The mutual hostility which had been steadily increasing between the German emperor and the people of Rome was in no way diminished by the death of John XII. In the emperor’s eyes Leo VIII continued as rightful pope, but the Romans would have none of him. Instead of recalling Leo to Rome, they sent envoys to the emperor in Rieti, informing him that after the libertine John they felt the need of a devout reformer; they therefore requested leave to elect a learned and morally irreproachable deacon named Benedict. Otto, of course, angrily refused; having been personally responsible for Leo’s elevation he could hardly have done otherwise, and he was determined to uphold his principle: that no pope could be elected or consecrated without his consent. But in refusing he must have known that he was throwing down a deliberate challenge, and the Romans had no hesitation in taking it up. Benedict V was duly elected and enthroned, and it was only when Otto marched back to Rome with Leo in 964 and laid siege to the city that they surrendered him. A synod, presided over jointly by Otto and Leo, condemned Benedict, who humbly refused to defend himself, quietly submitting while he was formally stripped of his robes and insignia—Liudprand claims that he removed them himself—and his pastoral staff (or possibly his scepter) was broken over his head. The emperor, who seems to have been impressed despite himself, allowed him to keep his rank of deacon and exiled him to Hamburg, where two years later he died.1
By that time Leo VIII was already in his grave. His successor, John XIII, who had been elected with the consent of only two bishops whom Otto had sent to represent him and who made no secret of the fact that he was content to do the emperor’s bidding, was predictably detested in Rome and after only two months was overthrown in a palace revolution and imprisoned in a castle in Campania. He soon escaped; and the Romans, hearing that the incandescent Otto was once more on his way, hastily welcomed him back; if they hoped, however, by doing so to avert the emperor’s wrath, they were disappointed. Of those responsible for John’s overthrow, the most fortunate were banished to Germany; the remainder were executed or blinded. Peter, the city prefect, was hanged by the hair from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, now on the Capitol but then in front of the Lateran Palace; he was then subjected to the age-old humiliation of being mounted backward on a donkey and paraded naked through the streets.
After this the Romans had no more fight left in them. Otto spent the next six years in Italy—he was to return to Germany only a few months before his death—consolidating his position and leaving the Romans in no doubt that he considered the pope as little more than his chaplain. At Christmas 967 he ordered Pope John to crown his twelve-year-old son, Otto II, as co-emperor, and five years later to officiate at the marriage of young Otto with the Byzantine princess Theophano.2 Just before he died in May 973 he arranged for the election of John’s successor, a virtually unknown priest who became Benedict VI, but with Otto’s iron hand no longer at the helm and young Otto II fully occupied with his own problems in Germany, Benedict could not hope to survive. Another coup, led this time by the increasingly powerful Roman family of the Crescentii, overthrew him and imprisoned him in Castel Sant’Angelo, replacing him with an obscure deacon named Franco Ferrucci who took the name Boniface VII. Boniface gave immediate proof of his piety and holiness by having Benedict strangled, but a swift counterrevolution obliged him to flee for his life to Byzantine territory in South Italy, with as much of the papal treasury as he could lay his hands on.
Once again the papal throne was vacant, and this time the choice fell on the high-minded Bishop of Sutri, who deliberately took the name of Benedict VII as a mark of respect to his unfortunate predecessor. He not only refused to recognize Boniface, he excommunicated him. But the antipope3 was far from finished; somehow, during the summer of 980, he even managed to return to Rome and reestablish himself in the Vatican. Only in the following March were Benedict and Otto II together able to expel him for the second time. It seems, however, to have been a more definitive expulsion, since this second flight took him not to Byzantine South Italy but to Constantinople itself.
An additional reason for this choice of refuge may well have been that by now there was heavy fighting in the South, where, after long periods of anarchy and confusion—Bari and Taranto, to take just two examples, had spent thirty and forty years, respectively, under Arab domination—the Byzantines had regained their hold toward the end of the ninth century. Otto I had unfortunately seen his son’s marriage to Theophano as grounds for claiming the “restitution,” as part of her dowry, of all Byzantine lands in Italy, and war had been the inevitable result. In 981 Otto II marched into Apulia, determined to settle the situation once and for all. This time the result was disaster. The Byzantines quickly arranged a temporary alliance with the Saracens, who soon afterward cut the imperial army to pieces near Stilo in Calabria. Luckily for Otto, he was a strong swimmer. He swam to a passing ship, managed somehow to conceal his identity, and later, as the vessel passed Rossano, jumped overboard again and struck out for the shore. He survived, but never recovered from the humiliation and died of malaria in Rome in September 983, aged twenty-eight. One of his last acts was to replace Pope Benedict—who had predeceased him by two months—with his chancellor for Italy, Peter Campanora, Bishop of Pavia. As John XIV—he modestly declined to use his own name—the first task of the new pope was to bury the emperor in St. Peter’s, the only one ever to be interred there.
Perhaps because Otto seems to have acted unilaterally and without any consultation—there is no evidence of a regular papal election—Pope John was left friendless on his death, deprived even of the support of the Empress Theophano, who had to hurry back to Germany to defend the interests of her three-year-old son, Otto III. In consequence he had little hope of survival when the odious antipope Boniface returned unexpectedly to Rome from Constantinople, liberally financed by the Emperor Basil II (the Bulgar Slayer). John was seized, badly beaten, and, as usual, consigned to Castel Sant’Angelo, where he died four months later of either starvation or poisoning. But Boniface had gone too far. Even for the Romans, to have murdered two popes was too much. He survived on the throne for eleven months—having blinded a cardinal deacon whom he suspected of acting against him—and then, on July 20, 985, suddenly died. Was he assassinated? There is no firm evidence, but his subsequent fate certainly suggests it. Stripped of its vestments, his body was dragged naked through the streets and exposed beneath the statue of Marcus Aurelius. There, left to the mercy of the mob, the remains of the Antipope Boniface were trampled on and subjected to nameless indignities—and serve him right.
THE NEW POPE, John XV, had been the preferred candidate both of the Curia and of John Crescentius, by now the virtual ruler of Rome. (Theophano being away in Germany with her infant son, the empire had had no say in the matter.) He was, it must be said, a considerable improvement on Boniface; he was nevertheless greedy, rapacious, and shamelessly nepotistic, and before long had made himself deeply unpopular with Church and people alike. Though quite forceful in his relations with foreign rulers and bishops—he was, incidentally, the first pope to perform a ritual canonization—in Rome he was content to be a puppet of John Crescentius, who in return could offer him a measure of protection; but Crescentius died in 988, and his brother Crescentius II, on succeeding him, seized power in the Papal State and kept the pope a virtual prisoner—so that when, in 991, a synod of French bishops complained that he had refused their envoys access to the Holy Father, Leo the papal chancellor was obliged to admit that his master was being held “in such tribulation and oppression” that he could give them no satisfactory answer. Four years later, in March 995, persecuted by Crescentius and detested by his clergy, John escaped from Rome and took refuge in Sutri; and that summer he sent envoys to young Otto III—now fifteen—with an appeal for help. Otto responded immediately, and the prospect of an imperial army once again on the march was enough to compel the Romans to make their peace. The pope was invited back to Rome and reinstalled with full honors in the Lateran, but long before the army reached the city he succumbed to a violent attack of fever. A few days later he was dead.
Otto, meanwhile, continued to Rome. He was an extraordinary child. Succeeding to the imperial throne at the age of three, he grew up combining the traditional ambitions of his line with a romantic mysticism clearly inherited from his mother, forever dreaming of a great Byzantinesque theocracy that would embrace Germans and Greeks, Italians and Slavs alike, with God at its head and himself and the pope—in that order—His twin viceroys. The pursuit of this dream made him even more preoccupied with affairs in Italy than his father had been before him. Once in Rome and crowned on Ascension Day 996 by his cousin Gregory V—the first German pope, twenty-five years old, whom he had prudently nominated en route—he built himself a magnificent new palace on the Aventine Hill, where he lived in a curious combination of splendor and asceticism, surrounded by a court rigid with Byzantine ceremonial, eating in majestic solitude off gold plate, but occasionally shedding his purple dalmatic for a pilgrim’s cloak and trudging barefoot to some distant shrine.
Ascetic or not, however, Otto soon found the Roman summer too much for him and in June left in search of a cooler climate; three months later, when he was safely back in Germany, the Romans, led by Crescentius, deposed Pope Gregory and threw him out of the city. The pope sought refuge in Spoleto, from which he made two armed attempts to return; both failed. He then moved on to Pavia, where at a synod in February 997 he excommunicated Crescentius, who responded by declaring the papal throne vacant and setting upon it a Calabrian Greek named John Philagathos, who took the title John XVI.
Despite his origins, Philagathos had already achieved remarkable success in the Roman Church. Ten years before, Theophano had first appointed him tutor to Otto III and then Archbishop of Piacenza; the see had been raised from a simple bishopric especially for him. In 994 he had been sent as a special envoy to Constantinople to find a Byzantine bride for young Otto, but had returned empty-handed. He was visiting Rome, ostensibly as a pilgrim, when he was approached by Crescentius and allowed himself to be installed as pope. His acceptance of Crescentius’s offer remains hard to understand. He was fully aware that a canonically crowned pope was very much alive, together with an emperor who had chosen him, was related to him, and could be trusted to support him. He could be looked on as nothing but an antipope and a creature of Crescentius; how could he possibly have expected to maintain himself on the throne?
And indeed he failed to do so. In March—only a month after his so-called accession—he was dismissed from Piacenza; soon afterward he was formally excommunicated. In December Otto, with his chosen Pope Gregory at his side and an army behind him, was once again heading toward Rome, which on his arrival in February 998 instantly opened its gates. Antipope John had fled just in time to the Campagna, but was soon captured. Blinded and hideously mutilated, he suffered much the same fate as the Prefect Peter half a century before, being paraded naked through the streets, sitting backward on a donkey. He was then formally deposed and defrocked before being incarcerated in some Roman monastery, where he lingered for another three years before a merciful death took him.
THE PAPAL HISTORY of the ninth and tenth centuries had been scarcely inspiring; but on Gregory’s death in 999 the Papacy suffered a sea change with the appointment by Otto III of his old friend (and another of his tutors) Gerbert of Aurillac, then Archbishop of Ravenna. The first Frenchman to become Supreme Pontiff,4 Gerbert took the title Sylvester II as a deliberate tribute to his namesake, Sylvester I, the contemporary of Constantine the Great, who had traditionally exemplified the ideal relationship between emperor and pope.
He had been born around 945 of humble parentage in the Auvergne but had received a first-class education, first at Aurillac and then at Vic in Catalonia. He had been drawn across the Pyrenees by a thirst for knowledge that could be obtained nowhere else in Europe. Mathematics, medicine, geography, astronomy, and the physical sciences were still deeply mistrusted in the Christian world; in that of Islam, they had been brought to a point unequaled since the days of ancient Greece. Gerbert himself is generally credited with having first popularized Arabic numerals and the use of the astrolabe, together with that of the celestial and terrestrial globes, in the Christian West. He was also a passionate lover of music who did much to develop the organ as an instrument. Brought to Rome in 970, he impressed everyone by his extraordinary intelligence and erudition, and by his brilliance as a teacher. Soon afterward he was summoned to the court of the fifteen-year-old Otto III, with orders “to rid him of his Saxon rusticity and to stimulate his Greek subtlety.”
As pope, Sylvester fulfilled every sensible expectation. He showed himself a determined reformer, denouncing the Church’s two besetting sins of nepotism and simony, forcing King Robert II of France to get rid of his wife, and at the same time working—as he had always intended to work—closely with the emperor to forge the sort of Christian Roman Empire of which they both dreamed. For a short time they were successful: together they reorganized the Church in Hungary and in Poland, and it was Sylvester who sent the original Holy Crown of Hungary5 to King Vajk, subsequently canonized as St. Stephen. In recognition of what the two had achieved, Otto even returned Ravenna to the pope, as well as the five cities of the so-called Pentapolis—Rimini, Faro, Pesaro, Senigallia, and Ancona, which Pepin the Great had granted to the Papacy in the eighth century—while making it clear that the transfer had nothing at all to do with the Donation of Constantine, which he was well aware was a forgery.
For a pope of such caliber, the Romans should have been grateful; it need hardly be said that they were nothing of the kind. By some sad irony Rome remained as unsuitable as any city could ever be, as both the center of the universal Church and the capital of a revived Western Empire. It was devoid alike of order and discipline, lying at the mercy of irresponsible magnates such as the Crescentii and the counts of Tusculum, and indeed of its own highly volatile populace. Thus, when in 1001 a minor outbreak of trouble in Tivoli got out of hand and spread to Rome, both pope and emperor were forced to flee for their lives. Otto died of malaria early in 1002, aged twenty-one; Sylvester was allowed to return, but in May 1003 followed him to the grave. His pontificate had lasted only four years, barely half of which he had spent in Rome; but he had demonstrated to the world at large that there was, after all, a future for the Church and that the Papacy was not beyond hope of recovery.
The next three pontiffs were all creatures of John Crescentius. All three were keen to establish relations with the new German king, Henry II the Holy; but Crescentius, whose Byzantine sympathies were growing stronger with age, continued to oppose any attempts to bring Henry to Rome for his imperial coronation. This state of affairs continued until May 1012, when, during another of those regular bouts of political upheaval inseparable from early medieval Rome, the counts of Tusculum overthrew the Crescentii and seized power for themselves. The deaths of Crescentius and the last of his three puppets, Sergius IV, within a week of each other at exactly this time cannot but suggest foul play, but there is no proof. It was scarcely surprising, in any case, that the next pope should have been a Tusculan—the son of Count Gregory of Tusculum and at the time of his election still a layman—who took the name of Benedict VIII. Now that there was no longer any obstacle to improving relations with the German king, Henry duly visited Rome, where he was crowned by Benedict on St. Valentine’s Day, 1014.
Unusually, the new pope was a soldier. No sooner ordained and enthroned, he was off at the head of an army to crush the remaining Crescentii in their mountain refuges, and much of the next six years was spent on campaign. In 1020 he appeared in person at the emperor’s court in Bamberg to consecrate Henry’s new cathedral and appeal for help. Henry agreed, and in 1022 marched down into the Mezzogiorno with no fewer than three separate armies. They achieved one or two minor victories, but there was no significant breakthrough. The principal result was the renewed rupture of relations between Rome and Constantinople, which had been somehow patched up after the Photian schism of 861 but which was now further exacerbated by the emperor’s insistence on—and the pope’s craven acceptance of—the inclusion of the hated filioque in the Creed.
Dying in 1024, Benedict was followed by two more close relatives—first his brother, then his nephew. All three having been laymen, each was tonsured, ordained, and enthroned in a single day. The first, John XIX, is remembered principally for having crowned Henry’s successor, Conrad II, in the somewhat unexpected presence of England’s King Canute, who happened to be in Rome on a pilgrimage. Canute seems to have been deeply impressed; in fact, John was venal, corrupt, and without a ray of spirituality. The best that can be said of him was that his nephew was worse. Benedict IX, elected as a result of wholesale bribery on the part of his father, is traditionally believed to have mounted the throne at the age of ten or twelve, though later research suggests that he was more likely in his early twenties. What is beyond doubt is that he was a shameless debauchee, who recalled to older members of his flock the worst days of the pornocracy. The Romans, hardened as they were to corruption in high places, bore him as best they could for nearly twelve years, but in January 1045 they rose up against him and forced him to abandon the city, replacing him with the Crescentian Bishop John of Sabina, who took the name Sylvester III. Sylvester, however, lasted just two months. Benedict promptly excommunicated him and regained his throne by March; but somehow he seems to have lost his enthusiasm, and in May he resigned his papal rights in favor of his godfather, the archpriest John Gratian—without, however, specifically renouncing the Papacy itself.
Why he took so extraordinary a step is far from clear, but the result was chaos. There were now no fewer than three pretenders, all claiming to be the legitimate pope. Two of the three were practically worthless; Gratian, who now called himself Gregory VI, was at least a serious churchman and a pious reformer, even though he was unable to shake off rumors of simony. The situation was finally resolved by the German king, Henry III. Henry had succeeded his father, Conrad II, in 1039 at the age of twenty-two. He was a conscientious ruler who took his religious responsibilities with the utmost seriousness and was a powerful champion of reform. His original purpose in coming to Italy was to receive his imperial coronation, but he immediately saw that his first task would be to put some order into papal affairs. On his way to Rome he saw Gregory at Piacenza but was left unpersuaded; his conclusion—surely the right one—was to depose all three contestants. Only Benedict refused to lie down, forever making trouble from his family properties near Frascati and still breathing defiance at his successors. Sylvester, who had never wanted the job anyway, returned to his old bishopric. Gregory, by far the worthiest of the three, fared worst of all. At a synod held at Sutri he was found guilty of simony in obtaining the papal throne and was banished, accompanied by his chancellor, Cardinal Hildebrand, to Germany. He died the following year in Cologne.
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WE CAN HARDLY blame Henry III for taking the choice of pope into his own hands and, after the anarchy of previous years, appointing a German to perform his coronation. In fact, he was to appoint four popes, one after another. There was one serious drawback to the choice of Germans: they were fatally susceptible to the old Roman scourge of malaria. The first, Clement II, lasted only ten months,6 and the odious Benedict, who was widely rumored to have poisoned him, reestablished himself for the next eight months at St. Peter’s. In July 1048 Henry’s next appointee, Damasus II, ruled for exactly twenty-three days before expiring at Palestrina. Whether, as some said, the heat had proved too much for him or whether Benedict was simply becoming more expert has never been properly established, but to most of the leading churchmen of his time his death made the Papacy seem a less desirable prize than ever, and Henry, called upon to fill the vacancy for the third time in less than two years, was finding the task increasingly difficult. Finally, at a great council held at Worms in December 1048, German and Italian bishops called unanimously for the emperor’s second cousin, a man of tried ability and undoubted saintliness, Bruno, Bishop of Toul.
Bruno’s reluctance to accept the invitation was unfeigned and indeed hardly surprising. He agreed only on condition that his appointment would be spontaneously ratified on his arrival by the clergy and people of Rome and accordingly set out for the Eternal City in January 1049, dressed as a simple pilgrim. Once there, however, he was immediately acclaimed and consecrated under the name of Leo IX, and for the next six years, until his death at fifty-one, the tall, red-haired, military-looking Alsatian—he had in fact commanded an army in the field during one of Conrad II’s expeditions into Italy—provided the Church with a quality of leadership that had long been wanting.
Hitherto the Papacy had been very much a Roman institution; Leo made it genuinely international. He traveled all the time, to northern Italy, to France, and to Germany, presiding at synods, fulminating against simony and married priests, officiating at magnificent ceremonies, preaching to immense crowds. He put the Papacy on the map of Europe as no pope had ever done before. He also built up an international Curia. No longer was the pope to be surrounded by self-seeking, ever-intriguing ecclesiastics, mostly from the Roman nobility. Leo called together men as different as the fiery ascetic St. Peter Damian—a doctor of the Church and forerunner of St. Francis as an apostle of voluntary poverty; the brilliant Abbot Hugh of Cluny, under whose direction medieval monasticism reached its apogee; Frederick of Lorraine, Abbot of Monte Cassino and later Pope Stephen IX; and Cardinal Hildebrand, who as Gregory VII was to prove himself the greatest churchman of the Middle Ages.
The Church hardly knew what had hit it. King Henry I of France, who had no wish for the pope to start interfering with his own church appointments, had forbiddden his bishops to attend the Synod of Rheims, held in the very first year of Leo’s pontificate. Some twenty had disobeyed him, but all too soon they regretted having done so. Leo opened the synod by demanding that each ecclesiastic stand up in turn and declare whether he had paid any money for his office. No fewer than five confessed; they were pardoned and restored to their sees. One, the Archbishop of Rheims himself, was summoned to Rome to make his defense. Another, the Bishop of Nantes, who had succeeded his own father in the diocese, was reduced to the priesthood. Yet another, the Bishop of Langres, fled and was excommunicated. The Archbishop of Besançon, who had attempted to defend him, was actually struck dumb halfway through his speech—those present being quick to draw the appropriate moral.
Yet Leo died a bitter and disappointed man, for two reasons. First, the Normans. Their story begins around 1015, with a party of some forty young Norman pilgrims at the shrine of the Archangel Michael on Monte Gargano, that curious rocky excrescence which juts out from what might be called the calf of Italy into the Adriatic. Seeing in this underpopulated, unruly land both an opportunity and a challenge, they were easily persuaded by the local Lombards to remain in Italy as mercenaries, with the object of expelling the Byzantine army of occupation from the peninsula. Word soon got back to Normandy, and the initial trickle of adventurous, footloose younger sons swelled into a steady immigration. Fighting indiscriminately for the highest bidder, they soon began to extract payment in land for their services. In 1030 Duke Sergius IV of Naples, grateful for their support, invested their leader, Rainulf, with the County of Aversa. Thenceforth their progress was fast. By 1050 they had effectively mopped up most of Apulia and Calabria, and Pope Leo, seeing an ever-growing threat along his southern border, proclaimed a holy war and raised an army against them.
It proved to be a grave mistake. The Normans might have been difficult neighbors, but they were by no means heretics and had always protested their loyalty to the Holy See. In any event, on June 17, 1053, the papal army was soundly beaten on the field of Civitate on the River Fortore. The expected Byzantine army never turned up—to the fury of the papalists, who inevitably felt betrayed—and the pope himself was taken prisoner. His captors treated him with slightly overdone respect, and nine months later, after they had gotten what they wanted—confirmation of their conquests and the lifting of their sentence of excommunication—they bore him back to Rome in state; but Leo never recovered from his humiliation and died only a month later.
THE POPE’S SECOND misfortune, greater far than the first, was that he was called upon to preside—although posthumously—over the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches. The two had been growing apart for centuries. Their slow but steady estrangement was in essence a reflection of the old rivalry between Latin and Greek, Rome and Byzantium. The Roman pontificate was rapidly extending its effective authority across Europe, and as its power grew, so too did its ambition and arrogance—tendencies which were viewed in Constantinople with resentment and not a little anxiety. There was also a fundamental difference in the approach of the two churches to Christianity itself. The Byzantines, for whom their emperor was the equal of the Apostles, believed that matters of doctrine could be settled only by the Holy Ghost speaking through an Ecumenical Council. They were accordingly scandalized by the presumption of the pope—who was, in their view, merely primus inter pares among the patriarchs—in formulating dogma and claiming both spiritual and temporal supremacy, while to the legalistic and disciplined minds of Rome the old Greek love of discussion and theological speculation was always repugnant and occasionally shocking. Already two centuries before, matters had very nearly come to a head over Photius and the filioque. Fortunately, after the death of Pope Nicholas I and thanks to the goodwill of his successors and of Photius himself, friendly relations had been outwardly restored; but the basic problems remained unsolved, the filioque continued to gain adherents in the West, and the emperor maintained his claim to rule as God’s Vice-Gerent on Earth. It was only a matter of time before the quarrel broke out again.
That it did so at this moment might be blamed partially on Pope Leo but was very largely the fault of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius. He was as unlike his distant predecessor Photius as can possibly be imagined. Whereas the latter had been a man of intelligence and charm—as well as the greatest scholar of his day—Cerularius was a narrow-minded bigot. Already before Civitate he had fired his first salvo: learning that the Normans, with papal approval, were enforcing Latin customs—in particular the use of unleavened bread for the Sacrament—on the Greek churches of South Italy, he had immediately ordered the Latin communities of Constantinople to adopt Greek usages, and when they objected, he had closed them down. There had followed a bitter correspondence in which the patriarch had condemned certain Roman practices as “sinful and Judaistic,” while the pope suggested—without a shred of justification—that the patriarch’s election had been uncanonical. To carry the papal letters to Constantinople, Leo, who was probably already dying, unwisely selected the three most rabidly anti-Greek churchmen in his Curia: his principal secretary, Cardinal Humbert of Mourmoutiers, who in the events that followed was to prove not a jot less bigoted and waspish than the patriarch himself; Cardinal Frederick of Lorraine; and Archbishop Peter of Amalfi, both of whom had fought with him at Civitate and bore a bitter grudge against the Byzantines for having let them down.
From the moment of their arrival at Constantinople, everything went wrong. The Emperor Constantine XI received them graciously enough, but Cerularius categorically refused to recognize their authority. Then came the news that Pope Leo had died in Rome. Humbert and his colleagues had been Leo’s personal representatives; his death consequently deprived them of all official standing. Their proper course in the circumstances would have been to return at once to Rome; instead, they remained in Constantinople, apparently unconcerned and growing more arrogant and high-handed with every day that passed. When a certain monk of the Monastery of the Studium answered the papal criticisms in polite and respectful language, Humbert replied with a stream of hysterical invective, describing the writer as a “pestiferous pimp” and “a disciple of the malignant Mahomet,” suggesting that he must have emerged from a theater or brothel rather than a monastery—surely confirming the average Byzantine in his opinion that the Church of Rome now consisted of little more than a bunch of crude barbarians with whom no argument, let alone agreement, could ever be possible.
At last, as Cerularius knew he would, Humbert lost the last shreds of his patience. At three in the afternoon of Saturday, July 16, 1054, in the presence of all the clergy assembled for the Eucharist, the three ex-legates of Rome—two cardinals and an archbishop, all in their full canonicals—strode into the Great Church of St. Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, and up to the high altar, on which they formally laid their solemn Bull of Excommunication. This done, they turned on their heels and marched from the building, pausing only to shake the dust symbolically from their feet. Two days later they left for Rome. It was only when the bull had been publicly burned and the legates themselves formally anathematized that peace returned.
Even if we ignore the fact that the legates were without any papal authority and that the bull iself was consequently invalid by every standard of canon law, it remains an astonishing production: few important documents, in the words of Sir Steven Runciman, have been so full of demonstrable errors.7 Yet such was the sequence of events at Constantinople in the summer of 1054 which resulted in the lasting separation of the Eastern and Western churches. It is an unedifying story because, however inevitable the breach may have been, the events themselves should never—and need never—have occurred. More strength of will on the part of the dying pope, less bigotry on the part of the narrow-minded patriarch or the pigheaded cardinal, and the situation could have been saved. The initial crisis arose in South Italy, the one crucial area in which a political understanding between Rome and Constantinople was vitally necessary. The fatal blow was struck by the disempowered legates of a dead pope representing a headless Church—since the new pontiff had not yet been elected—and using an instrument at once uncanonical and inaccurate. Both the Latin and the Greek excommunications were directed personally at the offending dignitaries rather than at the churches for which they stood; both could later have been rescinded, and neither was at the time recognized as introducing a permanent schism. Technically, indeed, they did not do so, since twice in succeeding centuries—in the thirteenth at Lyons and the fifteenth at Florence—was the Eastern Church to be compelled, for political reasons, to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. But though a temporary bandage may cover an open wound, it cannot heal it; and despite the balm applied in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council,8 the wound which was jointly inflicted on the Christian Church nine centuries ago by Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael Cerularius still bleeds today.
1. His remains were brought back to Rome by Otto III in 988.
2. Theophano was understood to be the daughter of the Emperor Romanus II; only on her arrival was she discovered to be merely a relative of the emperor’s brother-in-law John Tzimisces and by no means “born in the purple” as had been understood. Otto at first considered sending the poor girl straight back to Constantinople; fortunately, wiser counsels prevailed and two years later Tzimisces became emperor anyway, so all was well.
3. Since 1904 Boniface has been officially classified as an antipope, although he appears on the ancient official lists of popes and the next pope who took the name is known as Boniface VIII.
4. It is mildly remarkable that, if we ignore the antipope (which we must), the first Frenchman on the papal throne should have directly succeeded the first German.
5. The crown, thought to be originally a Georgian work of the fourth century, is the oldest surviving in the world today. No fewer than fifty-five kings of Hungary have been crowned with it.
6. The rumor that he was poisoned by Benedict IX is almost certainly without foundation. When his tomb was opened on June 3, 1942, there was evidence to suggest that he died of lead poisoning, but malaria remains the most likely cause.
7. The Eastern Schism. The relevant paragraph is also quoted in my own Byzantium: The Apogee, p. 321.
8. See chapter 28.