The shock was seismic. That Henry had soon reneged on his promises, capturing Rome in 1084 and forcing his great enemy to flee the city, had done nothing to lessen the impact of Gregory’s papacy on the mass of the Christian people. For the first time, public affairs in the Latin West had an audience that spanned every region, and every social class. ‘What else is talked about even in the women’s spinning-rooms and the artisans’ work-shops?’12 Here, so Gregory’s opponents charged, was yet another black mark against his name. To encourage wool-workers and cobblers to sit in judgement on their betters was to play with fire. The sheer violence of the propaganda levelled against Henry – that he was a pervert, an arsonist, a violator of nuns – threatened the very fabric of society. So too, of course, did Gregory’s readiness to stir up mobs against priests who had opposed his programme of reformatio. Only start howling down the clergy, and who knew where it might all end?
The travails of the bishop of Cambrai suggested one particularly alarming answer: the eruption of entire cities into rebellion. In 1077, desperate not to be deposed for accepting a ring from Henry IV, Gerard had travelled the long road to Rome, there to plead his case. Gregory, though, had refused to see him. Only after he had headed back north and begged for mercy from a papal legate in Burgundy had Gerard’s election finally been approved. Meanwhile, during the bishop’s absence, workers and peasants had seized control of Cambrai. Declaring a commune, they swore never to have him back. Gerard, faced with open insurrection, found himself with no choice but to beg the assistance of a neighbouring count. A humiliating recourse – and even once the rebels had been routed, and their leaders put to death, the sense of a world turned on its head would not go away. ‘Knights are armed against their lords, and children rise against their parents. Subjects are stirred up against kings, right and wrong are confounded, and the sanctity of oaths is violated.’13
Yet Gerard, following the pacification of Cambrai, did not repudiate the pledge of loyalty that he had made to Gregory. No sooner had the rebellion been crushed than he set to imposing on his clergy the very measures which, only a year previously, had caused Ramihrd to be lynched. Not even the death of Gregory himself, shortly after his flight from Rome, shook Gerard’s new-found commitment to reformatio. His eyes, like those of other bishops across the empire, had been opened. The humiliation of Henry IV had made visible a great and awesome prize. The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers – of a Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the earthly, from top to bottom, from palace to meanest village – no longer appeared a fantasy, but eminently realisable. A celibate clergy, once disentangled from the snares and meshes of the fallen world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian people as a model of purity, and bring them to God. No longer would it be monasteries and nunneries alone that stood separate from the flux of the saeculum, but the entire Church. Bishops who pledged themselves to the radicalism of this vision could reassure themselves that it was in reality nothing new, nothing out of tune with the teachings of their Saviour. In the gospels, after all, it was recorded that Jesus, approached by questioners looking to trip him up, had been asked whether it was permitted to pay taxes to pagan Rome. Telling them to show him a coin, he had asked them whose image was stamped on it. ‘Caesar’s,’ they had replied. ‘Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,’ Jesus had answered, ‘and to God what is God’s.’14
Nevertheless, deep though the roots of Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil of Christian teaching, the flower was indeed something new. The concept of the ‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, ‘for the first time and permanently’.15 A decisive moment. Lands that had long existed in the shadow both of the vanished order of Rome, and of the vastly wealthier, more sophisticated empires on their eastern flank, had been set at last upon a distinctive course of their own. Nor was it merely the division of European society into twin dimensions of church and state that was destined to prove enduring. So too was the demonstration of just how convulsive and transformative in its effects Christianity might be. It was no longer enough for Gregory and his fellow reformers that individual sinners, or even great monasteries, be consecrated to the dimension of religio. The entire sweep of the Christian world required an identical consecration. That sins should be washed away; the mighty put down from their seats; the entire world reordered in obedience to a conception of purity as militant as it was demanding: here was a manifesto that had resulted in a Caesar humbling himself before a pope. ‘Any custom, no matter how venerable, no matter how commonplace, must yield utterly to truth – and, if it is contrary to truth, be abolished.’16 So Gregory had written. Nova consilia, he had called his teachings – ‘new counsels’.
A model of reformatio had triumphed that, reverberating down the centuries, would come to shake many a monarchy, and prompt many a visionary to dream that society might be born anew. The earthquake would reach very far, and the aftershocks be many. The Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution.
Laying down the Law
The most intoxicating of all the reformers’ slogans was libertas – ‘freedom’. One place more than any other served as its emblem: a monastery charged with a sense of holiness so strong that Gregory had taken it as his model for the entire Church. First established back in 910, amid wooded Burgundian hills, Cluny had been placed by its founder under the protection of the distant papacy. The local bishop, to all intents and purposes, had been frozen out. Cluny’s independence had fast become the mainstay of its greatness. A succession of formidably able abbots, defying the violence and rapacity for which the local warlords were notorious, had succeeded in establishing their monastery as an impregnable outpost of the City of God. So unspotted that they would wash the shoes as well as the feet of visitors, so angelic that they were known to levitate while singing psalms, the monks of Cluny appeared to their admirers as close to celestial as fallen mortals could approach. Almost two centuries on from its foundation, the monastery had not only endured, but flourished mightily. As though from a chrysalis, an immense new church, on a scale never before witnessed, was emerging from the shell of the old. The ribs of its half-completed vault seemed to swell and reach for the skies. To visit it was to see proclaimed in stone just what freedom could truly mean.