Part 1222

"By investiture in mediaeval church law is meant the act of bestowing a church office, with the use of symbols, on the clergyman who has been appointed to fill it. It is especially to signify the act by which secular princes conferred on the chosen candidates the offices of bishop and abbot that the word is used since the eleventh century. The struggle which the papacy and the church carried on in the last half of the 11th and on into the 12th century for the purpose of doing away with this same right of the princes to confer such offices is called in consequence the war of the investitures. That the nomination of the bishops was a right pertaining to the sovereign was a view of the matter which had gained ground already in the time of the Frankish monarchy. The German kings up to the eleventh century insisted all the more on this right from the fact that the bishoprics and imperial abbacies had in course of time lost their original character of church organizations. They had been appanaged with imperial and other lands, with political and public rights, with immunities, rights of coinage etc. … They had, in consequence, become transformed into political districts, on a par with those of the secular princes and obliged, like the latter, to bear the public burdens, especially that of providing war-contingents and supplies. It Is true that in the period in question, although for the most part the king openly and freely filled the bishoprics and abbacies of his own accord, some elections had been carried through by the cathedral chapter, the other secular canons, the nobles, vassals and ministeriales of the bishopric. This was usually on the ground of royal privileges, of special royal permission, or of a designation of the candidate by the king. {3795} However the person might have been elected he could only enter into possession of the bishopric or abbacy after the king had formally conferred the office upon him. The death of a bishop would be announced to the king by envoys from the episcopal residence who at the same time, handing over the episcopal crosier and ring, would beg that the king would see to the refilling of the vacant office. It need hardly be said that any new candidate who might in the meantime have been elected presented himself likewise at court. The king discussed the matter of the bestowal of the vacant bishopric or abbacy with his secular and ecclesiastical nobles and councillors. His next step was to confer the office on the candidate he had chosen by means of investiture, that is by handing him the episcopal crosier and ring. The candidate in return had to take the oath of fealty and to perform the act of homage, the so-called hominium. This is how an episcopal office, at that time regarded as a conglomeration of ecclesiastical and secular rights, was regularly filled. … After the middle of the 11th century there began to show itself within the reform-party, which at that time gave the tone at Rome, a tendency, ever growing stronger, in favor of achieving the complete liberation of the church from the secular influence. The German kingdom and empire were to be subordinated to the papacy as to the proper controlling power. Those who held these views declared that the investiture of the bishops and abbots by the king was simony because, as was the custom on the part of those receiving other feudal grants, certain presents were made in return. It was demanded that the episcopal symbols, the ring and the crosier, should no longer be disposed of at the hand of a layman. As a matter of fact there had frequently been carried on an unworthy traffic with the bishoprics in consequence of the manner of conferring them. The ecclesiastical legislators, besides passing general laws against simony, came forward at first cautiously enough with the regulation that the clergy should accept no churches from the hands of a layman. The direct clash with the German court came later, in 1068, where the king had conferred the bishopric of Milan as usual through investiture, while the people, under the influence of the papal reform-party, demanded a bishop elected canonically and with Rome's consent. The king did not give way and Gregory VII, in the Roman synod of 1074, increased the severity of the earlier laws against simony, opening the struggle in a synod of the following year by ordaining that the people should not be present at ecclesiastical functions performed by those clergy who had gained office through simony, the reference being to those bishops who adhered to the king. Furthermore the royal right of conferring bishoprics by investiture was now directly denied. With this attack on an old and customary prerogative of the German king, one to which in earlier times had even been expressly acknowledged by the pope, an attempt was made to thoroughly undermine the foundations of the German empire and to rob the royal power of one of its chief supports. The bishops and abbots were princes of the realm, possessing, besides a number of privileges, the large feudal and allodial holdings which went with their churches. They had, on behalf of their bishoprics, to sustain the largest share of the empire's burdens. The crown found in them the chief props and supports of its power, for the ecclesiastical principalities could be freely granted to devoted adherents without regard to the hereditary dynastic claims of families. The only legal bond by which these princes were bound to the crown was the investiture with its oath of fealty and homage. The prohibition of this, then, denoted the cessation of the relationship which assured the dependence of the ecclesiastical princes on the king and on the empire and the performance of their duties to that empire. It delivered over the considerable material wealth and power of the imperial bishoprics and abbacies to a clergy that was loosed from all connection with the crown. With regard to the manner in which in future, according to the opinion of Gregory VII or the church-reform party, the bishoprics were to be filled, the above-mentioned synod does not express itself. The decrees of the Roman synod of 1080, as well as Gregory's own further attitude, however, make it appear unquestionable that, with the formal restoration of the old so-called canonical election by clergy and people in common with the metropolitan and his suffragans, he purposed the actual subjection to the pope of the episcopacy and of the resources which in consequence of its political position stood at its command. From the election of a secular clergy which should be freed from national and state interests by the carrying out of the celibacy laws—an election in which metropolitans who were to be kept in dependence on the papal throne were to play their part—there could result as a rule only bishops submissive to the papal court. All the more so as the Roman synod of 1080, in a form probably intentionally vague, gave the pope a right, concurrent with that of the archbishop, of testing the elections and of hindering any such as might be objectionable to the court of Rome. That the bishops and abbots elected in this way were to retain their former possessions and privileges in the empire was taken by Gregory VII as a matter of course. But were this the case their considerable resources stood wholly at the disposition of the papal chair; on the pope it depended what amount of services he would still allow for the benefit of the empire. Nay, more, as regards the ecclesiastical princes the pope would actually have taken the place of the emperor and king and could command the movements of the most insignificant vassal of a bishopric. … The dispute was finally ended by the concordat agreed to at Lobweisen (near Lorsch) and announced at Worms: … In the concordat the emperor renounced wholly the former investing with the bishop's and abbot's office by means of crosier and ring, and granted that in all churches these offices should be filled by canonical election and by the free consecration of the person elected. On the other hand the pope granted that the election of bishops and abbots belonging to the German kingdom might take place in presence of the emperor but without simony or violence, and that the emperor should have a right, employing the sceptre as a symbol and causing homage to be rendered, to perform the investiture—before the consecration, namely—with regard to the regalia, i. e. the totality of the landed possessions and rights which belonged to the individual bishopric or abbacy. … {3796} With the Concordat of Worms the church and the papacy, after a long struggle, had gained the victory over the empire. Even though the papal party had not been able to put through all its demands with regard to the question of investitures, yet the empire was compelled to renounce rights which had been exercised unassailed for centuries, and thereby to confirm the emancipation of the papacy from the former imperial overlordship, thus stamping its position as an independent political power. This success was the more considerable for the reason that the agreement of Worms had established the ecclesiastical and imperial rights only in the most general terms and in an equivocal form, but had left the further development of the new manner of conferring the offices to be decided by practice. … If already the Hohenstaufens of the 12th century had succeeded only with great efforts in protecting themselves against such interpretation of the Concordat as infringed on the imperial rights, there was, naturally, in the 13th century,—in view of the condition of the empire, the political situation of Germany, and the predominating supremacy of the papacy,—no further question of such an attitude. … In this form of interpretation, given to it by usage and derogatory to the imperial rights, the Concordat of Worms remained the basis of the German imperial law regarding the collation of bishoprics and imperial abbacies until the dissolution of the German empire in 1806."

_Hinschius, Investiturstreit (Herzog's Realencyklopaedie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, volume 6)._

See, also, PAPACY: A. D. 1056-1122 (pages 2427-2431).

PAPACY: A. D. 1162-1177. The Pope and the Emperor.

"In this fullness of his power [after the destruction of Milan, 1162] the emperor came anew into conflict with the papacy. Reason enough for it was that the emperor intended to treat Rome also as a city of the empire like the rest. … Between the claims of the two powers there was an ineradicable fundamental difference which showed itself at every moment. What the papacy did, to continually bring forward and maintain new rights, the empire could, after all, do also. Among other ways the remarkable contradiction finds utterance thus, that the emperor claims to be above the law, the pope above tribunals; the one is the chief, unrestricted lawgiver, the other the chief judge over all. The emperor rose up in injured self-esteem when the pope used the word 'benefice' in speaking of his relations with the empire. The pope was forced to explain the word, which had two meanings, in its more harmless sense. The Lombard cities always maintained that they had been strengthened in their opposition by Adrian IV. It is probable that already between the emperor and this pope a struggle would have taken place; but Adrian died (at Anagni, September 1, 1159), and after his death there was a disputed papal election. There was a powerful imperial faction among the cardinals but a still more powerful anti-German one. At the election it came to a hand to hand fight, as it were, between the two candidates. The purple mantle was just about to be laid on the shoulders of the anti-imperial cardinal Roland when the imperial candidate Octavian rushed in and tore it away from him. The latter was first proclaimed in Rome as Victor IV, the former was consecrated in Ninfa as Alexander III. The emperor saw here an opportunity of extending his power, indirectly at least, over the papacy also. He ordered both popes to appear at a council which he called. He took occasion to recall to remembrance an old right of the empire, the right of holding councils and passing judgment on the papacy. He accordingly appointed a church assembly to be held in Pavia and invited to it, as he says in his summons, all the bishops of England, France, Hungary, Denmark and his own kingdom. What a conception he had of his own dignity is shown by the words: 'It is enough to have one God, one pope, one emperor, and it is proper that there should be only one church.' In venturing once more to pass judgment on Frederick's actions and to inquire, solely from a historical point of view, how far his ideas deviated from previous ones I find that in this case he went to work exactly as he did against the cities. From the oldest times church conflicts had been settled by the emperor with the assistance of a council; since the days of Otto I immense achievements had been made in this way; but never yet had a German emperor called together at the same time the bishops of all other kingdoms. Frederick's deviation lay herein, that he appropriated to himself this right. He did not stop at what was customary and a matter of precedent but, on the basis of his own ideal conception of the imperial rights, extended his claim until it became altogether universal. It might have been possible to maintain this claim; but, so much is certain, it could only have happened after previous arrangement with the other monarchs. The council was attended from all parts of the empire on the one side or the other of the Alps. The emperor left the deliberations in the hands of the clergy. They declared in a body for Victor; the emperor spoke last and accepted him. Thus did he understand the imperial power, thus did he wish to exercise it. But it is evident that herewith the whole conflict with the papacy came into an entirely new stage. The emperor with his council wished to decide which pope all Europe should obey. Naturally he met with opposition. John of Salisbury expresses the point at issue very well; 'who,' he says, 'has made the Germans judges over the nations?' One might almost say this had been their claim. In so far as they appointed the emperor they wished also to have the precedence over other nations. … Of the popes only one, the favored one, Victor, submitted; the other, Alexander III, declared the pope should summon and not be summoned, should judge and not be judged. He was not willing to plunge the church into a new slavery. For the time being Victor maintained the supremacy in Italy. … The Romans dated their legal documents according to the years of his pontificate. Meanwhile Alexander III fled to France. He found support here mainly from the fact that the western nations would not accord to the emperor the supremacy over Europe which was implied in his decision regarding the papacy. … For a moment the kingdom of England seemed about to join in the church policy of the German empire; they formed as it were a Germanic party. The strict papistical idea was more the Romanic; but at the same time it was that of the expanding freedom of the people. {3797} That is why Alexander III had also on his side the Lombard cities which were opposing the emperor. Here too it was not a mere faction but a grand idea. The cities, with their striving for a constitution to a certain degree autonomic and resting on a basis of free elections, sided with the idea of the independence of the European kingdoms. From the depths of European life arose mighty strivings which opposed the idea of the emperor to renew the Roman empire and its prerogatives. … In the year 1165 Alexander, coming from Salerno, was escorted by William I [of Sicily] into Rome. This great opposition against the German empire was joined also by the Greek emperor, Manuel. He wished himself to attain the rule of the Roman empire and in return the Greek and the Roman churches were to be united. All at once Emperor Frederick found himself involved in a most dangerous struggle, but he was determined to fight it out. And he had the empire of the Germans on his side in the matter. At a great diet in Wurzburg, at the especial prompting of the imperial chancellor Raynald, archbishop elect of Cologne, the emperor and the princes swore never to acknowledge either Alexander III or any pope elected by his party. Indeed no future emperor was to be elected who would not promise to act accordingly. Stern obligations were further attached to this oath. … In November 1166 the emperor began his expedition for the purpose of driving out Pope Alexander. But already under his very eyes the Lombard cities were bestirring themselves against him."

_L. von Ranke, Weltgeschichte (translated from the German) volume 8, pages 179-185._

"The battle of Legnano, fought on May 29th, 1176, ended in disaster and defeat. Frederick himself, who was wounded and thrown from his horse, finally reached Pavia after days of adventurous flight, having meanwhile been mourned as dead by the remnant of his army. All was not yet lost, indeed, … but Frederick, although he at first made a pretense of continuing the war, was soon forced by the representations of his nobles to abandon the policy of twenty-four years, and to make peace on the best terms obtainable with Alexander III, and through him with the Lombard cities. The oath of Wurzburg was broken and the two treaties of Anagni and Venice put an end to the long war. … The terms of the treaty were finally assented to by the emperor at Chioggia, July 21st, 1177. Alexander now prepared to carry out his cherished project of holding a mighty peace congress at Venice; and there, at the news of the approaching reconciliation, nobles and bishops and their retinues came together from all parts of Europe. Now that the peace was to become an accomplished fact Venice outdid herself in preparing to honor the emperor. The latter, too, was determined to spare no expense that could add to the splendor of the occasion. He had negotiated for a loan with the rich Venetians, and he now imposed a tax of 1,000 marks of silver on his nobles. Frederick's coming was announced for Sunday, July 24th, and by that time the city had donned its most festive attire. … A platform had been constructed at the door of the church, and upon it was placed a raised throne for the pope. … Having reached the shore Frederick, in the presence of an immense crowd, approached the papal throne, and, throwing off his purple mantle, prostrated himself before the pope and kissed the latter's feet. Three red slabs of marble mark the spot where he knelt. It was a moment of world-wide importance; the empire and the papacy had measured themselves in mortal combat, and the empire, in form at least, was now surrendering at discretion. No wonder that later ages have fabled much about this meeting. The pope is said, with his foot on the neck of the prostrate king, to have exclaimed aloud, 'The lion and the young dragon shalt thou trample under thy feet!'"

_E. F. Henderson, History of Germany in the Middle Ages, pages 277-279._

PAPACY: A. D. 1870-1874. The "Kulturkampf" in its first stages.

See (in this Supplement) GERMANY: A. D. 1870-1874.

PAPACY: End--------

PARIS: A. D. 1788-1789. The city during the Revolution.

See (in this Supplement) FRANCE: A. D. 1788-1789.

PARIS: Municipal Libraries.

See LIBRARIES, MODERN: (page 2011).

PARRY, Captain, Northern voyages of.

See (in this Supplement) ARCTIC EXPLORATION: 1819-1820, and after.

PATENT-RIGHT.

See LAW, EQUITY: A. D. 1875 (page 1994).

PATRONS OF HUSBANDRY, The.

See SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: A. D. 1866-1875 (page 2951).

PEARY ARCTIC EXPEDITIONS.

See (in this Supplement) ARCTIC EXPLORATION: 1886, 1891-1892, and 1893-1894.

PENNSYLVANIA: A. D. 1785. The first Protective Tariff.

See TARIFF LEGISLATION: A. D. 1785 (page 3065).

PENNSYLVANIA BANK, The.

See MONEY AND BANKING: A. D. 1780-1784 (page 2212).

PENNSYLVANIA GERMANS.