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

by Eamon Duffy

  The exact nature of Urban’s promise is unclear, and the doctrine of Indulgences had far to go before reaching its full-blown form under Innocent III. But in any case, there were all the signs that popular enthusiasm here ran far ahead of papal intentions. The spiritual benefits which Urban promised boiled down to the substitution of the danger and effort of the Crusade for, normal ecclesiastical penance. This was something distinct from the forgiveness of sins, which remained dependent on true repentance and sacramental confession. But all over Europe popular opinion seized on the notion that by virtue of involvement in the Crusade a man’s sins were wiped away. Gradually the language of the popes about the Crusade dropped the early theological caution, and spoke of ‘full remission of sins’. By the end of the twelfth century, theologians had begun to worry about this, and papal language returned to its earlier reticence. These fine distinctions, however, were lost on the majority of Crusaders, for the papacy had triggered a wave of popular religious feeling which took on a theological life of its own.

  In 1095 all that lay in the future. In the meantime, from all over Europe, even from the fringes like Ireland and Scotland, men hurried to share in this great spiritual venture of arms. By 1099 Jerusalem had been taken and the Muslim population massacred. It was the beginning of an enterprise which would continue for centuries, and whose moral ambiguities would deepen with the passing years.

  But for the papacy in the short term at least it was a triumph. Only the key-bearer could have aroused the imagination of Europe with a promise of sins unbound, of penances remitted by the act of holy war. Only the Pope had the moral authority to persuade Europe with unblinking certainty that ‘God wills it’. The Crusade was led by the Bishop of Le Puy, appointed papal vicar by Urban, and the Pope placed the Crusaders themselves, their family, their property and lands under the protection of the Church – in effect the Crusader and his dependants became temporary clerics, and were thereby exempted from the jurisdiction of the secular courts. This legal protection was a very precious privilege, for no one could be sued or prosecuted for crimes or debt, for example, while it lasted. It was the material equivalent of the Crusading Indulgence, and like the Indulgence was a benefit only the Pope could have bestowed. Finally, the most telling aspect of the First Crusade was that this mighty wave of military enthusiasm owed nothing whatever to any king or emperor. The Pope had summoned the chivalry of Europe round the banner of the cross and St Peter, to overwhelming effect. No secular ruler could have done as much, and there could be no more eloquent demonstration of the centrality of the reformed papacy in the religious imagination of medieval Europe.

  III THE PINNACLE OF PAPAL POWER

  The papacy at the beginning of the twelfth century was at an unprecedented height in its spiritual prestige, and in its own self-confidence. As the century progressed, it would gather round itself more and more of the trappings of monarchy. New popes were crowned with a distinctive cap and gold circlet, quite distinct from the episcopal mitre they wore during the liturgy. According to the Donation of Constantine, this cap or tiara symbolised their lordship of the West. The rebuilding and decoration of the churches of Rome which successive popes undertook made lavish use of imperial motifs. Papal thrones were embellished with lion arm-rests, and porphyry and gold featured large in the designs for the Roman sanctuary floors, altars and pulpits produced by the Cosmati workshops. St Peter, declared Bernard of Clairvaux, had received the whole world to govern, and it was the task of his vicar ‘to direct princes, to command bishops, to set kingdoms and empires in order’. There were indeed two powers, ‘two swords’, the spiritual and the temporal, but both belonged to Peter, ‘the one to be unsheathed at his nod, the other by his hand’.16

  For Bernard this was a spiritual not a temporal claim, and he deplored the secular pomp and the secular business with which the popes were surrounded. Peter, he told Eugenius III, ‘is not known ever to have gone in procession adorned in jewels and silk, nor crowned with gold, nor mounted on a white horse nor surrounded by knights … In these respects you are the heir not of Peter but of Constantine.’17 In practice the distinction between what Peter had bequeathed to the papacy and what came from Constantine was not so easy to unpick, and the popes of the twelfth century did not try very hard. The burial of Innocent II in a porphyry tomb from the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which was believed to have been the sarcophagus of Hadrian, and of Pope Anastasius IV in a porphyry coffin which had once held the bones of St Helena, demonstrated how closely the spiritual and temporal claims of the popes had converged.

  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the papacy remained at odds with the empire for much of the twelfth century. The Investiture Controversy became both the symbol of the reformed papacy’s claims and the rock on which it seemed they might founder. The imperial Antipope Clement III died in September 1100, and his successors were men of straw who lacked imperial backing. The schism rumbled on till 1111, but was not a serious threat to the popes. But Henry remained determined to maintain his right to invest the bishops of his realm with ring and staff, and his overthrow and replacement by his son Henry V in 1106 changed nothing on this score: Pope and King remained at loggerheads. When Henry V came to be crowned emperor in Rome in February nil, Paschal II offered a desperate solution. If Henry would renounce investiture and permit free and canonical election of bishops, the Church in return would renounce all the ‘regalia’ – land, property and income derived from the secular power. From henceforth, the clergy from parish clerk up to the archbishops would live on voluntary offerings and church dues like tithes.

  Paschal was a monk, intent on separating the Church from the contamination of worldliness, but this solution had no chance of success. When the terms of the agreement were read out at the coronation ceremony, the German princes and bishops present rioted, refusing to consider so radical a dismantling of the structure of German landed society. The coronation could not proceed. Henry’s response was to clap the Pope and cardinals into gaol, and to threaten to recognise the Antipope Silvester IV. Paschal caved in, crowned Henry, and in April 1111 granted the ‘privilege of Ponte Mammolo’, conceding the right of investiture to the Emperor.

  Paschal bitterly regretted this betrayal of the reform cause, and he subsequently revoked the ‘pravilege’, as the ‘depraved privilege’ came to be called, in a dreadful twelfth-century pun. His frail and elderly successor, the Cassinese monk Gelasius II (1118–19), was to pay the price for this resistance, leading a harassed and persecuted existence, ousted from Rome by the antipope Gregory (VIII) and on the run from Henry V: he died and was buried at Cluny It was clear that if the work of the papacy was to be conducted with anything like tranquillity, the issue of investiture had to be settled once and for all. Pope Callistus II (1119–24) was able to do this, in the Concordat of Worms he concluded with Henry V in 1122. The Worms agreement built on a compromise arrangement first worked out in Norman England, whereby newly elected bishops swore fealty to the ruler for the temporalities of their sees, but the King made clear that he claimed no spiritual jurisdiction over them by abandoning investiture with staff and ring. Instead, on receipt, of their pledge of allegiance he conferred their lands on them with a tap from his sceptre. Canonical elections to the bishoprics and abbacies would be held in the Emperor’s presence, and the Emperor was given power of arbitration in the event of disputed elections.

  The settlement at Worms ended the conflict with the empire, at least for one generation, and the breathing-space it bought allowed the popes to turn their attention away from a sterile confrontation with the secular power to the implementation of religious reform within the Church at large. They had in any case other troubles closer at hand. Gregory VII had allied himself and the cause of reform with the Pierleoni family, wealthy bankers recently converted from Judaism, who threw the weight of their new money behind the Gregorian papacy. Their great rivals were the Frangipani, and the twelfth-century popes found themselves increasingly caught in the crossfire between these
feuding families. There was no return to the papal captivity of the ‘dark century’. Never again would a single family own the papacy, as the Theophylacts or Tusculani had done, but they could make Rome uncomfortable for the popes, and the elections of Honorius II (1124–30) and Innocent II (1130–43) were dogged and complicated by these dynastic tensions.

  The popes were also threatened by the mounting hostility of the city of Rome to their rule. As the papacy became more international, it forfeited Roman loyalty. This distancing was already present in the 1059 papal election decree, which effectively excluded the people of the city from any real say in the process. Every new pope had to spend huge sums on lavish gifts to the citizens to ensure acceptance of his election, a use of Church funds which brought bitter criticism from reformers everywhere. The twelfth century also saw a revival of republican spirit in Rome, and a pride in the city’s secular past, which culminated in 1143 with the setting up of a commune by the citizens and the establishment of an independent senate. All the mid-century popes had to contend with the threat of revolution in the city and the papal state round Rome. Lucius II (1144–5) died of wounds sustained while storming the forces of the Commune on the Capitol, and Eugenius III, Hadrian IV (1154–9) and Alexander III (1159–81) were all driven out of the city by the citizens.

  Control of Rome was not everything, however. The Antipope Anacletus II, Pietro Pierleoni, elected by a majority of the cardinals in 1130, was securely in charge of Rome, backed by the family bank and the Normans of southern Italy. But his opponent, Innocent II, was widely perceived as the true inheritor of the papal reform movement. He received the support of the most influential propagandist in Europe, Bernard of Clairvaux, and of most of the monarchs and national hierarchies of Europe. These included the Emperor Lothar III, who signalled his recognition of Innocent by performing the stirrup service for him at their first meeting, leading his horse by the bridle, as Constantine was reputed to have done for Pope Silvester, and as Pepin had done for Pope Stephen. Though Anacletus held the Vatican and St Peter’s till his death in 1138, almost no one in Europe believed him to be the true Pope, and his claims were set aside by the Second Lateran Council in 1139, attended by more than 500 bishops from sees as far apart as Lincoln and Jerusalem. The papacy was now more than ever an international, not a local, institution.

  Many of the problems confronting the mid-twelfth-century papal monarchy are starkly revealed in the pontificate of the only English Pope, Nicholas Breakspear, Hadrian IV (1154–9). Breakspear was a native of St Albans, but had been refused entry as a monk to the monastery there (his father did enter the monastery, where he is buried). He pursued a monastic vocation abroad, and became canon and eventually abbot of St Rufus in Avignon. Talent-spotted by Eugenius III, he became cardinal bishop of Albano (prompting puns about failure in St Albans but success in Albano), and was a hugely effective papal legate in Scandinavia, where he restructured the church and established new hierarchies for Norway and Sweden.

  Elected on a wave of triumph on his return from his Scandinavian mission, Hadrian was immediately confronted with attacks on papal territory in southern Italy from the Norman King William I of Sicily The reform papacy’s early support for the Normans had soured as their territorial ambitions had grown, and Norman support had helped prop up the Antipope Anacletus II. Hadrian was also under pressure from the Commune in Rome, now led by the radical monk Arnold of Brescia, who denounced all ecclesiastical wealth, and the papacy in particular as the head of a corrupt system. Hadrian had been a notorious disciplinarian as abbot in Avignon, and he was equally hard-boiled as pope. He put the city of Rome under interdict so that no sacraments could be celebrated there, expelled Arnold, and later had him arrested and executed by the German King, Frederick Barbarossa.

  On this occasion Barbarossa featured as an ally of the Pope, but he soon revived the old hostility between Emperor and Pope, with all the bitterness of the earlier Investiture disputes. The citizens of Rome had tried to play Pope and King off against each other by offering Barbarossa the imperial throne. Frederick, a deep admirer of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, was indeed determined to restore the glories of their empire, but he considered that the empire came from God and his own strong right arm. He had no intention of accepting it from a bunch of middle-class radicals.

  Hadrian therefore hoped for an alliance with Frederick which would simultaneously eliminate the danger from the Commune and provide him with protection against the Normans. Frederick, however, was not content to be the Pope’s policeman, and profoundly distrusted the monarchic pretensions of the papacy. He had probably seen the Lateran mosaics depicting the Emperor Lothar receiving the crown of empire from Innocent II in 1133, with the inscription ‘The king becomes the vassal of the Pope and takes the crown which he gives.’ Barbarossa would be no man’s vassal. He came to Italy to be crowned, but when he and Hadrian met in Henry’s military camp at Sutri in June 1155, he refused to perform the stirrup service, which he took to be a sign of vassalage. His refusal was immediately interpreted as a declaration of hostility to the Pope, and Hadrian’s terrified cardinals turned tail and ran, leaving the Pope alone. Agitated negotiations and consultation of ancient precedents persuaded Frederick to surrender on this issue next day, but he did so with a bad grace. It became clear that Hadrian could count on no help from him.

  A further disastrous misunderstanding in 1157 led to a total breakdown in relations. Hadrian sent legates to the Diet of Besançon with a letter to Frederick reminding him of the ‘benefits’ he had received from the Pope when he had been crowned. The German word used to translate the Latin ‘Beneficia’ meant feudal grants, and the legates were lucky to escape with their lives, as Frederick’s court erupted at the Pope’s apparent claim that the Emperor was his vassal. Hadrian may well have meant to imply just this, but, if so, he backed off rapidly. The damage was done, however, and at Hadrian’s death Pope and Emperor were at odds over episcopal appointments in northern Italy (including Ravenna, that ancient thorn in the side of the popes) and Hadrian was plotting with discontented Lombards to rise against Frederick.

  All this forced yet another papal change of heart about the Normans. Unable to beat them, Hadrian joined them. He recognised William as king of Sicily, and granted him sovereignty as a papal vassal over southern Italy, together with rights over the church there which would have made Gregory VII turn in his grave. He extended this favour to the Normans elsewhere, and in the bull Laudabiliter of 1156 he granted the English King Henry II the right to incorporate Ireland into his realms.

  There was more to this snuggling up to the Normans than papal opportunism. The church in Ireland was already experiencing the stirrings of reform – St Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh, who died in 1146, introduced the Cistercians into Ireland, and Malachy himself died in the arms of St Bernard. In 1162 another great reformer, Lurchan ua Tuathail, would become archbishop of Dublin. But the permissiveness of Irish social and sexual customs, and the still partially tribal church organisation there, were deeply shocking to European convention. In the life of Malachy which he composed Bernard painted the Irish church and people in the most lurid terms, in order to highlight the Archbishop’s reforming zeal and heroism. The Irish were not men but beasts, wallowing in vice, worse than any other barbarians. This jaundiced picture of the Irish was held pretty generally throughout Europe, especially in reforming circles, and it helps to explain the Pope’s actions.

  Henry did not at once act on Laudabiliter, and when the Normans did descend on Ireland in 1169 they did so at the invitation of a deposed king of Leinster (the eastern province of Ireland), Diarmuid Mac Murchada, as defenders of the right. Mac Murchada himself was a leading patron of Church reform, a monastic founder and friend of the Cistercian movement, and the brother-in-law of Lurchan ua Tuathail. In 1162 he had presided as king at an Irish reform synod attended by papal legates. So the first round of the long and tortured relationship between England and Ireland began with papal blessing, and with a Norman fo
rce which could plausibly claim to be warriors for the Pope, commissioned by the vicar of St Peter to reform ‘the barbarous enormities of the Irish’.

  Hadrians pontificate illustrated vividly the narrow room for manoeuvre, and the far reaching claims, of the twelfth-century popes. For all his decisiveness and vigour, none of the problems he confronted was resolved, and he left his successors facing an alienated empire and involved in an uneasy and dangerous alliance with the unscrupulous and land-hungry Normans. Alexander III (1159–81) would have to contend with a series of four imperial antipopes, the first of whom, Ottaviano of Monticelli (Victor IV), snatched the papal scarlet mantle from Alexander’s shoulders at his installation, and placed himself on the papal throne.

  Alexander was a vigorous reforming pope, whose legal expertise enormously contributed to the consolidation of papal authority. The Third Lateran Council, which he convened in 1179, was another milestone on the papal road to domination of the Western Church, enacting a wide-ranging papal programme against clerical corruption, heresy and in support of the blossoming of theology and canon law within the universities. The Council met in the wake of an accommodation between Alexander and Barbarossa, but for much of Alexander’s pontificate the confrontation with a hostile emperor had hamstrung the papacy, as it would his immediate successors. Throughout the 1160s, for example, fear of tipping the English King Henry II into the arms of the Emperor and the Antipope Paschal III had coloured Alexander’s dealings with England, and prevented him from supporting wholeheartedly Becket’s resolute stand against royal encroachments on the liberties of the Church. Not till Becket’s martyrdom and the King’s consequent penance was Alexander in a position to call Henry to order.