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Gregory X died at Arezzo. January 10. 1276, on his way back from France
to Rome. Only eleven days later the cardinals, putting into execution
for the first time the new law of the conclave, unanimously elected the
Friar Preacher, Peter of Tarentaise. This first Dominican pope was a
Frenchman. He took the name of Innocent V and reigned for just five
months. There was a short interval of three weeks and the cardinal
deacon Ottoboni Fieschi, a nephew of Innocent IV was elected -- Adrian
V (11 July). His reign was one of the shortest of all: he was dead in
seven weeks, before he had even been ordained priest. For the third
time that year the cardinals assembled, and elected now a Portuguese,
the one-time Archbishop of Braga, Peter Juliani, who has his place in
the history of scholastic philosophy as Peter of Spain. He took the
name of John XXI but, scarcely more fortunate than the other two popes,
he reigned only eight months. On May 20, 1277 the ceiling of his
library fell in and the pope was killed.
These short pontificates wrought much harm to the still fragile
restoration of Gregory X. In all the elections of that fateful year,
Charles of Anjou was active. Both the French pope and the Portuguese
showed themselves much more sympathetic to his policy than Gregory had
been; Innocent V favouring him in Italy and John XXI, apparently,
willing to forward his designs on the Eastern empire. But nowhere was
the change in the personality of the pope more to be deplored than in
the most delicate matter of all, Rome's relations with the newly
reconciled Eastern churches. Here John XXI showed himself heavy handed
and perhaps made inevitable the action of his successors that was to
wreck the whole work within the next five years.
A more certain -- but accidental -- effect of John's short reign was to
revive the abuse of over-long vacancies in the Holy See. The cardinals'
opposition to Gregory X's conclave regulation had been strong. Their
criticism now brought John XXI to suspend it, meaning to provide a new
rule. His sudden death found the cardinals without any rules at all to
bind them and the Holy See was thereupon vacant six months (20 May-25
November, 1277).
The pope ultimately elected was John Gaetani Orsini, one of the most
experienced diplomatists in the curia, a cardinal for more than thirty
years, who took the name of Nicholas III. None since Innocent IV
(1243-1254) had come to the high office with such -- extensive
knowledge of the curial routine, of the major problems of the time and
the personalities around whom they turned. Nicholas had been Innocent
IV's close companion in his exile, [ ] and in 1258 had played a great
part, as legate, in the national histories of France and of England at
the time of Simon de Montfort's first triumph. Since the death of
Clement IV (1268) he had been the strong man of the curia, a force to
be reckoned with in all the subsequent elections. He is credited with
the election of John XXI and in that pope's short reign was, indeed,
the power behind the throne. Through all the years that followed
Charles of Anjou's introduction into the politics of church defence
Nicholas III had been his warm supporter. But events during the several
vacancies of 1276 had chilled his enthusiasm. He was now critical, if
not hostile, and certainly awakened from the simplicity he had shared
with the scholarly French and Portuguese popes, whose inexperience of
politics failed to read beneath the surface of Charles's courtesy and
seeming submissiveness. The facts were that the King of Sicily's
diplomacy had begun definitely to check Rudolf of Habsburg in Germany;
that he was once again menacing the Greek emperor and that his power
overshadowed all Italy. Charles now took the style of King of
Jerusalem, Hugh III having abandoned the mainland and retired to
Cyprus, and sent to Acre as his vicar, Roger de St. Severin. The
Templars of Venice supported him and the barons of the kingdom had no
choice but to do him homage. Of the two great questions of the day, not
the crusade seemed now the more urgent but the freedom of the Papal
State, and the indefinitely more important thing bound up with this,
namely, the freedom of the papal action and so of religion everywhere.
It was to be the main aim of Nicholas III to check this new advance of
the King of Sicily.
Presently immense plans for the future organisation of Europe began to
take shape. New papal agents of proved character and high diplomatic
ability -- the future popes Martin IV and Nicholas IV, the Dominican
Master -- General John of Vercelli -- began to knit together the medley
of jealousies and rivalries in which the ambition of such magnificent
men as Charles of Anjou found its perennial opportunity. It was a great
pontificate, though all too short for the task before it. Nicholas III
was already an old man at his election (25 November, 1271) and in less
than three years he was dead (22 August, 1280) Nevertheless he had
notably lessened King Charles's hold on central Italy by refusing to
allow his re- appointment as Senator of Rome and imperial vicar in
Tuscany. More, by a special constitution Nicholas III made it
impossible for the future for any reigning prince to be senator. The
new senator, in 1278, was the pope himself, and he appointed his nephew
to act in his place. Charles, knowing himself for the moment
outmanoeuvred, submitted gracefully. In Germany the pope continued
Gregory X's policy of support to the new emperor-elect. He won from
Rudolf -- and from all the German princes -- an explicit renunciation
of all the old claims over any of the territories now counted as States
of the Church.
Had Nicholas III still greater plans in mind to establish permanent
friendliness between the Habsburgs and Capetians? Did his too speedy
death put an end to one of the best of all chances of preventing the
coming long centuries of Franco-German warfare and its sequelae of
world destruction? Opinions differ, but the pope is credited with the
desire to make the empire hereditary in the Habsburg family, and to
make the German kingship a reality beyond the Rhine and the Danube. The
kingdom of Arles would be detached from the empire and, united with
Lombardy, form an independent realm under a French prince. A second
Italian kingdom would be created in the lands between the Papal State
and Lombardy. Italy, like Germany, would experience a new, peaceful
political order. The Papal State would enjoy a new security. Charles of
Anjou would be satisfied -- and yet controlled. The major causes of
Franco-German rivalry would be forestalled.
But Nicholas died before his liquidation of the political debts of 1276
had been so successful as to allow such major schemes any chance of
success. He was the first pope for a hundred years to make Rome his
regular dwelling place and all but the last pope to do so for another
hundred; he has his place in history as the real founder of the
Vatican. The new orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic found in him a
constant friend, and his registers show how constantly he turned to
them to provide bishops for sees all over Europe. The one real blemish
was his over-fondness for his own family. It has won him a most
unenviable mark as a pioneer in the vicious business of papal nepotism,
and a blistering memorial in the Inferno of Dante.
Among the things which Nicholas III did not find time to do, was to
provide the much-needed regulations about the papal election, and after
his death the Holy See again remained vacant for six months -- time
enough and to spare for Charles of Anjou to turn to his own profit the
reaction which usually follows the disappearance of a strong ruler. The
new pope, Martin IV (elected 22 February, 1281) Simon de Brion -- was a
Frenchman and, from the beginning, he showed himself a most willing
collaborator in all the King of Sicily's schemes. It would not be
correct to describe him as, in any sense, the king's tool. All goes to
show a long-standing identity of views between himself and Charles, and
the cardinal’s long career in the service of the Holy See had shown him
to be a skilful diplomatist and administrator. Like very many of the
popes since Innocent III, he was a product of the University of Paris.
Like Clement IV, he had been high in the service of St. Louis IX. With
many more he had left that service for the Roman curia at the
invitation of the newly-elected French pope Urban IV (1261), who had
created him cardinal. Much of his life continued to be spent in France
as legate, and it was he who had negotiated, for Urban IV, the treaty
which made Charles of Anjou the papal champion and set him on the way
to become King of Sicily. It is not surprising that in the years
between Charles's victories and his own election (1268-1281), Simon de
Brion was the king's chief advocate and supporter in the curia. He was,
it is said, most unwilling to be elected. No doubt he foresaw the
stormy years that awaited him, the difficulties that must follow on any
reversal of the cautious policy of the last nine years, and he was an
old man. He was to reign just over four years and to initiate a series
of political disasters that would leave the prestige of the papacy
lower than at any time since the coming of Innocent III (1198).
To Charles of Anjou the election supplied the one thing so far lacking.
In the fifteen years since his conquest of Sicily, the king had made
more than one attempt to extend his power at the expense of the
Byzantine emperor at Constantinople. St. Louis IX had checked him in
1270, Gregory X in 1275, Nicholas III in 1278. Now, with a pope of like
mind with himself, his ambition was to be given free reign.
First of all, Martin IV, within two months of his election, reversed
the vital decision of Nicholas III that the civil government of Rome
should never be given into the hands of a sovereign prince, by
appointing the King of Sicily Senator for life. [ ] The immediate
result was a miniature civil war in Rome that lasted throughout the
reign, with all the customary sequelae of excommunication and
interdict. Martin himself never lived nearer to Rome than Orvieto and
Perugia.
Next, Martin IV definitely broke with the Eastern churches. It was
seven years all but two months since the solemn ratification at
Constantinople, [ ] by the Greek bishops, of the reconciliation made at
the Council of Lyons. Never, during all that time, had the popes felt
happy about the reality of the Greek submission to their authority; and
never had the great mass of the Greeks seen in the act of their
emperor, Michael VIII, anything more than a base surrender to the
despised and hated Latins. From the very beginning, very many of them,
courtiers even, and members of the emperor's own family, had refused
all relations with the clergy who accepted the union. But, so long as
Gregory X lived, Michael was confident that the schemes of the King of
Sicily, to restore, in his own person, the Latin empire at
Constantinople, would be effectively checked. This pope's personal
experience of the gravity of the crisis of Christianity in the East,
and his determination, in the interest of the projected crusade, to
forestall any warfare between rival Christian claimants to Eastern
principalities, were solid advantages that far outweighed, with the
ruler at Constantinople, the popular and the clerical hostility to the
union.
But the unlooked-for death, in January 1276, of this rarely experienced
pope, patient, understanding, the reverse of doctrinaire in his
handling of delicate practical problems, changed all. Moreover, Gregory
X had three successors in less than twelve months, and the upset in the
curia caused by the rapid appearance and disappearance of these popes
was, inevitably, a great opportunity both for those who wished to see
the union destroyed, and for those who had never thought it could be a
reality. The first of these popes, Innocent V, showed himself much
cooler towards Michael VIII than his predecessor had been. For Innocent
was a Frenchman, [ ] such another man of God as his predecessor, it is
true, and no more of a politician. But he was a supporter of Charles of
Anjou. When Michael demanded that the pope, for the protection of the
Byzantine empire in the approaching crusade, should strengthen the
emperor's authority by excommunicating the Latin princes already in
arms against him, Innocent, in his perplexity, could only reply by a
general exhortation about the need for unity. Before anything more
could be asked of him, or a new Eastern crisis develop, his five
months' reign was over (June 22, 1276). Adrian V, who followed him,
lasted only seven weeks. Then came a third pope favourable to Charles,
the scholarly Portuguese, John XXI. It was this pope who despatched to
Constantinople the embassy planned by Innocent V, charged to obtain
from Michael his own personal oath that he accepted the faith of the
Roman See as set out at the General Council, and to absolve the Greeks
from what censures they might have incurred through their adherence to
the schism now terminated. The nuncios were also to excommunicate, and
to put under interdict, all who opposed the union. [ ] At first all
went well. The emperor made no difficulties; his son and heir,
Andronicus, wrote a most dutiful letter of submission, professing his
enthusiasm for the union; and the Greek bishops, at a synod in April
1277, reaffirmed their acceptance of the primacy of the Roman See and
of the orthodoxy of its teaching about the procession of the Holy
Ghost. But in reaffirming this, the bishops somewhat altered the
terminology of the statement adopted at Lyons.
John XXI was dead before this last, disconcerting detail of the
Byzantine situation reached the curia. It was five months before the
vacancy was filled, and another twelve before Nicholas III took up the
question. From now on we can note a new stiffness in the Roman
attitude. For example, the Greeks are now told that they must add the
Filioque clause to the creed. This was, of course, more than the
General Council had asked; but there was now every reason why Rome
should be doubtful whether Greek opposition to the use of the clause
was not the outward sign of a refusal to accept the Roman terminology
as orthodox, of a clinging to the old contention that, on this point,
the Latins were heretics. The use of the clause was become a touchstone
of orthodoxy, as the use of the word homoousion had been, nine hundred
years before, in these same lands. The pope also, it would seem,
proposed to pass in review the whole Greek liturgy and rite, for he
bade his envoys to allow only those parts which were not contrary to
the faith. The nuncios were to travel through the chief cities of the
empire and to see that all these various orders were really obeyed, and
the emperor was to be persuaded to ask for the appointment at
Constantinople of a permanent cardinal-legate; so only could Rome be
assured that the Greeks really meant what they had professed.
Already there had been riots against the union, and now the emperor and
his bishops came to an understanding. They would not break openly with
the new papal commission (since only the pope's intervention could
preserve the empire from the designs of Charles of Anjou), and the
emperor pledged himself, whatever the consequences, not to consent to
add the Filioque to the creed. It was now only a matter of time before
the purely political intentions of the chief supporters of the union
became so evident that a breach with Rome must follow. While, at
Constantinople, the emperor stifled all opposition, and punished with
terrible cruelty those who stirred up the ever recurring anti-papal
riots, to the pope he perjured himself lavishly. The Greek bishops,
subtly contriving neither to refuse the pope's demands nor to satisfy
them, sent to Rome a reply that was little more than a mass of texts
from the Greek fathers, where any and every word but the "proceed" of
the Lyons definition was used to express the relation of the divine
Word to the Holy Ghost. Only the sudden death of Nicholas III (August
22, 1280) and the six months' interregnum which followed, delayed, it
would seem, the rupture that was now all but inevitable.
Then a final certitude came with the election, as Pope Martin IV, [ ]
of the King of Sicily's staunchest partisan in the curia. Charles had
now every encouragement to prepare the type of crusade which the kings
of Sicily traditionally favoured, the plan whose basic idea was to
install themselves at Constantinople as emperors and make war on the
Turks from this new vantage point. Venice -- also traditionally hostile
to the Greeks, and already responsible for the crime that had
transformed Innocent III's crusade into an immense act of piracy --
became his ally (July 3, 1281) and the pope, this time, joined the
anti-Byzantine coalition. [ ] The date was fixed for April 1283.
But Michael VIII had not, for a moment, failed to understand that tne
bright prospects which the election of Gregory X had opened to him were
now gone, perhaps for ever. While he carefully maintained diplomatic
relations with Martin IV in the state befitting a loyal Catholic
prince, Michael, too, made his preparations. But long before they were
complete, only four months after the pact with Venice, Martin IV took
the final step. On November 18, 1281, he excommunicated Michael as a
patron and protector of heretics, of schismatics and Or heresy.
The emperor did not, however, reverse his religious policy. As long as
he lived, another thirteen months only, there was no repudiation of the
work of Lyons. It was only after his death (December 11, 1282) that the
anti-Roman reaction began. It was extremely thorough. The new emperor,
Andronicus, publicly confessed his submission to the pope as a grave
sin and begged to be given suitable penance. The patriarch favourable
to the Latins -- John Beccos, almost the only sincere convert among the
higher clergy -- was deposed, and his successor (the anti-Roman whose
place Beccos had taken in 1275) had all the churches of the capital
purified with solemn rites, while a sentence of three months'
suspension was laid upon the whole body of bishops and priests. The
emperor obliged his mother, Michael’s widow, to abjure her allegiance
to tile pope, and he even refused a religious funeral to his dead
father. So Michael, after twenty years of religious trimming, in the
interests of Byzantine independence, was found, at the last, rejected
and cast out both by the Catholics and by the Orthodox. Although it is
extremely doubtful whether, inaugurated in such circumstances, any
reunion would have long endured, Martin IV, when he excommunicated its
main support, the Emperor Michael, sealed its fate in an instant. Also,
in excommunicating the emperor he was excommunicating the prince whom
Charles of Anjou was planning to supplant -- excommunicating him at the
very moment when the Sicilian king's plans were ripe. It is little
wonder that the pope's contemporaries judged his act severely, nor that
some were very ready to see, in the disasters to the papal arms which
followed, the manifest chastening hand of God.
For chastisement -- if such it were! -- arrived with speed. Far away
from Constantinople, at the very opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea,
was a prince who, for years, now, had nourished a bitter hatred of the
French, the King of Aragon, Peter III. Peter had seen his father make
over to St. Louis IX Aragonese rights in Languedoc, and also, in the
interests of this settlement, break up the unity of Aragon by creating
the new kingdom of Majorca. He had seen St. Louis' son, Philip III,
intervene powerfully to the south of the Pyrenees in the neighbouring
kingdom of Castile -- and in a succession dispute that concerned Aragon
very intimately. The French King of Sicily, Charles of Anjou, was
especially an enemy; for Peter's wife was the daughter of that King
Manfred of Sicily whom Charles had routed and slain at Benevento in
1266, the granddaughter of the last great Hohenstaufen, Frederick II.
She was therefore, since Charles of Anjou's execution in 1268 of
Conradin the last male of the line a personage of the greatest interest
to all the remnants of the Ghibelline party which, suppressed these
sixteen years but by no means destroyed, still swarmed in every state
and town of Italy. Peter's court was the last refuge of the party, and
there, biding his time in exile, was Manfred's capable Sicilian
minister, John of Procida.
It was this political genius who planned the great coup. While Charles
was busy with his plans to capture the empire of the East, binding to
himself the great commercial states of Genoa and Venice, and securing
the assistance of the new pope, John of Procida linked together Peter
III and the Emperor Michael, the native Sicilians who had already
learnt to detest their French rulers, and the Italian Ghibellines
everywhere. A great conspiracy against Charles and his suzerain the
pope was already afoot, when Martin IV threw over Michael VIII. The
rising at Palermo on Palm Sunday, 1282, [ ] and the massacre of the
French which followed -- the Sicilian Vespers -- was the Ghibelline
reply. Before Charles was able to put down the insurrection, Peter III
had landed in Sicily. The French were out, and out for all time. Only
the mainland territory remained to them and a war had begun, in which
the pope was directly involved, that was to last for twenty years. [ ]
The pope was involved because Charles was his vassal, the vassal indeed
of St. Peter. The pope had no choice but to intervene and, in the name
of St. Peter, with all means spiritual as well as temporal, defend his
vassal against the Aragonese invader. He excommunicated the King of
Aragon -- who, also, was his vassal -- and gave him three months in
which to submit; should he obstinately hold out, the pope would depose
him. [ ] Peter III ignored the excommunication. He had present victory
on his side and, in a war that was to be chiefly decided by sea power,
he had also the genius of the great admiral of his day, the Sicilian
Roger de Loria. The pope then deposed Peter. [ ] He offered the crown
of Aragon to yet another French prince, Charles of Valois, a younger
son of the King of France, and, when the offer was accepted, [ ] the
pope, to assist the Frenchman, proclaimed a real crusade against Peter.
[ ] Peter's subjects were released from their oaths of allegiance,
forbidden to acknowledge him as king, to pay him taxes or other dues.
The kingdom was laid under an interdict. To finance his
papally-appointed rival, immense sums of money were advanced by the
pope from the moneys collected for the war against the Saracens, and
special tithes were levied on ecclesiastical property in France,
Provence and Navarre, in Aragon, Majorca, Sicily and in all Italy; and
also in the dioceses of Liege, Metz, Verdun and Basle. To all who
helped the good work of installing Charles and expelling the Aragonese
King of Aragon, all the favours, temporal and spiritual, were granted
which might be had by going out to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens.
The popes had been unable for years to reorganise the holy war. Now it
had reappeared, in Spain, and directed against a Christian prince whose
crime it was to have made war on a papal vassal.
The King of France took up his son's opportunity [ ] and soon a great
French army was preparing to invade Aragon, with a fleet moving in
support along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Sicily, since Roger de
Loria's destruction of the Neapolitan fleet, was impregnably Aragonese.
A direct attack on Peter's homeland, if successful, would be the
simplest way to loosen his hold on the island.
At first all went well. The French invaded Rousillon in May 1285, and
on September 7 took the Aragonese city of Gerona. But now a double
disaster fell upon them. Fever took hold of the army and slew more
troops than the enemy. And de Loria, in a great battle off Palamos,
destroying the French fleet, cut the main line of the army's
communications, the chief means of its reinforcement and supply
(September 4). Among those struck down by the fever was the King of
France himself, and he was carried back, amid his retreating troops, to
die at Perpignan (October 5). For the first time in history French
policy had sent a conquering army beyond the natural frontiers of
France. The venture had ended in a great disaster.
Charles of Anjou had been spared, at any rate, this crowning
humiliation [ ] he had died in January 1285, while the expedition was
still in preparation, and its chances seemed excellent. [ ] Pope
Martin, too, died before he saw how his collaboration with the Angevin
was ending (28 March, 1285). All that the collaboration had in fact
achieved was to end the chances of the reunion scheme of Gregory X, and
to involve the papacy in a new war where the stake was not, any longer,
the pope's independence -- the one real danger to this, anywhere in
Europe, was in fact that very vassal of the pope in whose interest the
pope was at war. And the papacy was faced now with the fact, surely
full of omen, that in two important territories, Aragon and Sicily, the
bulk of the people and clergy were standing fast by the ruler whom the
pope had declared to be no ruler, ignoring the excommunication, the
deposition and the interdict laid upon them. If, despite such lavish
use of the spiritual arm, despite this all but official identification
of the temporal with the spiritual, the popes should lose in the
conflict, what would be the reaction in the sphere of the people's
devotion to papal authority as the centre and source of religious life?
Again, all over Italy the Ghibelline factions were busy. Lombardy, the
Romagna, Tuscany were filled with insurrection and riot, and there too
this same intermingling of spiritual and temporal was a leading, and
inevitable, feature of the struggle. Those on the one side were, by the
fact, bad Catholics: their opponents were engaged in war that was holy.
And from Germany, untouched by the actual struggle, came loud
complaints about the taxes levied on ecclesiastical revenues to finance
the papal diplomacy and arms. Martin IV's successors were scarcely to
be envied.
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