The next ten years saw no fewer than four popes in Rome. The first, Celestine II, detested King Roger and all he stood for and refused to ratify the Treaty of Mignano; it was a foolish policy, which he survived just long enough to regret. His representatives had been obliged to go cap in hand to Palermo before he died. Nor was his successor, Lucius II, any more fortunate. During his brief pontificate the Roman commune restored the Senate as a working body, with powers to elect magistrates and even to strike its own coinage. Serious fighting broke out once again in Rome. Lucius unwisely decided to take the offensive and while leading an armed attack on the Capitol was hit by a heavy stone. Mortally wounded, he was carried by the Frangipani to Gregory the Great’s old monastery of St. Andrew on the Caelian Hill; and there he died on February 15, 1145, after less than a year on the throne.
Eugenius III was elected on the same day to succeed him. His actual election, held on safe Frangipani territory, was smooth enough, but when he tried to proceed from the Lateran to St. Peter’s for his consecration, he found that the commune had barred his way; and three days later he fled the city. The speed of his flight surprised no one; indeed, the only surprising thing about Eugenius was that he should have been elected in the first place. A former monk of Clairvaux and disciple of St. Bernard, he was a simple character, gentle and retiring—not at all, men thought, the material of which popes were made. Even Bernard himself, when he heard the news, made no secret of his disapproval, writing to the entire Curia:
May God forgive you what you have done! … What reason or counsel, when the Supreme Pontiff was dead, made you rush upon a mere rustic, lay hands on him in his refuge, wrest from his hands the axe, pick or hoe, and lift him to a throne?
To Eugenius himself he was equally outspoken:
Thus does the finger of God raise up the poor out of the dust and lift up the beggar from the dunghill, that he may sit with princes and inherit the throne of glory.
It seems an unfortunate choice of metaphor, and it says much for the new pope’s gentleness and patience that he showed no resentment; but Bernard was, after all, his spiritual father, and in the months to come he was to need his old master as badly as he had ever needed him in his life—for he was now called upon to summon the Second Crusade.
It was made necessary by the fall of the Christian County of Edessa. Edessa, now the modern Turkish city of Urfa, was the first to be established of all the Crusader states of the Levant; it dated from the year 1098, when Baldwin of Boulogne had left the main army of the First Crusade and struck off to the east to found a principality of his own on the banks of the Euphrates. He had not stayed there long—two years later he had succeeded his brother as King of Jerusalem—but Edessa had continued as a semi-independent Christian state until, on Christmas Eve, 1144, it was conquered by an Arab army under Imad ed-Din Zengi, Atabeg of Mosul. The news of its fall horrified all Christendom. How, after less than half a century, had Cross once again given way to Crescent? Was this disaster not a clear manifestation of the wrath of God?
Although Edessa had fallen nearly eight weeks before the death of Pope Lucius, Eugenius had been on the throne over six months before he was officially notified and began to consider the implications of a Crusade. The first question to be decided was that of the leadership. Among the princes of the West, he could see only one suitable candidate. Conrad, King of the Romans—he had not received his imperial coronation—was beset with his own troubles in Germany; King Stephen of England had had a civil war on his hands for six years already. King Roger of Sicily was, for any number of reasons, out of the question. The only possible choice was King Louis VII of France.
Louis asked nothing better. He was one of Nature’s pilgrims. Though still only twenty-four, he had about him an aura of joyless piety which made him look and seem far older than his years—and irritated to distraction his beautiful and high-spirited young wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. At Christmas 1145 he announced to his assembled vassals his determination to take the Cross. Their reaction was disappointing, but Louis had made up his mind. If he could not fill the hearts and minds of his vassals with crusading fire, he knew precisely who could. He sent for the Abbot of Clairvaux.
To Bernard, here was a cause after his own heart. Exhausted as he was, he responded to the call with all that extraordinary fervor that had made him the dominant spiritual voice in all Christendom. Willingly he agreed to address the assembly that the king had summoned for the following Easter at Vézelay. At once the magic of his name began to do its work, and men and women from every corner of France poured into the little town. Since there were far too many to be packed into the cathedral, a great wooden platform was hastily erected on the hillside; there, on Palm Sunday morning, with the king at his side—displaying on his breast the cross which Pope Eugenius had sent him in token of his decision—Bernard made the speech of his life.
The text of his exhortation has not come down to us; we are told, however, that his voice rang out across the meadow “like a celestial organ” and that as he spoke the crowd, silent at first, began to cry out for crosses of their own. Bundles of them, cut in rough cloth, had already been prepared for distribution; when the supply was exhausted, the abbot flung off his own robe and began tearing it into strips to make more. Others followed his example, and he and his helpers were still stitching as night fell.
It was an astonishing achievement. No one else in Europe could have done it. Yet, as events were soon to tell, it were better had it not been done. The Second Crusade was to turn out an ignominious fiasco. First, the Crusaders decided to attack Damascus—the only Arab state in the whole Levant hostile to Imad ed-Din and his son Nur ed-Din, who had by now succeeded him. As such, it could and should have been an invaluable ally of the Franks; by attacking it, they drove it straight into the arms of their enemy. Second, they pitched their camp along the eastern section of the walls, devoid alike of shade and water. Third, they lost their nerve. On July 28, 1148, just five days after the opening of the campaign, they gave the order for retreat.
There is no part of the Syrian desert more shattering to the spirit than the dark gray, featureless expanse of sand and basalt that lies between Damascus and Tiberias. Withdrawing across it in the height of the Arabian summer, the remorseless sun and scorching desert wind full in their faces, harried incessantly by mounted Arab archers and leaving in their wake a stinking trail of dead men and horses, the Crusaders must have felt despair heavy upon them. Their losses, in both men and material, had been immense. Worst of all was the shame. Having traveled for the best part of a year, often in conditions of mortal danger, having suffered agonies of thirst, hunger, and sickness and the bitterest extremes of heat and cold, this once-glorious army, which had purported to enshrine all the ideals of the Christian West, had given up the whole thing after just four days, having regained not one inch of Muslim territory. It was the ultimate humiliation—which neither they nor their enemies would forget.
POPE EUGENIUS, MEANWHILE, had his own problems to contend with. The most troubling of these was the political situation in Rome, where the republican movement, which had already claimed the life of his predecessor, was now gaining further strength thanks to the teachings of an Augustinian monk from Lombardy whose influence in the city was growing almost daily.
His name was Arnold of Brescia. In his youth he had studied in the schools of Paris—almost certainly under Abelard at Notre Dame—where he had been thoroughly imbued with the new scholasticism, essentially a movement away from the old mystical approach to spiritual matters and toward a spirit of logical, rational inquiry. To the medieval Papacy, radical ideas of this sort would have seemed subversive enough, but Arnold combined with them a still more unwelcome feature: a passionate hatred for the temporal power of the Church. For him the state was, and must always be, supreme; the civil law, based on the laws of ancient Rome, must prevail over the canon; the pope should divest himself of all worldly pomp, renounce his powers and privileges, and revert to the poverty and simplicity of the early Fathers. Only thus could the Church reestablish contact with the humble masses among its flock. As John of Salisbury wrote:
Arnold himself was frequently to be heard on the Capitol and in various assemblies of the people. He had already publicly denounced the cardinals, maintaining that their College, beset as it was with pride, avarice, hypocrisy, and shame, was not the Church of God but a house of commerce and a den of thieves.… Even the pope himself was other than what he professed: rather than an apostolic shepherd of souls, he was a man of blood who maintained his authority by fire and sword, a tormentor of churches and oppressor of the innocent whose only actions were for the gratification of his lust and for the emptying of other men’s coffers in order that his own might be filled.
Naturally, the Papacy had fought back. Naturally too, it had used the Abbot of Clairvaux as its champion. In consequence, as early as 1140 Arnold had been condemned, together with his old master Abelard, at the Council of Sens and had been expelled from France. By 1146, however, he was back in Rome, and the Roman Senate, fired by his blazing piety and recognizing in his ideas the spiritual counterpart of its own republican aspirations, had welcomed him with open arms. Presumably as a sop to republican feeling, Eugenius had then released Arnold from his excommunication and ordered him to lead a life of penitence, but the action had done little to improve the pope’s popularity. In the spring of 1147, with his cardinals and Curia, he had traveled to France to give his blessing to the preparations for the coming Crusade. There and in Germany he had been received with every possible honor; only in Rome, it seemed, was he reviled. Back in Italy the following year and finding Arnold of Brescia as obstreperous as ever, he renewed the sentence of excommunication but did not for the moment attempt a return to the city.
Queen Eleanor had accompanied her husband, Louis VII, on the Crusade. It had not improved their marriage. Eleanor had made no secret of the fact that her lugubrious husband bored her to distraction and had indeed developed a relationship with her uncle, Prince Raymond of Antioch, which was generally suspected of going considerably beyond the avuncular. When she and Louis landed in Italy on their return from the Levant, they were barely on speaking terms. They called on the pope in Tusculum, the nearest town to Rome in which he could safely install himself. Eugenius was a gentle, kindhearted man who hated to see people unhappy, and the sight of the royal pair, oppressed by the double failure of the Crusade and of their marriage, caused him deep personal distress. John of Salisbury, who was employed in the papal Curia at the time, has left us a curiously touching account of the pope’s attempts at a reconciliation:
He commanded, under pain of anathema, that no word should be spoken against their marriage and that it should not be dissolved under any pretext whatever. This ruling plainly delighted the King, for he loved the Queen passionately, in an almost childish way. The Pope made them sleep in the same bed, which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own; and daily during their brief visit he strove by friendly converse to restore the love between them. He heaped gifts upon them; and when the time came for their departure he could not hold back his tears.
Those tears were perhaps made all the more copious by the knowledge that his efforts had been in vain. Had Eugenius known Eleanor better, he would have seen from the start that her mind was made up; for the time being, however, she was prepared to keep up appearances, accompanying her husband to Rome, where they were cordially received by the Senate and where Louis prostrated himself as usual at all the principal shrines, and so back over the Alps to Paris. It was to be another two and a half years before her marriage was finally dissolved—St. Bernard having persuaded Eugenius to modify his earlier attitude—on grounds of consanguinity; but she was still young, and only on the threshold of the astonishing career in which, as wife of one of England’s greatest kings and mother of two of its worst, she was to influence the course of European history for over half a century.
IN DECEMBER 1149, with the aid of an escort of Sicilian troops, Pope Eugenius at last returned to Rome, but it was no use: the prevailing atmosphere of open hostility soon persuaded him to leave again. He then entered into correspondence with King Conrad. He knew that the commune had suggested that Conrad should come to Rome and take it over as the capital of a new-style Roman Empire, so it could hardly refuse if the king were to come to the city for his coronation. Conrad, however, never did. He died in February 1152, before he could take up the pope’s invitation. Eugenius had no choice but to transfer his attentions to Conrad’s nephew and heir Frederick of Hohenstaufen, known as Barbarossa.
Now about thirty-two, Frederick seemed to his German contemporaries the very nonpareil of Teutonic chivalry. Tall and broad-shouldered, attractive rather than handsome, he had eyes that twinkled so brightly under his thick mop of reddish brown hair that, according to one chronicler, he always seemed on the point of laughter. But beneath that easygoing exterior there lurked a will of steel, an utter dedication to a single objective. He never forgot that he was the successor of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, and he made no secret of his determination to restore the empire to its former glory.
Frederick responded to the pope at once, proposing a treaty by which to regularize their future relations, and the resulting agreement was duly signed at Constance. By its terms Frederick promised to subject the Romans to papal control, while Eugenius undertook to crown him in Rome at his convenience—but once again the ceremony never took place as planned. This time it was Eugenius who died, in July 1153 at Tivoli. Though never a great pope, he had revealed a firmness of character which few had suspected at the time of his election. Like so many of his predecessors, he had been forced to spend money freely to buy support among the Romans, yet he had always remained personally incorruptible; his gentleness and unassuming ways had earned him love and respect of a kind that cannot be bought for gold. Till the day of his death he continued to wear, under his pontifical robes, the coarse white habit of a Cistercian monk. His successor, the immensely aged Anastasius IV, survived his election by only eighteen months and was followed by a man who was to prove to Frederick a far more formidable antagonist: the Englishman Nicholas Breakspear, who took the title of Hadrian IV.
When he was consecrated on December 4, 1154, Hadrian was about fifty-five. He had grown up in St. Albans but, having for some reason been refused admission into the local monastery, while still little more than a boy had taken himself off to France. There he had joined the canons regular of St. Rufus in Avignon, of whose house he eventually became abbot, gaining a reputation as an unremittingly strict disciplinarian. Back in Rome, thanks to his eloquence and his ability—and, perhaps, to his outstanding good looks—he had been spotted by Pope Eugenius. Fortunately for him, the pope was a convinced Anglophile; he once told John of Salisbury that he found the English admirably fitted to perform any task they turned their hand to, and were thus to be preferred to all other races—except, he added, when frivolity got the better of them. Frivolity, however, does not seem to have been one of Nicholas’s failings. In 1152 he had been sent as papal legate to Norway, there to reorganize and reform the Church throughout Scandinavia. Two years later he had returned, his mission accomplished with such distinction that, on Anastasius’s death the following December, the energetic, forceful Englishman was unanimously elected to succeed him.
There could have been no wiser choice, for energy and force were desperately needed. At the time of Hadrian’s accession Frederick Barbarossa had already crossed the Alps on his first Italian campaign. On his arrival in Rome he would be sure to demand his imperial coronation; but even if he were to receive it, there was little possibility that the pope would ever be able to trust him as an ally. Indeed, with his known absolutist views, Frederick was unlikely to prove anything but a constant anxiety to the Holy See. Still more alarming was the situation in Rome itself, where Arnold of Brescia was now, to all intents and purposes, master of the city. Pope Eugenius, an ascetic who may perhaps have harbored some secret sympathy for Arnold, had allowed him to return; Pope Anastasius had turned a deaf ear to his thunderings. But Pope Hadrian was a man of a very different stamp. When, on his accession, he found himself confined by Arnold’s supporters to St. Peter’s and the Leonine City, he had at first merely ordered the agitator to leave Rome; but when, predictably, Arnold had taken no notice and had indeed allowed his followers to attack the venerable Cardinal Guido of Santa Pudenziana as he was walking down the Via Sacra on his way to the Vatican, the pope played his trump card. Early in 1155, for the first time in the history of Christendom, the entire city of Rome was laid under an interdict.
It was an act of breathtaking courage. A foreigner, who had been pope only a few weeks and was able to rely on little or no popular support, had dared by a single decree to close all the churches of Rome. Exceptions were made for the baptism of infants and the absolution of the dying; otherwise all sacraments and ceremonies were forbidden. No Masses could be said, no marriages solemnized; dead bodies could not even be buried in consecrated ground. In the days when religion still constituted an integral part of every man’s life, the effect of such a moral blockade was immeasurable. Besides, Easter was approaching. The prospect of the greatest feast of the Christian year passing uncelebrated was bleak enough, but without the annual influx of pilgrims, one of the principal sources of the city’s revenue, it was bleaker still. For a little while the Romans held out; but by the Wednesday of Holy Week they could bear it no longer and marched on the Capitol. The senators saw that they were beaten. Arnold and his followers were expelled; the interdict was lifted; the church bells once again pealed out their message; and on Sunday, as he had always intended to do, Pope Hadrian IV celebrated Easter at the Lateran.
Frederick Barbarossa, meanwhile, kept the feast at Pavia, where on the same day he was crowned with the traditional Iron Crown of Lombardy. His subsequent descent through Tuscany was so fast that it seemed to the Roman Curia positively threatening. Henry IV’s treatment of Gregory VII seventy years before had not been forgotten, and several of the older cardinals could still remember how in 1111 Henry V had laid hands on Pope Paschal in St. Peter’s itself. In all the recent reports now circulating about the new King of the Romans, there was nothing to suggest that he would not be fully capable of similar conduct. No wonder the Curia began to feel alarm.
Hurriedly Hadrian sent two of his cardinals north to the imperial camp. They found it at San Quirico d’Orcia near Siena and were cordially received. Then, as an earnest of his goodwill, they asked Frederick for help in laying hands on Arnold of Brescia, who had taken refuge with some local barons. Frederick readily obliged; he detested Arnold’s radical views almost as much as the pope himself and welcomed this new opportunity to show his power. Sending a body of troops to the castle, he had one of the barons seized and held as a hostage until Arnold himself was delivered. The fugitive was immediately given up to the papal authorities; and the cardinals, reassured, applied themselves to their next task: to make arrangements for the first, critical interview between pope and king.
The meeting was fixed for June 9 at Campo Grosso, near Sutri. It began auspiciously enough with Hadrian, escorted by a great company of German barons sent forward by Frederick to greet him, riding in solemn procession to the imperial camp. But now trouble began. At this point, according to custom, the king should have advanced to lead in the pope’s horse by the bridle and to hold the stirrup while its rider dismounted; he did not do so. For a moment Hadrian seemed to hesitate. Then, dismounting by himself, he walked slowly across to the throne which had been prepared for him and sat down. Now at last Frederick stepped forward, kissed the pope’s feet, and rose to receive the traditional kiss of peace in return; but this time it was Hadrian who held back. The king, he pointed out, had denied him a service which his predecessors had always rendered to the Supreme Pontiff. Until this omission was rectified, there could be no kiss of peace.
Frederick objected that it was no part of his duty to act as a papal groom; but Hadrian would not be shaken. He knew that what appeared on the surface to be a minor point of protocol concealed in reality something infinitely more important—a public act of defiance that struck at the very root of the relationship between empire and Papacy. Suddenly and surprisingly, Frederick gave in. He ordered his camp to be moved a little further south; and there, on the morning of June 11, the events of two days before were restaged. The king advanced to meet the pope, led his horse in by the bridle, and then, firmly holding the stirrup, helped him to dismount. Once again Hadrian settled himself on his throne; the kiss of peace was duly bestowed; and conversations began.
Hadrian and Frederick would never entirely trust each other, but the ensuing discussions seem to have been amicable enough. The terms agreed to at Constance were confirmed. Neither party would enter into separate negotiations with Byzantium, Sicily, or the Roman Senate. Frederick would defend all papal interests, while Hadrian in return would excommunicate all enemies of the empire who after three warnings persisted in their opposition. The two then rode on together toward Rome.
FROM THE SIDE of the Papacy there was no longer any objection to the imperial coronation. The ceremony, however, had not been performed since the establishment of the Roman commune; how would Rome itself now greet its emperor-to-be? It was an open question, and Frederick’s recent move against Arnold of Brescia had made it more problematical still; but he and Hadrian were not kept long in suspense. While they were still some distance from the city, they were met by a deputation sent out by the Senate to greet them and to spell out the conditions on which they would be received. Their spokesman began with a bombastic and patronizing speech, suggesting that Rome alone had made the empire what it was and that the emperor would therefore do well to consider his moral obligations to the city—obligations which apparently included a sworn guarantee of its future liberty and the ex gratia payment of five thousand pounds of gold.
The spokesman was still in full spate when Frederick interrupted him to point out that all Rome’s ancient glory and traditions had now passed, with the empire itself, to Germany. He had come only to claim what was rightfully his. He would naturally defend Rome as necessary, but he saw no need for any formal guarantees. As for gifts of money, he would bestow them when and where he pleased. His quiet assurance took the delegates off their guard. Stammering that they must return to the capital for instructions, they took their leave. As soon as they were gone, pope and king held an urgent consultation. Hadrian, with his experience of the Senate, had no doubt that trouble was to be expected. He advised the immediate dispatch of a body of troops to occupy the Leonine City by night. Even with this precaution, he pointed out, the danger would not be entirely averted. If they wanted to avoid bloodshed, he and Frederick would have to move quickly.
The date was Friday, June 17, 1155. Such was the urgency of the situation that Hadrian decided not even to wait for the following Sunday, as he would normally have done. Instead, at dawn on Saturday, Frederick rode down from Monte Mario and entered the Leonine City, already occupied by his troops. The pope, who had arrived an hour or two previously, was awaiting him on the steps of St. Peter’s. They entered the basilica together, a throng of German knights following behind. Hadrian himself celebrated Mass; and there, over the tomb of the Apostle, he hurriedly girded the sword of St. Peter to Frederick’s side and laid the imperial crown on his head. As soon as the ceremony was done the emperor, still wearing the crown, rode back to his camp outside the walls, his huge retinue following on foot. The pope, meanwhile, took refuge in the Vatican to await developments.
It was still only nine in the morning, and the Senate was assembling on the Capitol to decide how best to prevent the coronation when the news arrived that it had already taken place. Furious to find themselves outwitted and outmaneuvered, they sprang to arms; soon one mob was pressing across the Ponte Sant’Angelo into the Leonine City while another, having crossed the river further downstream at the island, advanced northward through Trastevere. The day was growing hotter. The Germans, tired by their march through the night and the excitement of the past few hours, wanted to sleep and celebrate. Instead, they were ordered to prepare at once for battle. For the second time that day Frederick entered Rome, but he wore his coronation robes no longer. This time he had his armor on.
All afternoon and evening the fighting continued; night had fallen before the imperial troops had driven the last of the insurgents back across the bridges. Losses had been heavy on both sides. Bishop Otto of Freising, who was probably an eyewitness, reported that among the Romans almost a thousand were slain or drowned in the Tiber and another six hundred taken captive. The Senate had paid a high price for its arrogance. But the emperor too had bought his crown dearly. His victory had not even gained him entrance into the ancient city, for the sun rose the next morning to show all the Tiber bridges blocked and the gates barricaded. Neither he nor his army was prepared for a siege; the heat of the Roman summer, which for a century and a half had consistently undermined the morale of successive invading armies, was once again beginning to take its toll, with outbreaks of malaria and dysentery among his men. The only sensible course was to withdraw, and—since the Vatican was clearly no longer safe for the Papacy—to take pope and Curia with him. On June 19 he struck camp again and led his army up into the Sabine Hills. A month later he was heading back to Germany, leaving Hadrian powerless at Tivoli.
The story of the coronation of Frederick Barbarossa is almost told, but not quite. Apart from the emperor who was crowned and the pope who crowned him, there is a third character who, although he was not in Rome on that fateful day, influenced the course of events as much as either of them. No record exists to tell us exactly when or where Arnold of Brescia suffered his execution; we know only the manner in which he met his death. Condemned by a Church tribunal on charges of heresy and rebellion, he remained firm to the end and walked calmly to the scaffold without a trace of fear; and as he knelt to make his last confession, we read that the executioners themselves could not restrain their tears. They hanged him nonetheless; then they cut him down and burned the body. Finally, in order to ensure that no relics were left for veneration by the people, they threw his ashes into the Tiber. For a martyr, misguided or not, there could be no greater honor.
—
POPE HADRIAN, ON the other hand, felt betrayed. His southern frontier was under attack by King William of Sicily,1 and he had hoped that in accordance with the terms agreed on at Constance the newly crowned emperor would march against him. Frederick himself would have been perfectly ready to do so if only he could have carried his knights with him, but they were determined to leave the south and return at once to Germany, and he knew he could not press them too far.
Friendless and alone, unable to return to Rome since Frederick’s coronation, Hadrian spent the winter with his Curia at Benevento. As far as he was concerned, the emperor, his one hope, had shown himself to have feet of clay. Meanwhile, the situation in the South was fast deteriorating. King William, having overcome opposition from the Byzantines and his own rebel subjects, was on the march toward the papal frontier. As he approached, Hadrian sent most of his cardinals away to Campania—mainly for their greater safety but also, perhaps, for another reason. He knew that he would now have to come to terms with William. Die-hard cardinals had scuppered too many potential agreements in the past; if he was to save anything from a coming disaster, he would need the utmost freedom to negotiate.
As soon as the vanguard of the Sicilian army appeared over the hills, the pope sent his chancellor, Roland of Siena, and two other cardinals who had remained with him to greet the king and to bid him, in the name of St. Peter, to cease from further hostilities. They were received with due courtesy, and formal talks began at Benevento. The going was not easy. The Sicilians were in a position of strength and drove a hard bargain, but the papal side fought every inch of the way. It was not until June 18, 1156, that agreement was finally reached. William gained papal recognition over a far larger body of territory than had ever been granted before, on payment of an annual tribute. In return he acknowledged the pope’s feudal suzerainty; but there could be no doubt as to which party profited the most. We have only to look at the language in which the papal document of acceptance was drafted:
William, glorious King of Sicily and dearest son in Christ, most brilliant in wealth and achievement among all the kings and eminent men of the age, the glory of whose name is borne to the uttermost limits of the earth by the firmness of your justice, the peace which you have restored to your subjects, and the fear which your great deeds have instilled into the hearts of all the enemies of Christ’s name.
Even when allowance is made for the traditional literary hyperbole of the time, it is hard to imagine Hadrian putting his signature to such a document without a wince of humiliation. He had been pope only eighteen months, but already he had learned the bitterness of desertion, betrayal, and exile; and even his broad shoulders were beginning to bow. He appears now in a very different light from that in which we saw him when he placed Rome under an interdict or pitted his will against that of Frederick Barbarossa just twelve short months before. Perhaps it was John of Salisbury who best summed up his mood:
I call on the Lord Hadrian to witness that no one is more miserable than the Roman Pontiff, nor is any condition more wretched than his.… He maintains that the papal throne is studded with thorns, that his mantle bristles with needles so sharp that it oppresses and weighs down the broadest shoulders … and that had he not feared to go against the will of God he would never have left his native England.
THE FURY OF Frederick Barbarossa when he heard of the Benevento agreement can well be imagined. Had not Hadrian given him a personal undertaking not to enter into any private communications with the King of Sicily? Had he not now actually signed a treaty of peace and friendship—a treaty, moreover, by which he not only recognized William’s claim to a spurious crown but, in ecclesiastical affairs, granted him privileges more far-reaching even than those enjoyed by the emperor himself? By what right did he so graciously confer imperial territories on others? Was there no limit to papal arrogance?
It was not long before his worst suspicions were confirmed. In October 1157 he held an imperial Diet at Besançon. Ambassadors converged on the town from all sides: from France and Italy, from Spain and England—and, of course, from the pope. The effect of all Frederick’s arrangements was, however, slightly spoiled when, in the presence of the assembled company, the papal legates read out the letter they had brought with them from their master. Instead of the customary greetings and congratulations, the pope had chosen this of all moments to deliver himself of a strongly worded complaint. The aged Archbishop of Lund, while traveling through imperial territory, had been set upon by bandits, robbed of all he possessed, and held for ransom. Such an outrage was serious enough in itself; but it was aggravated by the fact that although the emperor had been furnished with full details of the case, he appeared as yet to have taken no steps to bring to justice those responsible. Turning to more general topics, Hadrian recalled his past favors to the emperor, reminding him in particular of his coronation at papal hands and adding, perhaps a trifle patronizingly, that he hoped at some future date to bestow still further benefices upon him.
Whether the pope was deliberately intending to assert his feudal overlordship we shall never know. Unfortunately, however, the two words he used, conferre and beneficia, were both technical terms used in describing the grant of a fief by a suzerain to his vassal. This was more than Frederick could bear. If the letter implied, as it appeared to imply, that he held the Holy Roman Empire by courtesy of the pope in the same way as any petty baron might hold a couple of fields in the Campagna, there could be no further dealings between them. The assembled German princes shared his indignation, and when Cardinal Roland, the papal chancellor, blandly replied by inquiring from whom Frederick held the empire if not from the pope, there was a general uproar. Otto of Wittelsbach, Count Palatine of Bavaria, rushed forward, his hand on his sword; only the rapid intervention of the emperor himself prevented an incident compared with which the misfortunes of the Archbishop of Lund would have seemed trivial indeed.
When Hadrian heard what had happened, he wrote Frederick another letter, couched this time in rather more soothing terms, protesting that his words had been misinterpreted; and the emperor accepted his explanation. It is unlikely that he really believed it, but he had no wish for an open breach with the Papacy. Nonetheless, the bagarre at Besançon, as anyone could have seen, was merely a symptom of a far deeper rift between pope and emperor, one which no amount of diplomatic drafting could ever hope to bridge. The days when it had been realistic to speak of the two swords of Christendom were gone—gone since Gregory VII and Henry IV had hurled depositions and anathemas at each other nearly a hundred years before. Never since then had their respective successors been able to look upon themselves as two different sides of the same coin. Each must now claim the supremacy and defend it as necessary against the other. When this involved the confrontation of characters as strong as those of Hadrian and Frederick, a flash point could never be far off; yet the root of the trouble lay less in their personalities than in the institutions they represented. While the two of them lived, relations between them—exacerbated by a host of petty slights both real and imagined—became even more strained, though it was only after their deaths that the conflict would emerge into open war.
The Treaty of Benevento proved to be of immeasurably greater significance than either of its signatories could have known at the time. For the Papacy it inaugurated a new political approach to European problems—one that it was to follow, to its own considerable advantage, for the next twenty years. Hadrian himself was gradually brought to accept what he must always have suspected—that the emperor was not so much a friend with whom he might occasionally quarrel as an enemy with whom, somehow, he must live. His concordat with King William gave him a powerful new ally and enabled him to adopt a firmer attitude in his dealings with Frederick than could ever otherwise have been possible—as the Besançon letter bears witness.
In papal circles, so radical a change in policy was bound to meet with opposition at first. Many leading members of the Curia still clung to their imperialist, anti-Sicilian opinions; and the news of the terms agreed upon had caused almost as much consternation in the Sacred College as in the imperial court. Gradually, however, opinion swung around in William’s favor. One reason was Barbarossa’s arrogance, as shown at Besançon and confirmed by several other incidents before and since. Besides, the Sicilian alliance was now a fait accompli; it was useless to oppose it any longer. William, for his part, seemed sincere enough. On the pope’s recommendation, he had made his peace with Constantinople. He was rich, he was powerful, and, as several of Their Eminences could, if they wished, have testified, he was also generous.
Now Frederick Barbarossa set out to sack and ravage the Lombard cities, and a great wave of revulsion against the empire swept down through Italy. With it, too, there was an element of terror: when the emperor had finished with Lombardy, what was to prevent him from continuing to Tuscany, Umbria, even to Rome itself? Only an alliance forged between an English pope and a Norman king. In the spring of 1159 there came the first great counterthrust against Frederick that can be directly ascribed to papal-Sicilian instigation. Milan suddenly threw off the imperial authority, and for the next three years the Milanese stoutly defied all the emperor’s efforts to bring them to heel. The following August, representatives of Milan, Crema, Piacenza, and Brescia met the pope at Anagni; and there, in the presence of envoys from King William, was sworn the initial pact that was to become the nucleus of the great Lombard League. The towns promised that they would have no dealings with the common enemy without papal consent, while the pope undertook to excommunicate the emperor after the usual period of forty days. Finally it was agreed by the assembled cardinals that on Hadrian’s death his successor would be elected only from those present at the conference.
It was perhaps already obvious that the pope had not long to live. While still at Anagni he was stricken by a sudden angina, from which he never recovered. He died on the evening of September 1, 1159. His body was carried to Rome and laid in the undistinguished third-century sarcophagus in which it still rests and which can still be seen in the crypt of St. Peter’s. During the course of the demolition of the old basilica in 1607 it was opened, and the body of the only English pope was found entire, dressed in a chasuble of dark-colored silk. It was described as being “that of an undersized man, wearing Turkish slippers on his feet and, on his hand, a large emerald.”
Hadrian’s pontificate is hard to assess. He certainly towers over the string of mediocrities who occupied the Throne of St. Peter during the first half of the century, just as he himself is overshadowed by his magnificent successor. He left the Papacy stronger and more generally respected than he found it, but much of this success was due to its identification with the Lombard League; and he failed utterly to subdue the Roman Senate. He was pope for less than five years, but those years were hard and of vital importance to the Papacy, and the strain told on him. Before long his health had begun to fail, and with it his morale. He died embittered and disappointed—as all too many of his predecessors had before him.
1. William I (“the Bad”), King of Sicily, had succeeded his father, Roger II, in 1154.