Gregory's Pontificate Analysis

Gregory and his ideas played an important role in many of the changes, a knowledge of his pontificate is essential for understanding later European history, up to and including the present. Gregory has not lacked historians, from his own time onwards. Among the pregnant changes of his time was a shift from speech towards writing as the principal means of government communication and record. Mainly as a result, Gregory's pontificate was covered by a burst of contemporary documentation. Since
Gregory VII's policies also sparked off widespread disputes conducted, to a degree none had been since the fourth century, by written appeals to literate opinion, we also possess three printed volumes of polemical pamphlets (or libelli), while ordinary historiography was also on the increase in his time,
1100, but Cowdrey shows it was employed already in
1078, in the appointment of a bishop of Augsburg. Gregory's pragmatism in other aspects of the lay­clerical relationship is well known, but not its extent. The pragmatism is shown here by an abundance of example ­ of Gregory's exhortations to lay congregations to boycott the Masses of non celibate priests; and to princes, to coerce lazy bishops. Anyone doubting Gregory's capacity for tactical somersaults in the matter of clerical and secular spheres of activity can turn to a letter of 1074, suggesting that Gregory, as pope, lead an army to rescue Byzantium from the Turks, and the king is to look after the Roman church while the pope is away. A pope so reliant on allies had no choice but such ideological gymnastics; nor should it need saying ­ though it does, and Cowdrey again says it with a new degree of authority ­ that Gregory was not the only one to shift his positions. Again and again we see a bishop, abbot, prince, or king, shifting a position in response to his own shifting configuration of interests and beliefs, several bishops, for instance, travelling to Rome to see Gregory and being