[size=+1]Chapter Two: Sins of the Brothers[/size]
The Emperors of Hispania enjoyed a stormy love-hate relationship with the Church for seven decades before Folkmar became Emperor. The notorious Demon King, Alfonso VI, was the first ruler of the Empire to come into conflict with the Church through his strong will and foolhardy defiance, and in the eyes of Medieval man he paid for his sins with his eternal soul. Domingo the Crusader followed a different strategy, acquiescing to the will of his court and his Church in all matters, and was rewarded with beatification. Eckhard the German took a third approach when dealing with the Church, that of complete irrationality, and happened to unwittingly stumble into the Pope’s good graces through the manifestation of extreme piety while in the last throes of his insanity. In each one of these cases, the Emperor relied on his own inherent qualities when approaching relations with the Church – Alfonso’s bullheadedness, Domingo’s spinelessness, Eckhard’s insanity. These disparate qualities led to diverging diplomatic strategies which, in the case of Domingo and Eckhard, proved successful, but were essentially unconscious. Folkmar’s reign marks the first time in Imperial history when an Emperor pursued a conscious diplomatic agenda with regards to the Church regardless of the ruler’s personal qualities – essentially, the first time reason was used as well as emotion when making ecclesiastical decisions.
This trend was consciously initiated by Emperor Folkmar through the passage of the Folkmarian Reforms, specifically through that body of legislation which created an ecclesiastical balance between the powers of the Church and those of the Throne. These laws were extremely precise in their wording, leaving nothing to the imagination and attempting to take every possible source of struggle between Church and Throne into consideration. This rationality made relations between rulers and priests within the Empire more cordial, but it also denied the role of the necessarily irrational, faith and emotion, in relations between the Church and the Empire. Thus, in order to gain the trust of the Church hierarchy, it was no longer possible to simply do what the clerics commanded or hide behind a pious façade. It became necessary for a ruler to create a strategy to assure the Church of his sincerity and piety before gaining the hierarchy’s trust. In short, the Folkmarian Reforms made Folkmar’s measured and calculated diplomatic strategy toward the Church hierarchy necessary.
Despite his speech impediment, Folkmar was a skilled diplomat, and was able to talk his way in to the good graces of the key clerics in the Empire. However, they assured him that more concrete action was needed if he were to gain the trust of the Pope. With only one weak independent Muslim state still in existence on the Iberian peninsula and a lack of Papal support for another Crusade – the Second Crusade having ebbed out in summer 1136 – Folkmar turned against heretics and excommunicants within the Empire itself in order to prove to the Pope his fitness to rule. The Inquisition was invited into the Empire to stamp out heresy, and excommunicants were identified and exiled throughout the decade of the 1140’s. Despite these harsh measures, Emperor Folkmar still faced one last bastion of impiety in his realm – the lands of his brothers, Sabín, Duke of Murcia and Albrecht, Duke of Cordoba. Both were excommunicated during the election crisis prior to Eckhard the German’s death in 1133, but they retained their lands and titles. In the name of the Pope, the Church, and the Messiah, Folkmar was determined to change this. All he needed was an excuse.
In April 1143, the Emperor created his own casus belli against the Duke of Murcia. In response to insults exchanged at a tournament held in the County of Valladolid, Folkmar demanded that Sabín surrender his Ducal title to the Emperor or face the wrath of the Imperial armies. Sabín called Folkmar’s bluff, and the Emperor declared him and his vassals, the Counts of Niebla and Alamansa, rogue and marched on their lands. The Imperial army, 4500 strong and under the leadership of the Emperor himself, marched on Sabín’s Ducal castle in the County of Murcia, investing it in the summer, while another army, 1300 strong under the ancient Philippe de Rennes, marched on Sabín’s holdings in Cadiz. The Duke is unable to break Folkmar’s armies, and his entire realm is occupied and added to Folkmar’s demesne in the summer of 1144.
With the annexation of the Duke of Murcia’s lands and the subsequent exile of Sabín Jimenez, Folkmar came into possession of some of the richest lands in Iberia. However, many of his vassals saw his treatment of Sabín’s former vassals as excessive. Where Folkmar decreed that any person serving an excommunicant was just as guilty as the excommunicant himself, his vassals held the opinion that duty to one’s ruler was on the same level as duty to one’s God, and one should not be violated at the expense of the other. Both were convoluted arguments which were built on shaky ideological foundations, but many found either one or the other very convincing. In any case, Folkmar’s standing in the eyes of the known world took a plunge, and would only get worse as his reign progressed.
In order to strengthen his control over these lands, which were unruly due to the large Muslim populations – who were, incidentally, also concerned that service to a non-Muslim ruler would imperil their souls, and were understandably distressed – and their distance from the core of the demesne, Folkmar granted lands to his sons. After marrying his eldest son, Guntram, to Adelheid von Nordheim, neice of Anselm von Nordheim, Duke of Bavaria, he gave him the counties of Cadiz and Niebla and title to the Duchy of Sevilla as a wedding present. To his second son, Sigfried, Folkmar granted the counties of Alamansa and Murcia and the title Duke of Murcia.
In the midst of all this diplomatic jockeying and abstract debating on the nature of God and man, a rat escaped from a small port in Murcia and fled into the countryside. This unidentified rat, and the terrible burden which flourished in its fur, would wreak more havoc over the next few years than any army, any ruler, or any nation could ever hope to create.
