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By Root 3431 0

Constantinople, they were terrorized, and gave their assent. For some time, the facts were concealed from the Pope, but when he came to know them, he took a high line. He summoned a council in Rome to consider the question; he deposed one of the legates from his bishopric, and also the archbishop of Syracuse, who had consecrated Photius; he anathematized Photius, deposed all whom he had ordained, and restored all who had been deposed for opposing him. The Emperor Michael III was furious, and wrote the Pope an angry letter, but the Pope replied: 'The day of king-priests and emperor-pontiffs is past, Christianity has separated the two functions, and Christian emperors have need of the Pope in view of the life eternal, whereas popes have no need of emperors except as regards temporal things.' Photius and the Emperor retorted by summoning a council, which excommunicated the Pope and declared the Roman Church heretical. Soon after this, however, Michael III was murdered, and his successor Basil restored Ignatius, explicitly recognizing papal jurisdiction in the matter. This triumph happened just after the death of Nicholas, and was attributable almost entirely to the accidents of palace revolutions. After the death of Ignatius, Photius again became patriarch, and the split between the Eastern and the Western Churches was widened. Thus it cannot be said that Nicholas's policy in this matter was victorious in the long run.

Nicholas had almost more difficulty in imposing his will upon the episcopate than upon kings. Archbishops had come to consider themselves very great men, and they were reluctant to submit tamely to an ecclesiastical monarch. He maintained, however, that bishops owe their existence to the Pope, and while he lived he succeeded, on the whole, in making this view prevail. There was, throughout these centuries, great doubt as to how bishops should be appointed. Originally they were elected by the acclamation of the faithful in their cathedral city; then, frequently, by a synod of neighbouring bishops; then, sometimes by the King, and sometimes by the Pope. Bishops could be deposed for grave causes, but it was not clear whether they should be tried by the Pope or by a provincial synod. All these uncertainties made the powers of an office dependent upon the energy and astuteness of its holders. Nicholas stretched papal power to the utmost limits of which it was then capable; under his successors, it sank again to a very low ebb.

During the tenth century, the papacy was completely under the control of the local Roman aristocracy. There was, as yet, no fixed rule as to the election of Popes; sometimes they owed their elevation to popular acclaim, sometimes to emperors or kings, and sometimes, as in the tenth century, to the holders of local urban power in Rome. Rome was, at this time, not a civilized city, as it had still been in the time of Gregory the Great. At times there were faction fights; at other times some rich family acquired control by a combination of violence and corruption. The disorder and weakness of Western Europe was so great at this period that Christendom might have seemed in danger of complete destruction. The Emperor and the King of France were powerless to curb the anarchy produced in their realms by feudal potentates who were nominally their vassals. The Hungarians made raids on Northern Italy. The Normans raided the French coast, until, in 911, they were given Normandy and in return became Christians. But the greatest danger in Italy and Southern France came from the Saracens, who could not be converted, and had no reverence for the Church. They completed the conquest of Sicily about the end of the ninth century; they were established on the River Garigliano, near Naples; they destroyed Monte Cassino and other great monasteries; they had a settlement on the coast of Provence, whence they raided Italy and the Alpine valleys, interrupting traffic between Rome and the North.

The conquest of Italy by the Saracens was prevented by the Eastern Empire, which overcame the Saracens of the Garigliano