Chapter 24

Frederick, by attaching, not the papacy but the clergy, alienated much support. Misfortunes gathered around him. His death ensured Innocent's supremacy. Soon the only legitimate heir of the Hohenstaufen was an infant, Conradin; and Conradin's future depended on his able but illegitimate uncle, Manfred. But Innocent did not live long to enjoy his victory; his arrogance and rapacity brought no honour to the papacy. English Grostête of Lincoln, on whom fell Stephen Langton's mantle, is the noblest ecclesiastical figure of the time.

For some years the imperial throne remained vacant; the matter of first importance to the pontiffs--Alexander, Urban, Clement--was that Conradin, as he grew to manhood, should not be elected. Manfred became king of South Italy, with Sicily; but with no legal title. Urban, a Frenchman, agreed with Charles of Anjou, brother of St. Louis, that he should have the crown, on terms. Manfred fell in battle against him at Beneventum, and with him all real chance of a Hohenstaufen recovery. Not three years after, young Conradin, in a desperate venture after his legitimate rights, was captured and put to death by Charles of Anjou.

A temporary pacification of Western Christendom was the work of Gregory X.; his aim was a great crusade. At last an emperor was elected, Rudolph of Hapsburg. But Gregory died. Popes followed each other and died in swift succession. Presently, on the abdication of the hermit Celestine, Boniface VIII. was chosen pope. His bull, "Clericis laicos," forbidding taxation of the clergy by the temporal authority, brought him into direct hostility with Philip the Fair of France, and though the quarrel was temporarily adjusted, the strife soon broke out again. The bulls, "Unam Sanctam" and "Ausculta fili," were answered by a formal arraignment of Boniface in the States-General of France, followed by the seizure of the pope's own person by Philip's Italian partisans.

_IV.--Captivity, Seclusion, and Revival_

The successor of Boniface was Benedict IX. He acted with dignity and restraint, but he lived only two years. After long delays, the cardinals elected the Archbishop of Bordeaux, a subject of the King of England. But before he became Clement V. he had made his pact with the King of France. He was crowned, not in Italy, but at Lyons, and took up his residence at Avignon, a papal fief in Provence, on the French borders. For seventy years the popes at Avignon were practically the servants of the King of France.

At the very outset, Clement was compelled to lend his countenance to the suppression of the Knights Templars by the temporal power. Philip forced the pope and the Consistory to listen to an appalling and incredible arraignment of the dead Boniface; then he was rewarded for abandoning the persecution of his enemy's memory by abject adulation: the pope had been spared from publicly condemning his predecessor.

John XXII. was not, in the same sense, a tool of the last monarchs of the old House of Capet, of which, during his rule, a younger branch succeeded in the person of Philip of Valois. John was at constant feud with the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, and also, within the ecclesiastical pale, with the Franciscan Order. Louis of Bavaria died during the pontificate of Clement VI., and Charles of Bohemia, already emperor in the eyes of the pope, was accepted by Germany. He virtually abdicated the imperial claim to rule in Italy; but by his "Golden Bull" he terminated the old source of quarrel, the question of the authority by which emperors were elected. The "Babylonish captivity" ended when Gregory XI. left Avignon to die in Italy; it was to be replaced by the Great Schism.

For thirty-eight years rival popes, French and Italian, claimed the supremacy of the Church. The schism was ended by the Council of Constance; Latin Christianity may be said to have reached its culminating point under Nicholas V., during whose pontificate the Turks captured Constantinople.

* * * * *

LEOPOLD VON RANKE

History of the Popes

Leopold von Ranke was born at Wiehe, on December 21, 1795, and died on May 23, 1886. He became Professor of History at Berlin at the age of twenty-nine; and his life was passed in researches, the fruits of which he gave to the world in an invaluable series of historical works. The earlier of these were concerned mainly with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--in English history generally called the Tudor and Stuart periods--based on examinations of the archives of Vienna and Rome, Venice and Florence, as well as of Berlin. In later years, when he had passed seventy, he travelled more freely outside of his special period. The "History of the Popes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" here presented was published in 1834-7. The English translation by Sarah Austin (1845) was the subject of review in one of Macaulay's famous essays. It is mainly concerned with the period, not of the Reformation itself, but of the century and a quarter following--roughly from 1535 to 1760, the period during which the religious antagonisms born of the Reformation were primary factors in all European complications.

_I.--The Papacy at the Reformation_

The papacy was intimately allied with the Roman Empire, with the empire of Charlemagne, and with the German or Holy Roman Empire revived by Otto. In this last the ecclesiastical element was of paramount importance, but the emperor was the supreme authority. From that authority Gregory VII. resolved to free the pontificate, through the claim that no appointment by a layman to ecclesiastical office was valid; while the pope stood forth as universal bishop, a crowned high-priest. To this supremacy the French first offered effectual resistance, issuing in the captivity of Avignon. Germany followed suit, and the schism of the church was closed by the secular princes at Constance and Basle. The papacy was restored in form, but not to its old supremacy.

The pontificates of Sixtus IV. and the egregious Alexander VI. were followed by the militant Julius II., who aimed, with some success, at making the pope a secular territorial potentate. But the intellectual movement challenged the papal claim, the direct challenge emanating from Germany and Luther. But this was at the moment when the empire was joined with Spain under Charles V. The Diet of Worms pointed to an accord between emperor and pope, when Leo X. died unexpectedly. His successor, Adrian, a Netherlander and an admirable man, sought vainly to inaugurate reform of the Church from within, but in brief time made way for Clement VII.

Hitherto, the new pope's interests had all been on the Spanish side, at least as against France; everything had been increasing the Spanish power in Italy, but Clement aimed at freedom from foreign domination. The discovery of his designs brought about the Decree of Spires, which gave Protestantism a legal recognition in the empire, and also the capture and sack of Rome by Frundsberg's soldiery. Charles's ascendancy in Italy and over the papacy was secured. Clement, now almost at his beck, would have persuaded him to apply coercion to the German Protestants; but this did not suit the emperor, whose solution for existing difficulties was the summoning of a general council, which Clement was quite determined to evade. Moreover, matters were made worse for the papacy when England broke away from the papal obedience over the affair of Katharine of Aragon.

Paul III., Clement's immediate successor, began with an effort after regeneration by appointing several cardinals of the Contarini type, associates of the Oratory of Divine Love, many of whom stood, in part at least, on common ground with avowed Protestants, notably on the dogma of justification by faith. He appears seriously to have desired a reconciliation with the Protestants; and matters looked promising when a conference was held at Ratisbon, where Contarini himself represented the pope.

Terms of union were even agreed on, but, being referred to Luther on one side and Paul on the other, were rejected by both, after which there was no hope of the cleavage being bridged. The regeneration of the Church would have to be from within.

_II.--Sixteenth Century Popes_

The interest of this period lies mainly in the antagonism between the imperative demand for internal reform of the Church and the policy which had become ingrained in the heads of the Church. For the popes, these political aspirations stood first and reform second. Alexander Farnese (Paul III.) was pope from 1534 to 1549. He was already sixty-seven when he succeeded Clement. Policy and enlightenment combined at first to make him advance Contarini and his allies, and to hope for reconciliation with the Protestants. Policy turned him against acceptance of the Ratisbon proposals, as making Germany too united. Then he urged the emperor against the Protestants, but when the success of Charles was too complete he was ill-pleased. He withdrew the Council from Trent to Bologna, to remove it from imperial influences which threatened the pope's personal supremacy. So far as he was concerned, reformation had dropped into the background.

Julius III. was of no account; Marcellus, an excellent and earnest man, might have done much had he not died in three weeks. His election, and that of his successor, Caraffa, as Paul IV., both pointed to a real intention of reform. Caraffa had all his life been a passionate advocate of moral reform, but even he was swept away by the political conditions and his hatred of Spain, which was an obsession. Professed detestation of Spain was a sure way to his favour, which, his kinsfolk recognising, they won his confidence only to their own ultimate destruction when he discovered that he had been deceived. Half his reign was worse than wasted in a futile contest with Spain; when it was done, he turned rigorously to energetic disciplinary reforms, but death stayed his hand.

A very different man was Pius IV., the pontiff under whom the Council of Trent was brought to a close. Far from rigid himself, he still could not, if he would, have altogether deserted the paths of reform. But most conspicuously he was inaugurator of a new policy, not asserting claims to supremacy, but seeking to induce the Catholic powers to work hand in hand with the papacy--Spain and the German Empire being now parted under the two branches of the House of Hapsburg. In this policy he was most ably assisted by the diplomatic tact of Cardinal Moroni, who succeeded in bringing France, Spain, and the empire into a general acceptance of the positions finally laid down by the Council of Trent, whereby the pope's ecclesiastical authority was not impaired, but rather strengthened.

On his death, he was succeeded by one of the more rigid school, Pius V. (1563-1572). This pope continued to maintain the monastic austerity of his own life; his personal virtue and piety were admirable; but, being incapable of conceiving that anything could be right except on the exact lines of his own practice, he was both extremely severe and extremely intolerant; especially he was, in harmony with Philip of Spain, a determined persecutor.

But to his idealism was largely due that league which, directed against the Turk, issued in one of the most memorable checks to the Ottoman arms, the battle of Lepanto.

Gregory XIII. succeeded him immediately before the massacre of St. Bartholomew. It was rather the pressure of his surroundings than his personal character that gave his pontificate a spiritual aspect. An honourable care in the appointment of bishops and for ecclesiastical education were its marks on this side. He introduced the Gregorian Calendar. He was a zealous promoter of war, open and covert, with Protestantism, especially with Elizabeth; his financial arrangements were effective and ingenious. But he failed to obtain control over the robber bands which infested the Papal States.

Their suppression was carried out with unexampled severity by Sixtus V. Sixtus was learned and prudent, and of remarkable self-control; he is also charged with being crafty and malignant. Not very accurately, he is commonly regarded as the author of much which was actually due to his predecessors; but his administration is very remarkable. Rigorous to the verge of cruelty in the enforcement of his laws, they were themselves commonly mild and conciliatory. He was energetic in encouraging agriculture and manufactures. Nepotism, the old ingrained vice of the popes, had been practised by none of his three immediate predecessors, though he is often credited with its abolition. His financial methods were successful immediately, but really accumulated burdens which became portentously heavy.

The treatment of public buildings in Rome by Sixtus V., his destruction of antiquities there, and his curious attempts to convert some of the latter into Christian monuments, mark the change from the semi-paganism of the times of Leo X. Similarly, the ecclesiastical spirit of the time opposed free inquiry. Giordano Bruno was burnt. The same movement is visible in the change from Ariosto to Tasso. Religion had resumed her empire. The quite excellent side of these changes is displayed in such beautiful characters as Cardinal Borromeo and Filippo Neri.

_III.--The Counter Reformation: First Stage_

Ever since the Council of Trent closed in 1563, the Church had been determined on making a re-conquest of the Protestant portion of Christendom. In the Spanish and Italian peninsulas, Protestantism never obtained a footing; everywhere else it had established itself in one of the two forms into which it was divided--the Lutheran and the Calvinistic. In Germany it greatly predominated among the populations, mainly in the Lutheran form. In France, where Catholicism predominated, the Huguenots were Calvinist. Calvinism prevailed throughout Scandinavia, in the Northern Netherlands, in Scotland, and--differently arrayed--in England.

In Germany, the Augsburg declaration, which made the religion of each prince the religion also of his dominions, the arrangement was favourable to a Catholic recovery; since princes were more likely to be drawn back to the fold than populations, as happened notably in the case of Albert of Bavaria, who re-imposed Catholicism on a country whose sympathies were Protestant. In Germany, also, much was done by the wide establishment of Jesuit schools, whither the excellence of the education attracted Protestants as well as Catholics. The great ecclesiastical principalities were also practically secured for Catholicism.

The Netherlands were under the dominion of Philip of Spain, the most rigorous supporter of orthodoxy, who gave the Inquisition free play. His severities induced revolt, which Alva was sent to suppress, acting avowedly by terrorist methods. In France the Huguenots had received legal recognition, and were headed by a powerful section of the nobility; the Catholic section, with which Paris in particular was entirely in sympathy, were dominant, but not at all securely so--a state of rivalry which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, while Alva was in the Netherlands.

Nevertheless, these events stirred the Protestants both in France and in the Netherlands to a renewed and desperate resistance. On the other hand, some of the German Catholic princes displayed a degree of tolerance which permitted extensions of Protestantism within their realms. In England, the government was uncompromisingly Protestant. Then the pope and Philip tried intervention by fostering rebellion in Catholic Ireland and by the Jesuit mission of Parsons and Campion in England, but the only effect was to make the Protestantism of the government the more implacable.

A change in Philip's methods in the Netherlands separated the northern Protestant provinces from the Catholic Walloons. The assassination of William of Orange decided the rulers of some of the northern German states who had been in two minds. The accession of Rudolf II. of Austria had a decisive effect in South Germany. When the failure of the house of Valois made the Huguenot Henry of Navarre heir to the French throne, the Catholic League, supported by the pope, determined to prevent his succession, while the reigning king, Henry III., Catholic though he was, was bitterly opposed to the Guises.

The immediate effect was the compulsory submission of the king to the Guises and the League, followed by the assassination, first of Guise and then of the king, at the moment when the Catholic aggression had taken shape in the Spanish Armada, and received a check more overwhelming than Philip was ready to recognise.

In certain fundamental points, the papacy was now re-asserting Hildebrandine claims--the right of controlling succession to temporal thrones. It is an error to regard it as essentially a supporter of monarchy; it was the accident of the position which commonly brought it into alliance with monarchies. In the Netherlands, it was by its support of the constitutional demands of the Walloon nobles that the south was saved for Catholicism. It asserted the duty of peoples to refuse allegiance to princes who departed from Catholicism, and it was Protestant monarchism which replied by asserting the divine right of kings; the Jesuits actually derived the power of the princes from the people. Thus a separate Catholic party arose, which, maintaining the divine appointment of princes, restricted the intervention of the church to spiritual affairs, and in France supported Navarre's claim to the throne; while, on the other hand, Philip and the Spaniards, strongly interested in preventing his succession, were ready to maintain, even against a fluctuating pope, that heresy was a permanent bar to succession, not to be removed even by recantation.

Sixtus V. found himself unable to decide. The rapid demise of three popes in succession after him (1590-1591) led to the election of Clement VIII. in January 1592, a man of ability and piety. He mistrusted the genuineness of the offer which Henry had for some time been making of returning to the bosom of the church, and was not inclined to alienate Spain. There was danger that the French Catholics would maintain their point, and even sever themselves from Rome. The acceptance of Henry would once more establish France as a Catholic power, and relieve the papacy of its dependence on Spain. At the end of 1595 Clement resolved to receive Henry into the church, and he reaped the fruits in the support which Henry promptly gave him in his claim to resume Ferrara into the Papal States. In his latter years, he and his right-hand man and kinsman, Cardinal Aldobrandini, found themselves relying on French support to counteract the Spanish influences which were now opposed to Clement's own sway.

On Clement's death another four weeks' papacy intervened before the election of Paul V., a rigorous legalist who cared neither for Spain nor France, but for whatever he regarded as the rights of the Church, as to which he had most exaggerated ideas. These very soon brought him in conflict with Venice, a republic which firmly maintained the supremacy of the authority of the State, rejecting the secular authority of the Church. To the pope's surprise, excommunication was of no effect; the Jesuits found that if they held by the pope there was no room for them in Venice, and they came out in a body. The governments of France and Spain disregarded the popular voice which would have set them at war--France for Venice, Spain for the pope--and virtually imposed peace; on the whole, though not completely, in favour of Venice.

But the conflict had impeded and even threatened to subvert that unity, secular and ecclesiastical, which was the logical aim of the whole of the papal policy.

_IV.--The Counter Reformation: Second Stage_

Meanwhile, the Protestantism which had threatened to prevail in Poland had been checked under King Stephen, and under Sigismund III. Catholicism had been securely re-established, though Protestantism was not crushed. But this prince, succeeding to the Swedish crown, was completely defeated in his efforts to obtain a footing for Catholicism, to which his success would have given an enormous impulse throughout the north.

In Germany, the ecclesiastical princes, with the skilled aid of the Jesuits, thoroughly re-established Catholicism in their own realms, in accordance with the legally recognised principle _cujus regio ejus religïo_. The young Austrian archduke, Ferdinand of Carinthia, a pupil of the Jesuits, was equally determined in the suppression of Protestantism within his territories. The "Estates" resisted, refusing supplies; but the imminent danger from the Turks forced them to yield the point; while Ferdinand rested on his belief that the Almighty would not protect people from the heathen while they remained heretical; and so he gave suppression of heresy precedence over war with the Turk.

The Emperor Rudolph, in his latter years, pursued a like policy in Bohemia and Hungary. The aggressiveness of the Catholic movement drove the Protestant princes to form a union for self-defence, and within the hereditary Hapsburg dominions the Protestant landholders asserted their constitutional rights in opposition. Throughout the empire a deadlock was threatening. In Switzerland the balance of parties was recognised; the principal question was, which party would become dominant in the Grisons.

There was far more unity in Catholicism than in Protestantism, with its cleavage of Lutherans and Calvinists, and numerous subdivisions of the latter. The Church at this moment stood with monarchism, and the Catholic princes were able men; half Protestantism was inclined to republicanism, and the princes were not able men. The Catholic powers, except France, which was half Protestant, were ranged against the Protestants; the Protestant powers were not ranged against the Catholics. The contest began when the Calvinist Elector Palatine accepted the crown of Bohemia, against the title of Ferdinand of Carinthia and Austria, who about the same time became emperor.

The early period of the Thirty Years' War thus opened was wholly favourable to the Catholics. The defeat of the Elector Palatine led to the Catholicising of Bohemia and Hungary; and also, partly through papal influence, to the transfer of the Palatinate itself to Bavaria, carrying the definite preponderance of the Catholics in the central imperial council. At the same time Catholicism acquired a marked predominance in France, partly through the defections of Huguenot nobles; was obviously gaining ground in the Netherlands; and was being treated with much more leniency by the government in England. And, besides all this, in every part of the globe the propaganda instituted under Gregory XV. and the Jesuit missions was spreading Catholic doctrine far and wide.

But the two great branches of the house of Hapsburg, the Spanish and the German, were actively arrayed on the same side; and the menace of Hapsburg supremacy was alarming. About the time when Urban VIII. succeeded Gregory (1623), French policy, guided by Richelieu, was becoming definitely anti-Spanish, and organised a huge assault on the Hapsburgs, in conjunction with Protestants, though in France the Huguenots were quite subordinated. This done, Richelieu found it politic to retire from the new combination, whereby a powerful impulse was given to Catholicism.