Investiture Controversy

Since Otto I, the German kings had governed through bishops and abbots whom they appointed and invested with ring and staff, and in 1046 Henry III had settled a papal schism by deposing three rival claimants. The reform movement that took hold in Rome in the mid-11th century fought simony and clerical marriage and demanded the "liberty of the Church": in 1059 a synod under Nicholas II gave the election of the pope to the cardinals. Gregory VII, pope from 1073, held that a pope could depose emperors (the Dictatus papae of 1075). When Henry IV installed one of his chaplains as archbishop of Milan in 1075, Gregory threatened him with excommunication; on 24 January 1076 at Worms the king and 26 bishops renounced Gregory — Henry's letter was addressed to "Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk" — and on 22 February Gregory excommunicated Henry, declared him deposed and released his subjects from their oaths, a step never before taken against a Roman king. Facing rebellious princes, Henry did penance at Canossa in January 1077, but the princes elected Rudolf of Rheinfelden as anti-king, and in 1080 Gregory excommunicated Henry again.

A synod at Brixen then elected Archbishop Wibert of Ravenna as Pope Clement III, and Rudolf died the same year. In 1084 Henry took Rome and was crowned emperor by his antipope, but Gregory's Norman ally Robert Guiscard drove him out and sacked the city, and Gregory died in exile at Salerno on 25 May 1085. Urban II won back most of the bishops; Henry IV was forced to abdicate by his son in 1105, and Henry V, who took Pope Paschal II prisoner in 1111 to extort the right of investiture, saw the concession revoked the next year. On 23 September 1122 Henry V and Callixtus II agreed at Worms that the emperor would renounce investiture with ring and staff and allow free elections, while in Germany elections would be held in his presence and he would invest the elected with their lands and rights by the sceptre; the First Lateran Council confirmed the agreement in 1123.

Historians stress that investiture was not the original issue: Gregory's sentence of 1076 did not mention it, and, as Rudolf Schieffer showed, the first general papal ban on lay investiture dates only from 1078; the name "investiture controversy" was used by writers such as William of Malmesbury soon after 1122. The conflict weakened the German monarchy for generations and strengthened the papacy as the head of the Latin Church.