But this crowning height to which Ariberto had brought the See of Milan was the brink of a signal downfall. The greatest, he was also the last of the strong ecclesiastical princes of Milan. Silently, steadily during these last centuries of revived vigour and prosperity a new force had been developing in the city, and acquiring conscious existence—the People. The wars of Ariberto’s reign had endowed this force with the knowledge of arms and a sense of its own power. It was the nameless, irresistible will of the masses of the citizens which had carried Ariberto to victory over the Emperor, and this very victory tended to the undoing of the Archbishop and his order, by weakening the feudal system with which the episcopal and aristocratic power of Milan was now inextricably bound up. It had been the part of the Church of St. Ambrose to give the consecrating impulse and inspiration to the revolt of the new world against the decaying order of the Roman Empire, and under its latest representative to lead the city, as we have just seen, to victory over the Head of feudalism. But now in its turn this great force for civilisation and humanity was to be corrupted by temporal power and possession—to renounce its mission as guide and sanctifier, and assume instead the part of opposition to the vital and progressive elements of the community. Ariberto and his clergy were, in fact, the representatives in Milan of feudalism and aristocracy. The hierarchy of St. Ambrose was composed of the great nobles of the city, in whose families the high ecclesiastical offices and benefices had became hereditary possessions. These arch-Priests, arch-Deacons, Cimiliarchs, Decumani—the Cardinals or Ordinaries, as the highest orders of the clergy were called—were great feudal magnates, forming the strongest class of the Milanese nobility. Ranged beneath them in ecclesiastic and feudal rank were the lesser clergy, just as the secular aristocracy was divided into the two degrees of Captains—Capitani—and their vassals, called Vavasours—Valvassori. Below these came the undistinguished masses of the people, merchants, artisans, and peasants, mostly serfs, and all absolutely subjected to the arbitrary government of the nobles.

The first revolt against this system was that already mentioned, which resulted in the battle of Campo Malo, and arose within the privileged class itself, being an attempt of the Valvassori and minor clergy to shake off the heavy yoke of their feudal superiors. But a much more fatal discord in the community began in 1042, when the whole populace joined with the discontented Valvassori, and broke out into fierce rebellion against the nobles. One Lanzone, a noble who had deserted his own order, was their leader. A civil war raged for many months, filling the streets with daily tumult and bloodshed, and at last the Archbishop and the magnates were forced to abandon the city. Invoking the aid of the nobles in the neighbouring communities, they returned with a strong army and invested the city. The struggle was waged with hideous ferocity on both sides, neither giving mercy to prisoners or wounded. The besiegers built six great strongholds round the walls, commanding the principal gates, and effectually shutting out all succour of food or arms. Two long and terrible years went by, till the plight of the citizens grew desperate. Pallid and lean from famine and sickness, still they fought on with invincible souls, in the midst of the deserted palaces and falling towers of this city which, the chronicler tells us, no longer seemed, as of yore, the seat of noble kings, but rather a desolate Babylon. At last Lanzone resolved to go to Germany and seek the help of Conrad’s successor, Henry III. But the Emperor, mindful of his father’s experience of Milan, would only grant it on condition that his army should occupy the city, and that the people should swear fealty to himself. But the new-born democracy, groping its way to liberty through a thousand obstacles, instinctively rejected these conditions, preferring its native tyrants to a foreign yoke. Lanzone skilfully used the fear of imperial interference to persuade the besiegers to agree to a reconciliation. Peace was concluded, all mutual wrongs being forgiven, the nobles restored to their homes and possessions, and a share in the government secured to the people.

The one sacrifice offered upon the altar of this new covenant between the classes was the leader Lanzone himself, who, at the first opportunity, was arrested and put to death by the aristocratic party. But his work was done, and the foundation of the future Republic had been laid. Archbishop Ariberto, now ill and aged, had taken refuge during the troubles at Monza, and returned to his own city, only to die (1045). His career fitly closes with the first signs of the collapse of the social order which he embodied.

CHAPTER II
The Patarini

“Dicetur in posterum subjectum Romæ Mediolanum.”—Arnulphus.

The revolt of the Milanese people against the nobles was associated with the great agitation for the reform of the Catholic Church, initiated and carried on in the eleventh century by S. Giovanni Gualberto, San Romualdo and his disciple, Peter Damiano, and by the Cluniac monk, Hildebrand, afterwards Gregory VII. This movement had its political aspect. The spiritual supremacy to which these men aimed to restore the dishonoured and discredited Papacy included domination over the temporal powers. The first step to be accomplished was unity of government within the Church’s own body, and the suppression of the virtual independence, based on feudal dominion, of the great metropolitan Sees, Milan, Ravenna and others outside Italy. Divining with sure instinct where the power of the future lay, they allied themselves with those democratic forces to which the Ambrosian Church was now fatally opposed, in a fierce attack upon the great Lombard See.

Much laxity of discipline prevailed among the higher clergy of Milan, whose pride and splendour was famous throughout Europe. They lived like great feudal barons; armed cap à pie, they led their vassals forth to battle, nor in their domestic manners were they more rigid. They were, moreover, obstinately attached by long custom to the two practices which the severer spirits in the Church had condemned and fought against for centuries, simony and marriage, both closely bound up with their feudal constitution and polity. They stoutly maintained that the ordination of married men as priests was sanctioned by St. Ambrose himself in his writings, nor did they demur to the marriage of those already in Orders, though the sentence of the great Doctor on this point was more doubtful. In fact, they married with the same unconsciousness of sin as their untonsured brethren did. The natural consequence was that the offices and benefices of the Church were bequeathed from father to son, and tended to become hereditary in certain favoured families. It followed as inevitably that bishoprics, abbacies and all offices carrying with them worldly possessions, came to be trafficked in like any other sort of estates. The investitures of them were granted by the feudal superior for fixed and regular fees, graduated according to the value of the office, a practice resulting from the introduction by Charlemagne of the system of feudal tenure into the ecclesiastical body politic. Thus there were few among the dignitaries of St. Ambrose who had not paid, according to the current price, for their spiritual rank and its accompanying temporalities, and the possession of ecclesiastical benefices, either to be held or disposed of at will, had become a form of wealth which, vitiated though its origin might be, was wound in inextricably with the complicated existence of Milanese society.

It was natural that the successive decrees of the Popes from Clement II. (1046-1047) onwards against simony and marriage should have been disregarded in Milan. The renunciation of the benefices which provided them with a livelihood, and the putting away of the wives and children to whom they were bound by the ties of innocent and natural affection, were sacrifices too hard for men whose vocation was rather worldly than spiritual. Nothing less than a social revolution could overthrow the rooted customs of the Ambrosian Church.

Such a revolution, in the heaving and unstable eleventh century, was, however, easily excited. The discontent of the lower orders with the aristocracy increased as their lately-won privileges generated the desire for a further share of power, and their particular animus against the ecclesiastical nobles was strengthened by a deep and widespread aspiration for religious purity and truth among many of the humblest people. The agitation against the real and supposed scandals in the lives of the clergy was taken up with fury in the poorest parts of the city.

A revolutionary party grew up, which became known among its opponents by the opprobrious name of Patarini, a term used in Milan to denote heretics, and derived perhaps from Patari, rag-sellers, who with their customers represented the lowest class of the people. And though the aim of the revolutionists was a social and moral, not a doctrinal, reform, there probably prevailed much freedom of thought and religious opinion among them. The heresy of the Catharists—better known under the name of Albigenses, by which they were called later in the south of France—was taking wide hold in North Italy at this time. The strange Manichean ideas of these sectaries, who believed in a dual principle of good and evil governing the world, must have found ready acceptance in pessimistic souls who saw the pride and luxury of the great on one side, and the misery of the oppressed and enslaved masses on the other. Their ideal of extreme bodily purity, rising to an asceticism which, by denying the flesh even the mere satisfaction of its needs aimed at the liberation of the spirit from its thraldom to the Devil by the self-extinction of the human race, contrasted their lives sharply with the luxurious habits of the majority of the orthodox clergy, and by sanctifying hunger and privation, gave a new dignity and self-respect to the down-trodden poor. Moreover, their stern rejection of all pleasure and selfish ambition gave them leisure and courage to devote themselves to the sick and suffering, so that many joined themselves to their company from the impulse of gratitude. They led in fact the evangelic life, though their dark and despairing tenets were utterly alien to the spirit of Christianity. They clung to their peculiar faith with a lofty enthusiasm which persecution could not subdue.