In the thirteenth century, empire and papacy, the two institutions that aspired to universal recognition if not predominance, both passed their zenith. By the middle of the century, the Holy Roman Empire began to disintegrate; even its slight recovery at the end of the century left it greatly reduced in power and prestige. The papacy, after an undulating course of power during the century, suddenly took a similar plunge after the pontificate of Boniface VIII (1294 – 1303).
Emperor Frederick II
Emperor Frederick II began his career as a ward of Pope Innocent III and came to the throne only after a prolonged period of civil wars. Half Norman and half Hohenstaufen by birth, Frederick was perhaps the best educated medieval emperor, skill in diplomacy and a patron of learning. He spoke fluent Arabic, kept a harem, and was more interested in the Saracen culture of his native Sicily than in his German lands. His realm was larger and wealthier than that of other medieval emperors, since he also owned southern Italy and Sicily, and indirectly ruled the Kingdom of Jerusalem as well as East Prussia, which was conquered by the Teutonic Knights during his reign.
Since he was not much interested in his possessions north of the Alps, so long as they remained obedient and paid taxes, he ceded much power to the princes and bishops of Germany. By granting them authority to collect their own taxes and tolls, to control their own police systems, strike their own coins, and set up their own courts, Frederick accelerated the decentralization of the empire.
His desire to gain control of central Italy involved him in an interminable struggle with the papacy, a struggle which neither was able to win. As husband of the heiress to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Frederick undertook a crusade (the Sixth, 1228 – 1229) to the Holy Land, although he was under the ban of papal excommunication. Instead of conquering the Holy Land by force of arms, he negotiated a settlement with the Moslems and thereby gained for the Christians free access to Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. To see an excommunicated emperor obtain access to the Holy Land horrified devout Christian believers while delighting the antipapal factions. This ambivalence helps explain Frederick’s reputation: with some he ranked as the greatest of emperors; others looked upon him as anti-Christ.
The Splintering of the Holy Roman Empire
After Frederick’s death, the imperial structure collapsed. The popes waged a relentless struggle to keep Frederick’s descendants from retaining control of southern Italy. To help extirpate the house of Hohenstaufen, the papacy invited the French Charles of Anjou (1226 – 1285), St. Louis’ brother, to seize the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The ambitious Charles complied gladly. He defeated the Hohenstaufen forces, had the last surviving male heir, Emperor Frederick’s fifteen-year-old grandson (Conradin) beheaded in Naples, and assumed the Sicilian crown. But Charles of Anjou, who dreamt of creating a Sicilian Mediterranean empire at the expense of Byzantium, soon became as unwelcome a neighbor to the papacy as the Hohenstaufen had been. In 1282, the Sicilians themselves rose in rebellion, massacred their French masters, and awarded the Sicilian crown to the King of Aragon (Peter III, the husband of Frederick II’s granddaughter). The Angevins succeeded in retaining only Naples. Thereafter, Sicily and Naples remained divided between Aragon and Anjou until the mid-fifteenth century.
Meanwhile, during the so-called Interregnum (1254 – 1273), there was no effective ruler for the Holy Roman Empire. The Italian city-states acted like sovereign bodies, and north of the Alps individual princes and bishops gained ever greater independence. The political splintering of Italy and Germany thus increased at a time when the French monarchy was growing more unified and centralized.
In 1273, the German electors ended the Interregnum by choosing as ruler Duke Rudolf of Hapsburg (1273 – 1291). The election had taken place under pressure of the papacy which recognized the need for re-establishing order in Germany and which was already casting about for a possible ally against the unruly Charles of Anjou who had barely established himself in Naples. Despite centuries of fighting between emperors and popes, the papacy realized that the two needed each other.
With the election of Rudolf of Hapsburg, the Holy Roman Empire entered a new era. Gone was the relative dynastic stability which before had left the crown in the same family for several generations at a time. For the next two centuries, the imperial crown was continuously passed from one ducal house to another. The center of the empire as well as of the royal domains that provided the primary income of the ruler shifted erratically from southern Germany (Hapsburg) to central Germany (Nassau), to western Germany (Luxemburg), to Bavaria (Wittelsbach), to the East (Luxemburg’s of Bohemia), and to Austria (later Hapsburgs). As a result, the crown was seriously weakened while the territorial princes gained in strength.
Emperor Charles IV (1347 – 1378) of the Luxemburg-Bohemian dynasty sought to put some order into the electoral process. In the Golden Bull of 1356, Charles awarded sole rights to elect the king as well as the emperor to seven electors – four lay lords and three ecclesiastical princes – and stipulated that the lay electorates should be inherited by primogeniture and be indivisible. This scheme did not provide for greater stability but merely guaranteed more power to the seven electors. Meanwhile the German princes, aided by pamphleteers and antipapal ecclesiastics such as the Spiritual Franciscans, who believed in apostolic poverty and objected to the wealth of the Church and to the worldly possessions acquired by the Franciscan Order, had proceeded to secularize the imperial crown. Through edicts by the German imperial Diet they stipulated that the imperial crown was henceforth to be bestowed by the German electors without papal approval or intervention.
During this period, the empire shrank in size and gradually shifted its center of gravity eastward. Control over Italy was lost despite occasional fruitless attempts to reclaim the peninsula. The Swiss cantons declared their independence; Provence, Burgundy, and the Low Countries slipped from imperial control. While the empire shrank in the south and west, its influence expanded in the east and north. Hungary, Bohemia, and Silesia became closely associated with it, and the Hapsburgs shifted their basis of operation from southern Germany and Switzerland to the newly acquired Austrian hereditary lands. Meanwhile German settlers, lay and ecclesiastic, noble and peasant, continued to push east along the Danube Valley and northeast along the shores of the Baltic, extending German commercial and cultural influence.
Two organizations were particularly active in this movement. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Teutonic Knights acquired a vast principality, stretching from west of the Vistula River to the Gulf of Finland. Although these lands did not remain within the official imperial frontiers after 1250 and their extent shrank considerably after the Knights several defeats by the Poles and Lithuanians between 1410 and 1466, the Teutonic conquests in Prussia formed the political basis for the later Kingdom of Prussia.
At the same time, the Hanseatic League extended German influence from Bruges and London in the west through the Scandinavian lands to Novgorod in Russia. The League was a loose association of north German trading cities for the purpose of protecting their trade, safeguarding common warehouses in foreign lands, and, if necessary, imposing favorable commercial settlements on other states through joint military action. By the late fourteenth century, the Hanseatic League had become so strong that it was able to defeat the Kingdom of Denmark.
Thus the Holy Roman Empire survived as a weak secularized state north of the Alps. Until the sixteenth century, most emperors still dreamt of re-conquering Italy and some actually attempted it. But, in fact, the claim to universality had ceased to be meaningful with the end of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, with the rise of territorial states within the empire, and with the growth of more centralized monarchies elsewhere in Europe.
The Papacy
After the powerful pontificate of Innocent III, the papacy spent the first half of the thirteenth century in bitter fight against Frederick II; much of the second half of the century was taken up by the problems of Naples and of anarchy in Rome. Meanwhile the papacy lost control over the crusades. Even some of the mendicant orders, although organized to spread the faith and to combat heresy, complicated the work of the popes. The Spiritual Franciscans alarmed the prelates of the Church through their insistence on apostolic poverty, while the Dominican friars became embroiled in the scholastic quarrel over the relative importance of reason and faith.
During the late thirteenth century, the papacy became quite secularized. Noble Roman families, supported by outside forces, particularly the Angevins of Naples, fought to determine whom to make pope. Yet the papacy retained much prestige. Pope Boniface VIII (1294 – 1303) attempted once more to raise the papacy to the level of universal authority and to recapture the glory of the pontificate of Innocent III. His failure has been attributed to many causes: he was too tactless in his maneuvers and too much interested in the advancement of his own family; his opponents, Edward I of England and Philip IV of France, were much stronger than had been Innocent III’s antagonists, John I and Philip II; moreover, the temper of the times no longer left room for claims of universal power.
Boniface’s fight with the kings of England and France centered primarily on tax exemption of the clergy. The pope was unsuccessful, since the English and French clergy generally sided with their king. Finally Boniface issued the bull Unam Sanctam (1302), an anachronistic statement of papal supremacy over the rising national monarchies. “Outside this [Catholic and Apostolic] Church,” the bull stated, “there is neither salvation nor remission of sins,” and “both are in the power of the Church, the spiritual sword as well as the material.” Such claims to superiority were clearly out of time with the time. The papal bull aroused the wrath of the French monarchy. Confident in the support of public opinion – a strong term for this period, but perhaps justified – the French king dispatched agents who captured Boniface with the aid of local enemies of the papacy. Although they were supposed to bring the pope back to France for trial, the French had to release him after a few days, when the local populace rose in his support. Soon thereafter Pope Boniface died, and with his death ebbed the power of the medieval papacy.
For well over a hundred years after Boniface’s death, the papacy floundered, embroiled in national quarrels, its political power low, its moral prestige in danger. Afraid of the anarchy in Italy, especially in Rome itself, and pressured by the kings of France, the popes took up residence at Avignon in southern France from 1309 to 1376. The Italian poet Petrarch (1304 – 1374) called this period “the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy.”
While at Avignon, the popes succeeded in centralizing papal administration and improving the tax collection system. At the same time, they unwittingly endangered papal power. Some unwisely continued to fight with the Holy Roman emperors at a time when they had lost the power to conduct such a struggle effectively. Moreover, the financial exactions and the pomp of the Avignonese court aroused the ire of kings and religious reformers – such as John Wyclif (1320? – 1384). Above all, it was risky for the papacy to abandon its universal character and to become identified with national politics, particularly during the Hundred Years War (1337 – 1453). For during this prolonged struggle against France, the English naturally distrusted a French pope, surrounded by French cardinals and residing in the confines of the French kingdom.
Papal Schism
Worse problems faced the papacy after 1378. The cardinals first elected an Italian pope who took up residence at Rome. Soon thereafter, some changed their support and chose a French pope to re-establish the Avignonese line. The resulting schism in the Church lasted until 1417. With Christians able to choose between two popes, obedience to, or rather support of, the one or the other depended heavily on political considerations. England, for example, still at war with France, sided with the Italian pope, whereas Scotland, as an ally of France, supported Avignon.
The papal schism further lowered the prestige of the papacy and stirred demands for reform both within and outside of the Church. As early as 1324, Marsiglio of Padua (1290 – 1343) in his book the Defender of the Peace, used in part by the emperor in his fight against the Avignon popes, had advocated the separation of church and state and had rejected the Petrine theory of apostolic succession. He had also urged that within the Church a general council should always be superior to the pope. This concept of conciliar supremacy with the Church, which harked back to the early centuries of Christianity before papal centralization, gained momentum after 1378, since the schism could only be ended if an authority higher than the popes determined which one was the legitimate pontiff. The conciliar movement was strongly supported by the theologians of the University of Paris and ultimately by various lay rulers, cardinals, lawyers, and reformers. Moreover it corresponded to a similar phenomenon in the secular world of the fourteenth century when corporate or representative bodies attempted to gain control over the monarchs.
When the conciliarists finally succeeded in forcing the convocation of church council (Pisa, 1409), the result was disastrous. The council deposed the two popes and chose one (Martin V); as no incumbents resigned, a triple schism resulted. A new council convened five years later at Constance (1414 – 1418). By then France was more than half occupied by English troops and was in no position to aid the Avignon pope. As in earlier centuries, the Holy Roman Emperor (Sigismund, 1411 – 1437) assumed control. The council then ended the schism by deposing all three popes and electing a new one. At the same time, the council of Constance passed several decrees which threatened the centralized, hierarchical structure of the Church. One (Sacrosanta) spelled out conciliar superiority over the papacy; the other (Frequens) asserted the right of Church councils to meet at regular intervals, without waiting to be convoked by a pope.
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