The Crusades
The world outside the monastic walls was a tumultuous place in the twelfth century. Shortly before Hildegard’s birth, Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade, the goal of which was the recapture of Jerusalem, which had been taken by the Muslims in 1076. The expedition was initially successful. First Nicea, then Antioch, was taken. Then Jerusalem was recaptured in 1099 and the Kingdom of Jerusalem established.
A Second Crusade, preached by Pope Eugenius II and Bernard of Clairvaux, was undertaken in 1147. Its goal was the recapture of the Christian city of Edessa, which had fallen to the Muslims in 1144. This one was a catastrophe. The Christian armies under Conrad III were decisively defeated, and the Crusade fell apart in 1150. The Third Crusade occurred only after Hildegard’s death, in 1189-92.
The Papacy
An astounding number of 24 popes reigned during Hildegard’s lifetime. The following 12 are considered authentic popes, succeeding each other through the line from Saint Peter:
Urban II (r. 1088-99)
Paschal II (r. 1099-1118)
Gelasius II (r. 1118-19)
Callistus II (r. 1119-24)
Honorius II (r. 1124-30)
Innocent II (r. 1130-43)
Celestine II (r. 1143-44)
Lucius II (r. 1144-45)
Eugenius III (r. 1145-53)
Anastasius IV (r. 1153-54)
Hadrian IV (r. 1154-59) (the only English pope, Nicholas Breakspear) Alexander III (r. 1159-81)
Three of them, Eugenius III, Hadrian IV, and Alexander III, had a direct impact on Hildegard’s life, and she communicated with all of them, and also with Anastasius IV.
A string of antipopes began in 1058, when a group of Italian noblemen had Benedict X elected pope. Benedict was later excommunicated as a papal usurper and perjurer. Nonetheless, antipopes continued to be appointed for political reasons throughout Hildegard’s life. The first antipope after Benedict X was Clement III, whom Emperor Henry IV appointed. More important, from
Hildegard’s perspective, was the appointment of Victor IV in 1159, whom Frederick supported in opposition to Alexander III. This caused a “papal schism” between Alexander and the next four antipopes that lasted throughout Hildegard’s life. The crisis came to a head when Frederick appointed the antipope Paschal III in 1164. The schism was not resolved until the Peace of Vienna in 1177. The line of antipopes includes the following:
Clement III (1080-1100)
Theodoric (1100-1101)
Adalbert (1101)
Silvester IV (1105-11)
Gregory (VIII) (1118-21)
Celestine (II) (1124-25)
Anacletus II (1130-38)
Victor IV (1138)—resigned Victor IV (1159-64)
Paschal III (1164-68)
Callistus (III) (1168-78)
Innocent (III) (1179-80)
The string of antipopes is largely a result of the Investiture Controversy, and the struggle between these popes was really a political struggle between the papacy, whose supporters in Italy were known as Guelphs, and the Holy Roman Emperor, whose supporters were known as Ghibellines.
The struggle began in 1075 and concerned the question of who had the right to appoint, or invest, bishops—the pope or the emperor. Because the position of bishop held significant political power and involved considerable wealth, the question was an important one. Pope Gregory VII forbade secular leaders to appoint bishops.
The controversy later expanded to involve the question of whether popes could depose emperors or whether emperors could depose popes. This was a question of hierarchy of power. It was resolved temporarily in 1122 at the Concordat of Worms, where Pope Callistus II arrived at a compromise with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. Nonetheless, the dispute continued for the rest of the century and beyond.
In 1144, the controversy reached another flash point, involving the temporal powers of the papacy, on the one hand, and the desire on the part of the citizens of Rome to return to the democratic ideals of the Roman Republic, a movement that generated the Commune of Rome, on the other. Arnold of Brescia (ca. 1090-1155) was a monk from Italy who opposed the pope’s temporal powers. He called on the church to renounce ownership of property and became the intellectual leader of the Commune. The Commune declared allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor, first Conrad III, later Frederick Bar-barossa. It tried to force Pope Lucius II (1144-45) to renounce his temporal powers. Lucius refused, gathered his forces, and attacked Rome. However, he died when a stone launched by the opposition hit him in the head, and the attack was unsuccessful.
Almost immediately Eugenius III was elected, but he had to be consecrated outside of Rome, because by that time the Commune was in control of the city. Eugenius was allowed to Rome on and off from 1145 until 1152. In 1148, during one of his stays in Rome, he excommunicated Arnold. Eventually Arnold was arrested and hanged; his body was then burned and his ashes thrown into the Tiber.
The Holy Roman Empire
The dominant political unit in Hildegard’s life was the Holy Roman Empire, an expanse of land embracing Germany, eastern France, northern Italy, and Bohemia. It began in 962, when Pope John XII crowned the German King Otto I as Roman emperor, and for the next eight centuries German kings held the position. The empire lasted until 1806, when Napoleon forced the last emperor, Francis II, to renounce the title. Voltaire famously remarked in the eighteenth century that the empire was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Hildegard lived through the reigns of the following five German kings:
Henry IV (r. 1056-1106)
Henry V (r. 1106-25)
Lothar III (r. 1125-37)
Conrad III (r. 1138-52)
Frederick I, Barbarossa (r. 1152-90)
The most significant of these for Hildegard was Frederick Barbarossa. He became king of Germany in 1152 and was named Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Hadrian IV in 1155. Frederick carried out military campaigns in Italy to expand the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, and in this capacity came into conflict with the popes, first Hadrian IV, then Alexander III. As a result of this friction, he supported the election of alternative popes. The resulting rift in the papacy between competing claimants, the “Papal Schism,” began in earnest in 1159 with the election of antipope Victor IV.
Frederick was a proponent of Victor IV (actually the second antipope with that name) and his successors Paschal III and Callistus III, and they were supporters of his. All of them were opposed to Alexander III, the officially recognized pope. The critical tone of Hildegard’s letters to Frederick was a result of the fact that Hildegard, by virtue of her position as leader of her convent, supported the legitimate pope and deplored the conflict between the emperor and the papacy.
The conflict between Frederick and Alexander III came to a head in 1165, when Frederick, at the Diet of Wurzburg, tried to force the recognition of the antipope Paschal III. Conrad the archbishop of Mainz fled Wurzburg to support Alexander, and Frederick replaced him as archbishop with Christian de Buch, who served in Mainz until his death in 1183. Christian had led forces against Alexander, but he was also instrumental in reconciling Frederick and Alexander at the Peace of Vienna in 1177.
The division between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines described above was established during Frederick’s reign. The Guelphs, who supported the papacy, were the party of wealthy merchants, while the Ghibellines, proponents of the emperor, were landowners whose wealth derived from agriculture. The two parties tended to identify with particular cities, and the choice of which party a city identified with depended on which of the two rulers, pope or emperor, was seen as the more threatening. Florence and Genoa were Guelph cities, while Pisa and Siena were Ghibelline.
Heresies
The later Middle Ages saw the rise of a great many heretical sects, each led by a particular individual. Some of them have names: the Albanenses, Bag-nolenses, and Concorrezenses in Italy, and the Albigensians in Languedoc. Among the heretical sects, the Cathars (“Purists” or “Puritans”) were the most prominent and the sect by whom the church felt most threatened. The name has been applied to many groups over a vast span of time, most particularly to the Manicheans of the late third century. The Cathars of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are descended from this group, although the two are not by any means identical in doctrine.
The faith of the Cathars is described as dualist, with a belief in the equality, or near equality, of good and evil. The degree to which they were considered equal determined the nature of the individual sect. Total equality was preached by the Albanenses in Italy and by most of the Cathars elsewhere in Europe. The other two Italian sects were mitigated dualists, in which good was supreme and eternal, while evil was inferior and temporal.
The principle of good created the supernatural world, including the human soul; the evil principle was responsible for all natural phenomena, including man’s physical being. Preservation or continuation of any aspect of the natural world was seen a preservation of evil. Taken to its extreme form, this led Cathars to the beliefs that marriage was unlawful, perpetual chastity was required, and some forms of suicide, in particular self-starvation, were praiseworthy. Putting these views into operation would lead to the annihilation of the human race; in any event, these beliefs limited the extent to which the sect could continue without converts.
Although Cathars were not widespread in Germany, they were well organized in the Rhineland area in which Hildegard lived, to the extent that they had their own bishop. In 1143 Cathars were discovered in Cologne, and other pockets were soon discovered in Bonn, parts of Bavaria, and Swabia. This is known because there are records of heretics being burned at the stake in these areas. Hildegard was born into this tumultuous situation.
World History
