Pope Gregory VII

Gregory VII made the papacy a monarchy and died driven out of Rome by a German army, which is the shape of the whole investiture contest in one life. He was born Hildebrand in Tuscany, of no particular family, and spent thirty years as the working brain of the reform party under a succession of popes before the Roman crowd acclaimed him to the office himself in 1073. The reform programme was about three things: simony, the buying of church office; clerical marriage; and lay investiture, the practice by which a king handed a bishop the ring and staff of his office. The third was the one that mattered politically, because bishops in the Empire held enormous secular estates and a ruler who could not appoint them could not govern. In 1075 he forbade it. The Dictatus Papae, a list of propositions from his register, claims among other things that the pope alone may depose emperors, that he may be judged by no one, and that the Roman church has never erred. Henry IV called a synod that declared him deposed; he excommunicated Henry and released his subjects from their oaths, which the German princes took as licence to elect someone else. That is why Henry crossed the Alps in the winter of 1077 and stood three days outside the castle at Canossa in penitent's clothes until he was absolved - a submission that solved Henry's German problem and settled nothing else. The war resumed, Henry installed an antipope, took Rome in 1084, and Gregory was rescued by Norman troops under Robert Guiscard who sacked the city so thoroughly that the Romans would not have him back. He died at Salerno the next year. The quarrel was settled at Worms in 1122 by compromise.

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