Innocent’s life was immensely rich in events of magnitude: he saw in turn all the kings of Europe kneel at his feet to receive their countries from his hand in fee; in the interests of the true faith he conjured up all the horrors of the Albigensian war; he first banned the Crusaders who conquered Byzantium and then founded a Latin Empire in the East under the aegis of the Latin Church; but this eventful life does not here concern us. Our interest lies only with the statesman who proclaimed himself the spiritual father of Frederick II, appointed by God to replace the earthly father he had lost; who in the line of medieval monarchs filled the hiatus that fell between the son and the grandson of Barbarossa, the aroma of whose spiritual reign still filled the air when the last of the Hohenstaufens mounted the imperial throne.
The royal High Priest of the Christian Church, the verus imperator of the Christian Empire, the first judge of Christendom, these three are one and of one origin: they are the Pope. That is roughly the underlying principle which first comes to the fore with Innocent III, not as a claim but as an axiom, a rounded whole, a “Summa.” Innocent’s point of departure was that the Pope—though the successor of the prince of the apostles—was not his representative on earth, not the representative of any man, but the representative of Christ himself, and through him the representative of God. Direct from God himself he held the plenitudo potestatis, the sum total of all power, from which derive all earthly powers: the priest’s, the judge’s and the king’s. Innocent in an unprecedentedly ambitious exposition of the papal rôle of mediator inculcated this doctrine most explicitly. All power is from God. The Pope, however, is placed as “mediator between God and man; nearer than God, further than man; less than God but more than man,” and to complete the circle of transmitted power he further states: “God is honoured in us when we are honoured, and in us is God despised when we are despised.” From this latter postulate sprang the later dogma, probably first formulated by Thomas Aquinas, “submission to the Pope is essential to every man for the salvation of his soul.”
This dual position of the Pope as mediator made possible the transmission of power which is closely bound up with Innocent’s transmutation of the Church into a Priest-State. The first conception of the hierarchy as a State was not his, but by a fortunate concurrence of time and opportunity its realisation was his work. The priestly power was derived from God through the papal mediator, and if this was to pass over immediate and uninterrupted to the bishops, it was in the highest degree important that every other influence should be ruled out at their election, especially the influence of despised secular authorities—whatever ancient privileges King or Emperor might claim. Shrewdly, skilfully, unscrupulously, Pope Innocent contrived to stage-manage in his own sense the bishops’ elections in all countries, exploiting for his own ends the political impotence that crippled Europe (with the sole exception of France). Sometimes he made treaties, sometimes concordats, and he contrived ere long to end the whole question of investiture disputes, and make the bishops throughout the Christian world his own immediate dependants, creatures whom he—and in still wider measure his successors—began, like the veriest autocrat, to appoint, remove, transfer, according to papal caprice. This he had the right to do, for this Pope-god was mighty to bind or to loose the spiritual wedlock—otherwise indissoluble—of the bishop with his diocese, “not as man, for he was not the vicegerent of man, but as God, for he was the vicegerent of God.”
With this “freedom of episcopal elections” the constitution of the Church achieved its complete independence of the temporal powers. On a plane above the profane world the Church became a peculiar state, in which the bishops played only the part of obedient civil servants, provincial governors and ambassadors of their papal Imperator. The divorce of the secular power from the Church patronage it had hitherto enjoyed was made final and complete by the papal legates, who as plenipotentiaries of the Pope ranked above the archbishops themselves and supervised the activities of the bishops’ officials, without the secular power being in a position to protest at finding itself deprived of all supervision over the Church.
Corresponding agreements, including the right of sending legates to the individual countries, were now usually added to treaties. A third stipulation commonly reserved to the priests the “right of direct appeal,” the right that is to say of every priest to approach the Pope without the intermediary of the secular power. This first secured the real cohesion of the spiritual State whose head was the Pope. If the firmly dovetailed fabric of the Church-state were not to be sprung, a further consequence inevitably followed: no “officials” of the Pope, with isolated exceptions, should in the future be amenable, as to a certain extent they had been heretofore, to secular courts. This necessitated a further development of the Canon law which Innocent made by a collection of Decretals, a work thus inaugurated by the Pope himself, though not completed till twenty years after his death. Like all the great Popes of the later Middle Ages, especially his predecessor Alexander III, Innocent was a first-class jurist, which in those days was almost synonymous with statesman. It is self-evident that if this great work of building up his state was to reach perfection he had no option but to proceed without scruple and without ruth.
The bishops and priests had hitherto been wont, not without advantage, to play off the papal against the royal power, and vice versa. The freedom that they lost, however, by the metamorphosis of the Church into a well-knit, monarchical, priest-state based on obedience, was made good in other ways. By Pope Innocent’s lofty conception of his priestly office the prestige of the cleric vis-à-vis the layman was immensely enhanced. Every ancient edict which could serve to evoke increased respect for the priest was called anew into remembrance and given fresh emphasis. For instance, the layman was unconditionally dependent on the mediation of the priest; the priest must be correctly ordained; the sacramental power of the priest was independent of his personal unworthiness; simony was treason against king and state. This vital importance of simony from a political point of view is comprehensible, since it interferes with the transmission of grace, which instead of proceeding from God and the Pope has been bought for money.
This new aloofness of the priest and his severance from the lay world is clearly marked by certain pregnant innovations in ritual, provoked by acute reaction against the heretics—just now beginning to show their heads—one of whose expressed aims was to lessen the cleavage between the layman and the priest. Amongst these new ordinances may be cited, for instance, the rule that the priest henceforth completes the mysteries with his face turned towards the altar and the East, and with his back to the people, not facing the congregation as heretofore: “less than God, but more than man.” The presence of the lay worshippers has become a matter of indifference in face of the magic metamorphosis of the elements which was wrought by the priestly benediction—the “Transubstantiation” as Pope Innocent first described the mystic miracle. In 1215 he elevated this doctrine into a dogma.
The reformed papacy of the eleventh century had under Gregory VII initiated the emancipation of the papal office and the papal elections from the power of the Emperor. Innocent III gradually extended this emancipation down to the bishops and sought to free their election and their office from temporal influences. This, however, was a very different matter, fraught with no little danger to the Church: might not a temporal ruler on his part create a wholly temporal state exempt from all allegiance to the Church? It has too seldom been remarked that it was the Church who first craved complete severance, and achieved it by every means in her power, who first, by the creation of a unified self-sufficing priest-state, furnished a model for a wholly temporal empire. The most remarkable point is, however, that the Church herself laid down certain principles—in somewhat “unorthodox” fashion—for this imitation of the spiritual by the temporal empire.’
It was inevitable that the Pope should stress the unconditional and unique quality of his office as mediator with reference to priestly power. But it is notorious
that he did not confine himself to this: the plenitudo potestatis conferred on him as God’s vicegerent rendered him the mediator not only for all spiritual, but also for all worldly authority—the knightly as the kingly. The very words in which he celebrated his mediatorship, in what was practically a self-apotheosis, added a rider to the well-known doctrine: as mediator it was his mission “to judge all men, but to be judged of none.” This priestly spirit which breathed fire into Innocent’s judicial functions endowed the temporal power with new strength. This faith in the actual, uninterrupted working and overflowing of divine power, through the Mediator, into judges and kings as well as into priests, constituted the very essence of the medieval mediatorship. This conception had been till now foreign, in lay affairs at any rate, to the medieval mind. True, the ruler received his power always direct from God as a fief, a beneficium, but he, as a temporal sovereign, was no mediator in the priestly sense. Innocent, of course, was not concerned to distinguish a spiritual and a temporal mediatorship, since the totality of power, the plenitudo potestatis, dwelt in him alone, as High Priest. All the greater would be some day the portent when the temporal power would claim the temporal mediatorship in respect of royal and judicial functions, would sever this from the mediatorship of the high priest and, following the Pope’s example, would perform its own apotheosis.
All unwitting, Innocent III had paved the road to a Kingship and a Judgeship that should challenge the rights of Priesthood. Eager to assert his limitless judicial powers he sought to break down all lines of demarcation. He liked to entitle Peter the sacerdos sive judex, “priest or judge,” and to use the Levites as an illustration of the essential unity of the priestly and judicial functions. The Lord himself had recognised the fact that the highest judicial authority was to be found in Rome. Peter, flying from Rome, had asked the question: Quo vadis, Domine? and did not Christ reply: Romam venio iterum crucifigi! Rome therefore—that is, of course, the Pope—became the court of highest instance on earth, with jurisdiction in worldly matters also, wherever dubious or mysterious cases were in question. God himself had placed the Pope, as Innocent untiringly repeated, on the throne of Justice, so that he might pronounce judgment also on the princes of the earth. And thus the Pope, though for the most part not interfering in the secular administration of justice, became the Over-Judge who could summon to his forum any quarrel in all the Christian world.
In precisely similar fashion Innocent sought to fuse priesthood and kingship. The Old and New Testament were at one, he pointed out, in holding that kingship was a priestly, and priesthood a royal office, and thus it was that the Saviour who—like the Pope—had been the Mediator between God and man was, as scion of David’s royal house, a King; as a son of God, a Priest. Innocent lent new life to a Bible figure, hitherto unregarded, or insufficiently exploited, by the Curia: that remarkable foreshadowing of Christ, the Priest-King of Salem, Melchizedek. Christ, and, as his representative, the Pope also, was a priest “after the order of Melchizedek,” such is the perpetually recurring formula in all the writings of Innocent the Great. With an inexhaustible variety of imagery he demonstrates that: “like as the soul is more than the body, so the priest is more than the king,” and he applies to the Pope the words of Scripture: “By me kings reign and princes decree justice.” He seeks ever fresh comparisons and metaphors to equate the vicegerent and mediator with the Lord himself, that he may appear as verus imperator, Emperor-Priest and Ruler of the world. There was nothing absolutely new in all this, nave the Pope’s unrelenting reiteration, which incessantly and particularly focussed the world’s attention on the priestly empire and the imperial priesthood.
Pope Innocent achieved his end. The wearer of the papal tiara was enthroned henceforth on giddy heights. On the other hand, however, thanks to the great Pope’s adoption of so many symbols and tokens of the Roman Emperors, the secular empire was saturated through and through with an atmosphere of hieratic sanctity. And the power of the Emperor, far from being weakened by this eloquence, received an undreamt-of accession of prestige. Thus Pope Innocent III, a spiritual father in very deed, must be reckoned, alongside Norman and Hohenstaufen, as amongst the immediate ancestors and predecessors of the young King Frederick.
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Buoyed up by such conceptions Innocent III flung himself into the quarrel of the succession. Formerly he had favoured Otto the Welf against Philip the Hohenstaufen, first, because “no pope loves a Staufen”; secondly, because a Hohenstaufen Emperor involved the danger, of which under a Welf there was no fear, of a fusion of Sicily with the Empire; thirdly, because the Welf was poor and had few adherents and would therefore be wholly beholden to the Curia and likely to prove a useful and obedient creature of the Pope. Lastly, the Welf was uncultured and unintellectual, but possessed in compensation an exceptionally powerful physique which well qualified him to be “the secular sword of the Church.” In spite of the Pope’s assistance, however, Otto had not succeeded in making headway in Germany against the Hohenstaufen rival. He would inevitably have succumbed in the last campaign of the Swabian Philip which was to have taken place in the summer of 1208. The attitude of Rome is an infallible index to the hopelessness of his cause: Pope Innocent withdrew his support from the Welf, released the Hohenstaufen from the ban, recognised the latter as king, and promised him the imperial crown if he would but make a pilgrimage to Rome.
Just as the Hohenstaufen was on the threshold of victory his assassination by the Count Palatine, Otto of Wittelsbach, a purely personal revenge, and the first regicide since there had been a German Empire, decided the succession in favour of the Welf. For the German princes were weary of civil war and quickly united to choose Otto of Brunswick, who hoped to unite the claims of both parties in his own person by betrothing himself, with the Pope’s approval, to Beatrice, the eleven-year-old daughter of the murdered man. Pope Innocent had conquered without effort: he hastened to declare himself ready to crown his protégé—whom he had so reluctantly thrown to the wolves—as Emperor in Rome.
It was not the wont of the Roman Curia, since she had come to power, to bestow the Emperor’s crown without a quid pro quo, and it was natural to demand an extra large one from her creature Otto IV; first, free episcopal election in Germany—which the Hohenstaufen had always refused to tolerate—then the recognition of Sicily as a papal fief, and an assurance of its absolute immunity from attack; and, finally, the cession to the Pope of certain imperial territories in Central Italy: the March of Ancona, Spoleto, the so-called Matilda inheritance, and others. In the general confusion created by the death of Henry VI, Pope Innocent had hastily seized these territories from the Empire, rightly or wrongly, and under the name of “Recuperations” incorporated them in the Patrimonium Petri. The Patrimonium now—in this extent a creation of Innocent’s—stretched right across Italy, a self-contained wedge driven between the papal fief of Sicily in the south and Lombardy, at all times hostile to the Empire. The dream of a united papal Italy seemed not too remote a possibility.
Otto was eager to reach his goal. He had already promised these concessions as long ago as 1201; he had no option but to cede what the Pope requested—without, however, securing the written confirmation of the German princes. He set out shortly to cross the Alps. As the boisterous march of his brilliant retinue broke the stillness of Rivotorto St. Francis is said to have sent one of his disciples to bid the future Emperor ponder on the evanescence of earthly greatness. Otto pursued his march. In the late autumn of 1209 he was crowned in Rome by Innocent himself as Roman Emperor. As for Innocent, he had, it seemed, accomplished all his desires. His protégé was Emperor; the severance of the Hohenstaufen Sicily from the empire of the Welfs seemed final and complete.
Suddenly events took place which threatened to overturn the whole nicely-balanced edifice of papal politics. The Welf, no sooner crowned, repudiated his promises. He laughed aloud when Innocent reminded him of his earlier agreements. In the very first negotiations about the central Italian territories Otto sh
owed himself anything but the Church’s “docile son.” The barons of the Sicilian mainland gave the immediate provocation for an incurable breach between Emperor and Pope. The arrival in Italy of the German Otto was heralded by the feudal nobility of Apulia as the signal to throw off for ever the yoke of the impotent young King. The conspiracy of September 1209, directed against Frederick by the barons of Sicily and Calabria, had fallen through, the Apulian barons had recourse this time to treachery. Their ringleader was the Count of Acerra, Diepold of Schweinspeunt, one of the young Germans who had held sway during Frederick’s boyhood in the royal castle of Palermo as successor to Markward of Anweiler. In addition to personal advantage and the hope of power, Diepold, like Markward, held firmly to the conviction that Sicily belonged unconditionally to the Roman Empire, and that the Norman heir of the Hohenstaufen was simply an obstacle in the way of union. After the lapse of over ten years an Emperor had appeared again in Italy. Diepold, therefore, immediately set himself to play into the hands of Otto IV as the only legitimate ruler of the kingdom.
Soon after his coronation in November 1209 Kaiser Otto visited Pisa, a town that had long been in alliance with Diepold and the Germans. Here the Apulian magnates sought him out, did him homage, and importuned him to seize the unprotected kingdom, for “none but the wearer of the Empire’s crown may reign by right in Sicily.” It is true that Otto had given the Pope assurances of the inviolability of Sicily, but he no longer held himself bound by the promise. It matters little whether the Emperor had from the first contemplated the reconquest of Sicily for the Empire—following the precedent of Henry VI—or whether he was now lured into the enterprise by the urgency of the Apulians, reinforced by the prayers of the Pisans. He agreed. He soon created Diepold Duke of Spoleto—an act of open hostility to the Pope—and in the following months, while regulating the affairs of Middle and Northern Italy, he began, as unobtrusively as possible, to make preparation for a campaign against Sicily. A further consideration may have weighed with him. The last of the Hohenstaufen, who was already a burden, might ere long be a danger. The imperial crown had been denied to Frederick after Philip’s murder, but he might at least lodge a claim to his father’s inheritance in Swabia, and there had in fact been negotiations between Pope and Emperor about some compromise with the young King. Many motives conspired to urge Otto forward to the fateful adventure, the Sicilian campaign.
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