Louis asked nothing better. He was one of Nature’s pilgrims. Though still only twenty-four, he had about him an aura of joyless piety which made him look and seem far older than his years—and irritated to distraction his beautiful and high-spirited young wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. At Christmas 1145 he announced to his assembled vassals his determination to take the Cross. Their reaction was disappointing, but Louis had made up his mind. If he could not fill the hearts and minds of his vassals with crusading fire, he knew precisely who could. He sent for the Abbot of Clairvaux.
To Bernard, here was a cause after his own heart. Exhausted as he was, he responded to the call with all that extraordinary fervor that had made him the dominant spiritual voice in all Christendom. Willingly he agreed to address the assembly that the king had summoned for the following Easter at Vézelay. At once the magic of his name began to do its work, and men and women from every corner of France poured into the little town. Since there were far too many to be packed into the cathedral, a great wooden platform was hastily erected on the hillside; there, on Palm Sunday morning, with the king at his side—displaying on his breast the cross which Pope Eugenius had sent him in token of his decision—Bernard made the speech of his life.
The text of his exhortation has not come down to us; we are told, however, that his voice rang out across the meadow “like a celestial organ” and that as he spoke the crowd, silent at first, began to cry out for crosses of their own. Bundles of them, cut in rough cloth, had already been prepared for distribution; when the supply was exhausted, the abbot flung off his own robe and began tearing it into strips to make more. Others followed his example, and he and his helpers were still stitching as night fell.
It was an astonishing achievement. No one else in Europe could have done it. Yet, as events were soon to tell, it were better had it not been done. The Second Crusade was to turn out an ignominious fiasco. First, the Crusaders decided to attack Damascus—the only Arab state in the whole Levant hostile to Imad ed-Din and his son Nur ed-Din, who had by now succeeded him. As such, it could and should have been an invaluable ally of the Franks; by attacking it, they drove it straight into the arms of their enemy. Second, they pitched their camp along the eastern section of the walls, devoid alike of shade and water. Third, they lost their nerve. On July 28, 1148, just five days after the opening of the campaign, they gave the order for retreat.
There is no part of the Syrian desert more shattering to the spirit than the dark gray, featureless expanse of sand and basalt that lies between Damascus and Tiberias. Withdrawing across it in the height of the Arabian summer, the remorseless sun and scorching desert wind full in their faces, harried incessantly by mounted Arab archers and leaving in their wake a stinking trail of dead men and horses, the Crusaders must have felt despair heavy upon them. Their losses, in both men and material, had been immense. Worst of all was the shame. Having traveled for the best part of a year, often in conditions of mortal danger, having suffered agonies of thirst, hunger, and sickness and the bitterest extremes of heat and cold, this once-glorious army, which had purported to enshrine all the ideals of the Christian West, had given up the whole thing after just four days, having regained not one inch of Muslim territory. It was the ultimate humiliation—which neither they nor their enemies would forget.
POPE EUGENIUS, MEANWHILE, had his own problems to contend with. The most troubling of these was the political situation in Rome, where the republican movement, which had already claimed the life of his predecessor, was now gaining further strength thanks to the teachings of an Augustinian monk from Lombardy whose influence in the city was growing almost daily.
His name was Arnold of Brescia. In his youth he had studied in the schools of Paris—almost certainly under Abelard at Notre Dame—where he had been thoroughly imbued with the new scholasticism, essentially a movement away from the old mystical approach to spiritual matters and toward a spirit of logical, rational inquiry. To the medieval Papacy, radical ideas of this sort would have seemed subversive enough, but Arnold combined with them a still more unwelcome feature: a passionate hatred for the temporal power of the Church. For him the state was, and must always be, supreme; the civil law, based on the laws of ancient Rome, must prevail over the canon; the pope should divest himself of all worldly pomp, renounce his powers and privileges, and revert to the poverty and simplicity of the early Fathers. Only thus could the Church reestablish contact with the humble masses among its flock. As John of Salisbury wrote:
Arnold himself was frequently to be heard on the Capitol and in various assemblies of the people. He had already publicly denounced the cardinals, maintaining that their College, beset as it was with pride, avarice, hypocrisy, and shame, was not the Church of God but a house of commerce and a den of thieves.… Even the pope himself was other than what he professed: rather than an apostolic shepherd of souls, he was a man of blood who maintained his authority by fire and sword, a tormentor of churches and oppressor of the innocent whose only actions were for the gratification of his lust and for the emptying of other men’s coffers in order that his own might be filled.
Naturally, the Papacy had fought back. Naturally too, it had used the Abbot of Clairvaux as its champion. In consequence, as early as 1140 Arnold had been condemned, together with his old master Abelard, at the Council of Sens and had been expelled from France. By 1146, however, he was back in Rome, and the Roman Senate, fired by his blazing piety and recognizing in his ideas the spiritual counterpart of its own republican aspirations, had welcomed him with open arms. Presumably as a sop to republican feeling, Eugenius had then released Arnold from his excommunication and ordered him to lead a life of penitence, but the action had done little to improve the pope’s popularity. In the spring of 1147, with his cardinals and Curia, he had traveled to France to give his blessing to the preparations for the coming Crusade. There and in Germany he had been received with every possible honor; only in Rome, it seemed, was he reviled. Back in Italy the following year and finding Arnold of Brescia as obstreperous as ever, he renewed the sentence of excommunication but did not for the moment attempt a return to the city.
Queen Eleanor had accompanied her husband, Louis VII, on the Crusade. It had not improved their marriage. Eleanor had made no secret of the fact that her lugubrious husband bored her to distraction and had indeed developed a relationship with her uncle, Prince Raymond of Antioch, which was generally suspected of going considerably beyond the avuncular. When she and Louis landed in Italy on their return from the Levant, they were barely on speaking terms. They called on the pope in Tusculum, the nearest town to Rome in which he could safely install himself. Eugenius was a gentle, kindhearted man who hated to see people unhappy, and the sight of the royal pair, oppressed by the double failure of the Crusade and of their marriage, caused him deep personal distress. John of Salisbury, who was employed in the papal Curia at the time, has left us a curiously touching account of the pope’s attempts at a reconciliation:
He commanded, under pain of anathema, that no word should be spoken against their marriage and that it should not be dissolved under any pretext whatever. This ruling plainly delighted the King, for he loved the Queen passionately, in an almost childish way. The Pope made them sleep in the same bed, which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by friendly converse to restore the love between them. He heaped gifts upon them; and when the time came for their departure he could not hold back his tears.
Those tears were perhaps made all the more copious by the knowledge that his efforts had been in vain. Had Eugenius known Eleanor better, he would have seen from the start that her mind was made up; for the time being, however, she was prepared to keep up appearances, accompanying her husband to Rome, where they were cordially received by the Senate and where Louis prostrated himself as usual at all the principal shrines, and so back over the Alps to Paris. It was to be another two and a half years before her marriage was finally dissolved—St. Bernard
having persuaded Eugenius to modify his earlier attitude—on grounds of consanguinity; but she was still young, and only on the threshold of the astonishing career in which, as wife of one of England’s greatest kings and mother of two of its worst, she was to influence the course of European history for over half a century.
IN DECEMBER 1149, with the aid of an escort of Sicilian troops, Pope Eugenius at last returned to Rome, but it was no use: the prevailing atmosphere of open hostility soon persuaded him to leave again. He then entered into correspondence with King Conrad. He knew that the commune had suggested that Conrad should come to Rome and take it over as the capital of a new-style Roman Empire, so it could hardly refuse if the king were to come to the city for his coronation. Conrad, however, never did. He died in February 1152, before he could take up the pope’s invitation. Eugenius had no choice but to transfer his attentions to Conrad’s nephew and heir Frederick of Hohenstaufen, known as Barbarossa.
Now about thirty-two, Frederick seemed to his German contemporaries the very nonpareil of Teutonic chivalry. Tall and broad-shouldered, attractive rather than handsome, he had eyes that twinkled so brightly under his thick mop of reddish brown hair that, according to one chronicler, he always seemed on the point of laughter. But beneath that easygoing exterior there lurked a will of steel, an utter dedication to a single objective. He never forgot that he was the successor of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, and he made no secret of his determination to restore the empire to its former glory.
Frederick responded to the pope at once, proposing a treaty by which to regularize their future relations, and the resulting agreement was duly signed at Constance. By its terms Frederick promised to subject the Romans to papal control, while Eugenius undertook to crown him in Rome at his convenience—but once again the ceremony never took place as planned. This time it was Eugenius who died, in July 1153 at Tivoli. Though never a great pope, he had revealed a firmness of character which few had suspected at the time of his election. Like so many of his predecessors, he had been forced to spend money freely to buy support among the Romans, yet he had always remained personally incorruptible; his gentleness and unassuming ways had earned him love and respect of a kind that cannot be bought for gold. Till the day of his death he continued to wear, under his pontifical robes, the coarse white habit of a Cistercian monk. His successor, the immensely aged Anastasius IV, survived his election by only eighteen months and was followed by a man who was to prove to Frederick a far more formidable antagonist: the Englishman Nicholas Breakspear, who took the title of Hadrian IV.
When he was consecrated on December 4, 1154, Hadrian was about fifty-five. He had grown up in St. Albans but, having for some reason been refused admission into the local monastery, while still little more than a boy had taken himself off to France. There he had joined the canons regular of St. Rufus in Avignon, of whose house he eventually became abbot, gaining a reputation as an unremittingly strict disciplinarian. Back in Rome, thanks to his eloquence and his ability—and, perhaps, to his outstanding good looks—he had been spotted by Pope Eugenius. Fortunately for him, the pope was a convinced Anglophile; he once told John of Salisbury that he found the English admirably fitted to perform any task they turned their hand to, and were thus to be preferred to all other races—except, he added, when frivolity got the better of them. Frivolity, however, does not seem to have been one of Nicholas’s failings. In 1152 he had been sent as papal legate to Norway, there to reorganize and reform the Church throughout Scandinavia. Two years later he had returned, his mission accomplished with such distinction that, on Anastasius’s death the following December, the energetic, forceful Englishman was unanimously elected to succeed him.
There could have been no wiser choice, for energy and force were desperately needed. At the time of Hadrian’s accession Frederick Barbarossa had already crossed the Alps on his first Italian campaign. On his arrival in Rome he would be sure to demand his imperial coronation; but even if he were to receive it, there was little possibility that the pope would ever be able to trust him as an ally. Indeed, with his known absolutist views, Frederick was unlikely to prove anything but a constant anxiety to the Holy See. Still more alarming was the situation in Rome itself, where Arnold of Brescia was now, to all intents and purposes, master of the city. Pope Eugenius, an ascetic who may perhaps have harbored some secret sympathy for Arnold, had allowed him to return; Pope Anastasius had turned a deaf ear to his thunderings. But Pope Hadrian was a man of a very different stamp. When, on his accession, he found himself confined by Arnold’s supporters to St. Peter’s and the Leonine City, he had at first merely ordered the agitator to leave Rome; but when, predictably, Arnold had taken no notice and had indeed allowed his followers to attack the venerable Cardinal Guido of Santa Pudenziana as he was walking down the Via Sacra on his way to the Vatican, the pope played his trump card. Early in 1155, for the first time in the history of Christendom, the entire city of Rome was laid under an interdict.
It was an act of breathtaking courage. A foreigner, who had been pope only a few weeks and was able to rely on little or no popular support, had dared by a single decree to close all the churches of Rome. Exceptions were made for the baptism of infants and the absolution of the dying; otherwise all sacraments and ceremonies were forbidden. No Masses could be said, no marriages solemnized; dead bodies could not even be buried in consecrated ground. In the days when religion still constituted an integral part of every man’s life, the effect of such a moral blockade was immeasurable. Besides, Easter was approaching. The prospect of the greatest feast of the Christian year passing uncelebrated was bleak enough, but without the annual influx of pilgrims, one of the principal sources of the city’s revenue, it was bleaker still. For a little while the Romans held out; but by the Wednesday of Holy Week they could bear it no longer and marched on the Capitol. The senators saw that they were beaten. Arnold and his followers were expelled; the interdict was lifted; the church bells once again pealed out their message; and on Sunday, as he had always intended to do, Pope Hadrian IV celebrated Easter at the Lateran.
Frederick Barbarossa, meanwhile, kept the feast at Pavia, where on the same day he was crowned with the traditional Iron Crown of Lombardy. His subsequent descent through Tuscany was so fast that it seemed to the Roman Curia positively threatening. Henry IV’s treatment of Gregory VII seventy years before had not been forgotten, and several of the older cardinals could still remember how in 1111 Henry V had laid hands on Pope Paschal in St. Peter’s itself. In all the recent reports now circulating about the new King of the Romans, there was nothing to suggest that he would not be fully capable of similar conduct. No wonder the Curia began to feel alarm.
Hurriedly Hadrian sent two of his cardinals north to the imperial camp. They found it at San Quirico d’Orcia near Siena and were cordially received. Then, as an earnest of his goodwill, they asked Frederick for help in laying hands on Arnold of Brescia, who had taken refuge with some local barons. Frederick readily obliged; he detested Arnold’s radical views almost as much as the pope himself and welcomed this new opportunity to show his power. Sending a body of troops to the castle, he had one of the barons seized and held as a hostage until Arnold himself was delivered. The fugitive was immediately given up to the papal authorities; and the cardinals, reassured, applied themselves to their next task: to make arrangements for the first, critical interview between pope and king.
The meeting was fixed for June 9 at Campo Grosso, near Sutri. It began auspiciously enough with Hadrian, escorted by a great company of German barons sent forward by Frederick to greet him, riding in solemn procession to the imperial camp. But now trouble began. At this point, according to custom, the king should have advanced to lead in the pope’s horse by the bridle and to hold the stirrup while its rider dismounted; he did not do so. For a moment Hadrian seemed to hesitate. Then, dismounting by himself, he walked slowly across to the throne which had been prepared for him and sat down. Now at last Frederick stepped forward, kissed the pop
e’s feet, and rose to receive the traditional kiss of peace in return; but this time it was Hadrian who held back. The king, he pointed out, had denied him a service which his predecessors had always rendered to the Supreme Pontiff. Until this omission was rectified, there could be no kiss of peace.
Frederick objected that it was no part of his duty to act as a papal groom; but Hadrian would not be shaken. He knew that what appeared on the surface to be a minor point of protocol concealed in reality something infinitely more important—a public act of defiance that struck at the very root of the relationship between empire and Papacy. Suddenly and surprisingly, Frederick gave in. He ordered his camp to be moved a little further south; and there, on the morning of June 11, the events of two days before were restaged. The king advanced to meet the pope, led his horse in by the bridle, and then, firmly holding the stirrup, helped him to dismount. Once again Hadrian settled himself on his throne; the kiss of peace was duly bestowed; and conversations began.
Hadrian and Frederick would never entirely trust each other, but the ensuing discussions seem to have been amicable enough. The terms agreed to at Constance were confirmed. Neither party would enter into separate negotiations with Byzantium, Sicily, or the Roman Senate. Frederick would defend all papal interests, while Hadrian in return would excommunicate all enemies of the empire who after three warnings persisted in their opposition. The two then rode on together toward Rome.
FROM THE SIDE of the Papacy there was no longer any objection to the imperial coronation. The ceremony, however, had not been performed since the establishment of the Roman commune; how would Rome itself now greet its emperor-to-be? It was an open question, and Frederick’s recent move against Arnold of Brescia had made it more problematical still; but he and Hadrian were not kept long in suspense. While they were still some distance from the city, they were met by a deputation sent out by the Senate to greet them and to spell out the conditions on which they would be received. Their spokesman began with a bombastic and patronizing speech, suggesting that Rome alone had made the empire what it was and that the emperor would therefore do well to consider his moral obligations to the city—obligations which apparently included a sworn guarantee of its future liberty and the ex gratia payment of five thousand pounds of gold.
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