26o A Short History of The World were annexed by the Venetians. A " Latin " emperor (Baldwin of Flanders) was set up in Constantinople and the Latin and Greek Church were declared to be reimited. The Latin emperors ruled in Constantinople from 1204 to 1261 when the Greek world shook itself free again from Roman predominance. The twelfth century then and the opening of the thirteenth was the age of papal ascendancy just as the eleventh was the age of the ascendancy of the Seljuk Turks and the tenth the age of the North- men. A united Christendom under the rule of the pope came nearer to being a working reality than it ever was before or after that time. In those centuries a simple Christian faith was real and widespread over great areas of Europe. Rome itself had passed through some dark and discreditable phases ; few writers can be found to excuse the lives of Popes John XI and John XII in the tenth century ; they were abominable creatures ; but the heart and body of Latin Christen- dom had remained earnest and simple ; the generality of the common priests and monks and nuns had Uved exemplary and faithful lives. Upon the wealth of confidence such lives created rested the power of the Church. Among the great popes of the past had been Gregory the Great, Gregory I (590-604) and Leo III (795-816), who invited Charlemagne to be Csesar and crowned him in spite of himself. Towards the close of the eleventh century there arose a great clerical statesman, Hildebrand, who ended his life as Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085). Next but one after him came Urban II (1087-1099), the pope of the First Crusade. These two were the founders of this period of papal greatness during which the popes lorded it over the emperors. From Bulgaria to Ireland and from Norway to Sicily and Jerusalem the pope was supreme. Gregory VII obliged the emperor Henry IV to come in penitence to him at Canossa and to await forgiveness for three days and nights in the courtyard of the castle, clad in sackcloth and barefooted to the snow. In 1176 at Venice the Emperor Frederick (Frederick Barbarossa) knelt to Pope Alexander III and swore fealty to him. The great power of the church in the beginning of the eleventh century lay in the wills and consciences of men. It failed to retain the moral prestige on which its power was based. In the opening decades of the fourteenth century it was discovered that the power of the pope had evaporated. What was it that destroyed the naive confidence of the common people of Christendom in the church so that they would no longer rally to its appeal and serve its purposes ?
