Absolute Monarchs (15 page)

Meanwhile, Pope Gregory had acted with his usual vigor. At his Lenten Synod of 1076 he had deposed all the rebellious bishops and thundered out a sentence of excommunication on King Henry himself. The effect in Germany was cataclysmic. No reigning monarch had incurred the ban of the Church since Theodosius the Great seven centuries before. It had brought that emperor to his knees, and it now threatened to do the same for Henry. The purely spiritual aspect did not worry him unduly—that problem could always be solved by a well-timed repentance—but the political consequences were serious indeed. In theory the ban not only absolved all the king’s subjects from their allegiance to him; it also rendered them in their turn excommunicate if they had any dealings with him or showed him obedience. Were it to be strictly observed, therefore, Henry’s government would disintegrate and he would be unable to continue any longer on the throne. Suddenly he found himself isolated.

The pope’s grim satisfaction can well be imagined as he watched his adversary struggling to retain the loyalties of those around him; his ban had been more successful than even he had dared to hope. The German princes, meeting at Tribur, had agreed to give their king a year and a day from the date of his sentence in which to obtain papal absolution. They had already called a Diet at Augsburg for February 1077. If by the twenty-second of that month the ban had not been lifted, they would formally renounce their allegiance and elect another king in his place. Henry could only bow to their decision. From his point of view it might have been worse. It called, quite simply, for his own abject self-abasement before the pope. If this was to be the price of his kingdom, he was ready to pay it. Fortunately, there was still one Alpine pass—the Mont-Cenis—unblocked by snow. Crossing it in the depth of winter with his wife and baby son, he hastened through Lombardy and at last found the pope at the fortress of Canossa, where he was staying as a guest of his friend the Countess Matilda pending the arrival of an escort to conduct him to Augsburg. For three days Gregory kept him waiting for an audience; finally he saw that he had no alternative but to relent, and to give Henry the absolution he needed.

The story of Canossa, usually enlivened by an oleaginous illustration of the king, barefoot and in sackcloth, shivering in the snow before the locked doors of a brilliantly lit castle, has always been a favorite with the writers of children’s storybooks, who present it as an improving object lesson in the vanity of temporal ambition. In fact, Gregory’s triumph was empty and ephemeral, and Henry knew it. His humiliation had nothing to do with repentance. It was a cold-blooded political maneuver which was necessary to secure his crown, and he had no intention of keeping his promises once they had served their purpose. The pope, too, can have had few delusions about the king’s sincerity. Had his Christian conscience permitted him to withhold absolution, he would doubtless have been only too happy to do so. He had won an unquestionable moral victory; but what was the use of a victory after which the vanquished returned unabashed to his kingdom while the victor remained cooped up in a Tuscan castle, blocked from Germany by the savage hostility of the Lombard cities and powerless to intervene?

Of course, Henry showed no sign of mending his ways. He antagonized the German princes to the point where they did indeed elect a rival king, Rudolf, Duke of Swabia. Gregory did his best to mediate between them but eventually, in 1080, excommunicated Henry once again, sentenced him to deposition, and declared Rudolf king. Alas, he had backed the wrong horse. That same year Rudolf was killed in battle; Henry, on the other hand, had never been stronger. For the second time he declared Gregory deposed; he then called a synod of German and Italian bishops at Brixen—now Bressanone—in the Tyrol, which in June 1080 dutifully elected Guibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, as Pope Clement III.

It was easy to elect an antipope but a good deal harder to install him. Henry made three attempts to take over Rome, but only on the third was he successful. Finally, early in 1084, a mixed party of Milanese and Saxons managed to scale the walls of the Leonine City; and within an hour or two Henry’s soldiers were fighting a furious battle in and around St. Peter’s. Pope Gregory, however, had been too quick for them. He had no intention of surrendering. Hurrying to the Castel Sant’Angelo, he barricaded himself in and watched, powerless, while on Palm Sunday Clement was enthroned in the Lateran and just a week later, on Easter Day, Henry was crowned emperor.

Gregory was to be saved by the Normans. Four years before, Robert Guiscard had sworn fealty to him, binding himself to give the pope any assistance he might need; in any event, his own position would be seriously threatened if Henry, now crowned emperor and supported by an obedient Clement III, were allowed to have his own way in South Italy. And so it was that on May 24, 1084, he rode up the Via Latina with a force estimated at some 6,000 horse and 30,000 foot and, roughly on the site of the present Piazza di Porta Capena, pitched his camp beneath the walls of Rome.

Henry had not waited for him. News of the size and strength of the Norman army had been enough to make up his mind. Summoning a council of the leading citizens of Rome, he explained to them that his presence was urgently required in Lombardy. He would be back as soon as circumstances permitted; meanwhile, he trusted them to fight valiantly against all attackers. Then, three days before the Duke of Apulia appeared at the gates of the city, he fled with his wife and the greater part of his army, the terrified antipope scurrying behind.

For three days Robert waited in his camp, uncertain, perhaps, whether Henry’s flight was genuine. Then, on the night of May 27, under cover of darkness, he silently moved his army around to the north of the city. At dawn he attacked, and within minutes the first of his shock troops had burst through the Flaminian Gate. They met with a stiff resistance; the whole area of the Campus Martius—the quarter lying immediately across the river from the Castel Sant’Angelo—became a blazing holocaust. But it was not long before the Normans had beaten the defenders back over the bridge, released the pope from his fortress, and borne him back in triumph through the smoking ruins to the Lateran.

That triumph, however, was short-lived. The whole capital was now given over to rapine and pillage, in which Robert’s several brigades of Sicilian Saracens were hardly conspicuous for their restraint. On the third day, with bestiality and bloodshed still continuing unabated, the people of Rome could bear it no longer; the whole city rose against its oppressors. Robert Guiscard himself was taken by surprise and surrounded. He was saved in the nick of time by his son, who smashed his way through the hostile crowds to his father’s rescue—but not before the Normans, now fighting for their lives, had set fire to the city.

Here, for Rome, was disaster, unparalleled in its history since the barbarian invasions six centuries before. Churches, palaces, ancient temples came crashing down before the advancing flames. The Capitol and the Palatine Hill were gutted; in the whole area between the Colosseum and the Lateran hardly a single building escaped the inferno. When at last the smoke cleared away and such Roman leaders as remained alive had prostrated themselves before the duke, a naked sword roped around their necks in token of surrender, their city lay empty, a picture of desolation and despair.

Gregory had won his battle after a fashion—but at what price? The heroic popes of the past had saved their city from the invaders—Leo I from Attila’s Huns, his own namesake Gregory the Great from the conquering Lombards; he, though in many ways greater than either, had delivered it up to destruction. Yet his letters show no remorse or regret. His conscience was clear. He had been fighting for a principle, and thanks to his own tenacity and courage that principle had been upheld. God’s will had been done.

So, with that sublime arrogance which was one of his chief and most unattractive characteristics, must Gregory have reasoned. But for him too there was to be retribution. The Roman populace, who had acclaimed him with such enthusiasm eleven years before, now saw him—and not without good reason—as the cause of all their misery and loss, and they were hungry for revenge. Only the presence of Robert Guiscard and his army prevented them from tearing their once-adored pope limb from limb. But Robert had no desire to stay in Rome a moment longer than was necessary, and so Gregory suffered his last humiliation: the realization that when the Normans left Rome, he would have to leave with them. At the beginning of July, escorted by the mighty host of Normans and Saracens that had been at once his salvation and his undoing, he turned his back on Rome for the last time—the proudest of pontiffs, now little better than a fugitive from the city that hated him. Southward they rode to Salerno. There the pope was settled in a palace befitting his dignity, and there, on May 25, 1085, he died. He was buried in the southeastern apse of the cathedral—“built by Robert Guiscard at his own expense,” as the façade inscription runs—where his tomb may still be seen.

In spite of the discredit which he had unwittingly brought upon the Papacy in his last years, the body of Gregory’s achievement was greater than he knew. He had gone a long way toward establishing papal supremacy over the hierarchy of the Church, and even though he had not won a similar victory over the empire, he had asserted his claims in such a way that they could never again be ignored. The Church had shown her teeth; future emperors would defy her at their peril. Yet Gregory died if not a broken, at least a disappointed, disillusioned man; and his last words—“I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile”—were a bitter valediction.

1.
The city of Galeria was abandoned in 1809, but its ruins can still be seen just off the Viterbo road, about twenty miles from Rome.

2.
The word “cardinal” comes from the Latin
cardo
, or “hinge.” The name was first given to the parish priests of the twenty-eight titular churches of Rome, who also served the papal basilicas (St. John Lateran, St. Peter’s, San Paolo fuori le Mura, and Santa Maria Maggiore). They were thus the “hinges” between the pope and his parishes. Gradually they formed a college, ranking as Roman princes second in order of precedence only to the pope himself. There are three ranks: cardinal priests, cardinal deacons, and, since the eighth century, cardinal bishops. All are nominated personally by the pope.

3.
Literally, “the Crafty.” Compare the English “wiseacre.”

4.
Hildebrand, or Hildeprand, was a common Lombard name. His father’s name, Bonizo, is an abbreviation of Bonipart, which seven centuries later we find again in the form of Buonaparte. Napoleon was also of Lombard stock. He and Hildebrand had much in common.

CHAPTER X

Innocent and Anacletus

T
he chaos which had driven Gregory VII from Rome was made, if anything, worse by his departure and death. Antipope Clement had his champions, but he could not hope to win over the reformist cardinals and so was never quite able to install himself permanently in the Vatican. The cardinals’ problem was to find a suitable successor, for recent history had not been such as to make the pontificate a particularly attractive proposition. There was one outstanding candidate: Abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino, who had directed the affairs of his great monastery for the past twenty-seven years, making of them its golden age. He had vastly extended its lands and its library, developing it into a center of learning, literature, and the arts, and his influence had extended far beyond its confines. He it was who in 1059 had negotiated the alliance between the Papacy and the Normans, and who in 1080 had reconciled Gregory VII with Robert Guiscard. He had actually sheltered the fugitive pope at Monte Cassino on his way to exile and had been with him when he died.

But, not surprisingly, he had absolutely no wish to be pope himself. Why should he exchange the peace and comfort of the monastery he loved for the nightmare that was papal Rome? It took the cardinals nearly a year to persuade him—few pontiffs have ever accepted the office with greater reluctance. And it was not long before he was proved right. Just four days after his election as Victor III in May 1086, before he had even been consecrated, serious rioting broke out in the city and he was forced to leave. He laid aside his papal insignia, rode off at once to Monte Cassino, and—with every sign of relief—took up his former duties. But he was not to be left in peace for long. Ten months later, in his earlier capacity of papal vicar in South Italy, he convened a synod at Capua, and there he was once more persuaded to accept the office to which he had been elected. Norman troops smashed their way yet again into Rome, from which it was now the antipope’s turn to flee; and on May 9, 1087, Victor was finally consecrated in St. Peter’s. This time he was almost a week in Rome before retiring again to his monastery, and in mid-June he was to endure the Holy City for an entire month. But that was enough. The end of July saw him back at Monte Cassino, and by mid-September he was dead.

His successor, Urban II, was a man of a very different stamp. Odo of Châtillon was a stately, scholarly aristocrat from Champagne, a zealous reformer who had been Prior of Cluny before coming south to accept the hugely important see of Ostia. He was a staunch upholder of papal supremacy on the Gregorian model—except that he possessed all the polish and diplomatic finesse that Gregory had so disastrously lacked. Since Rome was now once again in the hands of Antipope Clement and the imperialists, he had been elected and consecrated at Terracina, and he was well aware that Norman help would be necessary if he was ever to install himself in the Vatican. It was only after he had paid a personal visit to Count Roger—Robert Guiscard’s younger brother, now entrusted with Sicily—that Roger was able to organize an armed expedition to Rome by means of which, in November 1088, the pope entered the city, though even then he was confined to the tiny Tiber Island. By the following autumn he was back in exile. Not until Easter 1094, and then only through heavy bribery, was he able to penetrate to the Lateran and, six years after his consecration, to assume his rightful throne.

A few months later he sent an embassy to Constantinople. Ever since his accession he had worked hard to improve relations with Byzantium—Church union being, of course, the ultimate objective—and the Emperor Alexius Comnenus I had been gratifyingly quick to respond; when, therefore, the papal legates delivered to Alexius an invitation to send representatives to a great Council of the Roman Church to be held at Piacenza the following March, the emperor accepted at once. Most of the proceedings, he knew, would be concerned with domestic matters—simony, clerical marriage, the adultery of King Philip of France, and the like—but the Council might also provide him with the opportunity he had long sought, to appeal for Western aid against the Turks. They had invaded his empire a quarter of a century before, defeated a Byzantine army led by his predecessor, Romanus IV, and overrun practically all Anatolia except for a few areas around the coast. They could, he believed, be driven out, but only by a military expedition on a considerable scale. Piacenza might be just the place to say so.

The Byzantine spokesmen did their work well. Sensibly, they laid their emphasis less on the prizes to be won—though we may be sure that those did not go unmentioned—than on the religious aspect of their appeal: the sufferings of the Christian communities in the East, the submergence of Asia Minor beneath an Islamic tide, the presence of the infidel armies at the very gates of Constantinople, and the appalling danger that they represented, not only to the Empire of the East but to all Christendom. The listening delegates were impressed—none more so, perhaps, than Urban himself. From Piacenza he traveled on to his native France, and as his journey progressed a scheme gradually took shape in his mind, far more ambitious than any that Alexius had ever dreamed of: nothing less than a holy war, in which the combined forces of Christian Europe would march against the Saracen.

When he arrived in France, he called another Council, to gather at Clermont—now Clermont-Ferrand—on November 18. It would last for ten days, most of which would be taken up with routine Church business; on Tuesday the twenty-seventh, however, there would be a public session open to all at which, it was announced, the pope would make a statement of immense significance to all Christendom. This promise had precisely the effect that Urban had intended. So great were the crowds that poured into the little town to hear the pope speak that the cathedral was abandoned and the papal throne was erected instead on a high platform set in an open field outside the eastern gate. The text of his speech has not come down to us, but he seems to have begun by repeating the points made by the Byzantine delegates at Piacenza; unlike them, however, he then turned to the plight of Jerusalem,
¹
where Christian pilgrims were regularly being robbed and persecuted by the city’s Turkish overlords. It was now, he emphasized, the duty of the Christian West to march to the rescue of the Christian East. All those who agreed to do so “from devotion only, not from advantage of honor or gain,” would die absolved, their sins remitted. There must be the minimum of delay: the great army of the Crusade must be ready to march by the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1096.

The response to his impassioned appeal was more enthusiastic than Urban could have dared to hope. Led by Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, several hundred people—priests and monks, noblemen and peasants together—knelt before his throne and pledged themselves to take the Cross. The First Crusade was under way.

CONTRARY TO THE
expectations of many, the Crusade turned out to be a resounding, if undeserved, success. On July 1, 1097, the Seljuk Turks were smashed at Dorylaeum in Anatolia; on June 3, 1098, Antioch fell to Crusader arms; and finally on July 15, 1099, amid scenes of hideous carnage, the soldiers of Christ battered their way into Jerusalem, where they slaughtered all the Muslims in the city and burned all the Jews alive in the main synagogue. Pope Urban, however, never knew of their victory. He died two weeks later, shortly before the reports reached Rome.

He was succeeded by a good-natured Tuscan monk, Paschal II. It is said that when William II—William Rufus—of England was told that the character of the new pope was not unlike that of his own Archbishop Anselm, the king exclaimed, “God’s face! Then he isn’t much good”—a remark which, though quietly memorable in its way, is hardly fair to either ecclesiastic. Paschal may have been of a gentle disposition; he may have lacked the last ounce of moral fiber. But he was no weakling: after the death of Antipope Clement he successfully disposed of three more antipopes one after another, and for the first twelve years of his pontificate he staunchly upheld the principle which had by now become the central issue in the papal-imperial struggle: the right of investiture of bishops and abbots with ring and crozier. He was, on the other hand, prepared to negotiate; and at Sutri, where he met Henry on his way to Rome for his coronation, he made him a startlingly generous offer: if the emperor would renounce his claim to the right of investiture, he in return would surrender all the properties and rights of all churches—they were, of course, mostly German—which had come to the Papacy from the empire, retaining only those revenues, such as tithes, which were strictly ecclesiastical.

The new emperor, Henry V—who had succeeded his father in 1106—was, of course, delighted at the prospect of acquiring the vast wealth of the German bishoprics and abbeys. He accepted with alacrity and hurried on to Rome. Strangely enough, however, neither he nor the pope had thought to consult the German bishops of whose property they so cheerfully planned to dispose, and when, on February 12, 1111, the terms of the agreement were read out at the coronation service, there was a storm of protest so vociferous that the service had to be abandoned. This was the signal for the arrest of pope and cardinals, which in turn proved too much for the Roman populace. They rose up against the Germans, and during the consequent street fighting Henry himself was wounded. At last he and his army retired from the Leonine City, taking pope and cardinals with him. The churchmen were confined in various neighboring castles while tempers cooled.

When Paschal emerged two months later, there was little fight left in him. On April 12, Henry forced him to concede the right of investiture of bishops and abbots between election and consecration, and on the following day the pope—who had also been obliged to swear that he would never excommunicate him—crowned him emperor. Once again there was an outcry in the Curia. This was craven capitulation, the abject surrender of everything for which the reformers had struggled so long. All that Paschal had given away was declared to have been extracted by force and therefore invalid. Away in France, Archbishop Guido of Vienne pronounced sentence of excommunication on the emperor, a sentence which was subsequently repeated by Jordan, Archbishop of Milan. The pope himself, deeply contrite, considered abdication; in 1112 he personally withdrew his earlier concessions, referring back to Gregory and Urban with the words “whatever they have condemned I condemn; whatever they have rejected I reject”—which do not even suggest a firm grasp of the matters at issue, far less an assertive personality. He withdrew them again during a Lateran synod in 1116, once more forbidding all imperial investitures. But his reputation was gone; he never recovered his old authority. More rioting in Rome drove him from the city later that same year, and he left it again when Henry arrived in 1117. He returned the following January for the last time and was dead by the end of the month.

—

HIS SUCCESSOR, GELASIUS II
, was to reign for a year and five days; his pontificate is worth recording only because it partook of the quality of a nightmare. Papal authority was now recognized across most of Europe; within Rome, by contrast, the pope daily took his life in his hands. By the standards of the time, he must have been already an oldish man: he had been appointed cardinal in 1088, thirty years before, and papal chancellor the following year. He had held the fort in Rome during the frequent absences of both Urban and Paschal, had accompanied the latter into captivity and had vigorously defended him at the 1116 synod. He certainly deserved a quiet ending to his days. Instead, scarcely had the tiara been set on his head than he was seized by Cencius Frangipani—head of that awesome family which was now one of the most powerful in Rome—and locked up in one of the family castles, where he was brutally beaten. An eyewitness reported that Cencius, “hissing like a huge snake … grabbed the pope by the throat … struck him with his fists, kicked him, and drew blood with his spurs … dragging him away by the hair.” Had it not been for the swift intervention of the city prefect, he might never have been seen again.

Even after his release, Gelasius was to remain in Rome for only a little over a month. On hearing of his election, an angry Henry V had hurried south from Lombardy; and the pope fled with his cardinals to his hometown of Gaeta. Henry summoned him back to Rome in the hopes of reaching an amicable settlement; the pope refused; Henry, now more exasperated than ever, countered by appointing an antipope, Gregory VIII; whereat Gelasius immediately excommunicated them both. But the emperor had the upper hand only for as long as he remained in Rome; when at last he and his army marched away, Gregory was not strong enough to maintain himself in the whole city, and he withdrew to within the Leonine Walls.

Unable to install himself in the Vatican, on July 21 Gelasius was saying Mass in the Basilica of Santa Prassede when he was once again seized by the Frangipani. This time he managed to escape on horseback. He was eventually found by his followers sitting quietly in a field, still wearing his papal vestments. He had had enough. He returned to Rome only for as long as it took him to prepare his departure from the city for good. Then, escorted by six of his cardinals, he rode by easy stages via Pisa and Genoa, Avignon and Vienne, to Cluny—where, on January 29, 1119, he died.