What could be gained by favour could also be obtained by payment or claimed by forgery. The expenses of the Roman Curia increased; the monastic Orders were wealthy. Moreover, the critical faculty was slightly developed. Certain monasteries became notorious for the manufacture of documents in their own favour, St. Augustine's at Canterbury being especially bad offenders; and certain individuals from time to time supplied such material to all monasteries which would pay for them; while, finally, in return for well-bestowed gifts, the Roman Curia was often willing to recognise the authenticity of a spurious claim.
Calixtus II died in December, 1124, and in a few months (May, 1125) Henry V followed him to the grave. The imperial party at Rome had disappeared, but, on the other hand, Calixtus had established only a truce between the Roman factions. The Frangipani and Pierleoni families each nominated a successor to him, but the former forcibly placed their candidate in the papal chair. The six years of the pontificate of Honorius II (1124-30) are unimportant.
It was perhaps fortunate for the Papacy that the allegiance of Germany was also divided. With Henry V expired the male line of the Salian or Franconian House. He had intended to secure the succession for his nephew, Frederick the One-eyed, Duke of Suabia and head of the family of Hohenstaufen. But the anti-Franconian party procured the election of Lothair, Duke of Saxony, who had built up for himself a practically independent territorial power on the north-eastern side of Germany, and had taken a prominent part in opposition to Henry V.
Lothair's election, then, was a triumph for the Papacy, and the Church party could not let pass so good an opportunity of revising the relations of State and Church in Germany. They had maintained from the first that the Concordat of Worms was a personal arrangement between Calixtus II and Henry V. But the exact nature of Lothair's promise on election is a matter of great dispute. According to the account of an anonymous writer, he undertook that the Church should exercise entire freedom in episcopal elections without being controlled, "as formerly" (an obvious reference to the Concordat of Worms), by the presence of the lay power or by a recommendation from it, and that after the consecration (not before, according to the terms of the Concordat) the Emperor should, without any payment, invest the prelate with the regalia by the sceptre and should receive his oath of fealty "saving his Order." Lothair's actual conduct, however, in the matter of appointments seems to have been guided by the terms of the Concordat.
