On January 24, 1076, at the imperial assembly of Worms, Henry IV and the vast majority of the German bishops replied in even harsher terms to Gregory’s letter and oral message. The bishops renounced their obedience to “Frater Hildebrand,” and the king called on Gregory to abdicate and on the Romans to elect a new pope. Northern Italian bishops immediately joined the action and renounced their support for Gregory. The letters reached Gregory during the customary Lenten synod (February 14–20, 1076), and the outraged pope reacted immediately, using a prayer to Peter to depose and excommunicate Henry. In the same prayer, Gregory also absolved all of Henry’s subjects of their oath of fealty to the king. The effect of the excommunication was tremendous. Never before had a pope deposed a king, even though Gregory, according to a later letter, believed that he had historical precedents on his side, an assumption that even contemporaries considered untenable and a distortion of historical truth. Then as now, the deposition of Henry IV was the most hotly debated action taken by Gregory VII, who pursued to its logical conclusion his conviction that papal primacy pertained not only to the spiritual sphere but to the secular sphere as well. Church reform now became a contest for dominance between the priestly and the royal powers as they struggled to replace the Carolingian vision of mutual collaboration in which the church was entrusted to the monarchy for safekeeping.
In Germany Gregory’s action strengthened princely as well as episcopal opposition to Henry in a civil war that raged intermittently throughout his reign. In order to save his crown, Henry IV submitted to the pope at the castle of Canossa on January 28, 1077. Countess Matilda of Tuscany and Abbot Hugh of Cluny, (Henry’s godfather) had interceded for him. Gregory acted as a pastor of souls when he reconciled the king with the church, but Henry’s footfall nonetheless was an implicit recognition of papal claims. The encounter at Canossa had interrupted Gregory’s journey to Augsburg (now in Germany), where he was to meet German princes who had planned to elect a new ruler in opposition to Henry IV. Despite Gregory’s absolution of Henry and return to Rome, the princes proceeded with their plan. Their nominee, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, was elected (anti-)king on March 15, 1077.
The quarrel between Henry and Gregory intensified after the pope formally prohibited lay investiture at the council of November 1078. Investiture was the customary ceremony in which the emperor or king bestowed upon the bishops the ring and staff, the symbols of their office as well as of royal authority in and protection of the church. Nevertheless, Gregory at first tried to arbitrate between Henry and Rudolf, but he excommunicated Henry for a second time at the Lenten synod of 1080 and formally recognized Rudolf as king. However, after the absolution of Canossa, Henry had reasserted himself. The new excommunication had little effect, and the king was victorious in the civil war.
Following the formal deposition of Gregory VII under the aegis of Henry IV by the synod of Brixen in June 1080 and the nomination of Archbishop Wibert of Ravenna as pope, Henry marched on Rome, supported by German and, especially, Italian troops. The Eternal City was finally captured in March 1084, when the Romans, including many cardinals and other clergy, opened the gates to Henry and his army. They had deserted the papal cause in response to Gregory’s inflexibility. Wibert was enthroned as anti-pope Clement III, and Henry IV was crowned emperor. Gregory VII had at first sought refuge in the Castel Saint' Angelo but in July fled with his Norman liberators to Salerno, where he died on May 25, 1085. According to tradition, his last words were a paraphrase of a passage from Psalm 44, “I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile.”
Legacy
It might appear that Gregory was less successful as pope than he had been as a papal adviser, for, in the course of his bitter conflict with Emperor Henry IV, he was defeated. Apart from the court of Matilda of Tuscany, where his legend lived on, Gregory was soon forgotten, and he was not canonized until 1606. The history of the papacy and of the church, however, was profoundly influenced by him. His staunch advocacy of clerical celibacy and repudiation of simony reshaped the church and helped establish the ideals of the reformers as the standard for the church. Moreover, papal primacy cannot be imagined without Gregory. In his lifetime he attempted to translate his own religious experience with its mystical core into historical reality. Concepts that he grasped intuitively were elaborated on legally and theoretically in the 12th and 13th centuries and resulted in what is known as the papal monarchy.
The Haunting Sea
In his dreams... Richard was always someplace else, and many of those dreams took place around the sea. As far back as he could remember he had listened to the sea; to the sound of it mingling with the wind in the needles of the big trees. The wind which never stopped blowing, even when one left the shore behind and crossed the fields. It was the sound which cradled his childhood. He could hear it now as he listened to the plight of Eleanor, deep inside him; he knew it would come with him wherever he would go: The tireless lingering sound of the waves breaking in the distance on an island, then coming to die on the banks of the sea. As a child he dreamt that a day would not go by that he didn’t go to the sea; not a night when he didn’t wake up with his sheets wet from sweat, sitting up on his small cot stretching to see the tide from the shine of the moon, anxious and full of a desire he didn’t understand. The sea like an old playmate…a girl with windblown hair beckoning to him gleefully and then plunging into the blackness.
Richard thought of the sea as human, and in the dark all senses were alert, the better to hear her arrival, the better to receive her. The giant waves leaping one over another, sending its nutrient filled froth into the sand, like sperm into a womb or tumbling into the lagoon; the noise made the air and the earth vibrate like a boiler. I heard her, she moved and she breathed.
When the moon was full, he slid out of bed without a sound, careful not to make the worm-eaten floor creak. But he knew she wasn’t asleep; he knew her eyes were open in the dark and that she was holding her breath. He scaled the window ledge and pushed at the wooden shutters in the dream, and then he was outside, in the night. The garden was bathed in white moonlight; it shone on the top of the trees, swaying noisily in the wind, and he could make out the dark masses of rhododendrons and hibiscus. With a beating heart he walked down the lane which went toward the hills, where the fallow land began.
A large tree which Eleanor called the tree of good and evil, stood very close to the crumbling wall; he climbed onto its highest branches so that he could see the sea over the treetops and the expansive waving of the crops back and forth in unison with the wind…its own conductor. Tonight, the moon rolled between the clouds, throwing out splinters of light. Then suddenly over the foliage, he saw it: a giant black slab alight with shining, sparkling dots. Did he really see it, even in the dream, did he really hear it? The sea was inside his head, and when he closed his eyes, he saw and heard it best, clearly perceiving each wave as it crashed onto the reef and then came together again to unfurl on the shore.
He clung to the branches for a long time until his arms grew numb. The wind from the sea blew over the trees and the top of the crops waving to him, and the moon shone on the leaves. Sometimes in the dreams he stayed there until dawn, listening and wondering of what he might become; perhaps a captain steering the mighty sails, or even a seaman hoisting them. At the other end of the garden the big house was dark, closed in on itself like an abandoned wreck. The wind made the loose shingles bang and the framework creak. This, too, was the sound of the sea, as was the groaning of the tree trunk like a giant timber straining against the sails in a never ending or winning battle with the wind. He would not admit it to Eleanor but he was afraid to be alone in the tree, but he still did not wish to return to the room and he resisted the chill, the fear and the fatigue which made his head heavy.
It