Volume 3, Chapter 1

GESTA PER FRANCOS, 1270-1314

Section 1: BL. GREGORY X AND THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF LYONS, 1270-1276

Section 2: THE SHADOW OF ANJOU, 1276-1285

Section 3: FRANCE AND THE SICILIAN WAR, 1285-1294

Section 4: BONIFACE VIII, 1294-1303

Section 5: PHILIP THE FAIR'S LAST VICTORY, 1303-1314

BL. GREGORY X AND THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF LYONS, 1270-1276

IN the summer of the year 1270, terrible news came to France from Africa, and to all Christian Europe. The King of France, St. Louis, had died of fever in the camp before Tunis, and the crusade was over. A world of effort, of sacrifice, and of suffering had gone for just nothing; and something unique had passed from a singularly troubled world. The one leader whom, for his righteousness, all Christendom might have trusted was dead.

In that summer of 1270 the figure of the great French king stood out with especial significance. It was now sixteen years since the last of the emperors had died, vanquished by that papacy which his house had striven to enthrall. In those sixteen years Germany had been given over to anarchy, while the popes, with very varied success, had worked to consolidate their new, precarious, hold on independence. In the end no way had offered itself to them but the old way, the protection of some Christian sovereign's defensive arm. To find some such prince, and install him in southern Italy as king of their vassal state of Sicily, was, then, a first obvious aim of papal policy. No less obviously, St. Louis IX was the ideal champion. Years of negotiation, however, had failed to persuade him to become a partner in any such scheme. The saint was by no means accustomed to accept unquestioningly the papal solutions for political problems. But, in the end, ten years' experience convinced him that, so long as the chaos in southern Italy continued. the popes must be wholly absorbed by the single problem of how to remain independent amid the ceaseless war of political factions. On the other hand, the general affairs of Christendom stood in too urgent need of the papacy's constructive direction for any such papal absorption in Italian politics to be tolerable: the Italian disorder must be ended; and so St. Louis had not only assented to the papal policy but had allowed his youngest brother, Charles of Anjou, to become the pope's man, and to lead a French army into Italy for the defeat of the last remnants of the Hohenstaufen kings of Sicily. [318]

The pope's chosen champion had now destroyed the pope's enemies -- but the papal problem remained. Already, by the time Charles had to fight his second battle, it was becoming evident to the pope who crowned him and blessed his arms -- Clement IV -- that the victorious champion threatened to be as dangerous to the papal freedom as ever the Hohenstaufen had been. Strong protests against the new king's cruelty and tyranny began to be heard from the apostolic see. This pope, French by birth and for the greater part of his life a highly trusted counsellor of Louis IX, bound closely to the king by similarity of ideals and mutual esteem, was ideally equipped for the difficult task of guiding the new French venture through its first critical years. His sudden death, in November 1268, only two months after Tagliacozzo, was an immense loss; and this swelled into a catastrophe; first of all when the cardinals left the Holy See vacant for as long as three years, [319] and then when, while the Church still lacked a pope, death claimed St. Louis too. For long there had been no emperor, there was no pope, and now the King of France had died. The last sure hope of checking the ambitions of Charles of Anjou had gone. In St. Louis's place there would reign the rash simplicity of his son, Philip III. Charles would have an open field, every chance he could desire to build up a situation which the future popes would have to accept -- unless they were prepared to start a new war to destroy him, as he had destroyed for them the heirs of Frederick II.

Of the two deaths the more important by far was that of St. Louis. Sanctity is rare in rulers, and rarest of all is the sanctity that shows itself in the perfection of the ruler's characteristic virtue of prudent practical ability. The pope's death found the Church in crisis -- it did not create the crisis; but the French king alone could have brought the papacy and Christendom safely through the crisis. One thing alone could have saved it, and he alone could have done that one thing -- namely, maintain the tradition, now two centuries old, of French support for the popes in the difficulties which arose out of their office as guardians of political morality, while yet refusing to be a mere instrument for the execution of the popes' political judgments. The papacy needed the French -- but it needed also to be independent of them; and Christendom needed that the French should retain their independence too, and not become mere tools of popes who happened to be politicians as well as popes. This difficult and delicate part St. Louis managed to fit to perfection -- as none, before or since, has fitted it. And never was the lack of a prince to fit the part productive of greater mischief than in the twenty-five years that followed his death. For one main event of those years was the reversal of the traditional Franco-Papal entente that had been a source of so much good to both powers and, indeed, a main source of the peace of Christendom.

The Holy See, when Clement IV's death in 1268 delivered it over to the unprecedented calamity of a three years, vacancy, was already gravely embarrassed by the opposition of various Catholic powers to its leading policies. The popes were, for example, determined on a renewal of the crusade; but the great maritime republics of Genoa and Venice were all for peace with the Turks: war would mean the loss of valuable trade, defeat be the end of their commercial empire. The popes, again, had been favourably impressed by the Byzantine emperor's moves to end the schism between Constantinople and Rome that had gone on now for two hundred years; but Charles of Anjou wanted nothing so little as peace with Michael VIII, whom he was planning to supplant as emperor. The Lombard towns were the scenes of continual strife, the feuds bred by generations of civil war still active. The anti-papal forces in these cities found a curious ally in that wing of the great Franciscan movement which demanded a return to the most primitive form of the Franciscan life, and saw in this the kind of life all Church dignitaries ought to lead. The anarchic element in this movement, which threatened the existence of all ecclesiastical authority, was naturally welcome to rulers who, in every city of Italy, and beyond Italy too, aspired to restore the arbitrary omnipotence of the emperors of ancient Rome and secure thereby the exclusive triumph of material interests. [320] This active unnatural alliance of Franciscan Spirituals and totalitarian capitalists of one kind and another, the popes were bound to fight; and here they were gravely hampered by a legacy from the papacy's own recent past. In the long struggle against the last great Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, the central authority in the Church, under the popes Gregory IX (1227-1241) and Innocent IV (1243-1254) "saw itself compelled to turn all its activity towards those resources and influences of a temporal kind that were necessary for its defence, and to expand the whole system of its temporal activity in order to secure itself against the attacks of its tireless foe." [321]

This use, by the Vicar of Christ, of fleets and armies to maintain his independence -- and the chronic need for this use in the "Ages of Faith" -- this willing acceptance by the popes of suzerain status in the feudal world over more or less reluctant royal vassals, John of England in one generation, Charles of Sicily in another; this raising of huge sums of money by loans from bankers and by levies on all the sees of Christendom in turn; this use of the crusade ideal and formulae to describe and characterise wars against European princes who remained the popes' children in the Faith despite their disobedience; all this, to the modern reader, seems often to need a great deal of explanation. And the popes who defended, in this particular way, those rights and that independent status which, undeniably, were the bases of the general recovery of Europe from barbarism, had to meet, as we shall see, much criticism of a similar kind from their own Catholic contemporaries.

Naturally enough the first form the criticism took was resentment, well-nigh universal, at the financial levies. From the moment when, in 1261, the newly elected French pope, Urban IV, began the great move to haul the papacy out of the political slough where he found it, the popes' need of money never ceases. Both the bad effect on those who collected the money, and the resentment of those from whom it was extorted, are henceforth permanent active elements of the state-of-the-Church problem. Already by the time Charles of Anjou had established himself in the kingdom of Sicily (1266) there was -- we can now see -- cause for anxiety on this score.

At the other pole of the main axis of European affairs the French State, too, had its serious chronic problems. The traditional policy which had, by 1270, secured the Capetian kings' uniquely strong hold as rulers of a great nation, has been well described as "the slow collaboration of interests and public opinion." [322] In a century when popes are to be counted by the dozen, France had been so lucky as to have but two kings and both of them really great rulers. [323] Their achievement was very great, but it was not complete; and a modern French historian [324] has well described some elements of the problem St. Louis left to his son, Philip III, and which, aggravated by the fifteen years of this king's weak rule, faced the next king, one of the most enigmatic figures of medieval history. This was Philip the Fair, whose reign (1285-1314) was a turning point in the history of the papacy and the Church. " France was falling to pieces. One after another the institutions upon which the whole fabric rested were breaking up and giving way. . . . Some of the feudatories were as powerful as the king himself, the Duke of Aquitaine, for example, who was also King of England; others, such as the Duke of Brittany or the Count of Flanders, ruled provinces that were really foreign countries in their way of life; in Languedoc the people detested the French. From one end of the country to the other, a myriad contradictory uses, customs, traditions, jurisdictions, privileges contended and struggled; none of them subject to royal regulation. The great mass of the nation was set against the classes that ruled. . . everywhere the national life was disorganised; anarchy seemed imminent, and it seemed only too likely that several important provinces would become independent states or fall under foreign rule."

Philip the Fair would meet his problems with new resources and a wholly new combination of strength and ruse. In his bid to be really master of every element of French life, not only would he come into violent conflict with the papacy -- as other French kings had done in their time -- but he would inaugurate a new tradition in the relations of the principal monarchy in Europe with the Holy See. He would not be the partner of the pope, but his master. In his grandfather, St. Louis, there had been seen the perfection of the older conception, the French king allied with the papacy in an implicit pact of mutual assistance, a true defender of the independence of religion and at the same time just as truly defender of the rights of the French clergy-rights to property -- against the papacy itself. This devotion of St. Louis to the cause of the papacy did not ever entail any blind following of every detail of the papal policies. The king refused to allow Frederick II to capture Lyons while the General Council assembled there that was to condemn him; he even assembled an army in case Frederick should move. But, on the other hand, he did not, once Frederick was condemned and excommunicated and deposed by the pope, offer the pope his aid to carry out the sentence. St. Louis remained carefully neutral. Again "In his relations with the French episcopate, whether it was a matter of fiefs or even of applying disciplinary power, Louis IX showed a care to exercise control, and a susceptibility about his rights which conflicted only in appearance with his zeal for the interests of religion. It was his conviction that the prerogatives of the crown were necessary to the good order of the community, and thus the saint made it as much a matter of conscience to defend them well as to use them rightly; the prestige of those to whom religious jurisdiction was confided did not obscure the saint's clear vision of what was right, and in all matters he paid less attention to the noisy demands of the representatives of the clergy than to the canonical rules which ought to be the inspiration of their conduct." [325]

Such was the delicate situation and such the prince lost to the Church, to Christendom no less than to France, on August 25, 1270. Charles of Anjou, supreme for the moment, took charge of the crusade. He made a pact with the Sultan which brought the whole affair to an end (October 20) and, a month later, re-embarked the armies and sailed back to Europe.

Meanwhile, at Viterbo, the papal election continued to drag on. Holy men appeared to harangue and to warn the sixteen cardinals. The General of the new Servite Friars, St. Philip Benizi, fled from the offer of the honour. The kings of France and Sicily tried what a personal visit might effect. Then the people of Viterbo, in desperation with the cardinals' indifference to the scandal caused by their incompetence, took a hand and stripped of its roof the palace where the electors met. At last, on September 1, 1271, the cardinals gave power to a commission of six of their number to elect a pope, and that same day the six found their man. He was Theobaldo Visconti, not a cardinal, nor a bishop, nor even a priest, but the Archdeacon of Liege; and at this moment away in the Holy Land, encouraging the heir to the English crown in the forlorn hours of the last of the crusades. It was weeks before the archdeacon heard of his election, and months before he landed in Italy to be ordained, consecrated and crowned as Pope Gregory X (March 27, 1272).

The new pope, a man perhaps sixty years of age, was one of those figures whose unexpected entry into the historical scene seems as evident a sign of God's care for mankind as was ever the appearance of a prophet to Israel of old. He was largehearted, he was disinterested, a model of charity in his public life no less than in private, free from any taint of old political associations, simple, energetic, apostolic. His first anxiety was the restoration of Christian rule in the East: to this the European situation was secondary. But for the sake of the Crusade, the European complications must be speedily resolved, despite all the vested interests of long-standing feuds. In this work of reconciliation Gregory X's apostolic simplicity, and his aloofness from all the quarrels of the previous thirty years, gave to the papal action a new strength. A vision now inspired it that transcended local and personal expediency.

There was, the pope saw, no hope for the future of Catholicism in the Holy Land, no hope of holding off the Saracen from fresh conquests, so long as Rome and Constantinople remained enemies; and it was the first action of his reign to take up, and bring to a speedy conclusion, those negotiations to end the schism which had trailed between the two courts for now many years. That this policy of reunion, an alliance with the Greek emperor, Michael VIII, cut clean across the plans of Charles of Anjou to renew the Latin empire at Constantinople, with himself as emperor, and across his pact with Venice to divide up the Christian East between them, did not for a moment daunt the pope. Nor did the claims of Alfonso X of Castile to be emperor in the West hinder the pope from a vigorous intervention in Germany which resulted in the unchallenged election of Rudolf of Habsburg, and a close to nineteen years of civil war and chaos. A Germany united and at peace with itself was a fundamental condition of a peaceful Christendom.

This admirable pope knew the problems of Franco-German Europe by personal experience, from the vantage point of life in the middle lands that lay between the rival cultures. His direct diplomacy had thwarted the plan of Charles of Anjou to force the election of his nephew, the King of France, as emperor, and now the pope so managed the diplomatic sequence to the election of Rudolf of Habsburg that it brought these rivals into friendly collaboration. And he managed, also, in a personal interview at Beaucaire, to soothe the disappointed Alfonso of Castile. Nowhere, at any time, did Gregory X's action leave behind it resentment or bitterness.

The Crusade, reunion of the separated churches of the East, and the reform of Catholic life, thrown back everywhere by the fury of the long war with the Hohenstaufen, were Gregory X's sole, and wholly spiritual, anxieties. Christendom must be organised anew, refitted throughout for the apostolic work that lay ahead. The first, most obvious step, was to survey its resources, to study its weaknesses and then find suitable remedies. This would best be done in a General Council, and only four days after Gregory's coronation the letters went out to kings and prelates, convoking a council to meet at Lyons in the summer of 1274.

Gregory X is, above all else, the pope of this second General Council of Lyons. Nowhere in his well-filled reign is his largehearted trust in the better side of human nature more evident, his confidence that charity and a right intention in the pope would call out the same virtues in others. And certainly the greatest charity was needed in whoever hoped to heal the long, poisoned dissension that kept the churches of the East estranged from Rome. The schism, in its causes, went back centuries. Latin despised Greek as shifty and treacherous: Greek despised Latin as barbarous and uncivilised. The association of the two during the various crusades had steadily sharpened the antagonism. Finally there was the memory of the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the sack of the great city, the massacres, the expulsion of the Greek ruler and his replacement by a Latin, with a Latin bishop enthroned as patriarch in the see of Photius and Cerularios. That Latin regime had endured for less than sixty years. On July 25, 1261, the Greeks had returned under Michael VIII. Constantinople fell to him with scarcely a struggle, and with the Latin empire there crashed the Latin ecclesiastical establishment. That the immediate reaction of the then pope -- Urban IV -- himself a one-time Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, was to plan a great crusade of recovery, was most natural. That never before in their history were the Greeks so hostile to the Latins, was natural no less. And if this was the moment when Michael VIII proposed to the pope to bring the schism to an end, the observer might see in his action no more than the clearest of signs that the Greek emperor realised how slender was his hold on the new conquest. The King of France -- St. Louis -- had taken the cross in response to Pope Urban's appeal; and Venice, the real author of the piratical conquest of 1204, was also actively preparing. No pope, however, would hesitate between a restoration of obedience forced at the sword's point and a general return to obedience on the part of Constantinople and all its dependent churches. Michael's shrewd move held up the military expedition. From the day when Urban IV sent his Franciscan envoys to discuss Michael's proposal (28 July, 1263) the emperor knew his immediate danger was past.

Urban IV died (October 2, 1264) before much more had been done than to make clearer than clear how diverse were the intentions of emperor and pope. Michael had proposed first of all to complete the work of national unity; to drive out of the imperial territories, that is to say, what Latin rulers still remained. Urban thought that the religious reunion should come first.

Once a new pope was elected, Clement IV (February 5, 1265), Michael was able to begin all over again. It was a great advantage that Clement's plans for a crusade were directed to an expedition against the Holy Land itself. Constantinople now seemed secure against any western attack, and the emperor could safely begin the theological hedging and jousting. The Greeks, seemingly, proposed a council in which the differences of belief should be discussed. The pope replied, in the traditional Roman way, that the Faith being a thing that was settled, such discussionwas impossible. The pope's ambassadors could indeed go into the questions raised by the Greeks and, once the union was a fact, there could be a council to ratify it. And Clement sent a declaration of faith to the emperor (March 1267).

Constantinople was, however, at this moment in the throes of an ecclesiastical upheaval, which produced three successive patriarchs in eighteen months. Politics had the main share in this and now, unfortunately, although the patriarch in possession was a strong supporter of Michael as emperor, he had the disadvantage of being violently anti-Latin. Michael, perforce, must go slowly; and then, while he was considering Clement's reply, the pope died (29 November, 1268) and there began one of the longest vacancies the Holy See has ever known. [326]

If the long vacancy solved, for Michael, the immediate problem how to frame a submission to Rome that would be palatable also to his patriarch, it raised once more the problem of the security of his empire from western attacks. His chief danger in the West lay in the King of Sicily, Charles of Anjou. For this leading Guelf had no sooner overcome the Sicilian Ghibelline (1266), than he began to show himself, in the East, a most faithful follower of Ghibelline policy. To all the kings of Sicily-Norman, Hohenstaufen, and now Angevin -- the emperor at Constantinople was the traditional enemy. It was an antagonism that went back before the crusades, dating from those days when the Normans first conquered from the Greek emperor these Italian lands. And when the Sicilian kingdom fell to kings who were also German emperors, the traditional Mediterranean policy they inherited cut across the simplicities of the papally planned crusade. For these imperialists were enemies, first, of Byzantium. They might conquer the Turk ultimately, but their present thought was rather the Eastern Empire. An assault of this kind had been in the mind of the Emperor Henry VI when death so prematurely carried him off (1197). Seven years later, with the active assistance of his brother, the Emperor Philip, the plan was realised and Constantinople torn from the Greeks -- though not to the profit of Sicily. In the next generation Frederick II, Henry's son was the champion of the imperialistic idea and, surrendering the whole substance of the crusade, he negotiated a settlement with the Turks without any pretence of destroying their power. And now the conqueror of Frederick II's heirs was showing himself just as hostile to Byzantium, just as openly averse to any war against the Turks.

In 1267, while Clement IV and Michael VIII were seemingly planning a reunion of Latin west and Greek east, Charles began to style himself King of Jerusalem, and made the claim that he was heir to the last Latin emperor of the East. He was carefully building up a strong position for the future, gathering in claims and rights which, once Michael VIII was conquered, would become political realities. Clement out of the way, what should stay him? By the spring of 1270 his plans were completed, and to Michael VIII the end seemed very near. In his desperation he appealed to the cardinals and also to St. Louis. The saint, sympathetic to the scheme for reunion, and ever the enemy of such schemes of realpolitik as Charles of Anjou was promoting, halted his brother most effectively by summoning him to take his place in the crusade then preparing against Tunis.

St. Louis' tragic death (25 August, 1270) set Charles free to renew his efforts against Michael VIII, and he had already done much by negotiations with the Latin princes in Achaia and the Peloponnesus, when he met the greatest check of all, the election as pope of one resolved, before all else, to bring together Greek and Latin to defend Christendom against their common foe the Turk. Charles might now style himself King of Albania, and ally himself with Michael's Greek rivals (1272), and even send Angevin forces and some of his own Saracen archers to attack Michael in Greece (1273): the new pope had passed too speedily from desires to action, the work of the Council of Lyons was a political fact, and on May 1, 1275 the King of Sicily was compelled to sign a truce with Michael.

The motives of the Greek emperor in offering his submission to the various popes and so proposing to bring to an end the schism that had endured for two hundred and twenty years were, then, evidently no more than political. Such practical statesmen as Urban IV and Clement IV would no doubt have grasped this, and acted accordingly, long before any formal act of reunion was completed. Gregory X was more optimistic than such papal realists. He readily listened to Michael VIII's new offers and sent a distinguished commission of theological experts and diplomatists to Constantinople to initiate the good work.

The four envoys [327] -- Friars Minor -- took with them the creed or profession of faith, drafted by Clement IV. This the emperor, the bishops, and the people were to accept, and thereupon emperor and prelates were to take their places at the coming council. The arrival of this commission at Constantinople was the beginning of an immense theological excitement. It was immediately evident that the bishops would by no means obey mechanically any order from the emperor to submit themselves.

The leading theological question was the Latin doctrine that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, or rather whether the Latins had any right to express this doctrine by adding to the so-called creed of the Council of Nicaea the words "and from the Son". [328] The Greek bishops began by denying their right to do so, and gave the Latins an ultimatum to end the scandal by withdrawing the phrase. The emperor then took charge, and explained to his bishops, in private, that if this proposed arrangement with the Latins fell through, the empire was lost. As to the Latin formulae, no one could object to them as a matter of conscience, for the doctrines they expounded were perfectly orthodox. And he brought theological authority, and also earlier declarations of the Greek episcopate, to support the statement. The most learned man of the day was John Beccos, the chartophylax, [329] and to him the bishops now looked for the reply that would non-suit the emperor's plea. Beccos, however, contented neither party. He did not refute the emperor; but he declared the Latins to be heretics. Whereupon Michael ordered his imprisonment. The patriarch, for his part, organised his bishops to refute the emperor's case and all swore an oath to resist the proposed union.

The prospects of reunion seemed slight indeed. But the emperor could not afford not to buy off the danger that threatened from Sicily and Venice. He was helped by the conversion of Beccos to his views. In prison the chartophylax had set himself to study in the Greek Fathers the doctrine of the processions in the Blessed Trinity. St. Athanasius, St. Cyril and St. Maximus attested that the Latin teaching was the Catholic faith. Beccos, thereupon, revoked his judgment that the Latins were heretics and became the emperor's most enthusiastic aid. While the convert argued with the bishops for the orthodoxy of the Latin position, Michael tried a mixture of diplomacy and pressure. All that would be asked of them, he asserted, was a recognition of the primacy of the Roman see, of Rome's right to judge all cases in final appeal, and that they should pray for the pope publicly in the liturgy. It was in this last point that the final difficulty lay. The popes had tampered with the sacred wording of the creed: how could an orthodox bishop give them any countenance? Michael retorted by threatening the opposition with the penalties of high treason; at the same time he pledged himself that the bishops would not be asked to add so much as an iota to the creed. Reassured, the bishops consented now to accept the emperor's three points; also to make a joint protestation of obedience to the pope.

When the Greek deputation reached Lyons (24 June, 1274) the council had been in session for seven weeks. It had opened on May 7 with elaborate ceremonial and a sermon from the pope. Then, on May 18, it had passed the decree establishing the point of faith about the Filioque, [330] and on June 7 twelve decrees regulating the procedure to be followed in elections of bishops and abbots.

The arrival of the Greeks interrupted these legislative proceedings. The ambassadors were received with solemn ceremony; they presented the letters from the emperor and the Greek bishops; they declared they had come to show their obedience to the Roman Church and to learn from it the true faith. Five days later was the feast of SS. Peter and Paul. At the mass, sung by the pope, the epistle and gospel were chanted in Greek as well as Latin, and the credo likewise (with the Filioque clause repeated three times by the Greeks). St. Bonaventure preached a great sermon. On the octave day, July 6, the formal act of reunion and reconciliation took place. The letters from Constantinople were read; in the emperor's, he repeated the creed sent to him by the pope and declared it to be the true faith, accepted as such by him because it came from the Roman church. He pledged his eternal fidelity to this doctrine, his obedience to the papal primacy. In return he asked that the Greeks be allowed to keep the creed unaltered by any reference to the procession of the Holy Ghost from God the Son, and also that their ancient rite be left untouched. And the emperor's ambassador confirmed all this by an oath made in his master's name.

The General Council which met at Lyons in 1274 was summoned as a great assize to find means for the restoration of Catholic life no less than for the recovery of the Holy Land. With this in view, Gregory X had asked bishops in various countries to send in statements setting out the main reasons for the spiritual decay which he deplored, and to propose remedies.

By far the greater part of the reforms enacted in the thirty decrees of the Council [331] have reference to evils in the life of the clergy. . The pope, indeed, was to bring the council to a close with a sermon in which he declared that bad bishops were the principal cause of all that was wrong. [332] In the council he made no scruple about a direct attack on scandal in the highest place of all, the negligence of the cardinals in allowing vacancies of the Holy See to drag on for months and for years. On more than one occasion already, the faithful people had intervened to coerce the indifference of the cardinals by locking them up until they came to a decision, and a decree of the council [333] now authorised and regularised these extreme measures, imposing the conclave as the rule henceforward. On the death of the pope the cardinals present in the city where he died were to await ten days, but no more, for their absent brethren. Then, with but a single servant each, they were to take up their residence in the palace, living together in a single locked room without any curtains or screens to shut off any part of it. This conclave [334] was to be so arranged that none might enter or leave it unseen by the rest, that there would be no means of access to the electors or of secret communications with them; no cardinal must admit any visitor except such as were allowed in by the whole body to treat of the arrangement of the conclave. The new pope -- so Gregory X seems to have intended -- would thus be speedily elected, for his law next provides that should the election be delayed beyond three days "which God forbid', the cardinals' food was to be restricted to a single dish at each of their two daily meals; after five days more they were to be given only bread with wine and water. There are regulations for the admission of latecomers, for the care of sick cardinals who may leave and then wish to return. The cardinals are forbidden to occupy themselves with any other business than the election, and all pacts or conventions made between them are declared null, even though they be confirmed with an oath. Nor is any cardinal to receive anything of his ecclesiastical revenues as long as the vacancy of the Holy See endures; these are sequestrated and at the disposal of the future pope. Finally, in order that these provisions may not become a dead letter, the responsibility for providing the conclave and guarding it is laid on the civic authority of the town where it takes place; heavy penalties being provided for those who over-act the rigour towards the cardinals which the new law demands.

The cardinals objected strongly to the proposed law, and for a time there was a brisk duel between them and the pope, each striving to enlist supporters from among the bishops. And it would seem that the general sense of the council was against the reform as proposed, for it was not promulgated until some months after the council had dispersed.

The most usual way of appointing bishops or abbots was still, in 1274, by an election, where the canons or monks had each a vote. A whole series of decrees enacted in this council shows the many serious abuses which affected the system, and how thoroughly, in these last years before something was devised in its place, the Holy See strove to reform them. Appeals against elections (or provisions) to churches are to be made in writing and to be countersigned by witnesses who swear their own belief in the truth of the objections made and that they can prove this: penalties are provided for those who fail to make good their charges. [335] The elect must await confirmation before entering upon his charge. [336] He is to be informed of his election as soon as possible, to signify his acceptance within a month, and, under penalty of losing the place, seek confirmation within three months. [337] Voters who knowingly vote for one who is unworthy sin mortally, and are liable to severe punishment. [338] No voter is allowed to appeal against the one for whom he has voted -- certain special cases apart. [339] Far too many appeals are sent to Rome where the motive is not really serious. This practice is to cease [340] and in cases where a double election has been made no objection will be allowed for the future against the majority on the score of lack of zeal, of worth, or of authority, where the majority numbers two-thirds of the voters. [341] If objection be made that there is an evident defect, whether of due knowledge or otherwise, there must be an immediate enquiry into this. Should the objection be shown devoid of foundation, those who made it lose all right to pursue any further objection they have raised, and they are to be punished as though they had failed to prove the whole of their objections. [342] Finally, to protect the successful against the malice of the disappointed, it is laid down that those who revenge themselves on electors for not supporting them by pillaging the electors' property or that of the Church or of the electors' relatives, or who molest the electors or their families are by the very fact excommunicated. [343]

The elective system was already beginning to raise problems almost as serious as those it solved. In another hundred years it would have disappeared in the greater part of the Church, and bishops be directly appointed or "provided" by the pope. The foundation of the new system was the decree Licet (1268) of Gregory X's immediate predecessor Clement IV, a lawyer pope who had come to the service of the Church after a great career as jurist and administrator in the service of St. Louis IX. By that decree Clement IV had reserved to the Holy See the appointment to all benefices vacated by death, if the holder at the time he died had been a member of the Roman curia or had died in the city where the curia then was. [344] This new law had caused much dissatisfaction among the bishops, no less than among other patrons of benefices. At the General Council they strove to have it revoked. But though Gregory X was not, apparently, unsympathetic, he would do no more than modify it slightly, [345] and allow that vacancies falling under the reservation might be filled by the patron if the pope had failed to fill them within a month from the holder's death. [346]

What of the man appointed? and especially of the man who was the foundation of the whole system, the parish priest? It had already been laid down, a hundred years before this time, [347] that no one must be appointed to a parish who was younger than twenty- five. But this law had too often been disregarded, and so the Council now declared [348] that all appointments which violated the law were null and of no effect. It also reminded the nominee that he was bound to live in his parish and, if he were not a priest already, that he must seek ordination within a year or else ipso facto lose his benefice. Non-residence of beneficiaries -- of bishops and of parish priests especially -- was one of the chronic weaknesses of the seemingly powerful structure of medieval Catholicism. The popes never succeeded in their war against it, nor against the related mischief that the same man held more than one benefice: only too often, indeed, policy led the different popes to connive at these evils, and in the end, more almost than anything else, it was these that brought the imposing structure down to the dust. At Lyons, in 1274, laws were made to control the pluralist. No parish was to be given in commendam [349] unless to a priest; he must be of the canonical age of twenty-five and not already provided with a parish in commendam, and the necessity (on the part of the Church) must be evident; furthermore such appointments are good for six months only. Any Contravention of these conditions invalidates the appointment ipso iure. [350] As to pluralists -- clerics who hold more than one benefice -- bishops are to make a general enquiry and if one of the benefices held entails a cure of souls, the holder is to produce the dispensation authorising this. If this is not forthcoming, all but the first received of his benefices are to be taken as vacant and given to others. If, however, he is lawfully authorised he may retain all he lawfully holds, but it is put upon the bishop's conscience to see that the cure of souls is not neglected. Bishops are specifically warned to make certain, when they confer a benefice that entails a cure of souls, that if the beneficiary already holds such a benefice he is dispensed to hold the second with a dispensation which explicitly mentions his possession of the first cura animarum. [351]

Episcopal control of the clergy is strengthened by a canon which forbids bishops to ordain another bishop's subjects without his leave: bishops who transgress, lose automatically the right to ordain at all for twelve months. [352] The clergy are given a useful protection against the bishop in a new rule [353] about visitation expenses. Bishops were already allowed to exact a certain support in kind when they made the official visitation of a parish. The custom was, however, doveloping of asking money or gifts; another abuse was to exact procurations -- the payments in kind - without making the visitations. The council deals with these abuses (already noted and condemned by Innocent IV) by decreeing that all who have exacted these unlawful presents must restore double their amount to the victims. If the restitution is not made within a month, the bishop loses all right to enter a church until payment is made; his officials, if they are guilty, are suspended from office and benefice. Nor is any willingness of the injured party to remit the amount due, or part of it, to affect the automatic operation of the law.

Clerical immunity from the jurisdiction of the lay ruler was an ancient institution more and more contested in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Gregory X at Lyons made a concession to the princes, enacting [354] that the cleric in minor orders who contracted a second marriage lost all his clerical privileges and was henceforth wholly their subject. On the other hand, another canon [355] denouncing yet again [356] the barbarous custom called 'reprisals', -- by which, if the guilty party were beyond the law's power, the nearest innocent members of the community were made to suffer in his stead -- fixed a special penalty of excommunication and interdict for those who subjected ecclesiastics to this abuse.

There are two new laws to safeguard Church property, whether from lay rapacity or from cowardly negligence on the part of the clergy who should be its special defenders. Excommunication is henceforward to fall automatically on anyone -- whatever his rank -- who, unauthorised, takes upon himself the occupation and administration of the property of a vacant see or abbey, and also upon the clerics or monks who abet this usurpation. Those who enjoy such right of administration are warned not to go beyond their right, and that they are bound not to neglect the properties entrusted to their care. [357] The second law [358] forbids prelates -- without the leave of their chapter and the Holy See -- to make over their lands to the lay lord as the price of his protection, retaining for the Church a mere use of the property. All contracts of this kind hitherto made without leave are now annulled, even though confirmed with an oath. Offending prelates are to suffer a three years suspension from their office and their revenues, and the lords who force such contracts upon them, or who have not restored what they obtained through past contracts of this sort, are excommunicated.

The reform legislation of the Council did not only touch the layman in his relations with the clergy. In two canons, on usury and usurers, it strove to halt a mischief that lay at the very roots of social life. Already, by a law of 1179, as the Council recalls, the notorious usurer [359] was barred from the sacraments, and if he died he was forbidden Christian burial, and the clergy were not allowed to take offerings from him. These prohibitions had been largely ignored, and now, not only are they renewed, but it is forbidden [360] to states and rulers to allow usurers to take up residence within their territories, or to allow those already there to remain. Within three months they must be expelled. If the lord is an ecclesiastic, disregard of this new law entails automatically suspension from his office, a lay lord incurs excommunication, and a community or corporation interdict. As for the usurer himself, [361] he is not to have Christian burial, even though his will directs that restitution be made, until this has actually been done or substantial pledges given according to forms now provided. Members of religious orders -- and others too -- who bury usurers in disregard of this law are themselves to be punished as usurers. Unless a usurer first make restitution, or give a real guarantee that he will do so, no one is to witness his will or hear his confession, or absolve him. If his will does not provide for restitution it is, by the fact, null and void.

There is also a canon [362] about conduct in church and abuses of the church fabric from which much may be gleaned about the day to day religious life of the time. Churches are places built for prayer, places where silence should reign, and this especially during the time of mass. All are to bow their heads in reverence whenever the holy name of Jesus Christ is pronounced, especially during the mass. The church is not to be used for secular purposes, such as meetings, or parliaments, nor as a court of law; if trials are held there the sentences rendered are, ipso facto, null and void. Churchyards are not to be used for fairs. It is a terrible thing, says the canon, if places set apart for man to ask forgiveness for his sins become to him occasions of further sin. This canon inaugurated the popular devotion to the Holy Name, and the great confraternity still so flourishing, founded by the Dominicans at the command of Gregory X [363] to further the devotion.

Five of the remaining canons are directed to the reform of legal procedure; most of them relate to the law governing the punishment of excommunication. Excommunication is not incurred by those who hold intercourse with the excommunicated unless these have been excommunicated by name. This is a clarification of a canon of the last General Council. [364] Absolution, from any censure, which has been extorted by violence or threats is not only null and void absolutely, but also involves those using such threats in a further excommunication. [365] Those who give permission to their servants or subjects to murder, imprison or injure in any way, whether it be the officials responsible for a sentence of excommunication against them, or relatives of the officials, or those who refuse all intercourse with them since the excommunication, are by the fact excommunicated a second time; so too are those who carry out these orders. If within two months they have not sought absolution from this second excommunication, they can only be absolved from it by the Holy See. [366] Another new law [367] is directed to check the hastiness of ecclesiastics in issuing penalties whose effects are general. Canons who, as a punishment, propose to suspend the church services, must now give notice of this in writing, with their reasons, to the person or persons against whom this action is directed. If the canons fail to do this, or if the reasons assigned are insufficient, they lose all right to their revenues for the time the services were suspended and must moreover make satisfaction for any losses thereby incurred to those they meant to punish. Also, and here is a reference to a superstitious instinct not yet wholly departed from our midst, it is most strictly forbidden to emphasise the fact of the divine displeasure, to which the suspension of offices supposedly testifies, by such detestable practices as treating the sacred images irreverently -- for example, throwing them to the ground and covering them with nettles and thorns. This the bishops are to punish with the utmost severity.

To check the growing tendency to drag out law suits by maliciously contrived delays, and thereby to fleece the litigant, the council now enacted a most stringent canon. All advocates and proctors are henceforward to declare on oath, not only that they will do their utmost for their client, but also that should anything transpire in the course of the trial to convince them that his cause is not just, they will immediately withdraw from the case. This oath is to be taken at the opening of every judicial year, and heavy penalties are provided for neglect to do so or for any breach of the oath. Also, the canon fixes maximum fees for both advocates and proctors and puts upon them the obligation to restore anything accepted in excess of these amounts -- again under heavy penalties. [368]

Perhaps the Council's most important piece of legislation, after the law establishing the conclave, was the twenty-third canon Religionum diversitatem nimiam, on the new religious orders. From the moment when religious -- men formed by the discipline of the monastic vows and life -- had first begun to give themselves to the apostolic work of preaching the gospel and reconciling sinners to God, there had been trouble with the parochial clergy whose peculiar business and charge this work had always been. It was from among the religious that the missionaries had come who had converted the West from heathendom. On their labours was built the greater part of the present fabric of parishes and sees. It was the religious who was the trained man, in the early Middle Ages, the parochial priest the more or less well-gifted amateur; and as with habits of life so was it with professional learning. The vast mass of the parochial clergy had nothing like the chances of study which were open to the monk. The revival of learning which produced the universities no doubt improved their chances enormously, and indeed it was the chief function of the universities to educate the clergy. But, even so, universities were never so many that the whole body of the clergy passed through them. And long before the medieval universities reached the peak of their achievement as seminaries for the education of the parochial clergy, St. Dominic first and then St. Bonaventure had provided the church with a new kind of religious who was primarily a missionary priest, and the last word in the professional clerical sciences and arts, theologian, preacher and confessor. By the time of the Council of Lyons in 1274 Dominican and Franciscan priests were to be numbered by tens of thousands, and almost as numerous again were the priests of other new orders that had sprung up in imitation. Some of the new orders were as admirable as the models which had inspired them. Others were less so. For very different reasons the appearance of both types ruffled the peace of the clerical mind.

Already sixty years before the Council of Lyons, the Church had shown itself anxious and troubled by the task of controlling the new spiritual enthusiasm as it showed itself in the new missionary brotherhoods. These were almost always lay movements in origin; rarely was it to a priest that the inspiration to) lead this kind of life seemed to come. If there was zeal in plenty in these movements there was rarely any theological learning, or any appreciation that this was at all necessary for the preacher. Very often there was a definite anti-clerical spirit; sometimes there was heresy too. For very many reasons, then, the first rumours that a new brotherhood had been formed to preach penance and the remission of sins, and that it was sweeping all before it in some city of Languedoc or Umbria, can hardly have brought anything but deep anxiety to the Roman curia or to its head.

When the bishops poured into Rome for the General Council of 1215 they brought with them from every see of Christendom the tale of disputes between clergy and religious. Sixty years later, with the new mendicant missionary orders at the flood of their first fervent activity, they took similar tales to Lyons. From Olmuc in Bohemia, for example, came complaints that the Dominicans and Franciscans had gradually ousted the parochial clergy from all contact with their people. Baptism was the only sacrament for which the parish priest was ever approached. And where the people went, there they took their offerings. The bishop's suggestions, in this instance, were drastic indeed. These mendicant orders should lose their general power to hear confessions, or to preach except in the parish churches. Only those should preach or hear confessions whom the local bishop chose and authorised. Nor should any new friary be founded without the local bishop's leave.

The mendicants no doubt put forward once again the solid reason for their admittedly wide privileges; once they lost their exemption from all jurisdiction but that of the pope, how long would they survive in a world where there were bishops? In France, in the early days, the Dominicans, for example, found themselves treated just as layfolk, bidden to attend mass on Sundays, with the rest, in the parish church, and to confess to the parish priest as other parishioners were bound. [369] Twenty years nearly before this time (1274) the differences between clergy and mendicants had blown into a great conflagration at Paris, where the university had demanded from the pope all but the suppression of the orders and, at the pope's bidding, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure had stated the orders' case. Now, at Lyons, the question was raised again: it had already become, what it was to remain for centuries, one of the chronic problems of the Church, and one of the chronic evidences how harsh a soil human nature is to divine charity.

The decree now enacted deals drastically with all abuses, with institutes inaugurated in despite of existing law, and with lawfully founded institutes which have degenerated or seem to be tending that way. But it goes out of its way to protect and to praise the two great orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis.

The Council of 1215 -- says the new law -- had forbidden [370] the foundation of any new orders. This prohibition was now renewed, because, despite that law, rashness and presumption had brought into existence an unbridled mob of new orders -- of new mendicants especially -- who did not deserve approbation. Therefore, for the future, no one is to found any new order, or to enter one if such be founded. All orders and mendicant orders founded since 1215 and not approved by the Holy See are abolished, Those founded since and approved by the Holy See, and which live by alms collected from the general public and whose rule forbids them any rents or possessions, and to whom an insecure mendicity through public begging affords a living, must now follow this rule, namely members already professed may continue to live this life, but no more novices are to be received; no new houses are to be opened; no properties may be alienated without leave of the Holy See, for these properties the Holy See intends to use in aid of the Holy Land, or the poor and for other pious purposes. Any violation of this rule entails excommunication, and acts done in violation of it are legally void. Moreover, members of these orders are forbidden to preach to those outside their ranks, or to hear their confessions, or to undertake their funeral services. This 23rd canon, it is expressly declared, does not however extend to the Dominicans and Franciscans whose usefulness to the Church in general (it is explicitly said) is evident. As for the Carmelites, and the Hermits of St. Augustine, whose foundation dates back beyond the Lateran Council of 1215, they may continue as they now are until further decision about them is taken. A general scheme, says the canon, is in preparation that will affect them and indeed all the orders, non-mendicants included. Meanwhile members of the orders to whom this new rule now made applies, are given generally a permit to enter other approved orders. But no order or convent is to transfer itself as a whole without special leave of the Holy See.

THE SHADOW OF ANJOU, 1276-1285

Gregory X died at Arezzo. January 10. 1276, on his way back from France to Rome. Only eleven days later the cardinals, putting into execution for the first time the new law of the conclave, unanimously elected the Friar Preacher, Peter of Tarentaise. This first Dominican pope was a Frenchman. He took the name of Innocent V and reigned for just five months. There was a short interval of three weeks and the cardinal deacon Ottoboni Fieschi, a nephew of Innocent IV was elected -- Adrian V (11 July). His reign was one of the shortest of all: he was dead in seven weeks, before he had even been ordained priest. For the third time that year the cardinals assembled, and elected now a Portuguese, the one-time Archbishop of Braga, Peter Juliani, who has his place in the history of scholastic philosophy as Peter of Spain. He took the name of John XXI but, scarcely more fortunate than the other two popes, he reigned only eight months. On May 20, 1277 the ceiling of his library fell in and the pope was killed.

These short pontificates wrought much harm to the still fragile restoration of Gregory X. In all the elections of that fateful year, Charles of Anjou was active. Both the French pope and the Portuguese showed themselves much more sympathetic to his policy than Gregory had been; Innocent V favouring him in Italy and John XXI, apparently, willing to forward his designs on the Eastern empire. But nowhere was the change in the personality of the pope more to be deplored than in the most delicate matter of all, Rome's relations with the newly reconciled Eastern churches. Here John XXI showed himself heavy handed and perhaps made inevitable the action of his successors that was to wreck the whole work within the next five years.

A more certain -- but accidental -- effect of John's short reign was to revive the abuse of over-long vacancies in the Holy See. The cardinals' opposition to Gregory X's conclave regulation had been strong. Their criticism now brought John XXI to suspend it, meaning to provide a new rule. His sudden death found the cardinals without any rules at all to bind them and the Holy See was thereupon vacant six months (20 May-25 November, 1277).

The pope ultimately elected was John Gaetani Orsini, one of the most experienced diplomatists in the curia, a cardinal for more than thirty years, who took the name of Nicholas III. None since Innocent IV (1243-1254) had come to the high office with such -- extensive knowledge of the curial routine, of the major problems of the time and the personalities around whom they turned. Nicholas had been Innocent IV's close companion in his exile, [371] and in 1258 had played a great part, as legate, in the national histories of France and of England at the time of Simon de Montfort's first triumph. Since the death of Clement IV (1268) he had been the strong man of the curia, a force to be reckoned with in all the subsequent elections. He is credited with the election of John XXI and in that pope's short reign was, indeed, the power behind the throne. Through all the years that followed Charles of Anjou's introduction into the politics of church defence Nicholas III had been his warm supporter. But events during the several vacancies of 1276 had chilled his enthusiasm. He was now critical, if not hostile, and certainly awakened from the simplicity he had shared with the scholarly French and Portuguese popes, whose inexperience of politics failed to read beneath the surface of Charles's courtesy and seeming submissiveness. The facts were that the King of Sicily's diplomacy had begun definitely to check Rudolf of Habsburg in Germany; that he was once again menacing the Greek emperor and that his power overshadowed all Italy. Charles now took the style of King of Jerusalem, Hugh III having abandoned the mainland and retired to Cyprus, and sent to Acre as his vicar, Roger de St. Severin. The Templars of Venice supported him and the barons of the kingdom had no choice but to do him homage. Of the two great questions of the day, not the crusade seemed now the more urgent but the freedom of the Papal State, and the indefinitely more important thing bound up with this, namely, the freedom of the papal action and so of religion everywhere. It was to be the main aim of Nicholas III to check this new advance of the King of Sicily.

Presently immense plans for the future organisation of Europe began to take shape. New papal agents of proved character and high diplomatic ability -- the future popes Martin IV and Nicholas IV, the Dominican Master -- General John of Vercelli -- began to knit together the medley of jealousies and rivalries in which the ambition of such magnificent men as Charles of Anjou found its perennial opportunity. It was a great pontificate, though all too short for the task before it. Nicholas III was already an old man at his election (25 November, 1271) and in less than three years he was dead (22 August, 1280) Nevertheless he had notably lessened King Charles's hold on central Italy by refusing to allow his re- appointment as Senator of Rome and imperial vicar in Tuscany. More, by a special constitution Nicholas III made it impossible for the future for any reigning prince to be senator. The new senator, in 1278, was the pope himself, and he appointed his nephew to act in his place. Charles, knowing himself for the moment outmanoeuvred, submitted gracefully. In Germany the pope continued Gregory X's policy of support to the new emperor-elect. He won from Rudolf -- and from all the German princes -- an explicit renunciation of all the old claims over any of the territories now counted as States of the Church.

Had Nicholas III still greater plans in mind to establish permanent friendliness between the Habsburgs and Capetians? Did his too speedy death put an end to one of the best of all chances of preventing the coming long centuries of Franco-German warfare and its sequelae of world destruction? Opinions differ, but the pope is credited with the desire to make the empire hereditary in the Habsburg family, and to make the German kingship a reality beyond the Rhine and the Danube. The kingdom of Arles would be detached from the empire and, united with Lombardy, form an independent realm under a French prince. A second Italian kingdom would be created in the lands between the Papal State and Lombardy. Italy, like Germany, would experience a new, peaceful political order. The Papal State would enjoy a new security. Charles of Anjou would be satisfied -- and yet controlled. The major causes of Franco-German rivalry would be forestalled.

But Nicholas died before his liquidation of the political debts of 1276 had been so successful as to allow such major schemes any chance of success. He was the first pope for a hundred years to make Rome his regular dwelling place and all but the last pope to do so for another hundred; he has his place in history as the real founder of the Vatican. The new orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic found in him a constant friend, and his registers show how constantly he turned to them to provide bishops for sees all over Europe. The one real blemish was his over-fondness for his own family. It has won him a most unenviable mark as a pioneer in the vicious business of papal nepotism, and a blistering memorial in the Inferno of Dante.

Among the things which Nicholas III did not find time to do, was to provide the much-needed regulations about the papal election, and after his death the Holy See again remained vacant for six months -- time enough and to spare for Charles of Anjou to turn to his own profit the reaction which usually follows the disappearance of a strong ruler. The new pope, Martin IV (elected 22 February, 1281) Simon de Brion -- was a Frenchman and, from the beginning, he showed himself a most willing collaborator in all the King of Sicily's schemes. It would not be correct to describe him as, in any sense, the king's tool. All goes to show a long- standing identity of views between himself and Charles, and the cardinal's long career in the service of the Holy See had shown him to be a skilful diplomatist and administrator. Like very many of the popes since Innocent III, he was a product of the University of Paris. Like Clement IV, he had been high in the service of St. Louis IX. With many more he had left that service for the Roman curia at the invitation of the newly-elected French pope Urban IV (1261), who had created him cardinal. Much of his life continued to be spent in France as legate, and it was he who had negotiated, for Urban IV, the treaty which made Charles of Anjou the papal champion and set him on the way to become King of Sicily. It is not surprising that in the years between Charles's victories and his own election (1268-1281), Simon de Brion was the king's chief advocate and supporter in the curia. He was, it is said, most unwilling to be elected. No doubt he foresaw the stormy years that awaited him, the difficulties that must follow on any reversal of the cautious policy of the last nine years, and he was an old man. He was to reign just over four years and to initiate a series of political disasters that would leave the prestige of the papacy lower than at any time since the coming of Innocent III (1198).

To Charles of Anjou the election supplied the one thing so far lacking. In the fifteen years since his conquest of Sicily, the king had made more than one attempt to extend his power at the expense of the Byzantine emperor at Constantinople. St. Louis IX had checked him in 1270, Gregory X in 1275, Nicholas III in 1278. Now, with a pope of like mind with himself, his ambition was to be given free reign.

First of all, Martin IV, within two months of his election, reversed the vital decision of Nicholas III that the civil government of Rome should never be given into the hands of a sovereign prince, by appointing the King of Sicily Senator for life. [372] The immediate result was a miniature civil war in Rome that lasted throughout the reign, with all the customary sequelae of excommunication and interdict. Martin himself never lived nearer to Rome than Orvieto and Perugia.

Next, Martin IV definitely broke with the Eastern churches. It was seven years all but two months since the solemn ratification at Constantinople, [373] by the Greek bishops, of the reconciliation made at the Council of Lyons. Never, during all that time, had the popes felt happy about the reality of the Greek submission to their authority; and never had the great mass of the Greeks seen in the act of their emperor, Michael VIII, anything more than a base surrender to the despised and hated Latins. From the very beginning, very many of them, courtiers even, and members of the emperor's own family, had refused all relations with the clergy who accepted the union. But, so long as Gregory X lived, Michael was confident that the schemes of the King of Sicily, to restore, in his own person, the Latin empire at Constantinople, would be effectively checked. This pope's personal experience of the gravity of the crisis of Christianity in the East, and his determination, in the interest of the projected crusade, to forestall any warfare between rival Christian claimants to Eastern principalities, were solid advantages that far outweighed, with the ruler at Constantinople, the popular and the clerical hostility to the union.

But the unlooked-for death, in January 1276, of this rarely experienced pope, patient, understanding, the reverse of doctrinaire in his handling of delicate practical problems, changed all. Moreover, Gregory X had three successors in less than twelve months, and the upset in the curia caused by the rapid appearance and disappearance of these popes was, inevitably, a great opportunity both for those who wished to see the union destroyed, and for those who had never thought it could be a reality. The first of these popes, Innocent V, showed himself much cooler towards Michael VIII than his predecessor had been. For Innocent was a Frenchman, [374] such another man of God as his predecessor, it is true, and no more of a politician. But he was a supporter of Charles of Anjou. When Michael demanded that the pope, for the protection of the Byzantine empire in the approaching crusade, should strengthen the emperor's authority by excommunicating the Latin princes already in arms against him, Innocent, in his perplexity, could only reply by a general exhortation about the need for unity. Before anything more could be asked of him, or a new Eastern crisis develop, his five months' reign was over (June 22, 1276). Adrian V, who followed him, lasted only seven weeks. Then came a third pope favourable to Charles, the scholarly Portuguese, John XXI. It was this pope who despatched to Constantinople the embassy planned by Innocent V, charged to obtain from Michael his own personal oath that he accepted the faith of the Roman See as set out at the General Council, and to absolve the Greeks from what censures they might have incurred through their adherence to the schism now terminated. The nuncios were also to excommunicate, and to put under interdict, all who opposed the union. [375] At first all went well. The emperor made no difficulties; his son and heir, Andronicus, wrote a most dutiful letter of submission, professing his enthusiasm for the union; and the Greek bishops, at a synod in April 1277, reaffirmed their acceptance of the primacy of the Roman See and of the orthodoxy of its teaching about the procession of the Holy Ghost. But in reaffirming this, the bishops somewhat altered the terminology of the statement adopted at Lyons.

John XXI was dead before this last, disconcerting detail of the Byzantine situation reached the curia. It was five months before the vacancy was filled, and another twelve before Nicholas III took up the question. From now on we can note a new stiffness in the Roman attitude. For example, the Greeks are now told that they must add the Filioque clause to the creed. This was, of course, more than the General Council had asked; but there was now every reason why Rome should be doubtful whether Greek opposition to the use of the clause was not the outward sign of a refusal to accept the Roman terminology as orthodox, of a clinging to the old contention that, on this point, the Latins were heretics. The use of the clause was become a touchstone of orthodoxy, as the use of the word homoousion had been, nine hundred years before, in these same lands. The pope also, it would seem, proposed to pass in review the whole Greek liturgy and rite, for he bade his envoys to allow only those parts which were not contrary to the faith. The nuncios were to travel through the chief cities of the empire and to see that all these various orders were really obeyed, and the emperor was to be persuaded to ask for the appointment at Constantinople of a permanent cardinal-legate; so only could Rome be assured that the Greeks really meant what they had professed.

Already there had been riots against the union, and now the emperor and his bishops came to an understanding. They would not break openly with the new papal commission (since only the pope's intervention could preserve the empire from the designs of Charles of Anjou), and the emperor pledged himself, whatever the consequences, not to consent to add the Filioque to the creed. It was now only a matter of time before the purely political intentions of the chief supporters of the union became so evident that a breach with Rome must follow. While, at Constantinople, the emperor stifled all opposition, and punished with terrible cruelty those who stirred up the ever recurring anti-papal riots, to the pope he perjured himself lavishly. The Greek bishops, subtly contriving neither to refuse the pope's demands nor to satisfy them, sent to Rome a reply that was little more than a mass of texts from the Greek fathers, where any and every word but the "proceed" of the Lyons definition was used to express the relation of the divine Word to the Holy Ghost. Only the sudden death of Nicholas III (August 22, 1280) and the six months' interregnum which followed, delayed, it would seem, the rupture that was now all but inevitable.

Then a final certitude came with the election, as Pope Martin IV, [376] of the King of Sicily's staunchest partisan in the curia. Charles had now every encouragement to prepare the type of crusade which the kings of Sicily traditionally favoured, the plan whose basic idea was to install themselves at Constantinople as emperors and make war on the Turks from this new vantage point. Venice -- also traditionally hostile to the Greeks, and already responsible for the crime that had transformed Innocent III's crusade into an immense act of piracy -- became his ally (July 3, 1281) and the pope, this time, joined the anti-Byzantine coalition. [377] The date was fixed for April 1283.

But Michael VIII had not, for a moment, failed to understand that tne bright prospects which the election of Gregory X had opened to him were now gone, perhaps for ever. While he carefully maintained diplomatic relations with Martin IV in the state befitting a loyal Catholic prince, Michael, too, made his preparations. But long before they were complete, only four months after the pact with Venice, Martin IV took the final step. On November 18, 1281, he excommunicated Michael as a patron and protector of heretics, of schismatics and Or heresy.

The emperor did not, however, reverse his religious policy. As long as he lived, another thirteen months only, there was no repudiation of the work of Lyons. It was only after his death (December 11, 1282) that the anti-Roman reaction began. It was extremely thorough. The new emperor, Andronicus, publicly confessed his submission to the pope as a grave sin and begged to be given suitable penance. The patriarch favourable to the Latins -- John Beccos, almost the only sincere convert among the higher clergy -- was deposed, and his successor (the anti-Roman whose place Beccos had taken in 1275) had all the churches of the capital purified with solemn rites, while a sentence of three months' suspension was laid upon the whole body of bishops and priests. The emperor obliged his mother, Michael's widow, to abjure her allegiance to tile pope, and he even refused a religious funeral to his dead father. So Michael, after twenty years of religious trimming, in the interests of Byzantine independence, was found, at the last, rejected and cast out both by the Catholics and by the Orthodox. Although it is extremely doubtful whether, inaugurated in such circumstances, any reunion would have long endured, Martin IV, when he excommunicated its main support, the Emperor Michael, sealed its fate in an instant. Also, in excommunicating the emperor he was excommunicating the prince whom Charles of Anjou was planning to supplant -- excommunicating him at the very moment when the Sicilian king's plans were ripe. It is little wonder that the pope's contemporaries judged his act severely, nor that some were very ready to see, in the disasters to the papal arms which followed, the manifest chastening hand of God.

For chastisement -- if such it were! -- arrived with speed. Far away from Constantinople, at the very opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea, was a prince who, for years, now, had nourished a bitter hatred of the French, the King of Aragon, Peter III. Peter had seen his father make over to St. Louis IX Aragonese rights in Languedoc, and also, in the interests of this settlement, break up the unity of Aragon by creating the new kingdom of Majorca. He had seen St. Louis' son, Philip III, intervene powerfully to the south of the Pyrenees in the neighbouring kingdom of Castile -- and in a succession dispute that concerned Aragon very intimately. The French King of Sicily, Charles of Anjou, was especially an enemy; for Peter's wife was the daughter of that King Manfred of Sicily whom Charles had routed and slain at Benevento in 1266, the granddaughter of the last great Hohenstaufen, Frederick II. She was therefore, since Charles of Anjou's execution in 1268 of Conradin the last male of the line a personage of the greatest interest to all the remnants of the Ghibelline party which, suppressed these sixteen years but by no means destroyed, still swarmed in every state and town of Italy. Peter's court was the last refuge of the party, and there, biding his time in exile, was Manfred's capable Sicilian minister, John of Procida.

It was this political genius who planned the great coup. While Charles was busy with his plans to capture the empire of the East, binding to himself the great commercial states of Genoa and Venice, and securing the assistance of the new pope, John of Procida linked together Peter III and the Emperor Michael, the native Sicilians who had already learnt to detest their French rulers, and the Italian Ghibellines everywhere. A great conspiracy against Charles and his suzerain the pope was already afoot, when Martin IV threw over Michael VIII. The rising at Palermo on Palm Sunday, 1282, [378] and the massacre of the French which followed -- the Sicilian Vespers -- was the Ghibelline reply. Before Charles was able to put down the insurrection, Peter III had landed in Sicily. The French were out, and out for all time. Only the mainland territory remained to them and a war had begun, in which the pope was directly involved, that was to last for twenty years. [379]

The pope was involved because Charles was his vassal, the vassal indeed of St. Peter. The pope had no choice but to intervene and, in the name of St. Peter, with all means spiritual as well as temporal, defend his vassal against the Aragonese invader. He excommunicated the King of Aragon -- who, also, was his vassal -- and gave him three months in which to submit; should he obstinately hold out, the pope would depose him. [380] Peter III ignored the excommunication. He had present victory on his side and, in a war that was to be chiefly decided by sea power, he had also the genius of the great admiral of his day, the Sicilian Roger de Loria. The pope then deposed Peter. [381] He offered the crown of Aragon to yet another French prince, Charles of Valois, a younger son of the King of France, and, when the offer was accepted, [382] the pope, to assist the Frenchman, proclaimed a real crusade against Peter. [383] Peter's subjects were released from their oaths of allegiance, forbidden to acknowledge him as king, to pay him taxes or other dues. The kingdom was laid under an interdict. To finance his papally-appointed rival, immense sums of money were advanced by the pope from the moneys collected for the war against the Saracens, and special tithes were levied on ecclesiastical property in France, Provence and Navarre, in Aragon, Majorca, Sicily and in all Italy; and also in the dioceses of Liege, Metz, Verdun and Basle. To all who helped the good work of installing Charles and expelling the Aragonese King of Aragon, all the favours, temporal and spiritual, were granted which might be had by going out to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens. The popes had been unable for years to reorganise the holy war. Now it had reappeared, in Spain, and directed against a Christian prince whose crime it was to have made war on a papal vassal.

The King of France took up his son's opportunity [384] and soon a great French army was preparing to invade Aragon, with a fleet moving in support along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Sicily, since Roger de Loria's destruction of the Neapolitan fleet, was impregnably Aragonese. A direct attack on Peter's homeland, if successful, would be the simplest way to loosen his hold on the island.

At first all went well. The French invaded Rousillon in May 1285, and on September 7 took the Aragonese city of Gerona. But now a double disaster fell upon them. Fever took hold of the army and slew more troops than the enemy. And de Loria, in a great battle off Palamos, destroying the French fleet, cut the main line of the army's communications, the chief means of its reinforcement and supply (September 4). Among those struck down by the fever was the King of France himself, and he was carried back, amid his retreating troops, to die at Perpignan (October 5). For the first time in history French policy had sent a conquering army beyond the natural frontiers of France. The venture had ended in a great disaster.

Charles of Anjou had been spared, at any rate, this crowning humiliation [385] he had died in January 1285, while the expedition was still in preparation, and its chances seemed excellent. [386] Pope Martin, too, died before he saw how his collaboration with the Angevin was ending (28 March, 1285). All that the collaboration had in fact achieved was to end the chances of the reunion scheme of Gregory X, and to involve the papacy in a new war where the stake was not, any longer, the pope's independence -- the one real danger to this, anywhere in Europe, was in fact that very vassal of the pope in whose interest the pope was at war. And the papacy was faced now with the fact, surely full of omen, that in two important territories, Aragon and Sicily, the bulk of the people and clergy were standing fast by the ruler whom the pope had declared to be no ruler, ignoring the excommunication, the deposition and the interdict laid upon them. If, despite such lavish use of the spiritual arm, despite this all but official identification of the temporal with the spiritual, the popes should lose in the conflict, what would be the reaction in the sphere of the people's devotion to papal authority as the centre and source of religious life? Again, all over Italy the Ghibelline factions were busy. Lombardy, the Romagna, Tuscany were filled with insurrection and riot, and there too this same intermingling of spiritual and temporal was a leading, and inevitable, feature of the struggle. Those on the one side were, by the fact, bad Catholics: their opponents were engaged in war that was holy. And from Germany, untouched by the actual struggle, came loud complaints about the taxes levied on ecclesiastical revenues to finance the papal diplomacy and arms. Martin IV's successors were scarcely to be envied.

FRANCE AND THE SICILIAN WAR, 1285-1294

The next pope was a very old man, Honorius IV (1285-1287). The ill-fated French expedition to Aragon had not, indeed, yet begun its march when he was elected (2 April, 1285); but although Edward I of England intervened immediately, [387] suggesting to the new pope that he persuade Philip III to halt the military preparations and that negotiations be opened with Peter of Aragon, the die was cast. Honorius, a noble of ancient Roman stock, [388] might well intend -- it would seem he did so intend -- to reverse his predecessor's policy, and to follow the ways of Nicholas III and Gregory X, working for peace by removing the causes of wars before these became impossible to control. He would hold in check the new powerful French combination, now master of France and southern Italy, by a constant support of the Habsburg emperor in Germany; and also, while, as a good suzerain, he supported the King of Sicily, he would carefully supervise his whole political activity. But the pope could hardly condone, out of hand, the Aragonese occupation of Sicily: it was by all the standards of his time, no more than a successful act of international piracy; nor could he, humanly speaking, have expected the King of France to abandon the profitable holy war against the pirates, now, upon the instant, and at his sole word. The mischief done by the alliance of Pope Martin with King Charles must, perforce, work itself out.

Had Honorius IV enjoyed anything beyond one of the shortest of papal reigns he might, however, really have achieved the aims of his peace-inspired diplomacy. For within nine months of his election the whole international situation altered very remarkably. Charles of Anjou had died and his successor, Charles II -- a feeble king indeed by comparison with his formidable father -- was a prisoner of war in Aragon; Philip III of France had met his tragic death at Perpignan, and the new king, Philip IV, had tacitly abandoned the crusade against Peter III; Peter III himself had also died, of his wounds (November 10, 1285), and had divided up his lands: [389] Aragon and the new conquest, Sicily, were no longer united under the one ruler.

Honorius made good use of his opportunity in southern Italy. Taking over, as suzerain, the actual administration, he decreed a general restoration of law and government such as these had been before the first Hohenstaufen kings had built there the centralised, despotic state that was a model of its kind. And the pope even began to show himself willing to negotiate with Aragon about Sicily. At the same time, in Germany, Honorius IV arranged to crown Rudolf of Habsburg as emperor, to set thereby a seal upon Gregory X's restoration of the Empire. Since Rudolf had refused to join the crusade against Aragon, and had protested against German church revenues being used for it, this great gesture would fix firmly before the mind of the time the papal determination not to be the tool of French ambitions.

But Honorius IV was already in his seventy-seventh year, and long before the date appointed for the coronation (2 February, 1288) he was dead (13 April, 1287); his diplomacy had scarcely begun to put the new situation to good use. With Honorius there disappeared the last authentic representative of the skilful diplomatic tradition that went back to Innocent III, the tradition in which the popes had managed the rival chiefs of the respublica christiana while yet contriving never themselves to descend into the arena of inter-state competition, and always to give to their action the authentic note of an intervention from outside all conflict. Martin IV had dealt that tradition a terrible blow; his immediate successor had not been given the time to repair it; now would follow two long weakening vacancies of the Holy See [390] and two weak pontificates; and when, ten years after the death of Honorius IV, there would come once more a strong pope, moved to remould his universe after the best thirteenth century tradition, the moment had gone by. Nor was that strong pope, Boniface VIII, gifted with the wholly impersonal zeal, and detachment from all but the good cause, which had been the essence of the success he so needed to renew.

The best papal interpretation of the pope's role as chief of the respublica christiana called for action that never passed beyond diplomatic practice backed by sanctions that were spiritual. But in a world where every temporal thing could be regarded as help or hindrance to spiritual well-being, and where, by universal consent, the temporal was subordinate in excellence to the spiritual, it had only been a matter of time before the temporal - - blessed and consecrated for the purpose -- was, in a score of ways, pressed into the service of the spiritual. With Gregory IX (1227-1241) and Innocent IV (1243-1254) especially, [391] the Holy See's use of such temporal things as armies, fleets, systems of taxation, banking and loans, had expanded enormously; its whole conception of its own authority and jurisdiction over temporal affairs had expanded too. By the time of Martin IV and Honorius IV the papacy had become a kind of supranational European kingship, and to quote as a description, if not justification, of their authority the text of Jeremias about planting and uprooting [392] was now a commonplace of the stylus curiae. So long as the papal policies were victorious, what criticism there was of these new developments remained, for the most part, underground. But the succession of disasters in the reigns of these two last popes was an opportunity the critics could not resist. All over Italy the Ghibelline tradition was flourishing anew after a generation of eclipse; and alongside it there flourished a lively revival of the spiritual teachings associated with the great name of Joachim of Fiore. [393]

The Incarnation and the Passion of Our Lord were not, according to this new evangel, the high point of the divine mercy to man, and the foundation of all that would follow. The reign of Christ was but a preparation for a more perfect dispensation, the reign of the Holy Ghost. This was now about to begin. There would no longer be a church; the pope would joyfully resign his power to a new order of contemplatives; the active life would cease, and all Christendom become a vast monastery of contemplatives, vowed to absolute poverty; the law of spiritual effort would cease and, the Holy Ghost being poured out in a new and perfect effusion of gifts and graces, the law of spiritual joy would reign unhindered. Pope, cardinals, hierarchy, systematic theology, canon law -- these would not only disappear but their very presence and survival were, at this moment, hindrances that delayed the coming of the new age. The first duty of the faithful soul, then, was to abandon them, to abandon the reign of Christ, to leave the bark of Peter for the bark of John, and so prepare the way for the coming reign of the Holy Ghost. [394]

These theories are destructive, evidently, of all that Catholicism has ever claimed to be, and destructive also of the whole civilisation which, then, was very evidently bound up with traditional Catholicism. For many years, however, the theories had found enthusiastic support in one section of the great order of mendicant preachers, vowed to live in poverty, that was the great legacy to the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. To those elements in the order who had looked askance at the new detailed regulations called for by the very expansion of the order, and to those who fought the introduction of systematic theological study for the preachers, and to all those -- and they exist in every generation -- who had joined the brethren to satisfy and achieve their own spiritual ideals (and after their own way) these anarchical doctrines were most welcome. Already, in 1257, the pope had had to intervene to save the order from developments that would have dissolved it into a chaos of spiritual factions. Under the general then elected to govern it -- St. Bonaventure [395] -- who was maintained in office for seventeen years, unity was slowly and peacefully restored and the "Joachimite" tendencies disappeared. But they had never been destroyed. Always there had been friars who remained attached to them, and the tradition of devotion to them had been carefully handed down through thirty years in more than one convent of Languedoc and central Italy. The obvious preoccupation of the popes during all this time with the paraphernalia of courts and governments was fuel on which the fire of these "Spirituals" fed greedily. For years they watched these developments and denounced them. In the present disasters to the causes favoured by the Holy See, they saw the manifest chastisement of God's hand, proof that their own theories were true, and the best of all encouragement to press on the attack and destroy the present church.

The "Spirituals" possessed at this time (1287) a leader of great intellectual power, personal charm, and known austerity of life, Peter John Olivi. He was still a young man, [396] and had been a pupil at Paris of Peckham and of Matthew of Acquasparta, the two greatest of St. Bonaventure's own pupils. Olivi was an unusually complex kind of Franciscan, for he was an "intellectual," a scholastic philosopher and theologian indeed of very high power, a "Spiritual" also, and, lastly, a subtle commentator of the gospel according to Abbot Joachim. From a very early age he was regarded as a force in his order; Nicholas III had consulted him when the great decretal Exiit Qui Seminat was in preparation. And then, four years later, in 1282, at the General Chapter of his order at Strasburg, Olivi was accused of teaching false doctrine. His Franciscan judges condemned several of his philosophical and theological theories and Olivi accepted their verdict, under protest that the Holy See had not condemned them. For four years thereafter he was under a cloud, but now, in 1287, his old master, Matthew of Acquasparta, had been elected Minister General, and Olivi was given a lectorship in the great Franciscan school of Santa Croce at Florence. One result of this promotion was a great revival of "Spiritual" ideals in Tuscany.

Still more important to the Spiritual movement than Olivi's personality was, seemingly, the sympathy professed for these friars by one of the leading figures of the curia, the Cardinal James Colonna. He was the lifelong friend and confidant of the pope, Honorius IV, and his contact with the Franciscan Spirituals came through his affection for his very remarkable sister, herself a Franciscan nun of the strict observance and known to us as Blessed Margaret Colonna.

All the old controversies about the real meaning of the rule of St. Francis now revived. Were the "Spirituals" the only real Franciscans? Had the pope any right to lay down rules which -- so the "Spirituals" maintained -- contradicted the will of St. Francis? And with these controversies, and the controversies and fantasies about Abbot Joachim's theories, there went a medley of speculation, preached and rhymed about everywhere, as to the approaching end of the world, the coming of antichrist, the manner of man he would be, and where he was to be looked for. A great internal crisis was evidently threatening. Unusual wisdom, and sanctity too, would be needed in the popes if these restless elements were to be converted to a re-acceptance of the traditional way to perfection, namely dependence on the supernatural forces which the Church of Christ was founded to dispense. Toxins long latent -- whatever their origin -- in the mystical body were increasingly active in the blood stream. How could they best be rendered harmless, and the members they affected be made healthy?

It was against this background of threatening chaos and revolt that the cardinals debated the election of a successor to Honorius IV. After eleven months they came to a choice, the cardinal Jerome of Ascoli, Pope Nicholas IV: the new pope was a Franciscan.

But Jerome of Ascoli's election promised little to such of his brethren as were tainted with the apocalyptic theories of Abbot Joachim. The new pope had indeed, for a generation, been a leading influence in Franciscan life, but not in the circles where Olivi was a master. After a brilliant early career, as teacher in the University of Paris and administrator, Jerome had been sent to Constantinople in 1272 as the envoy of Gregory X, charged with the delicate business of bringing the Greeks to take part in the forthcoming General Council. At Lyons he had appeared with the Byzantine ambassadors as a kind of liaison officer and when, during the council, St. Bonaventure, now a cardinal, resigned his charge as Minister-General of the Franciscans, Jerome of Ascoli had been unanimously elected in his place (20 May, 1274). Very suddenly, only seven weeks later, the saint died, and from that time onward Jerome had been the determining force of orthodox development within the order. It was he who, as Minister-General, had summoned Olivi to deliver up certain of his manuscripts and on reading them had ordered them to be burnt for the harmful theories they contained. Another friar to feel the weight of his severity was Roger Bacon who also, amongst other things, showed a passionate credulity about the Joachimite prophecies. It was, seemingly, by Jerome of Ascoli's orders that this now aged Franciscan suffered his last monastic condemnation and imprisonment.

Nicholas III (1277-1280) had made use of Jerome as a diplomatist and, in 1278, had given him the red hat. The new cardinal had, at the pope's command, retained for a time the general direction of the order and he had been the chief influence in the promulgation of Nicholas' great decretal Exiit Qui Seminat (14 August, 1279) which gave an authoritative decision about the real meaning of the Franciscan ideal of religious poverty, in the hope of ending finally the long disputes of fifty years. The next pope, Martin IV, made him cardinal-bishop of Palestrina, the city that was the chief centre of the Colonna influence; and from now on Jerome of Ascoli gave himself to the care of his diocese. History knows little more of him, in fact, until his unanimous election as pope eight years later.

The death of his predecessor, Honorius IV, in April 1287, had not, of course, halted the war or the wartime diplomacy. The long conclave which followed was a golden opportunity for all parties to develop new positions and advantages. The most striking success had fallen to the King of Aragon. It was his especial good fortune that he still held prisoner Charles II of Sicily, and the special opportunity for exploiting this was the proffered mediation of the English king. Edward I (1272-1307). If Charles II -- religious, conscientious, timorous -- is the one lamb-like figure in all this long contest, our own Edward I, caught between the rival duplicities of the Aragonese king and Philip the Fair of France, [397] shows an inability to appreciate the realities of the case which, in another, might also be taken for lamb-like innocence of the ways of wolves. Time and again Edward's political anxieties made him the tool of the astute Alfonso and so, ultimately, destroyed all belief in the bona fides of his arbitration and played the French king's game, giving the pope whatever justification he needed for favouring France rather than England.

The first fruit of England's intervention was the Treaty of Oloron (25 July, 1287). Aragon consented to release the captive Charles II -- who had already renounced his rights to Sicily -- on the hard conditions of an immense money payment, the surrender of sixty-three noble hostages (among them his three eldest sons), and the pledge to negotiate a peace between the two Aragonese kings [398] on the one hand, and the chiefs of the Franco-Papal alliance on the other, within three years: should a peace satisfactory to Aragon not be concluded King Charles was to return to his captivity or surrender his lands in Provence. The Papal legates, present at the conference, allowed the treaty to be signed without any protest. It was a quasi-surrender of all that the popes had been fighting for in the last five years.

The King of France, however, refused the offer of a truce, refused the hostages a safe conduct through his territory, refused all facilities for the payment of the indemnity. The college of cardinals, also, showed themselves hostile to the treaty, and when, seven months after it was signed, they elected Nicholas IV, one of the pope's first actions was to quash and annul it absolutely, to cite the King of Aragon to appear at Rome within six months for judgment, and to order Edward I to negotiate the liberation of King Charles on terms that the Holy See could accept (15 March, 1288).

[genealogy page 39" />

Louis VIII + Blanche of Castile =>Charles of Anjou K. of Sicily 1266-1285 & St. Louis IX 1226-1270

St. Louis IX 1226-1270 + Margaret of Provence =>Philip III 1270- 1285

James I of Aragaon =>Isabella & Peter III

Philip III + Isabella =>Philip the Fair 1285-1314

Peter III =>Alfonso III & James II

NB. Margaret, the wife of St. Louis, was also largely Spanish by blood

The vigour of the papal reply was promising. It was followed up by the negotiation, under papal auspices, of a treaty between France and Castile (13 July, 1288) in which the two kings pledged themselves to a new attack on Aragon in alliance with the Holy See, and, after some delay from the pope, by new concessions to Philip IV of Church revenues to finance the offensive (25 September, 1288). The Ghibellines had been too active throughout the summer for the pope to be able to maintain his first independent attitude to France. Pisa had opened its harbours to the fleet of de Loria. At Arezzo the bishop had gone over to the same cause. At Perugia there were like activities, and at Rome itself the city was preparing to welcome the anti-papal forces as it had welcomed Conradin twenty years earlier. The pope was at the end of his funds. The only way to wring a loan out of the French was by more concessions.

Meanwhile Edward I had renewed his diplomatic work with the Aragonese and, for total result, he had achieved a treaty [399] still more favourable to Aragon than the treaty the pope had annulled. But the English king had, this time, made himself responsible for the indemnity and the hostages, and Charles II had at last been set free.

A sad dilemma awaited him, for the pledged negotiator of peace walked into a world of friends determined on war in his support. The pope ordered him peremptorily to resume the style and title of King of Sicily. The King of France refused to listen to his argument, and sent him on to Rome with a protective escort of French knights. The pope, knowing now that France was really behind him, felt stronger than ever before. He excommunicated the Ghibelline bishops of Pisa and Perugia, and ordered the King of Aragon to give back the money paid over in accordance with the new treaty; also to surrender the hostages and to come to Rome by October 1 (7 April, 1289). Whereupon the Ghibellines in Rome rose, and after bloody street fighting drove out the pope. He fled to Rieti, forty miles to the northeast of Rome, on the very frontier of King Charles' realm and, undismayed by this local defeat, on Whit Sunday (May 29) in the cathedral there, he crowned Charles as King of Sicily with all possible pomp. Just a fortnight later the Florentine victory of Campaldino (11 June) broke the Ghibellines of central Italy. Success, it would seem, had justified Nicholas IV's bold initiative. This was the high-water mark of his reign. The full flood of papal favours was loosed for the King of France, praise for his devotion in resuming the task taken up by his father in 1285, still more financial concessions (to be wrung in specie from the clergy of France), the preaching once more of the holy war against Aragon.

In reality it was the French who had triumphed; and this aspects of events was by no means lost upon the chief hindrance to their domination in western European politics, Edward I. The King of England was necessarily interested in Franco-Spanish relations because he was Duke of Aquitaine. The fact that he was also, as Duke of Aquitaine, the vassal of the French king made his interest -- and above all his present intervention as mediator -- highly unwelcome to the French, an irritant that came near indeed to being a casus belli. Philip the Fair had not been able to prevent the arbitration, but the award had been so patently anti-French and anti-papal that it had crashed almost of itself.

Edward now approached his problem from a wholly different angle. To divert the pope from the approaching offensive against Aragon, he proposed a new expedition to the Holy Land. He had, months before this, taken the cross and sworn his crusader's oath (December 1288) and now he besought Nicholas IV to rally all the princes of Christendom and to fix a date for the armies to set forth. No demand, publicly made by a special embassy, could have been more embarrassing, at the moment, for the pope. But, as if to prove him right in his preoccupation with the problem of Sicily, de Loria chose this moment to land a Sicilian army on the Italian coast not ten miles from the papal frontier and to lay siege to Gaeta (June-July 1289).

Edward was, for the moment, most effectively answered; and a Neapolitan army moved out to besiege in turn the Sicilian army besieging Naples. And now came two astonishing reversals for the Franco-Papal plans. First a terrible thunderbolt from the East, the news that the Sultan of Egypt had suddenly moved on Tripoli, the second greatest stronghold still in Christian hands, and had taken it. To the English ambassadors' demand that, in the interest of the Holy Places, they should be allowed to negotiate a peace or a truce between the armies around Gaeta the pope could not now say no. And then Charles II -- just as his son Charles Martel had the Sicilians at the point of surrender -- took command of his army, not, however, to fight but to reinforce the pleas of the English. In the conferences which followed he renewed to de Loria his old renunciation of all claims on Sicily, barely three months after the pope had solemnly crowned him as its king. But Charles II was now well away from the pope, and had outdistanced the legates sent to watch his conduct of the negotiations. By the time they arrived de Loria was celebrating his triumph.

All this was a great defeat for the pope, for the new treaty set free the Sicilian fleet to aid the Aragonese. The chances of a successful war against Aragon had suddenly shrunk, with Naples out of the war and de Loria set free to repeat the feats of 1285. With the aid of Charles II the papal diplomacy turned to consider how most easily to make peace with Aragon. The plan finally decided on was ingenious. Charles of Valois, titular King of Aragon since Pope Martin IV's grant in 1285, to enforce whose right the popes had been waging this holy war, would surrender his claims. Alfonso of Aragon -- styled by the popes a usurper, but the actual sovereign, descendant and heir of the long line of Aragonese kings -- would, in return for this recognition, surrender all rights and claims to Sicily. Finally, Charles of Valois, as compensation for surrendering his rights to Aragon, would receive in marriage a daughter of Charles II of Naples who would bring him as dowry her father's hereditary lands of Anjou and Maine. Charles II was willing. It only remained to win the consent of Alfonso, and of Philip IV of France; and in the first months of the new year (1290) an embassy especially strong in personnel left Italy for France. The legates were the two cardinals who had been sent to Gaeta, Gerard of Parma, cardinal bishop of Tusculum, and Benedict Gaetani, the future pope Boniface VIII.

It was now, at all costs, most important that the brother kings of Aragon and Sicily should realise that the King of France actively supported the pope's plan. No one understood this more clearly than the king and, yet once again, he prepared to turn to the permanent advancement of the royal power in France the pope's present need of his support. Philip the Fair's opportunity lay in a dispute that had, for some time now, been raging in France between different bishops and the royal officials.

It was, once more, the bitterly fought question -- never finally decided with any finality in these centuries when all Europe was Catholic -- of the power of the king over ecclesiastics in temporal matters, and the question of the power in temporals of ecclesiastical lords over their vassals; but the conflict was, this time, to prove the greatest opportunity so far given to a new force in the public life of Christendom, to the lay jurist trained in the law of ancient Rome, the man whose political ideal was to create anew, in the person of the medieval king, the emperor of Roman legal theory.

It has already been noted [400] how one very important feature of the reform of Christian life associated with St. Gregory VII (1073-1085), a turning point in the history of civilisation, was his care to recover, by learned researches, the half-forgotten tradition of the ancient Church law. The development, from these ancient sources, of the new scientific canon law, which, by the time of Boniface VIII, was an almost essential instrument of Church government, was contemporary with a great revival of the study of the law of ancient Rome, as this is set out in the corpus of law books published and imposed by the authority of the Emperor Justinian (527-565). [401] How the two systems developed side by side, each influencing the other, so that from the schools of Bologna in the twelfth century came the first great canonists and the first great civilians too, is one of the commonplaces of medieval history. [402] One, most important, result of this renaissance of legal study was the civilians' discovery and development of the Roman conception of sovereignty, as Justinian's books set this forth.

The authority of the ruler, in the early Middle Ages, over his subject who was a free man was considered to derive from a personal relation between the two. It was a relation symbolised in the act of homage, by which the vassal swore to be true to his lord, and by which the lord was considered bound to protect the vassal. What authority over the subject thence accrued to the lord was limited by known and mutually acknowledged conventions. Nor could the lord, rightfully, extend that authority outside the acknowledged field -- say in the matter of exacting financial aids -- without the previous consent of the inferior.

But the civilian legist discovered in the Roman Law an authority that was a different kind of thing altogether -- the res publica, public authority. For the Roman jurist sees not only the thousand, or the million, men living together under the rule of the one prince, but, as a thing distinct from any of them, or all of them, he sees also their collectivity, a something superior to them all, and for the sake of which, and in the name of which, they are ruled -- the State (if we may, by many centuries, anticipate the modern term). It is this res publica that is the real lord: and even the imperator is its servant, even when he is using those extraordinary, final, absolute, sovereign rights that are the very substance of his imperium.

As the centuries go by, the delegation of X or Y to be imperator, and so to wield lawfully these sovereign powers, becomes but a memory, a formality; and then less than that, until, long before the time of Justinian, the emperor has become indeed, what a medieval jurist describes him, lex animata in terris. The State is already a postulate of political order, to which all else is subject; from which all rights derive; owing its authority to none, but itself the source of whatever authority there is; and now the emperor has become the State incarnate. Nowhere do restrictions limit him that derive from any contract with his subjects. Whether he make new laws, or impose new burdens, his right is, of its nature, not subject to their discussion. [403]

That the splendour of this sovereign omnipotence -- impersonal, imprescriptible, indivisible, inalienable -- dazzled those on whom it first shone forth from the long neglected texts of the ancient Roman jurists, is understandable. And for a time they all clung faithfully to the primitive faith that, upon this earth, there could be but one such source of rights. Princes might be many, but there could only be one incarnation of such sovereignty as this. To the one emperor all other kings must then, in some way, by the nature of the case, be subject.

But gradually, during the thirteenth century, legists in lands where the new emperors of these later times -- the anointed chiefs of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation -- possessed not a title of real authority, in the bitterly anti-imperial city states of northern Italy, for example, and in France, developed an accommodation of the theory of sovereignty, that would make, say, the power of the King of France over the French the same kind of splendid, impersonal, all-powerful sovereignty. The new maxim began to have legal force that all kings were emperors, in respect of their own subjects; [404] and of them too was Justinian's dictum held to be true that the prince's decision has force of law. [405] No sovereign prince needs to seek assent or confirmation, from any source, in order that his will may truly bind his subjects.

There are many more implications -- of very great importance for the history of the legal, political, and social development of medieval Europe -- in these principles as they are now being developed. But the interest of these developments for this chapter is in a type of mind which they produced, the mind of the lay jurist who was now to win the Catholic prince's first victory over the papacy and always, henceforward, to fight the princes' battles against the claims of the Church. [406] These developments produced, also, the new "climate" in which, more and more, the fight was from now on to be waged. Against the "common good" which the theologians preached as the criterion of just laws, the legist would now set his own criterion of the "public welfare"; and it would be roundly stated that, given so good a system of law, theology ceased to be necessary for jurists. [407]

This new conception of royal authority which the study of Roman Law began to produce, would, in the end, alter the whole relationship between king and subject. It also threatened to alter the whole relationship between king and pope. [408] Whatever its importance, helpful or harmful, for the civil life of a nation, it is yet, by its very nature, a conception inimical to such an institution as the Catholic religion. From its first appearance, therefore, it is an idea which the popes never cease to fight; and the papal preoccupation with this struggle is, henceforward, a main topic of Church history in every century; for no theory about the nature of their power is more welcome to ruling princes than this that their rights are absolute, once the ingenuity of the jurists has really adapted it to their use.

The reign of Philip the Fair is the time when the jurisdiction of the French monarchy makes its first notable advances on the jurisdiction of the vassal lord's courts, advances based on a principle of political theory -- that all institutions in the kingdom are subject to the king's jurisdiction -- and the campaign is conducted systematically by the professional, civilian, jurists in the king's service. When such advances met the jurisdiction of a lord who was an ecclesiastic they encountered opposition that was due, not to something merely local, but to the Canon Law, to a reality more universal even than the king's jurisdiction, a system of law that was likewise based on principle. There had been, in recent years, fights of more than usual importance on this matter between the royal officials and the bishops of Chartres and Poitiers. When, in the late autumn of 1289, after the Truce of Gaeta, the King of France took up again the question of subsidies for the war, he pressed for a settlement of these dangerous disputes about the rival jurisdictions. If the pope wished for effective aid from France he must not hinder the king's plans to preserve the monarchy and keep the nation united. Philip the Fair is using the pope's extremity to strengthen his position at the expense of ecclesiastical immunities that are centuries old. He twice, within three months, sent to the pope a formidable list of his grievances against the clergy and signified to him that these complaints came in the name of "the counts, barons, universities and communes of the realm." [409] It is not merely the king, the pope is warned, but the whole nation that demands a settlement favourable to France.

Also, it appeared, Philip was disturbed at the pope's apparent partiality for England. In England, too, the last few years had seen trouble between the king and the Church on similar matters of jurisdiction, but the English king had managed to enforce his will without unfavourable comment from Rome. Moreover, in this very summer when Edward's intervention had, at Gaeta, for a third time in two years, cut across the papal policy, Nicholas had appointed one of Edward's subjects and chaplains, Berard de Got, to be Archbishop of Lyons. Here there was indeed a powder-mine, and under the circumstances the nomination was, on the pope's part, an incredibly imprudent move. For Lyons, on the very borders of France, was nevertheless a free city within the jurisdiction of the emperor, and the sovereign in Lyons itself was the archbishop with his chapter. Of late, the Emperor, Rudolf of Habsburg, had shown a new kind of interest in the affairs of these Burgundian lands, and at Besancon he had intervened with an army. Never had it been so important for France that the Archbishop of Lyons should be friendly; and the pope's nomination of Berard de Got gave Philip the opportunity of claiming to be himself the sovereign of Lyons, and of stating, under a new set of circumstances, the case he was already building up in the disputes at Chartres and Poitiers. That royal case went to the very heart of things, the fundamental relation between pope and king, between Church and State; and it is a foreshadowing of the great storm which, in another ten years, was to rock to its very base the good relations between the two. The king's advisers make no secret that their aim is a strong, centralised, singly-governed state, nor of their enthusiasm for this ideal. And, something never before heard of in France, they now flatly deny that the pope has any jurisdiction in temporal matters outside the lands granted him by Constantine. For the king, they declare, within his own realm is sovereign everywhere. Here indeed was grave matter, threats veiled perhaps, but threats without a doubt, and from the papacy's sole effective supporter in its struggle with Aragon and Sicily; threats of such a kind that, by comparison, the revolt of Sicily was but a trifle.

Nicholas IV's first reply to Philip was to increase his favours; and in order to prove how impartial past severities on the question of jurisdiction had been, a special embassy was sent to England to lecture Edward I on his shortcomings and bid him make himself more pleasing to God in this matter before offering himself as God's champion in the Holy Land. But this did not suffice. Philip the Fair returned to the matter with a further list of grievances and stiffened his terms to Charles II very considerably. Little wonder then that Nicholas IV, stirred mightily, sent his two best diplomatists and legists to France, nor that they were absent on their mission for a good twelve months.

The French king agreed to the arrangement proposed for the reconciliation of Aragon. [410] At Tarascon, in the following April, Alfonso III too, after some hesitation, accepted the pope's offer, pledging himself to come to Rome and make his submission.

Between the dates of the two political negotiations, the legates had settled with Philip the Fair the dispute about ecclesiastical jurisdiction, after more than one stormy scene with the clergy in a national synod that sat at St. Genevieve in Paris for fourteen days in the November of 1290. A royal ordonnance announced the terms of the agreement. The king's contention that he was, for all his lay subjects, supreme in matters of temporal jurisdiction was accepted; and clerics who no longer lived a clerical life were recognised to be subject to him as though they were laymen. .

On the other hand the king expressly reproved, and condemned as excesses, certain procedures of his officials that cut across the exercise of the bishops' jurisdiction in temporals. The old immunity of the clergy from lay jurisdiction, outside cases that concerned fiefs as fiefs, was confirmed, and also their traditional immunity from lay taxation. It was a treaty where compromises seemed equal or. both sides, fair and reasonable. But the concessions made by the king are, too often, qualified by captious clauses, and the rights recognised to the clergy are set out in language that is vague. There is nowhere mention of any penalty for the king's officials should they return to their old practices; and the important question who shall decide and how, if king and clergy disagree about the meaning of the pact, is left without any means of solution.

For the moment, however, all seemed well, and with a year of busy and apparently successful diplomacy behind them the legates returned to Rome (February 1291). The King of France had been reconciled with the pope and was making ready for the new, and no doubt final, assault on the Aragonese usurper in Sicily. The King of Aragon had abandoned his brother to his fate, and was preparing his own submission and the reconciliation of his kingdom with the Church.

And then, once again, came news from the East that wrecked in an instant all that the pope may have thought he had achieved. (On May 18, 1291, the Sultan of Egypt captured Acre, after a three- weeks' siege; the last stronghold the Christians possessed in the Holy Land had fallen, the most luxurious and civilised city of the Christian world. [411]

Close upon this catastrophe came another unexpected blow. The King of Aragon died, on June 18. His successor was his next eldest brother, the King of Sicily, late so skilfully isolated from all help from the Spanish homeland. Sicily and Aragon had now a single ruler. And finally, to complete the tale of losses, within another month the papacy's one disinterested supporter in Germany was dead, the Emperor Rudolf (15 July). Nicholas IV had treated him shamefully enough. He had put off the promised coronation, at the very time when he was preparing to crown Charles of Naples, the tool of Rudolf's rival, Philip the Fair; and he had intervened in Hungary to annul Rudolf's grant of the kingdom to his son Albert, preferring to the German yet another French prince, Charles Martel, the King of Naples' younger son. [