Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  And on the same day the pope sent the emperor many gold and silver jars filled with food of various kinds. And he sent also a fatted calf, with the words “It is meet that we should make merry and be glad, for my son was dead and is alive again; and was lost and is found.”

  The Treaty of Venice marked the climax and the culmination of Alexander’s pontificate. After all the sufferings and humiliations he had had to endure, through eighteen years of schism and ten of exile, and in the face of the unremitting hostility of one of the most redoubtable figures ever to wear the imperial crown, here at last was his reward. By now well over seventy, he had lived to see the emperor’s recognition not only of himself as legitimate pope but of all the temporal rights of the Papacy over the city of Rome—the same rights that Frederick had so arrogantly claimed for the empire at his coronation. It was a triumph, greater far than that which Pope Gregory had scored over Henry IV exactly a century before, but to the faithful who rejoiced with the old pope at Venice during those sweltering summer days it was also a tribute to the patience and tenacity with which he had steered the Church through one of the most troubled periods in her history.

  And now that that period was over, those qualities remained with him. Neither on the day of his triumph nor at any other time during the emperor’s stay in Venice did Alexander show the slightest inclination to crow over his former enemy. One or two subsequent historians have perpetuated the legend of the pope placing his foot on Frederick’s neck, of the emperor muttering under his breath, “Not to you, but to St. Peter” and Alexander replying sharply, “To me and to St. Peter.” But this story is told by no contemporary writer and is inconsistent with all the firsthand evidence that has come down to us. The emperor, too, seems to have behaved impeccably. On the day following the great reconciliation he tried to carry courtesy even further: having again held the papal stirrup on leaving the basilica, he would have led Alexander’s horse all the way to the point of embarkation if the pope had not gently restrained him. Did he, one cannot help wondering, remember then the two days spent at Sutri when he had refused to perform the same service for Pope Hadrian, on the way to Rome for his coronation twenty-two years before?

  But now Pope Alexander had one more task to perform. Early in 1179 he convoked the Third Lateran Council, the most important result of which was the decree governing papal elections. Until the mid–eleventh century popes tended to be appointed, sometimes by the people of Rome, sometimes by the emperor; but in 1059 it had been agreed that they should be the responsibility of the Church alone. Even then the elections tended to be hit-and-miss affairs, their rules never formally laid down, but now at last Alexander ordained that the right to elect a new pope was to be restricted to the College of Cardinals, with a two-thirds majority required before any candidate could be elected. Apart from the fact that since the pontificate of John Paul II the right to vote has been restricted to cardinals aged under eighty, virtually the same rules apply today.

  Alexander had achieved peace with the empire; he had not, alas, achieved peace in Rome. The Roman Senate remained so hostile that in the summer of 1179 he left the city for the last time. He had never liked it, never trusted its people; to him, all through his life, it had been enemy country. And when, after his death at Civita Castellana on the last day of August 1181, his body was brought back to the Lateran, the Romans proved him right. Not four years before, they had welcomed him back from exile to the sound of trumpets; now, as his funeral cortege entered the city, the populace threw filth at the bier, scarcely suffering his body to be buried in the basilica.

  ALEXANDER III WAS one of the greatest of the medieval popes. Innocent III, who was elected to the Papacy in 1198, was another. In the seventeen years that separated them, no fewer than five men occupied the Throne of St. Peter; all were Italians; all had to contend, as Alexander had contended, with the two continuing nightmares of the twelfth-century Papacy: the Hohenstaufen emperors and the Senate and people of Rome. Lucius III (1181–1185), a Cistercian monk who had been singled out for promotion by St. Bernard, soon found the city too hot for him and retired to Segni. He had one rather inconsequential meeting with the emperor at Verona in 1184, during which he learned to his deep consternation that Frederick had betrothed his son Henry to Constance of Sicily, the daughter of Roger II and—her nephew King William II being childless—heir to the Sicilian throne. This meant that Sicily would effectively become part of the empire and that the Papacy would be virtually surrounded.

  Lucius died while still at Verona and was buried in the Duomo. On the same day the cardinals unanimously elected Uberto Crivelli, Archbishop of Milan, to succeed him under the name of Urban III. Urban made no effort to live in Rome but continued in Verona, whence he reluctantly sent legates to represent him at the wedding of Henry and Constance in Milan Cathedral; he refused, however—as Lucius had done before him—to crown Henry co-emperor and was furious when Frederick characteristically had the ceremony performed by the Patriarch of Aquileia instead. Relations between pope and emperor rapidly deteriorated, to the point where Frederick ordered Henry to invade and occupy the Papal States; Urban was forced to capitulate, but the quarrel continued, and Frederick was spared a further sentence of excommunication only by the pope’s sudden death in October 1187 at Ferrara.

  On hearing the news of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem following the disastrous Christian defeat at Hattin in Galilee, Urban had died of shock. His successor, Gregory VIII, not far short of eighty at the time of his election, lost no time in calling upon Christendom to take up arms for its recovery. Gregory could not in the nature of things have expected a long pontificate; in fact, it lasted just eight weeks. He was busy trying to negotiate a truce between Genoa and Pisa, both of whose fleets would be vitally necessary to the success of the coming Crusade, when he died at Pisa just a week before Christmas, leaving the planning of the expedition to his successor, Clement III. It was agreed that the Crusade would be led by Frederick Barbarossa; he would be joined by Richard I, Coeur-de-Lion, of England; Philip Augustus of France; and William II (“the Good”) of Sicily.3 William in fact died, aged just thirty-six, in November 1189, before he could embark, but the other two kings met in Sicily to make the rest of the journey together.

  Frederick, on the other hand, elected to take the land route. He made the long and arduous journey across Eastern Europe, over the Dardanelles into Asia, and across Anatolia, until at last, on June 10, 1190, he led his army out of the last of the Taurus valleys and onto the flat coastal plain. The heat was sweltering, and the little Calycadnus River4 that ran past the town of Seleucia to the sea must have been a welcome sight. Frederick spurred his horse toward it, leaving his men to follow. He was never seen alive again. Whether he dismounted to drink and was swept off his feet by the current, whether his horse slipped in the mud and threw him, whether the shock of falling into the icy mountain water was too much for his tired old body—he was nearing seventy—remains unknown. He was rescued, but too late. The bulk of his army reached the river to find their emperor lying dead on the bank.

  Frederick’s death resulted in an immediate improvement in papal-imperial relations. Clement III had virtually no diplomatic experience; in the three years of his papacy he was nevertheless able to come to a mutually acceptable agreement with the new German king, Henry VI, promising him his imperial coronation. Henry for his part restored the Papal States that he had occupied in 1186. Equally remarkable, the pope also entered into successful negotiations with the senators of Rome. As a result he was able to settle back in the Lateran, in which neither of his two immediate predecessors had set foot. In return for regular payments and control of most of the city administration, the senators recognized his sovereignty, agreed to swear allegiance to him, and restored the papal revenues. With these two overriding problems out of the way, Clement devoted all his energies to preaching the coming Crusade.

  He need not have bothered. The Third Crusade, though not a complete fiasco like the Second, failed utterly
in its main object of recovering Jerusalem.

  Immediately on Frederick’s death his army began to disintegrate. Many of the German princelings returned at once to Europe; others took ship for Tyre, then the only major port in the Levant still in Christian hands; the rump, carrying the emperor’s body preserved—not very successfully—in vinegar, marched grimly on, though it lost many more of its men to an ambush as it entered Syria. The survivors who finally limped into Antioch had no more fight left in them. By this time too, what was left of Frederick had gone the same way as his army; his rapidly decomposing remains were hastily buried in the cathedral, where they would rest for another seventy-eight years, until a Mameluke army under the Sultan Baibars burned the whole building, together with most of the city, to the ground.

  Fortunately for the Crusading East, Richard and Philip Augustus arrived with their armies essentially intact; thanks to them, all was not lost. Acre now became the capital of the kingdom, but that kingdom, now reduced to the short coastal strip between Tyre and Jaffa, was but a pale shadow of what Crusader Palestine had once been. It would struggle on for another century, and when it finally fell to Baibars in 1291 the only surprise was that it had lasted so long.

  AFTER THE DEATH of William the Good, Frederick’s son Henry had become, by virtue of his marriage to Constance, King of Sicily. He was due to set out for his coronation in Palermo in November 1190, but just before his departure the news arrived of his father’s fate. He now had two crowns to claim instead of one. Inevitably, his departure was delayed by several weeks; fortunately the winter was mild and the Alpine passes were still open. By January he and his army were safely across. Then, after a month spent strengthening his position in Lombardy and securing the assistance of a fleet from Pisa, he headed toward Rome, where Pope Clement was expecting him.

  But before he could reach the city Pope Clement was dead. Hurriedly—for the imperial army was fast approaching—the Sacred College met in conclave and selected as his successor the cardinal deacon Giacinto Bobone. It seemed, in the circumstances, a curious choice. The new pope was of illustrious birth—his brother Ursus was the founder of the Orsini family—and could boast a long and distinguished ecclesiastical record, having stoutly defended Peter Abelard against St. Bernard at Sens more than fifty years before. But he was now eighty-five—hardly, one might have thought, the man to handle the overbearing young Henry during a crisis that threatened the position of the Church almost as much as it did that of the Kingdom of Sicily. There is every indication that he shared this view; only the proximity of the German army, together with widespread fears of another schism if there was any delay in the election, at length persuaded him to accept the tiara. A cardinal since 1144, it was only on Holy Saturday, April 13, 1191, that he was ordained priest; on the following day, Easter Sunday, he was enthroned in St. Peter’s as Pope Celestine III; and on the fifteenth, as the first formal action of his pontificate, he crowned Henry and Constance Emperor and Empress of the West.

  So far, everything had gone Henry’s way; but before he continued his journey, the old pope had a warning for him. Sometime during the first weeks of 1190, in a desperate effort to avoid absorption into the empire, the Sicilians had crowned a rival king of their own: Count Tancred of Lecce, the bastard son of King Roger’s eldest son, also called Roger, who had died before his father. Tancred had his problems—for one thing, he was villainously ugly—but he was energetic, able, and determined; Henry could expect serious opposition; indeed, he would be better advised to return at once to Germany.

  Henry, of course, took no notice and headed south. To begin with, he carried all before him. One town after another opened its gates; only at Naples was he brought to a halt. The city’s defenses were in good order—Tancred had had them repaired the year before at his own expense—its granaries and storehouses full. When the emperor appeared with his army beneath their walls, the citizens were ready. The ensuing siege was not even, from their point of view, particularly arduous. Thanks to the incessant harrying of the Pisan ships by the Sicilian fleet, Henry never managed properly to control the harbor approaches, and the defenders continued to receive regular reinforcements and supplies. Despite heavy battering, the defenses held firm, and it became clear, as the sweltering summer dragged on, that it was the besiegers rather than the besieged who were feeling the strain. Finally, on August 24, Henry gave the order to raise the siege, and within a day or two the imperial host had trailed off northward over the hills.

  Back in Germany, the insufferable young emperor continued to make trouble—nominating bishops as he liked, even condoning the murder of a certain Albert of Brabant, whom Celestine had confirmed as Bishop of Liège. Then, shortly before Christmas 1192, King Richard—although under papal protection while returning from the Crusade—was captured by Duke Leopold V of Austria, who shortly afterward handed him over to Henry. The ransom demanded—150,000 marks, more than double the annual income of the English crown—was eventually raised and was used by the emperor to buy off his German opponents. Thus, when Tancred of Lecce died in February 1194, just two weeks after Richard’s release, Henry was free to travel to Palermo without fear of opposition and claim his crown. He received it on Christmas Day of that same year.

  Constance was not present at her husband’s coronation. Pregnant for the first time at the age of forty, she was determined on two things: first, that her child should be born safely; second, that it should be seen to be unquestionably hers. She did not put off her journey to Sicily but traveled more slowly and in her own time; and she had progressed no further than the little town of Jesi, some twenty miles west of Ancona, when she felt the pains of childbirth upon her. There, on the day after her husband’s coronation, in a tent erected in the main square to which free entry was allowed to any matron of the town who cared to witness the birth, she brought forth her only son, Frederick—whom, a day or two later, she presented in that same square to the assembled populace, proudly suckling him at her breast.

  Three years later, in November 1197, after putting down a rebellion in Sicily with his customary brutality, Henry VI died of malaria at Messina. He was thirty-two. Pope Celestine, sixty years older, survived him by three months.

  1. By the end of the conclave there may have been only twenty-nine; according to Arnulf of Lisieux, Bishop Imarus of Tusculum, a renowned epicure, left early because he refused to miss his dinner.

  2. Oddly enough, it was the second time this title was chosen by an antipope. See chapter 10, this page.

  3. William the Good had succeeded his father, William the Bad, in 1166.

  4. In modern Turkish Seleucia has become Silifke, while the Calycadnus is now less euphoniously known as the Göksu.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Innocent III

  In August 1202 Pope Innocent III and his Curia were traveling through Latium and stopped at Subiaco, some thirty miles east of Rome. The town possessed a monastery, where the pope could easily have lodged, but—presumably because it could not accommodate his large retinue and he did not wish to leave them—the entire party, pope included, pitched camp on a hill above the lake. Innocent’s health was poor; he loathed the heat and always tried to escape the Roman summer. But that year there was no escape. All he had was a small tent; the sun was murderous, the flies an additional torture. Work was out of the question; everyone sat around in whatever shade they could find and tried to forget their discomfort in conversation. Many of them could not bring themselves to make the precipitous descent to the cool lake and the hard climb back to the camp. The pope, on the other hand, did, dipping his hands gratefully into the water and throwing it on his face.

  This little vignette—taken from a letter written at the time by a member of the papal staff to an absent colleague—sheds a warm and somewhat unexpected light on the man under whom the medieval Papacy reached its zenith. No pope ever had a more elevated conception of his position than Innocent III; he was indeed the Vicar of Christ on Earth (a designation that first became current in
his day), standing, as it were, halfway between God and man. But his complete confidence in himself—together with a sense of humor rare in the Middle Ages—made him patient, simple, and always approachable, genuinely loved by those around him. Lotario di Segni was born around 1160. His father was Trasimondo,

  Count of Segni; his mother, Claricia, was a Roman of the patrician Scotti family. There were strong papal connections: Clement III was his uncle, his nephew was to be Gregory IX. Blessed with a first-class intellect, Lotario had studied theology in Paris and law at Bologna; in his youth he had made the pilgrimage to Canterbury, only a year or two after Thomas Becket’s murder. Clement had made him a cardinal in 1190, but—since his family and the Scotti were longtime enemies—Celestine III had kept him firmly in the background. This gave the young cardinal time to compose several religious tracts—one of which, De Contemptu Mundi, sive de Miseria Conditionis Humanae—must, despite the gloom of its title,1 have enjoyed extraordinary popularity, since it survives in no fewer than seven hundred separate manuscripts. At any rate, this small, handsome, humorous man must have impressed himself mightily upon the Curia, because on the very day of the death of Pope Celestine on January 8, 1198, he was unanimously elected, at the age of thirty-seven, as his successor.