The Source:
John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe 1300-1500, Cambridge University Press 2009
CHAPTER 2
Europe in 1300: the political inheritance
Empires
For all the diversity of political systems at work in Europe in 1300, it is nonetheless possible to identify a series of types. The first of these is the Roman Empire, which was both an idea – perhaps the most fundamental political idea – and a concrete reality. The Rome of the Caesars was, of course, long gone, but it had suited almost every succeeding regime across the Mediterranean and beyond to adopt some at least of what it understood to be the rights, rituals and accoutrements of imperial power, and to insist on some kind of continuity with the Roman imperial tradition.
This means that Rome lay, in some sense, behind virtually every formal political entity in later medieval Europe, but its legacy had descended more particularly on three powers above all: the Emperor and king of the Romans, whose Roman associations went back to the ninth and tenth centuries, and who claimed to rule over much of central Europe; the ‘Eastern’ Roman emperor, based at the city of ‘New Rome’ founded by Constantine in the fourth century, and later known as Constantinople; and the Papacy, whose claims to rule extended over the Christian world and beyond.
As a spiritual leader, the Pope’s claims to anything as worldly as empire may seem a little strained, but sacred and secular power were easily intermingled at the imperial level, and of these three powers it was actually the Pope who possessed the highest, most extensive and consistently meaningful authority over Europe. At home in the Lateran Palace, clad in imperial crown and purple, and issuing decretals, the Pope of 1300 was every inch an emperor, and it is his empire that we shall discuss first.
The Papacy
The collapse of the Roman Empire in the west and the success of early popes in wielding its memory were central to the subsequent history of the Papacy, but it was not, of course, to the Caesars alone that the Pope owed his high authority. Nor was that authority simply due to the city of Rome’s important spiritual associations, as the site of St Peter’s diocese and martyrdom, the home of his relics, and the world capital in the time of Christ. Most fundamentally, perhaps, papal hegemony derived from particular interpretations of Scripture and Christian tradition, developed over generations by successive popes and their supporters.
First among these was the doctrine of the Petrine [St Peter] supremacy: that Christ had founded his Church on Peter, and that the Pope, as bishop of Rome, was Peter’s heir. As Christ had given the Church to Peter and not, it was argued, to all the apostles, so the Pope enjoyed primacy over all other churchmen.
This primacy was gradually puffed up to full sovereignty, with Innocent III (1198–1216), for example, arguing that, while ‘the others were called to a part of the care...Peter alone assumed the plenitude of power’, so that the Pope himself, ‘successor of Peter’ and ‘Vicar of Jesus Christ’ was ‘set between God and man, lower than God, but higher than man, who judges all and is judged by no one’ [ref.].
Christian dogma was thus central to the Pope’s position, but we should not see that position as any the less political for that.
After all, more simply secular authorities also found a basis in Scriptural precept and Christian tradition, and the spiritual arguments that underpinned the Papacy were devised by men with political, as well as spiritual, aims; these arguments were … shot through with the legal and political assumptions of their times.
Equally, the papal headship of the Church was readily extended to be a kind of headship of the world. This was essentially because ‘church’ and ‘world’ were not clearly distinguishable. For one thing, churchmen typically possessed extensive properties and other forms of secular power.
For another, the Church itself could be defined in several ways. If there was a visible church of ordained priests and prelates claiming possession of the keys of Heaven and a mediating role between man and God, there was also an invisible church of unknown identity – the inhabitants of Augustine’s Heavenly City, who were destined to live with Christ when their earthly sojourn came to an end – and, beyond that, there was a sense of the Church as the congregatio fidelium (‘congregation of the faithful’), that is, all baptised Christians – most of the inhabitants of Christendom, in other words, though not the Jews, Muslims and remaining pagans who lived among them. Headship of the Church was thus far-reaching in its implications, and ratione peccati (‘by reason of sin’), Innocent III [Pope 1198-1216] claimed jurisdiction over all Christians in all of their affairs, so as to recall the sinner from error to truth.
It is true that he and other popes recognised a distinction between secular and spiritual authority, often invoking the scriptural metaphor of two swords, or citing Christ’s injunction to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’, but they were also in no doubt that their own authority was higher than that of any secular lord. Boniface VIII [Pope 1294-1303], for example, declared that ‘one sword ought to be under the other and the temporal authority subject to the secular power’.
For Innocent III, a century earlier, meanwhile, the position was even more extreme – using the metaphor of the sun and the moon, he argued that ‘the royal power derives the splendour of its dignity from the pontifical authority’. These assertions arose not only from the general papal jurisdiction over Christians, but also from more specific agreements made when the Roman Empire was re-established in 800 and 962, and from particular interpretations of past imperial grants, from the fabricated ‘Donation’ of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine (306–37), which supposedly bestowed the Western Empire upon the Papacy, to the subsequent gifts and concessions of Ottonian and Salian Emperors. It was partly on the basis of these acquired rights that the Papacy felt able to bestow crowns on secular rulers within its dominion, and – from the mid-thirteenth century – to announce the deposition of those kings who offended.
Such, then, were the imperial claims of the Papacy: by what means, and in what ways, were they made real at the beginning of our period? Like all other monarchs, the Pope possessed a court, or Curia, which combined his household, his chief administrators, advisers and officers, and the wellsprings of his jurisdiction, or judicial authority.
It was in this central core that papal policy and claims to authority were devised, and from it, through the publication of letters and laws (encyclicals and bulls), the despatch of legates and other officers, and the attendance of appellants and petitioners, that papal rule was carried out. Well-established traditions of hierarchy and law within the Church helped to make the exercise of authority by the Papacy relatively straightforward and readily generalised – at least over the Church itself. There were … all kinds of tensions in this massive and complex organisation, but papal instructions still had general efficacy: they were usually guided by sound legal and theological advice; they were rapidly assimilated to the body of Church law in collections of papal ‘decretals’; and they tended to satisfy powerful interests.
Three other trends had helped to build up the papal monarchy during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
One was the close association of papal rule with the reform movement that began in the 1040s and 1050s. This movement, which had focused on re-spiritualising the Church, removing it from lay control and co-ordinating its operations, had immense ideological and legal authority within Christian society, and, up to the later thirteenth century, at least, it delivered much of that authority to the Papacy, which was regarded as the key means through which reform would be achieved.
Not only did the Pope typically affirm and defend the hierarchy of ecclesiastical powers which enabled clerics to protect their estate from secular lords, but he was also the direct sponsor and protector of several agencies that were central to the reforming mission: the crusades, which had a metaphorical and liturgical as well as military importance; the leading universities, which were developing and defining the doctrine and law of the Church; the friars, whose main roles lay in preaching to the laity and hearing their confessions; and the inquisition, which set out to identify and correct deviance within the Christian flock.
By the second half of the thirteenth century, it is true, the relationship between the Papacy and reform had become vexed and complicated – indeed, the Papacy has often been seen as the principal object of later medieval reform, rather than its exponent – but that relationship had played a major part in building the papal empire.
Two other key trends lay in the fields of jurisdiction and patronage.
During the twelfth century, the Papacy built up a remarkably accessible system of appeals: disputants could so readily appeal to the Pope against decisions made in lesser ecclesiastical courts that the Papacy was able to present itself as ‘ordinary judge’ of the whole Church. By 1200, this ease of access had generated an unmanageable amount of business at the Curia and various restrictions were introduced, but it had generalised papal authority throughout the Church, and broken the potential independence of intervening layers by making their authority effectively conditional upon repeated papal endorsement. It was perhaps in relation to the growth of its appellate jurisdiction, which focused so many clerical interests on itself, that the Papacy began to extend its rights over ecclesiastical appointments (‘provisions’). Instead of merely intervening in disputed elections or making recommendations, it began to grant ‘expectatives’ (or titles to office) to petitioners on a significant scale from the mid-twelfth century, and was making the first general reservations of particular categories of post by 1265. This development too was problematic and came to be much resented by those who gradually lost their power of appointment to the ever-growing Papacy, but it had a similar effect on the distribution of power within the Church as the development of appellate jurisdiction, and it attracted support not only from the individual petitioners who benefited from it, but also from those groups best placed to exploit papal patronage: the bureaucrats and placemen of the Curia; university men; and … the clerical servants of kings and lords.
The near-complete dominion which the Papacy had established over the Church by the early thirteenth century was full of consequences for its relations with lay powers. The development of a partly separate clerical estate under papal jurisdiction had been one of the great political and constitutional traumas of the high middle ages: prior to the ‘reform’, the Church had been, at every level, under lay control, and energetic attempts to defend lay interests were made along virtually every front. As both clerical and secular powers grew in scope and complexity, there were copious conflicts, typically focusing on whatever means of power was most important at the time – from investiture and homage around 1100, to jurisdiction in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and on, in succeeding years, to taxation, patronage and national allegiance.
But, throughout the period, accommodation, even resolution, was generally possible: ‘Church’ and ‘State’ were not continually, or even frequently, at odds; participants in either structure were usually participants in both, and had many interests, both individual and collective, in common.
This means that the main areas of potential conflict were also areas of compromise, and were developed over time in ways that tended to protect – for better and worse – the relationship between the Papacy and the leading secular authorities.
This is clear when we look at what were perhaps the three most important front lines between the papal Church and lay powers: jurisdiction, appointment and – from the thirteenth century – taxation.
In all three cases, the Papacy was generally willing to resolve questions in favour of secular rulers. For all the high statements mentioned above, the Papacy rarely interfered in secular jurisdiction and was usually prepared to compromise along uncertain boundaries.
The assumed powers of kingmaking and deposition were very rarely used after the early thirteenth century: apart from the imperial cases of 1245, 1301 (swiftly reversed) and 1324, the deposition of Sancho of Portugal, in 1245, in the midst of a civil war in that country, and in response to pleas from one Portuguese faction, is a lone example. When, in 1298, an embassy from the county of Flanders brought up the papal supremacy over lay rulers and invited Boniface VIII to intervene in its struggle with its overlord, Philip IV of France, the Pope refused to get involved, despite his own disagreements with Philip over other matters; he was not, he said on another occasion, so foolish as to confuse spiritual and temporal power, when both had been ordained by God.
As far as appointments were concerned, meanwhile, the provisions system, as it developed, was well tailored to the interests of rulers: generally speaking, it was chapters and other clerical electors and patrons who lost out, while kings and princes, in frequent contact with the Papacy, tended to increase their influence over benefices.
Similarly, in the sphere of taxation, while the Papacy moved to protect the Church from the first extractive experiments on the part of lay rulers, its decree of 1179 allowed the consensual taxation of clergy in circumstances of necessity. As it began to develop a tax system of its own to fund crusades, from 1199, it allowed lay rulers to collect and spend the resulting dividends. When, after a long period of agreed papal taxation for a nominal crusade (1285–91), the French king pushed at the convention by taxing the Church on his own authority and for a war against his defaulting vassals, the Papacy reacted sharply with the bull Clericis laicos of 1296.
But, in general, Popes conceded taxative rights over the Church pretty freely and, as they moved to establish a taxation-based revenue system for themselves in the fourteenth century, they took care to ensure that it did not cut across the fiscal interests of secular rulers.
The great exception to all this flexibility in dealings with lay powers was where papal territorial interests were concerned.
This is important, because it means that the papal empire was rather a different beast in its universal form from what it was on a more local basis. In the region of Rome, where Innocent III had decided to create what was effectively a secular state, the Pope was, quite straightforwardly, a lay ruler.
In the rest of Italy and Sicily (and, to a lesser extent, in Provence, the Languedoc, the German lands and Hungary), the Papacy controlled little territory directly, but was generally aggressive in the promotion of its rights, and those of the Church, against secular powers. This is a central explanation for the frequently bitter relations with the Emperors, since the latter also possessed a network of territories, rights and interests in Italy, including the papal client state of Sicily between 1194 and 1254. It also explains tensions in the relations between the Papacy and Charles of Anjou and his descendants, who were otherwise its most favoured lieutenants from the 1250s until the 1330s. They had been brought into the peninsula to regain Sicily from the Hohenstaufen, but once they had achieved control of the kingdom, in 1266, they began to pose a similar threat to papal dominance. There was also a territorial factor in the confrontations between Boniface VIII and Philip IV, since these blew up along what truly was a frontier between papal and French spheres of influence: in the conflicts of the turn of the century, it was among the bishops of southern France – a region where royal and episcopal jurisdictions were often shared, papal networks prominent and the inquisition active – that the French king faced the strongest resistance.
That the Pope had a territorial dimension to his rule has often been treated as a corruption of the Petrine ideal, but the real-world confusion of secular and spiritual power made it inevitable. Even at the height of the reform period, the Papacy was centrally concerned with the restoration of its rights and properties.
But it is also worth remembering that the territorial activities of the popes were prompted from below, as well as from above. Papal overlordship in Sicily had been revived in 1190 because Empress Constance wanted the backing of Pope Clement III to establish herself and her husband as rulers of the kingdom. The Papal State of Innocent III was established partly through the desire of various parties in the duchy of Spoleto and the march of Ancona to throw off imperial lordship in favour of the supposedly lighter yoke of the Papacy.
Equally, the French crown had been quite keen to encourage papal activity in the counties of Toulouse and Provence in the twelfth century, when these territories were held by stubbornly independent feudatories with heretical tastes. Even in Germany, papal interventions against the Emperor were almost always made in response to entreaties from his opponents.
The uses to which papal power could typically be put are thus an important thing to know, if we want to understand the impact of this particular imperial structure on the politics of Europe. Besides the defence of rights and territory within its immediate sphere of influence, what else was the Papacy for, as far as contemporary politicians were concerned?
We have already seen that the Pope was an important means of jurisdiction and appointment. These functions could have a general as well as individual utility: it could suit all kinds of powers to support papal claims, if the Papacy was willing to exercise its rights in ways compatible with their interests.
The papal interest in crusading, and the associated willingness to grant privileges and powers related to it, were additional attractions to lay powers: the honour and spiritual redemption that crusading brought were powerful currencies, and papal crusade taxation was a valuable asset in this early period when other means of taxation had not yet been developed.
Crusading was especially compatible with the interests of younger sons and cadet lines, such as the house of Anjou – power groups with rather limited resources of their own, but also with limited responsibilities for territorial government, especially by comparison to the kings who had sometimes led crusades (and who might additionally favour the removal of powerful relatives to a sphere where they could expand their status and resources unproblematically).
A general expectation that the Papacy would defend the clerical estate – or anything that could plausibly be represented as part of it – animated a lot of appeals for its support: even if most popes were unwilling to push things too far against most secular rulers, some papal backing could be anticipated and could alter the terms on which any such dispute was conducted. Even papal responsibilities towards the faith – the definition of doctrine, the repression of heresy, or sin – could attract politicians with essentially secular aims. … [examples given] …
… There were a variety of routes through which the Papacy could be invoked and manoeuvred, besides the obvious ones of appealing to its jurisdiction or its interests. One was through the conclave that elected each pope. The ancient ecclesiastical principle of consensual rule had combined with the Roman inheritance to produce an electoral monarchy, with the right of election concentrated, from 1059, in the hands of the cardinals, an increasingly defined group of high prelates with parishes in Rome and positions in the Curia. Papal elections were predictably open to political pressure – most notably from the great baronial families of Rome, from whose ranks many of the cardinals were drawn, but also from other secular interests, like the house of Anjou, whose influence across Italy enabled it to secure a number of extremely compliant popes in the 1270s and 1280s. The trends of ecclesiastical politics could also be powerful factors, leading to the election of popes who were known for their legal learning, or for their spirituality, or for their support of bishops, friars or other orders of the Church.
But these two kinds of pressure were not really so distinct … ecclesiastical divisions and interest groups were frequently intertwined with secular ones, so that the election of a decrepit hermit, Celestine V, in 1294, for example, was brought about by the conjunction of Angevin pressure with the belief of certain cardinals that an angelic pope was required to silence criticism of papal worldliness and to calm apocalyptic fears. Celestine proved incompetent, and his swift replacement with a more traditional Roman lawyer-pope, in the form of Boniface VIII, not only created new political possibilities through the constitutional innovation of a papal abdication, but helped to determine the pattern of allegiances inherited by the new Pope – enmity from other Roman families, unease from Charles II of Anjou, and a conviction on the part of the more spiritual Franciscan friars that the rule of Antichrist was, after all, beginning.
Other means of influence over the Papacy were more directly challenging. The ecclesiastical empire was a complex one, with many constituent organisations and layers, whose power could – in both theory and practice – be arranged differently in ways that could threaten papal sovereignty.
There were also … numerous ambivalences within canon law concerning the proper relationship between corporations and their heads, while the bits of Scripture that underlay the Petrine supremacy could be read in other ways, or countered by other texts more friendly to the sharing of apostolic authority among churchmen. …
… [The] Papacy was by no means alone in these kinds of predicaments … a general legacy of the political and legal theory of the thirteenth century and … a general problem faced by all rulers. But there was one kind of assault to which the Papacy and other prelates were uniquely vulnerable on account of their spiritual status. Because this played such a major role in the politics of the Church from the mid-thirteenth century to the early 1500s, it makes sense to introduce it here. It was what has often been called the ‘apostolic ideal’.
Apostolic visions of the Church expected the clergy to resemble Christ and the apostles: to be, in effect, poor preachers, lacking temporal authority and worldly goods. These visions spread across Europe with knowledge of the gospels, and were helped along by the various dualistic heresies of the twelfth century, which tended to sharpen existing distinctions in people’s minds between complexes of ideas linking goodness, asceticism and the spirit, on the one hand, and evil, worldliness and the flesh on the other.
Most powerfully, they were taken up by two movements … the ‘poor men of Lyons’, or Waldensians, who were ultimately left outside the Church because they would not accept the distinctive authority of the ordained clergy; and the followers of St Francis of Assisi, who were allowed into the Church because, on the whole, they, or their leaders, would do so. The Franciscans’ emphasis on preaching and poverty made them ideally fitted to some of the Papacy’s major concerns in the early thirteenth century: the conversion of the dualists who seemed so alarmingly numerous in the heartlands of Latin Christendom; the ministry in the towns, where the established parochial network could not cope with the rising population, and where the poor were gathered together in large numbers; and finally what has been called the ‘pastoral revolution’ – the beginning of serious efforts to spread Christian knowledge and liturgical practice more widely abroad within the laity.
Between papal recognition in 1209 and the middle of the thirteenth century, the Franciscans thus became a massively influential and numerous group, especially prominent in universities, towns and the entourages of great men.
From this position, they canvassed an idea of the Church which was profoundly at odds with the possession of secular authority and worldly goods.
These ideas were causing very serious problems at the very heart of the Church by the end of the thirteenth century, but they began to be mobilised against the Papacy earlier than this.
It was already common for representations of papal power on the part of the Emperor to present clerical authority as purely spiritual and thus intrinsically different from lay authority, so that, in 1232, for instance, Frederick II could make reference to ‘the ointment of the priestly office’ in contrast to ‘the might of the imperial sword’.
But Frederick’s later conflict with Popes Gregory IX (1227–41) and Innocent IV (1243–54) led him into two postures which were to be formative. In 1239, he appealed to the cardinals as Senators of Rome, calling on them to convoke a general council of the Church at which the issues in play between himself and the Pope could be judged. This manoeuvre, of course, accepted the existence of a papal church-state, even as it asserted the existence of an imperial one; it also restricted the Emperor’s attack to the person of the current Pope, even if it laid down precedents which would be highly undesirable for the Papacy if accepted.
In 1245, however, after six years of gruelling conflict culminating in his deposition, Frederick took a different tack, launching a general critique of the worldliness of the Church and calling for a return to apostolic poverty: the perverse confusion of priestly and temporal roles should end, and the Church should give up its property. The letters he wrote on this theme to the crowned heads of Europe seem to have had little effect, and of course Frederick himself had too much invested in the worldly Church really to push for its destruction, but this adoption of an apostolic/Franciscan perspective by a lay ruler was a harbinger of things to come, and later experiments with the same cocktail were to have more profound effects.
Ideas that directly assaulted the legitimacy of the Church as it was currently ordered were being openly canvassed, and – for the first time – a powerful figure had used them for political ends. It is true that a lack of legitimacy does not, in itself, prevent structures from working, and those of the Church continued to harness and organise large amounts of power, but the prominence of this potentially devastating critique of clerical dominion, and its intersection with the kinds of constitutional conflict to which all later medieval political forms were subject, meant that the Papacy entered our period in a strangely ambivalent position.
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