Nationalism and Culture (12 page)

The tasks of the bishops of Rome were therefore beset with great difficulties, to which not all of them were equal j and centuries had to pass before they could establish their influence over the majority of the clergy. This was all the more difficult as the bishops of the various countries were frequently wholly dependent on the holders of temporal power for their authority and right of maintenance. However, the bishops of Rome pur-

sued their aim with clever calculation and persistent effort j nor were they at all fastidious in their choice of means as long as these promised results.

How unconcernedly the occupants of the Roman chair steered toward their goal is proved by the clever use they knew how to make of the notorious ^sidorian Decretals" which the well-known historian, Ranke, has described as "a quite conscious, very well-conceived, but patent forgery" j a judgment which is hardly disputed anywhere today. However, before the possibility of the forgery of these documents was admitted they had already achieved their purpose. On their authority the pope..was confirmed as the viceroy of God on earth, to whom Peter had Intrusted the keys of~heaven. The whole of the clergy was subjected to his will. He was conceded the right to call general councils whose conclusions he could accept or reject according to his own judgment. Most important of all, these forged "Isidorian Decretals" declared that in all disputes between the temporal states and the clergy the decision was to lie in the last instance with the pope. Thereby the cleric was to be withdrawn entirely from the jurisdiction of the temporal power, so that he might be bound more firmly to the papal chair. Attempts of this kind had already been made. Thus, the Roman bishop, Symachus (498-514), had declared that the bishop of Rome was not responsible to any judge but Godj and twenty years before the appearance of the "Isidorian Decretals" the Council of Paris (829) declared that the king was subject to the church and the power of the priest stood above every worldly power. These forged decretals could, therefore, only have the purpose of giving to the claims of the church the stamp of legality.

With Gregory VII (1073-85) begins the real hegemony of the Papacy, the era of the "church triumphant." He was the first who quite publicly and without any limitations asserted the prerogative of the church over every worldly power, and even before his ascent of the papal throne he had worked with iron persistency toward this goal. Above all, he introduced fundamental changes into the church itself to make it a more serviceable tool for his purposes. His implacable severity brought it about that priestly cehbacYj which had often been proposed but never carried out, was now imposed effectively. In this manner he created for himself an international army which was not bound by any intimate worldly ties and whose least member felt himself a representative of the papal will. His well-known saying that "the church jCoulijaevoLireeJtself^^ servitude to temporal power until the priest was freed from woman" clearly indicates the goal he sought by this reform.

Gregory was a cunning and most astute politician, fully convinced of the justice of his claims. In his letters to Bishop Hermann of Metz he develops his concept with complete clarity, supporting it principally by the City of God of Augustine. Starting with the assumption that the church

was instituted by God himself, he concludes that in every one of his decisions the will of God is revealed and that the pope, as God's viceroy on earth, is the proclaimer of this divine will. Consequently any disobedience of him is disobedience to God. Every temporal power is but the weak work of men, as is at once apparent from the fact that the state has abolished equality among men and that its origin can be traced only to brutal force and injustice. Any king who does not unconditionally submit himself to the commands of the church is a slave of the devil and an enemy of Christianity. It is the church's task to unite humanity in a great community ruled only by God's laws, revealed to them by the mouth of the pope.

Gregory fought with all the intolerance of his forceful character for a realization of these aims, and although he finally fell a victim to his own policy, he nevertheless succeeded in establishing the hegemony of the church and in making it for centuries the most powerful factor in European history. His immediate successors, however, possessed neither the monkish earnestness nor the boundless energy characteristic of Gregory and therefor suffered many a setback in their contests with temporal power. But with Innocent III (i 198-1216) the papal scepter fell to a man who had not only Gregory's clearness of aim and unbendable will but far excelled him in natural ability.

Innocent_nI achieved for the church her highest aim and raised her power to a degree it had never before attained. He ruled his cardinals with the despotic will of an autocrat not responsible to anyone and treated the possessors of temporal power with an arrogance no one of his predecessors had dared to assume. To the Patriarch of Constantinople he wrote these proud words: "God did not only lay the dominion of the church in Peter's hands, he also appointed him to be the ruler of the whole world." To the envoy of the French king, Philippe Augustus, he said: "To princes is given power only over earth, but the priest rules also over heaven. The prince has power only over the bodies of his subjects, the priest has power also over the souls of men. Therefore the priesthood is as high above every temporal power as is the soul above the body in which it dwells."

Innocent forced the whole temporal power of Europe under his will. He not only interfered in all dynastic affairs, he even arranged the marriages of the temporal rulers and compelled them to obtain a divorce in case the union did not suit him. Over Sicily, Naples and Sardinia he ruled as actual monarchy Castile, Leon, Navarre, Portugal, and Aragon were tributary to him. His will was obeyed in Hungary, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland, Bohemia, and in the Scandinavian countries. He interfered in the contest between Philip of Swabia and Otto IV for the German imperial crown and gave it to Otto, only to take it away from him again later and confer it on Frederick II. In his quarrel with the English king,

John Lackland, he proclaimed an interdict over his realm, and not only forced the king to complete submission but even compelled him to accept his own country as a fief from the pope and to pay a tribute for this clemency.

Innocent thought of himself as pope and Caesar in one person and saw in the temporal rulers only vassals of his power, tributary to him. In this sense he wrote to the King of England: "God has founded kingship and priesthood on the church so that the priesthood is thus kingly and kingship priestly; as is apparent from the Epistles of Peter and the laws of Moses. Therefore did the King of Kings set one above all, whom he appointed his Viceroy on earth."

By the establishment of oral confession and the organization of mendicant monks. Innocent created for himself a power of tremendous scope. Furthermore, he made free use of his strongest weapon, the ban of the church, which with unyielding resolution he imposed upon whole countries in order to make the temporal rulers submissive to him. In a land hit by the ban all churches remained closed. No bells called the faithful to prayer. There were neither baptisms nor weddings, no confessions were received, no dying were given extreme unction and no dead buried in sanctified ground. One can imagine the terrible effects of such a status on the spirit of men at a time when faith was regarded as supreme.

Just as Innocent tolerated no equal power, he likewise permitted no doctrine which departed in the least from the usage of the church, even though entirely imbued with the spirit of true Christianity, The terrible crusade against heresy in the south of France, which changed one of the most flourishing lands in Europe into a desert, bears bloody witness to this. The dominant ambitious spirit of this fearful man balked at no means to guard the unlimited authority of the church. However, he also was but the slave of a fixed idea which kept his spirit prisoner and estranged it from all human consideration. His power obsession made him lonely and miserable. It became his personal evil genius, as it does with most of those who pursue the same end. Thus he spoke once concerning himself: "I have no leisure to pursue other worldly things j I can scarcely find time to breathe. Truly, so completely must I live for others that I have become a stranger to myself."

It is the secret curse of every power that it becomes fatal, not only to its victims but to its possessors. The bare thought that one must live for the achievement of an ehd which is opposed to all sound human feeling and is incomprehensible in itself, gradually makes the possessor of power himself into a dead machine, after he has forced all coming under the dominance of his power to a mechanical obedience to his will. There is something puppetlike in the nature of every power, arising from its own illusions, which coerces everything coming into contact with it into fixed

form. And all these forms continue to live in tradition even after the last spark of life has died in them, and lie like an incubus on the spirit which submits to their influence.

This, to their sorrow, the Germanic and after them the Slavic tribes —the people who had remained longest immune to the pernicious influence of Roman Caesarism—had to learn. Even after the Romans had subjugated the German lands from the Rhine to the Elbe their influence was confined almost entirely to the western territory. The inhospitality of the country, covered with enormous forests and swamps, never gave them an opportunity to confirm their dominion. When by a confederation of German tribes the Roman army was almost completely annihilated in the Teutqburger Forest and most of the strongholds of the foreign invaders were destroyed^"Roman rule over Germany was as good as broken. Even the three campaigns Germanicus waged against the rebellious tribes could not change the situation.

But there had arisen for the Germans, through Roman influence, a much more dangerous enemy in their own camp, to which their leaders especially soon surrendered. The German^ tribes whose habitat for a long time extended from the Danube to the Baltic and from the Rhine to the Elbe enjoyed a rather far-reaching independence. Most of the tribes were already permanently settled when they came in contact with the Romansj only the eastern part of the country was still semi-nomadic. From Roman records and later sources it is apparent that the social organization of the Germans was still very primitive. The various tribes were formed by families connected with each other by blood relationships j as a rule a hundred of these lived in scattered settlements on the same piece of land, hence the designation "hundred." Ten to twenty such hundreds formed a tribe, whose territory was designated as a count y (Gau). By the union of relateH tribes arose a people. The hundreds divided the land among themselves, and in such a manner that periodic repartitions were necessary. From this it is apparent that for a long time private ownership of land did not exist among them, and that private property was limited to weapons and homemade tools and~other objects of daily use. The tilling of the so il was done mainly^byjwomeii^and slaves. A part of the men frequently went on war-and-booty raids while the other part took its turn at staying home and maintained justice and right dealing.

All important questions were considered at general assemblies, or Folk-Things , and there decided. At these assemblies all freemen fit to bear arms participated. As a rule they occurred at the time of the new moon and were for a long time the supreme institution of the German people. At the Thing all differences were adjusted. The director of public administration was elected, as well as the commander during war. At these elections the personal character and the experience of the individual

were at first the determining factors. Later on, however, especially when the relations with the Romans became more frequent and more intimate, the so-called "foremost ones" or Fursten ("princes") were elected almost exclusively from the ranks of prominent families, which, by reason of real or imagined services to the community, had been the recipients of larger shares of booty, tribute and presents, and thus achieved a state of wealth which permitted them to keep a retinue of tried warriors and thus, quite naturally, to achieve certain prerogatives.

The oftener the Germans came in contact with the Romans the more amenable they became to foreign influence, which could not very well be otherwise, since Roman culture and technique was in all respects superior to the German. Even before the conquest of Germany by the Romans certain tribes had begun to move, had been assigned by the Roman rulers certain districts, and had in return obligated themselves to serve in the Roman army. In fact, German soldiers had already played an important part in the conquest of Gaul by the Romans. Julius Caesar enlisted many German soldiers in his armies and was himself always surrounded by a mounted~Bodyguard of four hundred Teuton warriors.

Many descendants of Germans who had been in Roman service later returned to their homes and used the booty they had won and the experience they had gained from the Romans to press their own countrymen into their service. Thus one of them, Marbod, succeeded in time in extending his dominion over quite a number of German tribes and subjecting all the land between the Oder and Elbe from Bohemia to the Baltic to his influence. And even Herman, "The Liberator," succumbed to the influence of the Roman will to power, which after his return he tried to impose upon his own people. Not in vain had Herman and Marbod lived in Rome and learned there what enormous attraction power has for the ambitions of man.

Herman's ambitions for political power, which became constantly more apparent after the destruction of the Roman host had led to the liberation of Germany from Roman rule, appear in a somewhat peculiar light. It soon became clear not only that the noble Cheruscan had learned in Rome the art of superior warfare, but also that the statecraft of the Roman Caesars had given his ambitions a mighty impulse which soon developed into a dangerous will to power. Absorbed by his plans he endeavored by every means to make the federation of the Cheruski, Chatti, Marsi, Bruk-teri and others permanent after they had achieved the destruction of the Roman legions in the Teutoburger Forest. After the final retreat of the Romans he soon engaged in a bloody war with Marbod, the issue of which was solely the rulership in Germany. When Herman's aim to raise himself from the elected leadership of the Cheruski to kingship over this and