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The Investiture Controversy was the long struggle between the papacy and the secular rulers — especially the German emperor — over the appointment of bishops and abbots in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The controversy began in the late eleventh century, with the papal attack on lay investiture and the imperial insistence on the traditional rights of the emperor, and it continued for nearly fifty years, with a series of dramatic confrontations between popes and emperors, including the famous Walk to Canossa of 1077. The controversy was a defining moment in the development of papal authority and in the relationship between Church and state in the Western Christian tradition.
The standard English-language treatment is Uta-Renate Blumenthal, “The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century” (Philadelphia, 1988). The Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII (1075) and the imperial answers are the primary sources, with the English translation in E. F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (1896).
The Background to the Controversy
The background to the Investiture Controversy is rooted in the medieval practice of lay investiture, in which secular rulers appointed and invested bishops and abbots with the symbols of their ecclesiastical office. The practice had developed in the early Middle Ages, when the secular rulers were the principal protectors of the Church and when the bishops and abbots were major landowners and secular officials. The practice of lay investiture had become widespread in the eleventh century, and it was a major source of corruption and abuse in the Church.
The Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century, named after Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), sought to free the Church from secular control and to enforce higher standards of clerical life. The reformers insisted that the appointment and investiture of bishops and abbots was a spiritual matter, to be decided by the Church alone, and they rejected the practice of lay investiture as a violation of the spiritual independence of the Church. The Dictatus Papae of Pope Gregory VII, a collection of twenty-seven propositions about the authority of the pope, asserted that the pope had universal jurisdiction and that the secular rulers had no authority in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments.
The Controversy with Henry IV
The Investiture Controversy was triggered by the election of Pope Gregory VII in 1073. Gregory, a reformer and a former monk of Cluny, immediately began to enforce the decrees of the reform against simony and nicolaitism, and he turned his attention to the lay investiture of bishops. In 1075, Gregory issued a decree forbidding lay investiture under pain of excommunication, and he ordered several bishops who had received their offices from the emperor to renounce their investiture.
The emperor Henry IV of Germany refused to accept the decree, and the controversy escalated into a full-scale struggle between the papacy and the empire. Gregory excommunicated Henry and released his subjects from their oath of allegiance, and Henry was forced to make a public penance at Canossa in 1077. According to the legend, Henry stood barefoot in the snow for three days, begging the pope’s forgiveness, and Gregory absolved him. The dramatic scene at Canossa has become a symbol of the papal triumph over the empire and of the supremacy of the spiritual authority over the temporal authority.
The peace of Canossa was short-lived, and the struggle resumed in 1080. Gregory excommunicated Henry again, and Henry marched on Rome and installed an antipope, Clement III, in 1084. Gregory was eventually rescued by the Norman duke Robert Guiscard, but he died in exile at Salerno in 1085. His last words were a famous expression of defeat and hope: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, and so I die in exile.”
The Continuation of the Struggle
The Investiture Controversy continued after the death of Gregory VII, with the popes and the emperors struggling for control of the appointment of bishops. Pope Urban II (1088–1099), the successor of Gregory VII, continued the struggle with Henry IV and his son Henry V captured Pope Paschal II in 1111 and forced him to concede the right of lay investiture, but the concession was later rejected by the Church.
The compromise of the Investiture Controversy was reached in the Concordat of Worms in 1122. The Concordat distinguished between the spiritual authority of the pope (to elect and invest the bishop with the ring and the staff) and the temporal authority of the emperor (to be present at the election and to invest the bishop with the symbols of his temporal office). The compromise left many questions unresolved, but it established the principle that the Church, in matters of its own governance, was independent of secular power.
The Significance of the Controversy
The Investiture Controversy was a defining moment in the development of papal authority and in the relationship between Church and state in the Western Christian tradition. The controversy established the principle that the pope had supreme authority in the spiritual order, and it set the stage for the papal monarchy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The controversy also established the principle that the secular rulers had no authority in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments, and it laid the foundations for the later struggles between popes and kings in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The Investiture Controversy also had a major impact on the development of the German Empire. The struggle with the papacy weakened the imperial authority in Germany, and the German princes gradually won autonomy in their own territories. The Golden Bull of 1356 would later codify the procedures of imperial election and grant formal recognition to the princely autonomy, but the process of decentralization had begun in the period.
The Investiture Controversy also had a major impact on the development of European political thought. The controversy stimulated the development of a rich literature of political theology and canon law, and it produced the major works of papal theorists such as Gregory VII and Innocent III. The controversy also stimulated the development of a rich literature of imperial theorists who defended the rights of the secular rulers against the papal claims. The controversy laid the foundations for the later debates about the relationship between Church and state in the Western Christian tradition.
The Concordat of Worms
The Concordat of Worms of 1122 was the compromise that ended the Investiture Controversy. The Concordat was negotiated between Pope Calixtus II and Emperor Henry V, and it was sealed at Worms in September 1122. The Concordat distinguished between the spiritual authority of the pope and the temporal authority of the emperor in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments.
The Concordat provided that the election of bishops and abbots in the German Empire would take place in the presence of the emperor or his representative, and that the bishop or abbot would receive the regalia — the symbols of his temporal office — from the emperor by the scepter. The Concordat also provided that the bishop or abbot would receive the spiritual symbols of his office — the ring and the staff — from the pope or his representative. The Concordat thus distinguished between the spiritual and the temporal aspects of episcopal authority, and it established the principle that the secular rulers had no authority in the matter of spiritual appointments.
The Concordat of Worms was a major step in the development of the Western Christian tradition of Church-state relations. The Concordat established the principle of cooperation between the papacy and the secular authorities, and it provided a framework for the resolution of future disputes between the Church and the state. The Concordat was later superseded by the developments of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — the rise of the papal monarchy under Innocent III, the struggle between Boniface VIII and Philip IV, the Babylonian Captivity — but it remained an important precedent for the relationship between Church and state in the Western Christian tradition.
Sources
Principal sources used in this article:
- Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy (Oxford, 1989), pt. 2.
Further reading:
- Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (Methuen, 1972).
For a recent single-volume synthesis with full scholarly apparatus, see the relevant chapter of Barbara H. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2014).