Leo IX

Pope (1049-1054)

• Born: June 21, 1002
• Birthplace: Egisheim, Alsace (now in France)
• Died: April 19, 1054
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Leo IX was one of the most important of the medieval popes. Coming to the Papacy after a long period of papal and religious decline, during an era when the authority of the Holy Roman Emperors was at its most influential, Leo instituted a number of significant reforms within the Church that had profound results not only for the Roman church in the West and the Orthodox church in the East but also for the Holy Roman Empire and other kingdoms in Europe.

Early Life

Leo IX was born Bruno of Egisheim, son of Hugo, count of Egisheim. The family was related to Conrad II, the Holy Roman Emperor. His parents were very religious, and Bruno was destined from an early age to enter the Church. The higher offices in the Church were generally reserved for members of aristocratic families, and Bruno was educated at a school for upper-class boys in Toul, an establishment noted for its atmosphere of piety and its reforming sympathies. After his schooling, he served as a deputy to Herman, the bishop of Toul, and led the military vassals of the bishop into battle alongside the emperor (a common action by members of the clergy in that strife-torn era). Herman died in 1026, and Bruno was chosen as the new bishop of Toul, although he was only in his mid-twenties and might instead have had a successful secular career serving the emperor. Toul was a poor diocese and not an obvious choice for an ambitious cleric. Bruno was consecrated bishop in 1027.

Rampant corruption plagued the Western church in the tenth and eleventh centuries; the monastic establishments and their regular clergy, as well as various elements in the secular clergy, from the Papacy down to the village priest, had succumbed to it. There were two major abuses within the Church, and both had widespread ramifications. Simony, or the buying and selling of church offices, was rife, and there was doubt whether a clergyman tainted with simony could validly perform the sacraments on which salvation depended. The second major abuse was that of Nicolaism, a name of unknown origin that came to stand for various types of sexual incontinence among the clergy. Requirements that all clergymen be celibate were widely disregarded, and many clerics had wives, mistresses, and children.

In addition, it was a violent age, and even the Church was not immune. During the eleventh century, many clergymen, including popes, were murdered, often by their fellow clergy. There were demands for reform, both from within the Church and from secular society. Some improvement had slowly occurred, often stemming from the example set first by the monastery of Cluny, in France, founded in 910, but also by other monasteries in northern Europe.

Bruno was never a monk, but he was a strong admirer of Saint Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism in the sixth century, and many of his closest advisers were monks. Bruno was a reforming bishop in Toul, and he concentrated particularly on ending abuses in the various monastic houses. He was also active militarily in defending his diocese from threatened invasion. Bruno was a loyal vassal to his relative the Holy Roman Emperor and a staunch defender of the empire. An able diplomat, he traveled to Rome on many occasions. Even though Toul was not a prominent diocese, Bruno became widely known, not only in the empire but also in other kingdoms, in ecclesiastical as well as political and military spheres.

Life’s Work

In 1048, Pope Damasus II died after serving as the bishop of Rome, or pope, for only twenty-three days; it was widely rumored that his death was caused by poison. The selection of the new pope depended on the wishes of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III, for by the eleventh century, the emperors had become not only secular rulers of the empire, which extended from the Germanies into Italy, but also the effective arbiters of the Church. In practice, the emperors not only chose the high officials of the Church but also invested their choices with the signs of the office, the bishop’s staff and ring. The Church had periodically fought against the involvement of laymen such as the emperors in the selection of bishops, abbots, and other clergy, and various church councils had passed resolutions against the practice of lay investiture. In the feudal age, however, the needs of secular society became intertwined with those of the Church; powerful kings, emperors, and other laypeople would not allow the Church to choose its own officials unilaterally. Too much was at stake, including the possession of land, which translated into wealth and political and military power. Because of the lands they held, counts and dukes had to be loyal vassals to their lords, and in the opinion of most kings and emperors, so must bishops and abbots.

Emperor Henry III chose the new pope at Worms. His selection was his relative, Bruno of Toul. Henry was a powerful ruler of both church and state who believed himself to have been chosen by God to rule; it is doubtful that he saw himself as subordinate to the pope, even in many areas of religion. He had already chosen two previous popes. Bruno was perhaps an obvious choice, given his family connection and his already wide reputation, but even Henry could not know just how significant his selection was to become. Under Bruno, who took the name Leo in honor of Leo the Great, the Papacy became a major center of reform. The movement had not begun at Rome, but with Leo, the Papacy became the driving force for reform for the next two centuries. Although the effective choice had already taken place at Worms, an election at Rome was the norm; thus, in late 1048, Leo left Toul for the Eternal City. He took with him other high-ranking clergymen, including the monk Hildebrand, who, as Pope Gregory VII, would later carry many of Leo’s reforms to fruition. Early accounts of his life have Leo entering Rome barefoot, as a simple pilgrim, and being received ecstatically by the Roman populace. His papacy had begun.

Although the reform of abuses in the Church had already started, Leo gave focus and direction to the reform impetus. Because of his experience as bishop and diplomat, his intellectual capabilities, his knowledge of the problems faced by the Church in the eleventh century, and his vision of what the power of the Papacy might accomplish, Leo was ideally suited to change the Church. To do so, however, he could not remain in Rome. His own preference may have been to travel widely, and given the state of the Church and the nature of medieval society, it was impossible that the curtailment of the various abuses could be enforced without the actual physical presence of the pope where the problems were manifest. In any event, Leo was a peripatetic pope. He held many councils and synods during his reign, some in Rome but many others in Italy, France, Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire. He preached particularly against simony and clerical incontinence, held up the canon law of the Church as the legal justification for the reforms, and, citing his authority as pope, demanded obedience. Accused and recalcitrant bishops and other church officials were summoned to Rome and in many cases were excommunicated and removed from office.

As a reformer, Leo was concerned with more than the spiritual state of the Church. As bishop of Toul he had been involved in various diplomatic, political, and military affairs, and those interests continued when he became pope. Given the character of medieval society, the Church could not be merely an institution that dealt in spiritual and otherworldly matters; since at least the mid-eighth century, the Church had also been a temporal Italian state. At times the Papal States were under the influence and control of the Holy Roman Emperor; Henry III intervened widely in Italian affairs. At other times the states of the Church had to rely on their own resources military, diplomatic, political, and economic to survive and prosper in a violent age. It was perhaps unfortunate that the church had become a state, but it was a reality that Leo accepted.

The political and military threat to the temporal powers of the Church during Leo’s reign occurred in southern Italy. Beginning before 1020, numerous bands from the duchy of Normandy in northern France had begun to loot and wage war in Sicily and southern Italy. The Normans were Christians, but much of the history of the medieval world was the story of Christians waging war on other Christians, often brutally. Leo and others complained about the ruthlessness of the Normans, but there were also political considerations. The Church and the Holy Roman Empire had an interest in the region, as did the Byzantine Empire, which had had a toehold in southern Italy for many centuries. The Norman influx upset those established power relationships.

Henry III was at that time involved with his claims to Hungary and thus gave little support to his kinsman Leo. When, after many diplomatic exchanges, warnings, and broken promises, Leo decided to wage a holy war against the Normans, he lacked sufficient resources. He had his own vassals and the support of a number of Italian princes, but without the military might of the Holy Roman Empire, Leo’s forces were no match for the Normans. Before Leo had hardly begun his campaign he was defeated in a bloody battle at Civitate, a village in central Italy, in 1053, and was forced to surrender. He was treated with honor and respect by the Normans, but if he was not broken in spirit, his physical capabilities had begun to wane. For the next several months, he remained in Benevento, and he returned to Rome only in the spring of 1054.

At Benevento, Leo set into motion one of the most momentous and symbolic events of the Middle Ages. In fact if not in theory, the Christian world was not ruled by a single church. In the West, over many centuries, the bishops of Rome and the Papacy had emerged as the central focus of religious faith and practice. The Papacy had argued successfully that the popes were the apostolic successors to the first bishop of Rome, Peter, who himself had been given the keys to the heavenly kingdom by Jesus Christ. Added to this Petrine Theory, as it is known, was the Donation of Constantine, an eighth century forgery that purported to give the Papacy all of the Western lands after Constantine had abandoned them to found his city of Constantinople in the early fourth century. This document was discovered to be a forgery only in the fifteenth century, and in earlier times, church officials such as Leo were sincerely convinced of its accuracy.

Yet in Constantinople, in the Byzantine Empire, the Papacy’s claims had never been totally accepted. Patriarchs of Constantinople, spiritual leaders of the largest city in Christendom and the wealthy and powerful Byzantine Empire, had often been reluctant to follow the lead of the Roman bishops. In the eyes of Eastern leaders, the West was more barbarous and less cultured than the East. Different historical experiences and cultural traditions, different religious practices, different languages Greek in the East, Latin in the West all combined to create friction and disagreements. Theologically, East and West quarreled over the issue of clerical celibacy and the so-called Filioque doctrine that had evolved in the West (possibly in the seventh century) and that described the Holy Spirit as coming not only from God the Father but also from Jesus Christ the Son. That was a change from the creedal language agreed on in 381, which had defined the Holy Spirit as coming only from God the Father. Through the centuries, then, Rome and Constantinople had coexisted only in an uneasy truce.

With the approval and guidance of Leo, an embassy was sent to Constantinople under the papal legate, Cardinal Humbert. Leo’s temporal aim was to gain assistance from the Eastern emperor against the Normans; he also hoped, however, to attain the more far-reaching goal of uniting the Eastern and Western churches under papal leadership. Earlier popes and patriarchs had been unwilling to push their respective claims; thus, Leo’s delegation, with its assertion of Western authority and supremacy and its criticism of Eastern abuses and heresies, was a new departure. It did not accomplish what Leo intended. His delegation did not receive the expected submission from the patriarch, Michael Cerularius; instead, Humbert excommunicated Michael in a dramatic confrontation. In turn, Leo’s delegates were excommunicated by the Eastern church. The attempt to unite the two churches resulted instead in opening a gulf between the Roman church and the Eastern Orthodox church that has proved permanent.

Significance

Leo IX died on April 19, 1054, three months before the acts of excommunication took place in Constantinople. He had returned to Rome only a month earlier. Leo was buried in Rome; he was canonized in 1087. The reform program he had instituted as pope was continued by his successors, many of whom had been his advisers. Preeminent among them was Hildebrand, who, as Gregory VII, became pope in 1073.

The entire body of reform and the era itself would later bear Gregory’s name; still, Gregory’s conflict with Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV over lay investiture and his claim to papal supremacy in general were but the logical outcome of the seeds planted during the pontificate of Leo IX. Leo reigned as pope for only five years, but his reign was a watershed in the history of the Papacy, in the reform of the institutional Church, in the relations between the Church and the secular powers, and in the growth of the papal monarchy. Commentators then and since have criticized Leo for his military activities while pope and for creating the long-lasting estrangement between the Roman and Orthodox churches, but his commitment to the moral and spiritual reform of the Church and the broader society cannot be in doubt.

Bibliography

Barraclough, Geoffrey. The Origins of Modern Germany. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972. This study is the classic account of the rise of Germany from the era of Charlemagne. The author sees Leo as a key figure in resisting the claim of the Holy Roman Emperors that they had been chosen by God to rule not only the state but also the church, a concept known as theocratic kingship or imperial theocracy.

Douglas, David C. The Norman Achievement, 1050-1100. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Douglas, biographer of William the Conqueror, here describes the impact of the Normans throughout Europe, from Normandy and England to Sicily and Italy. His discussion of Leo and the Battle of Civitate particularly stresses Leo’s call for a holy war or crusade against the Normans, a concept that would come to fruition in the Crusades to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims.

Knowles, David, and Dimitri Obolensky. The Middle Ages. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. This work is the second volume in a five-volume history of the Catholic church. The authors single out Leo for considerable discussion and in the broader context of the history of the Church note that “for the first time for almost two centuries a pope of ability, energy and spirituality was in office.”

Mann, Horace K. The Lives of the Popes in the Middle Ages: Volume 6, 1049-1130. 2d ed. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1925. Mann’s account of Leo, which extends to almost two hundred pages, is one of the few extensive biographies in English of Leo’s life and works. The treatment of Leo is extremely sympathetic. The volume includes, in translation, almost all the medieval sources regarding the pope and thus is indispensable.

Parisse, Michel, ed. La Vie du Pape Léon IX: Brunon, évěque de Toul. Translated by Monique Goullet. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1997. A French translation of the biography attributed to Wibertus or Cardinal Humbert, contemporaries of Leo. Bibliography, indexes.

Runciman, Steven. The Eastern Schism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. This study is a well-written narrative of the conflict between the Papacy and the Eastern Orthodox church during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Runciman states that many persons and events bear responsibility for the Schism of 1054 but particularly singles out Cardinal Humbert for exacerbating an already difficult situation.

Southern, R. W. Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970. This volume in the Pelican History of the Church is a succinct but comprehensive history of the Church during medieval times. It briefly but adequately puts Leo and such issues as the dispute with Constantinople into the historical and scholarly context.

Ullmann, Walter. The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages. 3d ed. London: Methuen, 1970. The author, who has written numerous books on the medieval Church, discusses the significance of Leo in the emergence of the Papacy as a rival to the Holy Roman Empire, and notes particularly the importance of the Donation of Constantine for Leo in his dispute with the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Williams, Schafer, ed. The Gregorian Epoch: Reformation, Revolution, Reaction? Boston: D. C. Heath, 1964. This is a volume in the Problems in European Civilization series and includes fourteen different selections by historians from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960’. As the title suggests, the articles concentrate on the reforms associated with Gregory VII, but many of the issues discussed relate to the years of Leo’s pontificate.