Council of Sutri

The Council of Sutri (or Synod of Sutri) was called by Henry III, King of the Germans and opened on December 20, 1046, in the hilltown of Sutri, at the edge of the Duchy of Rome. The Catholic Church does not list this as an ecumenical council.

The chronicles Annales Romani record the events thus...

"Henry, most victorious king by the grace of God...When he arrived at the city of Sutri, he called the Roman clergy along with Pope Gregory to meet with him. He ordered a special synod to be held in the holy church of Sutri and there, lawfully and canonically, he sat in judgment upon Bishop John of Sabina, called Silvester; the archpriest John, called Gregory; and the aforementioned Pope Benedict."

The council was called to resolve disorder over the papacy. A faction in the church encouraged Henry III to intervene, both to resolve the conflict and to receive his crown from the pope in an official ceremony. In the autumn of 1046 Henry III, already King of the Germans, crossed the Alps at the head of a large army and accompanied by a retinue of the secular and ecclesiastical princes of the empire, all of whom were his sworn vassals. Henry had two intentions, to be crowned Holy Roman emperor by the pope at Rome and, in order that the pontiff concerned have an unassailable title—one that would not cast doubts upon his conferred imperial title— to establish order in the Duchy of Rome.

Rome was in a state of warfare between noble factions, each of whom had a candidate they regarded as pope. A pope presided at St. Peter's, another at the Lateran and a third at Sta Maria Maggiore. Two of them, Benedict IX, a scion of the counts of Tusculum, and Sylvester III of the Crescenzi clan, represented rival factions of the Roman nobility. The claim of the third, Gregory VI, was peculiar in that he had purchased the title in good faith from Benedict IX two years previously. Each claimant had a number of supporters in the Roman church and held a portion of the city.

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