And no wonder either, Gregory being Gregory, that the Pope had likewise refused to budge. The challenge, it seemed to the outraged pontiff, was only incidentally to himself: for Henry was trampling on the very purposes of God. Early in 1080, shortly before a synod was due to be held in Rome, the Virgin Mary had duly appeared to Gregory in a vision, and reassured him of heaven’s backing for the dreadful steps that it was now his clear and pressing duty, as the leader of the universal Church, to take. Sure enough, on 7 March, the Pope greeted the assembled delegates to his council with a mighty groan, and then, his words tumbling out from him in an anguished torrent, pronounced that Henry was once again “justly cast down from the dignity of the kingship because of his pride, disobedience and falsehood.”
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The show of neutrality that Gregory had maintained with such rigorous forbearance since Forcheim was abandoned at last. All the weight of his authority, and all the invisible legions of God that he had no reason to doubt were his to command, he now committed to the support of Rudolf. Everything that he had ever laboured to achieve, in short, was being gambled on a single proposition: that it lay within his power to destroy Henry for good. That same Easter, in the awful setting of St. Peter’s, Gregory did not hesitate to make explicit the full, terrifying scale of what was now at stake between him and his adversary. “For let it be known to all of you,” he pronounced, “that if he does not recover his senses by the feast of St. Peter, he will die or be deposed. If this fails to happen, I ought no more to be believed.”
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Gregory, though, was unwilling to trust his fortunes entirely to the protection of the apostle. That summer, looking to secure an earthly shield for himself in addition to his celestial one, he took a deep breath,
swallowed his scruples, and agreed to meet with Robert Guiscard. The Duke of Apulia, who had responded to his excommunication back in 1074 by seizing Amalfi and menacing Benevento, was now formally absolved, and reconfirmed as a papal vassal. A humiliating climbdown for Gregory, to be sure – but an unavoidable one as well. Sure enough, late that June, right in the midst of his negotiations with the Norman duke, ominous news arrived from Germany. Henry, it was reported, repeating his tactics of four years earlier, had responded to Gregory’s deposition of him by summoning a council of his bishops, and leaning on them to depose Gregory in turn. A whole array of crimes had been laid at the door of “Hildebrand”: warmongering, of course, and the inevitable simony, but also, and more originally, a taste for pornographic floor shows.
Nor was that the worst. Henry had also taken a further and still more threatening step. A new pope had been nominated: the Archbishop of Ravenna, a distant relative of the Countess Matilda by the name of Guibert. Not surprisingly, then, on the feast day of St. Peter, 29 June, Gregory’s supporters waited with bated breath for this impostor to be struck down along with Henry; but nothing happened. Not only did the two men remain resolutely alive and flourishing, but it seemed to many, as summer turned to autumn, that the Almighty had adopted a policy of actively backing the anathematised king. On 15 October, for instance, as the Lady Matilda set out along the road to Ravenna in an attempt to kidnap her upstart relative, she and her army of knights were ambushed and so severely mauled that they had no choice but to retreat ignominiously to a nearby bolt hole.
Simultaneously, in Saxony, by the side of a swollen river south of Merseburg, an even worse calamity was befalling Gregory’s cause. Rudolf of Swabia, meeting Henry in yet another savage but indecisive battle, had his sword-hand hacked clean off, and within a matter of hours had bled to death. A maiming as just as it was awful, it appeared to his foes: for the fatal blow had been delivered to the hand with which the anti-king had once sworn to be Henry’s vassal. Gregory’s prophecy, “that in this year the false king would die,”
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now appeared
all too grimly ironic. God had indeed delivered a judgement, it seemed – but it was not Henry who had been found wanting.
And even Gregory himself, who naturally scorned to share in this analysis, had been left by Rudolf’s death feeling perhaps just a mea sure of perplexity at the mysterious workings of the Almighty, and looking anxiously to the north. No matter that the Saxons remained as obdurately unpacified as they had ever been: they had also been left exhausted and leaderless, and Henry could afford to ignore them at last. The road to Rome lay open so, come the spring, he took it. By May, he and his army were camped out before the city’s gates. There, however, much to Henry’s frustration, they found themselves obliged to halt. No matter that the would-be emperor had made sure to bring Guibert with him, in anticipation of a coronation in St. Peter’s: what he had neglected to bring were sufficient troops to intimidate the Romans, who had no desire for a swap of bishops. “Instead of candles, they met the king with spears; instead of singing clergy, with armed warriors; instead of anthems of praise, with reproaches; instead of applause, with sobs.”
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Gregory, gazing out at his enemy’s camp from the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo, a brooding stronghold just across from St. Peter’s, could afford to breathe a huge sigh of relief. By June, as the Roman marshlands shimmered pestilentially in the heat, the royal army had begun packing up its bags.
But for how long would Henry be gone? And if he did return in the new year, and in sufficient force to cow the Romans – what then? Although Gregory was buoyed by the solid backing of his flock, he could hardly help but reflect on the disappointing lack of support he had received from those better qualified, perhaps, to draw their swords in his defence. True, the Countess Matilda, ever loyal, ever valiant, had refused to submit to her royal cousin; but the effective limit of her resistance had been to hunker down in her Apennine strongholds, while being systematically despoiled of all her lowland possessions. Indeed, there was only one captain in Italy truly qualified to blunt the threat posed by Henry: that very same prince whose backing it had cost Gregory so much nose-holding to secure only the previous year.
Robert Guiscard, however, despite all the increasingly frantic appeals sent to him from the Lateran, had shown a marked disinclination to rally to his overlord’s cause: for his concern, as it had ever been, was ultimately with no one’s prospects save his own. The Duke of Apulia had always been a man to follow his dreams – and these, by the summer of 1081, had attained a truly grandiose dimension. Rather than marching to combat Henry, Guiscard had instead been preoccupied with his most glamorous and spectacular stunt yet: nothing less than an invasion of the Byzantine Empire.
An ambitious project, certainly – but not a wholly vainglorious one, even so. Seven years had passed since the failure of Gregory’s planned expedition to Constantinople, and still the fortunes of the New Rome remained firmly locked in a downward spiral: “the Empire was almost at its last gasp.”
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Even as the Turks continued with their dismemberment of its Asian provinces, so a fresh wave of invaders, the inveterately savage Pechenegs, had arrived to darken the northern frontiers, while in the capital itself the treasury and barracks alike were almost bare. Indeed, to the demoralised Byzantines, it appeared “that no other state in living memory had plumbed such depths of misery.”
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Their ruin appeared almost total.
Yet Guiscard, even as his nostrils were flaring hungrily at the scent of blood borne to him from across the Adriatic, had fretted as well that the opportunity might be slipping him by to make a kill.
In Constantinople, after a wearying turnover of emperors in which no fewer than seven pretenders had laid claim to the throne in barely twenty years, a young general had recently come to power in the wake of yet another coup. Alexius Comnenus, however, unlike his predecessors, was a man of formidable political and military talents: an emperor who, given half a chance, might even succeed in setting the empire back on its feet. Guiscard, resolved not to give Alexius any chance at all, had duly struck as hard and fast as he could. In June, having crossed the Adriatic, he placed the Albanian coastal stronghold of Durazzo under siege. In October, attacked by a Byzantine relief force led by the
Basileus
himself, and including in its ranks a sizeable contingent
of English Varangians, all of them naturally eager for vengeance on the compatriots of their conqueror, he won a crushing victory. The English, having taken sanctuary in a church, were reduced efficiently and satisfyingly to ashes after Robert had their refuge set on fire. Shortly afterwards, Durazzo itself was betrayed into his hands. It appeared that the Normans were on the brink of yet another conquest.
But Alexius was not finished yet. Reverting to time-honoured Byzantine strategy, he frantically dredged up what few reserves of treasure were still left to him – and dispatched them to Henry. “And so it was that he incited the German king to enmity against Robert.”
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Simultaneously, he set about fostering a revolt in Apulia – and to such effect that Guiscard, faced with the prospect of losing his power base, had little alternative but to abandon all his dreams of winning Constantinople and hurry back to Italy. For the next two years, preoccupied as he was with stamping out the flames of insurrection in his own dukedom, he would have no reserves spare to send to Gregory – and this despite the fact that Henry, subsidised by Byzantine gold, was by now a permanent presence in Italy, a standing menace to the Normans as well as to the Pope. It was true that Rome herself, protected by her ancient walls, continued to defy all his attempts to take her, blockades and assaults alike; but by 1083, after three years of intermittent siege, the pressure was starting to tell. Then abruptly, on 3 June, a calamity. A breach was made in the fortifications that encircled the Vatican, across the Tiber from the rest of the city; Henry’s forces flooded through the gap; St. Peter’s cathedral was captured. Gregory, standing on the battlements of Sant’Angelo, had to watch in impotent horror as his great enemy took possession of the holiest shrine in Christendom: the last resting place of the Prince of the Apostles.
This was a seemingly decisive moment: for there appeared nothing now to stop Henry from being crowned emperor. Yet the king, despite his capture of St. Peter’s, and despite having Guibert on hand to do the imperial honours, still hesitated. No matter the vituperations of his pet bishops, it was Gregory, in the opinion of the vast mass of the Christian people, and of the Romans above all, who remained
the one true Pope. Accordingly, rather than force through a coronation that his enemies would be able to dismiss as illegitimate, and in the hope of taking full possession of a still defiant Rome, Henry sought compromise.
As before, the man entrusted with attempting to negotiate this was that instinctive peacemaker, the Abbot of Cluny: for Hugh, amid all the convulsions and calamities that had followed Canossa, had somehow succeeded in keeping a foot still in both camps.
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Indeed, ever since 1080, when Gregory had written to him to ask if there was anyone he could recommend for the cardinalate, there had been a permanent touch of Cluny at the papal court: for the nominated candidate, a Frenchman by the name of Odo, had been the abbey’s number two, its “major prior.” But in 1083, as opposed to 1077, Hugh’s attempts at conciliation were doomed to failure: Gregory sent him packing. Only a few months on, however, as Henry’s noose around Rome continued to tighten, and a succession of well-directed bribes began to sap the city’s resistance at last, even Gregory had begun to suspect that the writing might be on the wall. By the autumn, it was the Pope who was hoping to open negotiations. Yet still the two sides remained as far apart as ever. That November, when Odo was sent by Gregory to explore terms, Henry was so enraged by what he saw as the continuing inflexibility of the papal bottom line that he briefly had the cardinal flung into prison.
Soon enough, however, and the royal blood pressure had begun to drop; and come the new year, Henry could afford positively to relax. What had previously been a trickle of defections from the ranks of Gregory’s supporters was fast becoming a flood. Deacons, papal officials, even the odd cardinal: all were crossing over to Henry’s side. Even more significantly, a majority of the Roman people were finally prepared to abandon their bishop as well. On 21 March 1084, a group of them unbolted the gates of their city – and Henry, after four years of waiting, rode into his ancient capital at last. Nor was he alone in laying claim to a much-anticipated inheritance. After all, with Gregory still bottled up in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Lateran had
been left standing vacant: the ideal opportunity, then, for a new tenant to move in. So it was, a bare three days after Henry’s entry into Rome, that Guibert adopted the name Clement III and was formally enthroned as Pope. Shortly afterwards, over Easter, it was Henry’s turn to be graced with the very grandest of promotions. Flanked by the Holy Lance, that ancient relic of awful power, he was first anointed by Clement, and then, the following day, crowned emperor: the heir of Charlemagne, of Otto the Great, of his own father. Rome, after a wait of many decades, could hail a consecrated Caesar once again.
But not for long. Even as Henry, resolved to finish off Gregory once and for all, was settling down to the siege of the Castel Sant’Angelo, disturbing news was brought to him from the south. Robert Guiscard and his brother, Count Roger of Sicily, were on the march at long last. The new emperor, having obtained the coronation that he had come to Rome to secure, opted not to hang around. His escape, and the Anti-pope’s too, proved to have been just in the nick of time. A bare three days after their hurried exit from the capital, and Norman outriders were clattering up to the city walls. The Romans, gazing out in horror at the immense army descending upon them, one that included not only a great shock force of knights but even Saracens levied from Sicily, kept their gates firmly barred, and writhed in indecision. Abandoned by their emperor, and all too conscious of the Hautevilles’ fearsome reputation, they feared the worst – as well they might have done. For Guiscard was already growing impatient. After three days of waiting, he duly led a night-time assault, and smashed his way into the city. Gregory, sprung from the Castel Sant’Angelo, was led in triumph to the Lateran – but even as he celebrated his release with a sumptuous Mass of thanksgiving, his Norman liberators were already fleecing his flock down to the very bones. Finally, after three terrible days, the despairing Romans attempted a fightback – only to end up being slaughtered as well as robbed. Gregory, gazing out from the Lateran, had to endure the sight of his entire beloved city up in flames. Never before had the capital of Christendom endured so brutal, so destructive, and so complete a sack. The most terrible atrocities
of all, it was reported, were committed by Count Roger’s Saracens.