Absolute Monarchs (17 page)

So Anacletus took the only course open to him: like other desperate popes in the past, he turned to the Normans. In September 1130, just about the time when the Council of Étampes was deciding in Innocent’s favor, he left Rome for Avellino, where Roger de Hauteville, Great Count of Sicily, was awaiting him. Roger had succeeded his father and namesake in 1101. First landing in Sicily just forty years before, Roger I had in that time transformed an island at once demoralized and despairing, torn asunder by internecine wars and decaying after two centuries of misrule, into a political entity, peaceful and prosperous, in which, for the first time in history, three peoples—Norman, Greek, and Arab—and three religions—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam—were happily coexisting in mutual respect and concord. His son had inherited the two Norman duchies of Apulia and Calabria in 1127 and had received a formal investiture from Pope Honorius in the following year. His task now, as he explained to Anacletus, was to weld his three dominions into a single nation. That nation could be nothing less than a kingdom, and Roger now desperately needed a crown.

Anacletus was sympathetic. If, as now seemed likely, Roger was to be his only ally, it was plainly desirable that his position should be strengthened to the utmost. On September 27, in the papal city of Benevento, he issued a bull granting to Roger and his heirs the crown of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria, together with the Principality of Capua, the “honor” of Naples—a deliberately ambiguous expression since Naples, still technically independent and with vague Byzantine affiliations, was not the pope’s to endow—and the assistance of Benevento in time of war. In return Roger pledged his homage and fealty to Anacletus as pope, together with an annual tribute of 600 schifati, a sum equivalent to about 160 ounces of gold. And so, on Christmas Day 1130, King Roger II of Sicily rode to his coronation in Palermo. In the cathedral there awaited him the archbishop and all the Latin hierarchy of his realm, together with senior representatives of the Greek Church. Anacletus’s special envoy, the Cardinal of Santa Sabina, first anointed him with the holy oil; then Prince Robert I of Capua, his vassal-in-chief, laid the crown upon his head.

Now at last King Lothair made up his mind: he declared for Innocent. Among all the European princes, there remained to Anacletus only three adherents: King David I of Scotland, Duke William X of Aquitaine, and King Roger of Sicily. The last alone would have been enough to lose him any imperial support he might have enjoyed, for by what right could any pope, legitimate or otherwise, crown some Norman upstart king over territories which properly belonged to the empire? After Roger’s coronation there could be no more sitting on the fence; Innocent it would have to be. Yet—perhaps as much to save his face as for any other reason—Lothair still tried to impose a condition: that the right of investiture with ring and crozier, lost to the empire nine years before, should now be restored to himself and his successors.

He had reckoned without the Abbot of Clairvaux. When Innocent arrived with full retinue at Liège in March 1131 to receive the king’s homage, Bernard was with him. This was just the sort of crisis at which he excelled. Leaping from his seat, he subjected Lothair to a merciless castigation before the entire assembly, calling upon him then and there to renounce his pretensions and pay unconditional homage to the rightful pope. As always, his words—or, more probably, the force of his personality behind them—had their effect. This was Lothair’s first encounter with Bernard; it is unlikely that he had ever been spoken to in such a way before. He was not lacking in moral fiber, but this time he seems instinctively to have realized that his position was no longer tenable. He gave in, making his formal submission to Innocent and reinforcing it with an undertaking that the pope probably found even more valuable: to lead him, at the head of a German army, to Rome.

IT WAS A
year and a half before Lothair kept his promise. Unrest in Germany delayed his departure, but by the summer of 1132 it was plain to him that the key to his domestic problems lay in the earliest possible acquisition of the imperial crown and the prestige it conferred; and so in August, with his queen, Richenza of Nordheim, and a force that amounted to little more than an armed escort, he set off over the mountains and into Italy.

He found Innocent waiting for him near Piacenza. The pope had managed to drum up a degree of local support; the imperial army on the last stage of the journey promised to be about two thousand strong. It was still a disappointing figure, but it was at least not shameful. What it now principally lacked was sea support. Pisa and Genoa in particular, the two great maritime republics on whose assistance Innocent had relied, could at that moment see no further than Corsica and Sardinia, over which they had long been squabbling; without their help, the imperial force would stand little chance in the face of a concerted Sicilian attack. But meanwhile the autumn rains were beginning, the roads rapidly turning to mud, and Lothair decided to postpone his coronation till the spring. By then, perhaps, the warring republics might be persuaded to settle their differences.

The fact that they did so was largely due to the Abbot of Clairvaux, who appeared in Italy soon after Christmas; by March, Bernard and Innocent together had alternately hectored and flattered the Pisans and Genoese into a truce, and a month later they were back again at Lothair’s camp, ready for the advance on Rome. The army was still sadly unimpressive, but imperial agents reported that King Roger was fully occupied with a rebellion on the part of his mainland vassals; he would be offering no serious opposition.

On the last day of April 1133 the emperor-to-be drew up his troops before the Basilica of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura. For some days already Rome had been in turmoil. Pisan and Genoese ships had sailed up the Tiber and were now lying threateningly under the walls; and their presence, aided by exaggerated rumors of the size of the oncoming German host, had induced many Romans to make a hurried change of allegiance. Much of the city thus lay open to Innocent and Lothair. They were received at the gates by the Frangipani nobles and their minions, who had never wavered in their opposition to Anacletus, and led in triumph to their respective palaces: the king and queen to Otto III’s old imperial residence on the Aventine, the pope to the Lateran.

But the right bank of the Tiber, with the Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s, still remained firmly in the hands of Anacletus; and Anacletus was not prepared to give in. Lothair, conscious of his own weakness, proposed negotiations, but the antipope’s reply remained the same as it had always been: let the whole question of the disputed election be reopened before an international ecclesiastical tribunal. If such a tribunal, properly constituted, were to declare against him, he would accept its decision. Till then, he would stay in Rome, where he belonged. Left to himself, Lothair would probably have been ready to accept this suggestion. Anything, in his view, would have been better than this continued schism; rival popes might lead to rival emperors, and in such an event his own position might be far from secure. But by now he had been joined in Rome by Bernard; and with Bernard there could be no question of compromise. If Anacletus could not be brought to his knees, he must be ignored. And so it was not at St. Peter’s but at the Lateran that Innocent was reinstalled on the papal throne and there—on June 4, 1133, with as much ceremony and circumstance as he could command—that he crowned Lothair Emperor of the West and Richenza his empress.

For the second time in half a century one putative pope had performed an imperial coronation while another had sat a mile or two away, impotent and fuming. After the previous occasion Gregory VII had been saved only by the arrival, not a moment too soon, of Robert Guiscard at the head of some thirty thousand troops. Anacletus knew that he could expect nothing from that quarter; the King of Sicily, though remaining his loyal champion, was otherwise engaged. Fortunately, rescue was unnecessary. Powerless the antipope might have been, but he was not in any physical danger. No imperial attack on the right bank would be possible without control of the two bridges spanning the river at the Tiber Island, and all approaches to those were effectively dominated by the old Theater of Marcellus, now the principal fortress of the Pierleoni. In the circumstances, the emperor had neither the strength nor the inclination to take the offensive. Now that his immediate aims were achieved, he thought only of returning to Germany as soon as possible. Within a few days of his coronation he and his army were gone and the Pisan and Genoese ships had returned down the river to the open sea.

For Pope Innocent, Lothair’s departure was nothing short of calamitous. At once his remaining supporters in the city began to fall away. Only the Frangipani remained loyal; but they could not hold Rome unaided. By July the agents of Anacletus had everywhere resumed their activity, and the gold was beginning to flow freely once again from the seemingly inexhaustible Pierleoni coffers. In August Innocent found himself forced once again into exile. He slipped unobtrusively from his diocese, just as he had three years before, and made his way, by slow stages, to Pisa and to safety.

Meanwhile the schism rumbled on. It had now become clear to Lothair that the antipope could never be dislodged from Rome while the King of Sicily protected him. In the autumn of 1135 an embassy from the Byzantine Emperor John II Comnenus arrived at the imperial court. John had his own reasons for wishing to eliminate Roger: his empire had never given up its claim to South Italy, and the rich Byzantine cities of Dalmatia constituted a temptation to raiding and freebooting which Sicilian sea captains had not always been able to resist. He now offered Lothair generous financial backing for a campaign to crush their common enemy once and for all.

The emperor needed little persuading. Thanks largely to the new prestige conferred upon him by the imperial crown, the situation in Germany had improved over the past two years, and his Hohenstaufen rivals had been forced into submission. This time he would have no difficulty in raising a respectable army. He foresaw little trouble from Anacletus. The antipope’s last remaining North Italian stronghold, Milan, had gone over to Innocent in June, and the schism was now confined to the Sicilian kingdom and Rome itself. Once Roger was out of the way, Anacletus would be left without a single ally and would be obliged to yield. Lothair replied to John, accepting his offer.

BY HIGH SUMMER
Lothair’s army was finally gathered at Würzburg. It was on a very different scale from the sad little company that had marched with him to Rome in 1132. In the forefront were the emperor’s son-in-law Duke Henry the Proud of Bavaria, and his old enemy and rival Conrad of Hohenstaufen, whom Lothair had confirmed in possession of his lands in return for a promise to participate in the coming campaign. It also boasted an ecclesiastical contingent which included no fewer than five archbishops, fourteen bishops, and an abbot. When it reached Bologna, Lothair split it into two. He himself proposed to continue through Ravenna to Ancona and thence to follow the coast southward into Apulia; meanwhile the Duke of Bavaria, with 3,000 knights and some 12,000 infantry, was to press down through Tuscany and the Papal State, if possible reestablishing Innocent in Rome and assuring himself of the Monastery of Monte Cassino before meeting his father-in-law at Bari for Whitsun.

The plan succeeded well enough, and it was a joyful and triumphant German congregation that assembled on Whitsunday, May 30, 1137, at the Basilica of San Nicola in Bari, to hear a High Mass of Thanksgiving celebrated by the pope himself—even though a Sicilian garrison was still holding out in the citadel. There was, perhaps, a measure of surprise that King Roger had made no effort to oppose the invaders, but the king knew that however far Lothair might advance, sooner or later he would be driven back, as so many invading armies had been driven back before, by sickness, the relentless summer heat, or the need to reach the Alps before the first snowfalls rendered them impassable. Past experience had shown that although such expeditions could be highly effective in the short term, the results they achieved seldom lasted for very long after their departure. The only sensible course, Roger believed, was to encourage the emperor to extend and exhaust himself to the limit.

Events soon proved him right. After the capitulation of the Bari garrison—whose tenacity he punished by hanging a number of them from gibbets all around the city and flinging the rest into the sea—Lothair decided against any further advance down the coast. There were several reasons for his decision. He was seventy-one years old and tired; besides, the whole situation had suddenly gone sour. Relations between the Germans and the papal retinue were deteriorating fast: the army, too, had been away ten months and was impatient to be home. Where Sicily was concerned, he could at least feel that he had saved his honor. He had not perhaps crushed King Roger as completely as he had hoped, but he had surely dealt him a blow from which he would take long to recover. It was a pity about Pope Innocent. Although one of the purposes of the expedition had been to reinstall him in Rome, the city had been studiously bypassed and he was as far from the Throne of St. Peter as ever. But henceforth the pope would have to fight his own battles.

Meanwhile, the old emperor could feel his life ebbing away. Though he marched with all the speed of which his dispirited army was capable, it was mid-November before he reached the foothills of the Alps. His companions implored him to winter there. The sickness was daily increasing its hold on him; it would be folly, they pointed out, to go any farther so late in the year. But Lothair knew that he could not afford to wait. With all the determination of the dying, he pressed on; but at the little village of Breitenwang in the Tyrol his strength deserted him. He was carried to a poor peasant’s hut, and there, on December 3, 1137, he died.

Just seven and a half weeks later, Anacletus followed him to the grave. St. Bernard had already made contact with Roger of Sicily in an attempt to detach him from the antipope; but it was Anacletus’s death that effectively brought the schism to an end. A short-lived successor, the so-called Victor IV, resigned after a few months, and Roger, freed now of the commitments that had cast such a blight on the first seven years of his reign, saw no point in continuing hostilities with the Holy See. He made public recognition of Innocent and ordered all his subjects to do likewise. It is hard to see what more he could have done, but the pope unaccountably refused a reconciliation, and at a Lateran Council on April 8, 1139, pronounced a renewed sentence of excommunication on the King of Sicily, his sons, and all those of his bishops whom Anacletus had consecrated. Then, still more unaccountably, he marched southward from Rome with his old ally Prince Robert of Capua and perhaps a thousand knights. Halfhearted negotiations failed and gave way to open hostilities; and at the little town of Galluccio a Sicilian army suddenly attacked. Robert managed to escape, but Innocent was not so lucky. That evening, July 22, 1139, the pope, his cardinals, his archives, and his treasure were all in the hands of the king, the greatest humiliation suffered by the Papacy since Robert Guiscard had annihilated the army of Leo IX at Civitate, eighty-six years before.