Salians (1024-1150)

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Electing a most unlikely successor to Henry II

Our history of the Hanse has come to an end, not with a bang but with a whimper. Of the things that have remained we have already talked a lot, the ideal of the honourable Hanseatic merchant, the cultural and political links to Scandinavia and the stories. The stories of the famous pirates, Klaus Störtebecker and Hans Benecke, the heroics of the wars fought with Denmark and the antics of Jurgen Wullenwever.

But there is something that reminds us of the days when traders speaking low German fed Europe fish, beer and grain. And that are the cultural achievements, the town halls, weighing houses and stores that became symbols of civic pride, the artists whose works adorn churches and palaces across the Baltic sea and last but not least the brick churches that shaped the way these cities still appear..…let’s have a look.

As the economic boom of the middle-ages gains pace people begin to think beyond their next meal and a roof over their head for the night They call for an end to the constant violence creating the peace movement that emerges in France and encompasses the whole of Europe. That movement is closely intertwined with the crusades, which begin in 1095 not least as a means to channel military restlessness away from the domestic peasants to the foreign lands.

Once the physiological needs of food, water, warmth and rest are covered and some degree of safety is provided, more and more people move up Maslow’s pyramid looking for belonging, love, status, knowledge, aesthetic beauty, self-actualisation and ultimately transcendence. In the 11th century the afterlife becomes the dominating concern of everyone from the mightiest aristocrat to the lowliest peasant. Therefore, priests and clergy are held to ever higher standards to ensure the effectiveness of prayer and worship in providing access to heaven. The idea that even after your death prayers by those still alive could improve your status in Purgatory drives generous donation to monasteries in exchange for their eternal prayers. It kick-starts frantic construction activity during which the great Romanesque cathedrals of Speyer, Mainz, and Worms rise up.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Season 2 of the History of the Germans – The Salians. I am really excited because this is the big one, the bit of German medieval history you really need to know about.

We start with Episode 22: Konrad II – who would have thought?

It has been a while since we stopped the narrative and so we should best start with a bit of context.

We are in the year 1024 and this season will cover almost exactly a century, until the end of the Salian dynasty in 1125. This is a period of quite fundamental change, not just in the Empire but in Europe more generally.

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As the economic boom of the middle-ages gains pace people begin to think beyond their next meal and a roof over their head for the night They call for an end to the constant violence creating the peace movement that emerges in France and encompasses the whole of Europe. That movement is closely intertwined with the crusades, which begin in 1095 not least as a means to channel military restlessness away from the domestic peasants to the foreign lands.

Once the physiological needs of food, water, warmth and rest are covered and some degree of safety is provided, more and more people move up Maslow’s pyramid looking for belonging, love, status, knowledge, aesthetic beauty, self-actualisation and ultimately transcendence. In the 11th century the afterlife becomes the dominating concern of everyone from the mightiest aristocrat to the lowliest peasant. Therefore, priests and clergy are held to ever higher standards to ensure the effectiveness of prayer and worship in providing access to heaven. The idea that even after your death prayers by those still alive could improve your status in Purgatory drives generous donation to monasteries in exchange for their eternal prayers. It kick-starts frantic construction activity during which the great Romanesque cathedrals of Speyer, Mainz, and Worms rise up.

At the same time increased wealth allow the secular powers to expand their military capabilities.  Stone castles sitting atop unassailable hills begin to replace manor houses and motte and bailey castles. The size of armies gradually increases, and the armoured riders of the Carolingian and Ottonian period gradually turn into actual knights.

And finally, new political entities emerge that either did not exist before or had been insignificant players on the international stage.

The most famous of such new entities to emerge is Norman England. They invade in 1066, less than halfway through the Salian period and establish a powerful entity that begins to project power beyond its own borders. England had hitherto been insignificant on an international stage, if you exclude the brief rule of King Canute.

But that is not the only state the Normans created. In this same period, a small group of pilgrims/mercenaries from Normandy managed to play the three powers in Southern Italy, the Byzantines, the Muslims and the Lombard dukes against each other until they themselves had conquered all the territories of their former employers and forced the pope to accept them as kings of Sicily.

This is also during this time of the first and only really successful crusade that created the Kingdom of Jerusalem and other crusader states. The Crusade movement was however not limited to the Near East. The kingdoms of Portugal, Lean, Castile, Aragon and Navarre conquered more than half of the Iberian Peninsula from the various Muslim kingdoms.

We have already seen the new kingdoms of Poland and Hungary appearing on the map during the 10th century. As we will see in this narrative, these polities will gain coherence and identity distinct from the empire. And another power comes into contact with western Europe, Russia, or more precisely the rulers of Kiev who forge political and marriage alliances with their neighbours.

Whilst new coherent political entities emerge around them, the French kings reach the low-point of their power under Henry I (1031-1061) when they barely control more than Paris and its surroundings. His weakness meant that not only his powerful vassals did as they liked but also smaller noblemen could become robber barons who plundered and murdered anyone crossing their land. The kingdom was sinking into chaos. His successors, Louis VI and Louis VII managed to drag the monarchy out of the hole and patiently expanded and pacified their territory so that by the end of the Salian period they were well on their way to face up against the Angevin empire in the 2 sets of 100 years wars with England.

The other key shift is in social order. The rise in economic activity gives birth to a merchant class based in the cities. That trend is most pronounced in Italy, but it also happens everywhere else in Europe. In Italy the city populations continue to clash with the bishops who often rule the city and the magnates who control the countryside. The rise of urban freedoms in Italy provides inspiration for cities north of the alps to chuck out their bishops and seek political self-determination.

If you take the 10,000 feet view of what has happened here, the striking thing is the absence of a central power. A central power that could organise the crusades, conquer Spain, provide law and order in France and clean up Southern Italy.

In 1024, when emperor Henry II, the last of the Ottonians passed away, such a central power existed. The German kingdom, by the standards of the times was a well-ordered political entity with a monarch who could command considerable resources, mainly through his control of church lands and military resources.

The question why Henry II’s successors did not consolidate Europe under their rule and why Europe today has this great diversity of languages, culture and history within a territory half the size of Canada is the story of these 100 years between 1024 and 1125, the hundred years of Salian rule.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

On July 13th, 1024 Emperor Henry II succumbed to his long-standing health issues. Henry II had no children. He did not even have nephews. In fact there was nobody at all in the male line to continue his, the Ottonian dynasty.

And worse, he did not make any plans for his succession. As a deeply pious man who saw his job in turning the empire into a “House of God”. In that logic, if the House would please the lord, the lord would select a worthy successor, and if he did not, then it is not worth saving in the first place.

That view may have been quite saintly but must have scared the hell out of everyone else. Previous transitions of power even where the new ruler had been designated by his predecessor had caused huge uncertainty. The civil wars of 936, 955, 982 and 1002 cannot have been forgotten.

The chronicler Wipo described the situation as follows:

Quote: “After the emperor’s passing the state orphaned by the loss of its father began to sway. All well-meaning men were gripped by fear though wicked men were hoping for the destruction of the realm. (and further) Since the emperor had died without offspring the magnates strived to become the first or if that fails the closest to the first, using force rather than wisdom” Unquote

The situation did not tip into civil war for two reasons.

First, a date for an election was set quickly for early September, just six weeks after the Henry II’s death which is about as fast as anyone can organise anything in the 11th century.

And second, control of the empire during that time of transition lay in the hands of empress Kunigunde. Kunigunde had been closely involved in all imperial affairs during her husband’s reign and was well respected. She, together with her extended and powerful family manage the empire during these tense times as smoothly as these things can be done.

On September 4th, 1024, representatives of the Swabians, Bavarians, Franconians and Lotharingians meet in Kamba, a now lost location on the left bank of the Rhine to elect a new king. That is four of the five great stems of the East Francian kingdom. Only the Saxons stayed at home, though they did hold a meeting amongst themselves to discuss the succession.

These four stems now proceeded to elect a new king. The question on everyone’s lips was now, how are we to elect a new king? What are the criteria?

One concept would be descendance from a previous emperor. In 1024 there was literally nobody who descended from a previous king in the male line, which is quite an achievement given women were expected to produce children to the point of total exhaustion or death. Part of the problem had been that the Ottonians consistently turned their offspring into bishops and abbesses, clearly disregarding the urge to prolong the dynasty. The second issue was that younger brothers had a habit of rebelling, which is why the childless Henry II forced his only brother to become a bishop!

It is not even clear whether blood alone would have been enough. The concept of primogeniture was comparatively new and only been introduced by King Henry the Fowler in 935 and not yet widely recognised. Henry II had claimed the throne based on being the closest descendant in the male line of king Henry I, but that was by no means acknowledged by everyone. He ultimately had to capture the throne in a coup, bypassing election.

In terms of blood relations, the closest were the two sons of the Count palatinate Ezzo who had married Otto III sister. Next up from there may be the son of the king of Hungary, whose mother was a sister of Henry II. And then you had the descendants of Konrad the Red who was married to one of Otto the great’s sisters. But given that the ultimate winner of this contest barely mentioned his  relation to the Ottonians, we can be confident that this was not the most relevant criteria.

But that does not mean any Tom, Dick or Harry could become emperor. Lineage is important. A future king must have pedigree and ideally a pedigree that goes bock to Charlemagne or even the Merovingians, who, as we all know, are descendants of a sea monster. That narrows it down to maybe about 500-1000 individuals in total.

But that does not really answer the question. How do they choose amongst these 500-1000 individuals of great ancestry?

Well, there are some general requirements for kingship like being a religious and moral person willing to defend the church, being willing to uphold the law and in particular the privileges of the elite, being merciful and being successful in battle.

These criteria are far too vague to whittle this down to a more manageable shortlist.

Ultimately it came down to politics. The winner of the contest was the one whose selection would please more than anyone else whilst irritating the smallest possible number. He, and I may have forgotten to mention it, it could only ever be a “he”, had to be powerful enough to be an effective ruler, but not so powerful that he would frustrate the other nobles’ ambitions. He had to have connections into most stems, but not be dominant in any of them.

Hence the election itself was not a voting process as we would recognise it, but a negotiation marathon that ended with one unanimous acclamation at the end. Wipo describes how the magnates camped along both shores of the rhine in tent villages organised by stems. They would then negotiate in secret gatherings and envoys were constantly going from tent to tent.

Over several days of negotiations that list was whittled down to two cousins, both called Konrad.

They were both descendants of Konrad the Red. You may remember him, he was the son-in-law of Otto the Great who became duke of Lothringia, then fell out with the emperor and joined Liudolf’s rebellion and, after bending the knee, fought valiantly in the battle on the Lechfeld where he died.

Konrad the Red’s direct ancestors are a bit of a muddle, but the family claims direct descendance from the great Clovis, king of all the Franks and founder of the Merovingian dynasty (we met him in part 2 of the Prologue). That is pretty much as good a lineage as one could possibly have. Clovis was believed to have been a Salian Frank, i.e., a member of the subtribe of the Franks that originated from the area around Worms. You may recognise the name from the so-called Salic or Salian law, a Frankish law code compiled by Clovis. We know the Salic law today as shorthand for excluding women from the inheritance of titles or monarchic roles. It was a lot more than that, but let’s not deviate too much.

Anyway, Clovis was a Salian and Konrad the Red’s family, being descendants of Clovis and holders of the lands where the Salian Franks had originated became known as “the Salians”.

The Salians had benefitted from the demise of the dukes of Franconia in 938 and created a coherent power base around the city of Worms, about 70 km south of Frankfurt. This was probably one of the first territorial entities where a magnate consolidated the lands and rights around a specific area into one coherent entity. Up until now aristocrats would often have lands and rights spread across the kingdom, they would hold the office of duke or count in one place, whilst their private lands are in a different part of the country. This Salian territory was different and thanks to being geographically connected and its rights and privileges going fairly deep, a lot more powerful than its optical size indicates. The Salians also worked hard to keep the territory together and -other than their peers – did not divide it between male descendants – there was only ever one descendant who would inherit all. The Salians also held the office of the duke of Carinthia from time to time, though they put little effort into this post a long way away from their personal possessions.

The two members of the Salians that made the shortlist, Konrad the Younger and Konrad the Elder were cousins. Konrad the elder’s father had died when he was quite young so that the control of the Salian territory moved from his branch of the family to the father of Konrad the younger and ultimately with Konrad the Younger himself. Konrad the Younger was the rich and powerful one.

Konrad the elder on the other hand was effectively disinherited except for some middling county he had received as a consolation prize. But he was not completely without means. He had rescued his finances by marrying Gisela, daughter of duke Herman of Swabia and widow of Ernst, duke of Swabia. Gisela had the guardianship for her son Ernst II which meant she controlled the duchy of Swabia.

The elder Konrad did hence fit the other two key criteria:

  1. he was well connected in Franconia where he came from, in Swabia through his wife, in Carinthia through his Grandfather and in Lothringia through his great grandfather -Tick
  2. but in none of these duchies did he have a controlling position – another tick in the box.

And then there was the clincher that made Konrad the elder look really attractive to the electors – Konrad was the diametrical opposite of Henry II.

Henry II had been an exceptionally well-read individual who was brought up to become a cleric. He preferred the company of bishops and monks over that of his secular vassals. Moreover, his interest in theology had led him to pursue a rigorous definition of incest that invalidated almost all marriages amongst the upper nobility and cause untold misery for many couples. Konrad II on the other hand had been trained to become a fighter, not a preacher, so never learned to read or write and was unlikely to disappear down a doctrinal rabbit hole.

Henry II was a sickly individual suffering from various ailment including rather painful gallstones. Konrad II on the other hand must have been one of the tallest and physically most powerful men of his time. He was nearly 2.0m tall, had broad shoulders and was known to have ridden for 100 miles without stopping. To put that into perspective, at a time when the average height was about 1.69m. Charlemagne who was described as “of lofty stature was a lot shorter at between 1.8 and 1.9m tall.

Henry II could draw on the resources of the well organised and rich duchy of Bavaria when he ascended the throne, making him less dependent upon his lords for vassalage. Konrad II had no material resources in his own right. His access to the resources of Swabia was indirect and temporary until Ernst II reached maturity.

And finally, Henry II had no children, whilst Konrad II already had a son at the time of the election.

For the German lords who regarded Henry II as a tyrant not being like Henry II was a massive plus point.

Konrad’s opposition to Henry II was well known. He had fought in several rebellions against Henry II and only reconciled with the emperor a few years before 1024.

One argument that stood against the elder Konrad was that because of that disinheritance thing, the younger Konrad was technically the head of the Salian family, making it hard to elect his minor cousin without the younger Konrad’s acceptance.

That is where the winning Konrad’s skill in negotiation comes to the fore. By some means not recorded he convinced the younger Konrad to agree that if either of them would be elected, the other would not contest the election. That was not the cleverest thing to do for the younger Konrad who had the resources to mount a serious threat in case of an election of the elder Konrad, whilst the elder Konrad could not realistically hope to unseat the younger Konrad. When the two Konrad’s sealed their agreement with a kiss in front of the magnates realised they could go with their preferred option, and the majority went for the elder Konrad as king Konrad II.

Now this is my interpretation based on the fundamental differences in character, resources and political position between Henry II and Konrad II. Many historians have very different views stressing continuity between Henry II and Konrad II. That view is based on the fact that Konrad II received strong support from ecclesiastical lords, first and foremost from archbishop Aribo of Mainz who had been a close associate of Henry II and heavily involved in his policy to prosecute secular lords for marrying close relatives.

We will probably never know exactly what motivated the electors in this, the first free election of a German king. There were likely lots of side-deals and promises, some of which will not be kept as many protagonists will find out shortly.

Once it was clear the pendulum would swing in favour of the elder Konrad, the archbishop of Cologne and the duke of Lothringia left the meeting at Kamba. As I said before, this is not an election that comes out with a 60/40 result. The result had to be 100% as it reflected gods will. Dissenters had to leave the assembly, which is what they did.

They had no hope in electing someone else, since the alternative candidate, Konrad the Younger had voted for his cousin. All they wanted was more privileges from the emperor in exchange for their vote. And that is what they got, thanks to some very odd behaviour of the archbishop of Mainz.

Following the election, the assembly proceeded to crown the new emperor in Mainz. As you all know, you need two things for a viable coronation, the imperial insignia and the correct archbishop. The former was procured quickly as the previous empress Kunigunde recognised the election and handed the insignia, including the Holy Lance over to the archbishop of Mainz. Aribo of Mainz was also the correct archbishop as the pope had awarded the right to crown the German king to the church of Mainz.

So, on September 8th, four days after election Konrad is crowned and anointed in the cathedral at Mainz. Who is not crowned and not anointed at the same time is the new empress, Gisela. There are endless speculation why Aribo refused to crown Gisela. The leading theory is that Aribo had refused it on the grounds that Konrad and Gisela were both descendants of Henry I and hence too closely related. That is a possible reason since Aribo was a fervent adherent of the theory that the bible prohibits marriages between relatives in the 7th degree. However, the archbishop would have known about that issue before the election he had just supported. Supporters of this theory therefore conclude that Konrad must have promised to annul the marriage immediately after the coronation, which he clearly did not do. The other theories assume some issue with one of Gisela’s previous marriages or her mother’s marriage, but run into the same problem.

Bottom line is that Aribo refused. Konrad need to get crowned asap because -as we know – being crowned transforms a human being into a representative of Christ on earth, which makes it a lot less likely to be deposed and killed. However, he would not accept the refusal to crown his wife.

The archbishop of Cologne had a lot less scruples about the imperial marriage and offered to crown Gisela. Konrad jumped at the opportunity and -in exchange- supported the bishops request to the pope to become entrusted with royal coronations from here on out. As Aribo found himself on the wrong side with the pope, the privilege was duly transferred to Cologne, so that from now on the correct archbishop is the archbishop of Cologne. That being said, some kings will be crowned by Mainz claiming the elder privilege, whilst sometime anti-kings have receive the blessing from Cologne and still end up not counting as correctly crowned. It’s complicated.

He may be elected, and he may be crowned, but he is not yet truly king. He may have bought the archbishop of Cologne with the right to crown kings in the future, but the two Lothringian dukes, Gozolo and Frederick remained in opposition. Equally the Saxons have not formally given homage. 

Konrad has to undertake a royal progress across his lands to secure support from all his nobles. It is a similar progress we have seen Henry II undertake after his coronation in 1002 and it will become a tradition for future kings and emperors.

The initial route is through Lothringia, where he did not encounter actual resistance, but still did not receive homage from the two dukes. They will come around, but not yet.

The next important staging post is the abbey of Vreden where Konrad is greeted by the abbesses Sophie of Gandersheim and Adelheid of Quedlinburg, the two sisters of Oto III. These are the standard bearers of the Ottonian and thereby the Saxon line. Their involvement in the election of Henry II had already been crucial. And again, by receiving and recognising Konrad as king, the Saxon nobles are compelled to accept him as king. And the Saxons did offer him homage a few weeks later at a great gathering in Minden at Christmas 1024. And, like Henry II, Konrad had to confirm the Saxon’s special rights and freedoms they trace back to the time of Otto the Great. These Saxon exceptionals will become the bane of the Salian regime and contribute to its downfall 50 years later.

Konrad moves on to Regensburg where he confirms his control of Bavaria, a duchy that had supported his election anyway. That does not stop him from moving several monasteries from ducal into direct royal control, in other words, nicking the duke’s assets.

In Spring 1025 we find him deep in the southwest in Konstanz where he received the homage of his Italian subjects, including the archbishop of Milan. During the previous year several players, namely the duke of Aquitaine and the king of France have checked out the situation in Italy considering putting themselves or one of their sons on the throne of Italy.  The discussions with the Italian magnates had convinced these pretenders not to push for it, at least for now.

Konrad may have felt re-assured that the Italians did not go into rebellion and elected someone else as their king, but that is not the same as being in control of the Italian kingdom.

The citizens of Pavia had used the period between Henry II’s death and Konrad’s election to burn down the royal palace in the centre of the city. This palace went back to the time of Theodoric the Great in the 5th century, if not further. It had been the centre of royal administration in Italy for centuries. The reason they burned it down is not hard to fathom. You may remember that Henry II’s troops had burned down the city and massacred its population in 1004 after the king had been attacked inside that same palace by an angry mob. Once he was dead, it was payback time.

When the citizens of Pavia appeared at Konstanz to justify themselves, they argued that they only burned the palace after Henry II was dead and hence did not insult the king or damage any living man’s property. Konrad response is quite remarkable: I know that you have not destroyed the palace of the king, as you had no king at the time. But you cannot deny that you have destroyed a royal palace. Even when the king passes, the kingdom remains like the ship remains even if the helmsman perishes. It was a public building, not a private home. It belonged to someone else, not yourselves. You have hence trespassed on another’s land and are hence subject to royal justice.”

This is a huge shift in perception of kingship. Under the Carolingian rulers, the kingdom was a private property, in the same way as a farm or a horse was a private property. The same Salian inheritance rules that require partition amongst the male heirs applied to it.Henry the Fowler already altered the legal status of the kingdom by making Otto the great his sole heir. But the idea that the sate could be distinct from the person of the ruler had not permeated by 983. Otto II had his cousin Henry the Quarrelsome incarcerated as a traitor. However, when Otto II died, he was immediately released, as he was only a traitor against the person of the king, not against the “state” (in inverted commas).

What Konrad says here is that he sees the kingdom as something that is bigger and separate from the person of the ruler, that it has its own rights that are unaffected by the fate of the person wearing the crown. This more modern notion of the state will be one of the foundations of Salians’ understanding of their role as kings and emperors. They may not always be consistent in this, but the prevailing logic is that they are acting on behalf of the state, the res publica as it is now sometimes called, not on behalf of themselves.

Apart from these exciting constitutional shifts, the discussions in Konstanz yielded a more practical outcome. Italy is restless and imperial power is not recognised.  Konrad needed to go down to Italy and get crowned emperor in Rome.

Other than his predecessor, Konrad went straight down to Italy in spring 1026, basically as soon as the last bit of Lothringian and Swabian opposition had caved, mainly out of exhaustion and lack of support.

In Italy he could rely on support from Aribert, the archbishop of Milan, a small number of friendly bishops and the Margrave Bonifaz of Canossa. Pretty much everyone else was opposed to imperial power. The aristocratic opposition led by the margrave of Tuscany could not build up the courage to elect their own king, they had not even the guts to call in a foreign leader as new king. But they remained in a passive aggressive opposition to Konrad, sitting on their castles sulking. Urban populations were more outspoken as we have seen with Pavia. Konrad besieged but Pavia held out until 1027 thereby slowing the royal progress down considerably.

There were even more urban riots during Konrad’s progress, most violently in Ravenna, another city hosting a major royal palace.

At this point Konrad did nothing much about the situation instead of awarding many a rights and privileges to his allies, namely the archbishop of Milan. The most significant move was transferring Tuscany to his ally Bonifaz of Canossa who now controlled a straight band of lands across central Italy, north of Rome ranging from Ferrara through Mantua, Modena, Reggio, Brescia all the way across through Tuscany.

In March 1027 he finally enters Rome and over Easter Pope John XIX crowns him and his wife Gisela as emperor and empress. As always in these tumultuous days there are violent riots in Rome that cost many lives. People fight over which archbishop leads the emperor to the church gate and even as trivial a matter as a cowhide.

Leaving this aside, it was still one of the most glamorous coronations of the Middle Ages. Two crowned kings were in attendance, Rudolf III of Burgundy and -drumroll- king Canute. Yes, this king Canute. You may have come across him in English history as the king who tried to command the waves. This story is about as misleading as King Alfred and the burned bread. Canute is a truly astounding character who created a Nordic empire comprising Denmark, Norway, parts of Sweden, the southern side of the Baltic coast and obviously England. He had come down to Rome not for the coronation per se but on pilgrimage. He used to mix business and devotion to meet and honour the brand-new emperor. Apparently the two got on well and forged an alliance that included a marriage between Konrad’s son Henry and Canute’s daughter.

This was quite a journey. Within a mere three years a mid-ranking aristocrat with nothing more than an impressive physique and impeccable lineage managed to rise first to king and now to emperor. And it is not just the titles he collected he also gained a modicum of control over this empire he took over from a very distant cousin.

In hindsight the election of 1024 is was a crucial step on the way that will make the empire an elective monarchy whilst France and Britain evolve into hereditary monarchies.

At this point in history most elevations to kingship still retained an elective element. That came from the ancient Germanic tradition of raising the most capable warrior to be lead the tribe as its king. That tradition had long been watered down, starting by limiting the set of potential electors from “all sword-carrying men” to the aristocratic elite.

In France and England the kings kept designating their sons to become kings and negotiate terms with the electors until such time that elections had become foregone conclusions and were eventually replaced by pure declarations of homage.

That did not work in the empire where Otto III, Henry II and later Henry V died childless requiring a decision about succession by the magnates. Elections were hence not always foregone conclusions, though we have seen and will see emperors pushing through the election of their sons. But with all the breaks, magnates could insist on an election every time. Whether the electoral principle helped or hurt the development of the empire is another one of these open questions you may want to keep in the back of your mind as we go through the medieval emperors.

But let’s go back to Konrad II. His trials and tribulations are not over though. Whilst he is trying to get to grips with the bewildering situation in Italy, his stepson, Ernst II of Swabia returned to his homeland and began a more serious rebellion. A rebellion that would turn into a great legend of friendship, a mother’s broken heart and adventure in foreign lands. At the same time, the Polish ruler Boleslav the Brave had crowned himself king, disregarding Konrad’s prerogatives. When Boleslav died, his son Mieszko II did the same, bringing down the wrath of the emperor. And, most importantly there is the acquisition of Burgundy. Burgundy had been associated to the empire and its kings had often given homage to emperors, but it was never formally integrated into the empire. Its king, Rudolf III was now very old and had no male heirs, opening up the route for an almighty inheritance dispute. All this and more in next few episodes.

I hope to see you then.

And by the way, the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to generous donations from our Patrons. If you too should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of some bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.

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OTD, Henry II Plantagenet ascended to the throne of England. His claim to the throne came out of a peace agreement between his mother, Matilda and her cousin Stephen of Blois.

Matilda and Stephen had been fighting over the throne of England for almost 20 years – a period known as The Anarchy. The peace agreement stated that Matilda would leave Stephen on the throne, but upon his death the crown would go to her son, Henry Plantagenet.

What has that got to do with German history? Matilda was the widow of Emperor Henry V who had died in 1125 at the relative young age of 39. If he had lived the next chapters of English and German history could have developed quite differently. Matilda would not have married Geoffrey of Anjou and the Plantagenets would not have become the kings of England.

It is possible that Mtailda would have relied on her German husband for support in the struggle with Stephen of Blois and, had she been successful, her son would have become King of England and Holy Roman Emperor. The Kings of England would not have received Anjou and possibly not have married Eleanor of Aquitaine…..

A very different outcome.

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Henry V has to accept the Concordat of Worms

In this week’s episode the last of the Salians will find that despite all his efforts, the tide of history cannot be stemmed, leaving him in exactly the same place his father ended up in 1076.

Transcript

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 41 – The Duke’s Rebuke

In this week’s episode the last of the Salians will find that despite all his efforts, the tide of history cannot be stemmed, almost leaving him in exactly the same place his father ended up in 1076.

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Last episode we left Emperor Henry V in May 1111 returning from his journey to Rome in triumph. The pope had confirmed the full ancient rights of investiture of the emperors. Not just that but the pope also promised not to bother the emperor ever again about investiture and had renounced any possibility of ever excommunicating him again. And, to top it all off, Henry V had secured the unimaginably rich inheritance of Great Countess Matilda of Tuscany upon her soon to be expected demise.

With more than anything anyone could have hoped to achieve, why the long faces, even amongst Henry’s entourage?

Henry’s close supporters, many of them bishops and abbots were still reeling from the events in Rome that happened before the pope’s hand was dragged over the signature box of the agreement by a rough looking imperial retainer.

You see, before all this heavy handed ness The pope had made a deal with the Emperor whereby the church would hand back all the counties, estates, market rights, mills and mints they had been awarded by the crown in exchange for the emperor renouncing any involvement in the selection and investiture of prelates.

Even though the deal collapsed as soon as it had been made public, for the bishops it was the ultimate betrayal. Their king had been willing to strip them of all their ancient rights and privileges. After all these centuries of service to the king, he was happy to drop them.

It is not just that. If Henry V had indeed taken back all the church’s lands and rights into his direct ownership and control, he would have been able to establish an all-powerful central authority. Something his father, with much less resources had tried to do in Saxony. Imagine what the son could have done with more than a third of all the assets of the country. A tyranny is what the bishops, abbots and their cousins, the dukes, counts, lords and knights would have called it.

It did not happen, but from this moment onwards all these bishops, abbots, dukes, counts, lords and knights no longer believed the king was the guarantor of their rights and freedoms. They now had to protect these rights by joining up together, against the king. It is from now that the documents begin to call all of these potentates, be they secular lords or bishops and abbots as princes. And these princes began to see themselves as the mutual guarantors of each other’s status against royal overreach. The Imperial Church, if it ever was under orders of the king, no longer sees itself as the instrument of the crown. These men, and very few women were Princes now, focused on expanding their territorial power and supporting their brethren.

How sudden this shift happens becomes visible in the person of Adalbert, chancellor of Henry V. He was a member of the inner circle of Henry’s government. He was one of the handful of people involved in the initial negotiations with Pope Paschalis II that had led to that infamous deal in February 1111. In recognition of his services, Adalbert was made archbishop of Mainz that same year.

When Adalbert arrived at Mainz, he decided that his archdiocese could not rely on the protection from the emperor. What was needed was a strong, coherent territorial power base that would allow him in extremis to give the “dos fingos” to the emperor.

Mainz being a mere 30 miles from the Salian heartlands around Worms the archbishop quickly found himself in a direct conflict with his former boss. The ultimate point of contention was the castle of Trifels, at this point still a modest fortification on a very promising location in the Palatinate. The two former friends came to blows and after alleging Adalbert was about to attack, Henry V had the archbishop arrested in 1112. That resulted in an outcry not just in Germany, but even in Rome where Pope Paschalis II intervened on behalf of his former adversary.

Henry took the Trifels and turned it into an imperial fortress, and probably one of the most famous ones. For a hundred years it will the place where the imperial regalia would be held for safekeeping, and it was also where King Richard Lionheart will be imprisoned.

The conflict with Adalbert was not the only indication that things weren’t right. Whilst Henry V maintained the outright façade of a ruler who acted always in concert with his magnates, backstage he was gradually building a royal territory in the Rhineland, sort of what his father had tried to do in Saxony. For that he relied on his Ministeriales who he supported across the whole of the realm. When he was called to adjudicate conflicts between nobles and Ministeriales, it seemed to the magnates that their Emperor would always side with the Ministeriales.

One of these disputes escalated and the Duke of Saxony with some of his magnates decided to abduct one of these litigious Ministeriales who had appealed to the imperial court. That was a direct challenge to imperial authority. Henry V deposed the Duke of Saxony, who was, you may remember a certain Lothar of Supplinburg. Remember the name. He will be important. In this initial effort Henry V was very successful. He apprehended the duke as well as a number of Saxon Magnates. One of them had also been the Count Palatinate holding lands along the river adjacent to the Salian lands. Henry V removed the title and lands and granted them to one of his closest followers. This was again another move to create a coherent power base around his family lands.

In 1113 Henry V looks as if he is on top of the world. His adversaries in Germany have not been able to foil his plans and he calls a royal assembly in Mainz. It is a splendid occasion where Henry V formally marries Matilda of England, now 11 years old. The duke of Saxony, Lothar of Supplinburg submits and is received back into the imperial grace. Some of his co-conspirators are not so lucky and remain in jail.

All that leaves a bitter aftertaste in the mouth of many a mighty lord. The attempt to strip the church of its lands, the expansion of royal territory, the support of the Ministeriales and the incarceration of Adalbert and the conspirators makes Henry V look very much like his dad.

The rebellion starts in Cologne where the archbishop and the now very powerful city reject imperial rule. When Henry V’s attempt to besiege and subdue Cologne fails, the rebels are joined by various Lothringian nobles, always willing to push back imperial control.

When Henry fights these combined forces and loses the whole of Northern Germany is encouraged to refute imperial authority.

Henry V changes tack and calls a royal assembly in Goslar to debate the issues and maybe find a compromise. When nobody who matters shows up, the severity of the situation is becoming clear.

A major military conflict is now inevitable.

On February 11th, 1115 in a place called Welfenholze the armies of Lothar of Supplinburg, mostly Saxons and people from the lower Rhine face up against the imperial army under Henry’s general, Count Hoyer von Mansfeld.

Not much detail is known about the battle. It seems that at some point the Saxons were under severe pressure and Hoyer von Mansfeld set out to bring the Duke Lothar of Supplinburg down himself. In that attack the imperial general was felled by a Saxon nobleman. After that the imperial army lost cohesion and the Saxons prevailed.

Lothar uses his advantage and quickly consolidates his position in the North occupying the Harz mountains including the silver mines in Goslar as well as Westphalia. From this point onwards Henry V will no longer have any power in Northern Germany. The citizens of Mainz even force him to release Adalbert their archbishop, who immediately joins Lothar’s army.

The excommunications that had been raining down on henry since 1111 not from the pope himself but from various bishops and archbishops. He could initially ignore them but now the bans are taking effect. Kicking a guy when he is down. Bishops are leaving the imperial camp as are many of the lay lords. The rebels hold an assembly in Cologne 1115 where they endorse the excommunication.

Henry’s saving grace were the southern lords, the Staufer, the Welfs and the Zaehringer who remained loyal. In that respect he was luckier than his dad who had to fight both the North and the Southwest. The lack of support in the south may have been the reason his opponents did not proceed to elect an anti-king as they had done in 1077..

From now on there is this odd situation that the country is split in half. The north is run by Lothar of Supplinburg, whilst the south is held by Henry V and his allies. The two sides kept fighting along the faultline, which was more or less along the Rhine and Main rivers. But neither side was able to mount an invasion of their enemy’s territory.

In this gridlock the news break that Matilda of Tuscany has died at the ripe old age of 69. Henry V sees this inheritance as crucial to tilt the overall balance in his favour. With the wealth of Northern Italy behind him he may be able to break his opponent’s stranglehold and establish true imperial control of the Reich. This logic will become the mainstay of imperial policy for the next century. Henry V’s ultimate successors, the Staufer will pursue a strategy of gaining resources in Italy as a means to defeat their enemies in the north.

In this, the first time the plan was implemented, it went surprisingly well. Even though Henry V had arrived without an army, he could take possession of most of Matilda’s assets and awarded her imperial fiefs to loyal men.

Whilst he was in Italy, opportunity came knocking. Pope Paschalis II had been expelled from the city of Rome. You may remember that old aristocracy of the Crescenti and the Tuscolani had become casualties of the Gregorian reform and the subsequent destruction of Rome by Robert Guiscard. By now a new set of families were taking control. The two leading clans now were the Pierleoni and the Frangipani. The Frangipani had risen within the old system of city government and one of their ancestors had been the prefect of the city. They converted the Colosseum into their private fortress. The Pierleoni were of a different sort. They were merchants and financiers who had most probably converted from Judaism in the late 11th century. They operated mainly as an urban family with their headquarters in the former Roman Theatre of Marcellus, that they had converted into their fortress.

At this time several of the ancient Roman monuments served as family strongholds. The Capitoline Hill was the seat of the Corsi family and the Palatine was held by a other clan. The Mausoleum of Hadrian had been Rome’s most formidable fortification, the Castello Sant Angelo for centuries. As in many Italian cities the ruling families lived in heavily fortified compounds to protect themselves against their rivals.

It was one of these conflicts between the major aristocratic families that led to the expulsion of the Pope. Paschalis II had supported a Pierleoni to become City prefect. That annoyed the Frangipani who started rioting.  The rioters gained the upper hand and the pope, as well as their Pierleoni. followers had to leave the city.

That meant the city was open for Henry V who entered in early 1117. There was not much for him to do in Rome other than demonstrate to Paschalis that he should call back his excommunicating prelates if he wants his city back. But since he was there why not celebrate a coronation.

Maybe a quick word on coronations. There are generally two types. There is the “real” coronation where an individual is elevated to a new status as king, queen, emperor or empress. And there are the festive coronations. These are sort of re-enactments of the actual coronation performed quite regularly at major gatherings like royal assemblies or on important church holidays. These were festivals meant to show off the magnificence and holiness of the monarch.

The coronation in Rome in 1117 was probably a bit of both. Henry was already emperor, so for him it was just a re-enactment. But his new bride had not yet been crowned empress, so it may have been intended as an elevation of her to imperial status. Henry’s party planners quickly ran up against an obstacle. None of the cardinals still resident in Rome were willing to crown the young lady. Finally, a bishop, Maurice of Braga could be convinced to put a crown on the head of the wife of the emperor. This ceremony, even in the widest definition of the word coronation, could not be regarded as a valid elevation of Matilda to Empress. For that you need a pope actual or antipope, or at least someone authorized by a pope. Maurice of a Braga was neither on the day of Matilda’s coronation. Hence when English history talks about the Empress Matilda, she wasn’t really an empress.

The proceedings were still irritating enough for the actual pope Paschalis II to excommunicate the hapless bishop Maurice of Braga. This did not facilitate any further rapprochement between emperor and pope.

In the summer of 1117 Henry left Rome, as he had to if he wanted to avoid dying from malaria. As we all know, come the summer the Germans die in Rome.  That allowed Paschalis II to get back in, thinking he was made of sterner stuff. Paschalis and his team stayed until January, when Paschalis suddenly died.

The cardinals elected Paschalis chancellor as pope Gelasius II, a man widely seen to be willing to compromise. Henry came down to Rome again in March 1118, which frightened the brand-new pope no end. Gelasius disappeared down south to Gaeta when Henry entered the Holy City.

And then Henry V did something odd, so odd that I simply have no explanation. He made his pet bishop, Maurice of Braga pope who took the papal name Gregory VIII. Why Henry decided to create a schism, something that had so badly hampered his father’s room to manoeuvre is simply inexplicable. Gregory VIII had no material support in Rome or elsewhere in Europe. It might be that Henry V followed demands of his Roman allies, the Frangipani, but their loyalty should not be worth a full-blown schism. It seems Henry realized his mistake almost immediately. He made no efforts to push his new antipope even in Germany and by June the emperor left Rome to leave Gregory the not really VIII to his fate. That fate would be to be captured by the true pope 4 years later and made to ride through the streets of Rome sitting naked backwards on a donkey. This punishment was not unknown and had been meted out to Roman prefects and popes but in this case was particularly apt as Gregory VIII’s nickname was “Spanish Ass”.

The pointless creation of a schism did not just blight the life of a poor Spaniard, but also meant that the new pope Gelasius II finally came off the fence and publicly excommunicated Henry V. With that the temperature in Germany was rising and the opposition was preparing for a royal assembly in Wuerzburg where the emperor was invited to defend his track record. That sounds far too much like a rerun of the Assembly at Tribur where Henry IV had been threatened with deposition. And that led immediately to Henry IV kneeling in the snow outside the castle of Canossa.

Henry V had no desire for frostbite and returned to Germany in haste. When he arrived the idea of a royal assembly dissipated quickly since the Southern dukes stuck with the emperor.  On the face of it the situation looked almost unchanged from when he had left. The North was held by Lothar, whilst his governors, Duke Frederick of Hohenstaufen and the Count Palatinate Gottfried did a good job at preventing him moving south.

But underneath the surface things have changed. The princes no longer just fought for status, tributes or honour. They were beginning to build what we would later call principalities. They built castles to force their will upon those within their territory, constraining their respective rights and privileges. Lothar did a great job of it in Saxony, making himself the most powerful Saxon Duke since Hermann Billung. And the same goes for his counterpart, Frederick von Hohenstaufen. Frederick did indeed defend the position of his imperial overlord, but at the same time began acquiring lands and castles for his own private estate. The chronicler Otto von Freising will describe this period as the time when the Staufer began building their private power base, their Hausmacht as it will be known from now on. They said of him that he would always pull a castle along the tail of his horse. The princes are on the rise.

By 1119 the war between Henry and Lothar had been going on for 4 years and both sides began to get exhausted. All in the country had been in civil war for more than 40 years since the conflict first started with the Saxon uprising 1073. Occasional periods of peace notwithstanding, the constant devastation had badly hurt the economy and let Germany fall behind France and England in cultural and intellectual leadership.

Even amongst his supporters the pressure to bring this endless conflict to an end was rising. Another opportunity emerged after the Pope Gelasius II had died after less than 2 years in office. His successor was Calixtus II, a Burgundian lord and distantly related to the emperor. He had initially been a harsh opponent of Henry V, but once he had ascended to the papacy had mellowed a bit. Calixtus indicated a willingness to negotiate and invited the German bishops to a council at Reims, close to the Franco-Imperial border.

Discussions between Henry V and the papal negotiators focused on a solution not dissimilar to the solution found in France. Henry offered that the bishops and abbots would be freely elected but had to swear a full oath of fealty to the emperor. And most crucially, that the churchmen were obliged to provide financial and military support to the emperor. 

 This solution seemed to have met with positive noises from the other side and Pope Calixtus was prepared to meet the emperor in person at the border town of Mouzon.

The parties exchanged draft contracts as both the Papal court and the Imperial entourage travelled to the agreed meeting point. The German side specifically believed that all was agreed and all they would do in Mouzon was put pen to paper, crack open the champagne and peace would be upon them.

This may or may not have been the same on the Papal side. But just before the two sides were to meet, the clerks on both sides began to stumble over a formulation in the draft contract. The wording in the papal draft suggests that the obligation of the bishops to support the emperor had a voluntary element to it. That was not acceptable to Henry V. The emperor even though taken aback by what he believed was a last-minute change of terms, he offered to discuss it with the princes.  but in the end, there was no rescuing the negotiations.

Afraid of papal duplicity Henry returned home. Meanwhile the Pope’s negotiators made up a story that Henry had appeared with a large retinue of armoured men intend on apprehending the pope. That was followed by a full excommunication and a re-iteration of the total ban on investiture. 

All back to square 1.

But three years later the two sides will finally agree what has become known as the Concordat of Worms. What it says is not earthshattering and certainly not worth 50 years of war and destruction. But then it was never really about investiture in the first place. What it really was about we should explore next week. I hope to see you then.

And in the meantime, should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.

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Crusaders attacking the Jewish communities in Mainz, Speyer and Worms

In 1095 Pope Urban II launches the First Crusade. Emperor Henry IV and his allies would rather be strung up below a beehive covered in honey than join a scheme devised by the Gregorian Pope.

Does that mean no Germans take part? No, the lack of support by their high aristocrats did not stop the common people. While most of them perish before the crusade had even really begun, some turn their religious fervour into a very different endeavour, bringing untold pain to the Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz, Trier, Metz, Prague and elsewhere

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 38 – The First Crusade

Today we will leave Henry IV to fend for himself. Instead, we will be looking at the First crusade and most specifically the role of Germans in that First crusade. A word of warning. In this episode we will have to discuss extreme violence, religiously motivated crimes and suicide. I will give a specific warning when we get there. Feel free to skip from that point onwards. I will make sure that you can pick up seamlessly at episode 39.

Last week we talked briefly about Pope Urban’s famous speech in the field outside the city of Clermont in France that kicker off the crusades. I must confess that I took a bit of artistic licence there and put words into Urban’s mouth that reflect only one of the five different versions of that speech. I felt that was ok given that by and large the gist of the speech is the same in all five versions. Urban calls upon the Christian faithful to free the holy land from the infidels.

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I will not give you a full rundown of the whole of the First Crusade. There are a number of excellent indie podcasts on the topic, namely my old colleague from a different world Nick Holmes who has a great show called Byzantium and the Crusades and obviously Sharyn Eastaugh’s epic History of the Crusades. And if you want to read about the crusades, check out Steven Runciman 3 books on the crusades. Brilliantly written and for me still the “go to” source.

Though we are not going to go through the Crusades in detail, there are some elements that had a bearing on German history.

The first of those is the question Why Urban asks for a crusade at this exact point in time, and even more importantly, why was his call successful now? He was not the first to call for Christian knights to aid in the fight against the infidels. There might have been a call for a crusade as far back as 1010 under pope Sergius IV. Pope Alexander II supported the recruitment of Christian knights in the fight against the Muslims in Span and Sicily. And in 1074 Gregory VII proposed a march on Jerusalem to none other than the emperor Henry IV, the man he would excommunicate just a year later. So what are the reasons it worked this time when it had not worked before?

Reason #1 was the rise and rise in lay piety that lay behind the church reform movement.  As their economic conditions improved people began seeking self-actualisation, which in 11th century society meant finding a way to get to heaven. The crusades offered a nearly perfect deal. If you do something, i.e., travel to the holy land to free the sites of Christ’s birth. Life and passion, you will be automatically cleansed of your sins and have a free ticket to heaven. It is the same logic that is behind gym memberships and Yoga classes. The difference is that if halfway through your Yoga class you realise the Tripod Handstand with Lots legs is not for you, you simply stay home numbing your bad conscience with a cup of cocoa. If you go on crusade, halfway through means you are somewhere in Hungary with no food, no horse and under attack from hostile locals.

Reason #2 was more short term. The same economic growth that drove piety had also resulted in a surge in population, leaving the world with an excess of younger sons and daughters. These young people had no chance of an inheritance. There was little chance of gaining land by force after the expansion of the realm of the Christian faith into the east and north had stalled a 100 years ago. The population pressure was brought to bursting in the last 10 years thanks to a series of draughts, freezing cold winters and other freak weather events that had destroyed the crops.

Reason #3 was the weakness of the Truce of God movements. As central authority had almost vanished in France and deteriorated in the empire, the church attempted to maintain some semblance of security by making the feuding lord and castellans swear on powerful relics that they would refrain from fighting on certain days of the week and holy days. That was a suboptimal system to start with since on the free days, feuding, i.e., killing of each their peasants and burning of their fields was perfectly ok. Moreover, these arrangements tended to be forgotten after a few years and normal service resumed until the bishop called another truce. The crusades offered a way to reduce the feuding, since the most aggressive armoured horsemen would join the crusade in search of riches or just sport, whilst those who stayed behind swore not to attack the lands of the absent crusaders.

Reason #4 was the one officially given, i.e., that Jerusalem needed to be freed. It is also the least compelling.

By the time Urban II made his stirring speech, Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for 460 years. Jerusalem had been captured in 636 by an army of the Caliph Umar, the father-in-law of Mohammed.

As had been the case in most conquests during the caliphate, the Arabs did not force the locals to convert to Islam. That did not mean they could live as they pleased. They did have to pay special taxes, could only maintain their old places of worship but not build new ones, and were generally treated as second class citizens though. But there was little persecution, and the Arabs did not mind in the slightest if Christian tourists came and generously spent their gold and silver. As long as the pilgrims behaved and paid for services, they were welcome.

In the early 11th century travel to Jerusalem had become relatively easy. The Byzantine empire had recovered from the initial dual assault by the Arabs and the Bulgars. It ruled over a coherent landmass from the Hungarian border to Syria. Hence pilgrims could either travel through Germany and Hungary and enter the eastern Roman empire in Belgrade or get there by crossing the Adriatic from Bari to what is today Durazzo in Albania. Once inside the Eastern Roman empire, the excellent roads would bring them via Constantinople and Anatolia to Antioch. Another 200 km on, the pilgrims would enter the Caliphate in Tartus in Syria from where it was just 500 km to Jerusalem.

The journey would take a whole year but was not much more dangerous or strenuous than travel in the Middle Ages was anyway. The comparative ease of the journey meant that pilgrim numbers surged. There were pilgrim hospices run by monks along the way, including the famed hospice of Saint John in Jerusalem had been set up in the 7th century well before the crusades.

For instance, in 1064/65 a large pilgrimage set off from Germany. It was led by the archbishop Siegfried of Mainz and comprised amongst others the bishops William of Utrecht, Otto of Regensburg, and Gunther of Bamberg. This pilgrim group numbered somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 including women and children looking to see the holy sites.

After 1064 the journey had become more dangerous. The Caliphate had begun to crumble under its own internal problems and attacks from Seldjuk Turks. The Turks had been around for a long time controlling the lands between the caliphate and India. In the 11th century they began exploring the opportunities arising from the weakness of the Caliphs. A long conflict between Arabs and Turks ensued during which warlords carved out smallish territories that regularly changed hands whilst the two major Islamic powers, the Fatimids and the Turkish sultans tried to gain control.

At the same time the Turks had begun attacking first Armenia and then the Byzantine empire itself. The Byzantine empire had its own problems as the Macedonian dynasty had failed to produce a male heir. The empresses Zoe and Theodora held things together for 30 years after the death of the great emperor Basil II.  But when Empress Theodora died in 1056, the state fell into civil war as a succession of civil and military potentate vied for the throne. In this midst of this infighting the Turks advanced. In 1071 they won their great victory at Manzikart. Though they did not immediately take advantage of the defeat of the emperor, Seldjuk warlords would capture most of Anatolia during the 20 years that followed.

Bottom line was that by 1095 the Byzantine empire no longer controlled the route across Anatolia. Not could the caliphs offer safe passage across Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.  Pilgrims were molested and occasionally relieved of their possessions. There were even selected cases where travellers were provided with accelerated entry into heaven.

In other words, the route to Jerusalem had become dangerous because of the absence of a central authority. What wasn’t the case was that a central authority blocked the route to Jerusalem, as Pope urban and his preachers had claimed. Realistically, without the crusades, the situation in the levant would probably have stabilised after some time and whoever one the contest would have reopened the lucrative pilgrim route again. Instead, we ended up with a conflict that in some ways is still continuing today.

And Reason #5 is purely political. It all kicked off with Alexius Komnenos, emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire asking the pope whether he would be allowed to recruit some mercenaries in the west to fight against the Muslims. Well, that may well be what he meant, but what Urban understood is that Alexius asked him for help fighting the Muslims.

Pope Urban received the appeal early in 1095 and pondered it on his journey to Clermont. Clermont had initially been scheduled to be an important council, but no one expected a call to free the holy sites of Christendom. The great plan must have formed in his head as he travelled up the Rhone River. His Eureka moment might even have come when he stopped at his former home, the abbey of Cluny to consecrate the (second) largest church in Christendom.

Urban II realised that a successful expedition to Jerusalem under the leadership of the church could resolve all the conflicts of the last decades in one fell swoop.

Just think back and ask yourself why the emperors had such a stronghold over the church for so long? Where does their claim to lead Christianity come from?

It starts with Charlemagne who could claim that he had expanded the reach of the word of Christ into the pagan lands of the Saxons and that he had defended Christianity against the Saracens in Spain.

When Otto the Great came to Rome in 962, he could claim the conversion of the Poles and the defeat of the Hungarians as the Lord’s work. Under Otto II the eastward expansion stopped following the Slav uprising. Otto III reinvigorated the idea of the emperor as the bringer of Christian faith to the east through his pilgrimage to Gniezno.

But after that progress stalled. The Kievan Rus went to the Orthodox church, the Lithuanians remained pagan until 1387 and the emperors failed to control the pagan lands between Poland and Saxony. Expansion of the Christian faith was now the job of the Christian Spanish kingdoms and the Normans in Sicily. What these had in common were two things. One, they were fighting Muslims, not pagans and secondly they were both vassals of the pope, not of the emperor.

The logical conclusion from here is that if the Gregorian Reformers could scale up this effort, the leadership of Christendom would permanently shift from the emperors to the papacy. Henry IV or whoever was his successor would have to submit to the pope and the antipope Clemet III would lose all his remaining support.

The cherry on the cake was that if the expedition was successful, the emperor in Constantinople would be compelled to acknowledge the pope as the spiritual lead, ending the schism between Latin and orthodox Christianity.

And then, finally, all the princes will kiss the feet of the pope, as Gregory VII had set out in his Dictatus Papae of 1075.

All of this made overwhelming sense to the men and women standing in the November mud outside the walls of Clermont, as it made sense to congregations all across France, England and Italy.

Whilst still at Clermont, Urban II received the first major pledge to go on crusade by Count Raymond of Toulouse. Soon the offers to take the cross came in hard and fast. The brother of the King of France, Hugh of Vermandois signed up, as did the count of Flanders and the duke of Normandy. The Normans in Sicily quickly realised that this effort was an easier way to gather some lands in the east than going it alone as they had before. Hence Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard and his nephew Tancred joined up as well. These high aristocrats began pawning their lands to raise funds to equip and feed an army for a campaign much longer than anyone had undertaken before in medieval Europe. There was however one subsegment of the European nobility who could not see the point of this at all, the German bishops and high aristocrats.

Obviously, Henry IV would rather be hung beneath a beehive covered in honey than join any of Urban II’s schemes. And that would go for most of his allies as well. If Henry and his mates are not going, then the rebel dukes and counts had to stay as well. They could hardly expect Henry IV to respect the Crusader’s immunity issued by Urban II.

There we go. A great war is on, and the Germans stay home – who would have guessed? All the Germans? No.

One of the great vassals of the empire would go on crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lothringia. Godfrey was free to do what he wanted as he had made his peace with the emperor back in 1087 but was not close enough to him to be a target of the rebels. Godfrey raised one of the largest crusader armies, became the Crusades unacknowledged leader and was ultimately crowned the first king of Jerusalem. Godfrey’s leadership eclipsed the official leadership established by Urban II, that of bishop Adhemar de Puy. And with the crusade ultimately under secular, not papal leadership, the big political bet of Urban II did not come through.

The loss of church leadership in the crusade was not the only thing that did not go according to plan. Whilst Urban II organised his professional crusader army, the idea of a crusade went viral. Several preachers, usually monks began calling the common people to go to the holy land. Not next year when all the preparation is done, but right now. Salvation and eternal life is waiting for you. Go now. Drop everything and come along. The most famous of these preachers was Peter, an itinerant monk. Steven Runciman describes him as follows: Peter was an oldish man, born somewhere near Amiens. His contemporaries knew him as “little peter” -chtou or kiokio in the Picard dialect. – but late the hermit’s cape that he habitually wore brought him the surname “the hermit”, by which he is better known to history. He was a man of short stature, swarthy and with a long, lean face, horribly like the donkey he always rode, and which was revered almost as much as he was. He went barefoot and his clothes were filthy. He ate neither bread not meat, but fish and drank wine.

Despite his unassuming physique he clearly inspired people. Guibert of Nogent tells us the “Whatever he said or did, it seemed like something half divine”

Peter started preaching almost immediately after the council of Clermont and he gathered supporters amongst the poor, the townsfolk and the younger sons of knightly families of Northern France, Flanders and the Rhineland, so that when he appeared in Cologne in April 1096, his peasant army had grown to 15,000 people. There was no way such a mass of people could be fed and watered anywhere in 11th century Europe. They were condemned to keep moving. An initial contingent of about 7,000 set off right after easter. This group travelled through Hungary and entered Byzantine territory at Belgrade. There were some hiccups along the way as nobody was expecting the crusaders to arrive that early, but they managed to get to Constantinople in the end.

Peter stayed behind in Germany for a few weeks preaching. That refilled his ranks and he soon had 20,000 followers, mostly men but also women and children hungry for salvation. They as well set off on the land route to Constantinople. Everything went well until they reached the border between Hungary and Byzantium. It seemed the Hungarian governor of the border fortress of Semlin was trying to instil some discipline in the huge horde. Things went out of control over the sale of a pair of shoes in the bazaar. An altercation turned into a brawl, which turned into a riot which turned into a pitched battle, at the end of which the Hungarian city burned down and its garrison was slaughtered. The Byzantine governor watched this in horror from the other side of the Danube. His Petchenegg soldiers tried to establish order, but they quickly realised they had no chance against that huge press of humanity. The garrison fled to Nish with the inhabitants of Belgrade in tow. The pilgrims storm Belgrade but finding little of value burn it down.

As I said at the beginning there are scenes of extreme violence and religiously motivated crimes in the sections that follow. If you are concerned about the impact these could have on you or on other people around you, please close the episode here. You should be able to follow the narrative from the next episode, Episode 39.

After that the emperor sends what must have been a regular army as an escort to lead them to Constantinople. Still too large to stay anywhere for long, the horde is packed off across the Bosporus towards the frontier. Though they were told to wait for the whole army to assemble, they kept moving slowly towards Nicaea, the capital of the Turkish sultan. As they moved, they made no difference between Muslims and Greek Christians, either was robbed of their possessions, their wives and daughters raped, and the men tortured. Months on the road had ripped the last bit of Christian charity out of them.

What this army now often called the Tafurs looked like is best described by Norman Cohn in his book Millennium: “barefoot, shaggy, clad in ragged sackcloth, covered in sores and filth , living on roots and grass and also at times of the roasted corpses of their enemies, the Tafurs were a ferocious band that any country they passed through was utterly devastated. Too poor to afford swords and lances, they yielded clubs weighted with lead, pointed sticks, knives, hatchets, shovels, hoes and catapults. When they charged into battle they gnashed their teeth as though they meant to eat their enemies alive as well as dead”, end quote.

As this army came up against the Sultan’s capital at Nicaea, they believed they could take the city with the help of the lord. Against the disciplined Turkish troops that had defeated the greatest powers of the east, the peasants stood no chance. They were ambushed and within minutes their undisciplined march turned into a chaotic rout. They were back in their camp even before the older folk who were left behind had even woken up. There was no real resistance. Soldiers, women and priests were killed before they even moved. The prisoners were killed except for the boys and girls that were of pleasant enough appearance to be sold as slaves. No more than 3,000 of the 25,000 who set off from Cologne survived. They joined the main crusade and some of them even entered Jerusalem, creating a bloodbath amongst the Muslims whereby the city was covered knee deep in blood and gore.

Peter the hermit had left some of his disciples behind in Cologne to gather even more followers for his doomed adventure. Three leaders emerged, Volkmar, Gottschalk and Count Emich of Leiningen. Volkmar sets off first, followed a few weeks later by Gottschalk.

Emich, count of Leiningen’s army was somewhat different. Though equally driven by lay piety, his followers tended to include more knights and counts and less peasants. And he had better access to information. One piece of information he found particularly useful was about Godfrey of Bouillon. Godfrey of Bouillon, great noble and future king of Jerusalem had found it hard to raise funds for his expedition. Relief came from an unexpected source. Kalonymos, the chief rabbi of the great Jewish community of Mainz had offered Godfrey 500 pieces of silver. The equally famed Jewish community of Cologne paid the same. That generosity was prompted by rumours that Godfrey had vowed to avenge the death of Christ with the blood of the Jews before he set off on crusade. I mean, I would be the last to suggest that Godfrey may have spread the rumour himself or actually made such a vow. A man who supervised the valiant slaughter of the civil population of Jerusalem and the burning of its Jewish congregation in their synagogue is beyond reproach.

Let’s talk briefly about the status of Jews in the empire. I am relying here on Peter Wilson’s great book, The Holy Roman Empire”. According to him, Charlemagne had revived the late imperial patronage of the Jews. They played an important role in the economy as they were able to sell slaves from the Eastern pagan lands to Spain where they would become slave soldiers. He estimates that around the year 1000 there were about 20,000 Ashkenazi Jews in the empire north of the Alps. Under the Ottonians the imperial protection was inconsistent. Otto II allocated the protection of the Jewish communities to the bishops, whilst Henry II expelled 2000 Jews from Mainz in 1012 but had to revoke this decree the following year.

In 1090 our friend Henry IV implemented a wide-ranging reform. He issued a general privilege to the Jews and made himself the Advocatus Imperatoris Judaica, or general protector of the Jews in the Empire. This arrangement persisted until the end of the empire in 1806. The safeguarding of legal, economic and religious rights became a prerogative of the emperor. Implementation of that varied throughout time and we will certainly talk about the successes and failure of this construct as we go along. But is should be note that the general rule stood for over 700 years and, as it was woven into the fabric of the law, granted what Wilson calls a surprising level of autonomy to the Jewish population, notwithstanding their status as second-class citizens.

But we are in the year 1096 and Henry IV is bottled up in Verona and his protection is not worth much.

All that gave count Emich of Leiningen an idea. Maybe the Jewish communities along the route could be made to support the cause. He started in Speyer on May 9th but struggled to get past the bishop’s troops who protected their Jewish community, probably in exchange of a generous donation to the still ongoing building works of the great cathedral. Or maybe for once a prelate was doing his job. Note that the German Bishops had been ordered by Henry IV to protect the Jewish communities after he had heard about persecutions in Northern France.

After the failure in Speyer, Emich and his rabble moved a bit further to Worms. There he spread the rumour that the Jews had drowned a Christian and use the water he had died in to poison the wells. That brought the townsfolk onto the side of the crusaders. They broke into Jewish homes and killed everyone who was not willing to convert. Many Jews had fled into the bishop’s palace. Emich and his men broke down the doors and despite the bishop’s pleading killed all of them, men, women and children, a total of 500 dead.

From Worms he then travelled to Mainz. If you have any notion of geography, you might realise that Emich and his followers are travelling North, not exactly the direction of Jerusalem. Archbishop Rothard did close the gates against the crusaders. But Emich’s arrival triggered riots within the city during which a Christian was killed. The rioters opened the gates and Emich’s forces enter. Again, the Jews seek shelter in the bishop’s palace, and again it is overrun. Resistance against the overwhelming numbers was futile. Some may have been prepared to convert, or at least pretend to convert, but many preferred to die for their faith, either from the enemy’s sords or by suicide.

Here is the report by Salomon bin Simson of what happened then (quote):

“As soon as the enemy came into the courtyard, they found some of the very pious there with our brilliant master, Isaac ben Moses. He stretched out his neck, and his head they cut off first. The others, wrapped by their fringed praying­ shawls, sat by themselves in the courtyard, eager to do the will of their Creator. They did not care to flee into the chamber to save themselves for this temporal life, but out of love they received upon themselves the sentence of God. […]

The women there girded their loins with strength and slew their sons and their daughters and then themselves. Many men, too, plucked up courage and killed their wives, their sons, their infants. The tender and delicate mother slaughtered the babe she had played with, all of them, men and women arose and slaughtered one another. The maidens and the young brides and grooms looked out of the Windows and in a loud voice cried: “Look and see, O our God, what we do for the sanctification of Thy great name in order not to exchange you for a hanged and crucified one….”

Then the crusaders began to give thanks in the name of “the hanged one” because they had done what they wanted with all those in the room of the bishop so that not a soul escaped.” (unquote)

This slaughter cost another possibly more than 800 lives.

Emich then tried his luck in Cologne but was less successful as the news had arrived before him and Jews had left the city or hid with their Christian neighbours. Some of his troops separated from the main army and diverted even further away from Jerusalem and attacked the Jewish communities in Trier and Metz. This group then looked for their valiant leader near Cologne killing Jews in Neuss, Wevelinghofen, Eller and Xanten. Not finding him they returned home, their holy work done.

Meanwhile the two other groups under Volkmar and Gottschalk heard about Emich’s pursuits and emulated their efforts by murdering Jews in Magdeburg, Prague, Regensburg, to name a few. 

None of these three groups made it to Jerusalem. By now the king of Hungary had become wary of these peasant crusaders. They were held up at the border and when they began raiding and pillaging, the king deployed his armoured cavalry who killed and dispersed them.

Emich’s unit was the last to arrive. They fought a veritable battle with the Hungarians and even besieged the border fortress of Weissenburg. The arrival of a royal army and a sortie of the garrison brought that to an end. Emich’s troops fled in panic.

Emich himself returned to his possessions in Leiningen, forever disgraced. Disgraced not for his crimes, but for not fulfilling his vow to go to Jerusalem.

I leave it to you to decide whether the First Crusade was a glorious moment in European history. As for German history, I can only look at it as a moment of shame and horror. It was the first large scale persecution of the Jews in the Middle Ages, containing all the hallmarks of what was to come. The blood libel, the poisoning of wells and the inability of the authorities to protect them.

Next week we will return to the rollercoaster that is the life of Henry IV. He is back in Germany, reconciled with the southern German dukes and all could now go smoothly. But history still has one last humiliation in store for him, the longest ruling, or not really ruling medieval emperor. I hope to see you then.

And remember, the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Steven and Jay who have already signed up.

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His coronation barely two months hence, Henry IV leaves Rome without being able to capture Pope Gregory VII. The Pope’s powerful vassal, Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia and greatest of Norman warlords was approaching with an army of 36,000.

Henry does not fancy a long siege in a malaria infested swamp with a hostile city population. He no longer needs Rome, what he needs to do is get back to Germany and bring peace to the war-ravaged country.

A U-turn in his policies helps to gain support amongst bishops and magnates so that by 1089, the country is largely pacified for the first time in 17 years.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 36 – Henry IV is Coming Home

Today we will talk about the return of Henry IV to Germany and how he brings the civil war to at least a more than temporary halt.

Before we start a just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Tom and Michael who have already signed up.

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Last week we left Henry IV celebrating his coronation in Rome. The ceremonies of emperor making had become ever more elaborate since pope Leo had surprised Charlemagne by putting a crown on his head on Christmas Day 800.  Ian Richardson describes the festivities as follows: The ceremonies lasted 4 days, during which the emperor entered five churches, St. Peter, St. John Lateran, Saint Paul outside the Walls, Santa Maria Maggiore and the church of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. For the main events, the consecration on March 31st and the Coronation on April 1st, the emperor wore linen tunic embroidered with gold and precious jewels, the imperial mantle, golden spurs and the imperial sword. On his hands he wore linen gloves and the episcopal ring, and on his head the imperial diadem. He went in procession to St. Peter’s, carrying in his left the golden orb, which signifies the government of all the kingdoms and in his right the sceptre of empire, in the manner of Julius, Octavian and Tiberius. He was preceded by the empire’s greatest treasures: the double relic of the holy lance of the leader of the Theban legion, St. Maurice, which had been refashioned so as to contain a nail of the holy cross. These relics were followed by the venerable order of bishops, abbots, priests and innumerable clergy, followed by the emperor accompanied by the pope and the archbishop of Milan and they were again followed by the dukes, margraves, counts and orders of the various princes.

It was almost like in the good old days of his father, Henry III.

The only fly in the ointment was that the previous and to many, only legitimate Pope, shouted bans of excommunication down on the procession as it crossed the Tiber bridge below the Castello di Sant’Angelo.

Unbeknownst to Gregory in his futile rage, help was on its way. Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia and most senior of the Norman leaders in the South of Italy had mustered an army of allegedly 30,000 men to bring relief to Rome. This army had been put together in a rush as Robert wanted to prevent Henry from invading his territory as Henry had promised the Basileus in Constantinople. With time being of the essence, he took all comers and promised them the earth. Normans for sure formed the core, but he also hired Southern Italians, Greeks, Albanians, allegedly even some of King Harold’s men who had fought against the Normans at Hastings. But most shocking of all, a large part of his army consisted of the Saracen militia from Sicily, who were not only allowed but encouraged to retain their Muslim faith. These were the men who came to free the Vicar of Christ.

When Robert approached Rome from the South by the end of May, Henry, his Pope Victor III and his army left for the North of Italy. Without a single arrow shot, a single stroke of the sword and not a single lance thrown, Robert Guiscard entered Rome and freed Pope Gregory from his refuge on the Castello di Sant Angelo.

German historians have often wondered why Henry gave up Rome, a city he had besieged for four years and that had cost him gargantuan amounts of blood, treasure and time. Why did he give up a city that was the symbol of his empire and that still held a pope he needed to have removed? I find the answer is fairly obvious.

Rome in 1084 was an odd-shaped city. Its ancient Aurelian Walls encircled an area that held almost a million people when they were built in the 3rd century. By 1084 at best 50,000 people lived in the city. Defending these walls required either an extremely large army or a militia of volunteers who could stand watch. The Romans may have been exhausted enough to fall for Henry’s bribery and let him in. But that is not at all the same as being willing to fight to the death for a German emperor against the allies of the pope they had raised themselves to the Throne of St. Peter.

Without the full support of the Roman population and given the size of his army, Henry could not hold Rome even at the best of times. No medieval emperor had tried it since Otto III. And it wasn’t the best of times. The largest of Rome’s fortresses, the Castello de Sant Angelo was still in the hands of Gregory VII, and so were two others, the Capitol held by the Corsi family and parts of the palace of the ancient emperor Septimius Severus held by a nephew of Gregory VII.

But the main reason to leave Rome is the one, listeners of this podcast are very familiar with, Malaria. It is May, and in May is when the Germans die in Rome.

3 days before Robert Guiscard’s arrival, Pope Clement III retires to Tivoli and Henry leaves for Northern Italy. Again, German historians have described that as being a flight. But if you look at the timeline of the imperial charters granted along the way, it is clear this was a typical slow imperial progress, not a flight. The leaders of Northern Italy paid him Homage along the way and congratulated him to his success. Henry could take it easy because he had nothing to fear from Robert Guiscard. All Guiscard wanted was to protect his lands and once the emperor had handed Rome back to the Gregorians, he could no longer attack the South of Italy.   

The people who had to fear Robert Guiscard were the Romans. Guiscard’s army had not come to fight for church reform and the freedom of Gregory VII, its great advocate. They had come for plunder. When they arrived and realized that both the papal and the imperial treasury had left or were out of reach, Guiscard’s soldiers began to go from door to door taking all that was left from a population that had just endured four years of consecutive sieges. With nothing to be had to satisfy their demands, they turned to violence. They flattened a considerable part of the city between the churches of San Lorenzo and S Silvestro in the North and between the Colosseum and the Lateran Palace.  Finally, they set fire to what was left of the imperial palaces on the Palatine and many churches. They even raided the Vatican. This Sack of Rome stands in a line with the more famous Sack of Rome by the Goths in 408 and the Sacco di Roma by the troops of emperor Charles V in 1527. The chronicler Hildebrand of Tours described Rome 20 years later as a “desert, strewn with ruins”.

The sack also led to the demise of the previously all-powerful clans of the Crescenti and the Theophylacts. Their power had been fading ever since the church reformers had taken control of the papacy. But after 1084 they are being replaced by an emerging “new aristocracy” of Rome. These new families, the Frangipani and Pierleoni will ultimately merge into the better known Colonna and Orsini. These families will rise within the papal administration and dominate Roman politics from now on.

A more immediate effect of the Sack of Rome was that Gregory VII’s position in Rome had become untenable. The population who had suffered four sieges on his behalf, endured his stubborn refusal to compromise lost it completely when the Papal relief troops stole their meagre remaining possessions and raped their wives and daughters.

Gregory VII had to leave in the baggage train of Robert Guiscard’s troops. Robert installed him in the town of Salerno where he kept writing letters to all and sundry asking to support the one true pope or be excommunicated for not doing so. Nobody came and in 1085 Gregory VII died in Salerno. His last words were: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, that is why I die in exile”

We will do a whole episode on the significance of these fifty years between 1070 and 1120. But it is still worth reflecting on Gregory for a moment. Even though he ends his life in defeat, he was one of the most important Popes in the history of the church. He had dominated the papacy long before he took the Holy See himself. Over these 40 years he relentlessly pursued his aim of making the papacy independent and superior to secular rulers and improve its moral standards. Even if I personally think that some of his reforms like the celibacy of the clergy had brought untold pain to both the members of the church and their adherents, I do admire Gregory’s unwavering commitment. He did not care about his own life or the life of his supporters when he resisted Henry IV alone in the Castello di Sant’ Angelo for nearly 2 years.

His genius was less in theology, in fact most would argue that Peter Damian and Hubert of Silva Candida were much deeper thinker and the true intellectual powerhouse of church reform. Gregory just copied what he liked from there and stubbornly stuck with it.

His genius was public relations. With very few exceptions all chroniclers have sided with Gregory against Henry. For some this was simply a function of their role, like Bruno and Lambert of Hersfeld. But for most it was a choice. Gregory managed to portray his acts not as acts he undertook as an individual but as a channel of the apostles or of God himself. And that allowed him to portray his ultimate defeat not as a failure of his policies, but as martyrdom for the cause. That is why his vision of the role of the papacy and the standards of moral rectitude survived his demise. 10 years after his death, Pope Urban II his direct successor will call Christendom to its most ambitious and most ill-fated endeavour, the Crusades.  Without Gregory no pope would have dared to call a crusade nor would have any secular ruler understood why he should follow this call.

When Henry IV hears about the demise of his archenemy he is back in Germany. After leaving Rome he had spent some time arranging the affairs of Northern Italy. He placed his 11-year-old son Konrad into the care of the Italian bishops as a focal point for imperial power in Italy.

Henry returns to a country devastated by more than a decade of relentless war. Saxony and parts of Swabia are still in the hands of the rebels. Henry’s main support base is Bavaria, the Rhineland, namely the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier and the lands of Frederick of Hohenstaufen. On the outside it seems not much has changed.

But stripping away the outer layers, a lot has changed. Henry seems to have realised that his previous policies have failed. Acting as an autocratic ruler towards either the princes or the Imperial Church system was no longer possible. He would not even be able to carve out his own territorial lordship as he had tried around the Harzburg. His new policy could be best described as a back-to-basics approach.

After 1085 he would be very careful with the appointment of bishops. Rather than running roughshod over the cathedral canon’s right to election, Henry would make sure that any of his bishops would be elected in line with canon law. He would choose candidates who had impeccable credentials both as scholars and as pastoral leaders. He supported candidates who were recognized for their efforts in implementing church reform. All he asked for is for them to be loyal to him and his Pope, Clement III.

He would be particularly careful in choosing bishops for the episcopal sees of his enemies. Pope Clement III had excommunicated and deposed all the bishops who supported the rebels, in particular the archbishops of Salzburg and Magdeburg, the bishops of Wuerzburg, Halberstadt, Hildesheim and many other Saxon sees. Henry could now go and appoint new bishops for these bishoprics. Apart from the above credentials he also made sure that the new bishops had strong support in their diocese, usually because they were members of a local aristocratic clan. That way he gradually dragged more and more parts of the country to his side.

His approach to secular princes also changed. When before he would just order them around and rarely listen to their advice, he now included them in his inner circle. Henry still relied on his Ministeriales, but these themselves gradually turned into aristocrats, building castles and marrying into the great families of the realm.

It is not just the inner workings of the regime that made it more attractive, the opposition also weakened.  The two towering figures of the early years of the rebellion, Rudolf von Rheinfelden and Otto von Northeim are both dead. The new anti-king, Hermann von Salm never really managed to get a foothold, largely because he was not as rich and as powerful in his own right as his predecessor.

The death of Otto von Northeim created a power vacuum in Saxony where various magnates competed for the leadership, the Archbishop of Magdeburg, the Margrave of Meissen, various sons of Otto von Northeim and the actual duke of Saxony. The struggle for leadership was often brutal and did not refrain from murdering of opponents.

Henry IV tried to take advantage of the disarray and invaded Saxony on multiple occasions. Bruno’s History of the Saxon Wars count a total of 15 invasions overall in the 17 years the war lasted. But none of these invasions was successful. Every time Henry manages to bring his troops into Saxony, the warring factions united against the external enemy, whilst Henry’s own army fell apart under the friction between its warlords.

I am not going to take you through the back a fourth of these 4 years of fighting. It ended around 1089 after some of the most stubborn opponents of Henry IV had died and Henry offered a compromise acceptable to all. He promised not to go back to Saxony, neither in peace nor in war, to respect the ancient rights of the Saxons that went back to Charlemagne and allowed the Saxons to rule themselves as they liked. He embraced Hartwig, archbishop of Magdeburg and one of the leaders of the Saxon rebellion since the very beginning as a member of his court and his inner circle of advisors. I like Ian Robinson description of this solution as a vice-regal system of government. The leader of the Saxons allowed them to do more or less as they liked, as long as they formally profess allegiance to the emperor and refrain from military action.

As for the other main opposition group around Welf IV, former duke of Bavaria and Berthold von Zaehringen, former duke of Carinthia, a solution was harder to find. By now the two lords have turned their fortified keeps on the tops of the mountains on the upper Rhine and in Switzerland into an impregnable string of fortresses. They enjoyed the support from some of the most revered bishops of the realm, including Gebhard von Salzburg, Altmann von Passau and Adalbert of Wuerzburg. Though these guys had all lost their diocese to Henry’s appointees they carried moral authority, further underpinned by the Gregorian papal legate, Odo Cardinal Bishop of Ostia.

They offered peace on condition that Henry would recognize Gregory’s successor, Victor III as the true pope and accept the excommunication of his pope Clement III. That was impossible since that would invalidate Henry’s coronation as emperor.

The only possible strategy for Henry was to keep the pressure on and wait for the old bishops to die. That they did, though slowly. But by 1089 the contingent of truly Gregorian bishops in Germany was down to 6 only one of them holding his own diocese.

By 1089 the kingdom was hence largely at peace for the first time since 1073. But this peace is very different to the peace under Henry III in the 1040s.

Henry III had ensured his peace through regular reconciliation assemblies where he would forgive his enemies and his enemies would forgive him, before everybody present would reconcile with everyone else. These events were followed up with imperial edicts banning feuds and these bans would be enforced by the imperial troops.

His son, Henry IV was no longer able to mandate peace in his realm. His aristocrats had used the preceding decades to build castles on their lands, increasingly in stone, that provided shelter from even the largest of armies. These castellans would settle their differences by raiding and pillaging their opponents’ lands, very much as has been the case in Capetian France. Central power had deteriorated so much that the bishops had to step in and declare a Peace of God for their diocese banning fighting during certain periods of the year. In 1082 Henry IV himself declared a Peace of God, together with his bishops. This time there was no edict of the king. Sanctions of the breach of the peace of God were spiritual, not secular. No imperial army would attack the castle of a castellan who breached the Peace. Henry had no military or political capacity to stop the feuding between his vassals. Where he intervened such as in the case of a feud between the archbishop of Salzburg and a local count, it was by bribing both sides with royal lands.

Whilst his rule stabilised, Henry also had been able to improve the position on the eastern border. Hungary had been lost the empire for a long time already despite the occasional marriage alliance. But the threat of Hungarian power meant that the Duke of Bohemia was looking for a closer association with the empire. Vratislav II, duke of Bohemia had been one of the most reliable of Henry’s allies all the way since 1075. In recognition of this loyalty, he raised him to be King of Bohemia. This royal title however came with a kink. It was a personal title, I.e., the sons of Vratislav would not be kings, unless the title was personally conferred on them by the emperor. To soften this blow he had Prague raised to be an archbishopric directly reporting to Rome, a privilege the dukes of Poland and Kings of Hungary had been enjoying for a long time and the Bohemians really, really wanted.

Even Poland came gradually back into the fold. The Polish rulers had used the weakness of imperial rule during the 1070s to distance themselves from the empire. That was made easier by the fact that the Saxons, Poland’s neighbours were busy fighting the royal armies rather than attacking Poland. When the Henry returned from Rome, the equation changed again, and Poland saw a benefit in supporting the emperor as a counterweight to the Saxons.

On the Western border of the empire the situation had remained challenging. You remember the endless wars between Henry III and Godfrey the Bearded. There was a period in the 1070s where the situation had improved for the imperial side. Empress Agnes had arranged a peace arrangement with the Counts of Flanders and Counts of Holland that held, at least for a while. When Godfrey the Bearded’s son. Godfrey the Hunchback became duke of Lower Lothringia, things improved even further. Godfrey the Hunchback had been one of Henry’s great supporters and potential trump card when he first contemplated a journey to Italy. I mentioned Godfrey some episodes ago because he had been married to none other than the great Countess Matilda of Tuscany. That marriage did not go well, and the couple separated. That may have been a reason for Godfrey to seek the support of Henry IV. It also could have facilitated Henry’s progress through the lands of Matilda of Tuscany. But none of that happened. Godfrey the Hunchback was run through by a spear in 1076 whilst answering a call of nature on campaign. His early death initiated a long and drawn war. Godfrey had appointed his nephew, also Godfrey to be his successor. Henry IV disagreed and appointed his own son, Konrad to be duke. After 11 years of war Godfrey ultimately won the conflict and was appointed duke of Lower Lothringia. This Godfrey was known as Godfrey of Bouillon after one of his possessions. And if you have some interest in the Middle Ages, this name might strike you as familiar. Maybe the first one you hear on this podcast. Godfrey of Bouillon will rise to prominence as the leader of the first crusade, which will kick off in less than a decade from where we are now.

The pope who will start the Crusades, Urban II had been elected pope in 1088 by those cardinals loyal to Gregory VII. The Gregorian reformers had gradually recovered from the loss of their great leader. Their main military supporter Matilda of Tuscany had regained her lands after winning a battle against the Northern Italian bishops.  The  Normans had provided the new pope with access to at least parts of the city of Rome with others held by Clement III. And Urban II was a dynamic and competent pope very much like a Gregory VII bringing bishops in his native France, in England and even some Cardinals back to the Gregorian side.

For Henry and his supporters, it had become clear that true and lasting peace could only be achieved by ending the schism. Only once Clement III was recognised across the whole of Christendom would the Swabians relent. And for that he had to go back down to Italy and end these Gregorians once and for all. Whether he will achieve that you will hear next week. I hope to see you then.

And in the meantime, should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.

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Henry IV defeats the anti-king Rudolf von Rheinfelden

Henry IV departs from Canossa having been released from the ban. But does that mean all his troubles are over? Far from it. His enemies in Germany gather to elect a new king and the war of words turns into a war of swords.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Episode 34 – Gaining the upper Hand

Today we will find out whether the events of Canossa will turn Henry IV. into a faithful son of the church, a universally acknowledge ruler of the empire and ardent supporter of Pope Gregory’s brand of Church reform. Me thinks not.

Before we start a just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes, regular blogposts and many other privileges. All that for the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Connie and Jolana who have already signed up.

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Last week we ended with King Henry IV. leaving the castle of Canossa where the pope had just released him from the ban of excommunication after a humiliating three days of standing outside in the snow doing penance for his alleged sins. Again, we do not know what he thought or felt on this journey down from the mountain. It could be elation that he is back in the bosom of the church and his kingdom returned to him, or he may be pondering the enormous price he had to pay for that.

But he did not have much time to ponder. A mere 10 miles down from Canossa he meets his army, led by the Lombard bishops. To put it mildly, these guys were certainly not happy about the reconciliation between the pope and their king. They had been living in a nightmare for years being pressured from below by an uprising of the urban poor and from above by the threat of being deposed by the pope. They had put all their hopes in the king coming down, removing this awful monk Hildebrand who had usurped the throne of Saint Peter and help them suppress the poor. Now this self-same king comes back from the negotiations having bent the knee and de-facto abandoning them to their fate.

The sources are contradictory about these next few weeks, but the most probable scenario is that Gregory and Henry had agreed to hold a joint synod in Mantua to stabilise the situation in Northern Italy and reconcile the bishops with the pope. That synod never happened, most likely because Gregory did not trust Henry’s promise of safe conduct. Not being too keen on getting apprehended by some irate bishops and incarcerated in a remote monastery or worse, Gregory remains on Matilda’s impregnable ring of fortresses around Canossa, watching.

Henry moves on to Piacenza and starts something that is supposed to look like royal rule in Italy. He even meets his mother who had come up from Rome, presumably to plead with him on behalf of the pope. I understand that psychology was an underdeveloped science in the 11th century, but who came up with the idea to think that Agnes could have any positive influence on the 26-year-old King Henry IV? His mother had abandoned him when he had been abducted age 11 in Kaiserswerth, she let him hang when he tried to establish his personal rule after 1066, she forced him to stay in the marriage with Bertha and now, during this low point of his career when he was abandoned by his friends, she had sided with his enemy. Well, she was very pious and prayed a lot.

Piacenza was the seat of bishop Dionysus of Piacenza, who like most of his colleagues had been excommunicated and hated Gregory. When Gregory sent two senior legates to the king to discuss what to do next after the synod of Mantua had failed, the bishop had both the legates thrown into jail. Henry said nothing.

The next day Henry sends a letter to Gregory’s asking for two things, (i) permission to be crowned king of Italy and (ii) who amongst the bishops should perform the ceremony. The latter is a good question since he needs an archbishop of Milan to officiate, of which there are currently a total of 3 roaming Lombardy, and he needs the bishop of Pavia who is at present excommunicated. The former is a stupid question. Since when does a King of the Romans need papal permission to be crowned king of Italy, and why would you think Gregory would allow it given his legates have just been thrown in jail? Suffice to say Gregory’s response was a resounding Njet. Who knows, Henry would have gone through with his coronation anyway, had it not been for some disconcerting news from Germany.

To explain those, let us talk a bit more about disappointing your followers. Henry IV is not the only one. You remember the German princes who are sitting by their warm winter fires and counting down the days until they are well and truly shot off that troublesome Salian king? Well, they were as surprised and as disappointed about this “reconciliation” as the Lombard bishops.

Gregory had written to the Princes on January 28th, right after the feast in the halls of Canossa. His letter still reads somewhat apologetic since he uses most of the parchment explaining why he could not refuse a king in a hare shirt, fasting and freezing outside his front door.

As for the hard-core anti-Henry faction in Germany, they could not care less if he had turned into a royal icicle. Members of that hard-core faction were first up, the Saxon magnates and bishops who were still in full-on rebellion occupying the Royal castles. Then there were those bishops who had fully bought into the Gregorian model of the papacy, namely Gebhard of Salzburg and Altmann of Passau.  And finally, there were the three Southern German dukes, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, duke of Swabia, Welf IV, duke of Bavaria and Berthold of Zaehringen, Duke of Carinthia.

These guys had expected to see pope Gregory coming across the alps just about now to officially condemn Henry IV. and elect and consecrate a new king. As far as comedowns go, that was a pretty bad one. They must have known that Henry had set out to intercept Gregory, but given time and weather, they could have been confident that Gregory should have made it through.

Just take a look at the timeline, it was really tight for Henry. Gregory was supposed to be in Augsburg by February 2 and he had set off from Rome in early December. Assuming a speed of 20 miles per day even across the alps in winter, the journey from Rome would have taken 30 days. But he only travelled as far as Canossa. From Canossa it was still 400miles or at least 20 days to Augsburg. Gregory should have left Canossa on January 13th if he had wanted to make it. On the other hand, It is unlikely that Henry had already managed to get anywhere near Canossa by January 13th. Henry had been in Besancon on December 25th, when he set off for his 500 mile journey to Canossa, meaning he and his army only arrived there around January 19th. That matches with the date of the reconciliation which happened on January 28th after 4 days of penance in the snow. 

If I was a Saxon noble and would look at these numbers and the letter from Gregory, I would feel a strong whiff of having been cheated. All the guy had to do was to run for Augsburg and they would have got rid of that pesky king.

But that does not mean all is lost. Henry IV. may no longer be excommunicated, but the pope had not explicitly reinstated him as king, at least that was their interpretation. So, they decided to call another Reichstag, this time in Forchheim in March 1077 to decide the fate of king Henry IV. They invited all the princes and bishops, as well as the pope and Henry IV. himself.

The pope said he was planning to come and was negotiating safe passage with King Henry IV. Well, that does not fill one with confidence. A man who did not dare to travel the 50 miles from Canossa to Mantua on this king’s guarantee is not going to travel 500 miles through enemy territory on a promise. Gregory instead sends his legates.

Henry himself is quite keen to go. However, his enemies, the three Southern German dukes are still blocking the passes. He could have taken the route via Mont Cenis as before but that would be pretty much double the distance and would have made it certain he would be late. So, Henry decides to use brute force. He travelled to Aquileia in the Northeast of Italy which was part of the duchy of Carinthia. There he elevates a local magnate to be the new duke of Carinthia and deposes Berthold of Zaehringen. That proves a clever move, because Berthold quickly loses ground in Carinthia and Henry can get through with a new ally in tow.

But he only gets into Germany in April. A month earlier the Reichstag of Forchheim had taken place.

Who went to the Reichstag? Well, it depends on who you ask. According to Lambert and Bruno, our two fully paid-up members of the Saxons fan club, everybody was there. All princes of rank and all the major bishops.  If you ask the chroniclers sympathetic to Henry, ahh, there are none. In terms of actual names quoted, the key participants were Otto von Northeim, Rudolph von Rheinfelden, Welf IV, Berthold von Zaehringen, now no longer duke of Carinthia, the Gregorian bishops, and at least one archbishop who used to be loyal to Henry, Siegfried of Mainz, two papal legates and, yeah, that is it.

This assembly then discussed -briefly- the need to depose king Henry, which they did. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? They then proceeded to elect a new king. Lambert said that the delegates had to choose amongst a multitude of noble and competent candidates. Well, not so sure. Welf IV and Otto of Northeim hated each other since both wanted the duchy of Bavaria, so they are both out. Berthold of Zaehringen had just lost Carinthia, which is not exactly the track record they were looking for. All the other senior guys were, well bishops.  That made the choice of Rudolph of Rheinfelden a foregone conclusion. So foregone, Rudolph had actually ordered a crown to be made months earlier.

Rudolph was of noble stock, descending from the kings of Burgundy and had been married to Henry IV’s sister. He was also a strong supporter of the reform movement. His family monastery in St. Blasien in the Black Forest had become a centre of the left wing of the reform movement. He was also a recognised military leader whose bravery and skills were acknowledged by all sides. What further worked in his favour was that he had established a strong rapport with Gregory VII already in 1073. Gregory rated him and his legates saw him as a man of “outstanding humility, suitable for the honour of Kingship in his age and his morals”.

So, the right man for the job, and a job that needs doing? Well not so quick.

There is not just this one party amongst the German magnates and bishops. When Henry IV was excommunicated and had accepted the conditions imposed in Trebur, his followers had to disperse and find ways to get their own excommunications lifted. But in March that had been done and they formed again as a party around the king. They make up the other committed faction opposing the opposition.

But the majority of the German magnates and bishops were in the middle. They were trying to find a way through this mess that allowed them to honour their obligations under the oaths they have made to the king, that addressed the concerns about expanding imperial power, that maintained their relationship with the pope and that kept them on the right side of the church reform movement.

What is happening here is that the three main strains of the narrative diverge again after they had converged at Canossa.  The fight of the princes against the king is no longer on parallel tracks with the expansion of papal power and church reform is no longer identified with one or other party.

That is why you find some ardent reformers supporting the king, whilst some fully paid-up members of the Imperial Church system support the rebels.

For those in the middle it was on balance ok to require the king to stand trial at a council in Augsburg when the king was still excommunicated, and the pope was presiding. They may even have sided with Rudolph of Rheinfelden had the pope given a good reason why they were no longer bound by their oaths of fealty.

But Gregory did neither get to Forchheim to preside over a trial nor did he declare that the deposition still stood irrespective of the revocation of the ban. In fact the pope could even have immediately reinstated the ban given that Henry did not provide satisfactory safe conduct to Germany as he had promised in Canossa.

To the rebels’ irritation Gregory did not explicitly endorse the election of Rudolph of Rheinfelden for another 3 years. He maintained a policy of strict neutrality and had even instructed his legates at Forchheim several times to be neutral. His legates ignored him, and he admonished them for that publicly.

Why did he do that? Clearly the frozen feet of Canossa had not turned Henry IV into an obedient son of the church whilst Rudolph von Rheinfelden had immediately sworn allegiance and submission to the pope and was an avowed supporter of the reform movement.

The reason Gregory gives is that he wanted to decide by weighing each side’s argument in a public council in Germany. He would decide once he had (quote) “heard the arguments on both sides and learned whom justice most favoured”. As you may have guessed I am not the world’s greatest fan of Gregory VII, so maybe I am biased, but to me it is clear. Gregory did not endorse Rudolph because he had not chosen Rudolph. His notion of what a pope is and what he can do does not have room for royal assemblies where some mere bishops, dukes and counts choose a king. The raising and deposing of kings is the pope’s job. And so none of you is king until I say so.

And another part of his papal doctrine is now biting its tail. Gregory had declared that the pope never errs, has never erred, and will never err. Let’s test this. In Canossa Gregory believed that Henry IV would honour his promise and be obedient to the Lord Pope, but within less than 2 weeks he realised that was not the case. Further, he believed that Henry would let him travel to Germany to sit in judgement over him, well he was wrong on that too. Gregory was an intelligent man who must have known that he had been played, but because he could not err, he could not admit that he had been played. That is hybris on a scale well beyond what Sophocles or Aeschylus had ever come up with.

It is only in 1080 after a lot of toing and froing that Gregory finally endorses Rudolph of Rheinfelden and excommunicates Henry IV for a second time. But by now the lines have become so entrenched, the excommunication had little effect. The faith in the pope’s omnipotence had evaporated quite quickly after 1077. When Gregory sent a letter declaring neutrality in May of that year, the Saxon chronicler Bruno wrote: “when our countrymen received this letter, they lost the great hope they had placed in the apostolic rock”. So even the so-called Gregorian party was no longer looking to Rome.

With his standing weakened, Gregory felt he needed to up the ante in his excommunication of 1080 and added a curse. Unless Henry would repent and resign by the feast of St. Peter in Chains, i.e., by August 1, he would be struck down by the apostles Peter and Paul. Spoiler alert, they did not.

With that let’s leave developments in Rome and the actions of Gregory for next episode and let us concentrate on events in Germany.

The assembly in Forchheim did not just elect Rudolph von Rheinfelden to be king, it also changed the constitution of the empire. The king conceded that “royal powers should belong to no one by heredity right, as was formerly the custom” and further that “the son of the king, even if he was extremely worthy, should succeed as king rather by spontaneous election than by the line of succession”. And that the “people should have it in their power to make king whoever they wished”.

This is a major tilt of the monarchy in Germany towards the electoral principle, the opposite of developments in France and England where the electoral components are waning away around that same time. In France we end up with the mantra “The king is dead, long live the king” whilst in the Holy Roman Empire the death of the previous ruler leads to the election of a new one. There are other elected monarchs in Europe, most notably the kings of Poland and they do have one thing in common, a weak central authority. The kings of France and England had a strong incentive to strengthen the central authority because they knew that their offspring would automatically inherit this position.  An elected monarch will always be incentivised to strengthen the position of his own family at the expense of central power.  Hence even though there will be dynasties passing the imperial title from father to son, like the Hohenstaufen, the Luxembourgers and the Habsburgs, they will use their position to expand their family’s territories rather than expanding royal power. Some historians, specifically in the 19th and 20th century had drawn a straight line from the events in Canossa and Forchheim to the weakness the Holy Roman Empire, to Prussian militarism, Kaiser Bill’s chip on his shoulder, World War I and World War II.

A bit of a stretch in my view, but I would agree that Forchheim was another fork in the road where the patterns of German history deviated from France and England.

Getting back to more mundane issues, in March 1077 there were now 2 kings. Rudolph of Rheinfelden thought initially he would have the upper hand, with him controlling Swabia himself and his allies controlling Bavaria and Saxony. However, things unravelled somewhat.

Henry had already successfully deposed Berthold von Zaehringen as duke of Carinthia and handed it to one of his followers. He now tried the same with Swabia. He made Frederick Count of Buren duke of Swabia. Frederick held lands in the centre of Swabia and commanded a significant followership amongst the major Swabian nobles. Henry further elevated his status even by marrying him to his daughter Agnes. Frederick then embarked on the construction of a suitable castle befitting his rank near the village of Stuf or Stauf. That castle would be called the Hohenstaufen a name that would be adopted by Frederick’s family, a family that will bring about Frederick Barbarossa, probably the best known of medieval German rulers thanks to a much better PR machine than the one our friend Henry IV. commanded.    

The new duke of Swabia was able to establish himself in part of the duchy, but the Zaehringer family, and their allies controlled most of the lands on the upper Rhine and into German Speaking Switzerland.

Henry was more successful in Bavaria and expelled his enemies from the duchy which he managed directly rather than appointing a new duke. That meant Rudolph of Rheinfelden’s actual power base was Saxony. He controlled most of it, including Goslar and its rich silver mines.

Henry established his main basis of operations in Mainz where the burghers had thrown out their archbishop in another sign that the urban elite is asserting itself in the major trading cities. He could count on the Bavarians, some Swabians, most of the Lotharingians and the duke of Bohemia.

The two armies were equally matched, Henry may have had more resources, but Rheinfelden had the greatest general of the time, Otto von Northeim. The first two major battles followed a simple pattern, where Henry would have the upper hand for the first half until Otto von Northeim appeared out of left field and pushed him back.

In the first of these battles, Henry and Rudolph both fled the field of battle, in the second it was just Henry who fled, but the rebels had sustained too severe losses to pursue the royal army.

Despite the military success Rheinfelden never managed to expand the opposition-controlled territory much beyond the Saxony and his exclave in Swabia.

In between negotiations between the parties and with the pope continued but without any conclusions.

On October 15th, 1080, the two armies met again on the Elster river in Saxony, not far from Leipzig. Henry had been retreating from a pursuing Saxon army. He was outnumbered and tried to combine forces with his ally, the duke of Bohemia. His progress came to a halt when he reached the swollen Elster river that he could not cross. He pitched up camp and prepared for battle. That evening he drew up another donation to the cathedral of Speyer, the shrine to the imperial Salian family seeking the help of the Virgin Mary. It had become a habit of Henry’s to make generous donations to the church of Speyer at pivotal moments of his career and as we have already seen, there is no shortage of such moments, making the cathedral church extremely rich. All that money went into making this already enormous church even bigger.

Here is how the historian I.S. Robinson describes the battle (quote):

At daybreak on 15 October Henry drew up his army west of the Elster, along a stream called the Grune, where the marshy ground would impede the enemy’s approach. His forces included the vassals of the sixteen prelates who accompanied him, Swabians under the command of their duke, Bavarians under the command of count Rapoto IV of Cham and Lotharingians commanded by Count Henry of Laach (future count palatinate of Lothringia).

There were no Bohemians in the royal army; Henry had failed to make contact with Vratislav’s forces. When the Saxons arrived on the opposite bank of the Grune, they were exhausted by their rapid march and were without most of their foot soldiers., who could not keep up. As they approached the royal lines, the bishops in the Saxon army ordered the clergy to sing Psalm 82, traditionally regarded as a prayer against the enemies of god’s church. The two armies picked their way through the marches on opposite banks of the Grune until they reached a safe crossing, whereupon they immediately engaged in close combat. The royal army fought so fiercely that some Saxon knights fled and the rumour that the whole Saxon army was in retreat was so far believed that the clergy in the royal camp began to sing the Te Deum. They were interrupted by the arrival of men bearing the body of Count Rapato IV of Cham.  This sudden reversal was the work of the resourceful Otto von Northeim. When the Saxon knights fled and royal forces pursued them, Otto rallied the foot soldiers and forced back the pursuers. Returning to the battlefield, Otto found the royal contingents commanded by Henry von Laach beginning triumphantly singing the chant of Kyrie Eleyson. Once more the premature celebrations of the royal army were cut short and, the foot soldiers of Otto von Northeim sent the enemy fleeing across the Elster.” (end quote).

But this victory did cost the rebels dearly. When Otto von Northeim returned to the camp, he found his king mortally wounded his right hand cut off. Rudolph of Rheinfelden died that night or in the morning of the next day.

That was a major blow to the opposition. The manner of Rudolph’s death, losing the hand he had sworn allegiance to Henry IV, seriously undermined the standing of the opposition as the “good ones” in the conflict. For once Henry IV is winning the propaganda war.

The other issue was that the opposition was divided. The two major protagonists after Rudolph were Welf IV and Otto von Northeim. These two men hated each other ever since Henry IV had replaced Otto as duke of Bavaria with Welf IV. Both men had drawn pledges from Rudolph that in case of victory they would get the duchy of Bavaria.

Under these circumstances electing a successor for Rudolph as anti-king proved difficult. Henry IV tried to use the situation by making a peace offering to the Saxons. They could elevate his son Konrad as Saxon king, who would reign as their ruler before finally succeeding his father as Emperor. That would bring back the old Ottonian order where the emperor was a Saxon. Otto von Northeim’s response was “I have often seen a bad calf begotten by a bad steer, so I desire neither the father nor the son”.

The opposition kept debating about who to elect, not helped by Gregory VII urging them to wait with the election until he could come down to Germany. The two parties agreed a truce until June 1081. Some fighting resumed and at some point, a much diminished assembly of opposition leaders elected Hermann von Salm, a previously unknown count to be king. Gregory did not endorse the new king and his name was never mentioned by the pope. More importantly, Otto von Northeim took his sweet time acknowledging that he would never be king and finally recognised Hermann. Fighting continued but it was for now on a level that allowed Henry to go down to Rome and go after his other great enemy, Gregory VII.

Rudolph von Rheinfelden was buried in the cathedral of Merseburg in under one of the first full length funerary monuments showing him as a living man with all the royal insignia. The inscription celebrates his kingship and his death as “the sacred victim of war” and who died for the church.

All part of the ongoing propaganda war. Rudolph von Rheinfelden is portrayed as a martyr for the cause of church reform, whilst Henry goes back to Gregory’s curse that the king would die if he had not relented by the day St. Peters Chains – well it did happen, just that the false king died from the false pope’s curse losing his right hand. This hand is still kept at the cathedral of Merseburg – or so they claim.

In 1082 Henry sets off for Rome to follow the propaganda war up with a real war. He can count on the Lombard bishops to help him but will that be enough to subdue Matilda of Tuscany and get into the city of Rome to impose a new pope and finally be crowned emperor. All that in the next episode.

I hope to see you next week. And in the meantime, should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.

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When Henry IV was excommunicated by pope Gregory VII in 1076, he was initially confident that his bishops would stick with him and that he could bring an army down to Rome to depose the pope. I mean his father had deposed 3 popes and up until recently the appointment of popes was very much an imperial prerogative.

But within just 8 months the support from the bishops crumbled away. There are many solid political reasons such as the bishops being afraid of their urban populations and cathedral chapters siding with the pope. But one specific event turned the tide decisively.

Bishop William of Utrecht, Henry IV. greatest cheerleader had been hurling insults and accusations of lewd behaviour at pope Gregory VII from the chancel of his church. He declared the King’s excommunication null and void and excommunicated the pope in turn.

That same day the cathedral was struck by lightening and the episcopal palace burnt down. And a few days later William had to take to his bed. He had suddenly become terribly ill and succumbed so quickly he could not even make confession and receive the last rites. The abbot of Cluny reported later that bishop William had appeared to him in a dream and had said that he was now suffering in the deepest recesses of hell.

When the magnates met for a Reichstag in Trebur in October 1076, many of the bishops had gone over to the opposite side giving the king an ultimatum that he would be deposed unless he gets released from the anathema before early February 1077.

Henry had to cross the alps in the midst of the coldest winter in living memory and beg for mercy from Pope Gregory VII at Canossa, one of the most famous events of the European Middle Ages.

If you want to hear the whole story, check out the History of the Germans Podcast available on my website www.historyofthegermans.com or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts (link here:https://history-of-the-germans.captivate.fm/listen)

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It is time – we are finally going to Canossa. Expect imperial power to go up in smoke, greedy mothers-in-laws, frozen passes, hoisted horses and tobogganing empresses.

All that ends with the enduring picture of a king first kneeling before a woman and then before a pope…..

That is the the episode you have to listen to!

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans, Episode 33 – Canossa finally

It has taken a while but today we will finally get to that famous moment reproduced in thousands of German schoolbooks and maybe the only event of the Middle Ages most Germans have heard about.

Before we start a just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to James, Sean and Stefan who have already signed up.

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Last week we ended with the famous letter of Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII that began with an insult: Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk and ended with a call for him to step down.

That letter arrived in February 1076 when Pope Gregory had convened bishops from near and far for his annual Lenten Synod in Rome. Gregory steps up to the altar and reads the letter of the king of the Romans. And then he reads another letter, sent by the German bishops making the same points and including the same insults that Henry IV had hurled at the holy father. And finally, he reads another letter sent by Henry IV to the people of Rome asking them to rise up against the false monk. Finally the imperial envoy addresses the congregation and demands the deposition of Gregory VII from the Synod. They promise that Henry IV will personally come to Rome at Pentecost and bring a new Pope.

10 out of 10 for Cojones, but not exactly Mensa-level intelligent. Who will be at the Lenten Synod called by Pope Gregory VII? Wild guess, mostly people who support Gregory VII. The bishops and other prelates who are opposed to Gregory VII have declared him not pope but a false monk, which makes it unlikely they would put in an appearance.

No surprise then that the hostile audience erupts, and the royal envoys are lucky to get out alive. Allegedly they had to hide behind the billowing papal robes to avoid getting stabbed.

Gregory’s response was swift and unflinching.

First, he deposes Archbishop Siegfried of Mainz, the most senior German clergyman. Siegfried is excommunicated and suspended from all episcopal duties. He then lists all other bishops who he suspects of voluntarily supporting Henry IV and declares them equally suspended. The remaining bishops have until August 1 to declare allegiance to the pope by messenger or in person. Failure to do so means automatic suspension. And the bishops of Lombardy are suspended wholesale. To put that into perspective, Gregory has just dismissed 26 bishops out of ~45, some of whom were actually in prison at that point in time. I would call that bold.

As for Henry IV Gregory declares the following: (quote)

O holy Peter, prince of the apostles, mercifully incline your holy ears to us and hear me, your servant, whom you have nurtured from childhood and whom you have delivered to this day from the hand of the wicked, who have hated and hate me because of my fidelity to you.

You are my witness together with my Lady, the Mother of God, and your brother amongst all the saints, St. Paul, that your holy Roman Church has forced me against my will to be its leader; bear witness that I have not thought of ascending your throne by force, and that I would rather have ended my life as a pilgrim than to ascend your throne by worldly means for the sake of earthly glory.

And therefore, I believe that it is by your grace and not by my own deeds that it has pleased you and pleases you that all the Christian people, who are committed to you, obey me, your duly ordained representative on earth. And so to me has been given by your grace the power to bind and to loose in heaven and on earth.

Based on this holy commission, in the name of Almighty God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, for the honour and safety of your Church, I deprive, by your power and authority, Henry the King, son of Henry the Emperor, who has risen up against your Church with outrageous insolence, of dominion over the whole realm of the Germans and over Italy.

And I release all Christians from the bonds of the oath they have taken or will take to him; and I forbid anyone to serve him as king. For it is fitting that he who seeks to diminish the honour of your church should himself forfeit the honour that was his due.

And since he has refused to obey us as a Christian, has not returned to the God whom he had forsaken, has consorted with the excommunicated, has committed manifold iniquities, has spurned  my commandments which, as you testify, I gave him for his own salvation, has separated himself from your church and has strived to tear it asunder – I therefore bind him in your stead with the chain of the Anathema. And I bind him in such a way that people of all nations may know and have proof that you are Peter and that the Son of the living God has built his church on your rock, a rock the gates of hell cannot overpower.(end quote)

This is not the first time a ruler has been excommunicated. The first time was in 390 AD when bishop Ambrose of Milan banned the emperor Theodosius for the massacre of Thessaloniki. And after that, kings are being excommunicated in surprising regularity. French rulers tend to have attracted more excommunications than most, usually for sexual misdemeanours, but equally King Harold II of England, of Hastings fame and Duke Boleslav the Bold of Poland have been excommunicated. By 1076 Gregor VII himself had already threatened to excommunicate Phillip I of France and had in fact excommunicated Robert Guiscard.

So that was not a surprise and probably well within the range of outcomes Henry IV had expected.

What is different in this ban are two things. First, Gregory “deprives” Henry of “dominion over the realm of the Germans and Italy” and he follows it up with: “I release all Christians from the bonds of the oath they have taken or will take to him”. That had not happened before, ever. Because so far, the church had stuck to the words of Jesus reported in Matthew, Mark and Luke: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”.

In Gregory’s mind the concept of an all-powerful papacy that is owed obedience by everyone, a pope whose feet are to be kissed by kings and emperors and who can depose bishops, kings and emperors supersedes this quaint New Testament notion.

Henry IV had no lofty concepts. He trusted in the language of spears and swords. Given the Roman populace was unwilling to revolt against Gregory, he decided that he would have to come down by himself to sort things out. He announced that he would raise an army and go down to Rome by Pentecost to receive the long overdue imperial coronation, be it from a chastened Gregory or another Pope.

If I had been a betting man in February 1076, I would have given Pope Gregory a maximum of 6 months in office. Pretty much everything was stacked against him.

  1. Just 30 years before, Henry’s father had deposed not just one, but three popes.
  2. Henry is riding high on a major victory against his internal enemies the Saxons.
  3. The German bishops have nothing good to say about Gregory who he had harangued and harassed them for years. And most of these had been members of the Royal chancery under either Henry III or Henry IV.
  4. In Italy the Lombard bishops would provide an imperial army free passage south.
  5. Matilda of Tuscany may be supportive of the papacy, but if the king would travel in the company of Matilda’s husband, Godfrey the Hunchback, some of her vassals may open their castles.
  6. And the Normans were no use right now as the relationship was a bit tense after they had begun to nibble away at papal territory.
  7. No chance the French king would come to the pope’s aide since Gregory had been on the verge of excommunicating him as well.
  8. Only the German magnates could sway in their loyalty to the king if the king continued in his authoritarian manner. On the other hand, the magnates were the brothers and cousins of the bishops, so they would take their steer from them.

No chance then? Well, the reason I am not a betting man is because my bets never work, and this one would have also spectacularly failed.

That things may not go as planned became clear quite quickly when Henry received note of the ban in March in Goslar. Enraged he asks the bishop Pibo of Toul who happened to be there to excommunicate Gregory at mass the next morning. In the night Pibo of Toul and another bishop fled the royal palace and disappeared from court.

That is just a foretaste of what happens over the next 8 months. The German bishops change their mind, almost all of them, wholesale. Why that happened has been discussed amongst German historians for centuries, starting with Otto of Freising, the 12th century chronicler.

As ever so often, there is not one reason for such a rapid acceleration of the wheel of fortune.

The first issue was that the line of argument that Henry IV and the bishops had taken was flawed. They basically argued that Gregory had not been pope, because he had not been elected using the proper process. That “proper process” was established only very recently at the 1059 Lateran Synod which ruled that the pope should be elected by the cardinals, not by the population of Rome.  Moreover, this proper process had not been fully observed in the 2 previous elections either. Plus, Gregory had been pope for three years already without anyone having made a fuzz about it.

And crucially, when the bishops looked at it in the cold hard light of the day, they realised that this argument could backfire quite badly. You see, Gregory even if his election may have been flawed, he had been properly ordained. And that situation applied to many of the bishops as well who had received their seats by appointment of the king rather than a free election by the cathedral canons. Some may have even given financial compensation to the king in one way or another that could now be seen as Simony. The bishops relied on the fact that they had been correctly ordained, which superseded any election flaws. The fear is that when the bishops establish a precedent that an incorrectly elected pope is no pope, where would they be?

What made this worse was that Henry IV had not been particularly good at choosing bishops who commanded the respect of their congregation. Some he pushed through against significant opposition amongst the cathedral chapter. Furthermore, Cities had grown both in wealth as well as in self-confidence. And as the merchants were getting richer, they found the bishop’s haughtiness and lack of commercial dynamism chafing. At the same time the urban population in general demands a reform of the church. They want properly trained and morally upstanding clergymen looking after their souls. I already mentioned the uprising of the merchants of Cologne in 1074 and the Pataria expelling the archbishop of Milan. If you are a German bishop with a restless urban population, the last thing you want is that the pope appoints a new bishop who brings the city population behind him and expels you for good.

And then there is the simple point that o.k. you say Gregory is not pope. So, who is pope then? If this one is not pope, why did you not appoint a new one? Doesn’t that suggest you may want to reconcile with Gregory after all and where will I, the humble bishop of small Rhenish town, be then. I do not want to be the guy Gregory will come down like a ton of bricks later, so better keep a low profile and see where the wind is blowing.

The before last point comes down to Henry IV’s behaviour. After the battle on the Unstrut he had the opportunity to show mercy and get to a lasting arrangement with the Saxons. But Henry did not look for reconciliation. He wanted to continue his policy of territorial consolidation through the construction of castles. Fun fact, his great enemy Otto of Northeim had swapped sides and was now his administrator in Saxony, rebuilding the castles he had railed against just 2 years earlier. That meant the Saxons remained hostile and the other dukes, counts and bishops remained concerned about the king’s authoritarian streak.

And finally, there are signs from heaven. Bishop William of Utrecht, Henry IV. greatest cheerleader has been hurling insults and accusations of lewd behaviour at him from the chancel of his church, claiming the excommunication was null and void. Days after he did this at the great easter mass in the presence of the king, William had to take to his bed. He suddenly became terribly ill and succumbed even before he could receive the last rites. The abbot of Cluny reported that bishop William had appeared to him in a dream and had said that he was now suffering in the deepest recesses of hell. Another supporter, the bishop Eppo of Zeits who fell from his horse and drowned in a shallow stream, because Saint Kilian wanted him to drink Water and not always wine.

With the bishops wavering Henry found it impossible to muster an army to push through his claim in Rome. The Reichstag he had scheduled for May took place but many major players like the dukes of Swabia, Bavaria and Carinthia were absent, so were a number of important bishops.

Gregory waded into the debate by sending letters to all and sundry explaining the excommunication and finally putting proper canonical law arguments on the table, presumably developed by his chancery since he himself was no great lawyer. In a smart move he empowered those bishops that had been loyal to the pope to immediately release others from the ban, provided they were repentant and avoided communion with the king henceforth. That allowed the episcopal opposition around the Archbishop of Salzburg to pull in more and more bishops

At the same time the situation in Saxony tensed up. Some of the bishops, unsure where this would all go did release the Saxon leaders that they had held in prison on behalf of the king. Once released these leaders and some who had managed to escape the wrath of the king gathered together and began a guerrilla war. Otto von Northeim changed sides again and handed the Harzburg over to the rebels, wiping out most of the gains of the previous year.

The bishops who had been firmly on Gregory’s side from the start met up with the Southern German dukes, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, Welf IV of Bavaria and Berthold of Zaehringen. These magnates concluded the king had not changed after the Saxon campaign and was still overbearing and autocratic. Something needed to be done to preserve the ancient rights and privileges.

At the heart of the opposition’s debates was the question whether they still owed the King obedience under the oaths they had sworn. The oath of fealty was the glue that held early medieval society together. The lord would give a fief to his knight in exchange for the oath of fealty. That was a good deal because breaking an oath was an unpardonable sin that would condemn you to hell, no ifs or buts.

Around 1070 this line in the sand began shifting.

We already heard in Otto of Northeim’s speech of 1073, that an oath was no longer sacrosanct. Otto said that he was no longer bound by his the oath to Henry IV, because the king had stopped being a king and had turned into a tyrant.

We have also seen Gregory relieving the congregation of Constance from their oath to the bishop in 1075. And now the pope has released everyone from their oath to the king.

This erosion of the value of oaths will be one of the significant outcomes of the investiture controversy that changed Western Europe for ever.

In October 1076 all the magnates and bishops of Germany came together in Trebur to debate how peace and unity of the kingdom could be maintained. Magnates who had been sworn enemies for a long time such as Otto of Northeim and Welf IV reconciled in the interest of peace.

This meeting was the first Reichstag where the king was absent. Not completely absent, he was across the Rhine in the castle of Oppenheim overlooking the gathering. But, as he was excommunicated, he was not allowed in the debates. That fact says more clearly than anything that Henry IV. had lost the argument. If he was seen as excommunicated, the man who excommunicated him, Gregory VII must be the true pope.

Some magnates wanted to go through with Gregory’s order, formally declare Henry IV. deposed and elect a new king. They even mustered their troops to cross the Rhine and attack the King. But, deposing the king and absolving everyone from their sworn obligations was still a step too far for many. There were also the papal legates who advocated for a more measured approach probably getting cold feet over the fundamental change the letters had unleashed.

Hence the conclusion was a compromise: Henry was ordered to write to Gregory and declare that he would henceforth be obedient to the Lord Pope. Further they decided that they would elect a new king, unless Henry would be able to get released from the papal ban within a year and a day from his excommunication, i.e., before early February.  The magnates invited Gregory to come to a Reichstag in Augsburg on February 2nd to decide whether Henry could remain as king.

Until this decision Henry had to give up his royal insignia and dismiss his remaining supporters and live like a private individual. And that he did. He left the site of his humiliation with a small group of supporters and goes to Speyer where he spends the next few weeks thinking what he can still do.

As you can see, within less than a year did Henry IV. go from undisputed ruler to excommunicated private citizen shunned by everyone.

There was only one way out and that was to get the ban lifted. The only person who could lift the ban was pope Gregory VII. Henry needed to meet Gregory before Gregory reached Augsburg or all will be lost.

A few days before Christmas Henry, his wife Bertha and his little son set off from Speyer for Italy. Not a single one of his nobles is with them. And along the way only few of his closest supporters would provide the travellers with food and horses. He is so ostracised that even his bishops and advisors who had also been excommunicated and who also tried to get to Italy and get relief refused to travel with him.

The dukes of Swabia, Bavaria and Carinthia who controlled the main alpine passes had them closed to the king, which is why he diverted to Besancon and further on the Mont Cenis. Mont Cenis you may remember was the one alpine pass not under control of the German duchies but held by Bertha’s parents, the counts of Savoy. I think I said a few episodes ago that this will matter later, and here it does. Without this alpine pass Henry would never have made it to Italy and his reign would have ended there and then. Son-in-law or not, the passage is however not free. Henry has to grant his mother- in-law the last bits of the kingdom of Burgundy that bore some similarity to imperial overlordship.

Lambert of Hersfeld said that the winter of 1077 was so persistently cold that one could walk across the frozen Rhine River from November to March. And that meant the pass across the alps was frozen too.

But there was no time to waste. Henry hired some locals who knew ways to get across even in the depth of winter. The guides led them up to the top of the pass. But on the other side with the road covered with ice, descend became difficult. They slid down the mountain on the hands and knees, held on by their guides. The horses were at times hoisted down the path or slid down the hill with their legs tied up, many died. The queen and her ladies in waiting were put on ox hides and tobogganed down into the valley.

Once the king arrived in the plains of Piedmont, the bishops of Italy flogged to his banner and within a short period of time Henry was in command of a serious army. The Italian bishops were keen for Henry to go down to Rome and remove Pope Gregory by force of arms.

Gregory at the same time had begun his trip towards Augsburg when he heard about Henry’s arrival. Given the king was now in command of an army, the pope was unclear what would happen next. His ever-faithful friend Mathilda of Tuscany suggested for him to go into one of her strongest defences, the castle of Canossa. Canossa is by the way not just one castle as it is often described, but a veritable chain of fortifications consisting of 6 or seven major castles that protect the approaches to Canossa itself.

Militarily we are in a stalemate. Canossa is too well defended for the royal army to overcome. On the other hand, the Pope cannot travel to Augsburg when the royal army bocks his path.

Henry first needed a team that could intercede on his behalf. The main interlocutors were the Abbot Hugh of Cluny, one of the most significant representatives of the monastic reform movement and at the same time godfather of Henry IV. And second, the great countess Matilda of Tuscany. Matilda was loosely related to the emperor and -despite her clear allegiance to Gregory – still his vassal. These two were of immeasurable value to Henry IV. because other than everybody else at his court, Gregory trusted these two. Getting their support was not easy. Henry had to beg them to advocate his case, according to the Italian chronicler Donizio, on his knees. The artwork that I use for this season shows that scene, where Henry IV. begs Matilda and Hugh of Cluny to plead on his behalf before the pope. I doubt that there is another medieval image of a crowned ruler kneeling before a woman for political rather than sexual reasons.

Henry kicked off negotiations by asking the pope to release him from the ban on the grounds that the German princes had slandered him out of greed and that the pope should not believe all they say. To that Gregory responded that if his case was true, he could put it to the Reichstag in Augsburg. There the pope would weigh the claims of the princes and the king justly and according to the laws of the church. What Gregory did not say is that he had received a letter in Henry’s own hand that contained enough attacks on the honour of the papacy as laid down on the Dictatus Papae to depose him three times over.

So, Henry had to change his approach. Henry’s intermediaries, Matilda and Hugh explained that Henry would happily submit to the pope’s judgement but that the Reichstag in Augsburg was too late. By then he would have been under the ban for more than a year and a day and so would no longer be king and hence have no standing in the proceedings. All he asks for is to be released from the ban, after which he would obey the pope in all and everything. Even should the pope decide that he was to lose the kingdom for his sins, he would accept that judgement without rancour and vacate the throne.

Gregory responded to Matilda and Hugh that if Henry was indeed prepared to accept the Papal judgement, why doesn’t he hand over the crown and imperial regalia to him right now und declares himself unworthy of kingship.

That is the moment where Matilda of Tuscany and Hugh of Cluny gain their place in the history books. They appeal to the Holy father’s mercy, quoting Isaiah 42 where God tells his servant: “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.” Thanks to the intervention of these two the pope finally allowed Henry to come and atone for his insults to the Holy Apostolic Church by showing obedience to the true Vicar of Christ.

Henry went to the castle of Canossa and I now hand over to Lambert of Hersfeld who describes the scene as follows (quote)

So he came as he was ordered, and since the castle was surrounded by a triple wall, he was taken into the perimeter of the second ring wall, while his entire retinue remained outside; and there he stood, after taking off the royal adornment, without any signs of royal dignity, displaying no pomp, barefoot, fasting from morning to evening, awaiting the pronouncement of the Roman pope. This he did on the second, this on the third day. Only on the fourth day was he let before him, and after many speeches and counter-speeches he was released from the ban. (unquote)

Gregory himself justified his actions by saying that the king’s tears “had moved all of those present there to such pity and compassion” that they wondered “at the unaccustomed hardness of our heart” and some were accusing him of cruelty if not tyrannical ferocity. And finally, he gave in against the constant supplications of those present and the persistency of his compunction.

I think the modern word is social pressure. Having a king kneeling in the front yard is something no 11th century person could ignore. Remember emperor Conrad II kneeling before his son Henry III begging to support him in his case against the duke of Carinthia. And what about emperor Henry II kneeling before his bishops asking for permission to create the bishopric of Bamberg…..it seems that the act of kneeling in the dirt is the sort of safe word in this Game of thrones where all persecution has to stop.

But these acts are very rarely spontaneous. They are -even if all participants claim the contrary – negotiated in the tiniest detail beforehand. The length of the penitence, the amount of crying, the depth of the bow, all that is set. I cannot get my head around the idea that the penitence in Canossa was any different. They had been negotiating for days, and assuming Gregory’s claim that he had exchanged legates since before Henry crossed the alps, probably for weeks before the famous scene took place.

And if that had been negotiated then the second part of the event, the conditions of readmittance had also been negotiated beforehand. Here is how Lambert of Hersfeld describes them (quote)

He (that would be Henry IV.) was to meet in a general assembly on any day and at any place that the pope might determine. After the German princes had been summoned, he was to answer the charges that were brought against him. The pope, if he thought Ito be right, would sit in the judge’s chair to decide the matter. After the judge’s decision Henry was either to keep the kingdom if he cleared himself of the accusations, or to lose it without resistance should the accusations proved to be true, and he was declared unworthy of the royal dignity according to the laws of the Church. Irrespective of whether he would keep or lose the kingdom, he would not take revenge on any man for the humiliation;

Until the day when his case would be heard in open court, he should not use any adornment of royal splendour, nor carry any signs of royal dignity; he should do nothing in regard to the administration of the state according to the usual custom of law, and nothing he did should have validity; finally, except for the collection of the royal income, which he himself and his family need for their maintenance, none of the royal demesne should be used; also, all who have sworn allegiance to him should be released from the fetters of their oath. Rupert bishop of Bamberg and Ulrich of Godesheim and the others, by whose evil promptings he had ruined himself and the kingdom, he should remove forever from his entourage.

If he again becomes powerful and newly strengthened in the kingdom after the accusations have been refuted, he should nevertheless always be subject to the Roman pope and be obedient to his commandments. (and further) …finally, if he were to act contrary to any of these obligations, the release from the ban now so ardently desired will be null and void,….and the princes of the realm should then, without being required to undertake any further investigation, and freed from all obligation of the oath, choose another king….

Hmm, really. Did Henry really sign over all his rights to the pope, agree to be non-king until his judgement is delivered and accept that he would automatically be excommunicated if he were to fail against any of this long list of obligations?

Not likely. Gregory VII wrote to the German princes from Canossa a few days later justifying the loosening of the ban and there he only mentions two commitments,

  1. that Henry swore to stand trial before the pope on the accusations brought by the princes, on a day and time of the Pope’s choosing, and
  2. That he gives safe passage to the pope and all his envoys.

That summary by Gregory is a lot more convincing. After all, Henry had an army waiting below Canossa that could besiege and ultimately depose the pope. So, he wasn’t without options. And equally if Lambert was right and Henry had signed up to these kinds of restrictions, why wouldn’t Gregory mention them to the German princes who were pretty upset about Gregory removing the ban?

This peace agreement was than sworn upon, not by the King himself but by his negotiators, Matilda of Tuscany, Adelheid of Savoy, some German bishops and Italian princes and last but not least Abbot Hugh of Cluny, who as a monk would not swear but promises to guarantee Henry’s future adherence to the agreement.

After that the pope celebrated mass to which Henry was admitted and where he was offered holy communion, whereby his ban was lifted. After that the party set down for a meal, a meal where Henry sat glumly at the popes table, scratching his fingernails into the tabletop.

The next day, Henry travelled back to Germany. Henry himself never mentioned what happened in this forbidding castle in Northern Italy. We do not know what he felt or said when he returned into the cold fresh air of this winter’s morning in January 1077. I have a good idea, but this being a family show, there is no way I can share it.

As we said many times before, images matter and even more so in the Middle Ages. The Image of an emperor kneeling in the snow begging the pope to give him his ancestral kingdom back has been reproduced over and over and will stick in people’s minds until today. Whether Canossa was a clever move by Henry IV. to thwart his enemies or whether it was a capitulation does not really matter. What the world saw was that the spiritual power of the papacy had subjected the most powerful of temporal rulers. That puts a wedge into the notion that the church and the world are one and the same, as had been the belief since Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman empire. The separation of church and state will not take place for another 700 plus years, but it is here in the frozen soil of the Emilia Romagna that the seed of modernity is planted.

I will dedicate a whole episode to the repercussions of Canossa and the events that follow when the season comes to an end. But next week we will first travel with Henry IV. back across the alps to Germany where his enemies do not care one iota that he is no longer excommunicated. They elect another king and the war of words turns into a war of swords. I hope to see you then.

by on

Henry had appointed a new archbishop of Milan in direct opposition to the Pope Gregory VII’s candidate (see previous post). As a consequence Gregory had sent a letter to Henry admonishing him and threatening excommunication.

Henry then called a synod of 26 German bishops in Worms for the 24th of January. These mighty prelates were tired of being harassed and harangued by the fanatic on the papal throne. No more did they want to be summoned to Rome to atone for things they believed were perfectly acceptable, like letting their canons get married or accepting financial obligations to the king upon investiture. And even more so if the pope himself failed to adhere to his own standards.

And so, Henry IV in agreement with his bishops writes back to Gregory on January 24th, 1076 as follows:

“Henry, king not by force, but by the grace of God, to Hildebrand, at present not pope, but false monk. You deserve such greeting for the disorder you created. There is no rank in the Church which you have not made to partake in shame instead of honour, in curse instead of blessing. For, to mention only a few, most important instances out of so many; you have dared to lay hands on the leaders of the holy Church, the Lord’s anointed – the archbishops, the bishops and priests; you have trampled them underfoot like slaves who do not know what their master is doing.; by crushing them have you endeared yourself to the commonest of people; you have regarded them all as ignorant, but yourself as omniscient.

This knowledge, however, you have used not for edification but for destruction, so that we are justified in believing that St. Gregory, whose name you have arrogated to yourself, prophesied about you when he said, “The pride of him who has power becomes the greater the number of those who are subject to him, and he thinks that he himself can do more than all.”

And indeed we have endured all of this, being anxious to preserve the honour of the apostolic see; but you have understood our humility as fear, and therefore have not been afraid to rise up against the royal power given to us by God, daring to threaten to take it from us. As if we had received our kingdom from you! As if the kingdom and the dominion were in your hands and not in God’s!

And this, although our Lord Jesus Christ has called us to kingship, but has not called you to the priesthood. For you have ascended by the following steps. For by cunning, which the monastic profession abhors, have you obtained money; by money, favour; by the sword, the throne of peace. And from the throne of peace you have disturbed the peace by arming the subjects against those who rule over them; by teaching, that our bishops, called by God, are to be despised; by taken offices from priests and giving it laymen, by permitting them to depose or condemn those who had been ordained as teachers by the laying on of the bishops’ hands.

And you even laid hand on me, who, though unworthy to be among the anointed, yet have been anointed to the kingdom; on me, who, as the tradition of the holy fathers teaches, may not be deposed for any crime unless, God forbid, I have departed from the faith, on me who is subject to the judgment of God alone. The wisdom of the holy fathers even left Julian, the Apostate, not to be tried by themselves, but left it to God alone, to judge and depose him. For even the true pope, Peter, exclaims, “Fear God, honor the King.”

But you, who do not fear God, dishonour Him in me whom He has appointed. Therefore St. Paul, when he spared no angel of heaven if he had preached otherwise, did not exempt even you who teach otherwise on earth. For he says, “If anyone, neither I nor an angel from heaven, preaches any other gospel than that which was preached to you, he will be condemned.

You then, condemned by this curse and by the judgment of all our bishops and by our own, descend and renounce the apostolic chair which you have usurped. Let another ascend the throne of St. Peter, who shall not exercise violence under the guise of religion, but shall teach the sound doctrine of St. Peter.

I, Henry, king by the grace of God, say to you, together with all our bishops, descend, descend or be damned forever.”

Translation by Ernest F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, (London: George Bell and Sons, 1910), adjusted by author

That went down like a lead balloon in Rome. For the follow-up to this story, check out Episode 33 of the History of the Germans Podcast available here or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts from.