Prince's Day in Trebur

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The Prince's Day at Trebur in October 1076 was an imperial assembly at which the German princes asked King Henry IV to come to an understanding with Pope Gregory VII and to have the ban on him removed.

prehistory

In 1075 there was a dispute between Henry IV and Gregory VII over the appointment of the new Archbishop of Milan by the king. According to the Pope's understanding, this “lay investiture” contradicted the relationship between church and state, in which only the church could be the leading power. He expressed this conviction in the spring of 1075 in the document Dictatus Papae . After failed negotiations and further appointments of bishops by Heinrich in Spoleto and Fermo, the dispute escalated and the Pope wrote to Heinrich in December 1075 urging him to withdraw these appointments. He reminded him of the duty of obedience of a Christian king to the Pope. Otherwise he threatened him with excommunication. As a reaction to this letter, Heinrich called an imperial assembly for the coming January in Goslar, where he celebrated Christmas this year.

At the court meeting in Worms that followed on January 28, 1076, Heinrich succeeded in persuading the majority of the German bishops to disobey the Pope and requesting him to resign in a letter.

Gregory's reaction took place on February 14, 1076 at the Synod of Lent in Rome, at which he de facto declared the king to be deposed by pronouncing the excommunication over him and thereby releasing his subjects from their oath to the king.

Within a relatively short time, the resistance of the Pope's opponents began to wane. More and more bishops turned away from the king's camp and tried to reconcile with the pope. The king's authority was visibly waning and the situation threatened to affect the entire empire.

The Imperial Assembly

Under these circumstances, a coalition of Heinrich's opponents decided to convene a princely convention in Trebur on October 16, 1076 , in order to discuss further steps there. It is not certain whether the removal of the king had already been decided, as Lampert von Hersfeld writes. In tough negotiations that dragged on for ten days and in which two legates with papal authority were involved, Heinrich at least managed to get a period of one year within which he had to be released from the ban. Heinrich, who had set up camp on the opposite side of the Rhine near Oppenheim, thus avoided the risk of immediate deposition and re-election, albeit at the price of extensive concessions to both his opponents in the empire and the Pope. In a letter he had to comply with all the Pope's demands, retract his accusations against Gregory and dismiss his banned advisers, and he undertook to secure his re-entry into the Church by February of the following year - the anniversary of the excommunication.

Another imperial assembly was agreed for February 2, 1077, at which his future fate would be decided in the presence of Pope Gregory.

consequences

Such a meeting would have meant the end for Heinrich as king. He therefore decided to approach the Pope, who was already on his way north, and to obtain the dissolution of the ban on church in direct agreement with him. With this walk to Canossa in January 1077 he ultimately saved his kingdom.

swell

  • Carl Erdmann (Ed.): The letters of Heinrich IV. , MGH German Middle Ages, 1937
  • Erich Caspar (Ed.): The Register of Gregory VII. , MGH Epistolae selectae 2, 1–2, Berlin 1920/23
  • Lampert von Hersfeld : Annals . Newly translated by Adolf Schmidt. Explained by Wolfgang Dietrich Fritz. 4th edition, expanded by a supplement compared to the 3rd. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2000, ISBN 3-534-00176-1 .
  • Sources on the history of Emperor Heinrich IV. Latin and German. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-19876-X ( Selected sources on the German history of the Middle Ages. Freiherr vom Stein-Gedächtnisausgabe. Volume 12). Contains u. a .: Bruno von Merseburg: Brunonis Saxonicum bellum. Brunos Sachsenkrieg (translated by Franz-Josef Schmale, pp. 191–405) and Carmen de bello saxonico . The song from the Saxon war (translated by Franz-Josef Schmale , pp. 142–189).

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Erich Caspar (Ed.): The Register of Gregory VII. , Reg . 3.10
  2. ^ Lampert von Hersfeld : Annalen , pp. 382/3
  3. ↑ Stefan Weinfurter : Canossa: The Entzauberung der Welt . P. 146