![The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/4/3/9/9/the-historians-history-of-the-world-08-parthians-sassanids-and-arabs-the-crusades-and-the-papacy-download.jpg)
The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]». Краткое содержание книги:
But the extirpation of these two internal enemies to the dignity and the power of the sacerdotal order was far below the holy ambition of Gregory; this was but clearing the ground for the stately fabric of his theocracy. If, for his own purposes, he had at first assumed some moderation in his intercourse with the empire, over the rest of Latin Christendom he took at once the tone and language of a sovereign. We must rapidly survey, before we follow him into his great war with the empire, Gregory VII asserting his autocracy over the rest of Latin Christendom.
[1074-1076 A.D.]
His letters to Philip I, king of France, are in the haughtiest, most criminatory terms: “No king has reached such a height of detestable guilt in oppressing the churches of his kingdom as Philip of France.” He puts the king to the test; his immediate admission of a bishop of Mâcon, elected by the clergy and people, without payment to the crown. Either let the king repudiate this base traffic of simony, and allow fit persons to be promoted to bishoprics, or the Franks, unless apostates from Christianity, will be struck with the sword of excommunication, and refuse any longer to obey him.
Hildebrand’s predecessor (and Alexander II did no momentous act without the counsel of Hildebrand) had given a direct sanction to the Norman conquest of England. Hildebrand may have felt some admiration, even awe, of the congenial mind of the conqueror. He advances the claim to Peter’s pence over the kingdom. William admits this claim; it was among the stipulations, it was the price which the pope had imposed for his assent to the conquest. But to the demand of fealty, the conqueror returns an answer of haughty brevity: “I have not sworn, nor will I swear fealty which was never sworn by any of my predecessors to yours.” And William maintained his Teutonic independence—created bishops and abbots at his will, was absolute lord over his ecclesiastical as over his feudal liegemen.
To the kings of Spain, in one of his earliest letters, Pope Gregory boldly asserts that the whole realm of Spain is not only within the spiritual jurisdiction of the holy see, but her property. No part of Latin Christendom was so remote or so barbarous as to escape his vigilant determination to bring it under his vast ecclesiastical unity. While yet a deacon he had corresponded with Sweyn, king of Denmark; on him he bestows much grave and excellent advice. In a letter to Olaf, king of Norway, he dissuades him solemnly from assisting the rebellious brothers of the Danish king. Between the duke of Poland and the king of the Russians he interposes his mediation. The son of the Russian had come to Rome to receive his kingdom from the hands of St. Peter. The kingdom of Hungary, as that of Spain, he treats as a fief of the papacy; he rebukes the king Solomon for daring to hold it as a benefice of the king of the Germans. He watches over Bohemia; his legates take under their care the estates of the church; he summons the archbishop of Prague to Rome. Even Africa is not beyond the care of Hildebrand. The clergy and people of Carthage are urged to adhere to their archbishop—not to dread the arms of the Saracens, though that once flourishing Christian province, the land of Cyprian and Augustine, is so utterly reduced that three bishops cannot be found to proceed to a legitimate consecration.
A Bishop of the Eleventh Century
But the empire was the one worthy, one formidable antagonist to Hildebrand’s universal theocracy, whose prostration would lay the world beneath his feet. The empire must acknowledge itself as a grant from the papacy, as a grant revocable for certain offences against the ecclesiastical rights and immunities; it must humbly acquiesce in the uncontrolled prerogative of the cardinals to elect the pope; abandon all the imperial claims on the investiture of the prelates and other clergy with their benefices; release the whole mass of church property from all feudal demands, whether of service or of fealty; submit patiently to rebuke; admit the pope to dictate on questions of war and peace, and all internal government where he might detect, or suppose that he detected, oppression. This was the condition to which the words and acts of Gregory aspired to reduce the heirs of Charlemagne, the successors of the western cæsars.
As a Christian, as a member of the church, the emperor was confessedly subordinate to the pope, the acknowledged head and ruler of the church. As a subject of the empire, the pope owed temporal allegiance to the emperor. The authority of each depended on loose and flexible tradition, on variable and contradictory precedents, on titles of uncertain signification; each could ascend to a time when they were not dependent upon each other. The emperor boasted himself the successor to the whole autocracy of the cæsars, to Augustus, Constantine, Charlemagne: the pope to that of St. Peter, or of Christ himself.e But all-powerful as was the pope abroad, in Italy his authority was restricted. Even in Rome the prefect Cencius dared to lay hands on Gregory VII, to tear him from the sanctuary of a church during a riot, and afterwards held him some time a prisoner. At Milan the citizens expelled Herlembald and his tool Atto, who exercised actual tyranny in the city under pretext of carrying out the pope’s reforms, and demanded an archbishop of Henry IV, who sent them a noble from Castiglione. This was the commencement of the struggle between sacerdotal and imperial power that culminated in one of the greatest and most stirring dramas of all history.
Events began auspiciously for Gregory, many points of support being promised him in Germany. Feudal rebellions had kept that country in a state of agitation during the minority of Henry IV, who was but six years old when his father died in 1056. The regency and even the person of the young king had been wrested from the empress Agnes by the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria. Once arrived at man’s estate, Henry IV set about suppressing the revolt that had, as usual, arisen among the Saxons. An important victory won in Thuringia seemed to promise him a continuance of success, when suddenly the voice of the pope thundered down upon him, ordering him, with unexampled audacity, to suspend all warlike operations, and to leave to the holy see the right of decision in his quarrel with the Saxons; furthermore, to abandon all pretensions to ecclesiastical investiture, under pain of excommunication. To this the legates joined the summons to appear at Rome to answer certain personal charges that had been brought against him. Henry IV replied to this furious attack with equal vigour, and in the synod of Worms, composed of eighteen prelates, his partisans, he caused sentence of deposition solemnly to be pronounced against Gregory VII (1076).
[1076-1077 A.D.]
This decree, instead of alarming the pope, but excited him to fresh aggression. No sooner was he delivered by a popular movement from the hands of his enemy, Cencius, the Roman prefect, than he began once more to thunder forth denunciations; he hurled a bull of excommunication at the emperor, in which he proclaimed him a rebel to the holy see, and declared his vassals free from all allegiance to him. This bull was mercilessly put into execution by the Saxons and Swabians, all enemies of the house of Franconia. At their head was Rudolf of Swabia and the Italian, Welf, of the house of Este, whom Henry himself had created duke of Bavaria. They convoked a diet at Tribur, suspended the functions of the emperor and menaced him with deposition if he did not win absolution from the curse of Rome. Henry acceded humbly, and promised to assemble a general diet at Augsburg, which he begged the pope to attend for the purpose of absolving him. Alive, however, to the danger of allowing his enemies to come together in a body, he resolved to anticipate the action of the proposed diet and went himself to Italy to implore pardon of the pope.