Sketches of Church History Part 14

CHAPTER V.

DECAY OF CHARLES THE GREAT'S EMPIRE.

A.D. 814-887.

Lewis, the son of Charles the Great, was a prince who had very much of good in him, so that he is commonly called the Pious. But he was of weak character, and his reign was full of troubles, mostly caused by the ambition of his own sons, who were helped by a strong party among the clergy, and even by Pope Gregory the Fourth. At one time he was obliged to undergo public penance, and some years later he was deprived of his kingdom and empire, although these acts caused such a shock to the feelings of men that he found friends who helped him to recover his power. And after his death (A.D. 840) his children and grandchildren continued to quarrel among themselves as long as any of them lived.

Besides these quarrels among their princes, the Franks were troubled at this time by enemies of many kinds.

First of all I may mention the Northmen, who poured down by sea on the coasts of the more civilized nations. These were the same who in our English history are called Danes, with whom the great Alfred had a long struggle, and who afterwards, under Canute, got possession of our country for a time. They had light vessels,--_serpents_, as they were called,--which could sail up rivers; and so they carried fire and sword up every river whose opening invited them, making their way to places so far off the sea as Mentz, on the Rhine; Treves, on the Moselle; Paris, on the Seine; and even Auxerre, on the Yonne. They often sacked the wealthy trading cities which lay open to their attacks; they sailed on to Spain, plundered Lisbon, pa.s.sed the Straits of Gibraltar, and laid waste the coasts of Italy.

After a time they grew bolder, and would leave their vessels on the rivers, while they struck across the country to plunder places which were known to be wealthy. They made fortified camps, often on the islands of the great rivers, and did all the mischief they could within a large circle around them. These Northmen were bitter enemies of Christianity, and many of them had lost their homes because they or their fathers would not be converted at Charlemagne's bidding; so that they had a special pleasure in turning their fury against churches and monasteries. Wherever they came, the monks ran off and tried to save themselves, leaving their wealth as a prey to the strangers. People were afraid to till the land, lest these enemies should destroy the fruits of their labours. Famines became common; wolves were allowed to multiply and to prey without check; and such were the distress and fear caused by the invaders, that a prayer for the deliverance "from the fury of the Northmen" was added to the service-books of the Frankish church.

Another set of enemies were the Mahometan Saracens, who got possession of the great islands of the Mediterranean and laid waste its coasts. It is said that some of them sailed up the Tiber and carried off the altar which covered the body of St. Peter. One party of Saracens settled on the banks of a river about halfway between Rome and Naples; others in the neighbourhood of Nice, and on that part of the Alps which is now called the Great St. Bernard; and they robbed pilgrims and merchants, whom they made to pay dearly for being let off with their lives.

Europe also suffered much from the Hungarians, a very rude, heathen people, who about the year 900 poured into it from Asia. We are told that they hardly looked human, that they lived like beasts, that they ate men's flesh and drank their blood. They rode on small active horses, so that the heavy-armed cavalry of the Franks could not overtake them; and if they ran away before their enemies, they used to stop from time to time, and let fly their arrows backwards. From the Elbe to the very south of Italy these barbarians filled Europe with bloodshed and with terror.

The Northmen at length made themselves so much feared in France, that King Charles III., who was called the Simple, gave up to them, in 911, a part of his kingdom, which from them got the name of Normandy. There they settled down to a very different sort of life from their old habits of piracy and plunder, so that before long the Normans were ahead of all the other inhabitants of France; and from Normandy, as I need hardly say, it was that William the Conqueror and his warriors came to gain possession of England.

The princes of Charles the Great's family, by their quarrels, broke up his empire altogether; and n.o.body had anything like the power of an emperor until Otho I., who became king of Germany in 936, and was crowned emperor at Rome in 962.

CHAPTER VI.

STATE OF THE PAPACY.

A.D. 891-1046.

All this time the papacy was in a very sad condition. Popes were set up and put down continually, and some of them were put to death by their enemies. The body of one pope named Formosus, after it had been some years in the grave, was taken up by order of one of his successors (Stephen VI.), was dressed out in the full robes of office, and placed in the papal chair; and then the dead pope was tried and condemned for some offence against the laws of the Church. It was declared that the clergy whom he had ordained were not to be reckoned as clergy; his corpse was stripped of the papal robes; the fingers which he had been accustomed to raise in blessing were cut off; and the body, after having been dragged about the city, was thrown into the Tiber (A.D. 896).

Otho the Great, who has been mentioned as emperor, turned out a young pope, John XII., who was charged with all sorts of bad conduct (A.D.

963); and that emperor's grandson, Otho III., put in two popes, one after another (A.D. 996, 999). The second of these popes was a very learned and clever Frenchman, named Gerbert, who as pope took the name of Sylvester II. He had studied under the Arabs in Spain (for in some kinds of learning the Arabs were then far beyond the Christians); and it was he who first taught Christians to use the Arabic figures (such as 1, 2, and 3) instead of the Roman letters or figures (such as I., II., and III.). He also made a famous clock; and on account of his skill in such things people supposed him to be a sorcerer, and told strange stories about him. Thus it is said that he made a brazen head, which answered "Yes" and "No" to questions. Gerbert asked his head where he should die, and supposed from the answer that it was to be in the city of Jerusalem. But one day as he was at service in one of the Roman churches which is called "Holy Cross in Jerusalem," he was taken very ill; and then he understood that that church was the Jerusalem in which he was to die. We need not believe such stories; but yet it is well to know about them, because they show what people were disposed to believe in the time when the stories were made.

The troubles of the papacy continued, and at one time there were no fewer than three popes, each of whom had one of the three chief churches of Rome, and gave himself out for the only true pope. But this state of things was such a scandal that the emperor, Henry III., was invited from Germany to put an end to it, and for this purpose he held a council at Sutri, not far from Rome, in 1046. Two of the popes were set aside, and the third, Gregory VI., who was the best of the three, was drawn to confess that he had given money to get his office, because he wished to use the power of the papacy to bring about some kind of reform. But on this he was told that he had been guilty of simony--a sin which takes its name from Simon the sorcerer, in the Acts of the Apostles (ch.

viii.), and which means the buying of spiritual things with money. This had never struck Gregory before; but when told of it by the council he had no choice but to lay aside his papal robes, and the emperor put one of his own German bishops into the papacy.

CHAPTER VII.

MISSIONS OF THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES.

It will be pleasanter to tell you something about the missions of those times; for a great deal of missionary work was then carried on.

(1.) The Bulgarians, who had come from Asia in the end of the seventh century, and had settled in the country which still takes its name from them, were converted by missionaries of the Greek Church. It is said that, when some beginning of the work had been made, and the king himself had been baptized by the patriarch of Constantinople (A.D. 861), the king asked the Greek emperor to send him a painter to adorn the walls of his palace; and that a monk named Methodius was sent accordingly, for in those times monks were the only persons who practised such arts as painting. The king desired him to paint a hall in the palace with subjects of a terrible kind, by which he meant that the pictures should be taken from the perils of hunting. But, instead of such subjects, Methodius painted the last judgment, as being the most terrible of all things; and the king, on seeing the picture of h.e.l.l with its torments, and being told that such would be the future place of the heathen, was so terrified that he gave up the idols which he had kept until then, and that many of his subjects were also moved to seek admission into the Church.

Although the conversion of Bulgaria had been the work of Greek missionaries, the popes afterwards sent some of their clergy into the country, and claimed it as belonging to them; and this was one of the chief causes why the Greek and the Latin churches separated from each other, so that they have never since been really reconciled.

(2.) It is not certain whether the painter Methodius was the same with a monk of that name, who, with his brother, named Cyril, brought about the conversion of Moravia (A.D. 863). These missionaries went about their work in a different way from what was common; for it had been usual for the Greek clergy to use the Greek language, and for the Western clergy to use the Latin, in their church-service and in other things relating to religion; but instead of this, Cyril and Methodius learnt the language of the country, and translated the church-services, with parts of the holy Scriptures, into it, so that all might be understood by the natives. In Moravia, too, there was a quarrel between the Greek and the Latin clergy; but, although the popes usually insisted that the services of the Church should be either in Latin or in Greek (because these were two of the languages which were written over the Saviour's cross), they were so much pleased with the success of Cyril and Methodius, that they allowed the service of the Moravian Church to be still in the language of the country.

(3.) Soon after the conversion of the Moravians, the duke of Bohemia paid a visit to their king, Swatopluk, who received him with great honour, but at dinner set him and his followers to sit on the floor, as being heathens. Methodius, who was at the king's table, spoke to the duke, and said that he was sorry to see so great a prince obliged to feed as if he were a swineherd. "What should I gain by becoming a Christian?" he replied; and when Methodius told him that the change would raise him above all kings and princes, he and his thirty followers were baptized.

A story of the same kind is told as to the conversion of the Carinthians, which was brought about in the end of the eighth century by a missionary named Ingo, who asked Christian slaves to eat at his own table, while he caused food to be set outside the door for their heathen masters, as if they had been dogs. This led the Carinthian n.o.bles to ask questions; and in consequence of what they heard they were baptized, and their example was followed by their people generally.

The second bishop of Prague, the chief city of Bohemia, Adalbert, is famous as having gone on a mission to the heathens of Prussia, by whom he was martyred on the sh.o.r.e of the Frische Haff in 997.

(4.) In the north of Germany, in Denmark, and in Sweden, Anskar, who had been a monk at Corbey, on the Weser, laboured for thirty-nine years with earnest devotion and with great success (A.D. 826-865). In addition to preaching the Gospel of salvation, he did much in such charitable works as the building of hospitals and the redemption of captives; and he persuaded the chief men of the country north of the Elbe to give up their trade in slaves, which had been a source of great profit to them, but which Anskar taught them to regard as contrary to the Christian religion. Anskar was made archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, and is styled "The Apostle of the North." But he had to suffer many dangers and reverses in his endeavours to do good. At one time, when Hamburg was burnt by the Northmen, he lost his church, his monastery, his library, and other property; but he only said, with the patriarch Job, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!"

Then he set to work again, without being discouraged by what had befallen him, and he even made a friend of the heathen king who had led the attack on Hamburg. Anskar died in the year 865. It is told that when some of his friends were talking of miracles which he was supposed to have done, he said, "If I were worthy in my Lord's sight, I would ask of Him to grant me one miracle--that He would make me a good man!"

(5.) The Russians were visited by missionaries from Greece, from Rome, and from Germany, so that for a time they wavered between the different forms of the Christian religion which were offered to them; but at length they decided for the Greek Church. When their great prince (who, at his baptism, took the name of Basil) had been converted (A.D. 988) he ordered that the idol of the chief G.o.d who had been worshipped by the Russians should be dragged at a horse's tail through the streets of the capital, Kieff, and should be thrown into the river Dnieper. Many of the people burst into tears at the sight; but when they were told that the prince wished them to be baptized, they said that a change of religion must be good if their prince recommended it; and they were baptized in great numbers. "Some," we are told, "stood in the water up to their necks, others up to their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, holding their young children in their arms; and the priests read the prayers from the bank of the river, naming at once whole companies by the same name."

(6.) I might give an account of the spreading of the Gospel in Poland, Hungary, and other countries; but let us keep ourselves to the north of Europe. Although Anskar had given up his whole life to missionary work among the nations near the Baltic Sea, there was still much to be done, and sometimes conversion was carried on in ways which to us seem very strange. As an instance of this, I may give some account of a Norwegian king named Olave, the son of Tryggve.

Olave was at first a heathen, and had long been a famous sea-rover, when he was converted and baptized in one of the Scilly islands (A.D. 994).

He took up his new religion with a great desire to spread it among his people, and he went about from one part of Norway to another, everywhere destroying temples and idols, and requiring the people to be baptized whether they were willing or not. At one place he found eighty heathens, who were supposed to be wizards. He first tried to convert them in the morning when they were sober, and again in the evening when they were enjoying themselves over their horns of ale; and as he could not persuade them, whether they were sober or drunk, he burnt their temple over their heads. All the eighty perished except one, who made his escape; and this man afterwards fell into the king's hands, and was thrown into the sea.

At another time, Olave fell in with a young man named Endrid, who agreed to become a Christian if any one whom the king might appoint should beat him in diving, in archery, and in sword-play. Olave himself undertook the match, and got the better of Endrid in all the trials; and then Endrid gave in, and allowed himself to be converted and baptized. These were strange ways of spreading the Gospel; but they seem to have had their effect on the rough men of the North.

At last, Olave was attacked by some of his heathen neighbours, and was beaten in a great sea-fight (A.D. 1000). It was generally believed that he had perished in the sea; but there is a story of a Norwegian pilgrim who, nearly fifty years later, lost his way among the sands of Egypt, and lighted on a lonely monastery, with an old man of his own country as its abbot. The abbot put many questions to him, and asked him to carry home a girdle and a sword, and to give them with a message to a warrior who had fought bravely beside King Olave in his last battle; and on receiving them the old warrior was a.s.sured that the Egyptian abbot could be no other than his royal master, who had been so long supposed to be dead.

Somewhat later than Olave the son of Tryggve (A.D. 1015) Norway had another king Olave, who was very zealous for the spreading of the Gospel among his people, and, like the elder Olave, was willing to do so by force if he could not manage the matter otherwise. On his visiting a place called Dalen, a bishop named Grimkil, who accompanied him, set forth the Christian doctrine; but the heathens answered that their own G.o.d was better than the G.o.d of the Christians, because he could be seen.

The king spent the greater part of the night in prayer, and next morning at daybreak the idol of the northern G.o.d Thor was brought forward by his worshippers. Olave pointed to the rising sun, as being a witness to the glory of its Maker; and, while the heathens were gazing on its brightness, a tall soldier, to whom the king had given his orders beforehand, lifted up his club and dashed the idol to pieces. A swarm of loathsome creatures, which had lived within the idol's huge body, and had fattened on the food and drink which were offered to it, rushed forth, as in the case of the image of Serapis, hundreds of years before;[67] whereupon the men of Dalen were convinced of the falsehood of their old religion, and consented to be baptized. King Olave was at length killed in battle against his heathen subjects (A.D. 1030), and his memory is regarded as that of a saint.

[67] See Part I., chap. XVI.

(7.) From Norway the Gospel made its way to the Norwegian settlements in Iceland, and even in Greenland, where it long flourished, until, in the middle of the fifteenth century, ice gathered on the sh.o.r.es so as to make it impossible to land on them. About the same time a great plague, which was called the Black Death, carried off a large part of the settlers, and the rest were so few and so weak that they were easily killed by the natives.

It seems to be certain that some of the Norwegians from Greenland discovered a part of the American continent, although no traces of them remained there when the country was again discovered by Europeans, hundreds of years later.

CHAPTER VIII.

POPE GREGORY THE SEVENTH.

PART I.

In the times of which I have been lately speaking, the power of the popes had grown far beyond what it was in the days of Gregory the Great.

I have told you Gregory was very much displeased because a patriarch of Constantinople had styled himself _Universal Bishop_.[68] But since that time the popes had taken to calling themselves by this very t.i.tle, and they meant a great deal more by it than the patriarchs of Constantinople had meant; for people in the East are fond of big words, so that, when a patriarch called himself _Universal Bishop_, he did not mean anything in particular, but merely to give himself a t.i.tle which would sound grandly. And thus, although he claimed to be universal, he would have allowed the bishops of Rome to be universal too. But when the popes called themselves _Universal Bishops_, they meant that they were bishops of the whole church, and that all other bishops were under them.