The Latin Papal Church (Gregorian Reform to Innocent III)

In the middle of the eleventh century a circle of reformers around Pope Leo IX set out to free the church from the lay lords who appointed its bishops and sold its offices. And ended by claiming for the papacy an authority no bishop of Rome had exercised before. Gregory VII's Dictatus Papae of 1075 asserted, among much else, that the pope alone could depose an emperor. The resulting Investiture Contest ran for half a century and produced the extraordinary scene of Emperor Henry IV waiting in the snow outside Canossa. What followed was a working papal monarchy. Canon law codified, legates everywhere, a run of great councils at the Lateran, and under Innocent III, who reigned from 1198 to 1216, a papacy that arbitrated between kings, authorized the new friars, called crusades, and in 1215 legislated at the Fourth Lateran Council for the whole Latin church — from the definition of the eucharist to the requirement that every Christian confess once a year.