Innocent III

“ Innocent III. as head of the great Church easily outranked every ruler of his day and stands high among the greatest leaders of the Middle Ages and of all ages. A contemporary describes him as "A man of wonderful fortitude and wisdom—one who had no equal in his own day; whereby he had been able to do acts of miraculous power and greatness." If Hildebrand was the Julius, Innocent was the Augustus of the Papal Empire. ”

“ Only partial success attended these efforts, but triumph was to come later on as a result of his labours. His endeavour to realise his theocracy was grand but impracticable as proved by its failure. It was like forcing a dream to be true; yet Innocent III. almost succeeded in western Europe a little more than a century later. The impress of Gregory VII.'s gigantic ability was left upon his own age and upon all succeeding ages. ”

“ Amidst all the distractions of Western politics, Innocent III. ardently strove to revive the crusading spirit. He never succeeded in raising all Europe, as several of his predecessors had done. But after great efforts, the eloquent preaching of Fulk of Neuilly stirred up a fair amount of enthusiasm for the crusading cause, and, in 1204, a considerable crusading army, mainly French, mustered at Venice. It was the bitterest disappointment of Innocent’s life that the Fourth Crusade [see chapter xv.] never reached Palestine, but was diverted to the conquest of the Greek Empire. ”

“ Innocent XIII. (Michele Angelo Conti) , pope from 1721 to 1724, was the son of the duke of Poli, and a member of a family that had produced several popes, among them Innocent III., was born in Rome on the 13th of May 1655, served as nuncio in Switzerland, and, for a much longer time, in Portugal, was made cardinal and bishop of Osimo and Viterbo by Clement XI., whom he succeeded on the 8th of May 1721. One of his first acts was to invest the emperor Charles VI. with Naples (1722) ; but against the imperial investiture of Don Carlos with Parma and Piacenza he protested, albeit in vain. ”

“ The affair of the crusade was, as we shall see, ever his most pressing care, and it was his bitterest grief that all his efforts to rouse the Christian world for the recovery of Jerusalem fell on deaf ears. He was strenuous in upholding orthodoxy against the daring heretics of Southern France. He was sympathetic and considerate to great religious teachers, like Francis and Dominic, from whose work he had the wisdom to anticipate the revival of the inner life of the Church. As many-sided as strong, and successful as he was strong, Innocent III represents it worthily and adequately. ”

“ Markwald of Anweiler left his Apulian fiefs for Romagna. But the Pope 317joined with Constance in his hostility to the Germans. Without Innocent III.’s strong and constant support she could hardly have carried out her policy. Recognising in the renewal of the old papal protection the best hopes for the independence of Sicily, Constance, on her death in 1198, called on Innocent III. to act as the guardian of her son. |Death of Constance, 1198.| Innocent loyally took up her work, and struggled with all his might to preserve the kingdom of Frederick against his many enemies. ”

“ No tie of kindred served as an excuse for concealing heresy. The son must denounce the father, and the husband was guilty if he did not deliver his wife to a frightful death. Every human bond was severed by the guilt of heresy; children were taught to desert their parents, and even the sacrament of matrimony could not unite an orthodox wife to a misbelieving husband. No pledge was to remain unbroken. It was an old rule that faith was not to be kept with heretics - as Innocent III. emphatically phrased it, "according to the canons, faith is not to be kept with him who keeps not faith with God." ”

“ In fact this was an axiom which none were so hardy as to deny, yet when, in 1204, the legates whom Innocent had sent to oppose the Albigenses appealed to him for aid against prelates whom they had failed to coerce, and whose infamy of life gave scandal to the faithful and an irresistible argument to the heretic. Innocent curtly bade them attend to the object of their mission and not allow themselves to be diverted by less important matters. The reply fairly indicates the policy of the Church. ”

“ In the East the Slavic nations were ready to accept Roman rule while the Eastern Empire was tottering and ready to fall. In general parties in all countries were crying out to the Pope for assistance. All Europe was ripe for just such a man as Innocent III. with just such a policy.
The first step in Innocent's plan was to make himself the political head of Europe. In Italy he first made himself absolute sovereign of Rome by removing all vestiges of imperial rule. The senators and the prefect, who held their commissions from the Emperor, were required to take oaths to him as their sovereign. ”

“ Bernard were approaching. In 1198, Lothaire Conti, a pupil of the University of Paris, was elected pope, with the title of Innocent III.; and, four or five years later, Simon, Count of Montfort l’Amaury, came back from the fifth crusade in the East, with a celebrity already established by his valor and his zeal against the infidels. Innocent III., no unworthy rival of Gregory VII., his late predecessor in the Holy See, had the same grandeur of ideas and the same fixity of purpose, with less headiness in his character, and more knowledge of the world, and more of the spirit of policy. ”

“ For the moment Innocent’s iron policy crushed opposition, but in adding the new hostility of the national kings and the rising nations of Europe to the old hostility of the declining Empire, Innocent was entering into a perilous course of conduct, which, within a century, was to prove fatal to one of the strongest of his successors. The more political the papal authority became, the more difficult it was to uphold its prestige as the source of law, of morality, of religion. Innocent himself did not lose sight of the higher ideal because he strove so firmly after more earthly aims. ”

“ No matter that Gregory—broken, defeated, miserable, outwardly ruined—died prematurely in exile; no matter that he did not, in his great reverses, anticipate the fruits of his firmness and heroism. His principles survived him; they have never been lost sight of by his successors; they gained strength through successive generations. Innocent III. reaped what he had sown. Kings dared not resist Innocent III., who realized those three things to which the more able Gregory had aspired,— "independent sovereignty, control over the princes of the earth, and the supremacy of the Church." ”

“ The denunciations of the German Minnesinger were re-echoed in the complaints of the last of the Troubadours. Rome had ceased to do harm to Turks and Saracens, but had stirred up Christians to war against fellow-Christians. God and His Saints abandon the greedy, the strife-loving, the unjust, worldly Church. The picture is darkly coloured by a partisan, but in every triumph of Innocent there lay the shadow of future trouble.
Innocent III.’s religious position. Crusades, even against heretics and infidels, are the work of earthly force rather than of spiritual influence. ”

“ It was Pope Innocent III who placed in the hands of the Church this terrible weapon of persecution, and who, by the awful severity of his own attitude towards liberty of conscience, of thought, and of expression, afforded to fanaticism and religious intolerance an example that was to be their merciless guide through centuries to come. ”

“ Be this as it may, no effective persecution was undertaken until the vigorous ability of Innocent III., after vainly trying milder measures, organized overwhelming war against heresy. During this interval the Poor Men of Lyons arose, and were forced to make common cause with the Cathari; the proselyting zeal which had been so successful in secrecy and tribulation had free scope for its development, and had no effective antagonism to dread from a negligent and disheartened clergy. ”

“ Innocent III, in a letter to the French bishops defending his claim to arbitrate between France and England, stands very far from any such admission. 'It belongs to our office', he argues, 'to correct all Christian men for every mortal sin, and if they despise correction, to coerce them by ecclesiastical censure. And if any shall say, that kings must be treated in one way, and other men in another, we appeal in answer to the law of God, wherein it is written, "Ye shall judge the great as the small, and there shall be no acceptance of persons among you." ”

“ But little was actually effected until the accession of Innocent III. marked the beginning of a more vigorous line of action. In 1198 two Cistercian monks were sent with the position of apostolic legates to win back the Toulousan heretics to the Church. For years they laboured incessantly, wandering and preaching throughout the land, and their unwearied zeal soon led a small band of enthusiasts to join them in their work. Innocent gave further powers to Peter of Castelnau, and Amaury, abbot of Cîteaux. In 1206 accident further associated with them the Spanish canon Dominic (see chapter xviii.) ”

“ If you marry that man you can have no sympathy with him. He is older than your father. Was there no one else in the world to help you, Innocent, that you should have referred to him?”
“Do not be angry,” sighed Innocent, softly, turning upon him her anxious, deprecating eyes. “No one else offered to help me. He is very kind——”
“Oh, kind!” cried Frederick, “is any one unkind? When you say such a thing you accuse us all. Surely I could have helped you better than Longueville——”
“Not you, Frederick,” said the girl. She did not withdraw her eyes from him, but a faint flush came upon her face. ”

“ She thought for the moment, however, that the ringing in her ears meant only weariness and pain, and sat down, to keep herself from fainting, in her mother’s chair.
“If you mean is it true that Innocent, poor Innocent, has done what they say,” said Nelly, low and trembling, “but all the rest is true enough. They have put her in—— Oh me! Oh me! how can I say it? It is those dreadful people, whom Frederick bound himself to for a curse to us all.” ”

“ There was much persecution, but it was not systematic. There is reason to think that in the pursuit of heresy the Church was mainly guided by considerations of its temporal interest, and was roused to severe action only when the spread of false doctrine threatened to reduce its revenues or seemed a menace to society. At the end of the twelfth century Innocent III became Pope and under him the Church of Western Europe reached the height of its power. He and his immediate successors are responsible for imagining and beginning an organized movement to sweep heretics out of Christendom. ”

“ As far as the Empire was concerned, chance at first favoured Innocent. For ten years a Germany weakened and divided by the rivalry of Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick left his hands free to act in Italy, and his pontificate marks a period of comparative quiet in the ardent conflict between pope and emperor which continued throughoutInnocent III. and the Empire. the middle ages. Not until 1210, when Otto of Brunswick turned against the pope to whom he owed his crown, was Innocent compelled to open hostilities; and the struggle ended in a victory for the Curia. ”

“ And, thanks to the severity of Innocent III., Philip repudiated the concubine, and restored Ingelburgis to her rights, as wife and queen. Hear what the [Pg 280] Protestant Hurter says, in his life of Innocent: "If Christianity has not been thrown aside, as a worthless creed, into some isolated corner of the world; if it has not, like the sects of India, been reduced to a mere theory ”

“ By heaven, it is enough to drive a man mad to see a girl making an idiot of herself like this!”
Poor Innocent could not stand against this torrent of reproof. She shrank back into a corner, and cried and sobbed. It seemed to her that heaven and earth had risen up against her, now that Frederick “scolded” her too. She had done no harm. But what an evening, what a round of miserable adventures she had gone through! Her limbs were aching with fatigue, and her mind with fright and terror. ”

“ Not disheartened by his first failure, Innocent still urged upon Europe the need of the holy war. If no expedition against the Saracens of Syria marked the result of his efforts, his pontificate saw the extension of the crusading movement to other lands. Innocent preached the Crusade against the Moors of Spain, and rejoiced in the news of the momentous victory of the Christians at Navas de Tolosa [see chapter xx.] . He saw the beginnings of a fresh Crusade against the obstinate heathen on the eastern shores of the Baltic. But all these Crusades were against pagans and infidels. ”

“ The reign of phantasmagoria had come back again; the strange dingy court with its lights, the strange sea of faces, all whirled about the girl—something which had no connexion with her, no meaning, an inarticulate dream. She gazed straight before her with her scared eyes which saw nothing. She held fast to the woman, the only point of reality which felt steady in this whirl of sight and sound. What it meant was all dark to Innocent. ”

“ Frederick had sole possession of the library, where he sat over the fire with his feet on the grate, and a countenance which was dark as the sky. And Nelly went to poor Innocent’s room and put things tidy with her own hands, and cried over the little empty white bed, as if Innocent had died. A wretched day, rain outside, cold, dulness, and misery within; but if people will marry in February, what else can be looked for? for the home of the bride is seldom a very cheerful habitation on the evening of the wedding day. ”