of Porto, John de Colonna, and Stephen Conti—negotiated peace terms with a new senator, Angelo Malebranca, and other leaders of the city, receiving their solemn oaths to render satisfaction to the Roman church and the emperor during a public ceremony staged on the Capitoline. Frederick had already given his approval to the plans for peace, assuring the pope of his support, even if he could not be on hand in person. Captives were released on both sides. Gregory soon returned to Rome.98
Compared to the pope’s ambitious plans for the next crusade to the holy places, or even his past calls for assistance against Frederick’s forces in the Regno, Gregory’s efforts to pitch an armed campaign against the citizens of his own city as a shared responsibility of all Christians seems to have had limited publicity and minimal impact. The pope never called for a direct subsidy or special tax to fund his campaign against the Romans, perhaps due to lingering complaints about his levies on clerical incomes in 1228, which had been raised to pay for his campaign against Frederick in the Regno after the emperor’s excommunication. Nor did he authorize any sort of preaching campaign to drum up support for this struggle against the “pride of the Romans.” There are no signs that the papal army directed against the Romans marched under the sign of the cross or even under the banner of the keys, an indicator of the limits on how far the papacy could push such spiritually and politically charged symbols in public. Beyond Matthew Paris’s sardonic comment about the joy brought to pagans by Christians killing each other, it remains difficult to determine what this war with the Romans meant for contemporaries increasingly habituated to hearing papal calls for military action in defense of the church. Judging by their silence, many chroniclers ignored the fighting between the Roman pope and the Romans, or perhaps never heard much about it.
In this regard, Gregory’s struggles with the Romans remained to a large extent a local affair rather than a concern for the entirety of Christendom. But the episode nevertheless remains an important and telling one. The papal campaign against the citizenry of Rome once again reveals the capabilities of the thirteenth-century papacy to publicly authorize violence in defense of the church, even against orthodox Christians: promising the remission of sins for those serving the papal cause and taking them under the “special protection” of the Apostolic See, styling the fight as a common challenge for the entire church, and attempting to draw upon ecclesiastical resources from around western Europe. Every time the pope became involved in any sort of military action, it mattered for the wider Christian community, possibly reaching into their pockets and disrupting their lives. Gregory’s fight with the Romans also demonstrates how Italian problems, so to speak, could become everyone’s problems. In this instance, the pope and emperor stood on the same side of the fight. Moving forward, that would not be the case.
Writing to Gregory from Worms in late July, Conrad, bishop of Hildesheim, expressed the joy felt by the “universal Christian people” that peace had returned to the Roman church after an end to the pope’s hostilities with the city of Rome.99 Through that settlement, there lay “hope for future tranquility and peace for all churches.” Conrad also shared news about Frederick’s marriage to Isabella of England, King Henry III’s sister, earlier in July. During the matrimonial negotiations, Gregory had supported Frederick and Isabella’s union. He may have even first suggested it as a means to ally the English crown and Roman empire—one more way of promoting the peace and furthering the cause of the new crusade. Frederick’s son Henry had attended the ceremony, having been received back into his father’s good graces, his rebellion at an end. (In fact, Frederick soon banished Henry to the Regno, where he died in 1242 after years of captivity.) Conrad concluded that the emperor and other magnates gathered for the wedding would be heading next to Mainz to hold an assembly on 15 August, a convocation intended for “the general good of the peace and the benefit of the entire church.”100
For years, despite the undeniable stresses and strains placed upon the relationship between their two offices, the pope and emperor had maintained a public state of concord between the two powers, preserving their agreement struck at San Germano. Gregory’s apparent concessions and reversals during this period—seeking to broker a settlement in Lombardy, embracing Frederick’s truce with al-Kamil, praising the emperor’s efforts against heresy, supporting him during his son’s rebellion, and even calling for imperial aid against the Romans—revealed something more than political expediency. These changes of direction signaled the vital appeal of harmony between the spiritual and temporal powers as the working balance for the good of Christendom. In his capacity as the Vicar of Christ, Gregory placed unparalleled demands upon Frederick, ones that the Hohenstaufen ruler openly embraced as a duty of his office. Or at least he did, as the pope had once complained, in “words” if not “deeds.” In this sense, Conrad of Hildesheim’s confidence, his sense that a time of crisis had passed for both the Roman church and empire, was understandable, if misplaced.
Chapter 3
The Widening Gyre
Writing to Frederick in September 1235, after years of celebrating the harmony that lay between the two powers, Pope Gregory acknowledged the tension and mistrust that had recently begun to change the tone of their relationship. Much went unsaid in this letter. During an imperial assembly at Mainz a month earlier, the emperor had openly declared his intention to subdue the rebellious cities of Lombardy, despite his previous commitment to place the “Lombard business” into the “hands of the church.” He now seemed to suspect that the pope and papal legates were working against his interests in the region. Overseas, the emperor faced a continued challenge to his rights in the Holy Land, another sign that papal mediation had failed him, perhaps by design. Responding to these unspoken disturbances, Gregory assured Frederick that he was still on his side, blaming recent troubles on those who preferred to “fish in muddy waters” and to work “in the shadows,” sowing “quarrels and complaints” and seeking to “dissolve the bonds of love in the hearts of princes with their poisons.” Such men, the pope reminded Frederick, had harmed the interests of the papal curia and the imperial court in the past. Specifically, Gregory told him not to believe “secret letters and documents” falsely attributed to the pope and meant to cast doubt on his commitment to the emperor’s rights. His past actions on Frederick’s behalf in the kingdom of Jerusalem and Lombardy served to demonstrate his sincerity. Frederick should “block out” the words of such liars and write back to the pope when the truth became known from Gregory’s actual letters.1
Nothing remains of such forgeries, and the pope remained vague about the identities of the “liars” trying to destroy the peace. But the sentiment behind his letter, the sense of erosion in his relationship with Frederick, was quite real. Over the following three years, the Hohenstaufen ruler followed through on his military plans to subdue the seditious cities of northern Italy, campaigning with his own troops, his local allies, and even Muslim mercenaries imported into the region from the Regno. The emperor’s decision to settle the Lombard business by force placed Pope Gregory in a difficult position: the “evangelizer of peace” confronted a high-profile war on the Italian peninsula that he had spent years trying to prevent. During this same period, other problems surfaced, swept up in the widening gyre of discord between the pope and the prince as they began to dispute over conditions in the Regno, the emperor’s supposed abuse of the clergy, and the pope’s interference in Frederick’s kingdoms. They argued about dilapidated churches, vacant clerical offices, feudal rights and talliages, and the free movement of envoys. They even disagreed over the whereabouts of a missing Tunisian prince, who was supposedly on his way to Rome to be baptized when he disappeared, somewhere in Apulia.2
As these disputes and grievances accumulated, Gregory and Frederick faced a growing public crisis between their offices that neither party seemed entirely to want but did not necessarily know how to avoid. The relentless political problems in northern Italy became a particular source of tension between them. Responding to
