Freaks of Fanaticism, and Other Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

"What shall we do?" asked a large party at Milan. "This Ariald tells us that if we receive the Holy Sacrament from married or simoniacal priests, we eat our own damnation. We cannot live without sacraments, and he has driven all the priests out of Milan."

The parties were so divided, that those who held with Ariald would not receive sacraments from the priests, the heavenly gift on their altars they esteemed as "dogs' dung;" they would not even join with them, or those who adhered to them, in prayer. "One house was all faithful," says Andrew of Strumi; "the next all unfaithful. In the third, the mother and one son were believing, but the father and the other son were unbelieving; so that the whole city was a scene of confusion and contention."

In 1058 Guido assembled a synod at Fontanetum near Novara, and summoned Ariald and Landulf Cotta to attend it. The synod awaited their arrival for three days, and as they did not come, excommunicated them as contumacious.

Landulf the younger, the biographer of Ariald, says that Pope Stephen X. reversed the sentence of the synod; but this account does not agree with what is related by Arnulf. Landulf the elder confounds the dates, and places the synod in the reign of Alexander II., and says that the Pope adopted a middle course, and sent ambassadors to Milan to investigate the matter. Bonizo of Sutri says the same. All agree that Hildebrand was one of these commissioners. Hildebrand was therefore able to judge on the spot of the results of an appeal to the passions of the people. It is the severest condemnation to his conduct in 1073, to know for certain that he had seen the working of the power he afterwards called out. He then saw how great was that power; he must have been cruelly, recklessly, wickedly indifferent to the crimes which accompanied its invocation. Landulf the elder says that the second commissary was Anselm of Lucca, whilst Bonizo speaks indifferently of the "bishops a latere" as constituting the deputation. Guido was not in Milan when it arrived, he did not dare to venture his person in the midst of the people. The ambassadors were received with the utmost respect; they took on themselves to brand the Archbishop as a simoniac and a schismatic, and, according to Landulf, to do many other things which they were not authorised by the Pope to do; so that the dissension, so far from being allayed by their visit, only waxed more furious.

At the end of the year 1058, or the beginning of 1059, the Pope sent Peter Damiani, the harsh Bishop of Ostia, and Anselm, Bishop of Lucca, on a new embassy to Milan.[21] They were received with respect by the Archbishop and clergy; but the pride of the Milanese of all ranks was wounded by seeing the Bishop of Ostia enthroned in the middle, with Anselm of Lucca, the suffragan of Milan, upon his right, and their Archbishop degraded to the left of the Legate, and seated on a stool at his feet. Milan assembled at the ringing of the bells in all the churches, and the summons of an enormous brazen trumpet which shrieked through the streets. The fickle people asked if the Church of St. Ambrose was to be trodden under the foot of the Roman Pontiff. "I was threatened with death," wrote Peter Damiani to Hildebrand, "and many assured me that there were persons panting for my blood. It is not necessary for me to repeat all the remarks the people made on this occasion."

But Peter Damiani was not the man to be daunted at a popular outbreak. He placidly mounted the ambone, and asserted boldly the supreme jurisdiction of the chair of St. Peter. "The Roman Church is the mother, that of Ambrose is the daughter. St. Ambrose always recognised that mistress. Study the sacred books, and hold us as liars, if you do not find that it is as I have said."

Then the charges against the clergy were investigated by the legates, and not a single clerk in Milan was found who had not paid a fee on his ordination; "for that was the custom, and the charge was fixed," says the Bishop of Ostia. Here was a difficulty. He could not deprive every priest and deacon in Milan, and leave the great city without pastors. He was therefore obliged to content his zeal with exacting from the bishops a promise that ordination in future should be made gratuitously; and the Archbishop was constrained to deposit on the altar a paper in which he pronounced his own excommunication, in the event of his relaxing his rigour in suppressing the heresy of the Simoniacs and Nicolaitans, by which latter name those who insisted on the lawfulness of clerical marriage were described.

To make atonement for the past, the Archbishop was required to do penance for one hundred years, but to pay money into the papal treasury in acquittal of each year; which, to our simple understanding, looks almost as scandalous a traffic as imposing a fee on all clergy ordained. But then, in the one case the money went into the pocket of the bishops, and in the other into that of the Pope.

The clergy who had paid a certain sum were to be put to penance for five years; those who had paid more, for ten (also to be compensated by a payment to Rome!), and to make pilgrimages to Rome or Tours. After having accomplished this penance they were to receive again the insignia of their offices.

Then Peter Damiani re-imposed on the clergy the oaths forced on them by Ariald, and departed.