The Church and the Empire, D. J. Medley [librera reader TXT] 📗

layman could make regarding it was to a right or rather duty of protection. If the Church was to be restored to freedom, investiture with ring and staff, and the control of the lands during vacancy of an ecclesiastical office must all be claimed back for the Church herself. The oath of homage would then naturally disappear, and there would no longer be that confusion of spheres which had resulted in the laicisation and the degradation of the Church.

[Sidenote: Henry IV and the German clergy.]

Moreover, the moment was propitious for asserting these views to the fullest extent. The chief represenative of lay authority was no longer a powerful Emperor nor even a minor in the tutelage of others. He was a King of full age whose wayward, not to say vicious, courses had alienated large numbers of his people. It is true that Henry IV never had much chance of becoming a successful ruler. Taken from his mother at the age of twelve, for the next ten years (1062-72) he had been controlled alternately by two guardians, of whom one, Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen, allowed him every indulgence, while the other, Hanno, Archbishop of Koln, hardly suffered him to have a mind of his own. Since he had become his own master he had plunged into war with his Saxon subjects. Henry, entangled in this war, answered Gregory’s first admonitions in a conciliatory tone; but in 1075 he decisively defeated the Saxons and was in no mood to listen to a suggestion for the diminution of the authority of the German King in his own land, which he had just so triumphantly vindicated. For Henry imitated his predecessors in practising investiture of bishops both in Germany and in Italy; and he realised that the summons of the Pope to the temporal princes that they should give up such investiture would mean the transference to the Papacy of the disposal of the temporal fiefs. This would involve the loss at one blow of half the dominions of the German King. Moreover, he was encouraged in an attitude of resistance by the feeling of the German Church. At the first Lenten Synod held in the Lateran palace after Gregory’s accession canons were issued forbidding all married or simoniacal ecclesiastics to perform ministerial functions and all laity to attend their ministrations. Immediate opposition was raised; the German clergy were especially violent: they declared that this prohibition of marriage was contrary to the teaching of Christ and St. Paul, that it attempted to make men live like angels but would only encourage licence, and that, if it were necessary to choose, they would abandon the priesthood rather than their wives. Gregory, however, sent legates into various districts armed with full powers, and succeeded in rousing the populace against the married clergy.

[Sidenote: Gregory’s decree against investiture.]

It was under these circumstances that Gregory determined to bring to an issue the chief question in dispute between Church and State.

Hitherto he had said nothing against the practice of lay investiture.

Now, however, at the Lenten Synod in 1075, a decree was issued which condemned both the ecclesiastic, high or low, who should take investiture from a layman, and also the layman, however exalted in rank, who should dare to give investiture. The decree had no immediate effect, and at the end of the year Gregory followed it up with a letter to the King, in which he threatened excommunication if before the meeting of the next usual Lenten Synod Henry had not amended his life and got rid of his councillors, who had never freed themselves from the papal ban.

[Sidenote: Henry’s Answer.]

Henry’s answer was given at a Synod of German ecclesiastics at Worms.

Cardinal Hugh the White, who for personal reasons had turned against Gregory, accused him of the most incredible crimes, and a letter was despatched in which the bishops renounced their obedience. Henry also addressed a letter to the Pope, which quite surpassed that of the bishops in violence of expression. “Henry, King not by usurpation but by the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand now no apostolic ruler but a false monk.” It accused him of daring to threaten to take away the royal power, as if Henry owed it to the Pontiff and not to God: and it concluded by a summons to him to descend from his position in favour of some one “who shall not cloak his violence with religion, but shall teach the sound doctrine of St. Peter.” It was nothing new for a Pope to be deposed by a Council presided over by the Emperor.

And it is true that the same resolution, transmitted by delegates from Worms, was adopted at Piacenza by a Synod of Italian bishops. But on this occasion the sentence was uttered by an assembly of exclusively German bishops, presided over by a King who was not yet crowned Emperor. If such a sentence was to be effective, Henry should have followed it up by a march to Rome with an adequate army. He merely courted defeat when he gave the Pope the opportunity for a retort in kind. Anathema was the papal weapon, and while the King’s declaration might even be resented by other rulers as an attempt to dictate to them in a matter of common concern to all, the papal sentence on the King was regarded by all as influencing the fate, not of the King only, but of all who remained in communication with him, if not in this world, at any rate in the world to come. Moreover, in this particular case, while no one believed the monstrous charges against Gregory, there was sufficient in Henry’s past conduct to give credibility to anything that might be urged against him.

[Sidenote: Gregory deposes Henry.]

Gregory’s rejoinder was delivered at the Lenten Synod of 1076. As against the twenty-six German bishops assembled at Worms, this Council contained over a hundred bishops drawn from all parts of Christendom, while among the laity present was Henry’s own mother, the Empress Agnes. Gregory used his opportunity to the full. In the most solemn strain he appealed to St. Peter, to the Virgin Mary, to St. Paul and all the saints, to bear witness that he himself had unwillingly taken the Papacy. To him, as representative of the Apostle, God had entrusted the Christian people, and in reliance on this he now withdrew from Henry, as a rebel against the Church, the rule over the kingdoms of the Teutons and of Italy, and released all Christians from any present or future oath made to him. Finally, for his omissions and commissions alike, Henry is bound in the bonds of anathema “in order that people may know and acknowledge that thou art Peter, and upon thy rock the Son of the living God has built His Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

The rhetorical flourish of the King’s pronouncement against the Pope withers before the tremendous appeal of the Pope to his divinely delegated power to judge the King. Gregory’s procedure was little less revolutionary than that of the King, but the claim to depose might appear as only a concomitant to the power already wielded by Popes in bestowing crowns, while for Gregory it had by this time become the copingstone in the fabric of those relations between Church and State which he and his party were building up.

[Sidenote: Gregory’s allies: Countess Matilda.]

Gregory’s position was not devoid of difficulties. Numerous protests were raised against this assertion of papal power. But events concurred to justify Gregory’s bold action. At the beginning of his pontificate the Normans were quarrelling among themselves; but in Tuscany the Countess Matilda had just become complete mistress of the great inheritance which included a large part of Central Italy. She was an enthusiastic supporter of the Papacy, and secured North Italy by a revival of the Patarine party against the Italian bishops who had repudiated Gregory at Piacenza.

[Sidenote: Rebellious German Nobles.]

But Gregory’s most effective allies were Henry’s rebellious subjects.

The Saxons broke out again into rebellion in the north, while the nobles of Southern Germany with the concurrence of the Pope met at Tribur, near Mainz, in October, 1076. Henry was forced to accept the most abject terms. He was to submit to the Pope, and the nobles further agreed among themselves that the Pope should be invited to pronounce the decisive judgment at a diet to be held at Augsburg a year later. If by that time Henry had not obtained the papal absolution, the kingdom would be considered forfeit, and they would proceed to the election of a new King without waiting for permission of the Pope. The nobles were hampered by the rivalry of those who hoped each to be Henry’s successor, and they did not wish to found the election of the new King on the acknowledgment of the papal power of deposition. They acted, therefore, as if so far, apart from the excommunication, the papal sentence of deposition had been only provisional.

[Sidenote: Henry’s Action.]

Henry saw that to be reinstated by the Pope in an assembly of his rebellious subjects would be even more damaging for his prestige than the original deposition, and, knowing nothing of the agreement of the nobles for a new election, he determined to go and get his absolution from the Pope at Rome. He treated the points in dispute between himself and his opponents as practically settled by his promise of submission, whereas the Pope desired to pose as arbiter between the contending parties in Germany; while the nobles aimed at electing a new King. Quite unconsciously Henry was forcing the hands of both parties of his opponents, whose obvious interests were in favour of delay. It was necessary that he should drink the cup of humiliation to the dregs; but the astute King preferred that it should be at his own time and place—at once and in Italy, instead of a year hence in Germany.

[Sidenote: Canossa.]

Henry carried out his design, even though it was in the middle of winter; and neglecting the welcome of the imperialists of North Italy, he ultimately tracked the Pope to the Countess Matilda’s fortress of Canossa, in the Apennines, above Modena. But Gregory would listen to no mediation, and demanded absolute submission to his judgment. So Henry again took the method of procedure into his own hands and appeared at intervals during three successive days before the castle in the garb of a penitent, barefooted and clad in a coarse woollen shirt. The picturesque account of this world-famous scene, which we owe to Lambert of Hersfeld, must be regarded as the monastic version current among the papal partisans. Gregory himself, who was scarcely likely to minimise his own triumph, in his letter to the German nobles says nothing of these details. He only relates that even his own followers exclaimed that “tyrannical ferocity” rather than “apostolic severity” was the characteristic of his act.

[Sidenote: Result Of Canossa.]

Thus Henry forced the hand of the Pope, who as a priest could not refuse his absolution to one who showed himself ready to submit to the severest possible penance for his sins. The only course open to Gregory was to accept the situation on which he had lost the hold, and to try to get some political concessions in the negotiations which must follow. The terms did not differ much from those arranged at Tribur: Henry should accept the decision of the diet of the German nobles, presided over by the Pope, as to his continued right to the crown, while if the judgment was favourable, he should implicitly obey the Pope for the future in all that concerned the Church. But, on the other hand, the papal excommunication and absolute sentence of deposition were removed, and the whole excuse for continued rebellion was thus withdrawn from his German opponents. Henry