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The Concordat of Worms was an agreement between the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire which regulated the procedure for the appointment of bishops and abbots in the Empire. Signed on 23 September 1122 in the German city of Worms by Pope Callixtus II and Emperor Henry V, the agreement set an end to the Investiture Controversy, a conflict between state and church over the right to appoint religious office holders that had begun in the middle of the 11th century.

By signing the concordat, Henry renounced his right to invest bishops and abbots with ring and crosier, and opened ecclesiastical appointments in his realm to canonical elections. Callixtus, in turn, agreed to the presence of the emperor or his officials at the elections and granted the emperor the right to intervene in the case of disputed outcomes. The emperor was also allowed to perform a separate ceremony in which he would invest bishops and abbots with a sceptre, representing the imperial lands associated with their episcopal see.

Background
During the middle of the 11th century, a reformist movement within the Christian Church sought to reassert the rights of the Holy See at the expense of the European monarchs. Having been elected in 1073, the reformist Pope Gregory VII proclaimed several edicts aimed at strengthening the authority of the papacy, some of which are formulated in the Dictatus papae of 1075. Gregory's edicts postulated that secular rulers were answerable to the pope and forbade them to make appointments to clerical offices (a process known as investiture). The pope's doctrines were vehemently rejected by Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, who habitually invested the bishops and abbots of his realm. The ensuing conflict between the Empire and the papacy is known as the Investiture Controversy. The dispute continued after the death of Gregory VII in 1084 and the abdication of Henry IV in 1105.

Even though Henry's son and successor, Henry V, looked towards reconciliation with the reformist movement, no lasting compromise was achieved in the first 16 years of his reign. In 1111, Henry V had brokered an agreement with Pope Paschal II at Sutri, whereby he would abstain from investing clergy in his realm in exchange for the restoration of church property that had originally belonged to the Empire. The Sutri agreement, Henry hoped, would convince Paschal to assent to Henry's official coronation as emperor. However, the agreement failed to be implemented, leading Henry to imprison the pope. After two months of captivity, Paschal vowed to grant the coronation and to accept the emperor's role in investiture ceremonies. He also agreed never to excommunicate Henry. Seeing that these concession had been won by force, ecclesiastical opposition to the Empire continued. The following year, Paschal reneged on his promises.

Mouzon
In January 1118, Paschal died and was succeeded by Gelasius II who, in turn, died in January 1119. His successor, the Burgundian Callixtus II, reached out to the emperor to resume negotiations with the aim of settling the dispute between the church and the Empire. In the autumn of 1119, two papal emissaries, William of Champeaux and Pons of Cluny, met Henry at Strasbourg, where the emperor agreed in principle to abandon the secular investiture ceremony that involved giving new bishops and abbots a ring and a crosier. The two parties scheduled a final summit between Henry and Callixtus at Mouzon, but the meeting ended abruptly after the emperor refused to accept a short-notice change in the Callixtus's demands. The church leaders, who were deliberating their position at a council in Reims, reacted by excommunicating Henry. However, they failed to endorse the pope's insistence on the complete abandonment of secular investiture. The negotiations ended in failure.

Worms
After the failure of the Mouzon negotiations, the majority of the clergy became willing to compromise in order to settle the dispute. The same sentiment prevailed in much of the German nobility. In 1121, pressured by a faction of nobles from the Lower Rhine and Duchy of Saxony under the leadership of the archbishop Adalbert of Mainz, Henry agreed to submit to make peace with the pope. In the summer of 1122, a synod was convened in Mainz, at which imperial emissaries concluded the terms of their agreement with representatives of the church; the emperor awaited the outcome in the nearby city of Worms.

On 23 September 1122, papal and imperial delegates signed a series of documents outside the walls of Worms. Henry renounced his right to invest bishops and abbots with ring and crosier, and opened ecclesiastical appointments in his realm to canonical elections. Callixtus agreed to the presence of the emperor or his officials at the elections and granted the emperor the right to intervene in the case of disputed outcomes. The emperor was also allowed to perform a separate ceremony in which he would invest bishops and abbots with a sceptre, representing the imperial lands associated with their episcopal see. The concordat was ratified at the First Council of the Lateran and its original charter is preserved at the Vatican Apostolic Archive.

Reception
The contemporary English historian William of Malmesbury praised the Concordat for curtailing what he perceived as the emperor's overreach. However, he regards the final settlement not a as defeat of the Empire at the hands of the church, but rather as a reconciliatory effort by the two powers. The reformist party within the church took a similar view, criticising the Concordat for failing to remove all secular influence on the church. For this reason, a group of followers of Paschal II unsuccessfully attempted to prevent the agreement's ratification at the Lateran Council.

The historian Uta-Renate Blumenthal writes that, despite its shortcomings, the Concordat freed "[the church and the Empire] from antiquated concepts with their increasingly anachronistic restrictions". According to the historian William Chester Jordan, the Concordat was "of enormous significance" because it demonstrated that the emperor, in spite of his great secular power, did not have any religious authority.