from PART I - INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE: 1100–1200
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2010
The history of the bishops of Rome in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is inseparable from their often bitter conflicts with lay rulers. The era, after all, commenced with the last phase of the Investiture Controversy and witnessed continuing quarrels with the Hohenstaufen emperors and other princes in England, Hungary, Norway, Denmark, France and Iberia, involving not only church–crown disputes, but problematic royal marriages as well. Yet, while the rhetoric of Roman supremacy over the secular state was often shrill (and never more so than in the fight with Frederick II), popes of this period were forced to accept the growing power of monarchs, whose ideological standing was considerably improved both by the study of Roman law in the twelfth century and the translation of Aristotle’s Politics in the thirteenth. Despite Gregory VII’s claim that kings were not latter-day Melchizedeks but merely ‘men of this world ignorant of God’, until Boniface VIII (c. 1294–1303) and Giles of Rome (c. 1243–1316) such strident claims were usually exchanged for compromise, a spirit already evident in the Concordat of Worms in 1122. In attempting to establish universal papal power over the regnum, the ‘Gregorian’ programme of the 1070s and 1080s by no means became a reality in the succeeding two centuries.
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