CHAPTER XII

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

The latter part of the eleventh century brought a resumption of intellectual labor upon the body of
political and social ideas that had been preserved from antiquity in the tradition of the Christian
Fathers and began a development which produced in the centuries following an astonishingly
brilliant and virile cul-ture. Order emerged once more from chaos and especially in the Norman
states began to promise administrative efficiency and political stability such as Europe had not known
since Roman times. Feudalism began to settle itself into a Laore definite sys-tem from which were to
arise constitutional principles that carried over from the Middle Ages into modern Europe. The cities,
first in Italy and a little later in the north, began to build up trade and industry which were to supply
the basis for an original and hu-mane art and literature. Philosophy and scholarship made a be-
ginning soon to be fructified by the recovery of important masses of ancient learning. The study of
jurisprudence, in southern France and the Italian cities of Ravenna and Bologna, began to restore a
knowledge of Roman law and to apply it to contempo-rary legal and political problems. In this
general rise of the in-tellectual level, affecting every branch of thought, it was natural that political
philosophy should share.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries political writing was in the main controversial, centering about
the contest between the popes and the emperors over the boundaries of the secular and
ecclesiastical authorities. Its extent, however, is astonishing. Probably the whole extant body of
political philosophy writ-ten between the death of Aristotle and the eleventh century would occupy
fewer pages than the great collection of political tracts that grew out of the struggle over the lay
investiture of bishops. As a subject of systematic scholarly investigation political theory emerged
more slowly than other branches of philosophical interest. In the thirteenth century it was stili 224

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH-STATE

225

overshadowed by the great systems of theology and metaphysica which were the typical creations of
the scholastic philosophers. In the fourteenth century treatises on political philosophy became more
common, as they continued to be from that time to the present. Yet the preservation of great
numbers of tracts from the earlier centuries speaks for a continuous interest in the sub-ject. And
even in the eleventh century certain main issues be-gan to be drawn and certain fundamental
problems began to emerge which evolved continuously in the centuries following.

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH-STATE

The starting-point for the eleventh-century controversialists, in respect to the relations of the secular
and spiritual authorities, was the Gelasian theory of the two swords already described, in which the
teaching of the Christian Fathers had been summed up. The distinction between spirituals and
seculars, between the in-terests of soul and body, was part of the warp and woof of Chris-tianity
itself. According to the view universally accepted in the eleventh century and indeed not overtly
denied for centuries thereafter-human society is divinely ordained to be governed by two
authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, the one wielded by priests and the other by secular
rulers, both in accordance with divine and natural law. No man, under the Christian dis-pensation,
can possess both sacerdotium and imperium. Neither authority was conceived to exercise an
arbitrary power, for both were believed to be subject to law and to fill a necessary office in the divine
government of nature and of man. Between the two, accordingly, there could be in principie no
conflict, though sinful pride or greed of power might lead the human agents of either to overstep the
boundaries allotted by the law. As parts of a di-vinely unified plan, each authority owed aid and
support to the other.

Within this circle of ideas, there was, properly speaking, neither church nor state in the modern
meaning of those terms. There was not one body of men who formed the state and one which
formed the church, for all men were included in both. There was only a single Christian society, as St.
Augustine had taught in his City of God, and it included, at least for the eleventh century, the whole
world. Under God this society had two heads, the pope 226

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

and the emperor, two principles of authority, the spiritual rule of priests and the temporal rule of
kings, and two hierarchies of gov-erning officials, but there was no division between two bodies or
societies. A controversy between these two hierarchies was in a legal sense jurisdictional, such as
might arise between two officials of the same state. The question was one of the proper boundaries
of authority and of what the one or the other might lawfully do within the limits, express or implied,
of his office. In this sense, and in this sense only, was there controversy between church and state at
the beginning of the dispute. As time went on this original conception was gradually set aside,
especially as the legal aspects of the dispute became more clearly defined. But in the beginning the
issue was between two groups of officials each in-vested with an original authority and claiming to
act within the limits of that authority.

The theory of the separation of the two authorities had never been very literally carried out; it had
not been understood to deny that in their earthly exercise they were in contact, or that each body of
officials owed aid to the other in their proper func-tions. Thus it was possible, when controversy
broke out, to point on either side to historical acts which were admitted to be justifi-able and which
yet might be interpreted as a control of the one hierarchy by the other. In the declining days of Rome
Gregory the Great had exercised great temporal power. Both ecclesiastical synods and individual
churchmen had followed the precedent of Ambrose in admonishing kings for their misdoings;
bishops were regularly counted among the magnates with whose consent laws were enacted; and
churchmen had exercised great influence in electing and deposing rulers. Pippin had sought and
obtained papal approval for setting aside the Merovingian dynasty in the Frankish kingdom. The
famous coronation of Charles the Great in 800 could readily be interpreted as a translation of the
empire to the Frankish kings by an authority vested in the church, on the analogy of the institution of
Jewish kingship by Samuel. Indeed, the administering of a coronation oath was universally felt to
have some religious significance, and like all oaths it might fall

within the disciplinary power of the church in moral matters. On the whole, however, down to the
time when the controversy between the ecclesiastical and the imperial jurisdictions broke out

THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE CHURCH 227

in the eleventh century, the control of the emperor over the papacy was more conspicuous and
effective than that of the pope over the emperor. This had usually been true as a matter of course in
Roman times, and anyone who reads the instructions of Charle-magne to the officers whom he sent
on circuit to conduct inquests through his empire will have no doubt that he regarded both
churchmen and laymen as his subjects, or that he took full re-sponsibility for the government of the
church. In the case of Leo III he had extended his inquisitorial authority to the alleged crimes of the
pope himself. In the tenth century, when the pa-pacy fell into exceptional degradation, it was the
emperors from Otto I to Henry III who had applied reformatory measures, ex-tending to the
deposition, under canonical forms, of Gregory VI and the infamous Benedict IX. In fact, the emperors
had ex-erted a major influence in abolishing the scandals that flowed from a state of affairs in which
papal elections were the football of petty patrician politics in the city of Rome. There were, of course,
obvious reasons of policy which impelled the emperors to exert their influence in the selection of
popes. But this influ-ence, while preferable from a churchman's point of view to local Roman
intrigue, was potentially a threat to the autonomy of the church in spiritual affairs.

THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE CHURCH

The controversy of the eleventh century originated in an in-creased self-consciousness and sense of
independence on the part of churchmen and in a desire to make the church an autonomous spiritual
power in consonance with the admitted validity of its claims. The tradition of Augustine presented
Europe to men's minds as essentially a Christian society, unique in the history of the world because
for the first time it brought secular power into the service of divine truth. According to this
conception, the ancient ideal of government for the sake of justice reached its consummation in
rendering not only to every man his right, but in the more vital duty of rendering to God the worship
that was his due. Gelasius, writing against the subordination of ecclesi-astical policy to the imperial
court at Constantinople, had as-serted that the priest's responsibility, being directed toward eter-nal
salvation, was weightier than the king's. Indeed, no other 228

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

conclusion was logically possible, if spiritual ends had in fact the importance which Christianity
imputed to them, and if the church were truly the institution by which alone these ends were to be
attained. The rising enlightenment of the eleventh century, growing up within the church and
dominated by the teaching which the Augustinian tradition made part of the climate of Christian
opinion, could not escape the obligation to make this teaching effective. Earlier the circumstances
had been lacking which made such an effort possible, but the first great effort of Christian civilization
could hardly have been directed to any-thing but realizing, under papal auspices, the ideal of a
Christian society in which the church should be, in fact as in right, the directing force behind a
Christian state.

Already in the ninth century, in the brief revival of scholarship permitted by Charles's empire,
churchmen had begun to develop the claims of the church in a Christian society. Thus Archbishop
Hinemar of Rheims had written:

Let them defend themselves, if they will, by earthly laws or by human customs, but let them know, if
they are Christians, that at the day of judgment they will be judged not by Roman or Salie or
Gundobadian law but by divine apostolic law. In a Christian kingdom even the laws of the state ought
to be Christian, that is, in accord with and suitable to Christianity.

The revival of the ninth century was a flash in the pan, but in the meantime changes were taking
place in the church itself which gave greater effectiveness to claims for the Christian state when the
more permanent revival of the eleventh century occurred. These changes affected in part the
centralization of papal au-thority and of ecclesiastical organization within the church and in part the
greater seriousness and militancy of churchmen in the pursuit of the Christian ideal. The first change
was connected with the fabrication of the forgeries known as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals in the
ninth century, and the second with the Cluniac reforms in the tenth.

The False Decretals were evidently produced with the object

2 They consist of over a hundred spurious letters attributed mostly to the pores of the first three
centuries and of numerous spurious reports of councils, inserted into an older body of authentic
material. They originated

245/966

90%

THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE CHURCH 229

of strengthening the position of the bishops; in particular, to protect them from deposition and
confiscation of property by secular rulers, to consolidate their control over the clergy of the diocese,
and to free them from immediate supervision except by their own synods. As means to these ends
they aimed to dimin-ish the authority of the archbishops, who were likely to be the agents of secular
supervision, and to exalt correspondingly the authority of the popes. They insured to the bishop the
right to appeal his case to Rome and to be secure against deposition or loss of property while it was
pending. The finality of a decision by the papal court in every sort of ecclesiastical case was asserted
in the strongest terms. The False Decretals, therefore, signify a tendency in the ninth century to
centralize the church in Frankish territory about the papal see, to make the bishop the unit of church
government, to enforce his direct responsibility to the pope, and to reduce the archbishop to an
intermediary between the pope and the bishop. In broad outline this was the type of gov-ernment
that came to prevail in the Roman church. There was probably no immediate purpose to exalt papal
authority in gen-eral and no immediate effect in that direction. In the eleventh. century, however,
when the False Decretals were universally ac-cepted as genuine, they provided a mine of arguments
for the in-dependence of the church from secular control and for the sover-eign authority of the
pope in ecclesiastical government. The controversy between the pope and the emperor resulted in
no small degree from the fact that the former had now become effectively the head of the church
and no longer felt himself to be dependent on the emperor for its good government.

The second event which had greatly increased the church's de-sire for autonomy was the wave of
reform which spread with the growth of the congregation of monasteries subject to the abbot of
Cluny. Cluny itself was founded in 910. An important pe-culiarity in its organization was the entire
independence which the body enjoyed in the management of its affairs and the choice

in Frankish territory about the year 850. See P. Fournier, "Études sur les fausses décrétales," Revue
d'histoire ecclésiastique de Louvain, Vol. VII (1906), pp. 33, 301, 543, 761; Vol. VIII (1907), p. 19. The
standard account is given by E. Sackur, Die Cluniacenser in ihrer kirchlichen und
allgemeingeschichtlichen Wirksamkeit, 2 vols., Halle, 1892-94.

230

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

of its heads. A second significant feature of its growth was the fact that, as new monasteries were
organized or old ones amalga-mated with it, control of these branches continued to be vested in the
abbot of the parent body. The Cluniac monasteries were accordingly much more than isolated bodies
of monks; they formed virtually an order centralized under the control of a single head. They were
thus well qualified to be the instrument for spreading the idea of reform in the church. Moreover,
the pur-poses of the reformers were much the same as those which had motived the growth of the
Cluny monasteries themselves. Sim-ony, or the sale of ecclesiastical offices, was a serious evil which
much needed reforming, and it was an evil intimately connected with the employment of
ecclesiastics in the work of secular gov-ernment. The evil consisted not only in the actual sale of
offices but also in the giving of ecclesiastical preferment as a reward for political services. It was a
foregone conclusion, therefore, that a heightened conception of spiritual functions should bring with
it a demand for the purification of the church, for permanently raising the papacy from the
degradation into which it had too often fallen, and for an autonomous control of the pope over ce-
clesiastical officers. It was precisely the more conscientious churchmen who felt most keenly the
menace to the spiritual office occasioned by the entanglement of the clergy in the business of
secular government. The direction which the reform movement must take in respect to the
government of the church was fore-shadowed at the Lateran Synod of 1059 by the attempt to secure
an orderly method of papal election in the College of Cardinals. Reform meant that the church must
seek to make itself a self-governing community with ecclesiastical policy and administra-tion in the
hands of ecclesiastics. The progress of such a reform necessarily contained latent possibilities of
conflict between the

pope and the emperor. The desire for the autonomy of the church was, in fact, an answer to an
abuse which was deeply rooted and which had been steadily growing. Long before the ninth century
churchmen were already great landowners. Charles Martel had feudalized large amounts of church
land to finance his wars against the Saracens, and as feudalism developed churchmen had been
more and more drawn into the system by which government had to be carried on.

THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE CHURCH

231

As an owner of land he owed feudal services and had, in turn, his own vassals who owed services to
him, and even though he had to perform the secular duties of his station nominally through lay
agents, his interests were largely identical with those of the feudal nobility. The higher clergy, by
virtue of their wealth and standing, were deeply concerned with every question of secular politics;
they were magnates whose power and influence no king could overlook. Indeed, feudalism apart,
their superior educa-tion, at least on the average, had made them the most eligible class from which
a king could draw the higher officials of his king-dom. It is probably true, as was said in the previous
chapter, that the church had been, all through the centuries which had inter-vened since the fall of
Rome, the main repository of the ancient ideals of public authority and civic order, and that
churchmen were likely to be the best agents for carrying out any royal policy which required a degree
of royal control. In the eleventh cen-tury, therefore, both for reasons that inhered in feudalism itself
and for reasons of policy that went beyond feudalism, church-men were deeply involved in secular
politics. In the persons of the higher clergy the organizations of the church and of the state met and
overlapped. So completely was this true that a radical separation of the two hierarchies, on the basis
of a sur-render of political functions by the clergy, was obviously im-possible.

The story of the great controversy is told in every medieval history; there is no need to mention here
more than a few of the principal moves. It began with the accession to the papal throne of Gregory
VII in 1073. In its first phase it concerned especially the lay investiture of bishops, that is, the part of
secular rulers in the choice of the higher clergy. Lay investiture was prohibited by Gregory in 1075.
The following year Emperor Henry IV tried to secure the deposition of Gregory, who replied by
excommuni-cating Henry and absolving his vassals from their feudal oathe. In 1080 Henry attempted
to set up an antipope to replace Greg-ory, and Gregory supported the pretensions of Rudolf of
Swabia to Henry's crown. After the death of the two chief actors the outstanding event was the
attempted settlement between Henry V ard Paschal II on the basis of a surrender by churchmen of all
political functions or regalia, which proved wholly impracticable. 232

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

The first phase of the controversy closed with the Concordat of Worms in 1122, a compromise by
which the emperor gave up the technical right of investiture with the ring and staff, the symbols of
spiritual authority, but retained the right to bestow the regalia and to have a voice in the choice of
the bishops. After this date, however, the controversy continued at intervals. on much the same lines
down to the end of the twelfth century, which makes a convenient stopping place for an exposition
of the opposed views of the two contending parties.

GREGORY VII AND THE PAPALISTS

In the position taken by Gregory, it is important to bear in mind his conception of his own office in
the church, though this was not strictly at issue. At the same time the issue with the empire could
hardly have taken the form it did had he not con-ceived the papal office as he did. From Gregory's
point of view the pope was nothing less than the sovereign head of the whole church. He alone
could create and depose bishops; his legate was to take precedence of bishops and all other officers
of the church; he alone could call a general council and give effect to its decrecs. Papal decrees, on
the other hand, could be annulled by no one, and a case once called into the papal court was not
subject to judgment by any other authority. In short, Gregory's theory of government in the church
was monarchical, not in the sense of a feudal monarchy but more nearly in the sense of the im-perial
Roman tradition; under God and the divine law the pope was absolute. This Petrine theory of the
papacy, though it ultimately gained acceptance, was a novelty by no means uni-versally admitted in
the eleventh century and sometimes it em-broiled Gregory with his bishops. As the church had kept
alive the conception of public authority in the face of the decentraliz-ing influences of feudalism, so
it was the first power to apply the conception in its own political reconstruction.

It is difficult if not impossible to bring the two sides in the investiture controversy to a clear-cut issue.
The reason for this was that both sides professed to accept the long-established prin-ciple of the two
swords, each supreme in its own province. Yet both sides were obliged to advance arguments which
by implica-tion set it aside. This was true of the imperialists because what

GREGORY VII AND THE PAPALISTS

233

they really desired was the continuation of a state of affairs which, in fact if not in theory, had given
the empire a preponderating voice in papal affairs. Their case was weak theoretically but strong in
respect to precedents, and as they were forced into a defensive position, they were obliged to make
the Gelasian theory the corner stone of their argument for secular independence. The claims of the
church, on the other hand, were virtually unanswer-able in the light of the whole scheme of
accepted Christian values. But the theory could be made good only if the church could as-sume a
position of leadership and direction which it had not had and which must carry it far away from the
admission of co-ordinate authority, under God, to the secular power. Probably neither side intended
to usurp authority that properly belonged to the other. The claims on both sides are hard to evaluate
be-cause in the eleventh century the legal concepts used had no such exact meaning as they came to
have with the development of the Roman and the canon law.

The position taken by Gregory in opposition to Henry IV was a natural, if extreme, development of
the church's admitted juris-diction over questions of morals. In respect to the crime of simony
Gregory proposed to proceed not only against the offend-ing ecclesiastic but directly against the
secular ruler, who was equally guilty. After forbidding the lay investiture of bishops and finding the
emperor contumacious, he undertook to enforce his decree with an excommunication. This in itself
was not a novel proceeding, but to it Gregory added the corollary that an excommunicated king,
being an outcast from the body of Chris-tians, could not retain the services and fealty of his subjects.
He did not claim that oaths could be dissolved by the church at will, but only that it was within its
jurisdiction as a court of con-science when it pronounced that a bad oath was lawfully void. The
ground upon which Gregory defended his action was the right and the duty of a spiritual authority to
exercise moral discipline over every member of a Christian community. He argued, like St. Ambrose,
that a secular ruler is himself a Christian and there-fore, in moral and spiritual matters, subject to the
church. In effect, however, this amounted to the claim that the right to ex-communicate carried with
it the right to depose, of course for adequate cause, and to absolve subjects from their allegiance.
236

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

the tendency of the papacy to assume a relation of feudal suze-rainty toward southern Italy and
other parts of Europe. At a later date, after the reception of Aristotle, the superior importance of
spiritual power would in itself constitute an argument for the dependence of the lower authority
upon it, since Aristotelian-ism conceived it to be a general law of nature that the lower exists for, and
is governed by, the higher.

The derivation of temporal from spiritual authority appears to have been first definitely maintained
by Honorius of Augsburg in his Summa gloria, which was written about 1123. His principal proof was
drawn from an interpretation of Jewish history, namely, that there was no royal power until Saul was
crowned, that Saul was anointed by Samuel who was a priest, the Jews having been governed by
priests from the time of Moses. In a similar fashion he argued that Christ instituted the priestly
power in the church and that there was no Christian king until the conversion of Con-stantine. It was
the church, therefore, which instituted Christian kingship to protect it from its enemies. Coupled with
this theory was an interpretation (or rather a misinterpretation) of the Dona-tion of Constantine as a
surrender of all political power to the pope. According to Honorius the emperors from Constantine
on held all their imperial authority by papal concession. In line with this contention he held that
emperors ought to be chosen by the pope, with the consent of the princes.

But having been radical in principle, Honorius was willing to be conservative in application, for he
concluded that, in strictly secular matters, kings should be honored and obeyed even by priests. Even
thinkers who were logically cutting the ground from under the old doctrine of the two swords were
not willing to abolish it root and branch. Honorius showed also an uncertainty of juristic analysis. His
argument from the Donation of Constan-

See Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. IV, Part iii, ch. 4. M.G.H., Libelli de lite, Vol. III, pp. 3 ff. See Carlyle, op. cit.,
Vol. , pp. 286 ff.

IV The Donation was forged in the papal chancellery some time in the third quarter of the eighth
century, at and its purpose was apparently to sup-port the papal claims laims in Italy at that time.
Honorius's Honoris interpretation of it as applying to the whole imperial power was novel and must
have been either a misunderstanding of its intent or a deliberate extension of ite meaning, as this
had previously been understood. See Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. II, p. 586; Carlyle, op. cit., Vol.
IV, p. 289.

HENRY IV AND THE IMPERIALISTS

tine was in the highest degree perilous, for if the pope's authority were delegated, it would seem
that the emperor might resume what he had granted. Presumably Honorius thought of Constan-tine
as merely recognizing a right inherent in the church under a Christian dispensation. A stronger
position was taken by John of Salisbury in his Policraticus some thirty years later. John depended
upon the inherent superiority of spiritual power to prove that both swords belong of right to the
church and that the church conferred the power of coercion on the prince.

For every office existing under, and concerned with the execution of, the sacred laws is really a
religious office, but that is inferior which con-sists in punishing crimes, and which therefore seems to
be typified in the person of the hangman.10

Hence John could defend the power of deposition by quoting the Digest to the effect that "he who
can lawfully bestow can law-fully take away." The secular ruler has a ius utendi but not strictly
ownership. It was true, of course, that John did not re-gard this theory as derogating from the worth
of political power in its proper employment or from the sanctity of the political office.

HENRY IV AND THE IMPERIALISTS

The position taken by the imperialist parties to the investiture controversy was, on the whole, more
defensive than that of the papalists. Essentially they were arguing for what had been the status quo,
in which the choice of bishops, and also papal elections, had been largely subject to imperial
influence. They could appeal, against the practically novel claim of ecclesiastical independence, to
the generally admitted theory of two independent spheres of authority. The corner stone of the
imperial position, therefore, was the accepted doctrine that all power is of God, the emperor's as
well as the pope's. This was the note struck by Henry himself in the letter which he addressed to
Gregory in March, 1076.11 Since his power was derived from God directly and not through the
church, he was responsible for its exercise solely to God. Hence he was to be judged by God alone
and could not be de-posed, unless for heresy.

10 Policraticus, 4, 3; Dickinson's trans., p. 9. 11 [Link]., Constitutiones, Vol. I, No. 62.

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

You have laid hands upon me also who, though unworthy among Chris-tians, am anointed to
kingship, and who, as the tradition of the Holy Fathers teaches, am to be judged by God alone and
not to be deposed for any crime, unless I should wander from the faith, which God forbid.

The "tradition of the Holy Fathers" upon which Henry de-pended was undoubtedly in the main the
strong statements of Gregory the Great upon the duty of passive obedience. This conception of the
indefeasibility of royal authority had never died out. Hincmar of Rheims had commented in the ninth
century on the opinion, which he says was held by certain scholars, that kings are "subject to the
laws and judgments of no one except God alone," though he qualified the view as being "full of the
spirit of the Devil." From the eleventh century on this theory was an important part of the imperialist
position. It fitted well, of course, with the Gelasian theory that the two swords can never be united in
the same hands. What God has given none but God can take away. The argument was undoubtedly
strong for it turned the tables on the papal party of reform. The head and front of Gregory's offense,
as Henry presented it, was precisely that he had attempted to wield both powers and so had
conspired against the divinely appointed order of human society. To con-found spirituals and
temporals would defeat the very purpose which formed the chief moral defense for Gregory's action.
Under a pretense of making the church independent he would have en-tangled it still further in
secular affairs. Such an argument might well appeal to the more moderate of Gregory's followers.
More-over, Henry's position provided the proper theological answer to be given in all cases where
undue clerical ambition could be al-leged, namely, the sanctity of secular authority itself. In its own
province, therefore, political power could claim to be what King James called "free monarchy." It was
this fact which made the divine right of the king a standard argument under all political
circumstances which could be construed to threaten ecclesiastical interference.

The theological defense of the emperor, though repeated times without number, did not offer much
chance for logical develop-

13 Quoted by Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 186, n. 1. 18 Quoted by Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 278, n. 2;
see also Vol. III, Part II, ch. 4.

HENRY IV AND THE IMPERIALISTS 239

ment. This was not true, however, of the juristic arguments, and in the long run the lawyers were the
ablest and most effective de-fenders of secular power. In the beginning, however, this form of
argumentation was not so well developed as in later contro-versies, such as that between Boniface
VIII and Philip the Fair of France. Nevertheless, there were interesting beginnings. The earliest of
these was the Defensio Henrici IV regis 14 (1084) of Peter Crassus, who is said to have been a teacher
of Roman law at Ravenna. Peter professed to argue the case between Henry and Gregory on legal
grounds. The gist of his argument lay in his insistence upon the indefeasibility of the right of
hereditary suc-cession. He urged that the pope or Henry's rebellious subjects had no more right to
interfere with his possession of his kingdom, which he had received as heir to his father and his
grandfather, than they had to take away any person's private property. For this theory Peter claimed
the authority of Roman law as well as of divine law and ius gentium. This argument bore no relation
to the constitutional theory of imperial authority in the Roman law, as stated by the lawyers either of
antiquity or of the Middle Ages, and it was definitely inappropriate to an elective monarch. Peter's
theory suggested, however, the characteristic connection of divine right with indefeasible hereditary
right. On the whole the theory was less important for its intrinsic merits than for its indication of a
tendency to support the secular power by using legal conceptions.

A more important form of the anti-papal argument is to be found in the York Tracts," produced about
1100 in the contro-versy over investiture between Anselm and Henry I of England. On the issue of
investiture the author's argument is hard to evalu-ate. He asserted sweepingly that the authority of a
king is of a higher kind than that of a bishop, that the king ought to rule over bishops, and that he is
competent to call a council of the church and to preside over it. Yet at the same time he denied the
king's right to invest bishops with their spiritual authority. Moré inter-esting, and probably more
important, was this author's attack

14 M.G.H., Libelli de lite, Vol. I, pp. 432 f. See Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. IV, pp. 222 ff. 1 M.G.H., Labelli de
lite, Vol. III, pp. 642 ff., especially Tract IV. See Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. IV, pp. 273 f.
240

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

upon the sovereign authority which Gregory had claimed to exer-cise in the church, since a critical
examination of the nature of spir-itual authority, and of the pope's share in it, was to form an im-
portant part of the later debates. In an earlier tract, written in defense of the deposed Archbishop of
Rouen, he flatly denied the right of the pope to discipline other bishops, arguing that in spirit-ual
matters all bishops are equal, that all enjoy the same author-ity from God, and are all equally exempt
from judgment save by God. The actual power wielded by the Bishop of Rome he called usurpation
and explained it as an historical accident depending on the fact that Rome had been the capital of
the empire. In yet another of the tracts he asserted that obedience was owed not to Rome but solely
to the church; "only the elect and the sons of God can rightly be called the Church of God." The York
Tracts appear to contain the germ of the argument which was elaborated two centuries later by
Marsilio of Padua in the De-fensor pacis, where it formed an important part of a tendency to
construe spiritual authority not as a power but as a right to teach and preach. The more completely
spiritual authority could be given exclusively an other-worldly significance, the more com-pletely it
must leave secular authority untrammeled in the fields. of law and politics, however great its moral
value might be held to be. The argument of the York Tracts was apparently the first somewhat
uncertain step on this line of argument.

The controversy, even in the eleventh century, tended to en-courage an examination of the
foundation of secular authority too. The problem was clearly involved in Gregory's attempt to depose
the emperor. As this called out the claim of indefeasible right from the emperor's defenders, so it
produced the argument on the papal side that his authority is conditional and that accord-ingly his
subjects' obligations are less than absolute. The con-ditional or contractual nature of political
obligation was implied not only by the practice of feudalism but was suggested also in the ancient
tradition transmitted by the Fathers of the church, es-pecially by the principle that law and
government ought always to be contributory to justice. There is, therefore, a fundamental difference
between a true king and a tyrant, which implies that there are conditions under which it is justihable
to resist a tyrant. Tract III. 17 Tract VI.

HENRY IV AND THE IMPERIALISTS

241

In the eleventh century this position was most clearly stated by Manegold of Lautenbach, and in the
twelfth by John of Salis-bury, who developed in the eighth book of his Policraticus the re-volting
theory of tyrannicide. In neither case does the argument imply a low estimate of political authority;
rather the reverse, since the evil of tyranny is greater just in proportion as true king-ship is more
august. But the essence of kingship is the office and not the person; hence the individual's right to
the office cannot be indefeasible. Manegold used this principle to show that deposi-tion could be
justified when a king has destroyed those goods which the office was instituted to preserve. He thus
arrived at a comparatively definite theory of contract (pactum) between the king and his people.

No man can make himself emperor or king; a people sets a man over it to the end that he may rule
justly, giving to every man his own, aiding good men and coercing bad, in short, that he may give
justice to all men. If then he violates the agreement according to which he was chosen, disturbing
and confounding the very things which he was meant to put in order, reason dictates that he
absolves the people from their obedience, especially when he has himself first broken the faith
which bound him and the people together."

A people's allegiance to its ruler is therefore a pledge to support him in his lawful undertakings and is
ipso facto void in the case of a tyrant. So far as the pope's power to depose a king was concerned,
Manegold conceived this as the right of a court of conscience to pronounce upon the reality of a fait
accompli; Gregory's action was defended on the ground that he had "pub-licly annulled what was
inherently invalid." The theory that the king stands in a contractual relation to his people in no way
con-tradicted the view that the kingly office itself was of divine origin.
Manegold's theory of a contract was not, therefore, an out-and-out defense of a papal right of
deposition. In fact, the de-pendence of the royal power upon the people could, with equal propriety,
be construed as implying its independence of the church. This position had the great advantage of
agreeing with the con-stitutional theory of Roman law, as well as with the imperialist

18 Ad Gebehardum (written between 1080 and 1085), M.G.H., Libelli de lite, Vol. I, pp. 500 ff.; see
Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 160 ff. 10 Quoted by Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 164, n. 1.
242

THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

emphasis upon the distinction of the two swords. Its development led to a more critical examination
of the historical precedents, such as the deposition of the Merovingian dynasty and the crown-ing of
Pippin, alleged in favor of the Pope's power to depose.20 The conclusion drawn was that the
deposition and the choice of a new king were done "by the common suffrage of the princes," and
merely with the approval of the pope. The position thus taken was historically sound and pierced a
weak spot in Gregory's argument. It was especially interesting, moreover, in illustrating a marshalling
of secular history in defense of the emperor's in-dependence, and in claiming the decision of secular
princes as a sufficient constitutional authority for the deposition or coronation of a king.

The controversy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries served to show the instability and vagueness
of the relation between the temporal and spiritual powers in the Gelasian tradition. The two sides
stressed different aspects of the tradition, both of which were equally well established. The papalists
emphasized the moral superiority of the spiritual power and the imperialists the in-dependence of
the two powers from one another. Both positions continued to be an intrinsic part of the argument
as the debate was continued into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The earlier controversy
suggested also the lines that would be followed as the argument on either side was developed. It
needed only that more definite juristic and constitutional ideas should prevail in order that the
church's claim of moral superiority should be transformed into a claim of legal suzerainty. And this
position had only to be stated to call out a counter argument designed to limit spiritual duties to
non-coercive instruction and exhortation. On the side of the temporal power also two developing
lines of argument were suggested, that which stressed the responsibility of secular rulers directly to
God with no earthly intermediary, and that which stressed the right of secular society, under God, to
provide for its own government.

20 See especially the tract De unitate ecclesiae conservanda written by an unknown author between
1090 and 1093. The tract was an answer to Gregory's second letter to Hermann of Metz, mentioned
above. M.G.H. Libelli de lite, Vol. II, pp. 173 ff. See Carlyle, op. cit., Vol. IV, pp. 242 ff.