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Athelstan had emerged from a lifetime of relentless campaigning as the first king of a realm that, by the time of his death, stretched from Northumbria to the Channel.
From Scandinavia to central Europe, pagan warlords began to contemplate the same possibility: that the surest path to profiting from the Christian world might not be to tear it to pieces, but rather to be woven into its fabric. Sure enough, two decades after the great slaughter of his people beside the Lech, Géza, the king of the Hungarians, became a Christian.
Ambitious chieftains, once they had been welcomed into the order of Christian royalty, were rarely tempted to renew the worship of their ancestral gods. No pagan ritual could rival the anointing of a baptised king.
Various clerics in Orléans, one of them high in royal favour, were said to have claimed ‘there was no such thing as the Church’;1 the inhabitants of a castle near Milan, swearing themselves to chastity, had laid claim to a purity that put married priests to shame; a peasant, only a hundred miles from Cambrai, had dreamed that a swarm of bees entered his anus, and revealed to him the iniquities of the clergy.
agitation. In Milan, where the clergy had long lived openly with their wives, riots had been convulsing the city for two decades. Married priests had found themselves boycotted, abused, assaulted. Their touch was publicly scorned as ‘dog shit’.3 Paramilitaries had barricaded the archbishop inside his own cathedral, and then, when he died, tried to foist their own candidate on the city.
When Ramihrd refused to acknowledge Gerard as a priest, he had done so in direct obedience to a decree of the Roman Church. Issued only the year before, it had formally prohibited ‘the King’s right to confer bishoprics’.8 A momentous step: for this – prohibiting kings from poking their noses into the business of the Church – had struck at the very heart of how the world was ordered.
Perhaps the most enduring contribution made by Matilda to the cause of reformatio, though, would prove to be her sponsorship of Irnerius, a Bolognese jurist. His commentaries on a vast corpus of Roman legal rulings, discovered only a few years previously mouldering in an ancient library, had made accessible to the Christian West what the Islamic world had long taken for granted: an entire system of law with ambitions to cover every aspect of human existence.
In 1215, a statute was promulgated in the name of the pope, legally affirming the independence of Paris’ university from the bishop. A year earlier, a similar measure had established the legal status of the colleges that, over the preceding decades, had begun to appear in the English town of Oxford.
In the Holy Land, Jerusalem had been lost to the Saracens. A campaign led by the kings of France and England to recapture it had failed. A second expedition, launched in 1202 in obedience to Innocent’s own summons, had been diverted to Constantinople. In 1204 it had stormed and sacked the city. A stronghold that for long centuries had withstood the envy of pagan warlords had fallen at last – to a Christian army.
Its captors justified their storming of the city by charging that its inhabitants were rebels against the papacy: for the churches of Rome and Constantinople, ever since the age of Gregory VII, had been divided by an ever-widening schism.
Back in 1095, when Urban II had summoned the warriors of Christendom to set out for the Holy Land, he had instructed them, as a symbol of their vow, to wear the sign of the cross.
In Spain, below the Sierra Morena, the great mountain range that stretches across the south of the Iberian peninsula, God’s favour had granted Christian arms a decisive victory. The Saracens’ defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa in the summer of 1212 had left them fatally exposed. Two decades on, their greatest cities – Cordoba, Seville – stood on the brink of capture by the king of Castile.
The abbey’s church, the largest in the world, had been paid for with the loot of al-Andalus. In 1142, its great abbot, Peter the Venerable, had crossed the Pyrenees, the better to understand what the Saracens actually believed. Meeting with scholars fluent in Arabic, he had employed them on a momentous project: the first translation of the Qur’an into Latin.
Far from building bridges, Peter’s translation of the Qur’an had only confirmed Christians in their darkest suspicions of its contents. Islam was the sump of all heresies, and Muhammad ‘the foulest of men’.
If numerous aspects of his teaching – the fixity of species, or the unchanging motion of sun, and moon, and stars as they revolved around the earth – could readily be integrated into the fabric of Christian teaching, then others were more problematic. The very notion of a rationally ordered cosmos, so appealing to natural philosophers, continued to unsettle many in the Church. Aristotle’s insistence that there had been no creation, that the universe had always existed and always would, was a particularly glaring contradiction of Christian scripture.
Anxieties in Paris were heightened by the discovery in 1210 of various heretics whose reading of Aristotle had led them to believe that there was no life after death. The reaction of the city’s bishop was swift. Ten of the heretics were burned at the stake. Various commentaries on Aristotle were burned as well.
The labour of reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine did not come easily. Many contributed to it; but none more so than a Dominican called Thomas, a native of Aquino, a small town just south of Rome. The book he worked on between 1265 and his death in 1274, a great compendium of ‘things pertaining to Christianity’,37 was the most comprehensive attempt ever undertaken to synthesise faith with philosophy.
Yet against the most determined of all Christ’s foes, there could be no campaign of slaughter. The Jews, Humbert de Romans reminded the council of Lyon, were not to be eliminated. At the end of days, so it had been foretold, they would be brought to baptism; but their fate it was, until then, to serve the Christian people as living witnesses to the workings of divine justice.
Two years later – again in England – another mortal blow to the good name of the Jews was struck. The discovery in Lincoln of the body of a small boy named Hugh at the bottom of a well saw ninety Jews arrested for the murder on the orders of the king himself. Eighteen were hanged. The dead boy, entombed in Lincoln cathedral, was hailed by locals as a martyr. That the papacy pointedly refused to confirm this canonisation did little to check the growth of the cult of Little Saint Hugh.
Christian artists, for the first time, began to represent Jewish men as physically distinctive: thick-lipped, hook-nosed, stooped. In 1267, sexual relations between Jews and Christians were banned by formal decree of a church council; in 1275, a Franciscan in Germany drew up a law code that made it a capital offence. In 1290, the king of England, pushing the logic of this baneful trend to its ultimate conclusion, ordered all the Jews in his kingdom to leave for good. In 1306, the king of France followed suit.
Talk of female priests, let alone a female pope, was laughable. God, expelling Eve from Eden, had sentenced her not just to suffer the pains of childbirth, but to be ruled over by her husband. It was a judgement that numerous Church Fathers had upheld:
‘The female,’ Aristotle had written, ‘is, as it were, an inadequate male.’6
Thomas Aquinas – great admirer of Aristotle though he was – had struggled to square the assumption that a woman was merely a defective version of a man with the insistence in Genesis that both had been divinely crafted for precise and specific purposes.
They knew that their Lord, risen from the dead, had first revealed himself, not to his disciples, but to a woman. In John’s gospel, it was told how Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus cured by him of possession by demons, had initially mistaken the risen Christ for the gardener – but then had recognised him. ‘I have seen the Lord!’
When workmen digging the foundations of a new house uncovered the statue, experts from across Siena flocked to admire the find. It did not take them long to identify the nude woman as Venus, the goddess of love. Buried and forgotten for centuries, she constituted a rare trophy for the city: an authentic masterpiece of ancient sculpture.
In June 1376, she arrived in Avignon, where she set to urging the pope, Gregory XI, that he should signal his commitment to God’s purpose by returning to Rome. Three months later, he was on his way. The venture, to Catherine’s bitter disappointment, proved a disaster. Barely a year after arriving in Rome, Gregory XI was dead. Two rival popes, one an Italian and one an aristocrat from Geneva, were elected in his place.
Sure enough, in 1367, when she was twenty years old, and Siena was celebrating the end of carnival, her reward had arrived. In the small room in her parents’ house where she would fast, and meditate, and pray, Christ had come to her. The Virgin and various saints, Paul and Dominic included, had served as witnesses. King David had played his harp. The wedding ring was Christ’s own foreskin, removed when he had been circumcised as a child, and still wet with his holy blood.* Invisible though it was to others, Catherine had worn it from that moment on.
The insistence of scripture that a man and a woman, whenever they took to the marital bed, were joined as Christ and his Church were joined, becoming one flesh, gave to both a rare dignity. If the wife was instructed to submit to her husband, then so equally was the husband instructed to be faithful to his wife. Here, by the standards of the age into which Christianity had been born, was an obligation that demanded an almost heroic degree of self-denial.
Catherine, refusing her parents’ demands that she marry their choice of husband, insisting that she was pledged to another man, had been entirely within her rights as a Christian. No couple could be forced into a betrothal, nor into wedlock, nor into a physical coupling. Priests were authorised to join couples without the knowledge of their parents – or even their permission. It was consent, not coercion, that constituted the only proper foundation of a marriage. The Church,
The Church, in its determination to place married couples, and not ambitious patriarchs, at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins. Only relationships sanctioned by canons were classed as legitimate. No families were permitted to be joined in marriage except for those licensed by the Church: ‘in-laws’.
In Paris, for instance, as the great cathedral of Notre Dame was being built, the offer from a collective of prostitutes to pay for one of its windows, and dedicate it to the Virgin, had been rejected by a committee of the university’s leading theologians. Two decades later, in 1213, one of the same scholars, following his appointment as papal legate, had ordered that all woman convicted of prostitution be expelled from the city – just as though they were lepers.
The French nickname for Dominicans – jacobins – had soon become a nickname for prostitutes too.
Just as the concept of paganism would never have come into existence without the furious condemnation of it by the Church, so the notion that men and women who slept with people of their own sex were sharing in the same sin, one that obscenely parodied the natural order of things, was a purely Christian one.
By 1400, amid recurrent bouts of plague, dread that the failure to cleanse a city of sodomy might risk the annihilation of its entire population was general across the peninsula. In Venice, a succession of spectacular sex scandals saw the establishment in 1418 of the Collegium Sodomitarum: a magistracy specifically charged with the eradication of ‘a crime which threatens the city with ruin’.
Now, preaching in Florence, Bernardino had come to a city so notorious for its depravities that the German word for sodomite was, quite simply, Florenzer.
In 1409, a council of bishops and university masters, meeting in Pisa, had declared both rival popes deposed, and crowned a new candidate of its own – but this, far from delivering Christendom a single pope, had merely left it stuck with three.
Of Sigismund as well – for it was presumed that it was by his treachery that Hus had been delivered up to the flames. Then, in 1419, an attempted crackdown by conservatives had precipitated open revolt. Hussites had stormed the city hall; flung their opponents out of its windows; seized control of churches across Prague.
Isabella, the queen of Castile, did not rule alone. By her side, her equal in everything, was her husband, the king of the neighbouring realm: Ferdinand of Aragon. Before the combined might of these two monarchs, the truncated rump of al-Andalus stood perilously exposed.
1492, the year of Granada’s fall and of Columbus’ first voyage, had witnessed another fateful step in the preparation of Spain for its mission to bring the gospel to the world. The Jews, whose conversion was destined to presage Christ’s return, had been given the choice of becoming Christian or going into exile.
Franciscans were revolted by the demands of sacrifice imposed by the Mexica’s gods. None doubted they were demons. There was Huitzilopochtli, the great patron of the Mexica, whose temple in Tenochtitlan, it was said, had been consecrated with the blood of eighty thousand victims; Xipe Totec, ‘the Flayed One’, whose devotees wore the skins of those offered to their patron, and stabbed their penises with cactus thorns; Tlaloc, the god of the rains, whose favours could be won only by the sacrifice of small children who had first been made to weep.
The wealth of the Indians, fallen into Christian hands, was not spent on bringing the world into the fold of Christ. Instead, shipped back to Spain, it was used to fund wars against the king of France.
When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’
The most dramatic example occurred in 1514, when a colonist in the West Indies had his life upended by a sudden, heart-stopping insight: that his enslavement of Indians was a mortal sin. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, like Augustine in the garden, Bartolomé de las Casas found himself born again. Freeing his slaves, he devoted himself from that moment on to defending the Indians from tyranny.
account of all his dealings with Cajetan. Luther understood, infinitely better than his adversary, how important it was to seize control of the narrative. His very life now seemed likely to depend on it. ‘I was afraid because I was alone.’
Yet fear was not Luther’s only emotion. He felt exhilaration as well, and a sense of exultation. Now that he was no longer a monk, and his bonds to the dimension of Catholic religio had been cut once and for all, he was free to forge something different: a new and personal understanding of religio.
Charles V wrote a reply. Obedient to the example of his forebears, he vowed, he would always be a defender of the Catholic faith, ‘the sacred rituals, decrees, ordinances and holy customs’.11 He therefore had no hesitation in confirming Luther’s excommunication. Nevertheless, he was a man of his word. The promise of safe passage held. Luther was free to depart. He had three weeks to get back to Wittenberg. After that, he would be liable for ‘liquidation’.
The most startling, the most outrageous move of all was made by a king who, far from ranking as an admirer of Luther, had not merely written a best-selling pamphlet against him, but been commended for it by the pope. Henry VIII – who, as king of England, lived in fuming resentment of the much greater prestige enjoyed by the emperor and the king of France – had been mightily pleased to have negotiated the title of Defender of the Faith for himself from Rome.
As wilful as he was autocratic, he demanded an annulment. The pope refused. Not only was Henry’s case one to make any respectable canon lawyer snort, but his wife, Catherine of Aragon, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella – which meant in turn that she was the aunt of Charles V.
In 1534, papal authority was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared ‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’. Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital treason.
Flailingly, five Lutheran princes had sought to put this process on an official footing. In 1529, summoned to an imperial diet, they had dared to object to measures passed there by the Catholic majority by issuing a formal ‘Protestation’. By 1546, when Luther died, commending his spirit into the hands of the God of Truth, other princes too had come to be seen as ‘Protestant’ – and not only in the empire.
