and the Westerners who had settled in their lands, flaring in the massacre of Latins in Constantinople in 1182. The Crusade of 1204 returned the insult with an intensity not sought by Innocent but not stridently condemned by him. While Innocent had roused Europe to a Crusade meant to reassert the Christian presence in the Holy Land, the nobles who executed the assault turned their eyes upon the Byzantine capital. Prince Alexius, the son of the dispossessed Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus, had approached the Crusaders with promises of money if they should install him as ruler of the empire. The nobility did not consult the pope in taking up the prince’s cause, which failed with the riots that immediately followed his establishment by Latin hands.
Seeing that the coffers in Constantinople were empty, and that they consequently would not receive the expected payment, the Crusaders conspired to seize Constantinople and make it the capital of a new Latin empire. This plan was concocted again without notifying the pope. The three-day sack of the city ensued, in which the Crusaders perpetrated one of the most heinous and unruly crimes in the history of the West. They set the Byzantine libraries on fire, destroying ancient manuscripts and decimating collections of antique art, while committing outrages against Byzantine men, women, and children as well as monks, nuns, and priests. It is reported that a French prostitute strolled through the Church of Saint Sophia and sat on the patriarchal throne while Latin soldiers paid her homage. The Crusaders helped themselves to whatever they pleased, compiling a trove of booty so enormous that it included the city’s priceless treasures as a fraction of the take. The desecration of the city and its shrines grieved the Easterners deeply, especially as a crime committed by supposed brothers in Christ. The memory of Constantinople’s ruin and the sacrilege involved catapulted the dissonance of earlier disputes into overt schism, permanently severing the East from the West.
Innocent’s reaction to the seizure of the city exacerbated Eastern discontent. In fairness, the first report he received did not mention the horrors that the Crusaders had poured out upon the people. Innocent was frustrated to learn that the Crusade had diverted its focus from the Holy Land to Constantinople, but he exulted at the prospect of an eastern Latin Empire that seemed, for the moment at least, to bind the whole of Christendom under Roman rule. His congratulations of the new Latin emperor stung the Byzantine population, while his later dismay upon hearing the details of the sack did nothing to mitigate the resentment inspired by his initial reaction. Far from resolutely denouncing the Western assault upon the city and its churchmen, Innocent supported the imposition of a Latin patriarch in Greek lands, a sign that he accepted the overthrow of Constantinople despite the obscenities carried out during the conquest. The leaders of the Eastern sees and their parishioners could not help but conclude that the Romans were no longer Christian brothers, for how could the pope tolerate such abuses and indulge the illusion of a unified Christendom?
Neither Innocent nor his followers had a satisfying answer to such questions, soon turning from Rome’s relationship with the East to business more pertinent to the Western churches. About a decade after the Crusade Innocent headed the Fourth Lateran Council. Preceded in 1179 by the Third Lateran, together the two councils issued hundreds of new statutes that solidified the church’s grounding in a concept of law independent from theology and lacking an apparent limit to its expansion. With the councils the twelfth century culture of lawyers took a significant step forward, as from the 1190s into the first decades of the thirteenth century the church composed no less than five major systematic collections of decretals. Innocent thus stands at the center of the congealing of the legal consciousness so pivotal for the earlier century into a detailed codex of rules with the formal stamp of the papacy. In 1234 Pope Gregory IX completed the process by amassing a comprehensive collection of decretals including roughly two thousand sections. Joined with the Decretum of Gratian, Gregory’s collection served as the foundation for further political theory as well as the canon law that remains in force in the current era.
The hundred years after Innocent saw the decline of papal supremacy over the temporal sphere, a development ironically forwarded by the grand pope. When Innocent introduced prince Frederick II as the successor of Otto IV, the emperor whom he deposed in 1215, he unwittingly raised up an adversary who harassed the papacy until mid-century. As emperor, Frederick ruled a Sicilian government that operated with brilliant efficiency while setting his sights on subduing all Italy under his authority. Innocent, who died in 1216, would not have dreamed of allowing Frederick such power, and the popes who followed him shared the same aversion to the emperor. For the duration of Frederick’s reign they found themselves on the defensive side of political squabbles and military threats.
Aside from convening a council to condemn and depose Frederick in 1245, Pope Innocent IV used every means at his disposal to gain supporters from across Europe for his duel with the emperor. Spiritual claims and privileges were deployed to effect temporal ends, debasing the papacy in the minds of those it hoped to influence. The papacy was fighting for its political life and, in order to protect its position, had vigorously adopted the habits and attitudes of a temporal political establishment. The popes continued to argue for Rome’s supremacy, claiming that the papacy was imbued with both the sacerdotal and the royal powers of Christ, but their rhetoric was marred by the reality of an emperor determined to ignore papal assertions and annul Roman power.
The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas lent intellectual credibility to the distillation of the kingdom from the church that developed in the first half of the century. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas affirmed that political life derived from man’s nature as a social animal. Reflection on the nature of man provided a framework for a political life fit for that nature and that facilitates the kinds of activity inherent in its design. By this reasoning Thomas crafted a theory of politics without overt reference to the supernatural or divine law. This theory had a noticeable impact, for just as one could conceptualize the kingdom with lenses that were not self-evidently theological, so kings could justify their powers in distinction from popes. If the pontiffs pointed to the royal rule handed down to them by Christ, after Aquinas the kings could answer that the temporal order possessed legitimacy independent of such rationales.
The dispute over national sovereignty and the right of popes over the nation’s churchmen brought the papacy to its knees, pitting the French king Philip IV against Pope Boniface VIII (1295–1303). The first of their battles concerned the right of kings to tax the clergy. When Boniface announced that kings had no power over the persons and goods in their realms that belonged to the church, Philip answered by halting all exports of currency and precious metals to Rome. This decree deprived the papacy of its principle source of revenue, with the result that Boniface succumbed to Philip’s right of taxation. The second dispute arose over Philip’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment of a French bishop, a matter carried out in spite of canon laws stating that only a pope could put a bishop on trial. After a multitude of papal bulls against Philip that met with the king’s own propaganda campaign, Boniface proclaimed his unqualified supremacy as pope in Unam Sanctam. Promulgated in 1302, the bull affirmed that all the church’s sheep belong to one shepherd, lest they not constitute one flock. It also argued that “the spiritual power has to institute the earthly power and to judge it if it has not been good,” a perspective that elevated Boniface over Philip as a lord over his subject. The bull so emphasized the pope’s authority that it pronounced it “altogether necessary to salvation for every creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” One could hardly imagine a more explicit and forceful combination of the papacy’s spiritual foundations with its supposed temporal authority.
Philip responded to Unam Sanctam by commissioning a military attack on the person of Boniface, who had recently taken up residence in his hometown of Anagni. In 1303 the king’s leading minister and an army of mercenaries assaulted the town in an effort to find the pope, discovering him after an afternoon of fighting. The minister and an associate entered the papal chambers and saw Boniface, an old man, dressed in pontifical attire and clutching a crucifix. The invaders insulted and mistreated him but could not finally decide what to do regarding their captive. A delay of three days permitted the people of Anagni to expel the mercenaries, with the pope escaping and returning to Rome. Yet the humiliation of the affair had done its work, with a shocked Boniface dying a few weeks later. His successors capitulated to Philip, even lauding
