J. H. Merle D'Aubigné - History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin (Vol. 1-8)

Three powers in their turn threatened these liberties.

First came the counts of Geneva. They were originally, as it would seem, merely officers of the Emperor; 19but gradually became almost independent princes.

As early as 1091, we meet with an Aymon, count of Genevois. 20The rule of these counts of Genevois soon extended over a wide and magnificent territory. They resided not only at their hereditary manor-seat in Geneva, which stood on the site of Gondebald’s palace, but also in various castles scattered in distant parts of their domain—at Annecy, Rumilly, La Roche, Lausanne, Moudon, Romont, Rue, Les Clées, and other places. 21In those days, the counts lived both a solitary and turbulent life, such as characterised the feudal period. At one time they were shut up in their castles, which were for the most part surrounded by a few small houses, and begirt with fosses and drawbridges, and on whose walls could be seen afar the arms of the warders glittering in the rising sun. At other times, they would sally forth, attended by a numerous escort of officers, with their seneschal, marshal, cup-bearers, falconers, pages, and esquires, either in pursuit of the chase on the heights of the Jura and the Alps; or it might be with the pious motive of visiting some place of pilgrimage; or not unfrequently indeed to wage harassing crusades against their neighbours or their vassals. But during all these feudal agitations another power was growing in Geneva—a power humble indeed at first—but whose mouth was to speak great things . 22

At the period of the Burgundian conquest Geneva possessed a bishop, and the invasion of the Germans soon gave this prelate considerable power. Gifted with intelligence far superior to that of the men by whom they were surrounded, respected by the barbarians as the high-priests of Rome, knowing how to acquire vast possessions by slow degrees, and thus becoming the most important personages in the cities where they resided, the bishops laboured to protect their city from abroad and to govern it at home. Finally they confiscated without much ceremony the independence of the people, and united the quality of prince with that of bishop.

In 1124 Aymon, Count of Genevois, by an agreement made with Humbert of Grammont, Bishop of Geneva, gave up the city to the latter, 23reserving only the old palace and part of the criminal jurisprudence, but continuing to hold the secondary towns and the rural district.

The institution of bishop-princes, half religious and half political, equally in disaccord with the Gospel of past ages and the liberty of the future, may have been exceptionally beneficent; but generally speaking it was a misfortune for the people of the middle ages, and particularly for Geneva. If at that time the Church had possessed humble but earnest ministers to hold up the light of the Gospel to the world, why should not the same spiritual power, which in the first century had vanquished Roman polytheism, have been able in later times to dispel the darkness of feudalism? But what could be expected of prelates who turned their croziers into swords, their flocks into serfs, their pastoral dwellings into fortified castles? Corruptio optimi pessima. The prince-bishop, that amphibious offspring of the barbaric invasion, cannot be maintained in christendom. The petty people of Geneva—and this is one of its titles to renown—was the first who expelled him in modern times; and the manner in which it did this is one of the pages of history we desire to transcribe. It needed truly a powerful energy—the arm of God—to undertake and carry through this first act which wrested from episcopal hands the temporal sceptre they had usurped. Since then the example of Geneva has often been followed; the feudal thrones of the bishops have fallen on the banks of the Rhine, in Belgium, Bavaria, Austria, and elsewhere; but the first throne that fell was that of Geneva, as the last will be that of Rome.

If the bishop, owing to the support of the emperors, succeeded in ousting the count from the city of Geneva, leaving him only the jurisdiction over his rural vassals, he succeeded also, in the natural course of things, in suppressing the popular franchises. These rights, however, still subsisted, the prince-bishop being elected by the people—a fact recorded by Saint Bernard at the election of Ardutius. 24The prince even made oath of fidelity to the people. Occasionally the citizens opposed the prelate’s encroachments, and refused to be dragged before the court of Rome. 25

Christianity was intended to be a power of liberty; Rome, by corrupting it, made it a power of despotism; Calvin, by regenerating it, set it up again and restored its first work.

But what threatened most the independence and liberty of Geneva, was not the bishops and counts, but a power alien to it, that had begun by robbing the counts of their towns and villages. The house of Savoy, devoured by an insatiable ambition, strove to enlarge its dominions with a skill and perseverance that were crowned with the most rapid success. When the princes of Savoy had taken the place of the counts of Genevois and the dukes of Zœhringen in the Pays de Vaud, Geneva, which they looked upon as an enclave , became the constant object of their desires. They hovered for centuries over the ancient city, like those Alpine vultures which, spreading their wings aloft among the clouds, explore the country beneath with their glance, swoop down upon the prey, and return day after day until they have devoured each fragment. Savoy had her eyes fixed upon Geneva,—first, through ambition, because the possession of this important city would round off and strengthen her territory; and second, through calculation, because she discovered in this little state certain principles of right and liberty that alarmed her. What would become of the absolute power of princes, obtained at the cost of so many usurpations, if liberal theories should make their way into European law? A nest built among the craggy rocks of the Alps may perhaps contain a brood of inoffensive eaglets; but as soon as their wings grow, they will soar into the air, and with their piercing eyes discover the prey and seize it from afar. The safer course, then, is for some strong hand to kill them in their nest while young.

The relations between Savoy and Geneva—one representing absolutism, the other liberty—have been and are still frequently overlooked. They are of importance, however, to the history of Geneva, and even of the Reformation. For this reason we are desirous of sketching them.

The terrible struggle of which we have just spoken began in the first half of the thirteenth century. The house of Savoy finding two powers at Geneva and in Genevois, the bishop and the count, resolved to take advantage of their dissensions to creep both into the province and into the city, and to take their place. It declared first in favour of the bishop against the count, the more powerful of the two, in order to despoil him. Peter of Savoy, Canon of Lausanne, became in 1229, at the age of twenty-six, Provost of the Canons of Geneva; and having thus an opportunity of knowing the city, of appreciating the importance of its situation, and discovering the beauties that lay around it, he took a liking to it. Being a younger son of a Count of Savoy, he could easily have become a bishop; but under his amice, the canon concealed the arm of a soldier and the genius of a politician. On the death of his father in 1232, he threw off his cassock, turned soldier, married Agnes whom the Count of Faucigny made his heiress at the expense of her elder sister, and then took to freebooting. 26Somewhat later, being the uncle of Elinor of Provence, Queen of England, he was created Earl of Richmond by his nephew Henry III., and studied the art of government in London. But the banks of the Thames could not make him forget those of the Leman. The castle of Geneva remained, as we have seen above, the private property of his enemy the Count of Geneva, and this he made up his mind to seize. ‘A wise man,’ says an old chronicler, ‘of lofty stature and athletic strength, proud, daring, terrible as a lion, resembling the most famous paladins, so brave that he was called the valiant ( preux ) Charlemagne’—possessing the organising genius that founds states and the warlike disposition that conquers them—Peter seized the castle of Geneva in 1250, and held it as a security for 35,000 silver marks which he pretended the count owed him. He was now somebody in the city. Being a man of restless activity, enterprising spirit, rare skill, and indefatigable perseverance, he used this foundation on which to raise the edifice of his greatness in the valley of the Leman. 27The people of Geneva, beginning to grow weary of ecclesiastical authority, desired to enjoy freely those communal franchises which the clergy called ‘the worst of institutions.’ 28When he became Count of Savoy, Peter, who had conceived the design of annexing Geneva to his hereditary states, promised to give the citizens all they wanted; and the latter, who already (two centuries and a half before the Reformation) desired to shake off the temporal yoke of their bishop, put themselves under his guardianship. But erelong they grew alarmed, they feared the sword of the warrior more than the staff of the shepherd, and were content with their clerical government