from the communities caught up in the violence tried to broker a new confederation and end these hostilities.37 Richard was released in September. During a subsequent meeting of the concerned parties at Bologna in October, an end to the violence seemed at hand until Ezzelino felt that he had been double-crossed by the Lombards’ generous treatment of the count. Alienated from the Lombard League and its allies, he and his brother turned for support from Frederick, swearing fealty to the emperor, who took them under his special protection. In April 1232, Ezzelino and his supporters staged a coup of sorts in Verona, taking control of the city and moving it into the imperial orbit. Further armed conflict between the Veronese and Mantuans followed.38
Greeted by enthusiastic crowds at Verona and Vicenza, the Dominican friar John effectively became the “duke” and “rector” of those cities the following year. Much like Leo de Valvassori and Gerard of Modena, he organized gatherings between warring factions in piazzas, fields, and other public spaces to exchange the kiss of peace and swear their commitment to his statues for resolving the endemic conflict in each commune. On 28 August at Paquara, a few miles south of Verona, he staged a particularly large and dramatic peace assembly, which was attended by representatives from Brescia, Mantua, Verona, Vicenza, and Treviso, the Romano brothers, the Montecchi, Azzo d’Este, Richard of San Bonifacio, Guala, the Dominican bishop of Brescia, and William, bishop of Modena, among others. Those gathered in the crowd listened to John’s sermon that he delivered from a massive wooden stage, after which the antagonists rendered the kiss of peace and agreed to end their dissension.39
Viewed from the papal curia, these sorts of peacemaking scenes did not seamlessly align with the Roman church’s priorities and interests in Lombardy. When news reached Pope Gregory about John of Vicenza’s appeal and successes in Bologna, he instructed the Dominican friar to head next to Tuscany to negotiate peace between the warring cities of Siena and Florence. John apparently ignored these instructions. Years later, Thomas of Cantimpré described a telling episode about Gregory’s first reaction to news of John. One of the Dominican preacher’s detractors reported that the preacher was led into the city of Bologna on a white horse covered by a silk palanquin, acting as if he was the pope and publicly appropriating papal ceremonial. Consulting the cardinals, Gregory quickly planned to excommunicate the presumptuous friar until William of Modena swore before everyone on the gospels that he had witnessed an angel descend from heaven and affix a golden cross on John’s forehead. Bursting into tears, the pope changed his mind and sent envoys to Bologna, who determined that the accusations against the miraculous preacher were untrue.40
At the same time, there are unmistakable signs that Pope Gregory recognized the public energies unleashed by the Great Devotion and worked, indirectly and directly, to channel them in favorable directions. Upon closer inspection, the religious revival that summer appears slightly less spontaneous and more strategic, linked to a wider set of papal designs for peace in northern Italy and not coincidently happening at the same time as Gregory’s high-level mediation between the Lombards and the emperor. There is evidence of ties between John of Vicenza and ecclesiastical figures close to the pope who possessed previous hands-on experience as peacemakers in Lombardy, including Guala of Brescia and William of Modena. According to one account, when the citizens of Bologna tried to keep John in their city, William helped him slip away to begin his preaching tour around Vicenza and Verona.41 More directly, Gregory issued a number of letters during the summer of 1233 enabling and bolstering John’s public appeal, approving his safe passage throughout northern Italy, and granting indulgences for those who attended his sermons. In August 1233, no doubt anticipating the peace assembly at Paquara later that month, Gregory authorized John to reconcile Ezzelino da Romano, who had been excommunicated by the pope’s own legates in Lombardy, if and when he rendered sufficient satisfaction for his sins. Chroniclers describing John’s charismatic acts of reconciliation note that the warring parties swore to obey not only him but also the “mandates of the Roman church,” thereby recognizing his authority to make peace given by the pope, the “lord Apostolic.”42
The peace envisioned by the Great Devotion nevertheless proved to be particularly ephemeral. In Piacenza a few months after Leo de Valvassori’s departure, many of the soldiers belonging to the militia abandoned the city with their families “privately” and “publicly,” rejecting their reconciliation with the popolo. The confusion and disruption in Piacenza grew worse when a mob attacked the next itinerant preacher who arrived on the scene preaching against heresy, a Dominican from Cremona named Roland. The city’s bishop imprisoned the perpetrators, but months of uncertainty and investigation followed while Pope Gregory tried to get to the bottom of things.43 As for John of Vicenza, his meteoric rise was followed by an equally dramatic fall. Within days after the peace assembly at Paquara, a group of citizens from Padua who felt that the Dominican friar had shown too much lenience toward the Romano brothers took control of Vicenza with help from the inside. When John rushed back to deal with this surprising turn of events, his opponents in the city arrested and imprisoned him. Although he was released a few weeks later, John’s charismatic effectiveness as a peacemaker was spent. During his captivity, he had to watch while the bishop of Vicenza and others sent a letter to the pope declaring the Dominican friar’s statutes null and void. As the Vicenza notary and chronicler Gerard Maurisio observed about the months after the Great Devotion, “Now an even worse war sprang back up, in its accustomed manner.”44
The peace movement that had so quickly seized the imagination of Italy’s communes came to an abrupt end. Frederick II would eventually complain about wandering preachers like John of Vicenza, presenting them as subversive figures taking orders from the papacy. In 1233, there are no signs that the emperor identified the revivalists of the Great Devotion in this way, although someone at the imperial court composed a mocking poem that parodied the supposed miracles wrought by John and others.45 By the spring of 1234, while endemic conflict continued to plague the communes of northern Italy and Frederick found new reasons to complain about his adversaries in the region, the Great Devotion was rapidly on its way to becoming a memory. The papacy’s public efforts to broker peace, by contrast, remained vital and visible, while Gregory’s legates at the imperial court secured Frederick’s renewed commitment to placing the “Lombard business” in the pope’s hands.46 As charismatic preachers like John of Vicenza lost credibility, the papacy reminded everyone about its own role in supporting and celebrating the order’s founder, adding Dominic to the catalog of saints on 3 July 1234.47 In some sense, the failure of the Great Devotion to achieve a meaningful peace highlighted the enduring significance of papal intervention in Lombardy. Every time that the Lombards and the emperor agreed to Gregory’s arbitration—before, during, and above all after the transitory Great Hallelujah—they publicly validated the Apostolic See’s role as the true evangelizer of peace in the region.
Civil Strife in Holy Places
After the Treaty of San Germano, the reforming of the peace between the two powers remained linked to one goal more than any other: the freeing of Jerusalem. In his declarations about the search for peace in Lombardy, Gregory repeatedly invoked the need for concord among Christians as a means to liberating the holy places. In the early 1230s, the pope and Frederick faced another area being torn apart by civil strife between Christians, conflict that was eroding the support needed for the next crusade, namely, the crusader territories overseas. Certain factions in the region continued to rebel against Frederick’s claims to the kingship of Jerusalem. During his earlier years of conflict with the emperor, Gregory, working through his legates and letters to the crusaders and Latin Christian inhabitants of the holy places, had tried to undermine Frederick’s claims in crusader Syria and Palestine. After their broadly celebrated reconciliation, he reversed course, trying to stabilize the Hohenstaufen right to rule over the region. For both the pope and emperor, crusading represented one of the highest callings of their offices, a calling repeatedly invoked and widely publicized among contemporaries through rituals, oaths, letters, and sermons. They both possessed a stake in projecting harmonious cooperation between the two powers and peace in Christendom as a precondition to a successful crusade. In these terms, the crusades ideally formed the ultimate cooperative
