Gregory VII

Pope Gregory VII, born Hildebrand (Ildebrando) in Sovana in southern Tuscany in the early eleventh century, rose from relatively obscure origins to become one of the most consequential popes of the Middle Ages. Traditional accounts place his birth in a family of modest standing, though later hagiographical writers sometimes claimed more distinguished ancestry. He was educated in Rome and associated with the monastery of Santa Maria on the Aventine Hill, where an uncle is said to have been abbot, and he embraced the monastic life in the Benedictine tradition. The reforming currents of the eleventh-century Latin Church, especially those linked with Cluny and with the circle of Pope Leo IX, shaped his formation. He spent a period at Cluny and returned to Rome as a leading advocate of clerical reform, opposing simony and clerical marriage.

Hildebrand served a succession of reforming popes in the mid-eleventh century. Under Leo IX he accompanied the papal court and gained experience of the wider Latin Church. He became a cardinal and, as archdeacon of the Roman Church under Nicholas II and Alexander II, was among the most powerful figures in the papal administration. He was closely involved in the papal election decree of 1059, which sought to place the choice of the pope more firmly in the hands of the cardinal-bishops and to reduce imperial and Roman aristocratic interference. His reputation as a rigorous reformer made him the natural choice when Alexander II died in 1073. He was elected pope by acclamation of clergy and people and took the name Gregory VII.

His pontificate is identified with the Gregorian Reform, a program that asserted the liberty of the Church from lay control, insisted on papal primacy, and demanded a morally purified clergy. In 1075 he issued, or caused to be compiled, the Dictatus Papae, a set of propositions claiming for the Roman pontiff unique and supreme authority, including the right to depose emperors. The same year he moved against lay investiture, forbidding ecclesiastics to receive bishoprics or abbeys from the hands of laymen. This brought him into direct conflict with Henry IV, king of Germany and future Holy Roman Emperor, who regarded the appointment of bishops as an essential royal prerogative in the imperial church system. Gregory excommunicated and deposed Henry in 1076, releasing subjects from their oaths of allegiance—an unprecedented assertion of papal power over a Christian monarch.

The struggle that followed, known as the Investiture Controversy, produced one of the most famous episodes of medieval history: Henry’s winter journey to Canossa in 1077, where he stood as a penitent before the castle of Matilda of Tuscany until Gregory granted him absolution. The reconciliation was temporary. Civil war in Germany, the election of an anti-king, renewed excommunications, and Henry’s support for the antipope Clement III (Wibert of Ravenna) prolonged the conflict. In 1084 Henry entered Rome and was crowned emperor by the antipope. Gregory, besieged in the Castel Sant’Angelo, was rescued by the Norman duke Robert Guiscard, whose troops sacked the city. Gregory left Rome with the Normans and spent his last months in Salerno in southern Italy. He died there on 25 May 1085. According to contemporary report he uttered the words, 'I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.'

Gregory VII was buried in the cathedral of Salerno. His uncompromising vision of papal authority and of a Church free from secular domination left a lasting mark on Latin Christendom, even though the investiture dispute was only later settled by compromise in the Concordat of Worms in 1122. Veneration of Gregory grew in later centuries. He was beatified in the late sixteenth century by Pope Gregory XIII and canonized in 1728 by Pope Benedict XIII. His feast is observed on 25 May. Historians continue to debate the balance between his spiritual ideals and his political methods, but few deny that his pontificate marked a turning point in the history of the medieval papacy and of Church–state relations in the West.