| #### 5. THE IMPERIAL MENACE TO THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION: (I) FREDERICK BARBAROSSA AND ALEXANDER III, 1154-1177 |

| #### #### The new reluctance of Catholicism to rally to the defence of the Holy Places was significant. The forces active within the Church in the first generation of the great spiritual revival were beginning to languish. The disinterested idealism which, for sixty years now, had so marvellously inspired the universality of the Church had almost spent itself. St. Bernard, in whom the spiritual revival and its popularity were symbolised, died in 1153, and the morrow of the crusade for which he had so devotedly, but unsuccessfully, spent himself was a new struggle between the Church and the Catholic prince. It was not a struggle, this time, to regain from the prince rights of jurisdiction which had lapsed to him through the disorder of centuries, but, more fundamentally still, a struggle to determine the respective positions of pope and emperor with the Church; a struggle in which the emperor challenged the pope at the same time that his ambition challenged also the liberties of the Italian city states. The pope, in this contest, had from the beginning allies bound to him by the political danger in which they, too, stood from the foe who was the foe of the papacy. #### Thus the imperial attempt consciously to restore Justinian and the Carolingians provoked a struggle complicated by political considerations, a struggle to be fought out therefore, on both sides, by the full lay apparatus of alliances and armies, as well as by the resources of ecclesiastical censure and prayer. There is about this necessary, and inevitable, preoccupation of the popes with the new Hohenstaufen emperor a certain worldly air. It lacks the pure idealism of the earlier struggle. None of the papal champions in it -- for all the real goodness of their lives -- has even come near to canonisation. The only saint of the struggle, the one purely ideal figure, is the English Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Thomas Becket, and his idealism, it is true to say, more than once gravely embarrassed the pope at a critical moment. #### The prince who willed to revive in himself all the old universal power of Justinian, was the Emperor Frederick I, elected in the very last year of St. Bernard's life, 1152. Tall and fair -- from his red beard called ever afterwards Barbarossa -- the typical German in bodily figure, as in his vague political idealism, he was at the time of his election a man thirty years of age, younger than St. Bernard by just a generation. His dream of transforming the idea of the Roman Empire into reality was soon given its opportunity. Invitations to come, armed, into Italy were not wanting. The nobles wished him to suppress the communes. In Sicily there were those who wished to see the Normans driven out. The pope desired the defeat of Arnold of Brescia. #### Not until the autumn of 1154 was Frederick ready to advance. By the time he came to Italy Eugene III was dead, and his short-lived successor too. The pope whom Barbarossa met was the one Englishman to whom that high dignity has fallen, Nicolas Brakespeare, Adrian IV, a solemn, austere figure, a simpleminded reformer who had already made a name as the second founder of Norway's Christianity. Arnold of Brescia, driven out for a time in 1154, had returned to Rome. The city welcomed him, and restored the republic until, with unheard-of directness, Adrian laid Rome itself under an interdict. The measure was so far successful that Arnold's supporters deserted him, and he fled to friends outside Rome. Easter 1155 saw the pope and the Romans reconciled. #### Barbarossa meanwhile had crossed the Alps, and was steadily advancing through Lombardy, where city after city opened its gates to him. Milan held out, but Frederick for the moment ignored it and passed through Tuscany towards Rome. At Campo Grasso pope and emperor met, and Frederick gave an unmistakable sign of his dispositions by utterly refusing the customary act of homage. Adrian, just as inflexibly, refused to proceed until it was given. It was three days before Frederick yielded, and when, immediately afterwards, the senate which, in Arnold's days, had ruled Rome, waited on him with a mixture of petitions and directions, he broke out violently against them. On Whit Sunday (June 18, 1155) Adrian crowned him emperor in St. Peter's. The Romans, irritated by the reception he had given the senate, attacked his troops, and the day ended in slaughter, and in Frederick's withdrawal -- with the pope, for his own safety, in the emperor's company. #### The last weeks of Frederick's advance had also seen the end of Arnold of Brescia. It had been part of the pact between pope and emperor that Frederick should capture and deliver Arnold over to the pope. The heresiarch was taken and confined in the papal prison. Thence he was taken out and hanged, his body burned, and the ashes thrown into the Tiber. About his end there stilllingers a great deal of obscurity. It is not really known by whose authority he was put to death, whether by that of the pope, or of the emperor, or, as one account states, by the Prefect of Rome, without the pope's knowledge, for some private reason. #### Frederick, crowned and consecrated emperor, returned into Germany. Adrian, left to himself, turned to the old diplomacy of alliance with the Normans and negotiations with the turbulent Romans. But to the emperor this Sicilian policy was most unwelcome, and at the diet held at Besancon (October, 1157) his indignation was given its opportunity. To the diet Adrian had despatched two legates -- one of them Roland Bandinelli, cardinal since 1150 and Chancellor of the Roman Church. The legates were charged to remind Frederick that as emperor it was his duty to defend the Church, the occasion of the admonition being the recent murder of the primate of Denmark. The emperor, the legate proceeded to say, must not forget that it was the Holy Roman Church which conferred on him the "signal favour of the crown”, and that it was proposed to add favours still more valuable. When this part of the message was read out tumult shook the assembly. The word used by the pope to mean favour (beneficium) had also the more restricted technical meaning of fief, and at the suggestion that, as emperor, Frederick must acknowledge the pope as suzerain, the great feudatories turned on the legates. " From whom then does the emperor hold the empire if not from the pope?” said Bandinelli, a founder of the Canon Law speaking through the legate. Whereat only Frederick's personal intervention saved him from the sword of an angry German. The legates were expelled; the diet broke up. #### Both parties now prepared for the struggle, Frederick organising Germany against the papal claims, protesting that the empire was not a papal fief, Adrian protesting as widely against the insult of the expulsion of his legates. The German bishops, in the main, showed as much sympathy with the emperor as, without a breach with the pope, was possible. #### In the spring of 1158 Frederick once more invaded Italy. The papal legates sent to assure him that he had misunderstood the famous admonition, [ ] that beneficium meant no more than a useful favour, were ignored; and the emperor advanced 011 Milan. It speedily submitted and at the Diet of Roncaglia (November, 1158) the new imperial position was clearly set forth. The Archbishop of Milan proclaimed that the imperial will was law for the emperor's subjects, and legists from Bologna gave the sanction of the new learning to this resurrection of pagan theory. [ ] The new concept of law was rapidly translated into practical regulations. Commissioners were sent to all the cities of Lombardy to secure for the emperor his newly declared rights, the chief of them the nomination of each city's rulers. #### The pope could not but be anxious. Italy being, by the new theory, a province of Frederick's empire, how soon would it be before he proceeded to exercise his imperial authority in Rome itself? What was the pope's political status for the future, if not that of a vassal to the emperor? The "Roman Question" was entering on a new chapter in its long and stormy history. If the Church's lately recovered freedom to elect its head were to survive, and that head's own independence in action, the emperor must, at all costs, be prevented from becoming the real ruler of Italy. The task was to occupy all the popes for the next hundred years. #### Adrian's reply to the menace of Roncaglia was to demand imperial recognition of the papal claim to Ferrara and the lands made over to the Roman See by the Countess Matilda. Furthermore, he sought a pledge that Frederick would disclaim any right as suzerain in Rome, for Rome being papal could not be imperial. Frederick refused. "If I, Emperor of the Romans," he declared, "have no rights in Rome, I have no rights anywhere." #### In April of the next year (1159) the war began. Milan revolted and Adrian, with his ally the King of Sicily, encouraged the Milanese. Frederick, in retaliation, revived the ghost of the commune and the pope was driven out of Rome. The next few months were filled with diplomatic duels. The pope endeavoured to unite the various Italian States against the emperor, while Frederick set out his claim to be, as Constantine's successor, the source of all the pope's authority as a temporal ruler. In official state documents he had begun to place his own name and style before those of the pope, and the pope's protest against the innovation only provoked the retort that a monster of pride now sat in St. Peter's chair. #### At this moment, when everything was set for the conflict, and, the imperialist party among the cardinals finally convinced, on September 1, 1159, the unexpected happened, the death of the pope. Fortune had given the emperor an immense advantage, striking down his practised adversary in the very opening of the duel. Moreover, he had the further advantage that the new pope might be one of his own, for all that the emperor was too far away from the scene to be able to influence the election personally. He would indeed hardly be aware of the Pope's death before the news arrived of his successor's election. #### Since the death of Urban II (1099) it had been common practice to choose the new pope the very day his predecessor died. But the emperor had his supporters even in the sacred college, and they won the first point in the struggle when they secured that the conclave should open, not at Anagni -- where Adrian, still in exile, had died -- but at Rome, on a territory hostile to Adrian and all he stood for. The English pope, then, was buried in St. Peter's -- where in the sarcophagus of red granite he still rests-and the cardinals proceeded to elect his successor. The matter occupied them for the then unusual space of three days, and the result was a double election. The majority had elected Adrian's chief adviser, no less a personage than Roland Bandinelli. He took the name of Alexander III. The rest, three voters, had chosen a friend of Barbarossa, the Cardinal Octavian, who called himself Victor IV. For the third time in less than forty years the Church was threatened with schism, this time at a moment when it was facing the greatest peril it had known for a century. #### The emperor did not make the mistake of immediately declaring for Octavian. He proclaimed himself neutral until the matter was settled by a council, and he did his utmost to keep the Kings of France and England neutral too. Next he summoned a council to meet at Pavia, and cited Alexander -- as Roland Bandinelli-and Octavian, as Victor IV, to appear before it. Alexander refused to appear, denying the emperor's right to call a council without the pope's consent. To which, when the council opened (February 5, 1160), Frederick replied by a renewal of his claims "to have a right to call the council as emperor. It is well known that Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian, Charlemagne and the others called councils, and I am their successor." Fifty bishops, German and Italian, attended and after a preliminary harangue Frederick left them to their task. They were by no means of one mind. Some of the Italians were for delaying the matter until a truly universal council met. But slowly, under the influence of pressure, those who could not escape yielded, and before the week was out the desired unanimity was attained, and Octavian declared true pope. On February 12, Frederick solemnly acknowledged him as such. #### Outside the empire he was less successful. By the end of the year France and England had decided for Alexander; by 1163 Spain, too, and Hungary, Scotland and Ireland. Even in Germany he had his supporters, led by the Bishop of Salzburg, and prominent among them the two new orders of Carthusians and Cistercians. #### Alexander excommunicated the emperor and his anti-pope, and once more Frederick's army moved into Lombardy. Milan was again forced to surrender and the emperor ordered it to be destroyed. His treatment of the Milanese terrorised the other cities of Lombardy into immediate submission. Bologna, too, admitted him and Alexander was forced to flee from Rome (1161). Nowhere in Italy was he really safe and he finally found a home in France. The year 1162 was perhaps the most critical in the whole struggle. The pope's scheme for a league against Frederick had broken down; his chief supporters, Louis VII of France and the English king, Henry II, were quarrelling over a marriage; Frederick was master of Lombardy; and when Alexander supported Henry II -- as indeed he could not but do-Louis began to negotiate with Frederick. Thanks in very large part to the German's lack of finesse the negotiation failed -- even ludicrously (St. Jean de Losne, August 29, 1162), and though Frederick held at Dole in Burgundy the council he had planned, the kings (reguli was the term his new imperialism used to describe them) were absent. Once more the emperor declared that, since Rome was a city of his empire, he must be allowed his say in the election of its bishop. #### The next year saw the breach between the English king and the Archbishop of Canterbury over a particular application of the same principle that divided Alexander and the emperor; and for the next two years the diplomacy of the harassed pope was taxed to the utmost to keep Henry II from going over to Frederick, and yet not surrender in England the rights for whose defence in Italy he was endeavouring to combine all Christendom. #### Octavian died in 1164, and Frederick gave him a successor in the Bishop of Cremona, known as Pascal III. To accredit his new pope he summoned the diet of Wurzburg (Pentecost, 1165) and there it was decided that all bishops and abbots, monks and priests should swear an abjuration of Alexander under pain of deposition, loss of goods, mutilation and exile. There followed an intensive campaign throughout Germany to impose the oath. Against the new tactics Alexander was powerless. His scheme for an anti-imperialist coalition never matured, the position in England remained unsatisfactory; France was merely passive in its support; and, in 1166, the King of Sicily died leaving a child to succeed him. The pope's one hope, and he knew it well, was Lombardy and the communes' realisation that his interests were theirs too. #### In 1167 the war began anew, Frederick marching once more into Lombardy, beating down on his way the resistance offered by the Bishop of Salzburg. He only halted in Lombardy to hold, at Lodi, a council which recognised Pascal III and then, heedless of the restored Milan and the incipient Lombard league, he made for Rome and Alexander. It was only a matter of time before he was inside the Leonine city; and while Alexander fled, to continue the resistance from the Colosseum, Frederick's troops ravaged and plundered, sparing not in the sack the very basilica of St. Peter. Master of the Apostle's shrine, the emperor now proposed a compromise. Both Alexander and Pascal should resign and a new election take place. This Alexander would not even discuss. Just in time he made his way out of Rome, while Pascal was enthroned and, on the morrow, crowned Frederick a second time. #### The emperor's triumph, however, did not last long. Plague fell upon his army, claiming thousands of victims, and so suddenly that contemporaries saw in the disaster the avenging hand of God. The emperor had no choice but to abandon his conquest, and through an Italy now really hostile he made his way north, to find himself hemmed in, unable to advance, too weakened to attack. Only the feint of a submission to Alexander saved him. #### Then (September, 1168) Pascal III died, to receive as a successor Calixtus III -- an imperial nomination that preceded a new offer of peace to Alexander, which, inevitably, failed since it refused him recognition as pope. Alexander developed his Italian policy. He sent new blessings to the league of communes, protecting it against defaulters by threats of excommunication, and in return the league named the new strong place it was building Alessandria in honour of the patriot pope. #### For the next five years there was a lull in the hostilities, emperor and pope waging a war of diplomacy in which Alexander, if he did not succeed in wielding his heterogeneous supporters -- Greeks, Sicilians, Lombard Communes -- into an alliance, at any rate kept them from each other's throats and defeated the emperor's attempts to win them from him. #### Then in 1174, fifteen years since the struggle began, Barbarossa resolved on a fourth invasion of Italy. It was even more elaborately conceived than the one which had ended so badly in 1167. But both at Ancona and at Alessandria the Imperialists were thwarted. Behind Frederick's back Germany seethed with discontent, and once again he turned to negotiations. In the March of 1176 he was, however, once more in the field and made a sudden move against Milan. It was the prelude to the end, for, after years of organisation, the exasperated Lombards were now ready for him. The army of the League did not wait to be locked up, and in the fiercely fought battle of Legnano (March 29, 1176) they routed the emperor and destroyed his army. For three days it was thought that Frederick himself had fallen, and then, a solitary dishevelled fugitive, he stumbled into Pavia, alive but broken finally. #### It was, however, long indeed before his haughty spirit would accept the fact. In October he made an effort to separate the pope from his Lombard allies, offering him recognition as pope, restoration of all the usurped rights and fiefs, and the surrender of the Matildine lands. [ ] Alexander was too loyal to be caught, and proposed a council at Ferrara at which the Lombards and the Sicilians too should be represented. The council appointed commissioners to meet in Venice and prepare there a definitive treaty. When it seemed that the discussion over the Matildine lands would wreck the conference Alexander's diplomacy proposed a compromise. There should be a truce for six years, Frederick acknowledging Alexander as pope and the question of the Matildine lands being left for a further fifteen years; meanwhile they were to remain in the emperor's hands. Frederick's entourage brought him round to accept and on July 25, 1177, outside St. Mark’s, he knelt before the pope begging for absolution. Pope and emperor together entered the great church, and eight days later the Peace of Venice was solemnly ratified. Alexander's "active patience" had been indeed rewarded, and in April, 1178 he was once more in occupation of Rome. #### For the first time since his election, nearly nineteen years before, the pope was free to devote himself wholly to the normal work of the Church. His situation resembled not a little that of Calixtus II in 1123, and the shrewd mind of this first of the lawyer popes resolved to inaugurate in a new General Council the recovery of a spirituality brought low, inevitably, by twenty-five years of bitter division. ####  |