THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY
The crown of Conrad the Salian passed in a direct line to his son, grandson, and great-grandson. The first, Henry III, reigned from 1039 to 1056; the second, Henry IV, from 1056 to 1106; the third, Henry V, from 1106 to 1125. The last two reigns were troubled by the bloody quarrel between the empire and the court of Rome, called the war of investitures. Rome had never made part of the monarchy of the Lombards. This ancient capital of the world, with the territory appertaining to it, had, since the conquest of Alboin, formed a dukedom, governed by a patrician or Greek duke, sent from Constantinople. The bishop of Rome, however, who, according to the ancient canonical forms, was elected by the clergy, the senate, and the people of his diocese, had much more authority over his flock than this foreign magistrate.
[717-1125 A.D.]
The pontiff, however, who now began to take exclusively the name of pope, had more than once successfully defended Rome with his spiritual arms when temporal ones had failed. When, in the year 717, an iconoclast, or enemy of images, filled the throne of Constantinople, the popes under the pretence of heresy rejected his authority altogether; a municipality, at the head of which were a senate and consuls, then governed Rome nearly as an independent state; the Greeks, occupied with their own dissensions, seemed to forget it; and Rome owed to this forgetfulness fifty years of a sort of liberty. The Romans found once more a faint image of their past glory; sometimes even the title of Roman Republic was revived. They approved, notwithstanding, of Pope Stephen II conferring on the princes of the Franks the dignity of patricians, in order to transfer to them the authority which the Greek magistrate exercised in their city in the name of the emperor of Constantinople; and the people gladly acquiesced when, in the year 800, Leo III crowned Charlemagne as augustus, and restorer of the Western Empire. From that period Rome became once more the capital of the empire. At Rome the chiefs of the empire were henceforth to receive the golden crown from the hands of the pope, after having received the silver one of the kingdom of Germany at Aachen, and the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan.
Great wealth and much feudal power were, by the gratitude of the emperors, attached to the see of Rome. The papacy became the highest object of ambition to the whole sacerdotal order; and, in an age of violence and anarchy, barons notorious for their robberies, and young libertines recommended only by the favour of some Roman ladies, not unfrequently filled the pontifical chair. The other bishops selected were often no better. The German emperors, on arriving at Rome, were sometimes obliged to put an end to such a scandal, and choose among the competitors, or depose a pope who put all Christendom to the blush. Henry III obliged the people to renounce the right which they had hitherto exercised, and so greatly abused, to take part in the election of popes. He, himself, named four successively, whom he chose from among the most learned and the most pious of the clergy of Italy and Germany; and thus powerfully seconded the spirit of reform which began to animate the church from the eleventh century.