Popes Against Kings

A church owned by lords

By the early 1000s, much of the Western church was in the grip of the lay aristocracy. In the feudal world, land meant power, and the church owned a huge amount of land. Kings and nobles therefore wanted to control who became bishop or abbot. They often sold these offices to the highest bidder, a practice called Simony (after Simon Magus, who tried to buy spiritual power from the apostles in Acts 8). Bishops were often more like barons than pastors, leading armies and managing estates. Many parish priests were married or lived with partners, and church property sometimes passed to their sons.

The papacy itself had been controlled by Roman noble families. In 1046 three rival men claimed to be pope. The German emperor Henry III, himself a sincere reformer, deposed all three and installed a series of reform-minded German popes.

The Gregorian Reform

The most important of these was Leo IX (1049–1054). He traveled across Europe holding councils, deposing simoniac bishops, and gathering a team of energetic reformers in Rome. These were the cardinals, originally the clergy of the main Roman churches, who became the pope's advisers. In 1059 a decree gave the cardinals the right to elect the pope, to free elections from emperors and Roman mobs. They still elect popes today.

The reformers' program was:

• End simony: church offices could not be bought.
• Enforce clerical celibacy: priests must not marry. This was meant to make clergy distinct and holy, and to stop church property being inherited.
• Win freedom of the church (libertas ecclesiae) from lay control, above all over the appointment of bishops.

The driving force was a monk named Hildebrand, a key adviser to several popes, who became pope himself in 1073 as Gregory VII (Hildebrand). The whole movement is named the "Gregorian Reform" after him.

Gregory VII and Henry IV

Gregory had an exalted view of papal power. A list of propositions in his register, the Dictatus Papae (1075), claims that the Roman church has never erred and never will. It says the pope alone may use imperial insignia, all princes should kiss his feet, he can depose emperors, and he can release subjects from loyalty to wicked rulers.

In 1075 Gregory banned lay investiture, the ceremony in which a king handed a new bishop his ring and staff, the symbols of his spiritual office. For the young German king Henry IV, this was intolerable. His bishops were key to governing his kingdom. Henry and his bishops declared Gregory deposed, addressing him as "Hildebrand, not pope but false monk." Gregory replied by excommunicating Henry and releasing his subjects from their oaths of loyalty.

It worked. The German princes, many of whom resented Henry, threatened to elect a new king unless he was reconciled with the pope. In January 1077 Henry crossed the Alps in midwinter to the castle of Canossa in northern Italy, where Gregory was staying with his ally, the powerful Countess Matilda of Tuscany. For three days Henry stood barefoot in the snow outside the gate, dressed as a penitent, begging forgiveness. Gregory, as a priest, could not refuse a penitent, and he lifted the excommunication.

"Going to Canossa" became a proverb for humiliating submission. But the victory was short-lived. Henry later had Gregory driven from Rome. The pope died in exile in Salerno in 1085, reportedly saying, "I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile."

Popes against kings: key confrontations

The compromise of Worms

The investiture conflict dragged on for fifty years and spread to England and France. It was finally settled by a compromise, the Concordat of Worms (1122). Bishops would be elected by the church and invested with ring and staff, the spiritual symbols, by church authorities. The emperor could be present at the election and would grant the bishop his lands and political rights by touching him with a scepter. In practice kings kept great influence, but the principle that spiritual authority came from the church was established.

Thomas Becket

In England, the struggle took a dramatic form. King Henry II of England made his friend and chancellor, Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, expecting a loyal ally. Instead Becket became a fierce defender of the church's rights, especially the right of clergy accused of crimes to be tried in church courts rather than royal courts. After years of conflict and exile, Becket returned to Canterbury. Henry, in a rage, reportedly cried out something like "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four knights took him at his word. On 29 December 1170 they murdered Becket in his own cathedral.

All Europe was shocked. Becket was made a saint within three years, and Henry did public penance at his tomb, being whipped by monks. Canterbury became one of Europe's great pilgrimage sites, the destination of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Innocent III: the papal monarchy

The medieval papacy reached its height under Innocent III (1198–1216). He was elected at 37, trained in law and theology, and intelligent and energetic. Innocent called himself the "Vicar of Christ," Christ's representative on earth, "less than God but greater than man." He compared the pope to the sun and kings to the moon, which receives its light from the sun.

Innocent intervened across Christendom:

• He decided disputed elections for emperor in Germany.
• He placed France under an Interdict, suspending church services across the kingdom, to force King Philip II to take back his rejected wife.
• He placed England under interdict and excommunicated King John of England for refusing to accept his choice as archbishop of Canterbury. In 1213 John surrendered, and he even made England a fief of the papacy.
• He launched the Fourth Crusade (which went disastrously wrong, see The Crusades) and a crusade against the Cathar heretics in southern France.
• He approved the new orders of friars, Franciscans and Dominicans (see Monks and Friars).

His crowning achievement was the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), attended by over 400 bishops and 800 abbots. It defined Transubstantiation as the official explanation of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. It required every Christian to confess their sins to a priest and receive Communion at least once a year, at Easter. It also regulated preaching and clergy behavior, and it ordered Jews and Muslims to wear distinctive dress, a decision with grim consequences.

Emperors and popes: the final round

The struggle between papacy and empire flared again with the brilliant, skeptical emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), "the wonder of the world." He ruled Germany and Sicily and surrounded the Papal States. Popes excommunicated him several times and preached a crusade against him. The papacy won in the sense that Frederick's dynasty was destroyed. But using crusades against fellow Christians for political ends damaged the papacy's moral authority.

Boniface VIII: overreach

The last great claim came from Boniface VIII (1294–1303). When King Philip IV "the Fair" the Fair of France taxed the French clergy without papal consent, Boniface issued the bull Unam Sanctam (1302). It declared that both swords, spiritual and temporal, belong to the church, and that "it is altogether necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff."

Philip responded with force, not theology. In 1303 his agents burst into the papal palace at Anagni and held the elderly pope prisoner, reportedly threatening and humiliating him. Boniface was freed by the townspeople after a few days but died a month later. The papacy's claim to supreme political power had collapsed against the rising power of a national king. Within a few years the popes would move to Avignon, under the shadow of France (see The Late Medieval Crisis).