Читать книгу A Short History of Italy (476-1900) - Henry Dwight Sedgwick - Страница 26

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These triumphs were due to the brilliant vigour of Pope Nicholas; but that triumphant position could not last, it was fictitious. The Papacy needed the support of a strong secular power, and when the Carlovingian Empire dissolved, it had nothing to rest on, neither genius nor military force, and fell into deep degradation.

To illustrate that degradation one episode will suffice; but there must first be a word of prologue. The Papacy, as has been said, occupied an anomalous position. From this sprang many troubles. As soon as the pressure of Imperial authority was removed, the Papacy tended to become the prize of municipal politics, and different parties in Rome (if the turbulent mobs may be called so) struggled to get possession of it. One party, with interests centred on local matters, indifferent to the greatness of the Papacy and its European character, and willing to have the Pope a mere local ruler, directed its efforts to getting rid of all Imperial and foreign control. The opposite party, with conflicting interests, wished for Imperial control, and constituted a kind of Imperial party, less from any large views, than in the hope of deriving advantages from Imperial support. Strife between the two parties was the normal condition, and often ended in riot and civil war. In this state of affairs, a certain Pope Formosus (891–896), who belonged to the Imperial faction, went so far as to invite the German king to come down to Rome and be crowned Emperor. The king actually came and was crowned, but accomplished little or nothing, except to arouse bitter hostility in his enemies. When Formosus died, his successor was elected from the opposite faction. The new Pope held a synod of cardinals and bishops, and before them, the highest Christian tribunal in the world, he summoned, upon the charge of violating the canons of the Church, the dead Formosus, whose body had lain in its grave, for months. The body was dug up, dressed in pontifical robes, and propped upon a throne. Counsel was assigned to it. The accusation was formally read, and the Pope himself cross-questioned the accused, who was convicted and deposed. His pontifical acts were pronounced invalid. His robes were torn from him, the three fingers of the right hand, which in life had bestowed the episcopal blessing, were hacked off, and the body was dragged through the streets and flung into the Tiber.

This incident sheds light on mediæval Rome, and on the character of the people with whom the Popes had to live. All the Popes, good, bad, and indifferent, whether they were struggling with the Empire on great cosmopolitan questions, or were trying to unite Christendom against Islam, always had to keep watch on the brutal, ignorant, bloody Roman people, who took no interest in great questions, and were always ready to rob, burn, and murder with or without a pretext.

Now that we have brought the Frankish Empire to its dissolution, and the Papacy to its degradation, we must leave the two wrecks for the moment, and stop in these dark years at the end of the ninth century to see how Italy herself has fared. The Italian world was out of joint, intellectually, morally, politically. There can hardly be said to have been a government. For a generation the poor, shrunken Empire had been but a shadow, and when the last Carlovingian died, its parts tumbled asunder. Local barons ruled everywhere. The Imperial title, which represented nothing, and conveyed no power, seemed, however, to have some vital principle of its own, some ghostly virtue; at least sundry kings and dukes thought so and fought for it; but until the coming of Otto the Great it remained a shadow. North of the Alps duchies and provinces united into kingdoms; but the peninsula remained split up into discordant parts. The valley of the Po was divided into various duchies, peopled by a mixed race of Latins and Lombards, whom the pressure of the conquering Franks had welded together. South of the Po lay the Imperial marquisate of Tuscany. Across the middle of the peninsula stretched the awkward strip of domain from Ravenna to Rome, inhabited by a race of comparatively pure Latin blood. This domain, included in the Donations of Pippin and of Charlemagne, nominally subject to the Papacy under the suzerainty of the Empire, was really in the possession of petty nobles, who knew no law except force and craft. South of this so-called papal domain lay the duchy of Spoleto and the Lombard duchy of Benevento, and farther south a few principalities, such as Naples, Amalfi, and Salerno, and finally in the heel and toe of Italy were the last remains of the Greek Empire. To the northeast, on its islands, lay the little fishing and trading city, Venice.

The Italians, as we had better call them now that Barbarian and Latin blood has well commingled, were in a most unenviable condition. Most of those who tilled the soil were serfs, and went with the land when it was sold; some were scarce better than slaves, others were only bound to render service of certain kinds or on certain days, either with their own hands or with beasts. Their lot depended on the humours of the overseers of great estates. Slaves were worse off because they had no personal rights, but they were always decreasing in number despite a slave trade, for there was a strong religious sentiment against slavery, and it was common for dying men to liberate their slaves. In the cities people were better off, for the artisans were free men, and by banding together in guilds (which had existed ever since the old Roman days) secured for themselves a more prosperous condition. But the only thriving places were the cities of the coast, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, where trade was already beginning to lay the foundations of future greatness.

These glimmerings of commerce were the only lights along the whole horizon. Everything else seemed to share the blight that had fallen on the Empire and the Papacy. The clergy, whose duty it was to maintain learning, failed utterly. Even in the happiest days of the Carlovingian Empire, Charlemagne had found it necessary to enact blunt rules for their guidance. "Let the priests, according to the Apostles' advice, withdraw themselves from revellings and drunkenness; for some of them are wont to sit up till midnight or later, boozing with their neighbours; and then these men, who ought to be of a religious and holy deportment, return to their churches drunken and gorged with food, and unable to perform the daily and nightly office of praise to God, while others sink down in a drunken sleep in the place of their revels. … Let no priest presume to store provisions or hay in the church."[6] Learning, supposed to be committed to their charge, went out like a spent candle. Books were almost forgotten, except perhaps here and there, in Pavia or Verona, where a grammarian still invoked Virgil to prosper his muse; or where in an episcopal city, like Ravenna, some chronicler wrote a history of the bishopric. The theory of historic truth on which these chroniclers acted gives an inkling of the mediæval attitude towards facts. Father Agnello, a priest of Ravenna, one of these chroniclers, says himself: "If you, who read this History of our Bishopric, shall come to a passage and say, 'Why didn't he narrate the facts about this bishop as he did about his predecessors,' listen to the reason. I, Andrea Agnello, a humble priest of this holy church of Ravenna, have written the history of this Bishopric from the time of St. Apollinaris for eight hundred years and more, because my brethren here have begged me and compelled me. I have put down whatever I found the Bishops had undoubtedly done, and whatever I heard from the oldest men living, but where I could not find any historical account, nor anything about their lives in any way, then, in order to leave no blanks in the holy succession of bishops, I have made up the missing lives by the help of God, through your prayers, and I believe I have said nothing untrue, because those bishops were pious and pure and charitable and winners of souls for God."[7]

The monks were no better than the secular clergy. The monasteries had grown large, for many men had joined in order to escape military service, or to obtain personal security, or an easier life, or greater social consideration; they had also grown rich, for many sinners on their deathbeds had given large sums, in hope to compound for their sins. Naturally monastic vows were often broken. Moreover, the little good that monks and priests did they undid by their encouragement of superstition. They first frightened the poor peasants out of their wits by portraying the horrors of hell, and then preached the magical properties of the sacraments and of saints' bones, until the ordinary man, feeling himself the sport of superhuman agencies, abandoned all self-confidence and surrendered himself to priestly control as his sole hope of safety in this world or the next.

Oppressed by anarchy, by division, by a degenerate church, by a gross clergy, and by waxing ignorance, Italy might seem to have had its cup of evil full. There was but one further ill that could be added, a new Barbarian invasion. It came. The triumphant Saracens, having overrun Spain and raided France in the west, having cooped up the Byzantine Empire in the east, now threatened to plant their victorious banners in the very heart of Christendom. As early as Charlemagne's last years they sacked a coast town scarce forty miles from Rome. In 827 they invaded Sicily, invited by a partisan traitor. Within ten years they had made themselves masters of almost all the island, except a few strongholds which managed to hold out for half a century. The beaten Byzantines retired to the mainland; but they did not get beyond the reach of the victorious Saracens, who raided all the Italian coast as far as the Tiber. Troops of marauders hovered round Rome and harried the country-side, robbing and pillaging at will. One band advanced to the very gates of the city, and sacked St. Peter's and St. Paul's, both outside the walls and undefended (846). All the southern provinces were overrun, half of their towns became Saracen fortresses. It seemed as if Italy were to undergo the fate of Spain and become a Mohammedan Emirate.

The danger to Rome roused the country. A Christian league was effected between the Imperial forces in Italy, the Pope, and the coast cities of the south—Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi. Pope Leo himself blessed the fleet, and the Christians beat the infidels in a great sea-fight not far from the Tiber's mouth (849). Some of the prisoners were brought to Rome and set to work on the walls which Pope Leo was building round the Vatican hill to protect St. Peter's; and Rome, imitating the days of Scipio Africanus, celebrated another triumph over Africa. The fighting was kept up all over the south. The Greek Emperor made common cause with his fellow Christians, and the immediate danger of conquest was arrested; but throughout this dismal ninth century, and all the tenth, southern Italy continued to suffer from Saracen marauders. The tales told of their cruelty are fearful, and match our tales of Indian raids in the old French-English war. Separate villages and lonely monasteries suffered most. Some good came out of the evil, however, for the chroniclers relate how the abbots and their terrified brethren spent days and nights fasting and in prayer.

Such was the condition of Italy when the Imperial Carlovingian line came to an end. The omnipresence of anarchy was a permanent argument for the need of an Imperial restoration. But the country did not know how to go to work to restore the Empire. At first various claimants asserted various titles, and Italian dukes and neighbouring kings fought one another like bulls, but none were able to establish any stable power. In the midst of these ineffectual struggles one real effort was made. Arnulf, king of the Germans, who regarded himself as the true successor of the great Frankish house and of right Imperial heir, marched down into Italy at the invitation of Pope Formosus, as we have seen, and assumed the Imperial crown (896). The expedition was barren of consequences, but it gives us another glimpse of the anomalous nature of the Papacy, and the different views entertained of it on the two sides of the Alps. The German king wished to be Emperor, and felt that an Imperial coronation at Rome by the Pope was essential. To him and to his German subjects the papal invitation was of high authority. When he reached Rome, however, the seat of the Papacy, he found the gates barred and the walls manned by rebellious citizens, who had locked the Pope in the Castle of Sant' Angelo, and had seized the government of the city. Arnulf easily carried the defences by storm and liberated the Pope. The incident illustrates the contrast between Teutonic respect and Roman disobedience, and describes the papal situation as it was half the time throughout the Middle Ages. Honoured and reverenced by the pious ultramontanes, the Popes were insulted, robbed, imprisoned, and deposed by their immediate subjects. This local disobedience, or, as it should be called, Roman republicanism, was often the insignificant cause of papal actions of far-reaching effect. The Popes were never strong enough of themselves to suppress these republican sentiments and ambitions; they needed support from some power, Italian or foreign. As they would not endure the idea of an Italian kingdom, they adopted the alternative of calling in a foreign power. This was the constant papal policy.

Another instance of Roman republicanism, or disobedience (as one chooses), throws further light on the nature of this thorn in the papal side. Not long after Arnulf's expedition, two women, Theodora and Marozia, mother and daughter, played a great part not only in Roman but also in Italian politics. These two women ruled the city and appointed the Popes. They were bold, comely, much-marrying women, choosing eligible husbands almost by force; both were wholly Roman in the fierceness, vigour, and sensuality of their characters. They were very capable, and, in part directly, in part through their husbands and others, exercised control for some thirty years; and when the daughter disappeared from history, her son, Alberic, took the title, Prince and Senator of all the Romans, and ruled in her stead.

Thus the last hope of Italians helping themselves perished; for if the Papacy was powerless, there was no help elsewhere in Italy. The usurpation of these viragoes and of Alberic differs in details from the usurpation of the later republicans, and of the Colonna, Orsini, and other barons, who shall appear hereafter in papal history, but for general effect on papal affairs and through them on European affairs, all these usurpations were very similar. The usurpers, in diverse characters, represent that third player in the fencing match, who, though by no means an ally of the Empire, frequently rushed in and struck up the Pope's guard, and continued to interfere for hundreds of years, until the Popes of the Renaissance finally established their temporal power in the city of Rome.

By the middle of the tenth century the disintegration of Italy had become so bad that it caused its own cure. It was obvious that something must be done. The Saracens, strongly established in Sicily, were a standing menace towards the south. From the north wild bands of Hungarians burst across the Alps and harried the land in barbaric raids as far as Rome. Feudal anarchy prevailed everywhere. Monks and clergy were, to say the least, no help. Even the Papacy, the only stable power, had become the appanage of a Roman family. There was but one way out of this chaos. The Roman Empire must be restored. The Latin people never believed that it was extinct but merely lying latent, requiring some happy application of might and right to set it going again on its majestic course. Charlemagne, in his day, had supplied the might. That might had faded away. Where was its substitute to be found? Pope Formosus and King Arnulf had already suggested the only possible answer—in the eastern portion of the Frankish Empire, the kingdom of Germany. That kingdom, composed of the great duchies of Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia, Saxony, and Lorraine, had become tolerably compact; it was strong at home, and was eager for glory and power abroad. Its ambitious king, Otto, of the Saxon line, was the man to undertake to follow Charlemagne's example. It was too late to hope to restore the Carlovingian Empire in its former boundaries, but with Germany to give strength and Rome to contribute title, there would be the two necessary elements for a renewal of the Roman Empire.

The immediate pretext of Otto's coming down into Italy was highly romantic. A lovely lady, the widow of one Italian pretender to the throne of Italy, was pestered with offers of marriage from another pretender. She refused, and was locked up in a tower by the Lake of Garda, where memories of Catullus and Lesbia still faintly lingered. She contrived to escape, and sent piteous messages for help to the great Otto, then a widower. Discontented factions in the north, and others suffering from oppression, including the Pope who had been rudely roused to the need of Imperial support, also sent messengers asking him to come. Otto came, took Pavia, and acted as King of Italy. He married the lovely widow, and wished to go to Rome to receive the Imperial crown; but Alberic, lord of Rome, would not give permission. Otto went back to Germany and bided his time. In ten years Alberic died leaving a young son, who, although only seventeen years old, inherited enough of his father's power to get himself elected Pope, John XII. Pope John, however, found himself encompassed by powerful enemies both in Rome and out. He too was obliged to recognize the absolute necessity of Imperial restoration, and called upon Otto for aid. The German king came, and was crowned by the Pope, Emperor of the Romans, in St. Peter's basilica, on the second day of February, 962. This coronation was the beginning of a new phase in the Roman Empire. In this phase that Empire is known as the Holy Roman Empire, although it was merely a union of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy.