Paschal II

Rainerius was a Cluniac monk whom Gregory VII had made a cardinal, and he inherited Gregory's quarrel without Gregory's appetite for it. Elected a fortnight after Urban II died, he spent eighteen years grinding down the imperial antipopes, outliving three of them, and pressing the ban on lay investiture in England and France, where it was settled by compromise in 1107.

Germany would not settle. In 1111 Henry V came to Italy for his coronation, and Paschal offered him an extraordinary bargain at Sutri: the church would hand back every regalian right it held from the crown, every duchy, county, toll and estate, and live on tithes and offerings alone, if the king would renounce investiture entirely. It was the reform argument taken to its logical end, and it would have stripped the German bishops of everything they owned.

He spent the rest of his life being punished for it. A Lateran synod in 1112 annulled the concession as extorted, his own supporters accused him of heresy, and he died in 1118 with Henry V's troops in Rome and his position no better than when he started.