The turbulent pontificate of Archbishop Anno II (1056-1075) signaled a major shift in the archbishop's relationship with both emperor and pope at the imperial level as well as with the emerging mercantile community of his cathedral city at the local level. The archbishop's holy city of endowed religious communities and their churches would be transformed through the intense forces unleashed by the Investiture Controversy, the ensuing collapse of the Salian dynasty, and the concomitant rise of an ever-more self-confident community of elite merchants and ministerials.

Anno II himself represented change in the archbishopric itself. Unlike his several predecessors, he was not a scion of a major comital family but, rather, came from the Steuβlingen, a minor noble family of the southern slopes of the Swabian Jura (today's Altsteuslingen just due southwest of Ulm). As one who rose from obscure beginnings through the personal cultivation of Königsnähe, his critics considered him an ambitious bounder whose loyalty was neither to king nor to church but, rather, to the advancement of his own career and that of his kin. Yet Anno was also widely known for his own ascetic spirituality and devotion to monastic reform. In sum, he was a complex man living in complex times: a “new man” on the rise in the changing world of the eleventh century and yet also a man deeply committed to maintaining the traditional princely bearing and status to which he had ascended by dint of hard work and the emperor's favor.

Anno began his ecclesiastical education as a cathedral canon in Bamberg, where his predecessor Archbishop Pilgrim had previously found his own way into the imperial court. Anno mastered his studies in Bamberg and Paderborn so thoroughly that he was appointed the cathedral schoolmaster in Bamberg, and like Pilgrim his reputation impressed Henry III, who appointed him court chaplain around 1046. Henry III took Anno along for the Hungarian campaigns of 1051-1052, and in 1054 he rewarded his royal confessor with the provostship of the new collegiate foundation of Saints Simon and Judas in Goslar (which Archbishop Hermann II of Cologne consecrated for the king in that year).