8 - The Structure of the Church, 1024–1073

Summary

it is no coincidence that the terminal dates of this chapter should respectively refer to the promotion of an emperor and of a pope, for they serve to delimit forty-nine years which witnessed a decline in the power and prestige of the German emperors and an energetic and lasting papal revival. In 1024, Conrad II (1024–39) became king of Germany, the first of the Salian house; in 1027 he was crowned emperor at Rome by Pope John XIX, a scion of the local Tusculan family, who had become pope also in 1024. According to his biographer Wipo, the rhetoric at his royal anointing was extravagant: Archbishop Aribo of Mainz declared, ‘You have come to the highest office; you are the vicar of Christ.’ In 1073, Hildebrand, archdeacon at Rome since 1058, became Pope Gregory VII (1073–85). From Lorraine, Abbot Walo of Metz was prompt in congratulation: ‘the Lord had caused one well versed in ecclesiastical duties to sit on St Peter’s throne, whence the light of all virtues radiated through the world and where all things converged as, in a circle, the radii meet at the middle point that geometricians call the centre’. In 1024 a king-emperor seemed to be at the world’s focal point, but in 1073 the pope. The contrast was a sharp one because of a crisis in papal affairs half-way between these dates. During the winter of 1045–6, Conrad’s son and successor Henry III (1039–56) undertook a Roman expedition and set aside three claimants to the papacy who had been contending since 1044.