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

by Tom Holland

  No wonder that many priests, bewildered by the sudden sea change in public opinion, one that sought to condemn their wives as whores and their own physical needs as a menace to the cosmos, found the new demands being placed upon them insupportable. “In every struggle with titillating pleasure,” was Peter’s own tip, “try to meditate on the grave”27 – either that or hurry off to Mass. Advice kindly offered, no doubt – but not entirely adequate, even so, to the frailties of every priest. There were many, it seemed, who needed to be hectored, even menaced, rather than simply encouraged. This was why, even as reformers sought to combine their great campaign against simony with a no less ambitious insistence that priests live as chastely as monks, there were some who looked to harness their supporters among the Christian people to a policy of active intimidation. Peter, that committed pacifist, was not one of them, of course; but there were others who argued with no less passionate a sense of righteousness that desperate circumstances might indeed require desperate measures. The stakes were cosmically high. Could there be anything more important, in the final count, than the readying of God’s Church for the coming of the end days?

  One episode, in particular, served to illustrate the kind of value judgement that its leaders were increasingly opting to make. In 1065, a knight from Milan by the name of Erlembald, a pious man much given to charitable works and pilgrimages, arrived in Rome and paid a call on Hildebrand. He was troubled and in need of spiritual guidance. Should he join a monastery, he asked the archdeacon, as he had originally been planning to do – or should he accept a very different calling, a summons just recently received from the Patarenes, to fashion them into an authentic fighting force and lead them as their generalissimo? Hildebrand’s answer was not long in coming. It took the form – a whole year before the granting of a similar standard to Duke William of Normandy – of a papal banner. Returning to the Patarenes beneath the fluttering of this “battle flag of St. Peter’s,”28 Erlembald duly threw himself into the brutal business of scouring simony and priestly unchastity from Milan for good: the first-ever knight to have received a formal papal blessing. Whether as a consequence of this or not, victory marked all his efforts. “He subdued the city by the sword and also by gold, and by many and diverse oaths; none of the nobles could withstand him.”29 Indeed, by 1071, such was the scale of Erlembald’s success that the wretched Archbishop Guy, holed up in his cathedral, and in increasingly poor health, had resolved on a clandestine resignation.

  Spies in Milan, however, keeping track of his intentions, were soon bringing news of all his plans to Rome; and Hildebrand moved quickly to capitalise. Sending both funds and instructions to the Patarene captain, he ordered his protégé to prepare a coup. By August, when the sick and weary archbishop finally breathed his last, Erlembald was primed. The Patarenes, backed by the presence of a papal legate, pushed for the election of a successor, a young clerk by the name of Atto; and on 6 January 1072, he was duly chosen. Erlembald, escorting the new archbishop to his palace amid a fearsome clattering of hoofs and glimmering of mail, sat him down there to celebrate his elevation with a sumptuous banquet. Yet the Patarenes, for all the speed and ruthlessness of their actions, had overstepped a fateful bound. Momentous forces – more momentous than even Hildebrand could imagine – were being set in train. The attempt to enthrone Atto, far from healing the fissures in Milan, was doomed only to widen them – and indeed to precipitate a crisis so devastating, so unexpected and so wholly without precedent that it would end up racking the whole span of Christendom and transforming it for all time.

  That a Patarene nominee as archbishop was a direct threat to the Church establishment in Milan went without saying – but it was also, and far more ominously, a slap in the face for Henry IV. The young king had not forgotten that it was his father, almost three decades previously, who had invested Guy with his staff and ring of office. Indeed, shortly before his death, the failing archbishop had returned them both to the imperial court, together with a proposal that the emissary to whom they had been entrusted, a deacon by the name of Godfrey, be invested with them in turn. King Henry, who was by now in his early twenties, and positively itching to throw his weight around in Italy, had needed no second encouragement. Godfrey had duly been graced with Guy’s staff and ring – and packed off back to Milan. An abortive mission, it might have been thought: for no sooner had he arrived in town to claim his throne than he was being hunted down by Erlembald’s heavies, chased into a lonely fortress, and put under siege.

  Even amid all Godfrey’s humiliations, however, there was one thing at least left to bring a smile to his lips: that though he might be mired in impotence, so too was his rival, Atto. Erlembald’s grip on Milan had proved less secure than he had trusted: for on the very day of his nominee’s election, indeed even as he sat down at the formal banquet to celebrate it, he and his Patarene bodyguards had suddenly found themselves being ambushed. A mob whipped up by the local clergy had burst into the archbishop’s palace, chased Atto into his bedroom, and beaten him black and blue. Even the papal legate had suffered the mortification of being stripped of all his clothes. Although Erlembald had quickly succeeded in restoring order, it had not been soon enough to prevent Atto from swearing to his captors that he would “never again intervene in the bishopric.”30 Such an oath could not readily be dismissed. Milan, as a result, had found herself stuck with two archbishops – neither one of whom was able to take up his office.

  A shocking state of affairs, to be sure – and yet barely hinting at the full scale of the crisis yet to come. In the summer of 1072, Pope Alexander II, at a formal synod of the Roman Church, pronounced that Atto was not bound by the oath he had given his assailants – and was therefore the rightful Archbishop of Milan. A few months later, in early 1073, Henry IV leaned on the bishops of Lombardy to stand as Godfrey’s patrons at his consecration. Alexander’s response was to excommunicate not only Godfrey himself, not only the Lombard bishops, but, just for good measure, some of Henry’s own closest advisers. Only once they had all been dismissed, the Pope declared, would he re-establish contact with the king: until that moment, he was to be regarded as “outside the communion of the Church.”31 Almost without anyone quite understanding how it had happened, papacy and empire, those twin pillars of Christendom, were at open loggerheads.

  Less than three decades had passed since Henry III, descending upon the shrine of the apostles, had dismissed three popes at a stroke, and set about laying the foundations for the great project of reform. In that time, though much had been attempted and achieved by the reformers, it had never been any part of their intention to humiliate the youthful Caesar. Just the opposite, in fact: Henry had always been the focus of their very highest hopes. Born of two exemplary parents, he had also been entrusted at his christening to the care of Abbot Hugh of Cluny, who had raised him dripping from the font, and been named his “spiritual father”32 – so that the youthful king was triply a child of reform. Even once Henry had come of age, a vague feeling of responsibility, even of condescension, continued to characterise how reformers such as Hildebrand regarded him. On several occasions, indeed, ordering the Empress Agnes out of her cloistered retirement, they had dispatched her on the gruelling journey back across the Alps, so determined had they been to keep a watchful eye on her son.

  Other missions, those considered too embarrassing or awkward for a woman to handle, they had entrusted to Peter Damian. Although Peter was old by now, and reluctant to leave his hermitage, he had undertaken them willingly enough: for he had always disapproved of sending Agnes, his spiritual ward, back to the scenes of her earthly greatness. In 1069, for instance, he had made the trek to the imperial court on a particularly delicate matter. Henry, bored of his new wife, the Lady Bertha, and complaining of her lack of sex appeal, had abruptly announced that he wished to divorce her. Peter, summoning all his considerable reserves of authority, had alternately menaced and wooed the young Caesar into backing down: the first time that a papal reformer had ever
succeeded in imposing his will upon a king. “If you are really determined in this matter,” Henry sighed, with a crashing lack of graciousness, “then I suppose I must brace myself to shoulder as best I can a burden that I cannot shed.”33 Yet Peter himself, despite the undoubted scale of his triumph, had very deliberately refrained from making a song and dance about it. Bridges had not been burned. Lines of communication had been left open. Proof had been offered that the king and the papacy, even when tensions were running high, were not necessarily doomed to conflict.

  But this was already, amid the gathering mood of crisis, a lesson well on the way to being lost. Peter, the leader among the reformers who had always been best qualified to teach it, was fading fast. He died in 1072, just a few months before the Empress Agnes, despairing of persuading her son to listen to her, gave pious backing to the excommunication of his advisers. A few weeks later, in April 1073, Alexander too was dead. The people of Rome, rather than wait for the cardinals to nominate a successor, were soon taking the law into their own hands. They knew precisely whom they wanted as their new pope: “Hildebrand for bishop!”34 Even as Alexander was being laid to rest in the Lateran, the cry went up across the whole city.

  “Like the raging of the east wind, which buffets with violent blasts,”35 Peter Damian had once described the inimitable archdeacon. Now, swept up from Alexander’s funeral amid the unanimous cheering of the Roman people, carried out of the basilica despite all his own modest protests, universally hailed by the name of Gregory, Hildebrand was borne from the Lateran past open fields, past blossom-heavy orchards, past crumbling ruins, down into the very heart of the Holy City itself, where, in an ancient church filled with relics of St. Peter, he was formally installed upon the throne of the Prince of the Apostles.

  The far-distant King Henry might not have given his nod – but the people certainly had.

  At a fateful moment for Christendom, Hildebrand had been installed as Pope.

  So Fearful a Weight

  “See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”36 So the voice of God, it was recorded in Holy Scripture, had once addressed a Jewish priest by the name of Jeremiah. The verse was a particular favourite of the new pope’s – as well it might have been. Though the ancient prophet, rather like Gregory VII himself, had lived at a time of wrenching and alarming change, not even the most appalling calamities had been able to shake his conviction that it was the Almighty Himself who had summoned him to his mission: to confound the wicked, and to admonish kings, and to shepherd a confused and wandering people. In short, to be right.

  What better model could there be for a man such as Gregory? True, his protests as he was hauled from the Lateran to his enthronement had been more than merely the display of false modesty that was expected of any candidate for a bishopric: “We are a sinner and unequal to the bearing of so fearful a weight.” A heartfelt confession, certainly. Yet rather than betraying any great crisis of confidence, it had in truth trumpeted the very opposite: an invincible sense of purpose, of calling, of destiny. Gregory VII was Hildebrand still. If indeed he did sometimes feel that his shoulders might buckle beneath the burden that he could feel, Atlas-like, laid upon them, then who could wonder at that? To the new pope, and to all the supporters of reform, it appeared self-evident that the forces of good were everywhere being menaced by those of evil, in the great cosmic struggle that was destined to climax with the hour of judgement, and the final coming of God’s kingdom. There could be no doubting, then, either the urgency or the gravity of Gregory’s task. “For to our small self, the care and oversight of all the churches have been committed.”37

  Small, perhaps – but formidably well qualified. Not since the age of Constantine had there been a man enthroned in Rome who could boast a more detailed knowledge of the various lands and limits of the world. Indeed, as Gregory pointed out with relish, “the law of the Roman pontiffs has governed more princedoms than ever that of the Caesars did”38 – so that a legate, bringing letters and reports to the Lateran, might be as likely to come galloping from Hungary, or Poland, or the distant kingdoms of the Northmen, as from anywhere within the ancient heartlands of Christendom. Although the new pope was thoroughly Roman in everything except his birth, his habit of thinking was nevertheless a global one. Whether it was the King of England, or the Abbot of Cluny, or the generalissimo of the Patarenes, Gregory had long been in the habit of regarding even the most celebrated men of the age as his agents. Of humble birth he might have been, and impeccably austere in all his personal habits – and yet an imperial cast of mind came to him no less naturally for that. Processing past the haughty monuments of an ancient and vanished empire, he showed no compunction in displaying himself to the Roman people arrayed in the traditional crown and robes of a Caesar: the first pope ever to flaunt such insignia in public. In private, seeking to order his thoughts about the destiny that God had entrusted to him, Gregory dared to go even further. To an unpublished memorandum, he confided a series of awesome convictions: “that the Roman pontiff alone is by right called ‘universal’”; “that all princes kiss the feet of the pope alone”; “that he is permitted to depose emperors.”39 Assertions so vaunting that even the author shrank from stating them aloud.

  The baptism of Vladimir, the prince of Kiev, was a momentous marker of the influence of Constantinople on the Rus warlords of the Wild East. Stupefied by the wealth and beauty of Miklagard, “the Great City,” many found themselves torn between the desire to emulate its sophistication and an ambition to loot it. (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Olaf Haraldsson: brutal, domineering—and the patron saint of the Northmen. (Werner Forman Archive)

  Harold Goodwinsson publicly pledges loyalty to his rival for the throne of England, Duke William of Normandy. Although the swearing of oaths was regarded by good Christians as a fearsome thing, Harold had a reputation for taking the matter less seriously, perhaps, than he might have done. (akg-images/Erich Lessing)

  It was the death of Harold that doomed the English cause in the wake of Hastings—for it left William effectively unopposed as king. Exactly how Harold died is unclear. The famous image in the Bayeux Tapestry, which appears to show him with an arrow in the eye, was almost certainly re-stitched at some point in the eighteenth century. The original, to judge from an engraving of the Tapestry published in 1733, showed not an arrow, but a spear. (akg-images/Erich Lessing)

  Five years after Hastings, a no less decisive battle was fought at the opposite end of Christendom. The defeat of a Byzantine emperor and his army at Manzikert left the Asian heartlands of the empire open to the scything incursions of Turkish cavalry. Towns that had been Roman for more than a thousand years were soon being lost to Constantinople for good. (Werner Forman Archive)

  Henry IV, King of the German Reich and—from 1084—Emperor of the West. “Such were the turns of his fortune,” as one admirer put it, “that it would be impossible for me to describe them, and for you to read about them, without tears.” (akg-images)

  In the great struggle between Emperor and Pope, Henry IV might pose as a Caesar— but Gregory VII reigned as the heir of a saint. Not just any saint, either: for Rome’s first bishop had been none other than Saint Peter, the “rock” on which the Church had been built. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” Christ had told him, “and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Here was a fearsome authority—and one that Gregory had not the slightest hesitation in claiming as his own. (Werner Forman Archive)

  A papal throne in the Lateran. It is said that when Gregory pronounced his sentence of excommunication against Henry, his throne miraculously cracked in two. (Vatican Museum)

  A view of the Rhine and the town of Tribur, as seen from the hill of Oppenheim. Back in the autumn of 1076, the great river constituted the dividing line between Henry and a menacing assembly of German pr
inces, summoned to Tribur to debate their king’s possible deposition. It was Henry’s determination to keep hold of his crown, even at the cost of accepting mortifying peace terms, which set in motion the events that would lead him to Canossa. (Author photo)

  A contrite Henry IV begs his godfather, Abbot Hugh of Cluny, and his second-cousin, the Countess Matilda, to intercede on his behalf with Gregory VII at Canossa. The illustration is from a biography of Matilda. Had it been from a biography of Henry, the scene would no doubt have been given a somewhat different spin. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)

  Canossa. The ruined state of the castle only compounds the sense of bleakness and isolation. Even in September, when this photograph was taken, the winds can be violent and icy. (Author photo)

  Alexius Comnenus, who succeeded to the throne of Constantinople in 1081, at a time when the Byzantine Empire appeared on the verge of utter collapse. His deft deployment of bribes to Henry IV, and a facility for stirring up revolts against his Norman enemies, enabled Alexius to haul his empire back from the very brink. (AKG London)