ampion
and the head of Western Christendom, palpably the master, and not even
in theory the subordinate, of the Pontiff from whom he received the
imperial crown. But he established ecclesiastics as a territorial
nobility, counteracting the feudal nobility; and when the mighty emperor
was gone, and the unity of what was nominally one empire passed away,
this ecclesiastical nobility became an instrument for the elevation of
the spiritual above the temporal head of Christendom. The change was
already taking place under his son Louis the Pious, whose character
facilitated it.

The disintegration of the empire was followed by a hideous degradation
of the papacy. But the Saxon line of emperors, the Ottos, sprung from
Henry the Fowler, once more revived the empire; the third of them
established a worthy pope in Silvester II. But both emperor and pope
died just after the eleventh century opened. Elections of popes and
anti-popes continued to be accompanied by the gravest scandals, until
the Emperor Henry III. (Franconian dynasty) set a succession of Germans
on the papal throne.

The high character of the pontificate was revived in the persons of Leo
IX. and Victor II. (Gebhard of Eichstadt); many abuses were put down or
at least checked with a firm hand. But Henry's death weakened the
empire, and Stephen IX. added to the rigid enforcement of orthodoxy more
peremptory claims for the supremacy of the Holy See. His successor,
Nicholas II., strengthened the position as against the empire by
securing the support of the fleshly arm--the Normans. His election was
an assertion of the right of the cardinals to make their own choice.
Alexander II. was chosen in disregard of the Germans and the empire, and
the Germans chose an anti-pope. At the back of the Italian papal party
was the great Hildebrand. In 1073 Hildebrand himself ascended the papal
throne as Gregory VII. With Hildebrand, the great struggle for supremacy
between the empire and the papacy was decisively opened.

Gregory's aim was to establish a theocracy through an organised dominant
priesthood separated from the world, but no less powerful than the
secular forces; with the pope, God's mouthpiece, and vice-regent, at its
head. The temporal powers were to be instruments in his hand, subject to
his supreme authority. Clerical celibacy acquired a political value; the
clergy would concentrate on the glory of the Church those ambitions
which made laymen seek to aggrandise their