Hildebrand, rising through the ranks of the Roman Church, had certainly not hesitated to view its sway as universal in its scope. Earnest, austere and implacable of purpose, he was a man perfectly suited to its ever more soaring spirit of ambition. By 1073, he had emerged as the most formidable agent of a papacy primed to claim a supreme authority over the entire Christian people. There had been no thought that year, when the throne of Saint Peter became vacant, of waiting for Henry III’s son, the young and headstrong Henry IV, to appoint a new pope. ‘Hildebrand for bishop!’5 the crowds had roared. Swept up onto their shoulders, the people’s choice had been carried to his enthronement in the Lateran, an ancient palace donated to the bishop of Rome centuries previously by Constantine. As a signal of his ambition, Hildebrand took the name of the Roman aristocrat who had famously devoted his life to preparing the Church for the end of days – the seventh pope to bear it. ‘He was a man on whom the spirit of the first Gregory truly rested.’6
In truth, though, Gregory VII’s ambitions for the papacy were of a momentously original order. For all that his predecessors had consistently laid claim to a position of leadership among the Christian people, none had ever proclaimed it so baldly or forcefully. Among the great accretion of documents stored in musty papal libraries – the canons of church councils, the proclamations of successive popes – there were numerous precedents suited to Gregory’s needs; and so he duly made sure to harvest them. Where necessary, though, he was more than ready to introduce innovations of his own. That the pope alone had a licence to be called ‘Universal’; to place inferiors in judgement over their superiors; to release those who had sworn obedience to a lord from their oaths: here were prerogatives to set the whole world on its head. Even before becoming Pope, Gregory had been eager to put them into practice. Far from condemning the militants in Milan, he had given them his personal blessing. It was no sin, Gregory believed, to amplify moral exhortation by threatening those who ignored it with violence. The heir of Saint Peter should not hesitate to draw on the support of the militant faithful. The very future of the Christian people was at stake. The proofs of this were manifest. An angel, so one of Gregory’s supporters reported, had appeared before the full view of a church as a priest was celebrating the eucharist, and begun scrubbing him down. The water had turned black. Finally, the angel had tipped the filthy contents of the bucket over the priest’s head. The priest, a man of hitherto spotless reputation, had broken down in tears, and confessed to the congregation that only the previous night he had slept with a servant girl. Gregory, no less than the angel, felt himself called to a mighty labour of cleaning. The clergy were leprous. Only he, the heir of Saint Peter, could bring them to purity. Priests had to be virginal, like monks. ‘To pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’:7 such was Gregory’s mission.
Never before had a pope made the foundations of the Christian world tremor so palpably. The excitement of Gregory’s followers was outweighed by the alarm of his opponents. Gerard was far from alone in feeling disoriented. Heresy seemed to have captured the commanding heights of the Church. The hierarchies on which bishops had always depended for their authority appeared under attack from the very man who stood at their head. Priests who polluted themselves by surrendering to their lusts were not the only objects of Gregory’s reforming zeal. Ramihrd, refusing to celebrate the eucharist with Gerard, had done so on a very particular basis. The bishop of Cambrai, following his election to the post in June 1076, had travelled to the German court. There, in obedience to venerable custom, he had sworn an oath of loyalty to Henry IV. The king, in return, had presented him with a shepherd’s crook, and a ring: the symbol of marriage. That bishops in lands ruled by the emperor might owe their investiture to him had long been taken for granted. Not by Gregory, though. When Ramihrd refused to acknowledge Gerard as a priest, he had done so in direct obedience to a decree of the Roman Church. Issued only the year before, it had formally prohibited ‘the King’s right to confer bishoprics’.8 A momentous step: for this – prohibiting kings from poking their noses into the business of the Church – had struck at the very heart of how the world was ordered.
Which was, of course, precisely why Gregory had sponsored it. Defilement came in many forms. A bishop who owed his investiture to a king was no less leprous than a priest who slept with a servant girl. To whore after baubles, and estates, and offices was to betray the King of Heaven. The scale of the change that Gregory was forcing on the Latin West could be measured by the fact that even reformers like him, only three decades previously, had depended on Henry III to secure them the papacy. That emperors had been hailed as sanctissimus, ‘most holy’, and that imperial bishops had long been administering royal fiefdoms: none of this mattered to him. For too long the rival dimensions of earthly appetites and commitment to Christ, of corruption and purity, of saecularia and religio, had been intermixed. Such pollution could not be permitted to continue. Bishops were servants of God alone, or they were nothing. Church had to be freed from state.
‘The Pope is permitted to depose emperors.’ This proposition, one of a number of theses on papal authority drawn up for Gregory’s private use in March 1075, had shown him more than braced for the inevitable blow-back. No pope before had ever claimed such a licence; but neither, of course, had any pope dared to challenge imperial authority with such unapologetic directness. Gregory, by laying claim to the sole leadership of the Christian people, and trampling down long-standing royal prerogatives, was offending Henry IV grievously. Heir to a long line of emperors who had never hesitated to depose troublesome popes, the young king acted with the self-assurance of a man supremely confident that both right and tradition were on his side. Early in 1076, when he summoned a conference of imperial bishops to the German city of Worms, the assembled clerics knew exactly what was expected of them. The election of Hildebrand, so they ruled, had been invalid. No sooner had this decision been reached than Henry’s scribes were reaching for their quills. ‘Let another sit upon Saint Peter’s throne.’ The message to Gregory in Rome could not have been blunter. ‘Step down, step down!’
But Gregory also had a talent for bluntness. Brought the command to abdicate, he not only refused, but promptly raised the stakes. Speaking from the Lateran, he declared that Henry was ‘bound with the chain of anathema’9 and excommunicated from the Church. His subjects were absolved of all their oaths of loyalty to him. Henry himself, as a tyrant and an enemy of God, was deposed. The impact of this pronouncement proved devastating. Henry’s authority went into meltdown. Numerous of his princely vassals, hungry for the opportunity that his excommunication had given them, set to dismembering his kingdom. By the end of the year, Henry found himself cornered. To such straits was his authority reduced that he settled on a desperate gambit. Crossing the Alps in the dead of winter, he headed for Canossa, a castle in the northern Apennines where he knew that Gregory was staying. For three days, ‘barefoot, and clad in wool’,10 the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne stood shivering before the gates of the castle’s innermost wall. Finally, ordering the gates unbarred, and summoning Henry into his presence, Gregory absolved the penitent with a kiss. ‘The King of Rome, rather than being honoured as a universal monarch, had been treated instead as merely a human being – a creature moulded out of clay.’11