Millenium (48 page)

Small, perhaps — but formidably well qualified. Not since the age of Constantine had there been a man enthroned in Rome who could boast a more detailed knowledge of the various lands and limits of the world. Indeed, as Gregory pointed out with relish, 'the law of the Roman pontiffs has governed more princedoms than ever that of the Caesars did'
³⁸
— so that a legate, bringing letters and reports to the Lateran, might be as likely to come galloping from Hungary, or Poland, or the distant kingdoms of the Northmen, as from anywhere within the ancient heartlands of Christendom. Although the new pope was thoroughly Roman in everything except his birth, his habit of thinking was nevertheless a global one. Whether it was the King of England, or the Abbot of Cluny, or the generalissimo of the Patarenes, Gregory had long been in the habit of regarding even the most cele­brated men of the age as his agents. Of humble birth he might have been, and impeccably austere in all his personal habits - and yet an imperial cast of mind came to him no less naturally for that. Processing past the haughty monuments of an ancient and vanished empire, he showed no compunction in displaying himself to the Roman people arrayed in the traditional crown and robes of a Caesar: the first pope ever to flaunt such insignia in public. In private, seeking to order his thoughts about the destiny that God had entrusted to him, Gregory dared to go even further. To an unpublished memo­randum, he confided a series of awesome convictions: 'that the Roman pontiff alone is by right called "universal"'; 'that all princes kiss the feet of the pope alone'; 'that he is permitted to depose emperors'.
⁵⁹
Assertions so vaunting that even the author shrank from stating them aloud.

And yet in truth, for all the unhesitating sternness with which Gregory was prepared to upbraid the pretensions of uppity princes, his concern was not with the ordering of their kingdoms, still less with any madcap attempt to refound the Roman Empire, but rather with a project that he saw as incalculably more important. Just as the monks of Cluny had laboured to make of their monastery a bulwark of the celestial set amid the woods and fields of Burgundy, so it was the gigantic ambition of Gregory to see the universal Church transfigured in an identical manner, in every princedom, in every town, in every village. For only then, once it had been freed for good from the cankered touch of grasping kings, and brought to shimmer with a radiant and unspotted purity, would it properly be able to serve the Christian people as a vision on earth of the City of God. Despite his crown and robes, it was no worldly power to which Gregory laid claim, but one infinitely greater. No wonder, then, that his admirers were agog. 'You are endeavouring things more awesome than our weakness can imagine,' wrote one abbot in a letter of congratulation to the new pope. 'Like an eagle you soar above all lower things, and your eyes are fixed upon the brightness of the sun itself.'
⁴⁰

Not that Gregory could afford to turn his gaze entirely from earthly matters. That he had inherited a crisis in the papacy's relations with Henry IV went without saying — as too did the pressing need to resolve it. Indeed, for so long as the king refused to dismiss his excommunicated advisers, the new pope felt himself unable even to write to the imperial court, and inform it of his election. Nevertheless, supremely conscious as he was of his global responsibilities, Gregory could not permit the breach with Henry IV to monopolise all his attention. The
Reich
was not the sum of Christendom. To the cast, there lay another Christian empire - and in 1073, even as Gregory was being enthroned as the Bishop of Rome, he feared that a literally fiendish danger was menacing the Second Rome. 'For everything has been laid waste, almost to the very walls of Constantinople.*
¹¹
News so shocking as to seem barely believable — and yet every traveller returning from overseas had con­firmed it. What could be stirring there, then, in the East, if not the armies bf very hell? The Devil, so Gregory himself suspected, was openly showing his hand - and with the goal, a chillingly genocidal one, of put­ting the Christian people to slaughter 'like cattle'.
⁴²

Certainly, the portents that had heralded the original brewing of the crisis in Byzantium, many decades previously, had indeed seemed infernal. In the winter of 1016, dragons had swooped in over Armenia, on the easternmost limit of the empire, 'vomiting fire upon Christ's faithful', and volumes of the Holy Scriptures had begun to tremble. Yet the simultaneous appearance there of Muslim horsemen 'armed with bows and wearing their hair long like women'
⁴³
— 'Turks', as they called themselves - had initially provoked no undue alarm among the Byzantines. Barbarians had been testing their empire for centuries, after all, and yet still it triumphantly endured, as was clearly the will of God. Nevertheless, as the decades went by, and the Turks did not drift away, but instead seemed only to swell in numbers and power, an increasingly larcenous presence on the eastern frontier, so there were those in Constantinople who had at last deigned to feel some anxiety. In 1068, one of them had been crowned
Basileus.
Three years later, reversing the traditional Byzantine policy of avoiding pitched combat at all costs, he had gathered together all the reserves he could muster, marched with them directly into the badlands of the East, and set about hunting down the barbarians. In August 1071, on a plain overlooked by a fortress named Manzikert, the imperial task force had at last caught up with its quarry, forced a battle - and been annihilated. The
Basileus
himself, taken captive, had ended up on his face before a Turkish warlord, as a leather slipper pressed down upon his neck.

Meanwhile, with 'the sinews of the Roman Empire',
⁴⁴
its armed forces, ripped and shredded beyond all hope of repair, the victors had immediately begun fanning out from the killing fields of Manzikert to claim their spoils. Roads which for a thousand years and more had served the cause of Roman greatness now stretched open and defence­less all the way westwards to the sea. As rival factions in Constantinople, with a near-criminal irresponsibility, devoted them­selves to scrapping over what remained of the stricken empire, so the Turks had been left to range across its Asian heartlands virtually as they pleased. 'I am the destroyer of towers and churches,*
⁴⁵
the invaders liked to boast. Not that they confined themselves to merely wanton destruction. Even as they trampled down ancient cities, and stabled their horses in famous monasteries, they made sure to enslave all the Christians they could, and drive the remainder into headlong flight. Refugees, flooding into Constantinople, only added to the mounting sense there of a cataclysm without precedent. 'Illustrious personages, nobles, chiefs, women of position, all wandered in begging their bread.'
⁴⁶
No wonder, then, that the sense of confusion, and of a whole world turned upside down, should have served to feed rumours of an imminent cosmic doom — and to sow panic as far afield as the Lateran.

And even if the turmoil in the East did not portend the coming of Antichrist, what then? Would the threat to Christendom be rendered any less real? Here were questions which Gregory, with his unrivalled array of international contacts, was uniquely well placed to ponder. Not for him the limited horizons of a mere king. In the summer of 1073, even as he was struggling to make sense of the appalling reports from Byzantium, telling news was brought to him of the sufferings of Christians in another one-time stronghold of the faith. North Africa, where St Augustine had written his great book on the City of God, had been under Saracen rule for many centuries; and now the local emir had imprisoned the leader of the church there, and beaten him, 'as though he were a criminal'.
⁴⁷
Gregory, writing to the unhappy arch­bishop, sought to console him by floating the cheery prospect that

God might soon 'condescend to look upon the African church, which has been toiling for such a long while, buffeted by the waves of various troubles'.''
⁸
A pious hope - but little more than that. In truth, as Gregory well knew, the African church was dying on its feet. Of the two hundred bishoprics and more that it had once boasted, a mere five remained. Food for thought indeed. After all, if the Africans, the very countrymen of St Augustine, could end up lost so utterly to Christendom that barely a Christian remained among them, then who was to say that the same terrible fate might not one day befall the people whom Gregory freely described as 'our brothers - those who hold the empire beyond the sea in Constantinople'?

Indeed, in his bleakest moments, he would confess to a dread that the Church, far from being brought by his leadership to a triumphant and universal purity, might instead 'perish altogether in our times'.
⁴⁹
To wallow in despair, however, was hardly Gregory's style. Even as he marked how many of Christendom's frontiers were bleeding, so also could he point to others that bore certain witness to God's continuing favour and protection. Barely twenty years had passed since Leo IX's promotion of Humbert to the archbishopric of Sicily: an appointment that at the time had appeared less a statement of intent than -the expression of a pipedream. Certainly, not even the most militant opti­mist in Leo's train, not even Hildebrand himself, would have dared to imagine back in 1050 that he might live to see the restoration of the Great Mosque of Palermo, where for more than two centuries the Saracens had been performing their unspeakable rites, to its original function as a cathedral.

Yet in 1072, only the year before Hildebrand's elevation to the papacy, that was precisely what had happened. Grown men had sobbed, invis­ible choirs of angels had sung and a mysterious beam of light had illumined the altar. It was a fittingly miraculous way to mark a seem­ing miracle: the restoration to Christendom of a metropolis so stupefyingly vast that it could boast a quarter of a million inhabitants, 500 mosques and no fewer than 150 butchers. Nor was it only the Cross that now rose above Palermo. For the new and fretful pope, there was an additional cause for satisfaction. Planted on the battlements, token of the city's subjection to the Roman Church as well as to Christ, there billowed a flag with the familiar insignia of St Peter: a papal banner.

It went without saying, of course, that such a victory could only ever have been won at the point of a sword. The corsairs of Sicily had always been brutal, yet even they had found themselves unable to compete for sheer ruthlessness with the new warlords on the Italian scene. Palermo's fall had effectively set the seal on a second Norman conquest. Indeed, the invasion of wealthy islands was becoming quite a speciality of Christendom's 'shock troops'.
³⁰
Even erstwhile enemies might be brought to a grudging respect for what the Normans them­selves, with a becoming lack of modesty, liked to vaunt as their own exceptional 'boldness and prowess'.
⁵¹
Back in 1059, for instance, it had been former associates of Leo IX, the Pope defeated at Civitate, who had first dangled the prize of Sicily before a man they had always pre­viously execrated.

Robert Guiscard, the most notorious of the Norman freebooters as he was also the most powerful, had long since crossed the shadowy divide that marked out banditry from lordship. Desperate as the reformers were for some authentic muscle, and with Guiscard himself not averse to being graced with a touch of respectability, the way had duly been opened for a spectacular
rapprochement.
The Normans of southern Italy, amid much papal nose-holding, had been welcomed in from the cold. Their chief, in exchange for acknowledging himself a vassal of the Holy Father, had been formally invested with the duke­dom of the lands he had already filched - 'and in future, with the help of God and St Peter, of Sicily too'.
⁵²

Not that the new duke of Apulia had ever needed a licence to go on the attack against anyone. Even without the stamp of papal approval, Guiscard would doubtless still have cast a greedy eye on the island - and the conquest of Sicily, when it duly came, had hardly been a ven­ture such as Peter Damian, let alone Adalbert or Alcuin, would have thought to bless. Indeed, on occasion, it had been literally written in blood: for in 1068, after one particular victory, Norman scribes had broadcast their triumph by dipping their pens into the viscera of the slaughtered Saracens, and then dispatching the resulting accounts to Palermo via captured messenger pigeons. Yet if shows of calculated savagery such as this had undoubtedly played a key role in under­mining Saracen morale, then the Normans themselves never doubted that all their victories derived ultimately from a power even mightier than themselves. In Sicily, at any rate, they could reckon themselves on the side of the angels. Guiscard, camped outside Palermo, had ringingly condemned the city as a lair of demons: 'an enemy to God'.
⁵³

His brother, Roger, the very youngest of the Hauteville clan, and the Norman leader who had committed himself most wholeheartedly to the winning of Sicily, was even more forthright in describing as his only motivation 'a desire to exalt the Holy Faith'.
⁵⁴
That this had been no hypocritical affectation, but rather a pious statement of the truth, had been evident in the indisputable proofs of divine favour that had accompanied all his exploits: great cities captured against the odds, battles won with the assistance of saints mounted on blinding white horses, the fluttering above Roger's own head of an unearthly stan­dard adorned with the Cross. To be sure, the rewards he ended up reaping had hardly been confined to the dimension of the spiritual: for his progress, from penniless youngest son to Count of Sicily, had been only marginally less spectacular than that of Guiscard himself.