hereditary: a decision which contributed to the formation of the free-
holding class which was the backbone of the Italian communes.^53
Confirming the rights of a Piedmontese monastery in 1039, the year
of his election, Conrad’s son Henry III located kingly honour in the
energetic justice which protected ‘the state of the catholic church’. An
emperor like Henry who was prepared to make and unmake popes did
not hesitate to use the church to safeguard the peace of the empire. The
arenga of a charter of 1040 proclaimed his belief that ‘the state of the
whole realm and public and private affairs would be more stable’ if he
protected the goods of the church; and a spurious charter written about
1116 pictures him de nostri statu regni tractantesbefore deciding in
1043 to marry Agnes of Poitou. In 1047, as he sat in his imperial palace
at Ravenna consulting with his judges and ‘dispensing justice to all in
the accustomed way’, he emphasized the imperial duty to scrutinize
‘justice and the state of the laws’. In 1049, along with Pope Leo IX, his
own appointment and the real initiator of papal reform, he presided
over a synod at Mainz to issue decrees condemning simony and clerical
marriage and confirm and extend on his own authority ‘the holy
canons’ and ‘sacred laws of our predecessors’ on the marriages of the
laity. He also legislated at this time against poisoning and other forms
of clandestine killing, since it was part of the emperor’s skill to ‘take
care of the commonwealth in the present in ways that would be useful
to later generations’.^54
The direction of Christian society by kings in amicable concert with
churchmen, as it had been established by the Carolingians, ended with
Henry III. It was accepted that Henry should legislate on the marriages
of his subjects despite his own uncanonical marriage (he and Agnes
were related within the prohibited degrees), and that he should both
campaign against simony and imperiously appoint and remove prelates.
But the intervention of an emperor in Rome itself to depose unsatis-
factory popes (as Henry III did) was identified by Geroh of Reichers-
berg, investigating the machinations of Antichrist in the mid-twelfth
century, as the time when regnumand sacerdotium began to break
apart and the political conflicts which led in his own day to the disasters
of the Second Crusade had their origin. ‘Where are the two swords if all
power is the pope’s or all Caesar’s?’^55 The struggle over the investiture
The peace of the land 85(^53) Conradi I, Heinrici I et Ottonis I Diplomata, 316; Wipo, ‘Deeds of Conrad II’, 92–6;
Constitutiones, 911–1197, 64; Conradi II Diplomata, 335–7; Hill, Medieval Monarchy in
Action, 73, 77–80, 205–7; Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europaischen
Privatrechtsgeschichte, i. Mittelalter, ed. H. Coing (Munich, 1973), 166–7.
(^54) Heinrici III Diplomata, 18, 71, 239–42, 351, 397–400, 538, 542; Annales Sangallenses
Maiores, ed. G. H. Pertz in MGH Scriptores in Folio 1 (Hanover, 1826), 84–5; Hill, Medieval
Monarchy in Action, 85–94, 211–14.
(^55) Geroh of Reichersberg, De investigatione Antichristi, ed. E. Sackur in MGHLibelli de
lite imperatorum et pontificum, 3 vols. (Hanover, 1891–97), iii. 372, 374, 388–92.