Fantastic Metropolis

These paradoxes would later come to tear the Church apart, thanks to the course that Innocent III would set as Pope: his attempt to raise the Church to a position of power over temporal princes and kings would result in the Church often acting as a temporal power, and when it did so, other temporal powers would move against it. During his lifetime, however, Innocent had little to fear: the Capetian dynasty would come to use his crusades to help unify France under its own banners, making bastards of the Saint-Gilles clan in its own holdings in Languedoc as it did the Plantagenets in Anjou and Aquitaine and Normandy. Philip Augustus was not the monarch of France who would later cause the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy (that would fall to his descendant Philip IV, also known as the Fair, he who struck down the Knights Templar) although he used the Albigensian Crusade admirably to help grow his own power base. Innocent III was in the tradition of Eugenius III, the student of Bernard of Clairvaux who had supported Hildegard of Bingen’s preaching. But unlike Eugenius, he came to the throne of Peter at a pivotal time when her fortunes were low: the Second Crusade agitated for by Bernard and Eugenius had ended in bitter failure, ultimately culminating in the loss of Jerusalem itself to Saladin. Several Popes rose and died in quick succession. The constant conflict between the papacy and the imperial power to the north only added to the confusion, but Innocent quickly took control of the situation, finding it easy enough to bring the Prefect of Rome (nominally loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor but, with the death of Henry IV in 1197, having no better alternative than Innocent) under his sway. He soon established his power through a series of actions, one of which included extorting from Henry IV’s widow various concessions that would lead to later conflict between the papacy and Frederick II, the emperor who would become known as Stupor Mundi for his intellect and outrageousness. (For a time, Innocent even served as Frederick’s mentor and guardian: one wonders if the intensely facile and inventive mind of Frederick found its first real adversary in the legalistic mentality of Innocent.) His intrigues reached into the dispute between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs that led to the double election of Philip of Swabia and Otto IV as Holy Roman Emperor in 1198, ultimately choosing Otto IV. (Granted, he flip-flopped on it, as Otto was as truculent and quick to anger as his uncle, Richard Cœur de Leon, and managed to offend most of his allies: only the assassination of Philip of Swabia prevented Innocent and the Princes from switching allegiances.) And when Otto went too far, tried to seize the Sicilian territories of Innocent’s ward Frederick II, and eventually allied with his uncle John of England against Innocent and his ally Philip Augustus in 1214, he was excommunicated, defeated and deposed in favor of Innocent’s choice Frederick.

Of course, Innocent may have lacked the ability to see into the future, elsewise he might not have been so quick to pick that particular brilliant but willful suzerain when his goal was papal supremacy over the empire, and indeed all Christendom. But it is still illustrative of Innocent’s essential nature and his use of the papacy as a temporal power: he dealt out interdiction and excommunication not as a matter of faith and salvation, but rather as a tactical weapon to keep rebellious lords and princes in line. To interdict a realm was to use the faith of a sovereign’s own people against him, to deny them mass and the sacraments, and to encourage rebellious lords under him to rebel. To excommunicate him was to render him without support in his own lands, to essentially make him a bastard in his own house. Now, when you look at Innocent’s tactical application of Christianity, of course heresies become problematic. If the Cathars spread out of southern France, and more lords pledged allegiance to their creed of opposition to the worldly, sexual abstinence outside of marriage, the effect on society would be immense. Cathars were paradoxically seductive to their opponents and yet fiercely and defiantly chaste: Gervase of Tilbury once attempted to seduce a Cathar lass in Reims and was rebuffed by her, which led to her arrest, trial and death sentence. Yes, that’s right: a Christian monk had a Cathar burned to death because she refused to surrender her virginity to him. Yet Domingo de Guzmn, the later St. Dominic who would establish the Dominican order, admitted in his letters that not only had he failed to make much headway preaching in Languedoc, but that the pretty young Cathar maids had often had more of an impression on him than he’d had on them. Think of the shock that must have coursed through the popes when the Dominic reported himself vulnerable to Cathar temptation. And a state within a state like Languedoc, nominally French but really a polyglot collection of independent lords owing but the most tenuous fealty to one another or to their suzerains, who were often helpless or disinclined to control them… such a state, totally seduced to Catharism, would be immune to Innocent’s greatest tactical weapons. Excommunication and interdict were of no avail against those that believed the Papacy to be a tool of corrupt matter, no more enlightened than any other institution of man, lacking in the knowledge of true spiritual good (the gnosis of the Perfect Ones, as the Cathars called their holiest figures) and thus no more or less able to do one whit to their souls than the French king. For sixty years, the papacy tried everything it could think of to end the Cathar heresy. It tried threats, excommunication, debate… the greatest scholars and debaters were sent into Languedoc. Bernard of Clairvaux himself, fresh from his defeat of Abelard and rational philosophy applied to the church, a setback for “Plato made into a Christian,” found himself unable to seduce Languedoc to his side. Nor did Dominic, nor did the arguments of Hildegard, herself probably the closest to the Cathar vision yet unable to cross the divide set in her path by Bernard and his student Eugenius, the rejection of Abelard’s Sic et Non, yes and no, and its application to Catholicism.