The Forge of Christendom (53 page)

Canossa. The ruined state of the castle only compounds the sense of bleakness and isolation. Even in September, when this photograph was taken, the winds can be violent and icy. (Author photo)

Alexius Comnenus, who succeeded to the throne of Constantinople in 1081, at a time when the Byzantine Empire appeared on the verge of utter collapse. His deft deployment of bribes to Henry IV, and a facility for stirring up revolts against his Norman enemies, enabled Alexius to haul his empire back from the very brink. (AKG London)

The seeming ruin of all Gregory’s ambitions. In the top panel, Henry IV is shown sitting in triumph, following his coronation as emperor by the antipope Clement III, while on the right Gregory is being expelled from Rome. In the bottom panel, the exiled pontiff is shown lying on his deathbed.

On the same day that Gregory VII died, the Muslim city of Toledo opened its gates to the Christian king of Leon, Alfonso VI. “We rejoice with a most joyful heart,” as Gregory’s successor, Urban II, would put it, “and we give great thanks to God, as is worthy, because in our time He has deigned to give such a victory to the Christian people.” (Corbis)

Urban II consecrates the high altar of the colossal new church at Cluny. The Pope stands on the left and Abbot Hugh, with his monks, on the right. (Art Archive)

Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Here, amid the darkness that would precede the light of the Second Coming, Antichrist was fated to manifest himself, enthroned in sanguinary glory. In 1099, when Jerusalem fell to the warriors of the First Crusade, the bloodshed on the Temple Mount was especially terrible. (Corbis)

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.”
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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 east, 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.”
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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 of 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.”
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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”
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– “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,”
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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,”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.