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The crusade against the Albigenses, the beginnings of the Order of
Preachers, and the approval of the Friars Minor were for Innocent III
so many means of countering newly arisen dangers to the future of
Catholic unity. But older than any of these, was the danger, chronic
since the time of Justinian, of the Church's dependence upon the
Catholic State. The pope, above all, must not be politically subject to
the emperor, and he must be able to control his own subjects, the
powerful barons of the Campagna especially and the turbulent bourgeois
of the towns. A series of monastic popes had begun the good work of
liberating religion from the control of the lay lord, and, in doing so,
they had brought to birth the Canon Law. One of the greatest of the
canonists of this pioneer generation had next become pope himself. In a
long reign of twenty-two years, filled very largely with resistance to
a new assault on his spiritual independence, he had added enormously to
the bulk of that law, had developed the field of the Roman Church's
habitual action, and had, indirectly, definitely created the role of
the canonist-pope. Such was the effect of Alexander III. In Innocent
III that role was played in all its fullness. The consequences were
literally, for once, epoch-making that, within seventeen years of
Alexander's death, another superb canonist, fifty to sixty years
younger -- younger by the age of two generations of thought in a time
when legal thought was developing rapidly came to rule the Church, and
that he ruled it for eighteen years.
Innocent III came to his post possessed of the whole theory of law, not
merely learned in a collection of laws only half understood as Law. The
corpus of legal deductions from the old truth of the Roman See's
supremacy in the Church, which were the result of the application of
that supremacy to the hundred happenings of everyday life, Innocent
proceeded to apply 011 a greater scale than ever, thereby giving to it
an even richer development than Alexander III, and setting an ideal,
not only of constructive jurisprudence but of practical policy, which
his successors have never lost. The new universal initiative which,
with St. Leo IX, the Roman See had assumed, it could never, after
Innocent III, abdicate nor safely neglect, nor could any other see
ever, henceforward, be more than a dependent local power.
The pope is God's vicar -- a phrase Innocent constantly uses, where his
predecessors had said Vicar of Peter. His power in the Church is
therefore absolute, his jurisdiction throughout the Church immediate,
and explicitly declared to be such. Bishops are his representatives;
and innumerable are the cases where, setting aside the elect of the
chapter, Innocent appoints the man of his choice. Direct communication
between bishops and the pope becomes much more frequent. All
translations, resignations and, a fortiori, depositions are matter for
the pope's exclusive decision, for a bishop is married to his church
and jurisdiction in questions of the vinculum of marriage is the pope's
exclusive prerogative. The pope has the right to examine and to exact
an account of all episcopal administration; and it is a right which
Innocent exercises continuously, setting aside here, very often, the
right of the metropolitan. Especially after the Latin conquest of
Constantinople (1203) does this tendency grow; and the pope,
apparently, planned to Latinise the whole Church. Another consequence
of the new juridical centralisation was the pope's enunciation, and in
the most practical way, of his right to appoint any cleric to any
office in any church throughout the world. They are not mere
recommendations which begin to descend from Rome on the different
patrons of benefices, but commands to appoint this person or the other.
It says much for the way in which Innocent judged his age, and for the
correspondence between its needs and his policies, that the bishops,
although they resisted strenuously enough his efforts to coerce their
political action, in these matters of spiritual government gave him
absolute obedience, More than ever, from all over the world, on all
manner of questions, bishops wrote to Rome for direction, for advice
and for solutions. Innocent III's practice, the eighteen years'
administration of a ruler, skilled in law and ruling with the
deliberate design of developing his jurisdiction, completed the work of
Alexander III, and crowned the Roman revival inaugurated in the
lifetime of St. Gregory VII. What Damasus, Siricius, Leo the Great and
Gelasius had begun, and the barbaric catastrophe had interrupted, these
popes achieved; it only remained for Gregory IX to set it all down in
the Decretals, and for their successors virtuously to use the splendid
instrument.
But the theory of the papal power as that of God's vicar, did not end
with the Canon Law and the government of the spirituality. As vicar on
earth of the King of Kings, the pope, it began to be held by the
canonists, must share in God's universal power over mankind. If the
Priest and the King are, both of them, set by God to rule the world,
they are by no means equal parties in that task. The King is the
servant appointed to carry out the instructions of the Priest. The
Priest has the duty of supervising the King, of correcting him, and,
where necessary, even of punishing him.
The State was on the way to become an organ of religion. Its rights,
its very existence as a natural reality, antecedent in time to the
Church, were, for these new theorists of the Canon Law, entirely lost
to sight. All this was a striking reversal of what had obtained three
centuries earlier under Charlemagne, when the State, with the consent
of the bishops, in practice governed the Church. Christendom, the City
of God upon earth, is one thing. It can therefore have but a single
head -- had it more than one, a later pope [ ] will declare, it would
be a monstrosity. As to who that head shall be there cannot, in
Christendom. be any doubt. It must be God's vicar, the Roman Pontiff.
It, for convenience, the pope had entrusted to the State one of the two
swords committed to him by God, the pope remained, none the less.
master of both. It is not from God directly that the kings receive
their authority, but from God through His vicar, the pope. So much has
the theory developed since the days of Gregory VII, thanks to a century
of the new scientific ecclesiastical jurisprudence stimulated by the
attempts of Barbarossa and Henry VI to regain their old control. These
emperors had claimed an absolutism in which they would dominate the
papacy and the Church. The canonists retorted by this theory of another
absolutism where the popes would dominate the princes and their
temporal authority. The one effectual answer to these developments of
the canonists no one as yet was able to state -- the theory of the
State as an autonomous natural society. But in these very years when
the canonists triumphed, another school of working jurists was
preparing whose sole inspiration was the Roman Law, and the end of the
thirteenth century would see the canonists' first defeat at its hands.
The field open to the pontifical intervention was now, therefore,
limitless. Not only the private life of the kings -- questions of
marriage, for instance -- came into it, but questions of taxation also,
questions of coinage, questions of the succession. In all of these,
somewhere, a point of morals was involved and the pope, thereby, was
given a ground to intervene. Innocent III certainly believed himself
authorised to exercise as pope -- apart altogether from what rights he
might have as feudal suzerain [ ] -- a direct authority in these and in
purely political questions too. It was the building of this theory into
every act of Innocent's enormously busy reign, rather, even, than the
most important of those acts, which gave to that reign its immense
significance in the history of the next three hundred years. Canon Law
had more than emancipated itself from the tutelage of Theology. How far
could Theology now defend it, in the reaction already slowly
preparing,. in the coming fight with the new civilian lawyers?
In marriage questions Innocent III intervened in Portugal to annul the
marriage of the heir to the throne with a too-near relation; and he
quashed the marriage of the King of Leon for a like reason,
excommunicating the king until he separated from the cousin he had
taken to wife. Still more resounding was the pope's strong action in
regard to a much more important supporter of the papacy, Philip II of
France. Five years before Innocent was elected, the King of France had
repudiated his wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, and had taken in her place
Agnes of Meran. Celestine III had admonished him, all to no purpose,
but the new pope immediately warned him that unless he dismissed Agnes
the kingdom would be placed under an interdict. Philip 11 persisted and
in December, 1199, the papal sentence was carried out. Nine months
later Philip submitted so far as to put away Agnes, and the interdict
was lifted. For years the effort to persuade him to take back the queen
continued, but not until 1213 was the pope finally successful.
With the English king, John, the pope had an even longer struggle, but
in the end here, too, he was victorious. The question at issue was the
succession to the primatial see of Canterbury or the death of Hubert
Walter in 1205. The monks of the cathedral monastery elected their
sub-prior. The king had desired the translation of the Bishop of
Norwich. The suffragan bishops of the province of Canterbury were in
arms against the monks' right to elect. Innocent confirmed the right of
the monks, but set aside both their candidate and the choice of the
king, and suggested to the representatives of the monks the English
cardinal, Stephen Langton, a leading figure in the learned world of the
time. This was in 1206. John resisted, refused to allow the new
archbishop to enter the kingdom, and punished heavily all who had
shared in the election. In 1208, therefore, Innocent laid the whole of
England under an interdict.
John, the strongest personality among the reigning princes of Europe,
held out, ordering his clergy to disregard the censure The next year he
was excommunicated. Three years later (1212 Innocent declared him to
have forfeited his right to rule; his subjects were freed from their
oath of allegiance, and the King of France was charged with the duty of
carrying out the de position. Then John surrendered. He made over his
kingdom to the pope, receiving it back as the vassal of St. Peter, and
promising an annual tribute of a thousand marks. He accepted the
archbishop and the interdict was lifted (June 29, 1214). The
papal-suzerainty over the new vassal state was not a mere name. In the
struggle between John and his barons, which had accompanied the
struggle with the pope and which went on after this was settled,
Innocent, like a good overlord, came to his vassal’s assistance. The
barons forced on John a recognition of their privileges -- the Great
Charter of 1215 -- and when John appealed against it, Innocent absolved
him from his promises. They had been made without the knowledge or
consent of the overlord, and so could not lawfully bind the vassal.
How soon the new amity between John and the great pope would have ended
we can only guess. In the course of the next year (1216) both of them
died, and one of the first tasks before Innocent's successor was to
secure for John's heir -- the child Henry III -- the full succession to
his inheritance. All through the minority of this king papal legates
watched over his interests, [ ] protecting his rights against the
turbulent nobility with all the armament of papal censure and the new
prestige of the Apostolic See.
Where Innocent III's conception of the papacy's universal lordship
found most its striking exposition was, of course, in his relations
with the empire. Here, at the beginning, fortune favoured Innocent
supremely. He was elected while the anti- German reaction that followed
the death of Henry VI [ ] was still sweeping all before it in Italy. In
Henry's own kingdom of Sicily the reaction was led by his widow
Constance, ruling as regent for her baby son, Frederick II. In the
centre of Italy, too, in the papal lands Henry had occupied and in the
lands of the Countess Matilda, the anti-imperialist spirit was no less
strong; and here, as in Rome itself, Innocent had little difficulty in
re-establishing the temporal authority of the Roman See. It was not by
any means a complete victory over the forces of disruption which had
had their own way now for generations, but, thanks to the skill with
which the new pope used his opportunity, the Holy See, in Rome and in
Italy, was, by the end of 1199, in a stronger position politically than
for forty years and more.
Henry VI died at the end of August, 1197. When Innocent was elected
pope, in the following January, no successor to Henry, as King of
Germany, had as yet been chosen by the German princes. Henry's son, the
baby King of Sicily, was ruled out from that succession by his age. A
much more likely candidate was Henry's brother, Philip of Swabia, who,
however, as the chief agent of Henry's Italian policy, lay under the
sentence of excommunication for his share in the violation of
ecclesiastical rights.
In March, 1198, a gathering of German princes elected Philip,
notwithstanding the excommunication. But not all the princes had taken
part in the election. There was a strong minority which had no desire
to see a fourth king and emperor from the Hohenstaufen; three months
after the election of Philip, these other princes elected Otto of
Brunswick, the younger son of Barbarossa's lifelong rival, Henry the
Lion. So it came about that, where Innocent's predecessors had been
faced with the menace of a strongly united empire under a master
politician, Henry VI, who was also King of Sicily, Innocent III -- his
rights as suzerain over Sicily once more recognised -- saw Germany torn
by civil war, and the rivals, Philip and Otto, striving each to enlist
his support. In a short nine months the wheel had indeed turned.
The pope was, at first, most carefully neutral. As the year 1198 ran
out, and through the spring of 1199, Philip gained steadily. By May of
that year he was almost everywhere victorious, and a gathering of his
supporters notified the pope, from Spires, that Philip had been elected
emperor, and that his nobles and bishops would support him in his
endeavour to regain all the jurisdiction of his brother and
predecessor, Henry VI (May 28, 1199). The peril that had hung over the
papacy and Christendom in the reign of the aged Celestine III began to
threaten once again.
Innocent protested immediately that, in proclaiming Philip emperor, the
diet of Spires had gone beyond its powers. The princes had the right
indeed to elect their king, but it was for the pope alone to make the
German king emperor. Beyond this protest Innocent, for the moment, went
no further, all his energies being directed to driving out of Sicily
the partisans of Philip, who had successfully occupied the kingdom and
were rebuilding the centralised despotism of Henry VI.
By the January of 1201 the pope had made up his mind, and in March he
published his decision. The reasoning that lay behind it is contained
in one of the most famous of all papal statepapers, the Deliberation on
the question of the Empire. [ ] Frederick of Sicily the pope rules out
because of his age; Philip, also, the pope rejects -- as one lying
under excommunication for offences so far unamended and unrepented, and
also because he came from a family traditionally hostile to the Church.
The empire moreover is not, in law, a family heritage; and to confer it
upon yet a fourth Hohenstaufen would be to make it hereditary in fact.
It is then to Otto that the pope makes over the supreme dignity, who
comes of a family for loyal centuries to the interests of religion;
wherefore "By the divine authority transmitted to us by blessed Peter,
we recognise you as king, and we command all men to swear to you
loyalty and obedience."
On June 8, 1201, Otto solemnly pledged himself to restore to the pope
all the territories occupied contrary to the will of the Holy See in
the previous fifteen years: the Patrimony, Ravenna, Spoleto, Ancona;
and to make over the lands inherited from the Countess Matilda. The war
now took another turn and the pope intervened, setting all his
diplomacy to rally supporters to Otto, outside Germany as well as among
its princes. Philip replied through the proclamation of the diet of
Bamberg (September 8, 1201). The pope, it was declared, was a
foreigner, and the election of the emperor was the concern of Germany
alone; it was rather the emperor who should name the pope, than the
pope the emperor; ancient history showed how true this was. The bishops
agreed with the lay princes.
For reply (May, 1202) the pope repeated his ruling, and the reasons for
it, stating with legal formality the relations of the pope and princes
to the empire. The German princes are declared to possess the right to
elect the king and emperor-elect. But the source of their right is the
Apostolic See. The right was granted to them when the pope transferred
the empire from the Greeks to the Germans. The king elected by the
princes the pope may reject -- for the pope is not bound to crown as
emperor a candidate who is unworthy, who may be, for example, a person
excommunicated, or even a heretic. The pope, then, is to judge the
fitness of the candidate; and if the pope reject him the princes must
elect another, in default of which the pope will himself choose the
emperor. Should it so happen that two candidates are elected -- the
present difficulty -- the princes must call in the pope to arbitrate.
Should they not do so, the pope will decide without their invitation.
In making his decision the pope is to be guided, not by the legality of
the elections that have been made, but by the qualifications and
character of the rivals elected.
The bishops who had signed the manifesto of Bamberg were now
excommunicated, and their resistance brought upon Germany a renewal of
the schism of forty years before. Soon, in many sees, there were two
bishops -- the excommunicated supporter of Philip and the bishop
recognised by the pope -- and contests everywhere.
Despite the pope's activity Otto's cause, however, continued to
decline. He lost supporters steadily, and in Italy the native
anti-papal forces, given new life through their association with the
greater conflict, prevailed once more. The work of 1198 was undone, and
Innocent driven from Rome like the weakest of his predecessors. In
Germany Otto's army was destroyed and he himself fled for safety to
England. All along the line Philip was victorious and, to all
appearances, finally victorious. But he still needed the pope, and, in
June, 1206, he made a bid for recognition. Between him and the pope's
support there lay the old excommunication for his invasion and robbery
of Church lands. Now he offered to submit. Innocent suggested to Otto
that the question of the election be submitted to arbitration. Otto
refused. Philip gave satisfaction for the crimes that had earned his
personal excommunication in the time of Innocent's predecessor, and was
absolved (August, 1207). He next offered to make all the restitution in
Italy to which Otto had pledged himself. Everything was tending to a
complete reconciliation between Innocent and Philip when, in June,
1208, he was murdered, by a personal enemy, for reasons of private
revenge.
If Otto and the princes could now come to terms, the war would cease.
An accommodation was found: Otto married his predecessor's daughter,
and he consented to submit himself to a re-election. This time the
princes accepted him unanimously. There remained the pope, Otto's
patron so long as his cause had had a fighting chance, and thanks to
whom, in very large part, he was now the elect of Germany. Otto, in the
first critical stage of the struggle, had already made all the
desirable promises. Now, as emperor-elect, petitioning the pope for the
imperial crown, he renewed them, in the Charter of Spires (March 22,
1209). On October 4, 1209, Otto IV was crowned at Rome by the pope.
After eleven years of diplomacy and war, years of a patient firmness
equal to his high claims, Innocent had seemingly restored the papal
overlordship to where it had been at Barbarossa's accession.
His victory was little more than an appearance. Otto was no sooner
crowned than he began to show himself more Ghibelline than the
Hohenstaufen, and heir to all the ambitions and the policies of Henry
VI. The territories of the Holy See were once more occupied; imperial
officials were installed in the different Italian cities; and the
emperor invaded Sicily, the kingdom of the pope's ward and vassal,
Frederick II.
Innocent fought the new tyranny by every diplomatic means in his power
and then, just thirteen months after the coronation, he excommunicated
Otto and freed his subjects from their allegiance to him. Saul had
proved unreliable; another would take his place.
Innocent's David was the young King of Sicily. In September, 1211, the
imperial crown was offered to him, and a year and three months later he
was crowned King of Germany at Frankfort. All that was Hohenstaufen in
Germany rallied to him, and Otto's fortunes declined as rapidly as they
had declined before Frederick's uncle ten years earlier. The papal
diplomacy succeeded now where then it had failed. Philip II of France
was free at last to be the pope's ally, in Germany as in Languedoc;
French interests and the papal interests coincided; and in the great
battle of Bouvines (July 27, 1214) Otto's cause went down for ever. He
died four years later, but from the day of Bouvines, Frederick was
safely master in Germany.
Innocent, to whose policy Philip of Swabia had finally bent and who had
next imposed his will on Otto, had finally succeeded in destroying
Otto, for his disloyalty, and had set in his place his own ward and
pupil. After seventeen years of endless vigilance, and of a use of all
the means he could command, the genius of Innocent had checked the
menace of Languedoc, and had secured the Church from the equally
dangerous political domination of the empire. The existence of religion
once again made secure he could resume the work of reform, give himself
wholly to that restoration of Christian life throughout the Church the
need for which had inspired every pope for a hundred and fifty years.
It should begin with a general council.
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