The Power Of The Popes Part 13

"The intolerable exactions, by which the court of "Rome has impoverished to such a wretched de- "gree the kingdom, shall cease, save in cases of "urgent necessity, and by consent of the king, and "of the Gallican church.

"The liberties, franchises, immunities, rights and "privileges, granted by the sovereigns to churches "and monasteries are confirmed."

5 "Nothing proves better," says a modern author, "the influence of superst.i.tion......than the number of crusades preached by order of Clement IV. A crusade into Spain against the Moors, whom they wished to exterminate; a crusade into Hungary, Bohemia and elsewhere, against the Tartars, whose incursions they dreaded; a crusade in favor of the Teutonic knights, against the Pagans of Livonia, of Prussia and of Courland, over whom they Wished to reign; a crusade into England against the barons, whom Henry III.

could not subject; a crusade into France and into Italy, to deprive the house of Swabia of the kingdom of Naples and Sicily; a general crusade for the conquest of the Holy Land. The crusaders were often opposed; they were loosed from the obligation to the one, when pressed to the execution of another; indulgences were distributed at the will of the pope; the expenses of the war exhausted kingdoms, and the pope's bulls kindled flames throughout Europe." - Millot's Elements of General History.-Mod. Hist. vol.

ii. p. 184, 186.

This act is so important, and does so much honour to Louis IX. that the Jesuit Griffet5 disputes its authenticity. We may oppose to Griffet, the authority of his brethren Labbe and Cossart;5 of Bouchel, of Tillet, Fontanon, Pinson, Girard, Lauriere, Ega.s.se du Boulay, in fine, that of all the jurisconsults, historians, and even theologians, who have had occasion to speak of the pragmatic sanction of St. Louis. But further, we see it cited in 1491, by the University of Paris; in 1483, in the states held at Tours; in 1461 by the parliament Charles VII. on the occasion of the pragmatic published by this king, expresses himself in these words: in 1440, by John Juvenal des Ursins,:

"You are not the first who has done "such things; thus did St. Louis, who is sainted and "canonized, and we must acknowledge he did well, "your father and others have approved it."

5 Note upon P. Daniel's History of France, vol. iv. p. 563

5 Concilior. vol. ii. Proofs of the liberties of the Gall. Church, vol. i. pt. 2. p. 28, 60, 66, 76,-pt. 3, p. 41, and, Real's Science of Government, vol. vii. p. 72.

There is, then, no room to doubt, that the most pious of the French kings was the most zealous defender of the liberties of the Gallican church; and this glorious resistance, which he made in 1268 to Clement IV. expiates the unfortunate consent that he gave to the treaty concluded between this pope and Charles of Anjou.

Thirty months elapsed from the death of Clement, to the election of his successor, Gregory X. Charles of Anjou profited of this interregnum to acquire a great authority in Italy; he aspired even to govern it altogether. Gregory X. who, perceived this, endeavoured to oppose four obstacles to it: a new crusade; the reconciliation of the Eastern church; the restoration of the Western empire, and the extinction of the factions of Guelph and Ghibeline. Since the death of Conradine, the discord of these factions was almost without object: it survived from habit and personal animosities, rather than from opposition of political interests. The Guelphs more powerful from day to day, were about re-establis.h.i.+ng the independence of the Italian cities, and perhaps reuniting under a head who was not to be a pope.-To provide against this danger, and to keep in check Charles of Anjou, Gregory X. confirmed the election of a new German emperor: this was Rodolph of Hapsburg, head of the house of Austria. This Rodolph renounced, in favour of the Roman church, the heritage of Matilda, and was nevertheless excommunicated, for having supported his sovereign rights over the Italian cities, and for having neglected to a.s.sume the cross. They at length became tired of these expeditions into Palestine, where the Christians, driven from the pettiest hamlets, scarcely preserved a single asylum. The Greek church, apparently reconciled to the second general council of Lyons, was not actually so for a long period. The most complete result of the pontificate of Gregory X. was the acquisition of the Comtat Venaissin, in which, however, the king of France, Philip the Hardy, reserved to himself the city of Avignon.

Nicholas III. annulled the oath taken to the emperor by the cities of Romagna; he obliged Charles of Anjou to renounce the vicars.h.i.+p of the empire, and the dignity of senator of Rome; he even incited Peter of Arragon to recover the kingdom of Sicily, which belonged by right of inheritance to his wife Constance. On which we must observe, that Charles had refused to marry one of his granddaughters to a nephew of Nicholas, and that this pontiff sprung from the house of the Ursini, had conceived the idea of dividing among his nephews the crowns of Sicily, of Tuscany, and of Lombardy, These projects did not succeed.

Martin IV. elected by the influence of Charles of Anjou, laid an interdict on the city of Viterbo, excommunicated the Forlivians, confiscated whatever they possessed in Rome, excommunicated Peter III.

king of Arragon, and excommunicated Michael Paleologus, emperor of Constantinople. A league of the Venetians, of Charles of Anjou, and the pope, had little success. Another crusade was undertaken against Peter of Arragon, who beat the crusaders: the Sicilian vespers, not without some appearance of justice, were attributed to this prince; a horrible ma.s.sacre, in which the French were the victims, in the year 1282, and which Martin IV. and Charles of Anjou might have prevented by a more prudent conduct.

When Celestine V. yielding to the advice of the cardinal Benedict Cajetan, had abdicated the papacy, this cardinal succeeded him, imprisoned him, and under the name of Boniface VIII., disgraced the chair of St. Peter, from the year 1294 to 1303. He excommunicated the family of the Colonnas, confiscated their estates, and preached a crusade against them. They were Ghibelines; Boniface, who had belonged to this faction, detested them for it the more. The pope answered in plain terms, that the Roman pontiff, established by providence, over kings and kingdoms, held the first rank on earth, dissipated every evil by his sublime regards, and from the height of his throne, tranquilly judged the affairs of men. You know, he writes, to Edward I. that Scotland belongs to the Holy See of full right. He treated Albert of Austria, elected emperor in 1298, as a usurper, summoned him to appear at Rome, and dispensed his subjects from their allegiance; but he menaced especially Philip the Fair, king of France.5

5 Bossuet Def. Cler. Gall. 1. iii. c. 33, 24, 35.

By the bull 'Clericis Lacos,' Boniface had forbidden, under pain of excommunication, every member of the secular and regular clergy from paying, without the pope's permission, any tax to their sovereigns, even under the t.i.tle of a gratuitous gift: Philip answered this bull by prohibiting the transportation of any sum of money out of the kingdom, without permission from under his hand. This measure at first seemed to intimidate the pontiff who, modifying his bull, authorised, in cases of pressing necessity, the contributions of the Clergy; but a legate soon arrived to brave Philip, and summon him to alter his behaviour, if he did not desire to expose his kingdom to a general interdict. This seditious priest was arrested; his detention set the pope in a rage.:

"G.o.d has appointed me over empires, to pluck up, "to destroy, to undo, to scatter, to build up and to "plant."

Thus does Boniface express himself in one of his bulls against Philip IV. That which is known by the name of 'Unatn sanctam,' contains these expressions:

"The temporal sword ought to "be employed by kings and warriors for the church, "according to the order or permission of the pope: "the temporal power is subject to the spiritual, which "inst.i.tutes and judges it, but which can be judged "of G.o.d alone; to resist the spiritual power, is "to resist G.o.d, unless they admit the two principles "of the Manicheans."

An archdeacon, the bearer of these bulls, enjoined the king to acknowledge, that he held from the pope his temporal sovereignty.

Finally, Bonifice excommunicated Philip: he ordered this monarch's confessor to appear at Rome, to render an account of the conduct of his penitent; he destined the crown of France to this same emperor, Albert, before treated as a criminal, but who now acknowledged by a written doc.u.ment.:

"that the "Apostolic See had transferred from the Greeks to "the Germans the Roman empire, in the person of "Charlemagne; that certain secular and ecclesiasti- "cal princes, hold from the pope the right of electing "the king of the Romans, the destined successor to "the empire; and that the pope grants to kings and "to emperors the power of the sword."

An euloguim is due to the victorious firmness of Philip, in opposition to these extravagancies: the commoners and the n.o.bles of France supported him; the clergy, though already imbued with ultramontane maxims, was led away by the ascendancy of the two former orders. The prelates at all times adhered to the king with a reservation in favour of 'the faith due to the pope', and thirty-four of them proceeded to Rome in defiance of Philip.

A letter of this prince to Boniface, VIII. commences with these words:

"Philip, by the grace of G.o.d, "king of the French, to Boniface pretended pope, "little or no greeting. Let your very great Fatuity "take notice, &c."

These insulting expressions, but little worthy of him who employed them, would have very badly succeeded, addressed to any pope who had at all less merited them than Boniface; but his pretensions really bordered on delirium, and he was altogether dest.i.tute of the political address requisite for their success. Three men, in the course of the thirteenth century, have checked the menacing progress of the pontifical power.

Boniface VIII. by disgracing it with his impotent excesses;5 Philip IV., in publis.h.i.+ng this discreditable conduct with unpunished insults; but above all, Louis IX. whose resistance, edifying like his other good works, had a.s.sumed against the worldly pride of the popes, the character and authority of the religion of Jesus Christ.

54 For the manners and religious opinions of this pope, see the pieces published by Dupuy. p. 523-560 of the Hist, of the dispute between Boniface and Philip the Fair. Many witnesses depose, that Boniface spoke with derision of the sacraments, of the mysteries, of the gospel, and even of the immortality of the soul. "We must,"

he said, "speak like the people, but we need not think like them."

Gregory VII. or Boniface VIII. would infallibly have excommunicated Louis IX.: the anathemas of the former would have been formidable, those of the latter could injure the court of Rome alone.

Boniface caused an ecclesiastical code to be compiled, which bore the name of 's.e.xte,' because it was considered as a sixth book, added to the decretals compiled under Gregory IX., by Raymond de Pennafort. This sixth book itself is divided into five, which correspond in the distribution of their contents with those of Raymond's collection, and embrace, with the decretals of Boniface VIII., those of his predecessors since the death of Gregory IX. When so many pontifical laws become acc.u.mulated in the several codes, ecclesiastical tribunals, of course, become requisite in order to apply them: episcopal courts therefore sprung up. Father Thoma.s.sin fixes their origin under Boniface VIII. and this opinion appears to us a more probable one than that which traces this inst.i.tution up to the twelfth century.

By officials, we understand, judges properly so called, attached to the cathedrals, and to the sees of archbishops, for the purpose of p.r.o.nouncing special, civil, or even criminal sentences: now this character does not sufficiently belong to certain dignitaries mentioned in the writings of Peter de Blois, and of which, in 1163, a council of Paris complained.-Furthermore, whether in the thirteenth or twelfth century, the era of the establishment of ecclesiastical courts is certainly long subsequent to the publication of the 'False Decretals,'

and to the corruption, of the ancient discipline of the church.

Legates, another instrument of the papal power, were divided into two cla.s.ses: the first, chosen in the very places in which they exercised their functions; the second, dispatched from the bosom of the Roman court, like arms extended by St. Peter, over the wide extent of Christendom. Among the former are also distinguished those who received an express and personal mission, and those who born, as it may be said, legates, held this t.i.tle from a privilege annexed to the episcopal or metropolitan see which they filled. Of all these various ministers, or commissaries of the pontifical government, the most powerful would always have been detached from their proper centre, if the very excess of their pomp and power had not too often humbled, in every kingdom, the prelates they came to eclipse and to rule. Their splendour, defrayed in each place by the churches, the monasteries, and the people, excited less of admiration than of murmurs; and even, after the third council of the Lateran had reduced them to twenty-five horses, they were still considered burdensome. It became necessary to dispose of sacred vases in order to make them presents; and to purchase at enormous prices the decisions, answers, favours, commissions, one had occasion to demand of them.

"The legations, says Fleury54 were mines of gold to the cardinals, and they usually returned from them loaded with riches."

Their avarice was so notorious and so unchangeable, that St. Bernard55 speaks of a disinterested legate as a prodigy; but their pride, more intolerable still, displayed too openly beneath the eyes of monarchs, the pretensions of the court of Rome, and provoked a signal resistance.

Very early these Legates 'a latere' became unacceptable in France, and it was ruled, that none should be received there, save when they should have been demanded and approved of by the king: this is one of the articles of the Gallican liberties.

55 4th Disc, on Ecclesiastical History, no. 11.

56 De Consider. 1. 4, p 4, 5.

The thirteenth century is that in which the popes arrived at their highest pitch of power: councils, crusades, anathemas, canonical codes, monastic orders, legates, missionaries, inquisitors, all the spiritual arms, re-tempered and sharpened by Innocent III. were, during this century, directed against thrones, and often triumphed over them.

Innocent bequeathed a universal monarchy to his successors: they have been unacquainted with the means of fully preserving this empire; but, in the year 1300, some small portion of wisdom had sufficed to Boniface VIII. to have been still the first potentate in Europe, and, notwithstanding the disgrace of this last pontificate, the influence of the Holy See still continued to sway that of other courts.

CHAPTER VII. FOURTEENTH CENTURY

THE residence of the popes within the walls of Avignon, from 1305 till subsequent to the year 1370, and the schism which, in 1378, divided for a long time the church between rival pontiffs, are the two leading circ.u.mstances of the ecclesiastical history of the fourteenth century; both have contributed to the decline of the pontifical empire. It is true that in leaving Italy the popes sheltered themselves from some perils: they removed from the theatre of the commotions which their ambitious policy excited or reanimated. It is also true that the apprehension of authorising, by so imposing an example, the wandering life of the bishops, was no longer worthy of restraining the sovereign pontiff: the time was past, in which sacred laws confined each pastor within the bosom of his flock; interests had amplified, had reformed these humble manners, and dissipated these apostolic scruples. But, to disappear from Italy, was to weaken the influence of the Holy See over the then most celebrated and enlightened country of Europe; it was to desert the post where they had obtained so many victories, the centre in which were united all the radii of the power they had achieved; it was to renounce the ascendancy which the very name of Rome conveyed, whose ancient glory was reflected on the modem pontificates that seemed to continue it; it was, in fine, to discontent the Italians, to deprive them of the last remains of their ancient consequence, and, by private rivalries, to prepare the way for a general schism. We may be astonished that this consequence should have been deferred for seventy years; but it was inevitable; and this schism, in exposing publicly the ambition of the pontiffs, in placing before the eyes of the mult.i.tude the picture of their scandalous quarrels, in revealing, by their reciprocal recriminations, the secret of their vices, dissipated for ever the illusion with which the power of their predecessors was environed.

The sojourn of the popes in the Comtat Venaissin, evinces at least that the pope could dispense with a residence in Rome; and many other proofs unite here to demonstrate, that any other city could become the seat of the first pastor of the church. To fix the papacy to a geographical point would be, to cut it off from the number of inst.i.tutions necessary to Christianity; for it is, without doubt, impossible that an essential article in the gospel establishment should depend on any particular locality, changeable at the will of a thousand circ.u.mstances.

Not one word in the gospel, or in the writings of the apostles points out the city of Rome as the indispensible metropolis of Christianity.

There is no spot upon earth, where one may not be, a Christian, bishop, patriarch, or pope. But this demi-theological discussion exceeds the limits of our subject: let us return to the popes of Avignon.

To throw a light on this portion of the history of the papacy, and to compensate for the details which would occupy too much s.p.a.ce here, we shall present in the first place, a slight sketch of the political revolutions of the fourteenth century.

In the East, the Turks were masters of Palestine. Ottoman, their head, founded the empire which bears his name; he turned to account the discord of the Persians, the Saracens, and the Greeks; he deprived them of Asiatic, and European provinces. The throne of Constantinople verged towards its ruin; seditions menaced it in the city, conspiracies encompa.s.sed it in the court; and the sons of the emperor were frequently the conspirators against him. The Russians were as yet barbarous; but in Denmark, Valdemar, taught by adversity, did honour to, and established the throne. Under his daughter Margaret, Sweden and Norway, formed with Denmark, but one monarchy. Poland, agitated for a long time by the Teutonic knights, respired under Casimir III. The English deposed Edward II., seconded the activity of Edward III,, and condemned and banished the proscriber Richard. In Spain, Peter the Cruel perished at the age of thirty-five, the victim of Henry Transtamare who succeeded him. In France, Philip the Fair had for successors his three sons, Louis X., Philip the Long, and Charles IV., weak princes, and dupes of their barbarous courtiers. After them, Philip of Valois, and John his unfortunate son, supported against the English an unsuccessful war: in vain did Charles V. devote himself to the reparation of so many evils; they recommenced with aggravations during the minority of Charles VI., continued during his derangement, during his whole reign, which was prolonged into the fifteenth century.

Since the Sicilian vespers, Sicily had remained subject to the king of Arragon, Peter III., who, in spite of the anathemas of Rome, transmitted it to his descendants; from the year 1262, Charles of Anjou had only reigned over Naples. Robert, the grandson of Charles, contributed in a singular degree to fix the popes in Avignon: he thus preserved a more immediate influence over the Guelphs, over Florence, over Genoa, and the other cities which belonged to this faction. The Holy See had clothed Robert with the t.i.tle of vicar imperial in Italy during the vacancy of the empire; and, when the emperors Henry VII. and Louis of Bavaria restored once mort the Ghibeline party, Robert served as a counterpoise.

Joanna, his grand-daughter, married the king of Hungary, Andrew, whom she is accused of having murdered; she herself died the victim of Charles Durazzo, who, fixing himself after her on the throne of Naples, transmitted it to his own children Ladislaus and Joanna II.

The exterior power of the Venetians rose or fell, their territories were extended or confined, according to the various success of their eternal wars with Hungary and Genoa. They took Smyrna and Treviso; they lost a part of Dalmatia; they made themselves masters of Verona, of Vicenza, and of Padua; they possessed, but could not preserve Ferrara: but they maintained and consolidated the the aristocratical government which Gradenigo had given them, and punished the attempted alteration by Salieri. Liguria, on the contrary, hara.s.sed for ages by intestine changes, presented in the fourteenth century a spectacle fickle as ever: we behold her obeying in succession a captain, two captains, sometimes Genoese, sometimes foreigners; a council of twelve, of twenty-four; a mayor; a doge: and, in the intervals of these ephemeral governments, receive or reject the yoke of the emperor, of the pope, of the king of France, or of the lord of Milan. This last t.i.tle at this time belonged to the family of Visconti. From the thirteenth century, an archbishop of Milan, Otho Visconti, had become lord of this city, and had obtained for his nephew Matthew the t.i.tle of vicar imperial of Lombardy. Matthew, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a.s.sociated with himself his son Galeas. Overthrown by the Torriani, restored by Henry VII., and upheld by Louis of Bavaria, the Visconti resisted the pope, the king of Naples, the Florentines, and the whole Guelphic party. After the emperor Venceslas had bestowed on one of these Visconti, John Galeas, the t.i.tle of Duke of Milan, they became powerful enough to defend themselves against the head of the empire himself. When Robert, the successor of Venceslas, wished to deprive them of the cities of which they had become masters, a decisive battle in 1401, confirmed their possession and r.e.t.a.r.ded their fall.

The emperors of the fourteenth century were, Albert of Austria, whose yoke the Helvetians shook off; Henry VII. of Luxemburgh, who, during a reign of five years, began to shed some l.u.s.tre on the imperial crown; Louis of Bavaria, the restless enemy of the popes; Charles IV. or of Luxemburgh, their creature; and his son Venceslas, a vindictive monarch, deposed in 1400. Robert belongs more pro-properly to the fifteenth century.