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Chapter  Licit and Illicit in the Rhetoric of the Investiture Conflict Alex Novikoff Two historical episodes of enduring significance loom large in the last quarter of the eleventh century: the investiture controversy between the German emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII and the launching of the first crusade by Pope Urban II. Following Carl Erdmann’s pioneering study on the origins of the idea of crusade, historians have long noted the connection between the rise of a Christian notion of holy war during the pontificate of Gregory VII and the advent of the crusades.1 The subject of medieval law and the illicit offers an opportunity to briefly consider a parallel theme also emanating from the investiture controversy and also possessing relevance to the papal justification of violence: the rhetoric of legal and illegal conduct in the polemical literature produced by the investiture con- flict. Although it was in the twelfth century that canon law underwent its most significant transformation, canonists of the late eleventh century such as Anselm of Lucca and Cardinal Deusdedit provide important examples of the role canon law played in the papal reform movement. But attention need not be confined to the explicitly legal literature of the period in order to appreciate the growing appeal to Christian law. The polemical treatises generated by the pro-imperial and pro-papal factions provide another vantage point for examining the legal arguments for and against the behavior of the eleventh-century temporal and ecclesiastical leaders and offer a prelude to some of the issues that would arise with the advent of the crusading movement. The conflict between empire and papacy that erupted in the mid-s was generations in the making. German emperors since the tenth century had made a practice of appointing (or investing) local bishops who would then take an oath of loyalty to the king, a practice specifically forbidden by church law but one that reflected the realities of power politics in the centu-  Alex Novikoff ries following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Although the collision course had long been set, and several church councils had been held during the eleventh century to resolve the issue of lay investiture and simony , it took the famous personalities of Emperor Henry IV (r. –) and Pope Gregory VII (r. –) for the conflict to reach its peak.2 The sequence of events that constitutes the central episode of the investiture conflict is well known.3 In  Emperor Henry III died, leaving his infant son the inheritor of the imperial crown. That same year Henry’s friend and ally Pope Leo IX also died, leaving his program of reform in the hands of his legates and successors, popes Nicholas II, Alexander II, and Gregory VII. From the beginning of his pontificate, Gregory devoted his energy to continuing, and intensifying, the campaign for moral reform that had been implemented by his predecessors. In his enigmatic memorandum Dictatus papae (), inserted in the original register of the papal chancery, Gregory gave a first indication of his challenge to sacred kingship, stating that it was licit for a pope to depose an emperor.4 He forbade the clergy to accept investiture into office from a layman and put forward a theological argument that the clergy, headed by the pope, were superior to kings and other lay powers, whose role was to carry out the clergy’s directions. Henry IV’s active resistance to the pope’s initiatives led Gregory to excommunicate Henry and depose him from his office as king (), declaring the nobles free from their feudal obligations toward Henry. With a Saxon rebellion on his hands, Henry, in desperation, went to Italy and appeared before the castle of Canossa in northern Tuscany, where Gregory was a guest of Countess Matilda of Tuscany (January ). Henry’s famous episode of allegedly performing penance by standing barefoot in the snow for three days earned him reconciliation with the church, but only temporarily.5 No sooner had he returned to Germany and extinguished the rebellion than he turned against the pope once more. A second excommunication of Henry IV in —in complete contrast to that of — prompted the majority of the German and Italian bishops to side with the king. Upon Henry’s invasion of Italy, Gregory had no choice but to flee Rome for the south under protection of his Norman vassal Robert Guiscard , himself a former three-time excommunicate of...

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