Investiture Controversy

Background

Investiture refers to installing a cleric in an office and handing over the insignia that signify that office. Medieval bishops and abbots were both church leaders and lords who governed extensive lands. For this reason, emperors and kings placed their own vassals in these positions and invested them personally, presenting them with the ring and the staff (crosier). This practice of secular rulers appointing clergy to church offices is known as lay investiture.

This practice was blamed for the spread of simony, the buying and selling of church offices, as well as of clerical marriage and concubinage. A church reform movement arose, centered on the Abbey of Cluny, which was founded in the tenth century. By the mid-eleventh century, the papacy itself had taken the lead in reform. In 1059 Pope Nicholas II decreed that popes would be elected by the cardinals, seeking to free papal elections from the influence of the emperor and the Roman nobility. The East–West Schism (1054), which divided the Western and Eastern churches, also occurred during this period.

Course of Events

• 1073: Hildebrand, a leader of the reform party, became Pope Gregory VII.
• 1075: Gregory VII prohibited lay investiture. Around the same time, the Dictatus Papae, a statement of papal powers, was drawn up; it included the claim that the pope may depose emperors.
• 1076: Henry IV, King of Germany, convened an assembly at Worms and declared the pope deposed. Gregory VII responded by excommunicating Henry IV (expelling him from the communion of the Church). As the German princes turned against the king, Henry IV found himself in a desperate position.
• January 1077: Henry IV went to the pope at the castle of Canossa in northern Italy and did penance, and the pope lifted the excommunication. The king is said to have stood barefoot in the snow for three days begging forgiveness, and the episode is commonly called the "Humiliation of Canossa."
• 1080–1085: The pope excommunicated Henry IV a second time. Henry IV set up Clement III as antipope (a rival pope set up in opposition to the canonically elected pope). In 1084 he captured Rome and was crowned emperor by Clement. Gregory VII left Rome and died at Salerno in 1085.
• 1122: Pope Callixtus II and Emperor Henry V concluded the Concordat of Worms. Clergy were to be elected according to canon law, and the spiritual authority symbolized by the ring and staff was to be conferred by the Church. The emperor would confer only the temporal authority symbolized by the scepter, that is, the lands and the rights attached to them. The concordat was approved by the First Lateran Council in 1123.

Similar conflicts occurred in England and France. In England, a compromise is reported to have been reached around 1107 that separated spiritual investiture from the oath of temporal fealty.

Outcome and Influence

Through this struggle, the principle of distinguishing the spiritual from the temporal authority of church offices became established. Papal power grew considerably within the Western Church, and canon law and the organization of the papal curia were also systematized. Imperial power, by contrast, weakened, and in the German lands the power of the princes increased.

Assessment

Within the Catholic Church, this series of reforms is commonly called the "Gregorian Reform." Many view it as having corrected simony and enabled the Church to become independent of secular power.

Protestant assessments are divided. On the one hand, some view favorably the fact that church offices were freed from the control of secular power. On the other, some hold that the papal power strengthened at this time laid the foundation for the papacy-centered system later criticized during the Reformation. In his 1520 treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Martin Luther criticized the claim that the pope stands above secular authority.

Some historians regard this struggle as one of the starting points of the Western tendency to view church and state as distinct spheres. For this reason it is frequently cited in discussions of the relationship between church and politics. It is also treated as a major event of medieval church history in the church history curricula of Korean Protestant seminaries.