Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/239

Rh investitures the difficulty of the common notion was already perceived. Bonizo bishop of Sutri cut the knot by denying that the empire had ever passed into the hands of the Franks; it pertained still to the inheritance of the Greeks: the German claim was fictitious. Still its existence under the Franconian or the Suabian emperors was too pressing a reality to be explained away; and the extreme view taken by imperialists, that Charles's elevation was simply obtained by right of conquest, was naturally enough balanced by an equal exaggeration on the other side, which saw in the event of the year 800, nothing less than a supreme example of the power inherent in the successor of saint Peter to displace and create empires. In such fashion it came about that Innocent the Third was able to state this audacious falsification of history as a cardinal fact in the relations of the church to the world. No discovery could have been more momentous. What the pope had given he could take away. By the death of the emperor the jurisdiction of the empire reverted into the hands of the pope; and it lay in his power to decide when the vacancy should be terminated. If there was a double election it was for him to say which was the legitimate candidate; without his sanction the title of either remained null. The pope, in other words, had the right of controlling not the coronation of the emperor (that by universal consent rested with him), but the actual appointment of the king of Germany: and this advance took place just at a time when the emperor was gradually subsiding into something like a national German sovereign, and when the Avignonese pope had already sunk into a virtual dependent of the king of France. Never could the universality of the pretension be less justified, and never could the political character of the papacy be less disguised.

Perhaps the work that extols the papal prerogative to its highest pitch is the treatise Of the Power of the Pope