[Sidenote: 1074. POPE GREGORY VII.] The power of Henry IV. seemed now to be assured; but the lowest humiliation which ever befell a monarch was in store for him. The monk of Cluny, Hildebrand of Savona, who had inspired the policy of four Popes during twenty-four years, became Pope himself in 1073, under the name of Gregory VII. He was a man of iron will and inexhaustible energy, wise and far-seeing beyond any of his contemporaries, and unquestionably sincere in his aims. He remodelled the Papal office, gave it a new character and importance, and left his own indelible mark on the Church of Rome from that day to this. For the first five hundred years after Christ the Pope had been merely the Bishop of Rome; for the second five hundred years he had been the nominal head of the Church, but subordinate to the political rulers, and dependent upon them. Gregory VII. determined to make the office a spiritual power, above all other powers, with sole and final authority over the bishops, priests and other servants of the Church. It was to be a religious Empire, existing by Divine right, independent of the fate of nations or the will of kings. He relied mainly upon two measures to accomplish this change,--the suppression of simony and the celibacy of the priesthood. He determined that the priests should belong wholly to the Church; that the human ties of wife and children should be denied to them. This measure had been proposed before, but never carried into effect, on account of the opposition of the married Bishops and priests; but the increase of the monastic orders and their greater influence at this time favored Gregory's design. Even after celibacy was proclaimed as a law of the Church, in 1074, it encountered the most violent opposition, and the law was not universally obeyed by the priests until two or three centuries later. [Sidenote: 1075.] In 1075, Gregory promulgated a law against simony, in which he not only prohibited the sale of all offices of the Church, but claimed that the Bishops could only receive the ring and crozier, the symbols of their authority, from the hands of the Pope. The same year, he sent messengers to Henry IV. calling upon him to enforce this law in Germany, under penalty of excommunication. The surprise and anger of the King may easily be imagined: it was a language which no Pope had ever before dared to use toward the Imperial power. Indeed, when we consider that Gregory at this time was quarrelling with the Normans, the Lombard cities and the king of France, and that a party in Rome was becoming hostile to his rule, the act seems almost that of a madman.