The Concordat of Worms

The popes since Gregory VII had condemned the investiture of bishops by lay hands (The Investiture Controversy and Canossa), and yet, as Pope Paschal II wrote in February 1111, a bishop-elect in the German kingdom was not consecrated until the king had invested him (Paschal II, privileges for Henry V (1111) privilege of 12 February). Paschal proposed a way out. Bishops, his privilege says, had become servants of the royal court because they held cities, duchies, counties, mints and tolls from the crown; these were to go back to the king, who would give up investiture (Paschal II, privileges for Henry V (1111) privilege of 12 February) (Ekkehard of Aura, Chronicle 1111 (p. 244)). The chronicler Ekkehard of Aura reports that when the terms were read out in Rome the princes protested furiously at the loss to the churches and to themselves, and that the pope was then kept under guard by the king’s men (Ekkehard of Aura, Chronicle 1111 (p. 244)). A second privilege, of April, granted Henry V (emperor) investiture with staff and ring (Paschal II, privileges for Henry V (1111) privilege of 12 April).

The settlement came eleven years later under Pope Callixtus II. Ekkehard describes a general assembly at Worms in September 1122, where the princes worked for a week or more to make peace. The pope’s legates, led by the bishop of Ostia, received the emperor and his army back into communion. Two charters were exchanged and read out in a field by the Rhine because of the size of the crowd, and the bishop of Ostia celebrated mass and gave the emperor the kiss of peace and communion (Ekkehard of Aura, Chronicle 1122 (pp. 259–260)).

In his charter Henry gives up “all investiture through ring and staff”, grants canonical election and free consecration in all the churches of his kingdom and empire, and promises to restore the possessions of the Roman church and of other churches lost in the conflict (Concordat of Worms edict of the emperor). In return Callixtus grants that the bishops and abbots of the German kingdom shall be elected in the emperor’s presence, without simony or violence. If an election is disputed, the emperor is to support the party with the better right, on the advice of the metropolitan and the bishops of the province. The one elected receives the regalia from the emperor by the sceptre and owes him what is due for them. In the other parts of the empire the bishop is consecrated first and receives the regalia within six months (Concordat of Worms privilege of the pope) (Ekkehard of Aura, Chronicle 1122 (p. 260)).

By these terms investiture with ring and staff no longer passes through the ruler’s hands (Concordat of Worms edict of the emperor), while the regalia, the cities, counties, tolls and other rights that a bishop holds from the crown, still do (Paschal II, privileges for Henry V (1111) privilege of 12 February) (Concordat of Worms privilege of the pope). The council that Callixtus held at the Lateran in 1123 repeated the rules of the reform: no one is to be ordained for money, no one consecrated bishop without canonical election, and no lay person is to dispose of the church’s affairs or goods (First Lateran Council, canons 1, 3, 8).