Gregory VII and the Normans

For almost exactly a year after the death of Leo IX on April 19, 1054, there was no pope in Rome. Henry III had already appointed three pontiffs, all Germans, and was determined to nominate a fourth; but before doing so he had long discussions at Mainz with a delegation from Rome headed by Cardinal Hildebrand. His choice finally fell on a young Swabian named Gebhard, who had been made Bishop of Eichstätt in 1042 while still in his twenties; but even then Gebhard hesitated for several months, accepting only in March 1055. The last pope to be nominated by a German king, he was enthroned on April 13 under the name Victor II, keeping his old bishopric throughout his pontificate. The Italian party had feared that he might prove too much a creature of the emperor; in fact, he proved a strong defender of the rights of the Church and a champion of reform no less determined than his predecessor. But he could not escape his countrymen’s vulnerability to the miasmas of Rome, and was already a sick man when he presided at a synod at Arezzo in July 1057. When he died a few days later, his German entourage wanted to take his body back to Eichstätt for burial, but the cortege was ambushed and robbed at Ravenna, and the body now rests, curiously enough, in the Mausoleum of Theodoric, then doing service as a church.

It is unlikely that Stephen ever entertained such an idea for a moment, but we shall never know, for in just seven months he too was dead. Feeling his end approaching, he had exacted from the Roman clergy a solemn oath that they would not elect his successor before the return of Hildebrand, who was on a mission to Germany; but the reactionaries saw their chance. Experience over the past few years had taught them that on occasions of this kind everything depended on speed. A coup d’état was hurriedly planned by a Tusculan-Crescentian alliance, and within a few days Giovanni Mincio, Bishop of Velletri, was enthroned as pope under the inauspicious title of Benedict X. From the point of view of the reformers, the choice could have been a lot worse; the new pope might have been somewhat weak-willed, but Leo IX had made him a cardinal and Stephen had considered him as a possible alternative candidate to himself. They could not, however, accept the manner of his election, which they viewed as uncanonical and corrupt. Leaving Rome in a body, they met Hildebrand in Tuscany and settled down to decide on a pope for themselves.

First came the problem of Benedict. Only thirteen years before, his odious namesake had demonstrated just how much harm could be done by a renegade antipope; Benedict X was a far more popular figure than Benedict IX, and this time there was no emperor ready to sweep down into Italy and restore order as Henry III had done. Duke Godfrey had returned to Tuscany—though this was perhaps just as well, since he had recently displayed a curious halfheartedness that had led to suspicions of a secret intrigue with the reactionaries in Rome. And so the Church took a surprising, fateful step: it called upon the Normans for aid.

The final decision to do so can only have been Hildebrand’s. No other member of the Curia, not even Pope Nicholas himself, possessed the necessary combination of courage and prestige. Throughout Italy, and above all among the churchmen of Rome, the Normans were still considered—not unreasonably—a bunch of barbarian bandits, no better than the Saracens who had terrorized the South before them. For many of the cardinals the idea of an alliance with such men, whose record of sacrilege and desecration was notorious and who had dared, only five years before, to take arms against the Holy Father himself and hold him captive for nine months, must have seemed more appalling by far than any accommodation with the Roman nobility or even Benedict himself. But Hildebrand knew that he was right. Pope and cardinals bowed, as nearly always, before his will, and in February 1059 he set off in person for discussions with one of the Norman leaders, Prince Richard II of Capua.

THE FATE OF Benedict X came as a profound shock to the reactionary group in Rome. They had expected neither the degree of resolution and unity of purpose with which the cardinals had opposed his election nor the vigor with which he had subsequently been swept aside. And now, before they were able to recover, Hildebrand dealt them a second blow, still more paralyzing in its long-term effects. The procedure governing papal elections had always been vague; it was theoretically based on a settlement, originated by the Emperor Lothair in 824 and renewed by Otto the Great in the following century, according to which the election was to be carried out by the entire clergy and nobility of Rome; the new pontiff, however, was to be consecrated only after he had taken an oath to the emperor. Such a decree, loose enough in its original conception and looser still in its interpretation through well over two hundred years, was bound to lead to abuses. Apart from the power it gave to the Roman aristocracy, it also implied a measure of dependence on the empire which, though counterbalanced by the need for every emperor to submit to a papal coronation in Rome, by no means accorded with Hildebrand’s ideas of papal supremacy. Now, with the Romans in disarray, a child on the German throne, and the assurance of armed Norman support should the need arise, it could at last be scrapped.

The Norman leaders, for their part, asked nothing better than an alliance with the Church of Rome—which would inevitably entail its alienation from the imperial court. However much they and their countrymen might have acted against individual religious foundations in the past, they had always—even at Civitate—shown respect for the pope and had taken arms against him in self-defense only after all attempts at a peaceful settlement had failed. They were not so strong that they did not welcome a guarantee against the threat of a combined onslaught by empire and Papacy or, indeed, an ally against any other enemy—Byzantine, Tuscan, or Saracen—with whom they might on occasion be faced. On the other hand, they were quite powerful enough to negotiate with the pope on an equal political footing. Their hopes were therefore high when Nicholas II left Rome in June 1059 with an impressive retinue of cardinals, bishops, and clergy and headed southwest toward the little town of Melfi, the first Norman stronghold in South Italy.

By just what title the pope so munificently bestowed on the Normans territories which had never before been claimed by him or his predecessors is a matter open to question; but few of those present at Melfi on that August day were likely to raise embarrassing issues of that sort. In any event, Pope Nicholas could afford to be expansive; he was getting so much in return. He was admittedly lending papal support to the most dangerous and potentially disruptive of all the political elements in South Italy, but by investing both its leaders—whose relations were known to be strained—he was carefully keeping this element divided. Furthermore, the two leaders now swore him an oath which effectively gave him feudal suzerainty over most of South Italy and Sicily and changed, radically and completely, the entire position of the Papacy in the region. By a lucky chance the complete text of Robert’s oath—though not, unfortunately, of Richard’s—has come down to us in the Vatican Archives, one of the earliest of such texts still extant. The first part is of little importance, but the second is vital:

All those present at the ceremony could be well satisfied with what they had done; not everyone, however, shared their satisfaction. The Roman aristocracy retreated into its musty palaces, furious and frightened. The Byzantines saw that they had lost their last chance of preserving what was left of their Italian possessions. And in the Western Empire, shorn of its privileges at papal elections, faced with a new alliance as formidable militarily as it was politically, and now, as a crowning insult, forced to watch in impotent silence while immense tracts of imperial territory were calmly conferred on a band of brigands, the reaction to Nicholas’s behavior can well be imagined. It was lucky for Italy that Henry IV was still a child; had he been a few years older, he would never have taken such treatment lying down. As it was, the pope’s name was thenceforth ostentatiously omitted from the intercessions in all the imperial chapels and churches, while a synod of German bishops went so far as to declare all Nicholas’s acts null and void and to break off communion with him. We cannot tell how he would have reacted; before the news could reach him, he died in Florence.

With Hildebrand continuing in his role of éminence grise, it was hardly surprising that the papal-Norman alliance should flourish. In 1063 Pope Alexander sent a banner to Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger, fighting the Saracens for the control of Sicily, and three years later he sent another to William the Conqueror, who flew it at Hastings. He did his best, too, to heal the breach with Byzantium, sending a mission under Peter of Anagni to Constantinople; but feelings on the Bosphorus were running too high, and after the Normans under Robert Guiscard had captured Bari in 1071—eliminating the last bastion of Byzantine power in South Italy—the chances of a settlement were even slimmer. Even there, however, relations were a good deal easier than those with the Empire of the West.

Henry IV had come to the throne of Germany in 1054, shortly before his fifth birthday. He had not made a particularly auspicious start to his reign. His mother, the Empress Agnes, who had taken over the regency, had been totally unable to control him, and after a wild boyhood and a deeply disreputable adolescence he had acquired, by the time he assumed power at sixteen, a reputation for viciousness and profligacy which augured ill for the future. This reputation he was at last beginning to live down, but throughout his unhappy life he remained hot-tempered, passionate, and intensely autocratic. Thus as he grew to manhood he became ever more resentful of what he saw as the increasing arrogance of the Roman Church and, in particular, of those reformist measures by which it was seeking to cast off the last vestiges of imperial control. It was plain that a showdown between Church and empire was inevitable. It was not long in coming.

Tension between the two parties had led to the burning of Milan Cathedral, and tempers were still running high on each side when, in April 1073, Alexander died, leaving his successor to carry on the struggle. There could be no question as to who that successor would be. Archdeacon Hildebrand had already wielded effective power in the Curia for some twenty years, during many of which he had been supreme in all but name. When, according to a carefully prearranged plan, the crowd seized him during Alexander’s funeral service, carried him to the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, and there exultantly acclaimed him pope, they were doing little more than regularizing the existing state of affairs, and the canonical election that followed was the purest formality. Hastily he was ordained priest—a desirable qualification for the Papacy which seems to have been overlooked during the earlier stages of his career—and was immediately afterward enthroned as Supreme Pontiff with the name of Gregory VII.

His strength lay, above all, in the singleness of his purpose. Throughout his life he was guided by one overmastering ideal: the subjection of all Christendom, from the two emperors down, to the authority of the Church of Rome. The Church could make them and unmake them; it could also absolve their subjects from their allegiance. But just as the Church must be supreme upon Earth, so too must the pope be supreme in the Church. He was the judge of all men, himself responsible only to God; his word was not only law, it was the Divine Law. Disobedience to him was therefore something very close to mortal sin. All this and much more was spelled out in his twenty-seven propositions, known as Dictatus Papae, published in 1075. These included the assertion that all popes are by definition saints, inheriting their sanctity from St. Peter—a theory which must have raised a few eyebrows among Gregory’s older contemporaries. Never before had the concept of ecclesiastical autocracy been carried to such an extreme; never before had it been pursued with such unflinching determination. Yet this very extremism was to ultimately prove self-destructive. Confronted by adversaries of the caliber of Henry IV and Robert Guiscard, as determined as himself but infinitely more flexible, Gregory was to learn to his cost that his persistent refusal to compromise, even when his principles were not directly involved, could only bring about his downfall.

Henry had long been eager to go to Rome for his imperial coronation, but his quarrel with successive popes over investitures had prevented him. After the Council of Worms, however, he saw that his journey could no longer be postponed. Gregory had not reacted to his deposition with the savagery that was already bring rumored in Germany, but he was clearly not going to accept it lying down. If, therefore, the Council was not to be held up to ridicule, he would have to be removed by force and a successor called. The need was for a swift, smooth military operation; and, while it was being prepared, steps must be taken to deprive the pope of local Italian support as far as possible. North of Rome this would be difficult: the formidable Countess Matilda of Tuscany was a devout champion of the Church, her loyalty to Gregory unswerving. To the south, however, the prospects looked more hopeful. The Norman Duke of Apulia in particular seemed to have no great love for the pope. He might well overlook his feudal responsibilities if it were made worth his while to do so. Once he and his men could be persuaded to participate in a combined attack on Rome, Gregory would not stand a chance.

Meanwhile, Pope Gregory had acted with his usual vigor. At his Lenten Synod of 1076 he had deposed all the rebellious bishops and thundered out a sentence of excommunication on King Henry himself. The effect in Germany was cataclysmic. No reigning monarch had incurred the ban of the Church since Theodosius the Great seven centuries before. It had brought that emperor to his knees, and it now threatened to do the same for Henry. The purely spiritual aspect did not worry him unduly—that problem could always be solved by a well-timed repentance—but the political consequences were serious indeed. In theory the ban not only absolved all the king’s subjects from their allegiance to him; it also rendered them in their turn excommunicate if they had any dealings with him or showed him obedience. Were it to be strictly observed, therefore, Henry’s government would disintegrate and he would be unable to continue any longer on the throne. Suddenly he found himself isolated.

The story of Canossa, usually enlivened by an oleaginous illustration of the king, barefoot and in sackcloth, shivering in the snow before the locked doors of a brilliantly lit castle, has always been a favorite with the writers of children’s storybooks, who present it as an improving object lesson in the vanity of temporal ambition. In fact, Gregory’s triumph was empty and ephemeral, and Henry knew it. His humiliation had nothing to do with repentance. It was a cold-blooded political maneuver which was necessary to secure his crown, and he had no intention of keeping his promises once they had served their purpose. The pope, too, can have had few delusions about the king’s sincerity. Had his Christian conscience permitted him to withhold absolution, he would doubtless have been only too happy to do so. He had won an unquestionable moral victory; but what was the use of a victory after which the vanquished returned unabashed to his kingdom while the victor remained cooped up in a Tuscan castle, blocked from Germany by the savage hostility of the Lombard cities and powerless to intervene?

Of course, Henry showed no sign of mending his ways. He antagonized the German princes to the point where they did indeed elect a rival king, Rudolf, Duke of Swabia. Gregory did his best to mediate between them but eventually, in 1080, excommunicated Henry once again, sentenced him to deposition, and declared Rudolf king. Alas, he had backed the wrong horse. That same year Rudolf was killed in battle; Henry, on the other hand, had never been stronger. For the second time he declared Gregory deposed; he then called a synod of German and Italian bishops at Brixen—now Bressanone—in the Tyrol, which in June 1080 dutifully elected Guibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, as Pope Clement III.

It was easy to elect an antipope but a good deal harder to install him. Henry made three attempts to take over Rome, but only on the third was he successful. Finally, early in 1084, a mixed party of Milanese and Saxons managed to scale the walls of the Leonine City; and within an hour or two Henry’s soldiers were fighting a furious battle in and around St. Peter’s. Pope Gregory, however, had been too quick for them. He had no intention of surrendering. Hurrying to the Castel Sant’Angelo, he barricaded himself in and watched, powerless, while on Palm Sunday Clement was enthroned in the Lateran and just a week later, on Easter Day, Henry was crowned emperor.

Henry had not waited for him. News of the size and strength of the Norman army had been enough to make up his mind. Summoning a council of the leading citizens of Rome, he explained to them that his presence was urgently required in Lombardy. He would be back as soon as circumstances permitted; meanwhile, he trusted them to fight valiantly against all attackers. Then, three days before the Duke of Apulia appeared at the gates of the city, he fled with his wife and the greater part of his army, the terrified antipope scurrying behind.

For three days Robert waited in his camp, uncertain, perhaps, whether Henry’s flight was genuine. Then, on the night of May 27, under cover of darkness, he silently moved his army around to the north of the city. At dawn he attacked, and within minutes the first of his shock troops had burst through the Flaminian Gate. They met with a stiff resistance; the whole area of the Campus Martius—the quarter lying immediately across the river from the Castel Sant’Angelo—became a blazing holocaust. But it was not long before the Normans had beaten the defenders back over the bridge, released the pope from his fortress, and borne him back in triumph through the smoking ruins to the Lateran.

That triumph, however, was short-lived. The whole capital was now given over to rapine and pillage, in which Robert’s several brigades of Sicilian Saracens were hardly conspicuous for their restraint. On the third day, with bestiality and bloodshed still continuing unabated, the people of Rome could bear it no longer; the whole city rose against its oppressors. Robert Guiscard himself was taken by surprise and surrounded. He was saved in the nick of time by his son, who smashed his way through the hostile crowds to his father’s rescue—but not before the Normans, now fighting for their lives, had set fire to the city.

Gregory had won his battle after a fashion—but at what price? The heroic popes of the past had saved their city from the invaders—Leo I from Attila’s Huns, his own namesake Gregory the Great from the conquering Lombards; he, though in many ways greater than either, had delivered it up to destruction. Yet his letters show no remorse or regret. His conscience was clear. He had been fighting for a principle, and thanks to his own tenacity and courage that principle had been upheld. God’s will had been done.

So, with that sublime arrogance which was one of his chief and most unattractive characteristics, must Gregory have reasoned. But for him too there was to be retribution. The Roman populace, who had acclaimed him with such enthusiasm eleven years before, now saw him—and not without good reason—as the cause of all their misery and loss, and they were hungry for revenge. Only the presence of Robert Guiscard and his army prevented them from tearing their once-adored pope limb from limb. But Robert had no desire to stay in Rome a moment longer than was necessary, and so Gregory suffered his last humiliation: the realization that when the Normans left Rome, he would have to leave with them. At the beginning of July, escorted by the mighty host of Normans and Saracens that had been at once his salvation and his undoing, he turned his back on Rome for the last time—the proudest of pontiffs, now little better than a fugitive from the city that hated him. Southward they rode to Salerno. There the pope was settled in a palace befitting his dignity, and there, on May 25, 1085, he died. He was buried in the southeastern apse of the cathedral—“built by Robert Guiscard at his own expense,” as the façade inscription runs—where his tomb may still be seen.