The Perfect Heresy (6 page)

The memory of that showdown was only two years old when the Cathars gathered in St. Félix, some thirty miles south of Lombers. Nicetas and the assembled Perfect, unmolested and unafraid, undertook the task of organizing the growing faith. Cathar dioceses were drawn up, and “bishops”—coordinators rather than feudal overseers like their Catholic counterparts—were appointed or confirmed. We know the names of the men in charge of the Cathar homeland: Sicard Cellerien got Albi; Bernard Raymond, Toulouse; Guirald Mercier, Carcassonne. Quietly, without the theatrics of earlier heretics, the Cathars were laying the foundations of a revolution. After St. Félix, the greatest fear of the orthodox—the rivalry of a powerful counter-church—came closer to being a reality.

O
N FEBRUARY
22, 1198, a generation after the Cathar conclave in St. Félix, the leaders of the Church gathered in Rome as Lotario dei Conti di Segni was crowned Pope Innocent III. Lotario’s solemn procession made its way from its assembly point on the hill of the Vatican past the churches and fortified mansions of the city. The snaking ceremonial moved from out of the shadow of Hadrian’s mausoleum and through the
abitato
, the warren of streets in the bend on the left bank of the Tiber. Robed men yanked on ropes in dozens of belfries to rend the air with a deafening din of celebration; thousands lined the parade route to watch. All eyes were on the thirty-seven-year-old pope, mounted on a white charger and clad in the regalia of his office. He wore the pallium, a lambskin cloth draped over his shoulders, and the tiara, a bejeweled coronet affixed to a silken skullcap.

A millennium earlier in the Eternal City, a man of his caliber might have been made emperor of the known world. For Lotario
, there was little difference in the two positions—except that the supreme pontiff of Latin Christendom was by far the superior one. The pope was the sole earthly guardian of absolute, irrefragable truth. Disagreement with him was not dissent, it was treason.

Even before his election on the second ballot, Lotario had had no doubts about the sanctity of his new role. He became, in his words, “higher than man, but lower than God.” As Innocent III, he proclaimed for all the world to hear in a sermon, “We are the successor of the Prince of the Apostles, but we are not his vicar, nor the vicar of any man or Apostle, but the vicar of Jesus Christ himself.” He had looked downward in the morning as the cardinals at St. Peter’s trooped before him and performed the proskynesis, the kissing of his feet. The more abject the posture, the more correct was the gesture. In this, Lotario trod the theocratic trail blazed in the eleventh century by Hildebrand, who, as Pope Gregory VII, had affirmed the pontiff’s superiority over all the crowned heads of Christendom. Previously, kingship was thought divinely ordained; Hildebrand and his successors had informed a misguided medieval world that it was up to the pope, and the pope alone, to decide who could rule. The man wearing the bishop’s miter in Rome was mightier than any bearded ruffian with a leafy family tree.

Well-traveled and well-informed, Lotario was aware, however, that what looked splendid sealed with a leaden
bulla
(hence a papal “bull”) often ended up a dead letter in the royal chanceries of the north. A new century was about to dawn, and Lotario wanted to make sure that the next 100 years would be rosier than the last. The 1100s had not been a happy time for the vicars of Christ. Prior to Innocent, eleven of the sixteen twelfth-century pontificates saw popes forcibly kept out of Rome by rioters, republicans, or agents of distant kings. The Roman commune led by Arnold of Brescia at midcentury was a particularly vivid episode in a recurring nightmare. In 1145, Pope Lucius II died of wounds incurred in a battle for control of the Capitol; thirty years earlier, a frail old Gelasius II was seated backward on a mule and forced to endure the jeers of his enemies. “Antipopes” were regularly elected by rival Roman clans and by churchmen in the thrall of the German emperor, the single biggest threat to the papacy’s independence.

Pope Innocent III

(Thirteenth-century fresco in the monastery Sacro Speco, Subiaco)

At the beginning of the 1190s, the man on the German throne, Henry VI, the son of Barbarossa, had seemed poised to
take over all of central Europe and, more important, the entire Italian peninsula. An ambitious and arrogant young monarch, he bestrode the continent like a latter-day Caesar; Celestine III, the aging pope in a besieged Rome, could do little else but try to have the man murdered. The plot was discovered, and Henry dispatched the papal assassin by nailing a red-hot crown into his skull. Then, in September 1197, Henry fell ill, most probably with malaria, and died in Messina, Sicily. It was a blessed mosquito for the papacy. Five months later, Henry’s infant son, Frederick, had become the ward of none other than Lotario dei Conti, the child’s birthright soon to be occulted by the skirted intrigues skillfully conducted by the new pope. The future looked bright for theocracy.

But as Lotario guided his horse through the straw-strewn streets, past dwellings proud and humble, he had to know that the Roman skies over his papacy were not cloudless. Hundreds of forbidding stone towers, constructed by the powerful families of the city, loomed over him like a forest of menace. As a Conti, Lotario had to contend with such clans as the Frangipani, Colonna, Annibaldi, and Caetani, all of whom counted cardinals and rich barons in their midst. The Vassaletti had cornered the market on quarrying classical Roman statuary into chunks of marble to be sold throughout Europe. It was the Frangipani who had made Gelasius take his shameful mule ride. And it was they and their allies who viewed this upstart Conti pope with misgiving.

To their patrician Roman noses, Lotario and his kinsmen still had a lingering scent of the barnyard to them. The Conti were from the Campagna, the rolling hinterland to the southeast of the city. Their rough-hewn castle, which still crowns the hilltop village of Gavignano, overlooked a quilted valley that had
known the hand of man since the time of the Etruscans. A few miles to the west, tucked behind steep green slopes, stood the larger town of Segni. It was between there and Gavignano that the estates of the Conti di Segni produced the wealth that fueled social striving.

Sometime around the middle of the century, Lotario’s father, Trasimondo, had wooed and won Claricia, a Roman heiress of the influential Scotti family. Given an exalted station in society through his highborn mother, the young Lotario eventually left the hills and valleys around Gavignano and rode toward Rome to make his mark in the world. Most probably, he took the Appian Way into the city, passing the hulking ruins of antiquity guarded by rows of pencil-thin cypress trees. Destiny smiled on him in 1187 when his mother’s brother became Pope Clement III and ensured his talented nephew’s rise to prominence. Lotario studied theology in Paris and learned the law in Bologna, and wrote several closely argued treatises. One of these,
De miseria condicionis humanae
(The wretchedness of man’s lot), won him lasting recognition among learned pessimists throughout Europe. His fierce and never idle legalistic intellect, wedded to the diplomatic guile of an Italian aristocrat, would make Lotario a redoubtable opponent to any who dared stand in his way.

Like the pilgrims who flocked to the sights described in
Mirabilis Urbis Romae
(The wonders of the City of Rome), a popular twelfth-century guidebook, Lotario’s procession would have passed through the neighborhood built over the Roman Forum. Tradition dictated that papal coronation parades stop at intervals along their route to receive the acclaim of the crowds and to distribute alms. No doubt at the arch of Septimius Severus, then 995 years old, Lotario’s retinue came to halt. Of the two tall towers that medieval Romans had seen fit to build on
the antique archway, the southernmost served as a belfry for the church of SS. Sergio and Bacco, where Lotario had served his cardinalate. The area of the Roman Forum had been the young man’s home in the city, where he had mastered the intricacies of its turbulent civic politics. A few hundred yards from the church of SS. Sergio and Bacco, midway between Trajan’s Column and the Colosseum, the new pope would commission a tower, the Torre dei Conti, as a great statement on the ambitions of his family. Lotario’s brother Riccardo would build the tower to protect the Conti’s new turf on the slopes leading to the Viminal Hill. The brown-brick monolith, called “unique in the world” by an astonished Petrarch, dominated the Capitol and the Quirinal, and would still do so if an earthquake in 1348 had not cut its height by half. Today it continues to loom over Nerva’s Forum, a reminder that Lotario not only raised his family from obscurity to greatness but also gave Rome the fleeting impression of once again being the capital of the world.

Beyond the Colosseum, past the flank of the Celian Hill, the procession headed to its final destination amid the well-tended fields of the papacy’s private domains. The basilica of St. John Lateran, the grandest and oldest of Rome, was built some 850 years earlier by the emperor Constantine, who donated the land and the adjoining palace to the Church from the private estate of his wife, Fausta. It was Constantine who decreed Christianity a legitimate Roman cult. His mother, Helena, had the staircase from Pontius Pilate’s quarters in Jerusalem hauled to the Lateran Palace. The pope could climb the twenty-eight steps of the Scala Santa in imitation of Jesus whenever the responsibility of his office weighed too heavily.

His parade finished, Lotario dismounted and entered St. John Lateran, his cathedral as the bishop of Rome. The church
was a treasure house of relics, the celebrity memorabilia of an age when faith outshone fame. Lotario had no doubt seen the Lateran’s collection: the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul; the Ark of the Covenant; the Tablets of Moses; the Rod of Aaron; an urn of manna; the Virgin’s tunic; five loaves and two fishes from the Feeding of the Five Thousand; and the dinner table from the Last Supper. The pope’s private chapel held the foreskin and umbilical cord of Jesus. Lotario’s beliefs, like those of the millions he now led, were rooted firmly in the material.

The Lateran Palace, where a banquet awaited the procession’s participants, had been the principal residence of the popes since Constantine’s Fausta was forced to find other lodgings some eight centuries earlier. Yet Lotario was aware that the Lateran now stood marooned in an archipelago of Frangipani strongholds around the Celian Hill. He was determined not to be cowed or held captive here; thus it was he who definitively nudged the papal court to where his triumphant day had begun, near the tomb of St. Peter on the grounds of the Vatican.

From summers of childhood in the Campagna to this portentous day in the winter of 1198, Lotario’s life had shaped him into a leader of unshakable convictions. He had been a boy when, in 1173, a pope in temporary residence in his hometown of Segni had proclaimed the murdered Thomas Becket a saint. Just thirteen, living with his family atop Gavignano, Lotario must have absorbed the lesson behind that beatification: No one must ever trifle with the Church. Becket went on to become the supernova of the medieval clerical firmament; when the apostate King Henry VIII robbed his tomb in the sixteenth century, he would make off with almost 5,000 ounces of gold. Lotario’s destiny lay between the base calculations of ordinary monarchs and the exalted peaks of sainthood.

As Pope Innocent III, he had now been given, in his words, “not only the universal church but the whole world to govern.” In many quarters of Europe, his beloved Church, buffeted by the changes of the twelfth century, had been left disorganized, discredited, or, worse still, corrupted. When he looked to the east, he saw Jerusalem still in the hands of the Muslims. On the Italian peninsula, years of turmoil had deprived the papacy of the lands from which it once drew income and temporal prestige. And to the west lay Languedoc, where the wound of heresy had been allowed to fester. A new pope had been chosen for a new century.