253. Barbarossa to Otto IV

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The end of the Roman Empire that never was

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Six
The Beginnings of the Western States

Chapter III
The Empire

1. Frederick Barbarossa
...

p272 It was necessary to determine [following the Concordat of Worms] whether the Carolingian conception was to continue in force: that is to say, whether the Church, regarded as the whole body of the faithful, and also as a political society, should continue to have at its head two principals, mutually independent, the first governing men's souls and the second their bodies: or whether... it was the duty of the Pope to dispose of the Imperial crown -- whether, in the language of the time, both the spiritual and the temporal sword were his, the Emperor receiving the latter from him as a vassal receives a fief from his sovereign. Only a new war could furnish the reply to this question, for no compromise was possible between... the two adversaries.
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p274 ...As [Frederick] Barbarossa conceived it, the Empire was no longer the Christian Empire which was born in St. Peter's, in the year 800, so intimately allied to the government of the Church, and so closely united to the Papacy, that they were indissoluble. As he conceived it, the Empire was in the full sense of the word the Roman Empire... More ancient than the Papacy, it was as independent of the Pope as was the Emperor of Byzantium. The Empire was not contained within the Church, but the Church in the Empire... and... the Pope... was merely a subject of the Emperor. The religious mysticism at the root of the Carolingian conception was here replaced by a sort of political mysticism, boldly harking back... to... Rome...
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p277 ...in Frederick's plans Germany played quite a secondary part... in politics he was as little of a German as it was possible for him to be. His mind was entirely filled with the Imperial ideal. At the very moment when the French and English monarchies were laying the foundations of stable national States he was about to reopen a conflict which was finally to hurl his country into the anarchy of the great interregnum, and leave it for long centuries cut up into feudal subdivisions.
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p281 ... A new campaign [against Pope Alexander III and the Lombard cities, lead by Milan] was opened in 1174... and was suddenly terminated, on May 29th 1176, by the battle of Legnano, when the Imperial army was cut to pieces and dispersed by the Milanese and their allies. The catastrophe was irremediable, as was the humiliation...

This is followed by a resumption of the conflict between Guelfs and Ghibellines that I absolutely refuse to get into.

[The fragmentation of Germany] had already gone so far by the end of the 12th century that Frederick realized that if he was to assure the future of his dynasty he would have to find a territorial base outside the country. Hence the marriage of his son Henry, in 1186, with Constance, the heiress to the Kingdom of Sicily. In order to survive, the House of Hohenstaufen was obliged to denationalize itself, turning from Germany to Italy.
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2. Before Bouvines

p282 To his son Henry VI, Frederick Barbarossa bequeathed an ungovernable Germany... The heritage of the Kingdom of Sicily, which Henry had received in 1189 on the death of his father-in-law William the Good, anchored him to the south of the peninsula and determined his career.

p283 Raised to the rank of kingdom for the benefit of Roger II by Pope Innocent II, in 1130, the Norman State of Sicily was incontestably the wealthiest, and, in point of economic development, the most advanced of all the Western States... Having always been accustomed to the most improved methods of administration, whether those of Byzantium or of Islam, the population allowed itself to be governed with docility; the Norman nobles constituted the only element to be feared. While they had quickly lost their pristine vigor, and were softened by the luxuries of their semi-Oriental life, they were none the less greedy and seditious.
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p286 ...the crushing blow of Bouvines defeated, in the person of Otto, the last representative of the Imperial policy as conceived by all the German emperors since Barbarossa. On November 19th, 1212, Frederick concluded with France a treaty against Otto and England. On July 12th, 1213, at Eger, he recognized all the possessions of the Pope in Italy, and renounced the right of supervising the episcopal elections, in conformity with the Concordat of Worms. The war decided, simultaneously, between him and Otto, between the Empire and the Church, and between France and England. 

This was the final end of the chimera which these Emperors had pursued as they dreamed of the revival of the Roman Empire. The Pope was triumphant: he could not suspect, in 1214, that his ward would presently become the most persistent of the enemies of the Holy See. [Shocking development :-| ] But the struggle which was about to begin between the Emperor and the Pope inaugurated an entirely new phase in the relations of Papacy and Empire. In this conflict... Germany was to play no part; since Frederick left Germany for Italy, and the former country, left to herself, finished by falling into a state of political decomposition; before foundering in the anarchy of the great interregnum.

248. Cluniac reform of the Church

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The Church in crisis

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Four
The War of Investitures and the Crusades

Chapter I
The Church

A lot here about the fall of the Papacy as it became the plaything of Italian noble families. But in other ways the Church was doing well,

p167 ...The influence of the abbeys was increased by the fact that many of the rural churches belonged to them, or were dependent upon them; and the monks officiated in them. The contemporary ideal of sanctity was the monastic ideal; the renunciation of worldly joys in order to save one's soul; the withdrawal from social activities, and even from all other virtues than those of renunciation, humility, and chastity. And it was to this ideal that the Church owed its renaissance: not to the bishops, whether they were semi-feudal as in France, or faithful to the Carolingian tradition, as in Germany. Their learning made no impression on this uncultivated public. The people wanted saints and workers of miracles.

p168 The feudal nobles, even more than the people, regarded the bishops as their enemies. They pillaged the monasteries, but they respected them...

We can judge of their feelings by the encouragement which they accorded to asceticism whenever this made itself conspicuous... Cluny... [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluny and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluniac_Reforms] founded in 910 by Duke Guillaume d'Auvergne... played a part whose importance might be compared with that of the Jesuits in the 16th century...The point at issue was the orientation of religious thought and feeling. I think we may say that the reform of Cluny monasticism set its stamp upon Western Christianity for centuries to come... For them [the Clunians] the world was the antechamber to Eternity. Everything had to be sacrificed to supra-terrestrial ends. The Salvation of the soul was everything, and it could be effected only by the Church; and the Church, in order to fulfill it's mission, must be absolutely innocent of temporal interests. Here there was no question of the alliance of Church and State, but only of the complete subordination, in the spiritual domain, of man and society to the Church, the intermediary between man and God... The priest belonged to the Church and the Church alone. He could have no seigneur, just as he could have no family. The marriage of priests, tolerated in practice, was an abomination which must disappear... In the domain of piety it [the tendency of Cluny] made for asceticism: in the political domain, for the complete liberty of the Church, and the breaking of ties that bound it to civil society...

p169 ...From the middle of the 10th century the reform spread through the whole of France, and into Italy, Flanders, and Lotharingia -- whence, at the beginning of the 11th century, it overflowed into Germany...

p170 The Church was regarded as a purely superhuman institution. Men lived in an atmosphere of wonder; miracles were matters of everyday experience. Every epidemic gave rise to miracles... The "peace of God" which interrupted the private wars on the occasion of the great annual feasts was one of the results of the extraordinary influence which the Church exerted over men's thoughts and feelings. But the riots which broke out in the 11th century to mark the popular disapproval of married priests were also the direct result of this influence...

p171 The power of the movement has left its traces to this day. It was then that the first great churches were built... The 11th century was an extraordinary period of church-building... 

...A serf could not enter the nobility, but he could enter the Church. He had only to go to school and learn Latin... 

In short, it was in the 10th and 11th centuries that the Church finally conquered the privileged situation that it retained until the end of the ancien regime...

p172 ...the Church, being the necessary medium of salvation, on concerning itself exclusively with the eschatological motives, obtained an ascendancy over men's souls which it had never before enjoyed... Lastly, its prestige brought it enormous wealth, in land, in alms, in privileges.

The whole movement evolved outside Rome and apart form the papacy. But it was bound to reach Rome...

Free Kool-aid

This is probably the best (or worst) time to insert this bit of fiction I've been sitting on.

(Cult representative at table on Market Street with large jug and paper cups.)

"Drink our Kool-aid! Free Kool-aid! Have faith in our Kool-aid!"

(Large, wordy, sign behind table.) 

"We are still hashing out the details of what our God is all about, but be assured our religion will be a doozy. What we can tell you is that if you drink our Kool-aid you won't go to Hell -- Hell is exactly like an endless morning commute to a job you hate, where you are stuck in looping detours while all the people you hate the most pass you (honking and waving) in a nearly empty HOV lane."

243. The inevitable Carolingian decline

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Papacy & Empire

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Three
Feudal Europe

Chapter I
The Dissolution of the Empire

1. Internal Causes

p109 Despite the fame of Charlemagne, we must be under no illusion as to the solidity of his political achievement... nothing could exceed the fragility of the Empire. The weakness of Louis the Pious, the quarrels of his sons, and the incursions of the Normans, Slavs and Saracens, merely hastened a dissolution whose causes were internal, and so obvious that they force themselves upon our attention.

...the royal power seems that of an absolute sovereign, but of one whose absolutism is doubly limited. It is limited... by Christian morality, and it accepts this limitation. It is limited further by the necessity of avoiding anything that will displease the aristocracy, and to this limitation it submits... In short, we may say that the Carolingian constitution was based on a disagreement. The two forces [the king and the aristocracy] that seemed to be in alliance were in reality two adversaries.

p110 ...This aristocracy declared that it was the people, and to a certain extent it was right; for the people had disappeared into the aristocracy. It had absorbed the people into its domains... Charles saw the danger, and he tried to guard against it. He attempted, by reducing the burdens that military service and the judicial service imposed on freemen, to safeguard those who had preserved their liberty... His measures met with the common fate of all attempts to deter social evolution from gravitating in the direction of interests and necessities; they could not prevent the inevitable. The peasants continued to cede their lands to the magnates and attach themselves to their domains.
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p112 ...The Imperial treasury was still fed from two sources: one of them -- war booty -- intermittent and capricious; the other -- the revenue of the domains belonging to the dynasty -- permanent and regular... Charles gave it [the latter source] his careful attention... but their yield consisted of pretestations in kind, just enough to revictual the court. Properly speaking, the Carolingian Empire had no public finances, and when this has been said we can appreciate how rudimentary was its organization compared with that of the Byzantine Empire or the Empire of the Caliphs, with their taxes levied in money...
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2. The Pope and the Emperor
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p115 Louis succeeded to the throne [814] in an atmosphere of general approval. The Empire was rejoicing in the profoundest peace... it was for good reason that the second Carolingian Emperor was known to tradition as "the Pious." But his piety... was preeminently a political piety. It was blended with a conception of the secular power which regarded the maintenance and protection of the Church as its raison d'etre. Charles... had retained something of his independence as a sovereign... as king of the Franks; but with his son this independence disappeared. Louis, on his accession, abondoned the title of King of the Franks and Lombards; the only title which he bore was that of Emperor... 
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I'm not going to cover the dynastic intrigues leading to the Treaty of Verdun in 843.

p119 The death of Louis II (875) furnished the Papacy with a fresh opportunity of affirming its superiority over the Empire, and of showing that the Empire was dependent on the Papacy and not on the dynasty. Louis had no children, and his nearest male relation was Carloman... whom he had appointed his heir. John VIII [Pope] (872-882) decided otherwise, summoned Charles the Bald to Rome, and crowned him. 

...By himself the Pope, reduced to the possession of his little Roman State, would have been absolutely incapable of resisting the least aggression. Further, in the last resort he owed the authority which he enjoyed... to the Carolingians whom he had crowned... A paradoxical situation, which permitted the Pope to dominate the Emperor for so long as the Emperor guaranteed his liberty; which allowed the spiritual power precedence over the secular only by virtue of the support which it received from the latter! And now the political anarchy into which Europe was falling... at the close of the 9th century, suddenly deprived the Pope of this indispensable protector. Charles the Bald was the last Emperor to enjoy any real prestige, to exercise any real power. After him, under the irresistible pressure of feudality, under the blows of the Normans, the Saracens, the Slavs and the Hungarians, [why not Magyars?] under the influence of regional particularism, and of personal ambitions and intrigues and rivalries, what was left of the Carolingian order foundered, and the princes, whether they called themselves kings or emperors, were equally powerless... Now... the very liberty of the Papacy was threatened. Since the Pope had the disposal of the Imperial crown, it would be possible henceforth to obtain it by subjecting him to violence... after the death of Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, marching upon Rome at the head of an army, had forced John VIII to crown him (881)... After the deposition of Charles the Fat and the final rupture of the Carolingian unity two Italian magnates, the Marquis of Friuli, Berenger, and the Duke of Spoleto, Gui, disputed for the ancient Lombard crown, and each had himself crowned king in Pavia. The Imperial dignity was vacant: Gui resolved to seize it. He had only to enter Rome with his soldiers...

I don't see how even Machiavelli could have done anything with this situation -- if he had been adviser to either the Carolingians or the Papacy. Have to admit I'm amused at how the Papacy outsmarted itself.