By 1095, the east end of the church had been sufficiently completed to permit the dedication of its two great altars. Cluny being Cluny, the man invited to do the honours was a pope. Urban II had once been a prior in the abbey, but had then left for Italy, where he had served Gregory as a notably shrewd and committed advisor, before himself being raised to the papacy in 1087. Travelling to Cluny, the new pope was doing honour not only to the monastery itself, but to the great ideal of a Church independent and free. Arriving on 18 September, and dedicating the two altars a week later, he hailed it as a reflection of the heavenly Jerusalem. The praise was heartfelt; but Urban had his attention fixed as well on a more distant horizon. Travelling on from Burgundy, he headed for central France, and the town of Clermont. There, as at Cluny, his talk was all of freedom. At a great council of bishops and abbots, priests were formally forbidden to do homage to earthly lords. Then, on 27 November, the pope travelled outside the town walls, and addressed an eager crowd in a muddy field. No less than Gregory, Urban understood the value of harnessing popular fervour. The great cause of reformatio could not merely be the stuff of councils. If it failed to liberate the Christian people across the entire globe, to light heaven and earth, to prepare the fallen world for the return of Christ and the day of judgement, then it was nothing. The Church, so the bishops and abbots gathered in Clermont had proclaimed, should be ‘chaste from all contagion of evil’.17 A fine ambition – but how could it be achieved while Jerusalem itself lay under Saracen rule? Not all the radiant purity of Cluny could make up for the horror of it. Urban, who gloried in the convulsions that reformatio had brought to Christian kingdoms, dared to dream of a greater convulsion still. Daringly, he offered his listeners an electrifying new formula for salvation. Listed as an official decree of the council held at Clermont, it promised warriors a means by which their trade of arms, rather than offending Christ and requiring penance to be forgiven, might itself serve to cleanse them of their sin. ‘For, if any man sets out from devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance.’18
In the Book of Revelation it was foretold that, at the end of days, an angel would gather grapes from the earth’s vine, and trample them in the winepress of God’s wrath, and that blood would flow out of the press, and rise as high as a horse’s bridle. The passage was one that Gregory’s followers knew well. One bishop who had travelled in Urban’s train to Clermont openly wondered whether it was the enemies of reformatio who were destined to be crushed in the final harvest. In the event, though, it was not on the battlegrounds of the papacy’s great conflict with Henry IV that blood would be made to flow through the streets, but in Jerusalem. Urban’s speech had reverberated to miraculous effect. A great host of warriors drawn from across the Latin West had taken a familiar road. As pilgrims had been doing since the time of the millennium, they had journeyed across Hungary to Constantinople; and then from Constantinople to the Holy Land. Every attempt by the Saracens to halt them they had defeated. Finally, in the summer of 1099, the great army of warrior pilgrims had arrived before Jerusalem. On 15 July, they stormed its walls. The city was theirs. Then, once the slaughter was done, and they had dried their dripping swords, they headed for the tomb of Christ. There, in joy and disbelief, they offered up praises to God. Jerusalem – after centuries of Saracen rule – was Christian once again.
So extraordinary was the feat as to be barely believable – and the news redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy. Urban himself died a fortnight after the city’s capture, too soon for news of the great victory that he had inspired to reach him; but the programme of reform to which he had devoted his life was much burnished by the winning of the Holy City. Emperors since the time of Charlemagne had fought wars of conquest beneath the banner of Christ; but none had ever sent an entire army on pilgrimage. Warriors present at the capture of Jerusalem reported having seen ‘a beautiful person sitting atop a white horse’19 – and there were some prepared to wonder if it might not have been Christ himself. Whatever the truth of the mysterious horseman’s identity, one thing was clear: the Holy City had been won, not in the name of any king or emperor, but in that of a much more universal cause.
But what name to give this cause? Back in the Latin West, the word starting to be used was one that, until the capture of Jerusalem, had barely been heard. The warrior pilgrims, so it came to be said, had fought under the banner of Christianitas: Christendom. Such a categorisation – divorced as it was from the dynasties of earthly kings and the holdings of feudal lords – was one well suited to the ambitions of the papacy. Who better to stand at the head of Christendom than the heir of Saint Peter? Less than a century after Henry III had deposed three popes in a single year, the Roman Church had carved out a role of leadership for itself so powerful that Henry’s grandson, the son of Henry IV, was brought in 1122 to sue for peace. In that year, in Worms, where his father had once commanded Gregory VII to abdicate, Henry V agreed a momentous concordat. By its terms, the fifty-year-old quarrel over the investiture of imperial bishops was finally brought to an end. Although ostensibly a compromise, time would demonstrate that victory was decisively the papacy’s. Decisive too was the increasing acceptance of another key demand of the reformers: that the clergy distinguish themselves from the great mass of the Christian people – the laicus, or ‘laity’ – by embracing celibacy. By 1148, when yet another papal decree banning priests from having wives or concubines was promulgated, the response of many was to roll their eyes. ‘Futile and ludicrous – for who does not know already that it is unlawful?’20
Increasingly, then, the separation of church from state was an upheaval manifest across the whole of Christendom. Wherever a priest was called upon to minister to the laity, even in the humblest, the most isolated village, there the impact of reformatio could be felt. The establishment of the Roman Church as something more than merely a first among equals, as ‘the general forum of all clergy and all churches’,21 gave clerics across the Latin West a common identity that they had not previously possessed. In the various kingdoms, fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout the world’.22
Emperors and kings, although they might try to take a stand against it, would repeatedly find themselves left bruised by the attempt. Not since the age of Constantine and his heirs had any one man exercised an authority over so wide a sweep of Europe as did the bishop of the ancient capital of the world. His open claim was to the ‘rights of heavenly and earthly empire’;23 his legates travelled to barbarous lands and expected to be heard; his court, in an echo of the building where the Roman Senate had once met, was known as the ‘Curia’. Yet the pope was no Caesar. His assertion of supremacy was not founded on force of arms, nor the rank of his ministers on their lineage or their wealth. The Church that had emerged from the Gregorian reformatio was instead an institution of a kind never before witnessed: one that had not merely come to think of itself as sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so. ‘The Pope,’ Gregory VII had affirmed, ‘may be judged by no one.’24 All Christian people, even kings, even emperors, were subject to his rulings. The Curia provided Christendom with its final court of appeal. A supreme paradox: that the Church, by rending itself free of the secular, had itself become a state.