The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

by Tom Holland

  A mere thirty years had passed since Henry III, at the Synod of Sutri, had laid on a masterclass in the art of removing troublesome popes. Now, determined to show himself a chip off the old block, his son aimed to reprise the coup. Three weeks into the new year, a full two-thirds of the Reich’s bishops assembled in splendid conference at Worms. Their mission was one about which Henry made absolutely no bones: to ensure the disposal of the Pope. The bishops’ solution? To insist that Gregory’s elevation had been merely as the favourite of the Roman mob, rather than as the choice of Henry and the cardinals – and that as a result he was no pope at all. A neat manoeuvre – and one with which Henry was naturally delighted. Just to spice things up a bit, however, he made sure that some additional allegations were thrown in for good measure: that Gregory had repeatedly perjured himself; that he had treated the imperial bishops like slaves; that he had been carrying on with the Lady Matilda. All was then set down, and dispatched by envoy to the man now referred to dismissively by the imperial bishops as “Hildebrand.” Henry himself was even ruder. “Let another sit upon St. Peter’s throne,” he proclaimed ringingly, “one who will not cloak violence with a pretence of religion, but will teach the pure doctrine of St. Peter. I, Henry, by God’s grace king, with all our bishops say to you: come down, come down!”74

  But Gregory did not come down. Instead, no sooner had he received Henry’s invitation to abdicate than he prepared to order the gates of hell unbarred and swung open wide, ready to receive the obdurate king. In the very church in which he had first been hailed as Pope, before a full assembly of the Roman Church, and in the presence of the relics of St. Peter, he ordered the letter from Worms to be read out – and the howls of horror which it provoked were terrible to hear. One week later, when Gregory formally confirmed the awful sentence of excommunication against the king, the throne of St. Peter, it is said, split suddenly in two. A wonder fit to chill the blood: for one half of Christendom was indeed now sundered from the other. The terms of Gregory’s anathema were dreadful and unparalleled. “I take from King Henry, son of the Emperor Henry, who has risen against the Church with unheard-of pride, the government of the entire kingdom of the Germans and of the Italians. And I absolve the Christian people from any oath that they have taken, or shall take, to him. And I forbid anyone to serve him as king.”75 A deposition that, once pronounced, echoed terrifyingly across Christendom. Indeed, nervousness as to what they might have brought down upon themselves and upon the Reich immediately began to afflict Henry’s bishops with serious second thoughts. At Easter, when the king summoned them to denounce “Hildebrand” to the Christian people, only one, William of Utrecht, was bold enough to do so – and his cathedral was promptly struck by lightning. One week later, and he was afflicted with excruciating stomach cramps. One month later, and he was dead. William’s fellow bishops, rather than persist in their support for a king who was so clearly accursed, now increasingly began to fall away. Many of them, anxious for their own souls, hurried to make their peace with Gregory – who, for his part, was diplomatically quick to welcome them back into the fold. Henry, having been cheered on all the way in the declaration of war that he had made at Worms, now found himself being abandoned on the very field of battle.

  Nor was it only the bishops who were proving fair-weather friends. The great lords of the Reich, who back at Christmas had seemed so cowed, so dutiful, so loyal, had in truth merely been biding their time. Like their brother princes of the Church, they had tracked “the great disasters that plagued the commonwealth”76 with much show of pious consternation but also with not a little smacking of their lips, for upheaval spelled opportunity for them. Sure enough, by the summer, the embers of Saxon resentment were blazing back into open flames. In August – in infallible proof that the wind had changed – Otto of Northeim opted to jump ship yet again. Even more ominously, as Henry struggled and failed to contain the renewed rebellion, the southern princes were also preparing themselves to show their hand. In September, Duke Rudolf and a host of formidable allies sent out a summons to the nobility of the entire Reich, inviting them to the town of Tribur, on the east bank of the Rhine, there to attempt, as they put it, “to bring a close to the various misfortunes that for many years had disturbed the peace of the Church.”77 Or, to put it more plainly: to discuss the possible deposition of the king. Every lord who travelled to Tribur understood the potential stakes. So too did the king himself. Weakened as he was by the sequence of calamities that had overwhelmed him since Easter, he knew full well that he had no hope of preventing the assembly by force. Instead, mustering what few supporters he could still count upon, he limped his way to the town of Oppenheim, directly opposite the great gathering of princes, on the far bank of the Rhine – and there, like a wounded lion, kept a beady but impotent watch upon those who might think to attempt to dispatch him.

  And certainly, the peril was very great. On 16 October, a letter from Gregory was read out by his legate to the assembled princes, in which the Pope for the first time broached the possibility of electing a new king, should Henry continue unregenerate. The Saxon leaders, however, and not a few of the southern dukes, were already set upon his deposition; and for a whole week they sought to force their case upon their peers. To a majority of the princes, though, such a step was simply too drastic to countenance – and Henry, sensing a chance to save his skin, even at a ferocious cost, duly signalled his willingness to bow his neck before the man he now referred to, once again, as “the lord Pope Gregory.”78 For ten days, envoys from the rival camps were ferried back and forth across the Rhine – until in due course a shaky compromise had been hammered out. The details of it, for Henry, were mortifying. He was required to swear an oath of obedience to Gregory; to revoke the sentence of Worms; to banish his excommunicated advisers once and for all. One term, however, more than any other, appeared particularly ominous: for the Pope, Henry’s enemies had insisted, was to be invited to an assembly at Augsburg, there to sit in judgement on the king, to consider whether to grant him absolution, and to listen to the Saxons and the southern dukes press for his deposition. A Damocles’ sword indeed. And yet, despite it all, Henry had secured his primary objective, and foiled that of his foes. For the while, at any rate, he remained the king.

  Nor, even though the assembly at Augsburg had been set for February, the anniversary of his excommunication, and a date that by now was only three months away, had he been left altogether without freedom of manoeuvre. First, Henry dispatched an urgent letter to Gregory, pleading to be allowed to come to Rome for his absolution, where it could be granted to him in cloistered privacy. Next, when this request was bluntly refused, he settled upon a desperate expedient. Knowing that Gregory, if he were to make Augsburg for February, would have to travel throughout the winter, Henry resolved to do the same. His plan: to head southwards, cross the Alps, and look to meet the Pope, not in Augsburg, but in Italy. “For as the anniversary of the King’s excommunication drew steadily nearer, so he knew that he had no choice but to be absolved before that date. Otherwise, by the sentence of the princes who would sit together in judgement on him, his cause would be fatally doomed, and his kingdom lost for ever.”79

  So it was, shortly after Christmas, in the very dead of winter, that Henry began his ascent of the Alps. Ahead of him, icy and deep buried in snow, there wound the road that would lead him, in due course, to Italy, and the gates of Canossa.

  Everything Turned Upside Down

  Early in the summer of 1076, as the full horror of the crisis afflicting Christendom was starting to dawn on people, the Abbot of Cluny had been confronted by a terrifying apparition. William of Utrecht, the same bishop who only one month previously had dared to condemn Gregory as a false pope from the very pulpit of his cathedral, had materialised suddenly before Hugh, licked all about by fire. “I am dead,” the bishop had cried out in agony, “dead, and deep buried in hell!,”80 before vanishing as mysteriously as he had appeared. Sure enough, a few days later, grim confirmation o
f the vision’s tidings had been brought to Cluny. The Bishop of Utrecht was indeed no more.

  Prompted by this alarming experience, Abbot Hugh had dutifully set himself to the task of redeeming his godson from the prospect of a similarly infernal fate. In early November, crossing into the Reich, he had selflessly put his own prospects of salvation into jeopardy by meeting with the excommunicated king, and urging him to hold true to his chosen course of penitence. Then, heading on southwards, Hugh had journeyed to Rome, where he had sought absolution for his dealings with Henry from the Pope himself. Gregory had granted it readily enough. Relations between the two men had long been close. “We walk by the same way,” as Gregory would later express it, “by the same mind, and by the same spirit.”81 Indeed, aside from his much-loved spiritual daughter, the Countess Matilda, Hugh was the only person to whom the sternly self-disciplined pontiff ever thought to confess his private anxieties. It was telling, no doubt that what he most admired in the abbot were precisely those qualities of compassion and emollience that he so often felt obliged, by virtue of all his responsibilities as the shepherd of the Christian people, to guard against in himself. Hugh’s attempts at peacemaking, though initially brushed aside, were certainly not begrudged. Leaving Rome that icy December on his fateful attempt to reach Augsburg, and his rendezvous with the German princes, the Pope made sure to keep the Abbot of Cluny by his side. Soon afterwards, crossing into Tuscany, he was joined by the Lady Matilda. So it was, in the new year, as the startling news was brought to the papal party of Henry’s crossing of the Alps, that Gregory, amid all the panic of his hurried doubling back to Canossa, found himself bolstered by the companionship of the two people upon whose support he had always most depended. Their advice, at this supreme crisis-point of his life, was unhesitating. Both, before Henry’s arrival at the gates of Matilda’s stronghold, had met with the king and promised to plead his cause. Both duly kept their word. Both, as Gregory sat by his window and stared out at the royal supplicant shivering in the snow below him, vigorously urged the course of mercy.

  As well they might have done. For Matilda, though she remained unstintingly loyal to the Holy Father, the benefits of securing the friendship of Henry, her overlord and second-cousin, were obvious – not least because, with the death of her mother the previous year, she now ruled alone as the protectress of her lands. Hugh, meanwhile, in his concern to see his godson redeemed from the yawning jaws of hell, felt little call to consider what impact Henry’s absolution might have upon Gregory’s plans and hopes for the reordering of the fallen world. The monks of Cluny, after all, were already as close to an angelic state as it was possible for flesh and blood to be. Far from labouring to bring the remainder of humanity to share in their own miraculous condition, their instinct had always been instead to man the ramparts of their abbey. Whereas Gregory did not hesitate to charge seasoned warriors such as Erlembald to fight for the cause of reform from their saddles, Hugh would invariably urge the opposite course upon them, and encourage any penitent knight to swap his mail coat for a cowl. Indeed, the glamour and mystique of Cluny’s name being what it was, even dukes, on occasion, had been known to abandon their princedoms for the abbey’s cloisters. “The shepherds flee, as do the dogs who are the protectors of their flocks,” Gregory, in naked frustration, had once raged at Hugh. “Only take or receive a duke into the quiet of Cluny, and you will be leaving a hundred thousand Christians without a guardian!”82 Even though the Pope knew both himself and the abbot to be allies in a common struggle, there were times, desolating times, when he feared that they might be pulling in opposite directions. At such moments, the knowledge of how alone he was with all his responsibilities would bear down on him in a peculiarly crushing manner. “For we bear a huge weight not only of spiritual but also of temporal concerns; and we daily fear our falling under the impending burden, for in this world we can in no way find means of help and support.”83 Such was the bleak confession that Gregory had made to Hugh back in 1074, during the very first year of his papacy. He might well have repeated it, and with even more justice, at Canossa.

  Certainly, his delay in calling Henry in from the cold was not, as his critics would subsequently allege, the expression of a stiff-necked arrogance, but rather of irresolution, perplexity and self-doubt. Gregory, that man of iron certitude, did not know what to do. The king’s manoeuvre had comprehensively outflanked him. As a result, he found himself confronted by an agonising dilemma. Absolve Henry, Gregory knew, and all the confidence that the German princes had placed in him would inevitably be betrayed. Refuse to show the humbled king mercy, however, and he would be betraying the duty that he owed to the Almighty Himself: to serve Him as the channel of His forgiveness and grace. Such a consideration, in the end, had to be reckoned paramount. So it was, on the third day of Henry’s penitence, that the Holy Father duly gave the guards on the gates the nod. The king was admitted into the castle at last, blessed with a kiss, and invited to Mass. Yet all along, in the back of Gregory’s mind, the dread would have lurked that he was being fooled, that he had been outsmarted, that his adversary had triumphed.

  An anxiety, it seems, that was gnawing at Henry too. Entering his cousin’s stronghold, his stomach was knotted up. When he and Gregory sat down together to mark their reconciliation with a meal, the occasion was not a success. No blame for this could possibly have been attached to the standard of fare on offer: for the Lady Matilda was heir to a long line of gourmands, and the balsamic vinegar of Canossa, in particular, was internationally renowned. Both Pope and king, however, showed precious little appetite. Gregory, as ascetic as ever, contented himself with the odd nibble at a herb or two; while Henry as well, despite his three days of penance, ate barely a mouthful. His discomfort, perhaps, was only to be expected. Feasts, which should properly have been rituals for bringing home to his subjects the full scale of his royal dignity and power, had all too often ended up emphasising the very opposite. Back when he was young, his guests had regularly amused themselves by having punch-ups over the seating arrangements. On one notorious occasion, indeed, two bishops had brought in rival gangs of heavies to help decide which of them should have the precedence. On another, a group of monks, indignant at Henry’s gifting of their monastery to the Archbishop of Cologne, had gatecrashed the royal hall and vandalised the dinner table, in full view of all the court. Unsurprisingly, then, any hint of awkwardness at a meal tended not to bring out the best in the king. Now that he had secured what he wanted from Gregory, he certainly had no wish to linger any longer than he had to at the scene of his humiliation. After one further summit with the Pope, held near by at a second of Matilda’s strongholds, Henry was off. By April, after a hurried tour of northern Italy, he was back in the Reich.

  Where, already, Gregory’s dark forebodings about how the German princes might respond to his absolution of the king were proving themselves all too justified. Henry’s enemies, brought the news of Canossa, had reacted to it with astonishment and consternation. Barely a month after receiving Gregory’s half-defiant, half-apologetic justification of his decision, the rebel princes had met in grim-faced assembly in Franconia, in the town of Forcheim. There, rather than wait for Gregory himself to arrive in Germany, as had previously been their intention, they had briskly set about delivering a judgement of their own. On 13 March, they had formally agreed that Henry, no matter what might have been decided on the topic at Canossa, should remain well and truly deposed.84 Then, two days later, and in the wake of a patently predetermined vote, the election had been announced of a new king: Duke Rudolf of Swabia. A fateful step: for although, over the course of the centuries, there had often been anti-popes, never before had there been an anointed anti-Caesar. The insurgency within Henry’s kingdom was fast becoming something intractable. What had previously been spasmodic rumblings were by now coming to shake the very fabric of the Reich. The threat was not merely of dynastic feuding, such as had perennially afflicted it, but of a far more total form of conflict: civil war of a
remorselessness such as no Christian realm had ever endured before.

  Not that this was immediately apparent to Henry. Reinvigorated by the success of his gambit at Canossa, he came strutting back across the Alps aglow with self-confidence, and spitting disdain for his upstart challenger. Most of the southern princes, shrinking from the course of open treason, reluctantly shuffled in behind him; Swabia, Rudolf’s own dukedom, was invaded and laid waste; Rudolf himself, abandoning his attempt to tour the Reich in a serene and stately manner, as befitted a king, was sent scampering for Saxony. Once arrived in that hotbed of rebellion, however, he and his supporters succeeded in hunkering down so impregnably that Henry, despite repeated efforts, found it impossible to shift them. The result was a stalemate – and an increasingly bloody one too. Battle after battle was fought – and every one indecisive. Armies composed primarily not of mail-clad horsemen but rather of conscripted foot-soldiers, merchants and billhook-carrying peasants, provided both kings with sufficient spear-fodder to keep returning to the killing-fields. Warfare on such a scale appeared to the Germans themselves something unprecedented and terrifying; and so, inevitably – for the habit of anticipating apocalypse was by now deeply ingrained in the Christian people – there were many who saw in it a foretaste of the end days. The Saxons, even as they fought in the name of a cause dusted down from books of pagan history – what had been termed by the ancients “libertas,” or “liberty”— simultaneously never doubted that they ranked as the sword-arms of heaven. Henry, in their fervent opinion, had been deposed both justly and irrevocably, as “an open enemy of the Church.” To die in the cause of their nation’s freedom was therefore to die as martyrs for Christ as well. Gregory’s own legates to Saxony, riding in Rudolf’s train and offering his warriors their blessing, had repeatedly confirmed as much. Henry, one of them had stated baldly, was “a limb of Antichrist.”85