Читать книгу The Two Powers - Brett Edward Whalen - Страница 13

Chapter 2

Reforming the Peace

A year after Gregory IX and Frederick II agreed to settle their violent differences at San Germano, the emperor issued a sweeping new legislative code for the kingdom of Sicily, the Constitutions of Melfi. These laws presented the “crown” as the sole source of justice and peace, centralizing royal government over the centrifugal forces of the local nobility, clergy, and urban communities. The code also reinforced and clarified Frederick’s rights over ecclesiastical offices and properties in the Regno. According to some modern commentators, the Constitutions of Melfi represented, among others things, a challenge to the universal jurisdiction of the Roman pope over the church at the expense of the king, a tacit rebuke to the “papal monarchy,” a “gauntlet thrown down in the great struggle between the empire and papacy.”¹ Certainly, when news reached Gregory about the planned legislation, he delivered a blunt rebuke to the emperor and to Jacob, archbishop of Capua, who had been tasked with helping to draft the law code. The pope warned Frederick that if he went through with his decision to issue the “new constitutions,” acting by his own will or following the advice of “perverse men,” he would rightly be called a “persecutor of the church and destroyer of public liberty.”²

Other scholars, however, have cautioned against interpreting this episode as indicative of a deeply rooted conflict between the two powers, pointing out that Gregory made no objections to the final version of the Constitutions of Melfi, apparently a sign that his protest worked, and that Frederick modified the new laws accordingly.³ Even as the pope called for the emperor to reconsider his forthcoming constitutions, he tried to avoid further escalation, stressing to the emperor in a subsequent communication that he had made his earlier complaints “in private not public, in secret letters, not cried aloud.”⁴ In yet another letter to Frederick that same month, which addressed persistent disruptions to the peace in the Regno, Gregory warned him about wicked men operating in the shadows who wished to destroy the state of concord between the two powers, the “two great lights” of the priesthood and empire.⁵ As will become evident below, this was hardly the last time that the pope would show an explicit sensitivity to the vulnerable nature of his relationship with the emperor during the fragile period following their reconciliation.

After his meeting with Frederick in September 1230 and more or less for the first time since the beginning of his papacy, Gregory did not stand at odds with the imperial ruler of the Christian world. Once again, Frederick had become a beloved son who had chosen the way of peace, resuming his proper duties to serve and defend the Roman church. Over the following years Gregory would repeatedly emphasize the theme of harmonious unity between the two powers or the two swords, the spiritual and the material, making common cause for the defense of the faith, the protection of the papal patrimony, and the proper ordering of the church. As the Vicar of Christ, who was responsible for preserving and fostering the peace, he identified a number of challenges and projects that called for the emperor’s assistance one way or another: settling the persistent strife on the Italian peninsula, above all in Lombardy; dealing with the imperiled conditions of the Holy Land; and combating the threat of heresy within the body of the faithful. When the Romans tried to cast off papal lordship and attacked neighboring communities that belonged to the Papal States, the pope even called for imperial assistance against the rebellious citizens of his own city.⁶

Rather than an elaborate ruse that masked the inevitable return of antagonism between Gregory and Frederick, these years of relative peace and cooperation in their relationship revealed the potentialities of public cooperation between the two powers in ways rarely seen before.⁷ Frederick openly embraced his role as a “spiritual son” of the Roman church, its defender against infidels, heretics, and other enemies. Such obligations did not imply political subordination to the Vicar of Christ; they represented the fulfillment of his exalted position. In its preamble, the Constitutions of Melfi make this claim clear. As part of the “stewardship” granted to them by the Lord, rulers should not allow the “Holy Church, the mother of the Christian religion” to be “defiled by the secret perfidies of slanders of the faith.” Rather, “they should protect her from attacks of public enemies” by the power of the “material sword” and “preserve peace,” the sister of justice. The law code reaffirmed the prince’s commitment to fight against heretics and his drawing the “sword of righteous vengeance against them,” preventing their hostile attacks against the Roman church, “the head of all other churches, to the more evident injury of the Christian faith.” Judged guilty of “public crimes,” heretics would face the loss of their property and capital punishment, while their accomplices would suffer dispossession and exile.⁸

To be clear, peace did not always or necessarily mean the absence of contention and violence. Peace meant coercion and war deployed in the right directions, for the right purposes, by the right authorities for the common good. In Lombardy, the Holy Land, and even the city of Rome, the pope and emperor confronted signs of the devil’s work, disturbers of the peace, warmongers, and sowers of scandal. As the head of the Roman church, Gregory possessed a compelling mandate for proclaiming peace, but he did not enjoy a monopoly over its creation. Papal and imperial networks of peacemaking ran on overlapping but sometimes divergent tracks. In different localities, the two Christian authorities confronted individuals and communities who refused their visions of peace or sought peace on different terms. Facing fluid political landscapes, Gregory and Frederick competed as much as cooperated, pursuing complementary but not identical ends, more often than not publicly rebuking each other for failing to live up to their divinely ordained duties. Rather than relieving the tensions embedded in the relationship between the two powers, reforming the peace transposed them into a different register.

Scars of War

Although the Treaty of San Germano had formally ended the fighting between the church and the prince, the process of turning that agreement into a meaningful political settlement on the Italian peninsula had just begun. By reconciling with Frederick, the pope shared public responsibility for the ruler’s subsequent actions. As early as October, Gregory warned him about certain men around Foggia conspiring to destroy the new peace, “murmuring” and “clamoring” that the convergence of two great lights—that of the pope and emperor—was casting them into the shadows. Such accusations caused him “grief in private, shame out in the open.” To prevent further blasphemy about “both our names,” Gregory called upon the emperor to act with mercy and forbearance, rather than giving such critics further reason to reproach the pope for the faith that he placed in Frederick. Judging by a letter sent to Frederick on 3 December, Gregory remained watchful for any signs of noncompliance on the emperor’s part. An envoy from the imperial court, a judge from Pavia identified only as G., had recently come to the papal curia with imperial “letters of security,” the promises sworn by various magnates and prelates to ensure that Frederick observed the terms established at San Germano. When the pope inspected the letters, however, he discovered several things omitted, either out of negligence or oversight. As a consequence, he decided not to “publicize” them, since this might give their detractors cause to “murmur” against them both. Gregory informed Frederick that he was sending Jacob, archbishop of Capua, to the imperial court to collate a complete dossier of the necessary documents. He also asked the emperor to recall the judge in question, who had continued on the road to Germany with the imperfect versions of the fiduciary letters, despite the pope’s instructions to suspend his journey.⁹

The War of the Keys had left the militarized Papal States and Regno in a disturbed condition. Not everyone was willing to lay down their arms and make the concessions demanded of them. The duchy of Spoleto remained a particular sore spot. The pope had appointed the bishop of Beauvais as its new duke, rewarding him for his service during the recent hostilities. When some of the locals rejected his lordship, he had to enter the duchy with an armed force.¹⁰ Frederick faced his own troubles trying to pacify the war-torn region. Richard of San Germano records that the emperor revoked his followers’ right to construct new fortifications, as permitted during the recent discord between church and empire. Gaeta remained another problem, since the fortified city refused to submit to the emperor’s authority as stipulated in the Treaty of San Germano, despite Gregory’s intervention on his behalf. This tense situation would last for years, until the commune finally acknowledged Frederick’s lordship and swore fealty to his young son Conrad, born from his marriage to Isabella of Brienne. Frederick also demanded restitution for damages caused during the recent war at Città di Castellana, although the pope reminded him that the commune pertained by right to the Apostolic See, as made evident by “many public charters.”¹¹

More than anything else, however, the unresolved contention between the Lombard League and the emperor remained the true test of Gregory and Frederick’s willingness, commitment, and ability to reform the peace. The underlying sources of tension between the two sides, such as the extent of the emperor’s rights to appoint officials, dispense justice, collect tolls, and requisition supplies, remained unresolved. The fact that the “rebellious” Lombards had fought against him in the War of the Keys did not help matters. Gregory clearly viewed the stability of the region as critical to the new peace. In October 1230, when the pope informed the league’s rectors about Frederick’s reconciliation with the church, he had taken care to assure them about his ongoing support of their interests. He also forwarded to them some copies of the oaths sworn at San Germano by Thomas of Acerra on Frederick’s behalf, which bound the emperor to forgive the Lombards and other supporters of the church and to revoke all judgments, edicts, and bans issued against them. The possibilities for renewed contention between Frederick and the league never seemed far away, compelling Gregory to warn the emperor about moving against the Lombards “by the power of strength rather than the rule of law.”¹²

Positioning himself as the mediator for peace in the region, the pope did not unilaterally intervene on the Lombard League’s behalf. In September 1231, Frederick announced his intention to hold an assembly at Ravenna the upcoming November intended “to reform the universal peace of the empire, put Italy into a prosperous and tranquil state, and settle the fervid disputes inside and outside of its cities, removing the foment of hatred and every disturbance among neighboring peoples.” In the summons to the gathering, he stressed the fact that he proceeded by the counsel of the highest pontiff, a public sign of cooperation between church and empire for establishing peace in Lombardy.¹³ According to one account of the Lombards’ October meeting at Bologna, to assure a “good peace” the rectors of the league sent envoys to Pope Gregory, calling upon him to prevent Frederick from moving his forces into the region.¹⁴ The pope, however, had already signaled his support for the imperial assembly. Writing to the bishops of Modena, Reggio, and Brescia and the bishop-elect of Mantua, the pope stressed his office’s role in keeping the peace, assuring them that in formally sealed letters the emperor had committed himself to abide by papal arbitration in Lombardy. Gregory forwarded copies of those documents to them. He also called upon them not to impede Frederick’s son Henry and the other German magnates coming to the assembly at Ravenna, adding instructions to assist the passage of Hermann of Salza, master general of the Teutonic Order, who was sent to Lombardy as the emperor’s chief representative.¹⁵

The pope’s concerns proved well founded. Much as they did in 1226, the cities of the Lombard League refused to send their envoys to the assembly and blocked the alpine passes leading from Germany into Italy, forcing Frederick to postpone the meeting until Christmas, and then again until March the following year. Responding to this worsening situation in January 1232, Gregory appointed James Pecorara, the newly minted cardinal bishop of Palestrina, and Otto Tonengo, cardinal deacon of San Nicola in Carcere Tulliano, as legates to mediate between the emperor and the recalcitrant Lombards.¹⁶ The two cardinals, who had long and controversial careers ahead of them as papal-imperial mediators, headed to Bologna with letters of credence for a meeting with the envoys of the Lombard League. In early March, James and Otto presented them a list of “imperial petitions,” including stipulations that the Lombards “swear an oath of fidelity to the lord emperor, as is customary,” that they “renounce oaths made that infringe upon the honor and right of the lord emperor and empire,” and that they bring their legal disputes “before the lord emperor or his vicars or legates in Lombardy.” The representatives from Brescia, Milan, Lodi, Piacenza, and elsewhere provided the cardinals with a record of their objections to such demands, along with a list of their requirements for keeping the peace, insisting that Frederick “remit all rancor” against the league and placing a cap on the number of troops that could accompany his son Henry into the region.¹⁷

According to a description of these proceedings sent back to Brescia by the city’s envoys, the cardinals insisted upon a “general” and “public” commission to negotiate with Frederick on the Lombards’ behalf. The Lombard representatives agreed to their proposal, provided that Frederick likewise commit to their arbitration. In their letter to the podesta about the meeting, the Brescians present indicated that they placed great trust in the legates, since one, James, came from Piacenza and the other, Otto, from Vercelli.¹⁸ In their own written proposition for this commission, the two legates said nothing of such personal affinities, highlighting the pope’s concern that the turmoil in Lombardy “could inflict grave damage upon all of Christendom, especially by impeding aid to the Holy Land.” If James and Otto could not broker an agreement, they reserved the right to place the entire matter before the pope and the other cardinals, who would determine what needed to be done to “settle the discord” and “affirm the peace.”¹⁹ While the representatives of the league waited at Faenza under strict instructions to remain there, the two cardinals traveled to Ravenna to meet with the emperor. When they arrived, however, they discovered that Frederick had left the city by ship for Venice. Some chroniclers portrayed this decision as born from a pious desire to visit the basilica of Saint Mark, while others identified the emperor’s dodge as a deliberate slight to the honor of the Roman church.²⁰

Over the following months negotiations continued. On 13 May 1232, James and Otto oversaw a gathering in the bishop’s palace at Padua, meeting first in the main hall of the cathedral chapter’s canonry. They were joined by a number of prominent Lombard bishops, envoys from the cities of the Lombard League bearing “public instruments” of their commission to negotiate, and Hermann of Salza, who had been given full power by the emperor to make promises, agreements, and compromises on his behalf.²¹ The following day, in the more formal setting of the bishop’s hall, both sides committed themselves to the terms of arbitration provided by the two cardinals the preceding March, making solemn promises to observe their judgments and meet any deadlines imposed by them until the end of the negotiations.²² Bringing the emperor back to the bargaining table proved difficult. Staying at Anagni, Pope Gregory made plans for a meeting between the concerned parties at the curia on Michaelmas, 29 September 1232. In July, after the emperor’s envoy failed to turn up for preliminary negotiations at Lodi, the pope extended the deadline until the first of November to allow sufficient time for the cardinals to assemble for the deliberations. Although the Lombards and the emperor did send some representatives to the curia, sufficient numbers did not arrive for the formal November meeting to come off as planned.²³

Peace in Lombardy and the March of Verona remained elusive. Heading into the spring of 1233, Gregory set a new date for the next meeting at Easter, assigning three cardinals—Otto, again, who was joined by John de Colonna and Stephen Conti, cardinal priest of Santa Maria in Trastevere—to oversee the next round of negotiations. Representatives from both sides met at the Lateran basilica on 24 May, submitting their written propositions for peace for review. Soon after, the pope and cardinals announced their decision. They undeniably gave the Lombards much of what they asked for: the pope called upon Frederick to “remit all rancor” against them, revoking all the judgments and bans issued against the members of the league, forgiving any of their past offenses, and receiving them in his grace. The Lombards likewise had to revoke any bans or edicts against the emperor or his loyal supporters and had to provide five hundred soldiers for assistance in the Holy Land over the course of two years. Both parties had to keep the peace and avoid further conflict. In closing, the pope instructed Frederick to send “patent letters” affixed with his golden seal confirming his commitment to these terms by Michaelmas the following September.²⁴

Like most compromises, this agreement did not entirely satisfy anyone. On 7 June 1233, the Lombard representatives again met with the pope, taking issue with some of the specific wording in terms of peace and requesting clarifications. In a record of the meeting kept by a notary from Milan, the pope gave his responses, observing, for example, that the Lombard League could defend themselves against attacks without violating the terms of peace treaty.²⁵ When news of the decision reached Frederick, he delayed returning the patent letters that the pope had requested, telling Gregory in July that he would not send them until Hermann of Salza returned to the imperial court with a more detailed report of the proceedings at the papal curia.²⁶ He also wrote “in confidence” to the cardinal-bishop-elect of Ostia e Velletri, Raynald da Jenne, complaining about the pope’s judgment that had let the Lombards off the hook, given the many injuries he had suffered from them. Frederick lodged a particular complaint about the Lombards’ promise to provide five hundred soldiers for service in the holy places, when they still owed four hundred soldiers from their previous agreement with the emperor.²⁷ Intentionally or not, this “private” letter did not remain confined to Raynald’s hands but was brought to the attention of the pope. On 12 August, Gregory sent a strongly worded response to the emperor, stressing all of his previous goodwill and efforts on Frederick’s behalf and taking him to task for complaining to Raynald and the cardinals rather than writing to him directly. As for the four hundred soldiers previously promised by the league, that commitment had expired when Frederick embarked on his contentious crusade years earlier. In case he had forgotten the terms of that voided agreement, the pope sent him copies of the original documents taken from the papal archives.²⁸

At this point, the logistical limitations of thirteenth-century epistolary communications made themselves felt. Soon after the pope sent this rebuke, Frederick’s written ratification of the peace agreement arrived at the papal curia, before the pope’s most recent complaints would have reached him. The reasons for the emperor’s change of position are not entirely clear. Whatever misgivings he had, he apparently decided that an imperfect settlement remained better than no settlement at all, allowing him to turn his attention elsewhere, including to the Regno, where he faced an insurrection from rebellious barons. The representatives of the Lombard League likewise ratified the terms of the agreement.²⁹ Through papal intervention, the mediation of cardinal legates, the circulation of documents, oaths and sworn promises, the threat of fines and ecclesiastical censure, and solemn face-to-face meetings, peace between the emperor and the Lombards—messy, imperfect, incomplete—had been established, or at least, their open discord was settled until another day. In later years, the pope, emperor, and representatives of the league would accuse each other of acting in bad faith, of pretending to seek reconciliation while secretly conspiring to undermine their foes. At the moment, however, as one English monastic chronicler observed about the news, “thus peace was made between them.”³⁰

The Great Devotion of 1233

During those same summer months of 1233, the war-torn communes and communities of northern Italy experienced an unexpected movement of what we might now call religious revival: processions and sermons, miracles and other charismatic displays in the name of peace, all organized by itinerant preachers before crowds in churchyards, piazzas, markets, and fields on the edge of towns. Looking back at this Great Halleluiah, or Great Devotion, as he finished his Chronicle decades later, the well-traveled Franciscan writer Salimbene of Adam—who will reappear throughout the rest of this book—described it as a “time of tranquility and peace, when martial weapons were entirely laid aside, of happiness and joy, of gladness and celebration, of praise and jubilation.”³¹ Modern scholars have described the Great Devotion of 1233 as a “peace movement” that emerged from the particular mix of religious piety, social unrest, and endemic violence that characterized the urban landscape of northern Italy in the early decades of the thirteenth century. Opinions are mixed on whether the Great Devotion favored Gregory’s or Frederick’s interests in northern Italy. In his landmark work on Frederick II, Ernst Kantorowicz observed that for the emperor, “the Great Allelujah had the most inconvenient political consequences. The only person who profited was Pope Gregory.” Others more recently see the pope as incidental to the Great Devotion, arriving “late and out of breath,” showing “opportunistic” support for the charismatic preachers that led the revival.³²

Neither of these appraisals captures the public complexities of the Great Devotion for the two powers. Its preachers did not uniformly favor the interests of either the pope or the emperor. Rather, their peacemaking initiatives presented opportunities and posed challenges for all sides in Lombardy, adding a new layer to an already complicated landscape of conflict and peacemaking. The Great Devotion cut across the supposed divides between the pro-imperial Ghibellines and the pro-papal Guelfs, convenient labels that mask a far more fluid set of shifting alliances and interested parties whose alignment with the party of the empire or that of the church formed a strategic choice, and not an irrevocable one. The charismatic peace movement of 1233 filled the public spaces left by the failure of established institutions to reconcile the warring factions of the strife-ridden Italian cities, rewiring the political and spiritual landscape of Lombardy and neighboring regions in the name of peace.³³

Many of the Great Halleluiah’s impresarios hailed from the mendicant orders, yet another demonstration of the rapidly expanding, highly visible role played by the relatively new friars in the public life of thirteenth-century Europe. They included Franciscans like Leo de Valvassori, who would later become archbishop of Milan. Leo arrived in Piacenza in the spring of 1233, after a year of street fighting between the city’s militia and the popular party led by their captain, William de Andito. The two sides gave a commission for Leo to resolve their conflicts: he gathered them in the piazza before the city’s cathedral church, where members from the various factions gave the ceremonial kiss of peace. The friar also arranged for the election of a new podesta, Lantelmo Mainerio.³⁴ Another Franciscan, named Gerard of Modena, along with a “simple and unlearned man” named Benedict de Cornetta, who was not a Franciscan but a “very good friend” of the friars, brought their version of peace to Parma. According to Salimbene, who saw both men with his own eyes, Gerard acted as podesta of the city, wielding “total lordship” over the Parmese so he might “bring peace to those warring against each other.” Wherever Benedict went, dressed in his black sackcloth and blowing his small copper horn, large crowds would gather, waving palms, bearing candles, and singing hymns. Salimbene listened to him preach on the wall of the bishop’s palace in Parma, then under construction.³⁵

The Dominican friar John of Vicenza emerged as perhaps the most noteworthy of the Great Devotion’s revivalist preachers, bringing his sermons of peace and miracles first to Bologna before touring around the Marches of Treviso and Verona in the summer of 1233. Verona represented a typical hot spot for armed conflict that involved all sorts of different individuals and groups but centered on Count Richard of San Bonifacio, a prominent magnate in the region, and his rivals, the Montecchi. Unrest in and around the city also demonstrated the limits of peacemaking through conventional means. In June 1230, Richard’s enemies had seized him and his followers, imprisoning them in Verona. In response, Richard’s allies from Mantua, joined by Azzo VII d’Este, jumped into the conflict. The powerful Romano brothers, Ezzelino and Alberic, backed the Veronese.³⁶ During a July 1231 meeting at Mantua, representatives 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 enterprise of the papacy and empire. It also created a means for either side to pressure the other openly, each accusing the other of neglecting one of their office’s paramount duties. The “business of the cross” could publicly unite and yet still divide the two powers like almost nothing else.⁴⁸

The pope’s concern for Christians overseas did not abate after the end of hostilities between him and Frederick. In the early months of 1231, the Roman pontiff identified a new threat to the holy places: a coming assault by the “king of the Persians.”⁴⁹ It remains unclear whom, exactly, the pope had in mind with this warning, but the danger struck him as quite real, having been relayed to him in letters sent to the curia from Syria by Gerold, patriarch of Jerusalem, and the leadership of the military orders.⁵⁰ In his blanket appeals for military and financial aid to the Holy Land, which were sent to Frederick, Henry III, Louis IX, and bishops throughout the church, Gregory drew upon well-developed themes from generations of crusade bulls, lamenting the Persian assault on the place where Christ had shed his precious blood for humanity’s salvation as a blow against all Christendom. Under these circumstances, he renewed his call for peace among Christians, including an end to ongoing hostilities between the French and English crowns. Writing to Frederick in August 1231, the pope stressed his obligation to defend Jerusalem against such “barbarous nations,” insisting that the Hohenstaufen ruler send funds to rebuild Christian fortifications around the region. In a conciliatory gesture, Gregory addressed him in this letter for the first time as the “king of Jerusalem,” a title that he and his predecessor, Honorius III, had withheld from their formal correspondence in light of the dispute between Frederick and the papal ally John of Brienne over the crown.⁵¹

By this time, however, Gregory faced another unprecedented situation in the history of crusading: a truce struck by the emperor of the Romans with the sultan of Egypt, one that had restored Jerusalem to Christian hands by peaceful means. Before reconciling with Frederick, the pope had done everything possible to spread disparaging news about this “traitorous” agreement. In a turnabout, he now recognized its temporary advantages in light of new threats. In February 1231, after receiving Frederick’s complaints that the Templars had disregarded the commands of his bailiff and had begun marshaling troops in the region, thereby potentially violating the truce with al-Kamil, Gregory rebuked the master of Templar Order at Jerusalem. Although the pope commended the Templars’ desire to fight the “enemies of God,” he insisted that they show temporary restraint, since the disruptions of war might further expose Jerusalem to danger from the menacing Persian king and cause “confusion among the entire Christian people.”⁵² Taking advantage of these improved relations with al-Kamil, later that year Gregory wrote directly to the sultan, calling upon him to free a number of merchants from Ancona, who, according to rumor, were wrongfully imprisoned in Egypt. Over the coming years, seeing the possibilities of a temporary “détente” with the infidels, the pope dispatched a number of remarkable letters to the Egyptian sultan and other Islamic rulers around the Mediterranean, expressing his hopes for their conversion.⁵³

During the years after the Treaty of San Germano, Pope Gregory also confronted something close to a civil war in crusader territories overseas that were still reeling from the disruptions caused by Frederick’s recent visit to the Holy Land. In Cyprus and Syria, fighting had continued between the emperor’s supporters and officials, including his new marshal in the area, Richard Filangerium, and factions that opposed his authority, including John of Ibelin, lord of Beirut, and a sworn association of nobles and citizens from Acre supported by the Genoese. The pope took steps to resolve this divisive conflict. Similar to his interventions in Lombardy, Gregory identified peace among Christians in the Holy Land as a necessary condition for concerted action against the infidels. In the region of Jerusalem, such discord among believers represented an existential threat. Latin Christians, the pope recognized, represented an embattled minority in the crusader principalities.⁵⁴ To deal with this situation, Gregory pressed Frederick to fulfill one of his obligations stipulated by the peace of San Germano: restoring the goods and properties seized from the Templars and Hospitallers during his controversial crusade and the War of the Keys. Without the healthy military orders, the pope declared, there could be no successful defense of the holy places.⁵⁵

For the most part, however, Gregory spoke out in support of Frederick’s rights as ruler of Jerusalem. In this case, his change of policy put him at odds with his own legate in Syria, the patriarch Gerold, who had repeated the emperor’s excommunication during his stay in the Holy Land and dogged his every step while on crusade, sending letters back to Europe that denounced Frederick’s vile pact with the infidels. By the summer of 1232, the pope had decided to recall the patriarch to the papal curia, accompanied by the Templar and Hospitaller masters, to give a full accounting of their recent actions in the turbulent crusader principalities. The pope had instructed Gerold to cooperate with the emperor’s representatives and help them to settle the political unrest in the region. News had reached Gregory’s ears that Gerold instead had actively supported the rebels opposing Frederick’s authority. Voices were crying out “openly and publicly” that Gerold worked to disturb the kingdom of Jerusalem, while some—mindful of Gerold’s previous attacks on the emperor’s reputation—blamed the pope for his actions. Proclaiming that the Devil was sowing “discord in place of peace, dissension in place of reform, hatred in place of love,” the pope arranged for Frederick to provide Gerold with letters of safe conduct, enabling him to depart from Syria at the next available passage.⁵⁶ The pope commissioned Albert Rezzato, patriarch of Antioch, to replace Gerold, who would be stripped of his legatine status if he failed to return immediately to the curia. Albert set to work mediating between the warring factions in the holy places, trying to secure Frederick’s rights along with those of his son Conrad, bringing the rebels back into line, and restoring peace to the area.⁵⁷

In the summer of 1234, Gregory dispatched a special legate to Syria, Theodoric, archbishop of Ravenna, to enforce the terms of an agreement finally struck by Albert between the emperor and his opponents. Addressing the barons of Jerusalem, the citizens of Acre, the masters and brothers of the military orders, and all of the clergy in the kingdom of Jerusalem, the pope again emphasized the need for peace in the region as part of his developing plans for a campaign to the holy places, which were endangered by the endemic fighting there among Christians. At this point, he took extra steps to ensure cooperation with his legate, enjoining the recipients of his letters “by the remission of sins” to observe inviolably the established truce and informing them about his instructions for Theodoric to secure the full restoration of Frederick’s possessions and rights as they existed before the recent uprising. As was often the case with such fully empowered legates, Gregory authorized the archbishop of Ravenna to compel obedience to his mandates through ecclesiastical censure, confirming in advance any judgment that Theodoric legitimately passed against the rebels.⁵⁸

Intervening on Frederick’s behalf and anticipating the end of Frederick’s ten-year truce with al-Kamil in 1239, Gregory clearly hoped to advance his plans for a new crusading expedition. His summons for what became known as the “Baron’s Crusade” served as a visual and vocal reminder of the pope’s authority to mobilize Christians—men and women, clergy and laity, the powerful and the humble—for a common purpose. In the widely circulated bull Rachel suum videns, the pope tapped into the emotional and biblical language of past crusade appeals, reminding his audience about Christ’s life and passion in the sacred places of Jerusalem. The loss of the Holy Land was a source of grief and scandal for the entire church. Among other measures, Gregory called for the observation of a “four-year general peace throughout the entire Christian world,” threatening excommunication and interdict for those who violated its terms unless they had suffered injuries that justified violating the peace.⁵⁹ Through sermons and liturgies, prayers, pious bequests and tithes, the redeeming of vows, and more, Christians from all walks of life could contribute to the crusading cause. To enact these plans in public, the pope relied especially on the mendicant orders, who provided an unparalleled cadre of crusade preachers and fund-raisers. Matthew Paris, always ready to criticize the invasive mendicants, bore witness to the impact of such activities in England, even though he viewed the friars’ preaching, commutation of vows, and other financial exactions as a fraud, since the monies collected for the Holy Land would never reach their goal.⁶⁰

As will become clear below, Gregory’s plans for the crusade would take some unexpected directions and eventually become a source of renewed tension between him and Frederick. In 1234, however, those problems lay in the future. During its earliest stages, the call for the Baron’s Crusade illustrated the compelling public profile of the Roman pope as the spiritual leader of the universal church and evangelizer of peace working in concert with secular powers to achieve the common good of defending the Holy Land, where Christ had redeemed humanity. Mediating in October of that year between Frederick and the Lombards, who were still at odds over their past grievances and the extent of the emperor’s rights, Gregory reminded them once again of the need for unity among Christians as a precursor to a successful crusade, especially at a time when the pope, moved to action by the “many clamors” reaching him from the Holy Land, sought to bring them expeditious aid. With Christendom at peace, Gregory envisioned, holy war would be exported beyond its borders.⁶¹

A Hidden Threat

As Pope Gregory publicized his plans for the upcoming crusade, he identified another threat to the peace in Christendom, a grave menace within the faithful: heresy. Heretics, the pope insisted, teaching their foul doctrines “secretly” and operating in the “shadows,” tricked the simpleminded into questioning bedrock elements of their faith, such as the incarnation of Christ, the efficacy of the sacraments, and the resurrection of the body at the Final Judgment. They also tried to cast doubt on the pope’s “fullness of power” over the church, his power of the keys over sin, and his right to excommunicate and interdict Christians. Eradicating heresy by wielding the spiritual sword against heretics represented one of Gregory’s chief responsibilities as the bishop of Rome and leader of the universal church. Facing this duty, the pope needed a partner to wield the material sword, one who would coerce and, if necessary, execute those judged guilty of heresy: namely, the Christian emperor, among other representatives of the secular arm.

Much like the crusade to recover the holy places, during the years after the Treaty of San Germano the battle against heresy formed a point of convergence for the two powers, allowing the pope and emperor to stress their shared duty to root out and destroy that hidden threat. As observed earlier in this book, the papal effort to combat heresy did not start with Gregory, but his time as pope marked an important—for some, infamous—moment in the history of the medieval church: its “inquisitorial turn,” the intensifying, centralizing, and institutionalizing of anti-heretical measures. In the popular imagination, the Inquisition summons images of dark dungeons, of clergy torturing more-often-than-not innocent victims far from prying eyes. To the contrary, the hunt for heretics in the thirteenth century involved the pope and his representatives in public displays of priestly authority, including acts such as preaching sermons, performing rites of excommunications, reading letters aloud and exhibiting their seals, receiving testimony in civic spaces, and publicizing anti-heretical statutes, among other “technologies” openly deployed against the hidden threat of heresy.⁶²

For Gregory, acting as the bishop of Rome and lord of the Papal States, fighting heresy was in part a local duty that might have reminded him of his time as a cardinal legate in Lombardy years earlier. According to the pope’s biographer, after returning to Rome in 1230 following his reconciliation with Frederick at San Germano, Gregory discovered that “Patarene” heretics had spread like a “contagion” throughout the city during his absence, seeking to cause “public harm” through “hidden means.” After conducting an inquiry into the matter, in February 1231 the pope convoked a meeting of the Roman senate and people before the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, where he condemned a great number of clergy and lay people, both men and women among the latter, based on the testimony of witnesses or their own confessions. The clergy suffered deposition, their sacred vestments removed before all the people. Richard of San Germano says that some of the Patarenes were converted back to the orthodox faith, while others were burned.⁶³ That same month, Gregory issued a new set of statutes regulating the investigation, prosecution, and punishment of heretics that was modeled on earlier examples of anti-heretical legislation. The edict called for the lifetime imprisonment of unrepentant heretics, barred them from holding public office, and anathematized their supporters. If they impeded proceedings against such “infamous” persons, judges and notaries should be deprived of their positions. The law banned the clergy from administering the sacraments to heretics or their supporters, taking alms from them, or giving them ecclesiastical burial. It also forbade clerics to dispute in “public or in private” with lay people about the catholic faith. Anyone who knew about the “hidden meetings” of heretics should tell their confessor or someone else who might notify their bishop.⁶⁴ In conjunction with the pope’s efforts, the Roman senator Annibaldo, demonstrating the shared interest of clerical and secular authorities in wiping out dangerous heretics, issued a set of municipal statutes against heresy at the same time, committing himself under oath to prosecute heretics identified by the church’s “inquisitors.”⁶⁵

Gregory’s pursuit of heresy did not stop with the city of Rome. Later that year, while collecting still outstanding debts from the War of the Keys from communities in Campagna, he took action against the lords of the commune of Miranda, who were known by “public infamy” to be “supporters of heretics, violators of public roads, forgers of papal bulls, and counterfeiters of coins.” After a siege of the town undertaken with allies from Rieti, Alatrin, a papal chaplain and rector of the duchy of Spoleto, met with Miranda’s leaders and other witnesses called by a herald to the Church of Saint Mary in Terni. He received their surrender on the pope’s behalf, taking the commune under the direct lordship of the Roman church.⁶⁶ In September 1231, Gregory issued the first of several warnings to Ezzelino da Romano, the father of the young warlord by that same name, calling him a “public protector” of heretics and causing an “enormous scandal in the general church.” The pope recounted his personal meeting with the senior Ezzelino years before, during his legation in Lombardy in 1221, which led to a tearful scene when Ezzelino deceitfully declared his devotion to the church and hatred for the “heretical depravity.” Gregory gave him two months to appear at the curia to answer for such charges and show his obedience to the church’s commands. Otherwise, the pope would call upon the faithful to take actions against him, including occupying his lands and seizing his goods.⁶⁷ The Roman pontiff’s support for the preachers of the Great Devotion—whose message of peacemaking included sermons against heresy and, on occasion, the burning of heretics—might have stemmed in part from his interest in opposing heresy through cities and communities of northern Italy.⁶⁸

As the occupant of the Apostolic See, the pope’s duty to oppose heresy extended beyond the Papal States and Italy. In principle, it reached throughout the universal church, wherever heretics might be lurking among orthodox Christians. In 1231, Gregory forwarded copies of both his and the Roman senator’s antiheretical edicts to other communities outside of Italy, calling upon prelates to publicize solemnly their contents once a month in their dioceses and to make sure that local secular judges and officials implemented and enforced those regulations.⁶⁹ The pope’s widely circulated calls for action against heretics, bulls like Illi humanis generis and Vox in Rama, painted a vivid portrait of heretical communities gathered in secret for foul rites, such as holding orgies, worshipping black cats, being visited by a diabolic “pallid man,” and tossing the Eucharist in the privy after mass, among other foul deeds.⁷⁰ To prosecute the war on heresy, Gregory, rather than just relying upon poorly trained or lukewarm local bishops, authorized figures such as the Premonstratensian canon Conrad of Marburg to take the lead in searching for heretical communities. Above all, he turned again to the mendicant orders, the Franciscans and especially the Dominicans, whose commitment to fighting heretics had started with their founder.⁷¹ Although the papal curia did not direct the daily activities of their investigations, such inquisitors publicly embodied papal authority, displaying letters and “written mandates” bearing the seal of the Apostolic See that empowered them to act in towns, cities, and parishes throughout Europe.⁷²

As part of this campaign against heresy, Gregory publicly validated the antiheretical measures promoted by Frederick II, which were enshrined in the emperor’s coronation oath and the Constitutions of Melfi. Richard of San Germano describes how the emperor sent his marshal and the archbishop of Reggio to seek out Patarenes in Naples in February 1231, at the same time that Pope Gregory had discovered them in Rome. In 1232, the emperor issued additional bans against heretics in Lombardy and the Regno along with legislation for the suppression of heresy in Germany, relying much like the pope on members of the Dominican order to abolish the “new and unheard-of infamy of heretical depravity” that had arisen there.⁷³ Proclaiming his own duty to destroy heretics, Frederick turned to the language of the two swords to elaborate how the empire and the church worked as separate but complementary entities for the defense of the faith. Writing directly to Pope Gregory, he celebrated how the “heights of heavenly counsel” had ordained the “priestly dignity” and “royal rank” for the rule of the world, disposing the spiritual sword to the one and the material sword to the other for the correction of errors in a time of growing malice and superstition among men. In each region of the Regno, he specified, a bishop would team up with an imperial justiciar to investigate possible heretics, keeping careful records of their findings. Just as the pope summoned the secular arm to assist the church, Frederick called upon the Roman pontiff, through his prayers and advice, to support his efforts against the “insanity of heretics,” together turning the “judgment of both swords, whose power is given to you and us by divine foresight” against those who “arrogantly assume glory for themselves from their perverse dogma, in contempt of the divine power against the mother church.”⁷⁴

Gregory, in turn, celebrated the emperor’s role in such “pious work,” noting that both the material and spiritual swords had to work together to eradicate the heretical threat. This included groups like the Stedingers, rebellious peasants in the diocese of Bremen whose secret machinations had burst into the open when they attacked clergy, refused to pay tithes, and destroyed churches, causing a “scandal” in Germany. Channeling the language, symbols, and material and spiritual benefits of crusading, and following in the footsteps of his predecessor Innocent III, who had declared the Albigensian Crusade against supposed Cathars, Gregory authorized the preaching of armed campaigns against such enemies of the faith. In addition, the pope promised the same remission of sins to those who took up the cross to combat heretics as those going overseas and taking them under the special protection of the Apostolic See like other crusaders.⁷⁵ Sending a version of Vox in Rama to Frederick in 1233, the Roman pontiff called upon the emperor specifically to destroy such enemies through the power given to him and avenge the injuries done to Christ the Lord. “Stand forth for the eradication of that depraved and perverse people, who cast so many insults at the living God,” Gregory exhorted the emperor, asking him to assure that the princes of Germany would take up the sword and wipe out the “ferment” of heretical depravity.⁷⁶

Much like the crusades, the fight against heresy enabled a public conjuncture of the papal and imperial offices. During their period of reconciliation after the War of the Keys, Gregory and Frederick found themselves in a position to turn their energies toward the suppression of heretics, whose crimes threatened the Roman church and empire together and therefore constituted a form of treason. At the same time, again much like the crusades, the alignment of church and empire against heresy went only so far. Under certain circumstances, the pope and emperor could pivot and accuse each other of failing to defend the faith from heretics, a lapse in the duty of their office. In July 1233, praising Frederick’s diligent opposition to heresy in the Regno, the pope felt it necessary to warn him about the scandal he might cause and the damage he might do to the imperial dignity if he burned rebels against his authority under the pretense of punishing heretics.⁷⁷ Years later, complaining about rampant heresy in Lombardy, the emperor would accuse the pope of favoring and protecting heretics rather than suppressing them. During the course of Frederick’s first excommunication, Gregory had hinted of the possibility that the emperor might himself be guilty of heresy by despising the Roman church’s “power of the keys,” a charge difficult to prove and one that the pope did not openly pursue. When he excommunicated Frederick for the second time, this accusation would return with less reticence. For the time being, however, the two powers, wielding the spiritual and material swords, stood united against the common threat of heretical depravity in their midst.

War with the Romans

In May 1234, Frederick made a personal appearance before Pope Gregory, who was then staying at Rieti. During this meeting, they discussed the unsettled conditions overseas in the holy places, but they also spoke about more pressing business. According to the pope’s biographer, Fredrick came as a supplicant, bringing his son Conrad with him and seeking assistance against his other son, Henry, the king of Germany, who had rebelled against his father. Gregory likewise had reasons for welcoming Frederick. Much like the emperor, he faced his own problems with inside agitators who questioned his authority as the lord of the Papal States and bishop of Rome, in this case facing an uprising by the inhabitants of his own city. This meeting at Rieti set the stage for perhaps the most unexpected and understudied episode of public cooperation between Gregory and Frederick during the years after the peace of San Germano, as the two former opponents agreed to assist each other against their present enemies.⁷⁸

Historians generally view this alliance as one of undisguised convenience: the pope aiding the emperor against his traitorous son, the emperor assisting the pope to wage war against his own city. This convergence of Gregory’s and Frederick’s interests, however, should not be dismissed as merely opportunistic. Much like the papal promotion of other common causes with the emperor, such as freeing Jerusalem and wiping out heresy, Gregory’s turn toward the “material sword” represented an advantage of the peace between the two powers. While the pope mobilized Christians to fight for the common cause of defending the Roman church’s liberty, Frederick could fulfill his imperial duty as that church’s primary defender. To some extent, the war with the Romans validated the harmony between two powers, even if the results of their cooperation fell short of papal expectations. At the same time, Gregory’s war against the Romans with imperial aid raised complaints about the pope’s use of ecclesiastical resources to field a “papal army” on the Italian peninsula. Much like the War of the Keys, the pope’s fight against the Christians of his own city did not sit well with everyone.

Gregory hardly represented the first pope to experience troubles with Roman aristocratic factions and communal government, a problem shared by generations of his papal predecessors. But as Peter Partner observes, his relations with the city were “notoriously bad.”⁷⁹ As seen in the previous chapter, after the pope repeated Frederick’s sentence of excommunication in the basilica of Saint Peter in 1228, a mob had driven him and several cardinals out of the church and eventually out of the city. By the time that the Gregory and Frederick agreed to the Treaty of San Germano, the pope had more or less made peace with the citizens of Rome, who had been “assailing the churches of the City and harassing the Patrimony’s vassals with various burdens,” as the author of the pope’s vita describes the situation. He also claims that the flooding of the Tiber in winter 1230, clearly a punishment from God, convinced the Romans to change their wicked ways. However, problems persisted between the Roman pontiff and the Romans due primarily to the city government’s territorial ambitions in central Italy. In the spring of 1231, Roman forces attacked Viterbo, part of the papal patrimony, and seized the town of Monteforte, near Naples, the following summer, using it as a base to “subjugate the remainder of Campania to their dominion.” In June 1232, Gregory left Rome for Rieti, not only to escape the summer heat but also because of his growing tensions with the Romans.⁸⁰

During this episode of conflict with the civil government of Rome, the pope turned to Frederick for help, seeking his assistance against the “pride of the Romans.” At Gregory’s request, the emperor took Viterbo under imperial protection in 1231 and tried to ensure that the Viterbans would cooperate with papal legates assigned to broker a peace agreement, Thomas of Capua and Raynald da Jenne. Throughout his correspondence with Frederick relating to this situation, Gregory emphasized the emperor’s role as the defender and advocate of the Roman church, who was responsible for protecting its rights, which were indelibly linked to those of the empire. At an especially evocative moment, he described his joy that the “imperial right hand” brandished the “triumphal sword taken up from the body of blessed Peter, received from the hand of Christ’s vicar,” wielding it vengefully against such malefactors. On more than one occasion, Gregory enjoined Frederick by the “remission of sins” to aid the Roman church.⁸¹ In one of his replies to the pope, Frederick expressed similar sentiments, remarkably describing the ultimate unity of the “two swords,” the spiritual power of priests and the temporal power of emperors, formed from one substance and joined in the “sheath” of the church.⁸²

Despite these promises, actual military aid from the emperor was not forthcoming. Facing an uprising in Sicily, Frederick returned to the Regno with his forces in the late fall of 1232, leaving the pope to make peace with the Romans as best as he could. In letters sent to Frederick the following February, the pope described his earlier satisfaction when the emperor’s envoys had informed him that Frederick was “manfully preparing to fight in defense of the faith, for the preservation of ecclesiastical liberty, and for the preservation of Saint Peter’s Patrimony.” Subsequently, Gregory heard rumors that Frederick planned to return to the Regno, abandoning his obligations as the defender of the church. In closing, the pope called upon him to fulfill his duties with “deeds, not just words.”⁸³ Gregory’s biographer, looking back at these events after 1239, when the pope excommunicated Frederick for the second time, claims that the emperor never really intended to help the church but instead secretly conspired with the Romans against the pope.⁸⁴ Through a series of negotiations led by the cardinals Thomas and Raynald, who smoothed things over by cash payments to the Romans, the pope nevertheless helped to forestall the assault on Campania. In March 1233, representatives from Rome approached the pontiff while he was staying at Anagni and begged him to return to the city. A few months after that, the pope helped to broker a truce between Rome and Viterbo in which the Romans forgave any damages caused by the Viterbans during the recent fighting and the Viterbans swore fealty to the Romans, both sides releasing their captives.⁸⁵

By the spring of 1234, however, this peace between the pope and the Romans began to deteriorate again. According to Gregory’s biographer, a new senator named Luke Savelli renewed the city’s military push into the surrounding regions and issued statutes “damaging the liberty of the church and causing enormous harm to the Apostolic See,” trying to enslave the papal patrimony and overturn its privileges that dated back to the days of Emperor Constantine.⁸⁶ By this time, news of the discord between the pope and the Romans had begun to make an impression on wider audiences around Christian Europe. Roger of Wendover, for example, describes how the Romans tried to “usurp” ancient rights in Rome, seeking among other things immunity from excommunication and interdict, a demand that the pope refused. While lesser than God, as Saint Peter’s heir and their spiritual father he possessed the right to stand in judgment over them. By May, the pope again left Rome for Rieti, where he passed a sentence of excommunication against Luke Savelli and several other leading Roman citizens due to their seizure and fortification of Monte Alto, a town belonging to the Patrimony of Saint Peter; their taking hostages from that same community; and their extraction of oaths from papal vassals, all actions contrary to the interests of the Roman church.⁸⁷

At Rieti, Gregory also began to make plans for a coordinated assault on the “rebellious Romans,” assisted by the emperor, who placed himself “at the service of the church” against the citizens of the city.⁸⁸ Neither the pope nor the emperor dissembled the fact that Frederick expected help against his rebellious son, who was allied with some of the Lombard cities in resisting Frederick’s rights. In July, Gregory wrote to the archbishop of Trier and other German prelates, denouncing Henry for violating his promises of fealty to his father and instructing the bishops to publicize Henry’s excommunication throughout the kingdom. He specified that the prince’s actions triggered the suspension of any oaths rendered to him by ecclesiastical and secular magnates.⁸⁹ The anonymous author of the Life of Gregory IX, writing after 1239 with retrospective disapproval of the emperor’s every action, claims that Frederick arrived uninvited at Rieti, offering his son Conrad as a hostage and pledge of his commitment to the understandably suspicious pope—a commitment he never intended to keep after getting what he wanted. Fortified with such “papal letters,” Gregory’s biographer claims, the emperor acted like “new legate of the Roman church,” taking advantage of the pope’s written support to turn the German magnates supporting his son against him.⁹⁰

Although Frederick indeed left for Germany to confront his rebellious son, other sources claim that he left a sizable force of troops behind at Viterbo to support the pope. Over the summer, Gregory began to widen his appeals for armed help against the Romans well beyond those he made to the emperor. In July, he wrote to the cities of the Lombard League, stressing this need to employ the “ministry of the imperial arm” in defense of the church and calling upon them not to impede the transit of Frederick’s forces. At the same time, still in the middle of peace negotiations between the Lombards and the emperor, he assured them that he would not abandon their interests.⁹¹ The following month, the pope informed the cities and leaders of Tuscany about the appointment of Rainier of Viterbo, cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, as the leader of the assembling papal army, which was intended for the defense of the papal patrimony and the liberty of the church. A few months after that, Gregory directed a letter to Siegfried, archbishop of Mainz, reminding him about an oath he took to protect the Patrimony of Saint Peter, instructing him to come with or send troops by the following March.⁹²

Around this time, the “pope’s army” and the “emperor’s army,” as Roger of Wendover describes the two forces, coordinated their assaults on the outskirts of Rome, destroying a number of surrounding villages. Roger tells us that Gregory also gave Peter, bishop of Winchester, a leadership role in the papal army, valuing him for his military skills and riches, not to mention the contingent of English foot soldiers and bowmen he brought with him. Later in October, when a large body of Roman troops made an undisciplined sally against Viterbo, the pope’s combined troops delivered a crushing blow against them, killing thousands and taking many more captive. As Matthew Paris adds in his History of the English, elaborating on Roger’s account, the slaughter was so great that “the hearts of Pagans rejoiced, far and wide.”⁹³ The Romans never recovered from these defeats, although they sent a defiant message by passing a series of edicts that condemned Rainier of Viterbo and banned the pope from returning to Rome until he paid a large indemnity for damages caused during the war.⁹⁴

During the following months, Gregory continued to solicit armed support from every corner of the Christian world, calling upon Eberhard, archbishop of Salzburg, and thirty-two other German bishops to provide troops with stipends for three months of service. He made a similar request to the archbishop of Rouen and nineteen other prelates in France and Spain, denouncing the Romans, who “ought to be special sons of the church, but, degenerating from sons into stepsons, are showing themselves to be disloyal and ungrateful, so that scarcely a spark of loyalty or gratitude remains among them.” In this letter, the pope identified the rebellious Romans’ desire to “enslave the Roman church,” not only by seizing its temporal goods but also by abusing its spiritual persons and offices, as a “public not private” problem.⁹⁵ Closer to home, Gregory summoned the citizens of Velletri to the service of the Roman church, promising “the full remission of sins for those who made confession with a contrite heart.”⁹⁶ The pope also took specific measures to raise funds for his campaign against the Romans while depriving the city of its own financial resources. In December 1234, citing the “malice of the Romans,” he instructed bishops in the kingdom of France to retain all revenues from benefices belonging to absentee Roman clergy, excepting papal chaplains, and to send the proceeds to Master Simon, an official from the papal chancery. In a similar letter to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, Gregory instructed them to forward such funds to the Templar master at Paris. The Tewksbury Annals record that some Romans were in fact deprived of their benefices, the revenues of which were forwarded to Canterbury.⁹⁷

Whether the money in question ever reached the pope is unclear. There is little evidence that bishops besides the opportunistic Peter of Winchester provided serious logistical support, in terms of either troops, funds, or supplies. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1235, Gregory’s overall efforts had worked, bringing his opponents to the bargaining table. In April and May, the pope’s legates in Rome—Romano, the cardinal bishop 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.