The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O’Shea Read Free Book Online

the thrall of the German emperor, the single biggest threat to the papacy’s independence.

     
    Pope Innocent III
     
    (Thirteenth-century fresco in the monastery Sacro Speco, Subiaco)
     
    At the beginning of the 1190s, the man on the German throne, Henry VI, the son of Barbarossa, had seemed poised totake over all of central Europe and, more important, the entire Italian peninsula. An ambitious and arrogant young monarch, he bestrode the continent like a latter-day Caesar; Celestine III, the aging pope in a besieged Rome, could do little else but try to have the man murdered. The plot was discovered, and Henry dispatched the papal assassin by nailing a red-hot crown into his skull. Then, in September 1197, Henry fell ill, most probably with malaria, and died in Messina, Sicily. It was a blessed mosquito for the papacy. Five months later, Henry’s infant son, Frederick, had become the ward of none other than Lotario dei Conti, the child’s birthright soon to be occulted by the skirted intrigues skillfully conducted by the new pope. The future looked bright for theocracy.
    But as Lotario guided his horse through the straw-strewn streets, past dwellings proud and humble, he had to know that the Roman skies over his papacy were not cloudless. Hundreds of forbidding stone towers, constructed by the powerful families of the city, loomed over him like a forest of menace. As a Conti, Lotario had to contend with such clans as the Frangipani, Colonna, Annibaldi, and Caetani, all of whom counted cardinals and rich barons in their midst. The Vassaletti had cornered the market on quarrying classical Roman statuary into chunks of marble to be sold throughout Europe. It was the Frangipani who had made Gelasius take his shameful mule ride. And it was they and their allies who viewed this upstart Conti pope with misgiving.
    To their patrician Roman noses, Lotario and his kinsmen still had a lingering scent of the barnyard to them. The Conti were from the Campagna, the rolling hinterland to the southeast of the city. Their rough-hewn castle, which still crowns the hilltop village of Gavignano, overlooked a quilted valley that hadknown the hand of man since the time of the Etruscans. A few miles to the west, tucked behind steep green slopes, stood the larger town of Segni. It was between there and Gavignano that the estates of the Conti di Segni produced the wealth that fueled social striving.
    Sometime around the middle of the century, Lotario’s father, Trasimondo, had wooed and won Claricia, a Roman heiress of the influential Scotti family. Given an exalted station in society through his highborn mother, the young Lotario eventually left the hills and valleys around Gavignano and rode toward Rome to make his mark in the world. Most probably, he took the Appian Way into the city, passing the hulking ruins of antiquity guarded by rows of pencil-thin cypress trees. Destiny smiled on him in 1187 when his mother’s brother became Pope Clement III and ensured his talented nephew’s rise to prominence. Lotario studied theology in Paris and learned the law in Bologna, and wrote several closely argued treatises. One of these,
De miseria condicionis humanae
(The wretchedness of man’s lot), won him lasting recognition among learned pessimists throughout Europe. His fierce and never idle legalistic intellect, wedded to the diplomatic guile of an Italian aristocrat, would make Lotario a redoubtable opponent to any who dared stand in his way.
    Like the pilgrims who flocked to the sights described in
Mirabilis Urbis Romae
(The wonders of the City of Rome), a popular twelfth-century guidebook, Lotario’s procession would have passed through the neighborhood built over the Roman Forum. Tradition dictated that papal coronation parades stop at intervals along their route to receive the acclaim of the crowds and to distribute alms. No doubt at the arch of Septimius Severus, then 995 years old, Lotario’s retinue came to halt. Of the two tall towers