and secular halves, so too did it imply a new notion of kingship separate from the
priesthood. The Investiture Conflict did not produce the modern distinction between
church and state—that would develop only very slowly—but it set the wheels in
motion. At the time, its most important consequence was to shatter the delicate
balance among political and ecclesiastical powers in Germany and Italy. In Germany,
the princes consolidated their lands and powers at the expense of the king. In Italy,
the communes came closer to their goals: it was no accident that Milan gained its
independence in 1097. And everywhere the papacy gained new authority: it had
become a “papal monarchy.”
Papal influence was felt at every level. At the general level of canon law, papal
primacy was enhanced by the publication c.1140 of the Decretum, written by a
teacher of canon law named Gratian. Collecting nearly two thousand passages from
the decrees of popes and councils as well as the writings of the Church Fathers,
Gratian set out to demonstrate their essential agreement. In fact, the book’s original
title was Harmony of Discordant Canons. If he found any “discord” in his sources,
Gratian usually imposed the harmony himself by arguing that the conflicting passages
dealt with different situations. A bit later another legal scholar revised and expanded
the Decretum, adding Roman law to the mix. At a more local level, papal
denunciations of married clergy made inroads on family life. At Verona, for example,
“sons of priests” disappeared from the historical record in the twelfth century. At the
mundane level of administration, the papal claim to head the church helped turn the
curia at Rome into a kind of government, complete with its own bureaucracy,
collection agencies, and law courts. It was the teeming port of call for litigious
churchmen disputing appointments and for petitioners of every sort.
THE FIRST CRUSADE
On the military level, the papacy’s proclamations of holy wars led to bloody
slaughter, tragic loss, and tidy profit. We have already seen how Alexander II
encouraged the reconquista in Spain; it was in the wake of his call that the taifa
rulers implored the Almoravids for help. An oddly similar chain of events took place
at the other end of the Islamic world. Ostensibly responding to a request from the
Byzantine Emperor Alexius for mercenaries to help retake Anatolia from the Seljuks,
Pope Urban II (1088–1099) turned the enterprise into something new: a pious
pilgrimage to the Holy Land to be undertaken by an armed militia—one
commissioned like those of the Peace of God, but thousands of times larger—under
the leadership of the papacy.
