of the church with the rights of the different nations that formed it, should have been so early discovered. But it was inevitable that, once the discovery was made, once the standard was raised against the encroachments (for so they were bitterly felt) of the papacy, the crusade should be extended to the abuses or deficiencies which were too obvious within the constitutional or dogmatic fabric of the church itself; and the heresies of Wycliffe or Huss were a natural outcome of the resistance provoked by Boniface the Eighth or John the Twenty-Second. It is not our purpose to follow the history to these issues: it is only necessary to observe that they were involved essentially in the conflict caused by the widened claims of the church. The political results of this conflict will come before us in the following chapter, but to make its precise conditions clear we have preliminarily to educe from the writings of the papal party the precise figure which the conception of the church took in their minds.
The time when Gregory the Ninth consolidated the canon law is well known to cöincide with a general failure of historical insight and historical veracity, which operated well-nigh as strongly upon the actors in the events of this period as upon its chroniclers. Fictions were everywhere accepted as truth and used recklessly to explain existing facts; and among these fictions two had a diffusion and influence which it is difficult to overestimate. One of these, the Donation, by virtue of which Constantine was alleged to have abdicated his imperial authority in Italy (it was afterwards said, in all parts of the west[1]) in favour of the successor of saint Peter, had been used
- ↑ Thus Augustin Trionfo: Ad papam pertinet immediate imperii plena iurisdictio. Postquam enim Constantinus cessit imperio occidentali, nulla sibi reservatione facta, in civitate Romana, in partibus Italiae, et in omnibus occidentalibus regionibus, plenum ius totius imperii est acquisitum summis pontificibus, non solum superioris dominationis, verum etiam immediatae administrationis, ut ex ipsis tota dependeat imperialis iurisdictio, quantum ad electionem et quantum ad confirmationem: ita ut extunc nullus de iure potuerit se intromittere de regimine occidentalis imperii absque expressa auctoritate et mandato sedis apostolicae, nisi usurpative et tyrannice: De potest. eccl. xxxviii. 1 p. 224.
