GREGORY II., by birth a Roman, was elected pope in 715. His pontificate is specially noticeable as forming an epoch in the progress of the territorial pre-eminence of the Roman see in Italy. The eastern emperors having almost entirely abandoned the government and, still more, the defence of Italy, and the aggressions of the Lombards becoming every year more formidable, the imperial authority in the West sank into little more than a name; and the tyrannical and barbarous measures by which the Emperor Leo the Isaurian attempted to enforce his decrees against image-worship weakened still more the tie which bound Italy to the eastern emperors. The natural result of the diminution of the imperial authority in Italy was the growth of that of the pope, to whom the deserted Italian provinces looked, partly as their spiritual counsellor and head, partly as their mediator with the barbarous enemy, partly as the centre of the political federation for self-defence which their very isolation necessitated. Gregory convened a council in Rome on the subject of the honour due to images, and addressed a very energetic letter to the emperor, protesting against the sacrilegious outrages of which he had been guilty, explaining and defending the Catholic doctrine on image-worship, and warning the emperor that the feelings of his subjects were so completely alienated by his conduct that it was only the pope's influence which prevented them from throwing off all allegiance. Gregory has been accused of himself fomenting this disaffection. The contrary, however, is attested, not only by his own letters, but also by Paul the Deacon, in his History of the Lombards (book vi. chap. 39); and it is quite certain that the circumstances themselves, and the well-known character of the emperor, would sufficiently explain any degree of discontent in Italy. At all events, the result of the contest was a most notable aggrandisement of the political authority and influence of the popes in Italy. Gregory II. was distinguished by his zeal for the evangelisation of heathen lands; it was under his auspices that the famous Winfried or Boniface entered on his missionary work in Germany. He died in 731.
GREGORY III., a native of Syria, succeeded Gregory II. in 731. In the same year he hurled the anathema of excommunication against the Iconoclasts, and the retaliations of Leo the Isaurian did much to weaken the ancient tie between the popedom and the empire. The encroachments of the Lombards in Italy during his pontificate became so formidable that, as the eastern emperors still remained powerless or indifferent to the protection of the Italian provinces, the Romans charged Gregory to send a deputation to Charles Martel, soliciting his succour against the enemy, and proposing upon that condition to recognise him as their protector, and to confer on him the title of consul and patrician of Rome. This offer was made by the pope 'in virtue of a decree of the Roman primus,' and is of great historical importance in the consideration of the nature and origin of the papal power in Italy. The embassy failed, owing to the pressure of his war with the Saracens, to enlist the aid of Charles; but it was a step towards the consummation of the independence of the West. Gregory III. died in 741.
GREGORY VII., pre-eminently the historical representative of the temporal claims of the medieval papacy, was born, about 1020, at Soana, a village in the southern border of Tuscany. Whether his family belonged to the burgher or the noble class is disputed by his biographers. His family name, Hildebrand, would imply a Teutonic descent; but by birth and education at least he was Italian. His youth was passed at Rome, in the monastery of St Maria, on the Aventine, of which his uncle, Laurentius (afterwards Bishop of Amalfi), was abbot. From Rome he passed into France, where he entered the celebrated monastery at Clugny, in the schools of which he completed his education; and from the strict ascetic observances there practised by him he acquired those habits of austerity which distinguished his whole life. He visited the court of Henry III., and obtained by his preaching the reputation of great eloquence. On his return to Rome he became the chaplain of Gregory VI.; but after the death of that pontiff he again withdrew to his former retreat at Clugny, from which he was only recalled by the earnest appeal of the new and zealous pope, Leo IX., whom he accompanied to Rome in 1049. Under this active and devoted pontiff Hildebrand exercised great influence. He now for the first time received holy orders, and was eventually created cardinal. Besides the responsible domestic employments which were assigned to him, he was sent as legate to the important Council of Tours, in which the cause of Berengarius was examined. Under all the short but important pontificates of the successors of Leo IX., who are known in history as the German popes—Victor II., Stephen IX., Benedict X., and Alexander II.—Hildebrand continued to exercise the same influence, and by inspiring into their government of the church the great principles to which his life was devoted he prepared the way for the full development of his theory of the papacy.
He was unanimously elected at Rome, without awaiting the imperial authorisation, three days after the death of Alexander II. The German bishops, who feared the effect of those reforms of which his name was a guarantee, endeavoured to prevent the Emperor Henry IV. from assenting to the election; but Henry gave his approval, and the new pope was crowned, July 10, 1073. From the date of his election the pontificate of Gregory was one life-long struggle for the assertion of the principles with which he believed the welfare of the church and the regeneration of society itself to be inseparably bound up. Regarding as the great evil of his time the thoroughly secularised condition of the church in a great part of Europe, and especially in Germany and northern Italy, he directed against this all his efforts. The position occupied by the higher clergy as feudal proprietors, the right claimed by the crown of investiture with the temporalities of benefices, the consequent dependence of the clergy upon the sovereign, and the temptation to simony which it involved were, in the mind of Gregory, the cause of all the evils under which Europe was groaning; and of all these he regarded Investiture (q.v.) as the fountain and the source. While, therefore, he laboured by every species of enactment, by visitations, by encyclical letters, and by personal exhortations, precepts, and censures, to enforce the observance of all the details of discipline—celibacy, the residence of the clergy, the instruction of the people—and to repress simony and pluralism, it was against the fundamental abuse of investiture that his main efforts were directed. In the year after his election he prohibited this practice, under pain of excommunication both for the investor and the invested, and in the following year he actually issued that sentence against several bishops and councillors of the empire. The Emperor Henry IV. disregarding these menaces and taking the offending bishops under his protection, Gregory cited him to Rome to answer for his conduct. Henry's sole reply was a haughty defiance; and in a diet at Worms in 1076 he formally declared Gregory deposed from the pontificate. The pontiff was not slow to retaliate by a sentence of excommunication; and in this sentence, unless revoked or removed by absolution in twelve months, by the law of the empire at the time, was involved the forfeiture of all civil rights, and deposition from every civil and political office. Henry's Saxon subjects appealing to this law against him, he was compelled to yield, and by a humiliating penance, to which he submitted at Canossa (q.v.) in January 1077, he obtained absolution from the pope in person. This submission, however, was but feigned; and on his subsequent triumph over his rival, Rudolf of Swabia, Henry resumed hostilities with the pope, and in 1080 again declared him deposed, and caused to be appointed in his place the antipope Guibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, under the name of Clement III. After a protracted siege of three years, Henry, in the year 1084, took possession of Rome. Gregory shut himself up in the castle of St Angelo. Just, however, as he was on the point of falling into his enemy's hands, Robert Guiscard, the Norman Duke of Apulia, entered the city, set Gregory free, and compelled Henry to return to Germany; but the wretched condition to which Rome was reduced obliged Gregory to withdraw first to Monte Cassino and ultimately to Salerno, where he died, May 25, 1085. His dying words are a deeply affecting but stern and unbending profession of the faith of his whole life, and of the profound convictions under which even his enemies acknowledge him to have acted—'I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die an exile.'
The character of Gregory VII. and the theory of church-polity which he represents are differently judged by the different religious schools; but his theory is confessed by all, even those who most strongly reprobate it as an excess, to have been grand in its conception and unselfish in its object. 'The theory of Augustine's city of God,' says Milman, 'no doubt swam before his mind, on which a new Rome was to rise and rule the world by religion.' In his conception of the constitution of Christian society the spiritual power was the first and highest element. It was to direct, to command the temporal, and, in a certain sense, to compel its obedience; but, as the theory is explained by Fénelon, by Gosselin, and other modern Catholics, the arms which it was authorised to use for the purpose of coercion were the arms of the spirit only. It could compel by penalties, but these penalties were only the censures of the church; and if in certain circumstances temporal forfeitures (as in the case of Henry IV.) were annexed to these censures, this, it is argued, was the result of the civil legislation of the particular country, not of any general ecclesiastical law. Thus, in the case of Henry, the imperial crown was forfeited, according to the Swabian code, by the mere fact of the emperor's remaining for twelve months under excommunication without obtaining absolution from the sentence. Moreover, whatever may be said of the power in itself, or of the lengths to which it has at times extended, the occasion and the object of its exercise in the hands of Gregory were always such as to command the sympathy of the philosophical student of the history of the middle ages. By his firm and unbending efforts to suppress the unchristian vices which deformed society, and to restrain the tyranny which oppressed the subject as much as it enslaved the church, he taught his age 'that there was a being on earth whose special duty it was to defend the defenceless, to succour the succourless, to afford a refuge to the widow and orphan, and to be the guardian of the poor.' Dean Milman sums up his history of Gregory VII. as of one who is to be contemplated not merely with awe, but in some respects, and with some great drawbacks, as a benefactor of mankind.
See Milman's Latin Christianity (vol. iii.); Giesebrecht, Geschichte der Deutsch. Kaiserzeit (vol. iii.); Bowden, Life of Gregory VII. (1840); Voigt, Hildebrand als Papst (2d ed. 1846); Gfrörer, Papst Gregor VII. (7 vols. 1859-61); W. R. W. Stephens, Hildebrand and his Times (1888); and the studies by Söhl (1847), Villemain (1872; Eng. trans. 1873), Langeron (1874), and Meltzer (1876). His whole literary remains are included within seven books or Registers of letters, which have been often printed.
GREGORY XIII., UGO BUONCOMPAGNO, was born at Bologna, January 7, 1502. He was educated in his native city, where he filled the chair of Law for several years. Having settled at Rome in 1539, he was distinguished by several important employments, and was one of the theologians of the Council of Trent; on his return thence he was created cardinal in 1565, and sent as legate to Spain. On the death of Pius V. Gregory was elected pope in 1572. Not one among the post-Reformation pontiffs has surpassed Gregory XIII. in zeal for the promotion and improvement of education; a large proportion of the colleges in Rome were wholly or in part endowed by him; and his expenditure for educational purposes is said to have exceeded 2,000,000 Roman crowns. The most interesting event of his pontificate, in a scientific point of view, is the correction of the Calendar (q.v.), which was the result of long consideration, and was finally made public in 1582. Under his care was published also a valuable edition of the Decretum Gratiani with learned notes. He was a zealous patron of the Jesuits, and supported the League in France against the Huguenots; and it was he who ordered a Te Deum in Rome on occasion of the massacre of St Bartholomew, and had a medal struck in honour of the occasion. He strongly supported Philip II. of Spain in his designs against England; and he left the mark of his energy on almost every department of church life and work. He died in 1585, in the eighty-third year of his age.
GREGORY, ST, surnamed ILLUMINATOR (Armenian Lusavoritch, Gr. Phōtistēs), was of the royal Parthian race of the Arsacidæ, and son of Anak, murderer of Chosrov I., king of Armenia. For this crime his whole family was slain save himself. He owed his escape to a Christian nurse, who secretly conveyed him, when he was two years old, to Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, her native town. He there married a Christian, who bore him two sons, and soon afterwards became a nun. Gregory proceeded to Rome, and entered the service of Terdat, Chosrov's son. After Terdat (Tiridates III.) had, with the help of the Romans, recovered his father's kingdom (286), Gregory, for his refusal to crown with garlands the statue of Anahit, tutelary goddess of Armenia, was thrown by Terdat into a deep pit, where a pious widow nourished him for fourteen years. About the end of that time Terdat was visited with the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar. Healed and baptised by Gregory, he became a zealous Christian, and established Christianity by force throughout his dominions. Gregory was consecrated bishop and head of the Armenian Church by Leontius, Archbishop of Cæsarea, and erected a great number of churches, monasteries, hospitals, and schools in which the sons of heathen priests were trained for the Christian priesthood, whereby a strongly national stamp was given to the church in Armenia. Having resigned the patriarchate in favour of his second son Aristaces, Gregory in 331 retired to a cave at the foot of Mount Sebuh in Upper Armenia, where he died in a few years. The patriarchate was held for many years by his descendants.
The sources for the history of Gregory, which is partly legendary, are two early Armenian histories written by Agathangelos and by Simeon Metaphrastes. A French translation of the former by Victor Langlois appears in vol. i. of the Historiens de l'Arménie (1867); the latter (evidently drawn from the former) is given in vol. cv. of Migne's Patrol. Græc. The former was known to
Moses of Khorene, the Herodotus of Armenia, who flourished in the 5th century. The best edition of his work was printed at Venice in 1865: a Latin translation by the brothers Whiston appeared at London in 1736; a French by Levaillant de Florival at Paris in 1841. See S. C. Malan's Eng. translation (1868) of the life of Gregory, from the Armenian work of the Vartabed Matthew (published at Venice, 1749).