with success; but he had likewise great taste for the fine arts, especially for architecture, both ornamental and military. He restored the walls of many of the greatest cities; built bridges and other useful works. He had large menageries, supplied from the East and from Africa. He sometimes vouchsafed to send some of the more curious animals about for the instruction and amusement of his subjects. The Ravennese were delighted with the appearance of some royal animals. He was passionately fond of field sports, of the chase with the hound and the hawk; his own book on falconry is not merely instructive on that sport, but is a scientific treatise on the nature and habits of those birds, and of many other animals. The first efforts of Italian sculpture and painting rose under his auspices; the beautiful Italian language began to form itself in his court: it has been said above that the earliest strains of Italian poetry were heard there: Peter de Vineâ, the Chancellor of Frederick, the compiler of his laws, was also the writer of the earliest Italian sonnet. Nor was Peter de Vineâ the only courtier who emulated the King in poetry; his beloved son Enzio, many of his courtiers, vied with their King and his ministers in the cultivation of the Italian language; and its first fruits the rich harmonious Italian poetry. His own age beheld with admiring amazement the magnificence of Frederick's court, the unexampled progress in wealth, luxury, and knowledge; the peace of the realm, notwithstanding some disturbance by those proud barons, whose interest it was to maintain the old feudal and seignorial rights; the reluctance of the clergy to recede from the complete dominion over the popular mind; the taxation, which weighed, especially as Frederick became more involved in the Lombard war, on all classes. Still the world had seen no court so splendid, no system of laws so majestically equitable; a new order of things appeared to be Some of these poems I have read in a collection of the Poeti del Primo Secolo, Firenze, 1814. A small volume has been published by the Literary Union of Stuttgard (1543), Italienische Lieder des Hohenstaufischen Hofes in Sicilien. It contains lays by thirteen royal and noble authors. Dante, in his book De Vulgari Eloquentia, traces to the court of Frederick the origin of the true and universal Italian language. We return to this subject. CHAP. XIII. DANGER TO THE CHURCH. 369 arising; an epoch to be commencing in human civilisation. But this admiration was not universal: there was a deep and silent jealousy, an intuitive dread in the Church, and in all the faithful partisans of the Church of remote, if not immediate danger; of a latent design, at least a latent tendency in the temporal kingdom to set itself apart, and to sever itself from the one great religious Empire, which had now been building itself up for centuries. There was, if not an avowed independence, a threatening disposition to independence. The legislation, if it did not directly clash, as it seemed to do, with the higher law of the Church; if it did not make the clergy wholly subordinate, degraded them in some respect to the rank of subjects; if it did not abrogate, it limited what were called the rights and privileges, but which were in fact the separate rule and dominion of the clergy; at all events, it assumed a supremacy, set itself above, admitted only what it chose of the great Canon Law of the Church; it was self-originating, self-asserting, it had not condescended to consult those in whom for centuries all political as well as spiritual wisdom had been concentered; it was a legislation neither emanating from, nor consented to by the Church. If every nation were thus to frame its own constitution, without regard to the great unity maintained by the Church, the vast Christian confederacy would break up; Kings might assume the power of forbidding the recurrence to Rome as the religious capital of the world; independent kingdoms might aspire to found independent churches. This new knowledge too was not less dangerous because its ultimate danger was not clearly seen; at all events, it was not knowledge introduced, sanctioned, taught by the sole great instructress, the Church. Theology, the one Science, was threatened by a rival, and whence did that rival profess to draw her wisdom? from the Heathen, the Jew, the 8 The Pope seemed to consider that Frederick's new constitutions must be inimical to the Church. "Intelleximus siquidem quod vel proprio motu, vel seductus inconsultis consiliis perversorum, novas edere constitutiones intendis ex quibus necessario sequitur ut dicaris Ecclesiæ persecutor et obrutor VOL. IV. publicæ libertatis.”—lib. v. Epist. 91, apud Raynald. 1231. He reproaches the Archbishop of Capua as "Frederico constitutiones destructivas salutis et institutivas enormium scandalorum edenti voluntarius obsequens."-Apud Höfler, ii. p. 333. 2 B Unbeliever; from the Pagan Greek, the Hebrew, the Arabic. That which might be in itself harmless, edifying, improving, when taught by the Church, would but inflame the rebellious pride of the human intellect. What meant this ostentatious toleration of other religions, if not total indifference to Christ and God; if not a secret inclination to apostasy? What was all this splendour, but Epicurean or Eastern luxury? What this poetry, but effeminate amatory songs? Was this the life of a Christian King, of a Christian nobility, of a Christian people? It was an absolute renunciation of the severe discipline of the Church, of that austere asceticism, which however the clergy and religious men alone could practise its angelic, its divine perfection, was the remote virtue after which all, even Kings (so many of whom had exchanged their worldly robes for the cowl and for sackcloth) ought to aspire, as to the ultimate culminating height of true Christianity. It was Mohammedan not merely in its secret indulgences, its many concubines, in which the Emperor was still said to allow himself Mohammedan licence; some of his chosen companions, his trusted counsellors, at least his instructors in science and philosophy were Mohammedans ; ladies of that race and religion appeared, as has been said, at his court (in them virtue was a thing incredible to a sound churchman). The Saracens whom he had transplanted to Nocera were among his most faithful troops, followed him in his campaigns; it was even reported, that after his marriage with Isabella of England, he dismissed her English ladies, and made her over to the care of Moorish eunuchs. Such to the world was the fame, such to the Church the evil fame of Frederick's Sicilian court; exaggerated no doubt as to its splendour, luxury, licence, and learning, as well by the wonder of the world, as by the abhorrence of the Church. Yet, after all, out of his long life, long if considered not by years but by events, by the civil acts, the wars, the negotiations, the journeyings, the vicissitudes, crowded into it by Frederick's own busy and active ambition and by the whirling current of affairs, the time during which he sunned himself in this gorgeous volup CHAP. XIII. GREGORY AND THE DECRETALS. 371 tuousness must have been comparatively short, intermittent, broken. At eighteen years of age Frederick left Sicily to win the Imperial crown: he had then eight years of the cold German climate and the rude German manners during the establishment of his Sovereignty over the haughty German Princes and Prelates. Then A.D. 1220 to A.D. 1225 to eight years in the South, but in the four first the 1224. rebellious Apulian and Sicilian nobles were to be brought under control, the Saracens to be reduced to obedience, and transported to Apulia: during the later four, was strife with the Lombard cities, strife about 1228. the Crusade, and preparation for the voyage. Then his Eastern campaign, his reconciliation with the Church. Four years followed of legislation; and perhaps the nearest approach to indolent and luxurious peace. AD. 1230 to Then came the revolt of his son. Four years more to coerce rebellious Germany, to attempt in vain to coerce rebellious Lombardy: all this was to close, with his life, in the uninterrupted immitigable 1238. feud with Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. 1234. A.D. 1234 to The Decre tals. The Pope Gregory IX., it is impossible to decide how far influenced by the desire of overawing this tendency of temporal legislation to assert its own independence, determined to array the higher and eternal law of the Church in a more august and authoritative form. The great code of the Papal Decretals constituted this law; it had now long recognised and admitted to the honours of equal authority the bold inventions of the book called by the name of Isidore; but during the Pontificate of Innocent III. there had been five distinct compilations, conflicting in some points, and giving rise to intricate and insoluble questions." Gregory in his old age aspired to be the Justinian of the Church. He entrusted the compilation of a complete and regular code to Raimond de Pennaforte, a noble Spaniard, related to lixitatem, confusionem inducere videbantur; aliquæ vero vagabantur extra volumina supradicta, quæ tanquam incertæ frequenter in judiciis vacillabant." h❝Sane diversas constitutiones, et decretales epistolas, prædecessorum nostrorum in diversa sparsas volumina, quarum aliquæ propter nimiam similitudinem, et quædam propter contrarie--In Præfat. tatem, nonnullæ etiam propter suam pro the royal house of Arragon, of the Dominican Order, and now the most distinguished jurist in the University of Bologna. Raymond de Pennaforte was to be to the Canon what Irnerius of Bologna had been to the revived Roman law. It is somewhat singular that Raymond had been the most famous antagonist of the Arabian school of learning, the most admired champion of Christianity, in his native Spain. The first part of these Decretals comprehended the whole, in a form somewhat abbreviated; abbreviation which, as some complained, endangered the rights of the Church on important points; but was defended by the admirers of Raymond of Pennaforte, who declared that he could not err, for an angel from Heaven had constantly watched over his holy work. The second contained the Decretals of Gregory IX. himself. The whole was promulgated as the great statute law of Christendom, superior in its authority to all secular laws as the interests of the soul were to those of the body, as the Church of greater dignity than the State; as the Pope higher than any one temporal sovereign, or all the sovereigns of the world. Though especially the law of the clergy, it was the law binding likewise on the laity as Christians, as religious men, both as demanding their rigid observance of all the rights, immunities, independent jurisdictions of the clergy, and concerning their own conduct as spiritual subjects of the Church. All temporal jurisprudence was bound to frame its decrees with due deference to the superior ecclesiastical jurisprudence; to respect the borders of that inviolable domain; not only not to interfere with those matters over which the Church claimed exclusive cognisance, but to be prepared to enforce by temporal means those decrees which the Church, in her tenderness for human life, in her clemency, or in her want of power, was unwilling or unable herself to carry into execution. Beyond that sacred circle temporal legislation might claim the full allegiance of its temporal subjects; but the Church alone could touch the holy person, punish the delinquencies, Chiflet, quoted by Schroeck, xxvii. 64. Raymond de Pennaforte was canonised by Clement VIII., in 1601. |