Millenium (49 page)

Yet still, amid all his triumphs, Roger never forgot what he owed to his celestial patrons, and to St Peter in particular. A cut of the loot was regularly forwarded to Rome. In 1063, Alexander II had even taken a delivery of camels, plundered from a Saracen baggage train. In exchange, as well as the inevitable banner, the Holy Father had granted Roger and his men something even more precious: 'absolu­tion for their sins'.
⁵⁵
A momentous innovation: for never before had a pope thought to bestow such a personal benediction upon warriors who had spilled the blood of heathens. Tentatively, but no less por­tentously for that, the papacy was groping its way towards a notion that the defeated Saracens, ironically, would have recognised well enough: that wars, if conducted to win back territory lost to infidels, might not only be justified, but even, perhaps, be regarded as a positive duty, one owed by the faithful to God.

A philosophy for which Gregory himself, it might have been thought, would have had a peculiar sympathy. And so, to a degree, he did. Nevertheless, as he listened anxiously to travellers' reports from the eastern front, and pondered his response, there was one thing he knew for certain: that he had no intention of entrusting the redemp­tion of a tottering Byzantium to Guiscard and his crew. The Pope, unlike his predecessor, had persisted in regarding the Norman adven­turers in Italy as bandits and terrorists. It was not enough that the Duke of Apulia, far from rallying to the support of his Christian brothers of Constantinople, had coolly taken advantage of the build­-up to the Manzikert campaign to grab their last remaining outposts in Italy for himself. Even worse, Gregory darkly suspected him of plot­ting a push northwards — into papal territory. Initial attempts to smooth things over between the Pope and the Norman captain quickly petered out when Guiscard flatly refused to trust an offer of safe conduct. By the early months of 1074, Gregory had so lost patience with his menacing vassals that he had begun to rank them alongside the Turks as enemies of Christendom. In March, the breakdown in relations between Pope and duke was sealed by the latter's excommu­nication. Yet while this drastic step had undoubtedly been prompted by Gregory's determination not to be taken for a ride by Guiscard, so also did it reflect something far profounder: a fearsome struggle within himself.

The English and the Milanese, perhaps, would have laughed hol­lowly at the notion — but Gregory himself never doubted that he was above all a man of peace. His wide-eyed relish for battle standards had always tended to outrun the dictates of his private conscience. No matter how justified he might feel in making blood-curdling appeals to the judgement of the sword, the grim realities of warfare never ceased at the same time to haunt and trouble him. The same hard- nosed politician who had urged Erlembald not to abandon the profession of arms also sternly affirmed that to be a knight was by its very nature to exist in a state of sin. The same seasoned strategist who had recognised more clearly than anyone that a threat to Constantinople was a threat to the whole of Christendom, and indeed had begun actively planning a military expedition to meet the peril, flinched from facing up to what such a mission might actually require. Gregory's true wish was not for brutal and battle-hardened warriors such as Guiscard's Normans, but for would-be martyrs. 'For as Christ laid down His life for us, so should we lay down our own lives for our brothers.'
³⁶
An injunction that came from the heart: for Gregory, whose courage was no less steely than his will, had every intention of riding at the head of his projected task force in person. Nor did Constantinople represent the limit of his ambitions, by any means. His ultimate hope, after repulsing the Turks, was to lead the armies of Christendom onwards, until at last they had reached that most fate­ful of all destinations: 'the sepulchre of the Lord'.
⁵⁷

And if there sounded something oddly familiar about this plan, then perhaps that was no coincidence, Jerusalem, after a lull of several decades, had begun to glimmer tantalisingly again on the horizon of many people's dreamings. So too a dread—or anticipation—of the end of the world. In 1054, for instance, some three thousand pilgrims had set off for the Holy Land, prompted by the sudden and fearsome blaz­ing of a mysterious star;
⁵⁸
ten years later, and an even larger expedition, twelve thousand in all, it was claimed, had repeated the journey, crosses sewn on to their cloaks, 'deceived by a certain vulgar opinion that the day of Judgement was at hand'.
³⁹
Vulgar, perhaps; but not only the poor and credulous had made the journey: bishops, and archbishops, and great princes had gone along too. Indeed, prophecies of the end time had lately been circulating around the very summit of the Christian world. In Italy especially, among opponents of reform, great play had begun to be made once again of that hoary figure of fan­tasy, the last Roman emperor - and naturally enough, it was Henry IV whom they looked to cast in the role.

Times, however, had changed; and the heir of the Caesars was no longer alone in claiming the rule of Christendom.
'Dux et pontifex',
'general' as well as 'pontiff,'
⁶⁰
was what Gregory aspired to be. And something more besides? Certainly, amid all the troubles of the age, the Pope's plan to lead an army to the Holy Sepulchre could hardly help but appear a pointed trampling on imperial toes. What earthly kings, and Henry IV especially, would make of Gregory's ambitions, only time would tell. Gregory himself, however, as he prepared for the great chal­lenges that lay ahead of him, could afford to feel sternly unconcerned. He was, after all, the heir of St Peter. The Almighty was on his side.

‘It does not escape us,' he wrote a year after his accession, 'how diverse are men's opinions and judgements concerning us - for some, pointing to identical cases and actions, will think us cruel, others unduly mild. To all of them, however, we can give no truer or more appropriate answer than that of the Apostle: "But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.'"
⁶¹
All the world, so Gregory believed, had been given into his hands. To him been entrusted the fateful task of reordering it - nor, in the final reckoning, was there anyone entitled to stand in his path.

The Road to Canossa

'That he is permitted to depose emperors.' Perhaps it was just as well that Gregory chose to keep this particular proposition from the youth­ful Caesar. Henry IV, as befitted the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne, was hardly the man to accept that he could be deposed by anyone. King of the various princedoms of Germany, he also laid claim to the rule of Italy—Rome included. Yet it is doubtful that Henry, even had he been alerted to the new pope's pretensions, would have been able to do much about them. Not straight away, at any rate. There was way too much already on the royal plate. Far from being in any position to contemplate a campaign in Italy, Henry was locked into a desperate struggle to maintain his authority within Germany itself. War, having already plunged the empire of Constantinople into chaos, had come as well, in the summer of 1073, to the empire of the West.

It was no race of pagans that had brought about this sudden calamity, however, no breed of savage invaders from beyond the fron­tiers of Christendom, but rather a people who ever since the time of Otto the Great had appeared the very wellspring of imperial greatness: none other than the Saxons. Yet Otto's own dynasty had long since passed away; and its replacement in 1024 by a line of Rhineland kings, sprung from the opposite end of the
Reich,
had led many in Saxony to feel increasingly exploited and oppressed. Even during the triumphant reign of Henry III, the local princes had been growing fractious; and some of them, during the troubled years of his son's minority, had actively plotted to do away with the infant king. Mistrust had bred mistrust in turn; and the adult Henry, with that same blend of suspi­ciousness and obstinacy that marked so many of his dealings, had disdained to mollify the restless Saxons. Instead, taking a leaf out of the Norman book, he had set himself to securing his hold on the duke­dom in the most up-to-date manner possible: by raising castles. A threat to the local nobility, of course - but also to the entire Saxon people. As in France, as in England, so in Saxony, the battlements sud­denly sprouting up on 'high hills and wild places'
⁶²
appeared to the locals an inversion of all that they held most precious: forbidding and sinister threats to their ancient liberties.

Henry's greatest castle, a stronghold raised at the foot of the Harz mountains, where Christendom's most lucrative gold mines were to be found, was regarded with particular hatred: for its walls and towers appeared all too grimly suited to the fell situation in which they had been raised. Indeed, at the very onset of the insurrection, when the Saxon rebels sought to trap Henry there, they found it an impossible task, so dense was the forest surrounding the Harzburg. 'No matter all the efforts of the besiegers, they could not prevent the comings and goings of those who were shut in.'
⁶³
Henry, fleeing the castle without supplies, and relying on a huntsman to guide him through the track­less wilds, reached safety at last only after having travelled through bogs and briars for three whole days.

It was a common fantasy, no doubt, among the oppressed everywhere to see a castle-builder forced into humiliating flight. That the Harzburg and every other royal stronghold be levelled, that the onward march of military innovation be reversed, and that the 'tyranny* which it facilitated be kept at bay: such were the demands of the Saxon rebels. Yet, for all the indignant talk of fortifications spread­ing across 'every hill and mountain, so as to threaten Saxony with ruin',
^H
an excess of castle-building on its own could hardly serve to sanction treason against an anointed king. Other justifications too were urgently needed. So it was that the insurgents, dredging up memories of Henry's scandalous attempt to secure a divorce, fell to accusing him of a whole host of sinister practices: incest, groping abbesses, and hints of even worse. Such charges, in an age which had witnessed even the saintly Agnes accused of nymphomania, might easily have been dismissed as the common currency of political abuse - except that Henry, like his mother before him, was finding himself acutely vulnerable to muck-raking.

For just as under the empress, so now under the king, the most venomous gossip of all was being whispered by princes. The movers and shakers of the
Reich,
having developed a taste for insubordination during Henry's minority, were finding it hard to kick the habit. It was no coincidence, perhaps, that the leader of the rebellious Saxons should have been Otto of Northeim: the same duke who, back in the days of Agnes's regency, had featured so prominently in the kidnap­ping at Kaiserswerth. True, Otto was a Saxon himself; but even among the princes of the Rhineland there was no lack of would-be jackals. Far from backing their lord against the rebels, the southern dukes were widely suspected of plotting his deposition. The greatest of them all, Rudolf of Swabia, was an object of particular royal suspicion. Already, in 1072, both Agnes and Henry's godfather, Abbot Hugh of Cluny, had been called upon to patch up relations between the king and his most powerful vassal. Then, at Christmas-time in 1073, trouble had flared up again. A court insider, tipping off Rudolf that Henry was plotting his assassination, had insisted on proving his claim by undergoing trial by combat. Only the unexpected abduction of the accuser 'by a terrible demon'; just a few days before the duel was due to be fought, had served to exonerate the king.
⁶⁵
Or had it? There were many who remained unconvinced. The charges against Henry - that he was a tyrant, a mur­derer, an enthusiast for every kind of vice - continued to swirl.

Self-evidently, then, with the Saxons still up in arms against him, and the southern princes manoeuvring to stab him in the back, it was hardly the time to be picking a fight with the Pope. There would be opportunity enough to do that, Henry judged, and to slap the uppity Gregory down for good, once the
Reich
had been successfully pacified. So it was that, rather than risk the slightest papal sanction being granted to his enemies' slurs, he brought himself to grovel — even going so far as to acknowledge that he might possibly have backed the wrong horse in Milan. 'Full of pleasantness and obedience,'
⁶⁶
a delighted Gregory described the royal tone to Erlembald. The likelier alternative, that the king might be stringing him along and playing for time, appeared not to have crossed the papal mind.

And time, sure enough, was what Henry had won for himself. In February 1074, amid the snow and ice of winter, he signed up to what appeared a humiliating peace, agreeing by its terms to demolish all his castles, and to restore Otto of Northeim to the full warmth of the royal favour. In truth, however, the king had gained far more than he had lost. Any prospect of a coalition between the ever-slippery Otto and the southern princes had now been successfully stymied. Even more promisingly, a wedge had been driven between the duke and the frustrated mass of the Saxon peasantry. In March, taking the law into their own hands, a great army of the
'valgus' —
'the common people' — stormed the Harzburg, then began tearing it to pieces block by block. Even the royal chapel was burned to the ground. Finally, in a climac­tic desecration, the grave of Henry's stillborn eldest son was dug up, and his tiny bones slung out amid the cinders and rubble. News of this outrage, not surprisingly, inspired widespread horror among the great. The southern dukes might mistrust the king powerfully, but they detested rioting peasants even more. The flattening of the Harzburg, ironically enough, spelled disaster for the Saxon cause. In the summer of 1075, Rudolf and a host of other lords at last submitted to joining Henry in a full-scale expedition against the rebels. On 9 June, amid the nightmarish swirling of a dust-storm, the Saxons were routed, and the wretched
'valgus'
put satisfyingly to the sword. By the autumn, Henry's mastery of Saxony was sufficiently complete for him to order his castles there to be rebuilt. Even the most fractious of the princes appeared ready to bow their necks to the royal yoke. So it was, for instance, that the royal lieutenant installed in the Harzburg, and compelled to supervise its wholesale restoration, was none other than the captain who had led the initial assault on the castle: that inveter­ate turncoat and survivor, Duke Otto of Northeim.