Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  The spokesman was still in full spate when Frederick interrupted him to point out that all Rome’s ancient glory and traditions had now passed, with the empire itself, to Germany. He had come only to claim what was rightfully his. He would naturally defend Rome as necessary, but he saw no need for any formal guarantees. As for gifts of money, he would bestow them when and where he pleased. His quiet assurance took the delegates off their guard. Stammering that they must return to the capital for instructions, they took their leave. As soon as they were gone, pope and king held an urgent consultation. Hadrian, with his experience of the Senate, had no doubt that trouble was to be expected. He advised the immediate dispatch of a body of troops to occupy the Leonine City by night. Even with this precaution, he pointed out, the danger would not be entirely averted. If they wanted to avoid bloodshed, he and Frederick would have to move quickly.

  The date was Friday, June 17, 1155. Such was the urgency of the situation that Hadrian decided not even to wait for the following Sunday, as he would normally have done. Instead, at dawn on Saturday, Frederick rode down from Monte Mario and entered the Leonine City, already occupied by his troops. The pope, who had arrived an hour or two previously, was awaiting him on the steps of St. Peter’s. They entered the basilica together, a throng of German knights following behind. Hadrian himself celebrated Mass; and there, over the tomb of the Apostle, he hurriedly girded the sword of St. Peter to Frederick’s side and laid the imperial crown on his head. As soon as the ceremony was done the emperor, still wearing the crown, rode back to his camp outside the walls, his huge retinue following on foot. The pope, meanwhile, took refuge in the Vatican to await developments.

  It was still only nine in the morning, and the Senate was assembling on the Capitol to decide how best to prevent the coronation when the news arrived that it had already taken place. Furious to find themselves outwitted and outmaneuvered, they sprang to arms; soon one mob was pressing across the Ponte Sant’Angelo into the Leonine City while another, having crossed the river further downstream at the island, advanced northward through Trastevere. The day was growing hotter. The Germans, tired by their march through the night and the excitement of the past few hours, wanted to sleep and celebrate. Instead, they were ordered to prepare at once for battle. For the second time that day Frederick entered Rome, but he wore his coronation robes no longer. This time he had his armor on.

  All afternoon and evening the fighting continued; night had fallen before the imperial troops had driven the last of the insurgents back across the bridges. Losses had been heavy on both sides. Bishop Otto of Freising, who was probably an eyewitness, reported that among the Romans almost a thousand were slain or drowned in the Tiber and another six hundred taken captive. The Senate had paid a high price for its arrogance. But the emperor too had bought his crown dearly. His victory had not even gained him entrance into the ancient city, for the sun rose the next morning to show all the Tiber bridges blocked and the gates barricaded. Neither he nor his army was prepared for a siege; the heat of the Roman summer, which for a century and a half had consistently undermined the morale of successive invading armies, was once again beginning to take its toll, with outbreaks of malaria and dysentery among his men. The only sensible course was to withdraw, and—since the Vatican was clearly no longer safe for the Papacy—to take pope and Curia with him. On June 19 he struck camp again and led his army up into the Sabine Hills. A month later he was heading back to Germany, leaving Hadrian powerless at Tivoli.

  The story of the coronation of Frederick Barbarossa is almost told, but not quite. Apart from the emperor who was crowned and the pope who crowned him, there is a third character who, although he was not in Rome on that fateful day, influenced the course of events as much as either of them. No record exists to tell us exactly when or where Arnold of Brescia suffered his execution; we know only the manner in which he met his death. Condemned by a Church tribunal on charges of heresy and rebellion, he remained firm to the end and walked calmly to the scaffold without a trace of fear; and as he knelt to make his last confession, we read that the executioners themselves could not restrain their tears. They hanged him nonetheless; then they cut him down and burned the body. Finally, in order to ensure that no relics were left for veneration by the people, they threw his ashes into the Tiber. For a martyr, misguided or not, there could be no greater honor.

  —

  POPE HADRIAN, ON the other hand, felt betrayed. His southern frontier was under attack by King William of Sicily,1 and he had hoped that in accordance with the terms agreed on at Constance the newly crowned emperor would march against him. Frederick himself would have been perfectly ready to do so if only he could have carried his knights with him, but they were determined to leave the south and return at once to Germany, and he knew he could not press them too far.

  Friendless and alone, unable to return to Rome since Frederick’s coronation, Hadrian spent the winter with his Curia at Benevento. As far as he was concerned, the emperor, his one hope, had shown himself to have feet of clay. Meanwhile, the situation in the South was fast deteriorating. King William, having overcome opposition from the Byzantines and his own rebel subjects, was on the march toward the papal frontier. As he approached, Hadrian sent most of his cardinals away to Campania—mainly for their greater safety but also, perhaps, for another reason. He knew that he would now have to come to terms with William. Die-hard cardinals had scuppered too many potential agreements in the past; if he was to save anything from a coming disaster, he would need the utmost freedom to negotiate.

  As soon as the vanguard of the Sicilian army appeared over the hills, the pope sent his chancellor, Roland of Siena, and two other cardinals who had remained with him to greet the king and to bid him, in the name of St. Peter, to cease from further hostilities. They were received with due courtesy, and formal talks began at Benevento. The going was not easy. The Sicilians were in a position of strength and drove a hard bargain, but the papal side fought every inch of the way. It was not until June 18, 1156, that agreement was finally reached. William gained papal recognition over a far larger body of territory than had ever been granted before, on payment of an annual tribute. In return he acknowledged the pope’s feudal suzerainty; but there could be no doubt as to which party profited the most. We have only to look at the language in which the papal document of acceptance was drafted:

  William, glorious King of Sicily and dearest son in Christ, most brilliant in wealth and achievement among all the kings and eminent men of the age, the glory of whose name is borne to the uttermost limits of the earth by the firmness of your justice, the peace which you have restored to your subjects, and the fear which your great deeds have instilled into the hearts of all the enemies of Christ’s name.

  Even when allowance is made for the traditional literary hyperbole of the time, it is hard to imagine Hadrian putting his signature to such a document without a wince of humiliation. He had been pope only eighteen months, but already he had learned the bitterness of desertion, betrayal, and exile; and even his broad shoulders were beginning to bow. He appears now in a very different light from that in which we saw him when he placed Rome under an interdict or pitted his will against that of Frederick Barbarossa just twelve short months before. Perhaps it was John of Salisbury who best summed up his mood:

  I call on the Lord Hadrian to witness that no one is more miserable than the Roman Pontiff, nor is any condition more wretched than his.… He maintains that the papal throne is studded with thorns, that his mantle bristles with needles so sharp that it oppresses and weighs down the broadest shoulders … and that had he not feared to go against the will of God he would never have left his native England.

  THE FURY OF Frederick Barbarossa when he heard of the Benevento agreement can well be imagined. Had not Hadrian given him a personal undertaking not to enter into any private communications with the King of Sicily? Had he not now actually signed a treaty of peace and friendship—a treaty, moreover, by which he not only recogniz
ed William’s claim to a spurious crown but, in ecclesiastical affairs, granted him privileges more far-reaching even than those enjoyed by the emperor himself? By what right did he so graciously confer imperial territories on others? Was there no limit to papal arrogance?

  It was not long before his worst suspicions were confirmed. In October 1157 he held an imperial Diet at Besançon. Ambassadors converged on the town from all sides: from France and Italy, from Spain and England—and, of course, from the pope. The effect of all Frederick’s arrangements was, however, slightly spoiled when, in the presence of the assembled company, the papal legates read out the letter they had brought with them from their master. Instead of the customary greetings and congratulations, the pope had chosen this of all moments to deliver himself of a strongly worded complaint. The aged Archbishop of Lund, while traveling through imperial territory, had been set upon by bandits, robbed of all he possessed, and held for ransom. Such an outrage was serious enough in itself; but it was aggravated by the fact that although the emperor had been furnished with full details of the case, he appeared as yet to have taken no steps to bring to justice those responsible. Turning to more general topics, Hadrian recalled his past favors to the emperor, reminding him in particular of his coronation at papal hands and adding, perhaps a trifle patronizingly, that he hoped at some future date to bestow still further benefices upon him.

  Whether the pope was deliberately intending to assert his feudal overlordship we shall never know. Unfortunately, however, the two words he used, conferre and beneficia, were both technical terms used in describing the grant of a fief by a suzerain to his vassal. This was more than Frederick could bear. If the letter implied, as it appeared to imply, that he held the Holy Roman Empire by courtesy of the pope in the same way as any petty baron might hold a couple of fields in the Campagna, there could be no further dealings between them. The assembled German princes shared his indignation, and when Cardinal Roland, the papal chancellor, blandly replied by inquiring from whom Frederick held the empire if not from the pope, there was a general uproar. Otto of Wittelsbach, Count Palatine of Bavaria, rushed forward, his hand on his sword; only the rapid intervention of the emperor himself prevented an incident compared with which the misfortunes of the Archbishop of Lund would have seemed trivial indeed.

  When Hadrian heard what had happened, he wrote Frederick another letter, couched this time in rather more soothing terms, protesting that his words had been misinterpreted; and the emperor accepted his explanation. It is unlikely that he really believed it, but he had no wish for an open breach with the Papacy. Nonetheless, the bagarre at Besançon, as anyone could have seen, was merely a symptom of a far deeper rift between pope and emperor, one which no amount of diplomatic drafting could ever hope to bridge. The days when it had been realistic to speak of the two swords of Christendom were gone—gone since Gregory VII and Henry IV had hurled depositions and anathemas at each other nearly a hundred years before. Never since then had their respective successors been able to look upon themselves as two different sides of the same coin. Each must now claim the supremacy and defend it as necessary against the other. When this involved the confrontation of characters as strong as those of Hadrian and Frederick, a flash point could never be far off; yet the root of the trouble lay less in their personalities than in the institutions they represented. While the two of them lived, relations between them—exacerbated by a host of petty slights both real and imagined—became even more strained, though it was only after their deaths that the conflict would emerge into open war.

  The Treaty of Benevento proved to be of immeasurably greater significance than either of its signatories could have known at the time. For the Papacy it inaugurated a new political approach to European problems—one that it was to follow, to its own considerable advantage, for the next twenty years. Hadrian himself was gradually brought to accept what he must always have suspected—that the emperor was not so much a friend with whom he might occasionally quarrel as an enemy with whom, somehow, he must live. His concordat with King William gave him a powerful new ally and enabled him to adopt a firmer attitude in his dealings with Frederick than could ever otherwise have been possible—as the Besançon letter bears witness.

  In papal circles, so radical a change in policy was bound to meet with opposition at first. Many leading members of the Curia still clung to their imperialist, anti-Sicilian opinions; and the news of the terms agreed upon had caused almost as much consternation in the Sacred College as in the imperial court. Gradually, however, opinion swung around in William’s favor. One reason was Barbarossa’s arrogance, as shown at Besançon and confirmed by several other incidents before and since. Besides, the Sicilian alliance was now a fait accompli; it was useless to oppose it any longer. William, for his part, seemed sincere enough. On the pope’s recommendation, he had made his peace with Constantinople. He was rich, he was powerful, and, as several of Their Eminences could, if they wished, have testified, he was also generous.

  Now Frederick Barbarossa set out to sack and ravage the Lombard cities, and a great wave of revulsion against the empire swept down through Italy. With it, too, there was an element of terror: when the emperor had finished with Lombardy, what was to prevent him from continuing to Tuscany, Umbria, even to Rome itself? Only an alliance forged between an English pope and a Norman king. In the spring of 1159 there came the first great counterthrust against Frederick that can be directly ascribed to papal-Sicilian instigation. Milan suddenly threw off the imperial authority, and for the next three years the Milanese stoutly defied all the emperor’s efforts to bring them to heel. The following August, representatives of Milan, Crema, Piacenza, and Brescia met the pope at Anagni; and there, in the presence of envoys from King William, was sworn the initial pact that was to become the nucleus of the great Lombard League. The towns promised that they would have no dealings with the common enemy without papal consent, while the pope undertook to excommunicate the emperor after the usual period of forty days. Finally it was agreed by the assembled cardinals that on Hadrian’s death his successor would be elected only from those present at the conference.

  It was perhaps already obvious that the pope had not long to live. While still at Anagni he was stricken by a sudden angina, from which he never recovered. He died on the evening of September 1, 1159. His body was carried to Rome and laid in the undistinguished third-century sarcophagus in which it still rests and which can still be seen in the crypt of St. Peter’s. During the course of the demolition of the old basilica in 1607 it was opened, and the body of the only English pope was found entire, dressed in a chasuble of dark-colored silk. It was described as being “that of an undersized man, wearing Turkish slippers on his feet and, on his hand, a large emerald.”

  Hadrian’s pontificate is hard to assess. He certainly towers over the string of mediocrities who occupied the Throne of St. Peter during the first half of the century, just as he himself is overshadowed by his magnificent successor. He left the Papacy stronger and more generally respected than he found it, but much of this success was due to its identification with the Lombard League; and he failed utterly to subdue the Roman Senate. He was pope for less than five years, but those years were hard and of vital importance to the Papacy, and the strain told on him. Before long his health had begun to fail, and with it his morale. He died embittered and disappointed—as all too many of his predecessors had before him.

  1. William I (“the Bad”), King of Sicily, had succeeded his father, Roger II, in 1154.

  CHAPTER XII

  Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa

  On September 5, 1159, the day after the body of Pope Hadrian had been laid to rest in St. Peter’s, about thirty cardinals assembled in conclave behind the high altar of the basilica.1 Two days later, all but three of them had cast their votes for the former chancellor, Cardinal Roland of Siena, who was therefore declared to have been elected. One of the three, however, was the violently pro-imperialist Cardinal Octavian of Santa Cecilia,
and just as the scarlet mantle of the Papacy was brought forward and Roland, after the customary display of reluctance, bent his head to receive it, Octavian dived at him, snatched the mantle, and tried to don it himself. A scuffle followed, during which he lost it again; but his chaplain instantly produced another—presumably brought along for just such an eventuality—which Octavian this time managed to put on, unfortunately back to front, before anyone could stop him.

  There followed a scene of scarcely believable confusion. Wrenching himself free from the furious supporters of Roland, who were trying to tear the mantle forcibly from his back, Octavian—whose frantic efforts to turn it the right way around had resulted only in getting the fringes tangled around his neck—made a dash for the papal throne, sat on it, and proclaimed himself Pope Victor IV.2 He then charged off through St. Peter’s until he found a group of minor clergy, whom he ordered to give him their acclamation—which, seeing the doors suddenly burst open and a band of armed cutthroats swarming into the basilica, they hastily did. For the time being at least, the opposition was silenced; Roland and his adherents slipped out while they could and took refuge in St. Peter’s Tower, a fortified corner of the Vatican. Meanwhile, with the cutthroats looking on, Octavian was enthroned a little more formally than on the previous occasion and escorted in triumph to the Lateran—having been at some pains, we are told, to adjust his dress before leaving.