The first and most immediate obsession over those two decades had been to remove permanently the right of the Holy Roman Emperor to have any say in the election of the Pope, and that had been promulgated, if not universally accepted, by Pope Alexander’s predecessor. Nicholas, in his declaration In nomine Domini, had laid out the rule which abrogated to the Church itself the right to decide on how a pontiff should be elected and who he should be. No more should envoys from the Eternal City crawl to Bamberg for the name of an appointee or be held to ransom by the aristocracy of Rome; the decision would be made by those qualified to judge the quality of the candidates: the cardinals, the senior bishops and the abbots of the great monasteries.
A second abiding desire was to bring back into the fold of the papacy the Eastern Church and to persuade the Patriarch of Constantinople, seen as the head of that communion, to acknowledge on behalf of his flock that in all matters of the Christian faith the Bishop of Rome was infallible and thus had ever been the head of both congregations — indeed there should never have been two — this being a prerequisite to his eventual ambition of a complete reunion. That centuries of dispute had ended in schism only spurred Hildebrand to work harder for reconciliation — at least, that was his term.
Unbeknown to the archdeacon, the church he controlled was seen as an intransigent bully with its insistence on the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist; clerical celibacy for all ordained priests in whatever liturgy; that Latin, not Greek, was sole language of the Mass, and that the Patriarch required the consent of the Pope to his position and that same pontiff had the right to nullify his appointments, as well as excommunicate from the faith him and any of his followers, both clerical and lay.
Emperor Michael Dukas had seemed inclined to take on the difficult task of seeking that reunion, and there had been much communication in search of the form of words that would bring it about. Along with his good religious intentions came that request for an army to undertake a crusade to reverse the effect of the Battle of Manzikert: that knights from Europe should take ship for Asia Minor and form the bulk of the forces needed to push back the Turks. It was an appealing idea to Hildebrand, given it would kill two troublesome birds with one stone by removing the pestilential Normans, who he would ensure took a major part, from Rome’s doorstep.
Even with the advance of the heathen Turks and the danger to their whole faith, what Hildebrand called reconciliation was not a notion that gained much favour with either the Patriarch or the Greek Orthodox flock, especially in Constantinople itself, where the mob was every bit as large and effective as they were in Rome. For any Byzantine Emperor who sought to impose a set of conditions that would please Hildebrand was to invite for himself instant and violent removal by that same congregation. Yet service to four popes had induced in Hildebrand the kind of flexibility that, once he had calmed his irritation, immediately had him seeking a solution; the overthrow of Michael Dukas was a setback to a policy, not the termination of one.
His first task was to pen for the Pope an immediate reply excommunicating the usurper Nikephoros — that he would pay no heed to this denial of the sacrament did not in any way diminish its effect in Hildebrand’s eyes. Then his assistants were called, a dozen tonsured monks, the demand from their master that they find everything that was known about this new claimant to the purple. With many spies in Constantinople, plus a need to be aware of the shifting and tortuous politics of that sprawling empire, the details were soon being studied, this just after he had dictated letters to be sent to his eastern envoys to find out if what he had been told about the fate of Dukas — that he had been imprisoned — was true. It was not common for deposed rulers of that polity to retire in peace, indeed to survive at all; the least they could expect was that they would be ceremonially blinded to prevent any hope of restoration.
Pope Alexander was informed of what had occurred, the problem of the East was discussed and the conclusion of what policy to pursue arrived at. This, apart from the required excommunication, was the paramount need to wait until matters became less opaque. Byzantine was not a commonly used word for nothing; in that particular polity lay a tangled web of alliances and relationships that stood as a mystery to most observers, even those who were relatively well informed by their spies. In Constantinople court intrigue was endemic and had been for centuries, while the succession to the imperial purple was never straightforward — it was too often decided by coup, the secret blade or a doctored potion — and the wearer was often not the real power, for it was many times more necessary to calculate who stood behind the throne as to know who sat upon it.
‘And the other inconvenience?’
‘Progresses well, Your Holiness — the Guiscard blames his neighbour for his recent difficulties. He is, as we speak, gathering his forces to attack Richard of Capua and has even sent to Sicily asking his brother to support him with lances and foot soldiers.’
‘And Capua?’
‘Is, thanks to us, aware of the threat and arming at an equal rate to defend himself. Naturally he has been in communication with us to provide him with support, Apulia being the more powerful.’
The elderly pope gathered his hands before his lips, either in contemplation or prayer — Hildebrand could not discern which. A conflict between the twin seats of Norman power was as tangled with possible outcomes as anything else with which the papacy had to deal. That mutual destruction was the preferred outcome did not have to be stated; both Capua and Apulia were a concern it would be a blessing to be rid of and it had taken much time to manoeuvre both into a position of impending hostilities — the spreading of rumours, the use of Vatican influence, money and its many bishops, abbots and priests to foster and exacerbate an already existing mistrust between the Normans to the point where they were ready to seek a conclusion on the field of battle.
The hoped-for outcome was that both would be diminished and what the papacy had lost, like control of the fief of Benevento outside of the city itself, could be recovered, the banditti wracking their possessions in the Abruzzi should be thrown out of that province, and that both Norman enclaves should be so beholden to Rome that they would be more supplicants than bullies. Less welcome was the notion that one should utterly subdue the other, thus creating a more powerful single entity. Yet if both Norman overlords presented Rome with a problem, the greatest, at present, was Richard of Capua, for the very simple reason that he was the closest and thus the more dangerous — he could take the city of Rome at will — so it would help if the Guiscard clipped his wings.
For every time Richard had aided the papacy — and he had in the past acted as a saviour, not least in securing the position of both Alexander and Hildebrand — there were a similar if not greater number of occasions when he had been the most potent threat at the very gates, while his incursions into borderland papal territories to indulge in outright theft were so numerous as to be a commonplace. Yet if the Duke of Apulia crushed Richard completely, would he not become their neighbour and an even greater threat? The elderly pope had to put aside these silent considerations; Hildebrand was speaking.