Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (62 page)

This was a sign that papal relations with the East were reaching a low ebb.
⁸⁶
A formal break between Rome and Constantinople in 1054 (see p. 374), not seen as significant at the time, signalled not simply a new era in relations between the two, but the culmination of a process in which the papacy made its claim to a primacy in the whole Church ever more formal. This could not have been predicted when, a thousand years before, Peter had been killed in the imperial capital. After the new millennium in 1000, three centuries followed in which the dream of a universal Christian monarchy became central to the shape of Western Christianity, and almost seemed to be capable of becoming reality.

11

The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900-1200)

ABBOTS, WARRIORS AND POPES: CLUNY'S LEGACY

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town walls, and three church spires in its skyline. Yet the place is haunted by an absence, the nature of which becomes clear if one seeks out the most imposing of those church spires in the town centre, to find it topping a very peculiar building, a monumental empty Romanesque domed hall, soaringly and at first sight bafflingly tall in proportion to its floor area. To enter this medieval elevator shaft of space is to realize that it was part of something much bigger. It is in fact one single transept from what was between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries the largest church building in the world (see Plate 13). The church's ancient splendour made it a symbol of all that the French Revolution hated and, after a mob sacked it in 1790, the shell was sold to a building contractor, who took three decades to pull it down, all except this sad, towering remnant. The Emperor Napoleon had a stud farm built over much of the empty site. Until those dismal years, the prodigious church proclaimed the importance of the abbey which had created it.

At the beginning, Cluny Abbey had not been unique. Its foundation in 909-10 coincided with a new phase in the constant urge to renewal in Western monastic life, but in character it differed little from the monasteries which the Carolingian reforms had produced. Bishops and aristocrats still thought that the best way to battle against monastic complacency and corruption was to devote huge resources in land and wealth to the creation of ever more splendid Benedictine houses. In the same era England witnessed a burst of parallel activity, vigorously supported by an expanding monarchy, and it might have been thought that England would lead European reform, as it had once led missions into northern Europe. The English were now precociously united under a single king. From the time of the pious and energetic King Alfred (reigned 871-99), the kings of Wessex had done their best to fight off invasion and occupation by Danish and Viking armies to create a version of Carolingian monarchy, just at the time when the Carolingians themselves were descending into quarrels and failure. Alfred's successors Aethelstan (reigned 924-39) and Edgar (reigned 944-75) achieved the united English kingdom anticipated in the Church of Augustine's mission and in the writings of Bede (see pp. 341-2). The uniting of England provoked an outburst of pride which might almost be styled nationalist, and which had a distinctive and galvanizing effect on the English Church.

Reforms in England were the work of a small group of great reformers whom King Edgar made bishops and archbishops. Aethelwold, a courtier of King Aethelstan, who had become a monk and from 963 was bishop in Edgar's royal capital of Winchester, was a scholar and dynamic teacher who inspired a series of decaying monasteries to adopt the Benedictine Rule as their standard of life, having himself translated that Rule from Latin into Old English. His unusual impact on the English Church left it one individual feature not often found elsewhere in Europe, and which was even extended after the Norman Conquest of 1066: the creation of cathedral churches which, up to Henry VIII's sixteenth-century dissolutions, were also monasteries, with a prior and monks instead of a dean and canons. The capital, Winchester, was itself one; another was Worcester, another Canterbury, though the cathedral canons of York 'Minster' never succumbed to reorganization into the monastic life.

Dunstan, who had been Abbot of Glastonbury when Aethelwold was there, was Archbishop of Canterbury from 959. He was both a great statesman, who presided over King Egbert's quasi-imperial coronation at Bath in 973, and a zealous promoter of Aethelwold's Benedictine project throughout the kingdom (engagingly if surprisingly, he also took an interest in personally annotating a manuscript of no-holds-barred erotic verse by the Latin poet Ovid, which still exists in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). Oswald of Worcester, a monk of Danish descent, was equally energetic in monastic foundations and refoundations across the English Midlands from Worcester to Ramsey; Edgar promoted him to the Archbishopric of York in 971. Notably, all these scholars were as concerned to write in Old English as in Latin, developing with pride a vernacular literary tradition which had most unusually been fostered by the writings of a king, Alfred of Wessex. That emphasis on the vernacular might well have altered the patterns of Christianity in northern Europe, if England rather than Cluny had proved to be the powerhouse of Christian change in the next century.
¹

Cluny's glory days came later than the English revival. The abbey outgrew the patronage of any one secular monarch or nobleman and proved far greater in its influence than the restrictions of a single kingdom. The founder, Duke Guillaume of Aquitaine, had endowed the abbey lavishly but made unusually few demands in return, in reward for which generosity monastic posterity gratefully entitled him 'the Pious'. A century after the foundation, a series of exceptionally shrewd and capable abbots built on this freedom of manoeuvre; they took their cue both from a provision in Duke Guillaume's founding charter placing them under the pope's special protection and from the example of Fleury, that much older Frankish monastery which, with exceptional and ruthless enterprise, had pioneered a special relationship with Rome (see p. 360). In 1024 Odilo, Abbot of Cluny from 994 to 1049, followed Fleury's example in gaining exclusive papal privileges; he also began major rebuilding and enlargement campaigns at the abbey, which by the end of the eleventh century produced the final version of the prodigy church (see Plate 13).
²

One should never underestimate the significance of architecture in Christianity and particularly not in the era of reform which now emerged. There was a vast amount of church-building, precisely because to rebuild a church building was regarded as a sacramental sign of institutional and devotional renewal in the Church: each new church was a reform in stone. One chronicler from Cluny saw the Christian world as clothing itself with 'a white mantle of churches', having safely passed the watershed of 1000, when the end of the world might have been expected (Cluny made rather a fuss about this millennium, while it is not at all clear that others did).
³
Worship in the church of Cluny itself was renewed in spectacular style amid the builders' scaffolding. Its monk-clergy celebrated an unbroken round of Masses and offices, while the centrepiece of these subsidiary dramatic performances were High Masses unequalled elsewhere in their splendour and solemnity. Western Europeans marvelled at this offering to God, and when they hastened to imitate it by endowing their own versions of Cluny, the abbots of Cluny harnessed this enthusiasm in a new way. Rather than simply giving their blessing to new independent abbeys in the traditional Benedictine manner, they demanded that each foundation should form part of a new international organization run by the abbot of Cluny himself, as 'priories' to his abbey: they would form a Cluniac 'Order' - the first monastic organization to bear this title - in which the abbot would progress round the priories and priors would gather at the mother house on a regular basis.

Moreover, the abbots of Cluny discovered a special and appropriately international purpose for their growing spiritual empire. Unusually and surprisingly for a great monastery, they did not make their own church into a cult centre for any celebrated saint. Instead they looked to a shrine on the furthest south-western frontier of Catholic Christendom, in the city of Compostela on the Atlantic coast of north-west Spain. From the ninth century Compostela Cathedral had claimed that it housed the body of one of the original twelve Apostles: James, in Spanish Santiago. From all over Europe, devout people now sought to make the long and difficult journey to the remote Iberian city, and Cluny, strategically placed in Burgundy, began organizing these crowds along the roads of Europe; its priories were agencies and way stations for the journey. The Compostela pilgrimage was only the flagship in a great industry of travel to holy places in Europe which blossomed during the eleventh century. Most of the greatest surviving churches of the period were built as stages or goals on pilgrimage tracks, and their architectural patterns took their cue from Cluny. Entering the main entrance of St Etheldreda's Ely Cathedral, Mary Magdalene's Vezelay Abbey, the church of St-Sernin in Toulouse on the Compostela route, or Compostela Cathedral itself, is to see something of what the lost church of Cluny was like. The nave is a long, cavernously vaulted road taking the pilgrim on a journey to the high altar in the far distance, with around the altar a passageway (ambulatory) completing a circuit of the whole church building. The entrances of such churches are commonly topped by relief sculptures of Christ in majesty or God the Father judging all creation, a powerful reminder of the object of any pilgrimage: the distant goal of Heaven. They are among the greatest and most moving specimens of medieval sculptural art.

The expansion of pilgrimage was only one symptom of profound changes in Church and society which Cluny Abbey embodied. What happened in the eleventh century was a Reformation, but unlike the more familiar Reformation of the sixteenth century, it was not a rebellion in the ranks but directed from the top, resulting in the most magnificent single structure of government which Christianity has known. Whether we approve of this achievement or not, it deserves the title of Reformation as much as the actions of Martin Luther and John Calvin, and we will not do it justice to see it, as later Protestants did, as a deliberate conspiracy by selfish clergy. The Church in the West was reacting creatively to change in the nature of power and wealth in the society to which it ministered. In the early medieval period, the chief way of gathering wealth was by warfare, yielding plunder and slaves; as we have seen, as late as the Carolingian period kings survived by giving handouts to their warlords (see p. 349). By the eleventh century this system was coming to an end. The change was symbolized by the collapse of Carolingian central authority in much of Europe over the previous century, which, whatever short-term disruptions it caused, was to lead to a new settled order in Western society. That was also encouraged by a gradual end to the wave of invasions of non-Christian peoples from north and east which had been a constant source of insecurity during the ninth and tenth centuries.

10. Cluny and the Santiago Pilgrimage

Nevertheless, most people would not have experienced the new system as a deliverance; it was characterized by new forms of exploitation. In a search for new sources of wealth, and with the prospect of greater stability in their territories, the nobility turned to squeezing revenues out of the lands which they controlled through more productive farming. Some of their enterprise was directed to expansion of cultivation - draining marshes, clearing forest - but whether in old or new farming communities, they regulated their land and the people on it ever more closely. From the tenth century many areas of Europe witnessed the purposeful creation of a network of new village settlements, with many more legal obligations on their newly gathered inhabitants. A large proportion of the rural population was reduced to serfdom: farmers became the property of their lords, with obligations to work on the newly intensive agricultural production.
⁴

Economic productivity dramatically rose as a result. There were better food supplies and more wealth. Surplus wealth and the need for ready exchange in which to transfer it meant that money became a more important part of the economy than it had been for centuries. Trade naturally benefited from the new prosperity and the rulers of peoples on the margins of Christian Europe, drawn further into trading networks, saw the advantages of adopting the faith of their neighbours, in a remarkable series of parallel developments.
⁵
To the east, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs all began succumbing to Christian missions, although it was some time before their monarchs made decisions between Eastern and Western Christianity (see pp. 458-65). Likewise around 1000 Christianity began making renewed progress in Scandinavia - first a conversion in Denmark ordered by its king, Harald Blue-tooth, around 960 under pressure from the Ottonian emperors, then a more gradual spread through what is now Norway and Sweden, even as far as remote Iceland. At the same time, the Christian nobility of Germany began casting covetous eyes on the non-Christian lands to their north-east around the Baltic, launching a counterpart to the wars of reconquest at the other end of Latin Christendom in Spain.