Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  Paschal I (817–24), who had himself hastily consecrated immediately after his election, to forestall any imperial interference, built on Stephen’s gesture by extracting from Louis the so-called Pactum Ludovicianum. In this pact the Emperor reconfirmed the Pope in the papal patrimonies, but undertook not to interfere in papal territory unless invited, and agreed that newly elected popes need only notify their appointment after consecration. In 817 Paschal took the opportunity of a visit to Rome by Louis’ son and heir Lothair, already crowned as co-emperor by his father, to anoint him, adding to the ceremony the gift of a sword to Lothair. This was perhaps a deliberate echo of St Peter’s gift of a spear and banner to Charlemagne in Leo’s mosaic at the Lateran, implying that the Emperor’s office was bestowed on Louis by the Pope for the protection of the Church.

  By contrast, Paschal’s successor Eugenius II (824–7), elected with imperial influence, gave away most of these papal gains. He acknowledged the Emperor’s sovereignty in the papal state, and he accepted a constitution imposed by Lothair which established imperial supervision of the administration of Rome, imposed an oath to the Emperor on all citizens, and required the Pope-elect to swear fealty before he could be consecrated. Under Sergius II (844–7) it was even agreed that the Pope could not be consecrated without an imperial mandate, and that the ceremony must be in the presence of his representative, a revival of some of the more galling restrictions of Byzantine rule.

  Yet, if the revival of a Roman empire in the West created new challenges, there were also ways in which it enormously enhanced papal authority. Anointing by the Pope, carried out in Rome, was successfully established as an indispensable part of the making of an emperor. Pope John VIII (872–82) actually anointed two emperors in succession, Charles the Bald in 875, in preference to his brother Louis the German, and then Charles the Fat in 879. In strictly ecclesiastical terms, too, and despite extensive imperial control of Church affairs, papal authority grew. Charlemagne had organised the Frankish church under archbishops, subordinating the ordinary diocesan bishops to their ‘metropolitans’. The Frankish bishops resented this extended metropolitan control, and the royal domination of the Church which it often mediated. Around the year 850 there appeared in France an elaborate forgery, allegedly the work of the early seventh-century Spanish scholar Isidore of Seville, but in fact designed as a very contemporary weapon against the authority of lay rulers and of metropolitan archbishops. These ‘False Decretals’ of ‘Pseudo Isidore’ were made up of a series of letters of early popes, all forged, a further series of papal letters from the time of Sylvester I to that of Gregory II, some of them spurious and many of them garbled, and a large collection of canons of councils, mostly authentic: the Donation of Constantine was also included. The point of the whole immense collection was to establish that the papacy was the real source of power in the Church, the Pope sharing his authority with the bishops at large as his vicars. The interference of metropolitan archbishops and synods in the affairs of other bishops was thus an infringement of papal authority, and bishops at odds with their metropolitans – or the crown – had a right of direct appeal to Rome.

  The compiler of these False Decretals was not working for the papacy, but against the archbishops. The Pope was a safely remote figure in distant Rome, who could be relied on not to interfere in the regions. It was therefore safe to inflate his authority in order to limit that of the local archbishop. But the False Decretals survived the circumstances of their composition. Their systematic presentation of a massive body of authoritative ecclesiastical legislation (however dubious some of it might be) made the collection one of the most often cited reference-books of the medieval Church. The role of the papacy as the fountain of all jurisdiction in the Church, even that of councils, already widely accepted, gradually became axiomatic. Unwittingly, the authors had put a formidable weapon into the hands of the medieval popes.

  Not that the affairs of Rome were totally dominated by the relationship with the Frankish empire. In the mid-ninth century the great threat to the papacy was the Muslim presence in Italy. Sicily was overrun in the 820s, and Arab forces were established on the Italian mainland by 838. In 846 a Saracen fleet carrying 500 horsemen sailed to the mouth of the Tiber, overran the weak coastal defences at Ostia, and attacked Rome; the graves of Peter and Paul were desecrated and stripped of all their riches. Between 848 and 852 the energetic monk Pope Leo IV (847–55), had been consecrated in crisis conditions without imperial permission, set himself to make a repetition of the Saracen sack impossible. With financial help from the Emperor Lothair he raised a wall, forty feet high and twelve feet thick, with forty-four defensive towers, round St Peter’s and the Vatican. The Leonine wall was both a demonstration of independent papal vigour, and an organisational triumph. Leo used labour-gangs supplied by the cities of the papal state, the larger monasteries and the domuscultae, to each of which was allocated a stretch of the work. For the first time, the Vatican was now safe behind walls. It was the first extension of the city since imperial times, and in some ways the most remarkable monument of papal Rome in the early Middle Ages.

  There were others, less practical but just as eloquent. The appeal to the authority of the early Church and the popes of early Christian Rome which characterised the False Decretals also dominated the religious symbolism of the Church buildings of ninth-century Rome. The great new churches built by Paschal I, like Santa Prassede, filled with relics brought in from the catacombs and decorated with mosaics deliberately modelled on those in the Constantinian basilicas, played on that appeal. Both relics and images were designed to connect papal Rome, Rome of the pilgrims, to the heroic age of early Christian Rome. After the Byzantine cultural dominance of the seventh and eighth centuries, such buildings mark a recovery of confidence in the value of Rome’s own past, and an eagerness to harness it to enhance the authority of Rome’s bishop.

  The pope who most completely embodied this renewed confidence was Nicholas I (858–67), the third and last Pope to be granted the title ‘Great’. Nicholas was an aristocrat, saturated in the writings of his great predecessors Leo, Gelasius and Gregory, and totally committed to the exalted vision of the papal office they contained. His understanding of papal jurisdiction coincided closely with that of the False Decretals, which he had probably read. He considered that no synod or council had binding force unless approved by him, that no bishop might be deposed without his agreement, and that all his decisions as Pope had the force of law. The empire obliged the Emperor to protect the Church. In Nicholas’ eyes, however, this responsibility gave emperors no rights to jurisdiction over the Church. Elected in his early forties, he set himself to translate a paper theory into concrete action.

  Within Italy, this determination brought him face to face with the Archbishop of Ravenna. The old exarchate was officially part of papal territory and in Church law was subject to papal jurisdiction. For years, however, the work of papal officials there, the rights of papal tenants, and the free access of the inhabitants of the region to Rome had all been under attack from the archbishops. Renewed complaints by the local bishops about the tyrannical behaviour of Archbishop John of Ravenna gave Nicholas the grounds he needed for action. In 861 he summoned the Archbishop to Rome, and when John cited ancient precedents for the exemption of his see from this sort of summons, Nicholas excommunicated and deposed him. The Archbishop gave in, accepted a drastic reduction of his powers and swore obedience to Rome.

  The same determination to bring upstart metropolitan archbishops to heel marked Nicholas’ confrontation with Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims. Hincmar was the most distinguished of the Frankish bishops, and an imperial favourite. Like every other bishop in the West, he accepted the primacy of the Pope, but in practice he tried to minimise its impact on himself. He opposed the anointing of Charles the Bald as emperor, because of the direct jurisdiction he feared this would give the Pope in Charles’ realms. A stickler for law, he saw the Pope as interpreter of that law and the final court of appea
l within the Church, but he thought of him as judge, not legislator. No pope could change the established laws of local churches. In 861 Hincmar deposed a suffragan bishop with whom he had long been in dispute, Rothad of Soissons. Rothad appealed to Nicholas, but Hincmar and his allies tried to block him, invoking Frankish law to override the canonical right of appeal to Rome. This was a red rag to the Pope, who in any case believed that no-one had the right to depose any bishop without papal permission. Since he had never been consulted, he overruled Hincmar, and reinstated Rothad. When Hincmar fought his decision, Nicholas threatened to suspend him from celebrating Mass. Once again, the Archbishop gave way before the Pope, though after Nicholas’ death Hincmar would go on resisting papal incursions into the Frankish church with undiminished vigour.

  The most courageous demonstration of Nicholas’ papal vision, however, came over the divorce of King Lothair of Lorraine. In 855 Lothair had made a dynastic marriage with Theutberga, daughter of the Duke of Burgundy. She proved unable to give him an heir, however, and Lothair divorced her on a trumped-up charge of incest, and married a concubine by whom he had already had three children. A synod of Frankish bishops meeting at Aachen obligingly recognised the divorce, but Theutberga appealed to the Pope. This case involved not only the role of Rome as a court of appeal, but the nature of Christian marriage in the tangle of Frankish and Germanic law. With characteristic decisiveness, Nicholas ruled in favour of Theutberga, and ordered Lothair to ditch his concubine and return to his legitimate wife and queen. When the archbishops of Cologne and Trier came to Rome with the decrees of a Frankish council recognising Lothair’s divorce and remarriage, Nicholas excommunicated them for conniving at bigamy. The Archbishop of Cologne ignored the excommunication, the Frankish authorities supported him, and the quarrel snowballed. In February 864 Lothair’s brother, the Emperor Louis II, marched on Rome to lay siege to the Pope. There were ugly confrontations, during one of which a procession into St Peters was attacked, and the jewelled relic of the True Cross brought to Rome by St Helena was trampled and broken – it was rescued from the mud by a party of English pilgrims. Imperial bishops raged against the Pope ‘who numbers himself as an apostle among the apostles, and who is making himself emperor of the whole world’, but Nicholas’ intransigence paid off. It became clear to the Emperor that the only way to make the Pope back down would be to kill him, and the moral weight of the papal office carried the day. The archbishops had to submit, and Lothair acknowledged Theutberga as his wife.

  The Lorraine divorce case showed Nicholas at his courageous best, defying emperors, archbishops and regional councils in defence not only of papal prerogatives but of a friendless woman. The same determination marked his relations with the Emperor and churches of the East, but here the consequence was to be a tragic split between the Churches of East and West. Once again, the trigger was the deposition of a bishop.

  In 858 the Byzantine Emperor Michael III was refused communion on the grounds of incest by Patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople. The Emperor deposed the Patriarch, and in his place appointed Photius, a brilliant and devout young layman from the imperial civil service. In breach of the canons, Photius was rushed through all the levels of the clergy in five days, and was duly installed as patriarch. Anxious to consolidate his position, he sent an announcement of his consecration to the Pope, justifying his uncanonical leap from layman to patriarch. Nicholas declined to recognise the appointment, however, till he had investigated the matter, and representatives of Rome duly travelled to Constantinople in September 860. They returned to Rome having agreed to the deposition of Ignatius, but Nicholas had meanwhile received an appeal from Ignatius. He repudiated his legates, and in 863 deposed and excommunicated Photius.

  The Photius affair would rumble on long after Nicholas’ death, but its significance was much greater than the rights or wrongs of Ignatius’ deposition. Relations between Rome and Constantinople had been poor for generations, and since the creation of the Carolingian empire and the Iconoclastic controversy what little contact there was between the Latin and Greek Churches was charged with mutual suspicion. The Photius affair crystallised that hostility. When the Emperor Michael protested at Nicholas’ excommunication of Photius, Nicholas unleashed a torrent of vitriol on him, denouncing the interference of the Eastern empire in matters that concerned only bishops, recalling the Greek Church’s constant lapses into heresy and schism, challenging the credibility of a Roman emperor who could not speak Latin, and declaring that ‘the privileges of this see existed before your empire, and will remain when it has long gone’. In a passage that clearly drew on the ideas found in the Donation of Constantine, he told the Emperor that the Roman Church was his mother, from whom he derived his imperial powers.28

  The Photius affair was complicated by papal initiatives in Buigaria. Under King Boris I, Bulgaria was a rising power in the Balkan region, a matter of immediate concern to the Emperor at Constantinople. Bulgaria had been evangelised by missionaries from the Greek Church, but Boris was anxious to maintain a political distance from Constantinople, and he had tried to get an independent Bulgarian patriarchate established, but had been blocked by Photius. He therefore turned to Rome, and asked Nicholas to send Latin missionaries to Bulgaria, and then to establish a Bulgarian archbishopric.

  Nicholas welcomed Latin involvement in Bulgaria for several reasons. He was genuinely committed to missionary work, encouraging the activities of St Ansgar in Scandinavia, and of the missionaries to the Slavs in Moravia, Cyril and Methodius. But he was also intensely conscious of the lost jurisdiction of the papacy in Illyricum and the Balkans, and saw in the Balkan adventure an opportunity to recover and even extend it. Nicholas duly sent the missionaries Boris requested, together with a long and detailed instruction on the Christian faith, expounding Western belief and practice and, in the process, disparaging Constantinople. Photius responded to this with an equally harsh attack on the West, reminiscent of the Quinisext Canons and denouncing clerical celibacy, fasting laws, the Western use of unleavened bread in the Mass, and the intrusion of the Filioque clause into the Creed. The Photius affair had become a platform on which the long-term alienation of the Churches of East and West was acted out. In 867 Photius presided over a synod at Constantinople which excommunicated and deposed the Pope, though Nicholas was dead before news of this reached Rome. Rome and Constantinople were now formally separated.

  The death of Nicholas I marks a watershed in the history of the papacy. Already Charlemagne’s empire had been distributed among his quarrelling descendants. By the end of the ninth century it was no longer even a fiction. The papacy had acted as midwife at the birth of that empire because it needed a strong protector. With its dissolution the popes were left defenceless in the snakepit of Italian politics. Nicholas’ feeble successor, Hadrian II (867–72), surrendered piece by piece all the high ground Nicholas had gained, backing down before Hincmar of Rheims, allowing Lothair of Lorraine, now once more cohabiting with his concubine, to receive communion, watching Bulgaria slip from Roman to Greek obedience.

  Deprived of the support of empire, the papacy became the possession of the great Roman families, a ticket to local dominance for which men were prepared to rape, murder and steal. A third of the popes elected between 872 and 1012 died in suspicious circumstances – John VIII (872–82) bludgeoned to death by his own entourage, Stephen VI (896–7) strangled, Leo V (903) murdered by his successor Sergius III (904–11), John X (914–28) suffocated, Stephen VIII (939–42) horribly mutilated, a fate shared by the Greek antipope John XVI (997–8) who, unfortunately for him, did not die from the removal of his eyes, nose, lips, tongue and hands. Most of these men were manoeuvred into power by a succession of powerful families – the Theophylacts, the Crescentii, the Tusculani. John X, one of the few popes of this period to make a stand against aristocratic domination, was deposed and then murdered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo by the Theophylacts, who had appointed him in the first place.

  The key figure in both Jo
hn X’s appointment and his deposition was the notorious Theophylact matron, Marozia. She also appointed Leo VI (928) and Stephen VII (928–31), and she had been the mistress of Pope Sergius III, by whom she bore an illegitimate son whom she eventually appointed as Pope John XI (931–6). In 932 John deepened the Eastern Church’s already almost limitless contempt for the West by granting a dispensation and sending legates to consecrate the sixteen-year-old son of the Emperor Romanus I as patriarch of Constantinople. It was, clearly, a period in which rulers liked to keep things in the family.

  The collapse of the papacy after Nicholas I is reflected in a corresponding tailing away of the great papal chronicle, the Liber Pontificalis, the fundamental source for papal history from the sixth to the ninth centuries. This chronicle is made up of a series of papal biographies, begun in the Lateran chancery while their subject was still alive, and updated as necessary. The ninth-century lives are compiled on a lavish scale, but the life of Hadrian II is incomplete, and thereafter the chronicle effectively stops, each entry being no more than a line or two giving the Pope’s name and regnal dates.

  The reputation of the popes of the ‘dark century’ after the silencing of the Liber Pontificalis was low at the time, and has not improved with the years. Its symbol is the macabre ‘cadaver synod’ staged by Stephen VI in January 897, when he put on trial the mummified corpse of his hated predecessor but one, Pope Formosus. The corpse, dressed in pontifical vestments and propped up on a throne, was found guilty of perjury and other crimes, was mutilated by having the fingers used in blessings hacked off, and was then tossed into the Tiber. Stephen himself was subsequently deposed by the disgusted Roman crowd, and strangled in prison.