The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (77 page)

He hoped that the new king of Germany and Italy would be his friend and ally, so he invited Conrad to Rome to receive the title right away. Unfortunately Conrad was not particularly impressed by John’s cooperation; he took the coronation in stride, as his right. Conrad II was an intelligent man and a good soldier, but he was also illiterate, uninterested in theology, and not overly concerned about the delicacies of church-state relationships. As far as he was concerned, the pope was there to do his bidding, and the church was there to help him carry out his own goals. He demanded that bishops and archbishops obey without question, and if they resisted he treated them as he would treat a rebellious soldier or courtier: with exile or imprisonment.
¹³

He ruled in this way until 1039, when convulsions carried him off before his fiftieth birthday. He had already crowned his son Henry the Black as co-ruler of Germany and Italy, and the young man, twenty-one at the time of his father’s death, assumed the thrones of both countries as Henry III.

Unlike Conrad, Henry was a literate ruler with an ear for church politics. Conrad, tone deaf to theological niceties, had nevertheless recognized his own shortcomings; he had given his son the education he had never had, hiring priests to tutor the boy in literature, music, and the affairs of the church. Henry lived in a landscape his father could not have imagined: one where the earthly and heavenly realms were both visible to him, each real and powerful and compelling him to action.
¹⁴

One of his earliest actions was to add the weight of royal authority to the Peace and Truce of God. In the last forty years, two church councils had extended the conditions of the Peace and Truce. Merchants and their goods had now joined peasants, clergymen, and farmers as official noncombatants, immune from attack. Certain days were now completely off limits for fighting: under threat of excommunication, no one could wage war on Fridays, Sundays, church holidays, or any of the forty days of Lent. In 1041, Henry III decreed that the Peace would be observed in Germany from Wednesday evening through Monday morning of every week of the year. In 1043, he attended a synod held in the Germany city of Constance and himself preached from the pulpit, imploring his people to keep a peace “unknown in previous centuries.” As an example to them, he forgave—on the spot—all of his own enemies, including several noblemen in Swabia who had been attempting rebellion.
¹⁵

Conrad had shoved the church roughly in whatever direction suited him; Henry III followed its decrees, studied its theology, worked for its purity. Yet in doing so, he managed to make it even more subordinate to the crown. His theological sensibilities were highly offended by the goings-on in Rome. The worldly John XIX, who had bought his way into the papacy, had handed the papal throne to his teenaged nephew Benedict IX, who ruled in Rome as pope for a decade and a half while carrying on the life of a wealthy young Italian nobleman: drinking, fornicating, and generally indulging himself. Conrad II had found the young pope acceptable, as Benedict IX was willing to excommunicate the emperor’s enemies when necessary, but the people of Rome got fed up. In 1045, an armed mob drove Benedict IX from the city and anointed a new pope of their own, a bishop who became Sylvester III.

Benedict IX had a powerful family, and they supplied him with armed men so that he could re-enter Rome. Within two months he had broken back into the city and reclaimed his title, while Sylvester III fled to a village on the edge of the Papal States, where he remained, still claiming to be pope.

Now there were two popes, and Benedict was about to complicate the situation further. He hadn’t enjoyed his brush with rebellion, and he offered to sell the papal throne to his godfather, the priest John Gratian, for a thousand pounds of silver. John Gratian handed over the money and was acclaimed as Pope Gregory VI.

Benedict then changed his mind. Apparently he had hoped to marry once he was no longer pope, but his lady love had rejected him; possibly he also missed the pomp and power more than he had expected. He declared that he was taking the seat of St. Peter back again.
¹⁶
So by 1046 there were three popes in Italy, none of them clearly legitimate. Someone needed to step in, but Henry III was not yet Holy Roman Emperor; he was merely king of Germany and the Italian kingdom. Yet his earthly power allowed him to become master of the church, even without the title of Protector and Defender. Henry III marched into Rome—“with a great force and an immense army,” the medieval
Pontificum Romanorum Vitae
tells us—and declared the papal throne empty and all three candidates unfit. “He tried the case canonically and justly,” the
Pontificum
continues, “and made the rights of the matter plain to the holy and religious bishops, and condemned [the three popes] with perpetual anathema.”
¹⁷

He then chose a new pope—Clement II, an “excellent, holy, and benign churchman”—who took up his new job on Christmas Day and before nightfall had crowned Henry III as Holy Roman Emperor. All together, the people and clergy of Rome repeated the grant made by Pope Leo VIII to Henry’s predecessor Otto, the first “holy” emperor, eighty years earlier: that as emperor, Henry had “the right to create popes and bishops…. [A]nd it was further agreed that no bishop should be consecrated until he had received his investiture from the hand of the king.”
¹⁸

Concerned for the purity of the church, Henry III had now taken control of it. As the impromptu hearing in Rome makes clear, he could also appropriate, when necessary, the power of anathema: the power of excommunication, of opening and closing the gates of heaven. Since the days of Pope Sylvester II, just a few decades earlier, the balance of power between church and emperor had swung far, far back towards the crown.

Now that he had dealt with the sacred troubles in Italy, Henry turned to deal with the political problems.

The south of Italy, long under the control of a patchwork of local counts and dukes who swore a loose loyalty to the emperor, had been infested by Normans. Over the last twenty years, chaos in their homeland (an extended struggle over the right to claim the title “Duke of Normandy”) had sent more and more Norman adventurers wandering east. Norman mercenaries had settled in the south of Italy, hiring themselves out to Italian noblemen as useful private swords—while carving out little independent domains of their own.

Looking south from Rome, Henry III could see a welter of competing powers, ready to erupt into full-scale war. Rather than going down and attempting to conquer them all, one at a time, he made a peaceful imperial trip south, circled through the battling states, and summoned the jostling dukes, counts, and mercenaries to reaffirm their pledges to the imperial crown, one at a time. The most powerful Norman warrior, Drogo of Hauteville, agreed to become the emperor’s man in return for an official title: Duke and Master of Italy, Count of the Normans of all Apulia and Calabria.
*

This established an actual Norman state in the south of Italy, and kept Henry III out of a long and damaging war. But his solution proved to be temporary. He went back to Germany; and almost at once, a new Norman adventurer arrived on the shores of southern Italy. His name was Robert Guiscard; he was Drogo’s half-brother, and his crafty ambition had earned him the nickname “Robert the Fox.”

Drogo was not about to divide his newly acquired realm with his half-sibling. The family was large—Drogo’s father, Tancred, had married twice and sired twelve sons—and Drogo already had awarded a minor command and the right to inherit his title to another younger brother, Humphrey. But he gave Robert the Fox a castle on the western edge of his kingdom, and Robert began to use this as a base to fight his way into the toe of the Italian boot in a vicious series of campaigns: “The start of his career was marked by bloodshed and many murders,” writes the twelfth-century historian Anna Comnena.
¹⁹

All of this Norman aggression aroused a great deal of hatred for Robert and his brothers among the non-Normans in the south. But Henry III was far to the north in Germany, and so the people of southern Italy made their complaints about the savagery of their Norman overlords to the pope in Rome.

Clement had died after less than a year, and the throne of St. Peter was now occupied by Leo IX, the cousin of Henry III.
*
Even though he had been appointed by his own blood relative, Leo IX was a reform-minded man; he had refused to accept the papacy until the people of Rome gave their approval. He was, in the words of the Norman chronicler William of Apulia, “an admirable man,” well liked and powerful, and he coaxed Drogo into taking an oath to halt the pillage and conquest in the south.
²⁰

But Drogo’s oath came too late. A conspiracy was already afoot among the people of the south, and in 1051 it erupted. Drogo was assassinated on his way to church, and a desperate message was dispatched to Rome: “The Apulians sent secret envoys to Pope Leo IX,” writes the Benedictine monk Malaterra, “inviting him to come to Apulia with an army, claiming…that they themselves would help him and the Normans were cowardly, their forces diminished and few in number…. The emperor sent an army of Germans to help him and he entered Apulia, trusting in the assistance of the Lombards.”
²¹

In his concern for the purity of the church, the emperor had become master of the pope; now the reform-minded pope had become the head of the emperor’s army. Leo IX rode at the head of the imperial forces to the Fortore river. There, his army was met by the Normans of the south, under the command of Drogo’s brothers, Robert the Fox and Humphrey.

In the battle that followed, the anti-Norman forces were driven back and shattered. Robert Guiscard fought with particular savagery: “He speared [the enemy] with his lance, beheaded them with his sword,” writes William of Apulia. “…He was unhorsed three times, thrice he recovered his strength and returned more fiercely to the fray…. He cut off feet and hands, sliced heads from bodies, ripped into breasts and chests, and transfixed those whose heads he had cut off.”
²²

Leo IX fled into a nearby fortress, where he shut himself up while the Normans laid siege. Finally, he had to surrender. But the Norman brothers Humphrey and Robert the Fox were too wily to kill the pope; that would have turned even some of their own followers against them. Instead they kept him in respectful captivity at Benevento; there, surrounded by Norman guards, he was forced to give them official papal recognition as rulers of the south.

The ripples were far-reaching. Furious at Leo’s assumption that he could bind and loose the duchies of the south, the patriarch of Constantinople—who still claimed to have spiritual authority over the remnants of the old Byzantine lands in lower Italy—resurrected a series of ongoing theological arguments between the eastern and western Christian churches and announced that the western faith had become so corrupt that it was now heretical.
*

From his comfortable prison, Leo ordered a clerical delegation to go east and try to work out the difficulties between east and west. Unfortunately, the two men in charge of the negotiations were equally short-tempered: the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, was autocratic, ambitious, and jealous of his authority; the senior priest of the delegation from Rome was Cardinal Humbert, suspicious of all things eastern and anxious to take offense. After weeks of fruitless argument and growing indignation on both sides, Cardinal Humbert wrote an official excommunication of Michael Cerularius and his supporters and threw it onto the altar at the Hagia Sophia. Michael Cerularius burned the excommunication and, in turn, excommunicated the entire papal delegation. Humbert led the priests out of Constantinople, shaking the dust of the east from his feet.
²³

By the time Humbert arrived back in Italy, Leo IX was dead. He had grown ill in March, and his captors had set him free so that he could draw his last breath in Rome. Only a few weeks after returning to his home, he died.

Leo IX had never been able to respond to Cerularius’s excommunication, and both condemnations stood. From 1054 on, the two churches—already separated by theology, language, and politics—remained separated by official decree. The year 1054 became known as the date of the Great Schism, the division of the once-unified Christian church into two separate bodies that would never be reunited.

In the next three years, all of the major players changed. Henry III died in 1056 without launching another expedition against the south of Italy; he left his six-year-old son, Henry IV, as king of Germany, which meant that the German noblemen were temporarily in charge of the country. Humphrey, the Norman count of Apulia, died in 1057, and Robert Guiscard, Robert the Fox, seized his title and his land. And in 1059, the bishop of Florence was elected pope as Nicholas II.
*

There was no emperor now to protect Rome, and the king of Germany was a child. Nicholas II decided (prudently) to make an alliance with the Normans, who were right on his doorstep. In 1059, he negotiated the Treaty of Melfi with Robert the Fox. Nicholas II would now acknowledge the Norman count as ruler of the southern Italian territories of Apulia and Calabria, in return for Robert’s willingness to accept the pope’s spiritual authority. (The treaty also recognized Guiscard as ruler of Sicily, although the island was currently under the control of the Fatimids; Guiscard would have to conquer it for himself.)

But the Treaty of Melfi did much more. It renounced the special right of the “Roman Emperor” to protect the heirs of St. Peter. In signing it, Nicholas II took away the central duty that made the office of the emperor holy. That duty had now been handed over to the Normans, who—as part of the treaty—even promised that they would fight
for
the pope, and
against
any future Holy Roman Emperor, if necessary.
²⁴