force rose to the control of the papacy--a strong and earnest
movement for reformation which had arisen outside the circle
of papal influence during the darkest days of its degradation,
indeed, and entirely independent of the empire. This had
started from the monastery of Cluny, founded in 910, in
eastern France, as a reformation of the monastic life, but it
involved gradually ideas of a wider reformation throughout the
whole church. Two great sins of the time, as it regarded them,
were especially attacked, the marriage of priests and simony,
or the purchase of ecclesiastical preferment for money,
including also appointments to church offices by temporal
rulers. ... The earnest spirit of Henry III. was not out of
sympathy with the demand for a real reformation, and with the
third pope of his appointment, Leo IX., in 1048, the ideas of
Cluny obtained the direction of affairs. ... One apparently
insignificant act of Leo's had important consequences. He
brought back with him to Rome the monk Hildebrand. He had been
brought up in a monastery in Rome in the strictest ideas of
Cluny, had been a supporter of Gregory VI., one of the three
rival popes deposed by Henry, who, notwithstanding his
outright purchase of the papacy, represented the new reform
demand, and had gone with him into exile on his deposition. It
does not appear that he exercised any decisive influence
during the reign of Leo IX., but so great was his ability and
such the power of his personality that very soon he became the
directing spirit in the papal policy, though his influence
over the papacy before his own pontificate was not so great
nor so constant as it has sometimes been said to have been. So
long as Henry lived the balance of power was decidedly in favor
of the emperor, but in 1056 happened that disastrous event,
which occurred so many times at critical points of imperial
history, from Arnulf to Henry VI., the premature death of the
emperor. His son, Henry IV., was only six years old at his
father's death, and a minority followed just in the crisis of
time needed to enable the feudal princes of Germany to recover
and strengthen their independence against the central
government, and to give free hands to the papacy to carry out
its plans for throwing off the imperial control. Never again
did an emperor occupy, in respect either to Germany or the
papacy, the vantage-ground on which Henry III. had stood. ...
The triumph of the reform movement and of its ecclesiastical
theory is especially connected with the name of Hildebrand, or
Gregory VII., as he called himself when pope, and was very
largely, if not entirely, due to his indomitable spirit and
iron will, which would yield to no persuasion or threats or
actual force. He is one of the most interesting personalities
of history. ... The three chief points which the reform party
attempted to gain were the independence of the church from all
outside control in the election of the pope, the celibacy of
the clergy, and the abolition of simony or the purchase of
ecclesiastical preferment. The foundation for the first of
these was laid under Nicholas II. by assigning the selection
of the pope to the college of cardinals in Rome, though it was
only after some considerable time that this reform was fully
secured. The second point, the celibacy of the clergy, had
long been demanded by the church, but the requirement had not
been strictly enforced, and in many parts of Europe married
clergy were the rule. ... As interpreted by the reformers, the
third of their demands, the suppression of simony, was as great a
step in advance and as revolutionary as the first.
Technically, simony was the sin of securing an ecclesiastical
office by bribery, named from the incident recorded in the
eighth chapter of the Acts concerning Simon Magus. But at this
time the desire for the complete independence of the church
had given to it a new and wider meaning which made it include
all appointment to positions in the church by laymen,
including kings and the emperor. ... According to the
conception of the public law the bishop was an officer of the
state. He had, in the great majority of cases, political
duties to perform as important as his ecclesiastical duties.
The lands which formed the endowment of his office had always
been considered as being, still more directly than any other
feudal land, the property of the state. ...
{1443}
It was a matter of vital importance whether officers
exercising such important functions and controlling so large a
part of its area--probably everywhere as much as one-third of
the territory--should be selected by the state or by some
foreign power beyond its reach and having its own peculiar
interests to seek. But this question of lay investiture was as
vitally important for the church as for the state. ... It was
as necessary to the centralization and independence of the
church that it should choose these officers as that it should
elect the head of all--the pope. This was not a question for
Germany alone. Every northern state had to face the same
difficulty. ... The struggle was so much more bitter and
obstinate with the emperor than with any other sovereign
because of the close relation of the two powers one to
another, and because the whole question of their relative
rights was bound up with it. It was an act of rebellion on the
part of the papacy against the sovereign, who had controlled
it with almost absolute power for a century, and it was rising
into an equal, or even superior, place beside the emperor of
what was practically a new power, a rival for his imperial
position. ... It was absolutely impossible that a conflict
with these new claims should be avoided as soon as Henry IV.
arrived at an age to take the government into his own hands
and attempted to exercise his imperial rights as he understood
them."
_G. B. Adams,
Civilization During the Middle Ages,
chapter 10._
"At Gregory's accession, he [Henry] was a young man of
twenty-three. His violence had already driven a whole district
into rebellion. ... The Pope sided with the insurgents. He
summoned the young king to his judgment-seat at Rome;
threatened at his refusal to 'cut him off as a rotten limb';
and passed on him the awful sentence of excommunication. The
double terror of rebellion at home and the Church's curse at
length broke down the passionate pride of Henry. Humbled and
helpless, he crossed the Alps in midwinter, groping among the
bleak precipices and ice-fields,--the peasants passing him in
a rude sledge of hide down those dreadful slopes,--and went
to beg absolution of Gregory at the mountain castle of
Canossa. History has few scenes more dramatic than that which
shows the proud, irascible, crest-fallen young sovereign
confronted with the fiery, little, indomitable old man. To
quote Gregory's own words:--'Here he came with few attendants,
and for three days before the gate--his royal apparel laid
aside, barefoot, clad in wool, and weeping abundantly--he
never ceased to implore the aid and comfort of apostolic
mercy, till all there present were moved with pity and
compassion; insomuch that, interceding for him with many
prayers and tears they all wondered at my strange severity,
and some even cried out that it was not so much the severe
dignity of an apostle as the cruel wrath of a tyrant. Overcome
at length by the urgency of his appeal and the entreaties of
all present, I relaxed the bond of anathema, and received him
to the favor of communion and the bosom of our holy Mother the
Church.' It was a truce which one party did not mean nor the
other hope to keep. It was policy, not real terror or
conviction, that had led Henry to humble himself before the
Pope. It was policy, not contrition or compassion, that had
led Gregory (against his better judgment, it is said) to
accept his Sovereign's penance. In the war of policy, the man
of the world prevailed. Freed of the Church's curse, he
quickly won back the strength he had lost. He overthrew in
battle the rival whom Gregory upheld. He swept his rebellious
lands with sword and flame. He carried his victorious army to
Rome, and was there crowned Emperor by a rival Pope [1084].
Gregory himself was only saved by his ferocious allies, Norman
and Saracen, at cost of the devastation of half the
capital,--that broad belt of ruin which still covers the half
mile between the Coliseum and the Lateran gate. Then, hardly
rescued from the popular wrath, he went away to die, defeated
and heart-broken, at Salerno, with the almost despairing words
on his lips: 'I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and
therefore I die in exile!' But 'a spirit hath not flesh or
bones,' as a body hath, and so it will not stay mangled and
bruised. The victory lay, after all, with the combatant who
could appeal to fanaticism as well as force."
_J. H. Allen,
Christian History in its Three Great Periods:
second period,
pages 69-72._
"Meanwhile, the Saxons had recognized Hermann of Luxemburg as
their King, but in 1087 he resigned the crown: and another
claimant, Eckbert, Margrave of Meissen, was murdered. The
Saxons were now thoroughly' weary of strife, and as years and
bitter experience had softened the character of Henry, they
were the more willing to return to their allegiance. Peace was
therefore, for a time, restored in Germany. The Papacy did not
forgive Henry. He was excommunicated several times, and in
1091 his son Conrad was excited to rebel against him. In 1104
a more serious rebellion was headed by the Emperor's second
son Henry, who had been crowned King, on promising not to
seize the government during his father's lifetime, in 1099.
The Emperor was treated very cruelly, and had to sign his own
abdication at Ingelheim in 1105. A last effort was made on his
behalf by the Duke of Lotharingia; but worn out by his sorrows
and struggles, Henry died in August, 1106. His body lay in a
stone coffin in an unconsecrated chapel at Speyer for five
years. Not till 1111, when the sentence of excommunication was
removed, was it properly buried. Henry V. was not so obedient
to the Church as the Papal party had hoped. He stoutly
maintained the very point which had brought so much trouble on
his father. The right of investiture, he declared, had always
belonged to his predecessors, and he was not to give up what
they had handed on to him. In 1110 he went to Rome,
accompanied by a large army. Next year Pope Paschal II. was
forced to crown him Emperor: but as soon as the Germans had
crossed the Alps again Paschal renewed all his old demands.
The struggle soon spread to Germany. The Emperor was
excommunicated; and the discontented princes, as eager as ever
to break the royal power, sided with the Pope against him. Peace
was not restored till 1122, when Calixtus II. was Pope. In
that year, in a Diet held at Worms, both parties agreed to a
compromise, called the Concordat of Worms."
_J. Sime,
History of Germany,
chapter 8._
{1444}
"The long-desired reconciliation was effected in the form of
the following concordat. The emperor renounced the right of
investiture with the ring and crosier, and conceded that all
bishoprics of the empire should be filled by canonical
election and free consecration; the election of the German
bishops (not of the Italian and Burgundian) should be held in
presence of the emperor; the bishops elect should receive
investiture, but only of their fiefs and regalia, by the
sceptre in Germany before, in Italy and in Burgundy after,
their consecration; for these grants they should promise
fidelity to the emperor; contested elections should be decided
by the emperor in favour of him who should be considered by
the provincial synod to possess the better right. Finally he
should restore to the Roman Church all the possessions and
regalia of St. Peter. This convention secured to the Church
many things, and above all, the freedom of ecclesiastical
elections. Hitherto, the different Churches had been compelled
to give their consent to elections that had been made by the
king; but now the king was pledged to consent to the elections
made by the Churches; and although these elections took place
in his presence, he could not refuse his consent and
investiture without violating the treaty, in which he had
promised that for the future elections should be according to
the canons. This, and the great difference, that the king,
when he gave the ring and crosier, invested the bishop elect
with his chief dignity, namely, his bishopric, but now granted
him by investiture with the sceptre, only the accessories,
namely the regalia, was felt by Lothaire, the successor of
Henry, when he required of pope Innocent II. the restoration
of the right of investiture. Upon one important point, the
homage which was to be sworn to the king, the concordat was
silent. By not speaking of it, Calixtus seemed to tolerate it,
and the Roman see therefore permitted it, although it had been
prohibited by Urban and Paschal. It is certain that Calixtus
was as fully convinced as his predecessors, that the condition
of vassals, to which bishops and abbots were reduced by their
oath of homage, could hardly be reconciled with the nature and
dignity of the episcopacy, or with the freedom of the Church,
but he perhaps foresaw, that by insisting too strongly upon
its discontinuance, he might awaken again the unholy war, and
without any hopes of benefit, inflict many evils upon the
Church. Sometime later Adrian endeavoured to free the Italian
bishops from the homage, instead of which, the emperor was to
be content with an oath of fidelity: but Frederick I. would
not renounce the homage unless they resigned the regalia. The
greatest concession made by the papal see in this concordat,
was, that by its silence it appeared to have admitted the
former pretensions of the emperors to take a part in the
election of the Roman pontiff. ... In the following year the
concordat was ratified in the great council of three hundred
bishops, the ninth general council of the Church, which was
convened by Calixtus in Rome."
_J. J. I. Döllinger,
History of the Church,
volume 3, pages 345-347._
See, also, PAPACY: A. D. 1056-1122;
CANOSSA; ROME: A. D. 1081-1084;
and SAXONY: A. D. 1073-1075.
ALSO IN:
_A. F. Villemain,
Life of Gregory VII.,
book 2._
_Comte C. F. Montalembert,
The Monks of the West,
book 19._
_H. H. Milman,
History of Latin Christianity,
books 6-8._
_W. R. W. Stephens,
Hildebrand and His Times._
_E. F. Henderson,
Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages,
book 4._
GERMANY: A. D. 1101.
Disastrous Crusade under Duke Welf of Bavaria.
See CRUSADES: A. D. 1101-1102.
GERMANY: A. D. 1125.
Election of Lothaire II., King, afterwards Emperor.
GERMANY: A. D. 1125-1152.
The rise of the College of Electors.
The election of Lothaire II., in 1125, when a great assembly
of nobles and church dignitaries was convened at Mentz, and
when certain of the chiefs made a selection of candidates to
be voted for, has been regarded by some historians--Hallam,
Comyn and Dunham, for example--as indicating the origin of the
German electoral college. They have held that a right of
"pretaxation," or preliminary choice, was gradually acquired
by certain princes, which grew into the finally settled
electoral right. But this view is now looked upon as more than
questionable, and is not supported by the best authorities.
"The phrase electoral princes (electores principes) first
occurs in the Privilegium majus Austriacum, which dates from
1156, but it does not appear what princes were intended, and
the accounts extant of the elections of the rival kings,
Philip and Otho (IV.) in 1198, show beyond question that the
right of election was not then limited to a few princes. The
election of Frederick II. (1213) is only described by the
authorities in general terms. They inform us that many princes
took part in the proceedings. The following brief passage
concerning the royal elections occurs in the Auctor Vetus de
Beneficiis: 'When the king elected by the Germans goes to Rome
to be 'consecrated (the) six princes who first cast their
votes for him shall by rights accompany him that the justice
of his election may be evident to the Pope.' The
Sachsenspiegel Lehurecht substantially copies this sentence,
but designates as the six princes: 'the Bishop of Mentz and of
Treves and of Cologne, and the Palsgrave of the Rhine, the
Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg.' The
Sachsenspiegel of Landrecht is still more explicit: 'In voting
for Emperor, the first shall be the Bishop of Mentz; the
second, the (Bishop) of Treves; the third, the (Bishop) of
Cologne. The first of the laymen to vote is the Palsgrave of
the Rhine, the steward of the Empire; the second, the Duke of
Saxony, the marshal; the third, the Margrave of Brandenburg,
the chamberlain. The butler of the Empire (is) the King of
Bohemia. He has no vote because he is not German.' The obvious
inference is that these three temporal princes voted before
the rest because they were respectively the steward, marshal,
and chamberlain. In the chronicle of Albert of Stade, the
inference is given as fact in these words: 'The Palsgrave
votes because he is steward, the Duke of Saxony because (he
is) marshal, and the Margrave of Brandenburg, because (he is)
chamberlain.' The mere fact that the right of casting the
first six votes attached to six particular princes implies
that their votes greatly outweighed those of their
fellow-princes, and this is well known to have been the case
in all the elections held in the thirteenth century subsequent
to that of Frederick II. Only two others were associated with
them in the double election of Richard of Cornwall and
Alphonso of Castile (1256), namely, the King of Bohemia and
the Duke of Bavaria. The whole number of participants was
therefore eight, yet Urban IV., in a letter written March 31,
1263, to Richard of Cornwall, mentions the King of Bohemia
alone as associated with them, and incidentally states that
the 'princes having a voice' in the royal elections were
'seven in number.' It seems as if this must have been the
statement of an idea rather than of a fact, although a college
of seven electors was a recognized institution ten years
later, as the circumstances attending the election of Rudolph
of Hapsburg, demonstrate."
_S. E. Turner,
A Sketch of the Germanic Constitution,
chapter 4._
{1445}
The Mark of Brandenburg was raised to the rank of an
Electorate in 1356--not in 1152 as erroneously stated by
Carlyle. The Margraf then became Kurfürst--"one of the Seven
who have a right ... to choose, to 'kieren' the Romish Kaiser;
and who are therefore called Kur Princes, Kurfürste, or
Electors. ... Fürst (prince) I suppose is equivalent
originally to our noun of number, 'First.' The old verb
'kieren' (participle 'erkoren' still in use, not to mention
'Val-kyr' and other instances) is essentially the same word as
our 'choose,' being written 'kiesen' as well as 'kieren.' Nay,
say the etymologists, it is also written 'Küssen ('to
kiss,'--to choose with such emphasis!), and is not likely to
fall obsolete in that form.--The other Six Electoral
Dignitaries, who grew to Eight by degrees, and may be worth
noting once by the readers of this book, are:
1. Three Ecclesiastical, Mainz, Cöln, Trier (Mentz, Cologne,
Treves), Archbishops all. ...
2. Three Secular, Sachsen, Pfalz, Böhmen (Saxony, Palatinate,
Bohemia); of which the last, Böhmen, since it fell from being
a kingdom in itself, to being a Province of Austria, is not
very vocal in the Diets.
These Six, with Brandenburg, are the Seven Kurfürsts in old
time; Septemvirs of the Country, so to speak. But now Pfalz,
in the Thirty-Years War (under our Prince Rupert's Father,
whom the Germans call the 'Winter-King'), got abrogated, put
to the ban, so far as an indignant Kaiser could; and the vote
and Kur of Pfalz was given to his Cousin of Baiern
(Bavaria),--so far as an indignant Kaiser could.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1621-1623.
However, at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) it was found
incompetent to any Kaiser to abrogate Pfalz or the like of
Pfalz, a Kurfürst of the Empire. So, after jargon
inconceivable, it was settled, that Pfalz must be reinstated,
though with territories much clipped, and at the bottom of the
list, not the top as formerly; and that Baiern, who could not
stand to be balked after twenty-years possession, must be made
Eighth Elector.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1648.
The Ninth, we saw (Year 1692), was Gentleman Ernst of Hanover.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1648-1705.
There never was any Tenth."
_T. Carlyle,
Frederick the Great,
book 2, chapter 4._
"All the rules and requisites of the election were settled by
Charles the Fourth in the Golden Bull [A. D. 1356--see below:
A. D. 1347-1493], thenceforward a fundamental law of the
Empire."
_J. Bryce,
The Holy Roman Empire,
chapter 14._
GERMANY: A. D. 1138-1268.
The house of Suabia, or the Hohenstaufen.
Its struggles in Germany and Italy, and its end.
The Factions of the
Guelfs and Ghibellines.
Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick the Second.
On the death of Henry V., in 1125, the male line of the house
of Franconia became extinct. Frederick, duke of Suabia, and
his brother Conrad, duke of the Franks, were grandchildren of
Henry IV. on their mother's side, and, inheriting the
patrimonial estates, were plainly the heirs of the crown, if
the crown was to be recognized as hereditary and dynastic. But
jealousy of their house and a desire to reassert the elective
dependence of the imperial office prevailed against their
claims and their ambition. At an election which was denounced
as irregular, the choice fell upon Lothaire of Saxony. The old
imperial family was not only set aside, but its bitterest
enemies were raised over it. The consequences were a feud and
a struggle which grew and widened into the long-lasting,
far-reaching, historical conflict of Guelfs and Ghibellines.
See GUELFS AND GHIBELLINES;
also, SAXONY: DISSOLUTION OF THE OLD DUCHY.
The Saxon emperor Lothaire found his strongest support in the
great Wölf, Welf, or Guelf nobleman, Henry the Proud, duke of
Bavaria, to whom he (Lothaire) now gave his daughter in
marriage, together with the dukedom of Saxony, and whom he
intended to make his successor on the imperial throne. But the
scheme failed. On Lothaire's death, in 1138, the partisans of
the Suabian family carried the election of Conrad (the
Crusader--see CRUSADES: A. D. 1147-1149), and the dynasty most
commonly called Hohenstaufen rose to power. It took the name
of Hohenstaufen from its original family seat on the lofty
hill of Staufen, in Suabia, overlooking the valley of the
Rems. Its party, in the wars and factions of the time,
received the name of the Waiblingen, from the birth-place of
the Suabian duke Frederick--the little town of Waiblingen in
Franconia. Under the tongue of the Italians, when these party
names and war-cries were carried across the Alps, Waiblingen
became Ghibelline and Welf became Guelf. During the first half
century of the reign of the Hohenstaufen, the history of
Germany is the history, for the most part, of the strife in
which the Guelf dukes, Henry the Proud and Henry the Lion, are
the central figures, and which ended in the breaking up of the
old powerful duchy of Saxony. But Italy was the great
historical field of the energies and the ambitions of the
Hohenstaufen emperors. There, Frederick Barbarossa (Frederick
Red beard, as the Italians called him), the second of the
line, and Frederick II., his adventurous grandson, fought
their long, losing battle with the popes and with the
city-republics of Lombardy and Tuscany.
_U. Balzani,
The Popes and the Hohenstaufen._