Otto I successfully revived the empire in the West on Carolingian precedents and secured Ottonian rule in Germany, but his greatest triumph may have come near the end of his reign when he secured both recognition from the Byzantine emperor and a marriage arrangement between his son, Otto II, and the Byzantine princess Theophano. In 973 Otto II succeeded his father as emperor. His attention, perhaps under his wife’s influence, was drawn to Italy and the Mediterranean, and he campaigned in southern Italy with disastrous results, suffering a terrible defeat at the hands of Muslim armies. When Otto II died in 983, his heir, Otto III, was only three years old, and a period of regency preceded a reign of great promise unfulfilled. Inheriting the traditions of both the Western and Eastern empires, the third Otto sought to revive the Christian Roman empire of Charlemagne and Constantine and planned a great capital in Rome. Otto’s grand ambition is reflected in the appointment of Gerbert of Aurillac as pope, who took the name Sylvester II in imitation of Constantine’s pope; in Otto’s efforts to expand the empire (see Researcher’s Note: Holy Roman Empire) and Christendom to the east; and in his discovery, with its apocalyptic overtones, of the tomb of Charlemagne in the year 1000. His premature death two years later, followed by that of Sylvester in 1003, ended this promising chapter of German history. His successor, Henry II, returned the imperial focus to Germany and contented himself with three brief Italian expeditions. The Salians, the papacy, and the princes, 1024–1125
During the reign of Conrad II (1024–39), the first Salian emperor, the kingdom of Burgundy fell finally under the overlordship of the German crown, and this tough and formidable emperor also renewed German authority in Italy. His son and successor, Henry III (1039–56), treated the empire as a mission that imposed on him the tasks of reforming the papacy and of preaching peace to his lay vassals. Without possessing any very significant new resources of power, he nevertheless lent his authority an exalted and strained theocratic complexion. Yet, under Henry, the last German ruler to maintain his hegemony in western Europe, the popes themselves seemed to become mere imperial bishops. He deposed three of them, and four Germans held the Holy See at his command; but lay opposition to the emperor in Germany and criticism of his control over the church were on the increase during the last years of his reign. Papal reform and the German church
More than any other society in early medieval Europe, Germany was divided and torn by the revolutionary ideas and measures of the so-called Gregorian Reform movement. Beginning with the pontificate of Leo IX (1048–54)—one of Henry III’s nominees—the most determined and inspired spokesmen of ecclesiastical reform placed themselves at the service of the Holy See. Only a few years after Henry’s death (1056), they agitated against lay authority in the church and issued a papal election decree that virtually eliminated imperial involvement. The ecclesiastical reformers sought to restore what they thought was the rightful order of the world and denied the notion of theocratic kingship. Priests, including bishops and abbots, who accepted their dignities from lay lords and emperors at a price, according to the reformers, committed the sin of simony (the buying and selling of church office). The reformers argued that earthly powers could not rightly confer the gifts of the Holy Spirit and thus rejected the tradition of lay investiture. They believed, moreover, that true reforms could be brought about only by the exaltation of the papacy so that it commanded the obedience of all provincial metropolitans and was out of the reach of the emperor and the local aristocracy.
The endless repetition of the reformers’ message in brilliant pamphlets and at clerical synods spread agitation in Italy, Burgundy, and Lotharingia—all parts of the empire. Their new program committed the leaders of the movement to a struggle for power because it struck at the very roots of the regime to which the German church had grown accustomed and on which the German kings relied. The vast wealth that Henry IV’s predecessors had showered on the bishoprics and abbeys would, if the new teaching prevailed, escape his control and remain at the disposal of prelates whom he no longer appointed. Under Roman authority the churches were to be freed from most of the burdens of royal protection without losing any of its benefits. The most fiery spirits in Rome did not flinch from the consequences of their convictions. Their leader Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), was ready to risk a collision with the empire.
Henry IV was not yet six years old when his father died in 1056. The full impact of the Gregorian demands—coming shortly after a royal minority, a Saxon rising, and a conspiracy of the southern German princes—has often been regarded as the most disastrous moment in Germany’s history during the Middle Ages. In fact, the German church had proved thoroughly unreliable as an inner bastion of the empire even before Rome struck. One of its leaders, Archbishop Anno of Cologne, kidnapped Henry in 1062 to gain control of both the young king and the regency, and another, Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen, exploited his influence over the young king by enriching his ecclesiastical possessions at imperial expense. In 1074 and 1075 Gregory proceeded against simony in Germany and humiliated the aristocratic episcopate by issuing summonses to Rome and sentences of suspension. These papal actions demoralized and shook the German hierarchy. The prelates’ return to their customary support of the crown was not disinterested, nor wholehearted, nor unanimous. The discontent of the lay princes
Henry IV’s minority also gave elbowroom to the ambitions and hatreds of the lay magnates. The feeble regency of his mother, the pious Agnes of Poitou, faltered before the throng of princes, who respected only authority and power greater than their own. The influence of the higher clergy at the court of Henry III and the renewed flow of grants to the church had estranged these princes from the empire. It is likely also that these eternally belligerent men lagged behind the prelates in the development of their agrarian resources. The prelates had a vested interest in peace, and under royal protection they improved and enlarged their estates by turning forests into arable land and also by offering better terms to freemen in search of a lord. The bishops’ market and toll privileges brought them revenues in money, which many of the lay princes lacked. So far, however, the princes’ military power, their chief asset, had remained unchallenged. Now, for the first time, they also had to face rivals within their own sphere of action. Henry III and the young Henry IV began to rely on advisers and fighting men drawn from a lower tier of the social order—the poorer, freeborn nobility of Swabia and, above all, the class of unfree knights, known as ministeriales. These knights had first become important as administrators and soldiers on the estates of the church early in the 11th century. Their status and that of their fiefs was fixed by seignorial ordinances, and they could be relied on and commanded, unlike the free vassals of bishops and abbots. Beginning with Conrad II, the Salian kings used ministeriales to administer their demesne, as household officers at court, and as garrisons for their castles. They formed a small army, which the crown could mobilize without having to appeal to the lay princes, whose ill will and antipathy toward the government of the Reich grew apace with their exclusion from it.