Pope Callixtus II
Callixtus II ended the fight over who appoints bishops by conceding half of it, which is why the settlement held. He was a Burgundian nobleman of the highest connections - son of a count, related to the kings of France, England and the emperor himself - and as archbishop of Vienne he had been one of the hardest opponents of imperial appointment, excommunicating the emperor twice before he was elected pope. The quarrel he inherited was fifty years old. It turned on whether a bishop, who was both a spiritual officer and a great landholder owing military service, received his office from the church or from the king who granted the land - and it had already produced an emperor standing barefoot in the snow at Canossa, two decades of civil war in Germany and a succession of rival popes. The Concordat of Worms in 1122 separated the two things that had been one. The emperor renounced investiture with ring and staff, the spiritual symbols, and conceded free canonical election; the church conceded that elections in Germany would take place in the emperor's presence and that he would invest the bishop with the temporal regalia by the touch of a sceptre, before consecration. Each side got the half it actually needed, and the formula was ratified by the First Lateran Council the following year - the first ecumenical council held in the West. It did not settle the underlying question of whether pope or emperor stood higher, which would be fought over for another two centuries. What it did was end the practice by which a king simply handed out bishoprics, and establish that a compromise between the two powers was possible at all. Callixtus died two years later, having also made peace with the Normans in the south and restored papal authority in Rome itself.
- Lived: 1065 CE – 1124 CE
- Nationality: Papal
- Roles: head_of_state, religious_leader
