Such an education sowed the seeds of mistrust, bitterness, and hatred in the heart of the young ruler, and as soon as he was able he threw himself into the arms of a different guide, Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen. The latter, no less ambitious than Hanno, and even prouder, sought to exalt his famous metropolitan see, whence missions still went forth across the North Sea and the Baltic, to the position of the patriarchate of the north. Formerly the friend of Henry III, he now sought to win the friendship of the youthful Henry IV. When Henry attained the age of sixteen he declared him of age, according to German law, by girding him with the sword, but for some years he continued to direct his unripe youth. In his endeavours Adalbert frequently incurred the displeasure of the Saxon nobles. Their intentions, as a matter of fact, were evil, and it was against them that he fostered the young king’s suspicions. Meanwhile the latter began to grow up to independent manhood. Of the authority, property, and prerogatives of his predecessors, he found but little left; all his efforts were directed to their recovery, and in pursuit of this end he manifested the iron will of his forefathers. Their hot blood flowed also in his veins, inciting him to occasional arbitrary acts, and above all to excesses which were magnified by the slanderous tongues of his enemies. He first sought to subdue Saxony. The means he employed for the purpose were such as the Normans had adopted in lower Italy; he erected strongholds in commanding situations in the land. From these centres, however, many acts of violence were perpetrated in the surrounding country, and he thus aroused the wrath, not only of individual nobles, but of the whole Saxon race.
But Henry did more than this to compass the fall of the enemies who had ruled for so long. About this time a man arose to accuse Otto of Nordenheim, duke of Bavaria, of having conspired against the king’s life, and offered to prove the charge by ordeal. Henry deposed the duke, laid him under the ban of the empire, together with Magnus of Saxony, of the house of Billing, and presently threw the latter into the dungeon of the Harzburg. He seemed bent upon completely abolishing the duchy of Saxony; but Bavaria he gave to a member of the ancient Swabian dynasty, Welf by name. Meanwhile Adalbert had died, after having seen all his plans go to wreck; for the Wends east of the Elbe, among whom he had hoped to establish his suffragan bishoprics by the help of Godschalk, one of their own chiefs, had rebelled, and extirpated Christianity for the time and for long afterwards, within their borders.
[1066-1075 A.D.]
Henry IV had begun his reign with vigour. This circumstance only hastened the formation of conspiracies against him among the nobles throughout the empire. In Saxony, the whole nation was in a ferment—clergy, nobles, and commons. All complained of intolerable oppression, exercised from Henry’s strongholds. At the head of the league now formed stood Otto of Nordheim. In South Germany, Rudolf of Swabia was in accord with him; Welf and Hanno were equally aware of the plot. The pope, too, influenced by Hildebrand, now cardinal subdeacon, also began to take an interest in German affairs; he zealously opposed his ecclesiastical authority to the evil desires of King Henry, who wished for a divorce from Bertha, his noble wife; and he also sought to intervene as mediator at the request of the Saxons.
Meanwhile the whole empire was on the verge of rebellion. In the year 1073 the Saxons rose as one man, and marched in a body sixty thousand strong to Harzburg near Goslar, a castle on a lofty height, commanding a wide view of the surrounding country, which the king had made into a stately royal residence. Henry, after useless negotiations, barely escaped by flight. When he tried to gather the princes of the empire around him, none appeared; nay, the idea of deserting him altogether and electing another emperor was openly mooted. At this crisis the towns alone proved true to Henry from the outset; and whilst these negotiations were pending, he lay sick to death in the loyal city of Worms. But he had scarcely recovered before he met and defeated the foreign foe in Hungary; and then with restless activity he turned to affairs at home. He still had some friends; the archbishop of Mainz, the dukes of Lorraine and Bohemia, and Welf of Bavaria came over on his side; and finally even Rudolf, who shortly before had laid the most treasonable plots against him, thought it advisable to make a fresh display of devotion. Concord between the South German princes and Saxons was at an end, and Henry skilfully made use of their dissensions.
In the wantonness of victory the Saxons had destroyed the Harzburg; they had even burned a church and desecrated graves; the archbishop of Mainz excommunicated them for the sacrilege; and in the summer of 1075 Henry IV marched against them, with such a splendid array as few emperors before him had led, in spite of their proffers of atonement and submission. Henry could have brought the matter to a peaceful issue, much to his own advantage and that of his people. But his soul thirsted for vengeance; he surprised the Saxons and their Thuringian allies at Hohenburg in the meadows on the Unstrut, not far from Langensalza. His army ranged in the same order as that of Otto the Great at the battle of the Lech, gained a sanguinary victory (1075). But German had fought against German, and on the evening of the battle loud lamentations broke forth in the royal army for the fallen, many of whom had been slain by the hands of their own kin. Nevertheless Henry was now master of Saxony and lord of all Germany; he seemed to have established his throne firmly once more. So he would have done, in all likelihood, had he not imprudently involved himself in a much more serious quarrel.
QUARREL BETWEEN HENRY IV AND GREGORY VII
[1075 A.D.]
We know how, amidst the indescribable barbarism, misery, and violence of the eleventh century, a reformation of morals, though in a gloomy monastic form, had proceeded from the convent of Cluny; and how the emperor Henry III himself had endeavoured to promote it. Through Hildebrand this reformation was transferred to Rome, to the court of the popes, who for nearly two centuries had been oblivious of the vocation ascribed to them by the faith of the age. As long as Henry III was alive, the Romans on whom the election still depended had, by Hildebrand’s advice, allowed the emperor to designate the popes. During the minority of Henry IV, the election was for the first time committed to the college of cardinals; and in 1075 Hildebrand was elected pope under the title of Gregory VII.
This great and gifted man immediately proceeded to carry his own ideas into practice. He would have the church thenceforth free from all temporal authority, that of the emperor included. He therefore issued an edict, which had already been suggested in earlier counsels but never carried out, prescribing the celibacy of the clergy. Unhampered by wife, child, and earthly cares, the clergy were in future to feel themselves merely members of a powerful ecclesiastical community, receiving orders from Rome, from the successor of St. Peter, the vicegerent of God and Christ upon earth. This edict, deeply as it touched the life of the nation, might seem to affect the emperor but slightly; yet a second struck at the roots of his power. Henceforth neither the emperor nor any temporal sovereign was to appoint bishops; in the phraseology of the time the investiture—i.e., the conferring of the ring and crosier, the symbols of episcopal office—was no longer to be in the hands of laymen. The cathedral chapter, that is to say the college of clergy attached to each cathedral, was to make the election, the pope to confirm it; no gift nor purchase was to be made on elevation to the sacred office, otherwise the candidate was guilty of simony, as the offence was styled, by a reference to Acts, viii, 18.