Esprimere e reprimere il dissenso nella lotta per le investiture

The investiture contest offers significant examples of how the ecclesiastical hierarchy had incorporated within itself the ability both to transform anti-systemic impulses into forms of organized dissent and to suppress the dissent of supporters of the imperial-led system centered on the Salic dynasty. The notion of heresy itself was much more fluid than it would be in later centuries. On both sides, religion, far from preventing dissent from arising, provided it with the languages and practices to make the narrow competing elites an effective historical force. Dissent was expressed within formalized contexts such as papal and provincial synods, or in ecclesiastically led assemblies such as those celebrated in Milan, where it coexisted with the trials celebrated by the patarines in the public squares. Dissent was also ritualized by the Gregorian party in Brescia who periodically made ‘identity’ pilgrimages to the areas controlled by Matilda of Canossa, and by the Vallombrosans who in Florence opposed the bishop Pietro Mezzabarba through conscious forms of desecration that in the language of the supporters of the Reichskirche were designated as so many attacks on the unitas Ecclesiae.