The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  1080 Gregory renews Henry’s excommunication (March). A German Church synod declares the pope to be deposed and elects Guibert, archbishop of Ravenna, to the papacy as Clement III (June).

  1081 Henry embarks on military hostilities in Italy.

  1084 Rome surrenders to Henry’s army (March). Gregory takes refuge in the Castel San’ Angelo. Clement III crowns Henry emperor (March 31). Robert Guiscard leads an army to Rome, and Gregory is freed. Henry withdraws from Rome.

  1085 Gregory VII dies.

  1104 Henry IV abdicates.

  1122 Concordat of Worms: Henry V renounces rights of investiture.

  * * *

  HENRY’S ACT OF PENANCE

  In order to lift the excommunication placed upon him Henry needed to perform an act of penance. His continued competence as a ruler was now in doubt, but his decision to perform as a penitent in Canossa rather than wait for Gregory’s arrival in Augsburg showed immense flair. Henry was going through the motions while at the same time consolidating his power in a region of northern Italy sympathetic to him. He also had with him the army he had raised in order to oppose the pro-papal Tribur agreement. From 25th to 27th January 1077 the German king stood outside the gates of Canossa’s castle in penitential mode, asking to be admitted and begging that the sentence of his excommunication be rescinded. His wish to be admitted was granted, and the sentence of excommunication was duly lifted on certain conditions—which Henry violated soon afterward. Elements of the German aristocratic opposition now seized their moment. Judging Henry to be fatally weakened, in March 1077 the nobility of Saxony, Thuringia and Bavaria elected Rudolf of Rheinfelden to be king of the Germans. Rudolf declared his obedience to the papacy and promised to respect the rights of individual German princes. Henry would eventually suppress the revolt in 1080, and in March of that year the pope renewed the sentence of his excommunication. Popular sentiment and German national feelings were now going Henry’s way and, after Rudolf’s death from injuries sustained at the Battle of Elster near Leipzig on October 14, 1080, support for the rebellion faded away. Henry, moreover, now had a very powerful supporter in Frederick I von Staufen, whom he had appointed to be the new duke of Swabia.

  MONARCHY VERSUS PAPACY

  The synod of the higher German clergy convened by Henry at Bamberg in June 1080 declared Gregory deposed as pope, and elected the archbishop of Ravenna in his stead. An emboldened Henry returned to Italy, where he built up his support network by granting privileges to many cities in the north. War then broke out with Matilda’s army in Tuscany, and in the course of 1081–82 Henry’s forces attacked Rome in three separate offensives. By the end of 1082 the Roman populace had made their own peace treaty: it stated that Gregory and Henry’s quarrel should be resolved by a special synod and, if that failed, another pope would need to be elected. At this point the pope took refuge in the Castel San’ Angelo and Henry, aided by reinforcements from the Byzantine army, took the city in March 1084. The Romans then made their own declaration of Gregory’s deposition and Ravenna’s archbishop, now confirmed by them in office as Clement III, crowned Henry as Holy Roman Emperor on March 31, 1084.

  BELOW Canossa Castle, in northern Italy, where Pope Gregory VII received Henry IV in 1077.

  Gregory seemed encircled but he was rescued by the intervention of Robert Guiscard who saw an opportunity to attack his Greek enemies in Rome. Guiscard’s army forced Henry to withdraw from Rome and Gregory was freed. The pope died the following year in Salerno, still urging the whole of Christendom to campaign against the German king-emperor. Gregory’s great cause did not die with him. In March 1088 Otto of Ostia was elected to the papacy by legitimate means, and as Victor II he pursued thoroughly Gregorian policies. He excommunicated Henry, who had now returned to Germany, as well as the antipope Clement, and set about creating a formidable anti-imperial coalition consisting of the Normans, the Rus of Kiev and the cities of the Lombard north of Italy. Henry’s retaliatory expedition marched across the Alps and was defeated in 1092 by the allied Lombard communes, who took advantage of the ambitions of Henry’s son Conrad and crowned him king of Italy at Monza in 1093. Henry was therefore forced to retreat to his German lands where by now his power was securely consolidated, and he therefore designated his younger son, the future Henry V, to be his heir in place of the rebel Conrad.

  Pope Paschal II, elected in 1099, pursued his predecessors’ policies and upheld Henry’s excommunication, although the emperor’s promise to go on crusade showed a readiness to conciliate. However, compromise became impossible once his son Henry rebelled in 1104, stating that he could owe no allegiance to an excommunicated father and emperor. Saxony and Thuringia, those chronic centers of rebellion, revolted against Henry. At a diet held in Mainz in December 1104 he was forced to resign his crown and was imprisoned, but Henry escaped from captivity and a final drama now unfolded. He joined the army formed in 1106 to oppose Henry V and Pope Paschal, and led that force to its victory on March 2 before dying a few days afterward. Henry V would choose one more antipope, despite his support for the Gregorian position, but in 1122 at the Concordat of Worms he renounced his rights of investiture and was therefore admitted back to the Roman communion. The agreement meant that Henry could now be recognized by the papacy as a legitimate emperor, but the longer-term effects of the contest were catastrophic. Although the Staufen emperors revived the imperial ambition to consolidate Germany’s territories, unification would not be finally achieved until 1871.

  * * *

  THE SALIAN DYNASTY 1024–1125

  CONRAD II

  (c.990–1039)

  r. 1024–39

  HENRY III

  (1017–56)

  r. 1039–56

  HENRY IV

  (1050–1106)

  r. 1056–1106

  HENRY V

  (1086–1125)

  r. 1106–25

  * * *

  WIDER EUROPEAN IMPLICATIONS

  The universality of the claims made by Gregory for the Holy See’s authority had their own implications for the English and French monarchies. Those abbots and bishops appointed by William the Conqueror, and by his successor Henry I, were loyal to the Crown and resistant to papal control on the terms set out by Gregory and his circle. There were heated exchanges between papal courts and English courts, but Gregory’s concentration on the German dimension limited his ability to act against Henry I, and the terms of the Concordat of London (1107) favored the English monarchy. Henry gave up his right to invest bishops and abbots, and he therefore no longer appointed them. But he also required that they should swear homage to him in recognition of their status as feudal vassals with regard to the land that they held as bishops. So far as these territories were concerned, England’s bishops were treated no differently from the secular lords who went through the same ceremony of commendatio or acknowledgment of loyalty. In practice, therefore, the investiture contest greatly strengthened the position of English monarchs, and their chanceries became increasingly staffed by secular scholars who could be rewarded with bishoprics and abbeys.

  LEFT Robert Guiscard frees Pope Gregory VII from the Castel San’ Angelo in Rome, where he had been besieged by Henry IV and the antipope Clement III in March 1084 (Codex Jenensis Bose 1157).

  Philip I of France was equally high-handed in relation to the Church, and his devotion to simony meant that the threat of excommunication hung over him in the mid-1070s. Here again, though, it was the gravity of the situation in Germany that saved Philip from papal condemnation. The Normans in Italy were perhaps the most perfidious of all Gregory’s allies. Previous popes had made substantial concessions to them and had hoped thereby to limit the Normans’ advance into central Italy as well as to gain some military protection. Robert Guiscard abandoned Gregory’s cause at the moment of Henry IV’s advance toward Rome, and when the city was captured the outraged local population dispatched Gregory, Robert’s ally, to his exile in Salerno.

  The investiture controversy’s effe
cts were both destructive and creative, with spiritual power and lay authority becoming more sharply defined than in the past. Gregory transformed papal government: the curia became the central administrative machine running an international organization, and the papal legist emerged to become a key figure in the history of the medieval papacy. Gregory’s trans-European awareness meant that he was inevitably concerned about the fate of the Greek Church, and the deepening split between Latin West and Greek East troubled him greatly. His alarm about the fate of Greek Christians who were coming under Arab and Turkish attack in Palestine and Syria led him to conceive of a military expedition aimed at retaking the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He is therefore one of the intellectual ancestors of the crusading ideal. Germany was broken by the contest and lapsed into a collection of small states. As the power of the monarchy dwindled so the rights of local lords grew, with the result that more peasants were turned into serfs. Local taxes and levies bore heavily on the population, while the Crown’s revenues dwindled. Justice became localized as well, since local courts reflected the regional power patterns and could evade regal control. This German model was replicated in northern Italy since here, too, the imperial and royal power dwindled away and was replaced by local lordship. The scene was set for the Staufer dynasty, the family that attempted to resolve these difficulties by subsuming them within a truly imperial and dynastic dimension.

  GOSLAR AND THE SALIAN DYNASTY

  The Romanesque structure of the imperial palace at Goslar in Saxony was built in the 1040s for Henry III and is an enduring monument to Salian dynastic ambition.

  Goslar became a major center of government under Conrad II, and its wealth, derived from local mineral resources, was central to his family’s political ambitions. The silver deposits of the Harz Mountains lay nearby, and Goslar itself is situated at the foot of the Rammelsberg Mountain, where mining operations yielded one of Europe’s major supplies of copper ore during the Middle Ages. Local riches turned Goslar into a “Rome of the north” with 47 churches, private chapels and monasteries being established there from the 11th century onward. The representative diets of the Holy Roman Empire were frequently convened in the city, and although no less than 62 imperial palaces are recorded as having existed, it was the kaiserpfalz or imperial palace at Goslar that was Henry III’s favored summer residence. He died there, and a sarcophagus within the building contains his heart.

  The Salian dynasty first rose to greatness as dukes of Franconia, with the family’s power base sited in the cities of the Rhineland in the duchy’s west. Their dynastic name recalled the Salians, who were a dominant tribal grouping among the Franks. The family could also claim an impeccably imperial bloodline: Conrad II’s father, Count Henry of Speyer, was the grandson of Liutgarde, a daughter of Otto the Great. Conrad was elected king of Germany in 1024 and then crowned emperor by Pope John XIX three years later. He was, however, the last to bear the title “duke of Franconia,” and after Conrad died the great cities of Rhenish Franconia—Mainz, Worms and Speyer—were ruled by their local prince-bishops as mini-states within the empire.

  The 11th-century imperial palace at Goslar.

  Conrad and his successors looked north and to Goslar partly because of the prospect of bullion. Cash might liberate them from dependence on the aristocracy and help them to assert German kingship’s independent authority.

  Conrad also recovered many expropriated lands, especially those given to monasteries and bishops, which he then returned to the royal demesne (lands personally owned by the Crown). These estates were then run on the Crown’s behalf by the ministeriales, a class of knight-administrators who worked as the king’s agents. Bullion supplies and demesne revenue gave the kings resources other than their own lands when it came to rewarding their adherents. And when looking to the east of Saxony, the Salians saw other political opportunities for independent assertion: new Crown territories might be established in the colonized lands.

  Conrad’s son Henry III was personally pious and much influenced by the Church reform movement advocated by the monastery at Cluny in Burgundy. He also thought he had the right to impose such a reform on the Church, and he used his powers of patronage to appoint serious-minded reformers. But it was exactly that degree of imperial power over the Church that the reform movement came to regard as an outrage in the generation that followed. Confronted by three rival claimants to the papacy, Henry convened the synod which met at Sutri near Rome in December 1046, and which followed his wishes by electing Suidberg, bishop of Bamberg, to the papal office as Clement II. Clement was enthroned on Christmas Day, and on the same day he crowned his patron emperor. Henry would use his influence to elect three more reforming German popes, but he was the last emperor able to dominate the Church, and his high-handedness alienated him from the German clergy. Godfrey II, duke of Upper Lorraine, led serial rebellions against the emperor, who also faced aristocratic dissent in Saxony and southern Germany. In 1054–55 the nobility in Bavaria and Carinthia tried to depose Henry, and his legacy included the power struggles of the German nobility that surrounded Henry IV in his boyhood.

  THE STAUFER DYNASTY

  1152–1266

  The Staufer family derived its name from the castle in Swabia, Germany, which was the dynasty’s original power base. Frederick von Staufen, appointed duke of Swabia by Henry IV in 1079, was a key imperial supporter. However, Henry V, the last of the Salian emperors, left no male heirs, and the struggle to succeed him—waged between Lothair, duke of Saxony, and Frederick II of Swabia—simply highlighted the lack of focus in the German national identity. By the end of his reign Henry V had in effect conceded victory to the papacy in the long-running investiture contest, and the campaign to provide national leadership had all but ended. That deficiency was also to be a Staufen opportunity.

  By 1125, when the reign of Henry V was over, Lothair was 50 years of age, childless and guileless. He was thus the ideal candidate for those who wanted merely a figurehead king of the Germans. His wife’s family, the Welfs of Bavaria, supported Lothair’s regnal ambitions, and in a contested election he defeated Frederick to become king in 1125. The German nobility’s decision was nonetheless controversial, since it ignored the rights of dynastic succession. Frederick’s mother, Agnes, was Henry IV’s daughter, and Henry V had therefore been his uncle. Frederick and his brother Conrad, duke of Franconia, thus inherited as family members the territories personally owned by Henry V and his Salian ancestors. However, they also claimed the Crown lands gained by the Salians as emperors. This amounted to a declaration of war, and in the ensuing conflict most of the German imperial cities backed the brothers. Lothair’s imperial coronation by Pope Innocent II in 1133, although a token of subservience to the papacy, nonetheless solidified his authority, and the Staufen conceded defeat in the following year.

  Recognition of Staufen leadership came after Lothair’s death in 1137, when Conrad was elected to succeed him. Factionalism nonetheless persisted and the Welf leader Henry the Proud, duke of Bavaria and of Saxony, contested Conrad’s election. As Lothair’s son-in-law, Henry had inherited the Saxon duchy. He was immensely rich, and therefore well placed to start a civil war. Conrad’s decision to deprive Henry of his duchies proved unpopular in both Bavaria and Saxony, and that divisiveness led to the first prolonged period (1137–42) of Welf-Ghibelline armed conflict. In 1152 Conrad lay on his deathbed. His son was only six years old and his brother Frederick had died five years previously. Conrad was never crowned emperor, but he recognized in his brother’s son, Swabia’s new duke Frederick, those qualities of military prowess, personal charm and ambitious idealism that might drive the family on to imperial greatness. It was the north Italians he tried to conquer who would dub this particular Frederick “Barbarossa,” and Conrad’s nomination of his nephew heralded a century of Staufen struggle for European predominance.

  RIGHT Frederick I (“Barbarossa”) with his two sons, Henry VI, Holy Roman emperor, and Frederick V, duke of Swabia (f
rom the Welfenchronik produced by the Benedictine monks of Weingarten Abbey, the Welf family monastery in southern Germany, during the 1180s).

  * * *

  THE STAUFER DYNASTY

  1152 Frederick von Staufen, duke of Swabia, is crowned king of Germany as Frederick I (“Barbarossa”). He is crowned emperor (1155) by Pope Adrian IV, but then excommunicated (1160) by Pope Alexander III.

  1190 Death of Barbarossa.

  1191 Henry VI, king of Germany, and his wife Constance of Sicily are crowned emperor and empress by Pope Celestine III.

  1194 Henry VI and Constance become joint rulers of Sicily. Birth of their son, Frederick.

  1198 Frederick II is crowned king of Sicily.

  1215 Frederick II’s coronation at Aachen as king of Germany.

  1220 Pope Honorius II crowns Frederick II emperor.

  1250 Death of Frederick II, who is succeeded by his son Conrad.

  1254 Conrad dies of malaria.

  1258 Manfred, Frederick II’s illegitimate son, seizes the Sicilian throne from Conradin, son of Conrad.

  1263 The papacy invests Charles, count of Anjou, with the kingdom of Sicily.

  1266 Battle of Benevento: Charles of Anjou defeats and kills Manfred.

  * * *

  FREDERICK I—A KING WITH CHARISMA AND GUILE

  Frederick I Barbarossa devoted himself to the cause of restoring the imperial power both in Germany and north Italy. The tenth-century dynasty of Ottonian emperors provided him with an inspiration in this regard, and so did Charlemagne’s memory. He was crowned king of the Germans in Aachen in 1152 and returned there in 1165 to attend the great service marking Charlemagne’s canonization—a recognition that Barbarossa, with his appreciation of symbolism, had promoted personally. His imposing physical presence, crowned by flaming red hair, contributed to his charisma, as did his keen practical intelligence and courtly grace. Symbols and gestures were also needed, because he had few other cards to play outside the Staufen power base in Swabia and Franconia. However, the inventiveness with which he impressed himself on the German public’s imagination meant that his leadership acquired a mythic quality, even in his own lifetime. He was crowned king of Italy in Pavia in 1154, and an initially obliging papacy gave him an emperor’s crown in 1155. Those were largely nominal roles, but his lineage gave Barbarossa a more tangible asset since his mother Judith belonged to the Bavarian ducal house. This great representative of the Ghibelline interest was therefore also a Welf, and that fact encouraged the hope of reconciliation between the two factions. This, though, was to underestimate the tenacity of Henry the Lion, the Welf leader who had inherited the duchy of Saxony from his father, Henry the Proud, following its restoration to the family by King Conrad in 1142. Henry the Lion was Barbarossa’s equal in grasping the importance of symbolic gesture and, unlike his rival, he had the means to express his vision of German glory through artistic patronage. Henry was Barbarossa’s supporter initially, and the duchy of Bavaria was therefore returned to his dynasty in 1156. His foundation of Munich, together with Henry’s embellishment of Brunswick, his capital in Saxony, marked the duke’s command of a Saxon-Bavarian power block stretching from the North Sea to the Alps. Marriage to Matilda, daughter of England’s Henry II, was further confirmation of Henry the Lion’s standing as one of Europe’s greatest princes.