Birthday Greetings #73

Happy birthday to Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.  Henry was a member of the Salian dynasty who kept the imperial throne warm for a while until the Habsburgs were invented.  He was crowned King of the Romans at the tender age of six with his mother acting as regent.  A measure of her popularity in this role can be gauged by the fact that a few years later Henry was kidnapped by the Archbishop of Cologne, his mother was "persuaded" to enter a convent and the archbishop settled down to rule as Henry's regent until the young emperor could come of age.  This Henry did somewhat more swiftly than the archbishop had counted on.  The archbishop returned from a foreign journey to discover that Henry was in charge and that he had better restrict himself to hanging around his own cathedral from now on.

With the actuality as well as the title Henry took stock of his patrimony.  There seemed to be rather a lot to do.  One of his kidnappers was now accused of being involved in a plot to murder him.  His nobility only tolerated his rule as long as he didn't try and tell them what to do.  The Saxons quite simply hated him (to be fair to Henry this hatred was something he inherited from his father, the Saxons had hated him too, for good and sufficient reason) and various noblemen took the opportunity to stop even pretending to be loyal to him and raised the standard of revolt.  On top of that the pope had pissed him off.

Henry managed to deal with most of the other problems but the pope was a little more serious.  Henry had attempted to divorce his wife (apparently she was unreasonably annoyed at his continuous infidelities).  Normally this was a case of a nod and a wink, a fat brown envelope to his holiness and voila, divorce.  On this occasion however the pope refused the sanction and Henry had to stomp back home with his beloved spouse no doubt smiling acidly at him the entire time.  Henry had nasty suspicions that the pope's action had less to do with concern for the sanctity of marriage (which never really bothered too many popes until we reached the twentieth century) and more to do with an ecclesiastical power play.

The trouble that most rulers of western Europe had at this time (approx 1071AD) was that to run their kingdoms effectively they needed a cadre of educated literate men.  The trouble was, there weren't any or at least not very many.  The church had a monopoly on education (to be fair they were the only ones qualified to do the teaching) and the bulk of the educated classes were the clergy.  This is why so many high ranking royal advisers were priests. The trouble was, ultimately these priests owed their allegiance to the pope not their royal master.  The pope was well aware of this and, pressing the issue further, denied the emperor the right to appoint priests to royal offices.  At a stroke Henry lost his qualified bureaucracy (such as it was) and at the same time any sort of power or authority over the priests themselves.  Since many of them were also powerful feudal lords (the Archbishop of Cologne hadn't thought twice about kidnapping the emperor, remember) this meant that quite a bit of imperial territory was no longer under even the nominal control of the emperor.

Having beaten up the Saxons rather badly Henry felt he was now free to take on the pope.  In 1076 Henry gathered a synod of compliant clergymen and declared the pope deposed.  In return the pope excommunicated him.  In the middle of Winter in the Alps Henry (if the stories are to be believed) went barefoot in sackcloth to the castle the pope was occupying and begged for readmission into the bosom of the church.  Perhaps he did, but it is instructive to note that the pope was occupying the castle because he was trying to hide from Henry's army which was nearby and the act of contrition (and some sort of act did take place) occurred on Italian territory far from Henry's German powerbase (and embarrassing witnesses) and in territory traditionally hostile to the pope.  In short forgiveness was probably wise.

Still the excommunication had emboldened Henry's enemies at home and the Saxons rose in revolt and set up some underemployed nobleman as antiking in Henry's place. Henry stomped home, stomped Saxons and was close to winning the war when the pope excommunicated him again. Henry would be excommunicated five times in the course of his life which is probably something of a record and is testimony to his ability to really piss off the papacy.

Once the Saxons had been more or less dealt with Henry invaded Italy.  Technically he was the king of Italy but the Italians tended to not pay much attention to that unless he was actually there with an army.  Certain Italian rulers had been less than loyal during the entire excommunication business and he came amongst them deposing some and robbing most.  He also made an alliance with the Byzantine emperor to make war against the Normans in the south of the peninsula.

But first he had to deal with the pope.  Since the pope had shown no hesitation in supporting an antiking Henry set up an antipope. However the real pope shut himself up in another castle and refused to resign.  Henry marched against the Normans as per his treaty but while he did so the people of Rome deserted his pet pope and Henry had to march back and remind them why it was a good idea to wait until he was out of the peninsula before coming out in revolt against him.  With his antipope apparently secure Henry got himself crowned emperor and then immediately had to leave as the Normans were marching on Rome to release the real pope.

After that things went downhill.  Henry returned to Germany and beat up some opposition there but one of his opponents from the old days (one Matilda of Tuscany) had married another of his opponents and soon there was nothing for it but to march back to Italy again. While he was busy there Matilda persuaded his son Conrad to join the revolt against him.  Henry wound up cut off in Italy but fortunately for him Matilda's husband discovered she had bequeathed her entire wealth to the church. Furious he abandoned her and sided with Henry.  Henry marched back into Germany, fired Conrad from the position of heir to the throne, ignored a couple more excommunications from various popes and started organising the country which, it was fair to say, had gone through a lot in the preceding years.

Unfortunately before he could get much done his younger son (and new heir) revolted against his excommunicate father and a whole civil war was started. The son (also named Henry) was obviously a chip off the old block because at a reconciliation meeting he had Daddy kidnapped and slung into a dungeon.  He then declared his father deposed and took over.  When news of this rather disreputable turn of events got out there was a groundswell of sympathy for Henry (the elder) and an army mustered to fight for him.  Henry broke out of prison, beat his son in battle but then died of illness before he could remove the precocious young tyke from the succession.  His son would succeed him as Henry V.