An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

Simony not really the sale of church offices.

Doubtless very few bought positions in the Church with the view of obtaining the "gift of God," that is to say, the religious office. It was the revenue and the honor that were chiefly coveted. Moreover, when a king or lord accepted a gift from one for whom he procured a benefice, he did not regard himself as selling the office; he merely shared its advantages. No transaction took place in the Middle Ages without accompanying gifts and fees of various kinds. The church lands were well managed and remunerative. The clergyman who was appointed to a rich bishopric or abbey seemed to have far more revenue than he needed and so was expected to contribute to the king's treasury, which was generally empty.

Simony corrupts the lower clergy.

The evil of simony was, therefore, explicable enough, and perhaps ineradicable under the circumstances. It was, nevertheless, very demoralizing, for it spread downward and infected the whole body of the clergy. A bishop who had made a large outlay in obtaining his office naturally expected something from the priests, whom it was his duty to appoint. The priest in turn was tempted to reimburse himself by improper exactions for the performance of his regular religious duties, for baptizing and marrying his parishioners, and for burying the dead.

So it seemed, at the opening of the eleventh century, as if the Church was to be dragged down by its property into the anarchy of feudalism described in a preceding chapter. There were many indications that its great officers were to become merely the vassals of kings and princes and no longer to represent a great international institution under the headship of the popes. The Bishop of Rome had not only ceased, in the tenth century, to exercise any considerable influence over the churches beyond the Alps, but was himself controlled by the restless nobles of central Italy. He appears much less important, in the chronicles of the time, than the Archbishop of Rheims or Mayence. There is no more extraordinary revolution recorded in history than that which raised the weak and demoralized papacy of the tenth century to a supreme place in European affairs.

Three rival popes.

61. One of the noble families of Rome had got the selection of the popes into its own hands, and was using the papal authority to secure its control over the city. In the same year (1024) in which Conrad II became emperor, a layman was actually exalted to the headship of the Church, and after him a mere boy of ten or twelve years, Benedict IX, who, in addition to his youth, proved to be thoroughly evil-minded. His powerful family maintained him, however, on the papal throne for a decade, until he proposed to marry. This so scandalized even the not over-sensitive Romans that they drove him out of the city. A rich neighboring bishop then secured his own election. Presently a third claimant appeared in the person of a pious and learned priest who bought out the claims of Benedict IX for a large sum of money and assumed the title of Gregory VI.

The interference of Henry III in papal affairs and its momentous consequences.

This state of affairs seemed to the emperor, Henry III, to call for his interference. He accordingly went to Italy and summoned a council at Sutri, north of Rome, in 1046, where two of the claimants were deposed. Gregory VI, more conscientious than his rivals, not only resigned his office but tore his pontifical robes in pieces and admitted his monstrous crime in buying the papal dignity, though his motives had been of the purest. The emperor then secured the election of a worthy German bishop as pope, whose first act was to crown Henry and Agnes his wife.[106]