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

as well at the entirety of the Christian people. Leo may have been an imperial nominee, yet it was crucial to both his and Henry’s purposes that they demonstrate as publicly as possible that no money had passed between them. Such was the scale of the task that they faced, in labouring to secure for the Church a new beginning, purged once and for all of the pollution of worldliness, that neither man could afford to be branded a simonist. Tellingly, in a vision granted him shortly before becoming Pope, Leo had been shown a hideous old woman dressed in filthy rags, who had importuned him and tugged at his robes; ‘and when the man of the Lord was driven by her unmannerly conduct to mark her face with the sign of the cross, the hag fell to the ground like a dead woman but rose up again, her appearance now one of wonderful beauty’.” That power, to draw a sign of the Cross upon the body of the Church, and to watch it restored to its former loveliness, was one that Leo had no wish to compromise. Too much depended on him. Too much was at stake.

Energy and determination, ambition and emollience: such were the qualities that Leo’s long career as an imperial bishop had served to hone. Now he had the chance to test them on the grandest stage of all. Only weeks into his papacy, and already he was holding a council in Rome: by its terms, the laws against simony were thunderously reaffirmed, and several simonist bishops deposed, while the Bishop of Sutri, who had falsely protested his innocence, was struck down by a stroke. Satisfying developments all — and yet only a beginning. Leo, possessed by a literally cosmic sense of mission, was hardly the man to rest content within the limits of Rome. No sooner had the council in the Lateran been concluded than he was off again, retracing his steps. By June he was back in his native Rhineland, and by early October he had crossed into the kingdom of France—the first pope to visit it in 171 years. As in Rome, so along the route of his northern travels, his calls for the clergy to reform itself tended to be greeted by the local bishops with a mixture of perplexity and outrage. Most of them, far from agreeing with Leo that simony was indeed a mortal threat to the health of Christendom, persisted in regarding it as a perfectly sensible and unexceptional practice, and one that had served to keep the Church on its feet for centuries. Not surprisingly, when Leo summoned the bishops of France to a council in Reims, a majority kept well away. All were promptly excommunicated. But even those few who did attend were given cause to regret it.

For as the bishops entered the church where the council was to be held, and bowed before the altar, they found themselves confronted by an awful and intimidating sight. There, brooding over the entire scene, was a casket containing the bones of Reims’ patron saint. Summoned to stand and swear on the relics that they had not paid for their positions, most of the bishops opted to remain in their seats and squirm in mortified silence. When one archbishop did rise and try to defend a colleague, he found himself struck miraculously dumb by the power of the outraged saint. His client fled in disgrace that same night; and, from that moment on, a succession of simonist bishops were obliged to stammer out their confessions and grovel for mercy. Indeed only one man emerged from the proceedings with his reputation truly burnished. Odilo, after more than half a century as the head of Christendom’s most celebrated monastery, had finally died at the beginning of the year; and all eyes were duly fixed upon his successor. How fortunate it was, then, that not so much as a hint of impropriety had attached itself to the election of Hugh of Semur. Making his public confession before the Pope, the new abbot of Cluny forthrightly denied any wrongdoing. ‘The flesh was willing,’ he explained, ‘but mind and reason revolted.’ A statement that was, in its perfect fusion of worldliness and simplicity, almost worthy of Leo himself.

Yet if Abbot Hugh’s backing for the cause of reform was welcome, it hardly came as a great surprise. What did astound the papal party, astound and delight it, was the seething, raucous mass of supporters who had flocked to Reims from miles around, immense crowds of the faithful who kept themselves and the Holy Father awake all night by singing and shouting his name, and then, in the morning, by jeering the unfortunate simonists as they slunk through the streets to confession. The millennium of the Passion had passed, and the New Jerusalem had not arrived; but still, among the poor and the trampled, there remained an undimmed yearning for a peace of God. Christ might have been delayed, but there before them was the Pope, the Vicar of St Peter himself, no longer a vague abstraction but a man of flesh and blood — and demanding changes of the priesthood that the oppressed were only too desperate to see. A Church no longer in hock to grasping earthly lords – what would this provide the wretched if not a true sanctuary? No wonder, then, that Leo’s tour of the lands of the North, ‘unprecedented in our time’, should have served to generate ‘such jubilation and applause’. It went without saying that Leo himself, the cousin of Caesar, had not the slightest intention of placing himself at the head of a band of peasants. Although events at Reims certainly were exhilarating, they also served as a warning to the Pope and his advisers that excitement might easily get out of hand. More than once the crowds had indulged themselves with a riot. Psalms and screams had intermingled in the streets. Nevertheless, the discovery that they had the