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The medieval papacy rose from a position of relative weakness in the early Middle Ages to a position of unprecedented power in the High Middle Ages. The Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century, the Investiture Controversy that followed, and the pontificate of Innocent III at the beginning of the thirteenth century all contributed to the development of a papal monarchy that claimed supremacy over all earthly rulers and that exercised a more extensive and more effective authority than any other institution in medieval Christendom. The papacy was, by the early thirteenth century, a sophisticated administrative apparatus with a developed legal system, an extensive financial network, and a diplomatic corps that reached into every kingdom of Europe.
This cluster explores the rise of the medieval papacy to the height of its power. The articles in the related long-tail pages provide deeper examinations of specific aspects of the topic.
Colin Morris, “The Papal Monarchy” (1989), and Walter Ullmann, “A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages” (1972), are the two standard English-language treatments. Ullmann, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, is the older legal-and-constitutional reading; Morris, writing after 1980, is the social-and-institutional reading. The page below uses both, and the contemporary polemical literature (the Dictatus Papae, the imperial answers, the pamphlets of the Avignon period) as primary material.
The Papacy in the Early Middle Ages
The papacy of the early Middle Ages was a much more modest institution than the papacy of the High Middle Ages. The bishop of Rome had a position of honor among the patriarchs of the early Church, and he had a special relationship with the churches of the West, but he did not have a clear claim to universal authority. The Donation of Constantine — a document forged in the eighth century, claiming that the emperor Constantine had granted temporal authority over the western Roman Empire to the pope — provided a later justification for papal claims, but it was not yet in circulation.
The papacy of the ninth and tenth centuries was a period of decline and disorder. The papal office was often in the hands of the Roman aristocracy, and the popes of the period were often the creatures of the Roman noble families. The pornocracy — the period in which the papacy was allegedly dominated by the senatrix Marozia and her family — was a low point in the history of the office, and it was followed by a period in which the German emperors exercised a dominant influence over the choice of the pope. The Ottonian system of the imperial papacy — in which the German emperor nominated the pope — was a major departure from the later Gregorian ideal.
The situation began to change in the eleventh century. The Cluniac reform movement and the papal reformers began to demand a free and independent papacy, and the German emperors gradually lost their grip on the office. The election of Pope Nicholas II in 1058, on the basis of a reform program that limited the role of the emperor in the choice of the pope, was a major step in the liberation of the papacy. The papal bull of 1059, In Nomine Domini, restricted the election of the pope to the cardinals, and it removed the emperor from the formal process of election.
The Gregorian Reform
The Gregorian Reform was the movement for the liberation of the Church from secular control and the purification of the clergy from the abuses of simony and nicolaitism. The reform was named after Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), but it had its roots in the Cluniac movement of the tenth and eleventh centuries and in the writings of the papal reformers of the period.
The reform movement had several major goals. The first was the liberation of the Church from the control of the secular rulers. The reformers insisted that the appointment and investiture of bishops and abbots was a spiritual matter, to be decided by the Church alone. They rejected the practice of lay investiture — the granting of the symbols of ecclesiastical office by secular rulers — and they insisted that the secular rulers had no authority in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments.
The second goal of the reform was the purification of the clergy from simony and nicolaitism. The reformers insisted that simony — the buying or selling of ecclesiastical office — was a grave sin, and they insisted that the clergy must remain celibate and not live with women. The decrees of the papal reformers — the decrees of Nicholas II, the decrees of Gregory VII, the decrees of Urban II — laid the foundations for the reform of the clergy in the period.
The third goal of the reform was the liberation of the papacy itself. The reformers insisted that the pope had universal authority in the Church, and that the bishops of the Latin Church were subject to the pope in matters of faith and discipline. The Dictatus Papae of Pope Gregory VII — a collection of twenty-seven propositions about the authority of the pope — set out the papal claims in a systematic form. The Dictatus asserted that the pope was the vicar of Christ, that he had universal jurisdiction, that he could depose emperors, and that he was subject to no judgment of any man.
The Investiture Controversy
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. 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. The controversy was a defining moment in the development of papal authority, and it set the stage for the later struggle between Church and state.
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.
The struggle between Gregory and Henry produced one of the most famous incidents of medieval history: the Walk to Canossa of 1077. After Gregory had excommunicated Henry and released his subjects from their oath of allegiance, Henry was forced to make a public penance at Canossa, the castle of Matilda of Tuscany, where the pope was staying. Henry stood barefoot in the snow for three days, begging the pope’s forgiveness, and Gregory absolved him. Yet the struggle continued, and in 1084 Henry captured Rome and installed an antipope. Gregory was eventually rescued by the Norman duke Robert Guiscard, but he died in exile at Salerno in 1085.
The Investiture Controversy continued after the death of Gregory, with the popes and the emperors struggling for control of the appointment of bishops. The compromise was eventually reached in the Concordat of Worms in 1122, which 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 Pontificate of Innocent III
The pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) was the zenith of the medieval papacy. Innocent was one of the most powerful and most ambitious of the medieval popes, and he used the papal office to exercise a more extensive and more effective authority than any of his predecessors. He claimed supremacy over all earthly rulers, he intervened decisively in the politics of Europe, and he launched the Fourth Crusade and the Albigensian Crusade, convened the Fourth Lateran Council, and issued a series of decrees that shaped the Church for centuries.
Innocent was a brilliant theologian and canon lawyer, and he brought a sophisticated intellectual apparatus to the papal office. He had been a student at Paris and Bologna, and he had written a major treatise on the misery of the human condition before his election to the papacy. As pope, he used the resources of canon law to extend the authority of the papacy into every corner of Christendom.
Innocent intervened decisively in the politics of Europe. He placed England under interdict during the dispute between King John and the pope over the appointment of the archbishop of Canterbury, a sanction that suspended all sacraments and religious services in the country. He intervened in the politics of France, Germany, Spain, and the Crusader States, deposing and installing kings with an authority that no secular ruler could match. He received the Kingdom of Aragon as a fief of the papacy, and he invested the King of Aragon with his crown in Rome.
Innocent convened the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which was one of the most important ecclesiastical assemblies of the period. The Council issued seventy-one canons on every aspect of Christian life, from the obligations of priests to the requirements for a valid marriage to the procedures for the confession of sins. The canons of the Fourth Lateran Council remained the basis of canon law in the Latin Church until the Code of Canon Law of 1917.
Innocent launched the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) and the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), two of the most controversial episodes in the history of the papacy. The Fourth Crusade ended in the Sack of Constantinople, a Latin Christian city sacked by fellow Christians, and the Albigensian Crusade was a brutal campaign against the Cathars of southern France that was marked by massacres and devastation. Both Crusades raised serious questions about the morality of the papal use of force, and both Crusades left a legacy of controversy that has continued to the present day.
The Later Medieval Papacy
The papacy of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was a period of decline. The popes of the period — Gregory IX, Innocent IV, Gregory X, Nicholas III, Martin IV, Honorius IV, Nicholas IV — struggled to maintain the authority of the papacy in the face of rising challenges from secular rulers, growing demands for reform from within the Church, and the diversion of resources to the Crusades and the suppression of heresy.
The struggle between Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) and King Philip IV of France (1285–1314) was a major turning point. Boniface was a defender of the papal claims, and he issued the bull Unam Sanctam in 1302, which asserted that the pope had supremacy over all earthly rulers. Philip responded by arresting the pope at Anagni in 1303, an act of violence that shocked the Christian world. Boniface was released soon after, but he died a few weeks later, and the papal claims were never the same.
The Babylonian Captivity of the papacy (1309–1377) — the period in which the popes resided at Avignon in southern France rather than at Rome — was another major turning point. The Avignon popes were criticized for their worldliness, their luxury, and their submission to the French crown. The return of the papacy to Rome in 1377 was followed by the Great Schism (1378–1417), in which two (and later three) popes claimed to be the true pope, and the unity of the papacy was broken for nearly forty years.
The papacy of the late medieval and early modern periods was marked by the conciliar movement — the movement for the reform of the Church through councils rather than through the pope — and the gradual emergence of the Renaissance papacy, with its nepotism, its luxury, and its political involvements. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century would eventually shatter the unity of Western Christendom and produce a permanent division between the Catholic and Protestant traditions.
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).