The revolt of the Milanese people against the nobles was associated with the great agitation for the reform of the Catholic Church, initiated and carried on in the eleventh century by S. Giovanni Gualberto, San Romualdo and his disciple, Peter Damiano, and by the Cluniac monk, Hildebrand, afterwards Gregory VII. This movement had its political aspect. The spiritual supremacy to which these men aimed to restore the dishonoured and discredited Papacy included domination over the temporal powers. The first step to be accomplished was unity of government within the Church’s own body, and the suppression of the virtual independence, based on feudal dominion, of the great metropolitan Sees, Milan, Ravenna and others outside Italy. Divining with sure instinct where the power of the future lay, they allied themselves with those democratic forces to which the Ambrosian Church was now fatally opposed, in a fierce attack upon the great Lombard See.

Much laxity of discipline prevailed among the higher clergy of Milan, whose pride and splendour was famous throughout Europe. They lived like great feudal barons; armed cap À pie, they led their vassals forth to battle, nor in their domestic manners were they more rigid. They were, moreover, obstinately attached by long custom to the two practices which the severer spirits in the Church had condemned and fought against for centuries, simony and marriage, both closely bound up with their feudal constitution and polity. They stoutly maintained that the ordination of married men as priests was sanctioned by St. Ambrose himself in his writings, nor did they demur to the marriage of those already in Orders, though the sentence of the great Doctor on this point was more doubtful. In fact, they married with the same unconsciousness of sin as their untonsured brethren did. The natural consequence was that the offices and benefices of the Church were bequeathed from father to son, and tended to become hereditary in certain favoured families. It followed as inevitably that bishoprics, abbacies and all offices carrying with them worldly possessions, came to be trafficked in like any other sort of estates. The investitures of them were granted by the feudal superior for fixed and regular fees, graduated according to the value of the office, a practice resulting from the introduction by Charlemagne of the system of feudal tenure into the ecclesiastical body politic. Thus there were few among the dignitaries of St. Ambrose who had not paid, according to the current price, for their spiritual rank and its accompanying temporalities, and the possession of ecclesiastical benefices, either to be held or disposed of at will, had become a form of wealth which, vitiated though its origin might be, was wound in inextricably with the complicated existence of Milanese society.

It was natural that the successive decrees of the Popes from Clement II. (1046-1047) onwards against simony and marriage should have been disregarded in Milan. The renunciation of the benefices which provided them with a livelihood, and the putting away of the wives and children to whom they were bound by the ties of innocent and natural affection, were sacrifices too hard for men whose vocation was rather worldly than spiritual. Nothing less than a social revolution could overthrow the rooted customs of the Ambrosian Church.

Such a revolution, in the heaving and unstable eleventh century, was, however, easily excited. The discontent of the lower orders with the aristocracy increased as their lately-won privileges generated the desire for a further share of power, and their particular animus against the ecclesiastical nobles was strengthened by a deep and widespread aspiration for religious purity and truth among many of the humblest people. The agitation against the real and supposed scandals in the lives of the clergy was taken up with fury in the poorest parts of the city.

A revolutionary party grew up, which became known among its opponents by the opprobrious name of Patarini, a term used in Milan to denote heretics, and derived perhaps from Patari, rag-sellers, who with their customers represented the lowest class of the people. And though the aim of the revolutionists was a social and moral, not a doctrinal, reform, there probably prevailed much freedom of thought and religious opinion among them. The heresy of the Catharists—better known under the name of Albigenses, by which they were called later in the south of France—was taking wide hold in North Italy at this time. The strange Manichean ideas of these sectaries, who believed in a dual principle of good and evil governing the world, must have found ready acceptance in pessimistic souls who saw the pride and luxury of the great on one side, and the misery of the oppressed and enslaved masses on the other. Their ideal of extreme bodily purity, rising to an asceticism which, by denying the flesh even the mere satisfaction of its needs aimed at the liberation of the spirit from its thraldom to the Devil by the self-extinction of the human race, contrasted their lives sharply with the luxurious habits of the majority of the orthodox clergy, and by sanctifying hunger and privation, gave a new dignity and self-respect to the down-trodden poor. Moreover, their stern rejection of all pleasure and selfish ambition gave them leisure and courage to devote themselves to the sick and suffering, so that many joined themselves to their company from the impulse of gratitude. They led in fact the evangelic life, though their dark and despairing tenets were utterly alien to the spirit of Christianity. They clung to their peculiar faith with a lofty enthusiasm which persecution could not subdue.

The confusion of the Catharists, or Catari, with the Patarini probably arose from the similarity of the names, and the natural tendency of the orthodox to confuse the different forms of thought outside their own dogmatic boundaries. The Patarini sympathised with the Catharists only in their practice of purity and evangelic simplicity of life. There is little doubt, however, that the Catharists mingled with the poorer classes of the city whence the Patarini were recruited, and must have taken advantage of the confusion of ideas resulting from the revolt against the old customs and authority to spread their doctrines.

Among the Milanese clergy themselves there was a small party zealous for reform. The first to raise open protest against simony and ‘concubinage’ was one of these, a noble ecclesiastic called Anselmo da Baggio. Ariberto’s vacant throne had been filled by the appointment of one Guido, a creature of the Emperor Henry III., who in securing his election, had partly recovered that sway over Milan which Ariberto had wrested from Conrad. Guido was a weak man, with an uneasy conscience himself about simony, since he had paid the usual fee to the emperor as his feudal superior for the confirmation of his election. Thinking to rid himself of the troublesome zeal of Anselmo, he procured his election to the bishopric of Lucca, and thus endowed him with new power. Anselmo was one of the principal allies and agents of Hildebrand, by whose influence he was raised later to the papal throne, where, as Alexander II., he was able to wield all the arms of Rome against his native Church. Another leader of a more popular class soon rose up to take his place in Milan, a certain deacon and student of letters named Arialdo. This man became the soul of the movement. He was joined by Landolfo da Cotta, one of the highest order of clergy, like Anselmo da Baggio. Landolfo was a fiery and eloquent speaker, a zealot whose body was consumed by disease and his soul by enthusiasm. The two went about preaching in public places and stirring up the poorer classes, and soon gathered together a formidable following. Invading the churches, they drove the clergy from the altars, and pursuing them with contumely and violence, sacked their houses and forced them to sign an engagement to consort no more with women. The whole city was in an uproar; all the sons of disorder rushed to join the rioters. Archbishop Guido summoned a synod of his clergy at a safe distance from the city, and thence fulminated an anathema against the ringleaders. Arialdo and Landolfo immediately hastened to Rome to make their complaint before the throne of Peter (1057). They returned accompanied by the Bishop of Lucca and Cardinal Hildebrand himself, sent by Pope Stephen X. to examine into the accusations laid against the Archbishop and his clergy. Their arrival raised a new and tremendous uproar. The Milanese, deeply jealous of the ancient episcopal glory and prerogatives of their city, rallied to the side of their own clergy at this attempt of the Pope to interfere, and the legates, having hastily and in secret condemned the Archbishop as simoniacal, and all his practices as abominable, departed, leaving matters worse than before.

As soon as the Roman attack had been driven off, and the issue appeared to be confined within the city, the masses again joined Arialdo. The clamour of bells and trumpets filled the streets and called the people to assemble in the great Roman theatre, where Arialdo and Landolfo inflamed their minds to fury by discourses against the clergy. There were daily riots in the streets. The clergy were supported by the nobles and by all the peaceable spirits, who, however, had none of the energy and zeal of their opponents, and soon wearied of the continual disorders and tumults. The struggle continued with intermittent uproar, and two years after the mission of Hildebrand, the Pope made a new attempt at intervention (1059). This time with the Bishop of Lucca there came instead of Hildebrand, whose soul contained no balm to pour upon angry passions, the famous Peter Damian. The contemplative of Fonte Avellana, fierce ascetic as he was, and inflamed with impatience and contempt for luxurious priests, nevertheless possessed the gift of persuading and winning men. The difficulties which had defeated the earlier legation met him also. The Ambrosian clergy stood out for the ancient freedom of their Church and Diocese and the independence of its jurisdiction. Enormous crowds gathered round the episcopal palace, thirsting for the blood of the new representatives of the papal pretensions, and the popular fury rose to a height when at a great assembly which Peter convoked to hear his message he placed the Archbishop of Milan on his left hand, giving the place of pre-eminence on his right to the Bishop of Lucca, as delegate of the Pope. But the sound of his voice calmed the tumult as he rose and eloquently proclaimed the glory of the Ambrosian Church and of the many martyrs who had sanctified it with their blood, and so skilfully and with such moving words did he reprove its abuses, that before long Archbishop, dignitaries and the whole immense throng of clerics, trembling with emotion and penitence, were prostrate before the altar, acknowledging their sinful practices and vowing to renounce them for the future. The success of the preacher was confirmed by the subsequent visit of Archbishop Guido to Rome, in answer to a summons from Nicholas II. There for the first time in history the Primate of Milan was constrained to promise obedience to the Pope of Rome, and to receive from him the symbolic ring of investiture.

This humiliation of their episcopal prince was a bitter grief to the noble party in Milan. Veneranda est Roma in Apostolo. But Milan is not to be despised in Ambrose, cries Arnolfo the chronicler. ‘It will be said in future that Milan is subject to Rome.’ And though Rome had won a lasting advantage, the moral effect of Peter Damian’s mission soon died out. The old ecclesiastical system and usage was not so easily overthrown. Two years later (1061) the conflict was resumed with new fervour by the Patarini, encouraged by the accession of their ally, Anselmo of Lucca, to the Papal throne. Moreover, a new champion of reform had arisen in Erlembaldo, a warrior lately returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and brother of the now dying Landolfo. Bold as a lion, breathing out fire and slaughter against the Ambrosians, Erlembaldo was a formidable foe for the timid Archbishop and his party, who were inspired by no confidence in the virtue of their cause. He appeared in the arena of conflict bearing the standard of the Church, with which he had been solemnly trusted by Pope Alexander, who did not hesitate to rekindle the flames of civil war in his native city.

The cruel scenes witnessed before were now renewed in Milan. Blood was spilt in the streets, churches were invaded and sacked, priests dragged bodily from the altars, their houses burnt, their wives misused. But when Arialdo and his lieutenant began to condemn the ceremonial usages peculiar to the Ambrosian Church, the citizens turned against them, and finding the opposition too strong, the two missionaries appealed to Rome and procured the excommunication of the Archbishop. This only aggravated the wrath of the Milanese. The Patarine leaders were abandoned by all but a few of their most devoted followers, and when Archbishop Guido appeared before the altar of the Cathedral Church with the Bull of excommunication in his hands, the fury of the immense assembly knew no bounds. The reformers were set upon in the sanctuary itself, and Arialdo was so badly beaten that he was left for dead. Guido, taking advantage of the momentary turn of the tide in his favour, laid an interdict upon the city until it should rid itself of Arialdo. The zealot was forced to fly, and a little later he fell into a snare which had been laid for him, and was betrayed into the hands of the Archbishop’s niece, lady of a castle on Lake Maggiore, by whose command he was carried in a boat to a lonely island and there cruelly done to death.

The cause of reform was thenceforth glorified by the memory and example of a martyr. Arialdo was shortly afterwards canonised by Pope Alexander. His loss inflamed his party to new zeal and drew to it a great access of adherents. Erlembaldo and a priest called Liprando di San Paolo now led the crusade, carrying it on with such fury of sword and fire that they became virtual masters of the city. The Archbishop, wearied out by the endless strife and the insidious attempts of Rome to depose him, renounced his See, and the nobles, outnumbered by the rioters, abandoned the disorderly city and sought peace and safety in their castles and country palaces.

The contest now centred on the election of a new Archbishop. Neither of the rival claimants put forward by the two parties succeeded in establishing himself on the episcopal throne. Chaos prevailed in the Ambrosian Church. Erlembaldo, strengthened by the accession of Hildebrand as Pope Gregory VII., usurped the whole authority in the city and throughout the archdiocese. He swept far and wide like an avenging sword, driving priests from their benefices, and tearing them from the altars. Half Lombardy cowered under his rude and noisy tyranny, and his name became a by-word of terror throughout Italy.

But two appalling conflagrations, which followed one another in 1071 and 1073, and laid waste the city, deprived the people of all heart for the contest with the aristocrats. Moreover, Erlembaldo’s tyranny was beginning to produce a reaction. The nobles, regaining courage, leagued together for a great effort to liberate the city from his authority. By means of promises and gold, they won a large number of the humble citizens to their side, and at last they appeared one day in force in the city, seeking their enemy. The populace, awed by their numbers and magnificent martial array, were little disposed to face them. Followed by a few only of the most faithful and zealous of the Patarini, Erlembaldo, mounted upon his war-horse, and in full armour, upholding the banner of the Roman Church, flung himself into the midst of his foes, and fell, pierced by a hundred swords.

With his death the war ended. There was none to take his place. The city, exhausted by the long strife, was glad to rest. The nobles returned to their homes and their old place in the city, and in spite of the persecution which they had suffered for twenty years, the Ambrosian clergy resumed their old practices to a large extent.

Nevertheless, the design of the great Hildebrand was achieved. The supremacy of Rome had been proclaimed, and acknowledged in the hearing of the whole world. The prestige of the greatest of the provincial Sees had suffered a blow from which it never recovered. So much was the episcopal power of Milan weakened that Gregory VII. was able to subtract many of its suffragan Sees and join them instead to other archdioceses; and before the century was over, the victory of the Pope over the Emperor Henry IV., in the famous quarrel of investitures, obliged the Ambrosian See to yield temporal as well as spiritual allegiance to the successors of St. Peter.

And though the Milanese clergy still clung for a while to their wives, and benefices continued to be bought and sold, these doubtful practices fell more and more into disrepute. Simoniac ecclesiastics gradually disappeared. The accusation of this sin was, however, long used by Rome as a means of gaining further advantages over the See of Milan, or driving out a prelate approved perhaps by the Emperor and obnoxious to the papal interests. It was equally useful to the people in making new encroachments on the privileges of the aristocratic clergy.

The gradual concentration of authority in Rome was greatly assisted by the influence of the monastic orders, who belonged as bodies to no particular diocese, but looked to the Pope as their supreme head, and were little disposed to be submissive to the prelates in whose jurisdiction a monastery might chance to be. In 1130, Bernard of Clairvaux and his white-robed monks—who seemed to the people, we are told, wonderful as angels from heaven—appeared in Milan, and gave an immense impulse to the monastic movement there. The rise of the mendicant orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic a century later brought a vast increase of strength to the Papacy. In Milan, as everywhere, the friars gained immense influence among the masses of the people. The See of Milan was by this time completely subjugated. It was greatly diminished in wealth and importance. The Pope exercised supreme jurisdiction in the archdiocese, and his legates constantly interfered in the government, assuming the highest place and authority with the acquiescence of the Archbishop. Deeply indeed had the See of St. Ambrose sunk since the days of the great Ariberto!

But the same movement which had defined the position of Rome, had by the process of strengthening and raising the walls of the fold, thrust an enormous number of Christians into the doctrinal wilderness outside, and the Church was now menaced by the great spread and increase of heresy. Heresy was, in fact, the fatal legacy of Hildebrand’s policy. While the Papacy, absorbed in its struggles with the Empire, could spare no energy to check them, the great sect of the Catharists, unhindered by worldly ambitions, had been quietly growing in numbers and strength, till in the twelfth century it was become a fully organised Church, divided into dioceses and governed by its own bishops. These sectarians were now generally called Patarini; the name of Hildebrand’s old allies had become synonymous with the enemies of the Church. The deep gulf between the Catharists and the orthodox Church was crossed by a chain of religious associations which had sprung up all over Lombardy, in protest against the luxury and scandalous manners of both clergy and laity, and were founded, like the original Patarini, upon moral rather than doctrinal principles. Many of them hovered indeed in thought upon the vague borderland between orthodoxy and heresy, and were touched by that Northern difference of religious sentiment which, after many temporary ebullitions, produced at last the Protestant revolution. In the thirteenth century fifteen different sects are enumerated in the city—the Catharists, the Believers of Milan, the Arnaldists, followers of Arnald of Brescia, the Poor Men of Lombardy, and others that were mostly local varieties of the same sects. Poverty and humility were, as their name denotes, the distinctive attributes of the Poor Men, while their doctrine was suspect enough to forbid their adoption into the Church. The large embrace of Rome succeeded, however, in enfolding another association of kindred type, the Umiliati, or Humble Ones, which was destined to become enormously powerful in Milan.

This order is said to have been founded early in the eleventh century by some Milanese nobles who had been captives in Germany, and who, converted to serious thoughts by the weariness of confinement, vowed that on their return they would live a holy and Christian life. It was a society of men and women, living in their own homes with their families, but distinguished from their neighbours by humility, industry and devoutness. A century later, under the influence of St. Bernard, they formed themselves into a regular order, with a rule obliging them to strict moral virtue and to the observance of all religious duties. They devoted themselves especially to the manufacture of woollen stuffs, one of Milan’s chief industries. Very soon out of the first order a second was formed, which adopted a monastic life of greater austerity, the men and women, including many married couples, living side by side in separate cloisters, and in course of time a third order arose, composed of men only, who took sacerdotal orders, and were called Canons. Thus the association, from a kind of religious guild, tended to develop into a regular order. But its rule had never been fixed or confirmed by any papal sanction, and it remained for two hundred years practically independent of Rome. Nor were its doctrines during this time free from unorthodox thought; we find the Umiliati included in the condemnation of heretical sects uttered by successive Popes from time to time in the intervals of their political cares. They shared the virtue of simplicity, at least, with the various bodies of Poveri who hovered half in and half out of the pale of Holy Church.

In the latter part of the twelfth century the order—in obedience perhaps to that widely diffused evangelical spirit which generated the great Franciscan movement a little later—had been developing and spreading very extensively. Its votaries went about preaching repentance in the squares and open places of the different cities, and persuaded numbers of noble persons, as well as plebeians, to abandon the sins of the world and the flesh, and to live according to the pious and simple vows of the order, either in monasteries or in their own homes. Their efforts were opposed by the bishops and regular clergy, who were disposed to look upon all zeal as heretical. But Pope Innocent III., recognising their virtue and their influence on the people, resolved to secure the somewhat loose orthodoxy of the brethren, and to direct their fervour and piety to the service of the Church. He extended his favour to them, and bestowed upon them the doubtful blessing of a formal rule, which, with the privileges, included the restrictions and severe discipline of a regular monastic order. This little pleased the Umiliati, and they made a touching appeal to Innocent’s successor, Honorius III., to relieve them from their new obligations, bringing forward an ancient formula, given them, they declared, by St. Bernard, to the observance of which they had already bound themselves. But the Pope absolved them against their will from their old vows of obedience and insisted on the observance of Innocent’s rule.

Thus the death-blow was dealt to the original spirit of the institution. After a short period of increased fervour and activity, in which they became the terror of their old spiritual kinsfolk, the heretics, the order followed the course of most other monastic bodies. Humility and poverty were exchanged for papal favours and honours, and for rich possessions, and before long corruption and laxity crept in among the brethren. The sacerdotal order became the first and most important, while those who followed the original rule of simplicity, humility and purity, living in their own homes, were called the Third Order. The brethren acquired in time great wealth from the woollen industry, which they continued to pursue, and later on they were largely employed in the public offices of the city, and especially in its financial concerns. Thus they gradually became very powerful, and under the tyrannies of the Visconti and Sforza, provided Milan with many great statesmen. In the sixteenth century the vast possessions of the order, in the form of commendas and prebends, etc., were practically owned by a few great families, and the actual number of the brethren had fallen to less than a hundred. Cardinal Carlo Borromeo procured the suppression of the ancient brotherhood in 1570, on the ground of the vices and luxury of its members. He risked his life by this step, since the degenerate brethren were not ashamed to employ assassins to attempt the murder of their spoliator. The possessions of the order were distributed among other convents, and their principal House, the Brera, which had belonged to them since the twelfth century, was handed over to the Jesuits.

The desire to define and purify doctrine, and to strengthen the Church, produced under a series of determined Popes a fierce outburst of persecution in the thirteenth century. In Milan, where heterodox opinions were held by many of the most powerful as well as the lesser citizens, it was the signal for repeated bouts of civil war and constant struggles between the Pope and the rulers of the city. The introduction of the Dominicans into Milan in 1220 gave an enormous advantage to the cause of orthodoxy. As soon as the people saw the Christ-like virtues of poverty and humility and evangelising ardour, hitherto associated in their minds only with the condemned Patarini, displayed by these approved Catholic orders, they followed the Friars with enthusiasm, careless indeed of doctrine, but believing and trusting those who lived as they did themselves and mingled with them freely, understanding their sorrows and needs. It is doubtful whether St. Dominic himself was ever in Milan, but his famous disciple, Peter of Verona, was sent there in 1232 by the Pope, with full authority to search out and punish heretics. Peter carried out his mission with merciless zeal. His name, made terrible by its unsparing use as authority for the infliction of torments and fiery death, came to be feared throughout Lombardy. So bitter a hatred did he rouse by his stern interpretation of the awful word, not peace but a sword, that he himself fell a victim to the weapon of his predilection. On a morning in 1252, as he was returning on foot with a single companion from Como to Milan, two assassins sprang out upon him from an ambush and smote him to death with a sword. The sword, transfixing his skull, is familiar to us all in mediÆval and Renaissance art as the ornament and emblem of the Saintly Inquisitor.

The murder of Peter Martyr was not inspired by heretical revenge alone. Motives of worldly policy had a share in the deed. The division of orthodoxy and heresy virtually followed that between the two great parties in the State, the aristocracy and the people, and the conflict between them repeated to some extent the great Patarine struggle two centuries earlier, though now, in the reversal of issues the Patarini were associated with the aristocrats against Rome. The murder of Peter was committed at the instigation of some of the nobles. The Archbishop himself, Fra Leone da Perego, a Franciscan, a man of notable character and ambition, who hated Peter, both as the agent of papal arrogance and usurpation in Milan, and as the exalter of the rival order of the Dominicans, was possibly not unaware of the plot. But the political aspect of the doctrinal warfare belongs to an epoch which we have not yet reached in our story of the city. It is enough to say here that the murder of Peter of Verona was of the greatest service to the cause of orthodoxy and the Church. It excited universal execration of the heretics, and the Dominican, elevated to the ranks of the Martyrs, was far more powerful with his cloven brow than even when alive. From this time forward heresy rapidly lost ground, and with the gradual quieting of party passion, under the domination of a single family in the city, it lost all political force, and died away in insignificance and oblivion, till the great reawakening of religious controversy in the sixteenth century.