PETER IN CHAINS
a worthy resting place beside Leo the Great. Hildebrand, who had once counselled him to lay aside the Papal insignia of office and to enter Rome garbed as a pilgrim, may well have seemed to many the man destined to be Pope. But he was still to labour quietly during twenty more years building and guiding the Church with a hand seen or un- detected in every move taken by Popes bearing other names.
Cluny and the German monarchy had raised the Roman See from an evil state during the eleventh century. In other countries, above all France and Spain, men looked upon the Germanization of the Pa- pacy with a jealousy in which there was latent a tendency to make the national churches sufficient unto themselves. Many thought it high time that the successor of Peter were freed from the direction of the German Emperor. While Henry lived no one dreamed of a breach. Hildebrand, at the head of a Roman embassy, once more requested a German Pope; and the answer was Bishop Gebhard of Eichstatt, the Emperor's relative and friend. A year later (1056) Gebhard, who had now become Victor II, stood beside the corpse of Henry. As the administrator of the Empire, who had been named in the testament, he rendered the dead monarch most loyal service. He crowned the Emperor's little son Henry IV, secured for his widow Agnes the Re- gency and an oath of loyalty from the German princes, and guaranteed the child a throne and the Empire a peace by bringing about a recon- ciliation with a most dangerous enemy Henry III had made during his later years the powerful Godfrey of Lorraine, who through his marriage with Beatrice of Tuscany had become heir to the crown of Tuscany and master of the rich House of Canossa. The Pope died (1057) on the way back to Rome, but the election of Abbot Frederic of Monte Cassino, Godfrey's brother, confirmed the new peace. This event had a profound and far-reaching effect. The power of God- frey, which had been further increased after Henry's death by acces- sions of territory in Italy, remained a bulwark of the Papacy as long as he lived to be the new protector of Rome and the Viceroy of Henty IV; and it was continued later by Mathilda, daughter of Countess Beatrice, who was an energetic woman. Godfrey's brother was called Stephen IX, and wore the tiara only one year. By threat- ening punishment if his orders were disobeyed, he compelled Peter
RISE
