Читать книгу The Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273 - T. F. Tout - Страница 10
ОглавлениеHenry III., 1039–1056.
Henry III. was now two-and-twenty years of age, and had been carefully educated for his great position. Gisela had procured for him the best of literary teachers, while Conrad himself had taken care that he should excel in all knightly exercises, and go through a sound drilling in war, law, and statecraft. He had already won martial glory against the Poles and Hungarians, while he had acquired political experience as virtual, if not formal, co-regent with his father. He was now able to take up his father’s work, and while carrying it on essentially in the old lines, to infuse it with a new spirit. For the gifted young king, though inheriting to the full the practical wisdom of his father, soared far above the cold self-seeking and hard selfishness of the least attractive of the great German Emperors. Under his strong and genial rule, the Holy Empire again became a great ideal, though it was now an ideal that had little that was visionary or fantastic about it. The seventeen years of his reign witnessed the culminating point of the power of the mediæval Empire. Under him Germany effectively ruled the destinies of the world. The early troubles that had attended the building up of the kingdom were over. The later troubles that sprang from the struggle of the ecclesiastical and temporal power had not yet begun.
A series of signal triumphs in the east first proclaimed to the world the greatness of the new king. Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary were all alike matters of concern to Henry. |Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary made fiefs of the Empire.| But Poland, so mighty a few years before, was distracted by civil strife, and attacked by the rising power of Bohemia, now the strongest Slavonic state. It was a light matter for Henry to retain Poland as a feudatory of the Empire. But it involved a long struggle before Bohemia, under its warlike Duke Bretislav, could be forced to accept the same position. It was Bretislav’s ambition to make himself a king, and to secure for the Bohemian bishopric at Prague the position of an archbishopric, so that a great Slavonic kingdom, independent both in Church and State, might centre round the Bohemian table-land. But Henry forced his way through the mountains of the border and threatened Prague itself. In despair Bretislav did homage to him for Bohemia and Moravia, and even for the outlying district of Silesia, which he had conquered from the weak Polish monarchy and made an integral part of the Bohemian kingdom. Even greater difficulties beset Henry in Hungary, where a heathen reaction had set Aba, a member of the hero race of Arpad, on the throne. In 1042 Henry invaded Hungary and dethroned Aba, but the Hungarian king was soon restored, and it was not until a third expedition in 1044 that Henry finally succeeded in destroying his power. Aba’s defeat secured the complete triumph of the German king. Peter, the new king of Hungary, performed homage to Henry, thus making Hungary, like Poland and Bohemia, a fief of the Empire. In 1045 Henry visited Hungary, and received the submission of the Magyar magnates. In pious gratitude for his victory Henry sent the gilded lance, which Peter had given to him as an emblem of his dependence, as a votive offering to the Papacy. A few years later another Arpad, Andrew, dethroned the weak Peter, and gave a more national direction to the fierce Magyar nation, though he was too conscious of Henry’s power to break openly with him. With a row of vassal kingdoms extending to the extremest eastward limits of Roman civilisation, the Holy Empire was fast becoming in a very real sense the mistress of the world.
Henry III. and France.
With all his power, Henry could not hope to obtain from the princes of the west the same formal acknowledgment of his supremacy that he had wrested from the lords of the east. The France of Henry I. was indeed feeble and helpless, but the early Capetian monarchy was still the centre of a great system, and its feudatories, though constantly at war with their king and with each other, would be likely to make common cause against a German pretender to universal rule. Henry III. was content to keep on friendly terms with his neighbours beyond the Rhine, and, as a good means of securing French friendship, he chose a wife from among the greater vassals of the Capetian throne. In 1043 he married Agnes of Poitou, the youngest daughter of that Count William of Poitou who, in his youth, had competed with Conrad the Salic for the crown of Italy. Agnes exercised henceforth strong influence over her husband, and in particular upon his ecclesiastical policy.
With the eastern kings paying him tribute and the monarch of the west seeking his friendship, Henry had now leisure to improve the internal condition of his dominions. Despite all that his predecessors had done, Germany and Italy were still in the utmost disorder. |Henry III. and Germany.| Conrad II.’s policy of encouraging the smaller nobility had tended to increase the private wars and local feuds that made existence so difficult and dreary for the simple freeman, and so dangerous even to the great lord. Henry now made strenuous efforts to restore peace to Germany. At a diet at Constance Henry solemnly forgave all his enemies, and craved their forgiveness in turn, calling upon the magnates to follow his example and lay aside their feuds with each other. Some degree of success followed this appeal, especially as Henry had partly abandoned his father’s policy of concentrating the national duchies in his own hands. Germany was so vast that it could hardly be effectively ruled from a single centre, and Henry hoped that henceforth the dukes whom he set up would be faithful ministers, and not champions of local independence.
Italy demanded Henry’s utmost care, and the critical position of the Papacy closely connected his policy with his attitude towards the Church. Since his marriage with Agnes, Henry had become more attentive to the teachings of Cluny, and was keenly alive to the scandals which still disgraced the Roman Church. No ecclesiastical reformation could be complete which did not begin with the head of the Church, and it was only by a great manifestation of his power that Henry could purify the Papacy. |Henry III. and Italy.| The Counts of Tusculum still kept their tight hold over the Roman Church, which had almost become their hereditary possession. After two brothers—the reforming Benedict VIII. (1012–1024) and the reactionary John XIX. (1024–1033)—had held in turn St. Peter’s chair, a third member of the Tusculan house, their nephew, Benedict IX., succeeded, despite his extreme youth, to the papal throne (1033). His excesses soon gave occasion to universal scandal, and in 1044 the Romans set up an Antipope in Sylvester III. Family influence still upheld Benedict, but next year new troubles arising, he sold the Papacy in a panic to a new pretender, who called himself Gregory VI., and who, despite his simoniacal election, soon attracted the reformers around him by his zeal in putting an end to abuses. But Benedict soon repented of his bargain, and sought to regain his position as Pope. The result was that three rival claimants to the Papacy distracted Rome with their brawls, and none of them had sufficient power to get rid of the others.
A synod assembled at Rome, and called on Henry III. to put an end to the crisis. In 1046 he crossed the Alps, and held a Church Council at Pavia, in which he issued an edict condemning simony. |Synod of Sutri, 1046.| In December 1046 he held another synod at Sutri, near Rome, where two of the three claimants to the Papacy were deposed. The third claimant was deposed in a third synod held in Rome itself. Suidgar, Bishop of Bamberg, was chosen Pope through Henry’s influence, and enthroned on Christmas Day as Clement II., conferring on the same day the imperial crown on Henry and Agnes. Accompanied by Clement, the Emperor made a progress through southern Italy, which he reduced to submission. Grave troubles on the Lower Rhine now brought Henry back to Germany; yet even in his absence his influence remained supreme in Italy. Clement II. died in 1048; but a whole succession of German Popes, the nominees of the Emperor, were now accepted by the Romans with hardly a murmur. The first of these—Damasus II., formerly Poppo, Bishop of Brixen, died after a few weeks’ reign. His successor, the Emperor’s kinsman, Bruno of Toul, took the name of Leo IX. (1048–1054). Short as was his pontificate, the result of his work was epoch-making in several directions. During the reign of his successor, Victor II. (1054–1057), Henry III. paid his second and last visit to Italy, the results of which we will speak of later. No sooner was he over the Alps than a rebellion broke out in Bavaria that necessitated his immediate return. The presence of the Emperor soon extinguished the revolt, but the rising taught Henry the insecurity of his position, and he now sought to conciliate his foes.
Death of Henry III., 1056.
In the summer of 1056 Henry held his court at Goslar, where he was visited by Victor II.; but in September he fell sick, and had only time to take further measures to secure his son’s succession, when death overtook him, on 5th October, in the thirty-ninth year of his age. Under him the mediæval Empire attained its apogee. Germany was now almost a nation; Italy a submissive dependency; the Papacy had been reformed, and the Church purified. A child of six years old was now called to the throne, whose burden had been almost too heavy for his father. With the accession of Henry IV. the decline of the Empire begins.
