Pope Nicholas II (1059-1061)

The pope who removed papal election from lay control

For centuries, the election of the pope had been disputed among the great Roman families, the clergy of the city, and, since Otto the Great, the German emperors. The result was a series of contested elections, antipopes, and scandals that weakened the spiritual authority of Peter's See.^[10] The decree of 1059 broke that logic: from then on, the cardinal-bishops were to designate the candidate, the other cardinals were to rally to him, and the rest of the clergy and people were to acclaim him.^[11]

"Let the cardinal-bishops treat together with the greatest care; then let them call to themselves the cardinal-clerics; finally, let the rest of the clergy and the people give their consent to the new election." -- Decree In Nomine Domini, Lateran synod, 13 April 1059 (translator's rendering from the Latin text; reference English trans.: Henderson, pp. 361-365)^[12][13]

This principle -- the election of the pope by a restricted ecclesiastical college, sheltered from lay pressure -- is the direct ancestor of the conclave: the 1059 procedure was later substantially modified -- extension of the election to the whole college of cardinals, then institution of the conclave -- but it ranks among the acts of the eleventh century that most durably shaped the government of the Church, of a scope historians agree in judging considerable.^[14]

The turning point of the Norman alliance

Nicholas II's second contribution was geopolitical. Since Leo IX's disastrous defeat at Civitate in 1053, where the pope himself had been taken prisoner, the Normans had been the papacy's chief enemy in southern Italy.^[15] Nicholas II carried out a reversal of alliance: instead of fighting the Normans, he recognized them, invested them with their conquests, and made them vassals of Saint Peter.^[16]

The calculation was bold. By relying on a military force that owed nothing to the Empire, the reforming papacy gained the freedom of action needed to defend its liberty. A few years later, in May 1084, the Normans of Robert Guiscard delivered Gregory VII, besieged in the Castel Sant'Angelo by Henry IV; but their troops sacked Rome, and the Romans turned against the pope, who was forced to leave the city. The act of Melfi thus prepared the great confrontation of the Investiture Controversy.

A central link in the Gregorian Reform

Finally, Nicholas II continued without rupture the work of purification begun by Leo IX. His synods condemned simony (the purchase of sacred offices), Nicolaism (clerical concubinage, connected with the question of priestly celibacy), and the lay investiture of clerics.^[17][18] He did not invent these battles, but he gave them new scope by linking them to the reform of papal election: a free pope, freely elected, for a free Church. The whole Gregorian program is already in seed form.

A Burgundian origin, poorly documented

The sources say little about Gerard's origins. The Holy See file and the Enciclopedia dei Papi agree on the essential point: he came from Burgundy, but his date of birth is unknown.^[19][20] Older notices, such as the Catholic Encyclopedia, add that he may have been born at Chevron, in present-day Savoy, and that he had been a canon at Liege before going to Italy.^[21]

An honest historian must distinguish here between the certain and the probable. That Gerard was a transalpine cleric, formed in imperial lands, is secure; the precise detail of his birthplace and Liege formation belongs to a tradition that should be handled with care, since recent scholarly notices do not all repeat it.^[22] The similarity with his predecessor Stephen IX, another Lotharingian cleric who passed through Liege, is worth noting: the reform of the eleventh century drew deeply from clerical elites of the Empire.

Bishop of Florence (around 1045)

What is firmly attested is his episcopal office. Gerard was bishop of Florence: according to Treccani, a document already mentions him under that title on 9 January 1045.^[23] The reference works do not agree, however, on the exact year he took the Florentine see: Treccani attests him as bishop of Florence from 9 January 1045 — the earliest surviving documentary mention — while the Catholic Encyclopedia dates his accession to 1046; this article follows the documentary attestation.^[24][25] He reached the Florentine see with the support of Godfrey the Bearded, duke of Lorraine who, through marriage, became margrave of Tuscany and the leading power in central Italy.^[26] This patronage placed Gerard from the beginning within the princely network that supported reform.

In Florence, Gerard proved himself a reforming pastor. The notices record that he restored canonical life among the clergy of many churches in his diocese: that is, the common and regular life of canons, an antidote to laxity and the privatization of benefices.^[27] Under his episcopate, Florence became one of the centers of reform in Tuscany.

Within the orbit of the reformers

As an influential bishop of a major city, close to the house of Lorraine-Tuscany, Gerard naturally belonged to the circle around the reforming popes. When the succession crisis opened in 1058 after the death of Stephen IX, the men of reform -- above all the archdeacon Hildebrand -- turned toward this experienced bishop, foreign to Roman factions.^[28][29]

The choice of a northern prelate, unattached to the city clans, was no accident: the point was precisely to free the papacy from the grip of the great Roman families. Gerard was the man of that strategy before he became its legislator.

The death of Stephen IX and the Tusculani coup

At the death of Stephen IX in Florence on 29 March 1058, the dying pope had made the Romans swear not to elect a successor before Hildebrand returned from his legation in Germany.^[30] The oath was immediately violated. Taking advantage of the reformers' absence, the Roman aristocracy, dominated by the counts of Tusculum, had one of its own elected on 5 April 1058: John Mincius, cardinal-bishop of Velletri, who took the name Benedict X.^[31]

For the reformers, this election gathered all the vices they were fighting: it was the work of a lay faction, obtained, according to the sources, by force and simony.^[32] Benedict X was in their eyes an antipope, and his intrusion became the textbook case that would justify, a year later, the complete refashioning of the mode of election.

The choice of Gerard at Siena (December 1058)

Back in Italy, Hildebrand led the response. The cardinals faithful to reform met far from Rome, at Siena, in safe Tuscan territory, under the protection of Godfrey the Bearded. There, in December 1058 — a presumed date, 6 December, the feast of Saint Nicholas, being only a hypothesis — they chose the bishop of Florence, who became Nicholas II.^[33][34]

A crucial detail for what followed: the election took place in the presence of the imperial chancellor for Italy, Wibert -- the future antipope Clement III --, a sign that the reformers still sought, at this stage, the approval of the German court, where the regent Agnes, mother of the young Henry IV, had governed since Henry III's death in 1056.^[35] The decree of 1059 would not abolish every reference to the king overnight; it would redefine its reach.

The reconquest of Rome and the fall of Benedict X

The occupant of the Lateran still had to be driven out. The campaign against Benedict X mobilized the forces of reform and, already, Norman help. The Norman chief Richard of Aversa supplied Nicholas II's supporters with three hundred knights, led by three counts, to retake the city.^[36] Before entering Rome, Nicholas II held a synod at Sutri, where Benedict X, declared an invader, was solemnly condemned, deposed and excommunicated.^[37][38][39]

Benedict X fled, was hunted down, and was finally captured; stripped of all dignity, he would end his days in confinement. The episode left the reformers with a durable lesson: without a hardened election procedure and without a reliable military protector, the papacy would remain the plaything of factions. The two great acts of 1059 answered this double lesson point by point.

The coronation of 24 January 1059

Master of Rome, Nicholas II was enthroned and crowned on 24 January 1059.^[40][41] The new pope could then govern. In a few months, he would concentrate in a single year -- 1059 -- three acts that marked history: the decree on papal election, the condemnation of Berengar of Tours, and the Norman alliance of Melfi.

One hundred and thirteen bishops at the Lateran

On 13 April 1059, Nicholas II gathered a considerable synod in the Lateran basilica: one hundred and thirteen bishops sat there, making it one of the largest assemblies of the reform.^[42][43] The council combined two registers: discipline (the reform of the clergy) and the constitutional law of the Church (the mode of papal election). It was by far the most important event of the pontificate.

In Nomine Domini: the decree on papal election

The decisive role of the cardinal-bishops

The heart of the decree is a reorganization of roles. Until then, the "clergy and people" of Rome theoretically elected the pope, which opened the door to every manipulation. From now on, the initiative belonged to the cardinal-bishops of the suburbicarian sees (Ostia, Porto, Albano, and the others). They deliberated first, chose the candidate, then called the other cardinals (priests and deacons) to rally; finally, the rest of the clergy and people gave their assent, now reduced to an acclamation.^[44][45]

The decree also provided two clauses of flexibility, dictated by recent experience. If necessary, the pope could be elected outside Rome when the city was in the hands of a faction -- exactly what had just happened at Siena. And the candidate could be chosen outside the Roman clergy if no worthy subject was found there.^[46] The text thus drew the lessons of the Benedict X crisis.

The clause concerning King Henry

The most delicate point was the place left to royal power. The decree did not remove every mention of the king of Germany: it reserved a certain deference to Henry IV, to whom a personal privilege of confirmation was conceded. The text asked that the election proceed "saving the honor and reverence due" to the king.^[47]

"... saving the honor and reverence due to our beloved son Henry, king and future emperor, according to what has been personally conceded to him." -- Decree In Nomine Domini, clause concerning the king, 1059 (translator's rendering from the Latin: "salvo debito honore et reverentia")^[48][49]

The formula is deliberately ambiguous. It treats the imperial right no longer as a constitutive power, but as a personal and revocable privilege, granted by the pope himself. This was a decisive shift: what had been a right of the Empire became a favor of the Church. The German court would understand the provocation.

Two versions of one decree

Historians know the decree of 1059 in two recensions with slightly different wording, preserved and edited side by side in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica.^[50] One, called "pontifical," minimizes the king's role; the other, called "imperial," amplifies it. The critical edition has shown that the second is a retouched version; its exact origin — imperial chancery or the schismatic cardinals of 1084 — remains debated.^[51][52] This textual duality alone reveals the political stakes of the document: for decades, the battle was fought even over the letter of the decree.

The interpretation of the decree remains debated. The classic reading -- that of the first historians of the Gregorian Reform -- sees in it a deliberately anti-imperial text, designed to exclude the emperor from the choice of the pope. Another reading, associated especially with A. Michel and H.-G. Krause, holds instead that the decree aimed first to end Roman factional struggles by confirming, in written form, the arbitration role that Emperor Henry III had already exercised in practice; from this angle, the rupture of 1061 would have resulted less from an amputation of imperial right than from distinct ecclesial tensions.^[53] Whatever the initial intention, posterity retained the first reading -- an electoral right returned to the Church -- and it founded the conclave.

The reform decrees: simony, Nicolaism, lay investiture

The same synod promulgated a series of disciplinary canons that extended the work of Leo IX. The council forbade simoniacal ordinations, the lay investiture of clerics, and the faithful's attendance at the Mass of a priest living in notorious concubinage -- a way of mobilizing the people against Nicolaism.^[54] One canon even forbade clerics to receive, in any way, churches and ecclesiastical goods from lay hands.^[55]

The following table summarizes the double inheritance of the synod of 1059: a reform of discipline and a reform of the constitution of the Church.

The coherence of the program is clear: by one movement, the reform sought to free the Church from lay powers, whether in the election of the pope, the appointment of clerics, or the ownership of ecclesiastical goods.

The Eucharistic controversy of the eleventh century

The synod of 1059 was also the stage for a major doctrinal debate. Berengar of Tours (c. 1000-1088), a renowned schoolmaster, supported a reading of the Eucharist that seemed to deny the Real Presence in favor of a purely spiritual or figurative presence: for him, the bread and wine remained signs, and Christ's body was received intelligibly, not substantially.^[56] The controversy stirred all Latin Christendom.

Summoned to Rome, Berengar appeared before the synod presided over by Nicholas II. Under the pressure of the assembly, he was forced to repudiate his doctrine, declared heretical, and to burn his books.^[57][58]

The abjuration formula of 1059

The formula imposed on him was drafted by the formidable Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida. It affirmed the Real Presence in terms of extreme realism:

"The bread and wine placed on the altar are, after consecration, not only a sign but the true Body and true Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; and they are, in a sensible manner, touched and broken by the hands of priests and ground by the teeth of the faithful, not only in sign but in truth." -- Formula of abjuration imposed on Berengar of Tours, Lateran synod, 1059 (translator's rendering from the Latin text; French check trans.: Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, no. 690)^[59]

What the Church truly holds

This text requires careful theological reading, because it embarrassed later theologians themselves. The formula of 1059 has the merit of firmness: against Berengar, it proclaims without ambiguity that the Eucharist is really the Body and Blood of Christ, not a mere symbol. On this point it expresses an inviolable dogma of the Catholic faith.^[60]

But its expression is polemically crude. To speak, if taken literally, of teeth "grinding" the Body of Christ leads to a Capharnaite caricature that the Church never meant to teach. The theological tradition clarified that Christ is present under the species in a substantial and glorious manner, not passible: it is the species of bread -- their sensible appearances -- that are broken and consumed, while Christ, wholly present under every particle, remains impassible.^[61] This is the distinction that Lanfranc of Pavia, then Saint Thomas Aquinas, and finally the Council of Trent would bring to full clarity with the term transubstantiation.

Berengar himself, once back in Tours, renounced the oath extracted from him and resumed his teaching, which reopened the controversy under the following pontificates.^[62] The episode of 1059 nevertheless marks a stage: it fixed the dogmatic requirement -- the Real Presence -- that later centuries would express in more exact terms.

Why turn to the Normans?

Since the beginning of the century, Norman adventurers had carved out principalities in a southern Italy divided among Lombards, Byzantines, and the emirs of Sicily. Leo IX had tried to stop them by force of arms and had suffered at Civitate, in 1053, a humiliating defeat followed by captivity.^[63] The logic of confrontation had failed.

Nicholas II -- surrounded by Hildebrand and by Abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino, a neighbor who knew the Normans well, whom the Enciclopedia dei Papi presents as the important mediator of this new southern policy -- chose the opposite path: turn the enemy into a vassal. To recognize the Norman conquests was both to legitimize them in law and to obtain, in return, an army faithful to Peter's See and independent of the Empire.^[64][65]

The oath of Robert Guiscard (23 August 1059)

At the synod of Melfi, on 23 August 1059, before the Latin bishops of the region, Nicholas II received the oath of fidelity of Robert Guiscard. The Norman chief recognized himself as a vassal of Saint Peter and adopted a title that says everything about the bargain:

"I, Robert, by the grace of God and of Saint Peter, duke of Apulia and Calabria, and, with their help, future duke of Sicily." -- Oath of fidelity of Robert Guiscard, synod of Melfi, 23 August 1059 (translator's rendering from the Latin formula; reference English trans.: EB1911)^[66][67]

The formula is remarkable. It gave Robert a title that was still largely virtual: Calabria was not yet wholly subdued, and Sicily, then in Muslim hands, remained to be conquered. The pope therefore invested the Norman with a land he would have to wrest from Islam -- a way of placing the future reconquest of Sicily under Saint Peter's patronage. In exchange, Robert promised an annual census to the Holy See -- estimated by historiography at twelve denarii per yoke of oxen --, the protection of the Roman Church, and his help in future papal elections.^[68][69][70]

Richard of Capua and the reach of the alliance

The same synod confirmed Richard of Aversa, already the artisan of Rome's reconquest from Benedict X, in his dignity as prince of Capua.^[71] The Norman alliance thus covered the whole south. The table below summarizes the two investitures of 1059.

The reach of Melfi went far beyond southern Italy. The papacy had just acquired, for the first time, a military ally who did not hold his power from the Empire. The balance that had structured the West since Charlemagne -- a pope under the protective tutelage of the emperor -- began to reverse. Without Melfi, Gregory VII's arm-wrestling with Henry IV during the Investiture Controversy would have been unthinkable.

A decree badly received in Germany

The two great acts of 1059 deeply worried the German court. The electoral decree, by reducing imperial right to a personal and revocable privilege, undermined the very foundation of German tutelage over the papacy. The Norman alliance, for its part, gave Rome an autonomous force.^[72][73] The regent Agnes and the German episcopate, faithful to the memory of Henry III, saw in this a betrayal of the collaboration that had carried the first reforming popes.

The end of the pontificate was thus marked by a rapid deterioration of relations with Germany. Nicholas II, who had nevertheless been elected in the presence of the imperial chancellor, found himself in open conflict with the court whose approval he had first sought.

The German synod of 1061 and the annulment of the decrees

The German response was brutal. In 1061, a synod of German bishops, gathered at the court's initiative, condemned the pope and declared his decrees null — at least according to the very obscure testimony of Peter Damian (letter 89).^[74][75] Nicholas II tried to send Cardinal Stephen of San Crisogono to Germany as legate to explain himself, but his mission was rebuffed and the cardinal himself kept away from the court.^[76]

The institutional schism was therefore tied before the pope's death. It would break out openly when Nicholas II disappeared: while the reformers elected Alexander II according to the decree of 1059, the German court raised against him the antipope Honorius II (Cadalus of Parma). The validity of the electoral decree became the very ground of the confrontation.

Death in Florence

Nicholas II died on 27 July 1061 in Florence, the city of which he had been bishop and to which he had probably withdrawn.^[77][78] Some sources hesitate over the exact day -- one sometimes reads 19 or 20 July --, but the Holy See file gives 27 July.^[79][80] He was buried in the old cathedral of Florence, the church of Santa Reparata, where tradition places his tomb near the altar of Saint Zenobius, the first bishop of the city.^[81]

Alexander II, Honorius II, and the first application of the decree

The succession of Nicholas II was the first test of the decree of 1059. The reforming cardinals elected Anselm of Lucca, who took the name Alexander II -- the first election conducted according to the new procedure.^[82] The German court responded by having the antipope Honorius II elected. The schism lasted several years, until Alexander II was definitively recognized.

The fact that the decree was immediately contested does not diminish its reach: on the contrary, it proves that it touched the heart of power. The papacy now had a written rule of election, which it would defend step by step until its full recognition.

What Nicholas II left to the Church

The balance sheet of a pontificate of less than thirty months is exceptional. Nicholas II left the Church three durable gains:

• a rule for papal election removed from lay control, ancestor of the conclave;
• a Norman alliance that gave the reforming papacy a protector independent of the Empire;
• a discipline of reform -- against simony, Nicolaism, and lay investiture -- that directly prepared the great struggle of Gregory VII.

"He stands, with Leo IX and Stephen IX, among the decisive artisans of the beginnings of the Gregorian Reform." -- Synthesis of the historiography of the eleventh-century reform^[83]

Gerard of Burgundy was not a pope of brilliance, but a pope of foundations. In a single year, 1059, he laid the institutional and political bases on which the liberty of the medieval Church would be built. The conclave that elects popes today still bears the distant trace of his Lateran decree.

• Pope Stephen IX -- The immediate predecessor, whose death opened the succession crisis of 1058.
• Pope Saint Leo IX -- The first great reforming pope, defeated by the Normans at Civitate before the reversal of alliance at Melfi.
• Pope Alexander II -- The successor, first pope elected according to the decree of 1059.
• The Gregorian Reform -- The great movement of purification of the Church, of which this pontificate is a central link.
• The Investiture Controversy -- The conflict in which the Norman alliance and electoral decree would bear fruit.
• The Eucharistic Real Presence -- The dogma defended, in still rough terms, against Berengar of Tours in 1059.
• Priestly celibacy -- The discipline that the decrees against Nicolaism intended to restore.