Investiture Controversy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Investiture Controversy began with a letter. In the winter of 1076, King Henry IV of Germany wrote to Pope Gregory VII using a salutation that was not exactly diplomatic. He addressed the pope as "Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk." The letter ended with a demand: "I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all of my Bishops, say to you, come down, come down!" Two of the most powerful men in medieval Europe had reached open war over a question that sounds almost procedural: who gets to appoint a bishop?

  But the stakes were anything but procedural. The German episcopate was the effective cabinet of the Holy Roman Emperor. The soldiers that dioceses provided formed the main source of the Empire's military power. To control who became a bishop was to control an army, a treasury, and a political machine. Gregory VII understood this. Henry IV understood it too. What followed was nearly fifty years of conflict that drew in Norman warlords, rival popes, German nobles in open revolt, and eventually a scene of barefoot humiliation in the snow that has been remembered ever since as the Road to Canossa.

  The conflict ended formally on the 23rd of September 1122, near the German city of Worms, with an agreement that attempted to split the difference. Whether it truly settled anything is a question that historians have debated for centuries. What is clear is that the Investiture Controversy reshaped the balance of power between church and state across Europe in ways that reached forward to the Protestant Reformation and, some scholars argue, to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

• 2. The Roots of the Struggle

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  After the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the task of choosing bishops fell not to church officials but to the ruling nobility, a practice known as lay investiture. Bishops and abbots often came from noble families themselves. Because the European nobility generally practiced primogeniture, leaving titles to the eldest surviving male heir, younger sons with no inheritance to claim frequently sought careers in the upper ranks of the church hierarchy.

  This arrangement had a financial logic. A substantial amount of wealth and land was tied to the office of a bishop or abbot. Selling church offices outright, a practice called simony, became an important source of income for nobles who owned the land on which churches were built. Holy Roman Emperors had their own reason to value the arrangement: bishops, unlike hereditary nobles, did not pass their offices to their children, so they were more reliably loyal. Emperors had come to depend heavily on bishops for secular administration.

  The trouble with simony became visible to all of Europe when Pope Benedict IX was accused of selling the papacy itself in 1045. Henry III, who reigned as Holy Roman Emperor from 1046 to 1056, stepped in to settle a papal schism and named several popes in succession, making him the last emperor to successfully dominate that selection process. When Henry III died, his heir was six years old. Henry IV became King of the Germans in 1056, and the question of who truly held authority over the church was left unresolved for a generation.

• 3. The 1059 Turning Point

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  The election of Pope Nicholas II in 1058 changed the rules of the game. His rival for the papal seat, Benedict X, had allegedly secured his election by bribing the electors, with the support of the Count of Tusculum. Dissenting cardinals elected Nicholas at Siena instead, and Nicholas then waged war against Benedict and retook the Vatican.

  In 1059, Nicholas convened a synod at the Lateran on Easter. The results were codified in the papal bull known as In nomine Domini. The bull declared that members of the nobility would have no part in selecting popes, that electors would be cardinals assembled in Rome, and that lay investiture was banned outright. The response from Germany was swift: all the bishops loyal to the Emperor assembled in 1061 and declared every decree of Nicholas II null and void.

  The underlying doctrine that Gregory VII would later develop had been forming for years before the famous clash of 1076. In 1075, Gregory composed the Dictatus papae, a document cataloging the principles of what became known as the Gregorian Reforms. One clause asserted that the pope held the exclusive power to depose an emperor. A council held in the Lateran Palace from the 24th to the 28th of February 1075 decreed that the pope alone could appoint or depose churchmen or move them between dioceses. When Henry IV installed his own chaplain, Tedald, a Milanese priest, as Bishop of Milan, while another priest named Atto had already been chosen by Rome, Gregory had the direct provocation he needed.

• 4. Excommunication and Canossa

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  Gregory excommunicated Henry in 1076 and deposed him as German king, releasing all Christians from their oath of allegiance to him. Many of Henry's subjects took the opening and refused to obey. German princes and the aristocracy were pleased to see the king diminished. They used the religious justification to continue a rebellion that had begun at the First Battle of Langensalza in 1075, seizing royal holdings, building forts that had previously been outlawed, and carving out local fiefdoms.

  Henry needed time to gather forces. He chose to seek Gregory's pardon in person. In 1077, he traveled to Canossa in northern Italy, where the pope was staying in the castle of Countess Matilda. As penance, Henry wore a hair shirt and stood barefoot in the snow. Gregory, suspicious of Henry's sincerity, eventually lifted the excommunication. But the German aristocrats who had risen against Henry were not ready to stand down. They elected a rival king, Rudolf von Rheinfeld.

  Three years later, on the Lenten synod of the 7th of March 1080, Gregory excommunicated Henry again and declared support for von Rheinfeld. Henry responded by calling a council of bishops at Brixen that proclaimed Gregory illegitimate. The internal revolt against Henry effectively ended that same year when Rudolf von Rheinfeld died. Henry then named Guibert of Ravenna, whom he had already invested as bishop of Ravenna, to be his pope, referring to him as Clement III.

• 5. War in Italy

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  In October 1080, pro-Imperial bishops of northern Italy clashed with the forces of Countess Matilda at the battle of Volta Mantovana, and the imperial side won. In March 1081, Henry IV marched from the Brenner Pass into the March of Verona unopposed and entered Milan in April of that year. He then moved on Rome and began a siege intended to remove Gregory VII by force and install Clement III in his place.

  The city of Rome held out, but the Vatican and St. Peter's fell in 1083. Henry gained thirteen cardinals to his cause on the outskirts of the city. The following year Rome itself surrendered. On Palm Sunday 1084, Henry solemnly enthroned Clement at St. Peter's Basilica. On Easter Day, Clement crowned Henry IV as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

  Gregory was still resisting, just a few hundred yards away, in the Castel Sant'Angelo. He called for help from Robert Guiscard, the Norman ruler of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria. Guiscard responded and entered Rome on the 27th of May 1084. The Norman force attacked with enough strength that Henry and his army fled. Gregory was rescued, but Rome was plundered in the process, and the citizens of Rome blamed Gregory for it. He was forced to leave the city under Norman protection and fled to Salerno, where he grew ill and died on the 25th of May 1085. His last words were reported as: "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile."

• 6. Henry V and the Concordat

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  The controversy did not end with Gregory's death. Each successive pope worked to diminish imperial power by encouraging revolt in Germany. Henry IV spent his final years struggling to hold a diminished kingdom, dependent on the goodwill of nobles who had spent years in open or quiet rebellion against him. On the 31st of December 1105, he was forced to abdicate and was succeeded by his son Henry V, who had himself rebelled against his father in favor of the papacy.

  Henry V quickly realized that a change in approach was necessary. When Pope Paschal II rebuked him for appointing bishops in Germany, Henry crossed the Alps with an army in 1111. Paschal, weak and with few supporters, proposed a radical compromise: German churchmen would surrender their lands and secular offices to the emperor and constitute a purely spiritual church, while Henry would stop interfering in ecclesiastical affairs. When this agreement was read aloud in St. Peter's, the crowd erupted in anger. Henry took the pope and cardinals hostage until Paschal granted him the right of investiture.

  Henry's apparent victory lasted barely a year. The clergy pressured Paschal to rescind the agreement in 1112. Excommunication followed, riots broke out in Germany, and a new Antipope Gregory VIII was appointed by the German king. The cycle repeated itself until Henry V, facing waning power just as his father had, gave up the right of investiture. Efforts by the future Pope Honorius II and the Diet of Würzburg in 1121 helped pave the way. On the 23rd of September 1122, near Worms, Pope Callixtus II and Emperor Henry V signed the Concordat of Worms. Bishops in Germany would be elected in the emperor's presence, but free of bribery and violence; elections outside Germany, in Burgundy and Italy, would occur without imperial interference. The emperor renounced the right to invest ecclesiastics with ring and crosier, the symbols of spiritual authority, while a new symbol, the scepter, was invented to represent worldly authority and handed over by the king. The Concordat was confirmed by the First Council of the Lateran in 1123. Henry V died without heirs in 1125, three years after signing it.

• 7. The English Parallel

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  While the German controversy burned for nearly fifty years, England navigated a version of the same dispute and resolved it faster. William the Conqueror had accepted a papal banner when he invaded England, but he successfully rebuffed Pope Alexander II's subsequent demand that he come to Rome and pay homage under the Donation of Constantine. The ban on lay investiture in the Dictatus papae did not shake the loyalty of William's bishops and abbots.

  Under Henry I of England, the exchanges between Westminster and Rome grew heated enough that Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, gave up his mediating role and retired to an abbey. Robert of Meulan, one of Henry's chief advisors, was excommunicated. The papacy, however, still needed English support while the German conflict was unresolved, and a projected crusade also required English cooperation.

  The Concordat of London, agreed in 1107, provided a model that the Concordat of Worms would later follow. Henry I gave up his right to invest bishops and abbots with the symbols of their office, while reserving the custom of requiring them to swear homage for the landed properties tied to the episcopate. He then used the controversy not as a weakness but as a tool to strengthen royal power. He expanded the system of scutage to reduce his dependence on knights supplied from church lands. Historian Norman Cantor observed that the resulting "Anonymous of York" treatises produced during this period are valuable to students of early-medieval political theory, even if they did not typify the outlook of the Anglo-Norman monarchy. The church-state tension that the Concordat of London suppressed would resurface in the affair of Thomas Becket under Henry II, in the Great Charter of 1217, and eventually under Henry VIII.

• 8. A Fractured Legacy

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  The Concordat of Worms was ambiguous by design. It skirted some issues and avoided others. German kings retained de facto influence over the selection of German bishops. All European kings supported John of England's defiance of Pope Innocent III ninety years after the Concordat, when the appointment of Stephen Langton was disputed. In practice, Rome often consecrated the clergy once notified by kings who the incumbent would be.

  The historian Norman Cantor wrote that the controversy "shattered the early-medieval equilibrium and ended the interpenetration of ecclesia and mundus." Medieval emperors, largely sustained by ecclesiastical ideals and personnel, were forced to build secular bureaucratic states whose structures persisted in the Anglo-Norman monarchy. The political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita argues that the Concordat of Worms contained within itself the germ of nation-based sovereignty that would later be confirmed in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

  The cultural damage in Germany was severe and lasting. In 1050, German monasteries were great centers of learning and art. German schools of theology and canon law were, by contemporary measure, unsurpassed anywhere in Europe. The long war sapped the energy of both German churchmen and intellectuals, who fell behind advances in philosophy, law, literature, and art that were taking place in France and Italy. Universities were established across France, Italy, Spain, and England by the early 13th century, among them the University of Bologna in 1088, Oxford in 1096, the University of Salamanca in 1134, the University of Paris in 1150, and the University of Cambridge in 1207. The first German university, Heidelberg, was not founded until 1386. Davis argues that the rifts left by the Investiture Controversy were so deep that neither Germany nor Italy could form a cohesive nation-state until the 19th century. The Protestant sects that later emerged in Germany, including those associated with Jan Hus and Martin Luther, took root in a culture that had spent generations questioning the Emperor's divine authority and the Church's moral legitimacy.