The imperial ambitions of the eleventh-, twelfth- and thirteenth-century popes are well known. Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) wrote in his Dictatus papae that only the pope had the right to use the imperial insignia.Footnote 1 The popes who followed Gregory VII continued to ‘imperialize’ the papacy: Bernard of Clairvaux would accuse his protégé, Eugenius III (1145–53), of being ‘the heir not of Peter, but of Constantine’.Footnote 2 One collection of essays about Innocent III (1198–1216) even posed the question as to whether he was ‘Vicar of Christ or Lord of the World?’Footnote 3
If we accept this narrative of imperialization – and there have been criticisms of it – then we must ask further questions: what exactly was the nature of papal imperium over the kings of Christian Europe? What, in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, was the ‘constitutional’ position of secular rulers vis-à-vis the pope?
The stock answer has been feudalism. The great twentieth-century historian of the medieval papacy, Walter Ullmann, claimed that, in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the newly active Roman papacy sought to bring the monarchs of Europe under their ‘feudal lordship’:
. . . the king . . . had to surrender his land into full papal ownership . . . and receive . . . it back as a fief, so that he became legally an usufructuary. In recognition of his usufruct and of the Petrine protection the king . . . undertook to render certain services, be they in the form of an annual money payment – census or tribute – or in the form of military duties.Footnote 4
Essentially, a king would genuinely give his kingdom to the pope so that the pope became the actual owner of the kingdom.
The two best-known cases of this so-called papal feudal overlordship were the Norman states in southern Italy and the kingdom of Aragon. The German medievalist Johannes Fried, however, made a strong argument in 1980 that the kingdom of Aragon was under papal protection, akin to monasteries which were placed under the protection of St Peter, and argued that such a position granted the papacy no real rights of ownership. It gave the papacy the right to receive an annual payment (the census) but the papacy's authority over the kingdom was limited to that payment; it was not evidence of genuine ownership. Fried contrasted this explicitly with the relationship between the papacy and the Normans in southern Italy, where (he thought) the papacy genuinely owned the Norman lands, and granted them to the Normans under some form of revocable tenure.Footnote 5 Fried, like Ullmann, still believed that the Norman states were under papal feudal lordship. Since Fried's book, little attention has been paid to papal dominion over kings from a comparative perspective. Alfons Becker, following Fried's work, suggested a vague third category between feudal overlordship and protection: ‘fidélités non vassaliques’. However, he followed Fried in believing that a distinction between overlordship (as in Sicily and Southern Italy) and protection (as in Aragon) existed in the eleventh century.Footnote 6
In the most recent contribution to the question of papal ‘feudal lordship’, Stefan Weinfurter identified a change in papal-royal relations in the first half of the twelfth century. He argued that the papacy adopted some feudal terminology and rituals to structure its relations with rulers around and after 1120 (although ‘feudal bonds’ were never the basis of papal authority).Footnote 7 Weinfurter interpreted the ceremony of homage as an intrinsically feudal ritual and regarded its performance in papal-royal relations after 1120 as evidence of the invasion of ‘feudal ideas’ into the curia.Footnote 8 However, the performance of the homage ritual does not allow us to be certain about the nature of papal dominion. Homage is a ritual with a wide range of uses and interpretations which cannot be reduced simply to ‘feudal’.Footnote 9 The approach adopted here will be to look to ideas about investiture and coronation.
This article will focus on the terminology used in letters between popes and secular rulers during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries; and on what that terminology tells us about how papal-royal relations were conceived. The question is basic: did secular rulers really see themselves as receiving their lands from the pope? What was the nature of papal imperium over the monarchs of Europe? I will argue that in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries there was not yet any clear distinction between so-called protection, of the type which Fried saw between the papacy and Aragon, and the language used to describe the relationship between the Normans in Sicily and the pope, which Fried, Weinfurter and many others have called ‘feudal overlordship’. Further, the language used to describe the bonds between popes and both Aragonese and Norman rulers was similar to that used to describe (and indeed condemn) lay investiture, the practice whereby it was monarchs rather than archbishops or the pope who ceremonially appointed bishops and abbots. It was around the 1120s to 1150s that this ‘language of investiture’ ceased to be used to describe papal-royal relations and it seems likely that this was an unintended consequence of the end of lay investiture of bishops between c.1078 and 1122. Once we have recognized the similarities between lay investiture and the bonds between pope and kings, it is possible to determine a new interpretation of how papal imperium over kings was understood, and how it changed.
Aragon, the Normans and the ‘language of investiture’
From the early eleventh century, groups of Normans fought as mercenaries in Southern Italy and eventually sought to take over the counties and principalities of Southern Italy for themselves. To legimitize their usurpations of these territories, some Norman rulers sought papal approval. Although they were initially rebuffed, in 1059 an alliance was formed between the pope and the two most powerful Norman rulers in the south of Italy. These two potentates, the duke of Apulia and the prince of Capua, swore oaths to the pope, undertook to give a specified annual payment to him and promised to help him retain the Roman papacy if necessary.Footnote 10 Importantly, however, we know that the duke of Apulia and the prince of Capua were ‘invested’ with their lands by the pope. We know this not merely from chronicle sources, but from the texts of the oaths themselves which the Norman prince and duke swore, and which were kept by the papal court: in the eleventh century all such oaths end with the Norman saying: ‘I will observe this fidelity to your successors . . . who . . . will confirm the investiture’ (investitura).Footnote 11 From the register of Gregory VII, we even have the text of such an investiture; it simply states: ‘I, Pope Gregory, invest (investio) you, Duke Robert, with the land which my predecessors conceded to you.’Footnote 12 Clearly therefore, in the eleventh century, the pope ceremonially invested the Norman rulers.
The kings of Aragon, during the same period, also initiated a special relationship with the papal court. Exactly when this relationship began is difficult to know but it might stem from 1068 when the king, Sancho Ramirez, went on a pilgrimage to Rome. By 1089 the king had established an annual payment to Rome, as he told Pope Urban II in a letter, and as the pope accepted in his reply to Sancho.Footnote 13 It is difficult to know whether Sancho was seeking papal legitimation for his rule over the nascent kingdom of Aragon, as the Normans were for their rule over Sicily and Southern Italy. By contrast with the Normans, there is no evidence that Sancho participated in an investiture ceremony, nor was the term ‘investiture’ used in the letters between Sancho and the pope. However, a papal privilege of 1089 for the royal monastic foundation of Montearagon, and for Sancho himself, claimed the king's successors should ‘accept that kingdom from our hand or from the hand of our successors’.Footnote 14 In 1095, Sancho's son, Peter I, told Urban II in a letter that he had ‘placed himself under your lordship’.Footnote 15 And again, also in 1095, in another privilege for the king, which gave the king freedom from excommunication unless it was pronounced by the pope, Urban II told Peter that ‘all your successors should accept that kingdom from our hand or the hand of our successors’.Footnote 16 Thus, it appears at first glance that my suggestion – that the terminology used for the Normans and for the Aragonese was the same – must be wrong. The Normans were invested (investitura) while the Aragonese were told to ‘receive the kingdom’ from the pope's hand. But if we turn to the language being used to condemn lay investiture at this time, we can see that in fact investiture and ‘accepting something from the hand’ are closely connected.
In 1078, a council of Gregory VII declared: ‘it is forbidden that anyone should accept investiture of churches from the hand of laymen’;Footnote 17 in 1089: ‘No-one should dare to take investiture of abbey or bishopric or any ecclesiastical dignity from a lay hand’;Footnote 18 in 1114: ‘we forbid that anyone should accept investiture of any ecclesiastical dignity from the hand of the emperor, or a king, or prince or any lay person’.Footnote 19 The principle that one accepted (accipio) investiture (investitura) from the hand (a / de manu) of a layman was prohibited by these decrees. The similarities between such language and the Norman and Aragonese terminology are clear: the Aragonese kings were supposed to accept (accipio) their kingdom from the hand (de manu) of the pontiff; the Norman dukes, on the other hand, received investiture (investitura) of their lands. Despite the apparent difference between the Aragonese and Norman kings, the language used in both cases to describe their position vis-à-vis the pope had something fundamental in common: both drew on the terminology used to describe lay investiture.
Significantly, this language of investiture vanished in the twelfth century. The eleventh-century oaths sworn to the pope by the Normans had ended ‘I will observe this fidelity to your successors . . . who . . . will have confirmed the investiture’. However, later twelfth-century oaths from the Norman rulers to the pope – otherwise identical – excised the word investitura from this sentence: simply promising: ‘I will observe this fidelity to your successors . . . who . . . will have confirmed what was conceded to me in your privilege’.Footnote 20 At the beginning of the papal schism of 1130–8, one of the two elected popes, Anacletus II, elevated the Sicilian count-duke, Roger II, into a king. The 1130 privilege granting Roger the royal title made no mention of investitura, however. It allowed Roger to be crowned and anointed by an archbishop of his choosing, but there was no mention of a ceremony of investitura performed by the pope.Footnote 21 Roger's actual coronation in 1130 was apparently conducted by a cardinal sent by Anacletus, rather than an archbishop, but the lack of any mention of investitura in Anacletus's privilege still indicates that this was a coronation ceremony rather than an investiture.Footnote 22 Although Anacletus II's side were the losers in the schism, the ‘winning’ pope, Innocent II, eventually confirmed Roger's kingship in 1139. Because of Roger's support for the antipope Anacletus, Innocent was not initially disposed to look kindly on Roger and indeed led an army against him. Unfortunately for Innocent, Roger was able to defeat the papal army and capture the pope. Once in Norman hands, Innocent proved unsurprisingly willing to confirm Roger's kingship, in essentially the same words as Anacletus.Footnote 23 The privilege of 1139, like that of 1130 and the later treaty of 1156 between the Norman kingdom of Sicily and the papacy, made no mention of any sort of ceremonial investitura by the pope.Footnote 24 The Sicilian king was given the privilege of being crowned and anointed by an archbishop instead.
The papal-Aragonese relationship also changed in the twelfth century. It finally adopted the terminology of papal protectio, the protection afforded to abbeys and churches by St Peter and the pope. Fried thought that protectio had been the keyword from the start, but I would suggest that this development was subsequent to the investiture contest, the conflict between c.1078 and 1122 over whether laymen could ceremonially invest bishops and abbots with their offices. This protectio gave the papacy a limited right: the right to an annual payment. The king of Aragon was not dependent on papal approval for his rule. There would be, in the twelfth century, no more discussions of the Aragonese kings receiving their kingdoms ‘from the pope's hand’, instead the kingdom would be ‘under ours and St Peter's protection’: the exact formulation used for protected monasteries.Footnote 25 The first use of this formula to describe the king of Aragon appeared in a letter of protection for the boy-king Alfonso II in 1163.Footnote 26 This letter, from Pope Alexander III, was also the first indication that the Aragonese were supporting him, rather than his opponent, in the papal schism which had begun in 1159. Perhaps under such circumstances, the papal court had no interest in arguing for a more extreme interpretation of papal-Aragonese relations.
The terminology used to conceptualize papal imperium changed during the twelfth century: the language of investiture, by which the pope had conferred government on the rulers of Aragon and Norman Sicily, vanished. Why did this common language of investiture disappear from papal-royal relations at this time? The likely impetus comes from the changes resulting from the conflict between kingdom and priesthood about inter alia lay investiture of bishops.
Unintended Consequences: The End of Lay Investiture of Bishops and Papal Investiture of Kings
The solution to the dispute over lay investitures was for bishops to be invested with the regalia, the property granted to the bishopric, by the secular rulers and to be consecrated and given the spiritualia by their ecclesiastical superior. Kings and emperors had often invested bishops with their bishoprics and drawn little explicit distinction between the property, which was the king's to give, and the sacral character. Such vagueness over whether laymen could give spiritual authority stretched even to the highest honours. In the mid-eleventh century, Emperor Henry III deposed and appointed several popes: even the Roman clergy acknowledged, at least in practice, that the emperor could do this.Footnote 27 Such authority apparently extended as far as actually investing the pope.Footnote 28 By the 1070s and 1080s, however, the patricius Romanorum, the legal justification which Henry IV adduced for imperial oversight of papal elections, was being challenged and dismissed by the Roman Church.Footnote 29 From at least 1078 clerical reformers insisted that, since a layman could not consecrate a clergyman, no layman could play any part in the appointment of bishops generally. One counter position to this, articulated by 1100, was that when a king invested a bishop he did not grant him sacral power but only the lands and rents of the bishopric. This counter position did not challenge the argument of the reformers that a king had no capability to invest a bishop with his sacred authority; only a clergyman could do that. Eventually compromises were reached in the early twelfth century, most famously at Worms in 1122, whereby kings invested bishops with their regalia and the pope or the appropriate clerical superior invested them with the spiritualia, the sacred and spiritual power of a bishop or abbot.Footnote 30 This compromise accepted that kings could not give clergymen their sacred power, but did allow them to give temporal goods. It was therefore predicated on a degree of possession: the rex could invest with the regalia – that is, with what pertained to the king.
Once one accepts that position, the idea of ‘investiture’ took on an extra level of meaning such as to render papal ‘investiture’ of a king unacceptable. The language of investiture as it was crystallized by the concordat of Worms raised the question: how could the pope invest any ruler with his land unless it was the pope's to give away? Before the investiture contest, no-one was too worried about what allowing kings to invest bishops, or popes to invest princes, might actually mean.Footnote 31 Prior to the conflict, bishops had been invested by kings even though a king had no power to give a clergyman his sacral authority; likewise, the kings of Aragon were perfectly willing to admit that they received their kingdom from the hand of the pope, while the Normans certainly took part in ceremonies of investiture. What is common here, before the investiture dispute, is a lack of concern with the possible connotations: neither the Aragonese nor the Normans distinguished clearly between the general approval of their rule which they wanted from the papacy and any suggestion that this implied that the pope was actually giving the land to a ruler.
The 1076 coronation of the king of Croatia and Dalmatia provides confirmation that in the eleventh century papal investiture of kings did not presuppose temporal authority, but was simply indistinct from spiritual approval. The king, Demetrius Zvonimir, announced to all that he had been ‘invested and constituted king, through banner, sword, sceptre and crown’ by Gregory VII's legate. The legate and pope must have concurred with this account, since Demetrius's document recounting it was incorporated into Cardinal Deusdedit's collection of canons in the later twelfth century.Footnote 32 And what exactly did ‘being invested through a crown’ imply, other than a coronation ceremony? This account of the Croatian ceremony drew no distinction at all between what we might assume to be a ‘feudal’ investiture with a banner or a sceptre and what we might think of as a ‘spiritual’ ceremony of coronation. Any distinction between being invested with land by a superior (who has some right to give that land away) and simply being recognized and approved by God (and his representative) was absent or unclear in 1076.
When the distinction between temporal regalia given by the secular superior and spiritualties conferred by the ecclesiastical superior was accepted for episcopal investiture, it had a knock-on effect on papal relations with rulers. Investiture was now something that a king did to ‘his’ bishops to give them their regalia. After the 1130s the Norman kings received the spiritual endorsement they wanted from being crowned and anointed; investiture was no longer equivalent to coronation. The Norman king did not need a ceremonial investiture which might have confused his temporal and spiritual legitimacy. The first appearance of coronation was in the antipope Anacletus's 1130 grant of the royal title to Roger of Sicily, only eight years after the concordat of Worms.Footnote 33 Papal investiture had ceased to be of any importance, probably because no-one saw the papacy as giving the actual territory, which is what investiture would have implied after the concordat.
From the 1130s onwards papal relationships with secular powers would move further away from the forms employed in the eleventh century. By the middle of the twelfth century, Aragon was, as Fried argued, a papal protectorate, where the papacy held limited rights only. In the eleventh century, the emperors had argued that they could intervene in papal elections generally through their authority as patricius, and had invested popes; in the 1150s, however, Frederick I judged that he could intervene in a papal election because he as emperor was the ultimate source of the pope's regalia: the temporal power of the pope in the city of Rome.Footnote 34 The emperor's justification was now couched solely in temporal terms: it was now dependent on a clear differentiation between the spiritual and temporal powers of the pope, and where those powers came from.
The focus here has been on southern Italy and Aragon because, apart from being the best studied relationships with the papacy, they are also the best documented. Other supposed ‘feudal’ relationships are often so poorly recorded that little can be said definitively. The evidence adduced to prove, for example, that Gregory VII sought lordship over Brittany or England is fairly ambiguous.Footnote 35 We should be wary of building arguments from such meagre evidence.
Gregory VII's letters to King Solomon of Hungary in October 1074 have been read as showing that papal temporal authority over that kingdom was conceived as distinct from papal power over kings generally: Hungary was a papal fief and therefore the pope held temporal power over its king. Writing to Solomon, Gregory expressed grave disquiet that the king had accepted his kingdom as a beneficium from the Emperor Henry IV, for the sceptre of Hungary was a beneficium of apostolic, not royal, authority. That kingdom had been ‘offered and handed over to blessed Peter by King Stephen [the first king] with all his right and power’.Footnote 36 This latter phrase again invites comparison with the kingdom of Aragon which, according to King Sancho in 1088, had been ‘handed over into the power of God and St Peter’.Footnote 37
Solomon's dealings with the Emperor Henry IV were prompted by the opposition to the Hungarian king, in the preceding years, from his cousin, Duke Gesa.Footnote 38 It therefore seems likely that Gregory's criticism of Solomon's association with Henry was prompted by complaints from Gesa and was not entirely initiated by Gregory: Gesa had been in communication with Gregory for months before this.Footnote 39 Solomon had looked for help from the emperor; Gesa had thus countered by calling on the pope for support.
It is the use of beneficium in Gregory's letter which has caused some confusion, because, as well as simply meaning ‘gift’, beneficium could also be a technical term denoting a conditional grant of land (i.e. a fief).Footnote 40 But Cowdrey, the doyen of Gregorian studies, noticed the flexibility of the term. In his translation of Pope Gregory's register, the first use of beneficium was translated as ‘fief’ (‘you received this kingdom as a fief’); while the second use was translated as ‘gift’ (‘the sceptre of the kingdom . . . [is] a gift of apostolic, not of royal, sovereignty’).Footnote 41 In his biography of Gregory, however, Cowdrey translated both uses of beneficium in this letter as ‘gift’.Footnote 42 I do not think that we should here read beneficium as a semi-technical term, like ‘fief’, denoting a unique papal temporal authority over Hungary. Rather, it should be understood as an assertion of papal power over kings generally: all kingdoms were, in the end, gifts from God. Confirmation of this interpretation comes from a letter of Gregory to Duke Gesa of March 1075. Here ‘the kingdom of Hungary, just as other most famous kingdoms [my emphasis], should be . . . subject to no king of another kingdom save to the . . . Roman Church’.Footnote 43 Gregory did not see Hungary as distinctly under the temporal power of the pope; instead, all kings were under some form of papal authority which did not explicitly distinguish between sacral and temporal.
Conclusion
It was not until the first half of the twelfth century that investiture or ‘accepting land from the hand’ of someone began to signify that the person who performed the investiture actually owned the thing they were giving away. With the end of the dispute over lay investiture (1122) it was recognized that a king could invest a bishop only with the regalia, with what pertained to the king. Now it was clear: how could a pope invest a king with a kingdom, or how could a king ‘accept’ it from a clergyman, unless the pope actually possessed it, unless it was really his to give away? Previously this had not been such an issue: kings had given away bishoprics, both spiritually and temporally, despite having no sacral legitimacy to do so. The coronation of the king of Croatia-Dalmatia did not distinguish between investiture and coronation. But the kings of Aragon and of Sicily were beginning to do so after the 1120s. Investiture of the Norman rulers of Sicily declined after 1122; the Aragonese kings did not ‘accept the kingdom from the hand’ of the pope in the twelfth century, and after c.1150 the Aragonese-papal relationship clearly came under the rubric of protection.
Papal authority – papal imperium – over monarchs does not fit neatly into distinct categories before the mid-twelfth century. We cannot simply say that Gregory VII and his successors believed the pope was the temporal governor of all kings, because it is not clear what the distinction between temporal superiority and spiritual leadership was. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the distinction between the spiritual power (which the popes had over all kings) and temporal power (which they did not) was explicit: Innocent III, accepting the surrender of the kingdoms of England and Ireland to the papacy in 1213–14, told King John when returning them to him as a fief (feudum) that ‘those provinces which from of old have had the Holy Roman Church as their proper teacher in spiritual matters should now in temporal things also have her as their special lord’.Footnote 44 The two – spiritual magistracy and temporal lordship – were distinguished and did not automatically go together. But to categorize the earlier royal-papal relationships in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries either as ‘feudal’ or ‘protective’ is to put the cart before the horse. These types of relationship were only defined after the end of the investiture contest. The old language of investiture, in which popes had indivisibly invested kings with both spiritual and temporal authority, was no longer acceptable. Papal imperium had moved on to new ground.
