Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (23 page)

It was a claim which was fleshed out in a multitude of ways. Throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries reformers of every aspect of the Church’s life turned to Rome for support, encouragement and spiritual heavy artillery Monastic reformers like St Bernard of Clairvaux saw in the papacy a God-given power which could override the corrupt worldliness of local bishops and priests, and which could declare the God-given direction of the Church in its search for purity and holiness. The Pope was Moses, declaring God’s law to his people. Bishops struggling against secular interference looked to Rome and the Pope’s spiritual authority for protection. Above all, the development of a sophisticated system of canon law, over which the popes presided as judges and courts of final appeal, made the papacy the centre of every concern of Christendom.

System and order became the marks of the papal regime – this was
the period, for example, in which the process of canonisation of saints, once a rule-of-thumb matter of local devotional recognition, was systematised and confined to the papacy. Papal business multiplied as litigants referred to the papal courts a multitude of matters once settled locally, such as dispensations for cousins to marry each other, appointments to lucrative ecclesiastical benefices, and the right to found a new monastery or to keep a private altar. Business grew like this not because popes insisted on their claims (though of course they did), but because Western Christendom found the papacy invaluable, a legal system which could be worked to everyone’s advantage, and an external control over local vested interests. The expanding papacy, armed with the exalted spiritual claims for which Gregory had struggled, in a thousand practical ways oiled the wheels of Church life, bringing stability and order to everything from treaties between warring nations to the property rights of country curates.

The transformation of the papacy was, among other things, the transformation of its institutions. As Rome was increasingly perceived as the executive centre of the Church, machinery evolved to handle the increase of business. Leo IX had made innovatory use of regional synods of bishops and abbots, assembled wherever he went, and serving both to commit local hierarchies to the cause of reform and to publicise the reform programme. Under his successors, the Roman synod took on a particular importance. Gregory VII held a synod every year in Lent, and these functioned both as debating chambers within which doctrinal and disciplinary decisions were hammered out and as courts in which solemn judgements were pronounced. These assemblies consolidated the authority of the Pope by associating the bishops with him, and cemented a sense of common identity and commitment to reform under him. Despite Gregory’s masterful way with other bishops, these synods were genuine deliberative assemblies, in which dissident voices were allowed. Under Urban II, whose synods were mainly held outside Rome, they increasingly functioned largely as rubber stamps, endorsing policies presented to the Council by the papal entourage.

In part this development reflected the growing numbers of those attending the synods. At the Council of Rheims in 1119, which excommunicated King Henry V and his antipope Gregory VIII, there were 427 participants, too large a forum for constructive discussion. The first three of the extraordinary series of four general councils
held in the Lateran between 1123 and 1215 were platforms from which the fundamental emphases of the reform programme were reiterated, and delinquents condemned. Councils had become bodies in which the Pope proclaimed laws for Christendom. Indeed the mere calling of a general council by the Pope rather than the Byzantine Emperor was a novelty, and an eloquent expression of the massive growth in the stature of the papacy. Yet councils also served to consolidate a sense of episcopal identity and collegiality, and thereby to evolve a potential counterweight to the emerging papal monarchy – as the popes would one day discover to their cost. They helped also to educate bishops into a sense of the Church as an international and not merely a regional entity. At the Third Lateran Council, the prince-bishops of Germany and France rubbed shoulders with an Irish bishop whose sole income (as he explained) was derived from the milk from three cows, and the Pope consecrated two Scottish bishops, one of whom had walked to the Council with a single companion. Such encounters played an important role in the medieval reimagining of the Church not as a communion of local churches, but as a single international organisation, with the Pope at its head.

The transformation of synods and councils was possible because many of their functions were being taken over by the cardinals, in particular by the Consistory, the regular meeting of the cardinals with the Pope. The cardinals had been crucial to the success of the reform movement from the very beginning – Peter Damian had called them ‘the spiritual senators of the Roman Church’, and considered that the prerogatives of the cardinal bishops transcended those of patriarchs and primates. From 1059 the cardinals were the chief electors of the Pope, and the election decree of that year specified that the choice lay in the first place with the seven cardinal bishops. The rest of the cardinals refused to concede this, however, and the rules governing papal elections remained murky for more than a century. The exclusive right of the cardinals to elect was not in fact securely established till the mid twelfth century, and the requirement for a two-thirds majority, which still holds, was not fixed until Lateran III in 1179. Even so, a majority was not an inevitable guarantee of legitimacy. Innocent II (1130–43) was elected by a minority of cardinals, his opponent, the Antipope Anacletus II by a large majority, yet in the long run it was Innocent who was recognised as the true Pope.

In the course of the twelfth century the cardinals became the chief executive officers of the papacy, meeting regularly with the Pope – and sometimes without him – to hear legal cases, appeals and requests for canonisation, to discuss doctrinal issues and to issue judgements. There were in theory up to fifty-four cardinals at any one time. In practice, the cardinals themselves worked to restrict the number in the interests of conserving power in fewer hands. At the death of Innocent III in 1216 there were only twenty-seven, at the death of John XXI in 1277 there were only seven.

The cardinals gradually became much more than advisers. Initially their signatures to papal acts in Consistory were probably understood as those of witnesses, but they came to be seen as necessary for the legitimacy of papal decisions. As the papacy evolved towards being a spiritual monarchy, the cardinals took on some of the characteristics of barons. They developed their own strong sense of collegiality, which could often block papal policies or lead to indecisiveness and inconsistency. In the twelfth century most were Italians, but they were routinely recruited from outside Italy also for, as Bernard of Clairvaux asked his pupil Pope Eugenius III (1145–53), ‘Surely they who are to judge the whole world must be chosen from the whole world?’
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The cardinals provided the pool from which the papal legates were selected. The popes from time immemorial had worked through locally based ‘vicars’ or agents, often the archbishops. These ‘permanent legates’, acting on behalf of the Pope in the localities, were gradually replaced by cardinals, especially cardinal bishops, despatched to deal with particular problems. The legates were ecclesiastical diplomats, travelling in a splendour calculated to overawe and outrank the local hierarchies, holding court and dispensing papal justice as they went, granting privileges, raising revenue to support the growing demands of the papal machinery. The legates could play a crucial role in the shaping of local churches along reformed lines, as Nicholas Breakspear, the future Pope Hadrian IV, did in Scandinavia in 1150, laying the foundations for the establishment of separate hierarchies in Norway and Sweden, till then subordinate to the Danish church. The system of legates institutionalised the mobile, proactive understanding of papal primacy over the churches of Europe which had been inaugurated by Leo IX’s travels. Their role as the arms of the papal monarchy was crucial to its growing prestige and power. Of
the nineteen popes in the century between Gregory VII and Innocent III, fifteen had been legates before their election.

As the Consistory increasingly became the supreme court of Christendom, the business heard before it became immensely varied, but often maddeningly trivial. Rome had originally been conceived as the court of final appeal: in the course of the twelfth century it took on the role of a court of first instance. With the journeying of Urban II in France and the sudden accessibility of the papal court outside Italy, business multiplied, and that trend intensified in the course of the next century. The Pope became the ‘universal ordinary’, exercising direct jurisdiction in every corner of Christendom, dispensing judgements which were built into the precedent books and became the basis of law.

The roots of this development were religious, based in the traditional Roman interpretation of the commission of Peter. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: ‘It is true there are other doorkeepers of heaven and shepherds of flocks: but you are more glorious than all of these … they have flocks assigned to them, one to each: to you all are assigned, a single flock to a single shepherd … You are called to the fullness of power. The power of others is bound by definite limits; yours extends even over those who have received power over others.’
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For Bernard as for Gregory the Great this lofty commission was a call ‘not to dominion, but to ministry through the office of your episcopacy’. Yet Bernard had no doubt that this ministry demanded that the Pope be exalted. ‘Why should you not be placed on high, where you can see everything, you who have been appointed watchman over all?’
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It was the work of the twelfth-century papacy to transform this religious perception into legal reality. The great originator here was Pope Alexander III (1159–81), the first of a long line of lawyer-popes. About a thousand papal decretals, or formal papal letters embodying legal decisions, survive for the twelfth century. An amazing 700 of them are Alexander’s, of which more than half concern English matters.

This flood of legislation was matched by a flood of legal codification. The study and practice of canon law had made a huge stride forward with the compilation by the Bolognese monk Gratian of the
Concordia discordantium canonum
(‘the harmony of discordant laws’) about the year H40. This massive collection and systematisation of
the whole body of canon law to the mid-century brought order and a dialectic method of resolving legal contradictions to a previously chaotic situation. It helped establish canon law as one of the principal fields of intellectual effort and advance over the next century. Gratian’s work was the enterprise of a private scholar, as most medieval legal collections were: the papacy had no hand in it. But it drew heavily both on papalist forgeries like the
Donation of Constantine
and on papal decretals. Canon law was papal law, and the growing dominance of law within the Church was a key factor in the establishing of the papacy at the heart of the Church, as the monarch and his courts lay at the heart of secular legal systems.

All this had a negative side, which was much commented on. The right of any cleric to appeal to Rome, and the prohibition of local action against them while the appeal was pending, meant that culprits could fend off just punishment almost indefinitely by appealing to the Pope. The judgements given in the papal court on cases far away was often based on insufficient information, or the one-sided presentation of a party in a dispute. Ecclesiastical superiors could be harassed by mischievous accusations against them at the papal court, and Gregory’s insistence in the
Dictatus Papae
that with papal permission ‘subjects may accuse their rulers’ seemed to many to subvert all order in Church and society. Bernard of Clairvaux would warn Eugenius III against undermining the hierarchy of the Church – ‘You have been appointed to preserve for each the grades and orders of honours, not to prejudice them.’
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It is no accident that it was in this period that the papacy began to use the term ‘curia’ (court), to describe its administration. The term was introduced by Urban II, and he began a reorganisation of every aspect of the papal household, which over the next fifty years would evolve into a highly efficient working machine, at the head of which stood the cardinals. There was a price to pay for this increase of efficiency. This papal household developed a strong
esprit de corps
, and was perceived by outsiders as a closed shop – as indeed it might be. No fewer than nine of the cardinals created by Pope Paschal II (1099–1118) began their careers as chaplains and clerks within the Curia. All medieval bureaucracies financed themselves by exacting fees for their services, and the Curia was no exception. Round the judgement seat of Peter was thrown a
cordon insanitaire
through which gold was the only passport. Savage satire blossomed against
the sale of grace at the papal Curia. The only saints venerated at Rome, it was said, were saints Albinus and Rufus, silver and gold. ‘Blessed are the wealthy, for theirs is the court of Rome.’
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These criticisms were not confined to the Curia, but reached to the popes themselves. Papal finances in the Middle Ages were never secure. The bulk of the papal income came from the Patrimony of Peter, the territories ruled by the pope. But these were constantly being eroded by marauders like the Normans, and the recurrent conflict with the empire and the many papal schisms of the period meant that the ‘real’ popes were often cut off from the revenues of the Patrimony. In the last years of his life Gregory VII lived on handouts from his Norman allies and from friends of the papacy like Matilda of Tuscany, while his opponent, the imperial Antipope Clement III, enjoyed the revenues of the lands of St Peter. Similarly, Innocent II (1130–43) spent much of his pontificate in exile, while the Antipope Anacletus II commandeered the papal revenues.