249. War of Investitures

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The Papacy outsmarts itself again

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

Book Four
The War of Investitures and the Crusades

Chapter II
The War of Investitures

1. The Empire and the Papacy since Henry III (1039)

p173 By restoring the fallen Empire in 962... Otto had undoubtedly intended to revive the Carolingian tradition...
...

p174 Henceforth... the Imperial dignity was merely an appendage, a consequence of German monarchy... But the Empire... although it belonged to the King of Germany, was by no means a German Empire. Debased though it was, its universality prevented it from becoming nationalized. Being Roman, it could not become the property of any nation... Instead of Germany having nationalized the Empire to her advantage, her kings... denationalized themselves to her detriment... the new Emperors were condemned to occupy the unprecedented situation of being neither universal sovereigns nor German sovereigns...

Down to the end of the 12th century they were incontestably the most powerful of the continental monarchs, and yet, when we come to consider them closely, we quickly perceive that their strength was more apparent than actual... The power of the Emperors was based... only on the Church, or rather, on the episcopal principalities... It was from these principalities that they drew the better part of their revenues and their military contingents... but unlike the King of France, the Emperor possessed no dynastic territory, no principality of his own... [?] He had no capital; and he wandered about the Empire, an eternal traveler, sometimes beyond the Alps, sometimes in Saxony, Swabia or Franconia. And naturally, this wandering power had no secular administration... 

p176 ...They [the Emperors] no longer risked such perilous adventures: [to the south of Rome after 982] so that Sicily, Apulia and Calabria... fell... into the hands of the Normans: a paradoxical spectacle.

p177 The story of the foundation of the Norman State in the south of Italy reads like a chanson de gestes. This extraordinary spectacle gave striking proof of the military strength of the Northern chivalry, and was a prelude to... the conquest of England and the first Crusade.

p178 Between the pontificates of Leo IX and Nicholas II the attitude of Rome toward the Normans underwent a complete transformation. The schism between the Latin and Greek Churches, which had so long been threatening, became definitive in 1054, after which date the Pope was directly interested in the expulsion from Italy of the few Byzantine troops which still remained there.

...It was... not surprising that he should conclude a close alliance with his enterprising neighbors in the South, and that he should favor their expansion. In 1059 -- though he was really disposing of territory which did not belong to him -- he gave Capua as fief to Richard of Arezzo, and to Robert Guiscard, Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. Two years later Guiscard seized Messina, and thirty years later still the island was completely liberated from the Muselman invasion. The last of the Byzantine outposts in Italy were similarly conquered... What none of the successive masters of Italy had been able to do the Normans had accomplished in less that fifty years...



2. The Conflict

...
p181 During the fifteen years which had elapsed since the pontificate of Clement II, the Papacy, thanks to the nominations of [Emperor] Henry III had not only recovered its position at the head of the Church, but was regarded with veneration and had acquired an influence such as it had never yet enjoyed... The immense moral force which had been evoked by the asceticism of the monks had at last given Rome the head for whom she had been waiting... The loyalty to Christ which had inspired men's souls was now confounded with loyalty to His Vicar... Since the beginning of the 11th century [Catholic] Christianity had spread into Denmark, Sicily and Norway, and even into remote Iceland... Never had Rome possessed so vast a spiritual domain, so potent an authority...

...In 1059 Nicholas II, in order henceforth to guard the nomination of the Popes from any alien influence, confided it to the college of Cardinals... Henceforth the election of the Vicar of Christ would be a matter of the Church alone...

p182 The conflict between the Papacy and the Empire may be dated from this reform... It was not due merely to chance that he concluded a treaty of alliance with the Normans in the very year in which the right of electing the Pope was conferred upon the Cardinals.

At the same time the Pope took measures to prohibit the marriage of priests, and in prevention of simony, which showed that he could henceforth count upon the support of the masses... Under the influence of reviving commerce a new social class, the bourgeoisie, was growing up in Lombard cities, and it took advantage of the motive provided by piety in order to rebel against the bishops, whose administration took no account of its [the bourgeoisie's] new requirements. 
...

...In 1075... [Pope Gregory VII] solemnly condemned, under penalty of excommunication, the investiture of any ecclesiastical function by the secular authority.

p183 Nothing... could be more consistent with the principles of the Church, but nothing could have been more impossible for the Emperor to concede...

...Gregory has been regarded as a sort of mystical revolutionary, an Ultramontaine endeavoring to ruin the State...

p184 ...In reality what Gregory was attacking was the political conception that made the Emperor the equal of the Pope... it must not be said that he attacked the State. It would be more correct to say that he deprived it of its clerical character. After all, by depriving the Emperor of the investiture of the bishops he was accelerating the secularization of the State... What if the Empire had been triumphant? The theocracy would have held the power; the priests would have governed in the name of the prince. Gregory... withdrew the priests from the government. What he really did was to launch the State on the path of secularization.  

p185 ...There were still enough bishops in Germany who were devoted to the sovereign... to make it possible for... [Henry IV] to act. He assembled them at Worms, and on January 24th 1076, he induced them to declare that Gregory was unworthy of the Papacy...

...Nothing could have served the cause of Gregory better than this pretension on the part of the King of Germany to dispose, as the master, of the head of Catholic Christendom. He replied by excommunicating Henry, and absolving from their oath all who had sworn fidelity to him. It then became evident that the decision of the Synod of Worms was not accepted even by the princes of Germany... the response of one and all to the sentence of Rome was to abandon Henry. In order to avoid a general revolt the king did not hesitate to repudiate the judgement of his own bishops and to humiliate himself before the Pope... [civil war breaks out in Germany which Henry wins. He places his own Pope (Clement III) in Rome but can't deal with Gregory who is secure in Castel Sant' Angelo and is soon relieved by Robert Giscard and the Normans.]

p187 ...[in] the Concordat of Worms (1222)... The Emperor [Henry V] renounced the right of investiture of his fiefs (regales) from the scepter before consecration; in other parts of the Empire (Italy and Burgundy) after consecration. There was thus a distinction between the spiritual power... and the temporal power... ...the election of bishops... would now be influenced not by the Emperor but by the neighboring princes. In reality, the Imperial Church was in ruins; there remained only a feudal Church. The Empire suffered thereby; the Papacy gained in prestige; but the discipline of the Church was not improved... Every election was bound to be a conflict of influences... The true solution would have been that of Pascal II, according to which the bishops would have abandoned their fiefs; but to this the Emperor would not give his consent, for the vast territorial wealth of the Church would have passed into the hands of the princes. In the last resort, the quarrel of the investitures ended in the triumph of the feudality over the Church... Elected by chapters in which the younger sons of the nobles predominated... [bishops] were now entirely feudal, and with them the dominating influence was the temporal. In seeking to liberate the clergy from the secular influence the Church had made it more than ever subordinate to them.



On rereading this in January of 2022...

We are getting close to the first crusade and the return of trade in the west -- above it is mentioned that the bourgeoisie was already growing in parts of Italy. That the Eastern Mediterranean was becoming a Norman Lake also removed the Islamic limit on Western trade. Thus the scene was already set for the transformation of Europe. 

While some writers have attributed this transformation to the Crusades -- and the need of the nobility to raise cash to travel far from their domains -- it looks to me that this was just an accelerant sprayed on a fire that had already started. The conquests of the Normans was an essential precondition to the return of trade and the consequent re-monetization of the feudal world.