Vassalage

In the early thirteenth century a new formal relationship between popes and kings appeared: kings might now be papal ‘vassals’ (vassalli) and their kingdoms ‘fiefs’ (feuda). Such language appeared in King John of England’s surrender to Pope Innocent III in 1213 and thence spread to other kingdoms, including the kingdom of Man, through a network of courtiers at the papal curia, all of whom had connections with the English royal court. The development and construction of these relationships was a two-way process in which both kings and popes participated; such relationships were not enforced on unwilling rulers by an over-mighty papal monarchy.

IV. Innocent III: A Lawyer-Pope and His Consensual “Policy” of Marriage? A Reconsideration

This article intervenes in the previous scholarly conversations of Kenneth Pennington, Charles Donahue, Jr., and Anne J. Duggan and suggests through the reassessment of the surviving evidence, a revisionist interpretation. It argues that Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) was not only a pope with legal expertise reflected in the remarkable consistency of his numerous decisions concerning cases of marriage formation that came to his attention in an ad hoc manner, but also, that he was, and he believed himself to be a legislating pope through his plenitude of power. He, rather than Alexander III (1159–1181), was responsible for creating and implementing the consensual “policy”, in the strictest definition of the term, for the formation of Christian marriage. Through a careful investigation of the pertinent papal letters of Innocent III found primarily in his registers, this article reconfirms and demonstrates Stephan Kuttner’s impression of the consistency of the letters as internal proof of the pope’s legal skill that he suggested long ago in 1974.

The Papacy Takes Charge

Chapter 8 moves from the Norman kingdom of the twelfth century to the newly changed situation in the early thirteenth century, as the demise of the Hauteville dynasty and the minority of the young king Frederick II Hohenstaufen (r. 1198–1250) created an opportunity for Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) and his successors to enforce their authority in southern Italy. Meanwhile, the Latin conquest of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (1204) created an imperative for the papacy to develop a coherent policy towards the integration of Greek Christians into the Roman church’s administrative and legal structures. The chapter discusses how the papacy formulated this policy at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the resulting increase in papal interventions in the legal affairs of the southern Italian Greeks. It then looks at Pope Honorius III’s (r. 1216–1227) short-lived effort to organise Byzantine-rite monasteries into an Order of St Basil under Grottaferrata (a predecessor to Eugenius IV’s more successful fifteenth-century order). It examines the Grottaferrata Nomocanon (Marc. gr. 171), a manuscript produced at the monastery in c. 1220–1230 that was apparently intended to provide a legal guide for the new order yet was still entirely Byzantine in character. The chapter finishes by focusing on the conflict between the Holy Saviour monastery of Messina and the papacy in the 1220s–1230s as an important example of the papacy’s efforts to bring the royal monasteries of the Kingdom of Sicily under episcopal control.

The Time of Preparation for the Pasch in the Light of Medieval Allegory

In the medieval liturgy, especially in the celebration of the Mass, allegorical interpretation of the texts and gestures played a very meaningful role. Among the most prominent representatives of the allegorical interpretation of the liturgy were: Isidore of Seville, Alcuin, Amalarius of Metz, Rabanus Maurus, Walafrid Strabo, Rupert of Deutz, John Beleth, Pope Innocent III, and William Durand. These ideas were laid out in treatises with the titles Expositiones Missae, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, or Liber de Divinis Officiis. This study presents the allegorical interpretation of the paschal preparation period, from Septuagesima Sunday to Holy Saturday, and its associated liturgical rites.

The Fourth Lateran Council as the Main Agenda for the Preparation of the Fifth Crusade

<p>The Latin Church in medieval time regarded crusades as holy wars against paganism and heretics. Pope Innocent III was one of the church leaders who strongly believed that Christians need to regain the Holy Land. After initiating the Fourth Crusade and was disappointed by the failure of the crusaders, Innocent III organised the Fourth Lateran Council for the main purpose of launching the Fifth Crusade. While some scholars maintained that the reform of universal church was one of the main agenda of the Council, this paper shows that it was ancillary to the preparation of all elements within the Church for the next Crusade.</p>

Comparative Politics of Exclusion in Europe and the Americas: Religious, Sectarian, and Racial Boundary Making since the Reformation

Based on a critical reading of three recent books, I argue that the exclusion of Jews and Muslims, the two major non-Christian religious groups in Europe and the Americas, has continued on the basis of ethnic, racial, ideological, and quasi-rational justifications, instead of or in addition to religious justifications, since the Reformation. Furthermore, I argue that the institutionally orchestrated collective stigmatization and persecution of Jews and Muslims predated the Reformation, going back to the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III in 1215. The notion of Corpus Christianum and Observant movements in the late Middle Ages, the elective affinity of liberalism and racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the divergence in religious norms at present are critically evaluated as potential causes of ethnoreligious exclusion.

Savvas Neocleous, Heretics, Schismatics, or Catholics? Latin Attitudes to the Greeks in the Long Twelfth Century. Studies and Texts, 216. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019, 291 pp.

In April 1204, a Western crusading army on its way to the Holy Land attacked and occupied the Eastern Roman capital of Constantinople in the notorious debacle of the Fourth Crusade. Pope Innocent III had adamantly forbidden the detour but lost control over the army. After the siege was successful, he seems to have wanted at least to use the conquest to effect a forced reunion of the churches East and West. In this frame of mind Innocent later explained to Theodore Laskaris, Emperor of Nicaea, who had complained that an army commissioned to aid the Holy Land had instead turned their crusading swords against fellow Christians, that the conquest was the result of inscrutable divine providence of just judgment. Greek insubordination to Rome was an evil, as he explained, that met the evil of the crusaders’ greed and deception (Registrum, ed. Hageneder, vol. 11, 63). Innocent was not allowed to remain complacent, however; for when the reunion failed to happen and even citizens and soldiers began moving from Jerusalem to the conquered Eastern Roman capital, the pope again reproached the aggressors.