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

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Otto’s cosmopolitan imperialism soon brought him in collision with Germany, and especially with the German Church. He set up a new archbishopric at Gnesen in Poland, where reposed the relics of the martyred Adalbert, and surrounded it with the mystical number of seven suffragans. In the same way, Sylvester, in recognising Stephen, the first Christian Duke of Hungary, as a king, established a Hungarian archbishopric at Gran. These acts involved a recognition of the national independence of Poland and Hungary. Wise as they were, they were resented in Germany as being directly counter to the traditional Saxon policy of extending German influence eastwards, by making the bishops subject to the German metropolitans at Magdeburg and Salzburg. The practical German bishops saw with disgust the Emperor giving up the very corner-stone of the policy of Henry and Otto I. The deep differences of sentiment came to a head in a petty dispute as to whether a new church for the nuns of Gandersheim should be consecrated by Bernward of Hildesheim, the diocesan, who favoured Otto’s fancies, or by the metropolitan Willegis of Mainz, who bitterly lamented the outlandish ideas of his old pupil. Sylvester upheld Bernward, but the German bishops declared for Willegis, and paid no heed to the papal censures that followed quickly on their contumacy. They refused even to be present at the Councils in which Sylvester professed to condemn the Archbishop of Mainz. The German clergy were thus in open revolt from Rome, and they were, as we have seen, the leaders of the German nation. Breakdown of Otto’s system in Italy.