Absolute Monarchs (18 page)

It was always a mistake for popes to meet Normans on the battlefield. Just as Leo had had to come to terms with his captors after Civitate, so now Innocent was forced to bow to the inevitable. On July 25, at Mignano, he formally confirmed Roger in his Kingdom of Sicily, with the overlordship of all Italy south of the Garigliano River. He then said Mass and left the church a free man. In the ensuing charter he managed to save a few shreds of the papal honor; but nothing could disguise the fact that, for him and his party, the treaty of Mignano spelled unconditional—or almost unconditional—surrender.

ON SEPTEMBER
24, 1143, Pope Innocent died in Rome. His long struggle with Anacletus had cost him dearly. Even his allies had proved a mixed blessing. Lothair, once safely crowned, had showed him scant consideration, Henry the Proud still less. Bernard of Clairvaux had been loyal but, deliberately or not, had seemed bent on stealing his thunder at every opportunity. His final triumph had been made possible only by the death of Anacletus; and almost at once it had been turned to dust by the rout at Galluccio. He had accepted this humiliation as gracefully as he could and had made terms with the Sicilian king, but he had been ill repaid. Within a year Roger, emboldened by the years of schism when he had done what he liked and Anacletus had never dared take issue with him, was acting more arrogantly than ever: creating new dioceses, appointing new bishops, barring the pope’s envoys from entering his kingdom without his consent, and even refusing to allow Latin churchmen in his dominions to obey papal summonses to Rome.

Even that was not all. For more than a century, a movement toward republican self-government had been gathering momentum among the cities and towns of Italy. In Rome itself successive popes and the old aristocracy had done their best to save their city from the general contagion, but the recent schism had weakened their hold. Innocent in particular had never enjoyed general popularity. Coming from Trastevere, he had always been considered one degree less Roman than Anacletus, and he was known to be a good deal less generous. When, therefore, they learned that he had made a separate peace with their enemy to the south, the Romans seized the opportunity to denounce the temporal power of the pope, revive the Senate on the Capitol, and declare a republic. Innocent resisted as best he could, but he was an old man—probably well over seventy—and the effort was too much for him. A few weeks later he was dead.

He was buried in a huge porphyry sarcophagus from the Castel Sant’Angelo which was believed to have formerly contained the bones of the Emperor Hadrian; but after a disastrous fire in the early fourteenth century his remains were transferred to the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which he himself had rebuilt just before his death. There, immortalized in the great apse mosaic, he stares down at us from the conch, his church clutched in his hands, a strangely wistful expression in his sad, tired eyes.

1.
Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands since its capture by the Caliph Omar in 638, but for most of the intervening period Christian pilgrims had been freely admitted and allowed to worship as and where they wished. The city had been taken by the Seljuk Turks in 1077.

2.
Accusations were made against him from time to time by such robust prelates as Manfred of Mantua and Arnulf of Lisieux (who actually wrote a book called
Invectives
) to the effect that he seduced nuns, slept with his sister, and so on; but these can be discounted as being simply the normal, healthy Church polemic to be expected at times of schism.

CHAPTER XI

The English Pope

T
he next ten years saw no fewer than four popes in Rome. The first, Celestine II, detested King Roger and all he stood for and refused to ratify the Treaty of Mignano; it was a foolish policy, which he survived just long enough to regret. His representatives had been obliged to go cap in hand to Palermo before he died. Nor was his successor, Lucius II, any more fortunate. During his brief pontificate the Roman commune restored the Senate as a working body, with powers to elect magistrates and even to strike its own coinage. Serious fighting broke out once again in Rome. Lucius unwisely decided to take the offensive and while leading an armed attack on the Capitol was hit by a heavy stone. Mortally wounded, he was carried by the Frangipani to Gregory the Great’s old monastery of St. Andrew on the Caelian Hill; and there he died on February 15, 1145, after less than a year on the throne.

Eugenius III was elected on the same day to succeed him. His actual election, held on safe Frangipani territory, was smooth enough, but when he tried to proceed from the Lateran to St. Peter’s for his consecration, he found that the commune had barred his way; and three days later he fled the city. The speed of his flight surprised no one; indeed, the only surprising thing about Eugenius was that he should have been elected in the first place. A former monk of Clairvaux and disciple of St. Bernard, he was a simple character, gentle and retiring—not at all, men thought, the material of which popes were made. Even Bernard himself, when he heard the news, made no secret of his disapproval, writing to the entire Curia:

May God forgive you what you have done! … What reason or counsel, when the Supreme Pontiff was dead, made you rush upon a mere rustic, lay hands on him in his refuge, wrest from his hands the axe, pick or hoe, and lift him to a throne?

To Eugenius himself he was equally outspoken:

Thus does the finger of God raise up the poor out of the dust and lift up the beggar from the dunghill, that he may sit with princes and inherit the throne of glory.

It seems an unfortunate choice of metaphor, and it says much for the new pope’s gentleness and patience that he showed no resentment; but Bernard was, after all, his spiritual father, and in the months to come he was to need his old master as badly as he had ever needed him in his life—for he was now called upon to summon the Second Crusade.

It was made necessary by the fall of the Christian County of Edessa. Edessa, now the modern Turkish city of Urfa, was the first to be established of all the Crusader states of the Levant; it dated from the year 1098, when Baldwin of Boulogne had left the main army of the First Crusade and struck off to the east to found a principality of his own on the banks of the Euphrates. He had not stayed there long—two years later he had succeeded his brother as King of Jerusalem—but Edessa had continued as a semi-independent Christian state until, on Christmas Eve, 1144, it was conquered by an Arab army under Imad ed-Din Zengi, Atabeg of Mosul. The news of its fall horrified all Christendom. How, after less than half a century, had Cross once again given way to Crescent? Was this disaster not a clear manifestation of the wrath of God?

Although Edessa had fallen nearly eight weeks before the death of Pope Lucius, Eugenius had been on the throne over six months before he was officially notified and began to consider the implications of a Crusade. The first question to be decided was that of the leadership. Among the princes of the West, he could see only one suitable candidate. Conrad, King of the Romans—he had not received his imperial coronation—was beset with his own troubles in Germany; King Stephen of England had had a civil war on his hands for six years already. King Roger of Sicily was, for any number of reasons, out of the question. The only possible choice was King Louis VII of France.

Louis asked nothing better. He was one of Nature’s pilgrims. Though still only twenty-four, he had about him an aura of joyless piety which made him look and seem far older than his years—and irritated to distraction his beautiful and high-spirited young wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. At Christmas 1145 he announced to his assembled vassals his determination to take the Cross. Their reaction was disappointing, but Louis had made up his mind. If he could not fill the hearts and minds of his vassals with crusading fire, he knew precisely who could. He sent for the Abbot of Clairvaux.

To Bernard, here was a cause after his own heart. Exhausted as he was, he responded to the call with all that extraordinary fervor that had made him the dominant spiritual voice in all Christendom. Willingly he agreed to address the assembly that the king had summoned for the following Easter at Vézelay. At once the magic of his name began to do its work, and men and women from every corner of France poured into the little town. Since there were far too many to be packed into the cathedral, a great wooden platform was hastily erected on the hillside; there, on Palm Sunday morning, with the king at his side—displaying on his breast the cross which Pope Eugenius had sent him in token of his decision—Bernard made the speech of his life.

The text of his exhortation has not come down to us; we are told, however, that his voice rang out across the meadow “like a celestial organ” and that as he spoke the crowd, silent at first, began to cry out for crosses of their own. Bundles of them, cut in rough cloth, had already been prepared for distribution; when the supply was exhausted, the abbot flung off his own robe and began tearing it into strips to make more. Others followed his example, and he and his helpers were still stitching as night fell.

It was an astonishing achievement. No one else in Europe could have done it. Yet, as events were soon to tell, it were better had it not been done. The Second Crusade was to turn out an ignominious fiasco. First, the Crusaders decided to attack Damascus—the only Arab state in the whole Levant hostile to Imad ed-Din and his son Nur ed-Din, who had by now succeeded him. As such, it could and should have been an invaluable ally of the Franks; by attacking it, they drove it straight into the arms of their enemy. Second, they pitched their camp along the eastern section of the walls, devoid alike of shade and water. Third, they lost their nerve. On July 28, 1148, just five days after the opening of the campaign, they gave the order for retreat.

There is no part of the Syrian desert more shattering to the spirit than the dark gray, featureless expanse of sand and basalt that lies between Damascus and Tiberias. Withdrawing across it in the height of the Arabian summer, the remorseless sun and scorching desert wind full in their faces, harried incessantly by mounted Arab archers and leaving in their wake a stinking trail of dead men and horses, the Crusaders must have felt despair heavy upon them. Their losses, in both men and material, had been immense. Worst of all was the shame. Having traveled for the best part of a year, often in conditions of mortal danger, having suffered agonies of thirst, hunger, and sickness and the bitterest extremes of heat and cold, this once-glorious army, which had purported to enshrine all the ideals of the Christian West, had given up the whole thing after just four days, having regained not one inch of Muslim territory. It was the ultimate humiliation—which neither they nor their enemies would forget.

POPE EUGENIUS, MEANWHILE
, had his own problems to contend with. The most troubling of these was the political situation in Rome, where the republican movement, which had already claimed the life of his predecessor, was now gaining further strength thanks to the teachings of an Augustinian monk from Lombardy whose influence in the city was growing almost daily.

His name was Arnold of Brescia. In his youth he had studied in the schools of Paris—almost certainly under Abelard at Notre Dame—where he had been thoroughly imbued with the new scholasticism, essentially a movement away from the old mystical approach to spiritual matters and toward a spirit of logical, rational inquiry. To the medieval Papacy, radical ideas of this sort would have seemed subversive enough, but Arnold combined with them a still more unwelcome feature: a passionate hatred for the temporal power of the Church. For him the state was, and must always be, supreme; the civil law, based on the laws of ancient Rome, must prevail over the canon; the pope should divest himself of all worldly pomp, renounce his powers and privileges, and revert to the poverty and simplicity of the early Fathers. Only thus could the Church reestablish contact with the humble masses among its flock. As John of Salisbury wrote:

Arnold himself was frequently to be heard on the Capitol and in various assemblies of the people. He had already publicly denounced the cardinals, maintaining that their College, beset as it was with pride, avarice, hypocrisy, and shame, was not the Church of God but a house of commerce and a den of thieves.… Even the pope himself was other than what he professed: rather than an apostolic shepherd of souls, he was a man of blood who maintained his authority by fire and sword, a tormentor of churches and oppressor of the innocent whose only actions were for the gratification of his lust and for the emptying of other men’s coffers in order that his own might be filled.

Naturally, the Papacy had fought back. Naturally too, it had used the Abbot of Clairvaux as its champion. In consequence, as early as 1140 Arnold had been condemned, together with his old master Abelard, at the Council of Sens and had been expelled from France. By 1146, however, he was back in Rome, and the Roman Senate, fired by his blazing piety and recognizing in his ideas the spiritual counterpart of its own republican aspirations, had welcomed him with open arms. Presumably as a sop to republican feeling, Eugenius had then released Arnold from his excommunication and ordered him to lead a life of penitence, but the action had done little to improve the pope’s popularity. In the spring of 1147, with his cardinals and Curia, he had traveled to France to give his blessing to the preparations for the coming Crusade. There and in Germany he had been received with every possible honor; only in Rome, it seemed, was he reviled. Back in Italy the following year and finding Arnold of Brescia as obstreperous as ever, he renewed the sentence of excommunication but did not for the moment attempt a return to the city.

Queen Eleanor had accompanied her husband, Louis VII, on the Crusade. It had not improved their marriage. Eleanor had made no secret of the fact that her lugubrious husband bored her to distraction and had indeed developed a relationship with her uncle, Prince Raymond of Antioch, which was generally suspected of going considerably beyond the avuncular. When she and Louis landed in Italy on their return from the Levant, they were barely on speaking terms. They called on the pope in Tusculum, the nearest town to Rome in which he could safely install himself. Eugenius was a gentle, kindhearted man who hated to see people unhappy, and the sight of the royal pair, oppressed by the double failure of the Crusade and of their marriage, caused him deep personal distress. John of Salisbury, who was employed in the papal Curia at the time, has left us a curiously touching account of the pope’s attempts at a reconciliation:

He commanded, under pain of anathema, that no word should be spoken against their marriage and that it should not be dissolved under any pretext whatever. This ruling plainly delighted the King, for he loved the Queen passionately, in an almost childish way. The Pope made them sleep in the same bed, which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by friendly converse to restore the love between them. He heaped gifts upon them; and when the time came for their departure he could not hold back his tears.

Those tears were perhaps made all the more copious by the knowledge that his efforts had been in vain. Had Eugenius known Eleanor better, he would have seen from the start that her mind was made up; for the time being, however, she was prepared to keep up appearances, accompanying her husband to Rome, where they were cordially received by the Senate and where Louis prostrated himself as usual at all the principal shrines, and so back over the Alps to Paris. It was to be another two and a half years before her marriage was finally dissolved—St. Bernard having persuaded Eugenius to modify his earlier attitude—on grounds of consanguinity; but she was still young, and only on the threshold of the astonishing career in which, as wife of one of England’s greatest kings and mother of two of its worst, she was to influence the course of European history for over half a century.

IN DECEMBER
1149, with the aid of an escort of Sicilian troops, Pope Eugenius at last returned to Rome, but it was no use: the prevailing atmosphere of open hostility soon persuaded him to leave again. He then entered into correspondence with King Conrad. He knew that the commune had suggested that Conrad should come to Rome and take it over as the capital of a new-style Roman Empire, so it could hardly refuse if the king were to come to the city for his coronation. Conrad, however, never did. He died in February 1152, before he could take up the pope’s invitation. Eugenius had no choice but to transfer his attentions to Conrad’s nephew and heir Frederick of Hohenstaufen, known as Barbarossa.