Absolute Monarchs (21 page)

While Frederick Barbarossa was tasting his triumph and disaster, what had happened to his old enemy the pope? Alexander had first taken refuge with his Frangipani friends. Serious as the situation was, he seems to have thought that he might still be able somehow to maintain himself in the capital, and when two Sicilian galleys sailed up the Tiber he had actually refused their captains’ offer to carry him away to safety. It was a courageous decision but, as he soon saw, an unwise one. The Romans, fickle as ever, turned against him. Disguised as a pilgrim, he finally embarked in a small boat and slipped down the river to freedom. Landing at Gaeta, he then made his way to Benevento, where he was joined by his loyal cardinals. He had escaped not a moment too soon. Had he fallen into the emperor’s hands, that surely would have been the end of his active pontificate; even if he had somehow avoided capture, he would probably have perished in the epidemic—which, it need hardly be said, did not confine itself to the imperial army but raged through Rome until the Tiber was thick with corpses. The Almighty, perhaps, had been on his side after all.

Such, certainly, was the view of the papal supporters. God-fearing men everywhere, and in Germany perhaps most of all, saw in that dreadful visitation on Barbarossa the hand of the exterminating angel—not only a just retribution for his crimes but also a proof of the rightness of Alexander’s cause. The pope’s popularity soared, and with it his prestige. The Lombard cities made him patron of their new League, and even invited him—though he did not accept—to take up residence among them. Meanwhile, they founded a new city between Pavia and Asti and named it Alessandria in his honor.

In Rome, the Antipope Paschal had meanwhile lost what derisory support he had ever enjoyed. His health too was failing fast, and everyone knew that he had not long to live. In such circumstances it would have been a simple matter for Alexander to return to the Lateran; but Alexander refused. He had come to hate Rome, and he despised the Romans for their faithlessness and venality. Three times in eight years they had welcomed him to their city; three times they had turned against him and driven him into exile. He had no wish to go through it all again. Benevento, Terracina, Anagni—there were plenty of other places from which the business of the Papacy could be transacted with efficiency and dispatch, free from the intrigues and the ceaseless violence of the Eternal City. He preferred to remain where he was.

It would be eleven years before he saw Rome again.

ON SATURDAY, MAY
29, 1176, at Legnano just outside Milan, Frederick Barbarossa suffered at the hands of the Lombard League the most crushing defeat of his career. He lost much of his army and narrowly escaped with his own life; but the disaster brought him to his senses. After four long Italian campaigns he saw that the Lombard cities were as determined as ever to resist him and, since the formation of their League, well able to do so. Pope Alexander was now recognized almost everywhere—even in much of the empire itself—as the rightful pontiff. For Frederick to persist any longer in the policy on which he had already wasted the best years of his life would earn him the derision of Europe.

His ambassadors met the pope at Anagni to negotiate the terms of the reconciliation. In essence, they were simple enough: on the imperial side, recognition of Alexander, restitution of Church possessions, and the conclusion of peace with Byzantium, Sicily, and the Lombard League; on the papal, confirmation of Frederick’s wife as empress, of his son Henry as King of the Romans, and of several distinguished prelates in sees which they originally owed to schismatic antipopes. The next question was where the great meeting was to take place. After prolonged argument it was agreed that pope and emperor should meet in Venice, on condition that Frederick not be admitted into the city until Alexander had given his consent.

On May 10, 1177, the pope arrived with his Curia. He was received by the doge and the patriarchs of Grado and Aquileia and, after High Mass in St. Mark’s, was carried in the state barge to the Patriarchal Palace at San Silvestro, which was put at his disposal for as long as he cared to remain. Before his meeting with the emperor there was much work to be done; during the discussions at Anagni he had had no brief to speak for either Sicily or the League, both of which would have to reach agreement with the imperial plenipotentiaries if the promised kiss of peace was to have the significance he intended for it. So now, in the Patriarchal Chapel, a second round of negotiations began. Meanwhile the emperor, to whom by the terms of the reconciliation Venetian territory was still forbidden, held himself in readiness—first at Ravenna, and later, with Alexander’s permission, at Chioggia.

The League representatives in particular proved hard bargainers, and the talks dragged on for over two months; but on July 23 agreement was complete. At the pope’s request a Venetian flotilla left for Chioggia and brought Frederick to the Lido, whither a delegation of four cardinals sailed out to greet him. In their presence he solemnly abjured his antipope and made formal acknowledgment of Alexander; they in turn lifted his seventeen-year excommunication. Now at last he could be admitted into Venice. Early next morning the doge himself arrived at the Lido, where Frederick had spent the night, with an impressive retinue of nobles and clergy. He personally escorted the emperor to a barge specially decorated for the occasion, and together they were rowed in state to the Piazzetta.

In Venice itself the last preparations had been completed. Flags were flying, windows dressed. For much of that summer the city was crowded as never before, with its normal floating foreign population of travelers and merchants now swollen to many times its normal size by the greatest princes and prelates of Europe, each bent on outshining his rivals in the splendor of his retinue. One, the Archbishop of Cologne, brought with him a suite of 400 secretaries, chaplains, and attendants; the Patriarch of Aquileia boasted 300, as did the archbishops of Mainz and Magdeburg. Count Roger of Andria, the second envoy of the King of Sicily, had 330; Duke Leopold V of Austria, with a train of only 160, must have cut a sorry figure indeed.

Of the several eyewitness accounts that have survived, perhaps the most vivid is the
De Pace Veneta Relatio
, whose author seems to have been a German churchman:

At daybreak, the attendants of the Lord Pope hastened to the church of St. Mark the Evangelist and closed the central doors … and thither they brought much timber and deal planks and ladders, and so raised up a lofty and splendid throne.… Thither the pope arrived before the first hour of the day [6
A.M
.] and having heard Mass soon afterward ascended to the higher part of his throne to await the arrival of the emperor. There he sat, with his patriarchs, cardinals, archbishops, and bishops innumerable; on his right was the Patriarch of Venice, and on his left that of Aquileia.

And now there came a quarrel between the Archbishop of Milan and the Archbishop of Ravenna as to which should be seen to take precedence, and each strove to sit himself in the third place from that of the pope, on his right side. But the pope determined to put an end to their contention and, leaving his own exalted seat, descended the steps and placed himself below them. Thus was there no third place to sit in, and neither could sit on his right. Then about the third hour there arrived the doge’s barge, in which was the emperor, with the doge and cardinals who had been sent to him on the previous day, and he was led by seven archbishops and canons of the Church in solemn procession to the papal throne. And when he reached it, he threw off the red cloak he was wearing and prostrated himself before the pope and kissed first his feet and then his knees. But the pope rose and, taking the head of the emperor in both his hands, he embraced him and kissed him and made him sit at his right hand and at last spoke the words “Son of the Church, be welcome.” Then he took him by the hand and led him into the Basilica. And the bells rang, and the
Te Deum laudamus
was sung. When the ceremony was done, they both left the church together. The pope mounted his horse, and the emperor held his stirrup and then retired to the Doge’s Palace …

And on the same day the pope sent the emperor many gold and silver jars filled with food of various kinds. And he sent also a fatted calf, with the words “It is meet that we should make merry and be glad, for my son was dead and is alive again; and was lost and is found.”

The Treaty of Venice marked the climax and the culmination of Alexander’s pontificate. After all the sufferings and humiliations he had had to endure, through eighteen years of schism and ten of exile, and in the face of the unremitting hostility of one of the most redoubtable figures ever to wear the imperial crown, here at last was his reward. By now well over seventy, he had lived to see the emperor’s recognition not only of himself as legitimate pope but of all the temporal rights of the Papacy over the city of Rome—the same rights that Frederick had so arrogantly claimed for the empire at his coronation. It was a triumph, greater far than that which Pope Gregory had scored over Henry IV exactly a century before, but to the faithful who rejoiced with the old pope at Venice during those sweltering summer days it was also a tribute to the patience and tenacity with which he had steered the Church through one of the most troubled periods in her history.

And now that that period was over, those qualities remained with him. Neither on the day of his triumph nor at any other time during the emperor’s stay in Venice did Alexander show the slightest inclination to crow over his former enemy. One or two subsequent historians have perpetuated the legend of the pope placing his foot on Frederick’s neck, of the emperor muttering under his breath, “Not to you, but to St. Peter” and Alexander replying sharply, “To me
and
to St. Peter.” But this story is told by no contemporary writer and is inconsistent with all the firsthand evidence that has come down to us. The emperor, too, seems to have behaved impeccably. On the day following the great reconciliation he tried to carry courtesy even further: having again held the papal stirrup on leaving the basilica, he would have led Alexander’s horse all the way to the point of embarkation if the pope had not gently restrained him. Did he, one cannot help wondering, remember then the two days spent at Sutri when he had refused to perform the same service for Pope Hadrian, on the way to Rome for his coronation twenty-two years before?

But now Pope Alexander had one more task to perform. Early in 1179 he convoked the Third Lateran Council, the most important result of which was the decree governing papal elections. Until the mid–eleventh century popes tended to be appointed, sometimes by the people of Rome, sometimes by the emperor; but in 1059 it had been agreed that they should be the responsibility of the Church alone. Even then the elections tended to be hit-and-miss affairs, their rules never formally laid down, but now at last Alexander ordained that the right to elect a new pope was to be restricted to the College of Cardinals, with a two-thirds majority required before any candidate could be elected. Apart from the fact that since the pontificate of John Paul II the right to vote has been restricted to cardinals aged under eighty, virtually the same rules apply today.

Alexander had achieved peace with the empire; he had not, alas, achieved peace in Rome. The Roman Senate remained so hostile that in the summer of 1179 he left the city for the last time. He had never liked it, never trusted its people; to him, all through his life, it had been enemy country. And when, after his death at Civita Castellana on the last day of August 1181, his body was brought back to the Lateran, the Romans proved him right. Not four years before, they had welcomed him back from exile to the sound of trumpets; now, as his funeral cortege entered the city, the populace threw filth at the bier, scarcely suffering his body to be buried in the basilica.

ALEXANDER III WAS
one of the greatest of the medieval popes. Innocent III, who was elected to the Papacy in 1198, was another. In the seventeen years that separated them, no fewer than five men occupied the Throne of St. Peter; all were Italians; all had to contend, as Alexander had contended, with the two continuing nightmares of the twelfth-century Papacy: the Hohenstaufen emperors and the Senate and people of Rome. Lucius III (1181–1185), a Cistercian monk who had been singled out for promotion by St. Bernard, soon found the city too hot for him and retired to Segni. He had one rather inconsequential meeting with the emperor at Verona in 1184, during which he learned to his deep consternation that Frederick had betrothed his son Henry to Constance of Sicily, the daughter of Roger II and—her nephew King William II being childless—heir to the Sicilian throne. This meant that Sicily would effectively become part of the empire and that the Papacy would be virtually surrounded.

Lucius died while still at Verona and was buried in the Duomo. On the same day the cardinals unanimously elected Uberto Crivelli, Archbishop of Milan, to succeed him under the name of Urban III. Urban made no effort to live in Rome but continued in Verona, whence he reluctantly sent legates to represent him at the wedding of Henry and Constance in Milan Cathedral; he refused, however—as Lucius had done before him—to crown Henry co-emperor and was furious when Frederick characteristically had the ceremony performed by the Patriarch of Aquileia instead. Relations between pope and emperor rapidly deteriorated, to the point where Frederick ordered Henry to invade and occupy the Papal States; Urban was forced to capitulate, but the quarrel continued, and Frederick was spared a further sentence of excommunication only by the pope’s sudden death in October 1187 at Ferrara.

On hearing the news of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem following the disastrous Christian defeat at Hattin in Galilee, Urban had died of shock. His successor, Gregory VIII, not far short of eighty at the time of his election, lost no time in calling upon Christendom to take up arms for its recovery. Gregory could not in the nature of things have expected a long pontificate; in fact, it lasted just eight weeks. He was busy trying to negotiate a truce between Genoa and Pisa, both of whose fleets would be vitally necessary to the success of the coming Crusade, when he died at Pisa just a week before Christmas, leaving the planning of the expedition to his successor, Clement III. It was agreed that the Crusade would be led by Frederick Barbarossa; he would be joined by Richard I, Coeur-de-Lion, of England; Philip Augustus of France; and William II (“the Good”) of Sicily.
³
William in fact died, aged just thirty-six, in November 1189, before he could embark, but the other two kings met in Sicily to make the rest of the journey together.