Herrschaft

Archbishop Anno II died on 4 December 1075 while visiting his beloved abbey of Siegburg, and since he requested on his deathbed that his burial site be changed from St. Maria ad gradus to the abbey, his monks ceremoniously interred him in the church crypt after an extensive ritual perambulation of the funeral cortège. While the Siegburg brethren advocated effectively to shape Anno's legacy into one of sainthood, the city of Cologne found itself in the midst of a serious crisis reaching across the entire German Empire. The longstanding worries about whether a German bishop could be at once a pious priest and an effective duke on behalf of the monarch had been answered here in the affirmative once more, though the accommodations needed to make an imperial prince-bishop like Anno II pass muster tested the bounds of credulity. Thank heaven for grateful monks who benefitted the most from his support of their vocations and communities.

Henry IV at first seemed finally ascendant in his kingdom by 1075, as his fortunes with the German nobility had appreciated and he now had the chance to replace a recalcitrant archbishop with one more supportive of his kingship and policies. Indeed, securing the archbishopric of Cologne was critical to maintaining his significant support in the Rhine-Maas region in the uncertain year of 1076. Though Henry had defeated the Saxon rebels by the end of the previous year, relations with the papacy had reached the breaking point at Gregory VII's brief but shocking Christmas night imprisonment in December of that year, which he blamed on the German king. As a result, the pope demanded that the king come to Rome for the Lenten Synod to defend himself against this crime as well as to accept the papal decree against lay investiture of bishops. This only resulted in Henry IV's hastily convened synod of bishops at Worms of 24 January 1076, which decreed that the pope was deposed because his own election was not in accordance with canon law. Employing a legal maneuver with ironic satisfaction, the synod pointed out that the Papal Election Decree of 1059, which Gregory VII himself had helped fashion, defined valid papal elections as taking place “with the consent and authority of the king,” which of course never took place in Gregory VII's 1073 election.