prelates were drawn to Rome and detained there by processes spun out interminably. They died off by shoals in that unhealthy city, the home of fevers, as Peter Damiani calls it, and now suddenly a new Papal right was devised, of giving away all benefices vacated by the death or resignation of their occupants at Rome. Clement IV. announced it to the world in 1266, while at the same time broadly affirming the right of the Pope to give away all Church offices without distinction.1

Then came the reservations of the French Popes at Avignon. They reserved to themselves a certain number of bishoprics, which, however, in France they often had to bestow according to the pleasure of the king. At the same time commendams were introduced, whereby they sometimes gave abbacies to secular priests, and other Church dignities to laymen.

The oath of obedience or vassalage the bishops had now to take to the Pope was understood as binding them to unconditional subjection in political as well as ecclesiastical matters, whence Innocent III. declared the German bishops perjured who acknowledged any other emperor than Otho whom he had chosen.2 It was by means of this oath that the Popes carried the 1 Sext. Decr. 3, 4. 2. 2 Registr. de Neg. Imp. Ep. 68.

exclusion of the Hohenstaufen from the throne.1 According to Pius II., a bishop broke his oath who uttered any truth inconvenient for the Pope, and he required the Archbishop of Mayence by virtue of it to convoke no imperial parliament without the Pope's consent.2

Thus the Roman Court became the universal heir of all former authorities and institutions in the Church. It had appropriated the rights of metropolitans, synods, bishops, national Churches, and besides that, the powers formerly exercised by the emperors and Frankish kings, in ecclesiastical matters. The inevitable consequence was to cripple the pastoral, whether parochial or diocesan administration throughout the Church, and introduce a general state of religious disease and decay, bishops and parish priests withdrawing more and more from their pastoral charges. This gave an immense lift to monasticism, with its strongly organized centralization, and the great religious communities became the centres of all active Church life. The exemptions and other privileges, only to be obtained at Rome, bound them closely to the Papacy, whose great support they were well known to be against the bishops. Leo x. assembled a commission, composed of members of the Religious 1 Raynald. Annal. a. 1206, 13; Leibnit. Prodr. Cod. Jur. Gent. i. 11, 12. 2 Gobellin, Comm. Pii II., 65, 143.

M

1

Orders in Rome, to consult on the means for forwarding papal interests and their own against their common enemies, the bishops. "For," says Pallavicini, "every monarchical Government must have a select body of subalterns in every province of the kingdom not subject to the immediate local authorities; hence exemptions." The monks were the willing and devoted servants and agents of the Roman Court against the bishops,3 who were looked upon and treated as its born enemies.

"2

At no time or place has the contradiction been so glaring between theory and practice, principles and proceedings, as during those centuries at Rome and Avignon. The Popes condemned all taking of interest, but the most elaborate banking business was carried on under their very eyes, and in close connexion with the Curia, who would have lost the breath of life, if the Florentine and Siennese capitalists and brokers had not advanced the required sums at usurious interest to the prelates, place-hunters, and numberless litigants. The papal bankers were a protected and privileged class, while everywhere else their fellows were under the ban, 1 Bzovius, Annal. Eccl. xix. a. 1516.

Storia del Concil. di Trento, 12, 13. 8.

3 Bossuet says, "La cour de Rome regardant les évêques comme ses ennemis, n'a plus mis sa confiance et ses espérances que dans cette multitude d'exempts."-Euvres, xxi. 461. Ed. de Liége, 1768.

and collected their debts and interest without mercy under shelter of Papal censures.1 As early as the twelfth century the Curia had made the discovery, which they were already reaping the fruits of in the thirteenth, that it was greatly for their interest to have a number of bishops, dioceses, and beneficiaries in their debt all over Europe, who were all the more pliant the more easily they could be held to payment by excommunication, and by putting on the screw of interest, at a time when ready money could generally be procured with difficulty only, and at an enormous interest. Thus Cardinal Nicolas Tudeschi, the first canonist of his day, observes that the Church dignities were so loaded with excessive imposts and extortions that they were always subject to debts, and nothing of their revenues was available for religious purposes. Cardinal Zabarella saw clearly enough that the root of the ecclesiastical corruption was the doctrine of legal sycophants about the papal omnipotence, whereby they had persuaded the Popes that they could do whatever they liked. "So

2

1 Cf. Biblioth. de l'Ecole de Chartres, 19° année (Paris 1858), p. 118, and Peter Dubois' account, about 1306 ("De Recup. Terræ Sanctæ," Bongars, Gesta Dei per Francos, ii. 315), of how one had to borrow many thousands "sub gravibus usuris ab illis qui publicé Papæ mercatores vocantur" to spend on the Pope and Cardinals.

2 Tract de Concil. Basil. in Pragmatica Sanctio (ed. Paris, 1666), p. 913.

completely has the Pope destroyed all rights of all lesser Churches that their bishops are as good as non-existent." Chancellor Gerson says, still more emphatically, "In consequence of clerical avarice, simony, and the greed and lust of power of the Popes, the authority of bishops and inferior Church officers is completely done away with, so that they look like mere pictures in the Church, and are almost superfluous."2 The Bishop of Lisieux observes later how the whole constitution of the Church is in a state of dissolution, and everything has long been full of quarrels and divisions through the conduct of the Popes. And the Church, torn to pieces with discontents and dissensions, made the impression on thinking men like Gerson, Pelayo, d'Ailly, Zabarella, and others, of having become "brutal," a hard prisonhouse, where only dungeon-air could be breathed, and therefore full of hypocrisy and pretence. The Venetian Sanuto, in 1327, reckoned that half the Christian world was under excommunication, including the most devoted servants of the Popes, so lavish had they been in the use of ban and interdict since 1071.* Epis

1 De Schismatibus (ed. Schardius), pp. 560, 561.

2 Opp. (ed. Dupin), ii. p. 1, 174.

3 In a letter to Louis XI. See Durand de Maillane, Libertés de l'Eglise Gallicane, iii. 6, 61, sqq.

Epist. ap. Bongars. Gesta Dei per Francos, ii. 310.