The Empire and the Church
Converging interests
In order to face down the nobles' power and their readiness to challenge royal control, Germanic sovereigns sought from the outset to secure the support of the Roman Church. This alliance was a founding principle of the monarchy and arose both from a Church commitment and from the monarchs' political choice. Intent on countering the princes' power and shore up a royal power that, though unsteady guaranteed the protection vouchsafed clerics and the church, those same clerics, and foremost among them the bishops, chose at the Council of Hohenaltheim[1] (916) massively to support the anointed monarch. The church was thereby making a powerful case ruling rebellions against the king to be alike to rebellions « against the fatherland and the faith »
with lasting consequences. For their part the monarchs, faced with the weakness of state institutions and the want of a royal administration, relied on the church and its managerial staff thus resuming, yet again, a Carolingian tradition.
This decision to turn the Church into a pillar of royal power was reinforced by Otto I and his successors creating an informal but efficient system[2], which made the bishops, enlisted in the administration and government of the Empire, its key mechanism. Thanks to the wholesale endowment of estates, rights, offices and responsibilities that came on top of the diocesan estates and resources proper, the bishops frequently found themselves in control of considerable holdings. These endowments could amount to the award of a whole county, indeed, starting with the Staufer[3], of duchies: in 1180, the archbishop of Cologne was awarded Westphalia along with the title of duke, as had the bishop of Wurzburg earlier, in 1168. Thus were prelates gradually set at the head of vast holdings that they managed in the name of the king, by delegation of royal authority. They made up the majority of the princes. At the turn of the 13th century the royal diet numbered fifteen secular royal vassals versus some 80 ecclesiastical princes, representing the greater part of the realm.
The counterpart to this open-handed policy towards the bishops was the sovereign's systematic intervention in episcopal elections. With the Ottonians came a de facto control of appointments by the royal power, which was recognised by a papacy ill-equipped to counter a trend the kingdom's prelates supported. The nucleus of this network was the royal chapel (hofkapelle), a prime recruiting ground for bishops, all trained at court and connected to the royal entourage.
The imperial dimension of royal power
This closeness with the Church was fostered by the nature of royal power : a temporal government sanctified by coronation rites and by the twofold dimension of a sovereign power both royal and imperial. The imperial dimension justified the royal power's claims to rule the church, starting with its representatives within its kingdom, and to use the bishops as auxiliaries of a power that afforded itself two dimensions : spiritual and temporal.
The 962 imperial coronation in Rome was all at once an attainment, the recognition of the Saxon dynasty that had ruled the Germanic realm since 919, and of the political program of restauratio romani imperii, a renaissance of Latin Christianity as a sovereign political power entertained both in pontifical circles and in the monarch's entourage. The thinking around the imperial dimension of power came in direct reference to the universality and grandeur of the Christian Roman emperors of the Late Roman Empire, of which Constantine[4] was the ultimate model. The 962 imperial coronation reiterated also and above all else the restoration of Charlemagne's Frankish empire. This Carolingian reference is omnipresent in Germanic kingship; anointed and crowned at Aachen, the king received the so-called crown of Charlemagne which was also used for the imperial coronation. The elevation of Charlemagne's relics, along with his solemn canonisation under Fredéric I[5] in 1165 was another link in the chain intended to exalt kingship and reinforce the sacred nature of a crowned king.
While Germanic sovereigns were like other sovereigns of their times called to exercise leadership in the realm's church, the imperial dimension of their power from 962 onwards imposed on them much broader responsibilities. Both king and priest – rex et sacerdos – the emperor was called to defend Christendom while keeping a hand in its management. Such Western conception of the emperor's power arose from an interpretation by Pope Gelasius I (492-496). Against the Byzantine emperors' will to govern the Church on the basis of the twin nature of a power both temporal and divine, he instituted, in a famous letter to Basileus Anastase[6], the « theory of the two swords »
that stated the respective roles of the pope and the emperor. Yet the prince's power was not exclusively temporal: he was duty-bound, by means of his temporal power (the “sword”), to defend and direct the “Christian people”. An earthly translation of divine monarchy, the imperial status thus took on a universal dimension; it turned the prince into a sacred figure, distinct from mere lay people as attested by the “anointment and coronation” rites. On the strength of this office, Germanic sovereigns would have little qualms in intervening in the internal affairs of the church. This system peaked around the year 1000 when Otton III[7] moved to Rome with his friend and collaborator Gerbert of Aurillac; making him pope under the name of Sylvester II[8], he was extending imperial church practices to the whole of Christendom.
This imperial conception of power, reinforced by Germanic royal power practices brought about tensions with the Papacy. Now, since the 10th century a strong internal renewal movement was bestirring the church; started in the monasteries it reached the papacy in the 11th century and brought the conflict to a head. It aspired to free the church from temporal shackles in order to assert the universalist dimension of its own authority beyond and above that of the kings. The situation was compounded by the location of the States of the Church at once within and without the empire in the image of Rome, capital of Christendom as well as of the emperors who never failed to proclaim themselves « kings of the Romans »
. For the papacy, the fight against imperial power then became a matter crucial to its independence and the supremacy it aimed to assert over the kingdoms of Latin Christendom. The conflict also had an immediate impact on the nature of royal power. At bishopric level, the blurring between the nature of royal power and that of imperial power resulted in the confusion between the bishop's religious and political missions as the agent both of royal power (regnum) and of the universal Church (sacerdotum). As the Church asserted itself, as the powerful reforming movement and desire to shake off political constraints grew, the bishops found themselves torn between their allegiance to the king and their duties towards the papacy.
