On this day in history 2: the coronation of Charlemagne and Merry Christmas

Tomorrow is Christmas Day so, as well as being the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, it will also be the 1222nd anniversary of the coronation of Charlemagne. The Royal Frankish Annals, written very soon after the event, tell us what happened:

“On the most Holy day of Christmas, when the king rose in prayer in front of the shrine of the blessed apostle Peter, to take part in the Mass, pope Leo raised a crown on his head and he was hailed by the whole Roman people: to the august Charles, crowned by God, the Great and peaceful Emperor of the Romans, life and victory! After the acclamations the pope addressed him in the manner of the old emperors. The name of Patricius was now abandoned and he was called emperor of the Romans.”

But why did this event happen, and why was it significant. Let’s take a look.

First things first, a short potted history of relations between the papacy and the Franks. Before the eighth century, the Franks and the papacy had very little to do with each other. Pope Gregory the Great (r.590 - 604), arguably the most proactive pope of the early Middle Ages, only addressed 30 of his more than 800 surviving letters to Frankish Gaul. The popes’ horizons mostly consisted of Italy and the East, where the enjoyed ongoing yet often very fraught relations with the Roman emperors in Constantinople, whom the popes in Rome were politically the subjects of. Meanwhile, the Lombards, a Germanic people, were building a powerful centralised state in Northern Italy which threatened the areas of the Peninsula remaining under Roman imperial control and the city of Rome itself. And from the 680s, there was a movement from within the city of Rome itself to break free of Roman imperial control and establish a ”Republic of St Peter.”

Things got really nasty in relations between Rome and the city of Constantinople when the Pope got into a nasty little spat with the Roman emperor, Leo IV the Isaurian (nope, not a type of dinosaur, a person from the wild Midwest of what is now Turkey) over whether it was ok to worship images of saints. Leo ended up confiscating all of the lands the papacy owned in southern Italy and Sicily, as well as depriving it of jurisdiction over the churches in southern Italy, Sicily, Ravenna, Venice, Istria and Dalmatia and giving them to Constantinople instead. The popes were livid, and from then on basically dropped the Roman emperors as their protectors and went essentially independent.

But the Lombards were closing in all the same, and the papacy needed a new protector. The pope found one in none other than our old friend, who I’ve written a fair few things about, Charles Martel. You see, Charles was a super successful Frankish statesman and general who had ruled as the prime minister of the Frankish kingdom for almost two decades, ended the civil wars there, fought successful campaigns against the pagan Saxons over the Rhine, defeated and converted the pagan Frisians in the Netherlands and beaten the Muslim Arab invaders of Gaul at Tours in 732 and at the river Berre in 737. Now he looked like the perfect candidate to headhunt as the papacy’s new protector. So the Pope sent envoys to Charles Martel with gifts and was like “yo, how’s it going man? Wanna help me out against these Lombards whenever I need it in return for some nice gifts and moral support.” And Charles Martel was like “sure thing, homie.”

Now Charles Martel died in 741 and his sons, Pippin the Short and Carloman, became joint prime ministers. Carloman found it all a bit too overwhelming - he literally butchered almost the entire tribal nobility of Alemannia (southwest Germany) at a massive show trial at Cannstadt in 746 after they rebelled - so he was like “man, all this politics and war is incredibly depressing. I can’t cope with this anymore. Need a change of scene to something quieter, more mellow.” so he went down to Rome in 747, met the pope and became a hermit at Monte Soracte. Pippin was this left in sole charge of the Frankish kingdom. But Pippin continued to be faced with rebellions across the Frankish kingdom, and realised that if he wanted his authority to be respected by all he needed to take over from the Merovingians, who by now were constitutional figureheads even more so than Charles III is now. But how was he going to do it. The Merovingian kings had ruled the Franks unchallenged for more than 250 years - longer than the USA has been around as of today. So how was he going to avoid coming across like an upstart parvenu. The answer was he needed to phone a family friend - none other than the Pope himself. So in 749, he sent the bishop of Wurzburg on an embassy to Rome, and the pope gave him the green light to overthrow the Merovingians, supposedly saying “it’s better to have a king that had real power than one without.” Thus in 751, Pippin deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, in one of the most successful, bloodless coups d‘etat in history. He was elected king by the Frankish nobility at Soissons and then anointed - a relatively new royal ritual that had just reached Frankish Gaul from Ireland and Visigothic Spain, but a powerful way of demonstrating that his royal authority came from God.

But that wasn’t enough. Three years later, Pippin was feeling really anxious. He was a usurper, the last Merovingian king and his son still lived in a monastic jail cell, and many Frankish nobles were now thinking - “if Pippin can have a pop at taking the throne for himself, why can’t we? What really makes him special and unique compared to us? Nothing.” And as it happened the Pope was in trouble as well. The Lombard king Aistulf had conquered the last major outpost of the Roman Empire on the north Italian mainland, Ravenna, in 751, and was now threatening Rome itself. This in 754, Pope Stephen II came north to Gaul, the first pope ever to travel north of the Alps, and in a special ceremony he reanointed Pippin the Short, to bolster his sacred royal authority. But he also did the same to Pippin’s sons, Charles (the future Charlemagne) and Carloman. And to put Pippin’s anxieties to rest once and for all, he made the Frankish nobility swear an oath not to elect any king ever again, except from Pippin’s male descendants.

But now Pippin had to honour his part of the bargain. In 754 - 757, he led campaigns into Italy to bring the Lombard king Aistulf to heel, making him promise to never bother the papacy again. The papacy itself received Latium and the Romagna in central Italy as its own sovereign territories - the 750s are the true birth of the Papal States.

Pippin died in 768, and was succeeded by Charlemagne and Carloman. Carloman died in 771, leaving Charlemagne in sole charge of the Frankish kingdom. The Lombards began to threaten Rome again and the pope was like “Charlemagne, my good friend. I’ve done so many favours for you, like anointing you when you were only six years old. Now come give me a hand against those bloody Lombards, who can’t honour a simple agreement if their lives depended on it.”

So Charlemagne invaded the Lombard kingdom in 774 and after laying siege to the capital Pavia, managed to conquer the highly centralised Lombard kingdom in a matter of months and took the Lombard king Desiderius and his family prisoner. The Pope showed his gratitude to Charlemagne by making him a patrician of Rome. Charlemagne and Pope Hadrian III were pretty good pals and in the Pope’s epitaph, possibly written by Charlemagne’s Anglo-Saxon adviser Alcuin, Charlemagne is described as having basically viewed the pope as a second father.

By the late 790s, things were looking absolutely splendid for Charlemagne. He now had an empire that stretched from the roadless, still mostly pagan Saxony covered with thick forests to the ancient cities of Italy and from the Atlantic to the Elbe. He had just founded a splendid new capital in the Old Roman spa town of Aachen, which one of his court poets claimed was a new Rome with its own forum and senate - some pardonable literary exaggeration thete. Another court poet claimed that Charlemagne’s recent destruction of the Avar Khaganate in 795 - 796 meant that he had surpassed the achievements of Julius Caesar and the pagan Romans because he, unlike them was backed by Christ. Charlemagne’s courtiers nicknamed him king David, after the Biblical hero. and his court was a centre of learning and culture to rival that of Solomon’s. And in 789, Charlemagne had issued the general admonitions, a lengthy administrative document distributed across the whole kingdom which aimed to reform government to make it more centralised and efficient, tackle corruption and injustice, increase education and literacy and build a better, more moral society. So it seemed right, amidst all this euphoria, that Charlemagne make an ambitious statement about his achievements.

Now in 799 that opportunity came. The pope was now Leo III, a man of non-noble background whose father may have been an Arab. The mafiosi aristocracy of Rome and Latium didn’t like that they had an outsider in charge - they wanted someone from the in-group. So they sent a lynch mob of Roman citizens who ambushed the pope when he was on a procession from the Lateran palace to the church of St Lawrence, threw him off his horse, gouged out his eyes and cut off his tongue before leaving him naked on the streets to bleed to death. The Duke of Spoleto rescued Pope Leo, who then fled north to seek Charlemagne’s help. Charlemagne was busy for the time being, but in August 800 he came down to give his friend the Pope a hand and teach those unruly Italians a lesson.

Charlemagne arrived at Rome at the head of a massive Frankish army on 24 November and had a triumphal procession in the city to Old St Peter’s with Pope Leo. In early December, Charlemagne convened a judicial assembly in Rome and held an inquest into what had happened last year. The citizens of Rome accused the pope of various crimes. But no witnesses came forward, so Pope Leo himself was like “very well then, let the Lord Jesus Christ and St Peter be my witnesses.” He ascended to the pulpit and put his hand on the gospel, St Peter intervened on his behalf and everyone then agreed the Pope was innocent.

The Pope was now completely in debt to God, St Peter and to Charlemagne. So what was he going to do? How was he going to say thank you and truly repay Charlemagne. Given that Charlemagne was the divinely anointed king of the Franks and Lombards, Patrician of the Romans and the most powerful ruler Western Europe had ever known since the Western Roman Emperors whose empire consisted of all six original member states of the EU plus a few other territories as well, there was only one thing he could really give him now. The Roman imperial title. So on 25 December 800, when Charlemagne went to St Peter’s Basilica to put the mass in Christmas, the Pope gathered together the Roman people, plonked the imperial diadem on Charlemagne’s head and proclaimed him the first Western Roman Empire in more than 320 years in front of a cheering crowd. And, as they say, the rest is history.

But hang on a minute. We need to consider some important questions. Was this really a holiday surprise? What were its implications? And how did the still Roman emperors in Constantinople feel about this, given they weren’t consulted about it?

Einhard, Charlemagne’s faithful friend and biographer, readily provides the answers to two of those questions.

“He said that he would not have entered the church that day, even though it was a great feast day, if he had known in advance of the pope’s plan … the Roman emperors were angry about it. He overcame their opposition through his greatness of spirit, which was without doubt far greater than theirs, by often sending ambassadors to them by calling them his brothers in his letters.”

So Einhard claims that Charlemagne was completely taken by surprise about it all. But was he really? Some would suspect that Einhard was just trying to make his dear old friend, the emperor, look modest. When we look more broadly, we can see that Charlemagne didn’t loathe grandeur and ceremony. This was the king, after all, who was nicknamed “David” by Ovid courtiers, who was called “the father of Europe” by the author of an epic poem imitating the style of Virgil’s Aeneid in his lifetime, built a splendid palace in the ancient Roman style at Aachen and who got absolutely hyped when the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, the most powerful ruler west of China, recognised him as an equal by sending him an elephant called Abdul Abbas in 802. The imperial title may have been a surprise Christmas present, but I don’t see any evidence to really suggest that Charlemagne objected to it - on the contrary I think he saw it as literally his crowning personal achievement.

But as Einhard absolutely correctly hints at, the Roman emperors in Constantinople were not happy with it at all. In their view, the pope had shunned them as the latest incident in their ongoing diplomatic row by giving what was not his to give to a Germanic “barbarian” ruler. The pope tried to justify what he had done by saying that there was no Roman emperor so the position was vacant. That was because at the time the Roman Empire was ruled by Irene of Athens who had taken over from her deposed and blinded son Constantine VI (there really is an awful lot of blinding in this period) in 797 - the first woman to rule

in her own right in Roman history, and not the last (more reigning Roman empresses would follow in the eleventh century). Indeed, there was talk of Charlemagne marrying Irene and unifying the two empires. But in 802 Irene was deposed and the new emperor, a Roman general called Nikephoros, was not happy either and so from then until 812 Charlemagne and Nikephoros entered a kind of Cold War in which Charlemagne attacked the Republic of Venice, by now basically independent but still legally part of the Roman Empire. Einhard lightly glosses over this. But in the end, Charlemagne and Emperor Michael I came to a diplomatic agreement to peace and mutual recognition in 813. Still, relations between West and East were soured thereafter. It’s notable that Einhard correctly called Michael and Nikephoros the emperors of the Romans. Later Carolingian writers would call the Romans “the Greeks” instead, a highly insulting term, just like modern historians now erroneously call them the Byzantines - a wholly anachronistic term. Meanwhile, the Romans continued to view the Franks with classically Roman disdain as Barbarian upstarts. The exchange between Charlemagne’s great-grandson, the Emperor Louis II, and Emperor Basil I in 871 makes for fun reading, as both claimed to be the real Roman emperor and called the other a Greek/ German impostor. Many more exchanges like this would come over the centuries, as western and eastern emperors claimed exclusive rights to the ancient Roman legacy - honestly, why couldn’t they have just agreed to share it?

But it’s clear that Charlemagne getting the imperial title didn’t mean he ruled over a new state or that he ruled different. He continued his zeal for centralisation of government, moral reform and promoting education and classical Roman artistic and literary revival, but this has already begun no later than the 780s. And in 806, when Charlemagne drew up a succession plan for his three adult sons, the empire was to be divided equally between the three of them and there was no mention of the imperial title. It was only because only one son, Louis the Pious, outlived his father that the imperial title was able to be passed to future generations and wasn’t just Charlemagne’s personal trophy.

But the popes this meant a big deal. Pope Leo III, before his death in 816, built many additions to the Lateran Palace, and in its great hall he created some amazing mosaics in the apses. Like most art and architecture from the early Middle Ages, they sadly do not survive today, but are mentioned in the ninth century book of the Popes and we have detailed accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and some early eighteenth century drawings of them. One of the mosaics shows Charlemagne and the Pope as equals standing below St Peter, and the inscription reads “blessed St Peter, give Pope Leo life and Emperor Charles victory.” Thus it would seem that the Pope saw him and Charlemagne as equals, both deriving their authority from God and protected by St Peter. But given that the Pope was the successor to St Peter, would that mean that the emperor was subject to the pope. Given that the Carolingian emperors were massively more powerful than the popes and de facto led the church in Western Europe, the poles weren’t going to challenge their authority or subordinate them to them. But after the papal revolution of the eleventh century, when the popes became much more powerful, many popes would demand subjection from the German emperors. Indeed, Pope Innocent III, the Uber-Pope of the Middle Ages, would claim he could make whoever he wanted emperor at will, and did so on multiple occasions in the opening decades of the thirteenth century during the great Welf-Hohenstaufen civil war, in which the pope backed both sides at different points. Thus, the memory of the coronation of Charlemagne was not treasured after the Reformation, and even more so in nineteenth century Germany when Otto Von Bismarck was trying to destroy the power of the Catholic Church in the southern regions of the German empire like Bavaria with his kulturkampf - the literal origin of the term culture war. This German historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made a big deal of Einhard’s comments, claiming that Charlemagne was a true Germanic king who was reluctant to become a Roman emperor because knew all too well that it was just an evil clerical conspiracy to subordinate the state to the church, which the Prussian monarchy was now working so hard to undo in its newly acquired empire.

early eighteenth century drawings of the ninth century Lateran palace mosaics, just before they were demolished, adapted from Paul Edward Dutton (ed), “Carolingian civilisation: a reader”, University of Toronto Press (2009)

Post-WW2, views of the coronation of Charlemagne have been a lot more positive, as a fusion of three integral elements to modern Europe - the Roman, the Germanic and the Christian. Indeed, Charlemagne’s empire has been seen as a forerunner to the EU, which had the Charlemagne prize for promoting European unity to this day.

Finally, Merry Christmas to one and all!

The nativity scene is depicted on the ivory book cover to the Lorsch Gospels (c.800), contemporary to Charlemagne's coronation and most likely by either one of the artists at Charlemagne's court or by the workshops at the royal monastery of Lorsch - a real masterpiece of Carolingian art, showing both the classical Roman artistic inheritance as well as many distinctively Carolingian stylistic features.

From the sources 9: self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the eleventh century reformation Part 3

 

The most enigmatic scene from the Bayeux Tapestry. A cleric in secular clothing touches the face of a mysterious woman called Aelfgyva in a bizarre intermission from the story of Harold Godwinson's visit to Normandy in 1064. Some think its an allusion to a notorious sex scandal at the time - it looks like the cleric is amorously caressing Aelfgyva, and in the border below a naked man is touching his genitals. The Bayeux Tapestry was most likely made between 1068 and 1070, not long after the time Guibert's family started searching for a church prebend for him.

So last time I gave my best attempt at a crash course on the papal revolution. But now let’s zoom back into the juicy details of Guibert’s autobiography and see how all this played out at the grass roots.

We’ll firstly revisit that quote from Guibert that was the stumbling block that led us on to the papal revolution:

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.

Now the specific moment in the papal revolution that Guibert is referring to when he says “at that time, the Holy See had initiated a new attack against married clerics” is in the spring of 1059, when Pope Nicholas II convened the Synod of Rome. This was a key point of escalation in the papal reform movement, as one of the most important outcomes of the synod was the creation of the college of cardinals to elect the pope – until 1059, popes had been installed on the throne of St Peter either by the emperor, the aristocratic clans of Lazio or by the Roman citizen mob. But it was also there that he continued what Leo IX did at Rheims in condemning simony, though he went a step further in outlawing all lay investiture even from the German emperor, who could continue to invest bishops once he had acquired that right from the Pope – this would be key in leading up to the struggle between Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. But what it also did was condemn clerical marriage, by forbidding any deacon or priest known to live with a woman from assisting and celebrating at the Mass. And as Guibert indicates clearly in this passage, these measures were widely supported by ordinary lay Catholics.

Early twelfth century fresco of Pope Nicholas II at the basilica of San Clemente Laterano in Rome, appearing no doubt as he did when he issued the legislation outlawing clerical marriage at the Lateran Council, which took place almost in the exact location where this fresco is, in 1059.

This event would have been one of the most discussed and divisive political events of Guibert’s childhood, almost like 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial crash, the election of Obama, the Coalition’s Austerity programme and the raising of tuition fees, the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War, Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump were for mine. And it really does testify to the growing power of the papacy that for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire, decisions made in Rome could be have effects on minor provincial towns in Northern France. But what’s also so interesting about this is that Guibert, despite being a serious Benedictine monk who struggled with self-loathing and guilt about his own sexual urges, finds the idea that clerics should be celibate too quite horrifying. You can tell from the language he uses to describe the campaigners against clerical marriage not as heroic moral reformers but as crazy fanatics trying to force good decent people to accept their ideology. Sounds almost familiar, doesn’t it! Indeed, as I’ll no doubt show you in future posts, Guibert was in many ways quite a conservative writer, who did not like the way politics, society and culture were headed. But why was the idea that deacons and priests should not have wives or have sex so radical?

Of course, contrary to what some historians specialising in the high and later Middle Ages (1050 – 1500), especially those specialising in sexuality and gender, tend to think, this wasn’t an idea that had come completely out of blue. Instead, the idea that clerics must be celibate had been floating around for a very long time. Here we are of course wading into incredibly theologically sensitive territory, as Catholics view clerical celibacy as an ancient and unshakeable apostolic tradition, whereas Protestants see it as an evil papistical innovation lacking in any Biblical foundation whatsoever which leads priests down the path of sin because they don’t have the right outlet for their natural urges (the marriage bed). Greek and Russian Orthodoxy sit between the two extremes. Bishops in Eastern Orthodox are generally not allowed to marry – indeed, they are often expected to be former monks. But ordinary priests and deacons are allowed to marry and have children, though they are expected to get married before their ordination, and this has been the tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy since the Middle Ages. Indeed, going back to late antiquity, the morals of priests has always been much more of an issue in Latin (Western) Christianity than in Greek (Eastern) Christianity. To Greek Christians in the fourth to seventh centuries, what mattered most to a church congregation was whether or not your priest believed in the correct theological doctrines, especially concerning the nature of Jesus Christ (whether he was more divine or human, or equally both). Whereas to Latin Christians in that period, and ever since, the question that mattered most was “is my priest a good man?” This is one of the many super-insightful things that Chris Wickham brings up in the “Inheritance of Rome”, which I’m still reading for fun at the moment.

The New Testament doesn’t say anything in favour of clerical celibacy. While, unless you’re Dan Brown, it is indeed true that Jesus of Nazareth himself was not married and never had sex, some of his disciples undoubtedly were. Matthew 8:14 mentions Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law – the first Pope was therefore a married man. St Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians 9:5, mentions that two of the other original twelve apostles, Jesus’ brothers James and Simon, were also married. And so far as we can tell from what Jesus says in the Gospels, he had nothing bad to say about marriage.

However, St Paul, without whom Christianity would have remained an obscure Jewish sect, had an ambivalent view of marriage. He may have been married before he went on the Road to Damascus, but by the time he was spreading the word of Jesus and writing his epistles he was single. Also, and this is really crucial, St Paul argued that being a lifelong virgin was the best possible choice for a Christian – in Corinthians 7:1 he wrote “it is good for a man not touch a woman.” This was because he believed that virgins had greater devotion to God than married men and women. In Corinthians 7:32 – 34 he wrote “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things of the world, how he may please his wife. There is difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.” But this doesn’t mean that St Paul opposed marriage outright. Instead, he argued that men and women should marry if they couldn’t contain their lust, because that way they’d avoid sinning. As he wrote in Corinthians 7:8 – 9 “it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” And, and this is crucial to what we’re focusing on here, he did not advocate for clerical celibacy. In his First Epistle to Timothy 3:2, he wrote “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt at teaching.” Its safe to say that this job description for priests and bishops was the one most widely held to by Christian communities in the first three centuries of Christianity.

Where things really started to change was in the fourth century AD, when as we said before bishops stopped being just local community leaders and essentially became officials under the patronage of the Roman Emperor following the conversion of Constantine the Great. That in itself didn’t do anything to endanger clerical marriage, but the more Christianised late Roman society became, the more issues flared up. Along with the rise of the first Christian monks and hermits, an ascetic invasion took place in which the ranks of the bishops and other church leaders came to be filled with admirers of these holy men and women who believed that virginity was spiritually superior to marriage. I can’t possibly do justice to explaining the rise of Christian asceticism, all I can say is read literally anything by Peter Brown (a living legend) as he’s been the undisputed expert on this stuff for the last fifty years. Among the biggest supporters of asceticism were St Ambrose of Milan, St Martin of Tours, St Jerome and St Augustine of Hippo. They were opposed by many people, including Jovinian, who argued that marriage and virginity were equally good and thus had a lengthy spat with Jerome over it. By the end of the fourth century, the ascetics had definitely won out over their enemies and almost all the writings of the anti-ascetic faction in late antique Christianity do not survive to us today, either being targeted for destruction or simply neglected over the centuries. And in the 390s, Pope Siricius made the first decree advocating celibacy for priests. Thus, by c.400 AD, clerical celibacy was the official ideological position of the Western Church and that did not change.

Did that decree actually make clerical marriage illegal and lead to any kind of systematic clampdown on married clerics. The short answer is, actually no. In the East, Pope Sicirinus was completely ignored and Greek Christianity has always officially allowed married priests, as I said before. But in the West too, for the next 600 years, clerical marriage was incredibly common and most of the time in most places basically tolerated. Indeed, it became normal for priests and even bishops to treat their churches as property that they could pass on to their sons. A good example is Archbishop Milo of Trier (d.753), who was a close ally of Charles Martel and may have been the uncle of Pippin Short (Rotrude of Hesbaye, Pippin’s mother, is his putative sister), both long-time friends of this blog. Milo was the son of Archbishop Leudwinus of Trier and his wife Willigard of Bavaria. He likewise had lots of children with his wife, and became the archnemesis of St Boniface, who disapproved of his worldly and warlike personality – fittingly enough, Milo died during a boar hunt. Not far from Trier, Archbishop Gewilib of Mainz was also married and was the son of Archbishop Geroldus. Gewilib was another warrior, who avenged his father after he fell in battle against the Continental Saxons on Charles Martel’s campaigns by slaying the Saxon warrior who killed him. He fell afoul of Saint Boniface too, and was deposed by him – back in St Boniface’s home country, Anglo-Saxon England, bishops were predominantly monks and therefore could not possibly be married. Some historians see a shift against clerical marriage, and certainly some Carolingian reformers were against it. For example, our friend Theodulf of Orleans wrote in the precepts for his diocese:

Let no woman live with a presbyter in a single house. Although the canons permit a priest’s mother and sister to live with him, and persons of this kind in whom there is no suspicion, we abolish this privilege for the reason that there may come, out of courtesy to them or to trade with them, other women not at all related to him and offer an enticement to sin with him.

Emperor Charlemagne’s own legislation left the situation much more ambiguous. In his General Capitulary for the Missi in 802, he wrote:

If, moreover, any priest or deacon shall presume hereafter to have with him in his house any women except those whom the canonical licence permits, he shall be deprived of both his office and inheritance until he be brought into our presence.

It is unclear whether the women included in the “canonical licence” for are just a priest’s blood relatives, or whether that would also extend to a lawfully wedded wife. Meanwhile the Penitential of Bishop Halitgar of Cambrai, written in the 830s, says a bit more clearly:

If after his conversion or advancement any cleric of superior rank who has a wife has relations with her again, let him be aware that he has committed adultery. He shall do penance with the foregoing decision, each according to his order.

What Halitgar meant by a cleric of superior rank is unclear. But what he’s saying is that if these clerics get ordained whilst still being married men, that’s fine, its just that they must swear off having sex once they’ve acquired their church positions.

Still, in the Carolingian period we continue to find plenty of married bishops, just as we also find plenty of bishops who led armies into battle and fought as warriors despite St Boniface’s condemnations of it in the 740s. Indeed, even Pope Hadrian II (r.867 – 872) was a married man with children, who remained married, sexually active and a family man after being appointed to the papal office. And among ordinary village priests and other lesser clerics, clerical marriage was normal and mostly unchallenged. We saw some of that in the Marseille Polyptych in 814. And as we go into the tenth century, we continue to see clerical marriage and priestly dynasties flourishing both inside and outside the former Carolingian Empire. In the cartulary of Redon in Brittany in the early tenth century, we see lots of priests passing down their offices to their sons for generation after generation. We can find lots of similar evidence from tenth century England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Italy and Spain. The evidence from Anglo-Saxon England for clerical marriage in the period 900 - 1066 is plentiful, and most named priests in this period seem to have been the sons of priests, many of whom inherited the exact same church offices as their fathers, as painstaking research by Julia Barrow has shown. Indeed, many of these priestly dynasties in Anglo-Saxon England continued even after the Norman Conquest brought the papal revolution to England. William the Conqueror and Archbishop Lanfranc seem to have only really taken action against married bishops, like Leofwine of Lichfield (deposed in 1071), which is a big contrast to Normandy where clerical celibacy did make some headway in the late eleventh century, despite much division over it. Only in the century after 1150 did church reformers really succeed in imposing celibacy on English cathedral canons and parish priests. As a result, many churches in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England were basically the property of these priestly dynasties. For example, when the incumbent priest of All Saints’ church in Lincoln tried to give the church to Peterborough Abbey when he decided to become a monk there, the citizens wouldn’t allow him to remove it from the ownership of his family unless King William consented, a case which is recorded in the Domesday Book.

All Saints' Greetwell, Lincoln, today. Though the church saw some alteration in the nineteenth century, most of the eleventh century building is clearly visible.

A really good example of a clerical dynasty working in practice is the hereditary priests of Hexham in Northumberland, a father, son and grandson who held the parish church in succession from 1020 to 1138. The dynasty began with Alfred, who was also sacrist of Durham cathedral from 1020 until his death in 1041. He married the sister of Collan II, provost of Hexham to the bishop of Durham from 1042 to 1056, and together they had three children: Eilaf, who succeeded his father at Hexham; Hemming, who became priest of Brancepeth no later than 1055; and Ulkill, who was priest of Sedgefield no later than 1085. Eilaf, like his father, held an important position in the bishop’s administration as well, and from his marriage he had two sons: Eilaf Junior, who succeeded him as priest of Hexham; and Ealdred, who was a canon at Hexham Priory. Eilaf Junior became the new priest of Hexham in 1086, the year of the Domesday Book, and kept the office until his death in 1138, the year the Scots invaded Northumberland and were defeated at the Battel of the Standard.

Thereby, while the idea of clerical celibacy had been around for a long time, and influential in a lot of circles, and past precedent certainly did matter – the papal revolutionaries certainly did look back to the late Roman world, when the first calls for clerical celibacy had emerged, for inspiration a lot. Still, it had never been the norm down to the eleventh century. Thus, it was a genuinely shocking idea for a monk, someone who professionally had to be in favour of abstaining from sex, like Guibert, when the papacy launched a campaign to make clerical marriage illegal in all of Latin Christendom in 1059.

Why the Papal revolutionaries would choose to target clerical marriage as one of the main evils to uproot does deserve explanation. Apart from the ideological precedents given by late Roman and Carolingian churchmen, the main attraction of it all came with the idea of bringing all churches and their property under the control of the Church as a multinational corporation and being able to control who was appointed to them. This you could not do if dynasties of hereditary priests existed (the natural consequence of clerical marriage), just like you could not do it if churches were under control of kings and feudal lords (lay investiture) or if people could just buy their way into clerical office (simony). The other underlying reason, going back to the letters of St Paul which we saw earlier, is the idea that you can only be fully devoted to God if you have no distractions, one of which being marriage and family life. Thus, if the papal revolutionaries wanted their priests to be as devout in their service to God and unquestioningly loyal to the Church as a multinational corporation as possible, they needed to deny them marriage and family life. Moreover, celibacy would give the priests moral authority by demonstrating high levels of self-control, just as it had given monks and other holy men such authority in centuries before. This would help them be the enforcers for the Church’s broader programme for Latin Christian society as a whole.

 The reasons why people would want to resist this are as clear as day. Imagine you’re just a regular parish priest somewhere in Northwest Europe sometime around 1100. You’re living a comfortable and wholesome life with your wife, your son and three daughters, all of whom you love to bits. All of a sudden, an order comes from your local bishop, a former monk who has never married, that your marriage is not a real marriage in either the eyes of God or the law. Therefore, you must separate from your wife and children and never let them in your house again, or risk being banned from performing church services and losing your property. People in your local village or town start jeering and publicly shaming your wife, calling her a concubine and a slut. All of your children are now bastards under the law and the plans you carefully laid out for them have to be thrown out the window. Your son can no longer train as a priest and succeed you. And no respectable young man in the local community will want to marry your daughters. This goes in the face of what was perfectly normal in your father and grandfather’s day, and you know that priests, bishops and even popes in the early church were married. You might feel tempted to tell him to f*** off and just carry on as you are. You can try to reason with him, pointing to church history and morality – if you can’t have a wife, your natural urges might lead you and other married clerics to fornicate with, you know, actual prostitutes, a mortal sin. Or you might get sympathetic neighbours to throw stones at the bishop or his agent. Or you might even go about writing pamphlets and speeches suggesting that this all a conspiracy by sodomite bishops and monks, trying to direct the new religious fervour of the common people against good honest married clerics, while they’re busy pulling and sucking each other off in their dormitories. All of these first three responses to the reformers are attested Normandy in the last quarter of the eleventh century by Orderic Vitalis, and the fourth response was taken by the cleric and poet Serlo of Bayeux. Its notable that one of the main champions of clerical celibacy in England, none other than Guibert’s former friend and tutor Anselm of Canterbury, was almost certainly gay. As William of Malmesbury wrote, at the Council of Westminster in 1102 there were going to be laws passed against sodomy in the monasteries, but Archbishop Anselm suspiciously decided not to promulgate them at the last minute. To many people at the time, reformers championing clerical celibacy were nothing but rank hypocrites.

In many ways, this is a story that resonates with our own times, in more ways than one, and historians writing about this period often slip into casting one side as the goodies and the other as the baddies, depending on their personal and political inclinations. The Gregorian reformers/ papal revolutionaries can seem like the good guys, as stalwart progressives who were trying to stamp out corruption and nepotism and make priests more upright and accountable. On the other hand, their opponents among the parish clergy can seem like the good guys, as honest, down-to-earth folks who were really doing their duties as best as they could but had fallen victim to snobby aristocratic bishops and hypocritical do-gooder monks who wanted to destroy established traditions and local communities in the name of their radical ideology. Likewise, both can seem like the bad guys in the face of twenty-first century sensibilities. The Gregorian reformers were undoubtedly misogynistic, essentially saying that women were to blame for bad priests and as soon as they put them away the better, and some would say that clerical celibacy is directly to blame for the current problem of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. On the other hand, their opponents resorted to what we would now recognise as homophobia in their polemics against the reformers, and essentially held to the belief, common among modern anti-feminist movements, that heterosexual men can’t control their lust and that without a wife or a stable long-term relationship they’ll shag any woman with a pulse. I’ve tried my best to be as impartial and empathetic as I can to both sides. Guibert was impartial on the matter in his own characteristically downbeat way, as we’ll see.

Now there were not one but two people helping bat for Guibert in getting that church prebend at Clermont. The first was of course his brother, a knight of the castle of Clermont whom the lord owed a debt. The other was his brother, a layman whom the local bishop had illegally made abbot of the very collegiate church where Guibert was going to get his prebend as a priest. Guibert describes his cousin, whom he detested, thus:

It just so happened that one of these zealots was a certain nephew of my father. This man, who was more powerful and cunning than his peers, would indulge in sex like such an animal that he would never put off having a woman when he wanted one, and yet to hear him rail against clerics regarding this particular canon [the ban of clerical marriage], one would have thought he was motivated by a singular modesty and distaste for such things … He could never be chained to a woman through marriage, for he never intended to be shackled by such bonds … Finding a pretence by which I might benefit at the expense of a certain well-placed priest, he began pressing the lord of the castle … For contrary to every law, human and divine, this man had been authorised by the bishop to be the abbot of that very church. Thus, even though he himself had not been canonically appointed, he was demanding of the canons that they respect the canons.

Much like in Serlo of Bayeux’s polemics, here the supporters of the papal revolution are hypocrites. All except here, the hypocrite in question (Guibert’s cousin) is not a covert homosexual, but a red-blooded openly promiscuous heterosexual. Guibert describes him both with vitriol and his outstanding verbal wit and sense of irony, and in doing so sums up what many people felt at the time about the reformers – that they were preachy and self-righteous, but ultimately more morally bankrupt than the clerics they were trying to cast aside.  

What did the poor married priest, whose job Guibert’s relatives were trying to steal to give to Guibert, do about this. Well, he took the nuclear option. Beat these revolutionaries and fanatics at their own game by turning their own principles against them. Guibert relates it thus:

At this time, it was not only a serious offence for members of the highest orders and canons to be married, but it was also considered a crime to purchase those offices involving no pastoral care … Those who took the side of the cleric deprived of his prebend as well as many contemporaries of mine, started murmuring about simony as well as the excommunications that had recently proliferated.

Now if there was anything more sure-fire to bring the ecclesiastical authorities and popular opinion on your side, it was accusations of simony. As I’ve explained before, outlawing simony was a cause celebre of the Gregorian Reform movement as well as imposing clerical celibacy. And most people could get behind it on that. As I explained to my year 10s when I was teaching them the church reforms of Archbishop Lanfranc as part of their Norman Conquest GCSE unit, having a simoniac priest in the eleventh century would be like having a local GP or a headteacher who had purchased their position rather than getting it on merit now. It was absolutely scandalous, because the church for people in the eleventh century was like the school system and the NHS for us today and so they wanted priests who were honest, upright and well-qualified for the job. And in trying to secure a church position for Guibert through a debt his lord owed him, what was his brother doing other than well, you know, simony of course. And from how Guibert describes it, in this way the married priest was able to get public opinion on his side over an issue that had clearly caught the attention of the citizenry of Clermont.

Even though he was a married priest, this man could not be forced to part with his wife through the suspension of his office; but he had given up celebrating Mass. Having given the divine mysteries less importance than his own body, he justly escaped the punishment that he thought he had escaped by renouncing the sacrifice. Once he was stripped of his canonical office, there being nothing left to deter him, he began publicly celebrating mass again while keeping his wife. Then a rumour spread that, in the course of these ceremonies he pronounced excommunication on my mother and her family and repeated it several days in a row. My mother, who always feared about divine matters, feared the punishment of her sins and the scandal that might erupt. She surrendered the prebend that had illicitly been granted and secured another one for me from the lord of the castle in anticipation of some other cleric’s death. Thus, do we “flee the weapons of iron, only to fall under the shafts of a bronze bow [Job 20:24].” To grant something in anticipation of someone’s death is hardly more than issuing a daily incentive to murder.

So the priest had successfully mobilised the local community against Guibert’s family, and by publicly excommunicating them in front of a crowd of the ordinary churchgoers who supported him, he was able to force them to back down. What Guibert’s mother then did next horrified Guibert, and indeed by the time Guibert wrote the Monodies, the practice of securing a church position in anticipation of the incumbent’s death had been outlawed by Pope Paschal II (r.1099 – 1118) at the Council of Beauvais in 1114. Thus, a would-be victim of the papal revolution was able to use some of most important weapons in its arsenal, accusations of simony and public opinion, against its very zealots.

As Conrad Leyser, who was my tutor at Worcester College during my undergraduate years has argued in a brilliant review article aimed at specialists, this little anecdote nicely illustrates the significance of the Gregorian reform movement as it was felt at the time. While it did nothing to immediately eliminate patronage, proprietary churches, dynasticism and lay aristocratic power from the church, decisions made in distant Rome nonetheless affected how people jockeyed for clerical offices in obscure corners of Northern France. Both sides appealed to the principles of the papal revolutionaries in their struggle over the church prebend at Clermont, one side doing so more successfully than the other, and both tried to get local public opinion, which was becoming very influenced by these revolutionary ideas, on their side. Indeed, in many ways this post and the two before it has been something of a homage to Conrad, who I really enjoyed being taught by, as they’ve touched quite a bit on his research interests and theories. Indeed, shoutout to Conrad if you happen to be reading this – you provided me with three years of excellent teaching and mentoring at Oxford, and you helped encourage and inspire me on my journey as a medieval historian, even though I eventually decided academia wasn't the future for me.

Sources used:

A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated by Paul Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996)

Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009)

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 – 1000, Penguin (2009)

Julia Barrow, The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, the Families and Careers in North-Western Europe, 800 – 1200, Cambridge University Press (2015)

R.I Moore, The First European Revolution, 970 – 1215, Blackwell (2000)

H.A Freestone, The Priest's Wife in the Anglo-Norman Realm, 1050-1150 (Doctoral thesis, 2018)

J.W Fawcett, “The Hereditary Priests of Hexham”, Hexham Parish Magazine (1903), pp.37–38

https://notchesblog.com/2016/02/09/the-manly-priest-an-interview-with-jennifer-thibodeaux/ - post by Katherine Harvey, in conversation with Jennifer Thibodeaux

https://blog.oup.com/2014/09/clerical-celibacy/ - post by Hugh Thomas

Conrad Leyser, “Review article: Church reform – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?”, Early Medieval Europe, Volume 24 (2016), pp 478 – 499