We have said that in ‘the Oath of Strasbourg’9 it was possible to distinguish the infant nations of France and Germany. This is true—yet Germany, though distinct from her neighbours, was to remain all through the Middle Ages rather an agglomeration of states than a nation as we understand the word to-day.

One reason for the absence of any common policy and ambitions was that Charlemagne, though he had conquered the Saxons and other Germanic tribes, had never succeeded in welding them into one people. Under his successors the different races easily slipped back into regarding themselves rather as Saxons, Franconians, or Bavarians than as Germans: indeed the Bohemians relapsed into heathendom and became once more altogether uncivilized.

This instinct for separation was aided by the feudal system, since rebel tenants-in-chiefs could count on provincial feeling to support them against the king their overlord. It is hardly surprising, then, if the struggle that broke out in Germany as elsewhere in Europe between rulers and their feudal baronage was decided there in favour of the baronage.

Perhaps if some strong king could have given his undivided attention to the problem he might have succeeded, like William I of England, in making himself real master of all Germany; but unfortunately the rulers of the German kingdom were never free from foreign wars. Just as the Norsemen had descended on the coasts of France, so Danes, Slavs, and Hungarians were a constant menace to the civilization of Germany; hordes of these barbarians breaking over the frontiers every year, and even pillaging districts as far west as the Rhine.

German kings, in consequence of this external menace, had to rely for the defence of their frontiers upon the military power of their great vassals. They were even forced to create large estates called ‘Marks’ (march-lands) upon their northern and eastern borders to act as national bulwarks. Over these ruled ‘Margraves’ (‘grafs’ or Counts of the Mark) with a large measure of independence. Modern Prussia was once the Mark of Brandenburg, a war state created against the Slav; Austria the Mark placed in the east between Bavaria and the Hungarians; Schleswig the Mark established to hold back the Danes.

Yet another cause told for disruption: the fact that when the Carolingian line came to an end in Germany early in the tenth century the practice sprang up of electing kings from among the chief princes and dukes. Though this plan worked well if the electors made an honest choice, yet it gave the feudal baronage a weapon, on the other hand, if they wished to strike a bargain with a would-be ruler or to appoint a weakling whose authority they could undermine.

The first of the elected kings of Germany was Conrad of Franconia, during whose reign the feudal system took strong root, and who ruled rather through his barons than in opposition to their wishes. On his death-bed he showed his honest desire for the welfare of Germany. ‘I know,’ he declared, ‘that no man is worthier to sit on my throne than my enemy Henry of Saxony.... When I am dead, take him the crown and the sacred lance, the golden armlet, the sword, and the purple mantle of the old kings.’ The princes, who followed his advice, found their new ruler out hawking on the mountain side, and under the nickname Henry ‘the Fowler’ he became their king and one of Germany’s national heroes.

In his untiring struggle against invaders Henry I recalls the Anglo-Saxon Alfred ‘the Great’, and like Alfred he was at first forced to fly before his enemies. To the disgust of the great dukes he bought a nine years’ peace from the Hungarians by paying tribute; but when the enemy went away he at once began to build castles or ‘burgs’, and filled them with soldiers under the command of ‘burgraves’. These castles were placed all along the frontiers, and gradually villages and towns gathered round them for safety.

In the tenth year the Hungarians came as usual to ask for the tribute money, but Henry ordered a dead dog to be thrown at their messenger’s feet.

‘In future this is all your master will get from us,’ he exclaimed, and the answer, as he expected, provoked an immediate invasion. Instead of being able to lay waste the countryside as of old, however, the Hungarians now found ‘burgs’ well fortified and provisioned that they could neither take nor leave with safety in their rear. When at last they met Henry in pitched battle, they broke and fled before his onslaught, declaring that the golden banner of St. Michael, carried at the head of his troops, had by some wizardry contrived their ruin.

Besides repulsing invaders, Henry the Fowler imposed his will to a considerable extent over his rebellious baronage. In another chapter10 we have noticed how he instituted ‘the order of knighthood’ as a way of harnessing to his service the restless energy of the younger sons of the nobles: he also tried to strengthen the middle classes as a counterpoise to the baronage by encouraging the construction of walled towns for the protection of merchants, while he would hold his councils rather in towns than in the woods like his predecessors, in order to attract people to settle there. Many of the Marks owe their origin to Henry’s policy of strengthening the border provinces; and in this and in his determination to subdue the Hungarians he found an able successor in his son Otto I.

Otto’s reign might from one aspect be called a history of wars. First there were foreign wars—the subjugation of Denmark, whose king became a German vassal; the reconquest and conversion of Bohemia; and also a series of campaigns against the Hungarians, resulting at last in 955 in a victory at Augsburg so complete that never again the hated invaders dared to cross the border save in marauding bands.

But besides fighting against foreign neighbours Otto had a continual struggle at home in order to reassert the authority of the crown over the great duchies such as Lotharingia and Bavaria. When he was able to do so he would replace the most turbulent of the dukes by members of his own family, or he would make gifts of large estates to bishops, hoping in this way to provide himself with loyal tenants-in-chief. In this, however, he was not successful, for he found the feudal bishops amongst his worst enemies; so that he turned at last for help to the new type of Churchman, bred by the Cluniac reform movement—men of learning and culture, monks in their religious observances, statesmen in their outlook. These were at one with him in his desire for a united Germany and a purer Church; but Otto was faced by a great problem when he wished to reform and control his bishops. How far were the German clergy under his jurisdiction? How far did they owe obedience only to Rome, as they claimed if he tried to exert his authority over them?

Charlemagne had been able to deal easily with such difficulties, for the Pope had been his ally, almost it might be said his vassal, and so they could have but one mind on Church matters. By the time of Otto the Great, however, German kings had long ceased to be emperors, and the imperial title, bandied about from one Italian prince to another, had become tarnished in the world’s eyes. Was it worth while, then, for a German king to regain this title in order to gain control over the See of St. Peter?

Students of history, able to test mediaeval policy by its ultimate results, will answer ‘No’, seeing that German kings would have done well to resist the will-of-the-wisp lure of the crowns of Lombardy and Rome; but to Otto the question of interference in Italy bore a very different aspect. Too great to be dazzled by the title of Emperor, too busy to invade Italy merely for the sake of forcing the Pope to become his ally, Otto found himself faced by the necessity of choosing whether he would make himself lord of the lands on the other side of the Alps or see one of his most powerful subjects, the Duke of Bavaria, do so instead.

The occasion of this choice was the murder of Count Lothair of Provence, one of the claimants to the throne of Italy. Lothair’s widow, Adelaide, a Burgundian princess, appealed to Germany to avenge her wrongs—a piece of knight-errantry with such prospects of profit that several of the German princes and notably the Duke of Bavaria, whose lands lay just to the north of the Alps, were only too willing to undertake it. In 951 Otto the Great, anticipating their ambitions, crossed the Alps with an army, rescued Adelaide from her husband’s murderer, married her himself, and was crowned King of Italy at Pavia.

Recalled to Germany by foreign invasions, he appeared again in Italy ten years later, and in February 962 was crowned Emperor by the Pope at Rome. His successors, dropping the title ‘King of Germany’, claimed henceforth to be ‘Kings of the Romans’ on their election and, after their coronation by the Pope, ‘Holy Roman Emperors’—temporal overlords of Christendom, as the Popes claimed to be spiritual viceroys.

This coronation of Otto the Great was a turning-point in the history of Germany, though at the time it caused little stir. To Otto himself it was merely the culminating success of his career, enabling him to undertake without interference the reform of the German Church that he had planned, and also to issue a charter that, while confirming the Popes in their temporal possessions, insisted that they should take an oath of allegiance to the Emperor before their consecration. By this measure the Papacy became in the eyes of Europe merely the chief see in the Emperor’s dominions; and under Otto’s immediate successors this supremacy was not seriously disputed by the Popes themselves. In some cases they were German nominees, ready to acknowledge the sceptre that secured their election; but, even where this was not the case, there was a general feeling that Rome had less to fear from the tyranny of Emperors beyond the Alps than from the encroachments of the petty lords of Italy.

The Dukes of Spoletum, Counts of Tuscany, and Barons of the Roman Campagna had no respect at all for the head of Christendom except as a pawn in their political moves. One of the most unscrupulous and dissolute families in the vicinity of Rome, the Crescentii, who claimed the title of Patrician, once granted by Eastern Emperors to Italian viceroys, secured the Papacy for three successive members of their house. Under the last of these, Benedict IX, a boy of twelve at the time of his election, vice and tyranny walked through the streets of Rome rampant and unashamed. The young Pope, described by a contemporary as ‘a captain of thieves and brigands’, did not scruple to crown his sins by selling his holy office in a moment of danger to another of his family. As his excesses had already led the people of Rome to set up an Anti-Pope, and as he himself withdrew his abdication very shortly, the disgraceful state of affairs culminated in three Popes, each denouncing one another, and each arming his followers for battle in the streets.

The interference of the Emperor Henry III (a member of the Salian House of Saxony) was welcomed on all sides, and at the Synod of Sutri the rival Popes were all deposed and a German bishop, chosen by the Emperor, elected in their place.

Henry III has been described by a modern historian as ‘the strongest Prince that Europe had seen since Charlemagne’. Not only did he succeed in subduing the unruly Bohemians and Hungarians, but he also built Germany into the temporary semblance of a nation, mastering her baronage and purifying her Church. His influence over Italy was wholly for her good; but by the irony of fate his cousin Bruno, whom he nominated to the See of St. Peter under the name of Leo IX, was destined to lay the foundations of a Papacy independent of German control.

Bruno himself insisted that he should be elected legally by the clergy and people of Rome and, though of royal blood, he entered the city barefoot as a penitent. Unlike the haughty Roman nobles to whom the title ‘Pope’ had merely seemed an extra means of obtaining worldly honour and pleasure, he remained after his consecration gentle and accessible to his inferiors, and devoted his whole time to the work of reform. At his first council he strongly condemned the sin of simony, and he insisted on the celibacy of the clergy as the only way to free them from worldly distractions and ambitions.

In order that his message might not seem intended for Italy alone, he made long journeys through Germany and France. Everywhere he went he preached the purified ideal of the Church upheld by the monks of Cluni; but side by side with this he and his successors set another vision that they strove to realize, the predominance of the Papacy in Italy as a temporal power.

It was Leo IX who, dreading the Norman settlements in southern Italy as a menace to the states of the Church, formed a league against the invaders, but after his defeat at their hands, followed shortly by his death, his successors, as we have seen, wisely concluded a peace that left them feudal overlords of Apulia and Calabria.11 Realizing that to dominate the affairs of the peninsula they must remain at home, future Popes sent ambassadors called ‘Legates’ to express and explain their will in foreign countries; while in 1059, in a further effort towards independence, Pope Nicholas II revolutionized the method of papal elections. Popes, it was decreed, were no longer to be chosen by the voice of the people and clergy of Rome generally, but only by the ‘Cardinals’, that is, the principal bishops of the city sitting in secret conclave. This body, the College of Cardinals, was to be free of imperial interference.

Behind Pope Nicholas, in this daring policy of independence, stood one of the most powerful figures of his age, Hildebrand, Archdeacon of Rome. The son of a village carpenter, small, ill formed, insignificant in appearance, he possessed the shrewd, practical mind and indomitable will of the born ruler of men. It is said that in boyhood his companions found him tracing with the chips and shavings of his father’s workshop the words, ‘I shall reign from sea to sea’, yet he began his career by deliberately accepting exile with the best of the Popes deposed by the Council of Sutri; and it was Leo IX, who, hearing of his genius, found him and brought him back to Rome.

Gradually not only successive Popes but the city itself grew to lean upon his strength, and when in 1073 the Holy See was left vacant, a general cry arose from the populace: ‘Hildebrand is Pope.... It is the will of St. Peter!’

Taking the name of Gregory VII, Hildebrand reluctantly, if we are to believe his own account, accepted the headship of the Church. Perhaps, knowing how different was his ideal of the office from its reality, he momentarily trembled at the task he had set himself; but once enthroned there was no weakness in his manner to the world.

In his ears the words of Christ, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’, could never be reconciled with vassalage to any temporal ruler. To St. Peter and his successors, not to emperors or kings, had been given the power to bind or loose, and Gregory’s interpretation of this text did not even admit of two co-equal powers ruling Christendom by their alliance. ‘Human pride has created the power of kings,’ he declared, ‘God’s mercy has created the power of bishops ... the Pope is master of Emperors and is rendered holy by the merits of his predecessor St. Peter. The Roman Church has never erred and Holy Scripture proves that it never can err. To resist it is to resist God.’

Such a point of view, if put to any practical test, was sure to encounter firm if not violent opposition. Thus, when Gregory demanded from William of Normandy the oath of fealty alleged to have been promised by the latter to Alexander II in return for the Papal blessing upon the conquest of England, the Conqueror replied by sending rich gifts in token of his gratitude for papal support, but supplemented them with a message as uncompromising as the Pope’s ideal: ‘I have not sworn, nor will I swear fealty, which was never sworn by any of my predecessors to yours.’ William thereupon proceeded to dispose of benefices and bishoprics in his new kingdom as he chose, and even went so far as to forbid the recognition of any new Pope within his dominions without his leave, or the publication of papal letters and decrees that had not received his sanction.

Perhaps if England had been nearer to Italy, or if William had misused his authority instead of reforming the English Church, Gregory VII might have taken up the gauntlet of defiance thus thrown at his feet. Instead he remained on friendly terms with William; and it was in the Empire, not in England, that the struggle between Church and State began.

The Emperor Henry III, who had summoned the Synod of Sutri, had been a great ruler, great enough even to have effected a satisfactory compromise with Hildebrand, but, though before he died he succeeded in securing his crown for his son Henry, a boy of six, he could not bequeath him strength of character or statesmanship. Thus from his death, in 1056, the fortunes of his House and Empire slowly waned.

It is difficult to estimate the natural gifts of the new ruler of Germany, for an unhappy upbringing warped his outlook and affections. Left at first under the guardianship of his mother, the Empress Agnes, the young Henry IV was enticed at the age of eleven on board a ship belonging to Anno, the ambitious Archbishop of Cologne. While he was still admiring her wonders the ship set sail up the Rhine, and though the boy plunged overboard in an effort to escape his kidnappers he was rescued and brought back. For the next four years he remained first the pupil of Archbishop Anno, who punished him for the slightest fault with harsh cruelty and deprived him of all companionship of his own age, and then of Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen, who indulged his every whim and passion.

At length, at the age of fifteen, handsome and kingly in appearance, but utterly uncontrolled and dissolute in his way of life, Henry was declared of age to govern for himself, and straightway began to alienate his barons and people. He had been married against his wish to the plain daughter of one of his Margraves, and expressed his indignation by ill-treating and neglecting her, to the wrath of her powerful relations: he also built castles on the hill-tops in Saxony, from which his troops oppressed the countryside: but the sin for which he was destined to be called to account was his flagrant misuse of his power over the German Church.

At first, when reproved by the Pope for selling bishoprics and benefices, Henry was apologetic in his letters; but he had no real intention of amending his ways and soon began to chafe openly at Roman criticism and threats. At last acrimonious disputes came to a head in what is called the ‘Investiture Question’, and because it is a problem that affected the whole relations of Church and State in the eleventh century it is important to understand what it exactly meant to Europe.

Investiture was the ceremony by which a temporal ruler, such as a king, transferred to a newly chosen Church official, such as a bishop, the lands and rights belonging to his office. The king would present the bishop with a ring and crozier and the bishop in return would place his hands between those of the king and do him homage like a lay tenant-in-chief.

The Roman See declared that it was not fitting for hands sacred to the service of God at His altar to be placed in submission between those that a temporal ruler had stained with the blood of war. Behind this figure of speech lay the real reason, the implication that if the ring and crozier were to be taken as symbols of lands and offices, bishops would tend to regard these temporal possessions as the chief things in their lives, and the oath of homage they gave in exchange as more important than their vow to do God’s service.

Gregory VII believed that he could not reform the Church unless he could detach its officials from dependence on lay rulers who could bribe or intimidate them; and in the age in which he lived he could show that for every William of Normandy ready to ‘invest’ good churchmen there were a hundred kings or petty rulers who only cared about good tenants, that is, landlords who would supply them faithfully with soldiers and weapons.

As a counter argument temporal rulers maintained that churchmen who accepted lands and offices were lay tenants in this respect, whatever Popes might choose to call them. The king who lost the power of investing his bishops lost control over wealthy and important subjects, and since he would also lose the right to refuse investiture he might find his principal bishoprics in the hands of disloyal rebels or of foreigners about whom he knew nothing.

The whole question was complicated, largely because there was so much truth on both sides; Gregory, however, forced the issue, and early in 1075, in a Synod held at Rome, put forth the famous decree by which lay investiture was henceforth sternly forbidden. Henry IV, on the other hand, spoiled his case by his wild disregard of justice. In the same year he appointed a new archbishop to the important See of Milan and invested him without consulting Gregory VII at all; he further proceeded to appoint two unknown foreigners to Italian bishoprics. Angry at the letter of remonstrance which these acts aroused he called a church council at Worms in the following year, and there induced the majority of German bishops very reluctantly to declare Gregory deposed.

‘Henry, King not by usurpation but by God’s grace, to Hildebrand, henceforth no Pope but false monk....’ Thus began his next letter to the Roman pontiff, to which Hildebrand replied by excommunicating his deposer.

‘Blessed Peter ... as thy representative I have received from God the power to bind and loose in Heaven and on earth. For the honour and security of thy Church, in the name of God Almighty, I prohibit Henry the King, son of Henry the Emperor, ... from ruling Germany and Italy. I release all Christians from the oaths of fealty they may have taken to him, and I order that no one shall obey him.’

This decree provided occasion for all German nobles whom Henry IV had alienated to gather under the banner of the papal legate, and for the oppressed Saxon countryside to renew the serious revolt which had broken out two years before. Even the German bishops grew frightened of the part they had played in deposing Gregory, so that the once-powerful ruler found himself looked upon as an outlaw with scarcely a real friend, save the wife he had ill-treated, and no hope save submission. In the winter of 1066, as an old story tells, when the mountains were frozen hard with snow and ice, he and his wife and one attendant crossed the Alps on sledges, and sought the Pope in his castle of Canossa, built amidst the highest ridges of the Apennines.

Gregory coldly refused him audience. The King, he intimated, might declare that he was repentant, he had done so often in the past, but words were not deeds. Putting aside his royal robes and clad in a penitent’s woollen tunic, Henry to show his sincerity remained barefoot for three days like a beggar, in the castle yard. Then only on the entreaty of some Italian friends was he admitted to the presence of the Pope, who at his cry of ‘Holy Father, spare me!’ raised him up and gave him formal forgiveness. The scene at Canossa is so dramatic in its display of Hildebrand’s triumph and the Emperor’s humiliation that it has lived in the world’s memory: yet it was no closing act in their struggle, but merely an episode that passed and left little mark. Henry IV, as soon as he could win himself a following in Germany and Italy, returned to the practice of lay investiture, and Gregory VII, who had never believed in his sincerity, continued to denounce him and plan the coronation of rival emperors.

Imperial ambitions at last reached their height, for Henry IV succeeded in inducing German and Italian bishops to depose Gregory once more and even appoint an Anti-Pope, in whose name imperial armies ravaged Lombardy, forced their way as far south as Rome, and besieged Hildebrand in the castle of St. Angelo. From this predicament he was rescued by the Normans of South Italy under Robert Guiscard; but these ruthless vassals of the Church massacred and looted the Holy City directly they had scaled the walls, and when they turned homewards, carrying Gregory VII with them, they left half Rome in ruins.

Gregory VII died not long afterwards, homeless and deposed, but with unshaken confidence in the righteousness of his cause. ‘I have loved justice and hated iniquity,’ he said, during his last illness, ‘therefore I die in exile.’ ‘In exile thou couldst not die,’ replied a bishop standing at his bedside. ‘Vicar of Christ and His Apostles, thou hast received the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.’ Future history was to show that Hildebrand in defeat had achieved more than his rival in victory.

Henry IV outlived his enemy by twenty-one years, but they were bitter with disillusionment. Harassed by Gregory VII’s successors who continued to advocate papal supremacy, faced by one rebellion after another in Germany and Italy, Henry IV yielded at last to weariness and old age, when he found his sons had become leaders of the forces most hostile to him. Even in his submission to their demands he found no peace, for he was thrust into prison, compelled to abdicate, and left to die miserably of starvation and neglect. In the reign of his son, Henry V, a compromise on the ‘Investiture Question’ was arranged between Church and Empire. By the Concordat of Worms it was agreed first that rulers should renounce their claim to invest bishops and abbots with the ring and crozier. These were to be given by representatives of the Church to candidates chosen and approved by them; but the second point of importance was that this ceremony must take place in the presence of the king or his representative, to whom the new bishop or abbot would at once do homage for his lands and offices.

Almost a similar settlement had been arrived at between Church and State in England some fifteen years earlier, arising out of the refusal of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, to do homage to Henry I, the Conqueror’s son. In this case there was no clash of bitterness and dislike, for the old archbishop was perfectly loyal to the king at heart, though prepared to go to the stake on a matter of conscience, as this question had become to earnest churchmen. His master, on his side, respected Anselm’s saintly character and only wished to safeguard his royal rights over all his subjects.

Compromise was therefore a matter of rejoicing on both sides, and with the decisions of the Council at Worms investiture ceased to be a vital problem. Its importance lies in the fact that it was one of the first battles between Church and State and, though a compromise, yet a formal victory for the Church. The dependence of the Papacy on the imperial government that Europe had considered natural in the days of Charlemagne, or of Otto the Great, was a thing of the past, for the acknowledgement of ecclesiastical freedom from lay supremacy, one of the main issues for which Hildebrand had struggled, schemed, and died, had been won by his successors following in his steps.

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.