Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

The Emperor Henry III, who had summoned the Synod of Sutri, had been a great ruler, great enough even to have effected a satisfactory compromise with Hildebrand, but, though before he died he succeeded in securing his crown for his son Henry, a boy of six, he could not bequeath him strength of character or statesmanship. Thus from his death, in 1056, the fortunes of his House and Empire slowly waned.

It is difficult to estimate the natural gifts of the new ruler of Germany, for an unhappy upbringing warped his outlook and affections. Left at first under the guardianship of his mother, the Empress Agnes, the young Henry IV was enticed at the age of eleven on board a ship belonging to Anno, the ambitious Archbishop of Cologne. While he was still admiring her wonders the ship set sail up the Rhine, and though the boy plunged overboard in an effort to escape his kidnappers he was rescued and brought back. For the next four years he remained first the pupil of Archbishop Anno, who punished him for the slightest fault with harsh cruelty and deprived him of all companionship of his own age, and then of Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen, who indulged his every whim and passion.

At length, at the age of fifteen, handsome and kingly in appearance, but utterly uncontrolled and dissolute in his way of life, Henry was declared of age to govern for himself, and straightway began to alienate his barons and people. He had been married against his wish to the plain daughter of one of his Margraves, and expressed his indignation by ill-treating and neglecting her, to the wrath of her powerful relations: he also built castles on the hill-tops in Saxony, from which his troops oppressed the countryside: but the sin for which he was destined to be called to account was his flagrant misuse of his power over the German Church.

At first, when reproved by the Pope for selling bishoprics and benefices, Henry was apologetic in his letters; but he had no real intention of amending his ways and soon began to chafe openly at Roman criticism and threats. At last acrimonious disputes came to a head in what is called the ‘Investiture Question’, and because it is a problem that affected the whole relations of Church and State in the eleventh century it is important to understand what it exactly meant to Europe.

Investiture was the ceremony by which a temporal ruler, such as a king, transferred to a newly chosen Church official, such as a bishop, the lands and rights belonging to his office. The king would present the bishop with a ring and crozier and the bishop in return would place his hands between those of the king and do him homage like a lay tenant-in-chief.

The Roman See declared that it was not fitting for hands sacred to the service of God at His altar to be placed in submission between those that a temporal ruler had stained with the blood of war. Behind this figure of speech lay the real reason, the implication that if the ring and crozier were to be taken as symbols of lands and offices, bishops would tend to regard these temporal possessions as the chief things in their lives, and the oath of homage they gave in exchange as more important than their vow to do God’s service.

Gregory VII believed that he could not reform the Church unless he could detach its officials from dependence on lay rulers who could bribe or intimidate them; and in the age in which he lived he could show that for every William of Normandy ready to ‘invest’ good churchmen there were a hundred kings or petty rulers who only cared about good tenants, that is, landlords who would supply them faithfully with soldiers and weapons.

As a counter argument temporal rulers maintained that churchmen who accepted lands and offices were lay tenants in this respect, whatever Popes might choose to call them. The king who lost the power of investing his bishops lost control over wealthy and important subjects, and since he would also lose the right to refuse investiture he might find his principal bishoprics in the hands of disloyal rebels or of foreigners about whom he knew nothing.

The whole question was complicated, largely because there was so much truth on both sides; Gregory, however, forced the issue, and early in 1075, in a Synod held at Rome, put forth the famous decree by which lay investiture was henceforth sternly forbidden. Henry IV, on the other hand, spoiled his case by his wild disregard of justice. In the same year he appointed a new archbishop to the important See of Milan and invested him without consulting Gregory VII at all; he further proceeded to appoint two unknown foreigners to Italian bishoprics. Angry at the letter of remonstrance which these acts aroused he called a church council at Worms in the following year, and there induced the majority of German bishops very reluctantly to declare Gregory deposed.

‘Henry, King not by usurpation but by God’s grace, to Hildebrand, henceforth no Pope but false monk....’ Thus began his next letter to the Roman pontiff, to which Hildebrand replied by excommunicating his deposer.