The Historians' History of the World 08

[104] Milmane says: “The empire and the papacy were now to meet in their last mortal and implacable strife. Cæsar would bear no superior, the successor of St. Peter no equal.”

[105] [“With Conradin’s death,” says Mullinger,d “the long contest of the empire with the popedom came to an end.”]

[106] [Of Clement IV, Milmane says: “It is his praise that he did not exalt his kindred, that he left in obscurity the husbands of his daughters. But the wonder betrayed by this praise shows at once how Christendom had been offended; it was prophetic of the stronger offence which nepotism would hereafter entail upon the papal see.”]

CHAPTER IV. FROM EXILE TO SUPREMACY

[1305-1513 A.D.]

The period in the papal history has arrived which in the Italian writers is called the Babylonish Captivity; it lasted more than seventy years (from 1305 to 1376). Rome is no longer the metropolis of Christendom; the pope is a French prelate. The successor of St. Peter is not on St. Peter’s throne; he is environed with none of the traditionary majesty or traditionary sanctity of the Eternal City; he has abandoned the holy bodies of the apostles, the churches of the apostles. It is perhaps the most marvellous part of its history that the papacy, having sunk so low, sank no lower; that it recovered from its degradation; that, from a satellite, almost a slave of the king of France, the pontiff ever emerged again to be an independent potentate; and, although the great line of mediæval popes, of Gregory, of Alexander III, and the Innocents, expired in Boniface VIII, he could resume even his modified supremacy. There is no proof so strong of the vitality of the papacy as that it could establish the law that wherever the pope is, there is the throne of St. Peter; that he could cease to be bishop of Rome in all but in name, and then take back again the abdicated bishopric.

Never was revolution more sudden, more total, it might seem more enduring in its consequences. The close of the last century had seen Boniface VIII advancing higher pretensions, if not wielding more actual power than any former pontiff; the acknowledged pacificator of the world, the arbiter between the kings of France and England, claiming and exercising feudal as well as spiritual supremacy over many kingdoms, bestowing crowns as in Hungary, awarding the empire; with millions of pilgrims at the jubilee in Rome, still the centre of Christendom, paying him homage which bordered on adulation and pouring the riches of the world at his feet. The first decade of the new century is not more than half passed; Pope Clement V is a voluntary prisoner, but not the less a prisoner in the realm, or almost within the precincts of France; struggling in vain to escape from the tyranny of his inexorable master, and to break or elude the fetters wound around him by his own solemn engagements. He is almost forced to condemn his predecessor for crimes of which he could hardly believe him guilty; to accept a niggardly, and perhaps never-fulfilled penance from men almost murderers of a pope; to sacrifice, on evidence which he himself manifestly mistrusted, the Templars, one of the great military orders of Christendom, to the hatred or avarice of Philip. The pope, from lord over the freedom of the world, has ceased to be a free agent.b

CLEMENT V

[1305-1311 A.D.]

The pontiffs being at a distance, the Ghibelline faction in Italy, which was hostile to the pontiffs, assumed greater boldness than formerly, and not only invaded and laid waste the territories of St. Peter, but also assailed the pontifical authority by their publications. Hence a number of cities revolted from the popes; Rome itself became the parent and fomenter of tumults, cabals, and civil wars; and the laws and decrees sent thither from France were publicly treated with contempt, and not merely by the nobles but also by the common citizens. A great part of Europe followed the example of Italy; and numberless examples show that the people of Europe attributed far less power to the fulminations and decrees issued from France than to those issued from Rome. Various seditions, therefore, were raised in one place and another against the pontiffs, which they were unable to subdue and put down, notwithstanding that the inquisitors were most active in the discharge of their functions.