The 1122 Concordat of Worms settled disagreements over the practice of simony, but power struggles continued between western rulers and the papacy. Popes and monarchs used the law, deceit, disinformation, and when all else failed, threats, violence and outright bullying to gain power. Eventually, rules of laws and presidents overcame secular encroachment of temporal government authority, but before that happened, succeeding popes attempted to use public perceptions to gain an edge. For example, Pope Leo III, understanding how imagery could be misconstrued among the masses erected a picture, thereby angering King Lother III, who said:
“It began with a picture, the picture became an inscription, the inscription seeks to become an authoritative utterance. We shall not endure it, we shall not submit to it; we shall lay down the crown before we consent to have the imperial crown and ourself thus degraded. Let the pictures be destroyed, let the inscriptions be withdrawn, that they may not remain as eternal memorials of enmity between the empire and the papacy.”
The picture in question was a mosaic erected in Lateran Palace. The picture showed Lother III kneeling at the Pope’s feet. Its inscription claimed Lother III had received the crown from Pope Leo III, thereby implying a new precedent of Papal lordship. Lother III insisted the picture and inscription be removed from public viewing, and after some argument, the Pope agree. Eventually, the incident was forgotten by everyone except the next king, Frederick of Barbarossa.
When Frederic became King in 1152, he vigorously resisted any attempt of papal subterfuge, even refusing the customary acts. For example, upon his first meeting with the Pope, Frederick refused to hold the Pope’s stirrup, which was customary at the time, but after twenty-four hours, his nobles convinced him the act was purely ceremonial and meant nothing. However, when Frederick and Pope Hadrian entered Rome and the Roman Senators announced the imperial crown only laid within their terms to bestow on Frederick, Frederick broke into a bitter rant and said,
“I have come. I have made your Prince my vassal and from that time until present have transferred you to my jurisdiction. I am the lawful possessor. Let him who can, snatch the club from the hand of Hercules...”
In other words, Frederick was stating that he had conquered all the empire on his own terms, and he did not need anyone else’s permission for anything, unless of course, someone else had the will and power to take the empire from him. Of course the implications of the speech were not lost on the Pope Hadrian, but that did not stop him from attempting to circumvent the new King Frederick. Pope Hadrian sent two representatives and a letter to Frederick who had gone to the Diet of Besancon. While translating and reading the letter, one asked rather innocently, “From whom then does he have the empire if not from our Lord the Pope?”
The question implied Pope Hadrian had given Frederick the empire making letter ambiguous at best, deceitful at worst. The angry Frederick ordered the papal representatives back to Rome and warned them to take the most direct route so they would have no opportunities to instill unrest within the empire.
King Frederick was not wrong to question the Pope Hadrian’s true intentions concerning the letter because as it turned out, Pope Hadrian had hoped the letter would be unchallenged and become a new precedent to the Pope’s claim of lordship over the empire. Furthermore, Hadrian could afford to write such an ambiguous letter because he knew that even if the letter was challenged, he could simply explain it away as a simple misunderstanding.
Both the Pope and the King complained bitterly about the incident to German Bishops, each tried to make a case against the other. In the end, the German Bishops sided with Frederick. Since they did, both Barbarossa and Hadrian decided it would be prudent to adopt a more conciliatory tone.
Therefore, while the twelfth century ended with a personal defeat for the pontiff and weakening papal authority over all the monarchs. However, things changed abruptly as Aristotle was formally reintroduced to western society.
By the first half of the thirteenth century, new translations of Aristotle developed theories of state that made papal arguments impotent. The newly developed theories no longer used theological premises and as early as 1202 new kingdoms of national rulers used the Aristotle arguments to stop recognizing any external superiors in temporal affairs. Unfortunately, those kingdoms also built up bureaucracies and networks of local administrators to administer justice and finance. And is so often the case, they also relied heavily on mercenaries to “legislate sporadically and attack systematically.” With the new powers, the monarchs mobilized national representative assemblies for whatever the kings wished to pursue and all these things cost money.
Therefore, while the church had used Papal authority to tax thus getting wealthy enough to begin interfering with secular politics, critics of the church, like Thomas Aquinas, pounced and claimed while both the spiritual and the secular had their places under god, it was up to man to determine when it was appropriate to obey either the church or the state because each was superior in its own way.
The Aquinas argument was not lost on the new pope. Pope Boniface VIII understood that if the Aquinas was right, and the Church and State were truly on equal footing, then the Church and its representatives were not required to obey the monarch. This made a convenient loophole to not pay taxes to the monarchs. So while Pope Innocent IV had stated Church property was to be used “so that it might come to the aid of all in need,” Pope Boniface VIII use the Aquinas argument to instruct the churches not to pay any taxes levied by any ruler unless first those taxes were first approved by the Pope.
However Philip the Fair (IV) of France took the opposite view and stated every monarch the right to tax anyone in their reign, including the clergy. In this way, the dispute over the right to tax clergy then became an issue over national sovereignty.
In the past, monarchs imposed taxes on ecclesiastical property throughout the thirteenth century with impunity. They understood it was not necessary to ask permission from the papacy because it was understood that the taxes were to only be used to fund armies needed to fight a just war. Normally just wars were defined as any war in which a Christian monarch was fighting a non-Christian nation to bring that nation under Christian leadership. Doing so, it was argued would then enrich the Church even more because there would then be more Christians to pay taxes and tithes to the Church. However, when two Christian Nations fought each other, and both kings raised funds by taxing everyone, including the clergy, the idea of fighting a religiously motivated just war became difficult to fathom. For example in at least one case Pope Boniface once Boniface declared a war unjust, he was able to flex the papal muscle by instructing the Clergy not to pay the taxes levied against them. However, when the kings then tried to force the Clergy to pay the taxes, Boniface further strengthened the Pope’s power by threatening to excommunicate not only any clergy who paid the taxes, but anyone who tried to collect the taxes too.
However, King Philip the Fair of France, much to his credit, did not attempt to enter a theoretical debate over the issue of the Pope’s right or the authority to stop a monarch from demanding taxes from anyone in his own realm. Instead, in August 1296, Philip forbade the export of all forms of negotiable currency from France. This action effectively stopped any money from making its way to the Papacy. Since the Church relied heavily on French funding for every aspect of the Papacy, Boniface was livid, saying, “He would suffer ruin and death rather than sacrifice any of the liberties of the church.”
Furthermore, while Philip the Fair was cutting off French Papal funding, two other groups also had their targets set upon Pope Boniface. The Powerful Colonna family of Rome had two cardinals as family members. The cardinals were angry at Boniface for what they considered inappropriate family favoritism. The second group, the even more powerful Spiritual Franciscans, “Hated Boniface as the epitome of the clerical worldliness that they despised and denounced.” Between the two groups, they publicly charged Boniface with heresy, simony, and that he had tricked the former Pope into resigning and then had arranged that Pope’s murder. The charges were to be considered along with the whole question of succession to the papacy.
Meanwhile, as the months passed, the papal coffer diminished and eventually Pope Boniface was forced to negotiate with Philip. Now negotiating from a power of weakness Boniface also discovered Philip had sent Pierre Flotte, his chief minister to join the Colonna Cardinals and the Franciscans. Now Boniface had no room to negotiate and was forced to concede in principle that only the King could decide when it was necessary to tax the clergy within his own kingdom. This was an extremely important victory for the monarchs because now monarchy everywhere could now tax the church.
So while deciding the question of taxes had followed relatively straight forward rules of logic and principles of law, the next crises did not, and instead used deceit and misinformation and violence to decide the question.
The year was 1300 and the centennial of the church. Pope Boniface declared a year long celebration. It had been three years since the Pope’s humiliating loss over the right to decide if and when the clergy could be taxed. Philip the Fair tried to “assert once and for all his mastery over his own kingdom” when the second crisis between Philip and Boniface began. In 1300, Philip arrested Bishop Saisset. It really did not matter if he was guilty of any crimes. Instead, the issue began as another question of the rules of law. It ended as another important test of strength between a pope and a monarch.
According to Church Canon, a bishop could only be tried by the pope. However, Philip refused to allow the Church to do so and Boniface, with the consent and approval of the College of Cardinals sent a personal letter other documents to attempt to settle the dispute. Furthermore, because Boniface also had other issues that needed to be address, he ordered all the Bishops to Rome for a November meeting to be held the following year. However, in a test of strength, when Philip found out about the bishops meeting, he refused to allow them to go. Instead, Philip burned the papal letter and documents and new forged new ones, making it seem as if the Pontiff had claimed attempted to claim feudal lordship over all France. To further his own power, Philip created a brand new institution made up of nobles, commons, and clergy. This three prong entity met at the Cathedral of Notre Dame seven months before the bishops were supposed to be in Rome. During the meeting, the chief minister of France, Pierre Flotte repeated the story about Boniface claiming lordship over France knowing that if a lie were repeated often enough, people would accept it as fact. Flotte claimed Boniface had been in direct violation of God with the statements in the letter and accordingly should be branded a heretic. The repeated lies seemed to work. Everyone, it seemed, either believed the lies and forged documents or wanted to believe them. Seven months later, less than half of the French Bishops attended the mandatory meeting that November in Rome.
To make matters worse, the meeting was a colossal failure. Boniface, in desperation to regain lost papal power, released the Unam Sanctam, “A set of general theological propositions about the nature of the church and the position of the pope within it.”
The Unam Sanctam, by its very nature made any compromise between Boniface and Philip impossible. Philip, in retaliation, sent his new minister, Guillaume De Nogaret with several hundred mercenaries to kidnap Boniface. The plan initially worked but ultimately failed when the townspeople managed to rescue Boniface three days later. However, Boniface, given neither food nor water when as a prisoner never fully recovered from the ordeal and he ultimately died several months later, leading to a succession of new popes.
Eventually, a Frenchman named Clement V became pope. As Pope, he stated the, “Unam Sanctam was not to be interpreted as any new claim by the papacy to lordship over France.”
Instead Pope Clement V attempted to placate Philip by publicly commending Philip for his actions. However by this time it no longer mattered. Philip no longer seemed to care how he was viewed by the Catholic Church because Philip instinctively understood power had shifted from the Church to that of the monarchy.
Therefore, Philip had completed the process earlier kings and emperors had started when they each attempted to use the law, deceit, disinformation, threats, and violence to overcome papal claims to supernatural authority.
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