Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/491

1024-1122.] ITALY 471 count. Having consolidated their possessions on the main land, the Normans, under Robert Guiscard s brother, the great Count Roger, undertook the conquest of Sicily in 10GO. After a prolonged struggle of thirty years, they wrested the whole island from the Saracens ; and Roger, dying in 1101, bequeathed to his son Roger a kingdom in Calabria and Sicily second to none in Europe for wealth and magnificence. This while, the elder branch of the Hauteville family still held the title and domains of the Apulian duchy ; but in 1127, upon the death of his cousin Duke William, Roger unite! the whole of the future realm. In 1130 he assumed the style of king of Sicily, inscribing upon his sworl the famous hexameter Appulus et Calaber Sieulus mihi scrvit et Afer. This Norman conquest of the two Sicilies forms the most romantic episode in mediaeval Italian history. By the con solidation of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily into a powerful kingdom, by checking the growth of the maritime republics, and by recognizing the over-lordship of the papal see, the house of Hauteville influenced the destinies of Italy with more effect than any of the princes who had previously dealt with any portion of the peninsula. Their kingdom, though Naples was from time to time separated from Sicily, never quite lost the cohesion they had given it ; and all the disturbances of equilibrium in Italy were due in aftar days to papal manipulation of the rights ac quire! by Robert Guiscard s act of homage. The southern regno, in the hands of the popes, proved an insurmountable obstacle to the unification of Italy, led to French interfer ence in Italian affairs, introduced the Spaniard, and main tained in those rich southern provinces the reality of feudal sovereignty long after this alien element had been elimin ated from the rest of Italy. ar of For the sake of clearness, we have anticipated the course vesti- of events by nearly a century. We must now return to the res> date of HiHebrand s elevation to the papacy in 1073, when he chose the memorable name of Gregory VII. In the next year after his election Hildebrand convened a council, and passed measures enforcing the celibacy of the clergy. In 1075 he caused the investiture of eccle-iu.sti- cal dignitaries by secular potentates of any degree to be condemned. These two reforms, striking at the most cherished privileges and most deeply -rooted self-indulgences of the aristocratic caste in Europe, inflamed the bitterest hostility. Henry IV., king of Germany, but not crowned emperor, convene! a diet in the following year at Worms, where Gregory was deposed and excommunicated. The pope followed with a counter excommunication, far more formidable, releasing the king s subjects from their oaths of allegiance. War was thus declared between the two chiefs of Western Christendom, that war of investitures which out-lasted the lives of both Gregory and Henry, and was not terminated till the year 1122. The dramatic epi sodes of this struggle are too well known to be enlarged upon. lu his single-handed duel with the strength of Germany, Gregory received material assistance from the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. She was the last heiress of the great house of Canossa, whose fiefs stretched from Mantua across Lombardy, passed the Apennines, included the Tuscan plains, and embraced a portion of the duchy of Spoleto. It was in her castle of Canossa that Henry IV. performed his three days penance in the winter of 1077; and there she made the cession of her vast domains to the church. That cession, renewed after the death of Gregory to his successors, conferred upon the popes indefinite rights, of which they afterwards availed themselves in the consoli dation of their temporal power. Matilda died in the year 1115. Gregory had passed I ft fore her from the scene of his contest, an exile at Salerno, whither Robert Wiskard carried him in 1084 from the anarchy of rebellious Rome. With unbroken spirit, though the objects of his life were unattained, though Italy and Europe had been thrown into confusion, and the issue of the conflict was still doubtful, Gregory expired in 1085 with these words on his lips : " I loved justice, I hated iniquity, therefore in banishment I die." The greatest of the popes thus breathed his last ; but the new spirit he had communicated to the papacy was not destined to expire with him. Gregory s immediate successors, Victor III., Urban II., and Paschal II., carried on his struggle with Henry IV. and his imperial anti- popes, encouraging the emperor s son to rebel against him, and stirring up Europe for the first crusade. When Henry IV. died, his own son s prisoner, in 1106, Henry V. crossed the Alps, entered Rome, wrung the imperial coronation from Paschal II., and compelled the pope to -grant his claims on the investitures. Scarcely had he returned to Germany when the Lateran disavowed all that the pope had done, on the score that it had been extorted by force. France sided with the church. Germany rejected the bull of investiture. A new descent into Italy, a new seizure of Rome, proved of no avail. The emperor s real weakness was in Germany, where his subjects openly expressed their discontent. He at last abandoned the contest which had distracted Europe. By the concordat of Worms, 1122, the emperor surrendered the right of investiture by ring and stall , and granted the right of election to the clergy. The popes were henceforth to be chosen by the cardinals, the bishops by the chapters subject to the pope s approval. On the other hand the pope ceded to ths emperor the right of investiture by the sceptre. But the main issue of the struggle was not in these details of ecclesiastical govern ment ; principles had been .at stake far deeper and more i widely reaching. The respective relations of pope and 1 emperor, ill-defined in the compact between Charles the i Great and Leo III., were brought in question, and the two chief potentates of Christendom, no longer tacitly concord ant, stood against each other in irreconcilable rivalry. Upon this point, though the battle seemed to be a drawn one, the popes were really victors. They remained inde pendent of the emperor, but the emperor had still to seek the crown at their hands. The pretensions of Otto the Great and Henry III. to make popes were gone for ever. Age of the Communes. The final gainers, however, by the war of investitures Rise of were the Italians. In the first place, from this time f ^. e forward, owing to the election of popes by the Roman curia, C1 the Holy See remained in the hands of Italians ; and this, though it was by no means an unmixed good, was a great glory to the nation. In the next place, the antagonism of the popes to the emperors, which became hereditary in the Holy College, forced the former to assume the protectorate of the national cause. But by far the greatest profit the Italians reaped was the emancipation of their burghs. During the forty-seven years war, when pope and emperor were respectively bidding for their alliance, and offering | concessions to secure their support, the communes grew in self-reliance, strength, and liberty. As the bishops had helped to free them from subservience to their feudal masters, so the war of investitures relieved them of depend ence on their bishops. The age of real autonomy, signalized by the supremacy of consuls in the cities, had arrived. In the republics, as we begin to know them after the war of investitures, government was carried on by cfficers called consuls, varying in number according to custom and accord ing to the division of the town into districts. _ These magistrates, as we have already seen, were originally appointed to control and protect the humbler classes. But,