Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (25 page)

The settlement at Worms ended the conflict with the empire, at least for one generation, and the breathing-space it bought allowed the popes to turn their attention away from a sterile confrontation with the secular power to the implementation of religious reform within the Church at large. They had in any case other troubles closer at hand. Gregory VII had allied himself and the cause of reform with the Pierleoni family, wealthy bankers recently converted from Judaism, who threw the weight of their new money behind the Gregorian papacy. Their great rivals were the Frangipani, and the twelfth-century popes found themselves increasingly caught in the crossfire between these feuding families. There was no return to the papal captivity of the ‘dark century’. Never again would a single family own the papacy, as the Theophylacts or Tusculani had done, but they could make Rome uncomfortable for the popes, and the elections of Honorius II (1124–30) and Innocent II (1130–43) were dogged and complicated by these dynastic tensions.

The popes were also threatened by the mounting hostility of the city of Rome to their rule. As the papacy became more international, it forfeited Roman loyalty. This distancing was already present in the 1059 papal election decree, which effectively excluded the people of the city from any real say in the process. Every new pope had to spend huge sums on lavish gifts to the citizens to ensure acceptance of his
election, a use of Church funds which brought bitter criticism from reformers everywhere. The twelfth century also saw a revival of republican spirit in Rome, and a pride in the city’s secular past, which culminated in 1143 with the setting up of a commune by the citizens and the establishment of an independent senate. All the mid-century popes had to contend with the threat of revolution in the city and the papal state round Rome. Lucius II (1144–5) died of wounds sustained while storming the forces of the Commune on the Capitol, and Eugenius III, Hadrian IV (1154–9) and Alexander III (1159–81) were all driven out of the city by the citizens.

Control of Rome was not everything, however. The Antipope Anacletus II, Pietro Pierleoni, elected by a majority of the cardinals in 1130, was securely in charge of Rome, backed by the family bank and the Normans of southern Italy. But his opponent, Innocent II, was widely perceived as the true inheritor of the papal reform movement. He received the support of the most influential propagandist in Europe, Bernard of Clairvaux, and of most of the monarchs and national hierarchies of Europe. These included the Emperor Lothar III, who signalled his recognition of Innocent by performing the stirrup service for him at their first meeting, leading his horse by the bridle, as Constantine was reputed to have done for Pope Silvester, and as Pepin had done for Pope Stephen. Though Anacletus held the Vatican and St Peter’s till his death in 1138, almost no one in Europe believed him to be the true Pope, and his claims were set aside by the Second Lateran Council in 1139, attended by more than 500 bishops from sees as far apart as Lincoln and Jerusalem. The papacy was now more than ever an international, not a local, institution.

Many of the problems confronting the mid-twelfth-century papal monarchy are starkly revealed in the pontificate of the only English Pope, Nicholas Breakspear, Hadrian IV (1154–9). Breakspear was a native of St Albans, but had been refused entry as a monk to the monastery there (his father did enter the monastery, where he is buried). He pursued a monastic vocation abroad, and became canon and eventually abbot of St Rufus in Avignon. Talent-spotted by Eugenius III, he became cardinal bishop of Albano (prompting puns about failure in St Albans but success in Albano), and was a hugely effective papal legate in Scandinavia, where he restructured the church and established new hierarchies for Norway and Sweden.

Elected on a wave of triumph on his return from his Scandinavian
mission, Hadrian was immediately confronted with attacks on papal territory in southern Italy from the Norman King William I of Sicily The reform papacy’s early support for the Normans had soured as their territorial ambitions had grown, and Norman support had helped prop up the Antipope Anacletus II. Hadrian was also under pressure from the Commune in Rome, now led by the radical monk Arnold of Brescia, who denounced all ecclesiastical wealth, and the papacy in particular as the head of a corrupt system. Hadrian had been a notorious disciplinarian as abbot in Avignon, and he was equally hard-boiled as pope. He put the city of Rome under interdict so that no sacraments could be celebrated there, expelled Arnold, and later had him arrested and executed by the German King, Frederick Barbarossa.

On this occasion Barbarossa featured as an ally of the Pope, but he soon revived the old hostility between Emperor and Pope, with all the bitterness of the earlier Investiture disputes. The citizens of Rome had tried to play Pope and King off against each other by offering Barbarossa the imperial throne. Frederick, a deep admirer of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, was indeed determined to restore the glories of their empire, but he considered that the empire came from God and his own strong right arm. He had no intention of accepting it from a bunch of middle-class radicals.

Hadrian therefore hoped for an alliance with Frederick which would simultaneously eliminate the danger from the Commune and provide him with protection against the Normans. Frederick, however, was not content to be the Pope’s policeman, and profoundly distrusted the monarchic pretensions of the papacy. He had probably seen the Lateran mosaics depicting the Emperor Lothar receiving the crown of empire from Innocent II in 1133, with the inscription ‘The king becomes the vassal of the Pope and takes the crown which he gives.’ Barbarossa would be no man’s vassal. He came to Italy to be crowned, but when he and Hadrian met in Henry’s military camp at Sutri in June 1155, he refused to perform the stirrup service, which he took to be a sign of vassalage. His refusal was immediately interpreted as a declaration of hostility to the Pope, and Hadrian’s terrified cardinals turned tail and ran, leaving the Pope alone. Agitated negotiations and consultation of ancient precedents persuaded Frederick to surrender on this issue next day, but he did so with a bad grace. It became clear that Hadrian could count on no help from him.

A further disastrous misunderstanding in 1157 led to a total breakdown in relations. Hadrian sent legates to the Diet of Besançon with a letter to Frederick reminding him of the ‘benefits’ he had received from the Pope when he had been crowned. The German word used to translate the Latin ‘Beneficia’ meant feudal grants, and the legates were lucky to escape with their lives, as Frederick’s court erupted at the Pope’s apparent claim that the Emperor was his vassal. Hadrian may well have meant to imply just this, but, if so, he backed off rapidly. The damage was done, however, and at Hadrian’s death Pope and Emperor were at odds over episcopal appointments in northern Italy (including Ravenna, that ancient thorn in the side of the popes) and Hadrian was plotting with discontented Lombards to rise against Frederick.

All this forced yet another papal change of heart about the Normans. Unable to beat them, Hadrian joined them. He recognised William as king of Sicily, and granted him sovereignty as a papal vassal over southern Italy, together with rights over the church there which would have made Gregory VII turn in his grave. He extended this favour to the Normans elsewhere, and in the bull
Laudabiliter
of 1156 he granted the English King Henry II the right to incorporate Ireland into his realms.

There was more to this snuggling up to the Normans than papal opportunism. The church in Ireland was already experiencing the stirrings of reform – St Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh, who died in 1146, introduced the Cistercians into Ireland, and Malachy himself died in the arms of St Bernard. In 1162 another great reformer, Lurchan ua Tuathail, would become archbishop of Dublin. But the permissiveness of Irish social and sexual customs, and the still partially tribal church organisation there, were deeply shocking to European convention. In the life of Malachy which he composed Bernard painted the Irish church and people in the most lurid terms, in order to highlight the Archbishop’s reforming zeal and heroism. The Irish were not men but beasts, wallowing in vice, worse than any other barbarians. This jaundiced picture of the Irish was held pretty generally throughout Europe, especially in reforming circles, and it helps to explain the Pope’s actions.

Henry did not at once act on
Laudabiliter
, and when the Normans did descend on Ireland in 1169 they did so at the invitation of a deposed king of Leinster (the eastern province of Ireland), Diarmuid
Mac Murchada, as defenders of the right. Mac Murchada himself was a leading patron of Church reform, a monastic founder and friend of the Cistercian movement, and the brother-in-law of Lurchan ua Tuathail. In 1162 he had presided as king at an Irish reform synod attended by papal legates. So the first round of the long and tortured relationship between England and Ireland began with papal blessing, and with a Norman force which could plausibly claim to be warriors for the Pope, commissioned by the vicar of St Peter to reform ‘the barbarous enormities of the Irish’.

Hadrians pontificate illustrated vividly the narrow room for manoeuvre, and the far reaching claims, of the twelfth-century popes. For all his decisiveness and vigour, none of the problems he confronted was resolved, and he left his successors facing an alienated empire and involved in an uneasy and dangerous alliance with the unscrupulous and land-hungry Normans. Alexander III (1159–81) would have to contend with a series of four imperial antipopes, the first of whom, Ottaviano of Monticelli (Victor IV), snatched the papal scarlet mantle from Alexander’s shoulders at his installation, and placed himself on the papal throne.

Alexander was a vigorous reforming pope, whose legal expertise enormously contributed to the consolidation of papal authority. The Third Lateran Council, which he convened in 1179, was another milestone on the papal road to domination of the Western Church, enacting a wide-ranging papal programme against clerical corruption, heresy and in support of the blossoming of theology and canon law within the universities. The Council met in the wake of an accommodation between Alexander and Barbarossa, but for much of Alexander’s pontificate the confrontation with a hostile emperor had hamstrung the papacy, as it would his immediate successors. Throughout the 1160s, for example, fear of tipping the English King Henry II into the arms of the Emperor and the Antipope Paschal III had coloured Alexander’s dealings with England, and prevented him from supporting wholeheartedly Becket’s resolute stand against royal encroachments on the liberties of the Church. Not till Becket’s martyrdom and the King’s consequent penance was Alexander in a position to call Henry to order.

By the end of the twelfth century, the finger of the papacy lay on every living pulse in the Church. The last Pope of the century, Innocent III (1198–1216), may stand as the greatest representative of this
pinnacle of papal power and influence. One of the series of lawyer popes thrown up by the growing centrality of canon law within the papal system, Innocent was a Roman nobleman whose personal name was Lothar of Segni. He was only thirty-seven when elected in 1198. An uncle had been Pope Clement III (1187–91), Innocent’s successor but one was his nephew Gregory IX (1227–41), while a great-nephew was to become Alexander IV (1254–61). But Innocent was elected pope on his merits rather than because of his family connections. Highly intelligent and a man of absolute personal integrity, he had studied theology at Paris and (probably) law at Bologna. As a student he had made the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, the great martyr for the spiritual rights of the Church against the claims of secular rulers, and this was a concern which would remain close to Innocent’s heart.

Innocent was a small, handsome, witty man, fond of puns and ironic wordplay, keenly alert to the absurd in the events and people around him. His first biographer described him as ‘strong, stable, magnanimous and very sharp’. He might have added that Innocent was also supremely self-confident. Certain that he enjoyed the direct guidance of God, he felt the full majesty of his own office. ‘Others are called to the role of caring,’ he declared, ‘but only Peter is raised to the fullness of power. Now therefore you see who is the servant who is set over the household, truly the vicar of Jesus Christ, the successor of Peter, the Christ of the Lord, the God of Pharaoh.’
¹⁸
Armed with that conviction, he threw himself into the reform of the Church in every aspect.

He was himself the author of several enormously popular devotional treatises, written before he became pope. His
Mysteries of the Mass
became the basis of the standard liturgical handbooks of the later Middle Ages. His treatise on the
Misery of the Human Condition
, a conventional diatribe against the misery and vanity of the world, perhaps inspired by his long years in the corridors of power at the Lateran, survives in a stupendous 700 manuscripts. Though his health was poor, he was restlessly active, and his energy often exhausted his entourage. One of his chaplains has left a remarkable and attractive account of a summer encampment in August 1202 outside the walls of St Benedict’s monastery at Subiaco, where Innocent had gone to get away from the heat of Rome. In the stifling heat the chaplains and clerks of the Curia choked on the smoke from the cook’s fire,
were devoured by gnats and were distracted by the noise of the cicadas and the pounding of the apothecary’s pestle and mortar. They nodded asleep over their paperwork while, in a shabby tent to one side, the Pope, ‘our most holy father Abraham’, ‘the third Solomon’, worked on, emerging occasionally to bathe his hands and rinse his mouth in a small stream. The chaplains eventually forced him to stop, and sat at his feet chattering and swapping jokes.

For the last twenty years of the twelfth century the papacy had been overshadowed by the hostility of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in Germany, and for the last ten the papal state had been in danger of encirclement, because of the death without heir of the Norman King William of Sicily The Emperor Henry VI claimed Sicily for his infant son, the future Frederick II, hoping to unite north and south Italy under a single dynasty. The popes, insisting that Sicily was a papal fief, backed another claimant, so as to prevent this imperial pincer-movement. But Henry himself died in 1197. His death brought a contested royal election in Germany, and the succession of the infant Frederick in Sicily, whom the Empress Regent quickly made a papal ward and placed under Innocent’s protection. Henry’s death also created a power vacuum in central and northern Italy, and Innocent determined to make the most of it by attempting to recover the papal territories which had been relentlessly eroded in the twelfth-century conflicts with the empire and the Normans. These included lands in the Campagna, in Tuscany, in Umbria and the Marches of Ancona, in Ravenna and in the scattered lands which Matilda of Tuscany had bequeathed to the reform papacy. He worked on Italian resentment of imperial taxation, making effective use of the text ‘my yoke is easy, my burden light’ to recommend papal overlordship. His eventual territorial gains were slight, but the campaign did result in an increase of tribute from cities which had previously paid little or nothing: Innocent used the new revenue to fund ambitious poor-relief programmes and the extensive renovation of the Roman churches.