Sigebert of Gembloux

Sigebert of Gembloux (Sigebertus Gemblacensis; c. 1030 – 5 October 1112) was a medieval author, known mainly as a pro-Imperial historian of a universal chronicle, opposed to the expansive papacy of Gregory VII and Pascal II. He became in early life a monk in the Benedictine abbey of Gembloux.

He was born near Gembloux which is now in the Province of Namur, Belgium, about 1030. He was apparently not of Germanic background, but seems to have been of Latin descent. He received his education at the Abbey of Gembloux, where at an early age he became a monk. Later he was for a long time a teacher at the Abbey of St. Vincent at Metz; about 1070 he returned to Gembloux. He was universally admired and venerated, and had charge there of the abbey school until his death, occupied in teaching and writing.

After his return from Metz he became a violent imperial partisan in the great struggle between the empire and the papacy that culminated in the Investiture Controversy. He was an enemy of the papal pretensions and he took part in the momentous contest between Pope Gregory VII and the Emperor Henry IV. Of his three treatises on this question, being very serviceable to the imperial cause to the contest, one is lost; this was an answer to the letter of Gregory VII, written in 1081 to Bishop Hermann of Metz, in which Gregory asserted that the popes have the right to excommunicate kings and to release subjects from the oath of loyalty. In the second treatise Sigebert defended the masses said by married priests, the hearing of which had been forbidden by the pope in 1074. When Paschal II in 1103 ordered the Count of Flanders to punish the citizens of Liège for their adherence to the emperor and to take up arms against him, Sigebert attacked the proceeding of the pope as unchristian and contrary to Scripture.

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