Download PDF | John C. Moore - Pope Innocent III (1160 61 - 1216)_ To Root Up and to Plant (The Medieval Mediterranean, 47)-Brill Academic Publishers (2003).
340 Pages
PREFACE
In the 1830s, Friedrich Hurter published a laudatory and lengthy biography of Pope Innocent III organized on strictly chronological lines. Although true to the way Innocent experienced his life, the result was, in its abundant detail, somewhat difficult to follow. Later biographers, perhaps learning from Hurter’s experience, have all organized their studies of Innocent’s life topically. In his six volume biography of Innocent, Achille Luchaire devoted each volume to a separate aspect of the pope’s life: Les Royautés Vassales, La Question dOrient, and so forth. This approach by Luchaire and later students of Innocent, including the distinguished scholars Jane Sayers’ and Colin Morris,’ has revealed a great deal about Innocent and his pontificate, but at a cost.
Readers can rarely learn from these studies how Innocent experienced his pontificate from day to day and how the events in one area of his experience may have influenced his reaction to events in others. A “sign of God’s favor” in Spain, for example, could play a role in his deciding to try again to organize a great crusade to the Holy Land.
Another common tendency among students of Innocent has been to stress certain of his decretals that were influential in the development of canon law after his death. This approach too has produced a body of very valuable historical literature, but it has also somewhat distorted our understanding of Innocent. A phrase used once or twice by Innocent may be very important to later history without being especially important for understanding Innocent’s mind. He claimed the right to intervene in the conflict between John of England and Philip of France occasione peccati or ratione peccati, by reason of sin, a phrase to assume considerable importance because of its inclusion in canon law. But Innocent used it only on this one occasion and it is not the best entry into his understanding of his office. The same can be said of several of his other decretals.
A similar tendency of scholars has been to quote a rarely used but striking phrase from Innocent’s records as though it characterized his entire papacy. Innocent’s attitudes, or at least his moods, varied over his eighteen-year pontificate. He was not always the “cool and calculating pope” presented by Walter Ullmann.’ He was sometimes over-confident, sometimes discouraged, sometimes elated, frequently ineffectual, and in his uncertainties he searched the developments of his day for signs of divine approval or disapproval.
This book, while not completely abandoning topical emphases, returns to a chronological approach in order to recapture events as Innocent experienced them and to look for their impact on him personally and on the decisions he made. It also looks to phrases, such as those in the front pages of this book, that tell more about Innocent’s fundamental views than do some expressions that were later enshrined in decretal collections. The book is not intended to revisit the many controversies surrounding Innocent and his pontificate but to give as clear and full a picture as possible of Innocent the man and of his life as he experienced it. At the same time, it is intended to be solidly based on evidence. I hope that even well-informed scholars, while testing my assertions against the evidence cited, can learn something from this approach and that general readers will find here a comprehensible and reliable introduction to Pope Innocent IIL.
In pursuit of this purpose, I have quoted generously from Innocent’s sermons and letters, all the while knowing that there is at present no way of knowing how much of that material was actually written by him, how much was written by others on his behalf. Consequently, we cannot always be sure that a perceptive observation or a neat turn of phrase originated with him. But just as we attribute to modern heads of states opinions presented in speeches that were nearly always drafted by others, I do not hesitate to attribute to Innocent ideas and attitudes that appear frequently in his writing, even though the text may have been first drafted by advisers or curial clerks. Few historians would doubt that Innocent was a strong personality, and few would find it likely that the prevailing themes and attitudes of his papacy were created and maintained by anyone but him.
The annotation of this book clearly shows my dependence on the work of many other scholars, but it does not convey my debt espe-cially to a few scholars of an earlier generation. The thorough and scrupulous scholarship of C. R. Cheney, Raymonde Foreville, Michele Maccarrone, and Helene Tillmann made this book possible.
I am also especially grateful to Professors Alfred Andrea and James Powell, and to my long-time friend and colleague Professor Linton S. Thorn. Each of them read the entire manuscript of this book and offered many helpful suggestions.
John C. Moore Bloomington, Indiana November, 2002
CHAPTER ONE
LOTARIO DEI CONTI OF SEGNI
The old man finally died on 8 January 1198. Anticipating trouble, some of the cardinals retired immediately to the fortified Septizonium monastery on the Palatine hill to prepare for the election. Others, including the young cardinal-deacon Lotario dei Conti of Segni went first to the funeral in the Basilica Nova in the forum, then proceeded to the Septizonium. Once gathered, the twenty or so cardinals celebrated a mass of the Holy Spirit, bowing to one another in ritualized humility and exchanging the kiss of peace.
They elected examiners to tally the votes and then submitted their secret ballots. The examiners reported the results: four names had been listed, but Lotario had received more votes than any other. Lotario moved his chair away from the other cardinals to let them speak more freely. No one challenged his character or his learning, at least not openly, but he was, after all, only thirty-seven. As they spoke, three doves penetrated the hall, and one came to rest near Lotario’s chair. ‘The cardinals were not credulous men, nor were they inclined to surrender their right of election to a supposed divine intervention. Stll, the descent of the dove, the whitest of the three, made its impression and perhaps gave them the courage to place youth and vigor on the chair of Peter. The election was done. For reasons we do not know, they called him Innocent.
The cheering crowd of clergy and laity who waited outside joined Lotario and the cardinals in a ragged procession back down to the Basilica Nova and then up the long hill to the basilica of St. John Lateran, now to become Lotario’s episcopal church. There, a red cloak was placed on his shoulders and at the entrance of the church, he sat for a moment in the “seat of dung,” to enact the words of Psalm 113, “raising up the needy from the earth and lifting up the poor out of the dunghill, that he may make him sit with princes...” Here, Innocent threw handfuls of coins to the assembled crowd as a symbol of the fact that the wealth controlled by the papacy was to be used for the service of others.
As the schola chanted the Te Deum, he entered the church and sat on the patriarchal throne. The cardinals led a procession of upper clergy to prostrate themselves at his feet and receive the embrace of peace. He was then led to the chapel of St. Silvester to sit on two marble chairs on either side of the entrance. Again, coins were thrown to the crowd, and he received the keys to the Lateran and other symbols of authority. Lotario dei Conti of Segni, who was not yet a priest, was now Pope Innocent H1.!
The ancient Via Casilina runs east and a little south from Rome, following a fertile plain that stretches between two lines of hills, in the area known as the Campagna. As one leaves Rome, the Alban hills rise on the right, revealing some, but concealing many more, of their hill-top towns and fortresses: Frascati, Monte Porzio, Rocca Priora, ‘Tusculum. Many of the fortifications rest on huge irregular stones first dragged into place long before there was a Rome.
On the left of the Via Casilina, about twenty-five km. from Rome, Palestrina rises in terraces, its Christian monuments dwarfed by the remnants of the ancient shrine of Fortune. Another twenty-five km. further, still on the left, Anagni stands high on its own hill, providing a good view of the next hill-top town in the series, Ferentino, about ten km. further on. On the other side of the plain, across from Anagni and about two hundred meters higher, stands the little town of Segni.
The city of Rome, this plain of the Via Casilina, and the hill-top towns of Segni on the right and Palestrina, Anagni, and Ferentino on the left made up the environment where Lotario of Segni began his life and lived most of it.* Born in 1160 or early 1161 in the cas-tle of Gavignano, just below Segni, he entered the world well placed. His father, ‘Trasmondo, was of the comtal family of Segni,’ and his mother, Clarice, was from the Scotti, a patrician family of Rome. Family wealth was to make possible an excellent education for Lotario, in Rome, Paris, and Bologna, and then to enable him as a cardinal to refurbish churches in central Italy. For Lotario, as for everyone else of his day, family connections were the measure of one’s place in the world and the instrument for improving that place.
His brother Richard grew up to be a leading Roman citizen and a reliable agent for Pope Innocent III. His sister, whose name we do not know, provided a good connection through her marriage to Peter Annibaldi, a Roman who was to play important roles in both papal and urban government.’ Lotario’s cousin Octavian occupied important posts in the curia, both before and after Innocent made him a cardinal in 1206.° The many references in Lotario’s papal letters to his nephews—including Stephen Conti, made a cardinal in 1216° show a typical successful family of the time at work, in an age before nepotism was thought a vice.’ At whatever point he and his family chose for him a clerical career, these connections began to work toward his advancement.
He had probably received minor orders and had been chosen to be a canon of St. Peter’s basilica before he left to study in Paris while still in his teens.? The prebend at St. Peter’s meant that the young student would have, from that point on, a regular income in addition to the wealth of his family.
Lotario received an excellent education, and he did not forget his teachers. His early education in Rome was directed by Peter Ismaele, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of S. Andrea al Celio, whom Lotario later made bishop of Sutri, just as he was to make Peter of Corbeil, one of his university professors, first bishop of Cambrai and then archbishop of Sens.’ At S. Andrea al Celio, Lotario took his first steps toward the trenchant Latin prose of his maturity. ‘There he began to build up the store of biblical stories and allusions that were to fill his later writings, and there he developed the talent for liturgical chant that would distinguish him as pope.!°
Lotario’s early years also provided weighty lessons outside of the classroom.'! In the year before his birth, a Roman cardinal, calling himself Pope Victor IV, found security on Segni’s hill and glared across the plain at Anagni where his rival the Sienese cardinal Roland Bandinelli took refuge as Pope Alexander HI. Alexander was to be pope for the first twenty-one years of Lotario’s life, but neither Alexander nor his rival popes were able to spend much time in the rebellious city of Rome. The great secular princes of the day were often on the move, but they moved by choice, for their own convenience.
Alexander’s sojourns in Sens, Genoa, Messina, Anagni, Tusculum, and Veroli were forced upon him. His exile included a stay in Segni, when Lotario was about 13.'? Whether in Segni or in Rome, the young Lotario was surely learning how insecure the life of the bishop of Rome was.
The Roman citizens showed great enthusiasm for keeping in the city the papal curia and the wealth it brought with it, but they showed equal enthusiasm for expelling popes for the sake of an independent Roman republic and senate. But even when the pope and the city government were on good terms, peace in the city was not guaranteed. Quarrelsome and powerful noble families built their fortifications throughout the city, making it a forest of towers. ‘Towers sprouted even from the tops of triumphal arches and other ancient monuments.
Should pope, senate, and noble families find themselves at peace, there was still Frederick Barbarossa, king of the Germans and emperor of the Romans. He was determined to be emperor of the Romans in fact as well as in name: “Since...I am... Roman Emperor, I would be merely the shadow of a sovereign and bear but an empty title without substance, if authority over the city of Rome were taken from my hands.”'’ Even when he was in far-away Germany, his presence loomed above the city like a smoking volcano.
Lotario grew up in a violent world. When he was about seven years old, in the spring of 1167, a great army of Roman citizens sallied forth with the pope’s blessing to take the nearby fortress of Tusculum from the imperial forces that had occupied it. ‘The German soldiers, led by the warrior archbishops of Mainz and Cologne, inflicted upon them the most humiliating and destructive defeat that a Roman army had suffered since antiquity. A few weeks later, in more bloody fighting, the forces of the emperor invaded the Vatican, captured the fortified basilica of St. Peter, and probably would have taken the entire city had not malaria driven them away.
Twelfth-century popes were, then, very vulnerable to local violence, but they had nonetheless become very important to the rest of Christendom. A century before, a group of radical reformers had gravitated toward the papacy and had made the pope the center and principal agent of an attempt to change drastically the world around them. They wanted to see a world organized according to the principles of Christianity, united in faith, secure in peace, harmonious in love and justice. And these changes could only be achieved through the vigorous leadership of those who best understood Christian faith, peace, love, and justice: the clergy, headed by the pope. In some ways, they were similar to Marxist revolutionaries, working toward a one-party state for the good of mankind. These Gregorian reformers (so-called after Pope Gregory VI, 1073-1085) challenged a system in which powerful aristocrats routinely appointed most clerical officials—hbishops, abbots, ordinary parish priests. By Lotario’s day, the Gregorian offensive had been remarkably successful. Most clerical officials were elected by other clergy, although the aristocrats continued to be very influential—often controlling—in those elections. The Gregorian reformers had also set out to enforce the old rule of celibacy, and again, to a remarkable degree they had been successful. There were still married priests, there were still bishops with concubines, but these practices were no longer accepted as normal. They called for concealment.
The prestige and influence of the popes had grown steadily since Gregory’s day. Urban II had preached the first crusade in 1095, and that expedition had recaptured the holy city of Jerusalem from the Muslim infidel. Throughout the twelfth century, papal legates moved through Christendom enforcing Gregorian reforms, actually unseating bishops whose offices had been improperly obtained. In 1123, 1139, and 1179, prelates from all over Christendom traveled to Rome to attend great councils presided over by the pope at the Lateran basilica. These councils were part of the growing acceptance throughout Christendom that the papacy was the supreme legislative and judicial office for church affairs.
But where did church affairs end and non-church affairs begin? The Gregorian party had precipitated a spectacular struggle with the emperor; but for the most part, Gregorian reforms progressed without overt conflict with the secular authorities, aristocrats of various levels. Popes and bishops were themselves usually drawn from aristocratic families, and cooperation between secular and ecclesiastical authorities was the rule rather than the exception. But secular princes were also expanding their power throughout the century, and an underlying tension was always there, occasionally breaking out, usually at the expense of the clerical official. The martyred Thomas Becket and a number of exiled popes are the best known examples, but there were many more. The power of ecclesiastical authorities was growing at the same time that they remained extremely vulnerable to violent attack, therein providing one of the great paradoxes of the twelfth century. Nowhere was it more apparent than in Rome.
Lotario was to have a second home, away from the violence of Rome and the Via Casilina: Paris. Probably at about the age of fifteen, he followed the road that many other young aristocratic Romans had taken in the twelfth century in pursuit of an education that would enhance their clerical careers.’ Paris stood in striking contrast to Rome; it was a city of peace. No factions there dared challenge the authority of the king of France; and scholars gathered to pursue learning and to enjoy the food, wine, and security they found there in abundance. For a Roman cleric, there was no foreign region more secure than the kingdom of France. For nearly a century, exiled popes had found refuge there, as did Thomas Becket, the exiled archbishop of Canterbury. In the mid-1170s, when Lotario arrived in Paris, the master of the city was the pious King Louis VIL, who had given shelter to Pope Alexander III and to ‘Thomas Becket. Louis was very different from Frederick Barbarossa and Henry II, the ferocious princes who had sent the pope and archbishop into exile. So Lotario had very good reason to revere the kingdom of France and to recall fondly his student days in Paris.'!° He also had good reason to be solicitous of the French monarch. The one he was to know best was Louis’s son Philip. In August, 1179, a year before Louis’s death, the ailing king had the fourteen-year-old boy crowned king, and thus began a reign that was to last until 1223. It encompassed part of Lotario’s student days and all of his pontificate.
Whereas King Louis provided a model of the pious Christian prince, his enemy Henry I of England (and Anjou) had demonstrated how dangerous the fury of a secular ruler could be to the clergy. His angry remarks had led, in 1170, to the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury, and the horror of that act was felt acutely throughout Christendom. Only three years later, Alexander III declared Thomas Becket a saint. Lotario may have been present at the canonization, since the ceremony took place in his home town.'® In Paris, the fate of Becket was much discussed,'’ and everyone there was surely aware of King Louis’s visit to the martyr’s tomb in 1179." Lotario himself made the pilgrimage some time during his days at Paris. Years later, he recalled the hospitality he had received en route from a venerable old man at the monastery of Andres in Flanders.'? He no doubt also remembered the lesson of Thomas Becket, the same lesson taught by the experience of popes in Rome: unarmed clergy were extremely vulnerable before secular powers. Lotario pursued his studies amid the dust of construction and expansion. The walls of the great cathedral of Notre Dame were slowly rising, and the young King Philip began an extensive program of construction—covered markets, water conduits, fountains, walls—although Lotario left too soon to enjoy the paved streets that replaced the smelly thoroughfares of his student days. The schools of Paris in the 1170s had not yet coalesced into a single entity, but the masters and students of the cathedral school overflowed from the Ile de la Cité across the Petit Pont to the left bank of the Seine and mingled with the scholars of the schools of the abbeys of St. Victor and Ste. Genevieve. The association of all the faculty became the university and was formally recognized by the king in 1200. In France, unlike in Italy, the faculty were all clergy. In this way, too, France seemed a friendlier environment for clerics and their concerns.”° Lotario’s stay in Paris probably lasted six to ten years, giving him time to complete his studies in the liberal arts and to pursue courses in theology. He may also have had an introduction to canon law. It was taught at Paris, and even the theology faculty were likely to have a familiarity with law and legal proceedings.”' But first, he studied the liberal arts, which meant literature and logic. Students studied classical literature through the grammars of the day, which offered extensive quotations from classical authors to illustrate points of grammar. Lotario’s later writings frequently quote classical writers such as Horace and Ovid. The logic of Aristotle had swept the schools of Paris and of France since the days of Abelard and his pupils, a generation or two earlier; but the passion for logic, which distracted scholars from literature and the Bible, was distrusted by many, especially the theologians.” It seems not to have lured Lotario away from traditional studies; his later writings do not display a strict application of formal logic. Still, the rigorous clarity of thought and expression he exhibited in later years is an indication that logicians were not the only scholars at Paris who respected the rules of logic.
Having become a master of arts in about six years, a cleric planning an ecclesiastical career would not be likely to dally in the long program of study leading to a master’s in theology, but Lotario spent at least some time as a student of the theologian Peter of Corbeil. Few of Peter’s writings have been found;*? but the works of many other Paris masters give us a good idea of their interests and their methods. They were one in their dedication to the study of the Bible. The long years of study in the liberal arts, the study of the great Fathers of the church—Sts. Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory— were all seen by the theologians primarily as means to understand the Bible.
The theology faculty adopted and applied a method of scriptural analysis that dated from antiquity. Its first basic principle was that the Bible was the inspired word of God and therefore an unfailing source of truth. But equally important was the principle that every line of the Bible had allegorical or “spiritual” meanings in addition to its literal meaning; and the task of the theologian was to discover and reveal those meanings.” The masters would read the text to their students (/ectio) and then offer their commentary. Their explanations gave allegorical meanings not only to a story in general, but also to minor actions or objects within the story. For example, in the book of Exodus, Aaron wears a breastpiece decorated with twelve precious stones arranged in four rows. In Lotario’s treatise on the mass, he points out that prelates are dressed similarly, thereby making the connection between the priesthoods of Old and New Testaments. He said that the four rows represent justice, fortitude, prudence, and temperance, and that the twelve stones each represent one of twelve virtues.”
Difficulties arising in the interpretation of Scripture might be the subject of public discussion or debate or of extended analysis by a lecturer or author (disputatio, questio), leading toward a resolution of the difficulty (solutio).*° This practice too appeared in Lotario’s later writings.
Interpreting scripture was therefore a matter for specialists. There were in Europe at the time lay people who were barely literate but who nevertheless read the Bible, explained it to one another, and preached the gospel in city streets. For Lotario and his highly-trained peers, that would be roughly the equivalent of a modern person’s practicing surgery or dentistry without any formal education—laughable if it were not so dangerous.
Sometime in the mid-1180s, Lotario moved from Paris to Bologna to continue his studies.” Bologna was the premier center for the study of law, Roman and canon, and no student in Bologna could remain impervious to its pervading influence or to the intellectual excitement that the study of law was creating throughout Europe. During the twelfth century, in an age when disputes were still commonly settled by stone, iron, and flame, Europeans rushed to make use of new legal procedures provided by princes and popes, procedures that offered reason as an alternative to violence. Young men who had studied Roman or canon law were in demand everywhere, because they knew how to take testimony, weigh evidence, and put in writing their conclusions. ‘They knew principles for settling disputes about property, about contracts, about marriages, principles that were the fruit of centuries of experience and thought. They knew the difference between logical arguments and specious arguments; they knew how to make fine distinctions. These skills were becoming as valuable and as much sought after as the military skills of chivalric champions. Even in England, where the common law was developing principles different from either Roman or canon law, clerics from the schools played a major role in legal development, bringing to it their preference for reason over custom and their respect for the power of the written document. For any young cleric hoping to rise in the clerical establishment, there was no better training than the study of law.”
The products of these schools formed an international society, men who literally spoke the same language (Latin), knew the same literature, valued the same intellectual skills. Having spent five to ten years together in the same schools, following the same curriculum, absorbing the same ideas, they knew one another well. A bishop in Scotland might feel closer to a bishop in Sicily or Germany, men he had spent his adolescence and youth with in school, than to the local clergy and laity, who had never been far from home.
While Lotario was pursuing advanced studies in Paris, Pope Lucius II (1181-1185) had found the political atmosphere in Rome inhospitable; and in early 1182, he left, never to return. He stayed about two years in Campagna, then moved north, passing through Bologna in July of 1184, and then took up residence in Verona, where he stayed until his death. His two successors, Urban III (1185-1187) and Gregory VII (1187) remained in Lombardy, although Gregory was moving toward Rome when he died in Pisa on 17 December. Clement II, elected in Pisa two days later, was in Rome by 11 February 1188. The price he paid for his peaceful entry was acknowledging the right of the Roman commune to self-government.” The tenure of the papal curia in Lombardy roughly coincided with Lotario’s studies in Bologna. A man of his background and education now studying in the vicinity (and a canon of St. Peter’s to boot) would inevitably be known in papal circles. Three incidents of 1187 show that his star was rising. First, he appeared at Grandmont (near Limoges) in the company of two papal legates, presumably on papal business. Second, in mid-1187, the monks of Canterbury, who were pursuing a case in the papal court, urged their representative to try to win the support of “Lord Lotario,” a man whose influence clearly made his goodwill worth having. And finally, Gregory VIII ordained him subdeacon. Gregory was elected in Ferrara on 21 October 1187 and died the following 17 December. In November, he spent several days in Bologna, and this may have been the occasion of Lotario’s ordination.
In the ordination ceremony, the pope said to Lotario, “Consider whose ministry you take on. If up to now, you have been lax in serving the church, henceforth you should be assiduous; if up to now drowsy, henceforth vigilant; if up to now drunken, henceforth sober; if up to now dishonorable, henceforth chaste.” He then prayed to God on Lotario’s behalf: “May the spirit of wisdom and understanding rest upon him, the spirit of counsel and fortitude, the spirit of knowledge and piety. May you fill him with the spirit of your fear and strengthen him in the divine ministry, so that, obedient in deed and submissive in word, he may seek your grace.”*’
In 1189 or 1190, with the papal court now back in Rome, Clement III appointed the twenty-nine-year-old Lotario cardinal deacon of the church of Sts. Sergio and Bacco, a position the pope had once held himself. Lotario probably profited from the determination of Clement to create a large number of new cardinals from the Roman region to give the papacy a more secure base in the city.*! On 30 March 1191, Clement was succeeded by the aged Celestine HI. During the next seven years, Cardinal Lotario was an active member of the curia, participating in cases heard in Rome, although not charged with any major diplomatic mission.*
Throughout the 1180s and the 1190s, Lotario’s education in the political facts of life in Italy continued. In January of 1185, in Milan, Frederick Barbarossa presided over the marriage of his son Henry to Constance, the heiress to the kingdom of Sicily (also called “the Regno,” including both Sicily and southern Italy).** Frederick then left Italy for good, leaving his son to pursue the Hohenstaufen ambition to dominate Italy.
No one could withstand Henry, who succeeded his father as emperor in 1190. By the end of 1194, he had defeated the anti-German forces in the kingdom of Sicily, and German dominance settled like a net over Italy. Henry’s brother Philip was made duke of ‘Tuscany. Conrad of Urslingen, besides being Henry’s vicar in Sicily, became duke of Spoleto. Markward of Anweiler recetved Romagna, the duchy of Ravenna, the march of Ancona, and the county of Abruzzi. Dipold of Schweinspeunt became count of Acerra. The aged Pope Celestine watched helplessly, his personal feebleness a fitting symbol of the status of the papacy in Italy.**
The successes of the Hohenstaufen became more ominous in 1194 when Constance gave birth to a son, called Frederick. The heir to the kingdom of Sicily, he was also elected to succeed his father as Holy Roman Emperor. Henry and his infant son presented the threat of permanent Hohenstaufen domination of Germany and of Italy and the permanent impotence of the papacy. That meant, almost certainly, the undoing of the Gregorian reform.
Sporadic lay resistance to this German domination got nowhere. A conspiracy of 1195 resulted in a number of Sicilian dignitaries, including the archbishop of Salerno, being sent to prisons in Germany, where some died, some were blinded. Many, including the archbishop and the family of a former king of Sicily, were still there when Innocent was elected. In 1197, the anti-German party in Sicily made one last attempt to take control of the kingdom, but the plan was discovered and Henry wreaked terrible vengeance. Men of Sicily and southern Italy were hanged, impaled, skinned alive, burned at the stake, and thrown into the sea. One with royal aspirations had a red-hot crown nailed to his skull. And the Empress Constance, whose sympathies were probably with the rebels, was required to witness the punishments. In the summer of 1197, the prospects for the old pope and his curia were dismal.*°
If Italian politics in the 1190s were depressing to the papal curia, major “world” events, were no better. In 1187, the same year when we find signs of Lotario’s presence in the curia in Lombardy, news had reached the West of terrible reverses in the Holy Land. ‘The Muslim leader Saladin had destroyed whole Christian armies, had taken one city after another, and had captured the relic of the true cross. In October, he took the city of Jerusalem itself after almost a century of Christian control.’ As Lotario was returning to the curia from Grandmont, a papal letter was being prepared, calling for a new crusade. That letter, probably the work of both Urban III and Gregory VIII, sounded a note that was to be fundamental for the pontificate of Innocent HI: the successes of the infidel were God’s punishment for the sins of all Christians. Along with military force, repentance and reform would be necessary to regain the Holy Land.**
The fall of Jerusalem so shocked the West that for the first and last time, most of the great Western rulers agreed to go to the rescue: the kings of England and France, the Holy Roman Emperor, and many more. But despite the prestige of its leaders, the third crusade was an embarrassment. Frederick Barbarossa drowned in Asia Minor—a punishment, Innocent was later to remark, for his sins against the church.*” Philip Augustus stayed only briefly before returning to France. Richard the Lion-Hearted of England, Anjou, and Aquitaine enjoyed some successes in reconquering important parts of the kingdom of Jerusalem, but the city itself remained in Muslim hands. Finally, the slightly sour odor of the whole crusade became even worse when Richard, its principal hero, became the victim not of Muslims but of Christians. He was captured by Leopold of Austria and held for ransom by the Emperor Henry VI.
The suspicion that God was withholding his support for the crusades was increased by the fate of the Latin Christians who carried the title “king of Jerusalem.” Conrad of Montferrat was assassinated in Tyre in 1192; Henry of Champagne fell to his death from a tower window in Acre in 1197. In papal circles, both deaths were seen as divine retribution for incestuous marriages.” The whole sorry story seemed to drive home the need for fundamental reform and rededication, if God was to bless the efforts of western crusaders.
Even in Spain, where Christian forces had been making steady progress against the Muslims, the news was not good. Christian kings expended more energy fighting one another than in fighting the infidel; and in 1195, Muslims won a major victory that nearly allowed them to regain control of Toledo."!
After Frederick Barbarossa drowned, the young Emperor Henry decided to take the cross himself. Pope Celestine and his advisors could hardly oppose a Christian prince who offered to deliver the Holy Land, but their experiences of Henry in Italy had not been good, and his clear ambition to expand into the eastern Mediterranean could only mean trouble for the papacy. He claimed parts of the Balkans; the kings of Cyprus and Armenia offered to become his vassals; German crusaders paraded through Italy to depart for eastern ports. The summer of 1197, then, saw the bad news in Italy and the bad news in Palestine coalescing into an ominous, Hohenstaufen whole.
The inability of the papal curia to do much about all this bad news was evident; but the importance of the papacy for the rest of Christendom continued to grow. Pilgrims still made their way to visit the city of St. Peter and St. Paul; and papal supervision of the distant church expanded, with clergy traveling to Rome to pursue their business and papal messengers making their way to all parts of Christendom. The cases assigned to Cardinal Lotario were part of a growing flood of business. His name appears frequently among those of cardinals witnessing papal documents, as it had under Clement III, and he was used as judge delegate or auditor in some of the increasing number of cases that were making their way to Rome. As pope, he later referred to cases he had dealt with while still a cardinal.”
Lotario’s life as cardinal during the 1190s is not well known. He remained in Rome and its environs. The pontificate of Celestine was unusual in that the curia never left Rome, although individual members may have vacationed elsewhere. As a cardinal, Lotario wrote three short treatises, but he clearly felt pressed by his curial duties. In the prologue to The Misery of the Human Condition, he said that he had been able to write the work because he had taken a brief vacation from his many difficulties. In the prologue to The Four Kinds of Marnage, he said that the work was not what he really had intended, but only what he could manage in the face of obstructing difficulties. And in the conclusion to The Sacred Mystery of the Altar, he acknowledged the limitations of the work, saying, “Especially since, in my duties, I am impeded by such a rush of cases and ensnared in such a tangle of business that for a brief period I could find neither leisure for reflection nor peace for writing.”
The content of these works shows that Paris had left its mark on Lotario. They were all in Latin, intended for a clerical audience. They all show his intimate familiarity with the Bible. Scriptural quotations are the main ingredient of nearly everything he wrote, although the works are also seasoned with quotations from classical authors. Every phrase, indeed every word, from the Bible was the inspired word of God, capable of standing on its own without reference to its context. Lotario and his contemporaries treated the Bible like a vast quarry of glass tiles, choosing them and arranging them to form whatever mosaic came to mind. The text had not only its literal meaning but several spiritual or allegorical meanings as well, as though the tile changed colors with changing light.
In the prologue to The Four Kinds of Marriage, Lotario gave a different interpretation to the passage of Exodus mentioned above. He reminded his friend the priest Benedict that the Old ‘Testament priest wore a breast-plate that was both quadrangular and double (Exodus 28:16) and that the numbers four and two had symbolic significance. The priest should discern among four things, namely truth and falsehood (lest he deviate in faith) and good and evil (lest he deviate in action). He should discern on behalf of two, priests and people, lest the blind lead the blind. Four also signified the four meanings of scripture that the priest should understand; two signified the Old and New Testaments to which that understanding was applied. Four signified the gospels of the New Testament; two the tablets on which the law of the Old Testament were inscribed.“
Numbered distinctions were not always coupled with allegory; they could be used as a logician would to give the different meanings or different species of a term. Lotario wrote that we seek to escape three evils: innate, acquired, and inflicted. The first we inherit (original sin), the second we commit (our personal sins), the third we suffer (punishment). We escape these evils through a triple fear: servile (fear of punishment), filial (love of justice), and in between, a mixed fear made up of both.** He commonly made distinctions based on conventional categories: internal-external, spiritual-carnal, spirit-letter, superior-inferior.
The allegorical view of life presumed a figurative union of all truth. Every event, every object, rested in a web of figures. Attention paid to one reverberated toward its figurative equivalents. Instead of starting with a biblical text, Lotario could begin equally well with a liturgical part of the mass or with an aspect of human marriage and move to its scriptural equivalent or to the fundamental truth that bound them together. For example, the tunic worn by the priest at mass signified the seamless garment of Christ, which in turn signified the unified doctrine of Christ, which must be preserved against heretical rips.*°
This kind of thought provided the substance of Lotario’s treatise The Four Kinds of Marriage. He wrote that there was the ordinary marriage between a man and a woman, two in one flesh, “historical” and carnal. There was the marriage between Christ and his church, two in one body, “allegorical” and sacramental. There was the marriage between God and the individual soul, two in one spirit, “tropological” and spiritual. And finally, the marriage between the Word of God and human nature in the incarnation of Christ, two natures in one person, “anagogical” and personal. The close observation of any one of these marriages could illuminate all the others. For example, the purpose of “historical” marriages was to produce offspring and to prevent fornication. The purpose of “allegorical” marriage was the same, for through his marriage to the church, Christ produced many children, who are conceived through catechesis, born through baptism, and nourished through communion. And through this marriage, the faithful are saved from the adultery of worshiping false gods. Similarly, in the marriage between God and the soul, the soul is like the fruitful vine, bearmg good works, while being saved from the vices represented by fornication.
In an ordinary marriage, there is a betrothal, a dowry, a marriage broker, and witnesses. In the “anagogical” marriage between the divine and human natures of Christ, the betrothal was God’s promise to Abraham; there was no dowry, since human nature has nothing to give to God, who has everything; the marriage broker was the angel Gabriel; the witnesses (father, mother, priest, and marriage broker) were God the Father, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the angel Gabriel. And, Lotario continues, just as the ordinary “historical marriage” should not be clandestine,
[God] wants the sacramental marriage not to be clandestine, but rather manifest to all. For, “He has pitched his tent in the sun, and he comes forth from his chamber like a bridegroom” (Psalm 19:4—5). “In the sun,” that is, openly. Accordingly, it is said elsewhere, “The lamp has not come so that it may be placed under a bushel, but on a lampstand” (Mark 4:21). “For the Lord has made known his salvation; in the sight of the nations he has revealed his righteousness” (Psalm 98:2). For this reason, he said to the apostles, “What I say to you in darkness, you say in the light; and what you hear spoken in your ear, proclaim from the rooftops” (Luke 12:3). “Go out and preach to every creature in the whole world.... And they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it” (Mark 16:15, 20). Therefore, “their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19:4). Every Christian should confess this sacramental marriage, “For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved” (Romans 10:10). For this reason, [Christ] said in the gospel, “Every one who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 10:32), and “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words..., of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38)."’
Lotario’s Four Kinds of Marriage was intended to give the reader spiritual insights into the allegorical ties that connected past, present, and future, matter and spirit, but it was also a vehicle for conveying basic orthodox doctrine.
At worst, the allegories and distinctions could become mechanical and tedious, as happened in some of the sermons Lotario wrote after he became pope. The Four Kinds of Marriage shows some of these traits, and its repetitions and poor organization suggest a hasty composition. At its best, though, the method provided a fertile analytic tool as well as an integrating framework in which scriptural analysis, contemporary theology, liturgical art, and moral guidance were all connected. Lotario’s two works The Four Kinds of Marriage and The Sacred Mystery of the Altar are, besides being treatments of their stated subjects, remarkably comprehensive statements of Christian doctrine.
The highly speculative character of contemporary theology appears in Lotario’s writing when he occasionally departs from allegorical treatments to address questions that he had clearly encountered in the schools. For example, he points out that the marriage of the soul with Christ is not broken through apostasy, any more than the marriage between man and woman is broken through adultery. With that, he moves into a series of formal questions: Why is the marriage with Christ not broken when the soul abandons the faith? Can a baptized infant enter into this sacramental marriage with Christ when it clearly cannot contract an ordinary marriage before the age of consent? Can Christ be considered a bigamist, having married first the synagogue and then the church? Or can he be considered a polygamist because he is married to many churches and many souls?**
Sometimes, he seems to think that this sort of speculation is irreverent, that it goes too far in trying to subject mysteries to rational analysis,’ particularly mysteries related to the Eucharist. Having raised the question of what happens to the Eucharist if the communicant vomits, he says, “I do not know how Christ arrives and I am ignorant of how he departs; he knows who is ignorant of nothing.”*’ On the relationship between the risen Christ and his shed blood, his umbilical cord, and his foreskin, Lotario said, “It is better to leave it entirely to God than to dare to define it.”’' A favorite biblical text was “God made man right, but he has tangled himself in infinite questions.”°? On the other hand, questions like these clearly held a fascination for him; he mentions them and sometimes seems unable to resist grappling with them.
Lotario’s methods of analysis were not exclusively allegorical. Sometimes he offered philological explanations, as when he compared Greek, Hebrew, and Latin versions of the word for bread in the Lord’s prayer,” and when he explained the meanings of three related verbs in biblical Latin, accingere, succingere, and praecingere.* In his work on the mass, he showed a strong sense of historical development, frequently explaining parts of the liturgy as the product of this or that historical development, sometimes giving his sources.” In discussing why the pope divides the consecrated host in a distinctive way, he said, “I have heard from some that the reason for this is historical, not allegorical; but since I have been able to discover nothing in authentic sources, I have thought it better to remain silent than to make rash assertions.”°°
Lotario’s masters at Paris had taught him all this, but they were no less concerned with moral problems, and there was no more central moral problem for the active prelate than that of balancing spiritual ideals with practical realities. In the twelfth century, the problem often took this form: the relative merits of the active and contemplative lives.*’ Lotario struggled with the problem both as cardinal and as pope. In The Misery of the Human Condition, he clearly approved of the active life rather than making the traditional monastic call for abandonment of the world; and in The Sacred Mystery of the Altar, he said that the two lives could be combined. Here too he followed the lead of his Paris masters.°* The cloth pallium worn around the neck by metropolitans (archbishops) bore two lines, he wrote, indicating both the active and contemplative lives. The prelate should therefore follow the example of Moses, who ascended the mountain to “philosophize” with God, and then descended to the camp to attend the needs of the people.®’ As pope, he was to offer the same formula to others,°' but it must not have worked so well in practice—hence his perennial complaints that the crush of business caused him to neglect his spiritual life.
In another work written as cardinal, The Misery of the Human Condition, Lotario reviewed with impressive (and depressing) thoroughness the miserable conditions that accompany all humans as they pass through this world. The second book of this work calls particular attention to the unpleasant realities likely to confront a man living in the circles of the powerful and wealthy: avarice, the corruption of justice, gluttony, lust, the love of honors. His examples make clear that he did not need to look to the households of merchants or princes to find these vices; they flourished in the world of the upper clergy. He knew the ambitious courtier, who “pretends humility, feigns honesty, displays affability, shows off his kindness, is accommodating, is compliant, honors everyone and bows to everybody, frequents courts, visits important people, rises and embraces, claps his hand and fawns ”°3 He had experienced the behavior of the proud man, who “disdains his former friends, ignores acquaintances made yesterday, is contemptuous of old companions.”* He also knew that the rule of celibacy was broken by priests “who embrace Venus at night and then worship the Virgin at dawn.... At night they excite the son of Venus on a bed, at dawn they offer the son of the Virgin on an altar.”
His acute awareness of the moral dangers of the world was balanced, at least partially, by a vision of how the world should be ruled. The Four Kinds of Marnage is not about politics, but it concludes with an epithalamium to Christ as bridegroom and king, and it sets forth Lotario’s basic idea of what a ruler should be. He contrasted the behavior of tyrants, who are terrible, cruel, false, impatient, unfair, with that of the bridegroom, who is no tyrant but a prince ( princeps). ‘This king is praised for the truth of the doctrine he preaches, the gentleness of the patience he exhibits, and the justice he implements in his life. “These three things are especially necessary for those who rule, that they be truthful in speech, gentle in heart, and just in deed.” Here is Lotario’s standard for what a ruler should be, whether he be ecclesiastical or secular. Indeed, later in the treatise, he referred to bishops as having been constituted as princes over all the land, although princes called not to dominion but to service.*’ He was setting standards for all judges, ecclesiastical as well as secular, when he said that the good judge should have constancy, lest he be impetuous, justice, lest he be unfair, prudence, lest he be indiscreet.
The third work written as cardinal, The Sacred Mystery of the Altar, also gives us some idea of how he thought the world should be governed, but it is the most problematic of these three works. On the one hand, it is the longest and contains the most elaborate development of theological ideas; it is the only one explicitly written for a general audience rather than for a particular friend; and it shows none of the signs of hasty composition found in The Four Kinds of Marriage. It is also the only work where Lotario augmented his allegorical and scholastic analysis with historical explanations, based on research in the sources. On the other hand, there is evidence that the work was revised after Lotario became pope,” so we cannot say with certainty how much of the work reflects his thinking as cardinal. My own opinion is that the revisions were slight.’”” Nevertheless, the following comments must be taken with this caveat: the passages referred to may have been added long after his election to the papacy.
In this work, Lotario provided the text of the Latin mass, with extended commentary, saying that he had set forth the present custom of the Apostolic See to be followed by other churches, since the Roman church was the “mater et magistra” of other churches.” Having described the six orders of the clergy, he then offered a chapter on the “primacy of the Roman pontiff” He rehearsed the biblical texts concerning Peter to demonstrate that Christ had committed to him the governance ( principatum) of the entire church. Peter can bind others, but he cannot be bound by them. It pertains to Peter, whose faith never falters, to strengthen the others. The supreme pontiff is called to the plenitude of power; other priests are called to share in the solicitude. Peter often spoke for the apostles; he alone dared to venture from the boat when Jesus asked him to walk across the water; he alone drew a sword to defend Jesus from his captors; and he alone leapt into the sea to greet the risen Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.”
There is something missing here. Lotario made no mention of Peter’s triple denial. It is not exactly a question of honesty, since Lotario surely knew that no member of his intended audience would fail to notice the omission. Indeed, it was a subject he would address frequently as pope;” in fact, he referred to it in the very first letter of his papacy. But as a junior member of the papal curia, Lotario probably thought it imprudent to refer to Peter’s failings. The passage shows Lotario’s elevated conception of the papacy; but it also shows that his intellectual concern for thoroughness was being tempered by the diplomat’s and courtier’s concern for the expedient. Veritas, truth, was to be a constant referent of his papacy; but so also were utilitas and necessitas.
These works of Cardinal Lotario are strangely silent about the major crises facing the papacy during the 1190s. ‘There are no explicit references to the Hohenstaufen threat in Italy, to Islam, to the Holy Land and the crusades, or to the major heresies of the day. Nothing in these writings anticipate the vigorous actions Pope Innocent was to take against heresy. The one exceptional reference is to Greek Christianity. He was explicit in his distaste for the “heresies” and liturgical practices of Greek Christians, who he believed were responsible for “the scandal of perpetual division” within the church.’ As pope, he was to enjoy a great but Pyrrhic victory over these “schismatics.”
His silence about other major issues of the day might be used as evidence that as cardinal he was not especially interested, were it not for the fact that the sermons he wrote as pope were to show the same characteristic: virtually no allusions to the major problems facing the papacy, excepting of course the morality of Christians in general and of the clergy in particular. It seems that he simply chose to exclude practical and temporal problems from these writings, where he dealt with questions more spiritual and more perennial than those taken up in his papal letters. They were works of the mountain, not of the camp.
If most of the events of the 1190s seemed a clear indication of God’s displeasure with Christendom, the autumn of 1197 signaled a decided change in divine favor. On 27 September, Henry VI died at the young age of 32, leaving only a two-year old son to pursue the Hohenstaufen program. Henry’s Sicilian widow, Constance, was as tired of German domination as were her compatriots, and she and they moved to bring it to an end. Then, the following January, the old Pope Celestine died. Those two deaths created an opportunity and the cardinals gathered at the Septizonium seized it. They elected Lotario. He was thrust forthwith into the camp.
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