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Walter Berschin From the Middle of the Eleven Century to the Latin Conquest of Constantinople From: Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages. 1.The
Schism of 1054 . . . regni
uestri partes etsi oppugnari, nunquam amen expugnari (sc. deus] permisit,
sed in uos magni illius Romani imperii gloriam nomenque transfudit.
Voluit, ut sicut potestas sic et uocabulum ad uos transmigraret, ac
religione mutata, imperio translato, sicut a pagano Romulo Roma dicebatur,
sic a Christiano reparatore Constantino uestra urbs Constantinopolis
uocaretur. Nanc ut dixi uelut metam intransmeabilem, uelut inuictum
obicem, uelut praefixum quem nunquam liceat transgredi terminum, omnia
prouidens supernus oculus paganis regibus, barbaris gentibus posuit, quo
oriens terreatur, boreas subdatur, occidens defendatur. [... even if
[God] allows some of your realm to be attacked, he has never suftered it
to be conquered; but he transferred the glory and name of this great Roman
Empire to you. He wished that just as the power migrated over to you, so
should the name as well; and since the religion had been changed and the
power transferred, so also, just as Rome had been named after the pagan
Romulus, so your city of Constantinople was named after the Christίan
renovator Constantine. The all-seeing celestial eye has imposed, as Ι
said, something like an impassable boundary, an unbreachable barrier, a
fixed line which can never be crossed, on the pagan kings and barbarian
nations, whereby the East is feared, the North subdued, the West defended.
] Abbot
Peter the Venerable of Cluny, epist. 75, to Emperor John ΙΙ Comnenus
The
idea that epochs are not necessarily defined by round numbers, battles,
and genealogical accidents certainly holds true in medieval studies for
the turning point which took place around the middle of the eleventh
century. The Western Imperium, which still had a powerful presence under
Henry ΙΙΙ, ran into a serious crisis under his son, Henry IV; the
papacy, on the other hand, experienced an unprecedented increase in power.
The "Romanesque" style in architecture arose. Book illumination
of the old artistic schools degenerated; it arose anew at other places,
but never regained the significance it had during the "Ottonian"
period. The liturgy no longer took as central and dominant a role as it
had formerly; the "politically gifted" forced their way up the
ladder: even under Henry ΙΙΙ, an Adalbert of Bremen and an Anno of
Cologne obtained their archbishoprics. Ecclesiastical law soon became the
discipline in which the cleric who was called to lead distinguished
himself no longer could one obtain an episcopal see on the basis of one's
artistic ability, no matter what that talent might be. The missionary
impulse was exhausted; the new borders established by the orbis
latinus in the early eleventh century-in Hungary, Bohemia, Poland,
Sweden, Norway, and Iceland- were scarcely extended any further in the
East and North. The "concept of the Crusades" arose,
perhaps the most important phenomenon of this eleventh-century turn
of the era.1 The
large, well-organized pilgrimages of the early eleventh century, which
took the overland route through Hungary, Bulgaria, and Constantinople to
the Mediterranean coast and on to the Holy Land, were precursors of the
crusades. The foundation of the Christian Kingdom of Hungary on the model
of the Western Imperium (King Stephan Ι, 997-1038) and the firm ties
between the Bulgars and the Greek Empire, due to Emperor Basil ΙΙ
Bulgaroctonus, had opened this route between the East and the West; the
route came to have great historical significance. The most famous of the
pilgrimages of the eleventh century was certainly that of the year 1064,
which included in its number Archbishops Siegfried of Mainz and Thiemo of
Salzburg, and Bishops Gunther of Bamberg and Altmann of Passau; in spite
of occasional military entanglements, this pilgrimage was still of an
entirely religious character -the "Ezzolied" bears witness to
this fact: o
crux salvatoris, du
unser segelgerte bist. disiu
werlt elliu ist daz meri, diu
rehten werch unser segelseil, der
segel de ist der ware geloube, der
heilige atem ist der wint, der
vuoret unsih an den rehten sint da
sculen wir lenten, gote lob. [O
cross of the savior, you who are our mast. All this world is the sea, my
Lord the sail and ferryman; good works are the lines of our sails, which
direct our course home. The sail is the true faith, which helps us toward
salvation. The wind is the Holy Spirit, which leads us to the right way.
Heaven is our homeland, there we shall land, God be praised.] Ezzo,
Cantilena de miraculis Christi 33,
ed. F. Maurer, Die religiösen
Dichtungen des 11. und 12. Jahhunderts
(Tübingen
1964), I, 300. The Vita Altmanni reports
that Ezzo composed the song on the journey to Jerusalem in 1065 (c. 3, MGH
Scriptores, XΙΙ,
230). Bishop Gunther of Bamberg, who commissioned the song, died during
the return trip from Constantinople. His body was wrapped in a large
Byzantine curtain of silk which depicted the emperor of the East on
horseback between two crowned female figures (the "Günthertuch"
is now in the Bamberg Domschatz). Somewhat
more than thirty years later, the Latins thought that they had to ensure
the safety of the last portion of the route on a permanent basis: the
crusader states of Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli, and Jerusalem (1099) were
thus founded. The readiness for a solution won by force had obviously
increased. It
was an act of violence in the style of the new era when Cardinal Humbert
of Silva Candida excommunicated Patriarch Michael Cerullarius of
Constantinople by laying a bull on the main altar of Hagia Sophia on 16
July 1054. This reformed monk from Lotharingia had attained great
influence at the court of the German Pope Leo ΙX (1048-54); he was named
archbishop of Sicily, which was at that time still under Saracen control
and offered him no possibility of action. He led the embassy which sealed
the schism between the Greek and Latin churches that was to last for
centuries. Humbert
is to be remembered for his work in that typically eleventh-century genre,
the polemical treatise. A number
of Greco-Latin polemical treatises in Codex Bernensis 292 are associated
with him. At the beginning of the codex, in the Latino-Greek polemic,
attributable to the cardinal, one finds the translation of a letter from
the Bulgarian Archbishop Leo of Achrida to Bishop John of Trani, which
takes a position against the Saturday fasts and azyme (unleavened bread)
of the Latin Church. Perhaps Humbert magnified the importance of the
controversy between East and West with the translation of this letter. Ιn
answer to this letter, Humbert wrote a Latin dialogue between a Roman and
a Constantinopolitan (from the year 1054), about which it is noted in the
Codex Bernensis that the text was translated into Greek by order of
Emperor Constantine ΙX Monomachus. Thereafter a treatise against the
Latins (in Latin translation) by Nicetas Stethatus appeared and was
followed by Humbert's refutation. The dossier was rounded out by the
embassy's report and the text of the fateful bull of excommunication. The
best overview of this literary complex is found in the description of the
manuscript Bern 292 in H. Hagen,
Catalogus Codicrιm Bernensium (Bern
1875) pp. 311-13. H. Hoesch
gives a new description and evaluation of the section of the manuscript
relevant here, in Die kanonischen
Quellen im Werk Humberts von
Moyenmoutier (Cologne/Vienna 1970), pp. 11-16. The texts mentioned are
edited by C.Will, Acta et scripta
quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saec. XΙ
compositae extant (Leipzig/Marburg
1861). A.
Michel followed up his two-volume work Humbert
und Kerullarios (Paderborn 1924 and 1930) with numerous other studies,
in which he attributed a whole series of works to Humbert, whom he had
raised to the level of a universal thinker and author on the basis of
parallel passages in the various works (even the beast epic Ecbasis
cuiusdam captivi per tropologiam!). But the indigesta
moles of Michel's Humbert studies scarcely concerned the Greco-Latin
portion of Humbert's oeuvre. It
is open to question whether the translations of the Greek polemical
treatises, which offered the cardinal such a welcomed motivation for his
own polemics, were executed by Humbert himself or whether he only had them
prepared.2 It is mentioned in the vita of Pope Leo ΙX that the
pope "learned to read the Holy Scriptures in Greek"3-could
this be an indication of how Humbert also worked with Greek? Ιn Humbert's
sphere of ecclesiastico-political activity in southern Italy, interpreters
and translators were not hard to find. But Humbert also takes an important
place in Greco-Latin literary history as a patron: he was the first to be
interested exclusively in the controversy between East and West. One
of the southern Italian opponents to the Roman claims has become more
distinct through a study by C. Giannelli: "Reliquie dell'attività
'letteraria' di uno scrittore italo-greco del sec. XΙ med. (Nicola
arcivescovo di Reggio Calabria?)," Atti
dello VIII Congresso Internazionale di Studi Bizantini (Rome 1953), Ι,
93-119. The concern here is a glossator who writes Greek and Latin; in pl.
10, Giannelli gives samples of the "scrittura latina
originalissima" (with scattered Greek letters) from Cod. Vat. gr.
1667. The glossator, who was, according to Giannelli, Archbishop Nicholas
of Reggio in Calabria or an Italo-Greek from among his associates,
formulated critical opinions about Rome and the Latins. The
Western attitude toward the Greeks changed around the middle of the
eleventh century-not everywhere nor simultaneously, but at any rate in the
movement of "Reform monasticism," which was dominant for about
three generations and through Gregory VII even attained to the papacy. The
movement wished forcibly to impose and enforce the Kingdom of God on
Earth; and it was to be a Latin Kingdom of God. From this perspective,
Greek was of secondary importance. This new situation is clearly
illustrated by the actions of a reform monk and enemy of the emperor, who
made use of just that encoding and transposing device with which the
Ottonian and early Salian emperors represented themselves as learned,
universal, and exalted in the "second sacred language"-namely,
by writing Latin words in the Greek alphabet-in order to denounce and
disparage the emperor. For the year 1085, in which the death of Gregory
VII sharpened many pens, Bernold of Constance wrote: "Eo tempore
quidam ex Saxonibus a fidelitate sancti Petri apostatantes, et a rege
Heremanno turpiter declinantes ├HYNPYKYM regem totiens abiuratum
receperunt. ... Episcopi autem Saxoniae et quidam ex principibus cum rege
eorum Heremanno in fidelitate sancti Petri permanserunt. ... Qui ...
postea a Saxonibus ad proprias sedes revocati sunt, postquam Saxones
├HYNPYKYM inde expulerunt. ..."4 ("At that time
some of the Saxons who had fallen away from the faith of St. Peter and had
shamefully turned from King Heremannus took Heinricus as their king. ...
The bishops of Saxony, however, and some of the princes remained with the
king constant in the Christian faith. ... Later they were recalled to
their sees by the Saxons, after the Saxons had expelled Heinricus.")
Ιn
Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen Wattenbach
and Holtzmann offer the comment on the passage that the use of Greek
letters here has an "amusing" ("erheiternd") effect.5
But Bernold's inspired idea demonstrates in all earnest that Ottonian
Hellenism could literally be reversed in meaning. Ιn 1085├HYNPYKYC (=Heinricus)
did not call to the Swabian Gregorian's mind the successor of
Constantine, the ecumenical kingdom, the second "sacred
language," but rather perfidy, schism, heresy, apostasy. Bernold had
used the Greek alphabet as if it were a death warrant. |
