Pope Gregory VII

Gregory VII, born Hildebrand, was pope from 1073 to 1085 and the driving force behind the great eleventh-century reform of the Western Church that historians call the Gregorian Reform. He fought simony, the buying and selling of church offices, and enforced celibacy on the clergy, and he claimed for the papacy a supreme authority over the whole Church and even over kings. His struggle with the German king and emperor Henry IV, known as the Investiture Controversy, produced the famous scene of the humbled ruler at Canossa and changed the relationship between church and state in Europe.

Hildebrand was born in Sovana, a small town in southern Tuscany in today's Italy, probably between about 1015 and 1025; the exact year is not known, and later reports that his father was a blacksmith or a peasant may be legend. He was sent young to Rome, where he was educated at a monastery on the Aventine hill. He became chaplain to Pope Gregory VI, and when that pope was deposed at the Synod of Sutri in 1046 by the emperor Henry III, on suspicion of having bought his office, Hildebrand followed him into exile at Cologne. Some chroniclers say he then became a monk at the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny, though this is disputed.

In 1049 he returned to Rome with the new pope, Leo IX, the first of a series of reforming popes appointed under imperial influence. For the next quarter of a century Hildebrand served them as a trusted administrator, legate and adviser, rising to archdeacon of the Roman Church and managing its finances and the Papal States. He supported the decree of 1059 under Nicholas II that gave the election of popes to the cardinals, reducing the role of the Roman nobility and the emperor, and he helped build an alliance between the papacy and the Normans of southern Italy.

When Pope Alexander II died in April 1073, the crowd at his funeral in the Lateran acclaimed Hildebrand as pope, and the cardinals confirmed the choice the same day. He took the name Gregory VII, probably in memory of his old patron.

Gregory pursued the reform agenda with an intensity new even among the reformers. At synods in Rome he condemned simony and ordered that married priests should not celebrate Mass, and he sent legates across Europe to depose bishops who resisted. Clerical marriage had been common in many regions, and his measures provoked anger and even riots among the clergy, but over the following generations celibacy became the norm in the Latin Church. In 1074 he proposed leading an expedition himself to help the Byzantine Empire and the Christians of the East against the Seljuk Turks, a plan that came to nothing but anticipated the Crusades launched twenty years later.

His view of papal power is summed up in the Dictatus papae, a list of twenty-seven propositions entered into his register in 1075. They state, among other things, that the Roman Church has never erred, that the pope alone may depose bishops, that all princes should kiss his feet, and that he may depose emperors and release subjects from their oaths of loyalty to wicked rulers. Historians debate whether it was a programme, a set of headings for a collection of church law, or private notes, but it shows how far his claims went.

The most explosive issue was investiture, the practice by which kings and emperors appointed bishops and abbots and invested them with the ring and staff, the symbols of their office. In the Holy Roman Empire bishops were also great landholders and royal officials, and since the time of Otto I the German kings had relied on them to govern. Gregory forbade lay investiture, and in 1075 the young king Henry IV defied him by appointing his own candidate as archbishop of Milan.

In January 1076 Henry and the bishops of Germany, meeting at Worms, declared Gregory deposed, addressing him as "Hildebrand, now no pope but false monk". Gregory replied in February by excommunicating Henry and declaring him deposed, releasing his subjects from their allegiance. It was an unprecedented step, and it worked: rebellious German princes, especially in Saxony, seized the chance and threatened to elect a new king unless Henry was absolved within a year.

Henry crossed the Alps in midwinter to forestall an alliance between the pope and his enemies. In January 1077 he arrived at Canossa, a castle in the northern Apennines belonging to Gregory's ally, Countess Matilda of Tuscany, where the pope was staying. According to the accounts, the king stood at the gate for three days as a barefoot penitent in the snow before Gregory absolved him. The scene became a symbol of the submission of secular power to the Church, though in the short term it was a political success for Henry, who recovered his position.

The German princes elected a rival king, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, anyway, and civil war followed. In 1080 Gregory excommunicated and deposed Henry a second time. This time the move backfired. Henry's supporters elected an antipope, Archbishop Wibert of Ravenna, as Clement III, and when Rudolf died of wounds after a battle later that year, Henry was free to march on Italy. After years of sieges he took most of Rome in 1084, and Clement crowned him emperor, while Gregory held out in the Castel Sant'Angelo.

Gregory's Norman ally, Robert Guiscard, came to his rescue in May 1084 and drove out the imperial forces, but his troops sacked Rome so violently that the Roman people turned against the pope who had called them. Gregory left the city with the Normans and spent his last months at Salerno, where he died on 25 May 1085. His epitaph in Salerno Cathedral records his last words, to the effect that he had loved justice and hated iniquity and therefore died in exile.

Gregory died apparently defeated, but the reform he had pushed survived him. The investiture dispute was settled only in 1122 by the Concordat of Worms, a compromise in which the emperor gave up investing bishops with ring and staff, the symbols of spiritual office, while keeping a role in their selection and in granting their lands. The broader result was a papacy far stronger and more centralised than before, with its own law and administration, which reached the height of its power under Innocent III a century later. The distinction he forced between spiritual and secular authority is often seen as one of the roots of the separation of church and state in the West. Admirers praised him as a fearless defender of the freedom of the Church, while opponents in his own day, and later Protestant writers, portrayed him as an arrogant tyrant. He was beatified in 1584 and canonised as a saint in 1728.