§ 96.18. King Philip Augustus II. of France, had inA.D.1193 married the Danish princess Ingeborg, but divorced her inA.D.1196, and married the beautiful Duchess Agnes of Meran. Innocent compelled him inA.D.1200 to put her away by issuing against him an interdict, but it was only inA.D.1213 that he again took back Ingeborg as his legitimate wife.—From far off Spain the young king Peter of Arragon went inA.D.1204 to Rome, laid down his crown as a sacred gift upon the tomb of the chief of the apostles, and voluntarily undertook the payment of a yearly tribute to the Holy See. In the same year a crusading army, by founding a Latin empire in Constantinople, brought the schismatical East to the feet of the pope (§94, 4). In England, when the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant, the chapter filled it by electing their own superior Reginald. This choice they had soon cause to rue. They therefore annulled their election, and at the wish of the usurping king John Lackland made choice of John, bishop of Norwich.Innocent refused to confirm their action, and persuaded certain members of the chapter staying in Rome to choose the cardinal priest Stephen Langton, whose election he immediately confirmed.279When the king refused to recognise this appointment, and on an interdict being threatened swore that he would drive all priests who should obey it out of the country, the pope issued it inA.D.1208 against all England, excommunicated the king, and finally, inA.D.1212, released all his subjects from their oath of allegiance and deposed the monarch, while he commissioned Philip Augustus of France to carry the sentence into effect. John, now as cringing and terrified as before he had been proud and despotic, humbled himself in the dust, and at Dover, inA.D.1213, placed kingdom and crown at the feet of the papal legate Pandulf, and received it from his hands as a papal fief, undertaking to pay twice a year the tribute imposed. But inA.D.1214 the English nobles extorted from their cowardly tyrant as a safeguard against lordly wilfulness and despotism the famousMagna Charta, against which the pope protested, threatening excommunication and promising legitimate redress of their grievances, though in consequence of confusion caused by the breaking out again of the civil wars he was unable to enforce his protest. And now his days were drawing to an end. At the famousFourth Lateran Council ofA.D.1215, more than 1,500 prelates from all the countries of Christendom, along with the ambassadors of almost all Christian kings, princes and free cities, gave him homage as the representative of God on earth, as visible Head of the Church, and supreme lord and judge of all princes and peoples. A few months later he died.—As in Italy and Germany, in France and England, he had also in all other states of the Christian world, in Spain and Portugal, in Poland, Livonia and Sweden, in Constantinople and Bulgaria, shown himself capable of controlling political as well as ecclesiastical movements, arranging and smoothing down differences, organizing and putting into shape what was tending to disorder. Some conception of his activity may be formed from the 5,316 extant decretals of the eighteen years of his pontificate.§ 96.19.The Times of Frederick II. and his Successors,A.D.1215-1268.—Frederick II.,280A.D.1215-1250, contrary to the Hohenstaufen custom, had not only agreed to the partition of Sicily from the empire in favour of his son Henry, but also renewed the agreements previously entered into with the pope by Otto IV. He even increased the papal possessions by ceding Ancona, and still further at his coronation at Aachen he showed his goodwill by undertaking a crusade. He also allowed this same Henry who became king of Sicily as a vassal of the pope, to be elected king of the Romans inA.D.1220, and then began his journey to Rome to receive imperial coronation. The new popeHonorius III.,A.D.1216-1227, formerly Frederick’s tutor and even still entertaining for him a fatherly affection, exacted from him a solemn renewal of his earlier promises. But instead of returning to Germany, Frederick started for Sicily in order to make it the basis of operations for the future carrying out of the ideas of his father and grandfather. The peace-loving pope constantly urged him to fulfil his promise of fitting out a crusade. But it was only after his successorGregory IX.,A.D.1227-1241, a high churchman of the stamp of Gregory VII. and Innocent III., urged the matter with greater determination, that Frederick actually embarked. He turned back, however, as soon as an epidemic broke out in the ships, but he did not himself escape the contagion, and died three days after. InA.D.1227 the pope had in a senseless passion hurled an anathema against him, and, in an encyclical to all the bishops, painted the emperor’s ingratitude and breach of faith in the darkest colours. The emperor on his part, in a manifesto justifying himself addressed to the princes and people of Europe, had quite as unsparingly lashed the worldliness of the church, the corruption, presumption and self-seeking of the papacy, and then inA.D.1228 he again undertook the postponed crusade (§94, 5). The pope’s curse followed “the pirate” to the very threshold of the Holy Sepulchre, and a papal crusading force made a raid upon Southern Italy. Frederick therefore hastened his return, landed inA.D.1229 in Apulia, and entered into negotiations for peace, to which, however, the pope agreed only inA.D.1230, when the emperor’s victoriously advancing troops threatened him with the loss of the States of the Church. In consequence of the pope’s continued difficulties with his Romans, who drove him three times out of the city, Frederick had frequent opportunities of showing himself serviceable to the pope by giving direct aid or mediating in his favour. Nevertheless he continually conspired with the rebellious Lombards, and inA.D.1239 renewed the ban against the emperor. The pope who had hitherto only charged Frederick with a tendency to freethinking, as well as an inclination to favour the Saracens (§95, 1), and to maintain friendly intercourse with the Syrian sultans, now accused him of flippant infidelity. The emperor, it was said, had among other things declared that the birth of the Saviour by a virgin was a fable, and that Jesus, Moses and Mohammed were the three greatest impostors the world had ever seen,—a form of unbelief which spread very widely in consequence of the crusades. Manifestoes and counter-manifestoes sought to outdo one another in their violence. And while the wild hordes of the Mongols were overspreading unopposed the whole of Eastern Europe, the emperor’s troops were victoriously pressing forward to the gates of Rome, and his ships were preventing the meeting of the council summoned against him by catching the prelates who in spite of his prohibition were hastening to it. The pope died inA.D.1241, and was followed in seventeen days by his successor Cœlestine IV.§ 96.20. For almost two years the papal chair remained vacant. Then this position was won byInnocent IV.,A.D.1243-1254, who as cardinal had been friendly to the emperor, but as pope was a most bitter enemy to him and to his house. The negotiations about the removal of the ban were broken off, and Innocent escaped to France, where at theFirst Lyonese or 13th Œcumenical Council ofA.D.1245, attended by scarcely any but Frenchmen and Spaniards, he renewed the excommunication of the emperor, and declared him as a blasphemer and robber of the church deprived of his throne. Once again with the most abject humility Frederick sued for reconciliation with the church. The pope, however, wished not for reconciliation, but the destruction of the whole “viper brood” of the Hohenstaufens. But the rival king, Henry Raspe of Thuringia, set up by the papal party in Germany, and William of Holland, who was put forward after his death inA.D.1247, could not maintain their position against Frederick’s son, Conrad IV., who as early asA.D.1235 had been elected in place of his rebel brother Henry as king of the Romans. Even in Italy the fortune of war favoured at first the imperial arms. At the siege of Parma, which was disloyal, the tide began to turn. The sorely pressed citizens made a sally inA.D.1248, while Frederick was away at a hunt, and roused to courage by despair, put his army to flight. His brave son, Enzio, king of Sardinia and governor of Northern Italy, fell inA.D.1249 into the hands of the Bolognese, and was subjected to a life-long imprisonment. Frederick himself inA.D.1250 closed his active life in the south in the arms of his son Manfred. The pope then returned to Italy, in order to take possession of the Sicilian kingdom, which he claimed as a papal fief. But inA.D.1251Conrad IV., summoned by Manfred, hasted thither from Germany, subdued Apulia, conquered Naples, and was resolved to lay hands on the person of the pope himself, who had also excommunicated him, when his career was stopped by death inA.D.1254, in his twenty-sixth year. On behalf of Conrad’s two-year-old son, Conradin, who had been born in Germany after his father’s departure, Manfred undertook the regency in Southern Italy, but found himself obliged to acknowledge the pope’s suzerainty. Nevertheless the pope was determined to have him also overthrown. Manfred, however, escaped in time to the Saracenic colony of Luceria, and with its help utterly defeated the papal troops sent out against him. Five days after Innocent IV. died,Alexander IV.,A.D.1254-1261, although without his predecessor’s ability, sought still to continue his work. He could not, however, either by ban or by war prevent Manfred, who on the report of Conradin’s death had had himself crowned, from extending the power and prestige of his kingdom farther and farther into the north.Urban IV.,A.D.1261-1264, a Frenchman by birth, son of a shoemaker of Troyes, took up with all his heart the heritage of hate against the Hohenstaufens, and inA.D.1263 invited Charles of Anjou, the youngest brother of Louis IX. of France, to win by conquest the Sicilian crown. While the prince was preparing for the campaign Urban died. His successor,Clement IV.,A.D.1265-1268, also a Frenchman, could not but carry out what his predecessor had begun. Charles, whom the Romans without the knowledge of the pope had elected their senator, proceeded inA.D.1265 into Italy, took the vassal oath of fealty, and was crowned as Charles I.,A.D.1265-1285, king of the two Sicilies. Treachery opened up his way into Naples. Manfred fell inA.D.1266 in the battle of Benevento; and Conradin, whom the Ghibellines had called in as a deliverer of Italy, after the disastrous battle of Tagliacozzo inA.D.1268, died on the scaffold in his sixteenth year.§ 96.21.The Times of the House of Anjou down to Boniface VIII.,A.D.1288-1294.—The papacy had emerged triumphantly from its hundred years’ struggle with the Hohenstaufens, and by the overthrow of this powerful house Germany was thrown into the utmost confusion and anarchy. But Italy, too, was now in a condition of extreme disorder, and the unconscionable tyrants of Naples subjected it to a much more intolerable bondage than those had done from whom they pretended to have delivered it. After the death of Clement IV. the Holy See remained vacant for three years. The cardinals would not elect such a pope as would be agreeable to Charles I. During this papal vacancy Louis IX. of France,A.D.1226-1270, fitted out the seventh and last crusade (§94, 6), from which he was not to return. As previously he had reformed the administration of justice, he now before his departure introduced drastic reforms in the ecclesiastical institutions of his kingdom, which laid the first foundations of the celebrated “Gallican Liberties.” Clement IV. gave occasion for such procedure on the part of the monarch who was a model of piety after the standard of those times, by claiming inA.D.1266 for the papal chair theplenaria dispositioof all prebends and benefices. In opposition to this assumption the king secured by a Pragmatic Sanction ofA.D.1269 to all churches and monasteries of his realm unconditional freedom of all elections and presentations according to old existing rights, confirmed to them anew all privileges and immunities previously granted them, forbade every form of simony as a heinous crime, and prohibited all extraordinary taxation of church property on the part of the Roman curia.—At last the cardinals took courage and electedGregory X.,A.D.1271-1276, an Italian of the noble house of Visconti. The desolating interregnum in Germany was also put an end to by the election ofCount Rudolf of Hapsburg,A.D.1273-1291, as king of the Germans. At theSecond Lyonese or 14th Œcumenical Council ofA.D.1274, the worthy pope continued his endeavours without avail to rouse the flagging enthusiasm of the princes so as to get them to undertake another crusade. The union with the Greek church did not prove of an enduring kind (§ 67, 4). The constitution, too, sanctioned at the council, which provided, in order to prevent prolonged vacancies in the papal see, that the election of pope should not only be proceeded with in immured conclaves in the place where the deceased pope last resided with the curia, but also (though this was again abrogated inA.D.1351 by a decree of Clement VI.) should be expedited by limiting the supply of food after three days to one dish, after other five days to water, wine, and bread. Yet this completely failed to secure the object desired. More successful, however, were the negotiations carried on at Lyons with the ambassadors of the new German king. Rudolf, in entering upon his government, renewed all the concessions made by Otto IV. and Frederick II., renounced all imperial claims upon Rome and the States of the Church, with the exception of the possessions of Matilda, and abandoned all pretension to Sicily. The pope on his part acknowledged him as king of the Romans and undertook to crown him emperor in Rome, where this agreement was to be formally ratified and signed. But Gregory died before arrangements had been completed.§ 96.22. The three following popes, Innocent V., Hadrian V., and John XXI., died soon after one another. The last named, previously known as Petrus [Peter] Hispanus, had distinguished himself by his medical and philosophical writings. He was properly the twentieth Pope John, but as there was a slight element of uncertainty (§ 82, 6) he designated himself the twenty-first. After a six months’ vacancyNicholas III.,A.D.1277-1280, mounted the papal throne. By diplomacy he secured the ratification of the still undecided concordat with the German kingdom, and Rudolf, who had enough to do in Germany, immediately withdrew from Italian affairs, even abandoning his claims to imperial coronation. The powerful pope, whose pontificate was marked by rapacity and nepotism, and who is therefore put by Dante in hell, did not live long enough to carry out his plans for the overthrow of the French yoke in Italy. But he obliged Charles I. to resign his Roman senatorship, and secretly encouraged a conspiracy of the Sicilians, which under his successorMartin IV.,A.D.1281-1285, a Frenchman and a pliable tool of Charles, broke out in the terrible “Sicilian Vespers” ofA.D.1282. The island of Sicily was thereby rent from the French rule and papal vassalage, and in a roundabout way the Hohenstaufens by the female line regained the government of this part of their old inheritance (§95, 1). Rome now again inA.D.1284 shook off the senatorial rule which Charles I. had meanwhile again assumed, and after his death and that of Martin, which speedily followed, they transferred this dignity to the new popeHonorius IV.,A.D.1285-1287, whose short but vigorous reign was followed by a vacancy of eleven months. The Franciscan general then mounted the papal throne asNicholas IV.,A.D.1288-1292. He filled up the period of his pontificate with vain endeavours to revive the spirit of the crusades and secure the suppression of heresy. Violent party feuds of cardinals of the Orsini and Colonna factions delayed the election of a pope after his death for two years. They united at last in electing the most unfit conceivable, Peter of Murrone (§98, 2), who, asCœlestine V.changed the monk’s cowl for the papal tiara, but was persuaded after four months by the sly and ambitious Cardinal Cajetan to resign. Cajetan now himself succeeded inA.D.1294 as Boniface VIII. The poor monk was confined by him in a tower, where he died. He was afterwards canonized by Pope John XXII.§ 96.23.Temporal Power of the Popes.—During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the spiritual power of the papacy had reached its highest point, the pope came to be regarded as the absolute head of the church. Gregory VII. arrogated the right of confirming all episcopal elections. The papal recommendations to vacant sees (Preces, whence those so recommended were calledPrecistæ) were from the time of Innocent III. transformed into mandates (Mandata), and Clement IV. claimed for the papal chair the right of aplenario dispositioof all ecclesiastical benefices. Even in the 12th century the theory was put forth as in accordance with the canon law that all ecclesiastical possessions were the property not of the particular churches concerned but of God or Christ, and so of the pope as His representative, who in administering them was responsible to Him alone. Hence the popes, in special cases when the ordinary revenues of the curia were insufficient, had no hesitation in exercising the right of levying a tax upon ecclesiastical property. They heard appeals from all tribunals and could give dispensations from existing church laws. The right of canonization (§104, 8), which was previously in the power of each bishop with application simply to his own diocese, was for the first time exercised with a claim for recognition over the whole church by John XV., inA.D.993, without, however, any word of withdrawing their privilege from the bishops. Alexander III. was the first to declare inA.D.1170 that canonization was exclusively the right of the papal chair. The system of Gregory VII. made no claim of doctrinal infallibility for the Holy See, though his ignorance of history led him to suppose that no heretic had ever presided over the Roman church, and his understanding of Luke xxii. 32 made him confidently expect that none ever would. Innocent III., indeed, publicly acknowledged that even the pope might err in matters of faith, and then, but only then, become amenable to the judgment of the church. And Innocent IV., fifty years later, taught that the pope might err. It is therefore wrong to say, “I believe what the pope believes;” for one should believe only what the church teaches. Thomas Aquinas was the first who expressly maintained the doctrine of papal infallibility. He says that the pope alone can decide finally upon matters of faith, and that even the decrees of councils only become valid and authoritative when confirmed by him. Thomas, however, never went the length of maintaining that the pope can by himself affirm any dogma without the advice and previous deliberations of a council.—Kissing the feet sprang from an Italian custom, and even an emperor like Frederick Barbarossa humbled himself to hold the pope’s stirrup. According to theDonation of Constantinedocument (§ 87, 4), Constantine the Great had himself performed this office of equerry to Pope Sylvester. When the coronation of the pope was introduced is still a disputed point.Nicholas I. was, according to theLiber pontificalis, formally crowned on his accession. Previously the successors of the apostles were satisfied with a simple episcopal mitre (§ 84, 1), which on the head of the crowned pope was developed into the tiara (§110, 15). At the Lateran Council ofA.D.1059 Hildebrand is said to have set upon the head of the new pope Nicholas II. a double crown to indicate the council’s recognition of his temporal and spiritual sovereignty. The papal granting of a golden rose consecrated by prayer, incense, balsam and holy water to princes of exemplary piety or even to prominent monasteries, churches, or cities, conveying an obligation to make acknowledgment by a large money gift, dates as far back as the 12th century. So far as is known, Louis VII. was the first to receive it from Alexander III. inA.D.1163.—The popes appointed legates to represent them abroad, as they had done even earlier at the synods held in the East. Afterwards, when the institution came to be more fully elaborated, a distinction was made betweenLegati missior nuntios andLegati nati. The former were appointed as required for diplomatic negotiations, visitation and organization of churches, as well as for the holding of provincial synods, at which they presided. They were calledLegati a latere, if the special importance of the business demanded a representation from among the nearest and most trusted councillors of the pope,i.e.one of the cardinals, asPontifices collaterales. The rank ofbornlegate,Legatus natus, on the other hand, was a prelatic dignity of the highest order conferred once for all by papal privilege, sometimes even upon temporal princes, who had specially served the Holy See, as for example the king of Hungary and the Norman princes of Italy (§96, 3,13), which made them permanently representatives of the pope invested with certain ecclesiastical prerogatives.—Among the numerous literary and documentary fictions and forgeries with which the Gregorian papal system sought to support its ever-advancing pretensions to authority over the whole church, is one which may be regarded as the contemporary supplement to the work of the Pseudo-Isidore. It is the production of a Latin theologian residing in the East, otherwise unknown, who, at the time of the controversies waged at the Lyonese Council ofA.D.1274 between the Greeks and Latins (§ 67, 4), brought forth what professed to be an unbroken chain of traditions from alleged decrees and canons of the most famous Greek Councils,e.g.Nicæa, Chalcedon, etc., and church fathers, most frequently from Cyril of Alexandria, the so-called Pseudo-Cyril, in which the controverted questions were settled in favour of the Roman pretensions, and especially the most extreme claims to the primacy of the pope were asserted. It was presented inA.D.1261 to Urban IV., who immediately guaranteed its genuineness in a letter to the emperor Michael Palæologus. On its adoption by Thomas Aquinas, who diligently employed its contents in his controversies against the Greeks as well as in his dogmatic works, it won respect and authority throughout all the countries of the West.
§ 96.18. King Philip Augustus II. of France, had inA.D.1193 married the Danish princess Ingeborg, but divorced her inA.D.1196, and married the beautiful Duchess Agnes of Meran. Innocent compelled him inA.D.1200 to put her away by issuing against him an interdict, but it was only inA.D.1213 that he again took back Ingeborg as his legitimate wife.—From far off Spain the young king Peter of Arragon went inA.D.1204 to Rome, laid down his crown as a sacred gift upon the tomb of the chief of the apostles, and voluntarily undertook the payment of a yearly tribute to the Holy See. In the same year a crusading army, by founding a Latin empire in Constantinople, brought the schismatical East to the feet of the pope (§94, 4). In England, when the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant, the chapter filled it by electing their own superior Reginald. This choice they had soon cause to rue. They therefore annulled their election, and at the wish of the usurping king John Lackland made choice of John, bishop of Norwich.Innocent refused to confirm their action, and persuaded certain members of the chapter staying in Rome to choose the cardinal priest Stephen Langton, whose election he immediately confirmed.279When the king refused to recognise this appointment, and on an interdict being threatened swore that he would drive all priests who should obey it out of the country, the pope issued it inA.D.1208 against all England, excommunicated the king, and finally, inA.D.1212, released all his subjects from their oath of allegiance and deposed the monarch, while he commissioned Philip Augustus of France to carry the sentence into effect. John, now as cringing and terrified as before he had been proud and despotic, humbled himself in the dust, and at Dover, inA.D.1213, placed kingdom and crown at the feet of the papal legate Pandulf, and received it from his hands as a papal fief, undertaking to pay twice a year the tribute imposed. But inA.D.1214 the English nobles extorted from their cowardly tyrant as a safeguard against lordly wilfulness and despotism the famousMagna Charta, against which the pope protested, threatening excommunication and promising legitimate redress of their grievances, though in consequence of confusion caused by the breaking out again of the civil wars he was unable to enforce his protest. And now his days were drawing to an end. At the famousFourth Lateran Council ofA.D.1215, more than 1,500 prelates from all the countries of Christendom, along with the ambassadors of almost all Christian kings, princes and free cities, gave him homage as the representative of God on earth, as visible Head of the Church, and supreme lord and judge of all princes and peoples. A few months later he died.—As in Italy and Germany, in France and England, he had also in all other states of the Christian world, in Spain and Portugal, in Poland, Livonia and Sweden, in Constantinople and Bulgaria, shown himself capable of controlling political as well as ecclesiastical movements, arranging and smoothing down differences, organizing and putting into shape what was tending to disorder. Some conception of his activity may be formed from the 5,316 extant decretals of the eighteen years of his pontificate.
§ 96.19.The Times of Frederick II. and his Successors,A.D.1215-1268.—Frederick II.,280A.D.1215-1250, contrary to the Hohenstaufen custom, had not only agreed to the partition of Sicily from the empire in favour of his son Henry, but also renewed the agreements previously entered into with the pope by Otto IV. He even increased the papal possessions by ceding Ancona, and still further at his coronation at Aachen he showed his goodwill by undertaking a crusade. He also allowed this same Henry who became king of Sicily as a vassal of the pope, to be elected king of the Romans inA.D.1220, and then began his journey to Rome to receive imperial coronation. The new popeHonorius III.,A.D.1216-1227, formerly Frederick’s tutor and even still entertaining for him a fatherly affection, exacted from him a solemn renewal of his earlier promises. But instead of returning to Germany, Frederick started for Sicily in order to make it the basis of operations for the future carrying out of the ideas of his father and grandfather. The peace-loving pope constantly urged him to fulfil his promise of fitting out a crusade. But it was only after his successorGregory IX.,A.D.1227-1241, a high churchman of the stamp of Gregory VII. and Innocent III., urged the matter with greater determination, that Frederick actually embarked. He turned back, however, as soon as an epidemic broke out in the ships, but he did not himself escape the contagion, and died three days after. InA.D.1227 the pope had in a senseless passion hurled an anathema against him, and, in an encyclical to all the bishops, painted the emperor’s ingratitude and breach of faith in the darkest colours. The emperor on his part, in a manifesto justifying himself addressed to the princes and people of Europe, had quite as unsparingly lashed the worldliness of the church, the corruption, presumption and self-seeking of the papacy, and then inA.D.1228 he again undertook the postponed crusade (§94, 5). The pope’s curse followed “the pirate” to the very threshold of the Holy Sepulchre, and a papal crusading force made a raid upon Southern Italy. Frederick therefore hastened his return, landed inA.D.1229 in Apulia, and entered into negotiations for peace, to which, however, the pope agreed only inA.D.1230, when the emperor’s victoriously advancing troops threatened him with the loss of the States of the Church. In consequence of the pope’s continued difficulties with his Romans, who drove him three times out of the city, Frederick had frequent opportunities of showing himself serviceable to the pope by giving direct aid or mediating in his favour. Nevertheless he continually conspired with the rebellious Lombards, and inA.D.1239 renewed the ban against the emperor. The pope who had hitherto only charged Frederick with a tendency to freethinking, as well as an inclination to favour the Saracens (§95, 1), and to maintain friendly intercourse with the Syrian sultans, now accused him of flippant infidelity. The emperor, it was said, had among other things declared that the birth of the Saviour by a virgin was a fable, and that Jesus, Moses and Mohammed were the three greatest impostors the world had ever seen,—a form of unbelief which spread very widely in consequence of the crusades. Manifestoes and counter-manifestoes sought to outdo one another in their violence. And while the wild hordes of the Mongols were overspreading unopposed the whole of Eastern Europe, the emperor’s troops were victoriously pressing forward to the gates of Rome, and his ships were preventing the meeting of the council summoned against him by catching the prelates who in spite of his prohibition were hastening to it. The pope died inA.D.1241, and was followed in seventeen days by his successor Cœlestine IV.
§ 96.20. For almost two years the papal chair remained vacant. Then this position was won byInnocent IV.,A.D.1243-1254, who as cardinal had been friendly to the emperor, but as pope was a most bitter enemy to him and to his house. The negotiations about the removal of the ban were broken off, and Innocent escaped to France, where at theFirst Lyonese or 13th Œcumenical Council ofA.D.1245, attended by scarcely any but Frenchmen and Spaniards, he renewed the excommunication of the emperor, and declared him as a blasphemer and robber of the church deprived of his throne. Once again with the most abject humility Frederick sued for reconciliation with the church. The pope, however, wished not for reconciliation, but the destruction of the whole “viper brood” of the Hohenstaufens. But the rival king, Henry Raspe of Thuringia, set up by the papal party in Germany, and William of Holland, who was put forward after his death inA.D.1247, could not maintain their position against Frederick’s son, Conrad IV., who as early asA.D.1235 had been elected in place of his rebel brother Henry as king of the Romans. Even in Italy the fortune of war favoured at first the imperial arms. At the siege of Parma, which was disloyal, the tide began to turn. The sorely pressed citizens made a sally inA.D.1248, while Frederick was away at a hunt, and roused to courage by despair, put his army to flight. His brave son, Enzio, king of Sardinia and governor of Northern Italy, fell inA.D.1249 into the hands of the Bolognese, and was subjected to a life-long imprisonment. Frederick himself inA.D.1250 closed his active life in the south in the arms of his son Manfred. The pope then returned to Italy, in order to take possession of the Sicilian kingdom, which he claimed as a papal fief. But inA.D.1251Conrad IV., summoned by Manfred, hasted thither from Germany, subdued Apulia, conquered Naples, and was resolved to lay hands on the person of the pope himself, who had also excommunicated him, when his career was stopped by death inA.D.1254, in his twenty-sixth year. On behalf of Conrad’s two-year-old son, Conradin, who had been born in Germany after his father’s departure, Manfred undertook the regency in Southern Italy, but found himself obliged to acknowledge the pope’s suzerainty. Nevertheless the pope was determined to have him also overthrown. Manfred, however, escaped in time to the Saracenic colony of Luceria, and with its help utterly defeated the papal troops sent out against him. Five days after Innocent IV. died,Alexander IV.,A.D.1254-1261, although without his predecessor’s ability, sought still to continue his work. He could not, however, either by ban or by war prevent Manfred, who on the report of Conradin’s death had had himself crowned, from extending the power and prestige of his kingdom farther and farther into the north.Urban IV.,A.D.1261-1264, a Frenchman by birth, son of a shoemaker of Troyes, took up with all his heart the heritage of hate against the Hohenstaufens, and inA.D.1263 invited Charles of Anjou, the youngest brother of Louis IX. of France, to win by conquest the Sicilian crown. While the prince was preparing for the campaign Urban died. His successor,Clement IV.,A.D.1265-1268, also a Frenchman, could not but carry out what his predecessor had begun. Charles, whom the Romans without the knowledge of the pope had elected their senator, proceeded inA.D.1265 into Italy, took the vassal oath of fealty, and was crowned as Charles I.,A.D.1265-1285, king of the two Sicilies. Treachery opened up his way into Naples. Manfred fell inA.D.1266 in the battle of Benevento; and Conradin, whom the Ghibellines had called in as a deliverer of Italy, after the disastrous battle of Tagliacozzo inA.D.1268, died on the scaffold in his sixteenth year.
§ 96.21.The Times of the House of Anjou down to Boniface VIII.,A.D.1288-1294.—The papacy had emerged triumphantly from its hundred years’ struggle with the Hohenstaufens, and by the overthrow of this powerful house Germany was thrown into the utmost confusion and anarchy. But Italy, too, was now in a condition of extreme disorder, and the unconscionable tyrants of Naples subjected it to a much more intolerable bondage than those had done from whom they pretended to have delivered it. After the death of Clement IV. the Holy See remained vacant for three years. The cardinals would not elect such a pope as would be agreeable to Charles I. During this papal vacancy Louis IX. of France,A.D.1226-1270, fitted out the seventh and last crusade (§94, 6), from which he was not to return. As previously he had reformed the administration of justice, he now before his departure introduced drastic reforms in the ecclesiastical institutions of his kingdom, which laid the first foundations of the celebrated “Gallican Liberties.” Clement IV. gave occasion for such procedure on the part of the monarch who was a model of piety after the standard of those times, by claiming inA.D.1266 for the papal chair theplenaria dispositioof all prebends and benefices. In opposition to this assumption the king secured by a Pragmatic Sanction ofA.D.1269 to all churches and monasteries of his realm unconditional freedom of all elections and presentations according to old existing rights, confirmed to them anew all privileges and immunities previously granted them, forbade every form of simony as a heinous crime, and prohibited all extraordinary taxation of church property on the part of the Roman curia.—At last the cardinals took courage and electedGregory X.,A.D.1271-1276, an Italian of the noble house of Visconti. The desolating interregnum in Germany was also put an end to by the election ofCount Rudolf of Hapsburg,A.D.1273-1291, as king of the Germans. At theSecond Lyonese or 14th Œcumenical Council ofA.D.1274, the worthy pope continued his endeavours without avail to rouse the flagging enthusiasm of the princes so as to get them to undertake another crusade. The union with the Greek church did not prove of an enduring kind (§ 67, 4). The constitution, too, sanctioned at the council, which provided, in order to prevent prolonged vacancies in the papal see, that the election of pope should not only be proceeded with in immured conclaves in the place where the deceased pope last resided with the curia, but also (though this was again abrogated inA.D.1351 by a decree of Clement VI.) should be expedited by limiting the supply of food after three days to one dish, after other five days to water, wine, and bread. Yet this completely failed to secure the object desired. More successful, however, were the negotiations carried on at Lyons with the ambassadors of the new German king. Rudolf, in entering upon his government, renewed all the concessions made by Otto IV. and Frederick II., renounced all imperial claims upon Rome and the States of the Church, with the exception of the possessions of Matilda, and abandoned all pretension to Sicily. The pope on his part acknowledged him as king of the Romans and undertook to crown him emperor in Rome, where this agreement was to be formally ratified and signed. But Gregory died before arrangements had been completed.
§ 96.22. The three following popes, Innocent V., Hadrian V., and John XXI., died soon after one another. The last named, previously known as Petrus [Peter] Hispanus, had distinguished himself by his medical and philosophical writings. He was properly the twentieth Pope John, but as there was a slight element of uncertainty (§ 82, 6) he designated himself the twenty-first. After a six months’ vacancyNicholas III.,A.D.1277-1280, mounted the papal throne. By diplomacy he secured the ratification of the still undecided concordat with the German kingdom, and Rudolf, who had enough to do in Germany, immediately withdrew from Italian affairs, even abandoning his claims to imperial coronation. The powerful pope, whose pontificate was marked by rapacity and nepotism, and who is therefore put by Dante in hell, did not live long enough to carry out his plans for the overthrow of the French yoke in Italy. But he obliged Charles I. to resign his Roman senatorship, and secretly encouraged a conspiracy of the Sicilians, which under his successorMartin IV.,A.D.1281-1285, a Frenchman and a pliable tool of Charles, broke out in the terrible “Sicilian Vespers” ofA.D.1282. The island of Sicily was thereby rent from the French rule and papal vassalage, and in a roundabout way the Hohenstaufens by the female line regained the government of this part of their old inheritance (§95, 1). Rome now again inA.D.1284 shook off the senatorial rule which Charles I. had meanwhile again assumed, and after his death and that of Martin, which speedily followed, they transferred this dignity to the new popeHonorius IV.,A.D.1285-1287, whose short but vigorous reign was followed by a vacancy of eleven months. The Franciscan general then mounted the papal throne asNicholas IV.,A.D.1288-1292. He filled up the period of his pontificate with vain endeavours to revive the spirit of the crusades and secure the suppression of heresy. Violent party feuds of cardinals of the Orsini and Colonna factions delayed the election of a pope after his death for two years. They united at last in electing the most unfit conceivable, Peter of Murrone (§98, 2), who, asCœlestine V.changed the monk’s cowl for the papal tiara, but was persuaded after four months by the sly and ambitious Cardinal Cajetan to resign. Cajetan now himself succeeded inA.D.1294 as Boniface VIII. The poor monk was confined by him in a tower, where he died. He was afterwards canonized by Pope John XXII.
§ 96.23.Temporal Power of the Popes.—During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the spiritual power of the papacy had reached its highest point, the pope came to be regarded as the absolute head of the church. Gregory VII. arrogated the right of confirming all episcopal elections. The papal recommendations to vacant sees (Preces, whence those so recommended were calledPrecistæ) were from the time of Innocent III. transformed into mandates (Mandata), and Clement IV. claimed for the papal chair the right of aplenario dispositioof all ecclesiastical benefices. Even in the 12th century the theory was put forth as in accordance with the canon law that all ecclesiastical possessions were the property not of the particular churches concerned but of God or Christ, and so of the pope as His representative, who in administering them was responsible to Him alone. Hence the popes, in special cases when the ordinary revenues of the curia were insufficient, had no hesitation in exercising the right of levying a tax upon ecclesiastical property. They heard appeals from all tribunals and could give dispensations from existing church laws. The right of canonization (§104, 8), which was previously in the power of each bishop with application simply to his own diocese, was for the first time exercised with a claim for recognition over the whole church by John XV., inA.D.993, without, however, any word of withdrawing their privilege from the bishops. Alexander III. was the first to declare inA.D.1170 that canonization was exclusively the right of the papal chair. The system of Gregory VII. made no claim of doctrinal infallibility for the Holy See, though his ignorance of history led him to suppose that no heretic had ever presided over the Roman church, and his understanding of Luke xxii. 32 made him confidently expect that none ever would. Innocent III., indeed, publicly acknowledged that even the pope might err in matters of faith, and then, but only then, become amenable to the judgment of the church. And Innocent IV., fifty years later, taught that the pope might err. It is therefore wrong to say, “I believe what the pope believes;” for one should believe only what the church teaches. Thomas Aquinas was the first who expressly maintained the doctrine of papal infallibility. He says that the pope alone can decide finally upon matters of faith, and that even the decrees of councils only become valid and authoritative when confirmed by him. Thomas, however, never went the length of maintaining that the pope can by himself affirm any dogma without the advice and previous deliberations of a council.—Kissing the feet sprang from an Italian custom, and even an emperor like Frederick Barbarossa humbled himself to hold the pope’s stirrup. According to theDonation of Constantinedocument (§ 87, 4), Constantine the Great had himself performed this office of equerry to Pope Sylvester. When the coronation of the pope was introduced is still a disputed point.Nicholas I. was, according to theLiber pontificalis, formally crowned on his accession. Previously the successors of the apostles were satisfied with a simple episcopal mitre (§ 84, 1), which on the head of the crowned pope was developed into the tiara (§110, 15). At the Lateran Council ofA.D.1059 Hildebrand is said to have set upon the head of the new pope Nicholas II. a double crown to indicate the council’s recognition of his temporal and spiritual sovereignty. The papal granting of a golden rose consecrated by prayer, incense, balsam and holy water to princes of exemplary piety or even to prominent monasteries, churches, or cities, conveying an obligation to make acknowledgment by a large money gift, dates as far back as the 12th century. So far as is known, Louis VII. was the first to receive it from Alexander III. inA.D.1163.—The popes appointed legates to represent them abroad, as they had done even earlier at the synods held in the East. Afterwards, when the institution came to be more fully elaborated, a distinction was made betweenLegati missior nuntios andLegati nati. The former were appointed as required for diplomatic negotiations, visitation and organization of churches, as well as for the holding of provincial synods, at which they presided. They were calledLegati a latere, if the special importance of the business demanded a representation from among the nearest and most trusted councillors of the pope,i.e.one of the cardinals, asPontifices collaterales. The rank ofbornlegate,Legatus natus, on the other hand, was a prelatic dignity of the highest order conferred once for all by papal privilege, sometimes even upon temporal princes, who had specially served the Holy See, as for example the king of Hungary and the Norman princes of Italy (§96, 3,13), which made them permanently representatives of the pope invested with certain ecclesiastical prerogatives.—Among the numerous literary and documentary fictions and forgeries with which the Gregorian papal system sought to support its ever-advancing pretensions to authority over the whole church, is one which may be regarded as the contemporary supplement to the work of the Pseudo-Isidore. It is the production of a Latin theologian residing in the East, otherwise unknown, who, at the time of the controversies waged at the Lyonese Council ofA.D.1274 between the Greeks and Latins (§ 67, 4), brought forth what professed to be an unbroken chain of traditions from alleged decrees and canons of the most famous Greek Councils,e.g.Nicæa, Chalcedon, etc., and church fathers, most frequently from Cyril of Alexandria, the so-called Pseudo-Cyril, in which the controverted questions were settled in favour of the Roman pretensions, and especially the most extreme claims to the primacy of the pope were asserted. It was presented inA.D.1261 to Urban IV., who immediately guaranteed its genuineness in a letter to the emperor Michael Palæologus. On its adoption by Thomas Aquinas, who diligently employed its contents in his controversies against the Greeks as well as in his dogmatic works, it won respect and authority throughout all the countries of the West.