Introduction: the Need for Ecclesiastical Sanction
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Sacred Conquest and Ecclesiastical Politics: The Normans and the Church in the Eleventh Century
Sean McGee
Introduction: The Need for Ecclesiastical Sanction
Ecclesiastical sanction is a common feature of the Norman conquests in Sicily and Southern Italy during the eleventh century. The various Norman conquerors all sought to legitimize their domination in this region by gaining the support of the Church. Their concern with adding a holy aspect to their military and political achievements shows the amount of importance they and those they sought to dominate placed on religion as a source of power. An examination of the strong relationship Norman rulers established between themselves and the churches Sicily and Southern Italy illustrates a key aspect of the way in which they came to be such a great force in Medieval Europe. The Normans’ success hinged upon their ability to appear as divinely appointed rulers who served, protected, and guided the Church in the countries they held. They derived authority from the Church, and they also exercised authority over it.
When discussing the ways in which medieval rulers used the Church to strengthen their power base, it is important to think about the broader factors that shaped the relationship between the secular and the sacred in Europe during the Middle Ages. At the time, these two realms were so intermingled that it often became rather difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Princes and prelates constantly debated the complex issue of where exactly the boundaries between their spheres of influence ought to be drawn. A great amount of confusion arose whenever the jurisdiction of lay rulers seemed to overlap or conflict with that of ecclesiastical authorities, and vice versa.
The reason this confusion existed was that in the climate of Medieval Europe, where war was almost constant and the concept of the state was virtually unknown, secular rulers were also in some aspects religious figures, and religious figures also had secular concerns: there were no clear distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In the introduction to his source book, The Crisis of Church and State: 1050-1300, Brian Tierney explains in plain terms why lay rulers throughout history in general and in Medieval Europe in particular needed to possess some sort of sacred authority: “To maintain order and unity in groups larger and less homogeneous than extended family systems is a complex and difficult task. Mere force is seldom sufficient in the long run.”[1] In order to retain the loyalty of their subjects and discourage their rivals, princes in the Middle Ages needed to possess a measure of sanctity, usually in the form of the blessing of a prelate and/or a say in the ecclesiastical affairs of their realms. They needed the cooperation of priests and monks, and they often needed these holy men to cede to them a certain measure of religious authority.
The overarching political theory of the Middle Ages stated that Christ was the only true ruler, and that He delegated the authority to govern the world to clergymen and secular princes, who acted as His agents. Of these two, the clergy was traditionally considered to have the greater authority, since everyone, including secular rulers, had to look to priests for the means of their salvation. Gelasius I, who was Pope from 492 until 496, articulated this belief in a letter he sent to the Emperor Anastasius in 494: “Two there are, august emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, the sacred authority [auctoritas] of the priesthood and the royal power [potestas]. Of these the responsibility of the priests is more weighty in so far as they will answer for the kings of men themselves at the divine judgment.”[2] Since this was the case, no prince could successfully hold power without having the Church on his side.
By the same token, the Church needed to support itself economically, and so priests and monks became landholders; and the more authority a cleric or abbot held in the Church, the more land he possessed, so that bishops and abbots came to hold as much land as the most powerful laymen. This meant that they had vassals who held land in fief from them, and that they themselves could be vassals who held land from laymen. It also meant that they had to administer their territories, serve in the courts of their lords, and furnish knights for their own defense as well as for their lord’s army. Finally, they needed a strong secular ruler to protect their propertythis was especially true since priests and monks were supposed to be prohibited from shedding blood.
And so two interrelated paradoxes existed: On the one hand, clerics and monks, whose lives were supposed to be devoted to God, needed lay rulers to help them with their temporal concerns and responsibilities. On the other hand, lay rulers, whose primary interest rested in secular matters, needed prelates to supply them with an aura of sacredness and divine authority. These paradoxes were basic facts of Medieval Europe. They governed the relations between all laymen and clerics, including the relations between the Normans, the priests and monks who lived within their dominions, and even the Papacy.[3]
The Normans who wanted to rule in Southern Europe faced certain difficulties in trying to establish themselves as lords, and they used the Church in a strategic manner in order to solve these problems effectively. The Normans who became the lords of Sicily and Southern Italy were faced with the problem that they were seen as foreign invaders in the eyes of the people whom they conquered. In addition, the political, ethnic, and religious situation in the South before the consolidation of that region under the Normans was totally chaotic. If the Normans wanted to place the lands there under their own administration, they would have to tame and combine a very diverse population that at various times was under the control of several separate political entities.
Ever since Justinian’s short-lived campaign to reclaim the West in the sixth century, the extent of the Byzantine Empire’s jurisdiction in Southern Italy was restricted to the regions of Calabria and Apulia. The Byzantine emperors governed the extreme toe and heel of the Italian boot from their regional capital of Bari. The Duchy of Naples, of which the maritime cities of Amalfi, Sorrento, and Gaeta were more or less a part, was only nominally subject to the rule of the Byzantine Empire. The Lombards had been entrenched in mainland Southern Italy since the late sixth century. By the eleventh century they had divided themselves into the principalities of Capua, Benevento, and Salerno, and these fiercely independent states were almost always at war with each other. A large number of Greeks still inhabited Sicily, even though the island had been under the complete control of Muslim emirs since the ninth century.
This politically and religiously fragmented region was also racked by wars. Sicilian and North African Muslims made periodic raids on the mainland. The Lombard princes squabbled amongst themselves constantly. Both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires viewed Italy as part of their patrimony, so both powers refused to recognize each other’s rights there and the Lombards’ sovereignty. The Patriarch of Constantinople and the Roman Pontiff, moreover, both claimed that Southern Italy fell within the jurisdiction of their respective sees. Constantinople, then, sent occasional expeditions in attempting to regain the Eastern Empire’s traditional holdings from the Muslims and Lombards alike, and the German Emperors too tried their best to make inroads there.[4] All of these groups were to provide opposition to the Normans who sought to carve out holdings for themselves in Sicily and Southern Italy. Furthermore, the Normans themselves opposed each other. Robert Guiscard (“the Wily”), his relatives, and his Norman peers were fortune hunters who typically harbored no loyalties to their fellow countrymen or anyone else except when they could expect personal gain.[5]
The Normans, who were Latin Christians, found that the peoples of Sicily and Southern Italy were just as divided religiously as they were politically. Sizable Jewish communities were scattered throughout the region.[6] The Sicilian emirates, foremost among which was the thriving metropolis of Palermo, were located at the center of the vast Muslim community that dominated the Mediterranean from Spain to the Levant. The Muslim inhabitants of the island were thus tightly connected to the vast world of Islam. Even though their overlords were Muslims, the Greeks in Sicily were not forced to convert and instead managed to maintain their religious identity.[7] The Greek Christians in Sicily and on the mainland adhered to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople, and so practiced their religion according to the Greek tradition.[8] The Lombards on the mainland followed the rites as they were practiced in Latin Christendom and looked to the Popes of Rome for ecclesiastical guidance. Affirming the primacy of the See of St. Peter, the Popes dreamed of forcing the Greek Christians of Sicily and Southern Italy to acknowledge their hegemony and conform to the standards of Latin Christianity.[9]
The Normans would take advantage of this situation, since their conquest of the region could appear along the lines of a war fought on behalf of the Papacy in order to restore Muslim Sicily to the Christian world, and to compel the Greek Christians to recognize the supremacy of the Roman Pontiff. This holy war was completed between 1059 and 1091 by the constitution of Norman-ruled states, namely the Principality of Capua, the Duchy of Apulia, and the County of Sicily. Roger II subsequently merged these into the Kingdom of Sicily in 1130, but in each case the Norman rulers had to receive the titles of legitimate prince, duke, count, or king by Papal investiture, which they obtained through vassalage to the Papacy. Papal appointment to these posts gave the Normans credibility in the eyes of their Norman followers, their subjects, and their opponents. (This would also, however, invoke the resentment of the Eastern and Western Emperors, both of whom believed themselves to be the true lords of Sicily and Southern Italy.) This benefited the Popes because the Normans became their protectors at a time when the Papacy was on increasingly sour terms with their traditional guardians, the “Roman” emperors: the Holy Roman Emperors in Germany wanted to appoint Popes rather than allow canonical Papal elections, and the Byzantines refused to recognize the primacy of the Roman Pontiff over the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. The Normans, meanwhile, were happy to take on the attractive and intensely chivalric image of warriors charged with defending the Vicar of St. Peter. In addition, the Normans would be able to spread their influence throughout the region by taking charge of the process of reforming the Greek churches along the lines of Latin Christendom and according to the directions of the Papacy. They had a justification for appointing their allies as bishops and abbots of the sees and monasteries which held lands and commanded authority there.
The Normans pleased the Papacy by making wise appointments and expanding the limits of Papal jurisdiction by extending the borders of Latin Christendom. In the Normans, the Popes gained powerful allies against the Germans. They needed the protection of the Normans, who promised to secure Papal elections and prevent the German Emperors from installing their own appointees to the See of St. Peter.[10] The Normans throughout all their adventures in the eleventh century proved to be very successful in forging an alliance with the Papacy that was beneficial to both sides.
From Enemies of Christendom to Papally-Sanctioned Rulers
Church sanction made legitimate the Norman conquests of Sicily and Southern Italy. Even before Roger II created the Norman Kingdom of Sicily in 1130, Norman leaders in the South made use of ecclesiastical support. Once the adventurers started in the eleventh century to carve out smaller lordships for themselves in the region, they inevitably sought to affirm their power over their territory and its inhabitants by winning approval and legitimate titles of office from the Church. Without this legitimization, the Normans would have seemed on a par with barbarian invaders, such as their Viking ancestors who raided northern France before King Charles the Simple enfeoffed Rollo with the Duchy of Normandy in 911.[11]
Approval of Norman expeditions in Italy and Sicily was all the more potent because it most often came directly from the Pope himself. This had to do not only with the Papal territories’ geographic proximity to the Normans’ conquests, but also with the fact that the Normans were perceived by the Pope as reclaiming for Latin Christendom lands held previously by the Greek Church and the Muslims. The Pope thus had a vested interest in the Normans’ expansion: when the Normans, who were Latin Christians, stretched their influence over Sicily and Southern Italy, the area over which the Pope and the Western Christian Church could hope to command authority over religious affairs increased.
Furthermore, the Papacy in these years was trying to break free from the control of the German Emperors, who wanted to keep their customary right to appoint Popes; they did not want to comply with the Papal Election Decree issued by the reforming Pope Nicholas II in 1059, which stated that the Cardinal Bishops ought to elect each new Pope.[12] The Popes needed political and military protection from the Western Emperors, and they saw that their best hope lay with the fearsome Normans who had by the mid-eleventh century become the most dominant force in Southern Italy.
It took a long time for the Normans to transform themselves into Papally approved rulers from the professional mercenaries and pirates they were upon their arrival in Italy at the beginning of the eleventh century. The bandits committed many a sacrilege, for not even pilgrims traveling through the peninsula on their way to the Holy Land or the shrine of St. Michael at Monte Gargano were safe. According to Ordericus Vitalis, an English monk who lived in the abbey of St. Evroul in Normandy, the sons of Tancred de Hauteville, who became the most famous of the Normans in the South, at first used to surreptitiously disguise themselves as pilgrims to avoid capture.[13] In fact, the Normans became so hated by the inhabitants of Italy for the way they ruthlessly plundered and pillaged throughout the country that they induced the retaliation of the Pope himself.[14] Leo IX could no longer tolerate their violence against his flock and their encroachment on Papal lands, and so he organized and led an army against them. At the battle of Civitate on 23 June 1053, Leo’s troops, who came from the Holy Roman Empire and the Lombard principalities (even the Byzantine Emperor had promised his assistance, but the Greek army did not arrive in time for the fight), confronted the Norman warriors Humphrey de Hauteville, his younger brother Robert Guiscard, and their brother-in-law Richard of Aversa. The expedition failed, however. The Normans defeated Leo and held him in honorable captivity in Benevento until his death on 19 April 1054.[15] This episode indicates that the Normans’ desire for conquest seems to have outweighed their inclination to defer to the Papacy with regard to secular concerns. That the Normans did not back down from a declaration of Holy War upon them by the Vicar of Saint Peter shows the extent of their ambition, audacity, and unwillingness to yield to the Papacy control over the way they handled their temporal affairs.[16]
The Normans were not entirely irreverent of the Pope, however. They had attempted in earnest to avoid fighting with the Vicar of Christ, and they begged his forgiveness after they defeated his army. According to Amatus (or Aime) of Monte Cassino, a monk who between 1075 and 1080 provides a contemporary account of the Norman conquests in his L’Ystoire de li Normant, the Normans treated the vanquished Pontiff with humility and respect:
. . . li pape avoit paour et li clerc trembloient. Et li Normant vinceor lui donerent sperance, et proierent que securement venist lo pape, liquel meneront o tout sa gent jusque a Bonivent, et lui aministroient continuelment pain et vin et toute choze necessaire . . .
. . . the Pope was afraid and the clerics trembled. And the victorious Normans gave him hope, and offered the Pope safe conduct, and they took him and all his people to Benevento, and they continually gave him bread and wine and everything necessary . . .[17]