Hildebrand
27 April 2009, 3:39 p.m.
53° 21' 4.59" N, 2° 17' 0.09" W
To be honest, I’m a little bit worried about those cocktails in the Manchester airport. I mean, that conversation sure feels as if it happened yesterday, but there’s no way I can avoid the fact: it happened this morning. It sorta bothers me, here as I’m tooling down the autobahn, that I had two strong cocktails—how many hours ago?
Wait a minute, let me think about this. Let me do the math. One unit of alcohol per hour after the first 30 minutes....
Nope, there’s no problem. The alcohol would have been completely out of my system by the time I landed at Mannheim, in fact, by the we took off from Hamburg! Yeah, definitely. I’m good. As long as I leave jet lag and sleep deprivation out of the equation, I’m good to drive. I’ve been good to drive this whole time.
So there I was—I’m in the Manchester Airport bar, on that long layover, talking to this Czech couple about how this whole Walk to Canossa thing got started, the original one, not my vacation, and I’m on a roll—for the first time, I’m making this story work—which is great, because when I tried to explain the history to people back in Waukegan, I usually got these blank stares.
So by the time the bartender brought the next round of cocktails, I was already telling the Czech couple what the world was like in 1050, which is the year that Henry IV was born. In 1050 his Dad—that would be Henry Number 3—he is at the peak of his powers: he has already gone down to Rome, he’s fired three popes, he’s picked his own pope, I mean 1050 is one year when things are really looking good for the Holy Roman Empire—by which, I explained, I meant the Holy Roman Emperor himself, the person, the guy, not the institution, which was always sort of a mess. Anyway, that year the Catholic Church is under the Emperor’s control, and all the German princes, for once, seem to be well-behaved, even the Saxons. Now of course, there’s a lot of conspiring going on, in the private chambers of castles, and in the vestuaries of cathedrals, in Germany and Italy, pretty much all over the place. The Saxons, being Saxons, are just waiting for a good chance to rebel, and Henry III’s big year in 1046, what you might call his display of imperial prerogative, well that has quietly pissed off a lot of people in Italy—by people, I explained to the Czech couple, I meant the people who show up in the historical record, roughly speaking, people who can read and write, so we’re talking about priests and monks and bishops, not ordinary people—and a lot of these pissed-off Italian clergy, including the backers of the now-deposed popes, well they are quietly organizing themselves into a reform movement.
Now some of these reformers are true believers, real purists, hard-core sex-negative fanatics like St. Peter Damian, who genuinely wants to clean up the church—I told them Peter Damian wanted to wipe the Church down with bleach, and of course the couple knew what I was saying—but there’s one reformer, an ambitious young monk named Hildebrand, let’s say he looks at this reform movement as a vehicle for his political ambitions. This Hildebrand goes around telling everyone that he’s the son of a small-town blacksmith, just a poor country kid who rose from his humble origins through brilliance and hard work to become the top protege of Gregory VI—who, if you’re keeping score, is one of the popes who got fired by Henry III.
Well, some people say Hildebrand isn’t a blacksmith’s son at all, that in fact he’s Gregory’s nephew, just another brat from the same rich Roman family. According to this version, Hildebrand came up with the blacksmith story after he saw how his uncle got bounced out of the pope job for acting too rich, too entitled, just too damn obvious when he tried to buy the papacy.
Or maybe Hildebrand did start out as a smart hard-working poor kid. It’s possible.
Anyway, Hildebrand goes into exile when Henry Three fires Gregory Six, and a few years later he turns up again as the toughest ecclesiastical operative in Rome. He’s the stage manager, the behind-the-scenes guy who basically runs the town. Sure he’s a reformer, but he’s not some starry-eyed idealist. Put it this way: Hildebrand is the kind of reformer we know all about in Chicago. He would fit right in.
As soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned Chicago. When you’re from Waukegan, people just cannot understand the difference. Next thing I know, the conversation is totally off track, and the Czech couple are asking me about Oprah, and Al Capone, and Michael Jordan, like they’re personal friends of mine. I tried to bring up Rahm Emmanuel, as a way of getting back to Hildebrand, but the Czech couple had never heard of him. Then I tried to explain how Hildebrand had been the one to push through the rule change that gave the College of Cardinals the right to pick the Pope, but they started talking to each other in Czech, so I dropped it.
Anyway, the cocktails did their job: on the flight to Hamburg, I slept like a baby.
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