CHAP. VII.

INNOCENT AND VENICE.

165

the whole Christian people. The destruction of Zara; the diversion of the army of the Lord, which ought not to have moved to the right or the left, from their lawful enemies the perfidious Saracens against faithful Christian nations; the contumelious repulse of the Legate of the Roman See; the contempt of our excommunication; the violation of the vow of the Cross in despite of the crucified Saviour. Among these enormous misdeeds we will not name those perpetrated in Constantinople, the pillage of the treasures of the church, the seizure of her possessions, the attempt to make the sanctuary of the Lord hereditary in your nation by extorting unlawful oaths. What reparation can ye make for this loss to the Holy Land by your misguiding to your own ends an army so noble, so powerful, raised at such enormous cost, which might not only have subdued the Holy Land, but even great part of the kingdom of Egypt? If it has been able to subdue Constantinople and the Greek Empire, how much easier Alexandria and Egypt, and so have obtained quiet possession of Palestine? Ascribe it not then to our severity, but to your own sins, that we refuse to admit the Abbot of St. Felix, whom ye call Archbishop of Zara. It would be a just offence to all Christian people if we should seem thus to sanction your iniquity in the seizure of Zara, by granting the pall of an archbishop in that city to a prelate of your nomination." The Pope called on the Venetians to submit and make satisfaction for all their crimes against the Holy See; on making that submission he would suspend the censure which the whole world expected to fall on the contumacious republic. We hear not that Venice trembled at this holy censure; history records no proof of her fear or submission.

A.D. 1206.

Through Venice flowed into Western Europe almost all those remains of ancient art, and even of ancient letters which had some effect in awakening the slumbering genius of Latin Europe. The other western kingdoms were content mostly with reliques; perhaps the great marts of Flanders, and the rising Hanse Towns had some share,

more or less direct in Eastern commerce; but of all except religious spoils, Venice alone, and through Venice Italy, was moved with some yet timid admiration of profaner works, such as the horses of Lysippus, which now again stand in her great Place of St. Mark. Venice after the conquest of Constantinople became a half Byzantine city. Her great church of St. Mark still seems as if it had migrated from the East; its walls glow with Byzantine mosaic; its treasures are Oriental in their character as in their splendour.

CHAP. VIII.

CRUSADE AGAINST HERETICS.

167

CHAPTER VIII.

INNOCENT AND THE ANTI-SACERDOTALISTS.

against

THE Crusades had established in the mind of men the maxim that the Infidel was the enemy of God, Crusade and therefore the enemy of every true servant of heretics. God. The war, first undertaken for a specific object, the rescue of the Saviour's sepulchre, that indefeasible property of Christ and Christendom long usurped by lawless force, from the profane and sacrilegious hands of the Mohammedan idolaters (as they were absurdly called), had now become a general war of the Cross against the Crescent, of every Christian against every believer in the Korân. Christian and unbeliever were born foes, foes unto death. They might hold the chivalrous gallantry, the loyalty, and the virtue each of the other, in respect: absolute necessity might compel them to make treaties which would partake in the general sanctity of such covenants; yet to these irreconcileable antagonists war was the state of nature; each considered it a sacred duty, if not a positive obligation, to extirpate the hostile faith. And in most Mohammedan countries the Christian had the claim of old possession; he fought for the recovery of his own. Mohammedanism had begun in unprovoked conquest; conquest was its sole tenure; and conquest might seem at

least a part of its religion, for with each successive race

which rose to power among the Mohammedans the career of invasion began again; the frontiers of Christendom were invested or driven in. All warfare, therefore, even carried into the heart of Mohammedanism, was in some degree defensive, as precautionary and preventive of future aggression; as aspiring to crush, before it became too formidable, a power which inevitably, when again matured, would be restrained by no treaty. Foreign subjugation, subjugation of Christian countries, was at once a part of the

The Nomad races,

creed, and of the national manners. organised by a fanatic faith, were arrayed in eternal warfare against more settled and peaceful civilisation. The Crusades in the north of Germany against the tribes of Teutonic or Sclavonian race might claim, though in less degree, the character of defensive wars: those races too were mostly warlike and aggressive. The Teutonic knights were the religious and chivalrous descendants of the Templars and the Hospitallers."

But according to the theory of the Church, the erring believer was as declared an enemy to God as the Pagan or the Islamite, in one respect more inexcusable and odious, as obstinately resisting or repudiating the truth. The heretic appeared to the severely orthodox Christian as worse than the unbeliever; he was a revolted subject, not a foreign enemy. Civil wars are always the most ferocious. Excommunication from the Christian Church implied outlawry from Christian society; the heretic forfeited not only all dignities, rights, privileges, immunities, even all property, all protection by law; he was to be pursued, taken, despoiled, put to death, either by the ordinary course of justice, (the temporal authority was bound to execute, even to blood, the sentence of the ecclesiastical court,) or if he dared to resist by any means whatever: however peaceful, he was an insurgent, against whom the whole of Christendom might, or rather was bound at the summons of the spiritual power to declare his estates, even his dominions if a sovereign, were not merely liable to forfeiture, but the Church assumed the power of awarding the forfeiture, as it might seem best to her wisdom. The army which should execute the

war;

CHAP. VIII.

SEEMING PEACE OF CHRISTENDOM.

169

mandate of the Church was the army of the Church, and the banner of that army was the Cross of Christ. So began Crusades, not on the contested borders of Christendom, not in Mohammedan or heathen lands, in Palestine, on the shores of the Nile, among the Livonian forests or the sands of the Baltic, but in the very bosom of Christendom; not among the implacable partisans of an antagonistic creed, but among those who still called themselves by the name of Christians.

of reign of

The world, at least the Christian world, might seem to repose in unresisting and unrepining subjection Apparent reunder the religious autocracy of the Pope, now at bus quiet the zenith of his power. However Innocent III., Innocent III. in his ostentatious claim of complete temporal supremacy as a branch of his spiritual power, as directly flowing from the established principles of his religious despotism, might have to encounter the stern opposition of the temporal sovereigns Philip of Swabia, Otho IV., Philip Augustus, or the Barons of England; yet within its clear and distinct limits that supremacy was uncontested. Emperor or King, however he might assert his right to his crown in defiance of the Pope, would fail at the same time to profess himself a dutiful son and subject of the Church. Where the contest arose out of matters more closely connected with religion it was against the alleged abuse of the power, not against the power itself, which he appealed when he took up arms. But there was

No

a secret working in the depths of society, which at the very moment, when it was most boastful of its unity, broke forth in direct spiritual rebellion in almost every quarter of Christendom. Nor was it the more watchful and all-pervading administration of Innocent III. which detected latent and slumbering heresies; they were open and undisguised, and carried on the work of proselytism, each in its separate sphere with dauntless activity. From almost every part of Latin Christendom a cry of indignation and distress is raised by the clergy against the teachers or the sects, which are withdrawing the people from their control. It is almost simultaneously heard in England, in Northern France, in Belgium, in Bretagne, in the