The Church and the Empire | Page 8

in the presence of a strong Emperor or an unscrupulous faction
even these elaborate provisions Papacy might be useless. The Papacy
needed a champion in the flesh, who should have nothing to gain and
everything to lose by attempting to become its master. Such a protector
was ready to hand in the Normans, who, recently settled in Southern
Italy, felt themselves insecure in the title by which they held their
possessions. Southern Italy was divided between the three Lombard
duchies of Benevento, Capua and Salerno, and the districts of Calabria
and Apulia, which acknowledged the Viceroy or Katapan of the Eastern
Emperor in his seat at Bari. The Saracens, only recently expelled from
the mainland, still held Sicily. Norman pilgrims returning from
Palestine became, at the instigation of local factions, Norman
adventurers, and their leaders obtaining lands from the local Princes in
return for help, sought confirmation of their title from some legitimate
authority. The Western Empire had never claimed these lands, but none
the less Conrad II and Henry III, in return for the acceptance of their
suzerainty, acknowledged the titles which the Norman leaders had
already gained from Greek or Lombard. Rome was likely to be their
next victim, and Leo IX took the opportunity of a dispute over the city
of Benevento to try conclusions with them. A humiliating defeat was
followed by a mock submission of the conqueror. The danger was in no
sense removed. Pope Stephen's schemes for driving them out of Italy
were cut short by his death, and meanwhile the Norman power
increased. Thus there could be no question of expulsion, nor could the
Papacy risk a repetition of the humiliation of Leo IX. It was Hildebrand
who conceived the idea of turning a dangerous neighbour into a friend
and protector. A meeting was arranged at Melfi between Pope Nicholas
and the Norman princes, and there, while on the one side canons were
issued against clerical marriage, which was rife in the south of Italy, on
the other side Robert Guiscard, the Norman leader, recognised the Pope
as his suzerain, and obtained in return the title of Duke of Apulia and
Calabria and of Sicily when he should have conquered it. Pope Leo's
agreement, six years before, had been made by a defeated and
humiliated ecclesiastic with a band of unscrupulous adventurers. Pope
Nicholas was dealing with an actual ruler who merely sought legitimate
recognition of his title from any whose hostility would make his hold
precarious. Thus resting on the shadowy basis of the donation of

Constantine the Pope substituted himself for the Emperor, whether of
West or of East, over the whole of Southern Italy. Truly the movement
for the emancipation of the Church from the State was already shaping
itself into an attempt at the formation of a rival power.
[Sidenote: Alexander II (1061-73) and Milan.]
The value of this new alliance to the Papacy was put to the test almost
immediately. On the death of Pope Nicholas (1061) the papal and
imperial parties proceeded to measure their strength against each other.
The reformers, acting under the leadership of Hildebrand, chose as his
successor a noble Milanese, Anselm of Baggio, Bishop of Lucca, who
now became Alexander II. He was elected in accordance with the
provisions of the recent Lateran decree, and no imperial ratification was
asked. On the purely ecclesiastical side this choice was a strong
manifesto against clerical marriage. The city of Milan as the capital of
the Lombard kingdom of Italy had for many centuries held itself in
rivalry with Rome. Moreover, it was the stronghold of an aristocratic
and a married clergy, which based its practice on a supposed privilege
granted by its Apostle St. Ambrose. But this produced a reforming
democracy which, perhaps from the quarter whence it gained its chief
support, was contemptuously named by its opponents the Patarins or
Rag-pickers. The first leader of this democratic party had been Anselm
of Baggio. Nicholas II sent thither the fanatical Peter Damiani as papal
legate, and a fierce struggle ended in the abject submission of the
Archbishop of Milan, who attended a synod at Rome and promised
obedience to the Pope.
[Sidenote: German opposition.]
The weak point in the decree of Nicholas II had been that the German
clergy were not represented at the Council which issued it, and it was
construed in Germany as a manifest attempt of the reforming party to
secure the Papacy for Italy as against the German influence maintained
by Henry III. The Roman nobles also had seen in the decree the design
of excluding them from any share in the election. It was only by the
introduction of Norman troops into Rome that the new Pope could be
installed at the Lateran. A few weeks later a synod met at