What were they hoping for? If they declared it, they did so under their breath. Christians were not oblivious to Augustine’s prohibition. They knew the orthodoxy: that the thousand-year reign of the saints mentioned in Revelation was not to be taken literally. In the event, the millennium of Christ’s death came and went, and he did not descend from the heavens. His kingdom was not established on earth. The fallen world continued much as before. Nevertheless, the longing for reform, for renewal, for redemption did not fade. On one level, this was nothing new. Christ, after all, had called on his followers to be born again. The longing to see the entire Christian people purged of their sins had deep roots. It was what, some two and a half centuries previously, had inspired Charlemagne in his great project of correctio. Yet though his heirs still claimed the right to serve as the shepherds of their people, to rule – as Charlemagne had done – as priest as well as king, the ambition to set the Christian world on new foundations was no longer the preserve of courts. It had become a fever that filled meadows with swaying, moaning crowds, and inspired armies of pilgrims to tramp dusty roads. To cross Hungary in the reign of King Stephen was to know just how remarkably the world might change. It had become a place of miracles. In 1028, a monk from Bavaria named Arnold travelled there, and was startled to see a dragon swooping over the Hungarian plains, ‘its plumed head the height of a mountain, its body covered with scales like shields of iron’.32 What marvel was this, though, compared to the true wonder: a land that was once the home of blood-drinking demons brought to Christ, its king serving as the guardian to thousands of pilgrims bound for Jerusalem, its towns filled with cathedrals and churches sounding to the praises of God? Arnold could recognise the shock of the new when he saw it. Far from unsettling him, the prospect of even further change filled him with a giddy excitement. In a world animated as never before by the fire-rush of the Holy Spirit, why should anything stand still? ‘Such is the dispensation of the Almighty – that many things which once existed be cast aside by those who come in their wake.’
Arnold was right to foretell upheaval. Much that had been taken for granted was on the verge of titanic disruption. Revolution of a new and irreversible order was brewing in the Latin West.
IX
REVOLUTION
1076: C
AMBRAI
The feverish spirit of the times was dangerous. Gerard, the bishop of Cambrai, had no doubt as to that. Christians who believed themselves endowed by revelation with insights into God’s purposes were a menace to the Church, and to the great fabric of its order, constructed with such care and effort over the thousand years since Christ. In the shadow of the millennium, the great serpent of heresy, which for centuries had seemed scotched for good, had begun to shake its coils again. Various clerics in Orléans, one of them high in royal favour, were said to have claimed ‘there was no such thing as the Church’;1 the inhabitants of a castle near Milan, swearing themselves to chastity, had laid claim to a purity that put married priests to shame; a peasant, only a hundred miles from Cambrai, had dreamed that a swarm of bees entered his anus, and revealed to him the iniquities of the clergy. This madness, it seemed, was capable of infecting every level of society. The charge, though, was customarily the same: that unworthy priests were disqualified from practising the rites and rituals of the Church; that they were polluted, tarnished, corrupted; that they were not truly Christian. The echo of the Donatists, reverberating down the centuries, was palpable.
Gerard, nervous of where such ravings might lead, was on his guard. Brought news that a man named Ramihrd was ‘preaching many things outside the faith, and had won a large number of disciples of both sexes’,2 the bishop was quick to act. Ramihrd was summoned to Cambrai. There, he was questioned by a panel of abbots and learned scholars. His answers, however, proved impeccably orthodox. He was then invited to celebrate with Gerard the ritual of the eucharist: the transformation, by means of a sublime mystery, of bread and wine into the very body and blood of Christ. Only a priest could perform this miracle – but Ramihrd, accusing the bishop of being filthy with sin, denied him the title of priest. The resulting uproar exploded into violence. Gerard’s servants, seizing the man who had so insulted their master, bundled him into a wooden hut. A crowd set it on fire. Ramihrd, kneeling in prayer, was burned alive.
This spasm of mob violence – although obviously an embarrassment to Gerard – was not without salutary effect. There was precedent for putting heretics to death. Half a century earlier, the clerics of Orléans charged with scoffing at the existence of the Church had been publicly burned: the first people to be executed for heresy in the entire history of the Latin West.* Ugly moods demanded ugly measures. The rush of Ramihrd’s followers to scoop up his ashes and consecrate him as a martyr spoke of an enthusiasm for his teachings that had become a kind of madness. The demand – a wild, an impractical one! – was for a Church that could shine amid the darkness of the fallen world as radiantly as the most discipline-hallowed monastery. Priests, unlike monks, had never been obliged to pledge themselves to celibacy – and yet this, in recent years, had become a subject of violent agitation. In Milan, where the clergy had long lived openly with their wives, riots had been convulsing the city for two decades. Married priests had found themselves boycotted, abused, assaulted. Their touch was publicly scorned as ‘dog shit’.3 Paramilitaries had barricaded the archbishop inside his own cathedral, and then, when he died, tried to foist their own candidate on the city. Gerard, who had only been invested as a bishop a few months previously, had no wish to see such turmoil rock Cambrai. This was why, rather than punish the murderers of Ramihrd, he was content to regard them as the agents of a higher purpose. Heresy, after all, had to be rooted out. Ramihrd’s admirers were weavers, peasants, labourers – nothing more. What were the complaints of such people to a bishop?
But Ramihrd, it turned out, also had admirers further afield. Early in 1077, a letter arrived in Paris, addressed to the city’s archbishop. It reported in shocked tones the news of Ramihrd’s fate. ‘We view it as something monstrous.’4 Ramihrd, so the letter declared, had been no criminal. The criminals were those who had murdered him. Here, to Gerard, was not merely a reprimand but a body blow. The letter had been written by a bishop – and not just by any bishop. The burning of Ramihrd stood condemned by the pope himself.
Hildebrand had always been a radical. Born – some said – the son of a Tuscan carpenter, the blaze of his future greatness had been presaged by miraculous sparks of fire on his swaddling clothes, and a flame seen issuing from his head. Defying his humble origins, he had never doubted himself entrusted by God with a fateful mission. When, as a young man, he was granted a vision of St Paul shovelling cow dung out of a Roman monastery, it had confirmed him in the ambition that he would hold to all his life: to sluice the Church clean of every spot of filth. This, elsewhere, might have been sufficient to condemn him as a heretic; but Rome, during Hildebrand’s youth, was a city in the throes of an intoxicating sense of renewal. For too long the papacy had been an institution pawed at and squabbled over by local dynasts. Pope after pope had served as a byword for scandal. The shame of it had finally prompted intervention by the emperor himself. Henry III, a man possessed of formidable piety and the self-confidence that came naturally to an anointed king, had briskly deposed and appointed a number of popes, before finally, in 1048, installing a distant cousin. A high-handed policy, certainly – but one that had fast served to raise the papacy from the gutter. A succession of popes as astute as they were devout had laboured to set it on a new course. Reformatio, they had termed this great project: ‘reformation’. Its ambition was not merely the redemption of the papacy from the canker of worldliness and parochialism, but the whole world. Papal agents – ‘legates’ – had been dispatched in increasing numbers north of the Alps. Meanwhile, talented clerics were recruited to the papacy’s service from across the Latin West. Increasingly, these had given to Rome a feel that the city had not possessed for many centuries: that of a capital at the heart of the world’s affairs.