The Forge of Christendom (54 page)

Yet in 1072, only the year before Hildebrand’s elevation to the papacy, that was precisely what had happened. Grown men had sobbed, invisible choirs of angels had sung and a mysterious beam of light had illumined the altar. It was a fittingly miraculous way to mark a seeming miracle: the restoration to Christendom of a metropolis so
stupefyingly vast that it could boast a quarter of a million inhabitants, 500 mosques and no fewer than 150 butchers. Nor was it only the Cross that now rose above Palermo. For the new and fretful pope, there was an additional cause for satisfaction. Planted on the battlements, token of the city’s subjection to the Roman Church as well as to Christ, there billowed a flag with the familiar insignia of St. Peter: a papal banner.

It went without saying, of course, that such a victory could only ever have been won at the point of a sword. The corsairs of Sicily had always been brutal, yet even they had found themselves unable to compete for sheer ruthlessness with the new warlords on the Italian scene. Palermo’s fall had effectively set the seal on a second Norman conquest. Indeed, the invasion of wealthy islands was becoming quite a speciality of Christendom’s “shock troops.”
⁵⁰
Even erstwhile enemies might be brought to a grudging respect for what the Normans themselves, with a becoming lack of modesty, liked to vaunt as their own exceptional “boldness and prowess.”
⁵¹
Back in 1059, for instance, it had been former associates of Leo IX, the Pope defeated at Civitate, who had first dangled the prize of Sicily before a man they had always previously execrated.

Robert Guiscard, the most notorious of the Norman freebooters as he was also the most powerful, had long since crossed the shadowy divide that marked out banditry from lordship. Desperate as the reformers were for some authentic muscle, and with Guiscard himself not averse to being graced with a touch of respectability, the way had duly been opened for a spectacular
rapprochement
. The Normans of southern Italy, amid much papal nose-holding, had been welcomed in from the cold. Their chief, in exchange for acknowledging himself a vassal of the Holy Father, had been formally invested with the dukedom of the lands he had already filched – “and in future, with the help of God and St. Peter, of Sicily too.”
⁵²

Not that the new duke of Apulia had ever needed a licence to go on the attack against anyone. Even without the stamp of papal approval, Guiscard would doubtless still have cast a greedy eye on the island – and the conquest of Sicily, when it duly came, had hardly been a venture
such as Peter Damian, let alone Adalbert or Alcuin, would have thought to bless. Indeed, on occasion, it had been literally written in blood: for in 1068, after one particular victory, Norman scribes had broadcast their triumph by dipping their pens into the viscera of the slaughtered Saracens, and then dispatching the resulting accounts to Palermo via captured messenger pigeons. Yet if shows of calculated savagery such as this had undoubtedly played a key role in undermining Saracen morale, then the Normans themselves never doubted that all their victories derived ultimately from a power even mightier than themselves. In Sicily, at any rate, they could reckon themselves on the side of the angels. Guiscard, camped outside Palermo, had ringingly condemned the city as a lair of demons: “an enemy to God.”
⁵³

His brother, Roger, the very youngest of the Hauteville clan, and the Norman leader who had committed himself most wholeheartedly to the winning of Sicily, was even more forthright in describing as his only motivation “a desire to exalt the Holy Faith.”
⁵⁴
That this had been no hypocritical affectation, but rather a pious statement of the truth, had been evident in the indisputable proofs of divine favour that had accompanied all his exploits: great cities captured against the odds, battles won with the assistance of saints mounted on blinding white horses, the fluttering above Roger’s own head of an unearthly standard adorned with the Cross. To be sure, the rewards he ended up reaping had hardly been confined to the dimension of the spiritual: for his progress, from penniless youngest son to Count of Sicily, had been only marginally less spectacular than that of Guiscard himself.

Yet still, amid all his triumphs, Roger never forgot what he owed to his celestial patrons, and to St. Peter in particular. A cut of the loot was regularly forwarded to Rome. In 1063, Alexander II had even taken a delivery of camels, plundered from a Saracen baggage train. In exchange, as well as the inevitable banner, the Holy Father had granted Roger and his men something even more precious: “absolution for their sins.”
⁵⁵
A momentous innovation: for never before had a pope thought to bestow such a personal benediction upon warriors who had spilled the blood of heathens. Tentatively, but no less portentously
for that, the papacy was groping its way towards a notion that the defeated Saracens, ironically, would have recognised well enough: that wars, if conducted to win back territory lost to infidels, might not only be justified, but even, perhaps, be regarded as a positive duty, one owed by the faithful to God.

A philosophy for which Gregory himself, it might have been thought, would have had a peculiar sympathy. And so, to a degree, he did. Nevertheless, as he listened anxiously to travellers’ reports from the eastern front, and pondered his response, there was one thing he knew for certain: that he had no intention of entrusting the redemption of a tottering Byzantium to Guiscard and his crew. The Pope, unlike his predecessor, had persisted in regarding the Norman adventurers in Italy as bandits and terrorists. It was not enough that the Duke of Apulia, far from rallying to the support of his Christian brothers of Constantinople, had coolly taken advantage of the buildup to the Manzikert campaign to grab their last remaining outposts in Italy for himself. Even worse, Gregory darkly suspected him of plotting a push northwards – into papal territory. Initial attempts to smooth things over between the Pope and the Norman captain quickly petered out when Guiscard flatly refused to trust an offer of safe conduct. By the early months of 1074, Gregory had so lost patience with his menacing vassals that he had begun to rank them alongside the Turks as enemies of Christendom. In March, the breakdown in relations between Pope and duke was sealed by the latter’s excommunication. Yet while this drastic step had undoubtedly been prompted by Gregory’s determination not to be taken for a ride by Guiscard, so also did it reflect something far profounder: a fearsome struggle within himself.

The English and the Milanese, perhaps, would have laughed hollowly at the notion – but Gregory himself never doubted that he was above all a man of peace. His wide-eyed relish for battle standards had always tended to outrun the dictates of his private conscience. No matter how justified he might feel in making blood-curdling appeals to the judgement of the sword, the grim realities of warfare never
ceased at the same time to haunt and trouble him. The same hardnosed politician who had urged Erlembald not to abandon the profession of arms also sternly affirmed that to be a knight was by its very nature to exist in a state of sin. The same seasoned strategist who had recognised more clearly than anyone that a threat to Constantinople was a threat to the whole of Christendom, and indeed had begun actively planning a military expedition to meet the peril, flinched from facing up to what such a mission might actually require. Gregory’s true wish was not for brutal and battle-hardened warriors such as Guiscard’s Normans, but for would-be martyrs. “For as Christ laid down His life for us, so should we lay down our own lives for our brothers.”
⁵⁶
An injunction that came from the heart: for Gregory, whose courage was no less steely than his will, had every intention of riding at the head of his projected task force in person. Nor did Constantinople represent the limit of his ambitions, by any means. His ultimate hope, after repulsing the Turks, was to lead the armies of Christendom onwards, until at last they had reached that most fateful of all destinations: “the sepulchre of the Lord.”
⁵⁷

And if there sounded something oddly familiar about this plan, then perhaps that was no coincidence. Jerusalem, after a lull of several decades, had begun to glimmer tantalisingly again on the horizon of many people’s dreamings. So too a dread – or anticipation – of the end of the world. In 1054, for instance, some three thousand pilgrims had set off for the Holy Land, prompted by the sudden and fearsome blazing of a mysterious star;
⁵⁸
ten years later, and an even larger expedition, twelve thousand in all, it was claimed, had repeated the journey, crosses sewn on to their cloaks, “deceived by a certain vulgar opinion that the day of Judgement was at hand.”
⁵⁹
Vulgar, perhaps; but not only the poor and credulous had made the journey: bishops, and archbishops, and great princes had gone along too. Indeed, prophecies of the end time had lately been circulating around the very summit of the Christian world. In Italy especially, among opponents of reform, great play had begun to be made once again of that hoary figure of fantasy,
the last Roman emperor – and naturally enough, it was Henry IV whom they looked to cast in the role.

Times, however, had changed; and the heir of the Caesars was no longer alone in claiming the rule of Christendom. “
Dux et pontifex
,” “general” as well as “pontiff,”
⁶⁰
was what Gregory aspired to be. And something more besides? Certainly, amid all the troubles of the age, the Pope’s plan to lead an army to the Holy Sepulchre could hardly help but appear a pointed trampling on imperial toes. What earthly kings, and Henry IV especially, would make of Gregory’s ambitions, only time would tell. Gregory himself, however, as he prepared for the great challenges that lay ahead of him, could afford to feel sternly unconcerned. He was, after all, the heir of St. Peter. The Almighty was on his side.

“It does not escape us,” he wrote a year after his accession, “how diverse are men’s opinions and judgements concerning us – for some, pointing to identical cases and actions, will think us cruel, others unduly mild. To all of them, however, we can give no truer or more appropriate answer than that of the Apostle: ‘But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.’”
⁶¹
All the world, so Gregory believed, had been given into his hands. To him been entrusted the fateful task of reordering it – nor, in the final reckoning, was there anyone entitled to stand in his path.

“That he is permitted to depose emperors.” Perhaps it was just as well that Gregory chose to keep this particular proposition from the youthful Caesar. Henry IV, as befitted the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne, was hardly the man to accept that he could be deposed by anyone. King of the various princedoms of Germany, he also laid claim to the rule of Italy – Rome included. Yet it is doubtful that Henry, even had he been alerted to the new pope’s pretensions, would have been able to do much about them. Not straight away, at any rate. There
was way too much already on the royal plate. Far from being in any position to contemplate a campaign in Italy, Henry was locked into a desperate struggle to maintain his authority within Germany itself. War, having already plunged the empire of Constantinople into chaos, had come as well, in the summer of 1073, to the empire of the West.

It was no race of pagans that had brought about this sudden calamity, however, no breed of savage invaders from beyond the frontiers of Christendom, but rather a people who ever since the time of Otto the Great had appeared the very wellspring of imperial greatness: none other than the Saxons. Yet Otto’s own dynasty had long since passed away; and its replacement in 1024 by a line of Rhineland kings, sprung from the opposite end of the
Reich
, had led many in Saxony to feel increasingly exploited and oppressed. Even during the triumphant reign of Henry III, the local princes had been growing fractious; and some of them, during the troubled years of his son’s minority, had actively plotted to do away with the infant king. Mistrust had bred mistrust in turn; and the adult Henry, with that same blend of suspiciousness and obstinacy that marked so many of his dealings, had disdained to mollify the restless Saxons. Instead, taking a leaf out of the Norman book, he had set himself to securing his hold on the dukedom in the most up-to-date manner possible: by raising castles. A threat to the local nobility, of course – but also to the entire Saxon people. As in France, as in England, so in Saxony, the battlements suddenly sprouting up on “high hills and wild places”
⁶²
appeared to the locals an inversion of all that they held most precious: forbidding and sinister threats to their ancient liberties.

Henry’s greatest castle, a stronghold raised at the foot of the Harz mountains, where Christendom’s most lucrative gold mines were to be found, was regarded with particular hatred: for its walls and towers appeared all too grimly suited to the fell situation in which they had been raised. Indeed, at the very onset of the insurrection, when the Saxon rebels sought to trap Henry there, they found it an impossible task, so dense was the forest surrounding the Harzburg. “No matter all the efforts of the besiegers, they could not prevent the comings and
goings of those who were shut in.”
⁶³
Henry, fleeing the castle without supplies, and relying on a huntsman to guide him through the trackless wilds, reached safety at last only after having travelled through bogs and briars for three whole days.

It was a common fantasy, no doubt, among the oppressed everywhere to see a castle-builder forced into humiliating flight. That the Harzburg and every other royal stronghold be levelled, that the onward march of military innovation be reversed, and that the “tyranny” which it facilitated be kept at bay: such were the demands of the Saxon rebels. Yet, for all the indignant talk of fortifications spreading across “every hill and mountain, so as to threaten Saxony with ruin,”
⁶⁴
an excess of castle-building on its own could hardly serve to sanction treason against an anointed king. Other justifications too were urgently needed. So it was that the insurgents, dredging up memories of Henry’s scandalous attempt to secure a divorce, fell to accusing him of a whole host of sinister practices: incest, groping abbesses, and hints of even worse. Such charges, in an age which had witnessed even the saintly Agnes accused of nymphomania, might easily have been dismissed as the common currency of political abuse – except that Henry, like his mother before him, was finding himself acutely vulnerable to muck-raking.