Finally, there was a nativist coup in the city and the new emperor was murdered. The crusaders, from their camps outside the walls, witnessed their hopes for military and financial support, which had already been dimmed because of Alexius’s attitude, begin to evaporate before their eyes. They decided to take charge of the situation themselves and on 9 April 1204, following confession and Mass according to the Latin rite, attacked the city. Disaster after disaster plagued them in their skirmishes and assaults. Even nature seemed to be against them; contrary winds made support from the sea nearly impossible. Why they resumed the attack at all after an interruption of a few days is unclear. Certainly, clergy preached the justice of the war: the crusaders and the Venetians had been betrayed, harassed, many killed; the Greeks hated them and were disloyal to Rome; God was testing His holy army, and they must meet the test.
On the twelfth of April they resumed the attack against devastating odds, managing to breach the walls and open the gates of the city, wreaking havoc as they rushed through the streets. When darkness fell, the situation was still uncertain. The smell of burning flesh and the noise of the collapse of buildings weakened by the flames permeated the city as destructive fires spread in the aftermath of the afternoon’s murderous street battles. Substantial Greek forces that might have saved the situation for the Byzantines decided instead to abandon the capital. As day dawned, the crusaders and Venetians discovered that they were masters of a smouldering yet still great city. They took their revenge: the spoils of war – reliquaries and relics, cameos and jewels, ornaments and precious icons – would soon find their way to castles and churches in the Latin West. They elected Count Baldwin IX of Flanders as emperor and proceeded to enforce Latin authority over the Greek people and the Greek Church in Constantinople and wherever else they could establish it in Greece, the archipelago and Asia Minor. The pope, who was genuinely dismayed by the fate of his crusading project, decided to accept the outcome as the will of God. It seemed as though the Churches would be definitively united, and there was hope that in the future the Latin empire of Constantinople would provide a base for sustaining the crusader settlements in the Holy Land.
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Meanwhile, in the heartland of southern France and northern Italy, there was a situation as confounding as the succession crises in Germany and Sicily and the strange course of the Fourth Crusade – heresy. Why heresy was or appeared to the popes as particularly widespread in southern Europe, especially Languedoc, has never been answered with complete satisfaction. Perhaps, as one argument goes, the dioceses in Languedoc were too large for efficient administration, giving dissident groups a chance to flourish there rather than elsewhere. Perhaps the aristocracy in this long-stateless region patronized as leaders of the Church those who supported them in their political squabbles, with little concern as to whether these men would pay much attention to curbing dissent.
What is certain is that, in the twelfth century, several groups or sects of Christians in Languedoc and the neighbouring lands began to claim a more authentic understanding of the faith. They did not all share the same beliefs. Some, like the Humiliati, were insistent on the superiority of the simple life and the necessity to preach the gospel of love even if they maintained their lay status. Yet, the Humiliati were also willing to live in endowed fraternal communities that provided a modicum of institutional control, on the pattern of monasteries, and did not seem to represent too great a breach with Catholic practice. Others wished to renounce all worldly possessions, rejected or at least cared little about institutional life, and also demanded to be allowed to preach, whether they were ordained to do so by the visible Church or not. Those of this persuasion, often called Waldensians after one of the most devout among them, Waldes, a rich merchant turned Poor Man of Lyons, did not all break irrevocably from the Church. Although a blanket condemnation of lay preaching had been imposed in the twelfth century, Innocent III allowed it under local licence and to particular groups. These included the rehabilitated Humiliati, whether lay or ordained, as some were, and also those Waldensians who retained their orthodoxy. Only those Waldensians who stubbornly rejected priestly authority and, over time, much more of the Catholic sacramental system, and penitential theology, including purgatory, came to be regarded as heretics.
Much more serious, in Innocent’s view, even than the unrepentant Waldensians were the Cathars, for their disagreement with the visible Church ran deeper. The overwhelming weight of recent research has been to emphasize that not all Cathars were the same, but almost any selection of the various views they held was repugnant to orthodoxy. The range of their beliefs comprehended rejection of the Old Testament and indeed of the traditional unity of God, in favour of dualism. The God of the Old Testament was the God of the visible, created world, a world of evil; the God of the Old Testament was evil. Opposed to him was the God of the New Testament, a spirit unsullied by created matter. Jesus, some sort of manifestation of the good God’s will, could not have been a corporeal being. He only appeared to be so and could never have suffered and died, an allegation that undermined the redemptive theology of Catholic orthodoxy, including the central thesis of vicarious atonement: He died and thus paid for our sins. Moreover, compounding the Cathars’ heresy in Catholic eyes was the fact that they taught their abominable doctrines at least in part through an organized group of teachers; there seemed to be in this sense a competing Cathar Church.
On sexual matters, any similarities between the Cathars and Catholics were more apparent than real. Both prized chastity, and both had people vowed to celibacy, the ‘perfect’ among the Cathars, monks, nuns and priests among the Catholics. But Cathar perfects spurned sex, not only because they sensed something vile in fleshly yearnings, but also because they detested the idea of reproducing, that is, of imprisoning souls in bodies for another generation. If Catholic theologians found virginity a higher ideal than sexual activity in marriage, they still argued that such activity found its basic justification, some would say its only justification, in reproduction. ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ God said in Genesis, pretty good evidence to a Cathar that the Old Testament God was evil.
One of the reasons that Innocent III was willing to reconcile orthodox Waldensians to the Church, and to sanction lay preaching under episcopal licence, is that the orthodox Waldensians found the Cathars’ theology repellent and zealously wanted to preach against it and to live exemplary Catholic lives of poverty that would wean the fallen from the heresy. In the same spirit, Innocent promoted St Dominic’s efforts to spread Catholic orthodoxy and St Francis’s mission to the urban faithful.
Dominic (1170–1221), a Castilian, had been involved in missions to the Cathar heretics in Languedoc since 1206, but had not been particularly effective in his efforts. He hit upon the idea of founding a new order of missionaries, the Order of Friars Preachers, whose principal duties would be to combat the heresy and teach the essentials of the Catholic faith. From the beginning he insisted that recruits to the order be possessed of the high intellectual training necessary to combat non-orthodox interpretations of the Bible, and he required his adherents to take a vow of poverty that, he believed, would promote a way of life that would in itself be exemplary. It would furnish a living answer to heterodox criticisms of clerical magnificence in a world otherwise of great poverty and appalling inequalities between the rich and the vast number of poor. Although Innocent favoured Dominic’s struggles, it was the pope’s successor who formally approved the new order, familiarly known after its founder as the Dominicans.
Innocent also saw in the movement founded by St Francis (1182–1226), whose rule he approved in 1210, a missionary force comparable to that of the Dominicans. By their poverty, their orthodox preaching of the gospel and their obedience, a necessary precondition to the pope’s recognition of the legitimacy of their endeavour, the Order of Friars Minor or Franciscans, also known as Grey Friars, from their plain garb, became something like the shock troops of evangelical Christianity in the early thirteenth century. In the beginning they were more loosely organized than the Dominicans. Their houses, also known as convents, were mere stopping-off points, as the early Franciscans were little more than itinerant mendicants. They were actively in the world and eagerly appealed to townsfolk, including merchants, brokers, artisans, common labourers and prostitutes. They were relentless in their criticism of avarice and self-indulgence and set an austere example of self-sacrifice to the urban laity. But they also, and no one more than their founder, carried with them the gospel of love and forgiveness. In his own time and soon after, there were those who, drawing on the prophecies of a twelfth-century Calabrian mystic Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), came to regard Francis as a sign or even THE SIGN of a new dispensation, the Age of the Holy Spirit. The belief that at the end of his life he miraculously received on his body the stigmata, the signs of Jesus’s suffering, confirmed this somewhat heterodox belief for many.
The St Francis of the Middle Ages ought not to be confused with the nineteenth-century vision of him as a Romantic, a lonely hero standing against conventions, a man who put feelings before the demands of propriety and custom, a perpetual man-child in his awe and love of nature. To be sure, some of the dramatic moments in his life explain his appeal to the Romantics. Francis, the youthful soldier, goes off to fight one more time and has a change of heart; the conversion compels him to renounce the luxury to which the well-to-do Italian merchant’s son has been accustomed and, in defiance of his father, to strip naked to formalize the renunciation. Francis’s love of nature as God’s creation, as expressed in his famous hymn, ‘Canticle of the Sun’, and in those stories about him preaching to the birds and calming a vicious wolf, fit in well with the Romantics’ own obsessions about unity with nature, too.
But Francis was never self-indulgent and always obedient to ecclesiastical, as opposed to paternal, authority; he was absolutely certain that he was chosen as a pillar of the visible Church. Even his personal turn against war and his identification with the gospel of love did not make him, for example, an opponent of the crusades, despite what some commentators have wanted to believe. There is no authentic statement of his condemning the wars, although it is probably true that he would have preferred persuasion or at least that he thought that persuasion might be more effective, as demonstrated by one of the more famous incidents from his life. He accompanied a crusading expedition of 1219, during which he crossed the lines dividing Christian and Muslim forces in Egypt. Taken by Muslim sentries, who thought the poorly dressed man might be an emissary sent to negotiate the Christians’ surrender, he was brought before the sultan. Instead of negotiating, he offered to walk unharmed through fire as proof of the supremacy of the Catholic faith. Recognizing their misidentification of the man as an emissary, the Muslims, after some initial uncertainty on how to treat him, finally decided to send the seemingly demented man back to the Christian camp.
It is as difficult to know why the Cathars and their austere doctrines appealed to so many people as it is to know why the Franciscans and their strident critique of the people to whom they were preaching did. Yet there is no doubt that, for example, many urban merchants were attracted to both and were as ready to protect the former from persecution as they were to patronize the latter. Some groups have particularly attracted historians’ inquiries and none more so than women. It has been suggested that women relished opportunities in Catharism that were lacking in Catholicism (at least until the Franciscan and Dominican movements seemed to promise them something) and that they became Cathars in greater numbers than men. These assertions still remain open questions, although opinions are strong on both sides.
As for the Franciscans and Dominicans, the situation is also somewhat nebulous. Certainly, a great many women were attracted to the evangelical movement and formed a second order of nuns. Yet, if they thought the roles that they would play would somehow duplicate those played by the men, they soon learned the error of their beliefs. Despite a promise from Innocent III to St Clare, one of Francis’s close friends and the founder of the Franciscan second order, the Poor Clares, future popes did not allow the sisters to live as austere a life of poverty as their male counterparts. And the women were never allowed to wander as holy beggars or to preach publicly to heretics or even to do so to plain ordinary sinful townsfolk. Despite these restrictions, women entered the orders in numbers, and women and men who wanted to share something of the evangelical movement without fully becoming friars or nuns came to constitute a third order of lay adherents.
In time, the renewal associated with the evangelical movement might have effected the conversion of Cathars and other heretics, but the pope saw a stumbling block in the refusal of many secular princes to pay more than lip service to bishops’ and missionaries’ efforts to bring the heretics to heel. No one excited his disgust more than Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, the most powerful baron in Languedoc. Raymond’s case was simple enough. He always insisted on his orthodoxy, but he had no desire to disrupt the social life of his domains. It is not clear that he saw the Cathars as a particular problem either. Many were or seemed to be good people, harmless vegetarians who fasted a lot; indeed, the phrase ‘good people’ (boni homines, bons hommes, and their feminine counterparts) was a common popular way of describing them in Languedoc. Many families were part Cathar, part Catholic. It might be dangerous to force people to repudiate kin and loved ones and subject them to episcopal censure, fines and imprisonment, backed up by the count’s prestige and power. It would destabilize his vast lordships, which stretched from the Atlantic in the west to beyond the Rhône in the east.
Innocent III was a patient man. He cajoled, negotiated, enticed, but he never forgot for one moment what his goals were: the conversion to the Catholic faith of a large and disaffected group of Christians infected with heresy and the protection of the faithful against those heretics who refused to convert. Raymond VI seemed too often indifferent to these goals. And that apparent indifference was maddening to the pope and his emissaries.
The sense of frustration grew over time. When, in 1208, one of the pope’s legates whom Raymond VI detested was assassinated, Innocent’s relative moderation came to an end. Blaming Raymond VI for engineering the murder, a deed the count always denied, the pope excommunicated him, in effect deposing him, and encouraged loyal orthodox Christians to join in a military campaign against him. The material promise was the distribution of his lands to the victors, and the spiritual promise was the bestowal on the soldiers of the same privileges that were granted to militant pilgrims to the Holy Land. The Albigensian Crusade, so-called from the town of Albi, not far from Toulouse, where the Cathars and their supporters were believed to be particularly strong, would be a holy war against Christians, no accident like the one against the Greeks in 1204 to be justified as God’s will after the fact, but authorized deliberately against Christian heretics. Some of the military encounters fought at the papacy’s behest in defence of its Sicilian policy in the recent past, especially those against Markward of Anweiler, whom Henry VI had made regent of the island kingdom, had an overtone of crusading, but one could still argue that genuine crusades were not being directed against Christians. With the Albigensian Crusade, that could no longer be said.
The war was to drag on for twenty years and its fortunes would profoundly affect the development of the French monarchy, for northern Frenchmen by and large made up the armies that fought in the crusade. In the end, too, though long after Innocent’s death, there would be a papal victory, and the missionary and repressive activity necessary to eradicate Catharism would be put in place. But not everyone was persuaded that the extension of crusading to Christian heretics was a good thing. Many would criticize future popes who had recourse to the practice after far less soul-searching than Innocent III.
Not every scholar believes that Innocent III was the greatest of the medieval popes. It is sometimes said, rather testily, that he was just the busiest. As if serious problems in Germany, Italy and Sicily, the strange fate of the Fourth Crusade, the harnessing of the evangelical movement and the confrontation with heresy were not enough, Innocent faced difficult political contests with the French and English monarchs. In both, he showed his characteristic patience and the willingness to resort to a radical solution if the patience did not pay off.
France presented the simpler problem. In 1193, several years before Innocent Ill’s pontificate, King Philip II Augustus married Ingeborg, the Danish king’s sister. Almost from the moment they wed he seemed repelled by her. Philip, in a reprise of the behaviour of his namesake Philip I, simply repudiated her. His defenders accused her of rendering him sexually impotent by witchcraft, but to no avail for their legal brief. It was hard for papal diplomats to allow the king to dispense with a wife who was so well-connected, particularly one who seemed so vulnerable as she complained publicly about her ill-treatment in pathetic broken French. The papacy sought to reconcile the couple. Philip wanted no reconciliation. As far as he and some of his ecclesiastical advisers were concerned, the marriage was unconsummated and invalid (the list of justifying reasons grew over time). Compliant bishops confirmed the invalidity of the marriage. Philip therefore took another wife, a Bavarian noble lady, who bore him two children.
The popes (after 1198, Innocent III) continued to demand that the king repudiate his second wife and take Ingeborg back. Every demand was met by refusal, until Innocent decided that he had to act more firmly. In the year 1200 he therefore laid the kingdom of France under interdict, suspending ecclesiastical services. Philip, like any king, had many difficulties facing him when he got word of the interdict. The outcome of one of these was unpredictable, yet boded many possibilities. The English king, John, who was duke of Normandy and lord of most of the other lands of western France, abducted the young fiancée of one of his French vassals in the same year, 1200. If self-help failed and the vassal followed legal practice and appealed to Philip II against John, the French king would be in the enviable position of judging his most serious political rival or, if John refused to be judged, of declaring his lands forfeited.
The interdict made Philip Augustus an unholy king, at least as far as his enemies and those who, enemies or not, recognized the pope’s right to discipline him in this way were concerned. How many of his countrymen he alienated is unknown, but whatever the political calculations Philip does not seem to have wanted to put his Bavarian wife aside. He only capitulated after she died in July 1201, and in doing so he received the pope’s legitimation of the children of the bigamous marriage. The marriage with Ingeborg was declared valid. Philip never succeeded in getting papal approval for a legal separation. Ingeborg remained in France, a strange and lonely figure, but heroic in her own right and treated with a kind of stand-offish respect until she died in 1236, thirteen years after Philip’s own death.
In 1202 Philip Augustus, freed from the interdict, achieved a real coup. John of England had failed to appear in the French royal court to defend himself against his vassal’s charge of the abduction of his fiancée. The court declared John’s fiefs in France forfeit to the Crown. Before the end of 1204 the French king had – he believed, legitimately – conquered Normandy as well as adjacent lands north of the Loire River and incorporated them into the royal domain. John, needless to say, fell into a foul mood, as did his barons, who mourned the loss of prestige of the English Crown and the loss of ancestral lands on the continent. It was expected that he would do something, sometime, but what and when were not known. In the meantime, John became embroiled in another terrible struggle, this time with the pope.
A strange situation confronted Innocent III in 1205. A delegation from Canterbury arrived in Rome to report that the sub-prior of the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, had been duly elected archbishop of Canterbury following the death of the incumbent, but another delegation soon told a different story. An election had taken place, but contrary to the law the chapter had not first sought permission from King John to have an election, because the members knew that he preferred a candidate whom they did not want. So John had threatened them into a new election. They had succumbed and chosen the king’s friend, the bishop of Norwich, to be the new archbishop. It was now the pope’s duty to confirm that second election.
Innocent was unmoved. The illegality of the first election was undoubted; so was that of the second. The liberty of the Church demanded free elections. King John’s threats were contrary to the canon law and his coronation oath. Moreover, papal permission was required to transfer a bishop, in this case the bishop of Norwich, to a different see. A bishop was wedded to his diocese, and only the pope, as vicar of Christ, could dissolve the bond between them. Innocent, therefore, quashed both elections and, exercising his rightful powers under the canon law, took the appointment into his own hands. An Englishman at the papal curia, Stephen Langton, a scholar and theologian who was a student at Paris when Innocent III had been there, was picked out for the job and sent to England.
None of the explanations for the pope’s behaviour seemed to matter to John, who regarded the appointment of Langton as a deliberate affront and, in the aftermath of his loss of Normandy, an unnecessary humiliation at a very trying time. In retaliation he refused to admit Langton to the realm, seized the possessions of the archbishopric of Canterbury, and exiled those bishops and other churchmen who publicly raised their voices in opposition.
Innocent III responded as he had responded to Philip Augustus’s defiance: he placed England under interdict. The suspension of ecclesiastical services would endure from 1208 to 1214. Negotiations were continuous during this period, but Innocent began to lose patience. In 1211 the situation began to change. Welsh revolts against the English began that year, and John, while raising a force to put them down, came upon information that many of his own barons were close to rebellion against him. They had personal grievances against what they believed was his arbitrary rule. There was also the interdict. It may have been getting under their skin; it certainly offered them the pretence of rebelling against an unholy king. And there was the legacy of the loss of the continental lands. Add to this the hints Innocent was giving that he might sanction a French invasion of England and the situation looked grim for John. After all, the pope had used force in the south of France. It was not to be supposed that he would hesitate in England.
John capitulated. A brilliant political move, his modern apologists insist. Less brilliant was the intransigence that had got him in the predicament in the first place. He recognized Stephen Langton as the legitimate archbishop of Canterbury, restored the exiled prelates to their offices and lands, repaid the church for losses incurred in the course of the dispute, and promised in addition to pay an annual tribute of 2,000 marks to the papacy. Finally, he gave the kingdom of England to the pope, receiving it back as a papal fief. Innocent III became John’s feudal overlord.
The brilliance of the move cannot be doubted. Innocent got everything he thought was right. John mollified the pontiff, who withdrew his support for any invasion of John’s English lands and in fact became an active protector of his new vassal. Meanwhile John undermined at least one ideological justification for rebellion against him; he was no longer an unholy king. While successfully putting down the Welsh insurgency, he also began to make known that he was planning to attack France and reconquer the ancestral lands of the Norman rulers. In a frenzy of diplomatic activity, he induced Otto of Brunswick, the German imperial pretender, to promise to make a second front against the French when the moment came for the attack. In all these preparations, King John had to be very public: English barons needed to be convinced of their king’s sincerity and to be persuaded to contribute military taxes, the so-called scutages, to the planned campaign.
In the event, the great two-pronged attack on France, launched in 1214, was a disaster. Philip Augustus destroyed the German forces under Otto of Brunswick at the Battle of Bouvines on 14 July of that year; and John, when he got the news in the camp he had set up in Poitou following his landings in France, decided it was the better part of valour to avoid pitched battle. He retreated to England, where he soon faced an angry nobility in rebellion, a rebellion joined by Archbishop Stephen Langton. The long-term consequences of that confrontation are best left to another time (see chapter 15). But the delight of Innocent III at the resolution of the interdict was now all lost in the rebellion against his new vassal and in his own friend Stephen Langton’s siding with rebels. Everything became confused. The treaty which worked out a temporary halt to the rebellion and which we know as Magna Carta (19 June 1215) was, to Innocent, a repugnant document, limiting, as it did, the power of an anointed king without papal approval, even though that king was also the pope’s vassal. Langton was recalled to Rome.
The Rome to which Archbishop Stephen Langton was recalled was preparing for the greatest assembly since the Council of Nicea of 325. More than 400 bishops would be present, 800 other prelates and numerous lay notables. The behind-the-scenes preparation was enormous, for Innocent intended that the council would do its work quickly and efficiently in little more than two weeks, 11 November–30 November 1215, hearing and ratifying decisions already taken in camera, and formally issuing them as seventy canons or decrees. Some of the canons concerned doctrine, others the organization of the church, still others discipline, but even these broad categories hardly cover the wealth of issues that the council addressed, including the Holy Land, the situation in Languedoc, and the disputed German election.
At the opening of the council, the delegates merely received reports on some issues. Innocent had issued the bull for the new crusade, the Fifth, in 1213. Delegates were brought up to date on preparations. With regard to Languedoc, they were informed of the military and religious situation. In 1215 both seemed extremely hopeful. Raymond VI came to the council, seeking reconciliation, but all the cards were in the hands of Simon de Montfort, the commander of the crusading army. He was de facto ruler of the region, and his agents were trying to secure de jure recognition of his claim as the new count of Toulouse (not that Raymond VI would ever acknowledge its legitimacy). Of the German situation, no resolution seemed possible when representatives of both Frederick II and Otto of Brunswick, the latter recently defeated by the French at Bouvines, stated their cases.
At the second session of the council, on 20 November, the pope-in-council made a series of solemn pronouncements. Raymond VI was formally deposed. Magna Carta was nullified, and all the rebels against King John placed under excommunication, which meant, given Lang-ton’s role in securing the charter, that the archbishop was temporarily suspended from his office. Frederick II was recognized as king of the Germans. Important measures were decreed on the crusade, including the suppression of tournaments for three years.
The most solemn pronouncements, of course, were about the nature of the Catholic faith, the incarnation, the trinity and unity of God, the perpetual virginity of Mary, baptism, and the miraculous transformation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the true body and true blood of Jesus Christ (transubstantiation). Let heterodox and heretics believe what they would, an authentic Christian was obliged to affirm these doctrines as well as the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, outside of which, it was declared, there was absolutely no salvation.
From his time in Paris, Innocent had been involved in the exciting discussions of the nature of Catholic Christianity that are sometimes associated with intellectual reformers in the circle of Master Peter the Chanter. He had, indeed, written a treatise on the mysteries of the Mass while a cardinal, that bears witness to the influence of the circle on his thought. The circle also included a young Stephen Langton. The reformers around the Chanter had delivered over many years a searing critique of some of the practices that had grown up within the Church, including the use of vulgar or popular proofs, like the ordeal, under ecclesiastical licence.
In these rarified intellectual circles, the debate was fierce. If one uses the ordeal as an example, the reformers argued that the received biblical texts prohibited the procedure. One was not to test or try God or believe it possible to force Him to make a miraculous judgement (Deuteronomy 6:16). Then why, rebutted the conservatives, did God sanction the child David’s trial by battle against the champion Goliath (I Samuel 17)? It was God’s choice, not man’s, the reformers replied. And it was well known, they continued, that ordeals of their own time could be in error. Men were condemned to death for murder after ordeals only to have the process compromised by the return of the so-called murder victims from pilgrimage or mercantile voyages. How could a judgement so false be a judgement of an inerrant God? Again, the conservatives had an answer – the ways of God are hidden: the condemned man must have done something warranting his execution or God would not have allowed him to be found guilty. And vice versa, if apparently guilty people went free, it was because the God who sees all in secret recognized their genuine contrition and forgave them openly.
Arguments like these could have remained academic exercises for ever, but the Fourth Lateran Council was the fillip for their impact on society at large. The reformers won: no longer were priests allowed to preside at ordeals. Thus, at one stroke, the connection between the ordeal and the holy was severed. But it was too much of a shock for secular justice. Princes resisted putting the decree into practice. Only Denmark and, in a few years, England seem to have abandoned the ordeal swiftly. Other countries were much slower to act and the ordeal was still being used with or without local priestly sanction in some parts of Europe in the late thirteenth century. In the end, however, it died out as an official judicial process.
The Fourth Lateran Council decreed on many more matters. It strengthened episcopal control over Benedictine monasteries, prohibited the foundation of new orders (a prohibition soon got around), and devised ways to isolate the Jews by making them wear distinctive clothing, for example. The last was also soon modified, in fear that the distinctiveness of Jews might make them easy targets for unscrupulous soldiers preparing for the Fifth Crusade. The council also regulated the use of excommunication and the display and veneration of relics, and clarified the theology of indulgences and, thereby, the doctrine of Purgatory, where souls were punished (purged) pending admission to heaven.
Other decrees required the taking of communion by the faithful and the annual private confession of sins to their priests at Easter. They reiterated the Church’s teaching on licit marriages, confirmed the priesthood’s duties towards the laity and made clear that the ideal priest was to be sexually pure, sober, and never careless of his cure of souls by being over-occupied with secular matters. But, of course, if any priests or lay persons departed from righteousness into sin, the same conciliar decrees reminded them that ‘by true repentance’ they could always be restored to the body of the elect and ‘through the right faith and through works pleasing to God, can merit eternal salvation’.
Just as with the rulings on the ordeal, many other canons of the Fourth Lateran Council had a chequered history. Germany, an extreme case, was very slow to obey. Civil war and, after the civil war, a renewed struggle between the German king-emperor, Frederick II, and Innocent’s successors made papal governance of the Church north of the Alps nearly impossible. Even so, time was on the council’s side even in Germany, for the decrees came to be incorporated into the canon law. In more peaceable times, therefore, they were routinely applied to ecclesiastical institutions and persons. Everything depended, of course, on the vigilance of individual bishops and local synods, the effectiveness of local priests, and the ardour of monks, nuns and friars. Backsliding was bound to occur and did occur. There remained a critical reforming spirit alive within the Church that repeatedly sought to renew its devotional and institutional life. But no one could deny that the Fourth Lateran Council was the most important statement of the nature and structure of the Catholic faith since the great ecumenical councils of late antiquity. And it had been Pope Innocent Ill’s work.
Even so, Innocent III did not believe that his labours were over. He was fifty-five or fifty-six when the council concluded, and he began almost immediately to publicize its work, fine-tune its rulings by interpretation and address problems like the still confused English situation, when suddenly and quite unexpectedly he fell ill and died in July 1216. He left a papacy at the pinnacle of its authority and power in the Middle Ages. It remained to be seen whether his successors could maintain the position.