CHAP. III. ASSERTION OF PONTIFICAL POWER. 187 hood, is justly deposed from his royal dignity, so that royal power and dignity is granted to Rudolph, for his humility, obedience, and truth." The censure did not conclude without the personal sentence upon Henry. It proceeded to the broad, bold assertion of more than the absolute supremacy of the ecclesiastical over the civil power; it declared all possessions, all dignities, all powers, to be at the sole disposition of the Church. "Come, then, ye fathers and most holy prelates, let all the world understand and know, that since ye have power to bind and loose in heaven, ye have power to take away and to grant empires, kingdoms, principalities, duchies, marquisates, counties, and the possessions of all men according to their deserts. Ye have often deprived wicked and unworthy men of patriarchates, primacies, archbishoprics, bishoprics, and bestowed them on religious men. If ye then judge in spiritual affairs, how great must be your power in secular and if ye are to judge angels, who rule over proud princes, what may ye not do to these their servants. Let kings, then, and all the princes of the world learn what ye are, and how great is your power, and fear to treat with disrespect the mandates of the Church; and do ye on the aforesaid Henry fulfil your judgment so speedily that he may know that it is through your power, not by chance, that he hath fallen-that he be brought to repentance by his ruin, that his soul may be saved in the day of the Lord." Not content with this tremendous excommunication, Gregory ventured to assume the prophetic office. He declared publicly, and either believed himself, or wished others to believe, with the authority of divine revelation, that unless Henry made his submission before the Festival of St. Peter and St. Paul, the 29th of June, he would be deposed or dead; and if his vaticination failed, men were to cease to believe in the authority of Gregory. War was thus declared. Gregory, it is said, sent a crown to Rudolph, with an inscription that it was The Pope the gift of St. Peter. Henry and the Bishops of acknowledges his party heard not now with cowering fear, with King." Petra dedit Petro, Petrus diadema Rudolfo. Rudolph April 12. disordered minds, and distracted counsels, but with the strongest indignation-with the most resolute determination to run all hazards-the anathema of the Pope. It seemed to have lost all its terrors even on the popular mind: no defections took place; no desertions from the court, the council, or the army. All disclaimed at once further allegiance to Gregory. Henry, in a letter to Dieterich Bishop of Verdun, issued his commands that the princes and prelates of the empire should be summoned to Mentz on the 31st of May, to depose the Pope, and to elect a new Head of the Church. At Mentz nineteen Bishops met, and with one voice determined to renounce Hildebrand as Pope. To this decree it was important to obtain the assent of the Lombard prelates. The Bishop of Spires crossed the Alps; the Archbishops of Milan and Ravenna assembled their suffragans at Brixen, in the Tyrol. There, in a synod of June 25. thirty bishops, they confirmed the deposition of the posed. false monk Hildebrand called Gregory VII. To the charges of licentiousness, bribery, and disturbance of the peace of the empire, they added accusations of heresy and necromancy. "We, assembled by the authority of God in this place, having read the letter from the synod of nineteen bishops held at Mentz against the licentious Hildebrand, the preacher of sacrilegious and incendiary doctrines; the defender of perjury and murder; who, as an old disciple of the heretic Berengar, has endangered the Catholic and Apostolic doctrine of the Body and Blood of Christ ;" the worshipper of divinations and of dreams; the notorious necromancer; himself possessed with an evil spirit, and therefore guilty of departing from the truth; him we adjudge to be canonically deposed and expelled from his see, and unless, on hearing our judgment, Gregory de * Quod a sæculo non est auditum, ut tot uno tempore inimicus humani generis mente captos contra sanctam Romanam ecclesiam armasset episcopos.Bonizo, p. 815. "This charge no doubt arose from his acceptance of the ambiguous confession from Berengar, see p. 183; and no doubt much was made of the decla ration which Berengar asserted him to have made, that he had received a special message from the Virgin Mary, testifying that the doctrine of Berengar was consonant with the Scriptures.Acta Concil. in caus. Berengar.; Martene et Durand Thesaur. Anecdot. iv. p. 103. СНАР. ІІІ. GUIBERT ANTI-POPE. 189 he shall descend from his throne, to be condemned for everlasting." : Guibert And now Guibert of Ravenna attained the object of his ambition he was elected Pope by the unanimous June 25. voice of the assembly. But Christendom had Anti-pope. submitted too long to the supremacy of Hildebrand to disbelieve or to question his title to the Popedom. This proceeding would appear to the world, not as a solemn decree of the Church, but as a passionate act of revenge, inflaming both the King and the prelates to overstep their powers. It neither shook the faith of his partisans, nor strengthened in their animosity the enemies of Hildebrand. Guibert was probably more dangerous as Archbishop of Ravenna and Chancellor of Italy than as the Anti-pope Clement III. The horrors of civil war might appear to be drawing to a close in Germany. The two armies met for a Battle of the decisive battle near the Elster. It might seem a Elster. religious no less than a civil war. Henry was accompanied to the battle by the Archbishops of Cologne and Treves and fourteen other prelates. The Saxons advanced to the charge, with the bishops of their party and the clergy chaunting the eighty-second psalm, "God standeth in the congregation of the princes." At the first gleam of IMPERIALIST PRELATES. PAPALISTS. Siegfried, Archbishop of Mentz, at first, then neutral, driven by his fears to be an ardent Hildebrandine after the excommunication. Treves, first Papalist, afterwards an Imperialist at the Elster. Udo Hildorf Cologne. Wezclin, Archbishop of Magdeburg, killed Rupert, Bishop of Bamberg. Eppo Herman Metz. Passau. Worms. Merseburg. Saxon Insurgents. Oct. 13. Death of success, the army of Henry broke out into the "Te Deum laudamus," and when, after the great reverse in the battle, their camp at Erfurt was surprised, they were singing a triumphant Kyrie Eleison. The defeat of Henry was more than counterbalanced by the fall of his rival. Rudolph, notwithstanding that he was the champion of the Pope, the subject of his triumphant vaticination, was mortally wounded in the battle. Rudolph. Some misgiving as to the justice of his cause embittered his last moments. His hand had been struck off by a sabre: as he gazed on it, he said, "With this hand I ratified my oath of fealty to my sovereign Henry; I have now lost life and kingdom. Bethink ye, ye who have led me on, in obedience to whose counsels I have ascended the throne, whether ye have guided me right." The death of Rudolph, though it did not restore peace to Germany-though the fatal strife was yet to last many years paralysed the adversaries of Henry for a time, and gave him leisure to turn his forces against his more irreconcilable enemy. Henry in In the spring of the year 1081 Henry crossed the Alps in far different condition from that in which four years before he had stolen, a deserted and brokenspirited suppliant, to the feet of the Pope. Gregory had been shown in the face of the world a false prophet: Heaven had ratified neither his anathema nor his predictions. Instead of his defeat and death, Henry came in the pride of conquest; and it was his adversary who had fallen, as his friends declared, by the manifest judgment of God, in the battle-field by the Elster. There was now no reluctance to follow him in a war which before seemed sacrilegious and impious: no desertion from his ranks—no defection from his councils. All Lombardy was zealous in his cause: on the same day that the battle was fought on the Elster the troops of his partisans had defeated those of the Countess Matilda; the allegiance of her subjects was shaken. The only protectors to whom Gregory could now look * All the Italians, Gregory himself repeatedly says, were for Henry.-Regest. ix. 3. CHAP. III. INTREPIDITY OF GREGORY. 191 were the Normans; but even the Normans, on account of some border disputes about territories, which they refused to abandon at the word of the Pope, were under the ban of excommunication. With them, however, he made a hasty treaty, withdrawing the interdict on the first seeming concession, and condescended to leave May, 1081. in abeyance the contested claims to Fermo. But the Normans, instead of marching, as Gregory proposed, with the Pope at their head, against Ravenna, had embarked on a wild enterprise against the Greek empire, and were besieging Durazzo on the other side of July, 1081. the Adriatic. Still Gregory was as firm in danger and adversity as he had been imperious and disdainful in the height of his power. The very depth of his soul was filled with confidence in the justice of his cause, and the certainty of divine favour. The way to Rome lay open to the army of Henry; the Countess Matilda could not venture on resistance in the field; she retired for security to her fortresses in the Apennines. By Pentecost the Germans and Lombards might be at the gates of Rome, the Germans infuriated by the hard measure dealt to their master; the Lombards by religious as well as by civil animosity. But the inflexible Gregory refused all concession; he indignantly rejected the advice, the supplications of his adherents, at least to make a show of submission. Even at the time when the vengeance of Henry was rapidly advancing against his undefended foe, he renewed his most imperious proclamations; he wrote to the leader of his partizans in language even for him unprecedentedly bold and contemptuous. The secular power is no longer admitted, as with the sacerdotal, a coincident appointment of God. It has its origin in human wickedness and diabolic suggestion; in blind ambition and intolerable presumption; kingship is an audacious usurpation on the natural equality of man." ! Epist. viii. 7. * To Herman of Metz. Quis nesciat reges et duces ab iis habuisse principium, qui Deum ignorantes superbia, rapinis, perfidiâ, homicidiis, postremo universis pœne sceleribus, mundi principe diabolo scilicet aptante, super pacis scilicet homines, dominari cœcâ cupidi tate et intolerabili præsumptione affectaverint. Are we reading a journalist of Paris in 1791? Every king, he proceeds, on his deathbed, as a humble and pitiful suppliant implores the assistance of a priest to save him from the eternal dungeon of hell. Can a king baptise? Can a king make the body and blood of |