The chaos which had driven Gregory VII from Rome was made, if anything, worse by his departure and death. Antipope Clement had his champions, but he could not hope to win over the reformist cardinals and so was never quite able to install himself permanently in the Vatican. The cardinals’ problem was to find a suitable successor, for recent history had not been such as to make the pontificate a particularly attractive proposition. There was one outstanding candidate: Abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino, who had directed the affairs of his great monastery for the past twenty-seven years, making of them its golden age. He had vastly extended its lands and its library, developing it into a center of learning, literature, and the arts, and his influence had extended far beyond its confines. He it was who in 1059 had negotiated the alliance between the Papacy and the Normans, and who in 1080 had reconciled Gregory VII with Robert Guiscard. He had actually sheltered the fugitive pope at Monte Cassino on his way to exile and had been with him when he died.
But, not surprisingly, he had absolutely no wish to be pope himself. Why should he exchange the peace and comfort of the monastery he loved for the nightmare that was papal Rome? It took the cardinals nearly a year to persuade him—few pontiffs have ever accepted the office with greater reluctance. And it was not long before he was proved right. Just four days after his election as Victor III in May 1086, before he had even been consecrated, serious rioting broke out in the city and he was forced to leave. He laid aside his papal insignia, rode off at once to Monte Cassino, and—with every sign of relief—took up his former duties. But he was not to be left in peace for long. Ten months later, in his earlier capacity of papal vicar in South Italy, he convened a synod at Capua, and there he was once more persuaded to accept the office to which he had been elected. Norman troops smashed their way yet again into Rome, from which it was now the antipope’s turn to flee; and on May 9, 1087, Victor was finally consecrated in St. Peter’s. This time he was almost a week in Rome before retiring again to his monastery, and in mid-June he was to endure the Holy City for an entire month. But that was enough. The end of July saw him back at Monte Cassino, and by mid-September he was dead.
His successor, Urban II, was a man of a very different stamp. Odo of Châtillon was a stately, scholarly aristocrat from Champagne, a zealous reformer who had been Prior of Cluny before coming south to accept the hugely important see of Ostia. He was a staunch upholder of papal supremacy on the Gregorian model—except that he possessed all the polish and diplomatic finesse that Gregory had so disastrously lacked. Since Rome was now once again in the hands of Antipope Clement and the imperialists, he had been elected and consecrated at Terracina, and he was well aware that Norman help would be necessary if he was ever to install himself in the Vatican. It was only after he had paid a personal visit to Count Roger—Robert Guiscard’s younger brother, now entrusted with Sicily—that Roger was able to organize an armed expedition to Rome by means of which, in November 1088, the pope entered the city, though even then he was confined to the tiny Tiber Island. By the following autumn he was back in exile. Not until Easter 1094, and then only through heavy bribery, was he able to penetrate to the Lateran and, six years after his consecration, to assume his rightful throne.
A few months later he sent an embassy to Constantinople. Ever since his accession he had worked hard to improve relations with Byzantium—Church union being, of course, the ultimate objective—and the Emperor Alexius Comnenus I had been gratifyingly quick to respond; when, therefore, the papal legates delivered to Alexius an invitation to send representatives to a great Council of the Roman Church to be held at Piacenza the following March, the emperor accepted at once. Most of the proceedings, he knew, would be concerned with domestic matters—simony, clerical marriage, the adultery of King Philip of France, and the like—but the Council might also provide him with the opportunity he had long sought, to appeal for Western aid against the Turks. They had invaded his empire a quarter of a century before, defeated a Byzantine army led by his predecessor, Romanus IV, and overrun practically all Anatolia except for a few areas around the coast. They could, he believed, be driven out, but only by a military expedition on a considerable scale. Piacenza might be just the place to say so.
The Byzantine spokesmen did their work well. Sensibly, they laid their emphasis less on the prizes to be won—though we may be sure that those did not go unmentioned—than on the religious aspect of their appeal: the sufferings of the Christian communities in the East, the submergence of Asia Minor beneath an Islamic tide, the presence of the infidel armies at the very gates of Constantinople, and the appalling danger that they represented, not only to the Empire of the East but to all Christendom. The listening delegates were impressed—none more so, perhaps, than Urban himself. From Piacenza he traveled on to his native France, and as his journey progressed a scheme gradually took shape in his mind, far more ambitious than any that Alexius had ever dreamed of: nothing less than a holy war, in which the combined forces of Christian Europe would march against the Saracen.
When he arrived in France, he called another Council, to gather at Clermont—now Clermont-Ferrand—on November 18. It would last for ten days, most of which would be taken up with routine Church business; on Tuesday the twenty-seventh, however, there would be a public session open to all at which, it was announced, the pope would make a statement of immense significance to all Christendom. This promise had precisely the effect that Urban had intended. So great were the crowds that poured into the little town to hear the pope speak that the cathedral was abandoned and the papal throne was erected instead on a high platform set in an open field outside the eastern gate. The text of his speech has not come down to us, but he seems to have begun by repeating the points made by the Byzantine delegates at Piacenza; unlike them, however, he then turned to the plight of Jerusalem,1 where Christian pilgrims were regularly being robbed and persecuted by the city’s Turkish overlords. It was now, he emphasized, the duty of the Christian West to march to the rescue of the Christian East. All those who agreed to do so “from devotion only, not from advantage of honor or gain,” would die absolved, their sins remitted. There must be the minimum of delay: the great army of the Crusade must be ready to march by the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1096.
The response to his impassioned appeal was more enthusiastic than Urban could have dared to hope. Led by Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, several hundred people—priests and monks, noblemen and peasants together—knelt before his throne and pledged themselves to take the Cross. The First Crusade was under way.
CONTRARY TO THE expectations of many, the Crusade turned out to be a resounding, if undeserved, success. On July 1, 1097, the Seljuk Turks were smashed at Dorylaeum in Anatolia; on June 3, 1098, Antioch fell to Crusader arms; and finally on July 15, 1099, amid scenes of hideous carnage, the soldiers of Christ battered their way into Jerusalem, where they slaughtered all the Muslims in the city and burned all the Jews alive in the main synagogue. Pope Urban, however, never knew of their victory. He died two weeks later, shortly before the reports reached Rome.
He was succeeded by a good-natured Tuscan monk, Paschal II. It is said that when William II—William Rufus—of England was told that the character of the new pope was not unlike that of his own Archbishop Anselm, the king exclaimed, “God’s face! Then he isn’t much good”—a remark which, though quietly memorable in its way, is hardly fair to either ecclesiastic. Paschal may have been of a gentle disposition; he may have lacked the last ounce of moral fiber. But he was no weakling: after the death of Antipope Clement he successfully disposed of three more antipopes one after another, and for the first twelve years of his pontificate he staunchly upheld the principle which had by now become the central issue in the papal-imperial struggle: the right of investiture of bishops and abbots with ring and crozier. He was, on the other hand, prepared to negotiate; and at Sutri, where he met Henry on his way to Rome for his coronation, he made him a startlingly generous offer: if the emperor would renounce his claim to the right of investiture, he in return would surrender all the properties and rights of all churches—they were, of course, mostly German—which had come to the Papacy from the empire, retaining only those revenues, such as tithes, which were strictly ecclesiastical.
The new emperor, Henry V—who had succeeded his father in 1106—was, of course, delighted at the prospect of acquiring the vast wealth of the German bishoprics and abbeys. He accepted with alacrity and hurried on to Rome. Strangely enough, however, neither he nor the pope had thought to consult the German bishops of whose property they so cheerfully planned to dispose, and when, on February 12, 1111, the terms of the agreement were read out at the coronation service, there was a storm of protest so vociferous that the service had to be abandoned. This was the signal for the arrest of pope and cardinals, which in turn proved too much for the Roman populace. They rose up against the Germans, and during the consequent street fighting Henry himself was wounded. At last he and his army retired from the Leonine City, taking pope and cardinals with him. The churchmen were confined in various neighboring castles while tempers cooled.
When Paschal emerged two months later, there was little fight left in him. On April 12, Henry forced him to concede the right of investiture of bishops and abbots between election and consecration, and on the following day the pope—who had also been obliged to swear that he would never excommunicate him—crowned him emperor. Once again there was an outcry in the Curia. This was craven capitulation, the abject surrender of everything for which the reformers had struggled so long. All that Paschal had given away was declared to have been extracted by force and therefore invalid. Away in France, Archbishop Guido of Vienne pronounced sentence of excommunication on the emperor, a sentence which was subsequently repeated by Jordan, Archbishop of Milan. The pope himself, deeply contrite, considered abdication; in 1112 he personally withdrew his earlier concessions, referring back to Gregory and Urban with the words “whatever they have condemned I condemn; whatever they have rejected I reject”—which do not even suggest a firm grasp of the matters at issue, far less an assertive personality. He withdrew them again during a Lateran synod in 1116, once more forbidding all imperial investitures. But his reputation was gone; he never recovered his old authority. More rioting in Rome drove him from the city later that same year, and he left it again when Henry arrived in 1117. He returned the following January for the last time and was dead by the end of the month.
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HIS SUCCESSOR, GELASIUS II, was to reign for a year and five days; his pontificate is worth recording only because it partook of the quality of a nightmare. Papal authority was now recognized across most of Europe; within Rome, by contrast, the pope daily took his life in his hands. By the standards of the time, he must have been already an oldish man: he had been appointed cardinal in 1088, thirty years before, and papal chancellor the following year. He had held the fort in Rome during the frequent absences of both Urban and Paschal, had accompanied the latter into captivity and had vigorously defended him at the 1116 synod. He certainly deserved a quiet ending to his days. Instead, scarcely had the tiara been set on his head than he was seized by Cencius Frangipani—head of that awesome family which was now one of the most powerful in Rome—and locked up in one of the family castles, where he was brutally beaten. An eyewitness reported that Cencius, “hissing like a huge snake … grabbed the pope by the throat … struck him with his fists, kicked him, and drew blood with his spurs … dragging him away by the hair.” Had it not been for the swift intervention of the city prefect, he might never have been seen again.
Even after his release, Gelasius was to remain in Rome for only a little over a month. On hearing of his election, an angry Henry V had hurried south from Lombardy; and the pope fled with his cardinals to his hometown of Gaeta. Henry summoned him back to Rome in the hopes of reaching an amicable settlement; the pope refused; Henry, now more exasperated than ever, countered by appointing an antipope, Gregory VIII; whereat Gelasius immediately excommunicated them both. But the emperor had the upper hand only for as long as he remained in Rome; when at last he and his army marched away, Gregory was not strong enough to maintain himself in the whole city, and he withdrew to within the Leonine Walls.
Unable to install himself in the Vatican, on July 21 Gelasius was saying Mass in the Basilica of Santa Prassede when he was once again seized by the Frangipani. This time he managed to escape on horseback. He was eventually found by his followers sitting quietly in a field, still wearing his papal vestments. He had had enough. He returned to Rome only for as long as it took him to prepare his departure from the city for good. Then, escorted by six of his cardinals, he rode by easy stages via Pisa and Genoa, Avignon and Vienne, to Cluny—where, on January 29, 1119, he died.
ONE THING WAS clear: there could be no peace in Rome until the vexed question of investiture could be settled. It was fortunate indeed that Gelasius’s successor both recognized its importance and possessed the strength of will to deal with it once and for all.
The son of Count William of Burgundy, Archbishop Guido of Vienne was related to the French, English, and German royal houses. He had been named by Pope Gelasius on his deathbed as his ideal successor, and the small minority of cardinals who had accompanied the pope to Cluny took it upon themselves to elect him there and then, crowning him at Vienne on February 9 as Calixtus (or Callistus) II. Astonishingly, their decision was retrospectively ratified by the unanimous vote of the cardinals in Rome, but by that time Calixtus was already at work, having sent envoys to negotiate with Henry V at Strasbourg. Meanwhile, he summoned a huge Council in Rheims for the end of October—it was to be attended by more than four hundred bishops—to obtain general approval for the policy he proposed to pursue.
Despite the fact that Henry also seemed anxious for a settlement, the first attempt at reconciliation failed, largely through mutual mistrust, and Calixtus took advantage of the Council in Rheims to confirm the sentence of excommunication that he had first pronounced as Archbishop of Vienne eight years before. Then, with the coming of spring, he rode south over the Alps, making a triumphal progress through Lombardy and Tuscany and entering Rome—where he was given an ecstatic reception—at the beginning of June 1120. One small preliminary problem had to be dealt with before he could settle down to the question of investiture: the Antipope Gregory was still at large. Henry had by now withdrawn his support from Gregory, who had retired to Sutri, but in April 1121 the town fell after a week’s siege and Calixtus brought the wretched antipope back to Rome. There he was paraded through the streets, mounted backward—on a camel this time—before being confined in various abbeys for the rest of his life.
Now at last the way was clear for the major challenge of Calixtus’s pontificate, and early in 1122 an embassy arrived from the emperor. Henry, they informed him, was ready for another round of talks; indeed, he had appointed a committee of twelve German princes to represent him. Calixtus dispatched three of his senior cardinals, including the future Pope Honorius II, to meet the princes at Worms, and it was there, after three weeks’ hard bargaining, that the famous concordat was agreed on September 23. Based on a model first developed in Norman England, it required the emperor to abandon his claim to invest newly elected bishops with ring and crozier, those being symbols of spiritual authority. He would, however, confer their lands upon them with a tap of his scepter, which represented temporal power. He would also guarantee to the higher clergy their freedom of election and consecration. In return Calixtus promised that canonical elections to German bishoprics and abbacies would always be held in the emperor’s presence, while in disputed elections the emperor would have the power of arbitration.
The Concordat of Worms marked the end of an important chapter in the long struggle between Church and empire. The pope had made concessions, which he recognized would be unpopular among the more inflexible of his flock; he was, however, at pains to emphasize that they were not necessarily to be accepted in principle. All he asked was that they should be tolerated for the time being in the interests of peace. He himself had no regrets; indeed, he felt nothing but pride in his achievement, which he celebrated by commissioning a series of frescoes for the Lateran.
But peace between Papacy and empire did not, alas, mean peace within Rome itself. The days of the Crescentii and the Counts of Tusculum were past; the two powerful families now confronting each other were the noble Frangipani and the far richer but relatively parvenu Pierleoni, who despite their Jewish origins had maintained a close working relationship with a number of popes since Leo IX and Gregory VII. The constant feuding between these two was to bedevil papal elections for years to come. On the death of Calixtus in 1124 the Frangipani easily won the day. The candidate favored by the Pierleoni had already been proclaimed as Celestine II, but during the service of consecration Roberto Frangipani and his followers burst into the assembly with drawn swords and insisted on the immediate acclamation of Cardinal Lamberto of Ostia. There followed a violent struggle, in the course of which Celestine was severely wounded and immediately resigned. The way was now clear for Lamberto, who was duly enthroned as Honorius II.
The Pierleoni-Frangipani rivalry was reflected in a similar breach among the Curia. On the one side, and forming the majority, were the old-school Gregorians, backed by the Pierleoni; on the other was a younger group led by the papal chancellor, Cardinal Aimeric, who had almost certainly been involved in Roberto Frangipani’s coup. Honorius belonged, of course, to the latter faction. He had been one of the cardinals who had accompanied Gelasius to France and one of the chief negotiators at Worms. A dedicated and determined reformer, he also worked hard to strengthen the position of the Church abroad, notably in Germany. In January 1130, however, he fell seriously ill, and Aimeric acted swiftly. The chancellor was well aware that the obvious successor to Honorius was Cardinal Pietro Pierleoni, who, after studying in Paris with the great Peter Abelard, had spent several years as a monk at Cluny before being appointed papal legate, first in France and then in England. His genuine piety and irreproachable Cluniac background had made him a staunch upholder of reform;2 he was also capable, strong-willed, and intensely ambitious. But he was a Pierleoni, and for Aimeric and his party that was enough. They seized the dying pontiff and carried him off to the Monastery of San Andrea, safe in the bosom of the Frangipani quarter, where they would be able to conceal his death until suitable dispositions could be made for the future. Then, on February 11, Aimeric summoned to the monastery such cardinals as he felt he could trust and began preparations for a new election.
Such a proceeding, flagrantly dishonest as it was, provoked an immediate reaction from the rest of the Curia. Hurling anathemas against “all those who would proceed to the election before the funeral of Honorius,” they nominated a commission of eight electors, to meet in the church of Sant’Adriano. The choice of this somewhat obscure church was clearly due to their natural reluctance to put themselves at the mercy of the Frangipani, but when they arrived there they found that Aimeric’s men had already taken possession of the building and fortified it against them. Furious, they turned away and gathered instead at the old Basilica of San Marco, where they settled down to await developments.
On February 13 the rumor swept through Rome that the pope was dead at last and that the news was being deliberately suppressed. An angry crowd gathered around San Andrea, and was dispersed only after the luckless Honorius had shown himself, haggard and trembling, on the balcony. It was his last public appearance; by nightfall he was dead. In theory his body should have been allowed to lie in state for three days; but since the election of a new pope could not take place before the burial of the old, Aimeric had no time for such niceties. Almost before the body was cold it was flung into a temporary grave in the monastery courtyard, and early the following morning the chancellor and those who shared his views elected Gregorio Papareschi, the Cardinal Deacon of the Church of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, to the Papacy. He was rushed to the Lateran and formally if somewhat hastily installed under the title of Innocent II; he then retreated to the Church of Santa Maria in Pallara—now San Sebastiano al Palatino—where the Frangipani could keep him out of harm’s way.
Meanwhile, at San Marco the crowd had been steadily growing. It now included some two dozen cardinals, together with most of the nobility and as many of the populace as could squeeze through the doors. When on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day the news of Innocent’s election was brought to them, there was immediate uproar. With one accord the cardinals declared the proceedings at San Andrea and the Lateran uncanonical and acclaimed Cardinal Pierleoni as their rightful pope. He accepted at once, taking the name of Anacletus II. At dawn that morning there had been no pope in Rome. By midday there were two.
INNOCENT OR ANACLETUS—it is hard to say which candidate possessed the stronger claim to the Papacy. Anacletus, there was no doubt, could boast more overall support, both among the cardinals and within the Church as a whole. On the other hand, those who had voted for Innocent, though fewer in number, had included the majority of the electoral commission of eight which had been set up by the Sacred College. The manner in which they had performed their duties was, to say the least, questionable, but then Anacletus’s own election could scarcely have been described as orthodox. It had, moreover, taken place after another pope had already been elected and installed.
One thing was certain. In Rome itself, sweetened after years of bribery by the Pierleoni, the popularity of Anacletus was overwhelming. By February 15 he and his party were in control of the Lateran, and on the sixteenth they took St. Peter’s. Here, a week later, Anacletus received his formal consecration, while Innocent had to be content with a more modest ceremony elsewhere. Day by day Anacletus entrenched himself more firmly, while his agents dispensed subsidies with an ever more generous hand, until at last his gold—supplemented, according to his enemies, by the wholesale pillage of the principal churches of Rome—found its way into the Frangipani fortress itself. Deserted by his last remaining champions, Innocent had no choice but to flee. Already by the beginning of April we find him dating his letters from Trastevere; a month later he secretly chartered two galleys on which, accompanied by all his loyal cardinals except one, he escaped down the Tiber.
His flight proved his salvation. Anacletus had bought Rome with bribes, but elsewhere in Italy popular feeling was firmly behind Innocent. In Pisa he was cheered to the echo; in Genoa the same. From there he took ship for France, and by the time he sailed into the little harbor of Saint-Gilles in Provence much of his old confidence had returned. It was well justified. When he found, awaiting him at Saint-Gilles, a deputation from Cluny with sixty horses and mules in its train ready to escort him the two hundred–odd miles to the monastery, he must have felt that, at least so far as France was concerned, his battle was as good as won. If the most influential of all French abbeys was prepared to give him its support in preference to one of its own sons, he surely had little to fear from other quarters; and when the Council of Étampes, summoned in the late summer to give a final ruling, formally declared in his favor, it merely confirmed a foregone conclusion.
France, then, was sound; but what of the empire? Here lay the key to Innocent’s ultimate success; but Lothair the Saxon, King of Germany, showed no particular eagerness to make up his mind. He was still engaged in a desperate struggle for power with Conrad of Hohenstaufen, and he had to weigh his actions with care. Besides, he had not yet been crowned emperor in Rome. To antagonize the pope who actually held the city was a step that might have dangerous implications. Innocent, however, was not unduly worried, for his case was now safely in the hands of the most powerful of all advocates and the outstanding spiritual force of the twelfth century: St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
To an objective observer in the twenty-first, safely out of range of that astonishing personal magnetism with which he effortlessly dominated all those with whom he came in contact, St. Bernard is not an attractive figure. Tall and haggard, his features clouded by the constant pain resulting from a lifetime of exaggerated physical austerities, he was consumed by a blazing religious zeal that left no room for tolerance or moderation. His public life had begun in 1115, when the Abbot of Cîteaux, the Englishman Stephen Harding, had effectively released this charismatic twenty-five-year-old monk from monastic discipline by sending him off to found a daughter house at Clairvaux in Champagne. From that moment on, almost despite himself, Bernard’s influence spread, and for the last twenty-five years of his life he was constantly on the move, preaching, persuading, arguing, debating, writing innumerable letters, and compulsively plunging into the thick of every controversy in which he believed the basic principles of Christianity to be involved.
The papal schism was just such an issue. Bernard declared himself unhesitatingly for Innocent. His reasons, as always, were emotional. Cardinal Aimeric was a close personal friend; Anacletus, on the other hand, was a product of Cluny, a monastery which Bernard detested, believing it to have betrayed its reformist ideals and to have succumbed to those very temptations of wealth and worldliness that it had been founded to eradicate. Worse still, he was of Jewish antecedents; as Bernard was later to write to Lothair, “it is to the injury of Christ that the offspring of a Jew should have seized for himself the throne of St. Peter.” The question of Christ’s and St. Peter’s own racial origins does not seem to have occurred to him.
Away in Rome, Anacletus was fully aware of the need for international recognition, but whereas his rival was able to whip up support in person he had to rely on correspondence, in which he had as yet been singularly unsuccessful. In an effort to reassure King Lothair he had even gone so far as to excommunicate Conrad, but the king had been unimpressed and had not even had the courtesy to answer his subsequent letters. In France, too, his legates were snubbed; and now, as reports reached him of more and more declarations for Innocent, he grew seriously alarmed. The weight of the opposition was far greater than he had expected; more disturbing still, it was not only the ruling princes who favored his antagonist but the Church itself. During the previous half century, thanks largely to Cluniac reforms and the influence of Hildebrand, it had developed into a strong and cohesive international authority. Simultaneously the mushroom growth of the religious orders had given it a new impetus and efficiency. Cluny under its abbot, Peter the Venerable, Prémontré under Norbert of Magdeburg—he who had persuaded Lothair to leave Anacletus’s letters unanswered—Clairvaux under St. Bernard, all were vital, positive forces. All three were united in favor of Innocent, and they carried the body of the Church with them.
So Anacletus took the only course open to him: like other desperate popes in the past, he turned to the Normans. In September 1130, just about the time when the Council of Étampes was deciding in Innocent’s favor, he left Rome for Avellino, where Roger de Hauteville, Great Count of Sicily, was awaiting him. Roger had succeeded his father and namesake in 1101. First landing in Sicily just forty years before, Roger I had in that time transformed an island at once demoralized and despairing, torn asunder by internecine wars and decaying after two centuries of misrule, into a political entity, peaceful and prosperous, in which, for the first time in history, three peoples—Norman, Greek, and Arab—and three religions—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam—were happily coexisting in mutual respect and concord. His son had inherited the two Norman duchies of Apulia and Calabria in 1127 and had received a formal investiture from Pope Honorius in the following year. His task now, as he explained to Anacletus, was to weld his three dominions into a single nation. That nation could be nothing less than a kingdom, and Roger now desperately needed a crown.
Anacletus was sympathetic. If, as now seemed likely, Roger was to be his only ally, it was plainly desirable that his position should be strengthened to the utmost. On September 27, in the papal city of Benevento, he issued a bull granting to Roger and his heirs the crown of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria, together with the Principality of Capua, the “honor” of Naples—a deliberately ambiguous expression since Naples, still technically independent and with vague Byzantine affiliations, was not the pope’s to endow—and the assistance of Benevento in time of war. In return Roger pledged his homage and fealty to Anacletus as pope, together with an annual tribute of 600 schifati, a sum equivalent to about 160 ounces of gold. And so, on Christmas Day 1130, King Roger II of Sicily rode to his coronation in Palermo. In the cathedral there awaited him the archbishop and all the Latin hierarchy of his realm, together with senior representatives of the Greek Church. Anacletus’s special envoy, the Cardinal of Santa Sabina, first anointed him with the holy oil; then Prince Robert I of Capua, his vassal-in-chief, laid the crown upon his head.
Now at last King Lothair made up his mind: he declared for Innocent. Among all the European princes, there remained to Anacletus only three adherents: King David I of Scotland, Duke William X of Aquitaine, and King Roger of Sicily. The last alone would have been enough to lose him any imperial support he might have enjoyed, for by what right could any pope, legitimate or otherwise, crown some Norman upstart king over territories which properly belonged to the empire? After Roger’s coronation there could be no more sitting on the fence; Innocent it would have to be. Yet—perhaps as much to save his face as for any other reason—Lothair still tried to impose a condition: that the right of investiture with ring and crozier, lost to the empire nine years before, should now be restored to himself and his successors.
He had reckoned without the Abbot of Clairvaux. When Innocent arrived with full retinue at Liège in March 1131 to receive the king’s homage, Bernard was with him. This was just the sort of crisis at which he excelled. Leaping from his seat, he subjected Lothair to a merciless castigation before the entire assembly, calling upon him then and there to renounce his pretensions and pay unconditional homage to the rightful pope. As always, his words—or, more probably, the force of his personality behind them—had their effect. This was Lothair’s first encounter with Bernard; it is unlikely that he had ever been spoken to in such a way before. He was not lacking in moral fiber, but this time he seems instinctively to have realized that his position was no longer tenable. He gave in, making his formal submission to Innocent and reinforcing it with an undertaking that the pope probably found even more valuable: to lead him, at the head of a German army, to Rome.
IT WAS A year and a half before Lothair kept his promise. Unrest in Germany delayed his departure, but by the summer of 1132 it was plain to him that the key to his domestic problems lay in the earliest possible acquisition of the imperial crown and the prestige it conferred; and so in August, with his queen, Richenza of Nordheim, and a force that amounted to little more than an armed escort, he set off over the mountains and into Italy.
He found Innocent waiting for him near Piacenza. The pope had managed to drum up a degree of local support; the imperial army on the last stage of the journey promised to be about two thousand strong. It was still a disappointing figure, but it was at least not shameful. What it now principally lacked was sea support. Pisa and Genoa in particular, the two great maritime republics on whose assistance Innocent had relied, could at that moment see no further than Corsica and Sardinia, over which they had long been squabbling; without their help, the imperial force would stand little chance in the face of a concerted Sicilian attack. But meanwhile the autumn rains were beginning, the roads rapidly turning to mud, and Lothair decided to postpone his coronation till the spring. By then, perhaps, the warring republics might be persuaded to settle their differences.
The fact that they did so was largely due to the Abbot of Clairvaux, who appeared in Italy soon after Christmas; by March, Bernard and Innocent together had alternately hectored and flattered the Pisans and Genoese into a truce, and a month later they were back again at Lothair’s camp, ready for the advance on Rome. The army was still sadly unimpressive, but imperial agents reported that King Roger was fully occupied with a rebellion on the part of his mainland vassals; he would be offering no serious opposition.
On the last day of April 1133 the emperor-to-be drew up his troops before the Basilica of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura. For some days already Rome had been in turmoil. Pisan and Genoese ships had sailed up the Tiber and were now lying threateningly under the walls; and their presence, aided by exaggerated rumors of the size of the oncoming German host, had induced many Romans to make a hurried change of allegiance. Much of the city thus lay open to Innocent and Lothair. They were received at the gates by the Frangipani nobles and their minions, who had never wavered in their opposition to Anacletus, and led in triumph to their respective palaces: the king and queen to Otto III’s old imperial residence on the Aventine, the pope to the Lateran.
But the right bank of the Tiber, with the Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s, still remained firmly in the hands of Anacletus; and Anacletus was not prepared to give in. Lothair, conscious of his own weakness, proposed negotiations, but the antipope’s reply remained the same as it had always been: let the whole question of the disputed election be reopened before an international ecclesiastical tribunal. If such a tribunal, properly constituted, were to declare against him, he would accept its decision. Till then, he would stay in Rome, where he belonged. Left to himself, Lothair would probably have been ready to accept this suggestion. Anything, in his view, would have been better than this continued schism; rival popes might lead to rival emperors, and in such an event his own position might be far from secure. But by now he had been joined in Rome by Bernard; and with Bernard there could be no question of compromise. If Anacletus could not be brought to his knees, he must be ignored. And so it was not at St. Peter’s but at the Lateran that Innocent was reinstalled on the papal throne and there—on June 4, 1133, with as much ceremony and circumstance as he could command—that he crowned Lothair Emperor of the West and Richenza his empress.
For the second time in half a century one putative pope had performed an imperial coronation while another had sat a mile or two away, impotent and fuming. After the previous occasion Gregory VII had been saved only by the arrival, not a moment too soon, of Robert Guiscard at the head of some thirty thousand troops. Anacletus knew that he could expect nothing from that quarter; the King of Sicily, though remaining his loyal champion, was otherwise engaged. Fortunately, rescue was unnecessary. Powerless the antipope might have been, but he was not in any physical danger. No imperial attack on the right bank would be possible without control of the two bridges spanning the river at the Tiber Island, and all approaches to those were effectively dominated by the old Theater of Marcellus, now the principal fortress of the Pierleoni. In the circumstances, the emperor had neither the strength nor the inclination to take the offensive. Now that his immediate aims were achieved, he thought only of returning to Germany as soon as possible. Within a few days of his coronation he and his army were gone and the Pisan and Genoese ships had returned down the river to the open sea.
For Pope Innocent, Lothair’s departure was nothing short of calamitous. At once his remaining supporters in the city began to fall away. Only the Frangipani remained loyal; but they could not hold Rome unaided. By July the agents of Anacletus had everywhere resumed their activity, and the gold was beginning to flow freely once again from the seemingly inexhaustible Pierleoni coffers. In August Innocent found himself forced once again into exile. He slipped unobtrusively from his diocese, just as he had three years before, and made his way, by slow stages, to Pisa and to safety.
Meanwhile the schism rumbled on. It had now become clear to Lothair that the antipope could never be dislodged from Rome while the King of Sicily protected him. In the autumn of 1135 an embassy from the Byzantine Emperor John II Comnenus arrived at the imperial court. John had his own reasons for wishing to eliminate Roger: his empire had never given up its claim to South Italy, and the rich Byzantine cities of Dalmatia constituted a temptation to raiding and freebooting which Sicilian sea captains had not always been able to resist. He now offered Lothair generous financial backing for a campaign to crush their common enemy once and for all.
The emperor needed little persuading. Thanks largely to the new prestige conferred upon him by the imperial crown, the situation in Germany had improved over the past two years, and his Hohenstaufen rivals had been forced into submission. This time he would have no difficulty in raising a respectable army. He foresaw little trouble from Anacletus. The antipope’s last remaining North Italian stronghold, Milan, had gone over to Innocent in June, and the schism was now confined to the Sicilian kingdom and Rome itself. Once Roger was out of the way, Anacletus would be left without a single ally and would be obliged to yield. Lothair replied to John, accepting his offer.
BY HIGH SUMMER Lothair’s army was finally gathered at Würzburg. It was on a very different scale from the sad little company that had marched with him to Rome in 1132. In the forefront were the emperor’s son-in-law Duke Henry the Proud of Bavaria, and his old enemy and rival Conrad of Hohenstaufen, whom Lothair had confirmed in possession of his lands in return for a promise to participate in the coming campaign. It also boasted an ecclesiastical contingent which included no fewer than five archbishops, fourteen bishops, and an abbot. When it reached Bologna, Lothair split it into two. He himself proposed to continue through Ravenna to Ancona and thence to follow the coast southward into Apulia; meanwhile the Duke of Bavaria, with 3,000 knights and some 12,000 infantry, was to press down through Tuscany and the Papal State, if possible reestablishing Innocent in Rome and assuring himself of the Monastery of Monte Cassino before meeting his father-in-law at Bari for Whitsun.
The plan succeeded well enough, and it was a joyful and triumphant German congregation that assembled on Whitsunday, May 30, 1137, at the Basilica of San Nicola in Bari, to hear a High Mass of Thanksgiving celebrated by the pope himself—even though a Sicilian garrison was still holding out in the citadel. There was, perhaps, a measure of surprise that King Roger had made no effort to oppose the invaders, but the king knew that however far Lothair might advance, sooner or later he would be driven back, as so many invading armies had been driven back before, by sickness, the relentless summer heat, or the need to reach the Alps before the first snowfalls rendered them impassable. Past experience had shown that although such expeditions could be highly effective in the short term, the results they achieved seldom lasted for very long after their departure. The only sensible course, Roger believed, was to encourage the emperor to extend and exhaust himself to the limit.
Events soon proved him right. After the capitulation of the Bari garrison—whose tenacity he punished by hanging a number of them from gibbets all around the city and flinging the rest into the sea—Lothair decided against any further advance down the coast. There were several reasons for his decision. He was seventy-one years old and tired; besides, the whole situation had suddenly gone sour. Relations between the Germans and the papal retinue were deteriorating fast: the army, too, had been away ten months and was impatient to be home. Where Sicily was concerned, he could at least feel that he had saved his honor. He had not perhaps crushed King Roger as completely as he had hoped, but he had surely dealt him a blow from which he would take long to recover. It was a pity about Pope Innocent. Although one of the purposes of the expedition had been to reinstall him in Rome, the city had been studiously bypassed and he was as far from the Throne of St. Peter as ever. But henceforth the pope would have to fight his own battles.
Meanwhile, the old emperor could feel his life ebbing away. Though he marched with all the speed of which his dispirited army was capable, it was mid-November before he reached the foothills of the Alps. His companions implored him to winter there. The sickness was daily increasing its hold on him; it would be folly, they pointed out, to go any farther so late in the year. But Lothair knew that he could not afford to wait. With all the determination of the dying, he pressed on; but at the little village of Breitenwang in the Tyrol his strength deserted him. He was carried to a poor peasant’s hut, and there, on December 3, 1137, he died.
Just seven and a half weeks later, Anacletus followed him to the grave. St. Bernard had already made contact with Roger of Sicily in an attempt to detach him from the antipope; but it was Anacletus’s death that effectively brought the schism to an end. A short-lived successor, the so-called Victor IV, resigned after a few months, and Roger, freed now of the commitments that had cast such a blight on the first seven years of his reign, saw no point in continuing hostilities with the Holy See. He made public recognition of Innocent and ordered all his subjects to do likewise. It is hard to see what more he could have done, but the pope unaccountably refused a reconciliation, and at a Lateran Council on April 8, 1139, pronounced a renewed sentence of excommunication on the King of Sicily, his sons, and all those of his bishops whom Anacletus had consecrated. Then, still more unaccountably, he marched southward from Rome with his old ally Prince Robert of Capua and perhaps a thousand knights. Halfhearted negotiations failed and gave way to open hostilities; and at the little town of Galluccio a Sicilian army suddenly attacked. Robert managed to escape, but Innocent was not so lucky. That evening, July 22, 1139, the pope, his cardinals, his archives, and his treasure were all in the hands of the king, the greatest humiliation suffered by the Papacy since Robert Guiscard had annihilated the army of Leo IX at Civitate, eighty-six years before.
It was always a mistake for popes to meet Normans on the battlefield. Just as Leo had had to come to terms with his captors after Civitate, so now Innocent was forced to bow to the inevitable. On July 25, at Mignano, he formally confirmed Roger in his Kingdom of Sicily, with the overlordship of all Italy south of the Garigliano River. He then said Mass and left the church a free man. In the ensuing charter he managed to save a few shreds of the papal honor; but nothing could disguise the fact that, for him and his party, the treaty of Mignano spelled unconditional—or almost unconditional—surrender.
ON SEPTEMBER 24, 1143, Pope Innocent died in Rome. His long struggle with Anacletus had cost him dearly. Even his allies had proved a mixed blessing. Lothair, once safely crowned, had showed him scant consideration, Henry the Proud still less. Bernard of Clairvaux had been loyal but, deliberately or not, had seemed bent on stealing his thunder at every opportunity. His final triumph had been made possible only by the death of Anacletus; and almost at once it had been turned to dust by the rout at Galluccio. He had accepted this humiliation as gracefully as he could and had made terms with the Sicilian king, but he had been ill repaid. Within a year Roger, emboldened by the years of schism when he had done what he liked and Anacletus had never dared take issue with him, was acting more arrogantly than ever: creating new dioceses, appointing new bishops, barring the pope’s envoys from entering his kingdom without his consent, and even refusing to allow Latin churchmen in his dominions to obey papal summonses to Rome.
Even that was not all. For more than a century, a movement toward republican self-government had been gathering momentum among the cities and towns of Italy. In Rome itself successive popes and the old aristocracy had done their best to save their city from the general contagion, but the recent schism had weakened their hold. Innocent in particular had never enjoyed general popularity. Coming from Trastevere, he had always been considered one degree less Roman than Anacletus, and he was known to be a good deal less generous. When, therefore, they learned that he had made a separate peace with their enemy to the south, the Romans seized the opportunity to denounce the temporal power of the pope, revive the Senate on the Capitol, and declare a republic. Innocent resisted as best he could, but he was an old man—probably well over seventy—and the effort was too much for him. A few weeks later he was dead.
He was buried in a huge porphyry sarcophagus from the Castel Sant’Angelo which was believed to have formerly contained the bones of the Emperor Hadrian; but after a disastrous fire in the early fourteenth century his remains were transferred to the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which he himself had rebuilt just before his death. There, immortalized in the great apse mosaic, he stares down at us from the conch, his church clutched in his hands, a strangely wistful expression in his sad, tired eyes.
1. Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands since its capture by the Caliph Omar in 638, but for most of the intervening period Christian pilgrims had been freely admitted and allowed to worship as and where they wished. The city had been taken by the Seljuk Turks in 1077.
2. Accusations were made against him from time to time by such robust prelates as Manfred of Mantua and Arnulf of Lisieux (who actually wrote a book called Invectives) to the effect that he seduced nuns, slept with his sister, and so on; but these can be discounted as being simply the normal, healthy Church polemic to be expected at times of schism.