chapter 14 Communicating Papal Primacy: the Impact of Gregory VII’s Ideas (11th–13th Century)

For a long time the papacy and its role in church and politics have attracted much attention from medievalists. There are many reasons for this extraordi- nary interest, which has been especially focused on the period from the 11th to 13th century. This epoch, beginning with the “Gregorian revolution”1 and lead- ing to dominium mundi of the popes, (“päpstliche Weltherrschaft” as German scholars like Haller, Hampe and many others used to say2 – mostly with a criti- cal undertone), was indeed characterized by papal attempts to establish hiero- cratic rule.3 In this period popes tried to subordinate and dominate the secular powers by insisting on their supreme position in the church and world. The slogan “papa est verus imperator”, which expressed this claim of primacy, is still well known today.4 It is impossible and not my intention to give an overview of the many argu- ments used in the controversy over this papal claim. And I cannot so much as mention all the conflicts which arose because of this claim, not only but especially between popes and German kings and emperors in this period. Everybody knows that most of the emperors in these centuries were excom- municated once or several times. This was done mostly with the argument that they had been disobedient or, more precisely, been stubbornly disobedi- ent to papal commands. This claim to obedience was an integral part of papal attempts to achieve primacy in the church and world.5 In all the scholarly discussions concerned with understanding these com- plex developments the causative role of Pope Gregory VII has been undis- puted. His new claims of papal primacy, briefly summarized in the Dictatus Papae, but extensively explained and distributed in his letters and in the work of his many collaborators, created a new and breath-taking model of papal

1 Cf. Berman, Law and Revolution. The Formation of Western Legal Tradition. 2 Cf. Haller, Das Papsttum. Idee und Wirklichkeit; Hampe, Das Hochmittelalter. 3 On the limitations of the hierocratic character of papal rule in this period cf. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII., p. 576; in general cf. Morris, The Papal Monarchy; Robinson, The Papacy 1073–1198. 4 Cf. Fuhrmann, “Der wahre Kaiser ist der Papst”. Von der irdischen Gewalt im Mittelalter, pp. 99–121. 5 Cf. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII., p. 555ff.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004415317_015 190 chapter 14 self-understanding and put forward its normative basis in holy texts.6 It is worth noting that, with the exception of the Dictatus Papae, Pope Gregory tried very hard to lay out the evidence for his claims by quoting references from holy texts, especially from the Bible. These quotations are a key to his interpretation of the Bible and give a vivid impression of how he legitimized his claim to rule the church and world. In the scholarly world, the lasting impact of these Gregorian ideas is much more contested than its existence. The frequent statements that his ideas and claims did not survive very long are mostly justified with one argument: That the Gregorian ideas did not enter to a significant extent into sources of canon law written in the following decades and centuries.7 This was taken as evidence that these ideas did not have a lasting effect. In the following I will concentrate on this point: How far did Gregory’s new ideas and arguments influence or even dominate the following centuries of papal history? Is it justified to characterize the twelfth and thirteenth century – especially in respect of the relationships between the church and world – as times in which the popes tried to continue on the path Gregory had indicat- ed before or were his successors modifying and softening his extreme ideas and claims? To make this undertaking manageable in one chapter I will again focus on one field: how the popes succeeding Gregory shaped their relation to German kings and emperors. Did they walk in his footsteps or were they open to compromise? For this purpose I will describe first how Gregory defined his relation to kings and emperors, considering in particular the normative basis of his positions. Doing this we have to take into account that the starting point to the re- thinking of the relation between the highest powers in the world and church – emperorship and papacy – is the intervention of Emperor Henry III at Sutri in 1046. Here Henry in his function as defensor ecclesiae and patricius Romanorum presided over a synod and decided which of several competing candidates should occupy the cathedra Petri.8 It was subsequently the emper- or who determined the election of popes, just as he had long done with the election of bishops in his realm. The famous decretum of papal election from 1059 was already directed against this practice9, and it marked only the tip of the iceberg: In this period, the Roman church made many efforts to legitimize

6 Cf. Althoff, ‘Selig sind, die Verfolgung ausüben’, esp. p. 39ff. 7 Cf. Fuhrmann, Papst Gregor VII. und das Kirchenrecht; esp. p. 93ff. 8 Cf. Anton, Die Synode von Sutri; Engelberg, Heinrich III. und die Synoden von Sutri und Rom. 9 Cf. Jasper, Das Papstwahldekret von 1059; Cowdrey, Gregory VII., p. 44ff.