CHAP. VI A. D. 1125-1190 Election of Conrad III and abandon ment of Italy to the Papacy To the battle cry of "Welf" was hurled back that of "Weiblingen," the name of a village in Suabia near the Hohenstaufen castle. Beginning thus in a rivalry for the German kingship and the imperial crown, the war cries of "Welf" and "Weiblingen," which the Italians pronounced "Guelf" and "Ghibelline," resounded as battle shouts and party epithets long after their origin had been forgotten; serving to designate, respectively, the papal and the imperial partisans in their repeated contests; and, finally, to denote the rival factions in the internal strifes of the Italian cities when the imperial claims ceased to be asserted south of the Alps. With the German election of 1138, the rivalry of the Guelfs and Ghibellines assumed for the time a dangerous character; but Conrad of Hohenstaufen was chosen king and displayed a remarkable energy in enforcing his authority. Henry the Proud generously offered to recognize the kingship of Conrad, if his territorial rights were respected; but this erratic warrior, not content with submission, proceeded to spoliation and stripped Henry of his duchies. The humbled duke having died soon afterward, Conrad yielded to the wave of enthusiasm for the Crusades which was then passing over Europe. Taking the cross at Speyer, on Christmas day, 1146, he soon attracted to his standard great numbers of the German nobles; civil war was for the time abandoned; and a vast multitude of adventurers, rich and poor, including women arrayed in the armor of knights or serving as squires, prepared to march to the holy war. In May, 1147, a general peace was proclaimed at Frankfort; and, having secured the election and coronation of his little son Henry as his successor, Conrad led his motley host toward the East. The indifference of Conrad III to Italian affairs and his long absence in the Holy Land left the Papacy to struggle alone with the reorganization of Italy. Bernard of Clairvaux, by repeated negotiations, had induced the Romans to receive Innocent II, and the death of Anacletus in 1138 enabled him for a time to assert his authority at Rome. A. D. 1125-1190 The Lateran Council in 1139 annulled the acts of Anacle- CHAP. VI tus, and attempted to re-establish peace, not only in the Church but throughout Christendom. Among its decrees was a reaffirmation of the Truce of God. In 1119, Calixtus II had ordered the observance of the truce from Advent to the eighth day of Epiphany, from Quinquagesima to the eighth day of Pentecost, during Ember Seasons, and on the vigils and feasts of the saints.1 Amidst the tribulations which beset the Papacy, and notwithstanding the conflicts which it occasioned and in which it was compelled to engage, the Church never ceased to stand for peace in an age of brutal force, and to oppose to the harsh realism of the feudal order the ideals of Christian unity and fraternity. Church Not only by the Truce of God, which the Church en- Civilizing deavored to impose upon the belligerent feudal lords and agency of the barons, but in the realm of justice also, a like influence was exerted both by precept and example. In the courts of the feudal lords, the judgment of God was sought by the trial of battle, where litigants, witnesses, and judges decided the case by physical combat. But in the ecclesiastical courts, justice was determined by the code of the Canon Law, which invoked the principles of reason and equity. If the popes inspired and organized the Crusades, thus appealing to the use of force, it was not because they loved war, but because the Holy Places were in danger. It was to guard and administer these memorials of the Christian faith that the military orders were founded in the Holy Land, where the Knights of the Temple in 1128 took their vows. of poverty, chastity, and obedience, followed by a vast development of militant monasticism, in which the Knights of St. John and the Teutonic Order were to exert a vast influence upon history and upon civilization. While the Church was using its authority to ameliorate the abuses of private warfare in Europe, it was thus elevating the power of the 1 For this decree of the Pope, see Dumont, Corps diplomatique, I, Part I, p. 66. A. D. 1125-1190 CHAP. VI Sword by the control of noble and refining principles in Asia. By its protection of the helpless and the innocent, which was made the ambition of the Christian knight, chivalry was at the same time ennobling the practice of arms and preparing the forces which were to overthrow feudalism as a social institution. The recognition of the rights of the humble, the association of the crusaders in a common cause, the formation of codes of honor, the emancipation of men from feudal obligations as a reward for their heroic deeds, the return to their places of origin of a new class of free men, were all to constitute a new leaven for the reorganization of society. A new spirit, more refined and more enlightened, was borne back to feudal Europe from the battlefields of Asia. Like the pax Romana, the pax ecclesiae, which made war a weapon of common defence rather than an instrument of mutual destruction, tended powerfully to supplant the reign of force by a reign of law. The Assizes of Jerusalem, composed under the direction of the most perfect representative of the spirit of chivalry, Godfrey de Bouillon, appeared to be the constitution of a robust society. They were, in reality, the testament of a social order about to expire. A system which had conceived and formulated the legislation by which it should be governed had already renounced the principle of force and accepted the principle of law. The revival The second crusade, which had taken Conrad III to the Holy Land, proved a pathetic failure; and he returned to Germany in 1149 to find himself confronted by a Welf rebellion. Innocent II had, in the meantime, formed an alliance with King Roger of Sicily, who had become his protector; while Italy, left to pursue its own course, had made great progress in the development of municipal independence. Like the other Italian cities, Rome had revived the idea of the Roman of communal liberty, but under circumstances of an exceptional nature. While other cities of Italy had gradually Republic 1 For a brief history of the "Assizes of Jerusalem," see the note on pp. 277, 278 of Choiseul-Daillecourt, De l'influence des croisades sur l'état des peuples de l'Europe, Paris, 1809. A. D. 1125-1190 passed from the rule of their bishops to the government of CHAP. VI "consuls" chosen by their communes, Rome, whose bishop was also pope, had received none of the new privileges accorded by the emperors. Here, the aristocracy had either made and controlled the Pope, or had been managed by him through imperial interposition or the gift of immunities. accorded by himself. The people and the smaller nobility, restless and dissatisfied, had always been ready for revolution, and had constituted a perpetual danger. In 1141, a revolt of the little city of Tivoli had been rudely repressed by the Romans; but, in making their treaty of submission, in order to escape total destruction, the vanquished had placed themselves wholly in the hands of the Pope. This incident suddenly unchained all the elements of insurrection which had been excited by the example of other Italian cities. Rome, once the mistress of the world, perceived itself held, alone, in the bonds of a mediaeval theocracy such as its neighbors had shaken off. A tempest of mingled pride, misery, and ambition now burst forth. The population rose in rebellion against the Pope, a democratic government was set up, the Senate was restored, and the city was plunged into a state of war. In the midst of this revolution, Innocent II passed away, leaving to his successors -Celestine II, Lucius II, and Eugenius III-a decade of storm and turbulence. Three burdens had long weighed heavily upon the common people of Rome: the despotism of the aristocracy, the appropriation of land by the clergy, and the calamities that had befallen the city in the tragic conflicts occasioned by the temporal claims of the popes. The revolution of 1141 was a protest against all three, a rising of the people in a fierce struggle for the municipal liberties already possessed by other cities of Italy. At the moment when revolt was rising to its most danger- Arnold of Brescia ous proportions, Arnold of Brescia, a Lombard scholar whose unusual rhetorical talents had been stimulated by the bold eloquence of his heretical master, Abelard, at Paris, after A. D. 1125-1190 CHAP. VI wandering through many lands declaiming against the temporal power of the Pope, in 1146 came to Rome, where he was received with wild enthusiasm. Supported by the masses of the city, and especially by two thousand Swiss who had followed him, Arnold eloquently attacked the temporal pretensions of the Papacy and the right of the clergy to hold property. Taking his text from the separation of the spiritual and the civil powers proposed in the repudiated transaction of Paschal II, the impassioned monk made the populace delirious by his political and social doctrines. The crime of possessing property, so vigorously denounced, rendered the Roman mob a willing instrument of divine vengeance for its punishment; while Eugenius III, fearing for his life in the midst of such fervid denunciation, fled to Viterbo, leaving Arnold in full possession of the city. It would be inspiring to perceive in this democratic movement a revival of civic responsibility and a restoration of republican liberties in the scene of their ancient grandeur; but the revolution serves rather to expose the depths to which political spirit and sound statesmanship had fallen in that moment of splendid opportunity. The Romans of that time could conceive of no higher aim than the futile wish to restore the ancient glory of Rome as the mistress of the world. Anxious to create for themselves some title of distinction, the demagogues demanded the restoration of the equestrian order as well as the re-establishment of the Senate, thus committing the city to the contentions of a new nobility. To crown this dream of greatness, Conrad III was importuned to come to Rome, make it his capital, and, "freed from the fetters of the clergy, to exalt and glorify the Roman Empire." Thus, instead of that awakening of civic responsibility which might have solved forever the problem of furnishing to the Papacy the freedom and security of a self-governed commonwealth without the embarrassment of its temporal authority, the ideal of the Roman commune was, in reality, only a revival of that passion for imperial dominion which had proved the curse of Italy. |