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223 Pages
Communicating Papal Authority in the Middle Ages
This book bridges Japanese and European scholarly approaches to ecclesiastical history to provide new insights into how the papacy conceptualised its authority and attempted to realise and communicate that authority in ecclesiastical and secular spheres across Christendom. Adopting a broad, yet cohesive, temporal and geographical approach that spans the Early to the Late Middle Ages, from Europe to Asia, the book focuses on the different media used to represent authority, the structures through which authority was channelled and the restrictions that popes faced in so doing, and the less certain expression of papal authority on the edges of Christendom. Through 12 chapters that encompass key topics such as antipopes, artistic representations, preaching, heresy, the crusades, and mission and the East, this interdisciplinary volume brings new perspectives to bear on the medieval papacy. The book demonstrates that the communication of papal authority was a two-way process effected by the popes and their supporters, but also by their enemies who helped to shape concepts of ecclesiastical power.
Communicating Papal Authority in the Middle Ages will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the relationships between the papacy and medieval society and the ways in which the papacy negotiated and expressed its authority in Europe and beyond.
Minoru Ozawa is Professor of Medieval History at Rikkyo University, Japan.
Thomas W. Smith is Keeper of the Scholars and Head of Oxbridge (Arts and Humanities) at Rugby School, UK.
Georg Strack is Professor of Medieval History at Philipps-Universitat Marburg, Germany.
Contributors
Yuichi Akae is a Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Keio University, Tokyo, where he teaches western history. His research involves themes and texts in the religious and intellectual history of western Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, with a particular focus on preaching. His publications include a monograph, A Mendicant Sermon Collection from Composition to Reception: The ‘Novum opus dominicale’ of John Waldeby, OESA (Brepols, 2015).
Mamoru Fujisaki is Associate Professor of Medieval Mediterranean History at the University of Tokyo and was previously an Associate Professor at Sophia University, Tokyo. His research focuses on the institution of the medieval Roman curia and European-Mongol relations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His first Japanese monograph, The Formation and Development of the Papal Curia in the Middle Ages (2013), won the Herend Prize of the Collegium Mediterranistarum.
Shigeto Kikuchi is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo, where he teaches European medieval history. His research interests centre on the Carolingian age. A revised version of his PhD dissertation which was accepted in 2013 by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Mtinchen was published in 2021 as his first monograph, Herrschaft, Delegation und Kommunikation in der Karolingerzeit. Untersuchungen zu den Missi dominici (751-888) (MGH Hilfsmittel 31).
Hisatsugu Kusabu is Professor of History at Osaka Metropolitan University, where he teaches pre-modern European and Byzantine history. He is also the Director of the Urban Culture Research Center in the Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences. His PhD on ‘Comnenian Orthodoxy and Byzantine Heresiology in the Twelfth Century: A Study of the “Panoplia Dogmatica” of Euthymios Zigabenos’ was awarded by the University of Chicago in 2013.
Harald Miiller is the Chair of Medieval History at the RWTH Aachen University. His research interest focuses on Renaissance humanism and on papal history. He has published several books and papers on the history of antipopes and schisms, including the edited volume Der Verlust der Ejindeutigkeit. Zur Krise pdpstlicher Autoritat im Kampf um die Cathedra Petri (De Gruyter, 2017).
Koji Murata is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Library, Information and Media Science at the University of Tsukuba. His research interests focus on Byzantine diplomatics, archival science, and the history of astronomy. His published articles include ‘An Overlooked Excerpt of the Chronicle of George the Monk in Codex Parisinus Suppl. gr. 1238’, Parekbolai, 11 (2021) and ‘The Mongols’ Approach to Anatolia and the Last Campaign of Emperor John II Vatatzes’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 55 (2015). He is currently working on a project on Byzantine records of celestial phenomena from historical, philological, and astronomical perspectives.
Takahiro Narikawa teaches medieval and European history as an adjunct at several universities in Japan. His studies on the Christianisation of Scandinavia and the Scandinavian Church’s relationship with the papacy include his MPhil thesis submitted to the University of Oslo, titled ‘Innovations and Conservatism: Foundation of the Metropolitan Authority and the Effective Control within the Church Province of Nidaros in the Thirteenth Century’ (2008) and ‘Lund as a Missionary Metropolis of the Scandinavian World around 1100’, Shigaku Zasshi, 120 (2011, in Japanese). He is currently completing his doctoral thesis on the changing relationship between the metropolitans in Scandinavia and the papacy in the High Middle Ages.
Jessika Nowak is a Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Wuppertal. Her research focuses on Church history, Burgundy, France, and Northern Italy. Her monograph, Ein Kardinal im Zeitalter der Renaissance. Die Karriere des Giovanni di Castiglione (2011), was awarded the Friedrich Sperl-Preis. She has edited six volumes: Et l’homme dans tout cela? with Gabriele Annas (2017), a volume on rules of negotiation and conflict resolution at the papal court with Georg Strack (2019), a book entitled De Bale a Marseille with Jan Riidiger (2019), a book about Besangon in the High Middle Ages with Anne Wagner and Jens Schneider (2020), La Lotharingie, un espace de l’entre-deux? with Tristan Martine (2021), and Espaces ecclésiastiques et seigneuries laiques with Tristan Martine and Jens Schneider (2021).
Minoru Ozawa is Professor of European Medieval History at Rikkyo University, Tokyo. He studied history and Scandinavian languages in Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Reykjavik and worked as a research fellow at Nagoya University before joining Rikkyo University in 2011. His research has concentrated on political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of Scandinavia between the eighth and twelfth centuries. His academic interests are also expanding into other fields, especially maritime history, intellectual history, and global history, including that of Japan.
Alessandro Simbeni is an independent scholar of art history, with specific interests in Italian painting and iconography of the Later Middle Ages. He has published articles on the art and the patronage of the Franciscan Order in Europe. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at Rikkyo University, Tokyo, where his work focused on the Franciscan missions to Asia, including the art production and propaganda of the Franciscan Order between Italy and East Asia in the pre-modern period.
Thomas W. Smith is Keeper of the Scholars and Head of Oxbridge (Arts and Humanities) at Rugby School, where he teaches history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society. His first monograph, Curia and Crusade: Pope Honorius II and the Recovery of the Holy Land, 1216-1227 (Brepols, 2017), was Highly Commended in the British Records Association’s Janette Harley Prize 2018. He is currently completing a second monograph on The Letters from the First Crusade, to be published by the Boydell Press, and, with Susan B. Edgington, an edition and translation of the Gesta Francorum Ierusalem expugnantium traditionally attributed to Bartolf of Nangis.
Georg Strack studied and researched at LMU University (Munich) before teaching at JMU University (Wiirzburg). Since 2019, he has held the position of Professor of Medieval History at Philipps University (Marburg). His doctoral dissertation and first book dealt with early humanism in Germany, a topic to which he continues to devote himself as Chairman of the Willibald-Pirckheimer Society. As a member of the advisory board of the Regesta Imperii, he contributes to the study of charters and auxillary sciences in general. His main fields of interest are the history of the crusades and the papacy. In 2022, he published his second monograph on papal oratory with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica.
Acknowledgements
This volume is the result of the international symposium Medieval Papacy: Governance, Communication, Cultural Exchange held at Rikkyo University, Tokyo, between 17 and 19 February 2017, organised by Minoru Ozawa with assistance from Shigeto Kikuchi, Soki Oda, and Satoshi Ohtani, where earlier versions of the papers published here were presented and discussed. Generous funding from Rikkyo University permitted the contributors from Europe to attend — a debt gratefully acknowledged here. The editors of the volume would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful and supportive comments on this book. Thanks to Jasmin Hauck and Andreas St6rmer for their assistance with the initial bibliographical and editorial work. Our editorial assistant at Routledge, Louis Nicholson-Pallett, rendered efficient help in the final submission of the book. Our commissioning editor, Michael Greenwood, has been, as always, an absolute pleasure to deal with. He has remained utterly friendly, supportive, and patient, even as the editorial process lasted longer than expected — what a gentleman!
Introduction Minoru Ozawa, Thomas W. Smith and Georg Strack
The questions of exactly what authority the medieval papacy had, and how it was communicated and received, have been of perennial interest to historians. One of the most influential historiographical traditions in the study of the subject of medieval papal authority has been the emphasis on its hierocratic aspects and the development of a legal system and ideology to support the claims of a ‘papal monarchy’ (as John A. Watt and Colin Morris titled their studies of the central medieval papacy), pursued in the second half of the twentieth century.!
The main proponent of the concept of hierocratic rule was Walter Ullmann, who advanced it a number of landmark studies.” Influenced in part by this tradition, individual popes such as Gregory VII and Innocent III proved attractive subjects for study, since they stood out as communicators of papal authority and power in their purest forms.’ In the later Middle Ages, scholars have focused on Boniface VIII, Clement VI and his successors in Avignon, and on the popes who restored papal authority after the Council of Basle.+ The late twentieth century was a fruitful era of research that laid the fundament for future work on papal authority, and resulted in classic studies that defined the field by scholars such as I. S. Robinson,° Kenneth Pennington,° and others,’ who nuanced existing interpretations of papal authority. The research interests underpinning these works remain essential avenues of enquiry for scholars. Recent notable studies have addressed topics of long-standing interest, such as the basis of papal authority in the Liber pontificalis,® relations between the papacy and lay powers,” papal government,!° jurisprudence,!! and the institution of legation,!* to take but a handful of examples. Current approaches are also building on the traditional foundation in different ways and exploring new perspectives.!?
Art historians have dealt a lot with visual representations of papal authority in architecture and frescoes; a recent collection of articles develops a new approach to these topics, not least by considering clothing.!> The influence of the material turn can also be seen in Steven A. Schoenig’s examination of the pallium as a tool and representation of papal power.!® An important strand in the recent historiography seeks to temper the traditional notion of the papacy as the unchallenged centre of hierocratic rule. Kathleen G. Cushing and Jeffrey M. Wayno tackle the problem head-on in their respective studies of the limitations that acted on papal authority.!” Mary Stroll, Harald Miller, and others have examined the threat that antipopes posed to the acceptance of papal authority.!* During the investiture contest, the German kings challenged papal authority and put popes such as Paschal II under pressure.!A volume of essays on Alexander III bears the subtitle The Art of Survival — testament to that pope’s struggle to exert his authority in the face of considerable opposition.2? Damian J. Smith has investigated when Innocent III reached the limits of his authority in his relations with the crown of Aragon.”!
The opponents of Boniface VIII went so far as to accuse him of heresy and of being the Antichrist himself.” John XXII was also confronted with the accusation of heresy for political reasons as well as for his theological ideas which his successor had to correct.?? Danica Summerlin and Wayno demonstrate the importance of general councils in papal government and stress the role that prelates from across Christendom played in creating the content of conciliar decrees in a consultative and collaborative fashion — they were not just called to the curia to rubber stamp a premeditated papal programme.” The relationship between the papal centre and the local periphery, and the communication of (sometimes competing) authorities between the two, has proven particularly fruitful in advancing our understanding of papal authority.”° It forms the explicit focus of several studies that analyse the connections and tensions between the Roman centre and regional spheres of influence, revealing how, just as in its engagement with councils, the papacy had to negotiate its authority in cooperation with other members of the universal Church.” It is to this historiographical tradition that the present volume seeks to contribute.
Adding to this debate on the communication of medieval papal authority, the essays presented here bridge Japanese and European scholarly approaches to ecclesiastical history to provide new insights into how the papacy conceptualised its authority and attempted to realise and communicate that authority in ecclesiastical and secular spheres across Christendom. Adopting a broad temporal and geographical approach that spans the Early to the Late Middle Ages, from Europe to Asia, the book focuses on the different media used to represent authority, the structures through which authority was channelled and the restrictions that popes faced in so doing, and the less certain expression of papal authority on the edges of Christendom. Its particular strength is the range of new perspectives that it offers on the communication of medieval papal authority, both in terms of the blending of Japanese and European scholarly approaches and studies on Europe (including its edges) and Asia.
The first part of the book explores the range of media that popes used to represent and communicate their authority, including letters, synodal sermons, and artistic endeavours such as the creation of tapestries. The examination of this source material testifies to the vitality of the papacy’s construction of its ideological and theological authority on its own terms, revealing the multifaceted and sensitive efforts of popes to make their authority felt at a distance from their curial palaces in Italy and Avignon. In Chapter 1, Shigeto Kikuchi surveys the evidence for the communication and acceptance of papal authority in early medieval Francia.
While there was an authority much closer to home in the form of the Carolingian kings, whom Franks seeking favour or redress could approach more easily, there was a certain awareness of, and desire for, papal authority in the kingdom. Kikuchi explores the wide range of different media through which papal authority was felt in Francia, including papal envoys, letters and privileges, gifts (including relics), the pallium, and epigraphic evidence, to test the extent to which papal government in this period was responsive or proactive. Kikuchi argues that the popes in this period were not merely reactive but took the initiative to travel over the Alps to Francia to communicate with its people directly, and acted spontaneously in inserting additional clauses of protection and sanction in its documents which their petitioners did not request. He also posits that papal and Frankish royal authority were not contradictory to one another but went hand-in-hand. Attention is drawn to the Frankish supplicants at the papal curia who were there conducting royal business or there as a result of royal intervention. In Chapter 2, Georg Strack examines how the motif of Imitatio Christi was used in papal synodal sermons between 1095 and 1274 both to express and challenge papal authority.
Focusing first on Urban II’s use of the motif, Strack then establishes a connection to Innocent HI’s famous sermon Desiderio desideravi (1215) in which that pope alluded several times to the Passion of Christ. He shows that the text of this sermon was widely received among chroniclers of the Late Middle Ages and that when they wrote about this speech, they emphasised the pope’s authority as a Christ-like preacher and prophet. Strack then demonstrates how Gregory X made reference to the text of the sermon when his authority was challenged at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, and also reveals — contrary to current scholarly interpretations — that when Matthew Paris reported Innocent IV giving a similar sermon at the First Council of Lyon in 1245, he did so in order to critique the pope as imitating Christ in words only, rather than to draw a positive comparison. Extending the examination of papal sermons further into the Late Middle Ages, in Chapter 3, Yuichi Akae studies John XXII and the beatific vision controversy, which the pope sparked in a sermon delivered on All Saints’ Day 1331.
John’s sermon provoked an intense flurry of communications on the matter ranging from sermons, through quaestiones disputatae, pamphlets, letters, and notarial instruments, to oral utterances, and culminated in the pope revoking his position on his deathbed in 1334. As well as studying the sermons of John, Akae considers how figures such as Thomas Waleys, William Ockham, and Clement VI engaged with the pope’s statements. He argues that John XXII faced particular difficulty in identifying and communicating his authority as a preacher. In Chapter 4, Alessandro Simbeni turns to the communication of papal authority through visual media with a case study of the Assisi tapestry commissioned by Sixtus IV between 1471 and 1482.
Simbeni emphasises that when the papacy used art to communicate its authority to ecclesiastical audiences (as opposed to secular ones) it had to employ different strategies and use richer and more complex figurative language, namely, in its biblical and doctrinal references. In the case of the Assisi tapestry, Sixtus attempted to use art to reinforce the unity of the Franciscan order, which was being torn apart from inside by divisions concerning its direction in the second half of the fifteenth century. The tapestry, which is based upon the allegorical image of a tree, depicts the history of the Franciscans and alludes to the variety and multiplicity of the order through the branches, while at the same time reaffirming the figure of Francis of Assisi as the common root of the tree. Despite Sixtus’ attempts to use his authority to influence the debate, he was ultimately unsuccessful, and the order split officially into Observants and Conventuals in 1517.
Yet the careful manifestation of authority through different media did not always translate into influence on the ground. The chapters of part two draw attention to the structural restrictions and challenges which acted to limit papal power. The chapters in this section point to the threats posed by antipopes, the problems that distance placed on international communication, and the machinations of curial factions in Italy. In Chapter 5, Harald Miller investigates how the contest between popes and anti-popes, and the schism that accompanied it, constituted a challenge to papal authority when the Roman papacy attempted to govern the whole orbis christianus.
The existence of an anti-pope represented a threat to papal authority since it divided the Church hierarchy and damaged the status of the papacy as an institution. Miller’s chapter explores how candidates managed to strengthen their arguments as rightful popes and overcome their rivals so as to install themselves on the throne of St Peter. He also investigates how people coped with the ambiguity inherent in the existence of two rival popes in a Church that was a monarchy by tradition. Chapter 6, by Thomas W. Smith, inspects how the logistical aspects of papal communication affected the administration of active crusades in Outremer and what this meant for pontifical authority. The Fifth Crusade (1217-21) represents a particularly good opportunity for such an investigation because it was an expedition whose character, strategy, and course were determined to a great extent by the sharing of information with the West. Smith outlines how papal crusade communication was conducted during the campaign and ascertains what its effect on the crusading movement was. He argues that the fate of the Fifth Crusade, perhaps more than any other, hung on contact and communication with the West. Paradoxically, though, in the end, perhaps the reliance of the Fifth Crusade on this regular stream of information on the preparedness of the long-awaited crucesignatus Emperor Frederick I contributed to its undoing.
The regular updates that the crusaders received that Frederick was about to depart contributed directly to the inaction of the army while the pilgrims awaited his arrival, and it hamstrung the ability of the crusade leadership to plan strategically in the long term. In Chapter 7, Jessika Nowak analyses the rich corpus of encrypted dispatches sent by Milanese ambassadors resident in mid-fifteenth-century Rome back to the duke of Milan. She studies how the papal curia as a locus of decision-making and the pope as a decision-maker and ‘man of action’ attracted a lot of attention in Milanese politics. Nowak demonstrates that the copious manuscript material left over from Milanese political correspondence reveals how the duke of Milan and his envoys went to great lengths to influence papal decision-making in their favour. Her chapter provides valuable evidence for the ‘global’ authority of the papacy according to the understanding at the time — something which comes through clearly in her source material.
Building upon the strengths and weaknesses of the institution examined in the first two parts of the book, the third and final part combines the two aspects and analyses the ways in which popes at the centre attempted to overcome the restrictions of their administrative structures in order to exert influence on the edges of Christendom, in Asia, Romania, and northern Europe through different media. Conversely — as in Nowak’s chapter on Milanese diplomacy — the essays also shed light on the two-way process in which the peripheries attempted to shape ecclesiastical politics and administration in Rome. Chapter 8, by Minoru Ozawa, analyses the background of the Viking King Cnut’s pilgrimage to Rome in 1027. Past scholarship has regarded his pilgrimage as an expression of the pious mind of the new Christian monarch.
This interpretation is partly correct, but we must remember that he was the first Viking leader who communicated and negotiated with a pope. This fact was important for Cnut in the construction of his northern imperium around the Northern Seas. Why, then, did Cnut meet Pope John XIX? A political factor is that Cnut became the king of England in 1016, where he needed ecclesiastical magnates to operate a different administrative system from those in Scandinavia. In order to achieve that aim, Cnut felt he needed to represent himself to all as a Christian king, not a Viking leader, and to invest ecclesiastical and monastic institutions with more resources such as lands, privileges, and gifts.
Yet there were economic factors at play here, too. As traders, Vikings transacted commercial treaties with emperors, kings, and magnates to expand their network of commerce. In 1027 Cnut requested that Emperor Otto II and King Rudolf of Burgundy keep the route to Rome safe for travellers and not to oppress them with tolls. This chapter explores how Cnut communicated with the pope and used papal authority in seeking to achieve his political and economic ends.
In Chapter 9, Mamoru Fujisaki studies the attempts of the papacy to convert ‘infidels’ in Asia to Christianity in the thirteenth century. In pursuing contact with the Mongols, and attempting to persuade them to convert, the popes made use of the newly-founded mendicant orders. Fujisaki illuminates how the papacy attempted to overcome the barriers of communication between the different cultures, especially the question of language, in its attempt to achieve its aim. It provides a valuable case study of the influence of the papacy at the cutting edge of its geographical reach. Chapter 10, authored by Koji Murata, assesses the nature and purpose of Pope Gregory IX’s communication with John HI Vatatzes, emperor of Nicaea. This correspondence is set against the background of Gregory’s efforts in 1235 to organise a new crusade in aid of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which was under threat from the empire of Nicaea and the Tsardom of Bulgaria. Although the crusade was never launched, its organisation generated a mass of communication being dispatched from the papal curia. Most studies hitherto have focused mainly on the letters to Catholic lords in the West, but Murata turns the focus on John III Vatatztes instead, a correspondence that has received insufficient attention.
This chapter explores how the papacy communicated with Byzantium in exile during the crucial years of the empire of Romania. Murata uses the papal letters to reveal that the attempt by Gregory IX to initiate the Constantinople crusade produced a major change in the papal attitude towards the Byzantines. In Chapter 11, Hisatsugu Kusabu turns his attention to the papal missionary campaigns against the so-called ‘medieval heresies’ in the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries in the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Observing the nomenclature of the titles of ‘heresies’ as established by both papal and Byzantine heresiologists, Kusabu argues that the campaigns were planned for papal networking over socio-religious authorities rather than for an ideological and doctrinal war on heresies. A comparative investigation of the elaborate title for heresies made by Eastern heresiologists reveals the relative papal indifference to those doctrinal contents, including medieval dualism and even the works of Byzantine heresiologists. Instead, the popes considered Bosnia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria the nodes of networking and described these areas as the corridor for the transportation of people, including missionaries and heretics coming to and from the East, to be controlled by Catholic authorities.
This chapter reveals the need for further research on the transportation of popular Christianity to the Balkans and the mutual communication that tended to be labelled as heretical by both the Church authorities and modern historians. In the twelfth, and final, chapter of the volume, Takahiro Narikawa illustrates the establishment, as well as the fragility, of the communication channel between the ‘centre’ of the Roman papacy and the ‘periphery’ of Latin Christendom mainly through crusading activity in its northernmost part, namely, the religious frontier between the Christian Norse (Scandinavians) and the non-Christian Saamis (called ‘Finns’ in medieval sources), a hunter-gathering people living in Fenno-Scandia. While the medieval Norse-Scandinavian involvement with the crusade both against the Muslims in Holy Land as well as their Baltic neighbours has recently attracted greater attention from researchers, few of them show interest in the fact that the official conversion of the Saamis usually dates to the early eighteenth century, well after the Reformation in Scandinavian countries. In other words, the Norse people maintained a religious frontier with these northernmost people throughout the Middle Ages while taking the cross to Holy Land and fighting other ‘infidels’. Narikawa draws attention instead to the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century popes who issued a series of crusade encyclicals against these ‘Finns’ in the Far North and what it can tell us about both papal communication and the religious mentality of the medieval Norse-Scandinavian peoples themselves.
Taken as a whole, the chapters of this book contribute to new directions in the study of the medieval papacy, problematising and moving us another step further away from the classic interpretation of the popes as hierocratic rulers exercising unwavering authority over the universal Church and secular powers. Its chapters reveal that papal authority was dependent on the interplay between the papacy and those with whom it was in communication, whether at its curia engaging in petitioning and diplomacy or at a distance. The papacy’s communication of authority to other members, both within and without Christendom, was a delicate, and often perilous, course that waxed and waned in different regions and at different times according to shifting political contexts and changing popes. Indeed, the breadth of this book makes it possible to compare and contrast papal authority across a considerable expanse of time and space, from the Early to the Late Middle Ages, and from the centre to the peripheries, using a range of different media. The studies collected herein underline that the communication of papal authority was a two-way process effected by the popes and their supporters, but also by their enemies who helped to shape concepts of ecclesiastical power.
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