Маргарет Олифант
The Makers of Modern Rome, in Four Books
No doubt the Pope, the man of so many disappointments, had set his heart on this as a thing in which for once he must not fail, and watched with a sore and angry heart the unsuccess of all these legitimate efforts. But it was not until one of the legates, a man most trusted and honoured, Pierre de Castelnau, was treacherously killed in the midst of his mission, that Innocent was fully roused. Heretofore he had rained excommunications over all the world, and his curses had come back to him without avail. But on this occasion at least he had a sure weapon in hand. The Pope proclaimed a Crusade against the heretics. He proclaimed throughout Europe that whoever undertook this holy enterprise it should be counted to him as if he had fought for Jerusalem: all the indulgences, blessings, hopes for heaven and exemptions for earth, which had been promised to those who were to deliver the Holy Sepulchre, were equally bestowed on those who went no further than the south of France, one of the richest districts in Christendom, where fair lands and noble castles were to be had for the conquest without risking a stormy voyage or a dangerous climate. The goods of unrepentant heretics were confiscated, and every one was free to help himself as if they had been Turks and infidels. In none of his undertakings was the Pope so hotly in earnest. There is something of the shrillness of a man who has found himself impotent in many undertakings in the passion which Innocent throws into this. "Rise, soldier of Christ!" he cries to the king of France; "up, most Christian prince! The groans of the Church rise to your ears, the blood of the just cries out: up, then, and judge my cause: gird on your sword; think of the unity of the cross and the altar, that unity taught us by Moses, by Peter, by all the fathers. Let not the bark of the Church make shipwreck. Up, for her help! Strike strongly against the heretics, who are more dangerous than the Saracens!"
The appeal came to a host of eager ears. Many good and true men were no doubt among the army which gathered upon the gentle hill of Hyères in the blazing midsummer of the year 1209, cross on breast and sword in hand, sworn to exterminate heresy, and bring back the country to the sway of the true religion; but an overwhelming number besides, who were hungry for booty however obtained, and eager to win advancement for themselves, filled up the ranks. Such motives were not absent even from the bosom of Simon de Montfort, their general, otherwise a good man and true. The sovereignty of Toulouse glimmered before him over seas of blood, which was as the blood of the Saracen, no better, though it flowed in the veins of Frenchmen; but the Provençaux could scarcely be called Frenchmen in those early days. They were no more beloved of their northern neighbours than the English were by the Scots, and the expedition against them was as much justified by distinctions of race as was the conflict of Bannockburn.
The chapter of history that followed we would fain on all sides obliterate, if we could, from the records of humanity, and we doubt not that the strictest Catholic as much as the most indignant Protestant would share this wish; but that, alas, cannot be done. And no such feeling was in any mind of the time. The remedy was not thought to be too terrible for the disease, for centuries after: and the most Christian souls rejoiced in the victories of the Crusade, the towns destroyed, the nests of heretics broken up. The very heretics themselves, who suffered fiercely and made reprisals when they could, had no doctrine of toleration among themselves, and would have extirpated a wicked hierarchy, and put down the mass with a high hand, as four hundred years later their more enlightened successors did, when the power came to them. There are many shuddering spectators who now try to represent to themselves that Innocent so far off was but half, or not at all, acquainted with the atrocities committed in his name; that his legates over-stepped their authority, as frequently happened, and were carried away by the excitement of carnage and the terrible impulse of destruction common to wild beasts and men when that fatal passion is aroused; and that his generals soon converted their Crusade, as Crusades more or less were converted everywhere, into a raid of fierce acquisition, a war for booty and personal enrichment. And all this is true for as much as it is worth in reducing the guilt of Innocent; but that is not much, for he was a man very well acquainted with human nature, and knew that such things must be.
As for Simon de Montfort and his noble companions, they were not, much less were the men-at-arms under their orders, superior to all that noble chivalry of France which had started from Venice with so fine a purpose, but had been drawn aside to crush and rob Constantinople on their way, only some seven years before. Baldwin of Flanders became Emperor of the great eastern city in 1204. Simon de Montfort named himself Count de Toulouse in 1215. Both had been sent forth with the Pope's blessing on quite a different mission, both had succumbed to the temptation of their own aggrandisement. But of the two, at the end Simon was the more faithful. If he committed or permitted to be committed the most abominable cruelties, he nevertheless did stamp out heresy. Provence regained her gaiety, her courts of love, her gift of song. Innocent, for once in his life, with all the dreadful drawbacks accompanying it, was successful in the object for which he had striven.
It is a dreadful thing to have to say of the most powerful of Popes, in whose time the Papacy, we are told, reached its highest climax of power in the affairs of men: he was successful once: in devastating a country and slaughtering by thousands its inhabitants in the name of God and the Church. All his attempts to set right the affairs of the world failed. He neither nominated an emperor, nor saved a servile king from ruin, nor struck a generous blow for that object of the enthusiasm of his age, the deliverance of Jerusalem. All of these he attempted with the utmost strain and effort of his powers, and many more, but failed. Impossible to say that it was not truth and justice which he set before him at all times; he was an honest man and loved not bloodshed; he had a great intelligence, and there is no proof that his heart was cold or his sympathies dull. But his career, which is so often quoted as an example of the supremacy of the Papacy, seems to us the greatest and most perfect demonstration that such a supremacy was impossible. Could it have been done, Innocent would have done it; but it could not be done, and in the plenitude of his power he failed over and over again. What credit he might have had in promoting Otho to the empire fades away when we find that it was the accident of Philip's death and not the support of the Pope that did it. In England his assumed suzerainty was a farce, and all his efforts ineffectual to move one way or the other the destinies of the nation. At Constantinople his prayers and commands and entreaties had about as much power as the outcries of a woman upon his own special envoys and soldiers. In France he had one brief triumph indeed, and broke a poor woman's heart, a thing which is accomplished every day by much easier methods; though his action then was the only moral triumph of his reign, being at least in the cause of the weak against the strong. And he filled Provence with blood and misery, and if he crushed heresy, crushed along with it that noble and beautiful country, and its royal house, and its liberties. Did he ever feel the contrast between his attempts and his successes? Was he sore at heart with the long and terrible failure of his efforts? or was he comforted by such small consolations as fell to him, the final vindication of Ingelburga, the fictitious submission of the Greek Church, the murderous extinction of heresy? Was it worth while for a great man to have endured and struggled, to have lived sleepless, restless, ever vigilant, watching every corner of the earth, keeping up a thousand espionages and secret intelligences all for this, and nothing more?
He was the greatest of the Popes and attained the climax of papal power. He carried out the principles which Hildebrand had established, and asserted to their fullest all the claims which that great Pontiff, also a deeply disappointed man, had made. Gregory and Innocent are the two most prominent names in the lists of the Papacy; they are the greatest generals of that army which, in its way, is an army invincible, against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. Let us hope that the merciful illusions which keep human nature going prevented them from seeing how little all their great claims had come to. Gregory indeed, dying sad and in exile, felt it more or less, but was able to set it down to the wickedness of the world in which truth and justice did not reign. And there is a profound sadness in the last discourse of Innocent; but perhaps they were neither of them aware what a deep stamp of failure remains, visible for all the world to see, upon those great undertakings of theirs which were not for the Church but for the world. God had not made them judges and dividers among men, though they believed so to the bottom of their hearts.
It is perhaps overbold in a writer without authority to set forth an individual opinion in the face of much more powerful judgments. But this book pretends to nothing except, so far as it is possible to form it, a glance of individual opinion and impression in respect to matters which are otherwise too great for any but the most learned and weighty historian. The statement of Dean Milman that "He (Innocent) succeeded in imposing an Emperor on Germany" appears to us quite inconsistent with the facts of the case. But we would not for a moment pretend that Milman does not know a hundred times better than the present writer, whose rapid glance at the exterior aspects of history will naturally go for what it is worth and no more. The aspect of a pageant however to one who watches it go by from a window, is sometimes an entertaining variety upon its fullest authoritative description.
It will be understood that we have no idea of representing the reign of these great Popes as without power in many other matters. They strengthened greatly the authority and control exercised by the Holy See over its special and legitimate empire, the Church. They drew to the court of Rome so many appeals and references of disputed cases in law and in morals as to shed an increased influence over the world like an unseen irrigation swelling through all the roots and veins of Christendom. They even gave so much additional prestige and importance to Church dignitaries as to increase the power which the great Prelates often exercised against themselves. But the highest pretensions of the Successors of Peter, the Vicars of God, to be judges and arbiters of the world, setters up and pullers down of thrones, came to no fulfilment. The Popes were flattered by appeals, by mock submissions on the weaker side, even by petitions for the ever ready interference which they seem to have attempted in good faith, always believing in their own authority. But in the end their decisions and decrees in Imperial questions were swept away like chaff before the strong wind of secular power and policy, and history cannot point to one important revolution5 in the affairs of the world or any separate kingdom made by their unaided power.
The last great act of Innocent's life was the council held in the year 1215 in Rome, known as the fourth Lateran Council. It was perhaps the greatest council that had ever been held there, not only because of the large number of ecclesiastics present, but because for the first time East and West sat together, the Patriarch of Constantinople (or rather two patriarchs, for the election was contested) taking their place in it, in subordination to the Pope, as if the great schism had never been. From all the corners of the earth came the bishops and archbishops, the not less important abbots, prelates who were nobles as well as priests, counting among them the greatest lords in their respective districts as well as the greatest ecclesiastics. Innocent himself was a man of fifty-five, of most temperate life, vigorous in mind and body, likely to survive for years, and to do better than he had ever yet done – and he was so far triumphant for the moment that all the kings of Christendom had envoys at this council, and everything united to make it magnificent and important. Why he should have taken for his text the ominous words he chose when addressing that great and splendid assembly in his own special church and temple, surrounded with all the emblems of power and supremacy, it is impossible to tell; and one can imagine the thrill of strange awe and astonishment which must have run through that vast synod, when the Pope rose, and from his regal chair pronounced these words, first uttered in the depths of the mysterious passion and anguish of the greatest sufferer on earth. "With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer." What was it that Innocent anticipated or feared? There was no suffering before him that any one knew, no trouble that could reach the chief of Christendom, heavy-hearted and depressed, amid all his guards, spiritual and temporal, as he may have been. What could they think, all those great prelates looking, no doubt, often askance at each other, brethren in the church, but enemies at home? Nor were the first words of his discourse less solemn.
"As to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain, I should not refuse to drink the cup of suffering, were it presented to me, for the defence of the Catholic Church, for the deliverance of the Holy Land, or for the freedom of the Church, even although my desire had been to live in the flesh until the work that has been begun should be accomplished. Notwithstanding not my will, but the will of God be done! This is why I say, 'With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer.'"
These words sound in our ears as if the preacher who uttered them was on the verge, if not of martyrdom, at least of death and the premature end of his work. And so he was: although there was as yet no sign in heaven or earth, or so far as appears in his own consciousness, that this end was near.
The discourse which followed was remarkable in its way, the way of the schoolmen and dialecticians so far as its form went. He began by explaining the word Passover, which in Hebrew he said meant passage – in which sense of the word he declared himself to desire to celebrate a triple Passover, corporal, spiritual, and eternal, with the Church around him.
"A corporal Passover, the passage from one place to another to deliver Jerusalem oppressed: a spiritual Passover, a passage from one situation to another for the sanctification of the universal Church; an eternal Passover, a passage from one life to another, to eternal glory." For the first, the deliverance of the Holy Land and the Holy Sepulchre, after a solemn description of the miseries of Jerusalem enslaved, he declares that he places himself in the hands of the brethren.
"There can be no doubt that it ought to be the first object of the Church. What ought we now to do, dear brethren? I place myself in your hands. I open my heart entirely to you, I desire your advice. I am ready, if it seems good to you, to go forth on a personal mission to all the kings, princes, and peoples, or even to the Holy Land – and if I can to awaken them all with a strong voice that they may arise to fight the battle of the Lord, to avenge the insult done to Jesus Christ, who has been expelled by reason of our sins from the country and dwelling which He bought with His blood, and in which He accomplished all things necessary for our salvation. We, the priests of the Lord, ought to attach a special importance to the redemption of the Holy Land by our blood and our wealth; no one should draw back from such a great work. In former times the Lord seeing a similar humiliation of Israel saved it by means of the priests; for he delivered Jerusalem and the Temple from the infidels by Matthias the son of the priest Maccabæus."
He goes on to describe the spiritual passage by the singular emblem to be found in the prophecies of Ezekiel, of the man clothed in white linen who inscribed a Tau upon the foreheads of all those who mourned over the iniquities committed around them, the profanations of the temple and the universal idol worship – while the executors of God's will went after him, to slay the rest. There could be no doubt of the application of this image. It had already been seen in full fulfilment in the streets of Beziers, Carcassone, and Toulouse, and many of those present had taken part in the carnage. It is true that the rumour went that the men marked with a mark had not even been looked for, and one of the wonderful sayings which seem to spring up somehow in the air, at great moments, had been fathered upon a legate —Tuez les tous. Dieu reconnaîtra les siens– a phrase which, like the "Up, Guards, and at them!" of Waterloo, is said to have no historical foundation whatever. Innocent was, however, clear not only that every good Catholic should be marked with the Tau– but that the armed men whom he identifies with the priests, his own great army, seated there round him, men who had already seen the blood flow and the flames arise, should strike and spare not.
"You are commanded then to go through the city; obey him who is your supreme Pontiff, as your guide and your master – and strike by interdict, by suspension, by excommunication, by deprivation, according to the weight of the fault. But do no harm to those who bear the mark, for the Lord says: 'Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, neither the trees till we have sealed on their foreheads the servants of God.' It is said in other places, 'Let your eye spare no man, and let there be no acceptance of persons among you,' and in another passage, 'Strike in order to heal, kill in order to give life.'"
These were the Pope's sentiments, and they were those of his age; how many centuries it took to modify them we are all aware; four hundred years at least, to moderate the practical ardour of persecution – for the theory never dies. But there is at the same time something savage in the fervour of such an address to all these men of peace. It is perhaps a slight modification that like Ezekiel it is the priests themselves, the dwellers in the Temple, who fill it with false gods and abominations, that he specially threatens. There were, however, so far as appears, few priests among the slaughtered townsfolk of those unhappy cities of Provence.
The Council responded to the uncompromising directions of their head by placing among the laws of the Church many stringent ordinances against heretics; their goods were to be confiscated, they were to be turned out of their houses and possessions; every prince who refused to act against them was to be excommunicated, his people freed from their vow of allegiance. If any one ventured to preach without the permission of the Pope he also was subject to excommunication. A great many laws for the better regulation of the Church itself followed, for Innocent had always acknowledged the fact that the worldliness of the Church, and the failure of the clergy to maintain a high ideal of Christian life, was the great cause of heresy. The Council was also very distinct in refusing temporal authority to the priests. The clergy had their sphere and laymen theirs; those spheres were separate, they were inviolable each by the other. It is true that this principle was established chiefly with the intention of freeing the clergy from the necessity of answering before civil tribunals; but logically it cuts both ways. The Jews, to whom Innocent had been just and even merciful, were also dealt with and placed under new and stringent disabilities, chiefly on account, it seems, of the extortions they practised on needy Crusaders, eager at any price to procure advances for their equipment. Various doctrinal points were also decided, as well as many questions of rank and precedence in the hierarchy, and the establishment of the two new monastic orders of St. Francis and of St. Dominic. It is needless to add a list of who was excommunicated and who censured throughout the world. Among the former were the barons of Magna Charta and Louis of France, the son of Philip Augustus, who had gone to England on their call and to their relief, a movement set on foot by Innocent himself before the submission of King John. As usual, neither of them took any notice of the anathema, though other combinations shortly arose which broke their alliance.
The great event of the Council, however, was the appeal of the forfeited lords of Provence against the leaders of the late Crusade. Raymond of Toulouse, accompanied by the Counts of Foix and of Comminges, appeared before the Pontiff and the high court of the Church to make their plaint against Simon de Montfort, who had deprived all three of their lands and sovereignties. A great recrimination arose between the two sides, both so strongly represented. The dethroned princes accused their conquerors with all the vehemence of men wronged and robbed; and such a bloodstained prelate as Bishop Fulk of Toulouse was put forth as the advocate on the other side. "You are the cause of the death of a multitude of Catholic soldiers," cried the bishop, "six thousand of whom were killed at Montjoye alone." "Nay, rather," replied the Comte de Foix, "it is by your fault that Toulouse was sacked and 10,000 of the inhabitants slain." Such pleas are strange in any court of justice; they were altogether new in a Council of the Church. The princes themselves, who thus laid their wrongs before the Pope, were not proved to be heretics, or if they had ever wavered in the faith were now quite ready to obey; and Innocent himself was forced to allow that: "Since the Counts and their companions have promised at all times to submit to the Church, they cannot without injustice be despoiled of their principalities." But the utterance, it may well be understood, was weak, and choked by the impossibility of denouncing Simon de Montfort, the leader of a Crusade set on foot by the Church, the Captain of the Christian army. It might be that he had exceeded his commission, that the legates had misunderstood their instructions, and that all the leaders, both secular and spiritual, had been carried away by the horrible excitement and passion of bloodshed: but yet it was impossible to disown the Captain who had taken up this enterprise as a true son of the Church, although he had ended in the spirit (not unusual among sons of the Church) of an insatiable raider and conqueror. The love of gain had warped the noble aims even of the first Crusade: what wonder that it became a fiery thirst in the invaders of lands so rich and tempting as those of the fertile and sunny Provence. And the Pope could not pronounce against his own champion. He would fain have preserved Raymond of Toulouse and Simon de Montfort too – but that was impossible. And the Council decreed by a great majority that Raymond had been justly deprived of his lands, and that Simon, the new Count, was their rightful possessor. The defender of Innocent can only say that the Pope yielded to and sanctioned this judgment in order that the bishops of France might not be alienated and rendered indifferent to the great Crusade upon which his heart was set, which he would fain have led himself had Providence permitted it so to be.
There is a most curious postscript to this bloody and terrible history. Young Raymond of Toulouse, whose fate seemed a sad one even to the members of the Council who finally confirmed his deprivation, attracted the special regard – it is not said how, probably by some youthful grace of simplicity or gallant mien – of Innocent, who bade him take heart, and promised to give him certain lands that he might still live as a prince. "If another council should be held," said the Pope with a curious casuistry, "the pleas against Montfort may be listened to." "Holy Father," said the youth, "bear me no malice if I can win back again my principalities from the Count de Montfort, or from those others who hold them." "Whatever thou dost," said the Pope piously, "may God give thee grace to begin it well, and to finish it still better." Innocent is scarcely a man to tolerate a smile. We dare not even imagine a touch of humour in that austere countenance; but the pious hope that this fair youth might perhaps overcome his conqueror, who was the very champion and captain of the army of the Lord as directed by the Pope, is remarkable indeed.
The great event of the Council was over, the rumour of the new Crusade which the Pope desired to head himself, and for which in the meantime he was moving heaven and earth, began to stir Europe. If, perhaps, he had accomplished little hitherto of all that he had hoped, here remained a great thing which Innocent might still accomplish. He set out on a tour through the great Italian towns to rouse their enthusiasm, and, if possible, induce them, in the first place, to sacrifice their mutual animosities, and then to supply the necessary ships, and help with the necessary money for the great undertaking. The first check was received from Pisa, which would do whatever the Pope wished except forego its hatred against Genoa or give up its revenge. Innocent was in Perugia, on his way towards the north, when this news arrived to vex him: but it was not unexpected, nor was there anything in it to overwhelm his spirit. It was July, and he was safer and better on that hillside than he would have been in his house at the Lateran in the heats of summer: and an attack of fever at that season is a simple matter, which the ordinary Roman anticipates without any particular alarm. He had, we are told, a great love for oranges, and continued to eat them, notwithstanding his illness, though it is difficult to imagine what harm the oranges could do. However, the hour was come which Innocent had perhaps dimly foreseen when he rose up among all his bishops and princes in the great Lateran church, and, knowing nothing, gave forth from his high presiding chair the dying words of our Lord, "With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer." One wonders if his text came back to him, if he asked himself in his heart why his lips should have uttered those fateful words unawares, and if the bitterness of that withdrawal, while still full of force and life, from all the hopes and projects to which he had set his hand, was heavy upon him? He had proclaimed them in the hush and breathless silence of that splendid crowd in the ruddy days of the late autumn, St. Martin's festival at Rome: and the year had not gone its round when, in the summer weather at Perugia, he "suffered" – as he had – yet had not, perhaps foreseen.
Thus ended a life of great effort and power, a life of disappointment and failure, full of toil, full of ambition, the highest aims, and the most consistent purpose – but ending in nothing, fulfilling no lofty aim, and, except in the horrible episode of bloodshed and destruction from which his name can never be dissociated, accomplishing no change in the world which he had attempted, in every quarter, to transform or to renew. Never was so much attempted with so little result. He claimed the power to bind and loose, to set up and to pull down, to decide every disputed cause and settle every controversy. But he succeeded in doing only one good deed, which was to force the king of France to retain an unloved wife, and one ill one, to print the name of Holy Church in blood across a ruined province, to the profit of many bloody partisans, but never to his own, nor to any cause which could be considered that of justice or truth. This, people say, was the age of history in which the power of the Church was highest, and Innocent was its strongest ruler; but this was all which, with his great powers, his unyielding character and all the forces at his command, he was able to achieve. He was in his way a great man, and his purpose was never ignoble; but this was all: and history does not contain a sadder page than that which records one of the greatest of all the pontificates, and the strongest Pope that history has known.
During the whole of Innocent's Popedom he had been more or less at war with his citizens notwithstanding his success at first. Rome murmured round him never content, occasionally bursting out into fits of rage, which, if not absolute revolt, were so near it as to suggest the withdrawal of the Pope to his native place Anagni, or some other quiet residence, till the tumult calmed down. The greatest of these commotions occurred on the acquisition of certain properties in Rome, by the unpopular way of foreclosure on mortgages, by the Pope's brother Richard, against whom no doubt some story of usury or oppression was brought forth, either real or invented, to awaken the popular emotion: and in this case Innocent's withdrawal had very much the character of an escape. The Papa-Re was certainly not a popular institution in the thirteenth century. This same brother Richard had many gifts bestowed upon him to the great anger and suspicion of the people, and it was he who built, with money given him, it is said, from "the treasury of the Church," the great Torre dei Conti, which for many generations stood strong and sullen near the Baths of Titus, and within easy reach of the Lateran, "for the defence of the family," a defence for which it was not always adequate. Innocent afterwards granted a valuable fief in the Romagna to his brother, and he was generally far from unmindful of his kindred. All that his warmest defenders can say for him indeed in this respect is that he made up for his devotion to the interests of the Conti by great liberality towards Rome. On one occasion of distress and famine he fed eight thousand people daily, and at all times the poor had a right to the remnants left from his own table – which however was not perhaps any great thing as his living was of the simplest.
