The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit thou on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
Psalm cx
In 1139 Pope Innocent II called the Second Lateran Council in Rome to celebrate the end of the schism in the church which had arisen from the circumstances of his elevation to the papacy in 1130. It had been a bitter conflict, ended only by the death in 1138 of Innocent’s rival, the anti-pope Anacletus II (Peter Pierleone). The validity of the rival claims had been far from clear, not least because a majority of the cardinals had voted for Anacletus, who had been backed by King Roger of Sicily and most of the Roman nobility. Innocent had become in effect an exile in northern Europe, where he was supported by most of the leading churchmen of the day, rallied by Bernard of Clairvaux, and through them by the kings of France and Germany.
In opening the council, Innocent heralded a new phase of centralisation in the church by spelling out the supremacy of Rome in all its affairs, and particularly in ecclesiastical appointments: ‘Rome is the head of the world’, he is reported to have said; ‘promotion to ecclesiastical dignity is received from the Roman pontiff … and is not legally held without his permission.’1 This council marked the end not only of the papal schism of the 1130s but in many ways of the long period of upheaval, questioning and disorder in the church that had been inaugurated by Henry III’s dismissal of three popes in 1046 and the emergence of the Patarene movement in Milan in the 1050s. In the decade between its summoning in 1139 and the conclusion of its no less important (though not formally ecumenical) sequel, the Council of Reims in 1148, the leaders of the church settled many of the issues that had been contested so furiously for so long, and put in place what can be recognised in retrospect as the essential foundations of the church for the rest of the middle ages, both governmentally and intellectually. In doing so, they effectively rejected the most radical implications of the apostolic movement, settling (from the apostolic point of view) for property rather than poverty, hierarchy rather than fraternity, institutional authority rather than charisma based on personal holiness of life. The apostolic ideal was not formally abandoned, of course, but it was firmly excluded as a practical model for the life of the church in the world. In the eyes of its zealots, therefore, it was betrayed.
So fateful a set of choices was not arrived at in any moment of clear or conscious decision. It was the sum of the outcomes of many disputes and debates, the settlements of many conflicts great and small. In some of them the issues arose in the form of heresy, or accusations of heresy, whose resolution helped to define the relationships that would thenceforth obtain within the body Christian and between that body and the world. The several cases of heresy that arose in the 1140s differed greatly from one another. Nevertheless, all were part of this wider process of definition and pulling together of the church, and must be understood in relation to it.
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The twenty-third canon of Lateran II declared that
We condemn and cast out of the church as heretics those who, simulating a kind of religious zeal, reject the sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord, the baptism of infants, the priesthood, and other ecclesiastical orders, as well as matrimony, and ordain that they be restrained by the civil power. For their partisans also we decree the same penalty.
This was a verbatim repetition of a resolution of a council at Toulouse in 1119. There is no reason to think that it was directed against or inspired by any particular heretic or group of heretics on either occasion. Rather, it presaged a considerably more active response to heresy accusations than had hitherto been the case. Between 1139 and 1148 two of the greatest in a stellar generation of scholars and teachers, Peter Abelard and Gilbert de la Porée, were charged with heresy in high-profile public trials; there were burnings in Provence, the Rhineland, the Low Countries and northern France; the two most influential churchmen of the age, Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, and Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, proclaimed heresy among the people a menace to the church, especially between the Alps and the Pyrenees, and wrote extensively against it; and the Council of Reims in 1148 dealt with at least four cases of heresy of quite different kinds and characters.
In retrospect it looks as though mounting anxiety about a trickle of heresy growing since early in the century ripened during the 1140s into a major preoccupation of the church. The appearance is deceptive. The fear of heresy among the people was not characteristic of early twelfth-century Europe, even though this was everywhere a time of acute political and social instability, of rebellions, risings and assassinations. ‘The Catholic faith has fought, and has crushed, conquered and annihilated the blasphemies of the heretics, so that either there are no more heretics or they do not dare to show themselves’, wrote Bishop Herbert Losinga of Norwich (1091–1119).2 The young Guibert of Nogent, growing up in Picardy in the 1080s and ’90s, formed, in the words of the latest and most acute study of his thought, ‘a view of eleventh-century Europe that sees Christianization as complete, and senses no danger from heretics’.3 This confidence had been shaken not by Guibert’s encounter with the heretic Clement of Bucy but by his contacts with Jewish learning, and with the lively and unruly scholarly and urban communities of Laon and Soissons.
Guibert’s younger contemporary Orderic Vitalis wrote sympathetically about the hermit preachers, despite their attacks on the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the traditional style of monasticism practised in his own house at St Evroul, but he had nothing to say about popular heresy or the threat of it. The rising that Henry of Lausanne fomented in Le Mans in 1116, 80 kilometres down the road from St Evroul and the centre of a region in which Orderic was keenly interested, does not rate a mention.
An obvious reason for this lack of widespread concern is that the cases of heresy in the 1120s, ’30s, and ’40s described in the last three chapters varied greatly in character and context. For the most part they had no connection with each other, and contemporary observers did not suggest that they had. What they had in common was derived from the movement to reform the church itself, from reactions to it and from the divisions that arose between different groups of reformers as to how, and how far, they should compromise with the world and with episcopal authority. Eloquent preachers could always get an enthusiastic hearing for attacks on clerical avarice and immorality, but only between the Loire and the Mediterranean, where Henry of Lausanne and Peter of Bruys, and perhaps others, had built up followings over several years, does it appear that there may have been something resembling a movement of popular heresy.
Even in that case the alarm of the churchmen has a certain air of artificiality. We know nothing of the origins of the expedition to the lands of the count of Toulouse in 1145, but it is not likely that preaching against popular heresy was its only, or even its primary, objective. It was led by a papal legate, Cardinal Alberic of Ostia, not by Bernard. The leading magnate of the region, Count Alphonse Jordan of Toulouse, did not lack rivals eager to stir up trouble (see Map 7, p. 186). As it happened, the activities of Peter of Bruys, and therefore Peter the Venerable’s attack on them, drew attention to the eastern half of Alphonse Jordan’s territories, where he was locked in rivalry with the count of Barcelona for control of Provence. The western part of his lands, whose overlordship King Louis VII of France, a firm supporter of the papacy through the long years of schism, now claimed by virtue of his marriage to Eleanor, daughter of Duke William IX of Aquitaine, was the focus, in complementary fashion, of Henry’s activity and Bernard’s preaching. Alphonse Jordan himself gained some political advantage from the 1145 mission, probably by directing its attention against some of the leading citizens of Toulouse, who were asserting the city’s independence of his authority at just this time, and certainly by diverting it to Albi, the chief stronghold of his greatest rivals in the region, the family of Trencavel, vicomtes of Béziers.
Henry of Lausanne had been preaching for almost twenty years since he left Le Mans for Aquitaine before he was arrested and brought before the Council of Pisa in 1135, and for up to another ten before Bernard of Clairvaux went in pursuit of him in 1145, announcing his mission in letters, later widely circulated, that painted a lurid picture of a land ravaged by heresy. Peter of Bruys had been active over two decades or more when Peter the Venerable found it necessary to write against him around 1139; his reputation had been sufficient to earn a scathing reference from Peter Abelard (in a book that had itself been burned as heretical in 1121), including the assertion that he was re-baptising his followers.4 It was, in short, rather late in the day when Bernard and Peter the Venerable issued their clarion calls. Heresy had not hitherto been a major preoccupation of either of them. Although Bernard led the attack in one of the most famous heresy trials of the middle ages, that of Abelard at Sens in 1141, heresy does not figure prominently in his extremely voluminous writings. Against Abelard, as in the Rhineland in 1147 and against Gilbert de la Porée in 1148, the initiative was taken by others, who had particular personal or political interests to pursue against those accused, and called Bernard’s attention to real or alleged heresies with, indeed, a well-founded confidence in the vigour of his response. Bernard was not so much a hound of heaven as a blunderbuss that could be relied on to explode with a loud bang when aimed and primed by others.
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For Peter the Venerable the identification and pursuit of heresy were only one part of a much larger enterprise that came to fulfilment in this decade of the 1140s.5 His Against the Petrobrusians was the first of three treatises, followed in 1143–4 by Against the Inveterate Obstinacy of the Jews and in 1148–9, or perhaps 1154, Against the Sect of the Saracens. All three groups denied the fundamental propositions of catholic Christianity – the Holy Trinity, the incarnation of Christ, his resurrection and real presence in the eucharist. Against each of them Peter mounted systematic rebuttals, using the technique of the disputation (disputatio) now being perfected in the schools of Paris, where Peter had been a student. A disputation set out the arguments for and against a set of propositions. Its object was to construct a logically complete case by refuting an equally complete set of contrary arguments. Those arguments were often attributed to a real opponent, but if that opponent had not provided a complete account of his position it was up to the disputant to do it for him, to ensure that his own case would be complete in its turn. Thus in rebutting five heresies attributed to Peter of Bruys, Peter the Venerable provided a systematic defence of catholic faith and practice at points crucial in this stage of its development – infant baptism, the building and use of properly consecrated churches, the adoration of the cross, holy communion from the hands of correctly ordained priests, and the penitential system, including offerings and prayers for the dead. The content and structure of Against the Petrobrusians, therefore, were determined by the requirements of Peter the Venerable’s defence of contemporary catholic teaching rather than by what Peter of Bruys actually taught or believed. For this reason caution is necessary, and it becomes ever more so from the 1140s onwards in weighing statements in academic dissertations and by academically trained masters as evidence of the actual beliefs and practices of the heretics against whom they were ostensibly directed.
Peter the Venerable did not only debate the enemies of Christ. He demonised them. If Muslims rejected his appeal to convert, he said, they would show themselves to be, like the Jews, incapable of reason and the willing instruments of the Devil. He is deservedly remembered for commissioning the first translation of the Koran into Latin, arguing that reasoned rebuttal would be a better response to Islam than crusading – but in his introduction to the translation he claimed, in the most abusive terms, that Mohammed had been a vicious, devious and illiterate Arab who attained power and wealth by bloodshed and trickery, and constructed his heresy with the help of Nestorian heretics and Jews. In the same way, even the title of the treatise – not just ‘Against the Jews’, but against their ‘inveterate obstinacy’ – implicitly classified Jews as heretics, who were defined by pertinacity in adhering to beliefs that they knew to be contrary to catholic teaching. In this Peter complemented the teaching of Anselm of Laon that the Jews had known Christ to be the son of God when they crucified him. Earlier scholars such as Abelard and Gilbert Crispin had debated with Jews, in their writings and perhaps occasionally in reality, with a measure of scholarly curiosity and detachment. Peter’s tone, and references to Jews in his other writings, make him the successor rather of Anselm of Laon and Guibert of Nogent. He was not only fundamentally opposed to Judaism intellectually, as of course Abelard and Gilbert Crispin had been, but also bitterly hostile to Jews personally and emotionally. He made much play, for example, with the suggestion that holy images and objects such as chalices, left with Jews as security for loans, were kept by them in privies and subjected to the foulest indignities. This was to become a recurrent motif of the anti-Semitism of the later twelfth century and beyond.
Professed Christians who would not acknowledge the authority of the church might occasionally undermine its popular support but had not hitherto aroused widespread anxiety. By treating Jews and Muslims as heretics, Peter the Venerable added to the list two enemies immeasurably more formidable than Tanchelm or Peter of Bruys. Jews denied fundamental propositions of catholic Christianity with the power and cogency of a much more ancient and sophisticated culture that Christians could not ignore. Christians were frequently at war with Muslims in Spain and the Middle East, but scholars who visited those lands encountered a civilisation whose prosperity and learning far eclipsed their own: the library at Córdoba had 100,000 volumes when in the Christian west a hundred amounted to a notable collection. Even more disconcertingly, Muslims were prosperous and influential subjects of the wealthiest and most glamorous monarch in Latin Christendom, Roger II of Sicily (d. 1153), prominent at his court and in his administration.
Peter the Venerable, like others of his generation in the monasteries and cathedral schools, was a casualty of the social revolution that was reshaping western society. As younger sons, they had had to give up their share of the estates to provide secure foundations for the family dynasties led by their elder brothers. What remained to them, apart from the spiritual consolations of the celibate life, was the task of shaping and defining a moral community to replace (though also to reinforce) the community of blood represented by those dynasties. That meant winning and securing the cultural hegemony on which the ability to confer legitimacy, and with it access to office and influence, must rest. Their only weapon was faith – a faith to be fought for, cherished as a gift, sustained by continual struggle, witnessed by hardship and sacrifice, as the writers of the twelfth century constantly insisted. Their sacrifice was well rewarded. In a society defined by faith the power of defining the faith itself was the key to every door.
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It would be hard to decide which of Peter the Venerable’s three targets in fact presented the smallest danger to Christian society in his time, for there was never the slightest possibility that the church would be overthrown by any of them. But in combination they gave him the means to define Latin Christendom with a new clarity by describing its enemies, though they had to be, if not invented, at any rate greatly magnified and reshaped for the purpose. In implying in Against the Petrobrusians that danger lurked among the common people, however, Peter struck a resonant chord. For four or five generations now, in the more prosperous parts of Europe, the systematic exploitation of agrarian wealth had become ever more harsh to the cultivators, while the increasing surplus that it generated supported the rapid growth of the towns and the conspicuous affluence of the privileged. The labour of the poor sustained a new variety of specialised activities, including most obviously teaching and learning, and all the arts and crafts associated with the building of the magnificent churches of this epoch, whose cost and splendour were one of the most regular grievances of those accused of preaching heresy. The tensions arising from rapid economic growth and the consequent widening of social differences were manifested not only in the widespread anticlerical unrest for which the language of religious reform provided expression but also in many revolts and rebellions, both in the towns and in the countryside. They were for the most part easily and ruthlessly suppressed, for in most conditions their desperate protagonists were helpless against armoured, mounted and highly trained knights. Nevertheless, they were enough to prevent the mighty from always sleeping easily in their beds, as is vividly illustrated by the well-known manuscript illumination of the nightmare in which Henry I of England was assailed by peasants demanding justice.
Areas that had not yet experienced the upheavals of agrarian transformation and ecclesiastical reform – broadly speaking, the mountainous and the border regions – were also sources of unease. The stereotyping process was applied not only to heretics, Jews and Muslims but also to anybody from places that failed to conform to the mid-twelfth century’s conception of a well-ordered society. In these decades we begin to be told by English chroniclers that Scotsmen wore kilts, Irishmen had tails and Welshmen were inveterate and incestuous liars. Another such region was the vast area between the Loire and the Mediterranean, which was also surrounded by ambitious rulers with more or less plausible claims to dominate it. What Bernard of Clairvaux took for the consequences of heresy there – ‘churches without people, people without priests, and holy days deprived of their solemnities’ – was, for the most part, simply the absence of the ecclesiastical developments that had taken place over the last century or so in areas he knew better. But in labelling this a land pervaded by heresy, ‘in need of a great work of preaching’, Bernard laid foundations that would be built on from the 1160s onwards, first by Henry II of England and later by the papacy and the French monarchy, to justify its conquest and subjugation.
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The council convened by Pope Eugenius III at Reims in 1148, attended according to one estimate by 1,100 archbishops, bishops and abbots, presented an imposing image of the reordered and reinvigorated church. An important part of its business was to restate the measures of its predecessors relating to clerical discipline. The only note of dissension, it seems, was from a section of the German clergy, led by Rainhald of Dassel, soon to become a bête noire for reformers of every kind, who objected to the banning of furs for the clergy.6 A notable reinforcement of the decrees against clerical marriage and concubinage insisted that marriages that had already taken place should be dissolved. This was to be applied not only to all those in holy orders of any kind (‘even nuns’) but also to those who had given up, or been removed from, their positions in the church and returned to the world. It is unlikely that the reiteration of these measures increased their effectiveness, but it served the purpose of the reformers in ‘sending a message’ (as their twenty-first-century counterparts like to put it) that the clergy was a separate order of society, and set firmly apart from the laity.
The conceptual basis of the distinction between clergy and laity, perhaps in the long run the most important result of the papal reform though by no means the unanimous intention of reformers, was also greatly clarified in the 1140s. The idea of ordination now came to designate a ritual in which an individual was permanently endowed with the power of conferring the sacraments, rather than simply being appointed to carry out certain functions in the community. That such power could not be vested in women or laymen was not ancient or firmly established doctrine. It emerged in the first decades of the twelfth century. Gratian of Bologna, who completed his authoritative compilation of canon law around 1140, gave it only as his personal opinion (an unusual indulgence for him), not as the authoritative ruling of the fathers and councils of the church, that ‘women cannot be admitted to the priesthood nor even to the diaconate’. Yet there were many references to women deacons in the records of the early church. Followers of Anselm of Laon said that only heretics had ever held that this meant they had been ordained, but Peter Abelard disagreed. Abelard also said, citing other distinguished masters in his support, that in celebrating the Mass the words of consecration themselves were sufficient, regardless of who said them. Such a view threatened both to leave the way open for women to act as ministers and to blur the developing distinction between clergy and laity.7 As we saw in the last chapter, this was one of the bitterest points of contention among the Premonstratensians between those who accepted episcopal discipline and the cure of parishes and the radicals who insisted on sticking to their original vision of the apostolic life. Eberwin of Steinfeld’s accusation that ‘these apostles of Satan have women among them who are – so they say – chaste, widows or virgins, or their wives, both among the believers and among the ministers’ was regularly and often accurately levelled against dissenting groups. It was far from being an instance of heretical innovation.
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The contrasting ways in which the Council of Reims dealt with two cases of heresy illustrates the implications of these developments. Eon (or Eudo) de Stella was a layman from Brittany who reportedly set up his own church, celebrating the Mass and ordaining bishops and archbishops from among his followers (or, in another version, designating them as angels or apostles). He claimed to be the son of God, convinced that the concluding words of the canon of the Mass, per eundem dominum nostrum (‘through Our Lord himself’) referred to him.8 A very much later account of his trial, by William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, claimed that when the pope asked Eon to identify himself he replied, ‘I am Eon, who will come to judge the quick and the dead.’ ‘In his hand’, William continued,
he held an oddly shaped stick, whose upper part was forked. Asked why he carried it he said, ‘this is a most wonderful thing. When the stick is held as you see it now, with two points towards heaven, God possesses two parts of the world, leaving the third part to me. But if I hold the stick so that the two points which are now uppermost point towards the ground, and the lower part, which has only one point, towards the sky, I keep two parts of the world for myself and relinquish one to God.’
The council dissolved in laughter and, recognising Eon as a lunatic – correctly, for to a modern psychiatrist this is a textbook description of paranoid schizophrenia – ordered him to be kept in custody. He died soon afterwards.
It is difficult to know what to make of Eon. The council was obviously right in declining to take him seriously as a religious figure, and the bishop who brought him before it insisted that he should not be deprived of life or limb, presumably on the grounds of his madness. Yet several contemporary though fragmentary reports agree that Eon had attracted considerable support in Brittany, an example of the capacity even, or perhaps especially, of very eccentric preachers to win devoted followers among humble people. He may have been assisted by the fact that the later 1140s was a time of acute famine. Eon was alleged to have harrassed monasteries, which stored large quantities of food collected as tithes, and to have fed his followers, ‘though not with true and solid food, but with food made of air’, William of Newburgh insisted. William also says, though it is not mentioned by the more strictly contemporary sources, that some of Eon’s followers who refused to repudiate his teaching and the ranks that he had conferred on them were burned at the stake. William does not say where or when these burnings took place, or whether it was on the authority of the council or of the Breton bishops.
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Gilbert de la Porée, the most celebrated master of the day and recently promoted to the bishopric of Poitiers, could hardly offer a greater contrast to Eon. He was accused by two of his archdeacons, who got Bernard of Clairvaux to take up the case, as he had done against Peter Abelard at Sens in 1141. Abelard’s earlier trial at Soissons in 1121 and the eleventh-century trials of Berengar of Tours had been great public events before the assembled magnates of the kingdom, lay and ecclesiastical. These confrontations were inspired at one level by the great question of how far the issues of theology and the mysteries of the faith were to be subjected to the rumbustious and sceptical questioning of the dialectical method of the schools, as opposed to the authoritative exposition ex cathedra of the monastic tradition and of old-fashioned masters such as Anselm of Laon and William of Champeaux. But they were also episodes in the political struggles of the great men who, as patrons of the scholars involved, were implicitly threatened when their protégés were accused of heresy. Now, however, the character of these occasions was changing, reflecting a growing reluctance among churchmen to allow the mysteries of the faith to be debated before laymen, let alone decided by them. The result in 1141 had been calamitous for Abelard, the most daring and enormously popular exponent of the dialectic, who went to Sens anticipating an academic disputation in which he had no equal and found himself facing a trial in which Bernard had rigged the jury the night before. Rather than submit to certain conviction, Abelard had halted the proceedings by appealing to Rome. He set out immediately to defend himself at the papal court but was preceded by a storm of letters from Bernard urging the pope and cardinals to have no truck with him. He got no further than Cluny, where he passed the remaining year or so of his life under a vow of silence.
The outcome of Gilbert’s trial was very different. It opened in Paris but after several days of discussion adjourned to Reims, where all those involved were due to attend the council. After further prolonged debate Gilbert was able to rally the cardinals to his defence, largely because it was suspected that Bernard was trying once again to prejudice the case in advance. Gilbert succeeded in rebutting the charges and disowned the book in which heretical views had been discovered by his accusers. This was a great triumph for Gilbert and the Parisian masters, and a great reverse for Bernard. It was the last time a noted master was held to account in this way before a public assembly of clerks and laymen. Henceforth, though a number of steps remained to be taken before the independence of the schools from external authority was formally established, it was effectively left to the masters themselves to regulate orthodoxy in their teaching and speculation. This was the beginning of the cherished European tradition of academic freedom. Its corollary, however, was that the distinction made by modern scholars between ‘learned’ and ‘popular’ heresy, until this time so thoroughly blurred as to be effectively meaningless, now became a real one. The way was opened for the rapid development of clerical ideas and expectations about heresy among the laity, and of measures for dealing with it.
The Council of Reims itself set that development in train with a canon against heretics and their protectors. It was intended for the remaining followers of Henry of Lausanne and Peter of Bruys, as its reference to ‘heresiarchs and their followers in Gascony and Provence’ makes clear, but it broke with precedent in neither naming them nor making any reference to the content or nature of their teaching and practice, thus leaving its provisions open for general application. Reflecting the character of the support that Henry at least had attracted, and perhaps more importantly what had enabled both men to flourish apparently unhindered for so long, it was specifically framed to deprive the heretics of the protection of the locally powerful, including the knights who had ‘hated clerks and enjoyed Henry’s jokes’. Those who embraced these unspecified errors were to be excommunicated, and ‘the celebration of the holy offices in their lands forbidden’.
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On 15 July 1148, on his way back from Reims, Eugenius III issued a bull forbidding the Roman clergy, on pain of the loss of their benefices and offices, to have anything to do with Arnold of Brescia, who had
publicly denounced the cardinals, saying that their college, by its pride, avarice, hypocrisy and manifold shame was not the church of God but a place of business and a den of thieves, which took the place of the scribes and Pharisees amongst Christian peoples.
The pope himself, Arnold continued, in John of Salisbury’s summary,
was not what he professed to be – an apostolic man and shepherd of souls –but a man of blood who maintained his authority by fire and sword, a tormentor of churches and oppressor of the innocent, who did nothing in the world save gratify his lust and empty other men’s coffers to fill his own.9
Wherever he went, at least since 1138, Arnold of Brescia had been making trouble, but he was no ordinary troublemaker. A well-educated son of the minor nobility of his city, he seems almost a throwback to the heroic age of reform, the days of Peter Damiani and Ariald of Milan. Brescia, the second city of Lombardy (after Milan), had been one of the main centres of Patarene activity since the Lateran Council of 1059 had outlawed simony and clerical marriage. In response, most of the Lombard bishops
since they had received large sums of money from priests and deacons living in concubinage, concealed the pope’s decrees, with one exception, namely the bishop of Brescia. On arrival in Brescia, after publicly reading out the pope’s decrees, he was beaten by the clergy and almost killed. This event served in no small way to promote the growth of the Pataria. For not only in Brescia but also in Cremona and Piacenza and in all the other provinces many people abstained from the communion of priests who lived in concubinage.10
Brescia’s subsequent history up to Arnold’s time is obscure, but it is clear that continuing conflict over religious reform was inextricably and perhaps indistinguishably linked to the bitter civil divisions that led to the emergence of the commune. Several bishops were deposed during that period, and so in the 1130s were several consuls, including two (at least) who were described as ‘hypocrites and heretics’.11 In an echo of Henry of Lausanne’s stay in Le Mans in 1116, Arnold, who had become superior of one of Brescia’s religious houses, ‘so swayed the minds of the citizens when the bishop was absent on a short visit to Rome [in 1138] that they would scarcely open their gates to the bishop on his return’, with the result that he was expelled from the city with his followers by Bishop Manfred, and his exile confirmed by Pope Innocent II.
After his expulsion Arnold went to Paris, where ‘he became a disciple of Peter Abelard, and together with Master Hyacinth, who is now a cardinal, zealously fostered his cause against the abbot of Clairvaux’. Hyacinth Boboni, like Cardinal Guido de Castello, who also protected Arnold a few years later, belonged to one of the Roman noble families who had taken to sending their sons to Paris to finish their education before embarking on a high ecclesiastical career – to good effect in these cases, for they both became popes, Guido as Celestine II and Hyacinth as Celestine III. It may be that Arnold had been meant for the same path. After Abelard’s fall in 1141 Arnold tried to teach in his place but secured only a handful of poor students, which suggests that his flair was evangelical rather than intellectual. He soon attracted the attention of Bernard of Clairvaux, who used his connections at the royal court to have Arnold expelled from France. He went to Zurich, where he won the approval of one of the emperor’s closest counsellers, Count Ulrich of Lenzburg, and of two prominent local lords, counts Rudolf of Ravensburg and Eberhard of Bodmen. Zurich was in the diocese of Constance, which had been the recipient of some of Gregory VII’s most incendiary exhortations to popular action against the bishop and local clergy, but the papacy had now become the defender of theocratic politics and the accumulation of ecclesiastical property. Zurich was also, though nothing like so advanced as its Lombard counterparts, a developing urban community which would later find itself in sharp conflict with the territorial aristocracy. That Arnold preached there for some time without arousing the hostility of the latter suggests that his message was religious rather than political. The reform of the clergy, and especially the married clergy, was the object of a papal mission to Bohemia in 1143, led by Cardinal Guido and accompanied by Arnold, to the fury of Bernard of Clairvaux.
Guido’s succession to Innocent II in September 1143, as Celestine II, is the most likely reason for Arnold’s reconciliation to the Roman papacy. Celestine died less than six months later. His successor, Lucius II, was confronted by a republican government which had taken control of the city. This was the latest stage of the determined struggle of some factions among the Roman aristocracy to maintain their grip on the city. If they could not do it through control of the papacy, the alternative was to revive Rome’s ancient institutions, declaring a republic under the leadership of a restored senate. Lucius died in February 1145, allegedly from a wound received when he led an armed attack on its headquarters, the Capitol. Since Arnold immediately made his submission to Lucius’s successor, Eugenius III, and embarked at his direction on a lengthy penance in the holy places of the city, he can hardly have played much part in these events, but that was soon to change. The deal that Eugenius made with the Romans to secure his succession quickly broke down, and within a year the pope had to flee the city. By 1148 Arnold’s removal from Rome had become an absolute requirement of Eugenius’s policy, and for the remainder of his pontificate he regarded Arnold as his greatest enemy in the city. So did his two successors. When the emperor Frederick Barbarossa chose to make peace with Hadrian IV in 1155, he signalled his amicable intentions by delivering Arnold, who had been captured by his troops, to the Prefect of Rome, in effect a papal functionary. He was condemned as schismatic by an ecclesiastical tribunal, returned to the prefect for punishment and sentenced to be hanged. On the scaffold he refused to abjure his sins or to make confession, saying that he believed that what he had taught was good and true and that he was not afraid to die for it. He knelt with raised arms to make his last prayer in silence. His body was burned and his ashes thrown in the Tiber, to prevent him from becoming the object of a cult.
The fact that Arnold lived in a period not only of intense political conflict in Italy (with its accompanying miseries) but also at a time of rapid social change and increasing distance between rich and poor, and between clergy and people, helps to explain his ability to attract and maintain a popular following. ‘He had disciples known as the heretical sect of the Lombards’, John of Salisbury tells us, ‘who imitated his austerities and won favour with the populace through outward decency and austerity of life, but found their chief supporters amongst pious women.’ Their name, and Arnold’s, persisted and would continue to be associated with pious dissent among the Italian laity, especially among the poor. At the bitter siege of Crema by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1159 ‘a great gang of the poor and indigent’ who did their best to hinder the attackers by pelting them with stones and rocks ‘were derisorily known as the sons of Arnold’.12
The attempt to extinguish Arnold’s memory was a hopeless failure. When Garibaldi overthrew the papal state in 1861, his triumph was celebrated by cries and posters that hailed ‘The Pope no longer a king! The liberal clergy! Arnold of Brescia!’ and as a hero of the Risorgimento Arnold has many statues in modern Italy, including one in his native city. To his contemporaries, however, he was not a political agitator or a champion of communal liberties but a prophet and a man of God. That is why a deep uneasiness pervades the records of his life and death. He was condemned, said Walter Map, no sympathiser with heretics, ‘uncharged, undefended and in his absence’. According to a poet close to the court, even the ruthless and haughty Barbarossa ‘lamented his death, but too late’.13His integrity, his austerity, his devotion and his idealism were undeniable. John of Salisbury says that he ‘had mortified his flesh with fasting and coarse raiment: [he] was of keen intelligence, persevering in his study of the scriptures, eloquent in speech, and a vehement preacher against the vanities of the world.’ Even his most furious enemy, Bernard of Clairvaux, who had not hesitated to exploit the personal lapses of many who aroused his wrath, including Peter Abelard and Henry of Lausanne, called Arnold ‘a man whom I could wish was as praiseworthy for his doctrine as for his way of life’, ‘whose life is as sweet as honey and whose doctrine is as bitter as poison’. Yet although he flayed Arnold with his most extravagant invective for supporting Abelard, Bernard did not call him a heretic. That he denounced him, even in the aftermath of the Council of Sens, only as a schismatic (that is, as having caused division in the church but not as doctrinally in error) is compelling evidence that Arnold was not a heretic and that he was a sound and skilful enough theologian, and unimpeachable enough in his life and reputation, to be proof against the accusation. Wherein, then, lay the bitterness of his doctrine?
The answer to that question was terrifyingly clear. As John of Salisbury put it,
He said things that were entirely consistent with the law accepted by Christian people, but not at all with the life they led. To the bishops he was merciless on account of their avarice and filthy lucre; most of all because of stains on their personal lives, and their striving to build the church of God in blood.
Many before him had said that the enjoyment of wealth and the exercise of temporal power by the church were unapostolic. Arnold did not shrink from spelling out the implications logically and in full, regardless of the practical consequences. When the Romans offered the imperial crown to Conrad III in 1148, they urged him, in words either written or inspired by Arnold, to take control of papal elections ‘so that priests cannot make war and murder in the world. It is not permitted to them to bear the sword or the cup, but to preach, to affirm their preaching by good works, and not to cause war or strife in the world.’
A few years later a letter to Frederick Barbarossa written on behalf of the city by Arnold himself or a close follower claimed that
the lie, the heretical fable which holds that Constantine simoniacally granted imperial property to [Pope] Sylvester I* is seen through in Rome so universally that the hirelings and whores confute the most learned in argument upon it, and the so-called Apostolic and his cardinals dare not show their faces in the city for shame.
The church would be cleansed only when papal power was replaced by the imperial authority that the Romans alone could legitimately confer.
As with many radical thinkers, Arnold’s principal achievement was to unite his enemies. However bitterly the pope, the emperor and the Roman nobles might quarrel among themselves, they knew that in the end they were locked together in a painfully constructed social, political and ecclesiastical order. The Roman nobles could no more afford to abandon the wealth and power that accrued to them through their close interconnections with the church than the church could give up the resources indispensable to its mission in the world, or the emperor place his crown at the disposal of the restless and venal citizens of a single city. Frederick Barbarossa’s uncle and biographer Otto, bishop of Freising, described Arnold with the rhetorical bluster of a seasoned politician faced by arguments too near the bone to be directly confronted, calling him ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing [who] entered the city under the guise of religion and inflamed to violence the minds of the simple people’. More thoughtful observers were not so sure. Throughout his life Arnold won admirers and supporters among the eminent as well as among the humble. They included, as we have seen, two future popes and perhaps Peter Abelard (the teacher of all three), who himself maintained that the power of binding and loosing resided only in those bishops who were worthy successors of the apostles.103
John of Salisbury was among the finest scholars of the age, an intimate of the English pope Hadrian IV and later one of Thomas Becket’s most loyal companions and supporters. His strikingly balanced and cautious account of Arnold, although written after his arrest and death, makes no mention of those events, or of Hadrian’s part in them. John gives his recital of Arnold’s virtues as fact, of his faults as hearsay: ‘he was reputed [ut aiunt] to be factious and a leader of schism, who wherever he lived prevented the citizens from living at peace with the clergy.’ Unwavering proponent of papal authority though he was, John did not think that the questions that Arnold had raised were easily dismissed.