The clash between the Church and the Empire

From the time of Constantine I's conversion to Christianity in the 4th century, the question of the relationship between temporal and spiritual power was constant, causing a clash between the Church and the Empire. The disappearance of imperial power initially enabled the pope to assert his independence. However, from 962 onwards, the Holy Roman Emperor took control of the papal election and appointed the bishops of the Empire himself, affirming the pre-eminence of his power over that of the Church. However, such was the stranglehold of the laity on the clergy that the Church eventually reacted. The Gregorian reform began in the mid-11th century. In 1059, Pope Nicholas II assigned the election of the pope to the college of cardinals. Then, in 1075, Gregory VII affirmed in the dictatus papae, stating that he alone possessed universal power, superior to that of the rulers, and withdrew the appointment of bishops from them. This marked the start of a conflict between the Papacy and the Emperor, which historians have dubbed the "Investiture Dispute". The most famous episode was Henry IV's excommunication and his penance at Canossa to obtain papal pardon. At the end of this conflict, the Pope succeeded in freeing himself from imperial guardianship. In 1122, under the Concordat of Worms, the Emperor agreed to the free election of bishops, reserving the right to give prelates temporal investiture. This compromise marked the defeat of the Empire.

The question flared up once again during the reign of Frederick Barbarossa. It took a particularly violent turn under his reign and that of Frederick II. The Holy Roman Empire was weakened. However, the Papacy was no more successful in imposing its vision of a global theocracy.

The theocratic temptation
In the 12th century, with the Holy Roman Emperor no longer able to control papal elections (due to the Gregorian reform begun in the previous century), the Roman nobility tried to regain their former privileges. As a result, the various Roman factions clashed on the death of Pope Honorius II.

On the Empire side, the death of Henry V in 1125 marked the end of the Salian dynasty at the head of the Holy Roman Empire. The new emperor, Lothaire of Supplinburg, was a prince who had always been loyal to the Pope. The Pope called upon him to help fight the claims of Roger II of Sicily, who was threatening the Papacy's possessions.

On February 1, 1130, Innocent II was elected, but some of the cardinals elected an antipope, Cardinal Pierleoni, who took the name of Anacletus II. Threatened by Anaclet's schism, which lasted 8 years, Innocent II regained his power only with the support of France, England and the Emperor.

The Papacy soon interpreted two of Emperor Lothaire's actions, initially simple gestures of deference, as rites expressing the Empire's complete submission. In Liege in 1131, the emperor took the pope's horse by the bridle, and in 1133, he was presented with a ring signifying that he took Tuscany from the Holy See. In papal propaganda, Lothaire became the Holy Father's squire. In a fresco at the Lateran, he is shown humbly kneeling to receive the crown from Innocent II.

In 1139, Innocent II organized the second Lateran Council. The pope demonstrated his aspiration to rule the world and dispose of the imperial crown. The Council proclaimed: "Rome is at the head of the world". The theocratic doctrine continued to develop in Rome. Canonists continued to subordinate secular affairs to spiritual ones.

In Italy, Arnold of Brescia defended the idea of total poverty and wanted to force the Pope to renounce all his temporal powers. Although condemned for heresy in 1140, he joined a republican revolt that drove the pope and his cardinals out of Rome in 1145. Rome was plagued by endemic power struggles. Pope Eugene III had to resort to force, and thus to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. At Konstanz in 1153, the two men signed an agreement. In exchange for the Pope's reconquest of the Papal States, he agreed to crown Barbarossa emperor. Rome was recaptured in 1155. Barbarossa was crowned by Adrian IV the day after he entered the city, on June 18, 1155. But this exchange of courtesies did not conceal the latent tensions between the Papacy and the Empire. Moreover, the city of Rome remained unsafe. The Pope, who claimed dominium mundi, could not control his own capital.

The situation escalated when, in 1157, at the Diet of Besançon - the episcopal principality was then part of the Holy Roman Empire - the Pope's legate, Orlando Bandinelli, (the future Alexander III), declared that "Rome is so well disposed towards Frederick I that it would grant him even greater beneficia". The Latin word beneficia has two meanings: benefit or fief. The word is translated into German as Lehen, meaning fief. The legate was nearly slain for such an affront (in feudal society, such a phrase meant that the Emperor would be no more than a vassal of the Pope). This incident marked the rupture between the Papacy and Frederick Barbarossa, and thus the beginning of the violent phase in the struggle between the Church and the Empire.

In fact, the Pope found it difficult to impose his dominium mundi. In England, he was fiercely opposed by Henry II, who succeeded in maintaining his domination over the English Church. Within the Church, some clerics doubted the superiority of papal power over that of the princes.

The conflict between Frederick Barbarossa and the Pope
At this time, two ruling houses were at war in the Empire. The Guelphs, whose name derives from that of the Bavarian ducal family, while the Welf, supported the papacy. The Ghibellines supported the Emperor. Their name is an alteration of Waiblingen, the fiefdom from which the Hohenstaufens originated.

Frederick I wanted to restore imperial power. The revival of Roman law enabled him to revive the idea of the state and the superiority of the power of the temporal sovereign. Frederick Barbarossa was supported in his fight against the Holy See by his chancellor, Rainald of Dassel, who urged him to break with the papacy, and by German princes and prelates. Thanks to a bold interpretation of the Concordat of Worms, he succeeded in taking control of the German clergy. The Emperor asserted that he could intervene in episcopal elections when there was disagreement between the electors. What's more, he refused temporal investiture to any candidate who displeased him. He was thus able to impose his views in Augsburg in 1152, in Worms in 1153, and even on the Pope in Magdeburg in 1154. Bishops and abbots thus became "imperial officials" once again. The Worms Concordat, the balance of the struggle between the Papacy and the Empire, was in jeopardy.

The Emperor also asserted that it was up to the great men of the Empire to elect the sovereign chosen by God, thus excluding the role of the Pope. After settling his German problems, Frederick went to Italy in 1154. He held a Diet in Roncaglia, where he heard the complaints of the Italian cities against the excessive power of Milan. He punished Milan by destroying Tortona, his ally.

In 1159, Alexander III was elected pope by a narrow majority of the conclave.

An antipope, Victor IV, was immediately elected, supported by the emperor. Alexander III had to flee Italy and took refuge in France. Open conflict erupted when Frederick Barbarossa sought to impose the imperial tax on Italian cities, which they refused. In 1162, Milan was destroyed and its inhabitants dispersed. This provoked the alliance of a number of towns to form the Lombard League, supported by Alexander III. Frederick Barbarossa had a new antipope elected each time the previous one disappeared. From the Würzburg Diet of 1165 onwards, all bishops in the Holy Roman Empire owed obedience to the antipope. Alexander III excommunicated the Emperor.

In 1167, he seized and pillaged Rome. However, with the army decimated by plague, the emperor was forced to withdraw. At Legnano in 1176, he was defeated by the Italian cities. Frederick Barbarossa went to Venice in 1177, where he prostrated himself before the pope and renounced his involvement in the papal election. The papal excommunication against Barbarossa was lifted. The emperor was also obliged to accept service as the pope's squire. Alexander III extoled the benefits of cooperation between the two powers. The Emperor's military losses, the symbolic effect of the excommunication and the rebellion of the Italian cities, at least for the time being, defeated his claims to Italy.

In 1179, the Pope convened the Third Lateran Council to settle the problems linked to the schism. In order to avoid them, the pope was to be elected by a two-thirds majority.

As the Emperor was still in a position to agree to the Pope's appointment of the Prefect of Rome, Frederick Barbarossa took advantage of the situation to reinforce his control over the Kingdom of Italy. He concluded an agreement with the cities of Italy. The Emperor also refused to return Matilda's inheritance of Tuscany to the Holy See. Above all, he continued to appoint bishops and abbots in Germany, still flouting the original meaning of the Concordat of Worms.

In 1186, Barbarossa married his son to the heiress of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, Constance, daughter of William II of Sicily. The Papacy was thus threatened with geopolitical encirclement.

After Barbarossa's accidental death during the Third Crusade, his son Henry VI prolonged the conflict with the Papacy over the question of Sicilian inheritance. Indeed, on the death of William II, the Normans of Sicily chose Tancred, nephew of Constantius, as king, with the support of the Pope and not the daughter of William II. However, Tancred soon died. On Tancred's death in 1194, Henry VI finally seized Sicily and refused to swear vassalage to the Pope for his Norman possessions in Sicily. He also wished to integrate them into his empire, but died before he could realize his plans.

This series of events led to the formation of urban leagues in Italy, such as the Lombard League, usually supported by the pope, and struggles between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. After the death of Frederick II in 1250, the Holy Roman Empire entered a period of anarchy, the Great Interregnum from 1250 to 1273.

This period was characterized by the presence of a political doctrine held by many emperors, Caesaropapism, i.e., the combination of spiritual and temporal powers under the emperor, in this case the Emperor of the West. Although this theory of political power was also present during the investiture quarrel, it was especially during this period that it took center stage politically. In opposition to this, the papal power emphasized its interest in theocracy, which means that the pope should have both spiritual and temporal powers. Civil power was thus subjugated to religious power, making the Pope the most powerful figure in the Christian world. These two theories were antitheses, reflecting the fact that the relationship between popes and emperors was still diametrically opposed.

The conflict between Frederick II and the Pope
In 1198, Lothaire de Segni was elected Pope under the name of Innocent III. He supported the idea that the pope alone possessed full sovereignty (the auctoritas of the Romans). Princes, on the other hand, possessed potestas, the political power given to them directly by God. Rulers, therefore, could not escape papal authority, and neither could national churches. His doctrine was more flexible than the dictatus papae of the Gregorian reform. In fact, even though he believed that spiritual power took precedence over temporal power, Innocent III limited papal intervention in temporal matters to three cases: grave sins committed by rulers, the need to make a decision in an area where no other authority had jurisdiction, and the defense of ecclesiastical property.

The Pope attempted to re-establish his authority over Rome and his own states. He definitively liquidated what remained of the Roman republic by obtaining the resignation of the municipality and the dismissal of the officers appointed by the republican senate.

The Prefect, until then an agent of the emperor, became an official of the Holy See. These measures led to a revolt initiated by the nobility. It took the Pope around six years to regain control of the city. At the same time, Innocent III managed to get his hands on Countess Matilda's inheritance: the March of Ancona, Campania and the Duchy of Spoleto.

Innocent III also played on the rivalries between the Hohenstaufens, the house of the late emperor, and the Welfs. When Henry VI died, the German princes were divided over the name of his successor. The Welfs elected Otto of Brunswick, while the majority Hohenstaufen supporters elected the king's brother, Philip of Swabia. Innocent III took advantage of this internal division in the Empire to assert the superior rights of the papacy. In the decretal Per Venerabilem of 1202, he asserted that, in the event of a challenge to the imperial election, the final decision belonged to the pope. At first, he favored the Welf Otto IV, who, to gain papal support, had promised him total sovereignty over the Church states, plus the exarchate of Ravenna, the estates of Countess Matilda, the march of Ancona, the duchy of Spoleto and recognition of his sovereignty over Sicily. But as soon as his power was consolidated, Otto IV reneged on his promise and behaved like all previous emperors. Innocent III excommunicated Otto IV in 1210, and favored the rise to power of Frederick II, his ward and Barbarossa's grandson. The Pope repeatedly intervened in the choice of emperors. Frederick II was crowned king at Aachen in 1215, after having given the Pope every guarantee that the rights of the Church would be upheld and that the German and Sicilian kingdoms would be separated.

By traveling to Germany in 1212 to assert his rights, Frederick II gave the princes greater freedom of action. Through two acts - the Statutum in favorem principum for temporal princes and the Confoederatio cum principibus ecclesiasticis for ecclesiastics - Frederick II guaranteed them important rights to secure their support. He wanted his son Henry to be elected and recognized as his successor. The privileges granted form the legal principles on which the princes could build their power autonomously. These privileges also marked the beginning of the formation of states on the scale of imperial territories in the latter part of the Middle Ages. It initiated a multi-secular movement that would contribute to the weakening of imperial power in favor of the prince-electors, and which was enshrined in the Golden Bull of 1356. Under the Statutum in favorem principum, the princes were granted the right to mint coins and establish customs. Frederick II also granted princes the right to legislate. Indeed, in their struggle for power at each elective process and in order to neutralize the Pope's recurrent interventions, the emperors had no choice but to ally themselves with the various prince-electors by offering them ever greater and more numerous privileges, to the detriment of the coherence of central power (a coherence already undermined by the investiture quarrel, which weakened the administrative framework available to the emperors).

Innocent III forged the weapon of the "political crusades", which would be taken up by his successors. He was the first to express the right to "exposure of prey", i.e. the Pope's right to authorize Catholics to seize the lands of those who failed to repress heresy. His successors would use it to subdue the emperors. He used the remainder of the decime paid by the French clergy for the Albigensian Crusade to wage war against Frederick II.

The latest episode in the struggle between the Church and the Empire pitted Frederick II against Popes Gregory IX and Innocent IV. Heir to the Norman state of Sicily, which he inherited from his mother, he reorganized it into a modern, centralized state with the aim of conquering the whole of Italy. He placed his nine-year-old son on the German throne. Conflict was inevitable. The new pope, Gregory IX (1227-1241), determined to bring the Hohenstaufens under papal authority, excommunicated Frederick II in 1227, because he had not left in time for the promised crusade.

When Frederick II finally left for the East, the Pope forbade the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem to help the Emperor in his reconquest of the Holy Land, forcing the latter to negotiate an agreement with the Sultan Al-Kamil, without fighting. This led to the signing of the Treaty of Jaffa in February 1229, under which Frederick II took possession of the city and kingdom of Jerusalem. This only served to exacerbate the fury of Pope Gregory IX, who launched an army against the emperor, financed by a tax on the income of the clergy and the remainders of the sums collected for the Albigensian crusade. This attack first succeeded in overcoming resistance at Monte Cassin, then moved rapidly upwards into Apulia. It was finally forced to retreat in June.

With the army raised by the Pope defeated, in 1230 the Emperor obtained a first lifting of the excommunication in exchange for material compensation.

As soon as he was absolved, Frederick waged a fierce battle against the Pope. In the Liber augustalis, also known as the Constitutions of Melfi, his jurists developed the idea that the ruler was the absolute master of his kingdom, and denounced the Pope's claim to rule the world. The emperor had to fight off a new revolt by Lombard cities, directed underhand by the pope. This was compounded by the revolt of the German princes led by Henry, the son the emperor had placed at the head of Germany. The Emperor then placed another son, Conrad, at the head of Germany, and had him crowned King of the Romans in 1237. Frederick II triumphed over the Lombard League on November 27, 1237, at Cortenuova. Confident of his strength, he then offended the Pope, claiming part of the Lombard cities and writing to the Romans to remind them of their former greatness under the Roman Empire. In 1239, he wanted to place his bastard son, Enzio, at the head of Sardinia. Conflict resumed between the Emperor and the Pope.

Frederick II was excommunicated a second time in 1239. The Pope led a veritable crusade. He offered soldiers who fought for him the same privileges as those who reached the Holy Land. Hungarians who had taken the crusade vow were even invited to commute it into participation in the war against Frederick II. The Pope denounced him as the Antichrist. Opposition reached its peak.

From March 1240, the Emperor began invading the Papal States (i.e. Lazio, Umbria and the Marches). He even marched on Rome in 1241 to prevent a council from being held to approve a new excommunication requested by Pope Gregory IX. But Pope Gregory IX died on August 22, 1241, before the council could be held, and the Emperor temporarily put an end to the siege of Rome, but still occupied the Papal States. The new Pope Innocent IV resumed the struggle. He called on the Germans and Italians to crusade against the Emperor, but was forced to take refuge in Lyon, where he convened a council in 1245. There, he deposed his adversary and released his subjects from their oath of loyalty. In this way, the Pope positioned himself as the master of both temporal and spiritual power, since he showed he could deprive a sovereign of his political power. The Council of Lyon is the culmination of papal theocracy.

The battle continued until Frederick II's death in 1250, turning Italy into a battlefield between Guelphs and Ghibellines. Indeed, the emperor did not consider himself defeated: despite plots and the Parma revolt, he was on the verge of consolidating his authority in northern Italy when he died in Apulia in 1250.

Frederick II's death marked the victory of the papacy and the apogee of the Church. Innocent IV, eager to put an end to the Hohenstaufens, excommunicated Frederick II's son, Conrad IV, and preached a crusade against him. Both men died in 1254. After Conrad IV's death, the Empire remained without a ruler until 1273. This was the Great Interregnum. The Great Interregnum enabled the German princes and cities to become virtually independent of the central power, which had completely disappeared, and to organize among themselves. In the 14th century, the emperors, and in particular Charles IV, ratified this state of affairs (Golden Bull of 1356). (Source: Encyclopædia Universalis).

But the Papacy did not enjoy its victory for long. It had to contend with the rising power of the national monarchies, and was in turn brought down by the King of France, Philip the Fair, after the attack on Anagni in 1303.