CHAPTER FOUR

NORMANS

I

CANOSSA Castle, which sits on a rocky crag in the beautiful, rolling hills of Emilia Romagna in northern Italy, is a popular spot with visitors. Though most are local, some come from as far away as Germany, where, as we will see, the castle holds a special interest. In truth there is not that much to see. The summit of the crag was never large and has been further reduced by landslides. Part of a tower and the curved wall of a chapel survive but visitors spend most of their time in the modern museum building. Here they look at objects found at the site, dummies of historical figures and a large plaster model of the castle, which is dramatically shown off by the custodian. At the press of a button church music rings out and a section of the castle slides away in a mechanical landslip.

The castle has been destroyed and remade at least once, and little if anything remains from its moment of greatest fame, in the eleventh century. Then it was one of the strongest fortresses in this region of Italy and overlooked the main route to north-western Europe. It was the property of a formidable local ruler, Matilda of Tuscany, who was renowned for personally leading her troops into battle.

During the icy winter of 1077 Matilda had a house guest at Canossa: Pope Gregory VII, of whom she was such a strong supporter that their enemies maliciously claimed that they were lovers. And on 25 January 1077 Pope Gregory received a visitor, who had been so anxious to waylay Gregory that he had spent the previous weeks hurrying across frozen Europe. A chronicler of the time, Lambert of Hersfeld, describes how he and his little band of followers struggled over the ice-covered Alps:

The men in the party did their very best to overcome this dangerous situation, now scrambling on their hands and feet, now leaning on the shoulders of their guides, sometimes slipping on the treacherous surface, falling over and rolling some way … The guides sat the queen and the ladies of her household on oxhides, led the way themselves and dragged them down behind them. They placed some of the horses on sleds, and led others with their feet hobbled, but many of these died as they were being dragged, and most of the others were in a very bad state … ¹

The party was led by King Henry IV of Germany, Burgundy and of Italy, and he had good reason to be in a hurry. Pope Gregory had excommunicated him, had orchestrated a revolt against him by his barons and churchmen, and was now on his way to Germany to preside over a council to depose him. Henry was fighting to save his throne. Gregory enjoyed the strong position he was in. Lambert of Hersfeld describes how he sat comfortably in the warm in Canossa Castle when Henry arrived,

and since the castle was surrounded by a triple wall, he [Henry] was allowed within the second of these walls, leaving all his attendants outside, and there, stripped of his royal robes, with nothing kingly about him, entirely without ceremonial, and with his feet bare, he stood, fasting, from morning until evening while he waited for the pope’s sentence. He did this for a second, and then a third day. Finally, on the fourth day he was admitted to the pope’s presence …²

A contemporary illumination that depicts Henry IV asking Matilda of Tuscany and the Abbot of Cluny to intercede for him with the pope at the St Nicholas’ Chapel at Canossa.

Lambert of Hersfeld, who was a staunch opponent of Henry and wanted to show him humiliated, probably exaggerates. Henry would have been unlikely to survive three days and nights outside, barefoot in the cold. Local people think it more likely that he spent the time negotiating from the nearby castle of Bianello and then came when Gregory had agreed to see him. Still, it was a remarkable event and one of the great shock moments of the central Middle Ages. Nobody had imagined a pope could wield power in this way, humbling Europe’s most powerful monarch. Pope Gregory’s triumph, though, would be short-lived. Four years later, in May 1081, King Henry appeared outside Rome at the head of an army, keen to enjoy a little revenge.

Yet something does not seem quite right here. The title of this chapter is Normans not Germans, Henricians or Imperialists. As we will see, this was a complex, three-cornered crisis involving three individuals whose characters could hardly have been more different. As well as puzzling, difficult Henry IV and controlling purist Gregory VII, the fate of the Romans lay also with Duke Robert Guiscard: a larger than life Norman military adventurer, as shameless as he was successful.

First the purist pope. Hildebrand, as he was known before assuming the papacy, was born in southern Tuscany and first came to Rome as a boy, probably at the invitation of his uncle, who ran a monastery on the Aventine Hill. He soon became a keen supporter of a new movement that was sweeping across Europe from France at this time and which sought to reform the Church. There was no question that the Church needed some shaking up as it had drifted far from early Christianity’s ideals of humility, poverty and chastity. As Western Europe’s greatest landowner it had become a magnet for those seeking wealth and power. Bishops were political players and simony – the sale of church positions – was common. Priests and monks enjoyed a much more comfortable lifestyle than the peasants whose tithes fed and clothed them. Nor did they deny themselves bedroom pleasures. By the ninth century married priests with large families were commonplace, and though in the early eleventh century, under the pressure of the Church reform movement, their marriages were less openly acknowledged than before, the change was largely cosmetic.

Nowhere was such unclergylike behaviour more evident than in Rome. Hildebrand arrived in the city at a low moment for the Roman Church, under Pope Benedict IX, whom chroniclers accused of every kind of monstrosity, from rape and murder to black magic. Medieval writers were often less interested in truth than in putting their patrons in the best light and assassinating the reputations of their enemies, so one frequently has to take their claims with a pinch of salt, but in Benedict IX’s case there are signs that something really was badly amiss.

A member of a powerful family from the hilltop town of Tusculum, who had dominated the papacy for a generation – his two first cousins were popes before him – Benedict became leader of the Catholic Church at the tender age of twelve or fourteen. In 1044, when he had reigned for a dozen years, the Roman populace ended centuries of political docility and rose against him in armed revolt. Their rebellion was a transforming event that brought a new generation of aristocratic families to the fore. It also brought an almighty mess, even by Rome’s messy standards. The rebels backed a new pope, Sylvester III, but Benedict maintained his claim. After a year he finally resigned the papacy and gave it – or rather sold it – to another candidate, Gregory VI, only to change his mind and claim it back. Rome ended up with three popes.

The chaos was sorted out by King Henry IV’s father, Henry III, who – like his son thirty-six years later – wanted to secure his position by being crowned Holy Roman Emperor. Imperial coronation was a tradition that already stretched back two and a half centuries to Charlemagne, but it required a plausible pope. Finding no such thing, Henry III created his own. In 1046 he journeyed to Sutri, just north of Rome, summoned a church council, had all three papal claimants dismissed and installed his candidate, who was German and strongly supportive of the reform movement.

It was a sea change moment. For the next half-century the papacy was in the hands of men determined to return the Church to the values of its earliest days, and who did so with a zeal that has been compared to that of Bolshevik revolutionaries. Rome’s leading families lost their ownership of the papacy. Whereas for generations almost all popes had been Romans, for the next eighty years popes and most high churchmen were outsiders, either from elsewhere in Italy or from Germany. Hildebrand quickly became a key figure in the reformist new guard and in April 1073 he himself became pope. He took office determined not only to clean up the Church but to begin a moral reformation of all Europe, attempting to ban marriages of which he disapproved. Much of his controlling purism became focused on one unfortunate individual.

This was the second of the trio, Henry IV, king of Germany, Burgundy and of Italy. He was only 22 years old when Hildebrand became pope in 1073, yet he had already had a trying life. When he was just five years old his father died suddenly and unexpectedly, propelling young Henry on to the throne under the regency of his mother Agnes, who was another keen supporter of the Church reform movement. At the age of eleven he was kidnapped by one of Germany’s powerful magnates, Archbishop Anno of Cologne – Anno invited Henry to see his river barge and then cast off – who supplanted Agnes and ruled the kingdom. When Henry finally assumed kingship for himself, at the age of fifteen, one of his first actions was to announce that he intended to divorce his wife by an arranged marriage, Bertha. Henry made no complaint against Bertha so it seems he simply did not like her. It was an unfortunate decision: Bertha was from a highly influential family and many German princes opposed Henry’s move. So did the Church reformers in Rome who, worked up by the new moral climate, declared that such an action by a leading monarch would be a stain on all Christians. Henry was forced to back down and keep his wife. Worse, the incident left him badly damaged. During the crisis his enemies had accused him of every kind of sexual depravity, from taking concubines and fathering illegitimate children, to incest and child abuse.

As ever, it is impossible to know if these accusations were actually true. Nor, for the purposes of this account, does it much matter. What matters is that the claims were brought to the ears of Hildebrand and that he believed them. Hildebrand, who was some thirty-five years older than Henry, assumed the role of a disapproving father, a role that was more convincing because Henry’s mother, Agnes, had moved to Rome where she was a close supporter of Hildebrand and the Church reformers. Agnes was as disappointed in her son as Hildebrand. Aside from his personal life there was also his attitude to Church reform. Henry was a supporter but, compared to his father, his zealotry was lukewarm.

Relations between the papacy and the German court, which were already strained, grew worse after Hildebrand became pope in 1073. The two clashed over power: Gregory objected to Henry’s appointment of bishops in his kingdom and also his choice of advisors, whom Agnes and Gregory disapproved of. In late 1075, following several spats between the two men, Gregory demanded that Henry acknowledge his subservience to ‘the empire of Christ’ – in other words, to himself – and warned that if he did not do so, he would never crown him Holy Roman Emperor. Henry, furious, countered by demanding that Gregory resign as pope, claiming he had been elected illegally. The fates took Gregory’s side. In early 1076 Henry summoned a synod of German churchmen in Utrecht who declared that Gregory was a false monk and excommunicated him. Just a month later on Easter Day Utrecht Cathedral was struck by lightning and burned to the ground and many Germans believed the disaster was God’s way of giving his opinion on the dispute. Gregory, sensing victory, excommunicated Henry and began conspiring against him with German princes, one of whom, the reformist Rudolph of Swabia, was waiting in the wings as a replacement king. Gregory declared that he and Agnes would go to Germany, where, like a pair of punishing parents, they would together preside over an assembly of German princes to decide Henry’s fate. As we have seen, Henry prevented him from doing so only by waylaying him at Canossa. There, to be released from excommunication, Henry had to swear an oath to Pope Gregory, accepting him as the arbiter in German politics, which meant he could decide Henry’s future as monarch.

Yet if Canossa was a painful humiliation for Henry, it served him well. Having survived the crisis he returned to Germany, largely ignored the oath he had sworn and transformed his situation. He showed new skill at winning key figures to his side. Though Rudolph of Swabia tried to seize the German throne and Gregory excommunicated Henry again, this time most German princes and churchmen stayed loyal to their king. In October 1080, at the battle of Hohenmölsen, Rudolph of Swabia ceased to be a problem when he lost a hand and then his life. Henry, finding that he finally had some political room in which to manoeuvre, determined to negate the humiliation of Canossa and secure his political position once and for all. He would march on Rome and be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. He would not even have to endure his mother’s disapproving looks as, conveniently, Agnes had died three years earlier.

In the winter of 1081 he gathered together a rather small army of Germans and Bohemians and crossed the Brenner Pass. Reaching Italy, where his forces were reinforced by some Italians, he then took a detour to Ravenna to collect the city’s pro-reform bishop, Wibert. Wibert was Henry’s fallback plan. If Gregory could not be persuaded or forced to crown him Holy Roman Emperor, then Henry would depose him and replace him with Wibert, his antipope.

Now it was Gregory who was in trouble. He scoffed at Henry’s little army, predicting that it would never reach Rome, as nobody would provide it with victuals, but under the management of his antipope, Wibert – who proved an excellent military organizer – the force proceeded smoothly southwards. Gregory looked to his allies in Italy, of whom he had two. The first was Matilda of Tuscany. Firmly loyal to Gregory, she would have helped if she could have but the previous October her forces had been routed by an army of Henrician loyalists from Lombardy. She was powerless.

That left Gregory’s other ally. So we come to the third of the trio, Robert Guiscard. He was Norman: a people who were eleventh-century Europe’s great success story. If Alaric’s Visigoths and Witigis’ Ostrogoths had had a long journey to Italy, so had Robert Guiscard’s Normans. It had begun in Scandinavia two centuries earlier, when shiploads of Danish Vikings set out to raid, among other places, northern France. Frankish rulers found their attacks so hard to deal with that they reluctantly granted them a piece of territory, which became known as the land of the Northmen, or Normandy. Here the invaders merged with the local population, took up the French language and French ways, fought violent feuds, were persecuted by their rulers, the dukes of Normandy, and sired huge families, creating numerous young Normans hungry to find opportunities somewhere else.

Many found them in southern Italy. Unlike the Normans who settled in England after 1066, the Normans of the south did not arrive as part of a grand, planned invasion but as small bands of adventurers. They probably first discovered the area when passing through it as pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. By the 1020s Normans were working as mercenaries for all the various local powers in this fractured, politically complex part of Italy: for Lombard princes, for the Byzantine Empire and for the pope of the time, Benedict VIII. Feuding and political persecution in Normandy turned a trickle of immigrants into a flood. In 1030 a group of Normans was granted a small piece of territory at Averna, near Naples – the first of several – which they then extended, seizing land and building castles in villages.

The Normans were widely loathed for their brutality and greed yet there was no getting rid of them. The German reformist pope, Leo IX, tried his best, assembling a grand anti-Norman coalition that included Lombard princes and the Byzantine Empire, only to suffer a disastrous defeat at 1053 at the battle of Civitate, where Leo himself was captured. Accepting that the Normans were now a major force in Italy, the papacy made its peace with them and soon found them useful. Norman soldiers were brought in to cow the old guard of anti-reform Roman families and to prevent them from installing their own papal candidates. So began an unlikely alliance, between idealistic, purist Church leaders and self-serving Norman adventurers.

Of all of these adventurers, none rose faster than Robert Guiscard. His father, Tancred, who was lord of the obscure Norman village of Hauteville, had twelve sons by two wives, of whom Robert was sixth: an unpromising start in life. In the mid-1040s, with no opportunities at home, Robert journeyed to Italy. After struggling for a time as a minor bandit leader in Calabria his breakthrough came when he married a Norman heiress, Alberada, who brought him a dowry of 200 knights. With these at his side Robert’s abilities soon showed themselves. He was physically intimidating, he had a talent for inspiring his followers and he was also very shrewd. The Normans had a reputation for cunning among contemporary chroniclers – William of Malmesbury memorably remarked that they ‘weigh treachery by its chance of success’³ – while Robert de Hauteville, to give him his full name, was regarded as tricky even by his fellow Normans. His nickname, Guiscard, meant cunning or weasel.

By the time Henry IV set out on his march to Rome, Robert Guiscard had been in Italy for thirty-five years and had made himself one of the most powerful and feared rulers in the Mediterranean. The sixth son of a minor Normandy squire, he now ruled most of southern Italy and his little brother Roger controlled most of Sicily in his name. His social rise had been equally spectacular. He was now a duke and, having discarded the wife who had got him started, he was married to a Lombard princess, Sichelgaita of Salerno.

And of course he was allied to the pope. As one might have guessed, relations between the grasping amoral adventurer and a controlling purist churchman had not been smooth. An initial meeting soon after Gregory became pope in 1073 went badly wrong when Robert, like a suspicious Mafia don, rejected the meeting place Gregory had proposed, which lay outside Robert’s territory. Robert’s mistrust was matched by Gregory’s pride and, as the chronicler Amatus of Montecassino reported, ‘discord grew up between them, an ill-will and great anger’⁴. Later, when Robert permitted his nephew to raid Church lands, Gregory excommunicated him and the following year he excommunicated him again. Yet Robert does not seem to have been overly troubled. In contrast to Henry IV, Gregory’s plotting did little to weaken his political position. The one who found he was vulnerable was Gregory. In June 1080, as his relations with Henry IV deteriorated, he realized he could not have an enemy to the south as well, and so he swallowed his pride and met Robert to make peace. Robert swore fealty to Gregory and gave him some gold, and in return Gregory released him from excommunication and accepted his claim to the latest territories he had seized.

Gregory had given more than he got. He had not even gained a useful ally, as it soon became apparent Robert had little interest in Gregory’s problems. In the spring of 1081, as King Henry marched south across Italy, Robert Guiscard was already on the other side of the Adriatic, campaigning against the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius Comemnus, in his most ambitious project to date: the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Pope Gregory had no friends to help him. As Henry’s army set up camp in the Fields of Nero, just north-west of the city walls, they did so safe in the knowledge that nobody was likely to trouble them.

II

What kind of Rome awaited Henry IV and his army? Of the seven incarnations of the city that will be examined in this book, that of 1081 was certainly the strangest. It was a kind of Gulliver’s Travels town, where tiny houses existed among vast ruins. Many Romans lived actually inside the ruins, which they called cryptae, making their homes in the broken remains of thousand-year-old apartment blocks, in long dry baths, and in the storerooms and corridors of abandoned theatres and stadiums. The Colosseum was now the city’s largest housing complex.

If a Roman had been transported from the 530s, just before the Gothic War, they would have been struck by how sleepily suburban – even rural – their city had become. In 1081 the most urban area was a rectangular zone centred on the Pantheon, yet even this was not crowded. Homes were one storey high, two at the most, and many had a little courtyard between them and the street, and a garden at the back. Outside this central rectangle, habitation was even more diffuse and consisted of hamlets and villages separated by farmland. Much of the outer edge of the city, including most of Trastevere, was comprised of orchards and vineyards.

Rome was now a small city and its population in 1081 has been estimated as somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000. Considerably smaller than it had been prior to the Gothic War, it was a thirtieth or fiftieth of its size at the height of the Empire. It was probably not much larger than it had been in 387 BC, when Brennus and his Gauls paid their visit, and when it was a fairly new town. Yet it was far from alone in its reduction. Shrunk though it was, in 1081 it was still the largest city in Western Europe and had been for several centuries.

In some ways it was not one city but three. To the left and right of the central rectangle were two satellite towns, each of which was a centre of the Church, and which were intense rivals. To the west was the pilgrims’ town, known as the Leonine City, that had grown up around St Peter’s. All pilgrims were required to stay here, including the most powerful pilgrims of the age: the kings of Germany who journeyed south, like Henry IV, to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. The German kings had their own palace that faced on to the Platea Sancti Petri – St Peter’s Square – which, when a royal visit turned violent, as such visits frequently did, became the site of pitched battles between royal followers and Romans. The Leonine City, which was a wholly separate entity from Rome, was busier and more concentrated than any other area, and contained all of the city’s shops. Lacking great ruins, its low, crowded streets would have seemed reassuringly familiar to medieval visitors.

At the eastern end was the Lateran, the papacy’s political headquarters. Separated from the rest of the city by fields, it formed a kind of high-powered clerical village. Around the Lateran Palace, home to the popes, antiquities were displayed to give a sense of their authority. These included a bronze she-wolf and also, in the open area in front of the palace, the Campus Lateranus, an equestrian statue thought to be of that key figure in the rise of Christianity, Emperor Constantine. Except that it was not Constantine at all, but a thoroughly pagan emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Medieval Romans could be hazy about their past. Also on display were the head and hand of a vast statue, which really was Constantine’s, but was widely believed to be of the biblical character Samson.

The Lateran was the departure point for an activity that, more than any other, lay at the heart of medieval Rome: religious processions. If emperors had met their Roman subjects in the circus, popes met them walking, and they met them far more often than other European monarchs. Thirty times a times a year popes embarked on great processions around their city. Sometimes on horseback, sometimes barefoot, and accompanied by crowds of high clergymen, nobles dressed in purple silks, ordinary Romans, and musicians playing cymbals, harps and trumpets, popes would journey for miles, performing masses along the way. Some of these grand processions were older than Christianity. One of the greatest, the Major Litany of 25 April, followed the route of an ancient pagan walk to honour the deity Robigus. Like many papal processions the Major Litany was quite a trek. Unusually, it began not at the Lateran but beside Augustus’ vast, broken sundial in the Campo Marzio, then it headed north for several miles to cross Ponte Milvio, before turning back along the west side of the Tiber – where today crowds of Roma and Lazio football fans gather to watch their teams in the Stadio Olimpico – and finally on to St Peter’s. There were also night processions, when torches lit the way, lamps were suspended from roofs and chandeliers hung in the streets. One of the greatest of these celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on the night of 15 August. During that season and at that hour the real feasting would have been by malarial mosquitoes.

These processions were not only an opportunity for the pope to meet his subjects. They were also a chance to pay them. The pope gave large sums to the churches where he said mass and, as emperors had had coins flung into the audience in the stadium, popes handed out money to select householders along the processional route, and gave to clergy and lay officials. They also gave to the poor. The greatest payouts were at Easter and Christmas, when the city’s churchmen and lay officials received income, expenses and bonuses all rolled into one. A new pope, like a new emperor, was also expected to give generously when he took power.

He often needed to pay to get power. As in earlier times, papal elections were frequently contested. In 1058 the old guard of Rome’s elite families, who had dominated the city before the revolt against murderous Benedict IX, attempted a comeback, thwarting the reformists and installing their papal candidate as Benedict X. It was a testing moment. Many will have resented the new non-Roman Church hierarchy and lower ranking churchmen were probably angry at the loss of their domestic and bedroom pleasures. Hildebrand, the future Pope Gregory VII, organized an energetic fightback. He persuaded the Norman prince Richard of Capua to lend him 300 knights and with the help of one of the city’s leading moneymen, Leone di Benedetto Cristiano, he distributed extensive bribes to the Romans. Hildebrand’s stick and carrot campaign bore fruit. Benedict X was expelled from the city and replaced by the reform movement’s man, Nicholas II.

It was the last gasp of Rome’s old guard families but not the end of papal schism and, just four years later, on Nicholas II’s death, another crisis arose. This time trouble sprang not from Rome’s former aristocrats but from the royal court in Germany, which was then under the thumb of the young Henry IV’s riverboat kidnapper, Archbishop Anno of Cologne, and which decided to put forward its own papal nominee, Bishop Cadalo of Parma. Hildebrand distributed money all through the night to set Romans against the German candidate, and again his efforts succeeded. When Cadalo was the first to run out of money his Roman supporters abandoned him and the reformists’ man was crowned pope as Alexander II. Hildebrand’s behaviour may seem surprising for a man determined to end the sale of Church offices yet he would have seen bribery as a justifiable means to an end. If reformists lost control of the papacy they would lose all hope of remaking the Church.

Besides, Gregory had little else to offer except cash. Europe’s other monarchs won supporters by giving out grants of land or feudal titles, but though the Church of Rome owned plenty of land – both within the city and for 25 kilometres all around it – popes had no wish to give an inch of it away. They needed it. Like emperors in the past, medieval popes assumed responsibility for feeding Rome. Where emperors had arranged transport of food to Rome from all across the Mediterranean, diminished medieval Rome could be fed largely from the farmland immediately round about, just as it had been when Brennus and his Gauls attacked, a millennium and a half earlier.

Bribery was also an easy option for popes, who were cash rich. Money flowed to them from tolls charged at the city’s gates, at the river ports, and at the market. It came from taxes, known as Peter’s Pence, paid by Europeans to the papacy. It came from gifts given by monasteries or devout individuals. It came from the fees and bribes paid to international Church courts that Gregory had recently set up. It came from friendly rulers such as Robert Guiscard who, as we saw, handed over gold to seal his peace deal with Gregory VII. It came from German rulers who journeyed south, like Henry IV, to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. But most of all it came from Rome’s greatest money-spinner: pilgrims.

Under Gregory VII the city’s pilgrim trade was booming. That Rome was enjoying a clean hands moment under the reformist popes doubtless added to the city’s appeal. Pilgrims by the thousand came in the hope that Rome’s famous saints would cure them of blindness, deafness or childlessness. Most of all they hoped the saints would intercede with God to forgive them their sins and award them a place in paradise. Saint Peter’s key to heaven appealed as strongly as ever. Pilgrims to Rome, who were known as Romipetae, needed only to gain permission from their local church and to buy their scrip (a leather purse) and their staff, and they could set out on the long and sometimes dangerous journey to Rome. Devout pilgrims, who believed that suffering would help annul their sins, walked barefoot, but most travelled more comfortably on horseback. Along the way they could add to their heavenly credit by calling in at other holy shrines, such as that of the Tunic of the Virgin at Chartres, or of the Finger of John the Baptist at Maurienne.

When they finally reached Rome pilgrims did not only visit the city’s great churches. They also played tourist and saw its classical remains. Though, as we saw with Marcus Aurelius’ statue, these were not always remembered very precisely. Along with the supposed statue of Samson, highlights included Romulus’ tomb, the remains of Julius Caesar’s palace – on which, it was claimed, St Peter’s had been built – and an old heap of stones that was said to have been Saint Peter’s personal stash of grain, and which had become petrified when the emperor Nero inadvisedly tried to steal it away from him. The Colosseum was claimed to be a temple to the sun that had once been topped by a vast dome.

Popes, and especially reform popes, squeezed every penny they could from pilgrims. The Church charged taxes on the lodging houses where pilgrims stayed. It taxed the shops which now crammed the great portico that led them to St Peter’s – which we last saw being used as cover by the Ostrogoths as they attacked Belisarius’ troops on Hadrian’s tomb – and where pilgrims could find every kind of service from boot repair to tooth-pulling, and could buy anything from straw for their beds and horses, to souvenir rosaries, and phials of oil from the lamps that burned above Saint Peter’s tomb. Most of all, the papacy took the coins pilgrims threw on to the altar of St Peter’s: a vast source of income, of which the reform popes greatly increased their own share, by sacking middlemen collectors who had filched half the proceeds.

The popes even made money from dead pilgrims. The Church claimed ownership of all property belonging to anyone who died during their pilgrimage. After a long and gruelling journey and with the city rife with malaria in the summertime these would have been plentiful. The reform popes took care to maximize income in this area and in 1053 Leo IX produced a papal bull that prohibited Romans from hiding the sick, hiding their possessions, or from advising them to leave the city. It was just such behaviour that gave Rome a reputation for being grasping and corrupt. By one account the very word Roman was a term of abuse in Europe and Geoffrey of Malaterra, the biographer of Robert Guiscard, was not unusual in his scathing view of the Romans.

Your laws are wicked, full of falsehoods.

In you all depraved things flourish: lust, avarice,

The lack of fidelity, the absence of order, the disease of simony,

All these weigh upon your territory and everything is for sale.

Formerly the sacred order – like water pouring forth – rushed through you.

Now one pope is not enough; you enjoy having two of such distinction.

Your fidelity is purchased with sumptuous displays.

When this one gives to you, you strike the other,

When this one stops giving to you, you invite the other one back.

You threaten this one with that one, and thus you fill your purse.⁵

In many ways it was an accurate assessment. Yet in Romans’ eyes they were doing nothing wrong. They were simply trying to survive and to lead tolerable lives in the way they always had, by carefully harvesting the pickings that their city and its rulers offered them. One could hardly expect them to change their ways now, when Rome had existed parasitically for more than a thousand years. Rome was a city built from handouts and its architecture in 1081 exactly reflected when the tap of gold had flowed or run dry.

Of the two lean centuries following the Gothic War, when the tap had slowed to a drip, there was little to show, and the main vestiges of this bleak time were classical buildings that had been converted into churches, such as the Pantheon, and buildings that had collapsed through neglect. These included one of Rome’s bridges, the Pons Agrippae, which fell down in the eighth century. Another casualty was the Colosseum, half of whose outer shell collapsed around the same time, leaving a vast heap of rubble. It used to be thought that this disaster was the result of an earthquake but it now seems likely that the Colosseum fell apart unaided. It had been built on two different kinds of sediment and as the building gradually settled under its own vast weight – and with many of the metal clamps holding the stones together stolen – it simply cracked apart.

The late eighth and early ninth century had left far more. It left Rome with churches, either new or rebuilt. Most were in the city centre, and were created to house martyrs’ remains that were moved from the catacombs for greater safety. They included Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, San Marco below the Capitoline and Santa Prassede with its fine Byzantine style mosaics. Even some of the city’s aqueducts were brought back to life at this time: the Acqua Virgo and probably three others. These were good times all across Europe, which was finally enjoying green shoots of recovery after the great collapse of the Germanic invasions, while Rome particularly benefited thanks to an alliance between popes and the powerful Frankish Empire: a special relationship that reached its zenith on Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor.

The second half of the ninth century, though, had left Rome with hardly a single new building. The tap of gold had again slowed to a dribble. The reason why lay on the far side of the river in the Vatican, where a Roman transported across the centuries from the 530s would find the greatest single change to their city. The district around St Peter’s was now enclosed by a new stretch of city wall, Rome’s first since the Aurelian. It had been built in a hurry, and with good reason. On 23 August 846, a force from Arab Sicily landed at the mouth of the Tiber. Roman militiamen and foreign residents sent against them were quickly beaten back, and though the main part of Rome was safe behind its walls, St Peter’s was not. The Arabs seized the basilica’s many treasures and even took its bronze doors. Pope Leo IV began work on the new wall just two months later. This was Rome’s greatest building project for centuries and the Frankish ruler Lothair lent a hand, calling for a special tax to be raised throughout his empire. Work gangs of Romans were employed, along with Muslim prisoners from a second fleet of raiders that was sunk in a storm, and the city’s lime kilns were kept busy baking ancient pieces of marble into plaster. Finally, after four years, the new Leonine Wall was complete. Shaped like a narrow horseshoe, it was three kilometres long and had three gates. It also revealed how building standards had fallen during the previous four centuries: it was only half the height of the 22-kilometre Aurelian Walls. As will be seen, on a number of occasions it would be Rome’s weak spot.

It was not only Rome that was struggling at this time. Most of Europe was assailed by a new trio of raiders – Arabs, Vikings and Hungarian horsemen – and rulers endeavouring to save their kingdoms from collapse had little gold to spare for Rome. As Rome’s income dried up, Roman families fought over the little that remained, taking the city into mean, lawless days. For the first time it became acceptable – even commonplace – for popes to be murdered. A low point was reached in 897, when Pope Stephen VI organized a show trial for his dead predecessor, Pope Formosus. Stephen had Formosus’ remains disinterred, dressed in full papal regalia and then placed on a chair so they could be tried by a Church synod. When Formosus’ corpse failed to answer accusations that it had gained office illegally, three fingers were cut from its right, benediction hand and it was stripped naked and then thrown into the Tiber. Yet Formosus’ bones soon had their revenge. Within months Stephen VI had been deposed and strangled.

The next era, the first half of the tenth century, would leave Rome a number of souvenirs, which included several monasteries and a new palace north of the Pantheon, built from the ruins of the temple of Serapis. This fresh spate of construction was the work of a power-playing dynasty, the Teofilatti, who employed an impressive variety of means to keep control of the city. The dynasty’s founder, Teofilatto, a leading figure in Roman politics, strengthened his position by installing an ally as pope, John VIII. A fighting cleric, who personally led his troops in battle and permanently expelled Arab raiders from central Italy, John VIII assumed, when Teofilatto died, that Rome would be his, but he had not reckoned on Teofilatto’s daughter, Marozia. Marozia had him suffocated and then augmented her power by marrying, in succession, two of southern Europe’s strongest monarchs. The only one able to unseat her was her own son, Alberic, who locked her up in the fortress of Hadrian’s tomb, ruled as king of Rome for twenty years, built the new palace in the old temple of Serapis, and then installed his son as pope. The Teofilatti may not have been gentle rulers yet under their reign Rome sparkled as Western Europe’s greatest city.

Their glory days finally came to an end in 963 when the king of a newly powerful German state, Otto I, marched south to have himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor. So began a new era of interference in Roman politics by increasingly idealistic German rulers, thanks to whom, as has been seen, the papacy came into the hands of the reformers. The reformist popes were more interested in moral change than building churches and in 1081 they had left little mark on Rome’s architecture, yet many new buildings appeared during the thirty-five years of their rule. These were part of a fashion that began to spread across Europe in the eleventh century, and which offered both status and protection from one’s neighbours: fortress towers. By 1081 Rome’s thirteen leading families had constructed a number of these, including several across the river in Trastevere. They also built fortresses in the city’s ancient ruins, whose thick walls made them even more formidable than the towers. The Frangipani family, whose power centre was the old Forum area, had a fortress in the eastern part of the Colosseum. The Corsi had a fortified home built out of the old Roman records office on the Capitoline Hill. The family of moneyman Leone di Benedetto Cristiano, the Pierleoni, who were based on the Tiber Island, made a fortress of the old Theatre of Marcellus. An extension spur of the Palatine Hill, the Septizonium was fortified. The city’s greatest strongpoint, though, was Hadrian’s tomb – today’s Castel Sant’Angelo – which in 1081 was known as the Castel dei Crescentii.

What was life like for members of Rome’s thirteen leading families in their towers and fortified classical ruins? Evidence from archaeological work and studies of legal documents paints a picture of a city that a visitor from the 530s would have found dismal. Long gone were the delights of late antique Rome. Though it is not easy to know precisely what functioned when, in 1081 it appears that only one of the city’s original eleven aqueducts was still operating: the Acqua Vergine, that brought water to today’s Trevi Fountain area. The Vatican was supplied by the smaller fourth-century Acqua Damasiana. For washing and drinking most Romans relied on wells, small springs that flowed only in rainier seasons, or the Tiber. Pleasure bathing was a distant memory.

Compared to earlier eras, even wealthy Romans led a simple existence in the eleventh century. The city’s housing was the best in Europe yet compared to the housing of classical times it was very basic. One of the most desirable residential locations was in the ruins of the Baths of Alexander just west of the Pantheon, that had homes with marble staircases and little gardens with apple and fig trees, but even here houses were poky and shoddily built from reused brick and stone. Further out, in the suburban hamlets around the centre, well-off Romans lived like farmers. They tended vegetables in their gardens and made their homes in upstairs rooms that were reached by a wooden outside staircase, while their animals lived below them. It was a state of affairs that aristocrats of the Empire would have found inconceivable. As for poor Romans, they lived in tiny, flimsy wooden dwellings just two or three metres across that would have been little more comfortable than the huts where the very first Romans had lived, two thousand years earlier.

Yet there had been some improvements. A document from 1127 describes a house with a new medieval invention that probably already existed in homes in the city in 1081: a cosy fireplace. And if Romans’ homes were basic, they could be well furnished. Dowries and wills of the time list kitchenware, trousseaus of clothes, beds, bedding, elaborate hangings, and walnut letter-holders. They also mention parchment books (paper had yet to arrive from the East). Here was another area where Romans were ahead of most Europeans. In the eleventh century, when literacy outside the Church was very rare in Europe, many leading Romans could read.

And their health will have been a little better than in earlier times. Annoyances were worse than ever, and with the routine of daily bathing gone Romans would have been constantly scratching flea and lice bites, but the city’s shrunken population was too small for diseases such as measles to be endemic. Romans in 1081 probably lived longer than they had done five or ten centuries earlier. As always, they lived longest if they were rich enough to escape the city during the malaria season.

If they did get sick, eleventh-century Romans’ first response was likely to be a guilty conscience. Christian medical thinking, which was strongly accusatory, viewed plagues and madness as evidence of sin, and leprosy as proof of sexual misbehaviour. Yet, in many ways, the rise of Christianity had changed matters less than one might expect, and Romans’ health options were fundamentally no different than they had been in pagan times. Like their sick ancestors, sick medieval Romans could seek either a religious or a professional cure. Though Rome now had several hospitals these were on the prayer side of the spectrum and were staffed by churchmen. As hospitals were also centres of infection, devout Romans would have been wiser to avoid them altogether and go to a church. A leading choice was that of the two curing saints Cosma e Damiano in the Forum, which was built on top of the old healing temple of pagan deities Castor and Pollux. Medieval saints, like pagan Asclepius, proudly advertised how they had saved sufferers whose ailments had confounded every doctor.

If Romans did go to a professional they had better options than most Europeans. Much had been lost and forgotten since the Germanic invasions and European medicine had greatly declined since classical times, but it had declined less markedly in Rome and southern Italy, where doctors probably did little more harm, and almost as much good in 1081 as they had done a thousand years earlier. Many of the best Italian doctors at this time were Jews, who had greater contact with medical knowledge preserved in the Islamic world, where faith and medical practice had been kept more distinct.

There would have been a number of Jewish doctors to choose from in Rome in 1081, as the city had a sizeable Jewish population. Benjamin Tudela, a Jewish visitor to Rome three generations after 1081, wrote that the city had a community of two hundred. In a curious mirror of the Christian world, Rome was the centre of European Judaism. The high status of Roman Jews sprang from the fact that their community was so ancient – it was the oldest continuously in existence – and that the Roman Jewish liturgy was believed to have been brought directly from the Great Temple of Jerusalem, from a time when it had still been functioning. The city’s Jews were often closely connected with the popes – in Tudela’s time one was Alexander III’s steward – and they sometimes persuaded popes to intercede on behalf of Jews who were being maltreated elsewhere in the Catholic world. In the late eleventh century Rome’s Jews had a powerful friend in Leone di Benedetto Cristiano who helped Gregory VII bribe the Romans in papal elections, and who, as one can guess from his name, was descended from Jewish converts to Christianity.

Yet, aside from its Jewish community, Rome was not a place of great diversity. The streets of the Leonine City pilgrims may have echoed with numerous languages, spoken by visiting pilgrims, but across the Tiber one would have heard little else but Italian, along with some Latin, and German spoken by a few higher churchmen in the Lateran. Rome was probably more culturally monochrome in the eleventh century than it had been in the 530s, when at least there was a visible Gothic presence.

Roman food, though, was becoming more diverse. The city’s lively market, which had moved only a short way from its ancient site beside the Tiber, to the slope of the Capitoline Hill, offered fish, every kind of meat, vegetable and fruit, along with vinegar, wines, and mustard oil. One could find black peppercorns, imported from the distant East, which were as popular as they had been in classical times, and so precious that they were sometimes used as currency. One could buy cheeses, which probably included buffalo mozzarella, as buffaloes had been introduced to Italy several centuries earlier, either by the Lombards or the Byzantines. Exotic new ingredients brought to Sicily by the Arabs were also to be found, including aubergines, spinach, pomegranates, almonds, rice and saffron, sugar cane and lemons.

By 1081 Roman cuisine was already moving away from its classical, Thai style incarnation towards something that is more recognisably Italian. Eleventh-century Romans enjoyed a vegetable sauce named pulmentarium that was the ancestor of pasta sauces and pizza toppings. However, there is no evidence that fresh pasta, which had existed in classical times, was particularly popular in the eleventh century, while dried pasta was a thing of the future and tomatoes remained undiscovered in the Americas. Though one culinary innovation had already reached Rome by 1081. It was first recorded in Venice in the tenth century, where it caused quite a stir when it was observed being used by a sophisticated Byzantine princess: the fork.

Romans were also less divided in terms of wealth than they had been for a long time. The thirteen leading families were nothing like the super-rich aristocrats of the past. They were not even landowners

– how could they be when the Church owned most land? – but were instead sub-letting tenants. Lacking dynastic prestige, as none could trace ancestors back beyond a few generations, they were an elite of the nouveau riche, whose power sprang from their fortresses, their gold and their connections.

Beneath them a whole crowd was pressing upwards, hoping for advancement. In marked contrast to Rome in 410 or even Rome in 530, Rome in 1081 had a sizeable middle class. This sprang from the city’s dynamic economy as, for all its parasitism, eleventh-century Rome was a productive place. Following on from Belisarius’ innovation, the Tiber now had a small fleet of floating mills. The city was filled with artisans’ workshops and there were ironworkers and potters in Trastevere, carpenters and shield-makers over the river, and shoemakers, furriers and bronze workers in the old Forum area. Rome was also one of Europe’s most important financial centres, whose moneylenders provided gold to popes, and to visitors who needed to bribe their way to a favourable result in the city’s new international Church court, which had recently been established by Gregory VII.

Rome’s middle-class clerks and minor clergy, builders and soldiers, artisans and shopkeepers enjoyed comfortable lives. The rents they paid were low and many leased two or three homes, along with a little land outside the city. Most owned a horse and a suit of chain mail and on the first Sunday of Lent, when throngs of Romans made their way to the hill of discarded amphorae, Monte Testaccio, to play games and kill a bear, a bullock and a cockerel – representing, respectively, the devil, pride and unchastity – the city’s poor walked, but its butchers and clerks, along with members of thirteen great families, rode with the pope. Rome still had its poor, of course, about whom – as usual – we know relatively little, but the city was now largely free of slaves. In 1081, though slavery still existed in Western Europe, it was a rarity. Instead of slaves, Rome’s wealthy were looked after by servants. Though the quality of servants’ lives was probably little better than that of slaves of earlier centuries, at least they had marriage rights and could own property.

Finally, Roman society was a little less patriarchal than it had been in earlier eras. The Middle Ages is not a time that is usually associated with women’s rights but in 1081 Roman females – or at least rich Roman females – were better off than one might suppose. In part, this was because their city followed Roman law, which was more generous to them than other legal systems in force in Italy at this time. Roman females could expect to inherit property alongside their male siblings. Like females in earlier ages they were usually married in their teens to Roman males in their twenties, which meant they had a good chance of becoming rich widows. The eleventh century saw a peak in female land ownership in Italy and a good portion of Roman property was passed down to children from their mothers. Some even passed on their surnames. In most cases this was probably because the children were born illegitimately or their father had been a churchman. In the century before 1081 more than a third of Romans who found their way into official records did not take their father’s surname but their mother’s. This was an era when Italian women could wield real political power, as did the formidable Matilda of Tuscany, who personally led her troops on campaigns.

As to Roman fathers, if, as is probable, they were like Genoese fathers a few decades later whose wills have survived, they would have been worriers. They worried they would be outlived by their young wives and that their children would be sidelined and lose their inheritance to children of a second marriage, a fear which led them to leave money incentives to discourage their wives from remarrying. They worried about their children who had died – of whom there would have been distressingly many in this era – and, fearing for their chances of reaching heaven, they left money to have masses said on their behalf. Even the childless were worriers. Afraid that there would be nobody to take care of them in their old age, they adopted.

When they were not worrying about their children or their health, or eating fine food with forks, the thirteen great families of Rome spent their energies competing with one another, and by the reign of Pope Gregory VII this competition had grown increasingly violent. A split existed among them whose origins went back to the 1062 crisis, when Henry’s riverboat kidnapper Archbishop Anno of Cologne and the German court tried to impose their own papal candidate. Though, as we saw, the German court was thwarted by Hildebrand’s energetic bribery, the dispute opened up a new and lasting fissure between supporters of popes and emperors, which would grow into the Guelph–Ghibelline conflict that set Italian cities against one another for several centuries. It would also play a part in Henry IV’s attack on Rome.

Most of Rome’s leading families, including the Frangipani, the Corsi, and the family of Leone di Benedetto Cristiano, the Pierleoni, stayed loyal to the reform popes, but three took the German side of the squabble. In 1075 a spat grew up between one of the pope’s officials and a member of one of these families, Cencio di Stefano. After di Stefano built a tower on Hadrian’s Bridge to extort money from passers-by, Gregory’s city prefect arrested him and was dissuaded with difficulty from executing him. The following Christmas Gregory VII, as was traditional, celebrated mass in Santa Maria Maggiore but a heavy rainstorm kept most Romans away and the church was almost empty. Di Stefano saw his chance for revenge. He ran into the church with a group of armed followers, seized Gregory by the hair, flung him on to his horse and kidnapped him, taking him to a nearby tower belonging to his family. The drama proved short-lived. The next day, when the weather had improved, a crowd of Romans freed Gregory, who forgave di Stefano on condition that he go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Having agreed, di Stefano then reneged and fled to Henry IV’s Italian capital at Pavia. It may seem a minor enough incident yet it seems to have had important consequences. Most of all it would lead Henry IV to make a bad miscalculation.

III

On 21 May 1081, Henry IV’s army camped outside the walls of Rome. Once again, our picture of his forces is imprecise but we know that they included Germans, Bohemians and northern Italians. There were feudal levies and mercenaries, foot soldiers, archers and also Europe’s new super-weapon: knights. Knights were a product of the stirrup, an innovation that had arrived several centuries earlier from the East. Thanks to stirrups a knight could ride full tilt at an enemy and spear him with his lance without being thrown backwards off his horse. With chain mail to protect both man and horse from archers’ arrows, knights were the tanks of the medieval world and a charge by them could smash through the most determined resistance. Yet there would not have been many knights in this particular army. As has been seen, Henry’s force was small. Compared to the hordes of Alaric and Witigis, it was tiny and it was probably a good deal smaller even than Belisarius’ army of 5,000.

Henry seems to have assumed that his military strength was not of much importance. What mattered was that he was there. The ease with which Gregory VII had been kidnapped from Santa Maria Maggiore may have made him over-confident, leading him to assume that Romans loathed their pope as much as he did. Such thinking would certainly explain his woeful lack of preparedness. Though he had brought an antipope, Wibert, he had neglected to bring any siege machinery and his timing, too, was poor. To mount a serious siege of Rome before the summer malarial season began he should have left Germany in the autumn. Instead he had left in the late winter, reaching Rome only on 21 May. He expected to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, whether by Wibert or Gregory, at Pentecost, which fell just a couple of weeks later. It seems Henry had hurried to Rome assuming he would be welcomed into the city by its citizens.

He soon realized his mistake. Members of Rome’s pro-German families slipped out to join him but, whether from a sense of loyalty or in memory of his cash handouts, the great majority of Romans sided with their pope. The city gates remained firmly shut and the walls were well guarded by the city’s militiamen, bolstered by a few Normans and some Tuscans sent by Gregory’s ally Matilda. Thwarted, Henry did his best to put a good face on things, writing a friendly manifesto to the Romans in which he feigned puzzlement that they had not come out to welcome their soon-to-be Holy Roman Emperor. He appointed officials, church and lay, just as if he were already inside the city, and even held a Whitsuntide procession with his antipope. Then, in early June, he and his army packed up and left.

Gregory and the Romans must have been exultant. After barely two weeks their enemy had turned tail and gone. Yet any celebrations were premature. Henry was fully determined to be crowned and to enjoy some revenge for his humiliation at Canossa, and the following three years saw a series of sieges of Rome that were the most protracted since those of Totila five centuries earlier. With each, Henry came a little closer to getting what he wanted. During his second siege, which began in February 1082, he detached two of Gregory’s last significant friends in the region, Abbot Desiderius of the monastery of Montecassino and southern Italy’s lesser Norman ruler, Prince Jordan of Capua. Henry also began negotiating an alliance with the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comemnus, who, eager to halt Robert Guiscard’s invasion of his empire, offered Henry a large cash payment if he would attack Guiscard’s territories in Puglia. Yet Comemnus’ gold also brought Henry new worries. Comemnus bribed a number of Guiscard’s underlings in Puglia to revolt and in April 1082 Guiscard was forced to leave his Byzantine invasion in the hands of one of his sons and sail back across the Adriatic. For the moment Guiscard was fully occupied dealing with the rebels but Henry cannot have been pleased to see him back on Italian soil.

At the end of 1082 Henry camped outside Rome with his army, determined to throttle the city with a prolonged siege. As famine struck, Romans’ loyalty to Gregory VII began to waver. Gregory did not help his own cause, as it was clear to all that he was the one preventing a resolution of the crisis. Regular negotiations were held between the besieged and the besiegers, in which Henry, eager to finish his campaign and get back to his kingdom, showed some flexibility, but Gregory would not give an inch. Starving Romans were paying the price for his high principles. Then Henry’s position was further strengthened when he enjoyed a breakthrough. The city’s famished defenders had become sloppy and on 3 June 1083 a force of Milanese and Saxons led by Wigbert of Thuringia scaled the low walls of the Leonine City, broke inside and opened one of the gates. After two days of fighting around St Peter’s, Henry’s army prevailed and he marched triumphantly through the gate with his knights, his bishops, his Roman allies and his antipope, to take up residence in the Imperial Palace beside St Peter’s.

His victory was a limited one. Though the Leonine City was his, the rest of Rome across the river was still locked firmly against him. As for Gregory VII, he was tantalizingly close and Henry might have glimpsed him staring disapprovingly at him. As the Leonine City fell Gregory’s Pierleoni allies had whisked him to safety in Castel Sant’Angelo, just a few hundred yards from St Peter’s. Yet, even if Gregory was safe, his position was deteriorating. The loss of the Leonine City further undermined Romans’ sense of loyalty. Henry increased his popularity by showering the Romans with gold that he had just received from his new Byzantine ally, Emperor Comemnus, which would have been very welcome to Romans who had been starved of income from the Church and the pilgrim trade. By the next year, as they endured yet another siege, and saw their pope as obdurate as ever – he insisted that Henry must humble himself again, as he had at Canossa – loyalty began to turn to loathing.

King Henry was unaware of their change of heart. Gloomily accepting that he would probably have to return to Germany crownless, he left Rome to honour his agreement with Alexius Comemnus and attack Robert Guiscard’s territories in Puglia, until, his campaign having hardly begun, he was surprised to receive a delegation of Romans inviting him into the city. In a letter to Bishop Theodoric of Verdun, Henry recounted his amazement:

What we did in Rome with ten men, so to say, the Lord wrought through us; if our predecessors had done it with tens of thousands, to all it would have been a miracle. When we were thinking of returning to German territory, behold, the Romans sent us envoys, asked us to enter Rome, and promised to obey us in all respects. And so they did…⁶

Finally, on 21 March 1084, after almost three years of trying, Henry entered Rome in full splendour. Against all precedent he took up residence not in the Imperial Palace but in Gregory’s home, the Lateran Palace, together with his wife, Bertha, who he had tried to divorce, and his antipope Wibert. Within days a parliament of Romans met and deposed Gregory VII – safe but livid in the Castel Sant’Angelo – and Wibert was elected as Pope Clement III. On Easter Monday, in a ceremony of great pomp, Clement III crowned Henry and Bertha Holy Roman Emperor and Empress. He had achieved all that he had come to Italy for.

Except that it was not quite all. He also wanted to enjoy some revenge for his humiliation at Canossa Castle. Shortly after his arrival in Rome his troops launched an attack on Castel Sant’Angelo, but the smooth, high stones of Hadrian’s old tomb proved as strong as they had to Witigis’ Goths five centuries earlier, and the attack was fended off with high casualties. It was still only the beginning of April, so there was ample time before the malarial season threatened. Henry besieged the fortress to starve Gregory into submission. In the meantime, he turned his attention to those of the city’s great families – the Frangipani, the Corsi, the Pierleoni – who had remained loyal to Gregory and had retreated to their fortresses. Henry besieged and took the Corsi’s strongpoint on the Capitoline. He had less luck with the artificial spur of the Palatine, the Septizonium, that was held by Gregory’s nephew Rusticus, where all he achieved was the destruction of some fine classical colonnades. His forces probably also attacked the Frangipani’s fortress in the Colosseum, where fire damage has been found from this time. He does not seem to have attempted to seize the Pierleoni’s fortress in the Theatre of Marcellus.

Then Henry’s chance for revenge slipped away. In early May troubling news arrived. Robert Guiscard was marching on Rome. Having shown no interest in helping Gregory since he had returned to Italy, two years earlier, he had now decided to come to his rescue. In part this would have been because he had finally crushed his rebellious underlings. At the time same time, while he had been content to see his former excommunicator suffer a little in Castel Sant’Angelo, he probably did not wish to risk losing him for good. A papal ally, especially a papal ally who owed him, could be useful.

Henry had no intention of staying and defending his new friends the Romans. He had everything he had come for. Why risk facing Robert Guiscard in battle, or becoming besieged in Rome during the malaria season? So, on 21 May 1084, in some haste, he, his wife, his antipope and his army abandoned Rome. They left just in time. Three days later Robert Guiscard’s army were camped outside the San Lorenzo Gate. If Guiscard hoped to be invited inside by Gregory’s supporters he was disappointed. Aside from the families still loyal to Gregory, still besieged in their fortresses, Romans remained resolutely antagonistic to their pope. This would be a fight.

Having just defied repeated sieges by Henry IV the Romans would have been confident, but so was Robert Guiscard. His army camped outside the city walls was eleventh-century Europe’s most formidable military machine, and Robert had defeated every major power in the Mediterranean, from Ibn al-Hawas of Sicily to the Venetians, to Emperor Alexius Comemnus of Byzantium. Now he had sent the Holy Roman Emperor fleeing.

As to what happened next, once again we find ourselves in the hands of highly partisan chroniclers. They even disagree on the size of Guiscard’s army. Two sources – Bishop Guido of Ferrara and William of Apulia – claim he had a huge force of 30,000 to 36,000 men, while Geoffrey of Malaterra reports, in his biography of Robert Guiscard, that he had only 4,000. Whom should we trust? Bishop Guido of Ferrara was on the imperial side of the squabble and so had good reason to exaggerate Guiscard’s strength, as it would make Henry’s flight more excusable. Besides, a force of tens of thousands seems implausible in an era when armies were rarely large, while it was even less plausible in the case of Robert Guiscard, whose main force was still on the far side of the Adriatic, battling with Alexius Comemnus’ Byzantines. Geoffrey of Malaterra’s small army seems the more likely.

As to how Guiscard’s soldiers got into Rome, there is less disagreement. Geoffrey of Malaterra tells us that Guiscard camped his army outside the San Lorenzo Gate for three days, during which time he carefully spied out the city, and for once all the sources concur. Guiscard’s forces successfully broke into the city without help from inside. It is a simple assertion yet it is also quite remarkable. All the attacks on a properly defended and walled Rome so far, from that of Alaric, to the Ostrogoths, to those of Henry IV, involved protracted and ineffectual sieges. Alaric took Rome after two years of trying, Totila after a year (twice) and Henry IV after three years. Witigis besieged the city for a full year and failed to take it at all. Alaric, Totila and Henry all managed to capture the city only with the help of those inside the walls. By contrast Robert Guiscard took Rome without any inside help, in just four days.

How did he do it? Sources and Roman tradition all agree that he camped his army to the east of Rome and then got in through one of the gates. Which gate, though, is less clear. The sources offer a series of possibilities, from the Pinciana and Flaminia gates on the north side of the city to San Lorenzo in the east, but it is almost certainly none of these. Archaeological work has uncovered both fire damage and repair work that dates from this period in a different location entirely: the Latina Gate to the south. The Porta Latina seems a highly plausible candidate. It still stands, and a glance is enough to show that the Aurelian Walls are lower here than at other locations. Geoffrey of Malaterra reports that, having left the main part of his army to the east of city, where they would distract and pin down Roman forces, he used darkness to sneak a force of some 1,400 round the walls, which then launched a dawn attack where he ‘sensed that the guard would be weakest, with nobody expecting anything to happen in that area.’⁷ In the late eleventh century the Porta Latina was in a quiet spot, far from the more inhabited parts of the city. As to how the Normans got into the city, Malaterra tells us that, ‘Once the ladders had been quietly positioned, he scaled the walls.’⁸ Guiscard relied on the simplest tactics: darkness and surprise. Yet his strategy proved so effective that one wonders why it was never tried by Henry, or for that matter by Alaric or Totila? Having scaled the walls, the Normans opened the Latina Gate and let their comrades inside. The city lay open to them.

Robert Guiscard, a warlord whose name inspired fear across the Mediterranean, had Rome at his mercy. Did he exact a terrible revenge on behalf of his ally, Gregory VII, whom the Romans had just betrayed? Once again, chroniclers offer a series of very different accounts, though all are agreed on one point: a dose of arson was involved. William of Apulia tells us simply that Guiscard ‘fired some of the buildings’,⁹ then rescued Gregory VII and left. The Liber Pontificalis claims Guiscard did great damage to the area north of the Pantheon, around San Lorenzo in Lucina. Leo Marsicanus looks to Guiscard’s cunning side, claiming that he deliberately set alight the church of Quattro Coronati and then, when the Romans were distracted trying to put it out, darted across the city to free Gregory. Geoffrey of Malaterra reports that Guiscard rescued Gregory with little trouble and reinstalled him in the Lateran Palace, but then three days later the Romans treacherously rose against him, and Guiscard, in order to defend himself, damaged ‘the greater part of the city’.¹⁰ The goriest version is offered by Bishop Guido of Ferrara, who claims that Guiscard burned most of the city, destroyed churches, and violently seized many married women and simple people from the sanctuary of churches.

Once again, archaeology offers the only neutral source of information. No evidence has been found of widespread destruction, though eight important buildings were damaged, some of them wholly destroyed. All were churches and they are worth listing: San Giovanni in Porta Latina, Santa Prisca on the Aventine Hill, San Giorgio Velabro by the river, San Lorenzo in Lucina to the north of the Pantheon – the area that the Liber Pontificalis claimed was badly damaged – and Santi Quattro Coronati on the Caelian Hill.

It may seem odd that Robert Guiscard, who had come to rescue the pope, burned churches. In this era, though, they frequently had two functions: religious and military. As robust stone buildings – a rarity in eleventh-century Europe – they were natural citadels. When Guiscard entered the city his greatest concern would have been to create a safe escape route for himself so that, if things went badly wrong, he would not risk the nightmare scenario of becoming trapped in a hostile city. He could leave no enemies behind him to block his retreat and so needed to smoke out any opponents holed up in churches, by setting alight their doors or, more probably, by climbing on to their roofs, removing tiles and firing the beams below.

Rome’s burned churches mark out the likely route the Normans took. Having caught the Roman defenders by surprise on the wall they then secured their line of retreat by smoking out two groups of resisters, in the tower above the Latina Gate, and in the church of San Giovanni in Porta Latina that was just below. Next they made their way north along the Via di Porta Latina, past the ruined Baths of Caracalla to the long-abandoned chariot-racing stadium, the Circus Maximus. Here they may have linked up with some of Gregory’s allies in the city, as his nephew Rusticus was still holding out in the nearby Septizonium fortress and the Frangipani clan were just beyond in the Colosseum. Pausing to smoke out some more resisters in the church of Santa Prisca on the Aventine Hill, and some more in San Giorgio Velabro by the river, the Normans would then have linked up with the Pierleoni on the Tiber Island, before finally making their way along the river to rescue a grateful and livid Gregory VII.

The Normans had achieved their aim but they still had to get safely out. It may have been now that they damaged the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, north of the Pantheon, or the church could have been fired by a second raiding force that broke into the city through one of the northern gates, as some sources claim. But the worst damage was still to be done. On the Caelian Hill the church of Quattro Coronati was gutted. It is easy to see why. If churches were strongpoints, Quattro Coronati, whose high walls rose out of the ruins of an ancient Roman town house, was nothing less than a fortress, which dominated the northern approach to the Lateran. Quite a struggle appears to have taken place here as not only Quattro Coronati but the whole Caelian Hill area was devastated. Was it here that the Romans launched the ill-fated counter-attack on the Normans that Geoffrey of Malaterra describes? It seems unlikely. As Guiscard’s eulogist Malaterra would have wanted to show that the Romans were treacherous and deserving of punishment. It is more likely that the church was fired so the Normans could seize the Lateran area, whose capture was essential if they were to prove that Gregory had truly triumphed. Control of the Lateran would also allow them to link up with the rest of the Norman army that was still waiting outside the walls.

So it seems that of all the accounts of the attack, the one that gives the truest picture is probably also the briefest: that of William of Apulia, who said only that Guiscard burned certain buildings, rescued Pope Gregory and left. His words hint at what seems to have been a distinctly modern operation. Robert Guiscard set himself a clear and limited mission that he undertook with great efficiency. He broke into the city, rescued Gregory and overcame Roman resistance in a very short time, probably a matter of hours. It was a search and rescue mission worthy of a modern special forces unit.

Not for the first or the last time, Rome had got off relatively lightly as the damage it had suffered could have been far worse. It was helped by its topography. As a garden suburb city, its buildings were too low and dispersed to fuel a firestorm. It was also fortunate to have been attacked in May when the air was still relatively damp and wood less combustible. Yet the destruction should not be understated, either. The Caelian Hill, which had been a busy artisan area, was largely abandoned after the sack. There would also have been other damage that no archaeology can reveal. If Guiscard’s attack was something of a surgical strike, there was still the question of what followed afterwards. The Romans had turned against their pope and now he was back in charge. He may have shown forgiveness – the sources offer no information either way – but his allies, the Frangipani, Pierleoni and Corsi, would have felt strongly aggrieved by those who had besieged them in their fortresses. It is hard to believe there was not some score-settling.

Despite Robert Guiscard’s success, the real victor in the whole messy business was Henry IV. Not only had he succeeded in having himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor, he also kept control of the papacy. Though he hurried back to Germany, his antipope Clement III retreated only as far as the nearby hilltop town of Tivoli, where, showing his military acumen once again, he foiled all efforts by Guiscard and Gregory VII to capture him. The majority of Romans did not waver in their hostility to Gregory – they really had grown fed up with the man – who, only weeks after being rescued, was forced to flee his state. Guiscard, recognizing the usefulness of having a pope as his house guest, took him to his capital, Salerno, where he quickly put him to work, and had him consecrate the fine new cathedral Guiscard had just built in the city. All in all, the Rome attack had been a highly successful operation for him, which had enhanced his status and given him guaranteed support from the rightfully appointed pope.

Yet Guiscard’s triumph was short-lived. Within a year both Gregory and he were dead. Gregory VII, his papacy still in tatters, died in exile in Salerno in May 1085. Robert Guiscard followed him two months later, succumbing to fever on the Greek island of Cephalonia, where he was trying to restart his stalled conquest of the Byzantine Empire.

Henry and his antipope fared much better. Henry ruled for another two decades before finally being betrayed, imprisoned and forced to abdicate by his son, Henry V. As for Clement III, within months of Guiscard and Gregory abandoning Rome for Salerno, he was back in the Lateran Palace and, despite repeated challenges by rival candidates, he clung on to the papacy for another sixteen years later until his death in 1100. Though he had his comeuppance in the end. After he died he received a damnatio memorie – a condemnation of memory – by his successor Paschal II, who had his bones dug up from their tomb and thrown into the Tiber.

Clockwise from top left: Henry IV and the anti-pope Guibert; Gregory being expelled from Rome; Gregory VII negotiates with the bishops about Henry’s excommunication; Gregory VII’s death; from the Chronicles of Otto Freising, twelfth century.

As to Rome, after three years of sieges and with its legitimate pope flung out, it was left in an unstable state. If papal schisms had occurred from time to time in the past, they now became so commonplace that most incumbent popes were menaced by rivals’ claims. And yet, somehow, in the city’s calmer moments, repairs were made and the churches that had been burned down by Guiscard’s troops, such as Santi Quattro Coronati, were rebuilt.

Two new churches were created thanks to the city’s instability. Both of these could be described as revenge churches, as their construction was used by one pope to obliterate the building of a hated predecessor. San Clemente, near to the Colosseum, had been closely linked with Henry IV’s antipope and military organizer, Clement III. After Clement III’s death his successor Paschal II – who threw Clement’s bones into the Tiber – had Clement’s church entombed with earth and used as the foundation for a new San Clemente. A few decades later the same fate befell Santa Maria in Trastevere, which had been the church of Anacaletus II before he became pope, and was entirely demolished and rebuilt by his successor and enemy, Innocent II. Thanks to spite, Rome gained two of its most beautiful churches.

If Roman politics were not already complex enough, in the 1140s a new element was added. As happened in other Italian cities at this time, Rome’s middle-ranking inhabitants created their own government – the Senate – as a secular answer to the papacy. That so much of early Rome has survived is partly thanks to the Senate. The new body looked back with nostalgia to Rome’s early days, meeting on the city’s old citadel of the Capitoline Hill, and reviving the ancient title SPQR. It also tried to protect the city’s surviving antiquities. It prohibited damage to Trajan’s Column on pain of death and senatorial officials, Maestri di Strade e degli Edifici, were created to protect ancient monuments. The Senate first met three years after Pope Innocent II began looting the Baths of Caracalla of stone to build his revenge church, Santa Maria in Trastevere, so its very existence may have been inspired by anger at the destruction suffered by the city’s ancient remains.

Naturally the papacy was none too happy with the new power arrangement, and emperors, popes and the Senate soon became embroiled in a shifting, triangular struggle for power. The main victim of the resulting chaos was the pilgrim trade, as pilgrims, impatient with Rome’s violent disorder and avarice, chose to go elsewhere. In the generations before 1081 Rome had gained a new rival in the form of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Pilgrims to Compostela, like those going to Rome, enjoyed an exciting journey that included the adventure of crossing high mountains, and though Compostela could not offer Peter and his keys to heaven, at least it was not infested with malaria, while successful pilgrims could buy a badge – a scallop shell – to show off when they got home. (Rome offered none.)

If Compostela were not enough, a few years after Robert Guiscard’s attack Rome had to endure a second great pilgrimage rival. A little surprisingly, this competition was largely created by the popes. In 1097 Pope Urban II, the nemesis of Henry IV’s antipope Clement III, made a reality of an idea that Gregory VII had dabbled with, and called for a crusade to the East. Two years later Jerusalem was captured from its Islamic rulers and became open to Christian visitors as it had not been for more than six hundred years. Jerusalem trumped Rome in every way. Pilgrims were forgiven all their sins. They felt they were in the presence of Jesus himself. And they could also buy a badge that depicted a palm leaf. Rome lost out as pilgrims flooded eastwards.

As Rome struggled, competition between its basilicas grew more cut-throat. Pilgrims were often disappointed by St Peter’s, where they found themselves kept frustratingly at a distance from the saint’s remains that were buried deep beneath the basilica. Even the area above the tomb, where one could lower pieces of cloth and have them imbued with blessings, was off limits to all but VIP pilgrims. The Lateran Basilica offered itself as a more exciting alternative. It had a large collection of excitingly visible relics, which included the Ark of the Covenant, milk from the Virgin’s breast, Jesus’ bodily remains and blood, his foreskin, the remnants of five of the loaves and two of the fishes he had produced and, most popular of all, the heads of both Saint Peter and Saint Paul. The Lateran Basilica also housed a very popular cloth image of Jesus – the Uronica – that was claimed to have been painted by Saint Luke and the angels. It was said to cause instant blindness to anyone who looked upon it, and so was always kept carefully covered. In mid-August it was carried round Rome in a grand procession, had its feet washed and was introduced to an image of Mary from Santa Maria Nova.

The priests of St Peter’s fought back. The cathedral already had a piece of the True Cross, which had been suddenly revealed to Pope Sergius I during restoration work in the seventh century. Now they discovered the chair on which Saint Peter had been enthroned as bishop (it was actually from northern France and was probably brought by Frankish ruler Charles the Bald for his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor). Most usefully of all they acquired their own image of Jesus – the Veronica – which was claimed to be on the cloth Veronica had used to wipe Jesus’ brow.

Soon there was enough pilgrim gold for both basilicas. Within decades of the Norman sack Europe was booming, gold flowed freely and Rome entered one of its greatest eras of cultural achievement. New churches were built and artists came from all over Italy to produce magnificent mosaics, frescoes and statues. Rome also offered an enticing new pilgrimage product – indulgences – which reduced the amount of time one spent in hell before reaching heaven. Best of all, in 1187, Jerusalem fell to Saladin and so Rome lost a major competitor. The dynamic Pope Innocent III, who took papal power-playing to lengths Gregory VII had only dreamed of, capitalized on Rome’s good fortune. He built a hospital for pilgrims in the Leonine City and introduced weekly processions of St Peter’s Veronica image of Jesus, which proved hugely popular. And he finally gave Rome pilgrims a badge – the Signa Apostolorum – which depicted Saint Paul with a sword and Saint Peter holding his key to heaven. Heaving with crowds, the Leonine City resembled a vast bazaar, shopping stalls sneaked their way into the very nave of St Peter’s, and innkeepers physically grabbed pilgrims from their rivals.

The good times reached a climax in the year 1300. In February of that year another power-player pope, Boniface VIII, announced that any pilgrim who reached Rome before the end of the year, who confessed, who was penitent and who stayed in the city for at least fifteen days would receive plenary indulgence, or forgiveness of all sins. Rome was now offering what had, until then, been a monopoly of Jerusalem. So began Rome’s first Holy Year. It was a triumphant success and one chronicler reported that it was as if the whole world was rushing to Rome, whether rich or poor, old or young, male or female. By Christmas, the crowds were so great that a number of unfortunate pilgrims were crushed to death.

Nobody could have imagined what lay just around the corner. Within a few short years all building projects in the city had been abandoned, artists had left to find better prospects elsewhere and the pilgrim trade was a shadow of its old self. Rome became a depressed city of street battles between rival families, whose population fell by half, to some 17,000. This was the century when Europe was ravaged by the Black Death, yet the plague, though it added to Rome’s decline, was not its real cause. Rome had been struck by something much more familiar. In 1309, encouraged by the king of France, the French Pope Clement V moved the papacy to Avignon. The popes had left.