And indeed he failed to do so. In March—only a month after his so-called accession—he was dismissed from Piacenza; soon afterward he was formally excommunicated. In December Otto, with his chosen Pope Gregory at his side and an army behind him, was once again heading toward Rome, which on his arrival in February 998 instantly opened its gates. Antipope John had fled just in time to the Campagna, but was soon captured. Blinded and hideously mutilated, he suffered much the same fate as the Prefect Peter half a century before, being paraded naked through the streets, sitting backward on a donkey. He was then formally deposed and defrocked before being incarcerated in some Roman monastery, where he lingered for another three years before a merciful death took him.
THE PAPAL HISTORY of the ninth and tenth centuries had been scarcely inspiring; but on Gregory’s death in 999 the Papacy suffered a sea change with the appointment by Otto III of his old friend (and another of his tutors) Gerbert of Aurillac, then Archbishop of Ravenna. The first Frenchman to become Supreme Pontiff,4 Gerbert took the title Sylvester II as a deliberate tribute to his namesake, Sylvester I, the contemporary of Constantine the Great, who had traditionally exemplified the ideal relationship between emperor and pope.
He had been born around 945 of humble parentage in the Auvergne but had received a first-class education, first at Aurillac and then at Vic in Catalonia. He had been drawn across the Pyrenees by a thirst for knowledge that could be obtained nowhere else in Europe. Mathematics, medicine, geography, astronomy, and the physical sciences were still deeply mistrusted in the Christian world; in that of Islam, they had been brought to a point unequaled since the days of ancient Greece. Gerbert himself is generally credited with having first popularized Arabic numerals and the use of the astrolabe, together with that of the celestial and terrestrial globes, in the Christian West. He was also a passionate lover of music who did much to develop the organ as an instrument. Brought to Rome in 970, he impressed everyone by his extraordinary intelligence and erudition, and by his brilliance as a teacher. Soon afterward he was summoned to the court of the fifteen-year-old Otto III, with orders “to rid him of his Saxon rusticity and to stimulate his Greek subtlety.”
As pope, Sylvester fulfilled every sensible expectation. He showed himself a determined reformer, denouncing the Church’s two besetting sins of nepotism and simony, forcing King Robert II of France to get rid of his wife, and at the same time working—as he had always intended to work—closely with the emperor to forge the sort of Christian Roman Empire of which they both dreamed. For a short time they were successful: together they reorganized the Church in Hungary and in Poland, and it was Sylvester who sent the original Holy Crown of Hungary5 to King Vajk, subsequently canonized as St. Stephen. In recognition of what the two had achieved, Otto even returned Ravenna to the pope, as well as the five cities of the so-called Pentapolis—Rimini, Faro, Pesaro, Senigallia, and Ancona, which Pepin the Great had granted to the Papacy in the eighth century—while making it clear that the transfer had nothing at all to do with the Donation of Constantine, which he was well aware was a forgery.
For a pope of such caliber, the Romans should have been grateful; it need hardly be said that they were nothing of the kind. By some sad irony Rome remained as unsuitable as any city could ever be, as both the center of the universal Church and the capital of a revived Western Empire. It was devoid alike of order and discipline, lying at the mercy of irresponsible magnates such as the Crescentii and the counts of Tusculum, and indeed of its own highly volatile populace. Thus, when in 1001 a minor outbreak of trouble in Tivoli got out of hand and spread to Rome, both pope and emperor were forced to flee for their lives. Otto died of malaria early in 1002, aged twenty-one; Sylvester was allowed to return, but in May 1003 followed him to the grave. His pontificate had lasted only four years, barely half of which he had spent in Rome; but he had demonstrated to the world at large that there was, after all, a future for the Church and that the Papacy was not beyond hope of recovery.
The next three pontiffs were all creatures of John Crescentius. All three were keen to establish relations with the new German king, Henry II the Holy; but Crescentius, whose Byzantine sympathies were growing stronger with age, continued to oppose any attempts to bring Henry to Rome for his imperial coronation. This state of affairs continued until May 1012, when, during another of those regular bouts of political upheaval inseparable from early medieval Rome, the counts of Tusculum overthrew the Crescentii and seized power for themselves. The deaths of Crescentius and the last of his three puppets, Sergius IV, within a week of each other at exactly this time cannot but suggest foul play, but there is no proof. It was scarcely surprising, in any case, that the next pope should have been a Tusculan—the son of Count Gregory of Tusculum and at the time of his election still a layman—who took the name of Benedict VIII. Now that there was no longer any obstacle to improving relations with the German king, Henry duly visited Rome, where he was crowned by Benedict on St. Valentine’s Day, 1014.
Unusually, the new pope was a soldier. No sooner ordained and enthroned, he was off at the head of an army to crush the remaining Crescentii in their mountain refuges, and much of the next six years was spent on campaign. In 1020 he appeared in person at the emperor’s court in Bamberg to consecrate Henry’s new cathedral and appeal for help. Henry agreed, and in 1022 marched down into the Mezzogiorno with no fewer than three separate armies. They achieved one or two minor victories, but there was no significant breakthrough. The principal result was the renewed rupture of relations between Rome and Constantinople, which had been somehow patched up after the Photian schism of 861 but which was now further exacerbated by the emperor’s insistence on—and the pope’s craven acceptance of—the inclusion of the hated filioque in the Creed.
Dying in 1024, Benedict was followed by two more close relatives—first his brother, then his nephew. All three having been laymen, each was tonsured, ordained, and enthroned in a single day. The first, John XIX, is remembered principally for having crowned Henry’s successor, Conrad II, in the somewhat unexpected presence of England’s King Canute, who happened to be in Rome on a pilgrimage. Canute seems to have been deeply impressed; in fact, John was venal, corrupt, and without a ray of spirituality. The best that can be said of him was that his nephew was worse. Benedict IX, elected as a result of wholesale bribery on the part of his father, is traditionally believed to have mounted the throne at the age of ten or twelve, though later research suggests that he was more likely in his early twenties. What is beyond doubt is that he was a shameless debauchee, who recalled to older members of his flock the worst days of the pornocracy. The Romans, hardened as they were to corruption in high places, bore him as best they could for nearly twelve years, but in January 1045 they rose up against him and forced him to abandon the city, replacing him with the Crescentian Bishop John of Sabina, who took the name Sylvester III. Sylvester, however, lasted just two months. Benedict promptly excommunicated him and regained his throne by March; but somehow he seems to have lost his enthusiasm, and in May he resigned his papal rights in favor of his godfather, the archpriest John Gratian—without, however, specifically renouncing the Papacy itself.
Why he took so extraordinary a step is far from clear, but the result was chaos. There were now no fewer than three pretenders, all claiming to be the legitimate pope. Two of the three were practically worthless; Gratian, who now called himself Gregory VI, was at least a serious churchman and a pious reformer, even though he was unable to shake off rumors of simony. The situation was finally resolved by the German king, Henry III. Henry had succeeded his father, Conrad II, in 1039 at the age of twenty-two. He was a conscientious ruler who took his religious responsibilities with the utmost seriousness and was a powerful champion of reform. His original purpose in coming to Italy was to receive his imperial coronation, but he immediately saw that his first task would be to put some order into papal affairs. On his way to Rome he saw Gregory at Piacenza but was left unpersuaded; his conclusion—surely th
e right one—was to depose all three contestants. Only Benedict refused to lie down, forever making trouble from his family properties near Frascati and still breathing defiance at his successors. Sylvester, who had never wanted the job anyway, returned to his old bishopric. Gregory, by far the worthiest of the three, fared worst of all. At a synod held at Sutri he was found guilty of simony in obtaining the papal throne and was banished, accompanied by his chancellor, Cardinal Hildebrand, to Germany. He died the following year in Cologne.
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WE CAN HARDLY blame Henry III for taking the choice of pope into his own hands and, after the anarchy of previous years, appointing a German to perform his coronation. In fact, he was to appoint four popes, one after another. There was one serious drawback to the choice of Germans: they were fatally susceptible to the old Roman scourge of malaria. The first, Clement II, lasted only ten months,6 and the odious Benedict, who was widely rumored to have poisoned him, reestablished himself for the next eight months at St. Peter’s. In July 1048 Henry’s next appointee, Damasus II, ruled for exactly twenty-three days before expiring at Palestrina. Whether, as some said, the heat had proved too much for him or whether Benedict was simply becoming more expert has never been properly established, but to most of the leading churchmen of his time his death made the Papacy seem a less desirable prize than ever, and Henry, called upon to fill the vacancy for the third time in less than two years, was finding the task increasingly difficult. Finally, at a great council held at Worms in December 1048, German and Italian bishops called unanimously for the emperor’s second cousin, a man of tried ability and undoubted saintliness, Bruno, Bishop of Toul.
Bruno’s reluctance to accept the invitation was unfeigned and indeed hardly surprising. He agreed only on condition that his appointment would be spontaneously ratified on his arrival by the clergy and people of Rome and accordingly set out for the Eternal City in January 1049, dressed as a simple pilgrim. Once there, however, he was immediately acclaimed and consecrated under the name of Leo IX, and for the next six years, until his death at fifty-one, the tall, red-haired, military-looking Alsatian—he had in fact commanded an army in the field during one of Conrad II’s expeditions into Italy—provided the Church with a quality of leadership that had long been wanting.
Hitherto the Papacy had been very much a Roman institution; Leo made it genuinely international. He traveled all the time, to northern Italy, to France, and to Germany, presiding at synods, fulminating against simony and married priests, officiating at magnificent ceremonies, preaching to immense crowds. He put the Papacy on the map of Europe as no pope had ever done before. He also built up an international Curia. No longer was the pope to be surrounded by self-seeking, ever-intriguing ecclesiastics, mostly from the Roman nobility. Leo called together men as different as the fiery ascetic St. Peter Damian—a doctor of the Church and forerunner of St. Francis as an apostle of voluntary poverty; the brilliant Abbot Hugh of Cluny, under whose direction medieval monasticism reached its apogee; Frederick of Lorraine, Abbot of Monte Cassino and later Pope Stephen IX; and Cardinal Hildebrand, who as Gregory VII was to prove himself the greatest churchman of the Middle Ages.
The Church hardly knew what had hit it. King Henry I of France, who had no wish for the pope to start interfering with his own church appointments, had forbiddden his bishops to attend the Synod of Rheims, held in the very first year of Leo’s pontificate. Some twenty had disobeyed him, but all too soon they regretted having done so. Leo opened the synod by demanding that each ecclesiastic stand up in turn and declare whether he had paid any money for his office. No fewer than five confessed; they were pardoned and restored to their sees. One, the Archbishop of Rheims himself, was summoned to Rome to make his defense. Another, the Bishop of Nantes, who had succeeded his own father in the diocese, was reduced to the priesthood. Yet another, the Bishop of Langres, fled and was excommunicated. The Archbishop of Besançon, who had attempted to defend him, was actually struck dumb halfway through his speech—those present being quick to draw the appropriate moral.
Yet Leo died a bitter and disappointed man, for two reasons. First, the Normans. Their story begins around 1015, with a party of some forty young Norman pilgrims at the shrine of the Archangel Michael on Monte Gargano, that curious rocky excrescence which juts out from what might be called the calf of Italy into the Adriatic. Seeing in this underpopulated, unruly land both an opportunity and a challenge, they were easily persuaded by the local Lombards to remain in Italy as mercenaries, with the object of expelling the Byzantine army of occupation from the peninsula. Word soon got back to Normandy, and the initial trickle of adventurous, footloose younger sons swelled into a steady immigration. Fighting indiscriminately for the highest bidder, they soon began to extract payment in land for their services. In 1030 Duke Sergius IV of Naples, grateful for their support, invested their leader, Rainulf, with the County of Aversa. Thenceforth their progress was fast. By 1050 they had effectively mopped up most of Apulia and Calabria, and Pope Leo, seeing an ever-growing threat along his southern border, proclaimed a holy war and raised an army against them.
It proved to be a grave mistake. The Normans might have been difficult neighbors, but they were by no means heretics and had always protested their loyalty to the Holy See. In any event, on June 17, 1053, the papal army was soundly beaten on the field of Civitate on the River Fortore. The expected Byzantine army never turned up—to the fury of the papalists, who inevitably felt betrayed—and the pope himself was taken prisoner. His captors treated him with slightly overdone respect, and nine months later, after they had gotten what they wanted—confirmation of their conquests and the lifting of their sentence of excommunication—they bore him back to Rome in state; but Leo never recovered from his humiliation and died only a month later.
THE POPE’S SECOND misfortune, greater far than the first, was that he was called upon to preside—although posthumously—over the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches. The two had been growing apart for centuries. Their slow but steady estrangement was in essence a reflection of the old rivalry between Latin and Greek, Rome and Byzantium. The Roman pontificate was rapidly extending its effective authority across Europe, and as its power grew, so too did its ambition and arrogance—tendencies which were viewed in Constantinople with resentment and not a little anxiety. There was also a fundamental difference in the approach of the two churches to Christianity itself. The Byzantines, for whom their emperor was the equal of the Apostles, believed that matters of doctrine could be settled only by the Holy Ghost speaking through an Ecumenical Council. They were accordingly scandalized by the presumption of the pope—who was, in their view, merely primus inter pares among the patriarchs—in formulating dogma and claiming both spiritual and temporal supremacy, while to the legalistic and disciplined minds of Rome the old Greek love of discussion and theological speculation was always repugnant and occasionally shocking. Already two centuries before, matters had very nearly come to a head over Photius and the filioque. Fortunately, after the death of Pope Nicholas I and thanks to the goodwill of his successors and of Photius himself, friendly relations had been outwardly restored; but the basic problems remained unsolved, the filioque continued to gain adherents in the West, and the emperor maintained his claim to rule as God’s Vice-Gerent on Earth. It was only a matter of time before the quarrel broke out again.
That it did so at this moment might be blamed partially on Pope Leo but was very largely the fault of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius. He was as unlike his distant predecessor Photius as can possibly be imagined. Whereas the latter had been a man of intelligence and charm—as well as the greatest scholar of his day—Cerularius was a narrow-minded bigot. Already before Civitate he had fired his first salvo: learning that the Normans, with papal approval, were enforcing Latin customs—in particular the use of unleavened bread for the Sacrament—on the Greek churches of South Italy, he had immediately ordered the Latin communities of Constantinople to adopt Gr
eek usages, and when they objected, he had closed them down. There had followed a bitter correspondence in which the patriarch had condemned certain Roman practices as “sinful and Judaistic,” while the pope suggested—without a shred of justification—that the patriarch’s election had been uncanonical. To carry the papal letters to Constantinople, Leo, who was probably already dying, unwisely selected the three most rabidly anti-Greek churchmen in his Curia: his principal secretary, Cardinal Humbert of Mourmoutiers, who in the events that followed was to prove not a jot less bigoted and waspish than the patriarch himself; Cardinal Frederick of Lorraine; and Archbishop Peter of Amalfi, both of whom had fought with him at Civitate and bore a bitter grudge against the Byzantines for having let them down.
From the moment of their arrival at Constantinople, everything went wrong. The Emperor Constantine XI received them graciously enough, but Cerularius categorically refused to recognize their authority. Then came the news that Pope Leo had died in Rome. Humbert and his colleagues had been Leo’s personal representatives; his death consequently deprived them of all official standing. Their proper course in the circumstances would have been to return at once to Rome; instead, they remained in Constantinople, apparently unconcerned and growing more arrogant and high-handed with every day that passed. When a certain monk of the Monastery of the Studium answered the papal criticisms in polite and respectful language, Humbert replied with a stream of hysterical invective, describing the writer as a “pestiferous pimp” and “a disciple of the malignant Mahomet,” suggesting that he must have emerged from a theater or brothel rather than a monastery—surely confirming 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 argument, let alone agreement, could ever be possible.
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