Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/506

Rh 1056-77. Saxony. Gregory VII. 488 and Anne began forthwith to rule the state. lly and by he was compelled by the diet to share his duties with Adalbert, archbishop of Bremen, who was not less ambitious than Anno, but was as gay, sociable, and worldly as his rival was proud and morose. In the end Adalbert made himself complete master of Henry, who thus grew up under the most diverse influences. The young king was generous, and endowed with considerable intellectual gifts; but, passing as he did from the gloomy palace in Cologne, where he lived a monk’s life under terrible censors, to the palace in Bremen, where he was petted and ﬂattered, he became wayward and self-willed. He assumed the duties of govern- ment at the age of ﬁfteen, and soon made enemies of nearly all the chief princes. In Saxony, where, like his father, he held his court, be excited by a series of iujudicious pro- ceedings intense hostility. While the Ottos were in pur- suit of the imperial phantom, a number of the crown lands in this duchy had been seized by nobles whose descend- ants now held them. Henry insisted on restoring these; and, as Henry I. had taken possession of the domains of his Carolingian predecessors, so Henry IV. claimed the domains of his Saxon predecessors. As if this were not enough, he built a number of fortresses which the free peasantry imagined were intended for prisons; he kept in conﬁnement the heir to the duchy, and he persistently spoke of the Saxons in a tone of supreme contempt. All classes were thus combined against him; and in 1073 the universal discontent found expression in a vast popular assembly, attended alike by freemen and by nobles, and in which—such was the gratitude of the church for royal favours—a leading place was taken by the archbishop of Magdeburg and by the bishop of Halbertstadt-, the former the brother, the latter the nephew, of Archbishop Anno. Henry was surprised by a band of rebels in his fortress of Harzburg, near Goslar. Attended by a few followers he escaped, and appealed to the princes for support; but he could :uot compel their aid, and of free will they would grant him nothing. After tedious and degrading negotia- -tions, -il'].'Wl1lCl1 he was accused of every kind of crime, he w‘as'at last ‘obliged to yield the demands of his enemies. As thésedemands did not include the destruction of the fortressés, the peasants, fancying they were betrayed, refused to‘:lay _down their arms, and stormed through the duchy, -not" only battering down the detested buildings, but even destroying the chapel of the Harzburg fortress and com- mitting acts of desecration with ruthless fury. This so alarmed the princes, both spiritual and secular, that Henry was able to advance with a large army into Saxony, where in 1075 he gained a decisive victory, and re-established the authority of the crown. - r’ While Germany was in this confused state, Hildebrand hadzbecome pope, as Gregory VII., and in 1075 he issued his'farf1ous decree against the marriage of the clergy and agaiiist their investiture by 1ayrnen,—for boldness and vastness the most magniﬁcent policy ever devised, since, had it been effected, the pope must have become the secular as well as the spiritual lord of Christendom. So quickly had the reforming zeal of Henry III. made the papacy a power which threatened to overshadow the world. To the decree as to investiture it was impossible for any sovereign to submit, and in Germany there were stronger reasons than elsewhere for resistance. Half the -hind of the country was held by the clergy, and most of it had been granted to them because, in virtue of their feudal relation to the sovereign, it was supposed that they would .he his most efficient helpers. Had the feudal tie been broken, the crown would soon have vanished, and the con- stitution of mediieval swciety must have undergone a radio ll change. Henry, who had hitherto treated the new pope with excessive respect, and was believed at the Vatican GERMANY [nrs'roI>.r. to have no strength of character, now announced his interi- tion of going to Rome and assuming the imperial title. The pope, to whom the Saxons had been encouraged to make complaint, responded by sending back certain mes- sengers of Henry's, with the command that he should do penance for the crimes of which his subjects accused him. Enraged by this unlooked-for arrogance, .llenry summoned a synod of German bishops, who declared llildebrand deposed. The answer was a bull excommunicating the German king, dethroning him, and liberating his subjects from their oath of allegiance. Never had a pope ventured to take so bold a stt p. It was within the memory of even young men that a German king had dismissed three popes, and raised, one after another, four of his own prelates to the Roman see. And now a pope attempted to drag from his throne the successor of this very sovereign. The effect of the bull was tremen- dous ; no other was ever followed by equally important results. The princes had long been chafing under royal power; they had shaken even so stern an autocrat as Henry III., and the authority of Henry IV. was already visibly lowered. At this important stage in their contest with the crown a mighty ally suddenly offered himself, and, with indecent eagerness, they hastened to associate themselves with him. Their vassals and subjects, appalled by the invisible powers wielded by the head of the church, sup- ported them in their rebelliousness. Henry had looked for no such result as this ; he had not comprehended the inff u- ences which lay beneath the surface, and was horriﬁed by his unexpected isolation. At a diet in Oppenheim he in vain humbled himself before the princes. They turned from him coldly, and decided that the pope should be asked to come to Germany to investigate, along with themselves, the accusa- tions brought against him ; that if, within a year, the sen- tence of excommunication were not removed, the king should lose his crown ; and that in the meantime he should live in retirement. 0 N ow came the strange scene at Canossa which burned Scene at For three days, in the 011103->'=* itself into the memory of Europe. depth of winter, the representative of the Caesars, clad in a penitent’s shirt, shivered in the outer court of tlie Countess M athilda’s castle, entreating to be admitted into the pope’s presence. No other mode of escape than complete subjec- tion to Gregory had suggested itself, or was perhaps pos- sible ; but it did not save him. Although the pope in a manner forgave him, the German princes, being resolved not to miss the chance which fortune had given them, met. in his absence and deposed him, electing ludolf, duke of Swabia, as his successor. But Henry’s bitter humiliations transformed his character; they brought out all his latent capacities of manliness. From being a wilful, thoughtless lad, he became a resolute man, with many evil traces indeed of his irregular training, but with a deep conscious- ness of his rights, and a fixed determination to maintain them. Effect of Ilenry's xco1n- muni«:a- tion. The war that followed —the war of investitures—was the Var of opening of that tremendous struggle between the empire ft‘ l and the papacy, which is the central fact of medizeval history, and which, after two centuries of conflict, ended in the exhaustion of both powers. Its details belong more to the history of Italy than to that of Germany, but in Germany its effects were most deeply felt. It was now that the nation plucked the bitter fruits of the seed planted by Otto I. in assuming the imperial crown, and both by Otto and his predecessors and successors in lavishing worldly power upon the church. In the ambition of the spiritual and the secular princes the popes had an immense engine of offence against the emperors; and they unscrup- ulously turned it to the utmost advantage. The most loyal friends of the emperors were the cities. They had been l'C.'tl- ire.