The Kingdom in the Sun Read Free

admitted, his energy and ability unquestioned. Rome was still overwhelmingly loyal to him. Why was it, then, that only four months after the wretched Innocent had been forced to flee the city, Anacletus should in his turn have found the ground falling away beneath his feet?
    He himself, perhaps, was partly to blame. Although he has undergone so much subsequent vilification that it is now almost impossible to form a clear picture of his character, it is beyond doubt that he was eaten by ambition and totally unscrupulous in the attainment of his ends. For all his reformist background, he had not hesitated to make use of his family's immense wealth to buy support among the aristocracy and people of Rome. There is no reason to believe that he was more corrupt than the majority of his colleagues, but rumours of his bribes had been assiduously spread by his enemies, who supported them with lurid accounts of his spoliation of Church property once Rome was in his power; and they found a ready audience among those in Northern Italy and abroad whose ears were not temporarily deafened by the jingle of Pierleoni gold. He was also handicapped— paradoxically enough—by his tenure of the Holy City, which held him down in the Lateran while Innocent progressed through Europe whipping up support. Yet these were all secondary considerations. There was one other factor which weighed the scales against Anacletus more heavily than all the others put together, and which was ultimately to prove the destruction of all his ambitions and his hopes. That factor was St Bernard of Clairvaux.
    St Bernard was now forty years old and far and away the most powerful spiritual force in Europe. To an objective twentieth-century observer, safely out of range of that astonishing personal magnetism with which he effortlessly dominated all those with whom he came in contact, he is not an attractive figure. Tall and haggard, his features clouded by the constant pain that resulted from a lifetime of exaggerated physical austerities, he was consumed by a biasing religious zeal that left him no room for tolerance or moderation. His public life had begun in 111 5 when the Abbot of Citeaux, the Englishman Stephen Harding, had effectively released him from monastic discipline by sending him off to found a daughter house at Clairvaux in Champagne; from that moment on, almost despite himself, his influence spread; and for the last twenty-five years of his life he was constantly on the move, preaching, persuading, arguing, debating, writing innumerable letters and compulsively plunging into the thick of every controversy in which he believed the basic principles of Christianity to be involved.
    The papal schism was just such an issue. Bernard declared himself unhesitatingly for Innocent, and from that moment on the die was cast. His reasons, as always, were emotional. Cardinal Aimeri, the papal Chancellor whose intrigues on Innocent's behalf had been directly responsible for the whole dispute, was a close personal friend. Anacletus on the other hand was a product of Cluny, a monastery which Bernard detested on the grounds that it had betrayed its reformist ideals and had succumbed to those very temptations of wealth and worldliness that it had been founded to eradicate. Worse still, he was of Jewish antecedents; as Bernard was later to write to the Emperor Lothair, 'it is to the injury of Christ that the offspring of a Jew should have seized for himself the throne of St Peter'. The question of St Peter's own racial origins does not seem to have occurred to him.
    When, in the late summer of 1130, King Louis VI, 'the Fat', of France summoned a Church council at Etampes to advise him which of the two candidates he should support, Bernard was ready to strike. Rightly sensing that any enquiry into the canonicity of the elections themselves might do his cause more harm than good, he stuck firmly to personalities and immediately embarked on a campaign of such vituperation that, in