This traditional world, with its mixture of ritual and informality, underwent a profound change in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. We will return to the bishops shortly to see how they were affected, but we now need to look at the mechanism of the change itself. It was a process normally known, after one of the popes involved, as the Gregorian Reform, though it began before the pontificate of Gregory VII, and the term ‘reform’ was hardly ever used by Gregory himself. The movement led to the increased bureaucratization of the Church, though this was not the result that its leaders had desired. They had wished to see a church in which the sacred was more clearly differentiated from the worldly. Clergy, monks, and nuns, already differentiated from the lay population of the Church through clothing and (at least theoretically) behaviour, were to be more sharply defined still; by contrast, there was a tendency to treat the laity, although members of the Church through baptism, as profane. The roots of the movement lay outside Rome itself, in tenth-century Italian monastic movements inspired by Greek hermits, and among some leading Italian, Burgundian, and Lotharingian ecclesiastics in the eleventh century. The views put forward—hostility to clerical marriage and the inheritance of churches (which the reformers termed ‘Nicolaitism’*), and to the purchase of sacred office (known as simony*, after the attempt by Simon Magus to buy the ability to work miracles recorded in the Acts of the Apostles) --had been standard features of canon-law collections from the late Roman period onwards. In practice, however, the ban on marriage had not been strictly enforced at sub-episcopal level. Simony, in the sense of purchase of sacraments such as the consecration of bishops, was probably relatively unusual, but in the sense of making gifts to patrons in return for the landed endowments of churches, a tactic that the reformers disliked, it was perfectly normal. Possibly an increasing use of money in transactions in the eleventh century led to inflation in the size of such gifts, and aroused anxiety as to their appropriateness, an anxiety felt most acutely in northern Italy and southern France.
Members of the reforming circles made their entry into the Roman Church through the Emperor Henry III (1039-56), who approved strongly of their ideas and who wished to see them reflected in the papacy itself, since a papacy with enhanced moral authority would confer more prestige on the role of the emperor, who was crowned by the pope. Henry was responsible for nominating a series of reforming popes of non-Roman origin. One of these, Leo IX (1049-54), made the firmest statement yet against simony at the synod of Rheims in 1049 by ordering those bishops present to state whether they had bought their office, and removing the staffs of those who admitted that they had. Leo also transformed the senior clerics in Rome, the cardinals, from a body of clergy of Roman origin and Roman horizons into a much more international group, some of whom could be sent as legates (envoys) to hear disputes outside Rome, thus building up a range of contacts for the pope in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere. Slightly later, Pope Nicholas II (1059-61) gave the cardinals the exclusive right to elect his successors. This would have been a step too far for Henry III, who approved of imperial involvement in papal elections, but he had died three years earlier, and his heir, Henry IV, was a child. The papacy continued to consolidate its links with places outside Rome in the last four decades of the eleventh century. Contacts with northern Spain led to strong papal support for campaigns by the northern kingdoms against al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), including the capture of Toledo in 1085; contacts with France led to papal involvement in ecclesiastical disputes, which in the case of Archbishop Manasses of Rheims (1060-80), one of the most prominent members of the French episcopate, led to his deposition by the legate Hugh of Die (d. 1106). This was confirmed by Gregory VII, illustrating the increase in papal authority north of the Alps. The papacy also began to intervene in disputes in the imperial Church, above all in the disputed election of the archbishop of Milan, in which Gregory VII supported a populist reforming movement, the Pataria, against the candidate desired by Henry IV.
It was this dispute over Milan that began what was to be a lengthy breakdown in relations between the papacy and the empire, which continued under Henry IV’s and Gregory VII’s successors until as late as 1122, even though both sides were actively seeking a solution to The impasse from 1111 onwards. During the course of the dispute the point at issue became the question of whether laymen, including kings, should have the power to invest churchmen with office, centring particularly on the ritual by which kings invested bishops with their staffs. Henry IV obtained the support of the imperial bishops in 1076 for Gregory VII’s deposition, to which Gregory speedily retaliated by excommunicating Henry. Peace between the two sides was briefly achieved through a penitential ritual performed by Henry at Canossa in 1077, but in 1080, having once more deposed Gregory, he created a rival pope (or antipope* in the eyes of his opponents), Clement (III) (Archbishop Guibert of Ravenna), while the official line of popes, finding it hard to maintain their position in Rome, spent more time elsewhere—sometimes in southern Italy with the support of the Norman rulers there, and sometimes in France. Their widening political contacts made it easy for Urban II to ask a ‘second tier’ of European leaders (including the count of Toulouse, the duke of Normandy, and the south Italian leaders) for help in protecting Christians in the East at the Council of Clermont in November 1095. Increasingly frequent papal intervention in ecclesiastical affairs far from Rome, and the authority assumed by the pope in declaring what became the First Crusade (see Chapter 6), now began to encourage parties involved in ecclesiastical disputes to appeal to the pope. A steadily growing papal involvement in litigation led to a steady rise in appeals to the pope and thus in the documentation of legal proceedings. What had begun as an anxiety about ritual and the purity of the sacred was turning into a need for notaries and lawyers.
World History
