So we’re back where we left off. Why did the plan to
kickstart the almost adolescent Guibert on his clerical career fall through?
Well firstly, we need to understand how the initial job offer was made. Like
most job offers, then and now, it was made after a vacancy had emerged in the
institution, in this case the collegiate church at Clermont owned and
controlled by Guibert’s brother’s feudal lord. But the circumstances in which
the vacancy had emerged were nothing ordinary. Indeed, it had come about
because a new revolutionary movement was starting to send shockwaves across
Europe in the 1060s. But what was this revolution? Guibert, who had a good
awareness of recent historical developments, gives us plenty of indication as
to what this revolution was:
At that time, the Holy See had initiated a new attack
against married clerics. Consequently, some zealots began railing against these
clerics, claiming that they should either be deprived of ecclesiastical
prebends or forced to abstain from priestly functions.
What Guibert is alluding to here is a revolution brewing all
the way over in Rome (the Holy See), but one that nonetheless was sending none
other than the papal revolution or the reformation of the eleventh century.
Historians have traditionally called it the Gregorian reform movement – the
latter term is misleading because, contrary to what earlier generations of
scholars thought, pretty much all historians now would agree that it wasn’t all
the brainchild of Pope Gregory VII (r.1073 – 1085). For starters, it had begun
a generation before Gregory, in the time of his predecessors Leo IX (r.1049 –
1054), Nicholas II (r.1059 – 1061) and Alexander II (r.1061 – 1073). The exact
roots of this revolution are incredibly murky and hard to determine, and
there’s no agreement among historians as to why it came about, though its safe
to say it didn’t come out of the blue. What we can say is that by c.1060, a
clearly identifiable revolutionary movement, with its cockpit in Rome and its
main hotbeds of support in France, the Low Countries, Western Germany and
Northern and Central Italy, had emerged calling for the following:
1. Strong,
centralised papal leadership over a Latin Western church unified
by law and religious practices.
2. The
end of secular control over churches and monasteries, and any lands
or tithes attached to them, and the appointment of priests by lay men
(lords and kings).
3. A
wholesale campaign against corruption within the clergy, aimed
specifically at stamping out the four evils of simony (purchasing of
church positions), nepotism, clerical marriage and pluralism (priests
being responsible for multiple churches and getting revenues from them).
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| While not the mastermind behind the Eleventh Century Reformation, without a doubt one of the most fiery and determined revolutionary leaders in history - Hildebrand of Sovana (1015 - 1085), or as he became, Gregory VII. |
All of these three aims were highly interconnected. In the
first half of the eleventh century, Western Christendom was essentially a
patchwork of local churches, all with their own effective leadership and very
different customs, especially when it came to church services (the liturgy).
They essentially shared only the Latin language, a set of theological doctrines
that hadn’t changed in almost 300 years and nominal allegiance to the pope in
Rome. Peter Brown has aptly described Europe in the period 500 – 1050 as
consisting of “micro-Christendoms.” The papal reform movement aimed to
transform this into a tightly-run religious multi-national corporation, or to
pick a different analogy a sort of medieval European Union. To this end, the
church as a corporation needed complete control over all church buildings,
lands and offices, and the clergy needed to be transformed from being
essentially local community figures and civil servants to kings and princes,
into a tightly organised and morally upright pan-European bureaucracy
answerable first and foremost to the church as a corporation and its CEO, the
pope.
The effects of this transformation can be clearly
illustrated by a comparison, between Gregory the Great (r.590 – 604), arguably
the most powerful and successful early medieval pope, and Innocent III (r.1198
– 1216), without a doubt the most powerful and successful pope of the high
Middle Ages.
More than 850 of Gregory letters survive. This is a figure
so voluminous that only a few figures in European history before the twelfth
century, such as the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, 835 of whose
letters survive thanks to the heroic efforts of early medieval copyists, can
come close to rivalling him for. Gregory’s letters are overwhelmingly addressed
to recipients from Central Italy, the Bay of Naples and Sicily. Fewer than
thirty of his letters were addressed to recipients in Merovingian Gaul,
excluding those for Provence where the Pope owned agricultural estates. Fewer
than ten were addressed to Visigothic Spain. Perhaps Gregory the Great’s most
famous achievement was instigating the process of the conversion of the
Anglo-Saxons to Christianity by sending St Augustine of Canterbury to the court
of King Aethelbert of Kent. Yet most of the Anglo-Saxons were converted not by
the Roman mission, but by Irish missions led by the likes of Saint Aidan. The
result of this was that Anglo-Saxon England remained divided between Celtic and
Roman Christian customs, which were profoundly different from each other until
the Synod of Whitby in 664, in which the Roman method for calculating the date
of Easter won out over the Celtic one, which was then followed by a plague that
killed off most of the pro-Celtic bishops. Theodore of Tarsus, whom I’ve
mentioned here before, came over to England in 668 and strictly reorganised the
church under Roman lines, and from his time on Anglo-Saxon archbishops of
Canterbury would collect their pallium (band of cloth symbolising their office)
from Rome.
Thus, the Pope had
considerable leverage in Anglo-Saxon England, but very little anywhere else in
early medieval Europe outside Italy. Pippin the Short might have deposed the
last Merovingian king, Childeric III, with the sanction of Pope Zacharias and
been anointed by his successor Stephen II. Charlemagne might have been crowned
by Pope Leo III. Lothar I might have got Pope Gregory IV to be on his side for
moral support in the Field of Lies in 833, where he and his brothers Pippin and
Louis the German tried to depose their father, Emperor Louis the Pious. But
papal authority in the Carolingian empire was mostly nominal. The Carolingians
may have spread Roman customs for monasticism and the liturgy across their
territories at the expense of pre-existing local ones, but they did this at their
own accord, not that of the papacy, and the pope only exercised influence over
the internal affairs of the Carolingian Empire when he was called in to do so
i.e., Pope Nicholas I (r.855 – 867) in Lothar II’s messy attempt to divorce
Queen Theutberga. Indeed, sometimes the papacy and the Carolingians resented
each other and wanted to stay out of each other’s affairs completely, as was
the case with Pope Paschal I (r.817 – 824), who basically wanted the Holy See
to withdraw into its own and told Louis the Pious’ envoys in 823 to f*** off.
And as Paschal I’s pet project, the Basilica of Santa Prassede in Rome shows,
he really fancied himself as essentially the local ruler of the eternal city,
unmatched throughout the Christian world in the number of ancient martyrs,
saints and churches it could fit within its walls.
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Pope Paschal I's ninth century mosaics at Santa Prassede, Rome. By Welleschik - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6853832 |
For Innocent III, 5,000 of his letters survive. These are
addressed to an impressive range of recipients which are more evenly across the
whole of Catholic Europe. To give just a particular kind of example, he sent
letters addressed to ordinary men and women (not kings, queens or aristocrats)
who wanted to separate from their spouses at Osney in Oxfordshire, Siponto in
Southern Italy and in Spain and Austria. His activities as pope also included the
following:
1. At
the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, he received delegates from Poland to
Portugal and from the Arctic Circle to the Holy Land – until the First Lateran
Council in 1123, church councils in the west tended to be only kingdom-wide or
provincial affairs. There he made rulings, binding throughout the whole of
Latin Christendom on a whole range of things. These included declaring that the
universe was indeed created from nothing; banning the clergy from gambling and
being drunk; exempting priests from taxation; determining how many degrees of
kinship made a marriage incestuous; requiring Jews to wear special clothing to
mark themselves out from Christians.
2. Innocent III excommunicated King Philip
Augustus of France for making an attempt at licenced bigamy when he couldn’t
divorce his queen, Ingeborg of Denmark, and King John of England for refusing
to accept his favourite candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen
Langton. He even forbade religious services from taking place in both kingdoms until
their kings had reconciled with him.
3. He
acted as referee in the civil war in Germany from 1198 – 1208, made and unmade
one German Emperor (Otto IV) and then made another (Frederick II).
4. He
launched two crusades to the Holy Land, one of which (the Fourth Crusade) he
inadvertently sent off course to Constantinople after he excommunicated all the
crusaders in 1202 for attacking the Catholic Croatian town of Zadar, and
another against the Cathar heretics in Southern France.
5. He
approved the creation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders of friars.
6. He
annulled the Magna Carta for King John in 1215.
The following was also true of the church as an institution
by 1215:
1. It
had a clearly defined, fairly uniform official hierarchy across Europe that had
to answer first and foremost to the authority of the Pope – Pope, Cardinals,
Legates, Bishops, Archdeacons, Deacons, Priests, Canons and Minor Orders.
2. It
directly owned 20% of all agricultural land in Europe, and could claim 10% of
all legitimate incomes as tithes paid to priests and bishops (not to be
appropriated by kings and lay aristocrats).
3. It
had a network of church courts all over Europe, with the Papal Curia in Rome
being the highest of them all, in which priests could be tried for criminal
offences separately from the rest of the population, and anyone could appeal to
for dispute resolution over marriage, debt and a whole host of other things.
 |
| A near-contemporary fresco (1219) of Pope Innocent III, the Uber Pope of the Middle Ages |
All of this would have been unthinkable until the later
eleventh century. This might surprise us, because many of us are used to
thinking of the Middle Ages as single epoch in the general setup of things
largely stayed the same throughout. We’re also used to thinking of it as an age
in which the Church was a concrete and all-powerful institution with iron control
over all of Europe – almost like the Cold War era Eastern Bloc, but with popes
and the inquisition being like a kind of Stasi. Of course, this popular view in
the Anglo-American world is in itself is a misleading caricature, based on more
than 500 years of anti-Catholic propaganda. But like all myths there is a
kernel of truth in it. Yet that kernel of truth only applies to the twelfth to
fifteenth centuries, when the Church really was this pan-European religious
corporation under the supreme central leadership of the Pope. And the
revolution going on in Guibert’s lifetime was the turning point that made this
world possible. Without it figures like Innocent III, who really was quite the
authoritarian and really did try to leave the stamp of his power across the
whole of Europe, could not have existed.
Who made this possible? Political revolutions need leaders
and visionaries and the papal revolution had them aplenty – Pope Leo IX,
Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida (1015 – 1061), Cardinal-Bishop Peter Damian
of Ostia (1007 – 1073), Pope Nicholas II, Pope Alexander II, Pope Gregory VII
and Pope Urban II (r.1088 – 1099). Indeed, Gregory VII can be seen as something
of a Vladimir Lenin figure in the Papal Revolution, and he divides opinion
among historians as much as Lenin used to do, but now doesn’t so much.
But revolutions can’t succeed with these alone. They need
provocateurs and shock troops. Provocateurs they certainly had in the form of
Cardinals and Papal Legates (commissioners sent into different kingdoms),
themselves innovations of the late 1050s and early 1060s. But who were their
shock troops. Among their shock troops were the German nobles who rebelled
against Emperor Henry IV during his struggle with Pope Gregory VII over who had
control over the church in the German Empire in the 1070s. Also among them were
the Norman barons and knights who conquered Anglo-Saxon England with William
the Conqueror or who subdued Southern Italy with Robert Guiscard. The Normans
fought at Hastings on 14 October 1066 under the papal banner, after William had gained Pope
Alexander II’s support for the invasion on the promise he would reform the
English church, helped by Gregory VII (then Archdeacon Hildebrand). The Norman
Conquest of England in 1066 – 1071 was then followed by a programme of
thoroughgoing reform and upheaval of the English church under William the
Conqueror – I recently taught this to my Year 10 GCSE history class, focusing
of course on the latter side of things. The Norman Conquest of Southern Italy
meant bringing those lands back under the Pope’s remit to begin with, since
they belonged either to the East Roman Empire or the Muslim Arab rulers of
Sicily, and the Normans literally held their territories there as fiefs from
the Pope.
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| The papal banner at Hastings as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry (c.1070) |
But it wasn’t just elite warriors who were the pope’s shock
troops. The eleventh century is basically the point in time at which we see
popular politics and the crowd re-emerging clearly for the first time in the
West since the days of the Western Roman Empire. We’ve seen signs that peasants
in the Carolingian Empire were aware of politics and the law in the Carolingian
Empire, but its in the eleventh century that we really start to see ordinary
people getting politicised for the first time since antiquity. Relatively
humble clerics, monks and preachers, the “zealots” of Guibert’s account, were
able to capture huge audiences with their charismatic speeches and
demonstrations. They could then whip up these crowds into a frenzy and use them
as lynch mobs to go after priests deemed to be corrupt or pressure the authorities
to reform the church.
This was the case from the beginning. The nominal start date
of the papal revolution is the Council of Rheims in 1049, which Leo IX held despite
not asking for King Henry I of France’s permission. For the Pope to hold a
church council outside Central Italy without asking the permission of a monarch
was unprecedented and unacceptable. The king angrily responded by holding a
feudal levy at the same time as a council which a third of the French bishops
and abbots attended, and Leo IX excommunicated them – no ninth or tenth century
pope would have dared try and override the authority of a king like that. But
what interests us is that at the council, Leo IX made all the French bishops
and abbots who did attend swear on holy relics that they had not bought their
offices – that they hadn’t committed simony, in other words. They had to do
this in front of crowds of ordinary citizens of Rheims and peasants from the
surrounding countryside, who had come to cheer on the reformers and pressure
and intimidate the bishops and abbots who wouldn’t comply. From the beginning,
the papal revolution was populist.
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| Quite the place to start a revolution, is it not? The Romanesque basilica of Saint Remigius at Rheims, which Leo IX consecrated before the council in 1049. I visited it in May and had a very good time there. |
And it only got more so from there. In May 1057, an incendiary sermon preached when the relics of Saint Nazzarro were being moved from one church to another led to popular uprising in Milan – the Patarenes. This predominantly lower-class movement took over the city government of Milan from its archbishop, installed their own priests in the city churches in place of those they saw as corrupt and even lynched some of the priests who had bought their offices/ were married – there was revolutionary violence aplenty in the Patarene uprising, that any Jacobin or Bolshevik would give a nod of approval.
At Florence in 1068, an immense crowd of its citizens
gathered to watch Peter, a Vallombrosan monk, walk through flames in support of
his abbot, Giovanni Gualberto’s, campaign against simony and nepotism, in
particular against the Bishop of Florence who had bought his office. He
miraculously survived, the opposite of what happened to Mohamed Bouazizi, the
Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 and literally
ignited the Arab Spring, but this put kindling on papal revolution all the
same.
Pope Gregory VII himself was all in favour of encouraging
popular unrest against clerics who wouldn’t budge. Indeed, he himself said in
one of his letters:
We have heard that certain of the bishops who dwell in your
parts either condone or fail to take notice of the keeping of women by priests,
deacons and sub-deacons. We charge you in no way to obey these bishops or
follow their precepts …
… If they disregard our rulings, or rather those of the
holy fathers, the people may in no wise receive their ministrations, so that
those who are not corrected by the love of God and the honour of their office
may be brought to their senses by the shame of the world and the reproof of the
people.
Gregory VII was hardly a democrat. But he did hold the
incredibly radical belief that if people in positions of authority were deeply corrupt
and immoral, you were under no obligation to show respect or obey them in any
way. This was exemplified in 1076 when he released all the German nobles from
their oaths of loyalty to Henry IV of Germany, thus taking a sledgehammer to
the traditional authority of kings and emperors. But here was appealing to a
lesser sort of people, ordinary townspeople and peasants as well as aristocrats.
And to encourage them to reject the authority of bishops who allowed the
priests in their diocese to live in sin really was incredibly socially subversive,
as well as theologically dubious – it did sound remarkably like the late Roman
heresy of Donatism. This kind of thinking, that high-minded transformative
ideas must trump respect for established order and authority, is the spirit
that has, for better or worse, made the modern world. in many ways also, Gregory VII was being just like a Mao Zedong, a supreme leader trying to build his own power by encouraging terror, unrest and general defiance of established elites in favour of high-minded revolutionary ideas. The parallels between the traditional Chinese elites and the centrality of kings and bishops to early medieval Western European social order, both of whose traditional power was challenged or even broken in this wave of extremism, are also tempting. Gregory VII was a truly dangerous man, and in the words of my former university tutor Conrad Leyser “a maniac.”
Indeed, we can see the truly subversive potential this had after
Gregory VII’s death. In the opening decades of the twelfth century, around the
time Guibert de Nogent was writing his autobiography, a blacksmith in Ghent in
Flanders called Manasses led a crowd of his fellow citizens to expel a married
priest from one of the city churches. He was an associate of Tanchelm of
Antwerp, a critic of corrupt and unreformed clergy who was so extreme that he
was accused of heresy, but was so popular that until some years before his
death in 1115 no one dared arrest him and he actually served as the Count of
Flanders’ envoy to the papal court. Another example of papal reformers who
veered into heretical territory is the monk Henry of Lausanne, a super
charismatic preacher who in 1116 led a successful popular revolt against the
clergy of Le Mans and forced all the city’s prostitutes to marry all the
unmarried men there. Henry of Lausanne encouraged people, as shown by his wildfire
preaching campaigns in southern France, to reject infant baptism and the
necessity of priests performing the sacraments for people to get into Heaven,
ideas that prefigured the teachings of Protestant Reformers. Gregory VII would
have been horrified by him, as indeed were orthodox Catholics at the time, but
he was nonetheless part of the can of worms that Gregory VII had unleashed.
Indeed, so much of the history of the high and late medieval church is all about
the attempts to reign in the demons that the papal revolution, and Gregory VII
in particular, had unleashed. It is also through this that we can trace a
direct link between the two great reformations – the one in the eleventh
century, and the one in the sixteenth.
This post might seem like an unnecessary tangent, given that
we were supposed to be discussing Guibert, but I’m afraid it was necessary.
Thanks for bearing with me, but for the next post we’ll zoom back into the
juicy details, and see how the eleventh century reformation/ papal revolution
played out at the grassroots level and how that affected young Guibert’s
future.
Sources:
“A monk’s confession: the memoirs of Guibert de Nogent” edited and translated by Paul Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996)
Chris Wickham, “The inheritance of Rome: A history of Europe from 400 -1000”, Penguin (2009)
Robert Moore, “The first European Revolution, 970 - 1215”, Blackwell (2000)
“Selected letters of Pope Innocent III concerning England (1198 - 1216)”, edited and translated by C.R Cheney, Thomas Nelson (1953)
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