Memory, 'Corruption', and Reform: The Roman Church, 860-960
Lead Research Organisation:
The University of Manchester
Department Name: Arts Languages and Cultures
Abstract
The project for which I seek funding looks to change the way we think about the medieval Church, and about its priests in particular.
In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages are an age of faith, and by the same token, an age of hypocrisy. We assume that the church hierarchy, and above all the papacy, exerted a towering and intimate power over the people, a moral authority systematically abused, which regularly served to corrupt its holders. The canonical contemporary witness here is Liudprand of Cremona (d. ca. 972), whose extraordinary account of the Roman Church has set the terms of all subsequent discussion. His story begins with the so-called 'Synod of the Corpse' in Rome (897), at which the body of Pope Formosus was put on trial and thrown into the River Tiber. This ghastly charade is seen by Liudprand to have initiated the 'Pornocracy', a period in which the Roman Church was dominated by the lusts, political and physical, of one family, the House of Theophylact, and its female dynasts in particular. Popes begat popes, and the Lateran Palace became little more than a brothel: in the two millennia of papal history, only the Borgias are seen to have exerted a more malign influence. It was not, however, so. For all their magnetic allure, Liudprand's tales of scandal cannot be allowed to stand unquestioned, especially in the current context of the ill-informed but high-stakes debates about the sexuality of the clergy.
It has in fact long been recognized that Liudprand's account is a partial one, but we have yet to understand what use to make of it. As one scholar has succinctly put it, Liudprand was a traitor: in the late 950s, he abandoned his local patron to attach himself to the Saxon king Otto I, who was soon to make himself new lord of Italy and of Rome, taking the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Liudprand's lurid account of papal vice must be understood as an attempt to legitimate Otto's takeover and his own switch of allegiance. For all that, we should not discard his testimony altogether: on closer examination, I argue, he does reveal more about the Roman church than unfounded rumour.
If we return to the posthumous trial of Pope Formosus, we find that his accusers (even in Liudprand's tendentious account) had a serious point to make. The charge against Formosus was that he could not become pope because he was already a bishop of another local see (Porto). As his enemies pointed out, the council of Nicaea (325) had forbidden bishops to move from see to see. His defenders, however, countered with other precedents, citing letters of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) to support their arguments. They lost the political battle, but continued to make their views known for some two decades after the Synod of the Corpse; and then their cause was taken up by Liudprand.
My argument is that the debate over episcopal transfer is a sign of an underlying transformation of the clergy in this period. Thanks in part to the stabilization of Latin Europe under the rule of Charlemagne and his successors, and then again under Otto, being a bishop was an increasingly professionalized responsibility. An episcopal job market developed, in which ambitious churchmen sought to attract the attentions of those with the power to pull them from obscurity onto a European stage (Liudprand being a classic example). But such mobility, and the might of the patrons behind it, threatened local communities, who did not wish to be treated as staging posts for career bishops. The demand for a celibate priesthood, I argue, was a symbolic way for these communities to express their concern about 'institutional promiscuity' and the abuse of episcopal authority.
To some, clerical celibacy seemed as though it might provide a solution to the dangers of a 'globalized episcopate'. That celibacy might itself become part of the problem/as is so clear tomany modern audiences - is another story.
In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages are an age of faith, and by the same token, an age of hypocrisy. We assume that the church hierarchy, and above all the papacy, exerted a towering and intimate power over the people, a moral authority systematically abused, which regularly served to corrupt its holders. The canonical contemporary witness here is Liudprand of Cremona (d. ca. 972), whose extraordinary account of the Roman Church has set the terms of all subsequent discussion. His story begins with the so-called 'Synod of the Corpse' in Rome (897), at which the body of Pope Formosus was put on trial and thrown into the River Tiber. This ghastly charade is seen by Liudprand to have initiated the 'Pornocracy', a period in which the Roman Church was dominated by the lusts, political and physical, of one family, the House of Theophylact, and its female dynasts in particular. Popes begat popes, and the Lateran Palace became little more than a brothel: in the two millennia of papal history, only the Borgias are seen to have exerted a more malign influence. It was not, however, so. For all their magnetic allure, Liudprand's tales of scandal cannot be allowed to stand unquestioned, especially in the current context of the ill-informed but high-stakes debates about the sexuality of the clergy.
It has in fact long been recognized that Liudprand's account is a partial one, but we have yet to understand what use to make of it. As one scholar has succinctly put it, Liudprand was a traitor: in the late 950s, he abandoned his local patron to attach himself to the Saxon king Otto I, who was soon to make himself new lord of Italy and of Rome, taking the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Liudprand's lurid account of papal vice must be understood as an attempt to legitimate Otto's takeover and his own switch of allegiance. For all that, we should not discard his testimony altogether: on closer examination, I argue, he does reveal more about the Roman church than unfounded rumour.
If we return to the posthumous trial of Pope Formosus, we find that his accusers (even in Liudprand's tendentious account) had a serious point to make. The charge against Formosus was that he could not become pope because he was already a bishop of another local see (Porto). As his enemies pointed out, the council of Nicaea (325) had forbidden bishops to move from see to see. His defenders, however, countered with other precedents, citing letters of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) to support their arguments. They lost the political battle, but continued to make their views known for some two decades after the Synod of the Corpse; and then their cause was taken up by Liudprand.
My argument is that the debate over episcopal transfer is a sign of an underlying transformation of the clergy in this period. Thanks in part to the stabilization of Latin Europe under the rule of Charlemagne and his successors, and then again under Otto, being a bishop was an increasingly professionalized responsibility. An episcopal job market developed, in which ambitious churchmen sought to attract the attentions of those with the power to pull them from obscurity onto a European stage (Liudprand being a classic example). But such mobility, and the might of the patrons behind it, threatened local communities, who did not wish to be treated as staging posts for career bishops. The demand for a celibate priesthood, I argue, was a symbolic way for these communities to express their concern about 'institutional promiscuity' and the abuse of episcopal authority.
To some, clerical celibacy seemed as though it might provide a solution to the dangers of a 'globalized episcopate'. That celibacy might itself become part of the problem/as is so clear tomany modern audiences - is another story.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Conrad Leyser (Principal Investigator) |