And the best way of securing this desirable end? To Gregory, a man with a proven taste for thinking big, the solution had seemed self- evident enough. Surely, he had mused, heaven’s purpose would best be served if all the various realms of Christendom were to become the personal property of St Peter, and his earthly vicar -- himself. Never a man to duck a challenge, he had duly dusted down the Donation of Constantine, and written to various princes, floating the startling suggestion that they might like to sign over their kingdoms ‘to the holy Roman church’. Yet even Gregory, never a man to sell his own expectations short, seems to have appreciated that the idea, by and large, was a non-starter. A few months after Canossa, for instance, addressing the various kings of Spain, he had no sooner asserted that the entire peninsula belonged to St Peter than he was hurriedly acknowledging that, ‘to be sure, both the misfortunes of past times and a certain negligence of our predecessors have hitherto obscured this’. Which was putting it mildly. Indeed, in sober truth, rulers needed to be either very pious, like the Countess Matilda, or else very hungry for legitimacy, like Robert Guiscard, to become vassals of St Peter. Even Gregory himself, though he remained indomitably convinced of the papacy’s entitlements, was not wholly oblivious to this. He may have been unbending in his aspirations – but in his methods often much less so. After all, as the Norman battle line had so potently demonstrated at Hastings, there was no shame in a tactical withdrawal, so long as it served the cause of an ultimate victory. When the Conqueror himself, for instance, invited by a pushy legate to become a vassal of St Peter, responded with a diplomatic snort, Gregory opted not to force the issue. William was; compared with Henry, a model partner of the Roman Church; why, then, risk the alienation of a king who was capable of serving ‘as a standard of righteousness and a pattern of obedience to all the princes of the earth’?
For Gregory, then, as for any general engaged in a war on multiple fronts, strategy was not merely a matter of clinging on to positions, no matter what, but also of judging which lines could legitimately be abandoned, in the cause of securing a lesser advantage. Certainly, as the bruising events leading up to Canossa had demonstrated, he was hardly afraid to go head to head with kings; and yet Gregory was sensitive as well to the advantages that might be gained from conciliation. In Spain, for instance, as in England, he ended up opting not to push his luck: for the King of Leon, no less than William the Conqueror, was a man who combined great devotion to the Roman Church with an imperious and iron-forged temper. Indeed, such was the fearsome reputation of Alfonso VI that he was darkly rumoured to have been guilty of fratricide, no less: for in 1072, ascending the throne, it had been in succession to his brother, murdered in a crime that — officially, at any rate – had never been solved. With a second brother incarcerated for life, and one of his cousins falling mysteriously off a cliff, such a king was clearly a man whose interests it might be perilous to cross — nor did Gregory choose to. Indeed, aside from a brief spat provoked by Alfonso’s choice of an unsuitable wife, relations between Pope and king grew so cordial that in 1079, only two years after the rebuff of his attempt to lay claim to Spain for St Peter, Gregory could hail his correspondent for his ‘exalted humility and faithful obedience’. Slightly over the top, it might have been thought – except that, from the perspective of Rome, it did not appear so at all. Alfonso might not have acknowledged himself a vassal of the papacy – but as a patron of reform, at any rate, he was fit to rank alongside any prince in Christendom. No matter that the Spaniards, harking back to the glory days when Toledo had been the holy city of the Visigoths rather than a Saracen capital, still clung to outmoded and heretical rituals — Alfonso had cheerfully abolished them all. In 1080, by swingeing royal decree, the Roman form of Mass was imposed upon his entire kingdom. Alfonso himself, in a dramatic gesture, drop-kicked a Visigothic service-book into a bonfire. This was precisely the kind of robust leadership that Gregory had always valued in a king.
For, although he was a man of God, the Holy Father was hardly unseasoned in the ways of the world. As a leader himself with a whole lifetime of diplomatic manoeuvrings to his credit, Gregory had few illusions as to the character of the warlords with whom he was obliged, as Pope, to deal. Nevertheless, this did not mean, of course, that the inevitable compromises which were forced upon him as a result necessarily sat easily with his conscience. That the universal Church remained dependent on the support of often murderous princes never ceased to frustrate and pain him. Several years into his papacy, indeed, and sometimes, in his darker moods, Gregory would find himself brought to question the very basis of worldly power. ‘For who does not know’, he raged bitterly on one occasion, ‘that kings and dukes derive their origin from men ignorant of God, murderers who raised themselves above their former equals by means of pride, plunder and treachery, urged on all the
