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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.
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