1080, when Gregory once again excommunicated Henry and recognized Rudolf. Henry,
in 1082, appointed an antipope. In 1084, Robert Guiscard and the Normans, on whom
Gregory had called to relieve Henry’s siege of Rome, looted and set fire to a significant
quarter of the city and were forced to leave, taking Gregory with them. Gregory died a
few months later at Salerno, exhausted.
However much of a failure Gregory’s pontificate may have appeared at the time,
Gregory nonetheless established with his new papal administration a mechanism for
implementing his ideals; and his archenemy, the German emperor, was never to be so
powerful again. In the century and a quarter that followed Gregory’s death, the pope
would muster all of Christendom to go on crusade for justice in the world; several of the
kings of Europe would receive their kingdoms in fief from the pope; and the renewal of
the church, both laity and clergy, would be encouraged and broadly supported by the
central vision of the papacy.
Mark Zier
[See also: GREGORIAN REFORM; LEO IX]
Gregory VII. Das Register Gregors VII, ed. Erich Caspar. In Monumenta Germaniae Historica,
Epistolae selectae, Vol. 2. Berlin: Weidmann, 1920–23. (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae
Historica, 1990.)
——. The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII: Selected Letters from the Registrum, trans.
Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932.
——. The Epistolae Vagantes of Pope Gregory VII, ed. and trans. Herbert. E.J.Cowdrey. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1972.
Arquillière, Henri-Xavier. Saint Grégoire VII: essai sur sa conception du pouvoir pontifical. Paris:
Vrin, 1934.
Fliche, Augustin. Saint Grégoire VII. Paris: Lecoffre, Gabalda, 1928.
Ullmann, Walter. The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages. 3rd ed. London: Methuen,
1970.
GREGORY IX
(d. 1241). Pope. When Innocent III died in 1216, his successor, Honorius III (r. 1216–
27), maintained a conciliatory policy toward the Hohenstaufen. This changed with the
election in 1227 of Innocent’s nephew, Cardinal Ugolino, who reigned as Gregory IX.
Gregory embroiled the papacy in a long-term confrontation with Emperor Frederick II,
his uncle’s ward. To prevent Frederick from dominating Rome through his double
heritage, imperial and Sicilian, the pope twice found reasons to excommunicate him.
Gregory, at the same time, adopted his foe’s harsh measures against heretics. This papal
policy affected southern France, where in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade the
Inquisition was entrusted to the new orders of friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans,
not the bishops, with the backing of the Capetian monarchy. (The French crown was the
chief lay beneficiary of the repression of the Cathars.) As a cardinal, Gregory had been a
friend of St. Francis; but he furthered the clericalization of the Friars Minor by ruling that
the Testament of their founder, which forbade petitioning the pope to relax the Rule, was
not legally binding on them. The key legal texts establishing the Inquisition became part
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