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facto rulers and proprietors of this distant religious house. What follows is an attempt to explain the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this special relationship for numerous French monasteries between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Vézelay was undoubtedly unique from its very foundation. Yet this monastery’s path towards autonomous governance and administration is representative of a growing ecclesiastical tradition, which can be traced to episcopal, Frankish, and papal practices. Its privileged position was not an a priori arrangement, but an
authorities and the latter’s position within monastic communities. In this respect, exemptions from the late eleventh century came to be used as legislative expressions of the papacy’s proprietary rights – ties of dependency and promises of apostolic protection, whose special relationship provided monasteries with a profitable legal position. An important transformation in the monastery’s spiritual authority can be detected in the surviving charter evidence for the late 1080s and 1090s. In the first years of his pontificate, Urban II instituted a
’s exempt status and secured its special relationship to Rome. With this established tradition of papal support, subsequent privileges issued to Corbie by popes Urban II (JL 5630), Paschal II (JL 6111), and Innocent II (JL 7671) collectively strengthened the monastery’s position relative to the bishop of Amiens. 30 As these two cases suggest, a monastery’s collective memory was increasingly directed towards political and judicial ends. Through archival preservation and ingenuity, monastic scribes deliberately and carefully constructed
Cluny was not the first or the last monastery to acquire exemption privileges from the papacy; it nevertheless stands as the model against which the medieval practice is habitually measured. That it prefigured the monastic renewal of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is now a theory largely refuted by scholars. 6 While the monastery’s foundation charter was ‘profoundly ambivalent about the pope’, 7 the confirmation of Cluny’s rights and liberties in the tenth and eleventh centuries nevertheless reveals a special relationship with the medieval papacy. The supra
also considers the religious and political context of individual communities, whose ‘special relationship’ with Rome transformed their spiritual, economic, disciplinary, and judicial orientation. Monastic exemption privileges give witness to a rich and lively institutional story of power and freedom – a traditio Romana (or ‘Roman tradition’), whose origins and development date to the early Middle Ages. 1 Viewed as outgoing papal grants of immunity and protection, they are significantly more than just diplomatic objects of study or
for the monasteries of Saint-Denis, Vézelay, Montiéramey, Fleury, Charroux, and Montier-en-Der, exhibiting a tradition of papal intervention that lends itself well to the following political interpretation. Put simply: the ninth-century evidence strongly favours the emergence of papal protection as the hallmark characteristic of monastic exemption privileges. To illustrate this point more clearly, let us consider the monastery of Corbie, whose special relationship with Rome gives witness to the legal precedent of early papal privileges that
different connection to the court, though it was also concerned with promoting a dynastically strong monarchy. The special relationship between Reims and the French King was old, beginning in the final years of the fifth century, when St Remigius, Bishop of Reims, baptized Clovis, thus converting the King and (by extension) all of France to Roman Christianity. 24 According to popular legend, as Remigius and Clovis waited at the church to celebrate the latter’s baptism the cleric carrying the holy chrism was blocked by the massive crowd from reaching the Bishop. Remigius
’s sudden acceptance of Hincmar more explicable. In particular, the impact of the Saracen attack on Rome in August 846 upon Lothar’s actions has not been brought out strongly enough in discussion. 46 Following an initial assault on Ostia, the Saracens attacked and looted Rome and St Peter’s itself on 27 August 846. 47 News of this rapidly reached Francia. It mattered deeply to Lothar: he had been crowned at St Peter’s in 823, and his picture hung in the church, a symbol of the ongoing special relationship between the Carolingians and Rome. 48
critical part in the ritual, and throughout the Late Antique period, it remained a key component for various ceremonies in Rome. 79 Indeed, the Emperor who passed through the arch was both celebrating a secular victory and demonstrating his quasi-divine being. The Ottonian and Salian emperors, over the tenth and eleventh centuries, began incorporating various aspects of classical design into their building programmes in a deliberate attempt to portray the Emperor as having a special relationship with God. 80 Such ceremonies were not limited to secular rulers; popes
level of papal involvement, yet numerous precedents show that the seeds of this special relationship were planted much earlier in the Middle Ages. It will become immediately evident that the papacy can seldom be labelled the initiator in these relationships. Nevertheless, as the evidence overwhelmingly suggests, opportunistic popes strengthened the webs of Roman authority by exploiting their newfound connections to the monastic community. In return, the granting of exemption privileges offered distant monasteries legitimate and qualified entry into Rome’s political