The Concordat of Worms
The Concordat of Worms in 1122 ended a fifty-year quarrel between popes and emperors about who appointed bishops. The stakes were larger than they sound. A bishop in the empire was both a spiritual officer and a great landholder with soldiers and jurisdiction, and the German crown had governed through such men for two centuries precisely because they had no legitimate heirs and their offices returned to the king. The reform party in Rome held that a layman investing a bishop with ring and staff was a scandal, and Gregory VII forbade it in 1075. Henry IV replied by having his bishops declare the pope deposed; Gregory excommunicated him and released his subjects from their oaths; and the German princes, who had reasons of their own, gave Henry a year to be absolved. That produced Canossa in January 1077, where the emperor stood in the snow outside the castle for three days as a penitent and Gregory, as a priest, could not refuse absolution. The war went on for another forty-five years regardless, with antipopes, antikings and a civil war in Germany. The settlement was a distinction. The emperor gave up investiture with ring and staff, the spiritual symbols, and kept the right to be present at elections in Germany and to invest the bishop with the temporal regalia by touching a sceptre. Church and crown each got a piece of the appointment. The compromise held, and the argument it settled established the church as an institution independent of secular rulers.
- Year: 1122 CE
- Category: Religious
