| #### 3. THE ROMAN SEE IN THE GENERATION AFTER THE CONCORDAT OF WORMS, 1123-1153 |

| #### #### The strong French pope, whose diplomacy had brought to a victorious end the fifty years' controversy with the emperor, did not long survive his triumph. He died in the year which followed the Lateran Council, on December 13 or 14, 1124. His successor, Honorius II -- the cardinal Lambert -- had a long experience in the central government of the Church, that went back to the days of Urban II. Pascal II had made him a cardinal; he had been the companion of Gelasius II in that pope's flight and exile; he had been a power in the conclave that elected Calixtus II and had been, throughout the reign, that pope's most trusted adviser; as such he had played an influential part in the negotiations that preceded the Concordat of Worms, and his known conciliatory temper had won him the goodwill of the Roman nobility; it had been a career to which election as pope came as a very natural crown. Yet the election was made unwillingly, and in circumstances that might easily have led to schism, and which did, six years later, actually lead to schism. #### The Roman nobility, whose interest in the frequent changes in their temporal ruler had been from the first beginnings of the Papal State, and could hardly fail to be, one of the major permanent anxieties of the popes, were still as willing as ever, at the death of Calixtus II, to attempt to renew their ancient hold on the papacy. In place of the Crescentii, the Theophylacts, the Cencii of previous centuries there were now the Pierleoni and the Frangepani. Each faction had its candidate, and the Pierleoni now triumphed, electing the cardinal Tommaso Buccapecci who took the name of Celestine II. But while the Te Deum was still in progress, the Frangepani leader broke in, tore from the shoulders of the newly-elected the papal mantle and bade him resign. The which, apparently very willingly, he did; and the terrified cardinals then elected Lambert, who took the name of Honorius II. For a few days the party of Celestine held out. But by St. Thomas's Day December 21, they had followed their leader; and then Honorius, too, resigned, to be immediately re-elected in more canonical fashion. #### Almost immediately he had to face a serious crisis, for in 1125 his old adversary, the emperor Henry V, died leaving no direct heir. For a century now the imperial crown had passed from father to son, and it was as important for the popes, as for the imperial feudatories, to take full advantage of the opportunity now offered to safeguard the principle of its electoral character against any claims of family. It was no less important to secure that the new emperor should be a prince sympathetic to the settlement of 1122, and that there should be no risk of a renewal of the controversy about Investiture. To election therefore, Honorius sent his legates, and in combination with the archbishops and bishops of Germany they secured the choice of Lothair of Supplimburg. When Lothair besought the pope's confirmation of his election the principles of St. Gregory VII were given an ideal recognition, and the emperor showed that the petition was no merely formal act of goodwill by an important modification of the Concordat. Elections of bishops and abbots were henceforward to be absolutely free, "neither extorted by fear of the king nor influenced by his presence as the use has been, nor restricted by any convention.” [ ] It is to the bishop thus freely elected and canonically consecrated that investiture of the temporalities is to be conferred by the touch of the sceptre. #### In his relations with France Honorius was equally happy, although his tactful handling of Louis VI, in a quarrel that involved the French king and the bishops, brought him a stiff letter of reproof from the young St. Bernard. #### Italian affairs were more troublesome. Much against his will the pope was forced, by losses in the field, to acknowledge the Norman hold on Apulia; and the Roman faction-fighting in which his reign was born continued through all its six years. It raged even around his very death-bed, for the Frangepani, who had so nearly lost in 1124, were determined to maintain their hold. They gathered in the palace where the pope lay dying, set it about with guards, and, the pope no sooner dead, all the cardinals present elected as his successor, the cardinal Gregory, who took the name of Innocent II (February 14, 1130). Unhappily the electors, for all their unanimity, were but a minority of the electoral college, and a few hours later their colleagues, outraged at the unseemliness of the uncanonical proceeding, elected-without any reference to Innocent's election -- the cardinal Peter Pierleoni. He called himself Anacletus II. #### The Church had a practical problem without a precedent since the new system of papal elections introduced in 1059. Which of the two was really pope? The first elected? or the elect of the majority? That neither was pope, since both were the elect of fragments only -- greater or less -- of the electoral college, is a view no one seems to have taken. The law of the papal election did not as yet specify any particular majority of the votes as necessary for validity. Nor was there any machinery to decide between the rivals. Anacletus had Rome in his support, and maintained himself there until his death (1138). Innocent meanwhile, driven from Rome, followed the well-worn track of persecuted popes over the Alps to France, to win, ultimately, recognition from the majority of the Catholic bishops and princes. #### The chief factor in that general recognition was the recognition accorded by Louis VI of France and the French bishops, and what determined their decision was the immense influence of St. Bernard at the Synod of Etampes. What principle, it may be asked, guided St. Bernard? Apparently the very simple one that, of the two rivals, Innocent was the better man, "une espece de divination de sa conscience." [ ] Pierleoni was the chief of the faction that had brought about his own election, an ecclesiastical politician primarily. Innocent, although the choice, perhaps even -- in the election -- the tool, of a faction, was at any rate not its leader. His election had not about it that air of self-election which, in his rival’s case, was so sinister a reminder of the worst days of. the last century. And Innocent had played a distinguished part in the struggle against Henry V. He must now have been advanced in years, for the earliest thing recorded of his clerical career is his service with the rival of St. Gregory VII, the anti-pope Clement III dead now these thirty years. Pascal II had made him a cardinal in 1116, he had shared the exile of the next pope, and then, in the time of Calixtus II, he had been the colleague of the cardinal Lambert -- the future Honorius II -- in the negotiation of the Concordat of Worms. #### What the influence of St. Bernard did in France, that of St. Norbert did in Germany. By the end of the year 1131 Innocent was recognised everywhere, except in Rome and southern Italy where Roger of Sicily remained true to Anacletus. #### It was inevitably a troubled pontificate, and even after 1138, when the death of Anacletus brought Innocent II universal recognition, some shadow of its origins continued to darken it. The emperor, Lothair, for all his exemplary action at his election in 1125, and despite his several expeditions against Anacletus, threatened to reopen the Investiture struggle, and only the influence of St. Bernard and St. Norbert kept him loyal to the Concordat. The French king, too, was not always satisfactory and his interference in the freedom of episcopal elections drew down on France an interdict. For Innocent II, despite his misfortunes, was no weakling. St. Bernard championed a spirit fashioned like his own. The work of reform went forward, the pope maintaining the tradition of local councils where he himself presided, correcting abuses and devising guarantees to prevent their repetition. The culmination of these, and the pope's greatest achievement, was the General Council of April, 1139, held in the Lateran, that marked the restored unity of Christendom after the death of Anacletus. #### The history of this great council, at which some five or six hundred bishops and abbots assisted, is curiously obscure. Its canons indeed survive, but no record of the council has come down written by anyone who was even in Rome at the time. Its canons, for the most part, [ ] repeat the legislation of earlier reforming councils. Of the new canons one regulates the dress of clerics, three are concerned with nuns -- they are formally deprived of the power to contract a valid marriage, they are not to sing the Divine Office in company with the monks, and spurious nuns who live privately at home are to be suppressed. Two new canons reflect the Church's care for religion as a social force, one against usurers a d the other against the use of catapults and bows in wars against Christians. Finally the ordinations of Anacletus are declared null and void. Two older canons are re-enacted, one against incendiaries and another against violators of the Truce of God. #### The council has, too, a certain doctrinal importance, not so much perhaps for its condemnation of Arnold of Brescia -- who as yet had not developed all his latent possibilities -- as for its condemnation (Canon 23) of the new, Manichee tendencies which were, seventy years later, to menace the very existence of Catholicism in southern France. For the first time for many years there is no canon touching the matter of investiture. On the other hand three canons deal once more with the question of clerical celibacy, and, in even stronger terms than in 1123, declare null and void marriages contracted by clerics in major orders. #### The principal work before the council was to remove the last traces of the late schism. Following the precedent of 1123, of Urban II in 1095 and of St. Gregory VII before that, the ordinations of the late anti-pope were annulled -- a proceeding that, in the mind of its chief historian, raises the greatest difficulty which the whole history of re-ordination presents. Innocent II was not content with this, nor with the submission of those who had followed his rival. There were numerous deprivations, and the altars these bishops had consecrated were destroyed. One victim,. especially, of the pope's revengeful spirit was the Cardinal Peter of Pisa, who had indeed been one of the anti-pope's chief supporters, but whom St. Bernard had won over to make his. submission even before the anti-pope's death. He had been a most valuable recruit to Innocent, who had received him gladly and confirmed him in his dignities. In the movement to secure the submission of the party of Anacletus, Peter had played a great part, but Innocent, now secure, thought only of the past and deprived him. Nor, despite all St. Bernard's pleading, did he ever restore him. #### For all its circumstance, the council was destined to very slight success. The pope's rigour made too unhappy an impression, he was soon involved in the disastrous war with Sicily, and there began twenty years of domestic political anxiety in Rome which effectively slowed down the papacy's European activity. #### Innocent II had triumphed, but to the end things continued to go badly in Rome and the south. The King of Sicily was excommunicated at the Lateran Council, and the pope himself prepared to carry out the sentence and depose him. But Roger was the better general. He captured the pope and compelled him not only to lift the excommunication but also, once more, to recognise the Norman claims to the Italian mainland. The Romans were angered by the pope's refusal to sanction the destruction of the rival Latin town of Tivoli. The new spirit of the Commune that now evidently possessed Rome as it did the whole north of Italy, showed itself in another way when Innocent was compelled to make a grant of local self- government. This developed, and a republic was proclaimed. In the midst of these new troubles the unhappy pope died, September 24, 1143. #### He was succeeded by the short-lived Celestine II (September, 1143-March, 1144) who had been one of Abelard's pupils and, when Cardinal Legate in France presiding at the condemnation of Arnold of Brescia -- of whom more immediately -- had been rebuked by St. Bernard for his neglect to use that disturber of the peace more severely. As pope he reigned long enough to revoke Innocent II's concessions to the King of Sicily, thus leaving to his own successor, Lucius II, an additional worry to embarrass his endeavours to suppress the new republic. #### Lucius II had been one of the legates thinks to whom Lothair III was elected emperor in 1125. The next pope had made him Chancellor of the Roman Church, and upon his election (March 12, 1144) he turned all his diplomacy to extricate the papacy from the domestic chaos in which its temporal affairs were rapidly submerging. He arranged a truce with Sicily. He allied himself with the Frangepani -- the more easily because the Pierleoni supported the Republic -- and with their aid proceeded to military measures. While besieging the Capitol he was however killed by a chance shot, after a reign of less than a year. #### In his place, that same day (February 15, 1145), the cardinals elected the abbot of SS. Vincent and Anastasius. He was #### Cistercian, won to the monastic life fifteen years before by St. Bernard, and after some years spent at Clairvaux, under the saint's direction, he had gone into Italy to undertake, at the request of Innocent II, the reform of the great abbey of Farfa. The election over, pope and cardinals fled from the hostile city, and it was in the abbey church of Farfa that, as Eugene III, its one-time abbot was consecrated. Rome meanwhile was given up to anarchy and pillage and then, in reaction against the horrors the pope was invited to return. But his stay was of short duration. The arch-disturber of his age now appeared there, the mystical revolutionary Arnold of Brescia, and in the January of 1146 Eugene III was once more an exile, destined not again to see Rome until a few months before his death in 1153. #### Arnold of Brescia, the ruler of Rome henceforward for a good nine years, is as typical a figure of the time as the popes he opposed, as Abelard, or as St. Bernard himself, who knew him well and whom in many respects he greatly resembled. He was much the same age as St. Bernard, born at Brescia in the last years of the eleventh century. He was ordained priest, became a canon-regular and even prior of his monastery. Like St. Bernard he was a man of amazing austerities. He was a famous speaker and gifted with a singularly charming personality. In Brescia he rapidly acquired fame as an eloquent critic of contemporary abuses, and, like many another clerical critic of clerical habits, he passed easily into a denial of the good of that he saw abused. The Church, for example, had no right to own property. Pope and bishops, by owning, were guilty of mortal sin; the Church was contaminated by the presence of such men; it ceased to be the Church; the pope was no longer pope; people should, therefore, refuse to receive the sacraments such men offered; better far, indeed, to confess to each other. Finally, he invited the attention of the emperor, to the miserable state of matters ecclesiastical. "It is in your power," he wrote to the emperor, "to arrange that for the future no pope shall be elected without your good pleasure.,' #### Arnold speedily came into conflict with his own bishop, for his share in making the commune of Brescia independent of the bishop. He was denounced at the Lateran Council of 1139 and deposed from his monastic office and banished from Italy, not to return without the pope's permission. France was his place of refuge, and 1141 found him at Abelard's side at the Council of Sens. With Abelard he was sentenced by Innocent II to lifelong confinement in a monastery. The sentence was never carried into execution, and Arnold passed to Paris where, hike an anti-clerical St. Bernard. he denounced in his lectures the wealth and vices of the clergy. #### St. Bernard's influence with Louis VII brought about his expulsion from France. He wandered into Switzerland, he spent some time in Bohemia in the company of the papal legate there, and then, in 1145, at Viterbo, he made a complete abjuration to Eugene III. Before the year was out he was the head and centre of the new revolt that drove the pope forth, and for the next nine years the object of rich reprobation as the most subversive enemy of the whole social order. #### The chief event, however, of Eugene III's reign (1145-1153) was the Second Crusade. ####  |