Investiture Controversy

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The Investiture Controversy and its impact on the East

This week we will hit the arguably most important set of events in medieval German history often summarised under the banner of the Investiture Controversy. The Investment Controversy came about through a confluence of three major strains, the rise in piety in the wake of improving economic conditions, the establishment of the papacy as a power separate and superior to temporal rulers and thirdly, the opposition of the German magnates against centralising tendency of the emperors, led by the Saxons. And it is the latter part this episode focuses on. If you are interested in the whole story, the episodes 30 to 42 can give you the overarching story. I actually listened to them again and am a little bit proud of what I have done there. So much for self-aggrandization and let’s find out.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 102 – The Great Divide

This week we will hit the arguably most important set of events in medieval German history often summarised under the banner of the Investiture Controversy. The Investment Controversy came about through a confluence of three major strains, the rise in piety in the wake of improving economic conditions, the establishment of the papacy as a power separate and superior to temporal rulers and thirdly, the opposition of the German magnates against centralising tendency of the emperors, led by the Saxons. And it is the latter part this episode focuses on. If you are interested in the whole story, the episodes 30 to 42 can give you the overarching story. I actually listened to them again and am a little bit proud of what I have done there. So much for self-aggrandization and let’s find out.

But before we start let me tell you that 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 Justin K, Margaret G., Ragnhild S and Regina who have already signed up.

We pick up the story where we left it in episode 100. The Saxon leaders had surrendered to Henry IV on October 25th, 1075. Henry’s soldiers were raiding and murdering up and down the duchy in revenge for the destruction of the Harzburg and the desecration of the imperial graves.

After the battle on the Unstrut Henry IV had the opportunity to show mercy and reach 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 that hostility came to bear as the conflict between Henry IV and pope Gregory VII explodes into the excommunication and deposition of the king. Just as a recap, Gregory and Henry had got into a disagreement over who could appoint the archbishop of Milan, which had resulted in 2 rival archbishops. This conflict had escalated into a letter Henry wrote to Gregory calling him, Hildebrand, not pope but false monk and where he called for him to be replaced. Gregory VII responded by first excommunicating and then deposing him. Henry was now dependent upon the support of his bishops and magnates, support he found he did not have. At an assembly at Trebur the German magnates ordered him deposed unless he can be released from the ban within a year and a day. That led to the famous crossing of the alps in mid-winter and the penance Henry IV did before Gregory VII at the castle of Canossa.

Whilst all this is going on, Saxony is back in open rebellion. Magnates who had fled into exile returned and the bishops released those who had been taken prisoner. Otto von Northeim changed sides again and handed the Harzburg over to the rebels, wiping out most of the imperial gains.

As you may remember that in March 1077 the princes declare Henry IV formally deposed at the assembly of Forchheim, even though he is now released from the ban. It is unclear who took part in this assembly, but we do know that Otto von Northeim was an important voice. At this diet, two decisions are taken. The first was the election of Rudolf von Rheinfelden, the duke of Swabia as anti-king. Even more important than that was the decision to change the constitution of the empire. The new 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”. The empire had become an elective monarchy.

In the civil war that follows the support for Henry IV sits mainly in the south, in his own lands around Worms and Speyer, Bavaria, parts of Swabia and along the Main river. The supporters of Rudolf of Rheinfelden are the Saxons, even though the anti-king himself wasn’t one.

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 short-lived truce until June 1081. After that fighting resumed and an 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.

But somehow the momentum was gone from the rebellion. Henry IV could leave the management of the conflict to his closest ally and son-in-law, Frederick of Hohenstaufen. Frederick kept things ticking over whilst focusing on consolidating both the royal territories as well as is own.

This lowkey conflict continued until Henry IV returned to Germany in 1084. In the meantime Henry had taken Rome and managed to effect an imperial coronation. Gregory VII had retaken the Holy City with the help of the Normans, but they made such mess, the pope had to leave with them and died in Salerno that same year.

Basically, Henry IV was back in the saddle. All that was left was mopping up the opposition. That opposition had now changed quite fundamentally. Otto von Northeim had died in 1083. With him the Saxons had lost their unifying figurehead. Amongst the temporal leaders of the Saxons we now have several. There is Magnus, the duke of Saxony who does play a role, but is often lukewarm in the support of the uprising and subsequently does not have the leadership role his title suggests. Then we have the sons of Otto von Northeim, of which there are at least three, Siegried, Kuno and Henry the fat. The house of Wettin is also on the rise and their main protagonist is Henry of Eilenburg. But the most prominent was Ekbert II, margrave of Meissen. He needs a bit more of an introduction.

Last time we talked about the margraviate of Meissen, the man in charge was the ruthless Eckart II who died childless. The county then went to the counts of Weimar who only lasted about 20 years before it went to Ekbert I, count of Brunswick. Now that rings a bell I guess. Brunswick will become the de facto capital of the duchy once Henry the Lion from the house of Welf takes over. For now it is just one of several important counties and seat of the Brunones, one of the ancient Saxon families. They are linked to the imperial family and as it happens the only family the Saliens have in Saxony. Ekbert I gained his one significant entry into the history books when he rescued little Henry IV from drowning at the coup of Kaiserswerth. That explains why Meissen is given to Ekbert I when the previous margrave died without male descendants in 1067. He did not last long, and in 1068 his son, Ekbert II takes over.

Ekbert II should be a contented little count. Not only did he hold the margraviate of Meissen, he was also count of Brunswick and Count of Frisia plus he had inherited the lands of the counts of Weimar, making him the most significant magnate in saxony now that Otto von Northeim’s possessions have been split up between his sons.

But he is not a contented little count, nor is he loyal to the imperial house that had bestowed all that wealth on his family. So he joined the Saxon uprising in 1073 and fought alongside Otto on Northeim. When their case was lost in October 1075 Ekbert’s little empire collapses into dust. Henry IV is so enraged by Ekbert’s betrayal, he issues an order saying that by the law of the nations … the enemies of the king… are outlaws and should be disinherited of all their possessions and that Ekbert “shall have no part in the kingdom” Meissen goes to the duke of Bohemia, Frisia to the bishop of Utrecht and Brunswick, I do not know.

What we do know is that the year after as the rebellion resumes, Ekbert is back. He regains Meissen and Brunswick and puts his weight behind Rudolf von Rheinfelden. But after his previous experience, he likes to keep an open mind and open communication channels with the other side so as to be ready to swap sides should things turn unpleasant. They did not get too unpleasant for Ekbert II until 1085 which is why he stuck with the Saxons.

The other thing that has changed was the relationship between the Saxons and the church reformers. So far, the Saxons and the popes have shared an enemy, but not much else. You may remember that one of the reasons the Saxons were so disenchanted with the emperors was their sponsorship of the church. And they did not feel that Gregory VII had been wholeheartedly in their side. It took him 3 years to endorse the anti-king Rudolf of Rheinfelden and he never supported the current official head of the whole enterprise, Hermann von Salm. Ah, sorry I nearly forgot him. He is still about, still technically their king, but he does not really matter.

By 1084 when Henry IV had returned triumphantly from his Italian adventures, the Saxons and the church move closer to together. The main church leaders are Hartwig archbishop of Magdeburg and Burchard of Halberstadt. The bishops were much less interested in the rights and privileges of the Saxons, but in church reform and the supremacy of the papacy. But needs must and the bishops stood together with the temporal lords throughout the 1070s and early 1080s.

And there is another leg to all this, the Swabians. When Rudolf of Rheinfelden became anti-king, his vassals in the south joined the Saxon uprising as did the house of Welf. They were supposed to be joint partners in the endeavour, but the two groups had again little in common apart from the animosity towards Henry IV. The military benefit of the alliance with the Swabians was almost entire offset by the complexity of coordinating across disconnected territories and the inability to elect a truly powerful leader as anti-king.

When Henry returns, he is no longer the teenager/young adult of his earlier career. He had grown up and become more realistic in his ambitions. So rather than going in like a wrecking ball, he now aims to break up the opposition and reconcile with former foes.

He tries this with the bishops by inviting them to have a theological discussion about the legality of his excommunication. This does not get very far since the situation is ultimately irresolvable by argument. Henry had created not only an antipope but also anti-archbishops and anti-bishops all of which were trading excommunications and bans. There were synods on either side where either the all Gregorian bishops were summarily deposed or all Henrician bishops were told to go packing.

Where he had more success was in trying to break up the phalanx of territorial lords. These guys did not care much about the pope and church reform, they just wanted to be free from authoritarian rule. But talking to the other side was risky. At an assembly of Saxon magnates the bishop Udo of Hildesheim, his brother and the count Dietrich of Katlenburg were accused of having opened negotiations with Henry.  The three of them admitted having spoken to the emperor but insisted they had no intention of surrendering. They were accused of betrayal and a quarrel broke out at the end of which Count Dietrich lay dead and the bishop and his brother had to run to Henry Iv where they remained.

Count Dietrich was not just anyone, he was a rebel since 1073, a member of a great old Saxon family and married to Ekbert of Meissen’s sister. His potential betrayal caused a lot of concern, and with good reason. What added to the worries was that bishop Udo of Hildesheim now definitely supported Henry. His job was to recruit more defectors. Henry promised not just preferment but also that he would swear an oath that “if the Saxons permitted him to exercise kingship in the same way as his father, he would never infringe the rights they had enjoyed since the time of their conqueror Charles the Great.”. He basically offers the Saxons what they wanted all along. That did work for the temporal lords, but not for the bishops. They tried to hold things together, if necessary by purges.

In 1185 Frederick of Putelendorf, a nephew of our old friend Adalbert archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, was killed by the count Louis “the leaper” of Thuringia, again upon suspicion of being a defector from the Saxon cause. This callous act brought Louis the victim’s job, making him count palatinate of Saxony.

Louis is a bit of a mystery man. There are many stories about him that are bit difficult to verify. He got his nickname when, after he was caught, escaped from prison by jumping into the Saale river from one of the towers of the castle of Giebichenstein. He was also the founder of the landgraviate of Thuringia, a princely territory that kept growing and growing in the centuries that followed, not always by playing cricket.

But by July 1185 the bishops’ poker play ended. Too many of the Saxon lords cared more about bringing the conflict to an end on acceptable terms. Henry IV was able to take a large army to Magdeburg where he was received with all the honours. The Saxon nobles even assembled to depose their useless anti-king Hermann von Salm. Henry then replaced all the opposition bishops with loyal candidates which was fine. Then he replaced several key administrative positions. All done, Henry IV dismissed his army and settled in to enjoy the lasting peace he had achieved.

His peace however lasted barely two months, or a Truss as we call it in England. Our friend Ekbert II who had sworn fealty again was clearly unhappy with the outcome. He had assumed that he would retain the margraviate of Meissen under the new regime. But that was not so. Henry IV maintained his decision to oust him and gave the margraviate to the duke of Bohemia. So he and others ganged up, sent the new bishops back home and called back Hartwig of Magdeburg and Burchart of Halberstadt. Hermann von Salm returned and celebrated Christmas in the same halls the emperor had sat in judgement only months earlier. Henry IV was back to square 1.

The following year, the emperor tried again. He mustered a large army and -after condemning Ekbert II again, this time as an enemy of the empire, set off for Magdeburg. But after a few weeks of burning and pillaging he turned around and goes back home. Why is not quite clear but some sort of treachery, this time in the imperial ranks thwarted the campaign.

Now it is the Saxons’ turn. They revive their old alliance with the Swabians around Welf IV and agree to jointly take Wuerzburg, thereby creating a land bridge between the two territories.  5 weeks into the siege an imperial army appears. The rebels march out to the Pleichfeld to fight. The southerners are full of fervour for the holy war they fight against their sinful deposed ruler. They put up high crosses on wagons flying red banners, a contraption that sounds like an Italian Carroccio. Whether rit was the crosses, the religious fervour or straightforward military skill, the imperials are defeated, not just defeated, but the battle turned into a rout. Eyewitnesses talk about nine huge piles of corpses of the defeated army against just 30 lost amongst the rebels.

But the Saxons and Swabians did not make much out of their success. They leave a garrison in Wuerzburg and re-install their archbishop. But a year later Henry IV is back, Wuerzburg returned to imperial control and the connection between the two rebel strongholds broken.

The divisions in the rebel camp keep deepening. At some point the Swabians negotiate with Henry directly without checking in with their partners. Duke Magnus Billung, after all nominally the leader of the duchy joins Henry IV.

So in 1187, Henry IV goes again. Same procedure as before. He raises and army and marches into Saxony. This time Ekbert II goes to the imperial tent, surrenders and swears fealty until the end of time, provided he is recognised as margrave of Meissen. Henry IV agrees, which was a difficult thing to do.

Henry’s most significant ally in the war with the Saxons was the duke of Bohemia, Vratislav. He was so dependent upon him, he elevated him to be king of Bohemia, something emperors had refused to do ever since Boleslav the Brave had claimed a crown. The other thing he had promised Vratislav was the margraviate of Meissen. He now had to go back on that promise. That was a high price to pay for the loyalty of Ekbert II, but sure worth it. Henry dismisses his army and sends Ekbert up to Magdeburg to get everything ready for his joyous entry into the city.

Well, Henry IV finds out that Ekbert’s idea of “until the end of time” meant barely 24 hours. Once he is in Magdeburg, Ekbert sends envoys to henry saying that actually, upon reflection, he is still bound by oath to his compatriots and so, sorry, no can do. What happened in the meantime is that the two bishops, Hartwig of Magdeburg and Burchart of Hialberstadt had handed over, not only all the land and money they could spare, but promised him they would make him “king of the Saxons”.

That was the end of that campaign. But hey, there is always another year.

The 1188 campaign was however different, different in so far as it did not happen.

The offer of kingship to Ekbert II was what brought the rebellion to collapse. The Saxon leaders knew Ekbert and they knew he was not to be trusted. So Ekbert was not proposed as king of the Saxons. Ekbert claimed that Burchart and Hartwig had tricked him, re-joined the camp of Henry IV, swearing ternal fealty and attacked the diocese of Halberstadt. Burchart met up with Hartwig and one of Otto von Northeim’s sons, Kuno in Goslar. What then happened is unclear, but somehow the citizens of Goslar and the Halberstadt Ministeriales get into a fight, at the end of which the Gregorian party is another bishop short. All fingers point at Ekbert II.

With Burchart gone, the other Saxons throw in the towel. The sons of Otto von Northeim bend the knee as does Henry of Eilenburg, head of the house of Wettin. In return henry confirms all ancient rights and privileges, whatever these are. Henry IV then marrie Eupraxia, the widow of the count of Stade, another important Saxon family.

Hartwig of Magdeburg is the first to submit, promising to bring along the other Gregorian bishops of Naumburg and Merseburg. Hartwig is immediately restored to his seat as the one and only archbishop. Not just that, he is made the emperors representative in Saxony and Thuringia, a sort of viceroy.

That arrangement was the smart move here. By creating a layer between the emperor and the Saxon nobles in the form of a man the Saxons knew and trusted, they could be assured that there would be no more imperial overreach. Hartwig was the ideal man for the role. He kept it until 1104, constantly loyal to the emperor and keeping his oath to leave the Saxons well alone.

That would be the end of this story was it not for the eternal troublemaker, Ekbert. Having rebelled twice and reconciled twice, he thought all good things are three and whilst all the other Saxons made peace, he got going again. And though he was pretty much on his own he won a battle at Gleichen where he again routed an imperial army. He captured the bishop of Hildesheim, the defector of 1185 and only let him live after he had handed over his diocese. But in the end, he could not sustain it. In 1189 Henry of Eilenburg caught up and defeated him. Ekbert got away and hid in a mill on the river Selke. There soldiers in the pay of the abbess Adelaide of Quedlinburg found him and killed him.

That was the end of Ekbert II of Meissen and also the end of the Saxon wars. The chroniclers counted 15 incursions of the emperor into Saxony. This was the last. Henry IV will never again set foot in the duchy. The Salians and their heirs will never again rule directly in Saxony. We have gone from unease, to rift to separation. Saxony will now look to its own leader who sits between them and the emperor. And the question who that will be hangs on the inheritance of Ekbert II.

Since Ekbert had no male offspring the margraviate of Meissen became a returned fief. That was given  to Henry of Eilenburg, whose family, the Wettins held it until 1918. 

Ekbert’s personal wealth including Brunswick and Frisia went to his daughter Gertrude who had married Henry the fat, son of Otto of Northeim. Henry the Fat takes over the role of Ekbert as the most important noble in Saxony until his death in 1101. Henry’s daughter Richenza inherited most of these lands and when she married Lothar von Supplinburg provided him with what he needed to rise first to duke of Saxony and later to emperor. But that is a tale for another time, next week to be precise. I hope you will join us again.

You won’t believe it, but when you hear this I will still be sailing somewhere in the Atlantic or maybe just got into the Mediterranean. If you want to follow along, you can do so on a website and app called Marine Traffic. Search for sailing vessel Purple Rain under French flag. What this journey means, apart from working like a dervish to get enough episodes recorded to cover the time, it also means that my marketing efforts trickle down to zero. Hence, I would hugely appreciate if you were to help promote the show. Why not send a link to the History of the Germans to a friend or family member who might be interested, write a comment on one of my older posts which tends to revive them or even write your own post on social media. That would be massively appreciated, as would obviously signing up on Patreon at patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

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The Conflict between the Saxons and the Emperors breaks out in the open

As we go through the story of the Saxon Stem duchy in the 10th and 11th century, two or maybe three main strains of the story emerge, the gradually drifting away of Saxony from the empire, the relationship between Saxons and Wends and the antagonism between the archbishop of Hamburg and the magnates. As for the first part of the storyline, the conflict between Saxons and the empire we are now hitting the hot stage. I did cover that already a long time ago in Episode 31 “The (second) Saxon War”. I had at some point thought of simply dropping the old episode into the feed as it quite neatly summarises the events of the great Saxon rebellion that precedes the journey of emperor Henry IV to Canossa. But then I thought I should at least put these events more into the context of the history of the North. So, most of what you hear now is recycled material with just a few artfully designed segues  –as Wilhelm Busch used to say “wovon sie besonders schwaermt, wenn es wieder aufgewaermt”.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 100 – The Saxon War – Take 2

As we go through the story of the Saxon Stem duchy in the 10th and 11th century, two or maybe three main strains of the story emerge, the gradually drifting away of Saxony from the empire, the relationship between Saxons and Wends and the antagonism between the archbishop of Hamburg and the magnates.

As for the first part of the storyline, the conflict between Saxons and the empire we are now hitting the hot stage. I did cover that already a long time ago in Episode 31 “The (second) Saxon War”. I had at some point thought of simply dropping the old episode into the feed as it quite neatly summarises the events of the great Saxon rebellion that precedes the journey of emperor Henry IV to Canossa. But then I thought I should at least put these events more into the context of the history of the North. So, most of what you hear now is recycled material with just a few artfully designed segues  –as Wilhelm Busch used to say “wovon sie besonders schwaermt, wenn es wieder aufgewaermt”. Sorry – not translatable.

But before we start let me tell you that 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 Albert J., Roman B., David B. and Mitchell B.  who have already signed up.

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Last week we saw the Saxons’ anger rising and rising and rising as the emperors Konrad II and Henry III tightened the screws on the duchy. And worse, the church had become a serious impediment to the looting and slaving business. The church insisted that Christians could not be enslaved and thanks to their missionary efforts in the eastern marches the pool of available pagan slaves was shrinking fast.

Resistance to the tightening control was not confined to Saxony. Towards the end of his reign Hermann of Reichenau, our most reliable chronicler of that period writes: quote “At this time both the foremost men and the lesser men of the kingdom began more and more to murmur against the emperor. They complained he had long since departed from his original conduct of justice, peace, piety, fear of God and manifold virtues in which he ought to have made progress from day to day; that he was gradually turning towards acquisitiveness and a certain negligence and that he would become much worse than he was before”. (end quote)

When Henry III died in 1056, the empire fell to his six-year-old son, Henry IV and his mother, the empress Agnes as regent. Agnes was in over her head and made several far-reaching and arguably catastrophic mistakes that undermined the imperial position.

As for the border region, the death of the emperor Henry III coincided with one of the rare defeats of the Saxons in their wars with the Slavs. The Margrave of the Northern March, William had taken an army “of Saxons in infinite number” who have been defeated and killed.

Naturally, the Saxons blame the emperor, who else for this defeat. Had he only sent more troops, made a better plan or generally been better at his job..

Lambert of Hersfeld writes the “the princes of saxony” had reached an agreement that the way to get compensation for their losses would be by seizing the kingship from young king Henry IV. Not just that but they were committed to actually killing the child, which would have created an absolute outrage. They then lined up behind a most unlikely candidate for the throne, a count Otto who was a half-brother of the margrave of the Northern marches whose mother was apparently a Slavic servant. This Otto person had spent most of his life in Bohemia and had only come to Saxony when his brother died in the hope of receiving the Northern March. Once there, the Saxon princes sold him the idea he could aspire straight for kingship. I am struggling to believe how serious the whole affair was, but it came to an actual battle when the conspirators with said Otto in their midst were heading to a royal assembly at Merseburg. On their way they ran into two distant relatives of the child king who somehow realised that something was amiss, plus they hated Otto and his friends for some other reason. In any event the two sides got to work, tearing each other apart. Otto and one of the royal cousins managed to run each other through with their lances, both dying from their wounds. In the end the royal party prevailed, and this particular insurrection petered out.

But that does not mean the Saxons were done. Nor was anyone else. The years of Agnes regency and then the rule of archbishop Anno of Cologne were extremely chaotic. The members of the regency council were accused of the most base corruption, shoving royal assets to each other whilst demanding bribes for the confirmation of rights and privileges. At the same time the duchies of Swabia and Bavaria slipped out of imperial control to men who would become the most irreconcilable enemies of the emperor. Check out episode 30 for more detail.

This regency period ended when Henry IV had been declared an adult at the ripe old age of 15.

It is around now, 1066 that Henry IV. begins his major castle building projects around Goslar. His father had already begun the process of creating a coherent royal territory around the silver mines in the Harz mountains. These royal lands around Goslar were administrated by Ministeriales, unfree men trained in war and administration. Mighty castles are built on the tops of mountains, castles no longer designed to protect the local population in times of war, but to suppress them. Instead of enfeoffing these castles to loyal men of noble descent, he garrisoned them with the sons of peasants trained in war who owed everything to him. He put the administration of the royal territory not into the hands of a count as would have been the case 50 years earlier but appoints a governor (Prefectus) who could be hired and fired at will.

The largest and most important of these new castles was the Harzburg, not far from the imperial residence in Goslar. Harzburg was not only one of the largest castles built in the 11th century, rivalling Fulk of Anjou’s mighty constructions, it was also designed as an imperial residence and administrative centre. Nothing indicates more clearly the change of times than the fact that the emperors are leaving their indefensible palaces on the plains and move behind 10-metre-high walls on mountaintops. The Harzburg contained an imperial palace as well as a monastery. Henry IV had his brother Konrad who had died very young as well as his first son buried in this richly decorated chapel. He also transferred the imperial regalia, i.e., the imperial crown, the Holy Lance etc. onto the Harzburg. 

Whilst the walls of the Harzburg and other fortifications are going up, the empire is shaken by a sequence of scandals that further undermine the imperial reputation. The first one involved Henry IV’s attempt to gain a divorce from the empress Bertha, something that did not happen and something he will later be very grateful for.

The second one which involved the recently appointed duke of Bavaria, Otto of Northeim. Otto was from a Saxon noble family that had come to prominence under Henry II. Otto himself made a very advantageous marriage when he married Richeza, a granddaughter of Otto II who also brought a huge dowry. He was put in as duke of Bavaria by Agnes in 1061, which was an odd choice to start with.

There is no indication that Otto of Northeim was involved in the attempts on Henry III’s life in 1046 and the botched coup of 1057, but he was such an important figure in Saxony, it is unlikely he was kept completely in the dark. Northeim then appears again as a co-conspirator in the kidnapping of Henry IV at Kaiserswerth, something that cannot have endeared him to the young king.

Then a sequence of mysterious events take place. Whilst Henry was staying at Otto of Northeim’s estate, one of his Ministeriales is ambushed and killed. Things are being investigated, but nothing comes of it. Since life is cheap and Ministeriales are still serfs, nobody ascribes much significance to that event.

In 1070, a certain Enigo, a thug of ill repute, claims publicly that Otto of Northeim had tried to hire him to murder the king. Otto of Northeim strenuously denies the claim. In classic 11th century fashion, when it is one man’s word against another’s, the resolution has to be through trial by combat. Otto of Northeim initially accepts the ruling but does then not appear on the set dates in Goslar to fight for his honour. Under these circumstances the Saxon magnates pass a judgement in default. Otto of Northeim was stripped of the duchy of Bavaria, all other fiefs and even of his allodial possessions. Northeim is declared an outlaw.

According to the chronicler Bruno, this was all a plot by Henry IV. to strip Northeim of his title. Bruno even alleges that Northeim would have been killed on the king’s orders even if he had won the trial by combat. I find that last point hard to believe. The trial would have taken place in full view of the Saxon nobles and if Henry would have wanted to pull a stunt like this, his reputation would have suffered immeasurable damage. That in combination with the string of assassination attempts by Saxon nobles and the mysterious death of his Ministeriales the year before makes it likely that there was something to this allegation.

Guilty or not, Otto finds support from other Saxon nobles, including from Magnus, son of the duke of Saxony in his fight with the king. But he failed to bring the whole of the duchy behind him and had to submit to the emperor after a year of fighting. Henry IV. imprisons him and Magnus. Otto of Northeim is released in 1072 and some of his inherited lands are returned to him, minus a chunk Henry wanted to keep. Magnus, who after his father’s death had become the duke of Saxony, is kept longer, presumably as insurance against another Saxon uprising.

As far as insurance goes, this one did not work.

In the summer of 1073, the Saxon had enough of Henry’s castles. What pushed them over the edge was that Henry, cash strapped as he was, did not pay the Ministeriales who manned the castles. As a consequence the Ministeriales forced the local peasants to bring food to them, and if they failed to do so, burned their villages and raped their wives and daughters. At least that is the story told by the usually extremely biased chroniclers Bruno and Lambert. It may also be that the villages belonging to the castles were obliged to bring the produce by law and custom, as was the case with the castles the mighty Saxon lords had built themselves. The only difference was that the soldiers manning Henry’s castles weren’t Saxons, but foreigners from elsewhere, possibly Swabia.

In June of 1073 the magnates of Saxony, including the bishops of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Hildesheim, as well as Hermann Billung, uncle of the incarcerated duke Magnus of Saxony and Otto of Northeim appear before the emperor in Goslar demanding an audience to discuss the castle building program.

Henry IV. does not grant an audience. In fact, he leaves the Saxon magnates stand outside the castle whilst he is playing dice with is mates inside – again as reported by our biased chroniclers. This is often seen as an unnecessary insult that justifies the upcoming rebellion and puts Henry IV. in the wrong. On the other hand, imperial dignity required that the king would not yield to such explicit demands. Henry IV. had had a poor previous experience when he yielded princely demands to come to an assembly in Trebur to defend his advisor, archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg-Bremen. That was an experience he was not too keen to repeat. Plus, Henry also had been assembling an army for a campaign against Poland, which would come in handy if he needed to suppress any Saxon uprising.

The Saxon magnates are now infuriated to the max. A month later they meet at Hoetensleben for an assembly. There Otto of Northeim gives his famous speech, which I will try to translate here. Thanks, by the way to deepl.com whose free translation service has become a lifesaver for this podcast. Here is Otto of Northeim:

“The calamities and disgraces that our king has brought upon each one of you for a long time are great and unbearable, but what he still intends to do, if the Almighty God permits him, is even greater and more severe. Strong castles he has erected, as you know, numerous in places already firm by nature, and has placed in them a great multitude of his vassals, and abundantly provided with weapons of all kinds. These castles are not erected against the heathen, who have completely devastated our land where it borders theirs, but in the midst of our country, where no one ever thought of making war against him; he has fortified them with such great effort, and what they mean for this land some of you have already experienced, and if God’s mercy and your bravery do not intervene, you will soon all experience it. They take your possessions by force and hide them in their castles; they abuse your wives and daughters for their pleasure when they please; they demand your servants and your cattle, and all that they like, for their service; yes, they even force you yourselves to bear every burden, however odious, on your free shoulders. But when I imagine in my thoughts what is still waiting for us, then everything that you are now enduring still seems to me to be bearable. For when he will have built his castles in our whole country at his discretion and will have equipped them with armed warriors and all other necessities, then he will no longer plunder your possessions one by one, but he will snatch from you all that you possess with one blow, will give your goods to strangers, and will make you yourselves, you freeborn men, oblige unknown men as servants. And all this, you brave men, will you let it happen to you? Is it not better to fall in brave fight than to live a miserable and ignominious life, being made a shameful mockery by these people.

Even Serfs who are bought for money do not endure the unreasonable commands of their masters, and you, who were born free, should patiently endure servitude? Perhaps you, as Christians, are afraid to violate the oath with which you have paid homage to the king. Indeed, to the king you have sworn. As long as he was a king to me and acted royally, I also kept the oath I swore to him freely and faithfully; but after he ceased to be a king, the one to whom I had to keep loyalty was no longer there. So not against the king, but against the unjust robber of my freedom; not against the fatherland, but for the fatherland, and for freedom, which no good man surrenders other than with his life at the same time, I take up arms, and I demand of you that you also take them up. Awake, therefore, and preserve for your children the inheritance which your fathers have left you; beware lest through your carelessness or slothfulness you yourselves and your children become serfs of strangers” (end quote)

Now before you go and think that here is the first outburst of genuine German nationalism, I have to stop you there. When Northeim talks of “patria” or “fatherland” he talks about Saxony, not Germany. And when he talks about freedom, he is not talking about human rights, but ancestral privileges, the Freedoms as they will be later called.

But rousing the speech is nevertheless and the Saxons raise an army and head towards the Harzburg, where Henry IV. had gone to hold out while his agents bring over the army initially meant for the Poland campaign to defeat these obnoxious Saxons once and for all. The Saxons set up camp on an opposite hill and sent their demands to the king. He was to dismantle all his castles in Saxony and dismiss his false councillors.

The Harzburg was almost impregnable, so the Saxons blockaded the castle’s food supplies whilst throwing large stones down on the fortifications from a new structure built on the opposite hill.

Henry’s hope of support from the army readied for the war in Poland was quickly dashed. The mighty princes who made up his forces shared many of the views Otto of Northeim had articulated in his speech. They could see that if Henry were to prevail in Saxony, he would proceed to build similar castles in Bavaria, Swabia and anywhere else in the country. So, the princes withdrew their troops. Some magnates led by the archbishop of Mainz go further allegedly offering Otto von Northeim the crown.

Henry IV. fled the Harzburg and set up camp in Worms. There he managed to gather some bishops for an attempt to make a military move on Saxony, but his support was far too weak.

On February 2nd, 1074 he signed the peace of Gerstungen, which cannot be described as anything but a complete capitulation. In a near full assembly of the great bishops and princes of the realm, Henry IV. conceded the demolition of all his castles, dismissed his councillors and gave full amnesty to all the rebels.

Henry IV. withdrew the garrison of the Harzburg and immediately the Saxons stormed in. The Saxon troops it is important to note were not just aristocratic knights but comprised a lot of free or half free peasants. These guys were the first through the gate and began the demolition work. In the peace agreement it was specifically stated that the demolition of the Harzburg should be gentle, respecting the imperial chapel on the site. Well, that did not happen. The Saxon commanders could not stop their enraged mob from tearing down the chapel, stealing the relics and horror of horrors pulling the remains of the Salian princes buried there out of their coffins and throwing them in the ditch like vile garbage.

This profound insult to the honour not just of Henry IV. but the realm as a whole led to one of these sudden mood swings that punctuate so much of medieval history.

The Saxon nobles apologised immediately and promised a thorough investigation and harsh punishment for the perpetrators. But that was not enough. The mighty princes, who did not treat their peasants any different to the way Henry IV. had the neighbours of the Harzburg, realised that these Saxon armies contained an unsettlingly large contingent of free peasants. And in 1073/1074 there had already been uprisings in major cities, namely Worms and Cologne where the bishops had to run for their lives. Even the mighty archbishop Anno of Cologne had been attacked. He only got away with his life because one of his supporters had put a door into the city walls near his house. This “hole of Anno” can still be seen in Cologne.

Given the choice between supporting a potentially overbearing emperor or the rabble-rousing Saxons, many of the Southern dukes, namely Rudolf of Rheinfelden, the duke of Swabia took the side of Henry IV. Henry IV. could muster an army to bring the Saxons to heel. The two sides met at the Unstrut river on June 9, 1075.

What ensued was one of the bloodiest and painful battles of the 11th century. Though in principle it was Saxons against the rest of the kingdom, in reality many families were split. Fathers were fighting sons; brothers were killing each other in the melee. The unity of the kingdom created when king Henry the Fowler had fought against the Hungarians literally around the corner from here was trampled into the dust on that early summer’s day.

Henry IV. prevailed in the brutal fighting. After the battle his troops were let loose across Saxony, murdering and pillaging wherever they went. On October 25th, 1075, the Saxon barons conceded an unconditional surrender.

This is by no means the end of the story – the civil war will continue. But it is a crucial moment. Up to this point there has been war and bloodshed in the kingdom. This is the Middle Ages after all where the state had not yet acquired the monopoly of violence. But this is the first time, imperial power stands against an entire duchy, not just its duke or a set of noblemen. If I had to put a pin onto the timeline where the history of Southern and Northern Germany split apart, the battle on the Unstrut would be my first choice.

Next week we will look at something that happens around the same time and involves several of the protagonists of this tale. It is the story of Gottschalk, the prince of the Abodrites who is trying to take his people out of the bind they find themselves in. He does that in a close alliance with Adalbert, the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and will meet his fate when that great prelate falls, but still paving the way to a reset of the relationship between Wends and Saxons. I hope you will come along.

As I said last week, when you hear this I will still be sailing somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. If you want to follow along, you can do so on a website and app called Marine Traffic. Search for sailing vessel Purple Rain under French flag. What this journey means, apart from working like a dervish to get enough episodes recorded to cover the time, it also means that my marketing efforts trickle down to zero. Hence, I would hugely appreciate if you were to help promote the show. Why not send a link to the History of the Germans to a friend or family member who might be interested, write a comment on one of my older posts which tends to revive them or even write your own post on social media. That would be massively appreciated, as would obviously signing up on Patreon at patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

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What did the Investiture Controversy really change

In this episode we will come to the end of the Investiture controversy, the end of the Salian dynasty and the end of Season 2  – and ask the question, what was all that about?

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 42 –  A World Revolution?

In this episode we will come to the end of the Investiture controversy, the end of the Salian dynasty and the end of Season 2  – and ask the question, what was all that 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 Andrew, Martha and David who have already signed up.

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Last week we ended with Emperor Henry V and Pope Calixtus II getting within a hairs breadth of an agreement that would have brought the investiture conflict in Germany to an end.

Over almost 50 years of war the church and the secular rulers have narrowed down the so-called investiture controversy to one question, how are bishops and abbots appointed? Both France and England had settled the issue with the papacy in 1104 and 1107. In France the arrangement was that the church was free to select its bishops and abbots, however, once selected, the bishop or abbot would have to swear fealty to the king and offer him the services associated with the fiefs the church had received. In England that rule was similar with the crucial difference that the king was allowed to be present at the election and had a casting vote in case no unanimous decision could be agreed upon by the canons. Both of these compromises were a formal limitation of royal prerogatives, but left the rulers with the all important access to the church resources.

The Emperor Henry V was ready to go down a similar route in 1119 and had travelled towards an encounter with pope Calixtus II, only for negotiations to collapse at the last minute. Both sides accused each other of duplicity and last-minute changes. Everything reverted to square 1 and the pope excommunicated Henry V who in turn resumed hostilities against the Gregorian party in Germany.

In 1121 he mustered an army to attack the city of Mainz and its archbishop, his former friend and chancellor Adalbert. Adalbert had by now become papal legate in Germany and one of the most intransigent agents of the hard-line reformers. His stubbornness had lost Adalbert some support amongst the more moderate factions, including his fellow church leaders, the archbishops of Cologne and Trier, but he still had the support of the Saxons under the leadership of Lothar of Supplinburg.

When the two armies faced each other the princes in both camps decided that for the sake of the realm, battle should be avoided. Without a mandate from the emperor of the archbishop the two sides negotiated a formula for peace: “regalia vel fiscalia regno, ecclesiastica ecclesii”. To the king the king’s rights and possessions, to the church the churches’ rights.

This, all the princes jointly promised, is what they would help the king to negotiate with the papacy. Facing a united front of emperor and all the princes, Calixtus II would have to yield. The princes did not have to say what would happen to Henry V if the emperor had dared to reject their proposal.

Let me just leave this here – we will discuss why this is probably an even more important event than the actual concordat of Worms in a moment.

With Germany united in its position, negotiations started swiftly and -after a bit of diplomatic to and fro were concluded on September 23rd 1122 in a field outside the city of Worms. The agreement consisted in two separate treaties.

In the first one, the Henricianum, named after Henry V, the emperor renounces his right to invest bishops with the ring and the staff. He guarantees the churches their right to freely elect their bishops and abbots. He promises to return or help recover whatever land and rights the churches may have lost to secular lords.

In the simultaneous treaty called the Calixtinium, Pope Calixtus II grants the emperor the right to invest the bishop or abbot with his royal fiefs. The symbol for that investiture is now a sceptre. In Germany this investiture is to take place before the consecration of the prelate, whilst in Italy and in Burgundy it takes place afterwards. And the pope allows for Henry to be present at the elections of bishops and abbots and grants him some sort of involvement in resolving contentious elections. In all cases the bishop or abbot owes the king the services under the rules of the fief.

In non-legalese this means the role of the German king in the selection and investiture of bishops is very similar to the situation in England and more significant than in France. Hold that thought – we will get back to this in a moment.

The Concordat brought an end to the religious conflict in Germany but did not result in much of an increase in imperial power on the ground. Saxony remained firmly in the hands of Lothar of Supplinburg. How little influence he now has becomes clear when the counties of Meissen and Lausitz became vacant. It was the duke of Saxony, not the emperor who chose the new counts for these extremely wealthy and strategically important counties. Lothar’s choice as count of Meissen was Conrad of Wettin. Conrad’s descendants would rule the lands around Meissen until rising to become the electors of Saxony, later kings of Saxony-Poland and creators of the greatest of German baroque cities, Dresden.

Whilst Henry’s room to manoeuvre in Germany became tighter and tighter, he was looking for a way out. Anything that would help him gather enough resources to resume the fighting and return to effective power in Germany.

And that opportunity came after in 1120 thanks to a maritime disaster. On the 25th of November William Adelin, son of King Henry I of England boarded the Blanche Nef, the White Ship in Barfleur in Normandy. William being 17 and a man about town took along his entourage of some 300 retainers many of similar age. And they proceeded to do what 17-year-olds left without parental supervision have done since time immemorial, they had some hell of a party. Plus, they were on the fastest ship of the royal fleet, which meant that obviously they wanted to have a race. The king himself had set off earlier that day and bets were taken that the Blanche Nef could overtake the royal ship. The ship’s captain, probably ether sozzled or stirred in his pride set off with a bunch of pissheads in the depth of the night. Barfleur is not an especially difficult port to navigate. What you have to do is go East northeast for about 2 miles to be clear of outlying rocks before you can turn due north for England.  The pilot and the captain, keen to speed things up cut the corner and hit a rock. In the dark and cold all onboard perished except for one man, a butcher from Rouen who clung on to the fatal rock.

The death of King Henry’s only son created an opportunity for our Henry, Emperor Henry V who was married to, yes, the only legitimate daughter of King Henry I, Matilda. It wasn’t clear at this point that Henry I would not have another son, but the optionality was attractive enough for the emperor to invest heavily in the friendship with the ruler of England and Normandy.

The two of them forged a military alliance and Henry V mustered an army to support his father-in-law in his perennial struggles with the French crown. Fighting the French suited Henry V well anyway after their king had been such a strong supporter of the pope in the run-up to the Concordat of Worms.

Henry V thought the puny king Louis VI of France who controlled nit much more than the area around Paris and could call some bishops his vassals would be a pushover. In particular if the two Henrys staged a pincer movement coming simultaneously from the North and the East. And he should have been, had it not been for a sudden emergence of national sentiment amongst the French.

Henry V’s initial target was the city of Reims, the place of royal coronations and place of Clovis’ baptism. Something about the idea of the German emperor lording it over the church of Saint Remy stirred up patriotic sentiment amongst the French princes. They joined their king at the Abbey of Saint Denis, outside Paris, and raised the royal battle standard, the Oriflamme, a blood red, pointed banner flown from a golden lance for the very first time. The Oriflamme was the symbol of Saint Denis, everybody’s favourite headless saint, was believed to have been carried by Charlemagne into the Holy land and wielded by the legendary Roland. It would lead the French army into battle for the next couple of hundred years. Where the emperors had their Holy Lance, the Kings of France had their Oriflamme.

In this contest of the symbols in 1124 the shiny Oriflamme won out. The flipside of Louis’ support in France was the deafening silence Henry’s call for national unity found in Germany.

This defeat is by no means the end of the struggle for the succession of king Henry I, a process that will take decades and pitched Matilda against her cousin Stephen of Blois.

Henry V did not take part in any of these struggles. He died On Mai 23rd, 1125 in Utrecht. He was 39 years old. If he had lived it would have been him who had fought alongside Matilda for the crown of England and his sons rather than the Plantagenets would have ruled England for the next few centuries. No Eleanor of Aquitaine, no Richard Lionheart no Henry V or Richard III. Shakespeare’s heroes would have been called Henry, Konrad or Fritz and you would look at this podcast and go Ahh Salians – so boring. Can’t you talk about something we know nothing about.

His body was brought to imperial basilica in Speyer where he was buried next to his father, grandfather and great grandfather.

Henry V had no son and with that the Salian dynasty ended. Henry V designated the sons of his daughter Agnes, Frederick and Konrad of Hohenstaufen to be the heirs to his fortune.

The Salian dynasty had ruled the Empire for almost exactly 100 years, from the election of Konrad II in 1024 to the death of Henry V in 1125. It was a period of massive change, socially, economically, politically and spiritually. Debate about what had happened and what it meant for the future began amongst contemporaries and has been raging ever since.

The chronicler Otto von Freising, a grandson of Henry V who wrote just 25 years after the death of the emperor saw the conflict between the papacy and the emperor as a world-ending calamity. The fragmentation of the unity of the spiritual and the secular was a portent of the end of the Roman Empire, which according to Saint Augustin ushered in the coming of the antichrist and hence the end of the world. It was the bishops and abbots who were to blame for this. They had been made rich by the generosity of the emperors only to turn around and impale their now enfeebled benefactor with his own swords.

The German 19th century followed in that same vein. The church had stalled the progress of Germany towards statehood that ultimately resulted in the fratricidal religious wars and subsequent political decline to insignificance of the Reich. This storyline had the added advantage of blaming the catholic pope for all the misery of the 17th and 18th century.  A view that helped justify why Germany should be unified by protestant Prussia and not by catholic Austria. In 1872 Bismarck initiated the Kulturkampf, an early version of a culture war. He attempted to restrain the catholic churches political influence. When he had pushback from the pope he famously said “we would not go to Canossa”. This statement, later put on a monument erected on the Harzburg, summarizes the 19th century Prussian view that the pope was Germany’s downfall. Going to Canossa became a standing expression signifying humiliating defeat. It is the German equivalent of “eating humble pie”.

After World War II German historians began to de-emphasize the importance of the conflict between pope and emperor. Focus shifted to the reasons for the tensions between the emperor and the princes. A view emerged that the Investiture Controversy was mainly a German civil war over hegemony where the pope could tilt the balance but was not driving events. The ineptitude of Henry IV and the military success of the princes ended the command monarchy of the early Salians, not Canossa or the Concordat of Worms.

Whilst Germans were looking at the Investiture conflict more as a continuation of broader longer-term trends, English historians like Norman Cantor, Chris Wickham and most recently Tom Holland put the Investiture Conflict in a line with the French and the Russian revolution as one of the great turning points of European, if not world history.

A World Revolution they call it. Well, was it that? What is a “World Revolution”? Mike Duncan is on his 326th episode of Revolutions has not mentioned the Investiture Conflict once.

If I have taken anything away from listening to the Revolutions Podcast it is that all of Revolutions seem to have the same structure. It starts with an existing political and economic order that has some serious structural weaknesses. These weaknesses are getting exposed by a combination of specific events, lost wars, bad harvests, financial collapse etc.. The whole thing blows up because an incompetent or excessively stubborn ruler fails to see the opportunities to avoid disaster and hurtles the creaky wagon of history down the precipice.

Imperial rule being exposed to unreliable bishops and rebellious dukes, I.e., structurally weak – tick;

Untimely death of Henry III, papal schisms and abduction of the king at Kaiserswerth exposing weakness of the regime – tick

Henry IV acting like a bull in a China shop towards Gregory VII and the Saxons -tick, tick, tick

Once a revolution has started, we cycle through the degrees of extremism where last year’s hard left are this year’s conservatives until the process is led at absurdum. After that last spasm of revolutionary energy, the surviving protagonists begin to rebuild society by combining bits of the old and bits of the new.

Again tick, tick, tick. We go from moderate reformer Leo IX to revolutionary Gregory VII, inventive Urban II to extremist Paschalis II, only to end up with Calixtus II who tries to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

In episode 30 I suggested a structure for the narrative across three strains, the rise of the papacy, the conflict between the princes and the emperor and the rise of lay piety. Even now, 12 episodes later, I think this structure is still valid and a great way to look at how this new order differs from the old.

Let’s start with the papacy.

Before 1042 the pope was little more than the bishop of Rome and an authority that could be called upon to resolve conflicts within the church that could not be resolved at a lower level. There were no rules about the selection or investiture of popes and formally the emperor had a significant role to play in that selection process. Whenever the emperors were active in Italian politics, they appointed and dismissed the popes.

By 1125 the idea that the emperor could legitimately appoint popes was dead as the Dodo. Yes, Henry IV and Henry V had appointed antipopes, and future emperors will do too, but their power didn’t reach much further than the tip of the imperial spears. From now on, the only legitimate pope was the one elected by the College of Cardinals – full stop.

Again, before 1042 the pope had no direct influence in the churches outside Rome. He would hold synods, usually together with the emperor, to determine doctrine and resolve disputes. But the pope had little if any executive power. When we look at the situation in 1125, the pope, usually represented by his legates, exercised more hands-on control over church on the ground. Legates would depose or install bishops, demand changes in liturgy and enforce doctrine set in Rome. That is not to say the church in France or in Germany was at the Pope’s back and call. There are bishops like Hartwig of Magdeburg who were trying to be both supporters of the Gregorian reform and loyal vassals of the emperor. But relative to where we came from, the role of the papacy has become so much more significant.

And finally, the papacy began determining secular policy. Even though the Gregorians were focused on the spiritual world, they ended up becoming more and more political. The proposal of pope Paschalis II if we assume it wasn’t a cunning trick to discredit Henry V, would have been the most radical expression of Gregorian thinking. The church giving up its entanglement with the lay world and focusing entirely on the spiritual well-being of their flock would have pleased Peter Damian and Humbert of Silva Candida no end. But it never happened. Rather than severing the links to the world of power politics, the Gregorian reform dragged the papacy deeper into it. Calling the Crusades to Jerusalem might have been high politics but could still be seen as linked to the spiritual role of the church. When it comes to the military conflict between Gregory VII and Henry IV, that line was crossed. Using the Normans in Sicily and Matilda of Tuscany as a counterweight to the imperial armies meant the pope had to get his hands dirty. It is not just the sack of Rome by Robert Guiscard but the absolution of soldiers fighting the emperors that made the spiritual and political objectives of the church becoming indivisible.

And that is why the papacy did not really win in the investiture controversy. Yes, the pope stood now on par or even above the emperor, but he did so on the same playing field, the field of power politics. Being a significant secular player had its advantages, but in the long run undermined the role of the church as an organization, leading ultimately to the faithful searching for salvation outside the established church hierarchy, in ne monastic orders like the Franciscans, in new forms of religious communities like the Albigensian, Waldensians etc., and ultimately in the belief that salvation is to come from the individual itself, a process the culminated in the Reformation. In a way it comes full circle, because the Gregorians objective was to make the church a vehicle that allows the faithful to reach the gates of heaven. Like so many other well-intentioned plans, it failed in the end.

The rise of the papacy displaced the emperor in several of his roles. The Ottonian emperors had been universal sacred rulers. The 10th and early 11th century was the time of the sacred rulers. Saint Stephen in Hungary, Edward the confessor in England, Saint Olaf in Norway. Above these sacred kings was the sacred emperor, anointed to lead all of Christianity. His title was Vicar of Christ and most humble servant of the apostles. This is the time where people believe the king could heal diseases by laying his hand on people – like Aragorn of Gondor.

The transition to this state of sacred ruler was bestowed upon them when they were anointed during their coronation. You may remember that the child king Otto III was rescued from an early death by the mere fast that he had been anointed as king literally hours before news arrived that his father had died. A king, and even more so an emperor anointed by the pope was no mere mortal, he was a being halfway between this world and the next. And some of them, namely Otto III and Henry II live the lives of saints rather than those of worldly rulers.

Breaking an oath to such a sacred king was simply inconceivable. Untold horrors would come down on the oath breaker, in this world and the next.

Something happened around the middle of the 11th century that devalued these oaths. And that happened even before Gregory released Henry’s vassals from their oaths. It was Otto von Northeim’s speech in 1073 (check episode 31) that ends the idea that oaths are inviable. It is when he says “As long as he was a king to me and acted royally, I also kept the oath I swore to him freely and faithfully; but after he ceased to be a king, the one to whom I had to keep loyalty was no longer there.”  

Otto von Northeim denies the king sacred status. For him he is just a human in a two-way relationship with his subjects. The king has to provide peace and justice in exchange for obedience. When he fails to do his bit, the oath is no longer binding.

When Gregory VII releases everyone from their oath to Henry IV and the emperor then has to do penance in the snow outside Canossa the idea of sacred, unbreakable oaths vanish. How little they are worth becomes so clear when Paschalis II releases Henry V from his solemn, public oath made before innumerable relics to never challenge his father.

By 1125 a king is just a man, an important man, but a man nevertheless.

And that gets us to the second strain of the narrative, the conflict between the princes and the emperor. If you think back over the last 20-odd episodes, most of the time was spent talking about the wheel of fortune that pulled good old Henry IV up to dizzying heights of military and political success before dropping him deep into the depth of desperation.

All this came about because we are in a period of transition. This is the transition from a time where wealth and power was tied to large agricultural estates to a more martial time where all that mattered was the strength of your stone castle. Encastellation had been held back in Germany until Henry III but went stratospheric during the minority of Henry IV. The king’s mother, Agnes of Poitou was unable to stem the process and the subsequent government of Anno of Cologne had no interest in doing so.

In these barely 15 years royal authority was gravely undermined. Once the vassals had gained a castle, they could very much do whatever they wanted, as no one could touch them on their mountain tops. Castles were a bit like nuclear weapons today.. All those who have them want to prevent anyone else to get them. Whilst the world in the 20th and 21st century was somewhat successful with its non-proliferation policy the medieval empire wasn’t. On top of that the size of the nobility grew alongside or faster than overall population. Chroniclers of the Ottonian era like Widukind and Thietmar mention roughly 500 individuals amongst the aristocracy from presumably a much smaller number of families. By 1125 this number has likely doubled. Add to that the proliferation of Ministeriales who also often held castles, you can easily assume a tripling of the numbers. In the end there will be 20,000 castles across Germany.

And when the king himself wanted a piece of the action and get his own superweapons in Saxony, the civil war started. And that was a war nobody could win because everybody by now had castles. Presumably some aristocrats did not build castles, but they were never heard from again.

With castles came something else, territorial power. Once you have the castle that overlooks the local town, the bridge and the market, it is only a question of time before the castellan will have gained control of the town, the bridge and the market, even if these rights had been granted to someone else, a bishop, a monastery or another knight.

By 1125 we are well en route to territorialization of the empire. The princes are consolidating their holdings both horizontally as well as vertically. The emperor is no longer able to prevent this process. Even worse, there are large parts of the country like Saxony where effective power has transitioned from the emperor to the territorial princes, like for instance in Saxony. The five duchies are no longer enough to satisfy the demand for status amongst ambitious families like the Babenberger, Zaehringer, Welf, Wettin etc., and gradually we see a proliferation of ducal title combined with a deterioration of the ducal function as one of the few institutions the empire possessed.

The same thing had happened in France, only some 50 years earlier. Where the story differs is that the French monarchy over time consolidated into an absolutist regime, whilst central authority in Germany continuously weakened. As always in history there is never just one reason or one event that creates a specific outcome, but during the hundred years of Salian rule decisive steps were taken that facilitated the outcome.

The first one we already talked about, the collapse of the sacred kingship under the battlements of Canossa which was never really recovered. In France the Investiture conflict had the opposite effect. It created an alliance between the pope and the French king that materially enhanced his prestige. Several subsequent rulers could expand on that prestige, recuperating some of the sacred component of kingship, which culminated in the reign of Louis IX, later to become Saint Louis.

The second key decision point was the assembly in Forchheim in 1077. There the nobles asserted their right to freely elect their king purely on merit. The kingdom they claimed was not a personal property that could be passed from father to son like a horse or a castle. It was the res publica, the common good in which all members of the aristocracy had a stake. We will see that there will be transfers of royal and imperial power from father to son, but these will still be based on elections which at least in principle were based on merit or size of bribe.

Making the empire an elective monarchy created an incentive for the holder of the position to transfer as much of the royal rights, lands and other assets to his family, rather than expanding central authority. Any subsequent occupant of the throne will then have to dig deep into his own wallet to maintain his authority. At the end of the process the emperors will derive their power not from the fact that they were emperors, but from their personal territorial wealth. Politics are driven by the dynastic interests of the Staufer, Luxembourger and Habsburgs, not by the interest of the empire. This is the second crucial difference with France, where the Capetians were better at producing sons, they usually promoted to co-king during their lifetime until the election process became a pure formality and fell into disuse.

Was the decision in Forchheim irreversible? Surely not. If one of the emperors had been able to expand their personal territory to ultimately comprise all of Germany, surely the Empire would have turned into a hereditary monarchy. But that was made harder thanks to some of the political choices the Salians had made. 

One was the excessively generous sponsorship of the Imperial church. Compared to France in particular the imperial church was extraordinarily rich not just in private goods but also in territorial lordships. Under the Ottonians and the early Salians these donations did not diminish the royal position as the bishops and abbots on the whole though with exceptions acted as organs of the emperor. During the later years of the Salian reign the imperial church stopped being an organ of the state and the bishops began operating like territorial princes. You remember Anno of Colognes acquisition of the territories of the Ezzonen and Adalbert of Mainz attack on Trifels. This development is usually believed to have been caused by the Investiture Controversy and specifically the Concordat of Worms. Modern historians take a more differentiated view. The concordat did not differ much from the settlement in England where the church remained under closer control of the king – Thomas a Beckett notwithstanding. And the trend to consolidate the territorial position started before the investiture conflict. For instance, the Lothringian bishops in Toul, Verdun, Liege and Utrecht were proactively pursuing territorial policies against Godfrey the Bearded in the 1050s. It feels that the urge to create a territorial power was a combination of opportunity and simple, old-fashioned greed, something not even a bishop is immune to. I would also throw in the betrayal of the bishops in 1111. When Henry V agreed with Paschalis II to expropriate the clergy, the remaining sense of fealty to the emperor evaporated.

Having lost so much of the royal resources to the church the emperors were now dependent upon their own territorial power. And again the Salians came up short. Henry IV tried create a territory under direct royal control outside interference of local dukes or counts around Goslar in Saxony. Henry IV defeat in the Saxon wars meant that the most valuable of the directly held royal territories was lost. Subsequent attempts for instance by Henry V around the family holdings in Worms were kept in check by a united front of the princes. With expansion in Germany blocked, the emperors had to find resources abroad. Henry V tried England, the Staufer looked to Italy, the Luxembourger and Habsburgs to Bohemia and Hungary and finally Prussia occupied lands to the east that were formally outside the empire.

That seemed a viable shortcut at the time but was not sustainable. Ruling Germany based on foreign resources was something even Emperor Charles V in whose empire the sun never set failed. In contrast  The kings of France  built their territory slowly and methodically, one castle at a time using only their domestic resources and a bit of help from the popes.. Again, the forks in the road the Salians went down or were dragged down were not roads that inevitably led to the fragmentation of the German states that could only be overcome by a militaristic regime. But it was a major contributing factor.

The flipside of imperial weakness is the enhanced role of the princes. Under the Ottonians the role of the dukes, counts and bishops was to support the emperor who was the sacred incorporation of the empire. By the time of Henry V’s death, the princes saw themselves as guardians of the empire. They had both the right and the obligation to defend it against its foes, to maintain peace and to protect the church. The emperor and the princes were the pillars on which the empire rested. That meant the princes can call royal assemblies, even royal assemblies where the emperor is not present or even NFI. The empire becomes a coordination mechanism that settles disagreements between the princes by consensus, rather than a state that settles it by force.

We have talked about the change in the relationship between emperor and pope and between emperor and princes which leaves the third strain in our narrative, the rise in lay piety.

As we talked about before, the period between 1000 and 1300 is a period of massive demographic and economic change. Population numbers overall roughly doubled thanks to improved agricultural technology, the abolishment of slavery and an absence of deadly pandemics. The improvements in agriculture allowed for a repopulation of the ancient Roman cities and the growth of new ones. Urbanization went hand in hand with the growth in trade. The large cities created markets for goods and ideas that travelled along the great rivers, the Rhine, Main, Danube and Elbe. These increasingly prosperous people demanded better from their clergy and better from their rulers.

These demands transformed from specific calls for say celibacy of the cathedral canons to broader claims for participation in city politics. The process started in Milan with the Pataria uprisings in the 1070s and then spread rapidly. Cologne rose up against its Bishop in 1074. That same year Worms sides with the emperor against their bishop. Once independent, the cities themselves became political players. Henry IV allied with Pisa and Lucca against Matilda of Tuscany. Mainz and Cologne were Henry IV’s strongest allies in his fight with his son. By Henry V’s time a city like Mainz would negotiate with its archbishop as equals, demanding freedoms and privileges in exchange for support in war.

On the underlying issue, the improvement in the quality of the clergy, the years 1024 to 1125 saw major shifts. Under the Ottonians we find many learned and sincere bishops, monks and abbots. But their ability to expand and project their knowledge was limited. By 1125 more and more Christian doctrine is written down and passed around the clergy along the same routes the goods are now shipped from Venice to Norway and from Cordoba to  Kiev. We find that by 1076 most bishops owned a more or less comprehensive compilation of canon law that they consulted to determine how to react to the excommunication and deposition of their king. The scholastic method, this great invention of the Middle Ages begins to spread amongst the intellectuals of the age. An early form of university opened its doors in Bologna in 1088, teaching amongst other things Roman law.

For the layman, on the still unpaved street these debates mattered. All they wanted was a priest who could help them into heaven. But that was no longer so easy. Is my vicar properly ordained by the right bishop? If not, what does that mean for the sacraments I have received. If not, how do I get a priest who will be able to pave the road to the final judgement? Can I make sure my town is loyal to whoever I think is the true pope, rue archbishop and bishop.

Mostly they had little ability to determine political outcomes. To mitigate their risk of ending up in purgatory or even hellfire, laymen became ever more pious. They tried to incorporate some of the habits of the apostles into their own life, fasting, regular prayer, good works and the like. In many ways this upped the ante for the priests who had to be even more devout in order to stand out and justify their elevated status. Most bishops saw these developments which is why, on the whole, they were supportive of church reform even when they were not supportive of the Gregorian popes.

This urge to find a way to heaven for oneself found its culmination in the First Crusade. Finally there was one thing any individual, rich or poor could do that was quite obviously in line with God’s wishes, that was outside these debates and civil wars. The first Crusade, though an amazing and unexpected military success must have been a terrible let-down for its participants. Instead of experiencing a period of bliss within the grace of god, the crusaders unleashed unimaginable horrors. We talked about the death and destruction the German participation in the First Crusade caused but even those who made it to Jerusalem must have wondered whether the slaughter of the cities Muslim population, the burning of its Jews inside their Synagogue was synonymous with walking in the footsteps of the apostles.

We asked at the start of this section whether the Investiture Conflict was a “World Revolution”. Sure, the Investiture conflict has all the hallmarks of a revolution, an old order is replaced with a new structure. That makes it a Revolution, but a “World Revolution”. That would be a revolution that fundamentally changed the whole of the humanity. It describes a series of events that stands unique in history as a turning point that, if it had not happened, would have left us with a materially different world.

Of all the things we talked about so far, the rise of the papacy, the loss of a central power in Germany or the emergence of cities and city states is not something that in similar form had happened before in other parts of the world and even in Europe itself. What could make it a “World Revolution” is that last consequence of the Investiture Conflict, bringing people the obligation and the right to choose your spiritualty.

That unleashed the scholastic method, universities, disputations, the Franciscans, the early heretics, the Hussites and the Reformation. Without the Reformation and the plethora of belief systems it seeded, the philosophers of the Enlightenment would not have dared to replace God with reason and modern life would indeed be fundamentally different. The crusades manifested a restlessness of spirit and body that drove European society to expand both their intellectual and their physical horizon until it had consumed the whole world.

So maybe it was a World Revolution. And even if it wasn’t, it was an epic tale, one I hope you enjoyed.

I will take a break now until early January to prepare for the next season, the Hohenstaufen. These ultimate glamour emperors may now have to work in this unwieldy new order, but hey do they make a story out of it. You can look forward to Emperor Fredrick Barbarossa still asleep under the Kyffhauser mountain waiting for the day his people need him to protect them from harm, Henry VI who used the ransom paid for Richard Lionheart to buy himself a kingdom, Frederick II the child of Puglia who allegedly grew up on the streets of Palermo to become one of best educated men in Europe living the lifestyle like his friend Salah ad Din. His son Enzo who was betrayed by his golden locks and his grandson Konradin who was beheaded on the market square in Naples.  I can barely wait. 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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Mathilda of Tuscany Marries a much Younger man

This week the wheel of fortune will turn again, tumbling our antihero Henry IV down from the heights he had so recently scaled. We will see him sink to the point of utter despair. And all that because a 43 year old woman marries an 18 year old.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 37 – The Two Grooms

This week the wheel of fortune will turn again, tumbling our antihero Henry IV down from the heights he had so recently scaled. We will see him sink to the point of utter despair. And all that because a 43 year old woman marries an 18 year old.

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 Steven and Jay who have already signed up.

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We should probably quickly recap where we are in the year 1090.

Things aren’t looking too bad for Henry IV. He has a modicum of control over most of Germany. The 17 year long war with the Saxons had been brought to an end, largely by giving them what they wanted, but peace is peace. In Italy his bishops were in charge of the northern part of the country and his anti-pope Clement III was on and off in control of Rome.

As for his enemies, there were essentially three centres.

In Swabia the deposed dukes of Bavaria and Carinthia, Welf IV and Berthold of Zaehringen kept fighting. Henry had entered peace negotiations with both, but their demands were unacceptable. They required the anti-pope Clement III to be removed and they themselves re-instated as dukes.

The second key enemy was the great countess Matilda of Tuscany, one of, if not the most formidable woman in 11th century Europe. Matilda had been reigning an area of Northern Italy, ranging from near Verona down to the papal states, including important cities like Mantua, Lucca, Pisa, Modena, Reggio and Florence. Matilda had been at war with her imperial kinsman and overlord since at least 1082, though the conflict dates back to the marriage of her mother to Godfrey the Bearded in 1054. She had stood loyally with her friend Pope Gregory VII until his very end at great personal expense.  At times she had been reduced to her indomitable mountain fortresses around Canossa and even needed to melt down her gold and silver treasures. Once Henry had left Italy, Matilda could free herself from the encirclement and won a great victory against the Lombard Bishops at Sorbara. That brought her back into her previous position as the most powerful secular ruler in Italy.

And finally, there was the Gregorian papacy. After Gregory VII had died in 1075 his remaining cardinals refused to recognise Pope Clement III, the man Henry had elevated to the seat of Saint Peter. Instead, they elected one of their own as Pope Victor III. Barely ever had anyone been so reluctant to become pope as Pope Victor III. He had been the abbot of the great monastery of Monte Cassino, founded by Saint Benedict and under his leadership the foremost seat of learning, literature, arts and monastic life in Italy. He had not just been an outstanding abbot but also a great negotiator on behalf of the church. He had good relations with his neighbours, the Normans. It was thanks to his efforts the initial agreement between the papacy and the Normans came about in 1059 and he also helped bringing Robert Guiscard to Rome in 1084.

And Victor III was a realist, not a fanatic like Gregory VII. He knew too well that after what Guiscard had done to Rome, the Romans would not voluntarily accept a Gregorian pope. Ad that meant getting into Rome was only possible in the train of a Norman army. What is a pope whose authority comes from the bloodied swords of Northmen and their Saracen soldiers? Well, not one Victor III aspired to be.

Having resisted the election for a year he was finally coerced into accepting the election in Rome. But just 4 days later, before he could be consecrated, he had to leave the Holy City as riots broke out. He returned to Monte Cassino and put the papal regalia into the bottom drawer. He remained as an elected but not consecrated pope for another year before The Normans again smashed into the Holy city. Victor III was finally consecrated. The Romans were still unconvinced of the benevolence of the Papal allies and so Victor III ran away after 10 days and hid in Monte Cassino, before the Normans dragged him back into Rome in June. He stayed a month before claiming he needed to go home for health reasons. He died in Monte Cassino in September 1087.

That should have been that. By now the Gregorian papacy had proven to be nothing more than a Norman plaything. The Antipope Clement III could hold at least parts of Rome and enjoyed the support of the local population. Clement III was also not against church reform so that the urban population saw some of their demands to get a better sort of vicar for their churches fulfilled.

The reason the Gregorian ethos survived owed a lot to Victor III’s successor, pope Urban II. He became pope in 1088 and – since Rome was in the hands of Clement III – was elected and consecrated in the stunningly beautiful, but tiny city of Terracina, halfway between Rome and Naples.

Urban II had grown up in France, son of a local aristocrat in Champagne and had joined the fabled monastery of Cluny. He rose through the ranks and was made prior of the abbey. In 1080 Pope Gregory invited him to become Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, the highest-ranking member of the college of cardinals.

Urban II shared Gregory VII’s view of the role of the papacy as the preeminent institution of Christendom, superior to kings and emperors. Where he differed was in his methods.

Where Gregory was rigid and doctrinal to the very end, Urban II had the polish and diplomatic finesse needed to get the papacy out of the hole Gregory had dumped it in.

The first order of service was to get out of the dependency on the Normans without irritating them. On that front he was lucky as Robert Guiscard died in 1085. His successor as duke of Apulia was Roger Borsa. Borsa means “Moneybags” in English suggesting he had less ambitious goals than his father more interested in “counting and recounting his money”.

Leadership of the Normans fell to Roger I, count of Sicily, the youngest of the 12 brothers of Robert Guiscard. Roger had been busy conquering the island of Sicily since 1063. Sicily had been an Arab emirate since the 9th century but had broken apart in the 11th century into small warring factions which created the opportunity for Roger. By 1090 he had removed the last of these mini emirs and set out to conquer Malta. What I am saying is that Roger was busy consolidating his rule over Sicily and less in need of a pet pope.

Urban then applied the old rule that my enemy’s enemy is my friend and concluded that in order to get rid of Clement III he needed to remove Henry IV. And that means he needed to forge a coalition of Henry’s enemies.

And that coalition came about in the form of a marriage, a marriage that even today would be seen as scandalous. Urban II’s proposal was simple, Matilda of Tuscany should marry the son of Welf IV, leader of the German opposition. That would give the anti-henry forces control over a coherent area stretching from the border of the Papal State all the way north, across the alps into Switzerland and Southern Germany. Henry IV and his pet pope, Clement III could be shut out from Rome.

Sounds great. Only issue was that Matilda of Tuscany was no spring chicken anymore. At 43 years of age she had little chance of further offspring, which was according to the doctrine of the church, the main purpose of marriage. And Matilda’s track record as a wife had not been quite in line with the expectations of the time.

She had separated from her first husband, Godfrey the Hunchback after a short marriage. The marital differences had come less from the lack of mutual attraction but from her reluctance to grant him political control over her rich lands. Matilda very much took the view that these lands were hers and hers alone and that no man, husband or otherwise were to command them. To put that into context, it took until 1963 before Italian women were allowed to hold a public office contested by a man.

For an 11th century red-blooded nobleman Matilda as a wife was a nightmare. 

And now let’s talk about the groom. His name was Welf V, son of -guess it – yes Welf IV. Not only was his name unimaginative in the extreme, but he was also no more than 18 years’ old.

The logic of the union was so blatantly obvious, it barely needs explaining. The lands of Matilda were to fall into the hands of the Welf family upon her soon to be expected demise, making the deposed dukes of Bavaria the most powerful princes in the empire.

Matilda was not keen, but a silver tongued Urban II convinced her that she had to make this last great sacrifice for the cause of god and the papacy. Young Welf V presumably was told to grin and bear it for a few years.

The betrothal of this unlikely couple took place in 1089.

With this announcement all peace negotiations between Henry IV and the Southern German opposition ended. War was to resume; the question was where? Henry IV could either continue his operations in Southern Germany and subdue the Welf and their allies, leaving Matilda well alone until that was resolved. Or, he could go down to Italy, knock out Matilda and end the schism once and for all by capturing Urban II.

Option 2 was bolder and – we know our Henry – for him bolder is better.

He appears in Italy in May 1090 at the head of a sizeable army. This time he brought along some of his German followers including Frederick von Hohenstaufen, his son in law and closest ally. That suggests he was looking to make Italy the place where the final battle was to be fought. Equally Welf V joined his new wife in Tuscany, together with a contingent of his German allies. 

As before Henry can count on the support from the Lombard bishops though their numbers are somewhat depleted as the archbishop of Milan had changed sides. Henry also no longer commanded the cities of Pisa and Lucca who returned into the fold of Matilda, having received all they needed from the emperor.

Hostilities in the first year are taken up by the siege of Mantua, forever one of the military linchpins of Italy.  Mantua barred the way to the heart of Matilda possessions south of the Po river. After 12 months of siege the city yielded and Henry entered the city in triumph. Two further strongholds nearby fell too opening the road towards the Po river and the heart of Matilda’s possessions.

This success was significant enough for Welf IV, father of Matilda’s husband to resume peace negotiations. It seems the marriage alliance has failed to yield the desired benefits. And with some of his supporters amongst the bishopric having passed this last year, it was time to look for a compromise.

As before Welf’s demands were twofold, return the duchy of Bavaria to me and abandon your antipope Clement III. With henry now in an even better position that two years before, he saw no reason to accept these demands and by summer 1091 hostilities resumed.

The year ended with another success for Henry. Matilda had sent out 1,000 of her knights to capture the emperor she had been informed had travelled with a small contingent close to her lands. Well it was a trap and her soldiers were routed by a much superior imperial force. 

At that point Matilda did what she had done previously when things had turned against her, she returned to her string of fortresses around Canossa and employed a defensive strategy.  In spring 1092 Henry began to systematically besiege and break these fortresses. First Montemorello, then Montalfredo. When he proceeded to Monteveglio, progress slowed. He wasted the whole of the summer before the walls of that castle.

There were around nine strongholds around her heartland of Canossa. Having lost two and one on the verge of going, Matilda’s vassals became concerned and wanted to bring this process to an end. Matilda was initially reluctant, but negotiations began in October 1092. But they went nowhere. A hermit, named John showed up and declared a vision that Matilda would prevail, and salvation was close at hand.

I usually do not set much store by hermits, but this one was right.

After the failure of the peace negotiations, Henry feigned a retreat towards Parma, but doubled back to attack her home and the heart of her defensive system, Canossa itself. Matilda left the castle with most of its garrison and moved a few miles down the road to another of her castles, Bianello. Bianleeo was by the way where most of the initial negotiations over the lifting of the excommunication had taken place 14 years earlier. This time the roles were reversed. Henry was at Canossa and Matilda in Bianello. But as before, Henry was not inside Canossa but besieged the castle from below.

It might well be that Henry thought that Matilda and most of her soldiers were inside the castle of Canossa or thought she had left for somewhere far away. In any event, on one foggy afternoon Matilda’s garrison came down from Bianello whilst the troops inside Canossa attempted a sortie. In the dark and foggy chaos henry’s troops had a hard time distinguishing friend from foe. The most dispiriting moment came when Matilda’s soldiers captured the royal banner, creating panic in the royal army.

Henry fled the site of his now second humiliation and took his remaining army north. News of his defeat travelled fast and two of the fortresses he only just had captured were returned to Matilda. One of them held the imperial train with supplies and  the campaign funds.

Christmas was a difficult feast for Henry who had lost most of the progress he had made that previous year. At the same time his German enemies smelled the morning air.  Berthold von Zaehringen had himself elected duke of Swabia though there was already a duke of Swabia, Frederick von Hohenstaufen. And so, Frederick von Hohenstaufen who had been with Henry these last 2 years has to go back home and take his remaining troops with him.

Another member of Henry’s entourage had also left, his eldest son Konrad. Konrad had lived in Italy for neigh on 10 years by now after his father had left him in the care of the Lombard bishops when he returned to Germany in 1084. He was now 20 years of age and his father entrusted him with an important mission.

Henry’s mother-in-law and Konrad’s grandmother, Adelheid countess of Savoy had died at the end of 1091. She was, like Matilda, one of these exceptional women who ran a state against all the laws and customs of the time. Her state was the margraviate of Turin and the county of Savoy, in essence what is today the Italian province of Piemonte and the French region of Savoy. And most importantly she controlled a number of Alpine passes, including Mont Cenis which you may remember her daughter Bertha tobogganed down.

Adelheid had no heir in the male line and had designated one of her grandson’s to inherit her lands. To Henry’s annoyance this grandson was not Konrad. But as emperor he could determine the succession of his vassals should they die without direct male heirs. That was the law of the land, but to enforce it, an army needed to be deployed against the obstinate new count of Savoy. Konrad was put in charge of that army and dispatched west.

So far so good. Konrad campaigned gingerly around Asti and Turin until in the summer of 1093. But then disconcerting news reached Henry at his camp in Verona. His own son had joined up with Matilda and pope Urban II.

What brought this treachery about has long been debated. Some later writers point out that Konrad was a bookish man who preferred reading over riding into battle. Some suggested that he had a falling out with his father over points of canon law and the claims of papal supremacy. The imperial propagandists describe him as a feckless boy who had lent his ear to bad councillors.

Modern historians like I.S. Robinson and Egon Boshof attribute him with more political intelligence. Konrad saw his father’s position deteriorating rapidly after the rout before Canossa. His army shrunk and the ranks of his enemies were swelled by formerly loyal Lombard bishops and  emerging independent cities. And there was no way this could be resolved as long as Henry clung to his anti-pope Clement III. And Henry could not let go of Clement III, because that would invalidate his Imperial Coronation.

Konrad may well have come to the conclusion that the only way the Salian house can remain in possession of power was if he would be crowned emperor by the right pope, i.e., Urban II. If that happened, he could fulfil the two conditions Welf IV had set for a lasting peace, setting aside Clement III and giving him the duchy of Bavaria. Peace with Welf IV and an arrangement with urban II would end all conflicts and bring Konrad on the throne of a now united empire.

That sounds like a plan. A plan Konrad went into without reservation. He met pope Urban II in Cremona. When the pope approached, Konrad went out to meet him and there performed what is called “the office of the groom”. Konrad would get off his horse and he would take the papal bridle, guiding the  vicar of Christ into the city.

This act of imperial submission to the papal authority had not been performed since the emperor Louis II, who was in fact no more than an Italian warlord. Allegedly it had been introduced by the emperor Constantine who performed it for Pope Sylvester after he had cured his leprosy by bathing him in the blood of young boys or some such nonsense.

By performing the office of the Groom or Stratordienst Konrad accepts the Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII and becomes a vassal of the Pope. And from now the popes will demand the office of the Groom at every Imperial coronation

For Henry this must have been a stab through the heart. All he fought for was the preservation of the Salian rule he had inherited from his father and grandfather. His son joining the papal camp makes all that worthless.

And this is not all. The next attack comes from his new wife. Empress Bertha who had faithfully followed her husband to Canossa had died 5 years earlier and Henry had married Eupraxia, a Russian princess. This marriage seemed to have been quite unsuccessful. Eupraxia does appear in only one charter during their marriage, which is a very low number compared to other Salian empresses and Henry’s first wife who appeared very regularly. That suggest she had little if any influence at court.

Early in 1094 Eupraxia sent a plea for help to Matilda of Tuscany.  Matilda then sent a small elite force who extracted Eupraxia from the imperial court at Verona and brought her to Canossa. There she quote  “complained that she had suffered so many and so unheard-of filthy acts of fornication with so many men as would cause even her enemies to excuse her flight”.  End quote.   eupraxia will repeat these allegations of gang rape by her husbands me. in public at a Papal Synod in 1095 and they have been recounted again and again ever since. There is no way to determine the veracity of these statements since propaganda in the 11th century generally pays no regard to facts.

And it does not matter, Henry had been betrayed by his son and accused of infernal crimes by his wife. His military position is now absolutely dire. His empire has shrunk to a couple of counties in Northern Italy held by his ally, the duke of Carinthia. He cannot return to Germany because his enemies control the Alpine passes. He cannot overcome his Italian enemies whose numerical superiority is now overwhelming. It may well be that he contemplated suicide or its 11th century equivalent, riding your horse into the middle of a melee.

As Henry’s star had sunk, Urban II is heading to the crowning moment of his papacy. On November 27th, 1095 in a field outside the French city of Clermont Urban II had gathered not just the bishops and magnates of the council, but also the local landowners, the castellans, their knights and the common people, the peasants, the artisans of the city and even the urban poor

 “A barbaric fury has deplorably afflicted and laid waste the churches of God in the regions of the Orient” Urban declares and this barbaric fury has “even grasped in intolerable servitude its churches and the Holy City of Christ, glorified by His passion and resurrection”. He calls upon all to “free the churches of the East”, and promises that “If any man sets out from pure devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance” “Deus vult, God wills it” is the crowds response, not just in Clermont but all across Europe. The crusades have begun.

Whilst Urban is making world history up in France, the wheel of fortune turns again, unexpectedly. It is not just Henry’s marriage that is on the rocks, the match made in heaven between Matilda and Welf V had also run its course. The marriage that brought all this misery about in the first place is now over.

We do not know who left who, but the bottom line is the same as in Matilda’s first marriage. The Lady is not for turning. Welf V may be a strapping young lad, but that does not mean Matilda will leave him her lands or take his political advice. Matilda’s life and work is bringing about her friend Gregory VII vision of an all encompassing and all controlling papacy. And hence the heir to Matilda will be the one who had been her master all along, The Lord and his representative on earth, the Pope. Little Welf will get nothing.

When this notion trickles through to the older Welf IV, deposed duke of Bavaria, he realised that everyone was in it for themselves, surprise. Time for Welf to finally get something for himself.

He opens negotiations with Henry and the two men quickly reach an agreement. Welf IV offers fealty to the emperor in exchange for the duchy of Bavaria. There is no mention of Pope Clement III or the schism or church reform. Let’s just bring this nonsense to an end.

In spring 1097 Henry IV returns to Germany after 7 years, most of which spent in despair and inactivity. He was so inactive that there is not a single imperial charter for the year 1094. None, nada, zilch.

Next week we will leave Henry to his own devices and talk a bit about the next great achievement of the Gregorian papacy, the First Crusade. We will talk about the horrors it unleashed for the Jewish communities in Germany and the misery it brought to the children and adults who walked all the way to Turkey only to be mercilessly slaughtered. And the men who in the main went, not for pure devotion but for reputation and monetary gain. I hope you will join us again.

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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Today we will look at what went on with Gregory VII after Henry had left to fight his rivals in Germany. Spoiler alert, things will not turn out the way he had hoped.

Transcript

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans, Episode 35 – To Rome to Rome

Today we will look at what went on with Gregory VII after Henry had left to fight his rivals in Germany. Spoiler alert, things will not turn out the way he had hoped.

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 Alon and Bengt who have already signed up.

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When Henry IV left Pope Gregory in Canossa in January 1078, Gregory thought he had won the ultimate victory and Henry would from now on be an obedient son of the church. And that should give him room to look after his other ambitions, namely, to bring the King of France to heel and to cash in on the support he had given to William the Conqueror, you know the guy who invaded England whilst Henry was fighting to establish his personal rule in 1066.

Let’s start with the  conqueror, Gregory had ensured he had the full support of the papacy and even received a papal banner to be carried into battle. His objective was to gain control over the English church. And William it seemed delivered, at least initially. He removed the existing Anglo-Saxon bishops wholesale and replaced them with reform-minded Norman clergymen. His new archbishop of Canterbury, Llanfranc was a man of international standing, originally from Italy. And though Lanfranc did all the right things and collected his Pallium in person in Rome and swore to be obedient to the pope, relations soured. When it came to Gregory’s claim to be the overlord of all secular rulers, Lanfranc was not falling in line. His allegiance was first and foremost to the man who put him in his post, William the Conqueror. He sided with his lord when Gregory insisted on the appointment of the bishop of Dol and even more importantly when Gregory insisted on splitting the country between the archbishops of York and Canterbury. Gregory wrote a string of angry letters to William and Lanfranc, but England being a country far, far away and his ruler well established, all he could do is write and be angry.

Geography matters – like a lot. And on that score, France looked like an easier place to assert papal authority. And Gregory had good reason to castigate the King of France for the way he selected his bishops. In the second half of the 11th century the kings of France were by all accounts the poor relations of the European rulers. Their land barely extended beyond the Ile de France. One of the few sources of income to the king was the right to invest his bishops and charge handsomely for that. Gregory’s man for French affairs was Hugh bishop of Die and later archbishop.

Gregory’s letters were a lot more effective in France then they were in England as the powerful magnates used it to further constrain the power of the king.

It was mostly with an eye to France rather than Germany that Gregory VII declared in 1080 (quote):

Following the statutes of the holy fathers, [] now we decree and confirm: that, if any one henceforth shall receive a bishopric or abbey from the hand of any lay person, he shall by no means be considered as among the number of the bishops or abbots; nor shall any hearing be granted him as bishop or abbot.

Moreover, do we further deny to him the favour of St. Peter and the entry to the Church until, coming to his senses, he shall desert the place that he has taken by the crime of ambition as well as by that of disobedience – which is the sin of idolatry. []

Likewise, if any emperor, king, duke, margrave, count or any one at all of the secular powers or persons shall presume to perform the investiture with bishoprics or with any ecclesiastical dignity, – he shall be bound by the bonds of the same condemnation” (unquote).

This is the famous ban on lay investiture. And what it says is quite simple. If any bishop, abbot or priest has been put into his role by a layman he is automatically excommunicated and so is the layman who had put him there.

There were bans on lay investiture before, but they were rarely as clear and uncompromising as this.

The real investiture conflict starts here, in 1080. Sure, the struggle between Gregory and Henry had its beginnings in the conflict over the investiture of the bishop of Milan. But the heart of the conflict had not been over the investiture of bishops but over whether the pope ranks above the emperor.

This ban turns it from a struggle for supremacy into a fight over the institutional integrity of the empire. The. An emperor who cannot appoint his bishops means the imperial church system collapses, and without the bishops the emperor has no soldiers. And that does just apply to the empire. As we saw some episodes ago, the power of the Norman dukes and later the kings of England was as well dependent on their control over the bishops. The. Inflict has become a fundamental question over the respective responsibilities o, the ecclesia, the church and the mind us, the world

Initially ban on investiture as well as the second excommunication of Henry IV on the same synod went nowhere. Gregory’s excommunications have been raining down on people in such frequency that people stopped caring. Practically all Lombard bishops had been excommunicated for years already. Many of Henry’s supporters in Germany are now excommunicated for the second time. And now the king of France and even the king of England were on the verge of being banned. But it wasn’t just the die-hard supporters of Gregory’s direct adversaries, neutral bishops were required to come to Rome and receive the Pallium or were refused consecration. Their reform efforts were criticized and constant demands to do this or that issued. And if one takes the wording of the ban on lay investiture literally, more or less everybody was excommunicated, because pretty much every bishop, abbot and priest had received at least his worldly fiefs from a secular lord. And these secular lords were now also technically under the ban. And as they say, if everybody is excommunicated, nobody is. Never will a ruler kneel in the snow before a pope again. The greatest weapon of the papacy had been utterly spent in just 3 years.

Henry’s reaction to this Synod of 1080 was his own synod of Brixen. Having first gathered his support amongst the bishops in Germany he brought his Italian and German support together, a total of 30 senior clergy. This synod did something the Synod of Worms did not dare to do, it “canonically deposed and expelled Gregory and condemned in perpetuity, if, having heard this [decree], he does not step down.”.

The synod accused Gregory of various misdeeds including of simony, violence, false oaths, the support of heresy, murder, watching pornographic floor shows and even of having a demon, all based on testimony of Hugo the White, cardinal bishop of San Clemente and sworn enemy of Gregory VII. So far so traditional. These kinds of arguments had been made as far back as the deposition of John XII by Otto the great who was accused of congress with all sorts of occult spectres.

But as time went on, the arguments for a deposition of Gregory changed in quality. It is right around this time that Roman law, specifically the Justinian Code was being studied again for the first time in centuries. Until now, most secular law had been Germanic law codes that had very limited internal coherence and some argue have actually rarely been applied. Royal judgements tended to be a bit ad hoc and often political. The church had raced ahead, and Canon Law had gained a lot of internal coherence during the 11th century. By the time of Gregory, most bishops would have a collection of Canon Law in their possession and would base their decision who to support in the ongoing conflict on these compilations. There are conflicting sources who ordered the codification of canon law and who actually produces the first approved version, but by the end of the century Canon law had a solid structure and coherence.

If the church has a coherent system of law, then secular lords needed one too. And that law was the Roman law compiled during the reign of the emperor Justinian in the early 6t century. If in canon law the pope was the source of all justice ad truth, under the Justinian code, that role fell to the emperor. Secular ruler really fell in love with the Justinian code once they could interpret it such that Emperor does not mean Henry IV, but any king, prince, count or baron.

One of the key provisions of the Justinian Code was the Lese Majeste – disrespecting the crown, a crime punishable by death. And that is what Gregory was accused of. He had offended the dignity of the ruler by claiming his excommunication.

For now, these arguments did not carry much weight, nor did other legal constructs from the Justinian code used in the case of Henry IV. But as we will see, the Roman law and its notion of the role of kings will become a key justification for the expansion of royal power, culminating in absolute monarchies almost everywhere in Europe, except for outliers like Britain, Poland and Venice.

This split of law into church law and secular law rare outside Europe is just another result of the events we describe here and call the Investiture Conflict or just Canossa.

The synod of Brixen did not just depose Gregory, it also elected Wibert archbishop of Ravenna as successor to Gregory VII. Clement III was of the same age as Gregor but different in background. Wibert was an old-school prelate in the mould of Leo IX. Of aristocratic stock he had pursued his career in the wind shadow of Emperor Henry III and rose to be Imperial chancellor for Italy. Empress Agnes made him Archbishop of Ravenna and despite his initial support for the antipope Cadalus was given his pallium by Pope Alexander II. Gregory thought him insufficiently fervent in his support for reform and excommunicated him – another one.

He took the name of Clement III but declared that he would not act as pope until he had been properly enthroned on the seat of Saint Peter. That might have been Clements’s own choice or a move by Henry IV to leave a way open for reconciliation with Gregory is not clear.  What is clear is that for the policy to work, Henry will have to bring Clement down to Rome, remove Gregor and affect a proper coronation of his pope. To get that done proved time consuming.

By 1081 Henry had suppressed the rebellion in Germany sufficiently to mount an attack on Italy and took a small army across the alps. The Lombard bishops swelled the ranks of his army and he was thinking that he would be back into Germany within a mere 4 months.

Gregory had not only lost a lot of ground within the church, he had also excommunicated Robert Guiscard the Norman lord the church had been relying on for the last decade. Gregory and Robert did patch up things in 1080, but the Norman was anything but an obedient vassal. His main focus was Constantinople which had fallen into complete disarray after a terrible defeat against the Seldjuk Turks at Manzikart. Robert, freebooter to the last instead of defending Christendom against the Muslim onslaught thought of benefitting from the chaos and pick up as much of the Byzantine empire as possible. So, not much help to be expected from that side.

Matilda was forever loyal, but powerful as she may be, could she hold out against the combined forces of the Empire and the Lombard bishops.

The last part of Henry’s calculation was that the population of Rome should be on his side. The former praefect Censius had already tried to abduct Gregory in 1075 and now assured the king of the support he should encounter in the city.

Henry marched gingerly through Italy which had become a lot more supportive of the Imperial party since his last visits.

Henry arrived in Rome at Pentecost expecting to be greeted by a procession of the senate and people of Rome accompanying him into the city under the singing of hymns and prayers. He was sorely disappointed. The people of Rome stuck by their pope. The church reform movement was a movement of the people and that is why they supported Pope Gregory as a representative of reform versus the conservative backlash.

Rome’s defences, built by the emperor Aurelian in the 3rd century were still strong and well maintained. And Gregory had created the Papal militia as his own military force that now manned the fortifications. Henry’s supporters came dressed for a party, not for war. They had no siege equipment, and their army was small.

But most importantly, it is already Pentecost, i.e., early May and Rome’s greatest defence mechanism, Malaria is getting into gear. There is nothing Henry can do but retreat with his tail between his legs. This is the first time an imperial progress towards a coronation had failed. The embarrassment of the failed coronation was almost as detrimental to his standing as the kneeling in the snow of Canossa.

As things stood, Henry now needed to get crowned, cost it what it may. If he did go back to Germany without a crown his enemies would feel vindicated, and the wavering middle would believe that God had made it clear that Henry should not be king.

The next 2 years Henry roamed around Italy, fighting Matilda od Tuscany and gathering armies he brought before Rome to besiege the city.

His army consisted initially mostly of the contingents of the Lombard bishops. But over time he gathered ore supporters. Amongst them were the Tuscan cities of Lucca and Pisa. Lucca had been the pre-eminent city of Matilda’s lands. Lucca was most famous for its silk weavers who initially imported their raw materials from the near East via Genoa before producing it themselves. Their silks replicated and improved Byzantine designs that proved extremely popular. Lucca was also home to prominent members of the Kalonymos family, which must count as one of the most creatively productive families in history. They can trace their lineage back to the 8th century and numerous rabbis, preachers, poets, teachers, authors, moralists, and theologians, and many prominent leaders of Jewish communities up to the 15th century came from its ranks. The family had branches in both Italy and Germany where they had been invited to settle by Charlemagne or one of his successors. They played a major role in the great Jewish communities of Speyer and Mainz.

Sorry, I digress. I simply cannot help myself looking at history I frankly did not know anything about before researching this episode but clearly features heavily in the history of other communities.

Back to Lucca. Henry IV offered the city more or less total freedom from oversight by either the margrave of Tuscany or the emperor himself. The city was allowed to build and maintain its own defences, was no longer obliged to build or maintain the imperial Pfalz, could no longer be billeted with soldiers, received market rights, customs privileges, and jurisdiction over everything but the most severe crimes. Lucca became thereby the first city in the empire to be officially granted the full rights of an imperial free city.

But Lucca was not the first free city in Italy. Seafaring cities like Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi and Naples had been de facto free cities for a long time already. But even these saw value in being granted rights and privileges by the empire. Pisa valued the confirmation of its rights sufficiently to side with Henry IV.

Whilst Henry was gathering troops in Italy, the situation in Germany oscillated. At times the new anti king Hermann managed to gain control of Saxony and the bits of Swabia and even at some point contemplated a march on Rome to support the pope. That effort collapsed when Otto von Northeim finally died, and Herrmann had to focus on holding Saxony.

For Henry that meant he had to rush back and forth between Rome, the lands of Matilda of Tuscany and the Alpine passes, never able to fully deploy his forces for a lengthy siege.

He showed up in Rome in February of 1082 with an army. But that siege failed again at the staunch defence of the Roman population.

Despite Henry’s efforts going nowhere, Gregory’s position also became desperate. He was simply running out of funds. He had called a synod for Lent in Rome, but hardly any bishops made it through and when Gregory asked for approval to pawn church property to fund the ongoing war, the few bishops who had gathered refused. Matilda, herself under enormous pressure had the great gold crosses and liturgical objects held at Canossa melted down and sent to the pope as bullion. 

By 1083 Henry found a new ally, Jordan of Aversa, the other Norman. You may remember that Pope Nicolas II had elevated two Norman warlords to become dukes, Robert Guiscard and Rainulf of Aversa. The idea was to split the Norman power in the South to ensure the papacy does not get too dependent on just one ruler. Robert Guiscard was a lot more successful than his countrymen, but the Aversa Normans were still around. These now joined Henry’s side in an attempt to push back Robert Guiscard. Guiscard himself was at the time fighting in Greece and what is now Albania, having upgraded his ambition from just taking over chunks of it to making the whole lot a Norman kingdom.

In the year 1083 Henry showed up before the gates of Rome again. As before he set up camp on the Vatican side of the Tiber. His troops made two attempts to overrun the Leonine walls that protect Saint Peter but were rebuffed. At the third attempt, the Romans attempted a sortie to break the siege. Fighting ferociously driven by the pangs of hunger and desperation, they pushed Henry’s forces all the way back into their camp. Henry, seeing that his rule may come to an end in this skirmish joined the fray and his soldiers followed him with renewed vigour driving the Romans back behind the walls of the city.

This fight had broken the resilience of the Romans who found themselves bereft of food, supplies and any hope of relief. Matilda was unable to help, the Normans were overseas. Morale deteriorated and discipline became slack. A few days later Henry’s soldiers noticed that a stretch of wall had no guards on them. In the dark they brought the ladders and climbed in without encountering any resistance. They opened the gates and the Imperial soldiers flooded in.  Gregory and his closest associates rushed for the safety of the Castello di Sant Angelo whilst resistance on the Vatican side of the city was quickly overcome. The papal militia was however able to hold the bridge over the Tiber and the main city of Rome remained in Gregory’s hands.

After that, negotiations started again. From Henry’s perspective the best solution would be if Gregory could be made to crown him. That would remove the stain of excommunication and end the conflict. Hence he and his pope-elect Clemet III left Rome. He kept a garrison there and tore down the walls of the Vatican city.

Thigs looked good for a while as Gregory, pressured by the Roman people, called a synod and promised to subject himself to whatever that synod decides about how the conflict could be resolved.  How sincere this promise was soon became quite clear. His invitation to the synod included clear instructions to the bishops attending. They were told to defend the church against the king a king he had once again excommunicated  from the walls of the Castello di Sant’Angelo. Gregory really did not care for compromise. Henry had no option than to sabotage the synod by apprehending the Gregorian bishops travelling to Rome.

In the meantime, he had received some financial support from the emperor in Constantinople who had come under pressure from Robert Guiscard. The Byzantine emperor wanted Henry to invade Robert Guiscard’s lands in Southern Italy and thereby forcing him to abandon his attacks against the Eastern Empire.

Henry used these funds to bribe the Romans who were now seriously tired of the stubborn Holy Father. They may support church reform, but they were even more keen on bringing these endless sieges to an end. And even in his college of Cardinals dissent was rising. His autocratic style had already irritated some of these eminent churchmen, but his insistence on fighting to the death was the last straw.

In 1084 16 cardinals went over to Henry’s camp and finally Rome opened its doors. Henry and the archbishop of Ravenna moved into the palace of the Lateran. A synod was called which deposed and excommunicated Gregory VII. Clement III was elected (again) and consecrated by the cardinal bishop of Ostia as was right and proper.

And then, finally, finally Henry IV. King of the Romans since 1056 was crowned emperor in St. Peter in the 28th year of his reign by Pope Clement and in the presence of many bishops, cardinals dukes, counts and the Roman people. If it wasn’t for the previous pope still holding out in the Castello di Sant’Angelo, it would have appeared as if finally, the good years of Emperor Henry III were back.

Are they? Well, we will see next week. Gregory is still around, and there is Robert Guiscard whose adventure in Byzantium is going pear-shaped. When he returns to defend his lands now under threat from henry in Rome, the rollercoaster that is Henry Iv’s reign will take another turn, a turn the brunt of which will be borne not by Henry but by the people of Rome who will see their worst fears realised. I hope you will join us again next week.

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Pope Paschal II offers to hand back all imperial fiefs which causes havoc

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 40 – Henry V’s Cunning Plan

In this episode we will see whether young Henry V will do any better at ending the conflict between Pope and Emperor, featuring one of the most audacious political moves seen in this conflict.

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 Ralf, Mehmet and Glenn who have already signed up.

Last week e followed our antihero Henry IV to his last and final betrayal when his youngest son, King Henry V rose up against him, like his elder brother Konrad had done. Henry V prevailed and the old emperor Henry IV died in 1106 still hoping against all the odds to return to the throne.

The king is dead, long live the king!

Who is that new king, Henry, fifth of his name?

In 1105 Henry V was 21 years of age. He was born in 1086, in one of the very few years of comparative quite in his father’s reign. But just 4 years later did the emperor go down to Italy where he would stay for 7 years, most of which spent in impotent rage against the pope, the countess Matilda, the German princes and his son Konrad. We do not know whether young Henry was with his father during this time or whether he stayed behind in Germany, and if so where and with whom..

All his formative years were spent in some form of limbo where he saw the ruler of the Reich being put under the yoke by his powerful vassals. In all likelihood Henry V did believe that it wasn’t easy to become king and even harder to remain king.

With that in mind we may have to retell the story of the end of Henry IV again. You see, last time you heard it from the point of view of the broken old emperor being subjected to yet another round of treachery, lies and deceit.

But now, let’s take a look at these events from the viewpoint of young King Henry V.

For him the year 1105 had become decision time. His father was old, so his last days were nigh.

At the same time the old man had been unable to reconcile with the pope, which meant that his rule was fragile and his succession even more so. Henry V’s worst-case scenario was that his father would suddenly die, and the Gregorian party would then propose their own candidate as king. All Henry V could rely upon was that he had been formally elected, anointed, and crowned in 1099 and that all the magnates had sworn fealty to him. But what is that worth? His own father was elected, anointed and crowned when the magnates deposed him in 1076. All it needs is a Gregorian pope to excommunicate him, and all that frankincense and Myrrh would fade into nothingness. As far as Henry V was concerned, his father needed to reconcile with the pope pronto or the new king’s reign would start with a civil war. 

After the murder of count Sighard and the subsequent Bavarian uprising that reconciliation would not happen for a long, long time. Pope Paschalis’ policy is reinvigorated, and he can again see the opportunity of maybe, maybe unseating Henry IV after all. If he was unwilling to compromise when Henry IV was well established, on what basis would he do it now?

Well, there was one way Henry IV could achieve a reconciliation with the pope, and that was by giving up all the investiture rights, the last remaining open issue between pope and emperor. But that would also mean that the empire would be finished. No investiture means no control over bishops, which means no call on episcopal military, which means no central power.

That would be the worst of all worlds for Henry V, a contested succession to an empire that was barely worth of its name.

The only way to avoid that outcome was to take over right now, put himself at the head of the Gregorian party and take a stab at reconciling with the pope. He made his point quite clear in a speech before the Magnates where he said that “he wasn’t fighting against his father, but on behalf his father’s realm”. The realm had become something that was truly detached from the person of the emperor, a concept first put out by Konrad II almost a 100 years earlier. The individual emperor had to protect the realm, even if it meant acting against his filial duties.

In light of that I simply do not understand why some historians accuse Henry V of ruthless ambition. Yes, the way he lured his father into the prison of Boeckelheim may not have been cricket, but there he stood and he could do no other.

And if we look at the end result, from the perspective of the empire, the situation improved massively under Henry V.

The empire recognizes Pope Paschalis II, Urban II’s successor. The schism is over. Each bishopric now has only one bishop so that no priest has to worry any more whether he was canonically appointed and no parishioner has to ask whether the baptism, marriage or last rites were valid. The pope has endorsed and absolved the king, meaning everyone can fulfil the oath to the king without opposing the church. And so the magnates recognize Henry V as their king and future emperor. A major civil war has been avoided. The country is at peace.

And, for the next 4 years the magnates remain supportive of the young king. The king listens to their council and makes a number of sensible decisions. One of which related to the succession to the duke of Saxony. Saxony, as you may remember had been a hereditary duchy for some time and its ducal family, the Billungs had ruled (in inverted commas) the duchy since the time of Otto the Great. The dukes were not massively powerful given that some of the Saxon counts ruled territories large enough to be dukedoms in their own right. The last of the Billung Dukes, Magnus had died in 1106. He had two daughters, who were each married to one of these extremely powerful Saxon counts.

If Henry had granted to duchy to either of these counts, the other would have contested the election and Saxony would have descended into civil war. To avoid that, Henry chose a compromise candidate, Lothar of Supplinburg. Lothar was related to all the major families in Saxony and even some of the Bavarian and Lothringian magnates. But he did not have much of a powerbase himself. That made him a popular candidate with all concerned. Remember the name, Lothar of Supplinburg, because, as we will find out in a few episodes, all concerned does not include the King Henry V and his heirs.

Apart from the Saxon succession the other key imperial job was to keep an eye and occasionally throw a lance at the restless neighbours, namely the still irritating counts of Flanders, dukes of lower Lothringia and assorted other potentates in the West. As for the east, the pattern that emerges is that both Poland and Hungary drift out of the influence of the empire. Poland is increasingly looking even further east to Russia and the Baltic seaboard rather than getting involved in imperial affairs. Hungary is expanding south. Its king became king of Croatia as well in 1102. Along with this southward focus, Hungary moved closer to Constantinople taking a neutral if not sometimes hostile stance towards the empire. Henry V tried to assert his increasingly theoretical suzerainty by supporting a pretender to the crown of Hungary, as Henry III had done before. But like him, the policy ultimately failed and Hungary will remain outside the empire.

In Bohemia, i.e., what is today the Czech Republic, it is the opposite. The dukes of Bohemia were roped even further into the empire as they were looking for support in their eternal internal family feuds. In 1114 the then duke of Bohemia confirmed his vassal status to the emperor by accepting one of the Erzaemter, or arch-offices of the realm. He became the Arch Cupbearer to the emperor. For the next few thousand imperial pints, Bohemia will be an integral part of the empire.

With the country at peace and the borders more or less calm, there remained only one really big issue to be resolved, and that was the conflict over the investiture of bishops.

Henry V had managed to gain papal support for his rebellion without having to renounce royal investiture. His smart move was not to negotiate with Paschalis beforehand. Hence the Pope was as surprised about events as everyone else. When Henry V asked to be absolved from the oath to his father, there was no time for the two sides discuss investiture. Paschalis had to choose to either refuse absolution and the rebellion would have collapsed, leaving him to continue negotiating with the intractable Henry IV, or to grant the absolution without conditions and see what happens next. He chose option 2.

And that meant once Henry V ascended the throne, he continued to select and invest bishops with ring and staff as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had done.

The pope on the other hand kept insisting on the total ban of royal investiture, including a ban on churchmen given the oath of vassalage to the king. The problem was intractable and though both sides tried to remain civil and no excommunication was yet forthcoming, tensions are mounting.

Whilst Paschalis and Henry V are gradually falling out, there is some movement in the debate about investiture outside the empire.

Let us not forget that the right to invest bishops and abbots is a topic not just in the empire, but all across Europe. The King of France and the King of England are also at loggerheads with the papacy over this question. The King of France needs investiture mainly because otherwise he would be pretty much bankrupt. The King of England has more money but had been relying on the church in England and Normandie for his financial and military resources in the same way as the emperors have done in Germany.

As a consequence, there were similar struggles in France and England between supporters of the Gregorian reform and the kings. In England it was the fight between Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury and the kings William Rufus and Henry I.

In France the king had so many issues with the papacy, the issue was outsourced to his bishops. It culminated in the debate over the succession to the bishoprics of Sens and Beauvais. Maybe because the less intense royal involvement, France was the first to reach a breakthrough. The great canonical jurist Ivo of Chartres came up with the concept that royal investiture had nothing to do with the spiritual role of the bishop. All it did was to grant the bishop lands and rights from the king in exchange for the oath of fealty as regards his obligations as a vassal. Otherwise the bishop remained free in his role as a spiritual leader. That was gradually accepted and ended up in a modus operandi where the king would not hand over the symbols of the bishop’s spiritual role, i.e., the ring and the crozier, but the bishop would swear him the oath of fealty – and presumably pay for taking on the fiefs.

In England the struggle also involved the exchange of many a learned treatise, one of which even claimed the opposite of the Gregorian doctrine, i.e., that the king is by his anointment put atop of the church. After a lot of to and fro in 1107 the King of England and the Pope agreed the concordat of Westminster. That sets out that -as in France- the spiritual investiture was a purely church affair but that the new prelate was to make an oath of fealty to the king as regards his fiefs. The royal rights however go further than in France. The king had the right to be present at the election of a bishop or abbot and, in case of disagreement, has the casting vote. In that arrangement the king remained pretty much in charge of his church.

Whilst France and England reach an agreement, the negotiations between Paschalis and Henry V are not going so well. In a first round in November 1106, both sides remained stubborn, and Paschalis reaffirmed the complete ban on Royal Investiture.

A delegation of German bishops and even a number of temporal lords with impeccable Gregorian leanings meet with representatives of Pope Paschalis in May 1107, but again negotiations run into the ground.

Whilst he refuses any compromise with the German side, Pope Paschalis goes to France and celebrates a solemn mass with king Phillip I and his son Louis VI in the church of Saint Denis. That puts the seal on that unofficial agreement over investiture and some other issues relating to the sexual incontinence French monarchs are so famous for. The church of Saint Denis is of huge significance as it is the same church where Pope Stephen II had crowned Pippin the Short and his son, the future emperor Charlemagne. The implication of this ceremony is straightforward, the pope wants the kings of France to take over the role of leader of Christendom from that evil tyrant from across the Meuse River, our friend King Henry V.

The journeys of Pope Urban II had already laid the foundations for this alliance between the French Monarchy and the Papacy, that the events of Saint Denis made public and for all to see. Over the next centuries the Capetian kings will use this papal endorsement to forge a coherent kingdom out of a hotchpotch of lands and rights around Paris. This support culminates a hundred years later in the Albigensian crusade where the pope promised a free ticket to heaven for anyone helping to bring the South of France under royal control. The French monarchs rewarded such support another century later with the installation of the papacy in Avignon under the watchful eye of a French garrison across the Rhone. I digress.

Back to year 1107. As the pope moves closer to the French and agrees the concordat with the King of England, he remains unmoved to the pleas of king Henry V. By now the German side realizes that the full investiture with ring and staff is no longer to be retained. In treatises presumably sponsored by the court, German writers begin to differentiate very clearly between the spiritual role and the secular role of the bishop, suggesting solutions along the lines of what had been agreed with France and England.

But again, the German delegations are rebuffed by Pope Paschalis II.

There is now only one thing to do. The king and the pope have to meet and thrash out their differences. But before he sets off, Henry V lays the foundation for another axis of European politics that lasted more or less until the First World war. He gets engaged to Matilda, daughter of King Henry I of England. She was at the time just 8 years old and the only surviving child of the Norman king. English History knows her as the Empress Matilda, adversary of King Stephen in the Anarchy and mother of King Henry II, the first of the Plantagenet kings of England.

This marriage was -as all other medieval marriages a political one. As the papacy aligned itself with France, Henry was looking for a counterweight, and who could be better than the King of England who was also duke of Normandy and hence in perennial squabbles with his southern neighbour. Henry also provided 10,000 pounds of silver as a dowry which was surely welcome. The slight problem was that the bride was only 8 years old and hence the marriage could not be consumed. Therefore, the happy couple could only get engaged. Now, the King of England was not prepared to hand over this kind of money for a mere engagement. So, instead of getting married, little Matilda is crowned queen in Mainz. Matilda will spend the next few years being educated by German bishops until Henry marries her when she turned 11, one hopes the consummation was still delayed by a few years after that.

His pockets refilled, Henry V sets off for Rome in the summer of 1110 and as usual spends the winter in Lombardy. He signs a standstill agreement with the Countess Matilda, who is still there, holding the keys to Rome. In February 1111 Henry V arrives at the gates of the eternal city.

The timing could not have been worse for Paschalis II. Like his predecessors he relied on the support of the Normans and the Countess Matilda in his squabbles with the emperor. Matilda had already decided to stand aside this time. And in a terrible twist of fate for the pope, the two leaders of the Normans, Roger of Apulia and Bohemond of Antioch died right around this time. Their future leader, Count Roger II of Sicily was a child. So, there was no hope for Norman support.

What to do now?

At this point Paschalis II comes up with a plan, to say it in the words of inimitable baldrick, a plan so cunning you can put a tail on it and call it a weasel.

Here is version one of how this plan came about: Pope Paschalis is a true Gregorian reformer who cares little about worldly politics, but a lot about the wellbeing of the holy mother church. And as he contemplates how to solve the problem of lay interference in the appointment of bishops, he has an idea. The king does not want the right of investiture because he wants to control the pastoral role of his bishops or abbots. He needs investiture because he needs access to the church’s financial and military resources. So, what about the church handing back all these counties, market rights, mints, mills and farms to the king in exchange for the king to completely withdraw from any interference with the bishops? Isn’t that the best solution? The church is free from royal interference and the king has no longer any need to interfere. Brilliant!

And so, he makes exactly that proposal to Henry V as the king approaches Rome. Henry V must have been dumbfounded by such an unimaginably generous offer. There are no statistics, but the typical estimate is that the church owned 1/3rd of all the land in western Europe and probably even more in Germany given the incessant transfer of land and titles to the bishops under the Imperial Church system. A generous offer indeed.

His advisors and even the king himself has doubts about the feasibility of this plan. How will the royal court administrate these enormous estates? Can you recruit enough Ministeriales to manage it? What about the bishops’ and abbots’ reactions?

But Henry V takes the offer. An agreement is signed and on February 12th he enters Rome for his coronation. He greets the pope on the steps of Saint Peter and kisses the Holy Father’s feet. As is the tradition, he swears to be the protector and defender of the holy church in all ways he could be of help. Paschalis then welcomes him as the son of the church and guides him into the forecourt of the old church of St. Peter.

The next part of the coronation was the scrutinium, an assessment of the fitness of the candidate to become emperor. It is here that Henry V formally renounces the right to invest the bishops. That is followed by the reading of the papal charter whereby the pope orders the bishops and abbots to hand back all the lands they own, every county, castle, farm and mill apart from those they had received as donations from private individuals.

And the result of this plan that was to please everyone was, was total mayhem.

The clergymen present had not been advised of the arrangements beforehand. In fact the whole treaty had been negotiated in secret between the king’s advisors and a small number of the pope’s confidants. These mighty bishops and abbots were not at all keen to give up their lands. Nor were the secular lords pleased with the outcome. Many of them held fiefs from the church, which they assumed would be lost to some ruddy Ministeriales under this arrangement.

Shouts went up, swords were drawn, crucifixes hurled and Rome broke out into rioting. The coronation had to be suspended. The parties tried to negotiate in the middle of the chaos. Henry insisted on the coronation and, since the pope was unable to hold up his side of the bargain demanded acceptance of his right of investiture. No agreement could be reached and by nightfall the still only King Henry V took the pope and his cardinals along into his army camp.

King and Pope left the city of Rome and set up camp at Ponte Mammolo just outside the walls. For 2 moth the pope and his cardinals refused to agree to Henry’s demands until they finally caved on April 12th. The pope and his cardinals issued a privilege to Henry V that allowed him to invest his bishops with both ring and staff – basically allowing him to run the imperial church exactly as his ancestors had been able to. Furthermore, he swore an oath to never bother the king again about investiture and to never excommunicate him. In exchange the king released his prisoners and swore allegiance to the pope and the holy church. And there was a side deal whereby Paschalis II released the old emperor Henry IV from his excommunication which meant he could finally be buried in his cathedral in Speyer.

All that was sealed off with the coronation of the Emperor Henry V which finally took place on April 13th. In May the freshly minted emperor set off home. And on the way home he scored another victory. He convinced the childless countess Matilda to name the emperor himself as the heir to her enormous wealth. How that happened, I have no idea. She had previously promised her lands to the seat of St. Peter.

All this looks like Henry V had achieved a complete triumph. He has been crowned emperor, the investiture controversy is resolved in such a way that all the imperial rights are protected, he is safe from any excommunication or papal interference and, to top it off, the empire gets hold of Matilda’s lands. 

Brilliant, eh!

No, not really. The agreement with the pope was so blatantly brought about by force, it was easily renounced. That happened as early as 1112 at a synod in Rome. The document was now called the “Pravileg”, the depraved privilege. Without waiting for any papal authorization several Gregorian bishops excommunicated Henry V, a process that was repeated multiple time throughout the rest of his reign.

As for the inheritance of Matilda, the competing claims of pope and emperor were added to the long list of their differences.

But the most severe impact was on his own vassals. When Henry V agreed to have his bishops and many of his magnates stripped of their possessions, the spectre of an overbearing Salian emperor returned. The great lords had believed Henry V had become one of them, had understood that all the title provided was a role as the First amongst Equals listening to his magnates’ advice in all his endeavours and bound to protect their rights and privileges. But with the acceptance of Paschalis’ offer he revealed himself as a man in the mould of his father and all his predecessors. A man who wanted to consolidate central power, push down the princes into mere royal subjects and rule as a Roman emperor, not as a Germanic king.

As the emperor’s perception changed and the excommunications began to reign down, Henry V’s reign begins to more and more resemble the reign of his father. Maybe that was the true motive behind Paschalis plan all along. He was as cunning as a weasel after all. Next week we will see how henry V handles this next turn of the wheel of fortune. 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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The end of Emperor Henry IV

It is hard to believe, but the last years of Henry IV’s tumultuous reign still held one final humiliation that capped the pain this man had already endured.

And that despite a period of relative stability which began after his return to Germany in 1097. Henry IV had accepted that his rule could not be one more than a First amongst Equals. He reconciled with his enemies in Swabia and Bavaria, largely by bribing them with valuable crown lands and settled into his new favourite residence in Mainz. The only one he did take issue with was the archbishop of Mainz for his involvement in the murder of the Jewish community under his protection.

He even attempted a lasting reconciliation with the Gregorian papacy admitting to having broken the unity of the holy mother church. But the new Pope, Paschalis II was not playing ball, leaving this issue as an open wound…long after the antipope Clement III had died.

The internal weakness of his regime became apparent when one of the guests at his imperial assembly in Regensburg ends up murdered by Ministeriales…..

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 39 – The End of Henry IV

This week we will talk about the last years of Henry IV, which, as hard as it is to believe, holds a final humiliation that capped the pain this man had already endured.

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At the end of episode 37 Henry IV was finally allowed to return home thanks to the reconciliation with his Southern German enemies, Welf IV and Berthold von Zaehringen. The price Henry had to pay for this reconciliation was fairly straightforward. He had to reinstate Welf IV as duke of Bavaria, and most painful of all, accept that Bavaria became a hereditary duchy, in other words, the king could no longer appoint the duke of Bavaria, let alone manage the duchy himself as he had done for the past 14 years.

As for the Zaehringer who had himself elected as anti-duke of Swabia against Frederick of Hohenstaufen, the deal was that Berthold retained the title of Duke, even though he was no longer duke of Swabia. He also received the royal demesne around Zurich, one of the most valuable of the crown’s possessions.

The net effect of that was that Swabia was divided into the ducal Swabia ruled by Frederick of Hohenstaufen and the Zaehringer Duchy in the south. Some argue it was even a three-way split, as the possessions of the Welfs in the eastern part of the duchy around Ravensburg were also out of ducal control.

The reconciliation with his last enemies meant that Henry IV could finally reign as emperor recognised across the whole of the empire. But this reign was now very different from the reign his father and grandfather exercised. Henry IV was now a First amongst Equals, a bit like his namesake Henry the Fowler had been. 200 years of expansion of central authority have been reversed.

The only right he still held on to was the right to invest bishops. These last 20 years, the bishops were often the only support Henry IV enjoyed. Amongst the secular princes only Frederick von Hohenstaufen had been unwaveringly loyal. The rest had to be bought or otherwise placated.

Before we get to the attack on this, the last real royal prerogative, there was one other thing that he believed his royal authority extended to, the protection of the Jews.

Those of you who have listened to the whole of Episode 38 may remember that Henry IV had declared himself the protector of the Jews in the empire in 1090. That was probably less of an act of religious tolerance than an attempt to raise funds for the depleted imperial coffers. Whether it was greed or enlightened self-interest does not matter because the imperial protection counted pretty much for nought when the crusaders massacred Jewish communities in Worms, Mainz, Trier and elsewhere.

Upon his return Henry IV initiated an investigation into these horrific atrocities, specifically the events in Mainz. He explicitly condemned the enforced conversions and allowed the Jews to return to their faith. Pope Clement III seconded this by declaring their baptisms uncanonical, which means they could return to their faith without being deemed apostate. That mattered because the sanction for apostasy was death.

Henry then followed the money trail and detected that a lot of the property of the murdered Jews had miraculously ended up in the hands of kinsmen and followers of the archbishop of Mainz, Ruothard. In fact a significant chunk of the assets had gone directly to this great prelate.

Henry could not let that go since Ruothard had been specifically ordered by the emperor to offer protection to the Jews. Ruothard had gone through the motions and offered the large Jewish community shelter in his fortified palace in the city. But when the troops of Emrich of Leiningen came knocking, the archbishop and his knights fled by the back door, leaving the unarmed men, women and children to their fate.

It transpired that the archbishop took 50 of the most prominent members of the community along and held them in a castle nearby. There they were offered freedom for conversion and compensation, which most refused resulting in them being killed or killing themselves in front of the archbishop.

Before the investigation was completed the archbishop and his kinsmen decided to run for it and hid in Thuringia for the next 7 ½ years.

That suited Henry well who took over Mainz as one of his preferred residences. It suited the citizens of Mainz even more as they thoroughly disliked their archbishop. This trend of citizens throwing their bishops out and forming their own independent city states is now really taking hold with Worms and Cologne leading the movement..

These next five years are a period of calm, most unusual for the reign of Henry IV. His rule is recognised by almost everyone. Once the Welf and the Zaehringer had reconciled themselves to the king, the only truly Gregorian base was the bishop of Constance, Gebhard. Though he remained the legate of the Gregorian pope in Germany, he had no more influence outside his own diocese, where Henry IV left him alone.

With his authority recognised across the land, Henry IV could move on to plan for his succession. He was now 48 years old, older than his father and grandfather when they died.

His eldest son, Konrad was still alive. You remember that he had betrayed his father and joined the Gregorian party. Pope Urban II and Matilda had promised him the world, including the imperial crown. He was even given a rich bride, the daughter of king Roger of Sicily. But, once the alliance between Matilda and the House of Welf had fallen apart and Henry IV had returned to Germany, young Konrad served no further purpose. He was given a modest castle to live in with his bride and was left to rot. Nobody called on him and even the pope who had promised to be his guardian and advisor never contacted him again.

But he was still technically King of the Romans and the future emperor, which meant he had to be formally deposed. That happened without much fuss in May 1098. Konrad ultimately died a broken man in 1101.

At the same royal assembly, Henry IV pushed through the election of his second son, also Henry. He was crowned King Henry V in Aachen in January 1099. His father had become a bit suspicious after the treachery of his eldest. Hence Henry V had to guarantee the emperors life and safety of his person on oath and was made to swear that he would never interfere against his will and command with matters of the kingdom, his honour and current and future possessions during his lifetime.

Hmm, this sounds long enough and legalese enough an oath to be broken some day…

Part two of the program was to make the current peace a lasting one. At the royal assembly in 1103 Henry IV declared a comprehensive peace to last for four years. He committed his nobles to preserve the peace for the churches, clergy, monks and lay brethren, for merchants, for women and Jews. Penalties for breaching the peace were severe. Perpetrators were to be blinded or would lose a hand for attacking and burning another one’s house, taking prisoners, wounding or killing a debtor, persistent theft or defending a peace-breaker. A castle where the peace breaker had taken refuge could be destroyed and his benefice could be seized by his lord and his possessions taken by his kinsmen.

That sounds again like a peace of god his father could have declared. But in the end it was not. The administration of the penalty was not to be done by the emperor or his appointees, but by those who had sworn the peace. It wasn’t the central authority that delivered the peace, it was the community, or so they hoped.

This peace is sometimes seen as the first act of imperial legislation within the context of the Holy Roman Empire, a construct not of a central monarchy but a mixed monarchy built around co-operation rather than command. It sort of was as the imperial peace or Reichsfrieden and its smaller cousins, the Landfrieden which became regular instruments of imperial rule. Yeah, maybe the Holy Roman Empire starts here, at the royal assembly of 1103. It is not called that for another 150 years, but the foundations are being laid.

The third part of his program to stabilise his reign was a reconciliation with the papacy. After Urban II’s propaganda coup with the crusades and even more so after the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, the old conflict between pope and emperor was resolved. The pope had won. No ifs, no buts.

The last obstacle was the anti-pope Clement III. As long as he lived Henry could not accept a Gregorian pope since that would have invalidated his coronation. Clement III was kind enough to die in 1100 removing this particular obstacle. Though. Cement’s cardinals elected a number of successor anti popes and held parts of the city of Rome, Henry ignored them. 

So, all could now be resolved. Henry IV called a royal assembly in Mainz where he proposed to send envoys to the pope to negotiate a settlement. And from 1100 to 1103 he made regular attempts to agree with Paschalis II.

With the question of who has the biggest now resolved, the pope came up with the next set of demands set out in the Dictatus Papae, the investiture of the bishops.

This whole fight between emperor and pope has been labelled the investiture conflict but you may have noticed that I barely mentioned investiture much in previous episodes. The issue made appearances all throughout the reign of Henry IV, going back to 1059 and it was usually included in the list of papal prerogatives.  But in reality, it wasn’t the big issue in the previous conflicts. All throughout this period henry IV had invested bishops and the Gregorian popes would happily receive bishops into their party who had been invested by Henry IV. Several of the reform popes had been present at investiture ceremonies performed by the emperor and kept stum.

But now, as the emperor was down, the popes saw the opportunity to tackle the issue.

What was the issue? The bottom line of it is, who appoints the bishops and abbots. In canon law, the question is a bit more complex. Because of the way the imperial church system had evolved over the previous two centuries, the German bishops were both religious leaders for the people in their diocese and feudal lords over the counties, castles, privileges and estates granted to their church. Under the early Ottonians the process of making a bishop consisted in two separate acts. Part one was the election as a religious leader by the congregation, specifically by the cathedral canons. Once elected, the bishop would then ask the king or emperor to be enfeoffed with the various secular rights of the bishopric. These two separate appointments were represented by the ring as a sign of the religious marriage of the bishop with his diocese and the staff as his sign of secular power. That sort of made sense, reflecting both the religious and the political dimension of the role of the bishop.

But as time went by the weight of the king and emperor in the decision who would be bishop had become ever more significant. The canons were aware that the king could refuse to enfeoff their chosen bishop with the lands, making them all suddenly very poor. Hence, they would ask the emperor for guidance in advance of an election. That then mutated in a process of direct orders of the king to elect so and so. Finally, under Henry III they dispensed with the niceties entirely and the king would invest his bishops directly with both the ring and the staff.

For the popes who saw themselves as the leader of Christendom and the immediate superior of the bishops, this system was unacceptable. How could a layman appoint a church leader, in particular a layman whose morals were not just in doubt but who was even excommunicated.

On the other hand, Henry IV could not relinquish the right to appoint bishops. That was literally the only power base he had left. The crown lands had been diminished and after the disaster in Saxony earlier in his reign there was no chance of building his own territorial power base.

We are at a complete impasse. Both sides want to come together, but they cannot get over this hurdle. Henry IV will send messages of peace and reconciliation to Paschalis II whilst at the same time investing bishops as before. Paschalis never writes back. Instead, he calls him “the chief of the heretics” and grants the soldiers fighting against henry in the constant border conflicts the same absolution crusaders received for going to Jerusalem. In 1102 he solemnly repeats Henry IV’s excommunication at a council in Rome and again releases everyone from their oath sworn to the king.

Henry’s response was to brush up his PR. He would make a big show and dance of his efforts to protect the priests and abbots against their rapacious secular neighbours. He would make another string of donations to the churches of Worms and Speyer. The cathedral in Speyer is by now reaching its completion as the extraordinary building that still stands today. He talks about going on pilgrimage to the Holy land to atone for his sins and he even writes to his godfather, abbot Hugh of Cluny, that he wants to do penance for his acts that ruined the unity of the holy church.

Did he mean all that? Maybe he did. He is now really old by the standards of the time and had been through the wringer so many time, I am wiling to believe he had enough. All he now cared about is leaving the empire to his successor in a reasonable shape and the conflict with the papacy resolved.

And most people in Germany agreed. 30 years of civil war had been enough, and nobody wanted a repeat. But as the failure to resolve the investiture conflict dragged on, the outward appearance of peace and stability hid some profound disagreements.

All came to a head at an assembly in Regensburg, capital of the duchy of Bavaria in the winter of 1103/1104. Many princes from all over the realm joined the emperor and his son for great festivities.  One of them, Count Sieghard of Burghausen, a rich noble from Southern Bavaria showed up with an unsuitably number of retainers. He argued that he needed so much protection because the court was too friendly to the Saxons and Franconians and that he feared for his life.

He may have been right about that. On the 5th of February 1104 Count Sieghard was murdered in his lodgings in Regensburg by a mob of Ministeriales. Ministeriales you may remember were unfree knights who were obliged to follow orders of their owners, usually princes, bishops or the emperor himself. But they weren’t just salaried soldiers. They had received fiefs to fund their weapons and cover their expenses. They would build castles on these lands and -over time- become indistinguishable from actual knights.

 According to some chroniclers, the Ministeriales had been enraged by some judgement count Sieghard had made in respect of one of his own Ministeriales. It was clearly not a smart move to antagonise a group of heavily armoured thugs with a chip on their shoulder for not being real knights. The Ministeriales besieged the lodgings of Count Sieghard for six hours and even the entreaties of the crown prince King Henry V could calm them down. The Ministeriales finally broke in and killed the Count and his household.

Public opinion blamed Henry IV for this murder. Sieghard was a guest of the emperor and was hence under his protection. Henry IV had sponsored the Ministeriales throughout his reign and his voice should have carried favour with them. In other words, Henry IV had failed to do his job, which led to the accusation that he was condoning the murder.

Feuds broke out across the empire, and particularly in the Northern provinces of Bavaria where many of the local counts had Gregorian leanings. The rebellion than extended to Saxony where another count apprehended the imperial candidate for the archbishopric of Magdeburg.

It is civil war again and Henry IV musters an army at Fritzlar in December 1104. And in the night of December 14th, 1104 young King Henry V, son of the emperor and sworn to obey him in all his commands, leaves the imperial camp. He runs for Bavaria where he finds support amongst the relatives of the murdered Sieghard.

Henry IV has to abandon his expedition to Saxony and returns to Mainz.

Henry IV’s enemies rally around his son. The pope, who had almost given up hope to unseat Henry IV was clearly surprised to receive a letter from young king henry V offering him allegiance in exchange for support in his fight with the father. He also urgently needs to be absolved from his solemn oath to obey his father. An oath he had made before the whole of the realm and on the most precious relics and regalia of the land. Without absolution, his soul and his rebellion would be lost.

But hey, that is one of the easiest things to sort out. Paschalis argument is simple. Henry IV has been excommunicated since, like forever. What is an oath to an excommunicate – just hollow words.

Being absolved meant that more malcontents could join young Henry Vth’s banner. And malcontent the Saxons always are. Archbishop Ruothgar of Mainz is another obvious supporter, as is the nominal leader of the Gregorian party in Germany, bishop Gebhard of Constance.

Most of the year 1105 was spent in military walkabout whereby Henry V failed to successfully challenge his father but gradually gains control of Southern Germany. One great coup was to get hold of the 15 year old Frederick II of Swabia, the son of Henry IV’s great ally Frederick of Hohenstaufen who had died the year before.

The elder Henry made a last attempt to take Regensburg with the help of the Austrians and the Bohemians. But after 3 days of a standoff outside the ancient city, Henry IV was betrayed by his allies and had to flee back to the one loyal area he still had, the cities of the Rhineland, namely Mainz, Speyer and Cologne.

Speyer fell at the end of October and Mainz was considered too dangerous, so he retreated towards Cologne. His son caught up with him near Koblenz.

Father and son finally met and first the elder Henry fell on his knees and begged his son to end the inhumane persecution. Then his son fell to his knees and said he would make peace with him if only he could reconcile with the pope.

The father accepted to come to a royal assembly in Mainz to debate the issue with the nobles and subject himself to whatever conclusion the assembly may reach. On the promise of safe passage to Mainz, Henry IV dismissed his army and joined the camp of his son.

On the first day his advisors told hm that they feared his son would break the oath and imprison him. When he confronted him, Henry V repeated his guarantee to take him to mains.

And when on the second day the number of armed men in Henry V entourage increased, the father asked the son again, are you taking me to Mainz to state my case, and again the son guaranteed the emperor’s safety.

And on the third day…well do I have to tell you, yes and for a third time Henry V guaranteed his father’s safety.

On the fourth day Henry IV was imprisoned in the castle of Boeckelheim. His goaler was a particularly Gregorian minded bishop who had little regard for an excommunicate imprisoned emperor. The former ruler’s followers had been dismissed except for three laymen, he was left without a bath and unshaven but worst of all, without being allowed communion during the holy days of Christmas.

There was no way Henry V would let his father appear in Mainz, a city staunchly supportive of the old emperor. He was allowed to come before an assembly in the imperial Pfalz of Ingelheim, but that was an assembly of henry V’s supporters. All the undecided and the supporters of the old king were left in Mainz.

Henry IV tried one last time to get himself out of the pickle he was in by displaying excessive penance. In a rerun of Canossa he threw himself at the feet of the apostolic legate, confessed his sins including his unjust persecution of the apostolic see and even performed the prescribed abdication. He then begged the legate to give him the absolution, having done all that was required of him. And if the man in front of him had been the pope, henry IV would probably have been absolved from the excommunication again, letting him fight another day. But the man in front of him was a mere apostolic legate who came up with the eternal rebuttal of the bureaucrat – I do not have the authority to release you from the ban. I will write to the pope who will sure acquiesce to your request. And even when he claimed he was in immediate mortal danger running the risk of dying without reconciliation with the church the legate remained unwavering – No can do. Do I need to tell you that under canon law he had been obliged to absolve the king under these circumstances? I presume you have heard enough about the Gregorian papacy by now to know the answer to that.

As Henry IV had now abdicated, his son Henry V was crowned in the cathedral of Mainz with the regalia he had forced his father to surrender and by that self-same archbishop Ruothard of Mainz who still had the blood of hundreds of Jews on his hands.

Henry IV was left in Ingelheim, apolitical and probably also emotional wreck. At some point he realise that his son could not let him live much longer and he fled. First to Cologne and then to Lothringia.

I have no idea how he did that, but somehow even after this last hammer blow, Henry IV did not give up. He retired too liege and when henry V send troops to capture him, his allies beat them. He then returned to Cologne where the citizens urged him to resume his role as emperor. When his son came to besiege the city he had to retreat twice experiencing heavy losses.

The father began to rebuild his power base and some disaffected nobles and bishops joined his side. He even opened up the possibility of giving in on royal investiture to split the Gregorian party. Things were looking up for old emperor henry in the spring of 1106 when he was suddenly struck by an illness. He died after nine days in Liege surrounded by his closest friends and advisers having received the last rites.

What a life. Henry IV had been emperor from 1056 to 1105, 49 years in total. In that time he was abducted by a faction of his nobles, abandoned by his mother, forced to marry a girl he saw as a sister, betrayed a hundred times by his nobles, forced to stand in the snow for three days to do penance, stabbed in the back by his eldest son , publicly accused of the worst misdemeanours by his second wife, and finally deposed by his youngest son. Where is the scriptwriter who sells the story to Netflix?

He was initially buried in the cathedral of Liege but was soon exhumed as the archbishops and bishops objected to an excommunicate to be laid to rest in consecrated ground. His body was then buried in un-consecrated ground outside the city. A few weeks later henry V demanded for his father’s remains to be brought to Speyer, but the citizens of Liege tried to keep hold of the body who they began to believe to be sacred. They would touch the bier for a blessing and spread the earth from his grave on their fields to ensure an abundant harvest.

Finally one of Henry IV’s most faithful servants was able to extract the body and transport it to Speyer where it was placed in a stone sarcophagus that was kept outside his magnificent cathedral for five years. Only once his son had achieved a breakthrough in the conflict with the papacy that from now on is indeed the Investiture conflict did he obtain absolution from the excommunication. He was finally buried in the magnificent cathedral he had built in the year 1111. His son held a eulogy of his great and beloved father, emperor Henry IV of happy memory.

Next week we will look at how Henry V, champion of pope Paschalis II finds himself caught in the same gridlock that prevented his fathers reconciliation with the mother church. I hope you will join us again.

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.

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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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Emperor henry IV kneels in the snow before Pope Gregory VII

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.

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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.