The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

Shortly before Christmas he assembled one thousand and forty-six bishops and Roman clergy at Sutri. The three popes were summoned, and Gregory and Sylvester III actually appeared. Sylvester was deposed from his pontificate and condemned to penance in a monastery. Gregory VI, however, gave the council cause to doubt its competence to judge him. Gregory, who was an upright man, or one at least conscious of good intentions, consented publicly to describe the circumstances of his elevation, and was thereby forced to condemn himself as guilty of simony and unworthy of the papal office. He quietly laid down the insignia of the papacy, and his renunciation did him honor. Henry, with the bishops and the margrave Boniface, immediately started for the city, which did not shut its gates against him; for Benedict II had hid himself in Tusculum, and his brothers did not venture on any resistance. Rome, weary of the Tusculum horrors, joyfully accepted the German King as her deliverer. Never afterward was a king of Germany received with such glad acclamations by the Roman people; never again did any other effect such great results or achieve the like changes. With the Roman expedition of Henry III begins a new epoch in the history of the city, and more especially of the Church. It seemed as if the waters of the deluge had subsided, and as if men from the ark had landed on the rock of Peter to give new races and new laws to a new world. What law, that stern and terrible power which kills, binds, and holds together, signifies in human affairs, has indeed been experienced by few periods so fully as by that with which we have now to deal.

A synod, assembled in St. Peter's on December 23d, again pronounced all three popes deposed, and a canonical pope had consequently to be elected. Like Otto III before his coronation, Henry had also at his side a man who was to wear the tiara and to confer the crown upon himself.

Adalbert of Hamburg and Bremen having refused the papacy, the King chose Suidger of Bamberg. The royal command was all that was required to place the candidate on the sacred chair. Henry, however, would not violate any of the canonical forms. As King of Germany he possessed no right either over that city or yet over the papal election. The right must first be conferred upon him, and this was done by a treaty which he had already concluded with the Romans at Sutri. "Roman Signors," said Henry at the second sitting of the synod on December 24th, "however thoughtless your conduct may hitherto have been, I still accord you liberty to elect a pope according to ancient custom; choose from among this assembly whom you will."

The Romans replied: "When the royal majesty is present, the assent to the election does not belong to us, and, when it is lacking, you are represented by your patricius. For in the affairs of the republic the patricius is not patricius of the pope, but of the emperor. We admit that we have been so thoughtless as to appoint idiots as popes. It now behooves your imperial power to give the Roman republic the benefit of law, the ornament of manners, and to lend the arm of protection to the Church."

The senators of the year 1046, who so meekly surrendered the valuable right to the German King, heeded not the shades of Alberic and the three Crescentii; since these—their patricians—would have accused them of treason.

The Romans of these days were, however, ready for any sacrifice so that they obtained freedom from the Tusculum tyranny. Nothing more clearly shows the utter depth of their exhaustion and the extent of their sufferings than the light surrender of a right which it had formerly cost Otto the Great such repeated efforts to extort from the city. Rome made the humiliating confession that she possessed no priest worthy of the papacy, that the clergy in the city were rude and utter simonists. All other circumstances, moreover, forbade the election of a Roman or even of an Italian to the papacy.

The Romans besought Henry to give them a good pope; he presented the Bishop of Bamberg to the assenting clergy, and led the reluctant candidate to the apostolic chair. Clement II, consecrated on Christmas Day, 1046, immediately placed the imperial crown on Henry's head and on that of his wife Agnes. There were still many Romans who had been eye-witnesses of like transactions—that is to say, of papal election and imperial coronation following one the other in immediate succession—in the case of Otto III and Henry V; who, as they now saw the second German pope mount the chair of Peter, may have recalled the fact that the first had only lived a few sad years in Rome and had died in misery.