776 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
code, as in the case of Magna Charta, — these were the high prerogatives actually exercised by the papacy. The decision rendered on the field of Roncaglia by the jurists of Bologna, asserting the independent rights of the empire, was only an episode, and popes snapped their fingers at the academic im pertinence. Now and then the wearers of the tiara were de feated, but they never ceased to insist upon the divine claims of their office. In vain did emperors, like Frederick II., appeal to the Scriptures as giving no countenance to the principle that popes have the right to punish kings and de prive them of their kingdoms.
The declarations of the popes were clear and positive. The figures employed by Gregory VII., comparing the two realms to gold and lead, sun and moon, soul and body, Inno cent elaborated and pressed. Gregory asserted that it rested upon him to give account for all the kingdoms of God.1 To him had been committed universal dominion — regimen universale.2 Innocent III. found in Melchizedek, the priest-king, the full type of the pope combining in him self the sacerdotal and regal functions.
Men of less originality and moral power could do no more than reaffirm the claims of these two master rulers and repeat their metaphors. Of these no one had more selfassurance than Gregory IX., who, at an age when most men are decrepit, bravely opposed to Frederick II. 's plans the fiction of the Donation of Constantine. Was not the Roman sceptre committed to the Apostolic see by the first Christian emperor, and did not the Apostolic see transfer the empire from the Greeks to the Germans, Charlemagne and Frederick himself being the successors of Arcadius, Valentinian, Theodosius, and the other Christian emperors of Rome.3 But Inno cent IV., 1254, returned to the position assumed by Hildebrand, that the papacy does not depend upon Constantine for secular dominion, as Peter received it directly from God.4
1 Reg., I. 63, Migne, 148. 569. 2 Reg., II. 51. 8 Br&iolles, IV. 914-923.
4 See Dollinger, Papstthum, pp. 67, 404. Leo X.'s bull against Luther reaffirmed this fiction of the transfer of the empire from the Greeks to the Germans by the pope. See copy of the bull in this Hist., VI. 233.
§ 123. PAPAL SUPREMACY IN CHURCH AND STATE. 777
When the struggle with the Hohenstaufen had been brought to a close, and peace established by the eleva tion of Rudolf of Hapsburg to the imperial throne, Gregory X. wrote to Rudolf: u If the sacred chair is vacant, the em pire lacks the dispenser of salvation ; if the throne is empty, the Church is defenceless before her persecutors. It is the duty of the Church's ruler to maintain kings in their office, and of kings to protect the rights of the Church." This was a mild statement of the supremacy of the Apostolic see. It remained for Boniface VIII., in his famous bull, unam sanctam, 1302, to state exactly, though somewhat brusquely, what his predecessors from Hildebrand, and indeed from Nicolas I., had claimed — supreme right to both swords, the spiritual and the temporal, with the one ruling the souls of men and with the other their temporal concerns.
These claims were advocated in special treatises by Ber nard and Thomas Aquinas, two of the foremost churchmen of all the Christian centuries. Bernard was the friend of popes and the ruling spirit of Europe during the pontificates of Innocent II. and Eugenius III. the mightiest moral force of his age. Thomas Aquinas wrote as a theologian and with him began the separate treatment of the papacy in systems of theology. In his Rule of Princes and against the Errors of the Grreeks, Thomas unequivocally sets forth the suprem acy of the Apostolic see over the State as well as in the universal Church. As for Bernard, both Ultramontane and Gallican claim his authority, but there are expressions in his work addressed to Eugenius III., De consideration, which admit of no other fair interpretation than that the pope is supreme in both realms.
Bernard's treatise, filling eighty compact columns in the edition of Migne, summons Eugenius, whom he addresses as his spiritual son, to reflect in four directions: upon himself, upon that which is beneath him, upon that which is around about him, and upon that which is above him. Such a voice of warning and admonition has seldom been heard by the occupant of a throne. The author was writing, probably, in the very last year of his life.