Christianity - The First Three Thousand Years Part 6

11.

The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900-1200)

ABBOTS, WARRIORS AND POPES: CLUNY'S LEGACY.

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town walls, and three church spires in its skyline. Yet the place is haunted by an absence, the nature of which becomes clear if one seeks out the most imposing of those church spires in the town centre, to find it topping a very peculiar building, a monumental empty Romanesque domed hall, soaringly and at first sight bafflingly tall in proportion to its floor area. To enter this medieval elevator shaft of s.p.a.ce is to realize that it was part of something much bigger. It is in fact one single transept from what was between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries the largest church building in the world (see Plate 13). The church's ancient splendour made it a symbol of all that the French Revolution hated and, after a mob sacked it in 1790, the sh.e.l.l was sold to a building contractor, who took three decades to pull it down, all except this sad, towering remnant. The Emperor Napoleon had a stud farm built over much of the empty site. Until those dismal years, the prodigious church proclaimed the importance of the abbey which had created it.

At the beginning, Cluny Abbey had not been unique. Its foundation in 909-10 coincided with a new phase in the constant urge to renewal in Western monastic life, but in character it differed little from the monasteries which the Carolingian reforms had produced. Bishops and aristocrats still thought that the best way to battle against monastic complacency and corruption was to devote huge resources in land and wealth to the creation of ever more splendid Benedictine houses. In the same era England witnessed a burst of parallel activity, vigorously supported by an expanding monarchy, and it might have been thought that England would lead European reform, as it had once led missions into northern Europe. The English were now precociously united under a single king. From the time of the pious and energetic King Alfred (reigned 871-99), the kings of Wess.e.x had done their best to fight off invasion and occupation by Danish and Viking armies to create a version of Carolingian monarchy, just at the time when the Carolingians themselves were descending into quarrels and failure. Alfred's successors Aethelstan (reigned 924-39) and Edgar (reigned 944-75) achieved the united English kingdom antic.i.p.ated in the Church of Augustine's mission and in the writings of Bede (see pp. 341-2). The uniting of England provoked an outburst of pride which might almost be styled nationalist, and which had a distinctive and galvanizing effect on the English Church.

Reforms in England were the work of a small group of great reformers whom King Edgar made bishops and archbishops. Aethelwold, a courtier of King Aethelstan, who had become a monk and from 963 was bishop in Edgar's royal capital of Winchester, was a scholar and dynamic teacher who inspired a series of decaying monasteries to adopt the Benedictine Rule as their standard of life, having himself translated that Rule from Latin into Old English. His unusual impact on the English Church left it one individual feature not often found elsewhere in Europe, and which was even extended after the Norman Conquest of 1066: the creation of cathedral churches which, up to Henry VIII's sixteenth-century dissolutions, were also monasteries, with a prior and monks instead of a dean and canons. The capital, Winchester, was itself one; another was Worcester, another Canterbury, though the cathedral canons of York 'Minster' never succ.u.mbed to reorganization into the monastic life.

Dunstan, who had been Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry when Aethelwold was there, was Archbishop of Canterbury from 959. He was both a great statesman, who presided over King Egbert's quasi-imperial coronation at Bath in 973, and a zealous promoter of Aethelwold's Benedictine project throughout the kingdom (engagingly if surprisingly, he also took an interest in personally annotating a ma.n.u.script of no-holds-barred erotic verse by the Latin poet Ovid, which still exists in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). Oswald of Worcester, a monk of Danish descent, was equally energetic in monastic foundations and refoundations across the English Midlands from Worcester to Ramsey; Edgar promoted him to the Archbishopric of York in 971. Notably, all these scholars were as concerned to write in Old English as in Latin, developing with pride a vernacular literary tradition which had most unusually been fostered by the writings of a king, Alfred of Wess.e.x. That emphasis on the vernacular might well have altered the patterns of Christianity in northern Europe, if England rather than Cluny had proved to be the powerhouse of Christian change in the next century.1 Cluny's glory days came later than the English revival. The abbey outgrew the patronage of any one secular monarch or n.o.bleman and proved far greater in its influence than the restrictions of a single kingdom. The founder, Duke Guillaume of Aquitaine, had endowed the abbey lavishly but made unusually few demands in return, in reward for which generosity monastic posterity gratefully ent.i.tled him 'the Pious'. A century after the foundation, a series of exceptionally shrewd and capable abbots built on this freedom of manoeuvre; they took their cue both from a provision in Duke Guillaume's founding charter placing them under the pope's special protection and from the example of Fleury, that much older Frankish monastery which, with exceptional and ruthless enterprise, had pioneered a special relations.h.i.+p with Rome (see p. 360). In 1024 Odilo, Abbot of Cluny from 994 to 1049, followed Fleury's example in gaining exclusive papal privileges; he also began major rebuilding and enlargement campaigns at the abbey, which by the end of the eleventh century produced the final version of the prodigy church (see Plate 13).2 One should never underestimate the significance of architecture in Christianity and particularly not in the era of reform which now emerged. There was a vast amount of church-building, precisely because to rebuild a church building was regarded as a sacramental sign of inst.i.tutional and devotional renewal in the Church: each new church was a reform in stone. One chronicler from Cluny saw the Christian world as clothing itself with 'a white mantle of churches', having safely pa.s.sed the watershed of 1000, when the end of the world might have been expected (Cluny made rather a fuss about this millennium, while it is not at all clear that others did).3 Wors.h.i.+p in the church of Cluny itself was renewed in spectacular style amid the builders' scaffolding. Its monk-clergy celebrated an unbroken round of Ma.s.ses and offices, while the centrepiece of these subsidiary dramatic performances were High Ma.s.ses unequalled elsewhere in their splendour and solemnity. Western Europeans marvelled at this offering to G.o.d, and when they hastened to imitate it by endowing their own versions of Cluny, the abbots of Cluny harnessed this enthusiasm in a new way. Rather than simply giving their blessing to new independent abbeys in the traditional Benedictine manner, they demanded that each foundation should form part of a new international organization run by the abbot of Cluny himself, as 'priories' to his abbey: they would form a Cluniac 'Order' - the first monastic organization to bear this t.i.tle - in which the abbot would progress round the priories and priors would gather at the mother house on a regular basis. Wors.h.i.+p in the church of Cluny itself was renewed in spectacular style amid the builders' scaffolding. Its monk-clergy celebrated an unbroken round of Ma.s.ses and offices, while the centrepiece of these subsidiary dramatic performances were High Ma.s.ses unequalled elsewhere in their splendour and solemnity. Western Europeans marvelled at this offering to G.o.d, and when they hastened to imitate it by endowing their own versions of Cluny, the abbots of Cluny harnessed this enthusiasm in a new way. Rather than simply giving their blessing to new independent abbeys in the traditional Benedictine manner, they demanded that each foundation should form part of a new international organization run by the abbot of Cluny himself, as 'priories' to his abbey: they would form a Cluniac 'Order' - the first monastic organization to bear this t.i.tle - in which the abbot would progress round the priories and priors would gather at the mother house on a regular basis.

Moreover, the abbots of Cluny discovered a special and appropriately international purpose for their growing spiritual empire. Unusually and surprisingly for a great monastery, they did not make their own church into a cult centre for any celebrated saint. Instead they looked to a shrine on the furthest south-western frontier of Catholic Christendom, in the city of Compostela on the Atlantic coast of north-west Spain. From the ninth century Compostela Cathedral had claimed that it housed the body of one of the original twelve Apostles: James, in Spanish Santiago. From all over Europe, devout people now sought to make the long and difficult journey to the remote Iberian city, and Cluny, strategically placed in Burgundy, began organizing these crowds along the roads of Europe; its priories were agencies and way stations for the journey. The Compostela pilgrimage was only the flags.h.i.+p in a great industry of travel to holy places in Europe which blossomed during the eleventh century. Most of the greatest surviving churches of the period were built as stages or goals on pilgrimage tracks, and their architectural patterns took their cue from Cluny. Entering the main entrance of St Etheldreda's Ely Cathedral, Mary Magdalene's Vezelay Abbey, the church of St-Sernin in Toulouse on the Compostela route, or Compostela Cathedral itself, is to see something of what the lost church of Cluny was like. The nave is a long, cavernously vaulted road taking the pilgrim on a journey to the high altar in the far distance, with around the altar a pa.s.sageway (ambulatory) completing a circuit of the whole church building. The entrances of such churches are commonly topped by relief sculptures of Christ in majesty or G.o.d the Father judging all creation, a powerful reminder of the object of any pilgrimage: the distant goal of Heaven. They are among the greatest and most moving specimens of medieval sculptural art.

The expansion of pilgrimage was only one symptom of profound changes in Church and society which Cluny Abbey embodied. What happened in the eleventh century was a Reformation, but unlike the more familiar Reformation of the sixteenth century, it was not a rebellion in the ranks but directed from the top, resulting in the most magnificent single structure of government which Christianity has known. Whether we approve of this achievement or not, it deserves the t.i.tle of Reformation as much as the actions of Martin Luther and John Calvin, and we will not do it justice to see it, as later Protestants did, as a deliberate conspiracy by selfish clergy. The Church in the West was reacting creatively to change in the nature of power and wealth in the society to which it ministered. In the early medieval period, the chief way of gathering wealth was by warfare, yielding plunder and slaves; as we have seen, as late as the Carolingian period kings survived by giving handouts to their warlords (see p. 349). By the eleventh century this system was coming to an end. The change was symbolized by the collapse of Carolingian central authority in much of Europe over the previous century, which, whatever short-term disruptions it caused, was to lead to a new settled order in Western society. That was also encouraged by a gradual end to the wave of invasions of non-Christian peoples from north and east which had been a constant source of insecurity during the ninth and tenth centuries.

10. Cluny and the Santiago Pilgrimage Nevertheless, most people would not have experienced the new system as a deliverance; it was characterized by new forms of exploitation. In a search for new sources of wealth, and with the prospect of greater stability in their territories, the n.o.bility turned to squeezing revenues out of the lands which they controlled through more productive farming. Some of their enterprise was directed to expansion of cultivation - draining marshes, clearing forest - but whether in old or new farming communities, they regulated their land and the people on it ever more closely. From the tenth century many areas of Europe witnessed the purposeful creation of a network of new village settlements, with many more legal obligations on their newly gathered inhabitants. A large proportion of the rural population was reduced to serfdom: farmers became the property of their lords, with obligations to work on the newly intensive agricultural production.4 Economic productivity dramatically rose as a result. There were better food supplies and more wealth. Surplus wealth and the need for ready exchange in which to transfer it meant that money became a more important part of the economy than it had been for centuries. Trade naturally benefited from the new prosperity and the rulers of peoples on the margins of Christian Europe, drawn further into trading networks, saw the advantages of adopting the faith of their neighbours, in a remarkable series of parallel developments.5 To the east, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs all began succ.u.mbing to Christian missions, although it was some time before their monarchs made decisions between Eastern and Western Christianity (see pp. 458-65). Likewise around 1000 Christianity began making renewed progress in Scandinavia - first a conversion in Denmark ordered by its king, Harald Blue-tooth, around 960 under pressure from the Ottonian emperors, then a more gradual spread through what is now Norway and Sweden, even as far as remote Iceland. At the same time, the Christian n.o.bility of Germany began casting covetous eyes on the non-Christian lands to their north-east around the Baltic, launching a counterpart to the wars of reconquest at the other end of Latin Christendom in Spain. To the east, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs all began succ.u.mbing to Christian missions, although it was some time before their monarchs made decisions between Eastern and Western Christianity (see pp. 458-65). Likewise around 1000 Christianity began making renewed progress in Scandinavia - first a conversion in Denmark ordered by its king, Harald Blue-tooth, around 960 under pressure from the Ottonian emperors, then a more gradual spread through what is now Norway and Sweden, even as far as remote Iceland. At the same time, the Christian n.o.bility of Germany began casting covetous eyes on the non-Christian lands to their north-east around the Baltic, launching a counterpart to the wars of reconquest at the other end of Latin Christendom in Spain.

The transformation in farming production changed the nature of the Western Church's ministry in society, making it pay more attention to the needs and obligations of the humble and the relatively poor. The backbone of the early medieval Church had been the select group of monarchs and n.o.bility who financed the growth of Benedictine monasteries and had themselves generally directed Church affairs. Probably in reaction to the newly emerging settlement patterns, the Church now spread its pastoral care throughout Europe in a dense network of what it called parochiae parochiae: parishes. Each of the new villages was expected to have a church. The ideal of a parish was a territorial unit which could offer literally everyday pastoral care for a universally Christian population; its area should be such that a parish priest could walk to its boundaries in an hour or two at most. That was certainly easily possible in the little Suffolk parish in which I grew up in the 1960s, where my father was the successor to a line of priests which dated back at least to this revolution in the Church's life in the eleventh century. From the eleventh century to the twentieth, the second half of Christianity's existence so far, the parish was the unit in which most Christians experienced their devotional life. Only now has that ceased to be the case.

As parishes were organized, it became apparent that there were new sources of wealth for churchmen as well as for secular landlords. The parish system covering the countryside gave the Church the chance to tax the new farming resources of Europe by demanding from its farmer-paris.h.i.+oners a scriptural tenth of agricultural produce, the t.i.the. t.i.the was provided by many more of the laity than the old aristocratic elite, and was another incentive for extending the Church's pastoral concern much more widely. This had a large number of consequences, not least in the Church's att.i.tude to sin. It certainly did not denounce as sinful the movement to enserf a large section of the population, any more than it had challenged slavery in the ancient world; that was hardly surprising, since very often great monasteries like Cluny were in the forefront of imposing serfdom on their tenants. But the clergy also became more alert to the possibilities of sin which wealth produced, and sought to protect their people from the consequences. It was during the twelfth century that avarice and the taking of interest on money (usury) became major themes for churchmen's moralizing alongside the most basic of human sins, pride.6 As sins multiplied, so did the means of remedying sin. The great historian of medieval society Sir Richard Southern saw the extension of the clergy's pastoral care in the parishes as leading to a profound s.h.i.+ft in the Western Church's theology of salvation and the afterlife. As sins multiplied, so did the means of remedying sin. The great historian of medieval society Sir Richard Southern saw the extension of the clergy's pastoral care in the parishes as leading to a profound s.h.i.+ft in the Western Church's theology of salvation and the afterlife.

The essence of Southern's argument is that in the earlier Benedictine era, the system of salvation had been geared to benefiting clergy and those wealthy enough to finance monks to pray for them and perform the very heavy penances demanded of the sinful, in order to avoid the pains of h.e.l.l. As the parish and t.i.the system developed, this older approach would not do: some other way must be devised to cope with the hopes and fears of a sinful population who could not afford such provision. This was where the idea of a middle state between Heaven and h.e.l.l, first envisaged in the theology of the Alexandrian theologians Clement and Origen at the turn of the second and third centuries, proved so useful and comforting. The instinct for justifying salvation by human effort, a constant thread from Origen through Evagrius and John Ca.s.sian, emerged once more to confront the 'grace alone' theology of Augustine. Few people can regard their drearily unspectacular sins as justifying h.e.l.lfire, but most would agree with the Alexandrians that life on earth provides hardly enough time to remedy even those sins and enter Heaven without further purgation. Penance could be done in this middle state, which was time-limited, and which moreover had only one exit, not to h.e.l.l but to Paradise. By the 1170s, theologians observing this growth of popular theology of the afterlife had given it a name: Purgatory. Never a notion which gained currency in the Eastern world, despite its precedent in Greek-speaking theologians, Purgatory was to become one of the most important and in the end also one of the most contentious doctrines of the Western Latin Church.7 This was by no means the Church's only reaction to the new economy. One symptom of the reorganization of society's wealth was a great deal of local warfare as rival magnates competed to establish their positions and property rights, or used violence against humble people in order to squeeze revenue and labour obligations from them; this was the era in which a rash of castles began to appear across the continent, centres of military operations and refuges for n.o.blemen. Churchmen in Francia reacted strongly in order to stop violence against their flocks (not to mention themselves and their own landed estates), appealing to the consciences of their communities to restore peace. They convened large gatherings, the first of which to be recorded was summoned by the Bishop of Le Puy in 975, in which the bishop threatened wrongdoers with excommunication and bullied those present into swearing an oath to keep the peace. The initiative was imitated by other bishops, who drew on their churches' collections of relics to reinforce their threats with the wrath of the saints.

So a 'Peace of G.o.d' movement was born throughout the Frankish dominions and beyond, east of the Rhine and south of the Pyrenees; eventually it even included a set of agreements about which days were legitimate for fighting. All sides benefited: thoughtful lords might be as relieved as the poor that the Church was providing an inst.i.tutional setting where disputes could be resolved without the possibility of violence. It was striking that the Church was appealing to consciences right across the social spectrum, even if the net result was to confirm and strengthen the new order of society. It was an essential feature of the movement that crowds turned up to witness the proceedings; their numbers and their consent were as much part of the pressure put on recalcitrant magnates as the bones of the saints. Yet the notables spiritual and temporal were actors too. Odilo, most energetic of the abbots of Cluny, was among the Peace movement's leading advocates; soon kings and even the pope were involved in regulating these councils and agreements. The papacy's intervention was particularly significant for the future, because it pointed towards an inexorable conclusion: if a single problem occurred all over Europe, then it was best dealt with by a single authority.8

THE VICAR OF CHRIST: MARRIAGE, CELIBACY AND UNIVERSAL MONARCHY.

The leaders.h.i.+p of the Western Church was now doing its best to provide pastoral care in the everyday lives of its members, and part of the bargain was that it sought to hold everyone, rich and poor, to rigorous new standards of holiness. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries it did its best to gain more control over the most intimate part of human existence, s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps and marriage; increasingly Church councils convened as part of the Peace movement began making orders which had nothing directly to do with peace, but regulated people's private lives.9 The Church successfully fought to have marriage regarded as a sacrament: Augustine of Hippo had thus described it, in what was then a rather vague use of the word 'sacrament', but now precision was brought to the idea. Marriage became seen as one of seven sacraments which had been inst.i.tuted by Christ himself, all marked with a sacred ceremony in church. A 'church wedding' had certainly not been known in the first few centuries of Church life; the laity were much slower (by several centuries) to accept this idea as the norm, and the efforts of some extremist theologians completely failed to impose the doctrine that the priest performed the marriage, rather than witnessing a contract between two people. The Church successfully fought to have marriage regarded as a sacrament: Augustine of Hippo had thus described it, in what was then a rather vague use of the word 'sacrament', but now precision was brought to the idea. Marriage became seen as one of seven sacraments which had been inst.i.tuted by Christ himself, all marked with a sacred ceremony in church. A 'church wedding' had certainly not been known in the first few centuries of Church life; the laity were much slower (by several centuries) to accept this idea as the norm, and the efforts of some extremist theologians completely failed to impose the doctrine that the priest performed the marriage, rather than witnessing a contract between two people.

This sacramental view of marriage meant that the Western Church saw a union blessed in Church as indissoluble; there was no possibility of divorce - again, not a common view in the first few centuries before Augustine - and the best one could hope for was a declaration that (on a variety of grounds) a marriage had never actually existed and could be declared null. This remains an axiom of marriage law in the Roman Catholic Church, and rather more untidily in the Church of England.10 At the same time, the Church much extended the number of relations.h.i.+ps of affinity between relatives which could be considered incestuous and therefore a bar to marriage; churchmen took these well beyond what even contemporary theologians could have claimed were scriptural guidelines, so that in the end the great Council of the Church at the Lateran Palace in 1215 (see pp. 405-8) had to do some embarra.s.sing backtracking to lessen the rigour. At the same time, the Church much extended the number of relations.h.i.+ps of affinity between relatives which could be considered incestuous and therefore a bar to marriage; churchmen took these well beyond what even contemporary theologians could have claimed were scriptural guidelines, so that in the end the great Council of the Church at the Lateran Palace in 1215 (see pp. 405-8) had to do some embarra.s.sing backtracking to lessen the rigour.11 It is possible to be cynical and suggest that a princ.i.p.al motivation for this otherwise puzzling excess on affinity (a motivation, indeed, for the Church's general concern to regulate marriage) was a wish to see property left to churches rather than to a large range of possible heirs in the family. The more limits were placed on legal marriage, the more chance there was of there being no legal heir, so that land and wealth would be left to the Church, for the greater glory of G.o.d.12 Another and wider perspective on this new concern for marriage and its boundaries would be to see it as yet another response to the new arrangements which were emerging for land owners.h.i.+p in eleventh-century society. If landed estates were to survive as economic units, it was important that they were not broken up by the old custom of letting all members of the family take their share. A new custom of 'eldest takes all' (primogeniture) became widely established by the twelfth century, and now the n.o.bility could see the Church and its concern for legitimate marriage as a helpful clarification to identify the true heir under the law of primogeniture. Most readers will agree that the Church's new approach was preferable to forcible male castration, which was employed with distressing frequency by certain European n.o.blemen in the eleventh century as a means of neutralizing potential competing founders of landed dynasties. Another and wider perspective on this new concern for marriage and its boundaries would be to see it as yet another response to the new arrangements which were emerging for land owners.h.i.+p in eleventh-century society. If landed estates were to survive as economic units, it was important that they were not broken up by the old custom of letting all members of the family take their share. A new custom of 'eldest takes all' (primogeniture) became widely established by the twelfth century, and now the n.o.bility could see the Church and its concern for legitimate marriage as a helpful clarification to identify the true heir under the law of primogeniture. Most readers will agree that the Church's new approach was preferable to forcible male castration, which was employed with distressing frequency by certain European n.o.blemen in the eleventh century as a means of neutralizing potential competing founders of landed dynasties.13 Certainly it is true that churchmen were deeply concerned about the loss of ecclesiastical estates to possession by families; that had a further effect on the Church's regulation of marriage. Very many clergy at that time who were not monks customarily married. Married clergy might well found dynasties, and might therefore be inclined to make Church lands into their hereditary property, just as secular lords were doing at the same time. The result was a long battle to forbid marriage for all clergy, not just monks: to make them compulsorily celibate. There had been occasional efforts to achieve this before, and the Western Church had from the fourth century generally prevented higher clergy from being married, but in 1139 a second council to be called at the pope's residence in Rome, the Lateran Palace, declared all clerical marriages not only unlawful but invalid.

There was not merely the issue of land at stake. Celibacy set up a barrier between the clergy and laity, becoming the badge of clerical status; at a time when everyone was being called to be holy, celibacy guaranteed that clerics still stole a march in holiness on laypeople. The struggle for universal and compulsory clerical celibacy was bitter, but even in countries like England, where married clergy put up fierce resistance, the fight was largely over by the thirteenth century. The issue was thrown open again in the sixteenth-century Reformation, but in the intervening period, any woman who was the partner of a priest was a concubine and all their children were b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. One pitiless view of such children among Church lawyers in the wake of the reforming Council of Pavia in 1022 was that they were automatically serfs of the Church, though there is little evidence that anyone took this very seriously.14 More practically, during the next few centuries, bishops in some areas of the Church such as Switzerland were pleased to derive a substantial and reliable source of income from fining their parish clergy for keeping women as concubines. More practically, during the next few centuries, bishops in some areas of the Church such as Switzerland were pleased to derive a substantial and reliable source of income from fining their parish clergy for keeping women as concubines.15 In many different ways, then, the clergy a.s.serted their power to regulate the lives of the laity, as well as establish their distinction from laypeople, and they took major initiatives to seize and harness the profound changes in European society. They could only do this because, from the mid-eleventh century, a rather dim and occasionally deeply scandalous sequence of popes was replaced in Rome by successive capable and strong-willed reformers, inspired by what had been happening beyond the Alps. They drew on their predecessors' centuries of claims about their place in the Church, which had previously given the pope a position of great honour but not much real power. Popes had not appointed bishops; rulers like Charlemagne or the local bishops who were their creations had called councils to decide on Church law and policy, even contradicting papal opinions from time to time. When the Pope crowned Charlemagne in 800, it had been in practice if not in theory from a position of some weakness (see p. 349), and later Holy Roman Emperors had proved to have minds of their own. In fact it is a paradox, and an antic.i.p.ation of the troubles which were now to afflict relations between pope and emperor, that the first pope who can be regarded as a reformer was a German imposed on Rome in 1046 as Clement II, after the Emperor Henry III had forcibly seen off the claims of three competing claimants to the papal t.i.tle.16 However they arrived at their new situation, the reforming popes now constructed a view of their position which did not brook contradiction. The very name Clement was a manifesto, reminding the world that the first Clement had been a close successor of Peter. Pope Leo IX (reigned 1049-54) was in the final year of his pontificate responsible for the drastic step of excommunicating the Oec.u.menical Patriarch Michael Keroularios in his own cathedral in Constantinople. The immediate issue was a dispute about eucharistic bread. At some point after it had become apparent that East and West had begun drifting apart, in the years after Chalcedon, the Latin West had come to use unleavened bread (azyma in Greek) at the Eucharist. in Greek) at the Eucharist. Azyma Azyma had the advantage of not dropping into crumbs when it was broken, a matter of some importance now that eucharistic bread was increasingly identified with the Body of the Lord - yet the Greeks (rightly) regarded this as yet another Western departure from early custom. Was such bread really bread at all? had the advantage of not dropping into crumbs when it was broken, a matter of some importance now that eucharistic bread was increasingly identified with the Body of the Lord - yet the Greeks (rightly) regarded this as yet another Western departure from early custom. Was such bread really bread at all?

Pope Leo sent his close friend Cardinal Humbert as negotiator with the Patriarch in 1054. Humbert was a former monk of Cluny who had recently been appointed archbishop in Sicily, an area of constant tension between Churches of Greek and Latin usage, and he was not inclined to diplomacy. Beginning with calculated rudeness to the Patriarch after their arrival in Constantinople, Humbert and his fellow envoys then appeared while wors.h.i.+p was proceeding in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. They strode through the congregation up to the altar and placed on it the Pope's declaration of excommunication, quitting the building with a ceremonial shaking of its dust from their feet, amid jeers from a hostile crowd. This was only a personal excommunication of the Patriarch and his a.s.sociates, but unlike the Acacian schism of the late fifth century (see p. 234), Pope and Oec.u.menical Patriarch did not declare the excommunication revoked for another nine hundred years after the events of 1054, and even now in many areas the reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism is distinctly shaky.17 The pope who drew together all the strands of papal self-a.s.sertion in the eleventh century was Gregory VII (reigned 1073-85). Born Hildebrand, an Italian who became a monk, he was in papal service from the 1040s, so he was another major voice in the circle of Pope Leo IX alongside the Cluniac Humbert. Once pope, Gregory was free to pursue the programme of Church reform which now had all Europe as its canvas, and which, in a series of formal statements entered into his administrative register, was centred on a definition of the pope as universal monarch in a world where the Church would reign over all the rulers of the earth.18 This one man's vision can be compared in its consequences over centuries with the vision of Karl Marx eight hundred years later; indeed, all the signs are that it will prove far longer-lasting in its effects. Popes had never before made such revolutionary universal claims. Not even the Donation of Constantine (see p. 351) would satisfy Gregory's agenda: it still represented a gift from a secular ruler to a pope, and that was the wrong way round, at a time when popes were increasingly bitterly clas.h.i.+ng with successive emperors. Twice Gregory went so far as to excommunicate the king and future Emperor Henry IV in the course of an 'Invest.i.ture Controversy', a dispute which continued to rage through the twelfth century as to whether monarchs could present senior bishops with symbols of sacred office when they were appointed. This one man's vision can be compared in its consequences over centuries with the vision of Karl Marx eight hundred years later; indeed, all the signs are that it will prove far longer-lasting in its effects. Popes had never before made such revolutionary universal claims. Not even the Donation of Constantine (see p. 351) would satisfy Gregory's agenda: it still represented a gift from a secular ruler to a pope, and that was the wrong way round, at a time when popes were increasingly bitterly clas.h.i.+ng with successive emperors. Twice Gregory went so far as to excommunicate the king and future Emperor Henry IV in the course of an 'Invest.i.ture Controversy', a dispute which continued to rage through the twelfth century as to whether monarchs could present senior bishops with symbols of sacred office when they were appointed.

This was a straightforward struggle about who was going to exercise control in the Church. Famously in the first of their clashes, the Pope kept the excommunicate Henry waiting in penitential garb, allegedly barefoot, for three days in winter snow, at the castle of Canossa in northern Italy, before granting him absolution. Gregory's successors took a new t.i.tle, more comprehensive than 'Vicar of Peter', more accurately to express his ideas: 'Vicar of Christ'. Not merely the successor of Peter, the pope was Christ's amba.s.sador and representative on earth. His duty was to lead the task of making the world and the Church holy.19 Gregory's humiliation of Henry was soon to be reversed, and the invest.i.ture controversy itself ended inconclusively in the early twelfth century, but similar issues flared up repeatedly later. In confrontations which sometimes became military campaigns, popes were able to wound the empire without effectively dominating it. As a result, Western Europe was not destined to become a single sacred state like the early Muslim caliphate, under either emperor or pope, but a constellation of jurisdictions, some of which threw off papal obedience in the sixteenth century. Gregory's humiliation of Henry was soon to be reversed, and the invest.i.ture controversy itself ended inconclusively in the early twelfth century, but similar issues flared up repeatedly later. In confrontations which sometimes became military campaigns, popes were able to wound the empire without effectively dominating it. As a result, Western Europe was not destined to become a single sacred state like the early Muslim caliphate, under either emperor or pope, but a constellation of jurisdictions, some of which threw off papal obedience in the sixteenth century.

One of the most poisonous confrontations between the Church's persistent claims and one of these monarchs was a dispute between King Henry II of England and his former Chancellor the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, about whether the King's newly developing royal legal system could claim full jurisdiction over English clergy, at a time when the Church's canon law was far more comprehensively developed. A party of Henry's knights took the initiative in murdering Becket at the altar in his own cathedral in 1170. It was a disaster for the public image of the English monarchy, inspiring Henry's undeferential neighbour King William I of Scotland gleefully to found a monastery at Arbroath dedicated to Becket, only eight years after the archbishop's martyrdom. The monks of Christ Church Canterbury, who had never liked Becket in life, had plenty of reason to be grateful to him after his death, since he attracted a considerable pilgrimage cult to their cathedral, magnificently rebuilt to highlight his shrine.20 Yet the English monarchy was no more permanently intimidated by papal claims to superior jurisdiction than were later Holy Roman Emperors; the relations.h.i.+p remained always open to negotiation. The same was true of those devout heirs of the Merovingian monarchs and servants of St Denis, the kings of France, or indeed any of the monarchies of Europe who took on their own sacred trappings. In many kingdoms of Europe, particularly in Aragon, monarchs were known to a.s.sert their own semi-priestly character by themselves preaching sermons on great occasions, despite angry protests from senior churchmen. Yet the English monarchy was no more permanently intimidated by papal claims to superior jurisdiction than were later Holy Roman Emperors; the relations.h.i.+p remained always open to negotiation. The same was true of those devout heirs of the Merovingian monarchs and servants of St Denis, the kings of France, or indeed any of the monarchies of Europe who took on their own sacred trappings. In many kingdoms of Europe, particularly in Aragon, monarchs were known to a.s.sert their own semi-priestly character by themselves preaching sermons on great occasions, despite angry protests from senior churchmen.21 A universal monarchy, however notional, needed a complex central bureaucracy. The popes had earlier built up a permanent staff of a.s.sistant clergy, cardinals. They were so called from the Latin cardo cardo, meaning a wedge rammed between timbers, for 'cardinals' were originally exceptionally able or useful priests thrust into a church from outside - their appointment had systematically breached the early Church's (fairly breachable) convention that clergy should keep in the same place for life.22 From the twelfth century these cardinals gained their own power, including the privilege of electing a new pope. Like every other European monarch, the Bishop of Rome found that he needed a Court ( From the twelfth century these cardinals gained their own power, including the privilege of electing a new pope. Like every other European monarch, the Bishop of Rome found that he needed a Court (Curia); this would not only provide him with more personal and less independent attendants than the cardinals had become, but would also meet the ever-growing demand from the faithful of Europe that the pope must do business for them. So in the 1090s the crusader-pope, Urban II, formalized structures for his Curia which became permanent.

Rome's newly imposed importance in the everyday life of the Church meant that it was worth making the long journey there. A monastery might seek a privilege like Fleury's or Cluny's to stop interference from a local bishop; an illegitimate boy might need a dispensation to get round the Church's rules excluding b.a.s.t.a.r.ds from the priesthood; a n.o.bleman, desperate for a legitimate heir under the rules of primogeniture, might need to have his childless marriage declared non-existent. One pet.i.tioner in the time of Pope Innocent III in 1206 was an English Augustinian canon, exercised because when he had been admitted to the Augustinian Order he had taken on a new name, Augustine. He worried that if people offered prayers for him as 'Augustine', the prayer would not be as effective as if they had used his baptismal name of Henry, and he wanted his old name back. Rome gravely a.s.sured him that since the pope himself took a new name on a.s.suming his office, there was no cause for concern.23 Naturally the unified Church of Gregory's reforms needed a single system of law by which universal justice could be given, and the twelfth century was the first age when this began to be put in systematic form as canon law. There had once been just such a system of universal law: that of the Roman Empire. Now a great stimulus was the rediscovery in Italy around 1070 of two copies of a compilation of imperial law, the great Digest Digest of Roman laws ordered by the Emperor Justinian (see pp. 433-4); this prompted a flouris.h.i.+ng of legal studies in Italy, especially in the city of Bologna. of Roman laws ordered by the Emperor Justinian (see pp. 433-4); this prompted a flouris.h.i.+ng of legal studies in Italy, especially in the city of Bologna.24 If an emperor could once have gathered a definitive volume of laws, so now could the Bishop of Rome. The chief collection of existing laws and papal decisions which codifies canon law comes from mid-twelfth-century Bologna, and goes under the name of Gratian, about whom nothing else is known and who may only have been the mastermind behind one draft of what remained an unwieldy and disjointed doc.u.ment. Even though Gratian's If an emperor could once have gathered a definitive volume of laws, so now could the Bishop of Rome. The chief collection of existing laws and papal decisions which codifies canon law comes from mid-twelfth-century Bologna, and goes under the name of Gratian, about whom nothing else is known and who may only have been the mastermind behind one draft of what remained an unwieldy and disjointed doc.u.ment. Even though Gratian's Decretum Decretum only gained official status from papal publication as late as 1917, from its earliest days it was the basis of Roman canon law - not least because of the vision which it embodied of a pyramid of Church authority culminating in the pope. Gratian made much use of the earlier fictions of pseudo-Isidore about papal authority (see pp. 351-2). only gained official status from papal publication as late as 1917, from its earliest days it was the basis of Roman canon law - not least because of the vision which it embodied of a pyramid of Church authority culminating in the pope. Gratian made much use of the earlier fictions of pseudo-Isidore about papal authority (see pp. 351-2).25 The The Decretum Decretum and canon law in general also specifically embodied that principle of the Gregorian Revolution that there were two cla.s.ses of Christians, clerical celibates and laypeople. Only a century ago, this could still be pithily spelled out in an official papal p.r.o.nouncement: 'The Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the mult.i.tude of the faithful.' and canon law in general also specifically embodied that principle of the Gregorian Revolution that there were two cla.s.ses of Christians, clerical celibates and laypeople. Only a century ago, this could still be pithily spelled out in an official papal p.r.o.nouncement: 'The Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the mult.i.tude of the faithful.'26 Given the new importance of canon law, it was no coincidence that every pope of significance between 1159 and 1303 was trained primarily as a canon lawyer. Given the new importance of canon law, it was no coincidence that every pope of significance between 1159 and 1303 was trained primarily as a canon lawyer.27 Bishops likewise developed their own administrations for local justice and Church order in their dioceses which reflected what was now happening centrally in Rome. The balance of local power in the Church between diocese and monastery was now tipping back in favour of bishops, after centuries in which abbots and indeed abbesses had characteristically been the leading figures in the Western Church. Diocesan bureaucracies were both symptom and cause of this. Kings and n.o.blemen in Europe saw the usefulness of competent bishops to improve their own administration and drafted them into their own governments. Often this might take a bishop away from his duties in his diocese, so his administration might have to carry on without him. Usually it did so quite successfully, but an efficient office system is rarely spiritually inspiring. Even though they generally tried to be real fathers-in-G.o.d for their dioceses, bishops were increasingly trapped in a world of fixed routine - faced with demands from pope and lay rulers, and remote figures to their flocks. In the long term, it was not a healthy development, and it bred a constant succession of tensions between clergy and people with which episcopal systems have continued to struggle - most damagingly for the Western Church in the sixteenth-century Reformation.

Nevertheless, this age of growing episcopal power also left a staggering heritage of architectural beauty: the cathedrals of medieval Catholic Europe. The grandest church buildings of the Carolingian era were, as we have seen, virtually all built for the round of wors.h.i.+p in monasteries. Given that the bishop and his diocese now had a new significance in the devotional lives of the faithful, the mother church of the diocese needed to be an outward and visible expression of that role. Very often, cathedrals were sited or resited in the expanding towns which were products of Europe's economic growth in the period. As a result, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the cathedrals of Latin Europe were rebuilt on a huge scale, to the extent that one celebrated French historian, Georges Duby, dubbed this 'the age of the Cathedrals'.28 It was by no means the case that great monasteries stopped building and rebuilding their great churches, but now they had rivals; on the whole, the accidents of European history, both in destruction and in well-intentioned rebuilding, have favoured the survival of medieval cathedrals rather than the most prodigious abbey churches. The archetypal specimens are in the region covered by France, although scarcely less splendid cathedrals are also to be found in England, where after 1066 Norman invaders did their best both to make a distinctive mark on the landscape and to pay off a debt of grat.i.tude to the papacy for blessing their conquest of the realm (see pp. 382-3). It was by no means the case that great monasteries stopped building and rebuilding their great churches, but now they had rivals; on the whole, the accidents of European history, both in destruction and in well-intentioned rebuilding, have favoured the survival of medieval cathedrals rather than the most prodigious abbey churches. The archetypal specimens are in the region covered by France, although scarcely less splendid cathedrals are also to be found in England, where after 1066 Norman invaders did their best both to make a distinctive mark on the landscape and to pay off a debt of grat.i.tude to the papacy for blessing their conquest of the realm (see pp. 382-3).

Symptomatic of that Anglo-French connection is the fact that the germ of a new architectural style for both cathedrals and monasteries, eventually spreading throughout Europe, is simultaneously to be found in major churches widely separated in this once-united cultural zone: Durham Cathedral, far to the north of England, and a rebuilt royal Abbey of St-Denis to the north of Paris, both under construction in the first half of the twelfth century. In these two enormous churches and then in many others, architects began tackling the technical challenge of engineering buildings which would reach to Heaven with an audacity not swiftly followed by their ignominious collapse. This was the style which ungrateful Italians of the fifteenth-century Renaissance christened 'Gothic', connecting it to barbarian peoples who by the age of the cathedrals had of course long vanished among the Catholic faithful.29 Nothing could be further from the Dark Ages than a Gothic cathedral: it is suffused with light, which is designed to speak of the light of Christian truth to all who enter it. Abbot Suger of St-Denis, one of the pioneering patrons of this new style in the early twelfth century, had been seized by enthusiasm for the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, mistaking that carefully obscured Eastern mystic for the martyred Gallo-Roman St Denis, patron of his own abbey. On the bronze doors of his lavish new enlargement of his abbey church, Suger arranged for an inscription of verses which encapsulated the way in which the anonymous Syriac Miaphysite a.s.sociated the quality of physical light with the experience of spiritual enlightenment. A church of stone could be transformed: Nothing could be further from the Dark Ages than a Gothic cathedral: it is suffused with light, which is designed to speak of the light of Christian truth to all who enter it. Abbot Suger of St-Denis, one of the pioneering patrons of this new style in the early twelfth century, had been seized by enthusiasm for the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, mistaking that carefully obscured Eastern mystic for the martyred Gallo-Roman St Denis, patron of his own abbey. On the bronze doors of his lavish new enlargement of his abbey church, Suger arranged for an inscription of verses which encapsulated the way in which the anonymous Syriac Miaphysite a.s.sociated the quality of physical light with the experience of spiritual enlightenment. A church of stone could be transformed: Bright is the n.o.ble work; but being n.o.bly bright, the work Should brighten the minds so that they may travel, Through the true lights, to the True Light where Christ is the true door.30 Light in the churches of the Gothic architectural tradition was filtered through windows which were increasingly themselves huge sequences of pictures in stained gla.s.s, telling the divine story from Old and New Testament and beyond into the history of the Church. Stained gla.s.s became one of the most compelling though also one of the most vulnerable media for conveying the doctrine of the Western Church (see Plate 30). It has never played such an important role in Orthodoxy or the non-Chalcedonian Churches, whose church architecture never aspired to become a framework for windows in the fas.h.i.+on of the Gothic churches of the Latin West. Gothic windows grew ever greater in expanse and therefore posed ever greater problems for the engineer of a vast bulky building. Intricate schemes of stone b.u.t.tressing like permanent open scaffolding for walls and ribs for stone-vaulted roofs were devised to take the stresses safely from ceiling, tower and spire to the ground. The semicircular arches of Romanesque architecture gave way (sometimes, all too literally) to arches composed of two arcs meeting at an apex in a point, so that the thrust could be absorbed more efficiently at the point, and arcades and windows could soar ever higher.

Above all were the church towers and pointed steeples which rose triumphantly higher than any other man-made structure in Catholic Europe; where they stood close to the palaces of kings or princes, no turret of the palace dared outstrip their closeness to the heavens. Even that great architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, notoriously uncompromising champion of twentieth-century modernism in architecture, once observed in a moment of unusually lyrical concession that twentieth-century architects had 'not been able to create anything anywhere both as elegant and as powerful as a late medieval steeple'.31 Perhaps the most perfect of all is the cathedral of Chartres, which, by a succession of miraculous escapes and the protection afforded by intense local pride, has preserved its twin spires, its sculpture and its stained gla.s.s almost unharmed from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Chartres Cathedral is a hymn to the glory of G.o.d and of the Mother of G.o.d, the shrine of whose tunic it was built to protect (so far, successfully). It rides its hill over the plains of northern France with no rival on the horizon, visible to its pilgrims further even than the bounds of the diocese ruled by its bishop (see Plate 31). Perhaps the most perfect of all is the cathedral of Chartres, which, by a succession of miraculous escapes and the protection afforded by intense local pride, has preserved its twin spires, its sculpture and its stained gla.s.s almost unharmed from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Chartres Cathedral is a hymn to the glory of G.o.d and of the Mother of G.o.d, the shrine of whose tunic it was built to protect (so far, successfully). It rides its hill over the plains of northern France with no rival on the horizon, visible to its pilgrims further even than the bounds of the diocese ruled by its bishop (see Plate 31).32 The universality of the Gothic style is one of the symptoms of the way in which Gregory VII's vision of a single Catholic Church seized the Western Church in the two centuries after his turbulent tenure of the Throne of St Peter. Monarchs might resist the claims of the Bishop of Rome, bishops might ignore his authority when it suited them, but from the forests of Scandinavia to the cities of Spain cathedrals arose which did their best to ape the models provided by Chartres and St-Denis (see Plate 32). In their wake, the humblest parish church was likely to provide its own little local exuberance as far as its means would allow. The Gothic style is so characteristic of the Latin Catholic West that it comes as a visual shock to find it in alien settings, but there it is in the church which for many was the heart of the Christian world: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the shelter for the Crucifixion site and tomb of the Saviour. Equally surprising to a traveller to the eastern Mediterranean is to stumble on French Gothic cathedrals in the Levantine suns.h.i.+ne of the island of Cyprus, in the cities of Famagusta and Nicosia. Stripped of their present Muslim minarets, which come from a later and radically different phase of their existence, they could be transported to a town of northern Europe, and sit there without any sense of incongruity. How have such buildings got this far east? Their presence is the witness to one of the greatest but ultimately also the most tragic of all adventures within the life of the Western Latin Church: the Crusades.

THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES ( 1060-1200).

When Cluny Abbey fostered European pilgrimage to St James in Compostela, it was offering ordinary people the chance of access to holiness, like so much of the Gregorian Revolution. After all, the great attraction of pilgrimage was that it opened up the possibility of spiritual benefit to anyone who was capable of walking, hobbling, crawling or finding friends to carry them. But Cluny was also annexing to that thought another new and potent idea. St James had become the symbol of the fight-back of Christians in Spain against Islamic power. It is still possible in Hispanic cultures as far away as Central or South America to watch (as I have done in Mexico) Santiago's image triumphantly processed on horseback, with a second image, the corpse of a Muslim, pitched over his saddle.

The Cluniacs' investment in the pilgrimage routes to Compostela was a major influence on the balance of power between Christians and Islam in Spain. Thanks to the effective collapse of the Muslim caliphate of Cordoba in 1031, the Christian cause was becoming increasingly successful, and that was one reason why the crowds swelled across the pilgrimage trails to Spain. The order allied itself closely with the Christian kings of Leon-Castile and Aragon-Navarre who were winning victories against the Muslims. A network of Cluniac houses grew in Christian Spain, and among the Cluniac monks who came to lead the Church in Spain was one who rose to be primate of the Spanish Church as Archbishop of Toledo as well as papal legate (representative) in Spain: Bernard, abbot of the chief Spanish model of Cluny, the monastery at Sahagun. The Cluniacs became familiar with the idea that G.o.d might wish Christians to initiate war against his enemies, and under Popes Gregory VII and Urban II, the latter of whom began his career as monk and then prior of Cluny, the Western Church took a dramatic new direction in its att.i.tude to war.33 While Christian leaders had once simply tried to stop Christians from being soldiers (see pp. 156-7), now the Church came to see warfare as something it might use for its own purposes. The notion of holy war, crusade, entered Christianity in the eleventh century, and was directed against the religion which from its earliest days had spoken of holy war, Islam. The Carolingians had done their dubious best to present their campaigns in northern Europe as wars for Christianity (see p. 349), but the difference now was that Christian warfare could actually be seen as the means to win salvation. The first impulse in this was sparked by a spectacular if wholly unusual outrage: in 1009 the mentally unstable Caliph al-Hakim of Egypt ordered the systematic demolition of Constantine's Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Although the Caliph's campaign against Christianity was relatively short-lived, and a curtailed subst.i.tute building was completed in the 1040s, Christian indignation at the destruction gradually grew through the century. It was stimulated by the general growth in pilgrimage, but especially by the opening up of a new land route to Jerusalem via Hungary, which meant that more and more people witnessed the damaged site.34 Churchmen began suggesting that a solution to such grievances might be a reconquest of the Holy Land. But before that became a practical possibility, Christianity won a great victory in the central Mediterranean, in the island of Sicily, which had been contested between Muslims and Christians since the early days of Islam. The victorious armies were led by warriors whose ancestors had come from the north, a restless Scandinavian people whose northern origins were commemorated by their name, Normans. They carved out niches for themselves in widely separated parts of Europe: northern France ('Normandy'), as far east as the plains of what is now Ukraine and Russia, and most ambitiously, after 1066, the whole Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. But the Normans' achievements in Italy were perhaps their most significant. The papacy had at first regarded their arrival as a threat, and Pope Leo IX had allied with Argyrus, governor of the Byzantine dominions in southern Italy. Leo also showed his interest in Sicily by appointing the increasingly influential Cardinal Humbert (see p. 374) as Archbishop of Sicily in 1050 - at the time, a purely symbolic gesture, since there was no Latin presence in the island, but one fraught with significance for the future.35 In the short term, the Pope's predictive powers seemed unimpressive: the Normans soundly defeated Argyrus in 1053 and took Leo prisoner after his disastrous rout in battle in south Italy. This unsurprisingly led to a spectacular reversal of policy by the Pope and his advisers (among whom Hildebrand and Humbert the Archbishop of Sicily were by now the most prominent). In 1059 the Pope recognized the Normans' new acquisition of wide territories in southern Italy, some of which were actually still in the hands of Muslims or Byzantines, and in 1066 there was to be a similar papal blessing for Duke William of Normandy's speculative invasion of England. Like the Franks before them, the Normans seemed to be a good investment for the papacy, and in Sicily they made spectacular conquests from 1060, setting up a Norman kingdom there which was to prove one of the most productive frontiers of cultural exchange between Byzantines, Muslims and Catholic Christians in the Mediterranean world. In 1063, in a gesture of thanks for a gift of four camels, Pope Alexander II sent the Norman King Roger of Sicily a banner which he intended should be a.s.sociated with Roger's military victories. Gestures such as this were turning the conquest of a wealthy island into something more like a sacred cause. By the end of the century, both Muslim commentators and Pope Urban II were looking back on the Norman seizure of Sicily as a precedent for the greater campaign for the Holy Land itself.36 It was Gregory VII who first sought to turn Western indignation about the Holy Land into practical action. He tried and failed to launch a crusade to the Holy Land in 1074; no one believed his claim to have already gathered an army of 50,000 men, for it was not at all clear where they were all a.s.sembled.37 His successor Urban II was a good deal more tactful and respectful of lay rulers than Gregory and did better - this despite the fact that there was no great immediate crisis to rally the West against Muslim aggression; in Spain, warfare continued to flicker on the frontier of the two religions, but that was nothing new. What Urban did have was a direct appeal for military help from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos. It was by no means the first such request from Alexios, but now the Pope seized on it as an excuse for action. At a council of churchmen and magnates called to Clermont in France and in a flurry of papal letters accompanying it around 1095, Urban described renewed but completely imaginary atrocities against Christian pilgrims by Muslims in Jerusalem, so that he could arouse appropriate horror and action would follow. The effect was sensational: n.o.blemen present hastened to raise their tenants to set out on a mission to avenge Christian wrongs in the East. In this state of heightened excitement, the Pope took time to consecrate the high altar of his old monastery of Cluny, dedicating the final enlargement of that gargantuan building; so the culmination of Cluny's glory can never be separated from the launch of the Crusades (see Plate 29). His successor Urban II was a good deal more tactful and respectful of lay rulers than Gregory and did better - this despite the fact that there was no great immediate crisis to rally the West against Muslim aggression; in Spain, warfare continued to flicker on the frontier of the two religions, but that was nothing new. What Urban did have was a direct appeal for military help from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos. It was by no means the first such request from Alexios, but now the Pope seized on it as an excuse for action. At a council of churchmen and magnates called to Clermont in France a