Killer popes
By promising salvation to the first crusaders, they ignited a Christian 'holy war' against Islam
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: The First Crusade
ONE DAY IN 1079, CARDINAL ODO OF CHÂTILLON – the future Pope Urban II – was visiting the papal residence in Rome, where he found the incumbent, the great Hildebrand of Sovana – Pope Gregory VII – surrounded by Christian relics salvaged from the Holy Land.
Here was a fossil-like chunk of bread and thirteen beans, allegedly table scraps from the Last Supper.
Here, a jumble of rocks taken from Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre.
Here were bits of wood reportedly broken off the true cross.
And here, the pride of Gregory’s collection, were the remains of Christ himself: the blood of the Son of God smeared on scraps of cloth, and two shrivelled things that nobody within papal earshot dared deny had been the Messiah’s umbilical cord and his foreskin.
Surveying these priceless items, the pontiff and the cardinal gave ear to a whisper that hastened from the Holy Land and had lately swelled into an anguished cry: Jerusalem, the relics’ provenance and the parish of Jesus, was still in Muslim hands and the dreaded Saracens had plundered Christ’s homeland.
The very idea shamed all Christendom, the prelates agreed, and they felt obliged to reclaim the Holy Land for the Lord. But how?
Hildebrand and Odo talked long into the night of the ideas taking shape in bishoprics throughout Christendom.
They spoke of raising an army of soldiers loyal to Christ.
They would be ‘Christian soldiers’, charged with the task of seizing back the sacred city for Jesus.
It would be a Holy War.
It would be a Christian crusade.
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No doubt, a succession of medieval popes had deemed Islam the greatest heresy and threat to Christendom. The incumbent in the Vatican now agitated for a violent response.
Hildebrand’s most effective recruiting tool was the promise of salvation to anyone who volunteered to ‘take the cross’ and fight and die for Christ. In doing so, he endowed the Holy See with the powers of god at a time when the pope was not yet deemed ‘infallible’.
Let’s examine why Gregory and subsequent popes presumed to adulterate the ‘purity of the divine’ with human agency.
For one thing, they were in earnest to justify their actions on earth. And they were short of time and arms.
Western Europe was woefully ill-equipped to fight a major war and fatigued by centuries of conflict. For 800 years, Christendom had barely known peace: first the invasions of Germanic and other tribes (c. 375–568 CE), followed by the bloody incursions by the Huns (370– 471 CE), a central Asian tribe whose horse-born lightning strikes under Atilla drove the Visigoths as far west as the Iberian Peninsula. Then, from the seventh to the tenth centuries, came the Arab conquests, the Norse raids and the waves of the Magyar (Hungarian) tribes.
This chronicle of slaughter prompted some to wonder whether human beings were mere beasts in human guise, destined to bleed each other to death. If so, the early medieval Roman Church was ill-equipped to meet the threat of a violent death. The papal forces were barely able to raise arms against local resistance.
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A little backstory will help us understand why. Many prelates had for centuries recoiled from the idea of taking up arms on behalf of Christ, for the prophet had left few in doubt about the meaning of his example of peace and love.
Yet, that lesson did not inhibit Pope Gregory I (c. 540–604 CE) from calling for higher taxes on non-Christians to force them to convert, and the procurement of weapons for missionaries.
Gregory I’s successors up to the 9th century drew on his ideas when they conceived of a Holy War for Christianity. Theirs would be a ‘just war’, in defence of their religion against the menace of Islamic heresy. They needed a Christian warrior to lead it.
In Charles the Great, better known as Charlemagne (747–814 CE), king of the Franks, the popes believed they had found their man.
Raw power over piety animated Charlemagne. Neither this nor the fact that the Frankish king had ten known wives or concubines vexed the consciences of Rome.
The popes, on the contrary, saw in this rapacious warrior the progenitor of a Christian empire, and Charlemagne was quick to harness the zeal of his papal backers to a campaign of conquest. He was the model for a Christian warlord.
Carolingian society was ‘organized for war, not prayer’, writes the scholar Peter H. Wilson. ‘Its goal was to acquire wealth through plunder and extorting tribute . . . Christianity channelled these ambitions by identifying non-Christians as “legitimate” targets.’
As the defacto leader of the armed wing of Rome, Charlemagne united most of Western Europe under the Christian banner except the Iberian Peninsula. For good reason was Charlemagne dubbed the ‘Father of Europe’.
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Ireland had been the first European ‘country’ to Christianise, in the fifth century; then came the Anglo-Saxons (seventh century), the Frisians (eighth century) and, by military force, the Saxons (c. 800 CE).
By the eleventh century, most of northern and eastern Europe had converted to Christianity: Scandinavia, Bohemia (c. 970 CE), Hungary (c. 1000) and Poland (c. 1000) joined the earlier European converts.
(Pagan exceptions were the Prussians and the Lithuanians, who wouldn’t officially turn Christian until 1300 and 1400, respectively.)
The Muslim hold on the Holy Land infuriated these fresh Christian converts, who hankered to reclaim the southern and eastern Mediterranean for Christ.
However, the idea of using violence in the Jesus’ name broke the mould of several centuries of Christian reluctance to raise arms. Not since Charlemagne had they launched major wars in the name of god. Rome ‘forbade clerics to fight or bear arms’ and imposed ‘penance upon soldiers for killing in battle’, explained the historian John Gilchrist, in his seminal essay, The Papacy and War Against the ‘Saracens’.
Between the fifth and eighth centuries, the Catholic Church had talked of seizing land lost to the Muslims but had refused to adopt Saint Augustine’s idea of a ‘just war’ against their enemies.
Saint Augustine had defined a ‘just war’ as one fought in defence of a just cause. It was a war that had been legitimately authorised and motivated by ‘right intent’ (meaning peace).
And yet, he had also described ‘holy wars’ against heretics as ‘just’. This confused his original meaning, because all holy wars were, in the minds of believers, ‘just’, and all were motivated by ‘right intent’.
The medieval popes’ ‘intent’ had little to do with peaceful coexistence with Islam. They aimed to reimpose through violence the pre-eminence of the Christian faith.
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The medieval popes were a bloody lot. Many lived and died by the sword: of thirty-two popes between 882 and 1003 (from Marinus I to Sylvester II, excluding the illegitimate Leo VIII), a quarter met a violent, unnatural death: John VIII, Stephen VI, Leo V, John X, John XII, Benedict VI, John XIV, of whom three were strangled.
John VIII’s enemies poisoned then clubbed him to death, while John X was smothered with a pillow.
John XII’s death was singularly unedifying: either he died of a stroke in 964 while in bed with a married woman or her jealous husband murdered him.
‘There seems to be no time when the popes were not involved in some armed conflict or other,’ writes Gilchrist.
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The Muslim invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries cemented the idea that Christendom should defend their faith through ‘battles for Christ’.
Thus, Leo IV (pope between 847 and 855 CE) offered salvation, and John VIII (872–882 CE) offered the remission of sins, to those who volunteered to fight and die ‘for the truth of the Faith, the salvation of souls and the defence of Christendom’ against ‘pagans and infidels’.
Pope Gregory VII, meanwhile, reversed papal ideas against arms-bearing, offering his banner to William of Normandy’s invasion of England in 1066.
Collectively, the popes of this era guaranteed ‘eternal life’ to those who died fighting the Saracens.
As John VIII wrote to the Frankish bishops in 878 CE, ‘The repose of eternal life will receive those who in the piety of the Christian religion have fallen in battle fighting against pagans and unbelievers.’
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And so, by the late eleventh century, the Holy See was bristling for war.
The popes drew heavily on the Bible to justify ‘God’s war’, chiefly the Hebrew prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah and the New Testament’s star convert, Saint Paul.
Not content with defending the faith, and fearing the destruction of Christendom, Rome for the first time resolved to use violence to expand its reach: the papal armies would impose their interpretation of Jesus Christ’s teaching on the Jews, pagans and ‘accursed Saracens’, whom they deemed inimical to his doctrines, and would forcibly reclaim territory lost to this triad of the ‘Antichrist’.
The popes meant to conquer any creed that refused to recognise the supremacy of Christ. This went further than the Islamic conquests. Rival faiths were tolerated under Islam, as we’ve seen, so long as they paid the tax.
The popes, in contrast, sought nothing less than the destruction of anyone who denied the word of Christ as the ultimate truth, as interpreted and preached by them.
Between 1049 and 1217, popes Leo IX, Gregory VII, Urban II and Innocent III engineered this transformation of the Christian faith. What had been a passive religion in sympathy with the peaceful ideals of the Lord mutated into an institution of organised violence.
Those four popes conceived of, established and promoted the concept of Holy War beyond the frontiers of Christendom, by ‘directing the soldier’s profession to ecclesi- astical ends’.
Christian soldiers would henceforth fight wars of conquest on behalf of Rome. The promise of everlasting life, in the popes’ gift, would prove the most persuasive recruiting sergeant.
They propagated the idea of an armed pilgrimage, of soldiers marching for Christ, a ‘crusade’ to reclaim the old frontiers of Christendom. Crucially, they believed they enjoyed the endorsement of God, justified by scripture.
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No pope worked harder to attach the promise of salvation to Holy War than Gregory VII, born Hildebrand around 1015.
Before he was elected pope, he had promoted war on behalf of the church in Sicily, England and Milan.
To many, he was an unscrupulous manipulator; in the view of others he was a ‘gentle shepherd of souls’.
One constant permeated Hildebrand’s character: he never resiled from his belief in the use of violence to propagate Christ’s kingdom on Earth. He feverishly planned and hoped to participate in a great war for Christendom.
His failure to raise a papal army inhibited his idea of himself as a warrior-pope. Yet he granted those prepared to fight and die for Christendom his official blessing, and anointed their campaigns as ‘holy wars’. Psychologically, at least, this differed little from the Islamic idea of ‘holy war’: a fight to the death in the name of their god.
Hildebrand aimed to recruit knights from across Europe. By these measures, he ‘certainly was the most warlike pope who had yet occupied the chair of St Peter’, writes the German historian Carl Erdmann. ‘He propagated the idea of crusade as no one before.’ He worked tirelessly to develop ‘the theory and practice of holy war and holy warriors’.
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Drawing on Augustine’s idea of a ‘just war’, Hildebrand promised to remit or annul sins and dangled the prospect of salvation to all who fought for Christ.
So long as their motives were grounded in faith and selflessness, ‘such soldiers could combine penance and violence’.
Hildebrand likened the Christian soldier’s sacrifice to the suffering of Jesus. A decade after the pope’s death, Rangerius of Lucca would recall that this vicar of Christ had promised to enlist Heaven’s aid to protect God’s infantry, and to send the archangel Michael to assist them in battle. Little wonder Hildebrand was thought to have the ear of the Almighty.
In the last years of his pontificate, he urged the church to abandon its tradition of passivity and to adopt a warlike character and a war plan. One of his last letters to the Holy See would be seen as a pivotal moment in the story of the Crusades:
‘Only a few of our people,’ he wrote, ‘have hitherto resisted the godless to the point of bloodshed; very few have suffered death for Christ. Just think how many knights die daily for their lords for the sake of vile lucre. But what do we do or endure for the Highest King? Hold before your eyes the standard of our leader, the Eternal King, of which He Himself says: “In your suffering you will redeem your souls.” Let us not avoid death for righteousness, but ever strive after it for the love of God and the defense of righteousness.’
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Hildebrand’s successor was listening. Pope Urban II lived and breathed the example of his great mentor.
Their unity of purpose produced Urban’s famous sermon to a grand council of the church convened in November 1095 in the Auvergne town of Clermont.
At issue was how to respond to the ‘barbaric fury’ of Islam that had ‘deplorably afflicted and laid waste the churches of God in the regions of the Orient’.
The Saracens, Urban warned, had ‘even grasped in intolerable servitude [the] churches and the Holy City of Christ, glorified by His passion and resurrection’.
Jerusalem, the scene of the crucifixion and the resurrection, had fallen into the hands of heathens. It was Urban’s grave duty to ask the princes of Christendom to march forth and ‘free the churches of the East’ from the hold of the Muslims.
Urban discarded the tradition that pilgrims should be unarmed and declared a plenary indulgence for anyone who ‘journeys to Jerusalem to liberate the church of God’. He named Count Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, as the leader of the expedition.
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Urban’s sermon at Clermont approved, for the first time, the concept of an ‘armed pilgrimage’. From that point, canon law allowed pilgrims to ‘engage in warfare en route’ - against Jews, pagans as well as Muslims - without threatening the spiritual purity of their pilgrimage.
In his letters and sermons, Urban promoted this idea: the armed expedition would be a ‘penitential war’ to rescue the Holy Land. He promised to remit all sins of those who accepted ‘their duty to follow Christ’, to avenge the loss of Christ’s homeland ‘as a debt of honour’.
Liberating the eastern church after centuries of bondage would also restore ‘fraternal unity’ and reaffirm the papal leadership of Christendom.
Urban understood the people’s terror of perdition. By promising the first crusaders a fast track to Heaven, he persuaded huge numbers to rally to his call.
Urban had the measure of the knights, too, to whom the idea of a crusade appealed at every level: as an act of heroic duty, as a Holy War for Christ and as an assured path to salvation.
The first crusaders came forward, to ‘take the cross’. They would leave on the day of the Assumption, 15 August 1096, bound for the Holy Land.
Next Thursday, 17th July 2025: The First Crusade
Selected sources and further reading:
Anonymous and Hill, R. (transl.) (1967) Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, (Deeds of the Franks and the Other Pilgrims to Jerusalem), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brink, S. and Price, N. (eds.) (2008) The Viking World, London: Routledge.
Byron, J. (2017) ‘Acts of Violence in the Book of Acts’ in Stuckenbruck, L.T. (ed.) Religiously Motivated Violence, Leiden: Brill.
Cushing, K.G. (1998) ‘Anselm and His Canonical Sources’, Papacy and Law in the Gregorian Revolution: The Canonistic Work of Anselm of Lucca, Oxford Historical Monographs.
Erdmann, C. with Baldwin, M.W. and Goffart, W. (transls.) (1977) The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, Princeton NJ; Princeton University Press.
Gilchrist, J. (2 May 1988) ‘The Papacy and War against the “Saracens”, 795–1216’, The International History Review, 10(2), pp. 174–97.
Kelly, J.N.D. and Walsh, M.J. Oxford Dictionary of Popes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Langan, J. (Spring 1984) ‘The Elements of St. Augustine’s Just War Theory’, The Journal of Religious Ethics, 12(1), pp. 19–38.
Matthews, S. and Gibson, E.L. (2005) Violence in the New Testament, London: T&T Clark International.
Morris, C. (1993) ‘Martyrs on the Field of Battle before and during the First Crusade’, Studies in Church History, (30), pp. 93–104.
Papal Encyclicals: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/.
Pope Gregory VII and Caspar E. (ed.) (1920–23) Das Register Gregors VII, MGH, Epistolae selectae, (11) Berlin.
Pope Urban II, (2023) ‘Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095’, Medieval Sourcebook (Six Versions of the Speech), Internet History Sourcebook Project, New York: Fordham University.
Rambiert-Kwaśniewska, A. (2016) ‘Did Paul the Apostle Call Christians to use Violence? A Theological Meaning of Agōn in Pauline Epistles’, eClassica II, pp. 97–103.
Tyerman, C. (2006) God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, London: Penguin Books.
Wilson, P.H. (2016) Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press.