14 - The western empire, 1125–1197

Summary

in 1122 the peace arranged at Worms between Pope Calixtus II and Emperor Henry V was designed to bring an end to the ecclesiastical, political and military emergencies which had disturbed the western empire since the 1070s, the series of confrontations called with hindsight the War of Investitures. The papal curia was enabled to return its attention to the programme of religious reform, and the First Lateran Council was celebrated in 1123. The emperor was freed from the incubus inherited from his excommunicated father Henry IV, and the preliminaries of the Worms pax committed the princes to assist the emperor in maintaining the authority and dignity of imperial rule. But the outcome of such intentions was problematical given the ingrained enmities, especially between Saxony and the royal court, caused by the War of Investitures. In any case the restoration of royal authority for which Henry V had striven since 1105 was called into question because the emperor, still a youngish man, died at Utrecht in May 1125. His marriage to Matilda of Normandy had proved childless, so it was necessary for the princes of the empire to set about electing a new king.

ELECTORAL PROCEDURES IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

In the early summer of 1125 the German bishops and secular magnates who had gathered in Speyer for the obsequies of Henry V sent letters to the other princes of the empire inviting them to Mainz in August for the election of the next king. A surviving version, to Bishop Otto I of Bamberg, requested him to pray for a candidate who would liberate church and empire from the oppression under which they had laboured hitherto. Such explicit criticism of the two preceding emperors was undoubtedly the work of Archbishop Adalbert I of Mainz, whose office traditionally conferred upon the incumbent the leading voice in German royal elections.