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Cambridge Medieval Textbooks
The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century
This is a comprehensive survey of the history of the Church in Western Europe from c. 900 to c. 1125, which is considered both as a set of institutions and as a spiritual body. The first half concentrates on the structures of religious belief and practice in the period 900-1050; the second half concentrates on the revolutionary changes associated with the rise of the papacy to a new level of rulership. It shows how far one can talk of a "reform movement," and how the idea and ideal of papal monarchy became both the prisoner and the leader of those who sought for a renewal of Christian life. Tellenbach's survey is the work of a scholar who has been working in the field for over sixty years. It is characterized by the freshness and maturity of its judgments, which cut through many fashionable theories. No other work on this topic offers comparable range, depth and authority.
423 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
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December 24, 2020
This useful book provides a corrective to many assumptions about Gregorian Reform in that not only does it contextualise the radical assertion of papal primacy associated with the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-1085) and his immediate successors within the historical development of the western Church in the tenth to early twelfth centuries, but also it distinguishes the processes of spiritual renewal pursued by reformers, clerical and lay, that both preceded and were contemporary to Gregorianism from the specific jurisdictional conflicts over authority that constitute the so-called Investiture Contest, and specifically the battles between pope and emperor in Germany and Italy.
In the early chapters, Gerd Tellenbach examines the growing movements for reform that were to provide much of the architectonics of later medieval western Christianity, particularly with reference to the decline of lay proprietary churches, the monastic renewal associated with Cluny and other mother convents, and the development of greater diocesan unity. Similarly, he shows that what lay at the heart of reform was a movement to rejuvenate the spiritual efficiency of the priesthood through the destruction of simony and nicolaitism, and that this had its origins and progressed separately from the papalism of the Gregorians. Further, he establishes how little a role the papacy originally played in the propagation of this, and how until the mid-eleventh century popes were predominantly concerned with the government of Rome and the patrimony of St Peter, so that when popes were involved in disputes outside of their Italian domains it was mostly at the request of disputants out of reverence for the see of St Peter rather than from papal intervention. What Tellenbach illustrates is just how limited papal authority was, not just with regard to lay rulers but also the episcopate, and how little of the hieratic later conception of society pertained in a world where churches looked to lay rulers, emperors, kings, princes, dukes, counts, and lords for protection and, in many cases, provision.
What changed this situation of a week papacy and seemingly autonomous and autarkic episcopate was the intervention of the German king Henry III in Rome after 1046, which saw the reform of the papacy and the succession of popes of his choice. What Henry sought was in effect a restitution of the alliance between emperor and pope associated with the Carolingians and Ottonians, and the reassertion of the principle of authority, derived singularly from God, but exercised spiritually and temporally in harmony through Church and secular lordship with the pope and he as emperor as partners, but with him dominant in all matters temporal. Henry III wanted a strong and respected papacy to legitimise his imperial coronation, but his vision of rulership remained theocratic - his authority came directly from God and was not endowed or mediated by pope or Church.
There was, therefore, not only a demand for reform by the beginning of the eleventh century, but already efforts to reform the Church in progress, and Henry III saw it as his duty as emperor to further this, which is why in large part he descended upon Italy in 1046, deposed the rival popes Benedict IX and Gregory VI at the council of Sutri and insured the election of Clement II. He did not regard imperial power and intervention in the Church as inimical to reform, but rather as a means of implementing it. However, that was not the view that the archdeacon Hildebrand was willing to accept and he was to labour fiercely against it as Pope Gregory VII. However, ironically, it was only the intervention of the emperor which made possible the reform of the papacy that was to give him the basis upon which to found his own papal movement of reform, which rejected the historical tradition of lay-clerical association in government and asserted a novel doctrine based upon the Petrine Commission and the 'two swords' theory of government of Gelasius I that gave to both spiritual and temporal swords authority in the world but with the former ultimately superior and dominant, with the secular submissive to the clerical. This positing of the superior authority of the spiritual over temporal and the superiority of clerics over laity, and with it the clear implication that the pope was the superior of emperors and kings, was to provide the argument that through his spiritual lordship the pope had power to not only admonish and correct, common to the priesthood, but also to excommunicate and depose rulers with whom he was in conflict as heretics de facto and to loose their subjects from their bonds of homage and fealty. In this manner, when Gregory came to twice depose and excommunicate Henry IV, he was asserting the supreme authority of the pope and with it his role, and his alone, to order and reform the Christian commonwealth, with emperors, kings, and other secular rulers as his spiritual sons duty bound to implement his demands. To Gregory, what he was doing was making practicable a power inherent in the unique authority of the bishop of Rome as St Peter's vicar, but previously unexercised. But, to Henry and the other kings, it was an assertion of a novel power, founded in abstraction, unhistorical in conception, and inimical to their role as divinely ordained to kingship and sanctified by unction.
So, Gregorian Reform was not just about reforming abuses in the Church, but was to be a radical altering of society based not upon history, tradition, or practice, but upon abstract theory founded upon the commision granted by Christ to Peter, and thereby to his successor in Rome, and inherent in ordination to all in priestly orders, that gave the pope the power to 'loose and to bind' and made the priest responsible at judgement before God for the souls of those in his cure. With this responsibility came the clerical power of popes and priests over men. And so, what had its origins in spiritual renovation of the Church came through the exertion of papal authority to be a jurisdictional revolution, and one with which emperors and kings could not hold, since they claimed their anointing, while not granting them priestly status, was recognition of their special position above other men and of their authority to rule and which descended directly from God without priestly mediation, requiring only, at coronation and anointing, episcopal recognition.
Once Tellenbach has established the historical and theoretical context, he goes on to examine first the pontificate of Gregory VII and then the convoluted course of the Investiture Contest until its conclusion with the 1122 Concordat of Worms between Henry V and Paschal II. The Investiture Contest was not only a dispute about rival theories of authority. It was also part of secular disputes within lordships, most notably that between the king and emperor in Germany and Italy and his powerful vassals, while it also played a part in the conflict between a centralising papacy and individual metropolitans and bishops. At its heart was the question of lay investiture, that is the role played by the laity in the conferring of benefices with the cure of souls upon clerks in holy orders, and yet when settlement was reached with secular rulers across Europe, it was far from a papal victory. In fact, through recognition of the right of kings to be present at episcopal elections, and so effectively determine the appointment of bishops, and confirmation of their right to invest bishops with the regalia associated with their office, the outcome of the Contest in actuality saw no real diminution of royal authority over the episcopate in their domains, and what power they surrendered was predominantly symbolic.
So, what then did the Investiture Contest achieve for the Church? In short, very little beyond the recognition by kings of the difference between the spiritualities, which belonged to the Church, and the temporalities, which belonged to the feudal lord, of a benefice, and the recognition that kings could only invest a bishop with the regalia of his office. However, in England and Normandy, and those parts of the empire that constituted the hereditary lands of the Saliens, the popes still had to accept that bishops could be invested with their temporalities after election, at which the king could be present and which could take place in his chapter house, but before episcopal consecration, thus ensuring kings could in effect appoint to the episcopate and endow with diocesan estates bishops who had not yet been consecrated to the office by metropolitans and their suffragans. Thus, while the papacy had asserted its sole authority over consecration and ordination, something never actually challenged, the reaffirmed influence emperors and kings were to exercise over the appointment of bishops meant the episcopate of western Christendom continued to be tied to the rulers who controlled their appointme. Any victory of spiritual jurisdiction won by the papacy was pyrrhic when compared to the practical benefits accrued by secular rulers, and popes of necessity had to continue to negotiate with and recognise the rights of kings when consecrating to the episcopate.
In terms of papal control over the episcopate and their claims to practical authority the Contest was not a success for the popes, particularly as it came at the cost of schism from 1080 with the election of the imperial antipope Clement III, but it did accrue some benefits with regard to papal supremacy. What no-one could deny at its closure was that the popes had asserted their spiritual predominance across western Christendom, and while unable to assail the theocratic vision of kingship, they had established their sole right to order ordination and consecration. However, Gregory VII had clearly failed in his attempt to depose Henry IV, whose weaknesses before his submission at Canossa in 1076 were mainly due to the political situation in Germany, while he himself had been deposed by a synod of imperial bishops in 1080, resulting in the election of an antipope and papal schism. And as the empire showed, where most of the episcopate remained loyal to Henry IV and Henry V, and where those Gregorian bishops who cleaved to Rome were in areas whose territorial lords were in opposition to the emperor and king, it was, as was to be the case later, political realities which determined papal recognition not the spiritual worthiness of the rival popes. The kings were certainly not the losers of the Investiture Contest and the popes' victory was hollow at best, so the only losers were the bishops with regards to their autonomy who now found themselves more reliant upon secular rulers for their election and investiture with the temporalities, while at the same time seeing their spiritual authority and independence diminished by the increased assertion of papal authority and the popes' exercise of their plenitude of power over, rather than in conjunction with, their brother bishops.
What becomes clear is that the rise of papalism and the consequential decline of episcopalianism in the government of the Church, with the validity of synods dependent upon papal recognition in person or through legates, as well as the attack upon lay investiture, were not concerned primarily with theology but rather with ecclesiastical jurisdiction and authority. Gregory VII appears neither as archdeacon nor pope to have taken a prominent role in the condemnation of Berenger of Tours over his symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist, a role he left to theologians and to synods, but neither did he accept Berenger's questioning of the real presence despite this being claimed as a reason for his deposition by the German bishops in 1080 at Blixen, while the Gregorian popes did not overly concern themselves with the perennial argument about the validity of ordination of and consecration by unworthy priests, primarily simoniacs and nicolaitists. For this reason the Gregorian papacy played little part in the development of scholasticism, while the assertion of the jurisdictional and authorative rights of popes operated relatively independently of the development and codification of canon law: the popes were not theologians and neither were they lawyers. What the popes instead were determined to do was establish their universal episcopacy and assert that the plenitude of power they exercised by delegation of the Petrine Commission was not shared by their fellow bishops. Instead the spiritual authority of bishops was delegated to them by the pope to whom they were subordinate. The object with the bishops, as with the laity and investiture, was to impose papal primacy upon the whole Church visible, and Gregory's Dictatus Papae of 1075 was intended to further this, being concerned with ecclesiastical authority and not dogma.
A dilemma for the popes in their attempts to impose spiritual lordship over secular rulers, and indeed one for the student of this period, is that the bishop of Rome as well as being the premier ecclesiastic of the West was himself the temporal lord of the patrimony of St Peter and the papal estates therein across the Romagna, while for reasons of security he maintained a political interest in both the lands of the Lombard plain to the north and the southern lands recaptured from the Byzantine emperor and the Saracens by the Normans from the mid-eleventh century. It is too early to speak of a papal state in this period, rather there existed a collection of estates under papal feudal lordship from which the pope derived revenues and over which he exercised jurisdiction, but these meant that the pope himself acted as a temporal lord, while his interventions in neighbouring areas of Italy were driven as much by temporal concerns as spiritual ones. The accepted model of ecclesiastical lordship was that when popes required military assistance, they were to call upon the secular arm to provide it, and such had been the justification for the relationship between the papacy and the Carolingian and later the Ottonian emperors. Indeed, when the Salien German king Henry III descended upon Rome in 1046 to install his chosen pope and free him and his successors from the oppressions and threats of the noble families and populace of the city, it was justified in these terms - the emperor as the primary lord of the temporal realm was bringing his secular forces to the assistance of the senior spiritual lord of Christendom. The problem was that just as popes wanted to be free of the control of the Roman factions, so they wanted also to avoid subjection and subservience to the emperor, and this provided a strong reason for the conflict between the Gregorian papacy and the Salien emperors, and why Gregory VII when forced to flee Rome in 1084 in face of Henry IV's army turned to the Normans of the Sicilian kingdom for assistance. He was, in desperation, seeking to call the secular arm to his aid as his predecessors had, but, in this case, against the emperor, the traditional protector of the papacy. The result of this was that as temporal lords involved in high politics, not only in Italy, but also in Germany where they sought to support the noble opponents of the emperors, the popes were themselves acting as Italian princes no differently from their rivals. The irony was that as the popes attempted to justify their spiritual lordship, the means they used and the revenues they required from their estates to finance their campaigns involved them more and more in temporal affairs, paving the way for the emergence of the papal state in the thirteenth century and what has come to be known as papal monarchy. The popes, in effect, as the kings and emperors knew from experience, were discovering that regardless of abstract thought and Biblical precepts, it was impossible in practice to separate the two Gelasian swords of authority from one another. And so, right up until the mid-nineteenth century, the popes continued simultaneously to be both spiritual leader and temporal Italian prince.
What this book reveals in its examination not only of eleventh century reform and the interrelated role played by secular rulers, especially the emperors and German dukes, but also of the emergence of the reform papacy with its claim to universal primacy is the dominant role played by Gregory VII, first as the archdeacon Hildebrand, and then as aggressively idealistic pope. It was Gregory who tried to harness the ideas which lay behind reform not only to revive the spiritual form of the Church, but to do so in a way that would impose papal supremacy not only over the episcopate and priesthood, but also over temporal lords, thus for the first time making the Petrine Commission the sole ultimate authority for human government, so that all authority ultimately descended from the power given by Christ to St Peter, exercised by the pope as his vicar, through his power to 'loose and to bind' on earth as in heaven and the concomitant eschatological responsibility given to all priests for the soul of those within his cure. Gregorian reform was, as Gregory VII propounded it, revolutionary, demolishing all theocratic justifications for royal rulership that had developed since the conversion of Constantine, and placing spiritual lordship above the temporal, although, after Gregory's defeat in 1083-5 and then death, and following the schism resultant from the election of antipope Clement III in 1080, it is noticeable that his successors, while retaining his theological and ecclesiological precepts never pushed things as far as he was prepared to do, particularly after 1111 and the seizure of Paschal II by Henry V, when the ultimate manifestation of papal weakness against imperial force forced him into concessions that paved the way for the final settlement of the Concordat of Worms between his successor, Calixtus II, and the same emperor in 1122.
There is, therefore, a distinction to be made between reform, aimed at the spiritual improvement of the Church through the suppression of simony, nicolaitism, lay investiture and propriety churches, and the revolutionary jurisdictional doctrines pursued by the Gregorians and their assertion of both clerical superiority and papal supremacy based upon the pope's office as vicar of St Peter, the prince of the apostles to whom the keys of the kingdom had been uniquely committed by Christ, and thus superior to the episcopal authority granted to other patriarchs and metropolitans through their succession from the other apostles. However, while there was this distinction in intent between reformers, the outcome was, as Tellenbach partly accepts, the clericalisaton of the Church, and its increasingly identification less as the invisible body of all believers in communion with the Roman see and more as the corporate body of the priesthood endowed through ordination with the powers of consecration, the most important being that of transubstantiation in the celebration of the Mass ,and who were separated from and superior to all of the laity, including emperors and kings. As, Gregory VII asserted, even those in the lowest of clerical orders below the priesthood, such as exorcists, were of greater spiritual validity than even the emperor. And it was from this conception that the revolutionary ideas of Gregory VII and the Gregorians flowed, pouring ecclesiological and jurisdictional doctrines of papal supremacy into the waters of reform, and fermenting the oceans of debate between monist (divine authority descends solely through the pope as successor of St Peter) and dualist (authority is exercised by both popes and bishops and by temporal rulers according to its purpose) theories of authority that were to form the politico-religious tides that determined Christian discourse for the remainder of the Middle Ages, as Tellenbach delineates in his excellent history of this fascinating period.
In the early chapters, Gerd Tellenbach examines the growing movements for reform that were to provide much of the architectonics of later medieval western Christianity, particularly with reference to the decline of lay proprietary churches, the monastic renewal associated with Cluny and other mother convents, and the development of greater diocesan unity. Similarly, he shows that what lay at the heart of reform was a movement to rejuvenate the spiritual efficiency of the priesthood through the destruction of simony and nicolaitism, and that this had its origins and progressed separately from the papalism of the Gregorians. Further, he establishes how little a role the papacy originally played in the propagation of this, and how until the mid-eleventh century popes were predominantly concerned with the government of Rome and the patrimony of St Peter, so that when popes were involved in disputes outside of their Italian domains it was mostly at the request of disputants out of reverence for the see of St Peter rather than from papal intervention. What Tellenbach illustrates is just how limited papal authority was, not just with regard to lay rulers but also the episcopate, and how little of the hieratic later conception of society pertained in a world where churches looked to lay rulers, emperors, kings, princes, dukes, counts, and lords for protection and, in many cases, provision.
What changed this situation of a week papacy and seemingly autonomous and autarkic episcopate was the intervention of the German king Henry III in Rome after 1046, which saw the reform of the papacy and the succession of popes of his choice. What Henry sought was in effect a restitution of the alliance between emperor and pope associated with the Carolingians and Ottonians, and the reassertion of the principle of authority, derived singularly from God, but exercised spiritually and temporally in harmony through Church and secular lordship with the pope and he as emperor as partners, but with him dominant in all matters temporal. Henry III wanted a strong and respected papacy to legitimise his imperial coronation, but his vision of rulership remained theocratic - his authority came directly from God and was not endowed or mediated by pope or Church.
There was, therefore, not only a demand for reform by the beginning of the eleventh century, but already efforts to reform the Church in progress, and Henry III saw it as his duty as emperor to further this, which is why in large part he descended upon Italy in 1046, deposed the rival popes Benedict IX and Gregory VI at the council of Sutri and insured the election of Clement II. He did not regard imperial power and intervention in the Church as inimical to reform, but rather as a means of implementing it. However, that was not the view that the archdeacon Hildebrand was willing to accept and he was to labour fiercely against it as Pope Gregory VII. However, ironically, it was only the intervention of the emperor which made possible the reform of the papacy that was to give him the basis upon which to found his own papal movement of reform, which rejected the historical tradition of lay-clerical association in government and asserted a novel doctrine based upon the Petrine Commission and the 'two swords' theory of government of Gelasius I that gave to both spiritual and temporal swords authority in the world but with the former ultimately superior and dominant, with the secular submissive to the clerical. This positing of the superior authority of the spiritual over temporal and the superiority of clerics over laity, and with it the clear implication that the pope was the superior of emperors and kings, was to provide the argument that through his spiritual lordship the pope had power to not only admonish and correct, common to the priesthood, but also to excommunicate and depose rulers with whom he was in conflict as heretics de facto and to loose their subjects from their bonds of homage and fealty. In this manner, when Gregory came to twice depose and excommunicate Henry IV, he was asserting the supreme authority of the pope and with it his role, and his alone, to order and reform the Christian commonwealth, with emperors, kings, and other secular rulers as his spiritual sons duty bound to implement his demands. To Gregory, what he was doing was making practicable a power inherent in the unique authority of the bishop of Rome as St Peter's vicar, but previously unexercised. But, to Henry and the other kings, it was an assertion of a novel power, founded in abstraction, unhistorical in conception, and inimical to their role as divinely ordained to kingship and sanctified by unction.
So, Gregorian Reform was not just about reforming abuses in the Church, but was to be a radical altering of society based not upon history, tradition, or practice, but upon abstract theory founded upon the commision granted by Christ to Peter, and thereby to his successor in Rome, and inherent in ordination to all in priestly orders, that gave the pope the power to 'loose and to bind' and made the priest responsible at judgement before God for the souls of those in his cure. With this responsibility came the clerical power of popes and priests over men. And so, what had its origins in spiritual renovation of the Church came through the exertion of papal authority to be a jurisdictional revolution, and one with which emperors and kings could not hold, since they claimed their anointing, while not granting them priestly status, was recognition of their special position above other men and of their authority to rule and which descended directly from God without priestly mediation, requiring only, at coronation and anointing, episcopal recognition.
Once Tellenbach has established the historical and theoretical context, he goes on to examine first the pontificate of Gregory VII and then the convoluted course of the Investiture Contest until its conclusion with the 1122 Concordat of Worms between Henry V and Paschal II. The Investiture Contest was not only a dispute about rival theories of authority. It was also part of secular disputes within lordships, most notably that between the king and emperor in Germany and Italy and his powerful vassals, while it also played a part in the conflict between a centralising papacy and individual metropolitans and bishops. At its heart was the question of lay investiture, that is the role played by the laity in the conferring of benefices with the cure of souls upon clerks in holy orders, and yet when settlement was reached with secular rulers across Europe, it was far from a papal victory. In fact, through recognition of the right of kings to be present at episcopal elections, and so effectively determine the appointment of bishops, and confirmation of their right to invest bishops with the regalia associated with their office, the outcome of the Contest in actuality saw no real diminution of royal authority over the episcopate in their domains, and what power they surrendered was predominantly symbolic.
So, what then did the Investiture Contest achieve for the Church? In short, very little beyond the recognition by kings of the difference between the spiritualities, which belonged to the Church, and the temporalities, which belonged to the feudal lord, of a benefice, and the recognition that kings could only invest a bishop with the regalia of his office. However, in England and Normandy, and those parts of the empire that constituted the hereditary lands of the Saliens, the popes still had to accept that bishops could be invested with their temporalities after election, at which the king could be present and which could take place in his chapter house, but before episcopal consecration, thus ensuring kings could in effect appoint to the episcopate and endow with diocesan estates bishops who had not yet been consecrated to the office by metropolitans and their suffragans. Thus, while the papacy had asserted its sole authority over consecration and ordination, something never actually challenged, the reaffirmed influence emperors and kings were to exercise over the appointment of bishops meant the episcopate of western Christendom continued to be tied to the rulers who controlled their appointme. Any victory of spiritual jurisdiction won by the papacy was pyrrhic when compared to the practical benefits accrued by secular rulers, and popes of necessity had to continue to negotiate with and recognise the rights of kings when consecrating to the episcopate.
In terms of papal control over the episcopate and their claims to practical authority the Contest was not a success for the popes, particularly as it came at the cost of schism from 1080 with the election of the imperial antipope Clement III, but it did accrue some benefits with regard to papal supremacy. What no-one could deny at its closure was that the popes had asserted their spiritual predominance across western Christendom, and while unable to assail the theocratic vision of kingship, they had established their sole right to order ordination and consecration. However, Gregory VII had clearly failed in his attempt to depose Henry IV, whose weaknesses before his submission at Canossa in 1076 were mainly due to the political situation in Germany, while he himself had been deposed by a synod of imperial bishops in 1080, resulting in the election of an antipope and papal schism. And as the empire showed, where most of the episcopate remained loyal to Henry IV and Henry V, and where those Gregorian bishops who cleaved to Rome were in areas whose territorial lords were in opposition to the emperor and king, it was, as was to be the case later, political realities which determined papal recognition not the spiritual worthiness of the rival popes. The kings were certainly not the losers of the Investiture Contest and the popes' victory was hollow at best, so the only losers were the bishops with regards to their autonomy who now found themselves more reliant upon secular rulers for their election and investiture with the temporalities, while at the same time seeing their spiritual authority and independence diminished by the increased assertion of papal authority and the popes' exercise of their plenitude of power over, rather than in conjunction with, their brother bishops.
What becomes clear is that the rise of papalism and the consequential decline of episcopalianism in the government of the Church, with the validity of synods dependent upon papal recognition in person or through legates, as well as the attack upon lay investiture, were not concerned primarily with theology but rather with ecclesiastical jurisdiction and authority. Gregory VII appears neither as archdeacon nor pope to have taken a prominent role in the condemnation of Berenger of Tours over his symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist, a role he left to theologians and to synods, but neither did he accept Berenger's questioning of the real presence despite this being claimed as a reason for his deposition by the German bishops in 1080 at Blixen, while the Gregorian popes did not overly concern themselves with the perennial argument about the validity of ordination of and consecration by unworthy priests, primarily simoniacs and nicolaitists. For this reason the Gregorian papacy played little part in the development of scholasticism, while the assertion of the jurisdictional and authorative rights of popes operated relatively independently of the development and codification of canon law: the popes were not theologians and neither were they lawyers. What the popes instead were determined to do was establish their universal episcopacy and assert that the plenitude of power they exercised by delegation of the Petrine Commission was not shared by their fellow bishops. Instead the spiritual authority of bishops was delegated to them by the pope to whom they were subordinate. The object with the bishops, as with the laity and investiture, was to impose papal primacy upon the whole Church visible, and Gregory's Dictatus Papae of 1075 was intended to further this, being concerned with ecclesiastical authority and not dogma.
A dilemma for the popes in their attempts to impose spiritual lordship over secular rulers, and indeed one for the student of this period, is that the bishop of Rome as well as being the premier ecclesiastic of the West was himself the temporal lord of the patrimony of St Peter and the papal estates therein across the Romagna, while for reasons of security he maintained a political interest in both the lands of the Lombard plain to the north and the southern lands recaptured from the Byzantine emperor and the Saracens by the Normans from the mid-eleventh century. It is too early to speak of a papal state in this period, rather there existed a collection of estates under papal feudal lordship from which the pope derived revenues and over which he exercised jurisdiction, but these meant that the pope himself acted as a temporal lord, while his interventions in neighbouring areas of Italy were driven as much by temporal concerns as spiritual ones. The accepted model of ecclesiastical lordship was that when popes required military assistance, they were to call upon the secular arm to provide it, and such had been the justification for the relationship between the papacy and the Carolingian and later the Ottonian emperors. Indeed, when the Salien German king Henry III descended upon Rome in 1046 to install his chosen pope and free him and his successors from the oppressions and threats of the noble families and populace of the city, it was justified in these terms - the emperor as the primary lord of the temporal realm was bringing his secular forces to the assistance of the senior spiritual lord of Christendom. The problem was that just as popes wanted to be free of the control of the Roman factions, so they wanted also to avoid subjection and subservience to the emperor, and this provided a strong reason for the conflict between the Gregorian papacy and the Salien emperors, and why Gregory VII when forced to flee Rome in 1084 in face of Henry IV's army turned to the Normans of the Sicilian kingdom for assistance. He was, in desperation, seeking to call the secular arm to his aid as his predecessors had, but, in this case, against the emperor, the traditional protector of the papacy. The result of this was that as temporal lords involved in high politics, not only in Italy, but also in Germany where they sought to support the noble opponents of the emperors, the popes were themselves acting as Italian princes no differently from their rivals. The irony was that as the popes attempted to justify their spiritual lordship, the means they used and the revenues they required from their estates to finance their campaigns involved them more and more in temporal affairs, paving the way for the emergence of the papal state in the thirteenth century and what has come to be known as papal monarchy. The popes, in effect, as the kings and emperors knew from experience, were discovering that regardless of abstract thought and Biblical precepts, it was impossible in practice to separate the two Gelasian swords of authority from one another. And so, right up until the mid-nineteenth century, the popes continued simultaneously to be both spiritual leader and temporal Italian prince.
What this book reveals in its examination not only of eleventh century reform and the interrelated role played by secular rulers, especially the emperors and German dukes, but also of the emergence of the reform papacy with its claim to universal primacy is the dominant role played by Gregory VII, first as the archdeacon Hildebrand, and then as aggressively idealistic pope. It was Gregory who tried to harness the ideas which lay behind reform not only to revive the spiritual form of the Church, but to do so in a way that would impose papal supremacy not only over the episcopate and priesthood, but also over temporal lords, thus for the first time making the Petrine Commission the sole ultimate authority for human government, so that all authority ultimately descended from the power given by Christ to St Peter, exercised by the pope as his vicar, through his power to 'loose and to bind' on earth as in heaven and the concomitant eschatological responsibility given to all priests for the soul of those within his cure. Gregorian reform was, as Gregory VII propounded it, revolutionary, demolishing all theocratic justifications for royal rulership that had developed since the conversion of Constantine, and placing spiritual lordship above the temporal, although, after Gregory's defeat in 1083-5 and then death, and following the schism resultant from the election of antipope Clement III in 1080, it is noticeable that his successors, while retaining his theological and ecclesiological precepts never pushed things as far as he was prepared to do, particularly after 1111 and the seizure of Paschal II by Henry V, when the ultimate manifestation of papal weakness against imperial force forced him into concessions that paved the way for the final settlement of the Concordat of Worms between his successor, Calixtus II, and the same emperor in 1122.
There is, therefore, a distinction to be made between reform, aimed at the spiritual improvement of the Church through the suppression of simony, nicolaitism, lay investiture and propriety churches, and the revolutionary jurisdictional doctrines pursued by the Gregorians and their assertion of both clerical superiority and papal supremacy based upon the pope's office as vicar of St Peter, the prince of the apostles to whom the keys of the kingdom had been uniquely committed by Christ, and thus superior to the episcopal authority granted to other patriarchs and metropolitans through their succession from the other apostles. However, while there was this distinction in intent between reformers, the outcome was, as Tellenbach partly accepts, the clericalisaton of the Church, and its increasingly identification less as the invisible body of all believers in communion with the Roman see and more as the corporate body of the priesthood endowed through ordination with the powers of consecration, the most important being that of transubstantiation in the celebration of the Mass ,and who were separated from and superior to all of the laity, including emperors and kings. As, Gregory VII asserted, even those in the lowest of clerical orders below the priesthood, such as exorcists, were of greater spiritual validity than even the emperor. And it was from this conception that the revolutionary ideas of Gregory VII and the Gregorians flowed, pouring ecclesiological and jurisdictional doctrines of papal supremacy into the waters of reform, and fermenting the oceans of debate between monist (divine authority descends solely through the pope as successor of St Peter) and dualist (authority is exercised by both popes and bishops and by temporal rulers according to its purpose) theories of authority that were to form the politico-religious tides that determined Christian discourse for the remainder of the Middle Ages, as Tellenbach delineates in his excellent history of this fascinating period.
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