Chapter I. The Papacy.(1)

§ 1. Claim to Universal Supremacy.

The long struggle between the Mediæval Church and the Mediæval Empire, between the priest and the warrior,(2) ended, in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, in the overthrow of the Hohenstaufens, and left the Papacy sole inheritor of the claim of ancient Rome to be sovereign of the civilised world.

_Roma caput mundi regit orbis frena rotundi._

Strong and masterful Popes had for centuries insisted on exercising powers which, they asserted, belonged to them as the successors of St. Peter and the representatives of Christ upon earth. Ecclesiastical jurists had translated their assertions into legal language, and had expressed them in principles borrowed from the old imperial law. Precedents, needed by the legal mind to unite the past with the present, had been found in a series of imaginary papal judgments extending over past centuries. The forged decretals of the pseudo-Isidor (used by Pope Nicholas I. in his letter of 866 A.D. to the bishops of Gaul), of the group of canonists who supported the pretensions of Pope Gregory VII. (1073-1085),—Anselm of Lucca, Deusdedit, Cardinal Bonzio, and Gregory of Pavia,—gave to the papal claims the semblance of the sanction of antiquity. The Decretum of Gratian, issued in 1150 from Bologna, then the most famous Law School in Europe, incorporated all these earlier forgeries and added new ones. It displaced the older collections of Canon Law and became the starting-point for succeeding canonists. Its mosaic of facts and falsehoods formed the basis for the theories of the imperial powers and of the universal jurisdiction of the Bishops of Rome.(3)

The picturesque religious background of this conception of the Church of Christ as a great temporal empire had been furnished by St. Augustine, although probably he would have been the first to protest against the use made of his vision of the City of God. His unfinished masterpiece, _De Civitate Dei_, in which with a devout and glowing imagination he had contrasted the _Civitas Terrena_, or the secular State founded on conquest and maintained by fraud and violence, with the Kingdom of God, which he identified with the visible ecclesiastical society, had filled the imagination of all Christians in the days immediately preceding the dissolution of the Roman Empire of the West, and had contributed in a remarkable degree to the final overthrow of the last remains of a cultured paganism. It became the sketch outline which the jurists of the Roman Curia gradually filled in with details by their strictly defined and legally expressed claim of the Roman Pontiff to a universal jurisdiction. Its living but poetically indefinite ideas were transformed into clearly defined legal principles found ready-made in the all-embracing jurisprudence of the ancient empire, and were analysed and exhibited in definite claims to rule and to judge in every department of human activity. When poetic thoughts, which from their very nature stretch forward towards and melt in the infinite, are imprisoned within legal formulas and are changed into principles of practical jurisprudence, they lose all their distinctive character, and the creation which embodies them becomes very different from what it was meant to be. The mischievous activity of the Roman canonists actually transformed the _Civitas Dei_ of the glorious vision of St. Augustine into that _Civitas Terrena_ which he reprobated, and the ideal Kingdom of God became a vulgar earthly monarchy, with all the accompaniments of conquest, fraud, and violence which, according to the great theologian of the West, naturally belonged to such a society. But the glamour of the City of God long remained to dazzle the eyes of gifted and pious men during the earlier Middle Ages, when they contemplated the visible ecclesiastical empire ruled by the Bishop of Rome.

The requirements of the practical religion of everyday life were also believed to be in the possession of this ecclesiastical monarchy to give and to withhold. For it was the almost universal belief of mediæval piety that the mediation of a priest was essential to salvation; and the priesthood was an integral part of this monarchy, and did not exist outside its boundaries. “No good Catholic Christian doubted that in spiritual things the clergy were the divinely appointed superiors of the laity, that this power proceeded from the right of the priests to celebrate the sacraments, that the Pope was the real possessor of this power, and was far superior to all secular authority.”(4) In the decades immediately preceding the Reformation, many an educated man might have doubts about this power of the clergy over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women; but when it came to the point, almost no one could venture to say that there was nothing in it. And so long as the feeling remained that there might be something in it, the anxieties, to say the least, which Christian men and women could not help having when they looked forward to an unknown future, made kings and peoples hesitate before they offered defiance to the Pope and the clergy. The spiritual powers which were believed to come from the exclusive possession of priesthood and sacraments went for much in increasing the authority of the papal empire and in binding it together in one compact whole.

In the earlier Middle Ages the claims of the Papacy to universal supremacy had been urged and defended by ecclesiastical jurists alone; but in the thirteenth century theology also began to state them from its own point of view. Thomas Aquinas set himself to prove that submission to the Roman Pontiff was necessary for every human being. He declared that, under the law of the New Testament, the king must be subject to the priest to the extent that, if kings proved to be heretics or schismatics, the Bishop of Rome was entitled to deprive them of all kingly authority by releasing subjects from their ordinary obedience.(5)

The fullest expression of this temporal and spiritual supremacy claimed by the Bishops of Rome is to be found in Pope Innocent IV.’s _Commentary on the Decretals_(6) (1243-1254), and in the Bull, _Unam Sanctam_, published by Pope Boniface VIII. in 1302. But succeeding Bishops of Rome in no way abated their pretensions to universal sovereignty. The same claims were made during the Exile at Avignon and in the days of the Great Schism. They were asserted by Pope Pius II. in his Bull, _Execrabilis et pristinis_ (1459), and by Pope Leo X. on the very eve of the Reformation, in his Bull, _Pastor Æternus_ (1516); while Pope Alexander VI. (Rodrigo Borgia), acting as the lord of the universe, made over the New World to Isabella of Castile and to Ferdinand of Aragon by legal deed of gift in his Bull, _Inter cætera divinæ_ (May 4th, 1493).(7)

The power claimed in these documents was a twofold supremacy, temporal and spiritual.

§ 2. The Temporal Supremacy.

The former, stated in its widest extent, was the right to depose kings, free their subjects from their allegiance, and bestow their territories on another. It could only be enforced when the Pope found a stronger potentate willing to carry out his orders, and was naturally but rarely exercised. Two instances, however, occurred not long before the Reformation. George Podiebrod, the King of Bohemia, offended the Bishop of Rome by insisting that the Roman See should keep the bargain made with his Hussite subjects at the Council of Basel. He was summoned to Rome to be tried as a heretic by Pope Pius II. in 1464, and by Pope Paul II. in 1465, and was declared by the latter to be deposed; his subjects were released from their allegiance, and his kingdom was offered to Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, who gladly accepted the offer, and a protracted and bloody war was the consequence. Later still, in 1511, Pope Julius II. excommunicated the King of Navarre, and empowered any neighbouring king to seize his dominions—an offer readily accepted by Ferdinand of Aragon.(8)

It was generally, however, in more indirect ways that this claim to temporal supremacy, _i.e._ to direct the policy, and to be the final arbiter in the actions of temporal sovereigns, made itself felt. A great potentate, placed over the loosely formed kingdoms of the Middle Ages, hesitated to provoke a contest with an authority which was able to give religious sanction to the rebellion of powerful feudal nobles seeking a legitimate pretext for defying him, or which could deprive his subjects of the external consolations of religion by laying the whole or part of his dominions under an interdict. We are not to suppose that the exercise of this claim of temporal supremacy was always an evil thing. Time after time the actions and interference of right-minded Popes proved that the temporal supremacy of the Bishop of Rome meant that moral considerations must have due weight attached to them in the international affairs of Europe; and this fact, recognised and felt, accounted largely for much of the practical acquiescence in the papal claims. But from the time when the Papacy became, on its temporal side, an Italian power, and when its international policy had for its chief motive to increase the political prestige of the Bishop of Rome within the Italian peninsula, the moral standard of the papal court was hopelessly lowered, and it no longer had even the semblance of representing morality in the international affairs of Europe. The change may be roughly dated from the pontificate of Pope Sixtus IV. (1471-1484), or from the birth of Luther (November 10th, 1483). The possession of the Papacy gave this advantage to Sixtus over his contemporaries in Italy, that he “was relieved of all ordinary considerations of decency, consistency, or prudence, because his position as Pope saved him from serious disaster.” The divine authority, assumed by the Popes as the representatives of Christ upon earth, meant for Sixtus and his immediate successors that they were above the requirements of common morality, and had the right for themselves or for their allies to break the most solemn treaties when it suited their shifting policy.

§ 3. The Spiritual Supremacy.

The ecclesiastical supremacy was gradually interpreted to mean that the Bishop of Rome was the _one_ or universal bishop in whom all spiritual and ecclesiastical powers were summed up, and that all other members of the hierarchy were simply delegates selected by him for the purposes of administration. On this interpretation, the Bishop of Rome was the absolute monarch over a kingdom which was called spiritual, but which was as thoroughly material as were those of France, Spain, or England. For, according to mediæval ideas, men were spiritual if they had taken orders, or were under monastic vows; fields, drains, and fences were spiritual things if they were Church property; a house, a barn, or a byre was a spiritual thing, if it stood on land belonging to the Church. This papal kingdom, miscalled spiritual, lay scattered over Europe in diocesan lands, convent estates, and parish glebes—interwoven in the web of the ordinary kingdoms and principalities of Europe. It was part of the Pope’s claim to _spiritual_ supremacy that his subjects (the clergy) owed no allegiance to the monarch within whose territories they resided; that they lived outside the sphere of civil legislation and taxation; and that they were under special laws imposed on them by their supreme spiritual ruler, and paid taxes to him and to him alone. The claim to spiritual supremacy therefore involved endless interference with the rights of temporal sovereignty in every country in Europe, and things civil and things sacred were so inextricably mixed that it is quite impossible to speak of the Reformation as a purely religious movement. It was also an endeavour to put an end to the exemption of the Church and its possessions from all secular control, and to her constant encroachment on secular territory.

To show how this claim for spiritual supremacy trespassed continually on the domain of secular authority and created a spirit of unrest all over Europe, we have only to look at its exercise in the matter of patronage to benefices, to the way in which the common law of the Church interfered with the special civil laws of European States, and to the increasing burden of papal requisitions of money.

In the case of bishops, the theory was that the dean and chapter elected, and that the bishop-elect had to be confirmed by the Pope. This procedure provided for the selection locally of a suitable spiritual ruler, and also for the supremacy of the head of the Church. The mediæval bishops, however, were temporal lords of great influence in the civil affairs of the kingdom or principality within which their dioceses were placed, and it was naturally an object of interest to kings and princes to secure men who would be faithful to themselves. Hence the tendency was for the civil authorities to interfere more or less in episcopal appointments. This frequently resulted in making these elections a matter of conflict between the head of the Church in Rome and the head of the State in France, England, or Germany; in which case the rights of the dean and chapter were commonly of small account. The contest was in the nature of things almost inevitable even when the civil and the ecclesiastical powers were actuated by the best motives, and when both sought to appoint men competent to discharge the duties of the position with ability. But the best motives were not always active. Diocesan rents were large, and the incomes of bishops made excellent provision for the favourite followers of kings and of Popes, and if the revenues of one see failed to express royal or papal favour adequately, the favourite could be appointed to several sees at once. Papal nepotism became a byword; but it ought to be remembered that kingly nepotism also existed. Pope Sixtus V. insisted on appointing a retainer of his nephew, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, to the see of Modrus in Hungary, and after a contest of three years carried his point in 1483; and Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, gave the archbishopric of Gran to Ippolito d’Este, a youth under age, and after a two years’ struggle compelled the Pope to confirm the appointment in 1487.

During the fourteenth century the Papacy endeavoured to obtain a more complete control over ecclesiastical appointments by means of the system of _Reservations_ which figures so largely in local ecclesiastical affairs to the discredit of the Papacy during the years before the Reformation. For at least a century earlier, Popes had been accustomed to declare on various pretexts that certain benefices were _vacantes apud Sedem Apostolicam_, which meant that the Bishop of Rome reserved the appointment for himself. Pope John XXII. (1316-1334), founding on such previous practice, laid down a series of rules stating what benefices were to be reserved for the papal patronage. The ostensible reason for this legislation was to prevent the growing evil of pluralities; but, as in all cases of papal lawmaking, these _Constitutiones Johanninæ_ had the effect of binding ecclesiastically all patrons but the Popes themselves. For the Popes always maintained that they alone were superior to the laws which they made. They were _supra legem_ or _legibus absoluti_, and their dispensations could always set aside their legislation when it suited their purpose. Under these constitutions of Pope John XXII., when sees were vacant owing to the invalidation of an election they were _reserved_ to the Pope. Thus we find that there was a disputed election to the see of Dunkeld in 1337, and after some years’ litigation at Rome the election was quashed, and Richard de Pilmor was appointed bishop _auctoritate apostolica_. The see of Dunkeld was declared to be reserved to the Pope for the appointment of the two succeeding bishops at least.(9) This system of _Reservations_ was gradually extended under the successors of Pope John XXII., and was applied to benefices of every kind all over Europe, until it would be difficult to say what piece of ecclesiastical preferment escaped the papal net. There exists in the town library in Trier a MS. of the _Rules of the Roman Chancery_ on which someone has sketched the head of a Pope, with the legend issuing from the mouth, _Reservamus omnia_, which somewhat roughly represents the contents of the book. In the end, the assertion was made that the Holy See owned all benefices, and, in the universal secularisation of the Church which the half century before the Reformation witnessed, the very Rules of the Roman Chancery contained the lists of prices to be charged for various benefices, whether with or without cure of souls; and in completing the bargain the purchaser could always procure a clause setting aside the civil rights of patrons.

On the other hand, ecclesiastical preferments always implied the holders being liferented in lands and in monies, and the right to bestow these temporalities was protected by the laws of most European countries. Thus the ever-extending papal _reservations_ of benefices led to continual conflicts between the laws of the Church—in this case latterly the Rules of the Roman Chancery—and the laws of the European States. Temporal rulers sought to protect themselves and their subjects by statutes of _Præmunire_ and others of a like kind,(10) or else made bargains with the Popes, which took the form of _Concordats_, like that of Bourges (1438) and that of Vienna (1448). Neither statutes nor bargains were of much avail against the superior diplomacy of the Papacy, and the dread which its supposed possession of spiritual powers inspired in all classes of people. A Concordat was always represented by papal lawyers to be binding only so long as the goodwill of the Pope maintained it; and there was a deep-seated feeling throughout the peoples of Europe that the Church was, to use the language of the peasants of Germany, “the Pope’s House,” and that he had a right to deal freely with its property. Pious and patriotic men, like Gascoigne in England, deplored the evil effects of the papal _reservations_; but they saw no remedy unless the Almighty changed the heart of the Holy Father; and, after the failures of the Conciliar attempts at reform, a sullen hopelessness seemed to have taken possession of the minds of men, until Luther taught them that there was nothing in the indefinable power that the Pope and the clergy claimed to possess over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women.

To Pope John XXII. (1316-1334) belongs the credit or discredit of creating for the Papacy a machinery for gathering in money for its support. His situation rendered this almost inevitable. On his accession he found himself with an empty treasury; he had to incur debts in order to live; he had to provide for a costly war with the Visconti; and he had to leave money to enable his successors to carry out his temporal policy. Few Popes lived so plainly; his money-getting was not for personal luxury, but for the supposed requirements of the papal policy. He was the first Pope who systematically made the dispensation of grace, temporal and eternal, a source of revenue. Hitherto the charges made by the papal Chancery had been, ostensibly at least, for actual work done—fees for clerking and registration, and so on. John made the fees proportionate to the grace dispensed, or to the power of the recipient to pay. He and his successors made the _Tithes_, the _Annates_, _Procurations_, Fees for the bestowment of the _Pallium_, the _Medii Fructus_, _Subsidies_, and _Dispensations_, regular sources of revenue.

The _Tithe_—a tenth of all ecclesiastical incomes for the service of the Papacy—had been levied occasionally for extraordinary purposes, such as crusades. It was still supposed to be levied for special purposes only, but necessary occasions became almost continuous, and the exactions were fiercely resented. When Alexander VI. levied the _Tithe_ in 1500, he was allowed to do so in England. The French clergy, however, refused to pay; they were excommunicated; the University of Paris declared the excommunication unlawful, and the Pope had to withdraw.

The _Annates_ were an ancient charge. From the beginning of the twelfth century the incoming incumbent of a benefice had to pay over his first year’s income for local uses, such as the repairs on ecclesiastical buildings, or as a solatium to the heirs of the deceased incumbent. From the beginning of the thirteenth century prelates and princes were sometimes permitted by the Popes to exact it of entrants into benefices. One of the earliest recorded instances was when the Archbishop of Canterbury was allowed to use the _Annates_ of his province for a period of seven years from 1245, for the purpose of liquidating the debts on his cathedral church. Pope John XXII. began to appropriate them for the purposes of the Papacy. His predecessor Clement V. (1305-1314) had demanded all the _Annates_ of England and Scotland for a period of three years from 1316. In 1316 John made a much wider demand, and in terms which showed that he was prepared to regard the _Annates_ as a permanent tax for the general purposes of the Papacy. It is difficult to trace the stages of the gradual universal enforcement of this tax; but in the decades before the Reformation it was commonly imposed, and averages had been struck as to its amount.(11) “They consisted of a portion, usually computed at one-half, of the estimated revenue of all benefices worth more than 25 florins. Thus the archbishopric of Rouen was taxed at 12,000 florins, and the little see of Grenoble at 300; the great abbacy of St. Denis at 6000, and the little St. Ciprian Poictiers at 33; while all the parish cures in France were uniformly rated at 24 ducats, equivalent to about 30 florins.” Archbishoprics were subject to a special tax as the price of the _Pallium_, and this was often very large.

The _Procurationes_ were the charges, commuted to money payments, which bishops and archdeacons were authorised to make for their personal expenses while on their tours of visitation throughout their dioceses. The Popes began by demanding a share, and ended by often claiming the whole of these sums.

Pope John XXII. was the first to require that the incomes of vacant benefices (_medii fructus_) should be paid over to the papal treasury during the vacancies. The earliest instance dates from 1331, when a demand was made for the income of the vacant archbishopric of Gran in Hungary; and it soon became the custom to insist that the stipends of all vacant benefices should be paid into the papal treasury.

Finally, the Popes declared it to be their right to require special _subsidies_ from ecclesiastical provinces, and great pressure was put on the people to pay these so-called free-will offerings.

Besides the sums which poured into the papal treasury from these regular sources of income, irregular sources afforded still larger amounts of money. Countless dispensations were issued on payment of fees for all manner of breaches of canonical and moral law—dispensations for marriages within the prohibited degrees, for holding pluralities, for acquiring unjust gains in trade or otherwise. This demoralising traffic made the Roman treasury the partner in all kinds of iniquitous actions, and Luther, in his address _To the Nobility of the German Nation respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate_, could fitly describe the Court of the Roman Curia as a place “where vows were annulled, where the monk gets leave to quit his Order, where priests can enter the married life for money, where bastards can become legitimate, and dishonour and shame may arrive at high honours; all evil repute and disgrace is knighted and ennobled.” “There is,” he adds, “a buying and a selling, a changing, blustering and bargaining, cheating and lying, robbing and stealing, debauchery and villainy, and all kinds of contempt of God that Antichrist could not reign worse.”

The vast sums of money obtained in these ways do not represent the whole of the funds which flowed from all parts of Europe into the papal treasury. The Roman Curia was the highest court of appeal for the whole Church of the West. In any case this involved a large amount of law business, with the inevitable legal expenses; but the Curia managed to attract to itself a large amount of business which might have been easily settled in the episcopal or metropolitan courts. This was done in pursuance of a double policy—an ecclesiastical and a financial one. The half century before the Reformation saw the overthrow of feudalism and the consolidation of kingly absolutism, and something similar was to be seen in the Papacy as well as among the principalities of Europe. Just as the kingly absolutism triumphed when the hereditary feudal magnates lost their power, so papal absolutism could only become an accomplished fact when it could trample upon an episcopate deprived of its ecclesiastical independence and inherent powers of ruling and judging. The Episcopate was weakened in many ways,—by exempting abbacies from episcopal control, by encouraging the mendicant monks to become the rivals of the parish clergy, and so on,—but the most potent method of degrading it was by encouraging people with ecclesiastical complaints to pass by the episcopal courts and to carry their cases directly to the Pope. Nationalities, men were told, had no place within the Catholic Church. Rome was the common fatherland, and the Pope the universal bishop and judge ordinary. His judgment, which was always final, could be had directly. In this way men were enticed to take their pleas straight to the Pope. No doubt this involved sending a messenger to Italy with a statement of the plea and a request for a hearing; but it did not necessarily involve that the trial should take place at Rome. The central power could delegate its authority, and the trial could take place wherever the Pope might appoint. But the conception undoubtedly did increase largely the business of the courts actually held in Rome, and caused a flow of money to the imperial city. The Popes were also ready to lend monies to impoverished litigants, for which, of course, heavy interest was charged.

The immense amount of business which was thus directed into the papal chancery from all parts of Europe required a horde of officials, whose salaries were provided partly from the incomes of _reserved_ benefices all over Europe, and partly from the fees and bribes of the litigants. The papal law-courts were notoriously dilatory, rapacious, and venal. Every document had to pass through an incredible number of hands, and pay a corresponding number of fees; and the costs of suits, heavy enough according to the prescribed rule of the chancery, were increased immensely beyond the regular charges by others which did not appear on the official tables. Cases are on record where the _briefs_ obtained cost from twenty-four to forty-one times the amount of the legitimate official charges. The Roman Church had become a law-court, not of the most reputable kind,—an arena of rival litigants, a chancery of writers, notaries, and tax-gatherers,—where transactions about privileges, dispensations, buying of benefices, etc., were carried on, and where suitors went wandering with their petitions from the door of one office to another.

During the half century which preceded the Reformation, things went from bad to worse. The fears aroused by the attempts at a reform through General Councils had died down, and the Curia had no desire to reform itself. The venality and rapacity increased when Popes began to sell offices in the papal court. Boniface IX. (1389-1404) was the first to raise money by selling these official posts to the highest bidders. “In 1483, when Sixtus IV. (1471-1484) desired to redeem his tiara and jewels, pledged for a loan of 100,000 ducats, he increased his secretaries from six to twenty-four, and required each to pay 2600 florins for the office. In 1503, to raise funds for Cæsar Borgia, Alexander VI. (1492-1503) created eighty new offices, and sold them for 760 ducats apiece. Julius II. formed a ‘college’ of one hundred and one scriveners of papal briefs, in return for which they paid him 74,000 ducats. Leo X. (1513-1521) appointed sixty chamberlains and a hundred and forty squires, with certain perquisites, for which the former paid him 90,000 ducats and the latter 112,000. Places thus paid for were personal property, transferable on sale. Burchard tells us that in 1483 he bought the mastership of ceremonies from his predecessor Patrizzi for 450 ducats, which covered all expenses; that in 1505 he vainly offered Julius II. (1503-1513) 2000 ducats for a vacant scrivenership, and that soon after he bought the succession to an abbreviatorship for 2040.”(12) When Adrian VI. (1522-1523) honestly tried to cleanse this Augean stable, he found himself confronted with the fact that he would have to turn men adrift who had spent their capital in buying the places which any reform must suppress.

The papal exactions needed to support this luxurious Roman Court, especially those taken from the clergy of Europe, were so obnoxious that it was often hard to collect them, and devices were used which in the end increased the burdens of those who were required to provide the money. The papal court made bargains with the temporal rulers to share the spoils if they permitted the collection.(13) The Popes agreed that the kings or princes could seize the _Tithes_ or _Annates_ for a prescribed time provided the papal officials had their authority to collect them, as a rule, for Roman use. In the decades before the Reformation it was the common practice to collect these dues by means of agents, often bankers, whose charges were enormous, amounting sometimes to fifty per cent. The collection of such extraordinary sources of revenue as the Indulgences was marked by even worse abuses, such as the employment of pardon-sellers, who overran Europe, and whose lies and extortions were the common theme of the denunciations of the greatest preachers and patriots of the times.

The unreformed Papacy of the closing decades of the fifteenth and of the first quarter of the sixteenth century was the open sore of Europe, and the object of execrations by almost all contemporary writers. Its abuses found no defenders, and its partisans in attacking assailants contented themselves with insisting upon the necessity for the spiritual supremacy of the Bishops of Rome.

“Sant Peters schifflin ist im schwangk Ich sorge fast den untergangk, Die wallen schlagen allsit dran, Es würt vil sturm und plagen han.”(14)