Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History) Benedict Wiedemann - Papal Overlordship and European Princes, 1000-1270-Oxford University Press (2022).
267 Pages
Introduction
Between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, those words were frequently quoted in papal correspondence. The pope—the successor of St Peter—had been placed, by God, above peoples and above kings. That the pope saw himself, and was seen by many, as supreme lord of all Christians is a commonplace in accounts of the period. In most tellings, this was a source of conflict. Kings and emperors— effective rulers of their own territories—could never bear the idea that they might be subject to a distant priest. Hence Emperor Henry IV’s dispute with Pope Gregory VII; hence King John of England’s battle with Pope Innocent III; hence Emperor Frederick II’s wars against Gregory IX and Innocent IV. This is the tale of the so-called ‘papal monarchy’ and its opponents. But that story can be turned on its head. This book examines specific relationships between popes and kings, points when a king placed himself under the lordship of the pope, or sought the ‘protection of St Peter’—a formal relationship whereby a realm received defence from the prince of the Apostles and his successor.
These relationships were not forced on kings, but sought by them. Secular rulers were not resisting the pretensions and claims of Rome; rather they desired to receive the pope as guardian or lord. The reason why is simple: having a special relationship with the pope meant that kings were able to use papal authority—the pope’s position ‘over the nations, and over the kingdoms’—for their own purposes. Secular rulers could send petitions to the pope asking him to grant their requests. Thus, perhaps counterintuitively, papal overlordship could actually contribute to the strengthening of royal power in a kingdom, rather than undermining royal independence. ***** Relationships between Medieval popes and kings have received plenty of attention from scholars. Historians well disposed towards the papal monarchy have focused on the structural relationship between popes and kings—that is, what the pope’s position was vis-à-vis Christian kingship in general. The importance of specific relationships between certain kings and the Holy See has also been recognized, however. Sometimes these specific relationships—the king of England receiving his realm as a fief in 1213, for example—have been seen as concrete illustrations of the pope’s attempts to enforce a universal world monarchy.
The implication is that the popes would have liked all kings to receive their realms as fiefs.¹ Rather than see these specific relationships as attempts to enact a general policy—the papacy trying to reduce all rulers to subservience—they have to be examined on their own terms and comparatively. Over the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, different types of relationship developed. Initially, as we shall see in chapter one, alliances between popes and kings were ad hoc and did not conform to set types. Indeed, it is not at all clear what either popes or kings thought their alliances meant in the eleventh century. Over the course of the twelfth century, the kingdom of Aragon moved into being ‘under the protection of St Peter’—a relationship with Rome analogous to that of certain monasteries and ecclesiastical institutions.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the language of fiefs and vassals—feudum; vassallus—appears in papal letters. Secular rulers might be ‘vassals’ of the pope; kingdoms might be papal ‘fiefs’. Over the course of the thirteenth century, it was established that these new relationships were fundamentally different from the existing protective relationships: although both vassal-kings and protected-kings might pay tribute (census) to the pope, a vassalking could be deprived of his kingdom for failing to pay. Emphasizing the variation and development in these relationships moves us away from seeing them merely as specific instances of a general policy aimed at the subjection of kingship to the priesthood. Distinguishing between different sorts of papal–royal relationship is important for another reason too. The (mainly German and Austrian) historians writing in the first half of the twentieth century tended to see any special relationship between a king and the pope as ‘feudal’. Thus the pope become feudal overlord of (deep breath) Sicily, Aragon, Portugal, England, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Denmark, the Rus’, Melgueil (southern France), the Isle of Man, the county of Besalú, the county of Cerdanya, Brittany, Provence, Barcelona, the entire Iberian peninsula, Corsica, and Sardinia. Calling all these relationships ‘feudal’ meant that ‘the king [ . . . ] had to surrender his land into full papal ownership [. . . ] and receive [. . . ] it back as a fief, so that he became legally an usufructuary. In recognition of his usufruct and of the Petrine protection the king [...] undertook to render certain services’.
The assumptions that all relationships between kings and the pope were ‘feudal’, and that the summary above holds true for all ‘feudal’ relationships, were challenged in the later twentieth century. Johannes Fried and Alfons Becker distinguished between different types of relationship.³ Fried advanced the idea that Aragon, Portugal, and some other counties were under papal protection rather than feudal lordship; Becker suggested that some kings were bound to the pope by a (non-vassalic) fidelity. Both, however, took it as read that some kings—the Norman rulers of Sicily and the thirteenth-century kings of England—were feudal vassals of the pope in the classic sense suggested above. Stefan Weinfurter, more recently, has dated the acceptance of ‘feudal bonds’ into the papacy’s relationship with the Siculo-Normans to around the 1120s, but emphasized that ‘feudalism’ was one tool amongst many in papal power relations.⁴ The trend in anglophone historiography was different. Elizabeth Brown and Susan Reynolds asked whether all the relationships which historians have labelled ‘feudal’ were really similar enough for the tag to mean anything.⁵ Relatedly, both asked whether features which historians have assumed to be characteristic of feudal relations really came from timeless alliances between tribal chiefs and their followers, or rather were constructions of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century legal profession, seeking to codify the relationships between kings and their greatest subjects. Taking both of these approaches into account, I focus on both terminology and duties. ‘Feudal’—as I use it here—is nominal: a feudal relationship between the pope and a king is one where the kingdom is called a feudum. This does not assume anything further about the relationship. I do not assume what a feudal—or protective—relationship is, and then apply it; I ask in what a relationship labelled by the word feudum (or its derivatives) consisted.
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The most important prong of this study points towards power and government. Implicit or explicit in the idea of the papal monarchy is that the pope was an active ruler who sought to increase his power at the expense of both secular rulers and provincial bishops. For Walter Ullmann: the crusades were [ . . . ] a stepping stone in the direction of the eventual establishment of a fully fledged world government. But we should not [ . . . ] assume that the crusades served as a model for the setting up of a papal world monarchy: the employment of brute force was a feature that did not gain much favour with the canonists. They preferred subtler methods, some of which would nowadays be termed the method of infiltration. This ‘method of infiltration’ appeared ‘under the guise of protecting individuals subject to curial jurisdiction’, beginning in Innocent IV’s reign (1243–54).⁶ Thus, for Ullmann, and for others too (albeit more subtly), these relationships of protection or lordship were tools for the papacy to reach towards global dominion. Rudolf Schieffer, more recently, summarizing his papstgeschichtliche Wende (largely synonymous with ‘papal monarchy’), dated the beginning of an ‘active feudal policy of the popes, aimed at winning as many [...] secular lords as possible for him [the pope] as vassals’ to Innocent III’s pontificate (1198–1216).⁷ Ullmann’s complex and remarkably consistent picture of a self-aggrandizing papal monarchy was painted mainly in colours drawn from the writings of canonists; the commentators on canon law. Ullmann, in fact, dismissed the value of papal letters as ‘too fact-tied and too concrete in their immediate application’ and (judged by their contents) motivated by ‘aggrandisement, lust for power, cupidity’.⁸ Ullmann’s student, Brian Tierney, did not always agree with the master’s picture of the papacy, but his canvases were populated by canonistic writings too.⁹ Fortunately, over the last few decades, attention has shifted to papal letters and documents. Ullmann’s complaint that papal letters and mandates give an impression of an aggressive and power-hungry papacy has been neatly reversed by the realization that papal letters were the products of a process in which the petitioner was king. Thus, papal letters and documents are the main sources for this study, but they have to be handled carefully. It is still the case that non-specialists tend to take papal letters as disinterested summaries of papal will. They are not. In the 1970s, Ernst Pitz laid out his what he saw as the fundamental principles of Reskripttechnik—rescript government, the Medieval practice of ruling.¹⁰ Most papal documents—mandates ordering someone to do something, privileges granting favours—were issued in response to petitions presented to papal officials. Large parts of the letters were simply rewritings of the petitions. In general, the papacy tended simply to approve petitions, although sometimes the request was only approved in part.
Once a papal document left the curia, there was no certainty that it would be enforced. Local ‘executors’ could be appointed, but they were not on salary and could hardly be compelled to carry out the task assigned. If a papal letter was ignored, all the beneficiary could do was to go back to the pope and ask him to send a command ordering the initial letter to be enforced. The beneficiary might actually decide not to try to enforce the letter. Sometimes the papal chancery would issue multiple different letters to a petitioner, so that the petitioner could choose which one to use.¹¹ While Pitz received a fair amount of pushback on parts of his approach, most of his ideas have now gained at least some foothold.¹² Work on papal letters, the papal chancery, and even the Crusades have confirmed the dominant role of petitions and petitioners as the engine of papal government.¹³ Therefore, while letters issued in the pope’s name are the main body of sources which I focus on, I interpret them overwhelmingly as indicative of the wishes and requests of petitioners and supplicants, rather than the pope’s will. In many cases, the specific wording and phrasing of the pope’s letter was taken directly from the petition or supplicatory letter. Analysing letters from this perspective radically changes the traditional view of papal overlordship of kings. Instead of being a story of papal self-aggrandizement, the petitions and requests received by the curia limited and defined the scope of papal action. During the Aragonese succession dispute in 1134–62, the papal court reacted to supplications from the Knights Templar and the ruler of Aragon; the pope did not seek to enforce his own claims to authority. During the royal minorities in Aragon, England, and Sicily at the beginning of the thirteenth century, supplicants and proctors at the curia decided what involvement the curia would have. The petitioners set the agenda, for their own ends.
The relationships between popes and kings allowed rulers and their counsellors to make use of papal authority. Royal proctors presented petitions to the pope asking for something and the pope approved it by his apostolic authority. Sometimes other petitioners—including enemies of the king—might petition the pope, asking him, as the lord or protector of the kingdom, to issue letters in their interest, but not necessarily in the royal interest. During the minority of King James I of Aragon, Aragonese and Catalan magnates asked the pope to appoint a council to ‘assist’ the regent, for example. These petitions were normally approved, just as the pope would approve the petitions of royal proctors. However, petitioning at the curia was expensive, and favourable contacts amongst the papal courtiers were very useful. Thus, while in theory anyone could instrumentalize papal authority for their own ends, kings were the most effective petitioners, since they had the resources. An increased emphasis on petitioners in pre-modern governance is not limited to the Medieval papacy.
In 1977—at the same moment Ernst Pitz was putting forward a view of reactive papal government—Fergus Millar published his The Emperor in the Roman World, which demanded that scholars of imperial Rome focused more on the petitions and appeals. Millar’s judgement on the emperor— ‘[a] very large proportion of his contacts with his subjects fell into a pattern which may be called petition-and-response’—would hardly be out of place in this book.¹⁴ Jim Holt and Tim Reuter both saw the importance of petitioners to twelfthcentury Angevin and Staufen government respectively.¹⁵ Outwith Christendom, Marina Rustow has reassessed the importance of petitions to the governance of the Fatimid caliphate.¹⁶ The legacy of the modern state has meant that we have tended to assume that state and government institutions exist primarily (if not exclusively) to instantiate the wishes and commands of the ruler(s). I do not believe this is the case with premodern government. Recently, in both modern and pre-modern scholarship, there has been more interest in how subjects are able to ‘work’ central governments.¹⁷ My insistence on viewing petitions as the driver of government has much in common with that. Pre-modern states especially had limited ability to ‘see’ their subjects—to collect information on the great mass of people in the polity and act on them all with equal strength. Instead, governments relied on the willingness of subjects to seek out the king or pope and petition him for redress. It was therefore crucial for the state to be legible to its subjects—that subjects knew how to approach and use the government apparatus—given that subjects were hardly legible to the state.¹⁸ This need for the state—the central governmental apparatus—to be legible to subjects was surely manifested in the aids to petitioners which we find from the twelfth century onwards. The ‘little book on the forms of petitions’ written by a cardinal at the beginning of the thirteenth century was intended (apparently) to aid humble petitioners pursuing business at the curia.¹⁹ The appearance of curial proctors around the year 1200 allowed petitioners to hire a professional to guide their business through the organs of the papal bureaucracy.²⁰
The various detailed accounts of prelates who conducted litigation before the pope might not have been intended as guidebooks, but they certainly show a deep interest in how to behave at the curia.²¹ Finally, the formularies produced by the papal chancery, penitentiary, and chamber for their own use were copied and disseminated by petitioners and litigants. There are now numerous manuscripts of these texts surviving in archives across Europe.²² In all of these ways, the pope’s subjects were doing their best to make the curia legible to them; to know how the pope’s court worked, and what they needed to do in order to get what they wanted. Papal lordship or protection allowed rulers, and petitioners more generally, to make use of papal authority. Supplicants could petition the pope. This is, of course, why rulers sought papal lordship or protection. Rulers were not reduced to vassalage by a self-aggrandizing papacy seeking world domination; rulers sought papal lordship to increase their own power and authority, or to strengthen and confirm their legitimacy. One of the broader implications of my approach—emphasizing petitioners as the driver of papal government—is that the papacy ceases to be the enemy of monarchy or of the territorial state, and becomes instead a potential resource for kings and states (and, indeed, their subjects). The traditional narrative of European politics between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is that the papacy and the empire fought over who would be the ultimate suzerain of Europe. The papacy won, and defeated the empire. But, while the papacy was distracted, it had ignored the consolidation of territorial monarchies in England and France—the precursors of modern nation states. By 1300, the universal pretensions of the papacy had been put down by the territorial monarchs of France and England.²³ The pan-European papacy was thus an opponent of the burgeoning nation state and, in the end, its victim. The conceptual approach in this book is that papal authority was placed in the service of petitioners. Relationships of overlordship and protection were sought out by rulers because they had the potential to contribute both to kings’ effective powers and also to their legitimacy. Hand in hand with a new papal–royal relationship went, implicitly or explicitly, recognition by the pope. It was an aspiring secular ruler who chose to approach the pope. Other options were sometimes available. In the mid-twelfth century, Portugal and Aragon-Catalonia seem to have desired recognition by Alfonso VII, ‘emperor of all Spain’, more than recognition by the pope.²⁴
The rulers of Bohemia were raised to kingship by the German emperors, not the pope.²⁵ In some cases, propagandists sought to claim that kingship was granted by angelic intervention.²⁶ A new ruler sought papal approval in order to assert his independence from powerful neighbours—although in other cases, such as Portugal and Aragon-Catalonia in the mid-twelfth century, recognition from the regional hegemon was preferable to papal approval. Rulers chose who to approach based on a complex combination of interest; often they chose to approach the pope, but this was their decision, not the result of papal claims and ambition. If, as has been claimed not infrequently, the pope was head of a sort of Medieval League of Nations/United Nations/European Union (delete depending on when the author was writing), then it was so because the people of Christendom saw him as a useful legitimator.²⁷ If, for any reason, the usefulness of papal approval was in doubt, then the pope’s authority fell through the floor. On a more prosaic level, the primacy of petitions in papal government meant that these new relationships were opportunities for kings to instrumentalize papal authority to strengthen their own regimes. Through petitions, rulers could gain papal letters and mandates in their favour, thus building up royal power within the realm. Of course, subjects and enemies of kings who were vassals and protégés of the pope could also petition Rome—and were likely to get their requests heard and approved—but kings and their counsellors tended to be the most effective petitioners. As we shall see in chapter five, the count-bishops of Maguelone did use papal overlordship to stymie the state-building ambitions of the French kings, but the count-bishops were themselves trying to build a state (albeit a smaller one). Papal authority was a potential tool for state-building. The usefulness of papal authority to royal power has been noticed by Pascal Montaubin in another context: Pope Eugenius III’s protection given to the kingdom of France during Louis VII’s absence on Crusade allowed Abbot Suger, Louis’ regent, to exercise his office outside the royal domain, strengthening vestigial royal power over the wider kingdom.²⁸ Papal protection strengthened regnal authority.
The Medieval papacy, and papal overlordship of kings, were not forms of supranational sovereignty which incipient nation states needed to destroy before achieving their true destiny, but potential enablers for developing polities. The two were not in conflict, but intimately and symbiotically connected. How should we reconcile this model of the papacy as a service industry with the ideology of the papal monarchy, with the statements of popes such as Boniface VIII that ‘it is necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff ’? Or of Innocent III that the pope was ‘lower than God but higher than man’?²⁹ How does it fit with the interpretation, which Ullmann spelled out, but with which the historiography was impregnated, that papal history is about the growth (and eventual decline) of ‘an idea’?
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