Papacy

There was no comparison between the two from the point of view of the East. The new Rome, where the emperor reigned, prevailed over the old, which was practically abandoned to the barbarians. She was still by courtesy given the precedence, but that was all; the council in Trullo (692) even claimed to impose reforms on her. When Rome, abandoned by the distant emperors, was placed under the protection of the Franks (754), relations between her and the Greek Church became gradually more rare, the chief occasions being the question of the images in the 8th century, the quarrel between Photius and Ignatius in the 9th, the affairs of the four marriages of the emperor Leo VI. and of the patriarch Theophylact in the i oth. On these different occasions the pope, ignored in ordinary times, was made use of by the Byzantine government to ratify measures which it had found necessary to adopt in opposition to the Greek episcopate.

These relations were obviously very different from those which had been observed originally, and it would be an injustice to the Roman Church to take them as typical of her relations with other Christian bodies. She had done all she could to defend her former position. Towards the end of the 4th century, when southern Illyricum (Macedonia, Greece, Crete) was passing under the authority of the Eastern emperor, she tried to keep it within her ecclesiastical obedience by creating the vicariate of Thessa lonica. Pope Zosimus (417) made trial of a similar organization in the hope of attaching the churches of the Gauls more closely to himself. He also vainly struggled against the autonomy of Africa.

Gregory the Great, 590-604.

It was Gregory I. who, though with no premeditated intention, was the first to break this circle of autonomous or dissident Churches which was restricting the influences of the apostolic see. As the result of the missions sent to England by him and his successors there arose a church which, in spite of certain Irish elements, was and remained Roman in origin, and, above all, spirit and tendency. In it the traditions of old culture and religious learning imported from Rome, where they had almost ceased to bear any fruit, found a new soil, in which they flourished. Theodore, Wilfrid, Benedict Biscop, Bede, Boniface, Ecgbert, Alcuin, revived the fire of learn ing, which was almost extinct, and by their aid enlightenment was carried to the Continent, to decadent Gaul and barbarian Germany. The Churches of England and Germany, founded, far from all traditions of autonomy, by Roman legates, tendered their obedience voluntarily. In Gaul there was no hostility to the Holy See, but on the contrary a profound veneration for the great Christian sanctuary of the West.

The surprising thing is that, although Rome was then included within the empire of the Franks, so that the popes were afforded special opportunities for activity, they showed for the most part no eagerness to strengthen their authority over the clergy beyond the Alps. Appeals and other matters of detail were referred

to them more often than under the Merovingians. They gave answers to such questions as were submitted to them; the machinery moved when set in motion from outside; but the popes did not attempt to interfere on their own initiative. The Frankish Church was directed, in fact, by the government of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. When this failed, as hap pened during the wars and partitions which followed the death of Louis, the fate of this Church, with no effective head and under no regular direction, was very uncertain. It was then that a clerk who saw that there was but an uncertain prospect of help from the pope of his time, conceived the shrewd idea of appealing to the popes of the past, so as to exhort the contemporary generation through the mouth of former popes, from Clement to Gregory. This design was realized in the celebrated forgery known as the "False Decretals" (see DECRETALS).

Nicholas I., 858-867.--Hardly were they in circulation through out the Frankish empire when it happened that a pope, Nicholas I., was elected who was animated by the same spirit as that which had inspired them. There was no lack of opportunities for intervening in the affairs not only of the Western but of the Eastern Church, and he seized upon them with great decision. He staunchly supported the patriarch Ignatius against his rival, Photius, at Constantinople ; he upheld the rights of Teutberga, who had been repudiated by her husband, Lothair II. of Lorraine, against that prince and his brother, the emperor Louis II. ; and he combated Hincmar, the powerful metropolitan of Rheims. It was in the course of this last dispute that the False Decretals found their way to Rome. Nicholas received them with some reserve ; he refrained from giving them his sanction, and only borrowed from them what they had already borrowed from authentic texts, but in general he took up the same attitude as the forger had ascribed to his remote predecessors. The language of his successors, Adrian II. and John VIII., still shows some trace of the energy and pride of Nicholas. But the circumstances were becoming difficult. Europe was being split up under the influence of feudalism ; Christendom was assailed by the bar barians, Norsemen, Saracens and Huns ; at Rome the papacy was passing into the power of the local aristocracy, with whom after Otto I. it was disputed from time to time by the sovereigns of Germany. It was still being held in strict subjection by the latter when, towards the end of the 11th century, Hildebrand '(Gregory VII.) undertook its enfranchisement.