by Tom Holland
A pronouncement for which Rudolf was, of course, most grateful. Nevertheless, as he struggled desperately to extend his writ beyond the limits of Saxony, he could have done with a little more cheerleading from the Holy Father himself. Not that he was alone in feeling disappointment on that particular score. Henry too, in the wake of Canossa, regarded papal backing as his right: fit reward for his penance. Both kings, taking it for granted that the Almighty was on their side, duly pressed for a papal condemnation of the other; but Gregory, tempering his natural decisiveness for once, sought to maintain a severe neutrality. He certainly was anguished by the slaughter in Germany, and desperate to see it brought to an end, yet his principal concern remained, as it had ever been, the securing of the freedom of the Church. If Henry was clearly less to be trusted on that score than Rudolf, then so also did he seem the likelier to prevail as the ultimate victor: a consideration fit to inspire even Gregory to a course of wait and see.
And yet the conclusion that most men would have drawn from this – that there were inevitable limitations set upon what any pope might hope to achieve in a world swayed by the sword – was one that he still disdained to draw. Combustible, scorching, volcanic: Gregory remained what he had ever been. Even as a baby, it was said, unearthly sparks had flickered across his swaddling clothes; and as an adult too, not only had a miraculous halo of flames been known on occasion to illumine his head, but before ever being raised to the throne of St. Peter, he had been granted a vision of his future, one spectacularly lit by fire. For he had dreamed a famous dream: “a prophecy of papal excellence and power, that flames came out of his mouth and set the whole world ablaze.” To Gregory’s enemies, impious as they were, this had appeared a clear portent of the destruction that he was fated to unleash upon the Christian people; but his supporters had known better. “For doubtless,” as one of them put it, “the fire had been that same fire cast upon the earth by the Lord Jesus Christ: a kindling eagerly to be desired.”86
Nor, even as Germany burned, did Gregory himself ever pause to doubt this. Unremittingly, with a persistence and an energy that appeared even to his bitterest opponents something prodigious, he stuck to the task of re-forging the entire Christian world upon the anvil of his will. Not a region of Christendom but its customs, if they appeared to Gregory to flout those of the Roman Church, might provoke a lordly scolding. Informed, for instance, that there was a fashion on Sardinia for priests to sport luxuriant beards, he did not hesitate to lecture the local authorities in the most peremptory manner: “we charge you,” he wrote sternly, “that you should make and compel all the clergy under your power to shave.”87 Such a close attention to details of personal grooming might, perhaps, have been thought to lie beneath the papal dignity – but Gregory knew otherwise. What else was his mission, after all, if not to restore wholeness to a fractured world, from the top to the very bottom? No possible effort, then, in the pursuit of such an awesome goal, could properly be spared him. Nothing for it, in the final reckoning, but to impose a uniform obedience upon the Church wherever it was found, and at every level. For only then could it be rendered truly universal.
And the best way of securing this desirable end? To Gregory, a man with a proven taste for thinking big, the solution had seemed self-evident enough. Surely, he had mused, heaven’s purpose would best be served if all the various realms of Christendom were to become the personal property of St. Peter, and his earthly vicar – himself. Never a man to duck a challenge, he had duly dusted down the Donation of Constantine, and written to various princes, floating the startling suggestion that they might like to sign over their kingdoms “to the holy Roman church.”88 Yet even Gregory, never a man to sell his own expectations short, seems to have appreciated that the idea, by and large, was a non-starter. A few months after Canossa, for instance, addressing the various kings of Spain, he had no sooner asserted that the entire peninsula belonged to St. Peter than he was hurriedly acknowledging that, “to be sure, both the misfortunes of past times and a certain negligence of our predecessors have hitherto obscured this.”89 Which was putting it mildly. Indeed, in sober truth, rulers needed to be either very pious, like the Countess Matilda, or else very hungry for legitimacy, like Robert Guiscard, to become vassals of St. Peter. Even Gregory himself, though he remained indomitably convinced of the papacy’s entitlements, was not wholly oblivious to this. He may have been unbending in his aspirations – but in his methods often much less so. After all, as the Norman battle line had so potently demonstrated at Hastings, there was no shame in a tactical withdrawal, so long as it served the cause of an ultimate victory. When the Conqueror himself, for instance, invited by a pushy legate to become a vassal of St. Peter, responded with a diplomatic snort, Gregory opted not to force the issue. William was, compared with Henry, a model partner of the Roman Church; why, then, risk the alienation of a king who was capable of serving “as a standard of righteousness and a pattern of obedience to all the princes of the earth”?90
For Gregory, then, as for any general engaged in a war on multiple fronts, strategy was not merely a matter of clinging on to positions, no matter what, but also of judging which lines could legitimately be abandoned, in the cause of securing a lesser advantage. Certainly, as the bruising events leading up to Canossa had demonstrated, he was hardly afraid to go head to head with kings; and yet Gregory was sensitive as well to the advantages that might be gained from conciliation. In Spain, for instance, as in England, he ended up opting not to push his luck: for the King of León, no less than William the Conqueror, was a man who combined great devotion to the Roman Church with an imperious and iron-forged temper. Indeed, such was the fearsome reputation of Alfonso VI that he was darkly rumoured to have been guilty of fratricide, no less: for in 1072, ascending the throne, it had been in succession to his brother, murdered in a crime that – officially, at any rate – had never been solved. With a second brother incarcerated for life, and one of his cousins falling mysteriously off a cliff, such a king was clearly a man whose interests it might be perilous to cross – nor did Gregory choose to. Indeed, aside from a brief spat provoked by Alfonso’s choice of an unsuitable wife, relations between Pope and king grew so cordial that in 1079, only two years after the rebuff of his attempt to lay claim to Spain for St. Peter, Gregory could hail his correspondent for his “exalted humility and faithful obedience.”91 Slightly over the top, it might have been thought – except that, from the perspective of Rome, it did not appear so at all. Alfonso might not have acknowledged himself a vassal of the papacy – but as a patron of reform, at any rate, he was fit to rank alongside any prince in Christendom. No matter that the Spaniards, harking back to the glory days when Toledo had been the holy city of the Visigoths rather than a Saracen capital, still clung to outmoded and heretical rituals – Alfonso had cheerfully abolished them all. In 1080, by swingeing royal decree, the Roman form of Mass was imposed upon his entire kingdom. Alfonso himself, in a dramatic gesture, drop-kicked a Visigothic service-book into a bonfire. This was precisely the kind of robust leadership that Gregory had always valued in a king.
For, although he was a man of God, the Holy Father was hardly unseasoned in the ways of the world. As a leader himself with a whole lifetime of diplomatic manoeuvrings to his credit, Gregory had few illusions as to the character of the warlords with whom he was obliged, as Pope, to deal. Nevertheless, this did not mean, of course, that the inevitable compromises which were forced upon him as a result necessarily sat easily with his conscience. That the universal Church remained dependent on the support of often murderous princes never ceased to frustrate and pain him. Several years into his papacy, indeed, and sometimes, in his darker moods, Gregory would find himself brought to question the very basis of worldly power. “For who does not know,” he raged bitterly on one occasion, “that kings and dukes derive their origin from men ignorant of God, murderers who raised themselves above their former equals by means of pride, plunder and treachery, urged on all the while by the Devil, who is th
e prince of this world?”92
A startling question – and one that only a man of humble origins, perhaps, would ever have thought to ask. To Gregory himself, a man who had toiled all his life to secure the Church as a bulwark against the legions of “the ancient enemy,”93 suspicion of the Devil’s cunning was only natural: a spur to ever more urgent labours. Yet even as he could reflect with satisfaction on the sheer global reach of all his efforts, and on how an immense sway of the earth’s scattered peoples, from the Swedes to the Irish, had been successfully urged to a common obedience, Gregory was increasingly conscious of a satanic and gathering darkness. It was all well and good for him to summon princes on the world’s edge to acknowledge the universal authority of “St. Peter and his vicars, among whom divine providence has appointed that our lot should be numbered”94 – and yet what if, even as he did so, the most hellish menace of all were lurking within Christendom’s heartlands? What, indeed, if the advance guard of Antichrist were already massing to assail the throne of St. Peter itself? This, by the seventh year of his papacy, was the monstrous possibility by which Gregory found himself increasingly shadowed. “And truly,” he reflected, “it can be held no wonder – for the nearer the time of Antichrist approaches, so the more violently does he strive to destroy the Christian religion.”95
Back in late 1077, as Henry’s pious and venerable mother lay dying, what had most consoled her was the conviction that her son and her spiritual father, the two men to whom she had devoted so much of her life, were reconciled at last, and that Christendom’s great breach was repaired for good. Perhaps, then, it was just as well that the Empress Agnes had passed away when she did. Despite the kiss of forgiveness that Gregory had bestowed upon Henry at Canossa, and for all the spirit of compromise that had characterised their mutual dealings in its immediate wake, both had remained wedded to positions that neither man could possibly concede: positions that were, in the ultimate reckoning, irreconcilable. Henry, alert at last to the full revolutionary implications of Gregory’s policies, was resolved never to surrender his right of investiture; just as Gregory, thunderously convinced of his divine vocation, remained no less committed to stripping it away for good. Small wonder, then, that the tensions which had seemed so dramatically eased at Canossa had soon begun to escalate again. In the autumn of 1078, Gregory, making all too clear what had hitherto been left diplomatically opaque, had issued a fateful decree: “that no priest may receive investiture of a bishopric, abbey, or church from the hand of an emperor or king.”96 Henry’s response was to invest two archbishops that very same Christmas. A year and more on, and still there had been no royal climbdown. Why, indeed, should there have been? Henry had every reason to feel confident. In Saxony, Rudolf’s support was showing signs of splintering at last. Certainly, there was not the remotest prospect now of the anti-king making a breakout from his increasingly beleaguered power base. Henry could consider himself as secure upon his throne as he had been since the body-blow of his excommunication. No wonder, then, called upon formally for the first time to abandon his right of investiture, that he had opted to call Gregory’s bluff.
And no wonder either, Gregory being Gregory, that the Pope had likewise refused to budge. The challenge, it seemed to the outraged pontiff, was only incidentally to himself: for Henry was trampling on the very purposes of God. Early in 1080, shortly before a synod was due to be held in Rome, the Virgin Mary had duly appeared to Gregory in a vision, and reassured him of heaven’s backing for the dreadful steps that it was now his clear and pressing duty, as the leader of the universal Church, to take. Sure enough, on 7 March, the Pope greeted the assembled delegates to his council with a mighty groan, and then, his words tumbling out from him in an anguished torrent, pronounced that Henry was once again “justly cast down from the dignity of the kingship because of his pride, disobedience and falsehood.”97 The show of neutrality that Gregory had maintained with such rigorous forbearance since Forcheim was abandoned at last. All the weight of his authority, and all the invisible legions of God that he had no reason to doubt were his to command, he now committed to the support of Rudolf. Everything that he had ever laboured to achieve, in short, was being gambled on a single proposition: that it lay within his power to destroy Henry for good. That same Easter, in the awful setting of St. Peter’s, Gregory did not hesitate to make explicit the full, terrifying scale of what was now at stake between him and his adversary. “For let it be known to all of you,” he pronounced, “that if he does not recover his senses by the feast of St. Peter, he will die or be deposed. If this fails to happen, I ought no more to be believed.”98
Gregory, though, was unwilling to trust his fortunes entirely to the protection of the apostle. That summer, looking to secure an earthly shield for himself in addition to his celestial one, he took a deep breath, swallowed his scruples, and agreed to meet with Robert Guiscard. The Duke of Apulia, who had responded to his excommunication back in 1074 by seizing Amalfi and menacing Benevento, was now formally absolved, and reconfirmed as a papal vassal. A humiliating climbdown for Gregory, to be sure – but an unavoidable one as well. Sure enough, late that June, right in the midst of his negotiations with the Norman duke, ominous news arrived from Germany. Henry, it was reported, repeating his tactics of four years earlier, had responded to Gregory’s deposition of him by summoning a council of his bishops, and leaning on them to depose Gregory in turn. A whole array of crimes had been laid at the door of “Hildebrand”: warmongering, of course, and the inevitable simony, but also, and more originally, a taste for pornographic floor shows.
Nor was that the worst. Henry had also taken a further and still more threatening step. A new pope had been nominated: the Archbishop of Ravenna, a distant relative of the Countess Matilda by the name of Guibert. Not surprisingly, then, on the feast day of St. Peter, 29 June, Gregory’s supporters waited with bated breath for this impostor to be struck down along with Henry; but nothing happened. Not only did the two men remain resolutely alive and flourishing, but it seemed to many, as summer turned to autumn, that the Almighty had adopted a policy of actively backing the anathematised king. On 15 October, for instance, as the Lady Matilda set out along the road to Ravenna in an attempt to kidnap her upstart relative, she and her army of knights were ambushed and so severely mauled that they had no choice but to retreat ignominiously to a nearby bolt hole.
Simultaneously, in Saxony, by the side of a swollen river south of Merseburg, an even worse calamity was befalling Gregory’s cause. Rudolf of Swabia, meeting Henry in yet another savage but indecisive battle, had his sword-hand hacked clean off, and within a matter of hours had bled to death. A maiming as just as it was awful, it appeared to his foes: for the fatal blow had been delivered to the hand with which the anti-king had once sworn to be Henry’s vassal. Gregory’s prophecy, “that in this year the false king would die,”99 now appeared all too grimly ironic. God had indeed delivered a judgement, it seemed – but it was not Henry who had been found wanting.
And even Gregory himself, who naturally scorned to share in this analysis, had been left by Rudolf’s death feeling perhaps just a mea sure of perplexity at the mysterious workings of the Almighty, and looking anxiously to the north. No matter that the Saxons remained as obdurately unpacified as they had ever been: they had also been left exhausted and leaderless, and Henry could afford to ignore them at last. The road to Rome lay open so, come the spring, he took it. By May, he and his army were camped out before the city’s gates. There, however, much to Henry’s frustration, they found themselves obliged to halt. No matter that the would-be emperor had made sure to bring Guibert with him, in anticipation of a coronation in St. Peter’s: what he had neglected to bring were sufficient troops to intimidate the Romans, who had no desire for a swap of bishops. “Instead of candles, they met the king with spears; instead of singing clergy, with armed warriors; instead of anthems of praise, with reproaches; instead of applause, with sobs.”100 Gregory, gazing out at his enemy’s camp from the battlement
s of the Castel Sant’Angelo, a brooding stronghold just across from St. Peter’s, could afford to breathe a huge sigh of relief. By June, as the Roman marshlands shimmered pestilentially in the heat, the royal army had begun packing up its bags.
But for how long would Henry be gone? And if he did return in the new year, and in sufficient force to cow the Romans – what then? Although Gregory was buoyed by the solid backing of his flock, he could hardly help but reflect on the disappointing lack of support he had received from those better qualified, perhaps, to draw their swords in his defence. True, the Countess Matilda, ever loyal, ever valiant, had refused to submit to her royal cousin; but the effective limit of her resistance had been to hunker down in her Apennine strongholds, while being systematically despoiled of all her lowland possessions. Indeed, there was only one captain in Italy truly qualified to blunt the threat posed by Henry: that very same prince whose backing it had cost Gregory so much nose-holding to secure only the previous year. Robert Guiscard, however, despite all the increasingly frantic appeals sent to him from the Lateran, had shown a marked disinclination to rally to his overlord’s cause: for his concern, as it had ever been, was ultimately with no one’s prospects save his own. The Duke of Apulia had always been a man to follow his dreams – and these, by the summer of 1081, had attained a truly grandiose dimension. Rather than marching to combat Henry, Guiscard had instead been preoccupied with his most glamorous and spectacular stunt yet: nothing less than an invasion of the Byzantine Empire.
An ambitious project, certainly – but not a wholly vainglorious one, even so. Seven years had passed since the failure of Gregory’s planned expedition to Constantinople, and still the fortunes of the New Rome remained firmly locked in a downward spiral: “the Empire was almost at its last gasp.”101 Even as the Turks continued with their dismemberment of its Asian provinces, so a fresh wave of invaders, the inveterately savage Pechenegs, had arrived to darken the northern frontiers, while in the capital itself the treasury and barracks alike were almost bare. Indeed, to the demoralised Byzantines, it appeared “that no other state in living memory had plumbed such depths of misery.”102 Their ruin appeared almost total.