Chapter 138. Pope and Emperor: Investiture, the Papal Monarchy and the Road to Westphalia

In the medieval West the question of who may command took the form of a contest between two institutions, each claiming to hold its authority from God. The papacy claimed supremacy over all Christians, kings included. Emperors and kings claimed that their power was sacred in its own right. From Gregory VII’s Dictatus Papae of 1075 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the contest produced excommunications, depositions, anti-popes, crusades against Christian rulers and, in the end, a European order in which the ruler decided his subjects’ religion. The backbone of this chapter is Anna Grzymała-Busse’s argument in Sacred Foundations that the Church was both a rival of the territorial state and a template for it. Her account is set beside Maurois’s history of England, Freeman’s intellectual history, the Encyclopedia of World History and a Romanian historical sketch of the Thirty Years’ War.

Gregory VII and the Dictatus Papae

According to Grzymała-Busse, “the arrival of Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085) heralded a new era of intense reform”. “In 1075, Gregory drew up the Dictatus Papae, a collection of twenty-seven papal privileges and prerogatives, including the exclusive right of the pope to use imperial insignia and the insistence that princes kiss the feet of the pope, and the pope’s alone.” She concludes: “the Dictatus declared that there were no limits to papal authority, either within or beyond the church, and that the papacy was the sole universal authority” [Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations, #62062, ch. 2].

Charles Freeman calls it “the astonishing Dictatus Papae” and emphasises the material stakes, pointing to “Gregory’s obsession with the control of church property, the right to which he claimed Constantine had given the church through his Donation”. Yet Gregory also claimed “that the emperor had never had the right to the temporal powers he had apparently transferred” [Freeman, The Reopening of the Western Mind, #64786]. Freeman identifies the Donation of Constantine as “a document later discovered to have been forged in the eighth century” [Freeman, #64786]. The forgery was exposed in the fifteenth century by Lorenzo Valla [Wikipedia: Donation of Constantine].

The Investiture Conflict, 1075-1122

The quarrel turned on lay investiture, the right of kings to appoint bishops. The conflict “began after Gregory VII prohibited lay investiture in 1075”, and the German king Henry IV “rejected Gregory’s authority and insisted on naming his own bishops”. There followed “nearly five decades of excommunications, denunciations, and mutual depositions … spanning the reign of two emperors and six popes”. The two sides read the same principles differently: “Gregory VII and his successors insisted this implied the primacy of the sacred, while Henry IV and his followers argued it meant distinct spheres of authority” [Grzymała-Busse, #62062, ch. 2].

The best-known events can be summarised as follows. In January 1076 Henry’s bishops at Worms renounced obedience to Gregory and demanded his abdication. Gregory excommunicated and deposed Henry at the Lenten synod of 1076 and released the princes from their oaths. To avoid losing the throne, Henry crossed the Alps in winter and stood as a penitent at the gate of Canossa for three days until Gregory absolved him on 28 January 1077 [Wikipedia: Road to Canossa]. The reconciliation did not hold. “German dukes deposed Henry IV in 1077, and Germany descended into a civil war that spread into Italy in 1080 and lasted for two decades.” When “Henry IV again began to name his own bishops … Gregory VII again excommunicated and deposed him in 1080”. Henry took Rome, his troops “pillaged it, and Gregory VII himself fled Rome only to die shortly thereafter”. Henry “named a rival pope (the ‘Anti-Pope’ Clement III), who enthroned Henry as the emperor” [Grzymała-Busse, #62062, ch. 2].

The settlement came in 1122. The Encyclopedia of World History reprints both sides of the Concordat of Worms. The emperor declares: “I, Henry, by the grace of God august emperor of the Romans … do remit to God, and to the holy apostles of God, Peter and Paul, and to the holy catholic church, all investiture through ring and staff”. Pope Calixtus II in turn grants “that the elections of the bishops and abbots of the German kingdom … shall take place in thy presence, without simony and without any violence” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “Concordat of Worms”]. Grzymała-Busse summarises the terms: the emperor “could no longer formally invest bishops with their spiritual authority”, but “could confer regalia with scepter and receive homage from the elect bishops”. She calls it “a compromise, not a resolution” [Grzymała-Busse, #62062, ch. 2].

Grzymała-Busse’s thesis: rival and template

Grzymała-Busse records that historians disagree about what the conflict was. Following Maureen Miller (2009), she distinguishes three interpretations. The first sees reform as an attempt to correct abuses, with the papal monarchy as its main result. The second sees lay influence in the Church as the reformers’ central concern and the investiture crisis as “a struggle for the right order”. A third reading centres on the Church itself [Grzymała-Busse, #62062, ch. 2, n. 12]. Her own argument is that the conflict had three side effects that shaped the European state. First, it made law a political weapon “in lieu of appeals to the divine”, and popes and emperors “invested heavily in legal expertise” after the founding of Bologna in 1088. Second, it “empowered nobles against monarchs by affirming that elections, rather than divinely sanctioned ascension, were a legitimate mechanism of leader selection”. Third, it fragmented the Holy Roman Empire. “Law, rather than charisma, would increasingly become the organizing principle of European governance. Election, rather than anointment, could legitimate rulers” [Grzymała-Busse, #62062, ch. 2].

On her account this fragmentation was “a deliberate policy of the medieval papacy”. Where the Church and rulers fought hardest, in Germany and Italy, no central authority arose until the 1870s. “Where the state was already relatively powerful, and the papacy needed the king’s acquiescence, if not support, as in England, state development unfolded with relatively little church” obstruction [Grzymała-Busse, #62062]. In the long run the Church paid for its victory: “when the opportunity of the Great Schism presented itself, the crown subordinated the episcopal mitre”, and its ideas and institutions “were adopted enthusiastically and adapted opportunistically by secular rulers, and were then deployed against the church” [Grzymała-Busse, #62062].

England: king, archbishop and pope

André Maurois, in the Romanian translation of his History of England, describes the conflict between the Church “reorganised by Gregory VII” and the civil monarchies as inevitable. Gregory’s aim was noble: “he wished to reform the Church so as to make it worthy of reforming the world” (“Dorea să reformeze biserica pentru a o face demnă ca ea să reformeze lumea”). Maurois weighs what each side stood to lose: “If the papacy had yielded on investiture, it would have risked seeing the Church in the hands of favourites of the civil power, perhaps even of simoniacs and heretics. If the king had yielded, he would have helped to establish in his own kingdom a rival power over which he would no longer have any authority” [Maurois, Istoria Angliei, #10017]. Grzymała-Busse notes that the papacy let William the Conqueror assert primacy over the English church in 1066 and conceded homage of ecclesiastics to Henry I. This allowed generations of English kings “to retain control over investiture” [Grzymała-Busse, #62062, ch. 2].

The struggle in England moved from appointments to jurisdiction. According to the Encyclopedia of World History, in 1163 at the Council of Westminster Henry II sought to try “criminous clerks” who had already been tried in church courts. He then imposed the Constitutions of Clarendon, to which Becket “orally agreed” and the quarrel escalated until 1170, when Becket excommunicated the bishops who had crowned Henry’s son [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “Becket, Thomas”]. It ended with the archbishop’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral that December [Wikipedia: Thomas Becket]. Under the Tudors the Crown completed the subordination. Donnelly records that Henry VII had those granted benefit of clergy “branded on the thumb”, and that Henry VIII “declared that anyone accused of murder on a public highway or in church could not claim benefit of clergy”, later extending the exclusion to “all murder, piracy, rape, abduction and sacrilege” [Donnelly, The Big Book of Pain, #33280, ch. 8]. Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the Acts of Supremacy place him among the rulers associated with the full form of the divine-right doctrine [Wikipedia: Divine right of kings].

Augsburg, the Thirty Years’ War and Westphalia

The Reformation split the Empire along confessional lines. In 1555 “Augsburg established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio: a ruler’s right to choose the religious denomination for his people” [Grzymała-Busse, #62062]. The Calvinists were left out, and “for Reformed believers, recognition would come at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204].

The historical sketch that introduces the Romanian edition of Schiller’s Wallenstein, written by the editor Virgil Tempeanu, calls the war “the bloody war, apparently religious” (“în aparenţă religios”). It “broke out in Bohemia, where by order of the emperor the Protestant churches just built in the small towns of Braunau and Klostergrab were demolished, although the Protestant confession was legally recognised”. Tempeanu stresses the political motives behind the confessional war. The Habsburgs pursued “a central and absolute authority in Germany”, relying on the Church and the Jesuits. Catholic France under Richelieu financed Protestant Sweden against the emperor because it feared a united Germany. The peace “restored religious freedom” but confirmed the defeat of imperial unification and left German fragmentation in place until the nineteenth century [Schiller, Wallenstein vol. 1, #24835, introduction by V. Tempeanu]. The Encyclopedia of World History records that “the Treaty of Westphalia is signed at Münster on October 24, bringing to an end the Thirty Years’ War” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, timeline 1648].

Interpreting Westphalia

Two readings of 1648 compete. In “the conventional periodization”, Grzymała-Busse writes, “the Treaties of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648) helped to establish the principle of sovereignty in international relations” [Grzymała-Busse, #62062]. Many scholars of international relations likewise date “Westphalian sovereignty” to 1648. Some historians reply that this view was formed only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [Wikipedia: Peace of Westphalia]. Grzymała-Busse offers a third reading. The templates of sovereignty, representation and the rule of law were already forged in the medieval rivalry between popes and kings, so Westphalia completed a long subordination rather than inventing the secular state [Grzymała-Busse, #62062]. The Wikipedia account of divine right makes a related point. With the papal check removed, Protestant and Catholic kings alike became answerable only to God, and the national churches became instruments of the crown [Wikipedia: Divine right of kings].

Key points

• Grzymała-Busse describes the Dictatus Papae (1075) as twenty-seven prerogatives that declared “no limits to papal authority”, including the pope’s exclusive use of imperial insignia and the kissing of his feet by princes [#62062].
• The Investiture Conflict (1075-1122) set Gregory’s “primacy of the sacred” against Henry IV’s “distinct spheres of authority”. It passed through Canossa (1077), a second deposition (1080), the anti-pope Clement III and Gregory’s flight from Rome [#62062; Wikipedia].
• The Concordat of Worms, whose text the Encyclopedia of World History reprints, gave spiritual investiture to the pope and regalia and homage to the emperor. Grzymała-Busse calls it “a compromise, not a resolution” [#5204, #62062].
• Freeman ties Gregory’s programme to control of church property claimed through the Donation of Constantine, a later-exposed eighth-century forgery [#64786].
• Grzymała-Busse argues that papal rivalry deliberately fragmented Germany and Italy, while England, where the pope needed the king, consolidated early [#62062]. Maurois sets out what pope and king would each have lost by yielding [#10017].
• English kings moved from Clarendon to the Tudor curbs on benefit of clergy and Henry VIII’s royal supremacy [#5204, #33280].
• Cuius regio, eius religio (1555) and the Westphalian treaties (signed at Münster, 24 October 1648) subordinated confession to the sovereign. Tempeanu calls the war only “apparently religious” [#62062, #5204, #24835].