The Foundations of Medieval Papal Legation

K. Rennie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349443093, 9781137264930
• eBook ISBN: 9781137264947
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Kriston R. Rennie examines the origins and development of medieval papal representation by exploring the legate's wider historical, legal, diplomatic, and administrative impact on medieval European law and society. This critical study is key to understanding the growth and power of the medieval Church and papacy in the early Middle Ages.

1

The Concept of Legation

The Roman Church from the very earliest days of its foundation has had the custom of dispatching its legates to all regions which are distinguished by the name of the Christian religion.¹

For the eleventh-century reforming pope, Gregory VII (1073–1085), papal legation was a practical concept founded on historical authority and precedent – an established custom attributed to his apostolic predecessors in Rome. In both theory and practice, this ecclesiastical office had long offered medieval popes a reliable solution to the intractable problem of governing Christendom. A letter to the clergy in Narbonne, Gascony, and Spain (dated 1077) makes manifest the legate’s administrative and bureaucratic advantages: ‘Matters which the governor and ruler of the Roman Church cannot manage to deal with by his own presence’, Gregory explained,

he can entrust on his behalf to legates, and through them proclaim the precepts of salvation and integrity of life to all the churches established throughout the world; and he can diligently instruct them by apostolic doctrine in all matters which belong to our holy religion.²

Employing a trusted Old-Testament metaphor, these papal agents were commissioned to eradicate and ‘root-out’ errors while attending ‘with careful vigilance to planting the seed-beds of virtues’ (cf. Jer. 1:10). Accomplishing this task required the full thrust of papal authority and jurisdiction, a burden of responsibility that medieval popes delegated with considered thought, thereby ensuring that their representatives would be received as agents of the apostolic see, as if the pope or St Peter were present. Such an expectation was realized only with a working and established system and culture of representation, the successful execution of which narrowed significantly the physical distance between Rome and the Christian provinces during the Middle Ages. Indeed, as a reliable cog in the larger papal machinery, a legate was axiomatic to effective medieval papal governance and administration; underpinning their office was an implicit obedience to individual legates ‘in all things as though you saw our [the pope’s] own face or actually heard us speaking. For it is written: “He who hears you hears me”’ (Luke 10:16).³

The history of medieval papal legation is nothing less than a study on power. Or, to be more precise, it relates to the transference and nature of power from Rome (centre) to the distant Christian provinces (periphery). How this ecclesiastical office was exercised and experienced determined its contemporary worth and overall function in the Middle Ages. The varied nature of this relationship is what truly characterizes this ecclesiastical office, which developed over centuries into an effective administrative, bureaucratic, and legal weapon of papal government. In totality, the commissioning and actions of individual legates furnish a collective profile by which the foundations of medieval papal legation can be viewed across time and space. This book’s central aim is to grasp the trajectory and impact of this institutional growth. As a burgeoning institution of Roman ecclesiastical government, the origins and development of legation reflect wider transformations in the early medieval Church, contributing ultimately to a more nuanced portrait of this influential religious and political institution. For the papacy, exploiting this representative corps was central to its own development as a legitimizing and centralizing force in medieval society, the success of which relied in part on a developing theory and practice of ‘sending forth on business’ (noun: legatio; verb: legare) – the very essence and definition of legation.

To experienced and historically minded church administrators like Gregory VII, legation was firmly embedded in church practice, tradition, and principle. The application of legates enabled the Roman Church to reach the territorial thresholds (limina) of Christendom, as an effective and efficient means of establishing, extending, and exercising Roman (i.e., papal) authority in the distant Christian provinces. But as this book suggests, such an ecclesiastical tradition of office, with all its administrative, social, and legal accoutrements, took centuries to develop. To be sure, the cornerstone of its institutional growth was laid in the early Middle Ages, shaping the foundations for its modern-day and current diplomatic practice, which the Vatican presently extends to 179 countries around the world.⁴ In many respects, the principles of legation have remained the same across the ages. Indeed, ‘legates of the Roman pontiff’ in the twenty-first century are likewise ‘entrusted the office of representing the Roman Pontiff in a stable manner to particular churches or also to the states and public authorities to which they are sent’.⁵ Similar to their application in the medieval and early modern world, the modern-day legate’s ‘principal function’ is likewise viewed as daily making ‘stronger and more effective the bonds of unity which exist between the Apostolic See and particular churches’. In order to reach this potential, contemporary legates require mandated jurisdiction to function freely in matters affecting particular churches, bishops, ecclesiastical offices (nominations, elections, and transfers), peace, and protection, and ‘to exercise the faculties and to fulfill other mandates which the Apostolic See entrusts to him [i.e., the ambassador]’.⁶

The increasing and pervasive need for papal representation is this book’s driving historical question. It also presents this book’s central historical problem. In their endeavours to ‘reconcile a universal Christianity with the conditions of a highly regionalized world’,⁷ medieval popes experienced limitations to their authority and influence – administrative, legal, and territorial constraints to which the developing office of medieval papal legation provided an effective solution. As the pope’s alter ego, these representative agents provided the crucial connecting link between Rome and the various Christian provinces. As the embodiment of justice, diplomacy, government, and law, they possessed great administrative, legal, and institutional promise, skills, and jurisdictional authority. Pope Gregory I (590–604) seems to have appreciated these official characteristics and qualities well in the late sixth century, as witnessed by his frequent appointment of representatives throughout Italy to alleviate the encumbrance of distance for regional churches and their dependency on Rome for matters of trivial concern. In a most suggestive admission on the inner-workings of this office, he declared to the bishop of Syracuse in 591 that ‘we carry out the laws of Heaven more effectively if we share our burdens with our brethren’.⁸ To the modern observer, this effusive reference to Galatians (6:2) bears pastoral overtones of the kind expected from a sixth-century monk-pope. But there is no mistaking the tone or intention of Gregory’s missive. By addressing forthright the problem of legal accountability, procedure, and ecclesiastical administration in a region beyond Rome and her immediate surroundings, this late sixth-century pope deployed one of the bureaucrat’s most coveted tools: delegation.⁹

This sixth-century example is a poignant marker for the institutional history of the medieval Church as a whole. The representative notion of ‘sharing the burden’ not only pervades the history of medieval papal legation and the Roman Church, but it enjoins them in administrative and legal procedure and policy. Nowhere is this hierocractic outlook of descending government more clearly expressed than in Gregory’s letter to the bishops of Gaul in 595. On this occasion, the pope stated that

while inferiors show reverence to the more powerful and the more powerful bestow love on their inferiors, one harmonious concord may be created out of diversity, and the administration of individual offices may be properly carried out. For the universality of the Church could not survive unless a great system of different ranks preserved it.¹⁰

Over the next five centuries, the medieval Church transformed its administration to accommodate a burgeoning Christian world. Where necessary, it developed existing infrastructure to exercise authority and execute justice more effectively and efficiently throughout an expanding Christendom. By the eleventh century, the application of legates had become an integral part of this wider ecclesiastical machinery. Addressing the archbishops of Rheims, Sens, Tours, Bourges, and Bordeaux, Pope Alexander II (1061–1073) spoke of his legate Peter Damian, ‘who is our eyes and the immobile foundation of the apostolic see’.¹¹ ‘Since we are occupied with many ecclesiastical affairs and cannot come to you personally,’ he explained, ‘we have committed to him our complete authority.’¹² When the canonist Bishop Ivo of Chartres wrote his Decretum (post 1093), moreover, the concept of papal legation had evolved significantly into an historically founded legal principle of representation, a theory on office further expanded in Gratian’s Decretum (c.1140) and Pope Gregory IX’s Liber extra (1234), in addition to a host of decretalist glosses from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹³ To many such canonists, the legate – simply stated – was a figure commissioned to another land (patria) or province (provincia) with specific (i.e., mandated) powers (vices) – that is, ‘whoever is sent from another’.¹⁴ Whereas these late medieval works defined ‘legation’ according to Roman (i.e., imperial) legal theory, drawing particularly from the maxims on ‘power’ and ‘jurisdiction’ found in Emperor Justinian’s sixth-century Corpus iuris civilis,¹⁵ early medieval legates were not exactly what these later canonists would call legati e/a latere (‘legates from the pope’s side’), nor were they merely legati nati (‘native legates’) or legati missi (‘legates sent’).¹⁶ Though claiming much of the same historical and institutional inheritance and authority, the foundations of medieval papal legation cannot be viewed through the same canonistic lens.

The summative history of papal legation belongs more appropriately to the early Middle Ages (c.300–1000), to the centuries that gave birth to its theoretical, legal, and bureaucratic formalization into a reliable branch of the papal machinery. This appreciation allows for a more concise mapping of its evolutionary history and impact on the narrative of medieval church history – a process of institutionalization extending over seven centuries, spanning the later Roman Empire and its inheritance in early medieval Europe. In re-constructing this more nuanced portrait, this book focuses primarily on the western Christian provinces of Italy, Francia (Gaul and Germany), and England, using these emerging kingdoms as case studies for political communications and governance between Rome (centre) and its distant Christian provinces (periphery). At their core, the ideas and arguments presented in the following chapters demonstrate the growth of the Roman Church as an institution alongside developments of papal power, primacy, government, and representation. Their narrative includes both church and secular history from late antiquity to the turn of the first millennium – a gradual but defining era in the formation or ‘rise’ of western Christendom. Within this wider framework, communication and contact forged through papal legates played a central role in Christianity’s rise and triumph in the Middle Ages; their activity provides a powerful lens for viewing the growth and power of the Roman Church and its papacy as a legitimate, centralizing force in medieval society.

This institutional and governmental approach is especially significant for understanding the Church’s rise to political prominence in the wake of a collapsing Roman Empire (post-fifth century). In this period, secular and ecclesiastical realms established political and religious alliances across great territorial distances and ecological frontiers, creating diplomatic relations and tensions that affected every level of medieval society. As this book will demonstrate by collective example, the formation and maintenance of ties between the centre in Rome and the periphery is essential to understanding this transformative and turbulent period of early European history. The role of the papal legate in this enterprise, moreover, on both individual and collective bases, was evolving to accommodate the papacy’s growing political needs and expectations in a burgeoning Christian world. This rayonnement de la papauté¹⁷ was made possible through the effective and increasing use of legation to various provinces.

Seeking justification for the use and legitimacy of papal legates is crucial to understanding this office’s growth over time. Notwithstanding the twelfth- and thirteenth-century developments briefly described above, the second half of the eleventh century marks an ideal terminus to this comprehensive study for the following reasons. After this period, papal legates were a more natural part of the papal governmental fabric, in legal, administrative, bureaucratic, and representational terms. In the 1070s and 1080s, for example, when the German king and emperor Henry IV was controlling the trans-alpine passages in Lombardy, Pope Gregory VII relied on papal representation to his northerly provinces (i.e., France, Germany, and England). As a result, in a period emphasizing the centralization of Church government and authority, Gregory was afforded more opportunity to govern Christendom from its political centre in Rome. In both cases, political demand and rising opposition among German clergy and laity impelled the expansion and extension of papal influence through representative means. Due primarily to this mounting imperial opposition, Gregory did not travel extensively throughout Christendom like his predecessors, or indeed like his successor Urban II (1088–1099), thereby increasing his need for the greater extension of papal influence beyond Rome and its surroundings. Indeed, from the late eleventh century onward, legates of a permanent nature (legati nati) were being commissioned to fill any noticeable holes in the papacy’s ability to administer and rule.

But was this always the case? Did the office of medieval papal legate develop organically alongside the Roman Church, as a cog in the larger machinery of papal government and law? As I will argue, earlier versions of this representative papal office were not rooted in the same legal traditions as those from the mid-eleventh century onward, creating different versions of the same ecclesiastical office of representation. Church law in the Middle Ages was developing as rapidly as the institution of the Roman Church itself. This realization complicates any parallels between the early, high, and late medieval legate. Beginning with the origins of medieval papal legation in the early fourth century, this book will examine the impetus for development from the first documented case. Making changes to one model of papal representation implies an inefficiency or incompatibility with the surrounding religious and political climate. Why change the current model of papal representation unless absolutely necessary? Further questions surround the conditions and circumstances warranting legal, institutional, and administrative changes to this papal office. In short, this book asks why it was necessary to extend papal influence beyond Rome and its surroundings in the first place. What were the benefits and consequences of so doing? What were the social, political, legal, administrative, and institutional conditions impelling this development? And, considering these and other questions in the larger context of a growing Latinized and Christianized world in the European West c.300–1000, how did papal legation impact the growth of Christianity and its respective western kingdoms?

Overall, the varied nature, response, and success of medieval papal legation are pervasive and unexplored themes in current medieval scholarship. The need for greater papal representation outside of Rome is but one facet of this office’s evolutionary history. In exploring the legate’s gradual transformation in the early Middle Ages, the historian inevitably (and immediately) encounters problems of terminology and language, of reconciling theory with practice. How papal representatives transformed from purely messengerial roles between Eastern (i.e., Byzantine, Greek) and Western (European, Latin) empires into fully fledged legal a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. The Concept of Legation
• 2. Theories of Legation
• 3. Early Categories and Uses
• 4. Towards Standardization
• 5. On Becoming Legate
• 6. The Right of Legation
• 7. Legates and Councils
• 8. The Growth of Legation
• 9. A New Era
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index