Absolute Monarchs (22 page)

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 River
⁴
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

I
n 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.

Within less than two years, Innocent found himself without a secular rival in Europe. The death of Henry VI and the traditional enmity of the House of Guelf toward the Hohenstaufen had left the Western Empire rudderless and Germany in a state of civil war. Byzantium under its ridiculous emperor, Alexius III Angelus, was also in near chaos; independent Norman Sicily was gone; and both England and France were occupied with inheritance problems after the death of Richard I in 1199. The pope was consequently in a stronger position than any of his recent predecessors, and without a hostile emperor to intrigue against him he was soon able to reassert his authority both in the Papal States—which had been reduced to near anarchy by Hohenstaufen policies—and in Rome itself, reconciling the various aristocratic factions, to several of which he was related through his mother. He even managed to acquire the Duchy of Spoleto and the March of Ancona, a territory which stretched from Rome to the Adriatic and provided an invaluable cordon sanitaire between North Italy and the Sicilian kingdom, where he pulled off another diplomatic masterstroke by persuading the Empress Constance to make Sicily a papal fief and appoint the pope as regent during her son, Frederick’s, minority.

He was less fortunate in giving his blessing to the Fourth Crusade. Like his predecessors, he was determined on the liberation of the Holy Places from Muslim occupation and as early as 1198 had called for a Crusade for the recovery of Jerusalem, imposing a tax of 2.5 percent on clerical incomes to pay for it. When, however, the Crusaders finally gathered in Venice in the summer of 1202, they were unable to pay the agreed 84,000 silver marks for the transport of their army across the Mediterranean; the Venetians therefore refused to sail unless they helped in the recapture of Zara (now Zadar) on the Dalmatian coast. Zara was duly taken and sacked, but fighting broke out almost at once between the Crusaders and the Venetians over the division of the spoils, and when order was finally restored the two groups settled down in separate quarters of the city for the winter. Before long news of what had happened reached the pope; outraged, he excommunicated the entire expedition. (Later he would reconsider and restrict the sentence—most unfairly—to the Venetians only.)

Worse was to follow. While the Crusade was still in Zara, Duke Philip of Swabia—Barbarossa’s fifth and youngest son, who had married Irene, the daughter of the dethroned Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelus—arrived with a proposal: if the Crusade would escort his brother-in-law, Isaac’s son Alexius, to Constantinople and enthrone him there in the place of the present usurper, Alexius would finance its future advance and supply an additional army of ten thousand. He would also heal the 150-year schism by submitting the Byzantine Church to the authority of Rome. The invitation sounded tempting indeed and was accepted by both the Crusaders and the Venetians, who quickly forgot their differences, but it led, in April 1204, to the most unspeakable of the many outrages in the whole hideous history of the Crusades: the brutal sacking and near destruction, by men wearing the Cross of Christ on their shoulders, of Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire and Christendom’s most vital outpost in the East. As a result, a succession of Frankish thugs, most of them hardly able to write their names and none of them speaking a word of Greek, occupied the throne of the emperors for the next fifty-seven years. Byzantium was to endure for almost two centuries more, but only as the palest shadow of what it once had been.

Pope Innocent, who had tried unsuccessfully to deflect the Crusaders from Constantinople altogether, was as horrified as anyone when he heard of the atrocities for which they had been responsible, but he could hardly ignore the fact that the Latin occupation brought with it a Roman Catholic patriarch, and so deluded himself into thinking that the schism was effectively at an end. “By the just judgment of God,” he wrote, “the kingdom of the Greeks is translated from the proud to the humble, from the disobedient to the faithful, from schismatics to Catholics.” How wrong he was: the rape of Constantinople, far from putting an end to the schism, set it in stone.

Meanwhile, Innocent’s belief in the Crusading ideal remained unshaken—as the Albigenses were to learn to their cost.

THE ALBIGENSES WERE
a heretical Christian sect that had first appeared in the Languedoc toward the beginning of the eleventh century. Their particular heresy, Catharism, did not exist only in Western Europe; in former times Cathars had existed in Armenia, where for centuries, under the name of Paulicians, they had been a thorn in the flesh of successive Byzantine rulers, as well as in Bulgaria and Bosnia, where they were known as Bogomils. Essentially, they espoused the Manichaean doctrine that good and evil constituted two distinct spheres—that of the good, spiritual God and that of the Devil, creator of the material world—and that the earth was a constant battleground between them. Their leaders, the
perfecti
, abstained from meat and sex; they also rejected saints, holy images, and relics, together with all the sacraments of the Church, particularly baptism and marriage. To Pope Innocent, such departures from strict orthodoxy could not be tolerated. At first he attempted peaceable conversion, sending a Cistercian mission headed by a legate, Peter of Castelnau, and the Abbot of Cîteaux, and subsequently joined by the Spaniard Domingo de Guzmán, better known as St. Dominic; but in 1208 Peter was murdered by a henchman of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, and Innocent proclaimed a Crusade.

That Crusade was to continue for the next twenty years, pitting the northern barons, led by Simon IV de Montfort, against those of the South. It led to several hideous massacres—the worst of them all in the town of Montségur—and it utterly destroyed the venerable Provençal civilization of the early Middle Ages. Even when the war ended in 1229 with the Treaty of Paris, after the wholesale massacres of countless heretics, the heresy refused to die. It would be another hundred years before the Inquisition, unleashed on the region with all its terrifying efficiency, succeeded in crushing it at last.

By a curious irony the year 1209, which marked the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade, also saw the establishment of the first of the two great mendicant orders, those of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic, respectively. Both men were well known to Pope Innocent, who, according to the old Franciscan tradition, orally approved St. Francis’s Order of Friars Minor in Rome on April 16. Those first friars were, quite simply, wandering preachers who accepted whatever employment—normally agricultural—or hospitality was offered them and, if absolutely necessary, begged for their bread.
²
They preached the simplest of sermons to townsfolk and peasants alike and took particular pains over the care of the sick. The order proved hugely popular and grew with astonishing speed; ten years after its foundation, it boasted over three thousand members. The second order, that of St. Dominic, would be sanctioned in 1216, five months after the pope’s death.

During the early years of Innocent’s pontificate, one of his most abiding concerns was the future of the German crown, which, it must be remembered, was elective rather than hereditary. Frederick of Sicily, the only son of Henry VI, had an obvious claim, but he was far away in Palermo and still a child. Of the two rival claimants in Germany, one was his uncle Philip, Duke of Swabia; the other was Otto, Duke of Brunswick, son of the Guelf leader Henry the Lion, Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, and his wife, Matilda, daughter of Henry II of England. Otto was consequently the nephew of Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Richard’s younger brother King John. Since Philip refused to give any undertakings with regard to Sicily while Otto readily agreed to respect papal rights both there and in the enlarged Papal States, Pope Innocent had no hesitation in supporting the Duke of Brunswick; Frederick’s future authority could, he felt, with any luck be restricted to Sicily. Hostilities between the two factions delayed any final solution to the problem for several years; gradually, however, the Duke of Swabia grew dangerously strong, to the point where Innocent might well have had to revise his position; the pope cannot have mourned unduly when Philip was murdered in 1208 by the Count Palatine of Bavaria, to whom he had refused one of his daughters in marriage. The way was now clear for Otto’s coronation, which Innocent performed in Rome on Sunday, October 4, 1209. But the Duke of Brunswick proved a sad disappointment. Within weeks he was showing himself every bit as arrogant and bullying as Barbarossa or Henry VI had ever been, and in the summer of 1210 he invaded the Sicilian kingdom and took possession of all South Italy. Unfortunately for him, however, he went too far: his invasion of the papal province of Tuscany led to his instant excommunication, and in September 1211 a council of the leading German princes met in Nuremberg and declared him deposed. They then dispatched ambassadors to Palermo, with an invitation to Frederick, now just seventeen, to assume the vacant throne.

The invitation came as a complete surprise. Frederick’s principal councillors strongly advised against acceptance. He had no ties of his own with Germany; indeed, he had never set foot on German soil. His hold on his own Sicilian kingdom was still far from secure; it was scarcely a year since the Duke of Brunswick had been threatening him from across the Straits of Messina. Was this really the moment to absent himself from Sicily for several months at least, for the sake of an honor which, however impressive, might yet prove illusory? On the other hand, a refusal would, he knew, be seen by the German princes as a deliberate snub, and could not fail to strengthen the position of his chief rival. Both in Italy and in Germany, the Duke of Brunswick still had plenty of support. Having renounced none of his long-term ambitions, Otto was fully capable of launching a new campaign—and he would not make the same mistake next time. Here was an opportunity to deal him a knockout blow. It was not to be missed.

Pope Innocent, after some hesitation, gave his approval. Frederick’s election would admittedly tighten the imperial grip to the north and south of the Papal States, and it was in order to emphasize the independence, at least theoretical, of the Kingdom of Sicily from the empire that the pope insisted on Frederick’s renunciation of the Sicilian throne in favor of his newborn son, with the child’s mother, Constance, acting as regent.
³
Once those formalities had been settled, Frederick could set off. At the end of February 1212 he sailed from Messina. His immediate destination, however, was not Germany but Rome; and there, on Easter Sunday, March 25, he knelt before the pope and performed the act of feudal homage to him—technically on behalf of his son the king—for the Sicilian kingdom.