Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (12 page)

The extinction of the central Lotharingian branch in 875 intensified the civil wars amongst the Carolingian elite. The deposition of Charles III ‘the Fat’ as German king in 887 unravelled the last reunification of East and West Francia and ended Carolingian rule in Italy, where control passed to the leading Carolingian-Lombard aristocrats, notably the dukes of Spoleto. These events underscored the importance of a viable Empire for the papacy, which was again caught between the Roman clans and regional strongmen like Guido of Spoleto, whom Pope Stephen V was obliged to crown emperor in 891. Stephen’s successor, Pope Formosus, tried to escape subordination by transferring the title in 896 to the East Frankish king Arnulf of Carinthia, only to be paralysed by a stroke and, afrer the 15-day reign of Boniface VI, replaced by Stephen VI. The new pope was obliged to recognize Guido’s son Lambert II as emperor, disinter Formosus’s recently buried corpse and put it on show trial. The corpse was duly condemned and thrown into the Tiber, but subsequent reports of miracles discredited Stephen VI, who in turn was himself strangled in August 897. His successor, Pope Romanus, ruled for only four months and was followed by Theodore II, whose pontificate of just 20 days nonetheless proved long enough to overturn the verdict and rebury the somewhat fragmenting Formosus.
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Some stability within the papacy returned once the Theophylact clan seized power in 901 and established a more durable relationship with the dukes of Spoleto, and then with the powerful lord of the southern Alps, Hugo of Arles, who did not receive the imperial title but nonetheless ruled as king of Italy from 926 to 947.
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Some of the Theophylact popes were no more sinful than other medieval pontiffs, but the state of the papacy was still shocking, especially to senior clergy north of the Alps, who were growing more confident with their own efforts to promote Christianity. A sentiment emerged that would later be labelled as ‘reform’. This lacked clear ideological coherence prior to the mid-eleventh century, but nonetheless it already argued that the church had to be freed from the ungodly and entrusted to better men. Prior to the later eleventh century, all reformers looked to the emperor to achieve this.

Ottonian Imperial Rule

The lack of a crowned emperor from 925 to 961 was largely due to the reluctance of the Theophylact popes to play their last card in their game against increasingly powerful kings of Italy. Hugo of Arles had been succeeded by Berengar II, margrave of Ivrea, who, by 959, had conquered Spoleto and was threatening Rome as the Lombards had done two centuries before. The best chance of relief appeared to be the Ottonians, who followed the Carolingians in eastern Francia from 919. Otto I had already made two botched attempts to assert authority in northern Italy between 951 and 952. He spent the next decade consolidating his hold over Germany, whilst carefully cultivating contact with bishops fleeing the troubles in Italy. Otto was determined to present himself as liberator, not conqueror, and thus worthy to be crowned emperor.
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His great victory over the heathen Magyars at Lechfeld in 955 convinced many contemporaries, including Pope John XII, that Otto was divinely favoured. Despite being unable to capture Berengar, Otto’s invasion of northern Italy succeeded in 961 and he was crowned emperor on 2 February 962.
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Otto’s coronation did not ‘refound’ the Empire, nor create a new empire, since a sense of the original Carolingian realm had persisted and there had been plenty of individual emperors after Charlemagne. Nonetheless, his coronation was a significant event and clearly intended to put papal-imperial relations on a new, improved footing. To this end, Otto issued his own charter (the
Ottonianum
), confirming the ‘donations’ of Pippin and Charlemagne of extensive lands in central Italy to sustain the pope. As with his predecessors, Otto envisaged these lands remaining under his suzerainty. He likewise bound himself to protect the pope, to whom he transferred large amounts of gold and silver, receiving numerous holy relics in return for his programme of Christianization north of the Alps.
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Otto’s ‘Roman expedition’ (
Romzug
) lasted three years and already displayed all the features shaping subsequent imperial interventions in medieval Italy. The convergence of interests facilitating Otto’s coronation was insufficiently stable for prolonged papal-imperial collaboration. Emperors wanted popes to possess sufficient personal integrity not to demean the imperial honour they conferred, but otherwise to be pliant executors of the emperor’s will. In Otto’s case, this included the
controversial elevation of Magdeburg to an archbishopric (see
p. 85
). Like his successors, Pope John XII wanted a protector, not a master, and he rebelled against the ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ of Ottonian emperorship by conspiring with Berengar and the Magyars in 963.
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The next moves established the template for subsequent emperors towards disobedient pontiffs. Otto returned to Rome, while John fled to Tivoli. After a brief exchange of letters failed to restore harmony, Otto convened a synod in St Peter’s, which deposed John on the grounds of murder, incest and apostasy – a charge sheet sufficiently grievous to justify the first ever deposition of a pope, and one that became standard for such actions in the future. Otto confirmed Lothar I’s papal constitution of 824, allowing the Roman clergy a fairly free choice in electing Leo VIII as replacement in December 963.

Deposition was the easy part. As Otto and his successors soon discovered, it was extremely hard to maintain their own pope without firm local support, which, for the next century or so, meant the backing of the Roman clans, Italian lords and bishops. John was still at large, creating a papal schism that threatened the integrity and legitimacy of the church. The Romans rebelled as soon as Otto left their city in January 964, allowing John to return and hold his own synod to depose his rival. Leo was restored by force later that month, expelling John, who died in May – allegedly in the arms of a married woman, another story typical of the mudslinging during later papal schisms. What followed merely underscored the intractability of the problem. The Romans elected Benedict V as their own anti-pope. Enforcement of Leo VIII was now a matter of imperial prestige. Otto besieged Rome until the starving inhabitants handed over the unfortunate Benedict, who was demoted and packed off as a missionary to Hamburg. Otto sent two bishops to oversee a new election following Leo’s death in March 965, but the successful candidate was in turn expelled by another Roman revolt nine months later. The emperor was obliged to return personally, crushing Roman opposition in December 966. The socially inferior were executed, while the rich were exiled. Those who had died in the meantime were disinterred and their bones scattered in what was clearly intended as exemplary punishment.
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Subsequent opposition drew an equally harsh response. The leader of the Crescenti clan was beheaded and hung by his feet along with 12 supporters in 998. Simultaneously, anti-pope John XVI was blinded,
mutilated and forced to ride through Rome seated backwards on a donkey. A riot after Henry II’s coronation in Pavia as king of Italy in 1002 ended in a massacre by imperial troops in which the city burned down. Further rioting after the imperial coronation of 1027 prompted Conrad II to force the Romans to walk barefoot, though this time they were spared execution. This ‘German fury’ (
furor teutonicus
) reflected general attitudes to justice in the Empire, which permitted harsh punishment of those who ignored opportunities to negotiate, or who rebelled having been previously pardoned.
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It also betrayed the basic strategic weakness of the imperial presence in Italy throughout the Middle Ages. Rome was not a pleasant billet for an imperial army. The nearby pestilent marshes made their presence felt each summer through malaria epidemics. That of 964 killed the archbishop of Trier, the duke of Lorraine and a sizeable part of Otto’s army. Campaigns in southern Italy often encountered the same problem: malaria killed both Otto II (983) and Otto III (1002), while Conrad II lost his wife and most of his troops to disease in 1038. Losses were hard to take, because Ottonian and Salian armies were quite small (see
pp. 321–2
). While they did have some capacity for laying sieges, Italy was a land of numerous, well-fortified cities. Violent shock and awe appeared a quick fix to these problems, but as later regimes have discovered, it generally alienated local support and discredited those who used it.

The Empire and Church Reform

Conflict within Rome produced another schism with three rival popes after 1044, including the pious but naive Gregory VI, who had bought his title. Concerned this would tarnish his imperial office, Henry III deposed all three at the Synod of Sutri in December 1046 and appointed Suitger, bishop of Bamberg, as Pope Clement II. This initiated a succession of four popes selected from loyal incumbents of German bishoprics lasting until 1057, and was most likely intended simply to restore the papacy as a reliable partner rather than subordinate it directly as part of the imperial church.
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Imperial intervention came precisely when the papacy faced new challenges emerging from the anxieties produced by rapid population growth and economic change.
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Many believed the church was losing its way amidst the new materialism, fuelling a broader reform agenda
encapsulated by the slogan ‘freedom of the church’ (
libertas ecclesiae
). Better standards were demanded of the clergy, with key papal advisors becoming more critical of long-standing issues around the mid-eleventh century. Gregory VI’s deposition focused attention on the problem of simony, the purchasing of ecclesiastical office, named after Simon Magus, who had tried to buy salvation from the Apostles. This was broadened into a generalized condemnation of the sale of spiritual office as well as favours. A second bugbear was nikolaitism, or clerical concubinage, associated with Nikolaos, a member of the early church who had defended elements of pagan practice. Both issues were part of a general renunciation of earthly life, which expected all clergy to live like monks and renounce worldly activities. By 1100, reformers also expected them to look different from laity by cutting their hair as a tonsure. Such demands were in fact part of a general reconceptualization of the social order along functional lines, with each group allotted a task to perform for the benefit of all.

A parallel and partially contradictory element emerged with the demand for greater spirituality among the laity too. This had a common root in the yearning of individuals for a simpler life free of worldly burdens. The most obvious manifestation was a new wave of monasticism particularly associated with Gorze in Lorraine and Cluny in the French part of Burgundy. The number of Cluniac houses increased fivefold across the eleventh century. A key element in the new monasticism was the renunciation of local control in favour of placing each religious house under the direct – but largely nominal – control of the pope. The movement spread to Italy where it was known as the Fruttuaria, and to Germany through the influential abbey of Hirsau where it was adopted by over two hundred monasteries.
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Reformed monasticism largely catered to elite interests, and its connections to wider lay piety were complex and not always amicable, but its coincidence with a broader yearning for a simpler, more Christian life added to the general sense of change.
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It was no coincidence that reform emerged in Lorraine and Burgundy where royal rule was relatively weak. Both Gorze and Cluny benefited from strong local lordly patronage, a factor exposing one of the main contradictions of reform. The new asceticism improved the clergy’s social prestige, enhancing the attractions of monasteries as convenient accommodation for the unmarried children of lords. Founding and
promoting churches was a good way to extend local influence and earn spiritual credit. Lords were happy for the monks to escape the jurisdiction of local bishops by placing their house under papal authority, because the pope generally entrusted them, as the primary donors, with supervisory and protectorate rights.
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Asceticism appealed also to the growing urban population, most of which was still under the jurisdiction of bishops as lords of cathedral towns. Attacks on simony and concubinage lent moral force to political demands for civic autonomy. Popular movements called
Patarenes
developed in Milan and Cremona during the 1030s, calling for sworn associations of the godly to provide a more moral and autonomous government.

The reformers’ demands were not immediately anti-imperial. Henry II had already held a synod at Pavia in 1024 that wrote most of the moral agenda into imperial law, including bans on clerical marriage, concubinage and some forms of simony. He personally forced Fulda abbey to observe Gorze rules, while other members of the imperial family promoted the new monasticism into the 1070s. Imperial support no doubt owed much to personal conviction and to the general mission to promote Christianity. The reform agenda served concrete, political goals too, since improved clerical discipline also promoted better management of the huge properties that emperors had given the church, which in turn enabled abbots and bishops to support the imperial household and military campaigns.
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Likewise,
libertas ecclesiae
could improve the emperor’s access to these resources by liberating them from local lordly influence.

Two developments conspired to pit pope against emperor over the reform agenda. First, the Salians were victims of their own success, since their rehabilitation of the papacy between 1046 and 1056 made it an agent rather than object of reform. Leo IX held at least 12 synods on his own initiative across Italy, France and Germany between 1049 and 1053, demonstrating active and credible leadership with decrees against simony and nikolaitism. Papal action was supported by the parallel development of canon law, which saw more systematic efforts to elaborate rules governing church management based on Scripture, the writings of the church fathers and the papal registers. Partial codification of the canons (i.e. decisions) and other papal decrees helped remove some of the ambiguities and gave greater credibility to papal claims to direct the church.
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The pope asserted himself as the
ultimate judge on doctrine and ritual, demanding that all true Christians share his opinions. The desire for clarity and uniformity opened a rift with Byzantium, which widened into the separation of the Latin and Orthodox churches after 1054. Latin definitively displaced vernacular languages in communicating Christianity in the west, while the role of priests was enhanced as they became the sole official intercessors between the laity and God. By the early twelfth century, the papacy wrested control over canonization from bishops and local synods, and within another century it was taking the initiative in selecting and approving candidates for sainthood.
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