Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (20 page)

CHAPTER THREE

SET ABOVE NATIONS
1000–1447

I T
HE
E
RA OF
P
APAL
R
EFORM

At the opening of the eleventh century the papacy was a contradictory mixture of exalted theory and squalid reality. In theory the bishops of Rome were lords of the world, exercising a unique spiritual supremacy symbolised by their exclusive right to anoint the western or ‘Holy Roman’ Emperor. In practice, the popes were strictly and often humiliatingly subordinated to the power of the local Roman aristocracy, or to the German ruling house. Of the twenty-five popes between 955 and 1057, thirteen were appointed by the local aristocracy, while the other twelve were appointed (and no fewer than five dismissed) by the German emperors. The ancient axiom that no one may judge the Pope was still in the law-books, but in practice had long since been set aside.

The popes themselves were deeply embroiled in the internecine dynastic warfare of the Roman nobility, and election to the chair of Peter, as we have seen, was frequently a commodity for sale or barter. The Ottoman era had led to a temporary improvement in the characters of the popes, but by the second quarter of the eleventh century standards had crumbled once more. Benedict IX (1032–48), whose election was the result of a systematic campaign of bribery by his father, the Tusculan grandee Count Alberic III, was as bad as any of the popes of the preceding ‘dark century’. Like his uncle and immediate predecessor John XIX, Benedict was a layman, and was still in his twenties at the time of his election. He was both violent and debauched, and even the Roman populace, hardened as they were to unedifying papal behaviour, could not stomach him. He was eventually deposed in favour of Silvester III (1045). With the help of his family’s private army, he was briefly restored in 1045 amid bloody
hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Rome. He was evidently tired of the struggle, however, for he accepted a bribe to abdicate in favour of his godfather, the archpriest John Gratian. It was rumoured that Pope Benedict needed the money in order to marry.

Gratian was a man with a reputation for holiness and a genuine interest in religious reform. His choice of name, Gregory VI (1045–6), was probably a deliberate allusion to the purity of the papacy under Gregory the Great. His election was therefore greeted with delight by those who were looking for a clean-up of the Church. Peter Damian, the ex-swineherd who had become abbot of the monastery of Fonte Avellana, and was one of the leading voices of monastic and clerical reform of the day, hoped that Gregory’s election might presage the return of ‘the golden days of the Apostles’, and prayed that religious discipline might flourish again under his guidance. Yet there was no doubt that money had changed hands to secure Gregorys election, both in setting up Benedicts pension and in providing financial sweeteners to the turbulent Roman crowd.

Into this delicate situation in 1046 strode the German King Henry III. Still in his twenties, he was a gifted warrior and a man of deep piety who saw his role as much in religious as in secular terms. Committed to the reform of the Church, he surrounded himself with bishops and men of learning. Henry had come to Italy to be crowned emperor. How much he knew about the circumstances of Pope Gregory’s election before his arrival is uncertain, but on learning the facts he acted decisively. He would not be crowned by a pope whose authority was undermined by the sin of simony, the purchase of holy things. At a synod held at Sutri in December 1046, Gregory, Silvester and Benedict were all formally deposed, and Henry set about reforming the papacy. Over the next ten years he appointed a series of popes committed to the renewal of the Church in general, and of the See of Peter in particular. All were Germans, and the names they chose as pope are significant – Clement II (1046–7), Damasus II (1048), Leo IX (1049–54) and Victor II (1055–7). Marking a clear break with the Gregories, Johns and Benedicts of the ‘dark century’, these were the names of great popes of the early Church, and they symbolised a conscious aspiration to recover the purity of early Christian Rome. The greatest of these imperial appointments was an Alsatian count, Bruno, Bishop of Toul, the Emperor’s distant
cousin. Bishop Bruno signalled his exalted religious ideals by refusing the papacy unless Henry’s choice was ratified by the Roman clergy and people, and he walked to Rome as a pilgrim for his installation as Pope Leo IX in 1049.

Leo represented the spearhead of a movement which had been stirring the Church in France and Germany for over a century. Though it aimed at the renewal of Christian life in general, it was intimately identified with reform of the monastic life. In the Frankish empire there had been a close connection between monasteries and monarchy, and successive emperors and kings had concerned themselves with the regulation and endowment of the great religious houses. Royal patronage enriched these communities, encouraged the proper keeping of the rule and the maintenance of a glorious liturgy, and protected the monasteries against interference.

The most famous of all the reforming communities of tenth-century Europe was the great monastery of Cluny, founded by Duke William of Aquitaine in 909. Like many other monasteries, Cluny was an aristocratic foundation, but one with a difference, for Duke William had decreed that the monks at Cluny ‘shall be wholly freed from our power, and from that of our kindred, and from the jurisdiction of royal greatness’.
¹
William placed his new monastery under the direct protection of the Holy See, and dedicated it to Sts Peter and Paul. This ‘special relationship’ with the papacy, ensuring Cluny’s freedom from external pressure and contributing to its prestige, culminated in 1054 with the exemption of the monastery from all episcopal control except that of the Pope.

Cluny gradually became the centre of a great web of religious communities, some new, and some older foundations seeking reform. By the mid-eleventh century there were hundreds of Cluniac houses throughout Europe. In some ways Cluniac reform hardly strikes us now as a ‘reformation’ at all, and it certainly was not primarily associated with personal austerity of living, poverty, study and contemplation. What Cluny offered was the beauty of holiness, monastic life conceived of as an orderly and dignified observance of the monastic rule, the adornment of the monastic church with splendid architecture, rich vestments and beautiful books and the elaborate celebration of the liturgy of the hours and the Mass.

Cluny enjoyed excellent relations with the kings and emperors of Germany, and Cluniac houses everywhere basked in the favour of
the European aristocracy: it was in no sense a revolutionary movement. But in one important respect Cluniac reform looked away from the Carolingian world in which monasticism had flourished under royal patronage, towards the papal future. For the German monasteries like Gorze, religious freedom meant freedom
under
the King. For Cluny, it meant, among other things, freedom
from
the King. This was a distinction which would come to dominate the very idea of religious reform, as more and more reformers came to see lay influence over the Church, however benevolent in intent, as the chief source of its corruptions.

In the mid-eleventh century, lay influence was everywhere in the Church. Monasteries and bishoprics were more than spiritual institutions. They were enormously wealthy social and political corporations, controlling vast revenues and carrying a corresponding weight in the calculations of kings. When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 he found there thirty-five monasteries, which between them controlled a sixth of the total revenue of the country No ruler could afford to ignore such power, or to leave it unchecked. Everywhere in Europe rulers exercised close control over the choice of bishops and abbots in their realms. The monasteries and other churches founded by kings and princes belonged to them, and their revenues were often at the disposal of the lay ‘proprietors’. Control by the ruler was symbolised in the ceremony of consecration of a bishop, in the course of which the King (or his representative) handed over the Bishop’s staff and ring of office. This ‘lay investiture’ was to become the focus of the reform papacy’s attack on lay interference in spiritual matters.

The potential in all this for corruption is obvious. Since becoming a bishop made a man immensely wealthy and powerful, men were prepared to pay for the privilege. More often than not, new bishops were required to pay large sums of money to the ruler who had nominated them. Reformers denounced this as the sale of holy things, called the sin of ‘simony’ after Simon Magus, who in the Acts of the Apostles had offered the Apostles money for the power to work miracles. But simony was not always easy to distinguish from the reasonable levying of a tax by the ruler when the revenues of the bishopric were transferred to a new holder. The papacy itself exacted fees of this sort. When Benedict VIII established a new bishopric of Besalu in 1017, he stipulated that each new bishop should pay the
pope one pound of gold. The papal clerk who recorded this provision carefully added that this payment was ‘not for the consecration but in token of true obedience’.
²

Cash payments as a condition for religious office were just one of the signs of the extent to which the Church was woven into the fabric of society. Clerical marriage and concubinage were another. In the Eastern churches, bishops were expected to be celibate: if they were married men on their election, they had to separate from their wives. In the West, this provision was applied to all clerics above the rank of subdeacon. Many popes and bishops had been family men, but in theory at least continuing sexual relations were ruled out by ordination. In practice, however, things were often very different. Clerical marriage or concubinage was routine all over Europe, and the laity may even have felt safer if their priest had his own wife. In England before the Norman Conquest many parish priests were married. The same was true in Milan and northern Italy generally, where married bishops were not uncommon, and clerical office might pass from father to son. Religious reformers in the West had always denounced this, but the reformers of the eleventh century were to place the attack on clerical marriage (known as ‘Nicolaism’) at the centre of their campaign for purity in the Church. The Tusculan Pope Benedict VIII had legislated against clerical marriage, but his concern was primarily with the dangers to Church property from greedy clerical families. In the reform era the concern was rather with the ritual purity of those who served the sanctuary, and with the symbolic separation of Church and world.

The early-eleventh-century papacy, for all its continuing theoretical claims, had been in many respects a local institution, trapped by geography and the politics of Rome. Leo IX determined to take the papacy out beyond Italy, and to make it the spearhead of a general reform. In a whirlwind pontificate of five years he travelled to Germany, France and northern Italy. Wherever he went he held a series of great reforming synods, which attacked the evils of simony, lay investiture and clerical marriage. The synod at Rheims, held in the year of his election, set the tone for later meetings. He had gone to Rheims to consecrate the new monastic church of St Remigius (the Apostle of the Franks), and to enshrine the saints bones at the high altar. The French King, anxious about Leo’s likely attacks on royal episcopal appointments, forbade his bishops to attend, and there were
only twenty bishops present. Nevertheless, the Pope used the occasion to inaugurate a purge against simoniac bishops. Having placed the bones of St Remigius on the high altar, he demanded that the bishops and abbots present declare individually whether they had paid any money for their office. He evidently knew his men: the guilty majority were shamed into silence. The Archbishop of Rheims, who was host for the Council, was spared open humiliation, being summoned to Rome to account for himself. The Bishop of Langres fled, and was excommunicated and deposed. His defence counsel, the Archbishop of Besançon, was struck dumb while speaking on his behalf, a judgement held to have come direct from St Remigius himself. Bishops who confessed – a quarter of those present – were pardoned and restored, though one of them, the Bishop of Nantes, who had succeeded his own father in office, was stripped of his episcopal honours and reduced to the priesthood.

In one week, Leo had asserted papal authority as it had never been asserted before. Bishops had been excommunicated and deposed, a powerful and prestigious archbishop summoned to explain himself in Rome, and the whole system of payments for promotion within the Church had been earth-shakingly challenged. And Rheims was only the beginning. Leo launched an all-out attack on the financial traffic in ecclesiastical appointments, from village priests up to bishops and archbishops, deposing the guilty and even reordaining priests ordained by such bishops, for simony at the time was held to be a heresy which invalidated the sacraments celebrated by the simoniac. He enforced orthodox doctrine, condemning Berengar of Tours for heretical teaching on the eucharist, and he did what he could to reform practical abuses, like the appointment of bishops by the secular ruler without election by or with the consent of priests and people. He also began a campaign against married priests, insisting that all clergy must be celibate.

In a momentous step which foreshadowed a permanent change in the character of the papacy, he built round him a remarkable body of like-minded reformers as advisers and deputies, thereby beginning the transformation of the Roman Curia from a locally recruited to an international body of experts and activists. They included monks like the fiery Peter Damian, Humbert of Moyenmoutier (a learned zealot whom he made cardinal bishop of Silva Candida), Frederick of Liège, Abbot of Monte Cassino (later Pope Stephen IX), Abbot Hugh of
Cluny, and the energetic Roman monk Hildebrand, who, as Pope Gregory VII, would give his name to the whole reform movement.

Leo’s determination to maintain the freedom of the papacy and to rid papal territory of political interference seemed compromised by a new development in Italy, the arrival of the Normans. Southern Italy was ruled by the Byzantine empire, Sicily by Muslims. But both regions were remote from the empires which claimed sovereignty over them, and were a paradise for landless adventurers. By the mid-eleventh century, Norman mercenaries, called in by local princelings struggling against Muslim or Byzantine overlords, had broken the Muslim power in Sicily and established themselves as a threat in their own right. They soon began to encroach on the southern reaches of the patrimony of Peter. Leo as a young man had led imperial armies in northern Italy. He now once again took to war, leading his own ramshackle army in a disastrous attack on the Norman forces in southern Italy. He had hoped for help from the German Emperor, and had planned to join forces with the Byzantine armies of the south, to drive out this shared new enemy. In the event, no help was forthcoming. Leo was humiliatingly defeated in June 1053, and his Norman enemies kept him under polite but close arrest for nine months.