Pope Innocent III and his World

John Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351910064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The year 1998 was the 800th anniversary of the election of Lotario dei Conti di Segni as Pope. At 37, he was one of the youngest men ever to hold that office, and he was to become one of the most important popes in the entire history of Christianity. Together with Gregory VII, he was one of the two most important popes of the Middle Ages. In his efforts to promote Christianity and defend it from its enemies, Innocent played a role in the history of almost every part of Europe and its environs. He initiated both the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, that ended up sacking the Greek Christian city of Constantinople, and the Albigensian Crusade, that devastated major parts of Southern France and led to its submission to the French crown. He promoted the crusades that accomplished the conquest and conversion of the pagans of the south Baltic coast. These papers are taken from the interdisciplinary conference, Pope Innocent III and his World, held in May 1997 at the Hofstra University Cultural Center, New York.

Innocent and His Milieu

Chapter 1

Lotario dei Conti di Segni becomes Pope Innocent III: The Man and the Pope

Edward Peters

I

How did a medieval papa electus become the kind of pope he became? The theological answer - that his electors and he were moved by the Spirit - is unsatisfactory to the historian and was not intended for him or her in any case. Two of the dangers of posing the question at all have been recently signalled by Edward Synan:

In one direction, the imposing file of eminent popes might seduce us into a prosopography without intelligible pattern; in the opposite direction, the majesty and continuity of the papal office, hypostasized in imagination as ‘the papacy’, might mask the existential diversity of those who held the office . . . ‘the papacy’ might seem to be more real than were the flesh-and-blood popes in whom the abstraction was incarnate.¹

One aspect of Synan’s second danger is illustrated by the famous observation of Baronius that often seems to inform much of the work of the late Walter Ullmann and others, that there is ‘one spirit among all Roman pontiffs’.²

But Synan’s dilemma does not have only two sides. There is also the theory of papal self-modelling based on earlier popes, an aspect tantalizingly suggested (but far from being as clearly reliable as we might wish) by the choice of papal names after the late tenth century, one most eloquently expressed by another Innocent, the Innocent XII in Book Ten of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (a poem which commemorates a papal trial in 1698).

Like to Ahasuerus, that shrewd prince,

I will begin, – as is these seven years now,

My daily wont, – and read a History

(Written by one whose deft right hand was dust

To the last digit, ages ere my birth)

Of all my predecessors, Popes of Rome:

For though mine ancient early dropped the pen,

Yet others picked it up and wrote it dry,

Since of the making books there is no end.

And so I have the papacy complete

From Peter first to Alexander last;

Can question each and take instruction so.

Have I to dare, −1 ask how dared this Pope?

To suffer? Suchanone, how suffered he?

Being about to judge, as now, I seek

How judged once, well or ill, some other Pope;

Study some signal judgement that subsists

To blaze on, or else blot, the page which seals

The sum up of what gain or loss to God

Came of His one more vicar in this world.³

Our earlier Innocent, too, read the Liber Pontificalis and evidently considerable other Roman and papal history.⁴

Then there are the particular agendas that each pope planned or encountered, as well as the institutional or other material resources which he had at his disposal, some agendas perennial, others (perhaps most) immediate and particular in time and place. Consider the surprising, dismaying and intractable marital problems of Philip Augustus and Ingeborg of Denmark that Innocent encountered at the beginning of his pontificate (the problem itself had begun several years earlier, in 1193) and worked on intermittently until almost the end, or the surprising reversal of positions in papal favor between Philip Augustus and John between 1199 and the end of the pontificate (or those between Otto IV and Philip of Swabia and later Frederick II), or the consequences and opportunities offered by the equally surprising death of Henry VI on 28 September 1197.⁵

There are still other theories about becoming pope in medieval Europe, few of them satisfactory, partly because we do not have enough biographical data on most medieval popes before their papacies - a lack that has sometimes led to some serious errors on the part of historians and others, most spectacularly, perhaps, in the case of the alleged Pope Joan.⁶

Finally, there is (at least from the mid-eleventh century and in some respects far earlier) the question of personal and professional experience, either outside of Rome (as in the cases of Leo IX or Urban II) or in papal service (as in the case of Hadrian IV), what might be termed the apprenticeship - or managerial - model, and we must remember that Lotharius spent nearly a dozen active years in the curia, probably from the age of twenty-six in 1186 or 1187 until his election as pope on 8 January 1198.⁷ His awareness of the papacy dated from the pontificate of Alexander III, and his immediate knowledge of its workings from that of Gregory VIII in 1187. This early experience is important; as Pennington observes, Innocent ‘had come to the papal throne with a clear conception of the papal prerogatives he wished to accentuate’.⁸ But how and under what circumstances had he formulated it?

The unique surviving letter of Lotharius as a cardinal - written to Henry VI in 1195 or 1196- unfortunately offers little evidence on this point, except for its iteration of the dangers of heresy and the need for a crusade being the two grounds on which papal and imperial agreement was essential.⁹ The letter, evidently a response to a communication from Henry, offers little more. Failing greater evidence from the letter, one must seek the development of Lotharius’ ideas on the papacy in other areas.

The question is worth asking, particularly in Innocent’s case, because the problem is especially teasing: the pontificate began busy and remained busy - at its very outset it faced one of the most complex sets of diplomatic and administrative problems of any pontificate. The first few pages of Pennington’s Pope and Bishops sum up the early papal activity dramatically: Innocent immediately begins to expound the theories of papal authority that characterize the papacy after him; he reforms the papal household and the curia, reorganizes the government of the city of Rome, reunites the papal states, restructures the Roman chancery, begins a style of papal rhetoric that influences subsequent canonist rhetoric, creates, in Pennington’s felicitous musical metaphor,‘ a melodic line to which canonists [later] responded’, begins to revise the papal liturgy and adopts - and modifies - the title vicarius Christi.¹⁰

Innocent was also one of the youngest of all popes. Like John Paul II he left a youthful paper trail. Among the items on that paper trail were surprisingly varied works of theology, homiletics and exegesis. He also left an extensive and interesting anecdotal history, one that invites speculation (if not categorical judgments) about his personality.¹¹ There are a few interesting physical descriptions and portraits, perhaps two that are likenesses - and Gerhart Ladner has taught us how to read them - but there is no deathmask.¹² His extraordinary political and legal vision invites questions as to its origin, questions not yet finally settled by Pennington, Imkamp or Maleczek.¹³ He was, after all, Innocent III, not Innocent IV, and it would be unrealistic to expect his expertise in canon law in 1198 to be that of a professor at Bologna in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. What seems to be needed is to compare Innocent to other students of theology and canon law of his generation and to consider seriously the extent and character of his participation in the meetings of the consistory both before and after his election.

His astonishing flexibility and devotional artistry in accepting radical religious movements in the face of considerable opposition, as well as his sympathy for Greek devotional practices if not the Greek ecclesiastical hierarchy, asks the same question. The sheer bulk of his official correspondence, his care for its organization and preservation, and especially some of its legal innovations suggest again the career before the papacy, especially if Innocent’s own hand can be detected in some of the key decretals.¹⁴ At the very least, the Registers and the legal collection sent to Bologna indicate Innocent’s strong concern for order and record - a concern expressed even in such details as seeing to it that each church in thepatrimonium possessed a silver chalice, which it was not allowed to pawn. This idea of order in details great and small seems a distinctive characteristic of Innocent, and of Lotharius.¹⁵ And he dreamed - at least three times while pope and with significant results, and presumably before.¹⁶ Innocent also remained sensitive and responsive to the dreams and visions of others throughout the pontificate. Those who dream - or are said to dream - are also interesting.

With good reason, the entire pontificate of Innocent, rather than the youth of Lotharius, has been the focus of most scholarship, particularly since most historians first encounter it in the dramatic contexts of Lateran IV and the early political decretals. But during the past two decades, that pontificate has been extensively rethought, from the work of Pennington, Imkamp, Roscher, and Maleczek to that of Brenda Bolton, Christoph Egger, Jane Sayers, Constance Rousseau and John Moore. In some respects all these changing views of Innocent seem to recapitulate the thought and interests of one great historian, Michele Maccarrone, whose own Innocent has moved from the Chiesa e stato of 1940 to the more recent studies of pastoral theology and the Petrine tradition in Rome.¹⁷

Perhaps the same may be said about the two editions of James Powell’s Innocent III: Vicar of Christ or Lord of the World? in 1963 and 1994. And the most important key to the revised, rather than the older Innocent, seems to be Lotharius. There was no marked change in the man after the election, although there was continuing intellectual, political and devotional development. The life before the pontificate seems deserving of some new consideration.

II

We have, of course, some assistance in the eulogistic and shrewd biographical narrative, the Gesta Innocentii Tertii, written in 1208 by someone fairly close to the pope with full access to the registers, and from it and other sources the biography of Lotharius can be constructed (some of its dating has been revised very recently, by Professors Moore and Bolton, among others, in interesting ways), although it will not tell us everything we wish to know.¹⁸ But it is a substantial work, ‘too important to neglect’, as Bolton has said, and it was written in a recently developed biographical tradition that includes Boso’s Life of Alexander III, the Gesta Friderici of Otto of Freising, the works of Suger, Guillaume le Breton, and Rigord on Louis VI and Philip Augustus, and the biographies of Bernard and Becket. The life can be easily and quickly summarized.

Lotharius was a son (we do not know the birth-order, although we do know of a brother named Richard and a sister who married into the Annibaldi family) of Trasimondo dei Conti di Segni and Claricia dei Scotti, his father part of a family of landowners in the Anagni region about fifty kilometers southeast of Rome, and his mother a member of the Romani de Scotta family, to which Pope Clement III (1187-1191), was also said to have belonged.¹⁹

Lotharius himself was born at Gavignano, near Segni and Anagni, in 1160 or 1161. He may have been dedicated to the church early, and he was sent to study at the monastery of Sant’ Andrea in Rome under Peter Ishmael, whom Lotharius/Innocent as pope later made bishop of Sutri. Innocent consistently remembered his teachers and fellow-students with appreciation and gratitude. At Sant’ Andrea Lotharius would have studied letters and may have come to the attention of his putative relative Cardinal Paul Scolari, who later became Pope Clement III (1187-1191).²⁰ Lotharius also may have studied liturgy in the Lateran scola cantorum and may have become a canon of St Peter’s.²¹ His life from a very early date was Roman (and Roman largely in the absence of both pope and curia), but not entirely.

Lotharius went to the schools of Paris in the late 1170s or 1180. A few earlier popes had been in contact with the Paris schools, but by the last quarter of the twelfth century these schools had developed considerably and were on the eve of becoming the University of Paris, a move that Innocent later supported.²² At Paris Lotharius studied under Peter of Corbeil (whom Innocent later made bishop of Cambrai and still later archbishop of Sens) and under Peter the Chanter and Melior of Pisa. Among his fellow students were Stephen Langton, whom Innocent later made archbishop of Canterbury and a cardinal, Robert of Courson, whom Innocent also used as a legate and later made a cardinal, and Eudes de Sully, whom Innocent later used as a visitator. All of these were powerful thinkers and forceful personalities.²³ While at Paris, Lotharius also made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in 1185 or 1186. Thomas had been canonized by Alexander III at Segni i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Pope Innocent III and his World
• Copyright Page
• Content
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One Innocent and His Milieu
• Part Two Shepherding the Flock
• Part Three Defining and Using Papal Power
• Part Four Encountering the Muslim World
• Index