4 o LIBERATION
offer resistance, but he hoped to prevail over them by recourse to ecclesiastical discipline. The King might well have been content to give in exchange for such gifts an investiture which at bottom was only a claim to the Empire's higher right of possession over the goods of the Imperial Church; but as one who knew the real German situa- tion and believed that the Pope also could not be unaware of it, he looked upon the offer as a gross attempt at fraud in order to make him give up investiture. He assented nevertheless but, realizing that the ecclesiastical dignitaries would not permit themselves to be stripped of rights, goods and honours attendant upon their positions as Im- perial princes through a mere stroke of the Papal pen, and that the worldly princes would be terrified by the enormous growth of the royal power and by the loss of ecclesiastical benefices they had so comfortably enjoyed, the King made a proviso that the agreement must be recog- nized by the Church in Germany and by the Imperial princes.
When the treaty was solemnly signed in St. Peter's a storm of in- dignation seized all those who were affected and therewith the whole Gregorian party. Henry demanded that the right of investiture be restored to him, and likewise insisted upon the crown, Pascal re- fused and that same evening he and his cardinals were imprisoned. That night an indignant city arose to avenge the deed of violence; and after the bloody fighting of the following days the King retreated, dragging the Pope and the Curia outside the walls. There he kept them under strict arrest for sixty days, immuring some in castles and some in a camp on the other side of the Arno; and, with barbaric threats, he tried to wrest from them what he wanted. The petitions of all who in behalf of the beleaguered city and of a Church in dire peril of schism threw themselves at Pascal's feet, finally caused the bewildered Pontiff to give way. The son of Canossa's Penitent ob- tained the Treaty of Ponte Mammolo from an humbled Pope who was not of Gregory's steel. This treaty recognized Henry's un- qualified right of investiture, proclaimed an amnesty without excep- tion, and recorded that the Pope had promised on oath never to im- pose the ban on the King. After he had been hastily crowned in the Leonine no people applauded the deed Henty rode off north- ward. Pope Pascal, however, immediately found himself surrounded by angry ecclesiastics who demanded that the treaty be broken.
PASCAL
