The Forge of Christendom (57 page)

Where, already, Gregory’s dark forebodings about how the German princes might respond to his absolution of the king were proving themselves all too justified. Henry’s enemies, brought the news of Canossa, had reacted to it with astonishment and consternation. Barely a month after receiving Gregory’s half-defiant, half-apologetic justification of his decision, the rebel princes had met in grim-faced assembly in Franconia, in the town of Forcheim. There, rather than wait for Gregory himself to arrive in Germany, as had previously been their intention, they had briskly set about delivering a judgement of their own. On 13 March, they had formally agreed that Henry, no matter what might have been decided on the topic at Canossa, should remain well and truly deposed.
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Then, two days later, and in the wake of a patently predetermined vote, the election had been announced of a new king: Duke Rudolf of Swabia. A fateful step: for although, over the course of the centuries, there had often been anti-popes, never before had there been an anointed anti-Caesar. The insurgency within Henry’s kingdom was fast becoming something intractable. What had previously been spasmodic rumblings were by now coming to shake the very fabric of the
Reich
. The threat was not merely of dynastic feuding, such as had perennially afflicted it, but of a far more total form of conflict: civil war of a remorselessness such as no Christian realm had ever endured before.

Not that this was immediately apparent to Henry. Reinvigorated by the success of his gambit at Canossa, he came strutting back across the Alps aglow with self-confidence, and spitting disdain for his upstart challenger. Most of the southern princes, shrinking from the course of open treason, reluctantly shuffled in behind him; Swabia, Rudolf’s own dukedom, was invaded and laid waste; Rudolf himself, abandoning his attempt to tour the
Reich
in a serene and stately manner, as befitted a king, was sent scampering for Saxony. Once arrived in that hotbed of rebellion, however, he and his supporters succeeded in hunkering down so impregnably that Henry, despite repeated efforts, found it impossible to shift them. The result was a stalemate – and an increasingly bloody one too. Battle after battle was fought – and every one indecisive. Armies composed primarily not of mail-clad horsemen but rather of conscripted foot-soldiers, merchants and billhook-carrying peasants, provided both kings with sufficient spear-fodder to keep returning to the killing-fields. Warfare on such a scale appeared to the Germans themselves something unprecedented and terrifying; and so, inevitably – for the habit of anticipating apocalypse was by now deeply ingrained in the Christian people – there were many who saw in it a foretaste of the end days. The Saxons, even as they fought in the name of a cause dusted down from books of pagan history – what had been termed by the ancients “
libertas,
” or “liberty”— simultaneously never doubted that they ranked as the sword-arms of heaven. Henry, in their fervent opinion, had been deposed both justly and irrevocably, as “an open enemy of the Church.” To die in the cause of their nation’s freedom was therefore to die as martyrs for Christ as well. Gregory’s own legates to Saxony, riding in Rudolf’s train and offering his warriors their blessing, had repeatedly confirmed as much. Henry, one of them had stated baldly, was “a limb of Antichrist.”
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A pronouncement for which Rudolf was, of course, most grateful. Nevertheless, as he struggled desperately to extend his writ beyond the limits of Saxony, he could have done with a little more cheerleading from the Holy Father himself. Not that he was alone in feeling disappointment on that particular score. Henry too, in the wake of
Canossa, regarded papal backing as his right: fit reward for his penance. Both kings, taking it for granted that the Almighty was on their side, duly pressed for a papal condemnation of the other; but Gregory, tempering his natural decisiveness for once, sought to maintain a severe neutrality. He certainly was anguished by the slaughter in Germany, and desperate to see it brought to an end, yet his principal concern remained, as it had ever been, the securing of the freedom of the Church. If Henry was clearly less to be trusted on that score than Rudolf, then so also did he seem the likelier to prevail as the ultimate victor: a consideration fit to inspire even Gregory to a course of wait and see.

And yet the conclusion that most men would have drawn from this – that there were inevitable limitations set upon what any pope might hope to achieve in a world swayed by the sword – was one that he still disdained to draw. Combustible, scorching, volcanic: Gregory remained what he had ever been. Even as a baby, it was said, unearthly sparks had flickered across his swaddling clothes; and as an adult too, not only had a miraculous halo of flames been known on occasion to illumine his head, but before ever being raised to the throne of St. Peter, he had been granted a vision of his future, one spectacularly lit by fire. For he had dreamed a famous dream: “a prophecy of papal excellence and power, that flames came out of his mouth and set the whole world ablaze.” To Gregory’s enemies, impious as they were, this had appeared a clear portent of the destruction that he was fated to unleash upon the Christian people; but his supporters had known better. “For doubtless,” as one of them put it, “the fire had been that same fire cast upon the earth by the Lord Jesus Christ: a kindling eagerly to be desired.”
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Nor, even as Germany burned, did Gregory himself ever pause to doubt this. Unremittingly, with a persistence and an energy that appeared even to his bitterest opponents something prodigious, he stuck to the task of re-forging the entire Christian world upon the anvil of his will. Not a region of Christendom but its customs, if they appeared to Gregory to flout those of the Roman Church, might provoke
a lordly scolding. Informed, for instance, that there was a fashion on Sardinia for priests to sport luxuriant beards, he did not hesitate to lecture the local authorities in the most peremptory manner: “we charge you,” he wrote sternly, “that you should make and compel all the clergy under your power to shave.”
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Such a close attention to details of personal grooming might, perhaps, have been thought to lie beneath the papal dignity – but Gregory knew otherwise. What else was his mission, after all, if not to restore wholeness to a fractured world, from the top to the very bottom? No possible effort, then, in the pursuit of such an awesome goal, could properly be spared him. Nothing for it, in the final reckoning, but to impose a uniform obedience upon the Church wherever it was found, and at every level. For only then could it be rendered truly universal.

And the best way of securing this desirable end? To Gregory, a man with a proven taste for thinking big, the solution had seemed self-evident enough. Surely, he had mused, heaven’s purpose would best be served if all the various realms of Christendom were to become the personal property of St. Peter, and his earthly vicar – himself. Never a man to duck a challenge, he had duly dusted down the Donation of Constantine, and written to various princes, floating the startling suggestion that they might like to sign over their kingdoms “to the holy Roman church.”
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Yet even Gregory, never a man to sell his own expectations short, seems to have appreciated that the idea, by and large, was a non-starter. A few months after Canossa, for instance, addressing the various kings of Spain, he had no sooner asserted that the entire peninsula belonged to St. Peter than he was hurriedly acknowledging that, “to be sure, both the misfortunes of past times and a certain negligence of our predecessors have hitherto obscured this.”
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Which was putting it mildly. Indeed, in sober truth, rulers needed to be either very pious, like the Countess Matilda, or else very hungry for legitimacy, like Robert Guiscard, to become vassals of St. Peter. Even Gregory himself, though he remained indomitably convinced of the papacy’s entitlements, was not wholly oblivious to this. He may have been unbending in his aspirations – but in his methods
often much less so. After all, as the Norman battle line had so potently demonstrated at Hastings, there was no shame in a tactical withdrawal, so long as it served the cause of an ultimate victory. When the Conqueror himself, for instance, invited by a pushy legate to become a vassal of St. Peter, responded with a diplomatic snort, Gregory opted not to force the issue. William was, compared with Henry, a model partner of the Roman Church; why, then, risk the alienation of a king who was capable of serving “as a standard of righteousness and a pattern of obedience to all the princes of the earth”?
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For Gregory, then, as for any general engaged in a war on multiple fronts, strategy was not merely a matter of clinging on to positions, no matter what, but also of judging which lines could legitimately be abandoned, in the cause of securing a lesser advantage. Certainly, as the bruising events leading up to Canossa had demonstrated, he was hardly afraid to go head to head with kings; and yet Gregory was sensitive as well to the advantages that might be gained from conciliation. In Spain, for instance, as in England, he ended up opting not to push his luck: for the King of León, no less than William the Conqueror, was a man who combined great devotion to the Roman Church with an imperious and iron-forged temper. Indeed, such was the fearsome reputation of Alfonso VI that he was darkly rumoured to have been guilty of fratricide, no less: for in 1072, ascending the throne, it had been in succession to his brother, murdered in a crime that – officially, at any rate – had never been solved. With a second brother incarcerated for life, and one of his cousins falling mysteriously off a cliff, such a king was clearly a man whose interests it might be perilous to cross – nor did Gregory choose to. Indeed, aside from a brief spat provoked by Alfonso’s choice of an unsuitable wife, relations between Pope and king grew so cordial that in 1079, only two years after the rebuff of his attempt to lay claim to Spain for St. Peter, Gregory could hail his correspondent for his “exalted humility and faithful obedience.”
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Slightly over the top, it might have been thought – except that, from the perspective of Rome, it did not appear so at all. Alfonso might not have acknowledged himself a vassal of the papacy – but as a patron
of reform, at any rate, he was fit to rank alongside any prince in Christendom. No matter that the Spaniards, harking back to the glory days when Toledo had been the holy city of the Visigoths rather than a Saracen capital, still clung to outmoded and heretical rituals – Alfonso had cheerfully abolished them all. In 1080, by swingeing royal decree, the Roman form of Mass was imposed upon his entire kingdom. Alfonso himself, in a dramatic gesture, drop-kicked a Visigothic service-book into a bonfire. This was precisely the kind of robust leadership that Gregory had always valued in a king.

For, although he was a man of God, the Holy Father was hardly unseasoned in the ways of the world. As a leader himself with a whole lifetime of diplomatic manoeuvrings to his credit, Gregory had few illusions as to the character of the warlords with whom he was obliged, as Pope, to deal. Nevertheless, this did not mean, of course, that the inevitable compromises which were forced upon him as a result necessarily sat easily with his conscience. That the universal Church remained dependent on the support of often murderous princes never ceased to frustrate and pain him. Several years into his papacy, indeed, and sometimes, in his darker moods, Gregory would find himself brought to question the very basis of worldly power. “For who does not know,” he raged bitterly on one occasion, “that kings and dukes derive their origin from men ignorant of God, murderers who raised themselves above their former equals by means of pride, plunder and treachery, urged on all the while by the Devil, who is the prince of this world?”
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A startling question – and one that only a man of humble origins, perhaps, would ever have thought to ask. To Gregory himself, a man who had toiled all his life to secure the Church as a bulwark against the legions of “the ancient enemy,”
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suspicion of the Devil’s cunning was only natural: a spur to ever more urgent labours. Yet even as he could reflect with satisfaction on the sheer global reach of all his efforts, and on how an immense sway of the earth’s scattered peoples, from the Swedes to the Irish, had been successfully urged to a common obedience, Gregory was increasingly conscious of a satanic and gathering darkness. It was all well and good for him to summon
princes on the world’s edge to acknowledge the universal authority of “St. Peter and his vicars, among whom divine providence has appointed that our lot should be numbered”
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– and yet what if, even as he did so, the most hellish menace of all were lurking within Christendom’s heartlands? What, indeed, if the advance guard of Antichrist were already massing to assail the throne of St. Peter itself? This, by the seventh year of his papacy, was the monstrous possibility by which Gregory found himself increasingly shadowed. “And truly,” he reflected, “it can be held no wonder – for the nearer the time of Antichrist approaches, so the more violently does he strive to destroy the Christian religion.”
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Back in late 1077, as Henry’s pious and venerable mother lay dying, what had most consoled her was the conviction that her son and her spiritual father, the two men to whom she had devoted so much of her life, were reconciled at last, and that Christendom’s great breach was repaired for good. Perhaps, then, it was just as well that the Empress Agnes had passed away when she did. Despite the kiss of forgiveness that Gregory had bestowed upon Henry at Canossa, and for all the spirit of compromise that had characterised their mutual dealings in its immediate wake, both had remained wedded to positions that neither man could possibly concede: positions that were, in the ultimate reckoning, irreconcilable. Henry, alert at last to the full revolutionary implications of Gregory’s policies, was resolved never to surrender his right of investiture; just as Gregory, thunderously convinced of his divine vocation, remained no less committed to stripping it away for good. Small wonder, then, that the tensions which had seemed so dramatically eased at Canossa had soon begun to escalate again. In the autumn of 1078, Gregory, making all too clear what had hitherto been left diplomatically opaque, had issued a fateful decree: “that no priest may receive investiture of a bishopric, abbey, or church from the hand of an emperor or king.”
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Henry’s response was to invest two archbishops that very same Christmas. A year and more on, and still there had been no royal climbdown. Why, indeed, should there have been? Henry had every reason to feel confident. In Saxony,
Rudolf’s support was showing signs of splintering at last. Certainly, there was not the remotest prospect now of the anti-king making a breakout from his increasingly beleaguered power base. Henry could consider himself as secure upon his throne as he had been since the body-blow of his excommunication. No wonder, then, called upon formally for the first time to abandon his right of investiture, that he had opted to call Gregory’s bluff.