The Church and the Empire, D. J. Medley [librera reader TXT] 📗

old cathedral and collegiate chapters, who were henceforth known as Secular Canons.

These bodies of clergy, who combined parochial duties with what was practically a monastic life, became exceedingly popular; and by degrees not only were Secular Canons of collegiate churches, and even of some cathedrals, transformed into Regular Canons, but even some monastic houses were handed over to them. Instead of existing as isolated bodies, like the old Benedictines, they took the Cluniac model of organisation and formed congregations of houses grouped round some one or other of those which formed models for the rest. Of these congregations of Regular Canons the most celebrated were those of the Victorines and the Premonstratensians.

[Sidenote: Victorines.]

The abbey of St. Victor at Paris was founded in 1113 by William of Champeaux, afterwards Bishop of Chalons. The Order came to consist of about forty houses, and its members strove to keep the Augustinian ideal of a parochial and monastic life. But the chief fame of the abbey itself comes from its scholastic work, and it became known both as the stronghold of a somewhat rigid orthodoxy and as the home of a mystical theology which was developed among its own teachers.

[Sidenote: Premonstratensians.]

But by far the most important congregation of Canons Regular was that of the Premonstratensians. Their founder, Norbert, a German of noble birth, in response to a sudden conversion, gave up several canonries of the older kind with which he was endowed; but finding that a prophet has no honour in his own country, he preached in France with astonishing success, and ultimately, under the patronage of the Bishop of Laon in 1120, he settled with a few companions in a waste place in a forest, where he established a community of Regular Canons and gave to the spot the name of Pr�montr�—pratum monstratum—the meadow which had been pointed out to him by an angel. Almost from its foundation the Premonstratensian Order admitted women as well as men, and at first the two sexes lived in separate houses planted side by side. The Order also began the idea of affiliating to itself, under the form of a third class, influential laymen who would help in its work. The Premonstratensian houses assimilated themselves to monastic communities more than did the Victorines: their work was missionary rather than parochial. The Order spread with great rapidity not only in Western Europe, but, even in its founder’s lifetime, to Syria and Palestine, and for purposes of administration it came to be divided into thirty provinces.

[Sidenote: St. Norbert in Germany.]

Meanwhile Norbert had come under the notice of the Emperor Lothair II, who forced him into the archbishopric of Magdeburg. Here he substituted Premonstratensians in a collegiate chapter for canons of the older kind, and he eagerly backed up Lothair’s policy of extending German influence upon the north-eastern frontier by planting Premonstratensian houses as missionary centres and by founding new bishoprics. Norbert, in fact became Lothair’s chief adviser and was an European influence second only to that of St. Bernard in all the questions of the day.

[Sidenote: Knights Templars.]

It was upon the model of the Canons Regular that the great military Orders of the religious were organised. In the year 1118 a Burgundian knight, Hugh de Payens, with eight other knights, founded at Jerusalem an association for the protection of distressed pilgrims in Palestine.

From their residence near Solomon’s Temple they came to be known as the Knights of the Temple. They remained a small and poor body until St. Bernard who was nephew to one of the knights, took them under his patronage and drew up for them a code of regulations which obtained the sanction of Honorius II at the Council of Troyes in 1128. From that moment the prosperity of the Templars was assured. Their numbers increased, and lands and other endowments were showered upon them in all parts of Europe. As monks they were under the triple vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and the regulations of the Order which governed their daily life were among the most severe. As knights it was their duty to maintain war against the Saracens. For administrative purposes the possessions of the Order were grouped in ten provinces, each province being further subdivided into preceptories or commanderies, and each of these into still smaller units. Each division and subdivision had its own periodical chapter of members for settling its concerns, and at the head of the whole Order stood the Grand Master with a staff of officers who formed the general chapter and acted as a restraint upon the conduct of their head. In addition to the knights the Order contained chaplains for the ecclesiastical duties, and serving brethren of humble birth to help the knights in warfare. Their possessions in Western Europe were used as recruiting-grounds for their forces in the East; but it was only in towns of some importance that they erected churches on the model of the Holy Sepulchre in connection with their houses.

[Sidenote: Knights Hospitallers.]

The Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem was a reorganisation of a hospital dedicated to St. John the Baptist. This had been erected for poor pilgrims by the merchants of Amalfi before the Crusades began. But it remained merely a charitable brotherhood living under a monastic rule and attracting both men and endowments, until the example of the Templars caused the then master, Raymond du Puy, to obtain papal sanction some time before 1130 for a rule which added military duties without superseding the original object of the Order.

Their possessions were divided into eight provinces with subdivisions of grand priories and commanderies, and the other administrative arrangements differed in little, except occasionally in name, from those of the Templars.

[Sidenote: Privileges of the military Orders.]

Both these Orders obtained not only extensive possessions from the pious, but wide privileges from the Pope. They were subject to the spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope alone; they could consecrate churches and cemeteries on their own lands without any interference of the local clergy; they could hold divine service everywhere.

Interdicts and excommunications had no terrors or even inconveniences for them. They were free from payment of tithes and other imposts levied on the clergy. There is no doubt that but for these Orders the Crusaders would have fared far worse than they did. The Templars and Hospitallers were the one really reliable element in the crusading forces. This is no very high praise, and their effectiveness was largely discounted by their bitter quarrels with each other and with the local authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, alike in the east and the west. They scandalously abused the extensive privileges accorded to them, by such acts as the administration of the Sacrament to excommunicated persons, to whom they would also give Christian burial. In 1179, at the second Lateran Council, Alexander III was moved by the universal complaints to denounce their irresponsible defiance of all ecclesiastical law, and subsequent Popes were obliged to speak with equal vigour. After the destruction of the Latin power in Palestine (1291) the Hospitallers transferred their headquarters to Cyprus till 1309, then to Rhodes, and finally to Malta. The Templars abandoned their raison d’�tre, retired to their possessions in the west, and placed their headquarters at Paris, where they acted as the bankers of the French King. Their wealth provoked jealousy: they were accused of numberless and nameless crimes, and their enemies brought about their fall, first in France, then in England, and finally the abolition of the Order by papal decree in 1313. Such of their wealth as escaped the hands of the lay authorities went to swell the possessions of the Hospitallers.

[Sidenote: Teutonic Knights.]

There were many other Orders of soldier-monks besides these two. The best known are the Teutonic Knights, who originated during the Third Crusade at the siege of Acre (1190) in an association of North German Crusaders for the care of the sick and wounded. The Knights of the German Hospital of St. Mary the Virgin at Jerusalem—for such was their full title—gained powerful influence in Palestine; their Order was confirmed by Pope Celestine III (1191-8), and in 1220 Honorius III gave them the same privileges as were enjoyed by the Hospitallers and Templars. Their organisation was similar to that of the older Orders.

Their prosperity was chiefly due to the third Grand Master, Herman von Salza, the good genius of the Emperor Frederick II, and a great power in Europe. Under him the Order transferred itself to the shores of the Baltic, where it carried on a crusade against the heathen Prussians, and here it united in 1237 with another knightly Order, the Brethren of the Sword, which had been founded in 1202 by the Bishop of Livonia for similar work against the heathen inhabitants of that country.

[Sidenote: Other military Orders.]

The Knights of the Hospital of St. Thomas of Acre was a small English Order named after Thomas Becket and founded in the thirteenth century.

They, together with those already mentioned as founded for work in Palestine, belonged to the Canons Regular. For convenience, however, mention should be made here of the great Spanish Orders which were affiliated to the Cistercian monks. These were founded in imitation of the Templars and Hospitallers for similar work against the Saracens of the Peninsula. The Order of Calatrava, founded by a Cistercian abbot when that city was threatened by the Saracens in 1158, and the Order of St. Julian, founded about the same time, which ultimately took its name from the captured fortress of Alcantara, were amenable to the complete monastic rule; while the Portuguese Order of Evora or Avisa, founded a few years later, was assimilated rather to the lay brethren of the Cistercians, and its members could marry and hold property.

There was one of the Spanish Orders, however, which was not connected with the Cistercians. The Knights of St. James of Compostella originated in 1161 for the protection of pilgrims to the shrine of Compostella. Their rule was confirmed by Alexander III in 1175, and the Order of Santiago became the most famous of the military Orders in the Peninsula.

[Sidenote: New Monastic Orders.]

The revival and reorganisation of the common life among cathedral and collegiate bodies roused the jealousy of the monastic houses. The absolute superiority of the monastic life over any other was an article of faith to which the obvious interests of the monks could allow no qualification; and the close imitation of the monastic model adopted by the Regular Canons was sufficient proof that the Church generally acquiesced in this view. The great reform movement of the eleventh century had emanated from the monks of Cluny; but just as the degradation of the monastic ideal by the Benedictines had called into existence the Order of Cluny with its reformed Benedictine rule, so now the failure of the Cluniacs to live up to the expectations and to minister to the needs of the most fervent religious spirits caused the foundation of a number of new Orders. In each such case the founder and his first followers strove, by the austerities of their personal lives and by the severity of the rule which they enjoined, to embody and to maintain at the highest level that ideal of contemplative asceticism which was the object of the monastic life. Such was the origin of the Order of Grammont (1074) and of Fontevraud (1094) and of the better known Orders of the Carthusians (1084) and the Cistercians (1098).

[Sidenote: Grammont.]

Thus Stephen, the founder of the Order of Grammont, was the son of a noble of Auvergne, who, in the course of a journey in Calabria, was so impressed by the life or the hermits with which the mountainous districts abounded, that he resolved to reproduce it, and lived for fifty years near Limoges, subjecting himself to such rigorous devotional exercises that his knees became quite hard and