Millenium (38 page)

And to be sure, Leo was far too alert to all the various shades of opinion in Christendom not to appreciate that there were many who regarded the martial spirit of his own native Church with the profoundest suspicion. Nevertheless, as he prayed within the candle- washed depths of Mount Gargano, and gazed up at icons of St Michael fitted out in the radiant weaponry of heaven, he was surely asking himself a number of fateful questions. What, for instance, if exhorta­tion and diplomacy could not serve to rein in the ravening of the Normans? And what if Henry III, the anointed Caesar, preoccupied as he was with the breaking of the princes of the
Reich
to his will, refused to embark upon a second Italian adventure? What, in such circum­stances, would Leo's responsibility be? The answer appeared as unavoidable as it was inconceivable. Surely the Pope himself would then have to raise an army, ride to war and crush the enemies of the Christian people, amid all the shock and carnage of battle. For what alternative would there be?

An excruciating dilemma. Small wonder that Leo should have found himself squirming painfully on its horns — and ever more so as the crisis deepened. In the summer of 1051, Drogo de Hauteville was assassinated in his private chapel, prompting his outraged compatriots to tighten the screws yet further on the wretched natives. Simultaneously, smooth-talking ambassadors from Constantinople had suddenly become a fixture in the Lateran: for the
Basileus,
waking up to the appalling prospect that the very existence of a Byzantine Italy might be at stake, had decided, for want of any better alternative, to seek out an alliance with Rome. In the summer of 1053, with no assistance received from the
Reich
beyond a contingent of seven hun­dred Swabian swordsmen, Leo had finally had enough. A momentous step was taken. For the first time, a pope formally blessed a standard of battle. Princes from across southern Italy were summoned to follow it against the Norman devils. Absolution from the stain of bloodshed — 'an impunity for their crimes'
⁸⁷
- was promised to all who answered the call. Here was no mere raising of local levies, such as popes had often done before, but rather a startling and fateful innovation: the launching of nothing less than a papally sanctioned holy war.

And it was the pontiff himself who led his army. Even though Leo, during the course of the synod at Reims, had solemnly reaffirmed the age-old prohibition against a priest bearing arms, his presence out on campaign was certainly sufficient to swell the numbers at his com­mand. Loathing of the Normans did the rest. As the grey outline of Mount Gargano began to loom on the eastern horizon, and a ren­dezvous with his new Byzantine allies drew ever nearer, Leo could feel well content. Even when the enemy, frantically mustering their scat­tered forces, and riding hell for leather northwards, unexpectedly interposed themselves between the papal forces and those of Constantinople, he was not unduly alarmed. The Normans, despite their success in keeping their opponents apart, were exhausted, hungry and comprehensively outnumbered. Against all the teeming hordes kicking up dust behind the Pope, they could set barely three thousand. Unsurprisingly, they sought a truce. Equally unsurpris­ingly, the Pope refused to grant one. Having laboured so hard to get the Normans where he wanted them, he was now resolved to crush them once and for all. Except that the Normans did not wait to be crushed. Instead, without warning, and even as their ambassadors were keeping Leo distracted still with negotiations, their horsemen threw themselves upon the papal ranks, with all the ferocity of starv­ing wolves assailing a flock of sheep. The Italians turned tail and fled. Only the Swabians, hulking, long-haired giants armed with massive, two-handed swords, stood firm amid the rout. Not until the end of the day were they finally overwhelmed. Pre-eminent among the captains who finally succeeded in trampling them down, 'slicing off their heads from their shoulders, and splitting open their guts',
⁸⁸
was Robert Guiscard.

Pope Leo IX, standing on the battlements of the nearby town of Civitate, watched it all. As the moans of the wounded and dying were borne to him on the evening breezes, so the consequences of the ruin that had overtaken his policy were already closing in on him. The cit­izens of Civitate, approaching him in mortified defiance, announced that they were no longer prepared to offer him shelter. The Vicar of St Peter was duly delivered up into the hands of the Normans. Both sides appeared equally embarrassed by the circumstances of their meeting.

The victors, falling to their knees, wept and begged Leo for forgiveness. Then, with a fulsome show of respect, they escorted the unhappy pontiff inland to Benevento, a city that lay directly on the northern­most border of their sphere of influence. Indeed, formally, it owed allegiance to the papacy itself: a fig leaf which barely served to conceal the grim reality of Leo's captive status. Nine months he was kept a pris­oner there. Only once he had finally accepted the right of the Normans to their conquests, it seems, was he released. As he left for Rome, he cut a pathetically broken figure, unable even to climb into his saddle. To many, the spectacle of the celebrated wayfarer lying in his litter was a salutary one. Even some of Leo's closest allies had been appalled by his recourse to the sword. The Pope had sought to sanctify a policy of warfare — and the policy had been found terribly wanting. Surely, then, his critics asserted, it was God Himself who had pro­nounced the judgement.

Yet Leo, though sick and weary, had not abandoned his conviction that the attempt to cleanse southern Italy of the Normans had been a righteous one. No less desperately than Christian souls required purg­ing of their sins, and the Church of simony, the sword-gashed world needed healing. So it was, in yet another startling innovation, that Leo pronounced the Swabians who had fallen at Civitate to have been mar­tyrs; and so it was too, even in Benevento, that he had persisted in secret negotiations aimed at renewing an anti-Norman alliance. With Henry III, the Emperor of the West, distracted by unrest in Bavaria, there had been only one other Caesar to call upon. Accordingly, in the late winter of 1054, Leo had ordered an embassy to embark for Constantinople. The fullest measure of how seriously its mission was taken lay in the identity of its leader: none other than Cardinal Humbert.

By early April, even as the Lateran began to buzz with rumours that the Holy Father was near death, his ambassadors were nearing their destination. From afar, blazing like dots of fire, they began to make out a gleaming of golden roofs, until at length, as their ship passed into the narrow strait of the Bosporus, there rose stretched out before them on the northern shore a panorama of incomparable beauty and magnif­icence. Cardinal Humbert, that loyal servant of the Bishop of Rome, could now gaze out for the first time at an authentic capital of a Roman empire. Constantinople remained what she had been for seven hundred years: the Queen of Cities and the bulwark of Christendom. On her ancient and massive walls, twelve miles long in all, men still stood guard just as their ancestors had done, when they had served to withstand the fearsome lust for conquest of the Saracens. In her forum, proclamations issued by a Caesar were still read out to a Roman people. Along her streets, and through the mas­sive space of her hippodrome, her armies had only a few years previously marched in a splendid triumphal procession: 'a reminder to the Romans that ardour breathes new life into the dead'.
⁸⁹
Above all, dominating the cityscape, and putting even the promontory-clinging sprawl of the imperial palace in the shade, there rose the stupendous cupola of the largest cathedral in the world, the Church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia: a monument that had been hailed in triumph by its builder as surpassing the very Temple of Solomon.

All of which, no doubt, in a Christian bishop, should have inspired a sense of wonder and reverence - and yet Cardinal Humbert, if he felt any such emotions, did not care to betray them. An ambassador he might be - but he certainly had no wish to appear a supplicant. Treading the streets of the New Rome, he found himself all the more bristlingly conscious of the dignity of the Old. As well he might have done: for the pretensions of Constantinople were calculated to infu­riate the tight-lipped scholar who had demonstrated to his own perfect satisfaction that his master ruled as the head of the universal Church. Not even through gritted teeth could Humbert bring himself to agree with his hosts that their Patriarch might rank as the peer of the Pope. Naturally, had he only been able to confine himself to the business of diplomacy, this would hardly have mattered. Both sides, after all, were desperate to secure a military alliance against their common foe; and the
Basileus,
Constantine IX, was a man celebrated for his affability and taste for the low brow. Listening to people with entertaining speech defects was his surest source of diversion - not debating theology.

Altogether sterner in his tastes, however, was the Patriarch himself, Michael Cerularius, a man of whom it was tactfully observed by one associate that 'he had a taste for speaking his mind'.
⁹⁰
Prickly, irascible and intransigent, he was in every way a fitting opponent of the cardi­nal. Already, even before Humbert's arrival in Constantinople, the two men had been firing off abusive letters to each other. When they were brought face to face, their insults grew progressively more vicious. Soon enough, to Constantine's frustration and embarrassment, he found all his attempts to negotiate a coalition with Rome against the Normans drowned out by their din. The rival prelates, not content with arguing over the rights and wrongs of the claims of the Pope to pre-eminence, made a point of dredging up every point of disagree­ment that had ever existed between their churches: a strategy which gave them both plenty to row about.

It did not take long for relations between the two men to pass the point of no return. As Humbert began labelling his opponents pimps and disciples of Mohammed, Cerularius withdrew to his palace in an ostentatious sulk. By summer, with the Patriarch still maintaining his icy silence, the streets filling with angry mobs and any hope of forging a common policy against the Normans in ruins, what little remained of Humbert's patience spectacularly snapped. On 16 July, dressed in the full splendid regalia of a prince of the Roman Church, he marched into the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, accompanied by his fellow legates. Ignoring the massed ranks of the clergy who were gathered there to celebrate Mass, the cardinal strode with an awful solemnity beneath the flickering of a thousand candles, past a multitude of coloured columns, and up to the gilded altar. There, paying no attention to the rising hubbub of indignation from behind him, he slapped down a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch, before turning briskly on his heels. Two days later, as the streets of Constantinople seethed with fury, he departed for Rome. Cerularius himself, meanwhile, never a man to duck a fight, made sure to anathematise Humbert in turn. The fateful bull he consigned to a public bonfire. Any remaining partisans of an alliance with the papacy were arrested.

That the negotiations might have gone better was self-evident enough. Nevertheless, many remained unclear as to how serious the bust-up had actually been. Had it been a spat or a permanent schism? No one was sure at first. Rows between the twin capitals of Christendom were certainly nothing new. Relations had been rocky for centuries, and popes and patriarchs had indulged in mutual excommunications before. In fact, as Cerularius and his cheerleaders gleefully pointed out, the bull of excommunication delivered against them had been legally invalid: for Leo IX, who had originally sent the embassy, had died back in the spring, leaving his legates without formal authority to anathematise anyone. Indeed, even some of those who had accompanied Humbert into Hagia Sophia on that momen­tous July day of 1054 still clung to the hope that the breach between the two churches might yet be healed. Three years later, when one of them was elected Pope, and took the name Stephen IX, he immedi­ately dispatched a mission of his own to Constantinople in a desperate attempt to repair the damage - but it was aborted by his almost imme­diate death. No further missions were sent. Already, in the space of a few years, the mood in Rome had decisively shifted. What was at stake, many reformers had begun to accept, was nothing less than a funda­mental point of principle. Cardinal Humbert had sounded out a trumpet blast on a truly decisive field of battle. The message that it sent to the rest of Christendom could hardly have been more ringing: no one, not even the Patriarch of the New Rome, could be permitted to defy the authority of the Pope.

Schism with the Eastern Church was not the only cost that had to be borne by the papacy. Any prospect of a renewed coalition with the Byzantines in southern Italy now stood in ruins. The Normans appeared ineradicable: 'as deadly to their softer neighbours as the bitter wind to young flowers'.
⁹¹
Rome herself had begun to look exposed. Then unexpectedly, in the autumn of 1056, that greatest and most formidable patron of reform, the Caesar of the West, Henry III, fell sick. His death on 5 October, coming virtually out of the blue and at a relatively youthful age, only added to the general mood of twitchiness in the Lateran. The new king was Henry's son and namesake: a boy of only five years. The new regent was the queen: the pious and unworldly Agnes. So a child and a woman were charged with serving the papacy, at a fateful moment in its fortunes, as its earthly protec­tors.

And yet in danger lay opportunity. Henry III had certainly served to reform the see of Rome; but he had also placed it in his shadow. There were those within papal circles - men such as Humbert and Hildebrand - who had begun to resent this: for the order of which they dreamed was one in which it was the Pope who put the emperor in the shade. Now, with the Caesar of Constantinople condemned as a heretic, and the western Caesar merely a child, a tantalising prospect had opened up. Clearly, if the world were to be brought to its proper order, then the reins of authority would need to be entrusted to someone. And who better, who more fitting, than the heir of St Peter, the Bishop of Rome?