’Tis under Leo IX. that Hildebrand begins to be distinguished, a man the most celebrated of his age. Born in Tuscany, where his father, they say, was a carpenter, he studied in France, embraced the monastic rule there, and returned into Italy to give counsel to Leo IX. Nicholas II. and Alexander II. and finally to succeed them in the pontifical throne. The idea of a universal theocracy had assumed in his fiery and iron soul the character of a passion; all his life was devoted to the undertaking. To assure the empire of the priesthood over the rest of mankind, he saw the necessity of reforming their manners and concentrating their relations, to isolate them more strictly, and to form them into one great family, the members of which should no longer recollect having belonged to a secular one. Ecclesiastical celibacy was as yet but a general practice, introduced into and renewed in almost every church, but in almost all, nevertheless, modified by exceptions or transgressions. Hildebrand resolved to reduce it to a rigorous law: at his instigation, Stephen IX. in 1058 declared marriage incompatible with the priesthood; treated as concubines all the priest’s wives; and excommunicated both them and their husbands, if the union was not instantly divided. The clergy made some resistance; the priests of Milan, especially, objected the permission granted them by St. Ambrose to marry, but in first nuptials only, and provided it was with a virgin.¹⁴² Hildebrand to cut these remonstrances short, classed in the number of heretics the obstinate gain-sayers.¹⁴³
¹⁴² Landolph Senior. Hist Mediol. 1. 3. et 4;—Rer. Italic. t. 4, p. 96, See.—Cocio. Hist, of Milan, pa. 1, b. 6, &C.
Under Nicholas II. Hildebrand changed the mode of electing the popes. Until his time, all the Romans, clergy, nobles, and people, had assisted in these elections. It was ruled that for the future they should be selected by the cardinal bishops alone, to whom the cardinal clerks should afterwards be united, and they were to close the matter by demanding the approbation of the rest of the clergy, and even that of the body of the faithful. The cardinal bishops are no others than the seven bishops of the Roman territory: Nicholas, in the same decree calls them his fellow countrymen, “comprovinciales episcopi.¹⁴⁴ With respect to the cardinal priests or clerks, it was those who administered the offices of the twenty-eight principal churches of the city of Rome. Long before Nicholas, these twenty-eight priests and these bishops, had been designated by the appellation of ‘cardinals’; but now for the first time, behold them invested with the exclusive and determinate privilege of nominating the new popes: the rest of the clergy and the people preserve no more than the power of rejecting the proposed. Such was the origin of the Electoral College of Cardinals; a college, however, which received subsequently, and by degrees, its present organization. It had, as we see, for its first founder, Nicholas II. or rather Hildebrand. Let us not omit the clause which terminates this decree:¹⁴⁵