§ 19. VICTOR III. AND URBAN II. 71
the holy war of the Cross against the Crescent. This was an immense gain for the papacy, which reaped all the credit and benefit of that extraordinary movement.
He took a noble stand in favor of the sanctity of marriage against the licentious King Philip I. of France, who cast away his legitimate wife, Bertha, 1092, and held adulter ous intercourse with Bertrada of Montfort, the runaway wife of the rude Count Fulco of Anjou. This public scandal led to several synods. The king was excommunicated by a synod at Autun in Burgundy, Oct. 16, 1094, and by the Synod of Clerrnont in 1095. He afterwards dismissed Ber trada, and was absolved by the pope.
Urban continued the war with Henry IV. without scruple as to the means. He encouraged the rebellion of his eldest son, Conrad, a weak and amiable man, who fled for protec tion to the Countess Matilda, was crowned king of Italy at Monza, and paid the pope the homage of holding his stirrup (the officium stratoris) at Cremona (1095). Urban, who had been consecrated pope outside of Rome, was able, 1088, with the aid of the Normans, to enter the city and possess himself of all its parts except the castle of St. Angelo, which remained in the hands of the followers of Wibert. Wibert had been in possession of St. Peter's, which he held as a fortress against Victor III. The streets of the papal city resounded with the war-cries of the two papal armies, while pope and anti-pope anathematized one another. Urban died at Flor ence in 1101.
The pope arranged an unnatural matrimonial alliance between the widowed countess and the young Guelph of Bavaria, whose father was the most powerful of the empe ror's enemies' in Germany. It was a purely political match, which made neither party happy, and ended in a divorce (1095). But it gave the papal party a political organiza tion, and opened the long-continued war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, which distracted every city in Italy, and
72 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1085-1122.
is said to have caused seventy-two hundred revolutions and more than seven hundred atrocious murders in that country.1 Every Italian was born to an inheritance of hatred and re venge, and could not help sharing in the conflict of factions headed by petty tyrants. The Guelphs defended the pope against the emperor, and also the democracy against the aristocracy in the city government. They were strong in pulling down, but were unable to create a new State. The Ghibellines maintained the divine origin and independent authority of the State in all things temporal against the encroachments of the papacy. The party strife continued in Italy long after the German emperor had lost his power. Dante was at first a Guelph, but in mature life joined the Ghibellines and became the most formidable opponent of Pope Boniface VIII.
Urban was able to hold a synod at Piacenza in Lombardy, where Henry IV. had his chief support, during Lent, 1095. It was attended by four thousand priests and monks and over thirty thousand laymen, and the meeting had to be held in the open field. The pope permitted Praxedis (Adelheid), the second wife of Henry IV., to recite the filthy details of acts of impurity to which she had been subjected by her husband, endorsed her shameless story, absolved her from all uncleanness, and remitted every penitential observance, " because she had not blushed to make a public and volun tary confession of her involuntary transgression."2 After
1 Guelfi, Wclfen, from Welf, TFo7/, a family name of the dukes of Bavaria. GhibelHni, Ghibellinen, from Waiblingen, the patrimonial castle of Conrad of Hohenstaufeii in Swabia. Comp. Ferrari, Histoire cles revolutions & Italic, ou Guelfes et Ghibellins, Paris, 1858, 4 vols. From the Guelphs descended the house of Brunswick and Hanover, and the royal family of England since George I., 1714.
2 Praxedis or Eupraxia, or (as the Germans called her) Adelheid was a Russian princess, who married Henry in 1089, two years after Bertha's death. She had preferred the same horrible charges before a synod at Constance in 1094. See Pertz, Tom. VII. 458, XVII. 14 ; Hefele-Knopfler, V. 211 sq. and 216 ; Greenwood, IV. 501.