Chapter XIII: Fall of the Hohenstaufen: Renewed Strife of Papacy and Empire

In the three preceding chapters the Holy Empire has been described in what is not only the most brilliant but the most momentous period of its history; the period of its rivalry with the Popedom for the chief place in Christendom. For it was mainly through their relations with the spiritual power, by their friendship and protection at first, no less than by their subsequent hostility, that the Teutonic Emperors influenced the developement of European politics. The reform of the Roman Church which went on during the reigns of Otto I and his successors down to Henry III, and which was chiefly due to the efforts of those monarchs, was the true beginning of the grand period of the Middle Ages, the first of that long series of movements, changes, and creations in the ecclesiastical system of Europe which was, so to speak, the master current of history, secular as well as religious, during the centuries which followed. The first result of Henry the Third’s purification of the Papacy was seen in the attempt of Gregory the Seventh to subject all jurisdiction to that of his own chair, and in the long struggle of the Investitures, which brought out into clear light the opposing pretensions of the temporal and spiritual powers. Although destined in the end to bear far other fruit, the immediate effect of this struggle was to evoke in all classes an intense religious feeling; and, in opening up new fields of ambition to the hierarchy, to stimulate wonderfully their capacity for political organization. It was this impulse that gave birth to the Crusades, and that enabled the Popes, stepping forth as the rightful leaders of a religious war, to bend it to serve their own ends: it was thus too that they struck the alliance—strange as such an alliance seems now—with the rebellious cities of Lombardy, and proclaimed themselves the protectors of municipal freedom. But the third and crowning triumph of the Holy See was reserved for the thirteenth century. In the foundation of the two great orders of ecclesiastical knighthood, the all-powerful all-pervading Dominicans and Franciscans, the religious fervour of the Middle Ages culminated: in the overthrow of the only power which could pretend to vie with her in antiquity, in sanctity, in universality, the Papacy saw herself exalted to rule alone over the kings of the earth. Of that overthrow, following with terrible suddenness on the days of strength and glory which we have just been witnessing, this chapter has now to speak.

It happened strangely enough that just while their ruin was preparing, the house of Swabia gained over their ecclesiastical foes what seemed likely to prove an advantage of the first moment. The son and successor of Frederick Barbarossa was Henry VI, a man who had inherited all his father’s severity with none of his father’s generosity. By his marriage with Constance, the heiress of the Norman kings, he had become master of Naples and Sicily. Emboldened by the possession of what had been hitherto the stronghold of his predecessors’ bitterest enemies, and able to threaten the Pope from south as well as north, Henry conceived a scheme which might have wonderfully changed the history of Germany and Italy. He proposed to the Teutonic magnates to lighten their burdens by uniting these newly-acquired countries to the Empire, to turn their feudal lands into allodial, and to make no further demands for money on the clergy, on condition that they should pronounce the crown hereditary in his family. Results of the highest importance would have followed this change, which Henry advocated by setting forth the perils of interregna, and which he doubtless meant to be but part of an entirely new system of polity. Already so strong in Germany, and with an absolute command of their new kingdom, the Hohenstaufen might have dispensed with the renounced feudal services, and built up a firm centralized system, like that which was already beginning to develope itself in France. First, however, the Saxon princes, then some ecclesiastics headed by Conrad archbishop of Mentz, opposed the scheme; the pontiff withdrew his consent, and Henry had to content himself with getting his infant son Frederick the Second chosen king of the Romans. On Henry’s untimely death the election was set aside, and the contest which followed between Otto of Brunswick (son of the Saxon duke Henry the Lion and of Matilda sister of Richard Cœur de Lion) and Philip of Hohenstaufen (brother of Henry the Sixth) gave the Popedom, now guided by the genius of Innocent the Third, an opportunity of extending its sway at the expense of its antagonist. The Pope moved heaven and earth on behalf of Otto, whose family had been the constant rivals of the Hohenstaufen, and who was himself willing to promise all that Innocent required; but Philip’s personal merits and the vast possessions of his house gave him while he lived the ascendancy in Germany. His death by the hand of an assassin, while it seemed to vindicate the Pope’s choice, left the Swabian party without a head, and the papal favourite was soon recognized over the whole Empire. But Otto IV became less submissive as he felt his throne more secure. Though he was a Welf by birth, he had no sooner received the imperial crown at Rome, than he retracted the engagements he had made, and proceeded to reclaim both the territories that had belonged to the Countess Matilda and the rights he had but just forsworn. The Roman Church at last deposed and excommunicated her ungrateful son, and Innocent rejoiced in a second successful assertion of pontifical supremacy, when Otto was dethroned by the youthful Frederick the Second, whom a tragic irony sent into the field of politics as the champion of the Holy See, whose hatred was to embitter his life and extinguish his house.

Upon the events of that terrific strife, for which Emperor and Pope girded themselves up once more, upon the narrative of Frederick the Second’s career, with its romantic adventures, its sad picture of marvellous powers lost on an age not ripe for them, blasted as by a curse in the moment of victory, it is not necessary, were it even possible, here to enlarge. That conflict did indeed determine the fortunes of the German kingdom no less than of the republics of Italy, but it was upon Italian ground that it was fought out and it is to Italian history that its details belong. So too of Frederick himself. Out of the long array of the Germanic successors of Charles, he is, with Otto III, the only one who comes before us with a genius and a frame of character that are not those of a Northern or a Teuton. There dwelt in him, it is true, all the energy and knightly valour of his father Henry and his grandfather Frederick I. But along with these, and changing their direction, were other gifts, inherited perhaps from his half Norman, half Italian mother and fostered by his education in Sicily, where Musulman and Byzantine influences were still potent, a love of luxury and beauty, an intellect refined, subtle, philosophical. Through the mist of calumny and legend it is but dimly that the truth of the man can be discerned, and the outlines that appear serve to quicken rather than appease the curiosity with which we regard one of the most extraordinary personages in history. A sensualist, yet also a warrior and a politician; a profound lawgiver and an impassioned poet; in his youth fired by crusading fervour, in later life persecuting heretics while himself accused of blasphemy and unbelief; of winning manners and ardently beloved by his followers, but with the stain of more than one cruel deed upon his name, he was the marvel of his own generation, and succeeding ages looked back with awe, not unmingled with pity, upon the inscrutable figure of the last Emperor who had braved all the terrors of the Church and died beneath her ban, the last who had ruled from the sands of the ocean to the shores of the Ionian sea. But while they pitied they condemned. The undying hatred of the Papacy threw round his memory a lurid light; him and him alone of all the imperial line, Dante, the worshipper of the Empire, must perforce deliver to the flames of hell.

Placed as the Empire was, it was scarcely possible for its head not to be involved in war with the constantly aggressive Popedom—aggressive in its claims of territorial dominion in Italy as well as of ecclesiastical jurisdiction throughout the world. But it was Frederick’s peculiar misfortune to have given the Popes a hold over him which they well knew how to use. In a moment of youthful enthusiasm he had taken the cross from the hands of an eloquent monk, and his delay to fulfil the vow was branded as impious neglect. Excommunicated by Gregory IX for not going to Palestine, he went, and was excommunicated for going: having concluded an advantageous peace, he sailed for Italy, and was a third time excommunicated for returning. To Pope Gregory he was at last after a fashion reconciled, but with the accession of Innocent IV the flame burst out afresh. The struggle filled and embittered the rest of Frederick’s life. It continued through the reign of his son Conrad IV, and proved fatal to his grandson Conradin, last scion of the great Swabian house.

The special pretexts which kindled the strife need not be enumerated: the real causes were always the same, and could only be removed by the submission of one or other combatant. Chief among them was Frederick’s possession of South Italy and Sicily. Now were seen the fruits which the first Frederick had stored up for his house when he gained for Henry his son the hand of the Norman heiress. Apulia and Sicily had been for some two hundred years recognized as a fief of the Holy See, and the Pope, who felt himself in danger while encircled by the powers of his rival, was determined to use his feudal right to the full and make it the means of extinguishing imperial authority throughout Italy. But although the strife had arisen out of territorial disputes, it soon assumed a religious character, it reopened every ancient fountain of hatred, and passed into a contest between the civil and the spiritual potentate. The time was one of intellectual upheaval and unrest: heresies were rife: the air was full of new doctrines. To this troubled or rebellious spirit Frederick, himself perhaps influenced by Muslim speculation, and certainly no dutiful son of the Church, made his appeal. The claim of the Papacy to control the secular power was met by a counterclaim on the Emperor’s part to exercise ecclesiastical authority—it would almost seem to create a new imperial Church of which he should be the head. Strange tales were told of his own beliefs and purposes. Some said that he sought to establish a new and better religion, that he deemed himself to be, like the Fatimite Sultans of Egypt, a sort of emanation from the divinity, and received nothing less than adoration from his followers. Others denounced him as an unbeliever who rejected the priesthood because they could no longer work miracles, who placed Moses and Christ beside Mohammed as impostors, who refused to admit as true anything that could not be proved from facts by human reason. Whatever ground these charges may have had, they inflamed the minds of men, and passion grew hotter than it had ever been in the days of Henry IV and Hildebrand, of Barbarossa and Alexander III. The Popes saw in Frederick the most dangerous of their enemies, because he struck at the root of their claims and sought to divert from them the allegiance of Christendom. They branded him as an apostate: they asserted that the Empire had been given to the Germans as a fief to be held from the Apostolic See, and declared that the power of Peter, symbolized by the two keys, was secular as well as spiritual. The Emperor appealed to law, to the indelible rights of Caesar; he claimed the right of reforming the Church against the will of the hierarchy, compared himself to Elijah rooting out the prophets of Baal, and denounced his foe as the Antichrist of the New Testament, since it was God’s representative on earth whom he was resisting. The one scoffed at anathema, upbraided the avarice of the Church, and treated her soldiery, the friars, with a severity not seldom ferocious. The other solemnly deposed a rebellious and heretical prince, offered the imperial crown to Robert of France, to the heir of Denmark, to Hakon the Norse king, succeeded at last in raising up rivals in Henry of Thuringia and William of Holland. Frederick died in the midst of his strife, ad 1250, and his son Conrad IV (associated with him in the Empire since 1237) survived him only four years. Germany was by this time a prey to anarchy, for Conrad had been occupied with efforts to save Italy. Manfred, an illegitimate son of Frederick II, maintained the contest there till his defeat and death near Benevento in 1266; and with Conrad or Conradin, son of Conrad IV, a gallant boy of fifteen who had crossed the Alps to assert his rights to Sicily (which the Pope had bestowed on Charles of Anjou), the house of Hohenstaufen ended.

Though this long struggle was a continuation of that which began nearly two centuries before under Henry IV, yet in this latest phase it is not so much the Teutonic Emperor who is attacked as the Sicilian king, the unbeliever and friend of Mohammedans, the hereditary enemy of the Church, the assailant of Lombard independence, whose success must leave the Papacy defenceless. And as it was from the Sicilian kingdom that the strife had chiefly sprung, so was the possession of the Sicilian kingdom a source as much of weakness as of strength, for it distracted Frederick’s forces and put him in the false position of a liegeman resisting his lawful suzerain. Truly, as the Greek proverb says, the gifts of foes are no gifts, and bring no profit with them. The Norman kings were more terrible in their death than in their life: they had sometimes baffled the Teutonic Emperor; their heritage destroyed him.

With Frederick fell the Empire. From the ruin that overwhelmed the greatest of its houses it emerged, living indeed, and destined to a long life, but so shattered, crippled, and degraded, that it could never more be to Europe and to Germany what it once had been. In the last act of the tragedy were joined the enemy who had now blighted its strength and the rival who was destined to insult its weakness and at last blot out its name. 1268. The murder, after his defeat at Tagliacozzo, of Frederick’s grandson Conradin—a hero whose youth and whose chivalry might have moved the pity of any other foe—was approved, if not suggested, by Pope Clement; it was wrought by the minions of Charles of Anjou.

The Lombard league had successfully resisted Frederick’s armies and the more dangerous Ghibeline nobles: their strong walls and swarming population made defeats in the open field hardly felt; and now that South Italy had passed away from a German line—first to an Angevin, afterwards to an Aragonese dynasty—it was plain that the peninsula was irretrievably lost to the Emperors. Why, however, should they not still be strong beyond the Alps? was their position worse than that of England when Normandy and Aquitaine no longer obeyed a Plantagenet? The force that had enabled them to rule so widely would be all the greater in a narrower sphere.

So indeed it might once have been, but now it was too late. The German kingdom broke down beneath the weight of the Roman Empire. To be universal sovereign Germany had sacrificed her own political unity and the vigour of her national monarchy. The necessity under which projects in Italy and disputes with the Pope laid each Emperor of purchasing by concessions the support of his own princes, the ease with which in his absence the magnates could usurp, the difficulty which the monarch returning found in resuming the privileges of his crown, the temptation to revolt and set up pretenders to the throne which the Holy See held out—these were the causes whose steady action laid the foundation of that territorial independence which rose into a stable fabric at the era of the Great Interregnum. Frederick II had by two Pragmatic Sanctions, ad 1220 and 1232, formally granted rights, already beginning to be rooted in custom, which were wide enough to give the bishops and nobles practical sovereignty in their own towns and territories, except when the Emperor should be present; and thus his direct jurisdiction became restricted to his narrowed domain, and to the cities immediately dependent on the crown. With so much less to do, an Emperor became altogether a less necessary personage; and hence the seven magnates of the realm, now by law or custom virtually sole electors, were in no haste to fill up the place of Conrad IV, whom the supporters of his father Frederick had acknowledged. William of Holland was in the field, but resisted by the Swabian party: on his death, in 1256, a new election was called for, and at last set on foot. The archbishop of Cologne advised his brethren to choose some one rich enough to support the dignity, not strong enough to be feared by the electors: both requisites met in the Plantagenet Richard, earl of Cornwall, brother of the English Henry III. He received three, eventually four votes, came to Germany, and was crowned at Aachen. But three of the electors, finding that the sums he had paid to them were smaller than those received by others, seceded in disgust, and chose Alfonso X of Castile, who, shrewder than his competitor, continued to watch the stars at Toledo, enjoying the splendours of his title while troubling himself about it no further than to issue now and then a proclamation. Meantime the condition of Germany was frightful. The new Didius Julianus, the chosen of princes baser than the praetorians whom they copied, had neither the character nor the outward power and resources to make himself respected. Every floodgate of anarchy was opened: prelates and barons extended their domains by war: robber-knights infested the highways and the rivers: the misery of the weak, the tyranny and violence of the strong, were such as had not been seen for centuries. Things were worse than they had ever been under the Saxon and Franconian Emperors; for the petty nobles who had then been in some measure controlled by their dukes, were now, after the extinction of several of the great houses, left without any feudal superior. Only in the cities were shelter or peace to be found. Those of the Rhine had already leagued themselves for mutual defence, and maintained a struggle in the interests of commerce and order against universal brigandage. 1271. At last, when Richard had been some time dead, it was felt that such things could not go on for ever: with no public law, and no courts of justice, an Emperor, the embodiment of legal government, was the only resource. The Pope himself, having now sufficiently improved the weakness of his enemy, found the disorganization of Germany beginning to tell upon his revenues, and threatened that if the electors did not appoint an Emperor, he would. Thus urged, they chose, in ad 1273, Rudolf, count of Hapsburg, founder of the house of Austria.

From this point there begins a new era. We have seen the Roman Empire revived in ad 800, by a prince whose vast dominions gave ground to his claim of universal monarchy; again erected in ad 962, on the narrower but firmer basis of the German kingdom. We have seen Otto the Great and his successors during the three following centuries, a line of monarchs of unrivalled vigour and abilities, strain every nerve to make good the pretensions of their office against the rebels in Italy and the ecclesiastical power. These efforts had now failed signally and hopelessly. Each successive Emperor had entered the strife with resources scantier than his predecessors, each had been more decisively vanquished by the Pope, the Lombard cities, and the German princes. The Holy Roman Empire might, and, so far as its practical utility was concerned, ought now to have been suffered to expire; nor could it have ended more worthily than with the last of the Hohenstaufen. That it did not so expire, but lived on six hundred years more, till it became a piece of antiquarianism hardly more venerable than ridiculous—till, as Voltaire said, it was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire—was owing partly indeed to the belief, still unshaken, that it was a necessary part of the world’s order, yet chiefly to its connection, which was by this time indissoluble, with the German kingdom. The Germans had confounded the two characters of their sovereign so long, and had grown so fond of the style and pretensions of a dignity whose possession appeared to exalt them above the other peoples of Europe, that it was now too late for them to separate the local from the universal monarch. If a German king was to be maintained at all, he must be Roman Emperor; and a German king there must still be. Deeply, nay, mortally wounded as the event proved his power to have been by the disasters of the Empire to which it had been linked, the time was by no means come for its extinction. In the unsettled state of society, and the conflict of innumerable petty potentates, no force save feudalism was able to hold society together; and its efficacy for that purpose depended, as the anarchy of the recent Interregnum shewed, upon the presence of the recognized feudal head.

That head, however, was no longer what he had been. The relative position of Germany and France was now exactly the reverse of that which they had occupied two centuries earlier. Rudolf was as conspicuously a weaker sovereign than Philip III of France, as the Franconian Emperor Henry III had been stronger than the Capetian Philip I. In every other state of Europe the tendency of events had been to centralize the administration and increase the power of the monarch, even in England not to diminish it: in Germany alone had political union become weaker, and the independence of the princes more confirmed. The causes of this change are not far to seek. They all resolve themselves into this one, that the German king attempted too much at once. The rulers of France, where manners were less rude than in the other Transalpine lands, and where the Third Estate rose into importance more quickly, had reduced one by one the great feudatories by whom the first Capetians had been scarcely recognized. The English kings had annexed Wales, Cumbria, and part of Ireland, had retained a prerogative great if not uncontrolled, and exercised no doubtful sway through every corner of their country. Both had won their successes by the concentration on that single object of their whole personal activity, and by the skilful use of every device whereby their feudal rights, personal, judicial, and legislative, could be applied to fetter the vassal. Meantime the German monarch, whose utmost efforts it would have needed to tame his fierce nobles and maintain order through wide territories occupied by races unlike in dialect and customs, had been struggling with the Lombard cities and the Normans of South Italy, and had been for full two centuries the object of the unrelenting enmity of the Roman pontiff. And in this latter contest, by which more than by any other the fate of the Empire was decided, he fought under disadvantages far greater than his brethren in England and France. William the Conqueror had defied Hildebrand, William Rufus had resisted Anselm; but the Emperors Henry the Fourth and Frederick the First had to cope with prelates who were Hildebrand and Anselm in one; the spiritual heads of Christendom as well as the primates of their special realm, the Empire. And thus, while the ecclesiastics of Germany were a body more formidable from their possessions than those of any other European country, and enjoyed far larger privileges, the Emperor could not, or could with far less effect, win them over by invoking against the Pope that national feeling which made the cry of Gallican liberties so welcome even to the clergy of France.

After repeated defeats, each more crushing than the last, the imperial power, so far from being able to look down on the papal, could not even maintain itself on an equal footing. Against no pontiff since Gregory VII had the monarch’s right to name or confirm a Pope, undisputed in the days of the Ottos and of Henry III, been made good. It was the turn of the Emperor to repel a similar claim of the Holy See to the function of reviewing his own election, examining into his merits, and rejecting him if unsound, that is to say, impatient of priestly tyranny. A letter of Innocent III, who was the first to make this demand in terms, was inserted by Gregory IX in his digest of the Canon Law, the inexhaustible armoury of the churchman, and continued to be quoted thence by every canonist till the end of the sixteenth century. It was not difficult to find grounds on which to base such a doctrine. Gregory VII deduced it with characteristic boldness from the power of the keys, and the superiority over all other dignities which must needs appertain to the Pope as arbiter of eternal weal or woe. Others took their stand on the analogy of clerical ordination, and urged that since the Pope in consecrating the Emperor gave him a title to the obedience of all Christian men, he must have himself the right of approving or rejecting the candidate according to his merits. Others again, appealing to the Old Testament, shewed how Samuel discarded Saul and anointed David in his room, and argued that the Pope now must have powers at least equal to those of the Hebrew prophets. But the ascendancy of the doctrine dates from the time of Pope Innocent III, whose ingenuity discovered for it an historical basis. It was by the Apostolic See, he declared, that the Empire was taken away from the Greeks and given to the Germans in the person of Charles, and the authority which Leo then exercised as God’s representative must abide thenceforth and for ever in his successors, who can therefore at any time recall the gift, and bestow it on a person or a nation more worthy than its present holders. This is the famous theory of the Translation of the Empire, which plays so large a part in controversy down to the seventeenth century, a theory with plausibility enough to make it generally successful, yet one which to an impartial eye appears far removed from the truth of the facts. Leo III did not suppose, any more than did Charles himself, that it was by his sole pontifical authority that the crown was given to the Frank; nor do we find such a notion put forward by any of his successors down to the twelfth century. Gregory VII in particular, in a remarkable letter dilating on his prerogative, appeals to the substitution by papal interference of Pipin for the last Merovingian king, and even goes back to cite the case of Theodosius humbling himself before St. Ambrose, but says never a word about this ‘Translatio,’ excellently as it would have served his purpose.

Sound or unsound, however, these arguments did their work, for they were urged skilfully and boldly, and none denied that it was by the Pope alone that the crown could be lawfully imposed. In some instances the rights claimed were actually made good. Thus Innocent III withstood Philip and overthrew Otto IV; thus another haughty priest commanded the electors to choose the Landgrave of Thuringia (ad 1246), and was by some of them obeyed; thus Gregory X compelled the recognition of Rudolf, who subsequently (ad 1279) admitted in a letter to Pope Nicholas III that the Germans owed the imperial crown to the Papacy. His son Albert I, anxious for the support of Boniface VIII against the German archbishops, made a similarly humiliating acknowledgement of the alleged right of transfer.

These admissions were, however, virtually recalled and the rights of the Empire strenuously asserted in the long and bitter conflict maintained against four successive Popes by the Emperor Lewis the Fourth. At the death of Henry VII, Pope Clement V, a Frenchman by birth, who had transferred his seat from turbulent Rome to Avignon, claimed for himself the Vicariate of the vacant Empire and claimed also a general supremacy over the imperial crown. His successor, Pope John XXII, while reasserting his claim to the Vicariate, summoned Lewis and his rival Frederick of Austria, both of whom had obtained some electoral votes, to submit their pretensions to his decision, 1316. and when Lewis refused, his resentment, accentuated by the Emperor’s opposition to his schemes for strengthening himself in Italy by stirring up enemies against the Ghibeline chiefs there, led him to form the plan of ejecting Lewis from the throne and transferring it to the French king Charles IV. John accordingly required the Emperor to resign the crown and shew himself obedient to the Holy See, without whose approval, it was insisted, no election was valid. Lewis protested and appealed to a General Council, but was promptly excommunicated, and his subjects declared to be released from their allegiance. Having by this time overthrown his rival Frederick, and finding that national feeling had been roused in Germany by the arrogance of the Pope, Lewis took courage, obtained a legal opinion in his favour from the University of Bologna, enlisted in his service a host of Franciscan friars who were embarked in a furious quarrel of their own with the Pope, and obtained the powerful aid of two of the greatest among mediaeval thinkers, the Paduan Marsilius and the English Franciscan William of Ockham. These men became his confidential advisers, and wrote pamphlets long enough to be called treatises on his behalf against the Pope. Stimulated by the counsels of Marsilius and John of Jandun, another bold spirit from the University of Paris, Lewis marched upon Rome and made friends with the Roman people, who thereupon summoned Pope John to return to his see, and on his refusal chose Lewis as their Senator. Extruding the Pope’s ally king Robert of Naples they named Sciarra Colonna Prefect of the City, and authorized him and three other syndics to perform the coronation. 1328. This accordingly took place. After the Emperor had, by a startling departure from precedent, received the crown from lay hands, he was consecrated by bishops whom the Pope had excommunicated. Thereupon Lewis (who had appointed Marsilius papal vicar in the City) and the Romans proceeded in a solemn parliament to depose Pope John (by the name of Jacques of Cahors) for heresy and treason, and as a ‘Destroyer of Peace.’ A Franciscan friar was chosen Pope in his place and crowned with the tiara by the hands of the Emperor.

These revolutionary proceedings, which could hardly have been attempted but for the absence of John XXII at Avignon and the disgust excited by his arrogance and greed, are doubly surprising as being carried through by a man whom his subsequent conduct shews to have been weak and vacillating. But it was rather to the weakness than to the strength of Lewis that they were due. He was in the hands of three strong men, one of them, Castruccio Castracani, lord of Lucca, a brilliant and unscrupulous Ghibeline leader, the other two, Marsilius and John of Jandun, uncompromising theorists, prepared to strike at the cardinal doctrines on which papal authority rested. Nor is it only as the boldest assertion of the rights of the Empire that the action of Lewis in Rome is memorable. It was also the one instance in which the Romans gave effect to their cherished doctrine that the transference of the imperial crown to Charles the Great had been their doing, the one instance in which the Teutonic power, allying itself with the Roman people, used their pretensions to be the fountain of legal right not only to supersede the Pope in his function of crowning the German king, but also to restore to them the function of choosing their own pastor, who in becoming bishop of Rome becomes also bishop of the whole world. To this point had the union of the ancient Roman law with the Aristotelian doctrines of the State brought the fiery scholastic champions of the secular power, who once and once only during the Middle Ages found an opportunity for putting their theories into practice.

As it was the extravagant pretensions of Boniface VIII and John XXII that had caused this reaction against their office, so the extreme measures taken by Lewis provoked in turn a reaction against himself. The Romans were fickle, as was their wont: Castruccio, obliged to return to Tuscany, and alienated from the Emperor, died soon afterwards, as did Sciarra Colonna. Lewis was forced to abandon Rome, and in 1329 the Romans solemnly abjured both Lewis and their antipope, who next year flung himself at John’s feet. Meanwhile the Emperor, having lost his hold on Italy, sought after his return to Germany to propitiate the Pope. John, haughty and inexorable, insisted on absolute submission. His successor, Benedict XII, influenced by France, was less peremptory but no more compliant; and Clement VI (1344-52) renewed the excommunication and required Lewis to admit that the Empire was a fiet of the Holy See. The German Estates, however, shewing more spirit than the Emperor himself, in two Diets held at Frankfort in 1338 and 1339, solemnly enounced and embodied in a Pragmatic Sanction the declaration that the Empire is held from God alone, and that the sovereign, once duly chosen by the electors, needs no confirmation or approval by the Pope. The electors in their famous conference held at Rhense in 1338 made a like declaration.

The writings of Ockham and Marsilius seem to have had considerable influence on opinion; and the book of Marsilius, entitled Defensor Pacis, is indeed one of the most remarkable treatises that remain to us from the Middle Ages. In holding that the ultimate source of power is in the people, Marsilius does not stand alone, for this position, sanctioned by the well-known doctrine of the old Roman law that the supreme authority of the Emperor springs from a delegation to him by the people of their inherent powers, is to be found in other mediaeval publicists. But he goes further, maintaining that the Church does not consist in any special sense of the clergy, but of all Christians; that a General Council stands above the Pope, that it ought to consist of laymen as well as of clerics, that persons of different religious opinions ought to be all equal before the law, and that the priesthood have no right to judge, much less to punish, heresy, since each man is answerable for his speculative opinions to the judgement of Christ only. Marsilius denies to the clergy the right to hold property (except what is needed to support life), as also any immunities or privileges outside their purely spiritual sphere of action, declares that Christ did not come on earth to establish any worldly power (regnum meum non est de hoc mundo), that the Pope ought not to have any such power,—the power of the keys does not imply it, for God alone can remit sins,—that the distinction of bishops and priests has no basis in the New Testament. He argues that St. Peter had no pre-eminence over the other apostles, that it is doubtful whether he was ever bishop of Rome, or even came to Rome at all, and that such authority as the Pope enjoys is due solely to the fact that Rome had been the old imperial city. No wonder that Pope Clement VI observed, after perusing the Defensor Pacis, ‘Never have I read a worse heretic.’

These doctrines struck at the root not merely of the particular claim made by John XXII, but of the whole sacerdotal system of the Middle Ages. Their enunciation coincided with the most extreme assertion of high Papalist doctrine ever made. Agostino Trionfo’s book on the Power of the Pope, dedicated to John XXII as the book of Marsilius had been to Lewis IV, claims for the Holy See absolute power over all secular sovereigns in all matters, temporal as well as spiritual. There is no appeal from him even to God, much less to a council, for his judgement is God’s. He may conceivably lapse into heresy, and, if so, he ceases ipso facto to be Pope, because spiritual life resides in faith, without which he is spiritually dead, as a corpse is not a man. But he is bound by no law except the Divine. He stands higher than the angels, and may receive the same sort of adoration as is rendered to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. He can at his pleasure depose an Emperor, appoint another, withdraw their functions from the electors, cancel any law issued by an Emperor or king, because he represents God upon earth with the plenitude of God’s authority.

In these propositions laid down by Trionfo, with the hearty approval of the Papal Curia, ecclesiastical pretensions may be deemed to have reached their high-water mark; and it presently appeared that the tide was beginning to turn. As the view which placed the Vicar of God little below God Himself came rather too late, for it went further than the opinion of Europe was now disposed to follow, so on the other hand the book of Marsilius came too early to have its full effect. Two centuries were to pass before the soil was ready to receive the seed which this precursor of Luther and Zwingli had sown. During those two centuries the Popes steadily declined in reputation and authority. Some of their moral sway over men’s minds was not while they dwelt at Avignon under the shadow of France. Still more was lost in the Great Schism which divided the Church for more than a generation (ad 1378-1417); and most of all was lost by the avarice and extortion—a cause of irritation to the clergy almost as much as to the laity—of which not a few pontiffs were guilty during this long period. After the middle of the fifteenth century the Popes, by this time firmly re-established in Rome, became more occupied with the building up of a temporal dominion in Italy than with the assertion of their authority over emperors and kings. So far indeed as the Emperor was concerned, they had the less need to trouble him, because Charles the Fourth had (ad 1355) abandoned to the Pope those territorial rights over Rome and Italy for which his predecessors had fought. No succeeding Emperor tried to make them good. The great Council of Constance, in which Western Christendom assembled under the auspices of the Emperor Sigismund, deposed two rival Popes, and obtained the resignation of a third, offered an opportunity which a man with the vigour and loftiness of Henry the Third might have seized to recover the influence of the imperial office and to use it for the benefit of the Church. But Sigismund was no Henry the Third; nor did any one after him essay the perhaps impossible task of correcting the abuses of ecclesiastical power. The Hapsburg Frederick the Third, timid and superstitious, abased himself before the Romish Court; and the long line of his Austrian successors has generally adhered to the alliance then struck.