European Medieval History

Beginning shortly after his death in 814, the inhabitants of Charlemagne's historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it an exemplar of Christian universality—Christendom. They mapped contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with each retelling, almost always including the Christian East. Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the ninth century but filtered through the social, cultural, and intellectual developments of the intervening years. Paradoxically, what happened was that Charlemagne became less important to the Charlemagne legend. The legend became a story about the Frankish people, who believed they had held God's favor under Charlemagne and held out hope that they could one day reclaim their special place in sacred history. Indeed, popular versions of the Last Emperor legend, which spoke of a great ruler who would reunite Christendom in preparation for the last battle between good and evil, promised just this to the Franks. Ideas of empire, identity, and Christian religious violence were potent reagents. The mixture of these ideas could remind men of their Frankishness and move them, for example, to take up arms, march to the East, and reclaim their place as defenders of the faith during the First Crusade.

The reign of Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), who gave his name to an era of Church reform, is critically important in the history of the medieval church and papacy. Thus it is surprising that this is the first comprehensive biography to appear in any language for over fifty years. This book presents Gregory's life and work in their entirety, tracing his career from early days as a clerk of the Roman Church, through his political negotiations, ecclesiastical governance, and final exile at Salerno. Full account is taken of his turbulent relations with King Henry IV of Germany, from his first deposition and excommunication in 1076, to the absolution at Canossa and the imposition of a second sentence in 1080. Pope Gregory was also a contemporary of William the Conqueror, and, as the author shows, fully supported his conquest of England. Gregory VII is presented as an individual whose deep inner belief in iustitia (righteousness) did not waver in the face of new circumstances, although his broad outlook underwent changes. Deeply committed to the traditions of the past and especially to those of Pope Gregory the Great, his reign prepared the way for an age of strong papal monarchy in the western Church.

The Council of Piacenza is among the most important papal synods of the Reform that was sweeping through the Western Church at the end of the eleventh century. Piacenza may receive a line or two in textbooks of medieval history due to a connection with the First Crusade, but if the assembly was a Crusade launching pad - and the matter is obscure - this is a footnote to its true significance. The council marked a turning point in the papal schism between Popes Gregory VII/Urban II and the so-called anti-pope Clement III, who was created and sustained by Emperor Henry IV. Urban’s earlier synods anticipated the rulings from Piacenza, and the canons promulgated at Piacenza became landmarks not only for the eleventh-/twelfth-century Reform but more broadly for the Church of the High Middle Ages and even beyond (see below). No accurate figures exist for attendance, but many churchmen from Italy and beyond responded to the papal call for a “general council” early in the year 1095 to deal with issues arising from the schism, and in essence to formulate a revised Reform ecclesiology. Piacenza would have both reaffirmed the provisions from Urban’s earlier synods and issued new decrees. The latter included canons about ordinations by simoniacs and the schismatics, in addition to statements about the use and the limits of mercy for those returning to Urban’s obedience. The official acts are lost, but the decrees survive in many similar twelfth-century copies that can be grouped into a few distinct versions. Identifying “the canons of Piacenza” is thus not a simple process, but important ideas occurring in the council reappear in other texts of Pope Urban, and also are found in the widespread Prologue on the hermeneutics of legal texts formulated by Bishop Ivo of Chartres. Piacenza also attracted skeptics and detractors. The debates that occurred therein are in great part lost from view, but tantalizing hints survive, e.g., in the well-known Chronicion of Bernold of Constance, in the little known Gesta Romanae ecclesiae contra Hildebrandum penned by the schismatic Cardinal-priest Beno of SS. Martino e Silvestro, and in a protocol accompanying several versions of the canons. But notwithstanding critics, inclusion of decrees from Piacenza in Gratian’s Decretum ensured their visibility throughout the High Middle Ages and on into modern times, for Gratian’s work became part of the living tradition of the Church’s Corpus iuris canonici . In addition to a new perspective on the “fortuna” of these canons and a new edition, this book includes a commentary on those texts akin to what was done in the author’s book on Urban II’s Council of Melfi. The last chapter, finally, discusses the legislation of Urban’s synods after Piacenza. That transmission is complicated and episodic, but the canons of Urban’s last council, held at St. Peter’s in Rome at Eastertime of 1099, duplicate a large number of decrees from Piacenza.

This book studies the proprietary church with coverage of most of Western Europe, from the end of the Roman Empire in the West to about 1200. The book provides a broad survey in varying degrees of intensity and with a shifting geographical focus; and it asks questions that are as much social and religious as legal or administrative. The book vindicates, for village and estate churches, Ulrich Stutz's basic concept of a church with its possessions, revenues, and priestly office as an object of what we can reasonably call property. However, it largely rejects his and his followers' application of this to great churches, and sees the position of intermediate churches (such as small or middling monasteries) as various, changeable, and ambivalent. Above all, it turns away from Stutz's view of the property relationship as a distinct institution or system of ‘Germanic church law’, presenting it rather as a fluid set of assumptions and practices taking shape as customary law.