by Eamon Duffy
By the end of the twelfth century, the finger of the papacy lay on every living pulse in the Church. The last Pope of the century, Innocent III (1198–1216), may stand as the greatest representative of this pinnacle of papal power and influence. One of the series of lawyer popes thrown up by the growing centrality of canon law within the papal system, Innocent was a Roman nobleman whose personal name was Lothar of Segni. He was only thirty-seven when elected in 1198. An uncle had been Pope Clement III (1187–91), Innocent’s successor but one was his nephew Gregory IX (1227–41), while a great-nephew was to become Alexander IV (1254–61). But Innocent was elected pope on his merits rather than because of his family connections. Highly intelligent and a man of absolute personal integrity, he had studied theology at Paris and (probably) law at Bologna. As a student he had made the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, the great martyr for the spiritual rights of the Church against the claims of secular rulers, and this was a concern which would remain close to Innocent’s heart.
Innocent was a small, handsome, witty man, fond of puns and ironic wordplay, keenly alert to the absurd in the events and people around him. His first biographer described him as ‘strong, stable, magnanimous and very sharp’. He might have added that Innocent was also supremely self-confident. Certain that he enjoyed the direct guidance of God, he felt the full majesty of his own office. ‘Others are called to the role of caring,’ he declared, ‘but only Peter is raised to the fullness of power. Now therefore you see who is the servant who is set over the household, truly the vicar of Jesus Christ, the successor of Peter, the Christ of the Lord, the God of Pharaoh.’18 Armed with that conviction, he threw himself into the reform of the Church in every aspect.
He was himself the author of several enormously popular devotional treatises, written before he became pope. His Mysteries of the Mass became the basis of the standard liturgical handbooks of the later Middle Ages. His treatise on the Misery of the Human Condition, a conventional diatribe against the misery and vanity of the world, perhaps inspired by his long years in the corridors of power at the Lateran, survives in a stupendous 700 manuscripts. Though his health was poor, he was restlessly active, and his energy often exhausted his entourage. One of his chaplains has left a remarkable and attractive account of a summer encampment in August 1202 outside the walls of St Benedict’s monastery at Subiaco, where Innocent had gone to get away from the heat of Rome. In the stifling heat the chaplains and clerks of the Curia choked on the smoke from the cook’s fire, were devoured by gnats and were distracted by the noise of the cicadas and the pounding of the apothecary’s pestle and mortar. They nodded asleep over their paperwork while, in a shabby tent to one side, the Pope, ‘our most holy father Abraham’, ‘the third Solomon’, worked on, emerging occasionally to bathe his hands and rinse his mouth in a small stream. The chaplains eventually forced him to stop, and sat at his feet chattering and swapping jokes.
For the last twenty years of the twelfth century the papacy had been overshadowed by the hostility of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in Germany, and for the last ten the papal state had been in danger of encirclement, because of the death without heir of the Norman King William of Sicily The Emperor Henry VI claimed Sicily for his infant son, the future Frederick II, hoping to unite north and south Italy under a single dynasty. The popes, insisting that Sicily was a papal fief, backed another claimant, so as to prevent this imperial pincer-movement. But Henry himself died in 1197. His death brought a contested royal election in Germany, and the succession of the infant Frederick in Sicily, whom the Empress Regent quickly made a papal ward and placed under Innocent’s protection. Henry’s death also created a power vacuum in central and northern Italy, and Innocent determined to make the most of it by attempting to recover the papal territories which had been relentlessly eroded in the twelfth-century conflicts with the empire and the Normans. These included lands in the Campagna, in Tuscany, in Umbria and the Marches of Ancona, in Ravenna and in the scattered lands which Matilda of Tuscany had bequeathed to the reform papacy. He worked on Italian resentment of imperial taxation, making effective use of the text ‘my yoke is easy, my burden light’ to recommend papal overlordship. His eventual territorial gains were slight, but the campaign did result in an increase of tribute from cities which had previously paid little or nothing: Innocent used the new revenue to fund ambitious poor-relief programmes and the extensive renovation of the Roman churches.
Innocent based his campaign to recover the eroded patrimony on documented gifts by the Carolingian and German emperors, not on the contested generalities of the Donation of Constantine. There can be no doubt, however, that he took an exalted view of the lordship of the Pope over the Emperor. He believed that the Pope had ultimate authority over the secular as well as the religious sphere. Christ, he declared, had left to Peter ‘the government not only of the Church but of the whole world’. He liked to quote Jeremiah: ‘I have set you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow.’ The Pope, he believed, was set in the middle between God and man, ‘lower than God but higher than man: one who judges all, and is judged by no one’. Yet he thought that papal intervention in secular matters should be ratione peccati, confined to cases where human sin and error threatened the fundamental purpose of secular government, which was the protection and furthering of the Church, and the extirpation of heresy.
Given these views, it is not surprising that when the partisans of Henry’s brother Philip of Swabia tried to insist that Innocent must crown him emperor because he had been duly elected ‘king of the Romans’, Innocent replied that in contested elections the Pope was free to choose between the candidates. The only relevant criterion was the candidate’s ‘suitability’ as a champion of the rights and interests of the Church.
Philip had strong support and was the better candidate: he would eventually have prevailed, but his murder in 1208 resulted in the victory of the papacy’s candidate, Otto of Brunswick. He posed at first as a dutiful son of the Roman Church and a patron of reform, and Innocent rejoiced that at last Pope and Emperor might join forces to reform Church and world: ‘If we two stand together, “the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places smooth”, for the pontifical authority and the royal power (both of them supremely invested in Us) fully suffice for this purpose, if each helps the other.’19 It was not to be. Otto soon revived all the imperial claims of Barbarossa and Henry VI, and Innocent transferred his hopes to Frederick of Sicily; he excommunicated Otto in March 1211. The German opposition to Otto seized on this signal and elected Frederick II in his place, and Innocent’s political instincts seemed justified, for in 1213, in the ‘Golden Bull of Eger’ Frederick guaranteed free episcopal and abbatial elections throughout his realms, surrendered claims over vacant churches, and allowed the right of appeal to the Curia, formerly restricted in Sicily. In 1215 he was crowned at Aachen, and took the Crusade oath. In the same year, the Fourth Lateran Council confirmed him as emperor. To allay Innocent’s fears about encirclement, he undertook to crown his infant son Henry king of Sicily, but to make him a papal ward and to allow the Pope to appoint a regent for Sicily. Frederick was to renege on all this, but by the time of Innocent’s death in 1216 the Pope’s policy towards the empire seemed an unqualified success.
In his relations with other monarchs Innocent combined the same exalted theory of papal supremacy with a practical willingness to accommodate friendly rulers. He intervened energetically in succession disputes in Norway, Sweden, Bohemia and Hungary, but is most famous for his excommunication of King John of England in 1209 because of the King’s refusal to accept the appointment as archbishop of Canterbury of Stephen Langton, an old friend of the Pope’s from their student days in Paris. After a bitter conflict John gave in, and made England and Ireland feudal fiefs of the papacy, paying a tribute of 1,000 marks a year. He also asked Innocent to send a papal legate to regulate Church affairs in England (English kings since William the Conqueror had
excluded legates) and he granted free elections to bishoprics and abbacies; in 1215 he too took the Crusading vow. This papal victory on all fronts, however, did not undermine royal power. Instead the Pope subsequently gave almost unqualified support to the King against his barons (including Archbishop Langton) and, in support of John, Innocent declared Magna Carta null and void.
But the keynote of Innocent’s pontificate was practical, pastoral reform. Theology at Paris when he was a student was dominated not by high speculation, but by practical topics such as the morality of the laity, the celebration of the liturgy, the reform of the Christian life. These were the issues that recur throughout Innocent’s own writings, and that characterise his greatest achievement, the work of the Fourth Lateran Council, which met in 1215. The Council tackled an enormous range of issues, all of them practical: the establishment of orthodox teaching, especially on the sacraments – this was the Council which defined the doctrine of Transubstantiation – new regulations requiring every Christian to go to confession and communion at least once a year, improvements in record-keeping in Church courts, a tidying up and easing of the laws about marriage within prohibited degrees of kinship, rules for the better discharge of episcopal duties and especially preaching and catechising in the language of the people, and reform of the monasteries. Behind much of this the distinctive concerns of the Pope can be detected, and the Council was the high point of the medieval papacy’s involvement with and promotion of the best reforming energies in the Church at large.
Orthodoxy was one of Innocent’s major preoccupations. It was an age of spontaneous and often alarming movements of religious enthusiasm. The wealth and worldliness of many churchmen and the embedding of the Church in the heart of the European establishment produced waves of revulsion among the devout, which often spun off into heresy. Innocent set about rooting out all such heresy – especially among the Cathars in Spain and southern France, a group whose religious imagination was haunted by the conflict between the powers of darkness and light. They identified the material world with evil, and so their leaders or ‘perfecti’ ate no meat, abstained from sex and denied the value of the Church’s sacramental system.
Innocent encouraged secular rulers to stamp out such doctrinal deviance in their realms, and he sponsored preaching and teaching campaigns against Catharism, also known as Albigensianism, at first using Cistercian missionaries. Part of the attraction of the Cathar teachers, however, was their austerely ‘apostolic’ lifestyle. The Cistercian preachers, by contrast, mounted on horses and dressed in fine cloth, failed to impress. Innocent turned instead to a group of wandering priest-preachers led by the Spaniard Dominic Guzman. Dominic and his disciples, who would one day become the Order of Preachers, were skilled in theological dialectic, but they also lived the life of poor men, begging their bread and going as roughly clad as the Cathar apostles. Innocents acceptance of such a group was characteristic of his freedom from a slavish imprisonment within bureaucracy and law. For all his own canonistic and administrative preoccupations, he possessed the imaginative ability to recognise and rise to the needs of the moment.
In all this Innocent did not shrink from the use of force, especially after the murder of Peter of Castelnau, the legate he had sent to organise the mission to the Cathars in the south of France, in 1208. He believed that the sword had been placed in the hand of the ruler for the protection of God’s truth. He encouraged the Crusade against the Albigensians which climaxed in the appalling massacre of the inhabitants of the Cathar town of Béziers in 1209, offering an Indulgence to all who took part in the campaign and raising funds for it by a tax on the French clergy.
This forceful way with error, however, needs to be set alongside Innocent’s sensitive handling of the many charismatic lay religious movements which characterised the time, and of which the Franciscans were the most orthodox expression. Innocent recognised that heresy could be effectively disarmed only if genuine religious zeal and reform were fostered: repression was not enough. Francis was introduced to Innocent by the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Ugolino, and the Pope was clearly exercised by Francis’ eccentricity and uncouth appearance at their first meeting in the Lateran – according to Matthew Paris, he told Francis to go and play with the pigs, where he belonged. To his consternation, Francis chose to take him literally, and reappeared in the Consistory next day caked in pig-dung: the Pope hastily granted his requests.
Whatever the truth of that story, Francis and his companions did seek papal support for their movement of absolute poverty. Innocent would put nothing on paper, but he tonsured the little group, thereby extending to them the protection (and restraints) of clerical status, and he gave them permission to preach, provided they kept to moral exhortation and steered clear of theology. It was a characteristically shrewd response, cautious but supportive, and the Franciscans went on to become pillars of papal authority. It says a good deal about the centrality of the papacy that popular charismatic movements like Francis’ should need and seek papal backing. It says much for the vision and genuine spirituality of Innocent and his immediate successors that the support was forthcoming.
Crusading in general had Innocent’s full support. War against the infidel was ‘the battle of Christ’, and he shared the conviction of his predecessors that the recovery of the Holy Places from Muslim rule was the special responsibility of the Pope. This aspect of his activity, however, was almost uniformly disastrous. He first called for a Crusade to liberate Jerusalem in 1198, and imposed an income tax of 2.5 per cent on the clergy to fund it. In the event, the Fourth Crusade was not launched till 1202, and it had spun out of Innocent’s control before any of the Crusaders left the West. The Crusading army was diverted to Constantinople by an invitation from the nephew of Emperor Alexius III to help overthrow his uncle and establish a regime in communion with Rome. This turned into the brutal sacking of the Eastern Christian capital, Constantinople, and the creation of a puppet regime with a Latin emperor, and a Latin patriarch. In theory, the schism between East and West was over. In reality, the outrage of the Fourth Crusade permanently poisoned relations between Greek East and Latin West.
Innocent certainly had not intended this outcome, and tried to turn the troops away from Constantinople, but he came to welcome it as a providential solution of the problem of the Eastern schism. ‘By the just judgement of God,’ he wrote, ‘the kingdom of the Greeks is translated from the proud to the humble, from the disobedient to the faithful, from schismatics to Catholics.’20 He never abandoned the Crusading ideal, however, and applied Crusading theory to the conversion of the remaining pagans of the north, encouraging the Christians of Saxony and Westphalia to take up arms against the pagans of Livonia, by granting them the same spiritual privileges as would be gained from a pilgrimage to Rome. To encourage crusading zeal he extended the Crusade indulgence not only to those who took part directly, but to those who merely assisted the Crusade with money or advice. One of the principal objectives of the Fourth Lateran Council was the launching of another Crusade to Jerusalem, which Innocent himself planned to lead from Sicily, though he was to die before the Crusade (in which, famously, Francis of Assisi took part) was launched.
IV EXILE AND SCHISM
The successors of Innocent III worked in his shadow. Most of the enterprises of Honorius III (1216–27) and Innocent’s devout and energetic nephew Gregory IX (1227–41) were inherited from him. They continued his support for the new and controversial mendicant orders. Honorius formally established the Dominicans in 1216, and Gregory, who had acted as Francis’ minder and protector in the Curia, canonised Francis in 1228, less than two years after the Saint’s death. Honorius, Gregory and their immediate successors were all Bologna-trained lawyers, and they also developed further Innocent’s work of legal codification. In 1234 Gregory promulgated the Liber extra, the first complete, authoritative collection of papal decretals, edited by the Spanish curial lawyer Raymond of Penafort. Almost a third of the decretals it contained were Innocent’s, and t
he collection was to remain the fundamental canon law text until the First World War.
Honorius continued Innocent’s missionary involvements in the Baltic region, and he also carried on and stepped up the campaign against the Albigensians. Gregory was equally committed to stamping out heresy, and he put the seal on the use of force against error in 1231, when he absorbed into canon law the imperial legislation which decreed the burning of convicted heretics by the secular power. In the same year he instituted the papal Inquisition, designed to supplement diocesan courts by providing an international tribunal to combat a heresy which itself paid no heed to diocesan boundaries. Gregory put the Inquisition in the hands of the friars, especially the Dominicans, whose sometimes relentless activities earned them the nickname Domini canes – the hounds of the Lord (the pope). The Inquisition, in fact, often supplanted the diocesan courts it had been founded to assist. It was soon active in France, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries and northern Spain, and under its fierce scrutiny Catharism shrivelled and faded away.
The most awkward legacy of Innocent III, however, was Frederick II. Frederick was one of the most forceful kings of the Middle Ages, a proud and ruthless ruler. He was half-Sicilian, and spent most of his life in the Mediterranean. His court was an exotic cultural, racial and religious mix and he displayed his pragmatism by tolerating both Jews and Muslims. He was, however, an unsatisfactory son of the Holy See. All his assurances about the preservation of papal lordship in Sicily, his respect for the rights of the Church and the integrity of the papal patrimony, and his vow to assist in the main papal enterprise by going on Crusade, proved false. In the hope of persuading him to set off for Jerusalem, Honorius crowned Frederick emperor in 1220, to no avail. In 1227 Gregory, disgusted by endless empty promises, excommunicated Frederick. In fact, in the following year, the Emperor, still under the papal ban, went to the Holy Land, and in a bloodless negotiation succeeded in recovering the Holy Places, but Gregory was not mollified, and fomented rebellion and the election of an anti-king in Germany.
