The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

by Tom Holland

  It was just the kind of clarion call that Hildebrand had surely been hoping that Peter would sound. Yet the author himself, for all his outward show of self-confidence, was inwardly racked by anguish and self-doubt. Meeting with Agnes in the candle-washed shadows of St. Peter’s, hearing her confession, encouraging her in her resolve to retire to a convent, he could see in the troubled empress only a reflection of his own inner turmoil. The cardinal too, though a prince of the Church, knew what it was to fear greatness. All the opportunities that high rank had brought him, all the glory, the power, the fame, appeared to him in truth only the most devilish temptations. Upon Hildebrand, indeed, he had bestowed the nickname – not altogether a jesting one – of “my holy Satan.”10 Peter could hardly neglect his duties as a cardinal, nor scorn his responsibilities to the Christian people; and yet he dreaded, all the same, what the fruits of such a lordship might be. Deep within his heart, no less devoutly than any heretic, he believed that it was in wild places without churches and hectoring archdeacons, out in forests, in swamps, in caves, that the surest hope of redemption lay. Arrayed in all the splendid robes of his office, Peter yearned only to be wearing filthy rags. Surrounded by the swirl and clamour of the Roman crowds, he longed for solitude. Pacing palaces, he dreamed of the rocky and unadorned cave in which, before becoming a cardinal, it had been his calling for many years to live. “You purify the hidden places of the soul,” Peter had fondly saluted his cell. “You wash away the squalor of sin. You cause men’s souls to shine with the brightness of an angel.”11

  And once, kneeling on the bare rock of his cave, lost in an ecstasy of tears and prayer, Peter had been granted a glimpse of Christ Himself. Like Adémar, he had witnessed his Saviour “pierced through with nails, and hanging from a cross.”12 Unlike Adémar, however, he had been so close to the terrifying spectacle that he had been able to crane his neck upwards and raise his parted lips to the wounds. To drink the blood of God! There was nothing in all the universe that could possibly taste sweeter. What, in comparison, could the entire fallen world appear except a realm of dust and distraction and shadow? No wonder, then, that Peter, in his yearning to free himself from the bonds of the earthly, should have fretted that all his obligations as a leader of the Christian people, oppressive as they were, might be serving to keep him an exile from the City of God. For he knew, none better, what it was to be an outcast, and deprived of the hope of love.

  Born in Ravenna in 1007, the last of a large and impoverished clutch of siblings, all his childhood had been one wretched sequence of rejections. His mother, slumping into post-natal depression, had refused to feed him; then she and her husband both, while Peter was still a baby, had abruptly died; brought up by one of his brothers, the young orphan had been starved, and beaten, and at length sent out to work as a swineherd. One day, guarding the pigs, he had come across a gold coin glinting in the mud – and for a brief moment, visions of everything that he could buy with it had served to dazzle the famished and shivering boy. But then, setting his thoughts against such ephemeral pleasures, Peter had steeled himself to answer a profounder need: going to a priest, he had handed over his precious coin, and paid for a Mass to be said for the soul of his father. More than food and more than clothes, what Peter had been missing were the parents he could never have. No wonder, then, all his life, that he should have longed with such desperation to behold the face of God: his Father in heaven. No wonder either that he should always have taken it for granted that, to do so, he would have to suffer.

  In which, of course, he was not alone. Growing up in Ravenna, Peter would sometimes have glimpsed, out in the swamps that stretched beyond the city, the disciples of St. Romuald, stooped dots set amid a mosquito haze. The memory never left him. Redeemed from servitude by a second brother, given an education, and emerging from it as the most brilliant teacher of his day, Peter had nevertheless flinched from taking the road that might have led to further advancement – and so it was, during or shortly after the fateful year 1033, that he had opted instead to follow the path of Romuald. From that moment on, never quite able to shake off a leaden sense that the end days remained imminent, he had imagined God sitting over him in unblinking judgement. Not a pleasure, but the experiencing of it would be a torment. Even finding himself the object of others’ generosity was sufficient to induce dizzy spells, and a feeling that hungry worms were seething in his guts. “In all conscience,” he cried out, after having had a vase forced on him by an admirer, “I would have preferred to be struck down with leprosy than bear the wound inflicted by this gift!”13

  Yet by a sombre irony, it was the very eloquence with which Peter expressed his yearning to be free of all earthly distractions that doomed him to his celebrity. Whatever other pleasures he felt able to give up, he could never quite abandon his addiction to firing off letters, to offering commentary, to self-promotion. Certainly, as Peter well knew, there were other hermits whose austerities were far worthier of fame than his own. One of them, a neighbour from his days as a hermit, was a particular hero. Dominic – “Metal Corset Man,”14 as he was known to his admirers – had bound his limbs as well as his stomach with bands of iron; stood upright all day while reciting psalm after psalm after psalm; and flogged himself until his whole emaciated body was left “as bruised as barley in a mortar.” That heaven approved of these feats appeared indisputable, for every so often a previously unheard-of miracle had been known to stamp itself upon Dominic’s brow, and hands, and feet: “the stigmata of Jesus Christ.”15 Never theless, there were many, even among the ranks of the reformers, who confessed themselves revolted by such extremes of self-mortification – and who found in Peter himself a model far worthier of emulation. What served to prick their consciences were not the regular floggings that he was forever urging upon them but his very public struggle against appetites with which all could identify.

  And hunger, perhaps, especially. Indeed, to Peter, who could remember full well what it was to starve, fasting was, if anything, an even greater ordeal than a scourging, and food the object of all his intensest hostility and desire. Not for him the gracious tolerance of lordly overeating that had been shown by Abbot Odilo. Mercilessly, Peter excoriated the rich for their grossness: for the pendulous folds of their paunches, for the violent flush of their crimson cheeks, for the embarrassing manner in which they were given “to belching and breaking wind.”16 Hildebrand himself, noted ascetic though he was, had duly been shamed into giving up leeks and onions. Great lords were not so readily embarrassed – but even among their ranks, a growing enthusiasm for reform had begun to menace the old easygoing admiration for a spreading belly. Obesity was passing out of fashion. It was a sign of the times, for instance, that Duke Rudolf’s brother, the Bishop of Worms, a man who had long been celebrated for his prodigious bulk, should have found himself regarded, “not with wonder, but with revulsion.”17

  Yet gluttony, though it might increasingly provoke ridicule, hardly threatened bishops with revolution. There were other appetites, however, to which flesh was also heir – and which, over recent decades, had come to strike many as a corrosive menace to the proper ordering of the very world. Already, this same startling conviction had set whole cities to totter. In 1057, for instance, priests had found themselves being boycotted, openly assaulted and even threatened with death, all in the streets of Milan. A development fit to send shock waves throughout Christendom: for not only was the city perhaps the largest in the whole of the Latin West, a rare example of an ancient settlement that had actually burst its Roman walls, complete with hospitals, public baths and even pavements, but its archbishop was so fantastically grand that it was all he could do not to look down his nose at the Pope.

  What on earth, then, could possibly have provoked such a crisis in so venerable and self-satisfied a church? It was a measure of the seriousness with which this question was taken in Rome that one of the two legates sent to investigate it had been none other than the highflying bishop who, three years later, would move
into the Lateran as Pope Alexander II. The other had been Peter Damian. Arriving in Milan, the two legates had found the city convulsed by running street battles. On one side were henchmen of the archbishop, an old crony of Henry III by the name of Guy; on the other, insurrectionists from the countryside and the poorer quarters of town. “Patarenes,” their enemies called them: a deliberate sneer, derived from the name of the local rag market. Yet though class tensions in the city undoubtedly were violent, it was not issues of poverty that obsessed the Patarenes. Rather, what had originally set them at the throats of Guy and his clergy was a custom so hallowed by tradition that for centuries no one in Milan had thought so much as to raise an eyebrow at it. A custom that had permitted priests to marry, to live openly with their wives – and to have sex.

  This was a red rag to Peter, of course. Perhaps, even had the Patarenes not been rampaging around the troubled city, forcing priests at knife point to swear oaths of chastity, he would still have looked favourably on their demands; for the taking down of the Archbishop of Milan a peg or two had long been an ambition of papal strategists. Nevertheless, the notion that a priest – a priest! – might feel himself justified in pawing at a concubine’s flesh, in stimulating “the pleasure that scratches the itch within,”18 and then in handling at a holy Mass the body and blood of Christ Himself, was naturally fit to throw Peter into apoplexies. To be sure, he had never had any intention of condoning the Patarenes’ thuggery. Violence filled him with horror: he had always regarded Leo IX’s war-making as an abomination, and in Milan it had been his aim to rebuild “with great discretion whatever he found there in a state of ruin.”19 But when it came to expressing the disgust he felt at the very notion of a married priest, discretion was hardly an option – for if a vase or a leek or an onion were a hellish temptation, then how much more so was a woman. Unlike a pot or vegetable, after all, she might take an active interest in being handled by a man. “Titbits of the devil, refuse of paradise, slime that fouls minds, blade that slays souls, wolfsbane of drinkers, poison of table companions, the stuff of sin, the occasion of death.” Such vehemence was hardly surprising. To Peter, in terror of exile from God’s presence as he was, it made no more sense for a priest to lie with a woman than for a fasting hermit to move into a kitchen. The seductions of a concubine, the perfumes of a pie: both, as a matter of the utmost urgency, had to be kept at bay. No wonder, then, in addressing the wives of priests, that Peter should have been roused to what even for him were spectacular heights of excoriation. “Yes, it is you I address, you harem of the ancient enemy, hoopoes, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, horse leeches.” And so on, and so on, and so on. “Whores, harlots, kissing-mouths, sloughs for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, nymphs, sirens, bloodsucking witches.”20 Brutal language indeed. Yet in the sheer violence of Peter’s revulsion was the measure of his ultimate dread – which was not of women, nor even of sex, but of the coming of the hour of judgement.

  And in expressing it, he spoke for multitudes. From the rag-pickers of Milan, with their riots against married priests, to great aristocrats such as Duke Godfrey and the Lady Beatrice, both of whom had piously sworn to forgo a marital bed, it was evident that chastity had become a pressing – indeed a consuming – issue for whole swaths of the Christian people. “Now, at the end of the ages, when men are multiplied beyond number, is the time of continence.”21 Maybe – and yet the sense of urgency with which this view had come to be sanctioned by reformers such as Peter, often in the face of furious opposition from their fellow priests, was something startling, nevertheless. A papal legate, had he come across campaigners such as the Patarenes only twenty years previously, would surely have sawn off his leg rather than look sympathetically on their cause. Back in the first decades of the new millennium, any obsession with chastity on the part of the poor, even more than vegetarianism or a taste for living in forests, had been regarded by the Church with the blackest suspicion. “They affect a profound distaste for sex,” Adémar said of the heretics in Aquitaine. True, he had gone on to insist, in a manner meant to be reassuring, that in private they indulged “in every kind of orgy” – but this had been only another example of his being economical with the truth.22 For Adémar to have acknowledged the appalling reality, that heretics were indeed capable of keeping themselves chaste, even as priests were cheerfully rutting with their wives, would have been, quite simply, insupportable. For what then would have served to distinguish the priesthood from the great mass of Christian people? What then would have served to mark the Church out as the ultimate bastion on earth of the celestial? What, indeed, people would surely have begun to ask, was the point of it at all?

  It was all the more fortunate, then, that once again – as with every other gauntlet flung down by heresy – there had been dauntless warriors of God on hand to meet the challenge. Monks, unlike priests, had always been expected to live as virgins. Chastity, no less than poverty, was one of the defining marks of their separation from the fallen world. Even so, during the approach to the Millennium, it had begun to serve an even profounder purpose. Just as in the woods and trackless wilds where heretics were prone to roam, so in famous monasteries such as Cluny, virginity had become the mark of men who dared compare themselves to the hosts of heaven. Never to have sex, never even “to eject semen by rubbing the penis, just as snot is blown out of the nose,”23 was a sacrifice that fitted a monk to rank with a martyr. So, at any rate, it had boldly been declared at Cluny – where, for a decade, scribes had set themselves to producing a whole dossier of documents designed to push the argument. And when had they begun this task? Anno Domini 999. A telling date, no doubt. Certainly, there would have been no one at Cluny unaware of the role that virgins were destined to play at the end of time, before the throne of Christ, the Lamb. For it was their songs which St. John, in the book of his revelation, had foretold were to sound from heaven. “It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are chaste; it is these who follow the Lamb wherever He goes; these have been redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are spotless.”24 So St. John had written.

  The passage of the decades, and the failure of the Lamb to materialise, had not in any way served to diminish the potency of Cluny’s spotless state. Just the opposite, in fact. The chastity of its monks remained easily the most awesome marker of the monastery’s holiness. Of its independence from the outside world as well. Not for the warrior virgins of Cluny the tangle of earthly commitments that offspring would have brought. No place for mewling bastards within their sacred walls. A relief to the monks themselves, no doubt – and to their neighbours, certainly, a mighty comfort. To great lords, those hard-nosed and calculating men, it offered a specific reassurance: that donations to the monastery, and especially donations of land, would not end up being turned against them by ambitious monks out to father dynasties of their own. To others, men and women fretful at the prospect of Christ’s return, and who might once have been tempted to embrace chastity themselves, and the path of heresy, in an attempt to prepare for the hour of judgement, it offered a profounder consolation: that they were justified, after all, in putting their faith in men of God. Yet if the monks of Cluny were correct, and a virgin was indeed worthy to rank beside a martyr, then so too was the converse: that a priest who slept with a woman was barely a priest at all.

  And what then of that supreme mystery, the awful power entrusted to him to mediate between heaven and earth, by transforming, at a holy Mass, bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ? “Dog shit,”25 according to the Patarenes, was all that the touch of a married priest was worth. Such language was a bit strong, perhaps, even for Peter – but he could sympathise with the sentiment, nevertheless.26 Just as simony always tended to be defined by reformers as a kind of leprosy or pestilence or rottenness, so the marriage bed of a priest was invariably represented as a stew of filth. On occasion, indeed, angels had been known to materialise and make the point lit
erally. Peter, writing to Hildebrand shortly before leaving on his mission to Milan, had described one particularly spectacular miracle: the public shaming of a priest whose reputation had always been irreproachable until that moment. Even as he was celebrating Mass, it was reported, an angel had appeared before the full view of the church and set to scrubbing him down, before finishing by emptying the bucket of by now grimy black water over his head. The priest, spluttering and sobbing, had thereupon confessed to the stunned congregation that he had slept with a servant girl only the night before. One slip, one single surrender to his lusts – and all had been ruined.