A Criminal History of Mankind (46 page)

And this, we can see, is the basic theme of history, its most constant pattern. Civilisation was the outcome of man’s religious urge - for the first cities grew up around temples. Religion has continued to be perhaps the most dominant theme in human history. Yet practically every major religious movement has changed its nature as its followers have fought amongst themselves. Why could those early city-dwellers not have lived in peace and prosperity, tilling the ground and worshipping their gods? They had what all animals crave most - security. But sooner or later, some minor squabble would blow up between small groups of rival citizens, and then all their fellow citizens would feel outraged to hear about the affront; every ego would rise up on its hind legs and cry out for revenge. (Rabelais satirises it in
Gargantua
when a war flares up over a quarrel between shepherds and bakers about cakes.) And the human ability for sympathy and communication instantly becomes a disadvantage as everyone feels that he himself has personally received the insult. Nothing heals more slowly or festers more persistently than a bruised ego. New resentments supplement the old ones, and soon both sides are convinced that the only answer lies in the total humiliation of the other.

The Assassins furnish a typical example, but the history of Christianity could offer a thousand more. As soon as Pépin gave the popes a basis of power by making them a present of the first Papal States, the popes became as violent and predatory as any emperor. Two and a half centuries later, the German emperor Otto the Great set out to create the Holy Roman Empire and pope and emperor instantly came into head-on collision; the pope lost, and was deposed by Otto, who replaced him with his own man. The struggle with the popes was continued by Otto’s successors. A century later, a pope named Hildebrand - Gregory VII - came to the throne with the conviction that the pope should be the temporal as well as the spiritual head of Christendom, and that he ought to choose emperors rather than vice versa. He could, said Gregory, interfere as he liked with the laws of any Catholic country, and his papal decrees should automatically overrule any decree of king or emperor. He sent messengers to all the European courts informing the kings and emperors of these new rules. Henry IV of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor, was outraged by this presumption. He called a synod of German bishops at Worms and informed Gregory that he had been deposed. Whereupon Gregory used the most formidable weapon in his armory: excommunication. In the Middle Ages, it was the most terrifying penalty the Church could impose. For the medieval intellect was curiously static (this was before the crusades); every Christian accepted without reservation that the wicked would suffer an eternity of horrible torments in hell, and also that if a man sinned, only the Church could remove the burden of sin and guarantee that he would still get to heaven. This was not regarded as philosophy or speculation or religion, but simply as fact, like the wetness of water. And since priests spent a great deal of time telling their congregations about the unpleasantness of hell, most people were terrified of the idea, and duly grateful to the Church for guaranteeing that they would avoid it. To be governed by an excommunicated king was almost the equivalent of being governed by the devil. The nobles began to plan Henry’s overthrow. He had no alternative than to climb down, swallow his pride and humbly beg the pope’s forgiveness. Gregory was spending January in a castle at Canossa, near Parma. Henry went there in the garb of a pilgrim, barefoot, to beg forgiveness. The pope kept him waiting in the snow for three days before he let him in and granted absolution. To add insult to injury, the pope gave his support to a Swabian duke who had revolted against Henry. This was too much. Henry fought the duke and killed him, then marched to Rome with an army; Gregory was forced to flee to Salerno, where he died in exile. Henry replaced him with his own candidate.

All this violence did no one any good. When Henry marched into Italy, Gregory called upon the aid of a Norman ally - the adventurer Robert Guiscard, who was in the process of freeing Sicily from the Arabs. Guiscard marched on Rome with a huge army which included Saracens, and when the Romans rose in an anti-papal riot, Guiscard’s army sacked Rome again (1084), with the usual bloodshed, rape and looting: a large part of the city was burned. As a consequence, Gregory became so hated that he was forced into exile.

The violent and unpleasant consequences of the quarrel reverberated on for another century. The popes were convinced that their spiritual power ought to involve earthly dominion; the German emperors thought - rightly - that earthly dominion was their affair. The quarrel became fiercer still under the emperors of the Hohenstaufen family (the ‘Staufer emperors’) - Frederick I (known as Barbarossa, or Redbeard) tried to add Italy to his empire, and might have succeeded if he had not been drowned on the third crusade with King Richard of England. His grandson Frederick II -known as
stupor mundi
(wonder of the world) because he was one of the greatest scholars of his day - tried even harder to seize the pope’s power for himself, and was twice excommunicated as well as being denounced as the Antichrist. But to the pope’s delight, he died of a sudden fever in 1250; to the pope’s even greater delight, his son Conrad died when he was invading Italy. The pope now presented Sicily to the Frenchman Charles of Anjou. The Sicilians had not much liked the ‘Staufer emperors’, but they disliked the French even more and rebelled in favour of a Staufer descendant. Charles won the fight. A boy called Conradin, grandson of
stupor mundi
, tried to regain his inheritance but was also defeated; he was publicly beheaded - an act that shocked the whole of Europe. And rebels in Sicily were crushed with particular violence, an act that made them loathe the French with a deep and unquenchable hatred.

The bloody climax erupted on Easter Monday 1282, in Palermo, Sicily. The Sicilians were in a rebellious mood; the king’s men were touring the island and seizing all stores of grain to supply an expedition against Constantinople. In front of the Church of the Holy Spirit, people were waiting to attend Vespers. Some French officials wandered into the square; they had been drinking and were in a merry mood. The crowd glared at them but did nothing. Then a sergeant named Drouet threw the match into the powder keg by grabbing a pretty married woman and trying to take liberties. Her enraged husband snatched out his knife and stabbed Drouet to death. The other Frenchmen drew their swords; the Sicilians drew their daggers, and within minutes, all the French were dead. The Sicilians realised that this would mean more executions. So they rushed through Palermo shouting ‘Death to the French’. Frenchmen were killed on the streets; then the Sicilians poured into inns frequented by the French. Women and children were killed too; the Sicilians were in a mood in which they wanted to exterminate every Frenchman in the world. They even broke into the monasteries and dragged out all foreign friars; they were ordered to pronounce ‘
ciciri
’, a word the French found difficult; anyone who stumbled or stuttered was slain. The French soldiers were easy to kill because most of them had been out drinking all day. Two thousand men, women and children were killed that night. Ironically, the French flag was replaced by the German eagle - the Sicilians had hated the Germans when they were rulers. The governor escaped to a nearby castle, but as he was parleying about surrender someone shot him dead with an arrow and the rest were massacred. Palermo declared itself a Commune. So did other towns as their citizens heard of the massacre and rose up against their French occupiers. Charles of Anjou was forced to call off his expedition against Constantinople. The citizens of Messina - descendants of those ancient pirates who had slit the throats of all the men and married the women sixteen centuries earlier - beat off all the French attempts to repossess the island and eventually offered the throne to a Spaniard who was related by marriage to the Staufer emperors. So a hundred-year-old squabble came to an uneasy resolution.

But if we look for a moment past the endless complications of loyalties and territorial claims and go straight to the heart of the matter, we can see that this was not really an ideological struggle between spiritual authority and the ambition of emperors. The underlying reality of the quarrel is also the underlying reality of the rise and fall of the assassins: grimly inflated egos convinced that they are arguing about spiritual issues or matters of principle when they are simply dominated by their own emotions.

As we have seen, the Christians were fully aware of this problem. They had always recognised the dangers of the ego, with its sins of pride and self-righteous resentment. From the time of Constantine, there had been movements within the Church that warned about the dangers of worldly power and tried to show by example how Christians ought to live: the hermits and desert fathers, the whole early monastic movement and dozens of solitary rebels - both women and men - who were later recognised as saints. In the tenth century, the papacy reached its lowest point so far - a period of fifty years that is known as the ‘pornocracy’; the office was simply bought and sold. Pope Sergius III had a mistress called Marozia, who made sure her bastard son became Pope John XI; both she and the pope were thrown into jail by another of her bastards; but in due course, her grandson became Pope John XII. (He was the one who asked Otto the Great for help, then promptly betrayed him and was deposed.) All this brought about a strong reaction. In France, a new monastic order was founded at the Abbey of Cluny that called for new standards of spirituality. But it also recognised that a monk’s duty was not simply to plant potatoes and make cider; he ought to devote himself to prayer and study - even study of the pagan writers - and to bringing Christian ideals to the common people. So just at the time that the election of popes fell into the hands of the German emperors, a great new movement of religious reform spread all over Europe.

And here we encounter the real absurdity. When the abbots of Cluny insisted that a monk should devote himself to prayer, meditation and study, they had recognised instinctively that human evolution is a matter of inner-development. This is the only true answer to the murderous violence of the power-hungry ego. When a man is totally absorbed in intellectual - or spiritual - discovery, the ego relaxes and then falls asleep.

Yet the Church was totally opposed to intellectual discovery. Convinced that man is a wicked sinner whose only salvation lies in the grace of God, the popes and bishops denounced intellectual speculation as a waste of time. It could only make a man proud of his own abilities and endanger his eternal salvation. It was not that the Church was afraid of losing its hold on the human mind. It genuinely believed that the message of Jesus - as interpreted by St Paul - was the total, self-sufficient answer to the riddle of human existence. Humankind was miserable because Adam had sinned, and the result was death and misery. But the Son of God had died on the cross to redeem mankind from original sin. The Church was an organisation established by Jesus to make sure that all men had a chance of salvation, of getting to heaven when they died. That was all that mattered. Book-learning was quite irrelevant. Philosophy and natural philosophy (as they called science) were both a waste of time. In fact, they encouraged man to think that he had the power to make up his own mind on questions of morality, and so endangered his soul. Leaders like Hildebrand believed sincerely and deeply that all men were ignorant children and that they were the spiritual fathers of mankind.

So the Church gave with one hand and took away with the other. Man must try to live the ‘inner life’, but he must on no account try to think for himself. The result was that the human intellect marked time for a thousand years. When the Church rediscovered the works of Aristotle - through the Arabs - in the eleventh century, he was seized upon with delight and voted a kind of honorary Christian. The reason was simply that he had apparently explained practically everything, from physics to morality, and the existence of his works gave no one any excuse for indulging in speculative thinking. The answer to every possible question could now be found either in the Bible or Aristotle. Aristotle explained the physical world; the Bible explained the spiritual world. What more was there to know? And if monkish philosophers - such as Peter Abelard - still felt the need to exercise their minds, they could apply themselves to explaining how the two worlds fitted together, and how God revealed His eternal goodness by making everything exactly as it is and not otherwise.

So the medieval world was a strangely static place, rather like a waxworks. People stayed in the place where they were born - unless they happened to be peddlers - because there was no reason to go anywhere else. Besides, travel was very difficult because there was almost no money in circulation. Only the great lords handled gold - and even they only occasionally. In his own castle he had no need for gold; his tenants brought him the produce he needed, and the beef came from his own herds. The common people made their own clothes, ate their own eggs and cabbages, drank their own milk and cider. It was the crusades that changed all that. If a crusader was making his way to the Holy Land, he needed gold - he could hardly take a dozen cartloads of cabbages and eggs to pay his way.

Italy, of course, had gold, for - apart from Byzantium - it war the most cosmopolitan place in the world. The pope owned vast estates - far too vast for his tenants to pay him in produce; he had to be paid in gold. So when the crusaders made their way through Italy, they took advantage of the Italian banking system. A bank (or bane) was a table, behind which sat a moneylender prepared to give gold (or, as the system became more sophisticated, letters of credit) in exchange for mortgages or documents that promised repayment with interest. Some crusaders paid for their passage by placing their soldiers and horses at the disposal of the banker. In the fourth crusade, the crusaders first of all stormed the city of Zara, an Adriatic port, and returned it to the Venetians, then went on and stormed Constantinople, sacked the city and gave half the spoils to Venice. The cities of Italy that lay on the route of the crusaders became very rich during the nine crusades. But their development was not entirely to the advantage of the popes. For riches bring luxury and leisure - as in ancient Rome - and leisure brings a need for excitement, for travel, for new ideas. The ‘wonder of the world’, Emperor Frederick II, had spent his childhood and youth in Sicily acquiring his taste for learning and freethinking in that island where Arabs and Christians had lived in harmony for two centuries. This is why he was not unduly perturbed when the pope excommunicated him; he was relatively certain that the Church is not essential to salvation - for if it is, then all those highly intelligent Muslims are damned, and that cannot be true.