by Will Durant
The excessive use of excommunication and interdict weakened their effectiveness after the eleventh century.105 Popes employed interdict, now and then, for political purposes, as when Innocent II threatened Pisa with interdict if it did not join the Tuscan League.106 Wholesale excommunications—e.g., for false returns of tithes due the Church—were so numerous that large sections of the Christian community were outlawed at once or without knowing it; and many who knew it ignored the curse or laughed it off.107 Milan, Bologna, and Florence thrice received wholesale excommunications in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Milan ignored the third edict for twenty-two years. Said Bishop Guillaume le Maire in 1311: “I have sometimes seen with my own eyes three or four hundred excommunicates in a single parish, and even seven hundred … who despised the Power of the Keys, and uttered blasphemous and scandalous words against the Church and her ministers.”108 Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair paid little attention to the decrees that excommunicated them.
Such occasional indifference marked the beginning of a decline in the authority of canon law over the laity of Europe. As the Church had taken so wide an area of human life under her rule when, in the first Christian millennium, secular powers had broken down, so in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as secular government grew stronger, one phase after another of human affairs was recaptured by civil from canon law. The Church properly won in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments; in most other fields her authority began to decline—in education, marriage, morals, economy, and war. The states that had grown up under the protection, and by the permission, of the social order that she had created declared themselves of age, and began that long process of secularization which culminates today. But the work of the canonists, like most creative activity, was not lost. It prepared and trained the Church’s greatest statesmen; it shared in transmitting Roman law to the modern world; it raised the legal rights of widows and children, and established the principle of dower in the civil law of Western Europe;109 and it helped to shape the form and terms of Scholastic philosophy. Canon law was among the major achievements of the medieval mind.
VI. THE CLERGY
Medieval parlance divided all persons into two classes: those who lived under a religious rule, and those who lived “in the world.” A monk was “a religious”; so was a nun. Some monks were also priests, and constituted the “regular clergy”—i.e., clergy following a monastic rule (regula). All other clergy were called “secular,” as living in the “world” (saeculum). All ranks of clergy were distinguished by the tonsure—a shaven crown of the head—and wore a long robe, of any single color but red or green, buttoned from head to foot. The term clergy included not only those in “minor orders”—i.e., church doorkeepers, readers, exorcists, and acolytes—but all university students, all teachers, and all who, having taken the tonsure as students, later became physicians, lawyers, artists, authors, or served as accountants or literary aides; hence the later narrowing of the terms clerical and clerk. Clerics who had not taken major orders were allowed to marry, and to take up any respectable profession, and they were under no obligation to continue the tonsure.
The three “major” or “holy orders”—subdeacon, deacon, priest—were irrevocable, and generally closed the door to marriage after the eleventh century. Instances of marriage or concubinage in the Latin priesthood after Gregory VII are recorded,110 but they become more and more exceptional.* The parish priest had to content himself with spiritual joys. As the parish was normally coterminous with a manor or a village, he was usually appointed by the lord of the manor111 in collusion with the bishop. He was seldom a man of much schooling, for a university education was costly and books were rare; it was enough if he could read the breviary and the missal, administer the sacraments, and organize the parish for worship and charity. In many cases he was only a vicarius, a vicar or substitute, hired by a rector to do the religious work of the parish for a fourth of the revenues of the “benefice”; in this way one rector might hold four or five benefices while the parish priest lived in humble poverty,112 eking out his income with “altar fees” for baptisms, marriages, burials, and Masses for the dead. Sometimes, in the class war, he sided with the poor, like John Ball.113 His morals could not compare with those of the modern priest, who has been put on his best behavior by religious competition; but by and large he did his work with patience, conscience, and kindliness. He visited the sick, comforted the bereaved, taught the young, mumbled his breviary, and brought some moral and civilizing leaven to a rough and lusty population. Many parish priests, said their cruelest critic, “were the salt of the earth.”114 “No other body of men,” said the freethinking Lecky, “have ever exhibited a more single-minded and unworldly zeal, refracted by no personal interests, sacrificing to duty the dearest of earthly objects, and confronting with dauntless heroism every form of hardship, of suffering, and of death.”115
Priesthood and episcopate constituted the sacerdotium, or sacerdotal order. The bishop was a priest selected to co-ordinate several parishes and priests into one diocese. Originally and theoretically he was chosen by priests and people; usually, before Gregory VII, he was named by the baron or king; after 1215 he was elected by the cathedral chapter in co-operation with the pope. To his care were committed many secular as well as ecclesiastical affairs, and his episcopal court tried some civil cases as well as all those involving clergy of any rank. He had the power to appoint and depose priests; but his authority over the abbots and monasteries in his diocese diminished in this period, as the popes, fearing the power of the bishops, brought the monastic orders under direct papal control. His revenues came partly from his parishes, mostly from the estates attached to his see; sometimes he gave more to a parish than he received from it. Candidates for a bishopric usually agreed to pay—at first to the king, later to the pope—a fee for their nomination; and as secular rulers they sometimes yielded to the amiable weakness of appointing relatives to lucrative posts; Pope Alexander III complained that “when God deprived bishops of sons the Devil gave them nephews.”116 Many bishops lived in luxury, as became feudal lords; but many were consumed in devotion to their spiritual and administrative tasks. After the reform of the episcopate by Leo IX the bishops of Europe were, in mind and morals, the finest body of men in medieval history.
Above the bishops of a province stood the archbishop or metropolitan. He alone could call, or preside over, a provincial council of the Church. Some archbishops, by their character or their wealth, ruled nearly all the life of their provinces. In Germany the archbishops of Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Magdeburg, and Salzburg were powerful feudal lords, who were in several instances chosen by the emperors to administer the Empire, or to serve as ambassadors or royal councilors; the archbishops of Reims, Rouen, and Canterbury played a similar role in France, Normandy, and England. Certain archbishops—of Toledo, Lyons, Narbonne, Reims, Cologne, Canterbury—were made “primates,” and exercised a debated authority over all the ecclesiastics of their region.
The bishops gathered in council constituted, periodically, a representative government for the Church. In later centuries these councils would lay claim to powers superior to those of the pope; but in this, the age of the greatest pontiffs, no one in Western Europe questioned the supreme ecclesiastical and spiritual authority of the bishop of Rome. The scandals of the tenth century had been atoned for by the virtues of Leo IX and Hildebrand; amid the oscillations and struggles of the twelfth century the power of the papacy had grown until, in Innocent III, it claimed to overspread the earth. Kings and emperors held the stirrup and kissed the feet of the white-robed Servant of the Servants of God. The papacy was now the highest reach of human ambition; the finest minds of the time prepared themselves in rigorous schools of theology and law for a place in the hierarchy of the Church; and those who rose to the top were men of intelligence and courage, who were not appalled by the task of governing a continent. Their individual deaths hardly disturbed the pursuit of the policies form
ed by them and their councils; what Gregory VII left unfinished Innocent III completed; and Innocent IV and Alexander IV carried to a victorious end the struggle that Innocent III and Gregory IX had fought against Imperial encirclement of the papacy.
In theory the authority of the pope was derived from his succession to the power conferred upon the apostles by Christ; in this sense the government of the Church was a theocracy—a government of the people, through religion, by the earthly vicars of God. In another sense the Church was a democracy: every man in Christendom except the mentally or physically defective, the convicted criminal, the excommunicate and the slave was eligible to the priesthood and the papacy. As in every system, the rich had superior opportunities to prepare themselves for the long hierarchical climb; but career was open to all, and talent, not ancestry, chiefly determined success. Hundreds of bishops, and several popes, came from the ranks of the poor.117 This flow of fresh blood into the hierarchy from every rank continually nourished the intelligence of the clergy, and “was for ages the only practical recognition of the equality of man.”*
In 1059, as we have seen, the right to select the pope was confined to “cardinal bishops” stationed near Rome. These seven cardinals were gradually increased, by papal appointment from various nations, to a Sacred College of seventy members, who were marked off by their red caps and purple robes, and constituted a new rank in the hierarchy, second only to the pope himself.
Aided by such men, and by a large staff of ecclesiastics and other officials constituting the papal Curia or executive and judicial court, the pope governed a spiritual empire which in the thirteenth century was at the height of its curve. He alone could summon a general council of the bishops, and their legislation had no force except when confirmed by his decree. He was free to interpret, revise, and extend the canon law of the Church, and to grant dispensations from its rules. He was the final court of appeals from the decisions of episcopal courts. He alone could absolve from certain grave sins, or issue major indulgences, or canonize a saint. After 1059 all bishops had to swear obedience to him, and submit to supervision of their affairs by legates of the pope. Islands like Sardinia and Sicily, nations like England, Hungary, and Spain, acknowledged him as their feudal lord, and sent him tribute. Through bishops, priests, and monks his eyes and hands could be on every part of his realm; these men constituted a service of intelligence and administration with which no state could compete. Gradually, subtly, the rule of Rome was restored over Europe by the astonishing power of the word.
VII. THE PAPACY SUPREME: 1085–1294
The conflict between Church and state over lay investitures did not die with Gregory VII and the apparent triumph of the Empire; it continued for a generation through several pontificates, and reached a compromise in the Concordat of Worms (1122) between Pope Calixtus II and the Emperor Henry V. Henry surrendered to the Church “all investiture by ring and staff,” and agreed that elections of bishops and abbots “shall be conducted canonically”—i.e., be made by the affected clergy or monks—“and shall be free from all interference” and simony. Calixtus conceded that in Germany the elections of bishops or abbots holding lands from the crown should be held in the presence of the king; that in disputed elections the king might decide between the contenders after consulting with the bishops of the province; and that an abbot or bishop holding lands from the king should render to him all feudal obligations due from vassal to suzerain.118 Similar agreements had already been signed for England and France. Each side claimed the victory. The Church had made substantial progress toward autonomy, but the feudal nexus continued to give the kings a predominant voice in the choice of bishops everywhere in Europe.119
In 1130 the college of cardinals divided into factions; one chose Innocent II, the other Anacletus II. Anacletus, though of the noble family of the Pierleoni, had had a Jewish grandfather, a convert to Christianity; his opponents called him “Judaeo-pontifex”; and St. Bernard, who on other occasions was friendly to the Jews, wrote to the Emperor Lothaire II that “to the shame of Christ a man of Jewish origin was come to occupy the chair of St. Peter”—forgetting Peter’s origin. The greater part of the clergy, and all but one of Europe’s kings, upheld Innocent. The populace of Europe amused itself with slanders charging Anacletus with incest, and with plundering Christian churches to enrich his Jewish friends; but the people of Rome supported him till his death (1138). It was probably the story of Anacletus that led to the fourteenth-century legend of Andreas “the Jewish Pope.”119a
Hadrian IV (1154–9) exemplified again the ecclesiastical carrière ouverte aux talents. Born in England of lowly parentage, and coming as a beggar to a monastery, Nicholas Breakspear raised himself by pure ability to be abbot, cardinal, and pope. He bestowed Ireland upon Henry II of England, compelled Barbarossa to kiss his feet, and almost maneuvered the great Emperor into conceding the right of the popes to dispose of royal thrones. When Hadrian died a majority of cardinals chose Alexander III (1159–81), a minority chose Victor IV. Barbarossa, thinking to restore the power once held by German emperors over the papacy, invited both men to lay their claims before him; Alexander refused, Victor agreed; and at the Synod of Pavia (1160) Barbarossa recognized Victor as Pope. Alexander excommunicated Frederick, released the Emperor’s subjects from civil obedience, and helped revolt in Lombardy. The victory of the Lombard League at Legnano (1176) humbled Frederick. He made his peace with Alexander at Venice, and once more kissed papal feet. The same pontiff compelled Henry II of England to repair barefoot to the tomb of Becket, and there receive discipline from the canons of Canterbury. It was Alexander’s long struggle and complete victory that made straight the way for one of the greatest popes.
Innocent III was born at Anagni, near Rome, in 1161. As Lotario dei Conti, son of the count of Segni, he had all the advantages of aristocratic birth and cultured rearing. He studied philosophy and theology at Paris, canon and civil law at Bologna. Back in Rome, by his mastery of both diplomacy and doctrine, and his influential connections, he advanced rapidly on the ecclesiastical ladder; at thirty he was a cardinal deacon; and at thirty-seven, though still not a priest, he was unanimously chosen pope (1198). He was ordained on one day, and consecrated on the next. It was his good fortune that the Emperor Henry VI, who had acquired control of South Italy and Sicily, had died in 1197, leaving the throne to the three-year-old Frederick II. Innocent seized the opportunity vigorously: deposed the German prefect in Rome, ousted the German feudatories from Spoleto and Perugia, received the submission of Tuscany, re-established the rule of the papacy in the Papal States, was recognized by Henry’s widow as overlord of the Two Sicilies, and consented to be the guardian of her son. In ten months Innocent had made himself master of Italy.
He had, on the existing evidence, the best mind of his time. In his early thirties he had written four works of theology; they were learned and eloquent, but they are lost in the glare of his political fame. His pronouncements as Pope were characterized by a clarity and logic of thought, a fitness and pungency of phrase, that could have made him a brilliant Aquinas or an orthodox Abélard. Despite his small stature he derived a commanding presence from his keen eyes and stern dark face. He was not without humor; he sang well, and composed poetry; he had a tender side, and could be kindly, patient, and personally tolerant. But in doctrine and morals he allowed no deviation from the dogmas or ethics of the Church. The world of Christian faith and hope was the empire that he had been named to protect; and like any king he would guard his realm with the sword when the word did not suffice. Born to riches, he lived in philosophic simplicity; in an age of universal venality he remained incorruptible;120 at once after his consecration he forbade the officials of his Curia to charge for their services. He liked to see the wealth of the world enrich Peter’s See, but he administered the papal funds with a reasonably honest hand. He was a consummate diplomat, and moderately shared in the reluctant unmorality of that distinguished trade.121 As if eleven centuries had fallen away, he was a R
oman emperor, Stoic rather than Christian, and never doubting his right to rule the world.
With so many strong popes in the fresh memory of Rome, it was natural that Innocent should base his policies upon a belief in the sanctity and high mission of his office. He carefully maintained the pomp and majesty of papal ceremony, and never stooped in public from imperial dignity. Sincerely believing himself the heir to the powers then generally conceded to have been given by the Son of God to the apostles and the Church, he could hardly recognize any authority as equal to his own. “The Lord left to Peter,” he said, “the government not only of all the Church, but of the whole world.”122 He did not claim supreme power in earthly or purely secular affairs, except in the Papal States;123 but he insisted that where the spiritual conflicted with the secular power the spiritual power should be held as superior to the secular as the sun is to the moon. He shared the ideal of Gregory VII—that all governments should accept a place in a world state of which the pope should be the head, with paramount authority over all matters of justice, morality, and faith; and for a time he almost realized that dream.