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Biography

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Guy of Burgundy, who reigned as Pope Callixtus II (also spelled Calixtus), belonged to the comital house of Burgundy, the Anscarid or Ivrea lineage that dominated the County of Burgundy in the eleventh century. He was a son of Count William I, called the Great, and of Countess Stephanie. The family stood among the highest nobility between the Saône and the Jura and was tied by marriage to several royal houses: a brother, Raymond of Burgundy, married Queen Urraca of León and Castile and became father of Alfonso VII; other siblings held counties and major bishoprics. Guy’s own path was ecclesiastical. By the later 1080s he was Archbishop of Vienne, metropolitan of a large province in the Kingdom of Burgundy (the Arelat) within the Holy Roman Empire. In that office he became a leading voice of Gregorian reform in the kingdom of France and in Burgundy, opposing simony, clerical marriage, and lay investiture, and serving as a papal legate charged with enforcing reform decrees among the French episcopate.

When Pope Gelasius II died at Cluny in January 1119, the cardinals who had followed him into Burgundy, together with French and Burgundian prelates assembled there, elected the Archbishop of Vienne as pope on 2 February 1119. He took the name Callixtus II and was crowned at Vienne. The election of a Burgundian magnate of reforming reputation was meant to rally support north of the Alps while the papacy was still at odds with Emperor Henry V and while an imperial antipope, Gregory VIII (Maurice Bourdin, former archbishop of Braga), claimed Rome. Callixtus first consolidated recognition in France and Burgundy, then entered Italy, recovered Rome, and obtained the capture and imprisonment of the antipope, thereby restoring a single papal obedience in the city.

The political centre of the pontificate was the settlement of the Investiture Controversy, the conflict over appointment to bishoprics and abbeys that had opposed popes to German kings since the 1070s. After earlier negotiations failed and fighting briefly resumed, representatives of Callixtus and Henry V agreed at Worms in September 1122 on the concordat that bears that city’s name. The emperor surrendered investiture with ring and crozier, the symbols of spiritual office. In the German kingdom he retained the right to be present at episcopal elections and to confer temporal regalia by the sceptre, with somewhat more church-friendly terms for Italy and Burgundy. The concordat did not remove every dispute over church lands and appointments, but it ended the most acute phase of the struggle and was received as a peace between priesthood and empire.

In 1123 Callixtus convened the First Lateran Council in Rome, later counted in the West as an ecumenical council. It confirmed the Concordat of Worms and issued canons against simony and clerical incontinence, forbade lay investiture of ecclesiastics, and legislated on the Truce of God, the status of crusaders and pilgrims, and the inalienability of church property. In the same years he confirmed privileges of churches and monasteries across Latin Christendom and, around 1120, issued a constitution in the tradition later known as Sicut Judaeis, forbidding forced baptism of Jews, violence against them, and seizure of their property without legal process. He died in Rome on 13 December 1124 and was buried in the Lateran basilica. After a short, contested succession, Honorius II was elected. Callixtus’s reign is remembered chiefly for the Worms settlement and for the Lateran legislation that gave conciliar form to a generation of ecclesiastical reform.

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