A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

‘Death to the French’. Frenchmen were killed on the streets; then the Sicilians poured into inns
frequented by the French. Women and children were killed too; the Sicilians were in a mood in
which they wanted to exterminate every Frenchman in the world. They even broke into the
monasteries and dragged out all foreign friars; they were ordered to pronounce ‘ciciri’, a word the
French found difficult; anyone who stumbled or stuttered was slain. The French soldiers were easy
to kill because most of them had been out drinking all day. Two thousand men, women and
children were killed that night. Ironically, the French flag was replaced by the German eagle - the
Sicilians had hated the Germans when they were rulers. The governor escaped to a nearby castle,
but as he was parleying about surrender someone shot him dead with an arrow and the rest were
massacred. Palermo declared itself a Commune. So did other towns as their citizens heard of the
massacre and rose up against their French occupiers. Charles of Anjou was forced to call off his
expedition against Constantinople. The citizens of Messina - descendants of those ancient pirates
who had slit the throats of all the men and married the women sixteen centuries earlier - beat off all
the French attempts to repossess the island and eventually offered the throne to a Spaniard who was
related by marriage to the Staufer emperors. So a hundred-year-old squabble came to an uneasy
resolution.
But if we look for a moment past the endless complications of loyalties and territorial claims and
go straight to the heart of the matter, we can see that this was not really an ideological struggle
between spiritual authority and the ambition of emperors. The underlying reality of the quarrel is
also the underlying reality of the rise and fall of the assassins: grimly inflated egos convinced that
they are arguing about spiritual issues or matters of principle when they are simply dominated by
their own emotions.
As we have seen, the Christians were fully aware of this problem. They had always recognised the
dangers of the ego, with its sins of pride and self-righteous resentment. From the time of
Constantine, there had been movements within the Church that warned about the dangers of
worldly power and tried to show by example how Christians ought to live: the hermits and desert
fathers, the whole early monastic movement and dozens of solitary rebels - both women and men -
who were later recognised as saints. In the tenth century, the papacy reached its lowest point so far
- a period of fifty years that is known as the ‘pornocracy’; the office was simply bought and sold.
Pope Sergius III had a mistress called Marozia, who made sure her bastard son became Pope John
XI; both she and the pope were thrown into jail by another of her bastards; but in due course, her
grandson became Pope John XII. (He was the one who asked Otto the Great for help, then promptly
betrayed him and was deposed.) All this brought about a strong reaction. In France, a new monastic
order was founded at the Abbey of Cluny that called for new standards of spirituality. But it also
recognised that a monk’s duty was not simply to plant potatoes and make cider; he ought to devote
himself to prayer and study - even study of the pagan writers - and to bringing Christian ideals to
the common people. So just at the time that the election of popes fell into the hands of the German
emperors, a great new movement of religious reform spread all over Europe.
And here we encounter the real absurdity. When the abbots of Cluny insisted that a monk should
devote himself to prayer, meditation and study, they had recognised instinctively that human
evolution is a matter of inner-development. This is the only true answer to the murderous violence
of the power-hungry ego. When a man is totally absorbed in intellectual - or spiritual - discovery,
the ego relaxes and then falls asleep.
Yet the Church was totally opposed to intellectual discovery. Convinced that man is a wicked
sinner whose only salvation lies in the grace of God, the popes and bishops denounced intellectual