Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

IX

REVOLUTION

1076: C

AMBRAI

The feverish spirit of the times was dangerous. Gerard, the bishop of Cambrai, had no doubt as to that. Christians who believed themselves endowed by revelation with insights into God’s purposes were a menace to the Church, and to the great fabric of its order, constructed with such care and effort over the thousand years since Christ. In the shadow of the millennium, the great serpent of heresy, which for centuries had seemed scotched for good, had begun to shake its coils again. Various clerics in Orléans, one of them high in royal favour, were said to have claimed ‘there was no such thing as the Church’;¹ the inhabitants of a castle near Milan, swearing themselves to chastity, had laid claim to a purity that put married priests to shame; a peasant, only a hundred miles from Cambrai, had dreamed that a swarm of bees entered his anus, and revealed to him the iniquities of the clergy. This madness, it seemed, was capable of infecting every level of society. The charge, though, was customarily the same: that unworthy priests were disqualified from practising the rites and rituals of the Church; that they were polluted, tarnished, corrupted; that they were not truly Christian. The echo of the Donatists, reverberating down the centuries, was palpable.

Gerard, nervous of where such ravings might lead, was on his guard. Brought news that a man named Ramihrd was ‘preaching many things outside the faith, and had won a large number of disciples of both sexes’,² the bishop was quick to act. Ramihrd was summoned to Cambrai. There, he was questioned by a panel of abbots and learned scholars. His answers, however, proved impeccably orthodox. He was then invited to celebrate with Gerard the ritual of the eucharist: the transformation, by means of a sublime mystery, of bread and wine into the very body and blood of Christ. Only a priest could perform this miracle – but Ramihrd, accusing the bishop of being filthy with sin, denied him the title of priest. The resulting uproar exploded into violence. Gerard’s servants, seizing the man who had so insulted their master, bundled him into a wooden hut. A crowd set it on fire. Ramihrd, kneeling in prayer, was burned alive.

This spasm of mob violence – although obviously an embarrassment to Gerard – was not without salutary effect. There was precedent for putting heretics to death. Half a century earlier, the clerics of Orléans charged with scoffing at the existence of the Church had been publicly burned: the first people to be executed for heresy in the entire history of the Latin West.* Ugly moods demanded ugly measures. The rush of Ramihrd’s followers to scoop up his ashes and consecrate him as a martyr spoke of an enthusiasm for his teachings that had become a kind of madness. The demand – a wild, an impractical one! – was for a Church that could shine amid the darkness of the fallen world as radiantly as the most discipline-hallowed monastery. Priests, unlike monks, had never been obliged to pledge themselves to celibacy – and yet this, in recent years, had become a subject of violent agitation. In Milan, where the clergy had long lived openly with their wives, riots had been convulsing the city for two decades. Married priests had found themselves boycotted, abused, assaulted. Their touch was publicly scorned as ‘dog shit’.³ Paramilitaries had barricaded the archbishop inside his own cathedral, and then, when he died, tried to foist their own candidate on the city. Gerard, who had only been invested as a bishop a few months previously, had no wish to see such turmoil rock Cambrai. This was why, rather than punish the murderers of Ramihrd, he was content to regard them as the agents of a higher purpose. Heresy, after all, had to be rooted out. Ramihrd’s admirers were weavers, peasants, labourers – nothing more. What were the complaints of such people to a bishop?

But Ramihrd, it turned out, also had admirers further afield. Early in 1077, a letter arrived in Paris, addressed to the city’s archbishop. It reported in shocked tones the news of Ramihrd’s fate. ‘We view it as something monstrous.’⁴ Ramihrd, so the letter declared, had been no criminal. The criminals were those who had murdered him. Here, to Gerard, was not merely a reprimand but a body blow. The letter had been written by a bishop – and not just by any bishop. The burning of Ramihrd stood condemned by the pope himself.

Hildebrand had always been a radical. Born – some said – the son of a Tuscan carpenter, the blaze of his future greatness had been presaged by miraculous sparks of fire on his swaddling clothes, and a flame seen issuing from his head. Defying his humble origins, he had never doubted himself entrusted by God with a fateful mission. When, as a young man, he was granted a vision of St Paul shovelling cow dung out of a Roman monastery, it had confirmed him in the ambition that he would hold to all his life: to sluice the Church clean of every spot of filth. This, elsewhere, might have been sufficient to condemn him as a heretic; but Rome, during Hildebrand’s youth, was a city in the throes of an intoxicating sense of renewal. For too long the papacy had been an institution pawed at and squabbled over by local dynasts. Pope after pope had served as a byword for scandal. The shame of it had finally prompted intervention by the emperor himself. Henry III, a man possessed of formidable piety and the self-confidence that came naturally to an anointed king, had briskly deposed and appointed a number of popes, before finally, in 1048, installing a distant cousin. A high-handed policy, certainly – but one that had fast served to raise the papacy from the gutter. A succession of popes as astute as they were devout had laboured to set it on a new course. Reformatio, they had termed this great project: ‘reformation’. Its ambition was not merely the redemption of the papacy from the canker of worldliness and parochialism, but the whole world. Papal agents – ‘legates’ – had been dispatched in increasing numbers north of the Alps. Meanwhile, talented clerics were recruited to the papacy’s service from across the Latin West. Increasingly, these had given to Rome a feel that the city had not possessed for many centuries: that of a capital at the heart of the world’s affairs.

Hildebrand, rising through the ranks of the Roman Church, had certainly not hesitated to view its sway as universal in its scope. Earnest, austere and implacable of purpose, he was a man perfectly suited to its ever more soaring spirit of ambition. By 1073, he had emerged as the most formidable agent of a papacy primed to claim a supreme authority over the entire Christian people. There had been no thought that year, when the throne of Saint Peter became vacant, of waiting for Henry III’s son, the young and headstrong Henry IV, to appoint a new pope. ‘Hildebrand for bishop!’⁵ the crowds had roared. Swept up onto their shoulders, the people’s choice had been carried to his enthronement in the Lateran, an ancient palace donated to the bishop of Rome centuries previously by Constantine. As a signal of his ambition, Hildebrand took the name of the Roman aristocrat who had famously devoted his life to preparing the Church for the end of days – the seventh pope to bear it. ‘He was a man on whom the spirit of the first Gregory truly rested.’⁶

In truth, though, Gregory VII’s ambitions for the papacy were of a momentously original order. For all that his predecessors had consistently laid claim to a position of leadership among the Christian people, none had ever proclaimed it so baldly or forcefully. Among the great accretion of documents stored in musty papal libraries – the canons of church councils, the proclamations of successive popes – there were numerous precedents suited to Gregory’s needs; and so he duly made sure to harvest them. Where necessary, though, he was more than ready to introduce innovations of his own. That the pope alone had a licence to be called ‘Universal’; to place inferiors in judgement over their superiors; to release those who had sworn obedience to a lord from their oaths: here were prerogatives to set the whole world on its head. Even before becoming Pope, Gregory had been eager to put them into practice. Far from condemning the militants in Milan, he had given them his personal blessing. It was no sin, Gregory believed, to amplify moral exhortation by threatening those who ignored it with violence. The heir of Saint Peter should not hesitate to draw on the support of the militant faithful. The very future of the Christian people was at stake. The proofs of this were manifest. An angel, so one of Gregory’s supporters reported, had appeared before the full view of a church as a priest was celebrating the eucharist, and begun scrubbing him down. The water had turned black. Finally, the angel had tipped the filthy contents of the bucket over the priest’s head. The priest, a man of hitherto spotless reputation, had broken down in tears, and confessed to the congregation that only the previous night he had slept with a servant girl. Gregory, no less than the angel, felt himself called to a mighty labour of cleaning. The clergy were leprous. Only he, the heir of Saint Peter, could bring them to purity. Priests had to be virginal, like monks. ‘To pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’:⁷ such was Gregory’s mission.

Never before had a pope made the foundations of the Christian world tremor so palpably. The excitement of Gregory’s followers was outweighed by the alarm of his opponents. Gerard was far from alone in feeling disoriented. Heresy seemed to have captured the commanding heights of the Church. The hierarchies on which bishops had always depended for their authority appeared under attack from the very man who stood at their head. Priests who polluted themselves by surrendering to their lusts were not the only objects of Gregory’s reforming zeal. Ramihrd, refusing to celebrate the eucharist with Gerard, had done so on a very particular basis. The bishop of Cambrai, following his election to the post in June 1076, had travelled to the German court. There, in obedience to venerable custom, he had sworn an oath of loyalty to Henry IV. The king, in return, had presented him with a shepherd’s crook, and a ring: the symbol of marriage. That bishops in lands ruled by the emperor might owe their investiture to him had long been taken for granted. Not by Gregory, though. When Ramihrd refused to acknowledge Gerard as a priest, he had done so in direct obedience to a decree of the Roman Church. Issued only the year before, it had formally prohibited ‘the King’s right to confer bishoprics’.⁸ A momentous step: for this – prohibiting kings from poking their noses into the business of the Church – had struck at the very heart of how the world was ordered.

Which was, of course, precisely why Gregory had sponsored it. Defilement came in many forms. A bishop who owed his investiture to a king was no less leprous than a priest who slept with a servant girl. To whore after baubles, and estates, and offices was to betray the King of Heaven. The scale of the change that Gregory was forcing on the Latin West could be measured by the fact that even reformers like him, only three decades previously, had depended on Henry III to secure them the papacy. That emperors had been hailed as sanctissimus, ‘most holy’, and that imperial bishops had long been administering royal fiefdoms: none of this mattered to him. For too long the rival dimensions of earthly appetites and commitment to Christ, of corruption and purity, of saecularia and religio, had been intermixed. Such pollution could not be permitted to continue. Bishops were servants of God alone, or they were nothing. Church had to be freed from state.

‘The Pope is permitted to depose emperors.’ This proposition, one of a number of theses on papal authority drawn up for Gregory’s private use in March 1075, had shown him more than braced for the inevitable blow-back. No pope before had ever claimed such a licence; but neither, of course, had any pope dared to challenge imperial authority with such unapologetic directness. Gregory, by laying claim to the sole leadership of the Christian people, and trampling down long-standing royal prerogatives, was offending Henry IV grievously. Heir to a long line of emperors who had never hesitated to depose troublesome popes, the young king acted with the self-assurance of a man supremely confident that both right and tradition were on his side. Early in 1076, when he summoned a conference of imperial bishops to the German city of Worms, the assembled clerics knew exactly what was expected of them. The election of Hildebrand, so they ruled, had been invalid. No sooner had this decision been reached than Henry’s scribes were reaching for their quills. ‘Let another sit upon Saint Peter’s throne.’ The message to Gregory in Rome could not have been blunter. ‘Step down, step down!’

But Gregory also had a talent for bluntness. Brought the command to abdicate, he not only refused, but promptly raised the stakes. Speaking from the Lateran, he declared that Henry was ‘bound with the chain of anathema’⁹ and excommunicated from the Church. His subjects were absolved of all their oaths of loyalty to him. Henry himself, as a tyrant and an enemy of God, was deposed. The impact of this pronouncement proved devastating. Henry’s authority went into meltdown. Numerous of his princely vassals, hungry for the opportunity that his excommunication had given them, set to dismembering his kingdom. By the end of the year, Henry found himself cornered. To such straits was his authority reduced that he settled on a desperate gambit. Crossing the Alps in the dead of winter, he headed for Canossa, a castle in the northern Apennines where he knew that Gregory was staying. For three days, ‘barefoot, and clad in wool’,¹⁰ the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne stood shivering before the gates of the castle’s innermost wall. Finally, ordering the gates unbarred, and summoning Henry into his presence, Gregory absolved the penitent with a kiss. ‘The King of Rome, rather than being honoured as a universal monarch, had been treated instead as merely a human being – a creature moulded out of clay.’¹¹

The shock was seismic. That Henry had soon reneged on his promises, capturing Rome in 1084 and forcing his great enemy to flee the city, had done nothing to lessen the impact of Gregory’s papacy on the mass of the Christian people. For the first time, public affairs in the Latin West had an audience that spanned every region, and every social class. ‘What else is talked about even in the women’s spinning-rooms and the artisans’ work-shops?’¹² Here, so Gregory’s opponents charged, was yet another black mark against his name. To encourage wool-workers and cobblers to sit in judgement on their betters was to play with fire. The sheer violence of the propaganda levelled against Henry – that he was a pervert, an arsonist, a violator of nuns – threatened the very fabric of society. So too, of course, did Gregory’s readiness to stir up mobs against priests who had opposed his programme of reformatio. Only start howling down the clergy, and who knew where it might all end?

The travails of the bishop of Cambrai suggested one particularly alarming answer: the eruption of entire cities into rebellion. In 1077, desperate not to be deposed for accepting a ring from Henry IV, Gerard had travelled the long road to Rome, there to plead his case. Gregory, though, had refused to see him. Only after he had headed back north and begged for mercy from a papal legate in Burgundy had Gerard’s election finally been approved. Meanwhile, during the bishop’s absence, workers and peasants had seized control of Cambrai. Declaring a commune, they swore never to have him back. Gerard, faced with open insurrection, found himself with no choice but to beg the assistance of a neighbouring count. A humiliating recourse – and even once the rebels had been routed, and their leaders put to death, the sense of a world turned on its head would not go away. ‘Knights are armed against their lords, and children rise against their parents. Subjects are stirred up against kings, right and wrong are confounded, and the sanctity of oaths is violated.’¹³

Yet Gerard, following the pacification of Cambrai, did not repudiate the pledge of loyalty that he had made to Gregory. No sooner had the rebellion been crushed than he set to imposing on his clergy the very measures which, only a year previously, had caused Ramihrd to be lynched. Not even the death of Gregory himself, shortly after his flight from Rome, shook Gerard’s new-found commitment to reformatio. His eyes, like those of other bishops across the empire, had been opened. The humiliation of Henry IV had made visible a great and awesome prize. The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers – of a Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the earthly, from top to bottom, from palace to meanest village – no longer appeared a fantasy, but eminently realisable. A celibate clergy, once disentangled from the snares and meshes of the fallen world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian people as a model of purity, and bring them to God. No longer would it be monasteries and nunneries alone that stood separate from the flux of the saeculum, but the entire Church. Bishops who pledged themselves to the radicalism of this vision could reassure themselves that it was in reality nothing new, nothing out of tune with the teachings of their Saviour. In the gospels, after all, it was recorded that Jesus, approached by questioners looking to trip him up, had been asked whether it was permitted to pay taxes to pagan Rome. Telling them to show him a coin, he had asked them whose image was stamped on it. ‘Caesar’s,’ they had replied. ‘Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,’ Jesus had answered, ‘and to God what is God’s.’¹⁴

Nevertheless, deep though the roots of Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil of Christian teaching, the flower was indeed something new. The concept of the ‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, ‘for the first time and permanently’.¹⁵ A decisive moment. Lands that had long existed in the shadow both of the vanished order of Rome, and of the vastly wealthier, more sophisticated empires on their eastern flank, had been set at last upon a distinctive course of their own. Nor was it merely the division of European society into twin dimensions of church and state that was destined to prove enduring. So too was the demonstration of just how convulsive and transformative in its effects Christianity might be. It was no longer enough for Gregory and his fellow reformers that individual sinners, or even great monasteries, be consecrated to the dimension of religio. The entire sweep of the Christian world required an identical consecration. That sins should be washed away; the mighty put down from their seats; the entire world reordered in obedience to a conception of purity as militant as it was demanding: here was a manifesto that had resulted in a Caesar humbling himself before a pope. ‘Any custom, no matter how venerable, no matter how commonplace, must yield utterly to truth – and, if it is contrary to truth, be abolished.’¹⁶ So Gregory had written. Nova consilia, he had called his teachings – ‘new counsels’.

A model of reformatio had triumphed that, reverberating down the centuries, would come to shake many a monarchy, and prompt many a visionary to dream that society might be born anew. The earthquake would reach very far, and the aftershocks be many. The Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution.

Laying down the Law

The most intoxicating of all the reformers’ slogans was libertas – ‘freedom’. One place more than any other served as its emblem: a monastery charged with a sense of holiness so strong that Gregory had taken it as his model for the entire Church. First established back in 910, amid wooded Burgundian hills, Cluny had been placed by its founder under the protection of the distant papacy. The local bishop, to all intents and purposes, had been frozen out. Cluny’s independence had fast become the mainstay of its greatness. A succession of formidably able abbots, defying the violence and rapacity for which the local warlords were notorious, had succeeded in establishing their monastery as an impregnable outpost of the City of God. So unspotted that they would wash the shoes as well as the feet of visitors, so angelic that they were known to levitate while singing psalms, the monks of Cluny appeared to their admirers as close to celestial as fallen mortals could approach. Almost two centuries on from its foundation, the monastery had not only endured, but flourished mightily. As though from a chrysalis, an immense new church, on a scale never before witnessed, was emerging from the shell of the old. The ribs of its half-completed vault seemed to swell and reach for the skies. To visit it was to see proclaimed in stone just what freedom could truly mean.

By 1095, the east end of the church had been sufficiently completed to permit the dedication of its two great altars. Cluny being Cluny, the man invited to do the honours was a pope. Urban II had once been a prior in the abbey, but had then left for Italy, where he had served Gregory as a notably shrewd and committed advisor, before himself being raised to the papacy in 1087. Travelling to Cluny, the new pope was doing honour not only to the monastery itself, but to the great ideal of a Church independent and free. Arriving on 18 September, and dedicating the two altars a week later, he hailed it as a reflection of the heavenly Jerusalem. The praise was heartfelt; but Urban had his attention fixed as well on a more distant horizon. Travelling on from Burgundy, he headed for central France, and the town of Clermont. There, as at Cluny, his talk was all of freedom. At a great council of bishops and abbots, priests were formally forbidden to do homage to earthly lords. Then, on 27 November, the pope travelled outside the town walls, and addressed an eager crowd in a muddy field. No less than Gregory, Urban understood the value of harnessing popular fervour. The great cause of reformatio could not merely be the stuff of councils. If it failed to liberate the Christian people across the entire globe, to light heaven and earth, to prepare the fallen world for the return of Christ and the day of judgement, then it was nothing. The Church, so the bishops and abbots gathered in Clermont had proclaimed, should be ‘chaste from all contagion of evil’.¹⁷ A fine ambition – but how could it be achieved while Jerusalem itself lay under Saracen rule? Not all the radiant purity of Cluny could make up for the horror of it. Urban, who gloried in the convulsions that reformatio had brought to Christian kingdoms, dared to dream of a greater convulsion still. Daringly, he offered his listeners an electrifying new formula for salvation. Listed as an official decree of the council held at Clermont, it promised warriors a means by which their trade of arms, rather than offending Christ and requiring penance to be forgiven, might itself serve to cleanse them of their sin. ‘For, if any man sets out from devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance.’¹⁸

In the Book of Revelation it was foretold that, at the end of days, an angel would gather grapes from the earth’s vine, and trample them in the winepress of God’s wrath, and that blood would flow out of the press, and rise as high as a horse’s bridle. The passage was one that Gregory’s followers knew well. One bishop who had travelled in Urban’s train to Clermont openly wondered whether it was the enemies of reformatio who were destined to be crushed in the final harvest. In the event, though, it was not on the battlegrounds of the papacy’s great conflict with Henry IV that blood would be made to flow through the streets, but in Jerusalem. Urban’s speech had reverberated to miraculous effect. A great host of warriors drawn from across the Latin West had taken a familiar road. As pilgrims had been doing since the time of the millennium, they had journeyed across Hungary to Constantinople; and then from Constantinople to the Holy Land. Every attempt by the Saracens to halt them they had defeated. Finally, in the summer of 1099, the great army of warrior pilgrims had arrived before Jerusalem. On 15 July, they stormed its walls. The city was theirs. Then, once the slaughter was done, and they had dried their dripping swords, they headed for the tomb of Christ. There, in joy and disbelief, they offered up praises to God. Jerusalem – after centuries of Saracen rule – was Christian once again.

So extraordinary was the feat as to be barely believable – and the news redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy. Urban himself died a fortnight after the city’s capture, too soon for news of the great victory that he had inspired to reach him; but the programme of reform to which he had devoted his life was much burnished by the winning of the Holy City. Emperors since the time of Charlemagne had fought wars of conquest beneath the banner of Christ; but none had ever sent an entire army on pilgrimage. Warriors present at the capture of Jerusalem reported having seen ‘a beautiful person sitting atop a white horse’¹⁹ – and there were some prepared to wonder if it might not have been Christ himself. Whatever the truth of the mysterious horseman’s identity, one thing was clear: the Holy City had been won, not in the name of any king or emperor, but in that of a much more universal cause.

But what name to give this cause? Back in the Latin West, the word starting to be used was one that, until the capture of Jerusalem, had barely been heard. The warrior pilgrims, so it came to be said, had fought under the banner of Christianitas: Christendom. Such a categorisation – divorced as it was from the dynasties of earthly kings and the holdings of feudal lords – was one well suited to the ambitions of the papacy. Who better to stand at the head of Christendom than the heir of Saint Peter? Less than a century after Henry III had deposed three popes in a single year, the Roman Church had carved out a role of leadership for itself so powerful that Henry’s grandson, the son of Henry IV, was brought in 1122 to sue for peace. In that year, in Worms, where his father had once commanded Gregory VII to abdicate, Henry V agreed a momentous concordat. By its terms, the fifty-year-old quarrel over the investiture of imperial bishops was finally brought to an end. Although ostensibly a compromise, time would demonstrate that victory was decisively the papacy’s. Decisive too was the increasing acceptance of another key demand of the reformers: that the clergy distinguish themselves from the great mass of the Christian people – the laicus, or ‘laity’ – by embracing celibacy. By 1148, when yet another papal decree banning priests from having wives or concubines was promulgated, the response of many was to roll their eyes. ‘Futile and ludicrous – for who does not know already that it is unlawful?’²⁰

Increasingly, then, the separation of church from state was an upheaval manifest across the whole of Christendom. Wherever a priest was called upon to minister to the laity, even in the humblest, the most isolated village, there the impact of reformatio could be felt. The establishment of the Roman Church as something more than merely a first among equals, as ‘the general forum of all clergy and all churches’,²¹ gave clerics across the Latin West a common identity that they had not previously possessed. In the various kingdoms, fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout the world’.²²

Emperors and kings, although they might try to take a stand against it, would repeatedly find themselves left bruised by the attempt. Not since the age of Constantine and his heirs had any one man exercised an authority over so wide a sweep of Europe as did the bishop of the ancient capital of the world. His open claim was to the ‘rights of heavenly and earthly empire’;²³ his legates travelled to barbarous lands and expected to be heard; his court, in an echo of the building where the Roman Senate had once met, was known as the ‘Curia’. Yet the pope was no Caesar. His assertion of supremacy was not founded on force of arms, nor the rank of his ministers on their lineage or their wealth. The Church that had emerged from the Gregorian reformatio was instead an institution of a kind never before witnessed: one that had not merely come to think of itself as sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so. ‘The Pope,’ Gregory VII had affirmed, ‘may be judged by no one.’²⁴ All Christian people, even kings, even emperors, were subject to his rulings. The Curia provided Christendom with its final court of appeal. A supreme paradox: that the Church, by rending itself free of the secular, had itself become a state.

And a very novel kind of state, what was more. The pope’s writ was above all a legal one. His supremacy over the clergy; his regulation of the borders between church and court; his provision of justice to those who sought restitution from what, a century on from Canossa, was coming to be called the ‘secular arm’: all were dependent on armies of lawyers. It was clerks with pens, not knights with lances, who were the papacy’s shock-troops. ‘Who but God has written the law of nature in the hearts of men?’²⁵ So Augustine had once asked. Here, in a conviction that reached ultimately back to Saint Paul, lay the surest basis for the papacy’s claim to a universal authority. The order defined by the Roman Church was one that consciously set itself against primordial customs rooted in the sump of paganism, or ephemeral codes drawn up on the whims of kings, or mildewed charters. Only one law could maintain for the entirety of Christendom the ties of justice and charity that bound together a properly Christian society: ‘the eternal law, that creates and rules the universe’.²⁶ This was not an order that could be administered by priests alone.

Yet lawyers, back in the first flush of reformatio, had counted for little. Their entrance onto the great stage of Christendom – certainly compared to that of the warrior pilgrims who, inspired by Urban II, had marched on Jerusalem – was little celebrated in chronicle or song; but would prove, in the long run, incalculably more decisive. In 1088, the same year that Urban became pope, one of his most eminent supporters had helped to establish a new nerve-centre for the transfiguration of Christian society: a law school in the Italian city of Bologna. The Countess Matilda, heiress to a great swathe of lands in Tuscany, and a woman as indomitable as she was pious, had consistently stood in the eye of the Gregorian storm. It was she, in 1077, who had been Gregory’s host at Canossa; and it was she, in the decade that followed his death, who had inflicted such military damage on Henry IV that he had eventually withdrawn from Italy for good. Perhaps the most enduring contribution made by Matilda to the cause of reformatio, though, would prove to be her sponsorship of Irnerius, a Bolognese jurist. His commentaries on a vast corpus of Roman legal rulings, discovered only a few years previously mouldering in an ancient library, had made accessible to the Christian West what the Islamic world had long taken for granted: an entire system of law with ambitions to cover every aspect of human existence. That the texts studied by Irnerius were of human rather than divine origin did not prevent him from assuming that they possessed a timeless significance: that they were as applicable in the present as they had been back in the days of the Caesars. The enthusiasm for his researches, and for the great field of study that they opened up, proved immense. Enterprising young men began flocking to Bologna. Anxious to set themselves on a secure legal footing, those from Italy and those from north of the Alps formed themselves into twin guilds: universitates. Within decades, Bologna had become the prototype of something never seen before: a university town. Even though Irnerius himself was no enthusiast for reformatio, there could no doubting whose cause this most benefited. Certainly, it did not take long for the path from university to Curia to become a thoroughly well-trodden one.

Bologna, though, was not merely a finishing school for papal clerks. There were scholars in the city with broader horizons. Partisans of reformatio, perusing the rediscovered corpus of Roman law, could not help but note a glaring absence. For centuries, ever since the great assembly of bishops convened by Constantine at Nicaea, councils of the Church had been meeting and issuing canons. No one, however, had ever thought to collate them. Various efforts had been made to rectify this in the decades that followed the millennium; but only in the wake of Irnerius’ labours was it definitively achieved. The Decretum – ascribed by tradition to a single monk named Gratian, and completed around 1150 – was a labour of decades.²⁷ Indisputably, the effort required was prodigious. Canon law did not consist merely of canons. There were papal rulings to be tracked down as well, and decrees passed by other bishops, and compilations of penances. Not merely scattered, these were often downright contradictory. The challenge faced by Gratian in making sense of them was freely acknowledged by the alternative title given to the Decretum: the Concordance of Discordant Canons.

How to iron out the inconsistencies? Gratian and his colleagues had two recourses. There was the guidance provided by scripture, of course, and by the Church Fathers – men such as Irenaeus, and Origen, and Augustine. Yet even these authorities did not provide Gratian with what Muslim lawyers had long taken for granted: a comprehensive body of written rulings supposedly deriving from God himself. No Christians had ever had such a resource. God, so they believed, wrote his rulings on the human heart. Paul’s authority on this score was definitive. ‘The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’ Here, for Gratian, was the foundation-stone of justice. So important to him was the command that he opened the Decretum by citing it. Echoing the Stoics much as Paul had done, he opted to define it as natural law – and the key to fashioning a properly Christian legal system. All souls were equal in the eyes of God. Only if it were founded on this assumption could justice truly be done. Anything obstructing it had to go. ‘Enactments, whether ecclesiastical or secular, if they are proved to be contrary to natural law, must be totally excluded.’²⁸

Much flowed from this formulation that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Age-old presumptions were being decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted. Clerks trained in Bologna were agents of revolution as well as of order. Legally constituted, university-trained, they constituted a new breed of professional. Gratian, by providing them with both a criterion and a sanction for weeding out objectionable customs, had transfigured the very understanding of law. No longer did it exist to uphold the differences in status that Roman jurists and Frankish kings alike had always taken for granted. Instead, its purpose was to provide equal justice to every individual, regardless of rank, or wealth, or lineage – for every individual was equally a child of God.

Gratian, by inscribing this conviction into the Decretum, had served to set the study of law upon a new and radical course. The task of a canon lawyer, like that of a gardener, was never done. The weeds were always sprouting, always menacing the flowers. Unlike the great corpus of Roman law, which scholars in Bologna regarded as complete, and therefore immutable, canon law was oriented to the future as well as to the past. Commentators on the Decretum worked on the assumption that it could always be improved. To cite an ancient authority might also require reflection on how best to provide it with legal sanction in the here and now. How, for instance, were the Christian people to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that ‘the use of all things should be common to all’?²⁹ The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in Bologna. By 1200, half a century after the completion of the Decretum, a solution had finally been arrived at – and it was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to a growing number of legal scholars, iure naturali – ‘in accordance with natural law’. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. Instead, he was merely taking what was properly owed him. It was the wealthy miser, not the starving thief, who was the object of divine disapproval. Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers concluded, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered a legal obligation.

That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’.

Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

In 1140, half a century after Urban II’s visit to Cluny, the most famous man in Christendom arrived in the abbey. Peter Abelard’s celebrity was founded, not on feats of arms, but on the vocation of learning which, as a young man, he had exuberantly embraced in preference to knighthood. Renowned for his ‘inestimable cleverness, unsurpassed memory and superhuman capacity’,³⁰ Abelard had made his name on the great stage of the most glamorous city in the Latin world: Paris. Home to the court of the French king, it was also a powerhouse of scholarship. Nowhere else, not even Bologna, could rival the sheer brilliance, self-conceit and daring of its intellectuals. Abelard’s star had shone with a particular intensity. Thousands, it was said, had flocked to his lectures. Necks would crane when he walked down the street. Girls would swoon. No one had contributed more to the lustre of the schools in Paris, and to their international reputation, than the master who, with typical modesty, liked to think of himself as ‘the only philosopher in the world’.³¹

Abelard’s fame, though, had long since shaded into notoriety. Combative as well as vain, his ability to bounce back from crises was rivalled only by his genius for precipitating them in the first place. His status as the leading light of the Paris schools had been secured on the back of repeated quarrels with his own teachers. Then, in 1115, he had embarked on the most scandalous of all his adventures: a secret affair with a brilliantly precocious student, ‘supreme in the abundance of her learning, and not at all bad-looking’,³² named Héloïse. Shortly after a clandestine marriage, Abelard had been cornered by thugs hired by his new wife’s uncle, pinned down in his bed and castrated. The humiliated victim had retired to a monastery; Héloïse, on his insistence, to a convent. Yet even as a monk, Abelard had found it impossible to stay out of trouble. It was a measure of his prestige that Saint-Denis, the monastery six miles north of Paris where he had been offered sanctuary, was the mother house of the very kingdom of France; and yet Abelard, investigating its early history, had delighted in demonstrating that the traditional account of its origins was almost certainly bogus. Naturally, this had not gone down well with his fellow monks; and so Abelard, defying the rule that required religiones never to leave a monastery without express permission, had returned to the road. Variously, he had lived as a hermit, as an abbot on the wild Atlantic coast, and as a teacher once again in Paris. His charisma, despite the passing of the years, remained undimmed. So too his capacity for attracting mingled hostility and adulation. Finally, in his seventh decade, there came the gravest crisis of all: his formal condemnation as a heretic. The terms of his punishment were expressed in two letters sent from Rome in the summer of 1140. Christendom’s most brilliant scholar was sentenced to have his books burned ‘wherever they may be found’;³³ its most brilliant orator to submit to perpetual silence.

Abelard had skirted such a fate once before. Back in 1121, he had been convicted of heretical teachings on the Trinity, and ordered to burn one of his own books: a sentence that had caused him more agony, he subsequently declared, than the loss of his testicles. His judge then, as in 1140, had been a papal legate. The papacy, in its determination to provide justice for the whole of Christendom, was determined as well to patrol the acceptable frontiers of belief. This was hardly surprising. Without the sanction provided by the great framework of Christian teaching, the right of the Roman Church to sit in judgement over king and peasant alike would be as nothing. A scholar such as Abelard, whose entire career had been a restless buffeting against the claims to authority of bishops and abbots, was bound to cause them alarm. By 1140, when he was brought to his second trial, the capacity of papal lawyers to define the bounds of orthodoxy was set on firmer foundations than it had been even two decades previously. The king of France himself attended Abelard’s second summons to court. Abelard, rather than answer his accusers, appealed directly to the pope. When news of his sentence arrived, he promptly headed for Rome, on the grounds that – in the long run – its justice ‘never failed anyone’. His trial, as public a topic of gossip as any ever administered by papal lawyers, appeared decisively to have affirmed their grip on what Christians might and might not believe.

And yet there was, for all that, no consensus that Abelard deserved to be silenced. The charges of heresy were furiously disputed – not least by Abelard himself. Even though it had taken him over a decade to recover from his first conviction and return to teaching in Paris, he had never once doubted that it was his critics who were in the wrong. Abelard’s devotion to God was as unstinting as his conceit. When Héloïse, writing to him from her convent, confessed that she dreamed of him even while participating in the eucharist, and that she would rather renounce heaven than her passion for him, his reply was only seemingly severe. By urging her to devote herself, not to memories of their love, but to her duties as a nun, his hope was to set his wife back on the road to salvation. Abelard himself had embarked in a very similar spirit on a great study of the Church Fathers. Discovering in their writings repeated contradictions, repeated challenges to the tenets of Christian belief, he had compiled entire lists of them, carefully catalogued and ordered – but not out of any ambition to challenge the Church’s teachings. Quite the contrary. Abelard no more aimed at rending the great fabric of Christian orthodoxy than did the compilers of canon law. His goal, like that of Gratian, was to bring harmony where there was discord. He too believed in progress. ‘By doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we perceive the truth.’³⁴ Here was the maxim that defined Abelard’s entire theology – and enabled him to promise his students an understanding more profound than that of the Church Fathers themselves. By applying the standards of reason to their writings, so he taught, a scholar could aspire to behold Christian truth in its proper perspective: clear, and whole, and logically ordered. Not even Abelard was so immodest as to claim a stature equivalent to that of Origen or Augustine; but he did aspire, by standing on their shoulders, to see further than they had done. This, to his accusers, was the expression of a monstrous arrogance, one that, ‘by assuming the entire nature of God to lie within the grasp of human reason, threatens the good name of the Christian faith’.³⁵ But to his admirers, it was thrilling. And there were, among these admirers, some who stood very high in the Church indeed.

This was why, in the summer of 1140, when Abelard stopped at Cluny on his way to Rome, he was treated as an honoured guest. No one could provide a surer sanctuary than its abbot. Peter the Venerable was, as his sobriquet implied, a man of unimpeachable sanctity, and the greatness of his monastery bestowed upon him a standing that was, perhaps, second only to that of the pope himself. Although Peter could not redeem Abelard’s heresies from condemnation, he was able, by virtue of his office and his connections, to secure a personal absolution for the embattled fugitive. When, two years after his arrival at Cluny, Abelard finally succumbed to exhaustion and old age, the respect shown his memory was startling. Not only did Peter, against all convention, send the body to Héloïse for burial, he escorted the coffin himself. In an epitaph intended to be widely read, the abbot described the dead philosopher as ‘the Aristotle of our age’. The attempt by Abelard’s enemies to damn his reputation, and to cast as heretical his insistence that the mysteries of the divine word might be deciphered by means of logic, was denied a decisive victory. His mystique survived his death. When, some two decades after burying her husband, Héloïse followed him into the grave, he is said to have reached out to hold her as she was laid beside him. Generations of students likewise folded themselves into Abelard’s posthumous embrace. By 1200, Paris could boast a university as vibrant as Bologna’s. The conviction Abelard had devoted his life to promoting – that God’s order was rational, and governed by rules that mortals could aspire to comprehend – had become, less than a century after his death, an orthodoxy upheld by papal legates. Those who taught it, far from being seen as a menace, were now allies to be defended. In 1215, a statute was promulgated in the name of the pope, legally affirming the independence of Paris’ university from the bishop. A year earlier, a similar measure had established the legal status of the colleges that, over the preceding decades, had begun to appear in the English town of Oxford. Universities were soon mush-rooming across Christendom. Not merely tolerated, the methods of enquiry pioneered by Abelard had been institutionalised.

‘It is by God’s laws that the whole scheme of things is governed.’³⁶ So Augustine, contemplating the immensity of the cosmos, had declared. Although theology, unsurprisingly, reigned in Paris and Oxford as the queen of sciences, there was no lack of other fields of study in which God’s laws were also to be distinguished. The workings of nature – of the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and of the elements, and of the distribution of matter, and of wild animals, and of the human body – all bore witness to their existence. It was no offence against God, then, to argue, as Abelard did, ‘that the constitution or development of everything that originates without miracles can be adequately accounted for’.³⁷ Quite the contrary. To identify the laws that governed the universe was to honour the Lord God who had formulated them. This conviction, far from perturbing the gatekeepers of the new universities, was precisely what animated them. Philosophy, which to many of Abelard’s opponents had been a dirty word, came to lie at the heart of the curriculum. Investigation into the workings of nature provided its particular foundation. The study of animals and plants, of astronomy, even of mathematics: all came to be categorised as natural philosophy. The truest miracle was not the miraculous, but the opposite: the ordered running of heaven and earth.

To believe this was not to doubt God’s absolute power. Anything was possible to him, and his will was unfathomable. On this, the record of scripture was clear. He had divided seas, and halted the passage of the sun across the sky, and might readily do so again. Yet scripture was clear as well that even the Almighty God might submit himself to a legal obligation. So it was, after flooding the world, that he had set a rainbow in the clouds, as the sign of a compact, that never again would he send waters ‘to destroy all life’;³⁸ so it was, in conversation with Abraham, that he had sworn a covenant, and with Moses decreed its terms. Yet the profoundest submission, the most shocking, was neither of these. ‘He freed us from our sins, and from his own wrath, and from hell, and from the power of the Devil, whom he came to vanquish for us, because we were unable to do it, and he purchased for us the kingdom of heaven; and by doing all these things, he manifested the greatness of his love for us.’³⁹ Thus Anselm, writing as Abelard was coming of age, had described the crucifixion. Humanity, lost to sin, had been redeemed by Christ. But how? The question was one that had haunted Abelard and his generation. Various answers had been attempted. Some had cast Christ’s death as a ransom paid to Satan; others as the resolution of a lawsuit between heaven and hell. Abelard, following in Anselm’s wake, had been more subtle. Christ had submitted to torture on the Cross, not to satisfy the demands of the Devil, but to awaken humanity to love. ‘This it is to free us from slavery to sin, to gain for us the true liberty of the sons of God.’⁴⁰ The demands of justice had been met; and by meeting them, Christ had affirmed to all humanity that heaven and earth were indeed structured by laws. Yet he had done more as well. Abelard, writing to Héloïse, had urged her to contemplate Christ’s sufferings, and to learn from them the true nature of love. To press this argument on his anguished and abandoned wife was not to torment her, nor to abandon his lifelong commitment to reason. Abelard had seen no contradiction between his career as a logician and his passionate commitment to the tortured Christ. The road to wisdom led from the Cross.

Mystery and reason: Christianity embraced them both. God, who had summoned light and darkness into being by the power of his voice, and separated the seas from the land, had ordained as well that the whole of his creation be a monument to harmony. ‘It is upon distinctions of number that the underlying principles of everything depend.’⁴¹ So Abelard had written. A century on from his death, monuments to the cosmic order created by God, to its fusion of the miraculous and the geometric, were starting to rise above towns across Christendom. To enter Saint-Denis, where Abelard had first lived as a monk, was to behold an abbey utterly transformed. The rays of the sun, filtered through windows patterned with exquisitely coloured glass, illumined the interior with an unprecedented light, radiant as, at the end of days, the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven would be radiant, with a brilliance ‘like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as silver’.⁴² Yet if Saint-Denis, in the play of coloured rays across its interior, offered its visitors a glimpse of revelation, so also, in the soaring of its flying buttresses, in the elongation of its vaulted arches, did it proclaim its architect’s mastery of proportion and geometry. Dedicated in 1144, in the presence of the French king himself, the abbey had provided a model for a spectacular new style of cathedral. ‘The dull mind rises to the truth through material things.’⁴³ So it was written on the doors of Saint-Denis. The cathedrals built in the abbey’s wake provided a physical expression, on a scale never before attempted, of the distinctive order that had emerged in the Latin West. Modernitas, its enthusiasts called it: the final age of time. They were spokesmen for revolution: a revolution that had triumphed.