by Will Durant
The first step toward this end was the liberation of the papacy from German control. The second was to bring all bishops under the authority of the papal see, at least to this degree, that the bishop should be chosen by the clergy and people of the diocese under the auspices of a bishop nominated by the pope or the metropolitan, and that the election should be valid only when confirmed by the archbishop or the pope.87 Gregory began with a letter (1073) to the bishop of Châlons, in which he threatened to excommunicate King Philip Augustus of France for selling bishoprics. In 1074 he sent a general letter to the French episcopate calling upon them to denounce the crimes of the King to his face, and to discontinue all religious services in France should Philip refuse to reform.88 Lay investiture continued there nevertheless, but the French bishops proceeded with caution, and left the issue to be fought out in Germany.
In February, 1075, a synod of Italian bishops at Rome, under the lead of Gregory, issued decrees against simony, clerical marriage, and lay investiture. With strange precipitance, Gregory at once excommunicated for simony five bishops who were councilors of Henry IV; he suspended the bishops of Pavia and Turin, deposed the bishop of Piacenza, and ordered Bishop Hermann of Bamberg to come to Rome to clear himself from charges of simony. When Hermann tried to bribe the papal tribunal Gregory unceremoniously deposed him. He politely asked Henry to nominate a fit successor for the Bamberg see; Henry not only nominated a court favorite, but invested him with episcopal ring and staff without waiting for papal approval—a procedure accordant with custom, but openly defiant of the Roman synod’s decree. As if to make still clearer his rejection of Gregory’s demands, Henry appointed bishops to the sees of Milan, Fermo, and Spoleto—almost under the nose of the Pope—and kept in his favor the excommunicated councilors.
In December, 1075, Gregory sent Henry a letter of remonstrance, and commissioned the bearers to add an oral message threatening to excommunicate the King should he continue to ignore the Roman synod’s decrees. Henry summoned a council of German bishops to Worms (January 24, 1076); twenty-four came, some stayed away. Before this assembly Hugh, a Roman cardinal, accused Gregory of licentiousness, cruelty, and witchcraft, and of obtaining the papacy by bribery and violence; and he reminded the bishops that the custom of centuries required, for the election of any pope, the consent of the German emperor—which Gregory had not asked. The Emperor, emboldened by his recent suppression of a Saxon revolt, proposed the deposition of the Pope; all bishops present signed the decree; a council of Lombard bishops at Piacenza approved it; and Henry sent it to Gregory with a choice superscription: “Henry, King not by usurpation but by God’s ordinance, to Hildebrand, not Pope but false monk.”89 The message was delivered to Gregory at a synod in Rome (February 21, 1076); the 110 bishops there present, all from Italy and Gaul, wished to kill the messenger, but Gregory protected him. The synod excommunicated the bishops who had signed the Worms decree; and the Pope launched upon the Emperor a triple sentence of excommunication, anathema, and deposition, and released Henry’s subjects from their oaths of obedience (February 22, 1076). Henry countered by persuading the bishop of Utrecht to anathematize Gregory—“the perjured monk”—from the pulpit of the cathedral. All Europe was shocked by the papal deposition of an emperor, and still more by the imperial deposition, and episcopal cursing, of a pope. The religious sentiment proved stronger than the national, and public support rapidly deserted the Emperor. Saxony resumed its revolt; and when Henry summoned the bishops and nobles of his realm to councils at Worms and Mainz his call was almost universally ignored. On the contrary the German aristocracy, seeing in the situation a chance to strengthen their feudal power against the King, met at Tribur (October 16, 1076), approved the excommunication of the Emperor, and declared that should he not obtain absolution from the Pope by February 22, 1077, they would name a successor to his throne. It was arranged between the nobles and the papal legates at Tribur that a diet should be held at Augsburg on February 2, 1077, under the presidency of the Pope, to settle the affairs of the Church and the kingdom.
Henry retired to Speyer, defeated and almost entirely deserted. Believing that the proposed diet would confirm his deposition, he sent messengers to Rome, offering to come there and ask for absolution. Gregory replied that as he would soon leave for Augsburg he could not receive Henry at Rome. En route north, the Pope was entertained at Mantua by his friend and supporter Matilda, Countess of Tuscany. Here he learned that Henry had entered Italy. Fearing that the King would raise an army among the antipapal population of Lombardy, Gregory took refuge in Matilda’s fortified castle at Canossa, high in the Apennines near Reggio Emilia. There on January 25, 1077, at the height of one of the severest winters that Italy could recall, Henry, says Gregory’s report to the German princes,
came in person to Canossa … bringing with him only a small retinue…. He presented himself at the gate of the castle, barefoot and clad only in wretched woolen garments, beseeching us with fears to grant him absolution and forgiveness. This he continued to do for three days, while all those about us were moved to compassion at his plight, and interceded for him with tears and prayers…. At length we removed the excommunication from him, and received him again into the bosom of Holy Mother Church.90
Gregory hesitated so long through no hardness of heart. He had agreed to make no peace with Henry without consulting the German princes; and he knew that if Henry, forgiven, should rebel again, a second excommunication would have diminished effect, and might receive less support from the nobility; on the other hand the Christian world would have found it hard to understand why the Vicar of Christ should refuse forgiveness to so humble a penitent. The event was a spiritual triumph for Gregory, but a subtle diplomatic victory for Henry, who now automatically regained his throne. Gregory returned to Rome, and devoted himself for the next two years to ecclesiastical legislation chiefly aimed to enforce clerical celibacy. The German princes, however, proclaimed Rudolf of Swabia King of Germany (1077), and Henry’s strategy seemed to have failed. But now that he had freed himself from the papal ban he found fresh sympathy from a people not enamored of the nobility; a new army was recruited to defend him; and for two years the rival kings ravaged Germany in civil war. Gregory, after long vacillation, gave his support to Rudolf, excommunicated Henry a second time, forbade Christians to serve him, and offered absolution from their sins to all who should enlist under Rudolf’s flag (March, 1080).91
Henry acted precisely as before. He called a council of favorable nobles and bishops at Mainz; the council deposed Gregory; a council of bishops from Germany and northern Italy at Brixen confirmed the deposition, declared Archbishop Guibert of Ravenna Pope, and commissioned Henry to execute its decrees. The rival armies met on the banks of the Saale in Saxony (October 15, 1080); Henry was defeated, but Rudolf was killed. While the rebel nobles divided on the question of a successor to Rudolf, Henry entered Italy, marched unresisted through Lombardy, recruiting another army as he went, and laid siege to Rome. Gregory appealed to Robert Guiscard for help, but Robert was far away. The Pope appealed to William I, whose conquest of England he had sanctioned and helped, but William was not sure that he wanted Henry to lose this royal argument. The people of Rome defended the Pontiff bravely, but Henry was able to seize a large part of Rome, including St. Peter’s, and Gregory fled to the Castello Sant’ Angelo. A synod in the Lateran palace, at Henry’s command, deposed and excommunicated Gregory, and consecrated Guibert as Pope Clement III (March 24, 1084); and a week later Clement crowned Henry Emperor. For a year Henry was master of Rome.
But in 1085 Robert Guiscard, leaving his campaign against Byzantium, approached Rome at the head of 36,000 men. Henry had no army to resist such a force; he fled to Germany, Robert entered the capital, freed Gregory, sacked Rome, left half of it in ruins, and took Gregory to Monte Cassino; the populace of Rome was so infuriated against the Normans that the Pope, their ally, could not remain there in safety. Clement returned to Rome as apparent Pope. Gregory went on to Sal
erno, held another synod, excommunicated Henry again, and then broke down in body and spirit. “I have loved righteousness,” he said, “and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.” He was only sixty-two; but the nervous strain of his bitter controversies had worn him out; and his apparent defeat by the man whom he had forgiven at Canossa left him no will to live. There at Salerno, May 25, 1085, he died.
Perhaps he had loved righteousness too imperiously, and had hated iniquity too passionately; it is reserved to the philosopher, and forbidden to the man of action, to see elements of justice in the position of his enemy. Innocent III, a century later, would realize a large part of Gregory’s dream of a world united under the Vicar of Christ; but he would win in a more temperate spirit and with wiser diplomacy. And yet Innocent’s victory was made possible by Gregory’s defeat. Hildebrand had grasped higher than his reach, but he had for a decade raised the papacy to the greatest height and power that it had yet known. His uncompromising war against clerical marriage succeeded, and prepared for his successors a clergy whose undivided loyalty immeasurably strengthened the Church. His campaign against simony and lay investiture would win a tardy victory, but in the end his view would prevail, and the bishops of the Church would become the willing servitors of the papacy. His use of papal legates was destined to extend the power of the popes into every parish in Christendom. Through his initiative papal elections were now free from royal domination. They would soon give the Church an amazing succession of strong men; and ten years after Gregory’s death the kings and nobles of the world would acknowledge Urban II as the head of Europe in that synthesis of Christianity, feudalism, chivalry, and imperialism which we know as the Crusades.
CHAPTER XXII
Feudalism and Chivalry
600–1200
I. FEUDAL ORIGINS
IN the six centuries that followed the death of Justinian, a remarkable collaboration of circumstances slowly effected a basic transformation of economic life in the West European world.
Certain conditions already noted came together to prepare for feudalism. As the cities of Italy and Gaul became unsafe during the German invasions, aristocrats moved out to their rural villas, and surrounded themselves with agricultural dependents, “client” families, and military aides. Monasteries whose monks tilled the soil and practiced handicrafts accentuated the centrifugal movement toward half-isolated economic units in the countryside. Roads injured by war, neglected by poverty, and endangered by highwaymen, could no longer maintain adequate communication and exchange. State revenues declined as commerce contracted and industry fell; impoverished governments could no longer provide protection for life, property, and trade. The obstruction of commerce compelled the villas to seek economic self-sufficiency; many manufactured articles formerly bought from the cities were—from the third century onward—produced on the great estates. In the fifth century the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris show us rural lords living in luxury on spacious holdings tilled by a semiservile tenantry; they are already a feudal aristocracy, possessing their own judiciary1 and soldiery,2 and differing from the later barons chiefly in knowing how to read.
The same factors that paved the way for feudalism between the third century and the sixth established it between the sixth and the ninth. Merovingian and Carolingian kings paid their generals and administrators with grants of land; in the ninth century these fiefs became hereditary and semi-independent through the weakness of the Carolingian kings. The Saracen, Norse, and Magyar invasions of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries repeated and cemented the results of the German invasions six centuries before: central protection failed, the local baron or bishop organized a localized order and defense, and remained possessed of his own force and court. Since the invaders were often mounted, defenders who could afford a horse were in demand; cavalry became more important than infantry; and just as in early Rome a class of equites—men on horseback—had taken form between patrician and plebs, so in France, Norman England, and Christian Spain a class of mounted knights grew up between the duke or baron and the peasantry. The people did not resent these developments; in an atmosphere of terror, when attack might come at any time, they craved military organization; they built their homes as near to the baronial castle or fortified monastery as they could; and they readily gave allegiance and service to a lord—i.e., a law-ward—or to a duke—i.e., one who could lead; we must imagine their terror to understand their subjection. Freemen who could no longer protect themselves offered their land or labor to some strong man in return for shelter and support; in such cases of “commendation” the baron usually assigned to “his man” a tract to be held as a “precarium,” on a lease revocable by the donor at any time; this precarious tenure became the usual form of serf possession of land. Feudalism was the economic subjection and military allegiance of a man to a superior in return for economic organization and military protection.
It cannot be rigidly defined, for it had a hundred variations in time and place. Its origins lay in Italy and Germany, but its most characteristic development came in France. In Britain it may have begun as the enserfment of Britons by Anglo-Saxon conquerors,3 but for the most part it was there a Gallic importation from Normandy. It never matured in northern Italy or Christian Spain; and in the Eastern Empire the great landowners never developed military or judicial independence, nor that hierarchy of fealties which seemed in the West essential to feudalism. Large sectors of Europe’s peasantry remained unfeudalized: the shepherds and ranchers of the Balkans, eastern Italy, Spain; the vine growers of western Germany and southern France; the sturdy farmers of Sweden and Norway; the Teutonic pioneers beyond the Elbe; the mountaineers of the Carpathians, the Alps, the Apennines, and the Pyrenees. It was not to be expected that a continent so physically and climatically diverse should have a uniform economy. Even within feudalism conditions of contract and status varied from nation to nation, from manor to manor, from time to time. Our analysis will apply chiefly to the France and England of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
II. FEUDAL ORGANIZATION
1. The Slave
In those lands and times society consisted of freemen, serfs, and slaves. Freemen included nobles, clerics, professional soldiers, practitioners of the professions, most merchants and artisans, and peasants who owned their land with little or no obligation to any feudal lord, or leased it from a lord for a money rent. Such peasant proprietors constituted some four per cent of the farming population of England in the eleventh century; they were more numerous in western Germany, northern Italy, and southern France; they probably constituted a quarter of the total peasant population in Western Europe.4
Slavery diminished as serfdom increased. In twelfth-century England it was mostly confined to household service; in France north of the Loire it was negligible; in Germany it rose in the tenth century, when no compunction was felt in capturing pagan Slavs for menial tasks on German estates, or for sale in Moslem or Byzantine lands. Conversely, Moslems and Greeks were kidnaped by slave traders along the shores of the Black Sea, western Asia, or northern Africa for sale as farm hands, domestic servants, eunuchs, concubines, or prostitutes in Islam or Christendom.5 The slave trade flourished especially in Italy, probably due to the nearness of Moslem countries, which could be preyed upon with a good conscience; it seemed a fair revenge for Saracen raids.
An institution that had lasted throughout known history appeared inevitable and eternal, even to honest moralists. It is true that Pope Gregory I freed two of his slaves with admirable words about the natural liberty of all men;6 but he continued to use hundreds of slaves on the papal estates,7 and approved laws forbidding slaves to become clerics or marry free Christians.8 The Church denounced the sale of Christian captives to Moslems, but permitted the enslavement of Moslems and of Europeans not yet converted to Christianity. Thousands of captured Slavs and Saracens were distributed among monasteries as slaves; and slavery on church lands and papal estates continued till the eleventh century.9 Canon law sometimes estimat
ed the wealth of church lands in slaves rather than in money; like secular law, it considered the slave as a chattel; it forbade church slaves to make wills, and decreed that any peculium or savings of which they died possessed should belong to the Church.10 The archbishop of Narbonne, in his will of 1149, left his Saracen slaves to the bishop of Béziers.11 St. Thomas Aquinas interpreted slavery as one consequence of Adam’s sin, and as economically expedient in a world where some must toil in order that others may be free to defend them.12 Such views were in the tradition of Aristotle, and in the spirit of the times. The rule of the Church, that her property should never be alienated except at its full market value,13 was unfortunate for her slaves and serfs; emancipation sometimes proved more difficult on ecclesiastical than on secular properties.14 Nevertheless the Church progressively restricted the slave traffic by forbidding the enslavement of Christians at a time when Christianity was spreading rapidly.
