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

by Tom Holland

  Yet Guiscard, even as his nostrils were flaring hungrily at the scent of blood borne to him from across the Adriatic, had fretted as well that the opportunity might be slipping him by to make a kill.

  In Constantinople, after a wearying turnover of emperors in which no fewer than seven pretenders had laid claim to the throne in barely twenty years, a young general had recently come to power in the wake of yet another coup. Alexius Comnenus, however, unlike his predecessors, was a man of formidable political and military talents: an emperor who, given half a chance, might even succeed in setting the empire back on its feet. Guiscard, resolved not to give Alexius any chance at all, had duly struck as hard and fast as he could. In June, having crossed the Adriatic, he placed the Albanian coastal stronghold of Durazzo under siege. In October, attacked by a Byzantine relief force led by the Basileus himself, and including in its ranks a sizeable contingent of English Varangians, all of them naturally eager for vengeance on the compatriots of their conqueror, he won a crushing victory. The English, having taken sanctuary in a church, were reduced efficiently and satisfyingly to ashes after Robert had their refuge set on fire. Shortly afterwards, Durazzo itself was betrayed into his hands. It appeared that the Normans were on the brink of yet another conquest.

  But Alexius was not finished yet. Reverting to time-honoured Byzantine strategy, he frantically dredged up what few reserves of treasure were still left to him – and dispatched them to Henry. “And so it was that he incited the German king to enmity against Robert.”103 Simultaneously, he set about fostering a revolt in Apulia – and to such effect that Guiscard, faced with the prospect of losing his power base, had little alternative but to abandon all his dreams of winning Constantinople and hurry back to Italy. For the next two years, preoccupied as he was with stamping out the flames of insurrection in his own dukedom, he would have no reserves spare to send to Gregory – and this despite the fact that Henry, subsidised by Byzantine gold, was by now a permanent presence in Italy, a standing menace to the Normans as well as to the Pope. It was true that Rome herself, protected by her ancient walls, continued to defy all his attempts to take her, blockades and assaults alike; but by 1083, after three years of intermittent siege, the pressure was starting to tell. Then abruptly, on 3 June, a calamity. A breach was made in the fortifications that encircled the Vatican, across the Tiber from the rest of the city; Henry’s forces flooded through the gap; St. Peter’s cathedral was captured. Gregory, standing on the battlements of Sant’Angelo, had to watch in impotent horror as his great enemy took possession of the holiest shrine in Christendom: the last resting place of the Prince of the Apostles.

  This was a seemingly decisive moment: for there appeared nothing now to stop Henry from being crowned emperor. Yet the king, despite his capture of St. Peter’s, and despite having Guibert on hand to do the imperial honours, still hesitated. No matter the vituperations of his pet bishops, it was Gregory, in the opinion of the vast mass of the Christian people, and of the Romans above all, who remained the one true Pope. Accordingly, rather than force through a coronation that his enemies would be able to dismiss as illegitimate, and in the hope of taking full possession of a still defiant Rome, Henry sought compromise.

  As before, the man entrusted with attempting to negotiate this was that instinctive peacemaker, the Abbot of Cluny: for Hugh, amid all the convulsions and calamities that had followed Canossa, had somehow succeeded in keeping a foot still in both camps.104 Indeed, ever since 1080, when Gregory had written to him to ask if there was anyone he could recommend for the cardinalate, there had been a permanent touch of Cluny at the papal court: for the nominated candidate, a Frenchman by the name of Odo, had been the abbey’s number two, its “major prior.” But in 1083, as opposed to 1077, Hugh’s attempts at conciliation were doomed to failure: Gregory sent him packing. Only a few months on, however, as Henry’s noose around Rome continued to tighten, and a succession of well-directed bribes began to sap the city’s resistance at last, even Gregory had begun to suspect that the writing might be on the wall. By the autumn, it was the Pope who was hoping to open negotiations. Yet still the two sides remained as far apart as ever. That November, when Odo was sent by Gregory to explore terms, Henry was so enraged by what he saw as the continuing inflexibility of the papal bottom line that he briefly had the cardinal flung into prison.

  Soon enough, however, and the royal blood pressure had begun to drop; and come the new year, Henry could afford positively to relax. What had previously been a trickle of defections from the ranks of Gregory’s supporters was fast becoming a flood. Deacons, papal officials, even the odd cardinal: all were crossing over to Henry’s side. Even more significantly, a majority of the Roman people were finally prepared to abandon their bishop as well. On 21 March 1084, a group of them unbolted the gates of their city – and Henry, after four years of waiting, rode into his ancient capital at last. Nor was he alone in laying claim to a much-anticipated inheritance. After all, with Gregory still bottled up in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Lateran had been left standing vacant: the ideal opportunity, then, for a new tenant to move in. So it was, a bare three days after Henry’s entry into Rome, that Guibert adopted the name Clement III and was formally enthroned as Pope. Shortly afterwards, over Easter, it was Henry’s turn to be graced with the very grandest of promotions. Flanked by the Holy Lance, that ancient relic of awful power, he was first anointed by Clement, and then, the following day, crowned emperor: the heir of Charlemagne, of Otto the Great, of his own father. Rome, after a wait of many decades, could hail a consecrated Caesar once again.

  But not for long. Even as Henry, resolved to finish off Gregory once and for all, was settling down to the siege of the Castel Sant’Angelo, disturbing news was brought to him from the south. Robert Guiscard and his brother, Count Roger of Sicily, were on the march at long last. The new emperor, having obtained the coronation that he had come to Rome to secure, opted not to hang around. His escape, and the Anti-pope’s too, proved to have been just in the nick of time. A bare three days after their hurried exit from the capital, and Norman outriders were clattering up to the city walls. The Romans, gazing out in horror at the immense army descending upon them, one that included not only a great shock force of knights but even Saracens levied from Sicily, kept their gates firmly barred, and writhed in indecision. Abandoned by their emperor, and all too conscious of the Hautevilles’ fearsome reputation, they feared the worst – as well they might have done. For Guiscard was already growing impatient. After three days of waiting, he duly led a night-time assault, and smashed his way into the city. Gregory, sprung from the Castel Sant’Angelo, was led in triumph to the Lateran – but even as he celebrated his release with a sumptuous Mass of thanksgiving, his Norman liberators were already fleecing his flock down to the very bones. Finally, after three terrible days, the despairing Romans attempted a fightback – only to end up being slaughtered as well as robbed. Gregory, gazing out from the Lateran, had to endure the sight of his entire beloved city up in flames. Never before had the capital of Christendom endured so brutal, so destructive, and so complete a sack. The most terrible atrocities of all, it was reported, were committed by Count Roger’s Saracens.

  Such was the fate that Gregory, the heir of St. Peter, had brought down upon the last resting place of the apostle: to be ransacked by infidels. As the smoke began to drift away at last, and the blood on the streets to dry, it was perfectly evident, even to the Pope himself, that his position in the ruined city had been rendered untenable: for the curses and clenched fists of the people who had once been his firmest supporters would make it impossible for him to continue in Rome without the protection of the Hautevilles. Accordingly, when Guiscard left at the end of July, he had little choice but to set out with him. No less than Pope Leo after Civitate, Gregory was now effectively a prisoner of the Normans. Indeed, if anything, his failure appeared even more total than Leo’s had been. Everything that he had ever fought for seemed in a state of ruin. His great adversary, crow
ned in triumph emperor, still sat on the throne of the Reich. Back in Rome, no sooner had Gregory left the city than the weasel Clement was slipping back into the Lateran. Gregory himself, set up by Guiscard in quarters just south of Amalfi, knew in his heart of hearts that he had been left much diminished and humiliated. Grimly, in a letter addressed simply “To the faithful,” he sought to make sense of it all. “Ever since by God’s providence mother church set me upon the apostolic throne,” he assured the Christian people, “deeply unworthy and, as God is my witness, unwilling though I was, my greatest concern has been that holy church, the bride of Christ, our lady and mother, should return to her true glory, and stand free, chaste and catholic. But because this entirely displeased the ancient enemy, he has armed his members against us, in order to turn everything upside down.”105 Certainly, that same winter, falling suddenly and mortally sick, Gregory had no doubt that the world did indeed lie in the shadow of Antichrist. No other explanation for the calamities that had befallen him and his great cause appeared possible. “I have loved righteousness,” he declared on 25 May, “and I have hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.”106 They were the last words that he would ever speak.

  However, the shadow of Antichrist was not nearly so spreading as Gregory, lying on his deathbed, had darkly thought. Time would show that his pontificate, far from having led to the ruin of the Church’s libertas, its freedom, had served instead to entrench it, and much else, beyond all prospect of reversal. The great mass of the Christian people, despite – or perhaps because of – the unprecedented upheavals of the previous decade, remained no less committed to the cause of reform than they had ever been; as did many of the foremost leaders of the Church, whether cardinals, bishops or abbots; and still, in the courts of great princes across Christendom, Gregory’s inimitable blend of lecturing and encouragement continued to reverberate. Even in the Reich itself, where Henry’s triumph appeared complete, the reality was somewhat different. The cause of reform in Germany, as Cardinal Odo had discovered when he arrived there late in 1084 as Gregory’s legate, had put down deep roots indeed. “What else is talked about even in the women’s spinning-rooms and the artisans’ workshops?”107 one monk, hostile to Gregory, had exclaimed back in 1075. A decade on, and the talk had grown even louder.

  So the calamities which had marked the end of the most momentous pontificate for many centuries had not served to herald the coming of Antichrist. On the contrary, much that Gregory had laboured so titanically and tumultuously to secure would more than survive his passing. As a reassurance of this, had he only been brought the news of it by some supernatural vision or angelic messenger, the dying Pope could have pointed to a signal triumph: proof that the Almighty was indeed still smiling upon Christendom. For on 25 May 1085, the very day of Gregory’s death, Christian arms had secured a glorious and much yearned-for conquest. Gates closed to them for many centuries had been opened at last. A holy city had been restored to the universal Church. Once again, as it had done long before, a cross stood planted in triumph upon the rocky battlements of Toledo.

  Deus Vult

  On 18 October 1095, as dawn broke over the halls and towers of Cluny, a sense of bustle, of excitement even, was already palpable across the great monastery. A guest was shortly expected – and not just any guest. Indeed, such was the abbey’s aura of holiness, and such its pedigree too, that it took a truly exceptional class of visitor to put those who trod its carpeted flagstones in the shade. The angelic monks of Cluny, who numbered dukes and penitent bishops among their ranks, were rarely outshone. Not that they would have felt, as they tracked the preparations of the abbey servants, and stole an occasional glance towards the road on the eastern horizon, that there was any infringement of their dignity in the offing. Just the opposite, in fact. The man the brethren were waiting to greet was no stranger to their cloisters. Once, indeed, he had been their “major prior.” Now, more than any Cluniac before him, he offered living proof of the heights that might be attained by an old boy of the abbey.

  Fifteen years had passed since Odo’s departure for Rome. In that time, he had proved himself the ablest, the shrewdest and the most committed of Gregory’s followers. For all his devotion to the memory of the great pope who had raised him to the cardinalate, however, Odo was a man of very different talents to his patron – and just as well. The time for blood and thunder had passed. With an anti-pope installed in the Lateran, and much of Christendom, in the wake of Gregory’s death, content to acknowledge Clement as the authentic heir of St. Peter, a touch of Cluniac cool was precisely what the beleaguered reformers had most needed. Like Abbot Hugh, whom Gregory, in rueful and half-envious admiration, had nicknamed “the smooth-talking tyrant,”108 Odo was a formidable conciliator: a born showman who combined exceptional persuasiveness with a steely measure of calculation, and who invariably came out a winner. So it was, back in 1085, after only five years as a cardinal, that he had been one of two heavyweight candidates to succeed Gregory, and continue the fight against Clement; and so it was too, after the election of his rival, that he had made sure to get on the new pope’s side, and be nominated as his successor. He had not had long to wait. Two years into the new pontificate, and the throne of St. Peter had been left vacant again. Odo had duly been elected to fill it. Taking the name Urban II, he had set himself to the great task of completing what Gregory had left undone – and, as a particular priority, to crushing the authority of Clement, the Anti-pope, once and for all.

  Eight years down the road, and he was well on his way to success. A subtle reader of men’s ambitions, and a master of the well-directed concession, Urban had a taste for tactics that blended rigour with discretion. By sternly ring-fencing the fundamentals of reform, and by giving way on everything else, his accomplishment had been to consolidate Gregory’s achievements far more effectively than Gregory himself would ever have done. “Pedisequus,”109 his opponents sneeringly labelled him: a mere lackey, a body servant, scurrying along dutifully in the footsteps of his predecessor. This, however, was to confuse Urban’s show of equanimity with a lack of initiative or assertiveness. In reality, no less than Gregory had been, the new pope was of a lordly disposition. Indeed, if anything, the habits of lordliness came more naturally to him than they ever had to the humbly born Hildebrand: for Odo’s parents had been noble, and he had grown up informed by the restless attitudes and aspirations of the warrior class of France. Certainly, as befitted someone who had spent his earliest years in a castle, his familiarity with the cutting edge was far from confined to the business of the Church. More than any pope before him, Urban II had the measure of the new breed of knightly captain.

  Indeed, perhaps, shared something of its ruthlessness himself. Just as the natural instinct of any castellan was to add to his own lands by hacking away at those of his rivals, so similarly, on the immeasurably vaster stage of Christendom, had Urban aimed to extend his authority by boxing in Henry and Clement as restrictively as he could. Remorselessly, he had worked to exploit every imperial humiliation, every imperial defeat – and there had recently been plenty of both. Rebellion in Bavaria, the continuing and implacable opposition of the Countess Matilda, and treachery from within the royal family itself: all, since the palmy days of Henry’s coronation, had served to cripple the emperor’s interests. Indeed, by 1095, so tightly were his enemies pressing in on him that the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne had ended up trapped in a tiny corner of western Lombardy, unable even to cross the Alps back into his homeland.

  Urban, looking to rub this in, had duly summoned a council under Henry’s very nose, just south of Milan, in a field outside Piacenza: a city that, officially at any rate, lay within the Anti-pope’s home diocese of Ravenna. A steady succession of Clement’s former adherents, summoned from across Christendom, had publicly submitted themselves there to Urban’s authority. Henry’s second wife, a Kievan princess by the name of Eupraxia, and as unhappily married as Bertha had been, had also appeared at the council, following her abducti
on from imperial custody by agents of the Countess Matilda: sensationally, and to the delegates’ delighted horror, she had publicly accused her husband of hosting gang-rapes on her.110 Then, in a climactic triumph, Urban had met with Henry’s eldest son, Conrad, a long-term rebel against his father and widely rumoured to have been Eupraxia’s lover – and promised to crown him emperor. The young prince, in exchange, had signed up unreservedly to the reformers’ cause. Indeed, in an ostentatious display of submission to Urban’s purposes, Conrad had even served the pontiff as a groom, walking by the side of the papal mount and holding its bridle. Who, Urban might well have reflected, was the pedisequus now?

  No wonder, then, following such a cavalcade of successes, that he had felt sufficiently confident of his grip on Italy to risk travelling on wards into southern France. Indeed, as his partisans delighted in pointing out, the fact that he had the freedom of much of Christendom, while the emperor remained humiliatingly penned up in Lombardy, was in itself yet another stunning boost to the Pope’s prestige. More were to follow almost daily over the course of Urban’s tour of France: for he had found himself being greeted there with an enthusiasm, a rapture even, that far exceeded even his own expectations. In part, no doubt, this reflected the fact that he was himself a Frenchman; and in part as well the meticulousness with which the visit had been planned. Yet something more was afoot. Not since Leo IX’s brief trip to Reims had a pope been seen north of the Alps – and during that half-century the affairs of Christendom had been convulsed from top to bottom. Now, with a Vicar of St. Peter actually treading French soil once again, the people of the various princedoms of the south, from Burgundy to Aquitaine, had been able to deliver their judgement on the developments of the past fifty years – and they were doing so with relish. Not only princes and abbots, either. Men and women who once, back in the shadow of the Millennium, might have flocked to see the relics of saints in fields, or else taken to the woods, there to attempt to live as the apostles had done, now gathered to glimpse the Pope. No wonder, over the half-century and more since 1033, that the peace movement had faded away, and heresy too: for both, in effect, had served their turn. The cause of those who had dreamed of a reordering of the fallen world, and demanded a cleansing of everything in human affairs that was most spotted and polluted, was now the cause of the Roman Church.