The Jewels of The Papacy

[Evola As He Is]

"The Christian Church and the Roman Empire had their birth about the same time, and have borne throughout a singular relation to each other, whether of antagonism or alliance. The Son of God took the flesh to work out His Father's will on earth, when the heir of the first Caesar had fully established the system of Julius, and gathered every civilised nation under one dominion. Every secular capacity, all the strength and splendour of this world - material enjoyment, despotic ambition, democratic aspiration - had summed themselves up in imperialism, just when every lofty longing and noble faculty of the soul found a divine quickening, a full expression and satisfaction in Christianity. The kingdom not of this world was set up in the world just as the kingdom of this world had attained its fullest, widest, and most glaring manifestation. The two great powers soon discovered and displayed their natural antagonism. The Roman Empire - the unwitting helper and unfolder of the Christian Church by the destruction of Jerusalem and the overthrow of the Hebrew polity - erelong recognised an adversary in that world-renouncing and self-immolating society, and singled it out for destruction. After a combat of three centuries, the mightier power prevailed ; the Empire held out its hand to the Church ; imperialism accepted Christianity. When the two foes became friends, each had somewhat degenerated. The kingdom of this world was waxing weak ; the kingdom not of this world was losing power. The Church, enfeebled as a divine ministrant, was becoming stronger as a secular society, and friendly connection with the Empire served to render the Church still more imperial… The weakness of the falling Empire added to her worldly strength. Too feeble and corrupt to maintain itself in life, it had strength to impart its peculiarities to its nobler intimate. The dying Empire clung close to the Church and wrought transformingly upon her. Pagan Rome did not perish without imparting an idolatrous tincture to her vanquisher. Imperial Rome did not fall without bequeathing her spirit and power, her method and organisation, to her ally ; and both at length reappeared with remarkable exactitude in papal Rome… The dignity of the imperial city gave some prominence to the head of the Christian community there ; and the fall of the Western Empire (476) left the Roman bishop the greatest personage in the chief city of the world. The barbarians beheld in the somewhat secularised Church the representative of the faith which most of them professed, and the representative of the empire for which they retained some reverence even while subverting it. She impressed them at once with a sense of her earthly majesty, with a feeling of her spiritual power. Of this twofold impression the Roman bishop had the chief benefit. The foremost dweller in the city of the Caesars, he grew every day greater… As the clergy were becoming priests, the bishops were becoming lords… the Christian Church became a kingdom of this world, its doctrines a mass of mingled truths and fables, its worship a heap of ceremonies, its table an altar, its ministry a sacrificing priesthood, its bishops prelates, and the bishop of Rome sovereign pontiff. " (1)

Three points need to be qualified in this panoramic account of the beginnings of the popedom, which serves as an introduction to the examination of J. Evola's views on the relations between the Empire and the Church and on matters pertinent to these.

The first is pivotal to a correct understanding of what made the connection between the Empire and the Church possible in the first centuries of this era : the common racial origin of the emperors - who, from Septimius Severus (193-198) onwards, were, if not of Afro-Asiatic stock, at least of non Roman descent, as were, according to Tacitus, most knights and senators as early as in Nero's days - and of most of the Church leaders - fathers - of that time. The "idolatrous tincture" pagan Rome imparted "to her vanquisher" as it died out originated in the oriental religions which had infiltrated and triumphed in Rome, bringing about the complete destruction of the mos maiorum ; "the western invasion of the mystery cults is hardly a miraculous conversion of the even-tempered, practical-minded Indo-European to an orgiastic emotionalism foreign to his nature. These religions came with their peoples, and so far as they gained new converts, they attracted for the most part people of Oriental extraction who had temporarily fallen away from native ways in the western world." (2)

Secondly, there is no need to refer to Gibbon's work to gather evidence that the non- and anti-Aryan of early substance of Christianity, by sapping Roman political and spiritual values, by acting, from the Seven hills, as a magnet for myriads of Semites, was not foreign to the decline and fall, nor to the caricatural character of the so-called Eastern empire. In Byzantium, "… the Christian idea (in those concepts in which the supernatural was emphasized) seemed to have become absorbed by the Roman idea in forms that again elevated the imperial idea to new heights, even though the tradition of this idea, found in the center constituted by the `eternal' city, had by then decayed... The Byzantine imperial idea displayed a high degree of traditional spirit, at least theoretically... The empire once again was sacrum and its pax had a supernatural meaning. And yet, even more so than during the Roman decadence, all this remained a symbol carried by chaotic and murky forces, since the ethnic substance was characterized, much more so than in the previous imperial Roman cycle, by demon worship, anarchy, and the principle of undying restlessness typical of the decadent and crepuscular Hellenic-Eastern world." (3) The Imperial idea in its original Augustan form could not possibly be assumed faithfully and even less be achieved by a clergy made up of representatives who, like John Chrysostom, Nectarius, Cyriacus, to name but a few patriarchs of the sixth century, were overwhelmingly, either of mixed birth, or Asian.

The third point relates to the fact that it is "With the gradual strengthening of the power of the bishops, and a tendency on the part of some to look to Rome as the hub of the Church, as well as capital of the empire," that "a corresponding assertion by the bishop of Rome of his right to superintend the other bishops would provide the substructure, the fundament of the institution which would subsequently be known as the papacy." (4) Whether the words "Tu es petrus" granted or not a superiority of power over the other apostles and whether or not such putative superiority was meant to descend to Peter's successors are theological issues which have no relevance from our point of view. The bottom line is that the Petrine function had to be organised and institutionalised before Christianity could actually attempt to compete with the imperial authority and to supplant it. The edict of Milan (A.D. 313) issued by the Mesian emperor Constantine, which went a step further than the edict of toleration (A.D. 311) by the Illyrian emperor Galerius, paved the way for this institutionalisation. "Under imperial protection, but with some notable exceptions, the Catholic church expanded rapidly throughout this period of the Roman Empire. It was an official act of Constantine in that same century, however, that laid the foundation for the traditional Roman Catholic Church as we know it, although it eventually separated from the Eastern or Greek Church. By turning the imperial attention away from Rome and by moving the capital of the empire from Rome to Byzantium (A.D. 330), Constantine left Rome to its bishop.

Over the centuries, with persistent, but not unchallenged assertion of central authority, the Roman bishop acquired the title of papa or pope, father of fathers, father of bishops, and other secular and political titles. The traditional concept of the papacy as the supreme hierarchical authority of the Roman Catholic Church was well established in the early part of the Middle Ages.

The bishop of Rome particularly, because of the very lack of a strong political, temporal authority in the West, stepped in to fill the void of authority, thus strengthening the power of the Roman See even more. After the death of Constantine, there continued a definite trend towards centralization with the bishop of Rome assuming a dual role, not only as the ecclesiastical and religious leader of the people, but also as a secular authority in matters political and temporal." (5) "… from the hour when Constantine, in the language of the Roman law, `Deo jubente,' by the command of God, translated the seat of power to Constantinople, from that moment there never reigned in Rome a temporal prince to whom the Bishops of Rome owed a permanent allegiance." (6)

It typically never occurred to R. Guenon, for whom "The distinction between the spiritual power and the temporal power results from a rupture of the primordial unity", "It was only at a later stage of development that this distinction was to be transformed into opposition and rivalry, destroying the original harmony and so making way for the struggle between the two powers, while the inferior functions in their turn laid claim to supremacy, resulting finally into total confusion, negation, and the overthrow of all hierarchy, " and "following their divergence, the royal principle had to assume a position of dependence upon the spiritual principle, allegedly the sole inheritor and proprietor of spiritual legitimacy", (7) that the union of the spiritual and of the temporal in the person of the Roman political leader as pontifex maximus, which the French author was not afraid to describe as "an anomaly", going so far as to wonder whether the "Roman tradition may not have a particular character that allows us to consider this as something other than a mere usurpation" (8), does not, contrary to his assumption, date back to the beginning of the Empire, but to the early days of Rome ; it never crossed his mind that it was the legal establishment of Christianity which introduced, confirmed, and, so to speak, gave official recognition to the distinction of the spiritual power and the temporal power in Rome. R. Guenon's error is entirely based on a total ignorance of what religion and politics meant in ancient Rome and of the rationale behind their indivisibility since the distant past in ancient Rome, as well as in ancient Germany, where « By old custom, the head of a house was its priest as well as judge and ruler", too. (9)

For the Church, it was basically a matter of dividing into two separate powers what was seen previously as two indivisible aspects of one and the same principle, of then opposing them dualistically while claiming to be the only source and custodian of the highest one and striving to dispossess the legitimate authority and bearer of both of the other, only to ultimately lay claim to both. The self-legitimisation of this otherworldly ex-propriation, this immaterial hold-up, is based on Matthew 22:21 and on Romans 13:2. If the formula "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's" characterises a dualistic view whereby human institutions and supernatural order are seen as disconnected and as separate, "For there is no power but from God : and those that are ordained of God." links together again human institutions and supernatural order by a sleight of hand : if Caesar derives his power from God, what one renders to Caesar is ultimately rendered to God.

For at least three reasons, it is important to trace the major episodes of the strife between the Church and the Empire, which was started by the former.

First, it is important to show how dramatically detrimental it was for Europe in leading to the weakening of the Western Empire and to the formation of the Nation-State and in absorbing and wasting at times almost all the energies of the European monarchs.

Then, it is also important to show that there has always been a more or less latent, a more or less open, struggle between the popes and contemporary political governments and historical figures with whom they came in contact, and that, if the exhortation to "render unto Caesar" implies that there were times when the popes felt obliged to conform to the will of the State, the study of the history of the relations between the Church and the State demonstrates that the opposite was true in most cases. The remark of F. de Coulanges, quoted in a footnote to `Revolt against the Modern World' "that although Pepin, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious swore to `defend' the Church, we should not be deceived by the meaning of this expression since in those days it had a different meaning than it does today. To defend the Church meant, in the parlance and in the mind-set of that period, to protect and exercise authority over her at the same time. What was called `defence' was really a contract that implied the state of dependence of the protected one, who was subjected to all the obligations the language of those times conveyed in the word fides, including an oath of allegiance to the ruler" - that remark does not carry much weight in the face of historical reality, of the unrelenting attempts made by the Church from its onset to undermine and to exercise authority, both on the plane of principles and in the political field, over a power which it designated as `temporal' and which acquiesced in this limiting and incapacitating appellation.

Meta-history - understood, not in a Hegelian, Spencerian or Marxist perspective, but as an analysis of "the decisive forces and influences (,) often irreducible to the simple human element, be it individual or collective", at work in past events, causes, and leaders - is wishful thinking, when it does not rest on a sound knowledge of history. (10) This is the third reason.

Sight will not be lost of Christian political thought, which stems from `the City of God' and which, despite the numerous refinements and facelifts it underwent over the centuries, remained faithful to Augustine of Hippo's core tenets in this respect : "the intrinsic or metaphysical superiority of the spiritual over the temporal ; the association of political power with sin and with all that is ignoble or distasteful in human life ; the idea of man's dependence upon Divine grace bestowed through the Church ; and the suggestion that earthly princes should place themselves and their resources at the Church's disposal." (11)

To substantiate this study, the substantive will be extracted from the essential substance of the best works on the subject, that is to say, those works in which the extremely rich material provided by history is presented clearly, well-organised and rigorously composed, since, as to the main events which marked the history of the struggle between the Empire and the Church, with the exception of the coronation of Charles in 800, they are the subject of a certain consensus among medievalists.

We will proceed, so to speak, by layers.

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"In the centuries after Gelasius the role of the papacy in temporal affairs was profoundly modified by the total breakdown of Roman imperial authority in the West. England fell to the Angles and Saxons, Gaul to the Franks, Spain to the Visigoths. In Italy itself a brief period of imperial reconquest - directed from Constantinople by the emperor Justinian (527-65) - was ended in 568 by the invasion of the Lombards, the last of the Teutonic peoples to ravage Italy. Thereafter the Byzantine emperors retained control only of south Italy, Sicily, and a few coastal strongholds like Ravenna. This situation produced two results of the greatest importance for the future development of church-state relations. First the popes emerged increasingly as temporal governors of Rome and the surrounding region. Then they abandoned their old allegiance to the Byzantine emperors and formed a new alliance with the Frankish kings that led eventually to the creation of a new empire in the west under papal auspices." (12)

Four different positions on the question of the relations between the Church and the State were intertwined in Patristic times : Donatism opposed the interference of the State in the Church and Arianism subordinated the Church to the State as the `Son' and the `Holy Spirit' to `God the Father', while Gelasius, who seems to have been of African descent and who, as recalled in `Heathen Imperialism', insisted that after Christ no man can be at the same time king and priest, posited, if we are to believe Gratian of Bologna, who cited Gelasius 600 years later in his `Decretum', that the two pillars of the Christian society, namely the "holy authority of bishops" and the "royal power", are both of divine origin and independent, each in its own sphere, irrespective of the fact that their concerns overlap ; the submission of the emperor, now a Christian, to the ecclesiastical law was preached by the followers of Ambrose, whose Patrician origins do not prejudge in any way his racial background. In 390, Ambrose required and obtained that Theodosius pay personal penance for the retaliatory massacre the latter had ordered in Thessalonica after one of his generals was murdered there. Theodosius was the first temporal leader in Europe to let himself be publicly humiliated by a representative of the Church.

By the time of Gregory I (590-604), the pope was de facto the ruler of Rome. "Gregory claimed to be nothing more than what he was, the most prominent bishop of a degenerate though not yet utterly corrupted church, and the faithful and obedient subject of the Eastern Empire. His prompt obedience to the civil power had a somewhat unseemly manifestation in the obsequious eagerness with which he transferred his allegiance from the rigorous but upright and magnanimous Maurice to his murderer the centurion Phocas, and in the strain of unworthy adulation in which he congratulated the accession, proclaimed the virtues, and anticipated the long, happy, and benignant reign of that foul and bloodstained usurper.

But this ill-bestowed flattery, however misbecoming the noble character of Gregory, was profitable to the Roman See. There are not many more painful and pathetic scenes in history, scenes where savage cruelty is encountered by sublime resignation, than the slaughter of the Emperor Maurice and his five sons at Chalcedon (602), followed a few years after by the slaughter of his widow Constantina and her three daughters on the same spot. Among royal and imperial monsters there has scarcely appeared one at once more horrible and contemptible than their murderer Phocas. This meet successor of Caligula, Nero, and Heliogabalus, is memorable not only as a monster, but as a benefactor of the Roman See, and holds a somewhat conspicuous place in ecclesiastical history as a helper and hastener of the papal supremacy. In gratitude for the obsequiousness of Gregory, and for the devotion of Boniface III., Phocas conferred upon the latter the title of supreme and universal bishop so fiercely branded by the former, and formally declared the Roman See the head of Christendom (606). The bounty of such a patron has been slighted and slurred over by Roman Catholic writers, while Protestant writers have loudly magnified and keenly enjoyed it. An impartial historian, however, must needs acknowledge in this concession of Phocas at once a recognition of prominence and a bestowal of dignity, a gratification and a provocation of ambition, the first clear, distinct, and formal step in the conversion of the Roman bishopric into the papal monarchy. The donation of Constantine is far more respectable, but far less authentic, than the concession of Phocas ; in the infamous centurion the papacy may claim an undoubted befriender, and the Roman Church must needs make the best of her earliest imperial paramour.

The Roman bishops of the seventh century were personally insignificant, and remain unmemorable... Not a single pontiff occupies the human memory, while Omar and Ali, Khaled and Amrou fill the imagination, and while Columban, Aidan, Colman, and Aidan's convert and friend the holy and valiant King Oswald of Northumberland, still uplift and gladden the souls of men. The singular reputation of Pope Honorius (626-638), whom the sixth general council of the Church reckoned among the heretics, has not rendered him interesting to posterity ; nor have the sufferings of Martini. (649-655), who was slowly done to death by the manifold cruelties of the Greek Emperor Constans, won him a conspicuous rank in the army of martyrs. But neither the dubious theology of Honorius nor the ignominious treatment of Martin stayed the very slow but steady progress of the Roman See towards the papal monarchy. The thick intellectual darkness of the time, and the utter bewilderment of Christendom, helped more and more to raise the Roman bishops into spiritual and ecclesiastical dictators. Councils and churches, though far from acknowledging their infallibility, more frequently consulted and deferred to their opinions. Theological disputes were settled more and more by their authority and for their advantage." (13)

The first phase of iconoclasm (726-787), coupled with the renewed threat of the Lombards, provided the papacy the much-awaited opportunity to shift alliances from Byzantium to the Frankish kingdom. Pope Gregory I, although he acknowledged alliance to Emperor Leo III, the Syrian, the Iconoclast, defied his will by demanding that he stop interfering in Church matters ; "... in Italy the devotion to images was still stronger, and the imperial authority was far weaker. A man of vigour and ability occupied the Roman chair. In Gregory II. the popular passion found a powerful exponent, and the imperial iconoclast encountered a formidable champion of idolatry. Gregory upbraided and resisted Leo, and at last defied and disowned his unbending sovereign, withheld the tribute, and withdrew the allegiance of Italy, 728. The Romans clave to their bishop and their idols ; Rome became practically independent, with her bishop for her real if not her recognised ruler..." (14) Gregory III - the son of a Syrian -, who forbad the German Christians to eat horse-flesh, pursued aggressively the policy of his predecessor toward the Eastern Empire. From that time, the papacy became a past master at playing off its enemies one against the other. "For nearly two hundred years it could balance the Lombards against the representatives of the Greek emperor. Eventually the Lombards became too powerful in the north, and two Frankish kings were called in to subdue them. This might have left the papacy weak as against a Frankish emperor who controlled all north Italy, but the danger was averted by the break-up of the Frankish. In the eleventh century the Normans captured the greater part of south Italy and Sicily : here again, pope Nicholas II saw the wisdom of allying with them, and his successors balanced their new allies against the Greek cities of the south and the new western empire which centred in Germany." (15) Two more important factors increased papal prestige and power from the time of Gregory I : the fact that the Church was then the largest landowner in Italy, and the pope's missionary work.

« As the Roman bishops had taken no harm from the curtailment of Christendom by the Arabs towards the East and South, they drew direct and signal benefit from its extension towards the North. The conversion of nations became more and more advantageous to them. In attempting the conversion of England, Gregory the Great mainly sought a spiritual conquest. In the conversion of Germany, more than a century later, Gregory II. and Gregory III. welcomed a papal acquisition. The Italian Angustine and his companions, who landed in Kent in 596, were missionaries from Rome. The English Winifred or Boniface and his countrymen who about 720 began to preach in Germany, must, notwithstanding many high endowments and much spiritual fervour, be regarded as emissaries of Rome. From Rome Boniface sought his commission ; at Rome he swore subjection to Pope Gregory and his successors ; more than once he renewed the vow, and thrust upon others the submission professed by himself. He took the style and title of a legate of the Roman See, and combined the life of a missionary and the death of a martyr with the part of a Roman champion. The conquests of the Franks in Germany greatly furthered his work. He followed in the track of Charles Martel, Carloman, and Pepin, and subjected the regions opened by their victorious arms. Rome waxed stronger for these combined labours of the Frankish conquerors and the English missionaries. Boniface holds at once a lofty and an ignoble place in ecclesiastical history ; the apostle of Germany stands forth as a great and pernicious innovator in Christendom. By him for the first time obedience to the Roman bishop was preached as a solemn duty and doctrine as essential as obedience to Christ. He first carried about with the Gospel the novelty of the papal supremacy - a novelty by no means at once or even readily admitted in theory or established in practice, but which slowly made way and grew at last into the papal monarchy.

"With (the) political triumph over the Byzantine Caesars, and this spiritual triumph which Boniface won for it in Germany, the first period of the papacy came to an end, the first act of the papal drama may be said to have closed. Aggrandised by the fall of the Western Empire and the invasion of the Teutons, the bishopric of Rome put forth a distinctly papal character about the beginning of the seventh century at the death of Gregory the Great, who was the last true Roman pastor. The grant of Phocas, without being in the least exaggerated, may be fairly taken as the starting-point in the history of the popedom.

"The whole period from the sixth to the middle of the eighth century, from the destruction of the Western Empire to the severance from the Eastern Empire, ministered to the aggrandisement of the Roman See, and to the growth of nothing else save and except Islam." (16) The secular ambitions of the papacy were coupled with renewed claims for spiritual authority. Gregory I, "as long as he was able,... strove to establish a foundation for the doctrine of the two powers, reasserting to his death the power priestly over the political. Included in the legacy of example and instruction which he left for those who came after him was a wealth of literature by his own hand. In his Dictatus Papae, a summary of guideline principles for supporters of the Hildebrandine reform, it is boldly asserted that the Roman church was founded by God alone, that the Roman pontiff alone is rightly to be called universal, that he alone may use the imperial insignia, that he may depose emperors." (17)

Then, a connection began between the Franks and the papacy, to the benefit, the temporal, material, benefit, of both parties. "Contrary to appearances for Charles (Martel) Frankish and Christian expansion were two sides of the same coin. Utilizing the church for political purposes becomes an administrative practice. Extending the influence of the church effected the improved control of the newly conquered regions of the realm." (18) The coordination of missionary activities with political and military eastward expansion of the Frankish power was already a tenet of the Merovingian policy under Dagobert. The temporal and temporary community of interests between both powers, evidenced by the fact that royal monasteries such as Fulda's and Lorsch's became "pillars of economic and socio-political power with extensive networks…" (19), culminated in the preparations for the deposition of Childeric III and in its aftermath. Pepin, the substantial possessor of the Frankish throne, consulted the pope in 749 as to the disposal of it, nominally occupied by Childeric III. Two years later, pope Zachary approved of the transfer of the throne and, in 751 (752, according to other sources. N.T.E.), pope Boniface crossed the Alps to crown and anoint the new monarch, crowned and anointed again two years later by Zachary. "Almost at once the papacy had occasion to seek the help of its new ally, for in 753 (754, according to other sources. N.T.E.) the Lombards again threatened Rome. Pope Stephen appealed to Pepin ; the king agreed to invade Italy and, most important of all, promised to `return' to the Roman see the lands that he proposed to conquer from the Lombards. That promise was duly fulfilled in 756, (755, according to other sources. N.T.E.) and from that year we can date the beginning of a formal papal claim to sovereignty in central Italy." (20) "Thus the second French dynasty was enthroned to the double advantage of the Roman bishops, who got as much by giving as by receiving - they received a principality and conferred a crown ; they became at once kings and king-makers." (21) "The popes must have known, however, that their title was insecure so long as it was not recognized by the imperial authorities at Constantinople and, moreover, that the emperors there would never willingly acknowledge it. The only real hope of establishing beyond doubt the legitimacy of the papal claim lay in the institution of a new Roman emperor in the West on whom the popes could rely as a friend and protector." (22) Conversely, the Carolingian dynasty and monarchy "gained legitimacy and focus through its Rome oriented Christianization... With the support of the papacy the Frankish Christian realm of the Carolingians could begin turning away from the Greek Christianity of Byzantium, towards its own Imperium Christianum." (23) In this tit for tat, the big winner in the long run would be the papacy.

A word needs to be said about the far-reaching implications of the coronation of Pepin and about the far-reaching implications of his consulting the pope as to the disposal of the Frankish throne. Whether it was introduced by the mayor of the palace or by the pope, the ritual anointment "represented an extraordinary ideological innovation, given that until that time the Frankish kings had risen to the throne by acclamation, and if consensus was also accompanied by mystical charisma, this was generally due to the royal blood flowing in their veins. By having himself anointed with holy oil, Pepin brought into use the ritual recorded in the Old Testament, in which it is told that Saul took control of the kingdom by being anointed by the prophet Samuel. After him, David and Solomon took the throne by being anointed. In the Christian world, a ritual of this kind had already been introduced by the Visigothic kings of Spain, but by this time their kingdom had fallen to the Arabs. Pepin was not just the first Frankish king but also the only Christian king of his times to introduce this sacred symbolism into his coronation, although the kings of England lost little time in following his example. Anointment was not simply a matter of attributing an air of holiness to the king, it also conferred upon him an almost priestly quality, as with the kings of Israel. Pepin could therefore rightfully claim to have been `anointed by the Lord' and assert his own authority over the Church as well as his kingdom, in a manner that he could not have done as a temporal lord who had only been crowned. For his part, Pope Paul I did not hesitate to speak of him as a new David chosen by God to protect the Christian people, and he applied to him the words of the Psalmist, "I have found David my servant ; with my holy oil I have anointed him." Thus the Franks were again ruled by a priest-king, as in the time of the reges criniti or long-haired kings, but this time the sacred charisma was wholly Christian and not pagan as in the case of the Merovingians. It did not preclude the use of the sword, which the king girded by divine will, and which he was required to draw in defense of the faith. Charlemagne was soon to demonstrate the immense advantage that the king of the Franks could gain from this kind of religious legitimacy." (24)

Zachary's decision was not an act of jurisdiction in temporal matters. Of course, it was not. "... This consultation created a precedent most dangerous for the royal power. The head of Christendom gave only counsel, but the faithful were bound to believe that he spoke in the name of God : from this to disposing of the crown was not a long step. All the more since, like Samuel among the Hebrews, he gave holy unction to the king, he made him a sacred personage and marked him with the priestly sign, implying that monarchy was sacerdotal in character. Thus the Church found that it had created for the benefit of the Carolingians a counterfeit of the Jewish kingdom, from which the pagan origin of the Merovingians had preserved them." (25)

"Another Roman pontiff fell out with another Lombard king ; again the Franks poured down from the Alps ; the kingdom of the Lombards fell before the mighty son of Pepin, and Charles the Great and Adrian I. made their triumphant entry into Rome together in 774. Twenty-six years after, the conqueror of so many nations, the lord of the West, again descended into Italy, and marched into Rome as the avenger and restorer of another pontiff, Leo III., accused of enormous crimes by personal enemies, deposed at the instigation of a rival, and wounded in the fury of a sedition. The Romans bowed before the will of the mighty conqueror ; the maimed and slandered pope took oath of his innocence before his illustrious protector ; and on Christmas day, 800, Leo III. placed the imperial crown on the head of Charles the Great, and hailed him Emperor of the Romans. The Western Empire reappeared." (26) The pontiff and the emperor "stood side by side, most strangely and confusedly bound together, each depending upon the other, each at once the master and the servant of the other, the pope a subject of the emperor whom he had made, the emperor the sovereign of his own creator. The Roman bishop rebelled against his Byzantine master, and made himself a Teutonic master, professed to transfer all the rights, powers, and dignities of the emperor of the Romans, including sovereignty over himself, from the direct successor of Julius Caesar, that dwelt at Constantinople, to a German king, took into his own hands the bestowal of that Roman Empire which came into being about the same time as that Christian Church into the topmost place whereof he had thrust himself, and professed to consecrate the dignity which he transferred... It was meet and right" (27) for the bishop of Rome "to become a giver and taker of earthly thrones, to covet and to confer the kingdoms of this world, with all the power and glory of them, to yield to the allurements and assume the prerogatives of that very tempter whom the heavenly King, whose vicar he professed himself, overcame in the wilderness… It was essential to heighten and perfect the worldliness of the kingdom which called itself not of this world, that it should confer the imperial crown and receive an Italian principality. An overseer of Christ's flock claimed at once to represent Christ and to create Caesar, to be a great spiritual prince and a small earthly prince, to be a king and a king-maker. 'The kingdom of our God and of His Christ hath become a kingdom of this world, and it shall last for so long.'" (28)

Charlemagne's coronation (29), a momentous event which very few contemporary sources relayed, marked a turning point in the growing tension between the Church and the State.

It is true that "Charlemagne was in nowise a dependant of the papacy. The principality which he rebestowed was the grant of a sovereign to a subject ; he was the real ruler of Rome, and the veritable master of the priest who had crowned him Caesar. He brooked no independent power in the vast dominion which his genius and valour had gathered together ; he did not even render to the pontiff absolute spiritual obedience" (30) ; it is also true that "On the other hand, Charles, although devotedly attached to the church and the pope, was too absolute a monarch to recognize a sovereignty within his sovereignty." (31) Yet, the very act that had made him the supreme, unchallenged political leader of the then western Europe enabled the pope to re-establish his ascendance over the temporal power : "By one brilliant gesture Pope Leo established the precedent, adhered to throughout the Middle Ages, that papal coronation was essential to the making of an emperor, and thereby implanted the germ of the later idea that the empire itself was a gift to be bestowed by the papacy." (32) As argued by P. Schaff "The pope, by voluntarily conferring the imperial crown upon Charles, might claim that the empire was his gift, and that the right of crowning implied the right of discrowning. And this right was exercised by popes at a later period, who wielded the secular as well as the spiritual sword and absolved nations of their oath of allegiance. A mosaic picture in the triclinium of Leo III. in the Lateran (from the ninth century) represents St. Peter in glory, bestowing upon Leo kneeling at his right hand the priestly stole, and upon Charles kneeling at his left, the standard of Rome. This is the mediaeval hierarchical theory, which derives all power from God through Peter as the head of the church. Gregory VII compared the church to the sun, the state to the moon who derives her light from the sun. The popes will always maintain the principle of the absolute supremacy of the church over the state, and support or oppose a government - whether it be an empire or a kingdom or a republic - according to the degree of its subserviency to the interests of the hierarchy." (33) "Charlemagne did not believe that he held the Empire from the pope who had crowned him and he himself passed the crown on to his son without the participation of the Holy See. The Roman people had acclaimed him, but he did not regard this action as an election ; the coronation was for him only the consecration of his possession of the State. It is none the less true that the initiative had the appearance of coming from the pope, and while the latter only imitated, perhaps by order, the patriarch of Constantinople the act appeared to Christendom as that of a dispenser of crowns. In any case in the middle of the 800 s the imperial dignity was regarded as having its source in the consecration and coronation by the pope ; the latter did not even feel under an obligation to take the emperors from the Carolingian house." (34)

The first period of the struggle between the Empire and the Church was aptly encapsulated by J. Evola in this way :

"During the early centuries of the Christianized empire and during the Byzantine period, the Church still appeared to be subordinated to imperial authority ; at Church councils the bishops left the last word to the ruler not only in disciplinary but also in doctrinal matters. Gradually, a shift occurred to the belief in the equality of the two powers of Church and empire ; both institutions came to be regarded as enjoying a supernatural authority and a divine origin. With the passage of time we find in the Carolingian ideal the principle according to which the king is supposed to rule over both clergy and the people on the one hand, while on the other hand the idea was developed according to which the royal function was compared to that of the body and the priestly function to that of the soul ; thereby the idea of the equality of the two powers was implicitly abandoned, thus preparing the way for the real inversion of relations." (35)

Both the `spiritual power' and the `temporal authority' of the popes advanced, and were greatly furthered by a series of pious frauds and forgeries, of which the Donation of Constantine, the Donation of Charlemagne, the Pseudo-Decretals of Isidore, etc. The latter "appeared early in the ninth century. This collection, falsely ascribed to the famous bishop of Seville, and consisting of decrees falsely ascribed to the early bishops of Rome, loudly proclaimed the power of the priesthood, and elaborately asserted the monarchy of the popes. Enormous assumptions were thrust into the mouths of venerable saints, simple pastors were made to prate about pontifical omnipotence, and the companion of St. Paul was made to talk like the crowner of Charlemagne. The forgery was clumsy and stupid as it was audacious, amusingly defied history, recklessly set at nought chronology, and unblushingly garbled and misquoted Scripture ; but it came out in a congenial time ; though not altogether unchallenged and unassailed, it prevailed with the darkness and grossness of the age, and accomplished its purpose of aggrandising the papacy. This production, in admirable harmony with the presidency of Peter and the donation of Constantine, completed the fortification of falsehood and forgery in which the popedom had intrenched itself, drawing its temporal power from a donation never made, grounding its spiritual power on a presidency never exercised, and supporting the same by decrees whereof their alleged authors were altogether innocent, and their alleged collector utterly unconscious." (36) The ghostly Donation of Pepin, by which the French king was supposed to have granted the pope in writing rights over the lands of central Italy conquered by the Lombards, thus providing the legal basis for the temporal power of the pope "it is true, the States of the Church Catholic Encyclopedia confesses, has not been preserved in the authentic version, but a number of citations, quoted from it during the decades immediately following, indicate its contents" ; less coyly, in the article `Donations' in his `Philosophical Dictionary', Voltaire writes that "the deed of this donation has never been seen ; and what is still stronger, the fabrication of a false was not even dared." (37)

Indeed, the Pseudo-Decretals of Isidore, the presidency of Peter and the donation of Constantine are three pieces of the same puzzle : "When under Constantine the Christian Church was framing her organization on the model of the state which protected her, the bishop of the metropolis perceived and improved the analogy between himself and the head of the civil government. The notion that the chair of Peter was the imperial throne of the Church had dawned upon the Popes very early in their history, and grew stronger every century under the operation of causes already specified. Even before the Empire of the West had fallen, St. Leo the Great could boast that to Rome, exalted by the preaching of the chief of the Apostles to be a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal city, there had been appointed a spiritual dominion wider than her earthly sway. In A.D. 476 Rome ceased to be the political capital of the Western countries, and the Papacy, inheriting no small part of the Emperor's power, drew to herself the reverence which the name of the city still commanded, until by the middle of the eighth, or, at latest, of the ninth century she had perfected in theory a scheme which made her the exact counterpart of the departed despotism, the centre of the hierarchy, absolute mistress of the Christian world. The character of that scheme is best set forth in the singular document, most stupendous of all the medieval forgeries, which under the name of the Donation of Constantine commanded for seven centuries the unquestioning belief of mankind. Itself a portentous falsehood, it is the most unimpeachable evidence of the thoughts and beliefs of the priesthood which framed it, some time between the middle of the eighth and the middle of the tenth century. It tells how Constantine the Great, cured of his leprosy by the prayers of Sylvester, resolved, on the fourth day from his baptism, to forsake the ancient seat for a new capital on the Bosphorus, lest the continuance of the secular government should cramp the freedom of the spiritual, and how he bestowed therewith upon the Pope and his successors the sovereignty over Italy and the countries of the West. But this is not all, although this is what historians, in admiration of its splendid audacity, have chiefly dwelt upon. The edict proceeds to grant to the Roman pontiff and his clergy a series of dignities and privileges, all of them enjoyed by the Emperor and his senate, all of them shewing the same desire to make the pontifical a copy of the imperial office. The Pope is to inhabit the Lateran palace, to wear the diadem, the collar, the purple cloak, to carry the sceptre, and to be attended by a body of chamberlains. Similarly his clergy are to ride on white horses and receive the honours and immunities of the senate and patricians. » (38) All of this is further proof that the Imperium Christianum, while being to a certain extent a continuation of the Semitic and cosmopolitan late Roman empire, was a parody of the actual Roman empire.

"Throughout the half-century (768-814) during which Charlemagne was the foremost man in the world, the popes, like the other conspicuous persons therein, must be reckoned among his dependants. On the death of the mighty monarch in 814, the dominion of the West passed to the feeble and impairing grasp of his son Louis, known at once as Louis the Kindly and Louis the Pious, whose kindliness degenerated into heedless facility, and his piety into superstitious weakness. The indulger and the victim of his wife, his children, and his priests, he was more than once delivered from their oppression and reinstated on the throne through the reverence of his people for the memory of his father, and their respectful pity for his own amiable and devout helplessness. Under such a sovereign the pontiffs meddled with much vigour and some effect, now upheld the parent against the children, now stirred up the children against the parent, and contributed not a little to the disorder of the empire of their own hallowing. The dominion of the West, got together and so firmly grasped by his mighty father, but so feebly and loosely holden by himself, fell to pieces in the hands of his sons, of whom Louis became king of Germany, and Charles the Bald became king of France, while Italy and the dignity of Roman emperor remained with Lothaire, the eldest, and passed on to his son Louis II., and other members of the race of Charlemagne. The relations of the popedom with the empire still exhibited the same singular mixture of subjection and supremacy, with a predominance of the former, even under these degenerate descendants of Charles the Great. As no one was held to be a proper and perfect emperor until crowned by the pope, so no one was held to be a proper and perfect pope until approved by the emperor. An energetic emperor asserted the imperial supremacy, an energetic pope asserted the papal supremacy... Louis II., the great-grandson of Charlemagne, vigorously bestirred himself to enlarge his authority over the Roman city and the Roman bishop ; Pope Nicholas I. (858-867) dealt in a lordly fashion with the State, and maintained the absolute power of the papacy over the Church. He made ample use of the forged Decretals, and sought to hasten their theory of the papal monarchy into a fact. He bowed reluctant monarchs and recalcitrant prelates to his will, forced Lothaire, king of Lorraine, and brother of... Louis II., to take back, for a while at least, the wife whom he had put away, and to repudiate the mistress whom he had married, and constrained Hinkmar, archbishop of Rheims, the first writer, the most powerful churchman, and the master spirit of the age, to restore a bishop whom he had got deposed.

But Nicholas was not ambitious and encroaching only in the West ; he assumed a lordly tone towards the Byzantine Caesars, and sought to establish his supremacy over the Greek Church." (39)

"According to that strange and mysterious sympathy of fortune between the popedom and the empire, so constantly manifested throughout the middle ages, the fall of the Carolingian empire in Italy, about 888, weakened the papacy and threw it into the hands of the petty princes who started up everywhere..." (40)

"The Holy Roman Empire, which had fallen very low under the descendants of Charlemagne, became a power again under its great Saxon chiefs, and, singularly enough, undertook the reform of the papacy which had hallowed it." (41)

The six first decades of the tenth century, later called the "saeculum obscurum" or "Römisches Hurenregiment", were not a period of glory for the papacy. It was in the hands of the Roman aristocracy, or rather pornocracy, particularly in the seasoned ones of the Theophylactes family, whose troika, Theodora the Old one and her two daughters Theodora and Marozia, among other things, made and unmade puppet popes. When Otto left North Germany, where, among other things, he was busy destroying heathen temples and cutting down nut-trees, to come to the aid of John XII, who, troubled by hostile neighbours, had asked him for assistance. "In 962, Otho descended from the Alps, put down the petty tyrants of Italy, received the imperial crown from the pope, and bound the Roman clergy and people not to elect a bishop without the emperor's leave." (42) "Otto might seem to have now reached a position loftier and firmer than that of any of his predecessors. Within little more than a year from his arrival in Rome, he had exercised powers greater than those of Charles himself, ordering the dethronement of one pontiff and the installation of another, forcing a reluctant people to bend themselves to his will. The submission involved in his oath to protect the Holy See was more than compensated by the oath of allegiance to his crown which the Pope and the Romans had taken, and by their solemn engagement not to elect nor ordain any future pontiff without the Emperor's consent. But he had yet to learn what this obedience and these oaths were worth... Otto regarded the pontiff as no more than the first of his subjects, the creature of his own will, the depositary of an authority which must be exercised according to the discretion of his sovereign." (43)

"This restored Empire, which professed itself a continuation of the Carolingian, was in many respects different. It was less wide, including, if we reckon strictly, only Germany proper and two-thirds of Italy ; or counting in subject but separate kingdoms, Burgundy, Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Denmark, perhaps Hungary. Its character was less ecclesiastical. Otto exalted indeed the spiritual potentates of his realm, and was earnest in spreading Christianity among the heathen : he was master of the Pope and Defender of the Holy Roman Church. But religion held a less important place in his mind and his administration : he made fewer wars for its sake, held no councils, and did not, like his predecessor, criticize the discourses of bishops." This did not prevent him, a few days after his coronation and anointment, from confirming formally the legitimacy of the Papal States and even from extending their boundaries. At home, whilst his father Henry I had tended to keep the Church at arm's length, Otto's main issue was "to regain control over the royal demesnes within the duchy ; to break the duke's control over the church in his land, reaffirm the direct connection between the crown and the church, and thus to make the church, as it had been in Carolingian times a pillar and support of the monarchy." (44) "But the result of royal reliance on the church was that the lay aristocracy, given little share in the work of government, tended more and more to withdraw into isolation and concentrate on building up its own estates. And though it is certainly true that no king in the tenth century could have foreseen the later demands for a church free from royal control, the fact remains that exclusive reliance on the church was dangerous, particularly as the higher ranks of the clergy were still essentially aristocratic. Bishops and abbots were regularly selected from the great noble families, and there was no guarantee that they would continue for all time to side with the monarchy against the aristocracy. And finally, the very success of the king in his dealings with the dukes created new problems, for in a country the size of Germany intermediate authorities to help the crown in the task of government were needed, and it was precisely these authorities that Otto I had weakened", (45) - along Carolingian lines. "In the eleventh century a full half of the land and wealth of the country, and no small part of its military strength, was in the hands of Churchmen : their influence predominated in the Diet ; the arch-chancellorship of the Empire, highest of all offices, was held by, and eventually came to belong of right to, the Archbishop of Mentz, as primate of Germany. It was by Otto, who in resuming the attitude must repeat the policy of Charles, that the greatness of the clergy was thus advanced. He is commonly said to have wished to weaken the aristocracy by raising up rivals to them in the hierarchy. It may have been so, and the measure was at any rate a disastrous one, for the clergy soon approved themselves not less rebellious than those whom they were to restrain." (46)

What was dubbed later as the alliance of the throne and altar, the hallmark of the period in the political field, marked the disintegration of the traditional Germanic world, especially the Saxon world. In old Saxony, the members of the second caste (frilingi) and those of the third caste (the lazzi) took part in political life along with the edhilingui, the representatives of the nobility. According to the very few sources available to us, there were some social tensions between them, which were only exacerbated by the Christianisation, since the frilingi and the lazzi seem to have seen Christian missionaries as a threat, not only to their ancestral religion, but also to their political power. Indeed, in the aftermath of the massacre in Verden (47), Charles "abolished the Old Saxon administration under chieftains and implemented the grafschaftsverfassung (system of countships) common to the rest of the Frankish kingdoms. This new administration placed Saxony under the governance of comites selected from the Saxon nobilissimi." (48) "In return for accepting baptism and his overlordship, Charlemagne gave the edhilingui what they had previously lacked : a monopoly of power vis-a-vis the frilingi and the lazzi." (49) In addition, he "enriched the crown and his faithful bishops, abbots, counts, and other potentates with confiscated Saxon lands", (50) thus precipitating "important changes in Saxon landownership through the importation of Frankish practices, which probably worsened the economic and material condition of the lower two castes." (51), as the royal and ecclesiastical profits from landlordship increased. Even more importantly, Saxony, as well as Frisia and various other parts of Germany, fell under the yoke of Judeo-Christianity through the enactment in 782 of the Saxon capitulary, "a blueprint for the comprehensive and ruthless Christianization of a conquered society. It was not simply that the sanctions were of an extreme harshness. It was also that the measures to be adopted in Christianization would destabilize and dislocate the social texture of Saxon life at the most intimate levels of family existence, touching birth, marriage and death. To the degree that such tactics had never before been essayed in a Christian missionary context, it seems reasonable to infer that this tearing apart of Saxon society was deliberately intended ; and that the measures were framed by persons who knew how to inflict the maximum damage." (52)

Through a chain reaction, the alliance between the throne and altar had two further consequences, which, from a truly imperial European standpoint, were as devastating for whatever remained of the spirit, of the soul, and of the body of the Roman empire in the tenth century as they are seen as positive by the author of the following lines, who, giving in to the Marxist sirens of the class-struggle theory and to the populist exaltation of the people conceived of as `demos', does not realise that the objective opposition he describes between wealthy and tyrannical nobles and the oppressed and impoverished people in Ottonian Saxony was to a great extent the result of the social, political and spiritual upheaval brought about by the common policy of the Carolingians and of the papacy, under the impetus of which more than a few had risen from below to hold the highest positions, while more than a few had been forced into serfdom : "Town-life there was none, till Henry the Fowler forced his forest-loving people to dwell in fortresses that might repel the Hungarian invaders ; and the burgher class thus beginning to form was too small to be a power in the state. But popular freedom, as it expired, bequeathed to the monarch such of its rights as could be saved from the grasp of the nobles ; and the crown thus became what it has been wherever an aristocracy presses upon both, the ally, though as yet the tacit ally, of the people. More, too, than the royal could have done, did the imperial name invite the sympathy of the commons. For in all, however ignorant of its history, however unable to comprehend its functions, there yet lived a feeling that it was in some mysterious way consecrated to Christian brotherhood and equality, to peace and law, to the restraint of the strong and the defence of the helpless." (53) The first of these disastrous consequences was that the monarchy let down the `old nobility' as soon as its alliance with the papacy was established firmly. The second, partly highlighted by the author, is that, no matter how deeply the imperial name invited by proxy the sympathy of the commons, the commons were always more influenced and instrumentalised by the papacy than by emperors or kings.

Besides being an expert at playing off its opponents against each other, the papacy's record was second to none when it came to use its enemies' power to defeat them while strengthening its own potential. The timing and the circumstances of the imperial coronation played a huge part in this : "What Christendom saw was that Charles was crowned by the Pope's hands, and undertook as his principal duty the protection and advancement of the Holy Roman Church. The circumstances of Otto the Great's coronation gave an even more favourable opening to sacerdotal claims, for it was a Pope who summoned him to Rome and a Pope who received from him an oath of fidelity and aid. In the conflict of three powers, the Emperor, the pontiff, and the people - represented by their senate and consuls, or by the demagogue of the hour - the most steady, prudent, and far-sighted was sure eventually to prevail. The Popedom had no minorities, as yet few disputed successions, few revolts within its own army - the host of churchmen through Europe. Boniface's conversion of Germany under its direct sanction, gave it a hold on the rising hierarchy of the greatest European state ; the extension of the rule of Charles and Otto diffused in the same measure its emissaries and pretensions. The first disputes turned on the right of the prince to confirm the elected pontiff, which was afterwards supposed to have been granted by Hadrian I to Charles, in the decree quoted as 'Hadrianus Papa.' This 'ius eligendi et ordinandi summum pontificem,' which Lewis I appears as yielding by the 'Ego Ludovicus,' was claimed by the Carolingians whenever they felt themselves strong enough, and having fallen into desuetude in the troublous times of the Italian Emperors, was formally renewed to Otto the Great by his nominee Leo VIII. We have seen it used, and used in the purest spirit, by Otto himself, by his grandson Otto III, last of all, and most despotically, by Henry III. Along with it there had grown up a bold counter-assumption of the Papal chair to be itself the source of the imperial dignity. In submitting to a fresh coronation, Lewis the Pious admitted the invalidity of his former self-performed one : Charles the Bald did not scout the arrogant declaration of John VIII, that to him alone the Emperor owed his crown ; and the council of Pavia, when it chose him king of Italy, repeated the assertion. Subsequent Popes knew better than to apply to the chiefs of Saxon and Franconian chivalry language which the feeble Neustrian had not resented ; but the precedent remained, the weapon was only hid behind the pontifical robe to be flashed out with effect when the moment should come. There were also two other great steps which papal power had taken. By the invention and adoption of the False Decretals it had provided itself with a legal system suited to any emergency, and which gave it unlimited authority through the Christian world in causes spiritual and over persons ecclesiastical. Canonistical ingenuity found it easy in one way or another to make this include all causes and persons whatsoever : for crime is always and wrong is often sin, nor can aught be anywhere done which may not affect the clergy. On the gift of Pipin and Charles, repeated and confirmed by Lewis I, Charles II, Otto I and III, and now made to rest on the more venerable authority of the first Christian Emperor, it could found claims to the sovereignty of Rome, Tuscany, and all else that had belonged to the exarchate. Indefinite in their terms, these grants were never meant by the donors to convey full dominion over the districts - that belonged to the head of the Empire - but only as in the case of other church estates, a sort of perpetual usufruct, a beneficial enjoyment which had nothing to do with sovereignty. They were, in fact, mere endowments. Nor had the gifts been ever actually reduced into possession : the Pope had been hitherto the victim, not the lord, of the neighbouring barons. They were not, however, denied, and might be made a formidable engine of attack : appealing to them, the Pope could brand his opponents as unjust and impious ; and could summon nobles and cities to defend him as their liege lord, just as, with no better original right, he invoked the help of the Norman conquerors of Naples and Sicily." (54)

On the death of Henry II. (1024), for whom humility was the foundation for all virtues, who strengthened the Church of Germany and who confirmed and renewed the donations his predecessors had made to the Holy See as soon as he was crowned and anointed emperor, the empire passed to Conrad II of Franconia, an energetic and successful prince. "At the election of King Otto I., the clergy had taken no part ; now they had the chief voice. So far had the favor of the Saxon kings advanced them. The clergy had not only become princes with temporal power ; they far surpassed in influence the temporal dukes. " (55) "... Otto the Great and his successors filled bishoprics, certain collegiate foundations, and important imperial monasteries with individuals of their own choosing, whom they personally invested with the symbols of office - bishop's crosier or abbot's staff - and to whose institutions they granted valuable sylvan, toll, market, and mintage rights, even whole countries, as well as legal and economic immunity. In return these men were required to provide servitium Regis, a broad range of administrative, military, and economic services to the king, in addition to praying for the kingdom's well-being and the ruler's salvation... For a king, who was - in spite of the sacral nature of his office - the very embodiment of secular authority, to invest a high cleric with his office clearly violated canon law, but legal norms and actual legal practice were two very different things... as long as people found ways to resolve or to accommodate the inherent contradictions of the "system", it did work. In the early tenth century, one pope even voiced his approval of the arrangement." (56) The system was later termed by scholars the "imperial church system". Conrad II took it over, ruling the clergy with an iron fist and using the Church to build up his royal powers. No king in the eleventh century could have foreseen the later demands for a church free from royal control, nor the later claims of, or rather made in the name of, the `people', as a result of their emancipation. If Conrad II correctly "… saw that a policy which relied for its support on the aristocracy alone, and neglected or abandoned the people, was hurtful to the crown as well as to the nation", (57) he made the opposite mistake of thinking that "the head of the empire could retain power only relying on the lower classes, on the people, and by not merely protecting but extending the rights of the lower nobility and the people." (58)

It is not surprising therefore that in 1036 the leaders of a democratic movement that had just emerged in Italy appealed to the German emperor against the arbitrariness of a member of the high nobility - an ally of his.

"In Lombardy more than in other parts of Italy, the lower nobility were tyrannized over by the high aristocracy, at the head of which was Heribert or Aribert, archbishop of Milan. This was the result of the situation in which the emperor Conrad II. had found himself at his first expedition into Italy, and of the policy which this dangerous situation had dictated.

Archbishop Aribert, who had presented to the emperor the homage of Italy, and who was the leader of the German party in Upper Italy, had obtained rich rewards for the services he had rendered to Conrad. The submission he exhibited towards the head of the empire, and the zeal with which he supported him in arms, had deceived Conrad respecting this prelate. The emperor had believed that he had found in him a devoted follower of his person and the empire, and had granted to him quite unusual powers over bishops and citizens ; he had invested him not merely with the power which an imperial chancellor of Italy possessed, but a kind of governorship over Lombardy. Not merely everything referred to the emperor in Germany went through his hands, but in most ecclesiastical and temporal causes in Lombardy he had the deciding voice.

But Aribert was as ambitious as he was crafty, as tyrannical in his own circle as he was hypocritical in his submissiveness towards the emperor ; he was by no means a man of German sympathies ; he loved the Germans as little as any Italian of the national party. He only wished to use the Germans as means to bring all Lombardy under his own hands. He had in Milan, the capital of his archdiocese, a princely court formed on the model of the Papal court at Rome. In this century, in more than one point of Europe, it was the case that an ecclesiastical prince had the idea of founding an ecclesiastical principality independent of Rome, of being Pope in his own territories. Aribert had in view the foundation of such an independent principality in North Italy, a Papacy of Lombardy, just as a generation later Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen wished to found a Papacy of the North ruling over a German Church independent of Rome. Aribert called the members of his chapter cardinals. This
college of cardinals he made the nursery for the bishops of his grand ecclesiastical principality. His court displayed the splendor and luxury of royalty ; and this gained to his side the citizens of Milan, who grew rich by the expenditure ; another portion of the citizens was won by his efforts to promote trade and industry, to enlarge and beautify the city, and to make it not merely splendid but strong to resist any attack from without." (58) " For years the ambitious prince of the Church had used every means and all his powers to reduce to vassalage the lower nobility and the freeholders, and to deprive them of their rights as immediate tenants of the empire. The vavassors or small vassals of Lombardy, formed a solemn league to protect in union their old liberties and rights." (59)

Conrad II came to Milan to examine the state of affairs, had Aribert arrested and imprisoned.

"But the clergy in Milan roused the people of the city in favor of their imprisoned pastor. High and low, women and children in penitential garb, headed by the clergy, marched in long procession through the streets, to entreat with lamentations and prayers for the liberation of their spiritual lord… The clergy knew how to stir up the always existing national hate of the Italians against the Germans, and regarded the imprisoned Aribert not as the contumacious insulter of the majesty of the emperor, but as the victim sacrificed by German brutality, as a martyr for Italian nationality in its struggle against foreign tyranny, a man in whose person the Italian nation was outraged and injured." (60) The clergy simply knew how to use in its own interest the `people'. Besides, its members were bound in an unbreakable solidarity : "Strengthened by the accession of the lower nobles whom he had gained over by the above measures, the emperor formally deposed Aribert from his archbishopric, and granted the see to his chaplain Ambrosius. But the feudal constitution and the deposition of Aribert so struck the high Italian clergy that they united with Aribert ; even the bishop of Cremona, who had hitherto been his accuser, and other prelates till now faithful to the emperor, rallied around him." (61) "This prince of the Church, Archbishop Aribert, taught the court of Rome the important lesson that, to oppose the power of the Germans over Italy, and to further the other aims of the Roman priesthood, its best ally was the armed citizens of the municipalities." (62) At the same time, the imperial ordinance promulgated by Conrad II to check the arbitrary power of the grandees "formed a barrier between the freeholders and lesser feudatories on the one side, and the spiritual and temporal grandees on the other" (63), forever separating the interests of the lower nobility and the high aristocracy in Italy.

"Agnes bore Henry III. two sons - Henry and Conrad. She urged him to adorn himself with the Roman imperial crown. King Henry III. himself was possessed with the idea that, although he was king of the Germans, king of Burgundy, and king of Lombardy, he would be of more importance in the eyes of men on both sides of the Alps if he were resplendent with the imperial crown of Rome, and with the nimbus of sanctity derived from his consecration as Emperor and Patron of Christendom by the hand of the Head of the Roman Catholic Church.

It cannot be denied that for most men of that time, as of all times, who believe more than think, the splendor of such a consecration was potent and imposing. But it was potent only to a certain extent. Henry, like his predecessors, had bitterly to experience that it had been better for him to remain king of the Germans, and to establish his throne on firm foundations in the interior of the German realm - better for him to seek the interests of the empire and his house, than splendor and appearance ; that it would have been better for him, his house, and the German nation to have been a mere king of Germany like Henry I. and Conrad I.

In addition to his desire of obtaining the crown of Rome, a second cause, religious feeling, impelled Henry to Italy. His piety was not unmixed with enthusiastic asceticism. Pie gave his back to the scourge of his confessor till the blood flowed ; he never placed the crown on his head except when a public ceremony bade him, and then only after confession and penance.

Rome at this time was a scandal to Christendom. There were no less than three Popes in Rome, each calling himself the Pope, and his see the Holy See. One of the three had sold the Papal See to the second for a thousand pounds of silver ; he received the money, but continued to play the Pope, retaining the title and revenues of the Pope. The highest spiritual dignity of Christendom had become an article of trade, bought by one and sold by another, just as all other spiritual dignities had become articles of trade, bought and sold. As so much temporal power and so much wealth was connected with spiritual offices, there was a rush for the position of bishop ; for the bishops were now temporal lords, princes more magnificent than the lay princes. The bishop had before him not only a free, unrestrained life like a temporal lord, but he had what the temporal lords had not, an inexhaustible money supply in the treasure and the revenues of the Church.

No account was taken of fitness in heart or mind ; the bishoprics were matters of speculation ; nothing was regarded but the question of money, or at best of politics. The bishops sold in turn every spiritual place which was worth anything, down to the very meanest ; in many places each situation had a fixed price, which fluctuated like prices of goods in the market, according to the goodness or badness of the times. The kings and princes, by reason of their rights of spiritual investitures, were the most to blame for this canker of the Church, the sale of livings (simony). They were the wholesale dealers ; the others only sold by retail what they had purchased from them. Even kings like Henry I, Otto I., and Conrad II, had never hesitated to trade in ecclesiastical offices ; because they saw how, in the States of the Church, the Popes themselves sold all bishoprics, abbacies, and clerical offices, the kings and emperors took the same liberty." (64)

In 1046, Henry III. "crossed the Alps, deposed the three rival pontiffs, exacted an oath from the Roman clergy and people that they would not choose a pope without the imperial leave, put in succession into the papal chair three or four short-lived occupants personally pure and upright, and set up for the absolute master as well as the cleanser of the Roman See. As wielded by Henry III., the Holy Roman Empire put forth its utmost might and majesty, a might and majesty that would have gladdened and satisfied Dante ; the purified papacy was its humble handmaiden.

But this position of the papacy in nowise delighted its best friends. Henry III. had two parties in the Church against him ; the reformer was unwelcome to the loose and pleasure-loving clergy, strong and numerous under so long a succession of profligate pontiffs ; while the master was no less unwelcome to the stricter and more aspiring members of the priesthood. These last abhorred the scandals of the time, the simony which pervaded the Church, and the profligacy which polluted the papal throne, not only as spiritual abominations, but as ecclesiastical disadvantages, not only as sins against God, but as hindrances to the greatness of the Church, as obstacles to the establishment of the papal monarchy. They held the bestowal of an ecclesiastical office to be the unforgivable transgression in a layman, and the purchase or even the acceptance of the same to be the sin unto death in a priest. A married priest, however, was not less abominable than a simoniacal priest ; and they recoiled with no less horror from matrimony among the clergy than from portentous profligacy in the vicar of Christ. They welcomed the imperial cleanser, but chafed beneath the imperial master. They wanted the papacy purified that it might become not a handmaiden but a mistress. They used the empire to cleanse the popedom, and then wielded the purified popedom for the subjugation of the empire. They took the rigid and unstained popes of Henry's appointing, and sought to mould them into ambitious and enterprising sovereigns of the Church. They set about converting imperial nominees into papal monarchs." (65)

It is worth dwelling on the underlying objectives of this congregation : "This society sprang from the Benedictine abbey of Clugny, in the modern French department of the Saone-et-Loire. Wherever this reformation reached a convent, there was a transformation effected. Yet this congregation of Clugny had, as its most secret thought and object, hierarchical and political ends - the supremacy of the Roman See over the emperors, kings, and peoples of Christendom, the conversion of the existing relation between Church and State, in which the Emperor stood higher than the Pope, into its opposite, so that the Pope should stand higher than the Emperor and all the world.

These predecessors of the Jesuits, who indeed worked in many ways far better than their successors the Jesuits, but were equally full of danger for the development of the German nation, had been brought to the knowledge of King Henry III. by his wife Agnes of Aquitaine. For the abbey of Clugny had been founded by her ancestor Duke William I. of Aquitaine.

A prince of religious sentiments like Henry III. could not, in view of the strictly holy life of the members of this order, suspect or discover the political and hierarchical principles which were the secret teachings of the heads and leaders of the congregation that had already spread itself through France, Spain, and Italy. King Henry came into contact only with the chief leaders, men of wisdom and caution. How powerful by its spirit, by its intelligence, by its wealth, this congregation was even in the time of Henry III., how injurious and fatal it was doomed to become to the kingdom of Germany, may be concluded from the fact that within a century after its establishment the congregation of Clugny numbered two thousand convents dependent for guidance on the abbot of Clugny, and that the whole society was immediately under the Pope. The majority of these two thousand monasteries were in France and Germany, the minority in Spain, Italy, and Poland. The successors of Henry III. found this powerful and numerous society to be a Papal guard ever ready to take the field against them, whether they belonged to the Salian house or to that of Hohenstaufen ; and King Henry, without presentiment of evil, contributed to raise the Roman Papacy and supply it with temporal weapons by means of these precursors of the Jesuits. By the influence of his wife, who, though fond of gayety was still a bigot, the wily lords of Clugny caught in their nets the religious heart of King Henry. They convinced him that as king of Italy and patron of the Holy See, it was his duty and his vocation to put a stop to the scandals which were caused by the contemporaneous presence of three Popes in Rome, by the traffic in clerical offices, and by the corruption of the Church ; and as his coronation as emperor and this business could be dispatched at the same time, King Henry undertook to cleanse Rome, centre of Chnstendom, and the Christian world dependent on it ; he undertook this the more readily the less his religious sentiments were in harmony with what his eyes beheld in all parts of Christendom." (66)

So Henry III crossed the Alps in September, 1046, "with such an army as no German king had for a long time led into Italy. It has been repeatedly represented by writers that Henry III. undertook this expedition of his own proper motion, with the definite object of making the Papacy an organ of the royal and imperial power, and thus
working on the nations of Christendom ; that as the bishops in Germany were tools in the king's hands, he wished to be master of the highest bishop - the Pope and Papacy of Rome. It is, however, doubtful whether he had such an idea ; it is certain that by saving the almost ruined Papacy, and by following the lead of the congregation of Clugny, he effected a result the very opposite of the views attributed to him above. He raised the Papacy, then seized with decay, till it began to overtop the crown of the emperors - a state of things which for centuries produced long struggles between the empire and the Papacy, and incalculable misery to the nations of Europe.

But this rescue of the Papacy was a natural impulse of this German king ; Henry, an ecclesiastical enthusiast, could, with his disposition, do nothing else than cleanse and save the Church." (67)

"Since the time of Otto I. it had been a right and custom that no Pope be elected without the knowledge and consent of the king of Germany. HenryII., indeed, had not maintained, had even surrendered, this right ; that for forty years the contending parties in Rome had filled the Holy See as they pleased, was an assault of anarchy on the system of the German empire. The assembly took the oath demanded, and while the litanies were still echoing through the Church, Henry took the German bishop Suidger of Bamberg, a noble Saxon, conducted him to the Papal throne, and bade him mount it.

Whether the king, in presenting Suidger to the assembly, wished only to exhibit the man who could again sanctify unsanctified Rome, or whether he wished by his own authority to appoint a Pope, who can tell ? The ecclesiastical dignitaries who had come with the king saluted Suidger, when he was on the throne, as Pope. The Romans, surprised, joined with their assent. They found a kind of consolation for themselves in the reflection that none of them could have done for Pope according to the requisitions of the king, since there was no one of them who was not married, or who had not bought his office and sold spiritual charges. Yet they did not omit to add that `properly' only a clerk belonging to a church in Rome could be elected Pope.

Thus Suidger, in the surprise, was made Pope by acclamation. King Henry had not presided over the election of a Pope and confirmed him, but rather had selected and nominated one. The man thus nominated called himself henceforth Clement II. This took place on the 24th of December, 1046, and on Christmas-day, this new Pope placed the imperial crown on the brows of Henry and Agnes.

The population of the city of Rome and of the vicinity were well pleased with this coming of the German king. Their old hatred of the Germans gave way on this occasion to their love of money. The fierce party strife in Rome, the shameless debauchery of the Popes, who squandered the offerings of the faithful from without Rome, the robberies and murders on the thresholds of the churches, and the bloody fights at the tombs of the apostles, had for a long time put almost entirely a stop to pilgrimages to the desecrated metropolis of Christendom. The cessation of gifts to the churches of Rome, and of the pilgrimages which in other days had brought such profit to the Roman people, was keenly felt by the population of the city. With the return of order, pilgrimages and profits recommenced.

The new Pope (Clement II) and the emperor went hand in hand to purify the Church and reform the Christian world." (68), as, with the return of order, pilgrimages and profits recommenced, and Hildebrand was biding his time behind the scenes.

Hildebrand began his work ; "… with his far-seeing thoughts for the liberty and supremacy of the Church, and with his democratic hate of temporal absolutism and the aristocracy, with broad views that did not criticise too closely the means to gain a great end, (he) found it necessary to remove from the peninsula the emperor who was acting so despotically before he could accomplish his designs in Italy" (69) : "In 1059, he got from Stephen II. a solemn declaration of the incompatibility of marriage with the priesthood, got the papal election regulated to the disadvantage of the empire, and at last, in 1061, got Alexander II. chosen pope without any imperial intervention." (70) "Under Henry III, the popes were the creatures and tools of the royal will ; under his son the Pope spoke commandingly as a judge" (71), as showed by the well-known conflict of the former with Hildebrand in 1069. Henry IV acknowledged Hildebrand as the lawful pope in 1073, a few years after the latter had opposed his accession to the imperial throne.

To realise how strong Hildebrand's position was when he assumed the papal chair as Gregory VII, it must be kept in mind that this power which then laid claim to a European supremacy contained within it a very important ecclesiastical element : "The Germans conquered while they made converts. Their marches advanced in conjunction with the Church over the Elbe, to the Oder on the one side, to the Danube on the other : monks and priests were the forerunners of German influence in Bohemia and Hungary. By this means a great accession of strength everywhere accrued to the spiritual power. In Germany bishops and abbots of the empire enjoyed, not only in their own possessions, but beyond them, the rights of counts, nay, sometimes of dukes; and ecclesiastical estates were no longer described as situated in such or such a county, but the counties as in such and such bishoprics. In Upper Italy almost all the towns became subject to the viscounts of their bishops. It would be an error to infer from this that the spiritual powers had already acquired a special independence. As the disposal of ecclesiastical appointments rested with the kings, (the chapters used to send back the ring and crosier of their deceased superior to the court, whence it was again bestowed on his successor,) it was in general advantageous for the princes to eke out the temporal privileges of the men of their choice, on whose devotedness they could rely. In defiance of the most refractory nobility, Henry III. placed a plebeian, one of his creatures, in the chair of St. Ambrose in Milan : to this line of conduct he was mainly indebted for the obedience he subsequently met with in Upper Italy. That Henry II. proved himself of all these emperors the most munificent to the Church, and that he was the most strenuous in insisting on his right to the nomination of the bishops, are facts that carry with them their mutual explanation. Care was also taken that the collation should be without prejudice to the rights of the state. The property of the Church was exempted neither from civil burdens, nor even from feudal service : we frequently find bishops taking the field at the head of their vassals. On the other hand, what an advantage it was to have the right of nominating bishops, who, like the Archbishop of Bremen, exercised the highest spiritual authority in the Scandinavian dominions and over many Wendish tribes !

If, then, the ecclesiastical element was of such eminent importance in the institutions of the empire, it is self-evident how much this must have been enhanced by the relation in which the emperors stood to the supreme head of the entire clergy, the Pope of Rome.

The popedom was bound to the German emperors by the strictest ties, as it had before been to the Roman emperors and to the successors of Charlemagne. True, indeed, the popes had exercised acts of sovereign authority over the imperial sceptre before it passed definitely to the Germans, and while it was yet in weak and wavering hands. But when the vigorous princes of Germany had achieved the conquest of that dignity, they became, if not admittedly, at least, in fact, what the Carlovingian race had been, the liege lords of the popedom. Otto the Great shielded with a powerful hand the pope whom he had seated in the pontifical chair : his sons followed his example : the fact, that the Roman factions did once more make head, and seize on and resign that dignity as their family interests fluctuated, purchase and traffic it away, did but more clearly indicate the necessity of some higher intervention. It was well known how vigorously this was exercised by Henry III. His synod at Sutri deposed, the intruders upon the popedom. No sooner had he put the patrician ring on his finger, and received the imperial crown, than he declared of his own good pleasure the individual who was to mount the papal chair. Four successive German popes were nominated by him : upon the occasion of a vacancy in the highest station in the Church the delegates from Rome presented themselves at the imperial court exactly as the envoys from other bishoprics, to receive the announcement of a successor to the dignity.

In this position of things it was a matter of personal interest to the emperor that the papacy should wear an imposing aspect in the eyes of the world. Henry III. promoted the reformation, which was undertaken by the popes appointed by himself; the augmentation of their power in nowise moved him to jealousy. That Leo IX held a synod at Rheims in defiance of the King of France, instituted and deposed French bishops, and received the solemn admission of the principle, that the pope is the sole primate of the universal church, might perfectly suit the emperor's purposes, so long as he himself had the disposal of the popedom. All this contributed to uphold that paramount majesty which he claimed over all Europe. What the Archbishop of Bremen effected for him in the north, the pope obtained for him among the other powers of Christendom.

But there was a great danger too involved in this condition of things.

The ecclesiastical order had become in the German and the germanized empire a totally different institution from what it had been in the Roman. A large share of political influence had been transferred to it ; it was possessed of princely power... it still depended on the emperor, the highest secular authority. But what if this authority should again fall into weak hands, and if at the same time the supreme head of the church, thrice powerful through his universally venerated rank, the obedience of his subordinates, and his influence over other states, should seize the favourable moment, and set himself in opposition to the imperial authority ?" (72)

Gregory VII, who always asked himself the right questions, proceeded to carry out his plan to make the Church independent from the Empire through two ecclesiastical regulations. "He renewed at a synod in Rome in 1074 the old laws of the Church which bound all the clergy, superior and inferior, to celibacy. By this means the clergy would be detached from dependence on temporal chiefs, to which a care for their families compelled them, and brought into more immediate connection with the head of the Church of Rome." (73) "At a second synod at Rome in 1075 Gregory took the second step preparatory for the independence of the Church. The resolution of this synod was, that the punishment of excommunication be inflicted on every clergyman who bought an office from any temporal prince, or received from any temporal power investiture, that is, enfeoffment as bishop or abbot with spiritual and temporal power." (74) As was seen above, "Hitherto Church property and priests had been embraced in the Feudal system, and temporal lords had delivered to their feoffees, archbishops, bishops, or abbots, a staff' and ring as emblems of the temporal authority over them.

Hitherto, also, the temporal lords had, quite of themselves, nominated the ministers of God's Word and the Church dignitaries ; had, independently, filled up vacancies in bishoprics and abbacies." (75)

"The authority of a count was connected with the bishoprics and abbacies. These rights, and in most part the great estates of the prelates, had been given by kings and emperors as fiefs of the crown, not as private property. Each new bishop or abbot had to ask from the king investiture in these rights, and to take the feudal oath to the head of the state, just like every lay feudal tenant of the crown, and like the latter, he was bound to serve and obey the king. At every appointment of a bishop or abbot the king could either grant or refuse, as pleased him, the investiture of these temporal rights and jurisdiction. Without such investiture a bishop or abbot could not enjoy his estates or his jurisdiction. This was an old right of the king, and embraced an important part of the king's prerogative.

Now that the spiritual princes were forbidden to accept investiture from the king, the great temporal possessions, domains, and countships of the spiritual princes must, if the prohibition were carried out, cease to be fiefs of the crown, and become the property of the Church ; the king's crown would lose one-half of its feudal power, since the spiritual princes formed a great portion of it, and the Holy See would gain in proportion. Gregory thus hoped to make the Church free from all temporal dependence, free in its elections and possessions, in its members and estates. The Pope would thus be raised above king and emperor, the Church above the State, and the Pope, as the Vicar of Christ on earth, would rule the world." (76)

"To gain room for the execution of his project, the liberation of the Church from every temporal power, the Pope wished to send into the far East the kings of Germany, France, and England, from whom he had to fear opposition to his plans ; he wished a crusade of Christian Europe for the liberation of the Eastern Christians from the Seljookian Turks, who, in 1073, had conquered Syria and the Holy Land. Even if the Pope said he would in person accompany the crusade to the East, yet he could never have intended to do so really." (77) One thousand years later, analogously, no opportunity is missed by those who are behind the sham politicians in office in occupied Europe to have these send European and western `armies' into the East, for purposes which cannot all be reduced to ideological, geopolitical, economic and tangible motives. Modern crusades are part of the Machiavellian strategy whereby European natives are lured into thinking that the enemy is outside, while the enemy within is busy importing a growing number of extra-Europeans into occupied European States. This can be accomplished all the more easily as the escapist tendencies of the contemporary native European are exacerbated by the media. Each time the enemy within decides to send troops to the East, a flock of mesmerised native Europeans follows them there in thought, and still in thought remains stationed there, as more and more immigrants from there enter most physically their countries with the benevolent complicity of the enemy within. If such escapism can be expected from uprooted peoples that have been brainwashed democratically for decades, it is remarkable that this centrifugal attitude is taken up and even fostered by most of those - we are not even referring to the profusion of thinkers with a Marxist or a liberal background who are portrayed as `Fascist' by the mass media - who claim to speak for the `people' and to enlighten the `people' from a patriotic, nationalist, National-Socialist, Fascist or simply anti-internationalist perspective. In 1074, the kings of Germany, France, and England turned down the call of Gregory VII for a crusade, "because each of them saw that Gregory wanted him away in order to build up the Church's power during his absence." (78)

"The composite character of Catholicism, J. Evola points out, should not be forgotten… wherever this character manifested itself as a force promoting order and hierarchy, thus providing a support for European society, this was mainly thanks to the influences of the Germanic-Roman world. Conversely, whenever the specifically Christian component triumphed, Catholicism acted in the West in an antitraditional, rather than traditional way." (79) The composite character of Catholicism appeared in full light in the `Middle Ages' whenever the papacy was in a position of strength. It shone as a full moon in the dark night that the reign of Gregory VII represented for what little left there was of traditional Europe. "Under the protection of the Papacy, republican forms and republican freedom of thought were rendered possible in Upper Italy, even if we allow that the Papacy had regard only to its own interests and the weakening of the power of the king, and that freedom of thought which arose in the republics was against the will of the Papacy.

A day had dawned in which every rank, every city, every corporation was struggling towards freedom. Did Gregory VIL, like other Popes after him, merely make use of these struggles, merely employ them for the predominance of the Church ? Or, did he indeed, at least at the commencement of his reign, did he wish to train the people to political freedom ? No man can give a complete proof of either one or the other supposition. But in the extant confidential letters of this great statesman on the Papal chair, as well as in his public writings, the deepest hatred of despotism, and a democratic spirit shone forth." (80)

"He attempted the conquest of Christendom, and sought to fashion all the monarchs of Europe into vassals of Rome. He was ever threatening and rebuking Philip I. of France. He forced upon Alphonso VI. of Castile, a warrior and a statesman, the Roman church-service to which he was not accustomed, and a wife for whom he did not care. He laid Bohemia under tribute, while he withheld from her, in spite of her earnest entreaty, worship and the Word in the Bohemian tongue. He assumed airs of sovereignty towards the greatest heroes and rulers of the age…" (81) "Hildebrand has the fullest right to be reputed the hero of the papacy and the architect of the papal power. He found the popedom weak and contemptible ; he left it strong and terrible. He found it the creature of the empire, and he left it on the high-road to mastery not only over the empire but over Christendom. He developed its ultimate tendencies and fixed its final character. He unfolded in all the height and depth, in all the length and breadth of its pretensions, aspirations and endeavours, the kingdom of this world which called itself not of this world, and he arrogated for it secular lordship over princes by virtue of the spiritual lordship which he arrogated for it over souls. He strove to make the papacy absolute in the Church and to make the Church absolute over the State ; he sought to bring the whole of life - social, political, and spiritual - beneath the papal power…" (82)

"Congenial successors pursued the work of Gregory and fiercely maintained the conflict with the empire." (83)

As many revolutionary spirits' in the history of the world, the career of Gregory VII came to an abrupt end, since he died in exile in 1085, a few months after having being declared deposed by the very king he had previously decreed be deposed and excommunicated, who was in turn made emperor by the antipope he had just created ; even his victory at Canossa had been only apparent, as was Henry's in Rome later. The spirit by which Gregory was possessed "took possession of public opinion. Under the emperor's hands and eyes this opinion became more catholic, more Papal, and gained and armed not only princes and people, but the emperor's own family, the sons of his body, his second wife, against him, till he broke under their influence." (84) What the episode of Canossa showed to public opinion, beyond the unexampled penitential humiliation of Henry, was that the pope had the right to depose a king and heir of the empire, and to absolve his subjects from their oath of allegiance. And that the head of the State acknowledged the temporal supremacy of the Church.

"The second act of the papal drama may be said to have closed here ; the second period of the popedom came to an end - a period of about three hundred years, from the middle of the eighth to the latter portion of the eleventh century (750-1073), from the close of its connection with the Greek empire to the beginning of its conflict with the German empire - a period which found the pope an influential personage and left him a temporal sovereign ; which found him predominant and left him monarch in the Church ; which found his spiritual sovereignty vigorously asserted, and left his infallibility all but unquestioned…" (85)

The emperor and the pope "stand forth the two central and most conspicuous figures of the Middle Ages. For some two or three centuries the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Church were the chief powers of the world. The utterly secularised Christian Church, and the nominally consecrated Roman Empire, that strange pair brought together so strangely and in such complete defiance of the birth and original nature of each, stood side by side at the head of Christendom. The age approved their connection and admitted their joint supremacy, assigning to the empire the chief place in the temporal region, and to the papacy the chief place in the spiritual region. This seemed a simple and symmetrical arrangement but it was spoiled by the double nature of the Roman Church. The two powers, while fully recognising each other's legitimacy, could not agree to reign together, but each sought to reign over the other ; or rather, the empire held to the theory of joint sovereignty, while the popedom, as became the kingdom of this world calling itself a kingdom not of this world, sought to realise the theory of its own sole sovereignty." (86) The emperor "allowed the spiritual and doctrinal supremacy of the pontiffs, were willing to leave the souls and consciences of men under their dominion ; but they demanded their obedience in matters temporal…", (87) claiming "them as subjects in all affairs of this world, while acknowledging them as masters in affairs of faith." (88)

"But this spiritual mastery in nowise satisfied the pontiffs. By very reason of this supremacy over souls, they claimed supremacy over states. Recognising the empire as the chief among merely temporal powers, the popedom pretended to be above it even in matters of this world. If the early Church had rendered absolute obedience to the Roman empire in all secular matters, the papacy had made the empire over to the Germans, had sanctified it, and had the rights of a new creator over its creature. The papal theory was altogether incompatible with the imperial theory." (89) The emperor "required obedience in temporal matters from his papal subject ; the pontiff demanded submission in all things from his imperial creature. The two great powers of the Middle Ages, the two chiefs of Christendom, so closely connected with each other, so curiously dependent on each other, fell out, and fought to ascertain which of the two really and practically was master of the other.

This conflict between the empire and the papacy was inevitable. It arose about bishop-making ; it arose in consequence of the twofold character which the Church had assumed as a spiritual and worldly kingdom. The bishops were at once pastors and barons, pillars of the Church and pillars of the State ; advancement to a bishopric was advancement to a barony. The emperor claimed the chief share in promoting his subjects ; the pope claimed the chief share in promoting his. The Christian people had long lost their original right of choosing their pastors. A man once invested with the ring and the staff was deemed a proper bishop; Caesar and pontiff fell out as to which of the two should confer this investiture. But the quarrel did not stop here ; it broadened and deepened into an all-pervading and mortal enmity. The question whether bishop-making was a papal or imperial function grew into the question whether the civil or ecclesiastical power should have the mastery in all things ; the contest between pope and emperor for supremacy in the secularised Church was aggravated into a struggle for supremacy in the world, for universal dominion." (90)

"This conflict covers almost exactly the whole period of papal greatness, from the accession of Gregory VII. to the death of Boniface VIII. (1073-1303), and stands out as its most signal and glaring fact, as the great business of the Middle Ages. It lasted about two centuries, and had every characteristic of a deadly struggle between two powers of this world, aggravated and embittered by the spiritual pretensions of one of the combatants... The pope stirred up civil war in the empire, and the emperor stirred up civil war in the Church. The pontiff seduced the family as well as the subjects of the [emperor], wrung his heart as well as shook his throne ; the son was set up against the sire, and the bonds of nature were torn asunder, to secure the triumph of the Roman Church. The pope bestowed the imperial crown upon a rebellious subject or son of the emperor ; the emperor conferred the pontifical crown upon a discontented and aspiring cardinal. So great were the interests at stake, and so strong the passions in conflict, that a papal candidate for the empire, when once on the imperial throne, became a strenuous upholder of its dignity; while an episcopal partisan of the [emperors], when once seated on the pontifical throne, became a vehement assertor of its claims. Yet this was through out a contest for dominion, not a warfare of destruction. The [emperors] fully acknowledged that papacy which they so steadfastly strove to resist ; the pontiffs amply recognised that empire which they so mightily laboured to subdue, even when they combined with this contest for the subjection of the imperial throne a war of extermination against a particular imperial house." (91)

Henry IV died in 1106, deposed and imprisoned "by an unnatural son whom the hatred of a relentless pontiff had raised in rebellion against him. But that son, the Emperor Henry the Fifth, so far from conceding the points in dispute, proved an antagonist more ruthless and not less able than his father. He claimed for his crown all the rights over ecclesiastics that his predecessors had ever enjoyed, and when at his coronation in Rome, A.D. 1111, Pope Paschal II refused to complete the rite until he should have yielded, Henry seized both Pope and cardinals and compelled them by a rigorous imprisonment to consent to a treaty which he dictated. Once set free, the Pope, as was natural, disavowed his extorted concessions, and the struggle was protracted for ten years longer, until nearly half a century had elapsed from the first quarrel between Gregory VII and Henry IV. The Concordat of Worms, concluded in A.D. 1122, was in form a compromise, designed to spare either party the humiliation of defeat. Yet the Papacy remained master of the field. The Emperor retained but one-half of those rights of investiture which had formerly been his. He could never resume the position of Henry III ; his wishes or intrigues might influence the proceedings of a chapter, his oath bound him from open interference. He had entered the strife in the fullness of dignity ; he came out of it with tarnished glory and shattered power." (92)

Lothair III, elected with ecclesiastical support, was not slow to express his gratitude to his benefactors by proceeding "to ask by his ambassadors for the Papal confirmation of his election - that is, to acknowledge that the empire was in tutelage to the Papal See.

"Such a thing had never yet occurred, that a king, acknowledged by the whole empire, should, by his own embassy dispatched to Rome, beg the Pope to confirm his election. Hitherto the Pope, when elected, had demanded confirmation of his election from the German king -, even the great Gregory VII. had not omitted to do so.

But now the German king degraded himself so far - it had been part of the price to be paid for the imperial crown which he had chaffered for - as formally and publicly to request from the Pope confirmation of his election !" (93)

Lothaire, once crowned and anointed, went further. "Innocent II. knew Lothaire well enough to see that he had to deal with a man weak in all political or ecclesiastical measures, a man who had lost all sense or feeling for his own honor, and for the honor and dignity of the German crown and nation. Lothaire renounced any division of the fiefs of the empire from the private dominions in Matilda's heritage, restored to Innocent all the property confiscated to the empire by Henry V., and received them back from the Pope as fiefs of the Papal See, and with the condition that after his death this heritage of Matilda should pass as a fief to his son-in-law the Guelph Henry, and after the death of the latter, revert to the Roman See. To such folly and degradation, to such injury towards the German empire, was the emperor Lothaire persuaded by Innocent. And he, the German king, the Roman emperor, performed all the formalities of feudal tenure ; he took the oath of vassalage to the Pope as his feudal lord, and promised to pay a yearly rent of one hundred marks of silver for the private domains of the great Countess.

The Romans comprehended better than Lothaire what he had given away : they painted the scene," How the emperor became the Pope's vassal." In the picture Lothaire, as the "Pope's vassal," lay with clasped hands at the Holy Father's feet for investiture, not only with Matilda's heritage, but with the imperial crown." (94)

Meanwhile, the strife between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines had begun in Germany, and the religio-political movement led by Arnold of Brescia, in an attempt to break the temporal power of the Church and to transform Italy into a republic under the leadership of the emperor, was becoming a real threat for the Papal See, especially since a pope supportive of the ideas of the reformer had just mounted the chair of Peter. At that time, the people of Rome, following Arnold's advice, sought to establish relations with the new king of Germany, Conrad III, a Hohenstaufen who had unsuccessfully supported Frederick for the kingship of Germany at the death of Henry V, "and invited him to Rome to take up his permanent residence there, to reduce the Pope, who had only usurped the government within the walls of Rome, to the purely spiritual functions of the first popes, and to make the nomination of the Popes, as it had been a century before, an exclusive privilege of the king and emperor. At any price Pope Eugenius III., who had fled for safety to France, and his champion Saint Bernard must keep the Hohenstaufen out of Rome. Bernard went to Germany, and by his eloquence so worked on Conrad and his nephew Frederick that they both at last resolved to join a second great Crusade - for which the popular saint had already labored in France with great success - for the protection of the oppressed Christians of the East"... (95)

"King Conrad's religious feelings overpowered his political sentiments." (96) It was not the first time a king's piety had overpowered his political sentiments and his duties towards his kingdom.

The chain reaction which can be seen at work in the historical events whose causes, consequences and aftermath we have been trying to encapsulate continued. "It was a remarkable time when Conrad quitted the scene. The artificially awakened enthusiasm for the Holy Sepulchre and for crusades had cooled, and through the greater part of Europe a struggle of an opposite tendency was seen, a spirit of freedom, which exhibited itself as a struggle in the cities for civic independence, for Republicanism ; as a struggle to get free from the dominion of the Church, that is, of the Papal See ; as a struggle for freedom of belief and conscience, for separation of Church and State. Not merely in a few, but in many, the spirit of the time began to show itself as a thinking, protesting spirit, and even the supreme head of temporal power, the king of the Germans, was not untouched by it. A new struggle between the royal power and the Papal power was imminent ; a storm, as it seemed, was preparing in the depths of the people's life." (97) The huge responsibility the papal policy bears for the revival and the development of this so-called "spirit of freedom' in consistence with the Church fathers' fanatic and telluric support for the so-called "freedom of human choice" and the assertion of the value and sanctity of the individual in an internationalist context (99) cannot be stressed enough.

Meanwhile, "The North German subjects of the young duke of Saxony, nobles and people, had freed themselves from the Crusade to the Holy Land by undertaking one against the heathen Wends in their own neighborhood. For this crusade also the Pope promised to all who engaged to extirpate these heathens of the North or bring them to be baptized, a like remission of sins, and like benefits as had been granted to the Crusaders to the Holy Sepulchre. The sagacious Duke Conrad of Zahringen marked this. Like Conrad, he had vowed the Crusade to Jerusalem. He fulfilled his vow by joining the Saxon crusade against the Wends. So did many Swabian crusaders. The Saxons, however, were at this time so unfanatic, and on such a footing with the Wends in their vicinity, that, at the very time when Conrad was marching to the East, they marched indeed in two columns against their heathen neighbors, but after receiving from the Wends a promise that they would be baptized, returned home again. The Wends never thought any more about being baptized; the Saxons never thought any more of compelling them. This crusade was a mere show ; the Christian Saxons and the heathen Wends had a good mutual understanding. They both wished for peace as the best thing for the interests of both. These Christians and these heathens had by bitter experience lost any longing for mutual slaughter to please the priests..." (99)

"Frederick was no friend of Arnold of Brescia, of the republican spirit, of the proud self-assertion of the cities. In his early youth, and when duke, he had thought and acted differently from his uncle Conrad, a man of simple character, and dear to the citizens, especially to those of Rottweil, Ulm, and his beloved Speyer. Barbarossa was of thoroughly aristocratic nature in his youth and early manhood, proud beyond measure of his birth and blood... As king he was filled with the `divine' plenitude of power appertaining to a German king. In his eyes the king of Germany required no Papal sanction, but had in himself the full right to be the head of Christendom, the emperor, the Caesar, lord of the Christian world, the lord absolute.

He clung with all his soul to the old privileged feudal system, and the royal power based thereon. True monarchy as befitted his time, and the spirit of his time, had not yet entered into his thoughts ; the one was repulsive, the other alien to his mind." (100)

"Such was the youth, such the king in the first fifteen years of his reign. Grievous, bitter experience, too late for himself, too late for the good of the German and Italian nations, tempered his imperious views and passions. When he had learnt to know the free citizen-spirit in its grandeur on the battlefield, m its noble worth on the domain of industry and art, he became its friend instead of an enemy, its promoter, not its despiser ; he became the king of the people, not the king of the knights.

With such views and sentiments King Frederick could only feel anger and contempt for the letter of the `Senate and People of Rome,' and at their demand that he should take the imperial crown from the hand of the Roman people, as the only power that could legally bestow it. It was only with reluctance that Frederick complied with the custom of receiving the imperial crown from the hand of the chief priest of Christendom ; as king of the Germans he felt himself already to be the head of all Christian princes and peoples, to be the emperor, a title to which, in his eyes, the bearer of the German crown had a right, without requiring its bestowal by another. More indignant still became the king when he heard that the Romans had made their constitution, since he had declared for the Pope, more democratic than it had been designed by Arnold of Brescia, and that they were intending to make a Roman the national emperor of Italy, and quite overlook the German king. Probably a fatal utterance of Frederick I. had been reported to the Romans, the speech which escaped him in anger, `he would never lower himself to swear an oath to the mob.'

He had no liking previously for the civic element, and now the democratic proceedings and want of tact of the people of Rome became disgusting to him. He hurried to commit the greatest folly which he, as king of Germany and as a Hohenstaufen, could, in opposition to all the traditions of the policy of the Salian emperors, commit, and which he and Germany had to suffer and to rue for his whole life long… In March, 1153, he made an agreement with the Roman See at Constance that he would not make peace with the Romans… without the consent of the Pope, but would labor to reduce Rome under the rule of the Pope, and establish his temporal power. The Pope engaged to crown the king as emperor without delay, to treat him as his best-beloved son, and, if he desired it, to excommunicate his enemies." (101) Frederick, as unaware that he was caught between the rock and the hard place of the Roman republic and the papacy as he was fearfully aware of what the pope had in store for him, had he decided to divorce his wife without his consent, fell from Charybdis to Scylla. A threat and, a fortiori, a bull of excommunication, was a potent coercive instrument in the fight of the papacy for supremacy. The consequences of a mere interdict may give the reader some idea of the coerciveness of such weapon : "Leo IX.'s campaign against the Normans was not successful, but it led to an alliance between the Papal See and these settlers in Southern Italy, which was an incalculable gain for the power of the Popes, and fatal for centuries to the kingdom and empire of Germany. The princes of Benevento, Pandulf III. and Landulf VI, had insulted the mother-in-law of Henry III. as she returned from a pilgrimage, and had been laid by Pope Clement II. under an interdict - that is, under that form of ecclesiastical censure by which the Popes made the people suffer for the prince for the purpose of rousing them to take arms against him. An interdict forbade every holy rite of the Church ; no religious worship was held, no child baptized, no communion celebrated, no Christian burial performed, no pair made one by the Church's blessing, no church-going bell allowed to sound. The rites of the Church then occupied the whole life of Christendom, and therefore the population bore with impatience the closing and silencing of the churches. Even the inhabitants of Benevento were soon weary of bearing the Church's curse on account of their princes ; they drove them away, and offered to Pope Leo the sovereignty of Benevento ; Hildebrand with joy seized this opportunity to gain for the Papal See a strong temporal foundation, and Leo IX. in person accepted the oath of homage from the people of Benevento on the 5th of July, 1051." (102)

Frederick of Hohenstaufen's opposition and contempt for the `spirit of the time' cannot be doubted : "The citizens of Milan were divided into three classes of free burghers ; there were no slaves nor even serfs in the Milanese. The nobles formed the first class of citizens
; from them, as a rule, were chosen the leaders and chiefs in time of war, and also a great part of the members of the city council and courts of justice. The guilds of merchants, bankers, capitalists, and artists formed the second class, the ordinary trades, and industries, partly freeholders, partly previous serfs, formed the third class. The lowest citizen had the right to carry arms, and knew how to use them. No handicraft excluded from knighthood.

The king and his entourage "jeered at the eligibility for knighthood possessed by handicraftsmen, at the law of Genoa and Milan, a law still more intolerable for an old feudal German ear, by which a matrimonial alliance between a noble and a non-noble citizen was no misalliance.

Such a constitution was as distasteful to the king, the first of German knights, as to the lowest knight, the owner of the pettiest castle. Even the nobility, high and low, of these city republics was in bad odor with the king and his knights. They saw in the altered condition of Upper Italy not an historical necessity, but only a temporary victory of the people over the nobles, the conquest of contemptible industry over the proud chivalry ; they thought if this spirit of civic freedom were to cross the Alps, the downfall of the feudal system would follow, and with it the fall of the German empire, which in their eyes was bound up with it. The king was determined to crush down or uproot this spirit at the place of its birth." (103)

However, the city nobility showed its true colour, that of its blood, when, seeing "that the king made a distinction between the aristocracy and democracy in Milan, and was determined to annihilate the republican system, it united still more closely with the other classes of the people, because its own interests were threatened by the king as much as those of the rest of the population. They stepped forward like one man for the common interests, for the defence of their reformed polity, which, not only by its existence, but by royal and imperial sanction, had become a legal polity. This latter point the king quite overlooked." (104) Yet, this did not prevent him from speaking of the Milanese citizens as "'slaves whose dwellings and forts must be destroyed.' Bishop Otto of Freisingen, the Babenberger, who was the king's uncle and privy councillor, spoke violently about the handicraftsmen in the Lombard cities bearing arms and the dignity of knighthood..." True to his noble nature, he called the industrial pursuits and the mercantile activity of the citizens, "despicable huckstering," and the republican communities a "pest"." (105)

Frederick, now emperor, was determined to extirpate the `free spirit' and the desire for national independence that had arisen in Italy. "The Crusades had enormously increased the trade of the Italian cities with the East, and their industries and wealth. They possessed means to resist, and the principles Frederick wished to uproot became in the conflict with him conscious of its own powers, and more developed." (106) The emperor saw in liberal national development of Italy "the vilest treason, a disloyalty that cried to heaven towards the honor of the German empire." (107) It is most interesting that this liberal national development was contemporaneous with the Easternisation of European manners, "imported from Palestine or learnt from commercial intercourse in the Mediterranean," and the strengthening of the influence of the pope over the `people', of the `vox populirisation'. (108)

"The emperor's relation to the Pope also urged him to Italy ; a friendship such as had been formed between him and Hadrian IV., cemented with innocent and noble blood, could not be of long continuance. Many things, not without faults of both emperor and Pope, had strained this friendship. Hadrian's passionateness made the tension a rupture by means of a letter which he addressed to the emperor at Besancon. This Latin letter was a complaint against the emperor of disregard to him, `which the Holy Father can the less explain as he had hitherto shown Frederick nothing but kindness, had assured to him the imperial diadem, which he even yet did not repent of, as he would not have repented had he conferred on him even greater beneficia.' The official language of the Middle Ages used the Latin word beneficium which, in classical Latin, means `a benefit,' to express `a fief.' When the envoy, Cardinal Roland, came to read this part of the letter, the emotion of the German princes was great. They all understood it as implying that the imperial dignity was a Papal fief and the emperor a vassal of the Pope. The cardinal strove to make head against the displeasure. `From whom, then, does the emperor receive the empire but from the Pope, the lord ?' The Bavarian Palgrave, Otto of Wittlesbach, would have stopped with his sword the mouth of the arrogant priest, if the emperor himself had not held his arm and allayed the storm.

Pope Hadrian IV. now declared that it was all a misunderstanding ; he had used the term beneficium in the old Roman sense as `benefit,' not in the feudalistic sense of `fief,' and he sent some cardinals to exculpate him ; they saluted the emperor as `their lord,' `the ruler of Rome and the world,' and called themselves `his clergy.' The emperor was content with this satisfaction." (108), despite the fact that "In the baggage of the Papal envoys was found a mass of papers which were intended to be distributed through the churches of the realm, and to excite the people against the emperor." (109)

Frederick I marched for the third time into the peninsula in 1158, determined to reassert his imperial sovereignty over upper Italy by stamping out the growing independence of Lombard trading cities. He widened the rights of the Empire, not only over ecclesiastical lands and corporations throughout Italy, but also over papal territories, at the diet of Roncaglia the same year, occupied Milan two years later, held again a diet at Roncaglia, at which the imperial tax (fodrum) was re-established, much to the scandal of Hadrian IV, who died before he could hurl the sentence of excommunication he had bound himself to pronounce against him, was actually excommunicated by Alexander III, the successor of Hadrian IV, had an antipope elected, put down an umpteenth revolt in Milan, forced Alexander III to flee to France, confronted the league which the Lombard towns had formed to resist his armies and which the papacy soon joined, was challenged and defeated by the Lombard league, met with Alexander III at Venice, knelt at his feet, kissed them and held his stirrup. "The defeat of Frederick was signal, but not ignominious. Just a hundred years before (1077), his great grandfather, Henry IV., grovelled before Gregory VII. The scene at Venice had not the personal debasement of the scene at Canossa, but it expressed a greater papal victory : in the one a craven crouched, in the other a hero yielded ; in the one an emperor was put to shame, in the other the empire was brought low." (110) A few centuries later, the consumer was king.

"In the midst of the conflict with Frederick Redbeard, another signal triumph was won for the papal power. Six years before the mighty Caesar knelt at the feet of the aged priest with whom he had been so long at war, Henry II. of England, the potent and imperious Plantagenet, knelt in penitent prayer and received bodily chastisement at the tomb of another priest with whom he had lived in fierce conflict, and whom his courtiers had slain. The Roman Church found more help in one dead." (111)

If it is during Frederick I's reign that the division between Guelphism, the papal and popular party, and Ghibellinism, the aristocratic party supporting the authority of the German emperors, became defined, it should be noted that the terms `Church party' and `imperial party' were usually preferred to those of Guelphs and Ghibelins until about 1250. The crisis of succession opened by the death of Emperor Henry VI, heir of Frederick I, helps to explain why : in the beginning unfavourable to the papacy, it "ended in its exaltation. Otho of Brunswick, the papal candidate, was worsted by Philip of Suabia, the antipapal candidate. The detested House of Hohenstaufen prevailed over the favoured House of Guelf. The assassination of Philip (1208) made room for Otho, and Innocent placed the imperial crown on the head of his nominee. But the possession of that crown soon converted the pontifical nominee into an imperial champion." (112) The pontiff and the emperor "erelong fell out about the respective rights of the papacy and the empire. Innocent bitterly resented the independence of Otho, and at once proceeded to uncrown the monarch of his choice, and undo the work of his own hands. He transferred his favour from the cherished blood of Guelf to the tainted blood of Hohenstaufen. The pontiff set up the head of the Ghibelins against the chief of the Guelfs. He invited his ward and vassal, Frederick, king of Sicily, the hereditary foe of the papacy, the hereditary champion of the empire, the grandson of Frederick Redbeard, the descendant of Henry IV., the heir of an excommunicated race, to avenge the wrongs and execute the sentence of the popedom upon the representative of the papal cause, upon the heir of a race devoted for generations to the Roman See. Frederick obeyed and triumphed ; Otho lost his crown, and Innocent enjoyed the satisfaction of a 'setter-up and puller-down of kings.'" (113)

The imperial House of Hohenstaufen was then hunted down and rooted out. "Frederick II., king of Sicily and emperor of Germany, a prince of many realms and rich endowments, voluptuous, heroic, intellectual, all-accomplished, and magnanimous, holding some conspicuous frailties in union with some lofty qualities, brought new splendour to the most illustrious throne of Christendom, and filled as large a space in the mind of the thirteenth century as another great German prince, another mighty Frederick II., occupied in the thoughts of the eighteenth century. Born of an anti-papal race, the heir of the Hohenstaufens, yet a ward and vassal of the papacy, helped to the throne of Germany by Innocent III., and encircled with the imperial crown by Honorius III., the vanquisher and dethroner of the Guelf emperor Otho, with the help of the pontiff, Frederick seemed born to reconcile the two irreconcilable powers, and bring the long strife between popedom and empire to an amicable end. But far otherwise was it to be. The imperial crown which had changed the Guelf Otho into a Ghibelin and the patronising pontiff into an adversary, was not likely to lose its anti-papal virtue with the blood of Hohenstaufen and the hereditary champion of imperial rights. The papacy dealt hardly and soon fell out with its imperial nurseling, exacting everything and conceding nothing. Pope Honorius charged Frederick with making bishops, oppressing the Church, and breaking his crusader's vow. The latter, who had taken the cross, remembered that he was an emperor as well as a crusader, and that he had duties at home as well as in Palestine, and deferred his expedition under the pressure once of State affairs and then of bodily illness. The pontiff imputed the growing peril of the Holy Land to the delays of the emperor, and at last (in 1228) Gregory IX excommunicated the tardy crusader. Frederick replied to the anathema by fulfilling his vow and sailing to Palestine, and the pope, who had excommunicated the emperor for not going, excommunicated him afresh for going. This expedition, though attended by the papal curse, was the only crusade except the first that met with any success. The excommunicated crusader recovered for Christendom the Holy City and much of the Holy Land, and alone of crusading chiefs, since Godfrey of Bouillon, entered Jerusalem in triumph. These advantages over the Moslem sorely wounded and bitterly incensed the sovereign pontiff, who invaded and ravaged the territories of the absent and victorious champion of the cross, and wrung money from almost every nation in Christendom to carry on this enormous warfare. These unnatural hostilities shortened Frederick's stay in Syria, and brought him home (1229) to the defence of his dominions against the pontifical invader, whom his vigorous preparations for war and his importunate demands for peace forced and shamed into a treaty. But Gregory, though apparently appeased, was in reality implacable. The emperor and the republics of Lombardy, with Milan at their head, fell out. The pope, who undertook to bring about a reconciliation, did everything in his power to encourage the confederates and embarrass the Caesar ; and at length (in 1239) openly declared against Frederick, excommunicated and deposed him. Again imperial power was encountered by Italian patriotism in alliance with the papacy." (114) "It was the Church, J. Evola wrote, that `blessed' the betrayal of the fides by siding with the Italian communes and lending her moral and material support to their revolt against the empire." (115)

"The age recognised as valid this dethronement of its most high-placed personage; and the first monarch of the Christian world was in truth its outcast. But Frederick did not forsake himself. He would fain have appeased the pope and conciliated the age ; but finding both irreconcilable, he resisted and defied them to the uttermost. He smote the papal league with the scimitar of his Saracen vassals ; he arrested and imprisoned prelates on their way to the council of Lyons. At the tidings that the synod had uncrowned him, he recrowned himself with his own hand. He fought at greater disadvantage and with no greater success than his ancestors, but he underwent no personal humiliation; he never humbled himself before the papal foe, like Henry IV. at Canossa, and Frederick I. at Venice ; to the last he strove stoutly and smote strongly. Frederick died in 1250, while the fight was raging, a richly endowed, fiercely hated, much erring and much enduring man. The splendour of his gifts and the greatness of his fortune were only equalled by the sharpness of his trials and sorrows, while the bitterness of his foes far exceeded the grievous ness of his sins. The nurseling and ward of the papacy, he came in for its deadliest hatred - a hatred such as it has borne to no other individual except perhaps his son Manfred. The most high-placed and illustrious person of his time was in sore conflict with it ; the chief sovereign of Christendom passed for a heretic or an unbeliever. The Roman Church made him a bed of thorns in this life and doomed him to a couch of fire in the life to come. His own and the succeeding generation acquiesced in the doom. But more distant ages have been more just and generous. The extravagant hatred and unbounded slander of his papal foes have won him favour with posterity; and history, while finding much to condemn, finds still more to admire and compassionate in the emperor Frederick II."

"The age recognised as valid this dethronement of its most high-placed personage; and the first monarch of the Christian world was in truth its outcast. But Frederick did not forsake himself. He would fain have appeased the pope and conciliated the age ; but finding both irreconcilable, he resisted and defied them to the uttermost. He smote the papal league with the scimitar of his Saracen vassals ; he arrested and imprisoned prelates on their way to the council of Lyons. At the tidings that the synod had uncrowned him, he recrowned himself with his own hand. He fought at greater disadvantage and with no greater success than his ancestors, but he underwent no personal humiliation; he never humbled himself before the papal foe, like Henry IV. at Canossa, and Frederick I. at Venice ; to the last he strove stoutly and smote strongly. Frederick died in 1250, while the fight was raging, a richly endowed, fiercely hated, much erring and much enduring man. The splendour of his gifts and the greatness of his fortune were only equalled by the sharpness of his trials and sorrows, while the bitterness of his foes far exceeded the grievous ness of his sins. The nurseling and ward of the papacy, he came in for its deadliest hatred - a hatred such as it has borne to no other individual except perhaps his son Manfred. The most high-placed and illustrious person of his time was in sore conflict with it ; the chief sovereign of Christendom passed for a heretic or an unbeliever. The Roman Church made him a bed of thorns in this life and doomed him to a couch of fire in the life to come. His own and the succeeding generation acquiesced in the doom. But more distant ages have been more just and generous. The extravagant hatred and unbounded slander of his papal foes have won him favour with posterity; and history, while finding much to condemn, finds still more to admire and compassionate in the emperor Frederick II."

"With him departed the might and majesty of the Holy Roman Empire, but not the relentless hate of the popes, who pursued his race as fiercely and implacably as they had persecuted him. The empire ceased to be formidable, and felt itself vanquished ; powerless competitors enfeebled and degraded it for many years, from the death of Frederick to the accession of Rudolf of Hapsburg (1250-73). It no longer defied the popedom ; it no longer lay in the way of the popes. But the House of Hohenstaufen had still crowns to lose ; its spoliation and extirpation formed the chief business of the papacy for nearly twenty years. Conrad IV. succeeded his father Frederick in the empire and the kingdom of Sicily, as likewise in the implacable hatred of Innocent IV., who plagued him with slanders, smote him with anathemas, helped to break his heart, rejoiced over his early death (1254), and despoiled his infant son Conradin of the Sicilian realm, which was overrun by the papal army... If he (Innocent III) did not transmit all his vices to his successor, he bequeathed his abhorrence of the House of Hohenstaufen, now become a papal passion inseparable from the papal throne." (116)

"But papal hatred would not forego its object ; it turned from the Plantagenets to the Capets ; disappointed in the royal family of England, it sought a destroyer of the Hohenstaufens in the royal family of France, and found an exact instrument in the brother of St. Louis, Charles of Anjou, Count of Provence, a man signalised by that union of fanaticism, ambition, ability, rapacity and ruthlessness, which has characterised all the eminent servants of the Roman See, from Simon de Montfort, the exterminator of the Albigenses, downward… But papal hate of the House of Hohenstaufen was to find a full 'and exquisite satisfaction in the blood of an innocent and still nobler victim, in the extirpation of the whole race. Conradin, son of Conrad and grandson of Frederick II., a gallant boy of sixteen, left his German home and his foreboding mother, and marched through Italy at the head of a devoted band of Ghibelin warriors, to reclaim the kingdom of Sicily from the French usurper whom the papacy had enthroned, and whom lie encountered at Tagliacozza (1268). A stratagem snatched the victory from the grasp of the young hero, and made him the captive of Charles of Anjou... But Charles of Anjou had a very hard heart, and was a thorough papal champion. Conradin had fought beneath the curse of Rome; the papal anathema sanctified the natural ruthlessness of Charles, and made of no account the princely birth, noble qualities, and tender years of Conradin. The kinsmen and courtiers of the victor pleaded hard for mercy to the imperial boy. The conqueror consulted his papal patron as to the fate of the youthful captive; Clement approved, if he did not advise, the bloody course which Charles desired ; the ruthless sanction of the Vicar of Christ prevailed over the merciful importunity of knights and barons, and decided the doom of Conradin ; and in the public place of Naples the headsman spilled the blood of the heroic boy, the last male of the most illustrious house in Europe (1268)." (117)

"This ruthless deed must be reckoned among the signal triumphs of the popedom. The conflict which had raged for two centuries between the empire and the papacy was at last brought to an end, not only by the prostration of the imperial power, but also by the extirpation of the imperial house. The race which had for generations sate on the chief throne of Christendom, in which genius and heroism were hereditary, and which had manifested its great qualities mainly in the protracted struggle with the popes, was exterminated by the creature and at the bidding of the Roman pontiff. The last descendant of Henry IV., of Frederick I., of Frederick II., perished on a scaffold. Nor was the decapitation of the heroic boy a single and isolated victory : it formed the crown and consummation of a series of papal triumphs. The conflict signalised by the shameful scene at Canossa and the humbling scene at Venice, was closed by the heart-rending scene at Naples. The contest forms a drama in three acts ; the first act commencing with the degradation of Henry IV. before Gregory VII. (1077), and ending with the compromise between Henry V. and Callixtus II. (1122) ; the second beginning soon after the accession of Frederick Redbeard (1152), and closing with his humiliation before Alexander III. (1177) ; the third opening with the quarrel between Otho IV. and Innocent III. (1211), and concluding with the execution of Conradin with the approbation of Clement IV. (1268). In this tremendous strife the worldly power, which pretended to be not of this world, showed itself far more ambitious and grasping, far more reckless and ruthless, than the avowed power of this world ; it prevailed by reason of its twofold character and action. A secular power with spiritual pretensions, it appealed to mightier passions and wielded mightier forces than its simply secular adversary ; it prevailed likewise through a capital error of that adversary. The empire acknowledged the spiritual claims of the papacy, and thereby acknowledged its own inferiority, confessed that it was fighting against a superior power, and thus fought at a great disadvantage. Defeat has almost always befallen those combatants of the popedom who have recognised its spiritual claims. France alone has combined successful resistance to papal encroachments with acknowledgment of papal authority. The empire vigorously strove, but miserably failed, against the secular aggressions of the power whose encroachments upon the soul and conscience it allowed. England, degraded by the baseness of John into a feudatory realm and treasure-house of the Roman See, stricken, debased, wrung out and emptied by papal oppression and extortion during the long impotence of Henry III., ever murmuring and groaning beneath the burden, ever chafing and striving against the yoke, never effectually strove and entirely prevailed until she renounced the spiritual sway of the foreign oppressor, and broke the ecclesiastical yoke of the Roman extortioner. Spiritual revolts have not always been victories ; but the only complete victories won over Rome have been spiritual victories. The Roman Church has generally been too strong for the State, when the strength of the State has not been upholden by the strength of the soul. In the contest for superiority between the closely related, mutually recognising, and mutually dependent powers so prominent in the Middle Ages, the victory must needs remain with the combatant of wider resources, loftier pretensions, and more unscrupulous character. It is no wonder that the Roman Church got the better in the struggle with its intimate and its creature, the Holy Roman Empire." (118)

"The spirit of Gregory X. was not the spirit of the Roman See. Uncongenial successors oppressively wielded its oppressive supremacy. The power of the popedom was indeed at its topmost height. The empire was brought low ; the imperial house was rooted out. The papacy had combined the complete triumph of its ambition with the full satisfaction of its wrath; it seemed to have at last realised its ideal - to have gotten the government of the world into its hands. Kings and princes seemed at the feet of the sovereign pontiff; impotent aspirants, like Richard of England and Alphonso of Castile, contended for the tarnished crown of the fallen empire. An exchange of services bound the popedom and the house of France together. The kingdom of England passed for a vassal realm of Rome. Souls and nations were alike in bondage ; she claimed the dominion of both worlds, and had her claim allowed. But this omnipotence was but momentary. The popedom only reached this topmost height of power to be straightway hurled from it. Retribution was at hand ; defeat and shame were not far off. But before the great stroke, the great humiliation, fell upon her, she had to witness the chastisement of her chief satellite, Charles of Anjou, and the partial undoing of her latest exploit in the way of giving and taking away crowns ; she did not remain unsmitten by the memorable vengeance of the Sicilian Vespers, which burst upon the butcher of Conradin and the tyrant of Naples and Sicily. The slaughter of the heroic boy and their rightful sovereign dwelt in the memory of the Sicilians. Fourteen years of heavy and manifold oppression on the part of Charles and his French instruments added ten thousand bitter 'recollections to that dark remembrance; and on Easter Tuesday, 1282, on the infliction of a new outrage, and at the sound of the vesper bell, the Sicilians rose upon their French oppressors, slaughtered eight thousand of them throughout the island, and made it over to Pedro III. of Aragon, the son-in-law of Manfred, the heir and avenger of the Hohenstaufens. Sicily was plucked for ever from the hard grasp of Charles of Anjou and his race. A papal donation was annulled; a crown taken away and given by the popedom was taken away and given in spite and in defiance of the popedom." (119)

"The Sicilian Vespers avenged Conradin, broke the heart of Charles of Anjou, and enraged his papal patrons, who went on heaping crowns and graces on the House of France and launching curses and crusades against the patriots of Sicily and the princes of Aragon. But the great mediaeval woe of the papacy was nigh at hand - a stroke from which it never wholly recovered. The bitterness of the stroke was enhanced by the birth of the inflictor. It came not from Sicilian patriot or German Caesar, but from the head of the beloved house of France. The Hohenstaufens were avenged by the kinsman of their despoiler and destroyer ; the empire was vindicated, the civil power was victoriously asserted by the chief of that royal race which had most profited by the exaltation of the papal power. The popedom was shamed, smitten, and led captive by its ally and darling, the grandson of St. Louis, the great-nephew of Charles of Anjou, the son of Philip III., who died on an errand of the Roman See, an ignominious and disastrous crusade against Pedro of Aragon. Philip the Fair, king of France, was chosen to trample on the pontiff, to degrade the priesthood, and to bring to an end the period of papal splendour." (120)

"In his zealous championship of ecclesiastical liberties and immunities, he forbade the clergy to pay tax or subsidy to the State without leave of the Roman See. Philip the Fair, ever in need of money, and jealous of the prerogatives of his crown, took especial offence at this bull as a wrong to his treasury and an encroachment on his authority, and answered it in kind by a decree which forbade gold or jewels to be sent out of the kingdom. This cruel thrust against the papal exchequer was resented by Boniface in a vehement and impassioned bull, wherein he rebuked the oppressions and exactions of the king against the church; reproached him with the piety of his ancestors and the favours of the Roman See towards himself and his house ; denounced his measures and reviled his advisers; threatened him with his own wrath, and prophesied the vengeance of Heaven. After this endeavour to impoverish each other, prince and pontiff paused awhile: each had much business and many enemies on his hands; each made some concessions to the other... Certain feudal rights and worldly possessions were in dispute between Philip the Fair and some of the French bishops. Boniface sternly interposed, and commanded the pastors of the Church to hold fast to every worldly advantage against the monarch of this world. The king pursued his claims, arrested and brought to trial a papal agent whose impetuous mediation had made matters worse. The pontiff forbade this trial of a priest by laymen ; summoned an assembly of the French clergy at Rome ; hinted at excommunication; and set forth the king's transgressions in the famous bull, 'Ausculta, fili.' Philip and the lawyers who surrounded him at once boldly and wisely widened the dispute. He stood forward as the champion of the laity against the priesthood, of the nation against a foreign usurper. He appealed to the people as no other French monarch had ventured to do, and convened the Estates General of the Realm - barons, bishops, and burghers - to vindicate the national dignity and independence against the Roman See. In their ears the pontiff was fiercely denounced; in their presence the obnoxious bull was burned. France and Rome, so long in close alliance, now stood in open hostility to each other. Philip laid hands upon the persons and property of the prelates who attempted to obey the papal summons to Rome. Boniface multiplied lofty pretensions and fierce threats, and declared the king excommunicated in company with his obsequious lawyers. They replied by accusing the pope of usurpation, simony, and heresy before an assembly of French bishops and barons, and by recommending his arrest and deposition. Boniface brandished his thunderbolts, and prepared to smite the king with a sentence of special excommunication and dethronement. But Philip smote more swiftly and more strongly. On the very day before the papal bolt was to be hurled - on September 7, 1303, a day destined to be especially disastrous to the popedom - a band of armed men, hired by William de Nogaret, the devoted agent of Philip and the public accuser of Boniface, and headed by Sciarra Colonna, the deadly enemy of the pontiff, marched into Anagni, a little town not far from Rome, the birthplace, favourite residence and summer retreat of the pope, with cries of `Death to Boniface : long live the king of France,' broke into the papal palace, plundered the papal treasury, and heaped insult and outrage upon the captive pontiff. For three days he remained in the hands of his enemies ; on the fourth day the people of Anagni rose, put to flight the captors, and delivered the captive. But Philip's work was effectually done. The victim bore back to Rome a shaken frame and a broken heart. Wrath, shame, and wounded pride threw him into a fever, which carried him off just a month after the outrage, October 11, 1303.
The terrible scene at Anagni closes the third act of the papal drama, brings to an ignominious end the period of papal splendour and omnipotence so strikingly opened more than two centuries before by the strange scene at Canossa, the abasement of the emperor Henry IV. before Gregory VII. The kingdom of this world which professed itself a kingdom not of this world, received its full development and attained its perfect consummation, marched on from triumph to triumph, vanquished every foe, subjugated every power, perpetrated every crime. Every tendency of the time either ministered to the papacy or was mastered by it; every event fought for it. The crusades, which almost exactly covered the period of its supremacy, not a little contributed thereto. The mighty men of the time were either its servants or its victims. Robert Guiscard, William the Conqueror, Lanfranc, Anselm, Bernard, Becket, Simon de Montfort the elder, and Charles of Anjou did battle for the Roman Church and prevailed. Henry IV., Abelard, Arnold of Brescia, Frederick Redbeard, and Frederick II., resisted her and were crushed. The papacy trampled on everything that stood in its way, whether public power or individual passion. Imperial might and national spirit, the strength of princes and the heart of man, genius, valour, love, subtle thought and earnest faith, all went down before the Roman Church… The wrongs of the Hohenstaufens, the wrongs of the Albigenses, the wrongs of the trampled State, of the tortured heart, of the stricken conscience, found an avenger in Philip the Fair. Through his triumph over the long triumphant popedom this unheroic and unwarlike king of France rises into historic greatness, and takes rank among the mighty men and master spirits of the world. He smote the papacy in the fulness of its strength ; he humbled it in the noontide of its splendour. Strangely, too, this daring and terrible blow was struck with perfect impunity. The outrage at Anagni was deeply abhorred and fiercely execrated; but it remained unavenged; it provoked no resistance, no reaction. The horror which it aroused still breathes and burns in the sublime execration of Dante :

'I see the lily in Anagni enter,
And in His vicar Christ new captive led,
I see him sore bemocked a second time
(The vinegar and gall again outpoured),
And among living robbers done to death.
I see the other Pilate too fell-souled
For this to glut him ; but he reaches forth
Within the temple his lawless, greedy grasp.
O my Lord God, when shall I be made glad
. With sight of that dear vengeance which Thy wrath
Stores up delighted in Thy hiding-place ?

The blow struck at Anagni not only remained unavenged and unreturned, but was altogether successful. It brought the papacy low, not only for a while but for ever; it was indeed a mighty stroke, from which the papacy never wholly recovered." (121) From which the papacy never recovered on a purely temporal plane.

The inconsistency of Dante's position lies not so much in the fact that a Ghibelline put a curse on the very king who put back in his place, "the eight circle of hell", his own public enemy number one, Boniface VIII, since it can be argued that the enemy of one's enemy is not necessarily one's friend, as in the fact that Philip IV's act is compared negatively to Ponce Pilate turning Jesus-Christ over to the Jews, when Ponce Pilate, as a subordinate of Tiberius, is regarded positively as an instrument of God, within the context of the theory of redemptive punishment developed by the Florentine author in Mon., 2-II-I-5. (122)

A paradox closely related to this inconsistency lies precisely at the heart of the failure of Ghibellinism. J. Evola rightly notes that, "Although the Hohenstaufen laid claim to the supernatural character of the empire, they failed to reintegrate in their representative the primordial function of the rex sacrorum, even though the Church had usurped the title of pontifex maximus that was proper to the Roman emperors", (123) but does not explain thoroughly why the Hohenstaufen failed ; why "… No matter how powerful and prideful, no medieval monarch ever felt capable of performing the function of the rite and the sacrifice... that had become the legacy of the clergy." (124) His observation that "On both sides there were compromises and more or less conscious concessions to the opposing principle" (125) is far from getting to the bottom of the failure, let alone that it is hard to see exactly what compromises and concessions were made in principle by the papacy ; let alone that, when one sees Ghibellinism and Guelphism, the imperial theory of power and the papal theory of power, as two opposing and irreconcilable principles, one sees double, as is clear from the political and historical considerations mentioned above and will be shown even more clearly in the following comments.

In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that "The Ghibelline emperors rose up against papal Rome in the name of Rome, thus upholding again the superior idea of the Sacrum Imperium against both the merely religious spirituality of the Church and her hegemonic claims." (126) The Ghibelline emperors did rise against papal Rome, yet not in the name of Rome, but in that of a Christianised Rome, let alone that, already by the reign of Frederick II, the struggle had become almost entirely political and was increasingly confined to Italian politics.

The whole Ghibelline discourse was entirely grounded in Christian tenets, just as Dante's analysis of the Roman Empire was predicated on mere Christian beliefs ; for Dante, Rome was Christian ab urbe condita, it just was not aware of it ; it is written in black and white every two pages in the Convivio, whose pro-imperial stances are carefully selected by J. Evola in `Revolt against the Modern World, while the Florentine author's indecisions and contradictions are appropriately pointed out in `The Mystery of the Grail'. If "... it behoves that there should be one, as shipmaster, who, considering the diverse conditions of the world, and ordaining the diverse and necessary offices, should have the universal and indisputable office of commanding the whole. And this office is called by pre-eminence empire, without any qualification, because it is the command of all the other commands. And hence he who is appointed to this office is called emperor because he is the commander who issues all the commands" (127), the fact remains that, to Dante, the "shipmaster" - an actual Christian simile for the ruler -, like the pope, derives his power and authority directly from God, the supreme reference for all Ghibellines, and that the "shipmaster" is there "for the perfection of the universal religious order of the human race". There is no evidence that Dante ever questioned the spiritual authority of the papacy, and his whole work shows that criticism of papal conduct does not imply any disbelief in the spiritual power of the papacy. (128) Actually, even in temporal matters, the authority of the emperor has its limits : "There are many others which seem to have some relation to the imperial art ; and herein those were and are deceived who believe that in such matters an imperial pronouncement carries authority. For instance, as to `manhood,' we are not to accept any imperial judgment on the ground of its being the emperor's. So let us render to God that which is God's." (129)

At best, Dante's work can be seen as supportive of the theory of joint sovereignty. This theory, to which the Empire held and which was asserted by the emperors, notably by Frederick I and Frederick II, "while the popedom, as became the kingdom of this world calling itself a kingdom not of this world, sought to realise the theory of its own sole sovereignty", (130) was itself a product of the Christian political thought, a fac-simile of the Gelasian theory that "Sacerdotium and Imperium are independent spheres, each wielding the one of the two swords appropriate to itself, and thus the Emperor no less than the Pope is Vicarius Dei" ; (131) that sacerdotal authority and royal power, both established by God, are distinct, but of equal power and dignity, except that one is a bit more equal than the other… Thus, the Empire and its defenders had only "a half-hearted doctrine", (132) that is to say, that of the two powers, to oppose the claims of the partisans of ecclesiastical power. As already outlined, "Ever since the days of Pope Gelasius I (492-6), the Church herself had accepted the view of a strict dualism in the organisation of society and, therefore, of the theoretical equality between the ecclesiastical and the secular organs of government." (133)

There were two weak points in Ghibellinism. The first weak point was the above-mentioned doctrine, since "it was rather a thesis for academic debate than a rallying cry for the field of battle. Popular contests are for victory, not for delimitation of territory. And its weakness was apparent in this, that while the thorough-going partisans of the Church allowed to the Emperor practically no power except such as he obtained by concession of or delegation from the Church, the imperial theory granted to the ecclesiastical representative at least an authority and independence equal to those claimed for itself, and readily admitted that of the two powers the Church could claim the greater respect as being entrusted with the conduct of matters that were of more permanent importance.

Moreover, historical facts contradicted this idea of equality of powers. The Church through her representatives often interfered with decisive effect in the election and the rejection of secular potentates up to the Emperor himself : she claimed that princes were as much subject to her jurisdiction as other laymen, and she did not hesitate to make good that claim even to the excommunication of a refractory ruler and - its corollary - the release of his subjects from their oath of allegiance. Finally, the Church awoke a responsive echo in the hearts of all those liable to oppression or injustice, when she asserted a right of interposing in purely secular matters for the sake of shielding them from wrong; while she met a real need of the age in her exaltation of the papal power as the general referee in all cases of difficult or doubtful jurisdiction.

Thus the claims of each power as against the other were not at all commensurate. For while the imperialists would agree that there was a wide sphere of ecclesiastical rule with which the Emperor had no concern at all, it was held by the papalists that there was nothing done by the Emperor in any capacity which it was not within the competence of the Pope to supervise." (134)

Even in its mildest form, the theory of the Church in the `Middle Ages' was a trompe l'oeil, since its champions "found a reconciliation of the two spheres to consist in the absorption of the secular by the ecclesiastical. The one community into which, by the admission of all, united mankind was gathered, must needs be the Church of God. Of this Christ is the Head. But in order to realise this unity on earth Christ has appointed a representative, the Pope, who is therefore the head of both spheres in this world. But along with this unity it must be allowed that God has sanctioned the separate existence of the secular no less than that of the ecclesiastical dominion. This separation, however, according to the advocates of papal power, did not affect the deposit of authority, but affected merely the manner of its exercise. Spiritual and temporal power in this world alike belonged to the representative of Christ.

But the bolder advocates of ecclesiastical power were ready to explain away the divine sanction of temporal authority. Actually existing states have often originated in violence. Thus the State in its earthly origin may be regarded as the work of human nature as affected by the Fall of Man : like sin itself, it is permitted by God. Consequently it needs the sanction of the Church in order to remove the taint. Hence, at best, the temporal power is subject to the ecclesiastical : it is merely a means for working out the higher purpose entrusted to the Church. Pope Gregory VII goes farther still in depreciation of the temporal power. He declares roundly that it is the work of sin and the devil. `Who does not know,' he writes, `that kings and dukes have derived their power from those who, ignoring God, in their blind desire and intolerable presumption have aspired to rule over their equals, that is, men, by pride, plunder, perfidy, murder, in short by every kind of wickedness, at the instigation of the prince of this world, namely, the devil ?' But in this he is only re-echoing the teaching of St. Augustine ; and he is followed, among other representative writers, by John of Salisbury, the secretary and champion of Thomas Becket, and by Pope Innocent III. To all three there is an instructive contrast between a power divinely conferred and one that has at the best been wrested from God by human importunity." (135)

The desecration of the State, which is inherent in these views, is echoed in the illustrations used by many popes to define the relation between what they were not afraid to call the auctoritas and the potestas : "Gregory VII, at the beginning of his reign, compares them to the two eyes in a man's head. But he soon substitutes for this symbol of theoretical equality a comparison to the sun and moon, or to the soul and body, whereby he claims for the spiritual authority, as represented by the soul or the sun, the operative and illuminating power in the world, without and apart from which the temporal authority has no efficacy and scarcely any existence. An illustration equally common, but susceptible of more diverse interpretation, was drawn from the two swords offered to our Lord by His disciples just before the betrayal. It was St. Bernard who, taking up the idea of previous writers that these represented the sword of the flesh and the sword of the spirit respectively, first claimed that they both belonged to the Church, but that, while the latter was wielded immediately by St. Peter's successor, the injunction to the Apostle to put up in its sheath the sword of the flesh which he had drawn in defence of Christ, merely indicated that he was not to handle it himself. Consequently he had entrusted to lay hands this sword which denotes the temporal power. Both swords, however, still belonged to the Pope and typified his universal control. By virtue of his possession of the spiritual sword he can use spiritual means for supervising or correcting all secular acts. But although he should render to Caesar what is Caesar's, yet his material power over the temporal sword also justifies the Pope in intervening in temporal matters when necessity demands. This is the explanation of the much debated Translatio Imperii, the transference of the imperial authority in 800 A.D. from the Greeks to the Franks. It is the Emperor to whom, in the first instance, the Pope has entrusted the secular sword ; he is, in feudal phraseology, merely the chief vassal of the Pope. It is the unction and coronation of the Emperor by the Pope which confer the imperial power upon the Emperor Elect. The choice by the German nobles is a papal concession which may be recalled at any time. Hence, if the imperial throne is vacant, if there is a disputed election, or if the reigning Emperor is neglectful of his duties, it is for the Pope to act as guardian or as judge ; and, of course, the powers which he can exercise in connection with the Empire he is still more justified in using against any lesser temporal prince." (136)

This process of desecration of the State is put into a metaphysical perspective in `Revolt against the Modern World' (and, later, in `Men among the Ruins, too) : "... the Church eventually disputed and regarded as tantamount to heresy and a prevarication dictated by pride that doctrine of the divine nature and origin of regality ; it also came to regard the ruler as a mere layman equal to all other men before God and his Church, and a mere official invested by mortal beings with the power to rule over others in accordance with natural law. According to the Church, the ruler should receive from the ecclesiastical hierarchy the spiritual element that prevents his government from becoming the civitas diaboli. Boniface VIII, who did not hesitate to ascend to the throne of Constantine with a sword, crown, and scepter and to declare : `I am Caesar, I am the Emperor,' embodies the logical conclusion of a theocratic, Southern upheaval in which the priest was entrusted with both evangelical swords (the spiritual and the temporal) ; the imperium itself came to be regarded as a beneficium conferred by the pope to somebody, who in return owed to the Church the same vassalage and obedience a feudal vassal owes the person who has invested him. However, since the spirituality that the head of the Roman Church incarnated remained in its essence that of the `servants of God,' we can say that far from representing the restoration of the primordial and solar unity of the two powers, Guelphism merely testifies to how Rome had lost its ancient tradition and how it came to represent the opposite principle and the triumph of the Southern Weltanschauung in Europe. In the confusion that was beginning to affect even the symbols, the Church, who on the one hand claimed for herself the symbol of the sun vis-à-vis the empire (to which she attributed the symbol of the moon), on the other hand employed the symbol of the Mother to refer to herself and considered the emperor as one of her `children.' Thus, the Guelph ideal of political supremacy marked the return to the ancient gynaecocratic vision in which the authority, superiority, and privilege of spiritual primacy was accorded to the maternal principle over the male principle, which was then associated with the temporal and ephemeral reality." (137)

It is clear that Philip the Fair cannot possibly be held responsible for initiating such a process, as argued by R. Guenon and, later, by J. Evola, who went so far as to call the French king a "sinister" character and as to apply to him, following indiscriminately in the footsteps of generations of misinformed historians, the nickname of "Counterfeiter" (138) the bishop of Palmiers once saddled him and Boniface VIII echoed, infuriated as the pope was with the anti-papal policy of the French king. Having been debased by Philip, the papacy found nothing better than to accuse him - the fair - of abasement. In substituting clerics for laymen in the French government and administration in order to break the dependence of the kingdom on the clergy for legal and accounting services, he only followed the example of Frederick II, who had founded the University of Naples to train lawyers, accountants, and civil servants for Sicily, following in this a trend set by the Roman Curia during the late twelfth century (139) ; in France, Louis IX was actually the first to introduce legists into the parliament, which he set up as a court of justice. It was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. The bishops, who were the officials and the counsellors of the Carolingian kings, the clerics, with whom these filled their chancellery, were gradually replaced under the Capetians by subordinates who, if they were laymen, helped nonetheless disseminating more or less consciously a law which was only nominally `Roman', bearing instead the brand mark of a Christian worldview. To Carolingian kings, to impregnate their subjects with Christian morality was the main goal of administration : the so-called revival of classical Roman law in the twelve century was part of the plan to transform and shape society thoroughly and totalistically according to Christian standards. Just as the Holy Roman empire was a caricature of the Augustean empire, grounded as it was on Christian dogmas, so the law that was spread by the legists in western Europe under the label of `Roman law' originated in a Biblical view of law, whose foundations are at odds with the governing principles of classical Roman law. Without going into detail, theology absorbed law in the beginning of the Christian era, degrading it to the level of morality. The ius, as defined by Aristotle as fair sharing, just due, `juste partage', `suum ius cuique tribuere', was boiled down to the Torah's notion of `Law' as a code of conduct, thus opening the door to the notion of `individual rights' in Europe (140). Given their Christian background, it is not surprising that the doctrine of the early legists focused on the three following points : the emancipation of the individual, the full equality in the family, the liberation of the land. (141)

While the Church played a pivotal role in the desacralisation of the organic State, Philip, no matter how fair and wise it was of him to tax the clergy on the secular property it held, to create a border tax on goods imported into France, to confiscate the assets and property of the papal bankers and of the Jews who had despoiled the kingdom, to forbid all export of currency and precious metals from France, did not make it sacred again. For, in the last analysis, he had the same points of reference as his predecessors since Clovis and as all grandees in Europe since Constantine. "... there seems no question of his belief that he held the kingdom directly from God, and that he thought himself answerable only to God for its governance. The great ordonnance of reform issued on 18 March 1303, proclaimed that the kingdom `had always been subject to God's sway, hand and protection, alone'... Philip seems to have come to believe in his calling, transcending the limits of secular rulership." (142) Likewise, two centuries before, "While Gregory asserted that as head of the church he had authority over all Christians (even kings), Henry argues that he is king through the divine will of God and thus that only God - not the pope - could sit in judgment of a king. Henry uses the church's early history to illustrate his argument. (143) From the moment that all European kings, all European emperors, without exception, met the pope on his own ground and brandished Christian beliefs in their struggle against the papacy, this struggle was doomed to fail.

If "we find in the Carolingian ideal the principle according to which the king is supposed to rule over both clergy and the people on the one hand," this principle is still reasserted in Christian terms, and not from a Roman perspective, as the Carolingian king saw himself as a surrogate of God on earth, and not as a new Augustus or even less as a new Tiberius. "It is significant that Charles regarded himself - and not the Pope - as the head of the God-state, and trod forth as the highest lord, not only in secular things but also in purely church matters." (144) By the same token, Otto III entitled himself "servant of Jesus Christ," "servant of the Apostles", considering the pope as one of his optimates. His theocratic notion of kingship is reflected in the imagery of his reign and, more generally, of all the emperors of the Ottonian dynasty. (145)

The fundamentally Judeo-Christian conception of kingship and of the imperial dignity displayed by the Ghibellines was thus the second weak point in their theory and in their action ; "during the Middle Ages, the dignity of the kings themselves had an almost priestly nature", and the fact that kingship was then "established through a rite that differed only in minor detail from episcopal ordination" (146) is only a mere political crystallisation of the Christianisation of the minds. Nothing can best illustrate the loss of all true Nordic points of reference in the German nobility than the fact the Saxons, less than four centuries after having been decimated, subjugated and Christianised, became the supporters of the papal party in Germany. The evidence thus shows that it is a misconception to state that "The Holy Roman Empire was both a restauratio and a continuatio, considering that its ultimate meaning - beyond any external appearance, compromise with contingent reality, and often limited awareness and various dignity of the individuals who represented its idea - was that of a renewal of the Roman movement toward an ecumenical `solar' synthesis." (147)

Because Ghibellinism was not rooted deeply enough in the non-dualistic Roman principles of authority to be able to pursue "the subjection of spiritual authority to temporal powers, but rather up-held, vis-à-vis the exclusivist claim of the Church, a value and a right for the State, different from those that are proper to an organization with a merely human and material character" ; because it actually acknowledged the papacy as the bearer of a `spiritual authority' and stooped so low as to settle for crumbs by accepting to be confined to the administration of temporal affairs, it was ultimately overcome and rooted out. Had Philip subjugated the Church and dechristianised France in the name of the Roman principles of auctoritas and potestas, he would have only dealt with Christianity the way ancient Rome dealt with the "hegemonistic attempts of Etruscan and sacerdotal elements or similar forces", (148), and, generally speaking, with the alien and adulterating proto-Christian cults through which the heterogeneous and hostile anti-Aryan element sought to infiltrate the Romanitas.

To understand why what he considered normal in the case of ancient Rome he found abnormal and even "diabolical" in that of the `Middle Ages', his claim that Christianity was rectified to a certain extent by Germanic and Roman influences of Germanic or of Roman origin in the course of time must be taken into account, and so must the caveats it is filled with. It is argued without further ado that "Catholicism developed through (a) the rectification of various extremist features of primitive Christianity" ; it is remarked upon half-heartedly that "Catholicism developed through (b) the organization of a ritual, dogmatic, and symbolic corpus beyond the mere mystical, soteriological element", but not that the `Roman' Catholic ritual owes far more to Semitic aesthetics than it does to Roman rites, nor that the Roman tradition is as devoid of dogma and doctrine as the Nordic tradition ; as to "(c) (149) the absorption and adaptation of doctrinal and organizational elements that were borrowed from the Roman world and from classical civilization in general", leaving aside these "organizational elements", of which we have already spoken, referring to the fact that, by the fourth century, the Church had developed a system of government based on the Roman constitutional model, taking shape of its government and copying names, offices and methods ; leaving aside the influence that Pauline patriarchalism cannot but have played in the formation of the Church hierarchical system (150), as regards these "doctrinal elements", the spirit of modernity which swept through Thomism can be seen in the theological sphere (151) and, more importantly, in the political as well as in the legal realm.

First, if Aquinas' Christian aristotelianism rejects the Augustinian view that the State is God's punishment for `original sin' in favour of the Greek philosopher's conception of the State as a political community for the good life of citizens, he distanced himself from the latter, for whom citizenship is strictly ethnically-defined in the best Aryan tradition, by viewing the `citizen', in the worst tradition of Stoicism, as a `koinonikon', that is, as a citizen of the whole inhabited world. Concomitantly, the Aristotelian concept of common good was counterfeited along the same universalistic lines : it no longer referred to an organic, and, therefore, racial community, to a koinonia politike, as a community of interest and of spirit within an ethnic City-State but, as in Paul, who had already hijacked this Greek term, to an intimate union between man and his fellow creatures, or between man and God, to the mutual fellowship of believers, irrespective of race, ethnicity and sex. The contradiction in terms that all groups of people can have common interests did not fail to be resolved by a theological sleight of hand, by the all-encompassing argument that God is the common good.

Then, "against the conception of the traditional medieval king, Aquinas offered `political government'(regimen politicum). `Political government' pertains to a situation in which the powers of the ruler are circumscribed according to the laws of the state. Aquinas' argument that a mixture of political government and regal government would be the most effective is full of democratic potential, highlighting a conflict between ascending and descending forms of government." (152), since "The ascending theme of government and law holds that the law creating power is located in the people" (153), and, here, the `people' is no longer conceived of as Senatus Populusque Romanus or polis, nor even as citizens of a political unit, but as the `congregation of the faithful' or as "nothing but the congregation of men", under God's leadership. "The political life is, for Aquinas, necessary in order to sustain human life, and is thus established as a part of God's creation. However, by emphasizing the need to sustain the political life in order to ensure human life and thus enable humans to live according to the will of God, Aquinas marginalizes all human difference… We must all be of the same type of human to live in Aquinas' world of Christian natural law, whereas for Aristotle, people need to be different in order to be discriminated against in order to enable politics. Whereas Aristotle establishes differences for political life, Aquinas does not." Due to a universalistic conception of natural law which, as was seen above, does not owe anything to Roman classical law, "Aquinas destroys the idea that difference is necessary for political life." (154)

What is also full of democratic potential in Aquinas is his ethics. While it is true that "Aquinas did not (and could not) conceive of an individual with innate rights, organic to the individual person and there was no self/other construction for Aquinas. Individuals for Aquinas are not autonomous subjects, they exist as a part of a whole", the fact remains that this whole is an abstract, inorganic whole, made up of groups and of individuals of very diverse racial and cultural backgrounds whose only link is a mere belief. Inorganic communities, as showed by M. Weber, are the breeding ground for individualism.

Whereas the early Christian attitude towards the State (155) was that of the "pure negation (and nothing more)" (156) which is typical of anti-tradition, it did not take long and much for the Church Fathers to infuse a counter-traditional element into it, denying "any paramount duty of loyalty to the state, and appealed to a higher loyalty to another fatherland." (157) Clearly, "Nothing is more foreign to us than the state. One state we know, of which all are citizens - the universe". (158) The actual counterfeit of the concept of State along Judeo-Christian lines was achieved by Aquinas and his disciples.

Whatever was borrowed by Christianity from what was intrinsically Aryan in Rome and, more generally, in the Greco-Roman civilisation was given a Judeo-Christian twist in the process, a Judeo-Christian twist which made it unrecognisable to the untrained eye and apparently fooled the Germans, as soon as they were exposed to these unfaithful, deceitful borrowings.

"The Germans, since the times of Tacitus... appeared to be very similar to the Achaean, paleo-Iranian, paleo-Roman and Northern-Aryan stocks that had been preserved, in many aspects (including the racial one), in a state of `prehistoric' purity. The Germanic populations just like the Goths, the Longobards, the Burgundians, and the Franks were looked down upon as barbarians by that decadent `civilization' that had been reduced to a juridical administrative structure and that had degenerated into `Aphrodistic' forms of hedonistic urban refinement, intellectualism, aestheticism, and cosmopolitan dissolution. And yet in the coarse and unsophisticated forms of their customs one could find the expression of an existence characterized by the principles of honor, faithfulness, and pride. It was precisely this `barbaric' element that represented a vital force, the lack of which had been one of the main causes of Roman and Byzantine decadence." (159) These `young races' "were young only because of the youth typical of that, which still maintains contact with the origins. These races descended from the last offshoots to leave the Arctic seat and that therefore had not suffered the miscegenation and the alterations experienced by similar populations that had abandoned the Arctic seat much earlier, as is the case with the paleo-Indo-European stocks that had settled in the prehistoric Mediterranean." (160) Besides their ethos, "The Nordic-Germanic people… carried in their myths the traces of a tradition that derived immediately from the primordial tradition." (161) Their view of the world, permeated "with ideals and with figurations of gods who were typical of `heroic' cycles", (162) was also closely akin to ancient Romans'.

Their contact with the Christianised Roman world produced a certain synergy. The new elements introduced by the Germans, the most important of which were political and institutional, merged with what the Church had borrowed from Rome in terms of governing structures and of legal institutions. The ethical notions of the Germans, as stressed by J. Evola, were also decisive in the shaping of the civilisation of the `Middle-Ages', with its "virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity..." (163) It is correct to say that "... both the idea of Roman universalism and the Christian principle, in its generic aspect of affirmation of a supernatural order, produced an awakening of the highest vocation of Nordic-Germanic stocks ; both ideas also contributed to the integration on a higher plane and to the revivification in a new form of what had often been materialized and particularized in them in the context of traditions of individual races," (164) provided that it is kept in mind that this `awakening', this `revivification', was oriented and channelled by the papacy to serve its own interest and purpose. Simply put, by an author who clearly did not realise how true his statement was, "The settlement of the Teutonic tribes was not merely the introduction of a new set of ideas and institutions to combine with the old, it was also the introduction of fresh blood and youthful mind, the muscle and the brains which were in the future to do the larger share of the world's work." (165)

"The fact that during the period in which they appeared as decisive forces on the stage of European history these stocks lost the memory of their origins, and that the primordial tradition was present in those stocks only in the form of fragmentary, often altered, and unrefined residues," may not have prevented "them from carrying as a deep, inner legacy the possibilities and the acquired Weltanschauung from which `heroic' cycles derive", (166) but it definitely hindered them from defending "the imperial idea against the Church and to restore to new life the formative vis of the ancient Roman world." (167) The incapacity of the Germanic element to defend the imperial idea against the Southern influences carried by the Church and, worse still, their yielding to these influences, can be ascribed precisely to this obscuration and to the corresponding weakening of the related human type ; the Germanic ethos, far from manifesting itself in its true and pure form, as it did, for example, in the Spartan and Patrician type, lacked plainness ; incidentally, no matter how hardened Philip IV's self-restrained nature, how softened his frugality, were by his religious devotion, this ethos is more visible in the Capetians than in the Ottonians and in the Hohenstaufens." No matter how filled with a sense of honour, a sense of justice, with brotherly affection and good-will, the German noble of the `Middle Ages' may still have been, his idea of honour, of justice, of brotherhood, of fides, was biased by the Christian values he came to be skilfully exposed to. The Christianisation of the Germanic ethos will be explored later. For the time being, it is necessary to try to account for the fact that, at the times the Nordic man came in contact with the already Christianised European world, the Nordic man was no longer what he used to be - for the fact that it was only subconsciously that he could assume his legacy - in short, for this darkening, of which the fact that "the supernatural element became obscured by secondary and spurious elements of the myth and the saga, as did the universal element contained in the idea of Asgard-Mitgard, the `center of the world'" (168) is not a cause, but, at best, (169) a consequence or symptom. The cause is to be found elsewhere. Los is wrong in assuming that the early Teutons were a pure race, and so is J. Evola in asserting that "These races descended from the last offshoots to leave the Arctic seat and that therefore had not suffered the miscegenation and the alterations experienced by similar populations that had abandoned the Arctic seat much earlier." (170) As a mater of fact, anthropological and archaeological research has shown conclusively that "At the beginning of the local Iron Age, a new people, bearing a Hallstatt type of culture, entered northwestern Germany and Scandinavia. These invaders were of the usual central European Nordic type associated in earlier centuries with the Illyrians. Through mixture with the local blend of Megalithic, Corded, and Borreby elements, these newcomers gave rise to a special sub-type of Nordic which was characterized by a larger vault and face, a heavier body build, and a skull form on the borderline between dolicho- and mesocephaly.

The Germanic tribes that wandered over Europe during the period of migrations belonged essentially to this new type. Exceptions were the Alemanni and Franks, who, in southwestern Germany, assumed a Keltic physical guise, which they spread to Belgium, France, and Switzerland, countries already familiar with the Kelts in person." (171)

There is no way a people of Nordic stock could have taken seriously the teachings of the Church, its woolly theory of power, its gynaeco-theocratic conception of kingship, its oriental vanities, its egalitarian, abstract, understanding of law, its dogmas and its doctrine, its "Levantine Syrian demonry", (172) hadn't it been previously contaminated physically, mentally and spiritually by extra- and anti-Aryan influences.

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APPENDIX

It is generally professed that the process of Christianisation of the Germanic peoples was completed by the middle of the eleventh century through three main ways or methods : by diffusion, that is, by missionary work ; caeasaropapistically ; and by the sword. To define Christianisation is another matter, over which Academia is increasingly divided, especially since the preliminary definition of a Christian, which, prior to or even instead of the definition of Christianity, is required to examine this process on solid grounds is not easy to arrive at.

What characterises a Christian, beyond faith, worship, the belonging to this or that denomination, the more or less sentimental, the more or less intellectual, adherence to dogmas, is a forma mentis, which is immediately and distinctly recognisable, whose features could already be found in pre-Christian human types and can still be felt in the increasingly undifferentiated man of the post-Christian era – a forma mentis which is reflected both in thought and action.

Of course, conversion does not mean an instant and complete switch to this forma mentis in the convert, even less so in the forced convert, who may not even have mental, intellectual, racial and spiritual predispositions for it, whereas there are chances that the one who voluntarily converts is predisposed for it.

By definition, the conversion of a people whose ethos was so different from the Christian's turn of mind as that of the Germanic tribes was could not be but a long process, as it seems more and more medievalists have come to realise from a closer study of primary sources (173), giving further credit to the view that "For all practical purposes, Christianity `converted' Western man only superficially ; it constituted his `faith' in the most abstract sense while his real life continued to obey the more or less material forms of the opposite tradition of action, and later on, during the Middle Ages, an ethos that was essentially shaped by the Northern-Aryan spirit. In theory, the Western world accepted Christianity but for all practical purposes it remained pagan." (174) This is so true that, when a Christian died and his heir was attached to the old ways, it was habitual for a whole tribe to leave the Christian faith and to return to its gods, a pattern which, incidentally, could also support the concomitant and less fashionable view that the various Germanic groups accepted Christianity as externally and abstractly as they had come to experience their own gods, the sacred. It cannot be overemphasised that conversion was by no means individual, interior. Rather, it proceeded from a group action. Leaders played a pivotal role in most cases. Missionaries approached a king and, if he converted, the people followed suit, on the basis of the tight bonds between the former and the latter – Christian queens were also powerful agents of conversion. Their acceptance of Christianity was thus determined by their allegiance to their ruler. With the exception of Frisia and Saxony, where the observance of Christianity was enforced by Franks through their military conquest, this religion spread in Northern Europe through various means of coercion without any substantial resistance from the ruler, the overking, to the aristocracy, down to the freemen, the freedmen, the commoners and the slaves.(175). It cannot be overemphasised that the conversion of rulers "did not entail the Christianization of the population even in an institutional sense, let alone in the sense of an internalization of beliefs." (176)

In fact, the acceptance of Christianity was far less external and abstract in the elite than in the other classes. "Christianity was part of the very identity of elite Franks, who increasingly came to see themselves as a people chosen by God, and thus to define themselves in distinction to the non- and imperfectly Christian peoples that surrounded them." (177) ; this also applies to the Ottonians and to the Hohenstaufens, to an even greater extent ; the more powerful the ruler, the more faithful, the more attached, no matter his more or less fluctuating relations with the papacy, to Christian values ; the more he felt responsible for saving the souls of his subjects.

Whatever the more or less complex motivations behind their conversion - be they political or psychological -, on which there has been much speculation, which lets one with a sensation of incompletion and which it is not our aim to fuel here, the action of the law of chemical affinities in the whole thing has been overlooked, let alone a factor closely linked to this law : the racial one. Similis simili gaudet. Various recent scientific researches in the fields of archaeology and genetic have proved conclusively that the stocks believed by J. Evola and most raciologists of his time, and, actually, by most historians until recently, on the strength of Tac., Germ. 4, not to have "suffered the miscegenation and the alterations experienced by similar populations that had abandoned the Arctic seat much earlier" (178) were instead, at least for some of them, no longer stocks of pure breed (especially on the maternal lineage), stocks which, during the Voelkerwanderung, interbred in turn, still for some of them, with mixed or even non Aryan populations.

Among the Eastern Germans, the Ostrogoths, it seems that most tribes preserved their original Nordic racial characteristics, while the Gepidae show clear traces of mongoloid mixture, due to their blending with the Huns, to whom they were subject for decades, and the western branch of Germanic-speaking peoples, namely, the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, of the Frisians, and of the Germans proper, among whom the Franks, the Alemanni, the Bavarians, the Thuringians, and the proto-Hessians, deviate in various physical respects from the typically Nordic type, as a mixed variety of central European Nordic combined with old north-western European or/and Celtic and Mongoloid elements ; traces of Mongoloid mixture are clearly visible in the Lombards, who, on the other hand, appear to have been reached by strains of Armenoid and Dinaric blood ; the Franks soon succumbed to Keltic mixture (179) Generally speaking, the first admixture among the Germanic tribes of our era is Mongoloid (180). The second admixture of races in early Germany, the Slavic, must have had an even more corroding impact on their Nordic blood, insofar as the Slavic tribes were already significantly affected by an admixture of Mongolian genes.

No account will be deliberately taken of these data in the examination it has occurred to us to conduct of one the very few tenuous points of contact between the Nordic ethos and the Christian pathos whereby the early Germans may have been slowly but surely lured into identifying themselves more or less coercively with the dominant assumptions of the Judeo-Christian sect. For the sake of exposition, it is necessary to pretend that the Germanic peoples that entered history at the beginning of our era were all purebred.

(1) Gill, T. H., The Papal drama : A historical essay. London : Longmans, Green, and Co, 1866, pp. 1-3.
(2) Frank., T., Race Mixture in the Roman Empire, AHR 21, 1916, p. 708.
(3) Evola, J., Revolt against the Modern World. Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1995 p. 288.
(4) Horsley, A. B., "The History," in Peter and the Popes. Provo, UT : Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1989, p. 43.
(5) Ibid. p. 44.
(6) Manning, H. E., The Temporal Power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, Second edition. London : Burns & Lambert, pp. 11-12.
(7) evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/spiritual-authority-and-temporal-power/.
(8) Guenon, R., Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power. Hillsdale, NY : SophiaPerennis, 2001.
(9) Gummere, F. B., Germanic Origins : A Study in Primitive Culture. New York : C. Scribner's sons, 1892, p. 277.
(10) evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/the-occult-war-conclusion/.
(11) thebasilica.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/on-the-medieval-catholic-background-of-the-reformation-%E2%80%9Ctwo-kingdoms%E2%80%9D-doctrine-ii-gelasian-dualism/
(12) Tierney, B., The Crisis of Church & State, 1050-1300 : With selected documents. University of Toronto Press, 1964, p. 16
(13) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 9-11.
(14) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 15-16.
(15) Deanesly, M., A History of the Medieval Church, 590-1500. Routledge.: London. 1989, p. 83-84. First published in 1925 by Methuen & Co. Ltd.
(16) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 16.
(17) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 16-17.
(18) Schutz, H., The Carolingians in Central Europe, their History, Arts, and Architecture : A Cultural History of Central Europe, 750-900. Brill Academic Publishers, 2004, p. 27.
(19) Schutz, H., op. cit., p. 30.
(20) Tierney, B., op. cit. p. 17.
(21) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 20.
(22) Tierney, B., op. cit. p. 17.
(23) Schutz, H., op. cit., p. 38.
(24) Barbero, A., Charlemagne. University of California Press, 2004, p. 20-21.
(25) Brissaud, J., A History of French Public Law. London, 1915, p. 74.
(26) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 20-21.
(27) Ibid., p. 21.
(28) Ibid., p. 22.
(29) This interpretation of the coronation of Charlemagne ties up with that of G. Breton, which was pointed out at evolaasheis.proboards.com/thread/7/jewel-papacy : "The reluctance of Charles to assume the imperial title is ascribed by Eginhard to a fear of the jealous hostility of the Easterns, who could not only deny his claim to it, but might disturb by their intrigues his dominions in Italy. Accepting this statement, the problem remains, how is this reluctance to be reconciled with those acts of his which clearly show him aiming at the Roman crown ? An ingenious and probable, if not certain solution, is suggested by a recent historian, who argues from a minute examination of the previous policy of Charles, that while it was the great object of his reign to obtain the crown of the world, he foresaw at the same time the opposition of the Eastern Court, and the want of legality from which his title would in consequence suffer. He was therefore bent on getting from the Byzantines, if possible, a transference of their crown ; if not, at least a recognition of his own: and he appears to have hoped to win this by the negotiations which had been for some time kept on foot with the Empress Irene. Just at this moment came the coronation by Pope Leo, interrupting these deep-laid schemes, irritating the Eastern Court, and forcing Charles into the position of a rival who could not with dignity adopt a soothing or submissive tone. Nevertheless, he seems not even then to have abandoned the hope of obtaining a peaceful recognition. Irene's crimes did not prevent him, if we may credit Theophanes, from seeking her hand in marriage. And when the project of thus uniting the East and West in a single Empire, baffled for a time by the opposition of her minister AEtius, was rendered impossible by her subsequent dethronement and exile, he did not abandon the policy of conciliation until a surly acquiescence in rather than admission of his dignity had been won from the Byzantine sovereigns Michael and Nicephorus." Bryce, P., Holy Roman Empire. London : MacMillan and Co, 1866, p. 58-59.
(29) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 25-26.
(30) Schaff, P., History of the Christian church, Volume 5, Part 1. Hendrickson Publishers, 1985, p. 254.
(31) Tierney, B., op. cit., p. 18.
(32) Schaff, P., op. cit., p. 252-53.
(33) Brissaud, J., op. cit., p. 76.
(34) Evola, J., op. cit. p. 287.
(35) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 27.
(36) ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/v/voltaire/dictionary/chapter167.html - "... on ne vit jamais l'acte de cette donation : et ce qui est plus fort, on n'osa pas même en fabriquer un faux."
(37) Bryce, P., op. cit., p. 99-101.
(38) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 27-29.
(39) Ibid., p. 34.
(40) Ibid., p. 40.
(41) Ibid., p. 38.
(42) Ibid., pp. 133-35.
(43) Ibid., p. 140.
(44) Barraclough, G.,The Crucible of Europe : the Ninth and Tenth Centuries in European History. University of California Press, 1976, p. 118.
(45) Bryce, P., op. cit., pp. 125-26.
(46) "in reality, the most likely inspiration for the mass execution of Verden was the Bible". Barbero, A., op. cit., p. 47.
(47) Goldberg, E. J., Popular Revolt, Dynastic Politics, and Aristocratic Factionalism in the early Middle Ages : the Saxon Stellinga Reconsidered, Speculum, Vol. 70, No. 3. (July 1995) p. 476.
(48) Ibid., p. 477.
(49) Ibid., p. 489.
(50) Ibid., p. 478.
(51) Fletcher, R. A., The Barbarian Conversion : from Paganism to Christianity. University of California Press, 1999, p. 215-216.
(52) Bryce, P., op. cit., pp. 132.
(53) Ibid., pp. 155-57.
(54) Zimmermann, W., A Popular History of Germany, from the earliest Period to the present Day. New York : H. J. Johnson, p. 850.
(55) Wolfram, H., Conrad II, 990-1039 : Emperor of Three Kingdoms. The Pensylvania State University, 2006, p. 251. First published in Germany as Konrad II, 990-1039 : Kaiser dreier Reiche, C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich, 2000.
(56) Ibid., p. 853.
(57) Ibid.
(58) Ibid., pp. 869-70.
(59) Ibid., pp 870.
(60) Ibid., pp. 872-73.
(61) Ibid., pp. 874.
(62) Ibid., pp. 876.
(63) Ibid.
(64) Zimmermann, W., op. cit., p. 887.
(65) Gill, T. H., op. cit., pp. 42-3.
(66) Zimmermann, W., op. cit., p. 888.
(67) Ibid., p. 889.
(68) Ibid., p. 890.
(69) Ibid., p. 901.
(70) Gill, T. H., ibid., p. 44.
(71) Zimmermann, W., op. cit., p. 931.
(72) von Rank, L., History of the Popes : their Church and State, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. New York : William H. Collyer, 1847, p. 16-17.
(73) Zimmermann, W., ibid., p. 963.
(74) Ibid., p. 961.
(75) Ibid., pp. 963-64.
(76) Ibid., pp. 964.
(77) Ibid., pp. 966.
(78) Ibid.
(79) Evola, J., op. cit., p. 360.
(80) Zimmermann, W., op. cit., p. 965.
(81) Gill, T. H., op.cit., p. 55.
(82) Ibid. p. 56.
(83) Ibid. p. 57.
(84) Zimmermann, W., op. cit., p. 992.
(85) Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 46.
(86) ibid., p. 48.
(87) Ibid., p. 49.
(88) Ibid., p. 49.
(89) Ibid.
(90) Ibid., pp. 49-50.
(91) Ibid., pp. 50.51.
(92) Bryce, P., op. cit., p. 163.
(93) Zimmermann, W., op.cit., p. 1020. "... Pope Nicolas I (860), still completely involved in Augustinian - that is, Magian - lines of thought, had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals (to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble oligarchy.
But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory VII actually obtained feudal supremacy over the Norman states of England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto the Great had awarded the tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the opposite sense; even Richard Cceur-de-Lion swore the vassal's oath to him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198-1216) made the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England became a Papal fief in 1113 ; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire in Byzantium followed." Spengler, O., The Decline of the West. London : George Allen & Unwin ltd, 1966, pp. 373-74.
(94) Zimmermann, W., op. cit., pp. 1024-25.
(95) Ibid., p. 1032.
(96) Ibid., p. 1033.
(97) Ibid., p. 1036.
(98) See, for instance, E. Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte : und zwei Schriften zur Theologie. Berlin ; New York, De Gruyter, 1998 ; Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, Tubingen : Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr, 1912.
(100) Ibid., p. 1038-39.

(101) Ibid., p. 1039-41.
(102) Ibid., p. 894. The curse of the Church was one of the various theological weapons which were then available to the papacy. See evolaasheis.proboards.com/thread/7/jewel-papacy. A papal curse had miraculous effects : "The exploits of the Normans were the marvels of the time. Conquerors of Southern Italy with wonderful rapidity and against tremendous odds, they aroused the fear and hate of all their neighbours by their astonishing valour and extraordinary rapacity. A confederacy was formed against them with Pope Leo IX. at its head. In 1053 the pontiff went forth to battle against them, saw his numerous army utterly discomfited by a little band of these matchless warriors at Civitella, and won from his defeat and captivity honours and advantages such as the most splendid victories seldom bring. The victorious Normans knelt in shame and sorrow before their vanquished captive, accepted their own conquests as papal fiefs, and became tributaries of the defeated Roman See, which thus strangely acquired the sovereignty of Naples and Sicily. The vicar of Christ was not only a king and a king-maker, but became a feudal lord. Thirteen years afterwards another and a still more memorable victory of the Normans brought scarcely less gain and glory to the popedom than did this unfortunate overthrow." In order to be able to understand this incredible, not to say miraculous, outcome, it should be pointed out that, before the battle, Leo IX had pronounced the curse of the Church against the Normans before the battle." Gill, T. H., op. cit., p. 45.
(103) Zimmermann, W., op. cit., p. 1042.
(104) Ibid.
(105) Ibid.
(106) Ibid., p. 1048.
(107) Ibid.
(108) "In all his most important acts he was the mouthpiece of popular opinion".
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7343/pg7343.html
(108) Ibid. pp. 1048-49.
(109) Ibid. p. 1049.
(110) Gill., T.H., op. cit. p. 70.
(111) Ibid., p. 71-72.
(112) Ibid., p. 79.
(113) Ibid.
(114) Ibid., p. 85-86.
(115) Evola, J., op. cit. p. 304.
(116) Gill, T.H., op. cit., p. 93.
(117) Ibid. pp. 95-96.
(118) Ibid. pp. 97-98.
(119) Ibid. p. 100.
(120) Ibid. p. 102.
(121) Ibid. pp. 104-08.
(122) See also Paradiso, VI, 90.
(123) Evola, J., op. cit. p. 297.
(124) Ibid.
(125) Ibid., p. 296.
(126) Ibid., p. 312-13.
(127) ia600404.us.archive.org/12/items/convivioofdantea00dantiala/convivioofdantea00dantiala.pdf - p. 243. Convivio IV is quoted in Heathen Imperialism, p. 66.
(128) Havely, N. R., Dante and the Franciscans : Poverty and the Papacy in the Commedia. Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 184.
(129) ia600404.us.archive.org/12/items/convivioofdantea00dantiala/convivioofdantea00dantiala.pdf - p. 273.
(130) Gill., T.H., op. cit., p. 49.
(131) Medley, D.J., The Church and the Empire : Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304. Rivingtons : London, 1910, p. 5.
(132) Ibid.
(133) Ibid.
(134) Ibid., pp. 6-7.
(135) Ibid., pp. 2-3.
(136) Ibid., pp. 4-5.
(137) Evola, J., op. cit., pp. 287-89.
(138) Col. Borelli de Serres, L., Les Variations monetaires sous Philippe le Bel et les sources de leur histoire. Paris, Picard et fils, 1902. This extensive study, the first and the only one to date to examine exhaustively all the available sources on the monetary policy of Philip IV, demonstrates conclusively, with a Swiss precision and the metronomic rigour of a Scottish accountant, that "there is no indication, nor any material evidence, of counterfeiting as such in the documents, quite the opposite."
members.multimania.nl/Numis10/PDF/Borrelli.pdf
(139) See Robinson, I.S., The Papacy - 1073-1198. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1992.
(140) On the distortion of the classical idea of natural law, or `objective right', into that of `natural rights' in the `Middle Ages', see the writings of genius, unfortunately not translated into English yet, but often discussed by fellow historians of law in the Anglo-Saxon Academia, of Michel Villey.
Well-read, including in Juvenal, he remarked aptly that the ius "was to be sewn up in a sack of vipers and thrown into the Tiber."
(141) Bardoux, A., L'Influence des legistes au moyen age. Paris, Auguste Durand, Librairie, 1859, p. 19.
(142) Laity, Laicisation and Philip the Fair of France, Reynolds, E.A.R., in Law, Laity, and Solidarities : Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds. Manchester University Press, p. 203, 2001. E. Renan's remarkably well-documented study on the religious policy during the reign of Philip IV leaves no doubt as to the deep piety of the king and the sincerity with which he took seriously his role of defender of the Church.
ia700609.us.archive.org/22/items/tudessurlapol00rena/tudessurlapol00rena.pdf
(143) Morris, C., Western Political Thought : Plato to Augustine, Volume 1. Longmans, 1967. p. 196.
(144) Los, F.J., The Franks, A Critical Study in Christianisation and Imperialism. Legion for the Survival of Freedom, Incorporated, 1940, p. 61.
(145) employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/politics/med_images_power.html
(146) Evola, J., Men Among the Ruins. Rochester, Vt. : Inner Traditions, 2002, p. 206.
(147) Evola, J., The Mystery of the Grail. Rochester, Vt. : Inner Traditions, 1997, p. 120
(148) evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/rome-against-etruria/.
(149) Evola, J., Revolt against the Modern World, p. 289.
(150) Dumais, A., Richard, J., Ernst Troeltsch et Paul Tillich : pour une nouvelle synthèse du christianisme. Laval, Les Presses de l'Universite, 2002, p. 66.
(151) evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/scholasticism-and-the-spirit-of-modernity/.
(152) independent.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Papers/813188/Thomism_in_Politics - p. 9.
(153) Ibid.
(154) Baron, I. Z., Justifying the Obligation to Die : War, Ethics, and Political Obligation with Illustrations from Zionism. Lexington Books, 2009, p. 63.
(155) In ancient Rome, "'Virtus' signified strength of character, courage, prowess, manly steadfastness. It was connected to `vir', that is to say, man as such, and not `man' in a generic and naturalistic sense. In modern language, it has assumed an essentially moralistic meaning, often associated with sexual prejudice, so much so that Vilfredo Pareto coined the term `virtuismo' (the irresistible urge, often exclusively verbal, to redeem the world. N. T. E.) to refer to the Puritan and sexophobic bourgeois morality. Generally speaking, a `virtuous person' means something quite different from what, for example, expressions such as the following one, with its rather effective reiteration, meant : `vir virtute praeditus' (literally, `a man endowed with valour' : `a man of valour'. N. T. E.). This difference often becomes an opposition. Indeed, a strong, proud, fearless, and heroic soul is the opposite of what is meant by a `virtuous person' in the modern conformist and moralist sense." (Lo sfaldamento delle parole (The Watering Down of Words), in L'Arco e la Clava)
No matter the Aristotelician veneer of Aquinas' views, `virtus' was and could not but be understood in a moralistic sense by a Dominican priest, whose ethical system was based upon the Christian notion "that God and religious values are primary, and that true goodness is to be measured in terms of an ultimate finality, reasoned by man's natural intellect but fully possessed only on the basis of the Christian faith." (http://www.ewtn.com/library/SPIRIT/MEANVIR.TXT) It is only a short step from the subjectivity inherent in morality to the subjective concept of right, a corollary of internationalism and individualism, when morality is the ultimate point of reference of a doctrine, of a system of thought.
(156) "But there was in Christianity an element of hostility towards the state which none of the other new religions contained. While they might lead to a neglect of the state religion by the greater interest excited in the new faith, Christianity insisted upon the entire abandonment of the national worship, not as an inferior religion but as an actual and particularly heinous sin… Christianity was a vast, organized defiance of the law. It vehemently denounced the national religion as a deadly sin." Adams, G. B., Civilization During the Middle Ages, Especially in Relation to Modern Civilization. New York-Chicago-Boston : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894, p. 46-47.
(157) Guenon, R., The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 260.
(158) Adams, G. B., op. cit.
(159) In Tertullian, Apology and De Spectaculis. London : Loeb Classical Library, Wm. Heinemann, 1931.
(160) Evola J., op. cit., p. 290-91.
(161) Ibid. p. 291.
(162) Ibid. p. 290.
(163) Ibid. p. 293.
(164) Ibid. p. 309
(165) Adams, G. B., op. cit., p. 90.
(166) Evola J., op. cit., p. 291.
(167) Ibid., p. 290.
(168) Ibid., p. 294.
(169) At best, since most of the myths and legends of the pre-Christian Nordic mythology were recorded and handed down to us by Christian scholars, and early lore was purged or reconfigured by them in the process. While it is often too hastily assumed that myths such as the Ragnarok and the Valhalla are largely the outcome of an imitation of the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem respectively, a Christian influence on their shaping cannot be ruled out. In any case, they both seem to have developed in the Viking age.
(170) Evola J., op. cit., p. 291.
(171) www.theapricity.com/snpa/chapter-VI6.htm ; see Shore, T. W., Shore, L. E., Origin of the Anglo-Saxon race : a study of the settlement of England and the tribal origin of the Old English people rigin of the Anglo-Saxon race : a study of the settlement of England and the tribal origin of the Old English people. London : E. Stock, 1906, p. 109.
"As regards the ancient brown race or races of North Europe, there can be no doubt of their existence in the south-east of Norway and in the east of Friesland. There can be no doubt about the important influence which the old Wendish race has had in the north-eastern parts of Germany in transmitting to their descendants a more brunette complexion than prevails among the people of Hanover, Holstein, and Westphalia, of more pure Teutonic descent." "the Welsh annals mention black Vikings on the coast, as if they were men of unusual personal appearance. There is another old word used by the Anglo-Saxons to denote black or brown-black the word sweart. The personal names Suart and Sueart may have been derived from this word, and may have originally denoted people of a dark-brown or black complexion." (ibid., p. 112)
"It is possible some of these dark Vikings may have been allies or mercenaries from the South of Europe, where the Norse made conquests." (ibid., p. 115) As odd as it may seem, there are ancient Saxon and Anglo-Saxon coins bearing the image of an individual with Negroid traits (http://www.nok-benin.co.uk/Imagenok/graphics/Canterb_coin_med.jpg
www.nok-benin.co.uk/Imagenok/graphics/Saxon_Negcoin_med.jpg)
emperornatie.blogspot.com/2011/07/black-freising-koning-and-british.html contains materials of an extremely shocking nature for the average European racist who believes that it is only a few decades ago that extra-Europeans have become a danger for the White race and that racial mixing is a relatively recent phenomenon, materials which the Black supremacists who publish them do not realise in the slightest how conspicuously, how radically they boomerang on their self-righteous rhetoric of self-victimisation, on their Jeremiadic discourse.
Speaking of the under-man, see L. Stoddard's work.
ia600300.us.archive.org/11/items/revoltagainstciv00stoduoft/revoltagainstciv00stoduoft.pdf
(172) Rosenberg, A., The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Noontide Press, 1982, p. 29.

(173) See Costamberys, M., Innes, M., MacLean, S., The Carolingian World, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1970 ; especially the chapter called `The Problem of Christianisation'.
(174) Evola, J., Revolt against the Modern World, p. 287. (many readers have surely noted that the claim that "Conversion to the Christian faith, more than altering the Germanic stocks'strength, often purified it and prepared it for a revival of the imperial Roman idea" (p. 294) is hardly reconcilable with the assertion that "Even in its attenuated and Romanized Catholic version, the Christian faith represented an obstacle that deprived Western man of the possibility of integrating his authentic and irrepressible way of being through a concept and in relationship with the Sacred what was most congenial to him" (p. 287)).
(175) Carver, M., The Cross Goes North : Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, Ad 300-1300, York, 2003, p. 551-52.
(176) www.scribd.com/joanne_loader/d/61387464-Berend-Nora-Ed-Christianization-and-the-Rise-of-Christian-via-Central-Europe-and-Rus-c-900-1200-Reup, p. 2. (incidentally, the cases of conversion analysed in this work show that the almost universal assumption that conversion was a necessary step toward building strong power is not "unproblematic" in various respects : "Many men sought to establish their power over society or against rivals by conversion to Christianity, often in the hope of military assistance from a Christian power, usually the Franks/Germans. This was by no means a foolproof method… Conversion (…) was not necessarily a road to power… however, rulers who succeeded in promoting Christianity also further consolidated their power." p. 14)
(177) Costamberys, M., Innes, M., MacLean, S., op. cit., p. 80.
(178) Evola, J. op. cit., p. 291 (bearing in mind the Hindu tradition of cosmology, and, more particularly, that of the four evolutionary Yuga cycles, it is interesting to note that the working of iron, which had been going on for times immemorial in Asia, was absolutely prohibited in ancient Scandinavia until the Christian era. gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k61148652/f167.image, p. 150).
(179) www.proto-germanic.com/p/abridged-version-of-races-of-europe-by_09.html.
(180) Archaeological findings "strongly suggests that the Hunnish impact on the peoples with whom they were in contact was much more pervasive than any literary sources of the fourth/fifth centuries indicate. Some of these skulls are Germanic, other show Mongol traits, which implies Hunnish wives or hostages among the Thuringians or slaves taken following the defeat of the Huns. Since the ornaments, especially the brooches, conform to tribal characteristics and were personal property, it is possible to speculate about tribal intermarriages from the grave inventories during the migration period (Schutz, H., Tools, Weapons and Ornaments : Germanic Material Culture in Pre-Carolingian Central Europe, 400-750, Leiden- Boston-Koeln : Brill, 2001, p. 34-35 – available at www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=115942992)
In this respect, it is not uninteresting that Clovis was the son of a Thuringian mother. According to Johannes, the Gepid Mundus, an East Roman general during the reign of Justinian I, was of Attilanic descent ; Balamber, a Hunnic king, married a Gothic princess. The Mongoloid strain in some Alans shows that Alanno-Hunnic marriages were quite common. The paleoanthropological evidence indicates that the Huns were racially mixed (Maenchen Helfen, O. J., The World of the Huns : Studies in Their History and Culture, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1973 - specifically the chapter called `Race'). The description which ancient writers give us of the Huns tends to prove that they belonged to the Mongoloid type, which is in turn far from being a pure breed ; the description of Attila by Priscus as being "Short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head ; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey ; and he had a flat nose and a swarthy complexion, showing the evidences of his origin" points out at a Negroid strain – skulls with Negro-Australoid features have been unearthed lately in China (http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTOTAL-KGXB197601005.htm). A Negroid presence in Eeastern Asia, and, more particularly, in China, was established beyond doubt (http://www.china.org.cn/china/2009-11/24/content_18944317_3.htm) ; see also www.oocities.org/ekwesi.geo/Southchina1.htm.