of prelates by princes which boiled up in the reign of the Emperor
Henry IV (1056–1106) began to transform the relationship of the
spiritual and temporal powers into an unstable demarcation of the
rights of the status ecclesiaeand the status regni. The tracts poured out
by both the supporters of Henry and those of Pope Gregory VII fuelled
the first great ideological conflict in European history. Gregory and his
supporters claimed the right of popes to judge kings and depose them
when they ruled unjustly—when like bad swineherds they killed the pigs
they were hired to tend. The imperialists for their part lamented ‘the
confusion of all human laws’, proclaimed it ‘a great heresy to resist
God’s order who alone has power to grant empire’, and feared the
destruction of the commonwealth which, following Cicero and Saint
Augustine, was to be defined as the multitude ‘not gathered together in
any fashion but under a common law’.^56
In 1050–2 Geoffrey Martel, count of Anjou and the Empress Agnes’s
step-father, stood up to an angry Pope Leo IX in defence of his
imprisonment of Bishop Gervase of Le Mans: the bishop was disloyal
and a threat not only to the count’s position (statum rerum suarum) but
also to the ‘public peace and quiet’ (a phrase which is used three times
in one letter), for God had given Geoffrey authority in ‘secular matters’
and made him judge over those who did evil.^57 In Germany the first
reaction to the Gregorian turmoil was rather for bishops to belatedly
promulgate the truce of God in their dioceses. In 1082, while the
emperor was still in Italy attempting to end the ‘unhappy state’ of things
at the highest political level, Bishop Henry of Liège enacted the truce in
his diocese, knowing that ‘where there is no governor, the people
perish’; all proved violators of ‘this law and pact’ were to be excommu-
nicated, and a convicted freeman would incur the loss of his inheritance
and exile from the diocese, a serf or cleric ‘the loss of all that he has and
his right hand’.^58 The following year Archbishop Siwinus imposed the
truce in the diocese of Cologne because of the decay of ‘tranquillity and
peace’ and the ‘troubles and dangers’ afflicting the church.^59 In 1084,
Henry IV returned from Italy to take charge: a council of the bishops
and nobility was summoned to Mainz and the peace of God was estab-
lished ‘by common consent’ throughout the kingdom. This seems to
have meant that the truce was promulgated in each diocese, but the
86 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^56) Karl Leyser, ‘The Polemics of the Papal Revolution’, in Trends in Medieval Political
Thought, ed. B. Smalley (Oxford, 1965), 42–64 [repr. in Leyser, Medieval Germany and its
Neighbours(London, 1982)]; Petri Crassi Defensio Heinrici IV regis, ed. L. de Heinemann, in
MGHLibelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum, i. 443.
(^57) Briefsammlungen der Zeit Heinrichs IV, ed. C. Erdmann und N. Fickermann, MGH Die
Briefe der Deutschen Kaiserzeit 5 (Weimar, 1950), 141–3, 146.
(^58) Constitutiones 911–1197, 603. 45 ; Joris, in La Paix, i. 505, 521 ff.
(^59) Constitutiones 911–1197, 602–5.