11

Compromises, Crusades, Councils, Concordats

No pope ever died hated by more people than Gregory VII. Both the partisans and the enemies of Henry IV blamed him for the chaos in the empire. The Italians held him responsible for Henry’s descent into the peninsula with his troops, and the Romans despised him for the devastation his Norman allies inflicted on their city. By the end of his pontificate he had managed to divide even the reform party, until then able to march in serried ranks. While it is true that he enjoyed a good relationship with William the Conqueror in England and treated Philip I of France with moderation, despite fulminations against him, rulers and bishops outside Germany and Italy were wary and had come into conflict with him.

In 1085, therefore, Saint Peter in his vicar had fallen low, and the triumph of Canossa had turned into a prelude to disaster. More important, the reform program was, partly as a consequence, meeting such resistance as to seem impossible ever to implement. Rulers balked at the idea of surrendering their right, now long-established custom, to designate bishops and abbots, who were among their most important vassals and whose loyalty was essential for the stability of their rule. The strictures against clerical concubinage and marriage seemed unrealistic in the extreme and were resisted in many places by both the clergy and their flocks. Otto, bishop of Constance, refused outright to enforce them and, when Bishop Altmann of Passau tried to, his clergy drove him out of his diocese with armed force. The conflict between Henry and Gregory ignited a propaganda war that lasted for two generations, until a compromise on the key issue of lay investiture was finally reached in 1122 with the Concordat of Worms.

Meanwhile, Clement III had established himself firmly in Rome and had won respect even from former foes for his learning, eloquence, and his obviously upright character. He commanded the allegiance of a majority of the cardinals. The clergy and nobles in and around Rome supported him so faithfully that they ensured his hold on the city for twelve years, from 1086 until 1098, when Pope Urban II was finally able to gain his last stronghold, the Castel Sant’Angelo. Not the puppet of the emperor he was expected to be, Clement acted with considerable independence and in a Roman synod of 1089 legislated against simony and clerical marriage. Clement III was a figure to reckon with, and he campaigned vigorously with rulers throughout Europe to have his pontificate recognized as legitimate.

The choice of a successor to Gregory was of course critical. Cardinals loyal to him were with the help of Countess Matilda for a brief period able to drive Clement from the city, and in May 1086, a year after Gregory’s death, they elected Desiderius, the respected abbot of Monte Cassino, who tried to decline the office. Four days after the election, rioting broke out in the city and the pope-elect was forced to flee for Monte Cassino. Not until another year passed did he finally yield to pressure and accept his election. He was duly consecrated, taking the name Victor III. To no avail. He died four months later.

The cardinals faithful to Victor had difficulty regrouping, but finally on March 12, 1088, they elected the cardinal-bishop of Ostia, Eudes of Châtillon-sur-Marne, who took the name Urban II. By the time Urban died eleven years later he had accomplished a miracle. He regained Rome, won almost universal recognition of the legitimacy of his papacy, and at the Council of Clermont in 1095 emerged as one of the most heeded leaders of all Europe.

A member of a noble French family, he had an excellent education at Rheims, entered the monastery of Cluny, where he rose to be grand prior under the revered abbot Hugh. Probably in 1080 he obeyed Gregory VII’s summons of Cluniac monks to Rome, where the pope named him to the see of Ostia. Throughout Gregory’s many travails, Eudes remained faithful to him and served him in a number of capacities. He was thoroughly committed to Gregory’s program, but his strategy for forwarding it was considerably less confrontational. The strategy was due in part to his personality, in part to lessons learned from Gregory’s mistakes, and perhaps in largest part to the precarious situation in which he found himself.

He was a realist. With steadfast military allies in the Normans and Countess Matilda, he entered upon a deliberate policy of soothing antagonisms. Although he was never able to mollify Henry IV, he was able to use Henry’s increasingly difficult political, military, and even marital situation to his own advantage. By 1092 he helped rally important cities like Milan and Cremona against the emperor, and by 1093 he profited from the defection of Henry’s son Conrad from his father to become the pope’s protector. By 1094 he similarly profited by the defection of Henry’s wife, daughter of the grand-prince of Kiev, to Henry’s enemies. The Normans, as mentioned, had supported Urban from the beginning, and they provided him with the military backing he often needed on the local scene. He was therefore able through bribery, force of arms, and persuasion bit by bit to regain Rome. In 1094 he took possession of the Lateran and shortly controlled the rest of the city except for the Castel Sant’Angelo. Clement III, who died two years later, was never able to return to Rome.

With the kings of England and France and the great nobles, he held the line on principle, but he was flexible in concrete circumstances and did his best to avoid open conflict. Urban made important concessions to William II of England and, fearing William’s possible defection to Clement III, he refused to settle the king’s conflict with Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury. In France he tried to adopt a cautious, soft-spoken approach to the problem of Philip I’s marriage, widely denounced as adulterous, but he eventually excommunicated the king. He therefore took a firm stand when alternatives were exhausted, but his more generally conciliatory policy won him heavy criticism from the zealots among the reformers. He prevailed.

At home he proved an able organizer. For the first time in papal documents the word curia begins to appear. It was simultaneous with the ever-increasing importance of the cardinals in decision-making. They now formed an inner circle around the pope, similar to a royal or imperial court. The cardinals, who began their ascendancy by being invested with pope-making authority, now became the chief counselors of the pope and assumed ever more responsibility for determining policy and acting as agents of the papacy to the church at large.

With his position secure by 1095, Urban held an important synod at Piacenza, which pronounced all ordinations performed by Clement and the bishops who sided with him invalid. Like Gregory VII, Urban hoped to ameliorate relations with the East and undo the schism of 1054. At the synod, therefore, Urban asked Christian warriors to respond to an appeal from emperor Alexis I Commenus of Constantinople for military aid against his enemies, the Seljuk Turks. Envoys from the emperor were present at Piacenza. The emperor’s situation was in serious jeopardy ever since in 1071 he lost the Battle of Manzikert, which meant the collapse of his eastern frontier.

Almost as soon as the synod at Piacenza was over, the pope traveled to Clermont in central France for another. At it occurred something totally unexpected, one of the most famous and momentous events in the entire Middle Ages. Urban, surely with Alexis’s appeal in mind, issued a passionate call to Christians to take up arms to help relieve the military pressure on Alexis and, even more important, to free the Holy Land from the “infidel.” (The Turks had captured Jerusalem in 1076.) He, according to one account, detailed the atrocities the Muslims were supposedly committing against Christians.

With that call the pope launched the First Crusade, a holy war willed by God. The cry thus arose, “God wills it!” With the cry arose the persuasion that taking up holy arms wiped out one’s sins and any punishment they deserved in this life or the next. It was out of this phenomenon that the seed for the doctrine of indulgences, later developed at length by theologians, was sown, which would be the spark that ignited the Reformation.

There were precedents for the crusades. Early in his pontificate, for instance, Gregory VII several times called upon Christian leaders, including his later enemy, Henry IV, to run as “soldiers of Christ” (milites Christi) to the aid of Alexis. But then he got so enmeshed in his problems in the West that he was not able to press his point further. By 1095 Urban was in a much stronger position. Despite the precedents, it was Clermont that set in motion the crusading movement that would from this point forward be a major preoccupation of the popes well into the seventeenth century. A new task was added to the popes’ ongoing agenda.

Urban meant the call for the young French nobility, which in fact took it up in great numbers. Military command fell to Count Raymond IV of Toulouse, who was joined by other important nobles. But Urban’s words fell upon other ears as well. In an age when preachers were able to rouse crowds to a frenzy, Peter the Hermit, who may or may not have been present at Clermont, was among them. Peter stirred the enthusiasm of tens of thousands of peasants and minor nobility—men, women, and children—to set out for the East without thought for the morrow. Many in this horde, which was devastated by disease and starvation, never made their way outside western Europe, and many of those who did left behind a trail of desperate pillage. Those who reached Constantinople were faced with a startled emperor, whom they expected to feed and provision them. Finally Alexis sent them on their way. The Turks ambushed, slaughtered, or enslaved many of these holy warriors. Peter survived and for a while played a role once the real forces arrived from the West.

Those forces traveled in several armies from France and southern Italy across the Balkans and Asia Minor under capable leadership, and they captured Antioch in 1098. The next year they captured Jerusalem and in a blood bath ruthlessly murdered the infidels, Jews, and even some Christians they found inside. Godfrey of Bouillon was then appointed the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem. Upon his death shortly afterward his brother Baldwin succeeded him, and on Christmas Day 1100, was crowned king of Jerusalem. Within the next twenty years the crusaders established themselves firmly in Palestine and Syria and formed a Latin Kingdom there that would last for two centuries but with ever decreasing strength. This First Crusade was the only one of the many modeled after it that “succeeded,” that is, the only crusade that defeated the enemy and gained the territory the crusaders sought.

Urban, who surely had no idea of the profound import of what he had set in motion, died two weeks after the crusaders took Jerusalem. He left the papacy in an incomparably stronger position than he found it when he was elected. He had accomplished a great deal, but the controversy over lay investiture required something more than his ad hoc solutions. That problem he left to his successors.

Sixteen days after Urban’s death the cardinals elected, without incident, Pascal II. Although the new pope, formerly a monk and then a cardinal, had held important missions under Urban, he was a timid, yet sometimes stubborn, personality for whom the complicated political situation of the day was beyond his powers. Pope for nineteen years (1099–1118), he was hardly the man to carry forward a solution to the problem. He made the abolition of lay investiture the very core of his program, which meant conflict was inevitable.

In 1105 Pascal made a big mistake in supporting Henry V, another of Henry IV’s sons, in his revolt against his father. Henry V eventually carried the day, but he turned out to be a brutal and treacherous ruler, as arrogantly insistent on royal right of investiture as his father had been. In 1110 he led an expedition into Italy with the purpose of attaining the imperial crown from Pope Pascal, and by the next year he had occupied Rome.

In February 1111, at Sutri north of Rome Henry agreed to a radical, if unrealistic, solution Pascal proposed to him: that the bishops, abbots, and other ecclesiastical vassals of the emperor renounce all their resources in land and men and turn them over to the emperor. The prelates would retain only those revenues, such as tithes, that came to them from strictly ecclesiastical sources. In exchange the emperor was to renounce investiture and guarantee that the future election to ecclesiastical offices would be free. For what more could Henry ask? He immediately accepted it, and agreed that the decision be announced during his coronation ceremony in Saint Peter’s.

The announcement sent tidal waves of shock through the assembly, brought the liturgy to an abrupt and disorderly halt, and then sent the same waves into the outside world. The cardinals immediately denounced it, and the German bishops in Henry’s entourage who up to this point had loyally supported him were outraged and loudly announced their refusal to be bound by it. Pascal’s solution—essentially a monk’s solution—was a solution that turned their world upside down. There was no way they could or would abide by it. Henry withdrew his assent to the proposal, and Pascal refused to crown him.

In the ensuing confusion Henry carried the pope and his cardinals off as his prisoners and then extracted from Pascal the right of investiture with crozier and ring and a promise that he would never excommunicate him. Two months after the aborted coronation ceremony Henry and Pascal returned to Saint Peter’s, where Pascal crowned Henry emperor. Every prelate committed to the principles of the Gregorian Reform reacted with fury. They accused the pope of heresy. When Pascal was finally free of the emperor, he himself renounced what he had done, saying he agreed to it only under duress. Such vacillation and obvious bowing to pressure further weakened the already weakened prestige of the pope.

Harassed now by reformers who felt he was not to be trusted and in 1116 forced by rioting to flee Rome, Pascal considered abdicating. He was able to return to Rome, but when he died shortly afterward in Castel Sant’Angelo, the city was once again in rebels’ hands. The cardinals hastily elected the cardinal-deacon John of Gaeta, at one time a monk of Monte Cassino but who later had served with distinction as chancellor of the Roman church under both Urban and Pascal. He as Gelasius II had a short but unusually turbulent reign.

Already elderly when he became pope, he had hardly been elected when he was brutally attacked and imprisoned in Rome by the head of the patrician Frangipani family, who detested Pascal and everybody in any way associated with him. Soon released, he fled Rome upon hearing that Henry V was approaching with demands to settle the investiture problem—of course in his own favor. Henry, convinced he could make no headway with Gelasius, installed an anti-pope in Rome, which led Gelasius to excommunicate both of them. Henry departed, leaving Rome in the control of Gelasius’s enemies, which included the anti-pope, Gregory VIII.

Gelasius managed to get into Rome but was again set upon by the Frangipani. He escaped their clutches and again fled the city. He set sail for France, where he hoped he would be safe and able to conduct the business of the papacy in peace. Upon his arrival there he almost immediately fell ill, retired to the monastery of Cluny, where he died after a pontificate that lasted barely a year.

Only two cardinal-bishops had accompanied Gelasius to France. Upon his death they elected Guy de Bourgogne, archbishop of Vienne and son of Count William of Burgundy. They notified the cardinals in Rome, who quickly ratified the election and had it publicly acclaimed by the clergy and people of the city assembled in John Lateran. They believed this hasty and doubtfully canonical procedure was required because the crisis demanded swift action and because they had in Guy an excellent candidate. On that last point they were absolutely correct.

The new pope, Callixtus II, was related to the English, French, and German royal houses. He knew and understood how that class thought and felt, and he recognized the legitimacy of some of their concerns about the abolition of lay investiture. He was a member of the secular clergy, not a monk as recent popes had been, and he was known and respected among his clerical peers. Never having lived in Italy, he was outside and above all factions there, including the factions among the cardinals themselves. Already recognized for his learning and diplomatic skills, he had all the strictly secular requirements for the job. He was, as well, fully committed to the principles of the reform. It is he who would bring the controversy to an honorable close, which meant compromises on both sides.

Callixtus was crowned at Vienne in central France on February 9, 1119, a week after his election. Even Henry V was ready for a settlement and began to see, from precedents gaining ground in France and England, that it was possible to renounce use of the ring and crozier and still retain some control over the choice of the candidates. The German princes and bishops, tired unto death of the controversy, applied pressure to Henry to seek a solution. Negotiations were opened, faltered, and resumed. In early 1122 an embassy came to Callixtus from Germany, which the pope received favorably, and in response to it he sent three cardinals to Worms to work out an agreement.

The result was the Concordat of Worms, the first such formal agreement between the papacy and a government or ruler. Beginning with this document the concordat became a standard instrument in papal policy-making. It thus had many successors through the centuries, some of them of great importance, such as the Concordat of Bologna, 1516, which for centuries regulated especially the mode of nomination of French bishops. During the years between the two World Wars the Holy See negotiated more concordats than at any other single time because of the way the map of Europe was rearranged by the Treaty of Versailles.

The terms of the Concordat of Worms were straightforward. Bishops (and abbots) would be freely elected by their clergy. The emperor gave up the right to invest them with ring and crozier. He was, however, allowed to be present at the election and receive homage from the new prelate as his vassals. Since he could refuse to receive homage, he in effect had veto rights and thus continued to exercise considerable control over the election. In balance, the emperor won the advantage, as did other rulers, as this solution became standard. The church had, however, successfully asserted a principle, had it enshrined in a solemn document, and had a trump card in deciding the validity of the election.

To ratify the Concordat and fully to solemnize it, Callixtus convoked a synod in the Lateran the following year. This synod was not much different from the many other synods that popes had been holding regularly, especially since the days of Leo IX. But as the centuries passed this synod began to be invested with greater authority and eventually became recognized as ecumenical, on a par with the great councils held in the East beginning with Nicaea in 325. But as an “ecumenical council” it and those that followed it were strikingly different. They were held in the West. They were exclusively Western in the makeup of the prelates who participated in them. Their language was Latin not Greek. Most important, they were convoked by the pope not the emperor. The pope set their agendas and in person or through his legates presided over them. Another great revolution and enlargement of papal authority was taking place.