[Sidenote: A momentary peace.]
It remained to be seen whether Gregory's failure implied Henry's success. The Emperor returned to Germany, where a strong desire for peace had grown up and was taking practical shape. In some dioceses the Truce of God was proclaimed, which, under heavy ecclesiastical penalties, forbade hostilities during certain days of the week and certain seasons of the year. Henry took up this idea, which as yet was too partial to be effective, and in 1085, in a Synod at Mainz under his presidency, it was proclaimed for the whole kingdom. The unfortunate anti-King Herman found himself deserted, and died, a fugitive, in 1088. Henry's moderation concluded what the desire for peace had begun, and even Saxony seemed to be reconciled to his rule.
[Sidenote: Urban II (1088-99).]
But his triumph was short-lived. Between him and any lasting peace stood the anti-Pope Clement III; for all who had received consecration at Clement's hands were bound at all hazards to maintain the lawfulness of his election. Moreover, Clement's opponent now was a man to be reckoned with. The first choice of the Gregorian party, Desiderius, Abbot of Monte Cassino, could not be consecrated for a year after his election, and four months later he was dead (September, 1087). The partisans of Clement were too strong in Rome, and the next election was carried out with total disregard of the decree of Nicholas II. It took place at Terracina in March, 1088, and was made by a large number of clergy in addition to the Cardinals. The choice fell upon Otto, Bishop of Ostia, a Frenchman of noble family and a monk of Cluny; but it was some years before Urban II could regard Rome as his headquarters.
[Sidenote: His policy against Henry.]
In some ways Urban was more uncompromising than his master Gregory. He upheld the papal legates in their strict treatment of the French bishops; he actually launched against Philip I of France the excommunication which Gregory had only threatened; to the prohibition of lay investiture he added an explicit command that bishops and clergy should not do homage to any layman. But while he showed himself thus in thorough sympathy with his predecessor, in his power of dealing with circumstances he proved himself by far the superior. A succession of clever if thoroughly unscrupulous measures restored the fortunes of the papal party. Henry had succeeded for the moment in dividing and isolating his enemies. Urban set himself to unite the chief opponents of Henry on both sides of the Alps. He planned a marriage between the middle-aged widow, the Countess Matilda of Tuscany, and the eighteen-year-old son of Welf, Duke of Bavaria (1089). Matilda was ready to sacrifice herself for the good of the cause. The Welfs, ignorant of Matilda's gift of her lands to the Papacy, eagerly accepted the bait; but soon discovering that they were being used as tools, they ceased to give any help, and in fact became reconciled to the Emperor. But meanwhile the Pope had discovered other more deadly weapons with which to wound the Emperor. The deaths of the anti-Kings had left the papal party without a leader in Germany. Events had shown the firm hold of the hereditary claim and the Salian House upon a large portion of the Empire. The only acceptable leader would be a member of Henry's own house. Henry's actions played into their hands. His eldest son, Conrad, had been crowned at Aachen in 1087 and sent into Italy to act as his father's representative. He is described as a young man of studious and dreamy character, unpractical and easily influenced. In 1087 Henry lost his faithful wife Bertha, and a year later he married a Russian Princess, Praxedis, who was the widow of the Count of the Northern March. The marriage was unhappy; each accused the other of misconduct; and Henry, suspecting the relations of Conrad with his stepmother, put them both in prison. Perhaps Conrad had already been worked upon by the papal party. He escaped, took refuge with the Countess Matilda, and was crowned King of Italy (1093). But he was only the tool of others. Far more immediately dangerous was the escape of Praxedis (1094), who laid before the Pope the foulest charges against Henry. To her lasting shame the Countess Matilda was the chief agent in these family revolts. The effect on Henry's position in Italy was disastrous. Pope Urban finally recovered Rome, and Conrad, having won the cities of Lombardy, took an oath of fealty to the Papacy in return for a promise of the Empire.
[Sidenote: Beginning of the Crusades.]
And just as if the success of these diabolical schemes was not a sufficient triumph, fortune at this moment gave the Pope a chance of superseding the Emperor in the eyes of all Europe, by inaugurating a great popular movement of which under different circumstances the Emperor would have been the natural leader. In 1085 the Eastern Emperor Alexius had appealed to Henry against the Normans, but now Henry was a negligible quantity—excommunicated, crowned Emperor by an anti-pope, not likely to undertake a distant expedition. In 1095, therefore, when Alexius needed aid against the Seljuk Turks, it was to the Pope that he sent his envoys, who appeared at the Synod of Piacenza. Those late converts to Mohammedanism had established their kingdom of Roum over the greater part of Asia Minor with its capital at the venerable city of Nicæa, and had captured Jerusalem, which thus passed out of the hands of the tolerant Caliphs of Cairo into those of the most fanatical section of Mohammedans. Pilgrims returning from Jerusalem spread through Europe tales of the harsh treatment to which they were subjected. Then in 1087 a new tribe of Saracens, the Almoravides, crossed from Africa to Spain and inflicted a severe defeat upon a Christian army. It seemed almost as if a combined movement of the Mohammedan world had begun for the final extinction of Christendom. If Gregory had been free he would have wished to promote the reunion of the Churches by sending help to the Eastern Empire; so that it was no novel idea that was suggested to the assembled magnates at Piacenza. Urban II no doubt saw the opportunity offered for asserting the leadership of the western world. Alexius' envoys were heard with sympathy; but Urban felt the need of appeal to a larger public, and summoned a great Council to Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, where he would be among his own countrymen. Here in November, 1095, he delivered before a vast concourse of persons assembled in the open air an impassioned appeal on behalf of the suffering Christians of the east. The result answered his utmost expectation, and the cry of the assembled multitude, "God wills it," was the ratification of the papal leadership. All methods were taken to stir the feelings of the west. The vast ecclesiastical organisation was used in order to transmit invitations to possible crusaders; the penitential system of the Church was brought to bear on those already conscious of a sinful life; popular preachers, such as Peter the Hermit, were employed to rouse the interest of the masses; the Pope himself spent the succeeding months in a tour through Southern France; and arrangements were made for the start of the first expedition from the Italian ports at the end of the summer of 1096, under the leadership of a legate appointed by the Pope.
[Sidenote: The first Crusade.]
It is not possible here to follow the fortunes of the Crusaders. Several unauthorised expeditions, which bore witness to the popular enthusiasm, made their way through Southern Germany; but the disorderly crowds which composed them perished either at the hands of the inhabitants of the Eastern Empire, whom they treated as schismatics, or among the Turks in Asia Minor. The real expedition passed partly by land, partly by sea from the Italian ports to Constantinople, whence the Crusaders set out across Asia Minor. Nicæa was taken in June, 1097; the Sultan of Roum was overthrown in battle at Dorylæum in July; Antioch detained the Crusaders from October, 1097, to June, 1098; and it was only in July, 1099, that after a siege of forty days Jerusalem was captured from the Saracens of Egypt, who had recently recovered it from the Turks.
[Sidenote: Its effect on the quarrel.]
But whatever may have been Urban's success in his own land of France and elsewhere, in Germany, at any rate, his efforts to turn the current against the Emperor had entirely failed. Of German lands Lorraine alone sent warriors to the First Crusade. The movement did not penetrate to the east of the Rhine, and the number of Germans who helped to swell the multitude of crusaders who marched through Southern Germany was inappreciable. At the same time the settlement of the questions at issue between Papacy and Empire were indefinitely postponed; for it would have been treason to the crusading cause to press the papal claims against Henry at this moment. It was Henry's turn to experience some good fortune. The proclamation of the Truce of God under his auspices, the manifest interest of the German ecclesiastics, and his own policy of favouring the rising cities combined to strengthen his position. Thus in 1098 he was able to obtain from the German nobles the deposition of his rebellious son Conrad and the election of his younger son Henry as King, who was made to promise that during his father's lifetime he would not act politically against him. Then in 1099 Pope Urban died, and was followed in 1100 by the anti-Pope Clement III, and in 1101 by Conrad. All the personal causes of disunion were being removed. Moreover, the success of the crusading policy made it impossible that Henry or Germany should stand apart from it altogether. Although Jerusalem was the capital of a Christian kingdom and other principalities centred round Tripoli, Antioch, and the more distant Edessa, powerful Mohammedan Princes lay close beside them at Damascus, Aleppo, and Mossul, as well as to the south in Egypt. There was need of constant reinforcement, for the fighting was continual. Under these inducements Germany began to contribute crusaders to the cause. Duke Welf of Bavaria led an army eastwards in 1101. In 1103 Henry's efforts in favour of peace culminated in the proclamation at the Diet of Mainz of the first imperial land peace sworn between King and nobles, which bound the parties to it for four years to maintain the peace towards all communities in the land. This was intended as a preliminary to Henry's participation in an expedition to the east.
[Sidenote: Death of Henry IV.]
But this was the very last thing desired by Henry's enemies, and there began a most unscrupulous attack which ended only with his death. Pope Urban's successor, Pascal II, strengthened by the death of the anti-Pope Clement and the failure of his party to maintain a successor, renewed the excommunication against Henry, and did everything deliberately to stir up strife in Germany. The nobles were angry at the cessation of private war and at the favour shown by Henry to the towns. But again they lacked a leader, and with diabolical craft the papal party worked upon the young King Henry by threatening to set up against him an anti-King who should rob him of the eventual succession. The result was that the young King broke his solemn promise, set up the standard of revolt, and was joined by nobles, ecclesiastical as well as lay, and by the restless Saxon rebels. By a trick he got his father into his power and forced him formally to abdicate, while he himself was crowned King by the papal legate. But the Emperor escaped, and with marvellous energy gathered adherents; but a renewal of the struggle was staved off by his own death after a few days' illness on August 6th, 1106.
[Sidenote: His justification.]
Henry never shook himself free from the difficulties of his own early misdeeds; but the rights upon which he took his stand were those exercised by his predecessors. The uncompromising attitude of his opponents and their humiliation of him made it a life-long struggle between them. Henry was no saint; but his opponents' tactics were indefensible. Under less adverse circumstances he might have proved a successful ruler. But he was the victim of a party which deliberately subordinated means to ends in pursuit of an ideal which Henry could scarcely be expected to understand or appreciate.
[Sidenote: Henry V.]
The papal party in its malice had overreached itself in selecting Henry V as its champion. True, he had destroyed the most stubborn enemy of the Papacy; but his own interests caused him to adopt his father's policy. His one object was to recover the prestige which the German King had lost in the struggles of the last twenty years. He was undisputed King in Germany; he showed an unscrupulous and overbearing demeanour which aroused opposition on all sides. He was not likely to be content with less power than his father had demanded over the German clergy, and at the first vacancies he invested the new bishops.
[Sidenote: Growth of a party of compromise on investiture.]
Henry's bold action was not altogether without reason. For some years there had been growing up within the ranks of the advocates of reform a moderate party which, while opposed to simony and clerical marriage, saw in the continued and close union of Church and State an indispensable guarantee of social order. They aimed therefore at conserving the rights of the Crown no less than at recovering those of the Church. This party is found especially among the French clergy. One of its chief spokesmen, the Canonist Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, who had suffered much for his enthusiasm for reform, insists in his correspondence even with the Pope himself, that the prohibition passed upon lay investiture is not among the class of matters which have been settled by a law for ever binding, but among those which have been enjoined or forbidden, as the case might be, for the honour or profit of the Church, and he appropriately bids the papal legate beware lest the Roman clergy should incur the charge of taking tithe of mint and rue while they omit the weightier precepts of the law. Moreover, both he and his friend Hugh of Fleury, in a treatise dealing with the "Royal Power and Priestly Office," maintain that the King has the power, "by the instigation of the Holy Spirit," of nominating bishops, or at least of granting permission for their election; and that, while the royal investiture, however made by word or act, pretends to bestow no spiritual authority, but merely estates or other results of royal munificence, it is for the archbishop to commit to a newly elected prelate the cure of souls.
[Sidenote: Settlement in England.]
This distinction, repugnant as it was to the extremists, soon found practical application. Lanfranc's successor in the See of Canterbury, Anselm, was, like his predecessor, an Italian, transferred from Normandy to England. He had to contend with the typical King of an unrestrained feudalism in the person of William II. A succession of quarrels ended in Anselm's retirement to Italy. Recalled by Henry I, he took back with him the maxims of the reformers about investiture, and refused to do the required homage to the new King. Henry was not an unreasonable man, and he sent Anselm to bring about some arrangement with the Pope. However, it was not until a rupture was imminent that Pope Pascal was persuaded to acquiesce in an agreement on the lines advocated by Ivo of Chartres and his party. By this Concordat (1107) Henry I agreed to give up his claim to invest with the ring and staff, while Archbishop Anselm allowed that the elected bishop might do homage for his lands to the King.
[Sidenote: Pascal II (1099-1118).]
At present neither side in the Empire was sufficiently honest in its intentions to be willing to accept so reasonable a settlement. But the fact that the Pope had felt himself obliged to allow it in one case sensibly weakened his position and correspondingly strengthened that of the German King. It was typical of Pascal's position in general. Though strongly Gregorian in principle, he was neither clever nor courageous, and was inclined to take up a position which he could not maintain. Intent on renewing the prohibition of lay investiture and afraid of Henry, Pascal determined to support himself upon France. Here, at any rate, Philip I had gradually dropped the practice of investiture of bishops. The papal censures of his scandalous private conduct uttered by Gregory and Urban had had no effect. Pascal accepted professions of amendment and acts of humiliation, and ceased to trouble himself further about Philip's private affairs. A Council of French bishops was held at Troyes (1107), where the decrees against lay investiture were renewed. The one gleam of hope for the future appeared in Pascal's deliberate abstention from any pronouncement against the King in person. Henry, occupied on the eastern border, could not pay his first visit to Italy until the beginning of 1111, and it was not without significance that on the eve of setting out he betrothed himself to the daughter of Henry I of England. He was more fortunate than his father had been in the moment of his visit. The Lombard cities quarrelling among themselves were quickly forced to submission; the Countess Matilda, grown old and tired of strife, sent her envoys to do homage for the imperial fiefs; the Normans had just lost their Duke. Pope Pascal, finding himself isolated, did not dare to meet by a simple negative Henry's demand for the right of investiture as well as for his coronation as Emperor.
[Sidenote: His proposal.]
By way of escaping from his difficulty he sent to the King an astonishing proposal. The King was to renounce the right of investiture and all interference in the elections, in return for which the prelates should give up all imperial lands and rights with which they were endowed, retaining merely the right to tithes, offerings, and private gifts: the papal rights over the Patrimony of St. Peter and the Norman lands were specially excepted. It has been pointed out that this was the policy which Count Cavour made famous as "a free Church in a free State." It seems almost impossible that Pascal should have thought that the German bishops would accept this solution: he may have hoped that they could be coerced into it. But in contracting himself out of the obligations to be imposed on all other ecclesiastical dignitaries, he practically renounced any claim to set the policy of the Church. Henry may have aimed at digging an impassable ditch between the Pope and the German bishops. It was an impossible agreement; for neither bishops nor lay nobles would wish to see so large an addition to the King's resources, while Henry himself could not afford to surrender the right of investiture, since it would stultify his claim to a voice in the election of the Pope.
[Sidenote: Henry's success.]
The publication of the agreement at Rome caused great tumults, Henry contriving that all the odium should fall upon the Pope. Then, since Pascal could not fulfil the part of the agreement which he had made on behalf of the Church, Henry forced him, the successor of Gregory, to acquiesce in the exercise by the German King of the right of investiture with ring and staff. Henry was crowned Emperor, though with very maimed ceremonial, and returned in triumph to Germany.
[Sidenote: Pascal's withdrawal.]
But his triumph was short, for he was immediately threatened with danger from two quarters. On the one side the leaders of the Ultramontane party were naturally most wrathful at this betrayal of their cause, and Pascal, threatened with deposition, placed himself in their hands. At the Lenten Synod of 1112 he confirmed all the decrees of his predecessor against lay investiture, thus annulling his own agreement with Henry. But he avoided issuing any sentence of excommunication against Henry in person. His own legates, however, had no such scruples, and in France Cardinal Conon took advantage of the strong feeling among the clergy to launch excommunications against the Emperor in several ecclesiastical Councils during 1114 and 1115. Guido, Archbishop of Vienne, presiding over a Council of Henry's own subjects at Vienne in 1112, had already condemned their sovereign and forced Pascal to acquiesce in the resolution.
[Sidenote: Henry's difficulties.]
Henry's right policy would no doubt have been to compel the Pope to observe the agreement. But it was more than three years before he could return to Italy. For revolt had broken out again in Germany. The nobles had their own grievances; the Saxons were always ready to take arms; the Church was roused because Henry dealt with ecclesiastical property as if the Pope's original proposal had been allowed to stand. The royal bailiffs acted in such a manner with the cathedrals that of a house of prayer they made a den of thieves.
Henry's forces were worsted in battle and he had recourse to his father's tactics, seeking in Italy, by personal dealings with the Pope, to recover the moral prestige which he had lost in Germany. He had a pretext in the death of the Countess Matilda (1115); for the Papacy was claiming not only her allodial lands, which she might have a right to bequeath, but also her imperial fiefs, which were not hers to dispose of. Henry occupied the dominions of Matilda without opposition. His presence in Italy caused Pascal still to refrain from personal condemnation of the Emperor, and a year later a party friendly to Henry opened the gates of Rome to him. Pascal fled to Albano, and only returned to Rome on Henry's departure, a dying man (January, 1118). His successor, Gelasius II, refused Henry's advances, and the Emperor resorted to the old and discredited policy of setting up an anti-Pope in the person of the Archbishop of Braga, in Portugal, who took the name of Gregory VIII. Gelasius excommunicated Henry and his Pope; but finding himself threatened in Rome, fled to Burgundy, and died at Cluny a year after his election (January, 1119). So far Henry's attempts to deal with the Pope had failed, and the publication of the new Pope's excommunication in Germany made the opposition so strong that Henry found it advisable to return.
[Sidenote: Calixtus II (1119-24)]
Gelasius' successor chosen at Cluny was Archbishop of Vienne, who took the title of Calixtus II. He was the first secular priest who had occupied the papal chair since Alexander II, and he was related to the royal families of France and England. Thus he had a wider outlook than the monks who preceded him, and the nobles would be likely to listen to a man of their own rank. He had been the most uncompromising of all Henry's opponents; but this was a guarantee to the Church that her position and power would not again be placed in jeopardy, for events were at length tending towards a conclusion of the weary strife. The views of the reformers had gained general acceptance as the doctrine of the Church. The obligation of clerical celibacy was acknowledged: simony had much diminished; Henry was the only King in Western Europe who still claimed to invest his prelates. Although it was some time before all the great French feudatories yielded to the spirit of reform, the French King himself had abandoned the practice of investiture for those bishops who were under his control. He retained, however, certain of his rights. The election could not take place without his permission, the newly elected bishop took an oath of fealty to the King, and during the vacancy of the see the revenues were paid to the Crown. It was more important still that in England the question of investiture had been settled by a compromise which recognised the twofold nature of the episcopal office, and that this compromise had received the sanction of the Pope. Henceforth it was practically impossible for the Church to maintain the position of the extreme reformers. When Pope Pascal was forced to grant the right of investiture to the Emperor, Henry I of England, as Anselm complained to Pascal, threatened to resume the practice. Already William I of England had defined the limits of papal power in his dominions without a protest from Rome, and Urban II had actually found himself obliged to endow Roger of Sicily and his successors with the authority of a papal legate within their own dominions. It was clear that the papal authority could do little against a really strong lay ruler. Moreover, the influence of the Church had greatly diminished. There was scarcely a see or abbey to which, during the last forty years, there had not been rival claimants: King and nobles alike had not only ceased to increase the endowments of the Church, but had caught at almost every opportunity of encroaching on them.
[Sidenote: Concordat of Worms.]
The accommodation was very gradual, for much suspicion of insincerity on both sides had to be overcome. The first step was taken in October, 1119. After the failure of direct negotiations between Pope and Emperor, a Council at Rheims, presided over by the Pope, renewed the anathema against Henry and his party, but only consented to a modified prohibition of investitures, since the office alone was mentioned and all reference to the property of bishop or abbot was omitted. It was two years before the next stage was reached, and meanwhile the anti-Pope had fallen into the hands of Calixtus, and Henry was still in difficulties in Germany. Finally, in October, 1121, the German nobles brought about a conference of envoys from both sides at Wurzburg, where in addition to an universal peace it was arranged that the investiture question should be settled at a General Council to be held in Germany under papal auspices. The Council met at Worms in September, 1122, and the papal legates were armed with full powers to act. The result was a Concordat subsequently ratified at the first Council of the Lateran in March, 1123, which is reckoned as the ninth General Council by the Roman Church. By this agreement the Emperor gave up all claim to invest ecclesiastics with the ring and staff. In return it was allowed by the Church that the election of prelates should take place in presence of the Emperor's representatives, and that in case of any dispute the Emperor should confirm the decision arrived at by the Metropolitan and his suffragans. The Emperor on his part undertook that the prelate elect, whether bishop or abbot, should be invested with the regalia or temporalities pertaining to his office by the sceptre, in Germany the investiture preceding the ecclesiastical consecration, whereas in Burgundy and the kingdom of Italy the consecration should come first.
[Sidenote: Results of struggle in Empire.]
We are naturally tempted to enquire who was the gainer in this long struggle? Writers on both sides have claimed the victory. It is clear, however, that neither side got all that it demanded. Considering the all-embracing character of the papal claim, the limitation of its pretensions might seem to carry a decided diminution of its position. Calixtus' advisers strongly urged that all over the imperial lands the consecration of prelates should precede the investiture of temporalities by the lay power. But the German nobles would not budge. In Burgundy and Italy conditions were different: in the former the power of the Crown had been almost in abeyance; in Italy the bishops had found themselves deserted by the Crown and had submitted to the Pope. The Crown had therefore to acquiesce in a merely nominal control over appointments in those lands. But in Germany the King perhaps gained rather than lost by the Concordat. His right of influence in the choice was definitely acknowledged, and by refusing the regalia he could practically prevent the consecration of any one obnoxious to him. The prelates of Germany, therefore, remained vassals of the Crown.
[Sidenote: on Papacy.]
On the other hand, the Papacy had definitely shaken itself free from imperial control. Henry III was the last Emperor who could impose his nominee Papacy upon the Church as Pope; the protégés of his successors are all classed among the anti-Popes. At the same time the papal privilege of crowning the Emperor and the papal weapon of excommunication were very real checks upon the German King; while the success of those principles for which the Cluniac party had striven established the theoretical claim of the Pope to be the moral guide, and the part which he played in starting the Crusades put him in the practical position of the leader of Christendom in any common movement. It was no slight loss to the Emperor that he had been the chief opponent of the Pope and the reformers, and that in the matter of the Crusades he and his whole nation had stood ostentatiously aloof.
[Sidenote: The work of the Church reformers.]
The great movement in favour of Church reform, which had emanated from Cluny, had worked itself out along certain definite lines. It is important to ask how far it had succeeded in achieving its objects. We have seen that it was a movement of essentially monastic conception aimed at the purification of the secular clergy. And we have seen that the evil to be remedied had arisen from the imminent danger that the Church would be laicised and feudalised. From the highest to the lowest all ecclesiastical posts were at the disposition of laymen who treated them as a species of feudal fief, so that the holders, even if they were in Holy Orders (which was not always the case), regarded their temporal rights and obligations as the first consideration and, like all feudal tenants, tried to establish the right of hereditary succession in their holdings. Thus the work of the reformers had been of a double nature; it was not enough that they should aim at exorcising the feudal spirit from the Church, at banishing the feudal ideal from the minds of ecclesiastics: it was necessary to effect what was indeed a revolution, and to shake the whole organisation of the Church free from the trammels which close contact with the State had laid upon it. It began as a reformation of morals; it developed into a constitutional revolution. There was involved in the movement both an interference with what might be distinguished as private rights and also a readjustment of public relations. The reformers headed by the Pope ultimately decided to concentrate their efforts on the latter. Hence we may begin by enquiring how far they had succeeded in freeing episcopal elections from lay control.
[Sidenote: Episcopal appointments.]
There were three several acts of the lay authority in connection with the appointment of bishops to which the Church reformers took exception. The King or, by usurpation from him, the great feudal lord had acquired the right of nominating directly to the vacant see, to the detriment, and even the exclusion, of the old electoral rights of clergy and people; and while in some cases nobles nominated themselves without any thought of taking Holy Orders, frequently they treated the bishoprics under their control as appanages or endowments for the younger members of their family. Then, before the consecration, the bishop-nominate obtained investiture from the lay authority by the symbolic gifts of a ring and a pastoral staff or cross, not only of the lands and temporal possessions of the see, but also of the jurisdiction which emanated from the episcopal office. Finally, the prospective bishop took an oath to his lay lord, whether King or other, which was not only an oath of fealty such as any subject might be called upon to take, but was also an act of homage, and made him an actual feudal vassal and his church a kind of fief.
[Sidenote: Right of election.]
The result of the long struggle was that in the matter of episcopal appointments, speaking generally, the right of election was not restored to clergy and people, in whom by primitive custom it had been vested, but that the laity, with the possible exception of the feudatories of the see, were banished altogether, the rural clergy ceased to appear, and, after the analogy of the papal election by the College of Cardinals, the canonical election of the bishop in every diocese tends to be concentrated in the hands of the clergy of the cathedral. It was a long time, however, before the rights of the cathedral chapters were universally recognised. Henry I of England in his Concordat with Anselm (1107) and the Emperor Henry V in the Concordat of Worms (122) both promised freedom of election. Philip I and Louis VI of France seem to have conceded the same right without any formal agreement. But many of the great French feudal lords clung to their power over the local bishoprics, and in Normandy, in Anjou, and in some parts of the south nearly a century elapsed before the duke or count surrendered his custom of nominating bishops directly. But the freedom of election by the Canons of the cathedral, even when it was conceded, was little more than nominal. In England, France, and the Christian kingdoms of Spain no cathedral body could exercise its right without the King's leave to elect, nor was any election complete without the royal confirmation. By the Concordat of Worms elections were to take place in the presence of the King or his commissioners. By the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) English bishops must be elected in the royal chapel. King John tried to bribe the Church over to his side in the quarrel with the barons which preceded Magna Carta, by conceding that elections should be free—that is, should take place in the chapter-house of the cathedral; but even he reserved the royal permission for the election to be held, and thecongé d'élirein England and elsewhere was accompanied by the name of the individual on whom the choice of the electoral body should fall. It was not the rights of the electors but the all-pervading authority of the Pope which was to prove the chief rival of royal influence in the local Church.
[Sidenote: Investiture.]
The quarrel between Church and State had centred round the ceremony of investiture, because in the eyes of the reformers the most scandalous result of the feudalisation of the Church was the acceptance at the hands of a layman of the spiritual symbols of ring and crozier. But as Hugh of Fleury had acknowledged in his tract on "Royal Power and Priestly Office," investiture there must be so long as ecclesiastics held great temporal possessions. Here again some of the French nobles clung to the old anomalous form of investiture, but otherwise the example of the imperial lands, of the royal domain of France and of England was generally followed, the gifts of ring and staff were conceded to the Metropolitan, and where no special form of investiture by the sceptre was retained it was confused with the ceremony of homage. But in Germany and England investiture with the lands of the see preceded consecration, so that while on the one hand it was not a bishop who was being invested by a layman, on the other hand the refusal of investiture would practically prevent the consecration of any one obnoxious to the Crown.
[Sidenote: Homage and fealty.]
With regard to the feudal ceremony of homage a distinction came to be drawn by writers on the Canon Law between homage and fealty, and ecclesiastics were supposed to limit themselves to the obligations of the latter, which were those of every subject. The ceremony was not precisely the same as in the case of a lay noble being invested with a fief; but in France, at any rate, the Crown never really abandoned its claim to a feudal homage, and in any case ecclesiastics were expected to fulfil their feudal obligations. Even Innocent III acknowledged this in a decree (§43) of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and in interceding with Philip II of France on behalf of two bishops who had been deprived of their temporal possessions for some neglect of military duty, he argues that they were "ready to submit to the judgment of your Court, as is customary in such matters."
[Sidenote: Regale.]
Arising out of these feudal relations certain rights over the possessions of ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical bodies were claimed by the Crown, which were the cause of serious oppression. According to the Canon Law, the bishop was only the usufructuary of the lands and revenues belonging to his see. The lands and revenues belonged to the Church. But inasmuch as these had been originally in most cases the gift of the Crown, the King claimed to deal with them in the method applied to feudal holdings. By the right ofregale, on the vacancy of a see through death, resignation, or deprivation of the bishop, the royal officers took possession of the temporalities, that is, the land and revenues, and administered them for the profit of the Crown so long as the see was vacant. The Crown did not hesitate to use the episcopal patronage and to fill up vacant canonries and benefices with its own followers, and it often took the opportunity to levy upon the inhabitants of the diocese a special tax—tallagium,tallage, ortaille—which a landlord had a right of exacting from his unfree tenants. It was to the interest of the Crown to prolong a vacancy, and attempts to limit the exercise of the right were of little practical effect.
[Sidenote: Right of spoils.]
An even more extraordinary claim was to the right of spoils (jus spoliiorexuviarium). The canonical law forbidding the bishop to deal by will with the property attached to his see, was interpreted as applying to everything which he had not inherited. Thus the furniture of his house and the money in his chest were claimed as of right by the canons of his cathedral, but were often plundered by the crowd of the city or by the local nobles. These lawless proceedings provoked the interference of the royal officers, who succeeded in most cases in establishing the right of the Crown to all movables that the bishop left. The earliest notice of this royal claim in Germany is found in the reign of Henry V. It was in full use under Frederick I. William II is probably responsible for introducing both theregaleand thejus spoliifrom Normandy into England. In France these were claimed by the feudal nobles as well as by the King. Bitter were the complaints made by the Church against the exercise of both rights. Kings and nobles clung to theregaleas long as they could, for it meant local influence as well as revenue. In most cases, however, the right of spoils had been surrendered before the thirteenth century. It is to be remembered that ecclesiastics themselves exercised this right, bishops, for example, claiming the possessions of the canons and the parish priests in their dioceses. The Popes in relaxation of the Canon Law gave to certain bishops the right of leaving their personal property by will, and the canons also are found encouraging their bishop to make a will.
[Sidenote: Claims of the Clergy.]
As a set-off against these claims of the Crown upon the Church, the clergy also advanced certain claims. These touched the two important matters of taxation and jurisdiction. The Church claimed for her members that they should not be liable to pay the taxes raised by the secular authorities, nor should they have causes to which any ecclesiastic was a party tried in the secular courts.
[Sidenote: Immunity from lay taxation.]
In seeking freedom from lay taxation the Church did not ask that her members should escape their feudal obligations, nor even that they should contribute nothing to the exigencies of the State. The desire was merely that the clergy should be free from oppression and that the Church should be so far as possible self-governing. Thus Alexander III decreed in the third Lateran Council (1179), that for relieving the needs of the community, everything contributed by the Church to supplement the contributions of the laity should be given without compulsion on the recognition of its necessity or utility by the bishop and the clergy. Innocent III, in the fourth Lateran Council (1215), provided a further safeguard against lay impositions in demanding the permission of the Pope for any such levy. This does not mean that the clergy escaped taxation at the hands of the State; it merely means that while the Popes themselves heavily taxed them for purposes which it was often difficult to describe as religious, the price paid by the Crown for leave to tax the clergy was that a large portion of the money should find its way to Rome.
[Sidenote: Tithes from the laity.]
The clergy were not content with this merely negative position. Besides the right of self-taxation, they claimed that the laity should contribute to the needs of the Church. The chief permanent source of such contribution was the tithe, both the lesser tithes on smaller animals, fruits, and vegetables, and the greater tithes on corn, wine, and the larger animals. The Church also claimed tithes of revenues of every kind, even from such divers classes as traders, soldiers, beggars, and abandoned women. Much of the regular tithe had fallen into the hands of laymen by gift from Kings to feudal tenants, or from bishops to nobles and others, in return for military protection. These alienated tithes Gregory VII tried to recover; but his need for the help of the nobles against the Emperor forced him to stay his hand. The third Lateran Council (1179) forbade, on pain of peril to the soul, the transfer of tithes from one layman to another, and deprived of Christian burial any one who, apparently having received such a transfer, should not have made it over to the Church. This was a definite claim for tithes as a right of which the Church had only been deprived by some wrongful act. But in the very next year (1180) Frederick I, at the Diet of Gelnhausen, declared that the alienation of tithes as feudal fiefs to defenders of the Church was perfectly legitimate. Religious scruples, however, seem to have caused the surrender of tithes by many lay impropriators, especially to monasteries.
[Sidenote: Bequests.]
There were many other sources of wealth to the Church. An enormous quantity of property was bequeathed to pious uses by testators. The attendance of the clergy at the death-bed gave them an opportunity of which they were not slow to make use. The bodies of those who died intestate, as of those unconfessed, were denied burial in consecrated ground; all questions concerning wills were heard in the ecclesiastical courts. The civil power attempted to check the freedom of death-bed bequest, especially in Germany, where it was held that a valid will could only be made by one who was still well enough to walk unsupported. Another common source of revenue came from purchases or mortgages or other arrangements made with crusaders, in which advantage was taken of the haste of the lay men to raise funds for their expedition.
[Sidenote: Wealth of the Church.]
From these and other sources the wealth which poured in upon the Church was enormous. Individual gifts in money or in kind as thank-offerings on all sorts of occasions reached no small of the total; while no religious ceremony, from baptism to extreme unction and burial, could be carried out apart from the payment of an appropriate fee. The clergy constantly complained of spoliation, and no doubt individuals suffered much. The very laymen who, with the title of advocates, undertook to defend a cathedral or a monastery were often its worst robbers. But the endowments and revenues of the Church were so extensive as to raise in the minds of many reformers the question whether they were not largely responsible for her corruptions.
[Sidenote: Immunity from lay jurisdiction.]
The clergy also sought freedom from the jurisdiction of the secular courts; in other words, the Church claimed exclusive cognisance in her own tribunals of all matters concerning those in Holy Orders. TheDecretiunof Gratian—the text-book of Canon Law—laid it down that in civil matters the clergy were to be brought before a civil judge, but that a criminal charge against a clerk must be heard before the bishop. Urban II, however, declares that all clergy should be subject to the bishop alone, and the Synod of Nimes (1096), at which he presided, stigmatises it as sacrilege to hale clerks or monks before a secular court. Alexander III (1179) threatens to excommunicate any layman guilty of this offence; while Innocent III points out that a clerk is not even at liberty to waive the right of trial in an ecclesiastical court in a matter between him and a layman, because the spiritual jurisdiction is not a matter personal to himself, but belongs to the whole clerical body. Finally Frederick II, on his coronation at Rome in 1220, forbade any one to dare to indict an ecclesiastic on either a civil or a criminal charge before a secular tribunal. But meanwhile the frequent perpetration of violent crimes by those who wore the tonsure made it imperative in the interests of social order that the Church should not be allowed to defend these criminals in order to save her own interests.
The fiercest struggle took place in England. Henry II did not deny the right of the Church to jurisdiction over her members; but he demanded that clerks found guilty of grave crime should be unfrocked by the ecclesiastical court, and that then, being no longer clerks, they should be handed over to the royal officers, by whom they should be punished according to their deserts. Archbishop Thomas Becket answered that it was contrary to justice and the Canon Law that a man should be punished twice for the same offence; that the punishment by the Church involved the offender's damnation and was therefore quite adequate; and that finally he himself was officially bound to defend the liberties of the Church even to the death. Henry II attempted to solve the difficulty by issuing the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), the third clause of which decreed that the royal officer should determine whether any matter in which a clerk was concerned should be tried in the secular or the ecclesiastical court, and that even if it went to the latter, the King's officer should be present at the hearing. As the price, however, of his reconciliation with the Papacy after Becket's death, Henry was obliged to withdraw the Constitutions.
The position of the Church on this question was clearly stated by Pope Celestine III in 1192. If a clerk had been lawfully convicted of theft, homicide, perjury, or any capital crime, he should be degraded by the ecclesiastical judge; for the next offence he should be punished by excommunication, and for the next by anathema; then, since the Church could do no more, for any subsequent offence he might be handed over to the secular power to be punished by exile or in any other lawful manner. This, of course, was a direct licence to the ill-disposed clergy to commit more crimes than were allowable for a layman; but the laity had to proceed cautiously in opposing it. In 1219 Philip II of France demanded that a clerk who had been degraded should not be protected by the Church from seizure outside ecclesiastical precincts by the royal officers with a view to his trial in a secular court. But here again, both at his coronation as Emperor in 1220 and again in the code of laws drawn up for his kingdom of Sicily in 1231, Frederick II confirmed the privileges of the Church in the matter of jurisdiction. On the latter occasion, however, he did reserve cases of high treason for the royal court. Almost the only immediate effect of these protests on the part of the State was that Popes and Councils enjoined on the ecclesiastical courts greater severity of treatment of offenders, even to the extent of perpetual imprisonment in the case of those whom the lay tribunals would have condemned to death.
[Sidenote: Increase of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.]
But this exclusive jurisdiction in all matters that concerned her own members was only a part of the authority claimed and exercised by the Church in the sphere of justice. Synods of the clergy did not hesitate to take part in the enforcement of civil law and order, and threatened with severe ecclesiastical penalties all who did not observe the Truce of God, or who were guilty of piracy, incendiarism, or false coining. At one time they attempted thus to suppress usury and trial by ordeal, which at other times they allowed. They even legislated against tournaments and against the use of certain deadly weapons in battle by one Christian nation against another. But apart from the special circumstances which called out and so justified the legislation, the Church claimed at all times jurisdiction over certain classes of lay persons and in certain categories of cases. Thus all persons needing protection, such as widows, minors, and orphans, came under the cognisance of the ecclesiastical courts, and to these the Popes added Crusaders. Furthermore, all cases which could be regarded as in any way involving a possible breach of faith were also claimed as belonging to the jurisdiction of the Church, and these included everything concerning oaths, marriages, and wills. Naturally the Church had cognisance of all cases of sacrilege and heresy. These excuses for interference in the transactions of daily life were susceptible of almost indefinite extension, especially since the Church asserted a right to hear cases of all sorts in her courts on appeal on a plea that civil justice had failed. Even so stout a champion of the Church as St. Bernard complains bitterly that all this participation in worldly matters tends to stand between the clergy and their proper duties. The secular powers constantly protested. Even when Alfonso X in his legal code allowed that all suits arising from sins should go to ecclesiastical courts, the Cortes of Castile constantly protested. The chief attempts to check the growth of ecclesiastical jurisdiction were made in France. Even under Louis IX the barons combined to resist the encroachments of the Church, and resolved that "no clerk or layman should in future indict any one before an ecclesiastical judge except for heresy, marriage, or usury, on pain of loss of possessions and mutilation of a limb, in order that," they add with a justifiable touch of malice, "our jurisdiction may be revived, and they [the clergy] who have hitherto been enriched by our pauperisation may be reduced to the condition of the primitive Church, and living the contemplative life they may, as is seemly, show to us who spend an active life miracles which for a long time have disappeared from the world."
[Sidenote: Simony.]
The result, then, of the efforts of the Church reformers to free the Church from the State had been an enormous increase in the power of the Church. But these efforts were in the beginning only a means to an end, and that end was the purification of the Church itself. We have, therefore, to ask how far the attempts to get rid of simony and to enforce the celibacy of the clergy had met with permanent success. Before the movement in favour of reform the traffic in churches and Church property was indulged in by laity and clergy alike. Not only Kings and nobles but bishops and abbots received payments from those who accepted ecclesiastical preferment at their hands, and were by no means always careful that ecclesiastical offices were acquired by those in Holy Orders. Church property, in fact, was treated by those who represented the original donors as if it were the private property of the patron. The reform movement of the eleventh century, at any rate, succeeded in making a distinction between the right of ownership and the right of presentation, and in limiting the power of the patron to the latter. Beyond this nothing much was permanently effected in checking the traffic in things ecclesiastical. Preferment continued to be used as patronage: offices and dignities in the Church were given to children, and preferments were accumulated upon individuals until pluralities became a standing grievance. Councils and Popes still thundered against simony, but with the extending authority of Rome the staff of the papal curia was increased, and the traffic in things ecclesiastical at Rome was notorious.
[Sidenote: Clerical marriage.]
The efforts of the reformers in checking clerical marriage had not been much more successful. The law now stood as follows: the first two Lateran Councils (1123, 1139) prohibited matrimony to priests, deacons, and sub-deacons; but to those only in one of the three minor orders of the Church it was still allowed, although Alexander III ultimately decreed that marriage should cause them to forfeit their benefice. It was some time, however, before these decrees could be enforced, and even the Popes found themselves compelled to deal leniently with offending clergy. Thus Pascal II allowed to Archbishop Anselm that a married priest not only might, but must, if applied to, minister to a dying person. Attempts were made to forbid ordination to the sons of priests, at least as secular clergy, but such regulations were constantly relaxed or ignored. Pascal II actually allowed that in Spain, where clerical marriage had been lawful, the children should be eligible for all secular and ecclesiastical preferment. In the remoter countries of Europe—the Scandinavian lands, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland—the decrees against clerical marriage were not accepted until far into the thirteenth century. Even in part of Germany, notably the diocese of Liege, the clergy continued openly to marry until the same century. But even in countries where the principle was nominally accepted it triumphed at the expense of morality. For example, in England the decree was published in Council after Council throughout the twelfth century and was undoubtedly accepted as the law. But in 1129, after the death of Anselm, who had opposed the expedient, Henry I imprisoned the "house-keepers" of the clergy in London in order to obtain a sum of money by their release. Furthermore, both in England and elsewhere, bishops finding it impossible to enforce the decree, frankly licensed the breach of it by individual clergy in return for an annual payment. It is interesting to note that several important writers of the age speak with studied moderation on this question. The great lawyer Gratian admits that in the earlier period of the Church marriage was allowed to the clergy. The Parisian theologian, Peter Comestor, publicly taught that the enforcement of the vow of celibacy on the clergy was a deliberate snare of the devil. The English historians, Henry of Huntingdon, Matthew Paris, and Thomas of Walsingham, speak with disapproval of the attempts to enforce it, and even St. Thomas Aquinas holds that the celibacy of the secular clergy was a matter of merely human regulation. Thus the protest of the reformers of the eleventh century in favour of purity of life among the clergy had met with the smallest possible success, but like all such protests, it helped to keep alive the idea of a higher standard of personal and official life until such time as secular circumstances were more favourable.
[Sidenote: Secular canons.]
So far, in speaking of the attempted purification of the Church in the eleventh century, we have dealt merely with the bishops and the parochial clergy. But a movement which emanated from the monasteries had a message also for those ecclesiastics who were gathered into corporate bodies, and whom we have learnt to distinguish respectively as canons and monks. Of these the canons were reckoned among the secular clergy; for although they were supposed to live a common life according to a certain rule, their duties were parochial, and they were not bound for life to the community of which they were members. The body of canons was called a chapter, and of chapters there were two kinds—the cathedral chapter, whose members served the Mother Church of the diocese, and, as we have seen, ultimately obtained the nominal right of electing the bishop; and the collegiate chapter, generally, though not always, to be found in towns which had no cathedral, the members of which, like those of a modern clergy-house, served the church or churches of the town. In the eighth century these communities were subjected to a rule drawn up by Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, in accordance with which they were required to sleep in a common dormitory, feed at a common table, and assimilate themselves as far as possible to monks. But in the two succeeding centuries there was no class of clergy which fell so far from the ideal as the capitular clergy. They were important and they were wealthy, for the cathedral chapters claimed to share with the bishop in the administration of the diocese, and both kinds of chapters owned extensive lands. In some of the more important chapters great feudal nobles had obtained for themselves the titular offices; in nearly all such bodies some, if not most or even all, of the canonries came to be reserved for younger members of the noble families. The common property was divided into shares, between the bishop and the body of the canons and between the individual canons: many of the canons employed vicars to do their clerical duty, and some even lived on the estates of the capitular body, leading the existence of a lay noble. Even those who remained on the spot had houses of their own round the cloister, where they lived with their wives and children, using the common refectory only for an occasional festival.
[Sidenote: Canons Regular.]
Thus no body of ecclesiastics stood in need of thorough reform more than the capitular clergy, and no class proved so hard to deal with. Attempts to substitute Cluniac monks for canons roused the opposition of the whole body of secular clergy. More successful to a small degree was the plan of Bishop Ivo of Chartres and others to revive among the capitular bodies the rule of common life. But it was difficult to pour new wine into old bottles, and the reformers found it more profitable to leave the old capitular bodies severely alone, and to devote their efforts to the foundation of new communities. To these were applied from the very first a new rule for which its advocates claimed the authority of St. Augustine. It laid upon the members vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and placed them under an abbot elected by the community of canons. Such was the origin of the Augustinian or Austin Canons, who came to be distinguished as Regular Canons, and are to be reckoned with monastic bodies, in comparison with the old cathedral and collegiate chapters, who were henceforth known as Secular Canons. These bodies of clergy, who combined parochial duties with what was practically a monastic life, became exceedingly popular; and by degrees not only were Secular Canons of collegiate churches, and even of some cathedrals, transformed into Regular Canons, but even some monastic houses were handed over to them. Instead of existing as isolated bodies, like the old Benedictines, they took the Cluniac model of organisation and formed congregations of houses grouped round some one or other of those which formed models for the rest. Of these congregations of Regular Canons the most celebrated were those of the Victorines and the Premonstratensians.
[Sidenote: Victorines.]
The abbey of St. Victor at Paris was founded in 1113 by William of Champeaux, afterwards Bishop of Chalons. The Order came to consist of about forty houses, and its members strove to keep the Augustinian ideal of a parochial and monastic life. But the chief fame of the abbey itself comes from its scholastic work, and it became known both as the stronghold of a somewhat rigid orthodoxy and as the home of a mystical theology which was developed among its own teachers.
[Sidenote: Premonstratensians.]
But by far the most important congregation of Canons Regular was that of the Premonstratensians. Their founder, Norbert, a German of noble birth, in response to a sudden conversion, gave up several canonries of the older kind with which he was endowed; but finding that a prophet has no honour in his own country, he preached in France with astonishing success, and ultimately, under the patronage of the Bishop of Laon in 1120, he settled with a few companions in a waste place in a forest, where he established a community of Regular Canons and gave to the spot the name of _Prémontré—pratum monstratum—_the meadow which had been pointed out to him by an angel. Almost from its foundation the Premonstratensian Order admitted women as well as men, and at first the two sexes lived in separate houses planted side by side. The Order also began the idea of affiliating to itself, under the form of a third class, influential laymen who would help in its work. The Premonstratensian houses assimilated themselves to monastic communities more than did the Victorines: their work was missionary rather than parochial. The Order spread with great rapidity not only in Western Europe, but, even in its founder's lifetime, to Syria and Palestine, and for purposes of administration it came to be divided into thirty provinces.
[Sidenote: St. Norbert in Germany.]
Meanwhile Norbert had come under the notice of the Emperor Lothair II, who forced him into the archbishopric of Magdeburg. Here he substituted Premonstratensians in a collegiate chapter for canons of the older kind, and he eagerly backed up Lothair's policy of extending German influence upon the north-eastern frontier by planting Premonstratensian houses as missionary centres and by founding new bishoprics. Norbert, in fact became Lothair's chief adviser and was an European influence second only to that of St. Bernard in all the questions of the day.
[Sidenote: Knights Templars.]
It was upon the model of the Canons Regular that the great military Orders of the religious were organised. In the year 1118 a Burgundian knight, Hugh de Payens, with eight other knights, founded at Jerusalem an association for the protection of distressed pilgrims in Palestine. From their residence near Solomon's Temple they came to be known as the Knights of the Temple. They remained a small and poor body until St. Bernard who was nephew to one of the knights, took them under his patronage and drew up for them a code of regulations which obtained the sanction of Honorius II at the Council of Troyes in 1128. From that moment the prosperity of the Templars was assured. Their numbers increased, and lands and other endowments were showered upon them in all parts of Europe. As monks they were under the triple vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and the regulations of the Order which governed their daily life were among the most severe. As knights it was their duty to maintain war against the Saracens. For administrative purposes the possessions of the Order were grouped in ten provinces, each province being further subdivided into preceptories or commanderies, and each of these into still smaller units. Each division and subdivision had its own periodical chapter of members for settling its concerns, and at the head of the whole Order stood the Grand Master with a staff of officers who formed the general chapter and acted as a restraint upon the conduct of their head. In addition to the knights the Order contained chaplains for the ecclesiastical duties, and serving brethren of humble birth to help the knights in warfare. Their possessions in Western Europe were used as recruiting-grounds for their forces in the East; but it was only in towns of some importance that they erected churches on the model of the Holy Sepulchre in connection with their houses.
[Sidenote: Knights Hospitallers.]
The Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem was a reorganisation of a hospital dedicated to St. John the Baptist. This had been erected for poor pilgrims by the merchants of Amalfi before the Crusades began. But it remained merely a charitable brotherhood living under a monastic rule and attracting both men and endowments, until the example of the Templars caused the then master, Raymond du Puy, to obtain papal sanction some time before 1130 for a rule which added military duties without superseding the original object of the Order. Their possessions were divided into eight provinces with subdivisions of grand priories and commanderies, and the other administrative arrangements differed in little, except occasionally in name, from those of the Templars.
[Sidenote: Privileges of the military Orders.]
Both these Orders obtained not only extensive possessions from the pious, but wide privileges from the Pope. They were subject to the spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope alone; they could consecrate churches and cemeteries on their own lands without any interference of the local clergy; they could hold divine service everywhere. Interdicts and excommunications had no terrors or even inconveniences for them. They were free from payment of tithes and other imposts levied on the clergy. There is no doubt that but for these Orders the Crusaders would have fared far worse than they did. The Templars and Hospitallers were the one really reliable element in the crusading forces. This is no very high praise, and their effectiveness was largely discounted by their bitter quarrels with each other and with the local authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, alike in the east and the west. They scandalously abused the extensive privileges accorded to them, by such acts as the administration of the Sacrament to excommunicated persons, to whom they would also give Christian burial. In 1179, at the second Lateran Council, Alexander III was moved by the universal complaints to denounce their irresponsible defiance of all ecclesiastical law, and subsequent Popes were obliged to speak with equal vigour. After the destruction of the Latin power in Palestine (1291) the Hospitallers transferred their head-quarters to Cyprus till 1309, then to Rhodes, and finally to Malta. The Templars abandoned theirraison d'être, retired to their possessions in the west, and placed their head-quarters at Paris, where they acted as the bankers of the French King. Their wealth provoked jealousy: they were accused of numberless and nameless crimes, and their enemies brought about their fall, first in France, then in England, and finally the abolition of the Order by papal decree in 1313. Such of their wealth as escaped the hands of the lay authorities went to swell the possessions of the Hospitallers.
[Sidenote: Teutonic Knights.]
There were many other Orders of soldier-monks besides these two. The best known are the Teutonic Knights, who originated during the Third Crusade at the siege of Acre (1190) in an association of North German Crusaders for the care of the sick and wounded. The Knights of the German Hospital of St. Mary the Virgin at Jerusalem—for such was their full title—gained powerful influence in Palestine; their Order was confirmed by Pope Celestine III (1191-8), and in 1220 Honorius III gave them the same privileges as were enjoyed by the Hospitallers and Templars. Their organisation was similar to that of the older Orders. Their prosperity was chiefly due to the third Grand Master, Herman von Salza, the good genius of the Emperor Frederick II, and a great power in Europe. Under him the Order transferred itself to the shores of the Baltic, where it carried on a crusade against the heathen Prussians, and here it united in 1237 with another knightly Order, the Brethren of the Sword, which had been founded in 1202 by the Bishop of Livonia for similar work against the heathen inhabitants of that country.
[Sidenote: Other military Orders.]
The Knights of the Hospital of St. Thomas of Acre was a small English Order named after Thomas Becket and founded in the thirteenth century. They, together with those already mentioned as founded for work in Palestine, belonged to the Canons Regular. For convenience, however, mention should be made here of the great Spanish Orders which were affiliated to the Cistercian monks. These were founded in imitation of the Templars and Hospitallers for similar work against the Saracens of the Peninsula. The Order of Calatrava, founded by a Cistercian abbot when that city was threatened by the Saracens in 1158, and the Order of St. Julian, founded about the same time, which ultimately took its name from the captured fortress of Alcantara, were amenable to the complete monastic rule; while the Portuguese Order of Evora or Avisa, founded a few years later, was assimilated rather to the lay brethren of the Cistercians, and its members could marry and hold property. There was one of the Spanish Orders, however, which was not connected with the Cistercians. The Knights of St. James of Compostella originated in 1161 for the protection of pilgrims to the shrine of Compostella. Their rule was confirmed by Alexander III in 1175, and the Order of Santiago became the most famous of the military Orders in the Peninsula.
[Sidenote: New Monastic Orders.]
The revival and reorganisation of the common life among cathedral and collegiate bodies roused the jealousy of the monastic houses. The absolute superiority of the monastic life over any other was an article of faith to which the obvious interests of the monks could allow no qualification; and the close imitation of the monastic model adopted by the Regular Canons was sufficient proof that the Church generally acquiesced in this view. The great reform movement of the eleventh century had emanated from the monks of Cluny; but just as the degradation of the monastic ideal by the Benedictines had called into existence the Order of Cluny with its reformed Benedictine rule, so now the failure of the Cluniacs to live up to the expectations and to minister to the needs of the most fervent religious spirits caused the foundation of a number of new Orders. In each such case the founder and his first followers strove, by the austerities of their personal lives and by the severity of the rule which they enjoined, to embody and to maintain at the highest level that ideal of contemplative asceticism which was the object of the monastic life. Such was the origin of the Order of Grammont (1074) and of Fontevraud (1094) and of the better known Orders of the Carthusians (1084) and the Cistercians (1098).
[Sidenote: Grammont.]
Thus Stephen, the founder of the Order of Grammont, was the son of a noble of Auvergne, who, in the course of a journey in Calabria, was so impressed by the life or the hermits with which the mountainous districts abounded, that he resolved to reproduce it, and lived for fifty years near Limoges, subjecting himself to such rigorous devotional exercises that his knees became quite hard and his nose permanently bent! Gregory VII sanctioned the formation of an Order, but Stephen and his first followers called themselves simplyboni homines. After his death the monastery was removed to Grammont close by, and a severe rule continued to be practised; but the management of the concerns of the house was in the hands, not of the monks, but of lay brethren, who began even to interfere in spiritual matters, and the Order ceased to spread.
[Sidenote: Carthusians.]
The founder of the Carthusians, Bruno, a native of Koln, but master of the Cathedral school at Rheims, also took the eremitic life as his model for the individual. To this end he planted his monastery near Grenoble, in the wild solitude of the Chartreuse, which gave its name to the whole Order and to each individual house. In addition to a very rigorous form of asceticism his rule imposed on the members an almost perpetual silence. The centre of the life of the Carthusian monk was not the cloister, but the cell which to each individual was, except on Sundays and festivals, at the same time chapel, dormitory, refectory, and study. The Carthusian rule has been described as "Cenobitism reduced to its simplest expression"; but despite the growing wealth of the Order, the rigour of the life was well maintained, and of all the monastic bodies it was the least subjected to criticism and satire.
[Sidenote: Fontevraud.]
A different type of founder is represented by Robert of Arbrissel, in Brittany, who, although he attracted disciples by the severity of his life as a hermit, was really a great popular preacher, whose words soon came to be attested by miracles. He was especially effective in dealing with fallen women, and the monastery which he established at Fontevraud, in the diocese of Poitiers, was a double house, men and women living in two adjacent cloisters; but the monks were little more than the chaplains and the managers of the monastic revenues, and at the head of the whole house and Order the founder placed an Abbess as his successor. The rule of this Order imposed on the female members absolute silence except in the chapter-house.
[Sidenote: Cluniac Congregation.]
The foundation of these Orders, greater or less, did not exhaust the impetus in favour of monasticism. Single houses and smaller Orders were founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of which many attained a merely local importance. The common feature of the great Orders was that each of them formed a Congregation, that is to say, an aggregate of numerous houses scattered over many lands, but following the same rule and acknowledging some sort of allegiance to the original home of the Order. The invention of this model was due to Cluny, although even among the Cluniacs the organisation of the Congregation, with its system of visiting inspectors who reported on the condition of the monasteries to an annual Chapter-General meeting at Cluny, was not completed until the thirteenth century. From the first, however, the Abbot of Cluny was a despot; with the exception of the heads of some monasteries which became affiliated to the Order he was the only abbot, the ruler of the Cluniac house being merely a prior. All the early abbots were men of mark, who were afterwards canonised by the Church. The fourth abbot refused the Papacy; but Gregory VII, Urban II, and Pascal II were all Cluniac monks. The real greatness of the Order was due to its fifth and sixth abbots, Odilo who ruled from 994 to 1049, and Hugh who held the reins of office for an even longer period (1049-1109); while the fame of the Order culminated under Peter the Venerable, the contemporary of St. Bernard.
[Sidenote: Its decay.]
But the history of the abbot who came between Hugh and Peter shows the strange vicissitudes to which even the greatest monasteries might be subjected. Pontius was godson of Pope Pascal II, who sent to the newly elected abbot his own dalmatic. Calixtus II visited Cluny, and while reaffirming the privileges granted by his predecessors, such as the freedom of Cluniac houses from visitation by the local bishop, he made the Abbot of Clunyex officioa Cardinal of the Roman Church, and allowed that when the rest of the land was under an interdict the monks of Cluny might celebrate Mass within the closed doors of their chapels. But as a consequence of these distinctions Pontius' conduct became so unbearable as to cause loud complaints from ecclesiastics of every rank. Ultimately the Pope intervened and persuaded Pontius to resign the abbacy and to make a pilgrimage to Palestine. Meanwhile another abbot was appointed. But Pontius returned, gathered an armed band, and got forcible possession of Cluny, which he proceeded to despoil. Again the Pope, Honorius II, interfered, and Pontius was disposed of.