Holy Roman Empire

V

The Salian Emperors and the Investiture Controversy (1024-1125)

For the next 100 years, German kings were chosen from the Salian line of Franconia, which was related to the Saxons. The Salians greatly increased the power and extent of the empire, but also initiated a period of intense political and religious strife, particularly the conflict with the papacy known as the Investiture Controversy.

The origins of the Investiture Controversy date back at least to the Carolingian Empire. By the 10th century, it had become common practice to treat ecclesiastical, or church, lands such as dioceses and monasteries as royal fiefs, which the German king could give out as he wished. Upon the death of a bishop, the king or one of his vassals appointed the successor, giving him the symbols of his office—the episcopal staff and ring—in a ceremony known as investiture. Often, as in other feudal transactions, money also changed hands; thus the entire process became tainted with the religious abuse known as simony (the buying or selling of spiritual offices or services).

During the 11th century, the issue of investiture by laymen—such as kings and emperors—rather than by churchmen became increasingly contentious. Much of the tension can be attributed to the monastic reform movement originating in Cluny, in present-day France, which encouraged a more austere, disciplined, and prayerful life within monasteries and convents. Cluniac leaders sought to abolish all acts of simony and to end control of the church by laymen. Some emperors were sympathetic to such reforms and fully supported them. But in the second half of the century, a series of popes were inspired by the Cluniac reforms to seek greater independence for the papacy, as well.

Since the time of Otto I, new popes had been nominated by the emperor and consistently relied on his support and protection during their reigns. However, in 1059 a synod, or Church council, took this power away from the emperors and established an independent college of churchmen, known as cardinals, who would elect the popes. This and other reforms began two centuries of power struggles between popes and the emperors, who had long been allies.

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The first and most famous conflict occurred when the emperor Henry IV, who reigned from 1056 to 1106, attempted to preserve his control over German clerical appointments. The young emperor came to power during a particularly desperate time for the empire, when the German princes were more divided and rebellious than ever. Henry had just fought off a Saxon revolt in 1075 when he was confronted by the new pope, Gregory VII, who wanted to free the entire church from control by laymen. When Gregory forbade the practice of nonchurch officials installing churchmen in their religious offices, Henry had him deposed by an episcopal synod at Worms, Germany, in 1076. The pope promptly excommunicated Henry, denying him the services of the church, and released all of his subjects, particularly his rebellious noble vassals, from their oath of loyalty to him.

The rebellious German nobles gave Henry the choice of either seeking forgiveness from the pope or being deposed by them. Henry chose the former and sought the pope out at a palace in Canossa in the Apennines in January 1077, waiting outside for three days as a barefoot penitent in the snow. Thinking he had succeeded in humiliating a disobedient emperor, Gregory forgave Henry.

Gregory, however, unwittingly angered the German nobles, who felt betrayed. They elected a rival king, Rudolf of Swabia, triggering nearly 20 years of civil war. In 1080 the pope recognized Rudolf as king and again excommunicated Henry. Henry responded by declaring Gregory deposed and having the Italian archbishop Guibert of Ravenna elected in his stead as Pope Clement III. Rudolf was killed in 1080, and Henry regained control of Germany. He then led his forces into Italy and captured Rome in 1084, where he was crowned emperor by Clement. A Norman army came to the aid of Pope Gregory, however, and drove Henry from Rome. Henry returned to Germany and there participated in a long series of civil wars, in which his sons eventually turned against him. In 1105 he was taken prisoner by his son Henry, later Emperor Henry V, and forced to abdicate.

Henry V continued his father’s struggle for supremacy over the papacy, but in the end the princes forced him to compromise with Pope Callistus II on investiture. The result was the Concordat of Worms in 1122, which stipulated that the elections of church officials in Germany were to take place in the imperial presence without the exchange of money. It also required that the emperor invest the candidate with the symbols of his worldly office before a bishop invested him with the spiritual ones.

The pope probably had the better of the bargain. The continuing rivalry between empire and papacy contributed in many ways to the weakening of the emperor’s authority and his powers. Although the imperial role in investiture was acknowledged, the shift towards a more independent church was unmistakable. Bishops, like other clerics, were increasingly integrated into a separate church hierarchy, with its own law and courts and its own autocratic ruler—the pope. The emperors, meanwhile, had not only lost their dominance over the papacy but, by giving up their ability to appoint bishops loyal to them, had also gained more potential rivals.

VI

The Hohenstaufens and the Peak of the Empire (1137-1254)

During the 12th and 13th centuries, the empire expanded to its greatest extent but was also divided by political feuding between two old princely rivals. The Hohenstaufen or Waiblingen family of Swabia, known in Italy as the Ghibellines, held the German and imperial crowns for over a century. The Welfs of Bavaria and Saxony, known as Guelphs in Italy, were allies of the papacy and persistently plotted against Hohenstaufen rulers.

After Henry V, the last Salian emperor, died without an heir, the Welfs and the Hohenstaufens competed for succession to the imperial crown. The other German princes took advantage of this rivalry to increase their own power at the expense of the empire, playing the factions off against one another. They bypassed the more powerful members of the feuding families who would have exerted greater imperial control and instead elected a series of weak emperors who were unable to challenge their authority. This resulted in a long civil war between the two factions, a war that eventually spilled over into Italy as the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict. The civil war in the empire was finally settled in 1152 by the election of Frederick I, the son of a Hohenstaufen father and a Welf mother.

However, the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict continued for another two centuries. It became a specifically Italian conflict between forces opposed to the papacy and those supporting it. See Guelphs and Ghibellines.

A

Frederick I, Barbarossa

Handsome, intelligent, warlike, judicious, and charming, Frederick I, called Barbarossa, ruled from 1152 to 1190. Partly to assert his status as a religious equal of the pope, he added Holy to his title of Roman Emperor. He spent most of his reign shuttling between Germany and Italy, trying to restore imperial glory to both regions and coming closer than any other medieval ruler.

In the north, he married the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy and joined that duchy to his hereditary lands. In the south, Frederick made six expeditions to Italy to assert full imperial authority over both the pope and the cities of the Lombards, which had become increasingly independent of the empire. He was initially successful in defeating a variety of alliances between these two challengers to imperial authority in Italy. During his fifth Italian expedition, however, he was defeated by the Lombard League at the Battle of Legnano in 1176 and was forced to recognize the cities’ political autonomy. Frederick later died leading the Third Crusade.

B

The Last Hohenstaufen Kings

More ambitious even than his father Frederick, Henry VI seized Sicily, an island off southern Italy, and forced the northern Italian cities to submit to him. Intending to create an empire in the Mediterranean, he exacted tribute from North Africa and the weak Byzantine emperor. However, when Henry died suddenly in 1197 while planning a new crusade, the empire immediately fell apart. The German princes refused to accept his infant son Frederick as king and thus initiated a new civil war between backers of the Hohenstaufen, Philip of Swabia, and those of the Welf, Otto of Brunswick. When Otto invaded Italy, Pope Innocent III secured the election of Frederick as German king on the promise that the young king would give up Sicily so as not to surround papal territory.

Outstandingly accomplished in many fields, Frederick II, who reigned from 1212 to 1250, was called Stupor Mundi (Latin for “wonder of the world”). Determined to keep Sicily as his base of operations, he revised his coronation promise to the pope, giving Germany rather than Sicily to his young son Henry. In exchange for the German princes’ support of his Italian campaigns, Frederick allowed them to usurp many of his own powers, making them virtually kings in their own territories. In an edict issued in 1220, Frederick surrendered to the German princes the right to erect castles, grant town charters, and levy taxes. Bishops and other ecclesiastical rulers received similar concessions for their support. Such decentralization soon backfired on Frederick and Henry, as the princes’ greater autonomy further weakened the power of the emperor.

Frederick spent the remainder of his long reign preoccupied with the struggle over northern Italy. He led a successful crusade to Jerusalem in 1228 but was soon forced to return to reclaim Sicily from the invading Pope Gregory IX. In 1237 the pope sided with the Lombard League against the emperor, and this time, Frederick responded by seizing the Papal States. Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, fled to Lyon, France, and declared the emperor deposed. Before he could secure his position against the League, Frederick died. Under his successor Conrad IV, the Hohenstaufens were finally ousted from Sicily.

The empire then suffered the turmoil of the Great Interregnum (1254-1273), during which two non-Germans, Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castile, claimed the imperial crown, though neither was ever crowned emperor. The German princes, meanwhile, exploited the absence of an emperor, to further solidify their own political independence. At the very time that French and English kings were centralizing their power, German lands were becoming further politically fragmented into numerous units, thus fracturing central authority. The Great Interregnum marked a decisive turning point in the history of Germany and the empire, beginning the long decline of real imperial power.

VII

Decline of the Empire and Ascendancy of the Habsburgs (1273-1806)

During the next two centuries, leadership of the Holy Roman Empire, as it was now known, was contested by three German dynasties—the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs, and the Luxemburgs. Eventually, the house of Habsburg prevailed, and the imperial crown became essentially a hereditary possession. Their victory, which coincided with the steady decline of imperial authority, was far from certain, however.

In 1273, the electors ended the Great Interregnum by choosing a minor Swabian prince, Rudolf of Habsburg, whom they believed would be no threat to their power and independence. Rudolf I instead concentrated on enlarging his own dynastic holdings. He defeated Bohemia and took from it Austria, Styria and Carinthia (both now provinces of Austria), and Carniola (modern Slovenia), thus making the Habsburgs one of the most powerful dynasties in the empire. By the following century, the Habsburgs had succeeded in elevating Austria, their seat of power, into an archduchy, which made the Habsburg family equal to the noble families who had originally sought out Rudolf because of his insignificance.

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