Backman Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe

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264 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

immersed in water that had been blessed by a priest. Since water thus consecrated

was expected to “receive” the innocent and “reject” the guilty, the extent to which

a person sank and drowned was taken as legal proof of innocence or guilt. (In

civil cases, a so-called petit jury heard evidence and rendered a verdict that settled

the case without the use of an ordeal.) The royal court, in other words, was more

concerned to make sure that a standard and fair practice existed for bringing

charges against people than it was eager to alter the traditional means of deciding

innocence and guilt.

Ironically it was the court’s concern with justice that got Henry into trouble

with the Church. During the 1130s and 1140s England’s ecclesiastical courts had

greatly enlarged their jurisdiction until they impinged upon cases normally re-

served for the royal courts. The royal curia was determined to rectify the situa-

tion but had to wait for the right moment. There were a variety of important is-

sues at stake. First was the restoration of royal rights; the court simply could not

afford to let the Church take over the function of providing justice. Second was

a question of perceived fairness. What, for example, would happen to a person

convicted of murder or rape in an ecclesiastical court? The king’s law was clear:

Both were capital crimes. But the Church could hardly order anyone’s execution,

and so it normally condemned murderers and rapists to excommunication and

banishment. The existence of two standards of justice violated the sense of ra-

tional order. Third was the issue of criminal clergy, priests who violated royal

law. The curia insisted on its right to punish those who broke the king’s law.

Fourth, if the Church controlled royal courts, what was to prevent convicts from

appealing their cases to Rome? This possibility threatened the very sovereignty

of the Angevin dynasty.

In 1162 the archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the English Church,

died, and the court saw its opportunity. Henry appointed his best friend and

chief adviser Thomas Becket, the royal chancellor, to the post. But Becket—to

everyone’s surprise, including his own—experienced an spiritual epiphany when

he was consecrated as archbishop and became instantaneously an implacable foe

of royal designs. Henry was hurt and outraged by what he regarded as open

treachery. Angry words were volleyed on both sides and by 1164 their quarrel

had grown so bitter that Becket had to ﬂee to France for his own safety. An at-

tempt at reconciliation in 1170 fell apart when Henry, angered by reports that

Becket’s ﬁrst action after returning to his cathedral at Canterbury was to order

the excommunication of several of the king’s supporters, ﬂew into a rage. In his

wrath he reportedly cried out: “Will no one rid me of this miserable priest?”

Four of his household knights, believing that they had been given an oblique

order, rode to Canterbury and murdered Becket as he was celebrating Mass at

the altar.

Becket’s martyrdom shocked Europe. He was, after all, the ﬁrst prominent

Christian leader to be killed by the State ever since the European recovery and

Church reform had taken root. A popular cult focused on his martyrdom arose

instantly and his canonization became formal within three years. Miracles were

reported to occur at his tomb, and Canterbury quickly became England’s most

popular pilgrimage site. For centuries, pilgrims came from all over Europe to pray

at his shrine. (We will meet the most famous group of them in a later chapter.)

Henry was genuinely remorseful for his unintended complicity in the murder and

even submitted to a penitential ﬂogging by the Canterbury canons, but he refused

to relinquish all his jurisdictional claims. In general, he and most of the English

THE PAPAL MONARCHY 265

kings who followed him in the Middle Ages retained control over ecclesiastical

appointments and regained full jurisdiction over the royal courts, but the ecclesi-

astical courts retained the deciding hand in all cases regarding those who could

claim “beneﬁt of clergy.”

Henry’s last years were ﬁlled with disappointment. His sons, now grown to

manhood, plotted endlessly against him, usually with the encouragement of their

mother Eleanor of Aquitaine and of Capetian France’s King Philip Augustus

(1180–1223). It has been said of Henry that he could govern everything but his

own family. His sons raised several rebellions against him, and Henry had to

campaign hard to quell them, but in the end their united efforts defeated him. But

Henry’s accomplishments in reviving royal government, standardizing English

law, and professionalizing the bureaucracy survived for generations, and perhaps

the best gauge of his success lies in the fact that the English central government

remained intact and operational even during the nearly decade-long absentee-

kingship of Richard the Lionheart (1189–1199).

The second site of renewed Church-State tensions was the German Empire.

The emperor Henry V (1106–1125), who had agreed to the Concordat of Worms

in 1122, died only three years later without an heir. The German prelates favored

as emperor the devout, and hopefully therefore malleable, duke of Saxony named

Lothair. They engineered his election, and Lothair ruled for twelve years (1125–

1137) but remained rather ineffectual since (as was by now the clear fate of all

German emperors) he could never win the support of most of the secular princes.

He did, however, produce a daughter whose marriage to Henry the Proud, the

duke of Bavaria, opened up a dynastic and ideological rift that would dominate

imperial and northern Italian politics for several centuries. The daughter, Gertrude,

brought to her husband both the imperial title and the duchy of Saxony—and

these, combined with Henry’s own Bavarian principality, made him easily the

most powerful of all the German princes. Thus when Lothair died in 1137, very

few of the princes wanted Henry as emperor, and so they elected instead the

relatively weak duke of Franconia Conrad III Hohenstaufen (1138–1152), who set

to work immediately to attack Henry the Proud and cut him down to size. Civil

war engulfed most of Germany for nearly twenty years as Henry and his follow-

ers—known as the Welfs (from Henry’s family name)—fought against the Hohen-

staufen family and their supporters—known as the Waiblings (from the Hohen-

staufen family’s favorite hunting lodge at Waiblingen). In one way or another this

Welf-Waibling rivalry, which is better known by the Italianate version of their

names as the struggle between the Guelf and Ghibelline parties, played a role in

almost all subsequent imperial politics both within Germany and northern Italy,

even long after people had forgotten what the original designations meant.

Conrad III’s reign corresponded almost exactly with Stephen’s reign in En-

gland and had much the same anarchic character. Upon his death the elector-

princes, still favoring a weak emperor, selected Conrad’s nephew Frederick Bar-

barossa (or “Frederick Red-beard”), whose reign from 1152 to 1190 made him the

contemporary of England’s Henry II. Frederick tried to reconcile with his Guelf

opponents, but had mixed success. His most important action was to reestablish

direct control over northern Italy, for he knew that it was only through the wealth

to be made in the Mediterranean, combined with the strategic advantage of being

close enough to intimidate the papacy that generally favored the Guelf party, that

he could hope to create a strong central government. He rode south with a large

army and bludgeoned every city that did not welcome him with open arms. The

266 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

pope at that time, Hadrian IV (1154–1159),

rode north to greet him, partially in

the hope of winning an ally to counterbalance the growing strength of the

Norman-Sicilians to the south. Their meeting at Sutri was tense, but pope and

emperor joined forces to combat a new problem: a revolutionary leader named

Arnold of Brescia. John of Salisbury gives a sharp thumbnail sketch of the man.

[Arnold] held priestly status, was a canon regular, and he disciplined his body

through denial and an absence of possessions. He had sharp intelligence, was

steadfast in the study of Scripture, spoke eloquently, and vigorously preached

contempt for the world. But as everyone says, he was also a born trouble-

maker and rabble-rouser, and everywhere he went he stirred up the people

against the clergy. He had been the abbot at Brescia, and when the local

bishop, who had traveled to Rome and was returning from there, arrived back

at Brescia he found that Arnold had so roused the minds of the local citizens

against him that they were scarcely willing to permit their own bishop to re-

enter the city. Because of this Pope Innocent I deposed Arnold as abbot;

Arnold then went to France and studied under Peter Abelard....He gave

bishops no rest, attacking them for their avarice and their shameful money-

grubbing, for leading sin-stained lives, and for trying to build God’s Church

through the shedding of blood.

...Hewonthewhole city [of Rome] over to

his side while the pope was abroad in France....Arnold’s followers practiced

chastity, and this, together with their reputation for honesty and self-discipline

made them popular with everyone but especially with religious women....

He openly attacked the cardinals with the charge that their College, on ac-

count of its hubris, avarice, hypocrisy, and manifold wickedness, was not a

church of God but a business-house and a den of thieves....Hesaid that the

pope himself was not what he claimed to be—that is, an apostolic man, a

shepherd of souls—but a man of blood who maintains his power by ﬁre and

slaughter, a desecrator of churches, and an oppressor of the innocent who

does nothing but feed on the world’s ﬂesh and ﬁll his own purse by emptying

those of everyone else.

Arnold’s party had taken over Rome in the hope of reestablishing the old Republic

and thus doing away with both pope and emperor. This rebellion in Rome marks

the ﬁrst clear indication of widespread and passionate dissatisfaction with the

direction taken by the new Church and the new Europe of the twelfth century.

The Church, Arnold inveighed, having freed itself from the corruption that came

through control by the State, had become corrupted once again, but in an even

more malignant and noxious way, by assuming control of the State, and the bishops

who once were loving shepherds of Christian souls had turned themselves into

power-drunk potentates. Cities themselves, man’s natural social and political unit

according to Arnold—the communities in which men may speak for themselves

and control their own destinies, places that formed the foundational units of the

early Church itself—have fallen victim to warlords and episcopal bullies. Only by

restoring true republicanism, by toppling corrupt and anachronistic hierarchies,

Arnold preached, can a truly Christian society be created. Arnold and his followers

believed that stripping the Church of all its wealth and political authority could

establish a truly Christian commonwealth and secure human happiness, in other

words, only a Church that was wholly divested of earthly concerns could possibly

2. Originally named Nicholas Breakspear, Hadrian IV is the only Englishman ever to have been pope.

3. He is referring to the crusade movement. The Second Crusade had recently gone awry when Arnold

attempted his revolution.

THE PAPAL MONARCHY 267

fulﬁll its spiritual mission. Hadrian and Frederick joined forces and put Arnold’s

rebellion down quickly, and Arnold himself was hanged—but his ideas long sur-

vived him and became prominent elements in heterodox reform movements of

the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Arnold’s suppression and Hadrian’s rapprochement with Frederick signaled

an important change in the papacy’s relations with the free cities of Europe, es-

pecially within Italy, for it seemed to many that the Holy See had in fact become

the enemy of the most cherished republican ideals–an independent episcopacy,

communal autonomy, and a reformed Church uninterested in wealth and power.

The next pope, Alexander III (1159–1181), tried to improve relations by champi-

oning the Lombard League, an alliance of northern communes against Barbarossa’s

depredations. Barbarossa tried to crush the League, and scored his greatest success

when he ﬂattened the city of Milan itself; nevertheless, the League defeated the

German forces decisively at Legnano in 1176, a battle that forced the emperor, the

pope, and the communes to come to terms. A ﬁnal agreement was reached with

the Peace of Constance in 1183, which recognized the de facto autonomy of the

communes, their right to self-government, to select their own ofﬁcials, collect their

own taxes, and administer their own laws. The communes, for their part, recog-

nized the suzerainty of the emperor—a suzerainty that they generally maintained

simply by the payment of annual tribute.

After this peace, Frederick’s difﬁculties with the Church abated somewhat. He

was an old man, and as he aged he became more devoted to a pious life. His life

ended when he responded to the news of Jerusalem’s fall to Saladin in 1187 and

put together a massive army that led the ﬁrst wave of the Third Crusade. Frederick

drowned while crossing an Anatolian river, and his forces quickly disbanded and

raced back to Germany to prepare for the next round of imperial politicking. The

subsequent phase of the imperial-papal struggle owed much to the results of those

maneuvers.

ONSOLIDATION OF

APAL

UTHORITY

Toward the end of the twelfth century, as the Church reform came to its conclusion,

many of the ideals and energies that had propagated it in the ﬁrst place began to

wane. The reform had begun with an identiﬁcation of the Church as the outraged

innocent, the spiritual house of God being trammeled and trampled upon by a

self-serving and greedy secular world. Christians rushed to its rescue in the tenth

and eleventh centuries and won it the freedom it needed; but then, toward the

end of the eleventh century and throughout the twelfth, when the reform reached

the papacy, ﬁgures like Gregory VII, Urban II, and Alexander III changed the rules

of the game by openly proclaiming the Church’s supremacy to and sovereignty

over the secular world. Church and State, in other words, were no longer separate;

they were still one, but with their historical roles reversed. The papacy itself had

become a massive bureaucracy whose hallways teemed with lawyers—canon law-

yers, to be sure, but lawyers nonetheless. Church supremacy over secular society

made necessary the means to wield it; consequently an elaborate ﬁnancial

machinery, judicial system, bureaucratic structure, police network, and standing

army all became elements of the new Church. Not everyone was pleased by this

militancy, as the example of Arnold of Brescia showed. Could the Church, and

speciﬁcally the papacy, dominate and administer the world without being

corrupted by it? The leading ﬁgures in the papal curia believed that it could. More

268 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

importantly, they believed that it had to. The idea of the “papal monarchy” rested

on the conviction that the long-term stability of Christian society required the

oversight of an impartial arbiter. The very fact of the Church’s disinterestedness

in worldly affairs made it the perfect and necessary judge over them. The fact that

the Holy See had had a territorial base in the Papal State since the seventh century

meant that it had quite a bit of experience in secular administration; but it now

began to take those powers abroad. As the examples of England’s Henry II and

Germany’s Frederick Barbarossa show, the campaign was a bumpy one, but during

the pontiﬁcate of Innocent III (1198–1216), the medieval papacy reached the high

point of its political power and international prestige. Innocent was by far the

single most powerful pope of the Middle Ages; perhaps only Pope John Paul II

in our own day has wielded comparable inﬂuence on the international scene.

At ﬁrst, the conditions did not seem right for so large an ambition. The wars

of Alexander III to win papal control, or at least to break imperial control, over

northern Italy, combined with the cost of the burgeoning bureaucracy of the papal

court itself, left the papacy deeply in debt in the 1180s and 1190s. Relatively few

members of the curia received a salary; most lived off fees that they exacted for

their services. But since no general standards existed to determine what those fees

should be, the opportunities for bribery were widespread. Persons ﬁling petitions

with an ofﬁce of the curia or appealing to the papal court had to grease the palms

of an apparently endless sequence of ofﬁcials. So lucrative were some of the clerk-

ships that popes like Alexander III began the practice of granting (for a fee) the

“expectancy” of the ofﬁce—in effect, selling the position like a future share on the

bond or stock market.

Thus a certain conundrum existed: Papal prestige ran at

an all-time high, but the reputation of the curia—the lawyer-ofﬁcials who ran the

pontiff’s administrative machinery—stood at a low level indeed. Popular satires

were written all across Europe ridiculing the corruption of fee-crazed papal bu-

reaucrats, the most famous of these being the “Gospel According to the Mark of

Silver” and the mock-hagiographic “Life of the Blessed Martyrs Albinus [Latin for

‘silver’] and Ruﬁnus [‘gold’].”

When Lothario dei Segni became Pope Innocent III in 1198, he was the youn-

gest cardinal in the Church, only thirty-seven years of age. He was also the most

brilliant. He had written two still-underrated books, De contemptu mundi [“On

Contempt for the World”] and De sacro altaris mysterio [“On the Sacred Mystery of

the Altar”], and had received a thorough legal training at Bologna. De contemptu

mundi does not have the tone and message that its title might lead one to think.

It is a subtle work that both evokes and expands upon St. Augustine’s distinction

between use and enjoyment; the world we inhabit is the supremely beautiful cre-

ation of a loving God, but it is the Creator, not the creation itself, that we ought

to focus our own love upon. Compared to God Himself, this world is as nothing

and we ought not to let it distract us from our true mission in life of loving and

serving Him; we should, in short, use the world to advance God’s cause but not

enjoy the world for its own sake.

It is in this light that we must consider Innocent’s enormous political ambition,

for even though he had an aristocratic background and an autocratic temperament

he did not seek power for power’s sake. His voluminous writings show a genuine

and complex, if at times contradictory, commitment to the ideal that only the Holy

See can arbitrate between secular leaders, resolve secular disputes, administer sec-

4. Since these expectancies were for ofﬁces that were technically administrative rather than ecclesias-

tical, selling them escaped the charge of simony.

THE PAPAL MONARCHY 269

ular concerns, and gauge secular actions and behaviors—precisely because of its

lack of interest in them. The papacy possessed, he argued, a “fullness of power”

(plenitudo potestatis) that entitled it, and in fact required it, to involve itself in every

aspect of human life in which moral or spiritual matters were at stake. That is a

rather large catchment area, and Innocent seldom hesitated to press his claims.

Nor did he bother to elucidate a large, carefully developed, all-embracing theory

about papal might; he simply produced a justiﬁcation for every action whenever

one was needed.

To take a particular example: Like many churchmen, Innocent had ambivalent

feelings toward the economic bonanza that Europe was enjoying. The improved

standard of living certainly pleased everyone in a general way, but the embryonic

system of capitalism that was emerging raised important moral questions. Capi-

talism, after all, depends on the use of credit in order to function. Banks loan

money to manufacturers, manufacturers loan money to merchants, merchants loan

money to business partners or to customers, all in order to keep the cycle of

manufacturing, marketing, and consumption moving. But credit also involves the

payment of interest, which is where the problem lay. From the Church’s point of

view, the charging of interest was intrinsically immoral since it entails proﬁting

directly from someone else’s economic need; to offer money to someone who needs

it only on condition that the person in need will repay more than the amount

borrowed is extortion (the speciﬁc term the Church used is usury), and the Church

tried everything it could to stamp it out—all to no avail.

Nevertheless, the issue illustrates Innocent’s concerns and methods: The

Church has a right and obligation, he insisted, to involve itself in any human

activity that has a moral component. Such a claim cast a wide net, one that In-

nocent used to full advantage. Asserting his claim of plenitudo potestatis he tried

not only to end the practice of charging interest but to set what he deemed the

just price of goods and services and to determine the fair wages of workers, to

articulate a speciﬁc code of sexual conduct within marriage and to regulate the

prostitution trade, to control social contact between members of different ethnic

and religious groups, to limit what he regarded as the excessive liberality of some

of Europe’s schools and universities, and to establish standards for social dress

and comportment. Moral renewal, Innocent felt deeply, had to be a constant, on-

going process at a personal, daily level, and it was the Church’s responsibility to

be at the center of it all and to urge it on.

One of his dearest desires was to lead a successful crusade, which he saw as

part of the call to personal moral renewal. Jerusalem still lay under Muslim control,

and the modest tolerance that marked Saladin’s treatment of Christians after the

Third Crusade ended with his death in 1193. Innocent planned the preaching and

recruitment for the new campaign meticulously. It was decided that the crusaders

would take the sea route rather than trek across eastern Europe and Anatolia—

since the Byzantines could not be trusted—and so plans were laid for the crusaders

to gather at Venice. But the commanders-in-charge had overestimated the number

of recruits they could bring and found themselves unable to pay the Venetians for

all the supplies and steerage for which they had contracted. The leading magistrate

(doge) of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, agreed to forgive the crusaders’ debt and trans-

port them to the Holy Land if they would stop en route at the Dalmatian city of

Zara, which the king of Hungary had seized some years before, and restore it to

Venetian control. Seeing no other option, the crusaders did so. When news reached

Rome of the crusaders’ sidetrack action, Innocent ﬂew into a rage and excom-

municated the entire crusading army. Zara, after all, was a Christian city. The

270 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

crusaders-in-exile wintered in Zara, and while they were there an embassy arrived

from the Byzantine prince Alexius, who had recently been driven from Constan-

tinople by a palace coup. Alexius promised the crusaders that if they helped re-

store him to his throne he would provide them with ample soldiers, supplies, and

money to complete their conquest of Jerusalem. He was lying, of course, but the

crusaders believed him since they saw no alternative. They therefore set sail for

Constantinople, which they conquered and sacked in April 1204. The crusade com-

mander, Count Baldwin of Flanders, quickly got rid of Alexius and became the

new emperor; he and his successors ruled until 1261, during which time the forced

reunion of the Latin and Greek churches was proclaimed. Given this unexpected

outcome, Innocent relented and rejoiced in the involuntary return of the Greeks

to Latin authority. The Greeks, for their part, felt otherwise.

The Latin empire that Baldwin and his successors ruled was hardly an empire

at all; it consisted of little more than the cities of Constantinople and Adrianople

plus the thin strip of land that connected them and a few outposts on the Anatolian

coast. Most of Asia Minor remained in Turkish hands. Three Byzantine rump states

were established at Nicaea, Epirus, and Trebizond, and the bulk of the western

portion of the empire (including most of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean

islands) was divided up by Venetian armed companies and French barons. On the

whole, the Latin Christians treated their Orthodox subjects more harshly than they

did their Muslim ones in the Holy Land. They introduced feudalism with a heavy

hand and displaced tens of thousands of indigenous farmers; they held monop-

olies over the most lucrative commodities moving through eastern ports; they

pillaged Orthodox churches and monasteries and attempted to compel obedience

to Rome. Innocent III, to his credit, was horriﬁed by the reports of the despoliation

of the eastern churches but was not so stricken that he could not reconcile himself

to the notion of a reunited—even if an unwillingly reunited—Christendom.

In his relations with the European heads of state, Innocent showed himself to

be a skillful politician, deftly playing one ruler off another. His ﬁrst challenge was

in dealing with the Norman-Sicilian realm. In 1186 Frederick Barbarossa had mar-

ried his son Henry VI (1190–1197) to Constance, the aunt of Sicily’s young king

William II (1166–1189). William, hoping to emulate his adventurous ancestor Rob-

ert Guiscard, had been planning to conquer Constantinople and wanted a German

alliance in order to avoid an invasion from the north while he was on campaign.

The pope at that time, Urban III (1185–1187), saw no reason to oppose the match

since he assumed, along with everyone else, that William would produce an heir

to the Sicilian throne. But in 1189 William died unexpectedly and childless, leaving

his aunt Constance and her Hohenstaufen husband as the rulers of Sicily and

southern Italy. The Papal State stood surrounded by imperial territories, and these

were now governed by the Holy See’s most implacable Hohenstaufen enemy.

When Innocent III came to the papal throne, Henry VI was dead but a son—

named Frederick—had already been born, thus assuring the dynastic linkage of

the northern and southern territories. Innocent played on Constance’s well-

founded fears of a baronial refusal to recognize her son’s rights and persuaded

her to recognize the Holy See as feudal overlord for Sicily; when Constance herself

took ill, she made her three-year-old son Frederick a ward of the papal court.

Innocent had won at least a respite from immediate danger as he waited for Fred-

erick to reach maturity.

Innocent’s warnings to Constance about baronial revolt had not been alarmist.

Throughout the Middle Ages the succession of a minor to a royal title almost

always inspired at least some aristocrats to break away and form an autonomous

THE PAPAL MONARCHY 271

principality. The fact that Frederick was only three meant that ambitious princes

had at least a dozen years at their disposal for doing mischief in Germany. Two

ﬁgures soon emerged to claim the throne for themselves: Otto of Brunswick led

the Guelf party, while Frederick’s uncle Philip of Swabia was the Ghibelline can-

didate. Aiming to minimize the Hohenstaufen power-base, Innocent initially sup-

ported Otto after extracting from him promises, never to attempt to unite Sicily

with the empire and to renounce all the royal controls over the German Church

left standing by the Concordat of Worms. But when Otto reneged on his promises,

Innocent quickly absolved the German princes of their oaths of loyalty to him and

began negotiations with Philip Augustus of France for a retaliatory strike. Otto

patched together a hasty pact with England’s unreliable king John, but the alliance

was smashed in a decisive battle at Bouvines by Philip Augustus’ forces in 1214.

This defeat effectively ended Otto’s reign, as the German magnates grudgingly

recognized young Frederick as the heir to the throne, and also started the French

campaign of driving the English from their continental possessions. Eighteen-

year-old Frederick, for his part, vowed to adhere to all the concessions originally

granted by Otto to Innocent. By deft diplomacy and a bit of luck, Innocent had

succeeded in securing Frederick’s crown, winning recognition that Sicily was a

papal ﬁef and would forever remain separate from the empire, and securing the

renunciation of all remaining royal rights over the German Church.

Innocent scored similar successes in his dealings with England and France.

Relations between those two kingdoms hardly improved in the aftermath of the

Third Crusade. While Richard languished in his Viennese prison cell and John

ineptly took over his government, Philip, a much keener strategist than either of

them, was hard at work plotting to drive the Plantagenets from France. Since the

dispute was between a feudal lord and his vassal, Innocent had no direct right to

intervene, so he invented one. Whenever there is a threat of war, he argued, there

is a threat of sin being committed, and for this reason the pope is obliged to take

action. Innocent wrote scores of letters to each sovereign, trying to micro-manage

the Anglo-French conﬂict. John proved malleable, even more so after Richard died

in 1199 and John took over the government in his own right. As Philip reconquered

territory after territory from the English—in the end he regained all the continen-

tal territories except for part of Gascony—John’s authority in England grew

weaker and weaker. The disputed succession to the archbishopric of Canterbury

in 1206 showed the extent of John’s weakness and of Innocent’s willingness to use

every weapon at his disposal. The cathedral canons had elected one candidate to

the ofﬁce; the suffragan bishops had chosen another, and John had put forth a

third. All three candidates sent embassies to Rome, but Innocent rejected them all

and appointed instead Stephen Langton, an English cardinal whom Innocent had

known years before when studying theology in Paris. The canons and bishops

acquiesced, but John loudly refused to recognize Langton or let him into the coun-

try. When the conﬂict escalated, Innocent took extreme measures: He excommu-

nicated John, freed his vassals from their feudal ties, helped Philip Augustus pre-

pare an invasion of the island, and placed the whole of England under an

interdict.

Faced with rebellion on all sides, John capitulated in 1213 and in a

desperate attempt to stay in power agreed to give the kingdom of England to

Innocent and receive it back from him as a papal ﬁef. Innocent rewarded John’s

5. An interdict is a ban on the performance of all sacraments within a proscribed territory. Although

an interdict could in theory be imposed by any bishop, in the past usually only popes had been willing

to use this extreme measure. Innocent used it often, and it usually worked.

272 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

return to obedience by condemning the Magna Carta of 1215, the charter conﬁrm-

ing the king’s obligations to his vassals and restricting his claims upon them.

Philip Augustus proved much harder to bring to heel. Innocent had clashed

with him earlier over the issue of Philip’s marriage to a Danish princess in 1193.

Philip, according to biased sources, married the young woman, named Ingeborg,

but found on the wedding night that her breath was intolerably bad, and so he

had her put away and ordered a council of French bishops to declare the marriage

annulled (even though he kept her dowry); he then remarried and raised a family.

Ingeborg appealed to Rome and Innocent tried for several years to get Philip to

return to her. When all else failed, Innocent imposed an interdict on France—but

Philip was shrewd enough to recognize that Innocent needed him to provide mus-

cle for the papacy’s struggles with England, Germany, and Sicily, and the pope

would therefore never take direct action to stir up the French nobles against their

king. So he bided his time. When Philip’s second wife died in 1213, he did agree

to restore Ingeborg to her queenly throne, but he never surrendered to Innocent’s

authority the way that Europe’s other monarchs had done and in the process he

won Innocent’s grudging respect. Philip’s victory at Bouvines against a German

force led by Otto of Brunswick, (the princes’ candidate for emperor, as opposed

to the papally supported Frederick II), marked the turning point in Innocent’s

political inﬂuence, and it made Philip, for the time being, the most powerful mon-

arch in Europe.

Buoyed by these victories, Innocent then embarked on his greatest achieve-

ment of all: In 1215 he summoned to Rome a general council to complete, ﬁnalize,

and codify the reform of the Church. This was the Fourth Lateran Council, and it

was by far the largest, busiest, and most imposing gathering of clerics since the

Council of Nicaea in 325. More than four hundred bishops and eight hundred

abbots, with all their retinues, were in attendance.

The Council began at daybreak on St. Martin’s day [11 November] with the

pope celebrating Mass in the Church of Our Savior, also known as the Church

of Constantine. The only people admitted were cardinals, archbishops, and

bishops; but when the Mass was ended and the various bishops and abbots

(who wore no mitres, unlike the bishops) had taken their seats, then many

thousands of people—it seemed like ten times a hundred thousand—clerics

and commoners alike, all streamed into the church. In no time at all so many

had poured in that even the church’s immense size could hardly hold them.

Then the lord pope, a man wiser than all others and ﬁlled with the spirit of

wisdom and understanding, stood on a raised platform above his cardinals

and ministers and sang the Veni, Creator.

Most of the council’s work had been accomplished beforehand; the convocation

was mainly a ceremonial send-off for all the ecclesiastical legislation that had been

drawn up earlier. With this council the Catholic Church reached full maturity. It

organized the papal bureaucracy into the ofﬁces that it would retain for centuries:

the Chancery, which dealt with records and bulls; the Camera, which administered

papal ﬁnances; and the Datary, which headed the Holy See’s judiciary wing. The

council also formally established the seven sacraments of the Church: baptism,

conﬁrmation, confession, the Mass, marriage, ordination, and last rites. It decreed

that all baptized Christians had to confess their sins and receive communion at

least once a year (a requirement that tells us much about the extent to which

medieval commoners participated in the Church’s sacramental life). It placed a

moratorium on the establishment of new religious orders; it forbade clergy from

THE PAPAL MONARCHY 273

participating in secular trials-by-ordeal. It condemned the practice of clerics’ charg-

ing fees for their performance of the sacraments. It enacted measures to enforce

clerical celibacy and obedience. It required that every monastery in Christendom

undergo an annual visitation by its presiding bishop to ensure proper liturgical

observance, monastic obedience, and moral uprightness. It ordered Europe’s Jew-

ish population to wear distinguishing badges on their clothing (a circular patch,

usually of yellow) so that Christians and Jews would not inadvertently trespass

interreligious social and legal borders. It ordered all bishops to operate schools

attached to their cathedrals and to preach in them regularly.

The Fourth Lateran Council lasted only three weeks, in which time it issued

an historic body of legislation. Innocent stood at the pinnacle of his power.

EVIVAL OF

ERESY

In the twelfth century, widespread heresy returned to Latin Europe. There is little

record of heterodox or dissenting religious groups in the preceding centuries and

this scantiness has led some historians to suggest that heresy all but vanished

under the Carolingians and then suddenly reappeared four hundred years later;

this conclusion in turn inclined them to believe that the sudden new outbreaks of

heretical views must have been the result of foreign inﬂuence—ideas brought back

by traders, crusaders, or pilgrims to the Greek and Muslim East. But a more likely

explanation is that the late- and post-Carolingian world faced such dire threats of

invasion, pillage, disease, and famine that religious deviance seldom got men-

tioned in the surviving texts. Who cared about theological hairsplitting when the

Vikings were burning the village? Besides, the most common religious problem

was probably apostasy—that is, newly Christianized people reverting to their orig-

inal paganism—which does not come under the category of heresy, and hence

those few chroniclers who set to work in the tenth and eleventh centuries seldom

mentioned any heresy astir in Christendom.

But full-ﬂedged heresy came back with a vengeance, literally, in the twelfth.

It ﬁrst reappeared in various guises in the Mediterranean cities and spread north-

ward. The inﬂux of new philosophical ideas from the translation centers, itinerant

scholars, cathedral schools, and universities certainly played a role in shaping

some of these new heresies, or in supplying some of their vocabularies, but it is

a mistake to think of twelfth-century heresies as movements of intellectual dissent.

They were instead, like the very energies that began the Peace of God campaigns

and the entire reform effort, popular movements and grassroots expressions of

social and spiritual discontent. A single, simple ideal propelled most of these

heretical groups: a desire for what they regarded as the apostolic life. Only a Church

that was made up of the simple ritual and moral purity of Christ’s ﬁrst followers,

they believed, could be a true church “of Christ.” Hence their heresy often con-

sisted more of rejecting ideas and practices of the reformed Church that they re-

garded as superﬂuous than it did of replacing those ideas and practices with

contrary ones of their own. Many protestors did not even recognize the necessity

of a sacramental priesthood—after all, they reasoned, the overwhelming majority

of believing Christians had been effectively priestless for twelve hundred years

anyway, so what did priests matter? The people developed their own traditions

of devotion, a kind of lay piety. They gathered in small groups to pray, sing hymns,

and recite psalms; those who knew how would read out passages from the Bible.

The devotional style was more congregational than most people today realize. The

Church, as it reformed, responded to the situation in a number of ways, and the