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Innocent III: Vicar of Christ

The first crusade. The first concordat. The first papal council. The evolution of a workable solution to the investiture controversy. The emergence of cardinals not only as pope-makers but as the members of a curia. The twelfth century opened a new era for the papacy as it did for Europe more generally. Real monarchs had by now emerged out of the feudal muddle, and they were ruling countries that we can begin to identify as England, France, and, at least to some extent, Germany (better known as the empire). Other monarchs emerged as well in eastern Europe, for instance, and in Spain.

These rulers paid a certain deference to the emperor, but they knew they were monarchs in their own right who could deal with the emperor on equal footing. Two powerful emperors made their mark—Frederick I and Frederick II—but after that a decline set in. Whereas in England and France, as well as other places, the crown had become hereditary, in Germany it remained elective, which contributed to its weakness and to the failure of a consistent pattern of strong leaders to emerge who could bring the nobility to heel. Until the middle of the thirteenth century the popes suffered a great deal of grief at the hands of the emperors, but after that they had more to gain and more to fear from the king of France.

The revival of literature and learning in the twelfth century was just as noteworthy as the emergence of monarchy. Vernacular poetry flourished among the troubadours. The sermons and treatises of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who spearheaded a reform of the Benedictines, circulated widely and were esteemed for their passion and warm devotion. From this time forward until at least the seventeenth century, he will be the most frequently read and highly esteemed Christian writer after Saint Augustine. Monk though he was, he projected a powerful public image. In the first half of the twelfth century, he was better known and exerted more moral authority than any pope.

A passion for learning gripped young men, who were ready to travel hundreds of miles and live in unfamiliar cities to sit at the feet of a renowned master. The study of canon law, which had never completely died out and had begun to revive even before the Investiture Controversy now entered its golden age, with an especially impressive center in Bologna. Application to Christian doctrines of the logical works of Aristotle, available in the important libraries in Latin translations, received impetus from Saint Anselm early in the century and from Abelard later. They were precursors of the great intellectual enterprise known as Scholasticism, which was well on its way a generation after Abelard as more and more ancient Greek and Arabic works were translated and assimilated.

Roads were repaired, travel was easier and safer. Trade therefore revived, as did cities. With the revival of cities, learning moved from monasteries, those holy castles in the countryside, to the bustle of the city. Urban schools sprang up, which by the end of the century had developed in several places into sophisticated universities—organized according to disciplines (philosophy, law, medicine, theology), held together by a corps of full-time faculty, and regulated by careful statutes. The universities offered degrees, which were public and official certification of professional competence.

As the great Romanesque and then Gothic churches rose in the cities, universities also became an impressive part of the urban complex. Although the students in them (all male) represented only a tiny percentage of the population, they became leaders in secular and ecclesiastical society. For ambitious churchmen, professional competence in canon law was more important than in theology. Bologna was the recognized center for the former, Paris and then Oxford for the latter. Impressive schools like these overshadowed others, but the lesser ones were many (about eighty by the sixteenth century) and forces to be reckoned with.

The twelfth-century revival of learning and high culture differed in one important regard from the similar phenomenon at the court of Charlemagne in the early ninth century and at the court of the Ottos in the tenth. The earlier revivals lasted not much more than a generation, after which, due to the worsening political and military situation, the surge lost its strength. The twelfth-century revival launched a trajectory that has continued unbroken up to the present. It has taken all sorts of twists and turns and has radically changed character, but it never suffered a real interruption.

All these developments had an impact on the papacy. Jurisdictional claims the popes had long been making could in these new circumstances be more readily reduced to practice. Although canon law recognized the autonomy of ecclesiastical institutions that filled the medieval landscape, it had a bias toward supporting the papal claims. The new ease in communication facilitated recourse to Rome for the settling of disputes. The papal tiara, a crown-like headdress, began to take on its definitive form and symbolize supreme papal authority. The papal curia grew in sophistication and complexity. The office of cardinal became ever more prestigious. The cardinals not only elected the pope but they, with a few exceptions, elected the pope from their own number.

What were formerly papal synods of local significance grew into general councils that legislated for the whole of Christendom. Although the medieval church continued to be radically local in character, it was unmistakably on the path to greater centralization. As secular monarchies more distinctly and distinctively emerged, so did the papal monarchy.

The story of the twelfth-century popes is a story of lights and shadows. As mentioned, putting the election in the hands of the cardinals did not eliminate contested elections. The cardinals were often bitterly divided among themselves on policy and politics. Most of them were Italian, which meant they were often embroiled in local rivalries and lacked the big vision of popes like Leo IX and Callistus II. In the decades after Callistus, however, what divided the cardinals was still the resolution of the investiture issue. The old-line, hard-core Gregorians, who were still a majority, had not fully reconciled themselves to the Concordat of Worms, whereas their opposite numbers considered the matter settled and wanted to move on. The Schism of 1130 between Anacletus II, who represented the former faction, and Innocent II, who represented the latter, became a pan-European affair and was not fully settled in favor of Innocent until Anacletus died eight years later.

In 1139 Innocent held the Second Lateran Council in which it became clear that, although the cardinals might differ among themselves on just how the principles of the Gregorian Reform were to be put into practice; those principles had by now worked their way into almost unquestioned acceptance among large numbers of churchmen. This was nowhere clearer than with clerical celibacy. Although cohabitation with wives and concubines was expressly forbidden in canon 7 of Lateran Council I, the five hundred bishops assembled for Lateran II gave the matter a fuller formulation, which would become classic. Canons 6 and 7 forbade all those in major orders (subdeacons, deacons, priests) from taking wives and, further, forbade the faithful from assisting at masses of priests they knew to have wives or concubines. The legislation did not stamp out the practice, but the law had been clearly laid down.

Among the popes of the twelfth century Alexander III is particularly important. He had an unusually long reign (1159–1181). As a young man he won renown as a professor at the emerging university of Bologna and as author of an important theological work and an even more important work on canon law. He had therefore assimilated the new learning, and his election signified that the technical proficiency he represented had become a new desideratum in the profile of church leaders. As pope he faced many tribulations, none more serious and ongoing than his conflict with the German king Frederick I (Barbarossa), who announced his intention of restoring the splendor of the empire. Frederick meant, in other words, to interpret the Concordat of Worms in terms favorable to himself and to establish his authority in Italy.

Alexander’s anti-imperial policy meant that, besides his other conflicts with Frederick, he had to face a succession of four anti-popes. At one point Frederick seemed invincible. He took Rome in 1167, installed his own pope, and forced Alexander to flee. Within a decade, however, Frederick was on the run. Alexander backed the northern Italian cities against Frederick, which led to his defeat in 1176 at the Battle of Legnano. Frederick’s defeat provided the conditions that allowed Alexander to make peace with him and then to hold the impressive Third Lateran Council in 1179, which further strengthened the prestige of the Apostolic See.

When King Henry II of England in 1164 promulgated a series of measures known as the Constitutions of Clarendon that asserted royal prerogatives over episcopal appointments, restricted certain privileges of the clergy, and put hindrances in the way of appeals to the pope, he ran into conflict with the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. Alexander tried to remain aloof from the affair, partly because he wanted Henry’s support against Frederick but also partly because he held more moderate views than Becket on the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal powers. Finally drawn into the conflict, he worked successfully, it at first seemed, to achieve a reconciliation. Becket returned to England from exile—only to be assassinated by four henchmen of the king. With that Alexander acted decisively by imposing a personal interdict on Henry, who was forced to submit, do penance, and rescind the Constitutions.

After Alexander came five popes in seventeen years. The last of them, Celestine III was eighty-five when elected. He lived for another five years, vigorous to the end. Well educated as a young man at Paris, where he studied under Abelard and later defended him against Saint Bernard, he had a deserved reputation for an unusual combination of integrity and political finesse. Like Alexander III he had to expend his energies trying to hold at bay an emperor—Frederick’s son, Henry VI. In 1197 Henry died, leaving his young son as his presumptive heir. The pope himself died the next year and was succeeded by Lothar of Segni, who took the name Innocent III (1198–1216).

Although Innocent’s decisions sometimes backfired, with him the medieval papacy reached an apogee of authority and respect. Only thirty-seven when elected, and thus a dramatic contrast with his predecessor, he came from a noble family of central Italy, which provided him with good connections in the upper strata of European society. It was a papal family par excellence. From it had come his uncle, Pope Clement III, predecessor to Celestine III. Innocent’s own successor but one would be his nephew, Gregory IX, after whom about a decade and a half later his grandnephew would be elected as Alexander IV.

As a young man Innocent received a cosmopolitan and first-rate education at the best institutions of the day—theology at Paris and then, at least for a short while, canon law at Bologna under the celebrated scholar Huguccio. He at some point made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Ordained to the diaconate and made a cardinal when he was probably in his late twenties, he stood on the sidelines during Celestine III’s pontificate. He used the time to write an ascetical treatise on the misery of the human condition (De Miseria Humanae Conditionis) and on the mass (De Sacro Altaris Mysterio), valuable as a window into the liturgy of the time. Both of them had wide circulation.

Like all the popes of the era, he was drawn into political imbroglios, the most immediate and long-lasting of which was the contest in Germany over three candidates for the imperial crown, which dragged on for most of his pontificate. A dreary, dangerous, and complicated affair, in which Innocent supported now one, now another candidate, ended in 1215 with the crowning of Henry VI’s young son, Frederick II. Innocent’s consistent concern was to give his approval to the person most likely to safeguard the rights of the church and least likely to encroach upon the territories of the Papal State and of the old Patrimony of Saint Peter. Frederick would later severely disappoint Innocent’s successors in both regards.

In 1208 the pope put England under interdict and then excommunicated King John for refusing to recognize Stephen Langdon, whom Innocent had nominated as archbishop of Canterbury. John submitted, made his Anglo-Irish domains a fief of the Holy See, and recognized the pope as his overlord. A few years later, in 1215 Innocent sided with the king and declared the Magna Carta void because it had been extorted from the king by his barons without papal consent. Elsewhere in Europe he intervened in royal matrimonial disputes, which brought him into conflict with the kings of Aragon, León, and France.

Innocent wanted to reestablish good relations with Constantinople and at the same time wanted to reestablish Christian control over the Holy Land. The Latin Kingdom founded after the First Crusade was by now little more than a vestige, and both the Second and Third Crusades had been failures. Innocent encouraged yet another attempt at helping Constantinople and conquering the territories lost to the Muslims. Largely due to his impetus a Fourth Crusade was launched from Venice in 1202. Planned and to a large extent executed as a big expedition, the crusade ran into serious difficulties even before it left Europe, and it soon got enmeshed in a bitter struggle for the imperial throne in Constantinople.

As a result of confusion, intrigue, and betrayals, the crusaders diverted their energies to Constantinople itself, to which they first laid siege, then invaded, and finally in the “Great Fire” of 1204 burned down a large part of it. This tragic episode made the Fourth Crusade for Greek-speaking Christians a horrid symbol of Latin aggression and barbarism. It became a major obstacle to reconciliation between the two churches, an atrocity never forgotten or forgiven. For the next four centuries further crusades were launched, none of which ever achieved its objectives; none of which was as ignominious as the Fourth.

If Innocent’s crusading effort was a disaster, he was more successful in north-central Italy. He is sometimes considered the real founder there of the Papal States in the sense that he was the first to bring them, if only temporarily, under effective papal control. They lay in the hands of local families and factions, some more loyal to the emperor than to the pope. Through his own authority and through his family connections, Innocent was able to place men loyal to himself in major cities and centers such as Bologna, Ancona, and Parma and thus ensure the States’ stability and the flow of income into Rome. He campaigned for allegiance with the motto, “My yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

Innocent, resolutely in the tradition launched by Gregory VII, held exalted views of papal authority. He is the first pope to divest himself of the title vicar of Peter and appropriate the title Vicar of Christ. “We are the successor of the prince of the Apostles, but we are not his vicar or the vicar of any man or Apostle. We are the vicar of Jesus Christ himself.”

This was a promotion of such magnitude as to defy comment. It was self-conferred. Through the centuries until the present it has wielded enormous rhetorical power, and when invoked it silences all opposition. Nonetheless, Innocent was a careful canonist and, despite what his political interventions might suggest, held fast to the distinction between the spiritual and temporal orders. Secular rulers had authority in their own right, independent of the church, but they could not exercise it in ways detrimental to the church. When they thus transgressed, the church had to step in.

Important though Innocent’s interaction with the great monarchs was, his pontificate had a much broader scope. For its long-range effect on the ministry and spirituality of Catholicism, nothing Innocent did can compare in importance with the encouragement he gave to the religious orders founded during his pontificate by Saint Dominic and Saint Francis of Assisi. Dominic gathered a group of priests to preach against the dualistic heretics known as Albigensians or Cathars in southern France, and Francis gathered clerics and laymen into a loose association to live in the poverty they imagined Jesus lived in and to preach a message of repentance, peace, and joy.

In encouraging these two groups Innocent provided the church with a new set of ministers besides the local clergy, who exercised care of souls in parishes and other local institutions. The Dominicans, Franciscans, and then the other orders that followed them, performed their ministry outside the parish structure as directed by their own superiors rather than the local bishop. They soon began to occupy important chairs in the universities, establish their own theological schools (studia) usually open to other clerics, and undertake evangelizing missions to exotic lands. They produced famous preachers and by their preaching zeal revived this fundamental Christian ministry that for a half dozen centuries had lain almost dormant. The official name for the Dominican order is, therefore, truly significant, the Order of Preachers (see fig. 12.1).

12.1: Innocent III with Saint Francis

Saint Bonaventura, Legenda major: 1457. Brescia, Italy. Pope Innocent III approving the Franciscan order.

©Alinari / Art Resource, NY

Innocent’s encouragement of the Dominicans and Franciscans is only one indication of his concern for the betterment of the internal life of the church. Although insistent on papal oversight of bishops, he deliberately strengthened their authority by limiting appeals to Rome and by encouraging them to hold frequent councils on the local level. He reformed the procedures of the curia to make them more efficient and less susceptible to bribery and other abuses. More than six thousand letters from his curia are still extant, many of which bear signs of his personal touch.

Perhaps the most reliable indication of the prestige he enjoyed and the authority he wielded was his marvelous success in convoking the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the year before his death. The council was one of the largest and most impressive assemblies in the Middle Ages and the largest council in the history of the church up to this point. Innocent intended it to be an assembly representative of the whole church, lay and clerical. To it came some four hundred bishops, some eight hundred abbots and other ecclesiastics, royal ambassadors from England, Germany, France, Hungary, Aragon, and Portugal, plus a number of representatives from smaller political units. In preparation for it Innocent had called for and received reports and suggestions from bishops in the field.

The council lasted only twenty days yet passed a large number of important decrees. To a great extent, therefore, it was a rubber stamp, simply ratifying materials prepared for it. Yet those materials had been drawn up using previously solicited information that had come from the bishops. Among the decrees none was more important for the life of piety of all Christians or would have a greater influence for centuries to come than Omnis utriusque sexus (“Everybody of both sexes”), which required annual confession and communion of every adult.

Innocent was pope at the head of a century that produced Saint Dominic and Saint Francis, Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Clare of Assisi and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Louis IX, king of France. Though a man of unquestioned integrity, Innocent was not himself a saint and never pretended to be one. He made some colossal mistakes, such as the Fourth Crusade and the crusade he promoted against the Albigensians in southern France. But he won for the Apostolic See greater respect and deference than any of his predecessors since Gregory the Great in the sixth century. His brilliance was too bright to last.