CHAPTER V THE CLUNIAC REFORMATION (910–1073) AND ITALY IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY[5]
End of the Dark Ages—Beginnings of the Cluniac Reformation—The Congregation of Cluny—Cluniac ideals—Camaldoli and Vallombrosa—Henry III. joins the Reformers—The German reforming Popes—Leo IX.—South Italy and Sicily in the Eleventh Century—The first coming of the Normans—Aversa—The sons of Tancred and the Conquest of Apulia—Robert Guiscard—Leo IX. and the Normans—Battle of Civitate—Early Career of Hildebrand—Nicholas II.—The Reform of Papal Elections—The Normans become Papal Vassals—Milan submits to Rome—Roger’s Conquest of Sicily—Feudalism in Southern Italy.
The Dark Ages were well over by the middle of the eleventh century, and after a century of anarchy, even feudalism had become a comparatively tolerable form of government. The stronger military states had absorbed their weaker neighbours, and, beyond the Alps at least, the disintegrating tendency of feudal doctrine had received a decided check, not only in the strong monarchy of the Germans, but even in the growth of vigorous feudal potentates such as the margraves of the eastern frontier of the Empire, the dukes of the Normans, and the counts of Flanders or of Toulouse. There were again forces making towards order, law, and peace. The state had been saved from absolute annihilation.
The Church was not yet in so sound a position. She had outlived the worst brutalities of the tenth century, but the fierce, lawless, grasping baron, who feared neither God nor man, was still an element to be reckoned with. The revived lay-power tended of itself to correct the worst abuses. The Empire had, as we have seen, reformed the Papacy. But if the Church was to live, it could not owe its life to the patronage or goodwill of outside reformers. The Church must reform itself.
Signs of such a purification of the Church from within had long been manifest, but the little band of innovators found it no easy task to preach to a world that knew no law but the law of the stronger. As ever in the Middle Ages, a new monastic movement heralded in the work of reformation. As the Carolingian reformation is associated with Benedict of Aniane, so is the reformation of the eleventh century associated with the monks of Cluny.