Читать книгу The Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273. Investiture Contest, Crusades & The Famous Conflicts онлайн

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ECCLESIASTICAL DIVISIONS of GERMANY

showing the growth of the provinces Magdeburg and Hamburg-Bremen.

In civilising the marks Otto had striven hard to use the Church to secure the extension of the royal power. ¹⁶ But the lay nobles were not slow to see that Otto’s trust in bishops and abbots meant a lessening of their influence, and resented any material extension of ecclesiastical power. The Saxon chieftains—half-heathens themselves at heart—did their very best to prevent the Christianisation of the Wends, knowing that it would infallibly result in a close alliance between the crown and the new Christians against their old oppressors. Even the churchmen of central Germany watched Otto’s policy with a suspicious eye. Typical of this class is Archbishop Frederick of Mainz, the centre of every conspiracy, and the would-be assassin of his sovereign. If his policy had prevailed, the Church would have become a disruptive force of still greater potency than the dukedoms. But a new school of churchmen was growing up willing to co-operate with Otto. His youngest brother, Bruno, presided over his chancery, and made the royal palace as in Carolingian times the centre of the intellectual life of Germany. Bruno ‘restored’ as we are told, ‘the long-ruined fabric of the seven liberal arts,’ and, like our Alfred, was at the same time the scholar and the statesman. From his efforts sprang that beginning of the general improvement of the German clergy that made possible the imperial reformation of the Papacy. Moreover, Bruno carried out a reform of discipline and of monastic life that soon made Germany a field ripe to receive the doctrines that were now beginning to radiate from Cluny to the remotest parts of the Christian world. Side by side with the religious revival came the intellectual revival that Bruno had fostered. Widukind of Corvey wrote the annals of the Saxons; the abbess Hrotswitha of Gandersheim sang Otto’s praises in Latin verse, and wrote Latin comedies, in which she strove to adopt the methods of Terence to subjects chosen in order to enhance the glories of religious virginity. The literary spirit touched Otto himself so far that he learnt to read Latin, though he never succeeded in talking it. Under Bruno’s care grew up a race of clerical statesmen, far better fitted to act as Otto’s ministers than the lay aristocracy with its insatiable greed, ruthless cruelty, and insufferable arrogance. It now became Otto’s policy, since he had failed to wrest the national duchies to subserve his policy, to fill up the great sees with ministerial ecclesiastics of the new school. The highest posts were reserved to his own family. His faithful brother, Bruno, became Archbishop of Cologne, and was furthermore intrusted with the administration of Lotharingia. Otto’s bastard son, William, succeeded the perfidious Frederick as Archbishop of Mainz. Otto now stood forth as the protector of the clergy against the lay nobles, who, out of pure greed, were in many cases aiming at a piecemeal secularisation of ecclesiastical property. The incapacity of a spiritual lord to take part in trials affecting life and limbs had already led to each bishop and abbot, who possessed feudal jurisdiction, being represented by a lay ‘Vogt’ (advocatus) in those matters with which he was himself incompetent to deal. The lay nobles sought to make their ‘advocacy’ the pretext of a gradual extension of their power until the bishop or abbot became their mere dependant. But this course was not to the interest of the crown. If the domains of the crown were to be administered by the local magnates or to be alienated outright, if the jurisdiction of the crown was to be cut into by grants of immunities to feudal chieftains, it was much better that these should be put into spiritual rather than into secular hands. Otto therefore posed as the protector and patron of the Church. Vast grants of lands and immunities were made to the bishops and abbots, and the appointment to these high posts, or at least the investiture of the prelates with the symbols of their office, was carefully kept for the king. The clergy, who in the days of Henry had feared lest the king should lay hands on their estates, joyfully welcomed Otto’s change of front. It was not clear to them as it was to Otto, that the royal favour to the Church was conditional on the Church acting as the chief servant of the State. Otto would brook no assertion of ecclesiastical independence, such as had of old so often set bounds to the empire of the Carolings. He desired to attach the Church to the State by chains of steel; but he carefully gilded the chains, and the German clergy, who were neither strong theologians nor sticklers for ecclesiastical propriety, entered as a body into that dependence on the throne which was to last for the best part of a century, and which was in fact the indispensable condition of the power of the Saxon kings in Germany. The unity of the Church became as in England the pattern of the unity of the State, and in a land which had no sense of civil unity, Saxon and Frank, Lorrainer and Bavarian were made to feel that they had common ties as citizens of the Christian commonwealth. Resistance of William of Mainz.