The eight decades from the middle of the eleventh century to the end of the third decade of the twelfth constitute one of the great turning points in European history. It was one of those periods during which vitally important changes in all aspects of life occur simultaneously and with such great rapidity that no contemporary could foresee the far-reaching consequences of many of them.
Such a period of fundamental and, at the same time, rapid change was the age of the Gregorian reform and the investiture controversy that the Gregorian reform precipitated. The Gregorian reform gets its name from Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), the most visible leader of the reform movement. The term investiture controversy is derived from the crucial issue of whether kings and other great lords had the right to invest bishops and abbots with the symbols of their office, that is, whether laymen had the right to appoint church officials. The period from 1050 to 1130 was the period of enormous commercial expansion, of the well-known rise of urban communities, of the first expression of political influence by the new burgher class. It was an age in which the first really successful medieval monarchy was created in Anglo-Norman England on the basis of the feudal institutions and administrative methods and personnel created by the energetic and far-seeing Norman dukes. It was an age in which the long separation of the new western European civilization from the life of the Mediterranean world came to an end. This isolation, in existence since the eighth century, was now replaced by the political and economic penetration of the western European peoples into the Mediterranean basin to the detriment of the Moslems and Byzantines, who had long ruled the Mediterranean lands and controlled Mediterranean trade without a challenge from the north. It was an age of tremendous intellectual vitality that witnessed the most important contributions to the Latin Christian theology since Augustine and the slow transformation of some of the cathedral schools of northern France and the municipal schools of northern Italy into the universities of the following centuries. It was an age of great vitality in legal thought, in which Roman law came to be carefully studied for the first time since the German invasion of the fifth century, and great strides were made in the codification of the canon law.
But as in the eras of fundamental change in modern history, these achievements must be accorded second place by the historian in favor of an ideological struggle. Out of a far-reaching controversy on the nature of the right order to be established in the world the pattern of civilization of the following centuries was to emerge. The period from 1050 to 1130 was dominated by an attempt at world revolution that influenced in highly effective ways the other aspects of social change. It seems, in retrospect, that it was almost necessary for a revolutionary onslaught to shake the order of the early Middle Ages to its foundations, so that the new political, economic, and intellectual forces could be given the opportunity to develop in the face of the old institutions and ideas.
It has been characteristic of the history of the West that its destiny has been shaped by world revolutions in which previous tendencies culminated and from which new ideas and systems emerged. A world revolution is a widespread and thoroughgoing revolution in worldview, the emergence of a new ideology that rejects the results of several centuries of development organized into the prevailing system and calls for a new right order in the world. The investiture controversy, which the Gregorian reform engendered, constitutes the first of the great world revolutions of western history, and its course follows the same pattern as the well-known revolutions of modern times.
Each world revolution has begun with some just complaint about moral wrongs in the prevailing political, social, or religious system. In the investiture controversy the leaders of the revolution, who have been called the Gregorian reformers, complained about the domination of the church by laymen and the involvement of the church in feudal obligations. This system had led to severe abuses, especially that of simony, which came to be defined in its most general sense as the interference of laymen with the right ordering of church offices and sacraments. In their condemnation of simony as heresy, the Gregorians had a perfectly valid complaint.
It has been characteristic of all the world revolutions, however, that while each has begun by complaining about abuses in the prevailing world order, the ultimate aim of the revolutionary ideologists has been not the reform of the prevailing system but its abolition and replacement by a new order. In the case of the investiture controversy, the complete freedom of the church from control by the state, the negation of the sacramental character of kingship, and the domination of the papacy over secular rulers constituted the ideal new order.
As in all other world revolutions, the ideology of the Gregorians called forth violent opposition from both vested interests and sincere theoretical defenders of the old order. After many acrimonious disputes and a flood of propaganda literature, bitter and protracted warfare resulted. The polarization of educated society into revolutionary and conservative left a large group of uncommitted moderates, including some of the best minds of the age, who could see right and wrong on both sides.
As in all other world revolutions, the ideologists of the investiture controversy were only partially successful in creating the new order. They succeeded in destroying the old system, but the new world was not the revolutionary utopia. Rather, it was a reconstruction of the political and religious system that took into account both old and new elements and left room for the human limitations of greed and power. The church gained a large measure of freedom from secular control, and there was a noticeable improvement in the moral and intellectual level of the clergy. But the church itself, from the time of the investiture controversy, became more and more interested in secular affairs, and so the papacy of the High Middle Ages competed successfully for wealth and power with kings and emperors. The church itself became a great superstate that was governed by the papal administration.
As in all other world revolutions, the ideologists during the investiture controversy were themselves united only upon the most immediate and more limited aims of the revolution. As the revolution proceeded, the Gregorians divided into a moderate and a radical wing, each led by eminent cardinals. The radicals were headed by Humbert and Hildebrand, the moderates by Peter Damiani. As in the modern world revolutions, the radicals were in control of the Gregorian reform movement, a period that was long enough to destroy the old order. But as the conservatives and moderates of various complexions at last perceived the real aim of the radicals and their reckless disregard for consequences, the radicals lost their leadership and were unable to realize their utopian ideals.
As in the modern world revolutions, the radicals lost their leadership not to the moderates of their own group, whom they had earlier swept aside, but to the politicians, the practical statesmen who called a halt to the revolution and tried to reconstruct from the shattered pieces of the old system and the achievements of the revolution a new and workable synthesis that would again make progress possible. This tendency is already evident during the pontificate of Urban II in the last decade of the eleventh century, and it became dominant in the papacy during the 1120s.
Like all world revolutions, the investiture controversy never reached a final and complete solution. New ideas in a new generation made former issues less meaningful, and the men of the new generation turned to other interests and new problems. In the 1130s many educated churchmen could not understand why popes and kings should have quarreled over lay investiture only two or three decades before.
The age of the investiture controversy may rightly be regarded as the turning point in medieval civilization. It was the fulfillment of the early Middle Ages, because in it the acceptance of the Christian religion by the Germanic peoples reached a final and decisive stage. On the other hand, the pattern of the religious and political system of the High Middle Ages emerged out of the events and ideas of the investiture controversy.
The Gregorians revolted against the medieval equilibrium and hence against many things that eleventh-century Cluny and its allies represented. What, then, were the origin and cause of the Gregorian reform movement that brought about the decisive turning point in medieval history?
The Gregorian reform movement was the logical outcome, but by no means the inevitable and absolutely necessary outcome, of the early medieval equilibrium itself. As the church in the late tenth and eleventh centuries penetrated more and more into the world, imposing its ideals on the lay society, it began to face the dangerous possibility of losing its distinctive identity and hence its leadership in western society. For as the lay piety steadily increased throughout western Europe, the special qualities of the clergy stood out less clearly. No longer did a devout attitude toward dogma and ritual and the veneration of the saints and their relics suffice to distinguish the outlook of ecclesiastic and layman. By the middle of the eleventh century it was apparent that lay piety had in many cases attained the level of religious devotion hitherto exhibited only by the more conscientious among the clergy. Cardinal Peter Damiani, whose writings so frequently served as a sort of barometric indicator of eleventh-century attitudes, observed that every faithful Christian was a microcosm of the whole church: “Each of the faithful seems to be, as it were, a lesser church.” If the Holy Spirit raised some of the faithful to the ministry of ecclesiastical dignity, Damiani asserted, it was to be expected that these ministers of God would reveal their special divine gifts by a superior form of religious life. Above all, the monks, who had professed the most perfect religious life, should at least act as the militia of Christ.
The great increase in lay piety created a new problem for the church, and its own traditional hierocratic doctrine, reflected in Damiani’s statement, made the problem particularly urgent. The power of the priesthood and the papacy had been built upon the principle that “him to whom more is given, from him more will be demanded.” Previously there was no doubt that more in the way of the spirit was demanded from the clergy; hence the justification of sacerdotal powers in the popular mind. Now doubts were arising on this issue. To many eleventh-century churchmen it seemed that only a greatly improved morality and heightened religious fervor among the clergy could continue to justify the exclusive powers of the sacerdotium. Otherwise the ecclesia would be absorbed into the thoroughly Christianized mundus, and the clergy would lose its distinctive position in society.
By the middle of the eleventh century churchmen everywhere in western Europe were encountering this new, critical problem. They knew that kings such as Henry III of Germany and Edward the Confessor were monks in worldly garb, always eager to lead the procession in a translation of holy relics. They found many nobles who took seriously the Peace of God, who endowed monasteries and cathedrals, undertook arduous pilgrimages, and hoped to be accorded the privilege of dying enshrouded in the monastic habit. Even the scurvy bourgeois gave glimpses of falling in with this new tendency, with their support of municipal churches and their devotion to religious festivals. Such laymen would expect a clergy to be still as morally superior to themselves as it was in the old days when society was savage and heathen, save in the most nominal sense. The hold of the church over lay society, the universal respect that the monks especially received from laymen, could be maintained only by a greatly enhanced piety and morality among the monks themselves.
The Benedictine order provided the greater part of the leadership for the eleventh-century church, and consequently the regular clergy was most sensitive to the consequences of the rise of lay piety. The origins of the Gregorian reform movement lay in novel tendencies that developed in eleventh-century monasticism, in a new spirit that made many monks dissatisfied with the prevailing Cluniac religious life and led them to advocate different and more stringent monastic ideals. The roots of Gregorianism are therefore to be found in the eleventh-century crisis of western monasticism.
The first stirrings of a new attitude toward monastic life (or, perhaps more accurately, an old attitude that was revived) came in northern Italy about the year 1000. For the first time, at least since the fourth century, the eremitic form of monastic life made its appearance to an appreciable degree in western Europe. It is not surprising to find that these hermits appeared first in northern Italy. Extreme asceticism is not a characteristic of an underdeveloped agrarian society in which the general standard of life is marginal and frugal in any case. Asceticism must have a wealthy society, the fleshpots and temptations of urban economy, to revolt against. This was true of the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century, where the fathers of the desert flourished, and it was true of northern Italy at the beginning of the eleventh century, where for the first time in the development of medieval western Europe an urban society existed. North of the Alps new ascetic movements made their appearance in the second half of the eleventh century. Particularly in northern France, Flanders, and the Rhineland devoted monks turned away from the comforts and security of the Cluniac type of monasticism and went into frontier regions in small groups to form new, strongly ascetic communities. These isolated new monastic establishments coalesced in the twelfth century into the great Cistercian movement and other new religious orders. In northern Italy, however, while new and more stringent cenobitic communities also appeared, the figure of the itinerant hermit-saint remained a powerful catalytic force in religious life into the thirteenth century, culminating in the Franciscan movement.
Whether cenobitic or eremitic in their inclinations, the leading spirits of the new ascetic movement within western monasticism were vehement in their criticism of the prevailing Cluniac type of religious life. They believed that Cluny and the other great Benedictine monasteries of the day were sadly deficient in observing the rule that the founder of their order had set down and that they were professing. Far from applauding the worldly influence and possessions of the great Benedictine communities, the ascetic leaders complained that the abbeys’ wealth and power were a source of temptation to their members, leading them away from the realization of the monastic ideal. The solution then for the hermits of the new, more ascetic communities was a strict subjection to the vow of poverty: They must live as the monks in Monte Cassino had lived in the time of St. Benedict, or, expressed in its full doctrinal form, they must return to the spiritual ideal of the apostolic church. In this respect, as in most others, Peter Damiani spoke for the new generation of puritanically inclined churchmen: “We not only abandon nobler occupations and worldly gain, but we have made profession of a perpetual renunciation of these things.” Only by adopting this great reform of the regular clergy, it was thought, could the monks preserve, and deserve to maintain, their position of leadership in Christian society.
How did these critical changes in monastic life result in the Gregorian revolution and the monumental struggle over the right order in the world? It was not inevitable that one should have led to the other, but under the circumstances of the era it was a natural progression. The men who came to prominence in the papal court in the 1050s were all monks, and it was natural for them to carry their ascetic and purifying interests one step beyond the monastery and apply it to the whole church. Thus Damiani devoted many years attempting to reform the corrupt clergy in northern Italy. The final step, logical though not inevitable, was to carry over the ascetic and purifying impulse into the world itself. This was the origin of the radical Gregorians’ attack on the whole prevailing Christian world order, and is explained by the circumstances of the medieval equilibrium itself—the interpenetration of the ecclesia and the mundus. If the church and the world were identical and synonymous, as many contemporaries said, then how could asceticism and reform stop within the limits of the church? For the church had no limits, or at least its limits were those of the world itself; the Gregorian radical felt compelled to apply his puritan ideals to all aspects of social life and to establish a unified Christian world system—Christianitas, Gregory VII called it. The Gregorians accepted the common eleventh-century identification of the church and the world with complete seriousness, and their ideology therefore required them to carry the ascetic, reforming, purifying impulse from the hermitage and the new monastic community into the most vital aspects of contemporary life outside the monastery. The institutional structure of their world confirmed the lessons of ideology. The regular clergy was so central to the life of the eleventh-century church that it was hard to conceive of a critical change in monastic life that would not affect and reform the whole church. Similarly, in most parts of Europe church and kingship were so involved with each other that radical church reform necessitated political and social revolution.
By the 1050s the chief assistants of the pope were organized into the “college” (corporation) of cardinals. The term cardinal comes from the Latin word for the hinge of a door; the cardinals were the hinges on which the great papal door moved. The term cardinal was singularly appropriate for the men who dominated the papacy in the second half of the eleventh century and attempted to carry out the Gregorian reforms. They were remarkably few in number—not more than a dozen all together over a period of more than half a century were important in the Gregorian movement. Actually, for only two pontificates, that of Gregory VII himself (1073–1085) and Paschal II (1099–1118), was there a real radical on the papal throne. The other two prominent Gregorian reformers were the cardinals Peter Damiani (died 1072) and Humbert (died 1061). The latter is often called Humbert of Silva Candida, after the small church in Rome whose pastorate he nominally held in conjunction with his cardinalate, as was customary.
The four leading Gregorian reformers were as remarkable a group of men as ever appeared in European history. They not only dominated the life of the eleventh-century church, but they participated in, and in many ways contributed to, the leading intellectual currents of the period. In every case the doctrines they propounded did not die with them or even with the eleventh or early twelfth centuries, but rather entered into the mainstreams of medieval thought. The implications of the Gregorians’ thought-world reach out in many directions and by no means only within the bounds of orthodox Catholicism. The Gregorians inaugurated a great debate on the nature of a Christian society. Their doctrines were challenged by other learned and devout churchmen, and out of this intellectual conflict emerged at last the outlines of almost every ideological position that was to develop more fully in the following five centuries. Many of the arguments propounded during the Gregorian reform period are still relevant to our experiences and problems.
Of the men we call the Gregorian reformers the one who was most universally loved and respected and least controversial in his own day was St. Peter Damiani. Nevertheless, the inspiration, the pattern, and the implications of his doctrines are in some respects the most difficult for us to grasp of any of the Gregorian reformers’ because of their diffuse nature and because they penetrated and affected almost the whole culture and literature of the High Middle Ages. With justice did Dante, in his Divine Comedy, place Damiani in one of the highest circles of heaven and regard him as the predecessor of St. Francis. It might be said, in fact, that St. Francis was only the ultimate development of a religious movement of which Damiani was the most outstanding and identifiable originator.
Damiani’s voluminous writings reflect the spiritual conditions of northern Italy in the first half of the eleventh century, from where he was brought to the papal court. Damiani was born in about the year 1007. He was an orphan of a poor family, but was adopted by a priest and received a good education in both theology and canon law. He found the prevailing Cluniac life, while in some respects admirable, too much involved with the world, and he became one of the leaders of the new eremitic movement in northern Italy. His vehement denunciation of the corruption of the secular clergy in the Italian cities brought him to the attention of Leo IX, who made him a cardinal and tried to channel his energies in the service of Rome. Damiani was never happy as a cardinal; he was more an itinerant hermit-saint and preacher than an institutional reformer. Damiani was sent to Milan to try to reform the church there, but his success was not great. He found himself at odds with Hildebrand (later Gregory VII) and Humbert, his colleagues in the college of cardinals, whom he admired but considered reckless and dangerous. He was the kind of man who inspired revolutionaries, but his saintly and charitable disposition precluded his being a revolutionary himself. His death the year before Hildebrand became pope is significant, for it removed from the scene the one man who could have restrained Gregory.
One of the prime items in the Gregorian program, as enunciated by Peter Damiani, directly affected the personal lives of the bishops and priests—the Gregorians’ strenuous efforts to implement the long-standing but hitherto scarcely enforced prohibitions against clerical marriage and in favor of clerical celibacy. Following the prescriptions of St. Paul, the early western Church had advocated that neither bishops nor priests should have wives and raise families or cohabitate with women or have occasional sex with women. Damiani devoted a whole book to exposing the clergy’s sexual scandals. The Byzantine church allowed ordinary priests to be legally married; Greek bishops were supposed to be celibate, and it was expected that a priest’s wife would do the right thing and enter a convent if her husband was promoted.
The Gregorian view that the Latin clergy should be fully celibate was predicated on the theory that bishops and priests, as well as monks, were married to the Church as the Bride of Christ. But what lay immediately behind the incessant pressure of the Gregorian papacy on behalf of sacerdotal celibacy was the practical belief that if bishops and priests did not have families, they would be more likely to devote themselves selflessly to their offices, rather than use their offices to get property and jobs for their children. The purpose, then, was to untangle the secular clergy from its involvement in the feudal order.
At the accession of Gregory VII, bishops commonly cohabitated with women, fathered children by them, and looked after the interests of their “nephews.” The cathedral clergy’s children were a significant segment of urban populations. The parish priests were generally married and heads of households. There was strong opposition to the Gregorian view of clerical marriage and sacerdotal celibacy, but the Gregorian papacy made a huge fuss about it and started a slow trend toward the rejection of wives and families by bishops and priests. Damiani was merciless in denouncing the clergy’s sexual practices. Of course a lot of bitter personal hostility against the Gregorian papacy was stirred Up by this severe application of canon law.
From the twentieth-century point of view, the Gregorian papacy was engaging in negative eugenics—the best educated and, in many instances, most intelligent component of the population was told not to produce offspring (compared with the opposite in the Jewish community, where rabbis were instructed by the Talmud to marry young and procreate freely). If Damiani and the other Gregorians could have understood this Darwinian argument, they would have rejected it because of their eschatalogical and messianic inclinations. By purifying the clergy, they were preparing for the imminent Second Coming; a few more or less intelligent children made no difference because historical time was running out.
Damiani was the leader of the more moderate group in the college of cardinals who tried to avoid a final break between the reforming papacy and the German emperor. But his teaching was revolutionary enough, in the sense that it reached to the foundations of the medieval religious experience and helped bring about a transformation of spiritual values. A great change was under way in the eleventh century in the medieval conception of the relationship between the deity and humanity. The judging, wrathful, distant God of the Old Testament, which predominated in early medieval religiosity, was coming to be replaced by the loving, self-abnegating son of the New Testament, with his weeping and charitable mother. Religion was becoming less a matter of formal worship and obedience and much more a personal experience. It was in the ascetic and eremitic monasticism in northern Italy and the intense religious experience of the Italian urban communities that this new spiritual outlook made its first appearance. By the middle of the twelfth century the new piety, as it has been called, had spread throughout Europe, had penetrated into the inmost reaches of the European consciousness, and had spilled over and enriched and ennobled the art and literature of medieval civilization. St. Peter Damiani was the first writer to express this new piety clearly. He was the founder of that mystical strain of personal identification of the self-abnegating, loving deity and the hopeful, ascending human spirit that sharply distinguished the religion of the High Middle Ages from what had gone before.
If Damiani thus played a primary role in the enrichment and fulfillment of medieval Catholicism, he must also be seen as an originator of an uncontrollable emotionalism that is not so praiseworthy as this new conception of the deity nor in the long run easy for the church to control. The new intense emotional religiosity brought with it an irrational fanaticism that if inculcated in the masses, could produce violent manifestations that no public authority could control. The popular reaction to the first crusade was to be an early example of this problem. It is not surprising to find that the massacre of Jews in 1096 as a popular response to the crusading appeal found its ultimate authority in the writings of Damiani himself. Even in the opinions of the great saint and mystic of the early eleventh century, fanaticism made its appearance as the reverse side of the new personal, intense religiosity that he did so much to foment. The great increase of anti-Semitic literature in the late eleventh century began with two pamphlets written by Damiani himself, whose passionate charity did not extend to those outside the Christian church.
The ultimate ambiguity and tension of Damiani’s doctrine lay in the fact that while he was the most orthodox defender of the validity and necessity of the sacraments as the means of divine grace and the authority of the priesthood alone to administer them to the laity, the central mystical inclinations of his teachings tended to lessen the indispensability of both sacraments and priesthood. For if personal identification is ultimately possible between the human soul and the loving Christ (at least in the popular mind, if not in theological argument), an alternative route to the deity has been opened up. The implications of this underlying dilemma were not seen in the eleventh century, but in the following two hundred years they were to become more and more a source of confusion, doubt, and agonizing conflict in Christendom. Considered against the whole structure of medieval culture, the doctrines of Damiani, who was in his personal inclinations the least radical of the Gregorian reformers, were potentially as revolutionary as anything ever said or done by Humbert or Hildebrand.
Damiani’s competitor for the intellectual leadership of the Gregorian papacy was Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, a thinker fully as learned and forceful as the great Italian mystic and in some ways more subtle, original, and complex. Humbert came from Lorraine, where Leo IX had been a bishop. It has been established that Humbert had been a monk at Cluny and came to feel strongly that Cluny had betrayed the ideals of its founder. Otherwise his early biography is obscure. Like nearly all the Cluniacs, Humbert of Lorraine was probably a product of the high nobility; this class background would help to explain his consistent hatred of the German monarchy that had asserted its authority over Lorraine against strong local opposition. It is certain that Humbert had studied in the new schools of the canon law that flourished in Lorraine and that he had obtained a vast knowledge of theology and church history. He was likely an intellectual prodigy—he had a good knowledge of Greek, which was unusual in western Europe at the time—and in spite of his acidulous and critical disposition and his extreme intellectual arrogance, which are revealed in almost every page he wrote, the church could not afford to dispense with his services. Leo IX was glad to have him in the papal service, where his erudition and daimonic energy made him an outstanding figure. Only his premature death—he could not have been much more than fifty in 1061—kept him from the throne of Peter.
Humbert’s knowledge of Greek fitted him for the role of papal ambassador to Constantinople. The revitalized and aggressive attitude of the papacy was leading to a reconsideration of papal relations with the Greek church, and the age-old conflicting claims of pope and emperor were again becoming an important issue. The Norman conquest of southern Italy, where many Greek Christians lived, also served to remind the papal court of the problems of Latin-Greek relations. Humbert was not the man to be either cautious or subservient in his negotiations with the Greek church. He ended his legation in 1054 by excommunicating the patriarch of Constantinople, thereby officially declaring a schism that had been developing since the fifth century. This schism has not been ended to the present day, although several attempts at reconciliation have been made over the centuries.
On his return to Rome Humbert became the theoretician of the reform movement and the leader of the radical wing in the college of cardinals. The crucial date, when the effects of his planning and theorizing became evident, was 1059. In this year he was responsible for the publication of two works that signaled the beginnings of the Gregorian revolution. The first was the papal election decree, setting forth the legal manner of electing popes. It placed the election fully in the hands of the cardinals and excluded the interference of both the German emperor and the Roman people. In view of the fact that less than twenty years before Henry III had made popes with almost annual regularity, it marked a great change in the relations between Rome and the German emperor. But Henry IV (1056–1106) was at the time a minor, and his family was fighting off the rebellion of the German nobility; Humbert was able to carry out his coup d’état with impunity, as he had expected. The second work that Humbert published in 1059 was his great treatise on church-state relations, The Three Books Against the Simoniacs, the ideological formulation of the Gregorian revolution. It is suffused with violent hatred of the German emperor and calls forcefully for the complete freedom of the papacy from secular control. But there is much more to Humbert’s masterpiece than this; it is essentially an attack on the whole early medieval equilibrium between the church and the world.
Just as Damiani’s work reflects one of the leading intellectual currents of the time, the new piety, so does Humbert’s book reflect the new logic, or dialectic—the new emphasis on the formulation of argument according to the strict canons of whatever was known of Aristotelian logic at the time. Humbert was a pioneer in this controlled manner of debate, which contrasted markedly with the shapeless, or at least purely rhetorical, kind of didactic prose in the early Middle Ages. And he used this new intellectual tool in combination with his vast erudition to undermine the existing world order. He argued that simony is not merely the buying and selling of church offices; it is any interference by laymen in the affairs of the church. By this definition much of the prevailing institutional organization of western society—lay investiture, proprietary churches, royal influence over ecclesiastical appointments—stood condemned as errors in the faith. By Humbert’s argument no king or nobleman in western Europe, and not many churchmen, were at that moment free from participating in acts that condemned their souls.
This was strong medicine, but Humbert was not content to stop at even this radical position. The fatal charms of dialectic, which were to lead so many other brilliant medieval minds into the uncharted swamps of heresy in the following three hundred years, claimed Humbert as an early victim. His puritanism compelled him by logical steps to the conclusion that if the clergy could be reformed in no other way, then the people should examine the moral character of their priest, and if they found it unsatisfactory, they should refuse to take the sacraments from him. Thus was Humbert led to a revival of the Donatist doctrine that the ministration of the sacraments by an unworthy priest was invalid and to its corollary that the laity had a right to judge the priesthood. It was against these very principles that St. Augustine had labored so hard more than six centuries before, with the outcome that the church had proclaimed Donatism the most dangerous of errors. It had been decided that the priest, in administering the sacraments, acted as the representative of God, that the efficacy of the sacrament was not dependent upon the personal qualities of the priest but upon the divinely constituted office that he held, and that the laity could not sit in judgment on the priesthood. Humbert’s revival of Donatism must be seen as an indirect consequence of the development of lay piety. It is apparent that he had greater respect for the opinion of many laymen than he had for the views of their official pastors.
Humbert had clearly fallen into doctrinal error, and the effect of his teaching, if widely accepted, could only be the undermining of the authority of the priesthood and the negation of the Catholic concept of the predominance of the office over the individual moral character of ecclesiastics. Put simply, it would lead to the substitution of a proto-Protestant church of the saints for the Catholic church. Damiani was quick to point out the Donatist tendencies in Humbert’s treatise; to him it was a lesson in the dangers of dialectic, whose value to the church he greatly doubted. Yet others in the papal circle, fired by puritanical fanaticism and no doubt not a little influenced by Cardinal Humbert’s strong personality and tremendous intellectual force, were not so quick to see the dangerous and explosive consequences of Humbert’s argument. Hildebrand, who was strongly under Humbert’s influence and who derived a great part of his ideology from Humbert’s writings, was slow to reject Humbert’s neo-Donatism and came around to condemning it only in the latter part of his pontificate.
Although it was finally again denounced by the papacy as the severest of errors in the faith, a position that the Catholic church has not altered to the present day, the revival of the Donatist ideology by Humbert, a prominent cardinal and the most subtle theoretician of the eleventh century, was a momentous event in the development of the medieval church. Never again was Donatism to disappear completely from the medieval thought-world. In the second half of the twelfth century it was to be the fruitful source from which heretical movements and doctrines were to evolve into the sectarian Protestantism of the sixteenth century. No scholar has yet established the precise line of continuity between Humbert’s treatise Against the Simoniacs and the Donatist heretics who appeared in large numbers in northern Italy in the last half of the twelfth century. It seems not too much to postulate, however, that Humbert’s teachings, while eventually condemned by the papacy, were taken up into the intense religiosity of the north Italian urban communities and played a leading role in turning the new lay piety in the direction of popular heresy.
In comparison with Damiani and Humbert, Hildebrand was not an original theoretician. He was, however, unsurpassed as an ideologist, which is not necessarily the same thing. He pulled together, from many sources, the novel and radical ideas of his day and synthesized them into a formidable, total program of revolution. As Pope Gregory VII he attempted to implement these doctrines, and in so doing he inaugurated the great struggle between pope and emperor that shook western society to its foundations. Whatever the judgment on the merits of his ideology and the achievements of his pontificate, Gregory VII must be regarded as one of the three greatest medieval popes. Among all the holders of the throne of Peter before the sixteenth century, only Gregory I and Innocent III are comparable in stature. And no pope was ever as controversial as Gregory VII. No one in Europe in the 1070s and ’80s could hold for long a moderate and neutral opinion of him. He was greatly admired and loved by some, and at the same time he aroused more hatred and contempt in his own time than probably any other bishop of Rome.
Gregory’s controversial quality makes it difficult to establish some of the key facts of his biography and the salient aspects of his character. So many stories and legends, favorable and unfavorable, were told about him that his personality remains somewhat obscured. He was a native Roman who literally grew up in the shadow of the basilica of St. Peter’s, took monastic vows, and entered into the service of the papacy in early manhood. Even before Leo IX became pope in 1049, Hildebrand was already an important man in papal circles, and although for a quarter of a century he was passed over for less able candidates in papal elections, he was a dominant force in the college of cardinals and the effective chief of the papal administration. Hildebrand’s attitude to the Roman see can be termed almost nationalistic, or at least parochial. Irrespective of the ideological questions involved, he detested the German emperor as an alien interloper who had no business interfering in Italian affairs, let alone in papal policy. Hildebrand’s last words when he died in southern Italy in 1085, after being driven from Rome by an imperial army, are highly significant: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.” Any place outside the Eternal City was exile to this native Roman.
It is difficult to establish Hildebrand’s family background. It is probable that he was of bourgeois background and that there were Jewish converts to Christianity in his family. His background would help to explain his almost paranoiac hatred of the established order. Beyond doubt, Hildebrand was a hard man to get along with. His prodigious ability as an administrator, his puritanical zeal, and his fantastic energy made him a great leader but a difficult colleague. Even the charitable Damiani referred to him as the “holy Satan.” Abbot Hugh of Cluny, the fastidious elder statesman of the eleventh-century church, detested Hildebrand on sight, regarded him as a crass careerist, and did everything he could to block the implementation of Gregory’s programs.
Without being either a great scholar or a systematic thinker, Hildebrand was well versed in canon law, theology, and church history. Lacking the true scholar’s interest in knowledge per se, he was nevertheless quick to make use of the new learning of the eleventh century to support his point of view. Even before he became pope, Hildebrand had directed some leading Italian scholars to undertake the collection and organization of the canon law, a scholarly work that was being pursued at the same time in northern France and Lorraine. The canon law was such a vast, unorganized body of contradictory propositions that he wanted to make sure that its codification was worked out in directions favorable to papal power. If he had done nothing else, Hildebrand would thereby have made a great contribution to the rise of papal authority, for when the codification that he inaugurated came to fruition in the mid-twelfth century, it resulted in a canon law that emphasized papal absolutism and rejected alternative early-medieval traditions.
Immediately after his elevation to the throne of Peter, in 1073, Hildebrand drew upon this papal-oriented research in canon law for the propositions that he published as the Dictatus Papae, a statement of papal power. The Dictatus Papae asserted that the Roman church was founded by God alone; that only the papal office was universal in its authority; and that the pope alone could depose bishops, reinstate them, or transfer them from one see to another. No church council was canonical without papal approval. No one could condemn an appellant to the apostolic see, which was the supreme court of Christendom. No decree or book was to be considered canonical without papal assent. Furthermore, the pope was said to be beyond the judgment of any human being; his actions were to be judged by God alone. The Roman church, by which is presumably meant the papacy, had never erred, and according to the Scriptures it never would err. The Roman pontiff was sanctified by the merits of St. Peter. No one could be a true Catholic unless he agreed with the pope. A final group of propositions in the Dictatus Papae dealt with church-state relations. It was asserted that only the pope could use the imperial insignia, implying that the pope was the true successor to Constantine. The pope had the power to depose emperors, and it was lawful for subjects to bring accusations against their rulers to the papal see.
The Dictatus Papae was a sensational and extremely radical document, and it is inconceivable to think that Hildebrand was so naive as not to realize that it would make this impression. It was a statement of the revolutionary program that Gregory intended to implement: the creation of a new world order for Christian society founded on the principle that papal authority alone was universal and plenary, while all other powers in the world, whether emperors, kings, or bishops, were particular and dependent. This idea of the plenitude of papal power was by no means novel. It could be found in the radical aspects of the Gelasian doctrine; in the Donation of Constantine; and in the pronouncements of the ninth-century pope, Nicholas I. Gregory could claim with justice that every proposition in the Dictatus Papae was merely a quotation from one or another early medieval canon-law text. But the revolutionary quality of a program is not lessened by the fact that at distant points in the past other people had said the same thing. The Dictatus Papae was a revolutionary document in view of the comprehensiveness and intransigence of its assertion of papal absolutism and its contradiction of the prevailing world order. For two hundred years papal power had been in abeyance and the great bishoprics and abbeys of western Europe had flourished with little or no assistance from Rome, and certainly with no effective papal jurisdiction over their affairs. The great ecclesiastics of northern Europe could not but feel greatly disturbed by this unmitigated assertion of their absolute subservience to Rome, which went so contrary to common experience. They could not deny the legal, and perhaps even the theological, basis for Gregory’s claims, but they would have been less than human if they had not felt that Gregory’s program was unnecessary and imprudent and a threat to their whole way of life. The church in Germany, France, and England had done well enough for two centuries without the benefit of papal assistance. To many, and probably to most, of the great churchmen of Europe the Dictatus Papae appeared to be the shrill assertion of long-forgotten and rarely exercised theoretical papal authority in the interests of the personal ambitions of Hildebrand.
To the kings of western Europe the Dictatus Papae necessarily seemed even more revolutionary and upsetting. It claimed a papal supremacy over monarchy that had never been practiced in European history. Granted that the Donation of Constantine made such claims, no important medieval ruler had ever allowed a pope to interfere in the affairs of his realm. The assertion of this supreme papal monarchy in the world seemed all the more shocking in view of the successful leadership in western society and the unchallenged authority over territorial churches that the great western kings had exercised since the days of Charlemagne.
The churchmen and kings of western Europe were to learn rapidly that Gregory intended to carry out the program he enunciated in the Dictatus Papae at the beginning of his pontificate. They were also to learn that his ideology was, if anything, more radical than was evident from the simple legal propositions of his initial programmatic statement. Drawing upon Augustinian theology, tapping the emotional resources of the new popular piety, and strongly influenced by the teachings of Humbert, Gregory proceeded during the stormy twelve years of his pontificate to refine and formulate his revolutionary ideology. Almost every letter of his voluminous official correspondence contained some part of this doctrine, but his ultimate theory of a Christian social order was drawn together and presented with tremendously persuasive force in his famous Letter to Hermann of Metz in 1082. Ostensibly a reply to certain questions put to him by the bishop of Metz, the Letter was actually a public pamphlet. It was published in many copies and sent to royal courts and important churches all over Europe.
Since the ninth century political Augustinianism had been on the wane. The social amelioration effected by the government of Charlemagne, Otto I, and Henry III visibly contradicted the bishop of Hippo’s strictures on the moral quality of the state. The theocratic kings of the tenth and eleventh centuries were, in the eyes of the churchmen who assisted them, not the pirates whom Augustine had talked about but, rather, divinely commissioned leaders who did the work of the Lord. The common identification of the ecclesia and the mundus was a different attitude from Augustine’s sharp distinction between the heavenly and earthly cities. The Augustinian view that the state had no moral sanction in and for itself but derived its sanction only from its position as a servant of the church was a meaningless and irrelevant proposition in a world in which there was no clear line of distinction between church and state. But it was this political Augustinianism that Gregory VII now revived in its fullest and most intransigent form. In his Letter to Hermann of Metz he contended that royal power was originated by murderers and thugs and that the state continued to bear the stamp of Cain. In the whole history of the world, he said, there were scarcely half a dozen kings who had avoided the damnation of their souls, and these, such as Constantine and Theodosius the Great, had saved themselves from the fatal temptations of secular power only by their subservience to the church. Many simple and ordinary Christians, he said, were more certain recipients of divine grace than were the mighty and powerful holders of royal power, who were in most cases really the instruments of the devil.
Continuing in the Augustinian vein, Gregory concluded that the only legitimate power in the world resided in the priesthood, particularly in the bishop of Rome as the vicar of Christ on Earth. Only those who subjected themselves to this divinely constituted authority could hope to be included in the Heavenly City. Strongly emphasizing the Pauline-Augustinian conception of liberty, he boldly asserted that the freedom of the Christian man consisted in the subjection of his selfish will to the divine ends that the papacy pursued in the world. Only a world order in which these doctrines were realized could be called just and right. Justice, Gregory insisted, was a matter not of custom or tradition or usage but of fulfillment of the Christian ideal as he saw it. No claims of convenience or custom could be made against his doctrine. He reminded his critics that the Lord had not said, “I am tradition,” but rather, “I am the Word.” With an apocalyptic zeal he demanded a new right order that would fulfill the ideals of Christian justice and liberty as he had defined them. Nothing less than this total Christianitas was acceptable; there could be no compromise with the devil.
The new piety and emotional religiosity of the eleventh century influenced Gregory VII’s outlook almost as much as Damiani’s. His writings are full of references to the Virgin and to the pauperes Christi, “Christ’s poor ones,” whose assistance he summoned and whose welfare he sought. In Gregory’s view this Christian poverty was not an economic or class matter—or at least it was only incidentally so. He was on the side of the poor in spirit, the meek, the humble, and the downtrodden of whatever class or group, and he was the enemy of the rich, the proud, and the powerful, whoever or wherever they might be. His hatred of the most powerful men in Europe was based upon a psychological and emotional sympathy for the underdog and hostility to their lords and oppressors. Gregory’s conception of Christian poverty was thus in part an attempt to read the Sermon on the Mount to the class-stratified society of the eleventh century. At the same time, his violent hatred of the leaders of contemporary society and his highly emotional concern for the pauperes Christi were probably symptoms of a paranoiac hysteria and manifestations of a deep neurosis.
Whatever the roots of Gregory’s emotionally charged concept of Christian poverty, he was opening up an important, but as yet tenuous and hitherto almost unknown avenue in medieval thought. With the minor exception of the sermons of St. Ambrose, social criticism and a Christian social gospel had not yet made an appearance in medieval civilization. They were not to be expected in the agrarian society of the early Middle Ages, in which all literate forms of expression were the preserve of the landed classes. The emergence in the eleventh century, especially in northern Italy, of new bourgeois and proletarian groups, affected as they were by the new emotional piety, was bound to change all this. Whatever Gregory’s intentions in his emphasis upon the spiritual superiority of the poor Christians, his teachings were bound to give encouragement to the underprivileged and ambitious classes of the European cities. Given the religious orientation of all forms of thought in the eleventh century and the pietistic outlook of the city dwellers, their social disaffection was bound to be expressed in millennial and apocalyptic doctrines. They, the underprivileged, were the poor who deserved to inherit the Earth, or at least much more of it than the established landed classes were willing to allow them. Gregory’s emotional attitude toward Christian poverty therefore found a fertile seedbed in the social disaffection and millennial yearnings of the new urban classes.
The ambiguous meaning of poverty, referring to the lack both of wealth and spiritual qualities, was encouraged by the Gospel itself, for the first Christians, the members of the apostolic church, the original disciples of the Lord, were poor in all senses of the word, both spiritually and economically. Was this a necessary relationship? To achieve that ideal state of poverty of the soul, that humility which was a sign of Divine Grace, was it necessary to divest oneself of worldly goods? This question was to become an agonizing dilemma for the church in the High Middle Ages. Gregory’s enthusiasm for Christian poverty accentuated the central importance of this problem in medieval thought without doing much to resolve it.
The last of the four Gregorian reformers, Pope Paschal II, the only radical Gregorian aside from Hildebrand to obtain the papal throne, carried the debate much further and provided a definite answer, although one unpalatable to the great majority of the leading churchmen of his time. Paschal had been a monk in the monastery of Vallombrosa, near Florence, one of the new ascetic and reform communities. He entered the papal service as an ardent disciple of Gregory VII and remained to the end of his days, long after the high tide of revolutionary ardor had begun to ebb at Rome, an intransigent high Gregorian. After serving as papal legate in Spain, where the fanaticism of the warrior Iberian Christians engaged in the Reconquista gave him no cause to lessen his puritanical zeal, he was elected pope in 1099. The nineteen years of his pontificate were marked by his stubborn continuance of the struggle with the German emperor Henry V, by a conflict over church-state relations with the English king, and by his support of a reckless and bootless scheme for a crusade against Byzantium. In 1111 he startled Europe by announcing that he had arrived at a concordat with the German emperor, ending the long conflict between empire and papacy. But when the terms of the peace treaty were published, his rebellious and angry cardinals forced him to repudiate the settlement.
Paschal’s solution of the debate over church-state relations was both simple and radical. Since the origin of the controversy lay in the question of the relative jurisdictions of regnum and sacerdotium, he proposed to the emperor that the German churchmen surrender to the imperial crown their lands and secular offices and constitute themselves a purely spiritual church. In return, Henry V promised not to interfere with the affairs of the German bishops and abbots; of course, the delighted emperor could afford to do so in view of the tremendous accretion of landed wealth and public offices he was given by Paschal’s proposal.
Paschal’s concession was neither the unaccountable act of an eccentric old man nor the consequence of force majeure by the emperor, as the papal court later claimed in repudiating Paschal’s treaty. The Concordat of 1111 was fully in accord with Paschal’s ideological position, which was, in turn, an offshoot of radical Gregorianism. Just as the new ascetic monastic orders had taken inflexible vows of poverty in imitation of the apostolic church, so Paschal, who was a product of this puritanical movement, had moved in the direction of the idea of the apostolic poverty of the whole church and the doctrine of a purely spiritual church “poor” in every sense of the term. This may be said to be a logical development of Gregory VII’s emotional, if ambiguous, advocacy of Christian poverty.
The provocative doctrine of the apostolic poverty of the church thus made its first clear appearance in the policy of the last of the Gregorian popes. Rejected by the high medieval papacy, looked upon with horror by the wealthy and powerful ecclesiastics of western Europe, this doctrine was to find favor with the popular heretical movements of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. It was to be advocated at the end of the thirteenth century by the radical wing of the Franciscan order, whose own religious heritage derived ultimately from that same north Italian asceticism of the eleventh century that produced Paschal II. The doctrine of apostolic poverty was condemned by the papacy as a heresy in 1323, but it continued for many decades thereafter to be a source of debate and confusion in the life of the medieval church. Frequently, in the indistinct thought-world of medieval popular heresy, the doctrine of the apostolic poverty of the church was to be held jointly with that millennial social gospel whose roots were also in the teachings of Gregory VII.
The intellectual consequences of the Gregorian reform must be seen as extremely heterogeneous and complex. The Gregorians propounded doctrines that built up papal authority, the centralized organization of the church, and the power of the sacerdotal office—and at the same time undermined them. The doctrines of plenitude of power, papal infallibility, and subservience of the monarchy to the priesthood were Gregorian. But from the teachings of the Gregorian reformers also came those ideas that eventually played a leading role in the dissolution of the medieval world order: religious individualism, Donatism, the millennial social gospel, and the doctrine of the apostolic poverty of the church.
In their own day the Gregorians by no means had the forum of public debate to themselves. On the contrary, their discussions of the nature of a Christian world order called forth a variety of comments, critiques, and treatises reflecting almost every shade of opinion. It is indicative of both the intense feelings that the Gregorian reform aroused and the increased literacy in the eleventh century that the surviving treatises of the period on church-state relations fill more than two thousand pages when printed in modern folio. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that it seems that around the year 1100 almost every monk in western Europe was writing a pamphlet on church and kingship.
Three representative and typical expressions of the criticisms directed against the Gregorians may be considered. First, there was the reactionary position expatiating on the early medieval tradition of theocratic kingship and asserting that the king was the anointed of the Lord, “and through Grace he is God,” as the Norman churchman who wrote the treatises that are commonly called the Anonymous of York tractates contended in the year 1104. Second, there was the conservative Cluniac position exemplified by the Treatise on Royal and Sacerdotal Power by Hugh of Fleury, the French royal abbey allied with Cluny. Hugh directly attacked Gregory’s denigration of the moral sanctions of kingship and concluded that, for the sake of right order in society, monarchy must continue to be superior to priesthood. The final position, and one of the most interesting and important of the period, was taken by the great canon lawyer, Bishop Ivo of Chartres. This wise and shrewd scholar expressed his doubts that the prevailing social order was actually contrary to the canon law and the demands of church dogma. But even if it were, he said, the sanction of social custom had to predominate even over the exigencies of written law and theology. Since the prevailing order had such wide support among the laity and even among the clergy that it could not be abolished without a schism, Ivo concluded, the reformers had better be content with a discreet protestation and hope for slow reform. The ideologists of the Gregorian papacy, however, were no more willing to listen to the moderate opinion of Ivo of Chartres—who was told by Rome to keep silent—than to the fulminations of royalist reactionaries and the bitter protests of Cluniac conservatives.
To many contemporary churchmen, sincere and devout in their calling, the Gregorians were not so much doctrinally wrong as imprudent, naive, and provincial. In countries where kingship was strong, especially in Anglo-Norman England and the German empire, the higher clergy had come to respect monarchy, in whose presence they literally stood with great frequency as royal councilors and ministers. The Gregorians, in contrast with such churchmen, were indeed naive and provincial. Nearly all of them came from Lorraine and northern Italy, where royal power was weak and disorganized and where no one, least of all a monk, could gain much respect for kingship. None of them had the opportunity to work in a royal chancery and to become acquainted with the personality of a Henry III or a William the Conqueror or to gain insight into the tremendous problems of eleventh-century government. Kingship was an idea for the Gregorians, something to be studied in Augustine or Gelasius; it was neither a brutal fact of everyday life nor a glorious sentiment (as it was to the higher clergy of England and Germany). The Gregorians were learned, devout, brave, and even intellectually brilliant men, but they were profoundly lacking in the wisdom and moderation that came from years of intimacy with power and majesty—knowledge that could not be gained in patristic literature, in canon-law collections, by devotions in a monastic oratory, or even by drawing upon the rich intellectual resources of the new piety and the new logic.
In 1075 the Salian German emperor Henry IV was the most powerful ruler in Europe, at least east of Normandy. Yet the “holy Satan,” Gregory VII, setting out to implement his program of justice and liberty, did not fear to demand that the German king immediately give up the institution of lay investiture by which he controlled the appointment of the great churchmen of his realm, and the pope threatened to depose Henry if he did not obey this decree. Gregory’s attack on the institutional basis of Salian power came at a crucial time in the development of the empire; it precipitated a fifty-year struggle that, in the opinion of many German historians, decided the fate of Germany.
Henry IV had ascended to the throne of his father’s premature death in 1056, but for nine years he was a minor, and until he attained his majority in 1056 his hold on the crown was insecure. The aggressive policy of centralization that Henry III had pursued had frightened the German nobility, and they determined to take advantage of the sudden reversal of fortune of the Salian house to strip the crown of its powers. Following along the lines set down by the tenth-century Ottonians, Henry had based his power on his control of the resources and personnel of the church, exercised through the doctrines of theocratic monarchy and the institutions of lay investiture, the proprietary church system, and advocacy over the great monasteries of the realm. In addition, Henry III had made use of royal ministeriales to garrison the crown castles that he had built all over the realm and especially in the northern duchy of Saxony, whose nobility and free peasantry had continued to exhibit a strong separatist tendency. It appears to have been Henry’s intention to incorporate the recalcitrant Saxon duchy into the family possessions of the Salian house, adding this territory to the native Salian duchy of Franconia to form extensive crown lands. The fulfillment of this dynastic policy would have placed the Salian monarchy in a position of overwhelming superiority with reference to the German nobility and would have been the capstone in the building of royal authority in Germany that had begun with the work of Otto I in the middle of the tenth century. It was through the expansion of their crown lands that the Capetian monarchs were able to ascend to supreme authority in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The German nobility, led by the recalcitrant Saxons, determined to take advantage of the sudden death of the great emperor Henry III in 1056 and the succession of a minor. The result was nine years of rebellion and civil war in Germany, in which the duchies exhibited the traditional centrifugal tendencies. But the German episcopate, even in Saxony, remained loyal to the monarchy and saved the throne for the young Henry IV. The wisdom of Otto I’s alliance with the German church thus received fresh confirmation.
When Henry IV became king in fact in 1065, he brought this decentralizing tendency to an immediate halt and set about continuing the work of his father. Henry was perhaps the ablest and wisest German ruler of the Middle Ages. Certainly no other German king exhibited more cunning, energy, and inflexible determination in advancing the cause of royal authority. Henry believed that the key to the problem was the duchy of Saxony, where he continued his father’s building of castles and embarked upon a policy of not only stripping the nobility of their autonomous privileges but pushing down the mass of free peasantry into a status of manorial serfdom completely dependent upon the crown. The inevitable consequence was another great rebellion in Germany, in which the aroused nobility and peasantry of the north were supported by dissident aristocrats in the rest of the realm and even by a few disaffected bishops. The struggle, however, was an unequal one, for on the king’s side were the great majority of the bishops, the royal ministeriales, many of the lower nobility, the wealthy monasteries under royal control, and the new burgher class of the Rhenish cities. By 1075 Henry IV had won a complete victory. The rebel leaders of the aristocracy had been humbled, and the Saxon peasantry had lost great numbers in battle and had come to feel that they had been betrayed by the nobility. The way now appeared to be open for the creation of a strong and unified state in Germany, paralleling the degree of central authority in the lands under the rule of the duke of Normandy and anticipating the French monarchy of the thirteenth century.
At this critical juncture the German king received the papal decree against lay investiture with the accompanying threat of deposition if he did not obey immediately. Henry had not been unaware of the great changes taking place at Rome. During his minority the papal election decree of 1059 had divested him of the prerogative of dominating the papal elections that his predecessors had enjoyed for a century. But, engaged as he was in pressing domestic concerns, he had been prepared to let Italian affairs take their course, at least until he could give them his undivided attention. Henry’s natural disposition toward Rome appears to have been cautious and moderate, and it is likely that, if let alone, he would not have interfered with the new independence of the papacy. But given the aggressive policy that Gregory undertook from the beginning of his pontificate, it was impossible for Henry to avoid a conflict with Rome. The initial dispute between the pope and the emperor was over a relatively minor issue, but one indicative of a much deeper underlying conflict. Shortly after Hildebrand became pope, the episcopal see of the febrile community of Milan fell vacant, and Henry and Gregory each maneuvered to secure the election of his own candidate. Gregory regarded this as an indication that the German king had not given up his claim to dominate the affairs of northern Italy, and perhaps it caused Gregory to accelerate his attack on the institutional basis of imperial power—its alliance with the German church—by means of the papal ultimatum of 1075. Flushed with his great triumph over the nobility, Henry decided to take the strongest possible line in replying to Gregory’s demands, and he found enthusiastic support for this policy among the German churchmen. For a long time these churchmen had been more aware than the king of the revolutionary course of the Hildebrandine papacy, and they were no more eager than Henry himself to abandon the prevailing system of church-state relations in Germany.
Consequently, at the beginning of 1076 the clerical scholars at the royal court prepared a letter to be sent in the king’s name to Rome in reply to the papal decree on investiture, damning “Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk,” in the strongest possible terms. One of the outstanding examples of medieval Latin rhetoric and reflecting the learning and literary skill of the Salian chancery, Henry’s letter constituted nothing less than a defense of the prevailing world order and a declaration of war on the pope who had presumed to dissolve this beneficent system. Henry informed Gregory that his conduct as pope had brought confusion and malediction upon the church; that he had dared to rise up against the royal power conferred on Henry by God; and that he had threatened to divest the Lord’s anointed of his kingdom, which Henry had received from the hand of God. Gregory, it was claimed, had usurped the apostolic chair; he had practiced violence under the cloak of religion and betrayed the teachings of St. Peter. The letter concluded with the stirring peroration that Hildebrand was now called upon by Henry, king by the Grace of God, and by all the imperial bishops, to come down from the throne of Peter. Some of the surviving copies of the letter add an eternal damnation for the pope.
Henry IV’s letter to Gregory VII was the desperate cry of self-justification upon the part of early medieval kingship, which had reached its culmination in the Salian empire of Henry III and his son. But Hildebrand seems to have anticipated such a reply. He was not afraid of the imperial army because in the preceding two decades the papacy had found powerful allies in Italy to serve as a balance of power against the great northern king—namely, the new Norman rulers of southern Italy and Sicily. At first the papacy had been hostile to the Norman invasion of the territory south of Rome, but by the end of the 1050s the papal court had come to realize that the Normans could be made into a counterweight against the troublesome Roman nobility and ultimately even against the German emperor, whose vague claims to hegemony in Italy the Normans as well as the papacy could be expected to oppose. The Norman-Italian rulers in turn needed papal sanction to give an aura of legitimacy to their naked seizure of the south Italian realms, which had previously been held by a motley crew of Moslem, Byzantine, and Latin princes. This recognition was gladly given by the papacy to cement an alliance with the Norman rulers, whose armies provided the necessary military support that the papacy hitherto lacked. In addition to this southern support Gregory could look for assistance in the north to the wealthy and powerful countess Matilda of Tuscany, a pious widow on friendly terms with Gregory himself. Matilda is the earliest example of that new type of independent aristocratic lady of great power and prestige who was to play an occasionally significant role in the politics and society of the High Middle Ages. Although she was a distant relative of the German king, the pope apparently felt that Matilda could be relied upon to protect him from Henry IV’s wrath if the occasion arose.
Acting with characteristic speed and determination, Gregory deposed Henry on receipt of his contumacious and insulting letter and sent papal agents into Germany to stir the ashes of the recent rebellion into a new flame of civil war. Every dissident element in Germany was now accorded a new and unprecedented pretext for attacking royal authority, and rebellion in self-interest was given divine sanction. It is likely, however, that Henry could have weathered this storm if Gregory had not taken the precaution of trying to preclude the continuance of the traditional support given by the great German ecclesiastics of the crown.
The bishops and abbots were informed by the papal agents and by letters sent directly from Rome that on pain of excommunication they were no longer to recognize Henry IV as their king. Excommunication was still a powerful instrument in the spiritual armory of the papacy; Europe was a long way from the time when the force of this weapon was to be blunted by excessive use. Furthermore, there was a real possibility that Gregory would triumph in his struggle with the German king, and the ecclesiastics of the empire, fearing for their own security, hesitated to risk their offices and status by openly siding with Henry IV. The immediate effect, of the papal decree of deposition, therefore, was a stunning collapse of royal power. Since at least two-thirds of Henry’s army came from ecclesiastical lands, he had lost the greater part of his military power without a blow being struck. By the end of 1076 the king found himself almost completely isolated, as the bewildered and frightened German ecclesiastics withdrew their support of the Salian house. The German nobility exulted in this unexpected reversal of their fortunes, and reasserting the old electoral principle in the German monarchy at papal suggestion, they set in motion the constitutional process of electing a new king from outside the Salian dynasty.
The court clerics convinced the king that only his surrender to Gregory and papal forgiveness of his purported sinful acts could save his throne. Henry determined to go to Italy and personally seek absolution from the pope. It was necessary for him to do so as quickly as possible, for Gregory had announced his intention of going to Germany to preside at the assembly of the German nobility that would formally divest Henry of his crown and elect a new king.
A contemporary German monastic chronicler of royalist sympathies has given us a probably romanticized account of how the desperate Henry IV rushed southward, accompanied by only a handful of retainers, through lands infested with his enemies. At the same time Gregory, traveling in a slower and more ceremonial manner, had set out from Rome with the intention of getting into Germany before the king could seek an audience with him. This melodramatic race, which held the attention of all Europe, was won by Henry. He encountered the pope at Matilda of Tuscany’s castle of Canossa, in northern Italy, where Gregory had been received as a guest by the countess.
The events that occurred at Canossa in the winter of 1077 constitute one of the great dramas of European history. Contemporary royalist chroniclers described, with pardonable exaggeration, how Henry stood in the snow for three days until at last the pope was willing to give him an audience and receive his penitent pleas for forgiveness and absolution. Actually, the events that occurred at Canossa were not only high drama but a crucial political encounter of great consequence for the subsequent development of the German investiture controversy, as both the king and the pope well knew. Henry needed papal absolution if he was to hold his throne, and Gregory was unwilling to grant it at the very moment of the collapse of Henry’s power, when the pope was on his way to attend a great assembly that would elect a papally approved candidate as the German king. By the tradition and law of the church, however, no priest, let alone the vicar of Christ on Earth, could refuse the comforts of absolution to a sincerely penitent and confessed sinner. Gregory very much doubted, and with good reason, that Henry was genuinely penitent, but it was difficult for him to proclaim his opinion publicly in view of Henry’s great show of remorse. Consequently, the pope ignored the king’s plea for an audience for three days. Matilda of Tuscany interceded with the pope on behalf of her kinsman; no ruler or great lord, at least outside Germany, enjoyed seeing the continued humiliation of one of the great anointed kings of Christendom.
Probably not even Matilda’s entreaties would have moved Gregory in his moment of triumph. It was only the unwelcome appearance at Canossa of abbot Hugh of Cluny and his unrelenting intercession on Henry’s behalf that forced Gregory’s hand. Abbot Hugh was the most widely respected and beloved churchman of his day. He and Hildebrand had always disliked each other, and the Gregorian and Cluniac worldviews strongly clashed, but Gregory could not afford to ignore the advice of the revered and saintly abbot. To have done so would have endangered his own position in Europe, for Gregory well realized that the crowned heads of Europe stood aghast at such novel events as were transpiring at Canossa. He knew that the active opposition of the Cluniac elder statesman of the church would have sufficed to turn public opinion against him and bring about the alignment of the other kings and rulers of Europe alongside the now vanquished Salian monarch. Hence Gregory finally gave Henry the audience he sought, heard his confession, and absolved him; he then made him promise to obey the papal decrees and restored him to his royal status.
In the pope’s eyes, if not in the opinion of the disappointed German nobility, there was now no need for electing a new king. Gregory abandoned his planned transalpine journey and dispatched a triumphant letter to the German nobility informing them of the events that had transpired at Canossa and of his peace with the penitent king, who had vowed to be henceforth a loyal servant of the papacy. But Henry, returning to his kingdom, also departed from Canossa in a victorious mood. He had saved his throne and had been given time to reestablish his power. It is most unlikely that he ever intended to observe the oath he had taken at Canossa, and within a year, when he made his intentions public, he was again deposed by the pope. But Henry was never again to be in the helpless position in which he had found himself at the end of 1076, and in fact, in the half century of the German investiture controversy, the papacy was never again to be anywhere as close to total victory as it had been on the morrow of Gregory’s initial attack on the German monarchy. After Canossa some German ecclesiastics had second thoughts and once again threw in their lot with the Salian house. For example, the abbot of the great monastery of Fulda, founded by St. Boniface, was in Henry’s later years the head of the royal chancery. With some ecclesiastical support and with the aid of the royal ministeriales and armies raised from the crown lands, the German king held his own in the long and bitter war with the German nobility. In 1085 Henry was momentarily powerful enough to take vengeance by driving his papal archenemy from Rome to refuge among his Norman allies in southern Italy, a humiliating exile from which Gregory did not return. Henry IV’s last years were embittered by the rebellion of his son, who joined the German nobility against him, but this was mainly a personal and dynastic matter. On his succession to the German throne in 1106, Henry V continued the war against the papacy and its allies in Germany.
Both contemporaries and many modern writers have debated whether it was the pope or the emperor who gained the most from the dramatic confrontation at Canossa. It was clear that both parties gained and lost something and that neither won a total victory. Canossa restored the German crown to Henry, but considering his abnegation before the pope, it also dealt a fatal blow to the ideology of theocratic kingship, upon which the Salian dynasty had relied so extensively. Furthermore, in being forced to obtain papal absolution, Henry gave substance to the Gregorian claim that the papacy had the right to judge and depose even the most prestigious ruler in Europe. Certainly Gregory had cause to exult that the moral power of the papacy had been demonstrated when the greatest ruler of the West was literally forced to become a penitent at his feet. Canossa signified that the bishop of Rome, who had played an insignificant role in the political affairs of Europe for two centuries, would now be a central figure in the affairs of European states.
Gregory’s triumph, however, was not unmitigated. Canossa sowed those seeds of doubt and concern about the good intentions and moral standards of the papacy that were to grow rapidly in the following century. The kings of western Europe had been put on their guard and were reluctantly forced to undertake a careful reappraisal of their relations with the church. Canossa made archaic the equilibrium of the early eleventh century. Even conscientious and devout churchmen now had to ask themselves why as sincere and able a ruler as Henry should have been put in such a miserable position. In discussing Canossa a century later, the church historian and imperial prince bishop Otto of Freising refused to see absolute right or wrong on either side. He thought that Gregory had gone to extremes, and he doubted the pope’s prudence and, by implication, his good intentions. Thus the magnificent demonstration of papal authority at Canossa had a far-reaching and complex influence on the moral consciousness of medieval society. It signaled the sudden resurgence of Roman leadership in Europe and at the same time set in motion that long chain of disillusionment and controversy that was to end two centuries later in another little Italian town with the demise of the medieval papacy.
After Canossa Gregory and Henry fought each other with relentless hatred and all the resources, both moral and physical, that they could summon. The pope again announced the deposition of the Salian ruler and joined with the rebellious German nobility in setting up an antiking. Similarly, Henry found a north Italian bishop who was willing to take the gamble of being installed as the antipope. These maneuvers had little or no effect, and the investiture conflict turned out to be a draw. After Gregory’s death in 1085, and particularly during the pontificate of the former Cluniac monk Urban II (1088–1099), the papacy’s determination began to slacken. While officially asserting his loyalty to Gregory’s policies, Urban began to seek a way out of the war of attrition in which the papacy had become involved. He tried to unite Europe behind the Roman pontiff through the preaching of the first crusade. Urban’s departure from Gregorian ideology was indicated by his willingness to grant the Norman rulers of England and southern Italy the same domination over their territorial churches that Gregory had condemned in the case of Germany. But the ending of the German investiture conflict had become a most difficult matter involving the necessity of saving face on both sides, and Urban was not able to find a way out of this impasse. It need hardly be said that no supporter of the German king joined the first crusade.
Urban’s successor, Paschal II, renewed the struggle, but after a decade even this intransigent high Gregorian wanted to call a halt to the seemingly endless conflict. His radical solution, as we have seen, while it pleased Henry V, was unacceptable to almost everyone else. By the latter part of the second decade of the twelfth century, a new generation of cardinals had come to dominate the papal government. Their experience in law and administration conditioned them to view the world from the standpoint of careful bureaucrats, not that of aggressive ideologists. To these new men the all-or-nothing policy of the Gregorian papacy seemed both dangerous and unnecessary. They envisioned the enhancement of papal authority through the institutional means of legal and administrative centralization of the church, rather than by a desperate war with the rulers of Europe. The new leaders at Rome agreed in general with Gregory’s ultimate aims, but emotionally they were not inclined to adopt the means he employed. What they wanted to preserve in Gregory’s program was the institutional reforms he had inaugurated: the increase in the bureaucracy of the papal court; the sending of legates, or papal ambassadors, to all parts of Europe; and the establishment of the Roman Curia as the effective high court of the church. But they were willing to work slowly for the fulfillment of these ends; to come to terms with the kings of western Europe, when necessary; and to bargain hard and continuously for limited concessions, rather than dare to risk all on a fundamental conflict. It is this moderate, bureaucratic, legalistic spirit, contrasting markedly with the apocalyptic frenzy of Humbert and Hildebrand, that distinguished the papacy of the twelfth century from the Gregorian revolution.
The new generation of cardinals regarded the German investiture controversy as an embarrassing vestige of a now-vanished age, and they were willing to make extensive concessions to achieve a compromise with Henry V. The principle upon which the short-lived English investiture controversy of 1103–1107 had been terminated was consequently resurrected and embodied in the Concordat of Worms of 1122 between Calixtus II and Henry V. The emperor abandoned the institution of lay investiture with its overtones of the now-discredited doctrine of theocratic kingship. But he was allowed to require the homage of bishops and abbots in his domains before they were invested with the symbols of their offices. Thus the papacy granted to the German king the right to exercise a veto over the appointment of German ecclesiastics and, by implication, to maintain the decisive voice in their selection.
This compromise had allowed the English king to maintain his practical control over the affairs of the church in his realm. But the effect of the Concordat of Worms was by no means a simple return to the status quo ante bellum because the half century of the investiture controversy had brought about such vast changes in the German political and social structure that the king was unable to take full advantage of the papal concessions. In many parts of the realm the great dukes had gained a semiautonomous territorial sovereignty, and it was they, not the king, who benefited from the Concordat’s grant of jurisdiction over ecclesiastical appointments in their duchies. In still other parts of Germany, particularly in the Rhineland, the great bishops themselves had become territorial princes whom the monarchy could no longer dominate. Thus, as far as Henry V and his successors were concerned, the Concordat of Worms in effect gave them the right to control the appointments of bishops and abbots only in the territories belonging to their own families.
This cataclysmic decline in the German crown’s traditional domination over the resources and personnel of the church was paralleled by its losses in other directions. Many of the royal ministeriales on whom the eleventh-century German monarchy had so heavily depended proved unreliable. They took advantage of the confusions of the long civil war to usurp control over the royal castles they were guarding and to bargain for their legal freedom with king or antiking, thereby becoming lords in their own right. By the early twelfth century some of these former ministeriales were marrying into the old noble families, and not a few of the great aristocrats of modern Germany are descendants of Salian serf-knights. This weakening of royal institutions was contemporaneous with the advancing power of the territorial princes. In Germany history the period of the investiture conflict signified a tremendous growth in the territorial sovereignty of the dukes and other great lords and the creation of provincial autonomy, which was not overcome until the second half of the nineteenth century. It is therefore with considerable justice that many German historians claim that the period between 1075 and 1122 determined the German fate.
The growth of territorial sovereignty and aristocratic power in Germany was greatly abetted by the extensive feudalization of the country for the first time. Vassalage was not unknown in Germany before the investiture conflict, but the feudal pattern was fragmentary and relatively unimportant, especially in the northern half of the land. Fifty years of civil war produced far-reaching political and social changes. The great lords imposed homage on their knights and placed themselves at the head of feudal armies. By the 1120s the bonds of vassalage had proliferated among the landed classes. This extensive feudalization of German society was a catastrophe for the monarchy because the feudal pyramid in Germany, as in France before 1150, was truncated. The feudal bonds did not ascend to the king’s level; they terminated in the suzerainty of the great aristocrats. The vassals of the great lords were bound by no feudal relationship to the king, and their loyalty was henceforth given to the territorial princes, who now had large and well-trained armies to use against the monarchy. The king’s military power was derived only from his position as feudal overlord in his native family duchy. But circumscribed as he now was by the virtually independent territorial princes, his private resources were inadequate to restore the shattered structure of central authority. Many great lords, taking advantage of their new autonomy, usurped the king’s former control of ecclesiastical property by assuming the advocacy of the great monasteries and the lordship over proprietary churches. Thus the nobility adopted for their own benefit and to the detriment of royal power some of the favorite Ottonian-Salian institutions.
To ensure the continued weakness of the monarchy, the nobility perpetuated the electoral nature of German kingship. Although, in constitutional theory, the electoral principle had never entirely died out and the Ottoman and Salian rulers had taken the precaution of having their sons elected before the royal deaths, in actual practice the tenth and eleventh centuries witnessed the substitution of hereditary succession. But under the urgings of the Gregorian papacy the nobility revivified the electoral idea. The clerical theorist Manegold of Lautenbach produced a treatise presenting a purely functionalized view of the German monarchy in which the king was compared to a swineherd, employed for a specific purpose, who could be dismissed if he displeased his employer. This radical Augustinian view of the German monarchy pleased the territorial princes, who naturally saw the king as a functionary with limited powers, whom they would chose and, if necessary, remove from office. For a quarter of a century following Henry V’s death in 1125 the German monarchy conformed to Manegold’s swineherd principle. The king was chosen by the princes, given no resources outside those his own duchy, and prevented from exercising any real authority or leadership in the realm. The royal title was furthermore passed from one family to another to preclude the development of any dynastic interest in the German crown.
Thus, when Frederick I of Hohenstaufen was chosen king in 1152, the royal power had been in effective abeyance for a quarter of a century and, to a considerable degree, for eighty years. The only untapped resources of the crown lay in northern Italy, over whose wealthy cities the emperor had a nominal claim of suzerainty. As a consequence of the investiture conflict, any king bent on regaining the authority that the Salians had exercised had to look to Italy. But the age of the investiture conflict had also witnessed great changes in northern Italy, which made any attempt at the real exercise of imperial power there highly problematical. Since the time of Henry III the Italian cities had experienced no effective rule by their nominal German overlord. And this was precisely the period of their tremendous expansion in wealth and population and the development of their communal institutions. The northern Italian cities, by the middle of the twelfth century, were dominated by narrow oligarchies of merchant and industrial entrepreneurs, ready and able to fight for the preservation of their status and power. They were the natural allies of the papal court, which greatly feared the reappearance of the emperor in Italy. The emperor could see no way of restoring royal authority in Germany except by conquest of northern Italy, but the pope thought that if the emperor should triumph in Italy, he would destroy the independence of the papacy. The investiture controversy, by decimating the resources of the German crown, paradoxically brought the papacy into inevitable conflict with the first ambitious and able prince to come to the Roman throne after the Concordat of Worms. The transformation of northern Italy during the period of the investiture controversy, however, made the success of such an imperial venture unlikely.
To these catastrophic political consequences of the struggle between pope and emperor may be added a cultural disaster: Germany’s loss of the intellectual leadership of western Europe. In 1050 the German monasteries were great centers of learning and art, and the German schools of theology and canon law were unsurpassed and probably unmatched anywhere in Europe. The long civil war and the acrimonious disputes between church and state seem to have syphoned off the energy and diverted the attention of the German churchmen. The churchmen were assiduous in producing treatises on church-state relations, but they ignored the tremendous advances in philosophy, law, literature, and art that were taking place during the same period west of the Rhine and south of the Alps. Thus German intellectual life fell out of step with the times and slowly became backward and archaic. At the beginning of the twelfth century French and Italian scholars were in the process of creating a new institution for higher thought and education that was to play the central role in the intellectual life of the High Middle Ages, but the first such university was not established in Germany until the fourteenth century. Culturally as well as politically the Germans fell behind during the investiture conflict and never quite caught up during the Middle Ages.