Download Ch.8 The Roman Church: Authority and the Pursuit of

1
Tom Burns
Organisation and Social Order
Chapter
VIII
THE ROMAN CHURCH: AUTHORITY AND THE PURSUIT
OF POWER
The gradual but eventually almost total collapse of the Roman world is clearest of all
when it comes to the major institutions in which power and authority are incorporated. In
the classic republics of Greece and Rome, the source of both power and authority lay in
the community of citizens, rich and poor, patrician and plebeian. This notion lingered on
until the end of the classical period, albeit in a progressively attenuated, abstract, and
finally empty form. It was the exercise of both power and authority that was vested in the
emperors' sovereignty.
Yet, whatever its source or form of exercise, power depends at all times on the readiness
of those over whom they are exercised to obey or conform. In the later years of the Roman
Empire1 in the West, this readiness was forthcoming from fewer and fewer people. The
combination of command over military power and civil authority institutionalised in the
Roman Emperor was eroded, and eventually disappeared altogether, so far as the
emperors, their administrators, and even, at the end, their military commanders, were
concerned.
With the termination of imperial sovereignty, power lay in the command of physical force
capable of overwhelming any opposition within the territory claimed by a king or duke.
For pagan barbarians, any authority conceivably separate from physical power attached to
custom, which reached back through the remembered past of their own communities and
beyond, into an 'immemorial' past. For Christians (and for the barbarians too, as they
became christianised), it derived from God and was vested in God's representatives on
earth. Both kinds were beyond the reach or control of ordinary mortals. In any case, the
sources of power and of authority lay in circumstances utterly alien to the idea that
sovereignty - power and authority combined - lay with the people.
From these beginnings, there arose two systems of domination, virtually completely
separate from each other and derived from virtually undiluted sources of power on the one
hand and authority on the other. Kingship, or lordship, was founded on power, and the
Church on authority.
Neither side could make either power or authority the basis of a claim for overall and
incontestable supremacy. One has to be constantly aware that kingship in the middle ages
1
The locus classicus of the argument is "Unter- und Ueberordnung," a section of Georg Simmel's
Soziologie (Dunckel & Humblot, 1908, pp.101-185); the section is translated in K.Wolff, The Sociology of
Georg Simmel, Free Press, 1950, pp.181-300.
2
was never equivalent to sovereignty; temporal rulers became supremely conscious of the
kind of rulership exercised by the pope, and sometimes asserted by ecclesiastical
magnates, which was founded on an authority lacking in their own. On the other hand, the
claim to rule over all Christians first staked out by Leo I and Gregory I and asserted to the
full by Gregory VII was never fully made good in secular terms.
The fact that power and authority were separated from each other from the start is one
clue to the politics, the institutions and perhaps the culture peculiar to Western Europe
during the medieval millennium - and testimony to the developmental, 'living,' character
of its traditions. Not that secular power and spiritual authority were in continual conflict
over the right of either kings and nobles or pope and bishops to command the other. It
was more that each side laid claim to sovereignty, one by the right that territorial
possession of land they had inherited or conquered gave them to command over all the
people who lived on their land, the other by right of command over the spiritual lives and
destinies of all Christians, wherever they lived.
Our own idea of sovereignty, so central to the idea of the modern state, and so different
from that which obtained in the days of the Roman Empire, and virtually inconceivable
during the Middle Ages, could nevertheless be said to have originated in the persistent
attempt on each side to overcome the medieval dualism of power and authority. It was an
issue peculiar to Western Europe. It did not arise in Eastern Europe; the Emperors in
Byzantium were also spiritual leaders of the Christian Church, and for their Moslem
successors there was no distinction between temporal and spiritual leadership.
I
Any secular authority divorced from power was, during the Middle Ages, limited,
insubstantial, contestable and short-lived. Whatever weight might be given to the
authority of tradition - to deciding or doing things in accordance with the practice of the
remembered past - would only count when those with power were uninterested, evenly
divided, or elsewhere. Effective authority exercised by, or through, persons became, for a
time, virtually a monopoly of the Church.
One of the principal themes which give historical coherence to the medieval millennium is
that of the curious and complicated mix of unity within the one Christian church and
contention among territorial rulers - and between them and ecclesiastical leaders for
supremacy.
The struggle between the two powers, secular and ecclesiastical, has the appearance of a
contest for mastery between physical force and authority. Throughout the Middle Ages
until possibly the last century or so, power meant, as it always has meant, ultimately,
physical power: superior armed strength. There were of course people able to persuade or
to manipulate others, and so possessed of what might in later times count as political
power, but such powers counted for very little unless allied with, or convertible into,
physical force. There were people with more land or more money, or command over
more credit or more productive capacity, but economic power could, in the last resort,
3
only be brought to bear on those whose power lay directly in resources of physical power
when it could be backed with or, if need be, used to pay for, armed strength.
On the other hand, authority as a form of power underwent a radical transformation. In
Roman times, authority had been a quality attached to an individual person. Birthright
social standing, wealth, military prowess, political distinction, rhetorical powers, all
carried with them a right to a stronger, even overriding, voice in decision-making; that is
what auctoritas meant. But with the advent of Christianity, authority became detached
from individual persons. The voice of supreme authority was that of God. And because
God had been made manifest in Christ, and Christ's words and intentions were conveyed
to ordinary mortals by the Church, which also interceded with him on their behalf, the
Church embodied divine authority. Kings were kings only 'by the grace of God' conveyed by the hand of the Church.
Emperors, kings, and princes sought to secure the foundations of their own power by
expanding the territories under their personal dominion and consolidating their control
over the places and the people within them - including those 'belonging to' the church.
Popes and leading ecclesiastics asserted their spiritual powers to the point of claiming an
authority over people superior to that of their secular rulers and, when that authority was
challenged by rulers, over them, too.
Increasingly, both sides sought the reinforcement of law. But law did not come in as a
third, neutral, element. In any case, both sides had their own system of law. Nor is law
in itself a source of power. As Dworkin has pointed out, the force of law comes from its
origins, or its originator - from the answer to 'Who says so?' over and above the answer to
'What does it say?' However, it was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that new
laws were made - 'positive law' in the sense of new legislation. Up to then, the authority
of law was that of custom.
In the pursuit of power during the Middle Ages, opportunism ruled. It always does - or
almost always. But it shows up rather more clearly during this period of history than at
others. And one major opportunistic strategy was to claim jurisdictional rights.
4
II
While its most solid basis was religious sentiment, the authority of the Church had more
than one source. Among the memories and relics of the Roman past which remained,
even in the darkest times, the biggest memory-store of all, naturally, was Latin. And, so
far as Western Europe was concerned, it was the Church which, almost single-handed,
ensured its preservation in speech and writing. Christian belief became the passport to
literacy and to the immense institutional and institution-building resources stored in Latin
transcripts. Christianity not only survived but actually spread among the invading tribes sometimes, as in the case of Britain, well after the Roman Empire had been forgotten.
Accordingly, when conditions began to mend, the authority which started to make its
presence felt was that vested in the Church.
What countervailing pressure there was against the perpetuation of a system founded
exclusively on force came from the Church, and most of the strength of that pressure lay
in an appeal to the past. There is of course nothing peculiar to the early Middle Ages in
this. In later times as well as earlier, the same sort of appeal (which has to be distinguished
from the authority inhering in tradition) has been a familiar reinforcement of essentially
ideological claims. But, during the Dark Ages, and all too often in the centuries that
followed, the world in which people lived was unrelievedly Hobbesian, one of 'continual
fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty and short.' The
attractions of an ordered, peaceful and benign world ordained in the distant past by Christ
and his apostles and reaffirmed by his vicars were more vivid and more potent, and the
appeal to it more fervent and more desperate than anything which came later, even though
the inspiration was much the same. It was all the more powerful an influence over men's
minds because it was underwritten by the invocation, overt or implied, of the mercy of
God, Christ's love, and the protection of the Church.
On all these counts the promise of deliverance was authorised by reference to the past:
real, mythical or, in truly Orwellian fashion, invented. "Not the least significant feature of
the medieval period," Walter Ullmann has remarked, "is the great reliance placed on
authority." But the authority - auctoritas - invoked was something other than that vested
in Rome's patrician order, or Senate, or Emperor. Authority came in the shape of custom
or tradition, or, better still, of documentary evidence from the past. "The value of an
auctoritas increased proportionately with its age: the older the auctoritas the more weight
and standing it had." It is this, Ullmann goes on, which explains the readiness to forge
documents, which "gave a practice or an institution the halo of moss green antiquity."2
Above all, the Church was the gatekeeper of the spiritual world, commanding access to
God, Christ and salvation. All of this represented the monopoly control of a resource on
which, once the Bishops of Rome had managed to establish their supremacy over all other
bishops, they built a powerful spiritual and cultural empire.
The dualism of temporal power and spiritual authority was manifested both symbolically
and practically in the clearest possible way. It was a dualism which extended to emperor
2
W.Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, 3rd. ed., Methuen, 1970, pp. 359-60.
5
and pope, to mortal body and immortal soul, to multiple domains and the one
Christendom, and to the means by which power on the one hand and authority on the other
were sustained and exercised. Dualism is imprinted in almost every aspect of the Middle
Ages. It is discernible in the structure of society itself, founded as it was on coercion (or
protection from coercion) and possession by right of arms, homage, maintenance and
vassalage on the one hand, and, on the other, possession and ownership by right of lawful
inheritance, oaths of fealty, and the award of benefices. Law itself was divided between
lay justice and ecclesiastical justice, and between the common law, with its appeal to
immemorial custom, and natural law, the reflection of God's law and commandments.
The dualism extended to mankind and to individual men, who were mortal bodies but also
immortal souls; they were seigneurs, liegemen, vassals and serfs and at the same time
members together of the congregation of the faithful. In this respect, the dualism could
easily turn into a dichotomy, two sets of principles which were mutually exclusive and,
much of the time, in conflict. It rarely amounted to a dyarchy, an ordered structure
subordinated to the two sets of principles in harmony with each other.
The potency of religious faith and the influence exercised by the Church was not lost on
territorial rulers. The coronation ceremony by which a new king's titular powers were
confirmed by God through the mystery of consecration, was adopted universally quite
early on; indeed, its appeal may have played no small part in the spate of conversions in
the fifth and sixth centuries, when the first to submit to baptism were kings and their
families. Later on, not only were churchmen the only persons capable of performing
clerical and administrative (as against judicial) tasks but monarchs came to look on
bishops as their natural allies in the unceasing battle they had to fight against the nobility.
Bishops were everywhere appointed by kings, and, as the landed property bestowed on the
Church accumulated, they became powerful landed magnates in their own right. This was
especially the case in Germany. Otto I's move in 'immunizing' bishoprics and abbey lands
from the administration and jurisdiction exercised by dukes and counts within their
territories was merely a useful reinforcement of the tie, not a revolutionary move.
When relative order emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the time when it is just
possible to make out the structural and topographical lineaments of modern western
Europe, power and authority were still separate and distinct from each other. But it is also
possible to discern opportunistic attempts on each side to take over the other and to claim
the addition of authority to power or of power to authority. William I's invasion of
England was 'authorised' by the Pope. Gregory VII himself was installed in the Lateran by
the Roman mob, a method of forestalling properly constituted election which he had
successfully initiated twelve years earlier at the installation of Pope Alexander II. Any
number of similar moves were made, and although in the event most proved stillborn or
short-lived, they yet left behind traces enough to ensure future attempts.
On the one side, the springboard for such attempts was the ascendancy established (for a
few years) by a king like Henry II of England - and tried for time and time again by
German emperors - over all other powers, authorities and interests in their territories, an
ascendancy gained by sheer force of arms, directly applied or threatened. On the other,
there was the authority built up by successive popes until it was rendered, by Gregory VII
6
in the first place, into a comprehensive system of authority which, he claimed, extended
over all worldly powers.
Kings, to reinforce their power, invoked the authority which they and their contemporaries
saw as inherent in the common law and in those interpretations of Roman law, then being
worked out from Justinian's Institutes in the new law schools of Italy, which could be used
to the same effect. As against this, the pope's authority was founded on the gift of divine
grace and on his position as Christ's vicar, which empowered him to confer the right to
rule or to confirm it (and also to withhold or withdraw it), all rendered, in turn, into a
comprehensive system of domination to which the earthly powers of emperors, kings and
princes were declared subject.
In the thirteenth century, it is true, Innocent III and Innocent IV came even closer than
Gregory VII to the actual exercise of superior authority - so close indeed, that the church
acquired almost all the apparatus, and much of the appearance, of a modern state: "The
medieval church was a state. Convenience may forbid us to call it a state very often, but
we ought to do so from time to time, for we could frame no acceptable definition of a state
which would not comprehend the church. What has it not that a state should have? It has
laws, lawgivers, law courts, lawyers. It uses physical force to compel men to obey its
laws. It keeps prisons. In the thirteenth century, though with squeamish phrases, it
pronounces sentence of death. It is no voluntary society. If people are not born into it,
they are baptized into it when they cannot help themselves. If they attempt to leave it,
they are guilty of crimen laesae maiestatis, and are likely to be burnt. It is supported by
involuntary contributions, by tithe and tax..."3
Thus Maitland. And it is easy to see how the question he asks would be resolved in his
eyes by the way the evidence he cites is ordered: the apparatus of law takes precedence.
Doubtless the medieval church has to count as a state if we accept that the definition of a
state as Rechtstaat - "a relatively centralised legal order", in Kelsen's minimal wording,4
which it is not - as we have good cause to know. It may be that the definition of the state
in terms of the Machstaat of Macchiavelli (and Weber) will prove insufficient, too, but for
us a state without armed forces - 'a monopoly of violence' - is unthinkable. In any case,
Maitland was more concerned with whether or not the medieval church-state could be
regarded as federal (coming to the reluctant conclusion that it could not), and the point is
perhaps - for once - truly academic. For the popes' monarchic claim was in fact twofold:
papal supremacy, or at least hegemony, over secular rulers, and absolute authority over
the Church itself. The first proved unattainable. Put simply (as Stalin put it, somewhat
later), the pope had no battalions - no resources of military power: "Popes dreamed of a
militia of St. Peter, of secular rulers obedient to command, of knights sworn to faithful
service, of mercenaries paid to act as agents of the church,"5 but, without any resources of
military power of their own, popes had to rely on allies; and these, time and again, found
betraying a pope even more profitable, and rather less risky, than their fellow monarchs.
3
F.W.Maitland, "William of Drogheda and the Universal Ordinary", in Canon Law in the Church of
England, C.U.P., 1898, p.100.
4
H.Kelsen, The Pure Theory of Law, trans. M.Knight, Univ. of California Pr., 1970, p. 286.
5
R.W.Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, Penguin, 1970, p.19.
7
The second aspect of the claim, however, the establishment of absolute papal authority
within the Church, was accomplished in full, although, up to the time of the Papal
Revolution, the odds were against this, too.
III
There is nothing to suggest that the church, in its earliest days, had any institutional
structure other than that of small communities of Christians bound together by faith and
brotherly love. Each congregation doubtless had its more revered teachers or elders, and
they might have been accorded some authority as overseers or 'shepherds', although such
authority was of the strictly personal kind. Nor was it long before certain men and women
were appointed for the dispensing of alms and similar tasks. They became familiarly
known as 'deacons' (the title commonly applied in the Empire to anyone elected or
appointed to any fairly lowly appointment - the 'ten' implied in the title having only the
vaguest numerical reference).
It was towards A.D. 200 that leading men in each community - earlier converts or those
with evangelical gifts - became known throughout the eastern parts of the Empire as
presbyters or episcopi. At the same time there is a first indication of differentiation in
status between them, the deacons, and the rest of the community. This particular
development came later in Rome, and it was not until the middle of the third century that
the tradition of St. Peter's investing Clement as his successor and as 'bishop of Rome' was
formulated.
Ordination, by which priests as well as deacons were made members of a separate ordo,
following the now customary rank ordering of citizens under the late Empire, came later
still, after the Empire became officially Christian. It was then the Roman emperor who
stood at the head of the Church as well as of the Empire. It was he who appointed bishops,
who became virtual dictators within their own diocese so far as matters affecting the
Church were concerned, although their diocese was in practice no more than the urban
centre of a 'civitas'.
During the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, the administrative structure of the Empire was
collapsing under the ignorance, disregard and demands of the Germanic tribes who were
invading or occupying the West. But at the same time the barbarians were also being
converted fairly swiftly to Christianity. So, as the power of the imperial government
declined in the western part of the Empire, the authority of the Church grew. However,
the leadership role enjoyed by the bishops (a role exploited to the full in Rome by Leo I
and Gregory I) was still fairly circumscribed, both the area and the congregation of their
bishoprics still being confined, for the most part, to the cities. Only in a few places did
bishops found churches in rural areas and appoint priests to them; but this was where the
bishops had land of their own, either bequests from wealthy Christians or endowments
from emperors who had come to find this the most convenient way of paying their
officials. The more conscientious, or more richly endowed, bishops were thus able to
provide land both for building churches and for endowing their priests during their tenure
of office.
8
As the cities were ravaged or vandalised, and their populations shrank, the intimate
connection between the cities and the bishops, on which their authority and the powers
they had acquired were founded tended to slacken. In the earliest times, before the
conversion of the Empire, bishops (or presbyters) had been chosen, perhaps even elected,
by their congregations, both laymen and deacons. After Constantine, it was for the
emperors to appoint them (or to confirm their appointment). This right was taken over by
the kings who took over the rulership of the West. Only in Rome itself, and in one or two
other cities which remained relatively populous, did the electoral system and the powers
of its bishop survive. Elsewhere, life, activity, people, power, all drained into the
countryside. It was then that the landed possessions of bishops began to assume
importance.
Under the later Roman Empire, the ownership of land had passed into the hands of fewer
and fewer people; most provinces consisted of a number of great estates, populated for the
most part by servile coloni. Even when these estates had been given as endowments in
earlier times, under the Empire, few of them were bequeathed in perpetuity to a bishop, or
to the Church; they reverted to the donors' heirs. This changed as things got worse, but
endowments became much more randomly located; bishops remained the principal
beneficiaries, but their possessions often lay well outside their diocese. Founding churches
in them meant, almost inevitably, a conflict between the possessor bishop and the bishop
whose diocese they were in, both claiming jurisdiction, authority over appointments, and
so on.
There were still more complications as the barbarians settled in increasing numbers, and
were converted to Christianity. Lay magnates endowed churches, and the endowment was
often proffered not to a bishop or a priest but to the saint to whom the church was
dedicated - a practice which became fairly common. "The land came to be uniformly
studded with churches built on these terms, and the earlier private churches, raised before
the barbarian conquests, seem to have fallen in line with the later both as to customary
endowment and as to the rights claimed by the lord; in the latter respect, indeed, there was
no difference between churches on lay and on ecclesiastical lands. The bishops regarded
themselves as landlords, and preferred that the churches on their estates should be held of
themselves by the same tenure as the clergy held theirs of lay lords. They would have the
customary rights of patronage and superiority rather than the more strictly ecclesiastical
authority of an earlier time. Thus the feudal conception, and with it the feudal terms
benefice and advowson, came into use for the definition of the position of the clergy."6
By the time of Leo I and Gregory I, bishops, with only the most tenuous allegiance to the
emperor remaining, with the structure of imperial government collapsing, and they
themselves hardly admitting of any superior in the Church, were becoming virtually
autonomous. In the next century, this trend was reversed as the power of the bishops fell
away, but it returned in the eighth century and thereafter in greater strength as bishops
became assimilated into the temporal structure of landed nobility and feudal service.
6
E.W.Watson, "The Development of Ecclesiastical Organisation and its Financial Basis", Cambridge
Medieval History, Vol. VI, 1929, p.532.
9
In those lands settled by Germanic peoples, the pre-Christian custom of endowing priests
with land ('glebe'), the produce from which they had to share with their chiefs, was
continued - but 'produce' came to include any offerings and dues made over to the priest.
The same happened in the case of tithes, which make their first appearance in the Empire
of the fifth century. First a purely voluntary offering, which it was thought proper to
divide among the bishop, the clergy, the poor and church building and maintenance, it
became assimilated during the seventh and eighth centuries with the land-tax which had
been customary under the Roman Empire. Charlemagne made it a universal tax, the
proceeds of which were to be handed over to 'the clergy' - a suitably indefinite term which
it was fairly easy to interpret as meaning bishops (who were included among the principal
administrative officers of the king) and monasteries.
By the tenth century, the office of bishop had become thoroughly politicised. In England,
bishops were numbered among 'the king's thegns'. In France and Germany also, bishops
held their land as tenants-in-chief of the king. As a matter of course, the king would
choose a member of the nobility to serve him as bishop. As a matter of course, too, the
service which bishops rendered in return included military service. "In England, from
early in the ninth century, bishops fought and fell in battle, and the military duty of
Frankish bishops during the same period became one of their most conspicuous
functions."7
The dual role of the bishops, seigneurial and sacerdotal, was resolved simply enough in
material terms by splitting their possessions into those devoted to ecclesiastical purposes
and those which, under the bishop, served the king, from whom he had received his office.
Ecclesiastical management within the diocese - the supervision of priests and churches
lying some distance away - became the responsibility of an archpriest or rural dean
appointed by the bishop. Ecclesiastical affairs in the city itself - the 'episcopal sedes', or
see - were the responsibility of the particular deacon who, following fairly rigid custom,
accompanied the bishop in the performance of his duties. The archdeacon, representing
the bishop, looked after diocesan finances and the affairs of the bishop's 'ecclesiatical'
estates; he also had powers of supervision over all clergy in the diocese generally, but
more especially those in the cathedral and churches of the city. For within the cathedral
itself clerical posts multiplied as its prosperity increased. Clerics and monks were
appointed by the bishop as canons, either to sing the rotation of the Psalter (the duty from
which their name derives) or, generally, to carry out his orders.
Again, as diocesan property increased, so did the complexity of diocesan affairs,
especially as benefactions of land outside the diocese became common. The usual solution
was virtually to follow customary feudal practice and appoint clerics to specific
endowments, allocated to prebends. A large, well-endowed cathedral might have as many
as fifty, many of whom might be, and often were, absentees - royal servants, Italian clergy
or nobles - enjoying the income without any priestly duties; the rest, with extra
endowments to reward their residence, and with a numerous body of assistant priests,
deacons, monks and laymen, formed their own inner corporate group, the cathedral
chapter, electing a dean as their head.
7
E.W.Watson, ibid., p.542.
10
At the same time, the bishop being drawn more and more into the ambit of secular affairs,
his attendance at the cathedral became limited to official occasions. Almost inevitably,
therefore, the cathedral clergy, constituting as they did a powerful interest-group within
the diocese, revived the earlier claim of the right (as representative' of the clergy and
congregation) to elect the bishop and, further, to participate in decision-making, forming,
as they, along with the bishop, did, one corporation.
By the twelfth century, at the end of the first thousand years of its existence, the Church
had developed a form of organisation at diocesan level which was sufficiently welldefined and widespread to make the term 'hierarchic' a familiar label for a structural
characteristic common to a large number of organisations. The bishop stands in overall
authority at the head, and below him are ranked, in order, archdeacon, dean, rural dean,
prebends, canons, deacons, monks, and laymen, all of them executing specific duties
within the diocese, many of them within the cathedral church itself, others with specific
authority over priests and deacons, and over the temporal and sacerdotal affairs of
churches and church lands within the diocese or possessed by it. What is more, the
hierarchy was composed of a variety of different official posts, each of which bore its own
set of responsibilities. (Again, the word 'office' for a set of such duties attached to an
individual incumbent bespeaks its ecclesiastical origin; it meant, to begin with, a church
service). The lineaments of a fully-fledged administrative structure are already visible.
On the other hand, the rights and duties, privileges and obligations attached to each office
were regarded as established by tradition backed in many cases by doctrinal authority and
as such secure from superior or rival officials. Further, the several positions had all
emanated not so much from the bishop's own powers and authority of rulership as from
contingencies arising from the spread of the Christian faith, the accumulation of Church
wealth, and the increasing splendour and complexity of church ceremonies and rituals.
And, further still, at the head of the whole group of clergy was a select collegiate group,
the chapter, who regard themselves as having the authority which came from their
representing the totality of members of the Church within the diocese. A kind of
constitutionalism permeated the diocesan organisation, especially when the chapter
claimed the right to determine matters of diocesan policy and appointments - including the
election of the bishop.
So, by the eleventh century, when the hierarchic order of 'feudalism' and of the Church
were assuming what appeared to be durable, mature, form, an alternative structure was
developing within the diocese. The bishop retained his powers as feudal lord, but the
diocese was becoming visible to his subordinates as a corporation.
IV
The Church as a whole was composed of the totality of Christians, and, like all such
corporate entities, it was held to be more than the sum of its individual members. At the
same time, the corporate body of the Church, which had a physical presence in the
corporeal life and worldly activities of its members as well as oversight of their spiritual
11
essence, could be represented in terms of the human body, a simile which became
extraordinarily potent and also lent itself to extension into imaginative anatomical detail.
It was as the Western Empire was collapsing in ruin that the bishops of Rome began their
climb to ascendancy. (The title 'papa' was reserved for them only after the sixth century;
before then, it was a form of address applicable to any bishop.) It would have been out of
the question in Constantine's or his immediate successors' time for the bishops of Rome to
lay claim to primacy on the basis of being St. Peter's successor, or Christ's vicar.
However, by the time the hierarchy of bishops, deacons and laymen was fully articulated,
it was easy for the pope to portray himself as the head of the body of the Church, with the
rest subject to him and its limbs and organs - the ordained clergy - his instruments. It was
in this guise that the "monarchic form of government was given its permanent theoretical
fixation by Leo I."8
Its 'permanent fixation' did in fact remain largely 'theoretical' throughout the next
thousand years, the claim to supreme authority, temporal as well as spiritual, over all
Christians being challenged inside the church as well as outside it. But it was never
surrendered. What does seem extraordinary is that for almost a thousand years after its
first appearance in the office of bishop of Rome the papacy, which was lucky to have
reasonably effective incumbents for even ten years out of a hundred, went from strength to
strength, however falteringly, while empires, kingdoms and dukedoms switched from
triumph to catastrophe - and sometimes extinction - from one decade to the next.
The papacy did, of course, have the unity of the western church on its side, but the unity
was itself, to begin with, unsure, partial and fragile. The Franks and Saxons stayed for
centuries with the Arianism to which they had first been converted, and the Celtic church
survived some time after the confrontation with the church of Rome at Whitby. The
conformity which eventually replaced the differences had, like them, more to do with
liturgy, the Christian calendar, and forms of ascetic devotion than with questions of
subordination to the pope or centralisation. Bishops were appointed by kings and
magnates, as they had been by the emperor in the two centuries or so of the Christian
empire, and were as likely to align themselves with them - and with the emperor, after
Charlemagne - as with the pope, whose election as bishop of Rome was also a local affair.
Missionary ventures were initiated by the faithful in many different countries; few, in fact,
were launched from Rome.
The founding fathers of the Papacy, Gelasius and Leo I, took their stand in the fifth
century first on the separation of the higher authority vested in the 'principate' of the
Roman Church from the power entrusted to the emperor in order to protect the 'corporate
union of Christians', and, secondly, on the jurisdictional primacy of the bishop of Rome
over all matters affecting Christians. It was a primacy vested in him not so much by the
declarations to that effect put out by emperors in the last hundred years of the western
Empire as by virtue of his location in Rome and of his 'double apostolic succession', the
see of Rome having been founded by both St. Peter and St. Paul.
8
W.Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, p.7.
12
The papacy naturally sought to reinforce its spiritual hegemony and also, almost
inevitably, to use it to establish itself as a worldly power. Some, perhaps most, of the
reasons for this lie in the strenuous efforts which the popes had to make to fend off the
takeover bids mounted by the emperors of the Eastern Empire, who claimed supreme
spiritual authority as well as temporal power, the 'universal church' of Christendom being
equivalent, in their view, to the 'body politic' of the Roman Empire. 'Caesaropapism' had
its roots in both the imperial constitution and the Old Testament. Augustus had possessed
supreme constitutional auctoritas' as princeps' and supreme sacerdotal leadership as
pontifex maximus. The divinity accorded him after death was assumed by later emperors
during their lifetime, and emperor-worship was fully established by Diocletian's time. As
for the Old Testament, just as David and Melchizedek were both kings and chief priests,
so was the Roman emperor 'rex-sacerdos'.
The papacy's appetite for temporal power when the first claim to it was made was an also
entirely straightforward reflection of the situation in which the papacy, and the Church,
found itself. By the eighth century the Church - monasteries, bishoprics and papacy - was
acquiring a great deal of landed property; bishops were being brought increasingly into the
ambit of temporal power and, as individuals, into the political and administrative structure
of kingdoms and (after Charlemagne) empire. The supremacy - 'monarchic' supremacy claimed by the great popes could only, in truth, be validated if it were made actual in
temporal terms: i.e., by the surrender of supreme overlordship by kings and princes to the
pope.
The centuries of conflict between the emperor in Byzantium and the pope in Rome ended
in the division of Christendom between the Eastern and the Roman church. No such
solution could obtain for the even longer struggle between popes and emperors in the
West, after Charlemagne had been crowned Emperor of the Romans in the year 800. For,
after they had emerged undefeated from the earlier conflict, the popes acquired
pretensions to worldly power of their own, as well as spiritual authority. In the process,
the Church's monopoly of literacy was put to good use. Well before 800, forged
documents (of which the Donation of Constantine is the most notorious) made their
appearance in which was asserted the supremacy of the pope over all kings and princes.
(This was meant to include even the Roman emperors in Byzantium, who still laid claim
to a sovereignty which combined spiritual authority and secular power). Pope Stephen II
pushed the 'special relationship' the popes had cultivated with the Frankish kingdom so far
as to have presented to him the 'Patrimony of St. Peter' - the later 'Papal States'- as a gift
from the King of the Franks in 756, on the basis of having at least a part 'restored' to him
of the Roman Empire which had been 'donated' by Constantine. But this was of
comparatively minor importance compared with the use made, century after century, of
the 'Donation of Constantine', the 'Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals' and other forgeries:
"It is impossible," Walter Ullmann has written, "to exaggerate the influence which this
fabrication had upon medieval Europe and on the Papacy specifically .....According to the
Donation, Constantine wishing 'to give the Roman Church imperial power and dignity of
glory, vigour and honour,' handed to the pope all his imperial insignia and symbols......
They all became the pope's property.... Furthermore, the pope was given the imperial
13
palace as his residence, as well as the city of Rome, all provinces of Italy, and the
occident. Lastly, Constantine wished to put the imperial crown on the pope's head, but most significantly - the pope refused to wear the imperial diadem."9
Charlemagne's coronation as emperor by the pope (under extremely dubious
circumstances) in the year 800 was used for centuries as further testimony to buttress the
papal claim. Charlemagne himself, if he saw the danger, took no account of it; he
secured his position by negotiating with the emperor in Byzantium, saw to it that it was he
who nominated, and crowned, his son as his successor, and performed the ceremony in
Aachen - which he even planned to institute as a second 'New Rome'. His conception of
his position as emperor was very much in line with what had been Justinian's; he was lord
of the Church, one who, as Alcuin put it, had been made rector of the Christian people
through the dispensation of Christ, and on whom the whole salvation of the Church of
Christ rested.10
The dissension between Charlemagne's grandsons, which led to the division of his empire
between them, and the onset of the second wave of invasions led this time by the Saracens
(who attacked Rome and sacked the two major basilicas there), abolished, for a time, all
but the memory of the Carolingian empire. However, the empire was revived, albeit in
diminished form, and the papacy was no better off. For although there was not the
complete subordination there had been to Charlemagne, the emperor had to intercede
more than once to settle papal elections, and the bishops in the Frankish kingdoms sought
to make themselves independent of pope as well as emperor.
One pope alone, Nicholas I, having dealt firmly with renewed verbal assaults on his
primacy from Byzantium, presented the same front to the Frankish emperor, asserting this
time his magistral right, as the supreme guardian of peace and justice, to intervene in the
affairs of the empire. Yet he was followed by a long series of ephemeral, ineffectual, and
sometimes criminal popes. To quote Geoffrey Barraclough's dismal recital: between John
VIII, who was murdered in 882, and John XII, "that 'dissolute boy', eighteen years old
when he became holy pontiff, who died (in 964), according to the scandal-mongering
bishop Liutprand of Cremona, of amorous excess while making love," one, Stephen II,
was strangled in prison and another, Benedict VI. smothered. "The fact is that they were
noblemen appointed for reasons of family policy or politics, scions of the different
aristocratic families..... which were striving to establish themselves as hereditary rulers
over the duchy of Rome."11
The next century, the eleventh, saw a resurgence of the empire and a succession of
emperors who took it upon themselves to reform the papacy - to rescue it, in fact, from the
popes. On the other hand, it was also the century not only of Leo IX but of Gregory VII,
whose pontificate marks a turning-point in the history of the papacy.
9
W.Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, Penguin edn., 1965, pp.59 and 60-61.
See G.Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy, Thames & Hudson, 1968, p.45.
11
ibid., p.63.
10
14
V
From the middle of the eleventh until well into the thirteenth century, the West underwent
- or, rather, produced - a series of revolutionary changes. Some of these, like the
reconstitution of medieval kingship by the Normans in Sicily into a kind of despotism,
were short-lived, although they had some consequences which stretched into the future.
Others, like the establishment of the Italian city-republics, lasted for centuries. Still others,
like the regeneration of urban life, the concentration of trade and industry in the towns on which it was founded - and the emergence of community politics and the artistic,
cultural and intellectual renaissance - which it fostered - had their permanent effects. But,
for contemporaries, it was the revolutionary change in the organisation and political
standing of the Church which must have produced the most immediate, sweeping, and
dramatic changes.
It was during the Papal Revolution - Maitland's 'Hildebrandine age', when the church
was 'in truth becoming a state,'12 - that "Very great efforts were made.... to give western
Christendom an efficient central government sufficient for directing the main areas of
human life."13 The papal court was radically reconstructed and so enlarged and
professionalised as to attract almost as many references by historians to the 'model
bureaucracy' created by the medieval church as to its being the first 'modern state',
centuries before any government or administration could earn either title.
One practical step towards the monarchic rule the popes were aiming at had been made in
the eighth century, when archbishops were appointed by the pope, to serve as his
viceregents in the several 'provinces' of the Western Church (although it was a long time
before their rule became effective, and then only to be curtailed once more by the
thirteenth century popes). In the same century, Pope Stephen III took a further step when
he nominated seven priests as 'cardinal bishops', thus clearly setting himself over and
above the highest order of ordained clergy. But it was not until the eleventh century that
the college of cardinals assumed something like its final shape and its lasting prominence,
and this as the decisive step towards wresting the papacy free from imperial control. A
Council of the whole Church convened by Pope Nicholas II in Rome in 1059 lodged the
right to elect the pope with the cardinals. They were bishops and other clergy from
dioceses in and around Rome who performed some offices in services held in the four
great basilicas and twenty-eight churches in the city and who, a little earlier, had been
assigned a few administrative duties. This in fact was no more than what accorded with
what churchmen everywhere were trying to make standard practice in the case of bishops,
who were elected by their cathedral chapters (even though it was still, often enough, the
king who either put forward candidates or reserved the right to ratify an election). For that
matter, election was in accordance with traditional theory concerning the accession of
kings to their thrones - in accordance with practice, too, in the case of the Empire, and
some other territorial domains.
12
13
F.W.Maitland, "William of Drogheda...." loc. cit., p.100.
R.W.Southern, op. cit., p.19.
15
The 'Papal Revolution' itself, however, was the culmination of a process which, beginning
in the tenth century with the Cluniac movement, was aimed directly at emancipating the
Church from its subordination to emperors, kings, and feudal lords as an essential first
step towards cleansing it of corruption and sin.
The Benedictine monasteries which multiplied in all the countries of western Europe from
the sixth century onwards supported communities which not only followed the same rule,
as against the personal model offered by some revered individual recluses, but in its rules
laid much stress on submission to superior authority. Benedictine monasteries were
centres of learning and literacy, and it was literacy and Latin which gave churchmen sole
command of knowledge of the institutions of the past, including Roman law. Literacy and
Latin also created the ability to communicate over distance and time with more effect and
greater certainty than could be done by word of mouth; this is an essential requirement of
any large-scale administrative system - as Charlemagne recognised, for churchmen (the
bishops he appointed as his principal administrators as well as the monks who staffed his
secretariat) served as the agents through whom he governed his empire.
The two purposes of the Cluniac movement - emancipation from secular power and moral
hygiene - were closely connected. The sale of benefices (simony) and clerical marriage,
two major targets of reform, brought the clergy within the scope of royal jurisdiction
concerning the holding of fiefs, service, and inheritance. And it is reasonably safe to
assume that the experience of secular rule and administration gained in the service of
Charlemagne and his successors reinforced their zeal for emancipation from lay
domination as a necessary preliminary to purifying the Church.
Not that the Cluniac movement of itself loosened the hold which emperors, kings and
local barons had over the Church, or even lessened the supremacy over clergy as well as
laymen to which emperors and kings laid claim in virtue of their anointment as 'Christ's
vicars'. Indeed, for a hundred years after the movement began, the Condition of the
Church worsened. But two things were accomplished which laid the foundations for later
popes. In the first place, whereas Benedictine monasteries had been virtually autonomous,
subject only to the jurisdiction of the local bishop, all monasteries which adhered to the
'rule' of Cluny - and there were over a thousand by Leo IX's time - were under the
jurisdiction (though not direct rulership) of the Abbot of Cluny; this made them parts of a
corporate entity much more tightly integrated than empire or Church - or, outside of
Sicily, any contemporary kingdom. Secondly, the Cluniacs were able to enlist the support
of the German emperors, and so prepared the ground for the appointment - by the
emperors - of the reforming popes Leo IX, Nicholas II, and Gregory VII.
It was the very sincerity (or self-willed assurance) of the Ottonian emperors' endeavour to
reform the Church 'from above' which set off the 'Papal Revolution'. In order to be able to
accomplish anything at all in this direction, they had to assert their supremacy. And this
became a major scandal in itself when Henry III, in Rome to celebrate his coronation,
having demoted their rivals, appointed two nominees of his own in quick succession. It
was the second of these, Leo IX, who, though a kinsman and a friend of the emperor,
made the first stand against the subjection of pope to emperor. But the central figure of the
16
papal revolution was his chief aide, Hildebrand, a monk of Tuscan birth who, even if he
did not spend the years at Cluny which he was said to have done, was thoroughly imbued
with the Cluniac spirit. During the four pontificates which preceded his own election ('by
the Roman mob') as Gregory VII he was closely connected with, if not solely responsible
for, the design and the engineering of the reforms which commenced the work of
recreating the papacy and reorganising the Church.
Riding high on the wave of moral reform which the emperors had sponsored in the first
place, Gregory elevated the authority of the papacy to the highest point it had ever
attained, challenged the emperor's rights and prerogatives, then humiliated him when the
challenge was defied, and went on to lend his support to an 'anti-king'. Although he
thereafter lost everything, dying in exile five years after his replacement as pope by
Clement III, the papacy was never again reduced to the abject condition of the previous
centuries, in spite of the catastrophic episode of the Great Schism and the appalling reigns
of some later popes. There were two reasons for this: his successful claim to jurisdictional
supremacy and the organisational reconstruction effected by him and his immediate
successors.
Gregory did much more than assert his independence of the emperor. The main
instrument of radical reconstruction was his Dictatus Papae, incorporated by later popes
into legislation at successive councils of the church. This asserted, among other things,
the pope's right to depose emperors and kings, the sole right to legislate for the community
of Christians, to act as supreme judge, and to absolve the subjects of unjust rulers from
their oath of fealty. Built into the edifice of canon law, the substantive system of law to
be applied within the jurisdiction of the church, with the pope as supreme judge, these
propositions challenged the juridical authority of the emperor within his empire, of kings
within their kingdoms, and of princes and lords within their domains. By the beginning of
the fourteenth century, the papacy was attributing absolute sovereignty to itself.
"The pope was head of the church; all other Christians were its limbs, its members. He
had full authority (plenitudo auctoritatis) and full power (plenitudo potestatis). Although
in practice his powers were limited - they increased only gradually, especially in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - nevertheless, in law, from the time of Gregory VII,
the pope was the supreme legislator, the supreme administrator, the supreme judge. He
could make laws, impose taxes, punish crimes. He could establish and suppress
bishoprics. He could dispose of ecclesiastical benefices and had final authority with
respect to the acquisitions, administration and alienation of all church property. All
actions and decisions of church officers or bodies - for example, decisions of ecclesiastical
courts or disputed elections of bishops - could be appealed to him. In addition, he was
universal judge of first instance; any Christian could resort to him on any matter requiring
judicial resolution, and he had sole cognizance of so-called major causes, such as cases
involving the deposition of bishops or the determination of disputed articles of faith. He
had supreme authority to excommunicate those who were recalcitrant. He alone could
summon a general council, and its decisions took effect only after he confirmed them.
Finally, he was the supreme teacher of the church, having a decisive voice in the
definition of ecclesiastical dogmas and the determination of the rules of the liturgy and
17
other matters of worship. Also in the twelfth century the pope acquired the sole power to
canonize saints."14
To these one can add the general superintendence of all church property (there were even
suggestions that he was actually owner, or principalis dispensator of the patrimonium
Christi), and the virtual monopoly of the distribution of indulgences, previously an
episcopal perquisite. In addition, while impositions by bishops were stringently regulated,
"the Roman fiscal system (tithes and annates) grew and increased from the time of
Innocent III."15
The application of canon law itself was of course restricted to church property and to
clerics in the first instance, but since legal, fiscal and administrative affairs were
everywhere in the hands of the clergy, whose monopoly of Latin, if not of literacy
altogether, was still virtually complete, this meant that large bodies of men in the
immediate entourage of kings and princes, as well as abbots, bishops and other church
potentates, could in many instances appeal from the judgment of their own overlords or
masters to another, and foreign, jurisdiction.
More to the point, perhaps, the legal and religious authority now wielded by the pope was
exercised through a larger, more competent, and better organised body of secretaries,
administrators and lawyers than were in the service of any single emperor or king.
VI
Such an accumulation of powers in the hands of a single person had as necessary
consequence a great increase in the size of the pope's court.
It was not long before the college of cardinals took on the position and powers in
connection with the pope and the Church of a cathedral chapter vis-a-vis the bishop and
the diocese. This eventually raised the same questions concerning the supremacy of the
pope as did cathedral chapters concerning the diocesan autocracy of bishops. "The term
'Romana ecclesia' as a result of the initiation of this corporate body, acquired a corporate
complexion."16
There is in these developments an obvious, even conscious, imitation of the apparatus of
imperial and royal government, as it developed in the second half of the medieval
millennium. The cardinals, with their own authority enhanced in the eleventh century and
again in the twelfth, when they took precedence over archbishops, were the pope's
councillors, and occupied the principal posts in the offices and law courts of Rome. The
college of cardinals and the pope's 'household' officials (chancellor, chamberlain,
14
H.J.Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard Univ. Press,
1983, p.206.
15
G. Le Bras, "Canon Law", in C.G.Crump and E.F.Jacob, eds., The Legacy of the Middle Ages, O.U.P.,
1932, p.334.
16
W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, p.321.
18
marshals, high steward, secretaries and the rest) constituted the papal curia, on the lines
of the imperial and royal curiae already in being. Some of them, in different ways and to
different degrees, exercised electoral rights; all of them certainly regarded their superior pope, emperor or king - as obliged to consult them in important matters.
Like the courts of contemporary emperors and kings, the papal curia was a judicial and
administrative body; and, just as with them, administration and jurisdiction were closely
connected - indeed, were scarcely distinguishable. The papal chancery kept records of
decrees, regulations and other governmental decisions, and the chancellor was keeper of
the papal seal; but the chancery also issued writs concerning legal cases. The exchequer the Apostolic camera - acted as treasury and was responsible for financial matters; it also
had its own court for civil and criminal cases arising from disputes over taxation and
church finance.
The pope himself (Maitland's 'universal ordinary') presided over the court of general
jurisdiction - the consistory - and claimed not only that it could act as a universal court of
appeal in all cases covered by the canon law, but that "the apostolic see is an
omnicompetent court of the first instance for the whole of Christendom"17. Further, as
papal jurisdiction increased in scope and in legal business, "the popes began to appoint
judicial auditors (cardinals, bishops, or simple chaplains). In the thirteenth century, the
auditors became a separate court, called the Audience of the Holy Palace."18 A court of
appeal, and a 'penitentiary' (a tribunal for non-criminal ecclesiastical cases) followed later.
The pope, too, could give absolution, and removed the right to distribute indulgences from
bishops to himself.
Of course, cases submitted to Rome from beyond the Alps would ordinarily be tried by
priests nearer at hand to the litigants, but even so, a papal rescript was necessary,
delegates appointed by him, and judgment agreed.
The absolute rule established by the popes over the church after the Papal Revolution was,
as Professor Berman has insisted,19 essentially a matter of legal authority: of jurisdiction and legislation, and not simply of his position at the head of the hierarchy of ordained
priests. It was exercised by means of the Papal Curia - cardinals, priests, chaplains and
deacons - which disposed of an army of secretarial and clerical assistants in Rome, and by
the systematic deployment of delegated judicial and administrative authority - not so
much through the existing priestly hierarchy, however, as through specially appointed
plenipotentiaries, designated, in conscious imitation of the Roman Emperors, as papal
legates. It was the legates, also, who handled negotiations with emperors and kings, and
did so, as plenipotentiary representatives of the pope, with far more authority than was
usually commanded by imperial and royal envoys and emissaries.
17
F.W. Maitland, "William of Drogheda and the Universal Ordinary", loc. cit, p.104.
H.J.Berman, op. cit., p.209.
19
ibid., p.206.
18
19
VII
As I remarked earlier, the papacy has been credited not only with the invention of the
modern state but also with the creation of modern bureaucracy. The work of the curia was
indeed discharged by an organised body of officials under direction from above and
according to an ordered system of regulations governing decisions and procedure. But it
was a system imposed by the priestly and juridical nature of their work more than by the
requirements of an administrative system. Payment by regular salary, which we take to be
one of the marks of modern bureaucracy, was rare, or merely nominal; the attempt by one
pope early in the thirteenth century to provide a fixed income in place of the bribes, fees,
gratuities on which curial officers depended was wholly unsuccessful. Payment of curial
officers - and rewards for the curia itself - was a perpetual problem. It was met mostly by
the award of benefices.
The management of all the business which the new regime generated was concentrated in
Rome (or rather, wherever the pope was, for the papal court, like the courts of all
medieval kings and emperors, was peripatetic20). Like royal courts, too, the administrative
core was the household, but, with the vast expansion of legal, financial and administrative
business, "much of the work of papal government operated through the cardinals'
households."21
"We do not need Namier to show that it was the family... that determined selection and
entry into the household, whether it was the household of pope, king, cardinal, bishop or
earl. The paternalistic nature of curial government - papal, royal, episcopal - extended the
conception of the family into a wider field. A pope, king, or bishop who did not provide
for his own, 'especially for those of his house,' as Adam Marsh reminded Grosseteste [the
twelfth-century Bishop of Lincoln who set himself against the papacy's practice of
appointing 'Roman rascals' to English benefices], citing I Timothy 5.8., 'had denied the
faith and was worse than an infidel.'"22
The cardinalate itself remained a stronghold of nepotism, dominated by the great Italian
houses of Annibaldi, Colonna, Conti, Fieschi, Orsini and Savelli, who supplied the papacy
with its own signoria (and with several of its popes). The new regime, by which
legislation, jurisdiction, diplomacy, taxation, financial management and ownership of
church property was all centralised in Rome, gave them an enormous increment of power
and influence. Moreover, centralisation proved to be self-reinforcing. There were few
cases of any importance, especially those affecting church property and the disposal of
benefices, which did not find their way eventually to Rome. "Appeals had been so much
encouraged that to go to the highest court in the first instance was often a short cut.
Sooner or later the cause would be laid before the pope, and therefore time and money
would be saved by at once seeking the threshold of the apostles and 'impetrating' an
appointment of delegates."23
20
J. Sayer, "Centre and Locality; Aspects of Papal Administration in England in the Later Thirteenth
Century." in B.Tierney and P. Linehan, eds., Authority and Power, C.U.P., 1980, p. 115.
21
ibid., p. 118.
22
J. Sayer, "Centre and locality..." pp.115-6.
23
F.W.Maitland, op. cit., p. 113.
20
The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, therefore, saw the growth of an immense traffic in
legal business between Rome and the provinces of the church, especially with the
provinces of Canterbury and York in England, the strongest and consequently the most
recalcitrant of medieval kingdoms. As Jane Sayers amply demonstrates, there were very
considerable pickings available to those who could influence the disposal of benefices and
the ultimate control over church property which papal absolutism brought:
"Of the thirty-six prebends of York, twenty-one .... were in the hands of foreigners
(mainly Italians from the great papal families) at some point in the [thirteenth] century....
Three prebends were occupied by the Fieschi, two by the Savelli, three by the Orsini, two
by the Gaetani, one by a Conti and one by a Ceccano....Fifteen of the fifty-six prebends of
Lincoln had foreign occupants. Lincoln supported five Colonnas, two Fieschi, two Conti,
two Savelli, two Annibaldi, and various relatives of those families...."24
The proportion of Italian prebendaries may have been higher in York and Lincoln than in
the other seven English cathedral chapters, where the king's court, as well as the pope's,
took its share, but prebends in English cathedral chapters represented only a fraction of the
benefices which members, relatives and friends of members of the papal curia could pick
up. One Pandulph de Sevilli "was a papal notary, and prebendary of Hereford, Salisbury,
and York, and several French cathedrals."25
In return, the curial beneficiary was expected to look after the interests of the bishops and
chapters of the provinces in which the sources of his income were located; there was much
correspondence seeking support for dispensations - for illegitimacy, for pluralism, and so
forth - but much more for support in the innumerable and everlasting legal disputes
referred to the courts of Rome. A fairly open and well-developed system obtained, by
which cardinals and others whose legations and assignments made them conversant with
the affairs and the priesthood of different provinces of the church acted as their sponsors
in the curia: "Archbishop Peckham, when he was quarrelling with the bishop of Hereford,
sent to his proctors in Rome a list of the judges who would be 'good', of those who would
be 'better', of those who would be 'best'; and in the eyes of a litigant the most impartial
judge will not be the 'best'".26
A large and elaborate system of client relationships grew up between the curia in Rome
and the church in each province, one which bears a close resemblance to the system of
'foreign clientage' under the late Roman Republic. Once again, the medieval church is
found reproducing one of the more characteristic institutions of the Roman Empire in the
conduct of its affairs.
In the long run, the most profound transformation of all brought about by the Papal
Revolution was the establishment and acknowledgment of the dichotomy of lay power
and ecclesiastical authority which had previously existed implicitly, and which the
24
J. Sayers, op. cit., pp. 122-3.
ibid., p. 123.
26
F.W.Maitland, op. cit., p.115.
25
21
revolution itself was explicitly intended to resolve by establishing the overall supremacy
of the pope over both the church and the kingdoms of western Europe. The eventual
reduction of the dichotomy, if not its total abolition, which was one of its aims, was the
work of the Reformation and of the absolutist regimes which began life with it. But even
before that, the sovereign supremacy of the papacy over the Church itself had been
challenged from within the church.
There is a considerable body of literature dealing with 'the Conciliar Movement'. By this
is usually meant the accumulation of writings which furnished the basis for the authority
of the Councils of the whole Church which met in the fifteenth century. The first (the
Councils of Pisa and of Constance) were accredited with the authority to heal the Great
Schism: the co-existence, between 1378 and 1419, of a pope in Rome and an anti-pope in
Avignon. Having exercised that authority, a Council was next convened at Basel in 1439
to enact a compromise solution whereby the Hussite radical reformers would be reclaimed
into the Church. However, it went on to assert its authority over the pope and to legislate
for far-reaching reforms in the Church, issuing decrees on election to benefices and
abolishing pontifical taxation. Faced with the opposition of Pope Eugenius IV, it
proceeded further still, and deposed him - thus provoking a further schism.
The literature on the conciliar movement is very largely taken up with commentaries on
the canonical writings which began to be collected and, in a sense, edited - 'glossed' - in
the eleventh century, and thereafter circulated widely. The accumulation of interpretations
and commentaries which argued the case on both sides - the monarchic powers of the
pope and the overriding authority of the corporate body of the Church - are without
question of the first importance, and most of our knowledge of medieval views on
political, constitutional and ecclesiastical matters is based on them. Yet it is arguable that
the strategies and tactics of bishops and chapters in competing for control over diocesan
affairs, and the organisational changes made at diocesan level and below, played a
considerable, perhaps major, part in the evolution of 'conciliarism' itself as well as in the
formation and testing of ideas concerning the nature of hierarchy and of the way in which
the 'corporation of the Church' was constituted.
More strikingly, perhaps, conciliarism played its part in shaping the idea of vested,
'natural', rights which played so large a part in offsetting the absolutist claims of kings
after the Reformation. Through the thousand-year-long conflict between emperor and
pope, the idea of papacy and the idea of kingship seemed often enough to be reflections of
each other; it is certainly the case that governmental forms and administrative apparatus
developed on both sides in a long drawn out process of imitative rivalry.