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

by Tom Holland

  The Road to Canossa

  “That he is permitted to depose emperors.” Perhaps it was just as well that Gregory chose to keep this particular proposition from the youthful Caesar. Henry IV, as befitted the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne, was hardly the man to accept that he could be deposed by anyone. King of the various princedoms of Germany, he also laid claim to the rule of Italy – Rome included. Yet it is doubtful that Henry, even had he been alerted to the new pope’s pretensions, would have been able to do much about them. Not straight away, at any rate. There was way too much already on the royal plate. Far from being in any position to contemplate a campaign in Italy, Henry was locked into a desperate struggle to maintain his authority within Germany itself. War, having already plunged the empire of Constantinople into chaos, had come as well, in the summer of 1073, to the empire of the West.

  It was no race of pagans that had brought about this sudden calamity, however, no breed of savage invaders from beyond the frontiers of Christendom, but rather a people who ever since the time of Otto the Great had appeared the very wellspring of imperial greatness: none other than the Saxons. Yet Otto’s own dynasty had long since passed away; and its replacement in 1024 by a line of Rhineland kings, sprung from the opposite end of the Reich, had led many in Saxony to feel increasingly exploited and oppressed. Even during the triumphant reign of Henry III, the local princes had been growing fractious; and some of them, during the troubled years of his son’s minority, had actively plotted to do away with the infant king. Mistrust had bred mistrust in turn; and the adult Henry, with that same blend of suspiciousness and obstinacy that marked so many of his dealings, had disdained to mollify the restless Saxons. Instead, taking a leaf out of the Norman book, he had set himself to securing his hold on the dukedom in the most up-to-date manner possible: by raising castles. A threat to the local nobility, of course – but also to the entire Saxon people. As in France, as in England, so in Saxony, the battlements suddenly sprouting up on “high hills and wild places”62 appeared to the locals an inversion of all that they held most precious: forbidding and sinister threats to their ancient liberties.

  Henry’s greatest castle, a stronghold raised at the foot of the Harz mountains, where Christendom’s most lucrative gold mines were to be found, was regarded with particular hatred: for its walls and towers appeared all too grimly suited to the fell situation in which they had been raised. Indeed, at the very onset of the insurrection, when the Saxon rebels sought to trap Henry there, they found it an impossible task, so dense was the forest surrounding the Harzburg. “No matter all the efforts of the besiegers, they could not prevent the comings and goings of those who were shut in.”63 Henry, fleeing the castle without supplies, and relying on a huntsman to guide him through the trackless wilds, reached safety at last only after having travelled through bogs and briars for three whole days.

  It was a common fantasy, no doubt, among the oppressed everywhere to see a castle-builder forced into humiliating flight. That the Harzburg and every other royal stronghold be levelled, that the onward march of military innovation be reversed, and that the “tyranny” which it facilitated be kept at bay: such were the demands of the Saxon rebels. Yet, for all the indignant talk of fortifications spreading across “every hill and mountain, so as to threaten Saxony with ruin,”64 an excess of castle-building on its own could hardly serve to sanction treason against an anointed king. Other justifications too were urgently needed. So it was that the insurgents, dredging up memories of Henry’s scandalous attempt to secure a divorce, fell to accusing him of a whole host of sinister practices: incest, groping abbesses, and hints of even worse. Such charges, in an age which had witnessed even the saintly Agnes accused of nymphomania, might easily have been dismissed as the common currency of political abuse – except that Henry, like his mother before him, was finding himself acutely vulnerable to muck-raking.

  For just as under the empress, so now under the king, the most venomous gossip of all was being whispered by princes. The movers and shakers of the Reich, having developed a taste for insubordination during Henry’s minority, were finding it hard to kick the habit. It was no coincidence, perhaps, that the leader of the rebellious Saxons should have been Otto of Northeim: the same duke who, back in the days of Agnes’s regency, had featured so prominently in the kidnapping at Kaiserswerth. True, Otto was a Saxon himself; but even among the princes of the Rhineland there was no lack of would-be jackals. Far from backing their lord against the rebels, the southern dukes were widely suspected of plotting his deposition. The greatest of them all, Rudolf of Swabia, was an object of particular royal suspicion. Already, in 1072, both Agnes and Henry’s godfather, Abbot Hugh of Cluny, had been called upon to patch up relations between the king and his most powerful vassal. Then, at Christmas-time in 1073, trouble had flared up again. A court insider, tipping off Rudolf that Henry was plotting his assassination, had insisted on proving his claim by undergoing trial by combat. Only the unexpected abduction of the accuser “by a terrible demon,” just a few days before the duel was due to be fought, had served to exonerate the king.65 Or had it? There were many who remained unconvinced. The charges against Henry – that he was a tyrant, a murderer, an enthusiast for every kind of vice – continued to swirl.

  Self-evidently, then, with the Saxons still up in arms against him, and the southern princes manoeuvring to stab him in the back, it was hardly the time to be picking a fight with the Pope. There would be opportunity enough to do that, Henry judged, and to slap the uppity Gregory down for good, once the Reich had been successfully pacified. So it was that, rather than risk the slightest papal sanction being granted to his enemies’ slurs, he brought himself to grovel – even going so far as to acknowledge that he might possibly have backed the wrong horse in Milan. “Full of pleasantness and obedience,”66 a delighted Gregory described the royal tone to Erlembald. The likelier alternative, that the king might be stringing him along and playing for time, appeared not to have crossed the papal mind.

  And time, sure enough, was what Henry had won for himself. In February 1074, amid the snow and ice of winter, he signed up to what appeared a humiliating peace, agreeing by its terms to demolish all his castles, and to restore Otto of Northeim to the full warmth of the royal favour. In truth, however, the king had gained far more than he had lost. Any prospect of a coalition between the ever-slippery Otto and the southern princes had now been successfully stymied. Even more promisingly, a wedge had been driven between the duke and the frustrated mass of the Saxon peasantry. In March, taking the law into their own hands, a great army of the “vulgus” – “the common people” – stormed the Harzburg, then began tearing it to pieces block by block. Even the royal chapel was burned to the ground. Finally, in a climactic desecration, the grave of Henry’s stillborn eldest son was dug up, and his tiny bones slung out amid the cinders and rubble. News of this outrage, not surprisingly, inspired widespread horror among the great. The southern dukes might mistrust the king powerfully, but they detested rioting peasants even more. The flattening of the Harzburg, ironically enough, spelled disaster for the Saxon cause. In the summer of 1075, Rudolf and a host of other lords at last submitted to joining Henry in a full-scale expedition against the rebels. On 9 June, amid the nightmarish swirling of a dust-storm, the Saxons were routed, and the wretched “vulgus” put satisfyingly to the sword. By the autumn, Henry’s mastery of Saxony was sufficiently complete for him to order his castles there to be rebuilt. Even the most fractious of the princes appeared ready to bow their necks to the royal yoke. So it was, for instance, that the royal lieutenant installed in the Harzburg, and compelled to supervise its wholesale restoration, was none other than the captain who had led the initial assault on the castle: that inveterate turncoat and survivor, Duke Otto of Northeim.

  Finally, after all the many setbacks and frustrations that had previously served to hobble him so grievously, it seemed that the young king was on the verge of securing what he had always regarded as his birt
hright: the chance to rule as his great father had done. Even as stone-masons and workmen returned to the Harzburg, and the great lords of the Reich hurried obediently to celebrate Christmas at the royal table, Henry was looking to set the seal on his victory. Some work still remained to be done, of course. Not everyone who had thought to challenge the royal authority over the years had yet been put sufficiently in his place. Indeed, dukes such as Rudolf and Otto might be overweening, but they were neither of them half so officious, nor half so condescending, as the jumped-up Tuscan monk who sat in the Lateran. To Henry, the son of a Caesar who had forced three papal abdications in the space of a week, the notion that any bishop, even a bishop of Rome, might pose as the leader of Christendom was grotesque and insufferable. He had affected to listen politely to Gregory’s fantastical scheme for an expedition to Constantinople, but it was with no little satisfaction that he tracked its ultimate abortion. Gregory himself, far from leading the warriors of Christendom to the Holy Sepulchre, had been left with nothing to show for all his plans except a lingering taint of failure and scandal. A salutary demonstration, Henry could reflect contentedly, that the duties of a Caesar were not easily usurped by anyone – the heir of St. Peter included.

  A point only emphasised by the peculiarly glaring contrast between the papal debacle and his own spectacular triumph. It was back in June 1074, exactly a year before Henry himself would lead the flower of the Reich to victory over the rebel Saxons, that Gregory had embarked on his expedition. First stop: a rendezvous with its somewhat improbable chief supporter. “My most beloved and loving daughter,”67 Gregory was in the habit of addressing the Lady Matilda of Tuscany. For the Pope, there was no embarrassment in acknowledging his obligations to a woman who was not yet thirty. Though Matilda’s stepfather, Duke Godfrey the Bearded, had died back in 1069, her mother, the Countess Beatrice, had succeeded admirably in keeping all the broad dominions of the House of Canossa to herself – and in grooming her only child to inherit their rule. Spirited, beautiful and blonde, Matilda was hardly a typical lieutenant of reform – and yet already she had proved herself a most invaluable one. Raised by her chaste and devout mother to believe passionately in everything that the new pope stood for, she had not hesitated to offer him an army of thirty thousand knights, nor to commit to accompanying his proposed expedition herself. Gregory, far from trying to dissuade her, had been so enthused by her “sisterly aid”68 that he had set about recruiting the venerable Empress Agnes to the venture as well. Soon enough, the Countess Beatrice had signed up too. Gregory’s opponents, however, rather than quaking in their boots at this impressive show of female backing, had responded with hilarity. Guiscard’s Normans, in particular, had been loud in their derision. Perhaps, had Gregory succeeded in crushing them before embarking for Constantinople, as had been his intention, the mockery would have been silenced – but he had not. Only a fortnight into the campaign, news had reached Beatrice and Matilda of an insurrection back in Tuscany. With their forced withdrawal, Gregory had found himself with little choice but to abandon the whole expedition. Then, once back in Rome, he had fallen ill. The Holy Sepulchre had been left to seem a very long way off indeed.

  Nor, a year and more on from the fiasco, had the damage been wholly repaired. Taunts that the rule of the Church had been handed over to a gaggle of women were widespread. Lurid allegations too of “a most appalling scandal.” To many bishops in particular, fed up as they were with hectoring demands from Rome that they impose a monkish lifestyle upon their priests, Gregory’s warm relationship with Matilda appeared the rankest hypocrisy. What was it, they charged, if not “intimacy and cohabitation with a strange woman”?69 Palpably unfair – but then again, as Henry himself knew all too well, innuendo hardly had to be true for it to be damaging. In the Reich especially, where bishops tended to be even haughtier than elsewhere in Christendom, and even more toweringly conscious of their own dignity, there were plenty who had developed an active stake in thinking the worst of the new pope. “The man is a menace!” sniffed one archbishop. “He presumes to boss us around as though we were his bailiffs!”70 Others, recoiling from Gregory’s brusque demands that priests be obliged to abandon their wives, demanded to know whether he planned to staff the Church with angels. Such a show of sarcasm had absolutely zero effect on Gregory himself. Indeed, by 1075, his prescriptions against married priests, and simony too, were attaining a whole new level of peremptoriness. In February, four bishops were suspended for disobedience. Then, in July, one of them, a particularly inveterate simonist, was deposed. Finally, as the year drew to its close, Gregory unleashed against the sullen and recalcitrant imperial Church the reformers’ most devastating weapon of all. “We have heard,” he wrote in an open letter to King Henry’s subjects, “that certain of the bishops who dwell in your parts either condone, or fail to take notice of, the keeping of women by priests.” Such men, rebels against the authority of St. Peter, he now summoned to the court of popular opinion. “We charge you,” Gregory instructed the peoples of the Reich, “in no way to obey these bishops.”71

  This papal gambit appeared dangerous and perverse, irresponsible and criminal to the outraged bishops themselves. To Henry IV as well – for naturally, at a time when he had only just succeeded in stamping out the bushfires of rebellion in Saxony, the last thing he wanted to see imported north of the Alps was anything resembling the Patarenes. It was the role and the duty of his bishops, after all, to serve him as his principal ministers: only destabilise them, and the entire Reich risked being set to totter. Even that, however, was not the deadliest threat posed by Gregory’s determination to bring the imperial Church to heel: for always, rumbling beneath the royal feet as it had done ever since the crisis first erupted in Milan, there waited a potentially even more explosive danger. For all Henry’s show of temporary contrition, the row over who had the right to invest the city’s archbishop – whether king or Pope – had still not been resolved; and in February, growing impatient, Gregory had sought to force the issue, and impose his candidate for good, by taking a fatal step. By the decree of a formal synod of the Roman Church, “the King’s right to confer bishoprics from that moment on was openly prohibited”:72 a measure targeted at Milan, to be sure, but with potentially devastating implications for royal authority across the whole span of the Reich. After all, without the right to invest bishops, how would Henry nominate his ministers, impose his authority, administer the kingdom? What future for the empire then? Gregory might not have intended it, but his attempt to win a battle threatened him with out-and-out war.

  It was a far-reaching miscalculation. Lulled into a false sense of security by the young king’s seeming tractability, Gregory had fatally misjudged the royal temper. In truth, Henry’s policy of appeasement towards the papacy had only ever been a temporary expedient. His invariable instinct, whenever forced into a corner, was to come out fighting. By the autumn, with the Saxons defeated at last, Henry had successfully punched his way out of one – and could devote all his energies to escaping the other. Fortunately for him, much had changed to his advantage over the previous few months. Firstly, back in late March, the cathedral in Milan had been swept by a terrible fire: a disaster interpreted by most Milanese as a judgement on the Patarenes. A few weeks later, and any lingering doubts that God had turned decisively against Erlembald were dispelled when the papal captain was ambushed and cut down, his supporters among the clergy mutilated, and his remaining supporters driven into exile. By early autumn, with the Saxons crushed and Milan swept clear of Gregory’s supporters, Henry felt ready to move at last. Ignoring the rival claims of Atto and Godfrey to the bishopric, he coolly nominated a third candidate: a deacon who had travelled in his train to the Saxon wars, by the name of Tedald. Nor was that the limit, by any means, of Henry’s provocations. For almost three years, he had found himself being pressed by Gregory to dismiss the advisers excommunicated by Alexander II – and had prevaricated. Now, in a pointed rubbing of salt into the papal wounds, he opted to dispa
tch one of them to Milan, to serve Tedald as his enforcer. A bullish and defiant assertion of royal authority, to be sure – but it was also, in the context of the gathering crisis, yet one further miscalculation. Though the Pope had badly underestimated the king, it would soon become clear that the king had underestimated the Pope even more.

  On New Year’s Day 1076, as Henry sat in royal splendour surrounded by the great princes of the Reich, seemingly the master of all he surveyed, three cloaked and breathless envoys were ushered into his presence. Barely three weeks it had taken them to ride the winter roads from Rome to Saxony: a telling measure of how urgent their mission was. Along with a letter from Gregory, written in a tone more of sorrow than of anger, they bore a verbal message for the king: one sterner, more prescriptive, altogether more threatening. Either Henry was to acknowledge all his offences, the Pope had decreed, and do penance for them – or else “not only would he be excommunicated until he had made due restitution, but he would also be deprived of his entire dignity as king without hope of recovery.”73 Such an ultimatum spoke loudly of Gregory’s courage, his sense of conviction, and his invincible self-confidence: for by now he had a far better understanding of his adversary’s character. Throwing down the gauntlet as he had done, he would have anticipated the likely response. A response that, sure enough, was not slow in coming.