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On the meeting of Henry IV and Pope Gregory at Canossa (1077):
"Late that January, and accompanied by only a few companions, he began the ascent of yet another upland road. Ahead of him, jagged like the spume of great waves frozen to ice by the cold of that terrible winter, there stretched the frontier of the Apennines. A bare six miles from the plain he had left behind him, but many hours twisting and turning, Henry arrived at last before a valley, gouged out, it seemed, from the wild mountainscape, and spanned by a single ridge. Beyond it, surmounting a crag so sheer and desolate that it appeared utterly impregnable, the king could see the ramparts of the bolt hole where the Pope had taken refuge. The name of the fortress: Canossa.
On Henry pressed, into the castle's shadow. As he did so, the outer gates swung open to admit him, and then, halfway up the rock, the gates of a second wall. It would have been evident enough, even to the suspicious sentries, that their visitor intended no harm, nor presented any conceivable threat. "Barefoot, and clad in wool, he had cast aside all the splendour proper to a king." Although Henry was proud and combustible by nature, his head on this occasion was bowed. Tears streamed down his face. Humbly, joining a crowd of other penitents, he took up position before the gates of the castle's innermost wall. There the Caesar waited, the deputy of Christ, shivering in the snow. Nor, in all that time, did he neglect to continue with his lamentations - "until," as the watching Gregory put it, "he had provoked all who were there or who had been brought news of what was happening to such great mercy, and such pitying compassion, that they began to intercede for him with prayers and tears of their own." A truly awesome show. Ultimately, not even the stern and indomitable Pope himself was proof against it.
By the morning of Saturday 28 January, the third day of the royal penance, Gregory had seen enough. He ordered the inner set of gates unbarred at last. Negotiations were opened and soon concluded. Pope and king, for the first time, perhaps, since Henry had been a small child, met each other face to face. The pinch-faced penitent was absolved with a papal kiss. And so was set the seal on an episode as fateful as any in Europe's history.
Like the crossing of the Rubicon, like the storming of the Bastille, the events at Canossa had served to crystallise a truly epochal crisis. Far more had been at stake than merely the egos of two domineering men. The Pope, locked into a desperate power struggle though he certainly was, had ambitions as well that were breathtakingly global in their scope. His goal? Nothing less than to establish "the right order in the world." What had once, back in the time of Gelasius, appeared merely a pipe dream was now, during Gregory's papacy, transformed into a manifesto. By its terms, the whole of Christendom, from its summit to its meanest village, was to be divided into two. One realm for the spiritual, one for the secular. No longer were kings to be permitted to poke their noses into the business of the Church. It was a plan of action as incendiary as it was sweeping: for it required a full-out assault upon presumptions that were ultimately millennia old.
However, even had Gregory appreciated the full scale of his task, he would surely not have shrunk from it. What lay at stake, so he believed, was the very future of mankind: for unless the Church were kept sacrosanct, what hope for a sinful world? No wonder, then, presented with the opportunity, that the Pope had dared to make an example of his most formidable opponent. "The King of Rome, rather than being honored as a universal monarch, had been treated instead as merely a human being - a creature molded out of clay."
Contemporaries, struggling to make sense of the whole extraordinary business, perfectly appreciated that they were living through a convulsion in the affairs of the Christian people that had no precedent, nor even any parallel. "Our whole Roman world was shaken." What then, could this earthquake betoken, many wondered, if not the end of days. That the affairs of men were drawing to a close, and the earth itself growing decrepit, had long been a widespread presumption. As the years slipped by, however, and the world did not end, so people found themselves obliged to grope about for different explanations. A formidable task indeed. The three decades that preceded the showdown at Canossa, and the four that followed it, were, in the judgment of one celebrated medievalist, a period when the ideals of Christendom, its forms of government and even its very social and economic fabric "changed in almost every respect." Here, argued Sir Richard Southern, was the true making of the West. "The expansion of Europe had begun in earnest. That all this should have happened in so short a time is the most remarkable fact in medieval history."
And, if remarkable to us, than how much more so to those who actually lived through it. We in the twenty-first century are habituated to the notion of progress: the faith that human society, rather than inevitably decaying, can be improved. The men and women of the eleventh century were not. Gregory, by presuming to challenge Henry IV, and the fabulously ancient nimbus of tradition that hedged emperors and empires about, was the harbinger of something awesome. He and his supporters might not have realized it - but they were introducing to the West its first experience of revolution.
It was a claim that many of those who subsequently set Europe to shake would no doubt have viewed as preposterous. To Martin Luther, the one-time monk who saw it as his lifetime's mission to reverse everything that Gregory had stood for, the great Pope appeared a literally infernal figure: "Hollenbrand," or "Hellfire." In the wake of the Enlightenment too, as dreams of building a new Jerusalem took on an ever more secular hue, and world revolution was consciously enshrined as an ideal, so it appeared to many enthusiasts for change that there existed no greater roadblock to their progress than the Roman Catholic Church.
Not that one necessarily had to be a radical, or even a liberal, to believe the same. "We shall not go to Canossa!" So fulminated that iron chancellor of a reborn German Empire, Prince Bismark, in 1872, as he gave a pledge to the Reichstag that he would never permit the papacy to stand in the way of Germany's forward march to modernity. This was to cast Gregory as the very archetype of reaction: a characterization that many Catholic scholars, albeit from a diametrically opposed perspective, would not have disputed. They too, like the Church's enemies, had a stake in downplaying the magnitude of what Canossa had represented. After all, if the papacy were to be regarded as the guardian of unchanging verities and traditions, then how could it possibly have presided over a rupture in the affairs of Europe no less momentous than the Reformation or the French Revolution?
Gregory, according to the conventional Catholic perspective, was a man who had brought nothing new into the world, but rather had laboured to restore the Church to its primal and pristine state. Since this was precisely what Gregory himself had always proclaimed to be doing, evidence for this thesis was not hard to find. But it was misleading, even so. In truth, there existed no precedent for the upheaval exemplified by Canossa - neither in the history of the Roman Church, nor in that of any other culture. The consequences could hardly have been more fateful. Western Europe, which for so long had languished in the shadow of vastly more sophisticated civilisations, and of its own ancient and vanished past, was set at last upon a course that was to prove irrevocably its own.
It was Gregory, at Canossa, who stood as godfather to the future.
Ever since the West first rose to a position of global dominance, the origins of its exceptionalism have been fiercely debated. Conventionally, they have been located in the Renaissance, or the Reformation, or the Enlightenment: moments in history that all consciously defined themselves in opposition to the backwardness and barbarism of the so-called "Middle Age." The phrase, however, can be a treacherous one. Use it too instinctively, and something fundamental - and distinctive - about the arc of European history risks being obscured. Far from there having been two decisive breaks in the evolution of the West, as talk of "the Middle Ages" implies, there was in reality only one - and that a cataclysm without parallel in the annals of Eurasia's other major cultures. Over the course of a millennium, the civilisation of classical antiquity had succeeded in evolving to a pinnacle of extraordinary sophistication: and yet its collapse in western Europe, when it came, was almost total. The social and economic fabric of the Roman Empire unravelled so completely that its harbors were stilled, its foundries silenced, its great cities emptied, and a thousand years of history revealed to have led only to a dead end. Not all the pretensions of a Henry IV could truly serve to alter that. Time could not be set in reverse. There had never been any real prospect of reconstituting what had imploded - of restoring what had been lost.
Yet still, long after the fall of Rome, a conviction that the only alternative to barbarism was the rule of a global emperor kept a tenacious hold on the imaginings of the Christian people. And not on those of the Christian people alone. From china to the Mediterranean, the citizens of great empires continued to do precisely as the ancient Roman shad done, and see in the rule of an emperor the only conceivable image of the perfection of heaven. What other order, after all, could there possibly be? Only in the far western promontory of Eurasia, where there was nothing of an empire left but ghosts and spatch-cocked imitations, was this question asked with any seriousness - and even then only after the passage of many centuries. Hence the full world-shaking impact of the events associated with Canossa. Changes had been set in train that would ultimately reach far beyond the bounds of western Europe: changes that are with us still.
To be sure, Gregory today may not enjoy the fame of a Luther, a Lenin, a Mao - but that reflects not his failure but rather the sheer scale of his achievement. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered: the fate of those that succeed is to end up being taken for granted. Gregory himself did not live to witness his ultimate victory - but the cause for which he fought was destined to establish itself as perhaps the defining characteristic of western civilisation. That the world can be divided into church and state, and that these twin realms should exist distinct from each other: here are presumptions that the eleventh century made "fundamental to European society and culture, for the first time and permanently." What had been previously an ideal would end up a given.
No wonder, then, as an eminent historian of this "first European revolution" has pointed out, that "it is not easy for Europe's children to remember that it might have been otherwise." Even the recent influx into Western countries of sizable populations from non-Christian cultures has barely served to jog the memory. Of Islam, for instance, it is often said that it has never had a Reformation - but more to the point might be to say that it has never had a Canossa. Certainly, to a pious Muslim, the notion that the political and religious spheres can be separated is a shocking one - as it was to many of Gregory's opponents.
Not that it had ever remotely been Gregory's own intention to banish God from an entire dimension of human affairs: but revolutions will invariably have unintended consequences. Even as the Church, from the second half of the eleventh century onwards, set about asserting its independence from outside interference by establishing its own laws, bureaucracy and income, so kings, in response, were prompted to do the same. "The heavens are the Lord's heavens - nbut the earth He has given to the sons of men." So Henry IV's son pronounced, answering a priest who had urged him not to hang a count under the walls of his own castle, for fear of provoking God's wrath. It was in a similar spirit that the foundations for the modern Western state were laid, foundations largely bled of any religious dimension. A piquant irony: that the very concept of a secular society should ultimately have been due to the papacy. Voltaire and the First Amendment, multiculturalism and gay weddings: all have served as waymarks on the road from Canossa." (Preface xviii - xxii)
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