The Investiture Controversy

In eleventh-century Europe a bishop was two things at once: the spiritual head of a diocese and the holder of substantial lands, revenues and jurisdiction. Kings and emperors appointed them accordingly, and invested them with the ring and the pastoral staff, the symbols of spiritual office. To a reforming party in the church, this was laymen giving away what was not theirs to give, and it stood behind everything else they wanted to correct: bishops appointed for political usefulness, offices bought and sold, and a clergy answerable to secular power.

Gregory VII pressed the point to its conclusion, prohibiting lay investiture and asserting in a famous set of propositions that the pope could depose emperors. Henry IV, whose government depended on appointing bishops, responded by declaring Gregory no true pope. Gregory excommunicated and deposed him, releasing his subjects from their oaths, which in a kingdom of restless magnates was a serious weapon.

The dispute ran for nearly fifty years and through several popes and rulers, with antipopes, armies and a sack of Rome along the way. It was settled at Worms in 1122 by dividing the question: the church would invest with ring and staff, and the ruler would invest with the temporal regalia, receiving homage for the lands. Similar compromises had already been reached in England and France.

In January 1077 Henry IV crossed the Alps in winter and stood outside the castle of Canossa, where Gregory VII was staying, for three days in penitential dress before being admitted and absolved. The scene became the standard image of secular power humbled by the church, and the German word for a humiliating climb-down still refers to it.

Read as politics it looks different. Henry's magnates had given him a deadline to have his excommunication lifted or lose the crown, and by presenting himself as a penitent he confronted the pope with a duty a priest cannot refuse. Gregory absolved him and lost his leverage; Henry returned to Germany, fought his opponents, and was excommunicated again three years later, at which point the sentence had lost its force. He installed an antipope and had himself crowned in Rome, and Gregory died in exile at Salerno.

The lasting outcome was structural rather than personal. Out of this struggle the Latin church emerged with its own law, its own courts, its own hierarchy of appeal terminating at Rome, and a claim to jurisdiction independent of any ruler. Historians of Western law have argued that this is where the distinction between spiritual and temporal authority as separate legal orders begins, and that a great deal of later European constitutional development follows from a quarrel about who hands a bishop his staff.