Church and Empire: The Cluniac Reform

Prior to the late eleventh century, the clergy of Western Christendom -- bishops, priests, and monks -­were, as a rule, much more under the authority of emperors, kings, and leading feudal lords than of popes.

In addition to its political-economic subordination, the church was also subject in its internal structure to the control of leading laymen. Emperors and kings called church councils and promulgated church law. At the same time, bishops and other prominent clergy sat in governmental bodies -- local, baronial, and royal or imperial. The bishopric was often a principal agency of civil administration. Bishops were important members of the feudal hierarchy. Marriage of priests, which was very widespread, brought them into important kinship ties with local rulers. Emperors and kings invested bishops not only with their civil and feudal authority but also with their ecclesiastical authority.

The system was similar to that which prevailed in the Eastern Roman Empire, and which was later denounced in the West as Caesaropapism.

It is not strictly correct, however, to speak of the kings and emperors of western Europe in the sixth to eleventh centuries as "laymen." That is what the pope called them after 1075, but before then they had had undisputed religious functions. It is true that they were not clergy; that is, they were not ordained priests. Nevertheless, they were "deputies of Christ," sacral figures, who were considered to be the religious leaders of their people. They were often said to be men made holy by their anointment and to have healing powers. The emperor, especially, claimed to

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be the supreme spiritual leader of Christendom, whom no man could judge, but who himself judged all men and would be responsible for all men at the Last Judgment. 3_

The empire of Charlemagne or of Henry IV is not to be confused with the earlier Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus or of Constantine. Although an illusion of continuity with ancient Rome was maintained, the Carolingian term "empire" (imperium) referred not to a territory or a federation of peoples but rather to the nature of the emperor's authority, which was in fact very different from that of the earlier Roman emperors. Unlike Caesar, Charlemagne and his successors did not rule their subjects through an imperial bureaucracy. There was no capital city comparable to Rome or Constantinople -­indeed, in sharp contrast to Caesar's city-studded empire, Charlemagne and his successors had hardly any cities at all. Instead, the emperor and his household traveled through his vast realm from one principal locality to another. He was constantly on the move, traveling in France, Burgundy, Italy, Hungary, as well as in his Frankish-German homeland.

The empire was not a geographical entity, but a military and spiritual authority. It was not called the Roman Empire until 1034, and it was not called the Holy Roman Empire until 1254.

In the tenth and early eleventh centuries there was a strong movement to purge the church of feudal and local influences and of the corruption that inevitably accompanied them. A leading part in this movement was played by the Abbey of Cluny, whose headquarters were in the town of that name in southern France. Cluny is of special interest from a legal point of view because it was the first monastic order in which all the monasteries, scattered throughout Europe, were subordinate to a single head. Prior to the founding of Cluny in 910, each Benedictine monastery had been an independent unit ruled by an abbot, usually under the jurisdiction of the local bishop, with only a loose federal connection with other Benedictine monasteries. The Cluniac monasteries, on the other hand, which may have numbered well over a thousand within a century after the order was founded, were all ruled by priors under the jurisdiction of the Abbot of Cluny. For this reason Cluny has been called the first translocal corporation; ^ultimately it served in this respect as a model for the Roman Catholic Church as a whole.

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Cluny's importance as a model of translocal, hierarchial, corporate government was matched by its importance in supporting the first peace movement in Europe.

The efforts of Cluny and the church generally to exempt certain classes of people from military service and from attack on their person or property, and to restrict fighting to certain times, could be only partly successful in an age of violence and anarchy such as the tenth and eleventh centuries. The importance of the peace movement for the future, however, and especially for the future of the Western legal tradition, was enormous, for the experience of collective oath-taking by groups in the name of peace played a crucial role in the founding of cities in the late eleventh century and thereafter, in the formation of guilds within cities, and in the promulgation of legislation by dukes, kings, and emperors through the so-called ducal or royal peace and through the "land peace" (pax terrae, Landfriede).

Above all, the Cluniacs and other reforming houses sought to raise the level of religious life by attacking the ecclesiastical power of feudal and local rulers, which was manifested particularly in the buying and selling of church offices (called "simony") and also in the related practices of clerical marriages and clerical concubinage (called "nicolaism"), through which bishops and priests were involved in local and clan politics. For these efforts to succeed, however, the support of a strong central power was needed. The papacy would have been far too weak for this purpose; at this time popes were, in fact, subordinate to the nobility of the city of Rome. The Cluniacs successfully sought the support of the emperors, Charlemagne's successors, who governed the area including what is now

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western Germany, eastern France, Switzerland, and northern Italy. The emperors, in turn, were glad to have Cluny's support, as well as that of other reform movements; with such support, in time, they wrested from the nobles of Rome the power to appoint the pope.

Contrary to modern ideas of the separateness of the church and the state, the church in the year 1000 was not conceived as a visible, corporate, legal structure standing opposite the political authority. Instead, the church, the ecclesia, was conceived as the Christian people, populus christianus, which was governed by both secular and priestly rulers (regnum and sacerdotium). Long before Charlemagne consented to be crowned emperor by the pope in 800, his devoted servant Alcuin, the English scholar and ecclesiastic, had referred to him as ruler of the imperium chrishanum ("Christian empire"), and Charlemagne himself in 794 had called a "universal" church council at Frankfurt at which he promulgated important changes in theological doctrine and ecclesiastical law. Some historians argue, that Pope Leo III made Charlemagne emperor, but it is closer to the truth to say that Charlemagne made Leo pope; and in 813 Charlemagne crowned his own son emperor without benefit of clergy.

Imperial and royal control of the church was needed to emancipate it from the corrupting influences of baronial and local politics and economics. However, this basic aim of the Cluniac Reform faced an insuperable obstacle: the clergy were so thoroughly enmeshed in the political and economic structure at all levels that they could not be extracted from it. Under the aegis of the great reforming emperors of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the monastic orders could be cleansed and the papacy could be strengthened, but the church as a whole could not be radically reformed because it was not independent. Simony and nicolaism remained burning issues.

Nicolaism (clerical marriage) was not only a moral issue, in the narrow sense, but also a social and political and economic issue. Marriage brought the priesthood within the clan and feudal structure. It also in- -91

volved the inheritance of some church offices by priests' sons and other relatives. This, at least, placed some limits upon simony (sale of ecclesiastical beneficies). If no church offices were to be heritable, could appointment (investiture) continue to be left in lay hands? More fundamentally, were emperors and kings spiritually qualified to make the large number of new appointments to high clerical offices that would be required if priests could no longer marry and have heirs to succeed them? And what about lower clerical offices that were to be filled at the behest of feudal lords?

There had always been a certain tension associated with the subordination of the clergy, and especially the papacy, to persons who, however dignified and even sacred their offices, were not themselves ordained priests. At the end of the fourth century, St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, had said, "Palaces belong to the emperor, churches to the priesthood"; and he had excommunicated Emperor Theodosius, lifting the curse of anathema only after the emperor had done penance. A century later Pope Gelasius I had written to the Emperor Anastasius: "Two [swords] there are, august emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, the sacred authority of the priesthood and the royal power... If the bishops themselves, recognizing that the imperial office was conferred on you by divine disposition, obey your laws so far as the sphere of public order is concerned... with what zeal, I ask you, ought you to obey those who have been charged with administering the sacred mysteries [in matters of religion]?" 6This was the original "two swords" doctrine: the priesthood administered the sacred mysteries, but the emperors made the laws, including the ecclesiastical laws. Among the Franks, kings and emperors had often depended on the support of popes and had acknowledged their superiority, and that of bishops generally, in matters of faith. The idea of ecclesiastical autonomy had deep roots in scriptural authority as well. Yet in fact Frankish emperors, and in the tenth and eleventh centuries German emperors as well as French and English kings -- plus Spanish, Norse, Danish, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, and other rulers -- governed bishops even in matters of religious doctrine, just as the Byzantine emperors had done. Moreover, they invested clergy with the insignia of their clerical offices: Frankish emperors and kings bestowed upon bishops the ring and pastoral staff that symbolized their episcopal authority, and uttered the words, "Accipe ecclesiam!'' ("Receive the church!"). This placed both the secular sword and the spiritual sword in the same hand. The justification was that emperors and kings were consecrated, sacral rulers, "deputies of Christ." There were many bishops, of whom the Bishop of Rome was primate (first among equals), but there was only one emperor, and within each kingdom only one king.

The Bishop of Rome had the title "deputy of St. Peter." Only in the twelfth century did he acquire the title "deputy of Christ." Only then was

-92- the emperor compelled to relinquish that title. As deputy of Christ, the pope claimed to wield both swords_one directly, the other indirectly. Now there were many secular rulers but only one pope.

The primacy of the Bishop of Rome among the other bishops of the church had been asserted as early as the fourth, and possibly even the third, century, and had occasionally -- though by no means always - been acknowledged by other leading bishops. Primacy, however, could mean many different things. As long as the church in the West remained largely decentralized and under the control of local lay rulers, papal authority was inevitably weak and was closely linked with imperial authority, which was also weak. The occasional struggle of local bishops and local churches to emancipate themselves from local lords might thus take the form of appeal to either imperial authority or papal authority or both. Only rarely did conflict escalate to higher levels. A striking example was the great forgery of the mid-ninth century known as the PseudoIsidore, or False Decretals. This was a huge collection of letters and decrees, falsely attributed to popes and councils from the fourth century on; it was directed against the efforts of the Archbishop of Rheims, supported by the emperor, to prevent his clergy from having recourse to Rome to decide disputes. The fact that for this purpose the author had to concoct a multitude of documents tells something of the nature of episcopal authority in the church at that time and before. In fact, the Pseudo-Isidore was not composed in Rome and was not generally accepted by the popes until over two hundred years later, when the papal party used it to justify aims quite different from those of the original text. In the latter part of the ninth century Pope Nicholas I ( 856-867) did assert papal authority not only over archbishops and bishops, declaring that their sees could not be filled without his consent, but also over emperors, declaring that kings were not entitled to sit in judgment over priests and that priests were exempt from the jurisdiction of kings. Again, however, such assertions were more important for the future than for their own time. They did not change the reality of imperial, royal, and local lay lordship over the church. Indeed, in the latter ninth, the tenth, and the early eleventh centuries, the prestige of the papacy was at its lowest ebb, and it was the emperors who attempted to raise it.

The primacy of the Bishop of Rome among other bishops also gave the king of the Germans a reason to take his armies down across the Alps every few years to reassert his imperial claim to be protector of Rome against the Lombard and Tuscan and Roman nobility.

The spiritual authority of the emperors became increasingly anomalous in the eleventh century, as simony and nicolaism proved too deeply rooted for them to overcome. In 1046 the subordination of the bishops of Rome to the emperor became not only anomalous but scandalous when Henry III, upon arrival in Rome to celebrate his imperial

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coronation, saw to it that three rival popes were deposed and a fourth elected. His appointee died after a few months in office, and a second appointee died a few weeks later_________________________________________________________ both said to have been

poisoned by factions in Rome that resented imperial intervention in the affairs of the city. 7 A third appointee, Leo IX ( 1049_1053), though a close kinsman and friend of Henry III, rejected the c oncept of the papacy as a bishopric of the emperor, and asserted not only his own independence but also his power over all other bishops and clergy, even outside the empire.

During Leo's reign a group of his proteges -- led by Hildebrand -formed a party which proposed and promoted the idea of papal supremacy over the church. Among its techniques was widespread publicity for the papal program. Eventually a large polemical literature which included many hundreds of pamphlets, was circulated by partisans of various sides. One historian has called this period "the first great age of propaganda in world history." 8_The papal pamphlets urged Christians to refuse to take the sacraments from priests living in concubinage or marriage, contested the validity of clerical appointments made in return for money payments, and demanded the "freedom of the church" -- that is, the freedom of the clergy, under the pope, from emperor, kings, and feudal lords. Finally, in 1059 a council in Rome called by Pope Nicholas II declared for the first time the right of the Roman cardinals to elect the pope.