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

he arrived in town to claim his throne than he was being hunted down by Erlembald’s heavies, chased into a lonely fortress, and put under siege.

Even amid all Godfrey’s humiliations, however, there was one thing at least left to bring a smile to his lips: that though he might be mired in impotence, so too was his rival, Atto. Erlembald’s grip on Milan had proved less secure than he had trusted: for on the very day of his nominee’s election, indeed even as he sat down at the formal banquet to celebrate it, he and his Patarene bodyguards had suddenly found themselves being ambushed. A mob whipped up by the local clergy had burst into the archbishop’s palace, chased Atto into his bedroom, and beaten him black and blue. Even the papal legate had suffered the mortification of being stripped of all his clothes. Although Erlembald had quickly succeeded in restoring order, it had not been soon enough to prevent Atto from swearing to his captors that he would ‘never again intervene in the bishopric’. Such an oath could not readily be dismissed. Milan, as a result, had found herself stuck with two archbishops – neither one of whom was able to take up his office.

A shocking state of affairs, to be sure—and yet barely hinting at the full scale of the crisis yet to come. In the summer of 1072, Pope Alexander II, at a formal synod of the Roman Church, pronounced that Atto was not bound by the oath he had given his assailants — and was therefore the rightful Archbishop of Milan. A few months later, in early 1073, Henry IV leaned on the bishops of Lombardy to stand as Godfrey’s patrons at his consecration. Alexander’s response was to excommunicate not only Godfrey himself, not only the Lombard bishops, but, just for good measure, some of Henry’s own closest advisers. Only once they had all been dismissed, the Pope declared, would he re-establish contact with the king: until that moment, he was to be regarded as ‘outside the communion of the Church’. Almost without anyone quite understanding how it had happened, papacy and empire, those twin pillars of Christendom, were at open loggerheads.

Less than three decades had passed since Henry III, descending upon the shrine of the apostles, had dismissed three popes at a stroke, and set about laying the foundations for the great project of reform. In that time, though much had been attempted and achieved by the reformers, it had never been any part of their intention to humiliate the youthful Caesar, just the opposite, in fact: Henry had always been the focus of their very highest hopes. Born of two exemplary parents, he had also been entrusted at his christening to the care of Abbot Hugh of Cluny, who had raised him dripping from the font, and been named his ‘spiritual father’ – so that the youthful king was triply a child of reform. Even once Henry had come of age, a vague feeling of responsibility, even of condescension, continued to characterise how reformers such as Hildebrand regarded him. On several occasions, indeed, ordering the Empress Agnes out of her cloistered retirement, they had dispatched her on the gruelling journey back across the Alps, so determined had they been to keep a watchful eye on her son.

Other missions, those considered too embarrassing or awkward for a woman to handle, they had entrusted to Peter Damian. Although Peter was old by now, and reluctant to leave his hermitage, he had undertaken them willingly enough: for he had always disapproved of sending Agnes, his spiritual ward, back to the scenes of her earthly greatness. In 1069, for instance, he had made the trek to the imperial court on a particularly delicate matter. Henry, bored of his new wife, the Lady Bertha, and complaining of her lack of sex appeal, had abruptly announced that he wished to divorce her. Peter, summoning all his considerable reserves of authority, had alternately menaced and wooed the young Caesar into backing down: the first time that a papal reformer had ever succeeded in imposing his will upon a king. ‘If you are really determined in this matter,’ Henry sighed, with a crashing lack of graciousness, ‘then I suppose I must brace myself to shoulder as best I can a burden that I cannot shed.’ Yet Peter himself, despite the undoubted scale of his triumph, had very deliberately refrained from making a song and dance about it. Bridges had not been burned. Lines of communication had been left open. Proof had been offered that the king and the papacy, even when tensions were running high, were not necessarily doomed to conflict.

But this was already, amid the gathering mood of crisis, a lesson well on the way to being lost. Peter, the leader among the reformers who had always been best qualified to teach it, was fading fast. He died in 1072, just a few months before the Empress Agnes, despairing of persuading her son to listen to her, gave pious backing to the excommunication of his advisers. A few weeks later, in April 1073, Alexander too was dead. The people of Rome, rather than wait for the cardinals to nominate a successor, were soon taking the law into their own hands. They knew precisely whom they wanted as their new pope: ‘Hildebrand for bishop!’ Even as Alexander was being laid to rest in the Lateran, the cry went up across the whole city.

‘Like the raging of the east wind, which buffets with violent blasts,’ Peter Damian had once described the inimitable archdeacon. Now, swept up from Alexander’s funeral amid the unanimous cheering of the Roman people, carried out of the basilica despite all his own modest protests, universally hailed by the name of Gregory, Hildebrand was borne from the Lateran past open fields, past blossom- heavy orchards, past crumbling ruins, down into the very heart of the Holy City itself, where, in an ancient church filled with relics of St Peter,