Investiture Controversy

For roughly half a century, from the 1070s to 1122, the popes and the German emperors struggled over who had the right to appoint bishops and abbots, and over the wider question of whether spiritual or secular power was supreme. The quarrel, known as the Investiture Controversy, pitted Pope Gregory VII against King Henry IV and later Henry V against a series of popes. It ended with the Concordat of Worms, a compromise that strengthened the papacy and left the Holy Roman Empire permanently weaker.

Investiture was the ceremony in which a new bishop or abbot received the symbols of office. Since the early Middle Ages it had often been performed by kings and nobles, because bishoprics and abbeys carried great wealth and land. In Germany, from the time of Otto the Great, bishops served as princes of the empire, royal advisers and suppliers of troops, so the emperors had every reason to choose them. Church reformers objected to the sale of church offices, known as simony, and to lay control generally. The emperors also influenced papal elections: between 1046 and 1056 Henry III resolved a papal schism and named several popes.

Henry III died in 1056, leaving a six-year-old heir, Henry IV. In 1059 a synod under Pope Nicholas II ruled that popes should be chosen by cardinals, with no part for lay nobles, and banned lay investiture. The German bishops declared these decrees void, but the next two popes, Alexander II and Gregory VII, were elected under the new rules. In 1075 Gregory drew up the Dictatus papae, a statement of papal powers that included the right to depose emperors, and a council in Rome reserved to the pope the appointment and removal of churchmen.

Henry IV, now an adult, kept appointing bishops. When Gregory protested, Henry and his bishops wrote denouncing him as a false monk and demanding a new election. In 1076 Gregory excommunicated Henry and released his subjects from their oaths of loyalty. Facing a revolt by German princes, Henry had to submit. In 1077 he went to Canossa in northern Italy, where the pope was staying with Countess Matilda, and, according to the traditional account, stood barefoot in the snow as a penitent until Gregory lifted the excommunication.

The reconciliation did not last. The rebel princes elected a rival king, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, and in 1080 Gregory excommunicated Henry again. Henry's bishops declared Gregory deposed and chose Guibert of Ravenna as pope, Clement III, who is regarded by the Catholic Church as an antipope. Henry besieged Rome, entered it in 1084 and was crowned emperor by Clement. Gregory's Norman ally Robert Guiscard drove Henry out, but his troops plundered Rome, and Gregory, blamed by the citizens, left with the Normans and died in exile at Salerno in May 1085. His successor's successor, Urban II, preached the First Crusade.

Henry IV was forced to abdicate at the end of 1105 by his son, Henry V, who soon took up the same cause. In 1111 he seized Pope Paschal II and his cardinals and extracted the right of investiture and an imperial coronation, but the pope withdrew the concession the following year. Meanwhile England had reached its own settlement in 1107, after a dispute involving Henry I and Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury. On 23 September 1122, near Worms, Henry V and Pope Callixtus II agreed a similar compromise. The emperor gave up investing bishops with the ring and staff, the symbols of spiritual authority, and accepted church elections; in Germany elections were to take place in his presence, and he would confer the bishop's worldly powers with a sceptre.

The papacy emerged with greater authority, while the German monarchy, weakened by decades of revolt, lost much of its control over the church and over its own nobles. Many historians see the long division of Germany and Italy as rooted partly in this decline.

Our 1100 map shows the Holy Roman Empire and the Papal States at the height of the dispute.