Absolute Monarchs (16 page)

—

ONE THING WAS
clear: there could be no peace in Rome until the vexed question of investiture could be settled. It was fortunate indeed that Gelasius’s successor both recognized its importance and possessed the strength of will to deal with it once and for all.

The son of Count William of Burgundy, Archbishop Guido of Vienne was related to the French, English, and German royal houses. He had been named by Pope Gelasius on his deathbed as his ideal successor, and the small minority of cardinals who had accompanied the pope to Cluny took it upon themselves to elect him there and then, crowning him at Vienne on February 9 as Calixtus (or Callistus) II. Astonishingly, their decision was retrospectively ratified by the unanimous vote of the cardinals in Rome, but by that time Calixtus was already at work, having sent envoys to negotiate with Henry V at Strasbourg. Meanwhile, he summoned a huge Council in Rheims for the end of October—it was to be attended by more than four hundred bishops—to obtain general approval for the policy he proposed to pursue.

Despite the fact that Henry also seemed anxious for a settlement, the first attempt at reconciliation failed, largely through mutual mistrust, and Calixtus took advantage of the Council in Rheims to confirm the sentence of excommunication that he had first pronounced as Archbishop of Vienne eight years before. Then, with the coming of spring, he rode south over the Alps, making a triumphal progress through Lombardy and Tuscany and entering Rome—where he was given an ecstatic reception—at the beginning of June 1120. One small preliminary problem had to be dealt with before he could settle down to the question of investiture: the Antipope Gregory was still at large. Henry had by now withdrawn his support from Gregory, who had retired to Sutri, but in April 1121 the town fell after a week’s siege and Calixtus brought the wretched antipope back to Rome. There he was paraded through the streets, mounted backward—on a camel this time—before being confined in various abbeys for the rest of his life.

Now at last the way was clear for the major challenge of Calixtus’s pontificate, and early in 1122 an embassy arrived from the emperor. Henry, they informed him, was ready for another round of talks; indeed, he had appointed a committee of twelve German princes to represent him. Calixtus dispatched three of his senior cardinals, including the future Pope Honorius II, to meet the princes at Worms, and it was there, after three weeks’ hard bargaining, that the famous concordat was agreed on September 23. Based on a model first developed in Norman England, it required the emperor to abandon his claim to invest newly elected bishops with ring and crozier, those being symbols of spiritual authority. He would, however, confer their lands upon them with a tap of his scepter, which represented temporal power. He would also guarantee to the higher clergy their freedom of election and consecration. In return Calixtus promised that canonical elections to German bishoprics and abbacies would always be held in the emperor’s presence, while in disputed elections the emperor would have the power of arbitration.

The Concordat of Worms marked the end of an important chapter in the long struggle between Church and empire. The pope had made concessions, which he recognized would be unpopular among the more inflexible of his flock; he was, however, at pains to emphasize that they were not necessarily to be accepted in principle. All he asked was that they should be tolerated for the time being in the interests of peace. He himself had no regrets; indeed, he felt nothing but pride in his achievement, which he celebrated by commissioning a series of frescoes for the Lateran.

But peace between Papacy and empire did not, alas, mean peace within Rome itself. The days of the Crescentii and the Counts of Tusculum were past; the two powerful families now confronting each other were the noble Frangipani and the far richer but relatively parvenu Pierleoni, who despite their Jewish origins had maintained a close working relationship with a number of popes since Leo IX and Gregory VII. The constant feuding between these two was to bedevil papal elections for years to come. On the death of Calixtus in 1124 the Frangipani easily won the day. The candidate favored by the Pierleoni had already been proclaimed as Celestine II, but during the service of consecration Roberto Frangipani and his followers burst into the assembly with drawn swords and insisted on the immediate acclamation of Cardinal Lamberto of Ostia. There followed a violent struggle, in the course of which Celestine was severely wounded and immediately resigned. The way was now clear for Lamberto, who was duly enthroned as Honorius II.

The Pierleoni-Frangipani rivalry was reflected in a similar breach among the Curia. On the one side, and forming the majority, were the old-school Gregorians, backed by the Pierleoni; on the other was a younger group led by the papal chancellor, Cardinal Aimeric, who had almost certainly been involved in Roberto Frangipani’s coup. Honorius belonged, of course, to the latter faction. He had been one of the cardinals who had accompanied Gelasius to France and one of the chief negotiators at Worms. A dedicated and determined reformer, he also worked hard to strengthen the position of the Church abroad, notably in Germany. In January 1130, however, he fell seriously ill, and Aimeric acted swiftly. The chancellor was well aware that the obvious successor to Honorius was Cardinal Pietro Pierleoni, who, after studying in Paris with the great Peter Abelard, had spent several years as a monk at Cluny before being appointed papal legate, first in France and then in England. His genuine piety and irreproachable Cluniac background had made him a staunch upholder of reform;
²
he was also capable, strong-willed, and intensely ambitious. But he was a Pierleoni, and for Aimeric and his party that was enough. They seized the dying pontiff and carried him off to the Monastery of San Andrea, safe in the bosom of the Frangipani quarter, where they would be able to conceal his death until suitable dispositions could be made for the future. Then, on February 11, Aimeric summoned to the monastery such cardinals as he felt he could trust and began preparations for a new election.

Such a proceeding, flagrantly dishonest as it was, provoked an immediate reaction from the rest of the Curia. Hurling anathemas against “all those who would proceed to the election before the funeral of Honorius,” they nominated a commission of eight electors, to meet in the church of Sant’Adriano. The choice of this somewhat obscure church was clearly due to their natural reluctance to put themselves at the mercy of the Frangipani, but when they arrived there they found that Aimeric’s men had already taken possession of the building and fortified it against them. Furious, they turned away and gathered instead at the old Basilica of San Marco, where they settled down to await developments.

On February 13 the rumor swept through Rome that the pope was dead at last and that the news was being deliberately suppressed. An angry crowd gathered around San Andrea, and was dispersed only after the luckless Honorius had shown himself, haggard and trembling, on the balcony. It was his last public appearance; by nightfall he was dead. In theory his body should have been allowed to lie in state for three days; but since the election of a new pope could not take place before the burial of the old, Aimeric had no time for such niceties. Almost before the body was cold it was flung into a temporary grave in the monastery courtyard, and early the following morning the chancellor and those who shared his views elected Gregorio Papareschi, the Cardinal Deacon of the Church of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, to the Papacy. He was rushed to the Lateran and formally if somewhat hastily installed under the title of Innocent II; he then retreated to the Church of Santa Maria in Pallara—now San Sebastiano al Palatino—where the Frangipani could keep him out of harm’s way.

Meanwhile, at San Marco the crowd had been steadily growing. It now included some two dozen cardinals, together with most of the nobility and as many of the populace as could squeeze through the doors. When on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day the news of Innocent’s election was brought to them, there was immediate uproar. With one accord the cardinals declared the proceedings at San Andrea and the Lateran uncanonical and acclaimed Cardinal Pierleoni as their rightful pope. He accepted at once, taking the name of Anacletus II. At dawn that morning there had been no pope in Rome. By midday there were two.

INNOCENT OR ANACLETUS
—it is hard to say which candidate possessed the stronger claim to the Papacy. Anacletus, there was no doubt, could boast more overall support, both among the cardinals and within the Church as a whole. On the other hand, those who had voted for Innocent, though fewer in number, had included the majority of the electoral commission of eight which had been set up by the Sacred College. The manner in which they had performed their duties was, to say the least, questionable, but then Anacletus’s own election could scarcely have been described as orthodox. It had, moreover, taken place after another pope had already been elected and installed.

One thing was certain. In Rome itself, sweetened after years of bribery by the Pierleoni, the popularity of Anacletus was overwhelming. By February 15 he and his party were in control of the Lateran, and on the sixteenth they took St. Peter’s. Here, a week later, Anacletus received his formal consecration, while Innocent had to be content with a more modest ceremony elsewhere. Day by day Anacletus entrenched himself more firmly, while his agents dispensed subsidies with an ever more generous hand, until at last his gold—supplemented, according to his enemies, by the wholesale pillage of the principal churches of Rome—found its way into the Frangipani fortress itself. Deserted by his last remaining champions, Innocent had no choice but to flee. Already by the beginning of April we find him dating his letters from Trastevere; a month later he secretly chartered two galleys on which, accompanied by all his loyal cardinals except one, he escaped down the Tiber.

His flight proved his salvation. Anacletus had bought Rome with bribes, but elsewhere in Italy popular feeling was firmly behind Innocent. In Pisa he was cheered to the echo; in Genoa the same. From there he took ship for France, and by the time he sailed into the little harbor of Saint-Gilles in Provence much of his old confidence had returned. It was well justified. When he found, awaiting him at Saint-Gilles, a deputation from Cluny with sixty horses and mules in its train ready to escort him the two hundred–odd miles to the monastery, he must have felt that, at least so far as France was concerned, his battle was as good as won. If the most influential of all French abbeys was prepared to give him its support in preference to one of its own sons, he surely had little to fear from other quarters; and when the Council of Étampes, summoned in the late summer to give a final ruling, formally declared in his favor, it merely confirmed a foregone conclusion.

France, then, was sound; but what of the empire? Here lay the key to Innocent’s ultimate success; but Lothair the Saxon, King of Germany, showed no particular eagerness to make up his mind. He was still engaged in a desperate struggle for power with Conrad of Hohenstaufen, and he had to weigh his actions with care. Besides, he had not yet been crowned emperor in Rome. To antagonize the pope who actually held the city was a step that might have dangerous implications. Innocent, however, was not unduly worried, for his case was now safely in the hands of the most powerful of all advocates and the outstanding spiritual force of the twelfth century: St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

To an objective observer in the twenty-first, safely out of range of that astonishing personal magnetism with which he effortlessly dominated all those with whom he came in contact, St. Bernard is not an attractive figure. Tall and haggard, his features clouded by the constant pain resulting from a lifetime of exaggerated physical austerities, he was consumed by a blazing religious zeal that left no room for tolerance or moderation. His public life had begun in 1115, when the Abbot of Cîteaux, the Englishman Stephen Harding, had effectively released this charismatic twenty-five-year-old monk from monastic discipline by sending him off to found a daughter house at Clairvaux in Champagne. From that moment on, almost despite himself, Bernard’s influence spread, and for the last twenty-five years of his life he was constantly on the move, preaching, persuading, arguing, debating, writing innumerable letters, and compulsively plunging into the thick of every controversy in which he believed the basic principles of Christianity to be involved.

The papal schism was just such an issue. Bernard declared himself unhesitatingly for Innocent. His reasons, as always, were emotional. Cardinal Aimeric was a close personal friend; Anacletus, on the other hand, was a product of Cluny, a monastery which Bernard detested, believing it to have betrayed its reformist ideals and to have succumbed to those very temptations of wealth and worldliness that it had been founded to eradicate. Worse still, he was of Jewish antecedents; as Bernard was later to write to Lothair, “it is to the injury of Christ that the offspring of a Jew should have seized for himself the throne of St. Peter.” The question of Christ’s and St. Peter’s own racial origins does not seem to have occurred to him.

Away in Rome, Anacletus was fully aware of the need for international recognition, but whereas his rival was able to whip up support in person he had to rely on correspondence, in which he had as yet been singularly unsuccessful. In an effort to reassure King Lothair he had even gone so far as to excommunicate Conrad, but the king had been unimpressed and had not even had the courtesy to answer his subsequent letters. In France, too, his legates were snubbed; and now, as reports reached him of more and more declarations for Innocent, he grew seriously alarmed. The weight of the opposition was far greater than he had expected; more disturbing still, it was not only the ruling princes who favored his antagonist but the Church itself. During the previous half century, thanks largely to Cluniac reforms and the influence of Hildebrand, it had developed into a strong and cohesive international authority. Simultaneously the mushroom growth of the religious orders had given it a new impetus and efficiency. Cluny under its abbot, Peter the Venerable, Prémontré under Norbert of Magdeburg—he who had persuaded Lothair to leave Anacletus’s letters unanswered—Clairvaux under St. Bernard, all were vital, positive forces. All three were united in favor of Innocent, and they carried the body of the Church with them.