The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

All this violence did no one any good. When Henry marched into Italy, Gregory called upon the aid of a Norman ally – the adventurer Robert Guiscard, who was in the process of freeing Sicily from the Arabs. Guiscard marched on Rome with a huge army which included Saracens, and when the Romans rose in an anti-papal riot, Guiscard’s army sacked Rome again (1084), with the usual bloodshed, rape and looting: a large part of the city was burned. As a consequence, Gregory became so hated that he was forced into exile.

The violent and unpleasant consequences of the quarrel reverberated on for another century. The popes were convinced that their spiritual power ought to involve earthly dominion; the German emperors thought – rightly – that earthly dominion was their affair. The quarrel became fiercer still under the emperors of the Hohenstaufen family (the ‘Staufer emperors’) – Frederick I (known as Barbarossa, or Redbeard) tried to add Italy to his empire, and might have succeeded if he had not been drowned on the third crusade with King Richard of England. His grandson Frederick II -known as stupor mundi (wonder of the world) because he was one of the greatest scholars of his day – tried even harder to seize the pope’s power for himself, and was twice excommunicated as well as being denounced as the Antichrist. But to the pope’s delight, he died of a sudden fever in 1250; to the pope’s even greater delight, his son Conrad died when he was invading Italy. The pope now presented Sicily to the Frenchman Charles of Anjou. The Sicilians had not much liked the ‘Staufer emperors’, but they disliked the French even more and rebelled in favour of a Staufer descendant. Charles won the fight. A boy called Conradin, grandson of stupor mundi, tried to regain his inheritance but was also defeated; he was publicly beheaded – an act that shocked the whole of Europe. And rebels in Sicily were crushed with particular violence, an act that made them loathe the French with a deep and unquenchable hatred.

The bloody climax erupted on Easter Monday 1282, in Palermo, Sicily. The Sicilians were in a rebellious mood; the king’s men were touring the island and seizing all stores of grain to supply an expedition against Constantinople. In front of the Church of the Holy Spirit, people were waiting to attend Vespers. Some French officials wandered into the square; they had been drinking and were in a merry mood. The crowd glared at them but did nothing. Then a sergeant named Drouet threw the match into the powder keg by grabbing a pretty married woman and trying to take liberties. Her enraged husband snatched out his knife and stabbed Drouet to death. The other Frenchmen drew their swords; the Sicilians drew their daggers, and within minutes, all the French were dead. The Sicilians realised that this would mean more executions. So they rushed through Palermo shouting ‘Death to the French’. Frenchmen were killed on the streets; then the Sicilians poured into inns frequented by the French. Women and children were killed too; the Sicilians were in a mood in which they wanted to exterminate every Frenchman in the world. They even broke into the monasteries and dragged out all foreign friars; they were ordered to pronounce ‘ciciri’, a word the French found difficult; anyone who stumbled or stuttered was slain. The French soldiers were easy to kill because most of them had been out drinking all day. Two thousand men, women and children were killed that night. Ironically, the French flag was replaced by the German eagle – the Sicilians had hated the Germans when they were rulers. The governor escaped to a nearby castle, but as he was parleying about surrender someone shot him dead with an arrow and the rest were massacred. Palermo declared itself a Commune. So did other towns as their citizens heard of the massacre and rose up against their French occupiers. Charles of Anjou was forced to call off his expedition against Constantinople. The citizens of Messina – descendants of those ancient pirates who had slit the throats of all the men and married the women sixteen centuries earlier – beat off all the French attempts to repossess the island and eventually offered the throne to a Spaniard who was related by marriage to the Staufer emperors. So a hundred-year-old squabble came to an uneasy resolution.

But if we look for a moment past the endless complications of loyalties and territorial claims and go straight to the heart of the matter, we can see that this was not really an ideological struggle between spiritual authority and the ambition of emperors. The underlying reality of the quarrel is also the underlying reality of the rise and fall of the assassins: grimly inflated egos convinced that they are arguing about spiritual issues or matters of principle when they are simply dominated by their own emotions.

As we have seen, the Christians were fully aware of this problem. They had always recognised the dangers of the ego, with its sins of pride and self-righteous resentment. From the time of Constantine, there had been movements within the Church that warned about the dangers of worldly power and tried to show by example how Christians ought to live: the hermits and desert fathers, the whole early monastic movement and dozens of solitary rebels – both women and men – who were later recognised as saints. In the tenth century, the papacy reached its lowest point so far – a period of fifty years that is known as the ‘pornocracy’; the office was simply bought and sold. Pope Sergius III had a mistress called Marozia, who made sure her bastard son became Pope John XI; both she and the pope were thrown into jail by another of her bastards; but in due course, her grandson became Pope John XII. (He was the one who asked Otto the Great for help, then promptly betrayed him and was deposed.) All this brought about a strong reaction. In France, a new monastic order was founded at the Abbey of Cluny that called for new standards of spirituality. But it also recognised that a monk’s duty was not simply to plant potatoes and make cider; he ought to devote himself to prayer and study – even study of the pagan writers – and to bringing Christian ideals to the common people. So just at the time that the election of popes fell into the hands of the German emperors, a great new movement of religious reform spread all over Europe.

And here we encounter the real absurdity. When the abbots of Cluny insisted that a monk should devote himself to prayer, meditation and study, they had recognised instinctively that human evolution is a matter of inner-development. This is the only true answer to the murderous violence of the power-hungry ego. When a man is totally absorbed in intellectual – or spiritual – discovery, the ego relaxes and then falls asleep.

Yet the Church was totally opposed to intellectual discovery. Convinced that man is a wicked sinner whose only salvation lies in the grace of God, the popes and bishops denounced intellectual speculation as a waste of time. It could only make a man proud of his own abilities and endanger his eternal salvation. It was not that the Church was afraid of losing its hold on the human mind. It genuinely believed that the message of Jesus – as interpreted by St Paul – was the total, self-sufficient answer to the riddle of human existence. Humankind was miserable because Adam had sinned, and the result was death and misery. But the Son of God had died on the cross to redeem mankind from original sin. The Church was an organisation established by Jesus to make sure that all men had a chance of salvation, of getting to heaven when they died. That was all that mattered. Book-learning was quite irrelevant. Philosophy and natural philosophy (as they called science) were both a waste of time. In fact, they encouraged man to think that he had the power to make up his own mind on questions of morality, and so endangered his soul. Leaders like Hildebrand believed sincerely and deeply that all men were ignorant children and that they were the spiritual fathers of mankind.

So the Church gave with one hand and took away with the other. Man must try to live the ‘inner life’, but he must on no account try to think for himself. The result was that the human intellect marked time for a thousand years. When the Church rediscovered the works of Aristotle – through the Arabs – in the eleventh century, he was seized upon with delight and voted a kind of honorary Christian. The reason was simply that he had apparently explained practically everything, from physics to morality, and the existence of his works gave no one any excuse for indulging in speculative thinking. The answer to every possible question could now be found either in the Bible or Aristotle. Aristotle explained the physical world; the Bible explained the spiritual world. What more was there to know? And if monkish philosophers – such as Peter Abelard – still felt the need to exercise their minds, they could apply themselves to explaining how the two worlds fitted together, and how God revealed His eternal goodness by making everything exactly as it is and not otherwise.