History of the city of Rome in the Middle Ages
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| History of the city of Rome in the Middle Ages |
When the gigantic struggle of the Middle Ages between the spiritual and secular powers was fought out, no mission of universal importance to the European world remained to the popes. With the absolute dominion that they had acquired in the thirteenth century, they turned to a suicidal policy against themselves and the Church.
They corrupted the Church with countless cases of abuse. Even in their impotence at Avignon under the protection of France, the popes, who acquired their great international position solely through opposition to the empire, again evoked the ancient war. But their challenge was answered by the reforming spirit of the West.
Bold thinkers now disputed not only, like the Hohenstaufens, the secular, but also the spiritual jurisdiction of the pope. Heresy appeared in the evangelical forms of Wycliffe and Huss. Faith was severed from knowledge. It seemed as though the nations, matured by the indefatigable work of thought, would fall from the decayed framework of the Catholic Church, even as they had burst the bonds of the Catholic empire.
The doctrines of the Ghibel- lines revived in their philosophic view of the world the idea of the empire and of the Imperial Monarchy. Germany pronounced its empire independent of the Roman Papacy, and the genius of Germany gave indications of its approaching severance from Rome in State and Church. In the fourteenth century the Ghibelline idea, feudal and imperialist, purified from its origin and given philosophic form, triumphed over the Guelf, in so far as the Guelf principle, identified with Latin citizenship, was at the same time the principle of the Roman Church.
The Guelfs had fought for civic and national freedom in the first place, for the Catholic Church in the second, and had prevented the union of the spiritual and temporal power in the emperor. The Ghibellines now disputed the union of the two powers in the pope. After Dante, their political philosophy acquired the power of critical science. Like an increasing torrent, the Ghibelline spirit flowed onward with growing strength and ended in the German Reformation, while the Guelf, limited more and more by local conditions, receded into Catholicism.
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