Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/56

 preached to ears which were never free from ghastly records of slaughter, and to souls perpetually startled by the portents of an eventful epoch.

The story of the Papacy itself in the fourteenth century is as important and striking as that of any of the larger European States. The State of the Church had been built up by successive papal assumptions on the basis of religious authority perverted into secular feudalism, and by means of extravagant tolls levied upon the religious devotion of Christendom. The dramatic surrender of the Emperor Henry at Canossa in 1077, followed by the bequest of the Countess of Modena a few years later, set the coping-stone on a principality which then extended from the Lombard kingdom of Naples to the banks of the river Po. The subjection of England by Innocent III., at the beginning of the thirteenth century, was as thorough in its way as that of Germany by Gregory VII.; for John not only resigned his crown and kingdom into the hands of the papal legate, but received them back in the character of a tributary vassal. And, though John's cleverness overreached itself, yet he doubtless saw clearly enough, as other monarchs saw before and afterwards, that resistance to the Pope meant a paralysing isolation, whilst submission to him brought effective aid and solid advantages. As a matter of fact, Innocent actively assisted the English King against his subjects from the moment when his contumacy came to an end.

The Italian Lothario Conti, known to us as Innocent III., raised the assumptions and usurpations of Rome to the highest pitch. He imposed submission