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.

Pope Clement IV., who prompted, witnessed, and enjoyed the extirpation of the Hohenstaufens, was replaced in 1271 by Gregory X., by far the best and most Christian-hearted of all the

mediæval popes, than whom no better man ever underwent the papal dignity, except perhaps Clement XIV., better known as Ganganelli, the suppressor of the Jesuits. The intimate friend of Edward I. of England, he laboured with that last of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, welcomed to Italy that great prince on his return from that bootless enterprise to the wise and vigorous administration of his own realm, and extolled the valour and devoutness of his fellow-crusader before the general council which met at Lyons in 1275.35 But though personally attached to Edward Longshanks, he showed no unjust and tyrannical favouritism, sought out no mere instruments, and singled out no enemies among the monarchs of Christendom. He disliked and discountenanced the ruthless ambition of the papal champion, Charles of Anjou, would know neither Guelf nor Ghibelin, and laboured for peace on earth and good will amongst men with an earnestness and singleness of aim very rare among Roman pontiffs. In achieving one apparent work of peace, he achieved one apparent papal gain; he reconciled the irreconcilable Greeks; he was the hero of one of those vainest of all papal enterprises, he won one of those idlest of all papal triumphs, a union of the Greek Church. The Greek emperor, Michael Palæologus, by the capture of Constantinople in 1261, overthrew the Latin empire and the Latin Church which the French and Venetians of the fourth crusade had established there. Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, the destroyer of the Hohenstaufens, the chief champion of the Roman Church, the most ambitious and energetic monarch of Western Christendom, threatened to undo the work of Palæologus, and undertook to reenthrone in Constantinople a French emperor and the Roman pontiff. Michael, determined to disarm the papal champion by conciliating the papacy, bribed and frightened a few Greek bishops into betraying their church, sent ambassadors to the council of Lyons over which Gregory presided, and recognised the supremacy of the Roman Church (1275).36 The pope rejoiced over an utter nullity, and the Church of Rome made much of a solemn mockery. The union came to nothing: in spite of imperial recreant and episcopal traitors, the Greek Church and nation set at nought the bargain; the Greeks would

35 Matthæus Westmonasteriensis, Historia, lib. ii. pp. 352, 353, 355, ed. London, 1570. The two friends became-one pope and the other king—when crusaders, and left the Holy Land, Gregory in 1271, and Edward in 1272, each to assume his crown. 36 Ibid. pp. 355-362.

not be united. Pope Eugenius IV. had to unite them again at the council of Florence in 1438, with precisely the same effect; and they still await the manipulation of another pontifical uniter. Gregory X. brought a large and generous heart to the administration of the papacy, and shed a sort of grace over the absolute authority of the popedom. But the influence of his personal character over the papacy was as transient and delusive as his union of the Greek Church. His pontificate was brief (1271-76); he has retained no place in the heart of posterity, and is most prominent and best remembered in ecclesiastical history as the regulator of the present mode of papal election.

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.37 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.

This insurrection of Sicily 600 years ago has been strikingly though more nobly reproduced in that Sicilian uprising which so lately astonished Europe and delighted England. Each was directed against a prince of the French race, a scion of the House of Capet in close alliance with the Roman pontiff. The papal curse rested upon the earlier enterprise and its chiefs, as the papal hate now rests upon the later business and the heroes thereof. But the old liberation was far inferior to the present deliverance-more sanguinary and savage, not so loftily conceived, not so speedily or wonderfully achieved, less fruitful and far-reaching. The liberator of the thirteenth century cannot bear comparison with the deliverer of the nineteenth. Garibaldi leaves John di Procida far behind, and Victor Emmanuel represents more potent ideas and a nobler cause than did Pedro' of Aragon. The Sicilian deliverance of 1282 stands out by itself an isolated triumph, without contagious power, without mighty consequences. But the Sicilian deliverance of 1860 was a great step in a mighty march, a noble book of a majestic epic, a deed connected with the progress and essential to the completeness of Italian freedom and unity. The latest and most glorious of the many expeditions to Sicily which history records has already had vaster consequences than all of them taken together.38 The stroke which laid low the Bourbons in 37 G. Villani, lib. vii. c. 57-61. Giannone, lib. xx. c. 5.

38 Not the huge armament with which Carthage invaded Sicily, when Xerxes invaded Greece, and which was overthrown by Gelon at Himera, on the very day whereon the Persians were vanquished at Salamis (B. C. 480); not that mighty and splendid Athenian expedition which failed so utterly before Syracuse, and the ruin whereof brought Athens low (B. c. 413-12); not that other great Carthaginian invasion in which Agrigentum was destroyed, Syracuse besieged, and Dionysius pressed hard (B.c. 409, 395); not even that beneficent enterprise of the heroic Timoleon, which delivered Sicily from domestic tyrants and foreign foes (B. c. 344); not the hasty expedition of the restless Pyrrhus (B. c. 278-7); not the entrance of the Romans followed by the first Punic war (B. c. 265–41); not their final conquest of the island under Marcellus, signalised by the fall of Syracuse and the death of Archimedes (B.c. 212); not the advent of the Arab corsairs who brought Islam into the island which they wrested from the Eastern Empire (A. D. 827-78); not the exploits of the band of Normans who, under the wise and valiant Count Roger, wrested Sicily from the Saracens

Sicily struck them down in Naples, and reached on to their ally, the pontiff. The uprising of 1282, while it drove the Capets from Sicily, left them Naples, and came upon the papacy as a provocation and defiance rather than as a stunning blow and deadly wound.

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 medieval 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 Cæsar, 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.

Seldom have antagonists been better matched than King Philip the Fair and Pope Boniface VIII. Both were under the sway of vehement passions, overbearing pride, towering ambition, and implacable resentment; but there dwelt in the ambition of the king a calm and settled energy and a harmony with the spirit of the age to which that of the wild and violent pontiff was a stranger. Philip, one of the very few eminently handsome men, not less renowned for ability and success, the most powerful and (1060-90); not the subjugation of the Sicilian Normans by Henry the Stern and his Germans (1195); not the cruel conquest of Charles of Anjou (1266); not the expedition of Pedro of Aragon, which completed the work of the Sicilian Vespers (1282); not the Austrian conquest (1707); not the attempt of Spain to win back the island, an attempt defeated by the English navy (1718); not the successful invasion of the Spaniards in 1734; not one of these enterprises can vie with the enterprise of Garibaldi for combined nobleness of motive, boldness of execution, rapidity of success, smallness of means, and greatness of results. The expedition of Timoleon was as nobly inspired, as bravely and victoriously executed; in truth the character and exploits of the lofty Greek bear a strong likeness to those of the high-souled Italian; but his means were greater, and his success was less rapid and fruitful.