control the temporal as well as the spiritual affairs of Europe, to
transfer crowns when they thought fit, to direct invasions and military
expeditions against any who questioned their authority. Hildebrand
boasts (_Ep._ vii, 23) that, when William of Normandy sent envoys to ask
Pope Alexander to sanction his unscrupulous invasion of England, and the
Papal Court was itself too sensible of the enormity to give its
sanction, he (Hildebrand) overbore the wavering Pope and forced him to
bless the enterprise; and, when he had in his turn mounted the Papal
throne, he vehemently claimed that his action had made England a fief
for ever of the Holy See! Gregory VII and Innocent III are the two
greatest and most sincerely religions of the medieval Popes, and they
carried the power of the Papacy to a height which excites the amazement
of the modern historian. But they were at the same time the most
militant of the Popes, and on the least provocation they set
armies--even the most barbaric and ferocious troops in Europe--in motion
to carry out their imperial commands. They arrogated the power of
deposing monarchs, and thus encouraged civil war and the ambitions of
neighbouring kings.

The rise of heresy and of protests against the corruption of the Papacy
was another very grave pretext of the Church to support the military
system. In the days of Gregory VII a body of Puritans known as the
Patareni spread over the north of Italy, and Rome encouraged a few
soldiers to lead armed mobs against them and drown their idealism in
blood. Innocent III has a more terrible stigma on his record. The
Albigensians, an early type of Protestants, were spreading in the south
of France, and the Pope sanctioned a "crusade"--an expedition, largely,
of looters and cut-throats--against them from all parts of France. The
appalling deceit practised by the Papal Legate and sanctioned by the
Pope, the ferocity of the campaign, and the desolation brought on one of