Popes and Emperors

Throughout the Middle Ages the Papacy occupied a central position in the life of the Western Church. The supremacy of the Bishop of Rome might be challenged at various times by secular rulers jealous of his authority within their kingdoms, by bishops who resented papal interference within their dioceses, or by dissident heretical groups who questioned the fundamental premisses on which papal claims were based; yet from the period of the conversion to Latin Christianity of the various Germanic tribes until the Reformation, no area of Western Europe was immune from the doctrinal and jurisdictional authority of Rome, and the history of the Papacy provides a common thread running through a long period of dogmatic and ecclesio- logical development.

When Leo I ascended the papal throne in 440 ce, imperial authority in Western Europe was already in decline. The emperor, in his new capital at Constantinople, increasingly neglected the backward and unproductive western provinces and concentrated the defence of the Empire in the East. Leo and his successors did not eagerly emancipate themselves from imperial tyranny; rather they were compelled to fill the vacuum left by the inertia and incapacity of emperors who nevertheless desired to preserve in full their theoretical authority in the abandoned Western provinces.

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ce, at imperial instigation, declared the parallel jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constanti­nople, an equality which was anathema to Rome. Yet the imperial govern­ment was still glad of any agency which might hold together the Western provinces. The decree of the Emperor Valentinian III in 455, supporting the Bishop of Rome against an assertion of independence by the churches of Gaul, is traditionally taken as marking the establishment of the unchallenged supremacy of the Pope as Patriarch of the West.

This elaborate theory was not devised to free the Papacy from imperial domination.

The Germanic tribes who settled in the West had a great admiration for the traditions of Rome, and as the institutions of imper­ial government gradually crumbled in the fifth and sixth centuries, they came to regard the Latin Church, and especially the Papacy, as the sole effective expression of the Roman spirit. A papal missionary strategy, culminating in Gregory I’s dispatch of the English mission in 596, gradually restored the lost provinces to Catholic Christianity. As conversion proceeded, the popes added to the prestige which they enjoyed as governors of the imperial city and heirs of the Caesars that reverence which was accorded by peoples whose new religion was more fetishistic than rational to the guardians of the relics of SS Peter and Paul and of so many other martyrs buried in the catacombs.

The initial efforts of the missionaries were directed towards the barbarian war-lords. Their conversion was often ascribed to divine intervention, as when Clovis, during his progress from tribal leader­ship to the kingship of the whole Frankish folk, on the eve of battle (c.

The Catholic bishops realised that a royal conversion would provide the opportunity for evangelisation among a receptive people. Strong government was an essential prerequisite for effective missionary work, and the episcopate placed at the disposal of successful tribal leaders the ideology which would transform them from barbarian war-lords into Chris­tian kings. A catena of biblical texts was forged to emphasise that subjection to a lawfully constituted prince was ordained by God. The ultimate sign of divine approval was, according to Frankish tradition, bestowed upon Clovis. At his coronation the oil for his unction descended from heaven on the back of a dove. This legend of the Sainte Ampoule was an important element in the political theology of the French monarchy far beyond the Middle Ages.

On Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne, King of the Franks, whose territory he had greatly extended, was crowned by the Pope as Emperor of the Romans. In the face of the violent indignation of the imperial authorities in Constantinople, he subsequently denied that he had ever sought this honour, yet his elevation was a recognition of political realities. Charlemagne, conscious imitator of both King David and of the Emperor Augustus, was regarded by the intellectuals at his court as the new Mel- chizedek, both priest and king. His rule was theocratic; he stood as the representative and the mirror image of God on earth. He was the channel by which the Divine Law was transformed into a code of legislation designed to establish a state of peace in which his subjects might pursue their quest for salvation.

The unity imposed by Charlemagne was ephemeral, and disintegrated under the pressure of pagan attack from all sides. In the short term the status of the Pope, liberated from imperial control, was enhanced, as he arbitrated between the claims of Charlemagne’s grandsons to the imperial title. Ultimately, however, the Papacy suffered from the break­down of public order and the fragmentation of authority which characterised the first ‘feudal’ age of Western European history, from the mid-ninth to the mid-eleventh century. The Papacy, like almost every bishopric in the West, became secularised, the prize for competing local families who appreciated the value to their own kin group of the annexation of spiritual authority. In the tenth century the Papacy sank to its nadir, and became the plaything of central Italian factions. The alternative, in the briefintervals of the restoration of imperial power, as under the three Ottoman kings of Germany (962-1002), was that the Bishop of Rome should become merely the senior domestic chaplain of a northern ruler.

The first attempts to reform the clerical order and to free the Church from the unscrupulous exploitation of lay lords were made north of the Alps in the tenth century by a group of monastic houses, of which the most prominent was Cluny, in Burgundy.

The twin evils which were attacked by Leo and his enthusiastic advisers were simony and clerical concubinage. The former signified the buying and selling of ecclesiastical office, which was no less than trafficking in the grace of the Holy Spirit, and was condemned as heretical. Clerical marriage had been commonplace in Western Europe for centuries, but the reformers regarded any relationship, however stable, between a priest and a woman, as immoral. It was intolerable that the minister who officiated at the miracle of the Mass should be tainted by what was seen as sexual squalour, while the begetting of sons by priests created the danger of an hereditary priestly caste, passing on churches from generation to generation irrespective of the individual’s suitability for the cure of souls. Leo implemented his reforms by taking the papal court on tour, convening a series of councils throughout Germany and France during which he expounded his radical legislation and deposed erring prelates. The impact of Pope Leo’s travels was extraordinary. He had announced firmly that the Bishop of Rome would no longer stagnate in his see, a mere custodian of relics, but intended rather to provide leadership for Western Christendom and to enforce reforms which would inevitably offend powerful vested interests. His idealism, however, attracted the support of many secular rulers, masters of the Church within their own dominions, such as Duke William of Normandy, and it is remarkable how quickly Leo’s premisses, upheld by his successors, were accepted throughout Western Europe. Abuses did not cease overnight, but within half a century it was generally agreed that simony and the keeping of women by priests were aberrations to be carefully concealed, rather than the norm of clerical life.

The Papacy was deprived of its greatest ally by the death in 1056 of the Emperor Henry III; the ensuing royal minority, accom­panied by factional strife, left it unprotected. It was self-defence which led Pope Nicholas II in 1059 to promulgate a decree which attempted to circum­vent the Roman aristocracy by entrusting the election of the Pope to the cardinals. Only later would this legislation be used to exclude also the emperor. In the same year, realising that the power vacuum in Germany and northern Italy left the Papacy vulnerable, Nicholas formed an alliance with the newly established Norman principalities of southern Italy, who would fulfil the vital role of protector of the Church of Rome. Practical necessity had loosened the ties between pope and Western emperor. At the same time, a group of theologians at the papal court arrived painfully at the conclusion that the greatest evil within the Church was not simony or immorality; these were merely symptoms of the degradation caused by lay domination of the Church at every level, from the local lord who appointed his kinsmen to a church on his estate to the emperor and kings who, sacrilegiously regarding themselves as the ministers of God within their domains, installed bishops and abbots according to their will and utilised the Church as an instrument of government.

The practical consequences of this view were seen in the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-85), who thought of himself as a conservative, attempting to recreate the purity of the apostolic age and to revive the supreme authority which he believed, sincerely but misguidedly, to have been exercised by the Bishop of Rome in the years following the conversion of the first Christian Caesar. He utilised the Donation of Constan­tine, an eighth-century forgery only detected as such in the fifteenth century, which described how the emperor had ceded to the Pope not only spiritual authority over all churches, but also supreme temporal power in the West. It was soon realised, however, that the Donation was susceptible of an imperial­ist interpretation, for what the emperor had given his successor might take away. Increasingly the Pope and his publicists emphasised the direct delega­tion of dominion to the Papacy by Christ himself. Gregory VII’s successors, indeed, adopted the title of Vicar of Christ, rather than Vicar of St Peter. The powers claimed by Gregory as a consequence of the divine commission were all-embracing. Not only should he exercise unrestricted authority within the clerical order, with complete discretion to determine matters of faith and Christian ethics, he also claimed the right to arbitrate in all matters in any way pertaining to the Christian commonwealth, which transcended all national and feudal frontiers. The feet of the Pope were to be kissed by all princes, he might depose emperors, he might absolve the subjects of unjust rulers from their oath of fealty. This was a doctrine of revolution. For seven hundred years the Church had provided Roman emperors and Germanic kings with an armoury of theological justifications for their paramount position within Christian society. Now the Bible, seen by all as a textbook from which could be abstracted God’s plan for the governance of the world, was reinterpreted in order to locate all directive authority within the priestly hierarchy, cul­minating in the Pope, and to reduce the lay ruler to the role of an executive officer, existing merely to fulfil, under the direction of the priesthood, the functions of law enforcement and punishment, necessary only because of the fallen state of man. Theocratic kingship was interred, and the ground-plan for papal monarchy was delineated.

Secular rulers did not, of course, acquiesce passively in this attack on their status, and because of the long-standing and intimate relationship between pope and emperor, the inevitable conflict broke first and most violently, once Henry IV attained his majority, in Germany and northern Italy. A dispute in 1075 over appointment to the important arch­bishopric of Milan rapidly escalated into a bitter confrontation over matters of fundamental ideological significance. The ensuing struggle is known as the Investiture Contest, since the question of whether a new bishop or abbot should be invested with ring and staff by the king or by his ecclesiastical superior became a convenient symbolic issue on which to focus the wider questions of control over the selection of the higher clergy and the rightful distribution of authority within the Church. This was a clash between two rival theories of world government, for both of which was claimed divine institution, the one sanctioned by long usage, the other revolutionary but allegedly a reconstitution of the pristine purity of a primitive golden age. The result was half a century of physical and intellectual violence, and the first great propaganda war in modern European history. Gregory excommuni­cated Henry and declared him deposed. The king ultimately appointed his own rival pope, whom in 1084, after a prolonged siege, he enthroned at Rome—there were to be eleven imperial anti-popes in the next hundred years. Gregory had by now been deserted by many of his own cardinals, who had come to believe that his policies of confrontation retarded rather than advanced reform within the Church at large, and the Pope died in exile in southern Italy in 1085, after the Holy City had been sacked by his own Norman allies. The conflict was not immediately resolved, but Gregory’s successors, if less charismatic figures, had a greater appreciation of the realities of power, while the kings of western Europe came to terms with the loss of their sacral status, for which they compensated by the institution of bureaucratic forms of government designed to maximise the exploitation of their secular resources. In 1122 the Investiture Contest in the Empire was ended by the Concordat of Worms, based on an earlier agreement in the Anglo-Norman realm. The king abandoned investiture, but retained the right to take, or to refuse, from newly elected prelates homage for the lands of their church, which gave him an effective power of veto. Elections, moreover, were to be held in the king’s presence, and in practice monarchs throughout the Middle Ages retained considerable control over the appoint­ment of the higher clergy, on whom they relied so heavily for the efficient conduct of government.

The compromise of 1122 was hardly in accord with the principles enunciated by Pope Gregory VII, and it is extremely doubtful if he, or his twelfth-century imitator Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canter­bury (1162-70), could have achieved the full implementation of their idealis­tic programme. The Church could neither isolate itself from the world, nor could it succeed in dominating entrenched secular institutions. It is arguable that more effective measures of reform were implemented by popes and prelates who sought accommodation with the lay power, enlisting the sup­port of pious rulers and utilising the machinery of the State to facilitate the Church’s great mission of the salvation of souls, than by those who invited confrontation by insisting on the inviolable privileges of the clerical order. Yet Gregory VII, if he died in exile with his work apparently in ruins, exercised a profound and lasting effect on Western ecclesiology and political thought. He established the principle that there are criteria, divorced from raison d’etat, by which the actions of the secular ruler must be judged. While papal authority was almost universally accepted, this standard was provided by the Divine Law, revealed to and interpreted by the pontiff. Thereafter, with the breakdown of unity and even the decline of religious belief, the measure came to be provided by the conscience of the individual. The Western tradition, forged by the eleventh-century Pope, is very different from that of the medieval Byzantine Empire and its modern successor states, where religion (and subsequently ideology) has been expected, in the tradi­tion of imperial Rome, to provide justification for the policies of the state.

The Concordat of Worms did not end hostility between the Papacy and the Empire. In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries there remained ideological differences between the two authorities, aggravated by the attempts of the Hohenstaufen emperors to resurrect the ancient prerogatives of the Caesars and to provide the German Empire with a tradition older than Christianity itself. The main issue, however, was terri­torial. The emperors sought, for political and fiscal reasons, to render more effective their dominion over northern Italy and to extend their authority southwards to Rome. The situation for the Papacy worsened considerably when Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, regarded as a dangerous free-thinker and seen by some as Antichrist, in the early thirteenth century united the Empire with the kingdom of Sicily, inherited from his mother, thus encircling papal territory in central Italy. If the Papacy was to remain an independent institu­tion, and the corner-stone of the unity of the Church in the West, it was essential that it should remain free ofimperial domination, and to achieve this freedom it was necessary to maintain around Rome a cordon sanitaire of territory under its own control. Pope Alexander III (1159-81) was successful in orchestrating the resistance of the quasi-independent northern Italian cities against the Emperor Frederick I, but the Peace of Venice of 1177, which provided temporary respite, solved none of the fundamental problems. Between 1227 and 1250 the Papacy fiercely resisted the efforts of Frederick II to unite all Italy under his rule. Holy war was preached against the Emperor, civil strife was fomented in Germany by papal legates, and the clergy of western Europe were heavily taxed in order to finance papal campaigns. Ultimately, but only after Frederick’s death, the Papacy was successful in breaking the Hohenstaufen dynasty, but the means to which it resorted were regarded by many as a perversion of the powers committed to the Vicar of Christ. The victory, moreover, was achieved only by inviting Charles of Anjou, younger brother of the French king, to invade the kingdom of Sicily, and once established he was as eager as his German predecessors to control the apostolic see. Once more a constant factor in papal history was empha­sised: the popes desperately needed the support of a strong secular ally to guarantee their independence, but any ruler strong enough to give effective protection would himself seek domination.

In the interval between two periods of imperial aggression, however, the medieval Papacy had apparently achieved the summit ofits authority during the pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216). He was elected at the extraordinarily early age of thirty-seven, and capitalised extremely ably on propitious political circumstances. He utilised the internal conflicts in Germany to secure, albeit with great difficulty, the elevation of his own candidates for the imperial title. He exploited King John’s difficulties in order to reduce England to the status of a papal fief. A lawyer by training, as were all but one of his predecessors and successors between 1159 and 1303, he formulated with logical clarity the fully evolved theory of the papal monarchy based on the vicariate of Christ, and he strove manfully to reform the government of the Papal States and the machinery of curial bureaucracy. He was also a religious leader of great vision. In the face of strong episcopal resistance, he supported the radical and inspirational interpretation of the Christian ideal propounded by Francis of Assisi, and presiding over the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), he co-ordinated a programme of general ecclesiastical reform designed to purge the Church of the laxity and opulence which had recently attracted so much criticism. Yet even so able a pontiff was frequently at the mercy of external forces. The reunion of the Greek and Latin Churches under the Bishop of Rome, so ardently desired by the papal court since the breach had gradually widened into schism in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, was achieved only at the expense of the scandalous sack of Constantinople by Western armies in 1204, which the Pope had never desired but was forced to condone. The extirpation of the Cathar heresy, which in northern Italy was peacefully eradicated by Franciscan preaching, in southern France was achieved only by a bloody crusade, initiated by the Pope but ruthlessly exploited by the acquisitive aristocracy of the north. Even Innocent’s imperial policy, apparently successful during his Efetime, bequeathed to his successors the bitter legacy of Frederick IPs ambition. If in 1215 it appeared that the Bishop of Rome was the arbiter of the affairs of Europe, and that Gregory VIPs ambitions had been fulfilled, it was because an extremely able Pope had strained the resources of the apostolic see to the limits in order to exploit a situation of temporary advantage.

There is a clear contrast between the apparently suc­cessful pontificate of Innocent III and the ultimate degrading failure of Boniface VIII (1294-1303), yet the two popes pursued identical policies, to which they were bound by tradition, and which may be summarised as the determined assertion, by legal and ideological means, of the papal plenitude of power in every matter connected, however remotely, with the spiritual welfare of mankind. In a society still regarded by papal publicists as a unitary Christian commonwealth, matters in which the Pope could and indeed was bound to intervene were almost limitless. When Boniface VIII stated that it was absolutely necessary for salvation for every creature to be utterly subject to the apostolic see, he was proposing no radical new thesis. The thirteenth century, however, had witnessed a radical shift in the European balance of power. The French monarchy had risen from insignificance to a position of dominance in the West, and a French cadet house ruled southern Italy. The effective power of the Empire, with its unrealistic universalist pretensions, had been broken by the Papacy, but in the process the concept of universalism had been shattered. In the late thirteenth century, for the first time in over two centuries, the ideological basis of papal authority was effectively chal­lenged. The reception, through contact with Islam, of the political thought of Aristotle had led to the questioning of the dictum that the secular state had been established merely as a remedy for sin, necessary because of mankind’s flawed nature and therefore tolerated by God as a regrettable evil. An alterna­tive view was now proposed that the state was the outcome of man’s natural tendency towards association, which was positively approved by God. The king was rehabilitated. No longer was power mediated to him through the Pope; rather it was granted to him by the voice of the people, which was equated with the voice of God. When Boniface VIII clashed with King Philip IV of France over the royal right to tax and exercise jurisdiction over the clergy of his realm, the Pope was confronted not only by superior physical force, but by an independently based ideology of the state which owed nothing to papal interpretation of the Bible. Undermined within the Papal States by a rival clan, the kindred of former popes who resented his mono­polising of office within his own family, Boniface was extremely vulnerable. His seizure by French agents at Anagni in 1303 and his almost immediate death were symbolic. The power of the Papacy was not broken, but hence­forth it would increasingly be forced to accommodate the aspirations of secular rulers and to compromise with their determination to control the Church within their kingdoms.

The nationalistic tendencies within the late medieval Church were emphasised and aggravated by the papal residence at Avignon from 1305 to 1378. The popes were driven to this city not so much by French royal pressure—Avignon was in fact an independent papal enclave—as by the anarchic condition of central Italy, which for seventy years they attempted to reduce to order from their stronghold north of the Alps. They were fiercely criticised, however, not only by Roman businessmen crippled by the absence of a great household noted for its conspicuous expenditure and by Italian humanists mortified by the decline in status of the imperial city, but by the nationals of all those countries diplomatically aligned against France. The situation was greatly worsened by the outbreak in 1337 of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, and the consequent division of western Europe into two armed camps. Successive popes attempted to act as honest brokers in this conflict, but while they thereby failed to satisfy the French king, they were nevertheless castigated by France’s enemies as tools of the Valois monarchy who had abnegated their universal responsibilities. An English tag had it that ‘as the Pope has become French, so has Jesus become English’.

The tensions within western Europe were reflected within the College of Cardinals, no longer as in the eleventh century the intimate assistants of the Pope, but representatives of national and sectional interests. The return of the Papacy to Rome in 1378 was shortly followed by schism, when the French cardinals set up at Avignon a rival Pope against Urban VI. The ‘Great Schism’, which lasted until 1415, shocked contem­poraries and provided much ammunition for heretical critics of the Church, but whatever solutions were put forward by theologians, the political conflicts within western Europe perpetuated the division. Every ally of France repudiated the Roman line of popes, while no friend of England would recognise the claimant at Avignon. The belated attempt of the cardi­nals of both obediences to assert their collegial independence by summoning a general council of the Church at Pisa in 1409 resulted not in the healing of the rift, since both Popes refused to accept their deposition, but in a third competing pontiff. The failure of the cardinals led to an increase in episcopal demands for a wider collegiality in the Church—an aspiration with deep roots, which had been rigorously repressed by the Papacy since the Gre­gorian reform. The kings of Europe, however, were content with a divided Papacy, from which they could the more easily wring concessions, and it was only the initiative of Sigismund, elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1411, whose hereditary power base was Bohemia, home of the Hussite heresy which fed on the divisions within the Church and which was thought to threaten secular as much as ecclesiastical authority, which secured the con­vening of the Council of Constance in 1415. The Council triumphantly asserted its orthodoxy by burning John Hus, the Bohemian heresiarch, and proceeded to heal the schism by electing Martin V as undisputed Pope. With the support of the other European rulers, however, it ignored the Emperor’s pleas to reform the Church at large, and the papal Curia in particular, before the election, and the new Pope and his successors, supremely conscious of their legacy, devoted the greater part of their energies to the undermining of plans agreed at Constance for regular and effective councils of the Church.

The Church in France had during the schism assumed an independent existence, looking increasingly to the king for the leadership hitherto expected from Rome. Martin V and his successors, desperate for support, negotiated concordats with other European rulers recognising their de facto authority within the national churches. Reformist elements within the Church continued to debate at the Council of Basle (1431-49) even after the papal dissolution of the council, but its success in negotiating with the Bohemian heretics was countered by the papal rap­prochement with the Byzantine Church, so long in schism; and its efforts towards reform were vitiated by the fear of secular rulers, eagerly fomented by the Papacy, that a demand for wider consultation within the Church signified an attack upon the developing trend towards autocracy within the state. Finally, appeal to a general council was declared to be heretical and treasonable. The Papacy, in order to defeat the conciliar movement, had sacrificed much of its authority to the national monarchies, and become increasingly preoccupied with its own political concerns in central Italy. The popes of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were of necessity territorial princes. Their ability to influence the spiritual life and ecclesiastical politics of western Europe had been eroded by the concessions made by their predecessors in order to ward off the threat of conciliarism.