Backman Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe
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204 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES
Artist’s re-creation of map of the Mediterranean by ’al-’Idrisi. Twelfth centur y.
This drawing re-creates one of the maps prepared by the celebrated Muslim
geographer ’Abu ’Abudullah Muhammad ’al-’Idrisi in the twelfth century. ’al-
’Idrisi was a scholar attached to the royal court of Roger II of Sicily (1130–
1154), and while in residence at the palace in Palermo he wrote his Kitab ’al-
Malik ’al-Rujjeri (“King Roger’s Book”), the greatest geographical work of the
Middle Ages. Unfortunately, it has never been translated into English. To view
the map correctly, one must invert it. Islamic maps in the Middle Ages
traditionally located south at the top of the map. (Latin Christian maps placed
east at the top, by contrast.) Jerusalem lies at the center. (British Library)
him as the vassal of the Holy See and recognized him as the legitimate ruler of
Apulia and Calabria (the two main regions of southern Italy). After Guiscard’s
death in 1085, his son Roger Borsa inherited his father’s duchy. Meanwhile Guis-
card’s younger brother Roger “the Great Count” began to establish a Norman
power-zone in Sicily, where he had started to campaign as early as 1061. The
Sicilian conquest was complete by 1091 and Norman-style feudalism was imposed.
Roger the Great Count died in 1101 and left Sicily in the hands of his wife Ade-
laide; she retired from the scene when their son Roger II reached manhood and
took over the reins of government in 1112. Roger II also inherited the childless
Roger Borsa’s peninsular territories in 1129; thus was created a vast new realm at
the very heart of the Mediterranean. On Christmas Day 1130, Roger II assumed
royal status with a grand coronation in his capital of Palermo.
This Norman-Sicilian kingdom ended when the dynasty’s direct line died out
in 1194. But while it lasted, it stood out as one of the wealthiest and most powerful
kingdoms in Latin Europe, thanks to the Mediterranean trade that passed through
Sicilian harbors. As in England, the Normans governed their realm with a heavy
hand. Feudal practices and institutions did not fit well in Mediterranean Europe,
where they ran counter to traditions of local autonomy in the countryside; the
urban coastal centers also were accustomed to their own communal ways; and the
polyethnic and multi-religious nature of the kingdom made for a cosmopolitan
but also continually tense social scene. Historians have frequently romanticized
the extent to which the Norman-Sicilian kingdom managed to harmonize these
antagonisms. If Muslims, Greeks, Lombards, Sicilians, and Normans, town-
dwellers, country rustics, and royal administrators found it possible to live to-
A NEW EUROPE EMERGES: NORTH AND SOUTH 205
Mosaic from the central apse of the cathedral at Monreale, Sicily. Twelfth centur y. The
mosaics of Norman Sicily are among the most splendid produced in the whole Middle
Ages. Here we see an image of Christ Pantocrator standing majestically above a scene of
an enthroned Madonna and Child who are flanked by angels, apostles and saints.
Elements of Greek artistic tradition (in the portraiture as well as in the Greek lettering)
combine with some Islamic elements (in the elaborate geometric tracery) to produce a
harmonious and powerful work of art. (Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)
gether and to prosper, this was more the “harmony” of people who got along
because they knew that they would face serious reprisals if they did not, than it
was an oasis of mutual respect and tolerance. Nevertheless, for at least a few
generations, these communities from around the Mediterranean did share a com-
mon ground that was not, for once, a battlefield.
206 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES
S
UGGESTED
R
EADING
Texts
Anonymous. The Poem of El Cid.
———. The Song of Roland.
———. The Usages of Barcelona.
Galbert of Bruges. The Murder of Charles the Good.
Hugo Falcandus. The History of the Tyrants of Sicily.
John of Salisbury. Policraticus.
Ordericus Vitalis. The Ecclesiastical History.
Otto of Freising. The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa.
———. The Two Cities.
Source Anthologies
Amt, Emilie. Medieval England, 1000–1500: A Reader (2001).
Shinners, John. Medieval Popular Religion, 1000–1500: A Reader (1997).
Strayer, Joseph. Feudalism.
Studies
Abulafia, David. The Two Italies: Economic Relations between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the
Northern Communes (1977).
Barber, Richard W. The Knight and Chivalry (1995).
Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993).
———. England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (1999).
Bisson, Thomas. Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (1995).
———. The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (1991).
Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (1992).
Chibnall, Marjorie. Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1166 (1986).
Crouch, David. The Reign of King Stephen, 1135–1154 (2000).
Duby, Georges. The Chivalrous Society (1978).
———. Medieval France (1991).
———. The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (1980).
———. William Marshall: The Flower of Chivalry (1985).
Dunbabin, Jean. France in the Making, 843–1190 (1985).
Fleming, Robin. Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England
(1998).
Freedman, Paul. The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (1991).
Gerber, Jane S. The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (1992).
Glick, Thomas F. From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval
Spain (1995).
Hanawalt, Barbara A., and Kathryn L. Reyerson. City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (1994).
Jones, Philip J. The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (1997)
Keen, Maurice. Chivalry (1984).
Lopez, Robert S. The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (1976).
A NEW EUROPE EMERGES: NORTH AND SOUTH 207
Loud, Graham. The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (2000).
Matthew, Donald. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (1992).
Poly, Jean-Pierre, and Eric Bournazel. The Feudal Transformation, 900–1200 (1991).
Reilly, Bernard F. The Medieval Spains (1993).
Reynolds, Susan. Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994).
———. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (1984).
Skinner, Patricia. Family Power in Southern Italy: The Duchy of Gaeta and Its Neighbours, 850–1139
(1995).
208
CHAPTER 10
8
T
HE
R
EFORM OF THE
C
HURCH
T
he reform of the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is one of
medieval Europe’s great success stories. Considering the depths to which
the Church had sunk in the tenth century, the fact that by the end of the eleventh
century it was able to re-create itself so completely in terms of its institutional,
doctrinal, intellectual, and spiritual life is deeply impressive. The medieval reform
and its aftereffects is arguably the most revolutionary chapter in Church history;
even the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, some have argued, ef-
fected less fundamental change in Christian life. The reform began at the local
level and worked its way up the social and ecclesiastical hierarchy, gaining mo-
mentum as it progressed, until at the end of the eleventh century it reached the
highest echelons of Church and State. As a result it both reflected and catalyzed
the upsurge of religious enthusiasm of the age. The more the Church reformed, it
seemed, the more thoroughgoing the people expected the reform to become, until
finally the stage was reached, with the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073–1085),
when the reform movement’s own goals were surpassed and an entirely new
ordering of society was proclaimed. In other words, what began as a reform turned
into a revolution of sorts. The end result was a Church as radically different from
what it had been before as Europe’s social and political orderings and institutions
were, as outlined in the preceding two chapters.
The reform of the Church is both an exciting and a cautionary tale. The re-
formers, guided by aspirations for a more meaningful and independent spiritual
life, gradually became enthusiasts for a type of spiritual purity that put at danger
those people outside the orthodox Christian order. On a popular level, champions
of peaceful pilgrimage to holy shrines evolved speedily into armed crusaders de-
termined to rid the world, or at least certain corners of it, of the “enemies of
Christ.” Anti-Semitic violence became widespread, though sporadic, in feudal Eu-
rope, and anti-Semitic prejudices (the same hatred, though with less of the violence
that sprang from it) abounded in the south. Within the Church itself, proponents
of ecclesiastical freedom from State control gave way to ideologues who pro-
claimed the authority of the reformed Church over the State and every aspect of
life within it. And the culmination of the reform came in the bloody struggle for
supremacy between the reformed Church and the equally reformed feudal
monarchies.
There is no question that reform was badly needed. For all its achievements,
the Church had never established itself as a freestanding institution; ever since
Constantine held sway over the Council of Nicaea in the early fourth century, the
churches of Christendom had lain under the more or less direct authority of the
secular state. The Carolingians had continued the practice by every means at their
disposal. Indeed, Charlemagne had made his view of things—the only view that
THE REFORM OF THE CHURCH 209
mattered, as far as he was concerned—perfectly clear in a series of letters he sent
to Pope Leo III, in which he articulated the general policy that it fell to the emperor
to maintain the Church materially, organizationally, and spiritually. The sole re-
sponsibility of the pope, he asserted, is to serve as a kind of personal example of
ideal Christian devotion: to provide a model of piety, prayer, modesty, virtue, and
obedience. But the Holy See is literally powerless. It is the prerogative, but also
the heavy responsibility, of the State to defend, administer, and promote Christian
life. That is why Charlemagne never bothered to consult with Rome before insti-
tuting his system of parish churches, or leading his monastic and liturgical re-
forms, or even deciding a purely theological issue like the debate over the use of
icons in Christian worship.
The Carolingians’ successors viewed it as their right to lord it over their local
churches; and as we saw in Chapter 9, they hurried the Church’s decline by their
pillaging, their simony, and their general lack of concern for maintaining orderly
spiritual life. A gathering of bishops at a Church synod in Trosle in the tenth
century lamented the ruin of the briefly thriving Christendom of Charlemagne’s
time:
Our cities are depopulated, our monasteries wrecked and put to the torch,
our countryside left uninhabited....Just as the first human beings lived with-
out law or the fear of God, and according only to their dumb instincts, so too
now does everyone do whatever seems good in his eyes only, despising all
human and divine laws and ignoring even the commands of the Church. The
strong oppress the weak, and the world is wracked with violence against the
poor and the plunder of ecclesiastical lands....Meneverywhere devour one
another like the fishes of the sea.
As civil society decayed, so did the local churches, which local warlords seized
as sources of revenue. Simony—the sale of ecclesiastical offices—ran rampant, as
did the practice of barons simply installing themselves, their friends, or family
members, in ecclesiastical positions without regard for whether or not those people
were capable of, or even interested in, actually guiding the spiritual lives of their
communities. The rot reached as high as the papacy itself by the tenth century,
when the Holy See was kicked around, bartered, and sold like a trophy among
the families conspiring to dominate local Roman politics. The absolute nadir was
reached with the pontificate of John XII (956–963), an indolent and cruel sensualist
who became pope at the age of eighteen and spent his seven years in office en-
gaged in orgies of sex, violence, incest, arson, and murder. No one mourned when
he died (reputedly of a heart attack after a strenuous bout of lovemaking with a
married woman). Few of his contemporaries were much better, and the dismal
nature of the situation can be glimpsed from the mere cataloging of what befell
those popes who came immediately before and after him: John VIII (872–882) was
knifed to death; Stephen VI (896–897) was strangled while rotting in a prison cell;
Benedict VI (973–974) was smothered while he slept: and John XIV (983–984) was
probably poisoned in the papal retreat at Castel Sant’Angelo. Another pope named
Formosus (891–896) died a natural death but suffered a cruel post-mortem hu-
miliation: His successor, Boniface VI (896), accused Formosus of having been a
heretic and a usurper, and decided, perversely, to place him on trial. Boniface
ordered Formosus’ body to be exhumed. The dead pontiff was brought into the
synod, propped up in the witness chair, convicted on all counts (his inability to
testify in his own defense was taken as evidence of his guilt), and then his corpse
was stripped naked and thrown into the Tiber river. Before throwing the body
210 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES
into the river, though, Boniface cut off the finger on which Formosus had worn
the papal ring; he kept the finger as a memento of his bizarre triumph. Boniface
himself lasted on the throne only a few days after this, before he too was dis-
patched.
1
Clearly, something needed to be done.
T
HE
O
RIGINS OF THE
R
EFORM
As seen earlier, Church reform began at the grass-roots level, with masses of com-
moners protesting the violence of the age and the corruption of the churches by
the warlords. The attack on the churches and the oppression of the poor, they
proclaimed, was an offense against God and nature. Outraged by what they saw
happening at all levels, and anguished over doubts about the efficacy of the cor-
rupted clergy’s sacraments, they demanded change in large, though unorganized,
numbers—protesting made possible by the clustering of the rural populace under
manorialism. Rural workers placed themselves under baronial lords’ care and of-
fered their labor in return for protection, but they demanded that the lords release
their stranglehold on the churches. Their “Peace of God” rallies, as they became
known, were the first mass peace movement in western history, and the workers
regarded the “freedom of the church” (libertas ecclesie) an essential component of
that peace.
These protests followed a monastic lead. Since monasteries were often
wealthy, they were singled out for attack by the post-Carolingian warlords. Tiring
of the abuse, Latin monks demanded protection and used, as we saw before, tech-
niques like liturgical cursing in order to persuade grasping barons to grasp less.
The first monastery to receive a guarantee of its freedom was the abbey of Cluny,
near the Aquitanian-Burgundian border, in or around 910. Duke William IX of
Aquitaine, in founding the abbey, made a sweeping declaration of its privileges
and immunities, and relinquished forever control of the monastic house, its lands,
possessions, clients, and tenants. Most importantly, he recognized its right to freely
select its own abbot and declared that
the monks gathered there are not to be subject to my authority or to that of
my relatives, neither to the splendor of the royal sovereignty nor to that of
any earthly power. In fact I warn and admonish everyone, in God’s name and
that of all His saints, and by the terrible Day of Judgment, that no secular
prince, no count, no bishop, nor even the pontiff of the aforesaid Holy See is
to attack the property of these servants of God, nor alienate it, harm it, grant
it in fief, or appoint any prelate over it against these monks’ will.
Cluny’s success inspired other houses to demand the same freedoms from their
masters, and many of those that managed to win out placed themselves under the
authority of the abbot of Cluny, so that by the start of the eleventh century, Cluny
governed a network of several dozen monasteries, both male and female, and the
Cluniac abbot was the single most powerful figure in the Latin Church.
2
1. Shocked by his behavior, a Church synod declared Boniface VI’s pontificate null and void after he
had been only fifteen days on the throne. Indeed, they claimed, his pontificate was never valid since he
had twice been defrocked on moral charges before being installed in St. Peter’s.
2. Cluny grew extremely quickly as enthusiastic monks flocked to it. A new building was soon required,
and before the end of the tenth century Cluny had started construction on a massive new church and
enclosure that was easily the largest in Europe. It was destroyed during the French Revolution, and only
a portion of one transept of the church remains.
211
The plan of the monaster y of Cluny. Tenth–twelfth centur y. This is the floor plan of the
monaster y of Cluny as it stood in the middle of the twelfth centur y. The original
building, established two hundred years earlier, was considerably smaller and had
already undergone one major expansion at the end of the eleventh century. This twelfth-
centur y abbey was by far the largest monastery in Western Christendom. It was largely
destroyed during the French Revolution, and only a portion of the north transept
remains today. (Speculum 29 [1954]: 1–43 at page 31, plate 10)
212 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES
The monastery of Cluny (artist’s re-creation). Tenth–twelfth centur y. This re-
creation of the Cluny monastery gives a powerful sense of its massive size.
(Kenneth J. Conant)
The village and manorial protests—the Peace of God movement—took Cluny
as a model of sorts, and starting around 985 demanded the same basic freedoms
for their parish churches. They had three things going for them. First, the mere
fact that the protesters were now concentrated in clusters of manorial settlement
meant that the lords needed to listen: After all, a crowd of several hundred, and
sometimes several thousand, passionate and torch-bearing protesters represented
a genuine threat to baronial safety. Second, the protesters appealed to the power
of the saints whose relics were the centerpieces of each church, just as the rebel
monks utilized the power of the saints in their liturgical curses. Devotion to the
saints stood at the center of commoners’ spiritual lives, given the paucity of un-
tainted priests in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and by invoking the power of
the relics against the warlords, the Peace of God enthusiasts significantly raised
the emotional pitch of their movement; in other words, it was not only the peo-
ple of any given parish who were outraged by local tyrannies but the saint him-
self, or herself, whose relics adorned the local church. These first two factors
were enough to ensure the movement’s partial success. Thugs who had won
their positions in society by seizing the churches found that they could win pop-
THE REFORM OF THE CHURCH 213
ular support by becoming champions of ecclesiastical reform, a gain that fre-
quently more than made up for whatever they lost in relinquished ecclesiastical
revenues. Their role as church reformers added a new element of religious le-
gitimacy to their emerging social status under the twin influences of feudalism
and manorialism.
But then the third factor weighed in. The bishops of Europe’s developing cities
scurried to seize the reins of the reform movement and provide it with organi-
zation, energy, and ecclesiastical blessing. Promoting the reform certainly raised
their profile. In theory the urban bishops had always had jurisdiction over their
entire dioceses, but in practice very few early medieval bishops had ever had any
meaningful control over the countryside (that is, control over ninety percent of
their flocks) because of the small, primitive, and isolated nature of the cities them-
selves. A bishop’s real power seldom reached much further than the municipal
gates, leaving the rural countryside far more under the indirect influence of the
rural monasteries and the great abbots. To counter this influence, urban bishops
had long relied on a network of surrogate “rural bishops”—also called “core-
bishops” (after the Latin term corepiscopi)—who oversaw the country churches. By
taking control of the Peace and Truce of God, the municipal bishops aimed to
supplant the power of both the rural abbots and the core-bishops. An ecclesiastical
revolution was in the making, one in which bishops, for the first time, were the
dominant figures in the Church.
3
By the start of the eleventh century, the reform movement was clearly in the
hands of these bishops. Their strategic first step was to undermine the authority
of the core-bishops, who enjoyed considerable popularity with the rural faithful.
As early as the middle of the ninth century, a group of bishops gathered at Reims,
in northern France, and compiled an enormous collection of forged documents—
mostly letters from early popes (some of whom, like Evaristus I and Telesphorus
I, were virtually unknown figures of the second century)—which supposedly
proved the absolute authority of bishops over core-bishops (and thus, of town
over countryside). Some of the faked letters even rejected the very notion of a
“core-bishop” as a legitimate representative of the Church. For good measure, the
reformers at Reims also composed papal letters that supposedly recognized the
independence of all bishops from their respective archbishops. All bishops come
under the direct and unique jurisdiction of the papacy, these letters claimed. Eu-
rope’s archbishops were outraged, but the pope in Rome could not have been
happier. Thus from the very start of the reform, the fates of Europe’s bishops and
of the papacy were united. The Reims documents formed the basis of episcopal
privilege for six hundred years, until they were discovered to be forgeries in the
Renaissance; but throughout the rest of the Middle Ages they were believed to be
the legitimate work of an ancient Church scribe named Isidore Mercatus, and
hence they are now known as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.
Some readers may be surprised to find devout ecclesiastical reformers en-
gaged in wholesale lying (but then to others it may be exactly what they would
expect). The great Church Reform was in many respects a “golden age” of forgery,
with scribes on all sides churning out reams of phony papal letters, land grants,
3. As an index of how important this shift was, one should note that with the exception of the miserable
politicos who abused the office in the tenth century, the great majority of those who held the papacy in
the first thousand years of Christianity had previously been a monk; in the second thousand years of
Christian history, virtually every pope has been a bishop before ascending to the Holy See.