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Investiture: Papal Investiture of Secular Rulers Prior to and during the Investiture Contest

We begin in the eleventh century. This is the most geographically broad chapter, travelling from Poland (c.991) to the Reform papacy’s relationships with the kingdoms of Aragon, Hungary, the Kievan Rus’, and Croatia and Dalmatia, and the counties and duchies of Sicily, Melgueil, Barcelona, and Cerdanya. Then the limited evidence for papal claims to England, Brittany, Denmark, Zeta, Iberia, Provence, and Besalú is reviewed. Because of the very wide geographical range, only a limited historiographical overview of each individual polity is practicable. Against previous attempts to fit all these relationships into clearly defined categories (for example, Sicily as fully owned by the papacy and granted to its Norman rulers as a fief; Aragon as under the protection of St Peter and not owned by the pope), I suggest that there was little distinction in the cloudy discourse of the day between the pope as a beneficent spiritual master—mediating God’s approval—and the pope as a temporal overlord.

Then the Investiture Contest and the Concordat of Worms (1122) forced popes and rulers across Europe to consider what the words they used to describe their relationships actually meant. In the eleventh century, the language used by popes and kings to describe their relationships was the same as the language of lay investiture—the terms kings used to appoint bishops in their realms. When, in the early twelfth century, the debates around lay investiture established that a king could only give bishops their regalia—land and rights which came from the king—secular rulers ceased to describe themselves as ‘invested’ by the pope or ‘receiving’ their kingdom ‘from the hand’ of the pope. This was because, in the twelfth century, such language could imply that the pope was the ultimate owner of their kingdom. Most kings preferred to see the pope as the granter of spiritual approval only.¹ Consequently this chapter is about investiture, and the changing conceptions of investiture across the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

Before ‘Reform’: Poland and Hungary

But first we must deal with the year 1000. There were two events, around the turn of the first millennium, which have given rise to claims that the pope became overlord of two eastern European realms: the coronation of St Stephen as the first king of Hungary (c.1001); and an account in a letter fragment known as Dagome iudex, apparently originating from Poland (c.991). Neither really tells us very much.

Stephen’s coronation is entirely mediated through later texts. The most famous text is a letter, seemingly of Pope Sylvester II, to King Stephen approving the king’s coronation and telling the king that Sylvester has granted him a crown and the royal title. From this an entire story can be written, a story of Hungary as the continuous papal fief. It begins with the pope raising Stephen to kingship in c.1001; then Pope Gregory VII turned against King Solomon in 1074. In the later thirteenth century, during a civil war, the popes then created a new Hungarian royal family by their authority as feudal overlords.² We see in this story not merely a continuous relationship but a ‘real’ feudal relationship: the pope could confiscate and redistribute his fief—the kingdom of Hungary—when he chose.

The story is mostly wrong, and the worst part is the first. The letter of Pope Sylvester—known either by its incipit Legati nobilitatis or as the ‘Sylvester-Bull’ (J³ 8467)—is a seventeenth-century forgery.³ According to J³ 8467 Stephen ‘offered’ his kingdom to the pope and in return Sylvester granted Stephen ‘the royal name and diadem’ and placed Hungary under the protection of St Peter. This story is mostly taken from the early twelfth century Vita written by Hartvic.⁴ It is still not believable, however. Hartvic’s main source, the late-eleventh-century Vita Maior of King Stephen, said only that Sylvester sent a papal blessing and letters.⁵ Thietmar of Merseburg, a contemporary writer, claimed that it was the ‘favour and urging’ of Emperor Otto III—not Pope Sylvester—that elevated Stephen to kingship.⁶ Clever arguments can, and have, been made for why Sylvester might have played a role anyway—the pope and emperor were together at the suspected time Stephen’s envoy met them—but fundamentally we are left with a lot of noise.⁷

Of course, the point should be made that, even if Sylvester had sent Stephen a crown and granted him the royal title, this might not have implied any deeper relationship. Bluntly: if the pope makes a king, that does not mean that he is henceforth the master of that king, as I suggested in several cases mentioned in the introduction. In this case, however, even what role Sylvester played in Stephen’s coronation is uncertain.

Moving on to Dagome Iudex. Dagome Iudex is a précis of a letter, believed to have been sent by Duke Mieszko of Poland to Pope John XV around 991. The précis was included in the Collection of Canons of Cardinal Deusdedit in c.1083–7.⁸ Dagome Iudex states that one ‘Judge Dagome’, his wife, Oda, and their two children, Mieszko and Lambert, gave (confero) their territory (the ‘city of Schinesghe’ and its appurtenances) to St Peter. ‘Judge Dagome’ has normally been assumed to be Duke Mieszko, although occasionally alternatives have been suggested—certainly Mieszko was married to Oda.⁹ Various proposals have also been put forward for why Mieszko sought a relationship with Rome.¹⁰ These arguments need not detain us for, as with the coronation of Stephen of Hungary, there is little we can build on the basis of Dagome Iudex.

Mieszko of Poland ‘gave’ his territory to St Peter. What he thought that meant is unknowable; certainly there are no specific duties outlined in the summary of his grant which has come down to us. It has been suggested that Mieszko’s grant obliged him and his successors to pay a cash tribute to the pope, akin to the census which kings under papal overlordship and protection would later pay.¹¹ However, Dagome Iudex—the summary of Mieszko’s grant—makes no mention of any kind of tribute. There are two eleventh-century references to the kings of Poland paying tribute to the pope: in c.1008/9 Bruno of Querfurt told Emperor Henry II that Bolesław Chrobry, Mieszko’s son and successor, claimed to be a tributary (tributarius) of St Peter. Thietmar of Merseburg recorded that Bolesław sent a letter to the pope in 1013, complaining that Henry II was preventing the King of Poland from paying the ‘promised census’ (promissum censum) to St Peter.¹² It is possible that these references are linked to the grant described in Dagome Iudex, although the actual document made no mention of tribute. However, the tributes mentioned in the early eleventh century were more likely intermittent gifts than formal, annual taxation. The line between obligatory payment and voluntary gift is a blurred one and (while we cannot be certain) the most likely option is that the Polish rulers liked to send gifts or alms to the pope whenever they could, as many of the Anglo-Saxon rulers of England did.¹³ The gifts from the Anglo-Saxon kings eventually morphed into a semi-obligatory annual payment known as Peter’s Pence. By the thirteenth century, Poland was also giving an annual payment to the pope under the name of Peter’s Pence. One of the stories circulating in Poland was that this census was not a sign of obedience or dependence, but a gift to pay for the lighting in St Peter’s.¹⁴ The English Peter’s Pence has an almost identical origin story: paying for the lights in St Peter’s.¹⁵ Generous gifts given to Roman churches by royal patrons could become institutionalized into recurring payments at fixed frequencies, but they did not necessarily start out that way.

We are left with very little. The only certainty is that in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, the newly Christianized Eastern European monarchies saw an advantage in appealing to the pope. The evidence does not allow us to categorize these relationships and I suspect doing so would be pointless anyway. As we shall now see, the evidence from the second half of the eleventh century suggests that relationships between rulers and popes did not distinguish between ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal’ aspects. A king might recognize the pope as his superior. He might even say that he received his kingdom from the pope. But such a sentiment did not necessarily mean—in the king’s eyes—that the pope could take his kingdom away from him; it did not mean that the pope was the real owner of the kingdom; it simply meant that all things came ultimately from God.

In the second half of the eleventh century a number of monarchs sought papal legitimation for one reason or another. Rudolf Schieffer pointed out that Gregory VII (r.1073–85) was mainly responding to requests from rulers who sought papal support to boost their legitimacy.¹⁶ The two most important were the new kings of Aragon, in Spain, and the Norman rulers of southern Italy and Sicily. The words with which these rulers described their relationships with the pope were similar to the words used to describe the appointment of bishops by kings: the Norman rulers were ‘invested’ by the pope, as bishops were ‘invested’ by kings; the Aragonese kings received their kingdom ‘from the hand’ of the pope, as bishops received their office ‘from the hand’ of the king. Such language can also be found in Pope Gregory VII’s relationships with other rulers, such as the prince of the Rus’.

The Investiture Contest did not end royal investiture of bishops. It did, however, clarify that a king could only invest a bishop with the regalia—the properties, rights and privileges which previous kings had given to the bishopric. The bishop’s sacred office could not be given by a secular ruler. In turn, kings ceased to be invested by the pope. In the aftermath of the Investiture Contest, investiture now meant that one person actually gave land or rights to another. The giver possessed what was given. The rex gave the regalia (that which pertained to the king). Hence, if a king was invested by the pope, it meant that the pope was the real holder of the kingdom. Prior to the Investiture Contest, this had not necessarily been the case. Now, after the Concordat of Worms in 1122 and the other agreements which ended the dispute, investiture meant that the pope was the temporal master of any king he invested. This was not something kings desired.

Aragon

There is some debate about precisely when the Aragonese monarchs sought to establish a bond with the Roman papacy. The best answer is between 1068 and 1089. In 1068 King Sancho of Aragon went on a pilgrimage to Rome and in 1088–9 Sancho declared that he would pay an annual census to the pope. What this relationship meant is equally vexed. Traditional historiography had seen it as temporal and feudal: the pope become the overlord of the kingdom.¹⁷ More recent scholarship—primarily that of Johannes Fried—has argued that Aragon was under the protection of the Holy See.¹⁸ But, for the eleventh century, these typologies put the cart before the horse. No one was asking what these relationships meant yet.

The Kingdom of Aragon was founded by Ramiro I, son of Sancho III of Navarre. The King of Navarre granted the land of Aragon to Ramiro and hence Ramiro became its first king. Upon Ramiro’s death in 1063, Aragon passed to his son, Sancho I (r.1063–94). He was then succeeded in turn by his three sons: Peter I, Alfonso I, and Ramiro II. To see what the papal–Aragonese relationship looked like in the second half of the eleventh century, we must go through the few surviving documents.

A document issued by Sancho in February 1068 states that it was made ‘when I [Sancho] went to Rome’.¹⁹ This is the only contemporary evidence we have for what has been claimed as the beginning of Aragon’s centuries-long relationship with Rome. However, in 1088/9 Sancho wrote a letter to Pope Urban II which mentioned his pilgrimage of twenty years before: the king had visited the ‘threshold of St Peter’ and ‘handed myself and my kingdom into the power of God and him [St Peter] always having it in mind that I should serve them’.²⁰ We cannot know precisely what the results of Sancho’s pilgrimage were, but the most plausible possibility is a change in the dominant liturgy used in the kingdom. The (admittedly fourteenth-century) Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña was very specific: the Roman rite replaced the Mozarabic rite in the royal abbey of San Juan on 22 March 1071 (between three and six o’clock).²¹

Six months or so after this change (October 1071) Pope Alexander II wrote to the abbot of San Juan. Alexander confirmed to the abbot that his monastery was under the tutelage and patronage of the Holy Roman Church in return for an annual census payment from the monastery to Rome.²² The letter went on to praise King Sancho’s ‘conver[sion] to the true and perfect faith’ and claimed that Sancho had ‘committed and subjected himself to the apostolic dignity’. As well as submitting himself to the apostolic dignity, Sancho had apparently arranged the return to the Roman Church of monasteries which had hitherto been alienated from it.

What did this mean? It seems reasonable to link Sancho’s ‘conversion’ to the adoption of the Roman liturgy in Aragon, and to link this adoption to Sancho’s pilgrimage three years before. The monasteries that were ‘alienated’ from the Roman Church might refer to all churches which had previously celebrated the Mozarabic rite, or more specifically to the three Aragonese monasteries which received papal privileges in 1071. The reference to Sancho ‘subjecting himself to the apostolic dignity’ is probably an explicit reference to the king’s pilgrimage. The History of Compostela, an early-twelfth-century chronicle from northern Spain, described confratres who had ‘once gone to St James’ (presumably on pilgrimage) and ‘subjugated themselves to the apostle’.²³ Such language—subjecting oneself, subjugating oneself—seems to have been one way of expressing the spiritual relationship between a pilgrim and the object of their pilgrimage.

Sancho’s claim that he wished to ‘serve’ St Peter when he undertook his 1068 pilgrimage may also be drawn from contemporary language used for the relationship between a pilgrim and his saint. Carl Erdmann—seeing through feudal spectacles—thought that this referred to military service, and hence indicated a traditional feudal relationship where a vassal owed military service in return for land given to him by a lord.²⁴ There is no reason to think this. Nikolas Jaspert, in his study of eleventh-century pilgrimages from Catalonia, provides many examples of pilgrims to the Holy Land, Rome, or Compostela describing themselves as ‘going in the service of God’ or ‘in the service of our lord Jesus Christ and St James the apostle’ and so on.²⁵ Sancho’s service was what he owed to the Saint whose tomb he had visited.

Royal pilgrimages to Rome were not unusual in the eleventh century. The king of Scotland known to posterity as Macbeth visited Rome in 1050, according to the chronicler Marianus Scotus.²⁶ Earl Thorfinn of Orkney also apparently travelled to the Eternal City at that time, or so says the Orkneyinga Saga.²⁷ Macbeth’s pilgrimage—and probably all royal pilgrimages to Rome—were accompanied by liberal distributions of alms and gifts.²⁸

There is one additional document of this period which we have to take into account: a letter of Pope Gregory VII to Bishop Garcia of Jaca (in Aragon), dating from either 1077 or 1084–5.²⁹ The general content of the letter need not concern us here, but the pope mentioned at one point that Ramiro of Aragon—King Sancho’s father—had ‘made himself and his kingdom tributary (tributarium) to the blessed holder of the Keys [St Peter]’. What are we to make of this? First, a number of historians have doubted the authenticity of the letter, including the great Aragonese historian Antonio Durán Gudiol.³⁰ The letter speaks of Ramiro—who died in 1063—as still being alive, and credits him with introducing the Roman Rite to Aragon. Actually, as we have seen, it was his son, Sancho, who did that.

Even if one accepts the authenticity of the letter, the description of the Aragonese king as a tributary to St Peter might not be all it seems. One possibility is that this refers to the large donation which Ramiro and Sancho made to the cathedral of St Peter in Jaca in 1063, and hence has nothing to do with Rome or the pope.³¹ Charles Bishko thought being tributary might refer to the census paid from 1071 by the royal monasteries of San Juan de la Peña, St Peter of Loarre and St Victorian in return for papal protection.³² Any of these could be the case. My own favoured solution, however, is slightly different. It is possible that the ‘tribute’ which made the king a ‘tributary’ was gifts or alms, as in the case of early-eleventh-century Poland. It is overwhelmingly likely that Sancho distributed both when he visited Rome in 1068. In modern parlance, a tributary is subject to or lesser than the person who receives the tribute. But it is possible that tributarium in this case—and possibly in the case of Poland in the early eleventh century discussed above—should be understood more as ‘gift-giver’ than ‘tributary’. This of course has rather profound implications for how we should see the relative status of the two parties: tributaries are below receivers; but gift-givers tend to be seen as superior to gift-recipients.³³ It might even be that Sancho would have described his payments as honourable gifts and himself as a patron, while the papacy saw the payments as the tribute of a loyal (but lesser) subject. Charles Bishko—studying the eleventh-century Castilian gifts to the abbey of Cluny—reached a similar conclusion but in reverse.³⁴ Bishko plausibly saw Castile’s alliance with Cluny, and Aragon’s alliance with Rome, as a rivalry—although such rivalry was probably more spiritual (who had the more prestigious religious centre) than political. In 1077, when Alfonso VI of Castile-León doubled his predecessor’s annual census to Cluny, Bishko held that Castile-León entered into a ‘para-feudal’, ‘pre-feudal’, or ‘proto-feudal’ relationship with Cluny. The Cluniac census was described by the same terminology as the Aragonese–papal census (censualis; tributum). Since (Bishko thought) everyone knew the Aragonese–papal relationship was ‘feudal’, Castile-León’s relationship with Cluny must have been semi-feudal too. When therefore, in 1142, Alfonso VII of Castile-León described the Castilian census to Cluny as elemosina (charitable alms), Bishko held this was an attempt to redefine what had previously been an obligatory payment. We can, however, turn that around: if the Castilian census was a charitable subsidy, then the Aragonese census to the pope might also describe gifts or alms.

So essentially what we have so far—between 1068 and 1088—is a king going on a pilgrimage to Rome, probably distributing gifts and arranging for the churches of his kingdom to shift from the Mozarabic to the Roman liturgy upon his return. We could say that this is not very much; in fact it is what we should expect. Kings sought honourable relationships with popes but such relationships were not yet formulaic ‘types’ nor did they yet define a clear and consistent hierarchy.

From 1088/9 we have several more documents and letters which speak to the papal–Aragonese relationship. I have already mentioned the letter Sancho wrote at that time to Pope Urban II. Fortunately, we also have Pope Urban’s reply from 1089. In 1089 Urban also granted privileges to three Aragonese monasteries. In 1095 Sancho’s son, King Peter, received a privilege from Urban in response to a letter he wrote to the pope, and in 1098 Peter wrote to Urban again.

As we have seen, in his letter to Pope Urban King Sancho recalled his past pilgrimage. Sancho had, when in Rome, ‘handed himself and his kingdom into the power of God and [Saint Peter]’.³⁵ Presumably this referred to the adoption of the Roman liturgy. While this was a good start, according to the king, he worried that he had not completed the work owed to God. Therefore he had now established an annual tribute (tributum) or census of 500 mancuses (a gold coin).

Urban’s reply to Sancho noted the promise of a census; the pope said that the king had made ‘his capital and all who are under his power tributaries (tributarios) to that Church’.³⁶ Other than the term ‘tributaries’ there was no other description of Aragon’s relationship with regard to the papacy. The keyword of the papal–Aragonese relationship was ‘tributary’. The status of the pope and king was being conceived primarily with reference to the outward signs of their relationship: the king sent money to the pope and so could be described as a tributary. The relationship was not being conceived in any deeper, more structural way. This is a potential warning against seeing these eleventh-century relationships as having a particular underlying theory, for example, that the pope was the true ruler of the kingdom. It does not appear that papal–royal relationships were being thought about in that way.

At the same time as the 1088/9 correspondence, Pope Urban II also placed several Aragonese monasteries under papal protection and liberty, at the explicit request of the king and the abbots of these foundations: Montearagon, St Pons de Thomières and San Juan de la Peña. All also received extensive royal patronage.³⁷ The privilege for Montearagon is the most important because that document described not only the papal protection afforded to the monastery, but the relationship between the papacy and the king. The privilege states that both Aragon and the monastery of Montearagon have been ‘received into the tutelage (tutela)’ of the Roman Church and the Apostolic See. Equally, the privilege went on, king, kingdom, and monastery should all be protected from assaults by any person ecclesiastic or secular.³⁸ Clearly, the tutelage for both monastery and kingdom was of a type: the terminology, and the warning that they should not be assaulted, were almost identical for the two. If the monastery had been taken under the protection of St Peter then it follows, as Johannes Fried has argued, that the kingdom had also now been taken under papal protection.³⁹ Surely it had. But Fried may have overstepped in taking ‘protection’ as a fairly well-defined, self-contained category here—a sort of spiritual superiority devoid of temporal claims—for the privilege went on:

We declare by Apostolic Authority […] that all his [King Sancho’s] successors should accept that kingdom from our hand or that of our successors (Constituimus […] ut omnes eius successores regnum illud de manu nostra nostrorumue successorum accipiant) and show fidelity and obedience to blessed Peter and to us, his vicar, and pay in return (rependo) the census and recognize themselves as kings, ministers and servants of blessed Peter.

The stipulation that all the future kings of Aragon should receive their kingdom ‘from our hand’ does not seem to fit Fried’s more laissez-faire argument of protection.⁴⁰ It seems as though the pope was claiming actual ownership. What if a future pope refused to give a new king their kingdom? Fried’s explanation thus needs refining, but, as will become clear, it would also be a mistake to postulate a straightforward papal claim to secular authority.

The seeming contradiction—between a weaker relationship of protection and a stronger relationship of real ownership—recurs in the next document too. Sancho died in 1094 and was succeeded by his son, Peter I. In 1095 Urban II issued a privilege specifically for Peter (later reissued by Pope Innocent III in 1213).⁴¹ This privilege might well have been issued in response to a letter from Peter to Urban where the king complained that the Aragonese bishops were exercising authority over the royal monastery of San Juan de la Peña which Peter thought should be exempt from episcopal power. In his letter to the pope, King Peter noted that Sancho (his father) had made San Juan ‘tributary’ (tributarius) of the Roman Church and indeed been a tributary himself, because of his annual census of 500 mancuses. Both Peter and Sancho were also the pope’s ‘faithful servant[s] and friend[s]’ and ‘subject to your lordship (dominatui vestro subdidi)’.⁴² The contrast between equality and subjection is stark in those quotations: friends are equal; servants and lords are not. In response to Peter’s letter, Urban freed Peter from having to obey sentences of excommunication passed against him by bishops. Only the pope or a papal legate could excommunicate the king. This right—to ignore excommunications issued by lesser prelates—is one of the privileges frequently associated with so-called exempt monasteries. Exemption—often seen as a development of the protection afforded to churches and abbeys by the pope—gave institutions various rights which limited the jurisdiction of their bishop and archbishop.⁴³ The exemption was an ecclesiastical exemption, and King Peter of Aragon seems to have participated in it. The privilege also restated that the king and kingdom had been ‘received under the tutelage (in tutelam) of the Apostolic See’ and that, in return, the king paid an annual census. Again, however, a different part of the privilege suggests that the papal–Aragonese relationship was not solely one of protection or exemption:

We declare by Apostolic Authority […] that all your successors should accept that kingdom from our hand or that of our successors (Constituimus […] auctoritate apostolica […] ut omnes tui successores regnum illud de manu nostra nostrorumve successorum accipiant) and pay in return the census—that is to say 500 mancuses—and recognize themselves as ministers and servants of blessed Peter.

This is recognizably similar to the stipulation found in Urban II’s letter of 1089. Again the idea that the kings of Aragon should receive their kingdom from the pope is openly stated in a privilege addressed to the king and which the king kept. Before we come on to what this meant, let us quickly look at a second letter Peter wrote to the pope, in 1098. Peter recalled that his father, Sancho, had been devoted to the pope and the Apostolic See and had paid 500 mancuses annually ‘as census’ (pro censu) ‘because all his kingdom was placed under the protection of blessed Peter’ (sub protectione beati Petri).⁴⁴ Peter then moved on to more practical matters: he sent the pope two years’ census—1,000 mancuses—and hoped that with this sweetener Urban would accede to Peter’s request to vary the episcopal boundaries of Aragon.

So that is what we are left with. The kings of Aragon were called ‘tributaries’ and paid census. There is some evidence that the papal–Aragonese relationship was framed in the same terms as relationships of protection and exemption between St Peter and certain monasteries. But the pope also thought the king should ‘receive his kingdom from our hand’. This final phrase is important because it allows us to find a second model for papal–Aragonese relations, in addition to protection and exemption: the investiture of bishops by kings.

We need to pay attention to the difference between the implications of ‘investiture’ before and after the resolution of the famous ‘Contest’ about it. The theme of the following paragraphs is that, before the conflict and its resolution, the discourse of investiture was applied in similar terms to, first, the relation of kings to bishops and, secondly, the relation of the pope to selected kings. In this period, however, the concept was foggy. After the Investiture Contest the meaning of ‘investiture’ became more precise, so that an equation between episcopal and royal investiture ceased to be acceptable to kings: the analogy with their investiture of bishops with regalia was not one they were inclined to draw or allow. From 1078 onwards the papacy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy in general banned churchmen from being ‘invested’ with their offices by kings or laymen. The terms in which investiture was banned will sound familiar. In 1078 a council of Gregory VII declared: ‘it is forbidden that anyone should accept investiture of churches from the hand of laymen.’⁴⁵ Urban II in 1089: ‘No one should dare to take investiture of abbey or bishopric or any ecclesiastical dignity from a lay hand.’⁴⁶ The council of Beauvais in 1114: ‘we forbid that anyone should accept investiture of any ecclesiastical dignity from the hand of the emperor, or a king, or prince or any lay person.’⁴⁷ On the other hand, when a bishop was created ‘correctly’—by an archbishop or the pope, not by a layman—the ceremony was described in the same way. Placidus of Nonantola—a hard-line anti-lay investiture polemicist—noted in his Book on the Honour of the Church (1111) that ‘the bishop, when he is blessed, accepts (accipio) the staff from the hand (de manu) of the archbishop.’⁴⁸ To avoid lay investiture one should not ‘accept’ (accipio) investiture ‘from the hand’ (a manu/de manu) of a layman. In the privileges of 1089 and 1095, the kings of Aragon were supposed to ‘accept’ (accipio) their kingdom ‘from the hand’ (de manu) of the pope. True, ‘investiture’—investitura—was not mentioned in the privileges for Aragon, but otherwise the similarity in phrasing is marked. Famously when a king made a bishop he said ‘accept the church’ (accipe ecclesiam) as he handed the bishop the symbols of his office.⁴⁹ The pope was telling the kings of Aragon that they should ‘accept’ (accipio) ‘that kingdom’ (regnum illud).

Until the reformers started banning lay investiture in the 1070s not many people had given consideration to what lay investiture might actually mean. If the king invested the bishops, did that mean episcopal power was his to give away? Did he own it? I suspect that, in the same way, the king of Aragon did not really concern himself with what this formulation—receiving the kingdom from the pope’s hand—might actually mean. That would change after the Investiture Contest. First, however we must turn our attention to the Norman rulers of southern Italy where we find a similar situation. The Norman rulers did not ‘accept their lands from the pope’s hand’, but they did participate in ceremonies of investiture (investitura).

Siculo-Normans

The Normans arrived in southern Italy at the end of the tenth century as foreign fighters for local lords.⁵⁰ It was not long before they began to take power for themselves. In 1053 Pope Leo IX, fearing the expansion of Norman power in the south, moved against them, but he was defeated in battle at Civitate. Leo’s defeat was followed by an offer from the Normans that, should he approve their conquests, the Normans would serve the pope in some way. Dione Clementi studied the various accounts of 1053 and concluded that Leo had refused to accede to the requests of the Normans, and that the Norman proposals had included nothing so formal as ‘vassalage’ or military service.⁵¹ As we will see in chapter two, papal–Norman relations in the twelfth century tended to be flexible and respond to the current situation rather than conform to a general model or type. For us, the important features of the relationship between the Norman rulers of southern Italy and the eleventh-century papacy are the oaths sworn by the Normans and ceremonies of investiture in which they participated.

Between 1059 and 1061 the first papal–Norman alliance was constructed. The popes recognized two of the Norman leaders as rulers of their territories and in return the Norman rulers swore an oath to the pope and promised to pay an annual ‘pension’ (pensio).⁵² We possess the texts of the oaths sworn by Robert Guiscard—duke of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily—and Richard of Aversa—claimant to the principality of Capua—to Popes Nicholas II and Alexander II in 1059 and 1061 respectively.⁵³ These oaths have often been described as ‘feudal’ and hence—in a somewhat question-begging fashion—as proof that the southern Italian Norman territories were fiefs of the pope, granted by the pope to the Normans and hence revocable.⁵⁴

Robert Guiscard and Richard of Aversa swore very similar oaths:

I, Robert, by the Grace of God and St Peter duke of Apulia and Calabria and with the aid of both future [duke] of Sicily, from this hour henceforth will be faithful (fidelis) to the Holy Roman Church and the Apostolic See and you my lord Pope Nicholas; I will not be in counsel or deed whence you should lose life or limb or be captured by evil deceit. I will not knowingly reveal counsel which you have confided and forbidden me to speak of to your damage. I will be an aider to the Holy Roman Church for the holding and acquisition of the regalia and possessions of St Peter, as much as I am able, against all men. And I will aid you so that you may hold the Roman papacy securely and honourably. I will not seek to invade or acquire the land of St Peter or the principality [of Capua], nor will I presume to plunder more than that which you or your successors concede to me, without the certain licence of you or your successors. With good faith I will be attentive to the pension from the lands of St Peter which I hold or will hold in order that the Holy Roman Church has it every year. All churches in my lordship I will release to your power with their possessions and I will be a defender of them to the fidelity of the Holy Roman Church. And I will swear fidelity to no one without saving the fidelity of the Holy Roman Church. And if you or your successors should leave this life before me, according to what I am ordered by the better cardinals, I will aid the Roman clergy and laity so that a pope can be elected and ordained to the honour of St Peter. All this above-written I will observe to the Holy Roman Church and to you with good faith, and I will observe this fidelity to your successors ordained to the honour of St Peter who confirm the investiture (investitura) you have conceded to me.⁵⁵

Much of this oath is word-for-word the same as the oath sworn by archbishops to the pope.⁵⁶ We have the text of the oath sworn to the pope by his suffragan bishops—bishops in the ecclesiastical province of Rome—and seemingly by archbishops as well, from the end of Pope Alexander II’s pontificate (c.1072–3):

I, Guibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, from this hour henceforth will be faithful (fidelis) to Blessed Peter and the Holy Roman Church and my lord Pope Alexander and their successors chosen by election of the better cardinals. I will not be in counsel or deed that they might lose life or limb or be captured by evil deceit. I will not knowingly unfold counsel which was confided to me either through him or through nuncios or letters to anyone, to your damage. I will be an aider to the Roman papacy and the regalia of St Peter for their holding and defence, saving my order. I will receive Roman legates, coming or going, honourably and aid them in their necessities. I will not defer coming to a Synod if called, unless hindered by lawful excuse or impediment. On the feast of the apostles [Peter and Paul], I will visit their threshold [Rome] either myself or through a nuncio, unless I am relieved by Apostolic licence. So help me God and these Holy Gospels.⁵⁷

This archiepiscopal oath stayed broadly the same for centuries. Gregory VII apparently tried to replace the promise to visit Rome with a promise to aid the Roman Church ‘through secular service’ (per secularem militiam) but this did not last.⁵⁸ Importantly, this oath to the pope was not only sworn by archbishops but—by the twelfth century at the latest—by those abbots and bishops who had been freed from the authority of their superior and were consequently consecrated by the pope in Rome; so-called exempt prelates.⁵⁹ Since the papacy granted exemption—privileges which freed abbots and bishops from their superior bishop or archbishop—from the eleventh century, as we saw in the case of the Aragonese monasteries, it seems quite likely that those abbots and bishops consecrated by the pope were already swearing an oath like this by the end of the eleventh century. This would mean that, rather than being a ‘feudal’ oath (whatever that is), the oath sworn by the Norman rulers to the pope could just as well be seen as akin to the oaths sworn by prelates whose immediate spiritual superior was the pope.

But, as with Aragon, it would be mistake to conclude that the eleventh-century Normans were simply under the spiritual protection of the pope. Such categories—spiritual protection versus temporal lordship—were not yet clearly defined. Robert Guiscard and Richard of Aversa both swore to pay an annual pension to the pope. The pension appears analogous to some of the ‘pensions’ paid by castles and towns within the central Italian lands ruled directly by the pope. In 1060—the year after Robert Guiscard swore fidelity to Pope Nicholas II—Nicholas issued a privilege to the fortress-settlement of Roccantica, thirty miles outside Rome. Nicholas called on the inhabitants to rebuild Roccantica. Nicholas also stipulated that the inhabitants were to pay a graded pension every Easter: the greater houses had to pay twelve pence and the lesser eight, six or two pence. In return they received the ‘protection’ (protectio) and ‘defence’ (defensio) of St Peter.⁶⁰ Cardinal Deusdedit summarized another similar grant of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) in his Collection of Canons (c.1083–7). The greater households in the fortress-settlement of Alvelino in Narni had to pay six pence every year; the mediocre households four; and the lesser households two pence. Payments here were to be made on 1 November, however.⁶¹ Robert Guiscard was to pay—for the duchies of Apulia and Calabria—twelve pence for every yoke of oxen on his lands, and the payment was to be made at Easter.⁶² The similarity here is that the pensions were graded. The tributes or census which we saw the kings of Aragon and some of their monasteries paying were fixed and invariable. Some castles and settlements in the papal patrimony also paid fixed census, which could either be a recognition of sovereignty, or in return for a privilege or freedom (comparable to census paid by protected monasteries).⁶³ The graded pensions from the Normans, Roccantica and Alvelino, however, look more like rents, payments based on the productivity of the land.⁶⁴ Potentially this might appear to be a more intensive extraction of dues—more intensive even than some land grants to noblemen within the papal patrimony, which stipulated only a fixed census. One could argue, on this basis, that the Norman realm in the eleventh century should be put in a similar category to fortresses within the papacy’s own area of direct lordship.

The most important aspect of the eleventh-century papal–Norman relationship was investiture, however. We know that the duke of Apulia and the prince of Capua were ‘invested’ with their lands by the pope. We know this from the texts of the oaths themselves which the Norman prince and duke swore. In 1059 Guiscard had ended his oath by confirming that ‘I will observe this fidelity to your successors […] who […] will confirm the investiture (investitura) you have conceded to me.’ This mention of ‘investiture’ was repeated in the oath Guiscard swore to Gregory VII in 1080, and in the oaths sworn to the pope by the princes of Capua in 1061, 1073, and 1079, all of which were near-identical.⁶⁵ Gregory VII’s registers actually record the wording of the investiture of 1080: ‘I, Pope Gregory, invest (investio) you, Duke Robert, with the land which my predecessors conceded to you.’⁶⁶ The actual form of the ceremony is unknown, although it seems to have included the handing over of a banner (vexillum).⁶⁷

The keyword here is ‘investiture’ (investitura), exactly the same word as we saw in the conciliar canons which banned lay investiture of prelates. In both Aragon and Norman Sicily we find that, in the second half of the eleventh century, the same language used to describe (and condemn) lay investiture was being used to describe papal investiture of kings: ‘accepting the kingdom from the hand’ in Aragon and ‘investiture’ in southern Italy.

Rus’, Croatia-Dalmatia, Melgueil, Barcelona, and Cerdanya

Aragon and Norman Italy are not the only cases where the popes invested secular rulers. In 1075, Isjaslav, Grand Prince of the Kievan Rus’ had been driven out by his brother (Sviatoslav) and so sent his son (Iaropolk) to Gregory VII to ask for aid. Gregory, in a letter of April 1075, told Isjaslav:

Your son, visiting the threshold of the apostles, came to us and, because he wished to obtain that kingdom through our hands as a gift of St Peter (dono Sancti Petri per manus nostras), having shown due fidelity to blessed Peter prince of the Apostles, asked with devoted prayers, asserting undoubtedly that his petitions would be firm and stable with your consent, if it should be given by the grace and defence of Apostolic Authority.⁶⁸

Gregory consequently ‘had given him the government of your kingdom (regni vestri gubernacula) on behalf of St Peter’ and told Isjaslav that he would happily grant any petitions the king sent. This was not an empty promise. Three days after this letter was written, Gregory tacked on an extra paragraph to a letter to Bolesław of Poland telling Bolesław to restore ‘the money that you have taken from the king of the Russians’.⁶⁹ Note here what will be a central theme in later chapters: that a relationship with the pope meant that kings could get their petitions approved and instrumentalize papal authority for their own needs. For now, however, let us note the language and course of events. Iaropolk had offered fidelity to St Peter—possibly an oath like that of Guiscard—and had then received the kingdom as a gift ‘through the pope’s hands’. We have already seen that lay investiture—when a king or secular ruler handed out bishoprics and abbeys—was received ‘from the hand’. Equally when a king invested a bishop, the bishopric was often described as a ‘gift’ (donum). In 1077, Gregory VII wrote in a letter that Bishop Gerard of Cambrai had ‘accepted the gift of the bishopric from King Henry [IV]’ (donum episcopatus ab Henrico rege se accepisse).⁷⁰ The canons of the Council of Poitiers of 1078 began:

The Holy Synod decreed that no bishop, abbot, priest or any person of the clergy should accept (accipio) from the hand (de manu) of king or count or any layman the gift of a bishopric or abbacy or church or any ecclesiastical things (donum episcopatus vel abbatiae vel ecclesiae vel aliquarum ecclesiasticarum rerum).⁷¹

The kingdom of Rus’ and a diocese could be ‘gifts’ (dona). What is described in Gregory’s letter to Isjaslav sounds like lay investiture: the candidate—Prince Iaropolk—offered fidelity to the pope and so in return Gregory gave him the kingdom as a gift ‘through his hands’.

The next year, in October 1076, Demetrius Zwonimir was crowned King of Croatia and Dalmatia with the approval of a papal legate, Gebizo. The new king sent Pope Gregory an account of this ceremony (preserved in Deusdedit’s Collection of Canons).

I, Demetrius […] by divine providence Duke of Dalmatia and Croatia, obtaining power from you Gebizo […] by the synodal concord and election of all the people and clergy of the government of the kingdom of Croatia and Dalmatia, am invested (investitus) and constituted king through banner, sword, sceptre and crown […].⁷²

In return for this grant of kingship (de mihi concesso regno), Demetrius promised an annual tribute (tributum) of 200 gold coins a year, paid at Easter. Demetrius then explained that he had sworn fidelity to Gregory:

I, I say, Demetrius, by the Grace of God and by gift of the Apostolic See (apostolice sedis dono) king, from this hour henceforth will be faithful (fidelis) to St Peter and to my lord Pope Gregory and their successors who are canonically elected; and I will [do nothing] by counsel of deed that he or, after him, future pontiffs or their legates should lose life or limb or be captured; and counsel which they [the popes] entrust to me, I will not knowingly reveal to anyone to their [the popes’] damage.

I will faithfully retain the kingdom which has been handed to me through your hand (per manum tuam), Lord Gebizo, and not detract from the right of the Apostolic See at all with any bad faith.

Again there are clear echoes of lay investiture here: Demetrius was ‘invested’ by the papal legate and swore fidelity. Demetrius also said that he had received the kingdom ‘through the hand’ of the legate. Investiture and receiving something ‘from/through the hand’ seem to be equivalent. Note also that Demetrius drew no distinction between being ‘invested’ and being ‘constituted’ king. An investiture with a banner sounds like a temporal—even a ‘feudal’—ceremony, whereas being constituted king with a crown sounds like a coronation (which we would probably assume to be a purely spiritual ceremony conferring God’s approval on the king). The distinction is absent. Or, at least, no one cared yet to draw a clear distinction. As we shall see, that changed after the Investiture Contest.

In 1085 Count Peter of Melgueil—a county in the far south of France around the town of Montpellier—resigned all his ‘honour’—comprising the allod (allodium) of both the county of Melgueil and the bishopric of Maguelone—to Pope Gregory VII. Henceforth he and his heirs would hold the county ‘through the hand (per manum) of the Roman Pontiff’, be under its fidelity and pay an annual census of one ounce of gold. The bishop of Maguelone would now be elected without interference from the count. If the count or his heirs contravened this they would be subject to ecclesiastical discipline and would pay the fine (mulcta) ‘which the Holy Roman Law promulgated by Theodosius, Arcadius and Honorius decrees’.⁷³ This was presumably a reference to Codex Theodosianus 16.2.34, which stipulated a fine of five pounds of gold for anyone who violated ecclesiastical privileges.⁷⁴ Peter ended by saying that he made his grant ‘through the investiture of my ring (per investituram annuli mei) in the hand of Bishop Peter of Albano, Roman legate’. Presumably this meant that Count Peter handed over his ring to the bishop as a sign of his gift.

In 1088, three years later, the new pope, Urban II, issued a privilege to the bishop of Maguelone confirming Peter’s grant. He noted that Peter had cut the bonds of servitude under which the bishop of Maguelone had laboured. He had also put the county under the right (ius) of St Peter, made himself and his heirs ‘knights’ (milites) of the Roman pontiff and obtained the county ‘from his [the pontiff’s] hand’ (ex eius manu).

Therefore, receiving the investiture of the bishopric of Maguelone and the county of Melgueil through a ring, from the hand of your fraternity, on behalf of the said count (investituram ex manu […] per annulum recipientes) we take the aforesaid church and county […] under the protection of St Peter (sub beati Petri […] protectione).⁷⁵

Obviously we should note that the counts henceforth should receive their county ‘from the pope’s hand’. This is very similar to what we saw in Aragon—where the kings ‘accepted’ the kingdom ‘from the pope’s hand’. However, this was also a grant of St Peter’s protection to the count.

Equally interesting is the clear overlap between episcopal and comital investiture, and the flexibility of the word ‘investiture’ itself. Urban’s privilege talked about both episcopal and comital investiture in the same phrase, with the same noun: ‘the investiture of the bishopric of Maguelone and the county of Melgueil’ (Magalonensis episcopatus et Substantionensis comitatus investituram). We might infer that investiture of a bishop and investiture of a secular ruler were thought analogous, or at least comparable. This strengthens the argument that we should not be surprised to find investiture language used in relationships between the papacy and secular rulers.

The pope received all of Peter’s grant—free elections and the county itself—through an investiture with a ring. In this case, the pope presumably did not think he was the subservient party. This investiture simply meant that Count Peter was resigning his illegitimately acquired power over the bishop of Maguelone to the pope (along with his legitimately acquired county). Investiture did not have the kind of technical meaning it would come to acquire.

In 1099, according to a concord made between the bishop of Maguelone and Count Peter’s son and heir, Raymond, the new count had to make amends for violating his father’s grant. Consequently, in Rome, Raymond ‘accepted his county through his [Pope Urban II’s] hand’ (accepit comitatum suum per manum eius).⁷⁶ Again we see the language of investiture: ‘accepting’ (accipio) a thing from or through the hand (per manum), just as the kings of Aragon did.

We end this section with the grants made by Count Berengar-Raymond II of Barcelona in 1090–1, and by Count William-Raymond of Cerdanya (also in Catalonia) during the pontificate of Alexander II (1061–73). Known as ‘the Fratricide’ because he allegedly murdered his brother (and co-ruler), Berengar-Raymond ‘gave’ (donavi) all his honour (omnen meum honorem)—but especially the city of Tarragona—to God, St Peter, and his vicar (the pope). Henceforth, Berengar-Raymond and his heirs would ‘hold all this [honour] through the hands and command of St Peter and his vicar’ (teneamus hoc totum per manus et vocem sancti Petri eiusque vicarii). They would also pay the pope a census of twenty-five pounds of silver every five years.⁷⁷ What makes this grant unique—as far as I know—is that Tarragona was not really Berengar-Raymond’s to give. The counts of Barcelona had actually already granted the city to Viscount Berengar of Narbonne in the mid-eleventh-century, and to Bernard Amat, a Barcelonan lord, in 1059–60. Fredric Cheyette judged these latter two cases to indicate ‘major political alliances’.⁷⁸ The 1090/91 grant was no exception. Its purpose was to persuade the pope to establish the metropolitan archdiocese of Tarragona which, in July 1091, Urban II did. The privilege issued to the new archbishop accepted Berengar-Raymond’s grant of Tarragona to the papacy (confirming that they were linked) and noted that the count had handed over all the land in his power to St Peter and instituted an annual census of five pounds of silver (thus rewriting Berengar-Raymond’s promise of twenty-five pounds every five years). Consequently, Urban received ‘all the land of the count which he offered to St Peter, and the city of Tarragona under the tutelage (sub tutela) of the Apostolic See’.⁷⁹ The count’s promise to hold his territory ‘through the hands’ of the pope potentially puts Tarragona in the same category as Melgueil and the other principalities which participated in the language of investiture. The pope’s receipt of the county as under the ‘tutelage’ of Rome makes us think immediately of Aragon, which was said to be under papal tutela.

The grant of William-Raymond of Cerdanya was recorded in Deusdedit’s Collectio Canonum. William-Raymond offered two castles to St Peter in order that his heirs should ‘accept’ (accipio) them ‘from the hand of the Roman pontiff’ (de manu Romani pontificis).⁸⁰ We are right back to the same sort of language we saw in the privileges from Pope Urban II to the Aragonese kings. It is another probable use of the language of investiture. Language based around ‘accepting’ territory ‘from the pope’s hand’ can be found in Aragon, Melgueil, and Cerdanya. The rulers of Barcelona, Croatia-Dalmatia, and the Rus’ all received their realms ‘through the hand’ of the pope or his legate. The Norman rulers of southern Italy and the king of Croatia-Dalmatia were ‘invested’ by the pope or his representative.

The Investiture Contest and the Concordat of Worms

Between c.1050 and c.1100 the language of lay investiture—by which kings and secular rulers appointed bishops—was also used to describe relationships between secular rulers and the pope. The reason why lay investiture of bishops provided a potential model for papal–royal relations was because—as yet—no one had really thought about what investiture meant.

The dispute over lay investitures lasted from 1078 and 1122. At various times the popes and a large part of the European clergy (those described as ‘pro-Reform’) were in conflict with the German emperors, the kings of England, and the kings of France. The solution to the conflict was for bishops to be invested with the regalia, the property granted to the bishopric, by the secular ruler, and to be consecrated and given the spiritualia by their ecclesiastical superior. Kings and emperors had often invested bishops with their bishoprics and drawn little explicit distinction between the property, which was the king’s to give, and the sacral character.

From the middle of the eleventh century clerical reformers had begun to insist that, since a layman could not consecrate a clergyman, no layman could play any part in the appointment of bishops. This position had support from the Fourth Council of Constantinople (869–70) which had banned ‘secular ruler[s] or other lay person[s]’ from interfering ‘in the election or promotion of a patriarch, metropolitan or any bishop’ under threat of anathema for the ruler and deposition for the bishop.⁸¹ One counterposition was that when a king invested a bishop he did not grant him sacral power (which was intrinsic to the bishop’s office) but only the lands and rents of the bishopric which had been given by the king or by past kings—the regalia. This position did not challenge the argument of the reformers that a king had no capability to invest a bishop with his sacred authority; only a clergyman could do that.

Eventually compromises were reached, most famously at Worms in 1122. Henceforth, kings would invest bishops with their regalia, and the pope or the appropriate clerical superior would invest them with the spiritualia, the sacred and spiritual power of a bishop or abbot.⁸² This compromise accepted that kings could not give clergymen their sacred power, but did allow them to give temporal goods granted by the crown. It therefore emphasized possession: the rex could invest with the regalia—that is, with what pertained to the king.

Once one accepts that position, the idea of ‘investiture’ takes on an extra level of meaning which must have worried kings who were invested by the pope. The language of investiture as it was crystallized by the concordat of Worms raised the question: how could the pope invest any ruler with the ruler’s land and realm unless it was the pope’s to give away? Before the investiture contest, no one seems to have been too worried about what allowing kings to invest bishops, or popes to invest princes, might actually mean.⁸³ Count Peter of Melgueil had given the pope the bishopric of Maguelone ‘through investiture’ in 1085. But the pope certainly cannot have believed that Peter—a layman—had legitimate rights over elections to the bishopric. And Peter was not making the pope bishop of Maguelone through this investiture. Peter was just renouncing his own abuses.

Prior to the Investiture Conflict, bishops had been invested by kings even though a king had no power to give a clergyman his sacral authority. Likewise, the kings of Aragon were perfectly willing to admit that they received their kingdom from the hand of the pope, while the Normans certainly took part in ceremonies of investiture. The counts of Melgueil, Barcelona, and Cerdanya, the king of Croatia-Dalmatia, and the king of the Rus’ all participated to a greater or lesser extent in this language of investiture. What is common here, before the twelfth century, is a lack of concern with the possible connotations: bishops had not worried too much that lay investiture looked as though a king was conferring ecclesiastical office. Neither the Aragonese, nor the Normans, nor the Melgorians, Croatians, or Rus’ distinguished clearly between the general approval of their rule which they wanted from the papacy, and any suggestion that this implied that the pope was actually giving the land to a ruler. The reformers had forced kings and their chanceries to think about what investiture meant.

When they did think about it, they did not like it. If kings were being invested by the pope, might not the pope be able to take back his possessions? Gregory VII’s excommunications and suspensions from office of Henry IV precipitated discussions across Europe about whether and why the pope could depose secular rulers.⁸⁴ In his famous letter of 1076 defending his excommunication of Henry IV, Gregory adduced the example of Pope Zacharias’ alleged deposition of the last Merovingian: ‘[…] Pope Zacharias deposed (depono) the king of the Franks and absolved all Franks from the sworn bond which they had made to him.’⁸⁵ Debates about the pope’s ability to depose secular rulers might have fed into the concerns of kings that, if they received their realms from the pope, they could lose them to him as well. Perhaps that is why, after the 1120s, the language of investiture vanished from papal–royal relationships. The oaths sworn by the Norman rulers in southern Italy and Sicily remained almost exactly the same between 1059 and 1212. However in 1059, 1061, 1073, 1079, and 1080 the oaths ended with the Norman princes promising to ‘observe this fidelity to your successors […] who […] will confirm the investiture (investitura) you have conceded to me’. In 1188, 1192, 1198, and 1212 the texts of the oaths excised the word ‘investiture’ from this sentence: ‘I will observe this fidelity to your successors […] who […] will have confirmed what was conceded to me in your privilege.’⁸⁶ We do not possess the texts of the oaths sworn by the Norman kings in 1130, 1139, and 1156, but none of the documents surviving from those years mentioned investiture. The grant of kingship made by Pope Anacletus II in 1130 gave the new Norman king, Roger II, the right to be crowned by an archbishop of his choosing, but did not mention papal investiture.⁸⁷ The second grant of royal status made by Pope Innocent II in 1139 also failed to mention papal investiture, as did the 1156 treaty of Benevento between King William I and Pope Adrian IV.⁸⁸ The chronicle attributed to Romuald of Salerno (attrib.; fl.c.1153–81) did claim that Adrian invested William in 1156 and that Innocent II invested Roger II in 1139.⁸⁹ The chronicle of Falcone of Benevento (d.c.1143) also claimed that Roger was invested in 1139.⁹⁰ Since there was no mention of investiture in the documentary evidence, it seems likely that both are mistaken, or were trying to present a picture of the proper relationship between the papacy and Norman monarchy to which Roger and William did not subscribe.

The introduction of a coronation ceremony for the Siculo-Norman kings in 1130 pushed papal investiture out. Coronation (a spiritual ceremony showing the approval of God, performed by an archbishop) replaced investiture (a ceremony which could easily be interpreted as the pope actually giving land and dominion to the Norman rulers). A stricter distinction between investiture and coronation was also a consequence of the Investiture Contest. As we saw earlier, in 1076 Demetrius of Croatia-Dalmatia had described his coronation as ‘being invested and constituted king through banner, sword, sceptre, and crown’ (per vexillum, ensem, sceptrum et coronam investitus atque constitutus rex). Now, after 1122, the two were not the same. The three twelfth-century Ordines for the coronation of the Sicilian kings did not use any cognate of ‘investiture’. Instead the king was anointed and ‘blessed and constituted king (constitutus rex) over the people whom the lord your God has given you to rule and govern’.⁹¹ Like Demetrius, the Sicilian king received sword (ensis; gladius), sceptre (sceptrum), and crown (corona)—and indeed an orb (regnum) and ring (annulum). There is even a hint of the investiture ceremony for bishops when the king is given these objects: ‘accept the sword’ (accipe gladium); ‘accept the crown of the kingdom’ (accipe coronam regni), as bishops were told to ‘accept the Church’ (accipe ecclesiam).⁹² But, in the coronation Ordines, there is no doubt that the bishops are acting for God alone: ‘do you wish to rule and defend the kingdom conceded to you by God with justice?’ The kingdom came to the king from God, mediated through the Sicilian bishops. Papal investiture no longer had a role.

Likewise there was no mention, in the twelfth century, of the Aragonese kings receiving their kingdom ‘from the hand’ of the pope. Instead, as we shall see in detail in chapter three, the kingdom of Aragon became a ‘protected’ kingdom: the language used to describe the relationship between Aragon and the Holy See was, by the middle of the twelfth century, that used to describe the relationships between monasteries ‘under St Peter’s protection’. Such a relationship, as Johannes Fried pointed out in 1980, gave the papacy a right to receive census payments but little else, and did not suggest ownership.⁹³

In the county of Melgueil the idea that counts should receive their kingdom ‘from the pope’s hand’ does not make an appearance in the twelfth century. Indeed, the relationship between the county and the papacy more or less ceased to exist in the twelfth century, only to make a return in the early thirteenth century.⁹⁴ Likewise, the papal relationships with the Rus’ and Croatia-Dalmatia do not seem to have drawn on the language found in the 1070s.

The cost–benefit calculation of having a formal relationship with the pope had shifted. The benefit was—as it always would be—the ability to use the pope’s authority for one’s own ends. Gregory had promised Isjaslav of the Rus’ that he would approve any petitions the king sent him. In 1079, three years after Demetrius of Croatia-Dalmatia’s coronation, Gregory—presumably at Demetrius’s request—sent a letter to a Croatian knight named Wezelin, marvelling that Wezelin dared to rebel against Demetrius ‘whom Apostolic Authority made king in Dalmatia’ and telling Wezelin that an attack against Demetrius was an attack against the Holy See itself.⁹⁵ Demetrius was thus able to use papal power against his enemies. But if such a relationship gave the pope power to remove kings, and if rulers feared that popes might use this power, there was a considerable risk. Hence the move away from investiture, which appeared, after 1122, to suggest that the popes actually owned kingdoms.

England, Zeta, Brittany, Spain, Besalú, Provence, Denmark

As noted earlier, there are a number of realms which have been thought—by modern historians—to have been claimed by Pope Gregory VII as ‘fiefs’ (or the like).⁹⁶ For these, we simply do not have enough information to know what was going on. Potentially they could all fit within the argument above—that between c.1050–1100 kings and popes used a language of investiture but after 1122 this ceased—but they cannot be said to support the argument because the evidence is so limited.

Famously, William the Conqueror, king of England, was reproached by a legate of Gregory VII in 1080 for failing to ‘do fidelity’ to the pope and for failing to collect the annual payment to Rome known as Peter’s Pence.⁹⁷ That year William also received a letter from Gregory describing the king as ‘a most beloved son and faithful man (fidelis) of St Peter and us’.⁹⁸ Alexander II (1061–73) had believed that ‘the kingdom of the English was under the hand and tutelage of the prince of the Apostles’ (sub apostolorum principis manu et tutela).⁹⁹ Alexander, like Gregory VII, asked William to resume paying the ‘annual pension’ (pensio). In 1080, William told Gregory that he would make sure arrears were sent to the pope. There is not enough here to be certain of anything but we have run across similar language: Aragon was under the pope’s tutela; the Siculo-Norman rulers, the kings of Croatia and Rus’, and the counts of Melgueil all swore fidelity. It is possible that William the Conqueror also participated—or refused to participate—in the language of papal investiture. We should also note another letter Gregory VII sent to William where the pope asked the king to collect the income sent to Rome from England ‘in order to make St Peter your debtor’.¹⁰⁰ The implication here is that the money from England was less a subject-tribute than a generous gift from patron to grateful recipient.

There is one letter from Pope Gregory to Mihailo, ‘king of the Slavs’, sent in 1078. Mihailo was the ruler of the kingdom of Zeta in the Balkans. Gregory told Mihailo that he could not terminate the dispute between the Bishop of Dubrovnik (in Zeta) and the Archbishop of Split (in Croatia-Dalmatia) because the letter Mihailo had sent to the pope contained different information to that contained in letters Gregory had received from his legate. Gregory therefore told Mihailo to send representatives to Rome from whom Gregory could inquire as to the ‘honour of your kingdom’ and consequently grant Mihailo’s petition for the gift of a banner (dono vexilli) and the concession of a pallium.¹⁰¹ This letter is normally taken as an indication that, first, Mihailo sought to remove his Church from allegiance to the Croatian archbishops and, secondly, that he wanted a similar position vis-à-vis the pope to that of his neighbour, Demetrius of Croatia-Dalmatia. Demetrius had been invested by the papal legate ‘through banner (vexillum), sword, sceptre and crown’ in 1076.¹⁰² If that is so (and we cannot be certain) then Mihailo must have been happy to swear fidelity and potentially be invested by the pope.

The evidence from Brittany is particularly unimpressive.¹⁰³ A privilege issued by Gregory VII for the abbey of Sainte-Croix of Quimperlé (Western Brittany) in 1078 began:

Brittany, as certain of your people testify, was committed to the tutelage and defence (tutele et defensioni) of the Holy Roman Church not only by emperors but even by its own inhabitants. Our predecessors were negligent in this matter (as in many others) and so the love and provision of Apostolic tutelage and the pristine intent of our devotion both fell into neglect and almost into oblivion. We therefore hasten to recall these—which until now were neglected—to memory […].¹⁰⁴

The privilege went on to place Sainte-Croix itself ‘under the tutelage and defence of the Apostolic See’ (sub tutela et defensione apostolice sedis). First, the identical wording used to describe the abbey’s protection, and Brittany’s relationship with Rome, might suggest to us that they were conceived as similar. The use of ‘tutelage’ (tutela) should put us in mind of Aragon in 1089 and 1095, Tarragona in 1091, and England in c.1066–73 when the same word was used. Secondly, it has to be said that Cowdrey’s belief that ‘[t]here can be little doubt that the papal claim was tacitly founded upon the section of the Constitutum Constantini in which Constantine delivered to the papacy omnes […] occidentalium regionum provincias’ does not carry conviction.¹⁰⁵ There is no indication at all that the ‘Donation of Constantine’ played any part in relations between secular rulers and the papacy, other than the long-standing popular belief that it must have done. Anyway, the privilege itself tells us where the ‘claim’ came from: ‘as certain of your people testify’. This reads as a suggestion put forward by the nuncios from Sainte-Croix who came to the Curia to petition for a privilege. It was a justification for why the pope should hark to them and grant their request. It is tempting to suggest that such a claim initially meant nothing to the curia. The pope’s insistence that the relationship had fallen ‘almost into oblivion’ through the neglect of his predecessors might well mean that he knew nothing about it. On that basis, we might even doubt whether the claim really referred to any concrete past event or was just instrumental rhetoric on the part of petitioners.¹⁰⁶

To stay for a moment with the ‘Donation of Constantine’: Cowdrey also deemed this to be the basis for Gregory’s claims of ‘direct lordship’ over ‘South Italy, Spain, and the islands of the western Mediterranean [Corsica and Sardinia]’.¹⁰⁷ There is limited evidence for this in those cases—the Donation was not explicitly (or, in my view, implicitly) brought up in relation to any of them by Gregory VII. Southern Italy has already been discussed at length and will be further discussed in chapter two. Aragon has been discussed but not Gregory’s supposed claim over Spain more generally. Gregory’s claim to Spain is based on two letters: one to all princes considering campaigning in Spain—sent when he was still pope-elect, before his consecration—and one sent in June 1077 to the kings, counts and other princes of Spain.

The first letter, from April 1073, told any princes considering campaigning against the Islamic rulers of Spain that Spain belonged to the personal right of St Peter and hence, now that Count Ebolus of Roucy had decided to campaign there, the count and the pope had agreed that Ebolus would possess any lands he conquered ‘on behalf of St Peter’ (ex parte sancti Petri). Anyone else thinking of going to Spain should therefore bear that in mind and respect the right (ius) of St Peter in Spain.¹⁰⁸ The purpose of this letter was not to claim overlordship of Spain. Had it been, it is likely that actual justifications for the existence of the ‘right of St Peter’ would have been offered. Instead, the vague ‘right of St Peter’ was the justification; the justification for Ebolus of Roucy to seize lands in Iberia without reference to the existing Spanish kings. This letter is surely a response to Ebolus’s fears that the Spanish rulers or other Frankish nobles would muscle in on his attempt to found a new lordship. When this letter is discussed in Gregorian scholarship, it often seems as though its only purpose was to claim supremacy over Spain.¹⁰⁹ Actually, this vague supremacy was the letter’s starting assumption. The letter’s purpose was to buttress Ebolus’s territorial claims (legitimated through the pope’s rights in Spain). Ebolus was the beneficiary of these claims over Spain and, as with Brittany above, the papacy’s claim to Spain might even have been a potential justification suggested by him.

The second letter (28 June 1077) to all the Spanish rulers was a pastoral letter. It began by outlining, first, the papacy’s position as head and universal mother of the Church; proceeded to emphasize that kings should keep the transitory nature of human existence in mind; then stated that:

[…] by ancient statutes the kingdom of Spain has been handed into the right and property (in ius et proprietatem) of blessed Peter and the holy Roman church. […] both the misfortunes of past times and some negligence of our predecessors have hitherto obscured this. For afterwards the kingdom was overrun by Saracens and pagans and the service (servitium) that used to be rendered to blessed Peter was withheld because of their infidelity and tyranny and for so many years diverted from the use of ourselves, the very memory of these things and of property began alike to fade. Now, because the victory that divine clemency has granted to you over these enemies, and which should always be granted, has handed over the land into your hands, we would not have you any longer to ignore this matter […].¹¹⁰

There is not enough here to be certain of anything.¹¹¹ It is tempting to point out the similarity between what is said here about the failing memory of the pope’s claims to Spain, and what was said in the privilege for Sainte-Croix in Quimperlé the next year (above).

More useful, however, is the phrase ‘right and property of St Peter’. Johannes Fried argued that—at least from the pontificate of Alexander III (1159–81)—this phrase in particular distinguished what he saw as the ‘protected’ kingdom of Aragon from kingdoms that were ‘fiefs’ of the pope (twelfth-century Sicily; thirteenth-century England), kingdoms that truly belonged to the pope’s lordship. Papal ‘fiefs’ were part of the ‘right and property of St Peter’.¹¹² Of course, Gregory VII preceded Alexander III (by nearly a century) so that distinction would not apply. Further, even after Alexander III we find that, in 1187, Pope Urban III said that the exempt priory of Santa Cruz de Coimbra in Portugal ‘pertains especially to the property (proprietatem) and tutelage of the Roman Church’.¹¹³ Around the same time, Urban also allowed several churches given to the Portuguese Knights Templar to choose their own bishop for consecrations or ordinations. These churches—partially exempt from episcopal jurisdiction—were said to be in ius et proprietatem beati Petri.¹¹⁴ Sandro Carocci has made the intriguing suggestion that the term proprietas was, until the mid-thirteenth century, a rhetorical expedient denoting ‘immediate dependence’ on papal authority. The basis of that authority could be ‘temporal power, feudal sovereignty or protection’.¹¹⁵

But for our period—the later eleventh century—all this discussion about the technical meaning of ius et proprietatem is moot. In 1102, Pope Paschal II told Bishop Stephen of Huesca that Peter I of Aragon had ‘given himself and all his [possessions] into the right and power of the Holy Roman Church’ (ius et potestatem).¹¹⁶ This is not quite the same as ‘right and property’, but maybe that is the point. This was not yet a fixed term. It was being used fairly loosely to describe Spain, Aragon, and elsewhere without necessarily having a clear technical meaning.

The papacy did have frequent interactions with Corsica and Sardinia from the eleventh century onwards.¹¹⁷ Corsica and Sardinia were fought over by the Pisans, the Genoese, and the indigenous inhabitants during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. There were frequent appeals to the papacy from one or the other side. Cowdrey was far from the only person to think that the papacy claimed lordship of these islands from Constantine’s Donation.¹¹⁸ Corsica and Sardinia will not be discussed here, however, since it seems likely that—until the thirteenth century and the creation of the ‘Kingdom of Corsica and Sardinia’—if the papacy thought it possessed special rights over the islands, those rights made Corsica and Sardinia analogous to lands in central Italy under the pope’s immediate lordship. In 1078 Gregory VII granted to his vicar half of the income from pleas—that is, coming from legal cases—on Corsica.¹¹⁹ This is not found in any of the Reform papacy’s relationships with secular rulers. Not with Aragon; not with the Normans in Sicily. Nowhere except in papal lands in central Italy—such as Roccantica.¹²⁰

The Counts of Besalú and Provence and the Danish kings round off this litany. Provence swore an oath to Pope Gregory VII in 1081 (recorded in the pope’s register). Besalú—a landlocked Catalonian county soon to be annexed to Barcelona—having seen the papal legate drive simony out of his county in 1077, awarded several annual censuses to abbeys in his county, and, additionally, established an annual census to St Peter of 100 gold mancuses. Thus St Peter would have him as a ‘personal knight’ (peculiarem militem).¹²¹ The Count of Provence’s oath is a slightly truncated version of that sworn by Demetrius of Croatia in 1076 (which was itself a shortened version of the oaths sworn by bishops and by the Siculo-Normans). The Count of Provence then added that he had granted (offero, concedo, dono) all his honour (omnem honorem meum) to God, SS Peter and Paul and the pope, and hence he granted all churches in his power to Gregory.¹²² Again concrete conclusions are risky. However one should note that Besalú used the same word—census—to describe the gifts he gave to abbeys within his county, and the annual tribute he established to Rome. Whether census was a tribute offered from a lesser to a greater, or a generous benefaction from a patron to favoured foundations, may have been open to interpretation.

There are a series of letters between Gregory VII and Kings Sweyn II (1047–76), Harald III (1076–80) and Cnut IV (1080–6) of Denmark.¹²³ The only even tangentially compelling evidence for any kind of formal relationship between Denmark and the Holy See comes from two early letters—both from 1075—where Gregory reminded Sweyn that the pope had been told ‘you wish to commit (committere) yourself and your kingdom to the prince of the apostles.’¹²⁴ A few months later Gregory reminded Sweyn that ‘you have sought certain things from our predecessor of blessed memory, Alexander, by which you would have made blessed Peter a debtor—indeed, by which you would have gained for your kingdom his exalted patronage (patrocinium).’¹²⁵ We know, fortunately, what Sweyn had been seeking from Alexander II which would have won him St Peter’s patronage. The first letter also mentioned ‘the matters which for the honouring of your kingdom you have both asked for and in return made promise to the Apostolic See in the time of our Lord Pope Alexander, both regarding a metropolitan see and regarding certain other things’. Sweyn wanted his own archbishop. Whether anything more than this was meant by the patronage of St Peter or ‘committing’ Denmark to Rome is impossible to say. We do also have a fragment of a letter from Alexander himself to Sweyn (hence c.1061–73) asking the king to send the ‘census of your kingdom’—possibly referring to the Danish Peter’s Pence—to Rome.¹²⁶

Hungary

The last case is—for the second time—that of Hungary. Hungary returns now because it gives us a final insight. Hitherto we have seen that, in the second half of the eleventh century, certain secular rulers—Aragon, the Siculo-Normans, the Rus’, Croatia-Dalmatia, Melgueil, Barcelona, and Cerdanya—described their relationships with the pope with terminology that drew on the language of lay investiture, the terms used to describe and condemn lay appointment of bishops. When the ceremony of investiture of a bishop by a secular ruler came to signify that the secular ruler was actually giving the bishop his regalia, kings and princes decided that they did not wish to be invested by the pope since this might suggest that the pope was the true owner of their land. It is possible that other kingdoms and counties participated in this ‘language of papal investiture’ in the eleventh century but this is impossible to say for certain. It does, however, leave one question: when the pope said that he ‘invested’ secular rulers, or that secular rulers should receive their realm ‘from the hand’ of the pope, was this a special relationship or did the popes simply think that all secular rulers received their realms ultimately from God and hence from the pope?

Hungary provides a possible answer. Gregory VII’s letters to King Solomon of Hungary in October 1074 have been read as claiming Hungary as a papal fief.¹²⁷ In his letter, the pope expressed his grave disquiet that Solomon had recently accepted Hungary as a beneficium from Emperor Henry IV (eius regnum a rege Teutonicorum in beneficium, sicut audivimus, suscepisti).¹²⁸ Solomon had recently been chased out of Hungary by Gesa, his cousin, and needed German aid. So, according to Lampert of Hersfeld (a contemporary chronicler) Solomon promised that ‘if the king was restored to kingship with his [Henry’s] help, he would thereafter be tributary (tributarius) to Henry.’¹²⁹ An added bit of confusion arises from Lampert’s use of eius beneficio to mean ‘with his [Henry’s] help’. Oswald Holder-Egger, who edited Lampert, assumed this meant ‘he would receive his kingdom in beneficium (fief) from King Henry’ (regnum suum in beneficium [feudum] ab Henrico rege susciperet). The more plausible interpretation, however—and the one followed by Ian Robinson in his translation—is that eius beneficio here means ‘with his help’.

But what did Gregory mean by beneficium here? A beneficium—meaning generally gifts or aid—could also be a semi-technical term denoting a grant of land. Gregory’s letter went on to say that he was particularly worried about Solomon’s promise to Henry IV because the sceptre of Hungary was a beneficium of Apostolic, not royal, majesty (sceptrum regni […] apostolice, non regie magestatis beneficium recognoscas). While beneficium could be read as a technical term here, the more plausible interpretation is surely to read it as a synonym for ‘gift’. Cowdrey, in his translation of Pope Gregory’s register, translated the first use of beneficium as ‘fief’ (Solomon received Hungary from Henry as a ‘fief’) but the second as ‘gift’ (‘the sceptre of the kingdom […] [is] a gift of apostolic, not of royal, sovereignty’).¹³⁰ In his biography of Gregory, however, Cowdrey translated both uses of beneficium in this letter as ‘gift’.¹³¹ Gregory’s claim for the papacy was that the royal sceptre was a beneficium of the pope. How could a sceptre be a ‘fief’? It seems likely that Gregory was claiming that the sceptre of royal power was within his gift, rather than Henry IV’s.

The next year, in two letters to Gesa (‘duke of Hungary’), Gregory praised the new ruler of Hungary telling him:

Truly, in contempt of the noble lordship (dominium) of blessed Peter, prince of the apostles, whose kingdom—we believe it not to be hidden from your prudence—it is, the king [Solomon] subjected (subdidit) himself to the king of the Germans and received the name of sub-king (regulus). But the Lord, foreseeing the wrong done to his prince, transferred the power of the kingdom to you [Gesa], by his judgement.¹³²

Here, in a letter of 17 April 1075, Gregory seemed to assert both lordship (dominium) and possession (‘whose kingdom […] it is’) of Hungary. But three weeks earlier Gregory had written to Gesa:

We believe it to be known to you that the kingdom of Hungary, just as other most famous kingdoms [my emphasis] […] should be subject (subici) to no king of another kingdom save to the holy and universal mother the Roman church […] Because your kinsman [Solomon] has acquired it by usurpation from the German king [Henry IV] not from the Roman pontiff, a divine judgement has (as we believe) impeded his lordship (dominium eius).¹³³

Obviously, Gregory was saying more or less the same thing in each letter—Solomon had subjected himself to the emperor in contravention of the rights of St Peter and so lost his kingship. But while one letter can be read as claiming rights for St Peter in Hungary specifically, the other makes it clear that the rights St Peter had in Hungary were the same as the rights St Peter had everywhere: ‘just as other most famous kingdoms’ (sicut et alia nobilissima regna). Gregory expected all kingdoms to be equally subject to the pope, and both the king and St Peter could have dominion in them.

The Spread of Ideas

A brief comment should be made about how the language and ideas of investiture spread. I have suggested here that kings and popes drew on the language of lay investiture—before and during the period when the practice was condemned—to structure royal–papal relationships. When lay investiture came to mean giving the regalia to the bishop—and hence to signify that the person performing the investiture actually owned the thing he was giving away—secular rulers no longer agreed to such a ceremony or the use of such language. But can we be sure that secular rulers from Aragon to Sicily knew all this?

First, we can be fairly sure that all secular rulers in the later eleventh century knew about the debates over whether the pope could depose secular rulers. Pages and pages of the MGH’s published Libelli de lite—the pamphlets of the propaganda wars—are spent discussing papal deposition of kings.¹³⁴ Even if rulers somehow managed to miss that, late eleventh-century collections of canon law contained commentary and historical precedents on the pope’s power to depose kings and emperors.¹³⁵ The first recension of the Collectio Tarraconensis was a canonical collection originally composed near Poitou in c.1080–90. By the end of the eleventh century there was at least one copy in the kingdom of Aragon, since one of the three surviving manuscripts of the first recension was made for the Cathedral of Roda (an Aragonese diocese) at that time.¹³⁶ This is one of the few canonical collections to include the Dictatus papae—a collection of statements about papal power from Gregory VII’s register—and its famous twelfth dictate that ‘it is permitted to him [the pope] to depose emperors.’¹³⁷ Such collections also included decrees against lay investiture. Tarraconensis includes the 1078 decree of the council of Poitiers quoted above, for example.¹³⁸ The Aragonese kings were surely aware both of the pope’s claim to depose rulers, and the common language of investiture used to describe their relations with the pope and lay investiture of bishops.

The Norman rulers of Sicily could draw a connection between lay investiture and papal investiture even more easily: at the council of Melfi in 1089, Urban II banned ‘anyone constituted in the clerical order or any monk […] to receive investiture of a bishopric or an abbey, or any ecclesiastical dignity whatsoever, from the hand of a layman’.¹³⁹ At the same council Duke Roger of Apulia (Guiscard’s son and successor) swore an oath to Urban, probably in the same words as all the other eleventh-century Norman oaths promising that the duke would keep fidelity to Urban’s successors ‘who renewed the investiture’.¹⁴⁰ According to the chronicle attributed to Romuald of Salerno (admittedly a later twelfth-century source) after swearing the oath at Melfi, Roger then ‘accepted the land with the ducal honour from him [Urban]’ (accepit […] ab eo terram cum ducatus honore).¹⁴¹ Roger was receiving his duchy in exactly the same words as Urban had just used to ban lay investiture.

Thus the Norman and Aragonese rulers would be able to make the connection. When, in the first few decades of the twelfth century, lay investiture came to mean the handing over of the regalia—the rights and lands granted by the bishops’ temporal superior—papal investiture became insupportable. The treatise De investitura episcoporum—which drew a distinction between ‘investiture by the king in farms and goods of the Church’ and consecration—circulated fairly widely.¹⁴² The texts of the Concordat of Worms itself were widely disseminated: according to the English chronicler Symeon of Durham (d.c.1129), letters testifying to the agreement were sent ‘through kingdoms and provinces’ and the concord between pope and emperor was ‘made public through nations and peoples everywhere’.¹⁴³ The rulers of Aragon and southern Italy would quickly be able to see what investiture of bishops now signified: the handing over of regalia.

Conclusion

In many of the cases examined in this chapter, the subjection of a secular ruler to the pope was described in terms reminiscent of investiture. Some rulers—such as the Normans in southern Italy and King Demetrius of Croatia-Dalmatia—were explicitly ‘invested’ by the pope or his legate. Some rulers—the Counts of Melgueil, the Kings of Aragon, the Count of Cerdanya, the Count of Barcelona—‘accepted’ their lands ‘from the hand’ or ‘through the hand’ of the pope. The King of the Rus’ received his kingdom as a ‘gift’ from the pope’s hands. All of this language drew on the terminology of lay investiture of bishops. At this time—c.1050–c.1100—there is little indication that there were different ‘types’ of relationship (such as spiritual protection or temporal lordship) between secular rulers and the pope. Rather, rulers and the pope recognized a vague and uncodified supremacy which the pope had over the world, and which could be described in language reminiscent of lay investiture. There was no problem with describing relationships between the pope and secular rulers, and between secular rulers and their bishops, in the same way, until the debates around investiture in the early twelfth century and the Concordat of Worms. By 1122 it was established that, when a king invested a bishop, the king was giving the bishops the regalia—land and rights which belonged ultimately to the king (rex). The clue was in the name: rex, regalia. Hence, logically, when the pope invested a king, the pope was actually giving the king his realm. Consequently, kings and secular rulers ceased to seek papal investiture. Now they saw that it could give the pope a claim on their realm. Gregory VII’s very public depositions of Henry IV simply confirmed to European rulers that it might not be wise to allow the papacy such a claim over them.

Papal Overlordship and European Princes, 1000–1270. Benedict Wiedemann, Oxford University Press. © Benedict Wiedemann 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192855039.003.0002

¹ A preliminary version of the general argument presented here can be found in Benedict Wiedemann, ‘Super gentes et regna: Papal “Empire” in the Later Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, The Church and Empire, ed. Charlotte Methuen, Andrew Spicer, Stuart J. Brown (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2018), pp. 109–122.

² For Stephen, Solomon and ‘fiefdom’, see H. E. John Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1998), p. 645; Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn. (Routledge: London, 2003), pp. 97–98. On the later thirteenth century, see Jean Sedlar, East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1994), pp. 163–164, cf. Andreas Kiesewetter, ‘L’intervento di Niccolò IV, Celestino V e Bonifacio VIII nella lotta per il trono ungherese (1290–1303)’, Bonifacio VIII: ideologia e azione politica, ed. Ilaria Bonincontro (Istituto storico italiano: Rome, 2006), pp. 139–198.

³ Papsturkunden 896–1046, ed. Harald Zimmermann, 3 vols. (Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Vienna, 1985–9), ii: 996–1046, pp. 737–740; Regesta pontificum Romanorum ab condita ecclesia ad annum post christum natum MCXCVIII, ed. Phillippe Jaffé et al., 3rd edn., 4 vols. to date (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: Göttingen, 2016–), iii: ab a. DCCCXLIV usque ad a. MXXIV, no. 8467; Regesta pontificum Romanorum ab condita ecclesia ad annum post christum natum MCXCVIII, ed. Phillippe Jaffé et al., 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Veit et comp.: Leipzig, 1885–8), no. 3909. But still occasionally thought authentic: Franco-Lucio Schiavetto, ‘Innocenzo III e l’Ungheria’, Innocenzo III: Urbs et Orbis, ed. Andrea Sommerlechner, 2 vols. (Istituto storico italiano: Rome, 2003), pp. 1192–9, at 1193; Brett Whalen, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, 2009), pp. 20, 245.

⁴ Vita Stephani regis Ungariae, ed. Wilhelm Wattenbach (Hahn: Hanover, 1854), MGH SS XI, pp. 222–242, at 233–234; Hartvic, ‘Life of King Stephen of Hungary’, trans. Nora Berend, Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, ed. Thomas Head (Routledge: London, 2000), pp. 379–396, at 383–384; Nora Berend, József Laszlovszky, Béla Zsolt Szakács, ‘The Kingdom of Hungary’, Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy, ed. Nora Berend (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007), pp. 319–368, at 343.

⁵ Vita Stephani, ed. Wattenbach, pp. 233–234.

⁶ Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merseburg, ed. Robert Holtzmann (Weidmann: Berlin, 1935), MGH SS. rer. Germ. N.S. IX, p. 198; Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, trans. David Warner (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2001), p. 193.

⁷ See László Veszprémy, ‘The Holy Crown of Saint Stephen’, Saint Stephen and His Country: A Newborn Kingdom in Central Europe—Hungary, ed. Attila Zsoldos, trans. Judit Barna (Lucidus: Budapest, 2001), pp. 95–110; Gyula Kristó, ‘The Life of King Stephen the Saint’, ibid., pp. 15–36, at 23; Gábor Thoroczkay, ‘The Dioceses and Bishops of Saint Stephen’, ibid., pp. 49–68, at 55–57; Gerd Althoff, Otto III, trans. Phyllis Jestice (Penn State University Press: Pennsylvania, 2003), p. 127.

⁸ Die Kanonessammlung des Kardinals Deusdedit, ed. Victor von Glanvell (Schöningh: Paderborn, 1905), no. 199, p. 359; Brygida Kürbis, ‘Dagome iudex—Studium krytyczne’, Na progach historii II (Wydawnictwo poznańskie: Poznań, 2001), pp. 9–88.

⁹ David Kalhous, Anatomy of a Duchy, the Political and Ecclesiastical Structures of Early Přemyslid Bohemia (Brill: Leiden, 2012), p. 76; Krystyna Łukasiewicz, ‘Dagome Iudex and the First Conflict over succession in Poland’, The Polish Review 54 (2009), pp. 407–429.

¹⁰ Przemysław Wiszewski, Domus Bolezlai: Values and Social Identity in Dynastic Traditions of Medieval Poland (c.966–1138) (Brill: Leiden, 2010), p. 4; Łukasiewicz, ‘Dagome Iudex’, p. 414; Kalhous, Anatomy, pp. 79–80; Przemysław Nowak, ‘Das Papsttum und Ostmitteleuropa (Böhmen-Mähren, Polen, Ungarn) vom ausgehenden 10. bis zum Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts’, Rom und die Regionen. Studien zur Homogenisierung der lateinischen Kirche, ed. Jochen Johrendt, Harald Müller (de Gruyter: Berlin, 2012), pp. 331–370, at 339–340.

¹¹ Nowak, ‘Das Papsttum und Ostmitteleuropa’, p. 340.

¹² Monumenta Poloniae Historica, 1st Ser., ed. August Bielowski, 6 vols. (Nakł. Akademii Umiejętności: Lviv/Krakow, 1864–93), vol. i, pp. 223–228; Die Chronik des Thietmar, ed. Holtzmann, p. 385; Chronicon of Thietmar, trans. Warner, p. 299.

¹³ Rory Naismith, Francesca Tinti, ‘The Origins of Peter’s Pence’, English Historical Review 134 (2019), pp. 521–552; Benedict Wiedemann, ‘The Character of Papal Finance at the Turn of the Twelfth Century’, English Historical Review 133 (2018), pp. 503–532.

¹⁴ Monumenta Poloniae Historica, ed. Bielowski, iv, pp. 272, 382.

¹⁵ Naismith, Tinti, ‘Origins of Peter’s Pence’, pp. 526–528.

¹⁶ Schieffer, ‘Papsttum und neue Königreiche im 11./12. Jahrhundert’, Päpstliche Herrschaft im Mittelalter: Funktionsweisen—Strategien—Darstellungsformen, ed. Stefan Weinfurter (Jan Thorbecke: Ostfildern, 2012), pp. 69–80, esp. 70. As opposed to the thirteenth century when, according to Schieffer, the papacy sought out feudal submissions.

¹⁷ Paul Kehr, ‘Cómo y cuándo se hizo Aragón feudatorio de la Santa Sede’, Estudios de edad media de la Corona de Aragón 1 (1945), pp. 285–326.

¹⁸ Fried, päpstlicher Schutz, pp. 82–83; Schieffer, ‘Die Reichweite päpstlicher Entscheidungen’, p. 22; Damian Smith, Innocent III and the Crown of Aragon: The Limits of Papal Authority (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2004), pp. 48, 56–57; idem, ‘Sancho Ramirez and the Roman Rite’, Unity and Diversity in the Church, ed. Robert Swanson (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1996), pp. 95–105, at 97–98; Robinson, The Papacy, pp. 303–307; Anne Duggan, ‘Alexander ille meus: The Papacy of Alexander III’, Pope Alexander III (1159–81): The Art of Survival, ed. eadem, Peter Clarke (Ashgate: Farnham, 2012), pp. 13–49, at 43–44. Joseph Hergenröther said much the same long before Fried, Catholic Church and Christian State, 2 vols. (Burns and Oates: London, 1876), i, pp. 81–83.

¹⁹ Documentos correspondientes al reinado de Sancio Ramírez, ed. José Salarrullana y de Dios, Eduardo Ibarra y Rodriguez, 2 vols. (Escar: Zaragoza, 1907–13), vol. i, no. 3, pp. 7–8. The document is dated to the 17 Kalends of March. This is odd. Conventionally March has only 16 Kalends.

²⁰ Robert Somerville, Stephan Kuttner, Pope Urban II, the Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi (1089) (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1996), pp. 97–99; Kehr, ‘Cómo y cuándo’, no. 3, p. 319; Paul Ewald, ‘Die Papstbriefe der Brittischen Sammlung’, Neues Archiv 5 (1880), pp. 274–414, 505–596, at 359–360.

²¹ The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña: A Fourteenth-Century Official History of the Crown of Aragon, trans. Lynn Nelson (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1991), p. 19. For the adoption of the Roman rite in Aragon see Smith, ‘Sancho Ramirez and the Roman Rite’, pp. 95–106.

²² Alexandri II Epistolae et Diplomata, no. 80, PL 146, cols. 1362–3. The letter is probably genuine, see Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1993), p. 183. Two other Aragonese monasteries—St Peter of Loarre and St Victorian of Sobarbe—also received protection privileges on the same day, Papsturkunden in Spanien, ed. Kehr et al., ii, nos. 3–4, pp. 260–265.

²³ Historia Compostellana, ed. Emma Falque Rey (Turnhout, 1988), lib. 2, cap. 15, linea 66 (accessed through Brepols’ Library of Latin Texts—A); Richard Fletcher, Saint James’ Catapault: The Life and Times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1984), p. 202.

²⁴ Erdmann, Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, pp. 347–362; idem, Origin of the Idea of Crusade, pp. 216–224.

²⁵ Nikolas Jaspert, ‘Eleventh-Century Pilgrimage from Catalonia to Jerusalem: New Sources on the Foundation of the First Crusade’, Crusades 14 (2015), pp. 1–49, at 9, 14–15, 17, 33–35, 37, 39–41, 43, 45.

²⁶ Mariani Scotti chronicon, ed. Georg Waitz (Hahn: Hanover, 1844), MGH SS V, pp. 481–568, at 558.

²⁷ The Orkneyinga Saga, ed. Joseph Anderson, trans. Jon A. Hjaltalin, Gilbert Goudie (Edmonston and Douglas: Edinburgh, 1873), p. 43.

²⁸ Naismith, Tinti, ‘Origins of Peter’s Pence’.

²⁹ Ramon de Huesca, Teatro historico de las iglesias del Reyno de Aragon, 9 vols. (J.M. de Ezquerro: Pamplona, 1780–1807), v: Estado antiguo de la santa iglesia de Huesca, pp. 405–408; Kehr, ‘Cómo y cuándo’, no. 1, pp. 314–317.

³⁰ Antonio Durán Gudiol, Ramiro I de Aragon (Guara: Zaragoza, 1978), p. 118–119, cf. Linehan, History and the Historians, p. 183 46n.

³¹ Kehr, ‘Cómo y cuándo’, pp. 301, 315; Fried, päpstlicher Schutz, p. 67 10n.

³² Charles Bishko, ‘Fernando I and the Origins of the Leonese-Castilian Alliance with Cluny I’, Studies in Medieval Spanish Frontier History (Variorum reprints: London, 1980), pp. 1–53, at 51–53.

³³ Timothy Reuter, ‘Gifts and Simony’, Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context, ed. Mayke de Jong, Esther Cohen (Brill: Leiden, 2001), pp. 157–168, at 164.

³⁴ Bishko, ‘Fernando I and the Origins of the Leonese-Castilian Alliance with Cluny II’, Studies in Medieval Spanish Frontier History, pp. 53–88. Cf. Patrick Henriet, ‘Cluny and Spain before Alfonso VI: Remarks and Propositions’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 9 (2017), pp. 206–219. Cf. also Weckmann, Constantino el Grande, pp. 62–63 who believed that the English Peter’s Pence began as alms, but gained a ‘feudal tint’ in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was, however, still described as eleemosyna in 1116 (ibid., p. 73).

³⁵ Somerville, Kuttner, Urban II, the Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi, pp. 97–99; Kehr, ‘Cómo y cuándo’, no. 3, p. 319; Ewald, ‘Die Papstbriefe der Brittischen Sammlung’, pp. 359–360.

³⁶ Somerville, Kuttner, Urban II, the Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi, pp. 155–162; Epistolae pontificum Romanorum ineditae, ed. Samuel Löwenfeld (Veit et comp.: Leipzig, 1885), no. 130, p. 63; Kehr, ‘Cómo y cuándo’, no. 4, pp. 320–321.

³⁷ JL, nos. 5398 (Montearagon), 5400 (St Pons of Thomières); Papsturkunden in Spanien, ed. Kehr et al., ii, no. 7, pp. 269–272 (San Juan).

³⁸ Ramon de Huesca, Teatro historico de las iglesias del Reyno de Aragon, vii: Iglesia de Huesca, pp. 458–462; Fried, päpstlicher Schutz, pp. 327–329 (JL 5398).

³⁹ Fried, päpstlicher Schutz, pp. 77–78.

⁴⁰ Fried’s suggestion (päpstlicher Schutz, pp. 81–82) that the pope was giving the protected kingdom—regnum illud—to the king, not the kingdom itself (which was the king’s irrespective of the pope), meaning that this sentence essentially means only that future kings should renew their protection ‘from the pope’s hand’, seems rather tenuous to me.

⁴¹ Papsturkunden in Spanien, ed. Kehr et al., ii, p. 120; Innocentii III regestorum sive epistolarum liber, 1213, no. 87, PL 216, cols. 888–9.

⁴² Iter Italicum, ed. Julius von Pflugk-Harttung (Kohlhammer: Stuttgart, 1883), no. 44, pp. 437–439; Paul Kehr, Das Papsttum und die Königreiche Navarra und Aragon bis zur Mitte des XII Jahrhunderts (de Gruyter: Berlin, 1928), no. 1, pp. 55–57; Liber Feudorum Maior: Cartulario real que se conserva en el archivo de la Corona de Aragón, ed. Francisco Miquel Rosell, 2 vols. (Concejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. Secciòn de Estudios Medievales de Barcelona: Barcelona, 1945–7), i, no. 4, pp. 6–7; Colección diplomática de Pedro I de Aragón y Navarra, ed. Antonio Ubieto Arteta (Escuela de Estudios Medievales: Zaragoza, 1951), no. 21, pp. 235–238.

⁴³ Ludwig Falkenstein, La papauté et les abbayes françaises aux XI^e et XII^e siècles. Exemption et protection apostolique (Honore Champion: Paris, 1997); Paul Rabikauskas, Diplomatica pontificia, 6th edn. (Pontificia Università Gregoriana: Rome, 1998), pp. 49–51; David Knowles, ‘Essays in Monastic History, iv: The Growth of Exemption’, Downside Review 31 (1932), pp. 201–231, 396–425.

⁴⁴ Kehr, Navarra und Aragon, no. 2, pp. 57–58.

⁴⁵ Das Register Gregors VII., ed. Erich Caspar, 2 vols. (Weidmann: Berlin, 1920–23), MGH Epp. sel. II, ii, no. 6.5b, p. 401.

⁴⁶ Somerville, Kuttner, Urban II, the Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi, p. 254.

⁴⁷ Robert Somerville, ‘The Council of Beauvais, 1114’, Traditio 24 (1968), pp. 493–503, at 503, reprinted in idem, Papacy, Councils and Canon Law in the 11th–12th Centuries (Variorum reprints: Aldershot, 1990), X.

⁴⁸ Placidi monachi Nonantulani Liber de honore ecclesiae, ed. Lothar von Heinemann, Ernst Sackur (Hahn: Hanover, 1892), MGH Ldl II, pp. 566–639, at 590.

⁴⁹ Robert Benson, The Bishop-Elect: A Study in Medieval Ecclesiastical Office (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1968), pp. 204–205, 238–239.

⁵⁰ Graham A. Loud, The Latin Church in Norman Italy (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007), p. 60; idem, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Pearson: Harlow, 2000), pp. 60–66; John France, ‘The Occasion of the Coming of the Normans to Southern Italy’, Journal of Medieval History 17 (1991), pp. 185–205.

⁵¹ Dione Clementi, ‘The Relations between the Papacy, the Western Roman Empire and the Emergent Kingdom of Sicily and Southern Italy (1050–1156)’, Bullettino dell’istituto storico italiano per il medio evo 80 (1968), pp. 191–212; Loud, Latin Church, p. 137.

⁵² H. E. John Cowdrey, The Age of Abbot Desiderius: Montecassino, the Papacy, and the Normans in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1983), pp. 111–117.

⁵³ Le Liber censuum de l’Église Romaine, ed. Paul Fabre, Louis Duchesne, Guillaume Mollat, 3 vols. (Thorin: Paris, 1889–1952), i, nos. 162–163, pp. 421–422, ii, no. 42, pp. 93–94; Das Papsttum und die süditalienischen Normannenstaaten, 1053–1212, ed. József Deér (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: Göttingen, 1969), nos. IV/2; VII/1, pp. 17–18, 21–22.

⁵⁴ Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1957), p. 349.

⁵⁵ Liber censuum, i, no. 163, p. 422.

⁵⁶ Noted (with different emphases) by Sandro Carocci, Vassalli del papa: potere pontificio, aristocrazie e città nello Stato della Chiesa (XII-XV sec.) (Viella: Rome, 2010), p. 51 n.11; Ullmann, Growth of Papal Government, p. 337; Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, p. 212; Kenneth Pennington, ‘Feudal Oath of Fidelity and Homage’, Law as Profession and Practice in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of James A. Brundage, ed. Kenneth Pennington, Melodie Eichbauer (Ashgate: Farnham, 2011), pp. 93–115, at 106; John Sabapathy, ‘Thinking Politically with Innocent III: Prudence and Providence’, Authority and Resistance in the Age of Magna Carta, ed. Janet Burton, Phillip Schofield, Björn Weiler (Boydell and Brewer: Woodbridge, 2015), pp. 115–136, at 120 37n.

⁵⁷ Kanonessammlung, ed. von Glanvell, no. 423, p. 599.

⁵⁸ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, ii, no. 6.17a, pp. 428–429; Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, pp. 348–350.

⁵⁹ Wiedemann, ‘The Joy of Lists’.

⁶⁰ Francesco Sperandio, Sabina sagra e profana antica e moderna (Zempel: Rome, 1790), no. 37, pp. 373–374. On which, see Brenda Bolton, ‘Nova familia beati Petri: Adrian IV and the Patrimony’, Adrian IV, the English Pope (1154–1159): Studies and Texts, ed. eadem, Anne Duggan (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003), pp. 157–179, at 162–163; Pierre Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval: Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IX^e à la fin du XII^e siècle, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (École Française de Rome: Rome, 2015), ii, pp. 1070–1071.

⁶¹ Kanonessammlung, ed. von Glanvell, no. 201, pp. 360–361.

⁶² Liber censuum, i, no. 162, pp. 421–422.

⁶³ Daniel Waley, The Papal State in the Thirteenth Century (MacMillan: London, 1961), p. 253.

⁶⁴ Toubert, Les structures, ii, pp. 1068–1073.

⁶⁵ Das Papsttum und die Normannenstaaten, ed. Deér, nos. IV/2; VII/1; VIII/1; IX/18a–b, pp. 17–18, 21–22, 23, 31, 32.

⁶⁶ AAV, Reg. Vat. 2, ff. 194r–v; Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, ii, no. 8.1b, pp. 515–516; The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085: An English Translation, trans. H. E. John Cowdrey (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2002), p. 365.

⁶⁷ Romoaldi II archiepiscopi Salernitani Annales, ed. Wilhelm Arndt (Hahn: Hanover, 1866), MGH SS. XIX, pp. 387–461, at 406, 408, 412, 415, 416, 417, 418, 422, 423, 429 (1059–1156); Falcone of Benevento, Chronicon Beneventanum, ed. trans. Edoardo D’Angelo (Galluzzo: Florence, 1998), pp. 88, 190, 222 (1127–39); Alexander of Telese, Storia di Ruggero II, ed. trans. Raffaele Matarazzo (Arte tipografica: Naples, 2001), p. 18 (1128); Annales Cavenses, in Das Papsttum und die Normannenstaaten, ed. Deér, p. 73 (1138); Vita Gregorii VII, in Das Papsttum und die Normannenstaaten, ed. Deér, p. 34 (1080); Chronicon Amalfitanum, in Antiquitates Italicae, ed. Ludovico Muratori, 6 vols. (Ex typographia Societatis palatinae: Milan, 1738–42), i, cols. 213, 214 (1059–80).

⁶⁸ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 2.74, pp. 236–237.

⁶⁹ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 2.73, pp. 233–235; Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, pp. 168–169.

⁷⁰ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 4.22, pp. 330–334.

⁷¹ Beate Schilling, ‘Die Kanones des Konzils von Poitiers (1078) (mit Textedition): ein Versuch’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 103 (2017), pp. 70–130, at 90. On the council, see Kriston Rennie, ‘The Council of Poitiers (1078) and Some Legal Considerations’, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 27 (2007), pp. 1–19.

⁷² Kanonessammlung, ed. von Glanvell, no. 278, pp. 383–385.

⁷³ Cartulaire de Maguelone, ed. Julien Rouquette, Augustin Villemagne, 7 vols. (Valat: Montpellier/Paris, 1912–1923), i, no. 14, pp. 18–20.

⁷⁴ The potential penalties faced by Count Peter were therefore no different to the potential penalties for any violator of the rights of the Church; the pope had gained no unique coercive power in Melgueil. Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis et leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes, ed. Theodor Mommsen, Paul Meyer (Weidmann: Berlin, 1905), p. 846; The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions, trans. (attrib.) Clyde Pharr (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1952), p. 446.

⁷⁵ Bullaire de l’Église de Maguelone, ed. Julien Rouquette, Augustin Villemagne, 2 vols. (Valat: Montpellier, 1911–14), vol. i: 1030–1216, no. 4, pp. 6–11. Although the privilege was dated to December 1087, Urban was not elected until early 1088: the privilege also contains an indictional date, however, which corresponds to 1088, as does the dating by Urban’s first pontifical year. The idea of the ‘knighthood of St Peter’ (militia sancti Petri) has been excessively reified; the term was probably not a formal title but merely an occasional term of address for lords and knights favourable to the pope. On the ‘militia’, see Ian Robinson, ‘Gregory VII and the Soldiers of Christ’, History 58 (1973), pp. 169–192; Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 640–650; Erdmann, Origin of the Idea of Crusade, esp. pp. 182–228; Ane Bysted, The Crusade Indulgence: Spiritual Rewards and the Theology of the Crusades, c.1095–1216 (Brill: Leiden, 2015), pp. 59–60.

⁷⁶ Histoire générale de Languedoc, ed. Claude Devic, Joseph Vaissète, 2nd edn., 16 vols. (Privat: Toulouse, 1872–1904), v, no. 404, cols. 760–1.

⁷⁷ Liber censuum, i, no. 216, pp. 468–469. On which, see Fried, päpstlicher Schutz, pp. 87–101.

⁷⁸ Fredric Cheyette, ‘The “Sale” of Carcassonne to the Counts of Barcelona (1067–1070) and the Rise of the Trencavels’, Speculum 63 (1988), pp. 826–864, at 863–864.

⁷⁹ Liber censuum, i, no. 215, pp. 467–468.

⁸⁰ Kanonessammlung, ed. von Glanvell, no. 271, p. 379. The grant is attributed to Raymond-William, count of Urgell, but there was no such person. The contemporary count of Cerdanya was William-Raymond, however, and so he was probably meant: Volkert Pfaff, ‘Der Liber Censuum von 1192’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 44 (1957), pp. 78–96, 105–120, 220–242, 325–351, at 340.

⁸¹ Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation, and Commentary, ed. trans. H. J. Schroeder (Herder: London, 1937), pp. 157–176, at 168, 173–174. On which, see Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 105–107, 547.

⁸² Michael Wilks, ‘Ecclesiastica and Regalia: Papal Investiture Policy from the Council of Guastalla to the First Lateran Council, 1106–23’, Councils and Assemblies: Papers Read at the Eighth Summer Meeting and the Ninth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Geoffrey Cuming, Derek Baker (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1971), pp. 69–85; Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (University of Pennslyvania Press: Philadelphia, PA, 1988), pp. 163–173; eadem, ‘Patrimonia and Regalia in 1111’, Law, Church, and Society: Essays in Honor of Stephan Kuttner, ed. K. Pennington, R. Somerville (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, PA, 1977), pp. 9–22, reprinted in Uta-Renate Blumenthal, Papal Reform and Canon Law in the 11th and 12th Centuries (Variorum reprints: Aldershot, 1998), IX; Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993); Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 546–550.

⁸³ For similar observations, see Charles West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Revolution between Marne and Moselle, c.800-c.1100 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2013), pp. 213–221.

⁸⁴ Detlev Jasper, ‘The Deposition and Excommunication of Emperors and Kings: A Collection of Historical Examples from the Investiture Conflict’, Canon Law, Religion, and Politics: Liber Amicorum Robert Somerville, ed. Uta-Renate Blumenthal, Anders Winroth, Peter Landau (Catholic University of America Press: Washington DC, 2012), pp. 199–214; Chronicles of the Investiture Contest: Frutolf of Michelsberg and his Continuators, trans. T. J. H. McCarthy (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2014), pp. 12, 124–125; West, Feudal Revolution, pp. 213–214; Karl Morrison, ‘Canossa: A Revision’, Traditio 18 (1962), pp. 121–148.

⁸⁵ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 4.2, pp. 293–297. See also ibid., ii, no. 8.21, pp. 544–563.

⁸⁶ Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, ed. Ludwig Weiland et al., 13 vols. (Hahn: Hanover, 1893–2017), MGH Const. I–XIII, i, nos. 415–416, pp. 591–593; ii, no. 411, p. 542; Die Urkunden der Kaiserin Konstanze, ed. Theo Kölzer (Hahn: Hanover, 1990), MGH DD. Konst., no. 65, pp. 203–205.

⁸⁷ Hartmut Hoffmann, ‘Langobarden, Normannen, Päpste. Zum Legitimationsproblem in Unteritalien’, Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 58 (1978), pp. 137–180, at 173–176; Graham A. Loud, Roger II and the Creation of the Kingdom of Sicily (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2012), pp. 304–306.

⁸⁸ Rome, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Arch. Cap. S. Pietro G.44, fols. 69r-v; Hoffmann, ‘Langobarden, Normannen, Päpste’, pp. 176–178; Loud, Creation, pp. 310–312; Constitutiones et acta publica, ed. Weiland, i, nos. 413–414, pp. 588–591; The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by Hugo Falcandus 1154–69, trans. Graham A. Loud, Thomas E. J. Wiedemann (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1998), pp. 248–252.

⁸⁹ Romoaldi Annales, ed. Arndt, pp. 423, 429; Loud, Creation, p. 259; History of the Tyrants of Sicily, trans. Loud, Wiedemann, pp. 223–224.

⁹⁰ Falcone, Chronicon Beneventanum, ed. D’Angelo, p. 222; Loud, Creation, pp. 238–239.

⁹¹ Reinhard Elze, ‘Tre ordines per l’incoronazione di un re e di una regina del regno normanno di Sicilia’, Atti del congresso internazionale di studi sulla Sicilia normanna (Istituto di Storia Medievale, Università di Palermo: Palermo, 1973), pp. 438–459.

⁹² On potential interactions between episcopal and royal inauguration, see Johanna Dale, Inauguration and Liturgical Kingship in the Long Twelfth Century: Male and Female Accession Rituals in England, France and the Empire (Boydell and Brewer: Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 76–77, 88, 212.

⁹³ Fried, päpstlicher Schutz, pp. 82–83.

⁹⁴ See chapter five.

⁹⁵ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, ii, no. 7.4, pp. 463–464.

⁹⁶ Morris, Papal Monarchy, p. 132; Ullmann, Growth of Papal Government, p. 334.

⁹⁷ Epistolae diversorum ad Gregorium VII, no. 11, PL 148, col. 748. Zachary Brooke, ‘Pope Gregory VII’s Demand for Fealty from William the Conqueror’, English Historical Review 26 (1911), pp. 225–238; idem, The English Church and the Papacy: From the Conquest to the Reign of King John, new edn. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989), pp. 140–143; Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 463, 646–647; Ullmann, Growth of Papal Government, p. 340.

⁹⁸ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, ii, no. 7.23, pp. 499–502.

⁹⁹ Kanonessammlung, ed. von Glanvell, no. 269, p. 378.

¹⁰⁰ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 1.70, pp. 100–102.

¹⁰¹ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, ii, no. 5.12, p. 365.

¹⁰² Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 442–443.

¹⁰³ In general, see Paula de Fougerolles, ‘Pope Gregory VII, the Archbishopric of Dol and the Normans’, Anglo-Norman Studies XXI, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Boydell and Brewer: Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 47–66.

¹⁰⁴ London, British Library, Egerton 2802, ff. 157r-8v; Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Sainte-Croix de Quimperlé, ed. Léon Maître, Paul de Berthou, 2nd edn. (Plihon et Hommay: Rennes, 1904), no. 132, pp. 293–296; Sancti Gregorii VII Pontificis Romani operum pars secunda, no. 37, PL 148, cols. 684–5 (the PL edition reads ‘gentis vestre’ as ‘gentis nostre’; the Cartulaire edition reads ‘devotionis nostre’ as ‘devotionis vestre’).

¹⁰⁵ Cowdrey, Gregory VII, p. 645.

¹⁰⁶ Cf. Wiedemann, ‘Papal Authority and Power’, pp. 72–73.

¹⁰⁷ Cowdrey, Gregory VII, p. 640.

¹⁰⁸ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 1.7, pp. 11–12; Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, pp. 7–8.

¹⁰⁹ Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 642–643; Lucas Villegas Aristizábal, ‘Pope Gregory VII and Count Eblous II of Roucy’s Proto-Crusade in Iberia c.1073’, Medieval History Journal 21 (2018), pp. 117–140.

¹¹⁰ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 4.28, pp. 343–347; Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, pp. 242–245.

¹¹¹ Although Bernard Reilly’s conclusion that this letter was the immediate cause for Alfonso VI’s adoption of the title ‘Emperor of All Spain’ is convincing: The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VI, 1065–1109 (Princeton University Press: Philadelphia, PA, 1988), pp. 102–104.

¹¹² Fried, päpstlicher Schutz, pp. 87, 301.

¹¹³ Papsturkunden in Portugal, ed. Carl Erdmann (Weidmann: Berlin, 1927), no. 115, pp. 331–332. See also Papsturkunden in Spanien, ed. Kehr et al., i, no. 264, pp. 570–575.

¹¹⁴ Papsturkunden in Portugal, ed. Erdmann, no. 107, pp. 300–301.

¹¹⁵ Sandro Carocci, ‘Patrimonium beati Petri e fidelitas: continuità e innovazione nella concezione innocenziana dei domini pontifici’, Innocenzo III, ed. Sommerlechner, pp. 668–690; Carocci, ‘Popes as Princes? The Papal States (1000–1300)’, A Companion to the Medieval Papacy: Growth of an Ideology and Institution, ed. Keith Sisson, Atria Larson (Brill: Leiden, 2016), pp. 66–84, at 79.

¹¹⁶ Papsturkunden in Spanien, ed. Kehr et al., i, no. 33, pp. 300–301; ii, no. 22, p. 302–303.

¹¹⁷ Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 643–645; Raffaelo Volpini, ‘Documenti nel Sancta Sanctorum del Laterano i resti dell’Archivio di Gelasio II’, Lateranum 52 (1986), pp. 214–264, esp. 259–261; Caffaro, Genoa and the Twelfth-Century Crusades, trans. Jonathan Phillips, Martin Hall (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2013), pp. 12–13, 60–61, 68–69, 103–105; Stroll, Calixtus II, pp. 301–312; Steven Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), pp. 40–41; Acta pontificum Romanorum inedita, ed. Julius von Pflugk-Harttung, 3 vols. (Kohlhammer: Tubingen/Stuttgart, 1880–86), vol. ii, no. 313, pp. 273–274; John Moore, ‘Pope Innocent III, Sardinia and the Papal State’, Speculum 62 (1987), pp. 81–101; Mauro Sanna, ‘Onorio III e la Sardegna’, Nuovi studi su Onorio III, ed. Christian Grasso (Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo: Rome, 2017), pp. 165–188; David Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994), pp. 235–252; Sanna, ‘Il regnum Sardinie et Corsice nell’azione politica di Bonifacio VIII’, Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo 112 (2010), pp. 503–528.

¹¹⁸ Ullmann, Growth of Papal Government, p. 334; Robinson, The Papacy, p. 309.

¹¹⁹ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, ii, no. 6.12, pp. 413–415.

¹²⁰ Toubert, Les structures, ii, pp. 1070–1071; Waley, Papal State, pp. 256–257.

¹²¹ Santa Iglesia de Gerona en su estado antiguo, ed. Antonin Merino (Imprenta de Collado: Madrid, 1819), España sagrada XLIII, no. 49, pp. 480–481.

¹²² Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, ii, no. 9.12a–b, pp. 589–591.

¹²³ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, ii, nos. 5.10, 7.5, 7.21, pp. 361–363, 464–465, 497–498. See Cowdrey, Gregory VII, pp. 454–458, 619–620, 647.

¹²⁴ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 2.51, pp. 192–194; Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, pp. 142–143.

¹²⁵ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 2.75, pp. 237–238; Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, pp. 170–171.

¹²⁶ Kanonessammlung, ed. von Glanvell, no. 268, p. 378.

¹²⁷ Morris, Papal Monarchy, p. 426; Cowdrey, Gregory VII, p. 645; Ullmann, Short History of the Papacy, pp. 97–98.

¹²⁸ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 2.13, pp. 144–146; Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, p. 108.

¹²⁹ Lamperti Hersfeldensis Annales, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger (Hahn: Hanover/Leipzig, 1894), MGH SS rer. Germ. XXXVIII, pp. 197–198; The Annals of Lampert of Hersfeld, trans. Ian S. Robinson (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2015), pp. 233–234, 237.

¹³⁰ Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, p. 108.

¹³¹ Cowdrey, Gregory VII, p. 444.

¹³² Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 2.70, pp. 229–230; Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, pp. 165–166.

¹³³ Register Gregors, ed. Caspar, i, no. 2.63, pp. 218–219; Register of Pope Gregory, trans. Cowdrey, p. 157.

¹³⁴ Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum, ed. Ernst Dümmler, 3 vols. (Hahn: Hanover, 1891–7), MGH Ldl I-III; on which, see Leidulf Melve, Inventing the Public Sphere: The Public Debate during the Investiture Contest (c.1030–1122), 2 vols. (Brill: Leiden, 2007); idem, ‘“Even the Very Laymen are Chattering about It”: The Politicization of Public Opinion, 800–1200’, Viator 44 (2013), pp. 25–48; Gerd Althoff, Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, William Kynan-Wilson, ‘Framing Papal Communication in the Central Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History 44 (2018), pp. 251–260.

¹³⁵ Jasper, ‘Deposition and Excommunication’, pp. 199–214; Friedrich Kempf, ‘Ein zweiter Dictatus papae? Ein Beitrag zum Depositionsanspruch Gregors VII.’, Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 13 (1975), pp. 119–139, at 131–134.

¹³⁶ Joseph Goering, ‘Bishops, Law, and Reform in Aragon, 1076–1126, and the Liber Tarraconensis’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 95 (2009), pp. 1–28; Lotte Kéry, Canonical Collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 400–1140): A Bibliographical Guide to the Manuscripts and Literature (Catholic University of America Press: Washington DC, 1999), pp. 214–215; Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010), pp. 84–85; Rennie, ‘Council of Poitiers’, p. 11.

¹³⁷ Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 5517, f. 121r.

¹³⁸ BnF, Lat. 5517, f. 128r.

¹³⁹ Somerville, Kuttner, Urban II, the Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi, pp. 254, 261.

¹⁴⁰ Somerville, Kuttner, Urban II, the Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi, pp. 258, 262.

¹⁴¹ Romoaldi Annales, ed. Arndt, p. 412.

¹⁴² Jutta Krimm-Beumann, ‘Der Traktat De investitura episcoporum von 1109’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 33 (1977), pp. 37–83, at 77–78; Melve, Inventing the Public Sphere, pp. 618–621.

¹⁴³ Symeon of Durham, Opera omnia, ed. Thomas Arnold, 2 vols. (Longman: London, 1882–5) vol. ii: Historia Regum, pp. 265–266; Stroll, Calixtus II, p. 415; Benson, The Bishop-Elect, pp. 303–304.