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

by Eamon Duffy

  Yet not all these men were contemptible. Formosus himself, despite having at one time been deposed from his earlier bishopric of Porto by Pope John VIII for plotting to have himself made pope, was a very remarkable figure, a brilliant missionary in Nicholas Is Bulgarian enterprise, a key player in attempts to patch up relations with Constantinople after the Photius shambles, a gifted papal diplomat in the West, and a man of austere personal piety. Even the appointments made by relentless fixers like Alberic II, the secular ruler of Rome who was Marozia’s son and eventual gaoler, included some admirable men. Ruthless politicians may be, indeed often are, conventionally pious, and Alberic was no exception. He appointed five popes, two of whom, Leo VII (936–9) and Agapitus II (946–55), were sincere reformers, promoting monastic revival and clerical reform in Italy and Germany. Leo in particular was the friend of the great Abbot Odo of Cluny, and, with Alberic’s support, entrusted to him the reform of the Roman monasteries. Leo also encouraged the revived monastery of Subiaco, St Benedict’s own house, and the reforming abbey of Gorze.

  But even these relatively decent popes were in Alberic’s pocket, and the dominance of the Roman ruling families made impossible any real papal initiative or consistency. In any case, Alberic more than compensated for these worthwhile appointments by securing a promise from the clergy and nobility of Rome to elect his son and heir Octavian as pope when Agapitus died, thereby uniting Church and state in Rome with a vengeance. Octavian was duly elected as Pope John XII (955–64) at the ripe age of eighteen. He was to die at the age of twenty-seven, allegedly from a stroke while in bed with a married woman.

  The decision of Otto I of Germany in 962 to revive the empire of Charlemagne offered the papacy some hope of change. Otto I and his successors Otto II and III had an almost mystical vision of the Christian empire, and of the sacred responsibilities it placed on the shoulders of the Emperor. Already the stirrings of reform in the churches of Germany, especially in the monasteries, had formed a bond between Germany and the papacy. Monastic reformers, struggling against entrenched local interests, including unworthy bishops, looked to the papacy to provide support in the form of the privileges and exemptions they needed for survival. From the distance of Germany, the personal failings of the popes were less significant than the authority of their office. The re-emergence of the empire, now firmly centred on Germany, strengthened this link between papacy and reform.

  Ironically, the Pope who anointed Otto I on the Feast of the Purification (2 February) 962 was the unsavoury twenty-five-year-old John XII. To him, however, Otto pledged the restoration of papal control of the lands promised by Pepin and Charlemagne, and the defence of the Church’s freedoms. In return, papal elections had to be agreed by the Emperor’s representatives, and popes would have to swear fealty to him. The Ottoman empire promised more than this to the popes, however. Otto’s determination to replace Byzantine rule in southern Italy with his own held out the prospect of papal control of the churches there, which had long been subject to Constantinople. The German Emperor’s power in northern Italy speedily resulted in the extension of papal influence there. Milan and Ravenna became more securely subordinate to Rome.

  There was a price to pay. With the restoration of Charlemagne’s vision came a return of Charlemagne’s claims. The Ottomans expected to exercise tight control over the Church, and the popes appointed under Ottoman influence were expected to endorse Ottoman policies. Papal unease with these claims expressed themselves in the scaling down of the rite of imperial anointing. In place of the sacramental oil, chrism, used in the consecration of bishops as well as kings, a lesser oil was used, and the Emperor was anointed only on his arm and back, not his head, to symbolise that his office was to bear the sword for the defence of the Church. More practically, Ottoman policies were often unpopular in Italy, and the popes collected more than their share of the hostility those policies provoked. When Otto II died suddenly in 983, leaving the three-year-old Otto III to the regency of his Byzantine princess mother, Pope John XIV (983–4) was left friendless, and was soon deposed and murdered. Rome sank once more into the control of the Crescentii.

  The imperial ideal was revived at the very end of the tenth century under the brief personal rule of Otto III. Of all the Ottomans, he had the most exalted view of Rome, and determined to establish his headquarters there. His understanding of his role as emperor, however, was perhaps influenced by his Byzantine mother. For Otto, the Pope was a junior partner, the chaplain of empire, whose first duty was conformity to the will of the Lord’s anointed. To ensure that this was so, he looked first to his own family. His first papal appointment was a twenty-five-year-old German cousin (the first German Pope) who took the name Gregory V (996–9). But this move backfired, because Gregory was detested by the Roman ruling families, who were resentful of imperial interference. Without their support Rome became too hot to hold the Pope, and he was deposed temporarily in 996.

  Gregory’s death in 999 enabled Otto to try again, this time with the brilliant Frenchman Gerbert of Aurillac, one of the wittiest and most learned men in Europe, and an experienced ecclesiastical politician. Gerbert had once been archbishop of Rheims, replacing an unworthy predecessor who had been deposed without papal consent. To defend his own position, Gerbert had attacked papal rights of interference in local churches. At the time of his appointment to the papacy he was Archbishop of Ravenna. Gerbert took the name Sylvester II (999–1003) to symbolise the rebirth of early Christian Rome, the Renovatio Imperii Romanorum which had appeared on some of Charlemagne’s seals, and which Otto had now adopted as his own. Gerbert would be Pope Sylvester to Otto’s Constantine.

  Otto had firm ideas about the nature of that partnership. Almost uniquely among leaders of the day, he realised that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, and said so. The Emperor was not the creation of the papacy: rather, the papacy was an instrument in the hand of the Emperor. Yet Otto showered benefits on the Church of Rome, restoring to it the lost territories of Ravenna and the Pentapolis. On the theoretical front, too, papal fortunes revived. Sylvester’s former hostility to papal claims evaporated once he was pope, and, ironically in view of his own earlier history, his vigorous assertion of the prerogatives of the Holy See, in Germany as well as Italy, now rivalled those of Nicholas I.

  None of this was to last. Otto, still in his early twenties, died in 1002. Once more, the warring families of Rome reasserted their control of the papacy, with a corresponding decline in papal calibre. Imperial influence was not entirely eclipsed, however, and the Tusculan Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24) worked in close harmony with the Emperor Henry II, whose attacks on Byzantine southern Italy he encouraged, in the hope of restoring papal authority there. This led to the breaking off of the fragile relations between the churches of Constantinople and Rome which had been patched up since the Photian schism. The situation was not eased by the fact that Benedict caved in to the Emperor’s insistence that the Creed, containing the Filioque, hitherto excluded from the Roman liturgy, should be sung at every Mass. Pope and Emperor nevertheless collaborated on a number of reform measures, almost certainly initiated by Henry, such as the Synod of Pavia’s stern measures in 1022 to stamp out clerical marriage and concubinage.

  This imperial interlude, however, did not fundamentally alter the essentially local character of the papacy at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Whatever the grandiose theoretical claims of popes like Nicholas the Great, the reality was that the popes were harassed Italian prince–bishops, desperately struggling to preserve the territory of St Peter, sometimes responding to but never initiating reforms which were beginning to stir within Christendom. Even the imperial popes were desperately vulnerable – Leo VIII (963–5) had been exiled from Rome, John XIII (965–72) imprisoned and forced to flee, Benedict VI (973–4) murdered, Boniface VII (974, 984–5), twice banished, Benedict VII (974–83) exiled, John XIV (983–4) murdered, John XV (985–6) fled, Gregory V (996–9) exiled, Sylvester II (999–1003) driven out wi
th his master Otto III. Ironically, the unavoidable price of papal security in the city seemed to be subordination to the rule of the local families, and the closing down of horizons.

  Yet Rome retained its mystique. In 1027 King Cnut of England came on pilgrimage, ‘because I heard from wise men that St Peter the Apostle has received from the Lord a great power of binding and loosing, and bears the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and therefore I deemed it useful in no ordinary degree to seek his patronage before God.’ The Pope whom Cnut encountered on this journey, with whom he negotiated a series of privileges for the English church, and whom he watched crown and anoint Conrad II as emperor of the Romans, was John XIX (1024–32), the younger brother of the ruling Count ofTusculum. He was a typical representative of his age. He had bribed his way to the papacy, and had been elevated from the status of layman to pope in a single day. Yet Cnut, if he was aware of these things, was not scandalised, and evidently felt no sense of incongruity at the distance between the key-bearer and his earthly representative. The Pope, for Cnut, was not essentially a leader, a reformer or an exemplar. Like other priests, he was the guardian of mysteries so holy that his own merits or demerits hardly mattered. It was the office that counted, not the man who held it. The Pope, in the words of Louis Duchesne, was ‘the high-priest of the Roman pilgrimage, the dispenser of benedictions, of privileges, and of anathemas’.29 No one looked to him to be anything more, and many would have resented it if the popes had tried. All that, however, was about to change.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SET ABOVE NATIONS

  1000–1447

  I THE ERA OF PAPAL REFORM

  At the opening of the eleventh century the papacy was a contradictory mixture of exalted theory and squalid reality. In theory the bishops of Rome were lords of the world, exercising a unique spiritual supremacy symbolised by their exclusive right to anoint the western or ‘Holy Roman’ Emperor. In practice, the popes were strictly and often humiliatingly subordinated to the power of the local Roman aristocracy, or to the German ruling house. Of the twenty-five popes between 955 and 1057, thirteen were appointed by the local aristocracy, while the other twelve were appointed (and no fewer than five dismissed) by the German emperors. The ancient axiom that no one may judge the Pope was still in the law-books, but in practice had long since been set aside.

  The popes themselves were deeply embroiled in the internecine dynastic warfare of the Roman nobility, and election to the chair of Peter, as we have seen, was frequently a commodity for sale or barter. The Ottoman era had led to a temporary improvement in the characters of the popes, but by the second quarter of the eleventh century standards had crumbled once more. Benedict IX (1032–48), whose election was the result of a systematic campaign of bribery by his father, the Tusculan grandee Count Alberic III, was as bad as any of the popes of the preceding ‘dark century’. Like his uncle and immediate predecessor John XIX, Benedict was a layman, and was still in his twenties at the time of his election. He was both violent and debauched, and even the Roman populace, hardened as they were to unedifying papal behaviour, could not stomach him. He was eventually deposed in favour of Silvester III (1045). With the help of his family’s private army, he was briefly restored in 1045 amid bloody hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Rome. He was evidently tired of the struggle, however, for he accepted a bribe to abdicate in favour of his godfather, the archpriest John Gratian. It was rumoured that Pope Benedict needed the money in order to marry.

  Gratian was a man with a reputation for holiness and a genuine interest in religious reform. His choice of name, Gregory VI (1045–6), was probably a deliberate allusion to the purity of the papacy under Gregory the Great. His election was therefore greeted with delight by those who were looking for a clean-up of the Church. Peter Damian, the ex-swineherd who had become abbot of the monastery of Fonte Avellana, and was one of the leading voices of monastic and clerical reform of the day, hoped that Gregory’s election might presage the return of ‘the golden days of the Apostles’, and prayed that religious discipline might flourish again under his guidance. Yet there was no doubt that money had changed hands to secure Gregorys election, both in setting up Benedicts pension and in providing financial sweeteners to the turbulent Roman crowd.

  Into this delicate situation in 1046 strode the German King Henry III. Still in his twenties, he was a gifted warrior and a man of deep piety who saw his role as much in religious as in secular terms. Committed to the reform of the Church, he surrounded himself with bishops and men of learning. Henry had come to Italy to be crowned emperor. How much he knew about the circumstances of Pope Gregory’s election before his arrival is uncertain, but on learning the facts he acted decisively. He would not be crowned by a pope whose authority was undermined by the sin of simony, the purchase of holy things. At a synod held at Sutri in December 1046, Gregory, Silvester and Benedict were all formally deposed, and Henry set about reforming the papacy. Over the next ten years he appointed a series of popes committed to the renewal of the Church in general, and of the See of Peter in particular. All were Germans, and the names they chose as pope are significant – Clement II (1046–7), Damasus II (1048), Leo IX (1049–54) and Victor II (1055–7). Marking a clear break with the Gregories, Johns and Benedicts of the ‘dark century’, these were the names of great popes of the early Church, and they symbolised a conscious aspiration to recover the purity of early Christian Rome. The greatest of these imperial appointments was an Alsatian count, Bruno, Bishop of Toul, the Emperor’s distant cousin. Bishop Bruno signalled his exalted religious ideals by refusing the papacy unless Henry’s choice was ratified by the Roman clergy and people, and he walked to Rome as a pilgrim for his installation as Pope Leo IX in 1049.

  Leo represented the spearhead of a movement which had been stirring the Church in France and Germany for over a century. Though it aimed at the renewal of Christian life in general, it was intimately identified with reform of the monastic life. In the Frankish empire there had been a close connection between monasteries and monarchy, and successive emperors and kings had concerned themselves with the regulation and endowment of the great religious houses. Royal patronage enriched these communities, encouraged the proper keeping of the rule and the maintenance of a glorious liturgy, and protected the monasteries against interference.

  The most famous of all the reforming communities of tenth-century Europe was the great monastery of Cluny, founded by Duke William of Aquitaine in 909. Like many other monasteries, Cluny was an aristocratic foundation, but one with a difference, for Duke William had decreed that the monks at Cluny ‘shall be wholly freed from our power, and from that of our kindred, and from the jurisdiction of royal greatness’.1 William placed his new monastery under the direct protection of the Holy See, and dedicated it to Sts Peter and Paul. This ‘special relationship’ with the papacy, ensuring Cluny’s freedom from external pressure and contributing to its prestige, culminated in 1054 with the exemption of the monastery from all episcopal control except that of the Pope.

  Cluny gradually became the centre of a great web of religious communities, some new, and some older foundations seeking reform. By the mid-eleventh century there were hundreds of Cluniac houses throughout Europe. In some ways Cluniac reform hardly strikes us now as a ‘reformation’ at all, and it certainly was not primarily associated with personal austerity of living, poverty, study and contemplation. What Cluny offered was the beauty of holiness, monastic life conceived of as an orderly and dignified observance of the monastic rule, the adornment of the monastic church with splendid architecture, rich vestments and beautiful books and the elaborate celebration of the liturgy of the hours and the Mass.

  Cluny enjoyed excellent relations with the kings and emperors of Germany, and Cluniac houses everywhere basked in the favour of the European aristocracy: it was in no sense a revolutionary movement. But in one important respect Cluniac reform looked away from the Carolingian world in which monasticism had flourished under royal patronage, towards th
e papal future. For the German monasteries like Gorze, religious freedom meant freedom under the King. For Cluny, it meant, among other things, freedom from the King. This was a distinction which would come to dominate the very idea of religious reform, as more and more reformers came to see lay influence over the Church, however benevolent in intent, as the chief source of its corruptions.

  In the mid-eleventh century, lay influence was everywhere in the Church. Monasteries and bishoprics were more than spiritual institutions. They were enormously wealthy social and political corporations, controlling vast revenues and carrying a corresponding weight in the calculations of kings. When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 he found there thirty-five monasteries, which between them controlled a sixth of the total revenue of the country No ruler could afford to ignore such power, or to leave it unchecked. Everywhere in Europe rulers exercised close control over the choice of bishops and abbots in their realms. The monasteries and other churches founded by kings and princes belonged to them, and their revenues were often at the disposal of the lay ‘proprietors’. Control by the ruler was symbolised in the ceremony of consecration of a bishop, in the course of which the King (or his representative) handed over the Bishop’s staff and ring of office. This ‘lay investiture’ was to become the focus of the reform papacy’s attack on lay interference in spiritual matters.

  The potential in all this for corruption is obvious. Since becoming a bishop made a man immensely wealthy and powerful, men were prepared to pay for the privilege. More often than not, new bishops were required to pay large sums of money to the ruler who had nominated them. Reformers denounced this as the sale of holy things, called the sin of ‘simony’ after Simon Magus, who in the Acts of the Apostles had offered the Apostles money for the power to work miracles. But simony was not always easy to distinguish from the reasonable levying of a tax by the ruler when the revenues of the bishopric were transferred to a new holder. The papacy itself exacted fees of this sort. When Benedict VIII established a new bishopric of Besalu in 1017, he stipulated that each new bishop should pay the pope one pound of gold. The papal clerk who recorded this provision carefully added that this payment was ‘not for the consecration but in token of true obedience’.2