[1066-1075 A.D.]
Henry IV had begun his reign with vigour. This circumstance only hastened the formation of conspiracies against him among the nobles throughout the empire. In Saxony, the whole nation was in a ferment—clergy, nobles, and commons. All complained of intolerable oppression, exercised from Henry’s strongholds. At the head of the league now formed stood Otto of Nordheim. In South Germany, Rudolf of Swabia was in accord with him; Welf and Hanno were equally aware of the plot. The pope, too, influenced by Hildebrand, now cardinal subdeacon, also began to take an interest in German affairs; he zealously opposed his ecclesiastical authority to the evil desires of King Henry, who wished for a divorce from Bertha, his noble wife; and he also sought to intervene as mediator at the request of the Saxons.
Meanwhile the whole empire was on the verge of rebellion. In the year 1073 the Saxons rose as one man, and marched in a body sixty thousand strong to Harzburg near Goslar, a castle on a lofty height, commanding a wide view of the surrounding country, which the king had made into a stately royal residence. Henry, after useless negotiations, barely escaped by flight. When he tried to gather the princes of the empire around him, none appeared; nay, the idea of deserting him altogether and electing another emperor was openly mooted. At this crisis the towns alone proved true to Henry from the outset; and whilst these negotiations were pending, he lay sick to death in the loyal city of Worms. But he had scarcely recovered before he met and defeated the foreign foe in Hungary; and then with restless activity he turned to affairs at home. He still had some friends; the archbishop of Mainz, the dukes of Lorraine and Bohemia, and Welf of Bavaria came over on his side; and finally even Rudolf, who shortly before had laid the most treasonable plots against him, thought it advisable to make a fresh display of devotion. Concord between the South German princes and Saxons was at an end, and Henry skilfully made use of their dissensions.
In the wantonness of victory the Saxons had destroyed the Harzburg; they had even burned a church and desecrated graves; the archbishop of Mainz excommunicated them for the sacrilege; and in the summer of 1075 Henry IV marched against them, with such a splendid array as few emperors before him had led, in spite of their proffers of atonement and submission. Henry could have brought the matter to a peaceful issue, much to his own advantage and that of his people. But his soul thirsted for vengeance; he surprised the Saxons and their Thuringian allies at Hohenburg in the meadows on the Unstrut, not far from Langensalza. His army ranged in the same order as that of Otto the Great at the battle of the Lech, gained a sanguinary victory (1075). But German had fought against German, and on the evening of the battle loud lamentations broke forth in the royal army for the fallen, many of whom had been slain by the hands of their own kin. Nevertheless Henry was now master of Saxony and lord of all Germany; he seemed to have established his throne firmly once more. So he would have done, in all likelihood, had he not imprudently involved himself in a much more serious quarrel.
QUARREL BETWEEN HENRY IV AND GREGORY VII
[1075 A.D.]
We know how, amidst the indescribable barbarism, misery, and violence of the eleventh century, a reformation of morals, though in a gloomy monastic form, had proceeded from the convent of Cluny; and how the emperor Henry III himself had endeavoured to promote it. Through Hildebrand this reformation was transferred to Rome, to the court of the popes, who for nearly two centuries had been oblivious of the vocation ascribed to them by the faith of the age. As long as Henry III was alive, the Romans on whom the election still depended had, by Hildebrand’s advice, allowed the emperor to designate the popes. During the minority of Henry IV, the election was for the first time committed to the college of cardinals; and in 1075 Hildebrand was elected pope under the title of Gregory VII.
This great and gifted man immediately proceeded to carry his own ideas into practice. He would have the church thenceforth free from all temporal authority, that of the emperor included. He therefore issued an edict, which had already been suggested in earlier counsels but never carried out, prescribing the celibacy of the clergy. Unhampered by wife, child, and earthly cares, the clergy were in future to feel themselves merely members of a powerful ecclesiastical community, receiving orders from Rome, from the successor of St. Peter, the vicegerent of God and Christ upon earth. This edict, deeply as it touched the life of the nation, might seem to affect the emperor but slightly; yet a second struck at the roots of his power. Henceforth neither the emperor nor any temporal sovereign was to appoint bishops; in the phraseology of the time the investiture—i.e., the conferring of the ring and crosier, the symbols of episcopal office—was no longer to be in the hands of laymen. The cathedral chapter, that is to say the college of clergy attached to each cathedral, was to make the election, the pope to confirm it; no gift nor purchase was to be made on elevation to the sacred office, otherwise the candidate was guilty of simony, as the offence was styled, by a reference to Acts, viii, 18.
This edict was a heavy blow to the German monarchs, for since the reign of Henry II they had sought and found support among the bishops against the increasing power of the nobles. The estates of the church formed a considerable portion of the imperial territory; the monarch disposed of them and of their revenues if he appointed bishops, as he had always done up to this time. Many of Henry IV’s appointments had been made, not with his father’s strict regard for clerical fitness, but for his own profit and to meet the needs of the moment. Some of these bishops had paid money to Henry’s counsellors for their appointment, and for this, in 1075, Gregory VII put them as well as the counsellors under the ban, demanding of the king to depose them, and threatening him with the punishment of the church if he refused. Long had Henry watched unwillingly the encroachments of the pope; after the victory over the Saxons had restored his power in the empire, he attempted, following the example of his father, to depose Gregory—without reflecting how much weaker his power was than his father’s, and how much nobler and greater was the mind of Gregory VII than were those of the previous popes. At Worms in 1076 he held a synod of German bishops, who neither by their worthy living nor their education could be called mirrors of the church. By them on a trumped-up accusation he had Gregory VII deposed. Gregory replied with the ban in 1076. This was the first time a pope had attempted this measure against a German king. And Henry was soon to realise what a ban, which at that time loosed all bonds of feudal obedience, signified. It was the signal for the princes, who jealously saw the royal power restored, to desert him. In the autumn of the same year they held a diet at Tribur on the old election field, and sent word to the king that if in a year and a day he was not free from the ban, they could no longer consider him their lord.
Henry saw himself deserted by all; he heard that Gregory VII was already on the way to Germany to adjudge his cause. He resolved on a reconciliation with the pope as the best way out of his troubles. He started in the severe winter, when the rivers were almost frozen in their beds, and crossed the snow-covered Alps, not as his predecessors with a formidable army, but as a penitent, accompanied by his noble-minded wife, a few faithful servants, and those placed under the ban with him. In Lombardy, in which a strong opposition prevailed against Gregory’s innovations, he had been offered means of resistance, but he rejected them, and hastened to Canossa, the fortress of the powerful Countess Matilda of Tuscany, a daughter of that Beatrice who had once caused Henry III such anxiety. She was as devoted to Gregory VII as to an ecclesiastical father, and now offered him her castle. Henry did not come as an assailant, but as a supplicant.i