HILDEBRAND, Sylvester Hassell The most arrogant and audacious pope that ever lived (excepting Innocent III. and Boniface VIII.) was Hildebrand, who called himself Gregory VII, and was real master of Rome for thirty-seven years, the lord of five popes, Leo IX., Victor II., Stephen IX., Nicholas II. And Alexander II, (from 1048-1073), and then pope himself (from 1073-1085). He was an imperious, inflexible, cruel, unscrupulous politician, whose one unswerving purpose was to make the Pope of Rome the supreme ruler and arbiter of the human race.
Notwithstanding the example of Peter, and the advise of Paul, and the horrible immoralities of a nominal celibacy, Gregory, in order to bind the clergy absolutely to the pope, decreed that all the priests and Bishops who had wives should put them away, and that the single should not marry; and he inaugurated what is called the Controversy of Investitures, declaring that temporal princes should have no right to appoint to church offices—thus making the clergy wholly free from feudal obligation to their national sovereigns, and responsible to the pope alone (although the clergy were themselves large landed proprietors and civil magistrates).
Henry IV., Emperor of Germany, refused to surrender the right of investiture, and took under his protection Bishops and councilors who had offended the pope, and was summoned by the latter to appear at Rome to answer for his conduct. The emperor, enraged, assembled a diet at Worms (in 1076), and declared Gregory deposed from the pontificate. The pope retaliated by excommunicating and dethroning Henry, and absolving his subjects from their allegiance to him.
Papal supremacy being an integral idea of German Christianity, the Saxon princes declared, at a diet in Oppenheim, that, unless the sentence of excommunication were removed in twelve months, Henry should lose his crown. Subdued by the rebellion of his subjects and the course of the pope, the emperor, with his wife and infant child and one faithful attendant, undertook, in the midst of an unusually rigorous winter, the extremely difficult and dangerous passage over the awful precipices and ice-fields of the Alps, and finally presented himself before the Castle of Canossa, in Northern Italy, where the pope was comfortably housed with his devoted adherent, Matilda, the Countess of Tuscany.
On a dreary winter morning, the ground being deeply covered with snow, the emperor was admitted within two of the three walls that girded the castle. Divested of all his royal robes, he was clad only in the thin white linen dress of the penitent, and barefooted and bareheaded, shivering and hungry, he thus humbly awaited for three days (January 25th, 26th, and 27th, 1077) the pleasure of the stern pontiff to admit him to his presence.
The pope at last received him, and granted him absolution only on the condition that Henry would appear at the time and place named by the pope, and answer the charges made against him; if his defense were satisfactory, he should receive his kingdom back from the hands of the pope— otherwise, he was peaceably to resign his kingdom forever. Henry’s humiliation and Gregory’s absolution were both dictated by mere policy. Freed from the church’s curse, Henry quickly won back the strength he had lost. He overthrew in battle the rival (Rodolph) whom Gregory upheld. He swept his rebellious lands with sword and flame.
He carried his victorious army to Rome, and was there crowned emperor by a rival pope. Gregory himself was only saved by his ferocious allies, Norman and Saracen, at cost of the devastation of half the capital—that broad belt of ruin which still covers the half-mile between the Coliseum and the Lateran gate. Then, hardly rescued from the popular wrath, he went away to die, defeated and heartbroken, at Salerno, with the almost despairing (the proudly bitter and Pharisaic) words on his lips: “I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile.”
Again excommunicated, Henry, twenty years later, vainly sought mercy from his own son, the unnatural champion of the church; vainly asked shelter in a monastery; and died in want and forsaken, deprived even of the empty honor of a royal tomb. Thus the pope was really triumphant at last. (Hassell’s History 429, 430)