Sketches of Church History Part 17

It had been found, at the time of the first crusade, that many people were disposed to fall on the Jews of their own neighbourhood, as being enemies of Christ no less than the Mahometans of the Holy Land, and the same was repeated now. But Bernard strongly set his face against this kind of cruelty, and was not only the means of saving the lives of many Jews, but brought the chief preacher of the persecution to own with sorrow and shame that he had been utterly wrong.

Although, however, a vast army was raised for the recovery of the Holy Land, and although both the emperor and the French king went at the head of it, nothing came of the crusade except that vast numbers of lives were sacrificed without any gain; and even Bernard's great fame as a saint was not enough to protect him from blame on account of the part which he had taken in getting up this unfortunate attempt.

These were some of the most remarkable things in which Bernard's command over men's minds was shown; and he was able also to get the better of some persons who taught wrong or doubtful opinions, even although they may have been men of sharper wits and of greater learning than himself.

In short, Bernard was the leading man of his age. No doubt he believed many things which we should think superst.i.tious or altogether wrong; and in his conduct we cannot help noticing some tokens of human frailty--especially a jealous love of the power and influence which he had gained. But, although he was not without his defects, we cannot fail to see in him an honest, hearty, and laborious servant of G.o.d, and we shall not wish to grudge him the t.i.tle of _saint_, which was granted to him by a pope in 1173, and has ever since been commonly attached to his name. Bernard died in 1153.

CHAPTER XII.

ADRIAN IV.--ALEXANDER III.--BECKET.--THE THIRD CRUSADE.

A.D. 1153-1192.

In the year of Bernard's death Adrian IV. was chosen pope; and he is especially to be noted by us because he was the only Englishman who ever held the papacy. His name at first was Nicolas Breakspeare; and he was born near St. Albans, where, in his youth, he asked to be received into the famous abbey as a monk. But the monks of St. Albans refused him; and he then went to seek his fortune abroad, where he rose step by step, until at length the poor Hertfordshire lad, who would have had no chance of any great place in his own country (for he was of Saxon family, and the Normans, after the Conquest, kept all the good places for themselves), was chosen to be the head of Christendom (A.D. 1154).

Adrian had a high notion of the greatness and dignity of his office.

When the emperor Frederick I. (who is called _Barbarossa_, or _Redbeard_) went from Germany into Italy, and was visited in his camp by the pope, Adrian required that the emperor should hold his stirrup as he mounted his horse, and said that such had been the custom from the time of the great Constantine. Frederick had never heard of such a thing before, and was not willing to submit; but on inquiry he found that a late emperor, Lothair III., had held a pope's stirrup, and then he agreed to do the like. But he took care to do it so awkwardly that every one who saw it began to laugh; and thus he made his submission appear like a joke.

Frederick Redbeard carried on a long struggle with the popes. When, at Adrian's death, two rival popes had been chosen (A.D. 1159), the emperor required them to let him judge between their claims; and, as one of them, Alexander III., refused to admit any earthly judge, Frederick took part with the other, who called himself Victor IV. And when Victor was dead, Frederick set up three more anti-popes, one after another, to oppose Alexander.

But Alexander had the kings of France and England on his side, and at last he not only got himself firmly settled, but brought Frederick to entreat for peace with him, and with some cities of North Italy, which had formed themselves into what was called the Lombard League (A.D.

1177). But we must not believe a story that, when this treaty was concluded in the great church of St. Mark at Venice, the pope put his foot on the emperor's neck, and the choir chanted the words of the 91st Psalm, "Thou shalt go upon the lion and the adder:" for this story was not made up until long after, and has no truth at all in it.

It was in Alexander III.'s time that the great quarrel between Henry II.

of England and Archbishop Thomas Becket took place. Becket had been raised by the king's favour to be his chancellor, and afterwards to be archbishop of Canterbury and head of all the English clergy (A.D. 1162).

But, although until then he had done everything just as the king wished, no sooner had he become archbishop than he turned round on Henry. He claimed that any clergyman who might be guilty of crimes should not be tried by the king's judges, but only in the Church's courts. He was willing to allow that, if a clergyman were found guilty of a great crime in these courts, he might be degraded,--that is to say, that he should be turned out of the ranks of the clergy,--and that, when he had thus become like other men, he might be tried like any other man for any fresh offences which he might commit. But for the first crime Becket would allow no other punishment than degradation at the utmost. The king said that in such matters clergy and laity ought to be alike; and about this chiefly the two quarrelled, although there were also other matters which helped to stir up the strife.

In order to get out of the king's way, the archbishop secretly left England (A.D. 1164), and for six years he lived in France, where king Lewis treated him with much kindness, partly because this seemed a good way to annoy the king of England. But at length peace was made, and Becket had returned to England, when some new acts of his provoked the king to utter some hasty words against him; whereupon four knights, who thought to do Henry a service, took occasion to try to seize the archbishop, and, as he refused to go with them, murdered him in his own cathedral (A.D. 1170). But as you must have read the story of Becket in the history of England, I need not spend much time in repeating it.

In 1185, when Urban III. was pope, tidings reached Europe that Jerusalem had been taken by the great Mussulman hero and conqueror, Saladin; and at once all Western Christendom was stirred up to make a grand attempt for the recovery of the Holy City. The lion-hearted Richard of England, Philip Augustus of France, and the emperor Frederick Redbeard, who had lately made his peace with the pope, were all to take part; but very little came of it. Frederick, after having successfully made his way by Constantinople into Asia Minor, was drowned in the river Cydnus, in Cilicia. Richard, Philip, and other leaders, after reaching the Holy Land, quarrelled among themselves; and the Crusaders, after a vast sacrifice of life, returned home without having effected the deliverance of Jerusalem. You will remember how Richard, in taking his way through Austria, fell into the hands of the emperor Henry VI., the son of Frederick Redbeard, and was imprisoned in Germany until his subjects were able to raise the large sum which was demanded for his ransom.

CHAPTER XIII.

INNOCENT THE THIRD.

A.D. 1198-1216.

PART I.

The popes were continually increasing their power in many ways, although they were often unable to hold their ground in their own city, but were driven out by the Romans, so that they were obliged to seek a refuge in France, or to fix their court for a time in some little Italian town.

They claimed the right of setting up and plucking down emperors and kings. Instead of asking the emperor to confirm their own election to the papacy, as in former times, they declared that no one could be emperor without their consent. They said that they were the chief lords over kingdoms; they required the emperors to hold their stirrup as they mounted on horseback, and the rein of their bridle as they rode. And while such was their treatment of earthly princes, they also steadily tried to get into their own hands the powers which properly belonged to bishops, so that the bishops should seem to have no rights of their own, but to hold their office and to do whatever they did only through the pope's leave and as his servants. They contrived that, whenever any difference arose in the Church of any country, instead of being settled on the spot, it should be carried by an appeal to Rome, that the pope might judge it. They declared themselves to be above any councils of bishops, and claimed the power of a.s.sembling general councils, although in earlier times this power had belonged to the emperors, as was seen in the case of the first great council of Nicaea. They interfered with the election of bishops, and with the appointment of clergy to offices, in every country; and they sent into every country their amba.s.sadors, or _legates_ (as they were called), whom they charged people to respect and obey as they would respect and obey the pope himself. These legates usually made themselves hated by their pride and greediness; for they set themselves up far above the archbishops and bishops of any country that they might be sent into, and they squeezed out from the clergy of each country which they visited the means of keeping up their pomp and splendour.

The popes who followed Gregory VII. all endeavoured to act in his spirit, and to push the claims of their see further and further. And of these popes, by far the strongest and most successful was Innocent III., who was only thirty-seven years old when he was elected in 1198. I have told you how Gregory said that the papacy was as much greater than any earthly power as the sun is than the moon. And now Innocent carried out this further by saying that, as the lesser light (the moon) borrows of the greater light (the sun), so the royal power is borrowed from the priestly power.

Innocent pretended to a right of judging between the princes who claimed the empire and the kingdom of Germany, and of making an emperor by his own choice. He forced the king of France, Philip Augustus, to do justice to a virtuous Danish princess, whom he had married and had afterwards put away. And he forced John of England to accept Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, although Langton was appointed by the pope without any regard to the rights of the clergy or of the sovereign of England. Both in France and in England Innocent made use of what was called an _interdict_ to make people submit to his will. By this sentence (which had first come into use about three hundred years before), a whole country was punished at once, the bad and the good alike; all the churches were closed, all the bells were silenced, all the outward signs of religion were taken away. There was no blessing for marriage, there were no prayers at the burial of the dead; the baptism of children and the office for the dying were the only services of the Church which were allowed while the interdict lasted. And it was commonly found, that, although a king might not himself care for any spiritual threats or sentences which the pope might utter, he was unable to hold out against the general feeling of his people, who could not bear to be without the rites of religion, and cried out that the innocent thousands were punished for the sake of one guilty person.

John was completely subdued to the papacy, and agreed to give up his crown to the pope's commissioner, Pandulf; after which he received it again from Pandulf's hands, and promised to hold the kingdoms of England and Ireland under the condition of paying a yearly tribute as an acknowledgment that the pope was his lord.

Archbishop Langton, although he had been forced on the English Church by the pope, yet afterwards took a different line from what might have been expected. For when John, by his tyranny, provoked his barons to rise against him, the archbishop was at the head of those who wrung from the king the Great Charter as a security for English liberty; and, although the pope was violently angry, and threatened to punish the archbishop and the barons severely, Langton stood firmly by the cause which he had taken up.

PART II.

While Innocent was thus carrying things with a high hand among the Christians of the West, he could not but feel distress about the state of affairs in the East. There, countries which had once been Christian, and among them the Holy Land, where the Saviour had lived and died, had fallen into the hands of unbelievers, and all the efforts which had been made to recover them had hitherto been vain. The pope's mind was set on a new crusade, and in order to raise money for it he gave much out of his own purse, stinted himself as to his manner of living, obliged the cardinals and others around him to do the like, and caused collections to be gathered throughout Western Christendom. Eloquent preachers were sent about to stir people up to the great work, and the chief beginning was made at a place called Ecry, in the north of France. It so happened that the most famous of the preachers, whose name was Fulk, arrived there just as a number of n.o.bles and knights were met for a tournament (which was the name given to the fights of knights on horseback, which were regarded as sport, but very often ended in sad earnest). Fulk, by the power of his speech, persuaded most of these gallant knights at Ecry to take the cross; and, as the number of Crusaders grew, some of them were sent to Venice, to provide means for their being carried by sea to Egypt, which was the country in which it was thought that the Mahometans might be attacked with the best hope of success.

When these envoys reached Venice, which was then the chief trading city of Europe, they found the Venetians very willing to supply what they wanted. It was agreed that for a certain sum of money the Venetians should prepare ships and provisions for the number of Crusaders which was expected; and they did so accordingly. But when the Crusaders came, it was found that their numbers fell short of what had been reckoned on; for many had chosen other ways of going to the East; and, as the Venetians would take nothing less than the sum which they had bargained for, the Crusaders, with their lessened numbers, found themselves unable to pay. In this difficulty, the Venetians proposed that, instead of the money which could not be raised, the Crusaders should give them their help against the city of Zara, in Dalmatia, with which Venice had a quarrel. The Crusaders were very unwilling to do this; because the pope, in giving his consent to their enterprise, had forbidden them to turn their arms against any Christians. But they contrived to persuade themselves that the pope's words were not to be understood too exactly; and at a meeting in the great church of St. Mark, Henry Dandolo, the doge or duke of Venice, took the cross, and declared to the vast mult.i.tude of citizens and Crusaders who crowded the church that, although he was ninety-four years of age, and almost or altogether blind, he himself would be the leader.

A fleet of nearly five hundred vessels sailed from Venice accordingly (Oct., 1202), and Zara was taken after a siege of six days, although the inhabitants tried to soften the feelings of the besiegers by displaying crosses and sacred pictures from the walls, as tokens of their brotherhood in Christ. After this success, the Crusaders were bound by their engagement to go on to Egypt or the Holy Land; but a young Greek prince, named Alexius, entreated them to restore his father, who had been dethroned by a usurper, to the empire of the East; and, although the French were unwilling to undertake any work that might interfere with the recovery of the Holy Land, the Venetians, who cared little for anything but their own gain, persuaded them to turn aside to Constantinople.

When the Crusaders came in sight of the city, they were so astonished at the beauty of its lofty walls and towers, of its palaces and its many churches, that (as we are told) the hearts of the boldest among them beat with a feeling which could not be kept down, and many of them even burst into tears. They found the harbour protected by a great chain which was drawn across the mouth of it; but this chain was broken by the force of a ship which was driven against it with the sails swollen by a strong wind. The blind old doge, Henry Dandolo, stood in the prow of the foremost ship, and was the first to land in the face of the Greeks who stood ready to defend the ground. Constantinople was soon won, and the emperor, who had been deposed and blinded by the usurper, was brought from his dungeon, and was enthroned in the great church of St. Sophia, while his son Alexius was anointed and crowned as a partner in the empire.

But quarrels soon arose between the Greeks and the Latins. Alexius was murdered by a new usurper; his father died of grief: and the Crusaders found themselves drawn on to conquer the city afresh for themselves.

This conquest was disgraced by much cruelty and unchecked plunder; and the religion of the Greeks was outraged by the Latin victors as much as it could have been by heathen barbarians.

The Crusaders set up an emperor and a patriarch of their own, and the Greek clergy were forced to give way to Latins. The pope, although he was much disappointed at finding that his plan for the recovery of the Holy Land had come to nothing, was yet persuaded by the greatness of the conquest to give a kind of approval to it. But the Latin empire of the East was never strong; and after about seventy years it was overthrown by the Greeks, who drove out the Latins and restored their own form of Christian religion.

Innocent did not give up the notion of a crusade, and at a later time he sent about preachers to stir up the people of the West afresh; but nothing had come of this when the pope died. I must, however, mention a strange thing which arose out of this attempt at a crusade.

A shepherd boy, named Stephen, who lived near Vendome, in the province of Orleans, gave out that he had seen a vision of the Saviour, and had been charged by Him to preach the cross. By this tale Stephen gathered some children about him, and they set off for the crusade, displaying crosses and banners, and chanting in every town or village through which they pa.s.sed, "O Lord, help us to recover Thy true and holy cross!" When they reached Paris, there were no less than 15,000 of them, and as they went along their numbers became greater and greater. If any parents tried to keep back their children from joining them, it was of no use; even if they shut them up, it was believed that the children were able to break through bars and locks in order to follow Stephen and his companions. Ignorant people fancied that Stephen could work miracles, and treasured up threads of his dress as precious relics. At length the company, whose numbers had reached 30,000, arrived at Ma.r.s.eilles, where Stephen entered the city in a triumphal car, surrounded on all sides by guards. Some shipowners undertook to convey the child-crusaders to Egypt and Africa for nothing; but these were wretches who meant to sell them as slaves to the Mahometans; and this was the fate of such of the children as reached the African coast, after many of them had been lost by shipwreck on the way.

Innocent, although he had nothing to do with this crusade, or with one of the same kind which was got up in Germany, declared that the zeal of the children put to shame the coldness of their elders, whom he was still labouring, with little success, to enlist in the cause of the Holy Land.

PART III.

A war of a different kind, but which was also styled a crusade, was carried on in the south of France while Innocent was pope. In that country there were great numbers of persons who did not agree with the Roman Church, and who are known by the names of Waldenses and Albigenses. The opinions of these two parties differed greatly from each other. The Waldenses, whose name was given to them from Peter Waldo, of Lyons, who founded the party about the year 1170, were a quiet set of people, something like the Quakers of our own time. They dressed and lived plainly, they were mild in their manners, and used some rather affected ways of speech; they thought all war and all oaths wrong, they did not acknowledge the claims of the clergy, and, although they attended the services of the Church, it is said that they secretly mocked at them. They were fond of reading the Holy Scripture in their own language, while the Roman Church would only allow it to be read in Latin, which was understood by few except the clergy, and not by all of _them_. And so eager were the Waldenses to bring people to their own way of thinking, that we are told of one of them, a poor man, who, after his day's work, used to swim across a river in wintry nights, that he might reach a person whom he wished to convert.

The Albigenses, on whom the persecution chiefly fell, held something like the doctrines of Manes, whom I mentioned a long way back,[80] so that they could not properly be considered as Christians at all. But, although we cannot think well of their doctrines, the treatment of these people was so cruel and so treacherous as to raise the strongest feelings of anger and horror in all who read the accounts of it. Tens of thousands were slain, and their rich and beautiful country was turned into a desert.

[80] Part I., p. 110.

The chief leader of the crusade in the south of France was Simon de Montfort, father of that Earl Simon who is famous in the history of England. Innocent, although he seems to have been much deceived by those who reported matters to him, was grievously to blame for having given too much countenance to the cruelties and injustice which were practised against the unhappy Albigenses.

Among the clergy who accompanied the Crusaders into southern France and tried to bring over the Albigenses and Waldenses to the Roman Church was a Spaniard named Dominic, who afterwards became famous as the founder of an order of mendicant friars (that is to say, _begging brothers_). He also founded the Inquisition, which was a body intended to search out and to put down all opinions differing from the doctrines of the Roman Church. But the cruelty, darkness, and treachery of its proceedings were so shocking, that, although Dominic was certainly its founder, we need not suppose that he would have approved of all its doings.

The Waldenses and Albigenses had been used to reproach the clergy of the Church for their habits of pomp and luxury; and Dominic had done what he could to meet these charges by the plainness and hardness of the life which he and his companions led while labouring in the south of France.

And when he resolved to found a new order of monks, he carried the notion of poverty to an extreme. His followers were to be not only poor, but beggars. They were to live on alms, and from day to day, refusing any gifts of money so large as to give the notion of a settled provision for their needs.

PART IV.