God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The papal–Frankish alliance proved mutually advantageous. The papacy gained effective protection in Italy; the Franks legitimacy for their mid- to late-eighth-century conquests in Lombardy, Gascony, Bavaria and Saxony between the Rhine and Elbe. The culmination of the alliance came on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III (795–816) crowned the king of the Franks, Charles the Great or Charlemagne (768–814), as the new Roman emperor in the west, inaugurating what came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire, which survived, with various interruptions and changes of fortune, nature and substance, until abolished in 1806 on the insistence of Napoleon. While the Frankish, or Carolingian (i.e. family of Charles), empire lasted, until the 880s, the papacy remained rather overshadowed. Thereafter the throne of St Peter tended to be the preserve of a dim succession of Roman nobles, some youthful, dissolute, even irreligious. Yet the reputation of their office remained high, especially in northern Europe, where papal authority still appeared as a final arbiter of ecclesiastical and spiritual issues; the newly converted King Miesco I of Poland sought papal protection in 991. In 962, the king of Germany, Otto I, who had recently conquered northern Italy, revived the western empire by being crowned in Rome by Pope John XII (955–64), a notoriously debauched twenty-five-year-old nobleman and libertine who apparently met his death, still only about twenty-seven, after a stroke suffered during intercourse with a married woman.

By the early eleventh century the papacy alternated between grand protégés of the German emperors, such as the scholar Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II, 999–1003), and a succession of local appointees of distinctly uneven calibre usually taking the names Benedict or John. Increasingly elements within the Roman church and elsewhere in Christendom sought to reform both the papacy and the wider secular church in the west by re-emphasizing the separation and dominance of the spiritual over the secular in church appointments, management, finance and behaviour. Under the patronage of Emperor Henry III (1039–56), the reformers seized control of the papacy. A succession of German, Italian and French popes in the half-century after 1048 transformed both the papacy and western Christendom. Deliberately and innovatively international in outlook and personnel, central in the policies of the reforming papal Curia came the understanding that the church of Rome was synonymous with the universal church; that the pope held temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction on earth as the heir to St Peter, to whom, according to the so-called Petrine texts in Matthew’s Gospel, Christ entrusted the keys of heaven and the power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven (Matthew 16:19). The more general reformist agenda included the improving of the morals and education of the clergy and the eradication of simony (paying for church office) and clerical marriage (a move both moral and economic, to protect church land from being inherited by non-clerical clergy children). An attempt was made to make secular priests more like monks, wholly distinctive from their lay neighbours and relatives, and loyally obedient to Rome.

This programme met fierce local opposition as it threatened the vested interests of lay and clerical patrons of private churches and monasteries; the habits of the mass of the secular priesthood; and the power of secular rulers to control the richest landed corporations in their regions. The most acute and bitter dispute developed with the king of Germany, Henry IV, whose accession as a minor had forced the reforming popes to seek independence from the German throne in order to protect themselves from Italian enemies. At issue were imperial rights in choosing a new pope; papal rights in approving the choice of emperor; and, more directly, the authority over appointments and control of the church in imperial lands in Germany and north Italy. The dispute was encapsulated in the ceremony of investing, i.e. giving newly consecrated bishops the ring and staff, symbols of their spiritual dignity. Traditionally in Germany, and elsewhere, kings performed this ceremony. Uniquely for a layman – and inconveniently for church reformers – kings were also consecrated, ‘the Lord’s Anointed’. The right to invest with the ring and staff became iconic, hence the name given to the dispute and the wars it generated, the Investiture Contest, although in reality the disagreements were both more mundane – control of church wealth and patronage – and sublime – the spiritual health of those who administered the Sacraments and ‘the right order in Christendom’.