Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

One celebrated abbot from the Low Countries, Poppo of Stablo, was especially admired for beating himself on the chest with a jagged stone whenever he had a spare moment, and for never smiling. Monks who found themselves subjected to Poppo’s disciplines perhaps not surprisingly tended to loathe him – but a succession of emperors stood in awe of his austerities. So it was, for instance, that when he announced himself appalled by a craze among the daredevils of the court for covering themselves in honey and then allowing a ravenous bear to lick them clean, Henry II promptly and contritely banned it. So it was too that Conrad II, despite being so given to worldly pleasures that he was widely rumoured to have sold his soul to the Devil, treated the fearsomely humourless abbot with the most wide-eyed respect, and entrusted many of his favourite monasteries to Poppo’s flinty zeal. Such a relationship appeared to optimists a shining model for the future of Christendom: Caesar and saintly churchman united in the heroic task of reform.

In 1039, with the death of Conrad, this task was inherited by his son, a young man uniquely well qualified to shoulder it. Henry HI, in contrast with his father, was a king of rare piety and conscientiousness. Like Poppo, and for an identical reason, it was his earnest ambition never to laugh. In 1043, when he married Agnes, the daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine, jesters were solemnly banned from the nuptials. It was true that Poppo himself, suspicious of the reputation of the Aquitainians for frivolity and luxurious fashions, had greeted the coming of a Frenchwoman to the imperial court with alarmed disapproval — but he need not have worried. Agnes, a descendant of the founder of Cluny, was in truth a bride ideally suited to her husband: together, whenever they were able, the royal couple sought to attend Mass at least five times every day.

Yet Henry, though sensitive and melancholic, yielded to none of his predecessors in the imperious character of his rule. His displays of humility, heartfelt though they were, did nothing to diminish his firm conviction that the sway of the Christian people had been granted him directly by God. In 1043, when Henry graciously announced from the pulpit of Constance cathedral that he forgave all his enemies, he did so as the head of a peace conference: one that had been summoned, not by his bishops, but by himself. A year later, when he appeared before his soldiers as a public penitent, it was as a victor on a corpse-strewn battlefield, amid the broken banners of rebels shattered on his sword. As a worthy offering to St Peter, he could think of no more suitable gift than ‘a golden spear” – a trophy wrested from a rival warlord. Such a king, eager for the legitimisation that only an anointing in Rome could bring, was hardly the man to feel overly inhibited in his dealings with even the most troublesome of pontiffs. Which was just as well: for by the autumn of 1046, when Henry finally felt secure enough in his authority over the Reich to lead an expedition southwards into Italy, he found not one pope waiting for him there, but three.

A truly monstrous state of affairs – and one that provided a fitting climax to the scandal-stained career of Benedict IX. Two years previously, with even the normally unshockable Romans starting to weary of his crimes, the Crescentians, heirs of the would-be pope-maker who had been beheaded by Otto III, had launched a sudden attempt to seize back the papacy for themselves. Taking the Holy Father by surprise, they had succeeded in driving him temporarily from Rome, and installing as his replacement their own local bishop, an anonymous patsy quite unworthy of his new title Sylvester III. Two years on, and Benedict was back, installed on his old throne, and defiantly eyeballing the Crescentians: wretched testimony to the abiding relish among Roman dynasts for cat-fights in the Lateran. Yet already the mastery of the papacy was starting to evade them: for no longer was it merely the local nobility who aspired to secure the election of a pope. Prominent reformers, appalled by the descent of Rome yet further into the mire, had wearied of merely wringing their hands. Accordingly, in the spring of 1045, they had thrown their weight behind the election of a third pope, the son of a converted Jew, as rich as he was pious, who had taken the name Gregory VI, and stirringly proclaimed himself the patron of reform. Here, for the young and idealistic, had been a moment of hope that they would never forget.

Typical of those inspired by Gregory’s election was a former pupil of his, a brilliant and pugnacious monk by the name of Hildebrand, whose humble origins as the son of a Tuscan carpenter had served only to emphasise all the more decisively his status as a high-flyer. Educated first in a monastery opposite the Palatine that had always served as Odilo’s favourite rest-stop in Rome, and then in the Lateran itself, he had come to burn with a passionate conviction that the ordering of the fallen world was the papacy’s alone to achieve. In Gregory VI, Hildebrand believed, the Church had at last found a worthy champion. He duly offered the new Pope his tigerish devotion. Gregory, in turn, appointed Hildebrand his chaplain. The bond between the two men would never fail. And yet by 1046, barely a year into his papacy, Gregory’s credibility was already coming under fire, even from those who had originally supported him, as the full, mortifying details of his election began to dribble out.

For Gregory, it emerged, had dirtier hands than had ever been supposed. Benedict IX was his godson; and the wealthy Gregory, in an attempt to persuade his incorrigibly avaricious rival to stand down, had slipped him a hefty bribe. That this might have been regarded as a problem appeared never to