INTRODUCTION

The Pontificate of Gregory VII is important as having occurred at a very critical period in the history of the Papacy, and as having left an indelible impression upon its later aims and policy. A great revival of the Empire had slowly taken place (a.d. 950-1046). “The German peoples within the empire of Charles the Great were united by the urgent necessity of protecting themselves against barbarous foes. They formed a strong elective monarchy, and shook themselves free from their Romanized brethren, the Western Franks, amongst whom the power of the Vassals was still to maintain disunion for centuries. The German kingdom was the inheritor of the ideas and policy of Charles the Great, and the restoration of the Imperial power was a natural and worthy object of the Saxon line of kings”. The restoration of the Empire involved a restoration of the status of the Papacy. The great monastery of Cluny and the monastic reformers there became a centre of the revival of Christian feeling, and aimed at uniting Christendom under the headship of the Pope. The reformers aimed at a strict enforcement of the celibacy of the clergy and the suppression of simony—to check, in fact, the secularization of the clerical office, to which many causes, especially the growing wealth of the Church, had contributed. The first desideratum was a reform of the Papacy, and the Emperor Henry III was called upon to effect this. The great Emperor, in whom the mediaeval empire touched its highest point, was not unnaturally hailed as a second David when, at the Synod of Sutri, he superintended the deposition of three Popes who simultaneously occupied the chair of St. Peter.

With Henry III the Empire attained its maximum of power, its maximum or influence upon the Roman See. In Rome no German sovereign had ever been so absolute. He became hereditary Patrician, and wore constantly the circlet of gold and the green mantle which were the badges of that office, seeming, as one might think, to find in it some further authority than that which the Imperial name conferred. To Henry was granted the nomination of the Pope, and by his instrumentality German after German succeeded to the Papacy, at the bidding of a ruler so powerful, so severe, and so pious.

A mere chance checked the course of Imperial patronage. The great Emperor died suddenly in 1056, leaving as his successor his son, a mere child, the unfortunate Henry IV.

Under the line of German popes the Papacy learned to borrow the strength of the Imperial system under which it had grown to power. So strengthened, the Papacy aimed at independence. A critical step was taken by entrusting the Papal election to the cardinal-bishops, priests and deacons, which aimed a blow at Imperial interference. Politically an alliance with the Norman settlers in Southern Italy enabled the popes to count upon a counter-balance to the Imperial power. The Papacy slowly prepared to assert its independence.

Under Gregory VII, the struggle between the Empire and the Papacy took an acute form. Not content with claiming for the Church an entire independence from the temporal power, he declared that the independence of the Church was to be found solely in the assertion of its supremacy over the State—Gregory VII did not aim at securing the Papal monarchy over the Church—that had been established since the days of Nicholas I. He aimed at asserting the freedom of the Church from worldly influences which benumbed it, by setting up the Papacy as a power strong enough to restrain Church and State alike. In ecclesiastical matters Gregory enunciated the infallibility of the Pope, his power of deposing bishops and restoring them at his own will, the necessity of his consent to give universal validity to synodal decrees, his supreme and irresponsible jurisdiction, the precedence of his legates over all bishops.

In political matters, he asserted that the name of Pope was incomparable with any other, that to him alone belonged the right to use the insignia of Empire; “that he could depose emperors, and all princes ought to kiss his feet; that he could release subjects from their allegiance to wicked rulers”. Such were Gregory's tremendous claims for the Papacy, and such claims naturally came into conflict with the temporal power of other great rulers.

Gregory VII died in exile, after a comparatively brief pontificate of not much more than ten years, but the theory of his office and the prerogatives which he asserted were brought by his successors to a marvelous realization. Without Gregory VII there would have been no Innocent III—that Pope who succeeded in effectively impressing the theory of hierarchic government upon Europe, and became in effect “the king of kings, lord of lords, the only ruler of princes”: for the influence of Gregory VII, like that of many another politician, was greater upon succeeding generations than upon his own.