Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

16

‘Halfway Between God and Man’: the Techniques of Papal Thought-Control

Towards the end of January 1077, in the middle of a bitter winter, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV arrived in Canossa, twenty miles south-east of Parma in north Italy. Henry was barely twenty-three at the time, a large energetic man, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, a typical Teuton. He was in Canossa to see the pope, Gregory VII, ‘the Julius Caesar of the papacy’, who was staying in the fortress there. Gregory, then in his early fifties, would later be canonised by the Church but, as the Church historian William Barry has said, he was in reality ‘what men of the world call a fanatic’. Earlier that month he had gone so far as to excommunicate the emperor – ostensibly because Henry had dared to appoint bishops in Germany, and because he had taken no action to stamp out the then-widespread practice of simony, the buying of offices, or the equally common practice of allowing the clergy, bishops included, to be married.¹

On the 25th of the month, Henry was admitted to the precincts of the castle. In deep snow, barefoot, fasting and dressed in only a long shirt, he was, according to legend, made to wait in the freezing cold for three days before Gregory consented to see him, and absolve him. This very public humiliation was a dramatic turning point in a quarrel that had been brewing for years and would continue for two more centuries.

At the end of the previous year, in a work he wrote for himself, called Dictatus papae (The pope’s dictate), Gregory proclaimed that ‘the Roman Church has never erred, nor will it err in all eternity’. He claimed that the pope himself ‘may be judged by no one’, and that ‘a sentence passed by him may be retracted by no one’. Gregory claimed moreover that a pope ‘may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men’, and that ‘of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet’, that the pope ‘may be permitted to . . . depose emperors’ and that ‘he alone may use the imperial insignia.’²

This great quarrel, what became known as the Investiture Struggle, was a protracted conflict with secular authorities for control of Church offices, where Gregory was merely the first in a long line of popes who followed his lead.³ The process he began culminated in 1122 in the Concordat of Worms (during the reign of the French pope Calixtus II, 1119–1124), whereby the emperor agreed to give up spiritual investiture and allow free ecclesiastical elections. To historians, the Investiture Struggle, or Contest, was part of a wider movement appropriately called the Papal Revolution.⁴ Its most immediate consequence was that it freed the clergy from domination by emperors, kings, and the feudal nobility. With control over its own clergy, the papacy soon became what one observer called an ‘awesome, centralised bureaucratic powerhouse’, an institution in which literacy, a formidable tool in the Middle Ages, was concentrated.⁵ The papacy reached the pinnacle of its power more than a century later in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216), perhaps the most powerful of medieval and maybe of all popes, who frankly proclaimed that ‘As God, the creator of the universe, set two great lights in the firmament of heaven, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night [Genesis, 1:15, 16], so He set two great dignities in the firmament of the universal church . . . the greater to rule the day, that is, souls, and the lesser to rule the night, that is, bodies. These dignities are the papal authority and the royal power. And just as the moon gets her light from the sun, and is inferior to the sun in quality, quantity, position and effect, so the royal power gets the splendour of its dignity from the papal authority.’⁶

This was fighting talk, but it was by no means all. Between 1076 and 1302 there were two more papal bulls asserting superiority of the papacy and four more kings were either excommunicated or threatened with it. The 1302 bull Unam sanctam is widely regarded as the ne plus ultra of the claims of the medieval papacy and certainly, the pope of the time, Boniface VIII, meant it to be an assertion of his continued paramountcy.⁷ The bull made no specific reference to the man who had provoked it, Philip IV, king of France, who had forbidden the export of coin from his country (thereby depriving the papacy of substantial revenue). Though agreement between the two men might have been reached, Boniface insisted on complete submission, but this only provoked the king to issue his own list of charges against Boniface, which included heresy. The pope retaliated with yet another bull, releasing Philip’s subjects from their allegiance, an affront that was too much for a band of partisans loyal to the king, who broke into the papal quarters at Anagni, fifty miles south-east of Rome, and captured Boniface. He was soon released but died a month later, from shock. A successor was speedily elected but he reigned for only nine months and, after that, the cardinals wrangled for two more years before the archbishop of Bordeaux was elected. He surrounded himself with French cardinals and settled at Avignon, which was to remain the seat of papal government for more than six decades (1309–1378).⁸ These events astonished all Europe and marked a turning point in papal fortunes. Never again would the papacy enjoy the supremacy it had known between Dictatus papae and Unam sanctam.

This period of papal supremacy, what has also been called papal monarchy, between the bulls of 1075 and 1302, was one of the most extraordinary in all history. It concealed three battles going on simultaneously in the High Middle Ages, three competing ideas which, though interwoven in terms of chronology and location (and newsworthiness), were conceptually quite distinct. There was first the battle between popes and kings as to who was the more senior. In turn, this struggle reflected on the nature of divine authority and the place of kings in that hierarchy. In the previous chapter, and in Chapter 11, the distinction was made between the Eastern Church, where the king drew his authority directly as Jesus’ representative on earth, and the Western Church where the popes, drawing on the apostolic succession of St Peter, conferred authority on kings. In the West, as we shall see, because of the growth of cities and commerce, and the associated increased independence of a merchant class, who could not easily be suborned to make war on a king’s behalf, as the serfs and knights had before them, kingly authority came to be questioned more and more, parliaments and estates evolved to give voice to the new classes and their interests, and if the pope had greater power than the king, as it at times seemed, if kings weren’t supreme, then kings became more and more subject to law. This was such a massive change that its description and discussion is begun below, in this chapter, and continued in Chapter 24.

The third idea we shall consider is that broached in the previous (hinge) chapter, namely the new understanding of faith, as something interior, something to be found within a person, an aspect of the new individuality. In some ways, this is the most interesting issue of all. An interior faith, while it made good sense in theological terms, and arguably conformed more closely to the teachings of Jesus Christ, as revealed in the scriptures, actually served as a weakening corrosive so far as the organised Church was concerned. A private faith was beyond the reach of the priest or the bishop; furthermore, private faith might lapse into unorthodoxy, or even heresy. What unites these three issues, and other matters discussed in the rest of this chapter (though once again we should not make more of this unity than is there) is intellectual (and therefore political) authority. If kings and popes claimed divine sanction for their position and power, yet argued so bitterly and so publicly among themselves (as they did), if individual faith was the way to true salvation, wasn’t this a new situation, a new predicament, both theologically and politically? It meant that there was, perhaps, a point to the new individuality, and the new freedom to consider a secular world.

This is important because it helps explain several paradoxes of the period, an understanding of which is essential if the High Middle Ages are to be fully comprehended. The above brief analysis helps explain, for example, why two such strong popes – Gregory VII and Innocent III – emerged when the papacy was actually weakening over the longer term; it explains why, as we shall see, the College of Cardinals and the Curia were formed at this time: they were attempts to strengthen the corporate nature of the Church because of its inherent weaknesses in the new psychological/theological climate. It also helps explain the history of, in particular, England, France and Italy. There were attempts to reassert the kingly authority, as often as not by ‘religious’ means: the canonisation of Louis IX, and the attempts by the Capetians and Plantagenets to accrue sacrality to kingship by such devices as the ‘royal touch’, which, it was claimed, cured scrofula. But in England and France this was the time when, following the commercial revolution, the parliaments first asserted themselves, while in Italy, a country of city-states, the idea of the commune evolved as an entirely separate (secular) authority.

Each of these issues is a major topic of inquiry at the moment in the history of ideas. They relate intimately to the birth of the modern world and what, exactly, we mean by that. The Renaissance, as we shall see, is no longer regarded by professional historians as the birth of modernity. Instead, the period between 1050 and 1250 – in the church, in commerce, in politics and in scholarship – may well be, as R. W. S. Southern has said, the most important epoch in Western history apart from the equivalent time-frame 1750–1950. The changing fortunes of the papacy were intimately bound up with this.

Let us begin our detailed discussion with a return to medieval ideas about kingship. In the West, kingship had arisen in two different configurations. In the eastern part of the Roman empire, Hellenistic and Oriental traditions gave rise to a conception of the emperor as the ‘Expected One’ of Christian prophecy, representing God on earth. By invoking God’s name, the king could ensure prosperity and victory in war. This was also the idea adopted in Russia.⁹

In the western part of the Roman empire, on the other hand, kingship took its colour partly from the traditions of German tribes and partly from the expanding role of the Catholic Church. The Germanic word for king, Reinhard Bendix tells us, developed from the word for kindred. The ancient supernatural beliefs of the German pagans attributed charismatic power not to individuals but to entire clans (this was an idea which even Adolf Hitler, centuries later, would find compelling). The Germanic ruler, or king, was not therefore especially linked to the gods, any more than the rest of the clan, but he was, in general, a superior military leader. His successes reflected the supernatural qualities of the entire people, not just of himself.

Christians, on the other hand, inherited through Rome and the Jewish/Babylonian/ Greek traditions the idea of priest-rulers as separate from, but at least equal to, military rulers. In addition, as the Church had developed, the clergy had obtained more and more exemptions from various taxes and other obligations. Canon law had grown in importance, so that judicial sentences handed down by bishops came to be regarded ‘like the judgements of Christ himself’.¹⁰ This was reinforced by the fact that, in the early Middle Ages, the authority of the bishops tended to take the place of secular government, not least because the Church often attracted abler men than what was left of the imperial administration.

All this made for an important distinction between East and West. An eighth-century mosaic in the church of St John Lateran, in Rome, shows St Peter conferring spiritual authority on Pope Leo III, and temporal power on Charlemagne. In fact, Catholicism derives its authority from the Apostle, not from Christ directly as in the Greek Orthodox tradition. According to this belief in the apostolic succession of the papacy, St Peter elevates the spiritual pope over the temporal king.¹¹ Later images show St Peter handing the keys of heaven to the pope while the king looks on. According to St Ambrose, bishop of Milan, ‘the emperor is within the Church, not above it’.¹² In the East, in contrast, the Byzantine emperors prevailed over the church because they had defeated the Germanic invaders and were in full control, politically. Pope Gregory I (590–603) addressed the ruler in Constantinople as ‘Lord Emperor’ while he referred to the kings of western and northern Europe as ‘dearest sons’. In 751–752, Pippin, the Carolingian regent, was elected king by an assembly of nobles but was then immediately anointed by Bishop Bonifacius – the same procedure as that employed in the appointment of bishops. ‘The Western Church had assumed the function of consecrating, and hence of authenticating, the royal succession in contrast to the Eastern Church which by crowning the emperor symbolised the divine origin of his authority. The Western Church put the king under God’s law as interpreted by the king; the Eastern Church accepted the Emperor as representing Christ on earth.’ In the East the emperor was, as we would say, head of the church; in the West the position of kings and of the Holy Roman Emperor was much more ambiguous.¹³

As a result the power balance between pope and kings and emperors switched back and forth throughout the Middle Ages. Charlemagne, based at Aachen, took the title ‘by the Grace of God’, which was normally conferred by the pope, but it wasn’t enough: at court he was addressed in biblical terms, as ‘King David’. In other words, he saw himself as divinely endowed whatever the Catholic Church in Rome said.¹⁴ After his death, however, Charlemagne’s sons never enjoyed the same level of power and allowed themselves to be anointed at their coronations. Though this played into the hands of the papacy in one way, Charlemagne’s demise also meant that the pope, now lacking a powerful ally, was once more at the mercy of the notoriously unruly Roman nobility. The French kings, as we shall see, were also pitched against the pope, not least during the Avignon ‘captivity’. It was this set of circumstances which allowed the power of local bishops to grow and it was their various idiosyncrasies, profligacies and other abuses that would lead to the need for major reform in the Church.

A further complicating factor was that the Church itself was all the while extending its secular power. Thanks to bequests, it acquired more and more land, which was then the main form of wealth. In order to retain the support of the Church, kings became patrons, endowing monasteries, for example, which both enriched the church and gave clerics even stronger control over men’s minds. ‘Only if kings walked the ways of righteousness, as the Church interpreted those ways, could they obtain felicity, good harvests, and victory over their enemies.’¹⁵ In such circumstances, it was only a matter of time before something very like the Investiture Struggle came about.

Before we return to that, however, there is one other medieval idea to consider: feudalism. ‘Feudalism’ isn’t a feudal word. It was invented in the seventeenth century, popularised by Montesquieu and adopted by Karl Marx among others.¹⁶ The actual words used at the time to describe the feudal hierarchy were ‘vassalage’ and ‘lordship’. Feudalism was, in fact, a specific form of decentralised government that prevailed in northern and western Europe from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. Its basic characteristic was lordship – political, economic and military power concentrated in the hands of an hereditary nobility. But in addition to vassalage or lordship, there were two other principles – a property element (fief), and the decentralisation of government and law.

The embryo of feudalism, according to the historian Norman Cantor, was the comitatus or gefolge, the Germanic war band, based on the loyalty of warriors to their leader in return for protection. The term ‘vassal’ comes from a Celtic word meaning ‘boy’ and, certainly to begin with, the ‘warriors’ were often no more than gangs of boys. (This was very different from later ideas about ‘chivalrous knights’.) In the early days, vassals had nothing to do with holding land – they lived in a barracks provided by their lord, who also clothed and fed them. What changed all this was a steady revolution in military technology. In the first place, the invention of the stirrup, in China, and its introduction into Europe, changed fundamentally the relationship between cavalry and infantry. The stirrup enabled the horseman to concentrate the combined force of weight and speed at the point of impact – at the end of his lance – radically enhancing his advantage.¹⁷ But this change brought with it associated problems. The knight’s armour, his sword and spurs, and the bits and bridles for his horses, were very expensive. War-horses were even more costly: knights needed at least two for battle proper, and these creatures also had to be fitted out with armour. The knight further needed several pack horses to move the equipment to the site of battle. Thus it was that the lords who wanted such chevaliers or cniht (knights) to fight for them found it expedient to invest (enfeoff) them with their own manorial estates, out of which they might extract the necessary income to fulfil their obligations in battle. This inspired a land-hunger in the chevaliers which helped the formation of Europe. One effect of this situation, however, was that government and legal authority, or at least some of it, passed down from the king to his great feudal vassals, who appropriated the right to collect taxes and to hold courts, where they heard pleas and administered their own rough (sometimes very rough) justice. This was a system that worked only up to a point. It meant that the countryside – of France and England in particular – was divided into a patchwork of territories with different and overlapping systems of taxes, jurisdictions and loyalties. The king was, in effect, little more than the first among equals in this system.

The Church had at first been hostile to this new set of arrangements, but before long the bishops – increasingly independent, as we have seen – found they could accommodate to the system as they themselves became vassals and lords in their own right, fully participating in feudal society except for actually making war. The hierarchical system, of interlocking loyalties, now stretched, it was said, throughout society ‘and on to the heavenly regions’.¹⁸

Recent scholarship has modified this traditional picture in important ways. As was mentioned earlier, the whole concept of ‘feudalism’, as generally understood, has been called into question, in particular the central importance of lord and knight. What is now regarded as more important is the overall situation of the serf, many more of whom are now understood to have been landowners and therefore, in that sense, free. Another factor is that, on occasions at least, the bishops did make war: in 1381 peasants rising in East Anglia were put down militarily by Bishop Despenser. The fact that a good proportion of peasants owned land (as high as 40 per cent in some areas) throws the lord/knight/fealty network into some relief. When also put alongside the greater numbers of the rising mercantile class, feudalism can be seen as an aspect of kingly weakness. And what happened in the High Middle Ages was that a weakening papacy fought weakening kings. The papacy lost (eventually, after a long time) whereas kings, perhaps because there were more of them, were more flexible in their reactions to the changes going on and, outside Italy, consolidated their position. Perhaps the popes fought too many battles on too many fronts. But that too was a sign of weakness.

Despite the involvement of bishops in feudal society, power swung back to the kings in Germany, especially during the reign of Otto I the Great (936–973). He insisted on being crowned by the archbishop of Mainz and effectively used the solidifying power of the church to gain the ascendancy over the other vassals and dukes. At the same time, he asserted his authority over bishops, thanks to property laws special to Germany, which meant that monasteries on royal lands actually belonged to the royal family, not the Church. A consequence of this was that, within Ottonian lands, the king had better control over the election of senior clergy than kings did anywhere else. This meant that the Investiture Struggle, when it came about, took place in Germany.

There was one other factor which lay behind the Struggle. Apart from the papacy, there was a semi-separate spiritual force in western Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and it too was a unifying element. This was the Benedictine order. And amid this order it was the emergence of Cluny, in southern Burgundy, that made the most impact. ‘The Cluniac programme became the intellectual expression of the prevailing world order.’¹⁹ The monastery at Cluny was the largest in all Europe, and the best endowed, and the religious life it cultivated became hugely influential.

The original order had been revised in 817 by St Benedict of Aniane, who had been given the task by Louis the Pious of introducing stability into monastic life. The crucial change that had come about in the intervening centuries was that Benedictines no longer supported themselves with their physical labour.²⁰ Instead, they now acted primarily as intercessors with the deity by means of an elaborate liturgy – which they supplemented with education, political and economic duties (levels of pastoral care improved and this had an effect in invigorating parish life). This was a new role, for the Benedictines anyway – and it was reinforced by their ‘feudal’ (or at least hierarchical) structure. Through a series of intelligent and long-lived abbots, in particular Odilo (d. 1049) and Hugh the Great (d. 1109), Cluny, while becoming known for the beauty of its liturgical devotions, established a chain of houses across northern Europe – Germany, Normandy, England – which accepted Cluniac domination, as vassals accepted direction from the next in line above in their system.

This evolving idea, of monks as intercessors, had important consequences. Kings and nobles hurried to endow the Cluniac monasteries, anxious to be mentioned in their prayers. Nobles would retreat to monasteries to die, believing they were closer to heaven. Monastic intercession encouraged a spate of church building and adoration of the clergy. But Cluny’s most direct effect on history came through its expansion into Germany at the time of Henry III (1039–1056). Henry married the daughter of the duke of Aquitaine, whose house had founded Cluny in the first place, but Henry had larger ideas about theocratic kingship and saw the monastery as essential to his aims. He wanted to complete the Christianisation of Europe but, in order to do so, certain matters had to be attended to first. Henry believed, or chose to believe, that at his coronation he had received the sacraments of his office, and that this gave him the spiritual authority to consecrate bishops and order the affairs of the Church. He also believed that he needed to reform the papacy which had been very weak for as much as a century. In 1045, for example, there were three rival popes in Rome and, partly as a result of this, Henry called a synod in that year to begin reform. Three Germans were appointed pope in quick succession, the last of whom, Leo IX (1049–1054), was Henry’s relative. Before long, this pattern would prove too much for other churchmen, provoking the so-called Gregorian reform of the Church. And that, in its turn, precipitated the investiture controversy.

Gregorian reform is the name historians now give to a period, 1050–1130, when four popes worked hard to change both the form of worship – the biggest upheaval since St Augustine’s time – and the status of the papacy, which had been languishing for centuries, proscribed locally by the rival claims of Roman noble families and internationally, as we have seen, by the various kings around Europe. This joint aim has been described as nothing less than a world revolution, ‘the first in western history’.²¹ As a result, the Church would gain a fair measure of freedom from secular control, there would be a marked improvement in the intellectual and moral level of the clergy, and the church itself would become a superstate, governed from Rome by the papal administration, or Curia.

But the Gregorian reforms were also associated with an even more important ground-shift in religious feeling in the eleventh century: the growth of lay piety. This came about partly as a reaction to the Cluniac movement. Thanks to the spread of the order across Europe, a devout attitude towards dogma, and a love of elaborate ritual (a ‘relentless liturgy’) became almost as common among ordinary people as it had been hitherto among monks and priests. But the self-representation of the Cluniacs as intercessors, in particular, while it satisfied the needs of many, conflicted with the new interiorisation of faith, where intercessors were not deemed necessary or desirable. More than that, the interiorisation of faith was leading some people in unusual and unorthodox directions: there was a resurgence of heresy. So two contradictory things were happening at once – an elaborate centralisation of worship, centring on the clergy as intercessors, and a proliferation of private beliefs, a good few of which could be characterised as heresy. This was the intellectual/emotional background to the rise of a new attitude to monastic life in the eleventh century: a reaction against Cluny. It involved a return to asceticism and eremitism and resulted, soon enough, in the Cistercian and Franciscan movements.

The idea behind the Cistercian reform was the restitution of the original Benedictine practice. The founder, Robert of Molême (c. 1027–1110), objected to the complexity of Cluniac art, architecture and in particular its liturgy, which he thought ‘had taken embellishment to the point of no return’, detracting from worship rather than enhancing it.²² In its place, he proposed an austere lifestyle, with hard labour, modest clothing and a vegetarian diet. He positioned his Cistercian abbeys on the remote fringes of civilisation, away from temptation. The abbeys themselves were modest and plain affairs, relying on line and form for their aesthetic appeal, rather than decoration. A certain serendipity was at work here, too, since one effect of locating the Cistercian abbeys in remote areas meant that they became involved in the agricultural revival that took place at this time, many of them becoming models of efficient estate management, which added to their importance and influence. But that influence was not simply organisational: they also became spiritual leaders. One reason for this was the work of Bernard of Clairvaux. The son of a nobleman from Burgundy, Bernard received his calling at the age of twenty-two. Highly familiar with the classics, he developed a mellifluous writing and speaking style, which helped him serve several popes and more than one king. He was one of those who advocated Church councils as a way to prevent heretical deviation, and he was an ardent champion of the Crusades, the course of action which took him farthest from Benedict’s original ideal of the monk as a man of peace. He also promoted devotion to the Virgin Mary.

The cult of the Virgin was one of the more important examples of popular piety in the twelfth century. It was Bernard’s contribution to conceive of Mary as, in a sense, the symbol for divine love, ‘the mother of all mercies’, whose intercession offered the chance of salvation to all. She is ‘The flower upon which rests the Holy Spirit’, said Bernard. Mary had not been an important figure in the early Church but through Bernard she became a valued addition to the deity and the Son and the Holy Spirit in helping people approach God.²³ Bernard did not agree with some of his contemporaries that the Virgin was exempt from original sin. His point was that Mary was important for her humility – her willingness to serve as the vehicle for Christ’s arrival on earth. Following Benedict, Bernard argued that humility is the queen of virtues and it was this which led Mary to accept the divine plan freely. ‘Through her, God, Who could have accomplished our redemption any way He wanted, teaches us the importance of our voluntary collaboration with divine grace.’²⁴ In fact, Mariolatry stood for even more than that. As Marina Warner has pointed out, ‘. . . by contrasting human women with the sublime perfection of the Virgin, earthly love could be discredited and men’s eyes turned once again heavenwards’.²⁵ The new concentration on the Holy Family, implied by the cult of the Virgin, distinguished post-1000 Christianity from its earlier forms. In an effort to increase piety, the Church was now more concerned with this world.²⁶

The friars, who emerged in the thirteenth century, did so to fill a gap not addressed by either priests or monks. The founders of the friars, Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) and Dominic Guzmán (c. 1170–1234), both concluded that what the Church needed at that time was clerics who were mobile, free to take to the streets, to preach, hear confessions and minister to people where they were, living their lives. Their very freedom made the friars highly organised, and open-minded: they adapted their orders to admit women and what they called ‘tertiaries’, lay people who associated themselves with their spirituality.

The Franciscans took their colour from their founder. Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant. He led a carefree life as a boy, and was known for his courtesy and cheerfulness.²⁷ ‘To the world a Sun is born,’ wrote Dante of Francis. He loved French literature, in particular lyric poetry, and ‘Francis’ (‘Frenchie’) was in fact a nickname he was given because of his literary tastes. He was converted, if that is the word, in two stages. Captured in a skirmish between the Assisians and Perugians, he caught a fever and turned to God. Later, after his release, he one day met a leper on the road. There was a great fear of lepers in those days – they were required to carry bells and ring them when approaching a healthy person. Instead of giving this particular leper a wide berth, Francis embraced him. However, when he looked back no one was there and Francis became convinced it had been Christ who had appeared before him, and converted loathing into brotherly love. Extraordinarily moved by this experience, Francis used his family wealth to rebuild a ruined church. When challenged by his father, the young man – in front of the bishop of Assisi and the assembled crowds – turned his back on his family wealth and embraced poverty. It is a story reminiscent in some ways of the Buddha.

Not all conversions are as fruitful. But Francis’ charisma was legendary. He thought that a religious leader taught best by giving a moral lead (though he was by all accounts an excellent preacher). His charisma meant that even when he preached to the animals this was not regarded as a mental aberration and he was still adored. Thanks to him the Franciscans venerated the infant Jesus and it is from this time that the Christmas crib was introduced. A number of other mystical experiences surrounded Francis, including an occasion when birds flocked around him with song and another when he received the ‘stigmata’, the physical wounds of the crucified Christ. These various episodes ensured that Francis was canonised within two years of his death, a world record. The main achievement of the Franciscans, following their founder’s example, was to establish that the purpose of theology was to ‘mobilise the heart and not merely to inform and convince the intellect’.²⁸ This was another aspect of the inward movement of faith.

But, in a sense, we are running ahead of ourselves. The new orders were a response to changes in lay piety but far from being the only ones. The fundamental aim of the Gregorian reform was to establish a unified world system, Christianitas, as Gregory himself called it.²⁹ There were three popes and a handful of cardinals who tried to bring about this ambitious reformation. (The term ‘cardinal’, incidentally, comes from the Latin word for the hinge of a door, the crucial device which helps open and close the way.³⁰)

The first of the three reformers, who inaugurated a great debate on the nature of a Christian society, was Peter Damian. Born as the orphan of a poor family, he was adopted by a priest and as a result received a good education. He was one of those who found Cluniac life too much involved with the world. One of his particular worries, where the Church was concerned, was the fact that so many of the clergy were either married or had children out of wedlock. Damian wrote an entire book denouncing these scandals, at the same time arguing strongly in favour of clerical celibacy. In Byzantium, ordinary priests were allowed to be married, though bishops were supposed to be celibate. (When a priest was promoted to bishop, his wife was expected to ‘do the decent thing’ and enter a convent.) But Damian was unhappy even with this: he believed that only if they were completely celibate would the clergy devote themselves exclusively to the Church, rather than use their offices to inveigle property and jobs for their offspring, a practice which was everywhere bringing the priesthood into disrepute. (It seems that ordinary lay people were little bothered by clerical concubines. The demand for priestly celibacy came from the top down and had as one of its aims making the clergy more separate from the laity.)

Damian was also the first to give rein to the new piety that was overtaking the Catholic Church, which was mentioned above and in the last chapter. This was the changed relationship between God and humanity. The original, jealous God of the Old Testament, which had dominated early medieval times, was now coming to be replaced by the more loving son as described in the New Testament, the God who suffered for our sins and whose ‘sorrowful mother’ was now being more and more invoked. In line with this, as has also been referred to, worship was becoming less a matter of formal, liturgical praying and singing, as in the Cluniac ideal, more an internal personal experience. In one way, this was enriching, in another it would prove unfortunate. Damian’s intense, internal approach to piety helped to release a fierce religiosity in many people, an uncontrollable emotionalism which would lead to fanaticism. It was this intensity which, as we shall see, led to the Crusades, to heresy, to anti-Semitism and inquisition.³¹

The second of the three makers of the Gregorian reform was Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida. He came from Lorraine and had been a monk at Cluny, where he too turned against the over-elaborate, all-consuming liturgy, feeling that the ideals of Cluny’s founder had been betrayed. As a highly educated and very clever cardinal, with a good knowledge of Greek, he was sent as papal ambassador to Constantinople. Not remotely diplomatic, his appointment there was abrasive and not wholly successful. He ended his visit in 1054 by excommunicating the patriarch on the Bosporus, formally recognising a schism that had been fermenting for centuries. (In some ways, this schism has never been healed.) On his return to Rome, Humbert took over as chief ideas man among those who wanted to see radical change. Beginning in 1059 he published two works which were the real starting point for what came later. The first was a papal election decree, an ambitious piece of work which set out a new manner of electing popes, a plan that excluded both the German emperor and the Roman people as had hitherto been the case. Instead, a college of cardinals (of about a dozen, in the first instance) was created and election was now fully in their hands. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this change: only a generation before, the German emperor had held the whip hand in papal elections. But the emperor of the day, Henry IV, was just then a minor, so Humbert calculated that such an opportunity might never come again. Humbert’s other book was actually called Three Books Against the Simoniacs and this was an anti-German tract which, as Norman Cantor says, was an attack on the whole ‘medieval equilibrium between the church and the world’. Even the tone of the book was new. Instead of adopting a high-flown rhetorical style, Humbert utilised the new learning, which is considered in the next chapter, in particular the so-called new logic, developed since the rediscovery of Aristotle. His style was controlled, cold even, but soaked through with a hatred of Germany. Its chief argument was that simony – the buying and selling of Church offices – was an unforgivable interference in Church affairs, and as dire as heresy.³²

He didn’t stop there. He went on to argue that if the clergy could be reformed in no other way, then the laity were entitled to consider the moral character of their priests and should they, too, be found wanting, the laity could refuse to take the sacraments from them. This was in effect a revival of the so-called Donatist doctrine, that the laity had a right to judge the priesthood. It was, intellectually and emotionally, a most dangerous development, the most provocative of reforms. It had for long been the practice for the church to argue that the efficacy of the sacraments was not dependent on the priest but on the divinely-constituted office. Now Humbert was throwing centuries of tradition by the wayside. It would lead, in the second half of the twelfth century, to the heretical movements which instigated both the inquisition and, in due course, the Protestant ideas that Martin Luther found so compelling.

The third of the reformers was not so much of an original thinker but he was the greatest organiser and synthesiser. This was Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII. Norman Cantor argues that the three greatest popes before the sixteenth century were Gregory I, Gregory VII and Innocent III, the last of whom we shall meet shortly. ‘And no pope was ever as controversial as Gregory VII, adored and hated in equal measure.’ Even before he became pope, Hildebrand had coerced Italian scholars into beginning the great codification and synthesis of canon law that would play such a part in the revival of Europe and the establishment of the new universities that are the subject of the next chapter. But what really drew the world’s attention was the publication, immediately after his election as pope in 1073, of Dictatus papae. This was by any measure a trenchant assertion of papal power, ‘a sensational and extremely radical document’.³³ As was mentioned above, the bull insisted that the Roman pontiff was sanctified by St Peter, that the papacy had never erred and, according to the scriptures, never would err. Only the papal office was universal in authority, said the bull, only the pope could appoint bishops, nothing was canonical without papal assent, no one could be a true believer unless he agreed with the pope, and the pope himself was beyond the judgement of any human being. The pope had the power to depose emperors, and people with grievances against their rulers could lawfully bring those grievances to the Holy See.

Breathtaking in its range, the bull was intended to create a new world order, subservient to Rome, and Gregory was perfectly aware of this. So great was the revolution proposed that not only the emperor and kings of northern Europe were unnerved by the bull; so too were the great ecclesiastics – the pope was proposing to change the modus vivendi that had existed for centuries. More than that, no medieval ruler had ever allowed a pope to interfere in the affairs of state. Most realised that a fight between popes and kings could not be far off. After the bull was published, however, Gregory did not sit on his hands but continued to develop his views in a series of pointed letters to Hermann, bishop of Metz. These were prepared in pamphlet form, as a series of questions put to the pope by the bishop, and sent to all the courts of Europe. In these letters, Gregory expanded his provocative views, further insisting that the state had no moral sanction, that royal power largely resulted from violence and crime, that the only legitimate authority in the world was that of the priesthood. Only complete Christianitas was acceptable.

In addition to this basic assault, however, Gregory also introduced – or reintroduced – an idea that had not been at the forefront of the church for some time. This was a concern for the poor. Gregory introduced the idea of the poor not so much as an economic issue as a quasi-political one. He himself instinctively sided with the downtrodden and at the same time loathed what he saw as their oppressors (kings included). Thus he introduced into Christianity a measure of social conscience and criticism, something it had lacked during the predominantly agricultural Middle Ages (though in his insistence on celibacy for priests, thousands of wives were turned out on to the street). This essentially emotional attitude towards poverty was a strengthening factor in the Church for a time; it proved popular among the new urban classes, by no means all of whom were happy with life in the new towns.³⁴ Gregory also implied that many of the well-to-do were spiritually poor, and this made him more popular than he might otherwise have been. But it wasn’t enough to put off the fight that was coming.

When Henry IV became king and emperor in 1065, it was just six years since Humbert had published his two books, one on electing the pope and the other on simony, both directed in particular against the Germans. Henry could not have been expected to go along with what was in those documents but in any case it took him until 1075 to stabilise his realm and reach a point where he felt sure that the peasants, burghers and aristocracy in Germany were content or at least quiescent. Then, a short time after Hildebrand became pope, as Gregory VII, the episcopal see of Milan fell vacant. Not long before, in 1073, Gregory had published Dictatus papae. A contest was looming and took material form when both Henry and Gregory proposed their own candidates for Milan. But Henry, fortified by his recent successes within his own territories, felt especially confident and so responded ‘robustly’ to the papal bull. He sent a letter to Rome in which, in frankly intemperate language, he damned Gregory as ‘at present not pope but false monk’.³⁵ The letter urged Gregory ‘to come down from the throne of Peter’ and was, in the words of one historian ‘contumacious and insulting’.³⁶

Gregory retaliated. He informed the bishops and abbots of Germany that, unless they refused to recognise Henry, they would be collectively excommunicated. He amassed support from rival political powers, in case there should be war. It was a successful manoeuvre – support haemorrhaged away from Henry and, at papal suggestion, the German nobility began to talk of electing a new king from another dynasty. Gregory rubbed salt into the wound by announcing that he would travel to Germany himself to preside personally over the assembly that would elect Henry’s replacement.

These were the circumstances that drew Henry to Canossa in the depths of winter, 1076–1077. His advisors had suggested that his only hope in the struggle was to personally seek absolution from Gregory. The unvarnished truth is probably that Henry was in no way penitent and that Gregory, for his part, would have preferred not to have absolved him. But both Matilda of Tuscany, a kinswoman of Henry (and in whose castle at Canossa the pope was staying), and Hugh of Cluny were present and appealing on the king’s behalf. Gregory could not risk Cluniac opposition nor that of other crowned heads across Europe, who were watching to see how high-handed he could be with a monarch who had made the journey personally to seek absolution. Henry was therefore absolved of his excommunication.

Today, excommunication holds few terrors for most of us but in the Middle Ages it was very different. In fact, Gregory VII had himself extended both the idea and practice of excommunication. The idea originated partly in the pagan ritual of devotio, when citizens who had committed serious crimes were sacrificed to the gods. In the process the criminals became sacer and were separated from everyone else.³⁷ In a world where law was weak, curses were added to contracts, as an additional means of enforcement, and this idea was also adopted by the early church. A final aspect was exile: Jews who married heathens during the Babylonian captivity were exiled and their property confiscated.³⁸ In the years before Jesus, in Palestine, heretics were banned from the synagogue and from community life. But the direct source of Christian excommunication was the gospel of Matthew, where it says that a Christian must admonish a sinner, at first privately, then in front of two or three witnesses and finally, and if necessary, before the whole church. ‘But if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican’ (Matthew 18: 17). The New Testament describes several incidents of social ostracism as a form of discipline. The concept of excommunication was first described in detail in a third-century Syrian document, the Didascalia, allegedly written by anonymous Apostles, which divides liturgical exclusion from social exclusion and describes the penance sinners must do to be brought back within the church. Sex, litigation, military duty, the baths, and the games were all forbidden to those who had been excommunicated.³⁹ Traditionally, however, the Church was always aware of the dangers of too much social exclusion – which might easily lead the sinner to the devil himself and so make matters worse.⁴⁰

In 1078, Gregory produced a canon, Quoniam multus, that was designed to limit the ‘contagion’ of excommunication, setting out prescribed lists of those who could have dealings with excommunicants without themselves being excommunicated. (This was in fact done to correct the ‘epidemic’ of excommunications that had been generated by Gregory’s very own papal reforms.) For example, an excommunicant’s family could associate with him: worried that husbands who couldn’t have sex with their wives would look elsewhere, the authorities took a pragmatic approach.⁴¹ Gratian used the term ‘anathema’ to mean full social and religious excommunication, confining excommunication itself to mean ‘mere’ liturgical exclusion.⁴² Only those convicted by the ecclesiastical courts could be anathematised, while excommunication was a matter of conscience and people could in theory excommunicate themselves. The Third Lateran Council (1179) excommunicated all heretics – excommunication for heresy was always much harsher than anything else and could lead to imprisonment and death.⁴³ Gratian’s division had become the norm by the turn of the twelfth/thirteenth centuries, but was by then known as ‘minor excommunication’ (exclusion from the liturgy) and ‘major excommunication’ (total social exclusion).⁴⁴

After Henry’s excommunication and subsequent absolution, there was now no need for Gregory to proceed to Germany and he returned to Rome. On the face of it, he had won a magnificent victory and had re-established the power of the church. (In returning Henry to royal status, he made him promise to obey future papal decrees.) But, at the same time, Henry had saved his kingdom and he now set about strengthening his position so that he would never again be in the position of weakness to which he had sunk before Canossa. The German Church rallied to his support and he conducted another – successful – campaign against the nobility. In this way it soon became clear that he had no intention of obeying papal decrees and, some time later, he was excommunicated again. The fact that he largely ignored this papal manoeuvre the second time around shows how much things had changed. In 1085 he finally obtained the revenge he had secretly sought all along, when he drove the pope from Rome, to southern Italy, ‘a humiliating exile from which Gregory did not return’.⁴⁵ Even Gregory was weaker than he appeared.

For many historians, this final outcome made the encounter at Canossa, in sporting terms, a draw or a tie. But that is not the same as saying that nothing came of it. Henry’s appearance before the pope dealt a mortal blow to the very idea of theocratic kingship, comforting to the various ‘estates’ around Europe, and gave sustenance to the idea that popes had the right to judge kings. This undoubtedly boosted the political muscle of the Catholic Church but at the same time many people – crowned heads in particular – had not exactly relished the high-handed and humiliating way Gregory had used, or abused, his power. One of the men who succeeded Gregory, Urban II (1088–1099), began to seek a way out of the perpetual conflict with the emperor and attempted to unite Europe behind Rome through the First Crusade. But even his style of papacy was too much for many people and from this time on there emerged cardinals of a different stripe – quiet diplomats, bureaucrats whose experience told them that more could be achieved behind the scenes by discussion than by confrontation. Thus the papacy was changed no less fundamentally by Canossa than was the status of kings. The Curia was aware of the papacy’s inherent weaknesses even if the more pugnacious popes were not.

While he was pope, Gregory also kept a keen eye on what became known as the Reconquista in Spain. Since the Muslims had conquered the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century, the ousted Christian nobles had sought refuge in the Pyrenees where, over two centuries, they had regrouped and, by the end of the tenth century, had regained at least some of the ground lost. It would take another four hundred years, to the end of the fifteenth century, before Muslim control was extinguished but, in the process, Christians came face-to-face with the Islamic idea of jihad, holy war, with its doctrine that the highest morality was to die fighting, on behalf of God.⁴⁶ In Christianity, the idea of ‘just war’ went back to St Augustine of Hippo and beyond, and Hildebrand was an ardent Augustinian. Just then Muslims were in control in the Middle East, as they were in Spain, and Christ’s sepulchre in Jerusalem was in the hands of unbelievers. When all this was added to the desire to reunite Eastern and Western Churches (as an effective way to combat the threat of Islam) the idea of crusade was born.⁴⁷

Of course, there were other reasons. A crusade would be the perfect expression of the papacy’s supreme power, it would help unite north and south Europe and even, in an ideal world, assert Rome’s dominance over Byzantium. Several birds would be killed by this one stone. So far as Gregory was concerned, however, the Investiture Struggle consumed too much of his time, and prevented him ever embarking on a crusade. It was left for his successor, Urban II, to take up the challenge. And by the time he was elected there were still more reasons why a crusade would prove useful. In the first place, it would help reunite Christendom after the bitter feuds sparked by Gregory’s reforms. It would boost papal prestige at a time when the Germans were not, exactly, Rome-inclined. And it might well boost France’s prestige – Urban had a French background. Because of the Investiture Struggle it was unlikely that the Germans would subscribe to a crusade, and the Normans, in the north of France and in Britain and Sicily, would likewise keep their distance. But in central and southern France, Urban knew that there were many lords, and the vassals of many lords, who would welcome the opportunity to obtain lands abroad and, in the process, save their souls.

Which is how it came about that Urban proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont in central France in 1095. There he delivered a highly emotional and rhetorical speech to the assembled knights, appealing both to their piety and to their more earthly interests. He dwelt at length on the sufferings which Christians were experiencing at the hands of the Turks, and the threat of Muslim invasion that hung over both Byzantium and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.⁹ Using a famous biblical phrase, Urban described Palestine as ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ and, in promising papal protection for the property and family of any crusader, he introduced an idea that was to have far-reaching consequences. He said that, as keeper of the keys to the kingdom of heaven, he vouchsafed the crusaders ‘plenary indulgence’ for their sins.⁴⁹ The origin of this idea may well have lain in the Islamic assurance that any warrior who died fighting for the faith was guaranteed a place in heaven. But the Christian idea of indulgence was soon expanded – and abused, so much so that it was one of the practices attacked by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century and, eventually, by the Council of Trent. By the twelfth century the Catholic Church had extended the institution of indulgence not just to crusaders but to those who supported them financially, and it is this which seems to have done the damage. By the fourteenth century, the papacy allowed the sale of indulgences even without a crusading pretext – the rich could simply buy their way to heaven.⁵⁰ It is easy to be cynical about the reasons people had for joining the crusades, and many no doubt had mixed motives. Nonetheless, it is said that, at the close of Urban’s address at Clermont, the assembled knights rose up and, as one, shouted ‘Deus vult’ – ‘God wills it.’ Many tore strips from their red cloaks and refashioned them into crosses. Thus the familiar emblem of the crusades was born.⁵¹

The intellectual consequences of the crusades have long been debated. There seems little doubt that they made some Christians more international in outlook and, of course, several Eastern practices were observed and adopted along the way (a taste for spices, for example, use of the rosary, and new musical instruments). But more generally it cannot be said that the crusades exerted widespread influence. Within two hundred years the Muslims had regained all the crusader settlements won by the Christians, and these Muslims were more hostile and bitter than they had been before the holy war – the Christians had shown themselves as no less fanatical than their enemies. In later years, when Christians tried to fashion a mode of living together with Jews or Muslims in the Middle East, the siege and sack of Jerusalem always got in the way. More surprising still, the crusades had much less effect on learning than might have been expected: the manuscripts that helped to stimulate the revival of scholarship in the West, which is the subject of the next chapter, were transmitted via Sicily, Spain and, yes, Byzantium. But not by crusaders.

If Gregorian reform had one achievement to its name, it had drawn attention to the church. In some ways this was a good thing but not in others. In the eleventh century Europe was changing and in the twelfth it would change more, as cities continued to grow. This was important ecclesiastically because the medieval church was essentially organised for coping with a primarily agricultural society, and now society was increasingly urban. Many of the inhabitants of the new cities were the new class of bourgeoisie, better educated, more literate and harder working than their predecessors, and intensely pious. As a result, they evolved a different attitude to the clergy. As the twelfth century got under way, we find criticism of the clergy becoming more and more intense. In the new universities it became the fashion for students to produce biting satires that portrayed the clergy as gross and corrupt. Papal legates, instead of being welcomed as envoys of His Holiness, were often treated as interlopers who interfered in legitimate local matters. Everywhere one turns, in the literature of the time, dissatisfaction with the established Church was growing.

One expression of the new piety – the new internal religion – was, as we have seen, the development of new monastic orders. A second effect was that heresy proliferated and was viewed much more seriously.⁵² In fact, there had always been heresy, especially in Byzantium, but between 380 and the twelfth century no one was burned. One element in the new situation was a reaction against a rich and worldly clerical establishment. Another was the rise of literacy and of speculative thought, as reflected in the new universities, Paris in particular. Two academic heretics at Paris were David of Denant and Amalric of Bena, but the most influential heresies of the twelfth century and the most fiercely combated, were the Waldensian, the millenarianism of Joachim of Fiore, and the Albigensian heresy of the Cathars.

Peter Waldo, a merchant from Lyons, was, like many heretics, a saintly, ascetic figure. The first anti-Cluniac monastery had been established at Lyons and the archbishop of the city had been a great follower of Hildebrand, so there was a tradition in the area which adhered to the idea of the apostolic poverty of the Church. The disciples of Waldo called themselves the Poor Men of Lyons and, as well as embracing apostolic poverty, and going about barefoot, they preached against the clergy (this is known as antisacerdotal). For the Waldensians, the line between heretic and saint was thin, the ‘Church’ was not the prevailing Catholic organisation, but instead a purely spiritual fellowship comprised of saintly men and woman ‘who had experienced divine love and grace’.⁵³

An even more vituperative anticlericalism was promulgated by a southern Italian abbot, Joachim of Fiore, who, towards the end of the twelfth century, argued that the world had entered the age of the Antichrist, an age which immediately preceded the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. The idea of the Antichrist had its roots in the earlier existence of the ‘human’ opponents of God and his Messiah, in the apocalyptic tradition of Second Temple Judaism. These ideas were taken over by the early Christians in the second half of the first century AD, who argued that there were forces abroad trying to prevent the return of Jesus (the first mention of the term ‘Antichrist’ in a biblical context comes in the first epistle of John). The tradition flourished in Byzantium and migrated to the West in a famous tenth-century document, Adso’s Letter on the Antichrist, which formed the standard Western view for centuries.⁵⁴ Adso, a monk, later abbot of Montier-en-Der, undertook a full ‘biography’ of the Antichrist in a letter addressed to Gerberga, sister of Otto II, the German ruler who renewed the western empire. It was a ‘reverse’ hagiography and a narrative, which accounted for its incredible popularity (it was widely translated). In Adso’s version of events, the Antichrist (the final Antichrist) will be born in Babylon, go to Jerusalem where he will rebuild the Temple, circumcise himself and perform seven miracles, including the raising of the dead. He will reign for forty-two months and meet his end on the Mount of Olives, though Adso never made it clear whether Jesus or the Archangel Michael will bring about this end. In paintings and book illustrations, the Antichrist was often depicted as a king (less often a Titan) seated on or barely controlling beast(s) of the apocalypse.⁵⁵

What set Joachim of Fiore apart (and one can see why) was his identification of the papacy itself as the Antichrist. For Joachim, exegesis of the Bible was the only way to an understanding of God’s purpose. On this basis he identified from Revelation 12 that: ‘The seven heads of the dragon signify seven tyrants by whom the persecutions of the Church were begun.’⁵⁶ These were: Herod (persecution by the Jews), Nero (pagans), Constantine (heretics), Muhammad (Saracens), ‘Mesemoths’ (sons of Babylon), Saladin, and ‘the seventh king’, the final ‘and greatest’ Antichrist, which he thought was imminent. A Cistercian, he founded his own order and worked out his vision. This was in part that the future lay with the monastic life – he felt that all other institutions would wither away. But his examination of the Bible, and the seven-headed dragon, led him to conclude that the final Antichrist, in modelling himself on Jesus, would take both priestly and kingly form. Therefore, as the eleventh- and twelfth-century popes acquired the mantle of a monarchy, it followed that Joachim should see in this the very Antichrist he was looking for.⁵⁷

His view turned out to be popular, possibly because of the simplicity of its appeal – everything was turned on its head. The more zealous the popes were in whatever they did, the more cunning the deceits of the Antichrist. The ‘fact’ that the end was imminent gave the millenarians more conviction than anyone else. Joachite reasoning had it that there were three ages in the history of the world (as mentioned in the Introduction), presided over by God the Father (Creation to Incarnation), God the Son (Incarnation to 1260), and God the Holy Spirit (1260 on), when the existing organisation of the church would be swept away. The passing of the year 1260 without notable incident rather took the wind out of the Joachite sails, but their ideas remained in circulation for some time afterwards.⁵⁸

But the heresy that was by far the biggest threat to the established Church was that known as the Cathari (Pure Ones, Saints), or the Albigensian religion, named after the town of Albi, near Toulouse, where the heretics were particularly well represented.⁵⁹ The main ideas behind the Cathar movement had been in circulation underground for some time. These ideas recalled the Manicheans of the fourth century who, according to some historians, had been kept alive in a sect in the Balkans known as the Bogomils. Equally probable, however, Catharism developed from Neoplatonic ideas which existed in more conventional theology and philosophy. (There is good evidence that many Cathars were highly educated and became skilled in debate.) A final strand may well have come from Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, in particular that form of thought known as Gnosticism (see here). The Manichees had believed that there are two gods, a god of good and a god of evil, a god of light and a god of darkness, who were in perpetual combat for control in the world. (There is clearly an overlap here with ideas about the Antichrist.) Associated with this set of beliefs, man is seen as a mixture of spirit (good) and matter, or body (evil). Like other heretics, the Cathars were ascetics whose aim was pure spirituality, the ‘perfect’ state. Marriage and sexual behaviour were to be avoided, for they led to the creation of more matter. The Cathars also avoided eating meat and eggs, because they came from creatures that reproduced sexually. (The limitations of their biological understanding allowed them to eat fish and vegetables.) They believed that the surest way to salvation was the endura, the belief that after receiving consolamentum on one’s deathbed one shouldn’t eat any more food as it would make one impure again. So in that sense they starved themselves to death.⁶⁰ They did concede, however, that those who did not live the absolutely pure life might still attain salvation by recognising the leadership of the ‘perfects’, or Cathari. These so-called ‘auditors’ of the true Cathar faith received a sacrament on their deathbed that wiped away all previous sin and allowed the reunion of their souls with the Divine Spirit. This deathbed ‘catharsis’ was the only true way to God for those who weren’t ‘perfect’.⁶¹ All manner of lurid ideas swirled around the Cathars. It was said, for example, that they rejected the Incarnation because it involved the ‘imprisonment’ of God inside evil matter. It was said they were promiscuous, so long as conception was avoided. And they were said to expose their children to endura, death by starvation as a form of salvation and, at the same time, ridding the world of yet more matter. All of these evils were easily countenanced, it was said, because it was Cathar practice to allow catharsis on the deathbed, and so what was the point of any other type of behaviour?

In the end the progress of the Cathars was halted first by the Albigensian crusade, 1209–1229, which removed the nobles’ support, then by the papal inquisition, which was created in 1231 to deal with the threat. As well as annexing this region for the kings of France, these campaigns helped redefine crusades as battles against heretics within Europe’s borders.⁶² This in turn helped sharpen Europe’s idea of itself as Christendom.

As the year 1200 approached, it is fair to say that the papacy was under siege. The greatest – or at least the most visible – threat came from heresy, but there were other problems, not least the weakness of the popes themselves. Since the death of Alexander III in 1181, the throne had been held by a succession of men who seemed incapable of coping with the great changes in the nature of piety, and the aftermath of the crusades, not to mention the new learning, unleashed at the new universities in Paris and Bologna. Strictly speaking, Aristotle – rediscovered in the universities – could not be deemed an heretic, since he had lived before Christ, but what he had to say still provoked anxiety in Rome. The very great importance of Aristotle is underlined in the next chapter.

It was in these circumstances that the cardinals in 1198 elected a very young pope, an extremely able lawyer, in the hope that he would have a long reign and transform the fortunes of the papacy. Though he didn’t live as long as he might have done, Innocent III did not disappoint.

Lothario Conti, who took the title Innocent III (1198–1216), came from an aristocratic Roman family. He had studied law at Bologna and theology in Paris, making him as educated a man as any then alive in Europe, and he had been elevated to the College of Cardinals at the very early age of twenty-six, under his uncle, Lucius III. But this was not only nepotism at work, for Innocent’s colleagues recognised his exceptional ability and his determination. On his coronation day, he made plain what was to come. He said: ‘I am he to whom Jesus said, “I will give to you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and everything that you shall bind up on earth shall be bound up in heaven. See then this servant who rules over the entire family; he is the vicar of Jesus Christ and the successor of Saint Peter. He stands halfway between God and man, smaller than God, greater than man”.’⁶³

Greater than man. Perhaps no pope had more self-confidence than Innocent, but in his defence it was as much conviction as bravado. Innocent believed that ‘everything in the world is the province of the pope’, that St Peter had been ordained by Jesus ‘to govern not only the universal church but all the secular world’, and he, Innocent, was intent on establishing, or re-establishing, a new equilibrium on Earth, one that would bring a new political, intellectual and religious order to Europe.⁶⁴ By the time he died, the Church was back in the ascendant, combating heresy, attacking secular power, improving the quality of the clergy, fighting intellectual unorthodoxy. It was Innocent who raised the first papal tithes, to fund the crusades, an exercise so successful that in 1199 he levied the first income tax on churchmen to fund the papacy itself. And it was Innocent who, effectively, installed an inquisition to combat the Albigensian heretics. In 1208 a papal legate was murdered in France and the count of Toulouse was believed to have been involved. This gave Innocent the idea of launching a crusade against the heretics.⁶⁵ This wasn’t the Inquisition (with a capital I) that was to achieve such notoriety in Spain (and was a royal institution rather than a papal one) but it was a similar idea. Innocent instituted a new legal process, a new practice, the systematic searching out of heresy, using investigation and interrogation, rather than waiting for someone to make an accusation. It too was a new expression of papal power and ambition (and of theological weakness).

This inquisition was not always the ‘unholy Reich’ it has been pictured but it was quite bad enough. There was also a bitter irony behind everything that occurred – because one reason heresy took root so quickly at that time, and so firmly, was the moral laxity and corruption of the clergy itself, the very people who would enforce the Vatican’s new law. For example, the Council of Avignon (1209) referred to a case of a priest gambling for penances with dice, and taverns whose inn signs showed a clerical collar. The Council of Paris (1210) exposed masses held by priests who had wives or concubines and parties organised by nuns.⁶⁶ Innocent III’s opening speech to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 confirmed that ‘the corruption of the people derived from that of the clergy’.⁶⁷

It is important to say that heresy had little to do with the magical practices and deep-rooted superstitions that were found everywhere in the twelfth century, not least in the church itself. Keith Thomas has described the extent of these magical practices – the fact that the working of miracles was held by some to be ‘the most efficacious means of demonstrating [the Church’s] monopoly of the truth’.⁶⁸ For example, people’s belief that the host was turned into flesh and blood was at times literal. One historian cites the case of a Jewish banker in Segovia who accepted a host as security for a loan, another gives the example of a woman who kissed her husband while holding a host in her mouth ‘so as to gain his love’.⁶⁹ Keith Thomas also mentions the case of a Norfolk woman who had herself confirmed seven times ‘because she found that it helped her rheumatism’.⁷⁰ The Church made clear the difference between heresy (stubbornly-held opinions, contrary to doctrine) and superstition (which included use of the Eucharist for non-devotional practices, as mentioned above). In any case, the heretics themselves had little interest in magic as it involved the abuse/misuse of the very sacraments they had themselves rejected.

To begin with, the Church showed a reluctant tolerance of heresy. As late as 1162, Pope Alexander refused to condemn some Cathars consigned to him by the bishop of Rheims on the grounds that ‘it was better to pardon the guilty than to take the lives of the innocent’.⁷¹ But the crusade against the Cathars had the advantage for many that it would bring material and spiritual benefits without the risk and expenditure of an arduous and dangerous journey to the Middle East. In practice, its effects were mixed. At the beginning, at Béziers, seven thousand people were massacred, an event so terrible that it gave the crusaders a psychological edge for ever after.⁷² At the same time, the Cathars were rapidly dispersed – meaning that their insidious appeal was spread further, faster, than might otherwise have been the case. The Fourth Lateran Council was called in response: it issued a ‘detailed formulation of orthodox belief’ containing the first outline of the new legal procedure.

This inquisition came into existence formally under the pontificate of Gregory IX, between 1227 and 1233, though the episcopal courts had hitherto used three distinct forms of action throughout the Middle Ages in criminal cases: accusatio, denunciatio and inquisitio. In the past, accusatio had depended on an accuser bringing a case, the accuser being liable to punishment if his or her allegations were not proven. Under the new system, inquisitio haereticae pravitatis (inquisition into heretical depravity), investigation was allowed, without accuser, but with ‘investigatory methods’. What these were was revealed in February 1231, when Gregory IX issued Excommunicamus, which produced detailed legislation for the punishment of heretics, including the denial of the right of appeal, the denial of a right to be defended by a lawyer, and the exhumation of unpunished heretics.⁷³ The first man to bear the title inquisitor haereticae pravitatis, ‘inquisitor into heretical depravity’, was Conrad of Marburg who, believing that salvation could only be gained through pain, turned out to be one of the most bloodthirsty practitioners this ignoble trade ever saw. But the most terrible of all bulls in the history of the inquisition was issued in May 1252 by Innocent IV. This was luridly entitled Ad extirpanda, ‘to extirpate’, which allowed for torture to obtain confessions, for burning at the stake, and for a police force at the service of the Office of the Faith (the Roman euphemism for the inquisition).⁷⁴

The main task of the inquisition, however, was not punishment as such, not in theory at any rate. It was to bring heretics back to the Catholic faith. The inquisitor generalis usually found its way to towns where there were known to be large numbers of heretics (many small villages never saw an inquisitor at any point). All men over fourteen, and women over twelve, were required to appear if they themselves imagined they were guilty of an infraction. When the people were gathered, the inquisitor would deliver a sermon, known at first as the sermo generalis and later as an auto de fe.⁷⁵ Sometimes indulgences were promised to those who attended. After the sermo any heretic who confessed was absolved from excommunication and avoided the more serious forms of punishment. However, part of the process of confession and absolution was ‘delation’, the identification of other heretics who had not come forward. Delation was invariably used as a sign of the validity of the original heretic’s confession. The heretics so identified would be interrogated and it was here that the terror began. Total secrecy surrounded the procedure, the accused was not allowed to know who had informed against him (otherwise no one would ever inform, or delate) and only if the accused could make a good guess, and be able to show that his accuser had a personal enmity against him, did he stand a chance of acquittal. The auto de fe carried out by Bernard Gui in April 1310 in the area of Toulouse shows the sort of thing that might happen. There, between Sunday, 5 April and Thursday, 9 April he tried and sentenced 103 people: twenty were ordered to wear the badge of infamy and go on pilgrimages; sixty-five were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment; and eighteen were consigned to the civil authorities to be burned at the stake. Not even the dead could escape. There were scores of cases of people being sentenced up to sixty years after their death. Their bodies were exhumed and the remains burned, the ash very often being thrown into rivers. In an age that believed in the afterlife and which worshipped relics, this was a terrible fate.⁷⁶

Torture techniques included the ordeal of water, when a funnel or a soaking length of silk would be forced down someone’s throat. Five litres was considered ‘ordinary’ and that amount of water could burst blood vessels. In the ordeal of fire the prisoners were manacled before a fire, fat or grease was spread over their feet, and that part of them cooked until a confession was obtained. The strappado consisted of a pulley in the ceiling by means of which the prisoners were hung six feet off the ground, with weights attached to their feet. If they didn’t confess, they were pulled higher, then dropped, then pulled up short before they hit the ground. The weights on their feet were enough to dislocate their joints, causing unbearable pain.⁷⁷ Torture captures the eye but in a feudal society the signs of infamy, and the ostracism they brought could be just as bad (for example, the marriage prospects of someone’s offspring were blighted).⁷⁸

The new piety was recognised and formalised by the Fourth Lateran Council, held at the Lateran Palace in Rome in 1215. This was one of the three most important ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church, the other two being the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, which considered the Catholic Church’s response to Protestantism. Four hundred bishops and eight hundred other prelates and notables attended Lateran IV, which set the agenda for many aspects of Christianity and clarified and codified many areas of worship and belief. It was Lateran IV that nullified Magna Carta and fixed the number of the sacraments as seven (the early Church had never defined the number of sacraments and, previously, some theologians like Damian had preferred nine, or even eleven). These seven were: baptism, confirmation, marriage, and extreme unction, marking the stages in life, plus mass, confession and the ordination of priests. Lateran IV also decreed that every member of the Church must confess his or her sins to a priest and receive the Eucharist at least once a year, and as often as possible. This, of course, was a reassertion of the authority of the priesthood and a direct challenge to heretics. But it did reflect the needs of the new piety. In the same vein the council also decreed that no new saints or relics were to be recognised without papal canonisation.⁷⁹

The sacrament of marriage was a significant move by the Church. At the millennium it would be true to say that most people in Europe were not married in a church. Normally, couples would just live together, though very often rings were exchanged. Even as late as 1500 many peasants were still married by the age-old rite of cohabitation. Nonetheless, by 1200, say, the majority of the wealthier and more literate classes were married by priests. This had the side-effect of curtailing marriage among priests and bishops, but more generally the sacrament gave the church control over divorce. Until Lateran IV, people needed church approval to marry anyone within the seventh degree of consanguinity (first cousins – which marriages are now allowed – are four degrees removed). In practice, people ignored this. Only later, when a divorce was in the offing, was this illegal degree of consanguinity ‘discovered’, and used as grounds for annulment. Lateran IV replaced this with the third degree of consanguinity, the chief effect of which, says Norman Cantor, was ‘to increase the Church’s capacity to interfere in individual lives’. This was Innocent’s aim.

His tenacity of purpose was remarkable. Innocent has been described as the greatest of popes and as the ‘leader of Europe’. David Knowles and Dimitri Obolensky put it this way: ‘His pontificate is the brief summer of papal world-government. Before him the greatest of his predecessors were fighting to attain a position of control; after him, successors used the weapons of power with an increasing lack of spiritual wisdom and political insight. Innocent alone was able to make himself obeyed when acting in the interests of those he commanded.’⁸⁰

During the thirteenth century, however, the moral authority of the papacy was largely dissipated. The Curia continued as an impressive administrative force but the growth of national monarchies, in France, England and Spain, proved to be more than a match for the Vatican bureaucracy. In particular the growing power of the French king posed a threat to Rome. In the early Middle Ages, the monarch with whom the pope had most come into conflict was the German emperor. But, owing to those very conflicts, the Germans had not been so well represented among the crusaders as had the French. That had given the French more power with Rome and, on top of that, the French king had obtained a fair proportion of southern France as a result of the Albigensian crusade, so that in this sense the papacy had helped bring about its own demise. These evolving trends climaxed during the reign of the French king, Philip IV the Fair (1285–1314).

Following the crusades, and the campaign against the Cathars, there was a sizeable French faction in the College of Cardinals, and the introduction of nationalism into the papacy made all elections at the time fairly fraught. The French house of Anjou ruled in Sicily but in 1282 the French garrison there was massacred by the Sicilians in a rebellion known as the Sicilian Vespers.⁸¹ At that time, the Sicilians gave their loyalty to the (Spanish) house of Aragon. The pope just then was French, owing allegiance to Charles of Anjou. He therefore proclaimed that the throne of Aragon was forfeit and announced a crusade, to be financed in part by the Church. This was an extreme measure, with no moral justification. In the eyes of neutrals it demeaned the papacy, even more so when the campaign failed. This failure turned Philip IV against the papacy, too, as he sought a scapegoat. Gradually, the French became more and more intransigent and this climaxed in 1292 when the papal throne became vacant and the French and Italian factions in the College of Cardinals cancelled each other out to the extent that they wrangled for two years without reaching agreement: no candidate achieved the required two-thirds majority.⁸² A compromise was eventually reached in 1294 with the election of Celestine V, a hermit. Totally confused and bewildered by his election, Celestine abdicated after only a few months. This ‘great refusal’, as Dante put it, was a demeaning scandal in itself, for no pope had ever abdicated and there were many of the faithful who, mindful that the pope occupies the throne of St Peter by divine grace, took the view that a pope couldn’t abdicate. Celestine said that he had been told to vacate his office by ‘an angelic voice’, but that to say the least was convenient. His place was taken by Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, who adopted the title of Boniface VIII (1294–1303). Boniface turned out to be arguably the most disastrous of all medieval popes. His idea of his office was hardly less ambitious than Innocent III’s, but he lacked any of the skills of his illustrious predecessor.⁸³

In 1294 war had begun between France and England and both powers were soon regretting the enormous cost and looking around for ways to raise funds. One expedient which occurred to the French was taxation of the clergy, a device used to fund the crusades which had been very successful. From Rome, Boniface disagreed, however, and he published a bull, Clericis laicos, which said so. The bull was particularly bellicose in tone and the French retaliated, expelling Italian bankers from the realm and, much more to the point, cutting off the export of money, which denied the papacy a considerable part of its income. On this occasion, Boniface gave way, conceding that the French king, and by implication all secular rulers, had the right to tax their clergy for the purposes of national security. (Taxing the clergy may not seem financially productive today, but remember this was a time when the Church owned as much as a third of the land.) A few years later, however, in 1301, another stand-off loomed, when a dissident bishop in the south of France was arrested and charged with treason. The French authorities demanded that Rome divest the bishop of his office so that he might be tried for his crime. Boniface, characteristically, and emboldened by the thousands of pilgrims that had flocked to Rome in 1300 for a jubilee, responded in a high-handed manner. He revoked his previous concession to the French king, regarding clerical taxation, and summoned a council of French clergy to Rome to reform the Church in France. A year later he published the notorious bull Unam sanctam, claiming that ‘both the spiritual and temporal swords were ultimately held by Christ’s vicar on earth and that if a king did not rightly use the temporal sword that had been lent him, he could be deposed by the pope’. The bull concluded: ‘We declare, proclaim and define that subjection to the Roman Pontiff is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature.’⁸⁴

The French advisors of Philip were no less extravagant in their tit-for-tat. At what was later described as the very first meeting of the French Estates General, Boniface was charged with every calumny conceivable – from heresy to murder to black magic. Even more contentiously, the Estates General insisted that it was the duty of the ‘very Christian king’ of France to rescue the world from the monster in Rome. The French were serious. So much so that one of the king’s advisors, William de Nogaret, a lawyer from Languedoc, was sent on a secret mission to Italy where he was met by certain enemies of the pope, both lay and ecclesiastical. His aim was nothing less than the physical capture of Boniface, the pontiff himself, who was to be brought back to France and put on trial. In fact, Nogaret did succeed in capturing the pope, at his family home of Anagni, south of Rome, and he started north with his captive. But Boniface’s relatives rescued His Holiness and hurried him back to the Vatican, where he soon died, a broken man. Dante saw this as a turning point in the history of civilisation.⁸⁵

So it proved. ‘The French had not succeeded in capturing the pope but they had succeeded, in a way, in killing him.’ The man who succeeded Boniface was Clement V, a French archbishop, who chose to settle not in Rome but in Avignon. ‘Dante wept.’⁸⁶ This was pictured, inevitably perhaps, as a ‘Babylonian captivity’ for the papacy but it endured for nearly seventy years. Even when the papacy returned to Rome, in 1377, the confusion and abuses didn’t end. The pope elected, Urban VI, conducted such a vendetta against corruption that, after a few months, part of the College of Cardinals withdrew back to Avignon and elected their own pope. There were now two Holy Sees, two Colleges of Cardinals, and two sets of Curiae. Even at local level the Great Schism was uncompromising and absurd – monasteries with two abbots, churches with two competing masses, and so on. A council was held in Pisa in 1408 to end the confusion. Instead, a third pope was elected. The whole absurd, comical, tragic business was not settled until 1417.

By then much damage had been done. Politically, the papacy was never as forceful again. There would be other powerful popes – or seemingly powerful popes – in the Renaissance and as late as the nineteenth century. But, in reality, they would never come anywhere near Gregory VII or Innocent III in either their ambition or their reach. No pope would ever again claim to be halfway between God and man. And yet politics was only one aspect of the papacy’s decline. It was the momentous changes in the intellectual field that were to do equally lasting damage.