Mr Schrör's lecture has already made it very clear why the crisis in Henry IV's reign came to a head in the years 1076-1080.
Setting the course
As a starting point for my reflections on the later consolidation of his rule, it should be remembered that the conflict with Gregory VII was not resolved despite Henry's visit to Canossa in 1077, but rather intensified in 1080 with Gregory's second banishment of King Henry.
Gregory VII justified this renewed banishment of Henry solely on the grounds that Henry had prevented the colloquium with which Pope Gregory wanted to decide through his advice or judgement whether Henry could still be king legitimately. Although Henry had sworn to Pope Gregory in Canossa that he would face this colloquium, he later failed to honour this promise.
A new situation had already arisen in March 1077 when the princes of the realm had elected Rudolf of Rheinfelden as their king. Since then, there had been the causa regum, the case of the two conflicting kings, without it having been possible to persuade the two parties to take part in a colloquium at which Pope Gregory wanted to decide which of the two would be allowed by justice to remain king.
Rather, both kings and their respective followers had endeavoured to reach a decision on this issue by means of military force, but were initially unsuccessful. Pope Gregory also only made a public decision in favour of Rudolf and against Henry in the Lenten Synod of 1080, whom he banned for a second time. Moreover, in a public prayer he asked the apostolic princes Peter and Paul to overthrow Henry.
"May all the kings and all the princes of this world now learn how great you are, what you are capable of, and may they fear to disregard the command of your church. And execute your judgement on the said Henry as soon as possible, so that all may know that he will not fall by chance, but will be put to shame by your power: hopefully to repentance, so that his soul may be saved on the day of the Lord".......
Earlier he had already asked the apostles Peter and Paul: "May this Henry, together with his favourites, never gain strength in any war and never win another victory in his life. On the other hand, I grant and allow Rudolf, whom the Germans have chosen as king in loyalty to you, to rule and defend the German Empire, and to all those who adhere to him in loyalty, I grant liberation from all sins and your blessing in this life and in the future, based on what you have entrusted to us."
In doing so, Gregory had - to put it casually - gone out on a limb and taken a very clear position. He had expressed a frequently attested Christian conviction that God and the saints intervened in worldly events in favour of the righteous and ensured that their battles ended victoriously.
Six months later, however, the opposite of what Gregory had asked of the princes of the apostles happened: on 15 October 1080, although Rudolf's army was victorious against Henry's in a battle on the River Elster in Thuringia, Rudolf died in this battle. And that was not all: his right hand, his oath hand, was cut off, which his opponents used to portray Rudolf's death as divine punishment for the breach of oath he had committed when he broke his oath of allegiance to Henry.
"Look," he is said to have confessed to the bishops of his party on his deathbed, "this is the hand with which I swore allegiance to my lord Henry; look, I am already leaving his kingdom and the present life. Now see whether you, who let me ascend his throne and who followed your command, have led me the right way."
Afterwards, Rudolf realised and repented of his transgression. It should only be mentioned briefly how much effort was made by Rudolf's followers to portray his death not as a punishment but as a reward from God. He had been found lying on a high pile of slain enemies, which proved how successfully he had fought, so that God had called him to himself as a reward. This is one of the versions that tried to put a positive spin on Rudolf's death. Another, no less hypothetical, version is that he was accidentally slain by his own men because they did not recognise him.
Despite such efforts, this event had a disastrous effect on the Gregorian party. Gregory himself made it abundantly clear in a letter that he had had little to do with Rudolf and wanted even less to do with him after his death. He had realised that Rudolf's death had caused lasting damage to the positions of the Gregorians.
Henry's grab for the imperial crown
Henry had already become active immediately after his second excommunication by Gregory and, interestingly, had received broad support from the bishops of the empire. A meeting in Mainz in May 1080, which was attended by 19 bishops of the empire, produced three letters, referred to in research as bishops' letters, in which representatives of the episcopate clearly sided with Henry. They argued in favour of "completely cutting off the head of the plague-bringing serpent" and electing a new pope to replace Gregory.
Consequently, a synod of German and northern Italian bishops met with Henry in Brixen in June 1080 to discuss the implementation of this deposition. The multiple accusations that the bishops of the empire had levelled against Pope Gregory in Worms in 1076 were now joined by new ones, the veracity of which is open to reasonable doubt: "(Gregory) is also demonstrably the murderer of four popes, whom he had poisoned by one of his confidants, John Brachiuti. Even if everyone else is silent about it, this John himself, tortured by all too late remorse in the fear of death, confessed it on his deathbed with a hideous scream."
In view of such accusations, the participants in Brixen considered themselves justified in deposing and expelling Pope Gregory "in accordance with the ecclesiastical statutes and, if he does not leave his seat himself after our judgement, to condemn him forever." Cardinal Wibert of Ravenna was envisaged as the future pope and successor to Gregory.
This happened - mind you - months before Rudolf of Rheinfelden lost his life. However, the realisation of this deposition of Pope Gregory was only possible once the opposing party had lost its head with the death of Rudolf. Henry proceeded with extreme caution and attempted to reach a provisional peace with his Saxon opponents in the empire in 1081, so as not to give them the opportunity to improve their positions in the empire through his absence in Italy.
To this end, he utilised an institution for the de-escalation of conflicts, which had already been used several times in the previous decade in an attempt to settle the conflict with the Saxons. In February 1081, five bishops from each party met in the Kaufungen Forest to negotiate peace without the participation of the king.
From Henry's point of view, this meeting of the bishops was an attempt to agree a peace that would allow him to move to Italy for a longer period of time without leaving his supporters and his possessions in the empire unprotected to his opponents. However, the Saxon-Gregorian opposing party, led by Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg, wanted to clarify a completely different issue in these negotiations, as Gebhard announced to the bishops of the other side right at the beginning of the negotiations: "So this is the core of our request: Show us convincingly that Lord Henry can rightfully be king, or let us prove to you as true that he cannot. And if either is proven, then stop persecuting us with fire and sword."
As Pope Gregory himself had intended since 1076, the Gregorian bishops wanted to sit in judgement of Henry - the Latin term for the intended proceedings is again colloquium. They wanted to decide whether Henry could remain king in view of the many and serious accusations against him. The bishops whom Henry had sent naturally refused and the meeting ended inconclusively, forcing Henry to leave the kingdom without a peace agreement in order to bring the prospective new pope, Wibert of Ravenna, into office.
After the failure of the bishops' negotiations, he did so without hesitation and celebrated Easter 1081 in Verona, arriving in Rome with his army for Whitsun that year. Rome remained closed to him, however, as the Romans did not immediately abandon their pope, and the heat of the summer forced Henry and the army to leave for the north of Italy, where he was able to pursue his imperial activities largely undisturbed.
However, Henry and his army appeared before Rome again early in 1082. An attempt to persuade the Romans to take legal action against Pope Gregory was unsuccessful. Both parties then sought agreements with the Normans at this time in order to utilise their military assistance, without this leading to direct results.
The situation did not change fundamentally until June 1083, when Henry's troops succeeded in capturing the city of Leo and St Peter's; Pope Gregory entrenched himself in Castel Sant'Angelo. The Romans, on the other hand, succumbed to the superiority of the royal army. Moreover, the cardinals fell away from Pope Gregory VII, with no fewer than 13 of them switching to Henry IV's side.
This cleared the way for King Henry to depose Gregory VII and elevate Wibert of Ravenna in his place as the new Pope Clement III. Above all, however, Henry IV could now be crowned emperor, which was also carried out by Pope Clement III in an elaborate ceremony, while Gregory VII sat powerless in Castel Sant'Angelo. Emperor Henry himself described this turnaround in his favour with surprise and euphoria in a letter to Bishop Dietrich of Verdun: "When we had already given up all hope of winning Rome and wanted to return to Germany, behold, the Romans sent envoys, asked us to enter Rome and promised to be obedient to us in everything, which they did. For they received us with the greatest joy when we entered, they stood by us with the greatest zeal while we stayed with them, and on our departure they gave us a triumphant and loyal escort. ..... Know that this Hildebrand was rejected by the rightful judgement of all the cardinals and the entire Roman people; our elected Pope Clement was elevated to the Roman throne by the acclamation of all the Romans, and we were crowned and consecrated emperor on the holy feast of Easter with the consent of all the Romans, amid the rejoicing of the entire Roman people."
However, this letter was probably only written by Henry IV in Verona, where he had fled to. In May of that year, the Norman Duke Robert Guiscard had already set off for Rome with a large army to defend Pope Gregory VII as miles St Peter and to fight Henry IV. Henry and his army fled from this superior force and continued to do so until they were safe on the other side of the Alps.
The Normans therefore seized the city of Rome without meeting much resistance, expelled Pope Clement III and thus reinstated Gregory in office. However, they then plundered, pillaged and ravaged Rome so mercilessly that Pope Gregory, as their ally, could no longer be sure of his life in Rome, but left with them for southern Italy, while Pope Clement returned to the city.
Pope Gregory VII subsequently died in Salerno in May 1085, leaving the two main rivals in Rome with a power vacuum. Although Henry IV had acquired the title of emperor, his flight had not decided whether the Gregorian party would regain the upper hand in Rome, so that there could be no question of a real consolidation of Henry's reign. However, the Gregorian party was also unable to bring a successor to Gregory VII into office in Rome by 1088.
Henry's return to the realm north of the Alps
Back in the realm north of the Alps, Henry IV immediately endeavoured to resume negotiations with his Saxon opponents. As early as 20 January 1085, another high-ranking assembly of archbishops and bishops from both parties met in Gerstungen-Berka in Thuringia. After the aforementioned experience of 1081, when they had not even been able to agree on the topic to be discussed in a similar meeting, this time they had agreed on the topic of the meeting beforehand: whether or not they were allowed to have fellowship with excommunicated persons.
At the same time, this was a topic that was being discussed intensively by experts in the pamphlets that had accompanied the conflict between kingship and the Church since the 1980s. In this respect, the Gregorian side felt well prepared for the issue at hand, while Henry IV's supporters had found completely new arguments with which they felt even better armed.
At the meeting, Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg, as spokesman for the Gregorians, began by stating confidently: "that according to the authority of the Gospels, the apostles and the decrees of the Holy See, one must obey the orders of the Pope and have no fellowship with those who are reported as banned." This was indeed the prevailing, well-documented view.
Then, however, Bishop Conrad of Utrecht made the following statement for the supporters of Emperor Henry: "Our lord, whose case is being discussed here, was not banned at all because the pope acted unjustly towards him by banning someone he was not authorised to ban."
Archbishop Wezilo of Mainz then quoted the following text to substantiate this claim in more detail: "someone who has been robbed of his property or driven from his property by acts of violence may not be accused, summoned, judged or sentenced until all that has been robbed has been fully restored to him, his right of ownership with all his privileges has been restored, and he can exercise his offices in peace for a long time after his own seat has been duly restored to him".
Since Henry had been deprived of part of his rule by the Saxon uprising against him, Gregory VII should not have judged him.
The quote came from the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, and it referred solely to bishops, who were not to be judged as long as they were expelled from their seats. However, the bishops on the other side missed this opportunity to attack the text. They were obviously so taken by surprise by this quote that only one of them started a discussion, but was fended off by Wezilo of Mainz. One contemporary witness rejoiced: "Then all the bishops of the opposing party were so confused and shattered that they could not answer anything, and the victory remained with the Church of God, for the liar's mouth fell silent." Anyone who could no longer put forward an argument in such a disputation had simply lost. Afterwards, a dispute broke out among Pope Gregory's followers that led to manslaughter.
The papal legate Odo of Ostia, who had attended this meeting in Gerstungen, only managed to prove months later in a memorandum that this provision aimed at bishops could not be applied to laymen, "otherwise a layman......, even if only a horse or an ox or a donkey had been stolen from him, could never be brought before a judicial assembly afterwards, not even for perjury or adultery or incest....". However, this rejection came far too late.
Overall, the fronts remained intact after Henry's return to the empire, even if they crumbled. The emperor proved to be more sensitive and responsible in his dealings with confidants and opponents alike than he had been in the first decades of his reign. For example, he promised Bishop Udo of Hildesheim, who switched to his party, on oath that he would "never interfere with the Saxons' rights, which they had considered the most suitable and glorious since the time of their conqueror Charles". His counsellors secured Henry's promise with the following oath: "They would no longer be his support against the Saxons if he ever lost sight of this determination."
Against the Saxon margrave Ekbert, who repeatedly rebelled against him and submitted to him several times, Henry showed the leniency and patience that he had certainly lacked in the early years. Finally, he also granted the reliable Duke Wratislaw of Bohemia the non-hereditary title of king, thus showing the elites that he now appreciated loyal service.
Nevertheless, Henry's five-year stay in the realm from 1085 to 1090 did not really consolidate his rule, even though the opposing king raised by his opponents, Hermann of Salm, posed no threat to him, who then ingloriously lost his life in 1088. Henry's activities extended equally to attempts to put his opponents in their place militarily and to achieve peaceful relations through negotiations. However, both were only partially successful.
However, this phase is characterised by his successful attempts to occupy the bishoprics of the empire with his followers. The Swabian historian Bernold, a staunch Gregorian, had to grudgingly admit: "The supreme heretic Wibert (i.e. Pope Clement III) and his companions on the side of their king Henry did not stop making cursed appointments (of bishops) and only granted them to their followers for the most expensive money .... In the German territories, only four bishops remained firmly in the Catholic community." (i.e. only they still belonged to the Gregorian party).
In contrast, Henry's military endeavours to subdue his Saxon and southern German opponents were less successful. In view of the inferiority of his armies, he sometimes had to avoid clashes altogether; in other cases, battles were fought that ended badly for him. Bernold, for example, describes the Battle of Pleichsfeld in 1086 in detail and insists that Henry's opponents had "caused an incredible slaughter among the enemy...so that one saw nine rather large piles of corpses", while his own people had only suffered 15 deaths. And of these, only 3 had died on the battlefield, the others later. Such a result, he concluded, could only be attributed to divine power. However, the Gregorians had vehemently denied divine intervention in such battles at the death of Rudolf of Rheinfelden.
Henry's rapprochement with the Saxon elites, against whom he had previously fought particularly bitterly, is striking in these years. The Swabian Bernold again comments on this with indignation: "The Saxons, by renouncing their loyalty to St Peter, accepted Henry, whom they had renounced so many times, into their fold." In 1088, Henry's relationship with the Saxons was even improved in a quite surprising way. The Emperor, who had just been widowed, became engaged to the young widow of the Saxon Margrave Henry of Stade, who had died in 1087. The emperor's fiancée, named Eupraxia or Praxedis, came from the house of the Grand Princes of Kiev.
One has to wonder what the political purpose of this betrothal was, which was honoured a year later in Cologne with the marriage of the two, which was performed there by Archbishop Hartwich of Magdeburg. He had been abbot of the Hersfeld monastery, which was loyal to Henry and owed its archbishopric to Emperor Henry. After all, it was a very unusual choice for an emperor to marry the widow of a margrave who had also been a member of a tribe with which the ruler had long been bitterly at enmity. However, it is known that a marriage in these times also established peace and alliance between the relatives of the bride and groom. There are even several references to the bride being a "hostage of peace" (obses pacis) in such a marriage. Normally, as is well known, only male persons secured peace by being handed over as hostages to the other side. It must therefore be assumed that the betrothal and marriage in the case cited were also intended to secure peace between Saxony and Emperor Henry. A few years later, however, this became a problem. More on this in a moment.
However, Emperor Henry's efforts to achieve peace with the Saxon tribe were considerably disrupted at the end of 1089, when his opponents also established a close political alliance by means of marriage. The important supporter of the Gregorian party in Italy, Margravine Mathilde of Tuscia, married Welf V, the son of the Bavarian duke, Welf IV. The southern German Guelphs had long been among Henry IV's staunch opponents in the Empire.
The political nature of this marriage was so obvious that the Swabian chronicler Bernold felt compelled to conclude that Mathilde had entered into this marriage "not out of a lack of abstinence, but out of obedience to the Roman pope, in order to be able to stand by the Holy Roman Church all the more vigorously against the excommunicated.... This marriage greatly grieved the so-called King Henry."
This marriage united a 17-year-old bridegroom with a bride of over 40 years and the young husband immediately began to fight against Henry IV's northern Italian supporters. Emperor Henry therefore took this situation very seriously and launched his 3rd Italian campaign after peace talks with opponents north of the Alps had once again failed in Speyer.
The 3rd Italian campaign of Henry IV.
In June 1090, he was already busy capturing the castles and possessions of Margravine Matilda outside Mantua, successfully asserting his rule against the Gregorians. Their Pope Urban II subsequently retreated to the Normans in southern Italy and Henry's Pope Clement III once again resided in Rome. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, the Margravine Mathilde's position could not be permanently shaken; Henry tried in vain to attack Canossa Castle and was unable to prevent the Margravine's warriors from recapturing lost territory.
North of the Alps, on the other hand, his Saxon and southern German opponents planned to continue their fight against Henry in 1092 and agreed a meeting of the Saxons and Swabians for this purpose, a generalis conventus, which did not bode well. However, this meeting was cancelled because a great famine forced the Saxons to set other priorities.
Emperor Henry may have seen this planned union of his opponents as a breach of the peace on the part of the Saxons, which he considered to have been concluded through his marriage to Praxedis in 1089. At the same time, he took his wife into custody, which only became public knowledge in 1094. However, the situation in Italy turned clearly against Henry as early as 1093, when his son Conrad, who had long acted as his father's representative in Italy after his coronation in Aachen, broke with him and turned to the Gregorian party and Margravine Matilda. The Lombard cities of Milan, Cremona, Lodi and Piacenza also joined this union in a 20-year pact. Conrad was re-crowned by Archbishop Anselm of Milan.
Together, these forces were now so strong that they were able to block Henry IV's Alpine passes and cut him off from reinforcements from the north for several years. He spent long periods in the confined area around Verona without any major activity as ruler. His opponent Bernold noted north of the Alps that Henry was so desperate that he was said to have wanted to kill himself.
In this situation, however, his wife Praxedis managed to escape from her husband's imprisonment and she also sought refuge with Margravine Mathilde. What she reported about her fate with Henry IV, however, gave the Gregorian party the opportunity to pillory Henry IV. The case was made the subject of investigations at synods in Constance in 1094 and Piacenza in 1095, with Praxedis personally presenting her accusations in Piacenza, while her case was heard without her in Constance.
Before I deal with these accusations, I would like to say in advance that Praxedis' statements were not believed by modern 19th and 20th century researchers. On the contrary, numerous researchers outdid themselves in their indignation and rejection of the allegedly brazen lies. I am quoting just two voices from a polyphonic chorus:
In 1903, Gerold Meyer von Knonau echauved himself in his five-volume Jahrbücher des Deutschen Reichs unter Heinrich IV as follows: "The most disgraceful things the shameless woman, who did not blush to tell even the most disgusting things about herself, if they could harm Henry IV, brought forward with an insolent forehead about her married life in order to justify her flight."
In the 19th century, the much-read author Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, in his "Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit" (History of the German Imperial Era), formulated the matter more cautiously, but equally dismissively, and at the same time completely obfuscated the facts: "The empress's situation may have become unbearable, and all the more so the more guilty she knew herself to be. She soon shamelessly accused herself publicly of adultery and sought to justify herself only by claiming that her own husband had forced her to commit adultery.
I have tempted the same."
The contemporary sources, on the other hand, are much more concise and precise in their statements. At the synod in Piacenza, Praxedis had "humbly prostrated herself at the feet of the pope to beg absolution for the unheard-of abominations of fornication that she had endured with her husband. The pope - and with him the holy synod - received her complaint very mercifully, because it was well known that she had not so much committed such abominations as endured them against her will," says Bernold.
Gerhoh von Reichersberg explains the same facts with a further detail: "she had been raped so often on her husband's orders that she could not know from whom the child she had conceived was."
In contrast to modern research, the people in charge at these synods believed the accusations. However, they were exclusively Gregorians. In any case, the core accusation was that Henry had frequently had his wife raped by his men during his captivity. The same accusation had already been levelled at him in the 1970s in relation to his sister Adelheid, the abbess of Quedlinburg. However, in this case there is no indication of a context that would have given rise to such barbarity.
This is different in the case of Praxedis, as Henry's betrothal and marriage in the context of his efforts to make peace with the Saxons, as well as the imprisonment of his wife when the Saxons were about to break the peace, points to a custom of the time to secure peace through the exchange of male hostages, but also through marriages, with women acting as 'hostages for peace' and being referred to as such.
However, it is also demonstrably part of this custom that hostages had to pay if they broke the peace they had guaranteed. The desecration of hostages was known and practised in the Middle Ages as revenge for a breach of contract. Male hostages were mutilated or killed. This suggests that Henry was avenging the Saxons' impending breach of peace against his wife.
This is by no means intended to solicit understanding for Henry's behaviour, but rather to counter the groundless partisanship of modern German scholarship against the blameless queen with an explanation that takes contemporary customs into account and thus makes Praxedis' accusations plausible.
Henry's reign as king and emperor thus seemed to be at an all-time low in the years of his son Conrad's apostasy and the flight of his wife Praxedis, as well as his confinement to the narrow area around Verona. Nobody would have expected this to change fundamentally again. Nevertheless, soon afterwards there was a complete turnaround, as one would put it today.
This change was triggered by the fact that Welf V dissolved his marriage to Margravine Mathilde, although he made it clear that he had never consummated the marriage. This change in the constellation of alliances, however, made it possible for the Guelphs to reach a settlement with Emperor Henry, which was also joined by the Zähringers in Swabia. As the Hohenstaufen dynasty had been related to Henry IV politically since 1079, Henry thus had the most important noble forces in Bavaria and Swabia on his side.
There was also no major resistance in Saxony when Henry returned to the realm in 1097. He was able to start a grand tour of the empire. The church festivals and court days on this journey were well attended and showed that the church and nobility had largely given up their opposition to Henry, although his banishment by the pope continued and was actually intended to rule out any contact with him.
In Aachen, his son of the same name was even crowned king, thus ensuring the continuation of the Salian dynasty, insofar as such a thing was possible. The fact that this fifth Henry fell from his father's throne not long afterwards and overthrew him will be discussed later.
To summarise briefly, Henry IV's reign was not really consolidated after 1080, the year of his second banishment and the death in battle of his opponent Rudolf of Rheinfelden. This was prevented by various circumstances: above all the persistence of the Gregorians even after the death of Gregory VII, but certainly also the accusations from his own family, which cast an unfavourable light on the emperor's practices.
On the other hand, however, he was not in any real danger of losing his office - as was the case several times in the first phase of his reign. Rather, it is striking how much support he received from ecclesiastical forces during this time, which enabled him to continue to fill the important episcopal positions in the imperial church with his own supporters, who stood by him even in difficult situations.
However, another observation seems even more important to me: the crises that Henry's reign as a whole brought with it also intensified the procedures by which amicable solutions to the conflicts were sought. Countless times, high-ranking representatives of the conflicting parties met for negotiations without the king being present, initially seeking to clarify the disputed question of whether Henry could still legally remain king, but then deciding that the use of force in the conflict should be avoided. This seems to have later led to the institution of arbitration, which we encounter as a new instrument of conflict resolution from the 12th century onwards.
These innovations gave the participation of the nobility and the church in royal rule more weight than it already had. In the long term, this development favoured the distinctly federal structure of the empire. In the short term, however, half a century after the end of the Salians there was an intense struggle at the next royal elections, in which the factions of the time of Henry IV still tried to play off against each other.
