A member of a powerful family from the hilltop town of Tusculum, who had dominated the papacy for a generation – his two first cousins were popes before him – Benedict became leader of the Catholic Church at the tender age of twelve or fourteen. In 1044, when he had reigned for a dozen years, the Roman populace ended centuries of political docility and rose against him in armed revolt. Their rebellion was a transforming event that brought a new generation of aristocratic families to the fore. It also brought an almighty mess, even by Rome’s messy standards. The rebels backed a new pope, Sylvester III, but Benedict maintained his claim. After a year he finally resigned the papacy and gave it – or rather sold it – to another candidate, Gregory VI, only to change his mind and claim it back. Rome ended up with three popes.
The chaos was sorted out by King Henry IV’s father, Henry III, who – like his son thirty-six years later – wanted to secure his position by being crowned Holy Roman Emperor. Imperial coronation was a tradition that already stretched back two and a half centuries to Charlemagne, but it required a plausible pope. Finding no such thing, Henry III created his own. In 1046 he journeyed to Sutri, just north of Rome, summoned a church council, had all three papal claimants dismissed and installed his candidate, who was German and strongly supportive of the reform movement.
It was a sea change moment. For the next half-century the papacy was in the hands of men determined to return the Church to the values of its earliest days, and who did so with a zeal that has been compared to that of Bolshevik revolutionaries. Rome’s leading families lost their ownership of the papacy. Whereas for generations almost all popes had been Romans, for the next eighty years popes and most high churchmen were outsiders, either from elsewhere in Italy or from Germany. Hildebrand quickly became a key figure in the reformist new guard and in April 1073 he himself became pope. He took office determined not only to clean up the Church but to begin a moral reformation of all Europe, attempting to ban marriages of which he disapproved. Much of his controlling purism became focused on one unfortunate individual.
This was the second of the trio, Henry IV, king of Germany, Burgundy and of Italy. He was only 22 years old when Hildebrand became pope in 1073, yet he had already had a trying life. When he was just five years old his father died suddenly and unexpectedly, propelling young Henry on to the throne under the regency of his mother Agnes, who was another keen supporter of the Church reform movement. At the age of eleven he was kidnapped by one of Germany’s powerful magnates, Archbishop Anno of Cologne – Anno invited Henry to see his river barge and then cast off – who supplanted Agnes and ruled the kingdom. When Henry finally assumed kingship for himself, at the age of fifteen, one of his first actions was to announce that he intended to divorce his wife by an arranged marriage, Bertha. Henry made no complaint against Bertha so it seems he simply did not like her. It was an unfortunate decision: Bertha was from a highly influential family and many German princes opposed Henry’s move. So did the Church reformers in Rome who, worked up by the new moral climate, declared that such an action by a leading monarch would be a stain on all Christians. Henry was forced to back down and keep his wife. Worse, the incident left him badly damaged. During the crisis his enemies had accused him of every kind of sexual depravity, from taking concubines and fathering illegitimate children, to incest and child abuse.
As ever, it is impossible to know if these accusations were actually true. Nor, for the purposes of this account, does it much matter. What matters is that the claims were brought to the ears of Hildebrand and that he believed them. Hildebrand, who was some thirty-five years older than Henry, assumed the role of a disapproving father, a role that was more convincing because Henry’s mother, Agnes, had moved to Rome where she was a close supporter of Hildebrand and the Church reformers. Agnes was as disappointed in her son as Hildebrand. Aside from his personal life there was also his attitude to Church reform. Henry was a supporter but, compared to his father, his zealotry was lukewarm.
Relations between the papacy and the German court, which were already strained, grew worse after Hildebrand became pope in 1073. The two clashed over power: Gregory objected to Henry’s appointment of bishops in his kingdom and also his choice of advisors, whom Agnes and Gregory disapproved of. In late 1075, following several spats between the two men, Gregory demanded that Henry acknowledge his subservience to ‘the empire of Christ’ – in other words, to himself – and warned that if he did not do so, he would never crown him Holy Roman Emperor. Henry, furious, countered by demanding that Gregory resign as pope, claiming he had been elected illegally. The fates took Gregory’s side. In early 1076 Henry summoned a synod of German churchmen in Utrecht who declared that Gregory was a false monk and excommunicated him. Just a month later on Easter Day Utrecht Cathedral was struck by lightning and burned to the ground and many Germans believed the disaster was God’s way of giving his opinion on the dispute. Gregory, sensing victory, excommunicated Henry and began conspiring against him with German princes, one of whom, the reformist Rudolph of Swabia, was waiting in the wings as a replacement king. Gregory declared that he and Agnes would go to Germany, where, like a pair of punishing parents, they would together preside over an assembly of German princes to decide Henry’s fate. As we have seen, Henry prevented him from doing so only by waylaying him at Canossa. There, to be released from excommunication, Henry had to swear an oath to Pope Gregory, accepting him as the arbiter in German politics, which meant he could decide Henry’s future as monarch.
Yet if Canossa was a painful humiliation for Henry, it served him well. Having survived the crisis he returned to Germany, largely ignored the oath he had sworn and transformed his situation. He showed new skill at winning key figures to his side. Though Rudolph of Swabia tried to seize the German throne and Gregory excommunicated Henry again, this time most German princes and churchmen stayed loyal to their king. In October 1080, at the battle of Hohenmölsen, Rudolph of Swabia ceased to be a problem when he lost a hand and then his life. Henry, finding that he finally had some political room in which to manoeuvre, determined to negate the humiliation of Canossa and secure his political position once and for all. He would march on Rome and be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. He would not even have to endure his mother’s disapproving looks as, conveniently, Agnes had died three years earlier.
In the winter of 1081 he gathered together a rather small army of Germans and Bohemians and crossed the Brenner Pass. Reaching Italy, where his forces were reinforced by some Italians, he then took a detour to Ravenna to collect the city’s pro-reform bishop, Wibert. Wibert was Henry’s fallback plan. If Gregory could not be persuaded or forced to crown him Holy Roman Emperor, then Henry would depose him and replace him with Wibert, his antipope.
Now it was Gregory who was in trouble. He scoffed at Henry’s little army, predicting that it would never reach Rome, as nobody would provide it with victuals, but under the management of his antipope, Wibert – who proved an excellent military organizer – the force proceeded smoothly southwards. Gregory looked to his allies in Italy, of whom he had two. The first was Matilda of Tuscany. Firmly loyal to Gregory, she would have helped if she could have but the previous October her forces had been routed by an army of Henrician loyalists from Lombardy. She was powerless.
That left Gregory’s other ally. So we come to the third of the trio, Robert Guiscard. He was Norman: a people who were eleventh-century Europe’s great success story. If Alaric’s Visigoths and Witigis’ Ostrogoths had had a long journey to Italy, so had Robert Guiscard’s Normans. It had begun in Scandinavia two centuries earlier, when shiploads of Danish Vikings set out to raid, among other places, northern France. Frankish rulers found their attacks so hard to deal with that they reluctantly granted them a piece of territory, which became known as the land of the Northmen, or Normandy. Here the invaders merged with the local population, took up the French language and French ways, fought violent feuds, were persecuted by their rulers, the dukes of Normandy, and sired huge families, creating
numerous young Normans hungry to find opportunities somewhere else.
Many found them in southern Italy. Unlike the Normans who settled in England after 1066, the Normans of the south did not arrive as part of a grand, planned invasion but as small bands of adventurers. They probably first discovered the area when passing through it as pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. By the 1020s Normans were working as mercenaries for all the various local powers in this fractured, politically complex part of Italy: for Lombard princes, for the Byzantine Empire and for the pope of the time, Benedict VIII. Feuding and political persecution in Normandy turned a trickle of immigrants into a flood. In 1030 a group of Normans was granted a small piece of territory at Averna, near Naples – the first of several – which they then extended, seizing land and building castles in villages.
The Normans were widely loathed for their brutality and greed yet there was no getting rid of them. The German reformist pope, Leo IX, tried his best, assembling a grand anti-Norman coalition that included Lombard princes and the Byzantine Empire, only to suffer a disastrous defeat at 1053 at the battle of Civitate, where Leo himself was captured. Accepting that the Normans were now a major force in Italy, the papacy made its peace with them and soon found them useful. Norman soldiers were brought in to cow the old guard of anti-reform Roman families and to prevent them from installing their own papal candidates. So began an unlikely alliance, between idealistic, purist Church leaders and self-serving Norman adventurers.
Of all of these adventurers, none rose faster than Robert Guiscard. His father, Tancred, who was lord of the obscure Norman village of Hauteville, had twelve sons by two wives, of whom Robert was sixth: an unpromising start in life. In the mid-1040s, with no opportunities at home, Robert journeyed to Italy. After struggling for a time as a minor bandit leader in Calabria his breakthrough came when he married a Norman heiress, Alberada, who brought him a dowry of 200 knights. With these at his side Robert’s abilities soon showed themselves. He was physically intimidating, he had a talent for inspiring his followers and he was also very shrewd. The Normans had a reputation for cunning among contemporary chroniclers – William of Malmesbury memorably remarked that they ‘weigh treachery by its chance of success’3 – while Robert de Hauteville, to give him his full name, was regarded as tricky even by his fellow Normans. His nickname, Guiscard, meant cunning or weasel.
By the time Henry IV set out on his march to Rome, Robert Guiscard had been in Italy for thirty-five years and had made himself one of the most powerful and feared rulers in the Mediterranean. The sixth son of a minor Normandy squire now ruled most of southern Italy and his little brother Roger controlled most of Sicily in his name. His social rise had been equally spectacular. He was now a duke and, having discarded the wife who had got him started, he was married to a Lombard princess, Sichelgaita of Salerno.
And of course he was allied to the pope. As one might have guessed, relations between the grasping amoral adventurer and a controlling purist churchman had not been smooth. An initial meeting soon after Gregory became pope in 1073 went badly wrong when Robert, like a suspicious Mafia don, rejected the meeting place Gregory had proposed, which lay outside Robert’s territory. Robert’s mistrust was matched by Gregory’s pride and, as the chronicler Amatus of Montecassino reported, ‘discord grew up between them, an ill-will and great anger’.4 Later, when Robert permitted his nephew to raid Church lands, Gregory excommunicated him and the following year he excommunicated him again. Yet Robert does not seem to have been overly troubled. In contrast to Henry IV, Gregory’s plotting did little to weaken his political position. The one who found he was vulnerable was Gregory. In June 1080, as his relations with Henry IV deteriorated, he realized he could not have an enemy to the south as well, and so he swallowed his pride and met Robert to make peace. Robert swore fealty to Gregory and gave him some gold, and in return Gregory released him from excommunication and accepted his claim to the latest territories he had seized.
Gregory had given more than he got. He had not even gained a useful ally, as it soon became apparent Robert had little interest in Gregory’s problems. In the spring of 1081, as King Henry marched south across Italy, Robert Guiscard was already on the other side of the Adriatic, campaigning against the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius Comemnus, in his most ambitious project to date: the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Pope Gregory had no friends to help him. As Henry’s army set up camp in the Fields of Nero, just north-west of the city walls, they did so safe in the knowledge that nobody was likely to trouble them.
II
What kind of Rome awaited Henry IV and his army? Of the seven incarnations of the city that will be examined in this book, that of 1081 was certainly the strangest. It was a kind of Gulliver’s Travels town, where tiny houses existed among vast ruins. Many Romans lived actually inside the ruins, which they called cryptae, making their homes in the broken remains of thousand-year-old apartment blocks, in long dry baths, and in the storerooms and corridors of abandoned theatres and stadiums. The Colosseum was now the city’s largest housing complex.
If a Roman had been transported from the 530s, just before the Gothic War, he or she would have been struck by how sleepily suburban – even rural – their city had become. In 1081 the most urban area was a rectangular zone centred on the Pantheon, yet even this was not crowded. Homes were one storey high, two at the most, and many had a little courtyard between them and the street, and a garden at the back. Outside this central rectangle, habitation was even more diffuse and consisted of hamlets and villages separated by farmland. Much of the outer edge of the city, including most of Trastevere, was comprised of orchards and vineyards.
Rome was now a small city and its population in 1081 has been estimated as somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000. Considerably smaller than it had been prior to the Gothic War, it was a thirtieth or fiftieth of its size at the height of the Empire. It was probably not much larger than it had been in 387 BC, when Brennus and his Gauls paid their visit, and when it was a fairly new town. Yet it was far from alone in its reduction. Shrunk though it was, in 1081 it was still the largest city in Western Europe and had been for several centuries.
In some ways it was not one city but three. To the left and right of the central rectangle were two satellite towns, each of which was a centre of the Church, and which were intense rivals. To the west was the pilgrims’ town, known as the Leonine City, that had grown up around St Peter’s. All pilgrims were required to stay here, including the most powerful pilgrims of the age: the kings of Germany who journeyed south, like Henry IV, to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. The German kings had their own palace that faced on to the Platea Sancti Petri – St Peter’s Square – which, when a royal visit turned violent, as such visits frequently did, became the site of pitched battles between royal followers and Romans. The Leonine City, which was a wholly separate entity from Rome, was busier and more concentrated than any other area, and contained all of the city’s shops. Lacking great ruins, its low, crowded streets would have seemed reassuringly familiar to medieval visitors.
At the eastern end was the Lateran, the papacy’s political headquarters. Separated from the rest of the city by fields, it formed a kind of high-powered clerical village. Around the Lateran Palace, home to the popes, antiquities were displayed to give a sense of their authority. These included a bronze she-wolf and also, in the open area in front of the palace, the Campus Lateranus, an equestrian statue thought to be of that key figure in the rise of Christianity, Emperor Constantine. Except that it was not Constantine at all, but a thoroughly pagan emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Medieval Romans could be hazy about their past. Also on display were the head and hand of a vast statue, which really was Constantine’s, but was widely believed to be of the biblical character Samson.
The Lateran was the departure point for an activity that, more than any other, lay at the heart of medieval Rome: religious processions. If emperors had met their Roman subjects in the circus, popes met them walking, and they met them far
more often than other European monarchs. Thirty times a times a year popes embarked on great processions around their city. Sometimes on horseback, sometimes barefoot, and accompanied by crowds of high clergymen, nobles dressed in purple silks, ordinary Romans, and musicians playing cymbals, harps and trumpets, popes would journey for miles, performing masses along the way. Some of these grand processions were older than Christianity. One of the greatest, the Major Litany of 25 April, followed the route of an ancient pagan walk to honour the deity Robigus. Like many papal processions the Major Litany was quite a trek. Unusually, it began not at the Lateran but beside Augustus’ vast, broken sundial in the Campo Marzio, then it headed north for several miles to cross Ponte Milvio, before turning back along the west side of the Tiber – where today crowds of Roma and Lazio football fans gather to watch their teams in the Stadio Olimpico – and finally on to St Peter’s. There were also night processions, when torches lit the way, lamps were suspended from roofs and chandeliers hung in the streets. One of the greatest of these celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on the night of 15 August. During that season and at that hour the real feasting would have been by malarial mosquitoes.
These processions were not only an opportunity for the pope to meet his subjects. They were also a chance to pay them. The pope gave large sums to the churches where he said mass and, as emperors had had coins flung into the audience in the stadium, popes handed out money to select householders along the processional route, and gave to clergy and lay officials. They also gave to the poor. The greatest payouts were at Easter and Christmas, when the city’s churchmen and lay officials received income, expenses and bonuses all rolled into one. A new pope, like a new emperor, was also expected to give generously when he took power.
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