THE RAPIDITY AND VIOLENCE OF THE PAPAL REVOLUTION
In trying to comprehend the full dimensions of the changes that took place during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one may lose sight of the cataclysmic character of the events that were at the heart of the Papal Revolution.
These events may be explained, ultimately, only by the totality of the transformation; but they must be seen initially as the immediate consequence of the effort to achieve a political purpose, namely, what the papal party called "the freedom of the church" -- the liberation103- of the clergy from imperial, royal, and feudal domination and their unification under papal authority. By placing that political purpose, and the events that followed immediately from the effort to realize it, in the context of the total transformation, one can see that what was involved was far more than a struggle for power. It was an apocalyptic struggle for a new order of things, for "a new heaven and a new earth." But at the same time, the political manifestation of that struggle, where power and conviction, the material and the spiritual, coincided, is what gave it its tempo and its passion.
Rapidity is, of course, a relative matter. It may seem that a transformation which began in the middle of the eleventh century and was not secured until the latter part of the twelfth century, or possibly the early part of the thirteenth century, should be called gradual. However, the length of time which it takes a revolution to run its course is not necessarily the measure of its rapidity. The concept of rapid change refers to the pace at which drastic changes occur from day to day or year to year or decade to decade. In a revolution of the magnitude of the Papal Revolution, life is speeded up; things happen very quickly; great changes take place overnight. First, at the start of the revolution -- in the Dictatus Papae of 1075 -Вthe previous political and legal order was declared to be abolished.
Emperors were to kiss the feet of popes. The pope was to be "the sole judge of all" and to have the sole power "to make new laws to meet the needs of the times." The fact that many of the features of the old society persisted and refused to disappear did not change the suddenness of the effort to abolish them or the shock produced by that effort. Second, new institutions and policies were introduced almost as suddenly as old ones were abolished. The fact that it took a long time -- several generations -- for the revolution to establish its goals did not make the process a gradual one.For example, it was part of Pope Gregory VII's program, at least from 1074 on, that the papacy should organize a crusade to defend the Christians of the East against the Turkish infidels. Until his death in 1085 he promoted that idea throughout Europe, although he was never able to get sufficient support to bring it about. Only in 1095 did his successor and devoted follower, Pope Urban II, succeed in launching the First Crusade. One may say, then, that it took a long time -- over twenty years -- to accomplish this change, which literally turned Europe around and united it in a collective military and missionary expedition to the East. But in another sense, the change from a precrusading Europe to a crusading Europe came with shocking rapidity. From the first moment the crusade became a declared objective of the papacy, the reorientation proceeded, continually producing new hopes, new fears, new plans, new associations. Once the First Crusade was undertaken the pace of change accelerated. The mobilization of knights from virtually every part of
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Western Christendom, their journeys across land and sea and, finally, the innumerable military encounters, were a compression of events into a time span that came and went with extraordinary speed. Moreover, it was not only on the ground, so to speak, that the crusades represented an acceleration of the pace of events.
It was also so in the realm of high politics. For example, the papacy tried to use the crusades as a means of exporting the Papal Revolution to Eastern Christendom. The pope declared his supremacy over the entire Christian world. The schism between the Eastern and Western churches, which had reached a climax in 1054 in the famous theological controversy over the filioque clause in the creed, 26 took the form of violence and conquest. Also in 1099 Western knights entered Jerusalem and founded there a new kingdom, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, subordinate, at least in theory, to the papacy. History was moving very fast indeed! Although almost fifty years elapsed before the Second Crusade was launched, and another forty y ears from the end of the Second Crusade to the Third, these time spans, too, must be considered in the light of the continual agitation that was generated both by anticipation of them and by the remembrance of them. Throughout the twelfth century there was a widespread feeling that a crusade might come at any time.And so with the principal aim of the revolution, expressed in the slogan, "the freedom of the church": it was not something that could be achieved overnight -- indeed, in its deepest significance it was not something that could be achieved ever-yet the very depth of the idea, its combination of, great simplicity and great complexity, was a guarantee that the struggle to achieve it would be, on the one hand, a prolonged one, over decades and generations and even centuries, and on the other hand, a cataclysmic one, with drastic and often violent changes occurring in rapid succession. For freedom of the church meant different things to different people. To some it meant a theocratic state. To others it meant that the church should renounce all its feudal lands, all its wealth, all its worldly power; this, indeed, was proposed by Pope Paschal II in the early 1100s, but was quickly rejected both by the Roman cardinals and by the German bishops who supported the emperor.
Or it might mean something quite different from either of these extreme alternatives. The fact that its meaning kept changing from 1075 to 1122 was one of the marks of the revolutionary character of the times.Apart from the crusades, the violence of the Papal Revolution took the form of a series of wars and rebellions. The papal and the imperial or royal sides used both mercenaries and feudal armies. There were many violent popular rebellions, especially in cities, against the existing authorities -- against ruling bishops, for example, who might be appointees and supporters of either the emperor or the pope.
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It is doubtful that the rapidity of the Papal Revolution can be separated from its violence. This is not to say that if the struggle could have been carried on without civil war____________________________________________________________ if Henry IV could have
been persuaded not to resist Gregory by armed force, or Gregory not to summon his Norman allies in defense the events would have lost their rapid tempo. Nevertheless, in the Papal Revolution, as in
the great revolutions of Western history that succeeded it, the resort to violence was closely related to the speed with which changes were pressed as well as to their total or fundamental character. It was partly because of the rapidity of the changes and partly because of their totality that the preexisting order was unwilling and unable to make room for them; and so force, in Karl Marx's words, became "the necessary midwife" of the new era.
Force, however, could not give a final victory either to the revolutionary party or to its opponents. The Papal Revolution ended in compromise between the new and old. If force was the midwife, law was the teacher that ultimately brought the child to maturity. Gregory VII died in exile. Henry IV was deposed. The eventual settlement in Germany, France, England, and elsewhere was reached by hard negotiations in which all sides renounced their most radical claims. What can be said for force is that it took the experience of civil war in Europe to produce the willingness of both sides to compromise. The balance was struck, ultimately, by law.