Fifteen years had passed since Odo’s departure for Rome. In that time, he had proved himself the ablest, the shrewdest and the most committed of Gregory’s followers. For all his devotion to the memory of the great pope who had raised him to the cardinalate, however, Odo was a man of very different talents to his patron - and just as well. The time for blood and thunder had passed. With an anti-pope installed in the Lateran, and much of Christendom, in the wake of Gregory’s death, content to acknowledge Clement as the authentic heir of St Peter, a touch of Cluniac cool was precisely what the beleaguered reformers had most needed. Like Abbot Hugh, whom Gregory, in rueful and half-envious admiration, had nicknamed ‘the smooth- talking tyrant’, Odo was a formidable conciliator: a born showman who combined exceptional persuasiveness with a steely measure of calculation, and who invariably came out a winner. So it was, back in 1085, after only five years as a cardinal, that he had been one of two heavyweight candidates to succeed Gregory, and continue the fight against Clement; and so it was too, after the election of his rival, that he had made sure to get on the new pope’s side, and be nominated as his successor. He had not had long to wait. Two years into the new pontificate, and the throne of St Peter had been left vacant again. Odo had duly been elected to fill it. Taking the name Urban II, he had set himself to the great task of completing what Gregory had left undone — and, as a particular priority, to crushing the authority of Clement, the Anti-pope, once and for all.
Eight years down the road, and he was well on his way to success. A subtle reader of men’s ambitions, and a master of the well-directed concession, Urban had a taste for tactics that blended rigour with discretion. By sternly ring-fencing the fundamentals of reform, and by giving way on everything else, his accomplishment had been to consolidate Gregory’s achievements far more effectively than Gregory himself would ever have done. ‘Pedisequis’, his opponents sneeringly labelled him: a mere lackey, a body servant, scurrying along dutifully in the footsteps of his predecessor. This, however, was to confuse Urban’s show of equanimity with a lack of initiative or assertiveness. In reality, no less than Gregory had been, the new pope was of a lordly disposition. Indeed, if anything, the habits of lordliness came more naturally to him than they ever had to the humbly born Hildebrand: for Odo’s parents had been noble, and he had grown up informed by the restless attitudes and aspirations of the warrior class of France. Certainly, as befitted someone who had spent his earliest years in a castle, his familiarity with the cutting edge was far from confined to the business of the Church. More than any pope before him, Urban II had the measure of the new breed of knightly captain.
Indeed, perhaps, shared something of its ruthlessness himself. Just as the natural instinct of any castellan was to add to his own lands by hacking away at those of his rivals, so similarly, on the immeasurably vaster stage of Christendom, had Urban aimed to extend his authority by boxing in Henry and Clement as restrictively as he could. Remorselessly, he had worked to exploit every imperial humiliation, every imperial defeat – and there had recently been plenty of both. Rebellion in Bavaria, the continuing and implacable opposition of the Countess Matilda, and treachery from within the royal family itself: all, since the palmy days of Henry’s coronation, had served to cripple the emperor’s interests. Indeed, by 1095, so tightly were his enemies pressing in on him that the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne had ended up trapped in a tiny corner of western Lombardy, unable even to cross the Alps back into his homeland.
Urban, looking to rub this in, had duly summoned a council under Henry’s very nose, just south of Milan, in a field outside Piacenza: a city that, officially at any rate, lay within the Anti-pope’s home diocese of Ravenna. A steady succession of Clement’s former adherents, summoned from across Christendom, had publicly submitted themselves there to Urban’s authority. Henry’s second wife, a Kievan princess by the name of Eupraxia, and as unhappily married as Bertha had been, had also appeared at the council, following her abduction from imperial custody by agents of the Countess Matilda: sensationally, and to the delegates’ delighted horror, she had publicly accused her husband of hosting gang-rapes on her. Then, in a climactic triumph, Urban had met with Henry’s eldest son, Conrad, a long-term rebel against his father and widely rumoured to have been Eupraxia’s lover – and promised to crown him emperor. The young prince, in exchange, had signed up unreservedly to the reformers’ cause. Indeed, in an ostentatious display of submission to Urban’s purposes, Conrad had even served the pontiff as a groom, walking by the side of the papal
