Part 18

Philip Augustus of France, trying to ignore and defy him, found in the end the anger he aroused worth placating: John of England changed his petulant defiance into submission and an oath of homage: Portugal accepted him as her suzerain: rival kings of Hungary sought his arbitration: even distant Armenia sent ambassadors to ask his protection. His most impressive triumph, however, was secured in his dealings with the Empire.

Henry VI had wished, we have seen, to make the imperial crown hereditary; but no German prince would have been willing to accept the child he left as heir to his troubled fortunes. The choice of the electors therefore wavered between another Hohenstaufen, Philip of Suabia, brother of the late Emperor, and the Welf Otto, son of Henry the Lion. The votes were divided, and each claimant afterwards declared himself the legally elected emperor, one with the title Philip II, the other with that of Otto IV.

For ten long years Germany was devastated by their civil wars. Otto, as the Guelf representative, gained the support of Innocent the Great, to whom the claimants at one time appealed for arbitration; but Philip refused to submit to this judgement in favour of his rival, believing that he himself had behind him the majority of the German princes and of the official class.

‘Inasmuch,’ declared Innocent, ‘as our dearest son in Christ, Otto, is industrious, prudent, discreet, strong and constant, himself devoted to the Church ... we by the authority of St. Peter receive him as King and will in due course bestow on him the imperial crown.’

Here was papal triumph! Rome no longer patronized but patron, with Otto on his knees, gratefully promising submission and homage with every kind of ecclesiastical privilege, to complete the picture. Yet circumstances change traditions as well as people, and when the death of Philip of Suabia left him master of Germany, the Guelf Otto found his old ideals impracticable: he became a Ghibelline in policy, announced his imperial rights over Lombardy, even over some of the towns belonging to the Pope, while he loudly announced his intention of driving the young Hohenstaufen from Naples.

Innocent’s wrath at this _volte-face_ was unbounded. Otto, no longer his ‘dearest son in Christ’, was now a perjurer and schismatic, whose excommunication and deposition were the immediate duty of Rome. Neither, however, was likely to be effective unless the Pope could provide Italy and Germany with a rival, whose dazzling claims, backed by papal support, would win him followers wherever he went. In this crisis Innocent found his champion in the Hohenstaufen prince denounced by Otto, a lad educated almost since infancy in the tenets and ambitions of the Catholic Church.

[Sidenote: Frederick II]

Frederick, King of Naples and Sicily, was an interesting development of hereditary tastes and the atmosphere in which he had been reared. To the southern blood that leaped in his veins he owed perhaps his hot passions, his sensuous appreciation of luxury and art, his almost Saracen contempt for women save as toys to amuse his leisure hours. From the Hohenstaufen he imbibed strength, ambition, and cruelty, from the Norman strain on his mother’s side his reckless daring and treachery. With the ordinary education of a prince of his day, Frederick’s qualities and vices might have merely produced a warrior king of rather exceptional ability; but thanks to the papal tutors provided by Innocent, the boy’s naturally quick brain and imagination were stirred by a course of studies far superior to what his lay contemporaries usually enjoyed, and he emerged in manhood with a real love of books and culture, and with an eager curiosity on such subjects as philosophy and natural history.

In the royal charter by which he founded the University of Naples Frederick expressed his intention that here ‘those within the Kingdom who had hunger for knowledge might find the food for which they were yearning’; and his court at Palermo, if from one aspect dissolute and luxurious, was also a centre for men of wit and knowledge against whose brains the King loved to test his own quips and theories.

When Frederick reached Rome, on Innocent’s hasty summons to unsheath the sword of the Hohenstaufen against Otto, much of his character was as yet a closed book even to himself. Impulsive and eager, like any ambitious youth of seventeen called to high adventure, and with a genuine respect for his guardian, he did not look far ahead; but kneeling at the Pope’s feet, pledged his homage and faith before he rode away northwards to win an empire. In Germany a considerable following awaited him, lifelong opponents of Otto on account of his Welf blood, and others who hated him for his churlish manners. Amongst them Frederick scattered lavishly some money he had borrowed from the Republic of Genoa, and this generosity, combined with his Hohenstaufen strength and daring, increased the happy reputation that papal legates had already established for him in many quarters.

In December 1212 he was crowned in Mainz. Civil war followed, embittered by papal and imperial leagues, but in 1214 Otto IV was decisively beaten at Bouvines in the struggle with Philip II of France that we have already described,[19] and the tide which had been previously turning against him now swept away his few friends and last hopes. With the entry of his young rival into the Rhineland provinces the dual Empire ceased to exist, and Frederick was crowned in Aachen, the old capital of Charlemagne.

Innocent III had now reached the summit of his power, for his pupil and protégé sat on the throne of Rome’s imperial rival. In the same year he called a Council to the Lateran Palace, the fourth gathering of its kind, to consider the two objects dearest to his heart, ‘the deliverance of the Holy Land and the reform of the Church Universal’. Crusading zeal, however, he could not rouse again: to cleanse and spiritualize the life of the Church in the thirteenth century was to prove a task beyond men of finer fibre than Innocent: but, as an illustration of his immense influence over Europe, the Fourth Lateran Council with its dense submissive crowds, representative of every land and class, was a fitting end to his pontificate.

In the year 1216 Innocent III died--the most powerful of all Popes, a striking personality whose life by kindly fate did not outlast his glory. In estimating Innocent’s ability as a statesman there stands one blot against his record in the clear light shed by after-events, namely, the short-sighted policy that once again united the Kingdom of Naples to the Empire, and laid the Papacy between the upper millstone of Lombardy and the nether millstone of southern Italy. Excuse may be found in Innocent’s desperate need of a champion with Otto IV threatening his papal heritage, added to his belief in the promises of the young Hohenstaufen to remain his faithful vassal. He also tried to safeguard the future by making Frederick publicly declare that he would bequeath Naples to a son who would not stand for election to the Empire; but in trusting the word of the young Emperor he had sown a wind from which his successors were to reap a whirlwind.

The new Emperor was just twenty years old when Innocent died. Either to please his guardian, or moved by a momentary religious impulse, he had taken the Cross immediately after his entry into Aachen; but the years passed and he showed himself in no haste to fulfil the vow. Much of his time was spent in his loved southern kingdom, where he completed Innocent’s work of reducing to submission the Saracen population that had remained in Sicily since the Mahometan conquest.[20] As infidels the Papacy had regarded these Arabs with special hatred; but Frederick, once assured that they were so weak that they would be in future dependent on his favour, began protecting instead of persecuting them. He also encouraged their silk industry by building them a town, Lucera, on the Neapolitan coast, where they could pursue it undisturbed; while he enrolled large numbers of Arab warriors in his army, and used them to enforce his will on the feudal aristocracy, descendants of the Norman adventurers of the eleventh century.

So successful was he in playing off one section of his subjects against another, opposing or aiding the different classes as policy dictated, that he soon reigned as an autocrat in Naples. Many of the nobles’ strongholds were levelled with the dust: their claim to wage private war was forbidden on pain of death: cases were taken away from their law-courts and those of the feudal bishops to be decided by royal justices: towns were deprived of their freedom to elect their own magistrates, while crown officials sent from Palermo administered the laws, and imposed and collected taxes.

On the whole these changes were beneficial, for private privileges had been greatly abused in Naples, and Frederick, like Philip Augustus or the Angevin Henry II, had the instinct and ability to govern well when he chose. Nevertheless the subjugation of ‘the Kingdom’, as Naples was usually called in Italy, was of course received with loud outcries of anger by Neapolitan barons and churchmen, who hastened to inform the Holy See that their ruler loved infidels better than Christians and kept an eastern harem at Palermo.

Honorius III, the new Pope, accepted such reports and scandals with dismay. He had himself noted uneasily Frederick’s absorption in Italian affairs and frequently reminded him of his crusading vow. Being gentle and slow to commit himself to any decided step however, it was not till the Hohenstaufen deliberately broke his promise to Innocent III, and had his eldest son Henry crowned King of the Romans as well as King of Naples, thus acknowledging him as his heir in both Germany and Italy, that Honorius’s wrath flamed into a threat of excommunication. For a time it spread no farther, since Frederick was lavish in explanations and in promises of friendship that he had no intention of fulfilling, while the old Pope chose to believe him rather than risk an actual conflagration. At last, however, the patient Honorius died.

Gregory IX, the new Pope, was of the family of Innocent, and shared to the full his views of the world-wide supremacy of the Church. An old man of austere life and feverish energy, he regarded Frederick as a monster of ingratitude and became almost hysterical and quite unreasonable in his efforts to humble him. Goaded by his constant reproaches and threats, the Emperor began to make leisurely preparations at Brindisi for his crusade; but when he at last started, an epidemic of fever, to which he himself fell a victim, forced him to put back to port. Gregory, refusing to believe in this illness as anything more than an excuse for delay, at once excommunicated him; and then, though Frederick set sail as soon as he was well enough, repeated the ban, giving as his reason that the Emperor had not waited to receive his pardon for the first offence like an obedient son of the Church.

A crusader excommunicated by the Head of Christendom first for not fulfilling his vow and then for fulfilling it! This was a degrading and ridiculous sight; and Frederick, now definitely hostile to Rome, continued on his way, determined with obstinate pride that, if not for the Catholic Faith, then for his own glory, he would carry out his purpose. The Templars refused him support: the Christians still left in the neighbourhood of Acre helped him half-heartedly or stood aloof, frightened by the warnings of their priests; but Frederick achieved more without the Pope’s aid than other crusaders had done of late years with his blessing. By force of arms, and still more by skilful negotiations, he obtained from the Sultan possession of Jerusalem, and entering in triumph placed on his head the crown of the Latin kings.

His vow fulfilled, he sailed for Sicily, and the Pope, whose troops in Frederick’s absence had been harrying ‘the Kingdom’, hastily patched up a peace at San Germano. ‘I will remember the past no more,’ cried Frederick, but anger burned within him at papal hostility. ‘The Emperor has come to me with the zeal of a devoted son,’ said Gregory, but there was no trust in his heart that corresponded to his words.

A Hohenstaufen, who had taken Jerusalem unaided, supreme in Naples, supreme also in Germany, stretching out his imperial sceptre over Lombardy! What Pope, who believed that the future of the Church rested on the temporal independence of Rome, could sleep tranquilly in his bed with such a vision?

It is not possible to describe here in any detail the renewed war between Empire and Papacy that followed the inevitable breakdown of the treaty of San Germano. Very bitter was the spirit in which it was waged on both sides. Frederick, whatever his intentions, could not forget that it was the Father of Christendom who had tried to ruin his crusade. The remembrance did not so much shake his faith as wake in him an exasperated sense of injustice that rendered him deaf to those who counselled compromise. Unable to rid himself wholly of the fear of papal censure, he yet saw clearly enough that the sin for which Popes relentlessly pursued him was not his cruelty, nor profligacy, nor even his toleration of Saracens, but the fact that he was King of Naples as well as Holy Roman Emperor.

To a man of Frederick’s haughty temperament there was but one absolution he could win for this crime, so to master Rome that he could squeeze her judgements to his fancy like a sponge between his strong fingers. ‘Italy is my heritage,’ he wrote to the Pope, ‘and all the world knows it.’

In his passionate determination to obtain this heritage statesmanship was thrown to the winds. He had planned a strong monarchy in Naples, but in Germany he undermined the foundations of royal authority that Barbarossa and Henry VI had begun to lay. ‘Let every Prince’, he declared, ‘enjoy in peace, according to the improved custom of his land, his immunities, jurisdictions, counties and hundreds, both those which belong to him in full right, and those which have been granted out to him in fief.’

The Italian Hohenstaufen only sought from his northern kingdom, whose good government he thus carelessly sacrificed to feudal anarchy, sufficient money to pay for his campaigns beyond the Alps and leisure to pursue them. In the words of a modern historian, ‘he bartered his German kingship for an immediate triumph over his hated foe.’

At first victory rewarded his energy and skill. His hereditary enemy, the ‘Lombard League’, had tampered with the loyalty of his eldest son, Henry, King of the Romans, whom he had left to rule in Germany: but Frederick discovered the plot in time and deposed and imprisoned the culprit. In despair at the prospect of lifelong imprisonment held out to him, the young Henry flung himself to his death down a steep mountain-side; and Conrad, his younger brother, a boy of eight, was crowned in his stead.

In North Italy Frederick pursued the policy not so much of trampling down resistance with his German levies, like his grandfather Barbarossa, as of employing Italian nobles of the Ghibelline party, whom he supported and financed that they might fight his battles and make his wrath terrible in the popular hearing. Such were Eccelin de Romano and his brother Alberigo, lords of Verona and Vicenza, whose tyranny and cruelties seemed abnormal even in their day.

‘The Devil’s own Servant’ Eccelin is called by a contemporary, who describes how he slaughtered in cold blood eleven thousand prisoners.

‘I believe, in truth, no such wicked man has been from the beginning of the world unto our own days: for all men trembled at him as a rush quivers in the water ... he who lived to-day was not sure of the morrow, the father would seek out and slay his son, and the son his father or any of his kinsfolk to please this man.’

Alberigo ‘hanged twenty-five of the greatest men of Treviso who had in no wise offended or harmed him’; and as the prisoners struggled in their death agonies he thrust among their feet their wives, daughters, and sisters, whom he afterwards turned adrift half-naked to seek protection where they might.

Revenge when this ‘Limb of Satan’ fell into the hands of his enemies was of a brutality to match; for Alberigo and his young sons were torn in pieces by an infuriated mob, his wife and daughters burned alive, ‘though they were noble maidens and the fairest in the world and guiltless.’

Passions ran too deep between Guelf and Ghibelline to distinguish innocency, or to spare youth or sex. Cruelty, the most despicable and infectious of vices, was the very atmosphere of the thirteenth century, desecrating what has been described from another aspect as ‘an age of high ideals and heroic lives’.

It is remarked with some surprise by contemporaries that Frederick II could pardon a joke at his own expense; but on the other hand we read of his cutting off the thumb of a notary who had misspelt his name, and callously ordering one of his servants, by way of amusement, to dive and dive again into the sea after a golden cup, until from sheer exhaustion he reappeared no more.

At Cortenuova the Lombard League was decisively beaten by the imperial forces, the _carroccio_ of Milan seized and burned. Frederick, flushed with success, now declared that not only North but also Middle Italy was subject to his allegiance, and replied to a new excommunication by advancing into Romagna and besieging some of the papal towns. Gregory, worn out by grief and fury, died as his enemy approached the gates of Rome: and his immediate successor, unnerved by excitement, followed him to the grave before the cardinals who had elected him could proceed to his consecration.

Innocent IV, who now ascended the papal throne, had of old shown some sympathy to the imperial cause; but Frederick, when he heard of his election, is reported to have said, ‘I have lost a friend, for no Pope can be a Ghibelline.’ With the example of Otto IV in his mind he should have added that no Emperor could remain a Guelf.

Frederick had indeed gained an inveterate enemy, more dangerous than Gregory IX, because more politic and discreet. From Lyons, whither he had fled, Innocent IV maintained unflinchingly the claims he could no longer set forth in Rome, declaring the victorious Emperor excommunicate and deposed. ‘Has the Pope deposed me?’ asked Frederick scornfully, when the news came. ‘Bring me my crowns that I may see what he has taken away!’

One after another he placed on his head the seven crowns his attendants brought him, the royal crown of Germany and imperial diadem of Rome, the iron circlet of Lombardy, the crowns of Jerusalem, of Burgundy, of Sardinia, and of Sicily and Naples. ‘See!’ he said, ‘Are they not all mine still? and none shall take them from me without a struggle.’

So the hideous war between Welf and Waiblingen, between Guelf and Ghibelline continued, and Germany and Italy were deluged with blood and flames. ‘After the Emperor Frederick was put under the ban,’ says a German chronicler, ‘the robbers rejoiced over the spoils. Then were the ploughshares beaten into swords and reaping-hooks into lances. No one went anywhere without flint and steel to set on fire whatever he could kindle.’

The ebb from the high-water mark of the Emperor’s fortunes was marked by the revolt and successful resistance of the Guelf city of Parma to the imperial forces--a defeat Frederick might have wiped out in fresh victory had not his own health begun to fail. In 1250 he died, still excommunicate, snatched away to hell, according to his enemies, not dead, according to many who from love or hate believed his personality of more than human endurance.

Yet Frederick, whether for good or ill, had perished, and with him his imperial ambitions. Popes might tremble at other nightmares, but the supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire over Italy would no more haunt their dreams for many years. Naples also, to whose conquest and government he had devoted the best of his brain and judgement, was torn from his heirs and presented by his papal enemy to the French House of Anjou. Struggling against these usurpers the last of the royal line of Hohenstaufen, Conradin, son of Conrad, a lad of fifteen, gallant and reckless as his grandfather, was captured in battle and beheaded.

Frederick had destroyed in Germany and built on sand elsewhere; and of all his conquests and achievements only their memory was to dazzle after-generations. _Stupor et Gloria Mundi_ he was called by those who knew him, and in spite of his ultimate failure and his vices he still remains a ‘wonder of the world’, set above enemies and friends by his personality, the glory of his courage, his audacity, and his strength of purpose.

_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._

Pope Alexander III 1159-81 Emperor Philip II 1197-1208 Emperor Otto IV 1197-1215 Fourth Lateran Council 1215 The Sixth Crusade 1228-9 Battle of Cortenuova 1237 Death of Conradin 1268

XV

LEARNING AND ECCLESIASTICAL ORGANIZATION IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The word ‘progress’ implies to modern men and women a moving forward towards a perfection as yet unknown, freshly imagined indeed by each generation: to the Middle Ages it meant rather a peering back through the mist of barbarian invasions to an idealized Christian Rome. Inspiration lay in the past, not merely in such political conceptions as the Holy Roman Empire, but in the domain of art and thought, where too often tradition laid her choking grip upon originality struggling for expression.

The painting of the early Middle Ages was stereotyped in the stiff though beautiful models of Byzantium, that ‘Fathers of the Church’ had insisted, by means of decrees passed at Church councils, should be considered as fitting representations of Christian subjects for all time. Less impressive but more lifelike were the illuminations of missals and holy books, that, in illustrating the Gospels or lives of the Saints, reproduced the artist’s own surroundings--the noble he could see from the window of his cell ride by with hawk or hounds, the labourer sowing or delving, the merchant with his money-bags, the man of fashion trailing his furred gown.

Vignettes such as these, with their neat craftsmanship of line and colour, their almost photographic love of detail, lend a reality to our glimpses of life in Europe from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries; yet great as is the debt we owe them, the real art of the Middle Ages was not consummated with the brush but with the builder’s tools and sculptor’s chisel.

[Sidenote: Mediaeval Architecture]

Like the painter’s, the architect’s impulse was at first almost entirely religious, though guild-halls and universities followed on the erection of churches and monasteries. Nourished on St. Augustine’s belief in this life as a mere transitory journey towards the eternal ‘City of God’, mediaeval men and women saw this pilgrimage encompassed with a vast army of devils and saints, ranged in constant battle for the human soul. Only through faith and the kindly assistance of the Saints could man hope to beat off the legions of hell which hung like a pack of wolves about his footsteps, and nowhere with greater efficacy than in the sanctuary from which human prayer arose daily to God’s throne.