There was never any doubt about aristocratic concern for the Church; in both Byzantium and the west this took the form of donations of land, money, and privileges, but the problem arose when the forms of involvement conflicted with new theological initiatives. The purchase of the archbishopric of Narbonne for his son by Count Guifred of Cerdaña with the sum of 100,000 solidi was just the kind of simoniac behaviour condemned by the Reform papacy, but it did mark a concern on the count's part that his family should take their rightful place in the church hierarchy of their region. When, at the end of the eleventh century, the patriarch of Constantinople condemned the charistikarioi (lay protectors of monastic houses who often contributed to their maintenance and the improvement of their estates) he may have been asserting the principle of the inviolability of church property, but he was also challenging a traditional expression of lay piety. Why, then, did such initiatives also gain widespread support amongst powerful lay interests?
A persuasive explanation is that the Reform Movement of the eleventh century encompassed support at the highest levels in the Church for activities which seized the imagination of contemporaries. In a southern context, where political authority was fragmented, the Peace of God movement found many supporters and a series of councils at which oaths were sworn to keep the peace was held in the Rhône valley in the 1030s. Many nobles, including the counts of both Toulouse and Barcelona, sought to increase their local prestige (and to deny the claims of others) by becoming vassals of the see of St Peter. On a more popular level, pilgrimages were encouraged as an expression of repentance and the most popular sites of the period, Rome, Compostella, and even Jerusalem itself, lay within the reach of the people of the Mediterranean lands. Travellers discovered new and powerful cult sites: the shrine of the Archangel Michael on Monte Gargano in southern Italy; the new Church of St Nicholas at Bari ( 1087), complete with the bones of the saint stolen by merchants from Myra in Asia Minor, and even the relic-charged city of Constantinople itself. Rome was not immune from this new enthusiasm for the out-
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