Roots of the Reformation XXI: The Ottonian Reformation 2

Otto I with Knights and Nobles

Well, we have strayed a bit from our theme of Reformation and the “Ottonian” Reformation of the Emperors Otto I, II, and III in particular.  The power of Otto I’s daughter, the Abbess Matilida, led us into a digression on women and ecclesiastical authority and then we looked a bit at the issue of Same Sex Marriage due to the passage of a bill legitimating gay marriage in New York State.  So let’s return to the Emperor Otto I and his attempts to reform the Church.

Otto had to carve out the position of Holy Roman Emperor after the title had fallen into disuse in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, but as King of Germany he had great power north of the Alps.  He tried to clean up the papacy which was going through one of its most discreditable periods in history, if not the single most discreditable period, but he did not have great luck.  He had allied himself with the reprobate John XII with the Diploma Ottonium in which he agreed to serve as protector of the Church, but the last thing John—one of the most immoral of popes—wanted was the Emperor interfering in the Church and any curtailment of John’s own power.  When John turned against Otto and his authority, Otto deposed him and saw that Leo VIII was elected in his place.  Church historians today see such a deposition as “invalid,” but at the time it was seen as a legitimate prerogative of the Emperor and the election of Leo was seen as valid. The Romans never accepted Leo—they saw him as a creature of the Emperor and resented the “foreign” interference in the election of their bishop.  John fled to the mountains outside Rome where he gathered an army from among family, friends, and retainers.  Otto was no sooner on his way back to Germany when John’s army attacked Rome and caused Leo to flee.  Otto turned around determined to beat John once and for all, but God called John to judgment before Leo had his chance to do the same.  With John dead, the Roman’s chose Benedict V but Otto was determined for Leo and had Benedict deposed and Leo re-installed as Pope.  Modern Church historians recognize Leo as the legitimate pope from this time (965) on.  Poor Benedict had a somewhat remarkable decline from the papacy.  Leo personally ripped the palium (the sign of his office as pope) frm his shoulders and his papal staff (crozier) was snapped in two over his head and he was reduced to the rank of deacon and sent into exile in Hamburg, Germany—about as far from Rome as you can get.  When Leo died, John XIII became pope—a compromise candidate acceptable to both the Emperor and the Roman Populace, though the first choice of neither.  John and Otto had some success in reforming the Church though no significant reform in Rome itself where the vested political interests of the different Roman noble families would resist change.  John and Otto established a number of new Archbishoprics in Germany—pushing missionary efforts eastward towards what is today the Czech Republic and southern Poland and northward into the Baltic.  John also established several Latin Archbishoprics in southern Italy which still had ties to Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire and where Christianity tended to follow the Greek rather than Roman pattern.  John’s expanding of his authority into the southern reaches of Italy shifted that alliance so that when the break between Rome and Constantinople occurred in 1054, the southern parts of Italy and Sicily remained in the Roman orbit rather than moving with Orthodoxy. 

If Otto’s success in Church reform south of the Alps was not as prolific as he might have wished, he had far greater influence in Germany where his power was stronger.  He was very proactive in the selection of bishops and abbots, choosing men who would be loyal to him (and thus balancing the nobles who resented the diminution of their power) and who saw eye to eye with him on Church matters.  He was particularly successful in pushing missionary activity along the eastern borders of his realm which not only won souls to Christ but subjects to his crown.  Otto had his son Otto II crowned in 961 while he, Otto I, was still alive in order to guarantee the succession.  The nobles having the right to elect the German King, Otto needed to be alive to make sure the election came out the way he wanted.  Otto lived for twelve more years, father and son nominally reigning jointly but the father holding on to power to the very end.  He died in 973 and was buried in the cathedral of Magdeburg, one of the Archiepiscopal Sees he created.   

Roots of the Reformation XXI: Leave it to the ladies: An Abbess' progress

Quedlinburg Abbey

Well, let’s go  back to the Emperor Otto and his determination to reform the Church.  In the first place Otto, like Charlemagne before him, needed the Church if he was going to bring unity to his vastly diverse empire.   It would be religion that could provide a common basis for all the different races and tribes, languages, legal codes, and traditions that comprised the empire he was trying to forge out of his vast holdings.  Otto also needed the Church—or to be specific—the bishops and abbots to be a counterweight to the power of the nobility and attain a true political supremacy and not just the imperial title.  Even so, supremacy did not come easily and Otto had to put down several rebellions by various dukes who were used to independence from any outside authority. 

Otto’s first brush with the papacy was when John XII, a particularly unworthy pope, appealed to Otto for help against Berengar II who was occupying the Papal States.  (Check entries for June 6^th, and June 18^th for more details on John and his alleged crimes ranging from incest to the invoking of demons.)  Otto defeated Berengar and Pope John crowned Otto as emperor.  Together they issued the Diploma Ottonianum—an agreement by which Otto pledged himself to defend the Church.  John was treacherous, however, and not wishing Otto to have control of Italy any more than Berengar, John tried to build an anti-Imperial alliance with the Magyars and the Emperor of Constantinople.  The Emperor returned to Rome and convoked a synod that deposed John and elected Leo VIII. Today the Catholic Church says that this deposing a pope by a synod and at the insistence of the Emperor was invalid and Leo was (initially) an anti-pope, but in that time and for centuries afterwards this was recognized as a legitimate act.  The Emperor claimed—and was accorded—this right to “make and break” popes as part of his oversight of the Church.  The story doesn’t end there, by the way, but we need not go further for our purposes other than to say that Leo may not have been as evil as John XII, but he was no worthy successor of Peter either.  It would be a while before the Emperors were able to get men of good moral character on the papal throne.

That doesn’t mean that Otto wasn’t sincere about Church reform, but the greatest efforts of reform during his reign were actually accomplished by his daughter, Matilda, the Abbess of Quedlinburg.  Quedlinburg was an abbey of canonesses.  A canoness is a woman religious much like a nun (or even, one might say, a type of nun) whose chief purpose is to serve the church to which her community of canonesses is attached by providing for the daily round of liturgical offices.  Just as canons are (usually) religious (in this case, men) whose chief work is to sing the offices in their abbey church, so too canonesses are obliged to sing the liturgical hours for the edification of the faithful.  They differ from monks and monastic nuns who, while the sing the daily offices, have their chief work in lectio divina (contemplation of the Word of God) and manual labor (ora et labora).  That distinction is a bit simplistic but perhaps in a future entry we can explore canons and canonesses more deeply.  I am using an awful lot of parentheses today, bear with me. 

Anyway Quedlinburg was a somewhat exceptional abbey.  It had been established by Otto’s mother who, in her widowhood, served as its first Abbess.  Otto appointed his daughter Matilda as its second Abbess when she was just eleven years old.  When Otto went to Italy to sort out various problems with the papacy, he left his daughter the Abbess Matilda, as regent in Germany.  She subsequently served as regent for her brother, Otto II, when he was occupied in Italy with various issues regarding the papacy.   While still in her teens, she convoked a reforming synod of the German prelates.  She was determined to end many of the abuses that were plaguing the Church at the time—especially the domination of important abbeys and dioceses by the various nobles who interfered with the election of bishops and abbots to put family members or clients in those positions.  This was ironic, of course, as Matilda herself had been appointed Abbess by her father, the Emperor. 

The Abbess of Quedlinburg, like the abbesses of many other imperial abbeys, was exempted from the authority of the local bishop and, indeed, had a virtual diocese of her own having jurisdiction of the many churches that belonged to the Abbey.  It was not unusual in the Middle Ages for abbeys, both of men and women, to be Abbeys Nullius—that is an abbey where the Abbot or Abbess held “ordinary” jurisdiction, i.e. the administrative (though not necessarily the sacramental) jurisdiction of a bishop.  Such Abbots and Abbesses had their own canonical tribunals, appointed pastors, gave letters dimmisorial  permitting ordinations, gave dispensations, granted faculties to the clergy and the various other jurisdictional responsibilities of bishops.  Today Roman authorities claim that one has to be in Holy Orders to exercise jurisdiction in the Church, but history testifies that this was not always the case.  In 1540 the Abbess and canonesses of Quedlinburg embraced the doctrines of the Reformation, becoming Protestant, but they continued leading their lives of prayer and education until suppressed by Napoleon (along with Catholic abbeys) in 1802.

Roots of the Reformation XX: The Ottonian Reformation I

The Empire of Otto I
included modern Germany, Switzerland,
the Netherlands, Belgiumjparts of Austria,
France, and Italy as far south as Naples 

Well, I ended up taking a bit of a vacation from the blog—which I shouldn’t do as every time I skip just two days, the readership starts falling and it takes me a week to rebuild it.  So sorry folks for the interruption.  I do have a life—and even a day job—and this blog takes a considerable amount of time.  But I do enjoy it and what is more it is worth it if it encourages people to think, not a about the past, but about our Catholic Church today and some of the issues confronting it.

We had been talking about the problem of Reform of the Church—and who can reform it when the need for reform begins right at the top.  This has happened in the past with corrupt popes and papal administrations that forgot the gospel and became over invested in their own ambition for power, wealth, and pomp.  We saw how in his day Charlemagne had stepped in and set things right with Leo III (blog entry June 4, 2011).  Well after Leo things only got worse—and we saw what happened with Marozia, Theodora and the pornacracy (entries June 9, June 6, and January 15).   You may remember the Cadaver synod (entry, January 24, 2011).  These are all great stories.  Amazingly, as corrupt as the Borgias were—and as Showtime showed them, they were pretty corrupt—the tenth century papacies were even more wicked.  Who would set the Church back in order?

Charlemagne’s empire with its Renaissance and Reformation did not last.  The Emperor was succeeded by his son, Louis, who in turn was succeeded by his son Lothair.  But Lothair’s claims of Imperial supremacy were disputed by his half-brothers Louis the German and Charles the Bald  The two brothers were too strong for Lothair and after much warfare among the three, Lothair was left with the imperial title but with much of the realm taken by his brothers. Lothair himself, when dying, left the imperial title to his son Louis, but divided his remaining lands among Louis and his two brothers—Lothair II and Charles of Provence.  This was not an easy time for Europe—the Magyars were sweeping in from the east, the Vikings were ravaging the Atlantic and channel coasts and the Saracens were ravaging the Italian possessions of the Empire. There was a need for strong leadership to meet the challenges and there were plenty of strong leaders—but they kept fighting one another rather than the external enemies.   On his deathbed, Louis named his cousin Carloman, the son of his uncle Louis the German, to succeed him, but his other uncle, Charles the Bald—in connivance with Pope John VIII—seized the throne.  John, by the way, is a curious personage himself and was quite effeminate.  Patrick Madrid, an amateur historian (and the operative word here is amateur), suggests his effeminacy may have given rise to the Pope Joan legends.  That is a very complex topic and we will have fun someday soon looking at those stories.  However “light in his buskins” he may have been, John was a good pope; indeed a great pope.  Of course the competition at the time was not much.  John had a problem and that was the Saracen (Muslim) pirates who were raiding papal Italy and so the pope turned to the Carolingians for help just as Leo III had turned to Charlemagne and Pope Zachary had turned to Pepin in their respective political woes in the previous century.  They let him down—they were too divided among themselves for any sort of effective response—and, in the end, the popes had to pay tribute to the Saracens.

Speaking of the Carolingians,  Charles the Bald was succeeded in the Imperial title by his nephew, Charles the Fat.   Meanwhile in each of these successions various grandchildren and great grandchildren of Charlemagne kept dividing lands and squabbling with one another, each trying to expand his own power.  Most were not interested in the imperial title because it had become nothing more than that—a title.  Power was local and the central administration of Charlemagne had completely broken down.  In fact, with the death of Berengar of Friuli in 924 the throne and title themselves were empty and remained so for thirty-eight years.  All this at a time when Europe needed strong leadership—and when the Church needed a protector not only against Vikings and Saracens, but against some of the most unworthy men every to sit on the throne of Peter.   This was a time when popes obtained their office by cash, by murder and by adultery.  

In 962 the great-great-great-great-grandson of Charlemagne, through a predominately feminine line, took the throne and revived the empire.   His name was Otto.  He had become King of East Francia in 936, that part of Charlemagne’s empire that went to Louis the German and is what we call today Germany (West Francia, or West Frankreich being France, also known at this period as Neustria).  Otto arranged for his coronation at Charlemagne’s capital of Aachen and in Charlemagne’s cathedral where Charlemagne’s bones lie.  Now, just in case you’re missing this—he is trying from the beginning to establish a claim to Charlemagne’s title and realm. His intention is to refound Charlemagne’s “Roman Empire.”

In the early 960’s, the papal possessions in Italy—the Papal States—were overrun and conquered by Berengar II, the grandson of Berengar of Friuli who had been the last emperor, dying in 924.  Berengar II was a thug.  The Pope—John XII—was worse.  Nevertheless, when John asked the help of Otto in regaining his temporal possessions, Otto came down into Italy, defeated Berengar, restored the Pope to power.  The Pope, for his part, then crowned Otto as Emperor, restoring the lapsed imperium.  Pope and Emperor then established the Diploma Ottonianum, a treaty in which Otto and his successors would “protect” the papacy. 

This brings us back to the thorny issue of papal versus imperial power.  Charlemagne saw himself having supreme authority over the Church in the model that the Byzantine Emperors had exercised from the time of Justinian, and in fact from Constantine’s control over the Church.  Certainly Constantine met nothing but gratitude from Popes Miltiades and Sylvester.   Justinian, for his part, kept papal authority dependent on the Imperial exarch in Italy.  This was and would be a problem for Eastern (later specifically Orthodox) Christianity where the Emperors—first the Greek Emperor at Constantinople and later the Russian Emperors at Moscow and Saint Petersburg—firmly kept the Church under the imperial thumb and the Church thanked them for that.  So deeply ingrained was the Caesropapism in Orthodoxy that centuries later, even under the worst years of Communist oppression and persecution, the Russian Church was totally compliant with the Soviet government.  But, to be fair, that was its strategy for survival and in so far as it was a survival strategy, it worked. 

The Western Emperors saw their authority in the same way and for several centuries most popes agreed.  We saw (see blog entry of May 12, 2011) that Charlemagne altered the Creed of Nicea and, in direct contradiction to Leo III, insisted that this revised Creed be used in the liturgy)   In 824, Louis the Pious, his son and co-emperor, Lothair, and Pope Eugene II promulgated the Constitutio Romana, a protocol by which the Popes recognized, among other things, that the authority of the Emperor was supreme.  The Popes, for their part, were in a bind.  They needed the military protection from a series of foes—Lombards, Magyars, Saracens, and a host of Italian warrior-counts—to protect Rome and the papal territories.  Secondly they, like everyone else in Europe, were used to thinking of the Emperor as being supreme, indeed as being the Vicar of Christ which was a title the emperors (not the popes) had appropriated to themselves.  Finally, the popes had very little real power.  Bishops were elected locally, admittedly often under some royal or noble pressure.  Local Bishops, not popes, made decisions regarding liturgy and cult as well as Church discipline.  Papal authority was exercised more by encouragement and exhortation than by decree.  There was not much point into getting into “turf warfare” with the Emperor.  That would change, but for the time being, the popes were willing to let the issue slide.  And it was just as well—the Church needed the emperors to clean up a papacy that had become hopelessly corrupt.  I did a blog entry on what historians call The Pornacracy (cf. January 15 2011) which means the Rule (of the Church) by whores and refers to a period.  While you’re looking at that check out the January 24 2011 entry which is about the Cadaver Synod.  This might give you a picture of just how mad things were in the Church in the tenth century.     I think tomorrow we will talk about John XII—the pope who asks Otto for help.  It will show you why we need some outside authority to clean up the mess in Rome.  Just remember the old Italian axiom—il pesce puzza dalla testa—the fish rots from the head: it was coined about the papacy. 

Roots of the Reformation XVIII: The Papacy of Whores

The Pope and his curia
medieval manuscript, Krakow

The papacy was in terrible decline from the 9^th century onwards –result of its immense wealth and the contentiousness to control it that made the papacy a pawn of several great Roman families that wanted to manipulate the wealth and power attached to the papacy for their own uses.  But this totally wiped out the moral credibility of the papacy and, at this stage of development of the doctrine of papal power, loss of moral credibility meant loss of power. 

The main power brokers for a long time were the family of Counts of Tusculum.  Two of the women of this family—Marozia and her mother, Theodora—prostituted themselves to different popes and schemed to put their sons and grandsons on the throne of Peter.  Marozia, the younger of the two women, while still only 15 was the mistress of Pope Sergius III.  Sergius seems to have been rather young  himself at the time of his being made pope, and he owed the papal office to Theophylact, the Count of Tusculum and father of Marozia.  Theophylact was the vestarius (treasurer) to the popes—a position which gave him access to the papal wealth.  There was a lot of confusion in the papacy at this time.  Leo V had been forcibly dethroned and imprisoned to be succeeded by Christopher.  Modern Church historians consider Christopher an anti-pope—but as recently as the early twentieth century he had been included on the list of legitimate popes and his picture is among the papal mosaics stretching from Peter to John Paul II decorating the basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.   In any event, his reign was quite short as after four months Sergius III—the “boyfriend” of Marozia—drove him from office and had him imprisoned in the Castle Sant’Angelo.  Both Leo and Christopher were strangled in Prison—some sources claiming that Christopher had Leo strangled and Sergius had Christopher so dispatched; others saying that Sergius ordered the murder of both in order to remove any counter-claims to his own papacy.  So you’ve got a fellow who was made pope by his girl-friend’s father and who has murdered—or ordered murdered—his predecessor(s).  We haven’t even begun yet.  In 910 Marozia and Pope Sergius have a son who, twenty years later, will himself become pope as John XI.  Sergius was long dead, of course, but Marozia was still around and engineered the election.  Marozia had a long string of lovers—some sources say including one or more of the intervening popes—and several husbands.  One of the husbands—Guy of Tuscany—attacked Rome where he and Marozia murdred pope John X and installed a succession of popes—Leo VI, Stephen VII, and her son by Sergius, John XI—who were no more than her puppets.  When Guy died, Marozia persuaded his brother, Hugh of Arles, to abandon his wife and marry her.  Alberic II, Marozia’s  son by her first husband, Alberic of Spoleto, had enough of her, however, and led a rebellion, putting both her and his half-brother, Pope John XI, in prison where they were murdered.  Lest you think that Alberic II was a good guy protecting the Church from all these evil people—he married his stepsister and then nominated his son to be pope.  The son, at age 17, became pope in 955 as John XII.  here is what was written of him:

Then, rising up, the cardinal priest Peter testified that he himself had seen John XII celebrate Mass without taking communion. John, bishop of Narni, and John, a cardinal deacon, professed that they themselves saw that a deacon had been ordained in a horse stable, but were unsure of the time. Benedict, cardinal deacon, with other co-deacons and priests, said they knew that he had been paid for ordaining bishops, specifically that he had ordained a ten-year-old bishop in the city of Todi... They testified about his adultery, which they did not see with their own eyes, but nonetheless knew with certainty: he had fornicated with the widow of Rainier, with Stephana his father's concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece, and he made the sacred palace into a whorehouse. They said that he had gone hunting publicly; that he had blinded his confessor Benedict, and thereafter Benedict had died; that he had killed John, cardinal subdeacon, after castrating him; and that he had set fires, girded on a sword, and put on a helmet and cuirass. All, clerics as well as laymen, declared that he had toasted to the devil with wine. They said when playing at dice, he invoked Jupiter, Venus and other demons. They even said he did not celebrate Matins and the canonical hours nor did he make the sign of the cross.

Whoa boy, ya think ya seen it all.  But wait—what happened to Theodora, the mama bear in this adorable family of adulterous murderers.  (And why didn’t Sister even tell us about this in sixth-grade history?)   Oh, by the way, before I go further: Pope John XII is a great, great, great, great, great, great, grandson of Charlemagne—through his mother.  Not that that is relevant.  It isn’t.  Just a little fact of history.  Theodora was not idle through all this.  She was a senetrix (a lady Senator) of Rome—more a title in those days than an actual position.    But Lady Senators were most rare and in fact it was a title that legitimized her immense political power.   Theodora was mistress to John X whom Marozia and Guy of Tuscany had killed.  Was Marozia jealous of her mother’s power?  Did that inspire the murder?  Who knows, it is all a mess.

Some modern historians claim that the various sources (Luitprand of Cremona, the Liber Pontificalis, and other contemporary histories)  portray Theodora and Marozia harshly, even falsely, because they were jealous of females exercising the political power that these women managed to wield.   That could—to a certain extent—be true; all historians have bias and there are no true “facts” in history.  The very tone of voice prejudices the student to the teacher’s point of view.  Nonetheless, these ladies and the accompanying popes are no candidates for canonization.  This period, known by the pejorative but wonderful appellation: the Pornacracy (the Rule of Whores), marks the most morally deprived period on the history of the popes.  Trust me when I say that this entry has only skimmed over the murders, adulteries, sodomies, bribes, simonies, blasphemies, and only the devil knows what else that has adorned the papal throne.  While great saints have sat in Peter’s chair, its history is not one of holiness.  But the question arises—and it is a question not only for the tenth century—who can reform the papacy when it needs reform?  What happens when the man on Peter’s throne is a depraved whoremaster?  Or, even more serious, what happens when the man on Peter’s throne is only a puppet for some figure, male or female, in the shadows who has control of the Church?  Don’t say it can’t happen—it has and more than once.   And it may have happened much more recently than you might think.  Hmmm.  Very recently.  The man in the window may not be the man with the power.