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BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GUELPHS AND GHIBELLINES
The doctrine of two powers to govern the world, one spiritual and the other
temporal, each independent within its own limits, is as old as Christianity itself,
and based upon the Divine command to "render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's". The earlier popes, such as
Gelasius I (494) and Symmachus (506), wrote emphatically on this theme, which
received illustration in the Christian art of the eighth century in a mosaic of the
Lateran palace that represented Christ delivering the keys to St. Sylvester and the
banner to the Emperor Constantine, and St. Peter giving the papal stole to Leo III
and the banner to Charlemagne. The latter scene insists on the papal action in the
restoration of the Western Empire, which Dante regarded as an act of usurpation
on the part of Leo. For Dante, pope and emperor are as two suns to shed light upon
man's spiritual and temporal paths respectively, divinely ordained by the infinite
goodness of Him from whom the power of Peter and of Caesar bifurcates as from a
point. Thus, throughout the troubled period of the Middle Ages, men inevitably
looked to the harmonious alliance of these two powers to renovate the face of the
earth, or, when it seemed no longer possible for the two to work in unison, they
appealed to one or the other to come forward as the savior of society. We get the
noblest form of these aspirations in the ideal imperialism of Dante's "De
Monarchia", on the one hand; and, on the other, in the conception of the ideal
The Hohenstaufen Dynasty - Page 23 of 200