Absolute Monarchs (7 page)

This rivalry was also responsible for the most indelible stain on the pope’s reputation. In November 602 the reign of the Emperor Maurice came to an abrupt and premature end. His army, deployed against the barbarian Avars and Slavs in the Balkans and looking forward to returning for the winter to Constantinople, was suddenly ordered to sit it out in the inhospitable lands beyond the Danube. Rather than endure the intense cold and discomfort under canvas, living as best they could off the local populations and in constant danger from marauding barbarian clans, the soldiers mutinied, raising as their leader one of their own centurions, a brutal and bloodthirsty monster named Phocas. Maurice and his five sons, the eldest of whom was the pope’s godson, were all murdered; Constantina and their three daughters were dispatched to a nunnery; and Phocas was crowned emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. Such an atrocity should have led to the most violent condemnation of which Gregory was capable; almost unbelievably—and bowing, presumably, to the inevitable—he sent the new emperor a message of fulsome congratulation and supported him for the remaining two years of his life. Had he lived to witness the reign of terror that would follow for another six, the executions and the judicial murders, the blindings and the mutilations, the tortures and the burnings alive, until in 610 Phocas himself was seized and torn to pieces, one can only hope that he would have changed his mind.

IN NORTHERN AND
far western Europe the prospects for extending Christendom seemed a good deal more promising than in the south. Some of the former Roman provinces, now ruled by barbarian kings mostly of Frankish origin, were already nominally Christian, though probably of the Arian persuasion; others were still pagan. All were in need of guidance if they were to be brought into the Catholic fold. At the beginning of Gregory’s pontificate the principal regions to be taken in hand seemed to be Visigothic Spain, Frankish Gaul, and Anglo-Saxon Britain.

The challenge of Visigothic Spain solved itself. Around the turn of the century its Arian King Recared, encouraged by the pope’s friend Leander, Bishop of Seville, announced his conversion to Catholicism. The bulk of the population—being by origin Roman provincials—were Catholic already; now the remaining Arian nobles and bishops followed their monarch’s lead. As a sign of his pleasure (and perhaps relief) at the news, Gregory made the king a present of two relics of extreme holiness: a key made from the chains of St. Peter and a crucifix containing within it a fragment of the True Cross together with a few hairs from the severed head of St. John the Baptist.

The Kingdom—or, more accurately, the kingdoms—of the Franks extended over modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, northwest Germany, and Switzerland. They were a Germanic people, theoretically Christian, their King Clovis I having been baptized in 499; but with them the challenge was not Arianism: it was chaos, with a dozen petty states and kingdoms all warring and intriguing against one another, the Church hierarchy, most of whose members had bought their highly profitable offices, far gone in depravity. (When King Childebert I, who ruled from 511 to 558, having murdered his nephews to acquire their lands, visited Soissons, the bishop was so drunk that he was denied admission to his own city.)

In Gregory’s attempts to restore a degree of order, he had but one ally, though not perhaps an entirely satisfactory one: Queen Brunhilde of Austrasia, daughter of King Athanagild of Visigothic Spain, who had converted from Arianism on her marriage to Sigebert I.
¹
In 575 Sigebert himself was assassinated, and Brunhilde was briefly imprisoned at Rouen; on her release she joined her young son Childebert II in his capital at Metz and for the next thirty years struggled to establish a united Catholic kingdom, maintaining a long and lively correspondence with the pope, who gave her all the support he could. Alas, they failed. Her objectives may have been praiseworthy, but her methods—which Gregory did his best to overlook—were no less violent than those of the rest of her family, and in 613, unable to bear her a moment longer, the Austrasian nobles seized her, tortured her for three days, tied her onto the back of a camel, paraded her for the mockery of the army, and finally dragged her to death at a horse’s tail.

In Britain, the problem was somewhat different. The first missionaries had probably arrived during the third century—British bishops had been present at the Council of Arles as early as 314—but with the coming of the largely pagan Anglo-Saxons the Christians had been driven to the farthest west and the religion had suffered a temporary eclipse. Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Scotland had done something to reverse the trend, but their churches had always plowed their own furrow. Celtic monasticism in particular, tending toward the Orthodox model, had little in common with that of the West; the Celts also had their own system of calculating the date of Easter, which they celebrated on a different day. It remained a fact that no previous pope had given serious thought to missionary work beyond the imperial frontier, and Gregory himself had countless problems nearer home. What is interesting is the importance he attached to that remote island—which he himself regularly described as lying at the end of the universe—and his determination not only that the Christian word should be spread but that the Christians already existing there should be brought under papal control and properly aligned with the ideas and practices of Rome.

All British children are—or used to be—brought up on the story, told by the Venerable Bede, of one of history’s first (and worst) puns: of how, some years before, Gregory had been wandering through the Roman market and, noticing some beautiful blond boys being offered for sale as slaves, asked from which country they had come. He was told that they came from the island of Britain and were called Angles. “Right,” said he, “for they have an angelic face, and it is meet that such should be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven.”
²
In 595 we find him writing to his rector in Gaul with instructions to recruit young English slave boys to be trained as monks, whom he may well have seen as potential interpreters; and in the year following he dispatched a mission of about forty monks to England under the leadership of Augustine, the prior of St. Andrew’s Monastery in Rome, the same house in which he himself had been a brother. Warned, on his arrival in southern Gaul, of the dire perils that awaited him among the barbarian English, Augustine turned back to Rome with the suggestion that the mission be abandoned, but Gregory put new heart into him, gave him letters of recommendation, and set him back on the road.

Still, presumably, in a state of some trepidation, Augustine and his monks finally landed on the Kentish coast in the spring of 597. They were politely received by King Ethelbert of Kent, at that time the chief ruler in the south of England; he is said by Bede to have extended his power to all England south of the Humber. His wife, Bertha, daughter of the Frankish King Charibert I and niece of Queen Brunhilde, was already a Christian and naturally gave Augustine her full support. Her husband at first remained cautious. “I see,” he said to Augustine,

that you believe what you say, or you would not have come all this way to say it. But you must not expect me immediately to renounce the customs which I and the English have observed from one generation to another. So go on talking: no one will interfere with you, and, if you convince us, of course it will follow that we will accept your message.

A few months later, however, Ethelbert, together with his court and the majority of his subjects, accepted baptism. He thus became the first Christian English king—and a saint to boot.
³
Augustine, meanwhile, established a monastery at Canterbury, which he dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul—though it was later to become St. Augustine’s—and which was almost certainly the earliest Benedictine foundation outside Italy. Canterbury in turn became the headquarters of Christianity in England, as it remains today. Pope Gregory was delighted. “By the shining miracles of his preachers,” he declared,

God has brought even the ends of the Earth to the faith. He has linked in one confession the limits of East and West. Behold, the tongue of Britain, which could formerly utter only barbaric sounds, has lately learned to make the Hebrew Alleluia resound in God’s praise.

Gregory was an administrator of genius, an organizer, and a missionary; he was not, and never could be, an abstract thinker or theologian, or even a politician. His faith was surprisingly simple: he was largely responsible for the growing belief in miracles and prophecies, as well as for the widespread veneration of saints and relics. Pious but practical, he intended the Patrimony of Peter to be a huge charitable fund, at the immediate disposal of the Church for the benefit of the poor—every day twelve paupers shared his table. In fact, by his work of consolidation, he unknowingly laid the foundations of what was later to be the Papal State, ensuring the temporal power of his successors which was to endure for the next thirteen centuries. Had he ever realized this, it would have horrified him. For all his determination to uphold the ecclesiastical supremacy of the papal throne, he had no desire for worldly glory; it was enough for him to be, as he constantly maintained,
servus servorum Dei
, the Servant of the Servants of God.

As the greatest pope of the early Middle Ages, Gregory’s most important achievement was to implant ineradicably in men’s minds the idea that the Roman Catholic Church was the most important institution in the world and that the Papacy was the supreme authority within it. He made important changes in the liturgy and showed a particular interest in church music: traditional plainsong is commonly known today as “Gregorian chant”—even though in his time it remained still largely undeveloped—and the Roman Schola Cantorum, probably the first body of trained singers to take over from the clergy and congregation and as such the ancestor of the modern cathedral choir school, was his personal creation. He was also a compulsive writer. In the first year of his papacy he produced a book,
Liber Regulae Pastoralis
, setting out directives for the pastoral life of a bishop, whom he saw primarily as a curator of souls. It was astonishingly widely read by the standards of the time and was later to be translated by King Alfred the Great. Then there were the
Dialogues
, dealing with the lives and miracles of Italian saints—including, of course, Benedict—a series of sermons on the Gospels, and a critical essay on the Book of Job. Finally there are nearly a thousand letters, probably the principal source of what we know of Gregory’s life and work. All these writings were, in the Middle Ages, to earn him a place—together with St. Ambrose, St. Augustine (of Hippo, not Canterbury), and St. Jerome—among the four original “Doctors of the Church.”

Of the four, he was the latest and the last, and the fact is not surprising, because the ancient world was on the verge of collapse. In Rome, the barbarians had done their worst. During their siege in 537 the Goths had cut the aqueducts, dealing the city a blow from which it was not to recover for a thousand years. The history of the aqueducts stretched almost as far back into the past: as early as 312
B.C
. the Romans, no longer prepared to make do with the murky insufficiency of the Tiber, built the first of those magnificent conduits; over the eight centuries that followed they were to construct ten more, the better to supply not only their domestic needs but the innumerable fountains and public baths for which the city was famous. Those aqueducts provided something else as well: the hydraulic power which drove, among much else, the mills on which the people depended for their bread. Their destruction was followed by famine and disease, together with a disastrous decline in popular morale.
⁴

Amid the general
dégringolade
, the figure of Gregory the Great shone out like a beacon. He stood for integrity, for order, and for the Christian faith, which alone offered hope for a better and happier world. At heart, nevertheless, he remained a humble monk, carrying on the traditions of his hero, St. Benedict, in every way he could. It was perhaps because of this humility—for no man was ever less spoiled by power—that he was genuinely loved, so much so that he was hardly in his grave before his people demanded that he should immediately be made a saint. The title of “the Great” came later; both were abundantly deserved.

1.
It was somehow typical of her time that her sister Galswintha, who had married Sigebert’s half brother Chilperic I, King of the Western Franks, was subsequently murdered by her husband at the instigation of his mistress.

2.
Bede,
Ecclesiastical History of England
, II, i. The hoary old quotation
“Non Angli sed angeli,”
despite being in Latin, is, alas, spurious. Still according to Bede, Gregory followed up this first pun with two more even worse ones, which the reader will be spared.

3.
Statues of Ethelbert and Bertha were unveiled on Lady Wootton’s Green in Canterbury in 2006.

4.
One pilgrim during the Dark Ages, a draper from Douai, was informed that the aqueducts “were formerly used to bring oil, wine, and water from Naples.”

CHAPTER V

Leo III and Charlemagne

(795–861)

E
arly in the seventh century, a new people and a new faith appeared on the world stage. Until the third decade of that century, the land of Arabia was terra incognita to the Christian world. But in September 622 the Prophet Mohammed had fled from the hostile city of Mecca to friendly Medina: this was the
hegira
, the event which marked the beginning of the Muslim era. Just eleven years later, his followers burst out of Arabia. The following year, an Arab army defeated the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius on the banks of the Yarmuk River; two years later still, they took Damascus; after five, Jerusalem; after eight, they controlled all Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Within twenty years, the whole Persian Empire as far as the Oxus River had fallen to the Arab sword; within thirty, Afghanistan and most of the Punjab. Then the Muslims turned their attention to the West. Their progress across North Africa was somewhat slower, but by the end of the century they had reached the Atlantic, and by 732—still less than a century after their eruption from their desert homeland—they had (according to tradition) made their way over the Pyrenees as far as Tours. There, only 150 miles from Paris, they were stopped at last by the Frankish leader Charles Martel.

For Christendom, the effect was cataclysmic. Three of the five historic patriarchates—Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—engulfed in the Muslim tide, now existed in little more than name; all the great churches of North Africa disappeared, save only the Copts of Egypt, who managed to retain a tenuous foothold. The lands which had seen the origins of Christianity were all lost, never to be properly recovered. The Eastern Empire was hideously maimed. The political focus of necessity now shifted north and west. Perhaps, as the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne suggested, it was Mohammed who made Charlemagne possible.

IN ITALY, ALL
through the second half of the seventh century and the first half of the eighth, we see two opposing tendencies: on the one hand, a steady weakening of political and religious links with the Byzantine Empire; on the other, an equally steady increase in the power of the Lombards. In 653 Pope Martin I, though old and ill, was arrested on trumped-up charges and taken to Constantinople, where he was publicly stripped of his vestments, dragged in chains through the city, flogged, and deported to the Crimea, dying there soon afterward; and matters came to a head in 726, when the Emperor (not the Pope) Leo III published his fateful edict imposing iconoclasm—a doctrine which, calling as it did for the wholesale destruction of all holy images, was received with horror in the West and caused revolts throughout Byzantine Italy. In retaliation, the emperor confiscated the annual incomes of the churches of Sicily and Calabria, transferring their bishoprics, together with a considerable number of others in the Balkan Peninsula, from the see of Rome to that of Constantinople. It was the continuation of the long, slow process of estrangement which would end, three hundred years later, in schism.

The Lombards, meanwhile, were steadily strengthening their hold. Under the greatest of their kings, Liutprand, they twice—successfully—laid siege to Rome. On the first occasion, in 729, Pope Gregory II—at last a Roman-born pope after a long succession of Greeks—confronted Liutprand, who abandoned the siege, feeling guilty enough to leave his arms and armor in St. Peter’s as a votive offering; but on the second, ten years later, he and his men were in a very different mood. This time, rather than enriching the basilica, they looted it. Gregory’s successor, Gregory III, powerless to stop them, looked about desperately for a new ally; and found him—or thought he had—beyond the Alps in Gaul, in the person of Charles Martel.

Charles was not himself a monarch. Technically, he was mayor of the palace at the court of the Merovingian king; but the Merovingians were nonentities, and it was in the hands of the mayor that the power effectively rested. Charles had already earned fame throughout Europe as the first man to check the advance of the Muslim army; if he could halt the Saracens, might he not do the same to the Lombards?

Perhaps; but he would not be hurried. He had his hands full in Gaul, and he remained there until his death. In 751, however, his son Pepin—the Short, as he was always called—managed to convince Pope Zachary that the holder of the power should also be wearer of the crown. Thus, at the hands of the English Archbishop Boniface, Pepin was crowned at Soissons, the feckless King Childeric III being packed off to end his days in a monastery. Henceforth Pepin was deeply in the pope’s debt: there was a good chance that any future appeal for aid might have a more sympathetic reception. In any case, the coronation came not a moment too soon; for in that very same year Ravenna was finally captured by the Lombard King Aistulf, and the Byzantine Empire’s final foothold in North Italy was lost forever.

Zachary, the last of a long line of Greek popes,
¹
died the following year. His eleven-year pontificate had not been easy. He had worked hard to save papal-imperial relations from a complete breakdown—an objective to which his translation of Gregory the Great’s
Dialogues
into Greek may or may not have contributed—but the fall of Ravenna had marked a further degree of rupture, and Aistulf was now busy mopping up what was left of Byzantine power in north and central Italy. For the Papacy the situation was now desperate, and it was hardly surprising that a Roman aristocrat, Stephen II—rather than yet another Greek—was chosen as Zachary’s successor.
²

Pope Stephen lost no time in traveling personally to Pepin’s court at Ponthion, near Châlons-sur-Marne, where he arrived in the first days of 754. On January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, he anointed the king, together with his wife and two sons, Charles and Carloman, awarding to all three the title he had just invented: Patrician of the Romans. Meetings between king and pope continued sporadically over the next six months, and were a triumphant success. Pepin willingly undertook the role of defender of the Papacy, promising to recover on behalf of the pope all the Italian cities and territories which the Lombards had captured from the empire; and in two major expeditions, in 754 and again in 756, he proved as good as his word, bringing King Aistulf to his knees, putting a client-king, Desiderius, on the Lombard throne, and marrying his daughter. After the second campaign he proclaimed the pope sole ruler of the lands formerly constituting the imperial exarchate, snaking across central Italy to embrace Ravenna, Perugia, and Rome itself.

His authority for this so-called Donation of Pepin is, to say the least, doubtful; and in Constantinople the Emperor Constantine V predictably lodged a furious protest. It was at one time suggested that Pepin might have based his action on the so-called Donation of Constantine,
³
but recent evidence suggests that this shameless fabrication was not concocted for another half century. Pepin himself justified it by claiming that his intervention had been for the love of St. Peter and that it was therefore to St. Peter that the conquered lands would belong. It remains true that the Papal States, which he thus brought into being, however shaky their legal foundation, would endure for over eleven centuries.

PEPIN DIED IN
768, leaving his kingdom, in accordance with the old Frankish custom, to be divided between his two sons, Charles and Carloman; but Carloman’s sudden death in 771 enabled Charles, ignoring the rights of his young nephews, to make himself sole ruler. Only two months later a tough-minded Roman aristocrat assumed the papal throne under the name of Hadrian I. He and Charles together continued the work which had been begun by Pope Stephen and Pepin, further cementing relations between the Frankish kingdom and the Papacy, and when, in 773, the Lombard client-king Desiderius forgot his place to the point where he began besieging Rome, Hadrian immediately turned to Charles for help. The Patrician of the Romans lost no time. He marched into Italy, seized the Lombard capital at Pavia, packed Desiderius off to a monastery, and—apart from adding “King of the Lombards” to his own steadily growing list of titles—abolished the Lombard Kingdom once and for all. Then, at Easter, 774, he decided to come to Rome.

The decision took Pope Hadrian by surprise; but he rose magnificently to the occasion, greeting his royal guest on the steps of St. Peter’s—which Charles is said to have climbed on his knees—and showing him every honor. In return Charles reconfirmed his father’s Donation, adding considerably to the extent of the territory concerned, and expressed his intention of imposing unity and uniformity, according to the Roman model, on all the churches within his dominions. Returning to Germany he next subdued the heathen Saxons, whom he converted en masse to Christianity before going on to annex the already Christian Bavaria. An invasion of Spain was less successful—though it provided the inspiration for the first great epic ballad of western Europe, the
Chanson de Roland
—but Charles’s subsequent campaign against the Avars in Hungary and upper Austria resulted in the destruction of their kingdom as an independent state and its incorporation in turn within his own frontiers. Thus, in little more than a generation, he had raised the Kingdom of the Franks from just one of the many semitribal European states to a single political unit of vast extent, unparalleled since the days of imperial Rome.

And he had done so, for most of the time at least, with the enthusiastic support of the Papacy. It was nearly half a century since Pope Stephen had struggled across the Alps to seek help from Pepin, an appeal which might more properly have been addressed to the Byzantine emperor and probably would have been if the Emperor Constantine V could only have spared a few moments from his obsession with iconoclasm to turn his attention to Italy. Pepin and Charles, in effectively eliminating the Lombard Kingdom, had succeeded where Byzantium had failed; and Byzantium was to pay dearly for its failure.

Pope and patricians did not, however, always see eye to eye, and a particular bone of contention was, rather surprisingly, iconoclasm. In 787, in an attempt to settle the issue, the Empress Irene—she was in fact the widow of the Emperor Leo IV, acting as regent for her seventeen-year-old-son—summoned the Seventh Ecumenical Council, to be held (like the first) at Nicaea. Hadrian duly dispatched his legates, carrying a long and closely argued defense of holy images, and the Council most gratifyingly declared in his favor. Charles, however, objected. This sudden rapprochement between Rome and Constantinople was not at all to his liking. Why, he demanded, had
he
not also been invited to send representatives to Nicaea? In what looks suspiciously like a fit of pique, he ordered his theologians to produce a defense of iconoclasm in the shape of what were called the
Libri Carolini;
and for a few years his relations with Pope Hadrian were seriously strained. But the cloud eventually passed. A mistake was fortunately discovered in the Latin version of the Council’s findings—“veneration” had been mistranslated as “adoration”—and by the time of Hadrian’s death on Christmas Day, 795, the two were once more on excellent terms.

It was just as well that they were, for the climax to the story was now rapidly approaching. The new Pope Leo III—not, of course, to be confused with the Byzantine emperor of the same name—could boast neither the birth nor the breeding of his predecessor. There is a theory that he may even have been of Arab stock. From the moment of his elevation he was the victim of incessant intrigue on the part of Hadrian’s family and friends, who had expected the papal throne to pass to one of themselves and were consequently determined to remove him. On April 25, 799, a group led by the late pope’s nephew actually attacked Leo in the course of a solemn procession from the Lateran to the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. They failed in their original intention of blinding him and cutting out his tongue—mutilations which would have obliged him to resign the Papacy—but they left him unconscious in the street. Only by the greatest good fortune was he rescued by friends and removed for safety to Charles’s court at Paderborn. Under the protection of Frankish agents he returned to Rome in November, only to find himself facing a number of serious charges leveled by his enemies, including simony, perjury, and adultery.

Whether or not the pope was guilty of these charges was almost immaterial, though Charles certainly had his suspicions. There was another question, infinitely more important: by whom could he possibly be tried? Who, after all, was qualified to pass judgment on the Vicar of Christ? In normal circumstances the answer given by some would have been the emperor at Constantinople, but the imperial throne was at that time occupied by Irene. That Irene was notorious for having blinded and murdered her own son was, in the minds of both Leo and Charles, also immaterial; it was enough that she was a woman. The female sex was known to be incapable of governing and by the old Salic tradition was debarred from even attempting to do so. As far as Western Europe was concerned, the Throne of the Emperors was vacant; Irene’s claim to it was merely an additional proof, if any were needed, of the degradation into which the so-called Roman Empire had fallen.