This illumination from The Pericope Book of Henry II, made for the cathedral of Bamberg in Germany, represents the ideology of sacral kingship that was confronted by the papacy of the mid- to late 11 th century. It portrays the western emperor Henry II (1002-1024) crowned and blessed by Christ and supported by St. Peter and St. Paul. In his right hand he holds a scepter and in his left a sword, symbols of sovereign authority.

For much of the tenth century western Europe was on the defensive, its lands attacked by Vikings from Scandinavia, Magyars (Hungarians) from the steppes of Central Asia, and various Muslim powers from North Africa. However, before the century ended the West’s fortunes took a turn for the better. It managed to absorb the Scandinavians and Magyars into the mainstream of Latin Christian culture and began to beat back Muslim attacks in the Mediterranean. Additionally, by the year 1000, the West was experiencing a sharp population rise and an economic revitalization that enabled it to begin to confront Byzantium and Islam as an equal. In fact, during the eleventh century momentum shifted substantially to western Christendom, as it became an aggressive Mediterranean force that threatened Byzantium and Islam on several fronts.

In Spain, the caliphate of Cordoba fragmented in 1031 into a number of petty Islamic states, and Christian powers were quick to take advantage. In 1063 Pope Alexander II (1061-73) offered relief from all penance owed for sins to any knight planning an expedition to Spain. By this papal act, the Christian war against Islam in Spain became a holy war.

Farther east, Norman adventurers-French warrIors whose Viking ancestors had settled in Normandy (Land of the Northmen) – were on the move to southern Italy, Sicily, and the Balkans. Under the leadership of the Hauteville brothers, especially Robert Guiscard, southern Italy was wrested from Byzantine control in a series of campaigns from ca. 1035 to 1071. Sicily, which North African Muslims had taken from the Byzantines in the ninth century, fell to Guiscard and his brother Roger of Hauteville in a campaign that lasted from 1061 to 1091. With eyes on other Byzantine lands, including probably Constantinople itself, Robert invaded the Balkans in 1081. His death in 1085 brought the invasion to an inglorious end, but he had set a precedent for two centuries of western designs and assaults on the lands of the Byzantine Empire.

When Roger invaded Sicily he bore a papal banner granted by Pope Alexander II, and when Guiscard invaded the Balkans he did so with the approval of Alexander’s successor, Gregory VII (1073-85), who mistakenly believed that Robert was trying to restore the rightful emperor of Constantinople. The papal blessing of these wars was a manifestation of a radical reorientation of the papacy and the western church that began ca. 1049 and continued well beyond 1100.

In essence, papal reformers attempted to free the church from control by lay rulers and in the process asserted that the Roman papacy was Christendom’s ultimate, God-ordained authority. Claims to spiritual preeminence that had been articulated by earlier popes, such as Gelasius I, were now transformed into the ideology that right order could only exist when the laity was subject to clerical authority in all moral and religious matters and the Roman papacy was recognized as the head of all churches. In 1075 Gregory VII went so far as to declare that the pope had the right to depose emperors and absolve subjects of their loyalty to unjust lords.

Such an attack on traditional notions of imperial and royal authority were ill received by the emperor at Constantinople and by western emperors and kings. The result in the West was a struggle between the papacy and some sovereigns that lasted from 1076 to 1122. Known as the Investiture Controversy (or Contest), this struggle ostensibly centered on the issue of whether or not lay rulers could install clerics in office and invest them with the symbols of their ministry. But the real issue was: who is the God-anointed head of the Christian people, the pope or a monarch? -In other words, did monarchs (especially the western emperor) rule by divine ordination and did they have certain sacral rights over the church and clergy?

Both sides finally agreed to negotiated truces, with the kings of England and France reaching an accommodation with the papacy in 1107, and the emperor in 1122. The settlements were compromises that recognized two realities: the new importance of the papacy in western European affairs and the severe weakening of the ideology of sacred kingship championed by Charlemagne and his successors. At the same time, rulers retained a good deal of real power in directing the affairs of the churches in their domains. Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 for what became the First Crusade must be placed against the backdrop of an ongoing struggle that was already two decades old.

In the East, the result of this assertion of papal authority was a magnification of the differences between the Byzantine and Roman churches. Pope Urban II’s appeal for the First Crusade must, therefore, equally be seen within the context of a radically reformed and revitalized papacy that wished to rescue fellow Christians in the East and “return” them to what it perceived as right order: subservience to papal authority.