Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  that you believe what you say, or you would not have come all this way to say it. But you must not expect me immediately to renounce the customs which I and the English have observed from one generation to another. So go on talking: no one will interfere with you, and, if you convince us, of course it will follow that we will accept your message.

  A few months later, however, Ethelbert, together with his court and the majority of his subjects, accepted baptism. He thus became the first Christian English king—and a saint to boot.3 Augustine, meanwhile, established a monastery at Canterbury, which he dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul—though it was later to become St. Augustine’s—and which was almost certainly the earliest Benedictine foundation outside Italy. Canterbury in turn became the headquarters of Christianity in England, as it remains today. Pope Gregory was delighted. “By the shining miracles of his preachers,” he declared,

  God has brought even the ends of the Earth to the faith. He has linked in one confession the limits of East and West. Behold, the tongue of Britain, which could formerly utter only barbaric sounds, has lately learned to make the Hebrew Alleluia resound in God’s praise.

  Gregory was an administrator of genius, an organizer, and a missionary; he was not, and never could be, an abstract thinker or theologian, or even a politician. His faith was surprisingly simple: he was largely responsible for the growing belief in miracles and prophecies, as well as for the widespread veneration of saints and relics. Pious but practical, he intended the Patrimony of Peter to be a huge charitable fund, at the immediate disposal of the Church for the benefit of the poor—every day twelve paupers shared his table. In fact, by his work of consolidation, he unknowingly laid the foundations of what was later to be the Papal State, ensuring the temporal power of his successors which was to endure for the next thirteen centuries. Had he ever realized this, it would have horrified him. For all his determination to uphold the ecclesiastical supremacy of the papal throne, he had no desire for worldly glory; it was enough for him to be, as he constantly maintained, servus servorum Dei, the Servant of the Servants of God.

  As the greatest pope of the early Middle Ages, Gregory’s most important achievement was to implant ineradicably in men’s minds the idea that the Roman Catholic Church was the most important institution in the world and that the Papacy was the supreme authority within it. He made important changes in the liturgy and showed a particular interest in church music: traditional plainsong is commonly known today as “Gregorian chant”—even though in his time it remained still largely undeveloped—and the Roman Schola Cantorum, probably the first body of trained singers to take over from the clergy and congregation and as such the ancestor of the modern cathedral choir school, was his personal creation. He was also a compulsive writer. In the first year of his papacy he produced a book, Liber Regulae Pastoralis, setting out directives for the pastoral life of a bishop, whom he saw primarily as a curator of souls. It was astonishingly widely read by the standards of the time and was later to be translated by King Alfred the Great. Then there were the Dialogues, dealing with the lives and miracles of Italian saints—including, of course, Benedict—a series of sermons on the Gospels, and a critical essay on the Book of Job. Finally there are nearly a thousand letters, probably the principal source of what we know of Gregory’s life and work. All these writings were, in the Middle Ages, to earn him a place—together with St. Ambrose, St. Augustine (of Hippo, not Canterbury), and St. Jerome—among the four original “Doctors of the Church.”

  Of the four, he was the latest and the last, and the fact is not surprising, because the ancient world was on the verge of collapse. In Rome, the barbarians had done their worst. During their siege in 537 the Goths had cut the aqueducts, dealing the city a blow from which it was not to recover for a thousand years. The history of the aqueducts stretched almost as far back into the past: as early as 312 B.C. the Romans, no longer prepared to make do with the murky insufficiency of the Tiber, built the first of those magnificent conduits; over the eight centuries that followed they were to construct ten more, the better to supply not only their domestic needs but the innumerable fountains and public baths for which the city was famous. Those aqueducts provided something else as well: the hydraulic power which drove, among much else, the mills on which the people depended for their bread. Their destruction was followed by famine and disease, together with a disastrous decline in popular morale.4

  Amid the general dégringolade, the figure of Gregory the Great shone out like a beacon. He stood for integrity, for order, and for the Christian faith, which alone offered hope for a better and happier world. At heart, nevertheless, he remained a humble monk, carrying on the traditions of his hero, St. Benedict, in every way he could. It was perhaps because of this humility—for no man was ever less spoiled by power—that he was genuinely loved, so much so that he was hardly in his grave before his people demanded that he should immediately be made a saint. The title of “the Great” came later; both were abundantly deserved.

  1. It was somehow typical of her time that her sister Galswintha, who had married Sigebert’s half brother Chilperic I, King of the Western Franks, was subsequently murdered by her husband at the instigation of his mistress.

  2. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of England, II, i. The hoary old quotation “Non Angli sed angeli,” despite being in Latin, is, alas, spurious. Still according to Bede, Gregory followed up this first pun with two more even worse ones, which the reader will be spared.

  3. Statues of Ethelbert and Bertha were unveiled on Lady Wootton’s Green in Canterbury in 2006.

  4. One pilgrim during the Dark Ages, a draper from Douai, was informed that the aqueducts “were formerly used to bring oil, wine, and water from Naples.”

  CHAPTER V

  Leo III and Charlemagne

  (795–861)

  Early in the seventh century, a new people and a new faith appeared on the world stage. Until the third decade of that century, the land of Arabia was terra incognita to the Christian world. But in September 622 the Prophet Mohammed had fled from the hostile city of Mecca to friendly Medina: this was the hegira, the event which marked the beginning of the Muslim era. Just eleven years later, his followers burst out of Arabia. The following year, an Arab army defeated the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius on the banks of the Yarmuk River; two years later still, they took Damascus; after five, Jerusalem; after eight, they controlled all Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Within twenty years, the whole Persian Empire as far as the Oxus River had fallen to the Arab sword; within thirty, Afghanistan and most of the Punjab. Then the Muslims turned their attention to the West. Their progress across North Africa was somewhat slower, but by the end of the century they had reached the Atlantic, and by 732—still less than a century after their eruption from their desert homeland—they had (according to tradition) made their way over the Pyrenees as far as Tours. There, only 150 miles from Paris, they were stopped at last by the Frankish leader Charles Martel.

  For Christendom, the effect was cataclysmic. Three of the five historic patriarchates—Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—engulfed in the Muslim tide, now existed in little more than name; all the great churches of North Africa disappeared, save only the Copts of Egypt, who managed to retain a tenuous foothold. The lands which had seen the origins of Christianity were all lost, never to be properly recovered. The Eastern Empire was hideously maimed. The political focus of necessity now shifted north and west. Perhaps, as the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne suggested, it was Mohammed who made Charlemagne possible.

  IN ITALY, ALL through the second half of the seventh century and the first half of the eighth, we see two opposing tendencies: on the one hand, a steady weakening of political and religious links with the Byzantine Empire; on the other, an equally steady increase in the power of the Lombards. In 653 Pope Martin I, though old and ill, was arrested on trumped-up charges and taken to Constantinople, where he was publicly stripped of his vestments, dragged in chains through the city, flogged, a
nd deported to the Crimea, dying there soon afterward; and matters came to a head in 726, when the Emperor (not the Pope) Leo III published his fateful edict imposing iconoclasm—a doctrine which, calling as it did for the wholesale destruction of all holy images, was received with horror in the West and caused revolts throughout Byzantine Italy. In retaliation, the emperor confiscated the annual incomes of the churches of Sicily and Calabria, transferring their bishoprics, together with a considerable number of others in the Balkan Peninsula, from the see of Rome to that of Constantinople. It was the continuation of the long, slow process of estrangement which would end, three hundred years later, in schism.

  The Lombards, meanwhile, were steadily strengthening their hold. Under the greatest of their kings, Liutprand, they twice—successfully—laid siege to Rome. On the first occasion, in 729, Pope Gregory II—at last a Roman-born pope after a long succession of Greeks—confronted Liutprand, who abandoned the siege, feeling guilty enough to leave his arms and armor in St. Peter’s as a votive offering; but on the second, ten years later, he and his men were in a very different mood. This time, rather than enriching the basilica, they looted it. Gregory’s successor, Gregory III, powerless to stop them, looked about desperately for a new ally; and found him—or thought he had—beyond the Alps in Gaul, in the person of Charles Martel.

  Charles was not himself a monarch. Technically, he was mayor of the palace at the court of the Merovingian king; but the Merovingians were nonentities, and it was in the hands of the mayor that the power effectively rested. Charles had already earned fame throughout Europe as the first man to check the advance of the Muslim army; if he could halt the Saracens, might he not do the same to the Lombards?

  Perhaps; but he would not be hurried. He had his hands full in Gaul, and he remained there until his death. In 751, however, his son Pepin—the Short, as he was always called—managed to convince Pope Zachary that the holder of the power should also be wearer of the crown. Thus, at the hands of the English Archbishop Boniface, Pepin was crowned at Soissons, the feckless King Childeric III being packed off to end his days in a monastery. Henceforth Pepin was deeply in the pope’s debt: there was a good chance that any future appeal for aid might have a more sympathetic reception. In any case, the coronation came not a moment too soon; for in that very same year Ravenna was finally captured by the Lombard King Aistulf, and the Byzantine Empire’s final foothold in North Italy was lost forever.

  Zachary, the last of a long line of Greek popes,1 died the following year. His eleven-year pontificate had not been easy. He had worked hard to save papal-imperial relations from a complete breakdown—an objective to which his translation of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues into Greek may or may not have contributed—but the fall of Ravenna had marked a further degree of rupture, and Aistulf was now busy mopping up what was left of Byzantine power in north and central Italy. For the Papacy the situation was now desperate, and it was hardly surprising that a Roman aristocrat, Stephen II—rather than yet another Greek—was chosen as Zachary’s successor.2

  Pope Stephen lost no time in traveling personally to Pepin’s court at Ponthion, near Châlons-sur-Marne, where he arrived in the first days of 754. On January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, he anointed the king, together with his wife and two sons, Charles and Carloman, awarding to all three the title he had just invented: Patrician of the Romans. Meetings between king and pope continued sporadically over the next six months, and were a triumphant success. Pepin willingly undertook the role of defender of the Papacy, promising to recover on behalf of the pope all the Italian cities and territories which the Lombards had captured from the empire; and in two major expeditions, in 754 and again in 756, he proved as good as his word, bringing King Aistulf to his knees, putting a client-king, Desiderius, on the Lombard throne, and marrying his daughter. After the second campaign he proclaimed the pope sole ruler of the lands formerly constituting the imperial exarchate, snaking across central Italy to embrace Ravenna, Perugia, and Rome itself.

  His authority for this so-called Donation of Pepin is, to say the least, doubtful; and in Constantinople the Emperor Constantine V predictably lodged a furious protest. It was at one time suggested that Pepin might have based his action on the so-called Donation of Constantine,3 but recent evidence suggests that this shameless fabrication was not concocted for another half century. Pepin himself justified it by claiming that his intervention had been for the love of St. Peter and that it was therefore to St. Peter that the conquered lands would belong. It remains true that the Papal States, which he thus brought into being, however shaky their legal foundation, would endure for over eleven centuries.

  PEPIN DIED IN 768, leaving his kingdom, in accordance with the old Frankish custom, to be divided between his two sons, Charles and Carloman; but Carloman’s sudden death in 771 enabled Charles, ignoring the rights of his young nephews, to make himself sole ruler. Only two months later a tough-minded Roman aristocrat assumed the papal throne under the name of Hadrian I. He and Charles together continued the work which had been begun by Pope Stephen and Pepin, further cementing relations between the Frankish kingdom and the Papacy, and when, in 773, the Lombard client-king Desiderius forgot his place to the point where he began besieging Rome, Hadrian immediately turned to Charles for help. The Patrician of the Romans lost no time. He marched into Italy, seized the Lombard capital at Pavia, packed Desiderius off to a monastery, and—apart from adding “King of the Lombards” to his own steadily growing list of titles—abolished the Lombard Kingdom once and for all. Then, at Easter, 774, he decided to come to Rome.

  The decision took Pope Hadrian by surprise; but he rose magnificently to the occasion, greeting his royal guest on the steps of St. Peter’s—which Charles is said to have climbed on his knees—and showing him every honor. In return Charles reconfirmed his father’s Donation, adding considerably to the extent of the territory concerned, and expressed his intention of imposing unity and uniformity, according to the Roman model, on all the churches within his dominions. Returning to Germany he next subdued the heathen Saxons, whom he converted en masse to Christianity before going on to annex the already Christian Bavaria. An invasion of Spain was less successful—though it provided the inspiration for the first great epic ballad of western Europe, the Chanson de Roland—but Charles’s subsequent campaign against the Avars in Hungary and upper Austria resulted in the destruction of their kingdom as an independent state and its incorporation in turn within his own frontiers. Thus, in little more than a generation, he had raised the Kingdom of the Franks from just one of the many semitribal European states to a single political unit of vast extent, unparalleled since the days of imperial Rome.

  And he had done so, for most of the time at least, with the enthusiastic support of the Papacy. It was nearly half a century since Pope Stephen had struggled across the Alps to seek help from Pepin, an appeal which might more properly have been addressed to the Byzantine emperor and probably would have been if the Emperor Constantine V could only have spared a few moments from his obsession with iconoclasm to turn his attention to Italy. Pepin and Charles, in effectively eliminating the Lombard Kingdom, had succeeded where Byzantium had failed; and Byzantium was to pay dearly for its failure.

  Pope and patricians did not, however, always see eye to eye, and a particular bone of contention was, rather surprisingly, iconoclasm. In 787, in an attempt to settle the issue, the Empress Irene—she was in fact the widow of the Emperor Leo IV, acting as regent for her seventeen-year-old-son—summoned the Seventh Ecumenical Council, to be held (like the first) at Nicaea. Hadrian duly dispatched his legates, carrying a long and closely argued defense of holy images, and the Council most gratifyingly declared in his favor. Charles, however, objected. This sudden rapprochement between Rome and Constantinople was not at all to his liking. Why, he demanded, had he not also been invited to send representatives to Nicaea? In what looks suspiciously like a fit of pique, he ordered his theologians to produce a defense of iconoclasm in the shape
of what were called the Libri Carolini; and for a few years his relations with Pope Hadrian were seriously strained. But the cloud eventually passed. A mistake was fortunately discovered in the Latin version of the Council’s findings—“veneration” had been mistranslated as “adoration”—and by the time of Hadrian’s death on Christmas Day, 795, the two were once more on excellent terms.

  It was just as well that they were, for the climax to the story was now rapidly approaching. The new Pope Leo III—not, of course, to be confused with the Byzantine emperor of the same name—could boast neither the birth nor the breeding of his predecessor. There is a theory that he may even have been of Arab stock. From the moment of his elevation he was the victim of incessant intrigue on the part of Hadrian’s family and friends, who had expected the papal throne to pass to one of themselves and were consequently determined to remove him. On April 25, 799, a group led by the late pope’s nephew actually attacked Leo in the course of a solemn procession from the Lateran to the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. They failed in their original intention of blinding him and cutting out his tongue—mutilations which would have obliged him to resign the Papacy—but they left him unconscious in the street. Only by the greatest good fortune was he rescued by friends and removed for safety to Charles’s court at Paderborn. Under the protection of Frankish agents he returned to Rome in November, only to find himself facing a number of serious charges leveled by his enemies, including simony, perjury, and adultery.