The Age of Faith

  In 1204, through the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders, he achieved one part of his plans: the Greek Church submitted to the Bishop of Rome, and Innocent could speak with joy of “the seamless garment of Christ.” He brought Serbia and even distant Armenia under the dominion of the Roman See. Gradually he secured control over ecclesiastical appointments, and made the powerful episcopacy the organ and servant of the papacy. Through an astonishing succession of vital conflicts he reduced the potentates of Europe to an unprecedented recognition of his sovereignty. His policies were least effective in Italy: he failed in repeated efforts to end the wars of the Italian city-states; and in Rome his political enemies made life so unsafe for him that for a time he had to shun his capital. King Sverre of Norway (1184–1202) successfully resisted him despite excommunication and interdict.124 Philip II of France ignored his command to make peace with England, but yielded to the Pope’s insistence that he take back his discarded wife. Alfonso IX of Leon was persuaded to put away Berengaria, whom he had married within the forbidden degrees of kinship. Portugal, Aragon, Hungary, and Bulgaria acknowledged themselves as feudal fiefs of the papacy, and sent it tribute yearly. When King John rejected Innocent’s appointment of Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope drove him by interdict and shrewd diplomacy to add England to the list of papal fiefs. Innocent extended his power in Germany by supporting Otto IV against Philip of Swabia, then Philip against Otto, then Otto against Frederick II, then Frederick against Otto, in each case exacting concessions to the papacy as the price of his favor, and freeing the Papal States from the threat of encirclement. He reminded the emperors that it was a pope who had “translated” the imperium or imperial power from the Greeks to the Franks; that Charlemagne had been made Emperor only by papal anointment and coronation; and that what the popes had given they could take away. A Byzantine visitor to Rome described Innocent as “the successor not of Peter but of Constantine.”125

  He repelled all secular efforts to tax the Christian clergy without papal consent. He provided papal funds for necessitous priests, and labored to improve the education of the clergy. He raised the social status of the clergy by defining the Church not as all Christian believers but as all the Christian clergy. He condemned the episcopal or monastic absorption of parochial tithes at the expense of the parish priest.126 To reform monastic laxity he ordered the regular surveillance and visitation of monasteries and convents. His legislation reduced to order the complex relations of clergy and laity, priest and bishop, bishop and pope. He developed the papal Curia to an efficient court of counsel, administration, and judgment; it became now the most competent governing body of its time, and its methods and terminology helped to form the art and technique of diplomacy. Innocent himself was probably the best lawyer of the age, capable of finding legal support, in logic and precedent, for every decision that he made. Lawyers and learned men frequented the “consistory” where he presided over the cardinals as a superior ecclesiastical court, to profit from his discussions and decisions on points of civil or canon law. Some called him Pater iuris, Father of the Law;127 others, in fond humor, called him Solomon III.128

  In his final triumph as legislator and Pope, he presided in 1215 over the Fourth Lateran Council, held in the church of St. John’s Lateran in Rome. To this twelfth ecumenical council came 1500 abbots, bishops, archbishops, and other prelates, and plenipotentiaries from all the important nations of a united Christendom. The Pope’s opening address was a bold admission and challenge: “The corruption of the people has its chief source in the clergy. From this arise the evils of Christendom: faith perishes, religion is defaced… justice is trodden under foot, heretics multiply, schismatics are emboldened, the faithless grow strong, the Saracens triumph.”129 The assembled power and intellect of the Church here allowed itself to be completely dominated by one man. His judgments became the Council’s decrees. It allowed him to redefine the basic dogmas of the Church; now for the first time the doctrine of transubstantiation was officially defined. It accepted his decrees requiring that a distinctive badge be worn by non-Christians in Christian lands. It responded enthusiastically to his call for a war against the Albigensian heretics. But it also followed his lead in recognizing the shortcomings of the Church. It denounced the peddling of fraudulent relics. It severely censured the “indiscreet and superfluous indulgences which some prelates … are not afraid to grant, whereby the Keys of the Church are made contemptible, and the satisfaction of penance is deprived of its force.”130 It attempted a far-reaching reform of monastic life. It denounced clerical drunkenness, immorality, and clandestine marriage, and passed vigorous measures against them; but it condemned the Albigensian claim that all sexual intercourse is sinful. In its attendance, scope, and effects the Fourth Lateran Council was the most important assembly of the Church since the Council of Nicaea.

  From that apex of his career Innocent declined rapidly to an early death. He had given himself so unremittingly to the administration and enlargement of his office that at fifty-five he was exhausted. “I have no leisure,” he mourned, “to meditate on supramundane things. Scarce can I breathe. So much must I live for others that almost I am a stranger to myself.”131 Perhaps in his last year he could look back upon his work and judge it more objectively than in the heat of strife. The crusades that he had organized for the reconquest of Palestine had failed; the one that would succeed after his death was the ferocious extermination of the Albigensians in southern France. He had won the admiration of his contemporaries, but not, like Gregory I or Leo IX, their affection. Some churchmen complained that he was too much the king, too little the priest; St. Lutgardis thought he could only by a narrow margin escape hell;132 and the Church herself, though proud of his genius and grateful for his labors, withheld from him that canonization which she had conferred upon lesser and more scrupulous men.

  But we must not refuse him the credit of having brought the Church to her greatest height, and close to the realization of her dream of a moral world-state. He was the ablest statesman of his age. He pursued his aims with vision, devotion, flexible persistence, and unbelievable energy. When he died (1216) the Church had reached a height of organization, splendor, repute, and power which she had never known before, and would only rarely and briefly know again.

  Honorius III (1216–27) does not rank high in the cruel annals of history, because he was too gentle to carry on with vigor the war between Empire and papacy. Gregory IX (1227–41), though eighty when made Pope, waged that war with almost fanatical tenacity; fought Frederick II so successfully as to postpone the Renaissance for a hundred years; and organized the Inquisition. Yet he too was a man of unquestionable sincerity and heroic devotion, who defended what seemed to him the most precious possession of mankind —its Christ-begotten faith. He could not have been a hard man who, as cardinal, had protected and wisely guided the possibly heretical Francis. Innocent IV (1243–54) destroyed Frederick II, and sanctioned the use of torture by the Inquisition.133 He was a good patron of philosophy, aided the universities, and founded schools of law. Alexander IV (1254–61) was a man of peace, kindly, merciful, and just, who “astounded the world by his freedom from despotism”;134 he deprecated the martial qualities of his predecessors,135 preferred piety to politics, and “died of a broken heart,” said a Franciscan chronicler, “considering daily the terrible and increasing strife among Christians.”136 Clement IV (1265–8) returned to war, organized the defeat of Manfred, and ruined the Hohenstaufen dynasty and Imperial Germany. The recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks threatened to end the accord between the Greek and the Roman Church; but Gregory X (1271–6) earned the gratitude of Michael Palaeologus by discountenancing the ambition of Charles of Anjou to conquer Byzantium, the restored Greek Emperor submitted the Eastern Church to Rome; and the papacy was again supreme.

  VIII. THE FINANCES OF THE CHURCH

  A Church that was actually a European superstate, dealing with the worship, morals, education, marriages, wars, crusad
es, deaths, and wills of the population of half a continent, sharing actively in the administration of secular affairs, and raising the most expensive structures in medieval history, could sustain its functions only through exploiting a hundred sources of revenue.

  The widest stream of income was the tithe: after Charlemagne all secular lands in Latin Christendom were required by state law to pay a tenth of their gross produce or income, in kind or money, to the local church. After the tenth century every parish had to remit a part of its tithes to the bishop of the diocese. Under the influence of feudal ideas the tithes of a parish could be enfeoffed, mortgaged, bequeathed, or sold like any other property or revenue, so that by the twelfth century a financial web had been woven in which the local church and its priest were rather the collectors than the consumers of its tithes. The priest was expected to “curse for his tithes,” as the English put it—to excommunicate those who shirked or falsified their returns; for men were as reluctant then to pay tithes to the Church, whose functions they considered vital to their salvation, as men are now to pay taxes to the state. We hear of occasional revolts of the tithepayers: in Reggio Emilia in 1280, says Fra Salimbene, the citizens, defying excommunication and interdict, promised one another “that none should pledge the clergy any tithe… nor sit at meat with them … nor give them eat or drink”—an excommunication in reverse; and the bishop was compelled to compromise.137

  The basic revenue of the Church was from her own lands. These she had received through gift or bequest, through purchase or defaulted mortgage, or through reclamation of waste lands by monastic or other ecclesiastic groups. In the feudal system each owner or tenant was expected to leave something to the Church at death; those who did not were suspected of heresy, and might be refused burial in consecrated ground.138 Since only a few of the laity could write, a priest was usually called in to draft the wills; Pope Alexander III decreed in 1170 that no one could make a valid will except in presence of a priest; any secular notary who drew up a will except under these conditions was to be excommunicated;139 and the Church had exclusive jurisdiction over the probate of wills. Gifts or legacies to the Church were held to be the most dependable means of telescoping the pains of purgatory. Many bequests to the Church, especially before the year 1000, began with the words adventante mundi vespero—“since the evening of the world is near.”140 Some owners, as we have seen, gave their property to the Church in precarium as disability insurance: the Church provided an annuity, and care in sickness and old age, to the donor, and received the property free of lien at his death.141 Some monasteries, by “confraternities,” gave their benefactors a share in the merits or purgatorial deductions earned by the prayers and good works of the monks.142 Crusaders not only sold lands to the Church at low prices to raise cash, but they received loans from church bodies on the security of pledged property, which was in many cases forfeited by default. Some persons, dying without natural heirs, left their whole estate to the Church; the Countess Matilda of Tuscany tried to bequeath to the Church almost a fourth of Italy.

  As the property of the Church was inalienable, and, before 1200, was normally free from secular taxation,143 it grew from century to century. It was not unusual for a cathedral, a monastery, or a nunnery to own several thousand manors, including a dozen towns or even a great city or two.144 The bishop of Langres owned the whole county; the abbey of St. Martin of Tours ruled over 20,000 serfs; the bishop of Bologna held 2000 manors; so did the abbey of Lorsch; the abbey of Las Huelgas, in Spain, held sixty-four townships.145 In Castile, about 1200, the Church owned a quarter of the soil; in England a fifth; in Germany a third; in Livonia one half;146 these, however, are loose and uncertain estimates. Such accumulations became the envy and target of the state. Charles Martel confiscated church property to finance his wars; Louis the Pious legislated against bequests that disinherited the children of the testator in favor of the Church;147 Henry II of Germany stripped many monasteries of their lands, saying that monks were vowed to poverty; and several English statutes of mortmain put restrictions on the deeding of property to “corporations”—meaning ecclesiastical bodies. Edward I levied from the English Church in 1291 a tenth of its property, and in 1294 a half of its annual revenue. Philip II began, St. Louis continued, Philip IV established, the taxation of ecclesiastical property in France. As industry and commerce developed, and money multiplied and prices rose, the income of abbeys and bishoprics, derived largely from feudal dues once fixed at a low-price level and now hard to raise, proved inadequate not only for luxury but even for maintenance.148 By 1270 the majority of French cathedrals and abbeys were heavily in debt; they had borrowed from the bankers at high interest rates to meet the exactions of the kings; hence, in part, the decline of architectural activity in France at the end of the thirteenth century.

  The popes added to the impoverishment of bishoprics by taxing their property and revenues first to finance the Crusades, later to pay the mountting expenses of the papal see. New sources of central income became necessary as the papacy widened the area and complexity of its functions. Innocent III (1199) directed all bishops to send to the See of Peter yearly a fortieth of their revenue. A cens or tax was levied upon all monasteries, convents, and churches that came directly under papal protection. “An annate” —theoretically the whole, actually half, the first year’s revenue of a newly elected bishop—was required by the popes as a fee for confirming his appointment; and large sums were expected from recipients of the archiepiscopal pallium. All Christian households were asked to send an annual penny (some 90 cents) to the Roman See as “Peter’s Pence.” Normally fees were charged for litigation brought to the papal court. The popes claimed the power to dispense in certain cases from canon law, as in permitting consanguineous marriage where some good political end seemed to justify the deviation; and fees were charged for legal processes involved in such dispensations. Considerable sums came to the popes from the recipients of papal indulgences, and from pilgrims to Rome. It has been calculated that the total income of the papal see about 1250 was greater than the combined revenues of all the secular sovereigns of Europe.149 From England in 1252 the papacy received a sum thrice the revenue of the crown.150

  The wealth of the Church, however proportionate to the extent of its functions, was the chief source of heresy in this age. Arnold of Brescia proclaimed that any priest or monk who died possessing property would surely go to hell.151 The Bogomiles, the Waldenses, the Paterines, the Cathari made headway by denouncing the wealth of the followers of Christ. A favorite satire in the thirteenth century was the “Gospel According to Marks of Silver,” which began: “In those days the Pope said to the Romans: ‘When the Son of Man shall come to the seat of our majesty say first of all, “Friend, wherefore art Thou come hither?” And if He give you naught, cast Him forth into outer darkness.’”152 Throughout the literature of the time—in the fabliaux, the chansons de geste, the Roman de la Rose, the poems of the wandering scholars, the troubadours, Dante, even in the monastic chroniclers, we find complaints of ecclesiastical avarice or wealth.153 Matthew Paris, an English monk, denounced the venality of English and Roman prelates “living daintily on the patrimony of Christ”;154 Hubert de Romans, head of the Dominican order, wrote of “pardoners corrupting with bribes the prelates of the ecclesiastical courts”;155 Petrus Cantor, a priest, told of priests who sold Masses or Vespers;156 Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, declaimed against the papal chancery as bought and sold, and quoted Henry II as boasting that he had the whole college of cardinals in his pay.157 Charges of corruption have been made against every government in history; they are nearly always partly true, and partly exaggerated from startling instances; but at times they rise to a revolutionary resentment. The same parishioners who built cathedrals to Mary with their pennies could protest angrily against the collective propensities of the Church, and occasionally they murdered a pertinacious priest.158

  The Church herself joined in this criticism of clerical money-grubbing, and made many e
fforts to control the acquisitiveness and luxury of her personnel. Hundreds of clergymen, from St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard, St. Francis, and Cardinal de Vitry down to simple monks, labored to mitigate these natural abuses;159 it is chiefly from the writings of such ecclesiastical reformers that our knowledge of the abuses is derived. A dozen monastic orders devoted themselves to preaching reform by their good example. Pope Alexander III and the Lateran Council of 1179 condemned the exaction of fees for administering baptism or extreme unction, or performing a marriage; and Gregory X called the Ecumenical Council of Lyons in 1274 specifically to take measures for the reform of the Church. The popes themselves, in this age, showed no taste for luxury, and earned their keep by arduous devotion to their exhausting tasks. It is the tragedy of things spiritual that they languish if unorganized, and are contaminated by the material needs of their organization.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  The Early Inquisition

  1000–1300

  I. THE ALBIGENSIAN HERESY HERESY

  ANTICLERICALISM rose to a flood at the end of the twelfth century. There were, in the Age of Faith, recesses of religious mysticism and sentiment that escaped and resented organized sacerdotal Christianity. Moving perhaps with returning Crusaders, new waves of Oriental mysticism flowed into the West. From Persia, through Asia Minor and the Balkans, came echoes of Manichean dualism and Mazdakian communism; from Islam a hostility to images, an obscure fatalism, and distaste for priests; and from the failure of the Crusades a secret doubt as to the divine origin and support of the Christian Church. The Paulicians, driven westward by Byzantine persecution, carried through the Balkans into Italy and Provence their scorn of images, sacraments, and the clergy; they divided the cosmos into a spiritual world created by God and a material world created by Satan; and they identified Satan with the Yahveh of the Old Testament. The Bogomiles (i.e., Friends of God) took form and name in Bulgaria, and spread especially in Bosnia; they were attacked by fire and sword at various times in the thirteenth century, defended themselves tenaciously, and finally (1463) surrendered not to Christianity but to Islam.