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

by Eamon Duffy

  Cash payments as a condition for religious office were just one of the signs of the extent to which the Church was woven into the fabric of society. Clerical marriage and concubinage were another. In the Eastern churches, bishops were expected to be celibate: if they were married men on their election, they had to separate from their wives. In the West, this provision was applied to all clerics above the rank of subdeacon. Many popes and bishops had been family men, but in theory at least continuing sexual relations were ruled out by ordination. In practice, however, things were often very different. Clerical marriage or concubinage was routine all over Europe, and the laity may even have felt safer if their priest had his own wife. In England before the Norman Conquest many parish priests were married. The same was true in Milan and northern Italy generally, where married bishops were not uncommon, and clerical office might pass from father to son. Religious reformers in the West had always denounced this, but the reformers of the eleventh century were to place the attack on clerical marriage (known as ‘Nicolaism’) at the centre of their campaign for purity in the Church. The Tusculan Pope Benedict VIII had legislated against clerical marriage, but his concern was primarily with the dangers to Church property from greedy clerical families. In the reform era the concern was rather with the ritual purity of those who served the sanctuary, and with the symbolic separation of Church and world.

  The early-eleventh-century papacy, for all its continuing theoretical claims, had been in many respects a local institution, trapped by geography and the politics of Rome. Leo IX determined to take the papacy out beyond Italy, and to make it the spearhead of a general reform. In a whirlwind pontificate of five years he travelled to Germany, France and northern Italy. Wherever he went he held a series of great reforming synods, which attacked the evils of simony, lay investiture and clerical marriage. The synod at Rheims, held in the year of his election, set the tone for later meetings. He had gone to Rheims to consecrate the new monastic church of St Remigius (the Apostle of the Franks), and to enshrine the saints bones at the high altar. The French King, anxious about Leo’s likely attacks on royal episcopal appointments, forbade his bishops to attend, and there were only twenty bishops present. Nevertheless, the Pope used the occasion to inaugurate a purge against simoniac bishops. Having placed the bones of St Remigius on the high altar, he demanded that the bishops and abbots present declare individually whether they had paid any money for their office. He evidently knew his men: the guilty majority were shamed into silence. The Archbishop of Rheims, who was host for the Council, was spared open humiliation, being summoned to Rome to account for himself. The Bishop of Langres fled, and was excommunicated and deposed. His defence counsel, the Archbishop of Besançon, was struck dumb while speaking on his behalf, a judgement held to have come direct from St Remigius himself. Bishops who confessed – a quarter of those present – were pardoned and restored, though one of them, the Bishop of Nantes, who had succeeded his own father in office, was stripped of his episcopal honours and reduced to the priesthood.

  In one week, Leo had asserted papal authority as it had never been asserted before. Bishops had been excommunicated and deposed, a powerful and prestigious archbishop summoned to explain himself in Rome, and the whole system of payments for promotion within the Church had been earth-shakingly challenged. And Rheims was only the beginning. Leo launched an all-out attack on the financial traffic in ecclesiastical appointments, from village priests up to bishops and archbishops, deposing the guilty and even reordaining priests ordained by such bishops, for simony at the time was held to be a heresy which invalidated the sacraments celebrated by the simoniac. He enforced orthodox doctrine, condemning Berengar of Tours for heretical teaching on the eucharist, and he did what he could to reform practical abuses, like the appointment of bishops by the secular ruler without election by or with the consent of priests and people. He also began a campaign against married priests, insisting that all clergy must be celibate.

  In a momentous step which foreshadowed a permanent change in the character of the papacy, he built round him a remarkable body of like-minded reformers as advisers and deputies, thereby beginning the transformation of the Roman Curia from a locally recruited to an international body of experts and activists. They included monks like the fiery Peter Damian, Humbert of Moyenmoutier (a learned zealot whom he made cardinal bishop of Silva Candida), Frederick of Liège, Abbot of Monte Cassino (later Pope Stephen IX), Abbot Hugh of Cluny, and the energetic Roman monk Hildebrand, who, as Pope Gregory VII, would give his name to the whole reform movement.

  Leo’s determination to maintain the freedom of the papacy and to rid papal territory of political interference seemed compromised by a new development in Italy, the arrival of the Normans. Southern Italy was ruled by the Byzantine empire, Sicily by Muslims. But both regions were remote from the empires which claimed sovereignty over them, and were a paradise for landless adventurers. By the mid-eleventh century, Norman mercenaries, called in by local princelings struggling against Muslim or Byzantine overlords, had broken the Muslim power in Sicily and established themselves as a threat in their own right. They soon began to encroach on the southern reaches of the patrimony of Peter. Leo as a young man had led imperial armies in northern Italy. He now once again took to war, leading his own ramshackle army in a disastrous attack on the Norman forces in southern Italy. He had hoped for help from the German Emperor, and had planned to join forces with the Byzantine armies of the south, to drive out this shared new enemy. In the event, no help was forthcoming. Leo was humiliatingly defeated in June 1053, and his Norman enemies kept him under polite but close arrest for nine months.

  This shambolic military sortie into southern Italy was to have disastrous religious consequences. The Byzantine court and Church detested the Normans, but, even more deeply, they resented the Pope’s interference in the south. Leo had characteristically taken the opportunity provided by the campaign to hold a reforming synod in the region, which was traditionally under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. He had also appointed his closest adviser, Humbert of Moyenmoutier, as archbishop of Sicily. Leo probably had little choice in the matter, because the island was newly recovered from Muslim domination by the Normans, who supported the imposition of a Latin church structure. Nevertheless, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, detested the Western Church, and responded by closing down all the Latin-rite churches in Constantinople. A deepening rift opened between East and West, with the Byzantine Church denouncing Latin liturgical practices like the use of unleavened bread in the Mass, and the Pope making ever stronger claims of papal supremacy. A long history of alienation and mutual suspicion lay behind this skirmishing, and neither side was prepared to give an inch. Matters came to a head in July 1054 when Humbert, acting as papal legate, strode into the cathedral of Hagia Sophia and laid a bull of excommunication on the high altar. The Patriarch responded two weeks later by excommunicating the Pope, though Leo had in fact been dead for months. But the tragic and continuing schism between East and West, long brewing as the customs and beliefs of the two Churches had grown apart, was ominously prefigured in this confrontation.

  Leo’s startling reshaping of the papacy from the prime example of corruption into the chief instrument of reform was continued by his immediate successors. Victor II (1055–7), former Bishop of Eichstatt, was the last of the German popes appointed by Henry III. The reforming party in Rome at first suspected him of being over-committed to imperial interests. In fact, he proved a zealous defender of the Church’s rights and property, and a keen promoter of reforming ideals such as clerical chastity and the campaign against simony. Victor’s successor, Frederick of Lorraine, who took the name Stephen IX (1057–8), was no imperialist, being the brother of Godfrey of Lorraine, Henry Ill’s most formidable rival in northern Italy. Because of this, he had left Rome for the life of a monk at Monte Cassino, in Norman southern Italy, when Henry came to Rome in 1055. Victor II, however, trusted him, and after Henry’s
death made him abbot of Monte Cassino in 1057, and shortly afterwards a cardinal priest. As pope, Stephen set about reforming St Benedict’s own monastery at Monte Cassino, and entrenched the leaders of reform even more deeply in the papal establishment by making the reform propagandist Peter Damian bishop of Ostia, and appointing Humbert of Silva Candida as his chancellor or chief minister.

  He also promoted the monk-deacon Hildebrand, whom he sent to Milan to establish links with the ‘Patarini’ movement there. Church and city in Milan were in the hands of a strongly aristocratic anti-reform elite. The Patarini, by contrast, were a populist opposition group who had taken up the reform campaigns against simony and clerical marriage. They looked for a clergy dedicated to poverty and chastity, and a renewal of the Church by a return to the apostolic pattern found in the Acts of the Apostles. Their nickname was a comment on their lower-class origins, for it meant ‘rag-pickers’, and the papal alliance with such a radical group was a portent for the future.

  The Roman aristocracy were also opposed to the papal reform movement, which had robbed them of their control of papal territory and revenues. When Stephen IX died there was a long delay in electing his successor, caused by Hildebrand’s absence in Germany. Seizing the moment, a group of nobles launched a lavish campaign of bribery, and succeeded in having John Mincius, Cardinal Bishop of Velletri and a member of the Tusculan clan, elected and enthroned as Benedict X in 1058. It was a shrewd choice, for Mincius had plausible reforming credentials and had been a friend of Stephen DCs. The reform party, however, refused to accept Benedict as pope. They fled the city, and Peter Damian, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia and therefore chief papal consecrator, refused to perform the ordination. In December that year the reform cardinals, meeting in Siena, elected the French Bishop of Florence, Gerard of Lorraine, as Pope Nicholas II (1058–61). Nicholas had the backing of the German court and, with the help of imperial troops and a lavish distribution of gifts to the population of Rome by Hildebrand, he drove Benedict out of the city. He was accepted as the true Pope early in 1059.

  Nicholas’ papacy was to be a further landmark on the road to reform. His determination to keep the initiative in the hands of the reforming party, and to prevent a repetition of the nobles’ coup of 1058, manifested itself in a new procedure for papal elections. Popes in the past had been appointed in a bewildering variety of ways – elected by assemblies of clergy and people, hailed by acclamation at the funerals of their predecessors, nominated by local gang-bosses, appointed by emperors. A synod at the Lateran in April 1059 promulgated a new papal electoral decree, confining the actual choice to the seven cardinal bishops, with the subsequent assent of the cardinal priests and deacons, and then the acclaim of the people: vague and grudging provision was also made for imperial approval.

  The ‘cardinals’ were simply the senior clergy of Rome. The word itself is probably derived from the term for a hinge or joint, and was first given to the twenty-eight parish priests of the titular churches of Rome, who also served the five papal basilicas which collectively formed the Pope’s cathedral. This double role made these priests the ‘hinges’ between the See of Rome, and the parishes of Rome. The word lost this precise original meaning, however, and became an honorific sign of status. It was extended to the holders of the seven ‘subarbicarian’ bishoprics round Rome, and to the nineteen deacons of the city, and it was this group of fifty-four senior clergy which was now envisaged as the sole electoral body for the papacy, with the initiative and determining role going to the cardinal bishops. The decree was a clear attempt to exclude lay influence, whether from the Emperor or the Roman nobility, from the whole process.

  The same synod made clerical marriage illegal, ordered the laity to boycott the Masses of priests who kept concubines, forbade the acceptance of churches from lay proprietors, and stipulated that the clergy serving a great church should live in common, a move towards a monastic pattern intended to improve clerical morals and discipline. But the most momentous development of Nicholas’ pontificate was the reversal of previous papal policy towards the Normans, and the beginning of the papacy’s consequent alienation from the German court. Here, practical necessity was the driving force. Since the death of Henry III Germany had been ruled by a minor, and the papacy had lost any real hope of effective German support against its enemies in Italy. The Pope determined therefore to form an alliance with the Normans of Sicily and southern Italy. The Norman hold on southern Italy had no legitimacy other than force of arms. The Pope now granted the Norman rulers there the duchies of Apulia and Calabria and the lordship of Sicily, as feudal fiefs under the sovereignty of St Peter. In return, they swore loyalty to him and promised military help when needed.

  This was a daring move, for the popes had never been sovereigns of southern Italy or of Sicily, and in strict law had no right to give what did not belong to them. The Donation of Constantine, however, was used to justify the transaction, and its advantages for the popes were at once obvious. The establishment of Norman rule in these traditionally Byzantine areas meant the replacement of Greek by Latin ecclesiastical obedience, and a massive expansion of papal influence. Two years later Nicholas’ successor, Alexander II (1061–73), would experience the practical benefits of this new relationship when the disgruntled Roman nobility persuaded the German Regent, the Empress Agnes, to flout the election decree of 1059 and install an antipope, Honorius II, in Rome. Honorius was driven out and the city forced into obedience by Norman troops.

  This confrontation was part of the deepening alienation between the reform papacy and the German monarchy. Papal legates had been excluded from the court and a synod of German bishops had excommunicated Pope Nicholas. Alexander compensated for these worsening relations by strengthening his links with the Normans. In 1063 Norman warriors fighting Muslims in Spain and Sicily were granted the banner of St Peter as a mark of papal blessing, and in 1066 Alexander sent the banner to Duke William of Normandy for his invasion of England. Since the Normans enforced clerical celibacy and paid at least lip-service to the campaign against simony, the Pope could view the conquest as a means of furthering the reform of the Anglo-Saxon church. The reconquest of Spain further extended papal influence, for in 1068 the King of Aragon placed his country under the feudal protection of St Peter, and in 1071 ordered the clergy to use the Roman liturgy instead of the ancient Mozarabic rite.

  By now, in any case, the dynamic of reform made conflict with the German court increasingly likely. Leo had identified the appointment of bishops and other clerics by secular rulers as one of the root causes of corruption in the Church. The Emperor Henry III had been the chief patron of the reform party, yet paradoxically as emperor he was also the chief offender in the matter of ‘lay investiture’, appointing and deposing popes and bishops. The issue came to a head in Milan, where the reform campaign against simony and clerical marriage had become the banner of the Patarini, and was therefore associated with social radicalism: reform and revolution became synonymous. On the death of the Archbishop in 1071, the young Henry IV promptly appointed an aristocratic new candidate from the anti-reform faction, investing him with staff and ring. A rival candidate favoured by the Patarini was recognised by Rome, and in 1073 Pope Alexander II excommunicated the King’s advisers. Pope and monarch faced each other across the ditch of reform.

  The man behind this stiffening of resistance to Henry’s claims was the Cardinal Archdeacon of Rome, Hildebrand. Of Tuscan peasant stock, he had been educated from his early youth for service in the Roman Church, and had been a force within the reform movement for almost twenty years. As a young man he had become a monk of the monastery of Santa Maria on the Aventine, one of the Roman houses reformed under Cluniac influence. He had also been a member of the staff of John Gratian, the deposed Pope Gregory VI (whom he revered, and whose name he took when himself elected pope in 1073). Hildebrand followed Gregory into exile at the imperial court at Cologne, where he probably entered a Cluniac monastery. Recalled to Rome by Leo IX to manage papal fina
nces, he became a key figure in the evolution of the programme of the reformed papacy, and after the death of Humbert of Silva Candida in 1061 was the leading ‘hawk’ among the reformers. He was elected pope by popular acclaim on the death of Alexander II.

  Gregory VII (1073–85) was one of the most energetic and determined men ever to occupy the See of Peter, and he was driven by an almost mystically exalted vision of the awesome responsibility and dignity of the papal office. His views were in many respects no more extreme than earlier advocates of reform like Humbert of Silva Candida, but in the hands of a ruling pope, and a pope of such singleness of vision, they took on a new radicalism. The reform movement had been imposed on the papacy by a German emperor, but Gregory owed nothing to the empire, and had seen a pope and a loved superior deposed by a king. His whole pontificate was a repudiation of the right of any king ever again to do such a thing.

  His view of the papacy itself was set out in a remarkable and somewhat mysterious group of twenty-seven propositions, known as the Dictatus Papae (the Pope’s Memorandum), inserted into the papal registers in 1075. The eleventh century had seen a steady growth in collections of legal canons, textbooks designed to serve the new spirit of reform. The twenty-seven maxims which make up the Dictatus Papae were probably headings for a new compilation of canons designed to illustrate papal prerogatives.3