BENEDICT III.

A.D. 855-858.

 

 

EMPERORS OF THE EAST.                                                    EMPERORS OF THE WEST.

 

Theodora and Michael III. (the Drunkard), 842-856               Lothaire I, 823-855.

Michael III., 856-867.                                                                  Louis II, 850-875.

 

 

AFTER informing us that Benedict was a Roman and the son of Peter, his biographer assures us that as a youth he took in learning as a sponge absorbs moisture. The good report of him that soon spread abroad was the cause of his being brought to the Lateran palace and added to the ranks of the clergy. He soon showed himself wise in mind and speech, and a man full of sympathy for all. Gregory IV made him a subdeacon, and Leo IV priest. As priest of the title of St. Calixtus, his signature is to be found among those of the cardinal priests appended to the decrees of the Roman Council of December 8, 853.

On the death of the latter Pontiff, the clergy, nobles, senate, and people gathered together immediately to beg God to point out to them a worthy Pope. After failing to induce Hadrian, the priest of St. Mark’s, to accept the burden of the pontificate, they unanimously resolved to select Benedict, straightway went off to his Church of St. Calixtus, and declared their wishes to him. Falling on his knees, the humble Benedict begged them, with tears, not to take him from his church, as he was unable to bear the weight of the papacy. He pleaded in vain. He was carried off in triumph, and, to the great joy of the whole city, enthroned, according to ancient custom, in the Lateran palace. The decree of election was at once drawn up, signed by both clergy and nobles, and, as old custom requires, sent off to the emperors Lothaire and Louis II.

The envoys to whom this decree was entrusted, Nicholas, bishop of Anagni, and Mercury, a magister militum, were met at Eugubium on their journey to Louis II by Arsenius, bishop of Horta. With arguments, in all likelihood, more  cogent than words, he persuaded the envoys to be false to the commission they had received, and to espouse the candidature of his son, the cardinal priest Anastasius, whom we have seen excommunicated by Leo IV. Although Arsenius, who had for some years been a man of considerable importance in Rome, was devoted to the emperor Louis II, his action in behalf of his son was no doubt the outcome of personal ambition rather than of any zeal to promote an imperial candidate. What story the envoys told Louis is not known. On their return to Rome they announced the coming of imperial missi. When these latter arrived at Horta, on the persuasion of Arsenius, they, or at least some of them, the counts Adalbert and Bernard, attached themselves to Anastasius. At Horta the counts were joined by Nicholas and the rest of his party, who left Rome on pretense of going to meet the imperial missi.

The first legates sent by Benedict to meet the counts were taken into custody, a mode of treatment which even barbarians, as the Book of the Popes takes notice, do not mete out to ambassadors. Benedict next sent forward Hadrian, the secundicerius of the Holy See, and the Duke Gregory.

Understanding from his missi that such was the emperor’s wish, the Romans, “not knowing the intrigues that were in progress”, went out across the Ponte Molle to meet them. All then entered the Leonine city together. Immediately a scene of violence ensued. The superista Gratian, whom we saw in the last pontificate arraigned for his real or supposed antipathy to the Frankish overlordship, and the scriniarius Theodore were seized; Anastasius entered the basilica of St. Peter, and, behaving worse than the Saracens, not only destroyed the representation of the synod in which he had been condemned, and which Leo, according to custom, had had painted and placed over the gates of the sanctuary, but also broke and burnt the images all about it. He then forced his way into the Lateran palace, ordered Romanus, bishop of Bagnorea, to drive Benedict from the pontifical chair, and himself sat on a throne “he was not worthy to touch” says Benedict’s biographer. The barbarous Romanus even went the length of tearing the pontifical robes from Benedict, and loading him with reproaches and blows. This is not the first time we have seen the Vicar of Christ treated like his Divine Master, and it will not be the last.

Anastasius then (September 21) handed Benedict over to the custody of certain priests, who for their crimes had been deposed by Pope Leo. Meanwhile the whole city was filled with grief, and clergy and laity flocked to the churches, and implored the help of God. On Sunday they met together in the Basilica Emiliana, and there, right into the apse where the clergy were assembled, the imperial missi forced their way, and with drawn swords called on the clergy to elect Anastasius. Finding they could not terrify the whole body, they seized the bishops of Ostia and Albano, for Radoald of Porto, the third bishop who had the right to consecrate the Pope, had already been gained, took them apart, and tried, first by promises and then by threats, to induce them to consecrate Anastasius. This they firmly refused to do, and pointed out to the missi that they were asking for what was opposed to the sacred scriptures. The noble courage and pointed words of the bishops had their effect on the Franks. For after a private discussion in their native language, their anger abated. Again early on Tuesday a great mass of the clergy and people assembled in the Lateran basilica and made it quite plain to the Franks that Benedict only would they have. The missi thereupon called the clergy into the Lateran palace, and at length found it necessary to yield to their arguments and firmness. They then consented to expel Anastasius from the Lateran and to agree to whatever should be decided upon after a three days’ fast. Anastasius was accordingly driven forth from the palace, while Benedict was restored to his party. From the place in the Lateran where Anastasius had confined him, he was escorted with great joy “on the horse which Pope Leo was wont to use” to St. Mary Major’s, where the next three days were spent in fasting and prayer. At the close of the fast the partisans of Anastasius came to Benedict, humbly acknowledged their guilt, and begged the forgiveness which they received. Even the imperial missi came to make soft speeches to the Pope.

He was then honorably escorted back to the Lateran palace, and on the following Sunday, October 6, or with Jaffe, September 29, was duly consecrated in the presence of the imperial envoys at St. Peter’s.

Surely this example of the methods of the interference of the secular power is enough to make any Erastian blush. For its own ends it would have put a wicked excommunicated cardinal in the chair of Peter by the sword, and by the hands of any villains whom they could have found to do their work.

Anastasius was condemned by a synod, but mercifully admitted by Benedict to lay communion, and, as a layman, made abbot of the monastery attached to S. Maria in Trastevere.

The Franks would at this period have been very much better employed in attending to their own internal affairs. But oppression was then the order of the day among them. The emperor Lothaire died (September 29) on the same day as that of the consecration of Benedict. Following the fatal example of his predecessors, he subdivided his long strip of territory. Louis II kept Italy and the imperial title, Charles received Provence, the duchy of Lyons, Dauphiné and that part of the old kingdom of Burgundy which was on the other side of the Jura mountains, and Lothaire II—of whom we shall have to say much—had, roughly speaking, the country between the Rhine and the Scheldt, between the Meuse and the Rhine, and southwards to the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone and the Jura mountains. This last kingdom came to be known as Lotharingia, or Lorraine in French. There were now five kings of the Franks. The Aquitainians were in constant revolt against Charles the Bald, the Slays were defeating Louis the German, and the Normans and Saracens were still devastating the north and south coasts respectively. The kings or nobles were constantly oppressing and robbing the Church. There is scarcely a council held among the Franks at this period which does not protest against the seizing of church property; and with much of what they did not rob, they did worse. They gave it to their utterly unworthy relations. The great nobles were daily making themselves more independent.

One of the few letters of Benedict which have been preserved, while treating of one man, gives us a vivid picture in miniature of the disorders among the Franks we have just sketched. In 856 Lothaire married Theutburga, the daughter of a certain Count Boso. The brother of Theutburga was a subdeacon, Hubert by name. Falling into bad company, the young man soon became remarkable for wickedness even in his age and country. He went about with a gang of abandoned men and women, and, though he had no lack of money from his various monasteries, he seized the famous monastery of St. Maurice (of Agaune) in Valais, and scattered its revenues on harlots, dogs, and birds. Of this monastery he kept permanent possession. He also violated the sanctity of the equally famous monastery of Luxeuil, by keeping possession of it for some days with his vile crew Nor did he hesitate to endanger the peace which the Pope had contrived to make between the emperor Louis II and his brothers; for the former had shown himself dissatisfied that his father’s will confined him to Italy. This infamous conduct of Hubert was at length brought to the notice of Benedict, who in a letter addressed to all the bishops of the kingdom of Charles, king of Provence, ordered the subdeacon to come to Rome to answer the charges brought against him, under pain of excommunication. It is not to be wondered at that a threat of excommunication did not alarm Hubert. Thinking to strengthen himself by advancing his relatives, Lothaire II in 859 granted Hubert a duchy between the Jura and the Pennine Alps. But after Lothaire began to dishonor his lawful wife Theutburga, Hubert’s sister, that worthy took up arms against his brother-in-law. And in his mountain fastnesses he defied the power of Lothaire. However, after the death (863) of Charles of Provence, that part of his kingdom which embraced Hubert’s duchy fell into the hands of the warlike emperor Louis II, and in 864 the subdeacon was slain by one of the emperor’s counts. What can have been the power of the law when a ruffian noble could so long despise with impunity the moral and physical forces of Pope, emperor, and king?

The letter just cited was not the first which Benedict had addressed to the bishops of France. He had written before to urge them to speak out against the evils which were impeding the action of the Church in France, and rather attributing the difficulties under which they were laboring to their silence. This letter, now lost, put, according to the Frankish bishops, the blame on the wrong persons. They were not conscious to themselves of having been “dumb dogs”. And so, thinking that their king (Charles the Bald) was the one at fault, they did not fail to tell him so. They addressed a memorial to him, in which they urge: “We should have felt keenly the reproofs which the Pope addresses to us in the letter which we have heard together with you, if we had really done what, with so much vehemence, he lays to our charge. But as we have never given our consent to the disorder (monastic laxity especially) concerning which he is most insistent; nay, as, on the contrary, we have often raised our voices against it, and have often warned you and your subjects by our words and writings to correct what has been done against the canons, we are less affected by his reproaches. Nevertheless once again we join our voices to that of the Pope, and exhort you to re-establish, as soon as may be, order in the monasteries of your kingdom which are in a deplorable condition, and to cause to be observed the capitularies to which you have affixed your seal at Coulaines, Beauvais”, etc. But to effect this much-needed reform Charles the Bald, if he had the wish, had not the courage. It would have been necessary for him to have put himself in active opposition to many of his great nobles, to whose relations, female as well as male (laics), many monasteries had been handed over.

However, it is a satisfaction to find that some monasteries in France, even in the midst of national disorders of every kind, were well governed, and were steadily laboring to preserve the monuments of antiquity, to be enjoyed in times of greater repose. Lupus, who, though born of noble parents (805), was, contrary to the rule at least of the ninth century, if not of the twentieth, an ornament to his rank, was in 842 appointed to the abbey of Ferrieres by Charles the Bald. The pupil of Rhabanus Maurus, and hence through him of Alcuin, he loved learning for its own sake, and his letters, which represent “the scholarly spirit of the ninth century, are not limited to the orthodox routine”. He reformed several monasteries, and kept his own up to a high standard of excellence. To simplify the work of reform by introducing unity, he sent some of his monks to Rome to learn the customs of the Church of Rome. By them he sent a letter addressed as follows : “To the most excellent and by all Christians specially venerated universal Pope Benedict, Lupus, the last of abbots, from the monastery of Gaul, which is called Bethlehem, or Ferrieres, wishes present prosperity and future blessedness”. He ventures to address the Pope, because he knows that he has inherited the humility as well as the power of St. Peter, begs him to instruct those he has sent in the Roman customs so that one rule might prevail over the diversity of customs which reigned in different places. “For”, he adds, with great fullness of truth, “in all that relates to religion and morality variety begets doubt”. Hence he has recourse to the fountain-head of faith. In conclusion he begs the Pope to let him have the loan of the latter portion of the Commentaries of St. Jerome on the prophet Jeremiah, Cicero’s De Oratore, the Institutes of Quintilian, and the commentary of Donatus on Terence, promising most faithfully to have them returned when copied.

It was stated in the biography of Leo IV that Benedict refused to do more than to declare Gregory of Syracuse suspended till he had received further particulars regarding his case from St. Ignatius. But his violent expulsion from his see (November 23, 837) prevented him from holding further communication with the Pope. Whilst still on good terms with the holy patriarch, the emperor Michael III, the Drunkard, “on account of his love for the apostles”, and also on account of his interest in the case of Gregory, and his wish by this action to secure the adhesion of the Pope to the sentence passed against him, had sent to Blessed Peter, whilst Leo was still Pope, a copy of the Gospels, with covers of pure gold adorned with precious stones, a chalice, a vestment of imperial purple, etc. These presents he had dispatched by the envoy of St. Ignatius, the monk Lazarus, a Chazar by birth, an artist of no mean order, and one who had suffered grievous persecution, for the use to which he had put his skill, at the hands of Michael’s father, the iconoclast, Theophilus. It would seem to follow from this notice that the representative whom Leo IV had asked Ignatius to send to Rome did not arrive there, at least till after that Pope’s death. But, as we have seen, Benedict would not give a final decision. He did not think he had received sufficient information either from Gregory’s agent, Zachary, or from Lazarus.

Benedict also received valuable presents from Ethelwulf, who this time came to Rome himself along with his son Alfred and a very numerous following. “In the same year (855)”, says the contemporary historian Asser in his life of Alfred, “he (Ethelwulf) went to Rome in great state, and taking with him the aforesaid King Alfred, for a second journey thither, because he loved him more than his other sons, he remained there a whole year”. The Book of the Popes tells us of the gifts he offered to Blessed Peter—crowns, images, other ornaments all of gold, such as baucae (goblets, small chalices or cruets), gabathe saxisce (dish-shaped lamps for floating wicks of Saxon work, saxisce?)—and such vestments as a saraca de olovero cum chrisoclavo (a dalmatic? with stripes of gold), a camisa alba sigillata olosyrica cum chrisoclavo (possibly a silken alb ornamented with the apparel in gold work), and vela majora de fundato (large hangings of cloth of gold). Being evidently in a generous mood, he gave, at the request of the Pope, public largess in the Church of Blessed Peter, gold to all the clergy and nobles, and small silver to the people.

Not content with this, on his return to his kingdom of Wessex, he did not forget Rome when he made his will. Among other provisions “he commanded also a large sum of money, namely 300 mancuses, to be carried to Rome for the good of his soul, to be distributed in the following manner, viz., 100 mancuses in honour of St. Peter, specially to buy oil for the lights of the church of that apostle on Easter eve, and also at cock-crow; too in honor of St. Paul for the same purpose, and too for the universal apostolic pontiff”. If Rome acquired a powerful hold on this country, incidents such as this show that it sprang from the free-will of its people. Rome’s influence in England was the result of the nation’s love for the successors of St. Peter, and not, in its origin at any rate, of any grasping for power on their part.

These personal donations of Offa and Ethelwulf must not be confounded with the Rome-feoh, or Peter’s Pence, which was a national tax, levied yearly for a long period at the rate of a silver penny from every family that had land or cattle to the annual value of thirty pence. The money thus raised was sent to Rome, and was for many ages divided between the Pope and the needs of the Schola Anglorum. There can, however, be no doubt that the regular payment of Peter’s Pence, which began at the close of this century, took its origin from these donations of our kings to Rome, which were given as well for the Pope himself as for the maintenance of the Schola Anglorum. This schola, seemingly the first of its kind, was certainly in existence at the close of the eighth century. It was the Anglo-Saxon quarter of Rome. In its church, now S. Spirito in Sassia, the English found priests of their nation, in its hospitals, food and lodging, and in its schools, instruction. It was enabled to do all this by the generosity towards it of our kings and people. But there is no reason to think that Peter-pence was in existence before the reign of Alfred. Under his son Edward, the Rome-feoh is mentioned for the first time by name; and then it appears, not as a new imposition, but as one of the accustomed dues of the Church. In confirmation of this assertion of Lingard may be mentioned the discovery, in 1883, in the north angle of the house of the Vestal Virgins at the foot of the Palatine, and close to the palace built by Pope John VII, of an earthen vessel containing 830 Anglo-Saxon silver pennies ranging in date from 871­947 A.D. Of these, 3 were of Alfred the Great, 217 of Edward I, 393 of Athelstan, 195 of Edmund I, a few of Sitric and of Anlaf, kings of Northumbria, 4 of archbishop Plegmund of Canterbury, etc. A bronze fibula of Marinus II (942-6), found buried with the treasure, would seem to fix the date of the burying of it to the time of that Pope. The treasure, now in the Museo delle Terme, was probably concealed by a papal official living in the palace of John VII during the time when Alberic, prince of the Romans, was at war with Hugo, king of Italy.

Forty years before the discovery just mentioned, another very large number of Peter’s Pence had been found. This collection illustrates the subsequent history of the Rome-penny, as the former does that of its origin. When the old campanile of St. Paul’s, outside the walls, was destroyed in 1843, there was discovered a hoard of over a thousand silver denarii belonging to a period from the close of the tenth century to the middle of the eleventh. In it were sixty different kinds of coins, coming from seventy-two mints in Italy, France, England, Germany, Burgundy, Holland, Flanders, and Hungary. Some hundred of them were Anglo-Saxon thirty-three of which dated from the reign of St. Edward the Confessor, while the rest were of earlier kings.

The first people, then, to pay the Rome-feoh were the English, and they were, moreover, the only people who paid it in the ninth century, and, possibly, even in the first part of the tenth century. Then it was gradually introduced into other countries, and the following century saw it paid by all the kingdoms of Western Christendom.

The earliest extant laws treating of the Petrespenny date, as has been said, from the time of Edward the Elder (921); but their preamble shows that earlier regulations on this subject had been issued. In process of time a fixed sum was sent, which from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, when its payment was stopped, amounted to about 48,000 denarii, or, as it is expressed in the Liber Censuum, “three hundred marks less one”.

Not long before he died Benedict had to take action on a matter with which his successor had also to deal. We have spoken above of a count Boso. Another Boso, (probably his son) a Lombard noble, had married a certain Ingeltrude. She proved to be a very dissolute woman, left her husband, and led a scandalous life in various parts of France. After Boso had to no purpose endeavored to induce her to return to him, he begged Pope Benedict to help him. As we learn from a letter of Pope Nicholas to the bishops of the kingdom of Louis the German, Benedict made strenuous efforts, by writing to the emperor, to bishops and to princes, to induce them to cause the runaway to return to her lawful husband. Owing to the protection afforded the adulteress by Lothaire II, himself an adulterer, neither Benedict nor Nicholas effected anything. After the latter Pontiff had in vain directed various letters to the different parties concerned, he listened to the request of several bishops that sentence of excommunication should be pronounced against her. Accordingly, by his orders, a council was held at Milan (c. 860), and Ingeltrude was excommunicated. But despite many other  letters in Boso’s behalf written by Nicholas, despite of his enlisting the support of Charles the Bald, against her protector, Lothaire, despite the confirmation of the sentence of excommunication, pronounced against her, at the councils of Rome (863) and Attigny (865), Ingeltrude continued to do as she pleased with impunity. The last event that we know of in connection with this lady took place soon after the holding of the council of Attigny. At this council Arsenius, the legate of Pope Nicholas, besides dealing with the case of the divorce of Lothaire, had renewed, as we have just said, the excommunication against her. After the council he was met by Ingeltrude at Worms. She swore before him to amend her life, and to go with him to Rome to get reconciled to the Church. But to give up her evil courses was too much for her. When near Augsburg she took to flight, and fades from our view covered with the legate’s excommunication.

This persistent effort of two popes, in the interests of Christian morality, to check a great cause of scandal in high places, though important it itself, was put into the shade by the far more serious struggle which had to be waged, in the same vital interest, in the case of King Lothaire in the days of Nicholas I, and with which this struggle was to a large extent contemporaneous. To the bold resistance, which with moral weapons alone the medieval popes made against the base passions of sovereigns, backed by all the material resources of their kingdoms, is due the position of woman in modern Europe. But for their unflinching firmness, monogamy, understood in its strictest sense, at once the glory and strength of Western civilization, would have been destroyed; and woman would have been in the West, what she is today in the East, the slave or the plaything of man.

What is recorded of Benedict’s work in connection with the various churches of Rome has reference, for the most part, to gifts to them of ecclesiastical vestments or furniture. Among these presents there is frequent mention of an evangelium of pure silver or gold, as the case may be. It is by no means clear whether these evangelia are copies of the liturgical gospels bound with ornamental plates of precious metal, or whether they are those symbols of the four Evangelists which “used formerly to be kissed by the faithful, who declared by this act . . . . that they accepted all that was written by the four Evangelists”. He also becomingly replaced the precious binding of the volume, containing the epistles of St. Paul and of the other apostles and the lessons of the Prophets, which was used by the subdeacons at the stations, and, moreover, added to it the Greek and Latin lessons which were wont to be read on Holy Saturday and on the eve of Pentecost. He became acquainted with the needs of the different churches by his pious custom of visiting them in turn, “singing heavenly hymns”, to pray for the flock entrusted to his care; for we are told that he relied “on the divine intuition of the saints”.

Following in the footsteps of his predecessor, his first care was to help to make good the damage done to the tombs and churches of the apostles by the Saracens. With plates of silver he redecorated the “sepulchre of St. Paul which had been destroyed by the Saracens”, and gave a “cover of pure gold to the bilicum, or upper cataract of the confession (of St. Peter); that is, of course, the little orifice in the floor, the fenestrella or little window of St. Gregory of Tours”, through which a glimpse could at one time be obtained of the actual sarcophagus of the Apostle. He presented to his basilica a large silver candelabrum, to replace the one “formerly carried off by the Saracens”. It was arranged to carry both lamps and candles, and was placed near the lectorium. He also re-roofed a large portion of the basilica, and especially that portion of it “which is over his body”.

Another interesting renovation effected by him was that of the seven stational crosses, viz., the silver crosses which were carried in front of the solemn processions to the different stations, and were very likely the same as those carried before the exarchs or emperors when they visited Rome. In the very earliest of the Ordines Romani, there is mention, in connection with the stations, of those “who carry the crosses”, and in ordines of the ninth century it is expressly stated that the processions to the stations are to be headed by the seven crosses. When in the twelfth century the number of the regions was increased to twelve, the number of the stational crosses was also brought up to the same figure. They appear to have been usually kept in the Church of S. Anastasia.

One of the one hundred and thirty-two great floods of the Tiber, which in historic times have spread their slime over the city of Rome, devastated it and the surrounding country at the beginning of Benedict’s reign. There is no need to describe this inundation, because its course was much the same as that of its predecessors, and its details in the Liber Pontificalis are consequently much the same as those already given there in describing them. But no doubt it added to the amount of restoration which the Pope was called upon to perform.

We may fittingly close our account of Benedict by recording his decree regarding the burials of his clergy. He laid down that on the death of a bishop, priest, or deacon, the Pope, with all his clergy, was to assist at his burial and in commending his soul to God,—a decree which, his biographer says, Benedict was as ready to fulfill himself as to make, and a decree which his great successor, who imitated the good deeds of his predecessor in this as in other respects, was also himself careful to execute.

Benedict was buried in front of the principal gate the basilica of St. Peter, probably on April 18, 858, the day after his death.