Ideas

by Peter Watson

  When Henry IV became king and emperor in 1065, it was just six years since Humbert had published his two books, one on electing the pope and the other on simony, both directed in particular against the Germans. Henry could not have been expected to go along with what was in those documents but in any case it took him until 1075 to stabilise his realm and reach a point where he felt sure that the peasants, burghers and aristocracy in Germany were content or at least quiescent. Then, a short time after Hildebrand became pope, as Gregory VII, the episcopal see of Milan fell vacant. Not long before, in 1073, Gregory had published Dictatus papae. A contest was looming and took material form when both Henry and Gregory proposed their own candidates for Milan. But Henry, fortified by his recent successes within his own territories, felt especially confident and so responded ‘robustly’ to the papal bull. He sent a letter to Rome in which, in frankly intemperate language, he damned Gregory as ‘at present not pope but false monk’.35 The letter urged Gregory ‘to come down from the throne of Peter’ and was, in the words of one historian ‘contumacious and insulting’.36

  Gregory retaliated. He informed the bishops and abbots of Germany that, unless they refused to recognise Henry, they would be collectively excommunicated. He amassed support from rival political powers, in case there should be war. It was a successful manoeuvre support haemorrhaged away from Henry and, at papal suggestion, the German nobility began to talk of electing a new king from another dynasty. Gregory rubbed salt into the wound by announcing that he would travel to Germany himself to preside personally over the assembly that would elect Henry’s replacement.

  These were the circumstances that drew Henry to Canossa in the depths of winter, 1076–1077. His advisors had suggested that his only hope in the struggle was to personally seek absolution from Gregory. The unvarnished truth is probably that Henry was in no way penitent and that Gregory, for his part, would have preferred not to have absolved him. But both Matilda of Tuscany, a kinswoman of Henry (and in whose castle at Canossa the pope was staying), and Hugh of Cluny were present and appealing on the king’s behalf. Gregory could not risk Cluniac opposition nor that of other crowned heads across Europe, who were watching to see how high-handed he could be with a monarch who had made the journey personally to seek absolution. Henry was therefore absolved of his excommunication.

  Today, excommunication holds few terrors for most of us but in the Middle Ages it was very different. In fact, Gregory VII had himself extended both the idea and practice of excommunication. The idea originated partly in the pagan ritual of devotio, when citizens who had committed serious crimes were sacrificed to the gods. In the process the criminals became sacer and were separated from everyone else.37 In a world where law was weak, curses were added to contracts, as an additional means of enforcement, and this idea was also adopted by the early church. A final aspect was exile: Jews who married heathens during the Babylonian captivity were exiled and their property confiscated.38 In the years before Jesus, in Palestine, heretics were banned from the synagogue and from community life. But the direct source of Christian excommunication was the gospel of Matthew, where it says that a Christian must admonish a sinner, at first privately, then in front of two or three witnesses and finally, and if necessary, before the whole church. ‘But if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican’ (Matthew 18: 17). The New Testament describes several incidents of social ostracism as a form of discipline. The concept of excommunication was first described in detail in a third-century Syrian document, the Didascalia, allegedly written by anonymous Apostles, which divides liturgical exclusion from social exclusion and describes the penance sinners must do to be brought back within the church. Sex, litigation, military duty, the baths, and the games were all forbidden to those who had been excommunicated.39 Traditionally, however, the church was always aware of the dangers of too much social exclusion which might easily lead the sinner to the devil himself and so make matters worse.40

  In 1078, Gregory produced a canon, Quoniam multus, that was designed to limit the ‘contagion’ of excommunication, setting out prescribed lists of those who could have dealings with excommunicants without themselves being excommunicated. (This was in fact done to correct the ‘epidemic’ of excommunications that had been generated by Gregory’s very own papal reforms.) For example, an excommunicant’s family could associate with him: worried that husbands who couldn’t have sex with their wives would look elsewhere, the authorities took a pragmatic approach.41 Gratian used the term ‘anathema’ to mean full social and religious excommunication, confining excommunication itself to mean ‘mere’ liturgical exclusion.42 Only those convicted by the ecclesiastical courts could be anathematised, while excommunication was a matter of conscience and people could in theory excommunicate themselves. The Third Lateran Council (1179) excommunicated all heretics excommunication for heresy was always much harsher than anything else and could lead to imprisonment and death.43 Gratian’s division had become the norm by the turn of the twelfth/thirteenth centuries, but was by then known as ‘minor excommunication’ (exclusion from the liturgy) and ‘major excommunication’ (total social exclusion).44

  After Henry’s excommunication and subsequent absolution, there was now no need for Gregory to proceed to Germany and he returned to Rome. On the face of it, he had won a magnificent victory and had re-established the power of the church. (In returning Henry to royal status, he made him promise to obey future papal decrees.) But, at the same time, Henry had saved his kingdom and he now set about strengthening his position so that he would never again be in the position of weakness to which he had sunk before Canossa. The German church rallied to his support and he conducted another–successful–campaign against the nobility. In this way it soon became clear that he had no intention of obeying papal decrees and, some time later, he was excommunicated again. The fact that he largely ignored this papal manoeuvre the second time around shows how much things had changed. In 1085 he finally obtained the revenge he had secretly sought all along, when he drove the pope from Rome, to southern Italy, ‘a humiliating exile from which Gregory did not return’.45 Even Gregory was weaker than he appeared.

  For many historians, this final outcome made the encounter at Canossa, in sporting terms, a draw or a tie. But that is not the same as saying that nothing came of it. Henry’s appearance before the pope dealt a mortal blow to the very idea of theocratic kingship, comforting to the various ‘estates’ around Europe, and gave sustenance to the idea that popes had the right to judge kings. This undoubtedly boosted the political muscle of the Catholic Church but at the same time many people–crowned heads in particular–had not exactly relished the high-handed and humiliating way Gregory had used, or abused, his power. One of the men who succeeded Gregory, Urban II (1088–1099), began to seek a way out of the perpetual conflict with the emperor and attempted to unite Europe behind Rome through the First Crusade. But even his style of papacy was too much for many people and from this time on there emerged cardinals of a different stripe–quiet diplomats, bureaucrats whose experience told them that more could be achieved behind the scenes by discussion than by confrontation. Thus the papacy was changed no less fundamentally by Canossa than was the status of kings. The Curia was aware of the papacy’s inherent weaknesses even if the more pugnacious popes were not.

  While he was pope, Gregory also kept a keen eye on what became known as the Reconquista in Spain. Since the Muslims had conquered the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century, the ousted Christian nobles had sought refuge in the Pyrenees where, over two centuries, they had regrouped and, by the end of the tenth century, had regained at least some of the ground lost. It would take another four hundred years, to the end of the fifteenth century, before Muslim control was extinguished but, in the process, Christians came face-to-face with the Islamic idea of jihad, holy war, with its doctrine that the highest morality was to die fighting, on behalf of God.46 In Christianity, the idea of ‘just war’ went back to St Augus
tine of Hippo and beyond, and Hildebrand was an ardent Augustinian. Just then Muslims were in control in the Middle East, as they were in Spain, and Christ’s sepulchre in Jerusalem was in the hands of unbelievers. When all this was added to the desire to reunite Eastern and Western churches (as an effective way to combat the threat of Islam) the idea of crusade was born.47

  Of course, there were other reasons. A crusade would be the perfect expression of the papacy’s supreme power, it would help unite north and south Europe and even, in an ideal world, assert Rome’s dominance over Byzantium. Several birds would be killed by this one stone. So far as Gregory was concerned, however, the Investiture Struggle consumed too much of his time, and prevented him ever embarking on a crusade. It was left for his successor, Urban II, to take up the challenge. And by the time he was elected there were still more reasons why a crusade would prove useful. In the first place, it would help reunite Christendom after the bitter feuds sparked by Gregory’s reforms. It would boost papal prestige at a time when the Germans were not, exactly, Rome-inclined. And it might well boost France’s prestige–Urban had a French background. Because of the Investiture Struggle it was unlikely that the Germans would subscribe to a crusade, and the Normans, in the north of France and in Britain and Sicily, would likewise keep their distance. But in central and southern France, Urban knew that there were many lords, and the vassals of many lords, who would welcome the opportunity to obtain lands abroad and, in the process, save their souls.

  Which is how it came about that Urban proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont in central France in 1095. There he delivered a highly emotional and rhetorical speech to the assembled knights, appealing both to their piety and to their more earthly interests. He dwelt at length on the sufferings which Christians were experiencing at the hands of the Turks, and the threat of Muslim invasion that hung over both Byzantium and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.* Using a famous biblical phrase, Urban described Palestine as ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ and, in promising papal protection for the property and family of any crusader, he introduced an idea that was to have far-reaching consequences. He said that, as keeper of the keys to the kingdom of heaven, he vouchsafed the crusaders ‘plenary indulgence’ for their sins.49 The origin of this idea may well have lain in the Islamic assurance that any warrior who died fighting for the faith was guaranteed a place in heaven. But the Christian idea of indulgence was soon expanded and abused, so much so that it was one of the practices attacked by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century and, eventually, by the Council of Trent. By the twelfth century the Catholic Church had extended the institution of indulgence not just to crusaders but to those who supported them financially, and it is this which seems to have done the damage. By the fourteenth century, the papacy allowed the sale of indulgences even without a crusading pretext the rich could simply buy their way to heaven.50 It is easy to be cynical about the reasons people had for joining the crusades, and many no doubt had mixed motives. Nonetheless, it is said that, at the close of Urban’s address at Clermont, the assembled knights rose up and, as one, shouted ‘Deus vult’ ‘God wills it.’ Many tore strips from their red cloaks and refashioned them into crosses. Thus the familiar emblem of the crusades was born.51

  The intellectual consequences of the crusades have long been debated. There seems little doubt that they made some Christians more international in outlook and, of course, several Eastern practices were observed and adopted along the way (a taste for spices, for example, use of the rosary, and new musical instruments). But more generally it cannot be said that the crusades exerted widespread influence. Within two hundred years the Muslims had regained all the crusader settlements won by the Christians, and these Muslims were more hostile and bitter than they had been before the holy war the Christians had shown themselves as no less fanatical than their enemies. In later years, when Christians tried to fashion a mode of living together with Jews or Muslims in the Middle East, the siege and sack of Jerusalem always got in the way. More surprising still, the crusades had much less effect on learning than might have been expected: the manuscripts that helped to stimulate the revival of scholarship in the West, which is the subject of the next chapter, were transmitted via Sicily, Spain and, yes, Byzantium. But not by crusaders.

  If Gregorian reform had one achievement to its name, it had drawn attention to the church. In some ways this was a good thing but not in others. In the eleventh century Europe was changing and in the twelfth it would change more, as cities continued to grow. This was important ecclesiastically because the medieval church was essentially organised for coping with a primarily agricultural society, and now society was increasingly urban. Many of the inhabitants of the new cities were the new class of bourgeoisie, better educated, more literate and harder working than their predecessors, and intensely pious. As a result, they evolved a different attitude to the clergy. As the twelfth century got under way, we find criticism of the clergy becoming more and more intense. In the new universities it became the fashion for students to produce biting satires that portrayed the clergy as gross and corrupt. Papal legates, instead of being welcomed as envoys of His Holiness, were often treated as interlopers who interfered in legitimate local matters. Everywhere one turns, in the literature of the time, dissatisfaction with the established church was growing.

  One expression of the new piety the new internal religion was, as we have seen, the development of new monastic orders. A second effect was that heresy proliferated and was viewed much more seriously.52 In fact, there had always been heresy, especially in Byzantium, but between 380 and the twelfth century no one was burned. One element in the new situation was a reaction against a rich and worldly clerical establishment. Another was the rise of literacy and of speculative thought, as reflected in the new universities, Paris in particular. Two academic heretics at Paris were David of Denant and Amalric of Bena, but the most influential heresies of the twelfth century and the most fiercely combated, were the Waldensian, the millenarianism of Joachim of Fiore, and the Albigensian heresy of the Cathars.

  Peter Waldo, a merchant from Lyons, was, like many heretics, a saintly, ascetic figure. The first anti-Cluniac monastery had been established at Lyons and the archbishop of the city had been a great follower of Hildebrand, so there was a tradition in the area which adhered to the idea of the apostolic poverty of the church. The disciples of Waldo called themselves the Poor Men of Lyons and, as well as embracing apostolic poverty, and going about barefoot, they preached against the clergy (this is known as antisacerdotal). For the Waldensians, the line between heretic and saint was thin, the ‘church’ was not the prevailing Catholic organisation, but instead a purely spiritual fellowship comprised of saintly men and woman ‘who had experienced divine love and grace’.53

  An even more vituperative anticlericalism was promulgated by a southern Italian abbot, Joachim of Fiore, who, towards the end of the twelfth century, argued that the world had entered the age of the Antichrist, an age which immediately preceded the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. The idea of the Antichrist had its roots in the earlier existence of the ‘human’ opponents of God and his Messiah, in the apocalyptic tradition of Second Temple Judaism. These ideas were taken over by the early Christians in the second half of the first century AD, who argued that there were forces abroad trying to prevent the return of Jesus (the first mention of the term ‘Antichrist’ in a biblical context comes in the first epistle of John). The tradition flourished in Byzantium and migrated to the West in a famous tenth-century document, Adso’s Letter on the Antichrist, which formed the standard Western view for centuries.54 Adso, a monk, later abbot of Montier-en-Der, undertook a full ‘biography’ of the Antichrist in a letter addressed to Gerberga, sister of Otto II, the German ruler who renewed the western empire. It was a ‘reverse’ hagiography and a narrative, which accounted for its incredible popularity (it was widely translated). In Adso’s version of events, the Antichrist (the final Antichrist) will be born in Babylon, go to Jer
usalem where he will rebuild the Temple, circumcise himself and perform seven miracles, including the raising of the dead. He will reign for forty-two months and meet his end on the Mount of Olives, though Adso never made it clear whether Jesus or the Archangel Michael will bring about this end. In paintings and book illustrations, the Antichrist was often depicted as a king (less often a Titan) seated on or barely controlling beast(s) of the apocalypse.55

  What set Joachim of Fiore apart (and one can see why) was his identification of the papacy itself as the Antichrist. For Joachim, exegesis of the Bible was the only way to an understanding of God’s purpose. On this basis he identified from Revelation 12 that: ‘The seven heads of the dragon signify seven tyrants by whom the persecutions of the church were begun.’56 These were: Herod (persecution by the Jews), Nero (pagans), Constantine (heretics), Muhammad (Saracens), ‘Mesemoths’ (sons of Babylon), Saladin, and ‘the seventh king’, the final ‘and greatest’ Antichrist, which he thought was imminent. A Cistercian, he founded his own order and worked out his vision. This was in part that the future lay with the monastic life he felt that all other institutions would wither away. But his examination of the Bible, and the seven-headed dragon, led him to conclude that the final Antichrist, in modelling himself on Jesus, would take both priestly and kingly form. Therefore, as the eleventh- and twelfth-century popes acquired the mantle of a monarchy, it followed that Joachim should see in this the very Antichrist he was looking for.57