Gregory VII

Gregory VII., better known as Hildelrand, was born about 1015 at Saona in Tuscany, where his father is supposed to have been a cai] enter.

He passed his early years in a monastic house at Rome, and in 1046 became one of the chf plains to Gregory VI., whom he accompanied into exile in Germany. He next passed some time as a monk at Clugny. He persuaded Bruno, when elected Pope as Leo IX., to refrain from exercising his authority until he had not only received nomination from the Emperor but had also been elected and consecrated at Rome, and over his successors, Arictor II., Stephen IX., Nicholas II., and Alexander II., his influence was unbounded, and he was himself Pope in all but name. At length in 1073, on the death of the last-named, he was persuaded to accept the tiara for himself, when he took the title of Gregory VII. in memory of his earliest friend. He immediately set himself to reform the Church from within and to protect it from without. Celibacy was restored and simony repressed, and in 1075' the Investiture struggle was initiated by a decree declaring any clerk who should receive office from lay hands liable to deposition and any layman who should presume to confer it subject to excommunication.

In 1076 the Emperor Henry IV. was cited to appear at Rome to answer charges of simony, sacrilege, and oppression; and when he replied by declaring Hildebrand deposed at the Diet of Worms the Pope rejoined by excommunicating him and the bishops who had attended. The German clergy now yielded, and Henry came and did penance at Canossa. Soon after this, however, he again defied Hildebrand, and, invading Italy in

1080, took Rome after a siege of more than three years, and set up Guibert as Pope Clement III.

Hildebrand at first shut himself up in the Castle of St. Angelo, and even when Henry had to return to Germany dared not remain in Rome, where his strict rule had made many malcontents. He therefore fled to the protection of Robert Guiscard the Norman at Salerno, where he died a year later on May 25, 1085. Hildebrand was one of the greatest men of the Middle Ages. He not only laid the foundations of the temporal power of the Popes, but also rescued the Church from the stagnation into which it had fallen. Had he not made so firm a stand as he did for the rights of the spiritual power, it seems doubtful whether there would have been any refuge in the Dark Ages from the tyranny of arbitrary kings and feudal despots. Gregory VII. has had many biographers, Italian, French, and German. Villemain's Histoire de Griyoire VII. was translated in 1874.