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The vast achievement of the General Council of 1215--the fourth in ninety
years--might have been expected to make further councils unnecessary for
some generations. But General Councils have always been the product of
historical accident. And who shall foretell when accidents will happen? The
thirteenth General Council was to meet, in fact, just thirty years after
the Fourth Lateran, and at Lyons in France. The purpose for which the pope
called it together makes it a council apart--the trial of the emperor.
The emperor was Frederick II, that King of Sicily whom, as a child of
three, his dying father, Henry VI, had made a ward of the pope; and whom,
as a young man of twenty, Pope Innocent III had called to be emperor.
Within four or five years of this, Frederick was launched on his great
career as chief antagonist of all that the popes had been striving for
since Hildebrand--the papal control (for protection's sake) of the papally
reformed church, its total independence of the lay power, and the
subjection of the lay sovereign, in regard to the morality of his rule, to
the teaching of the Church, i.e., to the pope as teacher. Crises, all
crises, develop character, and these long conflicts had developed a papal
mentality vis-a-vis the empire, as surely as they had developed a "mens" in
that corps of law-trained counsellors through whom princes were now
governing their states. As well as personalities, rival doctrines of law
were now in conflict, irreconcilable claims to supremacy, to independence
of control, vested interests hostile by tradition. Frederick II, ward of
Innocent III, was locked in conflict for a good thirty years with
Innocent's three successors, Honorius III, Gregory IX, and Innocent IV. It
was the last-named who called the first General Council of Lyons.
To understand the degree of the menace, we need to recall that Frederick
was a unique figure, as a man and as a ruler, in all these years; "the
world's wonder man," said the contemporary chronicler, Matthew Paris. And
we need to say something of the kind of place Sicily was, where Frederick
II was born and bred and where he lived for as much of his life as he
could, of Sicily the kingdom and Sicily the island of that name. The
kingdom then meant the island and all the Italian mainland from Sicily to
about 80 miles southeast of Rome on the Mediterranean coast, and to about
130 miles northeast of Rome on the Adriatic. For the best part of two
hundred miles the King of Sicily and the pope had a common frontier.
Potentially, Sicily was the chief permanent menace to the pope's
independence. All this territory, the island certainly and a good part of
the southern mainland, had been for centuries, and until about the time of
Hildebrand, a part of the Byzantine empire. In the eighth and ninth
centuries it had been the object of continual Mohammedan raids, and the
Saracens had settled there in great numbers. Then, halfway through the
eleventh century, Norman adventurers had gradually wrested the whole from
Saracens and Byzantines. Frederick II was, on his mother's side, the
descendant of these Normans.
The social effect of this extraordinary history was to produce, in the
island of Sicily especially, a culture richly diverse. Here, religiously,
were Latin and Greek, Christian and Moslem and Jew; the Levant, the
Mediterranean, the north of France; and eastern manners of life as deeply
rooted as western, eastern vices and western vices, the culture of Syria
and Egypt as of Italy and France. Frederick II grew up all but inevitably
only half a western European, it might be thought; and even more
orientalised by his own tastes than by the chance of the milieu where he
was bred. He was extremely intelligent, interested in the arts, active,
virile, ambitious, a strong ruler, utterly unscrupulous, and an
accomplished man of pleasure. He was as much at home with Moslems as with
Catholics, and lived in a half-Moslem court. Such was the prince on whom
the popes chiefly relied, in the years that followed the council of 1215,
to lead the great crusade that would reverse the long series of Saracen
victories and once more restore Jerusalem to Christian hands.
Left to himself, and no pope interfering, what would Frederick II have done
with the crusade? what would he have attempted? To make himself master of
the eastern Mediterranean and of Italy, as his father before him had
planned? The despotic ruler of a great state? And the Church in his
dominions? with no rights, no property but what the state allowed it? the
state controlling its whole life? With the papacy left at Rome in full
independence? What actually happened has often been told, and for the most
part has best been told by writers whose sympathies are not with the pope.
It was in 1211 that the German princes elected the seventeen-year-old
Frederick as "King of the Romans," that is to say, emperor-to-be. Innocent
III acquiesced. But he demanded that Frederick, who as King of Sicily was
his vassal (a feudal relation, pure and simple), should now make over that
kingdom to his infant son: the all-powerful lord of Germany should not
simultaneously be the lord of the realm which geography made the chief
threat to the pope's independence. This arrangement was ratified by the act
called the Pledge of Eger (1213), in which (among other matters) the
suzerainty of the Holy See over Sicily was explicitly acknowledged. And
Frederick, on the occasion of his receiving the crown of Germany, solemnly
took the crusader's vow, before the tomb of Charlemagne at Aachen.
The crusade set on foot by Innocent at the Fourth Lateran Council was a
fiasco. Frederick II took no part in it. He now began the most unusual part
of his complicated policy, the dissolution of all the royal power that his
father and grandfather[257] had built up in Germany, by surrendering to the
multitude of ecclesiastical princes, archbishops, bishops, and abbots, all
claim to control their temporalities, pledging himself to champion them
against any usurpation by the lay princes. This was a preliminary to
securing the election of his son, the nominal King of Sicily, as emperor-
to-be. A massive violation, indeed, of the pact made with Innocent III. To
the pope, Honorius III (1216-27), Frederick explained that the election had
been made without his knowledge and that, moreover, the arrangement secured
that Germany would co-operate more easily in the next crusade. He also
asked that he might now be crowned emperor by the pope, and when this took
place (1220), Frederick renewed his crusader's vow, fixing August 1221 as
the date of his departure.
For six years Frederick continued to delay the sailing date, and each time
the pope accepted the excuses he made. But in 1227 this pope died, to be
succeeded by one of the toughest popes who have ever reigned, a relative of
Innocent III who called himself Gregory IX. He immediately began to put
pressure on Frederick, who responded by assembling a great army and a fleet
of transports at Brindisi. On September 8, 1227, he sailed, but two days
later put back into port--the plague had caught his troops, they were dying
by the hundred. The pope simply ignored his explanation and excommunicated
him for breaking his vow (September 29). Frederick replied by a violent
attack on the pope. The Church, he said was a stepmother, not a mother. He
would leave for the Holy Land in May next year. To which the pope retorted
by renewing the excommunication, with the severe addition that wherever the
emperor went an interdict would fall--for as long as Frederick stayed in
any place the churches would close, there would be no mass and no
sacraments, except baptism and the last rites for the dying. If he insisted
on mass being said and was present (Gregory had already rebuked him for
doing this), he would be treated as a heretic, and the Sicilians be freed
from their allegiance to him.
Frederick organised his partisans in Rome, and soon Gregory IX was a
fugitive. On June 28, 1228, the emperor sailed for the East.
There was nothing religious about this expedition, and it was (in one
sense) completely successful, a diplomatic triumph. The emperor persuaded
the sultan to cede Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth and the route from
the coast leading thither, with all the villages through which it passed.
The Mohammedan inhabitants were to remain the sultan's subjects and have
the free exercise of their religion. Also the great mosque of Omar, in the
Holy City, was to be theirs and remain in use. Frederick, on the other
hand, pledged himself to prevent any attack from the West during the next
ten years. And in the church of the Holy Sepulchre the excommunicated
emperor crowned himself King of Jerusalem, before an audience of his own
soldiers and the Moslems. It was, indeed, wonderful. The Crusade principle,
the Christian reconquest of the Holy Land, had disappeared. The Christian
no longer planned to drive out the infidel.
By June 10, 1229, Frederick was back in Sicily. He had been away all but
twelve months.
It would be a pleasure now to tell the story of the sixteen years between
the hero's return and his excommunication at Lyons, in some detail. But our
business is merely to record the stages in his duel with the popes.
What Frederick II wanted to be, it seems agreed, was the Roman emperor of
old, but a "Catholic" Roman emperor--claiming that the empire was created
divinely, and that he was divinely commissioned to bring about the reign of
justice and peace, and also to spread the gospel everywhere. The Church, as
an institution wholly self-controlled (existing for the purposes of very
much the same divine mission) and the pope as its single supreme ruler,
could scarcely find any place in this fantasy. Which is why historians can
say that Frederick could not have succeeded and the Church survive, except
as a corps ministering and receiving sacraments within the four walls of
the basilicas. So long as this man was in power there must be war-unless
upon the Holy See there fell the misfortune of a succession of weakling
popes, too simple to be able to read the signs of the times.
The emperor returned from the East to find the war already on in his
kingdom of Sicily. He managed to drive out the papal army, punished his own
rebels with shudderingly cruel executions--we are told of men he had
skinned alive. Then he made a peace with the pope in which he conceded
almost everything, and was re-instated in the Church--an essential need, if
his gains in the Holy Land were to be maintained.
For six years after the treaty of San Germano (July 23, 1230) there was a
kind of truce. Frederick in his kingdom of Sicily ruled pretty much as if
he were already emperor and pope in one, building up his ideal of a strong
central despotism, and in Germany bribing the princes with lavish
surrenders of imperial rights; while the pope could barely maintain himself
in his own ever turbulent capital, and was quieted (to some extent) by the
emperor's exemplary, not to say bloody, repression of heretics, in Italy
and in Germany too.
Presently Frederick was ready, and in 1236 he returned from Germany to make
himself as truly master of Lombardy as he was of Sicily. The pope's
diplomacy was of no avail, nor the armies of the Lombard cities. At
Cortenuova, near Bergamo, the emperor routed them utterly (November 27,
1237), reversing his grandfather's defeat at Legnano of sixty years
earlier. To the Romans he announced his victory as a monarch writing to his
own capital city. He reminded them, in fact, that Rome was just this, and
spoke of celebrating a "triumph" there, in the antique fashion. Yet once
again the emperor was to govern the empire from his capital, they were
told; the ancient offices were to be revived and the Roman nobles be called
to fill them. From Rome the proconsuls, once again, would go forth to
govern the provinces, and to "infuse the blood of Romulus." The slender
hold of the pope on the city and the surrounding lands was almost the only
obstacle to the emperor's dream being realised.
But Gregory IX had already made clear his own conceptions of the relations
between pope and emperor--conceptions just as extreme as those of
Frederick, and presented with no less assurance that they were divinely
willed. So long as he lived there would be no weakening. He listed
Frederick's crimes against religion and once again excommunicated him with
a personal interdict (March 24, 1239). Frederick had not waited to be
attacked. He had already done his best to rouse the cardinals against
Gregory, telling them that the pope was no more than a kind of chairman of
their college, and appealing from his judgment to theirs. And his diplomats
worked to bring into combination against the pope Henry III of England and
St. Louis IX of France. All princes ought to unite to protest against a
pope who had gone so far beyond the limits of his real powers. And the
emperor also suggested to the cardinals that they call a General Council,
and he would offer his case for the judgment of all the bishops of the
world.
In reply to these manoeuvres the old pope replied in the tones of a very
Lear:[258] "A great beast has come out of the sea ... this scorpion spewing
passion from the sting in his tail ... full of the names of blasphemy ...
raging with the claws of the bear and the mouth of the lion, and the limbs
and the likeness of the leopard, opens its mouth to blaspheme the Holy Name
... behold the head and tail and body of the beast, of this Frederick, this
so-called emperor...."[259] Frederick was a heretic for his denial of the
pope's authority, for his mockery of the virgin birth, and his declaring
that nothing is to be believed that cannot be proved by the natural reason.
Frederick replied like a Father of the Church, pained at the pope's lack of
charity--"the pharisee who sits on the plague-stricken seat, anointed with
the oil of wickedness." He makes a most dutiful profession of faith and
retorts that the pope is a liar. It is he who is the sole cause of the
trouble, and the emperor too quoted the Apocalypse: "And a second horse
came out fiery-red, whose rider was empowered to take away all peace from
the world, bidding men slay one another."[260]
But if England and France held aloof from Frederick's invitation, they did
nothing to protect the pope from what his power could do. Moreover all
Germany--the ecclesiastical princes with the rest--stood by the emperor. By
the summer of 1240 the pope was fairly isolated. But on August 9 he issued
a summons to a General Council, to meet at Rome the following Easter. There
was only one way for the bishops to come--by sea. Gregory negotiated with
the Genoese for transports and protecting galleys. Frederick retorted by an
alliance with Pisa, and at the sea fight of La Meloria (May 4, 1241) the
Pisan fleet defeated the Genoese and took prisoner two cardinal legates and
a hundred bishops en route for the council. It never met, and Frederick,
moving ever closer to Rome, was all but prepared for the final assault
when, August 21, Gregory IX died. For nearly two years the Holy See was
vacant.
Gregory IX left twelve cardinals. Two of these were prisoners, a third,
Colonna, had gone over to the emperor. The official who actually ruled
Rome, the Senator Matteo Orsini, rounding up Colonna with the rest, locked
them all up in the ancient Septizonium with the announcement that none
should go forth until they had elected a pope. In this ruin they endured
the horrors of a semi-imprisonment for a couple of months, then elected
Celestine IV and--a number of them--immediately fled from Rome, as from the
plague. Celestine was dead within the fortnight, from the effects of the
weeks in the Septizonium. The cardinals refused to meet so long as
Frederick held their two brethren captive. Then Louis IX intervened.
Frederick thought it wise to release them, and on June 25, 1243, they
elected pope the cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi a Genoese. He called himself
Innocent IV.
This new pope was a man in the early fifties, vigorous, a practiced
diplomatist and a born administrator, "the greatest lawyer that ever sat
upon the chair of St. Peter."[261] His personal contribution to the strong
drink of Gregory IX's ideas about the Pope-State relation, was to make the
draught still stronger. God's mandate to the popes to govern men is
absolute and universal. The pope is lord of all, in the temporal sphere no
less than in the spiritual--the princes who rule the various states are,
whether they know this or not, rulers by delegation from him to whom both
swords were given.[262] Frederick's attempts to treat with this personage
broke down at the outset, for the pope's first condition was the release of
the hundred bishops. Nor would he make a peace without the Lombard cities.
In 1244 the negotiations were renewed, and in the midst of them the pope--
did he fear a plot to kidnap him? it is not impossible--fled from Italy in
disguise, to the city of Lyons on the very frontier of St. Louis' kingdom
of France (December 2, 1244). A month later the summons went out for a
General Council, to meet here on June 24, 1245, the feast of St. John the
Baptist. In an address given in the cathedral of Lyons the pope called on
the emperor to appear before the council, if not in person then by proxy,
and clear himself.
The acts of this council have not survived. But from two contemporary
accounts we know fairly well what happened at the three public sessions of
June 28, July 5, and July 17.
The attendance of bishops (140-50) and prelates was notably smaller than at
any of the earlier General Councils held in the West--less than half the
number who came to the council of 1179, perhaps a third of those at
Innocent III's council in 1215. Almost the only topic was the menace of
Frederick II.
The emperor had not ignored the pope's summons, or challenge. To Lyons he
sent one of his most capable legists, Thaddeus of Suessa. This personage,
on the eve of the council (according to one account of the affair), renewed
in his master's name all the promises made so many times before, but
refused the guarantees which the pope had demanded.
The council opened with an address by the pope on the five wounds of the
Church. These were the sinful lives of the clergy (high and low), the
recapture of Jerusalem by the Saracens, the Greek threat to that pitiful
mockery the Latin empire set up at Constantinople these forty years now,
the devastation of the Tartars in Hungary, and Frederick's persecution of
religion.
As to Frederick, the pope recapitulated the whole long story of his cruelty
and treachery, and put the case for his deposition. It was at the second
session that Thaddeus made his defence, putting the best colour he could on
the undoubted facts, and using all his skill on the points of law. Very
notably he impressed the bishops by his argument that no man should be
condemned as a heretic who had not been personally heard. Who else but the
accused could really know his own innermost heart and mind? And so a delay
was allowed for Frederick to put in an appearance--he was, at this time, at
Verona, the key city which, from the Italian side, commanded the main route
to Germany. Could the emperor have made the necessary arrangements and
arrived at Lyons within the nine days allowed him? And if he had done so,
would his known gifts of personality and oratorical skill have prevailed?
Conjecture, reveries of wishful thinking, cannot fill the gaps in our
knowledge.
It is said, by Matthew Paris, that the bishops were disturbed by the
argument about condemning a man for heresy in his absence. And at the third
and final session, on July 17, there was no general debate on the case. The
pope had spent the interval between the sessions in personally interviewing
the bishops, asking each whether he thought the case against Frederick had
been proved. The emperor found none to defend him--not a single bishop had
come from Germany,[263] by Frederick's own choice. At the third session his
advocate had not a second opportunity to reply on the facts. All he could
do was to raise the question whether this assembly was truly a General
Council. Were there enough bishops present to make it such? The protest
merely brought from Innocent the answer that Thaddeus must have expected--
who but Frederick had hindered the attendance of the bishops of Germany and
Italy? And the pope proceeded to the inevitable sentence--excommunication
and deposition.[264]
Supposing the General Council had authority to pass such a sentence, was
Frederick guilty of the crimes alleged? especially of the really fatal
crime, that against the Faith? His own manifesto, a protest against the
sentence and a defiance, can leave no doubt that the council had read his
character and intentions truly. The emperor did not, by any means,
straightway wither up and die. But the solemn act of the General Council
was the beginning of the end, of himself and the whole great house of
Hohenstaufen. Five years of bloody war followed, with the usual
alternations of unexpected defeats and unexpected victories. But when
Frederick II died, December 13, 1250, his cause was lost and the pope on
the way to become (should he choose) King of Sicily as well as pope--a
story that must be sought in the bitterly contested pages of Italian church
history. Just four years after Frederick, Innocent IV too died.
There remain for consideration the twenty-two canons enacted by Innocent at
Lyons, "the sacred universal council assenting." For once the laws are not
concerned with the moral state of Christendom. What more could have been
added to the seventy canons of the Fourth Lateran, barely thirty years old?
Innocent IV is the jurist par excellence. To the new Canon Law--i.e., the
great code promulgated by his predecessor Gregory IX in 1234, the Five
Books of the Decretals [of the Popes]--he stands in the same relation as
does Alexander III to the work of Gratian. Innocent was already a cardinal
when this great act of Gregory's was accomplished,[265] but he somewhere
found the time to write the first great commentary on it.[266] And when,
forty years after his death, another papal legist, Boniface VIII, added a
sixth book to the work, much of this was made up of Innocent IV's
decisions. Among his legal works that then passed into the body of the
Canon Law are these canons of 1245, almost wholly taken up with the details
of judicial procedure, and no doubt a definite landmark in the history of
church law.
For one who is not a lawyer to attempt to make clear to readers who are not
lawyers the importance of a series of technical legal reforms, would be to
waste their time and make himself ridiculous. But certain things may be
said about these twenty-two canons, nevertheless. One explains the meaning
of the technical term quidam alii ("certain others") in certain papal
rescripts. There is the useful rule that suits are to be dealt with by
professional lawyers--tried only in places where there is an adequate
supply of legal talent. Only to dignitaries must the important office of
Judge Delegate of the Apostolic See be committed. Judges against whom one
of the parties to the suit raises an objection are given powers to act, in
the case that the arbitrators chosen to judge the objection fail to act.
Judges delivering an unjust sentence are, by the fact, suspended from
office, and must make good the damage caused. They must not, while
suspended, say mass, under pain of a censure from which only the pope can
absolve them. Plaintiffs who fail to appear in court are to pay the costs
of the suit. Excommunications are to be set down in writing, with the
reason, and a copy given to the person affected. No judge is to
excommunicate those who hold intercourse with an excommunicated person,
except by process here provided. Otherwise the excommunication does not
bind, and the judge is liable to a penalty. Bishops are not affected by
suspensions or interdicts, unless the decree makes special mention of
bishops. In appeals to the Holy See in suits about elections to benefices
or provisions, the parties must set off for the Curia within one month from
the date of the appeal. If within twenty days of the arrival of one party
the other has not arrived, the case will be heard without him. "It is our
ardent desire to lessen litigation," says the pope, in the manner of all
good lawyers, and he proceeds to describe how appeals to his own supreme
tribunal must be set in motion.
There is a canon about elections, which decides that conditional votes are
invalid, and in the count are to be disregarded. And there is a canon about
homicide--about the practice of hiring murderers to get rid of an enemy.
"Prominent persons," says the canon, "have been reduced through fear of
this danger, to pay money to the chief of the gang ... not without
detriment to their Christian dignity." So any prince or prelate, or indeed
anyone at all, who makes such an arrangement with assassins, incurs by the
fact excommunication, and deposition from his office--whether the murder
takes place or not. Should it ever be established, in later years, that a
man made such a pact, no new sentence of excommunication or deposition is
needed in order to deprive him. The present suffices.
Finally the council enacted a lengthy decree about the need to deliver the
Holy Land from the Saracens, calling for prayers, for volunteers, offering
spiritual privileges, granting protection to the property of the crusader,
and levying new taxes on all clerical incomes, 5 per cent per annum for
three years. "We and our brethren the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church,
will pay one tenth of our revenues." Deliberate tax-dodgers, those who make
a fraudulent return of their income, are excommunicated. There are clauses
releasing crusaders from paying the interest on money debts, and commands
to creditors to release them from their oaths to pay the interest, and
stringent excommunications of Christians who supply the Saracens with
munitions of war, or give them advice and aid of any kind to the detriment
of the crusade. If such are taken prisoner, all their possessions become
the property of their captor, and they themselves become his slaves. For
four years all trade with the Saracen lands is to cease, so that ships may
be gathered for the expedition and the Saracens (it is hoped) be reduced to
beggary meanwhile.
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