Cerularius, having at last been persuaded by the Emperor or— more probably—by Bishop John of Trani how much was at stake, seems, however reluctantly, to have made a genuine effort to heal the breach; and Leo would have been well-advised to overlook being addressed as 'Brother' instead of 'Father' and other similar little pinpricks and let the matter rest. But he was tired and ill; and encouraged by Cardinal Humbert, who throughout the events which were to follow showed himself to be every bit as waspish and bigoted as the Patriarch, he determined to make no concessions. He therefore agreed that papal legates should be sent to Constantinople to thrash the whole question out once and for all, and allowed Humbert to draft two more letters in his name for these legates to deliver. The first of these, to Cerularius, addressed him as 'Archbishop', which was at least one degree politer than before; but it was otherwise quite as aggressive as its predecessor, being concerned less to defend the Latin usages themselves than to attack the Patriarch's presumption in questioning them in the first place. It also reprimanded him for having pretensions to oecumenical authority—which was probably due to a mistake in the Latin translation of his letter—and suggested that his election had been uncanonical, an accusation which was not remotely justified. Leo's second letter was to the Emperor and was, as we have seen, largely devoted to political affairs, in particular his determination to continue his war against the Normans. Nevertheless it carried a sting in its tail; the last paragraph contained a vehement protest against the Orthodox Patriarch's 'many and intolerable presumptions ... in which if, as Heaven forbid, he persist, he will in no wise retain our peaceful regard'. Perhaps to soften the effect of this veiled threat, the Pope concluded with a commendation of the legates whom he would shortly be sending to Constantinople. He hoped that they would be given every assistance in their mission, and that they would find the Patriarch suitably repentant.
Such tactics were a grave miscalculation. If the Pope valued the Byzantine alliance—and the Byzantines were, after all, the only allies he had against the Norman menace—it was foolish of him to reject the opportunity of conciliation with the Orthodox Church; and if he had been a little better informed about affairs in Constantinople he would have known that the personal goodwill of the Emperor would never suffice to override the Patriarch, who was not only a far stronger character than Constantine—by now a sick man, almost crippled with paralysis—but who also had the full weight of public opinion behind him. Finally it was hardly tactful to choose as legates on this particularly delicate mission Humbert himself, narrow-minded and rabidly anti-Greek, and two others, Frederick of Lorraine, the papal chancellor, and Archbishop Peter of Amalfi, both of whom had fought at Civitate and might be expected to share Leo's resentment at the Byzantines for letting them down.
This tight-lipped trio set off in the early spring of 1054 and arrived in Constantinople at the beginning of April. From the outset things went badly. They called at once on the Patriarch, but took offence at the manner in which they were received and stomped unceremoniously from the Palace without any of the customary civilities, leaving the Pope's letter behind them. Their own anger was, however, nothing to that of Cerularius when he read this latest document. It confirmed his worst suspicions. Against his better judgment he had been induced to make a gesture of conciliation, and here it was flung back in his face. Worse was to follow: for the legates, who had since been received by the Emperor with his usual courtesy, had been encouraged by this reception to publish in Greek translation the full text of the Pope's earlier, still undespatched, letter to the Patriarch and Leo of Ochrid, together with a detailed memorandum on the disputed usages.
To the Patriarch this was the final insult. Despite the fact that the earlier letter had been addressed, however disrespectfully, to him, he had not even heard of its existence until now, when it was being angrily discussed all over the city. Meanwhile a closer examination of the second letter—which had at least, after a fashion, been delivered—revealed that the seals on it had been tampered with. Immediately he thought of his old enemy Argyrus. Was it not more than probable that Humbert and his friends had called, on their way to Constantinople, at his Apulian headquarters and shown him the letter ? And if he had seen it, might he not even have altered the text? Forgetting, in his anger, that Argyrus's interest was to heal the breach between the two Churches rather than to open it further, Cerularius decided that the so-called legates were not only discourteous; they were dishonest as well. He therefore refused to recognise their legatine authority or to accept from them any further communications.
A state of affairs in which a fully accredited Papal legation, cordially welcomed by the Emperor, remained unrecognised and totally ignored by his Patriarch could not continue for long; and it was lucky for Cerularius that news of Pope Leo's death, which reached Constantinople within a few weeks of the legates' arrival, to some extent solved the problem for him. Humbert and his colleagues had been Leo's personal representatives; his death thus deprived them of all official standing. The Patriarch's grim satisfaction at this development can easily be surmised; it may, however, have been somewhat mitigated by the absence of any corresponding discomfiture on the part of the legates. Seemingly unabashed by this blow to their status, they now became more arrogant than ever. The publication of the draft reply to Leo of Ochrid's letter had provoked a firm riposte from one Nicetas Stethatus, monk at the monastery of Studium, criticising in particular the Latins' use of unleavened bread, their habit of fasting on Saturdays and their attempts to impose celibacy on their clergy. This document, though outspoken and occasionally clumsy, was couched in polite and respectful language; but it drew from Humbert, instead of a reasoned reply, a torrent of shrill, almost hysterical invective. Ranting on for page after page, describing Stethatus as a 'pestiferous pimp' and a 'disciple of the malignant Mahomet', suggesting that he must have emerged from the theatre or the brothel rather than from a monastery, and finally pronouncing anathema upon him and all who shared in his 'perverse doctrine'—which, however, it made no attempt to refute—this extraordinary diatribe can only have confirmed the average Byzantine in his opinion that the Church of Rome now consisted of little more than a bunch of crude barbarians with whom no agreement could ever be possible.
Cerularius, delighted to see his enemies not only shorn of their authority but making fools of themselves as well, continued to hold his peace. Even when the Emperor, now fearing with good reason for the future of the papal alliance on which he had set his heart, forced the luckless Stethatus to retract and apologise to the legates; even when Humbert went on to raise with Constantine the whole question of the Filioque, detestation of which was by now a cornerstone of Byzantine theology, no word issued from the Patriarchal Palace, no sign that the high Orthodox authorities took any cognizance of the undignified wrangle which was now the talk of the city. At last—-as Cerularius knew it would-—this imperturbability had its effect. Humbert lost the last shreds of his patience. At three o'clock in the afternoon of Saturday, 16 July 1054, in presence of all the clergy assembled for the Eucharist, the three ex-legates of Rome, a cardinal, an archbishop and a papal chancellor, all in their full ecclesiastical regalia, strode into the church of Santa Sophia and up to the High Altar, on which they formally laid their solemn Bull of Excommunication. Then, turning on their heel, they marched from the building, pausing only to shake the dust ceremonially from their feet. Two days later they left for Rome.
Even apart from the fact that the legates were without any papal authority and that the Bull itself was therefore invalid by all the standards of Canon Law, it remains an extraordinary document. Here is Sir Steven Runciman on the subject:
Few important documents have been so full of demonstrable errors. It is indeed extraordinary that a man of Humbert's learning could have penned so lamentable a manifesto. It began by refusing to Cerularius, both personally and as Bishop of Constantinople, the title of Patriarch. It declared that there was nothing to be said against the citizens of the Empire or of Co
nstantinople, but that all those who supported Cerularius were guilty of simony (which, as Humbert well knew, was the dominant vice at the time of his own Church), of encouraging castration (a practice that was also followed at Rome), of insisting on rebaptising Latins (which, at that time, was untrue), of allowing priests to marry (which was incorrect; a married man could become a priest but no one who was already ordained could marry), of baptising women in labour, even if they were dying (a good early Christian practice), of jettisoning the Mosaic Law (which was untrue), of refusing communion to men who had shaved their beards (which again was untrue, though the Greeks disapproved of shaven priests), and, finally, of omitting a clause in the Creed (which was the exact reverse of the truth). After such accusations, complaints about the closing of the Latin churches at Constantinople and of disobedience to the Papacy lost their effect.1
In Constantinople, where the narrow-minded arrogance of Humbert and his friends had already made them thoroughly disliked, the news of the excommunication spread quickly. Demonstrations in support of the Patriarch were held throughout the city. They were first directed principally against the Latins, but it was not long before the mob found a new target for its resentment—the Emperor himself, whose evident sympathy for the legates was rightly thought to have encouraged them in their excesses. Luckily for Constantine, he had a scapegoat ready to hand. Argyrus himself was in Italy, as yet unaware of what had happened and still working for the papal alliance; but those of his family who chanced to be in the capital were instantly arrested. This assuaged popular feeling to some extent, but it was only when the Bull had been publicly burnt and the three legates themselves formally anathematised that peace returned to the capital.
1 The Eastern Schism. 104
Such is the sequence of the events, at Constantinople in the early summer of 1054, which resulted in the lasting separation of the Eastern and the Western Churches. It is a sad, unedifying story because, however inevitable the breach may have been, the events themselves should never, and need never, have occurred. More strength of will on the part of the dying Pope or the senile Emperor, less bigotry on the part of the ambitious Patriarch or the pig-headed Cardinal, and the situation could have been saved. The fatal blow was struck by a disempowered legate of a dead Pope, representing a headless Church—since the new Pontiff had not yet been elected— and using an instrument at once uncanonical and inaccurate. Both the Latin and the Greek excommunications were directed personally at the offending dignitaries rather than at the Churches for which they stood; both could later have been rescinded, and neither was at the time recognised as introducing a permanent schism. Technically indeed they did not do so, since twice in succeeding centuries—in the thirteenth at Lyons and in the fifteenth at Florence —was the Eastern Church compelled, for political reasons, to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. But though a temporary bandage may cover an open wound it cannot heal it; and, despite even the balm applied by the Oecumenical Council in 1965, the wound which was jointly inflicted on the Christian Church by Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Cerularius nine centuries ago still bleeds today.
9
CONSOLIDATION
Roger, the youngest of the brothers, whom youth and filial devotion had heretofore kept at home, now followed his brothers to Apulia; and the Guiscard rejoiced greatly at his coming and received him with the honour which was his due. For he was a youth of great beauty, tall of stature and of elegant proportion . . . He remained ever friendly and cheerful. He was gifted also with great strength of body and courage in battle. And by these qualities he soon won the favour of all.
Malaterra, I, 19
IN the general exhilaration that followed their victory at Civitate, the Normans little suspected the magnitude of the events in Constantinople for which they had unwittingly provided the spark, nor the fact that in doing so they had probably saved themselves from extinction. They were on the other hand fully aware that the defeat of a massed papal army had added immeasurably to their reputation. Through the towns and villages of the peninsula there were now many who believed them to be genuinely invincible, as a result of some sinister contract with the powers of darkness; while even those who continued to suspect that they might yet succumb to a superior force were compelled to admit that for the moment no such force appeared to exist. This prevailing mood of defeatism offered them an advantage which the Norman leaders were quick to seize; and the records for the next few years tell of an almost unbroken succession of minor victories as one town after another fell, with hardly a struggle, to their attacks. Their principal target was what remained of Byzantine Apulia, where the demoralised Greeks, already deprived of papal support, unsuccessful in their attempted negotiations with Henry III and soon temporarily to lose the leadership of Argyrus, were incapable of prolonged resistance.
By the end of 105 5 Oria, Nardo and Lecce had all capitulated, while Robert Guiscard, plunging deep into the heel of Italy, had taken Minervino, Otranto and Gallipoli in one gigantic stride and was building up his power and reputation at such a rate that Count Humphrey, fearing for his own position, hastily despatched him back to his old stamping-ground in Calabria.
By this time Robert had attracted a considerable following, and his second term of occupation of San Marco must have been even more terrifying for the local inhabitants than his first. Fortunately for them he did not stay long. A highly satisfactory expedition against the southern territories of Gisulf of Salerno, during which Cosenza and certain other neighbouring towns fell to the Normans, occupied a few months, and soon after his return to the camp messengers arrived with an urgent summons for him to return to Melfi. Count Humphrey was dying. The two half-brothers had never been close—William of Apulia reports that on one occasion Robert so angered the Count that he found himself cast into a dungeon— but Humphrey seems to have understood that there was no other possible successor and he therefore appointed Robert guardian and protector of his infant son Abelard, and administrator of all his lands during Abelard's minority. Then, in the spring of 1057, he died. He had been a hard, jealous, vengeful man, with a streak of cruelty that had showed itself in the savage tortures inflicted on the murderers of his brother Drogo, and again on certain chiefs who had failed him at Civitate; but even if he lacked Drogo's fundamental goodness of heart and the gay panache of William the Iron-Arm, even if already before his death he was beginning himself to feel outshone by the brilliance of the young Guiscard, he had yet proved himself a strong and courageous leader, fully endowed with all those qualities which had already, in barely twenty years, made the name of Hauteville famous through half Europe.
When he saw Humphrey buried next to William and Drogo in the monastery of the Santissima Trinita at Venosa, Robert can have shed few tears. Geoffrey, his only surviving elder brother in Italy, had failed to achieve any particular distinction; William, Count of the Principate, and Mauger, Count of the Capitanata, two younger brothers recently arrived, were doing well for themselves—especially William, who had already wrested a castle from the Prince of Salerno at San Nicandro, near Eboli—but neither they nor any other Norman barons could approach the Guiscard in power or prestige. As Humphrey had foreseen, the succession was incontestably his. Even before his election, he had characteristically seized all the lands of his nephew and ward Abelard and had added them to his own extensive possessions; and when, in August 1057, he was formally acclaimed as his brother's successor by the Normans assembled at Melfi, and all Humphrey's personal estates devolved upon him also, he became the greatest landowner and the most powerful figure in all South Italy. It had taken him just eleven years.
But though Robert Guiscard was now supreme, his chief rival, Richard of Aversa, was not far behind. The Normans of Melfi and those of Aversa still retained their separate identities, and Richard had consequently not been a contender for the Apulian succession —he had anyway been fully occupied elsewhere. Young Gisulf of Salerno, despite the efforts of his uncle Guy of Sorrento to restrain him, had almost from the day of
his accession determined to oppose the Normans in every way he could. It was a short-sighted policy, since, especially after Civitate (where the Salernitans had been noticeable by their absence), the Lombard princes of South Italy could no longer hope to stem the Norman tide, and the policy of co-operation which had served his father Gaimar in such good stead was now even more vital if an independent Salerno was to be maintained; yet Gisulf quickly drew upon himself the armed hostility of Richard of Aversa and managed to keep his throne only by means of a last-minute alliance with Amalfi; while Richard in the north and Robert and William de Hauteville in the south relentlessly harried his borders, paring away the outlying Salernitan territory bit by bit until he was at last left with little more than the city itself.
The Normans In The South Page 13