two
The New Temple
The hopes of the Jews living in Palestine for an independent nation did not end with the fall of Masada. Some sixty years later, there was a second rebellion against Roman rule led by Simeon ben-Koseba who was acknowledged by the Rabbi Akiba as the promised Messiah. As before, the revolt met with an initial success: the forces of the Roman legate in Judaea, Tineius Rufus, were defeated. The Emperor Hadrian sent the legate in Britain, Julius Severus, to Palestine and in AD 134 Severus recaptured Jerusalem. The war continued for a further eighteen months until August 135, when Bether, the last of around fifty strongholds held by insurgents, fell to Severus and Simeonen ben-Koseba was killed.
The Romans’ punishment for this second rebellion was severe. The Jewish captives were either killed or enslaved. Judaea was abolished; it became the province of Syria-Palestine. The city of Jerusalem became a Roman colony from which all Jews were excluded. On the Temple Mount were built sanctuaries to the god-emperor, Hadrian, and the father of all the gods, Zeus.
However, by this time there were other sites in Jerusalem sacred to another religion that Rufus, the Roman Legate, felt he must cauterise by the superimposition of pagan temples. Over the ground that had been used for public executions a century before and a nearby tomb he built temples to Jupiter, Juno and Venus, the goddess of love. They had no significance for the Jewish nation but were sacred to the followers of another claimant to the title of Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Christ.
Jesus has remained a controversial figure throughout the twenty centuries since he lived and died, as much today as in the past. The traditional teaching of most Christian churches is that his coming was foretold by the nation’s prophets, most specifically by his cousin, a popular preacher called John the Baptist; that he was miraculously conceived in the womb of a virgin, was born in a stable in the village of Bethlehem, preached in Galilee and Judaea and performed a number of spectacular miracles starting with changing water into wine at a wedding in Cana. These miracles included many instances of healing the sick, but Jesus also demonstrated a power over nature by walking on water and calming storms. Like John the Baptist before him, he called for repentance and warned of judgement and eternal punishment for those who died in their sins.
In contrast to the brutality that was all around him in Palestine under Roman occupation, Jesus extolled gentleness and simplicity: he blessed the poor and the meek; he said we should aspire to the innocence of a child. The values he promoted reversed those of what he called ‘the world’ – the culture of egoism and self-indulgence. We should not strive for wealth, power and social advancement but take the lowest place at table. We should not retaliate against acts of justice but if struck on the face, ‘turn the other cheek’. It was not simply a matter of passivity: an enemy’s hatred must be met with love. Time and again, Jesus insisted that virtue did not lie in external observances of the kind practised by the Jews but depended upon our internal disposition – our feelings and fantasies as much as our deeds.
This denigration of ritual and observance, together with Jesus’s claims to be the Messiah and Son of God, to forgive sins and to embody the only means to eternal life, was considered both blasphemous and seditious by the Jewish leaders – the Pharisee scribes and Sadducee elders. They successfully persuaded the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, to have Jesus crucified. After his death he was taken down from the cross and laid in a nearby tomb but three days later, according to his disciples, he rose from the dead.
Even at this distance in time, and if treated as a character in work of fiction, the person of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels has a powerful effect on the reader. Unlike the books of the Old Testament which demonstrate the majesty of God through ‘the complexity of life, of emotions and desires beyond the range of intellect and language’, the Gospels are spare narratives virtually devoid of characterisation that nevertheless persuade us ‘that this and no other way was how it was’.16 To the literary critic Gabriel Josipovici, Jesus comes across ‘as a force, a whirlwind which drives all before it and compels all who cross his path to reconsider their lives from the root up. He has access, not so much to a secret of wisdom as to a source of power.’ Jesus speaks with exceptional assurance and authority yet makes the kind of claims for himself that one would expect from a lunatic. But as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, ‘he was exactly what the man with a delusion never is: he was a good judge. What he said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often unexpectedly moderate.’17
How historically accurate are these depictions of Jesus? Attempts to reach an objective view are frequently hampered by prejudice either in favour or against the Christian religion. The biblical scholar E. P. Sanders thinks it is possible to arrive at a core of historical fact.
We know that he started under John the Baptist, that he had disciples, that he expected the ‘kingdom’, that he went from Galilee to Jerusalem, that he did something hostile against the Temple, that he was tried and crucified. Finally we know that after his death his followers experienced what they described as the ‘resurrection’: the appearance of a living but transformed person who had actually died. They believed this, they lived it, and they died for it.18
This faith in Jesus in those who knew him proved contagious. ‘Whatever significance is ultimately ascribed to the title “the Christ”,’ writes Geza Vermes in Jesus the Jew, ‘one fact is at least certain: the identification of Jesus, not just with a Messiah, but with the awaited Messiah of Judaism, belonged to the heart and the kernel of the earliest phase of Christian belief.’19 However, this Messiah was not a warrior king who would lead the Jews to triumph and ascendancy in this world, but something far more profound and paradoxical – a sacrificial scapegoat who through his suffering would confound Satan and conquer death.
The most specific predictions of this saviour, so different to what most Jews expected, are found in prophecies of Isaiah made in the Temple in 740 BC. ‘Here is my servant,’ says God in his vision, ‘whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights.’ God will make him the ‘light of nations so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth’; yet he will be ‘a thing despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, a man to make people screen their faces; he was despised and we took no account of him. And yet ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried.’20
In the Psalms, too, we find the kind of lament that is echoed many centuries later in Christ’s suffering prior to his crucifixion. ‘I have become an object of derision, people shake their heads at me in scorn.’21 And in the Gospels, the evangelists quite specifically point to the episodes in the life of Christ that fulfil the prophets’ predictions. When, after they have nailed Christ to his cross, the Roman soldiers share out his clothes and throw dice for the seamless undergarment, it is, the Evangelist John points out, to fulfil Psalm 22, verse 18: ‘they divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothes’. Some of today’s sceptical scholars believe that the facts were added after the event to match the prophecies; that, for example, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was placed in Bethlehem, not Nazareth, because this was foretold by the prophet Micah. The historian Robin Lane Fox, despite the distance in time, feels sufficiently confident in his own researches to decide that ‘Luke’s story is historically impossible and internally incoherent … It is, therefore, false.’22
Can we discover anything about Jesus from sources other than the Gospels? The only references to him by a near contemporary are found in Josephus’s Antiquities, and in a version of his History of the Jewish War, probably written in Aramaic for a Jewish readership beyond the Euphrates. These passages are themselves controversial: one theory holds that they were removed from the Greek edition published in Rome so as not to antagonise the Emperor Domitian who was persecuting the Christians at the time; another that they are interpolations forged many years later by Byzantine monks. However, one disputed passage in Josephus’s Antiquities is quoted in the earliest history of the Christian Church, written by Eusebius in the fourth century: and, improbably if they were added by Christians, the passages in The Jewish War say as much about John the Baptist as about Jesus. John is ‘a strange creature, not like a man at all’. His face is ‘like a savage’s’. ‘He lived like a disembodied spirit … he wore animal hair on those parts of his body not covered by his own.’
Jesus, Josephus reported, was notable for his miracles: ‘he worked such wonderful and amazing miracles that I for one cannot regard him as a man; yet in view of his likeness to ourselves I cannot regard him as an angel either…’ Josephus describes how:
Many of the common people flocked after him and followed his teaching. There was a wave of excited expectation that he would enable the Jewish tribes to throw off the Roman yoke … When they saw his ability to do whatever he wished by a word, they told him that they wanted him to enter the City, destroy the Roman troops, and make himself king; but he took no notice.23
According to Josephus, the Jewish leaders bribed the Roman governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, to allow them to crucify Jesus because they were envious of his popularity. He also describes how, at the very moment of Christ’s execution, the veil of the Temple was ‘suddenly rent from top to bottom’; and, in his lengthy description of the Temple, Josephus mentions an inscription stating that ‘Jesus, the king who never reigned, was crucified by the Jews because he foretold the end of the City and the utter destruction of the Temple’.24
We find the same prophecy in the Gospels. ‘When some were talking about the Temple, remarking how it was adorned with fine stonework and votive offerings, he [Jesus] said, “All these things you are staring at now – the time will come when not a single stone will be left on another: everything will be destroyed.”’25 More audaciously, in the Gospel of John, Jesus suggests that the Temple, once destroyed, will subsist in him. ‘Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up,’26 a claim that was deemed blasphemous and later formed part of the charge against him. ‘This man said, “I have power to destroy the Temple of God and in three days build it up.”’27
Again, there are conflicting theories about Christ’s predictions that not just the Temple but Jerusalem itself would be destroyed. Christians think it explains why the incipient Christian community in Jerusalem moved to Pella before the Romans besieged the city; sceptics suggest that these ‘prophecies’ were added by the evangelists after the event. What is clear, however, is that the early Christians regarded the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem as both a necessary part of the new covenant between God and man, and as God’s punishment for the Jews’ repudiation of his only begotten Son. After the passage I have quoted above, describing a mother devouring her own child during the siege of Jerusalem, Eusebius, the earliest Christian chronicler, adds:
Such was the reward for the Jews’ iniquitous and wicked treatment of God’s Christ … After the Saviour’s passion, and the cries with which the Jewish mob clamoured for the reprieve of the bandit and murderer [Barabbas], and begged that the Author of Life should be removed from them, disaster befell the entire nation.28
From the perspective of the twentieth century, which has seen an attempt to exterminate the Jewish people more ruthless and systematic than that undertaken under Vespasian and Hadrian, it is difficult not to see such a judgement as one of the sources of anti-Semitism in the style of the Gospels themselves. Saint Matthew, for example, has Pontius Pilate protest: ‘“I am innocent of this man’s blood. It is your concern.” And the people, to a man, shouted back, “His blood be on us and on our children!”’29 But this did not signify, so far as one can judge, a condemnation of the Jews as a race of the kind we find in the cult of limpieza de sangre in Spain in the sixteenth century, or in the racial theories of a Houston Stewart Chamberlain in the nineteenth. Crude racial prejudice seems remarkably absent both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. After all, Christ’s disciples, the apostles and the evangelists, were all Jews.
The enmity that arose between the Jews and Christians was not racial but religious and, given the inherent contradictions, it is difficult to see how it could have been avoided. The destruction of the Temple, which Christ predicted, was more than a physical fact; it was a metaphor for the demise of Judaism. God had chosen the Jewish people as a chrysalis for the Messiah: once he had been born, it had served its purpose.
It is quite apparent from the Gospels that this was understood by the Jewish leaders in the Sanhedrin at the time. Whether or not their fear that Christ would provoke the Romans was sincere (given Pilate’s reluctance to become involved it was probably not), their alarm at his growing popularity seems reasonable in view of the import of his teaching. They may have been over-optimistic in believing that it would die with him; but if that was their judgement, then it was not unreasonable for the chief priest Caiaphas to decide that ‘it is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed’.30
However, Christ’s claims did not die with him: they came to be accepted by an increasing number of Jews. Leaving aside the questions of whether or not Christ rose from the dead, or a ‘holy spirit’ descended upon the rump of his followers in the form of tongues of fire, there is no doubt that the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth did not deter his disciples from preaching openly that he was ‘both Lord and Christ’.
It is equally clear that the Jewish leaders did what they could to suppress this nascent movement of seditious Jews. Peter was arrested; Stephen was stoned to death. Herod Agrippa I, the grandson of Herod the Great, beheaded the apostle James, the brother of John. Only the powers reserved by the Roman Procurator inhibited an all-out persecution; but in AD 62, during the brief interregnum between the death of Porcius Festus and the arrival of Lucceius Albinus, the high priest Anan condemned a second apostle called James, known as ‘the brother of the Lord’, to be thrown down from the wall of the Temple and clubbed to death.
The real bête noire of the Jewish leaders, however, was not one of Christ’s original twelve apostles, but Paul of Tarsus, a man who had never known Jesus and was zealous in persecuting Christians until, on his way to Damascus with warrants to arrest Christians signed by the high priest, Jesus appeared to him in a vision and appointed him his ‘chosen instrument to bring my name before pagans and pagan kings and before the people of Israel’.31 It was not just that Paul was a turncoat but that he took the repudiation of Judaism one step further, insisting upon a point that was not at all clear to Christ’s original apostles – namely, that you could be a Christian without first becoming a Jew.
Controversy about Paul continues to this day. He is charged with inventing Christianity – elevating ‘a Galilean exorcist’ into the founder of a world religion.32 The animosity of the Jewish leaders at the time, however, was provoked by the remarkable success he met in his preaching tours around the Roman Empire. The letters Paul wrote to those he had converted in cities like Ephesus, Corinth and Rome show a great respect for the Jewish tradition but an inflexible insistence that the Mosaic Law is now redundant, that we can only be saved by faith in Christ.
This radical repudiation of the Jews’ raison d’être antagonised many of the Jews among his fellow Christians; and it was not immediately accepted by the early Church. It was also used against Paul by the Jewish leaders who brought him before Gallio, the Proconsul of Achaea, charging him with ‘persuading people to worship God in a way that breaks the Law’. With an exasperation that reflects that of Pilate Gallio dismissed the charges: ‘“Listen, you Jews. If this were a misdemeanour or a crime, I would not hesitate to attend to you; but if it is only quibbles about words and names, and about your own Law, then you must deal with it yourselves – I have no intention of making legal decisions about things like that.”’33
Returning to Jerusalem, Paul was again arrested and was taken before the Sanhedrin but, claiming his rights as a Roman citizen, he was put under the protection of a Roman tribune, Lysias. Realising that they could not get rid of him by legal means, a group of Jews planned to assassinate him; but the plot was leaked to Lysias who then sent Paul to Caesarea escorted by seventy cavalry and two hundred infantry. There he appeared before the legate Felix together with his accusers – the high priest Ananias with some of the elders and an advocate called Tertullus who charged him with making trouble ‘among Jews the world over’ and being ‘a ringleader of the Nazarene sect’.34 Paul claimed his right as a Roman citizen to appeal to Caesar, and Felix therefore sent him in chains to Rome.
* * *
According to Christian tradition, Paul was eventually beheaded in Rome not as a result of the charges brought by the Jewish leaders but as a victim of the pagan Romans’ first persecution of Christians under Nero in the year AD 67. The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus considered that this first assault upon Christians was not the product of a considered policy of the imperial government but a whim of the Emperor Nero. After the fire which in July 64 had burned a large part of the city of Rome, Nero deflected the suspicion that he himself had started the fire by blaming the adherents of this troublesome sect. The initial execution of suspects was followed by a general round-up of Christians who were then put to death in a variety of refined ways: men were nailed to crosses, doused with pitch and set on fire, or wrapped in the skins of animals to be torn apart and devoured by dogs.
Although Tacitus thought that Nero’s cruelty went too far, and in fact provoked compassion in the citizenry, he had no doubt that the Christians merited ‘extreme and exemplary punishment’ because of their ‘hatred of humanity’. Their disdain for the material world, their refusal to bear arms or to take part in either the major or minor pagan rituals that were an integral part of Roman life, the secret meetings and obscure ceremonies where they ‘ate’ their god and, above all, their confidence that their pagan neighbours were destined to eternal torment while they would inherit eternal bliss, had a similar effect on the Romans as the aloofness of the Jews.
The Jews, however, were a known quantity, and they were seen as a nation, not a sect. Once the revolt in Palestine had been suppressed, the special privileges previously held by the Jews – the right to worship in their synagogues, to circumcise their male children, to rest on the Sabbath – were restored. The exclusiveness of Christians, on the other hand, was seen not just as offensive but as seditious; and, consequently, over the next two-and-a-half centuries they were intermittently suppressed. ‘Whatever may be the principle of their conduct,’ wrote Pliny the Younger, ‘their inflexible obstinacy appeared deserving of punishment.’35 As a result, in his capacity as an official of the imperial government, Pliny, whose writings show him to be a kind, cultivated and magnanimous man, ordered the execution of those who professed the Christian religion.
* * *
‘The more you mow us down the more we grow,’ wrote Tertullian, a Christian writer of the second century, ‘the seed is the blood of Christians.’ Although there were certainly a number of apostates who, when faced with a choice between being torn to pieces by lions and tigers in the arena or sprinkling a handful of incense on an altar in honour of Zeus, chose the latter, the sustained persecution of Christians did not prevent the growth of the Church. Far from shunning martyrdom, many of them embraced it as an imitation of the suffering of Christ. Ignatius, the third Bishop of Antioch, when arrested, forbade his followers to do anything to save him and implored the Romans to throw him to the lions. ‘Encourage the beasts to become my sepulchre, leaving no part of me behind.’ Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, was more judicious but equally inflexible when given the choice between worshipping Caesar and being burned to death. ‘The fire burns for an hour, and is speedily quenched,’ he said to the Roman governor Titus Quadratus, ‘but you know nothing of the fire of the coming Judgement and the eternal punishment reserved for the wicked,’ after which Quadratus passed sentence and ‘the crowds rushed to collect logs and faggots from workshops and public baths, the Jews as usual joining in with more enthusiasm than anyone’.36
Such atrocities were repeated in all corners of the Empire. In Phrygia (in Asia Minor) a small town was surrounded by legionaries:
who then set it on fire and completely destroyed it, along with the entire population – men, women, and children – as they called on Almighty God. And why? Because all the inhabitants of the town without exception – the mayor himself and the magistrates, with all the officials and the whole populace – declared themselves Christians and absolutely refused to obey the command to commit idolatry.37
The persecution was particularly harsh in two Roman cities on the River Rhône, Vienne and Lyons. First pagan servants were induced to accuse their Christian masters of incestuous and cannibalistic orgies to incite the populace against them; then the most atrocious deaths were inflicted upon those who would not abjure Christ and worship the pagan gods. Not only the leaders of the community such as the bishop Pothinus, but even the meanest, were subjected to torture. In Vienne, a maidservant, Blandina, perhaps rather plain, (‘through her Christ proved that things which men regard as mean, unlovely, and contemptible are by God deemed worthy of great glory’) was so resilient that ‘those who took it in turns to subject her to every kind of torture from morning to night were exhausted by their efforts and confessed themselves beaten – they could think of nothing else to do to her’. Finally ‘after the whips, after the beasts, after the griddle, she was finally dropped into a basket and thrown to a bull’.38
In the nineteenth century Friedrich Nietzsche was to denigrate Christianity for its appeal to servants like Blandina, and above all to the enormous number of slaves to whom its assurance of spiritual parity made up for their lack of civic worth. However, Christianity was not limited to the uneducated; it spread to the families of senators and even the emperors themselves. Formidable philosophers and scholars such as Justin, Origen, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria not only embraced Christianity but, in their own writing, deepened the Church’s understanding of Christian belief. Origen purged the scriptures of the apocryphal Gospels and established the authenticity of the New Testament as we know it today. Apollonius, described by Eusebius as ‘one of the most distinguished for learning and philosophy of the Christians of the time’, was given a hearing before the Roman Senate which nevertheless condemned him to be beheaded because no other verdict was possible under the statute: ‘It is unlawful for a Christian to exist.’
Before his arrest, Apollonius had been vigorous in refuting the heresy of a certain Montanus who denied that the Church had the authority to absolve penitents of serious sins. This heresy was just one among many which from its earliest days and throughout its history were to bedevil the Christian Church. The apostle Peter himself had warned that, ‘As there were false prophets in the past history of our people, so you too will have your false teachers, who will insinuate their own disruptive views…’;39 and Paul of Tarsus condemned the Gnostics and Docetics in his Epistle to the Colossians. Ignatius of Antioch used the word heretic as a term of bitter reproach. Tertullian who, ironically, was later to join the Montanists, defined a heretic as one who puts his own judgement above that of the Church, either founding a sect or joining one that deviates in its teaching from the doctrines which the apostles received from Christ.
To refute false teaching, the successors to the apostles held councils – the first in Jerusalem in AD 51, another in Asia Minor fifty years later. Each of these ‘bishops’ also had authority within his own community, with preeminence given to those in the major cities of the Empire such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome, the patriarchs of the nascent religion. A first among equals among these bishops and patriarchs emerged in the successor to Peter, the leader of the apostles, who had presided over the Christian community in Rome. Clement, who is thought to have been consecrated bishop by Peter, wrote in the year 96 to resolve a dispute in the Church in Corinth. Victor, Bishop of Rome towards the end of the second century, ruled on the date for the celebration of Easter and excommunicated a leather-seller called Theodotus who taught that Jesus had been a mere man.
Victor is also the first bishop known to have had dealings with the Emperor’s household: he supplied Marcia, the Christian mistress of the Emperor Commodus, with a list of Christians condemned to the mines of Sardinia and secured their release. Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, though an unsatisfactory ruler, tolerated Christians because of the influence of Marcia. Persecution was resumed under his successor, Septimius Severus. It was sporadic, depending upon the view of the current Emperor: some of the most sagacious and enlightened, like the Antonine emperors and Marcus Aurelius, were rigorous in their suppression of Christians. Persecution became severe under the emperors Maximin, Decius and above all Diocletian who in 303 embarked upon what came to be called ‘The Great Persecution’ which only ceased when Diocletian abdicated and retired to his palace at Split on the Dalmatian coast.
* * *
Before his retirement, Diocletian, deciding that the Roman Empire was too large to be governed by one man, had appointed four to a ruling body or tetrarchy, one of them Constantius Chlorus. Chlorus was assigned the northern quarter of the Empire which included Britain and Gaul. When Diocletian abdicated in 305, Chlorus became the senior Caesar in the west but died a year later in York. His son Constantine was proclaimed emperor by the legions in Britain and, after a series of victories over rival claimants, established his rule over the whole Empire.
Constantine believed that he had come to power with the help of the Christians’ God. On the eve of the critical battle against the rival Emperor Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, he had been told in a dream (or possibly a vision) to paint a Christian monogram on the shields of his soldiers: ‘In this sign conquer’. Persecution had been lax under his father Chlorus in the western provinces: now it ceased altogether throughout the Empire. Under the Edict of Milan in 313, all penal edicts against Christians were rescinded; Christian captives were released and their property was restored. But Constantine’s policy towards the Christians went beyond toleration. Bishops were made his counsellors and were allowed to use the imperial postal service, an invaluable privilege at a time when overland travel was both dangerous and expensive. A law of 333 ordered imperial officials to enforce the decisions of bishops, and to accept the testimony of bishops over other witnesses. Constantine donated the imperial property of the Lateran to the Bishop of Rome as a site for a basilica and he promulgated laws giving the Christian clergy fiscal privileges and legal immunities ‘for when they are free to render supreme service to the Divinity, it is evident that they confer great benefit upon the affairs of state’. He enjoyed the company of Christian bishops, called them his brothers, entertained them at court and, when they had been scourged and mutilated in past persecutions, reverently kissed their scars.
Like Herod, Constantine suffered from tragedy in his immediate family. His second wife Fausta accused Crispus, his son by his first wife, of making improper advances. Crispus was executed before Helena, Constantine’s mother, was able to prove to the Emperor that the charges were false. Fausta was then suffocated in a superheated bath.
In the wake of this tragedy, Helena – converted to Christianity by Constantine – set out on a penitential journey to Palestine. There Constantine had ordered the demolition of the temples and the construction of churches over the sites of Christ’s nativity in Bethlehem, his crucifixion in Jerusalem, and the tomb from which he had risen from the dead. In the course of the excavations, there was uncovered the timber of a cross bearing the inscription ‘Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews’. Whether or not this was what it purported to be, or a forgery passed off on a gullible old woman, it was accepted by Helena and faithful Christians as the supreme relic of their Salvation; and, upon its completion, was placed in the church built over the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
* * *
The conversion of Constantine was of momentous consequence for Christianity. Equally significant for the future of the Empire was his decision to move its capital from Rome to Byzantium on the Bosphorus. It had been clear for some time that Rome was poorly placed as a strategic centre for a state whose most vulnerable frontiers and most prosperous provinces lay in the east. The emperors had become first and foremost military commanders, no longer dependent either for their power or for their legitimacy on the Senate and people of Rome. Byzantium, with its strategic position between Europe and Asia, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and its natural harbour known as the Golden Horn, was ideally suited to this role. Within three weeks of his victory over Licinius, one of his rivals, at nearby Chrysopolis in 324, Constantine laid the foundations of this ‘new Rome’. The city, already enlarged by one of his predecessors, Septimius Severus, was tripled in size, endowed with magnificent public buildings such as the Hippodrome, begun under Severus, an imperial palace, public baths and halls, and streets adorned with numerous statues taken from other cities. Full citizenship and free bread were offered as an inducement to settlers: there was a policy of tolerance towards pagans and Jews.
Renamed Constantinople after its founder, the city became a centre for his favoured religion. A number of great churches were built by the Emperor, and in 381 it became the seat of a patriarch who joined those of Rome, Antioch, Alexandra and later Jerusalem. Many early Councils of the Church were called by Constantine to meet in Constantinople, or nearby cities such as Nicaea and Chalcedon.
* * *
The ascendancy of Christianity was not yet assured. During the reign of Constantine’s nephew, Julian, later known as ‘the apostate’, paganism was reinstated and the Church subjected to a form of renewed persecution. Significantly, one of the measures initiated by Julian to antagonise the Christians, whom he called ‘the Galileans’, was the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem; but natural calamities hampered the project (considered miraculous interventions by the Christians) and it was abandoned upon the death of the Emperor in 363.
Julian was the last of the pagan emperors. Under his successor, Jovian, the Church was restored to the privileged position it had enjoyed under Constantine. and became as intolerant of paganism as paganism had been of Christianity. Already, under Constantine’s son Constantius, the pagan temples had been closed and sacrifices to the pagan gods forbidden under pain of death. Now the prohibition was made absolute, and pagan ceremonies continued only in secret, frequently in the guise of carnivals or seasonal celebrations. The old temples were abandoned and became derelict or were destroyed.
The same intolerance was shown towards the Jews. Having aided and abetted the pagan persecution of Christians, and welcomed the counter-reformation of Julian the Apostate, they were now subject to oppression by imperial statutes and harassment by Christian mobs. The Emperor Theodosius, one of the last to rule an undivided empire, issued a decree in 380 prescribing the Nicene Creed as binding on all subjects. This was directed as much against heretical Christians as against pagans and Jews, but it encouraged excesses among Christian zealots. In 388, in Callinicum on the River Euphrates, the Jewish synagogue was burned down by a Christian mob. Theodosius ordered it rebuilt at Christian expense but was persuaded by Ambrose, the Archbishop of Milan, to rescind the command. ‘What is more important?’ the prelate asked the Emperor. ‘The parade of discipline or the cause of religion?’40 A further demonstration of the kind of power now exercised by bishops came two years later when a punitive massacre in Thessalonika ordered by Theodosius was condemned by a Church Council at Ambrose’s instigation, and the Emperor was only readmitted to communion after public penance.
Ambrose, the Archbishop of Milan, shows how while Rome became Christian, Christianity became Roman, adopting a system of administration and a body of law like those of the Empire, and employing the same personnel. Ambrose was the son of a Roman prefect and a member of the senatorial class. He had been educated at Rome and employed as an imperial civil servant, around 371 serving as governor of the provinces of Aemilia and Liguria whose administrative headquarters was then Milan. Mediating in his official capacity in a disputed episcopal election in 373, he was unexpectedly chosen by popular acclamation to be bishop himself. Although his family was Christian, he had not yet been baptized. He was received into the Church on 24 November and ordained priest and consecrated bishop on 1 December.
* * *
It was the sermons of Ambrose, delivered in Milan, that persuaded a young teacher of rhetoric in the city, Augustine, to become a Christian. The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, both of Berber extraction, Augustine had lived in North Africa until moving to Milan. The salient features of his youth were intellectual curiosity and sexual licence. At one time believing in Manichaeism, the belief that God and the Devil are equal powers, God the creator of spirit, the Devil of matter, and later a Neoplatonist, Augustine was persuaded by Ambrose of the truth of Christian teaching. But he was ambitious and had a powerful sexual drive. He gave up his mistress of long standing, by whom he had had a son, for the prospect of an advantageous marriage; and while waiting for his future bride to come of age, he had affairs with a number of other women. His love of women had always been an impediment to his conversion. As an adolescent he had prayed to God: ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ He had been afraid that God might grant his prayer too quickly – ‘that you might too rapidly heal me of the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than suppress’.41 Now in his early thirties, Augustine’s ‘old loves’ held him back. He was in a state of paralysing indecision until one afternoon, in the garden of his lodging, he heard an ethereal voice (‘it might be of a boy or a girl’) chanting, ‘take and read, take and read’. He opened a book of the epistles of Paul of Tarsus at random, and his eyes fell on Paul’s Letter to the Romans: ‘Let us live decently as people do in the daytime: no drunken orgies, no promiscuity or licentiousness, and no wrangling or jealousy. Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ; forget about satisfying your bodies with all their cravings.’42
Augustine was baptized by Ambrose in 387 and returned to North Africa where he became a priest. At first he lived in a secluded community but after five years was made Bishop of Hippo. The remaining thirty-five years of his life were spent fulfilling his duties as a diocesan bishop and writing works of supreme importance for the future of the Church. As we shall see when we come to the founding of the Templars, it was the rule established by Augustine for his community of Christians that the Order initially adopted; and it was Augustine’s theory of a just war that was used to defend the crusades.
* * *
There are two further developments notable in the time of Ambrose and Augustine that were to shape Europe in the Middle Ages. The first was the division of the Roman Empire into two. The eastern half became the Byzantine Empire and in time abandoned the use of Latin for Greek. The western half was ruled notionally from Rome, but at times from Milan or Ravenna. The line of demarcation was the Adriatic Sea, and a line through modern Yugoslavia which remains problematic to this day.
Both empires were constantly at war with the tribes and peoples beyond their borders – in Asia the Persians, in Europe across the Danube and the Rhine, the barbarian tribes of Sarmatians, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, Alamanni, Quadi, Vandals and behind them, pushing forward for unknown reasons from the steppes, the ferocious tribe of Huns.
The line could not be held but what came to be described as the ‘Fall’ of the Roman empire was not a single dramatic defeat or even a sequence of defeats of imperial armies followed by a systematic colonisation by the barbarian victors. ‘These invasions were not perpetual, destructive raids; still less were they organised campaigns of conquest. Rather they were a “gold rush” of immigrants from the underdeveloped countries of the north into the rich lands of the Mediterranean.’43
Some tribes, such as the Franks and Alamanni, had already been permitted to settle within the frontiers of the empire in north eastern Gaul; and the Ostrogoths and Greutingi, pushed west by the Huns, were allowed to move into Thrace. So-called ‘barbarians’ came to be recruited into the Roman army and even to command it. A half Vandal, Stilicho, married the niece of the emperor Theodosius and took charge of the Empire after Theodosius’s death. But it was a time of violence, confusion and disorder when fearful and frequently hungry hordes ranged around Europe in search of security and food. In 406, the Vandals and Sueves, followed by the Burgundians and Alamanni, fled from the advancing Huns across the frozen River Rhine and entered Gaul. In 407, the Romans withdrew their legions from Britain, leaving the Britons to defend themselves against the Picts and Scots in the north, and piratical raids on the eastern coast by Angles, Saxons and Jutes. In 410 Alaric and his Visigoths captured and sacked Rome, then moved back north along the coast of the Mediterranean to settle in south-western France and later in Spain. In 429, 80,000 Vandals swept through Spain and over the Straits of Gibraltar into the Roman provinces of North Africa: Augustine died in 430 while they were besieging his city of Hippo.
Attempts were made, particularly by the Roman general Aetius, to bring some order into the settlement of the barbarian tribes. There were some transitory triumphs: Aetius defeated an army of Huns under Attila which then moved south into Italy, sacking cities on the plain of the Po, and only holding back from an attack on Rome in return for tribute paid by the Pope. But after the death of Aetius, the western Roman emperors were mere figureheads, real power lying in the hands of Germanic tribal chiefs. One of these, Odoacer, deposed the last Emperor, Romulus Augustus, and ruled Italy as a barbarian king. Notionally, he did so as regent for the eastern emperor in Constantinople but in reality the western Roman Empire as a distinctive political entity had come to an end.
However, this did not mean ‘the disappearance of a civilisation: it was merely the breaking down of a governmental apparatus that could no longer be sustained’.44 The barbarians, who remained minorities in the lands they conquered, felt no antagonism to the empire and the idea of abolishing it never crossed their mind: ‘the conception of that empire was too universal, too august, too enduring. It was everywhere around them, and they could remember no time when it had not been so’.45 The social organisation and cultural traditions of the Roman Empire survived the demise of the single centralised administration in the counties, as duchies and kingdoms started to take shape – the Ostrogothic principality in Italy; a Visigothic state in Spain and in Gaul as far as the Loire; and further north, the kingdom of the Salian Franks. By the end of the fifth century, the Franks under their king Clovis had become the dominant power north of the Alps. After defeating the Alamanni and the Visigoths, Frankish dominion was established between the Rhine and the Pyrenees. Around 498, Clovis became a Christian together with all his barons: it was said that he had witnessed a miracle at the tomb of Martin of Tours.
* * *
The baptism of Clovis, like the conversion of Constantine, was of momentous significance for the future of the Christian Church. However, the portions which each party now brought to this marriage between the secular and spiritual were very different from what they had been a century-and-a-half before. Clovis was not the chief executive of a huge, well-regulated state but the leader of a horde of ferocious, uneducated fighting men. He could not give the bishops, as Constantine had done, lavish endowments, fiscal privileges and the perquisites of senior civil servants. All he could offer was the souls of his savage people, and a commitment to protect the universal or ‘Catholic’ Church.
The Church, on the other hand, had much to offer the barbarian chieftain, having an intact organisation modelled on that of the Roman state. At the apex of the hierarchy was the Patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Rome, now called the Pope from the Greek pappas, meaning father, with cardinals as the departmental heads of his administration. Below him, in what remained of the larger cities of the ruined Empire, were the archbishops; and in most towns of any stature, a bishop with a corps of literate deacons and priests. The Church was also rich, having been generously endowed with large landholdings by Christian emperors: it was therefore able, following the collapse of both commerce and legality, to see to the material as well as the moral well-being of the people under its care. With the collapse of the political and administrative institutions of the Roman world, the episcopate became the sole moral force, and, thanks to its landed possessions, the sole economic resource that remained for the people. The bishop replaced the state as the provider of public services, feeding the poor, ransoming captives and seeing to the welfare of the imprisoned. Hospices, hospitals, orphanages, even inns, were annexes of the churches and the monasteries.
The Church took on more than the functions of the defunct Empire; it was the Roman Empire in the minds of the people. To be a Roman was to be a Christian: to be a Christian was to be a Roman. After Justinian, ‘the Mediterranean world came to consider itself no longer as a society in which Christianity was merely the dominant religion, but as a totally Christian society. The pagans disappeared in the upper classes and even in the countryside … the non-Christian found himself an outlaw in a unified state’.46
In a real and self-conscious sense, the bishops of the Catholic Church took on the mantle of the Roman senatorial class: this was ‘the basic assumption behind the rhetoric and ceremonial of the medieval papacy’.47 Already, from the earliest days of the Christian Church, the Bishop of Rome had claimed an ascendancy in spiritual matters not merely as Patriarch of the West, but as the successor of Peter to whom Christ himself had given the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and the power to ‘bind and loose’, viz. define what was true and what was false; and by the time of the barbarian invasions, Roman jurisdiction was accepted in all the diocese of the western empire. Now to the Pope’s spiritual supremacy was added, in the absence of an emperor, the authority of the chief magistrate of the city of Rome.
Although for some time the city had been in decline, it remained by far the largest and most populous city in the west. Some of the majestic buildings and splendid monuments had been stripped by its inhabitants for building materials, but much remained of its glorious past. Its people were conservative; the old senatorial families were still pre-eminent; and pagan influences remained strong. When Alaric and his Visigoths threatened to attack the city in 408, the Prefect and Senate proposed sacrifices to the pagan gods.
Their invocations failed; but then so too did the diplomatic initiative of Pope Innocent I. The Visigoths under Alaric captured and plundered Rome. However, almost fifty years later Pope Leo I went to Mantua where he successfully persuaded Attila, the leader of the Huns, to stay away from Rome. In 455, he met Gaiseric, the leader of the Vandals, outside the walls of the city; and while he failed to prevent them from plundering the city, they desisted at his request from harming the people.
More than a hundred years after this, another pope, Gregory, who like Leo was to earn the appellation of ‘the Great’, faced a Lombard invasion and made himself responsible for the welfare of the citizens of Rome. Coming from a rich and aristocratic family, and related to two previous popes, Gregory not only used his own resources to mitigate the suffering of the poor, but he appointed rectors to maximise receipts from the ‘patrimony of St Peter’ – large estates all over Europe that belonged to the papacy. In 593, when the Lombard King Agilulf besieged the city, Gregory took command of the garrison and bribed the Lombards to leave.
In the absence of any effective secular authority, Gregory became the de facto ruler of Italy. He raised troops, appointed generals and made treaties. This was not perceived as a radical departure from tradition. ‘In Gregory’s time, the distinction later drawn between spiritual and secular matters was not clear: men had never thought of political authority being divorced from a religious basis.’48 He was equally zealous in pursuing the well-being of the Church, imposing celibacy on the clergy and a strict code for the election of bishops. He was tolerant towards the Jews: in 599 he ordered restitution after the desecration of a synagogue in Caraglio in northern Italy, and he reprimanded the bishops of Arles and Marseilles for allowing the compulsory baptism of Jews in their diocese. Like Leo before him, he insisted upon the universal authority of the Bishop of Rome, fought against heresy, and was said to have been moved by the sight of blond pagan Angles being sold as slaves in Rome to dispatch Augustine and a band of forty Benedictine monks to preach the Gospel in their homeland.
* * *
Gregory the Great was the first pope who was a monk; and the growth of monasticism is the second development in the history of the Christian Church that affects our understanding of the Templars. The word ‘monk’ comes from the Greek monos meaning ‘alone’ or ‘solitary’. It was not used by Christians until the fourth century because until the middle of the third Christian monks were unknown. The early Church was mostly found in the cities and, to judge from the Acts of the Apostles, its members held their goods in common. ‘We share everything,’ Tertullian wrote, ‘except our wives.’
However, not all men and women among the early Christians married. From the first, virginity was esteemed as a mark of total dedication to God. Paul of Tarsus, who is generally credited with a dislike of women, thought it was good to marry but better to remain celibate: he expected an imminent end to the world and therefore saw marriage as a pointless distraction. He also pointed out that those who were married must consider the well-being of their spouses while those who were unmarried could dedicate themselves wholly to God. An unprejudiced reading of his epistles suggests that he was neither as puritanical nor as misogynistic as he is usually portrayed. In the context of sexual relations, he enjoined husbands and wives to give to one another what they had the right to expect. Though initially ruling that widows should not remarry, he later reversed his judgement saying that it is better to marry than to live tormented by sexual desire (‘better to marry than to burn’).
Yet it seems certain that Paul and the early Christians considered marriage an impediment to perfection. This esteem for celibacy, though possibly found in the Essene sects, was a departure from the Jewish teaching that men and women should obey God’s command in the Book of Genesis to ‘be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it’; but it came from the advice of Christ himself when he commended ‘eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’, adding ‘Let anyone accept this who can.’49 This led to a cult of virginity in the early Church which sometimes went too far; the young Origen in the third century was censured for putting a literal interpretation on what Christ had said, a self-mutilation which he later regretted.
Eusebius, in his history, describes with approval how young Christian women, during periods of persecution, preferred death to dishonour. Dominina and her two daughters, ‘in the full flower of their girlish charm’, apprehended as Christians and sent under escort to Antioch, ‘when they had travelled half way … modestly requested the guards to excuse them a moment, and threw themselves into the river that flowed by’.50
The canon of saints has many such ‘virgins and martyrs’ from this period, but there were as yet no nuns or monks. Living as a Christian, and being ready to die for your beliefs, was considered enough. It was only after the conversion of Constantine, and the transformation of the Church from a persecuted sect into a rich and privileged institution that it became advantageous to be Christian, and possible to practise that religion with a minimal zeal. Among the majority of Christians, standards of piety declined; but there remained a small number who retained the fervent spirit of the early Church and sought to escape from the material and political preoccupations of the world. The growing wealth of the Church seemed to contradict Christ’s recommendation to the rich young man: ‘Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor.’ And subsequently: ‘How hard it is for those who have riches to make their way into the kingdom of God.’51
The first instances of Christians taking Christ at his word are found in Upper Egypt – first Paul, who at the age of fifteen, to escape from the persecution under the Emperor Decius, went to live in a cave close to a palm tree and a spring of water. He remained there for the next ninety years without any human company until he was found by a fellow hermit, Antony, shortly before he died. Antony, a young man from Hieracleus, also in Upper Egypt, on the death of his parents around 273, made provision for his sister’s education, then sold all his remaining property and gave the proceeds to the poor. He too went to live in a cave in the nearby desert, existing on bread and water which he consumed only once a day. A number of admirers joined him and he eventually founded two monasteries for which he drew up a rule of life. His fame was such that the Emperor Constantine asked for his prayers while Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, wrote an account of his life.
Antony’s example was infectious. The decades following his death saw a veritable exodus into the desert of men seeking to come close to God by living alone in remote places, in caves, makeshift huts or abandoned buildings, eating only enough for bare survival, inflicting upon themselves severe penances, and devoting their waking life to prayer. At first, these hermits would only gather to hear Mass and receive advice from older hermits; but subsequently communities were formed which accepted the rule of a chosen leader or ‘father’. Pachomius, who lived from AD 286–346, headed a group which added the vow of obedience to poverty and chastity and drew up a penal code for transgressions. He is deemed the first abbot, the word coming from abba, the Hebrew for father.
The example of the Egyptian hermits was followed in Syria and Palestine. In Syria, some chained themselves to the rock walls of their caves, or lived in the open air unprotected from the elements. Their reputation for sanctity attracted crowds of followers seeking their prayers and advice. To escape them, they would retreat yet further into the desert or, in the case of Simeon the Stylite, escape vertically by living on a platform on top of a pillar built to the height of sixty feet. From here could be heard not the ravings of a fanatic but words of sympathy and common sense. The Emperor Marcian visited him incognito, and under Simeon’s influence the Empress Eudoxia ceased to support the heretical Monophysites and returned to orthodox belief.
Jerome, a Roman scholar who translated the Bible into Latin and served as secretary to Pope Damasus, lived among the hermits in the desert east of Antioch. Basil, coming from a rich and distinguished family in Cappadocia in Asia Minor, travelled throughout Egypt, Syria and Palestine to visit the numerous communities before returning to found his own monastery on his family estate at Annesi on the River Iris close to a community of nuns already established by his sister Macrina. He rejected the individual feats of asceticism of the hermit in favour of a communal life where prayer was mixed with physical labour and works of charity: an orphanage and workshop for the unemployed were attached to his monastery. Although he wrote no Rule, Basil is regarded as the founder of monasticism in the Eastern Church.
The monastic movement spread to the West. John Cassian, a monk first in Bethlehem and later in Egypt, was sent by the Patriarch of Constantinople on a mission to Rome and thereafter remained in the West, settling in Marseilles. He founded two monasteries, one on the Ile de Lérins, and wrote two works on monastic life, Institutes and Conferences, which were used by the father of Western monasticism, Benedict of Nursia, in the formulation of his Rule.
Augustine of Hippo, as we have seen, thought that wholehearted conversion to Christianity led inevitably to some form of monastic life but was called out of monastic seclusion to help govern the Church. It was the same with Martin of Tours, the son of an officer in the Roman army and himself a soldier who though born in Hungary was stationed in Amiens in northern France where, after giving half his cloak to a beggar, saw it covering the shoulders of Christ in a vision. Leaving the army around 355/6, Martin lived for a time as a hermit, first on an island off the Italian coast, subsequently in a small community of hermits near Poitiers.
His holiness, and the miracles he was said to have performed, led to his election as the Bishop of Tours. He was consecrated on 4 July 371, despite the objections of some other bishops and the local nobility that he was not a gentleman and looked ‘contemptible with dirty clothes and unkempt hair’. Even as a bishop, he lived a form of hermit’s life in a monastery that he founded outside Tours. He was assiduous in the suppression of paganism, destroying sanctuaries and chopping down sacred trees. The miraculous powers ascribed to him continued after his death and supposedly led, as we have seen, to the conversion of Clovis. Martin was the first Christian who had died a natural death to inspire the cult of a saint.
However, Martin was the exception, not the rule among the bishops; and the progressive entanglement of the regular clergy with secular affairs in the last years of the Roman Empire together with the savagery that prevailed after the collapse of the Empire in the west, led those of a gentle and pious disposition to form numerous small communities set apart from the world:
with no interests outside its walls, save that of helping neighbours and travellers, materially and spiritually. Even within the walls there was no specific work. The monks at first were neither priests nor scholars, and there was no elaboration of chant or ritual. They lived together to serve god and save their souls.52
This monastic pluralism was changed through the influence of Benedict of Nursia, the most significant figure in the establishment of monasticism in western Europe. He was born around the year 480 into a family of minor gentry living south of Rome in the Sabine Hills. Sent to be educated in Rome, he was so appalled by the dissipation of the Romans that he fled from the city and lived as a hermit in a cave on a mountainside at Subiaco. Soon he was joined by other young men who wanted to share his way of life. Some time between 520 and 530, as a result of an intrigue, he left the community at Subiaco with a group of his supporters and moved to Cassinum where, demolishing a temple to Apollo that he found on the summit of a mountain, he established the monastery of Monte Cassino.
It was here that he wrote his Rule, a code of conduct for his monks that was to set the pattern for religious life in western Europe for the next six hundred years. In composing it, Benedict drew on the experiences of Basil and the works of John Cassian; but the tenor of the work reflects his own remarkable personality. In its judiciousness, it draws on his Roman heritage; in its fervour, on his strong faith. The Rule demonstrates a sound appreciation of the realities of living in a community, and a true understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. Absolute authority was vested in the abbot, chosen by the community, but in exercising that authority he is enjoined to ‘so temper all things that the strong may still have something to long for, and the weak may not draw back in alarm’. The regulations for everyday living govern what the monks should eat and drink and what they should wear. Their habit was black, and could vary in material at the discretion of the abbot according to the climate and season.
The monks’ diet was meagre: Benedict insisted upon a perpetual abstinence from meat and he set periods of rigorous fasting. The monks were to sing the divine office – prayers and psalms – at specified moments of the day and night and, when not at prayer or at table or in bed, they were to use their time in studying, teaching and, above all, in manual labour. Laborare est orare: to work is to pray. The monks laboured in the fields, making each monastery self-sufficient, and in the scriptorium, copying texts on to vellum, not just the books of the Bible but also the works of classical authors. Every monastery was to have a library, and every monk was to possess a pen and tablets.
Benedict lived in sombre times. The Goths had established a kingdom in Italy and were struggling to defend it from the forces of the eastern Emperor Justinian under his great general Belisarius. In 546, the year before Benedict’s death, the Goths captured Rome and left it in ruins: the city was totally deserted for forty days. It was retaken by Belisarius, fell again to the Goths, and its final deliverance by Justinian’s army caused such devastation that Gibbon considered it ‘the last calamity of the Roman people’. In Benedict’s lifetime, Italy had passed from the twilight of the ancient world into the gloom of the Dark Ages; but in that obscurity, the Benedictine monasteries of western Europe ‘became centres of light and life … preserving and later diffusing what remained of ancient culture and spirituality’.53 In the process, they became an integral part not just of European culture but of the European economy because, while kingdoms were fought over and great estates broken up, the monasteries often remained intact.
Before he died, Benedict was said to have sent one of his monks called Maur to found a monastery at Glanfeuil, near Angers, in France. Benedictine monasteries now grew up alongside the existing foundations of the Celtic missionary Columban in Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaine in the Vosges which, together with the Abbey of Bobbio in Italy, also founded by Columban, eventually abandoned the rigorous and inflexible code that Columban had brought from Bangor in Ireland in favour of the gentler rule of Saint Benedict.
In 596, as we have seen, Pope Gregory I, himself a Benedictine monk, dispatched Augustine, the Prior of Saint Andrew’s in Rome with forty of his Benedictine brethren on a mission to Ethelbert, the pagan King of Kent. In 633, Benedictines went to Spain. In England the Benedictine missionaries made contact with the Celtic Catholics who had been cut off from Rome by the barbarian invasions; and in 664, at the Synod of Whitby, they returned to the Roman fold. There followed a surge of religious enthusiasm in northern England. Benedict Biscop, a warrior-companion of King Oswy of Northumbria, abandoned his military career to become a priest and, after visiting Rome and becoming a monk on the Ile des Lérins, returned to England in 669 to found monasteries at Jarrow and Wearmouth. In 690, an English Benedictine, Willibrord, also a Northumbrian, sailed to what is now the Netherlands to preach to the pagan Frisians. He was followed by Boniface, another English Benedictine, this time from Devon, who preached the Gospel to the heathen tribes in Germany. He was killed by pagan Frisians and is buried at the monastery he founded at Fulda in Hesse.
The achievements of these Benedictine missionaries were secured by the monastic foundations that followed in their wake. In the two centuries after the death of Benedict of Nursia, these changed radically from remote refuges for communities of hermits to large complexes administering extensive estates. In areas such as Burgundy and Bavaria, the monasteries became major civic centres and were often elevated to episcopal sees in which both political and spiritual authority were combined in the monk-bishop. Principalities such as Cologne, Mainz and Würzburg were to be ruled by their bishops until they were secularised by Napoleon in 1802.
The pagans had their martyrs too, and in some instances it was difficult to distinguish conversion from conquest. Following the conversion of Clovis, the Franks had become the champions of the Church and the Church the patron of the Franks. By now a fusion had taken place between the Gallo-Romans and their Frankish conquerors. Mixed marriages had become frequent, and increasingly ‘Romans’ had changed their Latin names to Frankish ones. By the seventh century there had come into being a ‘French’ aristocracy described by the historian, Ferdinand Lot, as ‘a turbulent, pugnacious and ignorant class, scornful of things of the mind, incapable of rising to any serious political notion and fundamentally selfish and unruly’.54
In contrast to the sagacity and dedication of the imperial officials of antiquity, this new ruling class sought only its own aggrandizement and was indifferent to the public good. With the collapse of commerce, land was the only source of wealth and therefore its ownership the sole basis of power. There were customs but no law that could limit the powers of kings. The barbarism of the Franks, described with a certain relish by the chronicler Gregory of Tours, reached its nadir under the Merovingian successors of Clovis when, writes Ferdinand Lot, ‘the king wallowed in debauchery and his courtiers imitated him. In the second half of the seventh and in the eighth century it was even worse; the sovereign was literally a vicious degenerate who died young, a victim of his own excess.’55
Because of the inadequacy of these Merovingian monarchs, actual power passed into the hands of the kings’ first ministers, known as ‘mayors of the palace’, most notably Charles Martel. His son, Pepin the Short, was encouraged by Pope Zacharias to depose the last Merovingian King, Childeric III, and was crowned King of the Franks at Soissons in November 751 by Boniface, the missionary from Devon, now Archbishop and Papal Legate.
This compact between the Papacy on the one hand, and the Frankish kings on the other, was to remain in force for the next five hundred years. The monasteries, too, benefited from the alliance. The baronial class lived lives steeped in violence, treachery and lust; yet they believed implicitly in Christian teaching and, fearing damnation, endowed communities of monks whose prayers and austerities would atone for their sins. The same sentiment led bishops, compromised by their entanglement in the secular world, to found monasteries in their diocese and grant them privileges and exemptions. ‘From the seventh century there was not a single nobleman or bishop who did not wish to ensure the salvation of his soul by a foundation of this kind.’56 Abbeys such as Saint Germain-des-Prés outside Paris had become enormously rich by the end of the Merovingian period.
And just as the Frankish warriors made use of the monks’ prayers, so the monks made the most of the warriors’ prowess. The wars waged by the Franks against the Saxons east of the Elbe in the eighth century were not simply to secure their frontier and exact tribute but ‘as wars of Christians against barbarians who were also pagans, they had from the outset a religious tinge’.57 Saxon resistance both to the Franks and to Christianity was more stubborn than had been anticipated, and harsh measures were taken to persuade them of the advantages of submission and conversion. Now for the first time we enter an age ‘where monasteries are fortresses and baptism the badge of submission’.58 In 782, the Franks massacred 4,500 of their Saxon prisoners and deported or enslaved the rest. Three years later, the Saxon King Widukind surrendered and was baptized, an event celebrated by the Pope with three days of thanksgiving.
The King of the Franks who ordered this slaughter was Charles, the grandson of Pepin the Short who, like the popes Leo and Gregory, was to earn the title of the Great. With him, the compact between the kings of the Franks and the popes of Rome reached its fullest fruition. In the year 800, Charles, a prodigy of piety, courage and learning and now master of most of Europe, came to Rome at the head of his army where he was received with ceremony and respect by the man who had ascended the papal throne five years before, Leo III.
For the past three hundred and twenty-four years no emperor had reigned in Rome; and now in Byzantium the throne was deemed vacant because its present incumbent, the Empress Irene, had deposed and blinded her son, Constantine VI, and, more significantly, was a woman. On Christmas Day Charles came to hear Mass at the basilica built over the tomb of Christ’s apostle Peter wearing the white robes and sandals of a Roman patrician. As the reading of the Gospel ended, Pope Leo rose from his throne, crossed to the kneeling Frankish chieftain, and placed on his head the imperial crown. From the packed congregation of Romans and Franks, a tumultuous cry arose: ‘To Charles Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving Emperor, long life and victory!’ The supreme pontiff bowed in obeisance to the new Caesar. ‘From that moment,’ writes Sir James Bryce, ‘modern history begins.’59