Papacy

It was admitted, however, throughout the whole Church that the Holy See had an appellate jurisdiction, and recourse was had to it on occasion. At the council of Sardica (343) an attempt had been made to regulate the procedure in these appeals, by recognizing as the right of the pope the reversing of judgments, and the appointment of fresh judges. In practice, appeals to the pope, when they involved the annulling of a judgment, were judged by the pope in person.

But the intervention of the Holy See in the ecclesiastical affairs of the West, which resulted from these appeals, was only of a limited, sporadic and occasional nature. Nothing could have been more removed from a centralized administration than the condition in which matters stood with regard to this point. The pope was the head of the Church, but he exercised his authority only intermittently. When he did exercise it, it was far more frequently at the request of bishops or princes, or of the faithful, than of his own initiative.

Beginning of Temporal Power.

The Roman church had from a very early date possessed considerable wealth. Long before Constantine we find her employing it in aid of the most distant churches, as far afield as Cappadocia and Arabia. Her real property, confiscated under Diocletian, was restored by Constan tine, and since then had been continually increased by gifts and bequests. In the 4th and 5th centuries the Roman Church possessed property in all parts of the empire; but gradually, whether because the confiscations of the barbarian emperors had curtailed its extent, or because the popes had made efforts to concentrate it nearer to themselves, the property of the Holy See came to be confined almost entirely to Italy. In the time of St. Gregory there subsisted only what lay in Byzantine Italy, the Lombards having confiscated the property of the Church as well as the imperial domains. During the quarrels between the papacy and the Byzantine Empire her domains in lower Italy and Sicily also disappeared as time went on, and the territorial possessions of the Roman Church were concentrated in the neighbourhood of Rome.

It was then, towards the middle of the 8th century, that the pope, who already exercised a great influence over the government of the city and province of Rome, defending her peacefully and with difficulty against the advancing Lombard conquests, saw that he was forced, short of the protection of the Greek Empire, to put himself under the protection of the Frankish princes.

Thus there arose a kind of sovereignty, disputed, it is true, by Constantinople, but which succeeded in maintaining itself. Rome, together with such of the Byzantine territories as still subsisted in her neighbourhood, was considered as a domain sacred to the apostle Peter, and entrusted to the administration of his successor, the pope. To it were added the exarchate of Ravenna and a few other districts of central Italy, which had been recently con quered by the Lombards and retaken by Pippin and Charlemagne. Such was the foundation of the papal state.

The higher places in the government were occupied by the clergy, who for matters of detail made use of the civil and mili tary officials who had carried on the administration under the By zantine rule. But these lay officials could not long be content with a subordinate position, and hence arose incessant friction, which called for constant intervention on the part of the Frankish sov ereigns. In 824 a kind of protectorate was organized, and serious guarantees were conceded to the lay aristocracy.

Shortly afterwards, in the partition of the Carolingian empire, Italy passed under the rule of a prince of its own, Louis II., who, with the title of emperor, made his authority felt in political matters. Shortly after his death (875) fresh upheavals reduced to nothing the power of the Carolingian princes ; the clergy of Rome found itself without a protector, exposed to the animosity of the lay aristocracy. The authority of the pontificate was seriously impaired by these circumstances. One of the great families of Rome, that of the vestiarius Theophylact, took possession of the temporal authority, and succeeded in influencing the papal elections. After Theophylact the power passed to his daughter Marozia, a woman of the most debased character; then to her son Alberic, a serious-minded prince ; and then to Alberic's son Octavius, who from "prince of the Romans" became pope (John XII.) when yet a mere boy. After Marozia and Alberic and the rest another branch of the same family, the Crescentii, exercised the temporal powers of the Holy See ; and after them the same regime was continued by the counts of Tusculum, who were sprung from the same stock, which sometimes provided the Church with the most unlikely and least honourable pontiffs.