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Gregory VII: Who’s in Charge Here?

Picture for yourselves an emperor in penitential garb standing in the snow outside a castle begging forgiveness of a pope who is a guest inside. The year is 1077, the place is Canossa (a small village in the Apennines), the emperor is Henry IV (son of Henry III), and the pope is Gregory VII (formerly known as Hildebrand). This scene is a stunning contrast to the scene at Sutri in 1046 when Emperor Henry IV’s father sat proudly in judgment on three claimants to the papacy, saw to their deposition, and then placed his own candidate on the throne. In the thirty years that intervened between these scenes a revolution had occurred and a huge controversy had exploded.

This complex phenomenon goes by two names that indicate two aspects of the same reality. It is known as the Gregorian Reform when interpreted from the viewpoint of the changes that a small but determined group of reformers in Rome tried to effect in the church. The Reform begins with Leo IX, but it gets its name, quite properly, from one of his successors, Gregory VII. The phenomenon is known as the Investiture Controversy when interpreted from the viewpoint of the political ramifications of especially one element of the reformers’ program, the relationship in church leadership between the lay rulers and the higher clergy. Put anachronistically, the Investiture Controversy was about the relationship between church and state. The basic question was—who’s in charge?

If Leo IX initiated the Reform, Nicholas II set the immediate stage for the Controversy with the decree on lay investiture. When he died in 1061, relations with the imperial court were tense. The reformers at that point therefore sought a candidate acceptable to the court but one at the same time firmly in their camp. They found him in Anselm, bishop of Lucca, who took the name Alexander II. The reformers conducted the election according to the new provisions. Eager though they were to soothe relations with the imperial court, they did not request its assent to the election, an omission that did not go unnoticed. Meanwhile the Roman nobility stirred up so much opposition to the pope chosen according to provisions hateful to them that they were able to block access to Saint Peter’s, and Alexander had to be crowned under cover of night in another church in Rome dedicated to the same apostle, Saint Peter in Chains.

For four years Alexander had to contend with an anti-pope, Honorius II. He won the support of the reform-minded Anno, archbishop of Cologne, who had replaced Agnes as regent for the young Henry. Alexander finally prevailed and was able to establish himself for an important reign of twelve years, but the phenomenon shows that the reformers were still in a precarious position and that they were in no position to discount the authority of the imperial court, which in this instance saved Alexander’s papacy.

Alexander pursued the reform program already under way and at first, after the anti-pope problem was settled, did so without serious conflict with the court. But, in 1066 when Henry IV achieved his majority, trouble began to stir. The teenaged monarch was intelligent, resourceful, arrogant, and undisciplined, and he was much aware of the German kings’ tradition of pope-making. He was not somebody to be cowed by papal claims. When he came to the throne after a decade of regency, much of it under his mother, he found his domains in disarray. They would soon be in revolt. He had to assert himself strongly if he were going to keep his throne.

Henry’s chief and richest fief in Italy was the archbishopric of Milan. When Archbishop Guido died in 1071, Henry tried to force his candidate on the Milanese without any regard for elective procedures. The Milanese reacted against his moves, and Alexander could not stand by and let such a notorious flouting of the reform program happen in the second most important bishopric in Italy after his own. The Milanese meanwhile elected another archbishop, who had to flee to Alexander for protection against Henry’s supporters. The problem dragged on for almost two years. Alexander dared not confront the young emperor-elect directly, but instead in 1073 he excommunicated for simony five of Henry’s councilors involved in the affair. When Alexander died that year, the problem hung ominously in the air for his successor to handle.

Who would that successor be, and how would he be chosen? During Alexander’s funeral a cry arose from the crowd, “Hildebrand pope! Hildebrand pope! Hildebrand pope!” The cardinals immediately took matters into their own hands and gave their assent to the popular will. Was the outburst premeditated? There is no way of knowing, but there is also no doubt that Hildebrand was the reformers’ ideal candidate. Under Alexander he had risen to unquestioned leadership among the reforming party and served the pope well during those crucial years.

The mode of Gregory’s election was irregular according to the protocol laid down by Nicholas II, a fact that would later be thrown up at him and open him to charges of usurping the office. He himself never questioned the legitimacy of the election process. Although he expressed surprise and dismay at being chosen in words that have the ring of truth, we must in such cases make generous allowance for self-deception. In a letter to Wibert, archbishop of Ravenna, he described what happened:

“But then, suddenly, while our late master the pope was being borne to his burial in the church of Our Savior [John Lateran], a great tumult and shouting of the people arose and they rushed upon me like madmen, leaving me neither time nor opportunity to speak or to take counsel, and they dragged me by force to the place of apostolic rule, to which I am far from being equal. So that I might say with the prophet . . . ‘Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me.’”

Thus began one of the most important and tumultuous pontificates of the entire Middle Ages. About Gregory nobody is neutral. For one extreme he was a power-hungry cleric who would let nothing stand in the way of his achieving domination. For the other he was a holy man, a prophet, who did his duty no matter what the cost to himself. (He was canonized in 1606, but his feast was not celebrated in the Austrian empire until the mid-nineteenth century.) German-language historians have until relatively recently consistently criticized him as a pope who interfered in internal German politics, humiliated the emperor, and contributed heavily to the subsequent weakness of the empire. Gregory’s contemporaries were just as divided in their assessment of him. Saint Peter Damian, one of his closest collaborators, at one point called him “my holy Satan.”

Gregory came from relatively modest origins but had a good education in monasteries in and around Rome. He probably spent time as a monk, and some of his contemporaries considered him one. As pope he surrounded himself with students of canon law. Although he sometimes showed a surprising flexibility and compassion in dealing with difficult situations, he saw things in terms of black and white. Like the prophets he took justice as his war cry. His task was to ensure it prevailed, cost what it may. He liked to quote Isaiah, “I cannot be a mute dog afraid to bark “(Isaiah 56.10). When it was objected to him that lay investiture had become the established custom, he replied, “Jesus said, ‘I am the truth,’ not I am the custom.”

Gregory was utterly dedicated to the Roman church and believed all its claims with every fiber of his being. He saw himself a mystical extension of Peter into time. He not only exercised his authority as Peter’s vicar and in Peter’s name, but he embodied the saint in his person. This was certainly not a new idea for a pope, but few of Gregory’s predecessors felt it as passionately and intensely. Gregory had a dark view of the world in which he lived. It was a world where the devil held sway, where the righteous were few. In that world Gregory believed that he was among those few who had truth and right on their side. Since that was the case, he could not possibly lose in his contest against Henry and in his contests against other monarchs of the day.

Monarchy, in Gregory’s view, sprang from greed and ambition, unlike priesthood, whose origin was spiritual. He thus pitted secular and sacred against each other with a new and uncompromising starkness and in so doing denied the quasi-sacramental understanding of kingship that had long held sway. Moreover, implied in Gregory’s viewpoint was the principle that it was the pope’s prerogative to decide who was fit for kingship. No king of the eleventh century (or any century!) was ready to accept such outlandish ideas.

Gregory described the issue at stake in his dealings with monarchs, who besides Henry included King Philip I of France and William the Conqueror of England, as “the liberty of the church” (libertas ecclesiae). He fought for it as part of his mission to see justice done. From this point in history forward “the liberty of the church” became the slogan the church has habitually used to justify its prerogatives and its independence of action in struggles against unfriendly governments.

In the Vatican archives rests a document, The Memorandum of the Pope (Dictatus Papae) from 1075, of which Gregory is the author. It consists in a series of twenty-seven affirmations or axioms, perhaps meant to be headings for a reorganization of canon law. No matter what Gregory intended them to be, the axioms reveal how exalted his opinion of papal authority was. Here are a few samples:

No. 3. “That the pope alone can depose and reinstate bishops.”

No. 8. “That he alone may use the imperial insignia.”

No. 9. “That the pope is the only one whose feet are kissed by all princes.”

No. 12. “That he may depose emperors.”

No. 14. “That he has the power to ordain a cleric of any church he may choose.”

No. 19. “That he may be judged by no one.”

No. 22. “That the Roman church has never erred, nor ever, by the written word of Scripture, shall err to all eternity.”

No. 23. “That the Roman pontiff is undoubtedly sanctified by the merits of Saint Peter.”

No. 27. “That the pope may absolve the subjects of unjust men from their oath of fealty.”

Most of the claims made in the Memorandum had been made by earlier popes. They were, however, surely not accepted by everybody even in the West. In the Memorandum they were given a more absolute quality by being expressed so starkly, and the orchestration of them in the one document imbued them with a newly radical character. Some claims, however, were new and struck at the heart of the institutions that guaranteed order in a feudal society like that of the eleventh century. Among them was the claim that the pope could absolve subjects of their fealty.

But of the twenty-seven the most daring and unheard-of was number 12, that the pope may depose emperors. Gregory thought he had historical precedents for it, but many of his contemporaries thought, correctly, that he misunderstood the record. No pope had ever deposed an emperor. The claim that most blatantly flew in the face of the historical record, however, was number 23, that upon becoming pope a man was made holy.

Henry and Gregory carried out their bitter contest on two levels. The first was on the level of action. The deeper but less obvious was on the level of theology. It is interesting that they both used the same arguments to defend their positions. They were both theocrats. They saw themselves as chosen by God (or Saint Peter, in Gregory’s case). They were anointed, and their persons were sacred. They both acknowledged that the office the other held had a role in the well-being of church and society. They very much disagreed, however, on which of the offices had the dominant role—the king or the pope (regnum or sacerdotium).

The very personalities of Henry and Gregory might make it seem inevitable that they would clash. But the fight broke out over quite specific actions of the young emperor, beginning with his high-handed actions in Milan, a problem Gregory inherited from Pope Alexander. Henry installed his own candidates not only in Milan and sees in Germany but then used the same high-handed procedures in installing bishops at Fermo and Spoleto, right under Gregory’s nose. Henry was feeling strong and invincible because he had just put down a rebellion in Saxony.

As early as 1074, just after he was elected, Gregory wrote to the German bishops complaining that they were not enforcing reform decrees. The next February, 1075, he held a synod of bishops in Rome that in strenuous terms once again forbade lay investiture. Then on December 8 that same year he for the first time wrote Henry reproaching him for his conduct. He reminded the emperor that he, like everybody else, was bound to obey papal decrees. If Henry did not, he would have to suffer the consequences.

Henry, furious at such insolence, summoned at Worms a synod of German bishops, who were themselves smarting under Gregory’s reprimand to them. The synod denounced Gregory as a usurper of the papacy and accused him of perjury, immorality of various kinds, and abuses of papal authority in the dioceses of Germany. It pronounced Gregory deposed, a sentence confirmed by bishops of Lombardy. Henry himself wrote to Gregory asserting in the most extreme terms his theocratic view of his office. The letter began, “Henry, king not by usurpation but by the pious ordination of God, to Hildebrand, now not pope but false monk.” He went on:

You threatened to take the kingship from us, as though we had received it from you, as though kingship and empire were in your hands and not in the hands of God. Our Lord Jesus Christ has called us to kingship but has not called you to the priesthood. For you have risen by these steps, namely by cunning, which the monastic profession abhors, to money, by money to favor, by favor to the sword. Your have destroyed the peace. You have dared to touch me who, though unworthy, have been anointed to kingship. The true pope, Saint Peter, exclaims in his first epistle, “Fear God, honor the King.” . . . Descend, therefore, condemned by this anathema and by the common judgment of all our bishops and of ourselves. Relinquish the Apostolic See that you have arrogated. . . . I, Henry, king by the grace of God, together with all our bishops, say to you, Descend! Descend!

Gregory responded in kind. A few weeks later, February 1076, he held a synod in Rome that excommunicated Henry and all the bishops who had sided with him, released Henry’s vassals from their oath of fealty, and declared him deposed. Henry had badly overestimated his strength in Germany, where his vassals, including the bishops, were all too happy to curtail his authority, and their release from their oath freed them to do so. Moreover, at least with some of them the word of the pope commanded their respect and obedience. Henry was put on the defensive and his throne endangered. He had to agree to allow Gregory to come to Augsburg in Germany to settle the affair. Gregory accepted the invitation, set out, had difficulty getting through Lombardy because of the strong sentiment against him. He took temporary refuge in early 1077 in the castle at Canossa of the Countess Matilda. There a seemingly penitent Henry met him and for three days begged forgiveness and reinstatement (see fig. 10.1).

10.1: Henry IV

Emperor Henry IV on his knees before Matilda of Canossa, Countess of Tuscany, imploring her to intercede on his behalf to Pope Gregory VII in their struggle over lay investiture. Abbot Hugo of Cluny, another of the pope’s supporters, is present. Miniature from the Vita Mathildis by Bonzio. Ca. 1114 CE. Facsimile. Photo: Dietmar Katz.

©Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY

Gregory had won the first round. Canossa was Gregory’s great victory, but he paid for it dearly. He felt that as a priest he had to forgive any penitent person, no matter how high-born or low-born he might be, no matter what the offense. After Henry spent three days of penance in the snow outside the castle, Gregory forgave him and lifted the excommunication. He found his passage to Germany, however, still blocked by the Lombards, and Henry was able to present to his subjects his absolution as the definitive settlement of the affair.

The Germans could hardly believe their ears when they heard the news. Gregory had betrayed them! They had violated their oaths to their liege lord and now had to be reconciled with him on terms not their own. Some rallied to Henry’s side, but others continued to oppose him and, without consulting Gregory, went ahead to elect a new king, Rudolph of Swabia. Gregory, who had not foreseen such a turn of events, was dismayed at having to choose between the two candidates but, finally, three years later, in 1080, as civil war raged in Germany between the forces of the two claimants, decided for Rudolph and again excommunicated and deposed Henry.

O blessed Peter, chief of the Apostles, and thou, Paul, teacher of the gentiles, deign, I pray, to incline your ears to me and mercifully to hear my prayer . . . [remember] most unwillingly and unworthy as I was, to my great grief and with groans and lamentations I was set upon your throne. I say this because it is not I that have chosen you, but you that have chosen me and laid upon me the heavy burden of your church. And because you have commanded me to go up into a high mountain and denounce their crimes to the people of God and their sins to the sons of the church, those limbs of the Devil have begun to rise up against me and have dared to lay hands on me even unto blood.

The Germans had responded to the first excommunication and had paid the price. They were in no mood to worry about the second. They blamed Gregory for the plight into which they had fallen. And by then Henry had emerged victorious, with Rudolph dead on the battlefield. He had no reason to pay heed to anything Gregory said and, indeed, was eager to take him on again. He first summoned synods in Germany and Lombardy, which again declared Gregory had unlawfully usurped the papacy. This time they went on to elect another in his stead, Clement III, an old ally of Henry, former archbishop of Ravenna whom Gregory had excommunicated in 1076. From that point forward things moved fast. Henry, now feeling secure in Germany, marched into Italy with his troops in 1081 and soon laid siege to Rome

For the next two years Henry and his troops were for the most part kept at bay. By the summer of 1083, however, Henry took over the area around Saint Peter’s and by 1084 easily controlled the whole city. Gregory and a small force held out in Castel Sant’Angelo. Thirteen of Gregory’s cardinals deserted him and ran to Clement’s side. They along with other bishops solemnly enthroned Clement in Saint John Lateran, where Clement then crowned Henry emperor.

In desperation Gregory appealed to the Normans, with whom he had renewed the alliance first established by Nicholas II. Robert Guiscard, their leader, responded positively and arrived at the city with his troops. Henry’s forces withdrew without giving battle. The Normans thus freed the city from the emperor but then lived up to their reputation for viciousness by looting and burning at least a third of it. The result was one the worst sacks in the history of Rome.

The Romans held Gregory responsible, and he was therefore now in danger from them. He managed with Guiscard’s help to get out of the city unscathed, though cursed, and made his way to Salerno where the Normans ensured his safety. When the Normans withdrew from Rome, Clement reentered the city, where he was greeted as pope, a welcome replacement for the now despised Gregory. Henry IV’s triumph was total. The old pope, defeated, exiled, broken in body and spirit, did not have long to live. As he lay dying in Salerno a few months later, still thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of his actions, his last words, paraphrasing the psalm, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile.”