Part 473

_G. B. Adams, Civilization During the Middle Ages, chapter 10._

"At Gregory's accession, he [Henry] was a young man of twenty-three. His violence had already driven a whole district into rebellion. … The Pope sided with the insurgents. He summoned the young king to his judgment-seat at Rome; threatened at his refusal to 'cut him off as a rotten limb'; and passed on him the awful sentence of excommunication. The double terror of rebellion at home and the Church's curse at length broke down the passionate pride of Henry. Humbled and helpless, he crossed the Alps in midwinter, groping among the bleak precipices and ice-fields,—the peasants passing him in a rude sledge of hide down those dreadful slopes,—and went to beg absolution of Gregory at the mountain castle of Canossa. History has few scenes more dramatic than that which shows the proud, irascible, crest-fallen young sovereign confronted with the fiery, little, indomitable old man. To quote Gregory's own words:—'Here he came with few attendants, and for three days before the gate—his royal apparel laid aside, barefoot, clad in wool, and weeping abundantly—he never ceased to implore the aid and comfort of apostolic mercy, till all there present were moved with pity and compassion; insomuch that, interceding for him with many prayers and tears they all wondered at my strange severity, and some even cried out that it was not so much the severe dignity of an apostle as the cruel wrath of a tyrant. Overcome at length by the urgency of his appeal and the entreaties of all present, I relaxed the bond of anathema, and received him to the favor of communion and the bosom of our holy Mother the Church.' It was a truce which one party did not mean nor the other hope to keep. It was policy, not real terror or conviction, that had led Henry to humble himself before the Pope. It was policy, not contrition or compassion, that had led Gregory (against his better judgment, it is said) to accept his Sovereign's penance. In the war of policy, the man of the world prevailed. Freed of the Church's curse, he quickly won back the strength he had lost. He overthrew in battle the rival whom Gregory upheld. He swept his rebellious lands with sword and flame. He carried his victorious army to Rome, and was there crowned Emperor by a rival Pope [1084]. Gregory himself was only saved by his ferocious allies, Norman and Saracen, at cost of the devastation of half the capital,—that broad belt of ruin which still covers the half mile between the Coliseum and the Lateran gate. Then, hardly rescued from the popular wrath, he went away to die, defeated and heart-broken, at Salerno, with the almost despairing words on his lips: 'I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile!' But 'a spirit hath not flesh or bones,' as a body hath, and so it will not stay mangled and bruised. The victory lay, after all, with the combatant who could appeal to fanaticism as well as force."

_J. H. Allen, Christian History in its Three Great Periods: second period, pages 69-72._

"Meanwhile, the Saxons had recognized Hermann of Luxemburg as their King, but in 1087 he resigned the crown: and another claimant, Eckbert, Margrave of Meissen, was murdered. The Saxons were now thoroughly' weary of strife, and as years and bitter experience had softened the character of Henry, they were the more willing to return to their allegiance. Peace was therefore, for a time, restored in Germany. The Papacy did not forgive Henry. He was excommunicated several times, and in 1091 his son Conrad was excited to rebel against him. In 1104 a more serious rebellion was headed by the Emperor's second son Henry, who had been crowned King, on promising not to seize the government during his father's lifetime, in 1099. The Emperor was treated very cruelly, and had to sign his own abdication at Ingelheim in 1105. A last effort was made on his behalf by the Duke of Lotharingia; but worn out by his sorrows and struggles, Henry died in August, 1106. His body lay in a stone coffin in an unconsecrated chapel at Speyer for five years. Not till 1111, when the sentence of excommunication was removed, was it properly buried. Henry V. was not so obedient to the Church as the Papal party had hoped. He stoutly maintained the very point which had brought so much trouble on his father. The right of investiture, he declared, had always belonged to his predecessors, and he was not to give up what they had handed on to him. In 1110 he went to Rome, accompanied by a large army. Next year Pope Paschal II. was forced to crown him Emperor: but as soon as the Germans had crossed the Alps again Paschal renewed all his old demands. The struggle soon spread to Germany. The Emperor was excommunicated; and the discontented princes, as eager as ever to break the royal power, sided with the Pope against him. Peace was not restored till 1122, when Calixtus II. was Pope. In that year, in a Diet held at Worms, both parties agreed to a compromise, called the Concordat of Worms."

_J. Sime, History of Germany, chapter 8._

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"The long-desired reconciliation was effected in the form of the following concordat. The emperor renounced the right of investiture with the ring and crosier, and conceded that all bishoprics of the empire should be filled by canonical election and free consecration; the election of the German bishops (not of the Italian and Burgundian) should be held in presence of the emperor; the bishops elect should receive investiture, but only of their fiefs and regalia, by the sceptre in Germany before, in Italy and in Burgundy after, their consecration; for these grants they should promise fidelity to the emperor; contested elections should be decided by the emperor in favour of him who should be considered by the provincial synod to possess the better right. Finally he should restore to the Roman Church all the possessions and regalia of St. Peter. This convention secured to the Church many things, and above all, the freedom of ecclesiastical elections. Hitherto, the different Churches had been compelled to give their consent to elections that had been made by the king; but now the king was pledged to consent to the elections made by the Churches; and although these elections took place in his presence, he could not refuse his consent and investiture without violating the treaty, in which he had promised that for the future elections should be according to the canons. This, and the great difference, that the king, when he gave the ring and crosier, invested the bishop elect with his chief dignity, namely, his bishopric, but now granted him by investiture with the sceptre, only the accessories, namely the regalia, was felt by Lothaire, the successor of Henry, when he required of pope Innocent II. the restoration of the right of investiture. Upon one important point, the homage which was to be sworn to the king, the concordat was silent. By not speaking of it, Calixtus seemed to tolerate it, and the Roman see therefore permitted it, although it had been prohibited by Urban and Paschal. It is certain that Calixtus was as fully convinced as his predecessors, that the condition of vassals, to which bishops and abbots were reduced by their oath of homage, could hardly be reconciled with the nature and dignity of the episcopacy, or with the freedom of the Church, but he perhaps foresaw, that by insisting too strongly upon its discontinuance, he might awaken again the unholy war, and without any hopes of benefit, inflict many evils upon the Church. Sometime later Adrian endeavoured to free the Italian bishops from the homage, instead of which, the emperor was to be content with an oath of fidelity: but Frederick I. would not renounce the homage unless they resigned the regalia. The greatest concession made by the papal see in this concordat, was, that by its silence it appeared to have admitted the former pretensions of the emperors to take a part in the election of the Roman pontiff. … In the following year the concordat was ratified in the great council of three hundred bishops, the ninth general council of the Church, which was convened by Calixtus in Rome."

_J. J. I. Döllinger, History of the Church, volume 3, pages 345-347._

See, also, PAPACY: A. D. 1056-1122; CANOSSA; ROME: A. D. 1081-1084; and SAXONY: A. D. 1073-1075.

ALSO IN: _A. F. Villemain, Life of Gregory VII., book 2._

_Comte C. F. Montalembert, The Monks of the West, book 19._

_H. H. Milman, History of Latin Christianity, books 6-8._

_W. R. W. Stephens, Hildebrand and His Times._

_E. F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, book 4._

GERMANY: A. D. 1101. Disastrous Crusade under Duke Welf of Bavaria.

See CRUSADES: A. D. 1101-1102.

GERMANY: A. D. 1125. Election of Lothaire II., King, afterwards Emperor.

GERMANY: A. D. 1125-1152. The rise of the College of Electors.

The election of Lothaire II., in 1125, when a great assembly of nobles and church dignitaries was convened at Mentz, and when certain of the chiefs made a selection of candidates to be voted for, has been regarded by some historians—Hallam, Comyn and Dunham, for example—as indicating the origin of the German electoral college. They have held that a right of "pretaxation," or preliminary choice, was gradually acquired by certain princes, which grew into the finally settled electoral right. But this view is now looked upon as more than questionable, and is not supported by the best authorities. "The phrase electoral princes (electores principes) first occurs in the Privilegium majus Austriacum, which dates from 1156, but it does not appear what princes were intended, and the accounts extant of the elections of the rival kings, Philip and Otho (IV.) in 1198, show beyond question that the right of election was not then limited to a few princes. The election of Frederick II. (1213) is only described by the authorities in general terms. They inform us that many princes took part in the proceedings. The following brief passage concerning the royal elections occurs in the Auctor Vetus de Beneficiis: 'When the king elected by the Germans goes to Rome to be 'consecrated (the) six princes who first cast their votes for him shall by rights accompany him that the justice of his election may be evident to the Pope.' The Sachsenspiegel Lehurecht substantially copies this sentence, but designates as the six princes: 'the Bishop of Mentz and of Treves and of Cologne, and the Palsgrave of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg.' The Sachsenspiegel of Landrecht is still more explicit: 'In voting for Emperor, the first shall be the Bishop of Mentz; the second, the (Bishop) of Treves; the third, the (Bishop) of Cologne. The first of the laymen to vote is the Palsgrave of the Rhine, the steward of the Empire; the second, the Duke of Saxony, the marshal; the third, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the chamberlain. The butler of the Empire (is) the King of Bohemia. He has no vote because he is not German.' The obvious inference is that these three temporal princes voted before the rest because they were respectively the steward, marshal, and chamberlain. In the chronicle of Albert of Stade, the inference is given as fact in these words: 'The Palsgrave votes because he is steward, the Duke of Saxony because (he is) marshal, and the Margrave of Brandenburg, because (he is) chamberlain.' The mere fact that the right of casting the first six votes attached to six particular princes implies that their votes greatly outweighed those of their fellow-princes, and this is well known to have been the case in all the elections held in the thirteenth century subsequent to that of Frederick II. Only two others were associated with them in the double election of Richard of Cornwall and Alphonso of Castile (1256), namely, the King of Bohemia and the Duke of Bavaria. The whole number of participants was therefore eight, yet Urban IV., in a letter written March 31, 1263, to Richard of Cornwall, mentions the King of Bohemia alone as associated with them, and incidentally states that the 'princes having a voice' in the royal elections were 'seven in number.' It seems as if this must have been the statement of an idea rather than of a fact, although a college of seven electors was a recognized institution ten years later, as the circumstances attending the election of Rudolph of Hapsburg, demonstrate."

_S. E. Turner, A Sketch of the Germanic Constitution, chapter 4._

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The Mark of Brandenburg was raised to the rank of an Electorate in 1356—not in 1152 as erroneously stated by Carlyle. The Margraf then became Kurfürst—"one of the Seven who have a right … to choose, to 'kieren' the Romish Kaiser; and who are therefore called Kur Princes, Kurfürste, or Electors. … Fürst (prince) I suppose is equivalent originally to our noun of number, 'First.' The old verb 'kieren' (participle 'erkoren' still in use, not to mention 'Val-kyr' and other instances) is essentially the same word as our 'choose,' being written 'kiesen' as well as 'kieren.' Nay, say the etymologists, it is also written 'Küssen ('to kiss,'—to choose with such emphasis!), and is not likely to fall obsolete in that form.—The other Six Electoral Dignitaries, who grew to Eight by degrees, and may be worth noting once by the readers of this book, are:

1. Three Ecclesiastical, Mainz, Cöln, Trier (Mentz, Cologne, Treves), Archbishops all. …

2. Three Secular, Sachsen, Pfalz, Böhmen (Saxony, Palatinate, Bohemia); of which the last, Böhmen, since it fell from being a kingdom in itself, to being a Province of Austria, is not very vocal in the Diets.

These Six, with Brandenburg, are the Seven Kurfürsts in old time; Septemvirs of the Country, so to speak. But now Pfalz, in the Thirty-Years War (under our Prince Rupert's Father, whom the Germans call the 'Winter-King'), got abrogated, put to the ban, so far as an indignant Kaiser could; and the vote and Kur of Pfalz was given to his Cousin of Baiern (Bavaria),—so far as an indignant Kaiser could.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1621-1623.

However, at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) it was found incompetent to any Kaiser to abrogate Pfalz or the like of Pfalz, a Kurfürst of the Empire. So, after jargon inconceivable, it was settled, that Pfalz must be reinstated, though with territories much clipped, and at the bottom of the list, not the top as formerly; and that Baiern, who could not stand to be balked after twenty-years possession, must be made Eighth Elector.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1648.

The Ninth, we saw (Year 1692), was Gentleman Ernst of Hanover.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1648-1705.

There never was any Tenth."

_T. Carlyle, Frederick the Great, book 2, chapter 4._

"All the rules and requisites of the election were settled by Charles the Fourth in the Golden Bull [A. D. 1356—see below: A. D. 1347-1493], thenceforward a fundamental law of the Empire."

_J. Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, chapter 14._

GERMANY: A. D. 1138-1268. The house of Suabia, or the Hohenstaufen. Its struggles in Germany and Italy, and its end. The Factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines. Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick the Second.

On the death of Henry V., in 1125, the male line of the house of Franconia became extinct. Frederick, duke of Suabia, and his brother Conrad, duke of the Franks, were grandchildren of Henry IV. on their mother's side, and, inheriting the patrimonial estates, were plainly the heirs of the crown, if the crown was to be recognized as hereditary and dynastic. But jealousy of their house and a desire to reassert the elective dependence of the imperial office prevailed against their claims and their ambition. At an election which was denounced as irregular, the choice fell upon Lothaire of Saxony. The old imperial family was not only set aside, but its bitterest enemies were raised over it. The consequences were a feud and a struggle which grew and widened into the long-lasting, far-reaching, historical conflict of Guelfs and Ghibellines.

See GUELFS AND GHIBELLINES; also, SAXONY: DISSOLUTION OF THE OLD DUCHY.

The Saxon emperor Lothaire found his strongest support in the great Wölf, Welf, or Guelf nobleman, Henry the Proud, duke of Bavaria, to whom he (Lothaire) now gave his daughter in marriage, together with the dukedom of Saxony, and whom he intended to make his successor on the imperial throne. But the scheme failed. On Lothaire's death, in 1138, the partisans of the Suabian family carried the election of Conrad (the Crusader—see CRUSADES: A. D. 1147-1149), and the dynasty most commonly called Hohenstaufen rose to power. It took the name of Hohenstaufen from its original family seat on the lofty hill of Staufen, in Suabia, overlooking the valley of the Rems. Its party, in the wars and factions of the time, received the name of the Waiblingen, from the birth-place of the Suabian duke Frederick—the little town of Waiblingen in Franconia. Under the tongue of the Italians, when these party names and war-cries were carried across the Alps, Waiblingen became Ghibelline and Welf became Guelf. During the first half century of the reign of the Hohenstaufen, the history of Germany is the history, for the most part, of the strife in which the Guelf dukes, Henry the Proud and Henry the Lion, are the central figures, and which ended in the breaking up of the old powerful duchy of Saxony. But Italy was the great historical field of the energies and the ambitions of the Hohenstaufen emperors. There, Frederick Barbarossa (Frederick Red beard, as the Italians called him), the second of the line, and Frederick II., his adventurous grandson, fought their long, losing battle with the popes and with the city-republics of Lombardy and Tuscany.

_U. Balzani, The Popes and the Hohenstaufen._

Frederick Barbarossa, elected Emperor in 1152, passed into Italy in 1154. "He came there on the invitation of the Pope, of the Prince of Capua, and of the towns which had been subjected to the ambition of Milan. He marched at the head of his German feudatories, a splendid and imposing array. His first object was to crush the power of Milan, and to exalt that of Pavia, the head of a rival league. Nothing could stand against him. At Viterbo he was compelled to hold the stirrup of the Pope, and in return for this submission he received the crown from the Pontiff's hands in the Basilica of St. Peter. He returned northwards by the valley of the Tiber, dismissed his army at Ancona, and with difficulty escaped safely into Bavaria. His passage left little that was solid and durable behind it. He had effected nothing against the King of Naples. His friendship with the Pope was illusory and short-lived. The dissensions of the North, which had been hushed for a moment by his presence, broke out again as soon as his back was turned. He had, however, received the crown of Charles the Great from the hands of the successor of St. Peter. But Frederick was not a man to brook easily the miscarriage of his designs. In 1158 he collected another army at Ulm. Brescia was quickly subdued; Lodi, which had been destroyed by the Milanese, was rebuilt, and Milan itself was reduced to terms. {1446} This peace lasted but for a short time; Milan revolted, and was placed under the ban of the Empire. The fate of Cremona taught the Milanese what they had to expect from the clemency of the Emperor. After a desultory warfare, regular siege was laid to the town. On March 1, 1162, Milan, reduced by famine, surrendered at discretion, and a fortnight later all the inhabitants were ordered to leave the town. The circuit of the walls was partitioned out among the most pitiless enemies of its former greatness, and the inhabitants of Lodi, of Cremona, of Pavia, of Novara, and of Como were encouraged to wreak their vengeance on their defeated rival. For six days the imperial army laboured to overturn the walls and public buildings, and when the Emperor left for Pavia, on Palm Sunday 1162, not a fiftieth part of the city was standing. This terrible vengeance produced a violent reaction. The homeless fugitives were received by their ancient enemies, and local jealousies were merged in common hatred of the common foe. Frederick had already been excommunicated by Pope Alexander III. as the supporter of his rival Victor. Verona undertook to be the public vindicator of discontent. Five years after the destruction of Milan the Lombard league numbered fifteen towns amongst its members. Venice, Verona, Vicenza, Treviso, Ferrara, Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, Milan, Lodi, Piacenza, Parma, Modena, and Bologna. The confederation solemnly engaged to expel the Emperor from Italy. The towns on the frontier of Piedmont asked and obtained admission to the league, and to mark the dawn of freedom a new town was founded on the low marshy ground which is drained by the Bormida and the Tanaro, and which afterwards witnessed the victory of Marengo. It was named by its founders Alessandria, in honour of the Pope, who had vindicated their independence of the Empire. … The Lombard league had unfortunately a very imperfect constitution. It had no common treasure, no uniform rules for the apportionment of contributions; it existed solely for the purposes of defence against the external foe. The time was not yet come when self-sacrifice and self-abnegation could lay the foundations of a united Italy. Frederick spent six years in preparing vengeance. In 1174 he laid siege to the new Alexandria, but did not succeed in taking it. A severe struggle took place two years later. In 1176 a new army arrived from Germany, and on May 29 Frederick Barbarossa was entirely defeated at Legnano. In 1876 the seventh hundred anniversary of the battle was celebrated on the spot where it was gained, and it is still regarded as the birthday of Italian freedom."

_O. Browning, Guelphs and Ghibellines, chapter 1._

See, also, ITALY: A. D. 1154-1162 to 1174-1183.

"The end was that the Emperor had to make peace with both the Pope and the cities, and in 1183 the rights of the cities were acknowledged in a treaty or law of the Empire, passed at Constanz or Constance in Swabia. In the last years of his reign, Frederick went on the third Crusade, and died on the way.

See CRUSADES: A. D. 1188-1192.