Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (14 page)

These settlements rested on ideas advanced since the 1080s by Ivo, bishop of Chartres, and others, who distinguished between spiritual office (
spiritualia
) and temporal powers and properties (
bona exterior
). The latter, now increasingly understood collectively as ‘regalia’, were associated with the material world and duties to the monarch.
¹¹⁴
This distinction was welcomed by German and Italian bishops who needed their temporal jurisdictions to secure resources and the labour required for cathedral-building and other projects. The French and English agreements showed that conceding spiritual investiture did not impair royal authority over regalia. Pope Paschalis’s death in 1118 meant that Henry V could compromise without losing face, though further misunderstandings delayed the actual agreement until 23 September 1122.

The Concordat of Worms

The agreement consisted of two documents known collectively as the Concordat of Worms, though this name actually dates from seventeenth-century accounts. The emperor conceded spiritual investiture with vestments, ring and staff to the pope. German bishops were to be chosen according to canon law and free from simony, but the emperor was allowed to be present at elections and could adjudicate any disputes. The emperor invested each bishop with a sceptre symbolizing the temporal authority associated with regalia. This was to take place before ordination in Germany, but after it in Italy and Burgundy. The clause was revised in 1133 to emphasize that the new bishop had to swear loyalty to the emperor before receiving his temporal powers. The papacy’s own possessions were exempt from these arrangements, suggesting they were entirely outside imperial jurisdiction.

The Concordat has widely been interpreted as marking an epochal shift from the early to the high Middle Ages, and the start of secularization.
¹¹⁵
In fact, religion remained closely entwined with politics, but the agreement nonetheless regulated papal-imperial relations until 1803. Later generations have joined contemporaries in debating who
benefited most. Pope Callistus II certainly thought he had won, celebrating with commemorative frescos in the Lateran palace and sending copies of the Concordat around Europe. The corporate distinctions of the clergy had been preserved, while the new investiture ceremonies made it clear that the German king lacked spiritual powers – in this sense, politics were indeed desacralized. Henry V’s disavowal of the last imperial-backed anti-pope in 1119 underscored the emperor’s inability to make and break popes. However, the Empire had not been weakened. Rather, the outcome reinforced underlining trends, accelerating the transformation of church property from parts of the crown lands to possessions held by spiritual princes bound in more formalized feudal relations to the monarch. Meanwhile, the sense of collective responsibility for the Empire expressed through the rebellions against Henry IV continued with the Concordat, which had been negotiated with the assistance of lay and spiritual lords. These swore collectively to ensure that Henry V adhered to the terms. The Salians’ command monarchy was being replaced by a mixed system where the emperor shared more responsibility with his leading lords.
¹¹⁶

The papacy changed too. The original Gregorian goal of church liberty had been defeated. The more radical reformers were forced to accept that the papacy had political as well as spiritual responsibilities. The repeated papal schisms since 1080 had spawned multiple local ones as rival pontiffs consecrated their own bishops in the same sees. Reform was compromised as the papacy sold church property to finance its war against the emperor. The papacy was increasingly monarchical, imitating the Empire from the mid-eleventh century in the use of imperial purple and elaborate coronations. A century later, the popes assumed the title Christ’s Vicar, which had been used by the Salian kings but was now employed to assert papal authority over all monarchs. Papal territory expanded as the pope claimed Tuscany after Matilda of Canossa’s death. The Latin church was subject to greater central control, underpinned by the expanding papal administration and the establishment of the Inquisition in 1231 to police belief. The free election of abbots and bishops had largely ceased by 1380 as successive popes claimed the right to vet candidates and approve appointments.

Far from freeing the church, reform embedded it deeper into politics. The church alienated many of the people it claimed to serve and who now saw it as corrupt and detached from their spiritual needs. The
result was further waves of monasticism and new forms of lay piety. The latter were further stimulated by the heightened concern for personal salvation emerging in the twelfth century. The Waldensians and other grassroots fundamentalists embraced extreme poverty and rites increasingly at odds with the official church’s growing insistence on uniformity of belief and practice. Crusader indulgences were extended from the Holy Land to include combating heresy in a series of brutal campaigns in southern Europe after 1208. The requirement to confess at least once a year from 1215 opened the door to greater policing of inner thoughts. From 1231 heresy was punishable by death, and by 1252 the Inquisition was authorized to use torture to root out heresy.
¹¹⁷

The Empire’s rulers largely refrained from direct involvement in these issues after Henry V’s death in 1125 ended the Salian line. Pope Honorius II reversed the earlier papal-imperial relationship by claiming the right to confirm the next German king, and intervened in imperial politics by excommunicating the anti-king Conrad Staufer in 1127. The successful candidate, Lothar III, performed Strator service when he met the next pope in 1131. The Lateran palace was quickly redecorated with new frescos depicting this, which were then showed at the next imperial visit as evidence for what was now claimed as traditional practice. The emperor’s inferior status was further emphasized by the pope’s insistence on riding a white horse, symbolizing his purity and proximity to God.
¹¹⁸

The Staufers and the Papacy

As with so much in the Empire’s history, this apparent decline was soon reversed by new trends beginning in 1138 with the reign of Conrad III, who initiated the line of kings from the Staufer family lasting until the mid-thirteenth century. The Staufers capitalized on the fact that the pope still regarded the German king as the only monarch worthy of being crowned emperor. Conrad referred to himself as emperor even without being crowned.
¹¹⁹
This practice was continued by his nephew and successor, Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, who assumed imperial status immediately at his royal coronation in 1152, and named his own son ‘Caesar’ without papal involvement in 1186 (see
Plate 25
). The later Staufers followed suit, with Frederick II taking the title ‘elected Roman emperor’ in 1211, and it is likely that this practice would have become
firmly established had he emerged victorious in his struggle with the papacy after his imperial election in 1220. This assertion of imperial identity rested on the further development of the Empire as a collective political structure, since it tied imperial powers to the German royal election involving the major lords, and not to the coronation by the pope. Henry IV had already proclaimed ‘the honour of the Empire’ (
honor imperii
), and the Staufers developed this as something in which all lords shared, giving them a stake in defending it against the papacy.
¹²⁰

The stress on honour unfortunately hindered imperial policy in Italy by discouraging concessions that might have secured compromises, or won allies like the cities that combined in the powerful Lombard League in 1167 to demand self-government. Frederick Barbarossa’s expedition to Italy in 1154 was the first for 17 years and ended a 57-year period in which German monarchs had spent only two years south of the Alps. The prolonged absence weakened the personal networks that might have assisted peaceful negotiations. The emperor did not seek conflict, but was determined to reassert imperial authority. The 1,800 knights accompanying his first expedition were already considered a large army, and he returned with 15,000 on his second campaign in 1158.
¹²¹
However, the armies were never sufficient to master such an extensive and populous country. The need for local bases added urgency to Barbarossa’s insistence on reviving imperial regalia, including the right to garrison towns, levy taxes and demand military assistance. Inevitably, he was sucked into local politics. Northern Italy was a dense mosaic of bishoprics, lordships and cities, often enmeshed in their own conflicts. Support from one for the emperor usually prompted its rivals to back the papacy. Already on the first expedition Tortona was sacked and destroyed after it had surrendered, because Barbarossa was unable to restrain his Pavian allies.
¹²²
The return of the notorious ‘German fury’ damaged imperial prestige, further hindering the desired pacification. The pattern was repeated in four subsequent campaigns between 1158 and 1178. Barbarossa achieved local successes, but he could never control all of Lombardy.

The pope was not averse to cooperating with the emperor to escape the now oppressive influence of the Normans, whom he had been forced to raise to royalty as kings of Sicily in 1130. The Normans and the French had through their interference in Roman politics already created a schism (1130–39). However, they now combined to back a
majority candidate as pope against an imperial-backed anti-pope in a renewed schism (1159–80). Like Henry IV, Barbarossa was excommunicated, but unlike the Salian emperor he accepted a compromise in the Treaty of Venice 1177. The presence of Sicilian and English representatives at the negotiations revealed the internationalization of Italian affairs, which were clearly no longer an internal matter for the Empire. Although he made significant concessions to the Lombard League, Barbarossa was acknowledged as suzerain of northern Italy.

He was able to return to Italy from 1184 to 1186, this time without an army, and consolidate peace through an additional agreement with the Normans involving the marriage of Barbarossa’s son Henry to Constanza d’Hauteville, daughter of the king of Sicily. The unexpected death of the Norman king in 1189 opened the prospect of the Staufers acquiring both Sicily and its dependent territories, later known as Naples, in southern Italy. Timing favoured the Staufers, because the Saracen victory at Hattin in 1187 and subsequent capture of Jerusalem distracted the papacy, which now also needed imperial assistance for the planned Third Crusade. Despite opposition from many Norman lords, by 1194 Barbarossa’s son, now Henry VI, had secured Sicily. This success encouraged an escalation of his ambition. Already in 1191, Henry had rejected papal claims to suzerainty over Naples and argued this was under imperial jurisdiction. Within five years he was planning to integrate the former Norman kingdom within the Empire and convert the German monarchy into an hereditary possession (see
pp. 192
and
303–4
). Papal-imperial relations had shifted dramatically in the emperor’s favour. The extinction of the Normans deprived the pope of a counterweight to imperial influence, reduced his temporal jurisdiction to the Patrimonium, and left him facing an emperor more powerful than any since Otto I (
Map 5
).

Contingency again intervened, this time with Henry’s unexpectedly early death at 31 in September 1197, followed by that of his wife Constanza 14 months later, which left their four-year-old son, Frederick II, as a ward of the pope. The Staufers’ German supporters picked Frederick’s uncle, Philip of Swabia, as a more viable candidate in the royal election of 1198, but the situation was exploited by their local rivals, who elected Otto IV from the Welf (Guelph) family, leading to civil war until 1214.
¹²³

The response from Pope Innocent III reflected the political high
stakes. After some initial hesitation, in 1202 Innocent issued a decretal, or judgement of the papal court, called
Venerabilem
. This restated the Gregorian interpretation of the Two Swords doctrine that all authority, including temporal, flowed from God through the pope to kings. Innocent did not challenge the division of spiritual and secular authority enshrined in the Worms Concordat, and agreed that the Germans were free to elect their king, but claimed that popes had the right of approbation. This suggested he could veto candidates, for example on the grounds they had sinned. He also rebutted the Staufer practice of assuming imperial prerogatives immediately on their accession as kings, arguing that only popes crowned emperors. By distinguishing the wider Empire from the German kingdom, Innocent sought to usurp imperial authority in Italy and southern Burgundy. He claimed the status of imperial vicar, or governor if either there was no emperor or he was absent from Italy. Within 50 years, canon lawyers were claiming the pope was really the true emperor, since he had translated authority from Byzantium.
¹²⁴

Venerabilem
entirely reversed the position under the Ottonians, who had claimed broadly similar powers over the papacy. However, it also revealed how the papacy remained bound to the Empire. No pope could reduce the Empire to the status of any other kingdom without devaluing his own pretentions as sole emperor-maker. This explains why, despite extensive periodic tensions, popes crowned every German king from Otto I to Frederick II, except Conrad III and Philip of Swabia.

In practice, Innocent was unable to steer events. Both sides in the German civil war shared a desire to restrict papal influence. Hoping to prevent a union of the Empire and Sicily, Innocent eventually endorsed Otto IV, but this merely alienated some of that king’s supporters who now viewed him with suspicion. By 1207 Otto was obliged to ask for a truce, only for Philip of Swabia to be murdered in an unrelated dispute the following year.
¹²⁵
Otto skilfully rallied most of Philip’s supporters by assuming the same imperial goals in Italy, including attempting to control the south. Having just crowned Otto emperor, Innocent was compelled to excommunicate him a year later in 1210 and join France in supporting the young Frederick II of Sicily as the new Staufer candidate. Otto overreached himself by joining his uncle, King John of England, in an invasion of France that ended in a rout of the imperial
army at Bouvines, east of Lille, on 27 July 1214. Having already been crowned German king in 1212, Frederick was able to assume power unchallenged.