The Investiture Controversy and Canossa

Under the year 1075 the register of Pope Gregory VII holds a list of twenty-seven sentences headed Dictatus papae (Gregory VII, Register 2.55a (Caspar, pp. 201–202, with note 1)). Among them: the pope alone can depose or reinstate bishops, he may depose emperors, he may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men, and he himself may be judged by no one (Gregory VII, Register 2.55a). The list as it stands there names no addressee and gives no reason for its making (Gregory VII, Register 2.55a).

In December 1075 Gregory wrote to the German king Henry IV (emperor). He rebuked him for keeping company with excommunicated men and for giving the churches of Fermo and Spoleto to persons unknown to the pope, and held up to him the decrees of that year’s Roman synod (Gregory VII, Register 3.10). Henry replied in a letter addressed to “Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk”, which ends by ordering him, in the name of the king and all his bishops, to come down from the apostolic chair (Henry IV, Letters, to Hildebrand (1076)). At his Lenten synod of 1076 in Rome Gregory answered in the form of a prayer to St Peter (Gregory VII, Register 3.10a (Caspar, pp. 268–271)). He withdrew from Henry the rule of the kingdom of the Germans and of Italy, released all Christians from their oaths to him, and bound him with anathema (Gregory VII, Register 3.10a).

The chronicler Lampert of Hersfeld reports that later in 1076 the German princes told Henry that he would lose the kingdom for good unless he was absolved before the anniversary of his excommunication, and that they asked the pope to judge the case at Augsburg in February. Henry, he says, hurried over the Alps in a hard winter; the queen and her women were let down the icy slopes on ox-hides. Gregory, on his way north, turned aside at the urging of Matilda of Tuscany to the fortress of Canossa (Lampert of Hersfeld, Annals 1076 (pp. 281–283)) (Lampert of Hersfeld, Annals 1077 (pp. 286–288)).

Gregory described what followed in a letter to the German princes. Henry came with a few followers, laid aside the trappings of royalty and stood for three days before the castle gate, barefoot and clad in wool, asking with tears for absolution, until all who were present pleaded for him. Gregory then loosed the anathema and received him into communion, taking guarantees from the abbot of Cluny, from Matilda and the countess Adelaide, and from other princes. The whole matter, he adds, is still undecided, and he still means to come to Germany (Gregory VII, Register 4.12). Henry swore to do justice or make peace with the princes as the pope should judge, and to give the pope safe passage (Gregory VII, Register 4.12a). Lampert tells the scene at greater length and with details that Gregory’s letter lacks: a castle with three walls, the king fasting from morning until evening, admission on the fourth day, and a condition that Henry use no royal insignia until his case was heard (Lampert of Hersfeld, Annals 1077 (pp. 292–293)).

The conflict went on. Three years later Gregory said that he had restored Henry to communion and not to the kingdom; by then the princes had elected Duke Rudolf king, and Gregory excommunicated Henry a second time (Gregory VII, Register 7.14a). A Roman synod of 1078 forbade any cleric to receive a bishopric, abbey or church from the hand of an emperor, king or any lay person (Gregory VII, Register 6.5b, c. 3). Bernold of Constance, a chronicler on the pope’s side, records that in 1084 Henry entered Rome and was crowned at Easter by Guibert of Ravenna, whom excommunicated bishops had ordained as pope, and that Gregory died at Salerno on 25 May 1085 (Bernold of Constance, Chronicle 1084 (p. 440)) (Bernold of Constance, Chronicle 1085 (p. 444)). The agreement on investiture that was reached in 1122 is told in the Concordat of Worms.