Absolute Monarchs (20 page)

—

POPE HADRIAN, ON
the other hand, felt betrayed. His southern frontier was under attack by King William of Sicily,
¹
and he had hoped that in accordance with the terms agreed on at Constance the newly crowned emperor would march against him. Frederick himself would have been perfectly ready to do so if only he could have carried his knights with him, but they were determined to leave the south and return at once to Germany, and he knew he could not press them too far.

Friendless and alone, unable to return to Rome since Frederick’s coronation, Hadrian spent the winter with his Curia at Benevento. As far as he was concerned, the emperor, his one hope, had shown himself to have feet of clay. Meanwhile, the situation in the South was fast deteriorating. King William, having overcome opposition from the Byzantines and his own rebel subjects, was on the march toward the papal frontier. As he approached, Hadrian sent most of his cardinals away to Campania—mainly for their greater safety but also, perhaps, for another reason. He knew that he would now have to come to terms with William. Die-hard cardinals had scuppered too many potential agreements in the past; if he was to save anything from a coming disaster, he would need the utmost freedom to negotiate.

As soon as the vanguard of the Sicilian army appeared over the hills, the pope sent his chancellor, Roland of Siena, and two other cardinals who had remained with him to greet the king and to bid him, in the name of St. Peter, to cease from further hostilities. They were received with due courtesy, and formal talks began at Benevento. The going was not easy. The Sicilians were in a position of strength and drove a hard bargain, but the papal side fought every inch of the way. It was not until June 18, 1156, that agreement was finally reached. William gained papal recognition over a far larger body of territory than had ever been granted before, on payment of an annual tribute. In return he acknowledged the pope’s feudal suzerainty; but there could be no doubt as to which party profited the most. We have only to look at the language in which the papal document of acceptance was drafted:

William, glorious King of Sicily and dearest son in Christ, most brilliant in wealth and achievement among all the kings and eminent men of the age, the glory of whose name is borne to the uttermost limits of the earth by the firmness of your justice, the peace which you have restored to your subjects, and the fear which your great deeds have instilled into the hearts of all the enemies of Christ’s name.

Even when allowance is made for the traditional literary hyperbole of the time, it is hard to imagine Hadrian putting his signature to such a document without a wince of humiliation. He had been pope only eighteen months, but already he had learned the bitterness of desertion, betrayal, and exile; and even his broad shoulders were beginning to bow. He appears now in a very different light from that in which we saw him when he placed Rome under an interdict or pitted his will against that of Frederick Barbarossa just twelve short months before. Perhaps it was John of Salisbury who best summed up his mood:

I call on the Lord Hadrian to witness that no one is more miserable than the Roman Pontiff, nor is any condition more wretched than his.… He maintains that the papal throne is studded with thorns, that his mantle bristles with needles so sharp that it oppresses and weighs down the broadest shoulders … and that had he not feared to go against the will of God he would never have left his native England.

THE FURY OF
Frederick Barbarossa when he heard of the Benevento agreement can well be imagined. Had not Hadrian given him a personal undertaking not to enter into any private communications with the King of Sicily? Had he not now actually signed a treaty of peace and friendship—a treaty, moreover, by which he not only recognized William’s claim to a spurious crown but, in ecclesiastical affairs, granted him privileges more far-reaching even than those enjoyed by the emperor himself? By what right did he so graciously confer imperial territories on others? Was there no limit to papal arrogance?

It was not long before his worst suspicions were confirmed. In October 1157 he held an imperial Diet at Besançon. Ambassadors converged on the town from all sides: from France and Italy, from Spain and England—and, of course, from the pope. The effect of all Frederick’s arrangements was, however, slightly spoiled when, in the presence of the assembled company, the papal legates read out the letter they had brought with them from their master. Instead of the customary greetings and congratulations, the pope had chosen this of all moments to deliver himself of a strongly worded complaint. The aged Archbishop of Lund, while traveling through imperial territory, had been set upon by bandits, robbed of all he possessed, and held for ransom. Such an outrage was serious enough in itself; but it was aggravated by the fact that although the emperor had been furnished with full details of the case, he appeared as yet to have taken no steps to bring to justice those responsible. Turning to more general topics, Hadrian recalled his past favors to the emperor, reminding him in particular of his coronation at papal hands and adding, perhaps a trifle patronizingly, that he hoped at some future date to bestow still further benefices upon him.

Whether the pope was deliberately intending to assert his feudal overlordship we shall never know. Unfortunately, however, the two words he used,
conferre
and
beneficia
, were both technical terms used in describing the grant of a fief by a suzerain to his vassal. This was more than Frederick could bear. If the letter implied, as it appeared to imply, that he held the Holy Roman Empire by courtesy of the pope in the same way as any petty baron might hold a couple of fields in the Campagna, there could be no further dealings between them. The assembled German princes shared his indignation, and when Cardinal Roland, the papal chancellor, blandly replied by inquiring from whom Frederick held the empire if not from the pope, there was a general uproar. Otto of Wittelsbach, Count Palatine of Bavaria, rushed forward, his hand on his sword; only the rapid intervention of the emperor himself prevented an incident compared with which the misfortunes of the Archbishop of Lund would have seemed trivial indeed.

When Hadrian heard what had happened, he wrote Frederick another letter, couched this time in rather more soothing terms, protesting that his words had been misinterpreted; and the emperor accepted his explanation. It is unlikely that he really believed it, but he had no wish for an open breach with the Papacy. Nonetheless, the
bagarre
at Besançon, as anyone could have seen, was merely a symptom of a far deeper rift between pope and emperor, one which no amount of diplomatic drafting could ever hope to bridge. The days when it had been realistic to speak of the two swords of Christendom were gone—gone since Gregory VII and Henry IV had hurled depositions and anathemas at each other nearly a hundred years before. Never since then had their respective successors been able to look upon themselves as two different sides of the same coin. Each must now claim the supremacy and defend it as necessary against the other. When this involved the confrontation of characters as strong as those of Hadrian and Frederick, a flash point could never be far off; yet the root of the trouble lay less in their personalities than in the institutions they represented. While the two of them lived, relations between them—exacerbated by a host of petty slights both real and imagined—became even more strained, though it was only after their deaths that the conflict would emerge into open war.

The Treaty of Benevento proved to be of immeasurably greater significance than either of its signatories could have known at the time. For the Papacy it inaugurated a new political approach to European problems—one that it was to follow, to its own considerable advantage, for the next twenty years. Hadrian himself was gradually brought to accept what he must always have suspected—that the emperor was not so much a friend with whom he might occasionally quarrel as an enemy with whom, somehow, he must live. His concordat with King William gave him a powerful new ally and enabled him to adopt a firmer attitude in his dealings with Frederick than could ever otherwise have been possible—as the Besançon letter bears witness.

In papal circles, so radical a change in policy was bound to meet with opposition at first. Many leading members of the Curia still clung to their imperialist, anti-Sicilian opinions; and the news of the terms agreed upon had caused almost as much consternation in the Sacred College as in the imperial court. Gradually, however, opinion swung around in William’s favor. One reason was Barbarossa’s arrogance, as shown at Besançon and confirmed by several other incidents before and since. Besides, the Sicilian alliance was now a fait accompli; it was useless to oppose it any longer. William, for his part, seemed sincere enough. On the pope’s recommendation, he had made his peace with Constantinople. He was rich, he was powerful, and, as several of Their Eminences could, if they wished, have testified, he was also generous.

Now Frederick Barbarossa set out to sack and ravage the Lombard cities, and a great wave of revulsion against the empire swept down through Italy. With it, too, there was an element of terror: when the emperor had finished with Lombardy, what was to prevent him from continuing to Tuscany, Umbria, even to Rome itself? Only an alliance forged between an English pope and a Norman king. In the spring of 1159 there came the first great counterthrust against Frederick that can be directly ascribed to papal-Sicilian instigation. Milan suddenly threw off the imperial authority, and for the next three years the Milanese stoutly defied all the emperor’s efforts to bring them to heel. The following August, representatives of Milan, Crema, Piacenza, and Brescia met the pope at Anagni; and there, in the presence of envoys from King William, was sworn the initial pact that was to become the nucleus of the great Lombard League. The towns promised that they would have no dealings with the common enemy without papal consent, while the pope undertook to excommunicate the emperor after the usual period of forty days. Finally it was agreed by the assembled cardinals that on Hadrian’s death his successor would be elected only from those present at the conference.

It was perhaps already obvious that the pope had not long to live. While still at Anagni he was stricken by a sudden angina, from which he never recovered. He died on the evening of September 1, 1159. His body was carried to Rome and laid in the undistinguished third-century sarcophagus in which it still rests and which can still be seen in the crypt of St. Peter’s. During the course of the demolition of the old basilica in 1607 it was opened, and the body of the only English pope was found entire, dressed in a chasuble of dark-colored silk. It was described as being “that of an undersized man, wearing Turkish slippers on his feet and, on his hand, a large emerald.”

Hadrian’s pontificate is hard to assess. He certainly towers over the string of mediocrities who occupied the Throne of St. Peter during the first half of the century, just as he himself is overshadowed by his magnificent successor. He left the Papacy stronger and more generally respected than he found it, but much of this success was due to its identification with the Lombard League; and he failed utterly to subdue the Roman Senate. He was pope for less than five years, but those years were hard and of vital importance to the Papacy, and the strain told on him. Before long his health had begun to fail, and with it his morale. He died embittered and disappointed—as all too many of his predecessors had before him.

1.
William I (“the Bad”), King of Sicily, had succeeded his father, Roger II, in 1154.

CHAPTER XII

Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa

O
n September 5, 1159, the day after the body of Pope Hadrian had been laid to rest in St. Peter’s, about thirty cardinals assembled in conclave behind the high altar of the basilica.
¹
Two days later, all but three of them had cast their votes for the former chancellor, Cardinal Roland of Siena, who was therefore declared to have been elected. One of the three, however, was the violently pro-imperialist Cardinal Octavian of Santa Cecilia, and just as the scarlet mantle of the Papacy was brought forward and Roland, after the customary display of reluctance, bent his head to receive it, Octavian dived at him, snatched the mantle, and tried to don it himself. A scuffle followed, during which he lost it again; but his chaplain instantly produced another—presumably brought along for just such an eventuality—which Octavian this time managed to put on, unfortunately back to front, before anyone could stop him.

There followed a scene of scarcely believable confusion. Wrenching himself free from the furious supporters of Roland, who were trying to tear the mantle forcibly from his back, Octavian—whose frantic efforts to turn it the right way around had resulted only in getting the fringes tangled around his neck—made a dash for the papal throne, sat on it, and proclaimed himself Pope Victor IV.
²
He then charged off through St. Peter’s until he found a group of minor clergy, whom he ordered to give him their acclamation—which, seeing the doors suddenly burst open and a band of armed cutthroats swarming into the basilica, they hastily did. For the time being at least, the opposition was silenced; Roland and his adherents slipped out while they could and took refuge in St. Peter’s Tower, a fortified corner of the Vatican. Meanwhile, with the cutthroats looking on, Octavian was enthroned a little more formally than on the previous occasion and escorted in triumph to the Lateran—having been at some pains, we are told, to adjust his dress before leaving.

However undignified in its execution, the coup could now be seen to have been thoroughly and efficiently planned in advance—and on a scale which left no doubt that the empire must have been actively implicated. Octavian himself had long been notorious as an imperial sympathizer, and his election was immediately recognized by Frederick’s two ambassadors in Rome, who at the same time declared a vigorous war on Roland. Once again they opened their coffers, and German gold flowed freely into the purses and pockets of all Romans—nobles, senators, bourgeoisie, or rabble—who openly proclaimed their allegiance to Victor IV. Meanwhile, Roland and his faithful cardinals remained blockaded in St. Peter’s Tower.

But almost at once Octavian—or Victor, as we must now call him—saw his support begin to dwindle. The story of his behavior at the election was by now common knowledge in the city and, we may be sure, had lost nothing in the telling; everywhere, the Romans were turning toward Roland as their lawfully elected pope. A mob had formed around St. Peter’s Tower and was now angrily clamoring for his release. In the street, Victor was hooted at and reviled; lines of doggerel were chanted mockingly at him as he passed. On the night of September 16 he could bear it no longer and fled from Rome, and on the following day the rightful pontiff was led back into the capital amid general rejoicing.

But Roland knew that he could not stay. The imperial ambassadors were still in Rome and still had limitless money to spend. Victor’s family, too, the Crescentii, remained among the richest and most powerful in the city. Pausing only to assemble an appropriate retinue, on September 20 the pope traveled south to Ninfa, which was then under the sway of his friends the Frangipani; and there, in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, he at last received formal consecration as Alexander III. One of his first acts, predictably, was to excommunicate the antipope—who soon afterward (and equally predictably) excommunicated him in return. For the second time in thirty years, the Church of Rome was in schism.

Had Frederick bowed to the inevitable and accepted Alexander as the rightful pope that he indubitably was, there is no reason why the two could not have reached some accommodation. Instead, at the Council of Pavia in February 1160, the emperor formally recognized the ridiculous Victor, thereby forcing Alexander—whose claim was soon accepted by all the other rulers of Europe—into even closer alliance with William of Sicily and saddling himself with a new series of vain and useless obligations which were to cripple him politically for the best part of twenty years. The pope excommunicated Frederick in March—after Pavia he had little choice—and absolved all imperial subjects from their allegiance, but he was still unable to return to Rome. For nearly two years he divided his time between Terracina and Anagni, two papal cities conveniently close to the Sicilian kingdom, to which he looked both for his physical protection and for the financial subsidies he so desperately needed. Then, in the last days of 1161 he boarded a Sicilian ship for France.

For the next three and a half years he was to live in exile, mostly at Sens, working to form a great European League comprising England, France, Sicily, Hungary, Venice, the Lombard towns, and Byzantium against Frederick Barbarossa. He failed, as he was bound to do. King Henry II of England in particular he found impossible to trust. In the early days of the schism Henry had been a firm friend; as early as 1160 Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux had reported that while the king “received all Alexander’s communications with respect, he would not so much as touch Octavian’s letters with his hands but would take hold of them with a piece of stick and throw them behind his back as far as he could.” But in 1163 his difficulties with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, had begun, and in the following year his promulgation of the Constitutions of Clarendon—deliberately designed to strengthen his hold over the English Church at the expense of the pope—had caused a distinct chill in Anglo-papal relations.

But Alexander’s disappointment at his diplomatic failure must have been forgotten when, early in 1165, he received an invitation from the Roman Senate to return to the city. The Antipope Victor, who had also been forced to spend his last years in exile, had died the year before in pain and poverty at Lucca, where he had been staying alive on the proceeds of not very successful brigandage and where the local hierarchy would not even allow him burial within the walls. Frederick, stubborn as ever, had immediately given his blessing to the “election,” by his two tame schismatic cardinals, of a successor under the name of Paschal III, but the action had earned him and his new antipope nothing but scorn, and it may well have been the ensuing wave of resentment and disgust at the absurdity of the schism and the pigheadedness of the emperor that had at last brought the Romans to their senses. Besides, the pilgrim trade had dried up. Without a pope, medieval Rome lost its raison d’être.

For all that, the homecoming was not an easy one. Frederick did everything he could to prevent it, even hiring pirates to waylay the papal convoy on the high seas. But Alexander took a roundabout route and landed, in September 1165, at Messina. Two months later he reached Rome, where, escorted by senators, nobles, clergy, and people, all bearing olive branches in their hands, he rode in state to the Lateran.

EARLY IN
1167, Frederick Barbarossa led his army over the Alps and across the plain of Lombardy; he then split it into two parts. The smaller, under the Archbishop of Cologne, Rainald of Dassel—who was also imperial chancellor and the emperor’s right hand—and another warlike ecclesiastic, Archbishop Christian of Mainz, was to march on Rome, enforcing the imperial authority as it went, and open a safe road for the Antipope Paschal, still sitting nervously in Tuscany. Frederick himself, with the bulk of his army, pressed on across the peninsula toward Ancona, the nucleus of Byzantine influence in Italy, to which he laid siege. The inhabitants put up a spirited resistance. Their defenses were strong and in good order, and they were determined not to be deprived of their association with the Empire of the East, which brought them considerable profit. Luck, too, was on their side. First, the emperor was diverted by the appearance down the coast of a Sicilian force; soon after his return he received news which caused him to raise the siege altogether and leave at once for Rome. The Anconitans were saved.

The Romans, on the other hand, were as good as lost. On Whit Monday, May 29, just outside Tusculum, their large but undisciplined army had attacked the Germans and Tusculans under Christian of Mainz and, though outnumbering them many times over, had been utterly shattered. Imperial messengers had sped to Frederick with the news. Rome, they reported, was still holding out, but failing massive reinforcements it could not last long; still less could it hope to resist a new German attack at full strength. The emperor was jubilant. With Rome ripe for the plucking, Ancona could wait. His arrival in Rome sealed the fate of the Leonine City. A single savage onslaught smashed the gates; the Germans poured in, only to find an unsuspected inner fortress: St. Peter’s itself, ringed with strongpoints and hastily dug trenches. For eight more days it held out; it was only when the besiegers set fire to the forecourt, destroying the great portico so lovingly restored by Innocent II and finally hacking down the huge portals of the basilica itself, that the defending garrison surrendered. Never had there been such a desecration of the holiest shrine in Europe. Even in the ninth century, the Saracen pirates had contented themselves with tearing the silver panels from the doors; they had never penetrated the building. This time, according to a contemporary—Otto of St. Blaise—the Germans left the marble pavements of the nave strewn with dead and dying, the high altar itself stained with blood. And this time the outrage was the work not of infidel barbarians but of the emperor of Western Christendom.

St. Peter’s fell on July 29, 1167. On the following day, at that same high altar, the Antipope Paschal celebrated Mass and then invested Frederick—whom Pope Hadrian had crowned twelve years before—with the golden circlet of the Roman
Patricius
—a deliberate gesture of defiance to the Senate and People of Rome. Two days later still, he officiated at the imperial coronation of the Empress Beatrice, her husband standing at her side. Pope Alexander had no alternative; disguised as a simple pilgrim, he slipped out of the city and made his way to the coast, where he was discovered—fortunately by friends—three days later, sitting on the beach and waiting for a ship. He was rescued and taken to safety in Benevento.

Frederick’s triumph in Rome marked the summit of his career. He had brought the Romans to their knees, imposing on them terms which, though moderate enough, were calculated to ensure their docility in the future. He had placed his own pope on the Throne of St. Peter. North Italy he had already subdued, and now, with his strength still undiminished, he was ready to mop up the Kingdom of Sicily. Poor Frederick—how could he possibly have foreseen the catastrophe that was so soon to overtake him, one that in less than a single week was to destroy his proud army in a way that no earthly foe could ever have matched? On that memorable August 1, the skies had been clear and the sun had blazed down on his triumph. Then, on the second, a huge black cloud suddenly obscured the valley beneath Monte Mario. Heavy rain began to fall, followed by a still and oppressive heat. On the third came pestilence. It struck the imperial camp with an unparalleled swiftness and force, and where it struck, more often than not, it killed. Within a matter of days it was no longer possible to bury all the dead, and the rising piles of corpses, swollen and putrefying in the merciless heat of a Roman August, made their own grim contribution to the sickness and the pervading horror. Frederick, seeing the flower of his army dead or dying around him, had no choice but to strike his camp, and by the second week of August he and his silent, spectral procession were dragging themselves homeward through Tuscany.

Even now the nightmare was not over. Reports of the plague had already spread through Lombardy, and the Germans arrived to find town after town closed against them. At last, and with considerable difficulty, they reached the imperial headquarters at Pavia; and there—with the Alpine passes already blocked—Frederick was forced to halt, watching in impotent rage when, on December 1, no fewer than fifteen of the leading cities formed themselves into the greater Lombard League, the foundations of which had been laid at Anagni eight years before. It was his crowning humiliation; such was his Italian subjects’ contempt for him that they had not even waited until he was back over the Alps before making their ultimate gesture of defiance. Indeed, when the spring at last came and the snow began to melt, he saw that even this last lap of his homeward journey was to be a problem; the passes were all controlled by his enemies and closed to himself and his shattered army. It was secretly, shamefully, and in the guise of a servant that the Emperor of the West finally regained his native land.