ambition of the spiritual and the secular princes the pope had an immensely powerful engine of offence against the emperor, and without the slightest scruple this was turned to the best advantage.
When this struggle began it may be said in general that Henry was supported by the cities and the lower classes, while Rudolph relied upon the princes and the opponents of a united Germany; or, to make another division, Henry’s strength lay in the duchies of Franconia and Bavaria, Henry IV. and the anti-kings. Rudolph’s in Swabia and Saxony. In the Rhineland and in southern Germany the cities had been steadily growing in wealth and power, and they could not fail to realize that they had more to fear from the princes than from the crown. Hence when Henry returned to Germany in 1078 Worms, Spires and many other places opened their gates to him and contributed freely to his cause; nevertheless his troops were beaten in three encounters and Pope Gregory thundered anew against him in March 1080. However, the fortune of war soon turned, and in October 1080 Rudolph of Swabia was defeated and slain. Henry then carried the war into Italy; in 1084 he was crowned emperor in Rome by Wibert, archbishop of Ravenna, whom, as Clement III., he had set up as an anti-pope, and in 1085 Gregory died an exile from Rome. Meanwhile in Germany Henry’s opponents had chosen Hermann, count of Luxemburg, king in succession to Rudolph of Swabia. Hermann, however, was not very successful, and when Henry returned to Germany in 1084 he found that his most doughty opponent, Otto of Nordheim, was dead, and that the anti-king had few friends outside Saxony. This duchy was soon reduced to obedience and was treated with consideration, and when the third anti-king, Egbert, margrave of Meissen, was murdered in 1090 there would have been peace if Germany had followed her own impulses.
In the Papacy, however, Henry had an implacable foe; and again and again when he seemed on the point of a complete triumph the smouldering embers of revolt were kindled once more into flame. In Italy his son, Conrad, was stirred up against him and in 1093 was crowned king Henry and the Papacy. at Monza; then ten years later, when Germany was more peaceful than it had been for years and when the emperor’s authority was generally acknowledged, his second son, Henry, afterwards the emperor Henry V., was induced to head a dangerous rebellion. The Saxons and the Thuringians were soon in arms, and they were joined by those warlike spirits of Germany to whom an age of peace brought no glory and an age of prosperity brought no gain. After some desultory fighting Henry IV. was taken prisoner and compelled to abdicate; he had, however, escaped and had renewed the contest when he died in August 1106.
During this reign the first crusade took place, and the German king suffered severely from the pious zeal which it expressed and intensified. The movement was not in the end favourable to papal supremacy, but the early crusaders, and those who sympathized with them, regarded the The First Crusade. enemies of the pope as the enemies of religion.
The early years of Henry V.’s reign were spent in campaigns in Flanders, Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, but the new king was soon reminded that the dispute over investitures was unsettled. Pope Paschal II. did not doubt, now that Henry IV. was dead, that he would speedily Henry V. in Germany. triumph; but he was soon undeceived. Henry V., who with unconscious irony had promised to treat the pope as a father, continued, like his predecessors, to invest prelates with the ring and the staff, and met the expostulations of Paschal by declaring that he would not surrender a right which had belonged to all former kings. Lengthened negotiations took place but they led to no satisfactory result, while the king’s enemies in Germany, taking advantage of the deadlock, showed signs of revolt. One of the most ardent of these enemies was Lothair of Supplinburg, whom Henry himself had made duke of Saxony upon the extinction of the Billung family in 1106. Lothair was humbled in 1112, but he took advantage of the emperor’s difficulties to rise again and again, the twin pillars of his strength being the Saxon hatred of the Franconian emperors and an informal alliance with the papal see. Henry’s chief friends were his nephews, the two Hohenstaufen princes, Frederick and Conrad, to whose father Frederick the emperor Henry IV. had given the duchy of Swabia when its duke Rudolph became his rival. The younger Frederick succeeded to this duchy in 1105, while ten years later Conrad was made duke of Franconia, a country which for nearly a century had been under the immediate government of the crown. The two brothers were enthusiastic imperialists, and with persistent courage they upheld the cause of their sovereign during his two absences in Italy.
At last, in September 1122, the investiture question was
settled by the concordat of Worms. By this compromise,
which exhaustion forced upon both parties, the right
of electing prelates was granted to the clergy, and
the emperor surrendered the privilege of investing
The concordat
of Worms.
them with the ring and the staff. On the other hand
it was arranged that these elections should take place in the
presence of the emperor or his representative, and that he should
invest the new prelate with the sceptre, thus signifying that
the bishop, or abbot, held his temporal fiefs from him and not
from the pope. In Germany the victory remained with the
emperor, but it was by no means decisive. The Papacy was far
from realizing Hildebrand’s great schemes; yet in regard to the
question in dispute it gained solid advantage, and its general
authority was incomparably more important than it had been
half a century before. During this period it had waged war upon
the emperor himself. Instead of acknowledging its inferiority as
in former times it had claimed to be the higher power; it had
even attempted to dispose of the imperial crown as if the Empire
were a papal fief; and it had found out that it could at any
time tamper, and perhaps paralyse, the imperial authority by
exciting internal strife in Germany. Having thus settled this
momentous dispute Henry spent his later years in restoring
order in Germany, and in planning to assist his father-in-law,
Henry I. of England, in France. During this reign under the
lead of Otto, bishop of Bamberg (c. 1063–1139), Pomerania
began to come under the influence of Germany and of
Christianity.
The Franconian dynasty died out with Henry V. in May 1125, and after a protracted contest Lothair, duke of Saxony, the candidate of the clergy, was chosen in the following August to succeed him. The new king’s first enterprise was a disastrous campaign in Bohemia, but The reign of Lothair the Saxon. before this occurrence he had aroused the enmity of the Hohenstaufen princes by demanding that they should surrender certain lands which had formerly been the property of the crown. Lothair’s rebuff in Bohemia stiffened the backs of Frederick and Conrad, and in order to contend with them the king secured a powerful ally by marrying his daughter Gertrude to Henry the Proud, a grandson of Welf, whom Henry IV. had made duke of Bavaria, a duchy to which Henry himself had succeeded in 1126. Henry was perhaps the most powerful of the king’s subjects, nevertheless the dukes of Swabia and Franconia withstood him, and a long war desolated South Germany. This was ended by the submission of Frederick in 1134 and of Conrad in the following year. Lothair’s position, which before 1130 was very weak, had gradually become stronger. He had put down the disorder in Bavaria, in Saxony and in Lorraine; a diet held at Magdeburg in 1135 was attended by representatives from the vassal states of Denmark, Hungary, Bohemia and Poland; and in 1136, when he visited Italy for the second time, Germany was in a very peaceful condition. In June 1133 during the king’s first visit to Italy he had received from Pope Innocent II. the imperial crown and also the investiture of the extensive territories left by Matilda, marchioness of Tuscany; and at this time the pope seems to have claimed the emperor as his vassal, a statement to this effect (post homo fit papae, sumit quo dante coronam) being inscribed in the audience hall of the Lateran at Rome.
