Millennium Page 3
The growing power of the pope also put him at loggerheads with the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1001, there was as yet no official mechanism for the appointment of a new pope. Sometimes the noble families of Rome would choose one of their own; sometimes they would accept the nomination of the Holy Roman Emperor. The emperor maintained the right to appoint the man he thought best suited for the position, whether that meant a direct appointment or a rigged election. As a consequence, there was often conflict, with the pope occasionally being deposed by the emperor and replaced with an imperial sycophant. In 1046, when Henry III succeeded as king of the Germans and came to Rome to be anointed as emperor, he found three popes simultaneously claiming the title of pontiff. These were Benedict IX, who had sold the papal title but then refused to give it up; Gregory VI, the man who had purchased it from him; and Sylvester III, the local choice. Not wanting his imperial title to be sullied by doubt, Henry III summoned the Council of Sutri, at which all three popes were deposed; the emperor then appointed his own confessor as the next pope, Clement II. But the problem of appointment soon arose again. In 1058, two rival popes, Benedict X and Nicholas II, went to war with each other. The following year, Nicholas II prevailed and issued the papal bull In nomine Domini, which laid down the rule that all future popes were to be elected by the College of Cardinals, in secret, without the Holy Roman Emperor’s intervention.
In nomine Domini was just the first of a series of reforms promulgated by the Church’s cardinals, the most prominent of whom was Hildebrand, who would later become Pope Gregory VII. These reforms tended to set priests apart from all other men. Catholic clergy – from parish priests to bishops – were now prohibited from marrying. They were required to look like Latin clergymen – tonsured and clean-shaven – and to speak like them too, using only Latin in their religious services. They were prohibited from buying and selling ecclesiastical offices, a practice known as simony. They were removed from the jurisdiction of secular courts and tried by their bishop’s ecclesiastical court, in which they could not be sentenced to death. Most important of all, the reforms proscribed lay investiture. This meant that, in theory, no secular lord could appoint an ecclesiastical official; the senior clergy, including all the bishops and archdeacons in Christendom, had to be appointed by the pope. Gregory VII even extended his authority over the Holy Roman Emperor: he twice excommunicated Henry IV and on one occasion forced him to walk barefoot across the Alps in a hair shirt to beg forgiveness from him at Canossa. Although the reforms took time to come to fruition – many resisted the ban on clerical marriage and some rulers refused to give up the right to appoint senior clergymen – their impact was huge. By 1100, the Church had become an independent political and religious body that incorporated all the kingdoms from Norway to Sicily and from Iceland to Poland, and exercised varying degrees of influence over what people were beginning to call ‘the Latin World’.
The growth of papal power was accompanied by an intensification of Church authority at grass-roots level. Priests were established as permanent ecclesiastical agents within communities. Religious focal points – which, as we have seen in Moreton, in 1001 had been little more than crosses for public preaching and baptismal fonts in manor houses – were increasingly turned into churches in the proper sense of the word, paid for by the communities that wished to worship in them. We have already seen that at the opening of the eleventh century, the bishop of Devon, who nominally administered an area of 2,590 square miles, exercised authority over barely two dozen established priestly communities. The bishop of Paderborn in Lotharingia similarly administered only 29 churches within his diocese of 1,158 square miles.3 By 1100, however, their successor bishops each supervised hundreds of parishes. In some parts of England the process of parochialisation was almost complete by the end of the century. No fewer than 147 churches are mentioned in Domesday Book (1086) for the county of Kent; however, the contemporary collection of documents, Domesday Monachorum, suggests that there were twice that number, showing the parish system was already fully formed there.4 Much the same can be said for Sussex, where at least 183 of its eventual total of 250 medieval parish churches had been built by 1100.5 The populous and rich areas of Norfolk and Suffolk had even more churches.
In addition to the priests who served these congregations, a whole hierarchy of senior clergy was appointed. Archdeacons served under bishops as spiritual administrators of a given region. Deans were chosen to supervise collegiate churches. Northern European bishops were no longer situated in quiet places somewhere in the countryside; they moved into towns, in emulation of their southern European counterparts. In England, the bishop of Crediton moved to Exeter in 1050; the bishop of Dorchester relocated to Lincoln in 1072; the bishop of Selsey moved to Chichester in 1075; the bishop of Sherborne went off to Old Sarum (later Salisbury) in 1078; and the bishop of Elmham moved first to Thetford in 1072 and then to Norwich about 1095. By 1100, the English bishops were all established in towns – places with better infrastructure and faster communications. You could say that, whereas in 1001 it was rare to see any priests, in 1100 it was hard to get away from them.
In addition to the parish priests, archdeacons, bishops and archbishops, the pope presided over the monks whose numbers were growing with extraordinary rapidity. In the early tenth century, the duke of Aquitaine had founded a monastery at Cluny along revolutionary lines. Like other monasteries of the time, it was to follow the Rule of St Benedict; unlike other monasteries, however, it was to do so very strictly. Cluniac monks were forbidden from sexual intercourse and all forms of corruption, including simony and nepotism, and fell under the direct jurisdiction of the pope. Yet the most important element of the Cluniac way of life was a return to prayer as the monks’ key occupation. Labourers were employed to work in the monastery’s fields, which freed the monks to perform the liturgy. The new monastic model appealed to members of noble families, who considered manual labour to be beneath them. Cluny thus soon attracted both followers and wealth. It also drew very capable men to be abbots. More monasteries linked to the mother house of Cluny were established, and in the eleventh century this became the first proper monastic order in Christendom. At its height, the Clunic order comprised nearly a thousand monasteries throughout Europe. The whole project demonstrated the power of an organisation of religious houses under a single leadership. Soon even stricter monastic orders were established, such as the Carthusians in 1084 and the Cistercians in 1098.
If it seems that an army of monks and priests was on the move, headed by their papal commander-in-chief, then that is not far from the truth. In 1095, at Clermont in France, Pope Urban II held a council that marked a watershed in the growing influence of the Latin Church. The Byzantine emperor, Alexis Comnenus, buckling under the force of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia, had asked Urban II to exert pressure on the nobles in the west to send military aid to their Christian brothers in the east. What a turnaround! At the beginning of the eleventh century, Constantinople had thought of Rome as uncivilised; in 1054, its patriarch had excommunicated the pope’s legates; but in 1095, the Byzantines saw the pope as their potential saviour. Urban II, keen to heal the divide of the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, and hoping finally to assert papal supremacy over the whole of Christendom, was eager to assist. On 27 November, he preached a sermon to a large crowd in which he urged Christian men to desist from fighting each other and to go to Jerusalem to recover the holy seat of their lord, Jesus Christ, from the rule of the Fatimid caliph. His appeal received an ecstatic response and led directly to several waves of armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land, most notably the First Crusade. This expedition of Frankish and Norman nobles swept through Anatolia and Syria, conquering the great city of Antioch on the way to Jerusalem, which fell to their army on 15 July 1099. This in itself was extraordinary. Just imagine setting out from France on foot today for Jerusalem. Now imagine doing it without any guidebooks, phrasebooks or money, facing incredible heat and large numbers of heavily armed enemies. And
imagine doing it without having ever travelled more than a few miles from your native village. The very drama of setting out on a Crusade is impossible for us fully to appreciate. But urging people to fight their way to the ends of the Earth is a measure of how far the Church had come.
This had been an astonishing century for the Catholic Church. At the start of the period the pope had been hired and fired by the emperor. He could rely very little on the kings and dukes of Christendom who were embroiled in war. He could not exert his authority because necessary administrative and communication structures were patchy or non-existent. Where there were priests, they often defied religious expectations by using their own languages and customs, buying and selling offices, marrying, and behaving altogether like secular men. However, by the end of the century, the Catholic Church was united, centralised, organised, powerful and expanding. It was able to bring the emperor barefoot across the Alps and even to instigate the conquest of the Holy Land. It promoted literacy, book composition and the stimulation of intellectual activity across the whole continent. But its real triumph was in exerting its authority at grass-roots level. The eleventh century was when the Catholic Church changed from being simply a faith into which people were baptised to being a vast, organised system that governed how they lived and died.
Peace
There is a measure of irony in describing the First Crusade and then claiming that one of the greatest changes of the eleventh century was the growth of peace. The irony is all the greater when you consider that one of the reasons for the peace – or, rather, the lack of conflict – was the agency of the Church, which in 1095 had urged its members to wage war. Nevertheless, if you compare the Europe of 1001 with that of 1100, the latter is so much less violent that there can be no doubt that peace was one of the biggest changes of the eleventh century.
To understand this apparent contradiction it is necessary to consider the violence in context. Yes, the eleventh century saw a whole succession of wars, but the very word ‘war’ is significant here. When the Vikings attacked Devon in 997 and 1001, they were not fighting a war; they were carrying out the daily acts of aggression celebrated by a society whose culture endorsed violence as a way of life. Likewise, when the Magyars invaded the Holy Roman Empire and the Muslim general Almanzor attacked the kingdom of León, these hostilities were part of ongoing cultural conflicts. Each side understood itself naturally to be the mortal enemy of the other. When the pagan kingdoms on the perimeters of Christendom were converted, they swapped outright enmity for cultural fraternity and cautious coexistence. They might still go to war, and, as we have seen, even popes might fight each other. However, these were political wars to resolve a specific dispute, limited in their duration; conflict was no longer a daily occurrence. The Norman conquests of England (1066–71) and southern Italy (over the course of the eleventh century) were among the last Viking-style invasions of established Christian kingdoms. A permanent state of regular killing, which once had existed throughout Christendom, had by 1100 been pushed to the periphery and beyond, into the lands of pagan adversaries: the Córdoban Muslims, the Seljuk Turks and the heathen Lithuanians and Slavs.
The process by which European society shrugged off the old culture of universal violence was not just down to old pagan enemies becoming new Christian friends. It was also due to socio-economic changes, most notably the emergence of the feudal system. At the time of the Viking and Magyar invasions, European armies had fought on foot; they were no match for fast-moving maritime attackers or marauders on horseback. In order to preserve their lands and people, the rulers of Europe thus created specialist forces of mounted soldiers, whose armour, manoeuvrability and rapid redeployment could hold invaders in check. But warhorses were exceedingly expensive, and so was the chain mail that such knights were increasingly required to wear. Moreover, years of training, starting from boyhood, were required to fight on horseback. Thus the great nobles of Europe endowed these knights and their families with considerable estates: a new privileged class was created to sustain this military force. The feudal system was a reciprocal arrangement by which local communities fed and equipped their armed lords and were protected by them. This process, which was well under way by 1001, made it increasingly difficult for invaders to exploit the hitherto poorly defended European peasantry. The word ‘feudal’ might have negative connotations in the modern world, but in 1100 it meant that Christian Europe was better defended than it had been before.
It has to be said that the establishment of a class of feudal lords to defend Christendom against external enemies encouraged violence of a different kind, namely between the lords themselves. Indeed, the Norman chronicler William of Poitiers contrasted the frequent bloodshed in feudal Normandy, where neighbouring lords fought each other, with the relative peace of Anglo-Saxon England before 1066. However, there were a number of pressures on lords that encouraged peace. Several of these were pioneered by the Church, which actively pursued innovative ways of dampening violence. For example, a lord could be forced to do penance when he committed an act of unspeakable cruelty. One man who has gone down in history as committing more than his fair share of such acts is Fulk Nerra, Count of Anjou. On discovering that his wife had committed adultery with a farmer, he burnt her at the stake in her wedding dress. When he instigated a massacre so horrifying that the Church could not let it pass without recrimination, he was ordered to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After another atrocity, he was made to build a new monastery where priests would pray for his soul. By the time he died in 1040, Fulk had completed two pilgrimages to Jerusalem and founded two monasteries. While the Church clearly failed to curb all of his violent tendencies, it did manage to make an example of his black reputation, forcing him to perform these penances. Others no doubt took note. And one wonders how many more violent acts Fulk would have committed if there had been no restraint at all upon his temper. Ironically, on the strength of his pilgrimages and monastic foundations, some historians have referred to him as pious.
A second strategy devised by the Church to curtail violence was the movement known as the Peace of God, which had started in France in the late tenth century. This entailed the forceful use of religious propaganda – particularly the carrying of saints’ relics in processions – to urge lords to make peace, and to protect women, priests, pilgrims, merchants and farmers from the destruction of war. We may take a cynical view of such measures but in the eleventh century superstitious belief in the power of relics to inflict mortal damage on a person who broke his religious oath was not just widely held, it was intensely believed. It took on a special significance around the year 1033, which was understood to mark the millennium of Christ’s death. Another movement was that of the Truce of God. This initially prohibited all warfare from Friday night until first thing on Monday morning, as well as on the feast days of major saints. In the 1040s it was extended to prohibit men over the age of twelve from fighting between Wednesday evening and Monday morning and throughout Lent and Advent. It has to be said that it was not wholly successful: the Battle of Hastings was fought on a Saturday, so both Saxons and Normans broke the Truce of God. Nevertheless, it was constantly reaffirmed by ecclesiastical councils. Consequently lords were regularly reminded that the Church did not condone fighting among Christians. As Pope Urban made clear in his sermon at Clermont at the end of the century, if Christians really had to fight then they should direct their energies against the enemies of Christendom.
It is easy for us to mock churchmen who thought they could ban warfare from teatime on Wednesday until nine o’clock on Monday morning but these movements had more force than the Church alone could exert, for they advocated a morality that kings also endorsed. It was hugely destructive to a ruler’s interests if his vassals directed their resources and energies against each other. For this reason, both William the Conqueror and the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, championed the Truce of God. In addition, secular rulers had methods of their own to preserve peace. In England, William
purposely distributed his lords’ manors in small, separate parcels across the country, reducing their ability to control any stretch of land as a subkingdom. In addition, every manor was held personally from the king, so the bonds of fealty kept his vassals at peace. These bonds also meant that a king’s expectations of propriety had to be obeyed. Whether it was a Monday morning or a Saturday afternoon, the rules of war applied, and they often included the Church’s proscriptions. The slow process of containing and controlling Christian violence had begun.
The discontinuation of slavery
The French historian Marc Bloch declared that the disappearance of slavery constituted ‘one of the most profound [transformations] . . . that Mankind has ever known’.6 Without a doubt, slavery’s demise was a considerable change in European society over the period 900–1200, but it was a complex process. For a start, as that time range indicates, it was not a sudden and complete ‘abolition’: there were still slaves in the West in the thirteenth century, and several centuries after that in eastern Europe. Also, not all slaves experienced the same conditions of slavery: different countries had different laws restricting what a man might do with his slaves. On top of these factors, it is not always clear how slavery relates to other forms of servitude, especially the position of the serf or unfree peasant. Nevertheless, significant steps to limit slavery were taken in the eleventh century that led to its gradual disappearance in the West – hence the introduction of the subject here.