A resignation with a price tag
In 1045, Pope Benedict IX gave up the papacy in favor of Giovanni Graziano, a wealthy Roman priest who took the name Gregory VI. Medieval accounts describe the handover as a sale: Graziano paid Benedict to resign. The episode made an already troubled papal succession look less like a spiritual appointment and more like a private bargain.
Buying or selling a church office was known as simony, after Simon Magus, a figure in the New Testament who offered money for spiritual power. Church leaders condemned the practice because it treated authority over religious life as something a person could purchase. A resignation could transfer no property in the ordinary sense, but payment for the office made the bargain look precisely like the forbidden exchange.
The deal did not settle who was pope
Benedict’s departure did not end the contest over the papacy. Another claimant, Sylvester III, also asserted the title, while Benedict later returned to press his own claim. With rival claimants and a disputed paid resignation, Rome had no simple, broadly accepted succession.
In 1046, the German king Henry III intervened at a church council in Sutri, near Rome. The council removed Gregory VI and dealt with the rival claims; Henry then helped bring about the election of a new pope, Clement II. The sale had not made the papacy a piece of property that could be transferred cleanly. Instead, it exposed how deeply political power and church office were entangled—and left the question of legitimacy for a wider authority to decide.
