Court Day in Worms (1076)

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The court day to Worms on 24 January 1076, an event of the investiture struggle between the German King Henry IV. And Pope Gregory VII. And is regarded as the immediate trigger for the imposition of the excommunication of the king a few weeks later.

prehistory

In December 1075 Gregor wrote a letter to Heinrich urging him urgently to withdraw the appointment of bishops that he had pronounced in the wake of the Milan bishops dispute. 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.

Imperial Assembly

Among the ecclesiastical dignitaries, led by Siegfried von Mainz , was Cardinal Hugo Candidus, who fell away from Gregor and was then excommunicated. This was one of the circumstances that led Heinrich to succeed in persuading 2 archbishops and 24 bishops to come to a joint resolution against the Pope. In addition, the bishops generally feared, although they were not declared opponents of church reform, that their independence would be restricted by the increasing centralization of church power by Pope Gregory. A good year earlier, in a letter to the German dukes, he had not only urged the laity, as before, to boycott the masses of disobedient clerics, but also expressly called for the use of force.

Letter from Henry to Pope Gregory

In addition to a letter from the bishops in which they denied obedience to the Pope, Heinrich had Gottschalk von Aachen write his famous letter Descende, descende , in which he asked the Pope to resign:

"H. non usurpative, sed pia dei ordinatione rex Hildebrando iam non apostolico, sed falso monacho. [...] Ut enim de multis pauca et egregia loquamur: rectores sanctae ecclesiae videlicet archiepiscopos episcopos presbiteros, non modo non tangere, sicut christos domini, timuisti, quin sicut servos, nescientes quid faciat domnus eoruis, sub pedast. [...] Me quoque, qui licet indignus inter christos ad regnum sum unctus, tetigisti, quem sanctorum patrum traditio soli deo iudicandum docuit nec pro aliquo crimine, nisi a fide, quod absit, exorbitaverim, deponendum asseruit; cum etiam Iulianum apostatam prudentia sanctorum episcoporum non sibi, sed soli deo iudicandum deponendumque com miserit. [...] Alius in solium beati Petri ascendat, qui nulla violentiam religione palliet, sed beati Petri sanam doctrinam doceat. [...] Ego, H. dei gratia rex cum omnibus episcopis nostris tibi dicimus: descende, descende! "

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"Heinrich, not by presumption, but by God's righteous ordinance king, to Hildebrand, no longer Pope, but a false monk. [...] Not only are you not afraid to touch the rulers of the holy church, namely archbishops, bishops and priests who are anointed of the Lord, no, like servants who do not know what their master is doing, you trample them under your feet and won approval from the mouth of the mob. […] But you took our humility to be fear and therefore did not shy away from even rising up against the royal power bestowed on us by God; you dared to threaten, you would take it from us as if the rule of kings and emperors lay in your hands and not in God's hands. […] So then you, who are condemned by this curse and the judgment of all our bishops and our own, descend, leave the apostolic chair that you have presumed to be. [...] I, Heinrich, by the grace of God King, tell you together with all my bishops: Come down, come down! "

consequences

Gregor reacted with a hitherto unheard-of decision, the theoretical basis of which, however, he had laid two years earlier in his work Dictatus Papae : At the synod of Lent in Rome on February 14, 1076, he declared the German king deposed and pronounced the ban on him . This also released the king's subjects from their oath of loyalty. In order to end this situation, which was untenable for the German king, Heinrich finally declared himself ready after the Prince's Day in Trebur in October 1076 to ask the Pope in Canossa for forgiveness and re-entry into the church.

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, bibliographically updated edition. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-534-24665-6

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Erich Caspar (Ed.): The Register of Gregory VII. , Reg. 3.10; Wilfried Hartmann: The Investiture Controversy. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Munich 2007 p. 24.
  2. ↑ Erich Caspar (Ed.): The Register of Gregory VII. , Reg. 2.45
  3. ↑ medieval.uni-tuebingen.de , accessed on January 2, 2017.
  4. ↑ Translated from the Latin by Hans-Georg Fath.