Fantastic Metropolis

Of course, part of this might simply be misogyny. For that matter, part of it might be pragmatism: if, like Innocent III, you seek to promote the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church (and the Papacy, of course) over all of Europe, you want to crush the heretical movements. If women seem to be the most susceptible to heresy and the means by which it spreads, you marginalize them. Innocent, as has been stated, was no fool: in the hundred years before he became Pope, two women had shaken the face of Europe’s political landscape. In 1141, the same year that Hildegard first revealed her visions in her Nosce Vias Domini, a woman was crowned Monarch of England. Matilda, daughter of Henry I, granddaughter of William the Conqueror, had been appointed heir by her father and the lords of England had promised to uphold her rights, but her own cousin, Stephen of Blois (son of the Stephen of Blois we mentioned in part one, who accompanied Raymond of Toulouse as he breached the walls of Jerusalem; Raymond’s descendants would face Innocent’s Albigensian Crusade and the wrath of his creature, Simon of Montfort, who would dispossess them) who, despite being the son of the daughter of William the Conqueror (and thus claiming royalty through a woman himself) argued that England needed a King. Years of civil war between the two failed to decisively settle this issue: in the end, Stephen remained King while he lived, and Matilda’s descendants in the Plantagenet dynasty would rule after he died. Matilda’s son would marry a woman even stronger and more forceful, and perhaps more subtle and manipulative as well, in Eleanor of Aquitaine, who brought the rich lands of Aquitaine into the marriage, and thus created a Anglo-French empire that threatened to swallow France whole. Eleanor was a genius, sexually active, had gone on crusade along with her then-husband Louis VII in 1147 (and while doing so had initiated affairs with, rumors indicated, her own uncle Raymond of Poitiers and a captured Saracen), and when her libidinous ways estranged her from her monkish husband, she simply left him for the devilish Henry Plantagenet. Her sons would include John Lackland, the king who would be forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, and Richard Cœur de Leon, the Crusading King of England who would rule as Richard I. When looking at the immediate history of the Europe Innocent desired to bring wholly under control of the Papacy, he could see that women were a threat to all his hopes and plans; women were spreading the Cathar heresy, women were gathering power and influence within his own Church with visions and preaching, women were even endangering the social order that would serve to help maintain the Crusading drive into the Holy Land. Matilda and Eleanor were women who ruled in their own right, Eleanor even going so far as to help import the tolerant southern French social graces into the kingdom of her husband, tangling England and France up in social and territorial knots. To a man who sought to impose order, and to whom Canon Law was all important, they were a great threat.

And that’s not even considering if he was a sorcerer or not.

At the time, Spain was still struggling to determine its future, occupied by both Christian and Muslim rulers in the kingdom of al-Andalus, and Italy was fractured into squabbling states and partially occupied by the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, which itself was divided into petty palatinates and minor kingdoms. As the 12^th century progressed into the 13^th, Europe was still divided between the growth of royal power and the zealously guarded rights of the nobles, the remainder of the martial traditions of the Germanic tribes that had swept over the rotting remains of Rome. We know that when he became Archbishop of Reims, Gerbert of Aurillac was forced to swear to articles of faith that expressly contradicted Catharist tendencies, even though the Cathars as such were entirely unknown in the tenth century. (Manichæanism, as we have already expressed, was not.) Later, Gerbert became Pope Sylvester II, sat upon the throne of Peter for three years and died, and by 1080 the rumors of his having recanted on his deathbed from having invoked the devil were beginning to spread, including the establishment of a Vatican School of Magic. Of course, Gerbert was thought to have wrenched magical secrets from his time spent attending schools in the south, in Moorish Spain: one of Gerbert’s innovations or discoveries, the astrolabe, so entranced the imagination of Europe that more than a century after the man’s death the infamous Peter Abelard and Heloise named the son born of their tumultuous affair after it.

Abelard had discovered the power of logic as a young man, and clung tenaciously to it throughout his life, even when it was abundantly clear that he was in dire straits thanks to his notion that Christian faith itself could and should be subject to logical scrutiny. He created something he dubbed “theologia” to serve as the logical and scientific language of Christianity, and he had developed a dialectical method of dealing with philosophical, existential and religious problems, famously called the Sic et Non, an open-ended and relentlessly inquisitive “on the other hand.” For Bernard of Clairvaux, the guardian of a very different Christian tradition from the one that Abelard and the Cluniacs cultivated, all these notions reeked of heresy. Surely, no one could really imagine that Plato could be made over into a Christian, as Abelard had suggested.

—Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World

Christianity was divided, and nowhere can that division be more clearly seen than in its attack on both the gnostical elements of Catharism and the philosophical inquiry of Abelard. Once Bernard of Clairvaux had finished with Abelard, the man was totally broken, spent, and even condemned by the Pope. He died a year later in the care of Peter the Venerable and the abbey of Cluny, the wounds he’d suffered through his life of teaching and inquiry catching up with him. (Peter had been castrated by the relatives of Heloise due to their affair, although obviously too late to prevent Astrolabe from being born.) But the approach he’d resurrected in Western Christendom, the application of the intellect to religion, is almost identical to that of gnosticism… the idea that through wisdom (sophia) and the application of knowledge (gnosis) one can unravel the mysteries of the universe and achieve freedom from deception. Ironically, both the Cistercians under Bernard and the Cluniacs under Peter the Venerable would adopt aspects of the Manichæan/gnostic worldview that the Cathars, too, would embrace: the Cistercians saw the temporal world as inherently sinful and corrupt, requiring the domination of the Mother Church, while the Cluniacs took to heart the application of education and learning to questions of dogma and belief.