Absolute Monarchs (13 page)

From the moment of their arrival at Constantinople, everything went wrong. The Emperor Constantine XI received them graciously enough, but Cerularius categorically refused to recognize their authority. Then came the news that Pope Leo had died in Rome. Humbert and his colleagues had been Leo’s personal representatives; his death consequently deprived them of all official standing. Their proper course in the circumstances would have been to return at once to Rome; instead, they remained in Constantinople, apparently unconcerned and growing more arrogant and high-handed with every day that passed. When a certain monk of the Monastery of the Studium answered the papal criticisms in polite and respectful language, Humbert replied with a stream of hysterical invective, describing the writer as a “pestiferous pimp” and “a disciple of the malignant Mahomet,” suggesting that he must have emerged from a theater or brothel rather than a monastery—surely confirming the average Byzantine in his opinion that the Church of Rome now consisted of little more than a bunch of crude barbarians with whom no argument, let alone agreement, could ever be possible.

At last, as Cerularius knew he would, Humbert lost the last shreds of his patience. At three in the afternoon of Saturday, July 16, 1054, in the presence of all the clergy assembled for the Eucharist, the three ex-legates of Rome—two cardinals and an archbishop, all in their full canonicals—strode into the Great Church of St. Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, and up to the high altar, on which they formally laid their solemn Bull of Excommunication. This done, they turned on their heels and marched from the building, pausing only to shake the dust symbolically from their feet. Two days later they left for Rome. It was only when the bull had been publicly burned and the legates themselves formally anathematized that peace returned.

Even if we ignore the fact that the legates were without any papal authority and that the bull iself was consequently invalid by every standard of canon law, it remains an astonishing production: few important documents, in the words of Sir Steven Runciman, have been so full of demonstrable errors.
⁷
Yet such was the sequence of events at Constantinople in the summer of 1054 which resulted in the lasting separation of the Eastern and Western churches. It is an unedifying story because, however inevitable the breach may have been, the events themselves should never—and need never—have occurred. More strength of will on the part of the dying pope, less bigotry on the part of the narrow-minded patriarch or the pigheaded cardinal, and the situation could have been saved. The initial crisis arose in South Italy, the one crucial area in which a political understanding between Rome and Constantinople was vitally necessary. The fatal blow was struck by the disempowered legates of a dead pope representing a headless Church—since the new pontiff had not yet been elected—and using an instrument at once uncanonical and inaccurate. Both the Latin and the Greek excommunications were directed personally at the offending dignitaries rather than at the churches for which they stood; both could later have been rescinded, and neither was at the time recognized as introducing a permanent schism. Technically, indeed, they did not do so, since twice in succeeding centuries—in the thirteenth at Lyons and the fifteenth at Florence—was the Eastern Church to be compelled, for political reasons, to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. But though a temporary bandage may cover an open wound, it cannot heal it; and despite the balm applied in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council,
⁸
the wound which was jointly inflicted on the Christian Church nine centuries ago by Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael Cerularius still bleeds today.

1.
His remains were brought back to Rome by Otto III in 988.

2.
Theophano was understood to be the daughter of the Emperor Romanus II; only on her arrival was she discovered to be merely a relative of the emperor’s brother-in-law John Tzimisces and by no means “born in the purple” as had been understood. Otto at first considered sending the poor girl straight back to Constantinople; fortunately, wiser counsels prevailed and two years later Tzimisces became emperor anyway, so all was well.

3.
Since 1904 Boniface has been officially classified as an antipope, although he appears on the ancient official lists of popes and the next pope who took the name is known as Boniface VIII.

4.
It is mildly remarkable that, if we ignore the antipope (which we must), the first Frenchman on the papal throne should have directly succeeded the first German.

5.
The crown, thought to be originally a Georgian work of the fourth century, is the oldest surviving in the world today. No fewer than fifty-five kings of Hungary have been crowned with it.

6.
The rumor that he was poisoned by Benedict IX is almost certainly without foundation. When his tomb was opened on June 3, 1942, there was evidence to suggest that he died of lead poisoning, but malaria remains the most likely cause.

7.
The Eastern Schism.
The relevant paragraph is also quoted in my own
Byzantium: The Apogee
, p. 321.

8.
See
chapter 28
.

CHAPTER IX

Gregory VII and the Normans

F
or almost exactly a year after the death of Leo IX on April 19, 1054, there was no pope in Rome. Henry III had already appointed three pontiffs, all Germans, and was determined to nominate a fourth; but before doing so he had long discussions at Mainz with a delegation from Rome headed by Cardinal Hildebrand. His choice finally fell on a young Swabian named Gebhard, who had been made Bishop of Eichstätt in 1042 while still in his twenties; but even then Gebhard hesitated for several months, accepting only in March 1055. The last pope to be nominated by a German king, he was enthroned on April 13 under the name Victor II, keeping his old bishopric throughout his pontificate. The Italian party had feared that he might prove too much a creature of the emperor; in fact, he proved a strong defender of the rights of the Church and a champion of reform no less determined than his predecessor. But he could not escape his countrymen’s vulnerability to the miasmas of Rome, and was already a sick man when he presided at a synod at Arezzo in July 1057. When he died a few days later, his German entourage wanted to take his body back to Eichstätt for burial, but the cortege was ambushed and robbed at Ravenna, and the body now rests, curiously enough, in the Mausoleum of Theodoric, then doing service as a church.

This time there were no consultations with the emperor; Henry III had died suddenly at thirty-nine; his son Henry IV was a boy of six. It was the perfect opportunity for Hildebrand and his friends to recover the Italian reformist hold on the Papacy, and they acted fast. Their choice fell on Frederick of Lorraine, once Pope Leo’s chief lieutenant, by then abbot of Monte Cassino. As Pope Stephen IX he would hardly have been popular at the imperial court, his brother—Duke Godfrey III (“the Bearded”) of Lorraine—having recently married the widowed Marchioness Beatrice of Tuscany and thus assumed control of the strongest and best-organized power in North Italy. Already there were sinister rumors of how the pope was planning to take advantage of Henry IV’s minority by transferring the imperial crown from the House of Franconia to that of Lorraine.

It is unlikely that Stephen ever entertained such an idea for a moment, but we shall never know, for in just seven months he too was dead. Feeling his end approaching, he had exacted from the Roman clergy a solemn oath that they would not elect his successor before the return of Hildebrand, who was on a mission to Germany; but the reactionaries saw their chance. Experience over the past few years had taught them that on occasions of this kind everything depended on speed. A coup d’état was hurriedly planned by a Tusculan-Crescentian alliance, and within a few days Giovanni Mincio, Bishop of Velletri, was enthroned as pope under the inauspicious title of Benedict X. From the point of view of the reformers, the choice could have been a lot worse; the new pope might have been somewhat weak-willed, but Leo IX had made him a cardinal and Stephen had considered him as a possible alternative candidate to himself. They could not, however, accept the manner of his election, which they viewed as uncanonical and corrupt. Leaving Rome in a body, they met Hildebrand in Tuscany and settled down to decide on a pope for themselves.

Their choice fell on Gerard, Bishop of Florence, an irreproachably sound Burgundian who in December 1058, once he was assured of the support of the Empress-Regent Agnes and—equally important—of Duke Godfrey of Lorraine, allowed himself to be consecrated and crowned as Pope Nicholas II. He and his cardinals, supported by Duke Godfrey with a small military contingent, then advanced upon Rome, where the gates of Trastevere were opened to them. Quickly they occupied the Tiber Island, which they made their headquarters. Several days of street fighting followed, but at last the Lateran was stormed, Benedict barely managing to escape to Galeria.
¹

The reform party had won again, but the cost had been considerable. Benedict X was still at large, and had retained a loyal following; many Romans who had been forced to swear allegiance to Nicholas had raised their left hands to do so, pointing out that with their right they had already taken an oath of fidelity to his rival. More disturbing still was the knowledge that the reformists’ victory could not even now have been achieved without the military support provided by Duke Godfrey. In short, after all the efforts of the past decade, the Papacy was once again where it had been when Pope Leo had found it—caught fast between the Roman aristocracy and the empire, able sometimes to play one off against the other but never sufficiently strong to assert its independence of either. The great task of reform could not possibly be accomplished in such conditions. Somehow the Church must stand on its own feet.

First came the problem of Benedict. Only thirteen years before, his odious namesake had demonstrated just how much harm could be done by a renegade antipope; Benedict X was a far more popular figure than Benedict IX, and this time there was no emperor ready to sweep down into Italy and restore order as Henry III had done. Duke Godfrey had returned to Tuscany—though this was perhaps just as well, since he had recently displayed a curious halfheartedness that had led to suspicions of a secret intrigue with the reactionaries in Rome. And so the Church took a surprising, fateful step: it called upon the Normans for aid.

The final decision to do so can only have been Hildebrand’s. No other member of the Curia, not even Pope Nicholas himself, possessed the necessary combination of courage and prestige. Throughout Italy, and above all among the churchmen of Rome, the Normans were still considered—not unreasonably—a bunch of barbarian bandits, no better than the Saracens who had terrorized the South before them. For many of the cardinals the idea of an alliance with such men, whose record of sacrilege and desecration was notorious and who had dared, only five years before, to take arms against the Holy Father himself and hold him captive for nine months, must have seemed more appalling by far than any accommodation with the Roman nobility or even Benedict himself. But Hildebrand knew that he was right. Pope and cardinals bowed, as nearly always, before his will, and in February 1059 he set off in person for discussions with one of the Norman leaders, Prince Richard II of Capua.

Richard did not hesitate. Instantly he put three hundred men at Hildebrand’s disposal, and the cardinal hastened back to Rome with his new escort. By mid-March he and Nicholas were encamped together before Galeria, watching their army lay siege to the town. The Normans, employing their usual tactics, inflicted dreadful devastation on the entire region, burning and pillaging in all directions. The Galerians resisted with courage, beating back repeated attempts to storm the walls, but in the autumn they were forced to surrender. Benedict was captured, tried, publicly unfrocked, and imprisoned in the Hospice of Sant’Agnese on the Via Nomentana; and the era of papal-Norman friendship began.

THE FATE OF
Benedict X came as a profound shock to the reactionary group in Rome. They had expected neither the degree of resolution and unity of purpose with which the cardinals had opposed his election nor the vigor with which he had subsequently been swept aside. And now, before they were able to recover, Hildebrand dealt them a second blow, still more paralyzing in its long-term effects. The procedure governing papal elections had always been vague; it was theoretically based on a settlement, originated by the Emperor Lothair in 824 and renewed by Otto the Great in the following century, according to which the election was to be carried out by the entire clergy and nobility of Rome; the new pontiff, however, was to be consecrated only after he had taken an oath to the emperor. Such a decree, loose enough in its original conception and looser still in its interpretation through well over two hundred years, was bound to lead to abuses. Apart from the power it gave to the Roman aristocracy, it also implied a measure of dependence on the empire which, though counterbalanced by the need for every emperor to submit to a papal coronation in Rome, by no means accorded with Hildebrand’s ideas of papal supremacy. Now, with the Romans in disarray, a child on the German throne, and the assurance of armed Norman support should the need arise, it could at last be scrapped.

On April 13, 1059, Pope Nicholas held a synod at the Lateran, and there, in the presence of a hundred and thirteen bishops and with Hildebrand as always at his side, he promulgated the decree which, with one or two later amendments, continues to regulate papal elections to the present day. For the first time the responsibility for electing a new pope was placed squarely on the cardinals, effectively the senior clergy in Rome.
²
Only after a pontiff had been elected was the assent of the rest of the clergy and people to be sought. Lip service was still paid to the imperial connection by a deliberately vague stipulation that the electors should have regard for “the honor and respect due to Henry, at present king and, it is hoped, future emperor” and to such of his successors as should personally have obtained similar rights from the Apostolic See, but the meaning was plain: in future the Church would run its own affairs and take orders from neither the empire nor the aristocracy of Rome.

It was a brave decision, and not even Hildebrand would have dared to take it but for the Normans. To both the empire and the nobility of Rome it amounted to a slap in the face, however diplomatically delivered, and either side might be expected now or later to seek the restitution of its former privileges by force of arms. But Hildebrand’s conversations with the Prince of Capua, to say nothing of recent events at Galeria, had given him—and through him the Church as a whole—new confidence. With the aid of a mere three hundred Normans from Capua he had thrown the foremost of his enemies back in confusion; how much more might not be accomplished if the entire Norman strength from Apulia and Calabria could be mobilized behind the papal banners? Such support would enable the Church to shake off once and for all the last shreds of its political dependence, and allow the most far-reaching measures of reform to be enacted without fear of the consequences. Besides, the events of 1054 had produced a climate between Rome and Constantinople in which there was clearly no hope of an early reconciliation in the theological field; the sooner, therefore, that the perverted doctrines of the Greeks could be swept from South Italy altogether, the better. The Normans, having at last established tolerable relations with their Lombard subjects, were at this moment forcing the Byzantines back into a few isolated positions in Apulia—notably Bari—and into the toe of Calabria. Left to themselves, they would soon finish the job; then, in all likelihood, they would start on the infidels of Sicily. They were by far the most efficient people on the peninsula, and for all their faults they were at least Latins. Should they not therefore be encouraged rather than opposed?

The Norman leaders, for their part, asked nothing better than an alliance with the Church of Rome—which would inevitably entail its alienation from the imperial court. However much they and their countrymen might have acted against individual religious foundations in the past, they had always—even at Civitate—shown respect for the pope and had taken arms against him in self-defense only after all attempts at a peaceful settlement had failed. They were not so strong that they did not welcome a guarantee against the threat of a combined onslaught by empire and Papacy or, indeed, an ally against any other enemy—Byzantine, Tuscan, or Saracen—with whom they might on occasion be faced. On the other hand, they were quite powerful enough to negotiate with the pope on an equal political footing. Their hopes were therefore high when Nicholas II left Rome in June 1059 with an impressive retinue of cardinals, bishops, and clergy and headed southwest toward the little town of Melfi, the first Norman stronghold in South Italy.

Slowly and magnificently the papal train passed through Campania. It stopped at Monte Cassino, where it was joined by Abbot Desiderius, now the pope’s official representative in the South and thus in effect his ambassador to the Normans; it wound its way through the mountains to Benevento, where the pope held a synod; to Venosa, where he ostentatiously consecrated the new Church of the Santissima Trinità, the foremost Norman shrine in Italy; and finally to Melfi, where he arrived toward the end of August and found, waiting to receive him at the gates of the town, a huge assemblage of Norman barons headed by Richard of Capua and that other, still greater Norman leader: Robert de Hauteville, known as the Guiscard.
³

The Synod of Melfi, which was ostensibly the reason for the pope’s visit, has largely been forgotten. Its ostensible object was to try to reimpose chastity, or at least celibacy, on the south Italian clergy—an undertaking in which, despite the unfrocking of the Bishop of Trani in the presence of over a hundred of his peers, later records show it to have been remarkably unsuccessful. Nicholas’s presence proved, however, the occasion of an event of immense importance to Normans and Papacy alike: their formal reconciliation. It began with the pope’s confirmation of Richard as Prince of Capua and continued with his ceremonial investiture of Robert Guiscard, first with the Duchy of Apulia, next with Calabria, and finally—though none of the Normans present had ever set foot on the island—with Sicily.