Volume 2, Chapter 9

INNOCENT III AND THE CATHOLIC REACTION, 1198-1216

Section 1: THE CRUSADE AGAINST THE ALBIGENSES

Section 2: ST. DOMINIC AND THE FRIARS PREACHERS

Section 3: ST. FRANCIS AND THE FRIARS MINOR

Section 4: INNOCENT III AND THE CATHOLIC PRINCES

Section 5: INNOCENT III AND THE LATIN EAST

Section 6: INNOCENT III AND THE REFORM OF CATHOLIC LIFE: THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF 1215

THE CRUSADE AGAINST THE ALBIGENSES

THE newly elected Innocent III [262] had need of all the young man's energy, need of optimism and of confidence, to speak only of human gifts, if he was not to sink under the task that faced him. There was the menace of the new Moslem-influenced philosophical materialism in the schools of Paris; the problem of the new pious anti-clericalism of the penitential brotherhoods; the problem of the Manichee conquest of Languedoc; the problem of the future relations between the papacy and those unruly children of the Church the Catholic kings; the problem, too, which this last so largely conditioned, of the Latin East; and beyond all these the chronic task of recalling to every Catholic the standard of faith and good living to which, as a member of Christ's mystical body, he was called; the resumption and the completion -- if that were possible -- of the task which had been St. Gregory VII's, of removing all obstacles to the perfect working of God's Church as teacher and shepherd of men. It was a task which the Cardinal Lothario of Segni, fresh from his book On the Contempt of this World, took up willingly, eagerly, almost joyfully.

One of the first matters to which he applied himself was the state of things in Languedoc. Within a matter of weeks he had appointed two of the local Cistercians as his agents, accredited to the Prince, prelates and people. Their mission was to induce the prince to banish the heretics and to confiscate their property as the law of 1184 directed. Disobedience was to be punished by ecclesiastical censures, and to encourage the Catholic effort liberal indulgences were granted. As the year 1199 went by, with little to show in the way of success, the powers of these monks were increased. They were named as Innocent's legates and commissioned also to reform the lives of the local clergy. Even so they did not make much headway against the heresy, nor do much to change the clerical ill-living.

In 1202 the legates were changed and two other Cistercians were appointed in their place. One of these was Peter de Castelnau; he was bold and vigorous, and the attack at last began against the real centres of the sect. The Archbishop of Narbonne-who was, as it were, the primate of Languedoc -- was deposed when he refused to co-operate; and the Bishop of Toulouse deposed also, for simony. The Bishop of Beziers was suspended, and then the pope deprived all the bishops of Languedoc of their jurisdiction in heresy cases. This the legates alone could exercise henceforward, and in addition they received the power to deprive all unworthy clergy of their benefices, the deprived being denied all right of appeal. To add to the force of the legation the pope now named as its chief the head of the great Cistercian federation, the Abbot of Citeaux himself. Another Cistercian, Fulk -- a one-time troubadour -- was appointed to the vacant see of Toulouse and the Cistercian Bishop of Auxerre added to the band. By the year 1205 an active anti-Catharist propaganda -- instructions, controversy, sermons and pamphlets -- was in full swing, directed by the best disciplined religious of the time, papal commissioners who left the wavering Catholic no chance to doubt either his own faith or the will of the pope to correct disorderly living among his clergy.

Nevertheless the mission made very little progress. The Count of Toulouse still refused to co-operate, and repeatedly the legates asked to be relieved of their task. This the pope would not hear of and then the beginnings of a new force appeared, in the form of two Spaniards, Diego, Bishop of Osma, and Dominic Guzman, the prior of his cathedral chapter, sent to Languedoc by the pope when they had begged his leave to evangelise the Tartars of the Volga.

Dominic was at this time thirty-five years of age. He came of an impoverished family of the nobles of Castile -- a family which in his own generation gave several saints to the Church -- and he had had the great advantage of ten years of study in the schools of Palencia (1184-1194) at the time when, through the intellectual enthusiasm of Spanish clerics, the new knowledge was beginning its transformation of the west. In 1194 he had become a canon of the chapter of Osma, and when the bishop proposed to restore for his canons the original community life, under the so-called rule of St. Augustine, Dominic gladly co-operated. He was named sub-prior and five years later, on the prior, Diego's, consecration as bishop, he succeeded him as prior. With Diego he had been despatched by the King of Castile to negotiate a marriage treaty with Denmark. This was in 1203, and in the following year he was again in Denmark with his bishop to fetch home the bride. The lady died, however, and the two Spaniards next went to Rome, to that meeting with Innocent III which changed both their lives and a good deal of subsequent history.

Diego suggested to the legates that, given the prestige won for the Perfect by their austerity and given the worldliness of the clergy, the pomp and circumstance of office with which, naturally, the legates surrounded themselves could not but be a hindrance to their work. He suggested that they model themselves for the future on the seventy-two disciples sent forth by Our Lord, with neither scrip nor staff -- let alone retinue or guards -- no money in their purse, no shoes to their feet. To give point to the advice he himself became a Cistercian and, with Dominic, who, however, remained a canon-regular, began to put the ideal into practice. After some hesitation the legates followed suit. The mission split itself into small groups of threes and fours, and, living h apostolic fashion, began to tour the countryside and towns preaching, instructing and -- a new feature -- holding formal disputations with the chiefs of the heretics which sometimes ran on for a week or ten days.

Through 1206 and 1207 the new kind of mission continued, its way of life commended by the papal approval. Converts began to come in, and to house those who were women Dominic made his first foundation at Prouille, a community of women to shelter converts, living under that rule of St. Augustine which he had himself followed for twelve years. The Cistercians supplied the campaign with yet more abbots, after their general chapter of 1207, and a whole body of Waldensians were converted. These Innocent III allowed to continue their life as a kind of religious order under their old chief Durand of Huesca, with the name of Poor Catholics.

It was now nearly ten years since the mission first began. Despite all the efforts the heresy still held firm, its prestige Ullshaken, and that prestige due very largely to the complicity of the princes and particularly to the complicity of the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI. De Castelnau resolved on a final attempt to win or compel his co-operation. Twice the count had sworn to assist, and now, when he formally refused, the legate excommunicated him and laid an interdict on his territories. Three months later (January 15, 1208) one of the count's serjeants murdered the legate.

It was a crime that recalled the death, forty years earlier, of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The count was generally held responsible, and the deed drew down upon him all the Catholic energy of the time. It brought to an end the mission of simple preaching: it was the beginning of a regular war to punish Raymond and to root out the heresy once for all. The Cistercians, in a specially summoned general chapter, voted all the resources of the order for the new crusade and the pope set all his power to organise it. The murderer was excommunicated and Raymond's own sentence renewed. He was outlawed and deprived of all his rights as ruler; his vassals were freed from their allegiance to him; his allies from their treaty obligations; and the pope looked around for some prince to whom to entrust the leadership of the expedition and the execution of the sentence. The new heretics were declared to be more dangerous than the Saracens, and to all who took part in the war the same indulgences and favours were granted as to those who went out to Palestine. Presently the forces began to gather and by June, 1209, a huge army of two hundred thousand was ready at Lyons.

Raymond, after vainly trying to enlist support from the King of France, and from the emperor, surrendered himself to the legates (June 18, 1209), promising to expel the heretics, giving security in seven castles, and submitting to a public scourging in the church at St. Gilles. A few weeks later, when the crusade had reached Valence he joined its army. By the end of August two strongholds of the heresy had fallen, Beziers and Carcassonne, and at Beziers the victors -- apparently as a measure of terrorism -- had massacred the garrison and thousands of the inhabitants. The forty days for which the crusaders were pledged to serve had now almost expired, and, content with this preliminary success, the mass of the great army prepared to return home. Before it dispersed, however, one of its chiefs, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester in England, a baron from the north of France, was offered, and with some reluctance accepted, the heritage of the heretic Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne. In the next ten years he was from this precarious base to maintain, single-handed, the fight against the Count of Toulouse, against his numerous dependants and, most formidable of all, against the King of Aragon, Peter II, who as the suzerain of these southern French fiefs could not but be interested in their political fate.

From now on, the question of the Albigenses is mixed up with the personal ambitions of its chiefs and political rivalries. So it comes about that there is found fighting with Raymond, whose faith is suspect since he will not give up the heretics, a Catholic of such undoubted orthodoxy as Peter II. Whence, too, a new difficulty for Innocent III, in controlling the movement he has created and in keeping it true to its purpose, the extirpation of heresy, to which the question of the deposition of the family of Raymond bears, so far, no necessary relation at all. For four years the pope was besieged by the envoys of both parties. The legates in Languedoc, and Simon, urged extreme measures against the Count of Toulouse in whose promises, they asserted, no faith whatever could be placed. Raymond, on the other hand, and his ally the King of Aragon, continued solemnly to give every pledge demanded of them. And for a long time they managed to stave off the papal sentence.

The legates could judge better than the pope -- for all that the atmosphere of war may have made them partisans. They demanded that Toulouse, Raymond's capital and the centre of the whole affair, should surrender its heretics, and they met the refusal by re- excommunicating the count and laying all his territories under an interdict. He appealed to Rome and the, pope lifted the interdict and, while not confirming the sentence on Raymond, ordered that a council should meet in three months to consider his guilt. Meanwhile the Albigenses were steadily making good the ground they had lost. Those who had returned to Catholicism relapsed as soon as the crusading armies marched away. When the council met, at St. Gilles, 1210, Raymond had ignored all the obligations to which he was sworn. He had not dismissed his mercenaries, he still continued to patronise and favour the heretics. He thus played into the hands of the legates, who declared him incapable of testifying and therefore of clearing himself by oath.

Innocent, however, intervened yet once again. He sent Raymond a severe warning of what must follow on his perversity, and once more ordered him to co-operate in the work of extirpating the heresy. Similar admonitions were sent to his allies the Counts of Foix and Comminges. Three councils at the turn of the year -- Narbonne in December, 1210, Montpellier in January, 1211, and Arles in the February following -- were to judge what they had done. This new move from Rome brought in once more the King of Aragon. For all his engagements with Raymond he could not afford to see these important fiefs, that commanded the passes of the eastern Pyrenees, fall into the hands of enemies such as vassals of the King of France would be. He therefore did his best to reconcile all parties. He recognised de Montfort as Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne, he compelled his vassals to comply with the legate's conditions. But the Count of Toulouse, although he now married the king's sister, refused the conditions. He was thereupon re-excommunicated, and in April, 1211, the pope confirmed the sentence.

Through the rest of that year, and through 1212, de Montfort slowly conquered place after place. Peter II was away in the south of Spain playing a great part in the new crusade against the Moors, and soon Raymond was left with little else than his capital, Toulouse. The legate now urged the pope to depose him -- to set de Montfort in his place. This, however, Innocent would not do. Aragon's diplomacy, and his own natural fear of the Holy War becoming a means to make the fortune of a successful adventurer, kept the pope back. The legates were lectured for their partisan statements and bidden to wind up the crusade. Raymond was to be admitted to penance, and de Montfort reminded of his duties to Peter II, his suzerain (January, 1213). It was not until May, 1213, that the pope was convinced of the treachery of Raymond and of the trickery of the King of Aragon. Then he cancelled his letters of January, and ordered all concerned to submit to the legates. Peter, the Catholic champion against Islam, with the laurels of Las Navas de Tolosa fresh upon him, was warned that the heretics were more dangerous than any Moslem.

But Peter had already moved, and by the time the pope was writing these last paternal warnings, he was marching north with a huge army destined, he had every reason to think, to wipe out de Montfort for ever. There followed the campaign which ended on September 11, 1213, with the incredible battle of Muret. On that day de Montfort, with a force of some seven hundred cavalry, routed and destroyed Peter's army -- forty thousand strong in all, three thousand horsemen -- with the loss of only nine men killed. Peter himself was among the slain.

The whole of Raymond's dominions now fell into de Montfort's hands, always excepting Toulouse. But Innocent still refused to do more than recognise him as administrator of these lands until the coming General Council (summoned for November, 1215). The nobles all submitted unconditionally, and Raymond made over his lands to the pope. Nevertheless, despite Innocent's endeavours, the war now reopened. This was due to the action of the papal legate at the court of France. The French king Philip II. called Augustus (1180- 1223), had held back from the crusade ever since its inception six years earlier. But now, having defeated his allied enemies, England and the emperor, at Bouvines (July, 1214), he was willing to fish for whatever prize the upheaval in the south had to offer. In July the French cardinal who acted as legate at his court confirmed, in council, de Montfort's title as Count of Toulouse and renewed the crusade. A second council at Montpellier in January, 1215, also voted Raymond's deposition and the installation of de Montfort in his place, despite the protests of Innocent's legates there.

The final scene was enacted in the General Council when it met in the Lateran. The weight of evidence was too much for Innocent's hope of compromise, and on December 15, 1215, he recognised Simon de Montfort as Count of Toulouse. It was not, however, an unconditional recognition. All those lands which had so far escaped the crusade were assigned to Raymond's heir; Raymond himself was to enjoy a considerable annuity as long as he lived; his wife's dower lands were restored to her; and, finally, de Montfort was not created a sovereign prince. He was to remain what Raymond had been -- the vassal of the King of France. After seven years of stress, of bloodshed and of massacre in which neither side had the monopoly. the first great obstacle to the extirpation of the neo-Manichees had been surmounted. They were no longer protected by the State. In the next stage the State would co- operate with the Church against them. The primary agents of the Church in that next stage were the associates of Dominic Guzman, who about this time, 1215, begin to emerge as a new kind of religious order.

ST. DOMINIC AND THE FRIARS PREACHERS

The advent of the crusade in Languedoc did not put an end to the campaign of preaching and discussion. Diego retired to his diocese; the legates had now the conduct of the war to occupy them; it was Dominic who was now the principal figure in the purely religious movement. A pious layman gave over to the use of the preachers whom he led, a house in Toulouse, where the Cistercian bishop, Fulk, gave Dominic and his small band recognition as official preachers. Then the bishop made over to them the church of St. Romanus in that city. By the time the General Council met in 1215, the new society numbered sixteen members, and Dominic, who had shown his sense of where his calling lay by refusing successively the sees of Beziers, of Comminges and of Navarre, set out for the council with Fulk, to secure the approbation of Innocent III for what promised to be a new religious order.

The pope had, at the very beginning of Dominic's venture, called on the legates in Languedoc to seek out and foster men of this type. but now, since the general council had decided that new religious orders were not to be encouraged, he bade Dominic consult with his companions and choose some one of the already existing monastic rules under which to arrange their common life.

In August, 1216, Dominic was once more in Rome. At Toulouse it had been decided that the most suitable rule was the so-called Rule of St. Augustine -- the rule under which, since 1194, Dominic had himself lived, and under which he had organised the house at Prouille. The general exhortations and principles of this rule called for some practical supplement, and in the constitutions drawn up to provide this Dominic was greatly influenced by the constitutions of the Order of Premontre. Innocent III had died [263] before Dominic returned to Rome; and it was his successor, Honorius III, who in December, 1216, gave the new venture the papal approbation, as an order of canons dedicated to the work of preaching.

For all the traditional framework of the Augustinian rule and the status of an order of canons in which the preachers were now officially set, it was a new kind of thing which the pope had sanctioned, and the novelty of its nature -- an order of priests whose one purpose was intellectual work for the salvation of others -- showed itself in an amazingly novel adaptation of the monastic code.

To begin with, the only stability the new order had was stability to the order. The monk vowed himself to a particular house: the Preacher to go wherever preaching took him. The aim of the new institute was preaching, and to the study which is a first necessity of the preacher's office all else in the life must be strictly subordinated. The claim of study was, in every case of a conflict of monastic duties, to have precedence. Thus it was directed that the church services were not to be unduly protracted and the office to be chanted briskly, so that the time for study was not shortened. The idea was to train apostles to combat, by their intelligence no less than by their ascetic life, a heresy seductive philosophically no less than morally. From the new monasticism there disappeared the one-time universal element of manual labour. In austerity of life the Preachers yielded nothing to the Cistercians themselves, but for the necessary manual work of the house -- since the need of preachers was desperate -- lay brothers were instituted from the beginning. Even, at one moment, the founder would have handed over to the brothers the entire control of the temporal concerns of the order.

The unit of the society was the convent of at least twelve preachers, ruled by a prior and taught by a doctor, for every house of the Preachers was a house of study; and from study, as long as he lived, the Preacher was never exempt. To the lectures, which all must attend -- even the prior -- the secular clergy were to be admitted should they so desire. The doctor lectured on the text of Holy Scripture, treating theological questions as they arose. A second lecture commented the Liber Sententiarum of Peter Lombard. In the larger convents there was a second lecturer for the Sentences. Once a fortnight there was to be a public disputation.

The convents were grouped into provinces, and in each province it was the aim to provide a school of higher studies. At the summit of the intellectual organisation were the Studia Generalia, presided over by a regent, who lectured on Holy Scripture, and whom two bachelors assisted, one to lecture on the Glossa, the other on the Sentences. By 1248 there were five such studia, in the five great University cities of Paris, Oxford, Cologne, Montpellier and Bologna.

Lectureships were later created for the liberal arts, for logic, for natural science, for foreign languages (in view of the missions), and, in the Spanish houses, for oriental studies, for Hebrew, Greek and Arabic especially. The Friar Preacher was then a student for life. Whoever entered the order entered a university.

The Preacher was none the less a monk, in the austerity of his life and the public prayer to which he was bound. The abstinence from meat was perpetual. On all Fridays, on a score of vigils, and every day from September 14 to Easter, the Preacher had but one meal. He wore nothing but wool, he slept with his brethren in a common dormitory, he kept a silence almost as perpetual as his abstinence, and every day, publicly, at the chapter he confessed his offences against the rule.

Between this severe monastic observance and the new ideal of a learned apostolate in the world outside, there would seem to be an inevitable conflict, and the later history of the order shows, more than once, strong differences of opinion between the Preachers whom one ideal attracted as superior to the other. The difficulty arising from this dualism was present to the mind of the founder, who provided for it by a system of dispensations that is one of the features that makes his order, even to-day after seven hundred years, unique in the Church. This principle, that the superior not only may but must, when the good of the apostolate calls for it, dispense from any detail of the monastic observance, is set at the very head of the Constitutions, jointly with the definition of the order's purpose. The difficulty of course must persist, the equilibrium be sometimes hard to maintain, but there derives from the direction and from the spirit that inspires it a suppleness which perhaps no other order, as an order, possesses.

The convent buildings were to be as plain as possible, the territory worked from it carefully divided from that of its neighbours in the province. The Preachers were to go about in twos, to possess nothing, but to live on alms. Before Dominic died the poverty of the order received a new emphasis, for he adopted the Franciscan ideal that not only should the individual religious not be an owner, but that the very institute should be utterly dependent on what the providence of God sent to it.

At the head of the province was the provincial prior, and at the head of the whole order the Master-General, to whom every Preacher at his profession promised his obedience. Here was centralisation indeed, as developed as that of Cluny. It was, however, tempered by a bold innovation, the principle, namely, that all superiors are elected by those whom they will govern and that they are elected for a time only. The prior is the choice of the brethren of the convent, the provincial prior of a special provincial chapter, a body composed of all the priors and two delegates elected by each convent of the province. The Master-General is elected for life by a body consisting of all the provincials and one delegate from each province. The provincial chapter -- all the priors and one elected delegate from each convent -- meets annually and so, too, does the general chapter. Carefully planned regulations protect the freedom of election from any usurpation on the part of officials in days to come, surer of themselves than of their brethren, and preserve the institute against the premature fossilization that is the end of bureaucracy in all things human. In the order the superiors are nothing, the order is all. No external signs of respect are shown to the priors; they are not to be given the ritual honours that fall to the abbots in the different older orders. When the term of office expires the superior resumes in the order the place he last filled as a simple friar.

Supervision lies with the order; the community of each convent is bound to present a periodical report on the government of its prior, the provincial chapter on the provincial prior, the general chapter on the Master-General.

While the new institution has features in common with all the preceding attempts to found a centralised order -- notably with Cluny, Citeaux, and with Premontre above all -- its essence was Dominic's own creation and in this it is revolutionary, in the idea, that is to say, of religious scattered in convents throughout the world, not tied by vow to any one house but to the general service of the order throughout the world, and all owing obedience to the one general superior. Hitherto no more had been achieved than a federation of more or less autonomous monastic houses: in the Order of Preachers the Church welcomed the first religious order. Its curiously flexible rule has secured that, to a much greater degree than is usual, the ideal that gave rise to the order is still its very life. And the peculiar system of centralisation through "democratic" institutions continues to be, substantially, what St. Dominic planned and wrote into its first constitutions.

The original rule met its first revisers in the first general chapter held at Bologna in 1220. It was then that the decision was taken to adopt corporate poverty. The linen rochet which, as with the other canons-regular, formed part of the Preacher's habit, was given up, and in its place over their white tunic they adopted the monastic scapular. The title of abbot for the superior and of abbey for the convent were also abandoned. The Preachers were already, in reality, what they have since remained -- friars. Twenty years later it was the order's good fortune to have for its Master-General the greatest canon lawyer of the day, St. Raymond of Penaforte. He took the rule as St. Dominic had left it, and the decisions of the score of general chapters since his death, and arranging the whole scientifically, he produced what was henceforth the official text of the rule.

Once the order was papally confirmed, Dominic broke up the community of Toulouse and sent its members far and wide, three of them to the new university of Paris. Recruits began to come in, very many of them masters of arts, and in 1218 the Preachers were established at Lyons and Rome and Bologna. In 1219 the first Spanish houses were founded, at Madrid and Barcelona, houses also at Metz, at Rheims, Poitiers and Limoges, and six more in Italy. By the time of the general chapter of 1221 -- a matter of weeks only before St. Dominic's death -- there were sixty convents, organised in eight provinces: Provence, Spain, France, Lombardy, Rome, England, Germany and Hungary. Fifty years later, in those same eight provinces the number of houses had increased to three hundred and twenty, and there were the four new provinces of Poland, Scandinavia, Greece and the Holy Land. It is interesting to notice that, of the three hundred and ninety-four convents of 1277, no less than a hundred and forty were in the land where the neo-Manichees had once threatened to be supreme.

From the very beginning, the popes made continual and varied use of the new arm they had themselves done so much to create. The Preachers were the Roman Church's agents for the visitation of monasteries and sees, they preached the Crusade, they acted as its fiscal officials -- the order's protests against such distractions passing unheeded -- and of course to them first of all, once it was established, was committed the Inquisition. The Preachers were the natural reserve whence popes, bishops, other religious orders and universities, too, drew their professors of theology. From the new order came the first biblical concordances and correctories, the first complete commentaries, and many translations of the Bible into the new national tongues, French, Catalan, Valencian, Castilian and Italian. They compiled manuals for preachers and for confessors -- the Summa Penitentiarum of St. Raymond of Penaforte their model and type -- and books of reference innumerable: collections of matter for sermons, for example, collections of stories about the lives of the saints, manuals to guide the catechist, and handbooks for those engaged in casuistry, such, for example, the Summa contra Catharos of Moneta of Cremona.

Christendom began to be instructed as the Preachers spread rapidly through its cities and towns.

ST. FRANCIS AND THE FRIARS MINOR

The problem of the penitential brotherhoods of laymen, and of the anti-clerical, even anti-sacerdotal tendency of this movement, occupied Innocent III from the first months of his reign. For the Lombard groups of the Humiliati, no less than for the followers of Peter Waldo, the decision of Lucius III in 1184 had been the occasion of division. Many, the majority perhaps, left the Church rather than obey the prohibitions as to preaching. Others remained, and fifteen years later they were still following their special mode of life within the Church. These in 1199, for their better security, both against Catholic critics and against their own changeableness, Innocent organised in a new religious order. It comprised three classes. Those already married continued to live with their families, though practising the poverty of the Gospel. Others, without changing their lay state, lived a life in common under a rule. A third class were monks or nuns solemnly consecrating their new life by vows under a rule in which elements of the Benedictine and Augustinian rule were combined.

The new order, once approved, began to spread rapidly, as, in fact, all medieval orders spread. But long before the century in which it arose was finished, it had ceased to be a factor of real importance in the life of the Church, even in Italy. The first class -- its married members and those living in their own homes - - had disappeared; the other two had fused to become yet another monastic order. The poverty-loving laity who once had filled the ranks of the Humiliati were now being absorbed by a very much greater force, that had appeared within a few years of Pope Innocent's approbation of that order. This was the movement deriving from the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

Francis of Assisi -- Giovanni Bernadone by birth and baptism -- was one of several children of a wealthy cloth merchant of that town, and his Provencal wife. Francis was born about 1182. He was never a student, and his literary education was apparently never completed. But his wealth, his generosity, his wit, his musical gifts and gay disposition, made him, as he grew to manhood, one of the leaders of the fashionable youth of the city. With the rest of them he took his share in the wars between Assisi and Perugia, spent some time in prison there, and fell ill in consequence. The slow convalescence led to much self-analysis, and to a determination, imperfect as yet, to do something better with his life.

The next year he was once more in the train of a knight, in pursuit of glory, but illness drove him back to Assisi. Much uncertainty of soul, prayer, and solitude filled the next few months. Then an heroic act of self-conquest sent him to embrace a leper whom, a moment before, he had passed by with shuddering horror. He made the pilgrimage to Rome and, another heroic victory over his tastes, he persuaded a beggar outside St. Peter's to exchange clothes and surrender his pitch for the day. Then he returned to Assisi, the same light-hearted Francis but a changed man. He was twenty-four or five years old.

What was he to do with his life? As he prayed in the half-ruined church of St. Damiano a voice bade him repair it. He loaded a horse with cloth from his father's warehouse, sold it at Foligno, and offered the price to the priest -- who refused it when he heard how the donor had come by it. More important still, the incident ended his home life. For his father renounced him, and Francis delightedly accepted the chance. Solemnly, before the bishop, he took God for his only Father, stripping himself even of the clothes he had so far worn. The bishop took him under his protection, and gave him the minor orders. For the next year he begged, and with what he gained he rebuilt St. Damiano and St. Pietro and St. Maria degli Angeli, the Church of the Portiuncula. Even yet, however, God had not shown him where lay his ultimate way.

One day, in 1208, as he assisted at Mass and heard the words of the Gospel, they seemed a command to him personally: "Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. . . . Do not possess gold nor silver nor money in your purses: nor scrip for your journey, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor a staff." [264]

He knew now what God would have him do. He must live in absolute poverty and preach repentance for sin, brotherly love and peace. then followed the most literal following of the gospel that has ever been seen. Companions came to join him, one a local magnate, another a canon of the cathedral, and with them the famous Brother Giles. They lived in huts built of branches and covered with mud; they ate what they managed to beg; they watched; they prayed; and they preached -- simple exhortations lit by that joy, that gaiety even, which was inseparable from Francis' character.

Seven more companions came in. The band called themselves the Penitents of Assisi. Francis compiled a rule for them, and in 1209 he set out for Rome, to win for his enterprise the blessing of the pope.

Innocent had reorganised the Humiliati, and he had allowed more than one band of converted Waldenses to continue their life in common, but the common poverty that now asked his sanction was something so much sterner still that, for the moment, he hesitated. A vision or a dream, it is said, showed him the Lateran shaken and falling, and only held by the efforts of Francis. Finally he consented, gave a verbal approbation to what had been done, sanctioned the rule and allowed the Penitents to preach penance wherever they might go. But all were to be clerics at least. They now received minor orders and Francis the diaconate.

The next ten years saw the incredible expansion. Francis and his friends wandered through Italy, living as the day found them, sleeping in barns or, when barns were closed to them, under hedges, working with the labourers, utterly careless of hardships. and everywhere preaching peace, reconciliation, penance and the love of God for man His creature. Not every one of Francis' disciples had the gay disposition natural to his master, but something of that innocent joy, mirth even, lit the whole movement. To the perplexed Church there had been given a new leader, in whose life Waldensian austerity and the poetry of the Troubadours were combined, and all at the service of a faith wholly orthodox.

These new "poor men" had, in fact, a theologian's appreciation of religion as an objective thing; they were submissive to authority; recognising authority as the way of spirituality; and they reverenced, too, the visible means of spirituality, the sacraments, the Mass especially and the priesthood by which alone the Mass is possible. What St. Bernard had done for religious life, St. Francis now developed but with an even vaster effect. The Cistercian had himself chiefly preached in Latin, and the best of his work was directly addressed to the sanctification of the monk. The new preaching was in the vernacular tongues, and addressed to whoever would stand in the town square to listen. The new mission had a greater range than the old, and it developed the same powerfully effective treatment, the lesson of God's love through the human aspect of the mysteries of His incarnate life. When, for the Christmas of 1223, Francis at Greccio constructed the first crib, the development of religion's appeal to the ordinary man was set in a way where it was bound to advance with an altogether new rapidity. The Franciscans were the first order of revivalists within the Church, their whole aim and endeavour to rekindle love in hearts long since cold for all that the mind remained true.

Their immediate success outdistanced anything seen, before or since. Within ten years the number of those who had enrolled themselves as followers of Francis had reached five thousand. At the general assembly of the order in 1221 more than five hundred newcomers came to beg admission. It was inevitable, if the movement was not to suffer from its own success, that something of the happy informality of its cradle days must be sacrificed to a rule of more definite character. The rule as verbally approved by Innocent III, in 1209, the rule written down in 1221, which we still possess, left too much undecided and at the mercy of contrary interpretation. Hence, in 1223, a careful revision of the rule before it was solemnly approved by Honorius III.

About the share of others than St. Francis in this revision, about his own willingness or reluctance to accept their suggestions, the controversies still continue. Substantially it is the same rule as the rule of 1221 and this, it would seem from the language of the bull Solet of 1223, cannot really differ from that confirmed by Innocent III in 1209. As Honorius III confirmed it in 1223 it has been, ever since, the foundation of all Franciscan life; and for the century or more which followed the confirmation, it was the subject of fairly continuous controversy within the body of the order itself.

The rule of 1223, for all the legalist spirit which some would see in it, is by no means the carefully thought out code of St. Dominic's ordering, where a mass of detailed prescriptions logically derives from two or three enunciated fundamental principles. It is a statement of an ideal of life, and the bare precepts necessary to maintain the ideal. Nor is the new family's organisation worked out in great detail. The aim of these lesser brothers -- Friars Minor -- is stated to be the Gospel life in obedience, without property, and in chastity. This obedience Francis has promised to the pope -- the other brothers owe it to Francis. There are clerics in the order and there are lay brothers. There is a fast from All Saints to Christmas, on every Friday, during Lent, and, if the friar so wishes, for the forty days from January 6. The friar is never to touch money or coins, not even through an intermediary. Those who can work may do so, but not so as to hinder prayer or devotion. No one is to preach unless approved for the purpose by the head of the order, and always with the consent of the local bishop. The end of their preaching is declared to be "the utility and edification of the people, announcing to them vices and virtues, punishment and glory. . . ." The soul of the movement is in Chapter VI. "The brethren shall appropriate nothing to themselves, neither a house nor a place nor anything. And as pilgrims and strangers in this world let them go confidently in quest of alms." Finally, they are to ask of the pope a cardinal protector "so that being always subject and submissive at the feet of the same holy Church, grounded in the Catholic faith, we may observe poverty and humility and the holy gospels of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which we have firmly promised."

INNOCENT III AND THE CATHOLIC PRINCES

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 [265] 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 [266] -- 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, [267] 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 [268] 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. [269] 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.

INNOCENT III AND THE LATIN EAST

But before the story of Innocent III's general council is told, some account must be given of the way in which he dealt with the problem of the Latin East.

From the very moment of his election Innocent planned to restore the crusade. It was to be, once more, a papally directed thing; and the ideals that inspired it were to be protected against the selfishness of the magnates. Appeals to the princes of Europe, and requests for information to the bishops in the East and to the heads of the military orders, began to issue steadily from Rome. Legates were commissioned to restore peace between the warring kings; the papal diplomacy set itself to conciliate and win over the schismatic church of Armenia; and to resolve the new, most pressing problem of all -- the relations of the West with the empire of the East: Constantinople's malevolent neutrality must be turned. Here was a complicated problem indeed. The reigning emperor, Alexis III, had been welcomed as an ally by Innocent's predecessor who, for all that the Greek was a schismatic, had dreamed of setting him up to counterbalance the danger to religion from the Catholic Henry VI. The strange allies had in common a hatred of the Hohenstaufen, for the Greek emperor's dethroned predecessor -- Isaac Angelus -- was father-inlaw to Philip of Swabia.

Innocent III proposed to himself, at first, to bring the hundred and forty years' schism to an end, and thus to make Alexis III the chief of the new crusade. There would thus be an end to the old quarrels between the Latins who had won the battles and the Greek emperor claiming the Latin conquests as his own long lost territory. While, then, the pope was pressing forward with the usual preparations for a crusade, he was also negotiating with Alexis the calling of a general council that would restore the East to the unity of the Catholic faith. What the pope did not, as yet, realise was that the empire of the East was breaking up. It lacked a fleet; its army was wretchedly provided, the soldiers' pay in arrears; in all the provinces still nominally subject to Constantinople there were movements making for political autonomy which the government was powerless to arrest; and the empire v as not only menaced by the Turks, but by the Bulgarians and the Venetians too. Even if the pope succeeded in his plan to end the schism, the Byzantine empire, as a crusading force, was an arm that would break the first time it was used.

By the March of 1201 the vast preparations were so far advanced that the leaders of the crusade opened negotiations with Venice for the transport of men and stores. The terms agreed upon were that the republic should receive eighty-five thousand marks, and a half of whatever conquests were made. The pope's scheme, for an alliance with Constantinople, was ignored. The crusade, this time, was to make directly for the centre of the Mohammedan world, Cairo; and the armies were to be ready to sail on June 24,

This agreement Innocent ratified, with a solemn prohibition against attacking Christian States. The pope knew -- none better - - how, since the failure of the crusade of 1189-1192 and the quarrel of Barbarossa with Constantinople, the new idea had gained force that the Greeks were as much the enemies of the crusade as the Turks. Henry VI had actually planned to destroy the Greek Empire as the first step towards Catholicising the East; and now the crusaders had chosen as their leader a near relative of the dead emperor, Boniface of Montferrat, who had scores of his own to pay off in Constantinople. The dethroned emperor, Isaac Angelus, was an old ally; and the new line, so Boniface held, had been responsible for the death of his brother Conrad, a famous leader of the crusading armies in 1192. There was every chance that this Hohenstaufen-inspired leadership would take the crusade into the Hohenstaufen channel.

At this moment, March, 1201, there arrived in Italy Alexis Angelus, the son of the dethroned emperor. He did his best to enlist the sympathy of the pope and, more effectively, he came to an arrangement with his brother-in-law, Philip of Swabia -- at the moment under the papal ban, but the brains of the crusade. It is highly probable that it was at this interview (December 25, 1201) that the decision was taken to use the crusade to restore the dethroned Isaac Angelus. Within a few months Boniface actually proposed this for Innocent's sanction, but the pope held by his pledge.

The crusaders at last began to gather at Venice. Here again, the diplomacy of Philip and Alexis was busy; and, although no attempt was made to force a decision, the idea of capturing Constantinople as a first step towards the lasting triumph became familiar to all. The army was smaller than had been hoped. Even pledging all their resources, the Crusaders had not been able to raise more than four-sevenths of the sum promised to Venice. It was now suggested that they assist the Venetians to reconquer Zara now, and so wipe out their debt. There was a lively opposition to the proposal. The papal prohibition to attack Christian States, disobedience to which entailed excommunication, stood in the way; but in the end the plan was accepted and in November, 1202, Zara was captured from the Hungarians and restored to Venice.

At Zara, too, the Hohenstaufen scheme was adopted. The leaders of the crusade, fresh from suing out an absolution for the crime of Zara, now came to a definite understanding with Alexis as representative of the deposed Isaac Angelus. They would assist him to recover his throne, and in return he promised to restore the church of Constantinople, with its dependencies, to the Roman obedience, to pay a huge money indemnity to the crusading army, to join in the crusade himself and to maintain an army in the Holy Land. Once more there were violent dissensions in the crusading army, but, as at Venice, the majority accepted the pact. Chief among those who refused and who, at this stage, abandoned the crusade was Simon de Montfort.

On May 24, 1203, the armada set sail from Corfu. A month later it was in sight of Constantinople, and on June 24 it anchored off Chalcedon. Innocent, still true to his policy had, long before this, expressly forbidden the expedition.

From Chalcedon the leaders summoned Alexis III to yield. He refused, and on July 7 the siege began. Ten days later there was a general assault. Alexis III fled, the partisans of Isaac brought him out of prison and acclaimed him as emperor, and the gates were opened to the Latins. On August I Isaac's son Alexis, brother-in- law to the excommunicated Philip of Swabia, at the moment waging war on the pope and his protege Otto in Germany, was crowned as joint emperor with his father. It only remained for him to carry out the promises made at Zara.

To this, whatever his good faith, there were difficulties that were insurmountable. To begin with Alexis Angelus was not, as yet, master of more than the capital. Then the sum promised as an indemnity was far beyond what his treasury held. The Crusaders decided to winter at Constantinople. As the imperial subsidies delayed, they took to looting; and presently something like a state of war developed between the Crusaders and the populace of the capital. In February, 1204, the discontent in the city brought about a revolution. The recently restored Isaac, and his son, were murdered and the successful leader of the movement was proclaimed as Alexis V. He reigned for a matter of weeks only. The Crusaders decided to make themselves masters of the capital and to set up an empire of their own. They arranged how the immense booty of the city's wealth was to be shared; they arranged the procedure for the election of their emperor; they arranged, finally, how the territories should be divided: to the new emperor a quarter; to Venice three-eighths; and the remaining three-eighths, in fief, to the different leaders.

All this carefully arranged, they attacked on April 9. They were, however, repulsed. Three days later they attacked again. After a furious day of fighting they were masters of part of the town and, since Alexis V fled in the night, the morning of the thirteenth found them undisputed masters of the city. Three churches were appointed as depots for the loot, and then followed one of the great sacks of history. Never since Constantine placed there his capital, nine hundred years before, had Byzantium yielded to an invader. Now, all the accumulated treasures of a thousand years were to be had for the taking. Nothing was spared, the churches and convents were plundered as systematically as the palaces of the emperor and his nobility. Finally the emperor was elected -- Baldwin of Flanders -- and, on May 16, 1204, he was crowned in St. Sophia with Latin rites.

It remained to be seen what the pope would do. The new emperor sent an elaborate letter full of explanation of the many advantages that would accrue to religion from the conquest, and, when this failed to reach the pope, he despatched an embassy to make it all clear. Innocent, however, faced with the fait accompli, and with all the different Greek claimants to the empire dead, Angeli and Comneni alike, had no difficulty in accommodating his practical mind to the new situation. That situation was indeed the result of disobedience to his orders. The Ghibellines had triumphed. It remained for him to bring back to his authority as many as he could of the Crusaders and to safeguard the interests of religion in the new world united so forcibly to the West.

It was not long before the pope had measured the strength and reality of the reunion. The Latin empire in the East suffered in its very foundations from all the deadly insufficiency which had ruined the enterprise in Syria. Like the King of Jerusalem the emperor was little more than a primus inter pares. Then, too, between the new state and Syria lay Asia Minor and the two new states, of Nicaea and Trebizond, in which the Byzantines proceeded, with no hindrance from the Latins, to organise themselves. The Latins had, of course, inherited all the anxieties of the Byzantine emperors of the last three centuries, and their emperor was scarcely crowned before a Bulgarian invasion called him into the field. The Latin empire, far from providing a new basis for the crusade and new armies, was an additional liability lo the already overtaxed religious enthusiasm of the West, and it threatened to eat up resources that might otherwise have helped to change the situation in Syria.

Innocent III soon understood: the Holy Land remained as a major problem; and so long as he lived the pope planned and strove for its recovery. But in those plans the new Latin empire had no great place. It was, once more, the direct assault of the West on Islam that Innocent had in mind. To the execution of his policy there were even more than the usual distractions. There was the long war in Germany, the struggle with John in England, the crusades against the Moors of Spain and the heretics of Languedoc. But by 1215 the way was clear. One of the tasks of the General Council would be to organise, under the new Western emperor, a crusade whose successes should rival the glory of the first.

INNOCENT III AND THE REFORM OF CATHOLIC LIFE: THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF 1215

Whatever the degree of their individual sanctity, learning, or political capacity, one idea, beyond all others, never ceased to inspire the activities of the popes from the time of the Council of Sutri onwards -- the idea so to purify the life of the members of the Church, that through them God's perfection should shine forth and the city of God be realised upon earth. That all Catholics should live the life of the Gospel, the life of the counsels and the life of the precepts, was the whole aim of the Church's institution; and all the struggles waged by popes with the powers of this world were, in the last analysis, designed for this end -- to remove the obstacles which hindered the Church's mission of regenerating souls to God. Not that princes, and their usurpations of spiritual jurisdiction and the like, were the only obstacles. The hindrances presented by human weakness, human wickedness and human folly in a myriad individual lives still remained. Here was the very field of the Church's mission.

Finally the Church itself, considered as a means of regeneration, called for continual examination: more especially since, in these last two centuries, the Roman See had done so much to centralise administration. When the eleventh-century popes assumed the new role that made them the accredited initiators of every good work, they assumed a new responsibility for the vast world they directed, and for the good order of the machine through which they ruled. Their consciousness of their new responsibility is seen in the series of general councils which they begin to summon, one in every generation, and which are concerned primarily with the exposition of a standard of Catholic life, and with regulations designed to maintain that standard. The early [270] general councils were called, all of them, to define special points of faith which had begun to be called in question. They met in the lands where the disputes had arisen, and they were called at the request of the contending parties. The period which saw this institution develop was that time when the West -- and Rome along with the West-passed through the frightful chaos of what it is convenient to call the Barbarian Invasions. These over, and Rome at last able to begin to organise her supremacy, a new type of general council appears, whose chief concern is the practice of religion, and it is summoned at Rome's initiative. There are six [271] such councils in a hundred and fifty years and the greatest of them all is the one summoned by Innocent III in 1215 -- the Fourth Council of the Lateran. This was the greatest gathering of the whole Middle Ages, and through it, better perhaps than through any other event or institution, we can realise that extraordinary unity of medieval civilisation, the quality that made the medieval, for all the very real differences, really at home anywhere in Christendom and which, without destroying social and economic distinctions (and even their disadvantages), did so much ultimately to neutralise them.

The council was called, by letters of April 4, 1213, to meet on November I, 1215. All the bishops were invited, the heads of the new centralised religious orders too (an innovation in procedure produced by this new feature of religious life), Cistercians, Premonstratensians, Hospitallers and Templars, temporal princes also (another innovation), representatives of republics, even of the innumerable tiny city-states. All the bishops were ordered to come, three or four alone from each province excepted. Chapters, whether of cathedrals or of collegiate churches, were to send delegates, and the exempted bishops were to do the same. Two main problems were to occupy the council's attention, the question of the Holy Land and the question of the reform of Catholic life. Meanwhile a general enquiry was organised to provide particular matter for the discussions on reform.

The council actually opened on November 11, 1215, with four hundred and twelve bishops present, eight hundred abbots and priors, and representatives of all the States. The number of bishops from Germany was very small. The war now raging between Otto IV and Frederick II, and the remains of the schism which had in some sees placed both a papal bishop and an imperial bishop, made it impossible for many bishops to leave their churches.

There were three public sessions, the opening session on November 11, the second on November 20, and the final session on November 30. Before the first session, and between the other two, private meetings of one kind and another were held, at which the preparatory discussions took place which issued in the decrees ultimately promulgated at the final session. At the second public session there was a discussion on the claims of Frederick II to the empire as against the excommunicated Otto, and the council supported Innocent's action. There was also, apparently, a discussion on English affairs. The excommunication of the barons in rebellion against John was confirmed, and the council also assented to the pope's suspension of Cardinal Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, for his support of the rebels. At the final session there was a stormy discussion on the subject of the partition of the lands of Raymond VI of Toulouse, as to whether Simon de Montfort should be confirmed in his possession. The pope, here, was opposed to the council which would have recognised Simon. In the end, as has been related, Innocent was able to arrange a compromise. Finally, in this same session the seventy canons of the council [272] were solemnly promulgated.

The first canon is the famous profession of faith Firmiter, a statement of Catholic belief directed primarily against the Albigenses and the innumerable anti-sacerdotal sects of the day. It emphasises the creation of all things, spiritual and corporal alike, by the one sole God. The devils, too, are God's creation. That they are now evil is the effect of their own perversity. The reality of the Incarnation of the Only-begotten Son of God is affirmed once more, with a greater precision as to its mode. The sanctions of the future life for present conduct are explicitly set out. There is but a single Church for all believers. Outside of it no one can besaved; within it Jesus Christ Himself is priest and sacrifice, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the appearance of bread and wine, the bread being transsubstantiated [273] into the body and the wine into the blood by the power of God; so that, to make perfect the mystery of unity, we may receive of His where He has taken of ours. No one can bring this sacrament into existence but the priests duly ordained by that power of the Church which Jesus Christ gave to the Apostles and their successors. Baptism, by whomsoever administered, if it is rightly administered in the Church's form, is profitable to salvation as much to little children as lo adults. Sins committed after baptism can be made good by sincere penance. Not only virgins and those who lead a life of continency, but the married also can attain eternal happiness, by true faith and a good life.

Then follows a still more lengthy canon condemning the book of Joachim of Flora against Peter Lombard. The pope, in this canon, takes the unusual course of setting out Joachim's argument before proceeding to declare -- in a form that is even more unusual -- " We, however, with the approval of the Sacred Council, believe and confess with Peter Lombard" -- what the true teaching is. Joachim's theory is condemned; but the canon expressly declares that the condemnation is in no way to be taken as a condemnation of his foundation at Flora, which is a model of religious observance. Joachim, it is further noted, submitted all his writings to the apostolic see to be amended as the pope thought necessary, since, as he himself wrote, the Roman Church is the mother and teacher of all the faithful. This second canon concludes with a brief judgement on the pantheistic theories of Amaury de Bene, theories it describes as not so much heretical as insane.

The council then turns to review the life of the Church, to denounce the weakness and the wickedness of its members, and to provide punishment for the obstinate. It begins with the clergy.

Clerics living in sin are to be suspended, and, if they ignore the suspension, they are to be deposed. Bishops who allow such scandals to continue -- and especially if they allow it for the sake of money or some other advantage -- are also to lose their office for ever. Even more severely are clerics to be punished for sins of this kind in places where the discipline is such that they could, had they chosen, have married. [274] Drunkenness is another bad habit There are clerics, and bishops among them, who sit up all night carousing; drinking competitions are not unknown; the next day's Matins finds them absent from choir. Other bishops hardly ever say Mass, and laugh at the idea of assisting at it. When they do assist they do little more than gossip with the laity and transact business. [275] There is another type of ecclesiastic who delights in hunting and fowling. This is forbidden, no matter what his rank, and it is forbidden even to keep hunting dogs and birds.

Canon 16 has a long list of things which the clerics must not do: civil employments, trade (especially if it is dishonest), miming, acting, frequenting taverns (absolutely forbidden save for the necessities of travelling), dicing and even looking on at games of chance. Clerics are to be soberly dressed. Their garments are to be of a moderate cut, neither too long nor too short, and fastened up to the neck. Red and green are colours definitely forbidden. Clerics are not to wear embroidered gloves nor shoes. They are not allowed to gild their spurs, bridles, saddles nor any part of the harness of their mounts. Nor are their bridles or belts to be ornamented with gold or silver. Bishops are to wear linen unless they are monks, in which case they are to keep the habit of the order to which they belong. Clerics are not to have any part in trials that involve the punishment of death, nor are they to look on at executions. They are forbidden all military employment. They are not to act as surgeons. They are not to bless ordeals. This last prohibition, since it removed the one thing that gave the ordeal its value, was the beginning of the end of that superstitious usage.

That such abuses as those, for whose correction these laws are made, may not arise in the future, the council proceeds to legislate in the matter of clerical appointments.

Sees are not to be left vacant. If the chapter concerned does not elect within three months, the right (and duty) of providing the new bishop passes to the metropolitan. [276] If the chapter follow the method of election, a simple majority suffices. [277] The unlawful interference of the secular power is provided against by a canon which decrees that whoever accepts election in such circumstances not only is not elected, but loses all right to be elected, to any post at all in the future. Those who elect him are also to lose both office and income for three years, and to lose all electoral rights [278] The bishop, or abbot it may be, once elected, it falls to the metropolitan, or diocesan bishop, to confirm the election. He is to examine if the election has been made in due form and to examine if the elect be suitable. Should he confirm the choice of an unsuitable person -- especially one lacking in the requisite learning, or of evil life, or who is under the canonical age -- the confirmation is invalid, and he loses all rights in the matter of the next election, and is himself suspended until the pope absolves him. [279]

It is, once more, strictly forbidden to confer on the same person more than one benefice with cure of souls. The pope notes that the legislation of the previous council (the Third Lateran of 1179) about this scandal has had scarcely any effect, such is the impudence and greed of mankind. For the future, acceptance of the second office entails loss of the first. Whoever attempts to retain the first loses also the second. The patron of the first benefice is to make a new appointment, immediately its holder has accepted a second. The bishop's diligence in the observance of these salutary laws is not to be left to his own unaided conscience. At the annual provincial council there is to be an enquiry into all nominations to benefices since the bishops last met. Bishops who have made unsuitable appointments are to be admonished. If, after a second admonition, they have done nothing, they are to lose all rights of patronage, and the council is to appoint an official to exercise the right in their place. If the negligent bishop is the metropolitan himself, he is to be denounced to the Holy See. The disability laid on such bishops no one but the pope can remove. A last rule about appointments is that no cleric shall be given a canonry in a church where his father is already a canon -- whether the cleric be born in wedlock or no. All such appointments are null, and those who make such appointments are suspended.

The new papal centralisation would protect the Church against unworthy clergy. It aims at protecting the clergy against rapacious prelates. Bishops are warned that they must not rob the clergy serving those churches which are in the gift of the bishops. The pope has heard of unfortunate priests who receive only one-sixteenth of the revenue due to them, the episcopal patron retaining the rest. Nor are bishops to make visitations an excuse for bleeding their clergy. The canon of 1179 is re-enacted, and bishops who have offended are now required, not only to make restitution to the full, but to give in charity a sum equal to that they have had to restore. Metropolitans who neglect complaints of this kind made against their suffragans are to be severely punished.

Bishops, in canon 10, are reminded of their duty to preach, and when the bishop is not equal to the task, when for example the diocese is too extensive. he is to choose suitable priests to assist him. In all cathedral and collegiate churches he is to establish priests to act as his coadjutors in the work of preaching and hearing confessions. It is the bishop who is responsible for the education of the future clergy. The decree of the council of 1179. that in each cathedral, and in all the greater churches, there should be established a master to teach grammar, and in the metropolitan church a lecturer in theology, had in many churches the present council states, been entirely ignored. Whence it is now re-enacted, with this difference that a lectureship in theology is ordered to be founded in every cathedral. The bishop, furthermore. is specially warned to see that the clergy are trained in the administration of the sacraments. Better few good priests, so canon 27, than many bad ones. Churches are not to be used as depots in which the clergy may store their property. I hey are to be kept scrupulously clean, and the Holy Eucharist -- the chrism also -- is to be kept under lock and key.

One of the most constantly recurring complaints of the sectaries is that the clergy are too fond of money. The council, in a series of canons, labours to protect from this all too human vice the sacred things of God committed to the clergy's stewardship. Bishops are forbidden to receive offerings of money from those they absolve from excommunication. They are not allowed to receive fees on the occasion of consecrations, blessings of abbots and ordinations. Convents of women are ordered for the future to abstain from demanding a premium, under the plea of the convent's poverty, from girls who wish to become nuns. Nuns received under such an arrangement are to be transferred to other convents, as are also the nuns responsible for the arrangement. The same is to apply to communities of men. Bishops are not to take advantage of a parish priest's death to tax the church beyond what the law allows, nor to enforce the payment of such taxes by laying an interdict on the church. For moneys thus obtained double restitution is to be made. With regard to the fees customary at funerals and marriages, while the clergy often ask too much, the laity as often offer nothing. The Sacraments are to be given absolutely without charge. On the other hand, the custom of the laity making a free offering is to be encouraged.

The 62nd canon regulates the use of relics, and hopes to check the trade in spurious relics by ordering that no new relics are to be exposed for veneration without the Holy See's authentication of them. Collectors of alms, again, are not always genuine nor truthful. The canon gives a specimen of the letters of credence that should, and for the future must, guarantee them not to be frauds. The dress of such collectors is regulated, and they are to live religious lives. Bishops are warned not to grant extravagant indulgences.

A last class of abuses are those where the laity are the sinners. Lay patrons are warned against farming out benefices at a starvation rate, and reminded that lay alienation of church property is null and void. Lay patrons, and the official lay defenders of the Church, are warned against abusing their office to their own personal profit. Offences of this kind entail serious legal disqualifications that continue for four generations. Clergy are not to be taxed without a license from the pope. Those who levy such taxes without his permission are excommunicated, and all their acts are legally null. Should their successors not repeal such taxes within a month of assuming office, and give satisfaction for the wrong done, they fall under the same penalties. Another canon deals with evasions of tithe and canon 54 recalls that tithes have precedence of all other taxes and must be paid first.

Seven canons are taken up with the religious orders. To avoid grave confusion in the Church it is now forbidden to establish any new orders. Those who wish to be monks or nuns are to choose an existing approved rule. Founders of new houses are to do likewise. No abbot is to rule more than one monastery. Abbots are forbidden to exercise certain episcopal rights, to judge marriage cases, for example, to grant indulgences or to allot public penances. Monks must respect the rights of parishes in the matter of funerals, and the privileged monasteries' power of giving burial within the monastery to such laymen as are oblates of the house is given very strict definition: an oblate is one who lives in the monastic habit, or who, during his life, has made over his property to the monastery; a mere annual subscription is no qualification enough. No monk is to stand security for a debt without the abbot's permission. Monks to whom land that is tithe-bearing has been given are not exempt from payment of tithes.

The most important canon of all, so far as monks are concerned, is the twelfth, which, incidentally, marks the high water mark of Citeaux's influence in the Church of the Middle Ages. In every ecclesiastical province, it is now enacted, there shall be held every three years a common chapter of abbots, and of priors in those orders which do not have abbots, where so far this has not been the custom. All are to attend. The chapter, to begin with, will invite two Cistercian abbots of the neighbourhood to lend the assistance of their experience of the procedure at general chapters. The Cistercian abbots will choose two of the chapter and these four will preside. The object of the chapter is a thorough review Of the state of monastic life throughout the province. It has power to decide where reforms are needed. The chapter must appoint visitors for all the religious houses of the province, of women as well as of men, empowered to correct, as representatives of the Holy See, whatever calls for correction, and to denounce evil-doers to the local bishop. The bishops are to watch over the ordinary life of the monasteries so that the visitation will always find everything in good order. They are to be the monasteries' protectors, defending the monks especially from lay tyranny and usurpation.

The council also legislated for two of the sacraments. Canon 21 is the once famous law Omnis utriusque sexus that every Catholic, under pain of being debarred from church while alive and being denied Christian burial when dead, should, at least once a year, confess his sins to his parish priest, and, if only at Easter, receive the Holy Eucharist. The canon concludes with a warning to confessors about the spirit in which they should receive confessions, and of the obligation not to reveal what is confessed to them. Offenders against this last prescription are to be thrust into a severe monastery, there to do penance for the rest of their life. Related to this canon is the one which follows, reminding physicians that it is their duty to see that their patients remedy the ills of the soul no less than those of the body, and forbidding them to recommend, as a remedy for sickness, practices in themselves sinful. Three canons concern the sacrament of matrimony. Clandestine marriages are severely condemned and the clergy forbidden to assist at them. Clergy who are negligent in this matter are to be suspended for three years. The impediments of consanguinity and affinity are notably restricted: henceforward they invalidate marriage only as far as the fourth degree.

The relations between Jews and Christians are also before the council's mind. Christians are to be protected by the State against the rapacity of Jewish moneylenders. Jews -- and Saracens too-are to wear a special dress so that no Christian shall come to marry them in ignorance of what they are. During Passiontide Jews are to keep indoors; there have been only too many riots caused by their mockery of the Christians' lamentations on Good Friday. No Jews or pagans are to be elected or appointed to a public office; it is contrary to the sense of things that those who blaspheme Christ shall hold authority over Christ's followers.

It is perhaps the canonist that, in Innocent III, is the source of all his policy. In the General Council summoned by him Canon Law and procedure receive very notable attention. Seven canons deal with procedure in trials of one kind or another. Other canons regulate excommunications, rights of appeal, and the rules for the trial of clerics, the rights of chapters to correct their own members, and the rules for resignation of benefices. The clergy are forbidden to extend their jurisdiction by encroaching on that of the civil courts. But the most elaborate of this series is the third canon which details the policy to be followed in the pursuit of heretics. [280]

The laws were made. How could the council secure that the would be observed, that the bishops, once retired into the distant sees, would put into practice what they had accepted? The sixth canon is an attempt to provide the means. It lays down that the bishops of each ecclesiastical province are to meet annually, for the correction of abuses -- clerical abuses particularly -- and for the express purpose of maintaining the discipline which this council establishes. Official investigators are to be appointed for each diocese, who shall report to the provincial council whatever they have found needing correction and uncorrected. Negligent bishops are to be suspended from office and from income, and the decisions of the provincial council are to be published in every see through the annual diocesan synod.

The new canon lawyers had soon begun to collect and classify the decisions now pouring out from the popes, on all kinds o f questions, in reply to appeals from bishops everywhere. There were 4,000 such from Alexander III, more than 5,000 from Innocent III - - all set out in professional legal form, relating the case to principles, law that was living. Innocent III and Honorius III each sponsored a collection of his own decretals. By the time of Gregory IX there were too many collections. They overlapped. The law could not, always, be known with certainty. This pope then commissioned a Catalan Dominican -- St. Raymund of Penaforte -- to reduce the vast mass to a coherent code. In 1234 the code was ready -- the Five Books of the Decretals, 1963 capita in all, destined to be the basis of the Canon Law down to 1918. This code of 1234 was henceforward the only law, and it was universal, to be taught in all universities, to be administered in every bishop's court. Boniface VIII was to supplement it in 1295, and John XXII in 1317. But the main work was done in 1234, and with every year that passed it deepened the effect of the papacy as ruler of the whole church. (cf. CIMETIER, Les Sources du droit ecclesiastique, Paris, 1930; VILLIEN, art. Decretales in D.T.C.)

Endnotes

262: Elected January 8, 1198. [back]

263: July 16, 1216. [back]

264: Matt. x, 6, 9-10 [back]

265: Boniface VIII (1294-1303) in the bull Unam Sanctam [back]

266: i.e. in the four tributary kingdoms, Sicily, Portugal, Aragon, and England. [back]

267: cf. GASQUET, Henry III and the Church (1905) [back]

268: cf. supra, p. 318. [back]

269: For the text cf. MlGNE. Patrologia Latina. t. ccxvi, col. 1025 et seq. [back]

270: Nicea I, 325: Constantinople I, 381; Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451; Constantinople II, 553, Constantinople III, 680; Nicea II, 787, Constantinople IV, 869 [back]

271: Lateran 1, 1123; Lateran II, 1139; Lateran III, 1179; Lateran IV, 1215; Lyons I, 1245; Lyons 11, 1274. The Council of Vienne (1311-12) is by its origin and purpose in a class apart; and the next group of four (Constance, 1414-1417: Basle, 1431-1437, Florence, 1438-1493; Lateran V, 1512-1517) also have a unity of their own [back]

272: For the text of which cf. SCHROEDER, H. 1., Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (1937), 560-84, and a translation of them (which needs to be compared with the Latin), 237-96. [back]

273: The first time the mystery is officially described by a use of this term transsubstantiatis pane in corpus, et vino in sanguinem. [back]

274: canon 14. [back]

275: canon 17 [back]

276: Canon 23. [back]

277: Canon 24 [back]

278: Canon 25 [back]

279: Canon 26 [back]

280: This will be discussed in the section that deals with the formation of the Inquisition. cf. infra, pp. 408-9. [back]