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

A startling question – and one that only a man of humble origins, perhaps, would ever have thought to ask. To Gregory himself, a man who had toiled all his life to secure the Church as a bulwark against the legions of ‘the ancient enemy’, suspicion of the Devil’s cunning was only natural: a spur to ever more urgent labours. Yet even as he could reflect with satisfaction on the sheer global reach of all his efforts, and on how an immense sway of the earth’s scattered peoples, from the Swedes to the Irish, had been successfully urged to a common obedience, Gregory was increasingly conscious of a satanic and gathering darkness. It was all well and good for him to summon princes on the world’s edge to acknowledge the universal authority of ‘St Peter and his vicars, among whom divine providence has appointed that our lot should be numbered’ — and yet what if, even as he did so, the most hellish menace of all were lurking within Christendom’s heartlands? What, indeed, if the advance guard of Antichrist were already massing to assail the throne of St Peter itself? This, by the seventh year of his papacy, was the monstrous possibility by which

Gregory found himself increasingly shadowed. ‘And truly,’ he reflected, ‘it can be held no wonder – for the nearer the time of Antichrist approaches, so the more violently does he strive to destroy the Christian religion.’

Back in late 1077, as Henry’s pious and venerable mother lay dying, what had most consoled her was the conviction that her son and her spiritual father, the two men to whom she had devoted so much of her life, were reconciled at last, and that Christendom’s great breach was repaired for good. Perhaps, then, it was just as well that the Empress Agnes had passed away when she did. Despite the kiss of forgiveness that Gregory had bestowed upon Henry at Canossa, and for all the spirit of compromise that had characterised their mutual dealings in its immediate wake, both had remained wedded to positions that neither man could possibly concede: positions that were, in the ultimate reckoning, irreconcilable. Henry, alert at last to the full revolutionary implications of Gregory’s policies, was resolved never to surrender his right of investiture; just as Gregory, thunderously convinced of his divine vocation, remained no less committed to stripping it away for good. Small wonder, then, that the tensions which had seemed so dramatically eased at Canossa had soon begun to escalate again. In the autumn of 1078, Gregory, making all too clear what had hitherto been left diplomatically opaque, had issued a fateful decree: ‘that no priest may receive investiture of a bishopric, abbey, or church from the hand of an emperor or king’. Henry’s response was to invest two archbishops that very same Christmas. A year and more on, and still there had been no royal climb-down. Why, indeed, should there have been? Henry had every reason to feel confident. In Saxony, Rudolf’s support was showing signs of splintering at last. Certainly, there was not the remotest prospect now of the anti-king making a breakout from his increasingly beleaguered power base. Henry could consider himself as secure upon his throne as he had been since the body-blow of his excommunication. No wonder, then, called upon formally for the first time to abandon his right of investiture, that he had opted to call Gregory’s bluff.

And no wonder either, Gregory being Gregory, that the Pope had likewise refused to budge. The challenge, it seemed to the outraged pontiff, was only incidentally to himself: for Henry was trampling on the very purposes of God. Early in 1080, shortly before a synod was due to be held in Rome, the Virgin Mary had duly appeared to Gregory in a vision, and reassured him of heaven’s backing for the dreadful steps that it was now his clear and pressing duty, as the leader of the universal Church, to take. Sure enough, on 7 March, the Pope greeted the assembled delegates to his council with a mighty groan, and then, his words tumbling out from him in an anguished torrent, pronounced that Henry was once again ‘justly cast down from the dignity of the kingship because of his pride, disobedience and falsehood’. The show of neutrality that Gregory had maintained with such rigorous forbearance since Forcheim was abandoned at last. All the weight of his authority, and all the invisible legions of God that he had no reason to doubt were his to command, he now committed to the support of Rudolf. Everything that he had ever laboured to achieve, in short, was being gambled on a single proposition: that it lay within his power to destroy Henry for good. That same Easter, in the awful setting of St Peter’s, Gregory did not hesitate to make explicit the full, terrifying scale of what was now at stake between him and his adversary. ‘For let it be known to all of you,’ he pronounced, ‘that if he does not recover his senses by the feast of St Peter, he will die or be deposed. If this fails to happen, I ought no more to be believed.’

Gregory, though, was unwilling to trust his fortunes entirely to the protection of the apostle. That summer, looking to secure an earthly shield for himself in addition to his celestial one, he took a deep breath, swallowed his scruples, and agreed to meet with Robert Guiscard. The Duke of Apulia, who had responded to his excommunication back in 1074 by seizing Amalfi and menacing Benevento, was now formally absolved, and reconfirmed as a papal vassal. A humiliating climb-down for Gregory, to be sure – but an unavoidable one as well. Sure enough, late that June, right in the midst of his negotiations with the Norman duke, ominous news arrived from Germany. Henry, it was reported, repeating his tactics of four years earlier, had responded to