by Holland, Tom
No wonder that many priests, bewildered by the sudden sea change in public opinion, one that sought to condemn their wives as whores and their own physical needs as a menace to the cosmos, found the new demands being placed upon them insupportable. ‘In every struggle with titillating pleasure,’ was Peter’s own tip, ‘try to meditate on the grave’ – either that or hurry off to Mass. Advice kindly offered, no doubt – but not entirely adequate, even so, to the frailties of every priest. There were many, it seemed, who needed to be hectored, even menaced, rather than simply encouraged. This was why, even as reformers sought to combine their great campaign against simony with a no less ambitious insistence that priests live as chastely as monks, there were some who looked to harness their supporters among the Christian people to a policy of active intimidation. Peter, that committed pacifist, was not one of them, of course; but there were others who argued with no less passionate a sense of righteousness that desperate circumstances might indeed require desperate measures. The stakes were cosmically high. Could there be anything more important, in the final count, than the readying of God’s Church for the coming of the end days!
One episode, in particular, served to illustrate the kind of value judgement that its leaders were increasingly opting to make. In 1065, a knight from Milan by the name of Erlembald, a pious man much given to charitable works and pilgrimages, arrived in Rome and paid a call on Hildebrand. He was troubled and in need of spiritual guidance. Should he join a monastery, he asked the archdeacon, as he had originally been planning to do – or should he accept a very different calling, a summons just recently received from the Patarenes, to fashion them into an authentic fighting force and lead them as their generalissimo? Hildebrand’s answer was not long in coming. It took the form – a whole year before the granting of a similar standard to Duke William of Normandy – of a papal banner. Returning to the Patarenes beneath the fluttering of this ‘battle flag of St Peter’s’, Erlembald duly threw himself into the brutal business of scouring simony and priestly unchastity from Milan for good: the first-ever knight to have received a formal papal blessing. Whether as a consequence of this or not, victory marked all his efforts. ‘He subdued the city by the sword and also by gold, and by many and diverse oaths; none of the nobles could withstand him.’ Indeed, by 1071, such was the scale of Erlembald’s success that the wretched Archbishop Guy, holed up in his cathedral, and in increasingly poor health, had resolved on a clandestine resignation.
Spies in Milan, however, keeping track of his intentions, were soon bringing news of all his plans to Rome; and Hildebrand moved quickly to capitalise. Sending both funds and instructions to the Patarene captain, he ordered his protege to prepare a coup. By August, when the sick and weary archbishop finally breathed his last, Erlembald was primed. The Patarenes, backed by the presence of a papal legate, pushed for the election of a successor, a young clerk by the name of Atto; and on 6 January 1072, he was duly chosen. Erlembald, escorting the new archbishop to his palace amid a fearsome clattering of hoofs and glimmering of mail, sat him down there to celebrate his elevation with a sumptuous banquet. Yet the Patarenes, for all the speed and ruthlessness of their actions, had overstepped a fateful bound. Momentous forces – more momentous than even Hildebrand could imagine – were being set in train. The attempt to enthrone Atto, far from healing the fissures in Milan, was doomed only to widen them – and indeed to precipitate a crisis so devastating, so unexpected and so wholly without precedent that it would end up racking the whole span of Christendom and transforming it for all time.
That a Patarene nominee as archbishop was a direct threat to the Church establishment in Milan went without saying – but it was also, and far more ominously, a slap in the face for Henry IV. The young king had not forgotten that it was his father, almost three decades previously, who had invested Guy with his staff and ring of office. Indeed, shortly before his death, the failing archbishop had returned them both to the imperial court, together with a proposal that the emissary to whom they had been entrusted, a deacon by the name of Godfrey, be invested with them in turn. King Henry, who was by now in his early twenties, and positively itching to throw his weight around in Italy, had needed no second encouragement. Godfrey had duly been graced with Guy’s staff and ring – and packed off back to Milan. An abortive mission, it might have been thought: for no sooner had he arrived in town to claim his throne than he was being hunted down by Erlembald’s heavies, chased into a lonely fortress, and put under siege.
Even amid all Godfrey’s humiliations, however, there was one thing at least left to bring a smile to his lips: that though he might be mired in impotence, so too was his rival, Atto. Erlembald’s grip on Milan had proved less secure than he had trusted: for on the very day of his nominee’s election, indeed even as he sat down at the formal banquet to celebrate it, he and his Patarene bodyguards had suddenly found themselves being ambushed. A mob whipped up by the local clergy had burst into the archbishop’s palace, chased Atto into his bedroom, and beaten him black and blue. Even the papal legate had suffered the mortification of being stripped of all his clothes. Although Erlembald had quickly succeeded in restoring order, it had not been soon enough to prevent Atto from swearing to his captors that he would ‘never again intervene in the bishopric’. Such an oath could not readily be dismissed. Milan, as a result, had found herself stuck with two archbishops – neither one of whom was able to take up his office.
A shocking state of affairs, to be sure—and yet barely hinting at the full scale of the crisis yet to come. In the summer of 1072, Pope Alexander II, at a formal synod of the Roman Church, pronounced that Atto was not bound by the oath he had given his assailants — and was therefore the rightful Archbishop of Milan. A few months later, in early 1073, Henry IV leaned on the bishops of Lombardy to stand as Godfrey’s patrons at his consecration. Alexander’s response was to excommunicate not only Godfrey himself, not only the Lombard bishops, but, just for good measure, some of Henry’s own closest advisers. Only once they had all been dismissed, the Pope declared, would he re-establish contact with the king: until that moment, he was to be regarded as ‘outside the communion of the Church’. Almost without anyone quite understanding how it had happened, papacy and empire, those twin pillars of Christendom, were at open loggerheads.
Less than three decades had passed since Henry III, descending upon the shrine of the apostles, had dismissed three popes at a stroke, and set about laying the foundations for the great project of reform. In that time, though much had been attempted and achieved by the reformers, it had never been any part of their intention to humiliate the youthful Caesar, just the opposite, in fact: Henry had always been the focus of their very highest hopes. Born of two exemplary parents, he had also been entrusted at his christening to the care of Abbot Hugh of Cluny, who had raised him dripping from the font, and been named his ‘spiritual father’ – so that the youthful king was triply a child of reform. Even once Henry had come of age, a vague feeling of responsibility, even of condescension, continued to characterise how reformers such as Hildebrand regarded him. On several occasions, indeed, ordering the Empress Agnes out of her cloistered retirement, they had dispatched her on the gruelling journey back across the Alps, so determined had they been to keep a watchful eye on her son.
Other missions, those considered too embarrassing or awkward for a woman to handle, they had entrusted to Peter Damian. Although Peter was old by now, and reluctant to leave his hermitage, he had undertaken them willingly enough: for he had always disapproved of sending Agnes, his spiritual ward, back to the scenes of her earthly greatness. In 1069, for instance, he had made the trek to the imperial court on a particularly delicate matter. Henry, bored of his new wife, the Lady Bertha, and complaining of her lack of sex appeal, had abruptly announced that he wished to divorce her. Peter, summoning all his considerable reserves of authority, had alternately menaced and wooed the young Caesar into backing down: the first time that a papal reformer had ever succeeded
in imposing his will upon a king. ‘If you are really determined in this matter,’ Henry sighed, with a crashing lack of graciousness, ‘then I suppose I must brace myself to shoulder as best I can a burden that I cannot shed.’ Yet Peter himself, despite the undoubted scale of his triumph, had very deliberately refrained from making a song and dance about it. Bridges had not been burned. Lines of communication had been left open. Proof had been offered that the king and the papacy, even when tensions were running high, were not necessarily doomed to conflict.
But this was already, amid the gathering mood of crisis, a lesson well on the way to being lost. Peter, the leader among the reformers who had always been best qualified to teach it, was fading fast. He died in 1072, just a few months before the Empress Agnes, despairing of persuading her son to listen to her, gave pious backing to the excommunication of his advisers. A few weeks later, in April 1073, Alexander too was dead. The people of Rome, rather than wait for the cardinals to nominate a successor, were soon taking the law into their own hands. They knew precisely whom they wanted as their new pope: ‘Hildebrand for bishop!’ Even as Alexander was being laid to rest in the Lateran, the cry went up across the whole city.
‘Like the raging of the east wind, which buffets with violent blasts,’ Peter Damian had once described the inimitable archdeacon. Now, swept up from Alexander’s funeral amid the unanimous cheering of the Roman people, carried out of the basilica despite all his own modest protests, universally hailed by the name of Gregory, Hildebrand was borne from the Lateran past open fields, past blossom- heavy orchards, past crumbling ruins, down into the very heart of the Holy City itself, where, in an ancient church filled with relics of St Peter, he was formally installed upon the throne of the Prince of the Apostles.
The far-distant King Henry might not have given his nod – but the people certainly had.
At a fateful moment for Christendom, Hildebrand had been installed as Pope.
So Fearful a Weight
‘See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.’ So the voice of God, it was recorded in Holy Scripture, had once addressed a Jewish priest by the name of Jeremiah. The verse was a particular favourite of the new pope’s – as well it might have been. Though the ancient prophet, rather like Gregory VII himself, had lived at a time of wrenching and alarming change, not even the most appalling calamities had been able to shake his conviction that it was the Almighty Himself who had summoned him to his mission: to confound the wicked, and to admonish kings, and to shepherd a confused and wandering people. In short, to be right.
What better model could there be for a man such as Gregory? True, his protests as he was hauled from the Lateran to his enthronement had been more than merely the display of false modesty that was expected of any candidate for a bishopric: ‘We are a sinner and unequal to the bearing of so fearful a weight.’ A heartfelt confession, certainly. Yet rather than betraying any great crisis of confidence, it had in truth trumpeted the very opposite: an invincible sense of purpose, of calling, of destiny. Gregory VII was Hildebrand still. If indeed he did sometimes feel that his shoulders might buckle beneath the burden that he could feel, Atlas-like, laid upon them, then who could wonder at that? To the new pope, and to all the supporters of reform, it appeared self-evident that the forces of good were everywhere being menaced by those of evil, in the great cosmic struggle that was destined to climax with the hour of judgement, and the final coming of God’s kingdom. There could be no doubting, then, either the urgency or the gravity of Gregory’s task. ‘For to our small self, the care and oversight of all the churches have been committed.’
Small, perhaps — but formidably well qualified. Not since the age of Constantine had there been a man enthroned in Rome who could boast a more detailed knowledge of the various lands and limits of the world. Indeed, as Gregory pointed out with relish, ‘the law of the Roman pontiffs has governed more princedoms than ever that of the Caesars did’ — so that a legate, bringing letters and reports to the Lateran, might be as likely to come galloping from Hungary, or Poland, or the distant kingdoms of the Northmen, as from anywhere within the ancient heartlands of Christendom. Although the new pope was thoroughly Roman in everything except his birth, his habit of thinking was nevertheless a global one. Whether it was the King of England, or the Abbot of Cluny, or the generalissimo of the Patarenes, Gregory had long been in the habit of regarding even the most celebrated men of the age as his agents. Of humble birth he might have been, and impeccably austere in all his personal habits – and yet an imperial cast of mind came to him no less naturally for that. Processing past the haughty monuments of an ancient and vanished empire, he showed no compunction in displaying himself to the Roman people arrayed in the traditional crown and robes of a Caesar: the first pope ever to flaunt such insignia in public. In private, seeking to order his thoughts about the destiny that God had entrusted to him, Gregory dared to go even further. To an unpublished memorandum, he confided a series of awesome convictions: ‘that the Roman pontiff alone is by right called “universal”’; ‘that all princes kiss the feet of the pope alone’; ‘that he is permitted to depose emperors’. Assertions so vaunting that even the author shrank from stating them aloud.
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.’
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 cast, 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.* 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 bf 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’.
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 ha
ir long like women’ — ‘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’, 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,* 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.’ 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.