Pope Gregory IV - The Quarrels of The Carolingians

The Quarrels of The Carolingians

Over time, however, Papal dependence on the Holy Roman Emperor was loosened through the quarrels of Louis the Pious and his sons, the future emperor Lothair I, Pepin I of Aquitaine and Louis the German. Louis’ decision to jettison the agreement of 817 regarding the division of the empire by assigning a kingdom to his youngest son, Charles the Bald, in 829 was criticized by Gregory in a letter to the Frankish bishops. The following year (October 830), after a brief rebellion and reconciliation between Louis and his sons, Gregory declared that Louis’ second wife Judith was to be released from the convent where she had been forced to take the veil, and to be returned to Louis.

When the war between father and sons resumed in Easter 833, Gregory was approached by Lothair, seeking his intervention to bring about reconciliation between Lothair and his father. He was convinced to leave Rome and travel up to join Lothair, in hopes that his intervention would promote peace, but in practice this action annoyed the Frankish bishops who followed Louis, who believed that Gregory was actively supporting Lothair. Suspicious of Gregory’s intent, they refused to obey the Pope, and threatened to excommunicate him, were he to excommunicate them, and even to depose him as Pope. Annoyed by their actions, Gregory's response was to insist upon the primacy of St Peter's successor, the papacy being superior to the Emperor. He stated:

”You professed to have felt delighted when you heard of my arrival, thinking that it would have been of great advantage for the emperor and the people; you added that you would have obeyed my summons had not a previous intimation of the emperor prevented you. But you ought to have regarded an order from the Apostolic See as not less weighty than one from the emperor. Besides, it is false that the emperor's prohibition preceded your receiving mine. The government of souls, which belongs to bishops, is more important than the imperial, which is only concerned with the temporal. Your assertion that I have only come to blindly excommunicate is shameless, and your offer to give me an honourable reception if I should have come exactly in the way the emperor wanted me to is contemptuous. With regards to the oaths I have taken to the emperor, I will avoid perjury by pointing out to the emperor what he has done against the unity and peace of the Church and his kingdom. With regards to the bishops, in opposing my efforts in behalf of peace, what they threaten has not been done, from the beginning of the Church.”

Regardless of this claim, the vast bulk of the Frankish bishops maintained that the pope had no business interfering in the internal affairs of the kingdom, or in expecting the Frankish clergy to follow his lead in such matters. Their position was clear, that the equality of all the bishops outranked the leadership of the pope.

The armies of Louis and two of his sons met at Rotfeld, near Colmar, on June 24, 833. The sons persuaded Gregory to go to Louis's camp to negotiate, and initially Louis refused to treat Gregory with any honor. However, Gregory managed to convince Louis of his good faith, and returned to Lothair to arrange a peace. However, Gregory soon learned that he had been deceived by Lothair. Gregory was prevented from returning to the emperor, while Louis was deserted by his supporters and was forced to surrender unconditionally; Louis was deposed and humiliated at the Campus Mendacii, and Lothair was proclaimed emperor. Following these events, Gregory returned to Rome, while Louis was subsequently restored in 834. The emperor then sent a delegation to see Gregory, headed by St. Anschar, the Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, to question the Pope on the events which led to Louis’s removal from the throne by Lothair. Gregory swore an oath that his intentions were honourable, and that he had always sought to achieve a peaceful solution to the conflict between Louis and his sons. Accepting Gregory’s word, the envoys returned to Louis. After this failure in dabbling in imperial politics, Gregory by and large focused his attention for the rest of his pontificate in dealing with internal church matters.

In 836, Lothair, in his role as King of the Lombards, began stripping the possessions of the Roman church. After appealing to Louis, the emperor sent an imperial envoy to investigate the matter. Although Gregory was sick, he managed to advise the envoy of the situation, and asked him to take a letter to the emperor outlining Lothair’s attacks on the Church, which they managed to get past Lothair’s troops at Bologna. Then in 840, with Louis’ death and the accession of Lothair as emperor, war again erupted between the sons of Louis. Gregory made unsuccessful attempts to mediate in the conflict that ensued between the brothers, sending George, the Archbishop of Ravenna as his representative. According to Prudentius of Troyes, George faithfully tried to achieve his objective, but failed due to Lothair’s refusal to allow George to see Lothair’s brothers. However, according to Andreas Agnellus, George tried to bribe Lothair to make his archbishopric independent of Rome, and was captured at the Battle of Fontenoy. The subsequent Treaty of Verdun in 843 broke up the empire of Charlemagne, with Lothair retaining the imperial title and control of Italy.