Gerbert of Aurillac ( Pope Sylvester II), the tutor to the young Otto III, moved in imperial circles and brought with them able clergy from the north to act as papal administrators. Though the danger of the Roman mob was never absent from papal considerations--there were numerous occasions when the pontiffs were forced to flee from the city--its pernicious influence could, for a time, be lessened by the assistance which the emperors were prepared to provide. But the principles upon which this association was based were not to remain unchallenged. Though the ' Reform Movement' in the papacy, with its two main tenets of clerical purity and the redefinition of the bases of power and authority in the Church was to have considerable repercussions in all areas of the Christian life, its effects on the relationship between pope and emperor were particularly profound. Eleventh-century German emperors, such as Henry II and Henry III, were much in favour of reformed monasticism and the abolition of clerical abuses, but it was, ironically, the support that they gave to these parts of the reformist programme which was to encourage men such as Nicholas II and Gregory VII to go further. The Election Decree of 1059 declared that only a small group of high clergy (later to become the College of Cardinals) should elect the pope; the assent of the Roman clergy and people should be sought after the election and only vague references were made to the need to render to the emperor the honour that was due to him. This was not a view that the young Emperor Henry IV, brought up to believe in his duty to assure the right governance of the Church, could be expected to adhere to and it was, indeed, an argument which deeply offended many of the most pious laymen in the west. But the development of the idea that the Church was independent of lay control and, more fundamentally, the assertion that the spiritual power vested in the pope by St Peter was superior to that of any lay ruler, led to a conflict that was played out on both the theoretical and the political level.
At their root lay the reassessment of the respective roles of emperor and pope. If it were true, as the theoreticians that the popes increasingly gathered around them maintained, that the
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