Millenium

by Tom Holland

  Beyond all doubt, then, the trampling down of malefactors was to be reckoned a Christian duty - and yet it was still, even so, one hardly befitting a man of God. A bishop presided over his diocese as its father, not its constable. That role had to be shouldered instead by another, one better qualified to handle sword and spear - as indeed had been the case since the very earliest days of the Church. That Rome's empire had splintered into nothingness did not diminish this regrettable truth. If anything, indeed, it made it more pressing. For centuries, the Church had been obliged to accommodate itself to a bewildering array of warlords. The more rulers it had converted, the more it had mutated in response to their various styles of rule. Though it claimed to be universal, it was the very opposite of a monolith. Like the West itself, it constituted instead a kaleidoscope of differing peoples, tradi­tions and beliefs.

  Even in Rome herself, the very mother of the Church, the pressures of worldly circumstance never ceased to weigh upon the city's bishop. Back in the sixth century, armies dispatched from Constantinople had invaded Italy and restored to the empire its ances­tral heartland. 'The ancient and lesser Rome' had been incorporated into the dominion of 'the later, more powerful city',33 and her bishop had humbly acknowledged himself the subject of the far-off emperor. A Byzantine governor had moved into the city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast, administering as a province the emperor's conquests in northern Italy, the Eternal City included; Byzantine titles and gew­gaws had been lavished upon the Roman aristocracy; Byzantine fashions had become all the rage. The bishop himself, every time he celebrated a Mass, would pray for his absent master in Constantinople. Every time he wrote a letter, he would date it by an emperor's regnal year.

  And yet a sense of his own dignity never left him. Although exces­sive uppitiness might on occasion be punished by exile or threats of execution, the pre-eminence of Rome's bishop as 'the head of all Churches' was something that had been long and ringingly pro­claimed by Byzantine law.34 Despite his best efforts, not even the Patriarch of Constantinople, leader of the Church in the empire's very capital, had been able convincingly to rival it. Small wonder, then, that this authority should increasingly have tempted ambitious bishops in Rome to set themselves up as masters in their own city. They were, after all, at a gratifyingly distant remove from the emperor's actual person - and the same crisis that in the seventh century had inspired Methodius's prophecies of a last Roman emperor had served only to widen that remove. Greece had been infiltrated by savage barbarians from the North; the sea lanes preyed upon by corsairs; communica­tions between Italy and Constantinople rendered perilous in the extreme. Byzantine officials in Rome, turning ever more native by the year, had fallen into the habit of obeying their bishop rather than the governor in Ravenna - and the bishop himself into the habit of issu­ing them with commands.

  Perhaps a measure of imperiousness would have come naturally to any man who dwelt in a palace, the Lateran, that had originally been a grant from the Emperor Constantine, and who ruled as the effective master of the former mistress of the world. Early in the eighth century, indeed, plans were being drawn up - although never completed - to build him a second residence on the Palatine Hill: a site so associated with the age of the emperors that the very word 'palace' echoed it. Yet the bishops of Rome did not derive their authority merely from the legacy of the imperial past. Their patri­mony was something infinitely more awesome - indeed, so they proudly asserted, the most awesome of all time. Christ Himself, in naming Peter as His rock, had given to him the keys of heaven, with the power of binding and loosing souls everywhere on earth - and Peter, before his martyrdom, had ruled as the very first bishop of Rome.35 A trust more mystical and dreadful could hardly have been imagined. Peter's successors, proclaiming themselves the apostle's 'vicarii’, or 'deputies', had long since laid claim to it as their own. In Constantinople, where it was the emperor who believed himself entrusted by God with the leadership of the Church, this cut pre­dictably little ice: by the early eighth century, doctrines were being laid down by imperial fiat in the teeth of howls of protest from Rome.

  In the kingdoms of the West, however, lacking as they did the daz­zling pretensions of an ancient Christian empire, men were far more inclined to be impressed by the spectacle of a bishop on the throne of the chief apostle. Indeed, to see him as the very essence of a bishop. 'Pappas' - that ancient Greek word for 'father' - was still, in the eighth century, being claimed as a title by bishops everywhere in the East; but in the West, Latinised to 'Papa', by the Bishop of Rome alone. So far as the Latin Church was concerned, it had only the one Holy Father. It acknowledged just a single Pope.36

  And the Bishops of Rome, bruised as they were by snubs from their imperial masters, were duly appreciative. 'How regrettable it is', a papal letter of 729 dared to sneer, 'that we see savages and barbar­ians become civilised, while the Emperor, supposedly civilised, debases himself to the level of the barbarians.'37 Two decades later, and relations between Rome and Constantinople had turned frostier than ever. Divisions over subtle issues of theology continued to yawn. Trade links as well as diplomatic contacts had atrophied, leav­ing the papacy effectively broke. Most alarming of all, however, from the Pope's point of view, was the failure of the emperor to fulfil his most sacred duty, and offer to God's Church the protection of his sword and shield. Rome, long a frontier city, was starting to feel ever more abandoned. With the imperial armies locked into a series of desperate campaigns in the East, Byzantine efforts to maintain a pres­ence in Italy had focused almost exclusively on Sicily and the south. The north, as a result, had been left fatally exposed. In 751, it was invaded by the Lombards, a warrior people of Germanic origin who for almost two centuries had sat ominously beyond the frontier of Byzantine Italy, waiting for their chance to expand at the empire's expense. Ravenna, rich with palaces, splendid churches and the mosaics of saints and emperors, had fallen immediately. Rome her­self, it seemed inevitable, would be next.

  But hope still flickered, despite the negligence of Constantinople. The Pope was not utterly without protection. One year previously, a fateful embassy had arrived in Rome. It had borne an enquiry from a Frank by the name of Pepin, chief minister in the royal household and, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the Frankish people. Their legitimate king, Childeric III, although a descendant of Clovis, was but a feeble shadow of his glorious predecessor, and Pepin, eager to adorn his authority with the robes of monarchy, had resolved to thrust his master from the throne. Not wishing to offend against Almighty God, however, he had been anxious first to secure the Church's blessing for his coup — and who better to turn to for that than the Vicar of St Peter? Was it right, Pepin had duly written to the Pope, that a king without any power should continue to be a king? Back had come the answer: no, it was not right at all. A momentous judgement - and one, unsurprisingly, that had secured for Rome the pretender's undying gratitude. The Pope's ruling, it would soon be revealed, had set in train dramatic events. These would affect not only the papacy, not only the Franks, but all of Christendom.

  God's plans for the world had taken a startling and far-reaching turn.

  Haircuts and Coronations

  In 751, the same year that saw the fall of Ravenna to the Lombards, Pepin struck against the hapless Frankish king. Childeric's spectral authority was terminated, not by death, but with a haircut. The Franks had long held a king to possess a mysterious communion with the supernatural, one that could provide victory in battle to their men, fertility to their women and fruitful harvests to their fields: a magical power dependent upon his having a luxuriant head of hair. It was hardly a belief calculated to delight scrupulous churchmen - but such considerations, back in the turbulent times of Clovis, had not weighed heavily. Two and a half centuries on, however, and the Franks had become a far more dutifully Christian people. The pagan affecta­tions of their kings now struck many of them as an embarrassment. Few protests were raised when Pepin, having first snipped off Childeric's resplendent lock
s, immured him and his son in a monastery. The usurper, however, wishing to affirm his legitimacy as well as his brute power, moved quickly to cover his back. A great assembly of his peers was summoned. The letter from the Pope was brandished in their faces. Pepin was elected king.

  And yet election alone was insufficient to assure him of the authen­tic charisma of royalty. Although the Franks were Christian, they had never entirely abandoned their ancestral notion that kings were some­how more than mortal. Childeric's dynasty, which claimed descent from a sea monster, had flaunted its bloodline as something literally holy: a blatant foolishness, bred of an age of barbarism, which only the gullible and ignorant had continued to swallow. Yet Pepin too, in laying claim to the kingship of the Frankish people, needed to demon­strate that his rule had been transfigured by the divine. The solution - naturally enough, for God had imprinted the pattern of the future as well as the past upon its pages - lay in the Bible. The ancient Israelites, oppressed by the depredations of their enemies, had called upon the Almighty for a king, and the Almighty, duly obliging, had given them a succession of mighty rulers: Saul, and David, and Solomon. As the mark of his elevation, each one had been anointed with holy oil; and Pepin, faithful son of the Church, now laid claim to a similar conse­cration. He would rule not by virtue of descent from some ridiculous merman, as Childeric had done, but 'gratia Dei"-'by the grace of God'. The very same unction that served to impregnate a bishop with its awful and ineffable mystery would now imbue with its power the King of the Franks. Pepin, feeling the chrism sticky upon his skin, would know himself born again and become the mirror of Christ Himself on earth.

  A momentous step indeed - and one that brought immediate ben­efits to all involved. If Pepin was clearly a winner, then so too was the Church that had sanctioned it - and especially that oppressed and twitchy cleric, the Bishop of Rome. In the late autumn of 754, a pope travelled for the first time into the wilds of Gaul. Ascending the Alps amid gusts of snow, Stephen II toiled up an ancient road left cracked and overgrown by centuries of disrepair, travelling through a wilder­ness of thickening mists and ice, until finally, reaching the summit of the pass, he found himself at the gateway of the Kingdom of the Franks. Below the road, beside a frozen lake, there stood the ruins of a long-abandoned pagan temple: a scene of bleak and menacing desola­tion. Yet Stephen, no matter what emotions of apprehension may temporarily have darkened his resolve, would soon have found his spir­its reviving as he began his descent: for the way-stop ahead of him, his very first in Francia, offered spectacular reassurance that he was indeed entering a Christian land. Agaunum, where four and a half centuries previously the Theban Legion had been executed for their faith, was now the Abbey of St Maurice: a reliquary raised in stone above the sanc­tified remains of Maurice himself. No people in the world, the Franks liked to boast, were more devoted to the memory of those who had died for Christ than them: for 'the bodies of the holy martyrs, which the Romans had buried with fire, and mutilated by the sword, and torn apart by throwing them to wild beasts, these bodies they had found, and enclosed in gold and precious stones'.38 The Pope, arriving in the splendid abbey, breathing in its incense, listening to the chanting of its monks, would have known himself among a people ideally suited to serve as the protectors of St Peter, that most blessed martyr of them all.

  Nor was Stephen to be disappointed in his expectations. Six weeks ' after heading onwards from the Abbey of St Maurice, he finally met with the Frankish king. Bursting into floods of ostentatious tears, the Pope begged Pepin to march to the protection of St Peter, and then, just for good measure, reapplied the chrism. The Franks he ringingly endorsed as latter-day Israelites: 'a chosen generation, a royal priest­hood, a holy nation, a peculiar people'.39 Nor did Pepin, self-assured in a way that came naturally to a warlord anointed of God, stint in ful­filling his own side of the bargain. In 755, Lombardy was invaded, and its king briskly routed. Two years later, when the Lombards made the mistake of menacing Rome a second time, Pepin inflicted on them an even more crushing defeat. The territories that the Lombards had conquered from Byzantium were donated in perpetuity to St Peter. Arriving in Rome, Pepin personally and with a great show of sententiousness laid the keys of the cities he had conquered upon the apostle's tomb. And as caretaker of this portfolio of states, he appointed - who else? — St Peter's vicar: the Bishop of Rome.

  This was, for the papacy itself, a spectacular redemption from the jaws of catastrophe. That God in His infinite wisdom had ordained it appeared irrefutable. It was true, most regrettably, that there were a few too blinkered to recognise this, with officials from what remained of Byzantine territory in southern Italy voluble among them — but a succession of popes, confident in Pepin's backing, blithely dismissed every demand for restoration of the emperor's property. What were the arid pettifoggeries of diplomats when set against the evident will of the Almighty? The shocking manner in which the savage Lombards had presumed to menace the heir of St Peter was an outrage com­mitted not merely against the papacy itself, but against the whole of Christendom. No wonder that God had moved the heart of the Frankish king to such transcendent and gratifying effect. The surprise, it could be argued, was not that the papacy had been granted its own state to govern, but rather the very opposite - that no ruler had ever thought to grant it one before.

  Or had the Pope's archivists perhaps been overlooking something? Long centuries had passed since Constantine first established the Bishop of Rome in the Lateran — and who was to say what documents might not have been mislaid in all that time? Papal officials, keen to justify their master's claim to his new possessions, appear to have spent the decade that followed Pepin's victory over the Lombards ransack­ing the musty libraries of Rome. Certainly, it was at some point during the second half of the eighth century, even as the papacy was battling to keep hold of the grant of territories it had received from the Frankish king, that a remarkable and hitherto wholly unsuspected document was produced.[1] Its contents, from the papal point of view, could hardly have been more welcome. The foundations of the state donated to St Peter, it appeared from the document, were far more venerable than anyone in the Lateran had dared to imagine. They had been laid, not by Pepin, but by the most glorious Christian ruler who had ever lived: Constantine himself. The content of the document added sensational details to the biography of the great emperor. A sufferer, it was revealed, from 'the squalor of leprosy',''0 he had been miraculously cured by the then Bishop of Rome, a sage of towering holiness by the name of Sylvester. Constantine, submitting humbly to the will of Christ, had then headed off to install himself in Constantinople - but not before he had first adorned Sylvester in all the splendid regalia of empire, and surrendered to him and to the heirs of St Peter for ever the rule of Rome, together with what were vaguely termed 'the regions of the West'. The implication could hardly have been more pointed: the papacy, far from depriving the emperor of his property, had merely been reclaiming its due.

  Its case was helped, admittedly, by the fact that even the most learned had only the haziest notion of who Constantine had actually been. Just as the great monuments of the emperors now stood as dis­figured ruins, obscured beneath the spread of weeds and grass, so memories of the ancient past had long since faded into myth. In the West, unlike the East, there survived no contemporary account of the life of Constantine. Nothing to demonstrate that he had not, in fact, been a leper; that Pope Sylvester, for from presiding over the Church, had in truth been an ineffectual nonentity, much given to bleatings about his old age and poor health; that Constantine could certainly not have departed the Lateran for Constantinople, since he was yet to found the city at the time. Scholars in the West, far from uncovering these inconvenient details, never even imagined that they might exist to be exposed. Why should they have done? Great convulsions, the wise knew, only rarely ushered in novelty - for it was seen as the like­liest consequence of change that what had vanished would be repeated, repaired or restored. No dispensation of God stood reve
aled in the affairs of the world that had not, at some stage, been portended or foretold. It beggared belief, therefore, that a development as momentous as Pepin's donation of a state to the Pope should not have been foreshadowed by a similar gesture back in ancient times. Had the 'Donation of Constantine' not existed, papal officials might well have argued, it would have been necessary to invent it.

  And in this they would have been very much in the spirit of their age. As the eighth century drew to a close, so men far beyond the purlieus of Rome felt themselves possessed of a new and stirring sense of mission. 'Correctio', they called it: the ordering of the disordered, the burnishing of the besmeared. Here was a programme to whet the ambitions of warlords as well as scholars, and to send men into battle beneath the fluttering of banners, the hiss of arrows and the shadow of carrion crows quite as much as into the mildewed quiet of libraries. Even as a succession of popes struggled to establish their supremacy in Italy, so from the North, beyond the Alps, momentous achievements were being bruited of the Franks.