Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (22 page)

Gregory’s was a lonely vision of the papacy. Though he often spoke of other bishops as
confrater
or
coepiscopus
(brother and fellow bishop) in practice he saw himself as fighting a solitary battle, in a world which had turned its back on the demands of the Gospel. He told one correspondent in 1074, in language borrowed from the letters of Gregory the Great, that the Church ‘is everywhere battered by stormy waves and through ill fortune and negligence has come near to being shipwrecked and submerged’. To Hugh of Cluny he wrote, ‘I can find scarcely any bishops who were elected and live according to the canons, who lead the Christian people in love and not in worldly striving. And among the secular princes I know none who prefers God’s honour to his own, or justice to gain.’
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Unsurprisingly, therefore, he saw other bishops as, at best, assistants and servants, not as partners and equals. His critics among the German episcopate would complain that he ordered them about ‘like bailiffs on his estate’.

To begin with at least, however, Gregory tempered these austere and lofty claims with commonsense, charity and a good deal of personal warmth. He soon challenged Henry’s handling of Church appointments in northern Italy and Germany, and sent reforming legates to Germany to confront the problems there. Yet he was ready to absolve even grave offenders who demonstrated real penitence, he reversed harsh decisions made by his legates, and despite his horror of simony he did not make an issue over lay appointments to spiritual office, provided it was clear that there was no hint of a financial transaction involved.

Nevertheless, in the long run Gregory’s uncompromising vision was bound to lead to conflict with the German King, and conflict duly came. In 1075 Gregory held a synod in Rome which formally condemned lay investiture as sinful, and in, the same year the long-standing confrontation over Henry IV’s appointments to Milan literally flared up, when tensions between the Patarini and the establishment led to the burning of the cathedral there. Determined to settle the matter once and for all, Henry deposed both claimants to the archbishopric of Milan, and installed his own candidate. Henry was responding to the urgent appeal of the city fathers, but his high handed action directly challenged the Pope’s vision of the rights of the See of Peter and the recent prohibition of lay investiture. A letter of rebuke and challenge from Gregory, accompanied by an oral threat of excommunication and deposition, provoked a drastic response. In January 1076 the King summoned a synod of his bishops at Worms, denounced the Pope as a ‘false monk’, and pronounced him deposed, a sentence later confirmed by the bishops of Lombardy.

Henry’s letter of deposition betrays the resentment against the policies of the reform papacy which had been building up long before his accession, condemning the papal alliance with the Patarini, designed ‘to gain favour with the vulgar crowd’, and papal promotion of the lay boycott against the sacraments celebrated by married or simoniacal priests. The Pope, he declared, had ‘incited subjects to rebel against their prelates’ and ‘given laymen authority over priests’. The King also challenged the right of the Pope to depose an anointed king, who can be judged by no one except God. Gregory had acted ‘as if the empire and kingdom were at your disposal, and not in the disposal of God’.
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This was the voice of outraged authority, scandalised by the revolutionary implications of the
reform papacy’s programme, and the challenge it opposed to the established monarchic order. These sentiments would have been applauded by Charlemagne.

Gregory replied by excommunicating all the bishops who had collaborated with Henry, and, in an extraordinary and impassioned document, cast in the form of an extended prayer to St Peter, he declared Henry deposed for rebellion against the Church, and released all Christians from their allegiance to him: ‘On thy behalf I bind him with the bond of anathema … that the peoples may know and acknowledge that thou art Peter and that on thy rock the Son of the Living God has built his Church and that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’.
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Henry had in fact badly overplayed his hand. His father had deposed three popes, but times had changed, and the papacy had grown greatly in prestige since the days of the Tusculan puppet popes. The German bishops were loyal to the King, but most drew the line at deposing the duly elected successor of St Peter. Ecclesiastical support for Henry began to crack, a process hastened by the fact that Archbishop William of Utrecht, one of those who had excommunicated the Pope, died suddenly a month later, and his cathedral was struck by lightning immediately after Henry had celebrated Easter there. More urgently, many disaffected princes, especially in Saxony, had become used to independence during Henry’s long minority. They now seized the opportunity to rise against him. An assembly of princes in August 1076 delivered an ultimatum. Henry must revoke his sentence against Gregory and swear religious obedience to the Pope, and he must obtain absolution within a year of the original excommunication. There was to be an assembly at Augsburg early in 1077 in the presence of the Pope to resolve the differences between Pope and King.

Henry’s political position now became increasingly untenable: he was forced to a humiliating submission. Gregory had set out for the Augsburg assembly, but had trouble getting through Lombardy, where royalist bishops formed a strong anti-papal barrier. He took refuge in the castle of the loyal papalist Countess Matilda of Tuscany, at Canossa in the Apeninnes. There, in January 1077, with the ultimatum from the princes fast running out, Henry came to beg absolution, standing barefoot in the snow to beg the Pope’s pardon. Gregory was reluctant to act before the many contested issues had been settled at Augsburg, but finally relented and gave Henry absolution.

Canossa was an astonishing victory for the papacy, with the most powerful monarch in Christendom a suppliant at its gate, and the political unity and stability of Germany in the Pope’s hands. However much the royalist party in Germany and northern Italy might deny the Pope’s claims to jurisdiction over kings, here was eloquent acknowledgement that the King could not rule in defiance of the Pope. But the victory rapidly turned to ashes. In pardoning Henry, Gregory saw himself as pardoning a repentant sinner, not as conceding the issues contested between Pope and King. He vigorously denied that he had intended to restore Henry unconditionally to the kingship. Events, however, now developed their own momentum. The Lombard bishops refused the Pope passage into Germany, and Henry was able to present the events at Canossa as an end to strife between him and the Pope. The rebellious princes believed that the Pope had betrayed them, and they went ahead with the election of an anti-king, Rudolf of Swabia. Gregory tried unsuccessfully to mediate between Henry and Rudolf, but Henry’s truculent resistance to Gregory and Rudolfs genuine commitment to the papal reform movement in Germany made real neutrality difficult. In March 1080 Gregory once more solemnly excommunicated Henry, predicted his imminent death, deposed him from the throne and declared Rudolf king.

It was a disastrous move. Apart from anything else, the Pope had backed the wrong horse, for Rudolf was killed in battle later the same year, and Henry remained horribly healthy. But the mistake was worse than mere miscalculation. In 1076 moderate opinion everywhere had seen Henry as the aggressor, the Pope as defender of the right. The position was reversed now, for the papal deposition of Henry seemed no more than the thinnest of veils covering the naked ambition of the German princes: the papacy was sprinkling holy water on rebellion against the Lord’s anointed. Gregory, more than ever, seemed a dangerous revolutionary, and a zealot determined to concede nothing. Slowly, support for the Pope began to ebb away.

Henry was therefore able to appoint an antipope, Archbishop Guibert of Ravenna, who took the name Clement III, though repeated attempts to capture Rome and install the Antipope came to nothing. The conflict reduced Gregory’s finances to chaos, however, and he even contemplated mortgaging the lands of St Peter, a move vetoed by the Roman clergy. He got by on emergency supplies provided
by friendly rulers like the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. In 1084, however, Henry was able at last to enter the city and hand St Peters over to Clement. The Antipope crowned Henry emperor there a week later. Gregory watched helpless from the Castel Sant’ Angelo, abandoned by most of his cardinals, and blamed by the Roman people for the disasters which had befallen the city. He was rescued by the army of the most powerful Norman in Italy, Robert Guiscard, with whom, ironically, Gregory had once been bitterly at odds. The rescue destroyed whatever credibility Gregory had left, however, for the Normans subjected the city to the worst sack it had experienced since the fall of the Roman empire. Gregory was forced to flee, pursued by the curses of the Romans, and he died in bitter exile in Norman territory at Salerno, defiant and free from self-doubt to the end – ‘I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.’

Nineteenth-century historians liked to portray the confrontation between Pope and Emperor (or rather Pope and King, for in Gregory’s eyes Henry was never Emperor) as a conflict between Church and state, with Gregory usurping the rights of the secular power. But no one in eleventh-century Europe thought of Church and state as separate or separable entities. There was only one Christendom, and the conflicts between Pope and Prince arose from conflicting claims to spiritual headship within that single entity. Gregory’s achievement was to stake out, in the starkest of terms and with a new clarity, the spiritual claims of the Church. In the process, however, he shifted the foundations on which the relationship between Pope and monarch was believed to rest. Five centuries before, Pope Gelasius had declared that there were two powers, the pontifical and the royal, by which the world was chiefly governed. Gelasius had insisted that in things of the spirit the pontifical power took precedence, and that assumption had embedded itself in Western religious thinking. Yet pope and king remained twin sacred powers, ordained by God and each in his own sphere supreme.

Gregory brushed this venerable belief aside. Empire was pagan in origin, and belonged to an intrinsically lower order than the priesthood, above all the papacy. ‘Shall not an authority founded by laymen,’ he asked, ‘even by those who do not know God, be subject to that authority which the providence of God Almighty for his own honour has established and in his mercy given to the world?’ As for
the reverence due to monarchy,

It is often thought that Gregory’s claim to depose kings was rooted in a forgery, the
Donation of Constantine.
In fact, the precedent he liked to cite was Pope Zacharias’ permission to Pepin to depose the last Merovingian King, Childeric III. This was far more radical than anything deducible from the
Donation
, for it was based on the notion not of rights, divine or otherwise, but of usefulness, fitness or suitability. Zacharias had deposed the King ‘not so much for his iniquities, as because he was not fitted to exercise so great a power’. Gregory’s view of kingship was profoundly desacralised, light-years away from the quasi-sacramental aura that hovered round the priest—kings of Carolingian Europe. It was for the Pope to decide who was or was not ‘fitted’ to exercise royal power, and the acid test was not birth, nor election by the people, nor anything except utility to the Church. This almost, but not quite, boiled down to obedience to the Pope. Gregory put up with the determined resistance of William the Conqueror to papal intervention in the English church, and his refusal to receive legates or allow English bishops to visit Rome, because the King, by embracing reform, preventing clerical marriage and abstaining from simony, had shown himself more honourable and more tolerable, more ‘suitable’, than other kings.

Gregory’s pontificate represents the highest point of papal aspiration to dominion over the secular world. Later popes might refine his claims, but none would ever exceed them, and many would back away from their full implications. Paradoxically, he achieved startlingly little in concrete terms. Most of the bishops he excommunicated and deposed remained tranquilly in office, Henry long outlived him, and the papal reform changed direction after him, away from the attempt to rule the rulers, and towards the strengthening of its hold over the Church itself. Yet, if he was defeated in the short term,
the spirit of papal reform owed everything to him, for after him the papacy never receded from its claims to freedom from secular and political control in spiritual matters. At the Council of Clermont, ten years after Gregory’s death, Pope Urban II articulated once more the aims of the reform papacy, in terms borrowed from Gregory. The Church, he declared, ‘shall be Catholic, chaste and free: Catholic in the faith and fellowship of the saints, chaste from all contagion of evil, and free from secular power’.
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Because of Gregory, there would never again be another Charlemagne. No pope for a hundred years, perhaps no pope ever, would loom so large on the European scene as he had done.

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Gregory based his vision of papal supremacy on a total identification with the Apostle Peter: for him, as for all his predecessors, the Pope was the vicar of St Peter. But in the wake of the Gregorian era popes were increasingly dissatisfied with that way of stating their claims. The power they exercised over the Church, they believed, was not as deputies of Peter (for other bishops might claim apostolic origins for their sees) but, like Peter himself, as deputies of Christ. More than a century after Gregorys death Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) declared, ‘We are the successor of the prince of the Apostles, but we are not his vicar, not the vicar of any man or Apostle, but the vicar of Jesus Christ himself.’
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