Beginnings of Reform

The project of freeing the church from the world began in the tenth century with no particular plan and only a vague idea of what it might mean. The Benedictine monastery of Cluny (today in France) may serve to represent the early phases of the reform. The duke and duchess of Aquitaine founded Cluny in 910 and endowed it with property. Then they did something new: instead of retaining control over the monastery, like most other monastic founders, they gave it and its worldly possessions to Saints Peter and Paul. In this way, they put control of the monastery into the hands of heaven’s two most powerful saints. They designated the pope, as the successor of St. Peter, to be the monastery’s worldly protector if anyone should bother or threaten it.

The whole notion of “freedom” at this point was vague. But Cluny’s prestige was great because of its status as St. Peter’s property and the elaborate round of prayers that the monks carried out there with scrupulous devotion. The Cluniac monks fulfilled the role of “those who pray” in a way that dazzled their contemporaries. Through their prayers, they seemed to guarantee the salvation of all Christians. Rulers, bishops, rich landowners, and even serfs (if they could) donated land to Cluny, joining their lands to the land of St. Peter and the fate of their souls to Cluny’s efficacious prayers. Powerful men and women called on the Cluniac monks to reform other monasteries along the Cluniac model.

The abbots of Cluny came to see themselves as reformers of the world as well. They advocated clerical celibacy and argued against the prevailing norm, in which parish priests and even some bishops were married. They thought that the laity (all Christians who were not part of the clergy) could be reformed and become more virtuous. In particular, they sought to curb the oppression of the poor by the rich and powerful. In the eleventh century, the Cluniacs began to link their program of internal monastic and external worldly reform to the papacy. When bishops and laypeople encroached on their lands, they appealed to the popes for help. The causes that the Cluniacs championed were soon taken up by a small group of clerics and monks in the Empire, the political entity created by the Ottonians. They buttressed their arguments with new interpretations of canon law—the laws decreed over the centuries at church councils and by bishops and popes. They concentrated on two breaches of those laws: clerical marriage and simony (buying church offices).* Later they added the condemnation of lay investiture—the installation of clerics into their offices by lay rulers. In the investiture ritual, the emperor or his representative symbolically gave the church and the land that went with it to the priest or bishop or archbishop chosen for the job.

At first the emperors supported the reformers. Many of the men who promoted the reform lived in the highly commercialized regions of the empire—Italy and the regions along the northern half of the Rhine River. Familiar with the impersonal practices of a profit economy, they regarded the gifts that churchmen usually gave in return for their offices as no more than crass purchases.

Emperor Henry III (r. 1039–1056) took seriously his position as the anointed of God. He felt responsible for the well-being of the church in his empire. He denounced simony and refused to accept money or gifts when he appointed bishops to their posts. When in 1046 three men, each representing a different faction of the Roman aristocracy, claimed to be pope, Henry, as ruler of Rome, traveled to Italy to settle the matter. There Henry presided over the Synod of Sutri (1046), which deposed all three popes and elected another. In 1049, Henry appointed a bishop from the Rhine-land to the papacy as Leo IX (r. 1049–1054). But this appointment did not work out as Henry had expected.

Leo set out to reform the church under his own, not the emperor’s, control. Under his rule, the pope’s role expanded. He traveled to France and Germany, holding councils to condemn bishops guilty of simony. He sponsored the creation of a canon law textbook—Collection in 74 Titles—that emphasized the pope’s power. He brought to the papal court the most zealous reformers of his day, including Humbert of Silva Candida and Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII).

In 1054, his last year as pope, Leo sent Humbert to Constantinople on a diplomatic mission to argue against the patriarch of Constantinople on behalf of the new, lofty claims of the pope. When the patriarch treated him with contempt, Humbert became furious and excommunicated him. In retaliation, the patriarch excommunicated Humbert and his party, threatening them with eternal damnation. Clashes between the two churches had occurred before and had been patched up, but this one, the schism between the eastern and western churches (1054), proved insurmountable.* Thereafter, the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches were largely separate.

Leo also confronted a new power to his south. Under Count Roger I (c. 1040–1101), the Normans created a county that would eventually stretch from Capua to Sicily. (see “The World of the Investiture Conflict”) Leo, threatened by this great power, tried to curtail it: in 1053, he sent a military force to Apulia, but it was soundly defeated. Leo’s successors were obliged to change their policy. In 1058, the reigning pope “invested”—in effect, gave—Apulia, nearby Calabria, and even the still-unconquered Sicily to Roger’s brother, even though none of this was the pope’s to give. The papacy was particularly keen to see the Normans gain Sicily. Once part of the Byzantine Empire, the island had been taken by Muslims in the tenth century; now the pope hoped to bring it under Catholic control. Thus, the pope’s desires to convert Sicily meshed nicely with the territorial ambitions of Roger and his brother. The agreement of 1058 included a promise that all of the churches of southern Italy and Sicily would be placed under papal jurisdiction. No wonder that when the Investiture Conflict broke out, the Normans played an important role as a military arm of the papacy.

The popes were in fact becoming more and more involved in military enterprises. They participated in wars of expansion in Spain, for example. There, political fragmentation into small and weak taifas (see page 288) (See “Regional Diversity in Islamic Lands” in Chapter 9.) made al-Andalus fair game for the Christians to the north. Slowly the idea of the reconquista, the Christian “reconquest” of Spain from the Muslims, took shape, fed by religious fervor as well as by greed for land and power. In 1063, just before a major battle, the pope issued an incentive to all who would fight—an indulgence that lifted the knights’ obligation to do penance, although it did not go so far as to forgive all sins.