The same Church which, in the confusion and tumult of the great
migrations, restored authority by raising up and anointing kings, held
in later times with the aristocracy of the empire, and called into
existence the democracies of Italy. In the eighth century she looked to
Charlemagne for the reorganisation of society; in the eleventh she
relied on the people to carry out the reformation of the clergy. During
the first period of the Middle Ages, when social and political order had
to be reconstructed out of ruins, the Church everywhere addresses
herself to the kings, and seeks to strengthen and to sanctify their
power. The royal as well as the imperial dignity received from her their
authority and splendour. Whatever her disputes on religious grounds with
particular sovereigns, such as Lothar, she had in those ages as yet no
contests with the encroachments of monarchical power. Later on in the
Middle Ages, on the contrary, when the monarchy had prevailed almost
everywhere, and had strengthened itself beyond the limits of feudal
ideas by the help of the Roman law and of the notions of absolute power
derived from the ancients, it stood in continual conflict with the
Church. From the time of Gregory VII., all the most distinguished
pontiffs were engaged in quarrels with the royal and imperial power,
which resulted in the victory of the Church in Germany and her defeat in
France. In this resistance to the exaggeration of monarchy, they
naturally endeavoured to set barriers to it by promoting popular
institutions, as the Italian democracies and the aristocratic republics
of Switzerland, and the capitulations which in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries were imposed on almost every prince. Times had
greatly changed when a Pope declared his amazement at a nation which
bore in silence the tyranny of their king.[320] In modern times the
absolute monarchy in Catholic countries has been, next to the
Reformation, the greatest and most formidable enemy of the Church. For
here she again lost in great measure her natural influence. In France,
Spain, and Germany, by Gallicanism, Josephism, and the Inquisition, she
came to be reduced to a state of dependence, the more fatal and
deplorable that the clergy were often instrumental in maintaining it.
All these phenomena were simply an adaptation of Catholicism to a
political system incompatible with it in its integrity; an artifice to
accommodate the Church to the requirements of absolute