Ideas

by Peter Watson

  This was fighting talk, but it was by no means all. Between 1076 and 1302 there were two more papal bulls asserting superiority of the papacy and four more kings were either excommunicated or threatened with it. The 1302 bull Unam sanctam is widely regarded as the ne plus ultra of the claims of the medieval papacy and certainly, the pope of the time, Boniface VIII, meant it to be an assertion of his continued paramountcy.7 The bull made no specific reference to the man who had provoked it, Philip IV, king of France, who had forbidden the export of coin from his country (thereby depriving the papacy of substantial revenue). Though agreement between the two men might have been reached, Boniface insisted on complete submission, but this only provoked the king to issue his own list of charges against Boniface, which included heresy. The pope retaliated with yet another bull, releasing Philip’s subjects from their allegiance, an affront that was too much for a band of partisans loyal to the king, who broke into the papal quarters at Anagni, fifty miles south-east of Rome, and captured Boniface. He was soon released but died a month later, from shock. A successor was speedily elected but he reigned for only nine months and, after that, the cardinals wrangled for two more years before the archbishop of Bordeaux was elected. He surrounded himself with French cardinals and settled at Avignon, which was to remain the seat of papal government for more than six decades (1309–1378).8 These events astonished all Europe and marked a turning point in papal fortunes. Never again would the papacy enjoy the supremacy it had known between Dictatus papae and Unam sanctam.

  This period of papal supremacy, what has also been called papal monarchy, between the bulls of 1075 and 1302, was one of the most extraordinary in all history. It concealed three battles going on simultaneously in the High Middle Ages, three competing ideas which, though interwoven in terms of chronology and location (and newsworthiness), were conceptually quite distinct. There was first the battle between popes and kings as to who was the more senior. In turn, this struggle reflected on the nature of divine authority and the place of kings in that hierarchy. In the previous chapter, and in Chapter 11, the distinction was made between the eastern church, where the king drew his authority directly as Jesus’ representative on earth, and the western church where the popes, drawing on the apostolic succession of St Peter, conferred authority on kings. In the West, as we shall see, because of the growth of cities and commerce, and the associated increased independence of a merchant class, who could not easily be suborned to make war on a king’s behalf, as the serfs and knights had before them, kingly authority came to be questioned more and more, parliaments and estates evolved to give voice to the new classes and their interests, and if the pope had greater power than the king, as it at times seemed, if kings weren’t supreme, then kings became more and more subject to law. This was such a massive change that its description and discussion is begun below, in this chapter, and continued in Chapter 24.

  The third idea we shall consider is that broached in the previous (hinge) chapter, namely the new understanding of faith, as something interior, something to be found within a person, an aspect of the new individuality. In some ways, this is the most interesting issue of all. An interior faith, while it made good sense in theological terms, and arguably conformed more closely to the teachings of Jesus Christ, as revealed in the scriptures, actually served as a weakening corrosive so far as the organised church was concerned. A private faith was beyond the reach of the priest or the bishop; furthermore, private faith might lapse into unorthodoxy, or even heresy. What unites these three issues, and other matters discussed in the rest of this chapter (though once again we should not make more of this unity than is there) is intellectual (and therefore political) authority. If kings and popes claimed divine sanction for their position and power, yet argued so bitterly and so publicly among themselves (as they did), if individual faith was the way to true salvation, wasn’t this a new situation, a new predicament, both theologically and politically? It meant that there was, perhaps, a point to the new individuality, and the new freedom to consider a secular world.

  This is important because it helps explain several paradoxes of the period, an understanding of which is essential if the High Middle Ages are to be fully comprehended. The above brief analysis helps explain, for example, why two such strong popes Gregory VII and Innocent III emerged when the papacy was actually weakening over the longer term; it explains why, as we shall see, the College of Cardinals and the Curia were formed at this time: they were attempts to strengthen the corporate nature of the church because of its inherent weaknesses in the new psychological/theological climate. It also helps explain the history of, in particular, England, France and Italy. There were attempts to reassert the kingly authority, as often as not by ‘religious’ means: the canonisation of Louis IX, and the attempts by the Capetians and Plantagenets to accrue sacrality to kingship by such devices as the ‘royal touch’, which, it was claimed, cured scrofula. But in England and France this was the time when, following the commercial revolution, the parliaments first asserted themselves, while in Italy, a country of city-states, the idea of the commune evolved as an entirely separate (secular) authority.

  Each of these issues is a major topic of inquiry at the moment in the history of ideas. They relate intimately to the birth of the modern world and what, exactly, we mean by that. The Renaissance, as we shall see, is no longer regarded by professional historians as the birth of modernity. Instead, the period between 1050 and 1250 in the church, in commerce, in politics and in scholarship may well be, as R. W. S. Southern has said, the most important epoch in Western history apart from the equivalent time-frame 17501950. The changing fortunes of the papacy were intimately bound up with this.

  Let us begin our detailed discussion with a return to medieval ideas about kingship. In the West, kingship had arisen in two different configurations. In the eastern part of the Roman empire, Hellenistic and Oriental traditions gave rise to a conception of the emperor as the ‘Expected One’ of Christian prophecy, representing God on earth. By invoking God’s name, the king could ensure prosperity and victory in war. This was also the idea adopted in Russia.9

  In the western part of the Roman empire, on the other hand, kingship took its colour partly from the traditions of German tribes and partly from the expanding role of the Catholic church. The Germanic word for king, Reinhard Bendix tells us, developed from the word for kindred. The ancient supernatural beliefs of the German pagans attributed charismatic power not to individuals but to entire clans (this was an idea which even Adolf Hitler, centuries later, would find compelling). The Germanic ruler, or king, was not therefore especially linked to the gods, any more than the rest of the clan, but he was, in general, a superior military leader. His successes reflected the supernatural qualities of the entire people, not just of himself.

  Christians, on the other hand, inherited through Rome and the Jewish/Babylonian/ Greek traditions the idea of priest-rulers as separate from, but at least equal to, military rulers. In addition, as the church had developed, the clergy had obtained more and more exemptions from various taxes and other obligations. Canon law had grown in importance, so that judicial sentences handed down by bishops came to be regarded ‘like the judgements of Christ himself’.10 This was reinforced by the fact that, in the early Middle Ages, the authority of the bishops tended to take the place of secular government, not least because the church often attracted abler men than what was left of the imperial administration.

  All this made for an important distinction between East and West. An eighth-century mosaic in the church of St John Lateran, in Rome, shows St Peter conferring spiritual authority on Pope Leo III, and temporal power on Charlemagne. In fact, Catholicism derives its authority from the Apostle, not from Christ directly as in the Greek Orthodox tradition. According to this belief in the apostolic succession of the papacy, St Peter elevates the spiritual pope over the temporal king.11 Later images show St Peter handing the keys of heaven to the pope while the king looks on. According to St Ambrose
, bishop of Milan, ‘the emperor is within the church, not above it’.12 In the East, in contrast, the Byzantine emperors prevailed over the church because they had defeated the Germanic invaders and were in full control, politically. Pope Gregory I (590603) addressed the ruler in Constantinople as ‘Lord Emperor’ while he referred to the kings of western and northern Europe as ‘dearest sons’. In 751752, Pippin, the Carolingian regent, was elected king by an assembly of nobles but was then immediately anointed by Bishop Bonifacius the same procedure as that employed in the appointment of bishops. ‘The Western Church had assumed the function of consecrating, and hence of authenticating, the royal succession in contrast to the Eastern Church which by crowning the emperor symbolised the divine origin of his authority. The Western Church put the king under God’s law as interpreted by the king; the Eastern Church accepted the Emperor as representing Christ on earth.’ In the East the emperor was, as we would say, head of the church; in the West the position of kings and of the Holy Roman Emperor was much more ambiguous.13

  As a result the power balance between pope and kings and emperors switched back and forth throughout the Middle Ages. Charlemagne, based at Aachen, took the title ‘by the Grace of God’, which was normally conferred by the pope, but it wasn’t enough: at court he was addressed in biblical terms, as ‘King David’. In other words, he saw himself as divinely endowed whatever the Catholic church in Rome said.14 After his death, however, Charlemagne’s sons never enjoyed the same level of power and allowed themselves to be anointed at their coronations. Though this played into the hands of the papacy in one way, Charlemagne’s demise also meant that the pope, now lacking a powerful ally, was once more at the mercy of the notoriously unruly Roman nobility. The French kings, as we shall see, were also pitched against the pope, not least during the Avignon ‘captivity’. It was this set of circumstances which allowed the power of local bishops to grow and it was their various idiosyncrasies, profligacies and other abuses that would lead to the need for major reform in the church.

  A further complicating factor was that the church itself was all the while extending its secular power. Thanks to bequests, it acquired more and more land, which was then the main form of wealth. In order to retain the support of the church, kings became patrons, endowing monasteries, for example, which both enriched the church and gave clerics even stronger control over men’s minds. ‘Only if kings walked the ways of righteousness, as the church interpreted those ways, could they obtain felicity, good harvests, and victory over their enemies.’15 In such circumstances, it was only a matter of time before something very like the Investiture Struggle came about.

  Before we return to that, however, there is one other medieval idea to consider: feudalism. ‘Feudalism’ isn’t a feudal word. It was invented in the seventeenth century, popularised by Montesquieu and adopted by Karl Marx among others.16 The actual words used at the time to describe the feudal hierarchy were ‘vassalage’ and ‘lordship’. Feudalism was, in fact, a specific form of decentralised government that prevailed in northern and western Europe from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. Its basic characteristic was lordship political, economic and military power concentrated in the hands of an hereditary nobility. But in addition to vassalage or lordship, there were two other principles–aproperty element (fief), and the decentralisation of government and law.

  The embryo of feudalism, according to the historian Norman Cantor, was the comitatus or gefolge, the Germanic war band, based on the loyalty of warriors to their leader in return for protection. The term ‘vassal’ comes from a Celtic word meaning ‘boy’ and, certainly to begin with, the ‘warriors’ were often no more than gangs of boys. (This was very different from later ideas about ‘chivalrous knights’.) In the early days, vassals had nothing to do with holding land they lived in a barracks provided by their lord, who also clothed and fed them. What changed all this was a steady revolution in military technology. In the first place, the invention of the stirrup, in China, and its introduction into Europe, changed fundamentally the relationship between cavalry and infantry. The stirrup enabled the horseman to concentrate the combined force of weight and speed at the point of impact at the end of his lance radically enhancing his advantage.17 But this change brought with it associated problems. The knight’s armour, his sword and spurs, and the bits and bridles for his horses, were very expensive. War-horses were even more costly: knights needed at least two for battle proper, and these creatures also had to be fitted out with armour. The knight further needed several pack horses to move the equipment to the site of battle. Thus it was that the lords who wanted such chevaliers or cniht (knights) to fight for them found it expedient to invest (enfeoff) them with their own manorial estates, out of which they might extract the necessary income to fulfil their obligations in battle. This inspired a land-hunger in the chevaliers which helped the formation of Europe. One effect of this situation, however, was that government and legal authority, or at least some of it, passed down from the king to his great feudal vassals, who appropriated the right to collect taxes and to hold courts, where they heard pleas and administered their own rough (sometimes very rough) justice. This was a system that worked only up to a point. It meant that the countryside of France and England in particular was divided into a patchwork of territories with different and overlapping systems of taxes, jurisdictions and loyalties. The king was, in effect, little more than the first among equals in this system.

  The church had at first been hostile to this new set of arrangements, but before long the bishops increasingly independent, as we have seen–found they could accommodate to the system as they themselves became vassals and lords in their own right, fully participating in feudal society except for actually making war. The hierarchical system, of interlocking loyalties, now stretched, it was said, throughout society ‘and on to the heavenly regions’.18

  Recent scholarship has modified this traditional picture in important ways. As was mentioned earlier, the whole concept of ‘feudalism’, as generally understood, has been called into question, in particular the central importance of lord and knight. What is now regarded as more important is the overall situation of the serf, many more of whom are now understood to have been landowners and therefore, in that sense, free. Another factor is that, on occasions at least, the bishops did make war: in 1381 peasants rising in East Anglia were put down militarily by Bishop Despenser. The fact that a good proportion of peasants owned land (as high as 40 per cent in some areas) throws the lord/knight/fealty network into some relief. When also put alongside the greater numbers of the rising mercantile class, feudalism can be seen as an aspect of kingly weakness. And what happened in the High Middle Ages was that a weakening papacy fought weakening kings. The papacy lost (eventually, after a long time) whereas kings, perhaps because there were more of them, were more flexible in their reactions to the changes going on and, outside Italy, consolidated their position. Perhaps the popes fought too many battles on too many fronts. But that too was a sign of weakness.

  Despite the involvement of bishops in feudal society, power swung back to the kings in Germany, especially during the reign of Otto I the Great (936–973). He insisted on being crowned by the archbishop of Mainz and effectively used the solidifying power of the church to gain the ascendancy over the other vassals and dukes. At the same time, he asserted his authority over bishops, thanks to property laws special to Germany, which meant that monasteries on royal lands actually belonged to the royal family, not the church. A consequence of this was that, within Ottonian lands, the king had better control over the election of senior clergy than kings did anywhere else. This meant that the Investiture Struggle, when it came about, took place in Germany.

  There was one other factor which lay behind the Struggle. Apart from the papacy, there was a semi-separate spiritual force in western Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and it too was a unifying element. This was the Benedictine order. And amid this order it was the emergence of Cluny, in southern B
urgundy, that made the most impact. ‘The Cluniac programme became the intellectual expression of the prevailing world order.’19 The monastery at Cluny was the largest in all Europe, and the best endowed, and the religious life it cultivated became hugely influential.

  The original order had been revised in 817 by St Benedict of Aniane, who had been given the task by Louis the Pious of introducing stability into monastic life. The crucial change thathadcomeaboutintheinterveningcenturieswasthatBenedictinesnolongersupported themselves with their physical labour.20 Instead, they now acted primarily as intercessors with the deity by means of an elaborate liturgy which they supplemented with education, political and economic duties (levels of pastoral care improved and this had an effect in invigorating parish life). This was a new role, for the Benedictines anyway and it was reinforced by their ‘feudal’ (or at least hierarchical) structure. Through a series of intelligent and long-lived abbots, in particular Odilo (d. 1049) and Hugh the Great (d. 1109), Cluny, while becoming known for the beauty of its liturgical devotions, established a chain of houses across northern Europe Germany, Normandy, England which accepted Cluniac domination, as vassals accepted direction from the next in line above in their system.