The Salians, the papacy, and the princes, 1024–1125

During the reign of Conrad II (1024–39), the first Salian emperor, the kingdom of Burgundy fell finally under the overlordship of the German crown, and this tough and formidable emperor also renewed German authority in Italy. His son and successor, Henry III (1039–56), treated the empire as a mission that imposed on him the tasks of reforming the papacy and of preaching peace to his lay vassals. Without possessing any very significant new resources of power, he nevertheless lent his authority an exalted and strained theocratic complexion. Yet, under Henry, the last German ruler to maintain his hegemony in western Europe, the popes themselves seemed to become mere imperial bishops. He deposed three of them, and four Germans held the Holy See at his command; but lay opposition to the emperor in Germany and criticism of his control over the church were on the increase during the last years of his reign.

Papal reform and the German church

More than any other society in early medieval Europe, Germany was divided and torn by the revolutionary ideas and measures of the so-called Gregorian Reform movement. Beginning with the pontificate of Leo IX (1048–54)—one of Henry III’s nominees—the most determined and inspired spokesmen of ecclesiastical reform placed themselves at the service of the Holy See. Only a few years after Henry’s death (1056), they agitated against lay authority in the church and issued a papal election decree that virtually eliminated imperial involvement. The ecclesiastical reformers sought to restore what they thought was the rightful order of the world and denied the notion of theocratic kingship. Priests, including bishops and abbots, who accepted their dignities from lay lords and emperors at a price, according to the reformers, committed the sin of simony (the buying and selling of church office). The reformers argued that earthly powers could not rightly confer the gifts of the Holy Spirit and thus rejected the tradition of lay investiture. They believed, moreover, that true reforms could be brought about only by the exaltation of the papacy so that it commanded the obedience of all provincial metropolitans and was out of the reach of the emperor and the local aristocracy.

The endless repetition of the reformers’ message in brilliant pamphlets and at clerical synods spread agitation in Italy, Burgundy, and Lotharingia—all parts of the empire. Their new program committed the leaders of the movement to a struggle for power because it struck at the very roots of the regime to which the German church had grown accustomed and on which the German kings relied. The vast wealth that Henry IV’s predecessors had showered on the bishoprics and abbeys would, if the new teaching prevailed, escape his control and remain at the disposal of prelates whom he no longer appointed. Under Roman authority the churches were to be freed from most of the burdens of royal protection without losing any of its benefits. The most fiery spirits in Rome did not flinch from the consequences of their convictions. Their leader Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), was ready to risk a collision with the empire.

Henry IV was not yet six years old when his father died in 1056. The full impact of the Gregorian demands—coming shortly after a royal minority, a Saxon rising, and a conspiracy of the southern German princes—has often been regarded as the most disastrous moment in Germany’s history during the Middle Ages. In fact, the German church had proved thoroughly unreliable as an inner bastion of the empire even before Rome struck. One of its leaders, Archbishop Anno of Cologne, kidnapped Henry in 1062 to gain control of both the young king and the regency, and another, Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen, exploited his influence over the young king by enriching his ecclesiastical possessions at imperial expense. In 1074 and 1075 Gregory proceeded against simony in Germany and humiliated the aristocratic episcopate by issuing summonses to Rome and sentences of suspension. These papal actions demoralized and shook the German hierarchy. The prelates’ return to their customary support of the crown was not disinterested, nor wholehearted, nor unanimous.