Henry proceeded to the election of an anti-pope,
Clement the Third, and Gregory patronised a new emperor, Rodolph, duke
of Suabia. Henry had however generally been successful in his military
enterprises; and he defeated Rodolph in two battles, in the last of
which his opponent was slain. In the synod of Brixen, in which Clement
the Third was elected, Gregory was sentenced as a magician and a
necromancer. The emperor, puffed up with his victories, marched
against Rome, and took it, with the exception of the castle of St.
Angelo, in which the pope shut himself up; and in the mean time Henry
caused the anti-pope, his creature, to be solemnly inaugurated in the
church of the Lateran. Gregory however, never dismayed, and never at
an end of his expedients, called in the Normans, who had recently
distinguished themselves by their victories in Naples and Sicily.
Robert Guiscard, a Norman chieftain, drove the Germans out of Rome;
but, some altercations ensuing between the pontiff and his deliverer,
the city was given up to pillage, and Gregory was glad to take refuge
in Salerno, the capital of his Norman ally, where he shortly after
expired, an exile and a fugitive.
Gregory was no doubt a man of extraordinary resources and invincible
courage. He did not live to witness the triumph of his policy; but his
projects for the exaltation of the church finally met with every
success his most sanguine wishes could have aspired to. In addition to
all the rest it happened, that the countess Matilda, a princess who in
her own right possessed extensive sovereignties in Italy, nearly
commensurate with what has since been styled the ecclesiastical state,
transferred to the pope in her life-time, and confirmed by her
testament, all these territories, thus mainly contributing to render
him and his successors so considerable as temporal princes, as since
that time they have appeared.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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