It is a tradition in the history of the papacy that the cardinals often oscillate between choosing strong and weak popes to obtain alternate cycles of aggressive, reforming and then calm, conservative pontificates. Since the death of Alexander III in 1181, the papal throne had been held by a succession of well-meaning but weak men who seemed to have been paralyzed into a state of immobility by the vast problems affecting the church as a consequence of the twelfth-century changes in learning, piety, and power. Papal leadership was becoming such a negligible factor in European life that the cardinals went to the other extreme in 1198. They chose the ablest member of the college of cardinals, Lothario Conti, who took the title of Innocent III (1198–1216). At the time of his accession Innocent was only thirty-seven years old, phenomenally young for a pope. Innocent III came from one of the leading families of the Roman aristocracy. He was a man of limitless energy, high intellectual capacity, and unusual gifts as a leader and administrator. He was a canon lawyer of great ability, and he could have gained a distinguished reputation as a theologian if he had had the time or inclination. He was fully aware of the problems that the papacy faced on all sides, and he had no doubt that he could find ways to deal with them. The unusually high degree of self-confidence that characterizes men of his superior qualities was combined in Innocent’s case with his high sense of the traditions and power of the papal office. He believed that “everything in the world is the province of the pope,” that St. Peter had been commissioned by Christ “to govern not only the universal Church but all the secular world.” Innocent was fond of alluding to hierocratic theory, in which the spiritual sword was superior to the earthly sword, in which the subordination of monarchy to the priesthood was likened to the moon’s dependence on the sun. Innocent’s was not a revolutionary temperament, however, but that of a constructive conservative; he was not another Gregory VII. He did not intend to launch an apocalyptic attack on the forces that threatened to terminate the leadership of the church in medieval society; rather, by a great variety of methods he intended to exert papal influence on the changed society of western Europe and to control the effects of twelfth-century learning, piety, and power. He wished to direct these new forces into channels that would restore ecclesiastical influence in Europe. Innocent wanted a new equilibrium between the church and the world that would bring political, intellectual, and religious order to a society seething under the impact of new ideas and institutions. The greatest tribute to his ability, good judgment, and inflexible determination is the high degree of success he had. When he died, exhausted from his labors, papal leadership in Europe had been reaffirmed and the church was counterattacking on every front against heresy, intellectual disorder, and secular power. By the end of the 1230s a new consensus and optimism had entered European life. The forces dissolving the medieval world order seemed to have been stopped and turned aside by the peace of Innocent III.
The necessary foundation of all the other achievements of his pontificate, according to Innocent, was the reconstruction of the administration of the church. This reconstruction involved a general rationalization and tightening of central control to make more real the canonist’s doctrines of the plenitude of power of the absolute papal monarchy in the church. The reforms that Innocent introduced all through his pontificate were summed up and confirmed by the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, one of the three most important ecumenical councils of the Catholic church, the other two being the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. The Lateran Council set the number of Christian sacraments at the seven that still obtain in the Roman church: baptism, confirmation, marriage, and extreme unction (which mark the stages in the life of man) and the Eucharist or mass, confession, and the ordination of priests (the ones that are at the heart of sacerdotal Christianity). Only a bishop can confirm and ordain priests. The early-medieval church had never clearly defined the number of the sacraments. Damiani had at one point listed eleven, including the ordination of kings. The twelfth-century standard textbook on theology, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, had listen seven, and this view was accepted by the Lateran Council. The council decreed that every member of the church was to confess his sins to a priest and to receive the Eucharist at least once a year and as often as possible. This was a reassertion of the authority of the priesthood over the laity and was intended as a direct challenge to the doctrines of the antisacerdotal heretics. As a way of further inhibiting the corrosive effects of the new piety, the Lateran Council announced that there were to be no new saints and relics without papal canonization and that the proliferation of religious orders was to cease.
The Fourth Lateran Council’s listing of marriage as a sacrament was an important step in a trend that had been gaining momentum in the previous century—demanding a church ceremony for legitimation of a marriage. In the year 1000 the majority of people in Christian Europe were not married in a church ceremony. Marriage involved Germanic-style cohabitation, frequently signified by the giving of a ring. By 1200 perhaps half the people in Western Europe, particularly among the wealthier and more literate classes, were married by a priest. After the Fourth Lateran Council, sacramental marriage in the church became the prescribed norm, although in 1500 there were still many peasants who were married by the simple rite of cohabitation. If the family involved had property, church marriage was now a necessity in order to assure legitimacy of offspring and uncontested inheritance. This was a way of increasing the importance of the priesthood in everyday life.
The more general practice of marriage as a sacrament also increased the church’s control over divorce. What the representative of God had joined could now also be dissolved only by the church. It is a myth that the medieval church did not allow divorce. Until the Fourth Lateran Council, if you married within the seventh degree of consanguinity (someone who was your cousin seven times removed), you needed church approval. The common practice was to do this without license from the church. The cousinhood could later be conveniently discovered and an annulment obtained. The Fourth Lateran Council narrowed the ban to the third degree of consanguinity. This still allowed for heavy traffic in divorce proceedings through annulment (even if there were children of the marriage) from bishop’s courts all the way to Rome. In effect, divorce was not hard to get in the medieval church if you could afford the legal fees. Innocent’s bringing of marriage within much closer ecclesiastical jurisdiction thereby increased the church’s capacity to interfere in individual lives. Today in New York City thousands of Catholics first give close attention to the Cardinal Archbishop when they seek a church divorce. That was also true in medieval Europe after the Fourth Lateran Council.
Innocent greatly expanded the system of papal legates as a way of bringing the bishops of western Europe under closer control by Rome, and whereas the twelfth-century popes had frequently appointed the metropolitans in various countries as legates so as not to offend national feelings, Innocent chose Italian cardinals as his representatives to the territorial churches. In turn, the bishops were to give much greater attention to the affairs of their dioceses, particularly to the quality of the clergy under their rule. The bishops and their adjutants were to engage in annual visitation of the monasteries in their dioceses and to inspect carefully the cathedral and parish clergy to make sure they merited their offices. Innocent asserted with a high degree of success the right of the pope to appoint bishops in special cases: in the event of a disputed election whose resolution was appealed to Rome, if an episcopal or other church office was vacant for six months, and if the previous bishop died while on a visit to Rome. The frequent disputes over episcopal elections and the notoriously unsalubrious climate of Rome gave the thirteenth-century papacy many occasions to claim that the power of appointment had “devolved” upon the Roman curia.
The pontificate of Innocent III thus witnessed a general increase in the legal powers of the papacy as the high court of Christendom and the refinement of the legal institutions of the church. This general tightening of the administrative system of the church and the increase of centralized control had the immediate effect of improving the quality of both the higher and the lower clergy. Thirteenth-century episcopal visitation turned up hundreds of cases of incompetence and dereliction of duty by the monastic and parish clergy, and in turn the episcopate came under constant pressure and scrutiny from Rome to fulfill its pastorate. Innocent demonstrated that the effects of the new piety had gotten out of control in large part because of lax administration and that the best way to wean men away from their enthusiasm for heretic saints was by presenting to the world a Catholic clergy that was conscientious, zealous, and well informed.
The vast administrative structure of the papal monarchy, like that of any other government in Europe, needed a large amount of money to keep the machine going. The cardinals were furthermore princes of the church; they often came from prominent families of the Italian aristocracy and were accustomed to living well; and in any case the papal court, as one that claimed to be the most important in Christendom, could not appear impoverished and niggardly in comparison with the establishments of rulers north of the Alps. In addition, the pope had to find the money for the support of diplomatic and military ventures if he was to deal effectively with the entrenched secular powers of Europe.
Where was the money for these purposes to come from? Like any king, the pope had his demesne in the form of the papal states, but this was not enough to maintain the papal administration, diplomacy, court, and army. Like the kings of western Europe, he had to devise new forms of taxation. Special papal tithes levied for the third crusade had demonstrated both the vast wealth that could be obtained by a general tax on the clergy and how relatively easy it was to administer the tax, in view of the subordination of the clergy to papal authority and the church’s supply of loyal and literate tax officials. Accordingly, in 1199 Innocent levied the first general income tax on European churchmen for papal needs. Its great success made it the first of a variety of taxes levied by the thirteenth-century papacy on the clergy. This steady income not only facilitated the improvement of the papal administration, it gave the pope the added resources that were needed for his complex involvement in European politics.
A prime necessity for the freedom of papal action with regard to the kings of northern Europe had always been the security of the papacy in Rome. From the beginning of his pontificate Innocent worked hard to strengthen papal control over the city of Rome and over the papal states, which he sought to expand, while the power of the emperor to intervene was rendered negligible by the sudden death of Henry VI and the consequent dispute over the German throne. Innocent had a hard time asserting his complete control over the government of the Eternal City; the jealous nobility and the commune fought him step by step, but by 1205 he had firmly established his authority in his own city. Since Rome lived largely off the business of the curia, it could not long withstand the demand of the pope to control its municipal government. Innocent had even greater success with the patrimony of St. Peter, and during his pontificate the papal states attained the dimensions that they retained until the middle of the nineteenth century.
Secure at home, Innocent was able to devote his superb political talents to defining the pope’s relations with the great northern monarchies. “The imperial business,” as it was called in papal circles, was the most pressing political matter. Henry VI had terrified the papacy, and it was Innocent’s intention to separate the kingdom of Sicily from Germany once more and to preclude the papacy’s ever again being faced with the threat to its independence that Henry VI had presented. Innocent was given a great opportunity to achieve this aim by the renewal of the feud over the German throne between the Hohenstaufens and the Guelphs that plunged Germany into civil war after Henry’s death. The Hohenstaufens and their supporters chose Henry’s brother Philip of Swabia as king, while some of the German nobility who had come to fear the Hohenstaufen family joined in the election of Otto IV of Brunswick, the son of Henry the Lion. Both parties ignored the rights of the child Frederick II, Henry’s son, who remained in Sicily with his mother. Both parties tried to gain Innocent’s support because only the pope had the authority to make one of the rival kings emperor. Innocent waited three years to render his decision, intentionally allowing the civil war to deplete the power of the German crown further. Finally, in 1200, he rendered his decision, to no one’s surprise, in favor of Otto, who recognized the boundaries of the papal states, surrendered what remained of royal authority over the German church, and promised not to intervene in Italy.
Innocent appeared to have completely removed the German threat to the papacy, but in 1208 Philip was assassinated in a personal quarrel, and Otto married his daughter and established an unchallenged claim to the German throne. Almost immediately Otto took up the traditional policy of the German kings and moved upon northern Italy. Innocent was angry and disappointed, but not dismayed, for the Welf king was a colorless and incompetent leader who was no match for the pope. In 1212 Innocent recognized young Frederick II as king of Germany, after first extorting from Frederick the promise that he would abdicate as king of Naples and Sicily when he established his effective rule in Germany. Innocent then devoted himself to organizing a great coalition between the papacy, Frederick II, and Philip Augustus of France against Otto and King John of England, who was allied by marriage with the Welf house. This was the first great example of the clash of international alliances in European history. The conflict was decided at the battle of Bouvines in 1214, which had a profound effect on the political development of thirteenth-century Europe. Philip Augustus inflicted a crushing defeat on Otto and thereby opened the way for Frederick to gain the German throne.
At the time of Innocent’s death in 1216 the pope was again firmly convinced that he had permanently solved the German problem. Frederick II, whom Innocent personally admired and trusted, was obtaining the support of the German nobility, and Frederick had promised to abdicate the Sicilian crown as soon as he fully gained their loyalty. Furthermore, it did not appear that the German emperor would be much of a threat to the papacy in the future. Two decades of civil war and sweeping concessions of territorial sovereignty made to the German princes by the various claimants to the throne had further diminished the power and resources of the monarchy and had undone all the work of Frederick I and Henry VI.
Innocent’s triumphs in the imperial business were paralleled by his relations with the English and French monarchies. He humiliated the powerful Angevin king and improved the prospects of the French papal ally. The papacy had always been extremely wary of becoming involved in a struggle with the English king, but Innocent pressed such a contest and won a complete victory. The quarrel between the pope and King John arose over a disputed election to the see of Canterbury that, in accordance with the new provisions of canon law, was appealed to Rome. Innocent rejected the candidates offered him and appointed instead Stephen Langton, an Englishman who had been a theologian at Paris and was at the time a cardinal in the Roman curia. John regarded this appointment as a gross violation of the traditional royal authority over the English church; he furthermore regarded Langton as a papal agent, and he refused to recognize the archbishop-elect and forbade him to enter England. A bitter conflict ensued in which both pope and king used extreme measures. Innocent placed England under an interdict, which suspended church services, and John seized a great part of the landed wealth of the English church. Finally Innocent encouraged Philip Augustus to prepare for the invasion of England under the papal banner, and John, terrified that he would lose England to his great enemy as he had lost most of his continental possessions, abnegated himself before the pope. He not only accepted Langton as archbishop, but he became the pope’s vassal and made England the fief of the papacy. These sensational events seemed to demonstrate that no king could withstand for long the will of the papacy.
Even the pope’s ally, Philip Augustus, incurred Innocent’s wrath. They disputed a private matter, but Innocent, as the guardian of the faith and morals of Europe, used all the moral and religious powers at his command to force Philip’s accedence to the papal will. Philip had entered into a marriage contract with a Danish princess named Ingeborg to obtain the assistance of the Danish fleet for one of his ventures against the Angevins. When the titanic northern princess arrived in France, Philip changed his mind and refused to accept her as his wife. The affair dragged on for years until Innocent became pope and adopted his accustomed drastic measures, including the leveling of a papal interdict on France that forced Philip to give way. Eventually a compromise settlement favorable to all parties was reached. This strange incident demonstrates Innocent’s supreme self-confidence in the power of the papacy and his willingness to use all the weapons at the pope’s command even in minor matters. In general, Innocent’s relations with France were greatly to the benefit of the Capetian monarchy. The alliance he established with Philip Augustus against Otto IV and John intensified the long association of the papacy with the Capetian monarchy and cloaked Philip’s expansionist policies and devious methods in an aura of morality. The greatest boon that the French monarchy received from the papacy, however, was the Albigensian crusade, which opened up southern France to penetration by the north and eventual incorporation into the French crown. Philip Augustus did not participate in the Albigensian crusade, and it is possible that he did not fully perceive its significance. But the crusade destroyed the power of the nobility of Languedoc and made inevitable the subjection of southeastern France to the Capetian king.
Innocent had originally hoped to bring the Albigensian heretics back into the church by sending in outstanding preachers to demonstrate the Cathari errors. This approach had little success; the Albigensian doctrines had penetrated the social and intellectual milieu of southern France too deeply. The murder of a papal legate in 1208, in which the count of Toulouse was thought to be implicated, induced Innocent to take a more drastic measure, namely, the launching of a crusade against the heretics. Innocent had already become familiar with the use of the crusading ideal for some special purpose favorable to the Roman church. The fourth crusade of 1204, which Innocent had proclaimed, had been turned by the Venetians from its initial aim of fighting the Moslems to the attack and capture of Constantinople. Innocent readily accepted the change in plans because he saw the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople as the means of bringing the Greeks back into union with the Latin church and under the authority of the papacy. If a crusade could be directed against Constantinople, then assuredly it could be directed against heretics whose insidious doctrines, perverse morality, and stronghold in southern France threatened the unity of Latin Christendom. The northern French barons enthusiastically responded to Innocent’s proclamation of the Albigensian crusade. They looked upon it as a heaven-sent opportunity to carve out fiefs for themselves in the rich lands of the Languedoc. The Albigensian crusade took on the qualities of a land grab. The northern barons, led by one Simon de Montfort, a lord from the Ile-de-France, indiscriminately attacked the heretics and the orthodox and perpetrated bloodbaths in the southern cities. As a consequence the southern nobility, whether or not it sympathized with the Cathari doctrine, bitterly resisted the crusaders, and the king of Aragon, who was far from being a heretic, came to the assistance of the count of Toulouse.
At the battle of Muret in 1213 the southern forces were decisively defeated, and although it took another dozen years to end all resistance, the victory of the north was assured in the long run. By his launching of the Albigensian crusade Innocent prepared the way for the French crown to gain the wealthy lands of Languedoc, which finally took place in the 1220s. Innocent was criticized by the southern nobility in his own day and by many modern writers, for preaching this crusade against the Cathari. It has been said that he perverted the crusading movement and that he destroyed a brilliant civilization in the south of France. There is some truth to both indictments, but he had no alternative if he was to cut the cancerous sore of Catharism out of the body politic of Christendom.
With his typical thoroughness Innocent could not leave the heretics to be rooted out and judged by diocesan officials in southern France, whom he greatly distrusted anyway. He sent in legates commissioned to establish courts for dealing with heretics.
Out of these precedents developed the general papal mandate for judicial Inquisition officially prescribed in 1233, but well operative in the time of Innocent III. Panels of designated churchmen under the papal rules of Inquisition were to investigate reports of heresy and counterchurches in particular areas. The Inquisitors did not have to reveal to suspects called before them who had informed on them, nor could the accused confront the informers. The first and main aim of the court of Inquisition was to persuade and pressure defendants to confess and recant. For those who did so, on first offense, the normal penalty was mild. But those who refused to confess and who remained under suspicion of heresy and subversion of the Roman church were put to torture in Roman law’s traditional manner of getting at the truth. Those who confessed and then recanted were discovered by the Inquisitors to have relapsed into heresy and would on the second offense be subject to a much more severe penalty, such as ritualized public humiliation, imprisonment, and loss of property. Those with an established record of heretical resistance or repeated relapses from orthodoxy would be “relaxed to the secular arm,” to suffer death by burning.
Contrary to the widespread belief in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Inquisitors were, with few exceptions, not psychotic sadists who were insatiably seeking vengeance upon heretics through death penalties. The Inquisitors were normally well-trained canon lawyers and frequently Dominican friars or members of another religious order. Recent research has shown that they were sufficiently astute to be skeptical of the witchcraft craze of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to find the vast majority of the accusations against old women and similar marginal people who were alleged to be witches to be without substance.
Therefore, the courts of the papal mandated Inquisition should never be considered in the same category as the Nazi holocaust or Stalinist purges. Surviving Inquisitorial records are sparse. But it is a good guess that even including the Spanish Inquisition of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which in more Draconian fashion operated directly under the aegis of the Spanish crown rather than the papacy, the total number of people who died at the hands of all Catholic Inquisitions did not exceed five figures and probably did not total more than ten thousand people.
No one would claim that the Inquisitorial courts were liberal institutions. These courts used torture in the Roman manner, did not allow defendants to confront or often even to know the names of their accusers, sorely harassed and frightened people, and confiscated substantial property of the wealthy and high-born. The Inquisitorial process was not predicated on liberal doctrines of freedom of thought, such as had occasionally been expressed by pagan Roman aristocrats and that became central in western culture in the eighteenth century. Innocent III and his successor were opposed to a doctrine of religious and intellectual freedom. The heretics were enemies of Christian civilization and had to be eliminated—by persuasion, if possible, or by force, if necessary. St. Augustine had propounded such a doctrine, and it became much more meaningful when the Latin church was confronted with the mass movement of popular heresy around 1200. For Innocent III the gravest kind of crisis threatened the unity and security of the Latin church and not to proceed against the heretics with every means at the disposal of Christian society was not only weak and foolish, it was a betrayal of the Lord. Yet the Inquisitors wanted to kill nobody. They wanted to embrace everybody within the one and true Catholic church. They were eager to welcome dissenters and schismatics into the Roman community. They exulted in the conversion of Jews, and, in fact, some of the early Inquisitors were converted Jews who had joined the Dominican order.
Nothing, as Innocent said, was outside the province of the papacy, and he felt compelled to legislate not only on the matter of heretics, but on the treatment of the Jews. He forbade attempts to convert them to Christianity by force, but he advocated ghettoization—their exclusion as social pariahs from European society. The Fourth Latern Council decreed that Jews should wear a yellow label so they could easily be distinguished as outcasts. This requirement was to have a long and illustrious history in western Europe. Some writers have attempted to whitewash Innocent’s Jewish policy; they claim that he wanted to ostracize the Jews to save them from further pogroms, which were becoming endemic in European life as a result of the dissemination of the blood libels. It seems unlikely that Innocent was motivated by humanitarian reasons. He shared in the militant Christianity of his time, and the threat to the church from the great wave of antisacerdotalism tended to make ecclesiastical leaders even more intolerant and severe in their dealings with those who dissented from the Catholic faith. Innocent would not have been flattered by attempts to make him out to be a liberal. He had an unmitigated belief in the truth of the Catholic faith and the validity of the hierocratic tradition, the Petrine theory, and the Donation of Constantine. Both his doctrine and his personality were authoritarian. For eighteen years Innocent devoted his magnificent administrative and leadership qualities to furthering these doctrines, with far-reaching results.
For Innocent and his successors in the thirteenth-century papacy the Jews assumed a more threatening image for Roman Christianity than ever before. For Innocent III and his cardinals and Inquisitors, the Jews were associated with other enemies of the church—heretics, magicians, and witches against whom the church had to wage war and persecute with all the powers it could command. Even lepers (not only people with the communicable skin disease but a catchall category for social deviants) and liberated women sometimes fitted into this “other” of anti-Catholic demonized enemies of the church.
Was this a paranoid, papal hysteria, or was there some substance to it? The spread of Catharism and Waldensianism certainly generated a fierce anxiety in Rome. Like all anxieties, it fed upon itself and perhaps exaggerated the threat to the church, but it was not a paranoid delusion. It was grounded in reality even if it distorted that reality at the margin. Even the tendency of Innocent III, his immediate successors, and the papal Inquisitors to associate Jews and heretics had a segment of plausibility. Catharism sprouted in southern France where there was a large, wealthy Jewish population, whose rabbis were developing the mystical literature of the Kabbalah. And the Kabbalah had at its core the dualist theology of ancient Gnosticism, which had been a great threat to the mainline church in the second century A.D. So if Innocent III enunciated a greatly increased papal hostility to Jews and sought their full segregation from Christian society, illiberal as this policy appears from our point of view, it was not removed from thirteenth-century reality or contrary to its cultural assumptions.
Yet Innocent realized that his own methods could have only a limited impact on the problems of piety and learning. He had reorganized the church, humiliated kings, and caused the taking up of the sword against the worst of the heretics, but none of these approaches could resolve the struggle in men’s minds that followed from the effects of the new piety and the challenge of Aristotelian science. It is not the least of Innocent’s accomplishments as an administrator and leader that he was sensitive to the need for a more positive kind of approach than he himself could take and that he realized the significance and value of the work of St. Dominic and St. Francis.
The founding of the Dominican and Franciscan orders demonstrates the continued vitality of medieval civilization in the early thirteenth century. The product of the institutionalization of asceticism in the twelfth century—the religious orders working in the world—was used to meet the consequences of the new piety and the new learning and to reassert the leadership of the church in European society, thereby completing the bases of the new consensus that Innocent had set out to construct. The Dominican order met the forces that challenged the medieval order by teaching the truths of Catholic dogma and demonstrating their compatibility with science; the Franciscan approach was emotional, not intellectual. It appealed to men’s hearts rather than to their reason. It was founded on the premise that profound individual religious experience could strengthen faith. The development of thought, religion, and culture in the thirteenth century was largely the working out of the implications of the Dominican and Franciscan ideals.
The Order of Preachers, to give its official name, was a product of the struggle against the Albigensians. A Spanish priest named Dominic, working as a preacher against the heretics in Languedoc, gathered around him a group of like-minded disciples who aimed to live saintly lives, to be as ascetic as Cathari prefects, and to engage in homiletics and apologetics. In 1216 St. Dominic secured the pope’s approval of a new order that would follow rules derived from the Austin canons and the Premonstratensians. The order attracted from the first a steady stream of young men who fitted its high standards: The candidates had to be men of both ascetic persuasion and first-class intellectual powers. In the Dominican order ability counted for everything and overrode even the prescriptions of seniority. The officials of the order were responsible to meetings of the general chapter, and the representatives sent to these meetings were elected to ensure that the best man would most likely be chosen, irrespective of his age or length of time in the order. Like Dominic himself, the members of the preaching order were men who subordinated their own personalities and characteristics so that their talents could be fully put to the service of the church. The Dominicans were the intellectual shock troops of the thirteenth-century church. These were the ideal clergy to administer the new courts directed against heresy, and in the thirteenth century the Inquisition was largely a Dominican institution. Similarly, the aims, organization, and personnel of the new order made it eminently suitable for undertaking the task of meeting the Aristotelian challenge.
For three or four decades the Aristotelian texts had steadily been coming in from the Arabic world, and the philosophy and theology faculties of the University of Paris and, to a lesser degree, of other institutions had been deeply involved in trying to relate this new science to the older biblical-patristic tradition, with indifferent results. The Dominicans assumed this task eagerly, and by the middle of the century they had come to dominate the University of Paris. As scholars and intellectuals they were convinced that revelation and science were ultimately one truth. As the official apologists for church doctrine, they deeply sensed the necessity for a philosophical defense of Christian doctrine, and it was one of the Dominican professors at Paris, Thomas Aquinas, who definitively formulated this kind of intellectual system in the third quarter of the thirteenth century.
The Dominican message was addressed to educated people; it was the Franciscans who undertook the hardest task of trying to come to terms with the impact of piety on the ordinary townsman, of trying to control the direction of the urban religiosity that produced the great anti-sacerdotal movement. It was not the idea of St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) that his disciples should be organized into a corporate order along the lines of the Dominicans. He simply called on all men to live the life of Christ as fully as they could. And the saintly lives of his disciples, the fratres minores, “the little brothers,” would suffice to stir men’s hearts by example and convert them to better ways. It was the most direct possible approach to the problem of converting society. The walls of pride and hatred that had been created by the complexities of social life could be breached only by manifestations of Christian love. It was both the simplest and the most profound message possible, and its implications troubled the leaders of the church as much as they admired the greatest saint whom medieval civilization produced, the man who most perfectly followed in the steps of the Lord.
St. Francis’s life was as simple and pure as his teaching. His father was a wealthy merchant of Assisi in northern Italy, and his mother came from the urbanized nobility. He was a rich, spoiled youth who read chivalric romances and dreamed of himself as another Lancelot. But when he tried to become a knight, he was wounded and disgraced. He passed through one of those great conversions that other great religious minds of Christianity have experienced—St. Paul, Augustine, Ignatius Loyola, and Luther; he felt the grace of God coming unto him, and instead of mundane love, the most exalted kind of religious love became the inspiration of his life. He determined to live as Christ had lived—a mendicant, a teacher, a healer, the friend of all creatures, the preacher of the simplest and the most sublime truths. He wandered around the cities and villages of northern Italy existing solely as a beggar, and yet with the most complete faith in God’s grace to provide for him. He ministered to the poor, the sick, even the lepers, whom no one else would approach. He tried to lead the rich and the powerful to live more fully Christian lives, and he was never discouraged by the insults directed at him. He celebrated the glories of God’s creation with a magnificent lyric addressed to the sun, and he preached to the birds, whom he also regarded as his brothers.
The figure of the itinerant preaching saint had been familiar in the cities of northern Italy for two centuries, and such men had played a great role in fomenting the heretical movements of the twelfth century. But St. Francis seemed to go beyond any of these previous saints by the perfection of his life. His complete fulfillment of the life of Christ was confirmed by the appearance on his body of the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, it was said. He soon gathered men and women around him, whom he sent out along the dusty roads of Italy to bring the Christian gospel to the laity in the way that he had done. The rules he set down for his Little Brothers were general statements of principles, not the specific code of a corporate order. Francis’s basic requirement of his disciples was that they live and preach Christ and pursue their pilgrimage to the City of God with complete faith in divine beneficence, “taking nothing for the way.” The Little Brothers were to be poor in every sense of the word: poor in spirit, in possessions, in offices, and in learning. The kingdom of God within man was all they needed. The friars were, in accordance with the example of the apostolic church, to hold no property either individually or corporately. They were to live in abandoned churches, caves, or anywhere they could find shelter. Their physical labor was to earn them their keep, and if this did not suffice, they were to be mendicants. They were to obtain no privileges from the pope, and they were not to be ordained priests. They were not to seek learning because it was a snare and a distraction; to know that they should adore and serve God was enough.
These ideals bore some striking similarities to the attitudes of the Waldensian heretics, and Innocent and other ecclesiastical leaders were at first deeply concerned by the implications of what St. Francis was teaching. But there was something more, and this made all the difference: St. Francis was not an antisacerdotalist, but a firm believer in the authority of the priesthood and the efficacy of the sacraments, and he fully subordinated himself and his Little Brothers to the hierarchy. The priests alone, Francis told his followers, could minister the Eucharist that made salvation possible. He said that he had such faith in the priesthood and the sacraments that he would have faith even in the ministration of the sacraments by a bad priest. This constituted an explicit negation of the Donatist heresy and allowed Innocent to give his approval to Francis to continue his work and to found his little society of Friars Minor. Innocent shrewdly perceived that St. Francis was supplying the necessary supplement to the pope’s own work of restoring the prestige and leadership of the church. The Franciscan movement would make the positive contribution of inspiring the religious feelings of Europe, which could not be done by cardinal legates and Inquisitors. Innocent, who was a different kind of man from the saint of Assisi, nevertheless glimpsed how useful Francis’s work was to the church.
The Franciscan movement was the rallying point for all those laymen who were no longer satisfied with the church hierarchy but who did not want to break with the church and go off into the uncharted wastes of heresy. The teaching of St. Francis allowed those who wanted an intense personal religious experience to remain within the church. This was the best of all possible spiritual worlds, and it profoundly satisfied the religious yearning of the thirteenth century. The great enthusiasm that greeted St. Francis and his disciples, so deeply moved the laity of the thirteenth century, revivified their attachment to the church, and brought about the rapid spread of the Franciscan movement over Europe was not simply the result of the saintly disposition of these angelic men. It was because the Franciscans were both saints and Catholics. St. Francis was the product of mass psychology; the laity of his time wanted and needed such a figure, and they were fortunate in finding a man who so perfectly fitted their ideal.
The papacy after Innocent III determined to harness the Franciscan movement more firmly as an agent of clerical leadership by turning it into a corporate order on the model of the Dominicans. St. Francis only reluctantly agreed to these changes, and most of them were carried out while he was absent in the Levant trying to convert the Moslems. After his death the Franciscan order’s leaders, with papal encouragement, proceeded to violate some of Francis’s most fundamental rules. The Franciscans, and the Dominicans as well, became priests and were given the authority to wander over the countryside and through the towns, hearing confession, and administering the sacraments, much to the chagrin of the jealous parish priests and cathedral clergy. The Friars Minor came to hold property corporately, and Franciscan scholars became as outstanding as Dominicans for their work in philosophy and science. By the last quarter of the thirteenth century Franciscan professors dominated Oxford as much as Dominicans took the lead at the University of Paris. These changes were to produce grave disputes within the order, but did not detract from the new devotion and respect for the church that the Franciscans gained during at least the first half of the thirteenth century. Among Innocent Ill’s many decisions, none was as important as allowing Francis of Assisi to send out his Little Brothers into the cities and villages of Europe.
Just as Arthurian romance proclaimed the self-image of the aristocracy, Franciscan piety expressed the outlook of the thirteenth-century townsmen. The whole tenor of Franciscan teaching replaced traditional sacramentalism with a religion centered on personal experience. This was the kind of religion that the bourgeoisie demanded; it fitted their whole attitude toward themselves and toward society. The townsman’s position in the world was not derived from inherited status and traditional privilege; it was the consequence of his own efforts. Much as his business success was the result of his private striving and a reward for his hard work and self-restraint, he wanted his religion to concentrate upon a personal experience of Christ and the Virgin and to offer salvation as a reward for purity of life. Franciscanism—the ideals of which are directly advertised in the paintings of the late thirteenth-century Italian artist Giotto—satisfied, indeed intentionally catered to, these middle-class attitudes. It was believed that St. Francis, more than any other man, followed perfectly in the steps of the Lord, to the extent that the stigmata (signs) of the Savior’s wounds appeared on his body, entirely because of his complete purity and love, not because of any official status.
Sanctity, then, was a matter of personal experience and private devotion, just as social and economic position was (or ought to be) entirely a matter of personal achievement. The bourgeois wanted to believe that if he fastened his devotion on the Virgin and Child and lived an abstemious life, he was as good as the pope, better indeed than any martial aristocrat. Franciscan friars, preaching in the marketplaces of all European cities, allowed the bourgeoisie this self-serving doctrine, dangerous as it was for the stability and authority of the church.
The style of Franciscan preaching—again paralleled exactly by Giotto’s painting—was at one with the content of the friar’s sermons. The Franciscans abandoned the elaborate allegorical explication of biblical texts that had been the form of all previous medieval preaching. Instead, they told simple moralistic stories and described events drawn from common experiences of middle-class life, and their stories were told in a highly realistic manner. Again, the intention was to gratify the bourgeoisie, who thereby gained instruction in Christian morality without having to bother about arcane or learned traditions of biblical exegesis. Giotto’s style, which departed from medieval impressionism and nonrepresentational iconography toward a commonsense naturalism, was part of this Franciscan involvement in bourgeois culture—the inspiring story plainly told for plain men who want to be inspired. If the High Middle Ages produced the code of the gentleman and an ideology of aristocratic leadership in society, bourgeois Franciscan puritanism and naturalism sanctified and nourished the sentiments of the common man—a crucial precondition for modern democracy and mass culture.