The Lady Elizabeth had been born to greatness. Descended from a cousin of Stephen, Hungary’s first truly Christian king, she had been sent as a child to the court of Thuringia, in central Germany, and groomed there for marriage. At the age of fourteen, she had joined Louis, its twenty-year-old ruler, on the throne. The couple had been very happy. Elizabeth had borne her husband three children; Louis had gloried in his wife’s demonstrable closeness to God. Even when he was woken in the night by a maid tugging on his foot, he had borne it patiently, knowing that the servant had mistaken him for his wife, whose custom it was to get up in the early hours to pray. Elizabeth’s insistence on giving away her jewellery to the poor; her mopping up of mucus and saliva from the faces of the sick; her making of shrouds for paupers out of her finest linen veils: here were gestures that had prefigured her far more spectacular self-abasement in the wake of her husband’s death. Her only regret was that it did not go far enough. ‘If there were a life that was more despised, I would choose it.’2 When Count Paviam urged Elizabeth to abandon the rigours and humiliations of her existence in Marburg, and return with him to her father’s court, she refused point blank.
She stood heir, of course, to a long tradition: to that of Basil, and Macrina, and Paulinus. Thuringia too provided her with a role model, and a royal one at that: Radegund, a queen who, back in the age of Clovis, had cleaned toilets and picked out nits from the hair of beggars. Elizabeth, though, had a much more immediate source of inspiration to hand. She lived in a world that had been set on its head by reformers who, for a century and more, had laboured to wash Christendom clean of its filth, to swab and tend to its leprous sores. The supreme exemplar that Elizabeth had before her was not a saint but an institution: the Church itself. Like her, it had escaped the embrace of princes. Like her, it had pledged itself to a perpetual chastity. Like her, it had enshrined poverty as an ideal. ‘The only men fit to preach are those who lack earthly riches, because – possessing nothing of their own – they hold everything in common.’3 Such was the battle-cry that, back in the age of Gregory VII, had helped to trigger the great convulsion of reformatio. It was the same battle-cry that Elizabeth, giving away all her wealth, becoming one with porters and kitchen-maids, had raised herself.
Yet she had to tread carefully. All those who followed the path to voluntary poverty did. The scorching lava-flow of reformatio, which for decades had swept away everything before it, had begun to cool, to harden. Its supreme achievement – the establishment across Christendom of a single, sovereign hierarchy – was no longer best served by the zeal of revolution. Its leaders had won too greatly to welcome the prospect of further upheaval. Their need now was for stability. Clerks in the service of the papal bureaucracy and scholars learned in canon law had long been toiling to strengthen the foundations of the Church’s authority. They understood the awful responsibility that weighed upon their shoulders. Their task it was to bring the Christian people to God. ‘There is one Catholic Church of the faithful, and outside of it there is absolutely no salvation.’4 So it had been formally declared during Elizabeth’s childhood, in 1215, at the fourth of a series of councils convened at the Lateran. To defy this canon, to reject the structures of authority that served to uphold it, to disobey the clergy whose solemn prerogative it was to shepherd souls, was to follow the path to hell.
Yet that this needed stating, and by an assembled mass of bishops and abbots too, ‘from every nation which is under heaven’,5 only served to highlight an awkward truth: that the Church’s authority was not universally acknowledged. There were many, over the course of the century that followed Gregory VII’s papacy, who felt that the potential of reformatio was still to be met. The passions of revolution were not easily calmed. The more reformers who had risen to power in the Church sought to stabilise the condition of Christendom, so the more did those on the extreme fringes of reformatio accuse them of betrayal. A momentous pattern was being set. Revolution had bred an elite – and this elite had bred demands for revolution.
Most of the agitators, preachers who clung to the ideal of living as the apostles had done, of holding all their possessions in common, and of disdaining anything that smacked of the world, railed against the new model of the Church much as Gregory had railed against the old. Roaming the countryside barefoot, carrying crosses of bare and unadorned iron, they lambasted the clergy for failing to practise what they preached: for being leprous with lechery, and pride, and greed. The most radical campaigners went even further. Rather than holding out for further reform, they had come to despair of the very edifice of the Church. Built by popes and bishops out of blood, it lay beyond saving. Corruption was its entire fabric. There was no alternative but to pull it down. Prelates, dreading the spread of these teachings, naturally condemned them as heresy. By the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the panic in papal circles was at full flood. Heretics seemed everywhere. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, a programme for combating their spread was laid out in a detailed canon. ‘Every heresy that rises against the holy, orthodox and Catholic faith we excommunicate and anathematise. All heretics we condemn under whatever names they may be known.’6
Yet the boundary between heresy and sainthood could be a narrow one. The Lady Elizabeth, while still at court, had shared fantasies with her maids of becoming a beggar. With their help, in her private quarters, she had even dressed up in rags. But this was their secret. Elizabeth had not wished to embarrass her husband. It was not only his courtiers that she had risked scandalising. Out on the roads beyond the great castle of the Wartburg, where Louis had established his court, bands of preachers roamed, summoning the wealthy to do as they had done, and give away all their riches to the poor. Even though some of these preachers were women, Elizabeth had known better than to join them. To become a Waldensian was to risk damnation. Named after Waldes, a wealthy Lyons merchant who in 1173 had been inspired by Christ’s teachings to sell all his possessions, they had repeatedly been refused permission to proclaim their teachings. Appealing to the pope himself, they had been laughed out of court. Clerics had not put themselves through a gruelling course of university education merely to license laymen – idiotae – to pontificate on the scriptures. ‘Shall pearls of wisdom be cast before swine?’7 The Waldensians, rather than submitting obediently to this verdict, had responded by turning on the men who had thought to sit in judgement on them. Denouncing the pride and corruption of the clergy with a vitriol that would have done the Donatists credit, they were soon proclaiming their contempt for the very concept of a priesthood. Christ alone was their bishop. This heresy, rank and gross as it was, offered Elizabeth a chilling demonstration of just how far disobedience to the Church might go. That the Waldensians led precisely the kind of lifestyle to which she aspired, holding everything in common, subsisting on alms, only rendered them all the more salutary a warning.