eneral ignorance of the age bestowed a
consequence on the ecclesiastical offices, even beyond the great extent
of power and property which belonged to them. Superstition, the child of
ignorance, invested the clergy with an authority almost sacred; and
as they engrossed the little learning of the age, their interposition
became requisite in all civil business, and a real usefulness in common
life was thus superadded to the spiritual sanctity of their character.

When the usurpations, therefore, of the church had come to such maturity
as to embolden her to attempt extorting the right of investitures from
the temporal power, Europe, especially Italy and Germany, was thrown
into the most violent convulsions, and the pope and the emperor waged
implacable war on each other. Gregory dared to fulminate the sentence
of excommunication against Henry and his adherents, to pronounce him
rightfully deposed, to free his subjects from their oath of allegiance;
and, instead of shocking mankind by this gross encroachment on the
civil authority, he found the stupid people ready to second his most
exorbitant pretensions. Every minister, servant, or vassal of the
emperor, who received any disgust, covered his rebellion under the
pretence of principle; and even the mother of this monarch, forgetting
all the ties of nature, was seduced to countenance the insolence of
his enemies. Princes themselves, not attentive to the pernicious
consequences of those papal claims, employed them for their present
purposes; and the controversy, spreading into every city of Italy,
engendered the parties of Guelf and Ghibbelin; the most durable and most
inveterate factions that ever arose from the mixture of ambition
and religious zeal. Besides numberless assassinations, tumults, and
convulsions, to which they gave rise, it is computed that the quarrel
occasioned no less then sixty battles in the reign of Henry IV., and
eighteen in that of his successor, Henry V., when the claims of the
sovereign pontiff finally prevailed.[*]

[* Padre Paolo sopra Eccles. Benef. p. 113.]

But the bold spirit of Gregory, not dismayed with the vigorous
opposition which he met with from the emperor, extended his usurpations
all over Europe; and well knowing the nature of mankind, whose
blind astonishment ever inclines them to yield to the most impudent
pretensions, he seemed determined to set no bounds to the spiritual, or
rather temporal monarchy which he had undertaken t