July 16, during the sacred liturgy, they laid it on the altar at St. Sophia. Once again, alas, the maladroit pen of the Burgundian cardinal spoiled somewhat his excellent case. In the bull the traditional primacy of the Roman See is indeed re-affirmed, and the rights of the legates thence deriving; and the rectitude and orthodoxy of the emperor and his people are recognised. The one obstacle to peace is Michael, who styles himself patriarch, and his supporters. Their innumerable heresies are listed: there is in him, and them-it is declared -- something of the Simonists, the Donatists, the Arians and the Manichees; and they have corrupted the creed by suppressing the Filiogue clause. [206] Michael has refused to abjure and repent. He has refused audience to the legates; he has forbidden them to say mass; he has excommunicated the pope. Wherefore the legates pronounce against him the sentence already provided by St. Leo should he not submit.

The legates left for Rome two days later. But they were speedily recalled, by the emperor who, perhaps, still had hopes of reconciling Cerularius. On Wednesday, July 20, Humbert and his fellows were back in the capital. But before nightfall they were once more on the road to Rome, smuggled out of the city with great difficulty by Constantine, barely escaping with their lives. For the patriarch had not been inactive, since their first departure. He had made the bull of excommunication public, and "organised" the mob against this Latin insult. As a measure of appeasement the emperor had the bull ignominiously burned. and, now, while the legates made their slow way back to Italy the patriarch called a synod which condemned all that they had done -- not indeed as legates of the pope, for the synod denied that they were such, as it denied that the bull was the act of the Holy See. Cerularius next sent an official account of all this to the other Eastern patriarchs, and he also drew up a lengthy manifesto which set out the Eastern case against Rome. It is not now the Cardinal Humbert alone who is attacked, but all the Latins for the ways in which their practice differs from the East But, even so, there is no denial of the Roman claim to a primacy over the whole Church of Christ. The manifesto however -- and this is the most serious thing about it, much more serious than the list of liturgical "errors" put in accusation -- is penetrated with the idea already noted in Cerularius' earlier attack, namely that the East has gone its own independent way for centuries now, and that reconciliation with Rome is in no way desirable or necessary. The Latins are a conventicle of heretics -- what has the orthodox church of the Greeks to do with such? Here, at Constantinople, under the protection of the patriarch and the emperor, is the sole authentic religion of Jesus Christ.

The Patriarch of Antioch endeavoured, even so, to bring back Cerularius to a more amenable frame of mind. He admitted the barbarism of the Latin ways, but urged that these were details that did not matter essentially. As for the faith of the Latins, every pilgrim who visited the churches of the East was testimony that it was identical with that of the Greeks. Patience where there were differences, and peaceful discussion, was the only way out of the tangle, so he thought; and he besought Cerularius to reflect whether the long tale of disasters that had befallen the empire was not the penalty for the long misunderstanding and separation from the Apostolic See. At any rate Cerularius ought to wait until the new pope was elected, and then approach him in a spirit of gentleness and charity.

Cerularius, however, kept to his way. He made no move whatever towards Rome. Life within his jurisdiction would once more go on as in the years before the problem of the Normans brought St. Leo IX and Constantine IX together. And Peter of Antioch did not insert the new pope's name in the mass.

Six months after the excommunication, Constantine IX died (January, 1055). Until August, 1056, his aged sister-in-law Theodora, the daughter of Basil II, ruled, at least in name. Michael VI, whom she named as her successor, lasted barely a year. It was Cerularius who engineered [he revolution that threw him out, and who "created" the new emperor, Isaac Comnenus (August, 1057). But Isaac, once securely placed, refused to be the patriarch's tool. Soon he began to plan his removal. Just before Christmas, 1058, he had Cerularius arrested and ordered his trial. But, worn out by the crisis and the shock, the patriarch suddenly died. Whereupon the popular voice spontaneously hailed him as a saint. The emperor was compelled to bring back his body with great pomp, and himself to venerate it as that of a martyr. It was the beginning of a new career for Cerularius, of his influence as saint and martyr in the spiritual life of the Byzantine church and, above all, as a hero in the epic of its struggle with the tyrannical and heretical Latin barbarians. There was now a Byzantine myth about the events of 1054, as there was, in the Western chronicles, a Latin myth too. Upon these myths the animosity of the two races was largely to feed, and, in the next three centuries, to wax exceeding strong.

The bull of 1054 was no more than a personal excommunication of Cerularius, and, of course, of whoever adhered to him. It did not in any way condemn the Eastern churches nor their own local customs. But the whole of the Eastern churches now slid slowly into schism. Greek scorn of Latin ignorance and barbarity, [207] national pride, a certain disgust at the scandals which for too long had disgraced Latin Catholicism, scandal at the developments which made the Latin bishop a civil prince and often, even, a general in the field -- all these helped to feed the fire. Within forty years of the excommunication came the Crusades, and the conflict of Greek and Latin interests and ambitions in the East. The treachery of the one, and the bloodthirstiness and rapine of the other, achieved the evil work. Never again, save for brief moments and under the stress of political necessity, were the Greeks to submit to that divine primacy which, whatever the occasional mistakes of the men in whom it was manifested, had been, for the Greeks too, the one bulwark against heresy and which had desired to be their defender also against the encroaching Christian State.

THE OFFENSIVE AGAINST ISLAM: SICILY, SPAIN, THE EAST. 106-1099

The solemn imperial assent, given at Worms, to the principle that the Church is spiritually autonomous, marks the end of the hardy papal offensive on a usurpation consecrated by centuries. It is one of several signs that the Church, and the civilisation of which it is the main force, has left behind it for ever one very definite phase of growth. Another such contemporary sign is the new successful Catholic offensive against Islam, an offensive undertaken in Spain, and also in those Eastern lands whence Islam had first issued forth to destroy a whole Christian empire. The popes who, in the West, have successfully challenged the hold of the civil power over spiritual things are the popes who organise and promote the first crusade.

The land where Our Lord was born and died had had a powerful attraction for the West from the time of the first Christian emperors. With Constantine's restoration of Jerusalem, with the discoveries of the holy places and of the true cross, Palestine became the goal of innumerable pious travellers. The pilgrimage was born; and a whole organisation of hospices and related services sprang up to meet its innumerable requirements. Nor did the later political chaos which wore down the empire in the West really lessen, either the attraction of the East, or the determination of thousands to make their way thither. Commercial relations between the East and the West went on uninterrupted; in every Western town of any importance " Syrian" merchants were to be found and Paris, even, at the end of the sixth century, had a Syrian for its bishop.

When, half-way through the seventh century, the armies of the new Arab religion destroyed the Christian power in the East, the difficulties of the long voyage were of course greatly increased. Nevertheless the pilgrimages persisted, and the systematic almsgiving organised for their support since the time of St. Gregory the Great. With Charlemagne there came the first attempt to win for the pilgrims a defined measure of security, through diplomatic action at the court of the caliphs. Harun-al-Raschid, in 807, gave the emperor a kind of recognition as the protector of all these Latin Christians, and the churches and monasteries began to be restored. For the next two hundred years the pilgrims to Palestine enjoyed a kind of regulated security. Then came the half mad caliph, Hakim (1009-1020), who inaugurated a violent persecution of Jews and Christians alike, and destroyed the churches. The storm ended as abruptly as it had begun. Peace was restored, but under. an entirely new regime. The protector henceforward was the Roman Emperor at Constantinople. It was under Byzantine influences that the new restoration took place and that the Christian quarter of Jerusalem was now fortified.

This change of protector was to be of immense importance in the near future, for it was barely made when, in 1054, the schism of Cerularius came to separate Constantinople from the West for ever. The pilgrimages, however, continued, organised henceforth on a scale that made them miniature invasions. In 1027, for example, a pilgrimage left Normandy that counted 700 members under the protection of the Duke. In 1035 the Duke himself led a great band. But the greatest of all was the pilgrimage of 1065, 12,000 strong, led by the Bishop of Bamberg -- a real military expedition which, more than once, had to fight for its life. Despite the new Greek prestige, the enthusiasm for these spiritual expeditions grew with every year, and the Latin churches and monasteries began to be rebuilt.

Then, in the last half of this same eleventh century, a new virile force appeared, to dominate the Mohammedan world in the East and to threaten, not merely the security of the pilgrimages, but the existence of Eastern Christianity itself. This force was the empire of the Seljuk Turks. At first the auxiliaries, and then the masters, of the Caliphs of Baghdad they began, from 1064, to conquer Asia Minor and the islands in the Aegean Sea from the Roman Empire in the East, and to menace Constantinople itself. At the same time, they attacked the hold of the Fatimite Caliphs of Cairo on Syria, and in the very year of their great victory at Manizikert over the emperor, Romanus IV, (1071) they took Jerusalem from the Fatimites. Thereupon the chivalrous idea began to develop in the West of a holy war to recover the East from the Turks.

To liberate Christians by force of arms -- for what other way was there? -- from the yoke of their Mohammedan conquerors had already, for some years, been an integral part of the papal programme of religious restoration. And the papal interest in this had naturally shown itself first of all where the Mohammedan conquests were nearest to the popes, in Sicily and in Spain. The accident that the establishment of the Normans in the south of Italy coincided with a civil war in Sicily where three Mohammedan princes contended, made the Christian task here all the more easy. It was in 1060 that Robert Guiscard crossed the straits of Messina, and he fought the long war which followed as the sworn vassal of St. Peter, and under the banner blessed for him by Alexander II.

In Spain -- where the Mohammedans were still, after three hundred and fifty years, masters from Gibraltar to within less than a hundred miles of the Pyrenees -- there were also, midway through this same century, serious feuds among the Mohammedan rulers; while in the little kingdom of Castile there appeared in 1072 a great leader in the king Alphonso VI (1072-1109). Eight years before his accession the neighbouring King of Aragon, Sancho I (1063-1094) had led an army into the valley of the Ebro and had taken Barbastro -- an expedition significant in two ways of what was soon to come, for the king had the assistance of many French knights, and their presence in his army was due in part to the pope. It was Alexander II who was the real inspirer of what was, in effect, the first of the crusades. Not only, as in Sicily, did this army fight in Spain against the Moors under the pope's banner, but, anticipating the great act of Urban II thirty years later, the pope raised the character of the military activity by granting to all those who fought what we should call a plenary indulgence.

The expedition of 1063 ended, indeed, in failure. But Alexander II was preparing a renewal of it when, in 1173, he died. St. Gregory VII, who followed him, had been a main power in this as in Alexander's other policies. and for him too it remained one of the duties before the Holy See to provide for the liberation of Spain. But from now on and for some years, there were serious obstacles to check the good will of Gregory VII. The chief of these, of course, was the struggle with Henry IV of Germany that began Within three years of the pope's election and which, from thence on, more and more absorbed his whole attention. But there were serious difficulties also from within the little Christian kingdoms of the peninsula, Leon, Castile, Navarre, Aragon and the county of Barcelona. Here too there was urgent need of a religious reformation, and the Church suffered from the same trio of evils that tried it elsewhere: clerical ill-living, simony, the lay control of ecclesiastical appointments. To root out these abuses the popes employed in Spain the services they found useful in Italy and France -- local councils over which papal legates presided, and the subjection of the local episcopate to more or less permanent resident legates. And here they came into conflict not only with Alphonso VI of Castile [208] but with the great ecclesiastical system of Cluny also, nowhere better organised, more fruitful in good results or more powerful than in these frontier territories. When the war of reconquest began again, in 1079, the papacy had no share in it, and none therefore in Alphonso's great feat, the capture of Toledo in 1085, which had a sensational effect throughout all Europe.

After the spectacular capture of Toledo there was a strong Moorish reaction, and the early years of Urban II's pontificate are chiefly remarkable for the reconciliation which this Clunisian pope brought about between the Cluniacs in Spain and the papal legates. No pope could, through his antecedents, have been more interested personally in Spain than this one-time prior of Cluny and Urban has the great merit, too, that he brought to an end the animosity which had kept Castile and the papacy at arm's length for so many precious years. Finally, in the Spanish expeditions of 1089-1092, a great French soldier had emerged, Raymond, the Count of St. Gilles.

The papacy had, then, already quite an amount of practical experience of the hazards and difficulties of war against Mohammedans -- as well as a conviction of its real importance for the future of religion -- and Urban II himself was peculiarly well-placed to appreciate new projects when, at the council of Piacenza in March, 1095, envoys came to him from the Byzantine emperor Alexis I, begging for aid against the new enemy, the Seljuk Turks.

This was, of course, no appeal from a legendary land and a half- forgotten race. The papacy had never lost touch with Constantinople, despite the events of 1054; and to direct the Holy War to the East, as well as to the West, had very definitely been in the plans of St. Gregory VII at the outset of his reign. There was a friendly exchange of letters between this pope and the emperor Michael VII, in 1073, and a papal embassy was sent to Constantinople. In 1074 the pope made an attempt, which failed entirely, to organise an army for the defence of the Byzantine empire. In language characteristic of Gregory's generous spirit the religious case for the crusade is set out here once and for all, "These pagans have made a vigorous onslaught on the Christian empire; they have pillaged and laid waste the whole land with unheard of cruelties up to the very gates of Constantinople. They have occupied these countries with tyrannical violence and massacred thousands and thousands of Christians like beasts. If, therefore, we have any love for God, if we are truly Christian people, the unhappy fate of this great empire and the deaths of so many Christians must be for us all a great anxiety. Our Lord's own example, who redeemed us, and the duty of Christian charity, bid us not only to lament these misfortunes, but also, if it be necessary, to give ourselves in sacrifice for our brethren." [209]

To this appeal not a single prince made any reply, and very soon came the long war with the German king to absorb all the pope's attention. But what Gregory VII had failed to do in 1074, his disciple and alter ego Urban II did achieve twenty years later.

Urban II's interest in Eastern affairs began in the first year of his reign, while the pope, still exiled from Rome, was busy in Sicily with the reorganisation of the Church in this newly- liberated land. He was, at this same time, in communication with the Byzantine emperor, tentatively suggesting a reconciliation between Rome and the Eastern Churches. It was from the pope that the first move had come; nothing less, indeed, than a complaint to the emperor that, without any synodal action to justify it, his name was no longer recited in the Holy Liturgy. From this unexpected, and somewhat embarrassing, communication, there rapidly developed, at Constantinople, an important controversy; and soon the whole case for and against the achievement of Cerularius was revived. The emperor, Alexis I, was favourable to a rapprochement with Rome; the bishops, generally, were against it. The emperor's reasons were political -- and so too were those of Urban II, anxious to ward off the menace of an understanding between Alexis, Henry IV and the anti-pope "Clement III".

A council at Constantinople decided finally for the emperor's point of view. The pope's name was restored to the diptychs and he was invited to a council where the outstanding differences that kept East and West apart would be discussed. Our information about this episode goes no further, but relations between Urban II and Alexis I continued to be friendly, and it was wholly in keeping with this new spirit and with the events of the previous seven years that, in 1095, the emperor sent his appeal to the Council of Piacenza. [210]

In the months that intervened between that council and the one which followed at Clermont the pope had time to frame his policy, and to consult such experienced advisors as the Bishop of Le Puy and the Count of St. Gilles. When, in November, the council brought in to the ancient capital of Auvergne such an unprecedented host of lay enthusiasts, the pope was given the ideal setting for the publication of the new ideal. No doubt the circumstances fired him to make one of the great speeches of history. There were present at the council two hundred and sixty- four bishops, four hundred abbots, thousands of the lower clergy, and a vast multitude -- a hundred thousand it is said -- of nobles, knights and lesser folk. It was on November 27 that the pope made his famous speech. The text of it has not survived, but we know it was an appeal to the immense host before him to give themselves generously to deliver the Christians of the East from the new perils that beset them. The immediate result was an enthusiasm without limits and to the cry "God wills it" clerics, nobles, knights, and men of the people pressed forward to vow their lives, and to take as their badge that cross of red cloth from which came the name of Crusade.

It remained for the pope to organise this unprecedented enthusiasm into a definite fighting machine. To all who took the cross -- that is to say, to those who vowed to go to the Holy Land and fight for the deliverance of the holy places -- the pope granted plenary indulgence; whatever penances lay on them for past sins were remitted. The vow, once taken, was irrevocable; excommunication fell upon those who broke it. During the crusader's absence his property was under the Church's special protection and precautions were taken to save the would-be crusader from vowing himself without due premeditation. Monks were not to go without their abbot's permission. The faithful were bidder to take the advice of their clergy before enrolling themselves Young people were forbidden to go at all, and so, too, were married women. The Bishop of Le Puy was named as the pope, legate to preside over the whole vast affair. Constantinople was appointed as the rendezvous; the feast of the Assumption 1096 as the time. Letters were sent to all the bishops of Christendom to enlist their help, a succession of councils was held throughout France and Italy, and finally preachers were appointed to stir up enthusiasm and enlist recruits even in the smallest towns and most remote villages. Never had Europe known, in any cause such a vast campaign of propaganda. [211]

The preaching of the crusade produced a result wholly un expected by Urban II. In the pope's mind, the movement he had called into being was to be transformed into a disciplined military expedition led by the nobles of Christendom. [212] But long before this organised force was ready, enormous hordes of simple peasants, raised to a pitch of extraordinary fervour by the extravagance of wandering preachers, confounding often enough the heavenly Jerusalem with that the pope designed to free, victim of all manner of apocalyptic fantasies, set out for the East. Poor men, weary of the endless oppression of their masters, broken by the strain of bad harvests, driven desperate by the hopelessness of a hard life, they readily listened to what seemed the offer of an easy way to the millennium, and, a vast, unorganised rabble, with their wives, children, and old people, all their movables stowed on the farm waggon, their oxen shod and harnessed to it, by thousands and by tens of thousands, they slowly made their way through southern Germany and Hungary. Necessity made them lawless; they pillaged and looted as they went. A misguided piety led them, more than once, to wholesale slaughter of such Jews as they encountered. Long before they reached the Byzantine frontier their acts of brigandage had roused whole populations against them. The march through Hungary was a series of massacres and fights. In Constantinople itself, what of the horde survived gave itself to plunder, even stripping the churches of their lead. When, finally, they crossed the Bosphorus into infidel territory the Turks speedily made an end of the most of them. It was a very small band indeed that survived with Peter the Hermit to welcome, at Constantinople, the arrival of the real official crusaders six months later.

The military expedition was made up of four great divisions- Lorrainers, Germans, and northern French under Godfrey of Bouillon; Normans and other Frenchmen from the north under Robert of Normandy, William the Conqueror's eldest son. Provencaux under Raymond of Provence (whom the legate accompanied); and the Normans of southern Italy under the command of Robert Guiscard's eldest son, Bohemond. After varying adventures and disasters, the last of these armies arrived before Constantinople in May, 1097 -- nine months later than the appointed date. All was now ready for the Christian attempt to roll back Islam after its four hundred years, occupation of Christian lands.

It must be borne in mind that the condition of the Mohammedan world in 1096 was eminently favourable to the crusaders. Asia Minor, and Syria, too, were but recent conquests of the Turks. The populations were hostile to them, and the immediate military problem was that of disposing of the occasional Turkish garrisons scattered among their new, still hostile subjects. Moreover, since 1092, the Seljuks had lost their military unity. Where, until then, one powerful figure had dominated their world, four of his generals now disputed the succession. Asia Minor and Syria were each of them practically independent states. Syria especially, torn by a civil war between rival emirs, was in poor condition to resist the new invasion. The Mohammedan State in Egypt, by no means resigned to its defeat by the Turks twenty years earlier, was making from the south efforts to regain its ancient hold; and the very year that saw the crusade victorious at Antioch also saw the Turks defeated by the Egyptians at Jerusalem which, in 1098, reverted to Egypt after twenty-seven years.

Given competent leadership, it could only be a matter of time before the enormous crusading army defeated the weakened force of Islam. But to defeat the Mohammedans, it was already beginning to be apparent, was only half the problem. How much of the piety that had sent the crusaders into battle would remain to inspire their handling of the fruits of victory? The motives of Urban II and of the thousands who, at his appeal, took the cross were nothing but religious. So far the crusade was a gigantic, universal act of faith. Around this core of spirituality elements of more mixed quality soon gathered. There were merchants of one kind or another to whom the huge expedition offered undreamed-of opportunities of sudden commercial expansion; there were the adventurers and speculators whom every age has known and knows; and there were the ambitions and rival interests of the different princes and states to whom the actual conduct of operations was necessarily entrusted. Three princes especially, even before the expedition crossed into Asia, had already made their plans. Bohemond aimed at a kingdom with Antioch for its centre. Baldwin of Flanders -- brother to Godfrey of Bouillon-who detested Bohemond, would check him and establish a rival state at Edessa. Raymond of Provence, equally suspicious of Bohemond, would counteract his influence by his principality of Tripoli. The Italian merchant states, Genoa, Pisa and Venice, supplying much of the shipping and serving the armies with trading supplies, also looked to their compensating profits, to concessions and trading privileges in the new states. The conduct of the crusade must, in the nature of things, be entrusted to these states and princelings. The possibility, if not the certainty, was already present that they would use the great opportunity, and all that the faith of thousands had to offer, for their own personal aggrandisement, Christians still being not wholly Christian in their detachment.

And already, too, another cloud darkened the prospects of the future -- the attitude towards the crusade of the emperor at Constantinople. It is true that, more than once, he had made appeals for help-to the West. But that help, for all that it had now arrived, had not come in the way he had planned. He had looked for reinforcements, to be at his orders, in the re-conquest of the lost provinces. What had happened was the arrival of huge independent armies capable of conquering not only the Turks but also, perhaps, what the Turks had left unconquered of the imperial domain. The emperor's plans and the aim of the crusade -- to say nothing of the personal ambitions of the different princes -- were at variance. There could never be anything but mutual suspicion and continual conflict, the emperor striving always by diplomatic shifts to neutralise the crusaders' superior force, and the exasperation of the crusaders steadily growing though a hundred years until, finally, they made themselves masters of Constantinople too.

In May, 1097, the Catholic army crossed into Asia, and after a fortnight's siege the first of the Turkish strongholds fell to it -- Nicea. A fortnight later, at Dorylaeum, they routed the field army of the local sultan. The way through Asia Minor now lay open to them, and by October they were before the walls of Antioch. It was eight months before they reduced the city, and scarcely had they done so, slaughtering the garrison, when the victors were themselves besieged by a relieving Turkish army. They were utterly unprepared. In a few days plague and famine carried off a hundred thousand of their men. Many of the leaders made their way out of the apparently doomed city, and then the miraculous discovery of the Holy Lance that had pierced the side of Our Lord, revived the crusaders' confidence. Heartened by what all took as an evident sign of divine guidance, a bold sally planned by Bohemond put the besiegers to flight (June 28, 1098).

Nothing remained but to march on Jerusalem. It was, however, a good nine months before that march began, and the main cause of the delay was the quarrel between Bohemond and Raymond of Provence over the possession of Antioch. The legate, who might have been allowed to settle the matter, had died. Raymond, seeing the prize escape, began the first treacherous negotiations with the Byzantines, preferring to see them masters rather than his rival. Finally Bohemond was left in possession and in April, 1099, the crusade -- its rank and file weary of the costly sacrifice to the vanity of its leaders -- set out on the last stage of the journey.

Negotiations had been opened, a year before this, with the Egyptians, and it had been agreed that the crusaders were to have Jerusalem. But since that promise the Egyptians had themselves regained it (August, 1098) and when on June 6, 1099, after three years of marching and fighting, the Catholic army came before the Holy City there lay before it yet another siege. It was a siege of short duration. After another, alleged, vision in which the deceased legate appeared to one of the Provencal army, and after a great penitential procession, when the army, barefoot, made the circuit of the walls, while the enemy jeered and derided from the battlements, the assault was begun (July 14). The next day the crusaders were in, the defence forced at various points. It was the signal for one of the most frightful massacres of history. The victors killed all they met, soldiers and inhabitants, men, women and children, and their horses splashed through streets that ran in blood. After four hundred and sixty years of Mohammedan rule Jerusal