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Nicholas Encyclopedia Britannica

NICHOLAS, St, of Myra, according to the Roman breviary (December 6) was a native of Patara in Lycia, and was given to his parents in answer to their prayers. From his earliest infancy he signally displayed the piety for which his whole life was remarkable, on Wednesdays and Fridays regularly refusing to receive nourishment from his nurse except once only, and that after sunset. While still a youth he was deprived of his parents, and the wealth that he thus early inherited he forthwith distributed to the poor. To this périod belongs what may be called the characteristic deed of his life,—his secret bestowal of dowries upon the three daughters of a citizen fallen into poverty, who, unable to procure fit marriages for them, was minded to give them up to a life of shame. Having given himself wholly to God, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Palestine, and in his voyaging miraculously stilled a storm by his prayers. On his return to his native province he visited Myra, the capital, where, as it fell out, the bishop had just died, and the chapter had been divinely advised to select as his successor a man named Nicholas who should be the first to enter the church next morning. Nicholas, thus plainly indicated, was duly consecrated, and displayed throughout his whole term of office every episcopal virtue. Under Maximian and Diocletian he was seized for his constancy, removed far from his diocese, and thrown into prison, where he lay until the days of Constantine, when he returned to Myra. He afterwards attended the council of Nice, and died a natural death not long after his return. His remains were subsequently removed to Bari (Barium) in Apulia. So far the authoritative Roman legend, the documentary evidence for which, however, does not take us farther back than to the 9th ...

NICHOLAS of Basel, generally called by his friends the Great Layman or the Great Friend of God, was the founder of a singular widespread association of pious people who, in the age of monastic fraternities, lived in special religious fellowship in a fashion altogether different from the common usage of the time. They did not renounce their property, they took no vows of celibacy or of obedience, but they met together for pious conversation, they corresponded with each other, they had common ideas about conversion, holy living, and Christian faith and duty. They were the Quietists of the 14th century, and called themselves the “Friends of God.”

Nicholas was the son of a rich merchant of Basel, and was born in that town about the year 1308. Left his own master at the age of twenty-four, by the death of his parents, and possessed of considerable wealth, he went out into the world to enjoy life and seek adventures. He became engaged, burgher as he was, to a maiden of noble rank. The night before his betrothal, as he was praying, he had a vision which resulted in his breaking off his marriage, leaving home and friends, and devoting himself to an ascetic life. After some years spent in solitude, severe bodily mortifications, and deep soul struggle, Nicholas gained the religious peace he sought, and from this time devoted himself to turning men around him from sin to God. He did not enter any religious order; he remained, what he loved to call himself, a layman; he neither preached nor heard confessions, but by means of a singular gift of personal influence he drew round him disciples from all classes of society. His followers did not form themselves into a sect or into an order. Some of them were priests, monks, and nuns, but some of them lived in the world, were nobles, knights, rich merchants, and their wives. Their religious opinions were what are commonly called mystical; and indeed all the more notable mystics of the 14th century were under the influence of Nicholas and belonged to the Friends of God. They did not break loose from the outward order of the church; they observed, though with no great scrupulosity, sacraments, fasts, and. festivals; but they looked on all such things as unimportant compared with that absolute resignation to the divine will in all things which was their leading principle.

The most striking event in the life of Nicholas is his meeting, in 1346, with Tauler, the Dominican preacher of Strasburg, which had the result of entirely changing the character of Tauler’s religious views and of his preaching.

In the society of the Friends of God there came to be a small inner circle of thirteen, who attached themselves to Nicholas, lived in community, and were sent by him on long journeys to maintain communication among the brethren in the different countries of Europe. In 1380, two years after the beginning of the “Great Schism,” these thirteen friends met together for the last time, coming from Italy, Hungary, and different parts of Germany. The state of the church at the time seemed to fill them with despair. Nicholas had long, by the many secret means he had at his command, exercised a great though invisible influence on church appointments and ecclesiastical affairs, but now he seemed to feel it hopeless to strive any longer against the increasing wickedness of the times, and he broke up the society he had formed, releasing his followers from their obedience, and went with two friends into Austria. Ten years later one Martin of Mainz, a follower of Nicholas, was burnt as a heretic, and in the act of accusation there are allusions to Nicholas which show that he was still living. But, as he must have been then nearly eighty-five years of age, it cannot have been much later, though the actual date is unknown, when, with two companions, he was burnt as a heretic at Vienna, the chief crime of which he was accused being that “he audaciously affirmed that he was in Christ and Christ in him.”

Our information about Nicholas comes to us chiefly through Rulmann Merswin, a banker of Strasburg, who with his wife belonged to the Friends of God. Merswin collected many leters and documents relating to the society, and bequeathed them to a convent of the Knights of St John which he founded in Strasburg. They lay hid for centuries, while the memory of Nicholas perished; even his name was forgotten, and mediaeval students were aware only of a mysterious presence who was sometimes referred to as “the Great Friend of God.” At last Professor C. Schmidt discovered the documents in the library of the university, and was able to identify Nicholas with Tauler’s mysterious visitor and with the Great Layman.

See Carl Schmidt, Nicolaus von Basel, Leben und Wirken, Vienna, 1866; Die Gottesfreunde im vierzehnten Jahrhundert, Jena, 1854; and Miss Winkworth, History and Life of Johann Tduler, London, 1857.

9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 17, p. 483
[570 words — estimated reading time: 4 minutes]

Nicholas i Encyclopedia Britannica

NICHOLAS I., sometimes called The Great, and certainly the most commanding figure in the series of popes between Gregory I. and Gregory VII., succeeded Benedict III. in April 858. According to the annalist “he owed his election less to the choice of the clergy than to the presence and favour of the emperor Louis II. and his nobles,”—who can hardly have foreseen with what ability and persistency the rights of the holy see as supreme arbiter of Christendom were to be asserted even against themselves by the man of their choice. Of the previous history of Nicholas nothing is recorded. His pontificate of nine years and a half was marked by at least three memorable contests which have left their mark in history. The first was that in which he supported the claims of the unjustly degraded patriarch of. Constantinople, Ignatius; the history of the conflict cannot be related here, but two of its incidents, the excommunication of Photius, the rival of Ignatius, by the pope in 863, and the counter-deposition of Nicholas by Photius in 867, were steps of serious moment towards the permanent separation between the Eastern and the Western Church. The second great struggle was that with Lothaire, the king of Lorraine (second son of the emperor Lothaire I., and brother of the emperor Louis II. ), about the divorce of his wife Theutberga or Thietberga. The king, who desired to marry his mistress Waldrada, had brought a grave charge against the life of his queen before her marriage; with the help of Archbishops Gunther of Cologne and Thietgand of Treves, a confession of guilt had been extorted from Thietberga, and, after the matter had been discussed at more than one synod, that of Aix-la-C’hapelle finally authorized Lothaire, on the strength of this confession, to marry again. ...

NICHOLAS I. (1796-1855), czar of Russia, third son of Paul I., was born at Tsarkoe-Selo on the 25th June 1796. His elder brothers were Alexander and Constantine, of whom the former was twenty years his senior. Their father was murdered in 1801, and Alexander then became emperor. The education of Nicholas was conducted under the care of his mother, a pious but narrow-minded woman. He had not, like his eldest brother, whose education was directed by the empress Catherine, the advantage of associating in early life with men of culture and of modern ideas. Nor was he early introduced either to military or to political life. He was brought up in retirement, and even during the invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812 he was not permitted to serve in the army. His tastes, however, were all military, and his favourite studies mathematics and fortification. During the campaign of 1814 in France he was allowed to come to the allied headquarters, but not to take part in any engagement. He was present during the occupation of Paris in 1815, and in the following year was sent to travel on the Continent and to visit England, where his striking personal appearance excited the admiration of Sir Walter Scott. He married in 1817 Louise Charlotte, daughter of Frederick William III., king of Prussia, and this union had for half a century an important effect on the history of Prussia and Germany at large. After his marriage he received a military command from his brother, and from this time forward he gave his utmost attention to the mechanical part of military affairs, rejoicing in the occupations of a drill-sergeant, and identifying himself so completely with his soldiers that civil costume became insupportable to him, even when on visits to sovereigns who, like Queen Victoria, would have preferred to see him in less warlike guise. Alexander having no sons, Constantine was heir to the throne. This brutal and ignorant prince had, however, the sense to recognize his own unfitness for the task of governing an empire, and by a secret agreement with the reigning sovereign he renounced his rights in favour of Nicholas. Alexander died on December 1, 1825. Constantine, who was in Poland, showed no inclination to prefer his claims; the edict of the late emperor appointing Nicholas his successor was opened, and the younger brother was called by the highest authorities of Russia to assume the crown. He nevertheless refused, and, as it would seem, in perfect sincerity, until Constantine had formally confirmed his renunciation. The delay led to serious consequences. Conspiracies against the late emperor and in favour of a freer government had been formed in the army and among the nobles; and when the troops at St Petersburg were called upon to take the oath to Nicholas, revolt broke out. The young czar showed great nerve and courage, but the mutiny was not put down without bloodshed, and the impression which it left on his mind never passed away. Despotic by nature, trained in the midst of the monarchical reaction that followed the French wars, and accustomed to hear the earlier liberal tendencies of his brother Alexander spoken of as mere vagaries that had happily been abandoned, Nicholas saw in the outbreak of his soldiers in 1825 a warning never to relax the grasp of authority. The maintenance of despotic power was a duty to which he devoted himself with the deepest religious conviction. At the accession of Nicholas, Russia had been for some years on the brink of war with the Porte. Greece was in insurrection, and Russia had its own specific causes of complaint in consequence of the alleged infraction of the privileges of the Danubian provinces guaranteed by the treaty of Bucharest. It had long been the effort of European diplomatists to dissuade Alexander from interfering on behalf of Greece, and to find a peaceful solution for the difficulties in which Russia was more directly concerned. The Greek cause had, however, at length excited so much sympathy that the British Government took advantage of the accession of Nicholas to send the duke of Wellington to St Petersburg to propose some joint action on behalf of Greece. The attempt succeeded: England and Russia undertook to tender their mediation, requiring the sultan to grant the Greeks a modified independence, and the concert was subsequently joined by France. The result of this combination, and of Ottoman obstinacy, was the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino by the allied squadrons, and the establishment of Greek independence. This, however, did not terminate the contentions between Turkey and Russia. The Porte itself challenged war, and in 1828 hostilities broke out. Nicholas took part in the first and unsuccessful campaign of 1828, but allowed his generals to act by themselves in 1829; and the march of Diebitsch over the Balkans was followed by the peace of Adrianople. A Persian war had already been successfully concluded, and Russia had gained thereby two provinces in the east. The peace of Adrianople gave it only an improved frontier on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. In 1830 the fall of the Bourbons made an end of the friendship which existed between France and Russia, and restored the union between the three despotic courts of St Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin, which had been framed in 1814 and interrupted by the course of Eastern affairs. Nicholas did not refuse to recognize Louis Philippe, but he would never accord him the usual title of Mon Frère, and he lost no opportunity of treating him with contempt. The insurrection of Poland soon followed. Alexander had received the grand-duchy of Warsaw from the congress of Vienna as a separate kingdom, united with Russia only in the person of its ruler; and he had fulfilled his promise of granting it a constitution, and treating it as a distinct nationality. The violation of these rights by the grand-duke Cqnstan-tine, who was governor of Poland, and the virtual establishment of dictatorial rule, caused the insurrection against Nicholas. The Polish leaders sent their demands to St Petersburg; Nicholas replied that he would only answer them with cannon. The diet now pronounced his dethronement as king of Poland, and the armed struggle began. It was a long and doubtful one, for Poland had a regular army of its own; but the victory was at length won by Nicholas, and he showed no mercy to his conquered enemy. Poland was made a Russian province; its liberties were utterly extinguished; its defenders were sent by thousands to Siberia. During the years that followed, the struggle between the sultan and his vassal, Mehemet Ali, pasha of Egypt, brought the Eastern question again to the front of European affairs. The treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi seemed for a moment to have placed Turkey in absolute dependence upon the czar, who guaranteed it his protection against all internal and external enemies; but France and England now made their influence felt, and the ultimate settlement was the work of all Europe. Nicholas visited England in 1844, and tried, but unsuccessfully, to frame some plan of joint action with that country in view of the possible collapse of the Ottoman empire. The revolutionary spirit which the czar so passionately abhorred was now about to convulse Europe again. He watched the events of 1848, and strengthened his army. So long as revolution did not approach his own frontiers he was willing to hold his hand; but when Hungary rose against the Hapsburgs and established its national independence he felt that Poland would soon follow its example, and sent his soldiers to crush the Magyar armies which Austria had not been able to subdue. When the victory of despotism was secured, he joined with the Austrian Government in demanding from the Porte the surrender of the Hungarian leaders who had taken refuge in Turkey. But it was not long permitted to him to play the part of international autocrat. His aggressions upon the Ottoman empire, continued up to 1853, brought England and France into the field against him. His armies were defeated at Alma and Inkermann, his fortresses besieged; and in the bitterness of defeat death came upon him, and carried him from a world where, with the deepest conviction that he was doing God service, he had inflicted so much evil on mankind (February 18, 1855). He died as he had lived, a brave man, and his last words were those of simple prayer. Shortly before his death he is said to have laid two injunctions upon his successor,—to liberate the serfs, and never to grant Poland a constitution. (c. A. F.)

9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 17, p. 483
[720 words — estimated reading time: 5 minutes]

Nicholas ii Encyclopedia Britannica

NICHOLAS II., a Burgundian, whose Christian name was Gerard, was archbishop of Florence when he was chosen (December 28, 1058) at that place to succeed Stephen IX. in the papal chair. Some time previously the old Roman feudatory barons had caused to be consecrated, under the name of Benedict X., John, cardinal bishop of Velletri, who, however, was speedily deposed. The election of Nicholas had been brought about by Hildebrand (afterwards Gregory VII.), and his whole pontificate derived its character from that master-spirit. Its first act of historical importance was the framing by the second Lateran council (April 1059) of the decree which vested the election of popes in the cardinal bishops in the first instance, the assent of the cardinal priests and deacons being next required, then that of the laity, and finally that of the emperor. It was at the same council that Berengarius of Tours was temporarily induced to admit the doctrine of the corporeal presence in the sacrament. In the following June Nicholas visited Apulia, accepted the submission of the Normans, and removed the ban of excommunication, investing Richard in the principality of Capua and Robert Guiscard in the dukedom of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily. He died at Florence in June 1061, and was succeeded by Alexander II.

9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 17, p. 483
[213 words — estimated reading time: 2 minutes]

Nicholas iii Encyclopedia Britannica

NICHOLAS III. (Giovanni Gaetano), a member of the noble house of Orsini, succeeded John XXL as pope on November 25, 1277. Though his election was doubtless largely due to family influence, he was also personally a man of good endowments, and the record of his brief pontificate has more than one touch fitted to recall the grander manner of some of the greatest popes. In 1278 he extorted from the newly-elected and insecurely seated Rudolph of Hapsburg an absolute cession of the Romagna and of the exarchate of Ravenna, and in the same year he deprived Charles of Anjou of his vicariate of Tuscany; in the following year he compelled Charles to renounce his dignity of senator of Rome also, declaring himself perpetual senator, and his nephew Orso his vicar. He was understood to be planning with Rudolph an entirely new distribution of the thrones of the empire, by which the royal dignity was to be conferred on more than one member of the house of Orsini, when a stroke of apoplexy brought his career to a sudden close on August 22, 1280. Towards the beginning of his reign he repaired and strengthened the Lateran palace, and greatly enlarged the Vatican. For his simoniacal nepotism he has been placed by Dante in the third “bolgia” of the eighth circle of hell (Inf., xix. 31 sqf. The successor of Nicholas III. was Martin IV.

9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 17, p. 484
[234 words — estimated reading time: 2 minutes]

Nicholas iv Encyclopedia Britannica

NICHOLAS IV. (Girolamo de Ascoli), pope from February 22, 1288, to April 4, 1292, was born at Ascoli, of humble parentage. At an early age he entered the Franciscan order, of which he rose to be general in 1274, after the death of Bonaventura. It was in this capacity that in 1278 he condemned Roger Bacon to imprisonment on account of his writings. He subsequently became bishop of Praeneste; and he was created cardinal by Nicholas III. Repeated meetings of the conclave upon the death of Honorius IV. resulted, ten months after the vacancy had occurred, in the election of Ascoli, whose first and almost only historical act was to annul the solemn treaty by which Charles the Lame (of Anjou) had obtained from Alphonso III. of Aragon his release from prison,— “the most monstrous exercise of the absolving power which had ever been advanced in the face of Christendom” (Milman). The revival of the old and expiring enthusiasm of the crusading epoch was a cause he had much at heart; and it was partly at least with the object of stirring up the Mongols against the hated Saracens that he gave John of Monte Corvino and other members of his order their missions to China. The fall of Ptolemais, the last remnant of the Christian dominion in Palestine (1291), greatly affected him, and combined with other disappointments to hasten his death. Celestine V. succeeded.

9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 17, p. 484
[235 words — estimated reading time: 2 minutes]

Nicholas v Encyclopedia Britannica

NICHOLAS V. (Tommaso Parentucelli), the pope whose name is most intimately associated with the revival of learning, was the son of a physician, and was born at Sarzana, near Spezzia, in 1389. He received a good education at Bologna, became tutor in the Albizzi and Strozzi families at Florence, and ultimately entered into the service of Albergata, bishop of Bologna. He accompanied his patron on several embassies, and gained so high a reputation, for diplomatic ability and for learning that shortly after Albergata’s death he himself obtained the see of Bologna, was sent by Eugenius IV. on an embassy into Germany, and in December 1446 was made a cardinal. In less than three months he was pope in succession to Eugenius,—a. small majority of the electors, indisposed to the strongest candidate, Cardinal Prospero Colonna, having united upon Parentucelli as a man who had made no enemies. His policy as pope seemed clearly marked out for him. The church was reaching the end of a period of strife and schism. The. firmness of Eugenius IV. had at length almost beaten down the emperor, the antipope, and the council of Basel; the wisdom and moderation of Nicholas V. completed the work. Within two years the emperor made peace, the antipope abdicated, and the council dissolved itself. Nicholas hoped for a period of tranquillity, and determined, to exhibit the papacy to the world as the protector of art and learning. “To the demand of Germany for reformation,” says Mr Creighton, “he answered by offering culture.” He aimed especially at making Rome architecturally a worthy capital of the Christian world: he repaired its fortifications, began the rebuilding of its cathedral, enlarged and adorned its thoroughfares, and. traced much of the plan of restoration executed by his ...

9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 17, p. 484
[604 words — estimated reading time: 4 minutes]