The Historians' History of the World 08

The Crusades, as elsewhere described, had made the pope not merely the spiritual, but in some sort the military suzerain of Europe; he had the power of summoning all Christendom to his banner; the raising the cross, the standard of the pope, was throughout Europe a general and compulsory levy, the Heerbann of all who bore arms, of all who could follow an army. That which was a noble act of devotion had become a duty; not to assume the cross was sin and impiety. The Crusades thus became a kind of forlorn hope upon which all the more dangerous and refractory of the temporal sovereigns might be employed, so as to waste their strength, if not lose their lives, by the accidents of the journey, or by the sword of the Mohammedan. If they resisted, the fearful excommunication hung over them, and was ratified by the fears and by the wavering allegiance of their subjects. If they obeyed and returned, as most of them did, with shame and defeat, they returned shorn of their power, lowered in the public estimation, and perhaps still pursued, on account of their ill success, with the inexorable interdict. It was thus by trammelling their adversaries with vows which they could not decline, and from which they could not extricate themselves; by thus consuming their wealth and resources on this wild and remote warfare, that the popes, who themselves decently eluded, or were prevented by age or alleged occupations from embarkation in these adventurous expeditions, broke and wasted away the power and influence of the emperors.

The Crusades, too, had now made the western world tributary to the popedom; the vast subventions raised for the Holy Land were to a certain extent at the disposal of the pope. The taxation of the clergy on his authority could not be refused for such an object; a tenth of all the exorbitant wealth of the hierarchy passed through his hands. An immense financial system grew up; papal collectors were in every land, papal bankers in every capital to transmit these subsidies.

But after all none of these accessory and, in some degree, fortuitous aids, could have raised the papal authority to its commanding height,[100] had it not possessed more sublime and more lawful claims to the reverence of mankind. It was still an assertion of eternal principles of justice, righteousness, and humanity. However it might trample on all justice, sacrifice righteousness to its own interests, plunge Europe in desolating wars, perpetuate strife in states, set sons in arms against their fathers, fathers against sons, it was still proclaiming a higher ultimate end. The papal language, the language of the clergy, was still ostentatiously, profoundly religious; it professed, even if itself did not always respect, even though it tampered with, the awful sense of retribution before an all-knowing, all-righteous God. In his highest pride, the pope was still the servant of the servants of God; in all his cruelty he boasted of his kindness to the transgressor; every contumacious emperor was a disobedient son; the excommunication was the voice of a parent, who affected at least reluctance to chastise.

If this great idea was ever to be realised of a Christian republic with a pope at its head—and that a pope of a high Christian character (in some respects, in all perhaps but one, in tolerance and gentleness almost impossible in his days, and the want of which, far from impairing, confirmed his strength)—none could bring more lofty, more various qualifications for its accomplishment, none could fall on more favourable times than Innocent III. Innocent was Giovanni Lothario Conti, an Italian of noble birth, but not of a family inextricably involved in the petty quarrels and interests of the princedoms of Romagna. He was of the Conti,[101] who derived their name in some remote time from their dignity. The elevation of his uncle to the pontificate as Clement III paved the way to his rapid rise. He was elevated in his twenty-ninth year to the cardinalate under the title vacated by his uncle.