He found Innocent waiting for him near Piacenza. The pope had managed to drum up a degree of local support; the imperial army on the last stage of the journey promised to be about two thousand strong. It was still a disappointing figure, but it was at least not shameful. What it now principally lacked was sea support. Pisa and Genoa in particular, the two great maritime republics on whose assistance Innocent had relied, could at that moment see no further than Corsica and Sardinia, over which they had long been squabbling; without their help, the imperial force would stand little chance in the face of a concerted Sicilian attack. But meanwhile the autumn rains were beginning, the roads rapidly turning to mud, and Lothair decided to postpone his coronation till the spring. By then, perhaps, the warring republics might be persuaded to settle their differences.
The fact that they did so was largely due to the Abbot of Clairvaux, who appeared in Italy soon after Christmas; by March, Bernard and Innocent together had alternately hectored and flattered the Pisans and Genoese into a truce, and a month later they were back again at Lothair’s camp, ready for the advance on Rome. The army was still sadly unimpressive, but imperial agents reported that King Roger was fully occupied with a rebellion on the part of his mainland vassals; he would be offering no serious opposition.
On the last day of April 1133 the emperor-to-be drew up his troops before the Basilica of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura. For some days already Rome had been in turmoil. Pisan and Genoese ships had sailed up the Tiber and were now lying threateningly under the walls; and their presence, aided by exaggerated rumors of the size of the oncoming German host, had induced many Romans to make a hurried change of allegiance. Much of the city thus lay open to Innocent and Lothair. They were received at the gates by the Frangipani nobles and their minions, who had never wavered in their opposition to Anacletus, and led in triumph to their respective palaces: the king and queen to Otto III’s old imperial residence on the Aventine, the pope to the Lateran.
But the right bank of the Tiber, with the Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s, still remained firmly in the hands of Anacletus; and Anacletus was not prepared to give in. Lothair, conscious of his own weakness, proposed negotiations, but the antipope’s reply remained the same as it had always been: let the whole question of the disputed election be reopened before an international ecclesiastical tribunal. If such a tribunal, properly constituted, were to declare against him, he would accept its decision. Till then, he would stay in Rome, where he belonged. Left to himself, Lothair would probably have been ready to accept this suggestion. Anything, in his view, would have been better than this continued schism; rival popes might lead to rival emperors, and in such an event his own position might be far from secure. But by now he had been joined in Rome by Bernard; and with Bernard there could be no question of compromise. If Anacletus could not be brought to his knees, he must be ignored. And so it was not at St. Peter’s but at the Lateran that Innocent was reinstalled on the papal throne and there—on June 4, 1133, with as much ceremony and circumstance as he could command—that he crowned Lothair Emperor of the West and Richenza his empress.
For the second time in half a century one putative pope had performed an imperial coronation while another had sat a mile or two away, impotent and fuming. After the previous occasion Gregory VII had been saved only by the arrival, not a moment too soon, of Robert Guiscard at the head of some thirty thousand troops. Anacletus knew that he could expect nothing from that quarter; the King of Sicily, though remaining his loyal champion, was otherwise engaged. Fortunately, rescue was unnecessary. Powerless the antipope might have been, but he was not in any physical danger. No imperial attack on the right bank would be possible without control of the two bridges spanning the river at the Tiber Island, and all approaches to those were effectively dominated by the old Theater of Marcellus, now the principal fortress of the Pierleoni. In the circumstances, the emperor had neither the strength nor the inclination to take the offensive. Now that his immediate aims were achieved, he thought only of returning to Germany as soon as possible. Within a few days of his coronation he and his army were gone and the Pisan and Genoese ships had returned down the river to the open sea.
For Pope Innocent, Lothair’s departure was nothing short of calamitous. At once his remaining supporters in the city began to fall away. Only the Frangipani remained loyal; but they could not hold Rome unaided. By July the agents of Anacletus had everywhere resumed their activity, and the gold was beginning to flow freely once again from the seemingly inexhaustible Pierleoni coffers. In August Innocent found himself forced once again into exile. He slipped unobtrusively from his diocese, just as he had three years before, and made his way, by slow stages, to Pisa and to safety.
Meanwhile the schism rumbled on. It had now become clear to Lothair that the antipope could never be dislodged from Rome while the King of Sicily protected him. In the autumn of 1135 an embassy from the Byzantine Emperor John II Comnenus arrived at the imperial court. John had his own reasons for wishing to eliminate Roger: his empire had never given up its claim to South Italy, and the rich Byzantine cities of Dalmatia constituted a temptation to raiding and freebooting which Sicilian sea captains had not always been able to resist. He now offered Lothair generous financial backing for a campaign to crush their common enemy once and for all.
The emperor needed little persuading. Thanks largely to the new prestige conferred upon him by the imperial crown, the situation in Germany had improved over the past two years, and his Hohenstaufen rivals had been forced into submission. This time he would have no difficulty in raising a respectable army. He foresaw little trouble from Anacletus. The antipope’s last remaining North Italian stronghold, Milan, had gone over to Innocent in June, and the schism was now confined to the Sicilian kingdom and Rome itself. Once Roger was out of the way, Anacletus would be left without a single ally and would be obliged to yield. Lothair replied to John, accepting his offer.
BY HIGH SUMMER Lothair’s army was finally gathered at Würzburg. It was on a very different scale from the sad little company that had marched with him to Rome in 1132. In the forefront were the emperor’s son-in-law Duke Henry the Proud of Bavaria, and his old enemy and rival Conrad of Hohenstaufen, whom Lothair had confirmed in possession of his lands in return for a promise to participate in the coming campaign. It also boasted an ecclesiastical contingent which included no fewer than five archbishops, fourteen bishops, and an abbot. When it reached Bologna, Lothair split it into two. He himself proposed to continue through Ravenna to Ancona and thence to follow the coast southward into Apulia; meanwhile the Duke of Bavaria, with 3,000 knights and some 12,000 infantry, was to press down through Tuscany and the Papal State, if possible reestablishing Innocent in Rome and assuring himself of the Monastery of Monte Cassino before meeting his father-in-law at Bari for Whitsun.
The plan succeeded well enough, and it was a joyful and triumphant German congregation that assembled on Whitsunday, May 30, 1137, at the Basilica of San Nicola in Bari, to hear a High Mass of Thanksgiving celebrated by the pope himself—even though a Sicilian garrison was still holding out in the citadel. There was, perhaps, a measure of surprise that King Roger had made no effort to oppose the invaders, but the king knew that however far Lothair might advance, sooner or later he would be driven back, as so many invading armies had been driven back before, by sickness, the relentless summer heat, or the need to reach the Alps before the first snowfalls rendered them impassable. Past experience had shown that although such expeditions could be highly effective in the short term, the results they achieved seldom lasted for very long after their departure. The only sensible course, Roger believed, was to encourage the emperor to extend and exhaust himself to the limit.
Events soon proved him right. After the capitulation of the Bari garrison—whose tenacity he punished by hanging a number of them from gibbets all around the city and flinging the rest into the sea—Lothair decided against any further advance down the coast. There were several reasons for his
decision. He was seventy-one years old and tired; besides, the whole situation had suddenly gone sour. Relations between the Germans and the papal retinue were deteriorating fast: the army, too, had been away ten months and was impatient to be home. Where Sicily was concerned, he could at least feel that he had saved his honor. He had not perhaps crushed King Roger as completely as he had hoped, but he had surely dealt him a blow from which he would take long to recover. It was a pity about Pope Innocent. Although one of the purposes of the expedition had been to reinstall him in Rome, the city had been studiously bypassed and he was as far from the Throne of St. Peter as ever. But henceforth the pope would have to fight his own battles.
Meanwhile, the old emperor could feel his life ebbing away. Though he marched with all the speed of which his dispirited army was capable, it was mid-November before he reached the foothills of the Alps. His companions implored him to winter there. The sickness was daily increasing its hold on him; it would be folly, they pointed out, to go any farther so late in the year. But Lothair knew that he could not afford to wait. With all the determination of the dying, he pressed on; but at the little village of Breitenwang in the Tyrol his strength deserted him. He was carried to a poor peasant’s hut, and there, on December 3, 1137, he died.
Just seven and a half weeks later, Anacletus followed him to the grave. St. Bernard had already made contact with Roger of Sicily in an attempt to detach him from the antipope; but it was Anacletus’s death that effectively brought the schism to an end. A short-lived successor, the so-called Victor IV, resigned after a few months, and Roger, freed now of the commitments that had cast such a blight on the first seven years of his reign, saw no point in continuing hostilities with the Holy See. He made public recognition of Innocent and ordered all his subjects to do likewise. It is hard to see what more he could have done, but the pope unaccountably refused a reconciliation, and at a Lateran Council on April 8, 1139, pronounced a renewed sentence of excommunication on the King of Sicily, his sons, and all those of his bishops whom Anacletus had consecrated. Then, still more unaccountably, he marched southward from Rome with his old ally Prince Robert of Capua and perhaps a thousand knights. Halfhearted negotiations failed and gave way to open hostilities; and at the little town of Galluccio a Sicilian army suddenly attacked. Robert managed to escape, but Innocent was not so lucky. That evening, July 22, 1139, the pope, his cardinals, his archives, and his treasure were all in the hands of the king, the greatest humiliation suffered by the Papacy since Robert Guiscard had annihilated the army of Leo IX at Civitate, eighty-six years before.
It was always a mistake for popes to meet Normans on the battlefield. Just as Leo had had to come to terms with his captors after Civitate, so now Innocent was forced to bow to the inevitable. On July 25, at Mignano, he formally confirmed Roger in his Kingdom of Sicily, with the overlordship of all Italy south of the Garigliano River. He then said Mass and left the church a free man. In the ensuing charter he managed to save a few shreds of the papal honor; but nothing could disguise the fact that, for him and his party, the treaty of Mignano spelled unconditional—or almost unconditional—surrender.
ON SEPTEMBER 24, 1143, Pope Innocent died in Rome. His long struggle with Anacletus had cost him dearly. Even his allies had proved a mixed blessing. Lothair, once safely crowned, had showed him scant consideration, Henry the Proud still less. Bernard of Clairvaux had been loyal but, deliberately or not, had seemed bent on stealing his thunder at every opportunity. His final triumph had been made possible only by the death of Anacletus; and almost at once it had been turned to dust by the rout at Galluccio. He had accepted this humiliation as gracefully as he could and had made terms with the Sicilian king, but he had been ill repaid. Within a year Roger, emboldened by the years of schism when he had done what he liked and Anacletus had never dared take issue with him, was acting more arrogantly than ever: creating new dioceses, appointing new bishops, barring the pope’s envoys from entering his kingdom without his consent, and even refusing to allow Latin churchmen in his dominions to obey papal summonses to Rome.
Even that was not all. For more than a century, a movement toward republican self-government had been gathering momentum among the cities and towns of Italy. In Rome itself successive popes and the old aristocracy had done their best to save their city from the general contagion, but the recent schism had weakened their hold. Innocent in particular had never enjoyed general popularity. Coming from Trastevere, he had always been considered one degree less Roman than Anacletus, and he was known to be a good deal less generous. When, therefore, they learned that he had made a separate peace with their enemy to the south, the Romans seized the opportunity to denounce the temporal power of the pope, revive the Senate on the Capitol, and declare a republic. Innocent resisted as best he could, but he was an old man—probably well over seventy—and the effort was too much for him. A few weeks later he was dead.
He was buried in a huge porphyry sarcophagus from the Castel Sant’Angelo which was believed to have formerly contained the bones of the Emperor Hadrian; but after a disastrous fire in the early fourteenth century his remains were transferred to the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which he himself had rebuilt just before his death. There, immortalized in the great apse mosaic, he stares down at us from the conch, his church clutched in his hands, a strangely wistful expression in his sad, tired eyes.
1. Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands since its capture by the Caliph Omar in 638, but for most of the intervening period Christian pilgrims had been freely admitted and allowed to worship as and where they wished. The city had been taken by the Seljuk Turks in 1077.
2. Accusations were made against him from time to time by such robust prelates as Manfred of Mantua and Arnulf of Lisieux (who actually wrote a book called Invectives) to the effect that he seduced nuns, slept with his sister, and so on; but these can be discounted as being simply the normal, healthy Church polemic to be expected at times of schism.
CHAPTER XI
The English Pope
The next ten years saw no fewer than four popes in Rome. The first, Celestine II, detested King Roger and all he stood for and refused to ratify the Treaty of Mignano; it was a foolish policy, which he survived just long enough to regret. His representatives had been obliged to go cap in hand to Palermo before he died. Nor was his successor, Lucius II, any more fortunate. During his brief pontificate the Roman commune restored the Senate as a working body, with powers to elect magistrates and even to strike its own coinage. Serious fighting broke out once again in Rome. Lucius unwisely decided to take the offensive and while leading an armed attack on the Capitol was hit by a heavy stone. Mortally wounded, he was carried by the Frangipani to Gregory the Great’s old monastery of St. Andrew on the Caelian Hill; and there he died on February 15, 1145, after less than a year on the throne.
Eugenius III was elected on the same day to succeed him. His actual election, held on safe Frangipani territory, was smooth enough, but when he tried to proceed from the Lateran to St. Peter’s for his consecration, he found that the commune had barred his way; and three days later he fled the city. The speed of his flight surprised no one; indeed, the only surprising thing about Eugenius was that he should have been elected in the first place. A former monk of Clairvaux and disciple of St. Bernard, he was a simple character, gentle and retiring—not at all, men thought, the material of which popes were made. Even Bernard himself, when he heard the news, made no secret of his disapproval, writing to the entire Curia:
May God forgive you what you have done! … What reason or counsel, when the Supreme Pontiff was dead, made you rush upon a mere rustic, lay hands on him in his refuge, wrest from his hands the axe, pick or hoe, and lift him to a throne?
To Eugenius himself he was equally outspoken:
Thus does the finger of God raise up the poor out of the dust and lift up the beggar from the dunghill, that he may sit with princes and inherit the throne of glory.
It seems an unfortunate choice of m
etaphor, and it says much for the new pope’s gentleness and patience that he showed no resentment; but Bernard was, after all, his spiritual father, and in the months to come he was to need his old master as badly as he had ever needed him in his life—for he was now called upon to summon the Second Crusade.
It was made necessary by the fall of the Christian County of Edessa. Edessa, now the modern Turkish city of Urfa, was the first to be established of all the Crusader states of the Levant; it dated from the year 1098, when Baldwin of Boulogne had left the main army of the First Crusade and struck off to the east to found a principality of his own on the banks of the Euphrates. He had not stayed there long—two years later he had succeeded his brother as King of Jerusalem—but Edessa had continued as a semi-independent Christian state until, on Christmas Eve, 1144, it was conquered by an Arab army under Imad ed-Din Zengi, Atabeg of Mosul. The news of its fall horrified all Christendom. How, after less than half a century, had Cross once again given way to Crescent? Was this disaster not a clear manifestation of the wrath of God?
Although Edessa had fallen nearly eight weeks before the death of Pope Lucius, Eugenius had been on the throne over six months before he was officially notified and began to consider the implications of a Crusade. The first question to be decided was that of the leadership. Among the princes of the West, he could see only one suitable candidate. Conrad, King of the Romans—he had not received his imperial coronation—was beset with his own troubles in Germany; King Stephen of England had had a civil war on his hands for six years already. King Roger of Sicily was, for any number of reasons, out of the question. The only possible choice was King Louis VII of France.
Absolute Monarchs Page 17