Concordat of Worms

Signed on 23 September 1122 in the German city of Worms by Pope Callixtus II and Emperor Henry V, the agreement set an end to the Investiture Controversy, a conflict between state and church over the right to appoint religious office holders that had begun in the middle of the 11th century.

By signing the concordat, Henry renounced his right to invest bishops and abbots with ring and crosier, and opened ecclesiastical appointments in his realm to canonical elections.

[1] Having been elected in 1073, the reformist Pope Gregory VII proclaimed several edicts aimed at strengthening the authority of the papacy, some of which were formulated in the Dictatus papae of 1075.

Gregory's edicts postulated that secular rulers were answerable to the pope and forbade them to make appointments to clerical offices (a process known as investiture).

[6] In 1111, Henry V brokered an agreement with Pope Paschal II at Sutri, whereby he would abstain from investing clergy in his realm in exchange for the restoration of church property that had originally belonged to the Empire.

In the autumn of 1119, two papal emissaries, William of Champeaux and Pons of Cluny, met Henry at Strasbourg, where the emperor agreed in principle to abandon the secular investiture ceremony that involved giving new bishops and abbots a ring and a crosier.

[10] Due to his uncompromising position in 1111, Calixtus has been termed an "ultra", and his election to the papacy may indicate that the College of Cardinals saw no reason to show weakness to the emperor.

[12] After the failure of the Mouzon negotiations, and the disappearance into the horizon of the chances of Henry's unconditional surrender, the majority of the clergy became willing to compromise in order to settle the dispute.

Calixtus had been personally involved in negotiations with the Emperor over the last decade, and his intimate knowledge of the delicate situation made him the perfect candidate for the attempt.

In 1121, pressured by a faction of nobles from the Lower Rhine and Duchy of Saxony under the leadership of the archbishop Adalbert of Mainz, Henry agreed to submit to make peace with the pope.

[19] In his letter, Calixtus drew attention to their blood relationship, suggesting that while their shared ancestry compelled them to love each other as brothers, it was fundamental that the German kings draw their authority from God, but via his servants, not directly.

Conversely, he made sure to include a threat: if Henry did not change his ways, Calixtus threatened to place "the protection of the church in the hands of wise men".

[26] The Emperor received the papal legates in Worms with due ceremony,[26] where he awaited the outcome of the negotiations which appear to have actually taken place in nearby Mainz,[18] which was hostile territory to Henry.

[15] Although a possible compromise solution had already been received from England, this does not seem to have ever been considered in depth, probably on account of it containing an oath of Homage between Emperor and Pope, which had been a historical sticking point in earlier negotiations.

[29] Adalbert, Archbishop of Mainz wrote to Calixtus of how complex the negotiations had been, given that, as he said, Henry regarded the powers he was being asked to renounce as being hereditary in the Imperial throne.

[31] Henry, on oath before God, the apostles and the church[32] renounced his right to invest bishops and abbots with ring and crosier, and opened ecclesiastical appointments in his realm to canonical elections,[33] regno vel imperio.

[34] It had achieved its peace, argues Norman Cantor, by allowing local national custom and practice to determine future relations between crown and pope; in most cases, he notes, this "favored the continuance of royal control over the church".

[32] Neither charter was signed;[36] both contained probably intentional vagaries and unanswered questions—such as the position of the papacy's churches that lay outside both the patrimony and Germany—which were subsequently addressed on a case-by-case basis.

[52][53] The concordat was ratified at the First Council of the Lateran[33] and the original Henricianum charter is preserved at the Vatican Apostolic Archive; the Calixtinum has not survived except in subsequent copies.

Following a long-running dispute between Canterbury–York which ended up in the Papal court, Joseph Huffman argues that it would have been controversial for the Pope "to justify one set of concessions in Germany and another in England".

One of its primary concerns was to emphasise the independence of diocesan clergy, and to do so it forbade monks to leave their monasteries to provide pastoral care, which would in future be the sole preserve of the diocese.

Fuhrmann comments that, as Henry had shown in his life "even less interest in new currents of thought and feeling than his father", he probably did not understand the significance of the events he had lived through.

[62] However, later emperors, such as Frederick I and Henry VI, continued to wield as much, if intangible, power as their predecessors in episcopal elections, and to a greater degree to that allowed them by Calixtus' charter.

[66] I. S. Robinson, writing in The New Cambridge Medieval History, suggests that this was a deliberate ploy to leave further negotiations open with a more politically malleable Emperor in future.

[50] The contemporary English historian William of Malmesbury praised the Concordat for curtailing what he perceived as the emperor's overreach,[57] or as he put it, "severing the sprouting necks of Teuton fury with the axe of Apostolic power".

[70] Likewise Adelbert of Mainz—who had casually criticised the agreement in his report to Calixtus—continued to lobby against it, and continued to bring complaints against Henry, whom, for example, he alleged had illegally removed the Bishop of Strassburg who was suspected of complicity in the death of Duke Berthold of Zaehringen.

The following month he sent cordial letters to Calixtus agreeing with the pope's position that as brothers in Christ they were bound by God to work together, etc., and that he would soon visit personally to discuss the repatriation of papal land.

[33] According to the historian William Chester Jordan, the Concordat was "of enormous significance" because it demonstrated that the emperor, in spite of his great secular power, did not have any religious authority.

[61] While most historians agree that the Concordat marks a clear close to the fifty-year-old struggle between church and empire, disagreement continues on just how decisive a termination that was.

[63] Political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has argued that, in the long term, the Concordat was an essential component to the later—gradual—creation of the European nation state.