Pope Innocent III
Pope Innocent III was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Papal States from 8 January 1198 until his death in 1216.
Pope Innocent was one of the most powerful and influential of the medieval popes. He exerted a wide influence over the Christian states of Europe, claiming supremacy over all of Europe's kings. He was central in supporting the Catholic Church's reforms of ecclesiastical affairs through his decretals and the Fourth Lateran Council. This resulted in a considerable refinement of Western canon law. He is furthermore notable for using interdict and other censures to compel princes to obey his decisions, although these measures were not uniformly successful.
Innocent greatly extended the scope of the Crusades, directing crusades against Muslim Iberia and the Holy Land as well as the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in southern France. He organized the Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204, which ended in the sack of Constantinople. Although the attack on Constantinople went against his explicit orders, and the Crusaders were subsequently excommunicated, Innocent reluctantly accepted this result, seeing it as the will of God to reunite the Latin and Eastern Orthodox Churches. In the event, the sack of Constantinople and the subsequent period of Frankokratia heightened the hostility between the Latin and Greek churches; the Byzantine Empire was restored in 1261, albeit in a much weaker state.
Biography
Early life
Lotario de' Conti was born in Gavignano, near Anagni, southeast of Rome. His father, Trasimondo de' Conti di Segni, Count belonging to the notables of the city of Segni, was from the family of the counts of Segni, who eventually produced nine cardinals and four popes, including Gregory IX, Alexander IV, and Innocent XIII. Lotario's mother, Clarissa Scotti, was according to some scholars related to Pope Clement III.Lotario received his early education in Rome, probably at the Camaldolese Benedictine abbey of Sant'Andrea al Celio under Peter Ismael. He studied theology in Paris under the theologians Peter of Poitiers, Melior of Pisa, and Peter of Corbeil, and jurisprudence in Bologna, according to the Gesta. As pope, Lotario was to play a major role in the shaping of canon law through conciliar canons and decretal letters.
Shortly after the death of Alexander III, Lotario returned to Rome and held various ecclesiastical offices during the short reigns of Lucius III, Urban III, Gregory VIII, and Clement III, being ordained a Subdeacon by Gregory VIII and reaching the rank of Cardinal-Priest under Clement III in 1191.
As a cardinal, Lotario wrote De Miseria Condicionis Humane "On the Misery of the Human Condition". The work was very popular for centuries, surviving in more than 700 manuscripts. Although he never returned to the complementary work he intended to write, On the Dignity of Human Nature, Bartolomeo Facio took up the task writing De excellentia ac praestantia hominis.
Election to the papacy
died on 8 January 1198. Before his death he had urged the College of Cardinals to elect Giovanni di San Paolo as his successor, but Lotario de' Conti was elected pope in the ruins of the ancient Septizodium, near the Circus Maximus in Rome after only two ballots on the very day on which Celestine III died. He was only thirty-seven years old at the time. He took the name Innocent III, maybe as a reference to his predecessor Innocent II, who had succeeded in asserting the papacy's authority over the emperor.Reassertion of papal power
As pope, Innocent III began with a very wide sense of his responsibility and his authority. During Innocent III's reign, the papacy was at the height of its powers. He was considered the most powerful person in Europe at the time. In 1198, Innocent wrote to the prefect Acerbius and the nobles of Tuscany expressing his support of the medieval political Sun and Moon allegory. His papacy asserted the absolute spiritual authority of his office, while still respecting the temporal authority of kings.There was scarcely a country in Europe over which Innocent III did not in some way or other assert the supremacy which he claimed for the papacy. He excommunicated King Alfonso IX of León for marrying a near relative, Berengaria of Castile, contrary to the laws of the Church, and effected their separation in 1204. He received Aragon in vassalage from Peter II and crowned him king at Rome in 1204.
The Muslim recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 was to him a divine judgment on the moral lapses of Christian princes. He was also determined to protect what he called "the liberty of the Church" from inroads by secular princes. This determination meant, among other things, that princes should not be involved in the selection of bishops. It was particularly focused on the Patrimony of Saint Peter, the section of central Italy claimed by the popes and later called the Papal States. The patrimonium was routinely threatened by the Holy Roman Empire of the House of Hohenstaufen, which claimed it. Emperor Henry VI expected his infant son Frederick to bring Germany, Italy, and Sicily under a single ruler, which would leave the Papal States exceedingly vulnerable.
Henry's early death left his three-year-old son Frederick as king of Sicily. Henry VI's widow, Queen Constance I of Sicily, was as eager as Pope Innocent III to remove German power from the kingdom of Sicily, and therefore in her Will named Innocent as the guardian of her young son, Frederick, when she died in 1198. In exchange, Innocent was also able to recover papal rights in Sicily that had been surrendered decades earlier to King William I by Pope Adrian IV. The pope invested the young Frederick as king of Sicily in November 1198. He also later induced Frederick to marry Constance of Aragon, the widow of King Emeric of Hungary, in 1209.
Involvement in Imperial elections
Innocent was concerned that the marriage of Henry VI and Constance of Sicily gave the Hohenstaufens a claim to all the Italian peninsula except for the Patrimony, which would be surrounded by Imperial territory.After the death of Emperor Henry VI, who had recently also conquered the Kingdom of Sicily, the succession became disputed: as Henry's son Frederick was still a small child, the partisans of the Staufen dynasty elected Henry's brother, Philip, Duke of Swabia, king in March 1198, whereas the princes opposed to the Staufen dynasty elected Otto, Duke of Brunswick, of the House of Welf. King Philip II of France supported Philip's claim, whereas King Richard I of England supported his nephew Otto.
In 1201, the pope openly espoused the side of Otto IV, whose family had always been opposed to the house of Hohenstaufen.
The confusion in the Empire allowed Innocent to drive out the imperial feudal lords installed by Emperor Henry VI from Ancona, Spoleto and Perugia. On 3 July 1201, the papal legate, Cardinal-Bishop Guido of Palestrina, announced in Köln Cathedral that Otto IV had been approved by the pope as Roman king and threatened with excommunication all those who refused to acknowledge him. At the same time, Innocent encouraged the cities in Tuscany to form a league called the League of San Genesio against German imperial interests in Italy, and they placed themselves under Innocent's protection.
In May 1202, Innocent issued the decree Per Venerabilem, addressed to William VIII of Montpellier, explaining his thinking on the relation between the papacy and the Empire. This decree was afterwards embodied in the Corpus Juris Canonici and contained the following items:
- The German princes have the right to elect the king, who is afterwards to become emperor. This right was given by the Apostolic See when it transferred the imperial dignity from the Greeks to the Germans in the person of Charlemagne.
- The right to investigate and decide whether a king thus elected is worthy of the imperial dignity belongs to the pope, whose office it is to anoint, consecrate, and crown him; otherwise it might happen that the pope would be obliged to anoint, consecrate, and crown a king who was excommunicated, a heretic, or a pagan.
- If the pope finds that the king the princes have elected is unworthy of the imperial dignity, the princes must elect a new king or, if they refuse, the pope will confer the imperial dignity upon another king because the Church requires a patron and defender.
- In case of a double election, the pope must exhort the princes to agree. If, after a due interval, they have not reached an agreement, they must ask the pope to arbitrate. If this fails, the pope must decide in favour of one of the claimants. The pope's decision need not be based on the greater legality of either election but the qualifications of the claimants.
The conflict was decided by the Battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214, which pitted Otto and John, King of England and the Angevin Empire against Philip II of Capetian France. The French defeated Otto, and he lost all influence. He died on 19 May 1218, leaving Frederick II as undisputed emperor. King John was forced to acknowledge the Pope as his feudal lord and accept Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. In his turn, Frederick II would later become a bitter opponent of the papacy once his empire was secure. The victory of the Capetians in this battle permitted the Invasion of Normandy by Philip II of France and ended the Angevin Empire.