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

have crossed Gregory’s mind: for it was precisely the kind of manoeuvre that the Roman elite had always taken for granted. Times, however, had changed. Among prominent reformers, all of whom were pledged to the purification of the Church, the notion that a priestly office, let alone the papacy, might be bought and sold for profit was utterly horrifying. Indeed, so they pointed out, it was one that had haunted the ministry of the very apostles themselves: for St Peter, in the earliest years of his preaching, had been approached by a wizard named Simon, and offered gold in exchange for his ability to work miracles. ‘I see that you are in the gall of bitterness,’ the Prince of Apostles had replied dismissively, ‘and in the bond of iniquity’; and ever since the sin of trading in supernatural powers and offices had been known as ‘simony’. True, Gregory’s perplexity at finding himself branded guilty of such an offence was, perhaps, understandable – ‘for so widespread had the custom become that hardly anyone even knew it to be a sin’. Those who held the shining example of Cluny before them, however, and who argued for a clergy liberated from the reins of the rich and powerful, had no doubt that it was indeed a sin — and a pestiferous one at that. And among their number — fatefully for Gregory – was Henry III.

Who was, after all, a would-be emperor – and impatient to be anointed. Sublimely confident in his own right to order the Church, Henry duly prepared himself to cut the Gordian knot. Shortly before Christmas, he summoned the three rival popes to Sutri, a small town just north of Rome. Gregory – the only one to appear – was formally deposed by a hastily convened synod; so too Sylvester. Three days later, in Rome itself, Benedict was also given the push. Henry, taking a leaf out of Otto Ill’s book, then nominated one of his own countrymen to serve as pope, who, obediently moving into the Lateran, took the name Clement II. A few days later, on Christmas Day itself, the German king was formally anointed as the heir to Charlemagne.

Few among the ranks of the reformers thought to raise a protest against his high-handedness. Indeed, joining in the salutes to him as God’s representative on earth was none other than the by now fabulously venerable Odilo: potent testimony to the widespread enthusiasm for the labour of surgery that Henry had performed upon the papacy. True, there were some who still clung to their former loyalties: Hildebrand, for instance, stubborn in all things, flatly refused to abandon Gregory, even when the wretched abdicatee was exiled to the Rhineland. Yet he could not dispute the calibre of the men appointed by the new emperor to the Lateran; nor the earnestness of his attempts to wrest control of it once and all from criminality. When Clement II, less than a year into his papacy, died of lead poisoning, and the incorrigible Benedict, borne upon a great surge of bribery and intimidation, swept back into the Lateran for an unprecedented third time, Henry showed not the slightest hesitation in having him kicked off his throne yet again. A second German pope was dispatched to Rome; and then, when he also promptly expired, a third.

By now it was the winter of 1048 – and Gregory VI as well was dead. Hildebrand, ever passionate in his loyalties, was free at last to give them to someone else. All he needed was a worthy recipient. That December, in a mark of the favour with which he had already come to be regarded in imperial circles, the young priest was summoned to a council held in the ancient city of Worms. There, with the blaze of the king’s presence illumining the winter nights, and spilling reflections across the black and icy waters of the Rhine, he met Henry’s nominee for St Peter’s throne. ‘A new light was seen to rise upon the world.’ Certainly, it did not take Hildebrand long to know himself in the presence of a leader truly worthy of his devotion.

And so, of course, he pledged it.

Sailing from Byzantium

Hildebrand’s enthusiasm was hardly surprising. Bruno of Toul was the very model of a prince of the Church: tall, good-looking and a distant cousin of the emperor himself. Proficient in all the skills required of an imperial bishop, he had served variously as a judge, a general and a diplomat. Yet Bruno’s talents were not merely those required of an earthly lordship. At his birth, it was said, ‘the whole of his little body had been found marked with tiny crosses’ in a certain portent of a saintly future. And so it had proved. Much given as he was to spectacular displays of charity, and even to washing the feet of the poor, Bruno appeared to his admirers that most splendid of paradoxes, the ideal Christian leader: ‘for he combined the wisdom of a serpent with the innocence of a dove’. Hildebrand certainly thought so. All the hopes for the reform of the Church that he had previously pinned on Gregory he now transferred to Bruno. That same December, he signed up to accompany his new hero on the road back to Rome.

A journey that in itself gave a potent foretaste of the pontificate that was to come. Braving the snows and floods of winter, Bruno made his way southwards unaccompanied by any of Henry’s soldiers, and dressed only in the robes of a humble pilgrim. Angels, it was said, spoke to him on the way, and when at last he entered Rome he did so barefoot. Even then, it was only once the locals had publicly implored him to become their bishop that he deigned to take his place on the throne of St Peter, and adopted the name Leo IX. These gestures were shrewdly calculated to win him the support of his ever-fractious Roman flock; but aimed