No powerful Emperor ever accepted the Gelasian principle
entire. To refute it was, however, difficult, so well did it harmonise with the
current conception of the State. Under the later Carolingians it became the
programme both of reformers and of mere ecclesiastical politicians. The new
monasteries, founded or reorganised under the influence of Cluny, placed
themselves beneath the special protection of the Pope, thus escaping from
secular burdens. The national hierarchies hailed the forgeries of the
Pseudo-Isidore as the charter of ecclesiastical liberty. Pope Nicholas I took
his stand at the head of the new movement, and gave it a remarkable development
when he asserted his jurisdiction over the adulterous Lothaire II (863).
Nicholas died before he couldgive further illustrations of his claim to be
supreme, even over kings, in matters of morality and faith. From his time to
that of Hildebrand there was no Pope vigorous enough to make a similar example.
Dragged down by their temporal possessions to the level of municipal seigneurs and
party instruments, the Popes from 867 to 962 were, at the best, no more than vigorous
Italian princes. To that level they returned after the period of the Saxon
Ottos (962-1002). In those forty years there were glimpses of a better future;
the German Pope, Gregory V, allied himself to Cluny (996-999); as Sylvester II
(999-1003) the versatile Gerbert of Aurillac - at once mathematician,
rhetorician, philosopher, and statesman - entered into the romantic dreams of his
friend and pupil, Otto III, and formed others on his own behalf which centred
round the Papacy rather than the Empire. Sylvester saw in imagination the Holy
See at the head of a federation of Christian monarchies. But fate was no kinder
to him than to Otto; he outlived his boy patron only by a year.
