Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (19 page)

Nicholas welcomed Latin involvement in Bulgaria for several reasons. He was genuinely committed to missionary work, encouraging the activities of St Ansgar in Scandinavia, and of the missionaries to the Slavs in Moravia, Cyril and Methodius. But he was also intensely conscious of the lost jurisdiction of the papacy in Illyricum and the Balkans, and saw in the Balkan adventure an opportunity to recover and even extend it. Nicholas duly sent the missionaries Boris requested, together with a long and detailed instruction on the Christian faith, expounding Western belief and practice and, in the process, disparaging Constantinople. Photius responded to this with an equally harsh attack on the West, reminiscent of the Quinisext Canons and denouncing clerical celibacy, fasting laws, the Western use of unleavened bread in the Mass, and the intrusion of the
Filioque
clause into the Creed. The Photius affair had become a platform on which the long-term alienation of the Churches of East and West was acted out. In 867 Photius presided over a synod at Constantinople which excommunicated and deposed the Pope, though Nicholas was dead before news of this reached Rome. Rome and Constantinople were now formally separated.

The death of Nicholas I marks a watershed in the history of the papacy. Already Charlemagne’s empire had been distributed among his quarrelling descendants. By the end of the ninth century it was no longer even a fiction. The papacy had acted as midwife at the birth of that empire because it needed a strong protector. With its dissolution the popes were left defenceless in the snakepit of Italian politics. Nicholas’ feeble successor, Hadrian II (867–72), surrendered piece by piece all the high ground Nicholas had gained, backing down before Hincmar of Rheims, allowing Lothair of Lorraine, now once more cohabiting with his concubine, to receive communion, watching Bulgaria slip from Roman to Greek obedience.

Deprived of the support of empire, the papacy became the possession
of the great Roman families, a ticket to local dominance for which men were prepared to rape, murder and steal. A third of the popes elected between 872 and 1012 died in suspicious circumstances – John VIII (872–82) bludgeoned to death by his own entourage, Stephen VI (896–7) strangled, Leo V (903) murdered by his successor Sergius III (904–11), John X (914–28) suffocated, Stephen VIII (939–42) horribly mutilated, a fate shared by the Greek antipope John XVI (997–8) who, unfortunately for him, did not die from the removal of his eyes, nose, lips, tongue and hands. Most of these men were manoeuvred into power by a succession of powerful families – the Theophylacts, the Crescentii, the Tusculani. John X, one of the few popes of this period to make a stand against aristocratic domination, was deposed and then murdered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo by the Theophylacts, who had appointed him in the first place.

The key figure in both John X’s appointment and his deposition was the notorious Theophylact matron, Marozia. She also appointed Leo VI (928) and Stephen VII (928–31), and she had been the mistress of Pope Sergius III, by whom she bore an illegitimate son whom she eventually appointed as Pope John XI (931–6). In 932 John deepened the Eastern Church’s already almost limitless contempt for the West by granting a dispensation and sending legates to consecrate the sixteen-year-old son of the Emperor Romanus I as patriarch of Constantinople. It was, clearly, a period in which rulers liked to keep things in the family.

The collapse of the papacy after Nicholas I is reflected in a corresponding tailing away of the great papal chronicle, the
Liber Pontificalis
, the fundamental source for papal history from the sixth to the ninth centuries. This chronicle is made up of a series of papal biographies, begun in the Lateran chancery while their subject was still alive, and updated as necessary. The ninth-century lives are compiled on a lavish scale, but the life of Hadrian II is incomplete, and thereafter the chronicle effectively stops, each entry being no more than a line or two giving the Pope’s name and regnal dates.

The reputation of the popes of the ‘dark century’ after the silencing of the
Liber Pontificalis
was low at the time, and has not improved with the years. Its symbol is the macabre ‘cadaver synod’ staged by Stephen VI in January 897, when he put on trial the mummified corpse of his hated predecessor but one, Pope Formosus. The corpse, dressed in pontifical vestments and propped up on a throne, was
found guilty of perjury and other crimes, was mutilated by having the fingers used in blessings hacked off, and was then tossed into the Tiber. Stephen himself was subsequently deposed by the disgusted Roman crowd, and strangled in prison.

Yet not all these men were contemptible. Formosus himself, despite having at one time been deposed from his earlier bishopric of Porto by Pope John VIII for plotting to have himself made pope, was a very remarkable figure, a brilliant missionary in Nicholas Is Bulgarian enterprise, a key player in attempts to patch up relations with Constantinople after the Photius shambles, a gifted papal diplomat in the West, and a man of austere personal piety. Even the appointments made by relentless fixers like Alberic II, the secular ruler of Rome who was Marozia’s son and eventual gaoler, included some admirable men. Ruthless politicians may be, indeed often are, conventionally pious, and Alberic was no exception. He appointed five popes, two of whom, Leo VII (936–9) and Agapitus II (946–55), were sincere reformers, promoting monastic revival and clerical reform in Italy and Germany. Leo in particular was the friend of the great Abbot Odo of Cluny, and, with Alberic’s support, entrusted to him the reform of the Roman monasteries. Leo also encouraged the revived monastery of Subiaco, St Benedict’s own house, and the reforming abbey of Gorze.

But even these relatively decent popes were in Alberic’s pocket, and the dominance of the Roman ruling families made impossible any real papal initiative or consistency. In any case, Alberic more than compensated for these worthwhile appointments by securing a promise from the clergy and nobility of Rome to elect his son and heir Octavian as pope when Agapitus died, thereby uniting Church and state in Rome with a vengeance. Octavian was duly elected as Pope John XII (955–64) at the ripe age of eighteen. He was to die at the age of twenty-seven, allegedly from a stroke while in bed with a married woman.

The decision of Otto I of Germany in 962 to revive the empire of Charlemagne offered the papacy some hope of change. Otto I and his successors Otto II and III had an almost mystical vision of the Christian empire, and of the sacred responsibilities it placed on the shoulders of the Emperor. Already the stirrings of reform in the churches of Germany, especially in the monasteries, had formed a bond between Germany and the papacy. Monastic reformers, struggling
against entrenched local interests, including unworthy bishops, looked to the papacy to provide support in the form of the privileges and exemptions they needed for survival. From the distance of Germany, the personal failings of the popes were less significant than the authority of their office. The re-emergence of the empire, now firmly centred on Germany, strengthened this link between papacy and reform.

Ironically, the Pope who anointed Otto I on the Feast of the Purification (2 February) 962 was the unsavoury twenty-five-year-old John XII. To him, however, Otto pledged the restoration of papal control of the lands promised by Pepin and Charlemagne, and the defence of the Church’s freedoms. In return, papal elections had to be agreed by the Emperor’s representatives, and popes would have to swear fealty to him. The Ottoman empire promised more than this to the popes, however. Otto’s determination to replace Byzantine rule in southern Italy with his own held out the prospect of papal control of the churches there, which had long been subject to Constantinople. The German Emperor’s power in northern Italy speedily resulted in the extension of papal influence there. Milan and Ravenna became more securely subordinate to Rome.

There was a price to pay. With the restoration of Charlemagne’s vision came a return of Charlemagne’s claims. The Ottomans expected to exercise tight control over the Church, and the popes appointed under Ottoman influence were expected to endorse Ottoman policies. Papal unease with these claims expressed themselves in the scaling down of the rite of imperial anointing. In place of the sacramental oil, chrism, used in the consecration of bishops as well as kings, a lesser oil was used, and the Emperor was anointed only on his arm and back, not his head, to symbolise that his office was to bear the sword for the defence of the Church. More practically, Ottoman policies were often unpopular in Italy, and the popes collected more than their share of the hostility those policies provoked. When Otto II died suddenly in 983, leaving the three-year-old Otto III to the regency of his Byzantine princess mother, Pope John XIV (983–4) was left friendless, and was soon deposed and murdered. Rome sank once more into the control of the Crescentii.

The imperial ideal was revived at the very end of the tenth century under the brief personal rule of Otto III. Of all the Ottomans, he had the most exalted view of Rome, and determined to establish
his headquarters there. His understanding of his role as emperor, however, was perhaps influenced by his Byzantine mother. For Otto, the Pope was a junior partner, the chaplain of empire, whose first duty was conformity to the will of the Lord’s anointed. To ensure that this was so, he looked first to his own family. His first papal appointment was a twenty-five-year-old German cousin (the first German Pope) who took the name Gregory V (996–9). But this move backfired, because Gregory was detested by the Roman ruling families, who were resentful of imperial interference. Without their support Rome became too hot to hold the Pope, and he was deposed temporarily in 996.

Gregory’s death in 999 enabled Otto to try again, this time with the brilliant Frenchman Gerbert of Aurillac, one of the wittiest and most learned men in Europe, and an experienced ecclesiastical politician. Gerbert had once been archbishop of Rheims, replacing an unworthy predecessor who had been deposed without papal consent. To defend his own position, Gerbert had attacked papal rights of interference in local churches. At the time of his appointment to the papacy he was Archbishop of Ravenna. Gerbert took the name Sylvester II (999–1003) to symbolise the rebirth of early Christian Rome, the
Renovatio Imperii Romanorum
which had appeared on some of Charlemagne’s seals, and which Otto had now adopted as his own. Gerbert would be Pope Sylvester to Otto’s Constantine.

Otto had firm ideas about the nature of that partnership. Almost uniquely among leaders of the day, he realised that the
Donation of Constantine
was a forgery, and said so. The Emperor was not the creation of the papacy: rather, the papacy was an instrument in the hand of the Emperor. Yet Otto showered benefits on the Church of Rome, restoring to it the lost territories of Ravenna and the Pentapolis. On the theoretical front, too, papal fortunes revived. Sylvester’s former hostility to papal claims evaporated once he was pope, and, ironically in view of his own earlier history, his vigorous assertion of the prerogatives of the Holy See, in Germany as well as Italy, now rivalled those of Nicholas I.

None of this was to last. Otto, still in his early twenties, died in 1002. Once more, the warring families of Rome reasserted their control of the papacy, with a corresponding decline in papal calibre. Imperial influence was not entirely eclipsed, however, and the Tusculan Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24) worked in close harmony with the
Emperor Henry II, whose attacks on Byzantine southern Italy he encouraged, in the hope of restoring papal authority there. This led to the breaking off of the fragile relations between the churches of Constantinople and Rome which had been patched up since the Photian schism. The situation was not eased by the fact that Benedict caved in to the Emperor’s insistence that the Creed, containing the Filioque, hitherto excluded from the Roman liturgy, should be sung at every Mass. Pope and Emperor nevertheless collaborated on a number of reform measures, almost certainly initiated by Henry, such as the Synod of Pavia’s stern measures in 1022 to stamp out clerical marriage and concubinage.

This imperial interlude, however, did not fundamentally alter the essentially local character of the papacy at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Whatever the grandiose theoretical claims of popes like Nicholas the Great, the reality was that the popes were harassed Italian prince–bishops, desperately struggling to preserve the territory of St Peter, sometimes responding to but never initiating reforms which were beginning to stir within Christendom. Even the imperial popes were desperately vulnerable – Leo VIII (963–5) had been exiled from Rome, John XIII (965–72) imprisoned and forced to flee, Benedict VI (973–4) murdered, Boniface VII (974, 984–5), twice banished, Benedict VII (974–83) exiled, John XIV (983–4) murdered, John XV (985–6) fled, Gregory V (996–9) exiled, Sylvester II (999–1003) driven out with his master Otto III. Ironically, the unavoidable price of papal security in the city seemed to be subordination to the rule of the local families, and the closing down of horizons.

Yet Rome retained its mystique. In 1027 King Cnut of England came on pilgrimage, ‘because I heard from wise men that St Peter the Apostle has received from the Lord a great power of binding and loosing, and bears the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and therefore I deemed it useful in no ordinary degree to seek his patronage before God.’ The Pope whom Cnut encountered on this journey, with whom he negotiated a series of privileges for the English church, and whom he watched crown and anoint Conrad II as emperor of the Romans, was John XIX (1024–32), the younger brother of the ruling Count ofTusculum. He was a typical representative of his age. He had bribed his way to the papacy, and had been elevated from the status of layman to pope in a single day. Yet Cnut, if he was aware of
these things, was not scandalised, and evidently felt no sense of incongruity at the distance between the key-bearer and his earthly representative. The Pope, for Cnut, was not essentially a leader, a reformer or an exemplar. Like other priests, he was the guardian of mysteries so holy that his own merits or demerits hardly mattered. It was the office that counted, not the man who held it. The Pope, in the words of Louis Duchesne, was ‘the high-priest of the Roman pilgrimage, the dispenser of benedictions, of privileges, and of anathemas’.
²⁹
No one looked to him to be anything more, and many would have resented it if the popes had tried. All that, however, was about to change.