on repeating itself for nearly a century, the cardinals wanting a larger share in Church government and emoluments, the Popes refusing to stint themselves in the full enjoyment of their despotic power. The victory at last, as was inevitable, remained with the Popes, and in the course of the sixteenth century the cardinals lost again the rights they had hitherto maintained, and were reduced simply to advisers, whom the Pope might consult or not as he pleased, but whose opinions could not bind him.

It seemed like a Nemesis, that the Popes, who since Gergory VII.'s time were so ingenious in inventing oaths to entangle men's consciences and bring everything under their own power, now themselves took oaths, which they regularly broke. On the other hand, it is a riddle how the very cardinals who elected a Sixtus IV., an Innocent VIII., and an Alexander VI., one after the other, and thereby broke their own oaths, could suppose a Pope would be really withheld, by swearing to certain conditions at his election, from the seductions of absolute power. It was perhaps the lesser evil that the Popes eventually triumphed, for the despotism of an oligarchy is apt to be more oppressive than that of a single individual.

Unquestionably the influence over Church life exercised by the cardinals was mainly an injurious one. The institution was a later artificial creation, a foreign and disturbing element newly interpolated, a thousand years after the foundation of the Church, into the original hierarchy based on the ordinance of Christ and the Apostles. The cardinals wanted to excel the wealthiest bishops in expenditure, pomp, and number of servants, and Rome and the environs did not supply means for this. They wanted to provide their nephews and friends with benefices, and to enrich their families. In their interest, and to satisfy their wants, the order of the Church had to be disintegrated, heaping incompatible offices on one person to be allowed,1 and the system of increasing the revenues of the Curia by simony to be constantly extended. It was they who lived and battened on the grasping corruption of the Church. Before the thirteenth century there were only two examples of the union of the cardinalate with foreign bishoprics, but under Innocent IV. (1250) it became common, and thus the Roman Church supplied the precedent of the contempt

2

1 This was carried so far in the fourteenth century that one cardinal held five hundred benefices. Cf. "De corrupto Eccles. statu," Lydius' edition of Werke Clemang. 1614, p. 15.

2 Alv. Pelag. De Planct. Eccl. ii. 16, f. 52.

and neglect of official duties. Jacob of Vitry thought, even in his day, the revenues of the whole of France were insufficient for the expenditure of the cardinals.1 The great Schism, from 1378 to 1429, was ascribed by Western Christendom solely to their greed and lust of power.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the cardinals sometimes elected Popes not of their own body, but this never occurred after the middle of the fifteenth. During all the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century papal elections took place within a few days of the decease of the last Pope, but after the Papacy had reached the summit of its power, and the Pope was regarded as the spouse of the Church, widowed by his death, long vacancies, sometimes of years, became common. It seemed as if the cardinals wanted to show the world by a rare irony how easily the Church could get on without him from whom, in the new theory, all her authority was derived. Thus Celestine IV. was elected after a vacancy of two years, Gregory X. after three, Nicolas IV. after one. Two years and three months elapsed between his death and the election of Celestine v. There was a vacancy of eleven months after the death of Benedict XI., and of 1 Acta Sanct. Bolland. 23 Jun. p. 675.

two years and four months after Clement V., and the Christian world had to get accustomed to every conclave being the theatre of intrigues and quarrels between the French and Italian nations, which fought for the possession of the Papacy, till at last the French acquired exclusive possession of it.

The German nation was practically excluded from the College of Cardinals at that time. The German. Popes, from 1046 to 1059, made no German cardinals. During the contest of the Papacy against the Salic and Hohenstaufen emperors, some Germans who declared themselves against the Emperor were made cardinals; as Cuno, Cardinal-bishop of Præneste in 1114, who, more papal than the Popes, filled all Germany with excommunications in his office of Legate. After him there is the Cluniac, Gerhard, and Ditwein in 1134. Then Conrad of Wittelsbach, and Siegfried of Eppenstein, were appointed on account of their hostility to the Hohenstaufen, and Conrad of Urach by Honorius III. After him, the only German cardinal in the thirteenth century is Oliverius of Paderborn, and then, for above a century and a half, no German enjoyed the dignity. We must remember that every German would lean to the imperial side, and this, especially after French

policy became dominant in the Curia, would secure their exclusion. Urban VI., in 1379, when repudiated by the French and in the extremest distress, was the next to name some German cardinals.

§ XIV.-The Curia.

If we describe the great change which took place between the end of the eleventh century and about 1130, in the space of some forty years, by saying that the Roman Church became the Roman Court, this indicates a phenomenon of world-wide historical interest in its enor

mous consequences. and a Court is in truth a very great one. By the Church of Jerusalem, or Alexandria, or Ephesus, or Rome, or Carthage, had always been understood a Christian people united with their bishop and presbyters, a community of clergy and laity bound together by the ties of brotherhood.1 Ordinary matters were settled in the permanent synod of the bishop and his clergy; weightier and extraordinary matters in a council composed of the neighbouring bishops. In such a Church there were laymen bishops and priests teaching and dispensing

The distinction between a Church

1 Thus in the well-known definition of St. Cyprian (Ep. 69), "Ecclesia est sacerdoti plebs adunata et pastori grex adhaerens."