Innocent III

Innocent III (born 1160/61, Gavignano Castle, Campagna di Roma, Papal States [now in Italy]—died July 16, 1216, Perugia) was the most significant pope of the Middle Ages. Elected pope on January 8, 1198, Innocent III reformed the Roman Curia, reestablished and expanded the pope’s authority over the Papal States, worked tirelessly to launch Crusades to recover the Holy Land, combated heresy in Italy and southern France, shaped a powerful and original doctrine of papal power within the church and in secular affairs, and in 1215 presided over the fourth Lateran Council, which reformed many clerical and lay practices within the church.

Early life and career

The son of Trasimund, count of Segni, and Claricia dei Scotti, the daughter of a noble Roman family, Lothar began his education in Rome, possibly at the Schola Cantorum. After his early education in Rome, he traveled north in the late 1170s or 1180 to study in Paris, the leading centre of theological studies. Although little is known about his stay in Paris, what is known is suggestive. His teachers, Peter of Corbeil and Peter the Chanter, were the most accomplished theologians in Europe. Stephen Langton, whom Lothar as Pope Innocent later appointed archbishop of Canterbury, and Robert of Courson, whom he appointed as a papal legate and later raised to the cardinalate, were among his fellow students. In Paris Lothar learned to use the Bible as a tool for understanding and solving problems. His theological training shaped his thought and his language for the rest of his life and provided a foundation for his outlook and his policies.

After Paris Lothar studied in Bologna, whose university was the preeminent one for the study of canon and civil law. Although he may have pursued law for more than two or three years (the chronology of his life at this time is uncertain), it did not become the discipline that shaped his worldview or his vision of the papacy. During the 1190s Lothar wrote three theological tracts: De miseria condicionis humane (On the Misery of the Human Condition), De missarum mysteriis (On the Mysteries of the Mass), and De quadripartita specie nuptiarum (On Four Types of Marriage). The first was enormously popular in the Middle Ages, and the others demonstrate that he was a competent, if not gifted, theologian. All three tracts demonstrate his ability to use the Bible to understand Christian institutions in creative and original ways. They also reveal that his experience in Paris shaped his worldview more than his stay in Bologna.

Lothar probably entered clerical orders in Rome while he was a young boy. After his studies in Paris, Lothar was made a subdeacon by Pope Gregory VIII in late 1187. Pope Clement III elevated him to the office of cardinal deacon of SS. Sergius and Bacchus in December 1189 or January 1190. He worked in the papal curia during the 1190s but neither received important commissions nor held significant positions. In spite of his youth and lack of administrative experience, the cardinals quickly elected Lothar pope on the same day that the aged pope Celestine III died (January 8, 1198). He was given or took the name Innocent III, was ordained a priest on February 21, 1198, and was consecrated as bishop of Rome the next day, on the feast day of St. Peter’s Chair. Innocent undoubtedly chose the day of his consecration carefully. He wrote many sermons after he became pope, several of which commemorated the feast day of his consecration. When Innocent reflected on the first pope and Peter’s legacy in these sermons, he presented a luminous vision of the papal office and the pope’s role in Christendom.

Early pontificate

At the beginning of his pontificate, Innocent faced several serious problems. Emperor Henry VI had died, and there were two candidates for the imperial throne: Henry’s brother, Philip of Swabia, and Otto of Brunswick. The German princes were divided over the succession, southern Italy was in political shambles, and the Christian states in the Holy Land were in the hands of the Muslims. In the second half of the 12th century, heresy had become a grave problem in southern France. Papal authority in the city of Rome and over the Papal States had disintegrated, and the papal curia needed reform. Innocent faced all these problems simultaneously.

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The new pope’s vigour and resolve can be seen in the letters of the papal registers and in a chronicle, Gesta Innocentii III (“The Deeds of Innocent III”), written about 1208 by an anonymous member of Innocent’s curia who apparently knew the pope very well. In one of his first letters, Innocent ordered King Philip Augustus of France to take back his wife, whom the king had abandoned. With this mandate Innocent signaled his intention to extend papal jurisdiction and authority into the marital affairs of Christian princes.

From the beginning of his pontificate, Innocent also sought to establish papal temporal authority over Rome and the Papal States. Immediately after his consecration, he received homage from the leaders of the Roman nobility. In order to dominate the city of Rome, Innocent ordered the construction of the Torre dei’Conti, a massive military fortification in the middle of the city, which he placed under the command of his brother Richard. Earlier popes had confined their claims of sovereignty over the Papal States (Patrimony of St. Peter) to the area immediately around Rome, but Innocent used the power vacuum created by the death of the emperor to make much more expansive claims. He systematically sent papal legates to the cities of central Italy to secure their loyalty. Within a remarkably short time, not only nearby cities but also some as far away as Ancona, Assisi, Perugia, and Spoleto had declared their allegiance to the pope. By October 30, 1198, Innocent sent a letter to the rectors of those cities that had submitted to papal lordship. In it he fashioned a striking image of papal authority that he would repeat throughout his pontificate. Papal authority was represented by the Sun, and the Moon signified the power of lay princes. Both powers were established by God, he explained, but, just as the Moon received its splendour from the Sun, royal power acquired its greatness and dignity from papal authority.

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Innocent’s creative and passionate rhetoric became a part of his ruling style, and his deeds matched his rhetoric. He established a much larger papal territory than any of his predecessors had controlled, and, from his pontificate on, the pope functioned as an important secular prince in central Italy. Innocent understood the dangers of a pope exercising secular power, however. In the Gesta, his biographer commented that the more Innocent wished to free himself from secular affairs, the greater they burdened him. Innocent, he wrote, had often remarked, “Who touches tar is dirtied by it” (Ecclesiasticus 13:1).

Innocent was consumed by a passion to reconquer Jerusalem and the Holy Land, which had been lost following the Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn in 1187. On August 15, 1198, he sent letters to the kings and bishops of Christendom, imploring them to take up the cross and launch a new Crusade. He promised Crusaders a new papal indulgence, took them under papal protection, and imposed a tax on the clergy to help pay for the expedition. In spite of Innocent’s best efforts, the Fourth Crusade (1202–04) lacked strong leadership and was chronically short of money. The Venetians built a fleet to transport a large army, but the French and German contingents were only one-third of their projected size and could not fulfill their contractual obligations to pay the Venetians for transport. The result was a disaster for the papacy and for the Byzantine Empire. The Venetians persuaded the army to divert the Crusade to Constantinople because they wanted to depose one emperor and replace him with another. Outraged, Innocent excommunicated the Venetians, but he could not thwart their plans. The fleet arrived in Constantinople, and after a siege the city fell into Latin hands (April 12, 1204). Innocent accepted the result, mistakenly believing that the conquest of Constantinople would reunite the Latin and Greek churches. Instead, the Latins ruled over a truncated empire until 1261 and irrevocably weakened it. After the Greeks regained control of the Byzantine Empire and church, they rejected papal authority, and the two churches have remained divided.

Innocent’s first year was also marked by his efforts to establish his vision of papal monarchical power and authority within the church. Combining a streak of hardheaded practicality with an intellectual’s interest in ideas, Innocent transformed the theory of papal monarchy and pushed the papacy in new directions. His most creative rhetorical statements on papal power were expressed in letters that expanded the authority of the pope over emperor, kings, princes, and bishops. He claimed that the pope “has the authority because he does not exercise the office of man, but of the true God on earth.” Moreover, he implemented this vision in a number of ways. The author of the Gesta painted a portrait of a pope who had great skill in judicial affairs and who participated personally in some of the legal cases that the papal court accepted on appeal. By reforming the papal curia and reorganizing the papal judicial system, Innocent strengthened the hierarchical structure of the church. He also mandated the subordination of the bishops to the pope and insisted that only the pope could approve episcopal translations, resignations, and depositions. At the same time, Innocent swept away almost all the older, decentralized institutions that were characteristic of the church in the early Middle Ages.

When Innocent was elevated to the papacy, the political situation in Italy and Germany was precarious because of Philip of Swabia’s and Otto of Brunswick’s competing claims for the imperial throne. The struggle for the succession to the throne would be the most difficult problem Innocent faced in his first years as pope and would be complicated further by imperial and papal relations with southern Italy and Sicily. By the time of his death in 1197, Emperor Henry VI had subjected almost the entire Italian peninsula, including most of the Papal States, and Sicily to his rule. Henry’s claim to the south—the Norman kingdom of Sicily, a papal fief subject to the authority of the pope—was strengthened by his marriage to Constance, the daughter of King Roger II of Sicily. The legitimate heir to the kingdom of Sicily was Henry’s three-year old son, the future emperor Frederick II. Constance promoted Frederick’s interests by putting him under the protection of Innocent, who thus became regent. The pope’s challenge was to mediate the imperial succession while preserving the rights of Frederick and, especially, maintaining the integrity of the Papal States and papal power.

Faced with these challenges, Innocent moved quickly and effectively to recover the Papal States and also attempted to exercise his rights as feudal overlord of the kingdom of Sicily. In his dealings with the claimants to the imperial throne, Innocent sought to separate Sicily from the empire because any ruler who possessed both crowns was a threat to the Papal States. He exacted promises from both Otto and Philip to respect the boundaries of papal territory, but both candidates betrayed his trust. The importance and seriousness of the problem can be seen in the Gesta, which devotes many pages to the dispute, and in the special papal register that Innocent’s curia maintained for preserving a record of it (Super negotio Romani imperii; “Concerning the Business of the Roman Empire”). Fearing the ambitions of the Hohenstaufen Philip, Innocent supported Otto until the murder of Philip in 1208, at which point Otto violated his agreements with the pope. In 1212 Innocent was forced to turn to Henry’s son, Frederick, whose rule the pope had hoped to limit to the Sicilian kingdom. Although forced to support a candidate against his better judgment, Innocent used the dispute to establish the pope’s right to evaluate imperial candidates in a contested election. Per venerabilem (“Through Our Venerable Brother”), the decretal letter he wrote in 1202 reserving this right, quickly became part of canon law, even though Innocent’s claim was without precedent.

At the beginning of his second year as pope, Innocent turned his attention to the problem of heresy within the borders of Christendom. In a decretal letter, Vergentis in senium (March 25, 1199), that he sent to Viterbo, a city within the Papal States, Innocent declared that heresy was treason against God. Consequently, in pursuing heretics, he applied the sanctions and employed the procedural norms used in ancient Roman treason trials. This began Innocent’s long campaign to eradicate heresy, which lasted until the end of his pontificate and culminated in the Albigensian Crusade. Cathar (Albigensian) heretics had become prevalent in southern France. As early as 1199 the pope sent legates to deal with these heretics and their supporters, and in 1206 St. Dominic began to preach to the heretics with Innocent’s support. These efforts produced few results. Finally, in 1208, following the assassination of the papal legate, Innocent launched a Crusade against the heretics and gave the participants full Crusader indulgences and privileges. The war lasted until after Innocent’s death. Even after a political settlement brought the fighting to an end, the Cathar heresy flourished in the region until the beginning of the 14th century. Innocent’s Crusade was significant, despite the survival of Catharism, because with it the pope began the practice of using the Crusade to combat papal enemies wherever they were found. Later popes called for Crusades against disobedient Christian rulers and even cardinals of the church.

At the same time he was supporting St. Dominic, Innocent permitted St. Francis of Assisi to continue recruiting brothers and gave limited approval to the Franciscan religious life in 1210.