In achievement as in physical stature, Charlemagne was well over life-size; but that achievement was short-lived. This extraordinary figure–illiterate, immoral, more than half barbarian–kept his newly forged empire together by the strength of his personality alone; after his death in 814 its story is one of steady decline, with virtual disintegration following the extinction of his family in 888. North Italy became once again a battleground of faceless princelings, squabbling over a meaningless crown, dragging their land ever deeper into chaos. In the south, also, new dangers arose. First Corsica, then in 826 Crete fell into Muslim hands, this latter conquest radically transforming the entire strategic situation in the area: for 130-odd years, until it was reconquered by the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas, Crete was to be both a nest of pirates and the centre of the Mediterranean slave trade. Then, in 827, the Arabs of North Africa invaded Sicily in strength at the invitation of the Byzantine governor Euthymius, who was rebelling against Constantinople in an effort to avoid the consequences of having eloped with a local nun. Four years later they took Palermo. Henceforth the Italian peninsula was in constant danger. Brindisi fell, then Taranto and Bari–which for thirty years was the seat of an emirate–and in 846 it was the turn of Rome itself. A Saracen57 fleet sailed up the Tiber, sacked the Borgo and plundered St Peter’s, even wrenching the silver plate from the doors of the basilica. Again the city was saved by its Pope. In 849, summoning the combined navies of his three maritime neighbours–Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi–and himself assuming the supreme command, Leo IV destroyed the fleet off Ostia. The hundreds of captives were set to work building an immense rampart around the Vatican and down as far as the Castel Sant’ Angelo: the Leonine Wall, considerable sections of which remain today. Fortunately, as the century entered its last quarter, Muslim pressure relaxed. In 871 Bari fell to the Western Emperor Lewis II, and on his death the city passed to Byzantium, becoming the capital of Byzantine Italy for the next two hundred years.
At this time too there was a constant threat to the south coast of France. Around 890 a band of Andalusian corsairs landed at Saint-Tropez and dug themselves in on a nearby hilltop nowadays known as La Garde Freinet. From there they raided west to Marseille, north to Vienne and even to the abbey of St Gall in Switzerland. Not until 972 were they finally expelled. The number of wrecks of tenth-century Muslim ships found off the coast of Provence suggests considerable traffic with the rest of the Muslim world.
Leo IV and his second successor, Nicholas I, were the last two outstanding Popes to occupy the throne for a century and a half–unless we include the Englishwoman Pope Joan, who apparently managed to conceal her sex throughout her three-year pontificate until, by some unhappy miscalculation, she gave birth to a baby on the steps of the Lateran. Joan belongs, alas, to legend, but her story is symptomatic of the decadence and chaos of a period in which many of the historical Popes seems scarcely less fantastic: John VIII for example, hammered to death by his jealous relations; Formosus, whose dead body was exhumed, brought to trial before a synod of bishops, stripped, mutilated and cast into the Tiber, then miraculously recovered, rehabilitated and reinterred in its former tomb; John X, strangled in the Castel Sant’ Angelo by his mistress’s daughter so that she could instal her own bastard son by Pope Sergius III on the papal throne; or John XII, during whose reign, according to Gibbon, ‘we learn with some surprise…that the Lateran palace was turned into a school for prostitution; and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.’
But if John XII marked the nadir of the papal pornocracy, he was also responsible for Italy’s deliverance. In 962, powerless against the Italian ‘King’ Berengar II,58 he appealed for help to Otto, Duke of Saxony, who had recently married the widow of Berengar’s predecessor and was by now the strongest power in north Italy. Otto hurried to Rome, where John hastily crowned him Emperor. (This act was the Pope’s undoing. His debauchery was bad enough, but when two years later he also proved insubordinate to the Emperor he had created, Otto summoned a synod and had him deposed, obtaining a promise from the bishops that they should henceforth obtain prior imperial approval for any Pope they elected.) Berengar soon surrendered, leaving Otto supreme, and the Empire of the West was reborn, to continue virtually uninterrupted until the age of Napoleon.
Otto’s title of ‘the Great’ was not undeserved. He had but one ambition–to restore his empire to the power and prosperity it had enjoyed under Charlemagne–and he came close to achieving it. In the eleven years of his reign, spent largely in Italy, he brought to the north a measure of peace unparalleled in living memory. Rome was more of a problem. In the heat generated by constant papal intrigue flashpoint was never very far off, and in 966 the Emperor was faced with serious riots, which he was able to quell only after he had hanged the prefect of the city by his hair from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in front of the Lateran.59 It was in the south, however, that Otto found himself in real difficulties. He knew that he could never control the peninsula while Apulia and Calabria remained in Byzantine hands, but the Greeks’ hold on their Italian provinces was too strong for him. When war failed he tried diplomacy, marrying his son and heir to the lovely Byzantine princess Theophano; her dowry was generous, but it did not include south Italy. Otto died a disappointed man. His former allies, the Lombard duchies, were left more powerful than ever, while Apulia and Calabria remained as Greek as ever they had been.
Like his hero Charlemagne, Otto the Great was unfortunate in his successors. His son Otto II did his best, but after a hair’s-breadth escape from a Saracen expeditionary force which had trounced his army in Calabria he was struck down in 983, at the age of twenty-eight, after an overdose of aloes following a fever. (He is the only Roman Emperor to be buried in St Peter’s.) His son by Theophano, Otto III, proved a strange contrast to his forebears, combining the ambitions of his line with a romantic mysticism clearly derived from his mother and forever dreaming of a great Byzantinesque theocracy that would embrace Germans, Italians, Greeks and Slavs, with God at its head and Pope and Emperor His twin viceroys. This extraordinary youth had hardly left Rome after his imperial coronation when the city rose once again in revolt, but two years later he returned in strength, re-established order, restored the young German visionary Gregory V to the Papacy and built himself a magnificent palace on the Aventine. Here he passed the remaining years of his life in a curious combination of splendour and asceticism, surrounded by a court stiff with Byzantine ceremonial, eating in solitude off gold plate, occasionally shedding his purple dalmatic in favour of a pilgrim’s cloak and trudging barefoot to some distant shrine. In 999 he elevated his old tutor Gerbert of Aurillac to the Papacy under the name of Sylvester II. Gerbert was not only a distinguished theologian; he was also the most learned scientist and mathematician of his time, and is generally credited with having popularised Arabic numerals and the use of the astrolabe in the Christian west. For a Pope of such calibre the Romans should have been grateful to their Emperor, but Otto tried their patience too hard and in 1001 they expelled him from the city. He died the following year, leaving, as might have been expected, no issue. He was twenty-two.
In Italy at the end of the first millennium, we find certain patterns already formed, others slowly taking shape. First and most important is the interrelationship of Italy, the Papacy and the Empire of the West. Italy was once again an integral part of the Empire, united with Germany under a single ruler, but subordinate in that she had no say in his election. That ruler was thus always a German prince, never an Italian. On the other hand, though titular King of the Romans, he could assume the dignity of Emperor only after his coronation by the Pope in Rome; and the imperial claim to the right of papal appointment was not generally accepted in Italy–least of all by the curia and the Roman aristocracy. Even the journey to Rome through Lombardy, Tuscany and the Papal States could be made difficult for an unpopula
r candidate.
Meanwhile, the free towns of north Italy were growing steadily stronger and more self-willed. The chaos of the ninth and early tenth centuries had given them a taste for independence, and the peace which they had known under the Ottos had favoured their commercial development and already made many of them rich–particularly Milan, the first great crossroads south of the Alpine passes, and the swelling sea republics of Genoa, Pisa and Venice. This was a characteristically Italian phenomenon. All over western Europe, the revival of trade and the beginnings of organised industry had set in motion that slow drift from the country to the towns which still continues today; but in Italy, where there was no embryonic concept of nationhood to override that of municipal solidarity, the process was quicker and more self-conscious than elsewhere. For most of the north Italian towns the Emperor was too remote, his local representative too weak or irresponsible, to constitute a serious brake on their independent development. The result was that the towns continued to take advantage of the growing discord between Empire and Papacy, some using papal support to sever their allegiance to the Emperor, others pledging him, in return for an imperial charter, their constant steadfastness against papal blandishments. Thus during the eleventh and twelfth centuries were born the city-states of Italy, self-governing according to a communal system often consciously based on the Roman model, strong enough both to defend their independence against all comers–including each other–and to exert an increasing gravitational pull on the local landed aristocracy. And thus, simultaneously, were sown the seeds of that grim conflict, later associated with the names of the papalist Guelf and the imperialist Ghibelline, which was to lacerate northern and central Italy for centuries to come.
In Rome and the Papal States the old mixture of turbulence and turpitude still prevailed, as the great rival families–the Crescenti, the Counts of Tusculum and the rest–circled ceaselessly round the throne of St Peter. Yet even here and within the curia itself a new spirit was beginning to appear, an awakening consciousness of the Church’s need, if she were to survive, to shake off the shame of the past century and somehow to regain her intellectual and moral ascendancy. This was the spirit of Cluny, the great French mother abbey of reform. A Cluniac dependency had existed in Rome for the past fifty years; at the outset it had had little influence, but now at last its example and teachings were beginning to take effect.
Thus, so far as north and central Italy were concerned, the overriding tendency which was to shape the course of events in the eleventh century–the quickening of the struggle between an arrogant Empire and a resurgent Papacy, with the increasingly self-reliant Lombard and Tuscan cities playing off one against the other–was already discernible as the century opened. In the south, on the other hand, the situation in 1000 AD gave no clue to the momentous developments which lay in store. Of the four tenth-century protagonists in the region, two had now withdrawn: the Western Empire had shown no further interest since Otto II’s debacle, while the Saracens, though continuing their pirate raids from Sicily, seemed to have renounced the idea of establishing permanent settlements on the mainland. This led to a polarisation between the two remaining parties, Lombard and Byzantine, whose desultory fighting might have been expected to drag on interminably had they been left to themselves. In the event, however, they were now joined by a race of newcomers from the north, superior alike in courage, energy and intelligence, by whom they were outclassed and, in little more than fifty years, overthrown.
The story of the Normans in south Italy begins around 1015 with a group of about forty young Norman pilgrims at the shrine of the Archangel Michael on Monte Gargano, that curious rocky excrescence which juts out from what might be called the calf of Italy into the Adriatic. Seeing in this underpopulated, unruly land both an opportunity and a challenge, they were easily persuaded by certain Lombard leaders to remain in Italy as mercenaries with the object of driving the Byzantines from the peninsula. Word soon got back to Normandy, and the initial trickle of adventurous, footloose younger sons swelled into a steady immigration. Fighting indiscriminately for the highest bidder, they soon began to exact payment in land for their services. In 1030 Duke Sergius of Naples, grateful for their support, invested their leader, Rainulf, with the County of Aversa. Thenceforth their progress was fast, and in 1053, when Pope Leo IX raised a vastly superior army and led it personally against them, they defeated him on the field of Civitate and took him prisoner.
By this time the supremacy among the Norman chiefs had been assumed by the family of Tancred de Hauteville, an obscure Norman knight from the Cotentin peninsula, of whose twelve sons eight had settled in Italy and five were to become leaders of the first rank. After Civitate papal policy changed; and in 1059 Robert de Hauteville, nicknamed Guiscard–the Crafty–was invested by Pope Nicholas II with the dukedoms of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. Of these territories much of Apulia and most of Calabria remained Greek, while Sicily was largely in Saracen hands; but Robert, fortified by his new legitimacy, could not be checked for long. Two years later he and his youngest brother Roger crossed the Straits of Messina, and for the next decade were able to maintain constant pressure on the Saracens, both in Sicily and on the mainland. Bari fell in 1071, and with it the last remnants of Byzantine power in Italy. Early the next year Palermo followed, and the Muslim hold on Sicily was broken for ever. In 1075 came the collapse of Salerno, the last Lombard principality. By the end of the century the Normans had annihilated foreign opposition. In all Italy south of the Garigliano river they reigned supreme, while in Sicily they were well on their way to establishing the most brilliant and cultivated court of the Middle Ages.
The Western Emperors of the eleventh century were less preoccupied with Italy than the Ottos had been. Neither Henry II ‘the Holy’ nor Conrad II left an appreciable imprint on the peninsula; nor, in all probability, would Conrad’s successor, Henry III, have done so had not the situation in Rome deteriorated to such a point that in 1045 no less than three rival Popes were squabbling over the papal crown. Henry hurried to Rome and firmly deposed all three, but his two successive nominees lasted less than a year between them–the second, Damasus II, expiring after only twenty-three days in circumstances that strongly suggested poison–and it was not until December 1048 that a great council of Bishops assembled at Worms voted unanimously for the Emperor’s second cousin, Bishop Bruno of Toul.
With Bruno, who took the name of Leo IX, the Church recovered its self-respect. The dreadful spell that had so long degraded Rome was broken, and though the Pope died after only six years–it was he whom the Normans captured at Civitate, and he never really recovered from the humiliation–he had already laid the foundations for a reformed and revitalised Papacy. In this task, however, he had the whole-hearted support of his Emperor–an advantage which his own successors were never to enjoy for, with his death in 1054 and Henry’s two years later, the fleeting era of harmonious cooperation between Emperor and Pope was at an end. It was the irony of Henry’s life that, in striving to build the Papacy into an ally, he succeeded only in creating a rival. The Church, having regained her virtue, now began to seek power as well–a quest that was bound to bring her into conflict with imperial interests, especially when pursued with the inflexible determination of prelates such as Archdeacon Hildebrand.
For nearly thirty years before his election as Pope Gregory VII in 1073, Hildebrand had played a leading part in ecclesiastical affairs. Throughout his career, he had but one object in view: to impose upon all Christendom, from the Emperor down, an unwavering obedience to the Church. Sooner or later, therefore, a clash was inevitable; it came, unexpectedly, in Milan. In 1073, during a dispute over the vacant archbishopric, Henry’s son Henry IV had aggravated matters by giving formal investiture to one candidate while fully aware that Pope Gregory’s predecessor, Alexander II, had already approved the canonical appointment of another. Here was an act of open defiance which the Church could not ignore and in 1075 Gregory categorically condemned all ecclesiastical
investiture by laymen, on pain of anathema, whereupon the furious Henry immediately invested two more German bishops with Italian sees, adding for good measure a further Archbishop of Milan, although his former nominee was still alive. Refusing a papal summons to Rome to account for his actions, he then called a general council of all German bishops and, on 24 January 1076, formally deposed Gregory from the Papacy.
He had badly overplayed his hand. The Pope’s answering deposition, accompanied by Henry’s excommunication and the release of all his subjects from their allegiance, led to revolts throughout Germany which brought the Emperor literally to his knees. Crossing the Alps in midwinter with his wife and baby son, he found Gregory in January 1077 at the castle of Canossa and there, after three days of abject humiliation, he at length received the absolution he needed.
The story of Canossa, often enlivened by an illustration of the Emperor, barefoot and in sackcloth, shivering in the snow before the locked doors of the castle, has been a perennial favourite with German writers of children’s history books, in which it is apt to appear as an improving object lesson in the vanity of temporal ambitions. In fact, Gregory’s triumph was empty and ephemeral, and Henry knew it. He had no intention of keeping his promises of submission, and in 1081 he crossed into Italy once again–this time at the head of an army. At first Rome held firm, but after two years Henry managed to break through its defences. A few half-hearted attempts at negotiation were soon abandoned, and on Easter Day 1084 he had himself crowned Emperor by his own nominee, the antipope Clement III.
The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Page 14