Millenium (37 page)

For as the bishops entered the church where the council was to be held, and bowed before the altar, they found themselves confronted by an awful and intimidating sight. There, brooding over the entire scene, was a casket containing the bones of Reims' patron saint. Summoned to stand and swear on the relics that they had not paid for their positions, most of the bishops opted to remain in their seats and squirm in mortified silence. When one archbishop did rise and try to defend a colleague, he found himself struck miraculously dumb by the power of the outraged saint. His client fled in disgrace that same night; and, from that moment on, a succession of simonist bishops were obliged to stammer out their confessions and grovel for mercy. Indeed only one man emerged from the proceedings with his reputation truly burnished. Odilo, after more than half a century as the head of Christendom's most celebrated monastery, had finally died at the beginning of the year; and all eyes were duly fixed upon his successor. How fortunate it was, then, that not so much as a hint of impropriety had attached itself to the election of Hugh of Semur. Making his public confession before the Pope, the new abbot of Cluny forthrightly denied any wrongdoing. 'The flesh was willing,' he explained, 'but mind and reason revolted.'
⁷⁶
A statement that was, in its perfect fusion of worldliness and simplicity, almost worthy of Leo himself.

Yet if Abbot Hugh's backing for the cause of reform was welcome, it hardly came as a great surprise. What did astound the papal party, astound and delight it, was the seething, raucous mass of supporters who had flocked to Reims from miles around, immense crowds of the faithful who kept themselves and the Holy Father awake all night by singing and shouting his name, and then, in the morning, by jeering the unfortunate simonists as they slunk through the streets to con­fession. The millennium of the Passion had passed, and the New Jerusalem had not arrived; but still, among the poor and the trampled, there remained an undimmed yearning for a peace of God. Christ might have been delayed, but there before them was the Pope, the Vicar of St Peter himself, no longer a vague abstraction but a man of flesh and blood — and demanding changes of the priesthood that the oppressed were only too desperate to see. A Church no longer in hock to grasping earthly lords - what would this provide the wretched if not a true sanctuary? No wonder, then, that Leo's tour of the lands of the North, 'unprecedented in our time', should have served to gener­ate 'such jubilation and applause'.
⁷⁷
It went without saying that Leo himself, the cousin of Caesar, had not the slightest intention of plac­ing himself at the head of a band of peasants. Although events at Reims certainly were exhilarating, they also served as a warning to the Pope and his advisers that excitement might easily get out of hand. More than once the crowds had indulged themselves with a riot. Psalms and screams had intermingled in the streets. Nevertheless, the discovery that they had the full force of popular opinion behind them was one that the reformers would never forget. It lent them reassur­ance, and confidence, and even greater ambition.

Certainly, as Leo trailed his triumphant way back to Italy, it was evi­dent to his exultant supporters that a pope might indeed serve to make the weather far beyond the limits of Rome. Some, however, drew conclusions that were even more soaring. "The royal priesthood of the holy Roman see constitutes an empire both heavenly and earthly.'
⁷⁸
This vaunting claim was made by a man renowned, not for excitability but rather for his emotionless, indeed chilly, powers of rea­soning. Humbert of Moyenmoutier was a monk from the same region of Lorraine in which Leo had served as a bishop, and the two men had long been confidants. Summoned to accompany the Pope to the Lateran, the haughty and brilliant Humbert had soon emerged as his effective number two. Boldly, he set about pushing Leo's claims to leadership of the Church to ever more potent extremes. Stitching together musty precedents with a lawyerly dexterity, the Donation of Constantine not least, Humbert found himself able to demonstrate with great conviction a most momentous conclusion: that the papacy had an ancient entitlement to the rule of the entire Christian world. Yet even that was not the limit of where his logic led him. 'For such is the reverence among Christians for the holder of the apostolic office of Rome,' Humbert coolly insisted, 'that they prefer to receive the holy commandments and the traditions of their faith from the mouth of the head of the Church rather than from the holy Scriptures or the writings of the Fathers.'
⁷⁹
Here was justification, in effect, not merely for papal weight-throwing, but for permanent revolution.

Quite what this might mean in practical terms was a different matter. There was a hint, however, to be glimpsed in Humbert's pro­motion, in 1050, to a new post: that of cardinal bishop. While this title was venerable, dating back almost to the time of Constantine, the cardinalate itself had always played an essentially ceremonial role in the life of the Roman Church: serving the Pope as little more than a gilded dumping ground for superannuated aristocrats. Now, however, under the radical new management style introduced to the Lateran by Leo, all that began to change. Indeed, remarkably, within the space of only a few hectic years, he would succeed in transforming the college of cardinals into a veritable powerhouse of administrative talent manned, not by decrepit locals, but by prominent reformers drawn from far beyond the limits of Rome. Leo, as practical as he was visionary, had never been so naive as to imagine that his ambitions for the Christian people could be achieved merely at the prompting of his own exhor­tations. Accordingly, then, he looked to his ministers to provide him with what he himself, as an imperial bishop, had once provided Henry III: government. Humbert and his colleagues duly set to work, sweep­ing away cobwebs from the creaking administrative machinery of the Lateran, dusting down ancient books of law that might serve the papal purpose and posting legates with imperious missives across the length and breadth of Christendom. The duties that might be paid, in short, less to a bishop than to a Caesar.

Except, of course, that there were limits to what even a servant as wily and efficient as Humbert could achieve. Startling although the sudden starburst of papal prestige appeared to dazzled Christians, it remained, to a large degree, a thing of smoke and mirrors. Above all, Leo lacked what, in a fallen world, even the humblest castellan depended upon for survival: an iron fist. This, as it had done for cen­turies, still threatened the papacy with danger. Rome remained a city on the front line of the Latin world. In Sicily, of which Humbert had rather optimistically been made the archbishop, Islam was putting down roots more deeply than ever, with Christians a fast-shrinking minority penned into the island's north-east corner, and Palermo, its staggeringly wealthy capital, become almost completely Muslim. In Apulia, along the Adriatic coast, Constantinople maintained her grip upon the region's major ports, and nurtured her inveterate ambition to secure the whole of southern Italy for the
Basileus.
Yet these two foes, the Saracens and the Byzantines, formidable powers though they might be, offered at least the reassurance of familiarity. Far more alarming was a menace that appeared to have sprung up from nowhere, and almost overnight. In 1050, following up his northern tour, the ever itchy-footed Leo headed southwards. What he found there stunned and appalled him. It appeared that nothing had changed since the days of Otto II. Everywhere there stretched black­ened fields, ruined vineyards and half-burned churches. In villages ashen and abandoned, or along empty, silence-haunted roads, it was not unusual to find twisted corpses, veiled beneath white dust and fed upon by flies. And often, on the brow of a distant hill, there might be glimpsed a sinister presence: the silhouettes of horsemen. These were not Saracens, however — nor Byzantines. Instead, shockingly, they were Latin Christians, the compatriots of five bishops who just the previous year had been delegates at the Pope's own synod of Reims, immigrants to Italy only recently descended from the margins of the North: warriors, men of iron, sprung from 'that most restless of nations - the Normans'.
⁸⁰

And that they were savage, even by the standards of murderous brutality that had for so long prevailed in the South, was an article of faith among all who had ever had the misfortune to confront them - whether native, or Byzantine, or Arab. Indeed, an aptitude for inspiring terror was what had originally been the Normans' primary selling point. In the war-torn badlands of Apulia, hired swords had always been at a premium; and anyone with a horse and armour was in a seller's market. In 1018, a band of Norman travellers had been recruited to take part in a revolt against the Byzantines;
four years later, they were garrisoning a Byzantine fort against an invasion by Henry n. This provided a stirring precedent for any cash- strapped knight with a taste for adventure and violence. All that was needed to make it in southern Italy, it appeared, was a ready sword and a facility for treachery. Soon enough, like the scent of spilled blood borne to wolves, news of the pickings to be had in southern Italy had begun to sweep Normandy. Adventurers from the duchy, and from neighbouring counties too, had hurried to join the gold rush. The trickle of freebooters had rapidly swelled into a flood. Not, however, that their leaders had been content to stay mercenaries for long. 'For the Normans are avid for rapine,' as one Italian put it bluntly, 'and possess an insatiable enthusiasm for seizing what belongs to others.'
⁸¹
Above all, just like any castellan back in France, they wanted land.

A consideration that the natives had been fatally slow to take into account. Already by 1030, in a spectacularly short-sighted gesture, the ruler of Naples had granted a Norman freebooter his own fortress some ten miles north of the city, and awarded him the rank of count. In 1042, on the opposite side of the peninsula, a second Norman warlord, William of Hauteville, had been elected by his followers the Count of Apulia. Such a title was without the faintest shred of legal authority, of course; but William, who had not won his nickname of 'Ironarm' for nothing, had made every effort to give it some heft. The same tactics of terrorism and intimidation that had left entire regions of France studded with makeshift castles had been deployed to no less devastating effect against the hapless communities of Apulia. Nothing had served to throw the predators off course. Even the death of William himself in 1046 had led only to his replacement as count by Drogo, his brother. Indeed, the Hautevilles, like the Normans them­selves, appeared veritably hydra-headed.

One year later, a third sibling, Robert, had arrived in Italy — and immediately set about giving a masterclass in how to raise an endur­ing lordship from nothing. Mistrusted by Drogo - and not without justification — for his alarming combination of talent and ambition, he had been briskly dispatched to Scribla, an out-of-the-way fortress in Calabria, the toe of Italy, where it had been intended by his brother that he should sit and rot. Robert, however, despite finding himself surrounded by swamps, the droning of mosquitoes and little else, was hardly the man to moulder. Resolutely, he had set about bettering his fortunes. Despite his initial lack of either men or gold, a genius for brigandage had soon served to win him both. One particular trade­mark was to set fire to crops, and then demand payment for putting out the flames; another was to ambush the local bigwigs by dragging them down from their horses.

Yet Robert did not depend solely upon gangsterism to get his way. Brutal he might be — but he was also renowned for his generosity. Even at his very poorest, he made sure to scatter largesse. Foot-soldiers who signed up to follow him could do so confident - such were Robert's talents as a horse thief — that they would soon be mounted knights. His reputation was an enviable one: a lord who made it a point of honour always to do well by his followers. A lord, further­more, who was evidently going places. By 1050, a mere three years after his first arrival in Calabria, Robert 'had gorged himself on land'.
⁸²
Not only had he left the swamps of Scribla far behind him, but he had won himself a well-connected wife, the loyalty of over two hundred knights and a new nickname:
'Guiscard,
'the cunning one'.

Men such as Robert could not afford to pause for a moment in the pursuit of their ambitions. Conscious of themselves as a tiny minority in a hostile and resentful land, and nervously aware of just how pre­carious their situation was, the Norman captains and their knights knew that they had little recourse but to persist with their strategy of terror. Certainly, they were in no mood to listen to demands that they 'cease their cruelties and abandon their oppression of their poor'
⁸³
- not even when the demands came from a pope. A few weeks into his tour of southern Italy, then, and already Leo had concluded that the Normans were a challenge even more pressing than simony.

Which meant that it was his duty, as the shepherd of the Christian people, to confront and muzzle them. But how? That April, a sudden diversion from the Pope's customary business of holding synods and lecturing bishops served to offer a clue. Leaving the lowlands of Apulia behind him, Leo took a road that wound upwards over crags and through deep beech forests to the summit of a mist-haunted mountain named Gargano. Here, back in 493, the archangel Michael had materialised suddenly before a startled cowherd, and announced that a nearby cave was to serve him as a shrine; more than half a mil­lennium on, a great radiance of candles and golden fittings illumined the chapels that had been furnished within the cavernous and drip­ping depths. 'Flourishing in joy and bliss',
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the sanctuary was as numinous with a sense of mystery as any in Christendom: for what Gargano offered pilgrims was nothing less than an intersection with the glory and terror that was to come at the end of time. 'General of the hosts of heaven',
⁸⁵
St Michael had been titled: fittingly enough, for he it was, before the Day of Judgement, who was destined to slay Antichrist on the Mount of Olives, and to overthrow the dragon, 'that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil'.
⁸⁶
No wonder, then, that the fame of his shrine had come to spread far beyond the limits of Apulia - and to strike a particular resonance with those mighty warriors of God, the kings of Saxony. Both Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great had ordered the image of St Michael inscribed upon their battle standards; Otto II and Theophanu had travelled as pil­grims to Gargano itself; and Otto III, as penance for the atrocities that marked his time in Rome, had toiled barefoot up the mountain to the shrine. Even in the wake of Henry II's death, with the
Reich
ruled by a dynasty that was no longer Saxon, reverence for the warrior archangel had remained as passionate as ever in imperial circles. Leo certainly shared in it. After all, as Bruno ofToul, he had not shrunk from emulating St Michael, and leading soldiers into battle - although naturally, as befitted a priest, he had refrained from draw­ing a sword himself.