Chapter 23

Virtually a captive in the Turkish dominions, Charles conceived the project of persuading the sultan to attack Russia. At the outset, the grand vizier, Chourlouly Ali, favoured his ideas; but Peter, by lavish and judicious bribery, soon won him over. The grand vizier, however, was overthrown by a palace intrigue, and was replaced by an incorruptible successor, Numa Chourgourly, who was equally determined to treat the fugitive king in becoming fashion and to decline to make war on the Tsar.

Meanwhile, Charles's enemies were taking advantage of his enforced absence. Peter again overran Livonia. Augustus repudiated the treaty of Altranstad, and recovered the Polish crown. The King of Denmark repudiated the treaty of Travendal, and invaded Sweden, but his troops were totally routed by the raw levies of the Swedish militia at Helsimburg.

The Vizier Chourgourly, being too honourable for his post, was displaced by Baltaji Mehemet, who took up the schemes of Charles. War was declared against Russia. The Prince of Moldavia, Cantemir, supported Peter. The Turks seemed doomed to destruction; but first the advancing Tsar found himself deserted by the Moldavians, and allowed himself to be hemmed in by greatly superior forces on the Pruth. With Peter himself and his army entirely at his mercy, Baltaji Mehemet--to the furious indignation of Charles--was content to extort a treaty advantageous to Turkey but useless to the Swede; and Peter was allowed to retire with the honours of war.

_III.--The Meteor Quenched_

The great desire of the Porte was, in fact, to get rid of its inconvenient guest; to dispatch him to his own dominions in safety with an escort to defend him, but no army for aggression. Charles conceived that the sultan was pledged to give him an army. The downfall of the vizier--owing to the sultan's wrath on learning that Peter was not carrying out the pledges of the Pruth treaty--did not help matters; for the favourite, Ali Cournourgi, now intended Russia to aid his own ambitions, and the favourite controlled the new vizier. Within six months of Pruth, war had been declared and a fresh peace again patched up, Peter promising to withdraw all his forces from Poland, and the Turks to eject Charles.

But Charles was determined not to budge. He demanded as a preliminary half a million to pay his debts. A larger sum was provided; still he would not move. The sultan felt that he had now discharged all that the laws of hospitality could possibly demand. Threats only made the king more obstinate. His supplies were cut off and his guards withdrawn, except his own 300 Swedes; whereupon Charles fortified the house he had built himself. All efforts to bring him to reason were of no avail. A force of Janissaries was despatched to cut the Swedes to pieces; but the men listened to Baron Grothusen's appeal for a delay of three days, and flatly refused to attack. But when they sent Charles a deputation of veterans, he refused to see them, and sent them an insulting message. They returned to their quarters, now resolved to obey the pasha.

The 300 Swedes could do nothing but surrender; yet Charles, with twenty companions, held his house, defended it with a valour and temporary success which were almost miraculous, and were only overwhelmed by numbers when they sallied forth and charged the Turkish army with swords and pistols. Once captured, the king displayed a calm as imperturbable as his rage before had been tempestuous.

Charles was now conveyed to the neighbourhood of Adrianople, where he was joined by another royal prisoner--Stanislaus, who had attempted to enter Turkey in disguise in order to see him, but had been discovered and arrested. Charles was allowed to remain at Demotica. Here he abode for ten months, feigning illness; both he and his little court being obliged to live frugally and practically without attendants, the chancellor, Mullern, being the cook of the establishment.

The hopes which Charles obstinately clung to, of Turkish support, were finally destroyed when Cournourgi at last became grand vizier. His sister Ulrica warned him that the council of regency at Stockholm would make peace with Russia and Denmark. At length he demanded to be allowed to depart. In October 1714 he set out in disguise for the frontier, and having reached Stralsund on November 21, not having rested in a bed for sixteen days, on the same day he was already issuing from Stralsund instructions for the vigorous prosecution of the war in every direction. But meanwhile the northern powers, without exception, had been making partition of all the cis-Baltic territories of the Swedish crown. Tsar Peter, master of the Baltic, held that ascendancy which had once belonged to Charles. But the hopes of Sweden revived with the knowledge that the king had reappeared at Stralsund.

Even Charles could not make head against the hosts of his foes. Misfortune pursued him now, as successes had once crowded upon him. Before long he was himself practically cooped up in Stralsund, while the enemies' ships controlled the Baltic. In October, Stralsund was resolutely besieged. His attempt to hold the commanding island of Rugen failed after a desperate battle. The besiegers forced their way into Stralsund itself. Exactly two months after the trenches had been opened against Stralsund, Charles slipped out to sea--the ice in the harbour had first to be broken up--ran the gauntlet of the enemy's forts and fleets, and reached the Swedish coast at Carlscrona.

Charles now subjected his people to a merciless taxation in order to raise troops and a navy. Suddenly, at the moment when all the powers at once seemed on the point of descending on Sweden, Charles flung himself upon Norway, at that time subject to Denmark. This was in accordance with a vast design proposed by his minister, Gortz, in which Charles was to be leagued with his old enemy Peter, and with Spain, primarily against England, Hanover, and Augustus of Poland and Saxony. Gortz's designs became known to the regent Orleans; he was arrested in Holland, but promptly released.

Gortz, released, continued to work out his intriguing policy with increased determination. Affairs seemed to be progressing favourably. Charles, who had been obliged to fall back from Norway, again invaded that country, and laid siege to Fredericshall. Here he was inspecting a part of the siege works, when his career was brought to a sudden close by a cannon shot. So finished, at thirty-six, the one king who never displayed a single weakness, but in whom the heroic virtues were so exaggerated as to be no less dangerous than the vices with which they are contrasted.

* * * * *

HENRY MILMAN, D.D.

History of Latin Christianity

The "History of Latin Christianity, to the Pontificate of Nicholas V.," which is here presented, was published in 1854-56. It covers the religious or ecclesiastical history of Western Europe from the fall of paganism to the pontificate of Nicholas V., a period of eleven centuries, corresponding practically with what are commonly called the Middle Ages, and is written from the point of view of a large-minded Anglican who is not seeking to maintain any thesis, but simply to set forth a veracious account of an important phase of history. (Milman, see vol. xi, p. 68.)

_I.--Development of the Church of Rome_

For ten centuries after the extinction of paganism, Latin Christianity was the religion of Western Europe. It became gradually a monarchy, with all the power of a concentrated dominion. The clergy formed a second universal magistracy, exercising always equal, asserting, and for a long time possessing, superior power to the civil government. Western monasticism rent from the world the most powerful minds, and having trained them by its stern discipline, sent them back to rule the world. Its characteristic was adherence to legal form; strong assertion of, and severe subordination to, authority. It maintained its dominion unshaken till, at the Reformation, Teutonic Christianity asserted its independence.

The Church of Rome was at first, so to speak, a Greek religious colony; its language, organisation, scriptures, liturgy, were Greek. It was from Africa, Tertullian, and Cyprian that Latin Christianity arose. As the Church of the capital--before Constantinople--the Roman Church necessarily acquired predominance; but no pope appears among the distinguished "Fathers" of the Church until Leo.

The division between Greek and Latin Christianity developed with the division between the Eastern and the Western Empire; Rome gained an increased authority by her resolute support of Athanasius in the Arian controversy.

The first period closes with Pope Damasus and his two successors. The Christian bishop has become important enough for his election to count in profane history. Paganism is writhing in death pangs; Christianity is growing haughty and wanton in its triumph.

Innocent I., at the opening of the fifth century, seems the first pope who grasped the conception of Rome's universal ecclesiastical dominion. The capture of Rome by Alaric ended the city's claims to temporal supremacy; it confirmed the spiritual ascendancy of her bishop throughout the West.

To this period, the time of Augustine and the Pelagian controversy, belongs the establishment in Western Christendom of the doctrine of predestination, and that of the inherent evil of matter which is at the root of asceticism and monasticism. It was a few years later that the Nestorian controversy had the effect of giving fixity to that conception of the "Mother of God" which is held by Roman Catholics.

The pontificate of Leo is an epoch in the history of Christianity. He had utter faith in himself and in his office, and asserted his authority uncompromisingly. The Metropolitan of Constantinople was becoming a helpless instrument in the hands of the Byzantine emperor; the Bishop of Rome was becoming an independent potentate. He took an authoritative and decisive part in the controversy formally ended at the Council of Chalcedon; it was he who stayed the advance of Attila. Leo and his predecessor, Innocent, laid the foundations of the spiritual monarchy of the West.

In the latter half of the fifth century, the disintegration of the Western Empire by the hosts of Teutonic invaders was being completed. These races assimilated certain aspects of Christian morals and assumed Christianity without assimilating the intellectual subtleties of the Eastern Church, and for the most part in consequence adopted the Arian form. But when the Frankish horde descended, Clovis accepted the orthodox theology, thereby in effect giving it permanence and obliterating Arianism in the West. Theodoric, the Gothic king of Italy, in nominal subjection to the emperor, was the last effective upholder of toleration for his own Arian creed. Almost simultaneous with his death was the accession of Justinian to the empire. The re-establishment of effective imperial sway in Italy reduced the papacy to a subordinate position. The recovery was the work of Gregory I., the Great; but papal opposition to Gothic or Lombard dominion in Italy destroyed the prospect of political unification for the peninsula.

Western monasticism had been greatly extended and organised by Benedict of Nursia and his rule--comprised in silence, humility, and obedience. Monasticism became possessed of the papal chair in the person of Gregory the Great. Of noble descent and of great wealth, which he devoted to religious uses as soon as he became master of it, he had also the characteristics which were held to denote the highest holiness. In austerity, devotion, and imaginative superstition, he, whose known virtue and capacity caused him to be forced into the papal chair, remained a monk to the end of his days.

But he became at once an exceedingly vigorous man of affairs. He reorganised the Roman liturgy; he converted the Lombards and Saxons. And he proved himself virtual sovereign of Rome. His administration was admirable. He exercised his disciplinary authority without fear or favour. And his rule marks the epoch at which all that we regard as specially characteristic of mediæval Christianity--its ethics, its asceticism, its sacerdotalism, and its superstitions--had reached its lasting shape.

Gregory the Great had not long passed away when there arose in the East that new religion which was to shake the world, and to bring East and West once more into a prolonged conflict. Mohammedanism, born in Arabia, hurled itself first against Asia, then swept North Africa. By the end of the seventh century it was threatening the Byzantine Empire on one side of Europe, and the Gothic dominion in Spain on the other. On the other hand, in the same period, Latin Christianity had decisively taken possession of England, driving back that Celtic or Irish Christianity which had been beforehand with it in making entry to the North. Similarly, it was the Irish missionaries who began the conversion of the outer Teutonic barbarians; but the work was carried out by the Saxon Winfrid (Boniface) of the Latin Church.

The popes, however, during this century between Gregory I. and Gregory II. again sank into a position of subordination to the imperial power. Under the second Gregory, the papacy reasserted itself in resistance to the Emperor Leo the Isaurian, the "Iconoclast," the "Image-breaker," who strove to impose on Christendom his own zeal against images. To Leo, images meant image-worship. To his opponents, images were useful symbols. Rome defied the emperor's attempt to claim spiritual dictatorship. East and West were rent in twain at the moment when Islam was assaulting both West and East. Leo rolled back the advancing torrent before Constantinople, as Charles Martel rolled it back almost simultaneously in the great battle of Tours; but the Empire and the West, Byzantium and Rome, never presented a united front to the Moslem.

The Iconoclastic controversy threw Italy against its will into the hands of the image-worshipping Lombards; and hate of Lombard ascendancy turned the eyes of Gregory's successors to the Franks, to Charles Martel; to Pepin, who obtained from Pope Stephen sanction for his seizure of the Frankish crown, and in return repressed the Lombards; and finally to Charles the Great, otherwise Charlemagne, who on the last Christmas Day of the eighth century was crowned (Western) emperor and successor of the Caesars.

_II.--The Western Empire and Theocracy_

Charlemagne, the first emperor of the restored or Holy Roman Empire, by his conquests brought into a single dominion practically all Western Europe from the Elbe and the Danube to the Ebro. He stood the champion and the head of Western Christendom, palpably the master, and not even in theory the subordinate, of the Pontiff from whom he received the imperial crown. But he established ecclesiastics as a territorial nobility, counteracting the feudal nobility; and when the mighty emperor was gone, and the unity of what was nominally one empire passed away, this ecclesiastical nobility became an instrument for the elevation of the spiritual above the temporal head of Christendom. The change was already taking place under his son Louis the Pious, whose character facilitated it.

The disintegration of the empire was followed by a hideous degradation of the papacy. But the Saxon line of emperors, the Ottos, sprung from Henry the Fowler, once more revived the empire; the third of them established a worthy pope in Silvester II. But both emperor and pope died just after the eleventh century opened. Elections of popes and anti-popes continued to be accompanied by the gravest scandals, until the Emperor Henry III. (Franconian dynasty) set a succession of Germans on the papal throne.

The high character of the pontificate was revived in the persons of Leo IX. and Victor II. (Gebhard of Eichstadt); many abuses were put down or at least checked with a firm hand. But Henry's death weakened the empire, and Stephen IX. added to the rigid enforcement of orthodoxy more peremptory claims for the supremacy of the Holy See. His successor, Nicholas II., strengthened the position as against the empire by securing the support of the fleshly arm--the Normans. His election was an assertion of the right of the cardinals to make their own choice. Alexander II. was chosen in disregard of the Germans and the empire, and the Germans chose an anti-pope. At the back of the Italian papal party was the great Hildebrand. In 1073 Hildebrand himself ascended the papal throne as Gregory VII. With Hildebrand, the great struggle for supremacy between the empire and the papacy was decisively opened.

Gregory's aim was to establish a theocracy through an organised dominant priesthood separated from the world, but no less powerful than the secular forces; with the pope, God's mouthpiece, and vice-regent, at its head. The temporal powers were to be instruments in his hand, subject to his supreme authority. Clerical celibacy acquired a political value; the clergy would concentrate on the glory of the Church those ambitions which made laymen seek to aggrandise their families.

The collision between Rome and the emperor came quickly. The victory at the outset fell to the pope, and Henry IV. was compelled to humble himself and entreat pardon as a penitent at Canossa. Superficially, the tables were turned later; when Gregory died, Henry was ostensibly victor.

But Gregory's successor, Urban, as resolute and more subtle, retrieved what had only been a check. The Crusades, essentially of ecclesiastical inspiration, were given their great impulse by him; they were a movement of Christendom against the Paynim, of the Church against Islam; they centred in the pope, not the emperor, and they made the pope, not the emperor, conspicuously the head of Christendom.

The twelfth century was the age of the Crusades, of Anselm and Abelard, of Bernard of Clairvaux, and Arnold of Brescia. It saw the settlement of the question of investitures, and in England the struggle between Henry II. and Becket, in which the murder of the archbishop gave him the victory. It saw a new enthusiasm of monasticism, not originated by, but centring in, the person of Bernard, a more conspicuous and a more authoritative figure than any pope of the time. To him was due the suppression of the intellectual movement from within against the authority of the Church, connected with Abelard's name.

Arnold of Brescia's movement was orthodox, but, would have transformed the Church from a monarchial into a republican organisation, and demanded that the clergy should devote themselves to apostolical and pastoral functions with corresponding habits of life. He was a forerunner of the school of reformers which culminated in Zwingli.

In the middle of the century the one English pope, Hadrian IV., was a courageous and capable occupant of the papal throne, and upheld its dignity against Frederick Barbarossa; though he could not maintain the claim that the empire was held as a fief of the papacy. But the strife between the spiritual and temporal powers issued on his death in a double election, and an imperial anti-pope divided the allegiance of Christendom with Alexander III. It was not till after Frederick had been well beaten by the Lombard League at Legnano that emperor and pope were reconciled, and the reconciliation was the pope's victory.

_III.--Triumph and Decline of the Papacy_

Innocent III., mightiest of all popes, was elected in 1198. He made the papacy what it remained for a hundred years, the greatest power in Christendom. The future Emperor Frederick II. was a child entrusted to Innocent's guardianship. The pope began by making himself virtually sovereign of Italy and Sicily, overthrowing the German baronage therein. A contest for the imperial throne enabled the pope to assume the right of arbitration. Germany repudiated his right. Innocent was saved from the menace of defeat by the assassination of the opposition emperor. But the successful Otho proved at once a danger.

Germany called young Frederick to the throne, and now Innocent sided with Germany; but he did not live to see the death of Otho and the establishment of the Hohenstaufen. More decisive was his intervention elsewhere. Both France and England were laid under interdicts on account of the misdoings of Philip Augustus and John; both kings were forced to submission. John received back his kingdom as a papal fief. But Langton, whom Innocent had made archbishop, guided the barons in their continued resistance to the king, whose submission made him Rome's most cherished son. England and the English clergy held to their independence. Pedro of Aragon voluntarily received his crown from the pope. In every one of the lesser kingdoms of Europe, Innocent asserted his authority.

Innocent's efforts for a fresh crusade begot not the overthrow of the Saracen, but the substitution of a Latin kingdom under the Roman obedience for the Greek empire of Byzantium. In effect it gave Venice her Mediterranean supremacy. The great pope was not more zealous against Islam than against the heterogeneous sects which were revolting against sacerdotalism; whereof the horrors of the crusade against the Albigenses are the painful witness.

Not the least momentous event in the rule of this mightiest of the popes was his authorisation of the two orders of mendicant friars, the disciples of St. Dominic, and of St. Francis of Assisi, with their vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and their principle of human brotherhood. And in both cases Innocent's consent was given with reluctance.

It may be said that Frederick II. was at war with the papacy until his death in the reign of Innocent III.'s fourth successor, Innocent IV. With Honorius the emperor's relations were at first friendly; both were honestly anxious to take a crusade in hand. The two were brought no further than the verge of a serious breach about Frederick's exercise of authority over rebellious ecclesiastics. But Gregory IX., though an octogenarian, was recognised as of transcendent ability and indomitable resolution; and his will clashed with that of the young emperor, a brilliant prince, born some centuries too early.

Frederick was pledged to a crusade; Gregory demanded that the expedition should sail. Frederick was quite warranted in saying that it was not ready; and through no fault of his. Gregory excommunicated him, and demanded his submission before the sentence should be removed. Frederick did not submit, but when he sailed it was without the papal support. Frederick endeavoured to proceed by treaty; it was a shock to Moslems and to Christendom alike. The horrified Gregory summoned every disaffected feudatory of the empire in effect to disown the emperor. But Frederick's arms seemed more likely to prosper. Christendom turned against the pope in the quarrel. Christendom would not go crusading against an emperor who had restored the kingdom of Jerusalem. The two came to terms. Gregory turned his attention to becoming the Justinian of the Church.

But a rebellion against Frederick took shape practically as a renewal of the papal-imperial contest. Gregory prepared a league; then once more he launched his ban. Europe was amazed by a sort of war of proclamations. Nothing perhaps served the pope better now than the agency of the mendicant orders. The military triumph of Frederick, however, seemed already assured when Gregory died. Two years later, Innocent IV. was pope. After hollow overtures, Innocent fled to Lyons, and there launched invectives against Frederick and appeals to Christendom.