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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 205

order projected in papal propaganda (Bloch, 1961). And the papacy’s direct
control over the principal agency of mass communication, the Church, was even
at the height of its power far from absolute in practice.
But although the papacy’s hegemony was never total, its dual domination over
the institutions of mental production and mass communication was nevertheless
sufficient to enable it to gain increased authority and power at the expense of
adversaries with apparently infinitely greater resources at their disposal. This
process of aggrandisement can be briefly illustrated by perhaps the best-known
confrontation of the middle ages. In 1075, Pope Gregory VII brought to a head
the papal assault on lay control over ecclesiastical appointments by banning lay
investiture (i.e. the ritual symbolizing lay conferment of ecclesiastical offices).
This was followed by public pronouncements, sermons and pamphlets in a
sustained propaganda war. The German monarch, Henry IV, found to his cost
that this ideological assault was highly effective, because it drew upon a
consensus of opinion that had been built up over the centuries through constant
reiteration of ecclesiastical propaganda. When he was excommunicated,
temporarily deposed, and the oaths of allegiance made to him by his vassals
suspended by the pope, his position became increasingly perilous. His itinerant
court did not possess the historical records that would have been needed to
challenge effectively the papacy’s claim to sovereignty over the Church, and he
had no access to an alternative, literate tradition of thought that would have
legitimized his authority as ruler independent of the Church. He was king by the
grace of God, and this grace had been withdrawn by God’s supreme agent. His
vassals began to defect with, as Brooke (1964) put it, ‘the gates of hell clanging
about their ears’, though in some cases defections were clearly caused by more
opportunistic motives. At the Diet of Tribur, the German princes formally
declared that Henry IV would forfeit his throne unless he secured absolution from
the pope. The most powerful ruler in the west, who had merely sought to
maintain the practice of lay investiture sanctioned by custom for centuries, was
forced to go to Italy as a penitent to seek the pope’s absolution. While the papal
cause subsequently suffered a number of reverses, the German monarchy finally
abandoned lay investiture of the clergy after the Concordat of Worms in 1122
(Davies, 1957; Brooke, 1964; Ullmann, 1970 and 1977).
In short, the rise of papal government in the early and central middle ages was
based ultimately on the papacy’s successful manipulation of élite and mass
media to transmit not merely its claims to church leadership but an ideological
perspective of the world that legitimized its domination of Christendom. It was
only when the papacy’s domination of the élite centres of knowledge and mass
communications was successfully challenged in the later middle ages that the
(8)
papacy’s ideological ascendancy was broken . With the loss of its ideological
control, the papacy’s power collapsed. The issuing of excommunications which
had brought the most powerful European monarch literally to his knees in 1077
was not sufficient even to insure the payment of papal taxes by the fifteenth
century.