Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (24 page)

The constant friction between the twelfth-century popes and the city of Rome itself, especially after the declaration of the Commune in 1143, when the city took its own government into its hands, made Rome unsafe for the popes, and they often had to take refuge elsewhere. Cut off from their patrimony, they were permanently strapped for cash. This meant they had to improvise, and successive popes looked for sources of funding which did not depend on the patrimony. Archbishops paid huge fees for the pallium, charges were made for papal privileges and exemptions, the monasteries and churches under papal protection paid a tax or ‘census’, kingdoms which were fiefs of the papacy, such as Spain and Sicily, paid feudal dues, and England and Poland paid Peter’s Pence, a tax levied on churches throughout the land. In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the papacy began to reserve to itself the right to appoint to an increasing number of benefices, such as those vacated by clergy promoted to bishoprics, or any benefices vacated by the death of a cleric while visiting the papal Curia. Such measures not only added to papal income, but vastly increased papal influence and control through a web of patronage. In 1192 Celestine Ill’s chamberlain Cencius compiled the
Liber Censuum
, an exhaustive listing of all sources of papal funding, designed to maximise revenue. It was far more than a financial tool, and became a powerful instrument of centralisation, a map of the institutions, churches and kingdoms over
which the papacy exercised jurisdiction, and a means of consolidating and extending that jurisdiction.

From the beginning papal reform had gone alongside monastic reform, and monks remained central to the growing influence of the popes in the twelfth century. Papal protection defended reformed monasteries against the interference of hostile bishops or the depredations of lay proprietors and rulers. In return, the monasteries provided the papacy with a loyal and prestigious counterweight to recalcitrant local hierarchies. In the course of the eleventh century 270 religious houses had secured papal letters of exemption; in the course of the twelfth century, more than 2,000 would do so. To many observers, this development seemed subversive of the authority of bishops over religious houses in their dioceses, and this was something the papacy itself would become more sensitive to as the bishops themselves absorbed reforming ideals, and the confrontation between papacy and regional hierarchies eased.

Of the nineteen popes from Gregory VII to Innocent III, eleven were monks or canons regular. The reform popes had turned to the monasteries to find men free from the simony, corruption and unchastity which polluted so many secular clergy, so many of the bishops. Monks would be pure instruments for the cleansing of the Church. Gregory VII had written to Abbot Hugh of Cluny, asking him for ‘some wise men from among his monks, suitable for him to appoint as bishops …’ In the next two generations no fewer than eleven monks from Monte Cassino became cardinals. Gregory’s sucessor Victor III (1086–7) had been Abbot of Monte Cassino,
his
successor Urban II (1088–99) was a monk of Cluny, and
his
successor, Paschal II (1099–1118) was Abbot of the monastery at San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. Urban consecrated the new church at Cluny, the largest in Christendom before the building of the new St Peter’s in the Renaissance, while Paschal stacked the papal establishment with monks. He appointed seven monks of Monte Cassino as cardinals, and one third of all his sixty-six appointments to the college of cardinals were monks. Unsurprisingly, his successor, Gelasius II (1118–19), was a monk of Monte Cassino.

This extraordinary involvement of the monasteries with the papacy would outlive the great period of papal reform, and continue into the new age of monastic foundation represented by St Bernard and the Cistercians. Clairvaux produced eight cardinals in the course
of the twelfth century, and when Bernard’s former pupil Bernardo Pignatelli became Pope Eugenius III (1145–53) Bernards influence was so strong in the Curia that the cardinals grumbled that Bernard was pope, not Eugenius.

Perhaps the most striking proof of the transformation of the papacy into the greatest spiritual power in Christendom was the extraordinary response to Urban Us call at Clermont in 1095 to deliver Jerusalem from Muslim control, the launching of the First Crusade. The Crusades were a revolutionary new phenomenon, born out of the amalgamation of originally distinct elements – pilgrimage, holy war and, somewhat less certainly, the movement called the Peace or Truce of God. The Peace of God movement had been begun by the bishops of Burgundy and Aquitaine at the beginning of the eleventh century. Revolted by the murderous wars of the aristocracy, they held peace councils, excommunicating the aggressors, defending the rights of the poor who suffered because of war, and imposing fixed periods or ‘truces’ during which all hostilities against fellow Christians must cease. The movement spread to northern Europe and to Italy, and was backed by the reform papacy.

An alternative to destructive wars between Christians was holy war against the enemies of Christianity. There was a long tradition of papal support for such ‘holy wars’, primarily those against the Muslims in Spain. Gregory VII had himself planned to lead a military expedition to rescue the Christians of Constantinople from the Turks. Urban may also have had in mind a rescue-attempt to help Constantinople, but his prime concern was the liberation of the Holy Places from Muslim rule. He called on the warriors of Europe to channel their energies into an expedition to restore the Holy Land to Christendom, and explicitly linked this warfare to the traditional spiritual benefits of pilgrimage – ‘If any man sets out to free the Church of God at Jerusalem out of pure devotion and not out of love for glory or gain, the journey shall be accounted a complete penance on his part.’ So clear a link between salvation and holy war was something new, and it caught the imagination of Europe. One of the battlecries of the Crusade was
Deus lo volt
(God wills it!). Urban made a cross of cloth sewn on to one’s clothing the sign of the Crusade, and he bound those who agreed to go by a solemn vow. Failure to honour this vow would bring spiritual condemnation, fulfilment of it would bring remission of sins. He granted an indulgence, or free
pardon from the punishment due to sin, to all Crusaders, which was equivalent to a lifetime of hard penance. For hard-boiled and violent men in a world much preoccupied with sin and its consequences, this was a powerful incentive – as the Crusader Geoffrey of Villehardouin wrote, ‘because the Indulgence was so great the hearts of men were much moved; and many took the cross because the Indulgence was so great’.
¹⁵

The exact nature of Urban’s promise is unclear, and the doctrine of Indulgences had far to go before reaching its full-blown form under Innocent III. But in any case, there were all the signs that popular enthusiasm here ran far ahead of papal intentions. The spiritual benefits which Urban promised boiled down to the substitution of the danger and effort of the Crusade for, normal ecclesiastical penance. This was something distinct from the forgiveness of sins, which remained dependent on true repentance and sacramental confession. But all over Europe popular opinion seized on the notion that by virtue of involvement in the Crusade a man’s sins were wiped away. Gradually the language of the popes about the Crusade dropped the early theological caution, and spoke of ‘full remission of sins’. By the end of the twelfth century, theologians had begun to worry about this, and papal language returned to its earlier reticence. These fine distinctions, however, were lost on the majority of Crusaders, for the papacy had triggered a wave of popular religious feeling which took on a theological life of its own.

In 1095 all that lay in the future. In the meantime, from all over Europe, even from the fringes like Ireland and Scotland, men hurried to share in this great spiritual venture of arms. By 1099 Jerusalem had been taken and the Muslim population massacred. It was the beginning of an enterprise which would continue for centuries, and whose moral ambiguities would deepen with the passing years.

But for the papacy in the short term at least it was a triumph. Only the key-bearer could have aroused the imagination of Europe with a promise of sins unbound, of penances remitted by the act of holy war. Only the Pope had the moral authority to persuade Europe with unblinking certainty that ‘God wills it’. The Crusade was led by the Bishop of Le Puy, appointed papal vicar by Urban, and the Pope placed the Crusaders themselves, their family, their property and lands under the protection of the Church – in effect the Crusader and his dependants became temporary clerics, and were
thereby exempted from the jurisdiction of the secular courts. This legal protection was a very precious privilege, for no one could be sued or prosecuted for crimes or debt, for example, while it lasted. It was the material equivalent of the Crusading Indulgence, and like the Indulgence was a benefit only the Pope could have bestowed. Finally, the most telling aspect of the First Crusade was that this mighty wave of military enthusiasm owed nothing whatever to any king or emperor. The Pope had summoned the chivalry of Europe round the banner of the cross and St Peter, to overwhelming effect. No secular ruler could have done as much, and there could be no more eloquent demonstration of the centrality of the reformed papacy in the religious imagination of medieval Europe.

III T
HE
P
INNACLE OF
P
APAL
P
OWER

The papacy at the beginning of the twelfth century was at an unprecedented height in its spiritual prestige, and in its own self-confidence. As the century progressed, it would gather round itself more and more of the trappings of monarchy. New popes were crowned with a distinctive cap and gold circlet, quite distinct from the episcopal mitre they wore during the liturgy. According to the
Donation of Constantine
, this cap or tiara symbolised their lordship of the West. The rebuilding and decoration of the churches of Rome which successive popes undertook made lavish use of imperial motifs. Papal thrones were embellished with lion arm-rests, and porphyry and gold featured large in the designs for the Roman sanctuary floors, altars and pulpits produced by the Cosmati workshops. St Peter, declared Bernard of Clairvaux, had received the whole world to govern, and it was the task of his vicar ‘to direct princes, to command bishops, to set kingdoms and empires in order’. There were indeed two powers, ‘two swords’, the spiritual and the temporal, but both belonged to Peter, ‘the one to be unsheathed at his nod, the other by his hand’.
¹⁶

For Bernard this was a spiritual not a temporal claim, and he deplored the secular pomp and the secular business with which the popes were surrounded. Peter, he told Eugenius III, ‘is not known ever to have gone in procession adorned in jewels and silk, nor crowned with gold, nor mounted on a white horse nor surrounded by knights … In these respects you are the heir not of Peter but of Constantine.’
¹⁷
In practice
the distinction between what Peter had bequeathed to the papacy and what came from Constantine was not so easy to unpick, and the popes of the twelfth century did not try very hard. The burial of Innocent II in a porphyry tomb from the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which was believed to have been the sarcophagus of Hadrian, and of Pope Anastasius IV in a porphyry coffin which had once held the bones of St Helena, demonstrated how closely the spiritual and temporal claims of the popes had converged.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the papacy remained at odds with the empire for much of the twelfth century. The Investiture Controversy became both the symbol of the reformed papacy’s claims and the rock on which it seemed they might founder. The imperial Antipope Clement III died in September 1100, and his successors were men of straw who lacked imperial backing. The schism rumbled on till 1111, but was not a serious threat to the popes. But Henry remained determined to maintain his right to invest the bishops of his realm with ring and staff, and his overthrow and replacement by his son Henry V in 1106 changed nothing on this score: Pope and King remained at loggerheads. When Henry V came to be crowned emperor in Rome in February nil, Paschal II offered a desperate solution. If Henry would renounce investiture and permit free and canonical election of bishops, the Church in return would renounce all the ‘regalia’ – land, property and income derived from the secular power. From henceforth, the clergy from parish clerk up to the archbishops would live on voluntary offerings and church dues like tithes.

Paschal was a monk, intent on separating the Church from the contamination of worldliness, but this solution had no chance of success. When the terms of the agreement were read out at the coronation ceremony, the German princes and bishops present rioted, refusing to consider so radical a dismantling of the structure of German landed society. The coronation could not proceed. Henry’s response was to clap the Pope and cardinals into gaol, and to threaten to recognise the Antipope Silvester IV. Paschal caved in, crowned Henry, and in April 1111 granted the ‘privilege of Ponte Mammolo’, conceding the right of investiture to the Emperor.

Paschal bitterly regretted this betrayal of the reform cause, and he subsequently revoked the ‘pravilege’, as the ‘depraved privilege’ came to be called, in a dreadful twelfth-century pun. His frail and elderly
successor, the Cassinese monk Gelasius II (1118–19), was to pay the price for this resistance, leading a harassed and persecuted existence, ousted from Rome by the antipope Gregory (VIII) and on the run from Henry V: he died and was buried at Cluny It was clear that if the work of the papacy was to be conducted with anything like tranquillity, the issue of investiture had to be settled once and for all. Pope Callistus II (1119–24) was able to do this, in the Concordat of Worms he concluded with Henry V in 1122. The Worms agreement built on a compromise arrangement first worked out in Norman England, whereby newly elected bishops swore fealty to the ruler for the temporalities of their sees, but the King made clear that he claimed no spiritual jurisdiction over them by abandoning investiture with staff and ring. Instead, on receipt, of their pledge of allegiance he conferred their lands on them with a tap from his sceptre. Canonical elections to the bishoprics and abbacies would be held in the Emperor’s presence, and the Emperor was given power of arbitration in the event of disputed elections.