majority of contemporary Christians were not canon lawyers and did not understand the technicalities of the canonistic tradition. They nevertheless possessed varying degrees of awareness about the papacy’s jurisdiction over their lives, the pope’s status as the Vicar of Christ, his fullness of power over the church, his “power of the keys” over sin, and his possession of the “spiritual sword.”10 These terms, at once sacramental and juridical, frequently feature in non-canonistic sources. In this regard, the dilemma of the two powers played out in what Daniel Lord Smail has called the “legal culture of publicity” in the Middle Ages. Powerful popes and rulers might seem far removed from the ordinary men and women that Smail describes in medieval Marseilles, who needed “to perform openly and in the public eye in order to inscribe facts in the memories and gossip networks that comprised the archive on which proof in subsequent legal quarrels might depend.”11 And yet, members of the papal curia and imperial court likewise argued about the law in the “public eye,” sacrificing legalistic precision for sensationalism and seeking to create “public archives of knowledge” on a Christendom-wide scale.12
Certainly, one must be cautious when translating the medieval Latin word for “public” and its variants (publicus, publice, publicare), terms that commonly designated something as “lordly,” “royal,” or “official” or meant “to reserve as a royal prerogative” or “to confiscate for the fisc.”13 In our thirteenth-century sources, however, the word “public” suggested and designated many other things that come far closer to what we might now associate with public life. Canon law distinguished between the “internal forum” of the conscience and the “external forum” that encompassed “public or manifest transgressions of the Church’s law or divine law.”14 Public acts included the presentation and reading of documents “in public” (in publico) before witnesses and crowds, deeds done “openly” (palam) as opposed to “secretly” (clam), and the bringing of news “to public notice” (ad publicam notitiam). The invocation of the public takes shape in descriptions of information spreading “among all the people” (in universis populis), “throughout the entire world” (per totum orbem) or “throughout all the lands of Christendom” (per terras totius Christianitatis), not only in written form but also as rumors and word-of-mouth news—much of it, what we might now call “fake news.” Publicly embodying papal and imperial authority, apostolic legates and their imperial counterparts conveyed all sorts of communications to wider constituencies: “solemn,” “public,” and “open” letters or, by contrast, “closed” and “secret” ones, along with “letters of credence,” “excusatory letters,” and “exhortatory,” “admonitory,” and “testimonial” letters among them.15 Rituals of anathema and the denunciation of sinners took place publicly, as did the convocation of citizens in communal spaces or the summons for Christians to assemble at church councils. One even finds a sense of “public scandal” (scandalum publicum), the outrage caused by shameful behavior and the reputations ruined by scurrilous gossip.16
Through routes that are sometimes but not always traceable, letters, documents, and orally transmitted information (or disinformation) made their way to monastic and civic chroniclers, who emplotted what they read and heard into narratives of their own design. The word “chronicler” conjures images of medieval scribes, removed from the events of the world they described, often with a confused sense of chronology or just a poor grasp on the facts. Yet the chroniclers that we will encounter in this book, and not just the ones that scholars label Guelf (more or less pro-papal) and Ghibelline (favoring the empire) possessed their own stakes in the battles between the popes and the Hohenstaufen prince: figures like the English monk Matthew Paris, outraged at the financial costs of the papacy’s struggle with Frederick; or Salimbene of Adam, the well-traveled Franciscan friar, forced to traverse the war-torn landscapes of northern Italy during the years of conflict between papal and imperial allies.17 Such history-writers did more than passively record events: they memorialized a certain version of the past from their presentist perspective. They preserved—to some extent, imagined—conversations, rumors and gossip, gestures, and rituals they judged worthy of remembrance.18 In this regard, we can treat their mistakes, biases, and lack of factual accuracy as enriching their historical value rather than disqualifying them as unreliable primary sources, using them as a metric of sorts for contemporary reactions to the astonishing and sensational events of the thirteenth century.
At its most ambitious, this book suggests that we need to rethink the public nature of Christendom in the Middle Ages.19 Among many other implications, this reconceptualizing of medieval Europe’s Christian society has particular implications for the study of papal sovereignty. Historians have long emphasized the Roman papacy’s contributions to the unity of Latin or Western Christian believers, who were bound together by their shared sacred language, rites, laws, and obedience to Rome as the “mother and head of all churches.” Popes helped to shape that common identity through compelling ideas, stressing the unique role of their office as the unifier of the faithful on earth, and also through increasingly sophisticated forms of governance and communication, including the college of cardinals and consistory; the chancery and archives; a systematic tradition of canon law; and the staging of ecclesiastical councils, to name a few key examples. As an institution, the papacy acted as a leader in the broader information revolution that began to transform Europe starting in the eleventh century, with its well-known shift “from memory to written record.”20 By the thirteenth century, such changes in government, communication habits, and record keeping continued to accelerate. More effectively than before, the Roman curia functioned as the final court of appeals for ecclesiastical disputes; a source of privileges, immunities, and exemptions; a provider of benefices and dispensations; and a center for fund-raising through taxes and subsidies, bringing petitioners and favor seekers to Rome (or wherever else the pope happened to be), while legates, envoys, and judge-delegates empowered by the Apostolic See conveyed papal letters, rescripts, and other documents into every corner of Europe and beyond.21
Some might nevertheless question the premise that Christendom formed a “public” or “open” realm. As a “feudal” society, it has been argued, medieval Europe did not possess a genuine public sphere, lacking as it did the requisite economic conditions, spaces of interaction, and forms of communication—namely, print—for an informed citizenry engaging in discourse about the public good.22 Others have presented Christendom as a monolithic “religiously imagined community,” its inhabitants lacking a self-consciousness of their own historicity.23 In recent years, however, scholars have pushed back against dismissive views of medieval and early modern publics, demonstrating that premodern societies possessed their own performative cultures and communicative practices, their own open forums for debate over the social and political conditions of their lives.24 Still others have stressed the public as a “powerful rhetorical and discursive concept” rather than an actual space or lived interaction of citizens, conceptualizing the public within a nexus of texts, forming part of a social imaginary, a “fiction, which, because it can appear real, exerts real political force.”25 This sort of discursive public need not be limited by putatively modern technologies, spaces, and social categories.
Viewed from this perspective, rather than as a hierarchical, feudal, or static society lacking public awareness, medieval Christendom formed a dynamic place of circulating people, texts, rumors, and shared performances. As the principal dilemma of Christian sovereignty in the Middle Ages, the relationship between the two powers took shape within that open realm and in turn helped to shape it.26 Although far from the first conflict between popes and emperors, Gregory and Innocent’s successive struggles with Frederick II marked an especially vital and intensive episode of public crisis over the proper ordering of Christendom, one with the potential for violence that spilled into the open on more than one occasion. Even so, rather than eagerly seeking combat to the death, the two popes and the emperor more often seemed to be searching for ways to defer, delay, or defuse their political confrontations, while other parties sought advantage in the turmoil caused by the division between the popes and the emperor. That history of reluctance, compromise, and occasional cooperation
