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

a married priest was worth. Such language was a bit strong, perhaps, even for Peter — but he could sympathise with the sentiment, nevertheless. Just as simony always tended to be defined by reformers as a kind of leprosy or pestilence or rottenness, so the marriage bed of a priest was invariably represented as a stew of filth. On occasion, indeed, angels had been known to materialise and make the point literally. Peter, writing to Hildebrand shortly before leaving on his mission to Milan, had described one particularly spectacular miracle: the public shaming of a priest whose reputation had always been irreproachable until that moment. Even as he was celebrating Mass, it was reported, an angel had appeared before the full view of the church and set to scrubbing him down, before finishing by emptying the bucket of by now grimy black water over his head. The priest, spluttering and sobbing, had thereupon confessed to the stunned congregation that he had slept with a servant girl only the night before. One slip, one single surrender to his lusts – and all had been ruined.

No wonder that many priests, bewildered by the sudden sea change in public opinion, one that sought to condemn their wives as whores and their own physical needs as a menace to the cosmos, found the new demands being placed upon them insupportable. ‘In every struggle with titillating pleasure,’ was Peter’s own tip, ‘try to meditate on the grave’ – either that or hurry off to Mass. Advice kindly offered, no doubt – but not entirely adequate, even so, to the frailties of every priest. There were many, it seemed, who needed to be hectored, even menaced, rather than simply encouraged. This was why, even as reformers sought to combine their great campaign against simony with a no less ambitious insistence that priests live as chastely as monks, there were some who looked to harness their supporters among the Christian people to a policy of active intimidation. Peter, that committed pacifist, was not one of them, of course; but there were others who argued with no less passionate a sense of righteousness that desperate circumstances might indeed require desperate measures. The stakes were cosmically high. Could there be anything more important, in the final count, than the readying of God’s Church for the coming of the end days!

One episode, in particular, served to illustrate the kind of value judgement that its leaders were increasingly opting to make. In 1065, a knight from Milan by the name of Erlembald, a pious man much given to charitable works and pilgrimages, arrived in Rome and paid a call on Hildebrand. He was troubled and in need of spiritual guidance. Should he join a monastery, he asked the archdeacon, as he had originally been planning to do – or should he accept a very different calling, a summons just recently received from the Patarenes, to fashion them into an authentic fighting force and lead them as their generalissimo? Hildebrand’s answer was not long in coming. It took the form – a whole year before the granting of a similar standard to Duke William of Normandy – of a papal banner. Returning to the Patarenes beneath the fluttering of this ‘battle flag of St Peter’s’, Erlembald duly threw himself into the brutal business of scouring simony and priestly unchastity from Milan for good: the first-ever knight to have received a formal papal blessing. Whether as a consequence of this or not, victory marked all his efforts. ‘He subdued the city by the sword and also by gold, and by many and diverse oaths; none of the nobles could withstand him.’ Indeed, by 1071, such was the scale of Erlembald’s success that the wretched Archbishop Guy, holed up in his cathedral, and in increasingly poor health, had resolved on a clandestine resignation.

Spies in Milan, however, keeping track of his intentions, were soon bringing news of all his plans to Rome; and Hildebrand moved quickly to capitalise. Sending both funds and instructions to the Patarene captain, he ordered his protege to prepare a coup. By August, when the sick and weary archbishop finally breathed his last, Erlembald was primed. The Patarenes, backed by the presence of a papal legate, pushed for the election of a successor, a young clerk by the name of Atto; and on 6 January 1072, he was duly chosen. Erlembald, escorting the new archbishop to his palace amid a fearsome clattering of hoofs and glimmering of mail, sat him down there to celebrate his elevation with a sumptuous banquet. Yet the Patarenes, for all the speed and ruthlessness of their actions, had overstepped a fateful bound. Momentous forces – more momentous than even Hildebrand could imagine – were being set in train. The attempt to enthrone Atto, far from healing the fissures in Milan, was doomed only to widen them – and indeed to precipitate a crisis so devastating, so unexpected and so wholly without precedent that it would end up racking the whole span of Christendom and transforming it for all time.

That a Patarene nominee as archbishop was a direct threat to the Church establishment in Milan went without saying – but it was also, and far more ominously, a slap in the face for Henry IV. The young king had not forgotten that it was his father, almost three decades previously, who had invested Guy with his staff and ring of office. Indeed, shortly before his death, the failing archbishop had returned them both to the imperial court, together with a proposal that the emissary to whom they had been entrusted, a deacon by the name of Godfrey, be invested with them in turn. King Henry, who was by now in his early twenties, and positively itching to throw his weight around in Italy, had needed no second encouragement. Godfrey had duly been graced with Guy’s staff and ring – and packed off back to Milan. An abortive mission, it might have been thought: for no sooner had