Holy Roman Empire-Papacy Wars

At issue: The Investiture contest and controversy

Date: 1077–1250

Location: Holy Roman Empire

Combatants: Holy Roman Empire, Germans vs. papacy, Lombards, Tuscans, Sicilians

Principal commanders:Holy Roman Empire/German, Henry IV (1050–1106), Henry V (1081–1125), Henry VI (1165–1197), Frederick I Barbarossa (c. 1123–1190), Frederick II (1194–1250); Papacy, Gregory VII (1020?-1085), Urban II (1042?-1099), Alexander III (d. 1181), Gregory IX (1147?-1241), Innocent IV (d. 1254)

Principal battles: Flarchheim, Elster, Rome, Legnano, Vicenza, Cortenuova, Apulia

Result: The struggle ended in a draw, with neither side winning conclusively but the papacy becoming greatly politicized; the battles generally demonstrate the efficacy of infantry equipped with pikes, crossbows, and horses and illustrate the usefulness of the Neopolitan Saracen troops as an efficient destructive force

Background

The German emperors of the eleventh and twelfth centuries usually appointed their favorites to bishoprics by “investing” them with ring and staff, the symbols of episcopal authority. Such appointments were in fact justified by a widely held doctrine of unified church-state formulated by the churchmen themselves during the troubled ninth and tenth centuries. By questioning this practice of lay investiture, the reformers were challenging the very basis of royal authority. This challenge to the imperial authority came at a time when the German emperors were trying to subdue the hostile nobles in the empire and when the popes were seeking to exert their suzerainty over Italy and to rid the church of its multiple disorders. In so doing, both the empire and the papacy were endeavoring to resuscitate the Roman concept of universal monarchy to enhance their respective authority.

Action

The Investiture controversy began with the pontificate of Gregory VII, whose decree of 1075 prohibited the imperial practice in this regard. When Emperor Henry IV declared the pope deposed at Worms in 1076, the latter retaliated by excommunicating the monarch in 1077. Henry had been embroiled with Saxony at the time and so hastened to Canossa to recant and endure a humiliating penance. Unfortunately, his submission to Rome alienated the German nobles, and back home, Henry found himself in the midst of a civil war. In January, 1080, he was defeated by the dissident nobles led by their imperial nominee Rudolf of Swabia at the Battle of Flarchheim (1080). He was excommunicated once again. By June, however, the beleaguered monarch had recovered his position with the help of the German and Italian bishops, declared Gregory deposed at Brixen, and elected his friend, Guibert, the excommunicated archbishop of Ravenna, as the antipope Clement III. In October, Henry was defeated again by Rudolf and his Saxon allies at the Battle of Elster (1080), though Rudolf was killed in action. The king resumed control of the German church, returned to Lombardy along with the antipope, and conquered Rome in 1083. Early the next year, he invaded Apulia to keep the Normans, traditional allies of the pope, under check. Gregory was besieged in the castle of St. Angelo, Clement enthroned, and Henry crowned on Easter Day, 1084.

At the behest of the confined pope, the Normans invaded Rome and sacked the city. Clement fled to Ravenna, and Gregory followed his rescuers to Palermo where he took ill and died on May 25, 1085. His successor, Victor III, died on September 16, 1087, and was followed by Urban II, the erstwhile cardinal bishop of Ostia. Urban united the German and Italian opposition to the emperor by getting the papal ally, Countess Matilda of Tuscany, married to the son of Welf, duke of Bavaria, Henry’s most powerful adversary in Germany. Matilda’s army defeated Henry’s during the latter’s Italian campaigns of 1090–1092, and the emperor’s son Conrad rebelled against his father.

In 1095, Pope Urban traveled to France and Burgundy and proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. The declaration of the Holy War demonstrated the pope’s political power while establishing the universal monarchy of the church.

In September, 1096, Urban returned to Rome triumphantly, and in 1097, Henry IV left Italy in despair but crowned his younger son Henry V as his successor. Urban died on July 29, 1099. The new pope, Paschal II, provoked the German heir-apparent Henry to rebel against his father, who abdicated on December 31, 1105, and fled to Cologne and reclaimed his throne, which he declared had been given up under duress, but he died on August 7, 1106, at Liege in the midst of battle preparations.

Though Henry V proved stubborn enough to force Pope Paschal to crown him at St. Peter’s on April 13, 1111, he wisely refrained from claiming the full imperial power as it had existed half a century earlier. Toward the end of his reign, he worked out a compromise settlement with the church that brought the Investiture contest to an end. In course of time, both papacy and empire tended to draw back from their respective extreme stances and reconciled their differences in the Concordat of Worms (1122), whereby Henry agreed to give up the investiture and the pope recognized the emperor’s privilege of bestowing on the new prelate the symbols of his territorial and administrative jurisdiction. Though bishops and abbots were to be elected according to the principles of canon law by the monks of a monastery or the canons of a cathedral, the emperor had the right to be present at such elections and to make the final decision in the event of a dispute. The church had won its point—lay investiture was banned—but monarchs still exercised considerable control over their churches. Though the theory of papal monarchy remained unrealized, the power of the papacy had grown and that of the emperor declined relatively.

The papal-imperial conflict entered a new phase during the regime of the Hohenstaufen emperors Frederick I Barbarossa and Frederick II. Frederick I Barbarossa sought to exert feudal control over the Italian towns that prized their autonomy. He also confronted a series of strong popes beginning with Hadrian IV, who demanded a feudal subservience from lay authority. The next pope, Alexander III, supported the pretensions of the Lombard towns. The emperor responded by installing a series of antipopes of his choice, and their rivalry resulted in total disaster for the antipopes. The Lombard League inflicted a crushing defeat on the imperial army at the Battle of Legnano on May 29, 1176. With only his heavy cavalry of knights, Frederick engaged the league’s superior infantry equipped with pikes, crossbows, and horse. In the Peace of Venice (1177), Frederick acknowledged Alexander as the true pontiff. Matters with the Lombard towns dragged on until 1183, when the Treaty of Constance generally recognized their claims with only a nominal imperial overlordship. Earlier, in 1180, Frederick had stripped Henry the Lion of his holdings in Swabia and Bavaria in retaliation for his refusal to fight for the emperor in Lombardy, but he confirmed the status of the ösrerreich (Austria), already separated from Bavaria in 1156. In 1186, Frederick achieved a lasting imperial claim on Italy by getting his son Henry married to Constance, heiress of Sicily. Three years later, the emperor decided to join the Third Crusade and was drowned in the Saleph River in Cicilia in 1190.

The new German emperor Henry VI invaded Sicily when he heard that the kingdom due him through his wife had been given to Tancred of Lecce, an illegitimate son of Duke Roger of Apulia, by Pope Clement III. He was, however, beaten in Sicily and returned to Germany only to face the struggle between the Welfs and the Hohenstaufens. Henry finally killed Tancred in February, 1194, and was crowned on December 25 of that year. He made plans to go on a crusade but died at Messina in 1197.

The contest between empire and papacy reached its acme during the reign of Frederick II, who had in fact been brought to the imperial succession as a protegé of Pope Innocent III. In 1220, Frederick persuaded Innocent’s successor, Honorius III, to crown him as emperor by promising to join the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221). In 1227, he left for the Crusades but illness forced him to return in 1228, upon which he was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX. He departed on the Sixth Crusade in 1228 but did not fight the Muslims, instead negotiating with them. He managed to be crowned king of Jerusalem in 1229. He made a truce with the pope in 1230 but, following his expedition into Lombardy, capture of Vicenza in August, 1236, and his victory against the Lombard League at Cortenuova (1237), his relations with the pope soured, and he was excommunicated once again in 1239.

Aftermath

Frederick responded by marching on the Papal States in 1240, capturing a fleet bound for Rome and taking as hostage more than one hundred prelates. Pushing on to Rome, he was just outside the city walls when news reached him that Pope Gregory was dead. His failure to reconcile with Pope Innocent IV and to capture Viterbo, a city in Latium, in September, 1543, led to his deposition by Innocent at the Council of Lyons in 1245 followed by the election of an antiking Henry Raspe of Thuringia. Frederick died in 1250 in the midst of battle in Apulia. The pope triumphed in the end, and Frederick’s death spelled doom for the Hohenstaufen Dynasty as well as the medieval dream of a universal empire.

Bibliography

Abulafia, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. London: Pimlico, 1992.

Keen, Maurice, ed. Medieval Warfare: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Renna, Thomas J. Church and State in Medieval Europe, 1050–1314. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1974.