T H E I N T E R D I C T I N T H E T H I RT E E N T H C E N T U RY

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 The Interdict
in the Thirteenth
Century:
A Question of Collective Guilt

PET E R D . C L A R K E

1
 1
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Clarke, Peter D.
The interdict in the thirteenth century: a question of collective guilt/Peter D. Clarke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-920860-9
1. Interdict (Canon law) 2. Excommunication (Canon law) 3. Guilt (Canon law)
4. Punishment (Canon law) 5. Canon law—History. I. Title.
KBR3607.C53 2007
262.9’2—dc22 2007023160
Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
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 Preface

The interdict is a subject of great contemporary relevance. This was a sanction

of the medieval church normally imposed on an entire community because
of the conduct of its secular leaders. The interdict, therefore, raises issues of
collective guilt and punishment, the responsibility of the governed for the actions
of their governors, the justice and efficacy of imposing sanctions on a people
for the deeds of its leaders, the question of individual or collective consent
to the wrongs of others, and even the idea of individual or collective duty to
prevent others from committing such wrongs in the first place. These issues
are still of importance today, as much as they were in the thirteenth century,
not only for historians but also for lawyers, theologians, social and political
scientists, and moral philosophers. This book addresses these issues as they
were understood by medieval thinkers and churchmen, but hopefully this wider
academic audience will find something in this book which resonates with their
own work. Nevertheless this is fundamentally a historical study which explores a
largely neglected aspect of papal, ecclesiastical, legal, and political history of the
Middle Ages. It started life as a Manchester University PhD thesis completed in
1995 with a grant from the British Academy and under the enthusiastic and expert
guidance of Professor Jeff Denton. I only realized while extensively rewriting the
thesis as a book the truth of his many perceptive observations as my supervisor. I
am grateful to him and to my PhD examiner Professor Anne Duggan of King’s
College London, who recognized that I had made a ‘good start’ but needed to do
further research on manuscripts and in archives. The latter was carried out largely
between 1995 and 1998 in Rome, where I received the generous support of a
Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship. I benefited there from the advice
of Dr Martin Bertram of the German Historical Institute, Rome, who knows
more about thirteenth-century canon law manuscripts than anyone else. I am
grateful to him and to his institute for providing a welcoming academic home
for a British scholar at Rome. I also made frequent visits to the Stephan Kuttner
Institute of Medieval Canon Law at Munich University, and I am grateful to its
director, Professor Dr Peter Landau, for allowing me free access to its extensive
microfilm collection and for encouraging me to write this book. Its preparation
has incurred many debts to many other people, especially since this book has
been so long in the making, and I hope to have acknowledged below all others
who helped to bring it to fruition: the staff of the Vatican Library (in particular
the late Fr. Leonard Boyle and Dr Christine Grafinger), and of the British Library
(London), Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek (Munich), Bodleian Library (Oxford),
Cambridge University Library, John Rylands University Library of Manchester,
Bibliothèque royale (Brussels), Bibliothèque Nationale and Bibliothèque de
vi Preface

l’Arsenal (Paris), Nationalbibliothek (Vienna), the libraries of Gonville and

Caius College and Trinity College (Cambridge) and Merton College (Oxford),
Eton College Library, Durham Cathedral Library, Archivio di Stato di Firenze
(Florence), Archivio Comunale di San Gimignano, National Archives (London),
Archives départementales de l’Hérault (Montpellier), Cumbria County Record
Office (Carlisle), British School at Rome (in particular Valerie Scott and
Maria Pia Malvezzi), and the Keeper of the Archivio Vescovile (Volterra); as
well as the following colleagues and friends: Professor Dr Ludwig Schmugge;
Professor Henry Mayr-Harting; Professor Richard Sharpe; Dr Patrick Zutshi;
Dr Jörg Müller; Brenda Bolton; Professor David d’Avray; Dr Christoph Egger;
Dr Rosemary Morris (PhD internal examiner); Professor Jack Watt (for kindly
reading a first draft of chapter 1); Dr Joe Canning; Professor Ken Pennington;
Professor John Baldwin; Dr Martin Brett; Professor Manlio Bellomo; Dr Frances
Andrews; Alexander Murray; James Willoughby; Dr Magnus Ryan; Dr Bill
North; Dr Victoria Morse; Dr Kirsi Salonen; Dr Cordelia Warr; Dr Donal
Cooper; Dr Michèle Mulcahey; Dr Mary Sommar; Giulio Marcelli (a great
friend and flatmate in Rome); Bruno Boute of Leuven, the Courty family of
Paris, the Egger family of Vienna, the prior of St Albert and abbot of St Boniface
in Munich for their kind hospitality in those cities; and Lia, Angelo, and other
friends at the Vatican Library coffee bar. I am also grateful to Rupert Cousens
and his colleagues at Oxford University Press for publishing my book, and its
anonymous readers for their incisive and helpful comments. Finally I thank my
fiancée, Barbara Bombi, for her support and brightening my life while I wrote
the book, and my parents, Douglas and Edith, for their love and encouragement
throughout; this book is dedicated to them.
Peter D. Clarke
September 2006
 Contents

Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1

1. The Justification of the Interdict in Medieval Thought 14

1.1 Punishment of the Innocent 14
1.2 Collective Guilt and Punishment 21
1.3 Consent to Another’s Sin 29
1.4 Sin in Another’s Name 50
1.5 Conclusion 57

2. Kinds of Interdict 59
2.1 The General Local Interdict 59
2.2 The Particular Local Interdict 68
2.3 Personal Interdicts 75
2.4 Mixed Sentences 82

3. Laying of Interdicts 86
3.1 The Power to Interdict 86
3.2 The Canonical Procedure 103
3.3 Interdicts a iure 126

4. The Terms of an Interdict 130

4.1 Divine Offices 133
4.2 Sacraments 145
4.3 Ecclesiastical Burial 160

5. The Interdict in Action 169

5.1 Popular and Princely Responses to Interdicts 169
5.2 The Enforcement of Interdicts 187
5.3 The Interdict on San Gimignano: A Clerical Strike and Its
Consequences 204
5.4 A Tale of Two Cities: The Interdicts on Dax and Béziers 218

6. The Lifting of Interdicts 235

viii Contents
Conclusion 260
Bibliography 266

Index 283
 Abbreviations

N.B. Any abbreviations not listed below are to be found in the Bibliography.
A. anno, annum
AMN Analecta Medievalia Namurcensia
ASV Archivio Segreto Vaticano
BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
BL British Library
BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
BMCL Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law
BN Bibliothèque Nationale
CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina
Coll. I Collectio prima (collection of the canons of Lugd.
Conc. I); followed by the number of the canon.
Coll. III Collectio tertia (definitive collection of Innocent IV’s
Novelle); followed by the number of the chapter.
dist. distinctio (in works other than Gratian’s Decretum)
JL P. Jaffé, Regesta pontificum Romanorum ab condita
ecclesia ad annum post Christum natum MCXCVIII,
revised by S. Löwenfeld et al., 2 vols. (Leipzig
1885–88).
Lat. Conc. II Second Lateran Council (1139)
Lat. Conc. III Third Lateran Council (1179)
Lat. Conc. IV Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
Lugd. Conc. I First Council of Lyon (1245)
Lugd. Conc. II Second Council of Lyon (1274)
PL Patrologiae cursus completus … series Latina, ed.
J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris 1844–64).
Po. A. Potthast, Regesta pontificum Romanorum inde ab
anno post Christum natum MCXCVIII ad annum
MCCCIV, vol. 1 (Berlin 1874).
q. questio
reg. regula
v. verbum, verba
ZRGKA Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte,
Kanonistische Abteilung
Methods of citing legal texts:
Gratian’s Decretum: In Part I texts are cited by distinctio and canon, e.g. D.1 c.1
(the first canon in the first distinctio). In Part II they are cited by causa, questio,
x Abbreviations

and canon, e.g. C.1 q.1 c.1 (the first canon in the first questio of the first causa),
except at C.33 q.3 which forms the treatise De penitentia and where texts are
cited by distinctio and canon, e.g. De pen. D.1 c.1. In Part III (De consecratione)
texts are cited by distinctio and canon e.g. De con. D.1 c.1.
Decretal collections: In Compilationes prima-quinta (1–5 Comp.), Liber extra
(X), Liber sextus (VI), Clementine (Clem.), Extravagantes communes (Extrav.
comm.), and the collections of Alanus (Alan.) and Gilbertus (Gilb.) texts are
cited by book, title, and chapter, e.g. X 1.1.1 (the first chapter of the first title in
the first book of the Liber extra).
Roman law: In the Code of Justinian (Cod.) texts are cited by book, title, and
lex, e.g. Cod. 1.1.1. In the Institutes of Justinian (Inst.) and the Digest (Dig.)
texts are cited by book, title, and fragment e.g. Dig. 1.1.1. In the Novellae of
Justinian (Nov.) texts are cited by collatio, title, and fragment e.g. Nov. 1.1.1.
 Introduction

By the thirteenth century the interdict and excommunication were the chief
spiritual sanctions of the Western Church. By this time the two were sharply
differentiated in ecclesiastical doctrine. An interdict might affect an entire
community for the faults of one or more of its members, but St Augustine
had taught that excommunication might be imposed only on individuals for
their own sins, a view that Innocent IV confirmed as law.¹ Hence an interdict
did not signify collective excommunication (outlawed by 1246). Nevertheless it
needs to be pointed out that by the thirteenth century canon law distinguished
between two forms of excommunication, known as ‘major’ and ‘minor’, and that
the interdict corresponded closely to ‘minor excommunication’ in terms of its
effects. Both kinds of excommunication involved exclusion from church services,
the Eucharist and other sacraments, as did the interdict with certain exceptions,
but ‘major excommunication’ also involved total social exclusion with all the
consequences that implied.² Interdicts did not cut anyone off from the Church
as the body of the faithful, but, like minor excommunication, it suspended the
spiritual benefits of membership.
Distinct as the interdict was from excommunication by the thirteenth century,
it has received little separate and specific attention from historians. Admittedly
some interdicts are well known to historians, such as the interdict imposed by
Innocent III on King John’s England in 1208, and this and other such cases have
been the subject of several detailed studies.³ But it is some time since a general
overview of interdicts has been attempted. The only historical monograph on
interdicts in English appeared in 1909 and focused on Innocent III’s pontificate.⁴
By contrast excommunication has received far more recent general treatment,
though the abundant literature concerning it refers very little to interdicts.⁵ This
book attempts to remedy this neglect but cannot claim to be comprehensive.
Several obstacles face a general history of interdicts in the Middle Ages. Firstly,

¹ C.24 q.3 c.1; VI 5.11.5. ² Vodola, Excommunication, 36, 41–2.

³ See e.g. Cheney, ‘Interdict’; ‘Reaction’; ‘A recent view’.
⁴ Krehbiel. An excellent but older German monograph is Kober, ‘Das Interdict’. See also the
useful but brief treatment in Vodola, ‘Interdict’; Maisonneuve, ‘L’interdit’; and Hinschius, System,
v.19–31.
⁵ See e.g. Vodola, Excommunication; Logan; Helmholz, ‘Excommunication’; id. Spirit, ch. 14;
Murray, Excommunication; etc.
2 Introduction

interdicts occurred with increasing frequency by the later Middle Ages; therefore
sources regarding them multiply in this period. Indeed two fourteenth-century
interdicts are so well documented that a monograph has been devoted to each of
them.⁶ Hence the evidence is simply too abundant to allow anything other than
a superficial account of the development of the interdict across the whole Middle
Ages, especially after 1300. Secondly, it is necessary to understand the changing
political, ecclesiastical, and social context in which the interdict developed, but I
cannot claim any particular expertise in early medieval history. An unpublished
doctoral thesis over a century ago sought to trace the interdict’s origins and
evolution down to the twelfth century, and the time is ripe for a specialist in this
period to reassess such issues.⁷
These might seem negative reasons for restricting this study of the interdict
to the thirteenth century, but there are also positive reasons for doing so. First
of all it is in this period that the medieval papacy most fully developed its
claims to intervene in the affairs of secular rulers,⁸ and the interdict was a vital
tool of such interventionism. Indeed a community was subjected to an interdict
usually because its secular ruler had violated ecclesiastical rights. For example,
Innocent III imposed an interdict on France in 1199 because its king refused to
abandon his mistress and return to his wife despite papal refusal of a divorce;
in other words the interdict was meant to punish the king’s disregard for the
Church’s marriage law and its jurisdiction over matrimonial disputes. Innocent’s
exploitation of the interdict as a political weapon was much imitated by his
successors, and this development needs to be understood in the context of a
revolution in papal ideology largely initiated by Innocent himself, since this gave
rise to growing assertions of papal authority over lay rulers. The papacy, indeed,
increasingly used the interdict to bolster such claims in the thirteenth century.
Another good reason for concentrating on this period is that the papal registers
survive in a virtually continuous series from 1198.⁹ They record outgoing
papal letters and give vital evidence of papal relations with lay rulers. Hence
they shed much light on the operation of the interdict, since they include letters
threatening or pronouncing interdicts on recalcitrant rulers. Some letters indicate
why interdicts were imposed and how they were observed in practice. Others
provide accounts of princely and popular reactions to interdicts, usually derived
from petitions of clergy seeking papal support in enforcing such interdicts.
Thus they illustrate how popes responded to princely and popular opposition to

⁶ On the interdict against Lewis of Bavaria and of his supporters (1324): Kaufhold. On the
Florentine interdict (1376): Trexler.
⁷ Summarized in Howland, ‘Origin’. Documents on early interdicts were edited by Richter, De
origine.
⁸ See e.g. Watt, Papal Monarchy.
⁹ A critical edition of the registers of Pope Innocent III is in progress superseding older editions
in PL (see Bibliography s.v. Innocent III). Calendars of registers of other thirteenth-century popes
have also been published (see Bibliography s.v. Reg. Alexander IV–Urban IV).
 Introduction 3

interdicts. Papal letters also show that popes intervened not only over their own
interdicts but also those of other ecclesiastical authorities. Sometimes this was a
response to appeals against such sentences, since by the thirteenth century the
pope was seen as the church’s supreme judicial authority, or ‘universal ordinary’.
Papal letters might not only quash such interdicts as invalid but even grant
immunity from the interdict or at least from some of its effects. Finally these
letters show how the papacy developed and applied standard procedures with
regard to the interdict.
Indeed the main reason for focusing on this period is that popes established
a common law of interdicts between the late twelfth and the early fourteenth
centuries. This effectively regulated the operation of interdicts until the end of
the Middle Ages and beyond, since it formed part of the Corpus iuris canonici
that remained binding on all Catholics till 1917.¹⁰ The thirteenth-century papal
registers hence illustrate this law in action as it was being formed and the issues
that influenced its formation. It is, therefore, a fundamental assumption of this
book that ecclesiastical law and practice cannot be studied in isolation from
one another. As Brundage has recently observed, most records created by the
medieval church were legal in nature (and papal letters especially), so we cannot
make full and proper sense of them without a knowledge of the law that informed
them.¹¹ Conversely medieval canon law ought not to be treated simply as part
of intellectual history or the history of ideas; it affected people’s lives across the
Western Church in various ways. Indeed it is necessary to observe how the law
was applied in practice and understand how interpretation of it by commentators
influenced how it was applied. Furthermore a symbiotic relationship existed
between legal theory and practice in the thirteenth-century Western Church,
since most papal legislation of the period was essentially case law. For centuries
popes issued decretal letters in reply either to requests for judgement on specific
cases or for clarification of a point of law. But from the mid-twelfth century, as
papal jurisdiction expanded, these decretals proliferated dramatically in response
to external demand and came to form a growing body of new law. They are also
historical sources since many clearly refer to actual cases, and indeed some letters
cited below from the papal registers as evidence of practice also entered canonical
collections. Finally it must be recalled that growing numbers of clergy studied
canon law at universities from the late twelfth century, and that they included
many future popes and prelates who laid interdicts as well as lower clergy charged

¹⁰ The formation of this Corpus is discussed below. Literature on medieval canon law is too
extensive to cite fully; much of it is listed in the detailed bibliographies of the Bulletin of Medieval
Canon Law, 1– (1955– ). Excellent introductions are Brundage, Canon Law, and Helmholz, Spirit.
Standard guides to medieval commentaries on the Corpus are Kuttner, Repertorium, and Schulte,
Quellen, ii. Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique is also useful. A multivolume History of Medieval
Canon Law, ed. K. Pennington and W. Hartmann, has also begun to appear; an online version
of the last volume, a Bio-bibliographical Index of Medieval Canonists, is currently available at
http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington
¹¹ Brundage, Canon Law, 1.
4 Introduction

with enforcing these sentences. Canon law and the commentaries on it written
by their university teachers thus undeniably influenced their application of the
interdict. Indeed we cannot fully appreciate how interdicts worked at this time
without knowing how they were meant to work according to canon law and its
commentators.
Although this argument holds true for almost all the Church’s activities in the
thirteenth century, not only interdicts, a negative attitude to canon law has not
entirely disappeared among medievalists over forty years after Charles Duggan
berated it: ‘A curiously myopic view still survives, even among medievalists, that
canonical studies are merely of peripheral or highly specialist interest.’¹² Duggan
indeed concluded that it was far ‘from being a true opinion’. A basic aim of my
book is to demonstrate how canon law is central to our understanding of the
Church and its relations with society in the thirteenth century, and in particular
the interdict. In the first chapter the ideas of twelfth- and thirteenth-century
writers on canon law, theology, and Roman law will be examined to understand
how churchmen could justify a sanction like the interdict that seemed to punish
the innocent along with the guilty, in that it usually fell on an entire community
for its ruler’s fault. Evidence will be given of the influence of these ideas on
those using interdicts in the thirteenth century, especially Innocent III.¹³ Lay
forms of collective punishment were admittedly also potential influences, notably
penalties laid on a whole family or tribe for the crimes of one of its members.
But these secular sanctions were largely developed in the early Middle Ages and
thus need to be studied in relation to the interdict’s origins, which I am not
proposing here. And arguably the ideas of our twelfth- and thirteenth-century
thinkers constituted a more immediate and demonstrable influence on those
using interdicts in this period. In subsequent chapters explaining the interdict’s
operation canonical theory is presented along with examples of actual practice.
Hence canon law forms the essential backbone of the book.
In order to make this book accessible to those who are not specialists in canon
law, it is necessary here to sketch its development during the central Middle Ages.
This development will be traced from the appearance of Gratian’s Decretum
in about 1140. This canon law collection does not refer to the interdict, but
it includes texts that aroused debate on the related issues of punishment of
the innocent and collective punishment. Generally it marked a fundamental
turning point in the history of canon law and the Church. Earlier collections
had been compiled and they were an important source of texts for Gratian’s own
collection, but none of them had superseded the rest as the definitive summation
of the Church’s legal tradition. Gratian’s compilation was increasingly accepted
as such across the West by the late twelfth century. First within twenty years
of its appearance it became the standard textbook for the study of canon law

¹² Lawrence (ed.), English Church, 108. The italics are mine.

¹³ See also my ‘Peter the Chanter’ and ‘Popular Resistance’.
 Introduction 5

in Bologna, where Gratian himself had probably taught the subject. By the
mid-twelfth century Bologna was already acquiring an international reputation
for Roman law studies, and the Decretum also stimulated the growth of a canon
law school there. The earliest extant commentary on the Decretum was written
at Bologna in c.1148 by Paucapalea, possibly a pupil of Gratian. The most
important of these early Bolognese commentaries were completed in the 1150s
by Rolandus (once erroneously identified with the future Pope Alexander III),
in c.1164 by Rufinus, and in c.1171 by Johannes Faventinus.¹⁴ Those who
lectured and wrote on the Decretum soon became known as decretists, and
decretist schools sprang up outside Italy in France, the Anglo-Norman realm,
and the Rhineland. A French school was established at Paris by the 1160s
when Stephen of Tournai wrote his commentary on the Decretum; another early
decretist work of this school was the anonymous Summa Parisiensis (c.1170).
The Anglo-Norman school was centred on Oxford by the 1180s, and teachings
of two Oxford early decretists, Simon of Southwell and John of Tynemouth, are
reported in a commentary to the Decretum in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius
College MS 283/676.
A major reason for the Decretum’s success was that it was perfectly designed
for the classroom, and it is probable that Gratian originally compiled the book
for his own teaching. What made his book attractive as a teaching tool was
its ‘dialectical’ arrangement. The dialectical method was a common literary
technique among early twelfth-century scholars and involved assembling the
authorities for (pro) and against (contra) a particular proposition. It had been
popularized by the theologian Abelard’s Sic et Non, which collected contradictory
passages in the Bible, and similarly Gratian gathered conflicting legal authorities
and sought to resolve the contradictions between them through interpretation.
Accordingly Gratian entitled his collection a ‘concordia discordantium canonum’
(Decretum was a later appellation), and the canons there are interspersed with
his interpretative comments or dicta. His canons comprised extracts from the
Bible and Church Fathers, notably St Augustine, decrees of church councils, and
papal decretals. Recent research has demonstrated that the Decretum appeared
in at least two recensions, the first completed before 1139, perhaps as early as
the 1120s, and the second after 1139 and no later than 1158.¹⁵ The second
recension incorporated much extra material, including extracts from Roman law,
and was twice as long as the first. It has been argued that Gratian was not
responsible for this recension because it broke up the structure and argument
of the original, but it was this later version which was generally adopted.
Commentators on this recension continued Gratian’s work of harmonizing its

¹⁴ Twelfth-century decretist literature is described by Kuttner, Repertorium, 1–58, 123–271.

For editions of Paucapalea, Rolandus, Rufinus, Stephen of Tournai, and Summa Parisiensis, see the
Bibliography.
¹⁵ See Winroth. On the ‘dialectical’ method see Meyer.
6 Introduction

dissonant texts by interpretation. This process culminated in twelfth-century

Bologna with Huguccio’s Summa (c.1188), the summation of four decades of
decretist doctrine.¹⁶ By Huguccio’s day Bologna was the main centre for the
study of canon law in western Europe, attracting students and teachers from
north of the Alps. But their interests had begun to shift away from the old law of
the Church, as codified in the Decretum, towards new canon law that appeared
after the Decretum.
Ironically the Decretum partly stimulated the growth of this new law. Gratian
had exposed gaps in existing canon law and emphasized the papacy’s role as
supreme judicial authority in the Church, the ‘universal ordinary’. Indeed from
the mid-twelfth century the Decretum was effectively supplemented by the
papacy’s rulings on cases referred to it as ‘universal ordinary’. But one must be
wary of seeing this case law as self-conscious legislation from the outset. Though
the papacy sought to extend papal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction from the mid-
twelfth century, judicial business at the curia largely expanded in response to
external demand. Appeals to Rome from most parts of the West proliferated
from the mid-twelfth century, and papal decretals were essentially a by-product
of this process. But it was not the papacy that initially made decretals into
a body of law. Decretals were first assembled in private collections by their
recipients; they were indeed addressed to specific individuals. But, as interest in
the latest papal rulings grew, they began to circulate and canonists copied them
from various sources into their own collections. Many early collections were
compiled in England, and indeed English prelates were especially assiduous in
soliciting decretals partly as a response to the growing claims of royal jurisdiction
from the mid-twelfth century. This English interest in canon law also became
evident in the schools as we will see, but first let us return to early decretal
collections.¹⁷
These were initially haphazard affairs, but by the 1170s systematic collections
where decretals were organized under subject headings appeared. The most
important of these late-twelfth century collections was the Breviarium extrava-
gantium compiled by Bernard of Pavia (c.1188–92).¹⁸ It became the model for
most subsequent decretal collections. It was split into five books, each concerning
a broad area of decretal law: judicial powers (book 1); procedure (book 2);
clerical duties and privileges (book 3); marriage (book 4); crime and punishment
(book 5). Each book was further subdivided into sections or ‘titles’ (tituli) that
concerned specific aspects of its main theme. Most decretals on interdicts appear
in the title ‘De sententia excommunicationis’ in book 5 not only in Bernard’s
decretal collection but also most that followed it; Gilbertus was apparently the
only canonist to include a separate title ‘De sententia interdicti’ in his collection.¹⁹

¹⁶ See Müller, Huguccio. ¹⁷ See e.g. Duggan, Decretal Collections.

¹⁸ The ‘extravagantes’ of the title referred to decretals ‘wandering outside’ the Decretum.
¹⁹ Heckel, ‘Gilbertus und Alanus’, 217.
 Introduction 7

Bernard’s collection was the first of five generally used in courts and schools of
canon law before 1234, the quinque compilationes antique; hence his Breviarium
extravagantium became more widely known as Compilatio prima. The first
decretal collection officially approved by the papacy for use ‘tam in iudiciis quam
in scholis’ was Compilatio tertia. It contained decretals from the first twelve
years of Innocent III’s pontificate and was compiled by a papal chaplain Petrus
Beneventanus in 1210.²⁰ There is no evidence that Innocent commissioned it
but he did authenticate its content. This was largely a response to growing
forged decretals, and such papal approval was significant. Apparently Innocent
did not endorse Compilatio quarta, where Johannes Teutonicus assembled his
decretals not found in Compilatio tertia and canons of the Fourth Lateran
Council convened by him in 1215, and indeed canonists were slow to accept
this collection. Between these two Innocentian collections Compilatio secunda
had appeared. The work of a Welshman Johannes Galensis, it was said to be
secunda even though Compilatio tertia had appeared before it, for it contained
chronologically earlier material including twelfth-century decretals not collected
in Compilatio prima. Galensis largely derived these from the collections of
Gilbertus Anglicus (1202) and Alanus Anglicus (1205), two other canonists from
the British Isles active at Bologna. Finally Honorius III issued a collection of his
own decretals as Compilatio quinta in 1226, and unlike Compilatio tertia there is
no question whether the pope ordered the making of this collection, because its
bull of promulgation addressed to its compiler, Tancred of Bologna, makes this
explicit.²¹
These decretal collections, like the Decretum before them, became the subject
of canonistic commentary. Most of this activity was centred at Bologna, and
canonists from the British Isles were again deeply involved in this. Both Richardus
Anglicus (c.1197) and Alanus Anglicus (c.1201–10) wrote commentaries on
Compilatio prima, and Johannes Galensis likewise on Compilatio tertia (c.1212).
Iberian canonists were also active at Bologna; both Vincentius Hispanus and
Laurentius Hispanus composed commentaries on Compilatio tertia before 1215,
as did the German canonist Johannes Teutonicus (c.1217). The international
character of the Bolognese ‘decretalist’ school (decretalists being commentators
on decretals) indicates not only its reputation but the extent of canon law’s
influence. Furthermore the Bolognese decretalist commentaries circulated across
Europe, and in the early thirteenth century the Paris school of Petrus Brito also
produced commentaries on Compilatio prima.²² Some canonists even wrote on

²⁰ See Pennington, ‘Making’.

²¹ The first four compilationes were printed in A. Agustin, Antiquae collectiones decretali-
um … (Illerda 1576). Friedberg’s ‘edition’ of all five compilationes (see Bibliography) is unsatisfactory
as it omits the text of decretals included in the Liber extra (see below) though its compiler often
amended the texts he derived from the compilationes. For manuscripts of the compilationes and their
commentaries: Kuttner, Repertorium, 322–85.
²² See e.g. my ‘Collection’.
8 Introduction

their own collections, notably Bernard of Pavia in his Summa on Compilatio

prima (1192–8), Alanus in a commentary on his decretal collection (c.1206),
and Johannes Teutonicus in that on Compilatio quarta (c.1215).²³ The literary
activity of canonists thus concentrated on new decretal law by the early thirteenth
century, but they did not neglect the Decretum entirely. In c.1210–15 Alanus and
another unknown Bolognese writer (identified by some as Laurentius Hispanus)
wrote commentaries on it, known respectively as the Apparatus ‘Ius naturale’ and
Glossa Palatina. Several anonymous decretist commentaries also survive from the
French school of this period, notably the Apparatus ‘Ecce vicit leo’ (1202–10)
and Summa ‘Animal est substantia’ (1206–10).²⁴
Commentaries generally took the form of marginal notes surrounding the
legal text and relating to key words or passages in it. It was a common scholarly
technique to ‘gloss’ authoritative texts in this way, and interlinear and marginal
glosses had also been written on scriptural and Roman law texts since at least the
early twelfth century; Roman law indeed supplied many of the concepts and terms
of canonistic thought, as we will see, and influenced canonistic writing strongly
by the early thirteenth century. ‘Glosses’ not only elucidated the meaning of a
particular text but also noted analogies and contradictions between it and related
texts. In legal glosses these cross references were given in a highly abbreviated form
and were called allegationes.²⁵ Early glosses often comprised mere strings of them,
notably on the Decretum where they continued its work of identifying conflicting
legal authorities. But increasingly teachers of law added their own comments in
the gloss, and these originated largely as notes for their lectures in the schools, for
the lectures were based on close reading of the legal texts. Where they cited an
opinion of another teacher, they usually acknowledged him in the gloss with an
abbreviated form of his name, a siglum.²⁶ They also identified their own opinions
by sigla, e.g. ‘io.’ for Johannes Teutonicus. But not all glosses were authored and
circulated by the teachers themselves. Some are reported versions of their lectures
such as that on Compilatio prima (c.1205) by a pupil of Parisian canonist Petrus
Brito or the decretist gloss in a Cambridge manuscript noted above.²⁷
Besides glosses other genres of canonistic literature existed, notably the summa,
a treatise summarizing the rulings in a collection rather than analysing them
closely. It was normally transmitted separately from the legal text, e.g. Huguccio’s
Summa. Terse summaries of individual rulings were given in casus, notabilia, or
brocarda, e.g. notabilia of Paulus Hungarus (c.1220) on Compilatio secunda and
tertia. Finally canonists discussed specific legal problems or hypothetical cases

²³ Alanus’s commentary in Vercelli Cathedral MS 89 is described by Kuttner, ‘Alanus’.

²⁴ See Kuttner, Repertorium, 59–92, 206–7.
²⁵ These abbreviations are listed and extended by Mollat, Introduction. Methods for citing canon
law are clearly explained by Brundage, Canon Law, 190–202.
²⁶ Numerous sigla are listed and identified by Mollat, Introduction.
²⁷ Reported Brito gloss: n. 22. Cambridge manuscript: Kuttner, ‘Anglo-Norman Canonists’,
317–19.
 Introduction 9

in questiones which often reported disputations in the schools. A questio usually

noted the legal authorities for and against and then gave a ‘solutio’ reconciling
these authorities and hence applied Gratian’s dialectical method; the second part
of his Decretum indeed comprised a series of questiones.²⁸
The profusion of this literature was doubtless bewildering to students who
had to master it; hence for many texts a standard gloss or glossa ordinaria
that synthesized opinions of various commentators was established. The Glossa
ordinaria to the Bible begun by Anselm of Laon and his circle had paved
the way in the twelfth century. In c.1215 Johannes Teutonicus completed his
glossa on the Decretum that was accepted as ordinaria, but it was revised by
Bartholomew of Brescia thirty years later, and this later version accompanied
virtually all copies of the Decretum from the mid-thirteenth century into the age
of early printing. Certain glosses were also regarded as ordinaria on the quinque
compilationes, notably those completed by Tancred of Bologna around 1220
on the first three compilationes. Indeed his gloss appears in most manuscripts
of those collections. The only gloss on Compilatio quarta was by its compiler
Johannes Teutonicus and hence became ordinaria by default. Nevertheless the
Fourth Lateran Council canons in that collection also circulated independently
and were glossed by Vincentius Hispanus and Damasus (c.1215). Finally Zoën
Tencarius and Jacobus de Albenga wrote glosses (c.1230) on Compilatio quin-
ta, and Jacobus’s was the most widely diffused of these and hence effectively
ordinaria.²⁹
The decretal collections to which these glosses were attached were short-lived,
however, as the quinque compilationes were superseded in 1234 by the Liber
extra, so called because it was ‘extra’ to the Decretum. It was also known as the
Decretales of Gregory IX, rather misleadingly for it largely comprised decretals of
his predecessors derived from the quinque compilationes (which became antique
after the Liber extra appeared). Nevertheless Gregory IX had commissioned it
from his chaplain, Catalan canonist Raymond de Peñafort, whom he allowed a
free hand in editing this material, and the Liber extra included some 200 decretals
of his own, some of which he drafted specifically for it.³⁰ This marked a major step
towards more self-conscious papal lawmaking, and Gregory, following the lead
of his immediate predecessors in Compilatio tertia and quinta, further enhanced
the pope’s role in making definitive, exclusive, and authoritative collections of
decretal law.
The Liber extra’s rapid reception is illustrated by the writing of commentaries
on it within a few years of its promulgation on 5 September 1234. This did not
mean that glosses on the quinque compilationes ceased to be important as these

²⁸ On summe etc. see e.g. Kuttner, Repertorium, 123–256, 386–433, esp. 411–13 on Paulus
Hungarus.
²⁹ On these various ordinary glosses and their manuscripts, see Kuttner, Repertorium, 93–122,
322–85.
³⁰ See e.g. Kuttner, ‘Raymond’, and Michaud-Quantin, ‘Remarques’.
10 Introduction

collections lost legal force, for as most of the decretals collected there passed into
the Liber extra, so these older glosses travelled with these rulings into literature
on the new collection. Indeed one of the first commentaries on the Liber extra
was by Vincentius Hispanus (c.1236), who copied there many of his earlier
glosses on Compilatio prima and tertia and the Fourth Lateran Council canons,
often revising and updating them. Other early literature on the Liber extra
comprised the Summa of Johannes Hispanus de Petesella (c.1236), who taught
at Bologna and Padua, and the Lectura and Summa of Cardinal Goffredus de
Trano (d. 1245).³¹ Bolognese canonist Bernard of Parma also drafted a marginal
gloss on the Liber extra by 1239 and repeatedly revised it until his death in
1266. It was treated as ordinaria by the mid-thirteenth century and is found
in almost all manuscripts of the Liber extra. It cited many commentators on
the compilationes antique, thus maintaining the influence of the older decretalist
glosses. Alongside the glossa ordinaria, the most influential commentaries on the
Liber extra were those of Innocent IV and Hostiensis. Innocent completed his,
the Apparatus, around 1251, and though it draws on earlier literature that he
studied as a law student at Bologna, it also displays great originality of thought,
particularly on the question of collective guilt.³² Meanwhile Henricus de Segusio,
known as ‘Hostiensis’ since he was cardinal bishop of Ostia, wrote a Summa
(c.1252) and an extensive commentary by the time he died in 1271, and these
treatments of the Liber extra are subtle but less innovative than Innocent’s.
Other mid-thirteenth-century commentators on the Liber extra were southern
French canonist Pierre Sampsona and his pupil Bernard de Montmirat (d. 1296),
the latter being dubbed ‘Abbas antiquus’ as abbot of Montmajour, but they
‘collaborated so closely that it is easy to confuse their works’.³³
Meanwhile papal legislation continued to grow and was appended to copies of
the Liber extra. It comprised Innocent IV’s Novelle and Gregory X’s Novissime.
The Novelle circulated in at least three different collections, the first consisting of
decrees of the First Council of Lyon (1245).³⁴ The second largely comprised parts
of Innocent IV’s decretal ‘Romana Ecclesia’ (1246); this specifically addressed a
dispute between the Archbishop of Reims and his suffragans but was clearly also
conceived as general legislation, since it was reissued as such a month after its
original appearance. Finally Innocent IV confirmed his decrees, this decretal, and
eight further rulings in his third and definitive collection (1253). His laws were
glossed by Bernardus Compostellanus junior (before 1253) and ‘Abbas Antiquus’

³¹ On these commentaries see Schulte, Quellen, i.193; ii.81–3, 88–91. On Vincentius see Ochoa
Sanz.
³² On his Apparatus see Schulte, Quellen, ii.92–3, and Bertram, ‘Angeblicke Originale’. On
Bernard’s Glossa see Kuttner, ‘Glossa’.
³³ Hostiensis: Pennington, ‘Henricus’; ‘Earlier recension’. Sampsona and ‘Abbas’: Pontal,
‘Quelques remarques’; Vodola, Excommunication, 233–6 (quotation from p. 233); Bertram,
‘Pierre de Sampson’.
³⁴ See Kuttner, ‘Decretalistica’ and ‘Konstitutionen’; Kessler, ‘Untersuchungen’.
 Introduction 11

(1260) among others. Though Bernardus’s gloss was apparently seen as ordinaria,
Innocent’s gloss on his own laws, included in his Apparatus, was unremarkably
more influential. His 41 Novelle were supplemented by Gregory’s 31 Novissime
issued at the Second Council of Lyon (1274).³⁵ The gloss on the Novissime by
Johannes Garsias Hispanus (1282) was immediately accepted as ordinaria; thus
it was the most widely diffused. Other glosses included that of French canonist
William Durand the Elder (1289), noted as author of an important procedural
manual titled the Speculum iudiciale.
Subsequently the Novelle, Novissime, and other papal legislation issued since
1234 were incorporated in a new canon law collection promulgated on 3 March
1298 by Boniface VIII.³⁶ This was called the Liber sextus as it supplemented the
five books of Gregory IX’s collection. Boniface had commissioned three canonists
to compile it in 1296, one of whom was Bérenger Frédol, bishop of Béziers.
Bérenger subsequently wrote a treatise on excommunication and interdicts; thus it
has been supposed that he redacted the texts on these sentences in the Liber sextus.
However, it is clear that the pope himself contributed significantly to the Liber
sextus, as Bérenger’s treatise itself indicates, as over half the texts in this collection
are ascribed to Boniface and many of them appear there for the first time.
Some were admittedly adapted from the rulings of his predecessors, whilst others
resolved canonistic disputes about points of law, often affirming opinions of
Hostiensis.³⁷ Nevertheless it was a highly original compilation which represented
the culmination of self-conscious papal lawmaking, and canonists immediately
recognized it as authoritative. Johannes Andreae glossed it (c.1302) and his gloss
was ordinaria in his university of Bologna whereas the gloss of French cardinal
Johannes Monachus (c.1305) was ordinaria at Paris. Guido de Baysio (d. 1313),
nicknamed ‘Archdiaconus’ since he was archdeacon of Bologna University, also
wrote a commentary on the Liber sextus (and another on the Decretum known as
his Rosarium). Manuscripts of the Liber sextus were often accompanied by two or
all three commentaries, particularly in England. After 1317 they also normally
included another canonical collection, the Clementine, so called as it contained
constitutions of Clement V, many of them allegedly based on rulings of his
Council of Vienne (1311–12).³⁸ Although it was redacted by his death in 1314,
it was not promulgated till 1317 (by his successor John XXII). The gloss on the
Clementine by Johannes Andreae was generally recognized as ordinaria, and he
also wrote bulky commentaries, both called Novella, on the Liber extra and Liber
sextus before his death in 1348. By then decretal legislation and its codification

³⁵ See Kuttner, ‘Conciliar’; Johanek, ‘Studien’; Bertram, ‘Wissenschaftlichen’ and ‘Commentaire’.

³⁶ See Gagner; Le Bras, ‘Boniface VIII’; Schmidt, ‘Bonifaz VIII’ and ‘Frühe Anwendungen’; and
my ‘Two Constitutions’.
³⁷ On Bérenger see Schmidt, ‘Bonifaz VIII’, 230–2.
³⁸ See Menache, 288–305, and Müller, Vienne. On this early fourteenth-century literature see
Schulte, Quellen, ii.186–90, 191–3, 205–29. On Johannes Andreae see Kuttner, ‘Andreae’.
12 Introduction

had largely ceased;³⁹ the last major collection was John XXII’s Extravagantes
compiled and glossed by French canonist Jesselin de Cassagnes (c.1325). This
along with the Extravagantes communes, a fifteenth-century collection of papal
legislation issued since 1298, completed the Corpus iuris canonici. This body of
law also comprising the Decretum, Liber extra, Liber sextus, and Clementine was
first published at Paris in 1500 and frequently reprinted thereafter. A definitive
edition commissioned by Gregory XIII was published at Rome in 1582; this
‘Editio Romana’ remained the standard version of the Corpus until the appearance
of Emil Friedberg’s edition in 1881, though the latter is far from being the much
needed critical edition.
Clearly medieval canon law and canonistic literature represent a large, complex
body of material. Nevertheless various canonistic treatises on the interdict have
enabled me to penetrate this vast legal labyrinth, although most are late. The two
most significant are an anonymous treatise dated 1270 and generally attributed
to Hermann of Minden, a German Dominican,⁴⁰ and a treatise of the Bolognese
canonist Johannes Calderinus, the pupil and adopted son of Johannes Andreae,
completed shortly before 1359.⁴¹ The first is the earliest known treatise on
the interdict and draws heavily on Innocent IV’s Apparatus; the second is the
most thorough and original monograph on interdicts by a medieval canonist.
Beyond these treatises, I have investigated almost all the canonical collections
and commentaries cited above, largely in manuscripts; hence this book can claim
to be reasonably comprehensive on canonical theory in the ‘classical’ period of
canon law (1140–1317). It cannot make a similar claim for canonical practice,
though I have thoroughly searched editions and calendars of the papal registers of
1198–1303 for evidence of this. Chapter 5 contains case studies of three interdicts
based on these and other records, but the scope remains for many similar studies,
and this book aims to provide a framework in which these can be understood.
More generally it seeks to illuminate the relationship between the spiritual and
temporal powers in the thirteenth century. Though my subject may suggest an
emphasis on episodes of conflict between these powers, it also provides examples
of cooperation, for secular powers might aid the enforcement of interdicts and
conversely church authorities might use interdicts to defend secular interests.

³⁹ By the early fourteenth century papal legislation largely took the form of constitutions, i.e.
general abstract rulings, rather than decretals responding to individual cases. Indeed by then cases
referred to the papal curia were largely heard by the judges of the Rota, rather than the pope himself;
consequently the Rota increasingly made the case-law of the Western Church.
⁴⁰ Hermann of Minden (attrib.), ‘De interdictis’. Hermann was identified as the author by
Denifle and Ehrle, Archiv, ii.232. He was Dominican prior of the German province in 1286–90.
Manuscripts of this treatise are listed by Kaeppeli, Scriptores, ii.227–8 (no. 1878).
⁴¹ Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’. Another Bolognese canonist, Johannes de Legnano, observed in
his own treatise on the interdict dated 1359 (Legnano, ‘De interdicto’, fol. 335ra) that Calderinus
had published a treatise on the interdict at Bologna University ‘very recently’. Calderinus took his
doctorate in canon law at Bologna in 1326 and taught there from 1330 to 1359 (Schulte, Quellen,
ii.247–53).
 Introduction 13

Furthermore this study of a collective sanction seeks to raise important questions

about medieval notions of community, especially the relationship between the
head of a community and its members. Therefore this book explores three
fundamental dualities of medieval life: spiritual and temporal; individual and
society; and legal theory and practice.
 1
The Justification of the Interdict in Medieval
Thought

1.1 PUNISHMENT OF THE INNOCENT

An interdict was usually imposed on a community or place since its ruler had
sinned against the Church. Consequently, it punished the innocent along with the
guilty. This raised a moral and legal problem that twelfth- and thirteenth-century
canonists and theologians attempted to resolve in their writings. They were
familiar with a number of authorities that argued against the punishment of the
innocent. In Ezechiel 18:20, for instance, God had taught that each soul should
suffer for its own sin; therefore a son should not bear the burden of his father’s
wickedness. The same general principle was expressed in Roman law maxims:
‘penalties ought to bind their authors’; ‘nobody ought to be deprived of his right
without guilt’; ‘the deeds of some may not prejudice others’; and ‘one person’s
wrong ought not to result in a church’s loss’.¹ Nevertheless, the interdict was
one of several penalties approved by canon law and papal authority that departed
from this principle of restricting punishment to the guilty. In 1199, for instance,
Pope Innocent III responded to the growth of heresy at Viterbo in the papal
patrimony by ordering the disinheritance of the orthodox sons of heretics. This
order circulated widely, was included in the official body of canon law from
1210 onwards, and remained in force until the inquisition fell into decline in the
eighteenth century.² Contemporary canonists and theologians, therefore, had to
apply all their ingenuity to the problem of justifying the Church’s use of such
exceptional sanctions.
Gratian had approached the problem in one of his cause in the Decretum, that
is, hypothetical cases designed to stimulate student debate in the classroom. This
way of teaching law was a central purpose of his text and indeed revolutionary;
from the mid-twelfth century teachers of Roman and canon law generally adopted

¹ Cod. 9.47.22: ‘peccata suos debent tenere auctores’ (cited in X 3.11.2). The other principles
cited above were treated by the canonist Ricardus Anglicus at the end of the twelfth century; his
treatment has been edited and discussed in Piergiovanni, ii.1–19. See Piergiovanni in general on
this subject.
² See my ‘Punishment of the Guiltless’, esp. 271–8, and Pennington, ‘Pro peccatis patrum
puniri’.
 Punishment of the Innocent 15

this method. It involved posing questions, and at C.1 q.4 Gratian asked whether
it was legitimate for sons to be punished for their fathers’ sins. He answered in
his classic dialectical fashion by assembling authorities for and against, notably
Exodus 20:5 where God had threatened to visit the sins of the fathers on the sons
down to the third and fourth generations. He resolved the contradiction between
this text and others opposing such apparently indiscriminate severity by quoting
St Augustine. The latter had commented on this text that it showed divine mercy
not severity, for God postponed judgement in expectation of repentance until
the fathers’ sins were repeated in the third and fourth generations. In other words
descendants were punished for imitating their forebears’ sins, which they thereby
made their own. Gratian then cited many examples in the Old Testament of
divine punishment falling on whole communities but concluded with the same
interpretation: ‘by these examples none are proven to be held responsible for
the sins of others except imitators of their wickedness.’³ Most twelfth-century
theologians from Peter Lombard onwards adopted this line, observing that the
God of Exodus 20:5 had threatened to extend punishment to the third and fourth
generations ‘of those who hated him’ in imitation of their forebears.⁴ Stephen
Langton, a master of theology at Paris till 1206, observed that since a man usually
lived long enough to see the fourth generation of his descendants, they would
see his sinful example and imitate it, which they might not have done had they
not seen him.⁵ Conversely Innocent III, a one-time theology student at Paris,
used this imitation argument to limit a son’s responsibility for certain paternal
sins. For example in 1200 he ruled that illegitimate sons might be excluded from
clerical office only where they imitated their fathers’ incontinence.⁶
Although this interpretation of Exodus 20:5 restricted the punishment of third
parties to imitators, it conceded that a community could be lead astray by the
example of its head or members. Indeed a text of the third-century theologian
Origen included in the Decretum observed that a people could be polluted by
one sinner just as a flock could be infected by one diseased sheep.⁷ Likewise
in Leviticus 4:3 God had taught that a sinful priest caused his people to stray.
Innocent III quoted this text in a letter of 1198 and two of his sermons to warn

³ C.1 q.4 dictum post c.11, §12. On Gratian and the dialectical method see Meyer, 144–77.
⁴ Landgraf, ‘Vererbung’.
⁵ Langton on Exodus 20:5, Oxford, Trinity College MS 65, fo. 125ra; Durham Cathedral
MS A.I.7, fol. 42ra: ‘Ego sum visitans … Sed quare dicitur ‘‘In terciam et quartam generacionem’’,
cum in qualibet generacione puniatur imitator paterni flagicii? Solutio. Ideo dicit quia tamdiu
solent patres vivere. Prima, enim, generacio a xv annis et supra et sic usque ad lxx annos sunt
quatuor generaciones, et quod semper est vite hominis labor et dolor. Et ideo hoc dixit quia
filii videntes patres eos pocius imitantur quam si non viderent. Quod enim videmus pocius
imitamur quam quod non videmus.’ Another version in Durham Cathedral MS A.III.12, fol. 192ra:
‘In terciam et quartam generationem … usque ad has generationes solent antiquitus homines vivere
et posteritatem suam videre, sicut constabit si anni computentur. Homo, enim, in xva etate potest
generare, quae etas, si per v multiplicetur, erunt fere lxxx anni … ’ For a fuller treatment of such
views on Exodus 20:5 see my ‘Peter the Chanter’, 4–6.
⁶ X 1.6.20. Cf. X 1.9.10 §6. See my ‘Punishment of the Guiltless’, 279–80. ⁷ D.45 c.17.
16 Justification of the Interdict

clergy not to set a bad example to their flock. He observed in his sermons on
this text that if priests committed sins, laity would simply follow their example
and excuse themselves with the words of John 5:19: ‘A son can only do what
he sees his father doing.’⁸ The Paris master Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) and
Stephen Langton had glossed Leviticus 4:3 in similar terms; hence Innocent III,
possibly a pupil of the Chanter, was again following Parisian moral theology.⁹
These theologians had also argued that sons might suffer divine punishment to
prevent them imitating their fathers’ sins. According to the Chanter and Langton
God’s destruction of the Sodomites’ children was merciful since, if he had spared
them, they might have followed their parents’ example and suffered a fate worse
than death: to lose sight of God.¹⁰ But Langton had denied that human justice
was likewise justified in killing a son for his father’s sin. Indeed an anonymous
French canonist pointed out (c.1206–10) that God alone might inflict such
physical punishment on innocent sons, since only he could foresee that they
would become imitators of their parents’ vice.¹¹
When most canonists debated punishment of the innocent, they did not
pursue this notion of sin corrupting others. They were mainly concerned to

⁸ X 3.34.7. PL 217.650–1, 654, 678 (sermons). See my ‘Peter the Chanter’, 8–9.
⁹ Langton on Leviticus 4:3, Durham Cathedral MS A.I.7, fol. 56vb: ‘Delinquere faciens
populum. per exemplum suum, quia componitur orbis reg. ad exemplum, unde sacerdos per
quodlibet peccatum alios corrumpit. Vel intellige hoc, quando peccatum adeo est apertum quod
omnes corrumpebat … unde dicit Osea. ‘‘Erit populus sicut sacerdos’’, et dominus sicut servus.’
The Chanter on Leviticus 4:3, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 44, p.135a; London, BL, Royal
MS 2.C.viii, fol. 69va: ‘peccaverit. in omittendo vel faciendo … negligens aut peccans aut non
iudicans populum peccare facit … eum ad peccandum provocans … quia sacerdos sicut populus et
econtrario’.
¹⁰ The Chanter on Genesis 19:25, Eton College MS 14; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS
44, p.29b: ‘Et habitatores urbium et cuncta terre virencia … Infantes cum parentibus in Sodomis
cremati sunt … et provisum est illis ne diu viventes parentum exemplum sequerentur et sic sevius
punirentur. Parentes quoque tam pro eis quam pro se rei sunt. Mors enim filiorum est parentum, ideo
futuri sunt accusatores eorum … Quomodo cum parvulis Sodomorum actum est misericorditer?
Sed pena ibi accipitur pro dampno. Nullum maius dampnum est homini quam non videre deum’.
Langton makes the same points in his gloss on Genesis 19:25 v. parvuli pro peccatis parentum,
Oxford, Trinity College MS 65, fol. 48rb, adding that God’s angers condemns these children
‘temporaliter’, presumably sparing them the eternal damnation which they would have endured,
had they lived to follow their parents’ bad example.
¹¹ Langton on Deuteronomy 24:16, Oxford, Trinity College MS 65, fol. 270ra; Durham
Cathedral MS A.I.7, fol. 91rb: ‘Non occidentur patres pro filiis. Nota dominus dixit Moysi qualiter
ipse deberet punire. Dominus autem aliter punit et ita aliud est de hiis quos dominus punit et aliud
de hiis quos punit Moysis.’ Id. on 4 Kings 14:6, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS C.427,
fol. 47ra; Cambridge, Peterhouse MS 112: ‘sicut precepit dominus Moysi in Deuteron. xxiiii c.
Non morientur patres pro filiis etc. Sed contra in Iosue c. vii. [Joshua 7:24–6] Achor lapidatus
est cum filiis. Ecce pro peccato patris puniti sunt filii. Item in Exodo xx c.: ‘‘Ego sum deus tuus
fortis, zelotes, visitans iniquitates patrum in filios.’’ Solutio. Sententia divina puniuntur filii pro
patribus temporaliter sed non eternaliter, sed sententia humana non puniuntur, ut supradictum
est.’ Summa ‘Animal est substantia’ on C.24 q.3, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 42, fol. 119ra:
‘consumpti … Sed que est ratio quod Dominus ita corporaliter punivit eos pro peccato parentum?
Potest dici quod Deus bene sciebat eos futuros paterne luxurie imitators … visitans. Idest puniens
etiam corporaliter. Sed hoc nulli licet nisi Domino’.
 Punishment of the Innocent 17

distinguish which penalties might be imposed on the innocent and which not.
The Decretum included a letter in which St Augustine had castigated an episcopal
colleague for anathematizing a whole household for the sin of its head. Gratian
had thus distinguished that children might suffer a physical penalty for their
parents’ sins but not a spiritual one. Therefore most canonists taught that a
community might not be excommunicated, but Gratian’s distinction did not
explain why a community might still suffer the spiritual penalty of the interdict.¹²
Canonists could resolve this contradiction through theological doctrine on the
original sin. All mankind suffered death for Adam’s original sin. St Augustine
had taught that those who were baptized and remained in a state of grace at
death were at least safe in eternity. From this teaching Peter Abelard (d. 1142)
and later twelfth-century theologians concluded that God punished children
for their forebears’ sins by a ‘pena temporalis’, that is, suffering confined to
this earthly life, but never an eternal one, that is damnation.¹³ Hence canonists
from Rufinus (c.1164) onwards argued that one might not be excommunicated
for another’s sin because this involved an eternal penalty (it consigned those
dying unrepentant to eternal damnation). Conversely, one anonymous canonist
recognized (c.1185–7) that an entire city might be interdicted for another’s sin
since this was a ‘pena temporalis’.¹⁴ The same distinction was drawn by the
English canonist Alanus (c.1201–10).¹⁵ And the interdict was only one of several
penalties that late twelfth-century canonists classified as a pena temporalis in order
to justify their extension to the innocent. Others were fines, loss of status, and
physical penalties, although some canonists still doubted whether human justice
might punish the innocent physically.¹⁶ Innocent III had even used this idea in
1199 when he sought to justify disinheritance of the orthodox sons of heretics:
‘in many instances, even according to divine judgement, sons may suffer a pena
temporalis on account of their fathers, and, according to canonical sanctions,
retribution may be inflicted not only on the authors of crimes but also on the
offspring of the condemned.’¹⁷
Such arguments thus excused the application of some penalties to the innocent
in terms of their lesser severity, in that they entailed suffering only in this life, but

¹² C.24 q.3 c.1 (St Augustine). Cf. Gratian’s dictum before this canon and VI 5.11.5.
¹³ Landgraf, ‘Vererbung’, esp. 221.
¹⁴ Rufinus, Summa on C.1 q.4 (Ed. p. 230). Anonymous gloss on C.24 q.3 dictum ante c.1
v. Quod autem (inserted in Huguccio’s Summa on the Decretum), BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2280, fol.
253rb: ‘Pena duplex est, eterna et temporalis. Ad eternam non imputatur alicuius peccatum alii.
Ad temporalem id imputatur. Sed temporalis alia est corporalis, alia est spiritualis. Corporalis pro
peccato alterius alteri infertur … Spiritualis etiam quandoque infertur alteri pro altero ut apparet
in filiis sacerdotum adulterorum fornicatorum qui ab ordine repelluntur. Item pro peccato alterius
quandoque civitas tota interdicitur’.
¹⁵ Alanus on 1 Comp. 2.17.6 v. in terram, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol.
28va: ‘Ecce pro peccato unius alii punientur, quod non est absurdum de pena temporali. Perpetua
nullus pro peccato alterius punietur, ut i. q.iiii. Iam itaque [C.1 q.4 c.8].’
¹⁶ See Piergiovanni, ii.21–58.
¹⁷ X 5.7.10 (‘Vergentis’). See the literature on this decretal quoted in n. 2.
18 Justification of the Interdict

not for eternity, as under anathema. Indeed the Glossa Palatina on the Decretum
(c.1210–15) observed that for another’s sin one might not be anathematized but
one might well suffer a lesser spiritual penalty, one that forbade all sacraments
except infant baptism and penance of the dying, in other words an interdict.¹⁸
St Thomas Aquinas similarly justified interdicts despite Innocent IV’s ban on
collective excommunication when he noted (c.1252) that, though the innocent
were denied the Eucharist under an interdict, excommunication was a greater
penalty since it cut them off from the Church.¹⁹ The interdict’s severity was, as
we will see, gradually reduced by papal rulings during the thirteenth century,
which made it more bearable for the innocent and more defensible for canonists.
Nonetheless, even if canonists accepted that it was licit for the innocent to suffer
an interdict, it was licit only in certain circumstances and for certain reasons.
It was indeed a commonplace maxim of thirteenth-century canonists that one
might be punished without guilt but not without cause.²⁰
The canonist Damasus (c.1210–15) held that one was punished ‘temporaliter’
on certain occasions where the seriousness of the crime required it or a deterrent
was needed.²¹ Indeed the punishment of the innocent was usually reserved in
Roman and canon law for the most serious crimes. In Roman law treason was the
ultimate crime and its punishment involved not only the traitor’s execution but
the confiscation of his assets, thereby depriving his sons of their inheritance. In
1199 Innocent III extended this penalty to heretics, since he argued that heresy
was treason against Christ and so more heinous than that against any temporal
authority. His provision that the catholic sons of heretics suffer disinheritance
even exceeded Roman law on heresy, which had at least permitted orthodox
heirs to succeed to a heretic’s estate.²² Despite its severity canonists generally
called for strict enforcement of this ruling except for Tancred, who argued for
its moderation. But even he accepted (c.1220) that a serious crime justified the
suffering of the innocent under interdicts, remarking that when it was the doing
of a lord or father, his household might be deprived of Communion as a result.²³

¹⁸ Glossa Palatina on C.24 q.3 d.a.c.1 v. Quod autem pro peccato, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol.
71vb: ‘Nota in hac questione iii. quod unus pro alio non debet anath<em>atazari, ut infra e. Si
habes [C.24 q.3 c.1], sed alia minori pena spirituali bene preter baptisma parvulorum et penitentia
morientium, xvii. q.iiii. Miror, extra. de spon. Non est vobis [C.17 q.4 c.8; 1 Comp. 4.1.13]’. These
were indeed the classic exceptions to the ban on the sacraments in interdicted lands (see pp. 145–7,
148–52 below).
¹⁹ Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum, IV dist. 18, ii, 3, q.3.
²⁰ E.g. Raymond of Peñafort, Summa, 375: ‘Licite quis punitur sine culpa sed non sine causa.’
In 1298 Boniface VIII would make this a rule of law at VI 5.12.23.
²¹ Damasus, ‘Brocarda’, fol. 26rb (reg. 22): ‘Nullus punitur eternaliter pro peccato alterius, ut c.
Nullius [C.1 q.4 c.1], sed quandoque temporaliter quis punitur vel propter enormitatem delicti, ut
in §Verum [C.6. q.1 dictum ante c.1], vel propter terrorem, ut in c. Cum multe [C.15 q.8 c.3].’
The latter canon ‘Cum multe’ sought to enforce clerical celibacy by threatening to reduce the sons
of clergy to serfs of their fathers’ churches.
²² On ‘Vergentis’ and its canonistic reception see the literature cited in n. 2.
²³ Tancred on 2 Comp. 3.5.2 v. administrationis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 121ra: ‘hii sunt
casus in quibus quis privatur iure suo sine culpa sua non tamen sine causa … propter scelus enorme
 Punishment of the Innocent 19

Following Damasus canonists also recognized that one might be deterred

from committing or persisting in serious crimes by the penal consequences for
one’s nearest and dearest. In other words the punishment of the innocent was
understood to have a psychological effect on the guilty. For instance, the canonist
Johannes Teutonicus (c.1217) observed that Innocent III’s ruling on heresy
still permitted heretics to recover their assets ex indulgentia if they returned to
the Catholic faith. The pope’s intention was thus not wholly vindictive but
coercive: to drive heretics back into unity with the Church by threatening their
heirs where threats to themselves alone were ineffectual.²⁴ Likewise an early
thirteenth-century French canonist had remarked that a son rightly suffers a pena
temporalis for his father, for a father sometimes suffers more through his son’s
punishment than his own. The canonist Guido de Baysio (d. 1313) subsequently
elaborated on this point that if parents were not deterred from wrongs by
the penalties inflicted on themselves, at least they might be deterred by those
inflicted on their children, since parents feared more for their children than for
themselves.²⁵
The notion that a wrongdoer was most vulnerable through those closest to him
had already been recognized in late twelfth-century Paris theology circles. Thus
Peter the Chanter had observed that when God had threatened to visit the sins of
the fathers on their offspring down to the third and fourth generations, the sinful
father was most severely punished by seeing his offspring suffer on his account,
since men were used to living long enough to see the fourth generation of their
descendants.²⁶ It is implied here that the father might be induced to repent

patris vel domini spoliatur familia communione, xxiiii. q. iii. Si habes, supra. de sponsalibus. Non
est vobis lib. i. [C.24 q.3 c.1; 1 Comp. 4.1.13] … t.’
²⁴ Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 5.4.1 v. filiorum (http://faculty.cua.edu/Pennington/edit
501.htm). See my ‘Punishment of the Guiltless’, 277.
²⁵ Apparatus ‘Ecce vicit leo’ on C.15 q.8 c.3 v. in progeniem, Paris, BN, MS lat. nouv. acq.
1576, fol. 210va: ‘bene potest puniri <filius> pro patre pena temporali quia magis quandoque
punitur pater in filio quam in se ipso, ut ff. quod metus causa. Isti quidem §ult. [Dig. 4.2.8 §3],
sed numquam pena eterna punitur unus pro alio.’ Guido de Baysio, Rosarium, ibid.: ‘Ut si non
terrerentur parentes pro penis sibi illatis, saltem terreantur pro his que filiis infliguntur, nam plus
timent parentes de filiis quam de seipsis, ff. quod me. causa. Isti quidem.’ Cf. Azo (d. 1220), Summa
on Cod. 2.19 (Ed. p.39a): ‘pro affectu magis terrentur parentes in liberis quam in seipsis’.
²⁶ Peter the Chanter on Exodus 20:5, Eton College MS 14; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal
MS 44, p. 86a.: ‘Iniquitates patrum in filios usque in terciam et quartam generationem. Non solum
de patre, cum peccat, ultionem sumo, sed etiam in filium, nepotem et pronepotem vindic-
tam temporalem extendo, ut in illis etiam puniatur pater et auctor cladis videns eos sic
cruciari. Usque ad quartam generationem et non ultra dicit se punitura peccata patrum,
quia usque ad has generationes solent vivere homines et posteritatem suam videre.’ Id. on
Deuteronomy 5:9, Eton College MS 16; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 44, p. 306a:
‘Reddens iniquitatem patrum super filios … idest. temporaliter puniens filios et nepotes propter
peccata patrum, ut sic pater gravius puniatur in morbo et flagello filii, eum videns furiosum
vel leprosum, ut de Achab legimus et Iehu vindictam sumptam.’ Id. on Ezechiel 18:2, Paris,
BN, MS lat. 16793, fol. 30va: ‘Quid est vertitis parabolam in proverbium … Temporaliter autem
sepe punit deus filios pro peccatis parentum, quia in hoc ipso punitur pater, ut in leprosia
filii’.
20 Justification of the Interdict

when he realized the suffering that his sins had brought on his family. Indeed
a pupil of the Chanter, Stephen Langton, saw this as the motive for the divine
punishment that had fallen on Israel in 2 Kings 24. Its cause was King David’s
murder of Uriah and adultery with Beersheeba, and David had expressed remorse
at his people’s plight in 2 Kings 24:17: ‘I am the sinner. It is my wrong. What
have these sheep done? O Lord, I beg you, spare your people from your wrath.’
Langton noted Gregory the Great’s remark on this biblical passage that the wrath
of God that struck the people physically also prostrated the king with grief, and
Langton added that contrition was punishment in itself, for the king suffered
no other penalty than the contrition that he felt on seeing his people die. And
contrition, according to twelfth-century doctrine on penance, was prerequisite
for reconciliation of sinners to the Church.²⁷
It is also significant that Innocent III had studied theology at Paris, perhaps
under the Chanter himself, and he quoted this verse from Kings in a letter
of 1199 in order to justify the papal interdict on the kingdom of Lèon. The
king of Lèon’s refusal to break off his illicit betrothal had caused the sentence.
Innocent’s use of this verse makes it clear that the king’s responsibility for his
subjects’ suffering was meant to induce him to repent like King David. And,
even before becoming pope, Innocent had written in his theological treatise De
miseria conditionis humanae that a lord’s guilt entailed his serf ’s punishment,
and quoted approvingly Horace’s epigram that whatever wrongs kings commit,
their subjects shall pay for.²⁸ It is small wonder that as pope he readily imposed
interdicts on communities for their rulers’ faults and ruled in the first year of his
pontificate that orthodox sons of heretics be disinherited.
By the late twelfth century various arguments had evolved that could justify
the suffering of the innocent under certain penalties. Theology was the main
source from which canonists and popes, notably Innocent III, adapted these for
their own ends. It is doubtful whether they would have exploited such arguments
if the church authorities had not regularized usage of such sanctions, especially
under Innocent III. Following the reform movement of the late eleventh century,
the papacy had become increasingly assertive of its authority over laity and
clergy, and no more strongly than under Innocent III. It exploited sanctions

²⁷ Stephen Langton on 2 Kings 24:1, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS C.427, fol. 30ra;
Cambridge, Peterhouse MS 112, fol. 136va: ‘Et addidit furor. Nota glosam Gregorii [i.e. Gregory
the Great, Moralia in Iob, XXV, xvi, ed. CCSL 143B, 1260–2] … ‘‘Ira enim que corporaliter
populum pertulit ipsum quoque dolore prostravit.’’ Ex his verbis glose videtur quod contritio sit
pena quia David non fuit punitus alia pena quam contritione quam habebat videns populum mori’.
On contrition see Anciaux, 463–73.
²⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 2, p. 132; Innocent also interpreted the ‘sheep’ of 2 Kings 24:17 as
‘innocents’ in a sermon (PL 217.644). Id. De miseria, 21. The quotation is from Horace, Epistulae,
i. 2, 14. It was also cited by the anonymous Apparatus ‘Servus appellatur’ (c.1215) on 3 Comp. 1.3.4
v. excessibus, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 19, fol. 120ra: ‘Quicquid delirant reges, plectantur
Achivi, extra. de spon. Non est vobis et supra. de officio iud. del. Sane quia. l.i. [1 Comp. 4.1.13,
1.21.16].’ Incidentally the text being glossed here (3 Comp. 1.3.4) was a decretal of Innocent III
concerning an interdict on Le Mans.
 Collective Guilt and Punishment 21

touching the innocent in order to bolster that authority, in particular to defend

the Church against violations of its liberties, as in the case of the interdict,
and to combat heresy, as in the case of Innocent’s disinheritance provision.
Such collective penalties were not only a result of growing papal claims but
also a reaction to secular forms of social organization emerging in the twelfth
century. These created claims to collective loyalty that often conflicted with those
asserted by the Church. City communes had often been founded in defiance of
episcopal temporal jurisdiction, and some of those in northern Italy sometimes
banded together to oppose the papacy during its clashes with the empire. And
Innocent III often retaliated against such Italian communes with interdicts, trade
embargoes, exposure of their citizens and goods to seizure, and loss of their
see.²⁹ Moreover the rise of the communes promoted the growth of legal thought
in northern Italy on the nature of an organized community, or universitas as
jurists called it, from the late twelfth century onwards.³⁰ And it was in this
intellectual context that jurists began to confront the issue of corporate liability,
as a modern-day lawyer would term it, or collective guilt and punishment.

1 . 2 C O L L E C T I V E G U I LT A N D P U N I S H M E N T

The revival of Roman law in the twelfth century, largely stimulated by the
recovery of the complete text of Justinian’s Digest in around 1070, supplied the
emerging science of canon law with many of its concepts, procedures, and terms.
In particular, it enabled canonists to formulate their ideas about corporations
and was the source of the notion universitas itself. On the problem of corporate
liability, however, it gave them unclear guidance in two conflicting texts of the
ancient Roman jurist Ulpian. At Dig. 4.2.9 §1 he had admitted the possibility of
a people or collegiate body as well as an individual being guilty of intimidation
but had not elaborated. Yet at Dig. 4.3.15 he had stated that, in legal circles in
his time, it was doubted that a citizen body (municipes) might be charged with
fraud. He had even suggested that it was incapable of doing anything fraudulent.
Nevertheless he had conceded that legal action might be brought against it if it
had benefited as a result of fraud committed by those administering its affairs,
and he had compared this with a lord being sued for his proctor’s fraud. In other
words an organized community might be held responsible for the wrongs of its
rulers or agents; canonists would elaborate significantly on this view after 1200.
Despite Ulpian’s vague and equivocal position, medieval Roman lawyers were
in no doubt that a community was capable of wrongdoing. In his glossa ordi-
naria on the Digest Accursius (d. 1263) interpreted Ulpian’s question—‘Quid

²⁹ Tillmann, 45 ff.; my ‘Punishment of the Guiltless’, 278.

³⁰ See Michaud-Quantin, Universitas, for an excellent discussion of medieval notions of
community.
22 Justification of the Interdict

enim municipes facere possunt?’—to mean that they could not commit fraud
‘easily’.³¹His reading had been a juristic commonplace since c.1200. Another
Roman law commentator, Azo (d. c.1220), stated the same view in response to
Ulpian’s question: a citizen body can do nothing easily because of men’s natural
facility to disagree.³² Both Azo and Accursius recognized that it was hard for
a community to reach a consensus on collective action, but Accursius added
that a corporation might be held legally responsible for deeds of the majority
of its members, as if they were done by the whole body, and for deeds of its
rulers, since it seemed to have given a mandate for them.³³ Likewise, another
early thirteenth-century Roman lawyer, Pilius, concluded that Ulpian’s question
expressed the relative difficulty but not absolute impossibility of corporate wrong-
doing.³⁴ Mid-thirteenth-century canonists, notably Pope Innocent IV, would
adopt these views in their own treatment of this issue, as we will later see.
Canonists did not confront the question of corporate liability until after 1200,
perhaps because only then did Romanist corporation theory fully open their
minds to the complexities of the problem, and even then they first considered
it with regard to internal discipline, namely wrongs attributed to ecclesiastical
bodies rather than lay communities. One of the first canonists to discuss corporate
liability at any length was Johannes Teutonicus. In his glossa ordinaria on the
Decretum (c.1215) he conceded that a church might be accused of admitting
bretheren simoniacally, i.e. for payment, as Innocent III had ruled in his decretal
‘Dilectus filius’ (1201). But he contrasted this example with Ulpian’s doubts
about a community’s capacity to commit fraud and St Augustine’s teaching
against collective excommunication. He went on to point out the procedural
difficulty in bringing criminal charges against a corporation. He noted that a
community defended itself in court through a proctor or legal representative,
but the Romano-canonical procedure of the church courts did not allow the use
of proctors in criminal cases; hence a community might not be summoned on
criminal charges. He admitted, however, that another kind of legal action, an
inquisitio, might be brought against a community.³⁵

³¹ Accursius, Glossa to Dig. 4.3.15 v. facere possunt. ³² Azo, Summa on Cod. 2.20, p. 42b.
³³ Accursius, Glossa to Dig. 4.2.9 §1 v. collegium.
³⁴ Pilius, Summa super Tres Libros (Books X–XII of the Codex, in continuation of the Summa
on Books I–IX by Placentinus (d. 1192), Pilius’s teacher) at Cod. 11.29, London, BL, Arundel
MS 492, fol. 170va: ‘Item si metum vel vim aliquam fecerit, sicut quilibet conveniretur, ut ff. quod
metus causa l. Metum §Animadvertendum [Dig. 4.2.9 §1]. Quamvis dicatur alibi quod universitas
consentire non poterit, vel dolo facere, illud enim non inpossibilitatem sed facti notat difficultatem,
ut in pandectarum volumine t. de dolo l. Sed ex dolo §Sed an in municipes. [Dig. 4.3.15 §1]
notavimus’. Azo and Accursius echoed this point, observing that Ulpian’s question denoted the
rarity but not impossibility of collective fraud (see their glosses cited in nn. 32–3). See Ullmann,
‘Delictal Responsibility’, 79–81 and 83 ff., on further civilian discussion of this question.
³⁵ Johannes Teutonicus on C.12 q.2 c.58 v. accusandi, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1367, fol. 142vb;
‘Editio Romana’, i. 3139–40: ‘Ergo videtur quod alius posset accusare ecclesiam, ut scilicet accusatur
quod simoniace elegit aliquem, ut extra.ii. de symonia. Veniens, vel quod metum intulit alieni,
ut ff. quod me. c. Metum §ii [2 Comp. 5.2.1; Dig. 4.2.9 §1]. Sed contra, universitas non potest
 Collective Guilt and Punishment 23

His views were supported by and perhaps derived from the Glossa Palatina
on the Decretum (c.1210–15), which also stated the procedural impossibility of
charging a church or community with a crime, even intimidation, as Ulpian had
conceded. An inquisitio, it recognized, might be brought against a community,
such as a church for holding a simoniacal election, but in this instance only its
senior members were to be punished.³⁶ Johannes would reach a similar but more
elaborate conclusion in his gloss (c.1217) on Innocent III’s decretal ‘Dilectus
filius’. This had ordered an inquisitio into monasteries accused of admitting
brethren in return for payment, and, where it was proven, the imposition of
penances on the prelates and officials of the offending monastery. Johannes
wondered why only such individuals were to be punished and not the whole
community if all of the monks had done wrong and were understood to know
as much as their superiors. His answer was that the prelates and officials alone
were punished since everything was done at their counsel and instigation. Hence
he concluded that a community might not be charged or punished but its senior
members were to be punished.³⁷ In other words those in charge of a community
were to suffer the legal consequences of any wrong attributed to it. This inverted
the idea behind the interdict, that a community suffered for wrongs of its rulers.
Johannes and the author of the Glossa Palatina admittedly conceded that an
action might be brought against a church where its bishop or agent was accused
of a crime committed with its counsel, but neither drew out the implications of
this point in terms of collective responsibility.

dolum committere, ut ff. de dolo. Si ex dolo, nec dicitur aliquid possidere, ff. de acq. pos. l.i. §ult.,
nec civitas potest excommunicari, ut xxiiii. q.iii. Si habes [Dig. 4.3.15, 41.2.1 §22; C.24 q.3 c.1].
Preterea universitas per actorem vel procuratorem suum se defendere sed in crimine non interveniat
procurator, ergo universitas non potest de crimine conveniri, quod verum est. Dicas ergo hic poni
verbum ‘‘accusandi’’ pro verbo ‘‘agendi’’, vel intellige cum episcopus accusatur de crimine quod
commisit de consilio universitatis, ut xvi. q.vi. Placuit [C.16 q.6 c.2]. Item in modum inquisitionis
potest agi contra universitatem prout legitur, extra.ii.de sy. Veniens. [Vel dic quod non proceditur
contra universitatem sed potius contra singulos. Io.]’ The text in square brackets is in the ‘Editio
Romana’ but not in the manuscript and was probably added by Bartholomew of Brescia (c.1245),
perhaps quoting another Johannes.
³⁶ Glossa Palatina on C.12 q.2 c.58 v. accusandi, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol. 51va; BAV, Reg. lat.
MS 977, fol. 145va: ‘Quilibet potest de universitate accusare, ar. C. si reus vel accus. mor. l.i [Cod.
9.6.1], nam ibi plures de eodem crimine fuerint accusati. Sed numquid ecclesia vel universitas potest
accusari, cum et quandoque violentiam inferat, ff. quod metus causa. Metum §Animadvertendum
[Dig. 4.2.9 §1]. Non, propter iuris impossibilitatem et quia in crimine non posset se defendere
per actorem. Utitur ergo verbi ‘‘accusandi’’ improprie pro verbo ‘‘agendi’’. Vel hoc intellige cum
episcopus vel actor ecclesie accusatur de aliquo crimine quod commisit consilio universitatis, puta
rapina vel aliquo alio, ar. xvi. q.vi. Placuit [C.16 q.6 c.2]. Vel hoc intellige cum per inquisitionem
proceditur contra universitatem, extra. de symo. Veniens [2 Comp. 5.2.1].’ Id. on C.25 q.2 c.25,
v. Ita nos, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol. 73r: ‘Sed nunquid potest universitas de isto crimine accusari?
Videtur quod non, cum lex dicat quod universitas non potest aliquid dolo facere, ff. de dolo. Si ex
dolo §i [Dig. 4.3.15 §1]. Dicimus tamen quod potest et accusabitur nomine universitatis procurator
vel amministrator, ff. de con. Et de municipibus, C. de episcopali. audi. Decrevimus, et punientur
maiores, ar. extra.ii. de symo. Veniens [Dig. 35.1.97; Cod. 1.4.13; 2 Comp. 5.2.1].’
³⁷ Johannes on 3 Comp. 5.2.2 v. officialibus (edited at http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/edit
501.htm).
24 Justification of the Interdict

In contrast to their strict theoretical opposition to collective punishment, other

canonists adopted a more pragmatic line. Alanus Anglicus agreed (c.1201–10)
that no formal charges could be brought against a community although an
inquisitio might be conducted into its wrongdoings, but he added that if this
established guilt, it might be punished as often happened in practice; he gave no
examples of this, but the interdict is an obvious one.³⁸ Tancred found a middle
way between Johannes and Alanus. He copied the commentary of Johannes
on ‘Dilectus filius’ into his own glossa (c.1220) on that decretal and appended
Alanus’s view that a community might be canonically punished following an
inquisitio into its excesses. But Tancred qualified the latter in line with Johannes’s
conclusions, arguing that its senior members were to be punished more severely.³⁹
Tancred’s synthesis not only harmonized conflicting views but better described
contemporary practice, since when a community suffered an interdict, those who
had occasioned it normally fell under the harsher sanction of excommunication.
Although Johannes’s position was based on a rather literal reading of Roman
law, his pragmatic opponents could find support in recent writings of Roman
lawyers. When Bartholomew of Brescia revised Johannes’s Decretum commentary
in 1245, he added to its discussion of corporate liability that a community might
be accused for it could commit fraud, albeit not easily; he clearly followed the
Roman lawyers’ views on Ulpian that had appeared since Johannes’s commentary.
Like Alanus, he referred to actual practice too, observing that a chapter or civic
council was often accused and ‘excommunicated’.⁴⁰
Another canonist, Zoën Tencarius, had been even more dependent on
Romanist doctrine. He had treated corporate liability (c.1230) in response
to one of Frederick II’s ecclesiastical edicts in Compilatio quinta. The edict
threatened the imperial ‘ban’ on any community or person under his rule

³⁸ Alanus on 1 Comp. 1.10.4 v. accusandi, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879,

fol. 9rb: ‘Ar. quod universitas non potest accusari, et ar. vii. q.i. Sicut vir, extra. ne clerici vel mona.
c. penult., ff. quod metus causa 1. Metum §Animadvertendum [C.7 q.1 c.11; 1 Comp. 3.37.7; Dig.
4.2.9 §1]. Ar. contra ff. de acquir. pos. l.i §ult., ff. de dolo. Sed ex dolo §i [Dig. 41.2.1; 4.3.15].
Solutio: Cum iuris sollempnitate non potest accusari universitas, sed ea omissa de delictis eius potest
inquiri et, si et culpa inventa fuerit, puniri, ut extra. ne cleri. uel mo. c. penult., et ita sepe de facto.
Vel hic exponatur ‘‘accusare’’, idest ‘‘agere’’. Similis expositio C. de edendo. Qui accusari [Cod.
2.1.4].’
³⁹ Tancred on 3 Comp. 5.2.2 v. officialibus, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 262rb: ‘[following gloss
in n. 37] Ego dico quod licet universitas non possit accusari, potest tamen inquisitio de excessibus
universitatis vel collegii fieri et canonice puniri, sed maiores gravius sunt puniendi, ut supra. e. t.
Veniens l.ii., et xliiii di. Commessationes, ff. de condic. Et de municipibus, et xxv. q.ii. Ita nos
silanorum [2 Comp. 5.2.1; D.44 c.1; Dig. 35.1.97; C.25 q.2 c.25] t.’
⁴⁰ Bartholomeus Brixensis on C.12 q.2 c.58 v. accusandi, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1367, fol. 42rb;
‘Editio Romana’, i.1340: ‘[following the gloss at n. 35] Ego credo <quod> universitas ubi non
sunt infantes et similes persone accusari potest quia dolum committere potest. Nec obstat lex illa, ff.
de dolo. Si ex dolo, quia quod ibi dicitur ‘‘non potest committere’’, suple ‘‘de facili’’. Et vides quod
sepe capitulum accusatur et excommunicatur et consilium civitatis [Et delictum quod maiores de
universitate committunt ad omnes refertur, ff. de re. iu. l. Aliud [Dig. 50.17.160]] b.’ The closing
passage in square brackets appears in the ‘Editio Romana’ not the manuscript.
 Collective Guilt and Punishment 25

remaining excommunicate for over a year. Firstly Zoën asked why a community
was punished when, according to Roman law, it was not considered capable of sin.
He cited Ulpian’s doubts about collective fraud, a Digest text that argued against
the possibility of collective consent, and a well-known maxim in the Codex,
which urged that punishment be restricted to actual wrongdoers. However, he
noted that some jurists, including the Roman lawyer Pilius, had responded
to these objections that a community was understood to act and thereby sin
through its ruler; hence it was rightly held responsible for the deeds of its ruler.
He attributed this opinion to his own teachers at Bologna, which reinforces our
impression gained from Tancred and others that Johannes’s contrary opinion
was not widely accepted. Zoën then developed what he considered an even
stronger argument, tacitly borrowed from Azo and Pilius, that a community was
capable of sin because of its capacity for collective decision-making, such as in
making laws and appointments. He acknowledged the difficulty of a community
reaching agreement because of men’s natural facility for dissent, but concluded
that, since they rarely ‘consented’, i.e. came to a consensus, a community was
rarely said to sin, but it sinned sometimes and when it did, it was to be lawfully
punished.⁴¹ Earlier canonists had already categorized the interdict as a legitimate
punishment for a community, and a subsequent canonist, Pope Innocent IV,
would explicitly link the interdict with collective consent to wrongdoing.
Innocent (d. 1254) made a decisive contribution to juristic debate on col-
lective guilt and punishment, firstly by banning excommunication of organized
communities in his decretal ‘Romana Ecclesia: Ceterum’ (1245). His intention
stated in his law was to avoid imperiling innocent souls, and he added in a gloss
on his own law that it was absurd for one-day-old infants and absent members

⁴¹ Zoën on 5 Comp. 5.18.3 v. communitas, Tours, Bibliothèque municipale MS 565, fol. 41rb:
‘Sed quomodo est quod communitas punitur cum non intelligatur peccare posse? Quid enim
municipes dolo facere possunt, ut ff. de dolo. Sed ex dolo §Si autem municipes? Nam quomodo
peccare qui non potest consentire? Et universitas non potest, ut ff. de libertis univer. l. una [Dig.
38.3.un.], ergo nec peccare, quare ergo punitur cum non debeat protendi pena quam reperiatur
delictum, ut supra de hiis que fiunt a ma. par. c. Quesitum, et accedit, supra de regula. et trans.
ad relig. e. Que §Porro lib. e. et C. de penis. Sancimus [2 Comp. 3.9.2; 2 Comp. 3.18.(?); Cod.
9.47.22]. Respondent quidam et dicunt ut Pi<leus> quod communitas intelligitur tunc demum
peccare quando peccat is qui universitati preest, de cuius facto communitas facit, ar. ff. de condict.
et demon. Municipibus, et sic intelligunt legem, ff. quod metus causa. Metum §Animadvertendum
[Dig. 35.1.97; 4.2.9 §1]. Sed tu dicas quod, licet communitas teneatur bene de facto eius qui
communitati preest, ar. dicte 1. Municipibus, quod et nostri senciunt preceptores, tu tamen aliter
et melius respondeas et dicas communitatem illam peccare posse nam et bene potest peccare,
ut vides in lege condenda, C. de legibus et constit. Humanum, sic in electione, ut ff. de off.
questoris l.i. et supra. de elec. Quia propter l.iiii. [Cod. 1.14.8; 1.131; 4 Comp. 1.3.9]. Quod
ergo dicitur eos non posse consentire intelligendum est de facili, ar. ff. de orig. iu. l.ii. §Demum
cum populus, et ita intelligitur lex illa de libertis universitatum et quod dicitur ff. de dolo. Sed
ex dolo [Dig. 1.2.2 §22; 38.3.un.; 4.3.15]. Raritatem notat in possibilitate, naturalis est enim
hominum ad dissenciendum facilitas, ut ff. de arbitris. Item sumus §Principaliter [Dig. 4.8.17
§6], unde, cum raro consenciant, ipsa communitas raro peccare dicitur. Peccat tamen interdum,
quo casu communitas que peccat legittime est punienda. Zo.’ See n. 34 on Pilius’s views cited
here.
26 Justification of the Interdict

to fall under the excommunication of their community.⁴² His law thus limited
excommunication to the guilty members of a community. He merely turned a
traditional canonistic view into law, but his grounds for doing so, as revealed in
his commentary on his own and his predecessors’ decretal law, appear to negate
the idea of collective guilt. Indeed in one much misinterpreted gloss he argued
that a community could not be excommunicated for it was impossible for it to
do wrong, and this was because ‘community’ was the name of a right not of a
person.⁴³ That is to say, only an individual person was capable of wrongdoing.
He did not conceive of a community as a mere group of individuals who might
collaborate in a wrong but as something above and beyond its members: the
right to association. In his view any social group did not automatically constitute
a community in the juristic sense; this was a right conferred on it by a prince or
another competent authority, and without this no group might exercise corpo-
rate rights, such as appointing officials and representatives, and making majority
resolutions binding on the whole community.⁴⁴
This precise juristic notion of a community also informed a gloss on ‘Romana
Ecclesia: Ceterum’, in which he argued that a chapter as a mere conceptual
term and not a physical thing can do nothing except through its members.⁴⁵
That is to say, they alone might be guilty of a canonical crime and suffer the
canonical punishment for it, i.e. excommunication. Novel as his arguments
were, they articulated a similar position to that of Johannes Teutonicus. Like
the latter he also accepted that under Roman law only individual wrongdoers
might face criminal charges and criminal punishment but a civil action might
be brought against a community. Nevertheless Innocent admitted that the latter
might result in civil sanctions for the community, such as a fine imposed on
account of its rulers’ wrongdoing.⁴⁶ He elaborated on this point that if the rulers

⁴² Coll. III 40 (=VI 5.11.5; Po. 12062). Innocent IV, Apparatus (Venice 1578) on Coll. III 40
[=VI 5.11.5] v. in universitatem. All citations in this chapter from his Apparatus refer to this 1578
edition.
⁴³ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.39.53 v. consiliarios. See n. 50 on misinterpretation of this
gloss.
⁴⁴ See Eschmann, ‘Studies’, 8. Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.14: ‘Societas … non constituit
collegium … vel corpus … societas non est collegium per se, nisi aliter constituatur per principem
vel senatusconsultum, vel alio modo.’ Id. on X 1.31.13: ‘Intellige de illa universitate que constituta
est per superiorem sic quod sit universitas, nam, si tot essent homines simul collecti quot sunt
Rome et non haberent tacitum vel expressum consensum a superiore, non possent sibi constituere
iudicem nec haberent alia iura et privilegium universitatis.’ In reality such iura universtatis, for
example, those granted in royal municipal charters in England, often simply gave formal recognition
to existing corporations and confirmed collective rights established by custom. Nevertheless once
a superior had made the ‘creation’ of a universitas his prerogative, he could also claim the right to
dissolve one, a legitimate collective punishment in itself, as Innocent IV observed on X 5.39.53 v.
consiliarios: ‘privabitur privilegio universitatis, ut ulterius non sit universitas. Et sic patietur capitis
diminutionem.’ On Innocent’s corporate thought see also Melloni.
⁴⁵ Innocent IV, Apparatus on Coll. III 40 (=VI 5.11.5) v. culpabiles.
⁴⁶ Id. on X 5.3.30 v. abbatibus and on X 5.39.53 v. consiliarios. He went on to point out in
the latter gloss that under certain Roman laws (Cod. 9.16; Dig. 48.6), a criminal action might be
 Collective Guilt and Punishment 27

of a community or others committed a wrong with the mandate of the whole

community, or the majority of it, even if they acted against the will of the rest,
or even if they had acted without a mandate but the community subsequently
ratified that the wrong had been done in its name, the community might suffer
the spiritual penalty of an interdict or temporal one of a fine.⁴⁷ That is to say,
an organized community might bear legal responsibility for crimes committed
by its rulers or agents with its prior or subsequent consent, and the interdict was
an appropriate penalty, like civil sanctions, for this kind of fault. In drawing a
distinction between collective responsibility and individual guilt and the penalties
appropriate to these different kinds of fault, excommunication being reserved
to the latter kind, Innocent struck a more satisfying compromise than Zoën
or Tancred between the conservative Johannes Teutonicus and his pragmatic
opponents.
Innocent’s views on this issue were widely accepted. The canonist Hostiensis
(d. 1266) found them so compelling that he simply copied them into his own
glosses. Hostiensis merely reinforced Innocent’s view that excommunication
might not apply to a community by adding that such a sentence bound the
soul, and only an individual possessed a soul. Likewise the theologian St Thomas
Aquinas argued (c.1252–6) with regard to ‘Romana Ecclesia: Ceterum’ that one
ought to be excommunicated only for mortal sin, which consisted in action,
and action was proper to individuals; hence they might be excommunicated but
not a community, although it might be interdicted.⁴⁸ Later commentators on
‘Romana Ecclesia: Ceterum’, notably the fourteenth-century canonists Johannes
Monachus, Johannes Andreae, and Guido de Baysio, found little of originality to
add or oppose to Innocent IV’s ideas. Monachus (c.1303), for instance, remarked
that a community was not a person in any real sense but only figuratively, a
persona representata, and because excommunication might only bind a real person,
it was inadmissible against communities; this simply reformulated Innocent’s
notion of community as ‘the name of a right’, like persona representata a juristic
abstraction.⁴⁹
By the time of Innocent IV canonists had, therefore, reached a consensus that,
as a matter of general principle, a community might in certain circumstances

brought against a universitas but in such instances capital punishment was usually commuted to a
civil penalty, i.e. a fine.
⁴⁷ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.39.53 v. consiliarios: ‘Fatemur tamen quod, si rectores alicuius
universitatis vel alii aliquod maleficium faciunt de mandato universitatis totius, vel tante partis,
quod invitis aliis maleficium fecerint, vel etiam sine mandato fecerint, sed postea universitas quod
suo nomine erat factum, ratum habet: quod universitas punietur speciali [recte spirituali] pena
suspensionis et interdicti, 17 q.4 Uxor et c. Miror [C.17 q.4 c.33 & 8], supra. de spon. Non est [X
4.1.11] et etiam temporali puta pecuniaria, ff. quod met. cau. Metum §Animadvertendum, ff. de
vi. et vi. arma. Si vi [Dig. 4.2.9 §1; 43.16.4], 23 q.2 Dominus [C.23 q.2 c.2].’
⁴⁸ Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum, IV dist. 18, ii, 3, q.2.
⁴⁹ Johannes Monachus, Glosa on VI 5.11.5 v. universitatem (fol. 402va). On the other canonists
named here, see my ‘Theory and Practice’, 52–9.
28 Justification of the Interdict

be held to account for a certain kind of fault and suffer certain appropriate
penalties. This was in part an acknowledgement of the realities of legal practice,
notably interdicts. It also reflected a growth of canonistic concern, stimulated by
Roman law doctrine, with the nature of an organized community, in particular
the relationship between its head and members. By the mid-thirteenth century
canonists did not think in terms of collective guilt, since guilt for a crime under
canon and Roman law was specific to individuals; only they were capable of
sin. Neither did they think of a community as a mere group of individuals who
might unite in wrongdoing. In their view an organized community might only
technically act through its head or agents, but it might be held responsible to
some extent for their wrongs committed in its name. Hence they thought in terms
of collective responsibility rather than collective guilt. Innocent IV had provided
the most original statement of this view. He was the first canonist to use it as an
apologia for the interdict, and he introduced a new idea to canonistic thought
in community as the ‘name of a right’, a notion influenced by the contemporary
reception of Aristotle, especially his idea of universals.⁵⁰ Nevertheless Innocent’s
view that one might suffer for wrongs done by others with one’s consent or
in one’s name had a long tradition in both theological and canonistic thought
going as far back as the early twelfth century. One of the first commentators
on the Decretum, Paucapalea (c.1148), had qualified St Augustine’s teaching,
that members of a household might not be excommunicated for the sin of its
head, with the words, ‘unless they clearly supported the excommunicate’, i.e. the
sinner.⁵¹ The rest of this chapter will trace the growth of this doctrinal tradition
regarding consent, agency, and sin from the early twelfth century, for it laid the
crucial intellectual foundations on which Innocent IV would build his significant
justification of collective responsibility and collective punishments, notably the
interdict.

⁵⁰ Aristotle had taught that universals, general terms like universitas itself, were abstractions of
the mind, essentiae, but only individual entities, the substantia that embodied these essentiae, had
physical existence in the world: ‘the concepts being less real than the physical substances in their
motions and activities’ (Knowles, Evolution, 109). The Aristotelian view was generally accepted by
the schools of philosophy in the thirteenth-century Latin West and known as ‘moderate’ realism.
Hence Innocent, in speaking of a universitas as a nomen iuris, was a man of his time and not ahead
of it as some have argued. Indeed Gierke (Genossenschaftsrecht, 3. 279) and others claimed that he
had thereby invented the idea of a corporation as a fictitious ‘legal person’, actually a construct of
nineteenth-century jurisprudence. Rather, as Ullmann (‘Delictal Responsibility’, 81) rightly stated:
‘all Innocent IV was interested in proving was the legal inadmissibility of excommunicating a
corporate body.’ For other refutations of Innocent’s paternity of the fiction theory, see Eschmann,
‘Studies’, 33–4, and Rodriguez, ‘Innocent IV’.
⁵¹ Paucapalea, Summa on C.24 q.3 dictum ante c.1 v. quod autem pro peccato alicuius tota
familia non sit excommunicanda (Ed. p. 105). Cf. Sicard of Cremona (c.1179) on C.24 q.3,
BAV, Pal. lat. MS 653, fol. 98ra: ‘familiam non esse excommunicandam pro peccato unius
nisi faveat eum et in delicto foveat vel nisi gravissime moveatur ecclesia, ut Si habes.’ Gratian
based his dictum on C.24 q.3 c.1 (‘Si habes’), a letter in which Augustine had stated that
he would not anathematize a household for the sin of its head unless he was very seriously
moved.
 Consent to Another’s Sin 29

1 . 3 C O N S E N T TO A N OT H E R ’ S S I N

Twelfth-century canonistic doctrine on this issue was based on St Paul’s teaching

in Romans 1:32, that not only wrongdoers ought to suffer punishment but
also those who consented to their wrongdoings. This view was echoed in some
Decretum texts which ruled that a similar penalty binds both those doing wrong
and those consenting to it.⁵² Consequently twelfth-century commentators on
the Decretum had not limited guilt to individual wrongdoers, as Innocent IV
and other thirteenth-century jurists influenced by Roman law did. It was a
commonplace among those earlier canonists at least since Rufinus (c.1164) that
he who consented to another’s sin was guilty of it, for through consent he made
it his own.⁵³ The source of this canonistic view was theology, for as early as
c.1150 the theologian Rolandus had stated that the sins of others become our
own where we approve of them or imitate them.⁵⁴
Theology also shaped canonistic definitions of consent to sin. Peter Lom-
bard (d. 1160) and subsequent Bible commentators often copied a gloss of
St Ambrose (d. 397) on Romans 1:32. It had distinguished two kinds of
consent to sin: keeping silent when one could oppose sin (i.e. tacit consent);
supporting sin with praise (i.e. active consent).⁵⁵ This distinction was widely
adopted by twelfth-century canonists. Rufinus likewise identified two kinds
of consent of sin: negligence, when one ought to oppose a sin but failed to
do so; cooperation, when one defends or in any way aids a sin. The canonist
Johannes Faventinus (c.1170) added a third: licence, i.e. granting permission
to sin either before or after the fact.⁵⁶ This was the same kind of consent
that Innocent IV described some eighty years later as grounds for an inter-
dict: authorizing a ruler’s or agent’s wrong by a prior mandate or subsequent
approval.

⁵² C.2 q.1 c.10; C.17 q.4 c.5.

⁵³ Rufinus, Summa on D.83 d.a.c.1 v. Providendum (Ed. p. 173). The same point was made by
Stephen of Tournai, Summa on D.83 d.a.c.1 (Ed. p. 105); Johannes Faventinus on D.83 d.a.c.1 v.
Providendum, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 71, fol. 56ra; Summa Parisiensis on C.1 q.4 (Ed. p. 94); and
Summa Reginensis on D.83 dictum ante c.1 v. providendum, BAV, Reg. lat. MS 1061, fol. 15va. See
Kuttner, Schuldlehre, 43–7, on which this section of this chapter develops.
⁵⁴ Rolandus, Sentenzen, 253. The views expressed here were copied almost verbatim in the
Summa Parisiensis (c.1170) on C. 1 q.4 (Ed. p. 94).
⁵⁵ Peter Lombard on Romans 1:32 (PL 191.1336): ‘[Ambros.] Consentire est tacere cum possis
arguere, vel errorem adulando fovere.’ Reiterated in the Glossa ordinaria on Romans 1:32 v. qui
consentiunt.
⁵⁶ Rufinus, Summa on D.83 dictum ante c.1 v. providendum (Ed. p. 173); cf. Stephen of Tournai,
Summa on D.83 dictum ante c.1 v. admittas (Ed. p. 105). Johannes Faventinus on D.86 c.1 v. rector,
BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 71, fol. 56v: ‘tribus enim modis prelatus consentire dicitur: per negligentiam;
per licentiam; per <co>operationem … Si per licentiam assentit, <is> quam principalis auctor
reus constituitur, sive sit licencia iam in facto sive in faciendo, sicut presumi potest ex illo c. quod
est in xii. q.ii. De rebus [C.12 q.2 c.22].’
30 Justification of the Interdict

If canonists derived much of their thinking on consent to sin from theology,

their debate on the issue would be given further impetus by the rulings of two
popes trained as theologians: Alexander III and Innocent III. Alexander has been
identified with the theologian Rolandus, whose views on consent to sin we have
noted. Indeed, Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) claimed that this pope tolerated
the contemporary practice of executing the sons of forgers and traitors when
they had consented to their fathers’ sins.⁵⁷ Meanwhile it will be demonstrated
below that Innocent III was influenced by the Chanter’s views on consent to
sin. Indeed all of Innocent’s important rulings on this matter are from the
first year of his pontificate, which shows that his views were already formed
when he became pope. The rulings of both popes on this issue, in the decretals
‘Sicut dignum’, ‘Mulieres’, and ‘Quante presumptionis’, threatened penalties for
consent to attacks on the clergy.⁵⁸ Hence these rulings and canonistic responses
to them are relevant to interdicts, since an interdict was usually imposed on a
community because its ruler had attacked the persons, property, or rights of the
clergy.
In the first of these decretals, ‘Sicut dignum’ (1173; JL 12180), Alexander III
judged those variously associated with the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbish-
op of Canterbury, in 1170. The international notoriety of Becket’s martyrdom
encouraged the rapid reception of this decretal in canonical collections. Sig-
nificantly it adopted the canonistic distinctions between kinds of consent to
sin when it categorized those who shared in the guilt of Becket’s killers. First
those who had confessed to seizing Becket with the aim of killing, harming,
or holding him captive had thereby facilitated his death and were to perform
a penance similar to that enjoined on the actual killers. The first canonist to
gloss this decretal, Ricardus Anglicus (c.1197), recognized that these men had
consented to the murder by cooperation, the active form of consent to sin
identified by Rufinus. In support of the pope’s decision he cited a ruling from the
Decretum that a like penalty binds those committing a sin and those consenting
to it.⁵⁹

⁵⁷ Identity: Noonan, ‘Who was Rolandus?’, esp. 34–6. Peter the Chanter on 4 Kings 14:6,
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 371, fol. 62va: ‘<Non> morientur pro patribus. Modo
tamen filii falsariorum et reorum crimine lese maiestatis plectuntur morte pro peccato patris. Papa
tamen Alexander [III] hoc noluit pati nisi peccato patris consenserint. Pena pecuniaria etiam non
consentientes sepe puniuntur pro peccato patris.’ In another version of this gloss (Eton College MS
16; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 44, p. 407b) he made a similar point, that the pope had
disinherited a forger’s sons of everything except their mother’s goods, since she had not consented
to her husband’s sin: ‘Non morientur patres pro filiis etc. Pecunia tamen sepe puniuntur usque in
terciam et quartam generationem, uti a domino papa filiis cuiusdam suspensi et rem<???>sis non
est restituta patris hereditas, sed matris hereditatem que non consenserat marito habuerunt filii.
Etiam sepe pro facinore filii exulant.’
⁵⁸ X 5.12.6, 5.39.6 and 47. The decretal ‘Quante presumptionis’ was excerpted by canonists
from the letter copied into Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 24.
⁵⁹ Ricardus Anglicus on 1 Comp. 5. 10.7 (=X 5.12.6) v. pari pena, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol.
l02vb: ‘Consenserunt enim cooperando, ut infra xvii. q.iiii. Omnis [C.17 q.4 c.5].’
 Consent to Another’s Sin 31

Another early commentator on this decretal defined active consent differently,

in terms of the sinful intention which those seizing Becket shared with his
murderers. A pupil of the northern French canonist Petrus Brito, he observed
(c.1205) that one who intended to kill but did not do so was still a killer by
virtue of his will and hence deserved a penalty similar to, if not as severe as, that
inflicted on the actual killer.⁶⁰ In support of this view he cited a canon from the
Decretum, which ruled that where a mob attack on someone ended with their
death, he who had dealt the fatal blow was judged the killer, but others present
who intended to kill the victim had to perform a similar penance to the killer.
Hence collective punishment was justified where there was a collective intention
to commit a sin.
This reflected a fundamental development in the twelfth-century doctrine of
sin. Peter Abelard (d. 1142) had taught that what made a sin was not the nature
of the deed itself but the intention which lay behind it. According to Abelard
God might determine guilt from intentions in our minds, but human judges,
including ecclesiastical ones, might only infer it from the actual effects of those
intentions.⁶¹ Likewise the canonist Huguccio (c.1188) agreed that only God
might judge our inner will but he argued that human justice might punish will
that had been translated into outward actions, even if its fulfillment had not been
achieved. He even observed that under some canons intention and premeditation
were still punished even if they had not been put into effect, although less harshly
than if they had been.⁶²
Indeed by the early thirteenth century popes and canonists agreed that acts
expressing either consent to sin or intention to sin were both as bad as the sin itself
and entailed a similar punishment.⁶³ Nevertheless canonists did not consider

⁶⁰ Anon. on 1 Comp. 5. 10.7 v. pari pena, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9, fol. 80vb:
‘Verum est in genere non in asperitate quia, quando quis vult occidere et non occidit, homicida est
voluntate, vi. q.i. Verum, et ff. quod le. eos. de sicariis l.v. [C.6 q. 1 d.a.c.22; Dig. 43.3.5]. Et hec est
ratio quare omnes tenentur quando dubium <est> quis interfecit, ar. ff. ad 1. aquil. l. Item mela §Si
plures [Dig. 9.2.11 §4] … ne crimina remaneant inpunita … Idem est si multi sint in domo et adsit
de domo eiectus et effusus … Omnes illi qui in domo sunt tenentur, scilicet de eiecto et effuso, ibi.
§ult. et xxxiii. q.ult. Si quattuor homines [C.23 q.8 c.34].’ Similar views are found in another French
canonistic work, the decretist Summa ‘Animal est substantia’ on C.23 q.8 c.34 v. affluerunt, Bamberg
Staatsbibliothek Can. MS 42, fol. 117rb. On the first commentary see my ‘Collection’, 133–8.
⁶¹ Kuttner, Schuldlehre, 25.
⁶² Huguccio on C.6 q.l c.22 v. voluntatem, BAV, Arch. S. Pietro MS C.114, fol. 161vb; Vat.
lat. MS 2280, fol. 147r: ‘Ecce hic punitur voluntas et cogitatio sine effectu, tamen minus quam si
effectus sequeretur, ar. de pen. di.i. Si cui, et di.xviiii. Nulli Anastasius, di.xxii. Omnes [De pen.
D.1 c.30; D. 19 c.5; D.22 c.l]. In maleficiis enim voluntas spectatur non exitus, ut ff. ad 1. cor.
de sic. Divus. Ar. contra, de pen. di.i. §Contra eodem 1. Cogitationis [Dig. 48.8.14; De pen. D.1
dictum ante c.14]. De interiori quidem voluntate deus iudicat non homo, di.xxxii. Erubescant, et
xxxii. q.v. Christiana [D.32 c.11; C.32 q.5 c.32]. Sed hic intelligitur de illa cogitatione et voluntate
que non stetit in suis finibus sed processit ad actum exteriorum licet non sit consecuta effectum.’
⁶³ E.g. Innocent III’s decretal ‘Tua nos duxit discretio consulendos’ (1207; 3 Comp. 5.2.6; Po.
3235), which judged clerks accused of simony guilty on the grounds of intention; they had granted
property to a church on the condition that its clergy elected them to prebends. Cf. Johannes Galensis
on 3 Comp. 5.2.6 v. culpabiles, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 249vb: ‘Non
32 Justification of the Interdict

that a community might consent to sin through actions that supported the
actual sinners or shared their intentions, though this might happen in practice.
But, after valuables were stolen from Regensburg Cathedral and the city was
consequently ‘excommunicated’, or more likely interdicted, in 1146, Gerhoch of
Reichensberg argued that it could be held accountable if it had supported these
crimes and harboured their authors from justice, but he doubted that all citizens
had thus despised justice. Hence he condemned the sentence on the grounds
that only the wrongdoers should suffer not the whole populace, and that the
innocent should be separated from the guilty. It may be that as a theologian he
was articulating ideas of the schools.⁶⁴
Popes and canonists not only condemned active support for sin but also failure
to resist it, or tacit consent. In ‘Sicut dignum’ Alexander III ruled that those who
had aided Becket’s killers against their opponents were not free from guilt for the
murder, for ‘he who could free a man from death, and did not, killed him’, and
so they were to be punished though less harshly than the actual killers. Tancred
(c.1220) inferred that this applied to the archbishop’s subjects, who should have
resisted his killers by force in the first place. A pupil of the French canonist Petrus
Brito had compared (c.1205) those who failed to intervene with Saul, who was
called a killer of St Stephen since he had held the cloaks of those who stoned the
martyr.⁶⁵
The source of Alexander’s maxim in this ruling is unidentified, but Alanus
and other early commentators noted that it echoed the argument of several
Decretum texts, that he who failed to reproach the wicked, when he can (‘cum
potest’), supported their wickedness.⁶⁶ Jesus had also commanded his followers
in Matthew 18:15 to correct brethren who sinned against them. By the twelfth

dicit quod sint simoniaci ad parem penam tamen tenentur propter intentionem et opus subsecutum,
ar. de bi. c.i. lib. e. [3 Comp. 1.14.1] la<urentius>. Nisi velis dicere quod sola intentio facit
hominem simoniacum, ut i. q.i. Qui studet, et c. Reperiuntur, et q.iii. Non solum [C.1 q.l c.11, 7;
C. 1 q.3 c.11], sicut sola spes facit hominem usurarium, ut xiiii. q.iii. c.i [C.14 q.3 c. 1].’
⁶⁴ Codex Chronologico-Diplomaticus, i.215–16 (no. 229).
⁶⁵ Tancred on 1 Comp. 5. 10.7 v. debebant, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 87va: ‘Idest ‘‘parabant’’
ala<nus>. Vel sicut littera per se plane significat, quia subditi archiepiscopi debebant illos sua
violentia impedire ab incepto. t.’ Anon. on 1 Comp. 5.10.7 v. obviare, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale
MS 1407–9, fol. 80vb: ‘lxxxiii. d. Error, et ii. q.vii. Negligere [D.83 c.3; C.2 q.7 c.55]. Unde
Paulus fuit dictus homicida beati Stephani quia levavit vestimenta lapidantium eum.’ On Paul’s part
in Stephen’s martyrdom, Acts 7:58, 8:1: ‘et <Stephanum> eicientes extra civitatem lapidabant. Et
testes deposuerunt vestimenta sua secus pedes adulescentis, qui vocabatur Saulus … Saulus autem
erat consentiens neci eius.’ The italics are mine.
⁶⁶ Alanus on 1 Comp. 5.10.7 v. qui, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 85va:
‘Supra di.lxxxiii Error, supra di.lxxxvi Facientis, supra xxiii <q.iii> Qui potest, infra lombar. tu.
l.penult, supra xxiii q.v Reos, supra di.l Si quis viduam, supra xxiii q.ult c.ult [D.83 c.3; D.86 c.3;
C.23 q.3 c.8; Lombarda Casinensis 1.3.39 (Henry II, 2); C.23 q.5 c.7; D.50 c.8; C.23 q.8 c.34].’
The Lombard law text cited is edited in Liber Papiensis, 584, and listed in Lombarda Casinensis,
608. Other pertinent texts besides these are C.23 q.3 c.11 (see n. 91) and D.86 c.21, which ruled
that anyone who could save a man dying from hunger and did not, killed him. Johannes Faventinus
had hence judged (c.1170) on D.86 c.21 v. occidisti (BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 71, fol. 57rb) that one
who does not give a dying man food ‘reus est mortis’.
 Consent to Another’s Sin 33

century the power of ecclesiastical discipline had been reserved to prelates; thus
some theologians and canonists, notably Gratian and Peter Comestor, insisted
that only prelates were obligated under Christ’s commandment and similar
rulings in the Decretum.⁶⁷ For canonists of this persuasion, the key phrase in
these rulings on correcting sin was ‘cum potest’, which they clearly associated
with the idea of ‘potestas’ or power over others. For example the pupil of the
French canonist Petrus Brito observed (c.1205) that a lord who had sons and
did not correct them was at fault, for he had not done what he could do. Hence
only those with such power might bear guilt and punishment for consenting to a
sin by failing to oppose it. Therefore Vincentius Hispanus conceded in relation
to Alexander’s maxim that one who knew of another’s sin but was powerless to
stop it was free of blame.⁶⁸
But this restriction was not accepted by all canonists and theologians. Rufinus
(c.1164) considered that subjects (‘minores’) as well as prelates could consent
to sin in this way, but he distinguished that prelates who did so were as guilty
as the actual sinners, while subjects were far less so, unless the crime was truly
reprehensible and one they might easily have prevented, notably murder. His
contemporary Stephen of Tournai went even further, accepting that not only
was a prelate to resist a subject’s error, but a subject ought to resist a prelate’s
error. Stephen recognized that a subject lacked the power to coerce verbally and
physically which a prelate had, but he might accuse a prelate of error if it was
worthy of accusation and the subject had evidence.⁶⁹ Finally Huguccio noted
that correction of sin appeared to be restricted to prelates by virtue of their office,
but in his view it was a duty to which everyone was bound.⁷⁰

⁶⁷ Alanus, Apparatus ‘Ius naturale’ on C.23 q.3 c.8 v. esset, BAV, Ross. lat. MS 595, fol. 187va
(second layer of glosses): ‘Et spectat ad prelatum, ar. prox. q.iii. Tam sacerdotes [C.24 q.3 c.14].’
Johannes Teutonicus, Glossa ordinaria on D.83 c.3 v. possis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1367, fol. 56ra;
‘Editio Romana’ i.533: ‘Ex officio, hoc enim intelligunt quidam de prelato, arg. xxiii. q.iiii. Ita plane
[C.23 q.4 c.6], sed H<uguccio> de quolibet, xxiiii. q.iii. Tam sacerdotes.’ On Peter Comestor see
n. 72.
⁶⁸ Anon. on 1 Comp. 5.31.2 v. occident, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9, fol. 87va:
‘quia dominus erat in culpa qui habet filios et non corrigit eos, tunc ei imputatur quia non fecit
quod facere potuit, xlvii. d. Necesse et xxxvii. d. Legatum et ii. q. vii. Accusatio [D.47 dictum post
c.8; D.37 c.5; C.2 q.7 c. 15]’. D.47 dictum post c.8 and D.37 c.5 referred to the example of Elias in
1 Kings 2, who failed to correct his errant sons and hence suffered divine punishment together with
them. Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp. 5.10.7 v. potuit hominem, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek
MS 983, fol. 52vb: ‘Alias culpa caret qui scit sed prohibere nequid, ff. de re. iu. di. Culpa, supra de
heretic. c.ii. [Dig. 50.17.60; 1 Comp. 5.6.2].’
⁶⁹ Rufinus on D.83 dictum ante c.l v. providendum (Ed. p. 173); Stephen of Tournai on D.83
c.3 v. cui non resistitur (Ed. pp. 105–6). Johannes Faventinus copied this view of Rufinus in his
Summa at D.83 dictum ante c.l v. providendum and that of Stephen at D.86 c.l v. rector (BAV,
Borgh. lat. MS 71, fols. 56ra, 56vb).
⁷⁰ Huguccio on D.83 c.3 v. nichil est aliud quam fovere, BAV, Arch. S. Pietro MS C.114, fol.
99va: ‘Idest qui negligit arguere perversos, cum possit, videtur eorum malo consentire.’ Id. on v.
cum possis: ‘In quantum ex officio suscepto, et secundum hoc restringitur tantum circa prelatos. Ego
autem credo quod ad hanc correctionem teneantur omnes, ar. ii. q.vii. Quapropter, et v. q.v. Non
vos, et xxiiii. q.iii. Tam sacerdotes [C.2 q.7 c.47; C.5 q.5 c.1; C.24 q.3 c.14].’ Cf. Anonymous
34 Justification of the Interdict

Some later canonists also recognized a universal duty to resist other’s sins.
For example, after a decretal of Pope Innocent III declared those supporting the
forgery of papal letters excommunicate, one anonymous canonist commented
(c.1215) that this applied to anyone who knew of this crime and could prevent
it but did not do so. This commentator admitted that doubts existed about
who could perform this duty, and that a superior might do so by virtue of
his authority; he cited a Decretum text that stressed the duty of any head of
a community to correct its sinful members. However, he added that someone
lacking this authority could report this crime to one ‘who could help and not
hinder’, presumably a superior, just as Stephen of Tournai had held that a subject
could resist a prelate’s error by accusation. Our commentator hence concluded
in line with Huguccio that this was the duty of any Catholic.⁷¹ This assumption
also underlies Tancred’s view, such that Becket’s subjects should have resisted his
killers and papal judgement fell on them for their failure to do so. This doctrinal
development had clear implications for subjects who failed to resist their ruler’s
sin, as they thereby appeared to consent to it and merit punishment, such as
an interdict. And the canonists were not alone in developing this doctrine; the
Paris theologian Peter the Chanter (d. 1192) also contributed to it, and this is
important for it is supposed that he taught the future Pope Innocent III, and his
views arguably influenced Innocent’s own on this matter.
Peter the Chanter commented on Christ’s exhortation to fraternal correction
in Matthew 18:15 that he who sees someone sinning and keeps silent sins himself.
He then noted that some (quidam), notably the theologian Peter Comestor, stated
that this command was aimed only at prelates. But he was also aware that others,
including the canonists Rufinus and Johannes Faventinus, argued the opposite,
that it was enjoined on all, as St Augustine had taught: on superiors with regard
to subjects; and subjects with regard to superiors.⁷² The Chanter agreed with

Anglo-Norman decretist (c.1200) on D.83 c.3 v. negligere, Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College
MS 283/676, fol. 50rb: ‘Hoc non tantum de prelato sed etiam de quolibet fideli laico intelligendum
est, ut infra ii. q.i. Si peccaverit in te, infra xxiiii. q.iii Tam sacerdotes, infra d. lxxxvi. Facientis,
infra ii. q.vii. Negligere, infra xxiiii. q.iii. Qui errorem [C.2 q.1 c.19; c.24 q.3 c.14; D.86 c.3; C.2
q.7 c.55; C.24 q.3 c.32].’ See Kuttner and Rathbone, ‘Anglo-Norman Canonists’, 317–19, on this
Decretum commentary.
⁷¹ Apparatus ‘Servus appellatur’ on 3 Comp. 5. 11.4 v. innodatos, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek MS
Can. 19, fol. 211vb: ‘Est ergo canon late sententie et colligantur fautores, sed qualiter intelligit
‘‘fautores’’ … credo fautorem hic accipere qui scit et potest prohibere et non prohibet, nam talem,
dicit lex, pena falsi teneri, ut ff. ad 1. cor. de fal. 1. Lege Cornelia et di. lxxxiii. Error [Dig. 48.10.5;
D.83 c.3], sed super hoc qualiter debeat prohibere dubitari potest. Sed potest dici quod si esset
eius superior, auctoritate sua, ut xxiii. q.iiii. Si forte duo ista nomina [C.23 q.4 c.35]. Alias potest
denuntiare ei qui possit prodesse et non obesse, ad quam denuntiationem dico omnem catholicum
teneri, ut xxii. q.v. Hoc videtur [C.22 q.5 c.8]’.
⁷² Peter the Chanter on Matthew 18:15, Paris, BN, MS lat. 15585, fol. 124vb; Oxford, Merton
College MS 212: ‘Attendite … Ita enim peccat qui peccantem videns tacet … Sed si peccaverit
etc … . Hoc capitulum ad solos prelatos dicunt quidam pertinere eo quod in antiquibus codicibus
invenitur: ‘‘Respiciens dominus discipulos dixit ad Petrum, Si peccaverit, etc.’’ Alii econtra asserunt,
 Consent to Another’s Sin 35

the latter opinion and so reached the same conclusion as Huguccio. This was
not the only occasion when Peter’s views coincided with Huguccio’s, but there
is no evidence that either of these contemporary masters was directly familiar
with the other’s teachings. Significantly Innocent III, at the very beginning of his
pontificate, would implement the same principle concerning non-resistance to
others’ sins in the decretal ‘Quante presumptionis’ (1198; Po. 24). It is possible
that Huguccio had inspired his ruling, as Kuttner and others have perceived his
influence on Innocent, but Pennington has argued that there is no evidence that
the pope was taught by Huguccio or that he studied canon law for more than a
few years, if at all, during his stay at Bologna in the late 1180s.⁷³ The evidence
for the Chanter’s influence on Innocent is certainly much stronger in the case of
this particular decretal.
Innocent’s decretal was admittedly based on canon law, in particular a canon
of the Second Lateran Council (1139) which imposed excommunication on
those who physically attacked a clerk.⁷⁴ His decretal extended this sentence to
any who failed to defend the clerk when they could do so, thereby supporting
the attacker, for ‘catholic authority condemns those doing the deed and those
consenting to it to be bound by a similar penalty’. This argument and the
Lateran canon both occurred in the Decretum, but Innocent’s ruling was founded
more on the Chanter’s work than Gratian’s. Indeed the Chanter had collected
many contemporary and biblical examples of non-resistance as a ‘remote’ kind
of consent to another’s sin. He concluded that any Christian failing to defend
another Christian from injury, when able to do so, was guilty of a crime and
deserved to be accused before God, for ‘those doing a deed and those consenting
to it are to be punished by a similar penalty’. In direct anticipation of Innocent’s
ruling he also stated that those who saw a clerk being attacked and said nothing,
as if it pleased them, ought to incur the same penalty of excommunication as the
attacker, for silence meant consent when one could intervene very easily, and it
was as if one had ordered the clerk to be attacked. Even more significantly he
recognized that a ‘multitude’ was capable of non-resistance, arguing that none of
its members might excuse themselves like Pilate because the rest allowed a sin to
occur, since every single person could and ought to resist and speak against sin.⁷⁵

ut Io. Fa[ventinus] et Rufinus, eo quod vitio scandali omnibus sit inhibita. Et ad hoc pertineat
hoc capitulum, sicut etiam testatur Augustinus, dicens, ‘‘Hoc precipi omnibus et paribus in pares,
et maioribus in minores et minoribus in maiores’’. Item Theodorus in penitentiali: ‘‘Quicumque
fratrem peccare viderit nec increpat non modica pena dignus est.’’ Huic opinioni consentimus’. A
marginal note in the Oxford manuscript indicated that Peter Comestor was one of those limiting
the command of Matthew 18:15 to prelates: ‘Ita m<agister> P<etrus> Mandu<cator>.’ See my
‘Theological Views’, 17–18.
⁷³ Pennington, ‘Legal Education’; ‘Further Thoughts’. However, see n. 75.
⁷⁴ See Helmholz, ‘ ‘‘Si quis suadente’’ (C.17 q.4 c.29)’, on this canon.
⁷⁵ Peter the Chanter, Summa, II, AMN 7, pp. 271–5, esp. 275; ibid. III 2a, AMN 16, p. 397. Id.
Verbum abbreviatum (long version), BAV, Reg. lat. MS 106, fol. 92v (short version in PL 205. 217):
‘Quod peccatum unius redundat in universos … Totum unusquisque qui potest debet resistere
36 Justification of the Interdict

The Chanter would elaborate elsewhere on this idea of collective non-resistance,

but before we consider this and its clear implications for the interdict, we must
first examine how canonists reacted to Innocent III’s ruling, for this indicates
that canonists were still divided on this question of non-resistance.
Alanus Anglicus was the first to include ‘Quante presumptionis’ in a decretal
collection and gloss it (c.1206). Alanus recognized the Christian obligation to
defend one’s neighbour, as noted in the Decretum, but he regarded Innocent’s
interpretation of this as ‘new law’ contradicting the old law ‘Si quatuor’ that
had deemed innocent those present but not collaborating in a physical attack.⁷⁶
Under the pope’s ‘new law’ there was no longer any such person as an ‘innocent’
bystander. Perhaps the compiler of Compilatio tertia, Petrus Beneventanus, also
thought the pope’s law controversial, for he did not include it in his collection.
Johannes Teutonicus, nevertheless, included it in Compilatio quarta and made
an important distinction in his commentary on it. He observed that whatever
one ought to do in defence of lay persons, anyone was obliged to defend a clerk
by the ius publicum, that is, Roman law.⁷⁷ He added that anyone who did not
defend another when he could, if only by clamour and weeping, intended sin and
murder. Nevertheless he admitted that some canonists only applied this principle
to judges or those holding power. One such canonist was a French decretist who
had distinguished (c.1206–10) that anyone who could constrain a delinquent ‘de
iure’ and failed to do so approved his wrong and was accountable before God and
man in civil proceedings, for example, a bishop obliged to coerce his subjects, but
anyone, such as a subject, who could only constrain another ‘de facto’ was only
answerable to God.⁷⁸ Innocent’s ruling was clearly controversial, and it remained

et contradicere vel impedire. Ille vero qui se excusat et excipit a peccato multitudinis vel delicto
et per multitudinem vel etiam per prelatum se credit, similis est Pilato, qui immundam habens
conscientiam manus suas lavit.’ cf. ibid. fol. 94ra: ‘[same heading] … Qui excusant se ab occasione
peccati prestita nisi manu peccaverint, se reos non putantes … similes sunt Saulo consentienti
in necem prothomartyris Stephani, et eum in manibus omnium lapidantium servando eorum
vestes lapidanti [Acts 7:58–8:1; cf. Anon. gloss in n. 68].’ Huguccio also discussed this general
obligation to defend another in the context of a vassal’s duties: see Pennington, ‘Feudal Oath’,
63–4.
⁷⁶ Alanus on Alan. 5.22.1, v. possunt, Vercelli Cathedral MS 89, fol. 127va: ‘Comodum qualiter
unus alium debeat defendere diximus, xxiii.q.iii.in prin. et c. Non inferenda [C.23 q.3 c.7], ubi ergo
tenetur defendere proximum in illo casu. Si non defendat clericum, per interpretationem Innocencii
incidit in canonem ut hic dicitur, et est ius novum, sed xxiii.q. ult. c. ult. [C.23 q.8 c.34 (‘Si
quatuor’)] contra ar.’
⁷⁷ Johannes Teutonicus on 4 Comp. 5.15.3 v. interpretans, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 316rb:
‘dicunt tamen quidam solos iudices vel qui habent potestatem aliquam ad istud teneri, ut xxiii. q.iiii.
Forte [C.23 q.4 c.11]. Sed quicquid sit de defensione laicorum, quilibet tenetur ad defensionem
clerici, nam hoc ad ius publicum spectat, ut supra di. i. Ius publicum [D.1 c.11].’ The rest of this
gloss is too long to quote but many canonists copied it into their commentaries on this decretal,
notably Goffredus Tranensis (Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 157va) and Vincentius
Hispanus (see n. 79).
⁷⁸ Summa ‘Animal est substantia’ on D.83 c.2–3, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek Can. MS 42, fol.
47ra: ‘Istud non est generaliter verum sed tantum de his quos de iure prohibere potest, ut si videro
servum delinquentem et non corripio, approbo errorem, et obligor et quo ad Deum et quo ad
 Consent to Another’s Sin 37

so even after its inclusion in the Liber Extra (1234). In his commentary on that
collection Vincentius Hispanus held (c.1236) that this ruling should only apply
to those with the power and authority of defending others, such as podestàs,
officials, and judges, or lords in regard to their serfs, though he agreed that all
were obliged to resist wrong.⁷⁹
The Chanter’s doctrine that inspired Innocent’s ruling was thought radical
not only by canonists but even by his pupil and fellow Paris theologian,
Stephen Langton. Commenting on Peter Lombard’s gloss to Romans 1:32,
which interpreted silence as consent to sin, Langton had noted that Christ’s
command to correct one’s brother in Matthew 18:15 would thereby appear to
apply to all, such that if one saw a king sin or someone entering a brothel
and kept silent, one consented and hence sinned. But he concluded that in
practice the power to resist others’ sins was restricted to prelates by virtue of their
office.⁸⁰ And many early-thirteenth-century canonists, including Alanus and
even Johannes Teutonicus, accepted this general rule in accordance with Gratian,
though Johannes and others recognized exceptions to it, notably Innocent III’s
ruling, in the case of serious sins.⁸¹
Nevertheless canonists admitted that silence might be taken as consent to sin,
even if they debated whether it spelled penal consequences for all. The locus

homines civiliter, ff. de noxalibus actionibus. In delictis et l. In omnibus [Dig. 9.4.4, 3], sed illorum
errorem quos non nisi de facto corripere possum nunc corripendo non teneor nisi quantum ad
Deum, nec tunc etiam nisi credidero me posse prodesse, ergo prelatus tenetur civiliter et quo ad
Deum subditos cohercere, xliii c.i. et c. Ephesiis [D.43 c.1, 4]’.
⁷⁹ Vincentius on X 5.39.47 v. interpretans, Paris, BN, MS lat. 3967, fol. 207va: ‘[added to
gloss in n. 77] ego Vinc. distinguo <quod> scelus <quod> est commissum vel committendum
omnes tenentur obviare, xxiiii. q.iii. Tam sacerdotes, xiii. di. Nervi [C.23 q.4 c.14; D.13 c.2],
non tamen omnes non inpedientes eos qui volunt percutere clericos credo incidere in canonem
sed illos qui consentiunt habentes in loco auctoritatem et potestatem defendendi, ut potestates et
officiales et iudices locorum, vel domini super servos, vel patres super filios, vel viri super uxores, vel
paterfamilias super familiam’.
⁸⁰ Stephen Langton on Peter Lombard’s gloss (see n. 55) on Romans 1:32, Paris, BN, MS lat.
14443, fol. 259vb; Cambridge University Library MS Ii. 4. 23, fol. 166ra: ‘Consentire est tacere cum
possis arguere. Ex hoc videtur quod illud preceptum, ‘‘Si peccaverit in te frater tuus, corripe eum
inter te et ipsum solum’’ [Matthew 18:15], ad omnes pertineat, et ita si video regem peccare et
taceo, consentio et ita pecco, et si video aliquem intrantem lupanar et taceo, pecco. Ista maiori
indigent inquisitione, sed quantum ad expediens dicimus quod hic dicitur de posse officii esse
intelligendum. Unde sensus est, consentire est tacere cum possis de officio arguere. Et hoc ad solos
pertinet prelatos. Tamen in glosa media dicitur cum possis corrigere et planum est.’ No authentic
tradition of Langton on Matthew has survived.
⁸¹ E.g. Glossa Palatina on C.2 q.7 c.55 v. perturbare, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol. 34rb: ‘Idest,
prohibere et removere a malo. Et dicit h[uguccio] quod est preceptum ad omnes et quod quilibet
tenetur prohibere iniuriam ad proximum xxiii. q.ii<i>. Non inferendam [C.23 q.3 c.7]. Ego hic
similia intelligo tantum de prelatis, ar. xxiii. q.ult. Preterea, lxxxiii. <di.> §i, xxv q.<i> generali
[C.23 q.8 c.12; D.83 dictum ante c.l; C.25 q.l c.11]. Vel intellige de atrocibus, ut tunc quilibet
teneatur ar. extra de sententia excom. Quante, xxiii. q.iii. c.ult., de pen. di.i Periculose [Po. 24; C.23
q.3 c.11; De pen. D.1 c.23]. Vel dic quod quilibet tenetur prohibere proximum a committendo
xxii. q.v. Hoc videtur [C.22 q.5 c.8].’ Repeated with minor variants by Johannes Teutonicus at C.2
q.7 c.55 v. perturbare (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1367, fol. 97rb; ‘Editio Romana’, i.939). See also n. 67.
38 Justification of the Interdict

classicus in the Decretum was a text which ruled that, if a lord knew that his serf
had taken holy orders, which freed him from servile status, but the lord said
nothing then he lost his rights over the serf. Stephen of Tournai, Huguccio,
and subsequent canonists thus interpreted silence plus knowledge of the deed
as consent to it.⁸² And they applied this principle to consent to sin. Stephen
had compared the lord to a prelate who ought to correct and prevent the evils
of his subjects and sinned if he did not speak against these; but this implied
that only those with the power to correct sin consented to it by their silence.⁸³
Certain canonists qualified the principle of silence as consent even further
and noted a Roman law maxim which doubted whether silence always meant
consent; it could be ambiguous, somewhere between consent and contradiction,
as Damasus (c.1210–15) observed.⁸⁴ Johannes Teutonicus (c.1215) added that
silence might not be taken as consent when express consent was required, notably
in marriage.⁸⁵ Nevertheless the principle was applied in some instances that
silence meant consent to sin and was thus punishable. A text in Compilatio Prima
stated that a husband who knew of his wife’s adultery but continued to sleep
with her was judged an accomplice to her sin and thus guilty along with her. As
Ricardus Anglicus commented (c.1197), he was presumed to consent and sinned

⁸² D.54 c.20. See Stephen’s Summa on this text at v. preter voluntatem (Ed. p. 82). Cf. Huguccio,
ibid., v. sciente et non contradicente, BAV, Arch. S.Pietro MS C.114, fol. 72ra; Vat. lat. MS 2280,
fol. 56vb: ‘Videtur enim consentire. Hic enim scientia et taciturnitas pro consensu habentur, et
hoc propter favorem libertatis et religionis sepe contingit ut hic et xx. q.ii. c.i. et ii. et di. xxvii
Diaconus, et di. xxviii Diaconi [C.20 q.2 c.1,2; D.27 c.1; D.28 c.11].’ In 1298 Boniface VIII
would make the principle ‘Qui tacet consentire videtur’ a rule of law in his Liber Sextus at VI
5.12.43.
⁸³ Cf. Alanus on 1 Comp. 2.16.6 v. tacendo, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879,
fol. 27vb: ‘Ar. qui tacet consentit, liiii. di. Si servus [D.54 c.20]. Dic quod ubi per proibicionem
meam possum prohibere quod fit, tunc taciturnitas mihi nocet quia videor consentire. Si vero per
proibicionem meam non possum proibere quod fit, tunc taciturnitas mea mihi non nocet, ut ff. de
re. iu. Sepe. in medio le. [Dig. 42.1.63].’
⁸⁴ Ricardus on 1 Comp. 2.16.6 v. tacendo, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 34vb: ‘Verum est quod
qui tacet non loquitur. Tamen verum est non negare.’ Alanus on 1 Comp 4.11.3 v. nec, München,
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 7lva: ‘Nota qui tacet nec consentit nec negat quod est
verum, ff. de reg. iuris. Qui tacet. [Dig. 50.17.142]’. Damasus, ‘Brocarda’, fol. 27rb (reg. 48):
‘Solutio. tacere medium est inter contradictionem expressam et consensum expressum … ut ff. de
reg. iur. Qui tacet.’
⁸⁵ Johannes on D.27 c.l v. tacuerit, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1367, fol.19vb; ‘Editio Romana’, i.173:
‘taciturnitas semper habetur pro consensu nisi … in casibus ubi requiritur expressus consensio, ut
in servitute imponenda … in procuratore constituendo … in solvendo matrimonio … Vel distingue
an tale sit factum quod possit fieri me prohibente. In eo casu non obest taciturnitas ut rem
meam potest vendere quis me invito et ideo ibi non nocet taciturnitas, ut ff. de contrahen. emp.
Rem alienam [Dig. 18.1.28]. Si autem tale factum est quod non potest fieri me prohibente
ibi taciturnitas habetur pro consensu, ut extra. i. de hiis que fiunt a pre. c. Continebat [1
Comp. 3.9.2]. Sic distinguit lex ff. de re. iudi. Sepe, sic xi. q.iii. Quando [Dig. 42.1.63; C. 11
q.3 c.23].’ Cf. Huguccio on D.86 c.24 v. interim tacemus, BAV, Arch. S. Pietro MS C.114,
fol. 102rb; Vat. lat. MS 2280, fol. 79rb: ‘non semper qui tacet consentit nec semper idem
est tacere quam voce consentire, ar. de con. di. iiii. Cum pro parvulis [De con. D.4 c.77]’.
The Glossa Palatina repeated these remarks at D.86 c.24 v. tacemus, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658,
fol. 2lra.
 Consent to Another’s Sin 39

mortally by not calling her to repentance. Likewise the Chanter had condemned
the wicked silence of those, especially prelates, who did not reproach one close
to them when they saw his wickedness.⁸⁶
If the Chanter’s view was provocative, that any individual might suffer for
not correcting another’s sin, this principle appeared even more radical when
he and other Paris theologians applied it to whole communities. They did
so largely on the basis of St Augustine’s view blaming the Jews for Christ’s
crucifixion. Augustine commented on Psalm 81:4 that the Jewish people bore
some guilt for this crime as they had not constrained their leaders from having
Christ executed, when their leaders would have feared them owing to their
‘multitude’.⁸⁷ Notably he concluded that they could have freed their leaders
from this deed and themselves from consent to it, because whoever fails to resist,
when he can, consents. Peter Lombard adopted this interpretation in his own
gloss to Psalm 81:4, adding that it was aimed at ‘minores’.⁸⁸ Clearly ‘minores’
possessed the power to resist sin and derived it not from office, as their ‘maiores’
did, but from their sheer force of numbers. The Chanter recognized this power
of the mob when he assimilated Augustine’s gloss.⁸⁹ But he also developed this
view on Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion into a general ethical principle,
that any people had a duty to resist its sinful rulers. In his commentary on 2
Kings 24 he asked why divine judgement had fallen on the people of Israel as
well as King David after the latter had murdered Uriah and committed adultery
with Bethsheba. He noted Pope Gregory the Great’s explanation that a ruler’s
sin reflected the sinfulness of his people, and hence they suffered punishment
when he sinned. The Chanter went on to argue that God had punished Israel for
both David’s sin and its own, which consisted in its failure to resist David and its
consent to his acts of murder and adultery. In one manuscript a marginal note,
probably of the Chanter, concluded that we ought to fear for ourselves when we
do not resist our prelates’ sins. In a longer version of his commentary he observed
that a prince’s sin falls on his subjects since a multitude of them ought to restrain
him from evil, when it was able to do so. He then quoted Augustine on Psalm

⁸⁶ Ricardus on 1 Comp. 5.13.3 v. reus, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 104vb: ‘Presumitur
enim consentire, vel dico quod mortaliter peccat si eam ad penitentiam non denuntiet, ut ii.
q.i. Si petra [C.2 q.l c.19]’. The Chanter’s view is expressed in his Verbum abbreviatum (PL
205.19).
⁸⁷ C.23 q.3 c.11 (derived from Augustine’s gloss on Psalm 81:4). See Watt, ‘Parisian Theologians’.
⁸⁸ PL 191.778. Augustine’s gloss was also repeated with this remark, ‘Hoc modo minoribus
dicitur’, in the Glossa ordinaria to Psalm 81:4.
⁸⁹ Peter the Chanter on Psalm 81:4, London, BL, Royal MS 10.C.V, fol. 99va: ‘Et liberate
egenum de manu peccatoris. Pilati, scilicet, et maiorum Iudeorum potestate. ‘‘Per hoc ostenditur’’,
ut ait Augustinus [a marginal note quotes his gloss in n. 87] plebem Iudeorum non esse
immunem a morte Christi, cum pre multitudine timerentur, facultatem haberent resistendi. Ut
enim ait Augustinus: ‘‘Qui non resistit, cum potest, consentit.’’ … Sed numquid plebs potuerit
liberare adductum \innocentem/ patibulo a principe, cum summa rerum gerendarum non sit
penes populum? Numquid nisi liberavit pro posse suo peccabit? Ita maiores et minores dominum
crucifexerunt.’
40 Justification of the Interdict

81:4 in order to demonstrate that this ability came from force of numbers.⁹⁰
Consequently, the Chanter held that a people had both the power and a duty to
resist the sins of their ruler, and if they neglected this collective responsibility,
they thus deserved collective punishment. Hence he concluded in his Summa
that if King David had feared that the people would resist his wrongs, he would
not have had Uriah murdered, and therefore the people had incurred guilt and
punishment for Uriah’s death.⁹¹
The Chanter was not thereby advocating popular rebellion against sinful kings,
however. Baldwin has argued that, when Peter considered whether the people
had the right to liberate those condemned in princely miscarriages of justice,
‘Peter concluded that the people do not have the right of insurrection in such
cases’. Similarly Baldwin found that Stephen Langton agreed with this position,
for while he felt that the Jewish people had been obliged to liberate Christ
from the cross, resistance to authority in the face of an injustice was to consist
of prayers and petitions. Hence Baldwin concludes: ‘Since recourse to violent
rebellion against an unjust government was denied to the people, the Parisian
theologians must be seen in the last analysis as supporting Paul’s principle,
which made political obedience a divine command.’⁹² Admittedly Langton in
his own gloss on 2 Kings 24 noted the interpretation that when a king did
wrong, his people ought to resist him in so far as they could, otherwise they
sinned, and that therefore divine vengeance fell on King David’s people since
they did not resist him. But Langton considered this view ‘disputabilem’ though
he tactfully attributed it to St Jerome rather than contradict his master, the
Chanter, directly.⁹³ Even the Chanter had adopted Gregory the Great’s views on
civil obedience to sinful kings in his own gloss on 2 Kings 24, as did the authors

⁹⁰ Id. on 2 Kings 24:1, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 371, fol. 31r; Eton College MS
16: ‘Et addidit furor domini etc. Iam enim ultio facta fuerat in David et domo eius pro interfectione
Urie sed nondum in populo qui vel non resistit David vel consentit adulterio et homicidio
David … dixit rex … Punitus est ergo populus pro superbia David numerantis populum … et pro
peccato proprio quia non resistit David interficienti Uriam vel quia ei consensit.’ In Bodley
MS 371 a marginal note added: ‘ergo timere debemus nobis pro peccatis prelatorum cum eis
non resistimus.’ Another expanded version of this gloss in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS
44, p. 380b: ‘Addidit furor domini. Iam enim ultio facta fuerat in David et in domo eius
sed non in populo qui non resistit David vel ei consensit. Ecce peccatum principis redundat
in subditos et quod multitudo, cum posset, debet principem cohibere a malo. Unde super
Psalmum lxxxi versum ‘‘Eripite’’ etc. Augustinus: ‘‘Per hoc ostendit … [continues as n. 87] … se a
consensu’’.’
⁹¹ Id., Summa, III 2a, AMN 16, p. 193.
⁹² Baldwin, i.167–9. See also Buc, 350–67, 379–98, which discusses many of the texts and
questions raised here in a wider scholastic context.
⁹³ Stephen Langton on 2 Kings 23:59–24:1, Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 112, fol. 136rb:
‘Urias et Echeus: <Nota> glossam disputabilem Ieronimi que sic dicit … ‘‘Iam enim ultio
domini facta fuerat in David et in domo eius sed non in populo, vel quia non resistit
Dauid vel <ei> consensit’’. Simul glosam secundum illud Psalmi, ‘‘Eripite pauperem et
egenum’’ etc., quando ergo rex delinquit, populus debet ei resistere in quantum potest, vel
si non facit peccat’. Cf. Ps. Jerome, Quaestiones Hebraice in libros Regum et Paralipomenon
(PL 23.1363).
 Consent to Another’s Sin 41

of the glossa ordinaria to the Bible and Langton.⁹⁴ Gregory had held that a sinful
king might be judged only by God but his subjects were to take care that his
deeds did not displease them, lest they came to scorn or disrespect him, and,
if he could amend what displeased them, this ought to be suggested humbly.
Langton added that subjects should still respect a ruler who displeased them if
he was constrained by the law. As Gregory himself had concluded, subjects faced
with sinful rulers had to follow a subtle path of rectitude and humility. In other
words, a fine line divided resistance from disobedience, and in practice it was
hardly easy for subjects to toe this line and thereby avoid punishment for their
ruler’s sinful conduct.⁹⁵
Hence Paris theologians taught that subjects had a duty to call on a sinful ruler
to correct his faults but not rebel against him. This teaching arguably influenced
Pope Innocent III, who had of course studied theology at Paris. Early in his
pontificate his decretal ‘Etsi necesse’ (25 May 1199) cited God’s punishment of
David’s subjects in 2 Kings 24 in order to justify a papal interdict imposed on the
kingdom of Lèon for its king’s uncanonical marriage. Indeed in the same decretal
it is stated that when the people of Lèon saw that they were subjected to the
interdict together with their prince, they believed that they bore a degree of guilt
for his sin, because they consented to it by keeping silent. But Innocent’s decretal
was replying to the petition of some Iberian prelates and this observation occurs
in a summary of their petition, so it may represent their view rather than his
own. Nevertheless it agrees significantly with the teachings of Innocent’s masters
at Paris, and before becoming pope he had noted that subjects suffered for their
rulers’ sins. Even more strikingly in one of the first letters as pope, in February
1198, Innocent called for all the German princes to press for the release of the
Archbishop of Salerno; otherwise, all of Germany would fall under an interdict.
The archbishop had been captured by their emperor Henry VI, and since the
latter’s death he had been in the custody of Henry’s brother Philip of Swabia,
a prime candidate to succeed Henry. In other words, if subjects did not resist

⁹⁴ Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, XXV, xvi, CCSL 143B, 1260–2. Summarized in the
Chanter’s gloss on 2 Kings 24:16, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 371, fol. 31rb; Paris,
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 44, p. 380b: ‘Percutienti populum. Gregorius … Sed quia rectores
habent iudicem suum, non temere iudicent subditi vitam regentium. Per semetipsum effudit
dominus es nummulariorum et cathedras <vendentium> evertit, significans quia per magistros
iudicat vitam plebium, per semetipsum facta magistrorum … Dum ergo salva fide res agitur, virtutis
est meritum quicquid prioris est tolerare, debet tamen humiliter suggeri si forte valeat quod displicet
emendare. Sepe autem prelati in subditos et viceversa committunt, quia prelati subditos minus
sapientes arbitrantur, et subiecti rectorum facta iudicant, et si regnum tenere contingeret, se melius
agere putant … prelatis curandum est ne eorum corda <estimatione> singularis sapientie locus
superior extollat, ita subditis providendum est ne sibi facta rectorum displiceant, ita quod illos
contempnant vel non venerentur, sed semper humilitas conservetur.’
⁹⁵ Langton on 2 Kings 24:1 (summarizing Gregory’s gloss), Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson
MS C.427, fol. 29vb; Cambridge, Peterhouse MS 112, fol. 136va: ‘Si autem magistrorum vita iure
reprehenditur, oportet ut subditi eos etiam cum displicent venerentur’. The Glossa ordinaria adds to
its summary of Gregory on 2 Kings 24:1: ‘Subtilis enim via tenenda est rectitudinis et humilitatis,
ut sic magistrorum facta displiceant, ut subditorum mens a magisterii reverentia non recedat.’
42 Justification of the Interdict

a sin committed by their ruler (and perpetuated by their potential ruler), they
deserved a collective punishment. It is also notable that this sin was a violation
of clerical immunity and that Innocent’s letter included a general condemnation
of the failure to defend clerks from attack, the ruling incorporated in decretal
collections as ‘Quante presumptionis’ and discussed above.⁹⁶
Stephen Langton likewise applied the doctrine of the Paris theology schools
to the interdict when he wrote to the English people on the eve of Innocent’s
interdict on England.⁹⁷ As is well known, this interdict was occasioned by King
John’s refusal to accept Langton as papal nominee to the see of Canterbury;
hence Langton wrote to his flock from exile in France. He begged them not to
consent in any way to persecution of the English Church ‘since a like penalty
binds those consenting to a deed and those performing it’. He defined consent
as giving counsel, defence, or protection to wrongdoers, and as we will see,
canonists and Innocent III had also identified these forms of consent to sin.
He added that anyone who rejoiced in or turned a blind eye to wrongs also
consented to them when he could reasonably have prevented them in part or
even altogether. Hence non-resistance implied consent to sin, and Langton did
not restrict this to prelates as some canonists and even he himself did in their
scholastic writings. His question ‘Is there one of you who cannot help somehow?’
implied that resistance was a universal duty, and in particular he reminded
knights that they were invested by the Church in order to defend her. Even
those unable to oppose a prince directly might offer him sound warnings, oppose
wicked counsel, and restrain their retainers, subjects, and friends from consent
to evil, Langton argued. In effect he instructed the English to follow Gregory the
Great’s teachings on 2 Kings 24. They were to remain obedient to their king,
he warned, but if they consented to John’s disobedience toward God and the
Church, they were to repent and urge others to do the same in the knowledge
that, if they sought justice for the Church, it would be just as meritorious for
them to lack divine offices under the imminent interdict as to participate in them
at the proper time.
Canonists also took up this theological notion that a people had the power and
duty to resist its prince’s sins. Gratian had included in his Decretum Augustine’s
gloss on Psalm 81:4 blaming the Jews for not preventing the Crucifixion.⁹⁸
But only in the late twelfth century, following the Chanter’s response to this
text, did canonists begin to realize its sociopolitical implications. Huguccio was
apparently the first, and he stated the Chanter’s view that the text was directed at
‘minores’, who sinned since they could have restrained their leaders from Christ’s
murder but failed to do so and hence consented to it. Huguccio thus inferred

⁹⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 24; 2, no. 72. On his remark before becoming pope see n. 28.
⁹⁷ Acta, 6. The phrase ‘interdictum … expectate’ in this letter dates it between Innocent III’s
first threat of this interdict on 27 August 1207 and its proclamation on 23 March 1208. Innocent’s
decretal ‘Nuper a nobis’ (X 5.39.29) specifies the same forms consent to sin as this letter.
⁹⁸ See n. 87.
 Consent to Another’s Sin 43

that subjects might resist their secular or ecclesiastical superior if they saw him
act against God. This was consistent with his teaching that any Christian should
correct another’s sin when he could and sinned if he did not, and notably it
coincided again with the Chanter’s view. Indeed Huguccio likewise argued that
a multitude’s power over its leaders lay in its superior numbers.⁹⁹
Subsequent decretists followed this interpretation of Augustine’s gloss. Alanus
(c.1210–15) likewise understood it to mean that a people might resist a sinful
prince, but he noted that Augustine had also commented on Psalm 1:6 that a
king was only to be punished by God.¹⁰⁰ As Paris theologians taught, obedience
placed limits on popular resistance to a king’s sin. The contemporary author of
the Glossa Palatina made the same comments; it is unclear who is borrowing
from whom, but his other remarks on Augustine’s gloss are less circumspect.
Firstly he observed that the Jews had failed to prevent the Crucifixion by keeping
silent, that is to say, they had tacitly consented to it. He added that one had
the power to resist injury to another when one had jurisdiction. But he did
not reserve this power to prelates and others in authority as some canonists and
theologians did. Rather he argued that the people had this power since it had
jurisdiction and retained this even though it had transferred sovereignty to the
prince.¹⁰¹ In a period when it was widely accepted that power came from God,
the idea that it came from the people was radical, even when French and English
kings were crowned with the formal acclamation of their subjects. This notion
reflects the growing influence of Roman law on canonists, because it was based

⁹⁹ Huguccio on C.23 q.3 c.11, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2280, fol. 245r; Admont Stiftsbibliothek,
MS 7, fol. 319va: ‘Ostendit propheta. In illo versu scilicet David … ‘‘Eripite pauperem et egenum’’
etc. ubi loquitur David minoribus iudeis qui poterunt principes arcere ab interfectione Christi et
eis non consentire, quia qui non fecerunt, peccaverunt … cum pro multitudine. Quia multo plures
erant minores quam principes, et est argumentum quod neminem sociam habentem multitudinem
excusat allegatio inpotentie, ar. xxxi. q.ii. Lotarius [C.31 q.2 c.4] … a facto … est argumentum
subditos posse resistere suo prelato seculari vel ecclesiastico, si videant eum contra deum agentem,
ar. xi. q.iii. Qui resistit [C.11 q.3 c.97]’.
¹⁰⁰ Alanus, Apparatus ‘Ius naturale’ on C.23 q.3 c.11 v. principibus, Paris, BN, MS lat. 15393,
fol. 182va: ‘Argumentum posse quem(?) resistere principi malefacienti, sed Augustinus dicit super
illum verbum Psalmi ‘‘Tibi soli peccavi’’ [Psalm 1:6] quod rex a Deo tantum est puniendus.’ Peter
Lombard (PL 191.486) and the compilers of the glossa ordinaria on the Bible (ii.516a) also knew
this gloss on Psalm 1:6 but attributed it to Cassiodorus; Cassiodorus’s commentary on Psalm 1:6
(CCSL 97.457) is similar but lacks this exact phrase.
¹⁰¹ Glossa Palatina on C.23 q.3 c.11, Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.10.2, fol. 13rb:
‘permiserunt. Tacendo, xxxiii. q.v. Qui uxorem [C.33 q.5 c.10] … timerentur. Per hoc videtur
probari quod supracantavimus, scilicet quod proximus a proximo non tenetur repellere iniuriam
corporalem nisi iurisdictionem habeat, sed dic quod populus propter<ea> bene hoc facere potest,
cum populus iurisdictionem habeat, licet imperatore imperium transtulerit, ut inst. de iure naturali
§quis [Inst. 1.2.6], et principi et sibi retinuit … obviare. Quod possit quilibet resistere imperatori
suo si ipse in tempore(?) delinquit, sed ar. contra habes in Psalmum ‘‘Misere mei, Deus, tibi soli
peccavi’’ [Psalm 1:6]; dicit ibi in glosa Augustini quia rex tantum a Deo puniendus est.’ Goffredus
de Trano (d. 1245) stated the issue of tacit consent more forcibly, as Guido de Baysio noted in
his Rosarium on C.23 q.3 c.11 v. obviare: ‘intelligit Gof. consentire tacendo, lxxxiii. di. Error et c.
Consentire [D.83 c.3, 5].’
44 Justification of the Interdict

on a particular interpretation of the Lex regia in Roman law developed by the

Roman lawyer Azo (d. 1220) among others.¹⁰²
Radical as this notion was, Johannes Teutonicus nevertheless adopted it in his
glossa ordinaria on the Decretum.¹⁰³ He noted that Augustine’s gloss on Psalm
81:4 contradicted the view that nobody was bound to protect another from harm
unless he had jurisdiction and that a people had no jurisdiction. According to
Johannes the Lex regia stated that the people had such a right and had transferred
it to the emperor. He thus concluded that if a people or city had no jurisdiction,
one could not explain why it was punished for its judge’s fault, and he cited a
Decretum text which held a people or city responsible for punishing improper
acts of its members and making restitution of any losses resulting from such
acts.
The Glossa Palatina similarly concluded on Augustine’s gloss that, because
a people had jurisdiction, it had the power and duty to resist its king when
he wished to fight an unjust war or do anything wrong. In support another
passage from Augustine in the Decretum was cited such that if an earthly power
commanded anything contrary to divine law, a subject ought to disobey and serve
the higher power of God before the emperor, since although the emperor might
threaten the disobedient with prison, God might threaten hell!¹⁰⁴ Strikingly
similar ideas are stated in the Forma interdicti, which prescribed the terms of the
papal interdict on England (1208–14).¹⁰⁵ It required parish priests to preach to
their parishioners that they ought to obey God before man and not fear those
who had the power to kill them physically. Priests were then to say prayers for
the peace of the Church and for the king that Christ might guide him onto the
path of salvation and grant him the spirit of counsel that he might see God’s will
and carry it out.¹⁰⁶ Such sermons and prayers were clearly propaganda meant to
win the people over to the Church’s side but not to promote insurrection against
the king. The Forma interdicti encouraged the same non-violent resistance to his
sin as Stephen Langton’s letter to the English people on the eve of the interdict.

¹⁰² Laurentius Hispanus, possibly author of the Glossa Palatina, is credited by McManus, 50–74,
with a decisive role in this ‘Romanisation of canon law’. On the Lex regia see Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Q. R. D. Skinner, E. Kessler, and J. Kraye (Cambridge, 1988), 391–4.
¹⁰³ Glossa ordinaria on C.23 q.3 c.11 (Venice, 1496), fol. 214va; Cambridge University Library,
MS Dd.VII.20: ‘Ostendit propheta … Hic est evidens ar. contra illos qui dicunt quod socius non
tenetur iuvare socium, nisi habeat aliquam iurisdictionem [manuscript adds: in eum qui infert
iniuriam. Sed] isti dicunt quod populus non [Ed. bene] habet iurisdictionem, licet dicat lex
[Inst. 1.2.6] quod transtulit ius suum in imperatorem. Nam si civitas vel populus non haberet
iurisdictionem, quare punitur propter defectum iudicis, ut supra. e. q.ii. c. Dominus [C.23 q.2 c.2]?
Io.’
¹⁰⁴ As n. 101: ‘Cum potest Cum iurisdictionem habet, et ita intelligo extra. de homic. Sicut §i [1
Comp. 5.10.7]. Item probatur ex hoc c. quod populus debet resistere regi, cum contra ius voluerit
arma movere, vel aliquid mali facere, ar. xi. q.iii. Qui resistit [C.11 q.3 c.97].’ In his Rosarium
on the Decretum at C.23 q.3 c.11 Guido de Baysio (d. 1313) copied Huguccio’s gloss v. cum pro
multitudine (see n. 99) and the above gloss, which he specifically attributed to Laurentius.
¹⁰⁵ See p. 132 below on this source. ¹⁰⁶ Thesaurus, i.812–13.
 Consent to Another’s Sin 45

Therefore it seems that interdicts were intended not only to punish a people’s
failure to resist its ruler’s sin but also to coerce it into such resistance. Indeed
as early as 1111 Abbot Geoffrey of Vendôme had described how an interdict
had had exactly this effect. This interdict had fallen on the county of Vendôme
because of the count’s persecution of the Church, and, according to Geoffrey,
it had prompted all the people to proclaim against him, being aware of and
greatly displeased by his wickedness, so that clamour and the fear of men caused
him to desist. This account recalls, probably not coincidentally, Gregory the
Great’s gloss on 2 Kings 24 and Augustine’s on Psalm 81:4. Likewise the Gesta
Innocentii III alleged that the papal interdicts imposed on France and England
in 1199 and 1208, respectively, provoked popular clamours which prompted the
rulers of these kingdoms to seek terms with Innocent III. No source outside this
curial chronicle supports this version of events, but it at least shows what effect
the curia expected an interdict to have.¹⁰⁷ As a sanction meant to turn subjects
against their ruler the interdict was an extreme and desperate measure. Raymund
de Peñafort (c.1233) indeed noted that a household, city, or province suffered
an interdict when its lord committed a grave sin and could not be compelled
to make amends otherwise.¹⁰⁸ An interdict might be lifted once he who had
occasioned it submitted to ecclesiastical authority, and it was meant to induce
those who suffered it along with him to persuade him to do so.
However, not only those who aided or failed to resist sin were said to consent
to it and share blame for it, but also those inciting another to sin. Gratian’s
Decretum included a text suggesting that those who counselled and exhorted
another to commit murder were also murderers. The text comprised excerpts
from Augustine reiterating his view that the Jews were responsible for Christ’s
death, as it argued that they had killed him, albeit not with their hands, but
with their tongues crying ‘Crucify, crucify him’.¹⁰⁹ Rufinus and subsequent
decretists agreed that the Jews bore more guilt for Christ’s death than Pilate
and the Roman soldiers who had actually executed Christ, for Christ had said
to Pilate: ‘He has greater sin who delivered me to you.’¹¹⁰ These canonists
therefore concluded on the basis of this and another Decretum text (C.24 q.3
c.32) that those defending a sin were more guilty than those committing it and

¹⁰⁷ PL 157.84 (Geoffrey); see my ‘Popular Resistance’, esp. 78–81.

¹⁰⁸ Raymund de Peñafort, Summa, 372.
¹⁰⁹ De pen. D.1 c.23. Glossa Palatina (BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol. 85vb) summarizes it
thus: ‘Casus. Qui consilium dat ad occidendum homicida est. Unde Iudei probantur fuisse
homicide Christi, quia illum etsi non manibus tamen lingua occiderunt et magis peccaverunt
quam Pilatus vel milites qui eum crucifixerunt.’ Cf. id. on v. acutus: ‘Dum clamarent ‘‘cruci-
fige, crucifige’’. Et hii etiam fecerunt mortem ut gladius accutus.’ Both glosses were copied by
Johannes Teutonicus in his Glossa ordinaria at De pen. D.1 c.23 (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1367,
fol. 254vb).
¹¹⁰ Rufinus, Summa on D.83 dictum ante c.1 v. providendum (Ed. p. 173), quoting John 19:11.
Much the same was said by Stephen of Tournai on D.83 dictum ante c.1 v. admittat (Ed. p. 105)
and Johannes Faventinus on D.83 dictum ante c.1 v. providendum, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 71, fol. 56r.
46 Justification of the Interdict

so they deserved harsher punishment. The Decretum even recorded a case where
punishment was inflicted not on the actual sinner, a bishop acquitted on grounds
of senility, but on those who counselled his sin.¹¹¹ These were exceptions to the
rule that a ‘like penalty’ bound those committing a sin and those consenting
to it.
Canonists clearly considered that consent to sin varied in its gravity and so the
punishment should vary accordingly. Failure to correct another’s sin was deemed
less worse than the actual sin and so merited a lesser punishment, although
early decretists further distinguished that a prelate who consented in this way
might be punished more severely than a subject. Those who actively consented
by cooperating with the sinner had sinned as much as him and so were to be
punished likewise. Canonists considered counselling and defending sin the most
sinful form of consent for various reasons. An anonymous decretist (c.1185–7)
explained that it granted others the authority to sin.¹¹² Johannes Galensis of
Wales (c.1210) also observed that Innocent III’s decretal ‘Nuper a nobis’ (Po. 700;
1199) extended excommunication to those who had counselled a canonical crime
for the actual wrongdoer would not have committed it otherwise.¹¹³ Alexander
III had likewise ruled in the decretal ‘Sicut dignum’ that those who had provoked
Henry II by their suggestions to order Becket’s murder should be punished as
severely as Becket’s killers, and Tancred justified (c.1220) this on the grounds
that Henry might not have done so otherwise.¹¹⁴ Such papal rulings did not
follow canonistic doctrine strictly, for they had threatened the same penalty on
those counselling and those committing a sin. However, Innocent III’s decretal
‘Vergentis’ toed the more draconian canonistic line; according to Tancred it
punished defenders of heretics more than the actual heretics because they sinned

¹¹¹ D.86 c.24. Huguccio, ibid. v. duobus mensibus, BAV, Arch. S. Pietro MS C.114, fol. 102rb;
Vat. lat. MS 2280, fol. 79r: ‘Ecce casus ubi magis puniuntur consiliarii, quam auctor, ar. di. xcvi.
Duo, et xi. q. iii. Qui consentit [D.96 c.10; C.11 q.3 c.100]. Sed quare magis hic puniuntur
consentientes, quam auctor? Resp. parcitum est ei, quia senex et simplex erat sed in istis non
inveniebatur, quare cum eis dispensaretur. Postea presumebatur quia isti plus pecassent, quia ille
senex et simplex erat, unde quicquid fecit eius consiliariis inputari debebat’.
¹¹² Added to Huguccio’s Summa at C.24 q.3 c.32 v. Qui aliorum, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2280, fol.
254rb: ‘Hic habetur quod consentiens plus peccat quam faciens … Plus peccat qui defendit quia et
ipse peccat et auctoritatem peccandi aliis prestat.’ Cf. Glossa Palatina, ibid. v. defendit, BAV, Pal. lat.
MS 658, fol. 72rb: ‘Consensus … <quartus> per auctoritatem prestando, patrocinium, et favorem
et auctoritate facienti, xxiiii. q.iii. Qui aliorum … In quarto magis peccat consentiens quam faciens.
Quandoque tamen minus est facere quam auctoritatem prestare, ff. de act. ep. Iul. §Sed cum in
facto [Dig. 19.1.13 §7].’
¹¹³ Johannes Galensis on 3 Comp. 5.21.3 v. ei consilium, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
Clm 3879, fol. 261vb: ‘Qui alias non erat facturus, ff. de hiis que no. infa. l.i [Dig. 3.2.1], idest
favorem ei qui alias non erat facturus’. Cf. C.11 q.3 c.103.
¹¹⁴ Tancred on 1 Comp. 5.10.7 v. provocasset, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 87ra: ‘forte alias
non facturum.’ Cf. Zoën on 5 Comp. 1.1.1 v. consiliarios, Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale MS
565, fol. 1rb: ‘Abstinendum est ergo a consilio fraudulento etiam si alias sic facturus esset is
cui datur consilium, non enim oportet laudando augeri maliciam aliis, ut ff. de servo cor. l.i
§Sed utrum [Dig. 11.3.1 §4]. Et hoc est quod vulgo consuevit dici: Lauda malum et facies eum
currere.’
 Consent to Another’s Sin 47

more.¹¹⁵ Indeed this is comparable to the tendency of medieval chroniclers to

blame the faults of rulers on wicked counsellors. Counsel and consent were thus
closely related in medieval thought on collective guilt as on other matters.
By the early thirteenth century theologians and canonists had developed fairly
sophisticated notions of collective guilt on the basis of consent to another’s sin,
which in turn formed the doctrinal foundation for Innocent IV’s justification of
the interdict. Although they condemned the consent of a multitudo or populus,
tacit or otherwise, it was only after 1200 that they discussed this issue in
the context of corporation theory, that is to say, in relation to an organized
community or universitas. The only canonist who came close to doing so before
1200 was Rufinus, who had argued that if a prelate alienated his church’s dues
with his brethren’s consent, the church might suffer loss as a result, but if he acted
on his own authority without their consent, then only he would be punished and
the church would not suffer.¹¹⁶ This example is oblique and specific but raises
a key distinction: only the head of an organized community was responsible
for his conduct if the rest of the community did not approve it; but they
too were held accountable if he acted with their approval. This reflected the
decretist doctrine that consent to another’s sin made it one’s own. After 1200,
as corporation theory evolved, canonists applied this doctrine more explicitly to
organized communities. One of the first was a pupil of the French canonist Petrus
Brito, who said (c.1205) of a ruling of Alexander III on simony that a whole
monastery was at fault when all of its brethren consented to admission of novices
in return for money. Likewise Johannes Teutonicus conceded (c.1217) that an
abbot’s fraud ought to harm his church if the whole church body had given
him its consent.¹¹⁷ Tacit consent was also attributed to a universitas. Alexander
III’s decretal ‘Continebatur’ had provided that if an abbess alienated tithes of
her church and its convent knew but did not object, then her grant was valid,
for, as Alanus noted (c.1201–10), their silence was taken as consent. And such a
body might suffer for its silence.¹¹⁸ Johannes Teutonicus observed on Innocent
III’s decretal ‘Cum secundum aspostolum’ that where a bishop ordained a clerk
but failed to assign him a benefice, the bishop’s church was penalized for this

¹¹⁵ Tancred on 3 Comp. 5.4.1 v. defensare, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 264va: ‘Plus peccant
defensores hereticorum quam ipsi heretici et ideo gravius puniendi sunt, ut <xxiv> q.iii. Qui
aliorum [C.24 q.3 c.32] t.’
¹¹⁶ Rufinus, Summa on C.16 q.6 v. quod autem ea que ecclesia debentur (Ed. pp. 366–7).
¹¹⁷ Anon. on 1 Comp. 5.2.10 v. edere, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS 1407–9, fol. 74va:
‘extra. Innoc. [recte Alex.] iii. Veniens [2 Comp. 5.2.1] … ad illam decretalem dicitur quod totum
illud monasterium fuit in culpa quia omnes monachi consenserunt receptioni pecunie’. Johannes
Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 2.4.un. v. ipsius dolum (Ed. p. 194).
¹¹⁸ Alanus on 1 Comp. 3.9.2, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 42va:
‘contradicente. Nota in alienatione rerum ecclesie taciturnitas pro consensu habetur. Contra ar.
xii. q.ii. Sine ex., x. q.ii. §Hoc ius por. in fi. [C.12 q.2 c.52; C.10 q.2 c.2]. concessit. Hoc ideo
dicit quoniam, si multum tempus elapsum esset et conventus semper tacuisset, videtur consensisse,
ar. infra. de privil. Si de terra [1 Comp. 5.28.9]’. Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 3.5.1 v. vel
successores eorum (edited at http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/edit301.htm).
48 Justification of the Interdict

negligence by having to maintain the clerk, for it did not oppose the bishop over
this appointment and no bishop carried out ordinations without his church’s
counsel. Johannes thus concluded that those who had not resisted a wrongdoer
were punished.
A prelate was not to make decisions touching the rights of his church without
consulting its clergy, as Johannes indicated. Though Johannes and the pupil of
Petrus Brito spoke of a whole church body consenting to a prelate’s deeds, this
did not mean unanimous consent necessarily. Canonists accepted that collective
decisions might be made by a majority (maior et sanior pars). For example,
a majority vote was enough to elect a prelate, since, as Vincentius Hispanus
(c.1210–15) noted from Roman law, ‘what the majority does, all are understood
to do’. As early as the 1190s Bernard of Pavia had equated majority support
with the general consent of a church body, and he concluded that a dissenting
minority was thereby overruled and bound by the majority decision.¹¹⁹ This
also applied to collective wrongs, for Vincentius observed that if the majority of
a church body committed a wrong, it might result in loss for the church as a
whole.¹²⁰
Therefore Innocent IV was strongly supported by canonistic tradition when
he argued that a universitas might be interdicted if its leaders or agents had done
wrong with the approval of all or most of its members. The kind of universitas
that most concerned canonists was an ecclesiastical one, notably the bishop and
chapter, which, as the examples above show, practised this consensual form of
government. Bolognese canonists who developed corporation theory were also
influenced by the example of civic communes in northern Italy. Yet, when
canonists noted interdicts in papal letters, they described these as falling mostly
on a territory for the sin of its lord or prince and only occasionally on a city or
church.¹²¹ Alanus (c.1210–15) remarked that it could be imposed on subjects for
their superior’s contumacy. More tellingly Jacobus de Albenga (c.1230) observed

¹¹⁹ Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp. 5.2.21 v. perturbata, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS

983, fol. 49va: ‘Videtur ergo quod canonice electus fuit, supra. de hiis que fiunt a maiore parte
capituli c.i [1 Comp. 3.10.1], et quod maior pars facit omnes facere intelliguntur, ff. ad inimici.
Quod maior [Dig. 50.1.19]. Et in istis sufficit quod maior pars consentiat, supra de etate. Licet [1
Comp. 1.8.4]’. Bernard was applying this principle to a chapter or collegiate church specifically.
Bernardus Papiensis, Summa, III.10 §1 (Ed. p. 75). On this principle see Landau, ‘Bedeutung’, 42.
¹²⁰ Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp. 1.35.4 v. suo iure, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS
983, fol. 11rb: ‘<Si> vero maior pars ecclesie delinquid in faciendo, etiam in dampnum ecclesie
redundat, ut xxv. q.ii. Ita, ff. quibus mo. usufru. a. l. Si usus [C.25 q.2 c.25; Dig. 7.4.21].’
¹²¹ Ricardus Anglicus on 1 Comp. 4.1.13 v. tota, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 77ra: ‘Sic ergo
pro delicto unius tota provincia interdicitur, ut supra de off. iu. de. Sane quia [1 Comp. 1.21.16]
b<ernardus(?)>.’ Anon. on 1 Comp. 2.17.6 v. celebrari, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MS 1407–9,
fol. 23va: ‘Patet quod terra alicuius pro eius delicto potest interdici, xvii. q.iiii. Miror [C.17 q.4
c.8]’. Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp. 4.1.13 v. provincia, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983,
fol. 39va: ‘pro delicto principis tota terra subponitur interdicto’. Regarding an interdict on a city,
Glossa Palatina on C.17 q.4 c.8 v. domus tue, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol. 61ra: ‘Ar. quod delictum
unius et civitas debeat interdici, extra. de spon. Non est vobis [1 Comp. 4.1.13]’. Regarding an
interdict on a church, Alanus on 1 Comp. 3.33.17 v. terras, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
 Consent to Another’s Sin 49

that an interdict on a place might be caused by the delict of the person holding
lordship there.¹²² Feudal ties might justify why people in that place suffered an
interdict for their lord’s fault. Land was the basis of relations between a lord
and his subjects. His vassals held land from him in return for counsel and aid,
military and financial, which might involve them in supporting his sins. Indeed
Innocent III’s decretal ‘Nuper a nobis’ (1199) had extended excommunication
to any knowingly associating with an excommunicate in a crime by offering
him aid, counsel, or support; this had clear implications for feudal retainers.¹²³
Canonists had, moreover, defined counsel, cooperation, and defence as forms
of consent to another’s sin that merited punishment, and on the eve of the
English interdict Stephen Langton likewise condemned those who consented to
persecution of the English Church by giving counsel, defence, or protection to
wrongdoers. Thomas Aquinas also justified a pena temporalis, which punished
one for another’s sin, such as an interdict, in terms of medieval social relations,
arguing that one man belonged ‘temporaliter’ to another—sons to fathers, serfs
to lords—and hence shared their punishment.
However, though a feudal ruler required the counsel and aid and thus consent
of his principal vassals, he did not govern with the active consent of the
majority of his subjects. Only in the late thirteenth century did English kings
require communities to consent to grants of taxation through representatives
in Parliament. And even this was formal not free consent. Hence before the
late thirteenth century subjects might only consent to deeds of their ruler in
the tacit sense of failing to resist his wrongs. It was certainly in this sense that
Paris theologians and Bolognese canonists understood a people to consent to its
ruler’s sin and thereby deserve punishment, and we have seen that Innocent III
and Stephen Langton applied this way of thinking to interdicts. But scholars
and popes were not advocating popular revolt against abuses of temporal power.
After King John submitted to Innocent III, ending the conflict that occasioned
the papal interdict on England, the pope supported John against his rebellious
subjects and condemned Magna Carta as damaging to royal rights. Rather
scholastic doctrine on consent to another’s sin and the use of interdicts that

Clm 3879, fol. 58va: ‘ar. propter peccatum sacerdotis, patroni, vel domini terre ecclesia interdicto
supponi’.
¹²² Alanus, Apparatus ‘Ius naturale’ on C.24 q.3 d.a.c.1 v. pro peccato, BAV, Ross. lat. MS 595,
fol. 207rb (second layer of glosses): ‘Minori <excommunicatione> que est separatio a sacramentis
excommunicari possunt subditi pro superioris delicto si contumax fuerit, ut infra. de of. iud. del.
Sane quia nos, supra xvii. q.iiii. Miror [1 Comp. 1.21.16; C.17 q.4 c.8]’. (Alanus here defines the
interdict as collective minor excommunication). Jacobus de Albenga on 5 Comp. 2.16.1 v. interdicti,
London, BL, Royal MS 11.C.vii, fol. 257ra: ‘Quod quandoque fit propter delictum persone que
dominium habet in loco, ut supra de officio iud. del. Sane l.i., et de iure patro. Ex insinuatione, et
de spon. Non est vobis lib. i. [1 Comp. 1.21.16; 3.33.7; 4.1.13]’.
¹²³ 3 Comp. 5.21.3 (=X 5.39.29). Cf. Alanus (c.1201–10), who had said that one who gave
a thief aid and counsel might be judged his accomplice and guilty too, at 1 Comp. 5.26.6 v.
partitur, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 91rb: ‘Sive consilium sive auxilium
in participando.’
50 Justification of the Interdict

it justified were meant to reinforce a sense of popular collective duty to the

Church authorities above, but not necessarily in derogation of, that owed to lay
rulers. An interdict was meant both to punish subjects for not resisting their
ruler’s sins against the Church and to coerce them into persuading him to make
amends for these sins. Hence the interdict can be seen as the Church’s reaction
to lay forms of social organization emerging in the twelfth century, notably
kingdoms and communes, that made claims to collective loyalty sometimes in
conflict with those asserted by the Church.

1 . 4 S I N I N A N OT H E R ’ S N A M E

So far we have considered collective guilt in terms of a group’s consent to

a wrong of its head. Canonists also considered the problem from another
perspective, in terms of the formal relationship binding a community and its
head. We have already seen how feudal relations justified an interdict falling on
a land for its lord’s wrong. Organized communities might also be answerable
for wrongs of their representatives. From the early thirteenth century canonists
increasingly perceived the head of an ecclesiastical body as its proctor, i.e. its
legal representative empowered by its mandate to act on its behalf and bind
it by his actions.¹²⁴According to Post jurists had argued since the late twelfth
century that proctors were to receive a general mandate granting them full
power or plena potestas; this bound a client to consent to the decision of the
court in a suit brought by his proctor.¹²⁵ This mandate was issued by the
mid-thirteenth century to ambassadors despatched to negotiations and by 1300
to representatives summoned to Church councils, general chapters of religious
orders, and popular assemblies in England, France, and Aragon. Canonistic
discussion of proctorial power was based on Roman law, whose revival in the
twelfth century had introduced procedures involving proctors to ecclesiastical
courts. Civil charges might be brought against a universitas via its proctor, and
a univeritas or even an individual client might be held accountable for their
proctor’s conduct. Johannes Galensis (c.1210) noted the juristic commonplace
that one was often said to do what one did through another. Similarly Laurentius
Hispanus (c.1210) observed that whatever an advocate said on behalf of his
client, the client was deemed to have said.¹²⁶ Hence canonists recognized that
a proctor’s statements in court might prejudice his client, especially if the client
did not refute them. Alanus (c.1206) had argued that a client was not prejudiced

¹²⁴ See Tierney, 117–27. ¹²⁵ Post, 91–162.

¹²⁶ Johannes Galensis on 3 Comp. 3.26.5 v. inutiles, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm
3879, fol. 229vb: ‘Id enim sepe quis dicitur facere quod per alium facit, ut infra de sen. ex. Ut fame,
C. ubi et apud quem. l.iii, ff. de ami. tu. ita. Tamen §Quod si quis [3 Comp. 1.21.8; Cod. 2.46.3;
Dig. 26.7.5].’ Laurentius Hispanus on 3 Comp. 3.37.5 v. advocatus ipsius (Ed. pp. 534–5).
 Sin in Another’s Name 51

by his proctor’s statements unless he had ratified them or given the proctor a
mandate to make them. However, Alanus conceded that what a clerk said in
court might prejudice his church, even if this were not true of a proctor, at
least not without the above qualifications.¹²⁷ Johannes Galensis agreed that a
proctor’s statements might not prejudice the client unless he ratified them, but
he added that they might still prejudice the client when he did not refute them,
for it would be as if he approved them; in other words his silence might be taken
as consent.¹²⁸
The fullest discussion of this problem among the early decretalists is found in
the writings of Johannes Teutonicus. His view, repeated in many glosses on both
Compilationes tertia and quarta, was that whatever a proctor said or did wrong in
his client’s name might prejudice the client, unless he exceeded the terms of his
mandate, i.e. the general one empowering him to act in his client’s name. But
Johannes required no specific mandate or ratification approving such wrongs, as
Alanus had. Johannes conceded that a client ignorant of his proctor’s wrongs
might not be held responsible for them, presumably because he could not refute
what he did not know. Knowledge of a fact was seen as crucial in tacit consent to
it, as we noted above. This also applied to a proctor exceeding the terms of his
mandate, for Johannes argued that this would prejudice the client if he knew of
it but not otherwise. Johannes also observed that a proctor’s fraudulent conduct,
contumacy, or negligence might count against his client, since the client might
be accused of appointing a bad and incompetent proctor.¹²⁹
Such views on proctors could apply to a universitas, for it could appoint a
proctor or, strictly speaking, a syndic, notably to swear an oath in court in its
name.¹³⁰ They were especially pertinent to an ecclesiastical body, whose head

¹²⁷ Alanus on Alan. 1.5.5 (=3 Comp. 1.4.1) v. non negavit, Vercelli Cathedral Chapter MS 89,
fol. 55vb: ‘Que confessio presumptionem inducebat, domino tamen non preiudicabat, ut ff. de
inter. ac. Si defensor, et ff. de confessis. Certum §Sed an, et ff. ad l. Aquil. Proin. §Si procurator
[Dig. 11.1.9 §4; 42.2.6 §4; 9.2.25 §1], nisi dominus confessionem ratam habuerit hic, ff. de int. ac.
Qui servum [Dig. 11.1.20], vel sic confiteri mandaverit, ar. supra de procura. c.i. lib. i., et supra. de
procu. Cum pro causa lib. ii. [1 Comp. 1.29.1; 4 Comp. 1.16.1].’ Id. on Alan. 1.16.4 (=3 Comp.
3.29.un) v. confessus, fol. 67ra: ‘Sic ergo confessio illius presbyteri ecclesie preiudicavit, quod est
verum sine mala fide sic confessus, ar. infra. de his que fiunt ab episcopis. Cum olim, et infra. de
censi. Olim [4 Comp. 1.12.1; 3 Comp. 3.37.5]. Secus de procuratoris confessione, ut dictum est
supra. de postu. prela. Ad hec in glo. [Alan. 1.5.5].’
¹²⁸ Johannes Galensis on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. negavit, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm
3879, fol. 154vb: ‘Hec confessio sibi non preiudicabat … ff. de inter. ac. Si defensor, ff. de confessis.
Certum §Sed an, ff. ad l. Aquil. Provid. §i. [Dig. 11.1.9 §4; 42.2.6 §4; 9.2.25 §1], nisi ipse
confessionem ratam haberet, ar. de procurat. c.i. lib. i., de procurat. Ex insinuatione l.i [1 Comp.
1.29.1; 2 Comp. 1.18.3].’ Id. on 3 Comp. 3.29.un. v. confessus, fol. 231va: ‘Hec confessio … ubi non
revocata quasi approbata preiudicat, ff. de procurat. l.ii [Dig. 3.3.2]. Alias autem nisi approbaretur
domino non nocet, ff. de confessis Certum §Sed cui [Dig. 42.2.6].’
¹²⁹ Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. idem magister (Ed. p. 32); 1.18.11 v. protinus (Ed.
p. 127); 2.3.1 v. propter contumaciam (Ed. pp. 182–3). Id. on 4 Comp. 1.12.1 v. recusare, BAV,
Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 288va: ‘imputet ergo sibi quod malum procuratorem elegit’.
¹³⁰ Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.24.1 v. procuratorem, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 184va: ‘Hic
videtur quod universitas possit constituere procuratorem, ut infra de iuramento calumpnie c.uno
52 Justification of the Interdict

was increasingly regarded as its proctor and was elected by its members. And
the latter were obliged to elect a suitable candidate; otherwise, according to
many decretals of Innocent III, their voting rights might be transferred to a
superior. A gloss on the Decretum, possibly by Alanus (c.1210–15), had even
said that subjects might suffer because of a bad prelate, since he would lead them
astray by his bad example and, if they had elected him, they would be punished
unless he was removed.¹³¹ Subsequently Innocent IV affirmed that if a church’s
proctor was negligent, it might be punished not for his wrong but rather its own
fault in failing to elect a trustworthy and competent proctor.¹³² Twelfth- and
thirteenth-century theologians also argued that a sinful people deserved a sinful
ruler, notably Israel suffering divine punishment for King David’s sin in 2 Kings
24.¹³³ Though medieval kings were said to be elected with the acclamation of
their people in England and France, not until the late Middle Ages did jurists
impute the sins of kings to their subjects for ‘electing’ one who was unworthy of
office.¹³⁴
A potential obstacle to such arguments was Gratian’s maxim that the wrong of
one person, namely a prelate, ought not to result in loss for his church. Rufinus
had distinguished that a church might suffer as a result of alienations made by
its prelate with its clergy’s advice but not on his own authority alone.¹³⁵ Other
canonists drew another broader distinction. Johannes Faventinus discerned that
a prelate’s negligence could result in loss for his church, for example, as Rolandus
(c.1150) had also observed, a bishop’s failure to convert heretics subject to his
see, but the wrongdoer alone was to suffer for actual crimes like adultery or
murder.¹³⁶ The Summa Parisiensis expressed this distinction in terms of wrongs
of commission, such as adultery, which were not to result in a church’s loss,

[3 Comp. 1.26.un.], sed ibi sindicus dicitur … t.’ Laurentius Hispanus on 3 Comp. 1.24.1 v.
negligenter (Ed. p. 327).
¹³¹ Innocent III’s decretals on chapters electing unworthy prelates and thereby forfeiting voting
rights: 3 Comp. 1.3.7, 1.4.1, 1.6.8, 15; 4 Comp. 1.3.8–11. Alanus(?) on C.1 q.4 d.p.c.11 v.
inmeregeretur, BAV, Ross. lat. MS 595, fol. 96ra: ‘in vita subditorum deprivatur propter malum
prelatum, racione mali exempli, ut supra e. q. Homini [C.1 q.4 c.9], quia si subditi malum eligant,
puniuntur, alias removebitur, supra lxiii. Miramur [D.63 c.5].’
¹³² Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 2.6.1 v. sciens: ‘in predictis non punitur ecclesia pro delicto
procuratoris, sed pro sua culpa, in qua fuit quod non elegit et in fide et in facultatibus bonum
procuratorem.’
¹³³ E.g. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIa IIae , 108, art. 4, ad 1.
¹³⁴ Eschmann, ‘Notion of Society’, 6 n. 21, noted the opinion of Spanish jurist Franciscus de
Vitoria (d. 1546): ‘It is permitted to punish the whole ‘‘commonweal’’ (res publica) for the sin of
the king … The commonweal is indeed bound to entrust power to no one else but he who exercises
and uses it justly.’
¹³⁵ C.16 q.6 c.3. On this principle see Landau, ‘Bedeutung’, 42–3. On Rufinus see n. 116.
¹³⁶ Johannes Faventinus on C.16 q.6 c.3 v. delictum persone, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 71, fol. 122va:
‘Non est hic intelligendum de omni delicto. Sunt enim quedam prelatorum que in dampnum
ecclesie convertendum, ut eius negligentia qui hereticos ad suam cathedram pertinentes convertere
noluit … delicti ergo nomine hic intellige crimen, ut adulterium, homicidium et similia’. Rolandus,
Summa on C.16 q.6 (Ed. p. 55).
 Sin in Another’s Name 53

and those of omission, i.e. negligence, which might.¹³⁷ This formula became
a commonplace in subsequent canonistic discourse. But it was soon qualified,
since some canonists accepted that a church might sometimes suffer for its
prelate’s wrongs of commission. For example Peter of Blois (c.1180) combined
this distinction with that of Rufinus, arguing that a prelate’s wrong might result
in loss for his church if it was committed with the consent of his church or the
majority thereof; albeit this applied to wrongs against the church’s goods, like
alienations, not personal crimes like heresy. But not all canonists agreed that a
church suffered for its prelate’s wrongs if it authorized them, even alienations.¹³⁸
Nevertheless one influential canonist reached a synthesis similar to Peter’s;
Tancred argued that one person’s wrong did not result in a church’s loss if it was
not ‘contemplated’ by the church, for example theft, but it did if it arose from the
dictate of a prelate’s office or his church, whether it was a wrong of commission
or omission. Damasus (c.1210–15) likewise concluded that a prelate’s wrong of
commision resulted in his church’s loss when he acted on its behalf and in its
defence.¹³⁹ In other words a church might be held responsible for any wrong that
its prelate committed in his official capacity, acting in its name with its authority,
but not as a private person acting of his own volition. This may explain why
canonists did not hold clients responsible for proctors who exceeded the terms
of their mandates without their knowledge, as these proctors were acting not as
their agents but of their own free will. Agents needed authorization from those
in whose name they claimed to act, even if only a general mandate, and the
canonists also discussed this issue.
Huguccio had identified ‘licence’ as one of the forms of consent to another’s
sin, observing that whoever granted licence to a sinner approved his sin and so
ought to suffer the same penalty as him.¹⁴⁰ Early-thirteenth-century canonists

¹³⁷ Summa Parisiensis on C.16 q.6 (Ed. p. 186).

¹³⁸ Peter of Blois, Speculum (Ed. p. 29). Cf. The French Summa ‘De iure canonico tractaturus’
(c.1185) on C.16 q.6 c.1 v. detrimentum cause, Laon, Bibliothèque communale MS 371bis, fol.
141ra: ‘nec tamen inde ecclesie preiudicabitur nisi auctoritate collegii hoc factum fuerit, dico.’
Added in a marginal note: ‘Quidam tamen dicunt et forte verius quod si etiam auctoritate ecclesie
rem propriam ecclesie invadat episcopus, non preiudicat ecclesie’. Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp.
1.35.4 v. ignorante, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol. 11rb: ‘Hic valet argumentum
contrario sensu: delictum enim persone in dampnum ecclesie redundare non debet, xvi. q.vi. Si
episcopum [C.16 q.6 c.3]. Resp. dicunt quidam quod illud intelligitur quando prelatus solus
perpetrat ad instar tutoris, nam eius temeritas pupillo nocere non debet etiam si culpa precesisset,
C. unde vi. Meminerit [Cod. 8.4.6]. Secus si cum collegio dampnum dedit, viii. q.iii. Placuit, xxv.
q.ii. Ita nos [C.16 q.3 c.8; C.25 q.2 c.25]. Vel melius distingue inter delictum in omittendo et in
faciendo.’
¹³⁹ Tancred on 2 Comp. 2.14.2 v. successoribus, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 114rb: ‘Unde sic
solvo: delictum personale quod non contemplatione ecclesie committitur, ut furtum, adulterium
et similia, non redundat in dampnum ecclesie. Illud vero quod intuitu prelationis vel ecclesie
committitur, sive in faciendo sive in negligendo consistat, redundat in dampnum ecclesie. t.’
Damasus, ‘Brocarda’, fol. 26vb.
¹⁴⁰ Huguccio on D.86 c.1 v. negligentes, BAV, Arch. S. Pietro MS C.114, fol. 100va; Vat. lat. MS
2280, fol. 78ra: ‘Tribus modis dicitur quis consentire scilicet … Per licentiam, cum approbationem
54 Justification of the Interdict

preferred to speak of granting ‘authority’ to a sinner and considered it more

serious than the actual sin, arguing that it should be punished more harshly.¹⁴¹
Vincentius Hispanus (c.1210–15) thus remarked that when consent consisted of
authority in the form of commands, such as those from a father to a son or a lord
to his retainer, it was more incriminating than other forms of consent to sin.¹⁴²
One Decretum text had even suggested to the author of the Summa Reginensis and
other decretists that anyone who ordered a death, except for a judge imposing a
capital sentence, was guilty of murder along with the killer.¹⁴³ There was much
canonistic debate on this point and it had been stimulated by Alexander III’s
decretal ‘Mulieres’. It had ruled that any authorizing or ordering an attack on
a clerk required papal absolution, for ‘he truly commits the wrong by whose
authority or mandate it is proven to be committed’, an idea based on the Roman
lex Aquilia on murder.¹⁴⁴ Ricardus Anglicus (c.1197) inferred that the person
ordering the attack incurred the same penalty that the canon ‘Si quis suadente’
(C.17 q.4 c.29) imposed on a clerk’s attacker, i.e. papal excommunication, even
though Huguccio had doubted this.¹⁴⁵ Ricardus went on to argue that he incurred
this penalty even if he repented his order before the attack. Repentance spared
him from excommunication, Alanus added (c.1201–10), only if he revoked his

concedit et tunc equaliter peccat consentiens et faciens, ut xi q.i<ii> Qui consentit in fine [C.11
q.3 c.100]’. Id. on C.11 q.3 c.100 v. qui consentit, BAV, Arch. S. Pietro MS C.114, fol. 198rb;
Vat. lat. MS 2280, fol. 180rb: ‘In hoc capitulo facit Ysidorus mentionem de duobus consensibus
ad malum. Primo de illo qui fit per cooperationem, ubi gravius peccat consentiens quam faciens.
Postea de illo qui qui fit per licenciam, ubi equaliter peccat consentiens et faciens.’
¹⁴¹ Glossa Palatina on C.11 q.3 c.100 v. qui consentit, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol. 48vb:
‘Per cooperationem et auctoritatem.’ Johannes Teutonicus, Glossa ordinaria on C.2 q.1 c.10 v. et
consentientem, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1367, fol. 84vb; ‘Editio Romana’, i.533: ‘dicitur consentire cum
defendit peccantem vel quando sua auctoritate delinquitur, xi. q.iii. Qui consentit, xxiiii. q.iii. Qui
aliorum [C.11 q.3 c.100; C.24 q.3 c.32], et talis magis punitur quam faciens ut ibi dicitur … Io.’
Id. on C.11 q.3 c.100 v. consentit (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1367, fol. 135ra) copies the Glossa Palatina.
¹⁴² Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp. 5.2.7 v. reatum, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983,
fol. 48rb: ‘agentes et consentientes par pena constringit … Est consensus auctoritatis que in preceptis
consistit, ut de patre ad filium, de domino ad famulum, hic magis obligat, ut xxiiii. q.iii. Qui
aliorum. Est consensus negligentie huius pena minor, i. q.i. Quicquid [C.1 q.1 c.101]. Est consensus
licencie huius par pena, ii. q.i. Notum [C.2 q.1 c.10].’
¹⁴³ Summa Reginensis on D.50 c.8 v. aut facto, BAV, Reg. lat. MS 1061 fol. 9ra: ‘nam et qui
mandavit et consilium prestitit homicidii reus est’.
¹⁴⁴ 1 Comp. 5.34.7 (=X 5.39.6). Cf. Dig. 43.16.1 §12.
¹⁴⁵ Ricardus on 1 Comp. 5.34.7 v. auctoritate vel mandato, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 114vb:
‘Quidam solvendo concedunt de plano quod mandator incidit in canonem quibus consentio. Dicit
tamen magister Hucg<uccio> quod non incidit sed in detestationem criminis mittitur ad curiam
et illi consentirem si Celestinus [Pope Celestine III] non contradiceret.’ Cf. Huguccio on C.17 q.4
c.29 v. iniecerit violentas manus in clericum, BAV, Arch. S.Pietro MS C.114, fol. 248r: ‘Quid si quis
non percutit clericum sed facit eum percuti, idest, iussu eius percutitur, numquid in hunc canonem
inciditur? Et dicunt quidam quod sic, ar xxii q.v c.i [C.22 q.5 c.1] et decretalis Alex. ‘‘Mulieres’’, ubi
hec questio determinatur et respondent quod ille intelligitur facere cuius precepto et autoritate fit.
Mihi tamen videtur quod talis ipso iure non sit excommunicatus. Debent enim verba istius capituli
sicut dictum est cum affectu accipi. Graviter tamen peccat nec in illa decretale ‘‘Mulieres’’ dicitur
quod sit excommunicatus sed quod ad curiam Romanam sit mittendus quod forte in detestatione
criminis et terrore malefactorum dictum est et in pene exasperatione.’
 Sin in Another’s Name 55

order before the attack;¹⁴⁶ anyone then proceeding with the attack clearly acted
of his own volition. Thus canonists were careful not to let those in whose name
wrong was done evade responsibility for it.
A common view of early thirteenth-century canonists, based upon Roman
law, was that ratification, i.e. subsequent approval, was equivalent to a mandate
in regard to crimes. Although Alanus was one of the first canonists to state this
view, he did not apply it to the decretal ‘Mulieres’, arguing that the text did
not expressly refer to one ratifying an attack on a clerk, and he cited a Roman
law maxim that penalties were to be limited rather than extended.¹⁴⁷ Johannes
Galensis (c.1210) was less cautious. Though no glosses of his on ‘Mulieres’ are
known, he held that ratification was comparable to a mandate in regard to crimes,
especially when they had been carried out in the name of him who ratified them;
thus he who ratified a murder committed in his name might be judged a murderer.
Another contemporary canonist likewise pointed out that one might only ratify
deeds done in one’s name or with one’s contemplation.¹⁴⁸ Damasus (c.1210–15)
reviewed the canonistic debate on this point. He questioned the view that one
who ratified but did not order an attack on a clerk incurred excommunication.
He noted in favour of this view that ratification was comparable to a mandate
in regard to crimes and that the one ratifying was involved in a crime and
with a criminous person, which under Innocent III’s decretal ‘Nuper’ merited
papal excommunication. He also noted opposing arguments, such that it was
remarkable that anyone might be punished for approving another’s deed, for
approval consisted only of ‘will’ and not action, and that one could only ratify
what was done in one’s name. Despite the latter argument of Johannes Galensis

¹⁴⁶ Ricardus on 1 Comp. 5.34.7 v. mittendi, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 114vb: ‘Sed pone
quod peniteat dominus mandasse antequam clericus percutitur? Ex eo sequitur quod incidat in
canonem anathematis et iuste.’ Alanus on 1 Comp. 5.34.7 v. auctoritate, München, Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 95va: ‘Pone quod mandavit sed ante manuum iniectionem penituit.
Resp. nichilominus incidit in canonem nisi mandatum revocaverit’.
¹⁴⁷ Alanus (c.1206) on Alan. 5.2.4 (=3 Comp. 5.2.5) v. postea consenseris, Vercelli Cathedral
Chapter MS 89, fol. 115rb: ‘Si enim post consenserit crimine symonie, ut videtur, errat, quia in
maleficiis ratihabitatio mandato comparatur, ut ff. de vi et vi l.i §Quotiens in fi. et ff. de re. iu. Hoc
iure §Dictis [Dig. 43.16.1 §13; 50.17.152 §2]’ id. (c.1201–10) on 1 Comp. 5.34.7 v. auctoritate,
München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 95va: ‘Item pone quod non mandet sed ratum
habet. Resp. non incidit cum hoc in iure non exprimatur et pene emoliende sunt non extendende,
ar. de pen. di.i. Pene [de pen. D.1 c.18], ar. contra ff. de vi et vi l.i. §Quotiens.’
¹⁴⁸ Johannes Galensis on 3 Comp. 5.2.5 v. consenseris, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
Clm 3879, fol. 249va: ‘Quia in maleficiis ratihabitatio mandato comparatur, ff. de vi. et vi. ar. l.i
§Quot. [Dig. 43.1.16 §13], maxime in hiis que nomine eius gesta sunt qui ratum habet, ff. de neg. g.
Si pupilli §Item queritur [Dig. 3.5.5 §11]’. Id. on 3 Comp. 5.14.3 v. auctoritate, fol. 256ra: ‘incidit
in homicidium et forte … si ratum habuit homicidium nomine suo commissum, ar. supra de simo.
Sicut lib. e. [3 Comp. 5.2.5], ff. de vi et vi ar. l.i §Quotiens.’ Cf. Apparatus ‘Servus appellatur’ on 3
Comp. 2.6.5 v. ratam, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek Can. MS 19, fol. 153rb: ‘Nota quia illud solum
possum habere ratum quod meo nomine gestum, ut ff. de neg. g. <Si> pupilli §Sed si ego, ff. de
calump. l.ii, ff. de preca. Si servus [Dig. 3.5.5 §8; 3.6.2; 43.26.13] … alias non, sed negotium non
meum, si mei contemplatione geratur, possum ratum habere, ut ff. de neg. g. Si pupil. §Item quare
[Dig. 3.5.5 §11]’.
56 Justification of the Interdict

and Alanus’s view, Damasus concluded that one who ratified an attack on a
clerk might incur excommunication, a view also expressed in the contemporary
Glossa Palatina.¹⁴⁹ Tancred went further still, stating his belief that anyone who
could forbid an attack on a clerk and held jurisdiction or power of coercion
over the attacker effectively ratified the attack by not forbidding it and was
therefore excommunicate in accordance with ‘Quante presumptionis’, Innocent
III’s decretal which imposed this penalty on those who could resist an attack on
a clerk but failed to do so.¹⁵⁰ We thus return to the notion that tacit consent to
another’s wrong deserved punishment.
On the basis of this canonistic debate Innocent IV argued forty years later that
a universitas might be interdicted if it ratified a wrong committed in its name.
But he was not the first canonist to state that a universitas might suffer as a result
of ratifying its leader’s faults. Even Alanus had admitted that a chapter might not
reclaim property of its church if its bishop had alienated this with their consent,
but only if he had acted alone and his alienation was not confirmed as valid by
their ratification. Zoën likewise commented on Honorius III’s decretal ‘Dilecti
filii’, which held an abbey liable for debts its abbots contracted with its consent,
that the abbey was thereby understood to have ratified the abbots’ actions by
universal or majority consent, and what a whole body or the majority of it did
was referred to all its members.¹⁵¹

¹⁴⁹ Damasus, Questiones, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 261, fol. 44va: ‘Item pone quod aliquis non mandet
quod clericus percutiatur, sed ratam habeat percussionem, numquid incidit in excommunicationem?
Et videtur quod sic, quia in criminibus ratihabitatio mandato comparatur, ut infra. de simo. Sicut.
lib. iii. et de restit. spo. Cum ad sedem lib. iii. [3 Comp. 5.2.5; 2.6.5], ff. de vi. et vi. ar. l.i §Quotiens.
Item queritur dubita<n>s hic nonne iste qui ratum habet participat crimine et criminoso, ergo
incidit in eamdem excommunicationem in quam incidit ille qui iniecit, ut infra extra. de sententia
excom. Nuper lib. iii [3 Comp. 5.21.3]. Sed contra mirabile est quod dicis. Approbatio facti alicuius
penes voluntatem tantum consistit, nec progreditur ad aliquem actum, unde, licet puniatur adeo,
non est tamen punienda per ecclesiam, ut de pe. di.i §Cogitationis [De pen. D.1 c14]. Item non
potest quis negotium gestum ratum habere, nisi nomine ipsius sit gestum, ita quod inde oriatur
obligatio, ff. de neg. g. Si pupilli §Sed si ego, et de precario. Si servus. Solutio. dicit Ala. non incidere
et Io. Galensis, si nomine eius non fuit factum. Verius tamen videtur quod incidat.’ Cf. Glossa
Palatina on C.17 q.4 c.5 v. et consentientes, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol. 60vb: ‘Quid si quis percussit
clericum et alius percussit postea, numquid incidit in canonem? Videtur quod sic, quia in delictis
ratihabitatio retrotrahitur, unde si me eiecisti de possessione et alius postea prestitit auctoritatem,
ille tenetur interdicto, ff.de vi et vi ar. l.i. §Quotiens. Credo tamen contrarium in hoc casu, ar. ff.
de his que no. infa. Quid ergo §i, ff. manda. Si vero §Si post creditam [Dig. 3.2.13; 17.1.12 §14]’.
¹⁵⁰ Tancred on 1 Comp. 5.34.7 v. committi, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 96va: ‘ego credo
quod, si potest prohibere et est talis qui percutit in quo iurisdictionem vel cohertionem habet, is
qui ratum habet, si non prohibet, est excommunicatus, ut dicit illud capitulum et extra. Alani. e.t.
Quante presumptionis [Alan. 5.22.1]. t.’
¹⁵¹ Alanus on 1 Comp. 3.9.3 v. ratam, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol.
42va: ‘Nota rei ecclesiastice alienationem, que de iure valuit, ratihabitatione posse confirmari, ut xvi.
q.i. c.ult., infra de iure patro. Cum pastorali [C.16 q.1 c.58; 1 Comp. 3.33.13].’ Zoën on 5 Comp.
3.8.3 v. aut maioris, Tours, Bibliothèque municipale MS 565, fol. 26va: ‘Unde ratum intelligitur
fieri de consensu totius conventus nam refertur ad universos ut ff. de re. iu. Aliud refertur [Dig.
50.17.160], et quod maior pars facit omnes facere intelliguntur ut ff. ad inimic. Quod maior [Dig.
50.1.19]. Nam et in alienationibus idem seruatur ut x q.ii. Hoc ius [C.10 q.2 c.2] Zo.’
 Conclusion 57

1 . 5 C O N C LU S I O N

By the mid-thirteenth century ecclesiastical authorities and canonists could,

therefore, draw on a wide range of arguments, developed in scholastic circles over
the preceding century, in order to justify interdicts. Canonistic doctrine reserved
excommunication to individual wrongdoers, for it bound the soul, a principle
confirmed as papal law in 1245, but doctrine also accepted that others associated
with wrongdoers might suffer a pena temporalis, such as interdicts, the effect of
which was limited to this earthly life. The knowledge that serious wrongs had
penal consequences for others was meant to deter one from committing them
in the first place, or, failing that, make the undeterred feel guilty and make
amends. Such punishment was designed to impose psychological pressure both
before and after the fact not only on the wrongdoer but also on third parties. It
was meant to restrain them from supporting the wrongdoer, by actively aiding
and collaborating with him, tacitly failing to resist him physically or verbally, or
even inciting and authorizing him to do wrong. From the late twelfth century
the canonists argued that all these ways of consenting to another’s sin merited
punishment together with the sin itself. Some, notably Gratian, admittedly
asserted that only those who had the power to correct sin, such as prelates,
might suffer for not resisting others’ sin, but by the late twelfth century Peter the
Chanter and many Bolognese canonists, including Huguccio, believed that all
Christians had a duty to resist another’s sin, even subjects with regard to a sinful
ruler, and they deserved punishment for neglecting this duty. Augustine had also
argued that the power to resist another’s sin came from numbers as well as office
and hence blamed the Jews for not restraining their leaders from killing Christ.
The Chanter developed this into a general condemnation of any people who did
not resist its ruler’s sin, and canonists adopted this line of thought. Hence an
interdict was designed both to punish the failure of subjects to restrain their ruler
from sin and to turn them against him, compelling him to make amends.
Theology arguably gave the initial impetus for such doctrinal developments,
and theology continued to exert a strong influence on all aspects of canonistic
thought till at least 1200. It is also significant that the two popes who were most
innovative in introducing interdicts and other penalties touching third parties
into regular canonical usage, Alexander III and Innocent III, were both trained
in twelfth-century theology schools. The Chanter’s influence on Innocent is
particularly noticeable in this regard. Already, in Innocent’s pontificate, however,
Roman law was supplanting theology as the prime intellectual influence on
canonistic thought, and it stimulated new thinking on the nature of communities.
Jurists began to define certain ecclesiastical and secular bodies endowed by a
ruler with collective rights as corporations or universitates. And Roman law
denied that a corporation could be charged with a crime; it could only be held
58 Justification of the Interdict

responsible in a civil action for crimes of its ruler or agent. This led Johannes
Teutonicus to doubt whether punishment of a community was licit. Other
canonists, notably Alanus and Tancred, were sufficiently pragmatic to admit that
it was already valid in reality. Zoën and Innocent IV finally accommodated these
civilian principles within the canonistic justification of collective punishment,
and Innocent in particular argued that only individuals could do wrong and
therefore only they were to suffer the penalty for a canonical crime, namely
excommunication. He made a law to this effect that thus harmonized Roman
judicial procedure and traditional canonistic thought. The interdict remained the
appropriate punishment, like civil penalties in Roman law, for a community, in
Innocent’s view. While he subtly reformulated canonistic thought on collective
punishment, rebutting the idea of collective guilt, but accepting a notion of
collective responsibility, he followed deep-rooted canonistic tradition when he
held that this responsibility arose from consent to another’s sin. His notion of
collective responsibility was also based on civilian ideas of representation, which
had penetrated canonical procedure and canonistic thought by 1200, whereby a
community was held accountable for whatever a plenipotentiary did in its name.
It might appear ironic to modern eyes that the same ideas of consent, counsel,
and representation that gave rise to a theory of popular government, now generally
admired, also provided Innocent IV with a justification of the general interdict, a
penalty now seen as unjust and abolished under the modern Code of Canon Law.
Yet medieval thinkers would have seen little contradiction between communities
bearing both collective rights and responsibilities with regard to their leaders.
It must be added that the growth of canonistic thought on this issue was
not simply a response to intellectual currents but also to ecclesiastical practice.
The increasingly sophisticated views of canonists on collective responsibility
were more a reaction to than a vehicle for changes in legal practice, notably
Alexander III and Innocent III’s radical innovations in penal law mentioned
above. Nevertheless, canonistic doctrine helped to reinforce and defend current
trends in ecclesiastical practice and supplied the ecclesiastical authorities with an
apologia for the interdict, much needed in the face of the popular and princely
hostility that the sanction often provoked. Above all the use of the interdict and
the doctrine which justified it helped to reinforce the idea of Christian society
as one corporate unity, one unity in which subjects bore a share of responsibility
for their ruler’s crimes against the Church, over and above but not totally in
disregard of individual rights and responsibilities.
 2
Kinds of Interdict

It might be assumed that there was only one sort of interdict in the thirteenth
century, that imposed on a whole territory, such as the sentence that Innocent III
laid on King John’s England. But from the beginning of the thirteenth century
popes and canonists increasingly distinguished between an interdict on places and
an interdict on persons and defined how one worked differently from the other.
They further distinguished between general and particular (or specific) forms of
such interdicts. For example a personal interdict might be applied specifically to
an individual. This may come as a surprise given that we tend to assume that
an interdict normally affected a community, while excommunication was the
canonical penalty for individual sinners. A general local interdict imposed on
a territory or city is, admittedly, the kind of interdict most often encountered
in papal letters and other thirteenth-century sources, and it certainly produced
the better known and more dramatic cases of interdict. Nevertheless it was
clearly not the only kind of interdict, and one must understand how the
various kinds of interdict differed or were meant to differ in their usage and
operation.

2 . 1 T H E G E N E R A L LO C A L I N T E R D I C T

An interdict was sometimes already defined as a generale interdictum terre in

letters of the first year of Innocent III’s pontificate, and it was clearly an
established formula of the papal chancery by 1198. It was normally found in
grants to bishops and regular clergy of freedom to celebrate the offices ‘cum
generale interdictum terre fuerit’,¹ but recipients of these grants did not always
know what this clause meant. Early in 1199 the Pope had to clarify it at the
request of the Portuguese episcopacy; he intended it to describe the interdict
of a kingdom, province, or even a castle or town. His definition became a
canonistic commonplace after its inclusion in Compilatio tertia and then in
the Liber extra.² However, it was a rather prosaic definition and it failed to
resolve the ambiguities in the phrase generale interdictum terre. After Innocent III

¹ Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 287, 549 etc.

² Ibid. no. 551; 3 Comp. 5.23.1; X 5.40.17.
60 Kinds of Interdict

pronounced an interdict on ‘terra regis Francorum’ later in 1199, for example,

the bishop of Auxerre argued that his diocese was immune from the sentence
for the king had no land there. Innocent had overlooked the then key political
distinction between the royal demesne and the kingdom of France. In a decretal
of 1200 he explained that the legate who had published his sentence on ‘totam
terram regis Francorum’ had correctly interpreted it as relating to that land
‘que regi tunc temporis adherebat’, in other words all the land then under royal
jurisdiction. In some subsequent sentences of general local interdict Innocent
was, therefore, careful to specify that they were pronounced on the territory or
city where the guilty parties exercised lordship or temporal jurisdiction.³ His
more rigorous definition also rapidly entered canon law and was adopted by
canonists,⁴ for example Jacobus de Albenga, who stated that an interdict was
sometimes imposed on a place because of the delict of the person who had
lordship in that place.⁵
The pope thus defined the general local interdict in response to the demands
of practice. Canonists subsequently introduced subtle refinements to this papal
definition in order to cover various hypothetical situations. Vincentius Hispanus
commented (c.1210–15) that the interdict on ‘totam terram regis Francorum’
included land the king held as his wife’s dowry, for a husband was the lord of
a dowry.⁶ This interpretation was apparently followed in practice since Gregory
IX made a special exception to it in 1232, allowing a noblewoman to hear divine
offices in her dowry lands whenever her husband’s lands were laid under an
interdict.⁷ By 1342 Johannes Andreae could add many further distinctions. For
instance an interdict on a lord’s land was not to include land he acquired after
the sentence had been laid, but it was to remain in force on land that he sold
or lost subsequently until it was removed by the judge who laid it. A pupil of

³ Innocent III, Reg. 8, no. 84 (domain); 10, nos. 111, 125 (manors); 12, no. 80.
⁴ Alan. 1.5.5; 3 Comp. 1.4.1; X 1.5.1. Alanus’s collection was compiled c.1206, only a few years
after this decretal was issued.
⁵ See p. 49 n. 122. Cf. Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. propriam, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol.
154va: ‘Et licet rex in illa diocesi terram propriam non haberet, tamen tota est iurisdictioni subiecta
et ideo de regno dicitur esse … et ideo totum regnum intelligo iuste fuisse suppositum interdicto’.
Goffredus de Trano (d. 1245) on X 1.5.1 v. rex propriam, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197,
fol. 7rb: ‘Quamvis enim in diocese illa rex non teneret aliquam terram sed totam teneret barones,
nichilominus tamen tota erit regis Francie iurisdictione subiecta et ideo intelligendum erat totam
interdicto suppositam ut infra. de of. del. Sane, infra. de spon. Non est nobis [X 1.29.11, 4.1.11].
Gof.’
⁶ Vincentius Hispanus on 3 Comp. 1.5.1 v. totam, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1378, fol. 5vb (repeated
by him on X 1.5.1 v. totam terram, BAV Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 17rb): ‘ista terra est interdicta, quia
licet non esset sua quoad mensam, erat tamen sua quoad coronam, vel hec terra erat dotalis, unde
subicitur interdicto quia maritus est dominus dotis, inst. de rerum di. §Per traditionem, ff. de auro
et ar. le. Quinto et C. de rei ven. Dote ancillam [Inst. 2.1 §40; Dig. 34.2.10; Cod. 3.32.9]’. Cf.
also Apparatus ‘Servus appellatur’ on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. rex, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 19,
fol. 121va: ‘Idest quam per se ipsum teneat immediate, nam sua est licet sui re dotarii’. Vincentius
added in the above gloss that an interdict on the land that one held also included that which had
been pledged to one as a creditor.
⁷ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 989.
 The General Local Interdict 61

Andreae Johannes Calderinus likewise added that an interdict on a king’s or

duke’s land applied to land held from them in fief, even if outside their kingdom
or duchy.⁸
Behind these canonistic nuances lay the assumption that all land bound to a
lord by feudal ties was subject to the interdict that he provoked. Those who held
fiefs from that lord shared in his punishment presumably because they shared in
his crime by reason of their feudal obligations. Retainers held lands from their lord
in return for aid (military and financial) and counsel and this might involve them
in supporting him in a canonical wrong. Hence Johannes Teutonicus (c.1215)
interpreted Innocent III’s interdict on ‘terra regis Francorum’ as applying to all
lands that offered the king aid, and he cited a ruling of Innocent’s that extended
excommunication to those who gave aid to an excommunicate. Likewise over a
century later Johannes Calderinus held that an interdict was imposed on a king’s
land for assisting him ‘ratione feudi vel alias’ in the delict that had occasioned
the sentence.⁹
This canonistic teaching was also applied in practice. Innocent IV expressed it
both as a jurist in his Apparatus and as pope in his sentences of interdict.¹⁰ In
1246 he ordered various French clergy to enforce an interdict on lands supporting
the recently deposed emperor, Frederick II, and his allies. Of course it was not
the actual lands that were at fault for supporting him but the people living
there. Nevertheless land was the basis for raising finance and mounted troops to
aid enemies of ecclesiastical authority. Likewise in 1248 Innocent declared an
interdict on all castles and places in Salzburg province where people had bound
themselves by an oath to aid Frederick against the Church. It is unclear whether
a feudal oath was meant, but it is evident that the pope felt that those pledging
support to a wrongdoer deserved punishment along with him. The Franciscan
Monaldus hence wrote in his canon law manual (1270s) that when a prince’s
land was interdicted, the men of that land were affected only as long as they
remained under his lordship. Monaldus inferred that if they moved elsewhere
because of the interdict and in opposition to the prince so that nothing of theirs
remained under his lordship to provide him with aid, they no longer belonged to
his interdicted land. But another mendicant manualist John of Freiburg doubted
(c.1280) that such drastic action could release subjects from a local interdict
unless it was relaxed specifically in relation to them. Nevertheless this teaching

⁸ Johannes Andreae, Novella on VI 5.11.5 v. domini; Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De censura,

BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 12vb: ‘Et est sciendum quod interdicta terra regis vel ducis etc. et
talis propter delictum, terra assistens regi vel duci etc. in delicto ratione feudi vel alias, licet in
regno vel in ducatu non sit sita, tamen est interdicta.’ The view that an interdicted land remained
so after its lordship was transferred to another by sale had first been stated in the earliest treatise
on the interdict (Hermann of Minden, §84) and also noted by John of Freiburg, Summa, III,
xxxiii, q.226.
⁹ Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. rex terram propriam (Ed. p. 33). See n. 8 for
Calderinus.
¹⁰ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 1.5.1 v. regi; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 2344, 3572.
62 Kinds of Interdict

confirms that an interdict on a lord’s land was meant to punish those bound to
aid him by virtue of holding that land.¹¹
Occasionally a lord’s land was interdicted not because of a wrongdoing of his
own but of his subjects. As Innocent III pointed out in 1213 to a commune
lamenting an interdict imposed on its land for the excesses of its lords, biblical
examples taught that ‘superiors are sometimes punished for an offence of subjects
and subjects for the guilt of superiors’.¹² Indeed by the early thirteenth century
various canon law rulings held a superior penally responsible for a wrong that a
subordinate committed with his consent. Even if he had not expressly authorized
the wrong, his failure to restrain the subordinate from committing it or correct
him after the fact might be considered tacit consent. The only canonical excuse
for such negligence was ignorance of a subject’s wrongdoing. Indeed the few
cases in the thirteenth-century papal registers of a lord’s land being interdicted
for a subject’s fault are where the lord appealed on this ground. For example early
in 1213 Duke Henry of Brabant informed Innocent III that judges delegate had
imposed excommunication on him and an interdict on his land after one of his
servants had physically injured a clerk ‘although he [the duke] was absent and
unaware of this fact’; thus he petitioned the pope to relax these sentences. Some
lords even secured papal grants of immunity from interdicts laid on their land for
wrongs of their subjects committed without their support. For example in 1298
Boniface VIII forbade the imposition of interdicts on the lands of Duke Robert
of Burgundy for the crimes of his bailiffs or officials unless the duke or his deputy
refused full justice for these crimes when warned or requested. Presumably such
refusal was to be taken as tacit approval of an agent’s crimes.¹³
Where subjects committed crimes without the consent of their lord, express
or tacit, he could deny responsibility since they acted as private individuals
of their own volition. Canonistic doctrine supported this view from the early
thirteenth century, for it taught that a client was not answerable for what his
proctor did without his authority or knowledge, and likewise that a church was
not to suffer for crimes which its prelate committed without its consent and
as a private person. Consequently in 1265 when a provost and chapter in the
Clermont diocese complained to the pope that papal legates and judges delegate
laid interdicts on their parish for the wrongs of private persons who held neither
temporal lordship nor public office there, they were on solid legal ground, and
the pope recognized this in 1265 by granting their parish immunity from such
interdicts. But this and similar papal grants show that the canonistic distinction
between ‘public’ and ‘private’ wrongs was not always observed in practice.¹⁴

¹¹ Monaldus, Summa, fol. 95vb; John of Freiburg, Summa, III, xxxiii q.271.
¹² Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 20. See pp. 32–5, 36–7 with regard to what follows.
¹³ Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 56; cf. Reg. Honorius IV, no. 172. Reg. Boniface VIII, no.
2722.
¹⁴ Reg. Clement IV, no. 144; cf. Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1721. See pp. 52–3 for canonistic
discussion of this point.
 The General Local Interdict 63

A general local interdict was not always laid on the jurisdiction of a temporal
ruler and thereby justified in terms of social relations. It was sometimes laid on
places associated with the wrong that provoked it. The wrong in most instances
was seizure of property or persons under ecclesiastical protection. Sometimes
an interdict was laid on the stolen property itself to compel restitution to
its rightful owners. Innocent III in 1209 warned King John of England to
restore lands belonging to his brother’s widow; otherwise, he would impose
an interdict on them. Innocent was indeed mindful of the Church’s duty to
protect widows and orphans, as his biographer noted.¹⁵ More often an interdict
was laid on places where captured persons and goods were held. Pilgrims and
crusaders enjoyed ecclesiastical protection; thus when a party returning from
‘the service of Christ’ overseas was seized at Cremona, Innocent ordered the
local bishop and bishops of dioceses where the pilgrims were held to warn their
captors to release them and their goods in fifteen days. Otherwise the bishops
were to interdict the places where they were held and excommunicate their
captors.¹⁶These interdicts punished inhabitants of these places presumably for
harbouring the captors and in order to turn them against these violators of
ecclesiastical immunity. The interdict was chiefly used in this way to defend
property and personnel of the Church itself against lay hostility. Anyone
attacking a clerk already incurred excommunication under the canon ‘Si quis
suadente’ (1139), and interdicts were increasingly used during the thirteenth
century to reinforce this ruling. For example in 1248 Innocent IV confirmed a
statute of the Archbishop of Mainz, such that all places in the latter’s province
where goods stolen from clergy were brought, clerks were held captive, or the
wrongdoers involved were given refuge should remain interdicted until amends
were made.¹⁷ General as well as local ecclesiastical legislation laid interdicts
on places tainted by anti-clerical crimes. In 1298 Boniface VIII decreed that
a city incurred an interdict and loss of its see if it gave counsel, aid, or
support to those attacking or seizing a cardinal or failed to punish his attackers
in a month. Some fifteen years later a constitution of Clement V likewise
declared an interdict on any place where a bishop was attacked, seized, or
held. These rulings applied canonistic notions of collective guilt in condemning
the connivance of local communities at canonical crimes committed in their
midst.¹⁸
An interdict on the scene of a violent crime against a clerk also recognized
that the place was profaned by this sacrilegious act and thereby rendered
unfit for religion. In one case such places even seemed cursed. Clement IV
allegedly laid an interdict on some places in Tuscany after their inhabitants

¹⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 11, nos. 223–4; Gesta c.150 (PL 214.ccxxviii). On his use of interdict to
protect widows and orphans, see Innocent III, Reg. 13, no. 74; 14, no. 8.
¹⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 12, no. 77. ¹⁷ C.17 q.4 c.29; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 3626.
¹⁸ VI 5.9.5; Clem. 5.8.1.
64 Kinds of Interdict

had collaborated in seizing and killing a bishop, and, as they came under
Clement’s temporal jurisdiction in the papal state, he also withdrew their right
of municipium and universitas in perpetuity, i.e. freedom of civic and corporate
self-government. Some twenty years later in 1285 the places were said to be
deserted and uninhabitable. Allegedly no priest or clerk dared to officiate or even
stay there, and anyone still living there was to be refused the sacraments unless
they abjured the right to live there. The consequences of this interdict were
unusually harsh and barely accord with the Church’s teachings on penance and
redemption, but they suggest that even at this late time general local interdicts
still owed something to the maledictions that Benedictines had uttered against
the persons, families, and lands of their enemies in tenth- and eleventh-century
France.¹⁹ Indeed local interdicts were still associated with curses in sermon
exempla of the Dominican preacher Stephen of Bourbon in the mid-thirteenth
century.
Perhaps in reaction to such superstitions, popes and canonists were concerned
that local interdicts should not appear irrational. Tancred admitted (c.1210–15)
that it was more ‘honest’ to interdict persons than churches since churches did
no wrong but persons did.²⁰ Indeed about this time, early in 1213, Innocent
III maintained that royal chapels in France might not be interdicted for the
wrongs of their chaplains, since this would do injury to the king, but rather
the offending chaplain might be interdicted not the place ‘so that the penalty
bound its author’. The latter was a Roman law maxim in favour of limiting
punishment to the guilty, and here it also reflected the juristic idea noted above
that a superior was not accountable for wrongs done by subjects without his
approval.²¹ By the mid-thirteenth century the absurdity of the idea of punishing
a place struck many canonists, but they carefully distinguished that it was the
people of that place and not, in any real sense, the place itself that was the object
of an interdict. Bernard of Parma indeed observed that a place could not be
suspended or interdicted literally since it was a res inanimata. This might signify
not only an inanimate object but also matter lacking a soul (anima) and thus
unable to receive spiritual punishment. Innocent IV added that a place could
not receive or confer the sacraments. Hostiensis synthesized these views, arguing
that a place was incapable of sacraments and offices and could not do wrong or
be considered disobedient, in other words give a canonical cause for an interdict,

¹⁹ Reg. Honorius IV, no. 172; Little, esp. 12, 36, 60, 62–6, 84–5, 123–6, 129–49, 161,
163–4, 168–70, 182–5, 213–15, 255, 258, 260–1, 263–5, 267. On Stephen of Bourbon see
Winkler, ‘The Excommunicated Castle’, esp. 245, 252–3.
²⁰ Tancred on 2 Comp. 3.9.2 v. ecclesiam, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 122va: ‘non nego tamen
honestius esse personas interdicere, non enim ecclesie delinquunt sed persone, ut in aut. de manda.
prin. §oport. coll’ iii, et supra. de penis. Licet. libro i, xvi. q. vi. Illud [Nov. 17.1; 1 Comp. 5.32.3;
C.16 q.6 c.7] la.’ The siglum indicates that Tancred was citing an opinion of the canonist Laurentius
Hispanus (d. 1248).
²¹ Innocent III, Reg. 15, no. 227. The maxim cited is from Cod. 9.47.22; Celestine III also cited
it in his decretal ‘Quesivit’, glossed by Tancred in n. 20 above.
 The General Local Interdict 65

for it lacked the powers of intellect, reason, and the senses.²² It was the communis
opinio of these canonists that a place fell under an interdict because of the men
living there; hence it was they and not the place itself who were denied the
sacraments. An early fourteenth-century treatise on the interdict attributed to
Johannes Andreae therefore explained that when a city, town, castle, or church
was put under an interdict, this did not mean that its walls and buildings were
interdicted but that priests might not celebrate the offices in those places.²³
Nevertheless because a local interdict was imposed on a place and not directly
on the persons living there, it was meant to operate in a way different from
a personal interdict. Tancred taught (c.1220) that when a city was laid under
an interdict, clerks might go outside it and celebrate the offices in another
uninterdicted place, for it was the city that was interdicted and not the clerks.
This teaching was generally accepted among canonists by the mid-thirteenth
century;²⁴ hence it is probable that Tancred had simply been describing current
practice. Innocent III and his successors even ordered clerks to leave interdicted
cities on occasion, though it was never explicitly stated that the fugitive clergy
might thereby escape the effects of a local interdict.²⁵
By the mid-thirteenth century canonists also debated whether laity were free
from a local interdict outside the area affected. This was a more contentious
point, for there was a danger that those whom the interdict was meant to punish
would elude its hardships. Innocent IV hence distinguished that laity were free to
hear the offices and receive sacraments outside an interdicted place provided that
they had not done wrong or otherwise given cause for the interdict, but not if
they had. Conversely, he added, if an interdict was laid on people and not a place,
they were excluded from the offices or sacraments wherever they went. Although
Innocent was expressing a juristic opinion and not issuing a papal ruling, he
was pope and thus his view commanded respect and was widely accepted by
contemporary canonists. The first known treatise on interdicts (dated 1270)
copied it verbatim and explained how it might work in practice:²⁶ those who had

²² Bernard of Parma on X 5.31.18 v. inanes; Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. interdicti

violationem; Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.31.18 v. post interdicti violationem (vol. 2, fol. 77rb).
²³ Johannes Andreae (attrib.), De modo, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 8va (Ed. fol. 7v): ‘Et quando
dico ecclesiam interdici, non intelligo lapides interdici sed presbiteros ne in ea celebrant. Similiter
cum interdicitur civitas, villa vel castrum, non intelligo muros vel edificia sed ne in dictis locis
celebrentur divina.’
²⁴ Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.3.4 (= X 1.4.5) v. interdicto, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 152vb: ‘In
hoc clerici non sunt interdicti sed locus, unde si egrederentur civitatem, celebrare possunt divina in
alio loco non interdicto, quia locus est interdictus et non persone.’ Repeated almost verbatim by
Vincentius Hispanus (c.1236) on X 1.4.5 v. non servabant, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 15vb, and
Goffredus de Trano on X 1.4.5 v. etiam interdicto, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 6va.
Cf. also Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 1.4.5 v. in civitate.
²⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 182; 7, no. 41; 11, no. 143, etc. See pp. 189, 207 for further
examples.
²⁶ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.33.24 v. regularium; X 5.33.25 v. qui causam. Hermann of
Minden, ‘De interdictis’, §§76–8 (fol. 346va). Cf. Also Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.33.25 v. qui
causam (vol. 2, fol. 86vb).
66 Kinds of Interdict

not caused an interdict on their locality might accompany their parish priest to an
uninterdicted place and there he could celebrate the offices for them in a church
with its priest’s permission. But not all canonists accepted that innocent laity
enjoyed this freedom outside of interdicted places. Bernard of Parma believed
that they should not be admitted to any offices or sacraments, since anyone who
was under interdict in one church was under interdict in all of them. That is he
made no distinction between personal and local interdicts in terms of their effect
on the innocent, and his reasoning was that interdicts might thereby induce the
guilty to come to terms more quickly and be feared more. John of Freiburg
stated a similar hardline view that when a place was interdicted, those under the
jurisdiction of the guilty party were also understood to be interdicted personally
and thus excluded from offices and sacraments in uninterdicted churches.²⁷ Who
could this leave out, except perhaps the clergy? There is insufficient evidence to
show whether this or the more liberal view generally obtained in practice. In
1200, admittedly, the dauphin and count of Ponthieu had visited Normandy,
part of the ‘terra regis Anglorum’, to have their betrothals blessed since this was
forbidden in the interdicted ‘terra regis Francorum’. This suggests that Innocent
IV was describing customary practice, but it might be an untypical case and
these dignitaries might have received a special freedom. Conversely the proctors
of the dean and chapter of Laon accused the citizens of Laon of violating a papal
interdict laid on their city in 1296, in that they heard offices in churches outside
the city in the Laon diocese. Nevertheless the sentence was provoked by a rising
of the commune against the dean and chapter, and so if the latter perceived all
the people of Laon as guilty, there were no innocents free to hear offices outside
the city in accordance with Innocent IV’s teaching.²⁸
No papal legislation on the matter appeared until Boniface VIII published
his constitution ‘Si sententia’ in 1298. This allowed innocent citizens of a city
interdicted because of its lord or ruler to hear divine offices outside it provided
that they were not interdicted personally. Boniface then pointed up the contrast
with a personal interdict, ruling that no member of an interdicted people might
hear the offices or receive the sacraments anywhere. In other words he made
Innocent IV’s teaching into law. In common with other rulings of his it was
written specifically for his law code the Liber sextus to settle a canonistic debate
definitively. But his rulings in the Liber sextus not only responded to academic
controversies but also to practical problems of his day.²⁹ By the late thirteenth
century it was hard to define in practice where an interdict on a city ended and
where the ‘outside’ began. Rapid population growth across the West, notably
in Italian towns close to papal lands, meant that cities were no longer defined

²⁷ Bernard of Parma on X 5.33.25 v. causam; John of Freiburg, Summa, III, xxxiii q.259.
²⁸ Interdict on France: Howden, iv.115; Krehbiel, 119. Interdict on Laon: Reg. Boniface VIII,
no. 1533; Denton, ‘Laon’, esp. 79–82.
²⁹ VI 5.11.16. On the Liber sextus in general: Le Bras, ‘Boniface VIII’; Schmidt, ‘Papst Bonifaz
VIII’; Clarke, ‘Two Constitutions’.
 The General Local Interdict 67

simply by a circuit of walls; they were increasingly girdled by sprawling suburbs

with their own churches. Nicholas IV, Boniface’s predecessor, had reacted to
this situation by laying interdicts on a city and its suburbs. Suburbs came
under the jurisdiction of a city’s governors, and a general local interdict was
meant to apply throughout the jurisdiction of the temporal ruler who provoked
it. Boniface hence ruled in his constitution ‘Si civitas’ that an interdict on a
city, castle, or vill automatically included its suburbs and adjacent buildings.
His concern was that the sentence would be scorned if offices might be licitly
celebrated in such neighbouring places.³⁰ But how was ‘neighbouring’ to be
defined? The canonist Johannes Andreae (d. 1348) observed that it included the
buildings adjacent to the city, but then potentially buildings adjacent to those,
and so on indefinitely until an interdict embraced the whole world. This absurd
scenario was hardly what Boniface intended, and Johannes concluded that in
practice it was left to a judge to interpret what was neighbouring and what was
not.³¹
While the innocent might escape the effects of a local interdict outside the area
affected, at least after 1298, conversely those coming to that area from outside
were to be excluded from its churches along with its inhabitants according to
Innocent IV.³² It seems that this had been a given since the late twelfth century,
when the papacy began issuing grants permitting the military orders and other
religious arriving in interdicted places to open churches and celebrate offices
there once a year, as it would have been a meaningless freedom unless outsiders
were normally excluded.³³ A Christian burial was likewise prohibited to any
who happened to die in an interdicted place according to Innocent IV. Again
he apparently described customary practice, for the papacy had made exceptions
to this unwritten rule in favour of the military orders during the late twelfth
century and all clergy under Innocent III. Such freedoms were of course open to
abuse, and since the late twelfth century popes had warned those who enjoyed
them not to admit those who did not, particularly laity, to divine offices and
Christian burial in interdicted places.³⁴ By the mid-thirteenth century canonists
also doubted that such freedoms might be so extended, even though the papal
documents granting them only required the exclusion of excommunicated and
interdicted persons. The issue was not settled definitively till 1298, when Boniface
VIII’s constitution ‘Licet’ forbade those free to celebrate offices in private during

³⁰ Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 616, 717; cf. Reg. Urban IV, no. C107, which granted Troyes
Cathedral and churches in the city’s suburbs immunity from interdicts laid by legates, judges
delegate, or subdelegate. VI 5.11.17 (‘Si civitas’).
³¹ Johannes Andreae, Novella on X 1.5.1 v. adherebat; id. Glossa on VI 5.11.17 v. continentibus.
Cf. Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §§25–6 (fol. 326rb).
³² Innocent IV: as n. 22. Cf. Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.33.25 v. interdictis (vol. 2, fol. 86ra).
³³ 1 Comp. 5.28.3 §3 (= X 5.33.3 §3). 4 Comp. 5.12.7 (= X 5.33.24). Innocent III, Reg. 6,
no. 10; 7, nos. 95, 139; 10, no. 121; etc.
³⁴ Innocent IV: as n. 22. 1 Comp. 5.28.3 §§3–4 (= X 5.33.3 §§3–4). 4 Comp. 5.12.7 (= X
5.33.24). 4 Comp. 5.14.3 (= X 5.38.11).
68 Kinds of Interdict

general local interdicts from admitting those coming from elsewhere, except
those privileged in this regard.³⁵
By the late twelfth century general local interdicts were directed against places
associated with a wrongdoer or the wrong itself. This association was often
defined in feudal terms. A general local interdict might cover all lands under
the lordship of the guilty party and so punish his retainers, as he acted with
their advice and aid. It might also affect places linked with crimes against
property and persons under ecclesiastical protection, for either the complicity
of the inhabitants was assumed or they harboured the wrongdoers with their
thefts or victims. Thus this interdict was normally provoked by wrongs of a
temporal power against those associated with the spiritual power. The ‘rules’
governing its operation were largely a matter of customary practice and juristic
opinion until they were defined in law at the end of the thirteenth century. It
was thus gradually differentiated from personal interdicts. The latter were meant
to follow one wherever one went like a shadow, but a general local interdict
was to affect everyone settled or passing within its physical limits except those
granted immunity or innocent inhabitants passing outside those limits. It was as
if the place were polluted by sin and so declared unfit for religious worship until
cleansed of that sin, an idea which will be encountered more forcibly in the next
section.

2 . 2 T H E PA RT I C U L A R LO C A L I N T E R D I C T

When Innocent III had defined a generale interdictum terre in a decretal of 1199 as
an interdict on a kingdom, province, town, or castle, he was trying to differentiate
it from an interdictum particulare. He issued this decretal to advise Portuguese
bishops who had asked how one determined whether an interdict was ‘general’
or ‘particular’. This reveals that the distinction was current by the late twelfth
century even if it was not generally understood. Laurentius Hispanus glossing
this decretal (c.1210) defined an interdictum particulare as one laid on specific
churches or chapels. His definition was copied by Tancred in his ordinary gloss on
Compilatio tertia and generally accepted by subsequent canonists.³⁶ Nevetheless

³⁵ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.33.24 v. qui causam; Pierre Sampsona (1267), Distinctio on X
5.38.11, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 656, fols. 155vb–6ra; Bernard de Montmirat on X 5.33.25, BAV, Vat.
lat. MS 2542, fol. 80rb (Ed. fol. 144vb); Johannes Andreae (attrib.), De modo, BAV, Pal. lat. MS
797, fol. 9r (Ed. fol. 8v); see also pp. 166, 192–5, 203 below on abuse of clerical immunities. VI
5.7.11 (‘Licet’).
³⁶ Tancred on 3 Comp. 5.23.1 (= X 5.40.17) v. nomine, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol.
278rb: ‘nullum sit interdictum particulare, immo si eorum oratoria interdicerentur vel ecclesie,
supra. de privil. Sane. lib. i. [1 Comp. 5.28.8]. La<urentius>. Verumtamen quotienscumque
aliqua terra magna vel parva totaliter supponitur interdicto, generale interdictum dicitur ut hic in
fine. T<ancredus>.’ Vincentius Hispanus (c.1210–15) on 3 Comp. 5.23.1 v. intelligi, Bamberg
Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 20, fol. 179va, also copied Laurentius’s gloss, and again (c.1236) on X
 The Particular Local Interdict 69

thirteenth-century papal letters rarely refer to an interdict as particulare, though

they record interdicts on churches from at least the late twelfth century.³⁷ In
contrast to a general interdict the papacy used this interdict more to exert
authority over disobedient clergy than to coerce secular rulers. Indeed Pope
Celestine III and his successors often interdicted cathedral or collegiate churches
when chapters resisted papal provisions to canonries there. In one case from late
1203 an interdict was laid on Clermont Cathedral and unusually other churches
belonging to its chapter, because the bishop and canons had refused to admit
a papal candidate.³⁸ Occasionally a papal interdict was placed on a monastic
church in order to discipline its community. In one extreme case monks were
associated with a brutal attack on a P. de Sancto Albino, who had tried to
reform their degraded house near Vercelli. In 1212 Innocent III used canonistic
notions of collective guilt to justify an interdict on the monks’ church: none of
them were free from guilt or negligence, since some had aided the attack and
others had neglected to stop it.³⁹ Lesser prelates also resorted to interdicts on
churches of regular clergy who opposed their authority, especially their powers of
visitation and procuration, although such cases were often only recorded in the
papal registers when the monks appealed on grounds of exemption.⁴⁰ However,
an interdict on a church was not always provoked by its clergy. When possession
of a church was disputed, it might be interdicted to compel rival claimants, lay
or clerical, to come to terms.⁴¹
Examples of interdicts on churches are relatively rare in the thirteenth-century
papal registers, however, perhaps because of their extremely localized nature, and
even canonists and canon law said little about the phenomenon. Innocent IV
distinguished in his Apparatus that parishioners of interdicted churches might
hear offices and bury their dead at uninterdicted churches, if the clergy had
provoked the sentence (which in practice was generally the case), but not if the
parishioners themselves or their lord had caused it. In other words he taught
that a particular local interdict should work in a way similar to a general local
one: innocent laity might escape its effects outside its bounds. The only striking
difference was that clergy were not meant to enjoy the same immunities as

5.40.17 v. intelligi, Paris, BN, MS lat. 3967, fol. 210ra, where he appended Tancred’s addition,
misattributing it to Laurentius. Cf. Hermann de Minden, ‘De interdictis’ §10–11 (fol. 345rb).
³⁷ 1 Comp. 5.28.8: Alexander III confirmed papal immunity of Hospitallers’ churches from
interdict. 2 Comp. 3.9.2 (= X 3.11.2); see p. 102 below.
³⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 195. Other papal interdicts laid on churches for resisting provisions:
ibid. 1, nos. 55 (ordered by Celestine III), 418, 477; 2, no. 186 (?laid under Celestine III); 5, no.
145; 6, nos. 37 (?laid under Lucius III), 207; 7, no. 71; 9, no. 57 (?laid under Celestine III); Reg.
Nicholas IV, no. 657.
³⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 15, no. 105.
⁴⁰ E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 60; 15, no. 144; Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1738.
⁴¹ E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 221; 8, no. 47; 9, no. 49. Another example of laity provoking
interdicts on churches is when Venetians looted the Haggia Sophia in Constantinople after the
Fourth Crusade, and the Latin Patriarch laid an interdict on all churches ‘in parte sacrilegorum
ipsorum’ (Innocent III, Reg. 9, no. 1077).
70 Kinds of Interdict

they did under general local interdicts. Innocent held that the freedom of clergy
(granted in 1215) to receive burial without rites in interdicted places did not
apply to interdicted churches.⁴² Presumably the freedom of certain clergy to
celebrate offices behind closed doors during a general local interdict might not
be enjoyed if the recipients’ church was specifically interdicted. Indeed Petrus
Bonetus, a minor early fourteenth-century canonist, taught that members of the
military orders who arrived at an interdicted church might celebrate there in
accordance with their privileges if it lay under a general interdict but not if it had
been specifically interdicted.⁴³ Given that an interdict on a church was usually
caused by clergy, canonists such as Bonetus were no doubt concerned that clerical
immunities should not protect the guilty from its effects. Whether the papacy
took this view is not, however, certain on the available evidence.
The only papal law on particular local interdicts during the thirteenth century
was Boniface VIII’s constitution ‘Si civitas’ (1298), which ruled that when a
church was interdicted, offices were not to be celebrated in its chapels nor the
dead buried in any cemetery adjoining it, just as an interdict on a city was to
include its suburbs: lest the sentence be scorned as a result. Boniface did not
except the clergy from the ban on burial; hence he appears to confirm Innocent
IV’s teaching on this point.⁴⁴ Otherwise, the few canonistic opinions noted above
were the only guide to practice.
Canon law and its commentators had much more to say on a phenomenon
that closely resembled a particular local interdict: the suspension of worship
in a ‘violated’ church. The canon ‘Si motum’ in Gratian’s Decretum said that
a church was violated by murder or adultery, while the canon ‘Ecclesiis’ that
immediately followed it in the Decretum stated more generally that a church was
‘polluted’ by bloodshed or semen, though it did not specify these as products of
the above sins.⁴⁵ Laurentius Hispanus (c.1210) argued regarding ‘Ecclesiis’ that a
church polluted by blood and coition ought to be considered ‘quasi interdictam’;
this teaching was later copied by Tancred in his glossa ordinaria to Compilatio
secunda. Another contemporary canonist, Vincentius Hispanus, likewise taught
(c.1210–15) that if a church was violated, those holding the freedom to celebrate
in an interdicted church once a year, such as the military orders, might not enjoy
it ‘in tali interdicto’.⁴⁶ It would seem that these canonists were simply describing

⁴² Innocent IV on X 5.31.18 v. interdicti violationem and X 5.33.24 v. regularium; his teachings

here were noted by Johannes Andreae (attrib.), De modo, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 7rb–va (Ed.
fol. 5r).
⁴³ Petrus Bonetus on X 5.33.3 v. admittantur, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 193vb: ‘si autem
ecclesia esset specialiter interdicta, non possunt in ea celebrare, ut infra c. Tuarum §Eos [X 5.33.11]’.
⁴⁴ VI 5.11.17.
⁴⁵ De con. D.1 c.19–20. These canons contradicted each other on whether ‘violated’ churches
were to be reconsecrated before worship might be resumed in them, on which see pp. 246–7
below.
⁴⁶ Tancred on 2 Comp. 3.9.2 v. observare, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 122va: ‘Supple. Nec
tanquam interdictam ecclesiam habere nisi etc. et tunc non ratione interdicti cum nullum sit, ut
 The Particular Local Interdict 71

what ecclesiastical authorities, especially the papacy, saw as good practice. In

1198 the Archbishop of Lund had complained to Innocent III that when a bishop
in his province had forbidden celebration of offices in a Hospitaller church since
it was violated by an attack on its priest, the Hospitallers had disobeyed.⁴⁷ The
pope reacted by ordering the suspension of those illicitly celebrating in that
church. But later thirteenth-century canonists would have perceived the Lund
case as anomalous. The French canonists William Durand and Petrus Bonetus
argued that a ‘violated’ church had been interdicted by the law itself and not
by a man, such as a bishop. Innocent IV had argued that a ‘violated’ church
was not interdicted at all, but rather its ‘organs of worship’ were suspended.⁴⁸
Both arguments were used to justify the view that clergy officiating in ‘violated’
churches did not incur the canonical penalties for disregarding interdicts. This
view later became law in the Liber sextus (1298).⁴⁹
In the course of the thirteenth century canonists also tried to reconcile the
two definitions of ‘violation’ in the Decretum. Many appear to have accepted
the narrow sense in ‘Si motum’ on the question of bloodshed and held that
injury might result in ‘violation’ only if it was intentional, such as murder,
and not accidental. That is to say these canonists understood that ‘violation’
only arose when a sin was involved, since according to the canonistic doctrine
of guilt it was not the act but the intention behind it that made it a sin.
Moreover they agreed that a church was only ‘violated’ if the sin was actually
committed inside it, not outside, and a danger existed that scandal might arise
if it became public knowledge, but not if it was known only under the seal of
the confessional.⁵⁰ These qualifications still left room for doubt. The canonist
Bernard de Montmirat stated (c.1259–66) that if someone killed in self-defence
inside a church, it was not strictly speaking ‘violated’, but he thought it safer to
assume that it was.⁵¹ In regard to ‘violation’ by semen canonists found it even

infra, sed ratione delicti debet eam quasi interdictam reputare, puta si sanguine sit perfusa aut coitu
polluta, ut supra. de con. di. i. Ecclesiis. La<urentius>.’ Vincentius Hispanus on 3 Comp. 5.16.1,
BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1378, fol. 101ra: ‘Sed nonne poterant ibi celebrare ex privilegio semel in anno,
supra. e. Cum et plantare lib. i [1 Comp. 5.28.3]? Non admitto privilegium eorum in tali interdicto
quia locus excipiendus<est>.’
⁴⁷ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 450. Included in canon law as 3 Comp 5.16.1 (= X 5.33.11).
⁴⁸ William Durand, Speculum, I, §De legato, fol. 26r. Petrus Bonetus on X 3.40.10 v. semine,
BAV Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 122va: ‘ubi ecclesia polluta est sanguine est, interdicta est a iure,
sed celebrans in ecclesia interdicta a iure non est irregularis. Secus si a iure [recte homine], infra.
de privil. Tuarum [X 5.33.11].’ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. interdicti violationem.
Even Laurentius’s gloss copied by Tancred (n. 46) seemed to doubt that a ‘violated’ church was
technically interdicted.
⁴⁹ VI 5.11.18.
⁵⁰ Hostiensis, Lectura on X 3.40.10 v. aut sanguinis effusione (vol. 2, fol. 160va); Bernard de
Montmirat on X 3.40.10 v. sanguinis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2542, fol. 67vb (Ed. fol. 120rb); Petrus
Bonetus on X 3.40.10 v. semine, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 122va.
⁵¹ Bernard de Montmirat’s addition to Pierre Sampsona’s Lectura on X 3.40.4 v. proposuisti,
Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2083, fol. 39ra; MS 2113, fol. 64va: ‘Quidam voluerunt dicere
quod si aliquis se defendendo aliquem in ecclesia interfecerit, ecclesia non est reconcilianda. Sed
72 Kinds of Interdict

harder to determine whether a sin was involved. For them adultery was clearly a
sin and therefore it might ‘violate’ a church, as stated in ‘Si motum’, but some
canonists also debated whether sex between a married couple in church was a sin
even if it was licit elsewhere. The canonist Pierre Sampsona noted that doctores
antiqui agreed that a church was not ‘violated’ in the latter instance but that
the Spanish canonist Johannes de Deo had disputed this view. Hostiensis and
Sampson’s pupil, Bernard de Montmirat, agreed that a man sinned by having
sex with his wife in church, though Hostiensis added that the wife did not sin
as she was simply doing her marital duty! But the question was still open to
canonistic debate in the early fourteenth century, when Petrus Bonetus claimed
that a church was not ‘violated’ by sex between a married couple. These canonists
at least agreed that a church was polluted by human and not animal semen,
presumably since only human copulation involved sin, and only when the sin was
known publicly and not confided to a priest under the seal of the confessional.⁵²
That they found it necessary to debate such hypothetical questions indicates their
attitude to contemporary sexual morality.
The Decretum had specified other acts which made a church unfit for worship:
its total devastation by fire; its consecration by a simonist or excommunicate; if
it was built for the sake of profit; if it was dedicated without the local bishop’s
permission or relics in its altar.⁵³ A pupil of the French canonist Petrus Brito
added (c.1205) that if patrons of a church disagreed over the appointment of
a priest there, the bishop might suspend celebration of offices in it until they
came to terms, and this instance was also noted by later canonists. Since the late
twelfth century disputes over the patronage of churches had likewise occasioned
interdicts on such churches.⁵⁴ Moreover cemeteries might become unfit for

puto tutius esse quod debeat reconciliari. B.’ ‘Reconciliation’ made the church fit again for worship,
on which see pp. 246–7. The siglum ‘B.’ identifying this as Bernard’s gloss is absent in MS 2113,
which implies that it is an original gloss of Sampsona. The writings of Bernard and his teacher
Pierre de Sampson are often confused: Pontal, ‘Quelques remarques’, esp. 134–8, 141–2; Vodola,
Excommunication, 233–6.
⁵² Pierre Sampsona on X 3.40.10 v. cuiuscumque, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2083, fol.
39ra; MS 2113, fol. 64vb. Bernard de Montmirat on X 3.40.10 v. si ecclesia, BAV Vat. lat. MS
2542, fol. 67vb (Ed. fol. 120ra); Hostiensis, Lectura on X 3.40.10 v. semine (vol. 2, fol. 160va);
Petrus Bonetus on X 3.40.10 v. consecranda, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 122rb. In 1172–3
Alexander III declared in the decretal ‘Significasti’ (1 Comp. 5.13.6; X 5.16. 5) that a church was
‘violated’ after it became public knowledge that a woman had repeatedly committed adultery inside
that church with a priest.
⁵³ C.1 q.4 c.11; C.16 q.5 c.10; De con. D.1 c.5, 10, 26. Noted by later canonists: Johannes
Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 3.31.3 v. dedicationes (edited at http://faculty.cua.edu/Pennington/edit323
.htm); Tancred on 3 Comp. 3.31.3 v. reconciliari, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 245rb; Pierre
Sampsona on X 3.40.4 v. proposuisti, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2083, fol. 39ra; Hostiensis,
Lectura on X 3.40.4 v. reconciliari (vol. 2, fol. 159va); Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1
§14 (fol. 325vb).
⁵⁴ Anon. on 1 Comp. 3.33.1 v. perlatum est, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9,
fol. 52ra: ‘Si quilibet heredum patronorum suum voluerit instituere in ecclesia et concordare nolu-
erint, episcopus precipiat ne divina celebrentur in illa ecclesia donec concordent.’ Cf. William
 The Particular Local Interdict 73

Christian use if excommunicates were buried there, according to a decretal of

Innocent III (1213) included in Compilatio quarta and the Liber extra. Boniface
VIII later added in the Liber sextus (1298) that the ‘violation’ of a church by
bloodshed or semen also applied to its adjoining cemetery; hence burial was
forbidden there, but conversely ‘violation’ of the churchyard alone was not to
affect the church. This ruling echoed his constitution on the observance of
particular local interdicts.⁵⁵ It can be seen at work a year later at Ardembuch
parish in Tournai diocese, where it was said that the clergy refused to officiate,
since one of their number had allegedly been dragged from the parish church
and murdered, another had been beaten up there until blood flowed, and a third
had been wounded in the churchyard. In common with the Lund case a century
earlier and many interdicts laid on the scene of a canonical crime, this suspension
of offices was occasioned by violence against clergy and intended to encourage
deeper respect for them and their churches.⁵⁶
Another phenomenon similar in effect to a particular local interdict was
also a means of clerical self-defence: the so-called cessatio a divinis, where the
clergy of a specific church agreed not to celebrate offices. It was already in
use by 1215, when it was regulated by the Fourth Lateran Council.⁵⁷ It was
the practice in the churches of Lyon, Vienne, and Clermont, Johannes Garsias
Hispanus observed (1282), and Arras and elsewhere, according to William
Durand (c.1289). Indeed the cases recorded in thirteenth-century papal registers
mainly come from France.⁵⁸ It was a measure that chapters of some cathedral or
collegiate churches claimed to exercise by custom or privilege against attackers of
their property, persons, or liberties. For example regular clergy and other clerks
in Würzburg and its suburbs initiated a cessatio by May 1249 following a mob
attack by local citizens on clergy celebrating mass in its cathedral.⁵⁹ Hence it
was a protest designed to air a grievance, a kind of clerical strike. But since the
early thirteenth century canonists had been careful to distinguish that it was not
an interdict. An interdict was a judicial sentence, and, as Johannes Teutonicus
(c.1217) and subsequent canonists explained, nobody might impose this on
themselves as if they were their own judge; it was a commonplace maxim of

Durand, Speculum, I, §De legato, fol. 26rb, and Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §12–13.
Interdicts on churches caused by disputed patronage are noted above on p. 69.
⁵⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 26 (= 4 Comp. 3.14.1; X 3.40.7). VI 3.21.un.; cf. VI
5.11.17.
⁵⁶ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 2834. ⁵⁷ Lat. Conc. IV, c.7; 4 Comp. 1.13.1; X 1.31.13 §1.
⁵⁸ Johannes Garsias Hispanus on Lugd. Conc. II c.17 (VI 1.16.2) v. ecclesiis, BAV, Pal. lat. MS
629, fol. 280ra: ‘Ut in Lugdunense, Viennense, et Claromontense ecclesiis’. William Durand, ibid.
v. ex consuetudine (Ed. fol. 58r). French cases: Reg. Honorius III, no. 5342 (Langres); Reg. Gregory
IX, no. 2309 (Laon); Reg. Honorius IV, nos. 42 (Lyon), 767 (Châlons-sur-Marne); Reg. Nicholas
IV, nos. 420 (Reims), 2115 (Cambrai), 4299 (Reims); Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 355 (Reims), 2912
(Châlons-sur-Marne).
⁵⁹ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 4569.
74 Kinds of Interdict

Roman law that nobody might be judge in their own case.⁶⁰ Innocent IV and
Hostiensis thus agreed that clergy might officiate with impunity in any church
where its canons observed a cessatio, and Johannes Garsias Hispanus added that
priests might celebrate offices there in a low voice, ‘which might not be done had
the church been interdicted’.⁶¹
Nevertheless a cessatio was sometimes extended beyond the church in which
it started to others nearby. In 1286, at the request of the cathedral chapter of
Cambrai, Honorius IV required that whenever the chapter held a cessatio, it was to
be observed by clergy in other churches of the city as long as it lasted.⁶² Apparently
this practice was not uncommon by the early fourteenth century. A constitution
of Clement V then observed that chapters and clergy of collegiate and conventual
churches occasionally claimed by custom or otherwise the freedom to hold a
general cessatio of cities, lands, and other places. In other words it resembled a
general local interdict; the constitution indeed obliged regular clergy to observe
a general cessatio in the same way as general local interdicts regardless of their
freedoms. In his gloss on this constitution Johannes Andreae therefore applied
the distinction between general and particular interdicts to cessationes, noting
that speciales cessationes were observed only in churches where they began.⁶³
In conclusion a particular local interdict, in the proper sense of the term, was
used mainly as a tool of internal discipline, unlike the general local interdict,
though it was to be observed in much the same way as one, namely the innocent
might take part in offices outside its ambit. Two other phenomena had the
same effect of suspending services in specific churches, namely ‘violation’ and
cessatio a divinis, but by contrast they were usually occasioned by much the same
cause as a general local interdict, i.e. lay hostility against the clergy, and hence
likewise concerned external discipline. By the mid-thirteenth century canonists
also distinguished that neither phenomenon was strictly speaking an interdict,
since neither carried the same penal consequences as an interdict for clergy who

⁶⁰ Johannes Teutonicus on 4 Comp. 1.13.1 (= X 1.31.13) v. manifesta, BAV, Vat. lat.

MS 1377, fol. 289ra: ‘Item non videtur quod capitulum possit suspendere ecclesiam quia
iam se ipsos supponerent interdicto, quod esse non potest quod aliquis se ipsum suspendat,
nec possint esse iudices in proprio facto, ut extra. iii. de conces. preben. non va. Post elec-
tionem [3 Comp. 3.8.4]’. Cf. Damasus (c.1215) on Lat. Conc. IV c.7 (= X 1.31.13) v.
maxime in contemptum episcopi (Constitutiones, 422). Cf. also Vincentius Hispanus (c.1236) who
copied Johannes’s gloss on X 1.31.13 v. manifesta, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 52ra; and
Goffredus de Trano on X 1.31.13 v. cessaverint, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol.
25vb.
⁶¹ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 1.31.13 v. manifesta; Hostiensis, Lectura on X 1.31.13 v.
manifesta (vol. 1, fol. 165ra); cf. also Bernard of Parma on X 1.31.13 v. cessaverint a divinis.
Johannes Garsias Hispanus on Lugd. Conc. II c.17 (VI 1.16.2) v. cessare, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 629,
fol. 280ra: ‘presbiteri medio tempore infra ecclesiam etiam cum canonicis submissa voce officiant et
celebrant, quod non fieret si esset ecclesia interdicta, ut patet infra. de cleri. ex. min. Postulasti [X
5.27.7]’.
⁶² Reg. Honorius IV, no. 444; cf. n. 59 above.
⁶³ Clem. 5.10.1. Johannes Andreae, Glossa on Clem. 5.10.1 v. generalibus.
 Personal Interdicts 75

officiated in spite of them. The only exception was a general cessatio, which by
1317 was virtually equivalent to a general local interdict.

2 . 3 PE R S O N A L I N T E R D I C TS

Thirteenth-century canon law and its commentators differentiated a person-

al interdict from a local interdict to such a degree in terms of form and
observance that they seem almost separate institutions and had probably orig-
inated as such before they came to share a common name. According to the
canonists Alanus Anglicus (c.1210–15) and Zoën, a personal interdict was
the same in effect as minor excommunication, in that it denied access to the
sacraments and church services but did not imply the loss of legal rights and
social exclusion as major excommunication did.⁶⁴ Paulus Hungarus indeed
remarked (c.1215) that interdicted persons might bring lawsuits or appoint
proctors to do so on their behalf. And according to the canonist Petrus Bone-
tus, writing a century later, one might associate with an interdicted person
but not with an excommunicate, presumably meaning one bound by major
excommunication.⁶⁵
Canonists drew a distinction between major and minor excommunication by
the late twelfth century. When Decretum texts imposed excommunication for
contact with excommunicates, notably Gregory VII’s canon ‘Quoniam multos’
(1078), they interpreted it to mean the lesser form of the sanction. By the
end of the century papal decretals confirmed this teaching, and Innocent III’s
decretal ‘Nuper a nobis’ (1199) ruled that association with an excommunicate
incurred major excommunication only where this contact involved collaboration
in a crime.⁶⁶ Hence it seems likely that the general personal interdict origi-
nated as the extension of minor excommunication to an entire community in

⁶⁴ Alanus, Apparatus ‘Ius naturale’ on C.24 q.3 dictum ante c.1 v. pro peccato, BAV, Ross.
lat. MS 595, fol. 207rb (second layer of glosses): ‘Minori<excommunicatione>que est seperatio
a sacramentis excommunicari possunt subditi pro superioris delicto si contumax fuerit, ut infra.
de of. iud. del. Sane quia nos, supra. xvii. q. iiii. Miror [1 Comp. 1.21.16; C.17 q.4 c.8].
Excipiuntur penitentias <morientium> et baptismas parvulorum, que nulli pro peccato alterius
sunt deneganda, infra. de spon. et matrim. Non est vobis \ex. lib. i./, infra. e. q. Si habes. [1
Comp. 4.1.13; C.24 q.3 c.1] A.’ Zoën on 5 Comp. 1.18.1, Tours, Bibliothèque municipale
MS 565, fol. 7vb: ‘interdicto. Idest minori excommunicatione que aliquem separat ab ecclesie
sacramentis. excommunicatione. Maiori que seperat aliquem a communione fidelium, sicut de
his duabus habes, supra. de excep. c.i. vel iii. q. iiii. Engeltrudam [5 Comp. 2.16.1; C.3 q.4
c.12]’.
⁶⁵ Paulus Hungarus, Notabilium on 3 Comp. 5.23.7, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 261, fol. 89rc: ‘Item
nota ex hac decretali quod interdictus potest agere vel procuratorem constituere in agendo.’ Petrus
Bonetus on X 2.28.37, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 112vb: ‘cum interdicto participari potest,
non autem cum excommunicato, ff. de pen. l. Moris, ff. de servis. expor. l. Cui pacto, supra. Quod
metus causa. Sacris [Dig. 48.19.9, 18.7.5; X 1.40.5]’.
⁶⁶ Vodola, Excommunication, 41–2; C.11 q.3 c.103 (‘Quoniam multos’); X 5.39.29.
76 Kinds of Interdict

non-criminous contact with wrongdoers. Alanus Anglicus indeed distinguished

that no one might be bound by major excommunication for another’s sin but
minor excommunication might punish subjects for their superior’s delict; and
the two decretals that he cited in support of this view make it clear that he
had an interdict of a community in mind. Furthermore when a community
was interdicted, its guilty members and their collaborators, with whom the rest
of the community was inevitably in contact, were normally excommunicated.
For example before May 1235 the Bishop of Savona had excommunicated the
podestà and councillors of Noli and others of that commune who had personally
participated in destroying a castle of the bishop, and he had interdicted the
rest of the people of Noli.⁶⁷ Given the similarity between general personal
interdicts and minor excommunication, it is not surprising that communities
were sometimes said to be under excommunication when an interdict was
meant. The terms were used almost interchangeably in two papal letters referring
to Cremona in 1201, and as we have seen, the canonist Alanus still equated
minor excommunication with an interdict some ten years later.⁶⁸ Nevertheless
from the early thirteenth century canonists increasingly distinguished between
excommunication as a sanction reserved for individuals and the interdict as
applicable to communities. Popes still occasionally imposed full excommunica-
tion on groups, such as Honorius III’s sentence of 1222 on the masters and
scholars of Paris, but Innocent IV outlawed the practice in 1245. And by the
mid-fourteenth century the canonist Johannes Calderinus observed that minor
excommunication was rarely if ever imposed and the interdict had taken its
place.⁶⁹
A general local interdict also affected those associated with wrongdoers, often
also in conjunction with the excommunication of the guilty. Canonists did not
state in which circumstances a general personal interdict was more appropriate,
but in practice the latter was mainly used against communes and other urban
communities, whereas a general local interdict might apply to a whole territory
under the jurisdiction of a lord or feudal monarch. Personal interdicts were also
meant to work in a way distinct from local ones. Although canonists distinguished
between excommunication and interdict, they maintained that those under a
personal interdict were to be excluded from church services in the same manner
as excommunicates. Indeed since at least the late twelfth century, papal grants
of the freedom to celebrate behind closed doors during a general local interdict
specifically forbade the admission of excommunicated and interdicted persons.
By the mid-thirteenth century Innocent IV held that interdicted persons were to

⁶⁷ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2579.

⁶⁸ Krehbiel, 133. The opinions of Alanus discussed above are those in n. 64 above.
⁶⁹ Reg. Honorius III, no. 4012. Innocent IV: VI 5.11.5 (see pp. 25–6). Johannes Calderinus
(attrib.), De censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 11rb: ‘Sed quia minor excommunicatio numquam
vel rare ab homine infligitur, videtur per abusum de medio recessisse et interdictum quodammodo
in locum eius mutato nomine successisse.’
 Personal Interdicts 77

be excluded from church services anywhere, and Boniface VIII later confirmed
this teaching as law in the Liber sextus.⁷⁰ In fact the papacy seems to have
considered this the correct practice since at least the early thirteenth century.
In 1221 Honorius III had forbidden prelates of the Esztergom and Vesprém
dioceses in Hungary to admit excommunicated and interdicted persons of a
certain parish to divine offices, as some prelates had done presumably; otherwise
they would face due punishment.⁷¹
By the 1270s Monaldus could give priests detailed guidance in his canon
law manual on how to deal with interdicted persons. A priest in a church
that he was not bound to serve was not to celebrate divine offices there if
he suspected that interdicted persons were among his congregation. But if
the priest could identify the interdicted, he might warn them to leave and
then celebrate the offices for the non-interdicted. By contrast, a priest who
was obliged to serve a church had to celebrate the offices there even if he
knew some persons present to be interdicted and they refused to leave, but
he was to shun them at communion like excommunicates. This was true,
Monaldus asserted, even if the interdict had not been publicized but simply
made known to him by trustworthy persons. If the interdict was publicized
and a priest knowingly received the interdicted at divine offices, Monaldus
concluded that the rest of the congregation was not obliged to leave and did not
sin by hearing those offices, but the priest alone sinned, unless they approved
of his conduct. Priests no doubt faced these hypothetical situations outlined
by Monaldus in practice, but it cannot always have been easy for them to
discriminate between the guilty and the innocent. Another manualist John of
Freiburg conceded this point when he warned priests not to assume someone to
be an excommunicate or interdicted because they did not enter church during
services but listened to them from outside.⁷² Though these guidelines were
never expressed in law, they doubtless represented the ecclesiastical authorities’
notions of good practice. In northern Italy as early as 1207 the patriarch of
Grado had warned clerks of the church of Santa Maria Formosa on pain
of excommunication not to participate in the offices with their interdicted
provost, the Archdeacon of Castello. Likewise some forty years later, when
supporters in Basel of the deposed Frederick II incurred excommunication and

⁷⁰ See pp. 134–40 below on such papal grants; cf. X 5.40.17. The view expressed by Innocent
and other canonists (see pp. 65–6 and n. 26 above) was confirmed by VI 5.11.16. Likewise
Goffredus de Trano on X 5.38.11 v. quod audiri, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 153rb:
‘Si ergo non licet interdictis audire divina etiam extra ecclesiam constitutis, multominus hoc licet
excommunicatis. Indigni enim sunt divina audire a quibus sunt exclusi, ut extra. de excep. A nobis,
infra. t. prox. c. penult. [X 2.25.2, 5.3959].’ Cf. Pierre Sampsona (1267), Distinctio on X 5.38.11,
BAV, Pal. lat. MS 656, fol. 155vb–6ra.
⁷¹ Reg. Honorius III, no. 3273; cf. ibid. no. 4366, which warned the papal legate not to allow
any of the excommunicated or interdicted Cremonese to have communion (communicare) with
him.
⁷² Monaldus, Summa, fol. 97r; John of Freiburg, Summa, III, xxxiii q.263–6, esp. q.266.
78 Kinds of Interdict

interdict for destroying their bishop’s palace, Innocent IV required the Bishop of
neighbouring Strasbourg to enforce these sentences and order friars, Hospitallers,
and other religious specifically not to celebrate the offices if these persons were
present.⁷³
A papal law on personal interdicts did not appear, however, till as late as 1298,
when Boniface VIII’s constitution ‘Si sententia’ ruled that if a people were laid
under an interdict, its individual members were understood to be interdicted.
This countered the juristic notion of a universitas as an abstract entity above
and beyond its members, which Innocent IV had conceived in order to deny
the capacity of a universitas to suffer excommunication. In Boniface’s law a
community was nothing other than the persons who composed it. But his main
point was more practical than conceptual: members of an interdicted community
even outside of it were to be excluded from the sacraments and divine offices
anywhere.⁷⁴ No distinction was drawn between guilty and innocent, unlike
under a general local interdict. According to Johannes Andreae’s commentary on
this ruling (c.1342), ‘multi religiosi’ contended that the interdict of a community
should bind those present at the wrong that occasioned it and who seemed
to support it by keeping silent, but not those who were absent or opposed
it. In other words only those who bore collective responsibility for another’s
sin ought to suffer a collective penalty for it. Andreae, however, denied that
those who did not were to be excepted.⁷⁵ Other innocents not excepted were
those who became members of a community after the wrongdoing. Canonists
resolved this problem by referring to the juristic notion of a universitas as a
sempiternal community, one which remained conceptually the same even if its
actual members changed. Innocent IV held that a community existing at the
time of the wrong was the same one as in the future, but he did not see this
as a reason for excommunicating a community, since he felt that it would be
very wicked if future members who had no part in the wrong were thereby
affected.⁷⁶ Conversely Johannes Andreae remarked (c.1302) that an interdict
might still bind a community if it had not been relaxed after a hundred years,
since the community remained the same; there are indeed cases of interdicts
lasting for such long periods.⁷⁷ Johannes Calderinus, a pupil of Andreae, likewise
observed that an interdict on a people affected anyone becoming a member of
that people even if the sentence had preceded him, for a community was not
changed by new members. As Johannes Andreae had concluded, it was harsh

⁷³ Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 178; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 3109.
⁷⁴ VI 5.11.16. See pp. 65–6. ⁷⁵ Johannes Andreae, Novella on VI 5.11.16.
⁷⁶ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.39.53 v. consiliarios. On the sempiternal community see
Rodriguez, ‘Innocent IV’, 295, and Kantorowicz, 291–313.
⁷⁷ Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.16 v. non competano. Cf. Baldus de Ubaldis (d. 1417)
on Dig. 5.1.76 n. 4 as quoted in Kantorowicz, 295 n. 50. An interdict could last for 12 years
(Portugal), 30 years (Italian towns), 60 years (Sicily), and sometimes more than a century (Le
Bras, Institutions, 248 n. 26). See also p. 174 on an interdict lasting some 40 years noted by
Andreae.
 Personal Interdicts 79

that innocent persons were bound by an interdict, but a harsh sentence imposed
by a judge or the law was to be observed, and the innocent remained so in the
eyes of God.⁷⁸
The only exception that ‘Si sententia’ admitted was that the clergy were not
to be considered interdicted when the people were interdicted, and vice versa,
unless the sentence stated otherwise. This distinction had been foreshadowed
by Innocent III’s decretal ‘Ex parte’ (1203), which had referred to separate
interdicts laid on the people and clergy of a place. The sentence on the clergy
was evidently superfluous unless, as Hostiensis later observed, that on the people
was not understood to include the clergy. However, it is unclear whether this
applied in practice before ‘Si sententia’ confirmed this canonistic deduction as
law.⁷⁹ Hostiensis had also noted that when a church was interdicted and not
its clergy, they might celebrate offices elsewhere; hence when the clergy were
interdicted and not their church, other clergy coming to it from elsewhere
might celebrate in it.⁸⁰ Johannes Andreae (c.1302) repeated this comment,
but neither canonist stated whether laity might attend offices celebrated by
outsiders. Certainly an interdict on the people of a place did not technically
forbid those not belonging to that people, laity or clergy, from hearing offices
or receiving sacraments there. Johannes Calderinus conceded that such persons
were not bound by this sentence and the law did not prevent clergy from
celebrating offices in a loud voice in a place where only its people were
interdicted. Nevertheless he advised clerks against public celebration during such
an interdict, lest the interdicted could hear the celebrants’ voices and see the
Eucharist openly, and so ecclesiastical discipline would be disrespected.⁸¹ But
it is unclear whether interdicts of peoples ever indirectly affected outsiders in
practice.
Certainly canonists held that outsiders who joined an interdicted people were
thereby interdicted, but did the corollary follow, that those who ceased to belong
to an interdicted people thereby ceased to be interdicted? Calderinus held that
incarceration or banishment might exclude a person from an interdicted people
but he still remained interdicted. Entry to a monastic community was a more
effective escape route. By the mid-thirteenth century the papacy was granting the
prelates of various religious orders the power to absolve interdicted persons who
wished to join their houses. Calderinus later observed that profession of monastic
vows totally severed a person’s ties with an interdicted people, so that he might

⁷⁸ Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §34 (fol. 327ra); Johannes Andreae, Novella on VI
5.11.16.
⁷⁹ VI 5.11.16 (‘Si sententia’). 3 Comp. 5.16.3; X 5.33.13 (‘Ex parte’). Hostiensis, Lectura on X
5.33.13 v. populum (vol. 2, fols. 80vb–81ra).
⁸⁰ Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.33.13 v. et in clerum (vol. 2, fol. 80vb). Johannes Andreae, Glossa
on VI 5.11.16 v. in clerum.
⁸¹ Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §32 (fol. 327ra).
80 Kinds of Interdict

be ordained.⁸² Apparently, therefore, the sentence no longer had any effect on

him, for an interdict normally prevented ordination.
A person might be interdicted not only by virtue of belonging to an interdicted
people, however. As early as 1179 a canon of the Third Lateran Council had
referred to persons interdicted nominatim, which Alanus Anglicus (c.1201–10)
and Innocent IV interpreted to mean those specified in a sentence by name.
Thus an interdict might be laid on individuals. The canon required that those
interdicted nominatim be shunned along with excommunicates; hence a person
interdicted individually was to be treated more harshly than someone belonging
to an interdicted people.⁸³ Indeed Innocent IV distinguished that regular clergy
who had the freedom to open churches in interdicted places annually in order
to collect alms might admit interdicted persons to the offices, but not those
interdicted nominatim. Likewise Johannes Andreae inferred (1326) that since
Clement V’s constitution ‘Eos qui’ prohibited the burial in cemeteries of those
interdicted nominatim, it did not apply to those interdicted ‘non nominatim’
provided that they were not buried in an interdicted place.⁸⁴
In effect the canonists appear to have been drawing a distinction between the
innocent and the guilty. Innocent IV had added that those who provoked an
interdict on themselves were also excluded from the services of alms-collecting
regular clergy, even if they were interdicted as members of a community and
not nominatim. In fact, whereas most members of an interdicted community
were suffering for the wrongs of others, it seems that persons were interdicted
nominatim for their own wrongs just as excommunicates were. In the few
cases recorded in thirteenth-century papal registers of interdicts imposed on
individuals, the sanction was mostly used to punish faults of clerks. For instance
in 1207 the patriarch of Grado had interdicted the Archdeacon of Castello and the
church of Santa Maria Formosa where he was provost because of his disobedience:
he had failed to read out a mandate of the patriarch addressed to clerks of that
church. Indeed, in 1213 Innocent III had warned the Bishop, dean, and cantor
of Paris that no French royal chapel was to be interdicted for its chaplain’s
wrongdoing, but rather the chaplain himself ought to be interdicted.⁸⁵ Although
an interdict on an individual was less harsh than major excommunication and

⁸² Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §§35–7 (fol. 327rb). Papal grants: Reg. Innocent
IV, no. 2474 (minister general of Trinitarians); Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 312 (Carmelite priors),
900 (Cistercian priors), 3255 (Carthusian priors); Reg. Clement IV, no. 1720 (Dominican priors).
⁸³ Lat. Conc. III c.9 (= 1 Comp. 5.28.3; X 5.33.3). Alanus Anglicus on 1 Comp. 5.28.3 v.
nominatim, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 92ra: ‘Nominatim interdictus est
qui nomine suo vel aliis circumstantiis denotatur ut infra. instit. de exhereda. lib. §masculos [recte
Emancipatos; Inst. 2.13 §3].’ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.33.3 v. excommunicatis; cf. ibid. on X
3.5.31 v. nominatim.
⁸⁴ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.33.24 v. excommunicatis. Johannes Andreae, Glossa on Clem.
3.7.1 v. nominatim.
⁸⁵ Innocent IV: as n. 84. Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 78; 15, no. 227. Cf. also Reg. Honorius III,
no. 5513.
 Personal Interdicts 81

barely distinguishable in effect from minor excommunication, it represented a

double punishment for clerks in that it forbade them from participating in the
celebration of offices and administration of the sacraments as well as in hearing
and receiving these.
A sanction which had a similar effect was the interdict on entry to church
(ab ingressu ecclesie). An undated decretal of Alexander III (1159–81) had
threatened this against a monastic community, but it was more often used
against individuals. A canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) imposed
it for a month on prelates who did not follow the procedure laid down by
that canon for excommunicating someone, and it was also incurred for other
clerical offences under some subsequent papal laws. Alexander IV (1254–61)
reserved it as a mitigated penalty for prelates, who were only to incur the harsher
penalties of suspension from office and excommunication if they persisted in
their disobedience; the latter applied to lower clergy in the first instance. Hence
a canon of the Second Council of Lyon (1274) placed an interdict ab ingressu
ecclesie on prelates taking procurations in cash instead of in kind but punished
lower clergy doing likewise by suspension from office and benefice. Popes also
applied this preferential treatment in practice. In 1286 Honorius IV moderated
a judges delegate’s sentence of excommunication on some clerks of Canterbury
diocese in a debt case to an interdict ab ingressu ecclesie for their archbishop,
but he provided that the latter’s punishment might be increased in accordance
with Alexander IV’s ruling.⁸⁶ This kind of interdict might also affect laity, albeit
cases in the thirteenth-century papal registers are rare. For example after the
Bishop of Oporto fled to the curia alleging persecution by the king of Portugal,
Innocent III warned the king in 1211 to make amends to the bishop; otherwise
he would be interdicted from entry to church and all the sacraments. Certainly
lay dignitaries perceived it as a serious enough danger by the mid-thirteenth
century to request Innocent IV and Alexander IV for immunity from it. By the
1290s it was inflicted on both laity and clergy by church courts in England as a
penalty for failure to respond to summons.⁸⁷
An interdict ab ingressu ecclesie prohibited entry to church not only for the
purpose of celebrating or hearing offices. According to Innocent IV it even
forbade access to church for the sake of private prayer, and any who died under
this interdict were also denied burial in a church or cemetery. Hostiensis adopted
these views, and Monaldus similarly distinguished that persons under a general
interdict might pray in private in church, even in an interdicted one, but not
excommunicates or those under an interdict ab ingressu ecclesie. That is to say

⁸⁶ On monastic community: X 2.24.9. Automatic penalty: Lat. Conc. IV c.47 (= X 5.39.48);

cf. VI 5.7.8, 5.11.1 (see p. 104). Lugd. Conc. II c.24 (= VI 3.20.2). Alexander IV: VI 1.14.2. Reg.
Honorius IV, no. 605.
⁸⁷ King of Portugal: Innocent III, Reg. 13, no. 75. Immunity: Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 491
(Count of Toulouse), 7363 (King of Bohemia); Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1285 (Queen of Navarre).
Church courts: e.g. Select Cases, 425–7, 507–8.
82 Kinds of Interdict

the innocent were again to be treated less harshly than the guilty. By 1298
Boniface VIII had confirmed as a rule of canon law Innocent IV’s teaching on
burial. Nevertheless Johannes Andreae commented on this ruling that the ban
on celebrating offices only applied within church, so that those under this ban
might celebrate outdoors, in a tent, or private house.⁸⁸
To sum up, since the late twelfth century canon law had distinguished between
general and specific forms of the personal interdict as in the case of the local
interdict. A general personal interdict was normally imposed on a community
for the wrong of its head or some of its members. Its evolution can be associated
with the development of minor excommunication as a sanction against those
in non-criminous contact with excommunicates, and with the emergence of
organized communities, against which a general personal interdict was chiefly
aimed. Indeed juristic notions about organized communities largely shaped
canonistic doctrine on its application. In particular they led canonists to draw no
distinction between treatment of guilty and innocent under a general personal
interdict, in contrast to their teaching on a general local one, though they
admitted that wrongdoers interdicted by name were to be treated more severely.
Canonistic doctrine also seems to have been describing customary practice in
relation to general personal interdicts, though, in common with teaching on
general local ones, it was not confirmed in canon law till the end of the thirteenth
century. Canon law on specific personal interdicts was laid down earlier, and in
practice these were directed largely against the clergy, in common with specific
local interdicts. Personal and local interdicts were, nevertheless, meant to operate
in different ways, but sometimes their effects might be combined.

2.4 MIXED SENTENCES

Interdicts were occasionally laid on a people and its place of habitation. Pope
Martin IV used this double punishment in 1282–3 against Perugia, Spoleto,
and other places in Italy associated with supporters of the Aragonese occupation
of Sicily.⁸⁹ He regarded Sicily as a papal fief and Charles of Anjou as rightful
vassal king of the island; hence this use of the interdict was motivated by extreme
political circumstances, and indeed it was exceptional. Canonists only alluded to
such a double interdict as a hypothetical possibility and none classified it as a
distinct kind of interdict, as it was very much an expedient of judicial practice.
Canonists gave a little more attention to another sentence that brought
together aspects of the personal and local interdict in a different way: the so-
called ambulatory interdict. This sentence was imposed on an individual but it

⁸⁸ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.39.48 v. ingressum. Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.39.48 v.

ingressum ecclesie (vol. 2, fol. 117rb). Monaldus, Summa, fol. 96rb. Boniface: VI 5.11.20. Johannes
Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.20 v. in ea.
⁸⁹ Reg. Martin IV, nos. 280–1, 283, 310, 460, 467, 469.
 Mixed Sentences 83

affected any place where he or she happened to stop. It followed them like a
shadow, such that ‘they were never outside interdicted territory’. As Innocent IV
noted, a judge might impose an interdict that came into effect against churches
at certain times, such as whenever the local lord was present. A treatise on
interdicts attributed to Johannes Andreae added that such a sentence was to
be observed in a place as long as that person remained there. It might even
remain in force for three days after that person departed according to Johannes
Calderinus.⁹⁰ Presumably the aim was to turn people against a carrier of the
sentence wherever he went. For example in 1203 Innocent III had declared that
the murderers of Bishop Conrad of Würzburg and their heirs were to be deprived
in perpetuity of all fiefs and benefices belonging to the church of Würzburg,
and any diocese where they tried to obtain other ecclesiastical fiefs or benefices
was subject to interdict until they ceased trying or the inhabitants of the diocese
opposed them. This was perhaps not an ambulatory interdict in the strict sense,
but it demonstrates that in practice as well as in theological and canonistic
theory interdicts were designed to induce the innocent to resist the sins of the
guilty.⁹¹
Innocent III and successive popes frequently imposed ambulatory interdicts
on excommunicates, especially the persistently obdurate, thereby reinforcing
their pariah status. For example in 1199 Innocent III declared that all places
where Markward of Anweiler and his supporters arrived fell under interdict.
Markward and his supporters were already excommunicated for scorning the
pope’s authority as overlord of Sicily and ward of Frederick II, heir to the
kingdom, and Innocent III had even proclaimed a crusade against them. Thirty
years later Gregory IX likewise laid the excommunicate Frederick II under an
ambulatory interdict.⁹² Sometimes ambulatory interdicts formed part of a whole
battery of sanctions including excommunication. In a few cases it was combined
with an interdict on places under a guilty party’s jurisdiction, i.e. a general local
interdict. In one extreme case in 1256 Alexander IV threatened an ambulatory
interdict and excommunication on the duke of Silesia if he failed to free the
Bishop of Wratislava and other clerks in his custody, besides an interdict on
his land and places where these hostages were held. In other cases ecclesiastical
authorities applied such penalties sequentially rather than together. For example
a general local interdict was sometimes an aggravation of an ambulatory interdict.

⁹⁰ Krehbiel, 78 (quotation). Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.33.24 v. interdicto. Johannes Andreae

(attrib.), De modo, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 8ra (Ed. fol. 6v). Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De
censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 15ra: ‘interdicitur divinorum celebratio in locis ad que venerint
et per triduum post eius recessum’. Reg. Clement IV, no. 144, also referred to ambulatory interdicts
that were to last in places for three days after those under these sentences had passed through.
⁹¹ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 113. On the theory see pp. 39–45.
⁹² Markward: Innocent III, Reg. 2, no. 212. Frederick II: Reg. Gregory IX, no. 332. Cf. Innocent
III, Reg. 1, no. 121; 6, no. 17; 7, no. 46; 9, no. 154; 11, no. 26; 13, no. 75; Reg. Gregory IX,
nos. 757, 1639, 2158, 3615, 4453, 4777; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 5279, 5469; Reg. Honorius IV,
no. 768.
84 Kinds of Interdict

In 1199 when King Philip II of France refused to leave his mistress and return
to his wife, at first the papal legate in France threatened ambulatory interdicts
on Philip, his mistress, and members of their households, before proclaiming
a papal interdict on the whole kingdom of France two months later. By the
late thirteenth century an ambulatory interdict might form a stage in a scale
of penalties which increased in severity with the delinquent’s obduracy. The
concordat between the king and church of Portugal approved by Nicholas IV in
1289 stipulated, for example, that if the king, his successors, or officials failed to
amend any violation of the concordat in two months, the king’s chapel was to
be interdicted, and after four months he incurred an ambulatory interdict, then
after a further two months excommunication, and if he still remained obdurate
after that, his kingdom was to fall under a general interdict and his vassals were
absolved of fealty to him.⁹³ The various forms of the interdict could thus be
applied progressively as circumstances required.
In conclusion the ecclesiastical interdict embraced a range of sanctions that
excluded from the sacraments, divine offices, and church burial. As Vodola stat-
ed, the interdict brought together ‘a number of earlier disciplinary practices of the
Church’.⁹⁴ The derivation of general personal interdicts from minor excommu-
nication as a penalty for those innocently associating with excommunicates has
been noted, for example. The different forms of the sanction might be used for
different purposes; for instance the particular interdict, local or personal, helped
reinforce internal discipline, whereas the general interdict was aimed more at
external coercion, notably of secular rulers and other lay violators of ecclesiastical
liberty. Therefore it was a highly adaptable and flexible sanction, which could
even give rise to such peculiar variants as interdict ab ingressu ecclesie and so-called
ambulatory interdicts.
Thirteenth-century canonistic doctrine on the operation of these various kinds
of interdict reflected the papacy’s approach in practice, though the teachings and
the customary observances that they described were often not approved in canon
law till 1298. Indeed many points remained obscure and disputed until they
were clarified by papal rulings, notably the definition of a generale interdictum
terre or access of laity to churches outside their interdicted land. In attempting
to fill the gaps left by the law canonists were guided not only by papal practice
but also their own ideas of collective guilt, notably in their teachings on general
interdicts. In their opinio communis those associated with the guilty by feudal ties,
by membership of the same community as the guilty, or even by sheltering the
guilty and their crimes were held responsible and thus punishable under a general
interdict. Nevertheless canonists often distinguished that those who committed
a wrong should be treated more harshly than those simply associated with a

⁹³ Silesia: Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1557. France: Innocent III, Reg. 2, no. 188; cf. id. Reg. 7,
no. 171. Portugal: Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 717; cf. Reg. Honorius IV, no. 96.
⁹⁴ Vodola, ‘Interdict’, 494.
 Mixed Sentences 85

wrongdoer. Individual delinquents were thus often excommunicated in practice,

and interdicts were meant to punish the guilty more severely, for example if they
were named in a personal interdict or caused a general local interdict. Canon
law and canonistic doctrine on the interdict, therefore, tried to balance the
competing concerns of maintaining ecclesiastical discipline and mitigating it for
the innocent.
 3
Laying of Interdicts

From the mid-twelfth century canonists and theologians increasingly distin-

guished between the internal and external fora of ecclesiastical discipline.¹ By
the thirteenth century penance was enjoined in the forum internum for private
sins disclosed in the confessional, whereas excommunication, interdict, and other
canonical penalties were imposed in the forum externum for public crimes tried in
open court. This bifurcation resulted partly from the evolution of the Church’s
administrative structures during the twelfth century and the concomitant sep-
aration of canon law from theology. From the mid-twelfth century canonists
increasingly left sacramental matters, notably penance, to theologians and devoted
themselves to juridical issues, notably canonical crime and punishment.² Canon
law and its commentators increasingly defined who had power to excommunicate
and how it was to be exercised, and interdicts largely followed these procedural
rules during the thirteenth century. The reservation of excommunication and
interdict to the forum externum would have a profound influence on these rules.

3 . 1 T H E P OW E R TO I N T E R D I C T

From the mid-twelfth century the question of internal and external fora was
connected with another duality, orders and jurisdiction. It was agreed that those
in priest’s orders and above might enjoin penance and absolve sins in the forum
internum, but canonists taught by the thirteenth century that only those holding
ecclesiastical jurisdiction by virtue of an office (e.g. bishops) or commission (e.g.
judges delegate) might impose and remove sanctions in the forum externum.
Orders were not even a prerequisite for the exercise of such jurisdiction.³ In
canonistic doctrine this distinction was based on Gratian’s interpretation of the
power of binding and loosing. This was the ‘power of the keys’ that Christ
had conferred on St Peter (Matthew 16:18–19),⁴ and Gratian understood it
in two senses. He accepted the traditional explanation that it represented the
sacerdotal power to administer penance in the forum internum, and Christ had

¹ Russo, 436–59; Vodola, Excommunication, 35–6; Benson, 45–55.

² Cf. Huizing, 298. ³ Vodola, Excommunication, 36.
⁴ D.20 dictum ante c.1. Cf. C.24 q.1 dictum post c.1. See Tierney, 30–6, and Benson, 47–50.
 The Power to Interdict 87

also granted this power to absolve sin to all the apostles on another occasion.
But Gratian also interpreted the power of the keys as the judicial authority to
decide legal disputes, and he discussed this with reference to the pope alone.
He held that ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ were required to exercise this jurisdiction,
and these were granted to St Peter through the keys. One ‘key’ was knowledge
needed to judge between parties in court; the other was power to eject members
from the Church, i.e. excommunication. This implied that all ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, including the power to interdict, inhered in the pope as St Peter’s
successor; hence the decretist Rufinus argued before the Third Lateran Council
(1179) that the judicial authority of bishops was ultimately derived from the
papacy.⁵
Such an extreme claim on behalf of papal power would not be fully elaborated
until the fourteenth century, and indeed Gratian’s novel interpretation did
not have an immediately wide impact. The theologian Rolandus still asserted
in c.1150: ‘omnibus sacerdotibus indifferenter he claves conferantur ex verbis
Domini dicentis Petro’.⁶ But the idea that the ‘keys’ in a judicial sense, and
power to excommunicate and interdict, was reserved to prelates was accepted
among canonists by the thirteenth century.⁷ The canonist Bérenger Frédol argued
(c.1298) that priests held ‘potestas ligandi et solvendi’ only in the limited sense of
absolving sin but bishops received a fuller power (amplior potestas) that included
excommunication.⁸ He did not maintain that this was derived from the pope
but that bishops as vicars of Christ and successors of the apostles held the ‘keys’
that Christ had conferred on the apostles and their successors. Indeed most
thirteenth-century canonists, notably Hostiensis, did not accept that judicial
authority was simply delegated to prelates by the pope but rather it was a right
they exercised autonomously. This limitation of papal power was later challenged
by the friars in the early fourteenth century, who claimed that the pope had
supreme jurisdiction over the Church and distributed all jurisdiction to lesser
prelates.⁹ Hence when the canonist Johannes Calderinus considered who could
interdict in the mid-fourteenth century when the Avignon papacy was at its
zenith, this absolutist view of papal monarchy underlay his definition: it was
the pope who principally imposed interdicts, and others received this power of
coercion from him, since he alone had universal jurisdiction. In support of his
view Johannes cited an influential text of Augustine from the Decretum which

⁵ Benson, 85; cf. Pennington, 59 ff. ⁶ Roland, Sentenzen, 267. See also Russo, 446.
⁷ Anon. (c.1206) on 1 Comp. 3.33.16 v. archidiaconi, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9,
fol. 54rb: ‘ar. quod archidiaconus potest excommunicare, supra. de officio archid. Pleni ius [sic;
1 Comp. 1.15.5(?)]. De hoc planum est enim quod nemo excommunicare potest nisi qui claves
habet.’
⁸ Bérenger Frédol, 49–50.
⁹ Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 12rb: ‘Videndum est de
his qui interdicere possunt, et principaliter dominus papa interdicit, de excess. prelata. Tanta [X
5.31.18], a quo ceteri potestatem percipiunt cohercendi cum solus habeat universalem ordinariam
iurisdictionem, xxiiii. q. i. Quodcumque [C.24 q.1 c.6].’
88 Laying of Interdict

suggested that when St Peter received the keys, he ‘signified’ the Church; this
had significant implications for the pope’s position.¹⁰
Although thirteenth-century canonists conceived papal power in more limited
constitutional terms, they recognized that the pope as ‘universal ordinary’
exercised jurisdiction throughout the Church and issued laws for the whole
Church. This power was demonstrated through interdicts among other means.
The pope alone pronounced interdicts on entire kingdoms or provinces. Only
he or ecumenical councils convened by his authority attached interdicts to laws
that ran throughout the Church so that any violator of these laws incurred this
penalty. And the pope might even intervene in the jurisdiction of local ordinaries
(e.g. bishops) by granting those nominally subject to it immunity from interdicts
laid without papal consent and other more limited freedoms from interdict, as
well as quashing invalid interdicts referred to the curia on appeal.¹¹ The interdict
thus gave practical expression to the pope’s wide interventionist powers, but he
could not exercise them effectively without the cooperation of lesser prelates.
When the pope declared an interdict, he relied on prelates and other clergy in
the area or community which it concerned to publicize it and see that it was
observed. In this respect it was a test of his authority over local churches. The
English interdict is a case in point. In a letter of 27 August 1207 Innocent III
instructed the Bishops of London, Ely, and Worcester to publish an interdict on
England and have it ‘inviolably’ observed if they failed to persuade King John
to yield to papal demands.¹² The monks of Canterbury had made two disputed
elections to their vacant archiepiscopal see then accepted a candidate proposed
by the pope, Stephen Langton. John’s refusal to accept Langton was the cause
of the interdict. The bishops charged with laying it delayed for some months,
however, before they had the interdict promulgated on 23 March 1208.
Fear of the king’s immediate power perhaps initially overtook their duty to
a distant pope. The chronicler Roger of Wendover claimed that John reacted
furiously to the bishops’ ‘tearful’ entreaties to yield to the pope, allegedly uttering
blasphemous oaths against the pope and cardinals and threatening to expel all
clergy from England, confiscate their property, and send all Roman and papal
clerks back to the curia with their eyes torn out and noses slit if the interdict were
laid.¹³ Wendover is a notoriously unreliable source, and we will consider later the
king’s actual countermeasures to this interdict, but the bishops were wary enough
to flee into exile shortly after proclaiming the interdict. Possible intimidation
and fear of reprisals were not the only factors that made the bishops’ position
difficult. Their loyalties were split between king and pope. As prelates they owed

¹⁰ C.24 q.1 c.6. See Tierney, 34–6.

¹¹ On the thirteenth-century ‘constitutional’ view see Pennington, 62–74, and Watt, 75–92.
Interdicts imposed by papal legislation are discussed below at pp. 126–8.
¹² SLI, no. 30. See Cheney, ‘Interdict’, for an unsurpassed account of the English interdict.
¹³ Wendover, Flores, ii. 45–6; Gervase, ii. 101, 107. On King John’s reaction see below at
pp. 170–1, 176, 180–1.
 The Power to Interdict 89

obedience to the pope and had frequently been entrusted with executing papal
mandates, but they had also served the king before becoming bishops. And all
three, especially the Bishop of Worcester, probably owed their bishoprics to
royal patronage.¹⁴ Indeed the key issue in John’s dispute with Innocent was that
the pope consecrated Langton as archbishop without royal consent, contrary to
English custom, and had rejected the king’s preferred candidate. Moreover as
magnates the bishops also held the temporalities of their sees from the king and
were his subjects. A papal interdict hence severely tested the loyalties of local
prelates who were expected to enforce it against their secular ruler.
Indeed they might fail to do so for the reasons already discussed. In May
1203 Innocent III had threatened King John with an ambulatory interdict if he
did not recall the Archbishop of Dublin from exile and restore his temporalities
within a month. The execution of the sentence was delegated to Hubert Walter,
Archbishop of Canterbury and John’s chancellor, and the Bishop of Ely who later
had to declare the interdict on England. A year and a half later Innocent reproved
them for neglecting their mandate and it was renewed with a two-month deadline.
It is dubious whether the interdict was ever imposed, and the rationale for it
ceased in 1205 when Hubert Walter brought the king to an agreement with the
exiled archbishop.¹⁵ On occasion, clearly, it was more expedient for local prelates
to deal with their lay ruler by less confrontational means than a papal interdict.
The pope could also use agents to impose his interdicts who were less prone to
such divided loyalties: papal legates. Normally cardinals or others attached to the
curia, they were usually sent to places with which they had no personal ties. In
1198 the legate in France was Italian cardinal Peter of Capua, and the pope then
instructed him to persuade the French king to leave his mistress and return to his
wife; otherwise Peter was to lay an interdict on the king’s ‘land’. After the king
had ignored frequent warnings, Peter finally summoned a general council of all
prelates of the kingdom to meet at Dijon on 6 December 1199 where he ignored a
royal appeal and promulgated the interdict, issuing orders to prelates in the king’s
land (not all of whom attended the council) to have it observed.¹⁶ Peter had been
acting on a specific papal mandate, and similarly in 1227 Gregory IX instructed
the papal legate in England not to pronounce excommunication or interdict
against its king or his brother the count of Poitou, as the previous pope Honorius
III had required, without a specific papal mandate.¹⁷ Legates sometimes received
a general papal mandate to coerce any opponent of their mission by interdict or
other canonical penalties, but it was more common for the mandate to specify
which offenders they might use such measures against.¹⁸ On other occasions

¹⁴ See SLI, nos. 6, 9.

¹⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 64; 7, no. 171; Cheney, England, 304 n.; Krehbiel, 92.
¹⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 347; Krehbiel, 111–15. ¹⁷ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 94.
¹⁸ E.g. Reg. Urban IV, no. 594; the legate sent by Urban to negotiate peace between Henry III
and his barons in England was authorized to coerce the rebels by ecclesiastical censure. Cf. Reg.
Honorius III, no. 244; Reg. Clement IV, no. 116; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 225–6.
90 Laying of Interdict

popes employed other curial agents, notably papal scribes, vicars, chaplains, and
non-legatine cardinals, to proclaim an interdict to enforce papal judgements.¹⁹
Nicholas IV often granted more freedom to inquisitors, allowing them to deploy
excommunication and interdict against those obstructing their work regardless
of papal immunities; one mandate specified these opponents as uncooperative
civic officials, another as those who harboured or otherwise assisted heretics.²⁰
In most of the instances above clergy on the ground had to act as executors
of a sentence pronounced by the pope in a case already considered by him. As
universal ordinary the pope claimed authority to judge all cases referred to him
from across the Church, and his was a court of first instance, to which a case
might be appealed even from the lowest church court.²¹ Appeals to Rome rose
so dramatically and inexorably from the mid-twelfth century, however, that the
pope was increasingly unable to hear them all in person. A common solution
was to refer cases back to the provinces from which they came and commission
local prelates as papal judges delegate to hear them on the pope’s behalf. In an
undated decretal Alexander III made it a point of principle that a papal judges
delegate was superior to all parties in the case referred to him, even bishops
or others outside his jurisdiction; hence he might coerce them by an interdict
if they defied his authority; with regard to a bishop, by an interdict on entry
to church or even on his land. In another undated decretal Alexander added
that a judges delegate might punish the defiance not only of those involved
in the case but also of their chief supporters ‘since, according to scripture,
those doing wrong and those consenting to it should suffer a like penalty’, a
principle that also justified collective sanctions like the interdict. Both rulings
entered canonical collections, notably the Liber extra, and thus were recognized
by thirteenth-century canonists.²²
These rulings also applied to subdelegates. Alexander III provided that judges
delegate might subdelegate their commission if they could not discharge it because
of illness or another serious reason and the case could be settled without them.
Innocent III recognized in 1207 that judges delegate subdelegated their power of
coercion with their jurisdiction. Consequently subdelegates might impose inter-
dicts to enforce their judgements.²³ These rulings also passed into canon law, and
they can be seen at work in a letter of Alexander IV from early 1260. It recorded
that judges delegate had been appointed to settle a dispute in Ireland between
the Bishop and chapter of Lismore and their metropolitan, the Archbishop of

¹⁹ E.g. Reg. Honorius III, no. 2161 (scribes); Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1968 (chaplain); Reg.
Innocent IV, no. 4681 (vicar); Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 4497 (cardinal); Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1089
(nuncio).
²⁰ Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 320, 430 (officials), 892 (harbourers), 2777. See pp. 46–7 on how
canonistic doctrine called for the punishment of those defending heretics together with the heretics
themselves.
²¹ On the growth of papal appellate jurisdiction see, for example, Cheney, Becket, 47–75.
²² 1 Comp. 1.21.16 (= X 1.29.11); 1 Comp. 1.21.2 (= X 1.29.1).
²³ 1 Comp. 1.21.4 (= X 1.29.3); 3 Comp. 1.18.8 (= X 1.29.29).
 The Power to Interdict 91

Cashel, and his chapter over possession of some monasteries, churches, and
chapels. They had then subdelegated the case to the Bishop and Archdeacon
of Kilmacduagh and Archdeacon of Mayo, who had decided in favour of the
archbishop and his chapter and, at their request, imposed excommunication and
interdict on the Bishop of Lismore and some of his chapter.²⁴
A judges delegate’s or subdelegate’s power to coerce and hence to interdict
was restricted to the case over which he was granted jurisdiction. From the early
thirteenth century canonists also agreed that a legate might not exceed the limits
of his mandate, especially when it came to laying interdicts.²⁵ This view was
based on Innocent III’s decretal ‘Novit ille’ (1200). It had responded to the
French king’s complaint that the interdict on his kingdom was invalid since
the pope’s legate had proclaimed it outside the boundaries of the kingdom.²⁶
Although the legate had first published the sentence at Dijon, he then travelled
outside the kingdom and announced it again at a council at Vienne. Nevertheless
his legation, Innocent explained, included not only the kingdom of France but
also the provinces of Vienne, Lyon, and Besançon (whence prelates had come
to attend the second legatine council). Though this was an expedient reaction
to events, it contributed significantly to the general canonistic view that an
ecclesiastical judge might only pronounce interdicts on those subject to his
jurisdiction, and by the early thirteenth century one might legitimately appeal
against an interdict laid ‘a non suo iudice’. Indeed in 1193 Clement III’s decretal
‘A nobis’ had ruled that a general sentence of excommunication only bound
those subject to the one imposing it.²⁷
Consequently an archbishop might not impose interdicts ex officio outside his
province. But there was some debate among canonists whether an archbishop
was the judge ordinary of his suffragan’s subjects and might use interdicts against
them. From the early thirteenth century canonists generally agreed that this
was not true except in specific cases admitted by canon law: the suffragan was
negligent or gave his consent; a case was referred to the archbishop on appeal; a

²⁴ Reg. Alexander IV, no. 3063.

²⁵ Alanus (c.1206) on Alan. 1.5.5 (= 3 Comp. 1.4.1) v. metas, Vercelli Cathedral Chapter MS
89, fol. 55vb: ‘Si ergo metas legationis transisset legatus, ipsius iurisdictio expirasset et in homines
legationis, ar. ff. de offi. prefec. et leg. l. ult. ff. de off. presidis. Preses. [Dig. 1.12.3, 1.18.3] sed
contra ff. de officio procon. et l. l. ult. [Dig. 1.16.16]. Solutio. Secus de delegato pape quam delegato
proconsulis, vel dic quod iurisdictionem contentiosam amittit statim ex quo provinciam exiverit, ut
hic ammititur, voluntariam non, ut supra. de sent. ex. Ad eminentiam. lib. ii [2 Comp. 5.18.9].’
Vincentius Hispanus on 3 Comp. 1.19.5, v. fines, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1378, fol. 27rb: ‘Ultra metam
non teneret sententia, ff. de of. prefec. et leg. l. ult. ff. de of. pre. l. iii. [Dig. 1.12.3, 1.18.3] sicut nec
antequam ingrediatur, ut ff. de of. proconsulis l. ii. et iii. in fi. [Dig. 1.16.2, 3] sicut nec etiam ultra
iurisdictionis mensuram ff. de iurisdictione o. iud. l. ult. [Dig. 2.1.20]. Ordinarii autem sententia
ex iurisdictione lata tenet, ar. contra xi. q. i. Si quisquam. De con. di. i. Hic ergo [C.11 q.1 c.16,
De con. D.1 c.14]. Vin.’ Cf. likewise Johannes Teutonicus on 3. Comp. 1.19.5 v. terminos sue (Ed.
pp. 132–3), which gloss Tancred copied, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 180vb.
²⁶ 3 Comp. 1.19.5 (= X 1.30.7); see glosses in previous note.
²⁷ 2 Comp. 5.18.10 (= X 5.39.21).
92 Laying of Interdict

dispute arose between the suffragan and a subject of his; a case concerned a delict
or property of the suffragan’s subject in the archbishop’s diocese; the archbishop
was conducting a visitation; the suffragan’s see was vacant.²⁸ Controversy on this
issue was not confined to the schools but also broke out in practice. In 1245
suffragans of Reims province complained to Innocent IV that their archbishop
judged cases from their jurisdiction not appealed to him and arbitrarily laid
excommunication and interdicts on their subjects. The archbishop was cited
before the pope to account for himself and responded that he laid these sentences
when clergy of his province resisted his visitation. Innocent lifted these sentences
and ruled that the archbishop might excommunicate only those subject to his
jurisdiction. His ruling appeared in the decretal ‘Romana Ecclesia’ (1246), which
was conceived and circulated as an addition to canon law and presumably also
applied to interdicts.²⁹ An archbishop might, nevertheless, excommunicate or
interdict his suffragans, if not their subjects, as Vincentius Hispanus had observed
(c.1236); after all an archbishop was, according to Goffredus de Trano, the judge
ordinary of his suffragans.³⁰ Likewise by the early thirteenth century, it was a
canonistic commonplace that a bishop might lay an interdict ex officio only on
persons and places subject to his jurisdiction, i.e. within his diocese. Hence in
1290, after nobles forced the Bishop of Trent out of his diocese, he had to secure
papal permission to exercise his jurisdiction from just outside it and proclaim
excommunication and interdicts on his persecutors.³¹

²⁸ Anon. (c.1206) on 1 Comp. 1.22.un v. sive metropoleos, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS

1407–9, fol. 12vb: ‘Metropolitanus de causis subditorum sui suffraganei potest cognoscere si causa
defertur ad ipsum per appellationem ut hic, si negligens fuerit \episcopus/, ix. q. iii. Cum simus [C.9
q.3 c.3], si vacaverit episcopatus, ix. q. iii. Conquestus [C.9 q.3 c.8], quando clericus agit contra
episcopum suum secundum quosdam; alii dicunt quod arbitri sunt obligandi in hoc, xi. q. i. Pervenit
[C.11 q.1 c.39].’ Vincentius Hispanus on 3 Comp. 1.20.5 v. exceptis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1378, fol.
27vb: ‘Potest archiepiscopus iudicare de subditis sui suffraganei in casibus specialibus et in casu d.
xii. De hiis [D.12 c.13]. Item ubi deliquit in diocesi eius, vi. q. iii. Placuit [C.6 q.3 c.4], vel si habet
predium, supra. de foro compe. Sane. lib. i. [1 Comp. 2.2.4], vel tenet feudum ab eo, supra. de iud.
Ceterum. lib. i. [1 Comp. 2.1.7]. Item si criminalis causa est inter episcopum et suum subditum, vi.
q.ii. c.i [C.6 q.2 c.1] … Item ubi lis est inter episcopum et subditum suum in civili, xi. q.i. Si clericus
[C.11 q.1 c.46]’. Tancred on 2 Comp. 5.13.4 v. aliquid, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 141vb:
‘Ar. quod archiepiscopus non est iudex ordinarius totius provincie … La<urentius> notavit in illa
decretali ‘‘Pastoralis’’ [Po. 2350], quod est iudex ordinarius totius sed non cuiuslibet, vel est iudex
omnium sed habet iurisdictionem impeditam an est pro eo. infra. de prescrip. Cum ex officii. lib. iii.
[3 Comp. 2.17.6]. Mihi autem videtur quod non est iudex in diocesibus suorum suffraganeorum,
nisi in casibus supradictis ut expresse dicit illa decretalis ‘‘Pastoralis’’. t.’ Id. on 3 Comp. 3.5.9 v.
excommunicationis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 223rb: ‘Ideo valet hec sententia excommunicationis
ab archiepiscopo in subditos suffraganeorum suorum lata quia delegatus domini pape fuit in hac
parte, vel quia consensus episcopi loci accessit ut supra patet, alias esset contra, supra. ix. q. ii.
Nullus primas, et supra. de of. iudicis ordina. Pastoralis. lib. e. [C.9 q.2 c.3, 3 Comp. 1.20.5] t.’
²⁹ Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 1625, 1652–8; Po. 12062.
³⁰ Vincentius Hispanus on X 5.39.52 v. promulgata, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2546, fol. 243va: ‘Potest
ergo metropolitanus suspendere suffraganeum suum, ut hic, et excommunicare, xviii(?). di. De hiis.
v. q.iii. Si egrotans [D.12 c.13, C.5 q.3 c.1], sed subditum eius non. supra. de offi. ord. Pastoralis
[X 1.31.11].’ Goffredus de Trano, Summa, p. 109 (De officio ordinarii, §6).
³¹ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 2616.
 The Power to Interdict 93

A bishop had power to discipline his subjects once his metropolitan con-
firmed his election according to a decretal of Celestine III (1191–8); therefore
a bishop-elect might excommunicate and interdict in his diocese even before
his consecration.³² The power to excommunicate indeed pertained to jurisdic-
tion (conferred by confirmation) and not orders (received at consecration), as
Laurentius Hispanus and later canonists observed.³³ And this distinction was
applied in practice; Innocent IV affirmed that an Archbishop-elect of Cologne
had sufficient ordinary jurisdiction to correct wrongdoers in his diocese, even by
interdicting their lands.³⁴
A bishop’s judicial power was, however, subject to a constitutional limitation.
In several decretals incorporated in canon law Alexander III had exhorted prelates
not to administer their churches without their chapter’s advice, and his decretal
‘Pervenit’ specifically required them not to lay interdicts ‘sine iudicio capituli’.³⁵
Hence by the early thirteenth century canonists generally agreed that an interdict
laid by a bishop without his chapter’s consent was invalid. Exceptions to this
rule were allowed only by privilege or special custom according to Tancred.³⁶
Clearly the chapter was meant to restrain its prelate from arbitrary and excessive
sentences, and Hermann de Minden argued in his treatise on the interdict (1270)
that the chapter’s consent was especially necessary when the bishop intended to
impose a perpetual or long-lasting interdict.³⁷
It was a far more complex issue whether the chapter had the power to
interdict without its bishop. As canonistic doctrine had reserved this power
to those exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the key point was whether this
included chapters. Canonists increasingly perceived that a bishop derived his
jurisdiction from his chapter through its electing him and thus this authority
devolved to the chapter in a vacancy. Rufinus had argued that a chapter might
exercise its bishop’s judicial powers sede vacante. In 1184 Lucius III’s decretal ‘Ad
abolendam’ reinforced this view when it assigned the episcopal role of judging

³² 2 Comp. 1.3.7 (= X 1.6.15). See Benson, 108–15, esp. 111–12.

³³ Tancred on 2 Comp. 1.3.7 v. excommunicationi, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 103ra:
‘Confirmatus ergo excommunicare potest non solum electus in episcopum sed electus in abbatem,
ut infra. de simonia. Sicut nobis. lib. iii. [3 Comp. 5.2.5]. Unde patet quod excommunicare
iurisdictionis est non ordinis, unde et visitator ecclesie excommunicare potest, cum liberam habeat
administrationem, ut supra. vii. q.i. Quamvis triste [C.7 q.1 c.14] … La<urentius>.’ Also quoted
by Vincentius Hispanus on X 1.6.15 v. confirmatione, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 19vb, and
Goffredus de Trano on X 1.6.15 v. statuendi habeas, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 8vb.
³⁴ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 354.
³⁵ 1 Comp. 3.9.4–5 (= X 3.10.4–5); 1 Comp. 5.27.1 (= X 5.31.1).
³⁶ Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.3.4 v. interdicto, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 152vb: ‘Ad hoc
dicendum quod nec episcopus nec aliquis inferiorum prelatorum potest hoc facere sine consensu
capituli sui, nisi hoc optineat ex privilegio vel consuetudine speciali iam prescripta, ar. ad hec xv.
q. vii. Episcopus nullius causam et supra. de excessibus prelatorum. Ad hec. lib. i. [C.15 q.7 c.6, 1
Comp. 5.27.1] t.’
³⁷ Hermann de Minden, ‘De interdictis’, §17 (fol. 345va). Cf. Johannes Calderinus, ‘De
interdicto’, Pt 1 §55 (fol. 328rb).
94 Laying of Interdict

heretics to chapters in vacancies.³⁸ From the early thirteenth century canonists

hence understood that the bishop’s jurisdictional power might revert to his
chapter, and one French canonist (c.1206) even inferred that the chapter might
excommunicate in a vacancy (and presumably also interdict).³⁹ But in practice
various arrangements existed for the administration of vacant dioceses, and often
it fell to the bishop’s official, his deputy in judicial affairs, to exercise episcopal
jurisdiction sede vacante not the chapter.
Outside of vacancies canon law appeared to deny that chapters might exercise
jurisdiction. Celestine III’s decretal ‘Quesivit’ (c.1191–5) ruled that canons
might not impose interdicts without the consent of their bishop and the rest of
their cathedral chapter. It was the converse of Alexander III’s ban on episcopal
interdicts laid without the chapter’s consent, and like that ban it was subject to
exceptions.⁴⁰ A decretal of Innocent III suggested in 1206 that a dean and chapter
might interdict, but Goffredus de Trano’s commentary on this decretal doubted
whether a chapter might interdict or excommunicate ‘iure ordinario’ unless it
held this power by custom or privilege.⁴¹ In 1208 another decretal of Innocent
III had recognized that a dean might interdict even without his chapter’s consent,
but canonists likewise qualified this ruling. Johannes Teutonicus noted that it
went against canon law, notably ‘Quesivit’, but he admitted that a dean might
interdict by special custom, and Vincentius Hispanus argued that he might do so
by a special privilege of his church. Such views were widely held among canonists
by the mid-thirteenth century and they reflected contemporary practice.⁴² As
early as 1232 a bishop had allowed his chapter to use excommunication and
interdict against wrongdoers in his diocese, and subsequently popes granted
certain deans and chapters the power to interdict. Such papal grants usually
justified this as a means of self-defence against those violating their property,

³⁸ Rufinus, Summa on D.23 c.1 (Ed. p. 52); 1 Comp. 5.6.11 (= X 5.7.9). See Benson, 85, 106,
and Tierney, 127–30.
³⁹ Anon. on 1 Comp. 5.6.11 v. sede vacante, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9, fol.
79ra: ‘Quia sede vacante clerici bene possunt excommunicare, cum potestas episcopi devoluta sit
ad capitulum, lxv. d. Si forte [D.65 c.9].’ Cf. Jacobus de Albenga on 5 Comp. 1.18.1 v. pro bono
pacis, London, BL, Royal MS 11.C.vii, fol. 251ra: ‘Igitur videtur quod de iure communi vacante
ecclesia, prelati transferatur potestas ad capitulum … sicut vacante sede capitulum potest absolvere
excommunicatos, ut supra. de hereticis. Ad abolendam. lib. i. [1 Comp. 5.6.11] et alia facere’.
⁴⁰ 2 Comp. 3.9.2 (= X 3.11.2).
⁴¹ 3 Comp. 1.3.4 (= X 1.4.5). Goffredus de Trano on X 1.4.5 v. vel a vobis, Vienna,
Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 6va: ‘Capitulum, autem, non credo quod ordinario iure possit
excommunicare vel interdicere, nisi hoc ei competat ex privilegio vel consuetudine’.
⁴² 3 Comp. 2.19.13 (= X 2.28.55). Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 2.19.13 v. promulgavit
(Ed. p. 358); copied by Tancred, ibid. v. interdictum, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 218ra.
Vincentius Hispanus, ibid. v. cessaretur, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1378, fol. 55va: ‘credo quod hoc
<excommunicare> potest decanus ex speciali privilegio ecclesie illius.’ Cf. Goffredus de Trano on X
2.28.55 v. interdictum, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 75ra: ‘Erat enim de consuetudine
illius ecclesie ut decanus posset eam subicere interdicto, quod tamen erat contra ius scriptum’. Cf.
also Innocent IV, Apparatus, ibid. v. post modicum tempus; Bernard de Montmirat, ibid. v. appellavit,
BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2542, fol. 52rb (Ed. fol. 90rb); Hostiensis, Lectura, ibid. v. decanus episcopum
monuisset (vol. 1, fol. 191vb). Reg. Gregory IX, no. 891.
 The Power to Interdict 95

persons, and liberties. A decretal of Innocent IV to the dean of Orléans conceded

that he might protect himself against the temporal power by the spiritual sword;
hence the dean’s use of excommunication and interdict against a ballivus who
had seized his property was lawful. Innocent reissued this decretal as an addition
to canon law in 1251 and it entered the Liber sextus, but canonists did not see
it as a revocation of ‘Quesivit’.⁴³ Johannes Andreae maintained the traditional
view that the dean held this potestas fulminandi by custom or privilege. Indeed
late-thirteenth-century popes had continued to grant this power of self-defence
to certain deans and chapters as a special freedom.⁴⁴
Such a freedom was symptomatic of the growing autonomy of chapters during
the thirteenth century, and they increasingly claimed the power to exercise
jurisdiction independently of their bishop. This inevitably caused friction with
prelates, especially when a dean and chapter laid an interdict. For example
shortly before 1208 the Bishop of Auxerre had jailed and excommunicated a
priest for an alleged misdemeanour, but the dean of Auxerre claimed jurisdiction
over the priest, requiring the latter’s transfer to his custody. When the bishop
refused, the dean convened the chapter and, despite its opposition, interdicted
the cathedral so that services were to cease there whenever the bishop was present.
But this sentence was overruled since the bishop appealed to his metropolitan,
the Archbishop of Sens. The dean still tried to enforce the interdict by disrupting
services held in the bishop’s presence and even excommunicating the bishop’s
chaplain for chanting the offices; hence the bishop excommunicated the dean.
The dean retaliated by reissuing his interdict, this time with the chapter’s support,
and ordering its observance. Ultimately the case was referred to Innocent III,
who quashed the sentences issued by both sides. Innocent did not dispute
the dean’s right to lay this interdict, in effect against his superior, but after
his judgement entered canon law, mid-thirteenth-century canonists expressed
concern about the sentence, especially its effect on the bishop’s flock.⁴⁵ They
agreed that the bishop had appealed against the interdict so that his subjects
might receive the sacraments, hear the offices, and be instructed in the faith, since
he was accountable for their spiritual welfare.⁴⁶ In addition Hostiensis thought
it monstrous that a subordinate might presume to castigate and even punish a
superior contrary to clerical obedience, and Innocent IV had agreed that the dean
was not the bishop’s judge in this case, but added that he might protest against

⁴³ Coll. III. 41 (= VI 5.11.6). Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.6 v. decano.

⁴⁴ Reg. Martin IV, no. 381; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 2740, 4092.
⁴⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 189; see n. 42 above.
⁴⁶ Bernard de Montmirat on X 2.28.55 v. se et suum, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2542, fol. 52ra (Ed. fol.
90ra): ‘Vide formam appellationis: appellat episcopus pro se et suis subditis … quia subditi tenentur
ab episcopo recipere sacramenta … et divina officia audire in ecclesiis, per que populus reddatur bene
instructus in fide. Et si minus bene instructus esset, episcopus tenetur reddere rationem … unde ne
ecclesia interdicatur in qua populus instruitur, potest episcopus pro se et suis subditis appellare’.
Cf. Innocent IV, Apparatus, ibid. v. civitatis, and Hostiensis, Lectura, ibid. v. decanus episcopum
monuisset (vol. 1, fol. 191vb).
96 Laying of Interdict

a legitimate grievance. This concern to balance the rights of both bishop and
chapter was reflected in another papal judgement on a similar case in 1290.⁴⁷ The
dean and chapter of Lyon enjoyed a papal grant to use the spiritual sword against
anyone doing them injury (like Innocent IV’s concession to the dean of Orléans),
but they turned this weapon against their archbishop as their alleged persecutor.
He sought papal arbitration, and Nicholas IV confirmed both the grant to the
dean and chapter and their archbishop’s position as head of his church, so that
they might not use the spiritual sword against him and any excommunication,
suspension, or interdict they declared on him were void. Probably it was to curb
such abuses that thirteenth-century canon law and canonists did not admit that
every dean and chapter had an inherent power to interdict.
A related power that some chapters also held by custom or privilege was that
of imposing a cessatio a divinis. It is often difficult to distinguish in practice
whether a chapter was observing an interdict or cessatio on its church, as in
the Auxerre case, before these sanctions were more sharply differentiated in
the mid-thirteenth century. The effects of a cessatio and interdict were similar,
and likewise chapters were meant to use a cessatio in self-defence but turned it
against superiors. As in the cases above the consequent breakdown in relations
often meant papal arbitration was required. In 1287 Honorius IV tried to settle
a dispute between the bishop and chapter of Châlons-sur-Marne which had
resulted in a particularly dramatic cessatio. The bishop claimed that when his
archbishop came to consecrate him, the canons barricaded the doors of the
cathedral and its bell-tower and removed the service books, so that the bells could
not be rung to call the people or mass celebrated. According to the chapter the
bishop had the cathedral doors forced open and people and clergy assembled to
hear him hold mass in defiance of the cessatio. The dispute and cessatio were still
continuing twelve years later when Boniface VIII tried to resolve the matter.⁴⁸
The papacy had seen this use of the cessatio as an abuse and tried to curb it through
legislation since 1215, not apparently altogether successfully (see pp. 109–11
below).
The papacy also sought to regulate the power to interdict among other clergy
subordinate to bishops. Canon law had long recognized archdeacons as their
bishop’s deputies, who as oculi episcopi in the parishes might exercise correction
on his behalf. Huguccio and other canonists thus understood that archdeacons
held a cura animarum in a jurisdictional sense delegated by their bishops, though
some canonists argued that it was attached to their office.⁴⁹ The former view

⁴⁷ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 2649.

⁴⁸ Reg. Honorius IV, no. 767; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 2912.
⁴⁹ Tancred on 1 Comp. 1.15.4 v. consuetudinis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 11r: ‘Hug<uccio>
dixit quod archidiaconus non habet curam animarum nisi sibi demandetur ab episcopo, xvi. q.
vii. Nullus [C.16 q.7 c.11], et respondet ad omnia capitula que videntur dicere quod habeat
curam animarum quod intelliguntur ex delegatione et ita solvit contraria, s. e. t. Archidiaconis cum
suis concordantiis [1 Comp. 1.15.5]. Bazianus vero contrarium dixit, scilicet quod habet curam
 The Power to Interdict 97

was underscored by Alexander III’s decretal ‘Archidiaconis’, which ruled that

archdeacons might not proclaim sentences without the consent and authority of
bishops. Alanus Anglicus took this to mean that they might not excommunicate
in their own right (de iure), but he and other canonists recognized that they
might and did do so as a matter of custom (de consuetudine), and even other
decretals of Alexander III supported this view.⁵⁰ It was officially endorsed
when Gregory IX’s decretal ‘Dudum’ (1228) conceded that an archdeacon
imposed interdicts de consuetudine on parish churches under his supervision
and this pertained to his cura animarum. The assumption of ‘Archidiaconis’
that an archdeacon derived his jurisdiction from his bishop was also challenged
by another canonistic argument.⁵¹ Tancred asserted that this ruling did not
apply to archdeacons who were elected by the ecclesiastical body over which
they presided, since the latter were judges ordinary and might excommunicate
de iure communi. This view was widely adopted by subsequent canonists,
including Goffredus, who argued that a prelate elected by a collegiate body held
jurisdiction, and since jurisdiction was nothing without the power to coerce,
any prelate holding it might excommunicate. But Innocent IV questioned
this assumption and distinguished that although some archdeacons received
jurisdiction from the body electing them, only bishops might grant them power
to excommunicate.⁵²

animarum eo ipso quod episcopus <qui> instituit eum dat ei generalem administrationem. Pro
eo facit infra. de preben. Referente et s. e. t. Ut archidiaconus [1 Comp. 3.5.9, 1.15.2] cum suis
concordantiis … [fol. 11rb] … Vinc<entius>. Ego puto opinionem Hug’ prevalere, ar. infra. de
exces. pre. Ad hec lib. e. infra. de instit. Cum venissent lib. iii. [1 Comp. 5.27.2, 3 Comp. 3.7.3] … t.’
The first part of the gloss is copied, as Tancred acknowledges, from Vincentius Hispanus, ibid.
v. cuilibet (Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol. 6va). This canonistic debate was later
synthesized by Johannes Hispanus de Petesella, Summa on X 1.23, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2353, fol.
150va; the latter agreed not with Tancred but with Laurentius Hispanus and Johannes Teutonicus
that archdeacons held customary not delegated jurisdiction. On archdeacons as episcopal deputies
see D.93 c.6 and D.88 c.7.
⁵⁰ 1 Comp. 1.15.5 (= X 1.23.5). Alanus Anglicus on 1 Comp. 1.15.2 v. corrigat, Munich,
Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 10rb: ‘Ergo habet cohertionem archidiaconus, ar. infra.
de iure pa. Cum seculum. infra. de ap. Reprehen. supra. de elec. et e. p. Cum in cunctis [1 Comp.
3.33.16, 2.20.42, 1.4.16], quod est verum, scilicet modicam, sine qua nulla est iurisdictio, ut ff. de
officio eius cui man. est iuris l. ult. [Dig. 1.21.5]. Sed numquid potest excommunicare? Non credo
de iure suo, ar. infra. e. c. ult. xvi. q. ii. Visis. in fi. xxiiii. q. iii. Corripiantur [1 Comp. 1.15.5, C.16
q.2 c.1, C.24 q.3 c.17]. De consuetudine, tamen, excommunicant archidiaconi secundum quam
intellige omnia illa que dicunt quod potest excommunicare, ut extra. de iure pa. Cum seculum. de
ap. Reprehen. et si qua sunt similia’ (copied by Tancred; BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 10vb).
⁵¹ X 1.6.54 §4.
⁵² Tancred on 1 Comp. 1.15.5 v. sententiam, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 11ra: ‘Hoc ubi
archidiaconi non eliguntur ab universitate cui presunt, sicut alicubi eliguntur, xciii. d. Legimus
[D.93 c.24]. Quo casu cum iudex sit ordinarius, credo quod anathematizare possit de iure communi,
ut infra. de of. iu. or. Cum ab ecclesiarum [1 Comp. 1.23.3], et quod hic dicitur’; Zoën cited
this view on 5 Comp. 1.13.1 v. starent noting that ‘in qua opinione sunt moderni doctores ut
plene notatur xxv. di. Perlectis [D. 25 c.1] in quadam glosa Io<hannis> que incipit ‘‘hic videtur’’ ’
(T ours, Bibliothèque municipale MS 565, fol. 5va). Goffredus de Trano on X 1.23.5 v. promulgare,
Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 20vb: ‘archidiaconus eligatur ab universitate, ut xciii. di.
98 Laying of Interdict

This canonistic controversy reflected the archdeacon’s increasingly ambiguous

position in practice. By the late thirteenth century many archdeacons established
their own courts and tried to make these independent of their bishops, but the
latter equally tried to resist such encroachments on their jurisdiction.⁵³ A case
referred to Boniface VIII in 1301 indicates how archdeacons might assert their
claim to impose sentences not as episcopal judges delegate but ex officio. The
case involved a property dispute between the Franciscan convent of Burgos and
Benedictine abbey of San Domenico de Silos. The monks had evicted the friars
from a house allegedly belonging to their abbey. But the friars claimed that it
was theirs, complaining to the local bishop that the monks had seized books and
other things of theirs from it. He ordered restitution of these goods on pain of
excommunication and interdict. But the friars had also made this complaint to
the Archdeacon of Polenzuela, in whose archdeaconry both the friary and abbey
lay; hence he claimed jurisdiction over the case de consuetudine. When the monks
allegedly ignored his summons, he excommunicated the abbot, prior, and other
monks and interdicted the abbey. The bishop only intervened at his request when
the monks disregarded his sentences, which suggests that the bishop respected
his claim over the case.⁵⁴
The power of a plebanus to impose sentences was also increasingly recognized
from the late twelfth century. Plebani, known in England as rural deans and
elsewhere as archpriests, came to handle more and more judicial matters in this
period, at least in England.⁵⁵ Indeed a decretal of Alexander III included in
canon law ordered that if a plebanus imposed excommunication or interdict
rationabiliter on a parishioner of his, his bishop was to observe them as sentences
declared by prelates on wrongdoers that were binding.⁵⁶ Alanus Anglicus was
apparently the only canonist to deny that a plebanus thereby had power to
excommunicate and interdict ex officio under canon law; rather Alanus held that,
like an archdeacon, a plebanus might only impose such sentences by a special
indulgence or approved custom. Most canonists immediately recognized this
decretal as an important statement of general principle, affirming the right to
interdict and excommunicate as a judicial prerogative of prelates. Laurentius
defined a prelate as the head of a church elected by its clergy, and under this
decretal, he argued, any prelate was a judge ordinary, even if subject to a bishop,
and had jurisdiction to hear cases and excommunicate, and this included a
plebanus.⁵⁷ Tancred adopted his views and canonists generally accepted them by

Legimus [D. 93 c.24], et qui ab universitate eligitur habet iurisdictionem, ut in aut. de defensa.
civi. §Nos igitur coll. iii. [Nov. 15 pref.]. Si habet iurisdictionem, ergo potest excommunicare,
ut infra. de of. del. Ex litteris [X 1.29.29]’. Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 1.23.5 v. sententiam
excommunicationis.
⁵³ See e.g. Brundage, ‘Cambridge Faculty’, 36–41. ⁵⁴ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 4112.
⁵⁵ Cheney, Becket, 146–7. ⁵⁶ 1 Comp. 1.23.3 (= X 1.31.3).
⁵⁷ Alanus on 1 Comp. 1.23.3 v. tulerit, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879,
fol. 14vb: ‘Quod licuit ei ex speciali indulgentia vel consuetudine approbata. Alias de iure
 The Power to Interdict 99

the mid-thirteenth century.⁵⁸ They were no doubt responding to contemporary

practice, at least in England where ‘much [judicial] business fell to [plebani]
which in a more highly developed bureaucracy went to full-time officials’.⁵⁹
Officials were episcopal deputies who came to administer a bishop’s court on
his behalf; even archdeacons’ courts were run by their own officials in time.
Though officials gained competence over cases formerly passed to plebani, canon
law did not grant them the latters’ power to interdict ex officio. A constitution
of Boniface VIII, based on an earlier ruling of Alexander IV, forbade officials to
impose penalties, including interdicts, unless the power to do so was specifically
delegated to them.⁶⁰
Outside the hierarchy of secular clergy the heads of monastic houses certainly
had powers of ecclesiastical discipline, but early-thirteenth-century canonists
debated whether they included excommunication, and thus interdict. Tancred
summarized this debate: Alanus and others reserved de iure power to excommu-
nicate to bishops and claimed that it might only extend to abbots by privilege
or custom; this was consistent with Alanus’s similarly conservative views on
archdeacons and plebani. But Tancred agreed with Johannes Teutonicus that
abbots and priors fitted Laurentius’s definition of a prelate (they were elected
by the clergy over whom they presided) and thus held jurisdiction and might
excommunicate.⁶¹ Tancred, Johannes, and some later canonists also agreed that

communi plebanus non habet potestatem excommunicandi, quia nec archidiaconus, supra. de
officio archid. c. ult [1 Comp. 1.15.5].’ Cf. Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp. 1.15.3 v. voluit,
Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol. 6va: ‘Eo quod episcopus iurisdictionem committit
archidiacono intelligitur committere etiam archipresbitero.’ Tancred on 1 Comp. 1.23.3 v. firma,
BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 14va: ‘Hoc tenendum quilibet prelatus collegiate ecclesie, licet subsit
episcopo, est iudex ordinarius et habet iurisdictionem de causis cognoscendi et excommunicandi, in
aut. de defensoribus civitatum §ii. et hic et xv. q.iiii. c.i, ar. infra. de iudic. c. ii, ar. C. de iur. dic. o.
iu. l. ult. [Nov. 15.2, C.15 q.4 c.1, 1 Comp. 2.1.2, Cod. 3.13.7]. Illum autem dico prelatum qui
ab universitate vel collegio eligitur, ar. s. de elect. c.i etc. [1 Comp. 1.4.1] la<urentius>.’
⁵⁸ See n. 57 on Tancred. Vincentius Hispanus on X 1.31.3, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 50va:
‘Possunt ergo isti excommunicare, xvi. q. i. Alia est causa [C.16 q.1 c.6], ergo iudices ordinarii sunt,
infra. de iudic. c.i ar. xxiiii. di. Quando [X 2.1.1, D.24 c.5], et habent curam animarum, supra. de
elect. Cum in cunctis [X 1.6.7].’ Goffredus de Trano on X 1.23.5 v. promulgare (as n. 52): ‘Sed
cum plebanus habeat iurisdictionem, qui minor est archidiacono, excommunicare possit, ut infra.
de off. ord. Cum ab ecclesiarum [X 1.31.3].’ Cf. id. Summa on X 1.23 (Ed. p. 87); Innocent IV,
Apparatus on X 1.31.3 v. prelates. Bernard de Montmirat on X 1.31.3, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2542, fol.
25rb; Borgh. lat. MS 231, fol. 37va (Ed. fol. 43rb). Petrus Bonetus on X 1.31.3, BAV, Borgh. lat.
MS 228, fol. 57vb: ‘Casus. Archipresbyter et plebanus excommunicat vel etiam interdicit qui etiam
collegio preest.’
⁵⁹ Cheney, Becket, 147.
⁶⁰ VI 1.13.2. Johannes Andreae, Glossa, ibid., noted a precedent in Alexander IV’s decretal
‘Dudum (dilectis filiis)’. Cf. Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 7351.
⁶¹ Tancred on 2 Comp. 3.18.6 v. sententias, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 126rb; Borgh. lat. MS
264, fol. 89rb; Vat. lat. MS 2509, fol. 120va: ‘Excommunicationis. Potest enim abbas cohercere
eum, alias iurisdictio nulla esset, ut ff. de officio eius cui mandata est iurisdictio l. ult. [Dig. 1.21.5].
Quod autem possit excommunicare quibusdam placet. Alii contra, inter quos magister Ala<nus>,
vero enim iure hoc ad episcopum spectat, ar. xxiiii. q. iii. Corripiantur, xvi. q. ii. Visis in fi., ar.
contra ii. q. i. Nemo [C.24 q.3 c.17, C.16 q.2 c.1, C.2 q.1 c.11]. Illi ergo dicunt quod hoc esset ex
100 Laying of Interdict

abbots received this power to excommunicate on the confirmation of their

election, in the same way as bishops. Vincentius even classified abbots as judges
ordinary like bishops.⁶² But no canonist pretended that regular prelates might
operate courts ex officio and impose canonical penalties in judgements on cases.
A decretal of Innocent III (1211) decried abbots in Perugia diocese for ven-
turing into matrimonial cases beyond their competence and excommunicating
and interdicting their bishop’s subjects. Canonists generally restricted abbots’
and priors’ use of such penalties to the correction of monks subject to their
authority for deviations from monastic obedience. Innocent III approved this
in his decretal ‘Cum in ecclesiis’, and in another decretal of 1198 he reserved
this power of correction to abbots and priors unless their negligence necessitated
the local ordinary’s intervention.⁶³ The thirteenth-century papal registers do not
record such use of interdicts probably since there was no appeal from monastic
correction, but sometimes they include papal grants to abbots of extraordinary
powers to interdict. They were usually meant as a defensive measure in common
with similar grants to deans and chapters. In 1286 Honorius IV confirmed a
grant of Celestine III in 1192 which allowed the abbots of Cluny to impose
excommunication and interdict on any from the province of Lyon who did them
and their abbey wrong, if the bishops and prelates of these wrongdoers failed to
correct them when requested three times.⁶⁴
If the power to interdict was normally circumscribed for abbots and priors,
it was denied altogether to abbesses and prioresses. A decretal of Celestine III
(1191–8) stated that owing to her sex an abbess might not absolve nuns from
excommunication. Alanus, who appended this ruling to his decretal collection,

privilegio vel ex consuetudine A<lanus>. Michi videtur quod omnes prelati qui per electionem
collegio creantur hoc possunt, ar. hic et supra. de appell. Reprehensibilis lib. i, supra. de officio
iudicis or. Cum ab ecclesiarum lib. i, supra. de iure patro. Cum seculum, infra. de institutionibus.
Cum venissent lib. iii, xxiiii. q.iii. De illicita, infra. de symonia. Sicut nobis lib. iii [1 Comp. 2.20.42,
1.23.3, 3.33.16, 3 Comp. 3.7.3, C.24 q.3 c.6, 3 Comp. 5.2.5] t.’
⁶² See n. 33. Vincentius Hispanus on 3 Comp. 1.20.1, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1378, fol. 27va:
‘exequi. Ar. quod abbates et priores possunt excommunicare suos subiectos … compellas. Hoc est
hic notabile quod correctio monachorum, ut abbas est negligens, defertur ad episcopum. Primo loco
defertur abbati, ar. supra. <de ap.> Reprehensibilis lib. i [1 Comp. 2.20.42] … sentio abbates esse
iudices ordinarios non solum episcopum, supra. de of. prela. Cum ab ecclesiarum lib. i. et supra. de
iud. c.ii. lib. i [1 Comp. 1.23.3, 2.1.2] dummodo sit creatus ab aliqua universitate, ad illud c. De
persona [D.65 c.4].’ Cf. Johannes on 3 Comp. 1.20.1 v. si prelati (Ed. p. 134; copied by Tancred,
ibid., BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 181ra); and on 4 Comp. 1.14.2 v. excommunicationis, BAV,
Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 289va: ‘Nota quod prior potest excommunicare monachum, sic et electus in
abbatem, supra. de symo. Sicut. lib. iii [3 Comp. 5.2.5].’
⁶³ 4 Comp. 1.14.2 (= X 1.33.10), 2.10.2. Johannes Teutonicus on 4 Comp. 2.10.2 v.
supponebant, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 295va: ‘Quod solus episcopus potest, supra. de his. que
fi. a ma. parte ca. Quesivit [2 Comp. 3.9.2].’ See Johannes and Vincentius in n. 62. Goffredus de
Trano on X 1.33.10 v. excommunicationis, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 26vb: ‘Possunt
igitur abbates et priores excommunicare ut hic et infra. de symo. Sicut [X 5.33.3]. Correctio enim
monachorum ad ipsos pertinet, ut supra. e. t. Quanto [X 5.33.26]’.
⁶⁴ Reg. Honorius IV, no. 410. Cf. Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 7362.
 The Power to Interdict 101

thus doubted whether she might excommunicate deviant nuns in the first place.⁶⁵
However, Vincentius thought that an abbess held jurisdiction as she was elected
by her convent and thus, according to canonistic doctrine, a prelate. He even
conceded that she might impose an interdict ab ingressu ecclesie.⁶⁶ Honorius III’s
decretal ‘Dilecta’ (1222) also recognized that an abbess had power to discipline
disobedient subjects, but it ruled that she might not excommunicate them. This
settled the issue definitively. It rapidly passed into canon law and its earliest
commentator Jacobus de Albenga explained its doctrinal rationale: women might
not exercise the power of the keys, for Christ had conferred the keys on men,
namely the apostles, but not women, notably the blessed Virgin; hence abbesses
had no power to loose and bind, in the jurisdictional or penitential sense,
and therefore might not excommunicate or absolve.⁶⁷ Celestine III’s ruling
on absolution alluded to this argument, and it is still invoked against female
ordination in the modern Catholic Church. It was adopted by all subsequent
commentators on ‘Dilecta’, including Pierre Sampsona, who observed that
women might not impose an interdict or suspension, as these were reserved
to prelates as heirs to the keys of St Peter. Canonists, including Innocent
IV, generally agreed that abbesses might not interdict, albeit Vincentius had
conceded that they might ‘interdict’ their chaplains from celebrating divine
offices.⁶⁸

⁶⁵ Decretal edited by von Heckel, ‘Gilbertus und Alanus’, 317–18; cf. 3 Comp. 5.21.6 (=
X 5.39.33). Alanus on Alan. 5.22.5, Vercelli Cathedral Chapter MS 89, fol. 128ra: ‘solvere. Sed
numquid abbatissa potest sororem incorrigibilem excommunicare … disciplinam. Que abbatisse
reservanda est.’
⁶⁶ Vincentius on 1 Comp. 1.4.17 v. abbatissa, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol.
2vb: ‘Que iurisdictionem habet ratione officii, et hoc quia creatur ab uni<versi>tate et habet
iurisdictionem a lege, in aut. de defensoribus civita. l. xiiii [Nov. 15.6?], si in plebibus et infra. de of.
Cum ab ecclesiarum lib. e., si cum et quandoque femina habet ex consuetudine, infra. de arbitris.
Cum dilecti lib. iii. [3 Comp. 1.25.3] et potest hic interdicere ingressum ecclesie et egressum, xviii.
q. ii. Diffinimus [C.18 q.2 c.21].’
⁶⁷ 5 Comp. 1.18.3 (= X 1.33.12). Jacobus de Albenga, ibid. v. compellas, London, BL, Royal
MS 11.C.vii, fol. 251rb: ‘Quidam dicunt quod non potest excommunicare quia nec etiam absolvere
potest, ut ex. iii. de senten. ex. De monialibus [3 Comp. 5.21.6], et est hoc propter fragilitatem
sexus … tu dicas hanc esse rationem quare mulier excommunicare non possit, quia non sexui femineo
sed virili tradite fuerunt claves regni celorum, quia licet beata virgo dignior <et> excellentior fuerit
apostolis universis, non tamen ipse sed apostolis tradidit deus claves regni celorum. Unde cum mulier
claves non habeat, sed vir tantum, non potest mulier claudere vel aperire, unde nec excommunicare
nec absolvere potest, extra. iiii. de pe. et re. c. Nova quedam [4 Comp.5.14.1] Iac.’
⁶⁸ Pierre Sampsona on X 1.33.12 v. suspendat, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2083, fol. 15rb;
MS 2113, fol. 25ra: ‘Abbatissa enim suspendere, interdicere, vel excommunicare non potest, nam
ista tria ex collatione clavium facta beato Petro, et ipsum prelatis ecclesie, supra. e. Solite [X 1.33.6]’;
this view was also adopted by his pupil Bernard de Montmirat, ibid. (Ed. fol. 46r). Cf. Pierre
de Sampson (1267), Distinctiones, ibid., BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 127v; Goffredus de Trano,
ibid. v. mandata, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 26vb; Innocent IV, Apparatus, ibid. v.
suspendat. Vincentius, ibid. v. suspendat, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 53va: ‘Concedo tamen quod
abbatissa ex causa prohibere vel interdicere large capellanis ne celebrent vel accipiant portiones illa
die, et ipsi sunt ab ea interdicti large, idest prohibiti, nec tamen sunt re vera prohibiti, suspensi,
privati, vel interdicti.’
102 Laying of Interdict

In order to determine whether prelates below bishops might excommunicate

or interdict, canonists defined jurisdictional power as a prerequisite. Female
prelates fell foul of this criterion at least by 1230, but even more significantly
it posed a challenge for priests. Canonists noted that some ancient authorities
in the Decretum affirmed the power of priests to excommunicate.⁶⁹ But by the
late twelfth century many canonists argued that priests had no jurisdiction in
the foro externo, except if delegated to them, and hence no ex officio power to
excommunicate and indeed interdict as this pertained to the external forum.⁷⁰
According to Alanus priests might only exercise discipline in the internal or
penitential forum. Hostiensis later suggested that the penitential forum retained
the sanction of minor excommunication (significantly comparable in effect to
a specific personal interdict), for he claimed that priests might still impose it
to correct sinners; but ‘this never became common teaching and was not the
English custom’.⁷¹
No papal ruling specifically deprived priests of the ex officio power to interdict
or excommunicate, but Celestine III’s decretal ‘Quesivit’ forbade individual
canons to interdict their cathedral without the consent of the bishop and the
rest of their chapter. This ruling responded to the Bishop of Clermont’s claim
that some of his chapter had done so without this consent. Laurentius observed
that canons in Spain and Italy were also accustomed to interdict churches.⁷²
Nevertheless Innocent IV’s commentary on ‘Quesivit’ held that no valid custom
might allow an individual canon to lay interdicts, even on parishioners of his
prebend or their lands, for he held no jurisdiction and they were not his subjects
but his bishop’s. Subsequent canonists generally agreed, and it was also accepted

⁶⁹ Anon. on 1 Comp. 1.23.3, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–09, fol. 13ra: ‘in clericos.
Ar. quod sacerdos excommunicare potest clericos in sua parrochia constitutos. Similiter etiam
monachos excommunicare potest in sua parrochia constitutos, lxxxi. d. Ad reatum, xvi. q. i.
Alia [D.81 c.33, C.16 q.1 c.6] … observare. Ecce quod presbyter auctoritate sua excommunicare
potest, ii. q. i. Nemo [C.2 q.1 c.11].’ Alanus on 1 Comp. 1.16.5 v. cuncta, Munich, Bayerisches
Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 11ra: ‘Presbyter, autem, simplex de iurisdictione contentiosa nihil
habet. Ubicumque invenitur habere, dicatur quod hoc ex speciali delegatione vel secundum iura
antiquissima, ut ibi. ii. q. i. Nemo. xcv. Ecce [C.2 q.1 c.11, D.95 c.6]. De voluntaria iurisdictione
habet penitentias iniungere.’
⁷⁰ Ricardus Anglicus on 1 Comp. 1.16.5 v. opus exerceant, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 12vb: ‘Ar.
quod archipresbyter vel presbyter iurisdictionem non habeat … nam cum contentiosa iurisdictio
consistat in iurgiis iurgium, ad episcopum et archidiaconum pertineant, ut d. xxv. Perlectis [D.25
c.1]. Patet quod sola voluntaria iurisdictio ad sacerdotes, non contentiosa, ii. q.i. Nemo, xi. q.i.
Experientie [C.2 q.1 c.11 C.11 q.1 c.15], quia primum c. de presbyteris delegans intelligitur,
secundum sub nomine presbyterorum intelligit episcopos. Non est contra infra. de officio. i. or.
Cum ab ecclesiarum [1 Comp. 1.23.3], quoniam a specialis fuit indulgentia.’ Cf. Alanus in n. 69
above.
⁷¹ Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.39 §5; Logan, 14 n. 6.
⁷² 2 Comp. 3.9.2 (= X 3.11.2). Tancred, ibid. v. ecclesiam, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 122va:
‘Et intellige hoc ubi canonicus non habet ius episcopale in ipsa ecclesia. Alias si haberet et eidem
negaretur debitus census uel aliqua offensa excommunicatione digna perpetraretur, bene supponeret
ecclesiam interdicto, ut fit in Hyspania et etiam in Italia … La<urentius>.’
 The Canonical Procedure 103

that canons might only interdict as a chapter.⁷³ Indeed the power to interdict
was normally granted to them as a corporate body, notably during a vacancy.
From the late twelfth century popes and canonists tried to reserve the power to
interdict to ecclesiastical judges, chiefly popes and bishops. But the formation of
the Church’s judicial machinery stimulated growing legal business that quickly
exceeded the capacity of popes and bishops to deal with it all in person. They
increasingly had to pass on some business to deputies, popes to their legates
and judges delegate, and bishops to their archdeacons and plebani. The latter
indeed acquired jurisdiction over parishes by custom if not by right. It was a
canonistic commonplace that jurisdiction was nothing without coercion; hence
the power to interdict was necessarily delegated with it.⁷⁴ Despite the withdrawal
of this power from priests, individual canons, and female prelates, popes and
canonists were quick to accept its extension to lesser prelates. But the severity of
the interdict and the need to curb its arbitrary and excessive use meant that the
papacy had to regulate the laying of interdicts in ways other than reserving the
power to impose them to a specific but ever-growing body of clergy.

3 . 2 T H E C A N O N I C A L P RO C E D U R E

From the late twelfth century popes laid down procedural rules for excom-
munication, and these were largely applied to interdicts. First, according to
Alexander III’s canon ‘Reprehensibilis’ (1179) prelates needed to issue a warn-
ing before excommunicating their subjects. This ruling was meant to end the
‘reprehensible custom’ of bishops and archdeacons imposing excommunication
without warning in cases where appeals were anticipated. This effectively denied
the right of appeal since canonical procedure only permitted an appeal from
excommunication before the sentence was laid and not afterwards.⁷⁵ Canonists
recognized that ‘Reprehensibilis’ confirmed a principle stated in a ninth-century
Decretum text: ecclesiastical punishment ought to be preceded by a warning.⁷⁶
As early as c.1173–4 Alexander III had applied this principle to interdicts.
During one of Henry II of England’s many quarrels with his sons, he had their

⁷³ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 3.11.2 v. non debes. Quoted approvingly by Hostiensis, Lectura,
ibid. v. ecclesiam tuam (vol. 2, fol. 49ra). Cf. Bernard de Montmirat, ibid., BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2542,
fol. 57va; Borgh. lat. MS 231, fol. 86vb (Ed. fol. 100vb).
⁷⁴ This view was based on Dig. 1.21.5. Cited by Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.39 §5 (fol. 291rb),
among others.
⁷⁵ Lat. Conc. III c.6 (= 1 Comp. 2.20.42; X 2.28.26). See pp. 249–54 below on the appeals
procedure.
⁷⁶ C.12 q.2 c.21. Thus Ricardus Anglicus (c.1197) on 1 Comp. 4.1.13 v. moneatis, BAV, Pal.
lat. MS 696, fol. 77ra: ‘Nam amonitio debet precedere vindictam, ut infra. xii. q. ii. Indigne et
supra. de appell. Cum sit contra [C.12 q.2 c.21, 1 Comp. 2.20.5] b<ernadus(?)>.’ Ricardus is
apparently citing a gloss of Bernard of Pavia, who compiled 1 Comp. (c.1191) and wrote a Summa
on it. Cf. Alanus (n. 88).
104 Laying of Interdict

wives abducted, and Alexander required him to release them within forty days of
receiving his written warning to do so; otherwise an interdict would be placed on
the province where the captives were held.⁷⁷ This case illustrates that even when
wrongdoing was evident and hence an appeal was not at issue, a warning gave
the guilty party a chance to correct their fault and so avoid the sentence. Indeed
the aim of an interdict was not punitive but coercive; it was meant to persuade
the guilty party to come to terms with the ecclesiastical authorities. Sometimes a
threat of an interdict was enough to achieve this. In 1200, during the struggle
between Otto of Brunswick and Philip of Swabia for the imperial throne, Otto
complained to his chief supporter, Innocent III, that Hermann, landgrave of
Thuringia, had defected to Philip, breaking his oath of allegiance to Otto; hence
the pope ordered the Archbishop of Mainz to warn Hermann to keep his oath or
be compelled to do so by a papal interdict and excommunication.⁷⁸ There is no
proof that this threat was ever carried out but a letter of 1203 from Otto to the
pope suggests that it had prompted Hermann’s return to his service.⁷⁹ Interdicts
were also threatened on other occasions but not laid apparently. In effect it was a
last resort to be used only when warnings failed to move the guilty party. Indeed
when Innocent III reprimanded Philip II of France in 1202 for his continued
failure to leave his mistress and return to his wife, the pope observed that his
kingdom was interdicted because of this only after frequent warnings.⁸⁰
Despite ‘Reprehensibilis’, Alanus and a pupil of French canonist Petrus Brito
still held in the 1200s that excommunication was still valid without a warning,
even if the judge laying it thereby sinned.⁸¹ However, Innocent III had written to
Hungarian prelates in 1199 that if they imposed excommunication or interdict
against retainers or councillors of their king without canonical warning, their
sentences were not binding. His Fourth Lateran canon ‘Sacro’ (1215) reaffirmed
this principle, forbidding anyone to impose excommunication without proper
warning. It further required that warning be given before suitable persons who
could attest to its existence if necessary. Anyone violating this canon was to incur
an interdict ab ingressu ecclesiae for a month and, if appropriate, a fine, even if the
excommunication that they had imposed was justified. And this was also under-
stood to apply to interdicts, at least by 1298 if not before.⁸² It provided safeguards

⁷⁷ 1 Comp. 4.1.13 (= X 4.1.11). ⁷⁸ Innocent III, RNI, no. 27; cf. ibid. nos. 120–1.
⁷⁹ Innocent III, RNI, no. 106; Krehbiel, 94.
⁸⁰ Innocent III, Reg. 5, no. 49; Gesta c.51 (PL 214.xcvi). Cf. Krehbiel, 127; Innocent III, Reg.
5, no. 66 (see n. 91); 7, no. 83.
⁸¹ Anon. on 1 Comp. 2.20.42 v. commonitione, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9, fol.
29vb: ‘Que semper est necessaria, xii. q. ii. Indigne, ii. q. i. Si peccaverit [C.12 q.2 c.21, C.2 q.1
c.19]. Si tamen non premittatur, tenet excommunicatio, xi. q. iii. Si episcopus [C.11 q.3 c.40],
sed peccat sic excommunicans, contra c. Veniens [1 Comp. 5.25.un.].’ Alanus on Alan. 5.21.6
v. non tenere, Vercelli Cathedral Chapter MS 89, fol. 127ra: ‘Sententia excommunicationis sine
ammonitione vel iuris ordine omisso tenet, ut xi. q. i. c. i, ii et iii [C.11 q.1 c.1–3].’
⁸² Hungary: Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 511; cf. ibid. 10, no. 120. ‘Sacro’: Lat. Conc. IV c.47 (=
4 Comp. 5.15.5; X 5.39.48). See p. 106 on its application to interdicts.
 The Canonical Procedure 105

for both ecclesiastical judges and their subjects. The latter might appeal against
excommunication on the ground that it was laid without warning, but equally
judges might challenge such appeals if they could produce witnesses to testify to
their warning. The canonist Pierre Sampsona maintained that at least two such
witnesses were needed, but Innocent IV had argued that one was sufficient besides
the judge himself.⁸³ Nevertheless Innocent seemed more cautious in practice. In
1251 the Pope made careful provision so that the duke of Swabia could not deny
being warned before he incurred papal sentences. The Archbishop of Vienne and
Bishop of Grenoble were to warn him in person to make amends in two months
for persecuting the church of Turin; otherwise they were to excommunicate him
and interdict his lands.⁸⁴ If they failed to meet him, they were to issue this warning
often at public gatherings in places where it might easily come to his attention.
But not all ecclesiastical authorities were this scrupulous in observing ‘Sacro’.
Within some ten years of its appearance, popes were responding to appeals to
quash sentences laid without warning.⁸⁵ In 1237 Gregory IX had even had to
instruct French archbishops and bishops to proceed with maturity and seriousness
when pronouncing interdicts, since their king had claimed that some of them
were laying interdicts on his land prematurely, presumably without warning.⁸⁶
The papacy clearly saw warnings as vital to curb such arbitrary sentences and
ensure that excommunication and interdicts were only imposed in extreme
necessity. Innocent IV even affirmed in a canon of the First Council of Lyon
(1245) that if a judge excommunicated without warning those communicating
with excommunicates, his sentence was invalid.⁸⁷ Canonists took an even stricter
line. In the 1200s Alanus had taught that judges should issue a warning three
times or at least once peremptorily before resorting to a sentence. Subsequent
commentators on the Fourth Lateran ruling, including Johannes Teutonicus,
generally agreed. In particular Pierre Sampsona and his pupil Bernard de
Montmirat insisted that the three warnings be spaced at least a day apart.⁸⁸

⁸³ Pierre Sampsona on X 5.39.48 v. personis idoneis, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2113, fol.

73ra: ‘Sed quot personas sufficere? Dicit Innoc. quod una sufficit cum per unam possit probari
monitio, supra. de testibus. In omni negotio [X 2.20.4]. Sed illa loquitur de monitione que fit in
denunciatione, unde oportet esse duas personas adminus et sufficiunt, quia ubi numerus testium
non adicitur, et c. iv. q. iv. §Item in criminali, versu ‘‘Nisi numerus’’ [C.4 q.4 dictum post c.2].’
Innocent IV, Apparatus, ibid. v. personis. Bernard of Montmirat, ibid. v. personis, BAV, Borgh. lat.
MS 231, fol. 135vb; MS 260, fol. 107va (Ed. fol. 150ra), also noted this difference of opinion
between Innocent and his ‘magister’ Sampsona.
⁸⁴ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 5343.
⁸⁵ Reg. Honorius III, no. 5894; Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2289. Regular clergy were even granted
immunity from excommunication and interdict laid without warning: Reg. Honorius III, nos.
1753, 2640.
⁸⁶ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 3901. ⁸⁷ Lugd. Conc. I c.12 (= Coll. III 38; VI 5.11.3).
⁸⁸ Alanus on 1 Comp. 2.20.5 v. inrequisitum, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879,
fol. 31rb: ‘Sed nonne semper ammonitio debet precedere vindictam, ut xii. q.ii. Indigne [C.12 q.2
c.21] … Melius puto aliquem dupliciter requiri, vel ad emendationem quod fieri debet cum triplici
ammonitione ut xvi. q. ult. Omnes decime [C.16 q.7 c.5], vel ad iudicium, et hoc trinis edictis vel
uno peremptorio, ut xxiv. q. iii. De illicita [C.24 q.3 c.6].’ Johannes Teutonicus on 4 Comp. 5.15.5
106 Laying of Interdict

Gregory X confirmed this idea as law in a canon of the Second Council of Lyon
(1274), requiring judges to observe appropriate intervals of a few days between
the three warnings or at least between the peremptory warning and the sentence.
This was clearly meant to allow the guilty party time to reconsider their position.
This canon required that a warning name the party at whom it was directed,
lest there be any grounds for doubt. This canon was specifically designed to
bolster the Lyon I canon on excommunication, but Boniface VIII ruled in 1298
that it also had to be observed strictly in regard to interdicts; otherwise they
were considered invalid.⁸⁹ This ruling apparently had an immediate impact,
so one Spanish case suggests. This was the dispute between the Franciscans of
Burgos and monks of San Domenico de Silos referred to Boniface in 1301.⁹⁰
The Archdeacon of Polenzuela had summoned the monks three times to no avail
before excommunicating them and interdicting their abbey. In fact repeated
warnings before interdicts seem to have been observed for at least a century, as
Innocent III demonstrated as early as 1202.⁹¹
Often a warning was attached to a summons before a church court. This gave
the guilty party a formal opportunity to come to terms with the church authorities
and so avoid an interdict. For example Innocent IV issued a summons at Lyon,
calling on reprobate excommunicate Ponzard de Duno to obey ecclesiastical man-
dates and make amends by 29 June 1251; otherwise he would take further action
against Duno. When Ponzard not only failed to represent himself before the pope
but even seized Sienese merchants travelling on papal business, Innocent carried
out his threat, interdicting all Ponzard’s lands in Besançon and Lyon provinces
and placing an ambulatory interdict on Ponzard. Boniface VIII likewise used
threats of excommunication and interdict in 1296 to compel the citizenry of Ver-
dun to represent themselves before him; this gave them the chance either to contest
their bishop’s charges against them or make amends for their alleged wrongs.⁹²
If warning and summons went unheeded, an ecclesiastical judge might publish
an interdict so that, as Johannes Teutonicus and later canonists said, ‘ignorance
would excuse nobody from observing it’.⁹³ Innocent III’s decretal ‘Ad hec’ (1200)
stated that it was unnecessary to notify all interested parties of an interdict by

v. competenti, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 316va: ‘Idest trina, ut xxiv q. iii. De illicita.’ Pierre
Sampsona on X 5.39.48 v. ammonitione premissa, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2113, fol. 73ra:
‘Sed numquid dicitur quis ter monitus … sine interpolatione iuris, videtur sic quia tales monitiones
pro una sumuntur, xxxi. q. ii. Lotarius [C.31 q.2 c.4], quod Vin. non credit nam oportet adminus
quod quelibet admonitio contineat unum diem, ut ff. de publico iud. Accusatore [Dig. 48.1.13].’
Cf. Bernard de Montmirat, ibid. v. competenti, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 231, fol. 135vb; MS 260, fol.
107va (Ed. fol. 150ra). Sampsona attributes this view to Vincentius but it has not been found in
any of the latter’s glosses on this canon.
⁸⁹ Lugd. Conc. II c.29 (= VI 5.11.9); VI 5.11.13. ⁹⁰ As n. 54 above.
⁹¹ See n. 80. Cf. Reg. Innocent III 5, no. 66.
⁹² Reg. Innocent IV, no. 5469; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1253. Cf. Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 2168.
⁹³ Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. aut publice (Ed. p. 33); Tancred had a similar view
on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. publice and observari, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 154va. Reg. Honorius IV,
no. 807, required sentences against James of Aragon to be published by written proclamation nailed
 The Canonical Procedure 107

special mandate or letter; anyone had to observe it who knew of it, Johannes
Teutonicus observed, even by rumour alone.⁹⁴ The interdict on France, which
this decretal concerned, was made known in both ways; a legate proclaimed it at a
general council of French clergy, who could spread the news in their dioceses, and
then he announced it to all prelates of the kingdom by letter. Usually executors of
papal interdicts had to have them published in churches on Sundays and feast days,
when parishioners would hear them.⁹⁵ Canon law required no solemnities for
publication, but when an interdict was accompanied by the excommunication of
those provoking it, proclamation with bell, book, and candle was often required.
Some papal interdicts had to be publicized not only in the area affected
but also in neighbouring places. This is understandable given that a general
interdict was meant to affect outsiders arriving in interdicted places and members
of an interdicted people wherever they went. Thus after a legate had declared
excommunication on the king of Navarre and an interdict on his land, Innocent
III ordered these sentences to be published across Spain in 1198. But normally
publication was limited to neighbouring dioceses.⁹⁶ In 1233 Gregory IX required
that the excommunication of certain citizens of Bergamo and interdict on its
churches be published on Sundays and feast days with bells and candles in all
cities and places of Lombardy, Romagna, and the Marche.
Though Innocent III did not insist on written notice of interdicts, Innocent
IV issued a canon at the First Council of Lyon requiring ecclesiastical judges to
publish excommunication in writing, stating clearly the reason for the sentence.
In addition the excommunicate might request a copy of the sentence, which
the excommunicator had to provide within a month in the form of a public
instrument or testimonial letter bearing his genuine seal, i.e. a formal document
properly witnessed and authenticated. If the judge failed to comply with this
request, he was to suffer automatic suspension and interdict ab ingressu ecclesie for
a month. And if he participated in divine offices while under these penalties, he
also incurred ‘irregularity’, which prevented him from receiving and exercising
holy orders and was removable only by a papal dispensation. Presumably given
that the other penalties were imposed by papal law, absolution from them was
likewise reserved to the papacy. Innocent IV further ruled that the judge’s superior
might relax his invalid excommunication without the usual formalities, order
him to compensate the party whom he excommunicated, and otherwise punish
him to teach him the gravity of threatening excommunication sine maturitate

on the doors of the church where the Pope declared them so that ‘none might feign ignorance’. Cf.
Reg. Clement IV, no. 695; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 2178.
⁹⁴ 3 Comp. 1.4.1 (= X 1.5.1). Johannes Teutonicus, ibid. v. per speciale mandatum (Ed.
pp. 32–3); copied by Tancred, ibid. v. mandatum (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 154va). Cf.
Herman de Minden, ‘De interdicto’, §70 (fol. 346rb).
⁹⁵ France: Gesta c.51 (PL 214.xcvii). Proclamation in churches: Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 190;
12, no. 77; etc.
⁹⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 192; Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1668.
108 Laying of Interdict

debita.⁹⁷ These penalties were comparable with those imposed under Innocent
III’s canon of 1215 for excommunication laid without warning, and they were
likewise intended as deterrents against arbitrary sentences. Innocent IV added
that they were also applicable to judges disregarding this constitution when
laying sentences of interdict or suspension. And in common with Innocent III’s
canon it was not always observed. Over forty years after its appearance violations
of it were so common that between 1289 and 1291 Nicholas IV gave several
archbishops and bishops power to absolve and dispense prelates and clerks of
their dioceses who incurred suspension and irregularity by issuing sentences ‘sine
scriptis contra tenorem constitutionis Innocentii pape IV’.⁹⁸
Aside from these procedural formalities of warnings and publication, the
basic prerequisite for a canonical sentence of excommunication or interdict, at
least by 1215, was a ‘manifest and reasonable cause’. In fact Innocent III had
been warning prelates not to lay interdicts ‘sine manifesta et rationabili causa’
since becoming pope. In 1198 he granted St Vaast Abbey at Arras immunity
from these arbitrary sentences after its monks complained that prelates involved
in disputes with them laid interdicts on their churches, and he also ordered
removal of these sentences.⁹⁹ Over the following fifteen years he made numerous
grants of immunity from excommunication and interdict laid ‘sine manifesta
et rationabili causa’, often in response to such appeals, occasionally to secular
dignitaries and their lands, but usually to religious houses often as part of their
exemption privileges.¹⁰⁰ That such an immunity had to be granted suggests that
it was not yet a common right under canon law, but the principle was widely
recognized for appeals against such sentences were even made by laity not granted
this immunity. In 1211 the commune of Laon petitioned Innocent that their
bishop-elect and clergy laid excommunications and interdicts on them, their
lands, and households ‘sine rationabili causa ac pretermisso iuris ordine’. He
granted them immunity from such sentences for ‘ecclesiastical censure ought not
to oppress the innocent but correct the guilty’, and in 1212 when they alleged
that the same clergy violated this grant, he ordered the lifting of sentences ‘temere
promulgatas’ on them.¹⁰¹ Three years later at the Fourth Lateran Council he
confirmed as law in his canon ‘Sacro’ that if a judge excommunicated his subject
without manifest and reasonable cause, the aggrieved subject might appeal to
a higher court which might order his absolution.¹⁰² As he added, such a great

⁹⁷ Lugd. Conc. I c.19 (= Coll. III 36; VI 5.11.1).

⁹⁸ Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 1241 (Mainz), 2379 (Lyon), 3115 (Oviedo), 3389 (Patti), 5062
(Salzburg).
⁹⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 160; cf. ibid., no. 286.
¹⁰⁰ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 511 (see n. 82); 2, nos. 43, 70; 6, nos. 42, 115, 206; 7, nos. 30, 62;
8, no. 32; 10, nos. 33, 59, 68, 93, 120; 12, nos. 21, 52, 166; 13, nos. 51, 81; 14, nos. 45, 54, 63;
15, nos. 16, 100.
¹⁰¹ Innocent III, Reg. 14, no. 63 ; 15, no. 124; 16, no. 57. Cf. id. Reg. 7, no. 151; 10, nos. 68,
85, 125.
¹⁰² See n. 82 above.
 The Canonical Procedure 109

penalty was not to be imposed for a trivial reason. And this ruling apparently
also applied to interdicts, for in 1220 Honorius III forbade German prelates to
lay interdicts on lands of their emperor, Frederick II, ‘pro levi causa’, ordering
them to lift such sentences.¹⁰³
By the thirteenth century it was a canonistic commonplace that anyone
might be punished without guilt but not without cause, and popes were certainly
concerned that a canonical penalty that largely affected the guiltless, the interdict,
should appear justified.¹⁰⁴ However, as this German example indicates, Innocent
III’s canon did not secure immediate compliance, and following its appearance
his successors continued to grant magnates and monasteries freedom from
excommunication and interdict laid without manifest and reasonable cause.¹⁰⁵
In 1230 when Marseilles came under papal protection and gained this immunity,
Gregory IX required its citizens to pay an annual tribute of a hundred gold coins
for the privilege. Similarly in 1243–4 Innocent IV gave the Archbishop of Mainz
and Bishops of Beauvais and Amiens immunity for five years from sentences
laid by judges delegate without a specific mandate, for they stated that judges
delegate often excommunicated, suspended, or interdicted them ‘pro levi causa
minus quam rationabiliter’.¹⁰⁶ Continuing requests for such immunities indicate
that arbitrary sentences remained common and that ‘Sacro’ was not seen to give
adequate protection against them, at least until the mid-thirteenth century when
papal grants of such immunities cease.
Rules of procedure similar to those governing excommunication and interdict
were also laid down by the thirteenth-century papacy regarding the cessatio a
divinis. Another Fourth Lateran canon ‘Irrefragibili’ provided that if a chapter
held a cessatio without manifest and reasonable cause, especially in contempt
of its bishop, he might celebrate in the cathedral despite the cessatio and at his
request his archbishop might intervene to correct the chapter. Clearly this ruling
was designed to curb wilful abuse of a cessatio by chapters against ecclesiastical
superiors, and it perhaps responded to complaints of prelates at the Fourth
Lateran Council.¹⁰⁷ But, as Vincentius observed, if a chapter had a reasonable
cause to hold a cessatio, their bishop had to observe it.¹⁰⁸
Nevertheless misuse of the cessatio was still a cause for papal concern when
Gregory X regulated its use further in the canon ‘Si canonici’ (1274). It required
that before canons proceed to a cessatio, they should state its cause in a formal

¹⁰³ Reg. Honorius III, no. 2637.

¹⁰⁴ E.g. Raymond de Peñafort, Summa, III, 6 (p. 375b): ‘Licite quis punitur sine culpa sed non
sine causa’. See p. 18 above.
¹⁰⁵ Reg. Honorius III, nos. 324, 646, 1753, 2640, 5826, 5854; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 432, 1972,
2795, 4278; Innocent IV, nos. 245, 437, 468, 812, 2351, 5040, 7887. In two of these instances
(Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1753, 2640), the immunity also extended to sentences imposed without
due canonical warning.
¹⁰⁶ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 432; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 245, 437, 812.
¹⁰⁷ Lat. Conc. IV c.7 (= 4 Comp. 1.13.1; X 1.31.13).
¹⁰⁸ Vincentius on Lat. Conc. IV c.7 v. absque manifesta et rationabili causa (Constitutiones, 297).
110 Laying of Interdict

document authenticated by their seals and send this to the party against whom
the cessatio was directed.¹⁰⁹ In other words the provisions of Innocent IV’s
Lyon I canon concerning excommunication and interdict were extended to the
cessatio.¹¹⁰ If a chapter failed to comply or their cause was not canonical, they
had to repay income received from their church during the cessatio. Conversely
if a superior judged their cause canonical, he was to coerce the other party
to compensate them and their church for loss of divine service. The canonist
William Durand later argued (c.1289) that this compensation should even cover
alms and offerings that the church and other religious foundations were deprived
of during the cessatio, adding that he had introduced this practice into Italy and
had it observed at Modena, Pisa, Forlì, and elsewhere while he was rector of the
papal patrimony.¹¹¹ Clearly Gregory X’s main concern was the negative effects of
such ecclesiastical disputes for pastoral care, and a written warning of a cessatio,
as of an interdict, was meant to give the parties a chance to settle their differences
and thus avoid a suspension of religious services altogether. The cessatio, like the
interdict and excommunication, was only to be used as a last resort and when
justified.
This legislation on the cessatio was not wholly effective in containing tensions
between bishops and their increasingly autonomous chapters, however. A case
in point is the dispute between the Bishop-elect of Châlons-sur-Marne and his
chapter that led to a cessatio. Both sides claimed to have observed the terms of
‘Si canonici’.¹¹² They contradicted each other and only agreed on the dispute’s
cause: the jailing of a baker by the bishop’s provost. The chapter alleged that they
warned their bishop to free the baker and make amends to them, and that when
he refused, they held a cessatio. But according to the bishop, when the dispute
arose, he sent a representative to negotiate a settlement with them, offering to
release the baker and make amends to them, but they rejected his offer and,
despite his appeal to Rome, they began the cessatio. He asked Honorius IV to
force them to resume their offices and make amends to him, punishing them for
the cessatio, ‘according to Gregory X’s constitution’. In 1287 Honorius tried to
arbitrate but Boniface VIII was still seeking to resolve the dispute in 1299.
Boniface himself recognized the need to tighten up current papal legislation
on the cessatio in his constitution ‘Constitutioni felicis recordationis’ (4 April
1296).¹¹³ It required that before the chapter or convent of a collegiate church
held a cessatio, they should summon their absent members to determine by
majority consent whether their cause was canonical. If this was agreed, the
party occasioning the cessatio was to be notified of this cause, and in fifteen
days, or such time as distance required, proctors were to represent both sides

¹⁰⁹ Lugd. Conc. II c.17 (= VI 1.16.2). ¹¹⁰ Lugd. Conc. I c.19 (= Coll. III 36; VI 5.11.1).
¹¹¹ William Durand on Lugd. Conc. II c.17 v. occasione (fol. 60v).
¹¹² See p. 96 above and n. 48. Both sides claimed temporal jurisdiction over the baker.
¹¹³ ASV, A. A. Arm. C. 139. It is discussed more fully and edited in my ‘Two Constitutions’.
 The Canonical Procedure 111

before the pope with all documents regarding the dispute and seek papal justice.
Boniface also extended the penalties in Gregory X’s canon to those approving
or ratifying an uncanonical cessatio as well as those observing one. Such strict
regulations were meant to discourage use of the cessatio, promote peaceful
settlement of ecclesiastical disputes, and strengthen the central power of the
papacy to intervene in local church affairs. In particular it can be seen as part
of Boniface VIII’s concerted effort at this time to increase papal control over
the French Church. In April 1296 his bull ‘Clericis laicos’ was also circulated in
France, forbidding royal taxation of ecclesiastical wealth without papal consent,
and ‘Constitutioni’ likewise responded to events in France. It was apparently
occasioned by a dispute between the Archbishop of Reims and his chapter. The
canons had stopped services in the cathedral and other churches of the city,
and both sides appealed to the pope. On 28 April 1296 Boniface appointed
judges delegate to settle the dispute, but oddly he did not refer them to his
recent constitution.¹¹⁴ Nevertheless their mandate shares many of its basic
concerns: gathering of evidence from both sides; settlement of the dispute by
papal arbitration; and minimizing the disruption of religious worship.
It is not certain how widely this constitution circulated for it only survives as
a unique original document, an office copy already noted in the papal archives in
1366, though it is sealed and all formalities for issuing had been completed.¹¹⁵
Nevertheless a revised version of this constitution, ‘Quamvis super’, was issued
in the Liber sextus (1298).¹¹⁶ It significantly reworded the original text but did
not alter its basic aims, rather it reinforced them. Admittedly the prerequisite of
a majority decision for a cessatio was dropped, but the party whose offence or
injury gave rise to the cessatio had a chance to make amends for this. ‘Quamvis
super’ also made more practical arrangements for settlement at the curia. If
a cessatio was unavoidable, representations were to be made in a month, not
fifteen days, or as soon as possible, and the pope might settle the case even if
only one of the parties were present. Finally the deterrents were increased: the
pope might impose arbitrary penalties on the guilty party as well as to those
laid down in canon law; and a cessatio might be disregarded if a chapter held
it without fulfilling the preconditions or making the representations required
under ‘Quamvis super’.
These procedural rules were meant to ensure that no cessatio or interdict might
be held without manifest and reasonable cause, but what did this mean? Innocent
III’s decretal ‘Ex parte’ (1205) had defined contumacy and offence as the two
basic causes of a sentence of excommunication or interdict.¹¹⁷ He distinguished
that a sentence was imposed on someone for contumacy alone where they

¹¹⁴ Varin, Archives, 1. 1099–101.

¹¹⁵ On its diplomatic features see Schedario, iii. 613 (no. 4539). The reference to it in the
inventory of 1366 of the papal archive was printed by Muratori, Antiquitates, vi.189, xv.
¹¹⁶ VI 1.16.8 (printed with the earlier version in my ‘Two Constitutions’, 125–6).
¹¹⁷ 3 Comp. 5.23.7 (= X 5.40.23). See Logan, 47.
112 Laying of Interdict

disobeyed a summons to appear before an ecclesiastical judge, but it was also laid
for an offence where they disobeyed the judge’s orders to make amends for their
wrong. It was contempt for ecclesiastical authority not the wrong itself which
was manifest and reasonable cause. Therefore the purpose of an interdict was
not vindictive, to punish wrong, but coercive, to persuade wrongdoers to come
to terms with the ecclesiastical authorities. It might be laid only after they had
ignored warnings to do so and lifted once they sought reconciliation.
Nevertheless canonists had long recognized that a superior’s wrong ultimately
caused an interdict on the land or people under his jurisdiction. There were
almost as many kinds of such wrong as there were interdicts. As Johannes
Calderinus observed, no precise rule could be given about what constituted the
causes of an interdict, since they were so diverse, and it was ultimately left to
the judge concerned to decide what they were.¹¹⁸ The thirteenth-century papal
registers indicate a number of such causes, and these are broadly classified in the
following list with their frequency:
i) Supporting/defending a deed/person condemned by the 106
Church¹¹⁹
ii) Misappropriation of ecclesiastical property/revenues¹²⁰ 95
iii) Political opposition to papal temporal interests¹²¹ 54

¹¹⁸ Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 12ra: ‘Propter quas
causas feratur interdictum perstringemus, et non est facile, nec potest dari certa regula, sed secundum
diversitatem casuum et modum agendi poterit poni et non poni, et relinquendum est hoc arbitrio
iudicis cuius officium latius est, ff. de iurisd. omni. l.i [Dig. 2.1.1], nam regulariter pro quacumque
causa potest excommunicare, potest interdicere suo rectu, idest generaliter vel specialiter.’
¹¹⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 382; 5, nos. 135, 154; 6, nos. 37, 113, 190; 7, no. 14; 8, no. 84;
10, nos. 113, 160, 190; 11, nos. 26, 173; 12, nos. 63, 107; 14, nos. 8, 40, 64, 74, 79, 126; 15, nos.
15, 105, 159; 16, nos. 28, 48, 56; id. RNI, nos. 27, 120; id. Suppl. no. 63; Gesta c.22, 133 (PL
214.xxxiii, clxxx); Reg. Honorius III, nos. 832, 1240, 1136, 1686, 3524, 4517, 4549–51, 4555,
4583, 5720; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 481, 834, 1197, 1668, 2603, 2615, 4498; Reg. Innocent IV,
nos. 201, 2344, 2779, 3109, 3210, 3572, 3625, 3817, 4096–7, 4103, 4333, 4459, 5083, 5279,
5343, 7486; Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 24, 679–80, 2368; Reg. Urban IV, no. 649; Reg. Clement
IV, nos. 86–7, 124–5, 143, 413–14, 693–5, 699; Reg. Gregory X, nos. 162–5; Reg. Martin IV,
nos. 266, 277–8, 281, 283, 300, 309–10, 471, 482, 489; Reg. Honorius IV, nos. 172, 807; Reg.
Nicholas IV, nos. 320, 892, 6028, 6590, 6840.
¹²⁰ Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 3, 121, 268; 2, nos. 56, 272; 5, no. 68; 7, no. 147; 8, nos. 119,
154; 9, nos. 49, 243; 10, nos. 69, 112, 125, 172; 11, nos. 87, 175; 13, nos. 136, 190; 14, nos.
8, 52, 128, 133; 15, nos. 40, 193; 16, no. 98; id. Suppl. nos. 55, 60, 73, 179; Reg. Honorius III,
nos. 1097, 1451, 1925, 2155, 3993, 4364, 4430, 4500, 4594, 4636, 4674, 5513, 5808, 6187–8;
Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 470 (theft of body of St Francis), 481, 734, 757, 1327–9, 1968, 1997,
2376, 2603, 2753, 3615, 3630, 3861, 3862, 4453; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 3626, 3928, 4338; Reg.
Alexander IV, nos. 751, 2232, 2845; Reg. Nicholas III, no. 553; Reg. Martin IV, nos. 317, 574;
Reg. Honorius IV, nos. 65 (icon), 172, 412, 432, 680; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 420, 512, 552,
616, 678, 717, 2115, 2140, 2366, 2616, 2740, 3533, 3888, 4092, 4497, 4573, 5200, 7494; Reg.
Boniface VIII, nos. 1110, 1574, 3340, 3727, 4112.
¹²¹ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 552; 14, no. 74; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1451, 1589, 3524; Reg.
Innocent IV, nos. 2344, 3109, 3210, 3572, 3817, 4097, 4103, 4333, 4459, 5083, 5279, 5343;
Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 24, 2368; Reg. Clement IV, nos. 86–7, 124–5, 143, 413–14, 694–5,
699; Reg. Gregory X, nos. 162–5; Reg. Martin IV, nos. 266, 277, 281, 283, 462–6, 471, 482,
 The Canonical Procedure 113

iv) Destroying/attacking churches/ecclesiastical property¹²² 41

v) Attacking/killing ecclesiastical persons¹²³ 35
vi) Defiance/non-payment of ecclesiastical dues¹²⁴ 31
vii) Disobedience to ecclesiastical judgements/mandates¹²⁵ 30
viii) Violating ecclesiastical liberties (miscellaneous or 27
unspecified)¹²⁶
ix) Disobedience to ecclesiastical authority (miscellaneous)¹²⁷ 26
x) Mistreating laity under the protection/in the service of the 25
Church¹²⁸

489, 573–5, 577–8; Reg. Honorius IV, no. 807; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 6590, 6840, 7040; Reg.
Boniface VIII, no. 1123.
¹²² Innocent III, Reg. 2, nos. 27, 272; 6, no. 148; 7, no. 46; 9, no. 243; 14, no. 128; id. Suppl.
no. 73; Gesta c.16 (PL 214.xxix); Reg. Honorius III, nos. 951, 1097, 2295, 2553, 3669, 3993,
4674, 5808, 6188; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 734, 757, 1697, 1997, 2603, 2753, 3615, 3861–2,
3988; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 399, 3109, 3626, 5011; Reg. Gregory X, no. 948; Reg. Honorius
IV, nos. 486–7; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 552, 678, 2140, 2616, 4497, 6028; Reg. Boniface VIII, no.
1110.
¹²³ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 299; 2, no. 27; 5, no. 133; 6, nos. 17, 113, 148; 7, no. 46; 8, no.
124; 11, no. 26; 15, nos. 15, 119; 16, no. 144; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1097, 1271, 4191; Reg.
Gregory IX, nos. 734, 757, 1197, 2615, 3615, 3859, 3861, 4453; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 353–4,
3626, 4569; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 751; Reg. Urban IV, no. 649; Reg. Gregory X, no. 166; Reg.
Martin IV, no. 317; Reg. Honorius IV, no. 172; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 2140; Reg. Boniface VIII,
nos. 1253, 2142, 2834.
¹²⁴ Innocent III, Reg. 2, nos. 138, 233; 7, no. 41; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1635, 2415, 5513,
5690; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1328, 2520; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 497, 3871, 6115; Reg. Alexander
IV, nos. 750, 1219, 2661; Reg. Urban IV, no. 1130; Reg. Martin IV, no. 502; Reg. Honorius IV,
nos. 95 (crusader tithe), 123, 608, 704 (tithe for Aragon), 874; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 452, 1007
(for Aragon), 3863–6, 5906 (for Aragon against Moors), 6316 (for French king); Reg. Boniface
VIII, no. 3051 (as previous).
¹²⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 114; 7, no. 27; 10, nos. 57, 178; 12, no. 107 (surrender heretics);
14, no. 36; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 589, 4364, 4594, 5180; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 481, 1315 (ban
on usury), 1519 (summons), 2603 (surrender heretics), 2753; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 1290, 5469
(summons), 5474; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 3032 (summons); Reg. Martin IV, nos. 464–6, 482
(papal embargo), 503, 573–4, 577–8; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 6840 (expel excommunicate); Reg.
Boniface VIII, no. 4112 (summons).
¹²⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 2, no. 232; 5, no. 35; 7, no. 41; 10, no. 222; 14, no. 8; Reg. Honorius III,
nos. 1136, 1160, 1271, 2161, 2910, 4143, 4776, 6188, 6194; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 834, 1327
(forcing clerks to do military service, etc.), 1499, 1997, 2753 (as 1327), 4015, 6029; Reg. Innocent
IV, nos. 354, 7486; Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 751, 2851; Reg. Honorius IV, no. 432; Reg. Nicholas
IV, no. 3533.
¹²⁷ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 68 (visitation); 2, no. 30; 6, no. 189; 10, no. 57; 15, no. 144
(visitation); Reg. Honorius III, nos. 3233, 3745 (visitation); Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 781, 1275,
1299, 1738 (all except 781 regarding visitation); Reg. Innocent IV, no. 1652 (visitation); Reg.
Urban IV, no. C229; Reg. Clement IV, no. 116; Reg. Martin IV, nos. 277, 573–4, 577–8; Reg.
Honorius IV, no. 807; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 225–6, 320, 892, 1127 (visitation); Reg. Boniface
VIII, nos. 1253, 2142, 3340.
¹²⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 7, no. 153; 12, no. 77 (pilgrims); 13, no. 74 (widow); 14, no. 8
(orphans); 15, no. 15 (allying with Saracens against fellow Christians in Spain); Reg. Honorius
III, nos. 558, 1271, 2725 (papal ward); Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 757, 2579, 3861–2, 4498; Reg.
Innocent IV, nos. 4459, 5343; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1557; Reg. Urban IV, no. 1130; Reg.
Gregory X, no. 948; Reg. Honorius IV, no. 172, 432, 807; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 552, 582,
2140, 6028.
114 Laying of Interdict

xi) Seizure of ecclesiastical persons¹²⁹ 24

xii) Frustrating papal provisions¹³⁰ 24
xiii) Not restituting misappropriated property/revenues¹³¹ 22
xiv) Disputes among clergy over churches/property/rights¹³² 20
xv) Secular taxation of ecclesiastical property/persons¹³³ 19
xvi) Disobedience to secular powers¹³⁴ 19
xvii) Disputes between clergy and laity over 18
property/jurisdiction¹³⁵
xviii) Violating truces/peace¹³⁶ 18
xix) Defaulting on debts¹³⁷ 15
xx) Not opposing/correcting a deed/person condemned by the 13
Church¹³⁸

¹²⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 24; 8, no. 87; 10, no. 112; 14, no. 8; 16, no. 144; Gesta c.22 (PL
214.xxxii–xxxiii); Reg. Honorius III, nos. 980, 1271, 3837; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 734, 757 (both
for ransom), 1202, 1639 (extortion), 3859, 3861; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 3626 (for ransom), 5343;
Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 751, 1557; Reg. Gregory X, no. 166; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 552, 4573
(collusion), 6028; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1253.
¹³⁰ Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 55, 418, 477; 2, no. 186; 5, no. 145; 6, nos. 37, 195; 7, no. 71; 9,
no. 57; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1130, 5690; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 2679, 3859; Reg. Innocent IV,
nos. 1611 (abuse of provisions), 2403, 3871; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 2733; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos.
211, 236, 3772, 5858, 5964, 6105; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 4102.
¹³¹ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 242; 11, no. 223; 12, nos. 80, 107, 120; 13, nos. 67, 190; id. RNI,
no. 27; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1451, 3837; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1328, 1968, 2603, 2753, 3630;
Reg. Nicholas III, no. 553 (crusader tithe); Reg. Martin IV, no. 574; Reg. Honorius IV, nos. 412,
680; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 420, 616, 678.
¹³² Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 164, 221; 8, no. 47; 15, no. 228; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 622, 658,
1323; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1769, 2294 (non-residence); Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 530 (chapter’s
status), 1632, 7211, 7462, 7629; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 3063; Reg. Martin IV, no. 352; Reg.
Honorius IV, no. 767 (temporal jurisdiction); Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 211 (providee and presentee);
Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 4112, 4299 (chapter’s rights).
¹³³ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 182; 7, no. 41; 10, no. 222; 11, nos. 87, 175; 13, nos. 43, 67; 14,
no. 133; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1561, 2151, 3962; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1327–8, 1997, 2753;
Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1702; Reg. Martin IV, no. 349; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 2140.
¹³⁴ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 189 (papal appointee); 7, no. 153; id. RNI, nos. 27, 120; Gesta c.25
(PL 214.xlviii); Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1686, 4296, 4517, 4940, 4949–51, 4955; Reg. Innocent
IV, no. 4459; Reg. Urban IV, no. 598; Reg. Clement IV, nos. 44, 120; Reg. Martin IV, no. 300;
Reg. Honorius IV, no. 807 (backing usurper).
¹³⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 13; 8, no. 31; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1235, 4430, 6187–8;
Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1765, 1882, 2178, 2820 (church), 3745, 4758 (ecclesiastical fiefs); Reg.
Innocent IV, nos. 201 (commune seizing bishop’s temporal jurisdiction), 6115; Reg. Alexander
IV, nos. 750 (novalia), 2368; Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 1253 (commune seizing bishop’s temporal
jurisdiction), 2034.
¹³⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 92, 249,355, 552; 6, no. 162; 8, nos. 1 (impeding crusade),
114 (unjust war); id. Suppl. no. 233; Gesta c.84 (PL 214.cxxxvii; attending touraments); Reg.
Honorius III, nos. 558, 1057, 4302, 4583; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 2616 (general unrest), 5016
(thieves, robbers, and their harbourers); Reg. Nicholas III, no. 225; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 7040;
Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 3445.
¹³⁷ Reg. Honorius III, nos. 939, 3760; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 675, 998, 2391, 3461; Reg.
Innocent IV, nos. 6537, 7529; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 28; Reg. Martin IV, no. 492; Reg. Honorius
IV, no. 605; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 2264, 3653; Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 1084, 4656.
¹³⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 3; 7, no. 147; 14, no. 126; 15, no. 105; Reg. Honorius
III, nos. 1589, 1834, 5265; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1327, 1668 (heretics), 2603 (heretics),
 The Canonical Procedure 115

xxi) Secular statutes contrary to ecclesiastical 13

liberties/interests¹³⁹
xxii) Breaching agreement settled by ecclesiastical authority¹⁴⁰ 13
xxiii) Disciplining errant clergy¹⁴¹ 13
xxiv) Frustrating ecclesiastical jurisdiction/justice¹⁴² 12
xxv) Appointing as secular officials those condemned by the 11
Church¹⁴³
xxvi) Exile/ejection of ecclesiastical persons¹⁴⁴ 10
xxvii) Breaking oaths¹⁴⁵ 10
xxviii) Arbitrary (abuse of ecclesiastical powers)¹⁴⁶ 9
xxix) Matrimonial disputes/irregularities¹⁴⁷ 8
xxx) Lay interference in ecclesiastical appointments¹⁴⁸ 8
xxxi) Illicit assumption of ecclesiastical offices¹⁴⁹ 6
xxxii) Not fulfilling crusader vows¹⁵⁰ 5

3918; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 1290 (failing to coerce excommunicates); Reg. Boniface VIII, no.
2722.
¹³⁹ Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1511, 3962, 4961, 5768; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1080, 1327, 2753,
3083; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 7190; Reg. Martin IV, nos. 148, 349; Reg. Honorius IV, nos. 479–80.
¹⁴⁰ Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 130, 142, 552; 2, nos. 40, 187; Reg. Honorius III, no. 4302; Reg.
Alexander IV, nos. 2379, 2938; Reg. Martin IV, no. 503 (concordat); Reg. Honorius IV, nos. 96,
432; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 717 (concordat); Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 3445.
¹⁴¹ Innocent III, 2, no. 30; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 3745, 5513, 5690; Reg. Gregory IX, nos.
2294, 3343; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 497, 3871; Reg. Urban IV, no. 1130; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos.
3888, 4497, 6130, 6545.
¹⁴² Reg. Honorius III, nos. 832, 1097, 4822 (intimidating witnesses); Reg. Gregory IX, nos.
1327, 2753, 2213; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 201; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 751; Reg. Honorius IV,
no. 96 (impeding appeals to Rome); Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 430; Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 1253,
2142.
¹⁴³ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 298; 2, no. 75; 7, no. 83; 8, no. 85 (heretic); 10, no. 111 (aspostate);
Reg. Honorius III, nos. 5265, 5720; Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1498 (Muslims and Jews); Reg. Innocent
IV, no. 4096 (Frederick II’s allies); Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 6840 (excommunicate); Reg. Boniface
VIII, no. 864.
¹⁴⁴ Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 222; 11, no. 175; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 3669, 4818; Reg.
Gregory IX, nos. 734, 1277, 2376; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 2845; Reg. Clement IV, no. 1914; Reg.
Nicholas III, no. 134.
¹⁴⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 298; 2, no. 42; id. RNI, nos. 27, 120; Gesta c.25 (PL 214.xlviii);
Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1130, 4517; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1668, 3630; Reg. Martin IV, no. 277.
¹⁴⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 15, no. 186 (exacting procurations); Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1371, 1566
(harassing monastery), 1824 (frustrating visitation), 2192; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 1611; Reg.
Alexander IV, nos. 2448, 2661 (abuse of papal letters); Reg. Honorius IV, no. 608 (exacting
procurations).
¹⁴⁷ Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 92, 347; 2, no. 188; 5, no. 51; 7, no. 93; 10, no. 143; Reg.
Innocent IV, no. 3366; Reg. Urban IV, no. C376.
¹⁴⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 364; 6, no. 73; 7, no. 171; 14, no. 8; Gesta c.131 (PL
214.clxxv–clxxvi); Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 757 (citizenry adopting anti-bishop), 1327, 2753.
¹⁴⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 15, no. 228; Reg. Honorius III, no. 658 (no episcopal investiture); Reg.
Gregory IX, no. 3859; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 7462; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 680 (bishopric);
Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 4102.
¹⁵⁰ Innocent III, Suppl. no. 233; Gesta c.84 (PL 214.cxxxvii); Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1957; Reg.
Innocent IV, no. 2054; Reg. Nicholas III, no. 225.
116 Laying of Interdict

xxxiii) Heresy/apostasy/schism¹⁵¹ 4
xxxiv) Imposing secular jurisdiction on ecclesiastical persons¹⁵² 4
xxxv) Not compensating injured party¹⁵³ 3
xxxvi) Others¹⁵⁴ 7
This classification is necessarily arbitrary; hence this list is less scientifically precise
than it appears. Some interdicts had more than one cause and are therefore
represented several times in the above figures. Some causes are naturally related,
notably ii, iv, and v, since ecclesiastical property was seized in most instances by
laymen, and this often involved violence against clergy and the property itself. A
chain of causation may also be at work, for example where refusal of restitution
(xiii) concerned seizure of church property or lay property under ecclesiastical
protection (ii, x); such a chain arose from canonical procedure: wrongdoers
were warned to make restitution or be coerced to do so by interdict. Similarly
disobedience to ecclesiastical mandates (vii) and refusal to compensate injured
parties (xxxv) were usually responses to warnings and therefore procedural reasons
for interdicts, albeit the underlying causes in these cases, the actual wrongs, are
not always clear. Indeed the papal registers rarely give the full facts about
particular cases. Often only a threat of interdict is recorded and it is uncertain
whether a sentence was actually imposed. Sometimes the cause of an interdict
was unspecified and was even disputed by the parties concerned, which was why
the case was referred to the pope. Hence this list cannot be comprehensive even
for the papal registers.
Despite its limitations the list clearly shows that interdicts were used mostly as
a weapon of self-defence in reaction to attacks, usually by laymen, on ecclesiastical
property, persons, and liberties (ii, iv, v, vi, viii, xi, xv, xxi, xxvi, xxxiv). The
interdict was used far less as a tool of internal discipline, in disputes only involving
clergy (xii, xiv, xxiii, xxxi). As a judicial sanction it was sometimes used against
both clergy and laity to enforce decisions on cases where the church courts had
exclusive competence, notably debts, oaths, and marriage (vii, xvii, xix, xxii, xxiv,
xxvii, xxix, xxxv). Above all the list illustrates the explicit application of canonistic
ideas of collective guilt, as the single most frequently cited cause of an interdict
in the papal registers was consent to the wrongs of others, usually express (i) but
sometimes tacit (xx).
Some interdicts were laid for what seemed arbitrary or frivolous causes (xxvii,
xxxvi); these usually arose from jealous disputes among clergy. In two cases the

¹⁵¹ Innocent III, Reg. 14, no. 8 (keeping sorceress); 16, no. 48 (heresy); Reg. Honorius III, nos.
1240 (schism), 2030 (apostasy).
¹⁵² Innocent III, Reg. 7, no. 41; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1327, 2753; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 751.
¹⁵³ Innocent III, Reg. 13, no. 74; Reg. Honorius III, no. 3837; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 2140.
¹⁵⁴ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 182 (building latrines by cathedral cemetery); Reg. Honorius III,
no. 4674 (bringing prostitutes to clerks’ homes); Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1296, 1327 (seizing clerical
concubines); Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 1281, 5836; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 3675 (refusing to free a
prisoner-of-war).
 The Canonical Procedure 117

cause was hostility of secular clergy to mendicant popularity. In 1233 a widow

protested to Gregory IX that interdict and excommunication were declared
against her since local secular canons resented her decision to found a Dominican
priory on her land. In 1289 Franciscans of Orense diocese likewise complained
to former Franciscan Nicholas IV that their bishop threatened interdict and
excommunication on any laity who attended their preaching, made confession
to them, gave them alms, had contact with them, or brought to their churches
the bodies of those who had arranged to be buried there.¹⁵⁵
Interdicts arising from disputes between clergy and laity could have peculiar
causes too. The citizens of Cagli were interdicted and their officials excommu-
nicated in 1291 as a result of a planning dispute: they opposed the papally
approved extension of the city’s cathedral. Conversely buildings authorized by
the commune of Bergamo had occasioned Innocent III’s threat of an interdict in
1203. When local clergy refused to pay taxes to the commune, its podestà had
toilets built by the cathedral’s cemetery! Bergamo was to be interdicted unless
taxes collected from clergy were refunded and the toilets removed. Another lurid
means was apparently used to humiliate clergy into giving money to the lay power
in Portugal; it was one of many anti-clerical abuses which provoked interdicts
there. The Bishop of Oporto complained to Gregory IX that a royal statute
ordered the arrest of any woman found with a clerk. It was maybe meant to
enforce clerical celibacy originally, but the bishop claimed that royal officials and
vassals used it to extort hush money from embarrassed clergy. Under Honorius
III the Bishop of Lisbon had even declared excommunication and interdict on
royal officials who abused the statute by planting prostitutes (mulierculas) in
clergy’s houses.¹⁵⁶
However, the purpose of an interdict that strikes us as most controversial
was as a political weapon. The interdicts that Innocent III declared on France
in 1199 and England in 1208 are famous examples. It is even arguable that
Innocent regularized papal use of interdicts as a means of intervening in temporal
affairs. Initially interdicts were used in conflicts with lay powers largely to
enforce an issue of canon law, as in the case of France in 1199, or punish
violations of ecclesiastical liberty, as in the case of England in 1208.¹⁵⁷ But
during the thirteenth century the papacy came to exploit interdicts more and
more to bolster its own temporal power. This went hand in glove with the
papacy’s increasing concentration on its territorial interests in Italy, arguably
at the expense of its wider pastoral and reform agenda. The precedent for

¹⁵⁵ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1296; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 1281.
¹⁵⁶ Cagli: Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 5856. Bergamo: Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 182. Portugal: Reg.
Honorius III, no. 4674; Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1327; cf. ibid. no. 2753.
¹⁵⁷ The French interdict was to enforce the canon law of marriage by compelling Philip II
to leave his mistress and return to his wife (Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 347; Krehbiel, 110–25);
the English interdict punished King John’s interference in the appointment of the Archbishop of
Canterbury (Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 113; Cheney, ‘Interdict’).
118 Laying of Interdict

interdicting those who threatened the papal state was already set by the end
of the twelfth century. Under Celestine III an interdict was laid on Pisa and
his successor Innocent III lifted it in 1198 on the condition that Pisa joined
the Pope’s Guelf allies in the Tuscan League; otherwise the sentence would be
reimposed.¹⁵⁸ Guelfs were traditionally opponents of the pro-imperial Ghibellines
in northern Italian communes, and this usage of interdicts intensified with the
growing papal struggle against the empire. Innocent III employed interdicts
against supporters of emperor-elect Otto IV after he invaded the papal state
in 1211.¹⁵⁹ This trend grew under Gregory IX and his successsors, especially
Innocent IV, in their conflict with the emperor Frederick II and his heirs.
They saw the union of the Sicilian kingdom and German empire in Frederick
as a threat to their overlordship in Sicily and to the papal state. The military
manoeuvres of Frederick and his heirs in Italy and uncertain loyalties of the
communes there heightened such fears. Frederick’s pretensions to universal
monarchy and his leadership of a crusade and crown-wearing in Jerusalem
while under papal excommunication were also seen as challenging papal claims.
Hence countless interdicts were laid in the mid-thirteenth century on lands
and cities of Frederick’s dynasty and its allies in the empire, northern Italy,
the kingdoms of Sicily and Jerusalem (these comprise most of the interdicts
in the list at iii).¹⁶⁰ In 1257 an interdict was even threatened on England
since its king had failed to send his son Edmund with troops to conquer
Sicily from Frederick’s heirs in the Pope’s name. This use of the interdict
for temporal ends was justified by papal rhetoric. Innocent IV threatened
excommunication and interdict on the duke of Swabia since he had backed
the deposed Frederick II in ‘rebellion against God’ when he should have been
zealous for ‘catholic liberty’ and ‘risen in common faith with Mother Church
and stood before her as a wall against all enemy attacks’.¹⁶¹ Even when the
imperial threat ceased with Charles of Anjou defeating Frederick’s last heir
in 1268, the papacy soon renewed its sanctions and rhetoric in defence of
its temporal claims. Charles’s displacement as its vassal king of Sicily by the
Aragonese in 1282 resulted in interdicts against these new invaders and their
Sicilian allies.¹⁶²

¹⁵⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 552; Krehbiel, 102–3.

¹⁵⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 14, nos. 74, 79; 16, no. 56.
¹⁶⁰ Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 308–9 (crown-wearing provokes papal interdict on Jerusalem); Reg.
Innocent IV, nos. 2344, 2779, 3109, 3210, 3572, 3625, 3817, 4096–7, 4103, 4333, 4459, 5083,
5279, 5343; Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 24, 2368; Reg. Clement IV, nos. 86–7, 124–5, 143, 413–14,
694–5, 699; Reg. Gregory X, nos. 162–5; Reg. Martin IV, no. 266. On the background see
Abulafia, 165–70, 194–200, 341–66, and Morris, 559–67. The classic account of the conflict
after 1250 is Runciman.
¹⁶¹ England: Reg. Alexander IV, no. 2379. Swabia: Reg. Innocent IV, no. 5343. Innocent had
deposed Frederick as emperor in 1245.
¹⁶² Reg. Martin IV, nos. 310, 453, 471, 482, 489–90, 571, 577; Reg. Honorius IV, nos.
479–80, 807.
 The Canonical Procedure 119

Outside Italy the thirteenth-century papacy sometimes also used interdicts for
temporal ends, but ironically largely in defence of the rights of secular rulers (x,
xvi). This was especially true of Honorius III, who was more moderate than his
successors in his claims for papal power in the temporal sphere but still used
interdicts to defend papal vassal kings and thereby reinforced papal suzerainty
over their realms. He was especially protective of Henry III, heir to King John
of England; John had surrendered England and Ireland to Innocent III as papal
fiefs in 1213 and assigned his infant son to papal wardship at his death in
1216. Consequently in 1220 Honorius authorized use of excommunication
and interdict to restrain John’s widow and her accomplices from treachery
against Henry, and in 1223 he ordered the English episcopate to publish
the excommunication of Llewellyn, soi-disant prince of North Wales, and his
supporters and place the strictest interdicts on their lands for rebelling against
John and Henry.¹⁶³ In 1223 he similarly ordered the use of excommunication and
interdict to compel the count of Zwerin to free the king of Denmark, who held
his realm as a papal fief. Thus Honorius like any dutiful lord used the weapons
at his disposal to protect his vassals, even from their subjects, and to encourage
lay powers to accept papal protection. His successors Urban IV and Clement
IV continued his policy in the 1260s, approving use of excommunication and
interdict by papal legates to compel rebel English barons and their allies to cease
defying Henry III.¹⁶⁴
Thus the interdict could be used to preserve the status quo, and in fact it seems
to have originated as a means of maintaining social order. One of the first known
uses of interdict was at the council of Limoges in 994. The chronicler of the
event, Adémar of Charbannes, wrote some thirty years later that Bishop Alduin
of Limoges had had all monasteries and churches cease divine service ‘in order to
punish the rapine of the milites and the devastation of the poor’.¹⁶⁵ Adémar called
this a new practice (‘novam observantiam’) and recorded that it was adopted
again at another council of Limoges in 1031, when a ‘public excommunication’
was proclaimed on all the land of Limoges owing to peace-breakers. This measure
was necessitated by the decline of royal power and judicial institutions in late
tenth-century France which left society, and especially the clergy, vulnerable
to the arbitrary rule and ruthless exploitation of local lords, the rampaging
milites deplored by Alduin. Political and social circumstances had changed by
the thirteenth century, but the papacy sometimes still used the interdict to
enforce truces among secular powers (see list above, xviii). In particular it was
threatened on the lands of those who broke the general peace that was normally

¹⁶³ Reg. Honorius III, nos. 2725, 4517; Sayers, 162 ff. Cf. Acts, no. 220: Welsh princes
complained to Innocent III that the Archbishop of Canterbury interdicted their lands whenever
English invaded them.
¹⁶⁴ Denmark: Reg. Honorius III, nos. 4549–51, 4555. England: Reg. Urban IV, no. 755; Reg.
Clement IV, nos. 44, 116, 120.
¹⁶⁵ Little, 213–14; Mansi xix.541–2 (council of 1031). See also Howland, ‘Origins’, 444.
120 Laying of Interdict

declared along with a crusade, even if they only attended tournaments.¹⁶⁶ The
late eleventh-century papacy initiated the crusades in response to the anarchic
conditions that also gave rise to the interdict, and they were meant to direct
milites from fighting fellow Christians towards defending Christendom from
its external enemies. Given their common origin and purpose in keeping
social order, it is not surprising that the interdict was still used in support
of crusading by thirteenth-century popes, especially to compel fulfilment of
crusader vows (list, xxxii) and surrender of tithes for crusades or other holy
wars.¹⁶⁷
Apparently unlimited as the causes of an interdict were, not all uses of it
were approved by the papacy. Celestine III’s decretal ‘Quesivit’ (c.1191–5), for
example, condemned canons who interdicted their cathedral because of debts
owed to it or the wrong of a clerk or parishioner. In such instances, the canonist
Laurentius observed, it was more appropriate to interdict the persons involved
since they had done wrong and not the church. Indeed ‘Quesivit’ concluded
with the civilian maxim that sins ought to bind their authors. This also echoed
Gratian’s dictum that a church ought not to suffer because of one person’s
wrong.¹⁶⁸ But an interdict was often imposed on a community for the wrongs
of its head, and Tancred hence distinguished that a church might suffer for
its prelate’s wrong done in his official capacity but not as a private individual.
And ‘Quesivit’ had apparently condemned interdicts laid for the faults of private
persons. Certainly in 1257 Alexander IV forbade judges acting on papal authority
to interdict the churches or parish of Clermont-Ferrand on account of lawsuits
concerning private persons, for this prejudiced all parishioners, and he observed
in words echoing those of ‘Quesivit’: ‘a penalty ought not to bind those whom
innocence frees from guilt’. In 1265 Clement IV also used this argument when
he gave a parish in Clermont diocese immunity from interdicts laid by judges
delegate without a specific papal mandate for the delict or contumacy of private
persons.¹⁶⁹ Presumably such interdicts were widely seen as improper, for the
protest of the parish’s provost and chapter at such sentences had prompted the
grant.
But the closest canon law came to banning interdicts laid for faults of private
individuals was in debt cases. Boniface VIII’s constitution ‘Provide’ (1302)
forbade ecclesiastical judges to interdict a place because rulers, officials, or
individuals there defaulted on debts, except by specific papal permission.¹⁷⁰ As
the preamble observed, interdicts were very often laid ‘not without reason but

¹⁶⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 8, no. 1; id. Suppl. no. 233; Gesta c.84 (PL 214.cxxxvii); Lat. Conc. IV
c.71 (see Constitutiones, 115–17); Reg. Nicholas III, no. 225.
¹⁶⁷ Tithes: Reg. Nicholas III, no. 553; Reg. Honorius IV, no. 95; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 5906.
¹⁶⁸ 2 Comp. 3.9.2 (= X 3.11.2). On Laurentius see p. 64 n. 22. The maxim is from Cod. 9.47.22
(see p. 14 n. 1 above). Gratian’s teaching and Tancred’s distinction are discussed at pp. 52–3.
¹⁶⁹ Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1721; Reg. Clement IV, no. 144. See also p. 62 above.
¹⁷⁰ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 5019; Extrav. comm. 5.10.2.
 The Canonical Procedure 121

without the guilt of many’ and some judges were too inclined to use them in
lawsuits said to proceed ‘more from the root of greed than charity’, with negative
spiritual results for the faithful. The canonist Johannes Monachus observed
that cases involving merchants’ contracts gave rise to this ruling. Indeed it was
specifically occasioned by such a case from Ascoli in the Marche. The town’s
commune protested to Boniface that the Bishop of Osimo had interdicted Ascoli
at the request of secular judges, proceeding against them to recover debts owed
by an Ascoli merchant to a Florentine merchant. In a letter dated four days
earlier than ‘Provide’ and anticipating its rulings Boniface ordered the bishop to
relax the interdict and not to proceed further against the commune in debt cases
without a specific papal mandate.¹⁷¹ A century earlier Celestine III had simply
been concerned about interdicts laid for debts owed to churches, but since then
a system of international banking and commerce had developed, largely run by
Italians. Popes, princes, and merchants came to rely increasingly on loans from
Italian bankers, and use of ecclesiastical sanctions against defaulters became all
too common. It has been assumed that the diocese with the highest incidence
of excommunication in later medieval Europe was Florence, for so many of its
citizens were involved in papal finances.¹⁷² As ‘Provide’ makes clear, Boniface
VIII deplored overuse of interdicts for such worldly ends at the expense of
pastoral care. But, apart from ‘Provide’ and the rule that interdicts might only be
laid with manifest and reasonable cause, thirteenth-century popes did not seek
to regulate what ends interdicts might be used for.
Nevertheless the papacy granted certain dignitaries and communities freedom
from excommunication and interdict, not simply when imposed without manifest
and reasonable cause but in many cases tout court, although it was often specified
that this immunity might be disregarded on papal or legatine authority. From
an early stage it formed a significant element in ‘exemption’, the freedom from
episcopal jurisdiction that the papacy allowed a growing number of religious
houses to claim from the late eleventh century.¹⁷³ By Alexander III’s pontificate
such claims had to be recognized by papal documents specifying that the
monastery was directly subject to the holy see ‘nullo mediante’, and thus subject
only to its interdicts. But grants of exemption were rare outside Cistercian,
Cluniac, and other reformed houses in the late twelfth century. In 1215 only one
Augustinian and six Benedictine houses in England were ‘exempt’. By contrast
in 1184 Lucius III had affirmed that houses and brethren of the Cistercian order
held immunity from interdicts as part of their exemption.¹⁷⁴ This immunity
had been extended to new religious orders enjoying a special relationship with
the papacy, notably the Hospitallers, Templars, and Premonstratensians by

¹⁷¹ Johannes Monachus on Extrav. comm. 5.10.2 v. radice. Ascoli: Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 4656.
¹⁷² Brucker, ‘Ecclesiastical Courts’, esp. 255.
¹⁷³ Robinson, 223 ff., esp. 234–5; Knowles, ‘Exemption’; Cheney, Visitation, 36–46.
¹⁷⁴ England: Knowles, ‘Exemption’; Denton, Free Chapels, 16. Cistercians: PL 201.1301–2
(discussed in Schreiber, ‘Studien’).
122 Laying of Interdict

the late twelfth century, and the Dominicans and Franciscans in the early
thirteenth.¹⁷⁵
But the danger inherent in such grants was that delinquent clergy might
abuse them to evade ecclesiastical justice, and canonists aware of this argued
for limitation of this immunity. A pupil of the French canonist Petrus Brito
observed (c.1206) that the freedom of Hospitallers and their churches from
episcopal excommunication and interdict applied unless they fell into heresy or
committed a manifest act of plunder.¹⁷⁶ Tancred was similarly concerned that
immunities should not supply an excuse for sin, and while he argued that bishops
might not include exempt churches within a general local interdict, he conceded
that local ordinaries might punish exempt religious who committed wrongs
in their jurisdiction.¹⁷⁷ Tancred and other early thirteenth-century canonists
limited this exception to notorious wrongs (as opposed to hidden ones) and
wrongs in a non-exempt matter, notably homicide (as opposed to those in an
exempt matter, such as misconduct in ecclesiastical office).¹⁷⁸ But Innocent
IV later ruled at the First Council of Lyon that while the exempt might be
summoned before their local ordinary for any wrong, contract, or lawsuit of

¹⁷⁵ The immunity of the military orders was old enough to be regulated in Lat. Conc. III (1179)
c.9 (= 1 Comp. 5.28.3; X 5.33.3). Cf. Innocent III, Reg. 13, no. 11 (Spanish military order of
St James); Reg. Honorius III, nos. 203–4 (Franciscans, Dominicans), 2554 (Premonstratensians);
Reg. Alexander IV, no. 2988 ( Templars); Reg. Clement IV, no. 1758 (Hospitallers).
¹⁷⁶ Anon. on 1 Comp. 5.28.8 v. presumatis, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9, fol. 86vb:
‘Supra. de parochiis. Licet [1 Comp. 3.25.4]. Et verum nisi ceciderint in heresim, supra de hereticis
[1 Comp. 5.6]. Item si <???> manifestam fecerint depredationem, ut vi. q. iii. Placuit [C.6 q.3 c.4],
vel nisi ceciderint in canonem, tunc possunt eos denunciare, sicut iudex delegatus posset denunciare
excommunicatum qui magis numquam potest ligari denunciationem, ut extra Inno. iii. Pastoralis
§Qui [Po. 2350], quia non datum privilegium ad tutionem iniquitatis sicut nec appellatio, infra. de
appellationibus. Ad nostram [1 Comp. 2.20.3].’
¹⁷⁷ Tancred on 1 Comp. 5.28.3 v. enervant, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 93rb: ‘Pone
quod privilegiatus in parrochia alicuius episcopi deliquid, non potest episcopus loci eum
excommunicare? … Solutio. Quia episcopus non potest eorum ecclesias interdicere, quando totam
terram interdicto subponit. Preterea pro levibus et minimis causis ab episcopo non possunt
excommunicari … Et hec ratio quare puniuntur, nam papa nichil aliud eis concessit nisi quod eos
suos filios fecit, et hoc facto aliis episcopis iurisdictionem quo ad hoc non abstulit, nam alias nichil
aliud esset nisi materiam peccandi dare.’ Immunity was rarely so qualified in papal grants, e.g.
Innocent III, Reg. 8, no. 167.
¹⁷⁸ Tancred on 3 Comp. 5.16.1 v. interdicas, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 271rb: ‘Hic patet
quod iudex ordinarius potest punire exemptos, ut supra. de heretic. Ad abolendam l. i. in fi. [1
Comp. 5.6.11] ubi dicitur quod nullum privilegium prodest talibus … Ad hoc dicunt quidam quod
pro occultis delictis tales non possunt puniri ab episcopis sed pro notoriis, ar. huius decretalis.
Melius dices quod si privilegiatus deliquit circa rem non exemptam, ut in contractu vel maleficio
occidendo videlicet hominem vel adulterando cum aliqua, tale delictum potest punire episcopus
loci, quia etsi persona sit exempta, tamen res in qua delinquitur non est exempta. Si vero deliquit
circa rem exemptam, puta male gerendo se in officio suo vel alienando res ecclesie sue, tunc a solo
papa punitur.’ Cf. id. on 2 Comp. 1.6.2 v. excessus, 2.5.1 v. irritam, 5.14.2 v. per te (BAV, Vat.
lat. MS 1377, fols. 103vb, 110rb, 142ra). Cf. also Apparatus ‘Servus appellatur’ on 3 Comp. 5.16.4
v. (?)decernimus (Bamberg Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 19, fol. 215ra); Zoën on 5 Comp. 5.12.1 v.
privilegio ( Tours, Bibliothèque municipale MS 565, fol. 39rb); Johannes Hispanus de Petesella,
Summa, §De privilegiis (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2343, fol. 221rb).
 The Canonical Procedure 123

theirs done outside their monastery or an exempt place, they might not be
interdicted or excommunicated as a result, unless they were moved to priories
subject to the ordinary. In the decretal ‘Veniens’ he also explained that those
recognized in papal privileges as ‘speciales et proprios ecclesie Romane filios’
were not technically exempt but immune from excommunication and interdict
laid by anyone other than the pope or his legates, and this especially applied
to churches built by religious in uninhabited places or those under Muslim
rule.¹⁷⁹
The papacy had long defended grants of this immunity and the jurisdiction
that it reserved over their recipients, despite canonistic misgivings. Many prelates
resented this freedom from coercion and especially exemption as eroding their
judicial powers, and some asserted jurisdiction by interdict and excommunication
over those claiming such rights. An early test case was a dispute between the
Bishop of Paris and Abbot of Ste-Geneviève in 1201. The bishop held that
traditionally the priest of a certain parish received its cure of souls from him
and excluded from the offices anyone interdicted or excommunicated by him.
When the abbot chose a priest for this parish but refused to present him to
the bishop, the latter forbade its parishioners on pain of excommunication to
hear offices or receive sacraments in the abbey church, unless the celebrant had
received his cure from him. The parishioners initially obeyed, but then the abbey
enlisted a former abbot and eminent canonist, Stephen of Tournai, to preach
to them that no archbishop, bishop, or archdeacon might lay excommunication
or interdict on them. The abbot claimed that the abbey and its locality were
exempt and subject only to papal and legatine sentences; therefore, Stephen
argued, the bishop’s sentence was invalid being ‘a non suo iudice lata’. It was a
cogent canonistic argument: Innocent III quashed the sentence as violating the
abbey’s immunity, confirming that no interdict might be observed on the parish
church.¹⁸⁰ Honorius III also used this argument when he condemned the Bishop
of Transylvania for using excommunication and interdict in lands which ‘had
no bishop or prelate other than the Roman pontiff’; he instructed the Bishop of
Esztergom in 1223 to declare the sentences null as issued ‘a non suo iudice’ unless
the first bishop revoked them.¹⁸¹ Gregory IX likewise had to intervene in 1233
when English prelates tried to compel three abbeys to submit to visitation by
interdict and excommunication despite their immunity from such sentences.¹⁸²
Often religious houses, especially Cistercian and Cluniac ones, complained that
local ordinaries tried to circumvent such immunity by laying sentences on their
patrons and servants. Since the late twelfth century the papacy had responded by

¹⁷⁹ Coll. III 32 (= VI 5.7.1), 41 (= VI 5.12.1). Bernard de Montemirat noted (early 1260s) on
Coll. III 41 (‘Veniens’) that this distinction applied to the order of St James in Spain (BAV, Vat.
lat. MS 2542, fol. 88va). Cf. Innocent III, Reg. 13, no. 11.
¹⁸⁰ Innocent III, Suppl. no. 53. ¹⁸¹ Reg. Honorius III, nos. 4608, 4618.
¹⁸² Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1275, 1299, 1738.
124 Laying of Interdict

extending this immunity to these associates.¹⁸³ Honorius III even made such a
concession regarding the Cluniac order, and though his ruling entered canon law,
his successors were still asked to confirm it and make similar grants to Cistercian
houses down to the late thirteenth century.¹⁸⁴
Some laity might thus share the freedom of religious from excommunication
and interdict, but popes also gave this immunity to certain lay dignitaries in their
own right, notably kings and magnates, as well as ecclesiastical dignitaries like
bishops; it was often even extended to their chapels and lands.¹⁸⁵ These grants
apparently had a long tradition by the thirteenth century; in 1213 Innocent III
confirmed the freedom of the king and queen of Aragon from excommunication
and ‘interdiction’ allegedly first granted by Urban II (1088–99).¹⁸⁶ These were
personal grants that did not necessarily extend beyond their recipients’ lifetime to
their heirs, though they might be renewed, and some were limited to even shorter
periods, especially under Innocent IV. In 1251 he granted Simon de Montfort,
earl of Leicester and the English crown’s vicegerent in Gascony, personal freedom
for two years from excommunication and interdict laid by anyone in Gascony
without a special papal mandate.¹⁸⁷ On succeeding him as pope Alexander IV
revoked all Innocent’s grants of freedom from excommunication and interdict
to laity and clergy and their lands, perhaps since he had issued so many, and
perhaps to counter forgeries and raise funds from issuing new grants of this
much sought-after freedom.¹⁸⁸ Another limitation was that some grants only
gave immunity from sentences laid by papally commissioned judges without a
special papal mandate, and not local ordinaries, or vice versa.¹⁸⁹
However limited, such grants often rewarded lay dignitaries for service to
the Church. Immunity from interdict regularly formed part of the ecclesiastical
protection extended to crusaders’ lands. Indeed in 1235, after the king of

¹⁸³ E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 205; Innocent III, Suppl. nos. 4, 19, 42, 79, 86, 92, 124. Cf.
Alanus on Alan. 3.23.1 (= 2 Comp. 3.26.2) v. in aliis locis tantum pro se et familia sua, Vercelli
Cathedral MS 89, fol. 104ra: ‘Quo nomine servos et mercenarios intelligo comprehendi. Et est ar.
quod servientes privilegiatorum non possunt a diocesano excommunicari, ar. supra. de statu. mona.
Quanto nos [2 Comp. 3.22.4].’
¹⁸⁴ 5 Comp. 5.12.1 (= X 5.33.26). Papal grants: Reg. Honorius III, nos. 4177, 5564, 5859;
Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1727, 1741; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 477; Reg. Nicholas III, no. 455; Reg.
Honorius IV, no. 411; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 4902, 7365.
¹⁸⁵ E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 5, no. 43 (king of Armenia); 9, no. 245 (duke of Dijon’s chapel); 16,
no. 87 (king and queen of Aragon); Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1690 (king of Scotland), 2128 (Latin
empress of Byzantium and her chapels); Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1121 (bishop), 1399 (Portuguese
infanta and his kingdom of Majorca), 1677–8 (king and queen of France’s chapels), 1746 (ex-bailiff
of Latin empire of Byzantium and his land), 2642 (earl of Pembroke, his brothers, and their lands
in Ireland and Wales), 2756 (king of Hungary, his wife, children, and lands), 2805 (crusader
king of Navarre and his land), 3898 (queen of France’s lands), 4603 (chapel of heir to Byzantium
empire); etc.
¹⁸⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 87. ¹⁸⁷ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 5019.
¹⁸⁸ Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1006.
¹⁸⁹ E.g. without a specific papal mandate: Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 87; Reg. Gregory IX, nos.
1399, 1677–8, 2756, 2805, 3898, 4469, 4603; etc.
 The Canonical Procedure 125

Navarre took the cross, Gregory IX prohibited anyone to excommunicate him

or interdict his lands without a special papal mandate until his death or return
from crusade was certain.¹⁹⁰ Innocent III had even rewarded a prodigal’s return
to ecclesiastical obedience in 1214, when he agreed to King John’s request that
nobody might excommunicate him or interdict his chapel without a special papal
mandate; ironically Innocent did not lift the interdict on England provoked
by John till ten weeks after this grant.¹⁹¹ Conversely princes might forfeit
such immunities if they turned against ecclesiastical authority. Innocent IV in
1249 ordered the Bishop of Ratisbon to annul freedoms given to the duke of
Bavaria by Gregory IX, including freedom from interdicts and excommunication
laid without manifest and reasonable cause, unless the duke submitted by 15
August.¹⁹² When the deadline passed and the duke still supported the deposed
Frederick II against the pope, Innocent authorized the bishop to declare the duke
and his supporters excommunicate and his land interdicted, despite his former
freedoms, until he returned to the service of the Church by joining the crusade
against Frederick.
On at least one occasion immunity was granted to protect victims of arbitrary
and excessive sentences, although in a sense this is simply a variation on the grants
of immunity from interdicts laid without manifest and reasonable cause.¹⁹³ In
late 1210 Innocent III required the Archbishop of Sens and Bishops of Troyes,
Langres, Châlons-sur-Marne, and Auxerre not to lay ill-considered sentences of
excommunication and interdict on subjects and lands of Countess Blanche of
Champagne as she alleged they were doing. This warning did not have a lasting
effect, as the pope had to intervene again in 1214. He granted Blanche and
her son protection against prelates, officials, and chapters of Reims province,
notably the Bishop of Châlons who allegedly tried to enforce claims over her
temporal jurisdiction by excommunication and interdict. He also reminded the
Archbishop of Reims and Bishops of Soissons and Châlons-sur-Marne of his
warning of 1210 such that if they disobeyed, his executors would use the same
ecclesiastical sanctions against them. Ultimately he had to grant Blanche and her
son immunity from interdict and excommunication.
Such grants invalidated sentences imposed specifically on their recipients and
sometimes also their churches, lands, and subjects, but it was uncertain whether
these grants also freed them from observing general interdicts on the area or
community to which they belonged. This was a point of contention between
Innocent III and some exempt Cistercian houses under the English interdict,
and this issue was not settled in canon law definitively until a constitution of
Clement V ruled that the exempt should observe general sentences. Indeed a

¹⁹⁰ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2805.

¹⁹¹ SLI, p. 175 (15 April 1214). The interdict was not relaxed until 2 July 1214 (Cheney,
‘Interdict’, 295).
¹⁹² Reg. Innocent IV, no. 4333. Freedom granted in Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2795.
¹⁹³ Po. 4135a, 4943, 4946, 5269; Krehbiel, 143–4.
126 Laying of Interdict

grant of Gregory X to Philip III of France in 1273 was unusual in that it

forbade extension of general sentences of excommunication and interdict to the
king’s person unless he was expressly named in them.¹⁹⁴ Certainly by the early
thirteenth century canonists had agreed that immunities did not guard against a
certain kind of general sentence, one laid by canon law itself.¹⁹⁵

3 . 3 I N T E R D I C TS A IURE

This chapter has so far only treated interdicts laid by ecclesiastical judges,
termed by canonists interdicts ab homine or ferende sententie. But the thirteenth-
century papacy also attached penalty clauses to some of its legal rulings, whereby
any violating them automatically incurred excommunication or interdict. This
sentence was in effect laid by the law itself, not a judge, and was hence known as
excommunication (or interdict) a iure, a canone, or late sententie.¹⁹⁶ The sentence
had indeed already been laid before the wrong that occasioned it, as opposed
to a sentence to be laid (ferenda) by a judge after the fact. By the late twelfth
century canonists hence recognized that no warning was necessary before an
interdict late sententie, unlike an interdict ferende sententie, since the warning
was contained in the law that imposed it.¹⁹⁷ Some laws blurred this distinction
in that they deferred the sentence for a fixed period after their violation; in
this time the violator might make amends, so the sentence came into effect
only after he failed to do so in common with an interdict ferende sententie, but
such laws were exceptional. Canonists classified this kind of sentence as lata sub
conditione.¹⁹⁸
Provision for automatic excommunication was found in canon law long before
canonists began to analyse it.¹⁹⁹ They observed that the Decretum included laws
that laid this sentence for several crimes, chiefly heresy, resisting papal decisions,
simony, priests living in concubinage, lay investiture, and violence against clergy.
Canon law had only introduced automatic penalties in the last three instances
under the eleventh-century reform papacy, and after the Decretum’s appearance

¹⁹⁴ Clen. 5.10.1; see p. 203 below. Reg. Gregory X, no. 149. Cf. grant to Philip’s father Louis
IX in Reg. Clement IV, nos. 412, 419.
¹⁹⁵ Paulus Hungarus, Notabilium on 3 Comp. 5.16.1, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 261, fol. 88rc–va:
‘Item nota subtiliter quod interdicto lato ab homine possunt privilegiati in suo privilegio, secus
autem in interdicto lato a iure.’ See also n. 176 (‘nisi ceciderint in canonem’).
¹⁹⁶ Huizing, 279–80.
¹⁹⁷ Richardus Anglicus on 1 Comp. 5.34.14 v. excommunicatos, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol.
115ra: ‘Sed qualiter potest canon aliquis esse date sine peremptoria … Responsio. Est ammonitio
hominis, de qua habetur in capitulo ‘‘Si peccaverit’’ [C.2 q.1 c.19], et ammonitio legis, ut hic
Innocentius [recte Alexander] enim cotidie ammonet.’ Alanus on 1 Comp. 2.20.42 v. nisi, Munich,
Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 36ra: ‘In hoc ergo casu non est necessaria precedens
ammonitio, quod verum est ubicumque sententia fertur a iure, sed ubi a iudice ferenda debebit
precedere.’
¹⁹⁸ Huizing, 310–15. ¹⁹⁹ Ibid. 281–309.
 Interdicts a iure 127

such instances multiplied rapidly as a means to advance reform and punish

abuses condemned by the reformers. The earliest instances of interdict a iure
were apparently the suspension of worship in polluted or violated churches, but
thirteenth-century canonists disputed whether these were strictly interdicts. The
interdict was only defined by the late twelfth century as a distinct sanction,
and automatic sentences were first specified as interdicts in the early thirteenth
century and these only affected individual offenders like excommunication,
notably interdicts ab ingressu ecclesie which ecclesiastical judges incurred for
various breaches of canonical procedure.²⁰⁰ Penalty clauses in papal legislation
only imposed general interdicts after the mid-thirteenth century, perhaps as a
result of Innocent IV’s ban on collective excommunication in 1245. Thereafter
instances of automatic general interdict proliferated so much, notably under
Boniface VIII, that compilations of them became a minor canonistic genre by
the mid-fourteenth century.
Popularizing knowledge of such sentences was meant to provide scant excuse
for incurring them. One of the earliest and most widely circulated treatises
about them is a case in point. It was compiled by French canonist Bérenger
Frédol when Bishop of Béziers and following his collaboration on the Liber sextus
(1298). Indeed it was the situation he found in Béziers on completing this papal
commission that probably gave rise to his treatise. In his absence the consuls of
Béziers had taxed its clergy contrary to ‘Clericis laicos’ (1296), Boniface VIII’s
well-known bull forbidding lay taxation of clerical wealth without papal consent.
Under the terms of the bull the consuls incurred excommunication and the city
was interdicted.²⁰¹ Bérenger thus wrote the treatise, as his preface explains, to
teach his flock how to avoid automatic sentences in future. He listed twelve
instances of interdict a iure, citing ‘Clericis laicos’ and other recent papal rulings
also included in the Liber sextus. By the mid-fourteenth century continuators of
his treatise had added nine more instances from subsequent canonical collections,
notably the Clementine and Extravagantes of John XXII.²⁰²
The twenty rulings other than ‘Clericis laicos’ included provision for automatic
interdicts against:
a) a city where a papal election was held and its rulers and officials did not
observe the rules regarding the conclave;²⁰³
b) a city, castle, or place where its universitas levied tolls (pedagia) on churches
or clergy;²⁰⁴

²⁰⁰ E.g. Lat. Conc. IV c.47 (= 4 Comp. 5.15.5; X 5.39.48); cf. Coll. III 35 (= VI 5.11.1), VI
5.7.8.
²⁰¹ Treatise: Bérenger Frédol, 42–53. Clericis laicos: VI 3.23.3; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1567.
Béziers: Ibid., no. 2140; see also pp. 225–33 below.
²⁰² Bérenger Frédol, 25 (preface), 59–121 (continuations).
²⁰³ Lugd. Conc. II c.2 (= VI 1.6.3), i.e. issued by Gregory X in 1274.
²⁰⁴ VI 3.20.4 (first issued by Boniface VIII in 1298).
128 Laying of Interdict

c) a universitas which did not expel usurers arriving in its territory;²⁰⁵

d) a universitas which allowed seizure of pledges (repressalie) against ecclesiastical
persons and their property;²⁰⁶
e) churches and cemeteries where clergy had induced someone to choose burial
and failed to hand over the bodies within ten days of their burial;²⁰⁷
f ) the land of anyone who attacked, seized, or exiled a bishop, or ordered,
advised, supported, defended, or collaborated in such deed, any city doing
the same, and any place for as long as the bishop was held there.²⁰⁸
The sentences laid a iure on those levying tolls on churches or clergy were to
be publicized by diocesans according to a constitution of Clement V. In practice
it had probably long been the duty of local ecclesiastical authorities to identify
and publicize violations of canon law that carried an automatic sentence.²⁰⁹
Automatic sentences were not only laid by canon law that applied throughout
the Latin West, but also by the local ecclesiastical law that supplemented it in
specific provinces. A mid-fourteenth-century series of casus of excommunication
and interdict a canone from the Carlisle diocese in northern England hence
included instances from the conciliar and legatine legislation of the English
Church as well as the common law of the Universal Church. A notable
example comes from the Danish Church. In 1257 Alexander IV confirmed the
constitution ‘Cum ecclesia Daciana’ issued by a council of the Archbishop of
Lund and his suffragans. This had decreed that if the Danish king or any of his
nobles should order, consent to, or connive at the capture or mutilation of any of
the bishops within his realm, it would fall under an interdict so that priests and
chaplains were forbidden on pain of excommunication from celebrating divine
offices in the presence of nobles or any of their retainers or otherwise in public
or private.²¹⁰ Violence by the secular power against the spiritual was clearly a
particular problem in Denmark, and this law significantly bolstered Alexander
III’s decretal ‘Mulieres’ that already laid automatic excommunication on those
ordering attacks on clergy.

During the thirteenth century canon law and canonistic doctrine came to specify
with increasing precision how and by whom an interdict might be imposed,
even for which offences it was mandatory. Ecclesiastical judges alone might use

²⁰⁵ Lugd. Conc. II c.26 (= VI 5.5.1). Individuals violating this canon incurred suspension, if
prelates, or otherwise excommunication. If they or the interdicted universitas remained obdurate for
a month, their lands fell under an interdict for as long as the usurers lived there.
²⁰⁶ Lugd. Conc. II c.28 (= VI 5.8.un.). Individuals violating this incurred excommunication.
²⁰⁷ VI 3.12.1 (first issued by Boniface VIII in 1298). ²⁰⁸ Clem. 5.8.1.
²⁰⁹ Clem. 3.13.3.
²¹⁰ These casus were appended to a copy of Cardinal Ottobuono’s constitutions for the English
Church (1268) and inserted in a composite volume of the registers of the fourteenth-century bishops
of Carlisle (Carlisle, Cumbria County Record Office, DRC/1/2, pp. 393–5; see my ‘Fragment’,
133). Denmark: Reg. Alexander IV, no. 2268. ‘Mulieres’: 1 Comp. 5.34.7 (= X 5.39.6); see
pp. 54–5 above.
 Interdicts a iure 129

it and only if clearly justified and as a last resort, where warnings, summons, and
all other means had failed to secure compliance with their commands. It was
not a vindictive penalty intended to avenge a wrongdoing but a coercive one
designed to bring a wrongdoer to repentance and reconciliation. It was primarily
used to defend ecclesiastical persons, property, and liberties from the violence of
the secular power, to which they were highly vulnerable. In practice, however,
interdicts were sometimes subject to arbitrary and excessive use. Even the papacy
used the sanction as a political weapon to intervene in secular affairs, not always
in defence of ecclesiastical liberty but increasingly to protect its temporal interests
in Italy. Regulation was, therefore, insufficient to constrain use of interdicts, and
many, especially religious houses and secular rulers, sought protection from them
in papal grants of immunity. Regulation would probably never have arisen in the
first place had there not been a tendency to overuse and abuse interdicts. The
interdict and excommunication were the only means of coercion that the spiritual
power had under its direct control, which accounts for both this tendency and
papal concern to regulate their usage, lest they came to lose their efficacy and
diminish respect for ecclesiastical authority. Whether the interdict was effective
at all is another issue, and it can only be judged when it is understood what the
interdict was meant to accomplish according to canon law and its commentators.
Hence the next chapter will examine what the terms of the interdict were and
the evidence for their observance in the thirteenth century.
 4
The Terms of an Interdict

By Innocent III’s time an interdict was generally understood to involve suspension

of divine offices, withdrawal of the sacraments, and prohibition of ecclesiastical
burial in regard to the persons or places on which it was laid. But it was not
usually meant as a ban on all religious ministrations. By the late twelfth century
papal interdicts normally permitted infant baptism and penance of the dying.
And though evidence of interdicts is sparse before this period, it seems that these
exceptions were customary as early as the ninth century at least in the French
Church, whence the earliest recorded interdicts come.¹ Indeed canonists agreed
by the early thirteenth century that these sacraments should always be allowed
during interdicts, since, as Richardus Anglicus argued, they were necessary for
salvation.² Nevertheless Alanus held that they might be refused in extreme
circumstances, when absolute severity was required; he observed (c.1201–10)
that Innocent III was then applying this against the Piacenzans, presumably owing
to their persistent disobedience in the face of his interdict and other sanctions.³
Beyond the usual exception of these sacraments, however, papal mandates
for interdicts rarely specified the terms of the sentence. Neither were such
terms generally defined in canon law or canonistic doctrine at the beginning of
the thirteenth century. Consequently those required to execute such mandates
on behalf of Innocent III often had to write to him for clarification of the
terms of his interdicts. His extant responses to prelates ordered to enforce his
interdicts in France (1200), England (1208), Ferrara (1209), and Naples (1211)

¹ Alexander III’s decretal ‘Non est vobis’ (c.1173) was the legal locus classicus for these exceptions:
1 Comp. 4.1.13 (= X 4.1.11). An interdict on Laon diocese was condemned and lifted for denying
these exceptions in 869: see p. 146 and Howland, ‘Origins’, 439–40. These exceptions were allowed
when the council of Limoges imposed a ‘public excommunication’ on its diocese in 1031 (Mansi,
xix.541).
² Ricardus on 1 Comp. 4.1.9 v. preter baptisma, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 76va: ‘Ista enim
semper debent excipi, nam sacramenta sunt necessitatis, que etiam ab heretico essent sumenda, ut
xxiiii. q. i. Si quem forte, et de con. di. iiii. Sanctum est [C.24 q.1 c.40; De con. D.4 c.36]; secus
de aliis, ut xxiiii q. i. c. Cepit [C.24 q.1 c.42].’
³ Alanus on 1 Comp. 4.1.9 v. baptisma, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol.
63vb: ‘Omnia enim alia sacramenta uni interdicuntur pro peccato alterius quando res postulat, ut
hic et infra. e. Non est vobis, supra. de iure patro. Ex insinuatione [1 Comp. 4.1.13, 3.33.17]. Ista
vero nulli pro <peccato> alterius interdicuntur, ut xxiiii. q. iii. Si habes [C.24 q.3 c.1], nisi ex
maximo rigore, quem observat papa modo circa Placentinos.’ Innocent III interdicted Piacenza in
1198; see Krehbiel, 101–2.
 The Terms of an Interdict 131

shows how widespread the uncertainty was.⁴ The English interdict illustrates the
problem well.⁵ A letter of Innocent III dated 27 August 1207 instructed the
Bishops of London, Ely, and Worcester ‘to publish a general sentence of interdict
throughout England’ and, according to the usual concise formula, ‘permitting no
ecclesiastical office except the baptism of infants and the confession of the dying’.⁶
The bishops had presumably found this mandate insufficient, for the pope had
to write to them again three months later, explaining that his sentence, not yet
imposed, was to be observed by all clergy, secular and regular, including the
military orders, and that it also applied to Wales, a point he admitted to omitting
in his original mandate. But this still left many points unclear, and he had to
reply to queries from the bishops in a third letter seven weeks after they published
his interdict on 23 March 1208.⁷ They asked how infants might be baptised
with chrism if the interdict prohibited consecration of chrism; he suggested
alternative arrangements. He also ruled that the last Communion, the viaticum,
was not allowed along with confession of the dying during the interdict.⁸ Finally
he added that he would not have minded if from the start religious orders had
been permitted to celebrate the offices behind closed doors with excommunicates
and those under interdict excluded, as their privileges conceded. This seemed
to contradict his earlier letter requiring regular and secular clergy to observe the
interdict regardless of any privilege or liberty, and when he wrote to the three
bishops again on 22 August 1208, he had to refute allegations of inconsistency.⁹
This matter was then left to their discretion, and Innocent did not expressly
mitigate the interdict for regular clergy till 12 January 1209, when he permitted
all conventual churches observing the interdict to celebrate mass once a week
behind closed doors, though Peter of Blois, Archdeacon of London, observed that
many clergy in his diocese found this concession still left many issues unclear.¹⁰
In 1212 the English interdict was mitigated further by the concession of the
viaticum, reversing Innocent’s earlier ruling; hosts might be consecrated for the
dying at the masses permitted since 1209.¹¹
If the papal line on observance of the interdict was ambiguous and vacillating,
local attempts to supplement papal instructions contradicted each other even
more blatantly. Indeed the two fullest definitions of the interdict’s terms did not

⁴ X 5.38.11 (France); X 5.39.43 (Ferrara); Innocent III, Reg. 14, no. 74 (Naples).
⁵ See Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 298–300, and id. England, 300–6; cf. Parker, ‘Terms’.
⁶ SLI, no. 30 (Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 113).
⁷ His second letter of 15 November 1207 is SLI, no. 31 (Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 161); his
third of 14 June 1208 is SLI, no. 36 (Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 92).
⁸ He had, however, permitted the viaticum under the French interdict (1200); see pp. 149–50
below.
⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 141.
¹⁰ SLI, no. 37 (Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 211); Peter of Blois, 118–19 (Letter 24). This
concession was noted in various contemporary monastic chronicles: Annales, iv.54, 397; Coventry,
Memoriale, ii.201.
¹¹ Coggleshall, Chronicon, 165; Coventry, Memoriale, ii.205. Coggleshall suggests that this
mitigation was granted by the Bishops of Ely and London; see Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 299 n. 4.
132 The Terms of an Interdict

apparently come from the pope. One is admittedly titled the ‘Forma interdicti
ab Innocentio III in Angliam consituta’, but it probably emanated from one
or all of the sentence’s bishop-executors, as Cheney argues, or another English
ecclesiastical authority.¹² The other is an interpolated version of the pope’s
third letter to the bishop-executors (from 14 June 1208); it may represent the
application of the interdict in Canterbury diocese.¹³ Both documents show
that local ecclesiastical authorities were prepared to tolerate religious practices
that Innocent’s sentence did not technically ban, notably preaching, but they
also ‘point to divergent practices in different parts of the country’.¹⁴ Another
source, the Dunstable annals, noted observance of the interdict, probably in
Lincoln diocese, in similar but not wholly identical terms to the ‘Canterbury’
document.¹⁵ In particular, the issue of closing churches to laity was variously
interpreted. The ‘Forma interdicti’ held that no layman might enter church
even for private prayer, except a powerful one who was not excommunicated,
devoutly sought admittance, and could not be refused without dire repercussions;
even then he might be admitted only to hear a sermon. But the ‘Canterbury’
document required that churches remain closed except on important feast days,
when they might be opened to parishioners and others for prayer; whereas the
Dunstable annals record that priests granted access to the altars to anyone wishing
to make offerings. These sources also differed on provision for infant baptism
and on whether priests might distribute holy water and panis benedictus. In
addition a letter of Peter of Blois described, at the Bishop of Salisbury’s request,
arrangements in London diocese for Candlemas and Ash Wednesday during the
interdict. These had to be devised by the dean and chapter in the Bishop of
London’s absence; he was one of the interdict’s executors who had fled into exile
soon after promulgating it, and Peter had to write at the chapter’s behest in 1209
seeking his advice on other observances.¹⁶
Hence at the beginning of the thirteenth century the terms of an interdict
were, apart from the usual exception of infant baptism and penance of the dying,
largely ad hoc and a matter of local custom. Admittedly Innocent III issued
advice on request in specific cases, but it was not immediately clear whether
these rulings were intended to apply generally. For example Peter of Blois’ letter
to the Bishop of London had to ask whether the interdict might be mitigated
in his diocese in accordance with Innocent’s letter to the Bishop of Paris that

¹² Martène and Durand, i.812–13; these eighteenth-century editors used the text in a manuscript
then at Mont St Michel, now Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale MS 149, fol. 109rb–va (identified
by Cheney, ‘Collections’, 466). On its possible authors: Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 298; Parker, ‘Terms’,
259–60.
¹³ Gervase, II, pp. xcii–xciii. It is found in a collection of documents about the disputed
Canterbury election that occasioned the interdict, probably compiled by a monk of the cathedral
priory contemporary with its chronicler Gervase (Ibid., p. xvi).
¹⁴ Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 298; cf. Parker, ‘Terms’. ¹⁵ Annales, iii.30 (A. 1208).
¹⁶ Peter of Blois, 110 (Letter 20, to Bishop of Salisbury), 118–21 (Letter 24, to Bishop of
London).
 Divine Offices 133

had relaxed the terms of the papal interdict on France. Nevertheless from the
mid- to late twelfth century canonists increasingly collected such rulings in papal
decretals as a new source of canon law. In 1210 Innocent approved a collection of
his decretals for use in courts and schools, and this included some of his rulings
on the terms of interdicts.¹⁷ It marked the start of a common law of interdicts,
and as decretal law evolved during the thirteenth century, regulation of interdicts
grew with it. This process of gradual legal clarification and codification regarding
interdicts was largely completed by Boniface VIII’s Liber sextus (1298).
Canonistic literature also proliferated alongside this growing body of decretal
law in the thirteenth century, supplementing and complementing it. A close
symbiotic relationship developed between the two, not found as markedly in any
other period of canon law. Notably the Liber sextus confirmed many traditional
canonistic teachings on the interdict, although these in turn may have been
describing customary practices. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to trace
the evolution of the interdict’s terms from the customary practices of the early
thirteenth century to the fully articulated and systematic definition that existed
in law and legal doctrine a century later. The lines of development are not always
clear, however, and the evidence of practice that emerges from the thirteenth-
century papal registers and other sources is patchy. Hence it is not possible to
do more than assemble a few illuminating scraps of detail at certain points. The
evidence is organized under three main headings, each concerning a broad area of
religious observance: divine offices and other non-sacramental liturgical practices;
the sacraments, namely baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, marriage, holy orders,
penance, and extreme unction; and ecclesiastical burial.

4.1 DIVINE OFFICES

By the late twelfth century local interdicts forbade celebration of divine offices
in the churches affected; it was likewise understood that those under personal
interdict were denied participation in the offices.¹⁸ Offices are church services
and so include mass, wedding, and funeral services. Innocent IV even suggested
that an interdict affected all liturgical rites that only the ordained might perform,
and ecclesiastical authorities and canonists certainly recognized by the early
thirteenth century that it might have broad implications.¹⁹ Before we consider
these in detail, it must be pointed out that positive evidence of the offices
ceasing during interdicts is generally hard to find; the violation of an interdict

¹⁷ E.g. 3 Comp. 5.21.16 (= X 5.39.43).

¹⁸ Alexander III’s decretal ‘Ex rescripto’ contains one of the earliest express statements of the ban
on offices under interdicts (1 Comp. 2.17.6; = X 2.24.9).
¹⁹ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. violavit; cf. Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §§2 and
60–1.
134 The Terms of an Interdict

was usually thought more worthy of comment than its observance. The English
interdict is a case in point. Cheney found only a few contemporary references
to closed and silent churches that the faithful surely faced everywhere. The
chronicler Geoffrey of Coldingham mourned the bareness and desolation of the
altars in his own Durham diocese; the ‘Forma interdicti’ had indeed required
altars to be stripped.²⁰ He went on to lament the silence that had descended
on churches as a result of cessation of sung services and bell-ringing. In nearby
York diocese the Cistercian Matthew of Rievaulx evoked the same scenario in
dark moralizing terms, for he saw the interdict as divine retribution for sins
against the English Church, in particular appointment of unworthy candidates
to ecclesiastical offices: ‘And this apostacy is the principal and definite reason why
the voice of the turtle-dove, Mother Church, is not heard in our land. Mainly on
this account has the Lord of Hosts stopped the mouths of those celebrating him,
and abandoned us in derision and hissing, so that people and priest lack rites and
masses.’ A less colourful allusion to the absence of offices was the comment of the
Tewkesbury annalist that, after the interdict was relaxed, services were resumed
on 5 July 1214, which implies that they had been suspended.²¹
Scanty as the evidence is, it would seem that the interdict disrupted the
normal round of services in English churches. But the general ban on church
services was not meant to be total. When Innocent III said that the privileges
of English clergy did not free them from observing the sentence, its bishop-
executors apparently interpreted his instructions more strictly than he intended,
since he later expressed regret that monks had not been allowed to enjoy their
freedom to celebrate the offices in private, and, as already mentioned, he extended
this freedom to all conventual churches in early 1209. In fact papal grants of
this freedom to monastic orders and specific houses, churches, other religious
institutions, and prelates were already commonplace by the late twelfth century,
so much so that Compilatio tertia included a decretal interpreting their terms
from the first year of Innocent’s pontificate.²² By then the papal chancery had
strictly formulated such terms: recipients of such grants might celebrate divine
offices in their churches during a general local interdict in a low voice, behind
closed doors, with the excommunicated and those under interdict excluded, and
no bells being rung.²³ Such conditions were obvious precautions against violation
of the interdict. Bells normally summoned the laity to worship, and sung masses
might be heard even outside closed churches, while locked doors were necessary

²⁰ Historiae Dunelmensis, 25; Martène and Durand, i.813.

²¹ Wilmart, ‘Mélanges’, 83; Annales, i.61.
²² 3 Comp. 5.23.1 (= X 5.40.17); Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 551.
²³ So many of these grants are recorded in the thirteenth-century papal registers that it would be
tedious to list them all, but an illustrative selection is found in Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 287, 549;
2, nos. 7, 31, 71, 92, 102; 5, no. 9; 6, nos. 88, 115, 118, 206; 7, nos. 30, 95, 149, 185; 9, nos. 67,
242; 10, nos. 33, 59, 192, 205; 11, nos. 61, 92, 111, 141, 145, 193, 214, 217; 12, nos. 9, 10, 21,
166, 169; 13, nos. 11, 31, 81; 14, nos. 24, 62, 106; 15, nos. 16, 79, 126, 143, 234; 16, no. 146.
 Divine Offices 135

to prevent laity not only entering church but also seeing the services within,
in which they were largely passive spectators even at normal times.²⁴ Indeed
when some regular canons of Le Mans claimed that custom allowed them to
celebrate in a loud voice with bells ringing during a general interdict, Innocent III
quashed this custom as damaging to ecclesiastical discipline in a decretal of 1206,
conceding the canons the freedom to celebrate under the normal circumspect
conditions.²⁵ Sometimes a further reasonable qualification was placed on such
grants: they might not be enjoyed by those who had caused the interdict or who
were interdicted by name.²⁶ In a few instances the freedom to celebrate services
in private was limited to a certain interdict as in the English case, or interdicts
caused by a certain lay power, notably the local lord.²⁷ Initially this freedom
mainly featured in grants of exemption or papal protection to monastic, notably
Cistercian, houses, but at the Fourth Lateran Council Innocent III extended it to
all bishops under the normal conditions, including disqualification of those who
caused the interdict even through fraud.²⁸ And grants of this freedom to regular
clergy grew until 1298, when Boniface VIII ruled that masses and other divine
offices might be held daily in all churches and monasteries in private during
general local interdicts. He even required clergy to attend such services on pain
of the loss of their daily allowances in churches where they were distributed.²⁹
He was determined to maintain such observances, for, as the preamble to his
ruling explained, infinite spiritual dangers might arise from the privations of
the interdict. Nevertheless he was also concerned not to undermine ecclesiastical
discipline; in another ruling he added that those who gave any cause for an
interdict might not enjoy this freedom to celebrate or hear offices during it, and
clergy free to hold services behind closed doors might not admit others from
outside their church unless they shared this freedom.³⁰
And such freedoms were not always restricted to the clergy. In 1205 Innocent
III had confirmed that monks of exempt Cluniac houses might admit their
servants to their services held behind closed doors during interdicts. This
arrangement was also permitted in some other religious houses, and certain
bishops might likewise celebrate the offices in the presence of their household.
Occasionally the papacy allowed other favoured members of the laity to attend

²⁴ The need for such conditions was understood by Vincentius Hispanus on X 5.38.11 v. voce,
Paris, BN, MS lat. 3967, fol. 202va: ‘Patet quod non licet excommunicato extra ecclesiam stare
prope cum celebrantur divina, cum et omnes prohibeantur audire exterius in interdicto, ut hic
colligitur, et plenius in integra ubi dicebatur voce ita dimissa quod exterius non possint audiri.’ On
the ban on bell-ringing: Guido de Baysio, Lectura on VI 5.11.24 v. non pulsatis (fol. 126ra).
²⁵ 3 Comp. 1.3.4 (= X 1.4.5); Innocent III, Reg. 8, no. 212.
²⁶ E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 287; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1992, 3113, 3910, 6129, 6131;
Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1194, 2469, 4706; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 23, 5176; etc.
²⁷ E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 14, no. 24; 15, nos. 126, 143; etc.
²⁸ Lat. Conc. IV c.58 (= 4 Comp. 5.12.8; X 5.33.25).
²⁹ VI 5.11.24. On the origin of this ruling see my ‘Two Constitutions’, 120–1, 126.
³⁰ VI 5.7.11.
136 The Terms of an Interdict

such ‘private’ services. In 1212 Innocent III conceded that if the Archbishop
of Bourges interdicted a certain church subject to the abbey of Dol, chaplains
presented to the church by the abbey might still hold services there behind
closed doors and admit their servants, the poor, and sick.³¹ The devotion of
laity doing pious works was similarly rewarded. According to his biographer
Innocent III let prelates hold private services during the French interdict (1200)
for crusaders who had asked him for this freedom.³² The laity who composed
the third orders of the Humiliati, Franciscans, and Dominicans also obtained
freedoms to take part in offices behind closed doors like regular members of these
movements.³³ Unordained members of religious institutions, such as nuns and
sometimes brethren of leper hospitals, might also be allowed to have the offices
celebrated for them.³⁴
However, these extensions of clerical freedoms were unusual and a subject
of controversy among canonists. Johannes Teutonicus even doubted whether a
cathedral chapter might join their bishop in celebrating offices behind closed
doors, and he was concerned that broad interpretation of such freedoms might
result in interdicts being violated.³⁵ His concern was widely shared. After friars
had admitted scholars to their churches in interdicted Avignon, mid-thirteenth-
century canonist Pierre Sampsona saw this as an abuse of their freedom to hold
services behind closed doors. In his view only those given this freedom might
enjoy it; otherwise ecclesiastical discipline would be scorned.³⁶ Nevertheless

³¹ Cluniacs: Innocent III, Reg. 7, no. 185. Dol: id. Reg. 15, no. 126; cf. Reg. Gregory IX, no.
4706.
³² Gesta c.84 (PL 214.cxxxv–cxxxvi).
³³ Humiliati: Reg. Innocent IV, no. 2193. Most of these grants were localized: Reg. Honorius
III, no. 5740; Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 714; 1310; Reg. Urban IV, nos. 749, 1906; Reg. Honorius
IV, no. 886. Likewise by 1285 Franciscans could admit their servants, proctors, and craftsmen to
such offices (Reg. Honorius IV, no. 203).
³⁴ For nuns: Reg. Honorius III, no. 6131; Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1194; Reg. Innocent IV, no.
5176; Reg. Urban IV, no. 749; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 243, 869, 7502. For members of hospitals:
Reg. Clement IV, no. 1626; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 2098, 3738, 4566.
³⁵ Johannes Teutonicus on 4 Comp. 5.12.8 v. quandoque, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 314vb:
‘Numquid canonici tunc poterunt interesse? Non, ne per hoc vilescat rigor, ut supra. c. prox. [4
Comp. 5.12.7].’ Vincentius Hispanus and Damasus agreed, on Lat. Conc. IV c.58 v. celebrare
divina, that not all canons might join the bishop but only those he invited (Constitutiones, 371, 453).
Vincentius modified his view on X 5.33.25 v. possint, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 135rb: ‘Item
queritur an canonici sui tunc [fol. 135va] possunt cum eo ibi interesse. Dixit Io. quod non … Dixit
<Bernadus> Compos <tellanus> quod possunt quasi de familia, et satis credo quia pars corporis
eius sunt, supra viii. q.i. Verum [C.8 q.1 c.22].’
³⁶ Bernard de Montemirat on X 5.33.25, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2542, fol. 80rb (Ed. fol. 144vb):
‘Nunquid canonici cum episcopo possunt interesse? Sic audivi magistrum meum [Sampsona]
determinantem in questione facti satis isti simili: ecce quod Avinione civitas fuit supposita interdicto,
habent minores et predicatores privilegium quod possunt tempore interdicti celebrare divina,
interdictis et excommunicatis exclusis, veniebant scholares ad eorum ecclesias et admittebantur ab
eis. Dicebat magister meus quod hoc fieri non deberet quia stricte erat interpretandum privilegium,
ne vilesceret rigor discipline … et ideo tantum ipsi predicatores celebrare debebant et alii admittendi
non erant.’ Copies of this gloss in BAV, Borgh. lat. MSS 231 (fol. 129vb) and 260 (fol. 103rb),
have ‘P. de San.’ instead of ‘magistrum meum’, and ‘magister P.’ instead of ‘magister meus’.
 Divine Offices 137

Innocent IV taught that bishops and other individuals who secured this freedom
might admit their servants, at least clerical ones, to participate in their services,
but a convent might not do so, unless this freedom was extended to its servants
expressly; and as pope he made express grants of this kind. His teaching was
confirmed as law by Boniface VIII in the Liber sextus. But this extension of
clerical freedom to laity was somewhat curtailed when a constitution of Clement
V prohibited Franciscans on pain of excommunication to admit members of
their third order to hear offices during interdicts, despite previous grants to the
contrary.³⁷
Nevertheless there were more significant exceptions to the exclusion of laity
from services. Since the early thirteenth century popes had increasingly granted
some lay dignitaries the freedom to hear divine offices in interdicted places. In
a handful of instances access was merely conceded to the offices of clergy who
were free to hold them.³⁸ But usually such grants allowed their recipients to have
offices celebrated by their chaplain. Often it was specified who might accompany
them at these services, in the case of male addressees normally their wife and
children, and sometimes members of their household or retinue.³⁹ In 1244
Innocent IV simply permitted Count Henry of Vienne to admit ten knights,
and another nobleman to be accompanied by two or three ‘honest persons’.⁴⁰ Of
course he taught that persons free to take part in offices during general interdicts
might admit their servants; presumably he meant royal and noble as well as
episcopal recipients of this freedom. Johannes Andreae understood as much
in c.1302 after this teaching became law, but Innocent’s successors continued
to specify companions in grants to lay dignitaries until then.⁴¹ Otherwise the
conditions of such grants were the same as those to religious houses: offices
were to be held behind shut doors, etc.; and, according to some grants, only if
the recipient and their companions had not caused the interdict and were not
interdicted by name.⁴² Sometimes the terms were even more specific. In 1232
Gregory IX gave one noblewoman freedom to hear services in her dowry lands if
her husband’s land was interdicted.⁴³ In 1217 another noblewoman had gained a
similar grant from Honorius III alleging that her husband’s land was interdicted
by no fault of hers. Other grants were also explicitly designed to spare innocent

³⁷ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.33.25 v. et interdictis; cf. Reg. Innocent IV, no. 7557. Boniface
VIII: VI 5.7.11. Clement V: Clem. 5.10.3.
³⁸ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 852; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 4005, 6452, 6458; cf. grant in n. 32.
³⁹ Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1241, 4504 (prince with army), 5854; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 3919,
4277; etc.
⁴⁰ Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 407, 598; cf. ibid. nos. 405, 5956, 6435.
⁴¹ E.g. Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 177, 429, 1849; Reg. Urban IV, no. 2665; Reg. Gregory X, no.
148, etc. Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.7.11 v. persone.
⁴² E.g. Reg. Gregory IV, no. 3919; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 5956, 6435; Reg. Alexander IV, no.
177, etc.
⁴³ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 989; Reg. Honorius III, no. 314; cf. Reg. Urban IV, no. 2665, grant to
a widow in lands interdicted because of the Hohenstaufen.
138 The Terms of an Interdict

parties. After the papacy interdicted Sicily to punish the expulsion of its papally
approved Angevin rulers, Boniface VIII granted members of the dynasty and its
supporters seeking to reconquer the island in 1302 the freedom to have offices
celebrated there. These and other grants were also meant to reward lay service to
the Church, notably crusading. Innocent III’s grant to crusaders in interdicted
France has been noted; in 1238 Gregory IX likewise gave the crucesignatus
Richard of Cornwall freedom to hear offices in interdicted places on his land
with his wife and son.⁴⁴
Such grants often allowed lay dignitaries to hear offices only in their chapels,
but some also allowed them to do so in any interdicted place where they happened
to arrive.⁴⁵ Indeed royal and noble households were often mobile, and Nicholas
IV even made this concession to Queen Elizabeth of the Romans together with
a grant for her chaplain to celebrate offices at a portable altar if necessary.⁴⁶ No
such concessions to monastic houses are known, but religious were not usually
meant to leave the cloister. But interdicts could be mobile. When the king of
Portugal came under an ambulatory interdict in 1238, Gregory IX permitted
friars and other exempt religious to celebrate offices behind closed doors in any
town of the kingdom where he was present.⁴⁷ It is unclear whether this was
an exceptional grant, but some clergy secured the freedom to celebrate in any
interdicted places where they arrived. As missionaries and preachers friars often
travelled outside their convents, hence Franciscans obtained this freedom from
Innocent IV in 1246.⁴⁸ By the mid-thirteenth century these grants were usually
made to clergy on papal missions, notably legates and those preaching crusades.
The Archbishop of Tyre enjoyed such a grant whilst preaching the cross in
France in 1263, and in 1265 he was further authorized to admit crusaders and
those intending to take the cross to services behind closed doors in interdicted
places.⁴⁹
Such a concession was intended to reward and encourage acts of lay devotion,
especially necessary when interdicts removed the usual stimuli to piety. This
freedom to admit laity to churches in interdicted places was indeed most often
granted to those seeking lay charity. By the late twelfth century the papacy
permitted Hospitallers and Templars to open a church once a year on reaching
an interdicted place. This applied especially to brethren sent to collect alms,

⁴⁴ Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 4620, 4691. Reg. Gregory IX, no. 4277; cf. ibid. nos. 1627, 2565;
see above, n. 32.
⁴⁵ E.g. Reg. Honorius III, nos. 1483, 3314; Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 1627, 2125–6; Reg. Innocent
IV, no. 3184; Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 826–7; Reg. Urban IV, no. 2184 (bishop), etc.
⁴⁶ Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 3490 (altar), 3491. See n. 59 on concession of portable altars to
bishops.
⁴⁷ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 4247; cf. Reg. Urban IV, no. 749, discussed on p. 140 below.
⁴⁸ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 1959. On other mendicant freedoms during interdicts see n. 33.
⁴⁹ Reg. Urban IV, no. 385; Reg. Clement IV, nos. 1571–2. Cf. ibid. no. 321; Reg. Gregory X,
nos. 522, 524; Reg. Nicholas III, no. 292; Reg. Martin IV, no. 472 et seq.; Reg. Honorius IV, no.
796; Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 793 (nuncio), 798, 1615, 3369, etc.
 Divine Offices 139

and similar freedoms were conferred in the thirteenth century on those raising
funds for their hospitals, and even on one occasion those soliciting contributions
to a church’s fabric fund.⁵⁰ In the latter grant from 1253 it was specified that
churches might be opened in interdicted places and services held there so that the
faithful might become more devout and hear sermons exhorting them to offer
alms. These grants normally excluded excommunicates and those interdicted
nominatim, but otherwise the laity might attend such ‘open’ services.⁵¹ The
charitable work of lay confraternities might win similar papal recognition.
In 1255 members of a Milanese confraternity who contributed to paupers’
funeral expenses secured freedom to hear offices in their church behind closed
doors during a general interdict. But such direct grants to lay bodies were
very rare.⁵²
Perhaps less uncommon were grants allowing regular clergy to admit laity to
their services during general interdicts on certain feast days. In 1257 Alexander
IV permitted a nunnery in Genoa diocese to ring its bells and call people to hear
offices in its church on any feast of the Blessed Virgin during a general interdict.
In that year Dominicans of the shrine church of St Peter Martyr in Milan won
a similar freedom, to be enjoyed on the saint’s feast day and its vigil.⁵³ Indeed
Johannes Andreae implied that by 1298 many friars and other exempt clergy had
won grants to celebrate offices freely during interdicts on their special feast days,
even for up to a week afterwards.⁵⁴ In 1298, however, these and similar freedoms
of clergy and laity to participate in the offices during interdicts were largely
revoked by Boniface VIII’s constitution ‘Alma mater’.⁵⁵ It replaced them with
two general rights. One has already been noted, that allowing clergy to celebrate
offices. The other regarded lay access to these services: on the principal holy
days of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and Assumption churches might be opened
with bells ringing and those under interdict admitted to hear offices celebrated
solemnly in loud voices.⁵⁶ The usual conditions applied: excommunicates were
to be excluded and those occasioning the interdict might not approach the altar.
Boniface hence intended to mitigate the severity of the interdict for the innocent
while maintaining its force against the guilty. His motives for so doing will be
examined in the context of popular reactions to interdicts later, but contemporary

⁵⁰ Grant to military orders regulated in Lat. Conc. III c.9 (= 1 Comp. 5.28.3; X 5.33.3).
Hospitals: Reg. Honorius III, nos. 2993, 5829; Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 1553, 2037, 2373; Reg.
Nicholas IV, no. 842.
⁵¹ Cf. Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.33.24 v. excommunicatis. His grant was made to assist
the church of St Just, Lyon, to reward its clergy’s hospitality during the pope’s exile in Lyon (Reg.
Innocent IV, no. 6361).
⁵² Reg. Alexander IV, no. 774; cf. Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2565; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 104.
⁵³ Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 1664, 2195.
⁵⁴ Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.24 v. concessis.
⁵⁵ VI 5.11.24. As understood by Johannes Andreae in n. 54 and his Novelle on VI 5.11.24 v.
celebrent; cf. Guido de Baysio, Lectura on VI 5.11.24 v. non obstantibus (fol. 126rb).
⁵⁶ Guido de Baysio stated on VI 5.11.24 v. celebrentur (fol. 126r) that offices might be celebrated
from the vespers of the vigil until the vespers of the feast inclusive.
140 The Terms of an Interdict

canonists saw his ruling as a deserved amendment of the injustice of punishing

some for others’ sins.⁵⁷
It was promulgated in the Liber sextus, as well as circulating separately,⁵⁸ and
in the spirit of that compilation it established a common code of practice for
observing general interdicts. It superseded the freedom of the military orders
to open churches in interdicted places and most similar grants to groups and
persons. Albeit other rulings in the Liber sextus still recognized grants permitting
some individuals to hear offices with their households in general interdicts,
and one even let prelates celebrate them at portable altars in interdicted places
if churches were inaccessible.⁵⁹ Nevertheless while Boniface extended certain
freedoms during general interdicts to most clergy and laity, he also restricted
those freedoms. Papal grants of such freedoms had proliferated over the previous
century, and this was not the first papal attempt to regulate their growth. In 1263
Urban IV had noted that since his predecessor Alexander IV had interdicted
many places in Italy for supporting the papacy’s political opponents, many clergy
and laity had sought papal grants to celebrate these offices in such places.⁶⁰
Therefore Urban had revoked these grants, forbidding use of them on pain of
excommunication, so that the interdict might be observed more strictly. His
aim was to increase pressure on the interdicted communities to submit, but
his ruling did not have the desired effect and it concerned him that clergy in
such communities were denied the offices through others’ wickedness. He thus
backtracked, permitting clergy of collegiate churches and religious houses to
celebrate only before their conversi and visiting clerks; unordained religious such
as nuns and Humiliati might also have offices celebrated for them. Like Boniface
35 years later Urban replaced private freedoms with common rights, though only
in parts of Italy. More significantly he sought to strike a balance between coercing
the guilty and sparing the innocent, a basic problem in imposing an interdict
as a collective punishment, and one that the thirteenth-century papacy tried to
resolve in its ever closer definition of the terms of the interdict through general
legislation and specific grants, and nowhere more explicitly than in ‘Alma mater’.
By Innocent III’s time canonists had agreed that the ban on offices applied
especially to mass services and that these might be held during interdicts
only by those enjoying this freedom.⁶¹ But they also observed that some

⁵⁷ Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.24 v. appropinquent; cf. Johannes Monachus, Glossa,

ibid. (fol. 418vb).
⁵⁸ Po. 24523 (1 June 1298); Schmidt, ‘Frühe Anwendungen’, 123.
⁵⁹ VI 5.7.11 (households); VI 5.7.12 (portable altars), in effect an extension of the grant in n. 28.
⁶⁰ Reg. Urban IV, no. 749; cf. ibid. no. 2665.
⁶¹ Tancred on 1 Comp. 4.1.13 v. celebretis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 64vb: ‘Tali posito
interdicto, quero an, hostio clauso, populo non admisso, licet in ecclesiis divina celebrare? … missam
vero etiam secreto dicere non audent nisi sit eis concessum per privilegium, ut extra. iii. de ver.
si. Cum in partibus [3 Comp. 5.23.1].’ Likewise: Richardus Anglicus, ibid., BAV, Pal. lat. MS
696, fol. 77ra; Alanus, ibid., Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 64ra; Vincentius
 Divine Offices 141

other offices were excepted, notably canonical hours. Alanus taught that
during an interdict any clerk was free to recite the hours as a private devo-
tion even if interdicted himself.⁶² This reflected contemporary practice. When
Peter of Capua published the interdict on France in 1199, he allowed clergy to
say hours outside church provided that no laity might hear; this practice was also
tolerated under the English interdict, at least in Canterbury diocese.⁶³ Moreover
a decretal of Innocent III even allowed clergy to read the hours together in twos
and threes in conventual churches.⁶⁴ The same conditions applied as to grants
to celebrate offices during general local interdicts; namely the hours were not to
be sung but said behind closed doors with the excommunicated and interdicted
excluded and in a voice so low that nobody outside might hear. The decretal
appeared in Alanus’s collection with the Bishop of Paris as its addressee, and
it seems to be a response to his queries concerning observance of the French
interdict in 1200.⁶⁵ But it was not immediately understood to have general force.
Peter of Blois, Archdeacon of London, knew of it but asked his bishop in 1209
whether it applied in his diocese during the English interdict. And in 1213, after
King John admitted Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, Langton
allowed the hours to be sung during the interdict in a low voice in conventual
churches and even in parish churches by priests before their congregations,
regardless of Innocent III’s more restrictive concession.⁶⁶ Tellingly the latter
was not included in Compilatio tertia (1210). It appeared in Compilatio quarta
(1215), but canonists were slow to accept that collection; Tancred recognized
Innocent’s ruling but cited it from Alanus’s collection. Certainly canonists ac-
cepted its general force after its inclusion in the Liber extra.⁶⁷ They agreed that
hours might be said in churches by secular priests singly or conventual clerks
in pairs but others might not attend unless privileged to do so. Innocent IV
unusually claimed that in monastic churches the whole convent might say the

Hispanus on 1 Comp. 4.1.13 v. divina, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol. 39va; id. on 3
Comp. 1.4.1 v. suspenderant, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1378, fol. 5vb; etc.
⁶² Alanus on 1 Comp. 5.23.2 v. presumpserit, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879,
fol. 90va: ‘in modum enim privati suffragii dicere horas suas, quod etiam potest laicus, ut xxviii.
di. Presbiterum, xi. q. iii. Si quis episcopus in concilio [D.28 c.16; C.11 q.3 c.7].’ Cf. id. on Alan.
5.20.1 v. legere, Vercelli Cathedral Chapter MS 89, fol. 124va: ‘Non tamquam officiando <in>
ecclesia. Sic etiam clericus interdictus potest horas dicere, ar. xi. q. iii. Si quis episcopus in concilio.’
⁶³ France: Martène and Durand, iv.147. England: Gervase, II, pp. xcii–xciii (except when laity
present).
⁶⁴ Alan. 5.20.1 (= 4 Comp. 5.14.3; X 5.38.11).
⁶⁵ See von Heckel, ‘Gilbertus und Alanus’, 301–2; cf. Innocent III, Suppl. nos. 35–6.
⁶⁶ Peter of Blois, 120 (Letter 24); Wendover, Flores, ii.83–4.
⁶⁷ Tancred on 1 Comp. 4.1.13 v. celebretis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 65ra: ‘Tali posito
interdicto, quero an, hostio clauso, populo non admisso, licet in ecclesiis divina celebrare? Respondeo
non licet tamquam ecclesias officiando … sed tanquam privata suffragia singulariter possunt bini
binique, ut videantur potius legere quam cantare, ut extra. Alani. de penitentia et re. Quod
[Alan. 5.20.1].’ In his Lectura on X 5.38.11 v. et in conventualibus (vol. 2, fol. 101rb) Hostiensis
distinguished that during a general interdict a secular clerk might recite the hours with a colleague
in his room but alone in church.
142 The Terms of an Interdict

offices together for burials of its deceased members and the canonical hours.⁶⁸
Indeed in 1289 Nicholas IV gave a female convent in Mainz diocese freedom to
recite the hours together, but such a concession was exceptional.
Such private observances of clergy aside, the ban on offices generally affected
rites involving laity that only ordained clerks could perform. Notably priests
could not admit women to church during the French and English interdicts for
ritual purification after childbirth, known in England as churching.⁶⁹ Parish
clergy usually received new mothers at the church door, aspersed them with holy
water, and led them into mass with prayers and psalms of thanksgiving for God’s
gift of a child.⁷⁰ Innocent IV taught that such rites were offices and the function
of those in clerical orders and thus banned by an interdict. But alternative
arrangements that the sentence did not technically ban had been tolerated during
the French and English interdicts.⁷¹ In interdicted France priests were to advise
women that at times when they would have been churched they might pray
with their neighbours outside church, but they might not enter church, even
to act as godmothers at infant baptisms permitted during the interdict, until a
priest inducted them after it was lifted. In interdicted England mothers could
also observe churchings outside church, according to a Canterbury source, and
the Dunstable annalist said that they were done in church porches with gospel
reading, implying clerical involvement, but this perhaps only applied in his own
Lincoln diocese. Later practice is unclear, but according to Johannes Calderinus it
was customary by the mid-fourteenth century for mothers to confess their sins and
enter church offering thanks, provided that they were not interdicted by name and
did not cause the interdict, which indicates an even more relaxed arrangement.⁷²
Evidence for other minor observances reserved to the clergy is scant and rather
inconsistent, especially on the blessing of objects. Peter of Blois recorded in 1209
that under the English interdict the dean and chapter of London had banned
the blessing of candles at Candlemas but permitted the blessing of ashes on
Ash Wednesday.⁷³ Local ecclesiastical authorities clearly had to make their own
arrangements in the absence of general papal rulings on such points, but this
led to regional variations in practice. For example under the English interdict
clergy were not to bless bread or water according to the ‘Forma interdicti’, but
a Canterbury document stated that they might bless and distribute bread and
water in churchyards on Sundays, and the Dunstable annals said that this was
indeed done (at least in Lincoln diocese).⁷⁴ But when Peter of Capua had
promulgated the interdict on France, he forbade the use of holy water, even in

⁶⁸ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.38.11 v. horas; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 7502.
⁶⁹ Martène and Durand, i.813 (England); iv.147 (France).
⁷⁰ Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §89 (fol. 330va); Hamilton, Religion, 113.
⁷¹ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. violavit.
⁷² England: Gervase, II, p. xciii; Annales, iii.30. See n. 70 for Calderinus.
⁷³ Peter of Blois, 108 (Letter 20).
⁷⁴ Martène and Durand, i.813; Gervase, II, p. xciii; Annales, iii.30.
 Divine Offices 143

stoups outside churches, though he allowed the blessing of pilgrims’ staffs outside
church.⁷⁵ The inconsistencies of practice were reflected in the distinctions of
thirteenth-century canonists on this issue. Innocent IV argued that an interdict
did not forbid blessing of tables, as this was not reserved to the ordained, but
the opposite was true of blessing water, since only the ordained might do this;
Hostiensis and William Durand agreed.⁷⁶ Clearly this distinction was widely
understood by 1291 when Nicholas IV permitted two archbishops to bless
abbesses, nuns, chalices, altar cloths, and chrism during an interdict on Aragon.
By the mid-fourteenth century Johannes Calderinus understood that this ban on
blessings reserved to the ordained comprised the blessing of chalices, vestments,
palms on Palm Sunday, and candles at Candlemas as well as consecration of
churches and altars. But he felt that clergy might publicly and solemnly bless
water to asperse people on the four feasts when churches were opened during
interdicts.⁷⁷
Though it was not fully clear which offices the interdict banned, ecclesiastical
authorities generally encouraged secular clergy to continue with those pastoral
duties it was not thought to forbid, notably preaching. The legate who published
the interdict on France instructed priests to preach the word of God in
church porches on Sundays in place of mass.⁷⁸ This was intended to keep
alive a sense of community religion in the absence of the usual stimuli to
devotion. Likewise priests in interdicted England were expected to maintain
regular pastoral contact with their flock by calling them to hear a sermon in
the churchyard on Sundays and feast days. But in England preaching also had
another purpose. The ‘Forma interdicti’ sanctioned it as church propaganda,
to teach the laity to put their loyalty to God before that owed to man,
in other words to take the Church’s side in its dispute with King John;
after preaching clergy might also lead prayers for the peace of the Church
and Christ’s guidance of the king towards the will of God.⁷⁹ The aim
of an interdict was to turn the innocent against the guilty, and preaching
was to facilitate this. Innocent III likewise allowed preaching to bolster the
coercive aim of an interdict on Ferrara in 1209. Its bishop had asked whether
he might call excommunicates and those under interdict to church weekly
or monthly to preach God’s word to them and induce them to repent.⁸⁰
Innocent’s positive reply passed into canon law immediately; hence preaching

⁷⁵ Martène and Durand, iv.147.

⁷⁶ Innocent IV: as n. 71. Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.31.18 v. violavit (vol. 2, fol. 77ra); the views
of all three canonists, Durand included, are reported by John of Freiburg, Summa, III, xxxiii, q.255.
Aragon: Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 3979–80.
⁷⁷ Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §§91–2 (fol. 330va); he also taught that bishops
might not bless crowds when visiting interdicted places (§93). A German early-fourteenth-century
treatise on interdicts agreed that they banned blessings of water, of palms on Palm Sunday, candles
at Candlemas, and ashes on Ash Wednesday (Ludeco Cappel, Summarius, fol. 1v).
⁷⁸ Martène and Durand, iv.147. ⁷⁹ Martène and Durand, i.812–13.
⁸⁰ Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 267 (= 3 Comp. 5.21.16; X 5.39.43).
144 The Terms of an Interdict

became generally permitted during interdicts. In fact the military orders and
other religious doing missionary work and collecting alms had long held grants
to preach annually at churches in interdicted places.
Bible readings were naturally associated with sermons, but initially they were
not automatically tolerated along with preaching. The legate who permitted
preaching in interdicted France forbade clergy to read the New Testament aloud
to laity. During the English interdict the ‘Forma interdicti’ likewise approved
only private readings by clergy behind closed doors, but the Dunstable annals
alleged that Gospel readings took place at churchings and weddings in church
porches, at least in Lincoln diocese.⁸¹ The latter practice probably became the
norm, since Innocent IV taught that Innocent III’s toleration of preaching also
extended to public Bible readings by clergy, and this was generally accepted by
later thirteenth-century canonists.⁸²
Partly through such pastoral activity church authorities encouraged the usual
expressions of lay piety that interdicts did not technically forbid. During the
English interdict priests were to exhort parishioners to observe prayers and vigils
to make up for the loss of masses.⁸³ The sources for this interdict disagree on
whether laity might be admitted to church for prayer, but Hostiensis subsequently
taught that those under interdict might enter church to pray alone as long as
they had not caused the sentence and were not interdicted by name, and his
opinion was widely adopted by subsequent canonists.⁸⁴ Lay observance of the
church calendar had also been encouraged during the English interdict; priests
were to announce feast days and fasts and might set up a cross outside church
on Easter Sunday for the customary adoration of parishioners, a practice that
Johannes Calderinus considered widely tolerated during interdicts by the mid-
fourteenth century since no office was involved.⁸⁵ Furthermore pilgrimage could
still provide an outlet for popular religious feeling. Priests in interdicted France
were allowed to bless pilgrims’ staffs outside churches. And a Canterbury source
recorded that religious might admit pilgrims to their churches through a side
door for the sake of prayer in interdicted England; Cheney noted many examples
of pilgrims flocking to shrines and witnessing miracles there.⁸⁶ Indeed the papacy
sometimes rewarded the devotion of pilgrims and crusaders with the freedom

⁸¹ France: as n. 78. England: Martène and Durand, i.812; Annales, iii.30.

⁸² Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. violavit. Cf. Hermann de Minden, ‘De interdictis’,
§53 (fol. 346ra); John of Freiburg, Summa, III, xxxiii q.257; Petrus Bonetus, Lectura on X 5.31.18
v. violavit, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 193ra.
⁸³ Martène and Durand, i.812 (‘Forma interdicti’).
⁸⁴ Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.27 §1 (fol. 257vb). Cf. Monaldus, Summa, fol. 96rb; John of
Freiburg, Summa, III, xxxiii q.260; Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS
797, fol. 13va.
⁸⁵ Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §90. But, according to an early-fourteenth-century German
treatise, the office might be performed at the cross on Good Friday secretly and silently during
interdicts before the laity might approach it and make offerings (Ludeco Cappel, Summarius, fol.
3r). England: Martène and Durand, i.813; Gervase, II, p. xciii.
⁸⁶ Martène and Durand, i.147; Gervase, II, p. xcii; Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 316.
 Sacraments 145

to hear offices during interdicts, such as that granted by Gregory IX to those

visiting St Vincent’s shrine at Valencia.⁸⁷ The activity of lay confraternities was
likewise encouraged, and by the mid-fourteenth century Calderinus taught that
such bodies might sing litanies, rogations, and lauds to God and the Blessed
Virgin in church and publicly in interdicted places, which implies that popular
religious processions, which these associations held, were also tolerated.
The interdict’s ban on offices was prone to many exceptions and uncertainties
in the early thirteenth century. Clergy and laity increasingly requested papal
grants of freedom to celebrate or hear offices in general local interdicts; such
grants continued to proliferate until largely replaced by two general rights in 1298,
which allowed most clergy and laity some degree of participation in the offices.
The terms of the ban were left largely to local church authorities to determine,
until they were likewise clarified and codified by Innocent IV’s teaching that
interdicts forbade all functions reserved to holy orders. This definition became a
canonistic commonplace, and canonists applied it systematically when they came
to write treatises describing the terms of an interdict from the late thirteenth
century, notably Calderinus. In fact observances not reserved to clergy had
long been tolerated during interdicts before this definition so that some sense
of community religion was sustained. But these could hardly compensate for
the cessation of church services and most significant loss under interdicts: the
sacraments.

4 . 2 S AC R A M E N TS

4.2.1 Baptism
By the late twelfth century interdicts normally forbade administration and
reception of all the sacraments except infant baptism and penance of the dying.
Infant baptism had long been allowed under interdicts, for the church considered
it essential to salvation, as noted above. Indeed when the Archbishop of Naples
asked Innocent III whether children of its excommunicated and interdicted
citizens might be baptized, he replied in 1211 that baptism might not be refused
for their parent’s sins, since it was a sacrament of necessity.⁸⁸ Monaldus taught
in the 1270s that it could not be delayed by interdicts without imperiling a
child’s salvation. According to doctrine if a child died unbaptized, its soul went
into limbo, whereas the soul of a baptized child went straight to Heaven; hence
the church allowed even a lay person to baptize a newborn infant if it was in
danger of death. This was because baptism was said to cleanse a child’s soul
from original sin and confer membership of the Church. Probably because of

⁸⁷ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 4706. Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §82 (fol. 330ra).
⁸⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 14, no. 74; cf. n. 2.
146 The Terms of an Interdict

the latter, the Glossa Palatina suggested that those born in a community or place
under interdict were not bound by that sentence till after baptism; this further
explained why baptism was excepted.⁸⁹ Hence ecclesiastical authorities usually
made arrangements for infant baptism during interdicts by the late twelfth
century. When Peter of Capua ordered the closure of all churches in interdicted
France, he granted access only to laity bringing infants for baptism. During the
English interdict arrangements varied from one place to another. A Canterbury
source recorded that baptisms might be performed in church behind closed
doors in the usual manner but with no laity present except godparents; which
compares with the French practice. The Dunstable annalist, writing in Lincoln
diocese, also noted that priests baptized in churches. By contrast the ‘Forma
interdicti’ provided for infant baptism at home; a portable font could be brought
to parishioners’ houses for baptizing their children.⁹⁰
It was exceptional and controversial to forbid infant baptism during interdicts.
As early as 869, when Bishop Hincmar of Laon had attempted to do so, the
clergy of his diocese had protested to his uncle and metropolitan, Hincmar of
Reims, who lifted the ban and castigated his nephew. Even as late as 1286, when
the exception of infant baptism from an interdict was traditional doctrine, the
citizens of Liège complained to Honorius IV that their bishop had specifically
included infant baptism in his sentence on the city. In response a papal mandate
required that if this was true, the bishop was to relax his interdict; otherwise
this would be done by papal executors, since the pope felt that the loss of this
sacrament would result in spiritual dangers and offend God.⁹¹
Although infant baptism was usually allowed during interdicts, it was unclear
whether anointing of the baptized with chrism was allowed along with it before
1298. The latter was performed by parish priests, and fresh chrism had to be
consecrated for this purpose by local bishops and distributed to their clergy every
Maundy Thursday. The old chrism was then burned, for a text in the vulgate
recension of the Decretum had prohibited its usage in baptism.⁹² However, an
interdict forbade consecration of chrism, since Innocent IV taught that it banned
all functions reserved to holy orders, and this was already understood in England

⁸⁹ Monaldus, Summa, fol. 96ra; on baptism see Hamilton, Religion, 112, and Moorman, 83.
Glossa Palatina on C.24 q.3 c.1 v. in mortis periculo, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 658, fol. 71vb: ‘Sed
pone quod posset anathematizari familia sic pro peccato alicuius, vel civitas tota. Numquid erunt
excommunicati qui nascuntur? Sic, quam primo sunt baptizati, ante non. Pro hoc facit quia eadem
familia est, vii. q. i. Denique, ff. de iud. Proponebatur [C.7 q.1 c.9; Dig. 5.1.76]. Quidam tamen
dicunt quod qui nascuntur non sunt excommunicati.’ Cf. C.1 q.4 c.10.
⁹⁰ 90 France: Martène and Durand, iv.147. England: Gervase, II, pp. xcii–xciii; Annales, iii.30;
Martène and Durand, i.813. It was not uncommon even outside interdicts for newborn infants to
be baptized in an emergency at home by lay persons, usually the midwife or mother, lest the child
die and its soul enter limbo (Hamilton, Religion, 112–13; Moorman, 84); this may be the practice
tolerated by the ‘Forma interdicti’.
⁹¹ Howland, ‘Origins’, 439–40 (Laon); Reg. Honorius IV, no. 698.
⁹² De con. D.4 c.122; see Winroth, esp. chs. 2–4, on such additions to Gratian’s original
recension. Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.19 v. dubium non existit, explains this practice.
 Sacraments 147

by 1208. Shortly after the executors of Innocent III’s interdict had imposed it
there, they asked him how the baptized might be anointed if new chrism might
not be prepared during the interdict. He conceded that old chrism might be
used and, if necessary to prevent a shortage, mixed with oil by bishops or even
priests; hence the ‘Forma interdicti’ told English clergy to conduct baptisms
with chrism and all due solemnity.⁹³ But Innocent’s ruling did not pass into
canon law, and it is not known what provision was normally made for chrism
during subsequent interdicts, but as it was not essential to baptism, clergy might
have omitted it. Nevertheless Hostiensis argued that since baptism was permitted
during interdicts and it normally involved chrism, the latter should also be
tolerated. Subsequently in 1290 Nicholas IV allowed the Bishop of Barcelona
to consecrate chrism secretly and anoint the baptized in his diocese during
an interdict on Aragon, but such grants were apparently exceptional.⁹⁴ Finally
Boniface VIII ruled on this matter in his constitution ‘Quoniam’, which followed
Hostiensis by stating that chrism might be consecrated for use in baptism during
interdicts.⁹⁵ ‘Quoniam’ did not simply ratify canonistic doctrine but also marked
a significant departure by allowing adult baptism during interdicts. In the 1270s
Monaldus had accepted that baptism might be excepted from interdicts only for
infants, for adults did not risk damnation through lack of the sacrament and
might be saved by faith. Adult baptism was normally required only by converts,
for children of Catholic parents were usually baptized on the day of their birth
or shortly thereafter.

4.2.2 Confirmation
The baptized received this in order to complete their initiation into the faith.
According to doctrine those lacking it might not attain full membership of the
Church nor receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It was normally performed by
the local bishop and involved marking the sign of the cross with chrism on the
foreheads of candidates.⁹⁶ Owing to its close association with baptism it was
permitted along with the latter during interdicts by the early thirteenth century.

⁹³ Papal concession: SLI, no. 36 (= Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 92); cf. Gervase, II, pp. xcii–xciii.
Martène and Durand, i.813 (‘Forma’).
⁹⁴ Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.39.57 v. non negatur (vol. 2, fol. 123ra). Reg. Nicholas IV, no.
2943.
⁹⁵ VI 5.11.19; Johannes Andreae recognized in his Glossa on VI 5.11.19 v. quoniam that this
confirmed Hostiensis’s teaching. Monaldus, Summa, fol. 96ra; cf. John of Freiburg, Summa, III,
xxxiii, q.237.
⁹⁶ Laurentius Hispanus on 3 Comp. 5.21.16 v. confirmatione (Ed. p. 614): ‘Sine qua non est
plene christianus aliquis, ut de con. di. v. Omnes, si illam contemptu omittat, ut e. di. De hiis
in fine [De cons. D. 5 c.1, 3].’ This gloss was copied by most contemporary canonists, including
Johannes Galensis (Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 264ra), Johannes Teu-
tonicus (edited at http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/edit517.htm), Vincentius Hispanus (Bamberg
Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 20, fol. 179ra), and Tancred (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 277vb);
cf. Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.39.43 v. ad confirmationem (vol. 2, fol. 119rb); Guido de Baysio,
148 The Terms of an Interdict

In 1209 the Bishop of Ferrara asked Innocent III whether he might confirm
with chrism children baptized in his interdicted city, and Innocent’s affirmative
response quickly passed into canonical collections and thereby acquired general
force.⁹⁷ This ruling did not, however, address the issue of the supply of chrism
during an interdict, and, as we have seen above, this was not settled until 1298.
Hence in 1290 Nicholas IV had to grant the Bishop of Barcelona power to
consecrate chrism to confirm those baptized in his diocese during an interdict
on Aragon.⁹⁸ The constitution ‘Quoniam’ not only resolved this question but
also extended confirmation to adults as well as children, in line with its ruling
on baptism, though as early as c.1236 Vincentius Hispanus had assumed that
adolescents might be confirmed.⁹⁹ Nevertheless if Hamilton’s claim is correct
that most medieval laity were never confirmed, these concessions can only have
mattered to the devout.

4.2.3 Eucharist
However, few can have been unmoved by the loss of the Eucharist. Its consecration
was the high point of the mass, and laity came to mass largely to witness this
event even if they did not take Communion. In fact only those absolved of their
mortal sins might receive the sacrament. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council
required all laity to seek absolution and take Communion at least once a year
at Easter.¹⁰⁰ This was a very basic minimum, and it indicates how irregular
participation in the Eucharist then was. Indeed previously many laity only took
Communion at their final absolution on the point of death, as heavy penances
prescribed by the Church before the twelfth century discouraged most from
seeking absolution in their lifetime. By the late twelfth century absolution of the
dying was a traditional exception to the interdict, but it was unclear whether
the final Communion might be granted along with it during interdicts. When
Peter of Capua proclaimed the French interdict, he allowed priests to celebrate

Lectura on VI 5.11.19 v. confirmationem (fol. 124vb). On the scriptural basis for the sacrament:
Acts 2:1–4, 8:14–17.
⁹⁷ See n. 80.
⁹⁸ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 2943; cf. nos. 3879–80. Apparently an interdicted bishop might
not consecrate chrism or administer confirmation. Bernardus Compostellanus junior implied as
much in his glossa on Innocent IV’s Novelle at Coll. I 21 (= VI 5.11.4) v. periculosum (BAV,
Vat. lat. MS 1365, fol. 589vb): ‘in multis enim consistit officium episcoporum que necessitatem
inducunt, ex quorum dilatione pericula imminerent in crismatis confectione, sine quo baptismus
non fit, confirmatione pontificali, ordinum collatione … et que per alios prelatos inferiores fieri non
possunt.’
⁹⁹ VI 5.11.19; Vincentius on X 5.39.43 v. confirmationem, Paris, BN, MS lat. 3967, fol. 207rb:
‘[copies gloss of Laurentius as in n. 96 then] … Numquid tempore interdicti possunt adolescentes
confirmari? Sic, ar. illius c. de con. di. v. De hiis [De con. D.5 c.3], ubi dicitur quod baptismum et
confirmatio sunt connexa, et est iudicandum in eis. Vinc.’ See Hamilton, Religion, 113.
¹⁰⁰ Lat. Conc. IV c.21 (= 4 Comp. 5.14.2; X 5.38.12). See n. 139 on pre-twelfth-century
penance.
 Sacraments 149

mass alone weekly late on Friday mornings in order to consecrate the Eucharist
for the sick. Nevertheless the Bishop of Paris still sought reassurance from the
pope that the viaticum, the final Communion, might be administered. In 1200
Innocent III replied that as absolution was not refused to the dying, neither might
the viaticum, provided that they were truly penitent.¹⁰¹ This ruling was included
in Alanus’s decretal collection (c.1206), but it was not immediately applied to
Innocent’s interdict on England. In 1208, shortly after three English bishops
had proclaimed it, they asked Innocent III whether the viaticum might still
accompany absolution of the dying, but the pope’s reply was ambiguous. Hence
the ‘Forma interdicti’, which probably emanated from these bishop-executors,
discouraged clergy from administering the Eucharist to the penitent.¹⁰² But in
1209 the Archdeacon of London Peter of Blois urged his bishop, who was one of
these executors, to exploit Innocent’s ruling on the French interdict permitting
the viaticum. Finally in 1212 this bishop and the Bishop of Ely, another of the
executors, allowed priests to grant the viaticum to the truly penitent in extremis;
they were to obtain hosts from conventual churches where the pope had allowed
mass once a week in private since 1209.¹⁰³ Hence the arrangements were broadly
similar to those tolerated during the French interdict, as Peter of Blois would
have wished. But they were permitted by local ecclesiastical authorities; the pope
did not authorize the extension of his earlier ruling on the viaticum to England.
Significantly it was not included in Compilatio tertia, nor was it recognized
by contemporary canonists, except in an oblique gloss of Vincentius Hispanus,
observing that when divine offices alone were interdicted, mass might still be
celebrated and the Eucharist offered to the dying along with absolution.¹⁰⁴
Admittedly Innocent’s ruling was included in Compilatio quarta but canonists
were slow to accept this collection. Nevertheless a similar ruling entered other
contemporary decretal collections, where it was described as a canon of Alexander
III issued at the Council of Tours (1163). It proclaimed an interdict on the
lands of lords (castrenses) who attacked ecclesiastical property, but it excepted
Communion ‘timore mortis’ and allowed priests to celebrate mass alone once a
week behind closed doors in a nearby town in order to consecrate the host. But
Somerville doubts the historical authenticity of this text, observing that it was

¹⁰¹ Martène and Durand, iv.147 (France). Innocent III’s ruling was addressed to the Bishop of
Paris in Alan. 5.20.1 (= 4 Comp. 5.14.3; X 5.38.11); it echoes D.50 c.63 in its insistence that no
dying person might be denied the viaticum. It was so called since it sustained the dying on the way
(via) to Heaven.
¹⁰² SLI, no. 36, pp. 108–9 (= Reg. Innocent III 11, no. 92); cf. Gervase, II, p. xcii. Martène
and Durand, i.813 (‘Forma’).
¹⁰³ Peter of Blois, 120 (Letter 24). See Gervase, II, p. xcvii, on the papal concession of 1209
(solicited by Stephen Langton).
¹⁰⁴ Vincentius on 1 Comp. 4.1.10 v. celebrari, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol. 39rb:
‘Celebretur ergo missa, licet terra sit interdicta, ut per eucharistiam subveniatur morientibus, et
secundum hoc expone penitentias [in another hand :] idest, fructus penitentie, scilicet perceptione
eucharistie.’ It is unclear whether the addition was Vincentius’s or generally transmitted with this
gloss, since no other copy of his commentary is known to survive.
150 The Terms of an Interdict

transmitted only in collections much later than 1163, notably that of Alanus.¹⁰⁵
Indeed Alanus commented on this canon in his collection that it only had local
force, presumably in Tours province, and that its provision for the viaticum
was novel. His collection was nevertheless the likely source for its inclusion in
Compilatio secunda, a collection generally accepted in the schools and glossed by
several canonists, notably Laurentius Hispanus, who remarked on the exception
of the viaticum in this canon.¹⁰⁶ It was not included in the Liber extra, but it was
superseded there by ‘Permittimus’, a chapter that Gregory IX drew up specifically
for this collection commissioned by him. ‘Permittimus’ basically confirmed the
arrangements for the viaticum under the French interdict and in words similar to
those of the Tours canon, allowing clergy to celebrate mass once a week during
interdicts in order to consecrate the host for the dying.¹⁰⁷ In common with
grants to celebrate offices during interdicts, it required the celebrant to take the
precautions of saying mass in a low voice, behind closed doors, with no bells
ringing, and interdicted and excommunicated persons excluded. In addition the
Liber extra included Innocent III’s ruling on the French interdict, reinforcing
the principle of offering the viaticum. Hence it was generally recognized as a
regular exception to interdicts after 1234 along with infant baptism and penance
of the dying.¹⁰⁸ Indeed when the Bishop of Dax interdicted his city in 1243, he
authorized a priest from his cathedral to administer the viaticum as well as baptize
children and hear confessions of the sick. Moreover when the citizens of Liège
complained to Honorius IV in 1286 that their bishop had specifically prohibited
these three sacraments during his interdict on the city, the pope ordered the
sentence’s removal.
Otherwise interdicts generally excluded clergy and laity from participation in
the Eucharist. It was celebrated secretly and reserved for the dying in closed
churches. There were few exceptions to this general rule even amongst privileged
clergy. Early thirteenth-century canonists agreed that the freedom to celebrate
offices behind closed doors excluded the mass, and clerks might not even recite
it in secret during interdicts except where this was specifically conceded.¹⁰⁹
Admittedly Vincentius claimed that Templars and Hospitallers who were free to
open churches once a year in interdicted places might have mass celebrated there,

¹⁰⁵ Alan. 3.24.3 (= 2 Comp. 3.27.1). This so-called canon ten of the council of Tours (Mansi,
xxii.1179) is discussed by Somerville, 45–8, 50–1, esp. 45, where he calls it ‘a maverick canon’.
¹⁰⁶ Alanus on Alan. 3.24.3, Vercelli Cathedral Chapter MS 89, fols. 104vb–5ra: ‘sacramento.
Hoc locale est et fere quidquid dicit in hoc capitulum … [fol. 105ra] semel in hebdomada. Hoc est
novum.’ Tancred quoted Laurentius on 2 Comp. 3.27.1 v. communione, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377,
fol. 131ra: ‘Hic additur hoc tertium illis duobus permissis [infant baptism and penance of the dying]
que habes, supra. de spon. Non est vobis. lib. i. [1 Comp. 4.1.13] La.’
¹⁰⁷ X 5.39.57. On the need to consecrate fresh hosts every week, see Hostiensis, Lectura on X
5.39.57 v. ministris and v. semel (vol. 2, fol. 123ra).
¹⁰⁸ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 201; Reg. Honorius IV, no. 698. See pp. 218–25 below on the Dax
interdict.
¹⁰⁹ See n. 61.
 Sacraments 151

but only Tancred adopted this view among subsequent canonists.¹¹⁰ Nevertheless
by the mid-thirteenth century the papacy had granted the freedom to hold mass
in private and even receive the sacraments during interdicts to some clergy,
mainly friars. In 1267 Clement IV affirmed that Dominicans might hear mass
daily in their convents during interdicts behind closed doors, with no ringing
of bells, and all those outside their order excluded; he also conceded that they
might take Communion during interdicts, and Nicholas IV confirmed similar
freedoms to the Franciscans in 1288.¹¹¹
Laity might also receive such rare freedoms, notably as a reward for reli-
gious devotion. In 1225 Honorius III ordered all prelates in Italy to administer
sacraments to laity of the mendicant third orders during interdicts.¹¹² Johannes
Teutonicus had even suggested (c.1213–18) that pilgrims might receive the
Eucharist during interdicts. His view was adopted by several canonists, and a
treatise on interdicts added in 1301 that crusaders and those on long-distance
pilgrimages enjoyed such a freedom, but there is little evidence to support this
assertion and it was not a canonistic opinio communis.¹¹³ The only comparable
concessions were made by Gregory IX in 1235 to the knights of Jesus at Parma,
probably a crusader confraternity, and by Boniface VIII in 1299 when he allowed
the despatch of priests to interdicted Sicily to administer the sacraments to those
fighting a papal ‘crusade’ against the Aragonese occupation.¹¹⁴ But these were
exceptional grants, and the latter was largely meant to avoid the injustice of pun-
ishing the pope’s allies along with his enemies. Communion was generally denied
to healthy laity during interdicts. Even after Boniface VIII’s constitution ‘Alma
mater’ allowed lay participation in the offices during interdicts on the four main
annual feast days, the canonist Guido de Baysio observed that this did not extend
to the Eucharist. Likewise Guido’s pupil Johannes Andreae concluded that when
Boniface conceded absolution from sin for the healthy and infirm, the Eucharist
was not conceded along with it but reserved to the penitent in articulo mortis.¹¹⁵

¹¹⁰ Vincentius on 1 Comp. 5.28.7 v. in anno, Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol. 57rb:
‘qui primus de templariis venerit habebit ecclesie relaxationem, vel potius concedo quod non erit
relaxatio sed in ecclesia interdicta potest missa celebrari … et istud licitum est.’ Copied by Tancred
on 1 Comp 5.28.7 v. semel, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 93rb.
¹¹¹ Reg. Clement IV, nos. 509, 578; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 205; cf. ibid. nos. 71–2, 683
(Franciscan nuns), 4566 (leper hospital); Reg. Honorius IV, nos. 203–4.
¹¹² Reg. Honorius III, no. 5740; cf. Reg. Urban IV, nos. 2144, 2155, 2159.
¹¹³ Johannes on 3 Comp. 5.21.16 v. confirmationem (http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/
edit517.htm); copied by Tancred, ibid. (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 277vb), and Goffredus
de Trano on X 5.39.43 v. ad confirmationem (Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 157va).
Likewise Petrus Bonetus on X 5.38.11, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 167va: ‘Sed pone quidam vult
confiteri tempore interdicti et vult recipere eucharistiam, numquid potest? Dic quod non nisi vadat
ad aliquam peregrinationem, ut hic in dec. Quod in te.’ Cf. Johannes Andreae (attrib.), De modo,
BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 6rb (Ed. fol. 3r): ‘cum eisdem personis sanis non est tempore interdicti
huiusmodi eukaristia danda nisi crucem receperunt vel peregrinari debent ad partes longinquas.’
¹¹⁴ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2565; Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 3073; cf. n. 44.
¹¹⁵ Guido de Baysio, Lectura on VI 5.11.24 v. divinorum (fol. 126rb); Johannes Andreae, Glossa,
ibid. v. admittantur. Cf. id. Novella, ibid. v. divinorum. Cf. also n. 113.
152 The Terms of an Interdict

Although an interdict excluded the majority from receiving the host, it did
not technically prohibit people from seeing and revering the host, especially
when it was brought to the dying, at least according to Johannes Calderinus
in the fourteenth century. Admittedly thirteenth-century sources indicate that
ecclesiastical authorities had objected to the host being displayed publicly during
interdicts.¹¹⁶ Nevertheless use of panis benedictus was tolerated during some early
thirteenth-century interdicts in order to compensate for loss of the Eucharist.
This was traditionally bread set aside for mass but not consecrated. When Peter of
Capua published the French interdict, he permitted reception of panis benedicti
outside church on Easter morning. In interdicted England the practice varied.¹¹⁷
A Canterbury source allowed distribution of panis benedictus in churchyards on
Sundays, and the Dunstable annals noted that this was done in Lincoln diocese,
but the ‘Forma interdicti’ forbade its use. Canon law, however, never defined
observance on this point. Innocent IV taught that bread might be administered
as a viaticum during interdicts if a consecrated host were unavailable. But
apparently no canonist commented on its distribution to the healthy until the
fourteenth century. In 1301 a treatise attributed to Johannes Andreae opposed
‘customary’ use of panis benedictus instead of the host during interdicts; Andreae’s
pupil Johannes Calderinus agreed, observing that this bread was distributed on
Sundays in certain areas, notably France.¹¹⁸ In fact the custom of giving panis
benedictus had been dying out generally since the thirteenth century except in
parts of France, perhaps since church authorities preferred laity to receive the
Eucharist in accordance with the Fourth Lateran ruling.¹¹⁹

4.2.4 Marriage
The Eucharist might be celebrated only by priests and thus came under Innocent
IV’s definition of an interdict as a ban on offices performed by the ordained;
this was not true of the sacrament of marriage. According to doctrine this
sacrament was performed by the couple alone through the free exchange of
consent; canon law did not require this to be done in church before a priest.
Hence according to Innocent IV’s definition an interdict did not technically
impede marriage, and indeed Innocent argued that marriage might be contracted
by those under an interdict, for it was even canonical between infidels.¹²⁰
There were clearly also moral and practical reasons to allow marriages during

¹¹⁶ Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 2 §§3–4 (fol. 331va). On earlier objections see p. 190 below.
¹¹⁷ France: Martène and Durand, iv.147. England: see n. 74. See also Hamilton, Religion, 116.
¹¹⁸ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.38.11 v. viaticum; Johannes Andreae (attrib.), De modo (Ed.
fol. 3v) and Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fols. 6va and 13va.
¹¹⁹ Hamilton, Religion, 116; see n. 100 for this ruling.
¹²⁰ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 4.1.11 v. officia. Hostiensis, Lectura on X 4.1.11 v. morientium
(vol. 2, fol. 4vb); the latter’s view was repeated by Petrus Bonetus, ibid., BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228,
fol. 134va.
 Sacraments 153

interdicts given clerical denunciation of sex outside marriage as sinful and its
issue as illegitimate. Nevertheless Hostiensis considered that even if interdicts
did not forbid marriage, they forbade its solemnization. After all this had to be
performed by a priest, for it comprised a blessing that he pronounced on the
couple knelt before him at the church porch after their exchange of vows and a
nuptial mass that he celebrated after leading the newly weds into church. These
teachings probably reflected customary practice. During the English interdict the
Dunstable annals record in 1208 that marriages took place in church porches,
at least in Lincoln diocese, albeit according to another source betrothals and
marriages could not be contracted.¹²¹ It is thought that weddings were held
in churchyards under the French interdict, though the legate who imposed
it did not expressly permit marriages.¹²² Certainly it appears that marriages
were not solemnized in interdicted France, since some couples had to travel
outside this territory for nuptial blessings. The chronicler Roger of Howden
recorded that in 1200 the dauphin Louis and Blanche of Castile were wedded
by the Archbishop of Bordeaux in Normandy then outside the kingdom ‘for
the kingdom of France was then under an interdict’; likewise the count of
Ponthieu had his marriage to the French king’s sister blessed at Rouen.¹²³ In
interdicted England the Dunstable annals simply noted that the Gospels were
read at weddings, a function not reserved to the ordained. Hence it seems
that interdicts suspended solemnization in practice. By the fourteenth century,
however, Johannes Calderinus noted a possible exception to this. He argued that
marriages might be solemnized at Assumption (15 August) since Boniface VIII
permitted laity to attend church services on this and three other feasts during
general local interdicts; solemnizations were not permitted on the other feasts
even outside an interdict.¹²⁴ Nevertheless Calderinus also argued that a priest
might not solemnize a marriage if one or both partners were under a personal
interdict, though he conceded that it might be done in non-interdicted places if
the bride alone were interdicted, not nominatim but simply by belonging to an
interdicted community.

4.2.5 Ordination
While marriage was not a sacrament in the Church’s gift and so not in its power
to withhold, ordination might be received only from ecclesiastical superiors,
normally the diocesan; hence it was more readily included under the interdict’s
ban on the sacraments. Vincentius Hispanus indeed doubted (c.1236) whether

¹²¹ Annales, iii.30 (A. 1208); Martène and Durand, i.813 (‘Forma’).
¹²² Krehbiel, 119, cites the view that in interdicted France ‘marriages were solemnized at graves
instead of altars’, but he found no proof of this, not even in the legatine ‘Forma’ (Martène and
Durand, iv.147).
¹²³ Howden, iv.115; Krehbiel, 119.
¹²⁴ Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 2 §§9–10, 18 (fols. 331vb, 332rb).
154 The Terms of an Interdict

bishops might ordain in interdicted lands and noted that Cistercians might
do so, which implied that others might not.¹²⁵ Innocent IV distinguished that
in interdicted lands laymen might not take holy orders but ordained clergy
might be promoted to higher orders provided that they were not personally
interdicted. In practice sentences of interdict did not ban ordination explicitly,
but equally papal grants sometimes allowed it during interdicts, suggesting that
it was normally refused at such times. Nicholas IV granted licences to confer
and receive ordination in interdicted lands, for example, allowing the monks of
San Salvatore, Messina, to be ordained by bishops authorized by him to confer
orders on friars in interdicted Sicily.¹²⁶ Other evidence of a ban on ordination
during an interdict is hard to find. One late example concerns a prior who asked
Boniface VIII in 1301 to dispense some of his monks from irregularity; since
they had been ordained during an interdict on their abbey in Burgos diocese.¹²⁷
Clergy who violated interdicts incurred irregularity; hence the prior evidently
understood that interdicts prohibited ordination. Canonistic theory was clearer
on this issue than practice. Johannes Calderinus argued that orders might not be
conferred on interdicted persons or in interdicted places. But he admitted two
exceptions to this rule.¹²⁸ Members of an interdicted people might be ordained
after monastic profession, since they thereby ceased to belong to that people.
And clergy might be promoted to higher orders not in interdicted places, as
Innocent IV had argued, but in places where the people were interdicted, since
the clergy there were not interdicted according to Boniface VIII’s constitution
‘Si sententia’.
In addition to ordination most aspiring clergy sought ecclesiastical offices
and benefices, and interdicts might also affect appointment to these. By 1199
Innocent III had accepted that interdicted persons might not elect to ecclesiastical
offices or obtain benefices, and he was ready to quash appointments that violated
this principle.¹²⁹ His decretal ‘Cum dilectus’ (1209), which recorded one
such intervention, quickly entered canon law and established the rule that no
interdicted person might be elected or elect to offices.¹³⁰ Canonists subsequently
agreed that such elections were invalid. Johannes Galensis and Tancred also
accepted Innocent’s view that interdicted persons could not obtain benefices,

¹²⁵ Vincentius on X 5.33.25 v. possint, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 135rb: ‘Sed numquid
<episcopus> potest ordinare illum qui ei concelebret? Hoc tempore Cisterciensi possunt ordines
ordines conferre.’
¹²⁶ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 4.1.11 v. officia; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 3847 (Messina),
3979–80 (faculty for the Archbishops of Tarragona and Barcelona to ordain).
¹²⁷ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 4112.
¹²⁸ Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §§36–7, Pt 2 §11 (fols. 327rb, 331vb).
¹²⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 2, nos. 30, 232. The first of these letters also entered canon law at 3
Comp. 1.6.1 (= X 1.6.16).
¹³⁰ 3 Comp. 1.3.7 (= X 1.4.8). E.g. Paulus Hungarus, Notabilium on 3 Comp. 1.3.7, BAV,
Borgh. lat. MS 261, fol. 80vb: ‘Cum &c …. Item suspensus nec eligere nec eligi potest.’ Cf. id. on
3 Comp. 1.6.1, fol. 81ra: ‘Cum inter &c …. Item electio facta a suspensis vel interdictis non valet.’
 Sacraments 155

but other canonists were apparently silent on this issue.¹³¹ However, several
canonists debated whether a bishop under ecclesiastical censure might collate to
benefices or prebends in his cathedral. Tancred concluded in the negative, and
his view was adopted by Goffredus de Trano and more significantly Bernard of
Parma.¹³² The thirteenth-century papal registers shed no light on actual practice
in these matters. Papal interventions in elections involving interdicted persons
have been noted above, but they were not always negative. The papacy was not
unaware that vacancies could disrupt the administration and pastoral direction of
dioceses and religious houses, and hence Innocent IV authorized some elections
contrary to ‘Cum dilectus’. One French abbey had lacked an abbot for so long
that he feared that ‘serious spiritual privations’ would arise; therefore in 1252 he
suspended all sentences on its monks and permitted them to elect a new abbot
in response to their ‘prayers’.¹³³
Canon law did not, however, forbid elections to church offices or collation of
benefices in interdicted places, where these did not involve interdicted persons.
True, Tancred observed that it was wrong to hold an election in an interdicted
church, and he cited Innocent III’s decretal ‘Cum inter’ (1199) that had quashed
such an election, but, as Johannes Calderinus pointed out over a century
later, the electors in this case also lay under ecclesiastical censure.¹³⁴ Indeed
Calderinus maintained that elections might be held in interdicted places, for
an election was akin to marriage and marriage was allowed in such places; he
was, of course, drawing on Innocent III’s metaphor of episcopal election as a
spiritual marriage between a bishop and his church. But except for Tancred
thirteenth-century canonists were silent on this issue, although it might be
inferred that Innocent IV’s approval of promotion to higher orders in interdicted

¹³¹ Johannes Galensis on 3 Comp. 1.6.1 v. a suspensis, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm
3879, fol. 158vb: ‘Quod excommunicatorum electio non teneat liquet ix. q. i. Nos in hominem,
infra. de hereticis. Vergentis [C.9 q.1 c.6; 3 Comp. 5.4.1] … similiter nec beneficii susceptio, supra.
de etate. Cum littere lib. ii [2 Comp. 1.8.5]. Idem hic in suspenso, scilicet quod nequit eligere.’
Tancred on 2 Comp. 1.8.5 v. suspensi, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 104vb: ‘Suspensi eligere non
possunt, ut ix. q. i. Nos in homine, infra. de elec. c.i. in fi. lib. iii [C.9 q.1 c.6; 3 Comp. 1.6.1], nec
potest eligi suspensus, ar. supra. de ap. Constitutus lib. i. infra. de elec. Per inquisitionem lib. iii
[3 Comp. 2.19.4, 1.6.11], et beneficia ecclesiastica sunt ei interim deneganda, ut infra. de appell.
Pastoralis in fi. lib. iii [3 Comp. 2.19.11].’
¹³² Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.3.7 v. suspensis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 153vb: ‘Suspensus non
potest eligere nec eligi ut hic … nec investire, ut infra. de concessione preben. non vaca. Quoniam
diversitate [3 Comp. 3.8.2]. Sed nonne iudicare et prebendas dare iurisdictionis est utique … et
excommunicare … Quidam dicunt quod episcopus suspensus potest excommunicare et prebendas
dare … alii dicunt et credo verius quod episcopus suspensus non potest excommunicare nec preben-
das dare … beneficium dare et habere posse competit ratione ordinis.’ Cf. Johannes Teutonicus,
who took the contrary view on 3 Comp. 1.3.7 v. suspensis (Ed. p. 29); this gloss was adapted by
Tancred. Goffredus de Trano, Lectura on X 1.4.8 v. a suspensis, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS
2197, fol. 6vb, and Bernard of Parma, ibid., base themselves on Tancred’s gloss.
¹³³ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 5865; cf. ibid. nos. 8160, 8172.
¹³⁴ Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.24.1 v. eligerent, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 184va: ‘Et male si
interdictum erat monasterium, ut supra. de electione c.i. supra. de consuetudine c. ult. lib. e. [3
Comp. 1.6.1, 1.3.7] t.’ Calderinus (attrib.), De censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 13r (Ed. p. 275).
156 The Terms of an Interdict

lands extended to elections to higher offices. Nevertheless Calderinus apparently

described customary practice. For example bishops were elected with papal
approval to vacant sees at Chichester, Exeter, Lichfield, and Lincoln during
the English interdict.¹³⁵ But they were not consecrated, and while it is true
that their archbishop Stephen Langton was exiled in France, it appears that
metropolitans could not consecrate suffragans in interdicted places. Indeed the
election quashed in Innocent III’s decretal ‘Cum inter’ was judged invalid partly
since it was confirmed and the elect was consecrated in an interdicted church.
After all consecration was a liturgical ceremony and hence clearly came under
the terms of the interdict. Consequently in 1220 Honorius III had to grant the
Archbishop of Cagliari a faculty to consecrate his suffragans despite an interdict
on his province.¹³⁶ This suggests that the thirteenth-century papacy tolerated
elections, if not consecrations, in interdicted places, but occasionally it inhibited
elections in local papal interdicts. In 1255 a letter of Alexander IV noted that his
predecessor Innocent IV had reserved appointments to churches in the kingdom
of Sicily when he laid it under interdict. Indeed the previous year Innocent
had provided a bishop to Tricarico there, quashing the election of another
candidate to the see by its cathedral chapter.¹³⁷ Such inhibitions apparently often
accompanied papal interdicts on places in Italy and might be removed along with
these sentences. In 1264 Urban IV gave his legate in Umbria a faculty to relax
all papal interdicts and inhibitions on elections within his legation, and Clement
IV granted a similar power to his legate in the kingdom of Sicily in 1266.¹³⁸
Otherwise an election was not technically prohibited during local interdicts,
since, as Calderinus observed, it was not a sacrament.

4.2.6 Penance
Marriage and ordination were necessary for Christians wishing to follow certain
paths in life, but they were not essential to salvation. According to doctrine the
sacrament of penance was, however, necessary to maintain the soul in a state
of grace. Before the twelfth century penance had to be performed in order to
obtain absolution from sin but the penances prescribed were generally so onerous
that many only sought absolution at their deathbed, when they feared that their
salvation might otherwise be imperilled.¹³⁹ Thus it was customary not to refuse
absolution to the dying even during interdicts. But in the twelfth century the
doctrine of penance was transformed; notably absolution might be granted before
penance was performed and the scale of penances was reduced encouraging more

¹³⁵ Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 309. ¹³⁶ Reg. Honorius III, no. 2622. Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 311.
¹³⁷ Reg. Alexander IV, no. 467; Reg. Innocent IV, nos. 8060, 8270.
¹³⁸ Reg. Urban IV, no. 635; Reg. Clement IV, no. 275.
¹³⁹ Hamilton, Penance, esp. 173–206, suggests, however, that penance was more widespread
among the laity in the period 900–1050 than is often supposed, especially among royalty and
nobility.
 Sacraments 157

frequent confession. By 1215 Catholics were required to confess their sins to

their parish priest at least once a year at Easter. Hence by the thirteenth century
ecclesiastical authorities had to make provision for healthy as well as dying
penitents during interdicts. The legate who promulgated the French interdict
let parish priests hear confession and enjoin penance for individual penitents
in church porches provided that others might not overhear. In 1209 Peter of
Blois, Archdeacon of London, noted a similar arrangement made by his dean
and chapter during the English interdict: penitents might confess their sins to a
priest in a suitable place of his choice outside church.¹⁴⁰ A Canterbury source
also stated that penance should be enjoined on both the healthy and sick during
this interdict. Pilgrimage was a popular penance, and it was encouraged during
the French and English interdicts as we have seen. Another important penitential
activity for the laity was crusading, and thirteenth-century popes even sanctioned
preaching of the cross in interdicted places.¹⁴¹
Official tolerance of confession and penitential works might console the living
and stimulate popular piety, but most early thirteenth-century canonists sug-
gested that only the dying might obtain absolution during interdicts. Admittedly
Innocent III had ruled that crusaders and pilgrims might also receive it during
the French interdict, but it was initially unclear whether the decretal in which this
ruling appeared had general force, as we have already noted.¹⁴² Indeed the only
contemporary canonist who drew attention to Innocent’s ruling was Johannes
Teutonicus, who had included this decretal in Compilatio quarta, although
Tancred later noted his remarks.¹⁴³ Any doubts about the decretal’s place in
canon law were settled by its inclusion in the Liber extra, after which canonists
generally recognized that pilgrims and crusaders might be absolved together
with the dying during interdicts. Moreover mid-thirteenth-century canonists,
notably Bernard of Parma and Hostiensis, largely copied the commentary of
Johannes Teutonicus on this ruling. He had explained that anyone setting out
on a pilgrimage or crusade had reason to fear death and hence shared the same
need for absolution as the dying.¹⁴⁴ But Bernard de Montmirat held that this

¹⁴⁰ Martène and Durand, iv.147 (France); Peter of Blois, 110 (Letter 24).
¹⁴¹ England: Gervase, II, pp. xcii–xciii; Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 316. France: n. 140. See also papal
grants in favour of crusaders and pilgrims at nn. 32, 44, 49, 87.
¹⁴² See p. 141. A pupil of French canonist Petrus Brito noted on 1 Comp. 4.1.9 v. penitentias,
Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9, fol. 59ra, that penance of the dying might not be
extended to the infirm: ‘Penitentia innotescenda est infirmis non imponenda, xxvi q.vii c.i [C.26
q.7 c.1].’
¹⁴³ See nn. 113 and 144.
¹⁴⁴ Johannes Teutonicus on 4 Comp. 5.14.3 v. penitentiam, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol.
315va; Vat. lat. MS 2509, fol. 266ra; Borgh. lat. MS 264, fol. 308vb: ‘Hoc est in eis speciale
ut sine necessitate vel periculo mortis admittantur ad penitentiam, set certe ibi necessitas est quia
non intelligo nisi cum proficiscuntur. Idem dico si aliqui proficiscuntur ad iustum bellum quia
ibi est iusta causa timoris’. Cf. Goffredus de Trano, Lectura on X 5.38.11 v. penitentia, Vienna,
Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 153rb; Bernard of Parma, ibid.; Hostiensis, Lectura, ibid. (vol. 2,
fol. 101rb).
158 The Terms of an Interdict

was only true of pilgrims travelling more than two leagues beyond their diocese,
presumably because the dangers of their journey were otherwise insufficient to
merit absolution.¹⁴⁵ Probably Innocent III had simply meant to reward the
highest popular forms of penitential activity. He conceded absolution from sins,
but not, as Johannes Teutonicus was careful to observe, from the interdict
itself, for only those who occasioned the sentence might seek its removal, not its
innocent sufferers.¹⁴⁶ In other words Innocent conceded absolution in foro interno
but not in foro externo. Bernard of Parma and Hostiensis further concluded that
since this concession was made specifically to crusaders and pilgrims (besides
the dying), it was understood to be denied to other healthy penitents during
interdicts. But this was a matter of canonistic controversy. Tancred had dared
to argue that absolution might be granted to both the healthy and dying during
interdicts, since it might be refused to nobody. This view was peculiar to him
until its adoption by Vincentius Hispanus and Goffredus de Trano.¹⁴⁷ After
Bernard and Hostiensis stated the contrary, the issue was still unresolved when
John of Freiburg surveyed this canonistic debate (c.1280–98). Nevertheless he
noted with approval the solution suggested by Hermann de Minden’s treatise
on interdicts: the healthy might confess all but venal sins, and their confessor
might enjoin penance, including the taking of the cross, but not offer them
absolution or prayers or otherwise act as a priest.¹⁴⁸ In other words priests might
act as spiritual counsellors only for most healthy penitents, as they did during
the English and French interdicts at the start of the century.
Indeed Hermann’s cautious advice probably reflected approved practice more
accurately than Tancred’s radical opinion by the late thirteenth century. In
addition to crusaders, pilgrims, and the dying the papacy offered few others
express permission to receive absolution in foro interno during interdicts; they

¹⁴⁵ Bernard de Montmirat, Lectura on X 5.38.11 v. peregrinis (Ed. fol. 147ra), BAV, Vat. lat. MS
2542, fol. 81rb: ‘Nunquid omnibus? Ita videtur cum indistincte loquatur hic. Sed quid, secundum
hoc, si vadat ad ecclesiam non remotam ultra duas leucas causa peregrinationis? Nunquid habebit
hoc privilegium? Dic quod non … posset et satis probabiliter dici quod sufficiat si peregrinatio ultra
duas dietas extra diocesim suam sit remota’. Johannes Andreae also doubted in his Novella on X
5.38.11 v. morientibus whether women close to childbirth were among the ‘dying’ who might obtain
absolution during interdicts, and he conceded that this was true only if they were in imminent
danger of death. An early-fourteenth-century German treatise also stated this view (Ludeco Cappel,
Summarius, fol. 1r).
¹⁴⁶ Johannes Teutonicus (continued from n. 144): ‘Sed quid si interdicta civitate aliqui vellent
satisfacere, numquid in eis relaxandum esset interdictum? Non, quia aliquis sine culpa sua interdici
potest, supra. de sponsal. Non est vobis [1 Comp. 4.1.13], <et> quia sic rigor ecclesie dissolveretur,
ut supra. de privil. Ut privilegia lib. e. [4 Comp. 5.12.7].’
¹⁴⁷ Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.38.11 v. cum postulaverint (vol. 2, fol. 101va). Bernard: as n. 144.
Tancred on 1 Comp. 4.1.13 v. morientium, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 64vb: ‘Et etiam vivorum
quoniam nulli deneganda est penitentia, infra. de penitentiis et re. Quod quidam, De pe. di. ult. c.
ultimo. [4 Comp. 5.14.3; De pen. D.6 c.6] t.’ Copied by Goffredus de Trano, Lectura on X 4.1.11
v. morientium, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 115vb; and Vincentius Hispanus, ibid.,
BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 104va.
¹⁴⁸ John of Freiburg, Summa, III, xxxiii, q.237–8, 245; Hermann de Minden, ‘De interdictis’,
§79 (fol. 346va); cf. Monaldus, Summa, fol. 96v.
 Sacraments 159

included the Dominicans by 1267 and Franciscans by 1288.¹⁴⁹ This implies, as

Hostiensis and Bernard assumed, that it was normally prohibited by an interdict.
However by 1298 Boniface VIII had enshrined Tancred’s view as law in the
Liber sextus, when he ruled that the sacrament of penance could be administered
to the healthy and infirm as well as the dying during an interdict.¹⁵⁰ Nevertheless
Boniface added that it was still to be refused to those who committed or supported
the wrong that caused the interdict until they gave satisfaction for this wrong or
adequate guarantee to do so. He thus adopted Johannes Teutonicus’s distinction
between absolution from sin and absolution from the sentence, in common with
the more conservative commentators, synthesizing and settling canonistic debate.

4.2.7 Extreme Unction

The priest who administered final absolution and communion to the dying
also usually conferred the last of the seven sacraments, extreme unction. This
ritual anointing was meant to signify the spiritual healing and forgiveness of the
dying and mirrored the use of chrism in baptism at the start of their lives.¹⁵¹
However, the consecration of the oil used in these rituals was understood to be
forbidden during interdicts by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Priests
were, therefore, instructed to withhold extreme unction in interdicted France
and England.¹⁵² During the French interdict Innocent III had even affirmed
in a decretal that it was prohibited for all by a general interdict, and although
canonists were slow to recognize this decretal, its place in canon law was assured
by 1234.¹⁵³ Papal concessions of extreme unction during an interdict to the
Dominicans in 1267 and the Franciscans by 1288 were rare exceptions to this
ban.¹⁵⁴ Even when Boniface VIII permitted consecration and use of chrism for
baptism during interdicts, he did not lift the ban on extreme unction.
Priests might still perform other last rites during interdicts. They were allowed
to commend departed souls to God in interdicted England, for example, provided
that it was done privately in the house where the deceased was laid out and
without a cross or holy water.¹⁵⁵ Innocent IV also taught that, after the final
absolution, priests might pray for the dying and accept mortuary payments
for attending on them in interdicted places.¹⁵⁶ Over a century later Johannes
Calderinus agreed in his treatise on interdicts that all these practices, including
commendation, were licit during interdicts. Another treatise attributed to him,

¹⁴⁹ Reg. Clement IV, no. 509; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 205.
¹⁵⁰ VI 5.11.24. On this distinction see Guido de Baysio, Lectura on VI 5.11.24 v. relaxatio (fol.
125vb–6ra).
¹⁵¹ Hamilton, Religion, 121; the scriptural basis for the sacrament is in James 5:14–15.
¹⁵² Martène and Durand, i.813 (England), iv.147 (France).
¹⁵³ X 5.38.11 (= 4 Comp. 5.14.3). Addressed to the Bishop of Paris in Alan. 5.20.1 (see n. 65).
¹⁵⁴ See n. 149. On Boniface VIII’s ruling see n. 95.
¹⁵⁵ Gervase, II, p. xciii; Martène and Durand, i.813.
¹⁵⁶ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. interdicti violationem.
160 The Terms of an Interdict

nevertheless, advised priests not to visit houses of the dead during interdicts for
the sake of aspersing their bodies and saying prayers at their vigil unless they had
caused the sentence and made amends before death.¹⁵⁷ Bartholomew of Pisa’s
Summa had indeed suggested (1338) that generally priests might hold vigils
during interdicts only for deceased clerks.¹⁵⁸
From birth till death an interdict thus inhibited participation in the sacraments
to some degree. The extent of the ban was, however, gradually reduced by the
papacy during the thirteenth century, and the course of this development is so
complex that it needs to be briefly summarized. By the end of the twelfth century
infant baptism and absolution of the dying were excepted from interdicts.
Marriage was also understood to be unaffected, but not its solemnization.
Innocent III then added further exceptions, notably confirmation of children in
1209. In 1200 he had also extended absolution to crusaders and pilgrims and
permitted the Eucharist for the dying in interdicted France, but these rulings
were not widely recognized as generally applicable until 1234, when Gregory IX
also established the arrangements for consecrating the host for the dying. Finally
in 1298 Boniface VIII mitigated the severity of the ban still further, allowing
baptism and confirmation also for adults, the use of chrism in baptism, and
absolution even of the living during interdicts. Ordination, extreme unction, and
the Eucharist for the living remained under the ban on the sacraments, however,
with few exceptions.

4 . 3 E C C L E S I A S T I C A L BU R I A L

In a decretal of 1200 Innocent III stated, as if a matter of accepted fact, that

a general interdict forbade ecclesiastical burial, meaning burial with religious
ceremony and in consecrated ground.¹⁵⁹ Though contemporary sentences rarely
specified this third and final main effect of an interdict, the perfunctory nature
of this papal statement implies that it was already widely understood. Those who
died excommunicate had long been denied ecclesiastical burial under canon law.
As early as the fifth century Pope Leo I had enunciated the principle that ‘we may
not communicate with those persons dead with whom we have not communicated
when they lived’; and this had been included in Gratian’s Decretum.¹⁶⁰ By 1031,

¹⁵⁷ Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §93, Pt 2 §7 (fols. 330va, 331va); id. (attrib.), De
censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 14va (Ed. p. 281). Likewise according to an early fourteenth-
century German treatise (Ludeco Cappel, Summarius, fol. 1r), priests or clergy might not attend the
homes of the dead to read vigils or burn incense over them.
¹⁵⁸ Quoted by Nicholas Plowe, ‘De interdicto’, fol. 334ra.
¹⁵⁹ X 5.38.11 (= Alan. 5.20.1; 4 Comp. 5.14.3). Burial was thus prohibited by the interdicts
recorded in Innocent III, Reg. 6, nos. 118, 148, 162; Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 143; etc.
¹⁶⁰ C.24 q.2 c.1. See also n. 177 on Innocent III’s invocation of this principle to regulate
churchyards.
 Ecclesiastical Burial 161

when an ecclesiastical council imposed a ‘public excommunication’ on Limoges

diocese, this rule might apply to whole communities. The main effect of the
conciliar sentence was that nobody might be buried in Limoges diocese or taken
outside it for burial except clerks, visiting pilgrims, and infants under two years
old.¹⁶¹ Refusal of decent burial apparently became a fixed feature of such collective
sentences once they were regularized and more often imposed as interdicts in the
twelfth century. It was perhaps the most feared effect of an interdict, distressing
not only to the dying but also to their family and friends. The same fate was
allotted to suicides and executed criminals as well as excommunicates and other
outcasts, hence denoting social shame and exclusion.¹⁶² By Innocent III’s time
canonists were hardly unaware of the psychological effect of denying proper
burial.¹⁶³ A pupil of the French canonist Petrus Brito noted that if a person died
with significant debts, his heirs might be ‘terrorized’ into settling them through
him being denied Christian burial ‘in hatred of the heirs’. Alanus Anglicus
similarly observed that when the sacrilegious refused to make amends at death
and so were denied ecclesiastical burial, they brought shame on their heirs, and
the sight of their bones being buried ‘in the fields’ might so affect the heirs that
they would endeavour to give satisfaction to those robbed by the deceased. The
refusal of ecclesiastical burial under an interdict was likewise intended to shame
the guilty into repentance and provoke the innocent into compelling them to
this end.
The ban on burial rarely meant no burial at all, as Alanus indicated in the case
of the sacrilegious, but usually no burial in the normal place with the customary
rites, i.e. ecclesiastical burial. The French interdict was unusually strict in this
respect for it prohibited burial of any sort. The legate who promulgated the
sentence forbade clergy to admit bodies to cemeteries to be buried or even left
on the ground; they had to warn laity that it was a grave sin and usurpation
of clerical office for them to bury the dead even in non-consecrated places.¹⁶⁴
This insistence on non-burial apparently met with compliance if the testimony
of the Gesta Innocentii III is to be believed: corpses were not buried in cemeteries
anywhere in interdicted France but left unburied everywhere, even lying on the
ground. Ralph of Coggleshall claimed that corpses were simply left to rot, posing
an offence to public health and popular sensibilities: ‘the stench of these corpses
infected the air, and the horrible sight of them struck terror into the hearts

¹⁶¹ Mansi, xix.541. ¹⁶² See Murray, Suicide, ii.16–17, 41–53, 467–71.
¹⁶³ Anon. on 1 Comp. 2.20.41 v. tradendum sepulture, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS
1407–09, fol. 29vb: ‘Quando debitum evidens est ita quod heredes cognoscunt et tamen negant
se solvere, locum habet quod hic dicit, et hoc in odium filiorum seu heredum, quando enim quis
punitur propter delictum alterius, xvii. q.iiii. Miror [C.17 q.4 c.8]. Negatur sepultura ad terrorem ut
de torneamentis’. Alanus on 1 Comp. 5.14.5 v. penitentiam, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek
Clm 3879, fol. 87vb: ‘sed negatur sollempnis persone reconciliatio ad verecundiam heredum … nam
cum viderint ossa eius per campos sepeliri, lesis studebunt satisfacere rubore confecti.’
¹⁶⁴ Martène and Durand, iv.147. Cf. Murray, Suicide, ii.16–17, 464–71, on ‘non-burial’ of
suicides.
162 The Terms of an Interdict

of the living.’¹⁶⁵ Chroniclers often wrote with a moral purpose, however, and
he perhaps intended this as a macabre warning to others to avoid an interdict.
Roger of Howden’s more sober account actually suggests that the ban on burial
was not total; he recorded that the dead were buried outside French towns
at the roadside.¹⁶⁶ The ecclesiastical authorities no doubt found it difficult to
enforce the ban rigidly. They could withhold funeral services, but people might
still make arrangements for the burial of their dead. In interdicted England
ecclesiastical authorities even encouraged this and apparently limited the ban
to ecclesiastical burial. According to the ‘Forma interdicti’ dead laity or clergy
might be buried outside cemeteries wherever their friends wished, especially in
places that passers-by would see and feel moved, but no priest might attend
burials of laity. Roger of Wendover, albeit not the most trustworthy chronicler,
recorded that this was indeed done, observing that the dead were carried out
of towns and villages and buried ‘like dogs’ in ditches and highways without
priests or prayers.¹⁶⁷ Suicides were also buried in such places, as Murray noted,
especially spots that were visible to others, notably road junctions and boundaries
such as ditches.¹⁶⁸ Likewise the ‘Forma interdicti’ recommended public places
no doubt to provide a conspicuous reminder of the sentence’s dangers, albeit a
less disturbing one than decomposing bodies.
Special provision was made for burial of clergy during these interdicts, and as
we have seen this had also been the case under the burial ban imposed by the
council of Limoges in 1031. In a decretal of 1200 Innocent III had permitted
clergy who died observing the French interdict to be buried at cemeteries in
silence without ceremony. He had also mitigated the interdict on Lèon in this
way in 1199, but it was not initially clear whether these mitigations applied to
other interdicts.¹⁶⁹ The ruling on the French interdict was known to Peter of
Blois, Archdeacon of London, but in 1209 he had to ask his bishop whether it
might be observed in his diocese during the English interdict. In fact his bishop
was one of the sentence’s three executors, and if they indeed issued the ‘Forma
interdicti’, they merely conceded there that the bodies of dead clerks might be
deposited in marked hollow tree-trunks, or in lead coffins resting in the trees
or on the walls of cemeteries, presumably to await burial on the interdict being
lifted. Likewise the corpses of religious might be placed within their monastic
precinct, but the ground of the cemetery was to remain unopened.¹⁷⁰

¹⁶⁵ Gesta c.51 (PL 214. ccxiv); Coggleshall, Chronicon, 112–13. Older historians saw the Gesta
as mere papal panegyric but more recently its value as a source, admittedly an insider’s view from
the curia, has been reassessed, notably by Bolton, ‘Too Important to Neglect’.
¹⁶⁶ Howden, iv.138 (A. 1200). Cf. Murray, Suicide, ii.42–3.
¹⁶⁷ Martène and Durand, i.813 (‘Forma’); Wendover, Flores, ii.46. The Dunstable annalist
likewise recorded that the dead were buried outside cemeteries and without priests (Annales, iii.30).
¹⁶⁸ Murray, Suicide, ii.43–4, 46–50.
¹⁶⁹ France: X 5.38.11 (= Alan. 5.20.1; 4 Comp. 5.14.3). Lèon: Innocent III, Reg. 2, no. 72 (=
3 Comp. 4.15.1; X 4.20.5). On the Lèon interdict, see Krehbiel, 104–6.
¹⁷⁰ Peter of Blois, 120 (Letter 24); Martène and Durand, i.813 (‘Forma’).
 Ecclesiastical Burial 163

In practice English monasteries largely seem to have closed their cemeteries

in accordance with this ban, but rather than await the interdict’s removal
before burying their dead, they interred bodies in unconsecrated ground set
aside specifically for this purpose, thus following the provision of the ‘Forma
interdicti’ allowing burial outside cemeteries. At the Cistercian abbey of Meaux,
for example, monks and conversi were not interred in the usual places, but beside
its boundary wall in an orchard.¹⁷¹ Similar arrangements were made by the
monks of St Albans, Waverley, and Snellshall, where dedication of these ad hoc
burial grounds was recorded after the interdict was relaxed. This was slightly
more dignified provision than was made for most laity, if we accept Roger of
Wendover’s account, but the bodies of some laity were accepted by religious
institutions for burial in such special plots. Papal privileges had long granted
monastic houses the freedom to receive the bodies of laity who chose burial in
their cemeteries rather than the local parish churchyard, provided that they did
not die excommunicate or under interdict.¹⁷² Such persons might no longer be
buried in consecrated ground, but at Meaux a burial site marked with a wooden
cross was provided for the abbey’s servants, serfs, and neighbours on some waste
ground near a chapel, and the monks of Snellshall buried local parishioners in a
plot for their own dead during the interdict.¹⁷³
It is not known what arrangements most secular clergy made for their own
burial in interdicted England, but their superiors were apparently not spared from
the common fate of burial in unhallowed ground. Before his death Robert, Bishop
of Bangor, even provided for his burial in Shrewsbury marketplace. William de
Montibus, chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, was also buried in unconsecrated
ground, but after the interdict his body was exhumed and re-interred in his
church. The ban on ecclesiastical burial was thus applied to clergy and laity
indiscriminately during the English interdict.¹⁷⁴
The contemporary papal interdict on Narni also prohibited ecclesiastical burial
specifically, forbidding its citizens to bury their dead in ‘Christian’ cemeteries
on pain of excommunication, and this was seemingly the norm by the early

¹⁷¹ Meaux: Melsa, ed. Bond, i.351. St Albans: Liebermann, 172 (Annales S. Albani, 1214).
Waverley: Annales, ii.282 (A. 1214). Snellshall: Cartulary, ed. Jenkins, 7 ( Tattenhoe charter 11,
c.1218–24).
¹⁷² E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 11, nos. 145, 193, 200, 282; 12, nos. 21, 166, 169; 13, nos. 51,
81; etc.
¹⁷³ See sources in n. 170. In 1209 the Bishop of London confirmed provision of an enclosed
plot next to St Bartholomew’s Hospital that the mayor and citizens of London had request-
ed from its canons for the burial of dead citizens; brethren and inmates of the hospital
and poor from elsewhere could be buried in a separate plot (Records of St Bartholomew’s, 1.
109–10).
¹⁷⁴ Bishop of Bangor: Annales, 2. 273 (Waverley Annals A. 1213). William de Montibus:
Chronicle of Melrose, 57 (A. 1213). The bones of Ralph prior of St Benet Holme were likewise
translated (Chronica Iohannis de Oxenedes, 296). Geoffrey of Coldingham noted that Philip, Bishop
of Durham, was buried by laymen outside his cathedral’s precincts during the interdict (Historiae
Dunelmensis, 26).
164 The Terms of an Interdict

thirteenth century, as Innocent III’s decretal of 1200 observed.¹⁷⁵ Canon law did
not regulate the private arrangements for unchristian burial during an interdict,
though they were presumably generally similar to those observed in interdicted
England.¹⁷⁶ Innocent III, however, regulated access to churchyards in his decretal
‘Sacris’ (1200), generally accepted by contemporary canonists. They understood
it to rule that if excommunicates and others denied Christian burial were buried
in cemeteries, their bones should be exhumed and cast out, provided that they
could be distinguished from the bones of the faithful. This reinforced Leo I’s
teaching that when Communion was denied with persons when they were alive,
it was also denied after their death, thus maintaining their social exclusion beyond
the grave. Alanus even taught that mass might not be celebrated in any church
where such outcasts remained buried.¹⁷⁷ Such views were not confined to law
schools. In 1209, when Raymond of Toulouse asked the council of St Gilles to
lift the interdict on his lands, one of the preconditions set by the council was
that bodies buried during this interdict were to be disinterred by those who had
buried them and then re-interred solemnly after the sentence’s removal, unless
they were excommunicated by name.¹⁷⁸
Hence exclusion might be perpetual for those who died excommunicated,
but those dying under an interdict might be reconciled through reburial after
the sentence, no doubt a great comfort to their family and friends. The case
of William de Montibus has been noted. Likewise in 1237 Gregory IX ordered
that citizens of Reims who had died under an interdict might be buried in
churchyards after this sentence was relaxed, provided that they had received
final absolution from a priest, having shown signs of repentance at death.¹⁷⁹
Innocent IV subsequently established this as standard doctrine; as a jurist he
held that if anyone showed signs of repentance on dying in an interdicted
place, they might be buried in a cemetery after the interdict was lifted. He
added that if such contrite persons were buried in a churchyard during an
interdict, their remains might not be disinterred subsequently. Once again an
interdict was to be mitigated in favour of the innocent, specifically those dying
at peace with the Church. And popes applied such moderation in practice. In
1290 when Nicholas IV ordered the lifting of the interdict on Strasbourg, he
conceded that if any of its citizens had shown signs of repentance at death

¹⁷⁵ Reg. Innocent III 11, no. 143. Cf. Honorius III, no. 4052. See n. 164 on Innocent
III’s decretal.
¹⁷⁶ By the mid-fourteenth century Johannes Calderinus certainly accepted that the dead might
be buried without solemnity outside cemeteries in interdicted places; see his ‘De interdicto’ Pt 2
§22 (fol. 332va).
¹⁷⁷ ‘Sacris’: X 3.28.12 (= 3 Comp. 3.21.3). On Leo I’s teaching quoted in ‘Sacris’, see
n. 159. Tancred on 2 Comp. 3.26.2 v. excommunicatis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 130rb:
‘Immo nec missa celebratur ubi ossa excommunicatorum sunt, supra. de con. di. i. Ecclesiam [De
con. D.1 c.27], dummodo separari possunt ab ossibus fidelium, ut infra. de sepul. Sacris lib. iii.
A<lanus>.’
¹⁷⁸ PL 216.97–8; Krehbiel, 150–5, esp. 151. ¹⁷⁹ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 3540.
 Ecclesiastical Burial 165

and been buried in ecclesiastical cemeteries during the sentence, their bodies
might remain there.¹⁸⁰ But, according to Innocent IV, the penitent might not
receive ecclesiastical burial even in non-interdicted places, if they were personally
interdicted.
Canon law did not confirm these mitigations, but by 1234 it included
Innocent III’s decretal on the French interdict, hence giving general force to
its ruling on clergy who died observing an interdict. They might be buried in
consecrated ground but with no funeral service and almost secretly, as Hostiensis
observed.¹⁸¹ But this concession was apparently limited to general interdicts;
Innocent IV and Hostiensis denied that it might be enjoyed where a church or
the clergy were specifically interdicted. Besides this general concession, certain
regular clergy held special burial privileges, notably the military orders. A canon
of the Fourth Lateran Council indicates that papal grants of such privileges were
not uncommon by the thirteenth century, and it summarized their terms: the
privileged might hand over the corpses of brethren for ecclesiastical burial even
if the deceased had belonged to an interdicted church, provided that they were
not interdicted by name, excommunicates, or usurers; if prelates refused burial at
their churches, these bodies might be taken to churches of their own order.¹⁸² It
was a matter of canonistic debate, however, whether Templars and Hospitallers
might bury the dead at interdicted churches. A canon of the Third Lateran
Council (1179) had ruled that their freedom to open a church in an interdicted
place once a year did not allow them to conduct burials there. But most early
thirteenth-century canonists, including Tancred, agreed that this applied not
to burial of deceased brethren but only of dead outsiders; even Hostiensis
considered this opinion valid.¹⁸³ According to Innocent IV, however, brethren of
an interdicted church were not to be buried there but at another non-interdicted
church, and their fellow lay parishioners might not enjoy this freedom unless
their church was interdicted as a result of a violation or clerical wrongdoing.
In practice religious holding such privileges were burying persons other than
members of their own community, notably laity who paid a small annual

¹⁸⁰ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. interdicti violationem; Reg. Nicholas IV, no.
2679.
¹⁸¹ X 5.38.11. Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.38.11 v. solemnitatibus (vol. 2, fol. 101rb); on X 5.31.18
v. post interdicti violationem (vol. 2, fol. 72va). He also held that clergy who gave cause for an
interdict forfeited their right to Christian burial during it; id. on X 5.38.11 v. servaverint (vol. 2,
fol. 101rb).
¹⁸² Lat. Conc. IV c.57 (= 4 Comp. 5.12.7; X 5.33.24). Examples of these burial privileges are
found in Reg. Alexander IV, nos. 1553, 2037, 2373; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 842; etc.
¹⁸³ Lat. Conc. III c.9 (= 1 Comp. 5.28.3; X 5.33.3). Tancred on 1 Comp. 5.28.3 v.
defunctorum, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 93rb: ‘Nisi fratres eorum fuerunt, ut infra e. Simili modo
[1 Comp. 5.28.5].’ Cf. Alanus, ibid., Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 92rb:
‘Nisi cum fratres eorum fuerint, ut infra e. t. Simili … et si ecclesia fuerit interdicta, ipsi mortui per
hospitalarios tradantur semel in anno sepulture.’ Hostiensis supported this view in his Lectura on
X 5.33.24 v. non negetur (vol. 2, fol. 87rb) but ultimately agreed with Innocent IV, Apparatus on
X 5.33.24 v. non negetur and v. regularium.
166 The Terms of an Interdict

subscription to ‘join’ their order. Innocent III had denounced this practice in
his Lateran ruling on burial privileges and restricted these to those who had
entered the religious life fully, giving up all their property to their order and
adopting its habit. However, subsequent thirteenth-century popes occasionally
extended burial privileges to individuals outside monastic communities. In
1225 Honorius III required all Italian prelates to permit the burial of laity of
the mendicant third orders at their churches during interdicts; and in 1246
Innocent IV made a similar concession to lay devotees of the Humiliati.¹⁸⁴
Some grants even rewarded lay charity to religious against the spirit of Innocent
III’s ruling. In 1221 Honorius III allowed the Holy Cross monastery, Coimbra,
to grant its patrons ecclesiastical burial during an interdict, provided that
these persons had not provoked the sentence. In 1257 Alexander IV extended
traditional Hospitaller burial privileges to those admitted to the fraternity of
Sens hospital for the price of an annual donation, the very abuse Innocent
III’s ruling had condemned.¹⁸⁵ Boniface VIII even recognized lay philanthropy
in the community, when a confraternity formed to rebuild a road destroyed
by floods was allowed to bury its members at a chapel near this road during
general interdicts. A concern underlying such grants was that an interdict could
harm the church’s supporters, and in order to maintain their devotion it was
expedient sometimes to spare them one of the sentence’s harshest deprivations.
When the Bishop of Constance told Innocent IV, for example, that some of his
parishioners were aiding the Church against its political enemies in 1247, the
pope granted ecclesiastical burial, at the bishop’s request, for such parishioners
belonging to interdicted churches.¹⁸⁶ But generally such grants to laity were rare
and, except for the clergy, innocent and guilty alike suffered loss of ecclesiastical
burial under interdicts. Admittedly the fourteenth-century canonist Johannes
Calderinus speculated whether funeral services and burials were permitted on
the four principal feast days when Boniface VIII allowed churches to be opened
in interdicted places. But he observed that his teacher Johannes Andreae had
rejected this conclusion and no other canonist had drawn it. Boniface VIII
and his immediate successors had certainly not mitigated the interdict’s ban on
ecclesiastical burial; if anything they had sought to reinforce it, as we will see in
the next chapter.¹⁸⁷
The interdict constituted a severe disruption of the church’s religious activities,
but it was not meant to disturb the operation of church government. In
interdicted England the ‘Forma interdicti’ encouraged continued administration
of ecclesiastical justice to lay and clerical miscreants, though it required church

¹⁸⁴ Reg. Honorius III, no. 5740; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 2193.
¹⁸⁵ Ibid., no. 3129; Reg. Alexander IV, no. 2037.
¹⁸⁶ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 104; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 2613.
¹⁸⁷ Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 2 §15 (fol. 332ra). Cf. Andreae, Novelle on VI 5.11.24 v.
divinorum.
 Ecclesiastical Burial 167

courts to be held in cemeteries and priests’ houses, not in churches closed by

the interdict. In practice Cheney found that the judicial business of the English
Church was not disrupted, though King John appears to have effectively impeded
appeals to Rome from 1210.¹⁸⁸ According to the ‘Forma interdicti’ teaching was
also to continue in the schools of interdicted England. The scholars of Oxford
University admittedly dispersed, but, if Roger of Wendover is to be believed, this
was a protest at the arbitrary lynching of some students by townsfolk rather than
a direct result of the interdict, though town and gown were reconciled only after
the interdict was lifted.¹⁸⁹ Nevertheless Innocent IV taught that masters who
taught in the schools during an interdict violated it as much as one ministering
in holy orders. But Hostiensis pointed out that a master did not discharge his
duties by virtue of orders, and two fourteenth-century canonistic treatises indeed
concluded that clerks might still carry out offices unrelated to orders during an
interdict, including magister scholarum and notary public, since it only prohibited
the functions of the ordained.¹⁹⁰ Cheney indeed found that much routine
ecclesiastical business had continued as usual in interdicted England, notably
appointments to benefices and sees (only occasionally affected by interdicts as we
have seen) and church-building.¹⁹¹ In addition the ‘Forma interdicti’ had urged
parishioners to pay alms and other dues to the English Church as usual, even
though it was refusing most of its ministrations. In fact King John seized much
of its property, and, as the next chapter illustrates, when the Church’s activities
were disrupted during an interdict beyond the terms of the sentence, this usually
arose from the reactions of secular princes and communities.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century the terms of the interdict were not
specified in any detail by canon law. Innocent III began the gradual process of
defining them in response to external demand, largely at the request of bishops
instructed to enforce his interdicts. His rulings still left many points unclear
and provided much scope for local variations in practice, but canonistic doctrine
supplemented the law, providing general guidance on such issues, and at the
end of the century the gaps in the law were largely filled by Boniface VIII.
Boniface also revised some of Innocent’s rulings and resolved points disputed
among the canonists, to an extent redefining the terms of the interdict. In effect
he completed the process of legal clarification of those terms; his successors
did little to continue it. Indeed canon law and its commentators had defined
the terms of the interdict in such detail by the early fourteenth century that
an emerging genre of canonistic treatises on interdicts was largely devoted to

¹⁸⁸ Martène and Durand, i.813 (‘Forma’); Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 308–13.

¹⁸⁹ Wendover, Flores, ii.51; Krehbiel, 145–8.
¹⁹⁰ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. violavit; Hostiensis, Lectura, ibid. (vol. 2, fol.
76vb); Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’, Pt 1 §88 (fol. 330v); Ludeco Cappel, Summarius,
fol. 3r.
¹⁹¹ Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 309–12. See ibid. 301–7, and id., ‘Reaction’, on seizure of church
property.
168 The Terms of an Interdict

summarizing them; mnemonic poems were even written on the subject to guide
clergy.¹⁹²
In defining the terms of the interdict the papacy had largely sought to mitigate
its severity for the innocent whilst maintaining its force against the guilty. As
early as the twelfth century, even before popes began issuing general rules on
the subject, they were granting mitigations of the interdict to certain regular
clergy where they gave no cause for the sentence, notably the freedom to hold
offices privately in their churches. By the thirteenth century even secular and
ecclesiastical dignitaries and laity involved in pious activities were requesting these
papal grants in ever-increasing numbers. It is understandable that popes gave
clergy partial immunity from the effects of interdicts: interdicts were normally
used to defend clergy against secular adversaries. Laity who opposed these enemies
of the Church were also occasionally spared the sentence’s full effects. But why
did the papacy mitigate the interdict for the generality of laity, when canonists
had articulated an elaborate justification of collective punishment, whereby the
innocent rightly suffered for the sins of the guilty? This needs to be considered
in the context of popular and princely responses to interdicts. The interdict’s
efficacy as a means of coercion largely depended on its effect on popular feeling,
lay and clerical; thus its effect had to be well judged and such feeling taken into
account by the Church authorities when laying an interdict. These issues will be
explored in the next chapter.

¹⁹² Two such poems are edited in my ‘Interdict’, 318–19. One inc. ‘Tempore quando taces’ was
copied in a late-fifteenth-century hand on fol. 12r of a printed copy of Johannes Andreae, De modo;
London, BL, IA. 10915. The other in German, written no later than 1494 and titled ‘Wie man
sych halden solle wan interdict yst’ (inc. ‘Halt messe’), was printed in Ludeco Cappel, De interdicto,
fol. 4v.
 5
The Interdict in Action

5 . 1 P O P U L A R A N D P R I N C E LY R E S P O N S E S
TO I N T E R D I C TS

An interdict was designed to compel those who provoked it to submit to

ecclesiastical authority. As a collective sanction it was meant to achieve this by
turning the innocent against the guilty. Indeed jurists and theologians held that
the guilty could be coerced more effectively by making their innocent associates
suffer than punishing them alone (see Chapter 1.1). In practice collective
punishment occasionally had the desired effect. Abbot Geoffrey of Vendôme
recounted that the county of Vendôme was interdicted in 1111 to punish its
count’s seizure of abbey property with the result ‘that all the people who … are
much displeased by [the count’s] iniquity … proclaimed against him, and thus,
since he did not wish to desist voluntarily from unjust action for the love of
God, he desisted for both the clamour and fear of men or against his will’.¹ An
interdict was meant not only to provoke such popular resistance to sinful rulers
but also punish the lack of this resistance to the sin that caused the interdict in
the first place. Peter the Chanter and subsequent canonists held that subjects had
a collective duty to resist a sinful ruler and if they neglected this, they deserved
punishment along with him.
But did general interdicts always have the desired effect? Popular reactions to
the English interdict suggest otherwise. A contemporary monastic annalist noted
that, when the dispute arose between Innocent III and King John that caused the
interdict, all the laity, almost all the clergy, and many religious backed the king.²
The pope was opposing John’s interference in the appointment of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, and the king’s subjects doubtless sympathized more with royal
claims of local custom than the pope’s strict canonical position. Many English
clergy owed their church offices to royal patronage, the system that the pope
was fighting, and some even served in royal government. Contemporary verse
condemned the Bishop of Winchester for taking the king’s side and remaining at
his desk in the royal exchequer while his colleagues who proclaimed the interdict

¹ PL 157.84.
² Annales monastici, i.28 (Margam annals). Incidentally Margam was one of three Cistercian
abbeys accused of violating the interdict in the early days of the sentence; see p. 193.
170 The Interdict in Action

fled into exile.³ Evidently the conflict between pope and king tested loyalties,
and the interdict merely exacerbated this.
Popular feelings were further confused by royal and papal propaganda. Before
the sentence was declared, the pope had written letters to the episcopate of
the English Church and magnates of England calling for their support.⁴ He
complained that some of the bishops were ‘tepid and remiss’ in the Archbishop
of Canterbury’s cause (which lends some credence to the annalist’s claim above)
and encouraged them all to defend ecclesiastical liberty. He likewise warned the
nobles that in maintaining their fealty to an earthly king they should take care
not to offend their heavenly king, and reminded them that they could not ‘serve
two masters’ (Matthew 6:24). Hence he counselled them not to support John,
for the king opposed God. This recalled Augustine’s doctrine that Christians
owed obedience to God before earthly rulers, well known to canonists from
the Decretum; indeed Innocent’s supposed teacher Huguccio had cited it to
show that subjects had a duty to resist a king who defied God.⁵ Similarly after
the interdict was laid, the guidelines for its observance known as the ‘Forma
interdicti’ required priests to preach to their parishioners that they had to obey
God more than man (the apostles’ teaching in Acts 5:29).⁶ This weekly preaching
was also to warn against fearing those with the power to kill them, i.e. John and
his agents. Innocent had likewise warned the bishops and nobles to set aside such
fear or rather to fear God more than man; God, as Augustine’s doctrine pointed
out, could inflict much harsher punishment, namely hell. Indeed priests were to
admonish parishioners that those obedient to the Church might be saved but the
disobedient should fear divine retribution. The ‘Forma interdicti’ also instructed
priests to lead the faithful in prayers for the peace of the Church and for the
king, that Christ might guide him towards the way of salvation and doing God’s
will. This was all designed to persuade the English to take the pope’s side against
the king.
This message was reinforced by a letter to the English people from Stephen
Langton, for whose sake the interdict was imposed. Writing in exile shortly
before it was declared, he entreated his compatriots not to consent to John’s
persecution of the English Church, reminding them of the canonistic teaching
that a like penalty binds those doing wrong and those consenting to it. He
defined this consent according to the classic scholastic distinction as both active
support for sin and passive failure to resist it.⁷ He especially reminded knights of
their investiture by the Church and consequent duty to defend her, but rather
than armed insurrection he called for use of persuasion to turn John away from
wickedness and others from consent to it. Hence he expected people to react to

³ Political Songs, 10. ⁴ Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 159; SLI, no. 32.
⁵ C.11 q.3 c.97; on Huguccio see p. 43 n. 99. ⁶ Martène and Durand, i.812–13.
⁷ Acta Stephani Langton, 6. The letter was written at some point between 27 August 1207, when
the Pope threatened the interdict, and the sentence’s proclamation on 23 March 1208.
 Popular and Princely Responses 171

the interdict in accordance with theological and canonistic doctrine, namely to

resist their king’s wrongdoing, thereby compelling him to come to terms.
Innocent’s letters and the ‘Forma interdicti’ shared this expectation, but it was
countered by royal propaganda. In the week before the interdict’s publication
(on 23 March 1208) John sent agents to the shires with letters that told his side
of the story.⁸ One sent to the men of Kent instructed them to trust whatever its
bearer, Reginald of Cornhill, told them on John’s behalf about the wrong and
injury done to him; a similar letter to the Durham diocese spoke of ‘the injury
inflicted on us by the lord pope’. The interdict thus generated a propaganda war
between Church and Crown, but which side won? If we believe the Margam
annalist, John’s subjects were initially swayed by his claims but did the interdict
eventually turn them against him? The Gesta Innocentii III alleged that soon
after it came into force, John was forced to seek terms with the pope because
of the ‘general clamour’. This suggests that the interdict had its desired effect
and provoked an immediate popular backlash against the king.⁹ Innocent’s
biographer as a curial insider was perhaps expressing wishful thinking, however.
His main source was the papal registers, and a letter copied there relates that John
sought reconciliation with Innocent shortly after the interdict’s publication, but
not that he was prompted by public pressure; in any case subsequent negotiations
failed.¹⁰ Furthermore the English sources tell a different story. They imply that
the interdict aroused public resentment, but against the Church authorities rather
than John. In 1213 when Langton preached to a large crowd in London, hecklers
interrupted him to complain that, although he was reconciled with John and the
reason for the interdict had thereby ended, churches still remained closed and
silent; the sentence was not actually relaxed till ten months later. Likewise in 1209
when the pope had permitted conventual clergy to hold mass once a week behind
closed doors during the interdict, Peter of Blois observed that this caused scandal
and grumbling among London laity, ‘who saw unjust discrimination in it’.¹¹
Stubbs rightly called an interdict ‘that most … suicidal weapon of the medieval
Church’. Not only could this backfire and turn people against the Church instead
of its intended target, but it could also discourage religious devotion. Abbot John
of Ford in 1210 lamented that piety was in danger of expiring in interdicted
England unless God came to its aid, as the Eucharist had been withdrawn for
so long. He admitted that this was still reserved to a few (i.e. conventual clergy)
but added that the masses had been ‘starved’ of this for almost two years, and
he feared that ‘they will die on the road and completely cease to remember their
fatherland if their hunger goes on increasing’.¹²
This withdrawal of religious ministrations was a test of orthodoxy that might
have serious implications; this was recognized even before the English interdict.

⁸ RLP, 80a; Foedera, I/i.100. ⁹ Gesta c.131 (PL 214. clxxvii).

¹⁰ Letter: Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 90; copied in Gesta c.132 (PL 214. clxxviii).
¹¹ Langton: Lacombe, ‘Unpublished Document’, 417. Peter of Blois, 120 (Letter 24).
¹² Ioannis de Forda, 300, 303. Stubbs quotation from Cheney, England, 303
172 The Interdict in Action

Early in 1199 three Iberian prelates told Innocent III that a papal interdict
was endangering the kingdom of León in three ways. Firstly various heresies
were flourishing there, as the interdict stopped clergy from preaching against
heretics and discouraged the king from persecuting them. Secondly it made
León vulnerable to Saracen invasion, as the Church had stopped preaching holy
war and giving remission of sins to those fighting the infidel; and without this
ecclesiastical approval and because the people felt partly to blame for the interdict,
they feared falling further into sin by going to war. Indeed there is some evidence
that the interdict was inhibiting the realm’s defence. Christian Spain was then
threatened by the Almohads, a Muslim sect that had invaded southern Spain.
Conflict between the kings of Castile and León stopped them from presenting a
united front against the Almohads, but peace and an alliance was to be forged
through the king of León marrying the king of Castile’s daughter. However, the
marriage was invalid and the interdict was meant to enforce its dissolution. The
prelates’ request for a marriage dispensation met with papal refusal, so they had
to argue that the interdict exposed León to Muslim invasion in other ways.¹³
They also alleged that, since clergy might not administer spiritual things to laity,
laity refused temporal dues to the clergy, notably tithes, so that most clerks were
reduced to begging and even working for Jews ‘in ecclesie et totius Christianitatis
opprobrium’.
The bishops perhaps exaggerated the negative effects of this interdict to
secure its relaxation (the pope refused this), but during the thirteenth century
clergy recorded several instances when interdicts resulted in the growth of anti-
clericalism and heresy. After Bergamo fell under interdict because its citizens had
taxed its clergy, its bishop petitioned the pope in early 1210 that the sentence had
lasted so long that it had made some citizens less devout and more obdurate and
let heretics spread their errors more easily; other sources indeed refer to Cathar
sympathizers there at this time.¹⁴ Hence an interdict inadvertently provided
conditions for heresy to thrive, and Church authorities recognized this danger,
especially in areas where heresy was already a major concern. Early thirteenth-
century popes were notably concerned to eradicate the Cathar heresy in southern
France, for example, but in 1234 the Bishop of Marseilles warned the pope that
an interdict on his city had made it a safe haven for heretics, who were apparently
flocking there from surrounding areas.¹⁵ Presumably the sentence discouraged
secular authorities and laity from cooperating with the inquisition, for the Bishop
said that the heretics shrewdly considered that they could not be rooted out of
Marseilles while the interdict was in force. He had therefore relaxed it to drive
out the heretics more freely, and consequently he claimed to have handed over
many of them to secular justice and several others for imprisonment.

¹³ Innocent III, Reg. 2, no. 72; copied in Gesta c.58 (PL 214.cv–cvi). On the context see
O’Callaghan, ‘Innocent III’, esp. 317–25.
¹⁴ Innocent III, Reg. 13, no. 43. Lambert, 115. ¹⁵ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2020.
 Popular and Princely Responses 173

Admittedly popes exploited the interdict as a weapon against heresy, but even
they recognized that this might be counter-productive. In 1213 Innocent III
supported an interdict on Toulouse, since some of its citizens were Cathars and
several others were credentes, supporters, or protectors of Catharism, so much so
that Cathars were taking refuge there.¹⁶ However, some thirty years later Innocent
IV admitted to the Bishop of Toulouse that such sanctions had only made matters
worse. He observed that general sentences of excommunication and interdict
were laid so often in the bishop’s diocese that ecclesiastical censure was scorned
there, and some locals saw it as nothing, whilst the heretics, who naturally rejected
ecclesiastical discipline, were rejoicing.¹⁷ In order to strengthen orthodoxy and
discourage heresy there he granted the city, diocese, and all communities of the
lands of Toulouse immunity for five years from such sentences laid on papal
authority without a specific mandate. In fact southern French Catharism was
already in irretrievable decline, but Boniface VIII still associated it with popular
defiance of an interdict on the southern French town of Béziers as late as 1297.¹⁸
French Cathars were not the only heretics accused of turning interdicts to
their advantage. In Germany the papal–imperial conflict at its height under
Innocent IV and Frederick II provoked anti-clericalism that in turn enabled
Waldensianism to spread; the use of interdicts by pro-papal clergy in the struggle
only exacerbated these effects. The Passau Anonymous wrote in his treatise on
Waldensian heresy (c.1260) that its proponents rejoiced during these interdicts,
since then they could ‘corrupt’ the faithful more easily. In particular Waldensians
allegedly declared that it was wicked to refuse sacraments to the innocent under
these sentences since it punished them for the sins of others (a fact that canonists
had long tried to justify).¹⁹ According to the Anonymous these heretics even
claimed that interdicts deprived the souls of the dead in Purgatory of the Church’s
intercessions, and when they saw how interdicts also reduced religious devotion
among the living, they discouraged the faithful from giving tithes. David of
Augsburg, in a similar treatise (c.1260–72) based on his experiences as an
inquisitor, also noted how Waldensians exploited and enflamed public hostility
to German clergy as papal–imperial tensions climaxed in the 1240s, observing
that the clergy themselves partly provoked this situation through excessive use
of spiritual sanctions. Apparently these only added to the disruption of their
pastoral and inquisitorial work that political circumstances had caused, enabling
Waldensians to spread their views more easily.
It is hard to know whether interdicts often had such dramatic repercussions, as
popular responses to them are not well documented, and the evidence discussed
so far comes from clergy, who recorded events from their own peculiar viewpoint.

¹⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 48. ¹⁷ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 541.
¹⁸ See Lambert, 126–46.
¹⁹ Quellen, 90–1 (Passau Anonymous); Preger, ‘Tractat’, 219 (David of Augsburg). Schneider,
97; Lambert, 148.
174 The Interdict in Action

Boniface VIII nevetheless recognized by 1298 that the effect of interdicts on lay
orthodoxy was a widespread problem. His constitution ‘Alma mater’ observed
that, as a result of the withdrawal of sacraments and offices during general
interdicts, ‘the indevotion of the populace grows, heresies pullulate, and infinite
spiritual dangers arise’.²⁰ Indeed the canonist Johannes Andreae commented on
these words that he had heard of a place in the Marche which fell under an
interdict for so long that when it was lifted, people in their thirties and forties
had never heard mass there and derided priests who resumed celebration of it.²¹
Similar observations on the dangers of interdicts for pastoral care were made
in Boniface VIII’s constitution ‘Provide’ (1302), which noted that overuse of
interdicts was causing children and adolescents to grow up weak in the faith,
since they participated so rarely in the sacraments.
How did popes address the pastoral problems raised by interdicts? Innocent
III ordered that the interdict on Bergamo might be lifted once its podestà and
citizens had made amends. Gregory IX likewise approved the decision of the
Bishop of Marseilles to relax the interdict on his city in order better to suppress
heresy there. In these cases the canonical preconditions for lifting interdicts
were not disregarded, but these popes clearly saw no value in these sentences
remaining in force. Nevertheless popes were reluctant to abandon the interdict
completely as a means of coercion; they were more inclined to mitigate it in order
to minimize its pastoral consequences. Innocent III had adopted this approach
to the León interdict. He refused to relax it completely, but he agreed to its
temporary and partial relaxation, permitting celebration of divine offices and
burial of clergy in churchyards without solemnity. The king of León and his wife,
who occasioned the interdict by refusing to break off their uncanonical marriage,
were nevertheless excommunicated and subjected to an ambulatory interdict.
Innocent thus reduced the interdict’s severity for the innocent and intensified
the punishment of the guilty; his aim was to make the interdict a more effective
means of coercion. Boniface VIII also pursued this line in his constitution ‘Alma
mater’ almost a century later. He attributed the dangers of the general interdict
to its severity and therefore mitigated it in favour of the innocent, whilst denying
his concessions to the guilty. Such pastoral concerns and pragmatism no doubt
motivated other papal mitigations of the interdict.
The papacy also tried regulating usage of interdicts in order to avoid unwanted
effects. As noted above, Innocent IV granted Toulouse immunity from interdicts
since they had only encouraged the heresy that they were meant to combat.
Boniface VIII’s constitution ‘Provide’ likewise forbade general interdicts in debt
cases, for he was not only alarmed at the pastoral effects of such sentences but also
their misuse for such worldly ends. Clerical anxiety over these issues also underlay

²⁰ VI 5.11.24; Extrav. comm. 5.10.2 (‘Provide’).

²¹ Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.24 v. insurgunt.
 Popular and Princely Responses 175

calls for further papal reform of the interdict in the fourteenth century.²² These
suggest that thirteenth-century attempts to reserve the interdict as a justified last
resort had been insufficient; indeed the fourteenth-century canonist Johannes
Andreae noted that there was a very great danger that all Italy and beyond might
end up under interdicts.²³
Even if popes perceived that overuse of the interdict and its negative effect
on popular feeling might blunt its effectiveness as a political weapon, its success
largely depended on the reaction of those it was meant to coerce. But if general
interdicts did not always turn the innocent against the guilty, did the latter
still fear the sentence? In the thirteenth century growing numbers of kings and
nobles requested papal immunity from the interdict as well as freedom to hear
private services during one; this suggests that increasingly they saw it as worth
being free from. One secular ruler even claimed to find interdicts distressing.
When the Archbishop of Esztergom interdicted Hungary, its king, András II,
complained to Gregory IX in 1232 that the exclusion of him and his subjects
from the bosom of the Church was a painful injustice and had undermined his
reputation abroad.²⁴ The king’s petition was calculated to secure the relaxation
of this sentence, but it suggests that lay rulers did not regard interdicts with
equanimity. They could and did appeal against a threatened interdict to have it
quashed. But many rulers tried to stop interdicts by less canonical means.
First a ruler might prevent it from being published. As early as 1171 Henry
II had tried to stop publication of an interdict on England which the Bishop of
Senlis had already declared on his continental lands. The bishop was reacting
to Henry’s alleged complicity in Thomas Becket’s recent murder; thus the
king had good reason to fear that the pope would extend this papal interdict to
England.²⁵ Henry admittedly approached Alexander III through proper channels,
and his appeal to the curia stayed the pope’s hand, but according to Gervase of
Canterbury Henry remained sufficiently concerned to instruct his reeves at ports
on both sides of the channel to arrest anyone bringing papal letters of interdict

²² Auer, ‘Verschollene Denkschrift’. In this ‘Denkschrift’ the German Dominican John of

Dambach described the negative effects of John XXII’s interdict on the lands of Lewis of Bavaria
and his allies (see Kaufhold on this interdict). In 1348 Dambach proposed reform of the interdict to
Clement VI, and his treatise probably comprises arguments he made before the pope; he addressed
it to Emperor Charles IV in the hope that he would persuade the pope to carry out this reform
(Nauclerus, Chronica, ii.894).
²³ Johannes Andreae, Glossa on Clem. 3.13.3 v. interdicti.
²⁴ D’Achery, Spicilegium, iii.610.
²⁵ Gervase, I, p. 234. See Barlow, 253–6, and Warren, 113–14. A source hostile to the king
alleged that he sent agents with gifts to bribe the curia; a more credible account said that his
representatives swore that he would submit to papal judgement on Becket’s murder (Materials,
iv.165–6; vii.473–4). Henry II had also famously sought to limit use of interdicts in clause 7 of
the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164); this required that no tenant-in-chief or official of the king
be excommunicated or their lands interdicted unless the king or his justiciar was first asked to grant
justice in the matter (Materials, v. 75). This was one of the offensive clauses that Henry had to
abjure in order to obtain papal absolution in 1172.
176 The Interdict in Action

into England. His motive was perhaps legal since an unpublished sentence was
technically invalid, although it is doubtful that Henry knew this at such an early
date; more likely his reason was practical in that clergy could not enforce an
interdict they were unaware of. Henry might resist an interdict in this way since
his government was highly organized by late twelfth-century standards, with its
network of loyal agents. We have seen how his son John later used this to spread
anti-papal propaganda in 1208 when England was again threatened with a papal
interdict.
If Roger of Wendover is to be trusted, John also used intimidation to dissuade
the executors of this sentence from promulgating it, threatening physical violence
and property seizures against clergy in England if they did so.²⁶ Admittedly
he wrote with the benefit of hindsight; following the interdict’s promulgation
John indeed seized the goods of clergy who observed it. His account of John’s
blasphemous outburst against the tearful executors is also fanciful, with John
swearing to send all Romans or papal clerks found in his lands back to Rome
with their eyes torn out and noses cut off, but it is not wholly incredible.
John was noted for cruelty, and the executors certainly fled into exile soon after
declaring the interdict, doubtless fearful for their personal safety. According to
the Evesham Abbey chronicle Romans had their goods sequestrated and were
expelled on John’s orders, including the abbey’s own creditors, but not mutilated
apparently. Nevertheless John of Ford warned in 1210 that clergy had to fear
physical violence as well as loss of their property.²⁷ But, as Cheney noted, the
evidence here is ambiguous. Shortly after the interdict’s promulgation the king
ordered that clerks and monks were not to be harmed, but a fourteenth-century
chronicle claimed that he also forbade inquests into murders of clerks during the
interdict, thus many died.²⁸ Cheney found few violations of clerical immunity,
however, though there was the famous case that prompted Oxford University’s
dispersal in 1209. After a student accidentally slew a local woman and fled the
scene, the mayor and townsfolk hanged two or three clerks who were room-mates
of the fugitive, apparently with the king’s support.²⁹
As Cheney observed, ‘John treated the interdict as tantamount to a declaration
of war.’³⁰ And financial and physical coercion were his means of waging war
against this weapon of the pope. It was a war in which each side fought to
defend what it saw as its right. John defended the royal custom of controlling
ecclesiastical appointments, while the pope sought to defend ecclesiastical liberty
from such lay intrusions. But the king’s surrender to the pope in 1213 after
five years of conflict did not prevent further outbreaks of hostilities over such
issues. In 1286 John’s grandson Edward I exploited the archiepiscopal vacancy
at York to present a royal clerk, Bonet de St Quentin, to a prebend at Southwell

²⁶ Wendover, Flores, iii.221–2. ²⁷ Evesham, 225; Ioannis de Forda, 300.

²⁸ RLC, i.111a; Chronicles, 8 (Annales Londonienses).
²⁹ Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 301; Wendover, Flores, iii.227–8, 274. ³⁰ Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 297.
 Popular and Princely Responses 177

Minster.³¹ But Honorius IV had provided his chaplain, Rolando di Ferentino,

to the same prebend, and when Bonet and the Southwell chapter blocked this
provision, Rolando’s executor suspended the chapter, interdicted the minster,
and excommunicated Bonet. Edward reacted by having the executor jailed in the
Tower of London; Nicholas IV called for his release in 1288 and was still seeking
to enforce the provision in 1289. As in the Canterbury dispute under John, the
interdict arose from the competing claims of pope and king to place their own
man in the same benefice. It was not, however, the only time when Edward’s
interests conflicted with the Church’s or his government resisted interdicts;
Nicholas IV complained to Edward in 1292 that his officials sometimes did not
tolerate ordinaries using ecclesiastical censures.³²
Lay rulers elsewhere also defended their interests by retaliating against publica-
tion of interdicts. After Peter of Aragon displaced papally approved Angevin rule
in Sicily in 1282, Martin IV issued an interdict and other sanctions against Peter
and his allies, but Bishop Pontio of Majorca later complained that he had suffered
persecution when he published these sentences. Peter’s son Alfonso had invaded
Majorca and seized the bishop’s property and revenues, so the curia had to
give Pontio and clerks who joined him in exile incomes from southern French
benefices.³³ Peter doubtless saw Pontio’s obedience to the pope as disloyalty to
the Crown and hence deserving of retribution.
Not only royal but also city governments tried to stop interdicts being declared
against them, notably at Verdun. Relations between its clergy and laity were
turbulent for most of the thirteenth century as its citizens struggled repeatedly to
win autonomy from their bishop’s temporal jurisdiction. They finally exploited
an episcopal vacancy in 1286–9 to proclaim self-government.³⁴ The cathedral
chapter petitioned the pope to provide them with a bishop capable of restoring
their church’s rights, and Nicholas IV appointed noted jurist and curial auditor
Jacques de Revigny in 1289. But the citizens resisted Revigny’s attempt to recover
episcopal authority, so in 1296 he sought papal intervention. He told Boniface
VIII that citizens had seized clerks carrying his letters indicting them, torn up
the letters, and threatened to kill or mutilate anyone who came to execute his
mandates. Consequently when he sent priests to publish an interdict on Verdun,
they were allegedly set upon by an armed mob that forced them to swear not
to carry out his orders. He claimed that the city then responded with its own
sanctions against the clergy, forbidding citizens to have contact with him even
to give him food, a secular kind of excommunication, and revoking ‘benefit of

³¹ CPR 1281–92, 225. Bonet was a wardrobe clerk and trained lawyer whom Edward used
in dealings with France over Gascony in 1285 (Prestwich, 143, 305). I am grateful to Dr Philip
Saunders for these references. See his ‘Royal Ecclesiastical Patronage’ on similar clashes with the
papacy.
³² Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 236, 657, 6859.
³³ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 3793. On the context see Runciman, 237–80.
³⁴ Roussel, i.314–19; Histoire, ed. Girardot, 89, 91.
178 The Interdict in Action

clergy’, so that a layman might kill a clerk in a fight with impunity, and other
laymen might be punished if they failed to aid him. Citizens were also accused
of driving many clerks from Verdun and selling off their property.³⁵ No doubt
some of these charges were not exaggerated; the interdicts on the towns of Dax,
Bèziers, and San Gimignano treated below provoked similar reactions. However,
Revigny’s petition was designed to secure papal support, and Boniface responded
by summoning the revolt’s alleged ringleaders to the curia. No doubt like kings
these men saw their resistance to the interdict as legitimate defence of their
political claims.
Even more elaborate methods to counter publication of interdicts had featured
in accusations made by Portuguese prelates against their king Afonso III. In
1266 the Archbishop of Braga and six bishops fled Portugal for the curia
after interdicting their dioceses. They presented to the Pope forty charges of
royal violations of ecclesiastical liberties, four of which regarded interdicts.³⁶
The first stated that if bishops or rectors interdicted places or excommunicated
their parishioners for not paying tithes or other dues, the king had such
clerks banished and their goods confiscated. The second held that prelates
excommunicating the king’s men or interdicting places were intimidated and
their goods seized to force them to revoke these sentences, and if they refused,
it was forbidden to communicate with them or receive them into anyone’s
home on pain of imprisonment and sequestration; prelates reckoned this secular
‘excommunication’ all the more humiliating in that the royal judges who imposed
it were Jews. Thirdly if ecclesiastical judges, even judges delegate, interdicted a
royal town or its inhabitants, the king or his officials allegedly retaliated with their
own ‘interdict’ forbidding these clergy ‘common commerce’; anyone disobeying
this ban by offering them shelter, fire, or water could be punished. Like interdicts
this ban was to be publicized widely. Such clergy were also to be distrusted and
their property seized, inherited and ecclesiastical. Fourthly when a place was
interdicted or any of its inhabitants were excommunicated, especially lay judges
and other royal officials, the countermeasure generally adopted was to suspend
tithes, bequests, or offerings for the churches concerned; other Iberian prelates
had described a similar reaction to the León interdict over sixty years earlier.
Whatever truth lay behind these allegations, the main issue that had driven
the Portuguese prelates to the curia was Afonso’s resumption of the inquirições in
1258.³⁷ Originally instituted by his father in the 1220s, they inquired into the
property titles of nobles and particularly of the clergy and sought to recover royal
property, rights, and incomes, rather like Edward I’s subsequent Quo warranto
proceedings in England and equally resented. As a result of his inquirições Afonso

³⁵ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1253.

³⁶ Reg. Clement IV, no. 669. The charges appear with responses from Afonso’s successor Diniz
in Reg. Martin IV, no. 502, and Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 716.
³⁷ See Reuter, 61–82, and Linehan, ‘Castile’, 686–8.
 Popular and Princely Responses 179

had issued a law in 1265 which also foreshadowed Edward’s mortmain legislation,
ordering reversion to the Crown of royal lands obtained by those who paid the
king no taxes, mainly property in the ‘dead hand’ of the Church. This threat
to ecclesiastical wealth was mostly what prompted the bishops to approach the
Pope, but that is not saying that their other allegations of royal persecution,
including the countermeasures against interdicts, were concocted to win papal
support. In 1250 when king and clergy were on good terms, the Bishop of Oporto
complained that Afonso’s men claimed not to give a straw for excommunication,
and the king promised in the Cortes to curb such insolence and required all
his subjects to observe such sentences.³⁸ Furthermore if the charges were largely
false, it is doubtful that the bishops would have pursued them for over twenty
years, most of them dying at the curia in the meantime. Admittedly they dropped
some charges by the 1280s, but these had perhaps already been resolved, as
Reuter argues, and none of these regarded interdicts. Afonso himself certainly
opposed all charges almost till death, displaying ‘a capacity for survival which
amounted to genius’.³⁹ He showed no intention of making amends till January
1279 but he died a month later, leaving his son Diniz to negotiate a settlement
with the bishops. In 1284 Diniz promised them that he had ordered none of
the alleged countermeasures against interdicts, nor would he do so, and would
punish subjects employing them and order restitution of property taken from
clergy declaring interdicts and satisfaction for their ill-treatment. He gave similar
assurances regarding the other charges, but further terms suggested by Martin IV
were unacceptable to him, and the concordat between king and episcopate was
only finally ratified in 1289.
Such countermeasures against interdicts were intended not only to discourage
clergy from publishing these sentences but also from observing them. Some
measures specifically had the latter aim in mind, though they largely comprised
the same kinds of physical and financial coercion. After the French interdict was
declared at a council of prelates of the kingdom in 1199, Philip Augustus of
France persecuted bishops who had consented to the sentence and enforced it
by having them expelled from their sees and their property confiscated.⁴⁰ The
Bishops of Paris, Senlis, Amiens, Soissons, and Arras apparently enforced the
sentence very strictly. Bishop Odo of Paris’s disloyalty to the Crown especially
enraged Philip and, according to Ralph of Coggleshall, Philip sent knights who
seized Odo’s horses, baggage, and other goods, forcing him to leave his diocese on
foot; the Bishop of Senlis was said to have suffered the same indignity. Even lower
clergy and canons were ejected from their benefices and had their goods seques-
trated, presumably for refusing to celebrate. But several clergy did not observe the
sentence initially, notably the Archbishop of Reims and Bishops of Laon, Noyons,

³⁸ Portugaliae Monumenta Historica, I/i.189.

³⁹ Quotation from Linehan, ‘Castile’, 687. See also Reuter, 83–114.
⁴⁰ Recueil, xvii.51 (‘De gestis’), 387 (‘Extraits’). See Krehbiel, 115–16.
180 The Interdict in Action

Auxerre, Beauvais, Térouanne, Meaux, Chartres, and Orléans. Doubtless fear of

royal persecution dissuaded them as well as deference to Philip, and they penned
excuses to Innocent III, who had authorized the interdict, but promised to obey
his sentence if he commanded them to do so, which he apparently did, though it
is uncertain whether he secured the total compliance that his biographer claims.⁴¹
Dependent on spiritual sanctions to defend themselves, clergy were extremely
vulnerable to lay coercion, and the strain that it put on their loyalties divided
between king and pope must have been bewildering to many. King John readily
exploited this situation in England.⁴² Though it is suggested that he threat-
ened clerks physically, he mainly used financial coercion to dissuade them from
observing the papal interdict on England. His anti-papal propaganda included
letters sent to Lincoln and Ely dioceses on 18 March 1208 which announced that
on 24 March, the day after the interdict was to be published, his agents would
seize all lands and goods of abbots, priors, religious, and clergy of these dioceses
who refused to celebrate divine offices. Cheney assumed that such confiscations
were ordered across the kingdom; chroniclers certainly suggest that they were
widespread. Gerald of Wales observed that the interdict struck England with a
double wound, involving both the withdrawal of divine offices and plundering
of the clergy’s goods.⁴³ And several clerical commentators observed that four
men in each parish were charged with guarding the barns of secular clerks in
the king’s name. Bishops were to retaliate by excommunicating any who seized
ecclesiastical property, but many clergy negotiated to recover their possessions
from the Crown.⁴⁴ Richardson and Sayles inferred that since property was taken
from clerks for refusing to celebrate, it was restored to them in return for
the resumption of church services. However, there is no evidence to support
this assumption, and while Cheney found that John released most ecclesiastical
property through grants and commissions often to its owners soon after it was
seized, the sources suggest that this was done for a financial consideration.
The biographer of St Hugh of Lincoln stated that most rectors redeemed their
property from lay control with money.⁴⁵ John, nevertheless, retained goods of
clergy who went into exile after the interdict’s publication and of vacant sees
and monasteries, in many cases until the interdict was lifted. He was admittedly
exploiting the circumstances for financial gain but he was also trying to punish
clergy for obeying the pope before him. One financial sanction was deliberately
intended to embarrass the Church authorities. Several chroniclers report that
John ordered royal custodians of the clergy’s goods to arrest concubines of priests

⁴¹ Coggleshall, Chronicon, 112. Gesta c.52 (PL 214.xcviii–xcix).

⁴² Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 300–6; id., ‘Reaction’. ⁴³ Gerald of Wales, Opera, viii.311.
⁴⁴ Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 302–4; id., ‘Reaction’, 130–1, 132–5. Martène and Durand, i.813
(‘Forma interdicti’; the king, queen, and royal justiciar were to be excepted from this excommunica-
tion).
⁴⁵ Magna Vita, 303–4. See Richardson and Sayles, Governance, 346, and the critique of it by
Cheney, ‘A Recent View’.
 Popular and Princely Responses 181

and clerks and hold them to ransom. This mischievously drew attention to the
widespread violation of clerical celibacy that reformers had long deplored. Abbot
John of Ford, preaching in 1210, denounced as shameful priests who considered
their mistresses’ abduction the worst hardship of the interdict and hastened to
secure their release with ransoms paid from ecclesiastical revenues.⁴⁶
As Cheney has argued, John was fighting a war, in which the interdict
was the opening shot, but it was a war against the pope, not the English
Church itself. English clergy were victims of John’s war since they obeyed the
pope’s interdict. The conflict was essentially about who controlled ‘national’
churches, popes or kings, and notably in John’s England, church appointments.
Rulers had gained extensive control over the churches in the contemporary
Iberian kingdoms, especially in appointing bishops, and they were particularly
determined to dissuade clergy from obeying interdicts imposed in defiance of
that control. When Bishop Juan of Oviedo enforced a papal interdict on the
kingdom of León in his diocese, he was driven into exile and fled to Rome in
1198 seeking papal support; Innocent III approved the interdict’s removal on
condition that Juan was reinstated.⁴⁷ Over ten years later, when Sancho I of
Portugal tried to increase royal control over the churches of Oporto and Coimbra
and their bishops resisted with interdicts, similar complaints of royal persecution
ensued. Bishop Martinho of Oporto reached the curia ‘almost naked’ in 1210,
alleging that after he had laid an interdict on his diocese, Sancho flouted it,
ordering burial of the dead, and seized church property, presumably to compel
clergy to disobey the interdict.⁴⁸ Innocent III had persuaded the king to make
peace with Martinho in late 1210, but by then Sancho was involved in a similar
clash with Bishop Pedro of Coimbra. Pedro accused him of many violations of
ecclesiastical liberty, not least arresting clerks and trying them in the royal courts,
and cast doubt on his orthodoxy, alleging that he consulted a witch daily. When
he reacted to these charges with even more persecution, Pedro responded with an
interdict on his diocese and an appeal to the pope, which only provoked the king
further. He enlisted his friend the Archbishop of Braga to compel Pedro to relax
the interdict, but Pedro’s appeal was designed to block such a move. To prevent
Pedro following in Martinho’s footsteps to the curia, Sancho imprisoned him,
but he still managed to smuggle out a letter to the pope. This alleged that Sancho
(like the kings of France and England) had seized all goods of clerks observing the
interdict, and he considered anyone receiving these clerks his enemy. When Pedro
still refused to lift the interdict, Sancho like King John apparently threatened
violence; clergy refusing to celebrate during the interdict were to be blinded in
front of their friends and families. Pedro then lifted the sentence to avoid such

⁴⁶ Ioannis de Forda, 301; Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 306.

⁴⁷ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 125. See O’Callaghan, ‘Innocent III’, 320–1.
⁴⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 13, no. 57. See Reuter, 7–10.
182 The Interdict in Action

atrocities.⁴⁹ Hence the charges of resisting interdicts which Portuguese bishops

brought against Sancho’s grandson Afonso III were not unprecedented.
Clergy made similar complaints to the curia that the communes of Verdun
and San Gimignano violated their immunities during the interdicts on these
towns later in the thirteenth century. Resistance by lay powers to interdicts was
thus not uncommon at civic and national levels, and, as we have seen, it largely
comprised seizing church property and attacking the persons and liberties of
clergy. The ability of governments to resist interdicts depended partly on the
sophistication of their organization.⁵⁰ From the late twelfth century the rulers of
England, possibly the most centralized kingdom in the Latin West, could fight
interdicts with increasing force as the apparatus of royal government developed.
As town government also became more organized, communes are increasingly
found defying interdicts by the end of the thirteenth century, notably in the
progressive Italian city-states. But effective governmental machinery was not a
necessary condition; the personalities of rulers and historical circumstance might
also predispose them towards resisting interdicts. Iberian kings could exploit
their status as defenders of a Christian frontier society against Muslim attack
to increase their power over clergy behind the battle lines. Portuguese kings,
especially Sancho I and Afonso III, resented the wealth and influence of the
Portuguese Church and in their attempts to control it they fiercely resisted
interdicts. Sancho was probably even anti-clerical, and was influenced in this
direction by his ‘aggressively secularist’ chancellor Julião Pais and ‘Romanist
ideas he brought back from Bologna’.⁵¹
At the start of this chapter we noted that the aim of an interdict was to
turn the innocent against the guilty, but in practice an interdict might turn the
innocent against the Church and make the guilty even more defiant. Furthermore
popes tried to address this problem by mitigating the interdict’s severity for the
innocent whilst maintaining its force against the guilty. But sometimes popes
found this approach inadequate; hence from the late twelfth century they backed
up ineffective interdicts with other sanctions. In such cases popes threatened
to proceed both spiritualiter and temporaliter against those scorning interdicts.
Further spiritual proceedings comprised excommunication of the main offenders
if not already imposed, and this befell King John after he defied the English
interdict for over a year.⁵² A city might be threatened with loss of its see. As
noted in Chapter 2, spiritual sanctions might increase in number and severity
with the contumacy of the guilty, but a general interdict was usually the most
extreme, laid when other spiritual measures, notably excommunication, failed.
When it also failed, popes had to rely mainly on temporal sanctions for further
coercion.

⁴⁹ Innocent III, Reg. 14, no. 8. See Krehbiel, 149, and Reuter, 10–11.
⁵⁰ See Trexler, 3 ff. ⁵¹ As argued by Linehan, ‘Castile’, 688.
⁵² The pope also considered extending the interdict on England and Wales to John’s continental
lands before the king’s submission made it unnecessary; Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 136.
 Popular and Princely Responses 183

Innocent III applied a whole range of these against the Lombard communes.⁵³
Principal among these were commercial sanctions, clearly designed to harm the
chief source of these cities’ growing power. Shortly after becoming pope Innocent
imposed one on Parma and Piacenza. The cities had already been interdicted
for harbouring the robbers of a legate, and Innocent also threatened to strip
them of their diocesan status if they failed to return the stolen goods. Faced with
continued defiance he wrote to the bishops and clergy of both cities in 1198 of the
imminent effect of this threat and that he had called on the Empress Constance,
the kings of France and England, the count and barons of Champagne, duke
of Burgundy, and count of Maurienne to seize goods of Parman and Piacenzan
merchants in their lands until the cities restored those stolen from the legate.
Fighting fire with fire proved effective in Parma’s case as it complied later that
year, and Piacenza probably did so around the same time.⁵⁴
No doubt this success encouraged Innocent to deploy similar measures against
other Italian cities. He likewise threatened to instruct lay rulers to hold merchants
with their goods from interdicted Treviso in 1199, any Lombard commune taxing
its clergy in 1203, and Milan and Alessandria in 1212.⁵⁵ He was also prepared
to ban trade with Treviso, Milan, Alessandria, and, in 1208, Narni; in the case
of Milan and Alessandria this embargo was to be observed in both France and
Italy, thus affecting long-distance as well as local trade. Such measures were
not unprecedented. Innocent’s predecessor Celestine III had also imposed a
trade ban on interdicted Treviso, and Lucius III’s ‘Ad abolendam’ ruled (1184)
that a city not complying with this anti-heresy decree might be deprived of
commerce with other cities and of its see.⁵⁶ Nevertheless the frequency with
which Innocent applied such sanctions is remarkable. Trade bans admittedly
relied on the cooperation of lay powers and merchants, but Innocent was ready
to punish their non-compliance by excommunication and other sanctions, at
least regarding Narni. Of course commercial and territorial rivalries between
Italian cities provided an incentive to comply. Even the loss of a city’s see
enabled its neighbours to profit at its expense, not only in the spiritual sphere
but also the temporal. When Piacenza was again under interdict in 1206 and had
defied papal commands for three years, Innocent ordered its citizens to submit
in a month; otherwise their see would be suppressed and its diocese divided
among neighbouring ones. This implied the loss of the city’s temporal county,
and rather than endure this Piacenza quickly submitted. Like many Italian
communes the city and its territory were nominally subject to their bishop’s
temporal jurisdiction; hence diocese and contado were one.⁵⁷

⁵³ See Tillmann, 95 ff., and my ‘Punishment of the Guiltless’, 278–9.

⁵⁴ Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 121–2, 393. See Krehbiel, 101–2.
⁵⁵ Treviso: Innocent III, Reg. 2, no. 27. Lombard communes: Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 182.
Milan and Alessandria: Innocent III, Reg. 15, no. 189.
⁵⁶ Narni: Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 143; Krehbiel, 104. ‘Ad abolendam’: 1 Comp. 5.6.11 (= X
5.7.9). Celestine’s embargo is mentioned in Innocent’s letter to Treviso (see n. 55).
184 The Interdict in Action

Innocent III fought these communes, as Tillmann observed, with a rigour

and unwillingness to compromise he rarely showed in his conflicts with kings.
Doubtless he considered their rising power and ambitions a menace to the
papal state; and some had allied with German emperors who invaded the papal
state, notably Frederick I.⁵⁸ Following Innocent’s example his successors would
largely use temporal sanctions to defend papal territorial interests, and especially
against disobedient Italian communes. This was particularly true of Martin
IV. Shortly after he became pope in 1281, he was faced with a rebellion in
Romagna within the papal state centred on the town of Forlì. A papal army was
sent against the rebels and besieged Forlì but did not take the town or crush
the revolt. By 1282 Martin had excommunicated the rebels and their leader,
Guido da Montefeltro, and threatened to interdict papal communes that they
occupied, notably Forlì, unless they surrendered after a month. In common
with other interdicts this sentence was meant to make these communities
hostile to the guilty and compel them to come to terms. The pope could also
back it up with other collective sanctions. As these communes came under
his temporal jurisdiction, he could enforce temporal sanctions against them
without the aid of lay rulers. Indeed he threatened to proceed against them
spiritualiter et temporaliter, even suppressing their sees, if they failed to coerce
the rebels to withdraw. In March 1282 he extended the deadline for surrender
and specified these further proceedings: towns harbouring rebels would lose
rights, freedoms, privileges, and fiefs gained from the Roman or other churches;
individual wrongdoers would incur similar penalties, including loss of public
offices.⁵⁹
The pope’s enmity towards the rebels was deep-rooted. Their leader, Guido
da Montefeltro, was an old enemy of the papacy, having supported the heirs
of Frederick II. Earlier popes, notably Innocent IV, had regarded Frederick’s
personal union of the German empire and kingdom of Sicily as a threat to papal
political power in Italy, and they had struggled against him and his heirs with
unceasing vigour. This conflict split northern and central Italy into pro-papal
and pro-imperial camps, the so-called Guelfs and Ghibellines. Even after Charles
of Anjou had defeated the last of Frederick’s heirs and supplanted them as king
of Sicily with papal backing, these factions remained and the revolt in Romagna
marked a Ghibelline resurgence. It was to become part of what Runciman termed
a ‘great international conspiracy’ to oust Charles of Anjou from the papal fiefdom
of Sicily. With Sicilian, Byzantine, Ghibelline, and Genoese support the king of
Aragon conquered the island in 1282, claiming it by right of his wife, the last of
Frederick II’s descendants.⁶⁰

⁵⁷ Innocent III, Reg. 9, nos. 156–9. ⁵⁸ Robinson, 491–4; Morris, 194–6.

⁵⁹ Reg. Martin IV, no. 266. See Runciman, 212.
⁶⁰ See Runciman, 222–50. Cf. papal measures against Conradin and his allies, notably Italian
cities, in 1268: Reg. Clement IV, nos. 693, 694, 695, 699.
 Popular and Princely Responses 185

To Martin IV as a Frenchman (Charles was the French king’s uncle) this was
particularly intolerable. It provoked him to thunder a battery of spiritual and tem-
poral sanctions against Ghibellines and other ‘conspirators’. In November 1282
he warned Ghibellines that he would renew their excommunication and interdicts
on towns where they held out in Romagna unless they submitted by Christmas.
They and these towns would also be subjected to a trade ban and seizure of proper-
ty outside papal temporal jurisdiction by the proper authorities. Hence the secular
arm would be invoked against communities unmoved by interdicts as it often was
against obdurate excommunicates. The deadline was not met and the trade ban
came into force soon thereafter, as Martin issued warnings in February 1283 that
commerce with the rebels, especially supplying them with arms and food, entailed
excommunication for individuals and interdicts for towns and churches.⁶¹ As
with Innocent III, when the pope could not directly enforce temporal sanctions,
he could threaten spiritual sanctions to persuade others to do so.
On the day when he threatened these sanctions against Ghibellines Martin IV
declared similar measures against Sicilian rebels and the Aragonese invaders. He
had already interdicted towns, notably Palermo and Messina, for their part in
the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, the local uprising of Easter 1282 against Angevin rule. But
their support of the subsequent Aragonese invasion convinced him that further
sanctions were needed; hence he threatened to proceed against them spiritualiter
et temporaliter. Towns that persisted in backing excommunicate ‘occupier’ Peter
of Aragon against the pope and his Angevin vassal would be deprived of their
sees and commerce with others.⁶²
By January 1283 Martin IV had proclaimed Charles of Anjou’s war to recover
Sicily a ‘crusade’, and in March he declared Peter deposed from Aragon, a
papal fief, and his vassals released from fealty to him, inviting Catholics chosen
by the Holy See to occupy Aragon. Further measures against Peter’s Sicilian
supporters also followed; Martin renewed his interdict against the rebel towns
and threatened them with loss of papal privileges and any fiefs or rights held from
the Roman and other churches. As in Romagna he had the power to withdraw
the latter as feudal overlord. Others, however, had to enforce the embargo on
Sicily, and he specified its terms by November 1283.⁶³ Venice, Genoa, Pisa,
Ancona, and other maritime towns might not buy from or sell to Sicilians,
make contracts with them, admit them knowingly to their territory, approach
Sicily, or export arms or other necessities there. Rulers of these towns were to
compel their subjects to respect the embargo; violation of its terms entailed
excommunication for individuals and interdict for communities. To reinforce
the embargo further Martin ordered the Bishop of Castello in January 1284

⁶¹ Reg. Martin IV, nos. 279–83, 309.

⁶² Reg. Martin IV, nos. 270, 276. The sentences against Guido da Montefeltro and his supporters
were renewed in ibid., nos. 268, 462.
⁶³ Reg. Martin IV, nos. 310, 460, 483, 490, 583, 587. See Runciman, 245, 246, 251, 265–6.
186 The Interdict in Action

to announce its terms to the people and clergy of Venice in St Mark’s Square;
he issued similar instructions to the Archbishops of Genoa and Pisa. Genoa,
Ancona, and Venice were specifically cautioned since they had supplied ships
to Sicilian rebels in 1282, Genoa had perhaps sent them arms, and in 1283
the doge of Venice was even suspected of making overtures to the Aragonese.
Admittedly Genoa, Pisa, and Venice had also provided ships for the Angevins,
but this inconsistency doubtless only increased papal distrust of these cities.
Hence the interdict on Sicilian towns was accompanied by measures of social
exclusion that normally followed excommunication. Even after Charles of Anjou
and Martin died, leaving the island in Aragonese hands, Sicily’s isolation was
maintained by Nicholas IV, who crowned Charles’s heir as its king in 1289.
Admittedly Nicholas partly lifted the embargo later in 1289, letting Venetians
sail to Sicily and have contact with Sicilians without fear of excommunication
provided that they did not sell arms or otherwise support the rebels or Aragonese.
But others remained bound by the original terms of the embargo. Sardinians could
still be excommunicated for associating with Sicilians in 1291, when Nicholas
authorized the Archbishop of Cagliari to absolve his subjects if they traded with
Sicilian merchants provided that they did not support them otherwise. Despite
such sanctions and the Angevin ‘crusade’, the Aragonese and their Sicilian allies
were unmoved; a French invasion of Aragon had also failed in 1285. By 1302
Boniface VIII had to acknowledge Peter of Aragon’s heirs as the real possessors
of the kingdom of Aragon and island of Sicily.⁶⁴
Though temporal sanctions mostly reinforced interdicts on Italian cities, partly
for political motives and partly since papal claims of lordship over these towns
eased their implementation, they occasionally accompanied interdicts north of
the Alps for wider reasons of social control. When a band of knights attacked
the Breton episcopal town of Tréguier, notably its churches, their property and
clergy, in 1232 Gregory IX authorized an ambulatory interdict on the knights and
ruled that if they failed to come to terms within a month, they might be deprived
of any fiefs held from the Church. As in papal territory church authorities
might inflict temporal sanctions by virtue of their temporal jurisdiction. But he
added that the secular arm might be invoked if necessary ‘so that the severity
of human discipline coerces those whom the fear of God does not recall from
evil’. Ecclesiastical judges proclaimed these sanctions, but over two years later
the knights remained defiant and exercised lordship in those fiefs de facto which
they had lost de iure. The secular arm was indeed invoked in the shape of the
count of Brittany, but he ignored a papal request to compel those knights under
his jurisdiction to submit. As Innocent III had found, spiritual sanctions had
to be threatened to press temporal authority to place its power at the Church’s
disposal.⁶⁵

⁶⁴ Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 1390, 5578. On these later events see Runciman, 257–75.
⁶⁵ Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 757, 2158.
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 187

It is uncertain whether the count or knights complied, but this case shows
how weak the Church authorities were in means of coercion. However much
the thirteenth-century papacy asserted its power to intervene in the temporal
sphere, even in places under its temporal jurisdiction, it ultimately relied on
secular authorities to enforce its wishes. Its embargoes on Sicily and other places
in Italy under papal suzerainty could not succeed without the cooperation of
those outside its temporal rule, and it required Charles of Anjou’s support
to reinforce its political control over Italy, ill-fated as this partnership was.
Its capacity to act independently in the temporal sphere, especially to impose
temporal sanctions, was thus limited. Even in the spiritual sphere, where papal
supremacy was largely undisputed, its sanctions did not go unchallenged by lay
rulers. When it proceeded against them spiritualiter, it relied upon their piety
and pressure of public opinion to compel them to submit, but its interdicts
sometimes only succeeded in undermining lay orthodoxy and turning them even
more against the Church. Royal and civic governments could use their resources
to defy interdicts; their capacity and tendency to do so generally increased with
their organization (ironically the latter was largely influenced by ecclesiastical
institutions). Indeed by the later thirteenth century the papacy’s claim to proceed
against its opponents spiritualiter and temporaliter was seriously challenged by
emerging nation-states. For example after the French city of Laon defied a papal
interdict laid in 1296, Boniface VIII not only failed to act further temporaliter,
as he threatened, but the French king Philip IV succeeded in intervening both
temporaliter, abolishing Laon’s commune, and spiritualiter, imposing penances
on its citizens for their sins against the Church.⁶⁶ In the face of such challenges
the papacy had demonstrated its reluctance to abandon the interdict as a political
weapon; Boniface VIII significantly reduced the general interdict’s severity for
the innocent in order to reinvigorate the sanction. For him and previous popes
the interdict ultimately tested their authority over the Church, so they were
determined to enforce it and make it work. The next section examines how they
tried to enforce observance of interdicts from the late twelfth century in the face
of growing lay opposition.

5 . 2 T H E E N F O RC E M E N T O F I N T E R D I C TS

By Innocent III’s time papal mandates imposing an interdict regularly instructed

their executors to observe the sentence and have it observed inviolably. Indeed
Innocent’s decretal ‘Petiistis’ (1212) ruled that only if an interdict was not
observed by clergy it was meant to defend, were others not obliged to observe
it.⁶⁷ Even if an interdict was flouted by those who provoked it, others were not

⁶⁶ Denton, ‘Laon’, 89. ⁶⁷ X 5.33.20 (= 4 Comp. 5.12.3); Innocent III, Reg. 15, no. 162.
188 The Interdict in Action

free to ignore it. This was basically a question of clerical obedience to ecclesiastical
superiors. As Honorius III put it in a letter to exempt prelates in the Latin Empire
of Constantinople, they were to enforce interdicts their patriarch pronounced
on their subjects; otherwise they might give laity an excuse for rebellion and
contempt when they should provide a model of obedience and devotion. The fact
that clergy had to be told this indicates that they did not always respect interdicts.
In fact three years before this letter, in 1222, Honorius had ejected monks from
a Cistercian house in the patriarchate for scorning a legate’s interdict.⁶⁸
Only ordained clergy might celebrate offices and administer the sacraments and
conversely withhold these religious comforts, but strict observance of interdicts
did not depend on them alone. The passive compliance of the laity was also
required, especially lay powers whom interdicts were meant to punish. As we
have seen, royal and civic governments might compel clergy not to observe
interdicts directed against them, and they were partially successful in doing so.
Examples of this are found time and again across thirteenth-century Europe.
A canon of Coimbra Cathedral petitioned Gregory IX in 1232 that fear drove
him to celebrate offices for his king, Sancho II of Portugal, in interdicted places,
since he was surrounded by spears, swords, and blades. Admittedly his petition
was meant to obtain papal leniency for violating interdicts, but his excuse seems
credible; Gregory received other reports of royal officials harrassing Portuguese
clergy around this time.⁶⁹ As we have noted, such lay coercion comprised
economic sanctions as well as physical violence. Indeed this canon alleged that
when he ultimately refused to celebrate for those entering his church by force,
they expelled him from his prebend and seized its revenues. Similar accusations
were made against Conrad of Hohenstaufen two decades later after he claimed
the kingdom of Sicily and German empire as Frederick II’s heir in defiance of
the papacy. According to English chronicler Matthew Paris, while the kingdom
lay under a papal interdict, Conrad had forced clergy to celebrate offices in 1254.
Conrad denied inflicting violence on these clerks and alleged that they violated
the interdict of their own free will and were even doing so on his arrival in Sicily.
His own letters apparently contradicted his version of events, but he maintained
that these were issued without his consent and none of them compelled clergy to
celebrate. Nevertheless it is hardly a coincidence that Conrad was also accused of
intimidating clergy in the empire at this time. Early in 1254 monks of Scafusa
Abbey in Constance diocese petitioned Innocent IV that Conrad had ordered
them to celebrate for those under excommunication and interdict. When they
refused, he had allegedly confiscated grain, livestock, and other goods of the
abbey and gave its lands as fiefs to enemies of the papacy, presumably his own
supporters.⁷⁰

⁶⁸ Reg. Honorius III, nos. 3904, 5423.

⁶⁹ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 964. Cf. ibid. no. 810. See also Linehan, ‘Castile’, 683, and Reuter, 24–9.
⁷⁰ Matthew Paris, Chronica, vi.301. Reg. Innocent IV, no. 7635.
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 189

Clergy who observed interdicts directed against their lay rulers were evidently
vulnerable to such attacks on their persons and property. Fear of royal persecution
had even driven the bishops into exile who proclaimed Innocent III’s interdict
on England, and other English clergy followed them abroad once this fear was
realized. Sometimes popes even advised clergy to leave places before interdicts
came into force there; such precautions were meant not only to protect clergy
from persecution but also reinforce observance of the sentences: clergy could
hardly minister in interdicted places if they were not there to be forced into
this. In 1203 when Innocent III threatened an interdict on Bergamo, he thus
required its metropolitan the Archbishop of Milan and the Bishop of Vercelli to
compel clergy to leave the city and its contado apparently at its bishop’s request.
Clergy were not to return until the commune made amends for its violations of
ecclesiastical immunity; those who disobeyed were to incur excommunication
and suspension. Innocent similarly instructed the Archbishop of Ravenna a year
later when he authorized him to lay Modena under interdict for mistreating its
clergy.⁷¹ When an interdict was caused by persecution of clergy, it was clearly
reasonable to assume that this might increase after the sentence was laid. But
where could clergy find refuge and how could they sustain themselves away
from their benefices? Papal mandates did not usually say. When Innocent III
laid an interdict on Narni in 1208, he merely instructed its bishop and clergy
to leave that city for ‘nearby places’. Presumably churches there made ad hoc
provision for them. Some eighty years later, when clergy left interdicted San
Gimignano, they stayed at a church just a few miles away. Significantly they fled
lay persecution apparently at their own initiative not an ecclesiastical superior’s
order. Nevertheless Innocent III’s successors occasionally followed his example by
ordering clergy to leave interdicted areas, normally in the papal state. Sometimes
this must be inferred from the fact that clergy received papal permission to
return to places where an interdict was to be relaxed.⁷² But not all clergy were
told to leave in the first place. After all interdicts did not forbid all religious
ministrations. When Martin IV required the Bishop and clergy of Perugia to
leave their interdicted city in 1282, he told them to leave behind sufficient priests
to administer infant baptism and penance of the dying, sacraments normally
permitted under general interdicts. Doubtless this provision was usual in these
cases of clerical self-exile. Certainly it provoked popular outrage at San Gimignano
when its ‘exiled’ clergy refused to release priests to perform ministrations allowed
during the interdict there; its commune consequently resorted to hiring priests
from elsewhere for this purpose.⁷³

⁷¹ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 182; 7, no. 41.

⁷² Narni: as n. 56. San Gimignano: see p. 207. Papal permission: Reg. Gregory IX, no. 3839
( Todi); Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1574 (Orvieto).
⁷³ Reg. Martin IV, no. 280. Cf. ibid. no. 281 (Spoleto). Perugian clergy received papal permission
to return seventeen months later: ibid. no. 575. On San Gimignano see p. 208.
190 The Interdict in Action

Another precaution designed to reinforce observance of interdicts was to

take the host away from interdicted churches. After all priests were required to
consecrate it weekly and keep it in their churches for the dying during interdicts
by 1234. Even if they refused to administer it to the healthy, it might remain an
object of veneration for those denied it. Indeed even outside of interdicts many
laity attended masses simply to marvel at the elevation of the host and rarely
received it. If they believed that it was as salutary to see the host as receive it,
ecclesiastical authorities had to ensure that it was not exposed to public view lest
the interdict appear to be flouted. Indeed it provoked a scandal in 1297 when
consuls of interdicted Béziers had the host taken from its clergy to their town
hall; it was not apparently distributed but presumably was on display to the
faithful. It was not the first time that this danger arose or was anticipated at least.
In 1234, shortly before weekly consecration of the host became a legal norm
during interdicts, judges delegate had sought to reinforce an interdict on the
land of a Breton nobleman by ordering removal of the corpus Christi from there.
Likewise over sixty years later, when Laon Cathedral was violated in the rising of
the city’s commune and offices were suspended there, the dean and chapter had
the Eucharist taken away from their closed church; it was apparently moved to
Bruyères seven kilometres away.⁷⁴ In 1290, five years earlier, priests had allegedly
even carried off other objects of popular adoration when they walked out of
interdicted San Gimignano, namely altar paintings.
When clergy could not escape lay persecution during interdicts, the papacy, as
we have seen, might impose additional sanctions including temporal ones. These
were meant both to reinforce the interdict’s purpose, in coercing the guilty to
submit, and to compel them to respect the interdict itself, since their scorn for
it provoked these extra measures. When Martin IV approved the interdict on
Perugia in 1282, he ordered that if it was not observed and Perugians did not
submit to him by a certain deadline, they would be deprived of all papal grants
and all property held from the Roman or other churches.⁷⁵ Beyond such ad hoc
measures the papacy made no provision in canon law against lay violators of
interdicts until the council of Vienne (1311–12), and even then it was in response
to external demand. At the council Clement V received complaints from prelates
that some temporal lords coerced clergy to celebrate in their chapels and other
churches in their interdicted lands and even had people called to hear mass there by
church bells and public criers. Clement was also informed that some lords forbade
excommunicates and those under interdict to leave church during mass when
asked to do so by celebrants; thus services often had to be abandoned in order to
avoid scandal. Pope and council responded with the canon ‘Gravis’, which placed

⁷⁴ Béziers: see p. 228. The judges acted against this nobleman since he continued persecuting the
Bishop of Tréguier despite or perhaps because of this interdict: Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1765. Laon:
Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 355–6; Denton, ‘Laon’, 82. Cf. Trexler, 123–7 (host displayed in 1377
at interdicted Florence).
⁷⁵ Perugia: as n. 73.
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 191

excommunication on those committing such abuses and reserved absolution to

the holy see. It is unclear whether such penalties were applied to laity other than
lay powers. Ordinary citizens had, after all, defied interdicts at Béziers and Verdun
in the 1290s, even if they did so partly at the direction of lay powers. Tancred had
said (c.1220) that laity who scorned interdicts ought to be anathematized and
cited a canon which required that those who still resisted ecclesiastical correction
be condemned to exile by the judgement of their king. And over a century
later a treatise attributed to Johannes Calderinus also argued that lay violators
of interdicts who remained obdurate after excommunication should endure this
sanction. Admittedly the aid of the ‘secular arm’ was often invoked by the church
authorities against obdurate excommunicates by the fourteenth century, but no
cases are known to concern laity resisting interdicts, at least in England.⁷⁶
However, laity rarely violated an interdict directly, usurping clerical functions
it banned, but usually indirectly, by encouraging clergy to flout the sentence.
Clerical cooperation was not always extracted by force but sometimes given
voluntarily. For instance, after the Bishop of Limoges interdicted his city in
1202, his clergy allegedly scorned his sentence, preaching in churches and even
celebrating there after they were excommunicated.⁷⁷ The lay power collaborated
with the clergy and unusually coerced not them but laity to disregard the sentence:
burgesses of Limoges fined matrons and others who, fearing excommunication,
refused to attend services held by these clergy or accept the Eucharist from
their hands on Easter day. This does not necessarily mean that laity attending
mass in interdicted places were automatically excommunicated; in this case
they probably feared incurring this penalty as a result of communicating with
excommunicates. Nevertheless this example illustrates how an interdict might test
the authority of ecclesiastical superiors over clergy. In some cases local Church
authorities instructed clergy to disregard an interdict imposed by higher ones.
When Innocent III confirmed the Bishop of Modena’s interdict on Cremona in
1203, he observed that the archpriest and archdeacon there had authorized priests
to celebrate publicly.⁷⁸ Whilst such disobedience signalled tensions within the
Church hierarchy, it might arise since local prelates supported the lay power at
whom an interdict was directed. Innocent IV condemned the Bishop of Squillace
in Sicily in 1253 for backing its king Frederick II after the latter’s deposition as
emperor in 1245 and for requiring priests and clergy of his diocese to celebrate
despite the papal interdict on the kingdom. The bishop was in fact a nephew

⁷⁶ ‘Gravis’: Clem. 5.10.2. On Béziers see pp. 227–30. Tancred on 1 Comp. 4.1.13 v. debitam,
BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 65ra; Vat. lat. MS 2509, fol. 61va: ‘Pena debita hec est: clericus qui
contempnit interdictum deponitur et laicus anathematizatur, ut infra. De clerico excommunicato
ministrante c. ii et xi. q. iii. Si quis episcopus, Placuit universo [1 Comp. 5.23.2; C. 11 q. 3 c. 6,
9] t.’ Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 15vb: ‘Si laici fuerint
et interdictum violaverint, excommunicari debent, et si moniti non destiterint ad requisitionem
ecclesie, regis iudicio exilio deputentur.’ England: Logan, 49–53.
⁷⁷ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 97; Krehbiel, 130–1.
⁷⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 6, no. 13.
192 The Interdict in Action

of Frederick’s chamberlain, who allegedly had engineered his election, and given
that many prelates owed their posts to lay patronage, interdicts must often have
tested whether their loyalty lay more with the temporal or spiritual power.⁷⁹
In 1283, after Martin IV deposed Peter of Aragon, clergy along with other
subjects of his even incurred interdict and excommunication for supporting him;
unremarkably given their sympathies reports soon reached the pope that they
were not observing the interdict.⁸⁰ Some prelates even used the same methods
as lay powers to resist interdicts directed against them. In 1289 the Bishop of
Perigeux complained to Nicholas IV that after he removed an abbot from office
and interdicted the latter’s abbey, the abbot celebrated there and compelled
laity by seizure of their goods and even of their persons to attend services and
receive the sacraments there. Indeed some thirty years later the canonist Johannes
Andreae observed that bishops and other prelates might be excommunicated
under Clement V’s constitution ‘Gravis’ as well as temporal lords for coercing
clergy to celebrate during interdicts.⁸¹
Even when secular clergy observed interdicts, religious were often accused of
flouting them and this was a source of tension between seculars and regulars from
the late twelfth century. Since then many religious had secured papal licences to
celebrate offices in private during general local interdicts, and frequent episcopal
complaints to Rome followed that they were admitting those under interdict to
such private services, even though the licences required the exclusion of such
persons.⁸² The military orders were regularly accused of abusing the generous
papal grants that they enjoyed during interdicts. Bishops were also frustrated
since these and other religious holding similar freedoms often claimed immunity
from episcopal correction; hence papal intervention was usually needed against
such abuses. For example the Bishop of Hereford petitioned Alexander III that
the papacy allowed Hospitallers to open interdicted churches once a year, but
they were doing so more frequently in his diocese and even burying the dead
there; the pope warned them not to violate their privileges in future or they might
lose these freedoms. Though his ruling did not find a lasting place in canon
law, this threat became enshrined as a canonistic principle. Similar episcopal
complaints at the Third Lateran Council prompted Alexander to ban Templars
and Hospitallers from burying the dead at interdicted churches. Subsequently
canonists agreed that this ban did not apply to dead members of these orders,
and Innocent III confirmed this in a canon of the Fourth Lateran Council. But
such burial privileges were still not to be extended to laity, and Innocent III often
had to correct religious on this point.⁸³

⁷⁹ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 7259. See Pybus, ‘Frederick II’, 162–3.
⁸⁰ Reg. Martin IV, nos. 482, 489.
⁸¹ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 669. Johannes Andreae, Glossa on Clem. 5.10.2 v. temporales.
⁸² E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 464, 476, 507; 5, no. 135; 6, no. 10; 9, no. 88; etc.
⁸³ 1 Comp. 5.28.7; see e.g. Ricardus Anglicus, ibid. v. privilegium, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol.
111vb: ‘Solutio: Credo privilegium per abusionem amitti, idest per delictum quod committitur in
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 193

The papacy had to hedge such immunities with conditions in order to limit
the scope for violation of interdicts. The terms of papal licences to celebrate
in interdicted areas were especially strict. As we have seen, they required their
recipients to shut the doors of their churches, excluding excommunicates and
those under interdict, and not to ring the bells before celebrating in a low voice
(so that nobody outside could hear). Consequently, when Innocent III heard in
1206 that some canons in Le Mans rang the bells of their church and celebrated
with the doors open during an episcopal interdict, he intervened decisively. A
legate had already condemned them at the local dean and chapter’s request for
violating the interdict, but their proctor claimed that their church was exempt
and that, according to a custom recognized by the bishop, they might ring bells
and celebrate offices in a loud voice even during general interdicts provided
that excommunicates and those under interdict were not admitted. The pope
responded by revoking this custom as going against strict observance of interdicts,
replacing it with a licence for the canons to celebrate during general interdicts
on their city but subject to the usual conditions.⁸⁴ This judgement quickly
found a lasting place in canon law, but maintaining the balance it attempted to
strike between protecting such immunities and enforcing interdicts remained a
perennial problem for the papacy.
This difficulty was well illustrated by Innocent’s interdict on England. Before
his executors published it, he told them that it was to be observed in churches
of both regular and secular clergy despite any freedoms or privileges.⁸⁵ But five
months after they declared the interdict, they informed him that although all Cis-
tercians in England had begun by observing it, after a few days some had resumed
celebrating the offices; the monks concerned belonged to Margam, Meaux, and
Beaulieu abbeys.⁸⁶ The Meaux Abbey chronicle indeed records that its members
celebrated behind closed doors with excommunicates and those under interdict
excluded as long as the interdict lasted. This represented them acting in accor-
dance with their freedoms. In 1208 at the Cistercian General Chapter the abbot
of Cîteaux hence acknowledged that the abbots of these houses had stood for the
order’s freedom and he imposed penances on other Cistercian abbots in England
for observing the interdict ‘contra immunitates ordinis’. Moreover he instructed
all Cistercians in England and Wales to resume celebration of the offices in
accordance with their freedoms, despite the interdict and the executors’ orders,
until they received a mandate from the pope telling them to stop.⁸⁷

abutendum.’ Lat. Conc. III c.9 (= 1 Comp. 5.28.3; X 5.33.3). Lat. Conc. IV c.57 (= 4 Comp.
5.12.7; X 5.33.24); see pp. 165–6 above. Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 464, 476, 507; 6, no. 10.
⁸⁴ Innocent III, Reg. 8, nos. 212 (= 3 Comp. 1.3.4; X 1.4.5), 213.
⁸⁵ SLI, no. 31. The English ‘Forma interdicti’ specifically forbade Hospitallers to open churches
and bury in cemeteries (despite their freedoms), but priests might call people to hear them preach
outside churches (Martène and Durand, i.813).
⁸⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 141.
⁸⁷ Melsa, i.351. Statuta, i.351. Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 235; Gervase, II, p. cix.
194 The Interdict in Action

This situation embarrassed the pope. It appears that the executors had enforced
his interdict more strictly than he intended, for he admitted to them by June 1208
that he would not have minded had monks been allowed to celebrate behind
closed doors according to their privileges from the outset. This apparently
contradicted his previous orders, and in another letter to the executors in August
he had to refute allegations that he revealed his purpose first one way then
another. However, his letter did not end the confusion but simply left the issue
to his executors’ discretion. Not until January 1209 did he allow celebration of
the offices and weekly consecration of hosts for the dying in conventual churches
provided that the interdict was observed there from the start.⁸⁸
Although this seemed to confirm the Cistercians’ freedoms, initially they
were denied this concession. Innocent III regarded the abbot of Cîteaux’s
intervention as an affront to papal authority and chastised him in February
1209 for encouraging English Cistercians to violate the interdict. A copy of the
executors’ mandate concerning strict observance of the interdict was sent to him
with orders to compel his English brethren to respect it, and he obediently did
so. The pope’s reaction seems excessive when they had apparently acted as their
freedoms allowed, but a contemporary letter of his to the English episcopate
suggests otherwise. He had received reports that some Cistercians had violated
the interdict by flagrantly exceeding the terms of their privileges: ringing their
churches’ bells; bellowing chants with the doors open; and admitting outsiders
to Communion celebrated with more than usual solemnity.⁸⁹ He instructed the
bishops to investigate these rumours, compel offending houses to observe the
interdict, and send their abbots or priors under suspension to Rome to account
for themselves. Doubtless these allegations were exaggerated, and protests from
the Cistercian General Chapter soon followed. In March 1209 he responded by
acknowledging the order’s freedom to celebrate during interdicts but expressed
reservations about letting its English brethren enjoy this given their alleged
conduct. But he issued a letter on the same day requiring his executors to
mitigate the interdict for Cistercians in accordance with their freedom if they
could do so without causing scandal and the interdict being broken. As Cheney
judged, ‘these confusing and contradictory orders … arose from the use of the
interdict as an instrument of diplomacy’.⁹⁰ Although Innocent III was prepared
to honour papal immunities, he was also concerned not to weaken the interdict
against King John.
The situation also arose from a misunderstanding of Innocent’s executors over
his intentions and of Cistercians over the nature of their freedoms. Indeed after
he had declared the interdict on France in 1199, Cistercians there also disputed

⁸⁸ SLI, no. 36, p. 109. Innocent III, Reg. 11, nos. 141, 214.
⁸⁹ Reg. Innocent III, 11, nos. 259, 260. His letter to the bishops was copied by Gervase, II,
pp. xcvi–xcvii.
⁹⁰ Cheney, England, 306. Innocent III, Reg. 12, nos. 9, 10.
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 195

whether their immunities freed them from observing it, but here the General
Chapter punished those disregarding it.⁹¹ As the papacy established a common
law of interdicts, such excuses wore thin and papal reprimands of religious
violating interdicts became less common, which suggests that they increasingly
understood the limits of their freedoms. In 1247, however, Innocent IV still had
to tell Dominicans, Franciscans, Hospitallers, and other religious in Basel not to
celebrate offices before its interdicted citizens. Alexander IV and Martin IV also
had to correct exempt clergy for illicitly extending their freedoms to laity during
interdicts.⁹² Friars remained particular offenders in this respect, as we will see.
And some religious still resisted interdicts aimed at them, especially by the local
ordinary. In 1294 the Bishop of Mâcon complained to Celestine V that after
he had interdicted a Cluniac church, four of its monks forced open the chancel
door and places where chalices and ornaments were kept and celebrated with the
church doors open and bells ringing.⁹³
Since religious ministrations only continued during interdicts through clerical
disobedience, voluntary or coerced, from the later twelfth century the papacy
aimed a growing body of penalties for violation of interdicts mainly at clergy,
and very little at laity as we have seen, though such measures were meant
to counteract lay attempts to coerce clergy to disregard interdicts. Clergy
increasingly found themselves under pressure from both ecclesiastical and lay
directions. Indeed automatic penalties in canon law for clerical violation of
interdicts were so numerous by the early fourteenth century that, according
to the canonist Guillaume de Montlauzun, there were more of them than for
violation of excommunication or suspension. In his view one reason for this
was that the interdict was respected less and so disregarded more than these
other sentences. Another reason, he added, was that its violation created more
scandal than breaches of those sentences, for it was imposed on more people,
more generally, and more publicly;⁹⁴ those sentences normally bound individuals
only. Indeed an interdict was a very conspicuous test of the Church’s authority
over society, especially its own clergy, and one that faced growing princely and
popular hostility in the thirteenth century, hence the papacy had to develop
increasingly elaborate means to enforce it.

⁹¹ Krehbiel, 116–17; Statuta, i.258.

⁹² Reg. Innocent IV, no. 3109. Cf. Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1321; Reg. Martin IV, no. 530.
⁹³ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 2142.
⁹⁴ Guillaume de Montlauzun, Sacramentale (c.1319), Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hamilton MS
24, fol. 81ra: ‘Si queras que est ratio quod pluribus penis puniatur qui violat interdictum quam
qui violat excommunicationem vel suspensionem cum alias omnia cetera sunt regulariter paria, dic
quod hec est ratio quia aliqui credebant interdictum vilius et minus ceteris et ideo vilipendebant et
negliebant ipsum, quare ut magis apparetur, gravius punitur ad instar peccati in spiritum sanctum,
ar. xxv di. Qualis et de pen. di. i. consimilibus [D.25 c.4; De pen. D.1 c.34]. Hoc est vel
quia transgressio interdicti cum maiori scandali fit quam aliarum penarum pro eo quod in plures
communius fertur et magis publice quam cetere pene, extra. de postul. prela. c.i et de of. or. Novit
[X 1.5.1; 1.30.7].’
196 The Interdict in Action

The earliest papal rulings on this issue, as on others, were issued in response
to external demand, largely from prelates requesting advice on how to discipline
clergy. Thus in an undated decretal, addressed in the Liber extra to the Bishop
of London but in earlier collections to the Bishop of Tours or other prelates,
Alexander III ruled that clergy who celebrated while under interdict or excom-
munication incurred permanent deposition. When many such offenders were
reported to him from Toledo province, he introduced a distinction to this ruling
in another undated decretal addressed to their archbishop. The pope instructed
him to depose these priests from office in perpetuity if they were fewer than
forty, but if they were more than forty, he might reserve this penalty for the more
serious offenders and only temporarily suspend the rest. Hence clergy might
be punished according to the severity of their violation. This applied a Roman
law principle that punishment was to be mitigated in the case of a multitude
of offenders, as canonists recognized.⁹⁵ Canonists also noted that those who
returned to obedience might be dispensed from permanent deposition. Vincen-
tius Hispanus held that a bishop might grant this dispensation, but Tancred
agreed with Alanus and other canonists that this power was reserved to the
pope. Tancred also shared Vincentius’s doubts whether judges delegate might
exercise this power on the pope’s behalf. Later canonists generally accepted this
reservation to the papacy; even Vincentius (c.1236) came around to it.⁹⁶ It was
consistent with the nascent canonistic principle that only the authority imposing
a penalty might lift it, which in the case of penalties attached to papal law was the
pope himself. Indeed it appears that such violators of interdicts might be deposed
only on papal authority. In 1221 when Honorius III heard that the Bishop
of Hildesheim deposed a priest for celebrating before excommunicates during
an interdict, he revoked this penalty since ‘according to canonical sanctions’ it
might not be inflicted on mere episcopal authority.⁹⁷ Papal reservation of the
correction of clergy violating interdicts also characterized rulings of Alexander
III’s successors.

⁹⁵ 1 Comp. 5.23.3, 4 (= X 5.27.3, 4). Cf. Anon. (c.1206) on 1 Comp. 5.23.4 v. multitudinem,
Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9, fol. 85ra: ‘Quia ubi multitudo est in causa detrahendum
est ibi aliquid severitas pene, ut l. d. Ut constitueretur [D.50 c.25].’
⁹⁶ Vincentius on 1 Comp. 5.23.3 v. admonitionem, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol.
56ra: ‘Ergo quod episcopus dispensare cum clerico ministrante, xi. q. iii. Si quis episcopus dampnatur
[C.11 q.3 c.6].’ Alanus on 1 Comp. 5.23.3 v. redierint, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm
3879, fol. 90va: ‘Quod dictum est de dispensatione? … Secundum quosdam quod alius a papa cum
eis dispensare non potest, ar. xi. q. iii. Si quis damp., supra xi. q. iii. Placuit, Si quis episcopus [C.11
q.3 c.6, 9].’ The latter gloss was copied by Tancred, ibid. v. admonitionem (manuscripts as follows).
Id. on 1 Comp. 5.23.4 v. presumpserint, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 91vb; Vat. lat. MS 2509,
fol. 86vb: ‘Sed nunquid potest delegatus dispensare cum talibus ut ministrent et videtur quoniam
vicem pape gerit, supra. de sen. exco. Ad eminentiam lib. ii. [2 Comp. 5.18.9]. Non credo, ar. xi. q.
iii. Si quis episcopus [C.11 q.3 c.6] … Vinc.’ Vincentius copied Alanus’s gloss from Tancred on X
5.27.3 v. nisi monita, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 6769, fol. 131va. Cf. Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.27.4
v. ad tempus; Bernard of Parma on X 5.27.3 v. moniti, who held that a legate might grant such
dispensations on the pope’s behalf.
⁹⁷ Reg. Honorius III, no. 3321.
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 197

One such ruling was also prompted by another external request. The dean
and prior of Cologne Cathedral asked Innocent III how to punish secular and
regular clerks for celebrating in interdicted places, notably when they were
already excommunicated for doing so. He replied in the decretal ‘Postulastis’
(1207) that secular clergy were to be deprived of their benefices; canonists also
came to regard this as a consequence of the deposition incurred under Alexander
III’s rulings. Monks or nuns, Innocent added, were to be packed off to stricter
monasteries to do penance. By 1210 ‘Postulastis’ had found a lasting place in
canon law alongside Alexander III’s rulings.⁹⁸ Consequently its sanctions might
be incurred likewise ipso iure. Certainly these penalties were also understood to
be imposed on papal authority. In 1218 the Bishop of Prague solicited a faculty
from Honorius III to strip prelates and clerks in his diocese of their benefices,
as they had participated in offices, thereby violating an interdict laid by him.
Honorius also authorized the removal of regular clergy who violated interdicts.
And even before Innocent III had issued this ruling, bishops had sought his
backing to discipline monks who violated interdicts, even religious subject to
episcopal jurisdiction, presumably in order to prevent these monks appealing on
the grounds of their immunities.⁹⁹
Innocent III had also issued another less general ruling on clerical violation of
interdicts in 1200. Although it was not solicited, it originated in response to a
specific case referred to him.¹⁰⁰ The chapter of Sens had elected the Bishop of
Auxerre as their archbishop and sent their precentor to ask the pope to endorse
the bishop’s translation. But Innocent refused since the bishop had not observed
the papal interdict on France. His ruling in this case established the principle that
the election to ecclesiastical office of anyone violating an interdict was invalid. It
soon entered decretal collections where it attracted canonistic attention. Alanus
included it in his own collection and observed that clergy nominating or electing
such unworthy candidates were to lose their voting rights in accordance with
other papal rulings. Most canonists accepted this view after Innocent’s ruling
passed into Compilatio tertia and the Liber extra.¹⁰¹ Indeed Innocent had pointed
out to the Sens chapter that he might remove its voting rights, but instead he let it
choose a more suitable candidate; it had observed the interdict, he conceded, even

⁹⁸ Innocent III, Reg. 10, no. 62; 3 Comp. 5.12.3; X 5.27.7.

⁹⁹ Reg. Honorius III, no. 1722. Cf. Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 464, 476; 6, no. 10.
¹⁰⁰ Alan. 1.5.5; 3 Comp. 1.4.1; X 1.5.1. See also Gesta c.56 (PL 214.ciii).
¹⁰¹ Alanus on Alan. 1.5.5 v. privare, Vercelli Cathedral Chapter MS 89, fol. 56rb: ‘Nota
quod postulantes indignum privari possunt iure postulandi, ut supra. e. c. i [Alan. 1.5.1], sicut
et eligentes, ut supra. de elec. Cum in cunctis. lib. i., supra. de filiis presbiterorum. Innotuit.
lib. ii, infra. de prebendis. Cum non ignores [1 Comp. 1.4.16; Gilb. 1.10.4; Alan. 3.4.3]
contra ar.’ This gloss was adopted by Johannes Galensis (c.1210) on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. privare,
Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 155rb. Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.4.1 v. inmerito
noted that the canon ‘Cum in cunctis’ set the precedent for this and that it referred to those
nominating or electing an unworthy candidate ‘scienter’ (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 154vb;
Vat. lat. MS 2509, fol. 146rb). Cf. Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 1.5.1 v. privare, and Bernard of
Parma, ibid.
198 The Interdict in Action

if its archbishop-elect had not. However, on subsequent occasions when electors

violated interdicts, it seems that they lost their voting rights strictly in accordance
with Alanus’s teaching. When the chapter of Beauvais elected their dean as their
bishop by a majority vote, canons who voted against him informed Gregory IX
that he and most of his supporters had celebrated in Beauvais Cathedral although
interdicted by the previous bishop.¹⁰² For this and other reasons these canons
proposed that those who had elected the dean should be deprived of their voting
rights and his election blocked. In May 1238 Gregory suspended the interdict on
the cathedral to allow a new election, although he did not expressly exclude from
it electors accused of violating the sentence. Certainly ten years later monks of an
abbey in Vienne could not elect a new abbot because they had celebrated during
a papal interdict on that city, at least according to their mother house, which
used this as a pretext to appoint an abbot for them.¹⁰³ Thus in practice it seems
that violators of interdicts might neither elect nor be elected to church offices.
Over and above these rulings Gregory IX’s decretal ‘Tanta’, after its inclusion
in the Liber extra, was immediately recognized by canonists as the most significant
on clerical violation of interdicts.¹⁰⁴ It was originally issued in 1232 with regard to
clergy of Coimbra diocese who violated a papal interdict on Portugal. We noted
above that a canon of Coimbra Cathedral petitioned Gregory that the Portuguese
king and his men coerced him to celebrate for them during this interdict. He
also alleged that his bishop ordered him to do so and when he refused, the
bishop’s agents seized his prebend. We have seen that some prelates did support
their rulers in defying interdicts; ‘Tanta’ was largely occasioned by the bishop’s
admission of such complicity before the curia. His actions are comparable with
those of lay rulers against clergy observing interdicts. He confessed to violating
the interdict and forcing others to do so. He had exiled any who resisted, after
confiscating both their own and their relatives’ property and depriving them of
their benefices, which he had conferred on his supporters; our canon claimed to
be a victim of this.
‘Tanta’ was the pope’s detailed response. Firstly clergy whom the bishop had
deprived of benefices were to be reinstated and any who had received these
benefices from him were to lose them and any others they held. Second the
latter and any other clergy who violated the interdict were to be suspended from
ecclesiastical offices and benefices. This was not unprecedented; in 1200 Innocent
III ordered the suspension of clergy who did not observe his interdict on France
from the start.¹⁰⁵ Thirdly Gregory required that any who laid violent hands on
clergy observing the Portuguese interdict and their property were to be declared
excommunicate; they would have incurred this sentence automatically under the
canon ‘Si quis suadente’ in any case.¹⁰⁶ Finally all offenders had to represent

¹⁰² Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 4078–9, 4358–60, 4365. ¹⁰³ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 4232.
¹⁰⁴ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 810; X 5.31.18. ¹⁰⁵ Gesta c.57 (PL 214.ciii); Krehbiel, 124.
¹⁰⁶ Lat. Conc. II c.15 (1139); C.17 q.4 c.29.
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 199

themselves before the Pope in four months, presumably to obtain absolution.

Certainly ‘Si quis suadente’ required its violators to seek absolution from the
Pope in person, and it was said that clergy suspended for violating the French
interdict were similarly obliged to approach the holy see. When Raymond of
Peñafort included ‘Tanta’ in the Liber extra, he amended this summons to the
curia, limiting it to the excommunicate.¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless mid-thirteenth-century
canonists would debate whether absolution from all its penalties was reserved to
papacy, as we will see.
One of the most substantial and influential early commentaries on ‘Tanta’ was
by Innocent IV. It was where he defined the interdict as forbidding religious rites
that only the ordained might perform; hence clergy performing them violated
the interdict and incurred suspension under ‘Tanta’.¹⁰⁸ Accordingly Innocent
argued that ‘Tanta’ applied to priests celebrating mass or other offices but not
clergy chanting responses or reading lessons during offices. Hostiensis broadly
agreed but added that the latter clergy only avoided suspension if they took part
in offices out of devotion; the reverse was true if they did so out of contempt for
ecclesiastical authority and had the offices celebrated in spite of an interdict.¹⁰⁹
There were clearly different kinds and degrees of violation. In 1266, for example,
Clement IV heard how clergy in Volterra diocese had violated a papal interdict
in various ways. He was concerned to vary their punishment according to the
severity of their violation ‘since a multitude is said to be at fault’. In other
words he applied ‘Tanta’ in accordance with Alexander III’s decretal for Toledo
province. Clement thus ordered some violators to be suspended for longer than
others: those who illicitly rang church bells for funerals might be suspended for
twice as long as those who did so for the canonical hours.¹¹⁰ This example also
shows that Clement followed Hostiensis in applying ‘Tanta’ to those encouraging
violation of an interdict, since church bells were rung to call laity to services.
Innocent IV and Hostiensis disagreed more strongly over whether the penalties
stipulated in ‘Tanta’ were imposed by the law itself or ecclesiastical judges. The
issue was important, for according to canonical procedure a penalty might only be
lifted by the authority that imposed it. Innocent IV argued that clergy celebrating
in interdicted places were suspended not by law but by the judge who imposed
the interdict.¹¹¹ This implies that they had to obtain absolution from this judge,
but Innocent did not say so explicitly. He did, however, question the canonistic
assumption that they also incurred irregularity. This was a canonical impediment

¹⁰⁷ Raymond also cut the letter’s final sentence which provided that the canons and others
reduced to begging by the bishop’s confiscations be compensated from his cathedral’s property. On
such editorial changes see Kuttner, ‘Raymond of Peñafort’.
¹⁰⁸ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. violavit.
¹⁰⁹ Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.31.18 v. violavit (vol. 2, fol. 76vb).
¹¹⁰ Reg. Clement IV, no. 348. A similar letter was copied into Benedict XII’s formulary for the
papal penitentiary (1334); see my ‘Papal Penitentiary’, 422–3.
¹¹¹ Innocent IV, Apparatus on X 5.31.18 v. interdicti violationem.
200 The Interdict in Action

forbidding reception or exercise of holy orders; it might be overcome only by

papal dispensation. Bernard of Parma made this assumption, as did Hostiensis,
and Hostiensis also rejected Innocent’s claim that those who imposed an interdict
punished those who violated it. On the contrary he held that they were suspended
by law.¹¹² The law in question and the penalty it contained were established by
the papacy; hence this implies that those who violated interdicts had to ask the
holy see for dispensation from irregularity and absolution from suspension.
Hostiensis apparently reflected reality where irregularity was concerned. Soon
after ‘Tanta’ appeared in the Liber extra, it was understood in practice that clergy
who celebrated during interdicts might incur irregularity and so require papal
dispensation. Gregory IX himself dispensed some such clergy in Milan diocese
seven months after the Liber extra was issued.¹¹³ In 1247 even Innocent IV
allowed the Bishop of Olmütz to dispense clerks in Bohemia who had celebrated
during an interdict, allegedly out of fear of their king. Innocent’s chancery was
doubtless acceding to the bishop’s request, but it is striking that the pope’s
views as a jurist did not shape his curial policy on this issue. Certainly his
successors followed practice rather than his sceptical commentary. Increasingly
they delegated their powers of dispensation in certain cases, as Innocent did in
1247, especially to legates and bishops.¹¹⁴ But it was usually granted subject to
certain conditions by the late thirteenth century. These normally included the
proviso that clergy who violated an interdict ‘in contempt of the keys’ might not
be dispensed; this echoed the remark in ‘Tanta’ that the Bishop of Coimbra had
‘scorned the keys of St Peter’ by violating a papal interdict.¹¹⁵ According to papal
mandates clergy might be dispensed if they celebrated during interdicts out of
fear; this was the excuse of the Bohemian clergy in 1247. In this and most cases
it normally meant fear of a lay power coercing them to celebrate.¹¹⁶ Ignorance or
naïvety (simplicitas) were also grounds for dispensation. They might arise from
a genuine misunderstanding, as in a case referred to Honorius IV in 1285.¹¹⁷ A
canon of Tours had presumed to celebrate at an abbey in interdicted Blois for its
monks enjoyed a papal grant to celebrate during interdicts, but he later realized
that this did not apply to him as an outsider. He also pleaded old age as an

¹¹² Bernard of Parma on X 5.31.18 v. inanes; Hostiensis, Lectura on X 5.31.18 v. post interdicti
violationem (vol. 2, fol. 77rb).
¹¹³ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2520.
¹¹⁴ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 3063. Cf. Reg. Alexander IV, no. 1773 (cardinal); Reg. Martin IV,
no. 382 (legate); Reg. Honorius IV, nos. 589, 608 (bishops); Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 1007, 1387,
2133 (archbishops), 2201 (legate), 2736 (bishop), 2901, 2965 (mendicant provincials), 3185, 6590
(bishops and archbishops), 7211 (patriarch). Gregory IX had also delegated this power to the
cardinal penitentiary by the late 1230s; see my ‘Papal Penitentiary’, 422.
¹¹⁵ Reg. Honorius IV, no. 589; Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 2133, 2736, 7211.
¹¹⁶ Fear: Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 2133, 2736. Lay coercion: Reg. Honorius IV, no. 589. Ignorance:
Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 7211. Naïvety: ibid. nos. 2133, 2736. Cf. my ‘Papal Penitentiary’, 428–30.
¹¹⁷ Reg. Honorius IV, no. 144. In 1227 Gregory IX had already accepted ignorance as an excuse
provided that it was not crass or supine (X 5.27.9).
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 201

excuse for not approaching the pope in person for dispensation; hence Honorius
instructed two ecclesiastical dignitaries in Tours to grant him it.
It is unclear whether Innocent IV’s successors also reserved absolution from
suspension in these cases, as it was not normally delegated along with dispensation.
Admittedly in 1283 Martin IV instructed a legate to absolve a bishop suspended
for violating a papal interdict, but another legate had laid the suspension and
it is unclear whether his authority to do so was derived from the pope as judge
enforcing his own interdict or as legislator.¹¹⁸ Hence it is debatable whether
Innocent IV or Hostiensis influenced practice on this point in the late thirteenth
century. Certainly in this period popes threatened penalties for violation besides
those prescribed by law and did so as universal ordinary enforcing their own
interdicts. In 1286, when James of Aragon was crowned king of Sicily in defiance
of the papacy, Honorius IV told clergy to observe an ambulatory interdict against
him or they would incur not only canonical penalties but also excommunication
and loss of all offices and benefices.¹¹⁹ This punishment was unusual in severity
and scope. It applied not only to priests celebrating mass and those officiating
in lesser orders but also those preaching at services, even if sermons were
allowed during interdicts; this far exceeded Innocent IV’s definition of violation.
Excommunication was also an extraordinary penalty for those violating the
interdicts Martin IV laid on Aragon and Castile, but apparently only those who
celebrated might incur it.¹²⁰ It was presumably imposed on papal authority for
Nicholas IV empowered various Spanish prelates to absolve such clergy from
that sentence as well as dispense them from irregularity.
However, papal legislation did not react to the canonistic debate and practical
developments following ‘Tanta’ until over sixty years after its publication in
the Liber extra. In 1298 Boniface VIII issued several rulings in the Liber sextus
which resolved various disputed points arising from ‘Tanta’ and confirmed many
customary practices as law. For example his constitution ‘Is qui’ stated that
clergy knowingly celebrating in interdicted places incurred irregularity, unless
they might celebrate there by law or privilege. Hence Innocent IV’s doubts on
this point were set aside. And in accordance with practice and doctrine, Boniface
confirmed that dispensation from this irregularity was reserved to the pope.¹²¹
He added that such clergy were ineligible, not only in that they might not be
elected to church office, as Innocent III had ruled, but also that they might not
vote in such elections; they had long been excluded from them in practice.
Whilst ‘Is qui’ reinforced papal power to discipline violators, the constitution
‘Episcoporum’ responded to demands from bishops and other prelates. It was
directed against secular and regular clergy regardless of their immunities, and
addressed long-standing episcopal concerns about abuse of such freedoms during
interdicts. Boniface also defined violation of interdicts in similar wide terms

¹¹⁸ Reg. Martin IV, no. 382. ¹¹⁹ Reg. Honorius IV, no. 807.
¹²⁰ Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 1686, 2133, 2736, 2901, 2965, 3185. ¹²¹ VI 5.11.18 §2.
202 The Interdict in Action

to Hostiensis, including those who knowingly celebrated offices in interdicted

places (except when allowed by law) and those who had them celebrated.¹²²
‘Episcoporum’ also applied to clergy admitting those under interdict or known
excommunicates to the offices, sacraments, or burial. All such violators incurred
an interdict ab ingressu ecclesie. As Boniface explained in another constitution
‘Is cui’, clergy under such an interdict might not celebrate or act in their office,
and if they did so, they also incurred irregularity. Moreover those who died
under this interdict were denied ecclesiastical burial unless they had repented.¹²³
‘Episcoporum’ added that this penalty remained in force until violators gave
proper satisfaction to the judge whose interdict they had scorned. Therefore
Boniface struck a compromise between the opposing views of Innocent IV and
Hostiensis on whether violators were penalized by the judges laying interdicts or
the law. ‘Episcoporum’ imposed the penalty, but it made violators accountable
to both judges and the law.
Boniface’s rulings were supplemented some two decades later by Clement V.
Whereas Boniface had synthesized canonistic tradition and customary practice
in his legislation, Clement largely reinforced the existing law and addressed
specific abuses. For example his constitution ‘Eos qui’, allegedly sanctioned at the
council of Vienne, supplemented the provisions of ‘Episcoporum’ on ecclesiastical
burial.¹²⁴ It forbade on pain of excommunication the burial in cemeteries of
anyone interdicted by name, known excommunicates and usurers, and anyone
dying during interdicts. In the latter case, however, it conceded that the law
made some exceptions; notably clergy dying during interdicts might be buried
in hallowed ground if they had observed them.¹²⁵ It then concluded with two
points based on ‘Episcoporum’. Those excommunicated by ‘Eos qui’ had to give
proper satisfaction to those injured by their actions, as the local bishop saw fit;
otherwise they might not be absolved. The canonist Johannes Andreae suggested
that injured parties included those on whose behalf the interdict was laid.¹²⁶ This
was not necessarily the judge who laid the interdict, as in ‘Episcoporum’, though
the local ordinary was assigned a role as arbitrator. Absolution was probably
reserved to the pope, though this was not made explicit. Nevertheless ‘Eos qui’
made clear, as did ‘Episcoporum’, that no immunity might be claimed from
it through exemption or other privileges. Clearly the abuse of burial privileges
during interdicts condemned at the Third Lateran Council remained a concern
over a century later. Indeed during an interdict on Laon (1295–7) some of the
dead, including excommunicates, were said to be interred in local churches and
cemeteries of the mendicant and military orders.¹²⁷

¹²² VI 5.7.8. ¹²³ VI 5.11.20. ¹²⁴ Clem. 3.7.1.

¹²⁵ X 5.38.11. See p. 162. Clergy who violated interdicts were presumably refused ecclesiastical
burial during them; cf. VI 5.11.18, 20.
¹²⁶ Johannes Andreae, Glossa on Clem. 3.7.1 v. sepelire.
¹²⁷ X 5.33.3 §3. Laon: Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1533; Denton, ‘Laon’, 85, 87–8. Boniface
ordered the exhumation of these illicitly buried bodies.
 The Enforcement of Interdicts 203

By the early fourteenth century regular clergy were accused of other abuses
of their freedoms during interdicts. In the preamble to Clement’s bull ‘Ex
frequentibus’, apparently issued in 1310 and included in the Clementine, he
observed from his own experience and the ‘frequent complaints of prelates’ that
religious abused the freedom to celebrate behind closed doors during interdicts.¹²⁸
They allegedly had holes bored or windows made in these doors, presumably so
that excluded laity could witness the offices inside. Apparently such violations
were widespread. Therefore Clement’s bull ordered religious, even the exempt,
to observe inviolably on pain of excommunication interdicts laid by papal or
ordinary authority. It nevertheless affirmed Boniface VIII’s concession in ‘Alma
mater’ that clergy might celebrate behind closed doors.
The issue of lay access to the ‘private’ worship of regular clergy, only implied
in ‘Ex frequentibus’, was directly confronted in another ruling of Clement V,
‘Cum ex eo’.¹²⁹ Issued in 1306, it noted that Franciscans admitted members
of their third order to hear offices in their churches during interdicts, and it
claimed that this undermined respect for interdicts among those who remained
excluded. The third order comprised lay men and women including married
couples, and previous popes had allowed some of them to attend Franciscan
services during interdicts. However, friars had long been criticized for receiving
laity at their churches in interdicts. Müller noted an instance of special relevance
to ‘Cum ex eo’. After a legate had interdicted Strasbourg in 1283, he accused
local Franciscans of admitting laity to their third order so that they might hear the
offices in the friars’ churches during his interdict. In 1287 the cardinal forbade
the Franciscans on pain of excommunication from receiving tertiaries in their
churches at that time.¹³⁰ ‘Cum ex eo’ extended this ban under the same penalty
to the Franciscan order as a whole and in regard to any interdict; papal grants
to the contrary were to be disregarded. Those incurring excommunication under
‘Cum ex eo’ might be absolved only by the pope, though he could delegate his
power to absolve them to bishops. This curbing of mendicant privilege clearly
met with the approval of prelates, for ‘Cum ex eo’ was renewed at the council of
Vienne prior to its inclusion in the Clementine.
Decretal collections from their emergence in the late twelfth century down
to the Clementine in 1317 thus record increasing pressure on clergy to enforce
interdicts. The proliferation of laws against clerical violation of interdicts,
especially from 1298, indicates how widespread the problem was becoming. Not
only were clergy subject to growing lay coercion to violate interdicts, but also
prelates often claimed that regular clergy abused their freedoms, admitting laity
to their churches and cemeteries during interdicts. Automatic sanctions were
especially needed against religious who claimed immunity from correction by
local ordinaries. But the question remains whether popes and other Church

¹²⁸ Clem. 5.10.1. On the date of this constitution see Müller, Vienne, 546.
¹²⁹ Clem. 5.10.3. ¹³⁰ Müller, Vienne, 545–7, esp. 546.
204 The Interdict in Action

authorities could make interdicts work during the thirteenth century, despite
growing lay opposition and clerical violations. In Chapters 2–4 we understood
how the interdict was meant to work according to the canon law and canonists
of the period. In the final parts of this chapter we will examine more closely how
it actually worked in practice through detailed case studies of three thirteenth-
century interdicts. As far as possible these have been based on the records of
both the secular power and Church authorities in order to obtain a balance of
views. All three interdicts provoked dramatic clashes between clergy and laity;
and largely as a result the responses to them are well documented. Both these
facts influenced my choice of these interdicts for close study.

5.3 THE INTERDICT ON SAN GIMIGNANO: A CLERICAL

S T R I K E A N D I TS C O N S E QU E N C E S

The strike has been defined as ‘a temporary stoppage of work’ designed ‘to express
a grievance or enforce a demand’. In many ways an interdict is comparable. The
clergy likewise withdrew their labour during interdicts as an act of protest. The
interdict that lay on the Tuscan commune of San Gimignano in c.1289–93 was
notably comparable to modern industrial conflicts. The power against whom it
was aimed tried to counter it in various ways, its deprivations provoked popular
resentment, and an end to it was sought through a compromise negotiated by an
independent arbitrator. Such elements of industrial disputes as the strikers’ ‘walk-
out’ and countermove of hiring ‘blackleg’ labour also featured at San Gimignano.
The story of this ‘strike’ can be reconstructed in considerable detail, sometimes
on a week-by-week basis, as the commune’s records survive in some abundance
at this time.¹³¹ Like other thirteenth-century north Italian communes it had a
very sophisticated form of popular government; regular meetings of its various
committees were carefully minuted and its finances recorded in detailed ledgers.
By contrast local ecclesiastical records of the dispute are sparse. Some were copied
into a register of the commune and the clerical voice is echoed elsewhere in its
records; a papal letter also reported clerical grievances during the interdict.
Before studying the sources, we need to examine the context. San Gimignano
was a town with a small contado or county extending less than 10 km from it walls,
in contrast to its powerful neighbours Florence and Siena. It had no bishop’s see
but lay within Volterra diocese, and its spiritual needs were served principally
by the provost and secular canons of its collegiate church or pieve. A Bishop of

¹³¹ The above definition of a strike is from Hyman, Strikes, 17. The medieval records of the
commune are split between the Archivio Comunale di San Gimignano (ACSG) and Archivio di
Stato di Firenze (ASF) and were selectively calendared by Davidsohn, Forschungen, II. The ACSG
has recently been recatalogued; the new call numbers are cited here with the old ones cited by
Davidsohn in brackets.
 The Interdict on San Gimignano 205

Volterra had founded the town c.929, and his successors steadily increased their
temporal jurisdiction over the castrum and terra of San Gimignano till 1199
when its people formed a commune independent of episcopal control.¹³² This
phenomenon was indeed widespread among twelfth-century Italian towns ruled
by bishops. Like such towns San Gimignano had, therefore, a difficult relationship
with its local bishop long before he interdicted it in 1289. Strife between bishop
and commune had broken out at least three times already in 1229, 1267, and
1277 and verged on armed warfare. The bishop had used spiritual sanctions
against the commune on these occasions too, excommunicating its officials in
1267, and again in 1277, when he also interdicted the town.
The cause of these past conflicts was territorial: San Gimignano disputed the
frontier with Volterra to its north-west, seeking especially to strengthen its weak
hold over the castles of Ulignano and Gambassi. But the cause of our interdict is
uncertain, nor do we know when it was laid, since no record of its proclamation
has been found. Nevertheless Bishop Rainieri of Volterra had apparently declared
it on the commune and excommunicated its officials by late December 1289.
The commune’s accounts at this time reveal that a judge Octavantus of Florence
was paid for advice regarding the ‘sentence of excommunication laid against
us’.¹³³ A letter of the bishop addressed to the commune on 11 January 1290 also
refers to the excommunication and interdict as already in force. It states that the
sentences were incurred because the commune had made ordinances and statutes
‘at the instigation of the devil’, presumably contrary to ecclesiastical interests. But
it does not specify what these were. It simply upbraids the commune for ignoring
the bishop’s warning to revoke this legislation (and thus secure his absolution)
and for having proceeded to ‘worse things’.¹³⁴ Such peiora were later specified in
a petition of the town’s clergy to Nicholas IV; its content was reported in the
pope’s reply of 5 November 1290 copied into his registers. This petition probably
describes both the causes and effects of the interdict but does not distinguish
between them. Hence we will return to it later.
Although the evidence hardly illuminates the interdict’s cause, historians have
proposed various causes. The authors of the two main histories of the town,

¹³² The only political history of the town is Pecori, San Gimignano, recently supplemented by
Waley, ‘Guelfs and Ghibellines’. The town’s medieval development is outlined by Luzzati, ‘San
Gimignano’.
¹³³ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 171, fol. 7v; Davidsohn, Forschungen, II no. 1753. This
jurist may be the ‘dominus Actavianus’ sent as the commune’s envoy to seek ‘concordia’ with Bishop
Rainieri on 23 January 1295 (ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 200, fol. 17r) and described as
plebanus of Santa Maria Novella. This probably does not refer to the Dominican church in Florence
as a plebanus headed a parish church and there is no evidence that it functioned as such or that any
Octavantus or Actavianus was linked with it in this period. I am grateful to Michele Mulcahey for
this information.
¹³⁴ ACSG, N.0069 (N.N.17), fol. 47r (edited in my ‘San Gimignano’, 298). Cf. Waley, Siena,
131: ‘The [Sienese] bishop’s occasional protest that certain statutes were ‘‘against ecclesiastical
liberty’’ is so generic that it is sometimes difficult to know what was at stake.’ Reg. Nicholas IV, no.
3581.
206 The Interdict in Action

Coppi and Pecori (heavily reliant on Coppi), refer to a dispute between clergy
and commune over decime. Indeed the commune sent three emissaries to speak to
the provost of the pieve on 11 March 1290 ‘super facto clericorum pro decimis’,
but to no avail Coppi says.¹³⁵ Likewise, when the town council met on 18 April
1290 to consider an offer from two Florentine emissaries to mediate between
commune and clergy, a councillor proposed that they be told everything ‘quod
clerici occasione decime faciebant’.¹³⁶ Three years later the commune was still
negotiating with the clergy, when it instructed emissaries to promise whatever the
provost and canons wanted regarding the decima and that the commune ‘in dicta
decima benigne se habebit’. But what decima means in the sources is ambiguous.
It may mean tithes, and certainly the clergy claimed by November 1290 that
the commune had forbidden payment of such decime to them, although this
might have been a reaction to rather than cause of the interdict. Alternatively it
may mean a ‘tenth’ levied by the commune, and clerical exemption from such
secular taxation was increasingly contested by the late thirteenth century. Indeed
the clergy also alleged by 1290 that the commune required them to pay a trade
tax called cabella as if they were laity. No secular tenth is mentioned but the
commune needed to tap clerical wealth at this time: it had to meet the costs of
building a new palazzo comunale; supporting the Guelf league in wars against
Arezzo and Pisa; and paying taxes to vicars of Charles II of Anjou. Certainly
Waley indicates that both ecclesiastical and secular taxation were issues dividing
laity and clergy in thirteenth-century Italian communes; but ultimately it is
unclear which was at stake here.¹³⁷
Volpe gives another, albeit finance-related, reason for the conflict.¹³⁸ Bishop
Rainieri of Volterra was podestà of San Gimignano in 1289, governing it
through a vicar. A podestà was usually well remunerated, and Volpe considered
the commune’s subsequent conflict with the clergy a reaction to the bishop’s
lucrative involvement in its affairs. Thus under Rainieri’s successor as podestà
it introduced the statutes against ecclesiastical liberty that provoked the bishop
to lay the interdict. It seems a plausible explanation but, in the absence of clear
evidence, highly speculative.
Ridolfi explains the background to the interdict differently again, claiming
that commune and clergy were on bad terms from 1287 for another reason.¹³⁹
Apparently this arose from a dispute between the friars of San Galgano and

¹³⁵ Coppi, 152; Pecori, 115. ACSG, N.0068 (P.77), fol. 1v.
¹³⁶ ACSG, N.0069 (N.N.17), fol. 71v; Davidsohn, Forschungen, II, no. 1762 (18 April 1290).
See also ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 195, fol. 24r (c.8 March–13 June 1293).
¹³⁷ Waley, City-Republics, 44. Bishop Rainieri’s letter of 1290 (n. 134) may allude to the
financial cause of the dispute: it laments that Sangimignanesi had strayed onto the paths of avarice
(‘averitatitis tramite deviare’) and seeks to recall their souls from the fate of the greedy (‘vestras
animas apetatorum nexibus revocare’).
¹³⁸ Volpe, 181, 183–4.
¹³⁹ Ridolfi, ‘Ricordo’, esp. 98–9. Pecori, 122, alluded to the dispute over this estate but dated
it to 1276. Nevertheless on 28 October 1293 the commune paid for documents concerning its
 The Interdict on San Gimignano 207

provost and canons of San Gimignano over an estate bequeathed by a wealthy

moneylender to the Church of Santa Maria Villacastello near the town. The
friars alleged that he was murdered by a clerk of San Gimignano; the commune
supported their accusations seeking the Bishop of Siena’s intervention. According
to Ridolfi the Bishop of Volterra had threatened an interdict if the commune
continued to interfere, but the dispute only worsened so he carried out his threat.
This story cannot be pure invention, but again it is impossible to substantiate. It
may underlie the clergy’s complaint to Nicholas IV that the commune disregarded
their immunity from its secular jurisdiction.
If the interdict’s origins are obscure and disputed, the immediate reactions to
it are well documented. It is evident that by January 1290 clergy had staged a
‘walk-out’ leaving the town for the nearby Church of Santa Maria Villacastello.
Indeed it was not uncommon for clergy of interdicted Italian towns to exile
themselves, largely to avoid being forced by laity to ignore the interdict. Certainly
our clergy claimed later in 1290 that the commune persecuted them so much
that they had to abandon the town.¹⁴⁰
It seems that before the clergy left, they had stripped the altars of the pieve. A
meeting of the commune’s general council was convened by the podestà, Benghus
de Buondelmontibus of Florence, on 24 January 1290 to discuss the issue.¹⁴¹ Two
of the councillors called on Benghus to have the altars re-covered with whatever
was taken. Another rejected this and proposed that the heads of the town’s Fran-
ciscan and Austin friars be sent to ask the Bishop of Volterra what the commune
had done that the clergy should despoil the pieve, its altars, and tabule. A majority
vote backed this conciliatory proposal but most proposals at the meeting urged
Benghus to identify and even punish those who had stripped the altars. Ultimately
these hawkish voices prevailed, since the commune’s accounts in October 1290
show that Gratia Andree was paid for recording proceedings against priests for
‘stealing’ paramenta and other pictures from altars of the pieve.¹⁴² Indeed around
then the clergy alleged that the commune had summoned clerks before its court,
and the proceedings recorded by Gratia were apparently held in the first half of
1290 under Benghus. The clergy’s action at the pieve and commune’s reaction are
illuminating in several respects. First, this is one of the earliest references to altar
paintings in medieval Italy. Second, that clergy removed these images during an
interdict suggests that they had a liturgical as well as devotional function.¹⁴³ After
all interdicts forbade public liturgical ceremonies but not private devotional acts

dispute with the monastery of S. Galgano at the Bishop of Volterra’s court (ASF, Comune di San
Gimignano 193).
¹⁴⁰ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 3581. The provost was at Santa Maria Villacastello by 11 March 1290
when the commune sent emissaries to him (n. 135), but he and other clergy had evidently left San
Gimignano by January as the following indicates.
¹⁴¹ ASCG, N.0069 (N.N.17), fols. 49v–50r.
¹⁴² ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 178 (unfoliated; among entries for October 1290); ASCG,
N.0070 (N.N.16), fol. 25v (among entries for 31 October 1290). Cf. Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 3581.
¹⁴³ I am grateful to Cordelia Warr and Donal Cooper for these observations.
208 The Interdict in Action

like venerating images. Finally, that the commune charged priests with theft of
the images shows not only disregard for privilege of clergy but also that it saw
these objects not as exclusively church property but somehow its own. Doubtless
they were donated by local townspeople, perhaps even the commune itself, and
were symbols of communal pride like Duccio’s Maestà, a massive altarpiece
carried in civic processions at fourteenth-century Siena. The commune did not
own the pieve (unlike at Bologna) but it acted as if it did, sometimes holding
council meetings in the church’s precincts. One of the clergy’s grievances was
that they had to ring bells to announce these. As Larner and Jones noted, secular
and sacred blended in Italian towns to form a ‘state religion’.¹⁴⁴
Stripping the altars was not the only clerical act that scandalized the commune.
Apparently from the outset clergy observed the interdict more strictly than canon
law required. Infant baptism and absolution of the dying had long been allowed
during an interdict, but seemingly none of the clergy returned from self-exile to
administer these essential sacraments. In January and February 1290 four men
acting for the commune asked canons of the pieve to baptize children there; they
were doubtless refusing to do this. Demands of the town’s laity for clergy of
the pieve to baptize their children and absolve their dying were numerous; the
commune owed a notary payment in October 1290 for writing ten carte full of
them. The commune had even sent a messenger on 20 March 1290 to beg the
provost to send back a priest from Santa Maria Villacastello to perform infant
baptisms and ‘alia necessaria’ at the pieve; it is not recorded whether the mission
was successful.¹⁴⁵
In fact the commune devised its own solution to the problem by paying clergy
to minister in their interdicted town, in effect hiring blackleg labour.¹⁴⁶ As early as
27 January 1290 two priests, Bonsignori and Jacobus, appear on the commune’s
payroll. They had been in its service since at least the start of January, soon after
the interdict came into force, at a rate of four soldi per day. Their duties included
burying the dead, absolving the dying, and baptizing babies born in the town and
its county.¹⁴⁷ The latter two practices were of course licit, but an interdict banned
burial in consecrated ground except for clergy who died observing the sentence.
Ironically the town’s exiled clergy later told Nicholas IV that the commune
denied their burial rights during the interdict. Hence these priests were probably
burying laity. This was licit in unhallowed ground but priests might not officiate
at funerals even of clergy. Moreover on 5 March 1290 the commune sent an
agent with two horses to fetch two priests to celebrate offices in the pieve and

¹⁴⁴ Larner, 250; Jones, 438. This grievance is described by Pecori, 122.
¹⁴⁵ ACSG, N.0068 (P.77), fols. 2r (20 March 1290), 11v (payment to four men; 29 April 1290).
Notary paid: ACSG, N.0070 (N.N.16), fol. 38r (2 October 1290); same entry copied into ASF,
Comune di San Gimignano 177 (unfoliated; among entries for 30 November 1290).
¹⁴⁶ It apparently did the same during an earlier interdict; Pecori, 104.
¹⁴⁷ They were paid for these and other services in February 1290 too; ASF, Comune di San
Gimignano 176 (unfoliated; 27 January, 25 February 1290).
 The Interdict on San Gimignano 209

elsewhere at its pleasure, which the interdict also prohibited. Indeed the exiled
clergy later informed Nicholas that the commune had had offices celebrated or
‘rather profaned’ by clerks who were not canonically instituted at the pieve.¹⁴⁸
It certainly seems that the blacklegs did not belong to the town or its churches,
notably the priest ‘Lapus’ who came on 21 March 1290 and stayed at the pieve
for the commune. This admittedly happened the day after the commune sent
for a priest from Santa Maria Villacastello, and Lapus’s arrival was noted in a
register of the commune after this request. Nevertheless it is unlikely that Lapus
was an exiled priest who had returned on the provost’s orders, for he was on
the commune’s payroll by 19 March at a similar rate to the other priests in the
commune’s service. He was clearly an outsider since the commune had to pay for
him to be loaned a bed with two sheets, a cover, and pillow!¹⁴⁹ Another priest,
Iohannes, who was on the commune’s payroll by July 1290, was also clothed at
its expense; apparently this had also been done for Lapus.¹⁵⁰
Local Church authorities learned by April 1290 that these priests were working
in San Gimignano despite the interdict. Hence the commune had to defend
its priestly employees against charges of violating the sentence. For example it
sent a notary on 18 April 1290 to appeal to Bishop Rainieri, as he had initiated
proceedings against the commune and a priest at its service, subsequently
identified as Lapus. The bishop was clearly concerned to enforce his own
interdict, and local prelates supported him. The day after the notary approached
him, the commune sent two other agents to Florence to beg its bishop’s vicar
not to molest or trouble Lapus in his work for the commune. According to the
commune this involved conferring sacraments and doing baptisms as these were
necessary and might not be refused de iure.¹⁵¹ Hence it claimed that its priests
were doing no more than canon law permitted during interdicts.
Certainly its records do not substantiate the local clergy’s allegation that these
priests administered sacraments the interdict prohibited, even to excommunicated
and interdicted persons. Early in 1290 the commune had engaged priests expressly
to offer sacraments allowed during interdicts, as we have seen. Its records also
substantiate its claim that Lapus was mainly doing baptisms. On 29 April 1290
it approved payments to two men for bringing water to fill fonts for baptisms
and to another for a big candle lit on Sundays when Lapus was said to perform
them.¹⁵² Furthermore it was recorded that the commune twice sought chrism
and holy oil. Hostiensis had taught that it was licit to anoint the baptized with

¹⁴⁸ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 3581. ASCG, N.0068 (P.77), fol. 1v (4 March 1290).
¹⁴⁹ ACSG, N.0068 (P.77), fols. 2r (20 March 1290), 7r (19 March 1290), 10v (bedding; 29
April 1290).
¹⁵⁰ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 178 (unfoliated; salaries to Iohannes and Lapus among
monthly expenses for July–November 1290, and clothing allowance for them among September
expenses).
¹⁵¹ ACSG, N.0068 (P.77), fols. 3v (17, 19 April), 11v (payment to notary identifying Lapus; 29
April).
¹⁵² Ibid., fol. 12r. Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 3581.
210 The Interdict in Action

chrism during interdicts, but priests had to obtain fresh chrism every Maundy
Thursday when it was blessed by their bishop, so the commune sent for chrism
soon after this date in 1290 and 1291. On 23 March 1290 an agent of the
commune went to ask the provost at Santa Maria Villacastello for ‘unctionem
cum qua fit baptismum’. The provost presumably refused this along with the
recent request for a priest to do baptisms, for two days later the commune
sent another envoy to seek chrism and holy oil for baptism from a priest even
further away. On 28 March 1291 it reimbursed its priest Iohannes and another
for fetching chrism and holy oil, probably for baptism. Certainly no evidence
suggests that the dying were anointed with chrism in the interdicted town, the
sacrament of extreme unction being banned during interdicts.¹⁵³
Nevertheless the commune had solicited priests to perform some ministrations
banned by the interdict, notably divine offices. The evidence for regular celebra-
tion of the offices is, however, indirect and ambiguous. Late in 1290 local clergy
complained that the townsfolk had seized the pieve by armed force, throwing
stones at its canons’ houses, breaking down its doors, and snatching the keys to its
bell-tower and sacristy from its clergy. They had then allegedly had the bells rung
at all canonical hours and the offices celebrated there. The commune’s records
indicate that this story was not wholly exaggerated. Certainly the commune
seems to have taken control of the pieve in January 1290; on 26 March 1290 it
paid two men for guarding the pieve and its property day and night for over two
months.¹⁵⁴ It is surely not coincidental that clergy of the pieve also left town by
January 1290. The commune’s accounts also include frequent wage payments to
bell-ringers at the pieve from January 1290, but we can only assume that their
role was to announce celebration of divine offices. Most of these payments were
made for ringing the ‘hours’ night and day.¹⁵⁵ Apparently this was not simply
to mark time but services, since two payments refer to ‘customary hours’ and
another specifies the hours of terce, nones, and vespers. Apparently the pieve’s
bells also announced the funerals conducted by the commune’s priests, for it
appointed a Muzzo Manonelli of Celluole on 2 November 1290 to ring them
for the dead as well as the hours night and day.¹⁵⁶ He was also required to light
lamps and perform other duties for the commune in the pieve; apparently he

¹⁵³ ACSG, N.0068 (P.77), fol. 2v (23, 25 March 1290; the second search for chrism was to
Castiglione Fiorentino, 72 km away). ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 181 (unfoliated; 28 March
1291).
¹⁵⁴ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 3581. ASCG, N.0068 (P.77), fol. 8r (26 March 1290).
¹⁵⁵ ASCG, N.0068 (P.77), fol. 9v (6 April 1290); N.0071 (N.N.20), fols. 26v, 38r (31 August
and 28 September 1292); N.0072 (N.N.19), fol. 8r (1 December 1292). All the following are
unfoliated: ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 176 (27 January 1290); 182 (29 July, 13 October
1291); 183 (August and October 1291); 187 (23 January, ‘de die et nocte tempore rumoris’; 26
January; and January, February, March, and April 1292); 188 (1 September 1292).
¹⁵⁶ Customary hours: ASCG, N.0068, fols. 8r (26 March 1290; at the church of S. Giovanni),
10v (29 April 1290; Muzzo at the pieve). Both unfoliated: ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 177 (2
November 1290); 178 (‘tercia ora et nona et vesperas’; September 1290).
 The Interdict on San Gimignano 211

was the pieve’s sacristan and continued in this office at the commune’s request
from January 1290. It had begun to pay him a monthly salary then for staying
in the pieve ‘ut hactenus consuevit’, presumably in the sacristy whose keys the
townsfolk had supposedly seized.¹⁵⁷
It appears that the bells called laity to services at the pieve during the interdict,
though no hard evidence has been found for these services; records of the
commune’s payments to its priests mainly describe their duties generically as
servitium communis. Therefore it apparently disrupted observance of the interdict
despite the opposition of local clergy. Its motives for sustaining religious life at
San Gimignano were probably pious as well as political. Its podestà and judges,
for example, had given three candles weighing 8 lb. to the pieve early in 1290
for the feast of the saint after whom the town was named (San Geminiano, 31
January).¹⁵⁸ The townsfolk’s capture of the pieve and requests for infant baptism
also suggest that the commune was responding to popular demand. Local clergy
indeed provoked popular resentment by observing the interdict too strictly, and
the commune was determined to restrain such anti-clerical feeling. It had set men
to guard the pieve and its property, doubtless against further attacks of the kind
already described. Indeed this suggests that it did not orchestrate the mob attack
on the pieve. Moreover on 9 February 1290 its general council authorized the
podestà to order throughout the contado that its inhabitants were not to make
a grida or rumor against priests and clergy or harm their persons or property;
otherwise they would face his judgement. Presumably the attack on the pieve also
occasioned this ruling. It soon came into force: on 16 March 1290 the podestà
was empowered to judge accusations of damage to the provost’s property. Besides
physical attacks the clergy had endured verbal ones, as the ruling of 9 February
implied. Indeed it was further proposed on 27 May that the podestà declare
throughout the contado that no male or female over the age of twelve might
sing songs or start rumours about priests or clerks; otherwise they would be
fined twenty soldi for singing and five for rumours.¹⁵⁹ Clearly the commune
sought to pacify aggrieved local clergy; the February ruling was actually proposed
on the grounds that clerks were defaming the commune and townsfolk. Such
conciliatory measures were doubtless meant to help resolve the dispute with these
clergy.
Indeed despite the commune’s attempts to break their strike by hiring blackleg
priests, it ultimately sought favourable terms with them and the interdict’s
relaxation. From an early stage both parties petitioned ecclesiastical judges to
settle their dispute. As early as 11 January 1290 Bishop Rainieri, who had recently

¹⁵⁷ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 176 (unfoliated; 27 January 1290).

¹⁵⁸ Ibid. (25 February 1290).
¹⁵⁹ ASCG, N.0069 (N.N.17), fols. 55r–v (9 February), 63v (16 March), 77r (27 May 1290);
Davidsohn, Forschungen, II, no. 1766. Cf. ibid. no. 623 and Waley, ‘Guelfs and Ghibellines’, 199,
on a similar ban on ‘singing songs between Guelfs and Ghibellines’ at San Gimignano in February
1252.
212 The Interdict in Action

imposed the interdict, exhorted the commune to accept the Bishop of Pistoia as
arbiter of its differences with the clergy. It presumably agreed to this proposal,
since an envoy of the commune was paid twice in February 1290 for going to
Pistoia. And on 17 April 1290 a member of the commune was sent there to
learn of any progress in its dispute with the clergy. But progress was slow, for the
commune continued to send envoys to the Bishop of Pistoia down to October
1291.¹⁶⁰ By this stage he was not the only third party involved. The Bishop of
Florence’s vicar was already taking action against the commune’s priests by 19
April 1290 when the commune appealed to him. He was presumably responding
to complaints from the Bishop of Volterra, for on 23 April the commune sent
two judges to Florence to defend it against defamatory charges of the bishop’s
agents and bring accusations against the bishop and the clergy.¹⁶¹ This war of
words merely intensified and prolonged the dispute, and before the end of April
it had already been referred to the papal curia.¹⁶²
In fact the commune had been in frequent contact with the curia since
December 1289, when the dispute first arose. The nature of its initial contacts is
unclear, however, though members of the commune were apparently cited before
the curia in January 1290. By 29 April 1290 the commune’s records are explicit
that its dealings at the curia concerned its dispute with local clergy. Proctors
were then being used there to represent both the Eight for the defence, one
of the commune’s principal governing bodies, and Lapus, whom local church
authorities had doubtless denounced to the curia as a ‘strike-breaker’. Moreover
on 27 May 1290 the Eight for the defence resolved that syndics and proctors be
instructed at the curia to defend all members of the commune should any of them
be cited there or any injury intended towards them. By September the commune
was spending much and often on its dealings at the curia, including the gold
florin paid to an advocate for defending the commune ‘coram sede appostolicha
vel suis auditoribus’. This extraordinary expenditure doubtless prompted the
commune to assess its contado that month in order to raise 500 pounds in
tax from its inhabitants. In late October it held several meetings to authorize
payments totalling some 600 gold florins to the lawyers at the curia handling
its dispute with local clergy. The commune raised such hefty sums not only by
general taxation but by mortgaging all its property, and on 5 December it decided
to obtain 500 gold florins by this means to meet its spiralling legal expenses at

¹⁶⁰ See n. 134 on Rainieri’s letter. The commune’s general council considered the bishop’s
proposal on 12 January: ASCG, N.0069 (N.N.17), fol. 48r. Envoys to Pistoia: ASCG, N.0068
(P.77), fol. 3v (17 April 1290); ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 176 (25 February 1290); 178
(August, October 1290); 182 (30 September, 13 October 1291); 183 (August 1291). All of these
ASF registers are unfoliated.
¹⁶¹ ASCG, N.0068 (P.77), fols. 3v (19 April), 4r (23 April 1290); Davidsohn, Forschungen II,
no. 1763.
¹⁶² ACSG, N.0068 (P.77), fols. 11r, 12r (29 April 1290). Expenses arising from contacts with
the curia, December 1289–February 1290, are noted passim in ASF, Comune di San Gimignano,
176 (unfoliated).
 The Interdict on San Gimignano 213

the curia. Accordingly the commune’s accounts record frequent payments in late
1290 to messengers and notaries for work concerning its case at the curia, but
these only represent the tip of the iceberg. In October 1290 a notary was paid to
keep a separate ledger of the commune’s expenses arising from its dispute with
the local clergy, but this does not appear to have survived; hence the total cost of
the commune’s case cannot be known.¹⁶³
Nevertheless the commune was clearly expending much effort and money on
settling its differences with the clergy, which shows that it took the interdict
seriously. But the dispute was not to be resolved quickly or easily. The clergy
of San Gimignano had brought serious allegations against the commune which
are described in a letter of Nicholas IV addressed to the Bishop of Florence and
dated 5 November 1290.¹⁶⁴ That the commune’s legal expenses at the curia
escalate around this time is no coincidence. The pope recounts that the clergy
had recently clamoured and tearfully declared at the curia that the commune
persecuted them so much that they had fled. They had done so in January, and
probably their account largely portrays the commune’s initial reaction to the
interdict before it attempted a more conciliatory approach. Indeed the Bishop
of Volterra had reprimanded the commune in a letter of 11 January 1290
for doing worse things then than before the interdict.¹⁶⁵ Some of these things
have already been noted: the taxing of clergy on goods bought and sold; the
ban on paying tithes; the attack on the pieve; the hiring of blackleg priests to
celebrate the offices and administer banned sacraments there; and the refusal
of ecclesiastical burial to local clergy. These clergy had also complained to
Nicholas IV that if any of them brought a complaint against a member of
the commune, justice was denied and a severe penalty inflicted on both the
plaintiff and the notary who drew up his summons against the accused. It
was further alleged that the commune forced clerks to appear before its court,
and if they resisted, they were arrested and imprisoned in chains. Apart from
infringing clerical immunity from lay justice the commune allegedly denied these
clergy their legal rights, notably as plaintiffs, and was thus imposing the secular
equivalent of excommunication. Like excommunicates the clergy apparently
also suffered social exclusion: local labourers were forbidden to live or work
on ecclesiastical lands or vineyards; nobody from the town might speak to its
priests, visit their churches, or offer them any support or even human kindness
(humanitatis obsequium). They were also subjected to the burial ban, despite
their legal immunity from it during interdicts, as if they were excommunicate.

¹⁶³ ACSG, N.0069 (N.N.17), fol. 77r (27 May 1290). Expenses: ASF, Comune di San
Gimignano, 177 (expenses for 29 November and 5–8, 13, 17, 26, 29–30 December 1290); 178
(September–November 1290); 179 (tax assessment; it tactfully excluded clergy but not labourers
on church lands); ASCG, N.0070 (N.N.16), fols. 20r, 21r, 23r–v (meetings in late October), 27r,
28r, 28v (payment to notary), 34r, 35v, 38v, 39r (decision to mortgage property), 40v, 41v, 44r,
44v, 45v.
¹⁶⁴ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 3581. ¹⁶⁵ See n. 134.
214 The Interdict in Action

Though these seem apt countermeasures against the Church’s sanctions, there is
little evidence of them in the commune’s records. The only documented instance
when the commune tried clerks in its courts during the interdict was when it
sought to prosecute those who stripped the pieve’s altars in early 1290. But
another of the clergy’s claims can be tested more fully, namely that the podestà
and Eight for the defence forbade every artifex of the commune to work for
them. In fact these officials instructed four men in January and February 1290
to compel all artifices and merchants of the town to swear an oath to serve its
priests. This suggests that they were not doing so, but it does not necessarily
mean that the commune forbade them to do so and then revoked this ban. The
same four men were also told to ask canons of the pieve to baptize the townsfolk’s
children; hence it seems likely that local traders withdrew their services as
a spontaneous reaction against clergy doing likewise, and that the commune
sought to reconcile these two groups. It even paid a notary in October 1290 for
24 documents instructing local quasi artisti to serve the town’s clergy.¹⁶⁶ Another
clerical allegation finds some support in its records but also seems exaggerated,
namely that some of the Eight were defamed as heretics. Some members of the
commune, including the Eight, admittedly faced charges at the curia in 1290,
but their nature is unclear. Nevertheless the commune was supplying provisions
to an inquisitor and his entourage at the local Franciscan convent by October
1290.¹⁶⁷
Whatever truth lay in the clergy’s allegations, Nicholas IV took them seriously
enough to instruct the Bishop of Florence to cite the podestà and some named
past and present members of the Eight to appear in person at the curia within
fifteen days of his summons accompanied by a syndic or proctor representing
the commune. If they did not appear by this deadline, the pope would proceed
to further spiritual and temporal penalties against them and their contado, if
necessary invoking the aid of the secular arm in nearby towns. The commune
complied; its council agreed on 3 December 1290 to send one or more syndics
to Rome to defend the commune and its members, bring counter-accusations
against its clergy, and accept papal judgement. A few days later the Eight left for
the curia with the commune’s syndic, the podestà’s proctor, a notary, a porter,
and an agent carrying 200 florins to meet their expenses.¹⁶⁸ The proceedings then
dragged on for over fourteen months, as the commune’s ever-rising expenditure
at the curia shows, and the Eight had to answer another papal summons in June
1291. Meanwhile the case between commune and clergy was still being heard
by the Bishop of Pistoia; the commune required three sheepskins to record its

¹⁶⁶ ACSG, N.0068 (P.77), fol. 11v (payment to the four men on 29 April 1290); N.0070
(N.N.16), fol. 25v (payment to the notary on 31 October 1290).
¹⁶⁷ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 177 (unfoliated; 29 November, 16–17 December 1290);
ACSG, N.0070 (N.N.16), fol. 34r (2 October 1290); Davidsohn, Forschungen, II, no. 1780.
¹⁶⁸ ACSG, N.0070 (N.N.16), fols. 38v, 39r, 40v, 41v, 44v, 45v (3, 5, 21, and 29 December
1290).
 The Interdict on San Gimignano 215

progress by December 1290.¹⁶⁹ Ultimately it was not settled by that bishop or

the pope but another party.
In March 1292 both sides appointed Scolarius Ardinghelli, Archbishop of
Tyre, as arbiter of their dispute and agreed to obey whatever settlement he
decided, with the Bishop of Volterra’s acquiescence.¹⁷⁰ Presumably they had
wearied of their costly and fruitless litigation, and doubtless the clergy also
found popular hostility towards them rising as the dispute continued despite the
commune’s efforts to protect them. Indeed it had ordered the restitution of corn
to priests throughout the contado in August 1291, which implies that their share
of the harvest was withheld, presumably as a protest.¹⁷¹ Hence clergy and bishop
must have particularly welcomed Ardinghelli’s intervention. The commune
perhaps proposed him as arbiter, as it had sent an ambassador with him to the
curia on 21 February 1292, which also suggests that papal approval was sought
for his arbitration.¹⁷² In any case he was highly acceptable to both sides: he was
born in San Gimignano and hence sensitive to local feelings, while as occupant
of a distant see he was untainted by association with their dispute. After he heard
and considered what both sides had to say, he gave his decision on 3 April 1292.
It ordered the clergy to procure the removal of the interdict, which he identified
as the dispute’s cause, and absolution of anyone excommunicated in the contado
because of it. They were also to drop all legal action against the commune or its
members at the curia or elsewhere.¹⁷³ The commune considered his judgement in
its favour so important that it was not only recorded in its Libro bianco, a kind of
civic cartulary named after its white cover, but also summarized in an inscription
painted on the back wall of the council chamber in its new palazzo comunale.
Ardinghelli required the clergy to carry out his instructions by the end of
May; otherwise they would incur a penalty, and the inscription specifies this
as a fine of one hundred silver marks. Despite this threat, they were reluctant
to accept his judgement against them. On 12 July 1292, six weeks after the
deadline, the commune’s general council appointed a syndic to ask the clergy
on the commune’s behalf to comply with the arbitration. Indeed the clergy had
not apparently ceased from legal action against the commune, as Ardinghelli
required, for the syndic was also to represent and defend it in litigation regarding

¹⁶⁹ Pistoia: ibid. fol. 42r (21 December 1290). Papal summons: ASF, Comune di San Gimignano
184 (general council, c.8–16 June 1291). Expenses at curia: ASF, Comune di San Gimignano
182 (entries for 29 July, 27 August, 30 September, and 13 October 1291); 183 (expenses for
July–October 1291).
¹⁷⁰ ACSG, Libro bianco, fols. 121v (commune’s submission to his arbitration, 28 March 1292),
123r (provost’s submission on behalf of clergy, 7 March 1292), 125v (bishop’s consent, 23 March
1292).
¹⁷¹ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 182 (entries for 27 August 1291); 183 (expenses for
September 1291).
¹⁷² ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 187 (payment to ambassador on 23 February 1292).
¹⁷³ ASCG, Libro bianco, fol. 122r–v. On the inscription summarizing its terms in the palazzo
comunale see my ‘San Gimignano’, 295 (photograph), 299–300 (text). It is also reproduced on the
dust jacket of this book.
216 The Interdict in Action

the dispute.¹⁷⁴ Nor, it seems, had they observed Ardinghelli’s order to secure
relaxation of the interdict. The priest Milliori, whom the commune had hired
in March 1292, was still in its service at the usual rate of 4d. per day in
June,¹⁷⁵ which implies that local clergy were still enforcing the interdict. Even
in October and November 1292 it employed the priest Iacobus and a clerk at
the Church of S. Matteo to visit the bodies of the dead, ring the hours, and
carry out other duties. Presumably local clergy continued to accuse such priests
of strike-breaking, for the commune had to send an envoy on behalf of Iacobus
to Pistoia at this time, doubtless to defend him against such charges before the
bishop there.¹⁷⁶ All of this can only have added to the clergy’s unpopularity, and
it seems that they feared reprisals: by December 1292 the commune was paying
a night watchman to guard the priest Bartholus at Celluole (just outside San
Gimignano) ‘ne quis malefactor ledat eum’.¹⁷⁷
Indeed the clergy did not hold out long. On 3 March 1293 at their request
the Bishop of Volterra appointed a delegate to settle their differences with the
commune; doubtless they thereby hoped to gain a more favourable decision. In
response to this delegate’s summons of 8 March, the general council decided
the next day to appoint one or more syndics to represent the commune before
him. On the podestà’s advice it also agreed to set up a four-man committee to
discuss the issues in dispute.¹⁷⁸ Perhaps this body drew up the proposals that two
envoys of the commune had to present to the provost around this time.¹⁷⁹ These
included a promise to observe whatever he and his canons wished regarding
decima (one of the interdict’s alleged causes). In return they were to cease all
proceedings against the commune and its members before the curia, the Bishop
of Volterra, or any delegate of his. Perhaps because of this approach, both sides
were soon negotiating terms. On 10 April the general council voted the podestà
full authority to make an agreement with the town’s clergy and the Bishop of
Volterra that respected Ardinghelli’s arbitration, notably that the bishop was
to lift the interdict and absolve those excommunicated. Accordingly the next
day the podestà and council sent a syndic to the bishop to secure removal of
these sentences and swear obedience to ecclesiastical mandates for the commune.
Terms were not agreed immediately, but on 23 June seven canons of the pieve met

¹⁷⁴ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 185; ACSG, N.0071 (N.N.20), fol. 6r; Davidsohn,
Forschungen, II, no. 1804.
¹⁷⁵ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 187 (expenses for March, April, and June 1292). May’s
expenses included payments to agents going to the Bishop of Volterra ‘occasione concordie facte
inter commune sancti Geminiani et clerum de sancto Geminiano et curte’.
¹⁷⁶ ACSG, N.0072 (N.N.19), fols. 8r, 13v, 22v, 37v; N.0073 (N.N.18), fols. 12v, 23v.
¹⁷⁷ ACSG, N.0072 (N.N.19), fols. 5v, 51r.
¹⁷⁸ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 195, fol. 12v (letter of 8 March 1293); 191 (general council
on 9 March 1293); 192 (payments on 10 February and 7 March 1293 to messengers for taking
letters at the podestà’s command to the bishop).
¹⁷⁹ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 195, fol. 24 (c.8 March–13 June 1293). Around then the
commune also asked the bishop to settle its dispute with the provost over ‘novitates’ at Gambasso
(ibid. fol. 23r).
 The Interdict on San Gimignano 217

there with sixteen rectors of local parishes and resolved on behalf of their churches
that their agents drop legal action against the commune and its members before
the curia and judges acting on papal authority, and that their mandates to these
agents be annulled. At the commune’s request they gave written confirmation of
this accord, which was then copied into the Libro bianco.¹⁸⁰
Therefore, over a year after Ardinghelli’s arbitration of their dispute with
the commune, the clergy fulfilled one of its main requirements. But it is
unclear whether they met another requirement, persuading their bishop to
lift his sentences of interdict and excommunication. Certainly payments to
blackleg priests no longer feature in the commune’s accounts after 1292; thus we
might assume that local clergy had returned and resumed their pastoral duties.
Admittedly they agreed to abandon their case at the curia, but they still pursued
their dispute before the Bishop of Volterra; the commune continued to make
representations to him down to 1295. Two of the many references to these in
its records suggest that the interdict continued after 1292. In August 1293 the
commune paid a notary for drawing up a syndical instrument ‘regarding the men
interdicted by the lord bishop of Volterra’, but this sounds like a sentence on
specific individuals rather than the commune as a whole. The other reference is
also allusive: in October 1294 the commune reimbursed a man for his expenses
‘over the matter of the interdict’, specifically for seeking advice from experts
in canon law that might aid the commune ‘regarding the grievance of the said
interdict’.¹⁸¹ Hence it is hard to say when the interdict and the dispute that
caused it ended, although the commune sent an envoy to the Bishop of Volterra
in January 1295 ‘pro facto concordie’. A document of the commune dated 21
March 1295 perhaps marked the final rapprochement of clergy and laity. It was a
decree enacted ‘for the honour, reverence and preservation of God’s holy church
and ecclesiastical liberty’ binding the commune’s podestà and officials to respect
ecclesiastical liberty and clerical immunity in perpetuity, and forbidding them
and other members of the commune from making or observing any ruling in
prejudice of the same. But the commune’s violations of the church’s freedoms
that occasioned the dispute with the clergy, the interdict, and ultimately the
decree are not specified.¹⁸² Over a year earlier, in February 1294 the commune
had at the provost’s request drawn up a ruling on financial dues to the pieve that
were customary before the dispute. They were probably a key issue in the dispute,
but doubtless there were other issues that the decree subsequently tried to resolve.

¹⁸⁰ ASCG, N.0074 (N.N.21), fols. 29v–30r, 31r–v, 42v (general council on 10 and 11 April
and 26 June 1293; the last meeting authorized a syndic to receive clergy’s undertaking to drop
legal action); ASCG, Libro bianco, fol. 151r; ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 192 (expenses at
Volterra regarding the dispute paid on 23 May and 23 June 1293); Davidsohn, Forschungen, II,
nos. 1829, 1833.
¹⁸¹ ASF, Comune di San Gimignano 194 (expenses for August 1293); 199, fol. 41r (October
1294).
¹⁸² Archivio Vescovile di Volterra, Dec. X, no. 12, edited in my ‘San Gimignano’, 300–1;
Regesta, ed. Schneider, no. 967. See n. 133 on the envoy of January 1295.
218 The Interdict in Action

Clearly the commune took the interdict on San Gimignano seriously. The
laity resented its withdrawal of spiritual comforts, particularly infant baptism and
the final absolution. And even though the commune hired clergy to supply such
wants, it still sought to make peace with clergy, observing the interdict and even
restrained popular resentment against them. The commune’s expenditure in its
search for a settlement at the curia, Pistoia, and Volterra shows that it considered
the interdict worth being free from. Even after an ecclesiastical arbitrator found
in its favour, it was willing to make concessions to the clergy to secure their
compliance, and the clergy apparently carried on enforcing the interdict until
it did so. But whether lasting peace between commune and clergy was thereby
achieved is debatable.

5 . 4 A TA L E O F T WO C I T I E S : T H E I N T E R D I C TS O N D A X
A N D BÉZ I E R S

These interdicts are treated together for several reasons. Firstly, parallels and
contrasts can be drawn between the towns they affected and reactions they
elicited. Both towns lie in south-west France, Dax facing the Atlantic coast,
Béziers the Mediterranean. By the time they fell under these interdicts, each had
been subject to a distant royal power for under a century. Dax was taken by Henry
II of England in 1177 and remained part of English Gascony until its recapture by
the French in 1442. By contrast Béziers was part of the Languedoc incorporated
in the French royal demesne after 1229 as a result of the Albigensian crusade.
Though nominally controlled by agents of their respective rulers, both towns also
developed their own self-governing bodies or communes. And the communes
of Dax and Béziers reacted strongly to these interdicts.¹⁸³ In both cases clergy
observing the interdict protested to the curia that the commune persecuted them
for doing so and even usurped some of their spiritual functions in order to disrupt
observance of the interdict. In doing so each commune opposed the bishop who
had his see in its city. In both cases the dispute between commune and clergy was
decided and the interdict relaxed through the intervention of a higher power: at
Dax its secular overlord, the king of England; at Béziers the highest ecclesiastical
authority, the pope. A less happy parallel is that local archives are not as rich
for Dax and Béziers as for San Gimignano. But lay reactions to both interdicts
are vividly described in contemporary papal letters, though these are based on
petitions of aggrieved local clergy and hence describe events from a particular
perspective. Nevertheless other views on events are provided by royal records and
a civic cartulary for Dax and later accounts for Béziers.

¹⁸³ On the commune’s origins at Dax: Livre noir, pp. xvii, xx, xxiii, xxvi–xxviii; De Sauviac, 177,
185–7; Marsh, 2. These historians also treated the interdict at Dax: Livre noir, pp. xxxii–xxxiii; De
Sauviac, 188–91; Marsh, 106–10.
 A Tale of Two Cities 219

To begin with Dax, the interdict imposed there by late 1242 was not the
first to fall on the town. The nineteenth-century historian of Dax, De Sauviac,
recounts that a century earlier Guillaume de Falgars, the city’s bishop since 1135,
had interdicted his cathedral and other suburban churches. His interdict was
provoked by a revolt against him. Its leaders were relatives and friends of a man
whom he had excommunicated for seizing episcopal dues; the man had died
unrepentant and the bishop’s refusal to allow him ecclesiastical burial sparked the
revolt. The bishop excommunicated its leaders as well as closing Dax’s churches:
De Sauviac observed that he punished Dax as if their accomplice (témoin de cet
acte inouï ). He then left Dax. Ultimately townsfolk sought him out begging him
to return. On his rapturous reception at Dax he celebrated mass in the cathedral
marking the end of his interdict and absolved the penitent rebels.¹⁸⁴
There are notable parallels between this interdict and that imposed on the city
by a later bishop, Navarre de Miossans, elected to the see of Dax in 1239. Firstly,
the later interdict was also occasioned by lay opposition to episcopal authority,
though its leaders were civic officials asserting communal rights rather than private
individuals waging a personal feud. Secondly, Navarre likewise excommunicated
the ringleaders, i.e. the officials, and interdicted the city, because its people, so
he told the curia, had supported their opposition to him.¹⁸⁵ Indeed this reflected
the canonistic teaching that those consenting to a wrong ought to be punished
along with the wrongdoers. Thirdly, Navarre also fled from his enemies into exile
and following a reconciliation agreed to return to a contrite public reception.
The dispute that provoked this interdict arose between him and the citizens of
Dax before August 1242. King Henry III of England, then in Gascony, learned
of it by 3 August, when he ordered that it be settled before the seneschal of
Gascony, his chief agent in the region, or the viguier of Dax, another royal
official, if the seneschal could not attend to it.¹⁸⁶ Although Henry wanted this to
be decided ‘sine ulteriori questione’, his subjects at Dax were reluctant to come to
terms. By November 1242 their bishop interdicted the city and excommunicated
its officials, namely its capdellus or mayor, G. Arnauld de Gos, and justiciars
(iusticiarii). The dispute that had occasioned these sentences concerned rival
jurisdictional claims.¹⁸⁷ According to the bishop the mayor and justiciars had
usurped jurisdiction over some men under his lordship and ignored his warnings
to respect his rights; consequently he excommunicated these officials for their
disobedience and interdicted Dax for backing them. Indeed, in May 1243, when
the king intervened more decisively, the bishop identified the dispute’s main
object as the village of St-Vincent-de-Sentes, where citizens of Dax claimed
certain seigneurial rights de iure et de facto that he contested. But by then other

¹⁸⁴ De Sauviac, 164–6. ¹⁸⁵ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 201.

¹⁸⁶ Rôles Gascons, no. 590; London, National Archives, C66/52 (Patent roll, 26 Henry III); CPR
1232–1247, 337.
¹⁸⁷ As n. 185. On Henry’s intervention of May 1243: Livre noir, 207–14, esp. 210, 213 on
St-Vincent-de-Sentes. See also De Sauviac, 189–90.
220 The Interdict in Action

issues had intensified the conflict between citizenry and bishop, not least their
reaction to his interdict on Dax.
He alleged that the mayor and justiciars had some priests, including one called
Durand de Vic, celebrate offices in his cathedral, administer sacraments, and
grant the dead ecclesiastical burial under the interdict. These officials allegedly
also fined those refusing to associate with these priests and forbade anyone to seek
such ministrations from other priests. The bishop’s allegations were substantiated
when the king and his treasurer Pierre Chaceporc, canon of Poitiers, intervened in
the dispute in May 1243. The king noted that the mayor and justiciars had fined
those who refused to attend the offices in the interdicted cathedral and instead
went to other churches; he ordered that such fines be refunded. Likewise Pierre
Chaceporc found that corpses were buried in the cathedral cemetery during the
interdict, and he decided that those of persons from other parishes nearby should
be exhumed and reburied at their respective churches.
Clearly the dispute had divided the people of Dax but not simply along lay and
clerical lines. On the one hand some renegade priests supported the commune
against the bishop, violating his interdict. On the other hand some pious laity
were unwilling to disobey it, attending churches outside the interdicted city in
strict accordance with canonistic doctrine. Apparently such internal divisions
only deepened after the Bishop of Bayonne intervened. On behalf of the local
metropolitan, the Archbishop of Auch, he warned the mayor and justiciars to
stop defying the Bishop of Dax and his interdict and forbade the renegade priests
to support them and hold services on pain of eternal damnation and loss of
their benefices and offices. When his threats and warnings went unheeded, he
renewed the excommunication of the mayor and justiciars and extended it to
their supporters, including these priests and other citizens, but to no avail.¹⁸⁸
The civic officials then apparently drove out of the cathedral some Dominicans
who came to preach there on All Souls’ Day (1 November 1242), and ordered
that nobody might receive any sacrament from the cathedral chaplain; otherwise
they would be punished. The Bishop of Dax and his archbishop had required
this priest to baptize infants, hear confessions of the sick, and administer final
communion to the dying. Ironically these canonical exceptions to the interdict’s
ban on sacraments were meant to curb popular resentment of the sentence. But
the mayor and justiciars seemed resolved to supplant the ecclesiastical authorities
in providing for the pastoral needs of their citizens during the interdict; these
officials allowed only their clerical supporters to minister in Dax.
When these events were reported to the archbishop and his provincial council,
they tried imposing their authority where his agent, the Bishop of Bayonne, had
failed. They confirmed the bishop’s excommunication of ‘schismatic’ priests and

¹⁸⁸ As n. 185. On the pious laity and Henry’s instructions below: Livre noir, 208–9, 211–12.
See p. 197 above on loss of benefices and excommunication as penalties for celebrating in interdicted
places.
 A Tale of Two Cities 221

sent letters to the civic officials and their supporters, exhorting them to return
to the unity of the Church within forty days of receiving these. But the Bishop
of Dax claimed that their only response to this warning was to seize goods from
him and some of his clergy. As we have seen, secular authorities often reacted to
an interdict by imposing ‘economic’ sanctions on clergy observing it. Henry III
certainly accepted that this had happened at Dax, for in May 1243 he instructed
that the bishop, his chapter, and all his men be reinstated in their houses,
revenues, and possessions. The king, nevertheless, implied that both sides in the
dispute had suffered depredations, since he also ordered mutual restitution of all
goods seized during the conflict. These losses probably occurred in the final most
acrimonious stages of the dispute described by the Bishop of Dax.
Mayor G. Arnauld was succeeded by a new capdellus called Barthélemy, who
intensified the dispute his predecessor instigated. He and his justiciars, so the
bishop claimed, threatened to punish anyone giving, selling, or lending anything
to clerks or other literate persons who refused to serve in churches under the
‘schismatic’ priests. Neither was anyone to buy from them, receive them in their
homes, or show them any human kindness or familiarity. As at San Gimignano
fifty years later, clergy obeying the interdict were to be ostracized in the same
way as excommunicates. The commune thus countered the Church authorities’
excommunication of its clerical supporters and conversely required citizens to
associate with them despite that sentence. Apparently the social exclusion of
clergy loyal to the bishop was enforced. The bishop reported that some country
people sold them food, presumably in ignorance of the commune’s ruling, and
were overwhelmed by insults and injuries.
Seemingly it was not the only violence arising from the dispute. According to
De Sauviac,¹⁸⁹ a citizen mob also besieged the cathedral canons in their houses
facing the church, drove them out by force, and demolished some of their homes.
The bishop certainly related that the attack on the country traders prompted
him and other clergy to abandon their residences across the Dax and Bayonne
dioceses, as they had reason to fear such violence against themselves. Seemingly
hostilities also broke out between the commune’s and the bishop’s supporters,
for Henry III observed in May 1243 that prisoners had been taken on both
sides; he ordered their release and mutual restitution of goods seized during
the conflict (guerra). A fatality had even occurred, for Henry’s co-arbiter in the
dispute, Pierre Chaceporc, heard that the bishop’s servants (valitores) had killed
a man; he clearly believed this since he ordered the bishop to have a priest pray
for the man’s soul for a year and send a servant on pilgrimage to the Holy Land
for the same purpose. De Sauviac claimed on uncertain authority that the victim
was renegade priest Durand de Vic and he was killed in the cathedral cemetery.
Certainly Durand died under the interdict, and the bishop stated that his fellow
excommunicates buried him beside the cathedral; Chaceporc later ordered his

¹⁸⁹ De Sauviac, 189.

222 The Interdict in Action

exhumation and reburial at Divielle Abbey. But neither the bishop nor Chaceporc
suggest that he met a violent end. Admittedly Chaceporc required the bishop to
‘reconcile’, i.e. ritually purify, the cathedral and its cemetery after the interdict,
which would be required if violence had been committed there, but he did not
give the reason for this and it could equally have been necessitated by burial of
excommunicates there, notably Durand himself.¹⁹⁰
During this ever-worsening dispute both sides looked to higher authorities to
resolve it. Shortly after it broke out, Arnauld and his justiciars had tried referring
it to the curia, but the bishop excommunicated them and interdicted Dax,
considering their appeal groundless.¹⁹¹ By any means there had been a papal
vacancy effectively since Gregory IX’s death in 1241. When the bishop himself
later sought papal intervention, the new Pope Innocent IV did not respond till
20 October 1243, four months after his election.¹⁹² But in the meantime Henry
III had intervened.¹⁹³ After his failed attempt to end the dispute in August
1242, he had received a complaint from the men of Dax by December 1242
accusing the bishop of a hostile attack on them, when apparently three of them
had been captured and another killed. This was presumably the fatality noted
by Chaceporc in May 1243; it was also noted then that captives were held but
on both sides. Either the men of Dax omitted this inconvenient detail or took
prisoners after their complaint to the king. In any case on 15 December 1242 the
king cited the men and Bishop of Dax to appear before him on 29 December to
air these grievances. It is not recorded whether they appeared, but five days after
this deadline Henry set a second hearing for 21 January 1243. The bishop was to
appear before him again on 8 February 1243, but in late January he cancelled this
hearing and delegated the case to an agent, whom he intended to send to Dax
expressly in order to settle the dispute; he also warned the bishop not to harrass
the men of Dax in the meantime. The agent was apparently unsuccessful, since
fresh allegations had reached Henry by April 1243, this time from clergy of Dax.
The mayor and justiciars apparently prevented cultivation of their vineyards and
other lands; thus Henry ordered these officials on 19 April to stop doing this
lest the clergy be deprived of produce.¹⁹⁴ Presumably, as at San Gimignano, this
economic sanction was enforced by forbidding labourers to work on ecclesiastical
estates and designed to discourage clergy from observing the interdict.
On 19 April 1243 Henry also promised the mayor and justiciars that he
would resolve their differences with the clergy on reaching Dax. Four weeks later

¹⁹⁰ Livre noir, 209, 211 (prisoners); 210, 213–14 (Chaceporc’s judgement).
¹⁹¹ As n. 185.
¹⁹² The vacancy after Gregory’s death on 22 August 1241 was only interrupted by Celestine IV’s
brief pontificate (elected 25 October; died 10 November 1241) before Innocent’s election on 25
June 1243.
¹⁹³ As n. 186. Rôles Gascons, no. 1591 (15 December 1242); London, National Archives, C54/55
(Close roll, 27 Henry III); CCR 1242–1247, 58.
¹⁹⁴ Rôles Gascons, nos. 952 (19 April), 1196 (3 January), 1201 (c.21–31 January 1243); London,
National Archives, C66/53 (Patent roll, 27 Henry III); CPR 1232–1247, 374, 399.
 A Tale of Two Cities 223

he arrived and proposed that both sides submit to his arbitration in temporal
matters and to Pierre Chaceporc’s in spiritual matters.¹⁹⁵ Both sides agreed
and offered guarantees to abide by this agreement before various ecclesiastical
dignitaries on 15 May. Ten days later, on 25 May 1243, Henry and Chaceporc
gave their judgement. Many of its terms have already been described: restititution
of the bishop and chapter’s property; surrender of goods and people seized by
both sides; reimbursing of fines levied on those avoiding illicit services at the
cathedral; exhumation of Durand de Vic and others buried there and their
reburial elsewhere; and obligations on the bishop to reconcile the cathedral
cemetery and atone for the murder attributed to his servants. The king further
ordered that the commune compensate the bishop and chapter for damages,
paying the former 120 livres morlans and the latter 100 livres, to be shared
among the canons and other deserving persons at the discretion of the bishop
and the minister of the Franciscans at Dax. These sums had to be paid by
Michaelmas (29 September), while Henry’s other conditions had to be fulfilled
as early as Pentecost (31 May). Apparently the reburial of Durand de Vic and
others was to be conducted promptly, as Chaceporc made this a precondition
for the bishop’s return to Dax. He also specified the arrangements for the
latter and these strikingly recall the reconciliation of Navarre’s predecessor
Guillaume de Falgars to his flock following an interdict a century earlier. The
community of Dax was to meet Bishop Navarre as he approached Dax in order
to beg his forgiveness and lead him to his cathedral. Extraordinarily, though
Chaceporc did not apparently act on higher ecclesiastical authority, he required
the bishop to absolve G. Arnauld and other officials running the city during
the dispute, as well as the rest of its citizens and their supporters. Mass was
then to be celebrated, signifying the relaxation of the interdict. Guillaume de
Falgars had performed such acts voluntarily, but Navarre was obliged to do so.
Chaceporc also made demands on Dax’s citizens: they and their neighbours had
to pay tithes and ecclesiastical dues as they had done in the past. Evidently
these were withheld during the interdict, presumably as one of the commune’s
sanctions against clergy observing it. Finally Henry and Chaceporc required
both parties to obey their arbitration on pain of a thousand marks payable to
the king.
But this arbitration did not settle the dispute that provoked the interdict.
Henry left this to a commission of six citizens of Dax and six knights from outside
Dax, who had to investigate the bishop’s alleged jurisdictional rights over St-
Vincent-de-Sentes that the commune disputed and decide the issue in the king’s
name by the Michaelmas deadline. Whether the arbitration led to peace between
bishop and town is unclear. On 20 October, five months later, Innocent IV
addressed the bishop’s complaints against the commune.¹⁹⁶ Probably these were
submitted to the curia before May, for he does not mention the arbitration. The

¹⁹⁵ Livre noir, 207–14 (25 May), 396–400 (15 May 1243). ¹⁹⁶ As n. 185.
224 The Interdict in Action

papal vacancy to 25 June and Innocent’s subsequent involvement in more urgent

matters, notably his conflict with Frederick II, had clearly delayed this papal
response. It was addressed to the Bishop, Archdeacon, and sacristan of Oloron, a
see near Dax and subject to the same metropolitan. They were instructed to have
Bishop Navarre’s excommunication and interdict observed and renewed until
clerical grievances were satisfied and Dax’s mayor and justiciars sought absolution
at the curia. Moreover clergy celebrating offices under the interdict were to be
punished canonically and bodies of excommunicates exhumed from cemeteries;
if necessary the aid of the secular arm was to be invoked. In fact the lay power had
already intervened, giving the commune similar instructions to make amends to
the clergy and disinter an excommunicate and others illicitly buried. Indeed the
king’s arbitration had required that differences between clergy and commune
be settled by Michaelmas, three weeks before the pope’s response; hence the
latter was probably redundant. Nevertheless it ended by ordering its addressees
to annul any settlement that was illicit or injurious to the bishop and clergy
of Dax. It is doubtful that this was a cryptic allusion to the royal arbitration,
but these instructions implicitly allowed for its revocation. His addressees might
indeed have found such royal intervention in ecclesiastical affairs questionable,
but since Dax’s clergy had to turn to the king for justice in the absence of a pope
and won favourable terms, the arbitration probably brought a lasting settlement.
Certainly no further references to the dispute have been found, and the Bishop
of Dax doubtless lifted his interdict once the necessary reparations were made.
A further royal intervention perhaps helped turn the May truce between clergy
and commune into more lasting peace.¹⁹⁷ In September 1243 Henry ordered
reform of Dax’s administration. The capdellus and twenty justiciars that had
apparently formed its government since the twelfth century were replaced by
a mayor and twenty jurati. Citizens might elect the jurati and nominate three
candidates for mayor annually, but the final choice of mayor lay with the seneschal
of Gascony, the king’s chief agent in the region. This measure was designed
to increase royal control and improve stability by preventing concentration of
power in the hands of any one faction. The capdellus G. Arnauld had indeed
tried to expand the commune’s jurisdiction and not only at the expense of the
bishop but also of local nobility. In late 1242, after the dispute between bishop
and commune had arisen, the knights of Dax had complained to Henry III that
they were required to appear before the capdellus and justiciars in lawsuits.¹⁹⁸
On 26 December 1242 the king had ordered these civic officials to desist and
confirmed the custom that the knights were subject only to his or his seneschal’s

¹⁹⁷ Rôles Gascons, no. 1230 (9 September 1243); London, National Archives, C66/53 (Patent
roll, 27 Henry III); CPR 1232–1247, 406. Marsh, 106–10; cf. ibid. 102–6 on a similar royal
intervention around this time at Bayonne.
¹⁹⁸ Rôles Gascons, no. 1291 (26 December 1243); London, National Archives, C54/55 (Close
Roll, 27 Henry III); CCR 1242–1247, 7. On the knights’ role in the arbitration: Livre noir,
209–10, 212–13, 397, 398.
 A Tale of Two Cities 225

court. Hence these officials tried to exercise jurisdictional powers claimed by both
king and bishop; this makes royal reorganization of the commune all the more
understandable. The knights’ dispute further indicates that divisions at Dax did
not fall along lay and clerical lines. The Bishop and knights of Dax were united
by their grievances against the commune, and the interdict arguably helped to
consolidate if not forge this alliance. The bishop’s lay allies during his interdict
certainly included knights, for when he and his chapter swore to observe the
royal arbitration on pain of 1000 marks, five knights, described as citizens of
Dax, stood as guarantors of this sum. Furthermore Henry’s decision to appoint
six knights and six citizens to settle the dispute between bishop and commune
was surely motivated by a concern to balance the commission in favour of both
sides. Thus, even if the commune defied the interdict, the sentence influenced or
reinforced a powerful section of public opinion against it; consequently the king
intervened and reduced its autonomy. Indeed after his reform a mayor friendly
to episcopal interests was elected. Arguably the interdict at Dax was, therefore,
ultimately effective.
The interdict on Béziers some fifty years later was also caused by the city’s
commune extending its powers at local clergy’s expense, in fact literally so for the
issue at stake was lay taxation of church property. The Fourth Lateran Council
(1215) had ruled that this was not licit without papal approval; lay rulers who
compelled clergy to pay taxes faced anathema. But increasingly secular rulers taxed
clergy in their lands with papal acquiescence; later thirteenth-century popes even
assigned clerical taxes intended for crusades to kings who then used them for other
purposes. Communes emerging across Europe since the twelfth century followed
kings in disregarding clerical freedom from lay taxation. This possibly caused
the interdict at San Gimignano, and lay resentment of this clerical privilege
had certainly arisen at Béziers by 1283,¹⁹⁹ when the ‘consuls’ who governed
Béziers complained about minor clergy abusing it. Apparently married clerks
and others who had been tonsured but exercised an ‘artem mechanicam’ rather
than church office refused to contribute to royal and civic taxes without papal
consent. The consuls sought royal intervention, especially regarding property
formerly subject to lay taxes but now in the dead hand of the Church. Béziers
was subject to the French king, and in July 1283 he convened a parlement, the
supreme tribunal of his realm, at Carcassone; petitions submitted to it included
this request from nearby Béziers. Royal judges ruled that clerks living at Béziers
‘non clericaliter’ might be compelled to pay taxes, and if their bishop objected,
the issue should be referred back to parlement. He probably objected, for a
parlement at Carcassone in 1284 heard that local prelates and their officials (their
deputies in judicial matters) tried to protect ‘clericos mercatores’, even married
ones, from paying royal and civic taxes. It was apparently customary for their

¹⁹⁹ Langlois, ‘Rouleaux’, 198–9, 206; Given, 143. Lateran ruling: X 3.49.7.
226 The Interdict in Action

fathers and predecessors to pay these; hence this parlement ruled that such clerks
should not be excused from doing so. The seneschal of Carcassone, the principal
royal agent in the region, apparently enforced this ruling in Béziers diocese too
strictly, for the king ordered him on 15 June 1292 to stop making certain clerks
there pay taxes at the will of the city’s consuls. The king was doubtless responding
to renewed protests from local Church authorities. Ironically in subsequent years
the greatest lay attack on this clerical immunity was made by the king. As is
well known, Philip IV introduced many taxes to fund a war against England,
and French clergy came under increasing pressure to contribute. In 1294–5 he
won clerical concessions to his tax demands at ecclesiastical assemblies across
his kingdom.²⁰⁰ Clergy of Narbonne province, which included Béziers diocese,
even met at Béziers to approve additional royal subsidies in the spring of 1296.
However, the issue of clerical taxation was soon brought to a head at a national
and local level by Boniface VIII’s famous bull ‘Clericis laicos’.
It forbade lay taxation of ecclesiastical wealth without papal consent. It merely
reaffirmed the earlier Lateran ruling admittedly, but it also reacted against
subsequent political developments, notably recent clerical concessions to royal
tax demands in both England and France. It partly responded to long-standing
grievances of clergy who felt that such encroachments undermined their privileged
status, as in Béziers diocese. It can also be seen as a naïve attempt to halt the
Anglo-French war, for which clerical taxes were needed, and thereby reassert the
papacy’s traditional role in keeping peace between Christians. It was not only
provocative at the level of high politics. Besides threatening excommunication
on rulers who violated its terms (echoing the Lateran ruling’s anathema), it
also proclaimed an interdict on corporations that did so.²⁰¹ This challenged
communes like Béziers. Its consuls claimed customary powers to tax local church
property; an inquiry ordered by the French king on 1 January 1296 had found
in their favour.²⁰² Ironically ‘Clericis laicos’ was drawn up around then, being
dated 25 February 1296 in the papal register, but its impact was not immediate,
for the pope delayed its promulgation until April 1296. News of it then spread
quickly and copies of it gradually circulated in France. The Bishop of Béziers
later informed the pope that it was publicized in his diocese and his official had
even had it copied for the consuls so they could not claim ignorance of it.²⁰³
Nevertheless they defied it, levying taxes on church property, even compelling

²⁰⁰ Denton, ‘Ecclesiastical Assemblies’; id. ‘Taxation’, esp. 241–4. Martin-Chabot, p. 111, no.
563 (15 January 1292).
²⁰¹ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1567; Po. 24291.
²⁰² ‘Mémoire des consul de besiers’, pp. 1–2; Montpellier, Archives départementales de l’Hérault
G765. The handwritten ‘Mémoire’ is one of several dossiers in G765 compiled in the eighteenth
century when another dispute arose at Béziers over civic taxation of church property. The dossiers
refer to the dispute of 1296–8 and usefully cite documents now lost, notably the royal mandate of
1 January 1296. The ‘Mémoire’ relates that the latter was addressed to the seneschal of Carcassone,
who with the royal judge of Béziers held this inquiry involving 49 witnesses.
²⁰³ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 2140 (7 October 1297).
 A Tale of Two Cities 227

some clergy to pay by seizing their goods. They were determined to exercise their
customary right upheld by the recent royal inquiry, and their position paralleled
Philip IV’s, who was equally opposed to ‘Clericis laicos’. Indeed, according to
an eighteenth-century account, letters patent of the king dated 23 January 1297
required the seneschal of Carcassone and Béziers to compel local clergy to pay
taxes on their property. If these clergy complained to the Church authorities,
the seneschal was to have their temporalities confiscated; seemingly the consuls
executed these letters by seizing goods of clergy who refused to pay them taxes.²⁰⁴
Hence their defiance of ‘Clericis laicos’ began after 23 January but before October
1297 when the pope had learned of it.²⁰⁵
The city’s cathedral chapter apparently reacted by seeking a fresh inquiry
into the consuls’ taxative powers, but this time under ecclesiastical auspices.²⁰⁶
Mediators of the consuls and canons met in the latter’s chapter house under the
arbitration of the Archdeacon of Cabrières. Aided by two professors of canon
and civil law they tried to determine whether civic taxes might be levied on
ecclesiastical property, and whether the consuls might force clergy to pay them.
This attempt at mediation failed, however. Although the consuls agreed to return
goods seized from clergy for the sake of peace, they denied having done wrong or
violating ‘Clericis laicos’. A principle was at stake for both consuls and clergy, and
neither side wished to compromise. Hence the Church authorities judged that
the consuls were excommunicated and Béziers was interdicted under ‘Clericis
laicos’. Local clergy observed these sentences till May 1298 when the dispute was
finally resolved.
The consuls and populace apparently defied these sentences to such an extent
that the Bishop of Béziers, Bérenger Frédol, had to seek papal intervention.
Boniface VIII’s response is recorded in two lengthy papal letters dated 7 and
13 October 1297 respectively and preserved in his registers.²⁰⁷ They contain
the only extant account of lay reactions to the Béziers interdict; hence they
must be treated with caution. Firstly, the poor survival of civic documents at
Béziers for this period means that we have no secular sources against which
to test these Church records as at San Gimignano. They might exaggerate lay
hostility, especially when it was reported to the pope in order to secure his
intervention. Secondly, the account in the first letter is based on the petition
of the Bishop of Béziers, and while the second letter does not specify the
source of its allegations, they probably came from him. But it is doubtful

²⁰⁴ From the first page of a handwritten dossier titled ‘Arret du Conseil de Renvoy en la Cour
d’entre le maire et comune de la ville de Beziers et la Chapitre St. Nazaire de la dite ville. Extrait
du Registre du Conseil d’Etat’ (dated 9 August 1751) in Montpellier, Archives départementales de
l’Hérault G765; St Nazaire was Béziers Cathedral. The contemporary ‘Mémoire’ (see n. 202), p. 2,
alludes to several such letters sent by Philip to the seneschal of Carcasssone and Béziers in 1297 and
1298.
²⁰⁵ See n. 203. ²⁰⁶ Soucaille, ‘Institutions Municipales’, 236.
²⁰⁷ Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 2140–1. The second letter was edited by Raynaldus, Annales,
xiv.513b–14a, and Du Plessis, Collectio, i.125; enregistered in ASV, Reg. Vat. 48, fol. 319r.
228 The Interdict in Action

whether he witnessed the events he described, since he resided at the curia from
November 1296 till early 1298. Apparently he was also absent from his see
before November 1296, since he attended a synod of French clergy at Paris
over the summer of 1296. He then went to Rome on the synod’s behalf to
obtain papal consent for royal taxation of the French Church as ‘Clericis laicos’
required.²⁰⁸ Ironically it was during his absence on this business that the dispute
broke out in his diocese over ‘Clericis laicos’; tellingly his official brought the bull
to the consuls’ attention, not him. After his arrival in Rome, Boniface enlisted
his collaboration on the Liber sextus, which prolonged his absence until shortly
before its promulgation on 3 March 1298. The consuls clearly exploited this
situation, and it doubtless contributed to their bald defiance of the interdict. As
the saying goes, when the cat is away, the mice will play. Indeed the dispute at
Béziers was not resolved nor the interdict lifted until after the bishop’s return in
early 1298.
According to the first papal letter the interdict’s immediate effect was to
make the consuls even more defiant of ‘Clericis laicos’, as they continued their
campaign of confiscating church property to coerce clergy to pay taxes. During
interdicts when the issue was not taxation secular rulers also seized the clergy’s
goods to discourage them from observing the sentence. The consuls perhaps
shared this aim, as they apparently ensured that the interdict was not strictly
enforced at Béziers. First, they allegedly had hosts seized from clergy and taken
to the town hall. It is uncertain whether these were distributed in defiance
of the interdict. Perhaps the consuls simply had them displayed for popular
veneration, although Church authorities might still find this provocative, as
Florentine councillors found eighty years later when they urged exposition of
the host in their interdicted city.²⁰⁹ Even if the consuls did not technically
violate the interdict in this way, they allegedly did in another. They were said
to have had the city’s dead brought for burial in or close to the cemeteries
of local churches and religious houses. Apparently crosses were carried before
the funeral processions, and church bells were rung and citizens loudly chanted
‘Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison’ and ‘Pater noster’, as clergy did at funerals. Of
course an interdict forbade Christian burial except for clerks who died observing
it, and it even banned such solemnities at their funerals. Boniface VIII responded
by ordering exhumation of bodies buried in contempt of this interdict; they were
to be taken so far from churches that voices of clergy chanting offices could not
be heard in places where they were dumped.
The pope reacted even more sternly to reports that unorthodox views underlay
the consuls’ defiance. The bishop claimed that when he threatened to interdict
Béziers if they continued to tax clergy, one leading citizen allegedly responded
that he and his fellow citizens did not care as the city was already interdicted and
added that they had never been as happy and life had never been as good as during

²⁰⁸ See Schmidt, ‘Papst Bonifaz VIII’, 227–8. ²⁰⁹ Trexler, 123–7.
 A Tale of Two Cities 229

the interdict. This man was described as consiliarius of the consuls; doubtless
his subversive views reflected theirs. When another consiliarius called Jacques
Amelii was asked how he dared defy ‘Clericis laicos’, he apparently expressed
even greater contempt for church authority, retorting with foul words that he
would do nothing for the Roman pontiff. Boniface’s first letter responded by
ordering the local metropolitan, the Archbishop of Narbonne, to investigate these
allegations. If he found that the consuls had taxed and seized clerical property;
he was to enforce the interdict on Béziers. The consuls, their consiliarii, and
other guilty citizens were to give satisfaction within a month of being warned,
which presumably meant restitution of this property; otherwise the archbishop
was to have it proclaimed throughout his province that they were to be shunned
as excommunicates. He was also to identify the main ringleaders and summon
them and Jacques Amelii to appear in person before the pope within two months.
Boniface specifically suspected Amelii of unorthodoxy because of his anti-papal
outburst. Indeed five years later he would state in his famous bull ‘Unam
sanctam’ (1302) that obedience to the pope was essential to human salvation.²¹⁰
Apparently by 1297 he already equated opposition to papal authority with heresy:
his second letter ordered the inquisitor for the Carcassone region to investigate
Béziers for heresy.
This letter invites even less trust than the first because of its colourful rhetoric
and extreme allegations. Firstly, it stated that several citizens of Béziers had
aroused suspicions through their words and deeds that they wished to imitate
their forefathers’ wickedness. This referred to the Cathar heresy that flourished
in the Languedoc until it was largely crushed by the early thirteenth-century
Albigensian crusade. Indeed the letter added that these citizens ignored the fact
that their ancestors had been punished by the sword for their wickedness and
persecution of churches. This may specifically refer to the crusaders’ massacre
of the city’s inhabitants in 1209; Simon de Montfort, military leader of the
Albigensian crusade, had notoriously justified the indiscriminate attack with the
claim that ‘God would know his own’. The crusaders had slaughtered Catholics
as suspected Cathars, and Boniface’s belief that Catharism was resurgent at
Béziers was equally misguided, as we will see.
Secondly, this letter stated that the citizens sought to overthrow ecclesiastical
liberty by levying extraordinary taxes on churches and seizing the persons and
goods of clergy by force. They apparently pressed clergy to accept statutes and
agreements requiring them to pay these dues; this may refer to the royal letters
of 23 January 1297 which stipulated this. They had consequently incurred
excommunication and interdict under ‘Clericis laicos’ but apparently scorned
these papal sentences in contempt of the keys. The letter described examples

²¹⁰ Extrav. comm. 1.8.1. Cf. Innocent III’s decretal ‘Vergentis’ (1199), which famously equated
heresy with treason (X 5.7.10); see my ‘Punishment of the Guiltless’, 272–8, and other literature
on ‘Vergentis’ cited there.
230 The Interdict in Action

of this which resemble those in the first letter, and they probably came from
the same source, the Bishop of Béziers. Some of the citizens apparently claimed
that things were better for them during the interdict than any other time; the
first letter attributed similar remarks to a nameless consiliarius. They added that
their food had lost none of its flavour and they had lost no sleep because of
their excommunication. Such remarks suggested to Boniface that the citizens
abhorred the sacraments forbidden by interdict and excommunication. Some of
them allegedly had unorthodox attitudes towards church authority, since they
said the vilest things about the papacy; this may refer to comments attributed
to Jacques Amelii in the first letter. They had even appealed to the temporal
power to remove the excommunication and interdict, although this was reserved
to the spiritual power which laid these sentences. Hence, Boniface observed, the
citizens acted as if the Church did not have the ‘power to bind and to loose’;
he meant this in the jurisdictional sense as the power to impose and remove
canonical penalties.²¹¹ Boniface added that some citizens had remained obdurate
for two years or more under excommunication (presumably imposed before
‘Clericis laicos’). He concluded that the behaviour of the citizenry smacked of
heresy. Hence he instructed the inquisitor for the Carcassone region that if he
found that these allegations were true, he was to prosecute suspected heretics at
Béziers ‘lest the weeds of heretical destruction are allowed to spread to the death
of the catholic seed’.²¹²
It is doubtful that the hostility to the interdict at Béziers was symptomatic
of a Cathar revival, even if we accept the problematic evidence of these letters.
Admittedly unorthodox views were reported, but the Bishop of Béziers attributed
them to only two individuals albeit ones influential with the consuls, and Boniface
perhaps distorted the evidence by crediting such opinions to groups of citizens
in his second letter. It is thus questionable whether they were widely held at
Béziers, and even if they were reported accurately, which is doubtful, they were
not necessarily views of heretics. Apparently the religious rites that continued
under the interdict had a popular following and hence might say more about the
orthodoxy of the majority at Béziers. Chanting of the ‘Pater noster’ at funerals, for
example, parallels its constant recitation by Cathar perfecti, but this practice ‘was
not unknown to thirteenth-century [orthodox] piety’.²¹³ In any case elaborate
public funerals went against the Cathar dualist belief that the physical body was
the creation of an evil God; hence Cathars were said to inter their dead at night
in unconsecrated ground without ritual.²¹⁴ Appropriation of hosts also hardly

²¹¹ Cf. Tierney, 30–6.

²¹² ASV, Reg. Vat. 48, fol. 319r: ‘officium inquisitionis heretice pravitatis in eadem civitate sic
solerter studeas exercere ut perfidie filiis vipereis morsibus contra deum et eius sponsam ecclesiam
insultantibus tamquam materni uteri corrosoribus, per quorum seductionem mundus inficitur et
per eos velut per oves morbidas gregi fidelium gravior infligitur corruptela, exterminatis et penitus
profugatis, heretice labis zizania non permittatur in necem catholici seminis pervagari’.
²¹³ Lambert, 106–11, 119 (quotation). ²¹⁴ Dossat, ‘Cathares’, 79, 80–1.
 A Tale of Two Cities 231

accorded with Cathar belief, which considered the Eucharist mere bread not
the corpus Christi. Citizens probably revered the Eucharist, despite Boniface’s
claim that they scorned the sacraments. Indeed their participation in traditional
religious rites during the interdict suggests that though they defied ecclesiastical
authority, they were at least outwardly orthodox. Moreover Catharism had
largely disappeared in the Languedoc by 1297.²¹⁵ After its last major stronghold
had fallen there in 1243, the inquisition had gradually rooted out the heresy in
southern France. By the 1270s most Cathar perfecti had fled persecution there to
safer havens in northern Italy. Nevertheless the unceasing activity of inquisitors
in the Languedoc provoked popular resentment which Church authorities might
have interpreted as sympathy for heretics. At Carcassone a plot was supposedly
hatched in 1284 to seize and destroy inquisition records and in 1295 citizens ran
their inquisitor out of town and assaulted his fellow Dominicans.²¹⁶ Later events
at nearby Béziers can only have confirmed official suspicions that Catharism still
thrived in the area. Furthermore the Languedoc was home to radical Franciscan
thinker Jean Pierre Olivi (d. 1296), whose strict views on Franciscan poverty had
provoked conflict in his order and papal censure. Although officially rehabilitated
by his death, he remained a focus for Spiritual Franciscans and attracted particular
support at the Béziers convent. Indeed most nineteenth-century historians of
Béziers and the Languedoc linked local sympathy for Olivi with Boniface VIII’s
decision to send the inquisition to Béziers.²¹⁷
Boniface perhaps also had another motivation: he was determined to show
that ‘Clericis laicos’ was not a dead letter despite considerable hostility to it in
Béziers and elsewhere. Admittedly out of political expediency he had conceded
in his bull ‘Etsi de statu’ (31 July 1297) that the French Crown might tax clergy
without papal consent if it considered that a national emergency existed. But this
only released the French king from observing ‘Clericis laicos’. It still bound other
lay powers, including the consuls of Béziers. This was shown by its reissue in the
Liber sextus (March 1298), which the Bishop of Béziers helped to compile.²¹⁸
Arguably Boniface had already demonstrated its continuing force at Béziers
in October 1297 by threatening the inquisition against those scorning ‘Clericis
laicos’ and its penalties, notably the interdict. This threat was apparently effective,
for the consuls came to terms in early 1298. Doubtless they were no longer
confident of royal support. Admittedly the king had condemned inquisitors
for persecuting innocent Catholics at Carcassone in May 1297, ordering its
seneschal not to arrest such persons on mere suspicion of heresy. But after
Boniface issued the constitution ‘Ut inquisitionis’ in the Liber sextus, requiring

²¹⁵ Lambert, 126–46, esp. 133–8; Dossat, ‘Cathares’, 75–7.

²¹⁶ Davis, 51–9; Given, 231.
²¹⁷ On Olivi: Burr; Lambert, 192–4. On alleged support for him at Béziers: Julia, 230–1;
Sabatier, 274–5; De Vic and Vaisette, ix.199–200; Histoire de Béziers, 122–7.
²¹⁸ VI 3.23.3. Contemporary canonists certainly recognized its legal force, even in the French
schools: Izbicki, ‘Clericis laicos’, esp. 181–3. On ‘Etsi de statu’ see Denton, ‘Taxation’, 249–53.
232 The Interdict in Action

lay powers to cooperate with the inquisition, Philip called for observance of this
ruling throughout his realm including Carcassone.²¹⁹ Boniface won his support
by exempting him from ‘Clericis laicos’. This allowed him to tax French clergy
but did not necessarily predispose him towards local lay powers seeking to do
the same. After royal taxes were levied on the lands of the Bishop of Béziers by
virtue of Boniface’s concession, Philip declared in a letter to all justiciars of his
kingdom on 11 October 1297 that this did not derogate the traditional freedoms
of the bishop and his lands.²²⁰
Nevertheless the terms that the consuls of Béziers initially offered the clergy
did not imply submission to ‘Clericis laicos’.²²¹ Eighteenth-century accounts
claimed that the consuls agreed on 8 January 1298 to restitute goods seized from
the clergy in order to secure absolution from excommunication and relaxation of
the interdict. But they made it clear that they were not conceding an extension
of clerical freedom at the expense of civic rights; in other words they were not
prepared to abandon their claims to tax church property. Their terms were
essentially those they had offered before the Archdeacon of Cabrières at the start
of the dispute. The chapter of Béziers had rejected those terms then and enforced
the interdict, and it had probably not come to find them acceptable in the
meantime. Furthermore its bargaining position was strengthened by its bishop’s
return. He probably arrived in Béziers by early 1298, after completing his work
on the Liber sextus. He certainly intervened in the dispute between consuls and
clergy by May 1298, and this doubtless prompted the consuls to grant more
generous terms, including acceptance of ‘Clericis laicos’.
According to a nineteenth-century historian of Béziers,²²² the bishop Bérenger
Frédol sought papal absolution for the consuls, offering assurances that they
repented seizing clerical property. Doubtless his recent service at the curia partly
accounted for Boniface’s favourable response to his petition. Apparently the pope
instructed Gerald Cardinal Bishop of Sabina to consider the consuls’ plea for
reconciliation. Gerald was told that they had promised to make restitution of
goods seized from clergy in lieu of taxes and give them satisfaction for other losses
incurred. Restitution and satisfaction were of course canonical preconditions for

²¹⁹ VI 5.2.18. On Philip’s attitude to the inquisition at Carcassone: Paris, BN, Doat MS 32,
fols. 264r–v (25 March 1296), 266r–7r (5 May 1297), 272v–4v (‘Ut inquisitionis’), 275v–9v
(Vidimus of the same; 6 February 1299), 280r–1v (order that the same be observed throughout the
realm; 6 September 1298).
²²⁰ Paris, BN, Doat MS 62, fol. 263v: ‘nolumus quod dictis hominibus vel episcopo predicto
possit in futurum preiudicium aliquod generari nec in dictis locis et terra sue ecclesie aliquam servi-
tutem seu onera propter hoc imponere, non intendentes occasione dicte subventionis quocumque
nomine censeatur libertatibus [vel] immunitatibus dicti episcopi terreque sue … in aliquo derogare.’
This was sent from Flanders where he needed such revenue to fund a campaign against an English
invasion backed by the Flemish.
²²¹ Described in the ‘Mémoire’ (see n. 202), pp. 3–4, and ‘Arret’ (see n. 204).
²²² Soucaille, ‘Institutions municipales’, 236–9. Soucaille quotes at length the documents
discussed here but unhelpfully gives their source as ‘un unstrumen sur parchemin’ that has proved
impossible to trace. The ‘Mémoire’, p. 4, also refers to these documents.
 A Tale of Two Cities 233

absolution. On 13 May 1298 Gerald thus instructed a Raymond du Puy that

once the consuls fulfilled these, as they promised, he might absolve them from
excommunication and relax the interdict. Raymond was Bishop of Agde and
like Bérenger a suffragan of the Archbishop of Narbonne. Hence Bérenger could
again exploit his connections to help resolve the situation. Indeed he wrote to
Raymond on 23 May that the consuls had made the required restitution and
satisfaction; hence he requested that Raymond absolve them and lift the interdict
in accordance with Gerald’s mandate, provided that they or their proctor swore
an oath before him to obey ecclesiastical mandates. Raymond replied a day later,
on 24 May, that he intended to lift the interdict but first required proctors
of the consuls to swear that the consuls would not violate ‘Clericis laicos’ but
observe it in future. Indeed the consuls appointed proctors a week later, on 31
May, to ask him to remove sentences imposed on them and Béziers by ‘Clericis
laicos’. Presumably they gave the required oaths and the interdict was relaxed as
a result. Raymond was certainly confident of a reconciliation on 24 May when
he allowed Bérenger to admit the consuls, consiliarii, proctors, and citizens of
Béziers to divine offices and the sacraments, notwithstanding the sentences of
excommunication and interdict.
Evidently it concerned Bérenger that his diocese had fallen into such disorder,
even alleged heresy, and he was anxious to prevent this reoccurring. Shortly
after the Liber sextus appeared and he returned to Béziers, he compiled a treatise
of instances in canon law where excommunication and interdict were incurred
automatically; this naturally included ‘Clericis laicos’. His treatise was designed,
he wrote in its preface, ‘for the common utility of all clergy and laity, especially
our subjects, that they might avoid the ties’ of these sentences.²²³ He addressed
it to the abbots, priors, rectors, and chaplains of his diocese, requiring that at
least twice a year priests proclaim in every parish church in his diocese those
instances where its laity might incur such sentences. Clearly he did not intend
his subjects to forget the consequences of violating ‘Clericis laicos’ or other papal
rulings, many of which he and his collaborators had included in the Liber sextus
along with ‘Clericis laicos’. Admittedly Clement V revoked ‘Clericis laicos’ and
its penalties in 1306 as part of his conciliatory policy towards lay powers, but
the clergy of Béziers remained defensive of their privileged status and were again
resisting royal and civic taxes by the 1350s. Thus when the interdict at Béziers
ceased in 1298, the tensions between its commune and clergy remained.²²⁴
Did any of our three interdicts actually work? According to canon law and
canonists, how an interdict was meant to work was that clergy withdrew most
of the sacraments, suspended divine offices, and refused ecclesiastical burial. In

²²³ Bérenger Frédol, 24–5, 53 (‘Clericis laicos’). On Bérenger and the interdict: Viollet, ‘Bérenger
Frédol’, 71–2.
²²⁴ Reg. Clement V, no. 906; incoporated in canon law as Clem. 3.17.un. Soucaille, ‘Institutions
municipales’, 250 ff.; Pascal, ‘Béziers’, 110–13.
234 The Interdict in Action

this sense the interdicts on our three towns largely worked, for most clergy
observed them. However, the lay powers who occasioned these sentences tried to
disrupt their enforcement. At Dax and San Gimignano civic authorities enlisted
renegade priests to continue ministrations to the laity, including ecclesiastical
burial. Laity even performed clerical functions by conducting funerals at Béziers.
Nevertheless such defiance indicates that laity keenly felt the deprivations of these
interdicts, notably at San Gimignano, even if at Béziers some allegedly expressed
indifference. But this does not necessarily mean that these interdicts worked by
turning popular resentment of their privations against the guilty. Conversely
they appear to have turned laity against clergy observing these sentences, even
provoking mob attacks on canons at Dax and San Gimignano as well as popular
derision of clergy at Béziers and possibly San Gimignano. But commentators
tend to note defiance rather than obedience to interdicts. Certainly the interdict
at Dax elicited various responses; some laity obeyed it. No doubt this was also
true at San Gimignano and Béziers though it went unrecorded. The interdict at
Dax apparently united lay and clerical opponents of the guilty. Even when no lay
support of the clergy is evident, the secular powers did not necessarily welcome
the anti-clericalism an interdict provoked, notably at San Gimignano. Despite
their initial defiance, lay authorities in these towns eventually found the interdict
and associated conflict with clergy inconvenient; hence they came to terms to
secure the sentence’s relaxation. External pressures admittedly influenced civic
officials at Dax and Béziers. At Dax these came from a temporal not spiritual
superior; even at Béziers the papal threat of the inquisition carried the risk of
being handed over to the secular arm for punishment. Political expediency was
also a factor. Philip IV’s reconciliation with the papacy deprived the consuls of
Béziers of a key ally in their defiance of ‘Clericis laicos’ and its sanctions, for they
claimed to tax clergy on royal authority. Moreover he had agreed to cooperate
with the inquisition, which was then threatened against them. Cheney similarly
found that the prospect of invasion from abroad and revolt at home had made
it expedient for King John to seek an alliance with the pope and the lifting
of the interdict on his kingdom. Cheney was unsure whether the interdict had
contributed to these circumstances.²²⁵ The interdict at Dax arguably brought to
a head tensions between the city’s rulers and their opponents, lay and clerical. In
the thirteenth century secular powers could not long remain on bad terms with
spiritual authorities but had to seek a modus vivendi of mutual benefit. And until
they were prepared to do so, the church authorities carried on enforcing our
three interdicts. The result was not necessarily lasting peace between laity and
clergy but an interdict might not be lifted until the guilty sought at least a truce
in their conflict with ecclesiastical authority, as we will see in the next chapter.

²²⁵ Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 317.

 6
The Lifting of Interdicts

An interdict’s aim was not to punish but persuade the guilty to submit to
ecclesiastical authority and make amends to injured parties for the offences that
caused the interdict. Once this was achieved, it might be lifted or, canonically
speaking, relaxed. Normally only the guilty could bring this about. According
to Johannes Teutonicus the innocent victims of an interdict could not seek its
removal by offering reparation for the guilty. By the mid-thirteenth century
canonists generally agreed, including Innocent IV, who explained that the sin
that occasioned the interdict was not theirs;¹ hence the innocent might not
atone for it. They could only end interdicts indirectly by pressing the guilty to
submit to ecclesiastical mandates; indeed general interdicts were meant to have
this effect. However, when the guilty were unknown or dead, this norm was
impracticable. For example the Lombard commune of Gravellona complained
to Innocent III that an interdict laid on its territory for offences of its lords had
never been relaxed, and it feared that spiritual dangers might arise from this.
Innocent hence judged in 1213 that it might secure the interdict’s relaxation by
making amends to God, presumably since the injured parties were as intangible
as the offenders.² But Johannes Teutonicus did not include this decision in
Compilatio quarta; hence in his gloss on this collection of Innocent’s later rulings
Johannes still argued that only the guilty might make amends.
The canonical procedure for removing an interdict, like that for imposing
one, broadly followed the rules concerning excommunication. Firstly Hostiensis
and other thirteenth-century canonists held that as a rule only the judge who
had laid a sentence might lift it, but they also admitted exceptions to this rule.
They had recognized since at least the early thirteenth century that a judge’s
sentence might even be lifted by his superior in certain circumstances. Paulus
Hungarus noted (c.1220), for example, that the pope might absolve someone

¹ Johannes: see p. 158 n. 146. Goffredus de Trano copied this gloss in his Lectura on X 5.38.11
v. penitentia, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 153rb–va. Cf. Innocent IV, Apparatus on
X 5.38.11 v. signum; Bernard de Montmirat, Lectura on X 5.38.11 v. crucis, BAV, Borgh. lat.
MS 231, fol. 132rb; MS 260, fol. 104vb (Ed. fol. 147ra); Monaldus, Summa, fol. 96vb; Anon.
on X 5.38.11 v. canonicas, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 167ra: ‘Pone ista civitas est supposita
ecclesiastico interdicto <et> unus vult satisfacere, numquid est satisfactio recipienda? Respondeo
aut est persona qui dedit causam et tunc potest, de hereti. Ad abolendam [X 5.7.9], aut non est
persona que dedit causam interdicti et tunc non potest ut hic.’
² Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 20.
236 The Lifting of Interdicts

excommunicated by a judge delegate, and in practice popes had lifted interdicts

laid by judges delegate since the late twelfth century.³ But the judge here derived
his power to lay and lift sentences from his superior, the pope. A local ordinary’s
interventions in the ex officio jurisdiction of his subordinates were technically
subject to greater limitations. Alexander III had ruled that a bishop might not lift
sentences of excommunication or interdict laid by an ordinary subject to him,
specifically a plebanus, without the latter’s knowledge. But Tancred commented
that if a bishop ignored this ruling, his relaxation was still valid.⁴ Nevertheless
canonists agreed that a metropolitan might lift his suffragans’ sentences in certain
instances. For example Paulus noted that a decretal of Innocent III permitted a
metropolitan to do so if his suffragan maliciously refused to grant absolution.⁵
But normally a metropolitan could only intervene if the matter was referred to
him on appeal, and we will return to appeals later.
A superior was not the only one who might intervene. The canonist Johannes
Hispanus de Petesella argued (c.1236) that an excommunicate might be absolved
by the delegate or successor of his excommunicator,⁶ and apparently this
principle also applied to interdicts. In practice the pope did not usually relax
his interdicts in person but delegated the power to do so, just as he empowered
subordinates to impose them. Indeed sometimes the pope ordered the same
person to relax an interdict that he had authorized to lay it.⁷ But this was not
always the case. Johannes Teutonicus noted that if the pope ordered anyone
to be excommunicated, the executor of this mandate might not absolve the
excommunicate unless the pope granted him full cognizance over the latter’s
case, such as a judge delegate had.⁸ Hence the pope might reserve absolution
and order someone other than this executor to grant it. This certainly happened

³ Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.39 §12 (fol. 294vb). Paulus Hungarus, Notabilium on 3 Comp.
1.20.5, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 261, fol. 82rb: ‘Item excommunicatus a delegato non potest absolvi
nis<i> a papa vel ab illo qui ei succedit in honere hac honore.’ Cf. Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 221
(referring to Urban III (1185–7) lifting sentences laid by judges delegate).
⁴ 1 Comp. 1.23.3 (= X 1.31.3). Tancred on 1 Comp. 1.23.3 v. relaxetis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377,
fol. 15ra: ‘Sed pone quod episcopus relaxet talem sententiam eis inrequisitis, numquid tenet talis
absolutio? utique eo quod est iudex ordinarius eorum, xi q. i. De persona, ar. in aut. de defensoribus
civitatum in prin. [C.11 q.1 c.33; Nov. 15] ubi dicitur quod non prohibetur defensor civitatis, cui
episcopus comparatur, cognoscere de causis inferiorum pretermissis municipalibus magistratibus. t.’
⁵ Paulus Hungarus, Notabilium on 3 Comp. 1.20.2, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 261, fol. 82rb: ‘Item
excommunicatus a suffraganeo potest metropolitanus absolvere si ille excommunicator malitiose
noluerit absolvere.’ Cf. id. on 3 Comp. 5.21.14, fol. 89rb: ‘Item nota contra archiepiscopos quod
excommunicatos a suis suffraganeis propter delictum manifestum non debent absolvere nisi illi
malitiose illos non absolverint.’
⁶ Johannes Hispanus de Petesella, Summa, §De sententia excommunicationis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS
2343, fol. 224r: ‘Sed per quem est absolutio facienda? Respondeo per excommunicatorem vel eius
superiorem vel delegatum ab eo, ut supra. de offic. del. Prudenciam §sextus. et infra. e. Sacro, supra.
xi. q. iii. quasi per totum [X 1.29.21 §6; X 5.39.48; C.11 q.3], vel a successore excommunicatoris,
ut supra. xi. q. iii. Si episcopus ante [C.11 q.3 c.40].’
⁷ E.g. Reg. Innocent IV, no. 6038.
⁸ Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 2.18.1 v. absoluta (Ed. pp. 309–10). Tancred copied this at
3 Comp. 2.18.1 v. absolvi (e.g. BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 210vb).
 The Lifting of Interdicts 237

with some papal interdicts. For example, the one on France was proclaimed by
the legate Peter of Capua but relaxed by another legate sent for this purpose,
Cardinal Octavian. If an interdict was, as Cheney remarked, the Church’s means
of ‘waging war’, it made diplomatic sense to use a different agent to negotiate the
peace. Indeed Philip II of France complained to Innocent III about the legate
who published the interdict on his realm, and offered to submit before (other)
legates or judges delegate.⁹
Clearly, as Johannes Teutonicus implied, nobody might relax a papal sentence
unless authorized to do so. Thus Johannes also argued that a legate might not
absolve anyone excommunicated by the pope or a judge delegate, unless, as
Paulus Hungarus also noted, he had a specific mandate to do so. But Johannes
added that a sentence laid by a legate might be lifted by the successor to his
legation;¹⁰ the French interdict is a case in point. Tancred adopted this view and
likewise held that a judge delegate’s sentence might be lifted by whoever replaced
him in that capacity.¹¹ As we have seen, Johannes Hispanus de Petesella later
extended this principle to sentences laid by any ecclesiastical judge. It was clearly
expedient for a judge might die or otherwise vacate his office while his sentences
were still in force. Indeed shortly before February 1238 the Bishop-elect of
Beauvais relaxed an interdict laid on his cathedral by his deceased predecessor.¹²
Moreover a bishop gained the judicial powers of his office on election to it,
including the power to lift as well as lay interdicts. Hence such canonistic views
were not only pragmatic but also based on the theoretical separation of the office
and the person holding it; these powers inhered in the office not the person and
thus might be delegated to another or pass to a successor.
While an office was vacant, however, alternative provision had to be made
for lifting sentences imposed by its former occupant. Since the mid-twelfth
century some canonists had argued that during episcopal vacancies a bishop’s
jurisdictional powers reverted to his chapter, though in practice it was one of
several possible arrangements. Nevertheless, just as canonists had thereby inferred
that a chapter might lay interdicts sede vacante, Jacobus de Albenga argued that
it might also lift sentences then. Some later canonists adopted this view, and

⁹ Gesta c.53 (PL 214.xcix). Similar considerations doubtless influenced Innocent’s decision to
instruct his legate Nicholas, Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum, to remove the interdict on England and
Wales instead of the three English bishops who had proclaimed it and so alienated King John; SLI,
pp. 164–5, 171–2.
¹⁰ Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 1.6.19 v. possit absolvere; 1.19.2 v. pontifici reservata; 2.18.1
v. absoluta (Ed. pp. 85, 130, 310). Paulus Hungarus, Notabilium on 2 Comp. 5.18.9, BAV, Borgh.
lat. MS 261, fol. 80ra: ‘Ad eminentiam etc. Nota quod legati qui mittuntur a latere summi pontificis
licet non habeant mandatum speciale absolvendi excommunicatos tamen possunt.’
¹¹ Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.18.5 v. contestatione, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 177v; Vat. lat.
MS 2509, fol. 168vb: ‘Colligitur ex loco isto quod si iudex delegatus ante litem contestatam
excommunicet aliquem pro contumacia, post annum non valet illum absolvere. Sed contra infra
titulo secundo. Pastoralis [3 Comp. 1.20.5] ubi colligitur quod successor in dignitate qui successit
in honore et honere illum absolvere possit.’ Cf. n. 8.
¹² Reg. Gregory IX, no. 4078.
238 The Lifting of Interdicts

it became law when Boniface VIII ruled in his Liber sextus that if episcopal
jurisdiction was transferred to a chapter sede vacante, it might lift sentences that
its bishop would have lifted were he alive.¹³
Who might lift a sentence, however, if it was not laid by a judge but
incurred under canon law? Some papal rulings that placed sentences on their
violators reserved absolution to the pope, and the number of such reserved
cases increased from the mid-twelfth century. For example, Boniface VIII’s bull
‘Clericis laicos’ inflicted sentences of excommunication and interdict that might
be removed only on papal authority.¹⁴ In practice a pope authorized others
to lift sentences in reserved cases, as with sentences he laid as a judge. For
example, Boniface mandated a cardinal to lift the sentences laid on Béziers and
its citizens under ‘Clericis laicos’. Such mandates were not all specific to certain
sentences but might be general. In 1291 Nicholas IV had given the abbot of
St Denis a faculty to absolve anyone from excommunication, suspension, or
interdict laid by canon law or a judge where absolution was reserved to the
papacy.¹⁵
But not all papal rulings that imposed sentences expressly reserved absolution.
Innocent III had commented in his decretal ‘Nuper a nobis’ (1199) that where this
was the case, other Church authorities might lift these sentences. He specifically
ruled that an excommunicate might be absolved by his bishop or priest in such
cases. His ruling rapidly entered canon law,¹⁶ but whether canonists understood
it to apply to interdicts is unclear, nor is practice on this point evident from
the thirteenth-century papal registers. Nevertheless it is doubtful that anyone
less than the local ordinary could lift a general interdict a iure. Indeed Bérenger
Frédol’s treatise on such sentences states that he and his fellow compilers of
Boniface VIII’s Liber sextus suggested to Boniface that clergy below episcopal
rank might not absolve from excommunication a canone promulgata unless the
canon concerned authorized them. Apparently Boniface agreed to this but it did
not result in a ruling in the Liber sextus.¹⁷
The competent authority normally relaxed an interdict after the guilty ful-
filled certain conditions. These were defined in Innocent III’s decretal ‘Ex

¹³ Jacobus de Albenga on 5 Comp. 1.18.1 v. pro bono pacis, London, BL, Royal MS 11.C.vii,
fol. 251ra: ‘Vacante sede capitulum potest absolvere excommunicatos, ut supra. de hereticis. Ad
abolendam lib. i. [1 Comp. 5.6.11].’ Id. on 5 Comp. 3.7.1 v. in collationibus, fol. 261va: ‘Utrum
mortuo episcopo qui excommunicavit transferatur potestas absolvendi ad capitulum dubitari
consuevit et videtur quod non, ut xi. q. iii. Si episcopus [C.11 q.3 c.40]. Dicunt tamen doctores
quod transferatur potestas absolvendi ad capitulum et hoc propter periculum animarum, et est ar.
ad hoc supra. de maio et obe. c. i. in fi. lib. e. [5 Comp. 1.18.1].’ Cf. Note added to Goffredus
de Trano, Summa, §De sententia excommunicationis, BAV, Ottob. lat. MS 54, fol. 160rb: ‘Nota
quod pastore vacante capitulum potest excommunicare, iudicare et absolvere, ut supra. de hereticis.
Ad abolendam. et supra. de maio. et obedientia c. Hiis que, prout ibi notatur et c. Cum olim. et ut
notatur supra. de off. or. c. fin. [X 5.7.9; 1.33.11, 14; 1.31.20].’ Boniface VIII: VI 1.17.un.
¹⁴ VI 3.23.3. Cf. Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.39 §12 (fol. 294ra–va); Bérenger Frédol, 47.
¹⁵ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 6101. ¹⁶ 3 Comp. 5.21.3 (= X 5.39.29).
¹⁷ Bérenger Frédol, 50; Schmidt, ‘Papst Bonifaz VIII’, 230. But cf. VI 5.11.22.
 The Lifting of Interdicts 239

parte’ (1205).¹⁸ It largely rationalized and clarified existing procedure and soon
influenced practice, as it quickly entered canon law. First it distinguished that
what the guilty should do to have an interdict or excommunication lifted
depended on whether the sentence was laid for contumacy alone or also for
an offence. Contumacy generally meant disobedience to ecclesiastical authority;
‘Ex parte’ defined it as the refusal to ‘stand by the law’ (stare iuri) when cited
(summoned before a church court). ‘Ex parte’ thus concluded that in the case
of contumacy a sufficient cautio to ‘stand by the law’ had to be given before a
sentence might be lifted. Canonists generally understood this cautio to mean an
oath or ‘sworn caution’ (cautio iuratoria).¹⁹ Indeed letters of Innocent III before
‘Ex parte’ specified the latter as a prerequisite for lifting interdicts.²⁰ Sometimes
the guilty had to swear this oath before the proper authorities in person. In 1213
Innocent III instructed judges to receive an oath sworn by Afonso II of Portugal
corporaliter before relaxing the interdict on Portugal and absolving him from
excommunication.²¹ Such an express requirement suggests that usually this oath
was sworn by representatives of the guilty. For example, when the officials and
commune of Pistoia sought absolution from papal sentences of interdict and
excommunication in 1266, they sent a proctor to the curia to swear on their
souls that they would fully obey papal and ecclesiastical mandates.²²
But what did it mean to swear an oath to ‘stand by the law’? Innocent himself
even recognized the phrase’s ambiguity. When Philip II of France sought the
lifting of the interdict on his realm and offered ‘a sworn caution to stand by the
law’, apparently Innocent responded that Philip had to distinguish whether he
meant the law as it stood (iuri dictato) or law to be stated (iuri dictando). If the
former, he had to swear to leave his mistress and return to his wife, i.e. observe
current canon law on marriage; his past refusal to do so had caused the interdict
on France. If he meant the law to be stated, he had to accept judgement on his
marriage’s validity (which he disputed).²³
Contemporary canonists drew similar distinctions. Tancred accepted Alanus’s
view that the oath might promise one of three things: to obey canon law, i.e.
Innocent III’s ius dictatus; to stand by ecclesiastical judgements or mandates,
i.e. Innocent’s ius dictandus; to obey the mandate of the prelate receiving the
oath. The latter prelate was usually authorized to lift the sentence, and hence
he might also have laid it. Hostiensis indeed later taught that if anyone was

¹⁸ 3 Comp. 5.23.7 (= X 5.40.23).

¹⁹ E.g. Tancred on 2 Comp. 1.3.7 v. satisfactione, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 103ra: ‘Ille qui
excommunicatus est pro contumacia quia nolebat stare iuri vel in aliquo simili obedire in principio
prestito iuramento debet absolvi ut in illa decretali ‘‘Quesitum’’ [1 Comp. 1.23.2].’
²⁰ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 92; 5, nos. 51, 136; 7, no. 136; 8, no. 125.
²¹ Innocent III, Reg. 16, no. 52.
²² Reg. Clement IV, no. 413. Cf. ibid. nos. 414, 694; Reg. Honorius III, nos. 827 (sworn caution
to be received from one in the name of the whole populace of Pavia), 2637 (suitable proctors to
stand by the law in Frederick II’s name).
²³ See n. 9.
240 The Lifting of Interdicts

excommunicated by a judge whose mandates he had scorned, he had to swear to

obey that judge’s mandates to gain absolution.²⁴ This teaching reflected practice
concerning papal interdicts. Thirteenth-century popes often required the guilty
to swear obedience to papal mandates before papal interdicts might be lifted.
Sometimes this requirement was stated only in generic terms, but frequently
obedience was also required to mandates regarding the specific issues that caused
the interdict. In 1213 Afonso II of Portugal had to swear such obedience. But
sometimes it was only implied. After Innocent III had excommunicated the
robber of a legate and interdicted his lands, the pope ordered in 1205 that he
might be absolved on swearing an oath to obey papal mandates, but then he
was to be instructed that this oath obliged him not to harass papal envoys in
future.²⁵ And sometimes when an interdict was laid for disobedience to certain
orders, it was lifted in return for obedience to those orders. After two legates
had interdicted Pisa in 1198 for failing to join the Tuscan League as Innocent
wished, the pope ordered them not to relax the interdict unless Pisa agreed to
his wishes.²⁶
However, Innocent observed that sentences might be laid for an offence as
well as such disobedience. In his decretal ‘Ex parte’ he distinguished that if
an offence was manifest rather than doubtful, the guilty had to make suitable
satisfaction, i.e. amends, before the sentence might be lifted. This apparently
confirmed normal practice; by the late twelfth century papal letters ordered that
excommunicates might not be absolved until they gave satisfaction to injured
parties.²⁷ Canonists had also recognized this as a legal principle even before ‘Ex
parte’ and certainly did so thereafter.
Satisfaction took various forms. Often it meant restitution of property wrongly
acquired. For example, after Parma was interdicted for harbouring a legate’s rob-
ber, it promised the legate restitution. It agreed to pay him back half of the stolen
money by 25 April 1199, making a first instalment of one hundred marks. In
return he lifted the interdict and other sanctions, but he threatened to reimpose
them if this deadline was not met. Sometimes restitution included compensation
for income lost from property which was seized. In 1251 Innocent IV warned the
duke of Swabia to make restitution of a castle seized from the Bishop of Turin and

²⁴ Tancred on 2 Comp. 5.18.4 v. iuramentum, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 143va: ‘Quidam
dicunt illud esse quod parebunt iuri, ar. infra. e. t. Cum olim lib. iii. [3 Comp. 5.23.8]. Alii dicunt
quod stabunt iudicio sive mandato ecclesie, ut hic et supra. de ap. Ad hec. lib. i. [1 Comp. 2.20.30].
Alii quod parebunt mandato prelati suscipientis sacramentum, ut supra. e. t. c. penult. lib. i. [1
Comp. 5.34.15] … A<lanus>.’ Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.39 §14 (fol. 295vb).
²⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 8, no. 125.
²⁶ Ibid. 1, no. 35; Krehbiel, 102–3. Cf. Reg. Honorius III, no. 5720: Bergamo fell under a
papal interdict after electing a Cremonese as its podestà contrary to papal mandates and obtained
its relaxation in 1225 with a sworn caution not to appoint anyone as their ruler contrary to papal
prohibitions in future.
²⁷ As n. 18. Cf. e.g. Innocent III, Reg. 2, no. 27. See also n. 35.
 The Lifting of Interdicts 241

of any profit derived from it on pain of interdict.²⁸ This issue arose not only when
seizure of church property caused interdicts but also when it resulted from them.
We have noted that lay rulers often reacted to an interdict on their lands by seizing
the goods of clergy observing it. Philip II of France did so and had to give satisfac-
tion to such clergy before the French interdict might be lifted in 1200. Likewise
King John was required to make reparations for sequestrating property of clergy
who observed the papal interdict on his realm. Cheney showed that most of these
clergy had recovered this property by the time John came to terms with the pope;
hence restitution concerned only a minority, mostly clergy who had been in exile
during the interdict and whose estates John retained. But they included Stephen
Langton; his exclusion from the see of Canterbury by John had provoked the
interdict, and in 1213 the pope required that John restore ecclesiastical temporal-
ities to Langton and others before the interdict might be lifted. Furthermore John
had exploited church property financially while it remained in his hands, and most
dispossessed clergy had probably paid him in order to recover it. Hence the legate
Pandulf ’s mandate to lift the interdict told him to ensure such clergy received full
compensation. By January 1214 it was arranged that John pay Pandulf 100,000
marks towards this compensation and the pope ordered that the interdict might
be lifted once John swore an oath to pay this. John had already paid 27,000 marks
in compensation by then, and a few months later the pope revised the arrange-
ment, requiring John to bring this up to 40,000 before the interdict’s removal
and thereafter pay half-yearly instalments of 6,000 marks. But the only further
compensation was 6,000 marks paid nearly six months after the interdict was
lifted.²⁹ Nevertheless the total paid was still substantial and a major concession by
John. He was desperate for a papal alliance against the combined threat of French
invasion and baronial revolt, and made an even more striking concession to win
papal support by surrendering his kingdom and Ireland to Innocent III as a fief.
But offenders were not always so obliging when major claims were made for
compensation. When a secular lord attacked an abbey in Le Mans diocese, seized
its property, held some of its monks to ransom, and drove the rest into exile,
Gregory IX excommunicated him and interdicted his lands, and on papal orders
the diocesan and his metropolitan assessed the abbey’s damages at 4,000 marks.
Even though Gregory approved this sum, the lord refused to pay it, offering
a less generous settlement, and even continued harassing the abbey. Therefore
in 1231 Gregory required its abbot, the diocesan, and his official to declare
this lord a heretic and his vassals absolved of their fealty unless he relented.
Though damages were usually determined by the competent Church authorities,
as in this case, they were sometimes subject to negotiation between the guilty

²⁸ Parma: Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 393; Krehbiel, 102. Swabia: Reg. Innocent IV, no. 5343.
²⁹ France: Gesta c.54 (PL 214.c); Krehbiel, 121–2. England: Cheney, ‘Interdict’, 301–6; id.
‘Reaction’; SLI, pp. 171–2, 188–90.
242 The Lifting of Interdicts

and injured parties, notably when the former pleaded difficulties in meeting
the claim. For example, when men of Noli allegedly destroyed a castrum of the
Bishop of Savona, he had excommunicated them and the commune’s officials
and interdicted its other inhabitants and then a legate required it to pay 2,000
Genoese pounds toward rebuilding the castrum.³⁰ The commune appealed to
the pope that it was too small and poor to pay this sum but still wished to
obey ecclesiastical mandates; in other words it sought absolution. In May 1235
Gregory IX responded that if it reached an agreement with the bishop’s successor
over damages, the sentences might be lifted.
Thus satisfaction for manifest offences comprised not only restitution of goods
seized but also compensation for goods damaged. Moreover when interdicts were
laid in debt cases, it also meant repaying the debt, at least before Boniface VIII
banned the use of interdicts to enforce debts in 1302. For instance when Sienese
merchants sued the Bishop of Utrecht over money owed to them, they procured
his excommunication and an interdict on his land. The bishop then agreed to
settle with his creditors but he defaulted and later died. At their request Gregory
IX intervened in 1235, requiring the bishop’s successor to settle the debt and their
expenses in pursuing it in church courts. This shows that satisfaction might also
cover the injured party’s costs in seeking legal redress, and that if an offender died
before making satisfaction, his successor might be liable for it. Indeed Innocent
III had often said that ‘succedat in onere qui substituitur in honore’.³¹
Although Innocent ruled in ‘Ex parte’ that satisfaction had to be made before
a sentence laid for a manifest offence might be lifted, this ruling was not
always applied rigidly. Indeed Innocent himself was initially prepared to allow
the English interdict’s relaxation once King John merely promised the clergy
satisfaction, albeit for offences that resulted from rather than caused the sentence.
Likewise after the civic officials of Amiens were excommunicated and interdicted,
Honorius III ordered in 1218 that they might be absolved on receipt of a caution
that they would make satisfaction for losses inflicted on some monastery; such
offences had doubtless provoked these sentences.³² Hence assurances of future
satisfaction might be enough to secure relaxation, at least from popes. But a cautio
in this context might signify something more than an oath or promise. Generally
a cautio meant money or goods pledged as a security. Sometimes canonists also
understood it as such. Ricardus Anglicus argued that excommunicates might be
absolved if a cautio was pledged ‘de satisfaciendo’, i.e. ‘for the satisfaction to be
made’.³³ Even after ‘Ex parte’ required that satisfaction precede relaxation, not all

³⁰ Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 734, 2579.

³¹ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2391. See e.g. Lat. Conc. IV c.46 (= X 3.49.7) for Innocent’s punning
maxim.
³² Reg. Honorius III, no. 1160.
³³ Ricardus on 1 Comp. 2.20.15 v. donec, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 40va: ‘Nota quod nullus
est absolvendus ante cautionem prestitam de satisfaciendo, ut \extra. t. Vestra dixit [recte duxit]/,
infra. xxiiii. q. ii. Legatur, infra. de pen. di. i. Neminem, infra. xxiiii. q. <ii.> Dampnationis, infra.
 The Lifting of Interdicts 243

canonists interpreted this strictly; some still applied Ricardus’s teaching in certain
circumstances. Johannes Teutonicus commented on ‘Ex parte’ that if anyone
was too poor to make satisfaction, it was enough to pledge a cautio. Anyone too
poor even to offer a pledge might swear an oath instead, he added. Perhaps the
officials of Amiens pleaded poverty as their excuse for offering a cautio instead of
immediate satisfaction. Certainly this case suggests that the papacy and canonists
agreed on the mitigation of ‘Ex parte’. Furthermore many thirteenth-century
canonists adopted Johannes’s views, although some, notably Hostiensis, stuck
more strictly to the letter of ‘Ex parte’.³⁴
Even if a cautio was not always an acceptable substitute for satisfaction, it
was needed to secure relaxation in other instances. By the late twelfth century
papal letters sometimes required a suitable or sufficient caution, and by the early
thirteenth century canonists understood this to mean a pledge.³⁵ Sometimes it
was needed when a cautio in the form of an oath was not considered a sufficient
guarantee of obedience, notably when the papacy had reason to doubt the
mere word of the guilty. For example, at the height of the crusade against the
Cathars, Toulouse was interdicted in 1209 for refusal to hand over suspected
Cathars, and when it sent messengers to seek papal relaxation of the interdict,
Innocent III instructed a legate to grant this on receiving a ‘sufficient caution’.
A thousand pounds was agreed as the ‘caution’ in 1210, and this sum was
to be raised by taxing the city.³⁶ Not only money might be pledged but also
property. In 1218 Honorius III said that sentences of excommunication and
interdict on citizens of Alessandria might be lifted, since they had sworn to stand
by apostolic mandates and pledged a castle.³⁷ Moreover by the early thirteenth
century canonists observed that fideiussores might act as guarantors of the guilty
party’s good faith and agree to give the pledge. When only half the sum required
at Toulouse was paid, its citizens had to appease the legate by handing over
hostages. Normally fideiussores pledged property rather than themselves. In 1266
Clement IV ordered that before sentences of interdict and excommunication on
Pistoia might be relaxed, fifty or more merchants from there and Florence had to
bind themselves and their goods as security that Pistoians would observe papal

xiiii. q. vi. Si res, infra. de usur. Cum tu sicut, infra. de raptoribus. Super eo [JL 9666; C.24 q.2 c.2;
De pen. D.1 c.43; C. 24 q. c.2 c.5; C.14 q.6 c.1; 1 Comp. 5.15.5, 5.14.5].’ Vincentius Hispanus
copied this gloss at 1 Comp. 2.20.17 v. iniuriam, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol. 19vb.
³⁴ Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 5.23.7 v. contumacia: http://faculty.cu.edu/Pennington/edit
517.htm. Cf. Tancred, ibid., BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 279rb; Goffredus de Trano, Lectura on
X 5.40.23 v. pro contumacia, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS 2197, fol. 160ra; Bernard of Parma,
ibid.; Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.39 §14 (fols. 295vb–6ra).
³⁵ E.g. Tancred on 2 Comp. 2.7.3 v. sufficienti cautione, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 111rb;
Vat. lat. MS 2509, fol. 104va: ‘Nota quod nomine cautionis simpliciter posito nuda solummodo
intelligitur que sit solis verbis, ut C. de ver. si. Sancimus [Cod. 6.38.3], sed ex quo ydonea vel
sufficiens ponitur pignorativa vel fideiussoria vel iuratoria intelligitur, ut ff. mandati. Si mandato
Titii §ult. [Dig. 17.1.59].’
³⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 12, no. 156; De Vic and Vaisette, viii.614–16; Krehbiel, 152–3.
³⁷ Reg. Honorius III, no. 1686.
244 The Lifting of Interdicts

and ecclesiastical mandates. Pistoia had already sent a proctor to swear an oath to
this effect and present fideiussores at the curia, but Clement clearly found them
inadequate. The cardinal whom he ordered to absolve the Pistoians was to find
the fifty merchants suitable in terms of the ease of summoning them and their
ability to pay. Indeed he required them to pay fines on their pledged property if
the Pistoians ever violated their oath.³⁸ In this instance not only might fideiussores
forfeit pledges, but the relaxation that they had secured might also be forfeit.
When Innocent III had ordered a legate to lift the interdict on Toulouse, he
warned that if its citizens failed to give the caution required, they would fall back
under the interdict again. Indeed when they had provided only half the sum
required, the legate reimposed the sentence.³⁹
By the mid-thirteenth century the canonist Bernard of Parma even understood
that when ‘Ex parte’ required a sufficient caution before sentences laid for
contumacy might be lifted, it meant a pledge or fideiussores. Though his gloss
on ‘Ex parte’ was ordinaria, Hostiensis and other canonists still interpreted a
caution in this context as an oath.⁴⁰ But a sufficient caution in the sense of
a pledge was usually prerequisite for lifting of sentences laid for an ‘offensa
dubia’. This term came from ‘Ex parte’, where Innocent III ruled that if a
sentence was laid for a ‘doubtful offence’, it might be lifted once a ‘security’
was given that the offender would obey ecclesiastical mandates.⁴¹ In practice
Innocent’s successors interpreted this ‘security’ as a pledge. But when was an
offence manifest rather than doubtful, and thus satisfaction more fitting? The
countess of Blois asked Innocent exactly this question, for ‘Ex parte’ specifically
concerned an interdict on her lands. In another decretal ‘Cum olim pro
canonicis’ (1207) he replied that a manifest offence was proven by a confession
or other evidence beyond denial;⁴² this gloss on ‘Ex parte’ accompanied it in
canonical collections from 1210. Innocent’s clarification implied that a doubtful
offence was not proven but contested between the alleged offender and their
accuser. Consequently it appears that the pledge bound the accused to submit
to ecclesiastical judgement on the disputed offence and, if this was proven,
to make satisfaction. For example, the Bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône interdicted
the duchess of Burgundy’s lands since, according to him, she had destroyed

³⁸ Reg. Clement IV, no. 413; issued with a similar mandate requiring thirty fideiussores from
Pistoia’s neighbour Prato. Cf. Reg. Martin IV, no. 130: the Bishop of Parma was ordered to lift a
papal interdict on his city when suitable fideiussores swore obedience to papal mandates on behalf of
its commune.
³⁹ See n. 36. Cf. Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 616: renewal of a papal interdict on Bologna was
authorized if restitution and satisfaction were not made within eight days of its relaxation.
⁴⁰ Bernard of Parma on X 2.24.7 v. sufficienti cautione; X 3.21.8 v. cautionem idoneam; X 5.40.23
v. sufficiens. Hostiensis: see n. 34. Cf. Johannes Hispanus de Petesella, Summa §De sententia
excommunicationis, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2343, fol. 224ra; Borgh. lat. MS 163, fol. 80ra: ‘est
absolvendus prestita cautione quod stabit iuri, si pro contumacia fuit ligatus, <et etiam> iuramento
quod stabit mandatis ecclesie’.
⁴¹ As n. 18. ⁴² Innocent III, Reg. 8, no. 31; 10, no. 66. 3 Comp. 5.23.8 (= X 5.40.24).
 The Lifting of Interdicts 245

some iron chains in Chalon that belonged to him.⁴³ In 1219 Honorius III
intervened, presumably at the duchess’s request, and instructed the Bishop,
dean, and precentor of Auxerrre to relax the interdict once she gave them a
‘sufficient caution’ to stand by the law on the disputed matter. Presumably such
mediation was often necessary where the judge who laid an interdict also made
the accusations that occasioned it.
The distinction between manifest and doubtful offences could be hard to
draw in practice, and sometimes both kinds might be in question. Indeed by
Honorius III’s time papal mandates to lift interdicts sometimes contain a catch-
all formula, requiring both satisfaction for manifest offences and a sufficient
caution for doubtful ones. In the case of Noli above Gregory IX required it
to fulfil this dual obligation before the sentences there might be lifted.⁴⁴ But
papal mandates rarely specified what the pledge or satisfaction should comprise.
In some cases it was left to papal executors to determine, but their decisions
are rarely known. Nevertheless details sometimes emerge. Gregory IX in 1236
defined the prerequisites for lifting an interdict on Arezzo and absolving from
excommunication its podestà and councillors. First, the latter had to offer a
caution, comprising an oath and pledge of a thousand pounds, such that they
would obey papal mandates and annul civic statutes contrary to ecclesiastical
liberty. Second, the Bishop and churches of Arezzo diocese had to receive three
hundred pounds in satisfaction of their losses; the chapter of Arezzo Cathedral
determined that the losses did not exceed this amount. Third, two castra seized
by the city had to be restored to the chapter and their former inhabitants ordered
to return, they having been forced to live in Arezzo.⁴⁵ In this case there was
admittedly no coupling of manifest and doubtful offences, but a more common
combination of contumacy and manifest offence, which required both a caution
and satisfaction.
Once the requisite caution or satisfaction was given, the competent authority
might relax the interdict. Unlike absolution from excommunication, this involved
no solemn ritual, according to Hostiensis. He taught that an interdict might
be relaxed by words alone just as it was laid by them. Later canonists widely
adopted his teaching as it apparently reflected current practice, where these
words were usually expressed in a public proclamation.⁴⁶ Indeed in 1234 when
judges delegate had revoked the count of Brittany’s excommunication and an
interdict on his lands, this was declared in places where the sentences were
published, namely in neighbouring parts and throughout the French kingdom.
But it is unclear whether this was standard procedure; Clement IV in 1266

⁴³ Reg. Honorius III, no. 2295.

⁴⁴ Ibid. nos. 1054, 1991. Cf. Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 2376, 4080, 4736. Cf. also n. 30 (Noli).
⁴⁵ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 3083.
⁴⁶ Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.39 §14 (fol. 296va). Cf. John of Freiburg, Summa, III, xxxiii,
q.269; Petrus Bonetus on X 2.28.37, BAV, Borgh. lat. MS 228, fol. 112vb: ‘in absolutione interdicti
nulla forma sollempnis est statuta, ymo sicut nudo verbo profertur, sic nudo verbo relaxari potest’.
246 The Lifting of Interdicts

simply required a cardinal to make similar proclamations in places where he

saw fit.⁴⁷ The removal of sentences might also be announced in writing. Canon
law did not require this, even if Innocent IV ruled in 1245 that sentences had
to be promulgated in scriptis. Nevertheless some thirty years earlier Johannes
Teutonicus had advised that former excommunicates ought to preserve their
letters of absolution carefully as proof of their absolution. Doubtless those
released from interdicts sought similar safeguards against allegations that they
remained interdicted. In 1296, for example, the rulers and commune of Orvieto
obtained letters from Boniface VIII stating that all sentences and penalties on
them, including an interdict, were revoked.⁴⁸
Although canon law did not prescribe a ritual to lift interdicts, it did to end the
cessation of worship in violated or polluted churches. The canons ‘Ecclesiis’ and
‘Si motum’ in Gratian’s Decretum required reconsecration of such churches.⁴⁹
But by the late twelfth century the papacy provided a simpler ceremony.
Alexander III’s decretal ‘Significasti’ (1172–3) ordered the ‘reconciliation’ of
such churches by aspersion with holy water. This responded to a case where a
woman committed adultery with a priest in church; the church’s ‘reconciliation’
was meant to parallel the penance enjoined on the woman. Penitents were
aspersed with holy water on reconciliation to the church to signify the cleansing
of their sins, just as aspersing violated churches literally washed away the stains
of sin. ‘Ecclesiis’ similarly compared consecration to baptism, stating that, just as
a person should not be rebaptized, a church should not be reconsecrated unless
it were violated. This exception to a logical theological argument had perhaps
made Alexander III, a theologian himself, uncomfortable. There was still unease
over the issue when Innocent III was asked for an alternative to reconsecration
in the case of a church violated by murder and bloodshed. He had studied
theology, and perhaps this also led him to confirm in the decretal ‘Proposuisti’
(1207) that the church might be ‘reconciled’ with holy water mixed with ash
and wine; penitents similarly had their faces ritually smeared with ash to signify
their humble contrition. These papal rulings were incorporated in canon law
and generally accepted among canonists by the early thirteenth century.⁵⁰ This
legal change was already reflected in a papal letter of 1198, which stated that the
Archbishop of Lund had prohibited celebration of divine offices in a violated
church until its ‘reconciliation’. But it is unclear whether this illustrates reception
of ‘Significasti’ at Lund or awareness of that decretal in the papal chancery where
this letter was drawn up.⁵¹

⁴⁷ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2190; Reg. Clement IV, no. 413.
⁴⁸ Innocent IV: see p. 107. Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 1.18.10 (Ed. p. 127). Reg.
Boniface VIII, no. 1651.
⁴⁹ D.68 c.3 (repeated at De con. D.1 c.20); De con. D.1 c.19.
⁵⁰ 1 Comp. 5.13.6 (= X 5.16.5); 3 Comp. 3.31.3 (= X 3.40.4).
⁵¹ Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 450 (= 3 Comp. 5.16.1; X 5.33.11, where misaddressed to the
Archbishop of Lyons, i.e. ‘Lugdunensi’ instead of ‘Lundensi’).
 The Lifting of Interdicts 247

Gregory IX further clarified the law on ‘reconciliation’ in 1233 at the request

of the Bishop of Astorga in Portugal. The bishop had apparently asked whether
priests might ‘reconcile’ violated churches, as was customary in the province
of Braga where his diocese lay. The pope replied that the power to ‘reconcile’
was reserved to bishops but they might delegate it to priests. A year later this
ruling was published in the Liber extra.⁵² Although it thereby became common
law, some sixty years later bishops and other prelates, including abbots, still
considered it necessary to seek papal permission to delegate to priests their power
to ‘reconsecrate’ violated churches.
Absolved excommunicates likewise had to undergo a ritual ‘reconciliation’
to the church before they might be readmitted to the sacraments and divine
offices. The authority who absolved them might also enjoin a penance on them
for the offence that provoked their excommunication.⁵³ This was also true of
those whose offence caused interdicts as they were normally excommunicated
on this account. But it was unusual to impose penances on an interdicted
community, though when this occurred, heavier penances fell on those whose
offence caused the interdict. In 1213 the legate Nicholas, Bishop of Tusculum,
enjoined penance on burgesses of Oxford responsible for hanging some clerks
of Oxford University; this violation of clerical immunity from lay justice had
caused an interdict on Oxford and the university’s dispersal in 1209. According
to Roger of Wendover the penitents had to visit every church in Oxford unshod,
naked, and carrying scourges and ask its priest for absolution by reciting Psalm
50.⁵⁴ In order to prolong their penance and better deter them and others from
repeating this sin, they were to visit only one church a day. On 25 June 1214
Nicholas also placed obligations on all citizens of Oxford which were partly
penitential.⁵⁵ First, for ten years students were to be charged for lodgings half the
rent they paid before the university dispersed; rents on lodgings built since then
were to be fixed by a committee of four masters and four burgesses. Secondly,
annually the city had to provide 52 shillings to support poor scholars and a
feast on St Nicholas day for a hundred poor scholars; such alms-giving was
a common penance enjoined on excommunicates.⁵⁶ Besides other conditions
that citizens had to swear to observe, including selling food and other goods
to scholars at just and reasonable prices, Nicholas enjoined a further penitential
act to be performed after the interdict was relaxed. Citizens found guilty of
hanging the clerks had to go to their victims’ graves without shoes, belts, hats,
and cloaks, followed by the rest of the citizens, and move the clerks’ bodies to a
cemetery designated by the clergy. Nicholas declared that if the burgesses did not
comply, they would incur excommunication and, along with Oxford, fall back

⁵² Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1324 (= X 3.40.9). Cf. Reg. Nicholas IV, nos. 1595, 2014, 2132, 2845,
3028, 3382, 4091, 5161, 5196, 5531, 5845.
⁵³ Logan, 143–4. ⁵⁴ Wendover, Flores, ii.94; Krehbiel, 145–8.
⁵⁵ Munimenta, i.1–4. ⁵⁶ E.g. William Sampson in Logan, 143.
248 The Lifting of Interdicts

under the interdict; they presumably complied, as there is no further record of

this interdict.
A comparable case has been noted at Laon.⁵⁷ Like Oxford this French city
was interdicted owing to violation of clerical and ecclesiastical immunity. In
1295 leading citizens stormed its cathedral, dragged out two laymen and a clerk
taking refuge there, and wounded them violating the church; civic officials later
jailed the clerk despite his immunity from lay justice. The Bishop of Laon held
the whole community responsible for these events; hence he interdicted it and
excommunicated the ringleaders. Although the pope enforced these sentences,
the citizens came to terms owing to royal not papal intervention. In 1298 the
French king required them to do certain penances before the sentences might
be lifted, a striking intrusion of temporal power into spiritual affairs. These
included a barefoot procession bearing gifts of wax figures to the cathedral and
the endowment of a chapel in that church. But otherwise in the thirteenth
century such collective penances were not associated with lifting of interdicts or
specified by canon law and its commentators as prerequisite to this.
Occasionally the papacy lifted an interdict even when the guilty did not
repent, or rather because it failed to move them to repentance. For example,
Gregory IX lifted an interdict on Pisa and the excommunication of its officials
when the sentences failed to compel restitution of certain castra to the Bishop
of Lucca. This was no climbdown. His idea was to mollify the Pisans into
submission, but when they remained obdurate, he threatened to reimpose the
sentences in 1237 unless they capitulated.⁵⁸ Innocent IV responded with similar
pragmatism when interdicts laid in Germany during his clash with Frederick II
proved counter-productive. In 1247 Innocent allowed the Bishop of Constance
to relax the interdict on his diocese for up to two months so that he ‘might
better attract everyone to devotion to the church’.⁵⁹ As seen in Chapter 5,
interdicts might not only increase the defiance of the guilty but also reduce
the devotion of the innocent. In the latter case the papacy might also deem
it pragmatic to relax interdicts. For example, Urban IV lifted the ‘ambulatory’
interdict on Afonso III of Portugal and his consort Beatriz in 1263 on hearing
from two Portuguese bishops that it had caused serious spiritual dangers, loss
to clergy, and popular scandal.⁶⁰ Moreover it no longer had any purpose.
Alexander IV had authorized it when Afonso refused to abandon his bigamous
consanguineous marriage to Beatriz and return to his first wife, but she had
died by 1259 and Beatriz had since borne him three children, including a male
heir.⁶¹ Hence Urban’s decision was prompted by both political and pastoral
expediency.

⁵⁷ Denton, ‘Laon’, 88–92 (including edition of royal document specifying the penances at
pp. 90–2).
⁵⁸ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 3630.
⁵⁹ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 2616: ‘ut ad devotionem ecclesie possis melius attrahere universos’.
⁶⁰ Reg. Urban IV, no. C376. ⁶¹ Linehan, ‘Castile’, 686.
 The Lifting of Interdicts 249

Boniface VIII revoked similarly ‘obsolete’ interdicts in 1296, largely because

they brought ecclesiastical discipline into disrepute. Franciscans in Cologne
province told him that these sentences were laid on the lands of some nobles
there so long ago that hardly anyone remembered this and nobody cared about
observing them. Indeed when these friars tried observing them, apparently the
province’s inhabitants did not act likewise but rather ‘to the disturbance and
scandal’ of these sentences. Boniface thus declared that the friars might disregard
these antiquate sentences.⁶² Presumably, like the Gravellona interdict noted
earlier, they became irrelevant since the grievances that prompted them no
longer mattered or were even known. Occasionally popes even overlooked such
grievances and relaxed interdicts as a political favour. In 1297 when Boniface’s
famed clash with the Colonna turned into open war, his allies included the
commune of Fermo but it lay under an interdict and various other sentences and
fines. In 1298 he revoked these penalties, ordering the Bishop of Fermo to lift the
interdict in view of Fermo’s military services to the papacy ‘contra Columpnenses
scismaticos et rebelles’.⁶³ Indeed the interdict’s purpose had already been served,
namely to compel obedience to ecclesiastical authority, since Fermo had returned
to papal obedience.
Thirteenth-century popes thus understood that an interdict had to serve its
proper ends; otherwise, it might be counter-productive spiritually and politically.
We saw in Chapter 3 how they legislated and intervened to curb usage of
interdicts for improper ends. For example, interdicts might not be laid without
‘manifest and reasonable cause’, but such a principle would be ineffectual without
a mechanism to enforce it. The appeals’ system that evolved in the Church from
the mid-twelfth century provided this. Indeed the Fourth Lateran Council
(1215) which established this principle ruled that if judges violated it, an appeal
might be made to their superior to remove their unjust sentences. In fact by
the 1170s Alexander III had already provided for appeals from sentences to a
superior. He even specified in his decretal ‘Qua fronte’ (c.1174–81) that those
under ‘unreasonable’ sentences of excommunication or interdict might appeal for
absolution even if judges who imposed such sentences objected.⁶⁴ This decretal
was addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Alexander was expressly
providing for appeal from a bishop’s sentence to his metropolitan. But appeals
did not necessarily have to go to a judge’s immediate superior. Decretal law
also allowed appeals directly to the pope as ‘universal ordinary’, and interdict
cases involving appeals to Rome abound in the thirteenth-century papal registers.
The earliest examples show ‘Qua fronte’ in action. In 1198 when monks of
Saint-Vaast Abbey, Arras, had petitioned Innocent III about interdicts laid on
their churches by local prelates, he ordered the relaxation of such ‘unreasonable’
sentences. In this case he applied Alexander III’s term ‘unreasonable’ to sentences

⁶² Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 1307. ⁶³ Ibid. nos. 2552, 2555.

⁶⁴ 1 Comp. 2.20.41 (= X 2.28.25). Cf. his ruling at 1 Comp. 1.23.2 (c.1171–80).
250 The Lifting of Interdicts

laid ‘without manifest and reasonable cause’, anticipating his later ruling at the
Fourth Lateran Council that such sentences might be removed on appeal. Indeed
before 1215 he gave Saint-Vaast and other beneficiaries immunity from interdicts
laid without manifest and reasonable cause. Such grants allowed them to appeal
to Rome if they were aggrieved in this way and declared that sentences laid after
such appeals were not binding.⁶⁵ But he did not restrict such appeals to those so
privileged prior to his Lateran ruling. He responded favourably to appeals from
Le Puy and Laon in 1207 and 1211, respectively, against interdicts laid without
reasonable cause.⁶⁶ Indeed such appeals often prompted his grants of immunity
from such sentences, as in the case of Laon and Saint-Vaast. Hence Innocent
recognized a general right of appeal from such sentences on the basis of Alexander
III’s decretal ‘Qua fronte’ and simply confirmed this in his Lateran ruling.
Another influential ruling of Alexander III on appeal from interdicts was his
decretal ‘Ad hec’. The Bishop of Norwich had asked him how to deal with those
who appealed from an interdict and then refused to observe it. He responded
in ‘Ad hec’ that they might not avoid an interdict’s effects by appealing after
it was laid.⁶⁷ This signalled a departure from Romano-canonical procedure, the
rules then being devised for the church courts. Normally appeals suspended
proceedings against appellants in the church courts from which they appealed.
But canonists quickly learned from ‘Ad hec’ that interdicts were not suspended by
subsequent appeals.⁶⁸ Alanus explained that generally no sentence that came into
immediate effect might be relieved by an appeal. Innocent III gave this explanation
in his decretal ‘Pastoralis’ (1204) when he extended the ruling in ‘Ad hec’
to excommunication, and it was generally accepted by later thirteenth-century
canonists.⁶⁹ This principle aside, the aim of such legislation was to curb frustratory
appeals. As ‘Ad hec’ indicated, appeals might be used as an excuse to ignore
interdicts. Even after ‘Ad hec’ circulated in Compilatio prima, the Archbishop
of Arles still lamented in 1206 that those he laid under excommunication or
interdict appealed to Rome ‘in elusionem ecclesiastice discipline’. Nevertheless

⁶⁵ Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 160 (Saint-Vaast), 511; 2, no. 43; 7, no. 62; 10, nos. 120; 168;
14, no. 45.
⁶⁶ Ibid. 10, no. 85; 14, no. 63. Cf. ibid. 7, no. 151; 15, no. 124; 16, no. 57.
⁶⁷ 1 Comp. 2.20.46 (= X 2.28.37).
⁶⁸ E.g. Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 2.19.13 v. suspendendum (Ed. pp. 358–9); this
gloss was copied by Tancred, ibid. (BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 218rb) and Bernard of Parma
on X 2.28.55 v. suspendendum. Alanus on 1 Comp. 2.20.46 v. declinare, Munich, Bayerisches
Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879, fol. 36va: ‘Generaliter omnis sententia que secum trahit executionem
per appellationem non <res>cinditur’.
⁶⁹ 3 Comp. 2.19.11 (= X 2.28.53). See e.g. Anon. on 1 Comp. 2.20.46 v. declinare, Brussels,
Bibliothèque royale MS 1407–9, fol. 30rb: ‘Patet quod executio annexa est interdicto sicut
excommunicationi, tamen tam interdictus quam excommunicatus appellare potest, <ut> iii. q.ix.
Revera, supra. de officio ord. Quesitum [C.3 q.9 c.12; 1 Comp. 1.23.2], sed tamen appellatio non
relevat sententiam sed facit quod causa transferatur ad superiorem.’ Cf. Tancred on 3 Comp. 1.20.2
v. suspendatur, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 181ra: ‘Hoc ideo quia illa sententia secum trahit suam
executionem ut infra. de appell. Pastoralis’. Cf. also Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp. 1.23.2 v.
sententia, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek MS 983, fol. 9ra.
 The Lifting of Interdicts 251

in accordance with ‘Ad hec’ popes often insisted that interdicts remain in force
despite a subsequent appeal. In 1238 Gregory IX ordered that the interdict on
Corbie and excommunication of its mayor and jurati be obeyed though the latter
had appealed to him. The abbot of Corbie laid these sentences since these officials
had led townsfolk in attacking his abbey and seizing some of its property. He told
the pope that their appeal was frivolous and a mere pretext to continue defying
his authority. Allegedly townsfolk had buried those under excommunication
and interdict in the abbey cemetery, even building an atrium for such burials,
presumably a walled enclosure. The pope ordered its demolition and publication
of these sentences throughout the local province until Corbie’s inhabitants came
to terms. Evidently an appeal was no excuse for disregarding existing interdicts;
clergy who did so could incur the canonical penalties for violating interdicts. In
1235 clergy in Milan diocese informed the pope that they were so confident of an
appeal to him, they had not observed an interdict but hence now feared that they
were irregular. Accordingly when Gregory IX relaxed this interdict, he granted
those who celebrated during it provisional dispensation from irregularity.⁷⁰
While early thirteenth-century canonists agreed that an appeal did not suspend
an interdict already in force, they conceded that it might refer the appellant’s case
to a higher court.⁷¹ Laurentius even held that a superior might absolve such an
appellant if his appeal seemed justified, a view later adopted by Tancred.⁷² But
the issue was more problematic in practice. When an interdict was threatened
on a city or region, its ruler was normally the appellant. Indeed Vincentius
Hispanus admitted that a prince might appeal against his land being interdicted
for another’s fault.⁷³ The problem was that if the fault was his, church authorities
might excommunicate him as well as interdict his land, and Innocent III had
ruled in his decretal ‘Per tuas’ (1203) that excommunicates might not appeal
until after their absolution.⁷⁴ Excommunication deprived a person of the right
to act in court even if interdicts did not. Furthermore Hostiensis argued that one

⁷⁰ Arles: Innocent III, Reg. 9, no. 27. Corbie and Milan: Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 2520, 4498.
⁷¹ See n. 69 (Brussels gloss). Cf. Apparatus ‘Servus appellatur’ on 3 Comp. 5.21.14 v. videtur,
Bamberg Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 19, fol. 219vb: ‘Appellatio non relevat, transfert tamen ad
superiorem, extra. de ap. Qua fronte et iii. q.viiii. Revera [1 Comp. 2.20.41; C.3 q.9 c.12].’ Tancred
on 3 Comp. 1.20.2 v. obiectum, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 181ra: ‘Appellare potest non ut
excommunicationem relevet sed ut causam transferat ad superiorem, supra. de appell. Qua fronte
lib. i. infra. de sen. ex. Per tuas [1 Comp. 2.20.41; 3 Comp. 5.21.14] … Vinc.’
⁷² Tancred on 3 Comp. 5.23.7 v. terram, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 279ra; Vat. lat. MS 2509,
fol. 229ra: ‘per appellationem hec absolutio ad superiorem refertur si appellatio iusta appareret, ut
supra. de appell. Cum in ecclesia. lib. ii [2 Comp. 2.19.11] la.’ Cf. McManus, ‘Laurentius’, 619.
⁷³ Vincentius Hispanus on Lat. Conc. IV c.42 v. ne clerici (Constitutiones, 348). By 1207 the
Bishop of Auxerre had appealed against an interdict on his city, which was subject to his temporal
jurisdiction, as Pierre Sampsona noted on X 2.28.55 v. civitatis, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek MS
2083, fol. 29vb; MS 2113, fol. 51rb: ‘Nota hic quod episcopus appellat nomine sue civitatis vel
nomine suorum subiectorum’. Cf. his pupil Bernard de Montmirat, Lectura on X 2.28.55 v. se et
suum, BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2542, fol. 52ra; Borgh. lat. MS 231, fol. 77rb; MS 260, fol. 61vb (Ed. fol.
90ra).
⁷⁴ 3 Comp. 5.21.14 (= X 5.39.40).
252 The Lifting of Interdicts

might not even appeal from an interdict in force unless it was suspended. Clearly
the appeal could not suspend it, but Hostiensis taught that it could be suspended
for a time by the one who laid it and appeals lodged. Early thirteenth-century
canonists had disagreed whether appeals from suspended interdicts were valid,
as Hostiensis noted. Nevertheless his teaching was widely accepted by later
canonists, especially Johannes Andreae and Johannes Calderinus, albeit Johannes
de Legnano still judged the matter open to debate after an interdict on Bologna
was suspended in 1357.⁷⁵
Nevertheless appeals to Rome were sometimes made against interdicts already
in force, as thirteenth-century papal registers reveal. Even Innocent III had
entertained such appeals; hence contemporary canonists rightly described practice
in arguing that they might be referred to higher courts. Indeed when the
Archbishop of Arles decried his subjects’ frustratory appeal against his sentences
in 1206, Innocent still conceded that it might be prosecuted; and he appointed
judges delegate to hear a similar appeal in 1212.⁷⁶ But it is hard to say whether
Hostiensis’s view described or even caused a change in papal practice later in
the thirteenth century. No appeals against suspended interdicts are known from
the papal registers, which might illustrate Hostiensis’s point, though examples of
popes suspending interdicts occur there. Nevertheless by the end of the century
popes appear less sympathetic to appeals from those under interdict. In 1291
Nicholas IV rejected such an appeal from clergy in Lyon, Vienne, and Besançon
provinces and Cambrai, Liège, Metz, Toul, and Verdun dioceses. They refused
to pay a tenth granted by him in aid of the French Crown and he had authorized
its collectors to compel them to do so; thus they were interdicted and their
archbishops and bishops excommunicated. Their defiance was understandable
in regions not considered part of the French kingdom; hence they appealed to
the pope despite these sentences that they were not obliged to pay this tax to
the French Crown.⁷⁷ Nicholas reacted by ordering his collectors to continue
coercing them regardless of any appeal.
Even before the right to appeal against interdicts in force became problematic,
papal registers referred more to appeals made before rather than after sentences
were laid, notably under Innocent III.⁷⁸ Canon law had long favoured such
advance appeals and the warning required before a sentence allowed sufficient
opportunity for them. In the 1170s Alexander III had already ruled that
excommunication was not binding if it was laid on anyone after they appealed.

⁷⁵ Hostiensis, Lectura on X 2.28.37 v. illud (vol. 1, fol. 180rb); Johannes Andreae, Novella on X
2.28.37; Johannes Calderinus (Andreae’s pupil), ‘De interdicto’, Pt 2 §31 (fol. 333ra); id. (attrib.),
De censura, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 797, fol. 15r (Clarke, ‘Theory’, 284–5). Legnano, ‘De interdicto’; the
latter text abridges that in BAV, Vat. lat. MS 2639, fols. 292vb–300rb (McCall, ‘Legnano’, 417,
420), where the explicit records that Legnano debated this question in Bologna on 13 January 1358.
⁷⁶ Innocent III, Reg. 15, no. 12. Arles: n. 70.
⁷⁷ Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 6316; Denton, ‘Assemblies’, 4–6.
⁷⁸ E.g. Innocent III, Reg. 1, nos. 58, 131, 240; 5, no. 136; 6, no. 42; 8, no. 31; 9, no. 27; 10,
nos. 120, 189, 190, 194; 14, no. 133; 15, nos. 119, 192; etc.
 The Lifting of Interdicts 253

By 1198 Innocent III was applying this rule to interdicts, declaring them null
if an appeal had preceded them.⁷⁹ In 1203 he amplified on Alexander III’s
ruling in his decretal ‘Per tuas’: if a sentence of excommunication was laid after
an appeal or contained an ‘intolerable error’, those subject to it did not need
absolution to prosecute their appeal. But he conceded that it was papal custom
to absolve them ‘provisionally’ (ad cautelam). Apparently he was extending
this custom to interdicts by 1209, when he provisionally relaxed sentences of
excommunication, suspension, and interdict imposed after an appeal to Rome.⁸⁰
The distinction between declaring such sentences not binding and relaxing them
provisionally was not purely semantic; provisional relaxation implied that they
might be reimposed if the appeals preceding them were not upheld. In this
instance absolution might be secured only by fulfilling the usual preconditions:
swearing obedience to ecclesiastical mandates and offering satisfaction. A decretal
of Honorius III suggests as much. It responded to an appeal of the Bishop of Le
Mans against his suspension by his metropolitan. Honorius agreed to relax this
sentence provisionally once he had sworn that he would obey his metropolitan’s
mandates if he were found guilty of whatever provoked the sentence.⁸¹ Jacobus
de Albenga commented on this decretal that if he was suspended ex culpa vel
offensa, he should have given satisfaction before he could be absolved.
Such an oath of obedience might be required of appellants seeking provisional
relaxation of interdicts, especially after Honorius’s decretal was included in the
Liber extra (1234).⁸² For example, in 1235 Gregory IX required the Bishop
of Ascoli Puglia to relax provisionally an interdict placed on an abbey after an
appeal, but its abbot and monks first had to give a ‘sufficient caution’ to obey
ecclesiastical mandates on issues that occasioned the interdict. Such mandates
doubtless comprised those of the cardinal appointed to hear their appeal and of
the Archbishop of Bari who had laid the interdict. An oath was not the only
precondition for such appellants from ecclesiastical censure. A Third Lateran
Council canon (1179) required them to prosecute their appeal within the
deadline set by the appeal judge; otherwise they had to pay the other party’s costs.
Incidentally it also required that a warning precede a sentence, hence enabling
appeals before it was imposed. By the mid-thirteenth century this right of appeal
was subject to further limitations. At the First Council of Lyon Innocent IV ruled
that provisional absolution was denied if the judge who laid the sentence (or
another opponent) could prove in eight days that a manifest offence had caused
it. Faced with such opposition absolution might be granted only on fulfilment of

⁷⁹ Ibid. 1, nos. 131, 240; 5, no. 136; 6, no. 42; 10, nos. 20, 189, 194; 14, no. 133. Alexander
III: n. 64.
⁸⁰ Innocent III, Reg. 11, no. 205; 3 Comp. 1.3.7 (= X 1.4.8). ‘Per tuas’: n. 74.
⁸¹ 5 Comp. 5.18.4 (= X 5.39.52). Jacobus de Albenga on 5 Comp. 5.18.4 v. parebit, London,
BL, Royal MS 11.C.VII, fol. 270vb: ‘In hoc fecit bene quia si erat suspensus ex culpa vel offensa
prius deberet satisfacere quam absolveretur, ut supra. de v. sig. Ex parte. lib. iii. [3 Comp. 5.23.7].’
⁸² Reg. Gregory IX, no. 2712.
254 The Lifting of Interdicts

the usual preconditions, including a suitable caution to obey the law regarding
an offensa dubia. Moreover Innocent ruled in his decretal ‘Venerabilibus’ (1254)
that a sentence might be relaxed provisionally if it followed an appeal made on
legitimate and provable (probabili) grounds; doubtless the reverse was true where
these were lacking.⁸³
This legislation was meant to discourage frustratory appeals, i.e. those made
to frustrate the legal process generally and threatened sentences specifically. The
papacy was certainly concerned about this abuse by the mid-thirteenth century.
Indeed after a legate excommunicated the king of Hungary and interdicted his
court, the Archbishop of Esztergom apparently not only refused to publish these
sentences but also appealed to prevent others doing so; Gregory IX upbraided
him for this in 1234. Nevertheless, if judges thought an appeal frustratory, they
sometimes enforced sentences regardless, and occasionally popes even authorized
them to do so against notorious offenders. In 1243 Innocent IV empowered the
Archbishop of Cologne to use ecclesiastical censure, barring any appeal, against
those persecuting clergy and churches in his diocese, even interdicting their
land if necessary, and in particular he could ignore frivolous appeals ‘habitually
launched in destruction of ecclesiastical discipline’.⁸⁴ Indeed the canonist Alanus
had distinguished that frustratory appeals were invalid in the case of notorious
crimes or when they were a means to persist in a crime or the grounds for appeal
were clearly unjust. Canonists even taught that such appeals might be ignored
altogether after a ruling of Innocent III in 1203.⁸⁵ The concern was that not only
might subjects escape ecclesiastical discipline but archbishops might also exercise
appellate jurisdiction at their suffragans’ expense. In 1245 Innocent IV learned
from bishops of Reims province that sentences of excommunication or interdict
laid by them or their officials were illicitly lifted by their metropolitan and his
officials owing to frivolous appeals. Appellants seeking to avoid their judgement
allegedly secured archiepiscopal rescripts in favour of their appeals before these
sentences were published, even when no grievance was stated as grounds for
appeal. Innocent’s decretal ‘Romana Ecclesia’ replied to such allegations by
limiting the archbishop’s right to hear appeals from and absolve suffragans’
subjects; and such restrictions were meant to apply generally.⁸⁶
Nevertheless during the thirteenth century canonists identified an increasing
number of legal reasons why a superior might relax a sentence provisionally. A

⁸³ Lat. Conc. III c.6 (= X 2.28.26); VI 5.11.2, 7 §2.

⁸⁴ Reg. Gregory IX, no. 203; Reg. Innocent IV, no. 354.
⁸⁵ Alanus on 1 Comp. 2.20.42 v. ingressum, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek Clm 3879,
fol 36vb: ‘Frustratoria enim tenet appellatio, ut s. e. t. Consuluit, extra. t. Prudentiam [1 Comp.
2.20.16; 2 Comp. 2.19.16], nisi in casibus ut in notorio crimine, ut supra. Ex querimoniis [1
Comp. 2.20.33], et ubi pretextu appellationis in crimine vult perseverare, ut supra. e. Relatum [1
Comp. 2.20.21], et ubi manifeste iniustam causam appellandi assignat ut supra. e. t. Relatum’.
Cf. 3 Comp. 2.19.11 (= X 2.28.53) and Johannes Teutonicus on 3 Comp. 2.19.11 v. indulgetur
expresse (Ed. pp. 350–1).
⁸⁶ Reg. Innocent IV, no. 1625; VI 5.11.5.
 The Lifting of Interdicts 255

prior appeal, whether frustratory or not, was one. Another was specified along
with this in Innocent III’s decretal ‘Per tuas’ (1203), namely an ‘intolerable
error’ in the sentence. An early commentary on ‘Per tuas’ understood this to
mean that the sentence was laid because of something that could not give rise
to contumacy, such as belief in God. In other words the sentence’s cause was
uncanonical; Innocent defined contumacy as the main canonical cause of a
sentence.⁸⁷ Likewise Vincentius argued that an ‘intolerable error’ was an error
of law, notably excommunicating someone for being obedient, i.e. the opposite
of contumacy. Johannes Teutonicus agreed, but added that an intolerable error
might be an error of fact, notably excommunicating someone for a deed they
had not done.⁸⁸ He also taught that this error might involve a mortal sin, a view
Vincentius noted but later rejected. Johannes nevertheless accepted his argument
that appeal was unnecessary in the case of intolerable error, since the sentence
was automatically null. Johannes’s commentary on ‘Per tuas’ was largely copied
by Tancred into his gloss on Compilatio tertia and later canonists treated this
gloss as ordinaria; thus they adopted Johannes’s definition of ‘intolerable error’,
though not apparently his view on appeal as unnecessary.⁸⁹ Nevertheless the
basic idea of intolerable error as something against canon law was influential, and
the grounds for provisional relaxation which canonists identified beyond those
in ‘Per tuas’ were largely instances of this.
First, since the late twelfth century canonists had stated the maxim that a
sentence laid on anyone by someone who was not their judge was null.⁹⁰ By
the early thirteenth century this argument was recognized in practice as grounds
for appeal. For example, in 1213 Countess Matilda of Flanders sought papal

⁸⁷ Apparatus ‘Servus appellatur’ on 3 Comp. 5.21.14 v. errorem, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek MS

Can. 19, fol. 219vb: ‘Quod intelligo quandocumque excommunicat eum pro tali facto ex quo non
potest surgere contumacia puta ‘‘Excommunico te quia facis quod debes’’, vel ‘‘Excommunico te
quia credis in deum’’ vel ‘‘quia credis articulos fidei’’, alias non’.
⁸⁸ Vincentius on 3 Comp. 5.21.14 v. errorem, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 20, fol.
178vb: ‘Cum enim errorem continet nec etiam appellare necesse est, ar. ff. que sen. sine ap. res.
l.i. §1 [Dig. 49.8.1] … Sed quis erit error? Dicunt quidam quodlibet peccatum mortale peccatum,
xxviii. q. i. Uxor, xiii. di. Nervi [C.28 q.1 c.4; D.13 c.2]. Ego intelligo errorem iuris de quo agitur
unde si excommunicat <eum> quia non adulteratur, tenet excommunicatio, vel quia non interficit
hominem. Si autem excommunicat eum quia est obediens, non tenet quia pro sola contumacia
quis est excommunicatus, xi q.iii. Certum [C.11 q.3 c.43].’ Johannes on 3 Comp. 5.21.14 v.
intollerabilem: http://faculty.cu.edu/Pennington/ edit517.htm
⁸⁹ Tancred on 3 Comp. 5.21.14, copied Johannes’s gloss at v. errorem and the first part of
Vincentius’s gloss before ‘Sed quis erit error?’ at v. intollerabilem; BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol.
277va. Vincentius (c.1236) on X 5.39.40 v. errorem, Paris, BN, MS lat. 3967, fol. 206v, copied
Johannes’s gloss too but added: ‘dico ego quod error mortalis peccati non est contra naturam
excommunicationis expresse ut ‘‘Excommunico te quia <non> interficis hominem, adulteraris vel
non furaris’’ non offendit excommunicationem, licet quidam dicant contra ius’. Johannes’s gloss
was also copied by Goffredus de Trano on X 5.39.40 v. intollerabilem, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek
MS 2197, fol. 157rb. Cf. Bernard of Parma on X 5.39.40 v. intollerabilem errorem.
⁹⁰ Ricardus Anglicus on 1 Comp. 1.23.2 v. appellationem, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 696, fol. 17rb:
‘Nota quod sententia a non suo iudice de causa nulla est, ut ii. q. i. Inprimis [C.2 q.1 c.7].’ Copied
with additional allegations by Tancred, ibid.; BAV, Vat. lat. MS 1377, fol. 14vb.
256 The Lifting of Interdicts

justice as the Archbishop of Reims had excommunicated her and interdicted

her lands though she claimed to hold nothing in his diocese. The pope hence
understood that she was not subject to the archbishop’s jurisdiction, and ordered
that his sentences against her be declared null unless her case had been referred
to him on appeal or delegated to him. It is unclear whether canonists recognized
such exceptions, but Johannes Andreae later stated that even sentences laid by
delegated authority might be null if they went against the delegator’s intentions.⁹¹
Another instance of nullity canonists identified by the early thirteenth century
was a variation on the maxim above.⁹² Those directly subject to the pope
and immune from ordinary jurisdiction, notably the exempt, could not be laid
under valid sentences except by papal authority. As the local ordinary was not
their judge, they might appeal against his sentences. Two undated decretals of
Alexander III acknowledged this right and declared such sentences not binding
de iure. Hence almost a century later a priory claiming exemption from episcopal
jurisdiction appealed to Rome when the Bishop of Orvieto excommunicated its
monks and others associated with it and interdicted it and a church subject to it.
A cardinal appointed by Innocent IV to hear their appeal judged in 1257 that
the bishop had acted wrongly and his sentences were invalid as the priory and
church were exempt; Alexander IV confirmed this.⁹³
Further instances of nullity largely concerned violations of judicial procedure.
And these instances grew as the rules of procedure governing the interdict
multiplied. For instance, following the ruling at the Third Lateran Council
(1179) that a warning should precede a sentence, sentences might be declared
null if laid without a warning. Certainly this was true under Innocent III, and
as we have seen, he was also prepared to declare sentences null if laid without
manifest and reasonable cause even before he made the latter a legal requirement
in his Fourth Lateran Council ruling.⁹⁴ Innocent IV reinforced these rulings
at the First Council of Lyon, adding that a sentence should be proclaimed
in writing. Hence the canonist Pierre Sampsona could remark by the mid-
thirteenth century that a sentence might be annulled as unjust if laid without
warning, reasonable cause, or written form (sine scriptis).⁹⁵ By c.1302 Johannes

⁹¹ Innocent III, Reg. 15, no. 199; cf. Reg. Honorius III, no. 2166. Johannes Andreae, Glossa on
VI 5.11.10 v. ad cautelam.
⁹² Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp. 2.20.7 v. excommunicationis, Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek
MS 983, fol. 19rb: ‘Sed contra nonne exemptus est ab eius iudicio? Si ergo iuste sententiavit in
eum, non tenuit, x. q.ii. c.i. [C.10 q.2 c.1].’ Tancred on 2 Comp. 5.13.3 v. tenere, BAV, Vat. lat.
MS 1377, fol. 141vb: ‘Eos eximit dominus papa a iurisdictione sui prelati unde sententia talis iure
communi tamquam a non suo iudice lata non tenet, ut xi. q.i c. penult. et C. si a non compe. iudice
l. ult. supra. de iudic. At si clerici. lib. i. [C.11 q.1 c.46; Cod. 7.48.4; 1 Comp. 2.1.6] … A<lanus>.’
⁹³ 1 Comp. 2.1.6; 3.25.4. Reg. Alexander IV, no. 2448; cf. Reg. Gregory IX, no. 1299.
⁹⁴ Lat. Conc. III c.6 (= X 2.28.26). Innocent III, Reg. 1, no. 240; 10, no. 120 (immunity from
sentences laid without warning and freedom to appeal against them).
⁹⁵ Coll. III 36; (= VI 5.11.1). Pierre Sampsona on X 1.29.36 v. postulanti, Vienna, National-
bibliothek MS 2083, fol. 13va: ‘Aut dicitur sententia esse nulla aut annullanda tamquam iniusta,
aut quia lata est monitione non premissa aut absque causa rationabili, ut infra. de sententia
 The Lifting of Interdicts 257

Andreae could list twelve instances where excommunication might be declared

null and provisionally absolved. Bérenger Frédol even claimed that provisional
absolution was to be granted to anyone seeking it around this time.⁹⁶
Nevertheless provisional absolution was only possible in certain instances,
and Gregory X even outlawed it altogether regarding general local interdicts
at the Second Council of Lyon. According to the first commentators on this
ruling, Johannes Garsias Hispanus and William Durand, it responded to the fact
that canonists doubted whether these interdicts might be lifted provisionally.⁹⁷
Certainly canonists justified the ruling readily. Durand noted that though the
innocent punished by general interdicts seemed to deserve provisional relaxation
more than excommunicates (who might still seek it), excommunication had
graver spiritual consequences. It separated from communion of men while
interdicts only forbade the sacraments and even then not all of them. It also
bound the soul and might consign the latter to eternal damnation, whereas
nobody was delivered to Satan by general interdicts; hence there was less urgency
to relax them.
Johannes Andreae largely adopted these views in his gloss on the Liber
sextus (considered ordinaria at Bologna) after this ruling was included there.
He also agreed with Durand and Garsias Hispanus that, since its ban on
provisional relaxation related to general interdicts, this did not apply to specific
interdicts, at least on persons.⁹⁸ But Guido de Baysio distinguished that it
applied to specific interdicts on places, notably individual churches, but not
admittedly on persons. Nevertheless Johannes Monachus, whose gloss on the
Liber sextus was ordinaria at Paris, argued that specific interdicts might be
lifted provisionally even on churches. As with excommunication the reason
given was the greater severity of such sentences; he and Garsias Hispanus
argued that the mitigations of the interdict, notably infant baptism, applied to
general not specific sentences.⁹⁹ Monachus apparently reflected current practice.

excommuni. Sacro [X 5.39.47], aut sine scriptis et ita contra constitutionem novam, infra. de
sententia excommuni. Cum medicinalis [Coll. III 36] … dicatur annullanda tamquam iniusta ex
tribus causis predictis’.
⁹⁶ Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.10 v. ad cautelam; he simply added four cases to the
eight already listed by Hostiensis, Summa on X 5.27 §4 (fol. 258rb). Bérenger Frédol, 4. See also
Logan, 118–19.
⁹⁷ Lugd. Conc. II c.30 (= VI 5.11.10). Johannes Garsias Hispanus on Lugd. Conc. II c.30, v.
Presenti, BAV, Pal. lat. MS 629, fol. 285ra: ‘sed dubitatur utrum sicut observabatur in sententia
excommunicationis ita observaretur in sententia interdicti promulgata in civitatem vel castrum’. Cf.
William Durand on Lugd. Conc. II c.30 (fol. 103r).
⁹⁸ Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.10 v. declaramus; v. generaliter. William Durand on
Lugd. Conc. II c.30 (fols. 103v–104r).
⁹⁹ Guido de Baysio on VI 5.11.10 v. sive; v. non habere (Ed. fol. 123ra). Johannes Monachus
on VI 5.11.10 (Ed. fol. 407vb). Johannes Garsias Hispanus on Conc. Lugd. II c.30 v. ad cautelam,
BAV, Pal. lat. MS 629, fol. 285ra: ‘Sed quid de suspensione vel de interdicto specialiter promulgato?
Nunquid relaxabitur ad cautelam? Dic quod sic ar. hoc a contrario sensu et ar. supra. e. Solet [Coll.
III 37], maius enim periculum est in interdicto speciali quam in generali, cum in generali baptismus
258 The Lifting of Interdicts

For example the chapter of a collegiate church in Tèrouanne diocese told

Boniface VIII that, despite their prior appeal to him, their bishop interdicted
them and their church and excommunicated its clergy. The sentences were
technically null; hence the chapter sought their revocation, at least provisionally.
Boniface acceded in 1298, four months after reissuing Gregory X’s ruling in
the Liber sextus.¹⁰⁰ This case also illustrates that personal interdicts were still
lifted provisionally in practice, and indeed canonists agreed that specific personal
interdicts might be, for, as Johannes Andreae argued, they forbade all sacraments
like excommunication.
Certainly provisional absolution was crucial for excommunicates to prosecute
appeals. Without it they might not act in court, whereas those under interdicts
were not deprived of such rights; thus Gregory’s ruling did not necessarily inhibit
appeals from general interdicts. Durand even argued that a lord might obtain
provisional absolution of sentences on him and his family by reason of a prior
appeal, even if an interdict on his land might not be lifted while the appeal
was pending. Durand’s earlier arguments excused the continuing punishment of
the lord’s innocent subjects which this implied. Nevertheless Johannes Andreae
pointed out that interdicts might be suspended; hence provisional relaxation
was unnecessary.¹⁰¹ Although we have noted no evidence that interdicts were
suspended for the sake of an appeal, they were certainly suspended for other
reasons: to facilitate resolution of disputes, notably between clergy and laity;¹⁰²
reward a city’s devotion to the papacy;¹⁰³ permit an episcopal election;¹⁰⁴ allow
those preaching the crusade to celebrate in interdicted places, and presumably
recruit better there.¹⁰⁵ Normally an interdict might be suspended only by the one
who laid it and for a specific period; after this it came back into force unless the
guilty had come to terms in the meantime.¹⁰⁶ But this period might be extended
to allow the guilty extra time to do so. In 1300 Boniface VIII ordered a legate
to suspend an interdict on Spoleto until All Saints’ Day since it opposed his
enemies at nearby Gubbio.¹⁰⁷ It had provoked the sentence by seizing a castrum
under papal overlordship; on the suspension expiring he ordered the legate to
extend it and secure restitution of that castrum in the meantime.

parvulorum et penitentie morientium excipiantur et predicatio verbi dei et confirmatio episcopalis,

supra. e. c. Responso et c. Permittimus, de spon. Non est [X 5.39.43, 57; 4.1.11]. Sed specialiter
interdicto omnia ista denegantur ante absolutionem’.
¹⁰⁰ Reg. Boniface VIII, no. 3051.
¹⁰¹ William Durand on Lugd. Conc. II c.30 (fol. 104v). Johannes Andreae, Glossa on VI 5.11.10
v. generaliter.
¹⁰² Reg. Clement IV, no. 671; Reg. Nicholas IV, no. 7211; Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 2034, 2374.
¹⁰³ Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 932, 4211.
¹⁰⁴ Reg. Gregory IX, nos. 3894, 4358. See pp. 154–6 above.
¹⁰⁵ Reg. Urban IV, nos. 385, C321.
¹⁰⁶ See e.g. Hostiensis, Lectura on X 2.28.37 v. illud (vol. 1, fol. 180r). Cf. Reg. Boniface
VIII, no. 932.
¹⁰⁷ Reg. Boniface VIII, nos. 3727, 3731, 3897.
 The Lifting of Interdicts 259

What this chapter has sought to illustrate is that an interdict’s aim was not retri-
bution but reconciliation, both between wrongdoers and wronged and between
ecclesiastical authority and those disobeying it. It thus differed strikingly from
the vindictive forms of contemporary secular punishment. Medieval churchmen
believed in the possibility of redemption for sinners; thus their sanctions were
meant to induce repentance. Once the one who had provoked an interdict
complied with their demands and gave the required pledge or satisfaction, the
sentence might be relaxed. Hence it was a means to an end rather than an
end in itself. Sometimes it was lifted without such preconditions being fulfilled,
notably when it was failing to serve this end or even impeding it. Moreover
interdicts might be relaxed provisionally when they were null, and grounds
for nullity expanded during the thirteenth century. Nevertheless in his decretal
‘Per tuas’ (1203) Innocent III distinguished that sentences appealed as unjust
rather than null remained binding. His decretal concerned excommunication
but Hostiensis understood that this distinction also extended to interdicts. Early
thirteenth-century canonists had held that obedience to unjust sentences was
meritorious and meant that ecclesiastical discipline was feared.¹⁰⁸ When later
canonists accepted that an unjust interdict was valid and the ban on provisionally
relaxing general local interdicts justified, they likewise held that the suffering of
innocents under such sentences was excusable. Although an interdict was not
meant to be vindictive, its effect was undeniably harsh on the innocent. Their
suffering was underscored by their impotence since they might bring about the
lifting, and indeed the laying, of general interdicts only indirectly. The initiative
in provoking such sentences and securing their removal ultimately lay with the
guilty.

¹⁰⁸ Hostiensis: as n. 75; cf. Johannes Andreae, Novella on X 2.28.37. Laurentius Hispanus cited
the argument for obeying unjust sentences on 3 Comp. 2.19.11 v. cum executionem excommunicatio
secum trahat (McManus, ‘Laurentius’, 442), attributing it to Petrus Hispanus; cf. Apparatus ‘Servus
appellatur’ (probably by a pupil of Laurentius) on 3 Comp. 2.19.11 v. excommunicatis, Bamberg,
Staatsbibliothek MS Can. 19, fol. 170r. Laurentius’s gloss was copied by Johannes Teutonicus on 3
Comp. 2.19.11 v. secum trahat (Ed. p. 352) and Tancred, ibid. v. executionem (BAV, Vat. lat. MS
1377, fol. 217va).
 Conclusion

This book has largely treated the interdict as a collective sanction, though it might
be placed on individuals and sometimes was. Its application to entire communities
posed a major moral and legal problem, for it involved punishing the innocent
together with the guilty. The writings of twelfth- and thirteenth-century canonists
and theologians do much to illuminate why contemporary popes and prelates
thought such indiscriminate punishment was justified. Firstly the schoolmen
recognized that a penalty that struck at those close to an offender might be more
effective than one that affected him alone. Secondly they recognized the Pauline
doctrine that those consenting to evil deserved punishment along with the
evildoer. And they distinguished between two main forms of consent. It might
be ‘express’, involving active collaboration and support, or ‘tacit’, meaning the
failure to resist others’ sins. Admittedly some reserved this correction of others’
sins to those in authority, but several, notably Peter the Chanter and Huguccio,
argued that it was a universal duty and might even be exercised against the
powerful by their subjects. The Chanter, Huguccio, and some early-thirteenth-
century canonists even suggested that this responsibility weighed even more on
subjects as a group than as individuals, for their power to resist sins lay in their
numbers. Hence the group that failed in this duty deserved punishment more.
These writers specifically had in mind Jewish failure to stop Christ’s Crucifixion,
but their argument clearly had wider, more contemporary, political resonances.
Innocent III, trained at Paris in the Chanter’s day and at Bologna when Huguccio
was the leading canonist there, hinted more than once that interdicts fell on
realms where subjects failed to resist their prince’s disobedience to the Church.
Likewise Stephen Langton, a pupil of the Chanter, warned King John’s subjects
not to consent to royal defiance of the Church shortly before his kingdom was
interdicted. Churchmen and the schoolmen who taught them considered that
subjects owed greater loyalty to ecclesiastical than secular authority, especially
when lay and clerical powers clashed. Clergy had to preach to John’s subjects
under the interdict on his realm that they had to fear and obey divine power
more than human. Such views partly derived from the doctrine of the reform
papacy that popes had a right to depose unfit rulers and release their subjects from
obedience. Kern even credited the reform papacy with enshrining an ‘ecclesiastical
right of resistance’, such that subjects had a duty to resist princes condemned
 Conclusion 261

by ecclesiastical authority.¹ Schoolmen backing this right in the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries were also reacting to organized forms of lay government
emerging at that time, whose claims over their subjects increasingly rivalled the
Church’s own. Churchmen largely used interdicts to defend ecclesiastical claims
against the secular power and to reinforce their authority over clergy and laity.
However, although they imposed interdicts to incite subjects to resist errant
rulers and punish past failure to do so, they and their teachers thereby advocated
peaceful protest not armed uprising. They recognized that royal power was
ordained by God and hence to be obeyed even when misused against his Church.
The interdict and scholastic doctrine that justified it thus sought to reinforce
a sense of collective responsibility, if not collective guilt, among subjects for
the faults of their rulers. Canonistic thought in this regard and many others
drew on late twelfth-century theology, as shown by the remarkable unanimity of
Huguccio and the Chanter on this matter. But Roman law and its commentators
began to replace theology as the main external influence on canonistic thought
by the early thirteenth century, notably on ideas of collective responsibility.²
This change indeed carried such ideas in a new direction as canonists began
to explore them within the context of corporation theory. Roman law supplied
canonists with the notion universitas, an organized community or corporation.
Although they largely applied it to ecclesiastical bodies like a bishop and his
chapter, they recognized that it also described the city communes emerging across
Europe, particularly in northern Italy where the most famous canonists taught.
By the mid-thirteenth century canonists reached a consensus that a universitas
might be held responsible for crimes of its rulers or agents done with its prior
consent or subsequent approval and that it might be penalized accordingly;
Innocent IV who crystallized this view specified the interdict as an appropriate
penalty. This affirmed that a community was capable of ‘express’ consent to
its leaders’ faults, not only tacit consent as earlier theologians and canonists
had argued. Organized ecclesiastical and civic communities were indeed run
on the basis of express and collective consent, notably in the election of their
leaders. Jurists increasingly observed that those invested with power by such a
community were its representatives and thus it might be held responsible for
whatever they did in this capacity. Hence consent included a general mandate
to act in another’s name, not just approval of specific acts. This was based on
another area of interaction between Roman and canon law: Romano-canonical
procedure. This defined the rules governing the growing system of church courts,
notably the appointing of proctors or legal representatives. Such rules provided
that litigants might issue a general mandate to a proctor and canonists agreed
by the early thirteenth century that this bound them to whatever the proctor

¹ Kern, Divine Right, 81–133, esp. 97–117.

² Cf. Meyer, 243–6, 252–7, 265, 271–3.
262 Conclusion

did on their behalf provided that it came within the mandate’s terms. It is
not hard to see how this principle came to be applied more generally when
thirteenth-century canonists increasingly saw the head of an ecclesiastical body as
its proctor. Even in the secular sphere governments might issue general mandates
to their agents, notably ambassadors; Edward I of England required that the
representatives of local communities attend Parliament with plena potestas to bind
those communities to whatever was decided there, largely tax grants.³ However,
in most thirteenth-century communities, especially kingdoms, tacit consent to
authority remained the norm, and even when kings were crowned with their
subjects’ acclamation and they summoned popular assemblies to approve their
taxes, such consent was rarely free if express. But feudal ties could also justify
interdicts on kingdoms and other domains. Those holding lands from the lord of
such a domain owed him financial and military aid and counsel. Consequently
this might involve them in supporting him against the Church and hence their
punishment along with him under a general local interdict might seem deserved.
Although such thinking on consent and representation might justify interdicts
on communities, the thirteenth-century papacy had misgivings about such
collective sanctions. It recognized that they did not always have the desired effect
of turning the innocent against the guilty. Frequently the innocent turned against
Church authorities for depriving them of religious ministrations and the guilty
became even more defiant and resisted observance of interdicts. Sometimes the
innocent supported the guilty in their defiance. In addition, the papacy observed
that interdicts could have undesirable side effects. The lack of pastoral care could
weaken the faith of many and encourage the growth of heresy, especially when
interdicts disinclined rulers from persecuting it. But the interdict was too valuable
as a means of coercion for the papacy to abandon it completely, though sometimes
popes were prepared to lift an interdict simply because it was proving counter-
productive. Generally they insisted upon strict enforcement of interdicts in the
teeth of popular and princely opposition. Popes from Alexander III to Clement
V issued laws that inflicted automatic penalties on clergy ignoring interdicts. And
when lay rulers defied interdicts, popes sometimes threatened to proceed against
them further both spiritualiter and temporaliter. Temporal proceedings usually
meant an embargo, though when popes applied these outside their temporal
jurisdiction, they clearly depended on the cooperation of foreign rulers.
Popes also strove to make the interdict work more effectively by mitigating
its severity for the innocent whilst maintaining its force against the guilty. By
the twelfth century infant baptism and penance of the dying were traditionally
excluded from the interdict’s ban on the sacraments. From the late twelfth century
the papacy introduced further exceptions. Firstly they granted certain regular
clergy and others freedoms in interdicted lands, notably the right to celebrate
behind closed doors, usually provided that these beneficiaries had not provoked

³ Post, 91–162.
 Conclusion 263

the interdict. Such grants were even made to secular dignitaries and other laity,
especially to reward service to the Church and pious activities like almsgiving and
crusading. But most went to clergy mostly to spare them from sanctions normally
imposed on their behalf; interdicts were largely weapons of self-defence against lay
infringements of clerical immunities. In 1298 Boniface VIII’s constitution ‘Alma
mater’ made it the common right of all clergy to celebrate offices behind closed
doors during general local interdicts, and further conceded that the laity might
be admitted to these services on certain feast days. Hence the thirteenth-century
papacy reduced the severity of such sentences not only by grants to specific groups
or individuals but also by rulings that acquired general force. At the start of the
century these were normally issued in relation to individual sentences, notably
Innocent III’s interdict on France, and they were applied to other interdicts
mainly as a result of their inclusion in decretal collections compiled by canonists.
As popes seized the initiative from canonists in creating such collections, notably
Gregory IX with the Liber extra, they became more self-conscious as legislators.
For example Gregory wrote a ruling for his own collection, that the host was
to be consecrated for the dying weekly in all interdicted lands. This movement
towards direct general legislation culminated in the Liber sextus, where ‘Alma
mater’ appeared. Indeed this constitution represented the most self-conscious
papal attempt to reform interdicts; Boniface VIII recognized the need to do so
in its preamble, observing that during general interdicts ‘the indevotion of the
populace grows, heresies pullulate, and infinite spiritual dangers arise’.
In addition to softening the terms of the interdict, the papacy also attempted
to curb misuse of the sanction which might otherwise limit its effectiveness.
Innocent III heard appeals from interdicts on the grounds that they had no
manifest and reasonable cause, even granting some appellants immunity from
such sentences, and he made it a general rule that such sentences were null. His
successors introduced more procedural rules concerning interdicts that increased
the grounds for appeal from the sanction and encouraged judges to use it
only as a last resort, where other means of coercion failed. Popes especially
discouraged general interdicts in cases involving the faults of private individuals
such as debts; popes and canonists agreed that a community might be held
accountable and punished only for faults of its public figures. But interdicts
doubtless became more frequent as ecclesiastical jurisdiction expanded, and such
regulation was probably a reaction to this. Indeed by the thirteenth century
the power to interdict was technically limited to ecclesiastical judges, but the
growing business of church courts, especially the curia, meant that this power
was increasingly delegated and passed into ever more hands, particularly at the
lower end of the clerical hierarchy. Not only were there ever more men able to
lay interdicts (and only men since this power was denied to women) but ever
more papal laws imposed an automatic interdict on their violators. Such laws
were so numerous by the early fourteenth century that treatises listing them
proliferated.
264 Conclusion

Indeed since the late twelfth century a substantial body of papal law and
legal doctrine on interdicts had developed. Early papal rulings on the interdict
arose largely in response to external demand, since local ecclesiastical authorities
asked the pope to clarify how it was meant to work. Subsequently, as argued
above, papal lawmaking became more self-conscious and less related to individual
cases, but it maintained the pragmatic concern of earlier rulings to make the
interdict more effective as a means of coercion. Its operation was thus regulated
at the end of the thirteenth century far more closely than at the start; and
papal letters and other sources show that increasingly the interdict worked in
accordance with canon law and canonistic thought. But did all this regulation
yield the effect popes desired? Our studies of interdicts at Béziers, Dax, and
San Gimignano suggest that, despite municipal and popular defiance, clergy
of these towns could enforce these sentences until the canonistic preconditions
for lifting them were fulfilled, i.e. satisfaction, oaths, or pledges; albeit at San
Gimignano it is difficult to say exactly what this involved. How far papal
reform and regulation of the interdict made these sentences effective is debatable.
Certainly new laws imposing penalties on clergy who violated interdicts may
have reinforced observance, but some clergy were willing to flout the interdicts
at San Gimignano and Dax while laity circumvented the law by usurping clerical
functions at interdicted Béziers. Even clergy observing these interdicts did so in
their own interest, since the sentences were laid in defence of their liberties and
property. Moreover papal mitigations of the interdict did not necessarily make
these sentences effective either. City officials even impeded clerical observance
of such mitigations at Dax, expelling Dominicans who came to preach in the
cathedral and banning reception of the permitted sacraments from its chaplain.
Admittedly such preaching might persuade people to take the Church’s side, but
Dax’s officials did not stop clergy observing such mitigations so that popular
resentment of the Church might increase and the interdict’s efficacy decrease for
the want of them. These clergy were boycotted since they observed the interdict
according to canon law and were obedient to ecclesiastical authority. Indeed
Dax’s officials encouraged renegade priests to offer ministrations banned by the
interdict in defiance of canon law and episcopal authority. Nevertheless some
laity observed the interdict canonically, shunning these priests and attending
churches outside Dax. The latter option and other exceptions to the interdict
doubtless encouraged their loyalty to the Church but grievances shared with the
clergy against the city’s officials seem a stronger factor. However, it indicates
some popular awareness of what was officially permitted during interdicts. This
was also evident at San Gimignano when many laity solicited clergy to baptize
their children and absolve the dying; the refusal of such customary mitigations
doubtless contributed to popular resentment of these clergy and the interdict as
well as the commune’s decision to hire its own priests to perform these rites.
Nevertheless even when canonical mitigations were respected, they did not bring
universal compliance with the interdict, since laity in all three towns participated
 Conclusion 265

in rites banned by it, and civic authorities enabled them to do so at Dax and
San Gimignano.
Despite such civic and popular defiance, those who occasioned these interdicts
eventually sought to be free from them, which meant coming to terms with
the Church authorities, or at least lengthy litigation and negotiation in the
case of San Gimignano. And growing requests from laity and clergy for papal
immunities from the interdict in the thirteenth century indeed suggest that it
was increasingly seen as something worth being free from. It was thus a potent
weapon in the hands of churchmen, even if papal reform of the sanction had not
entirely reduced its unwanted side effects, as our case studies show. Interdicts were
especially valuable to the papacy as it faced deepening opposition to its claims to
intervene in secular affairs by the later thirteenth century. The interdict was a tool
of this interventionism, and resistance to this sanction sprang increasingly from
resentment of the ecclesiastical claims it was used to defend. Such resentment
culminated under Boniface VIII, and it is no coincidence that he made the biggest
contributions to papal law on the interdict. He thereby sought to reinvigorate it
as a means to counter the growing challenges to traditional papal claims. Indeed
some of his laws inflicted an automatic interdict on violators of the clerical
immunities they upheld, notably his bull ‘Clercis laicos’. Its arenga described
the laity as traditionally hostile to the clergy, which can be seen as a rationale
for interdicts and his attempts to reinvigorate them. Indeed the whole history of
the evolution of canonical thought and procedure on interdicts in the thirteenth
century is one of growing papal determination to bolster the spiritual power in
its relations with temporal rulers and reinforce a sense of corporate identity in
Christian society over and beyond, if not always in derogation of, individual
liberties.
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MS 14 (Peter the Chanter on Genesis, Exodus)
MS 16 (Peter the Chanter on Deuteronomy, 1–4 Kings)

Laon, Bibliothèque communale

MS 371bis, fols. 83r–170v (Summa ‘De iure canonico tractaturus’ on the Decretum)
 Bibliography 267

Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek
MS 983 (Vincentius Hispanus on 1 Comp.)

London, British Library

Arundel MS 492 (Pilius, Summa super Tres Libros)
Royal MS 2.C.viii (Peter the Chanter on Leviticus)
Royal MS 10.C.v (Peter the Chanter on Psalms)
Royal MS 11.C.vii ( Jacobus de Albenga on 5 Comp.)

Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek

Clm 3879 (Alanus Anglicus on 1 Comp.; Johannes Galensis on 3 Comp.)

Oxford, Bodleian Library

Bodley MS 371 (Peter the Chanter on 1–4 Kings)
Hamilton MS 24 (Guillaume de Montlauzun, Sacramentale)
Rawlinson MS C.427 (Stephen Langton on 1–4 Kings)

Oxford, Merton College

MS 212 (Peter the Chanter on Matthew)

Oxford, Trinity College

MS 65 (Stephen Langton on Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy)

Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal

MS 44 (Peter the Chanter on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, 1–4 Kings)

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale

MS lat. 3967 (Vincentius Hispanus on the Liber extra)
MS lat. 14443 (Stephen Langton on Peter Lombard’s gloss on Romans)
MS lat. 15393 (Alanus Anglicus, Apparatus ‘Ius naturale’ on the Decretum)
MS lat. 15585 (Peter the Chanter on Matthew)
MS lat. 16793 (Peter the Chanter on Ezechiel)
MS lat. nouv. acq. 1576 (Apparatus ‘Ecce vicit leo’ on the Decretum)

Tours, Bibliothèque municipale

MS 565 (Zoen Tencarius on 5 Comp.)

Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

Arch. S. Pietro C.114 (Huguccio, Summa on the Decretum)
Barb. lat. MS 1626 (Vincentius Hispanus on the Liber extra)
Borgh. lat. MS 71 ( Johannes Faventinus, Summa on the Decretum)
Borgh. lat. MS 163 ( Johannes Hispanus de Petesella, Summa on the Liber extra)
Borgh. lat. MS 228 (Petrus Bonetus and anonymous glossator on the Liber extra)
Borgh. lat. MS 231 (‘Abbas Antiquus’ on the Liber extra)
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Pal. lat. MS 656 (Pierre Sampsona, Distinctiones)
Pal. lat. MS 658 (Laurentius Hispanus, Glossa Palatina on the Decretum)
Pal. lat. MS 696 (Ricardus Anglicus on 1 Comp.)
Pal. lat. MS 797 ( Johannes Andreae (attrib.), De modo; Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De
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Vat. lat. MS 1367 (Decretum with glossa ordinaria)
Vat. lat. MS 1377 ( Tancred on 1–3 Comp.; Johannes Teutonicus on 4 Comp.)
Vat. lat. MS 1378 (Vincentius Hispanus on 3 Comp.)
Vat. lat. MS 2280 (Huguccio, Summa on the Decretum)
Vat. lat. MS 2343 ( Johannes Hispanus de Petesella, Summa on the Liber extra)
Vat. lat. MS 2509 ( Tancred on 1–3 Comp.; Johannes Teutonicus on 4 Comp.)
Vat. lat. MS 2542 (‘Abbas Antiquus’ on the Liber extra)
Vat. lat. MS 2546 (Vincentius Hispanus on the Liber extra)
Vat. lat. MS 2639 ( Johannes de Legnano, De interdicto and other treatises)
Vat. lat. MS 6769 (Vincentius Hispanus on the Liber extra)

Vercelli Cathedral
MS 89 (Alanus Anglicus’s decretal collection with his own glosses)

Vienna, Nationalbibliothek
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MS 2113 (Pierre Sampsona on the Liber extra)
MS 2197 (Goffredus de Trano on the Liber extra)

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G765

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Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano

A. A. Arm. C.139; Reg. Vat. 48

Volterra, Archivio Vescovile

Pergamene, Dec. X, no. 12

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 Index
Abbas Antiquus, Apparatus on the Novelle 10 2.16.6: 38 n. 83
Abbas Antiquus, Lectura on the Liber extra 2.17.6: 17 n. 15
(X) 10 2.20.5: 105 n. 88
1.31.3: 99 n. 58 2.20.42: 126 n. 197; 254 n. 85
2.28.55: 94 n. 42; 95 n. 46; 251 n. 73 2.20.46: 250 n. 68
3.11.2: 103 n. 73 3.9.2: 47 n. 118
3.40.10: 71 n. 50, n. 51; 72 n. 52 3.9.3: 56 n. 151
5.33.25: 68 n. 35; 136 n. 36 3.33.17: 48 n. 121
5.38.11: 158 n. 145; 235 n. 1 4.1.9: 130
5.39.48: 105 n. 83; 106 n. 88 4.1.13: 140 n. 61
Abbas Antiquus, Lectura on Innocent IV’s 4.11.3: 38 n. 84
Novelle 5.10.7: 32 n. 66
Coll. III 41: 123 n. 179 5.14.5: 161
abbesses 100–101 5.23.2: 141 n. 62
abbots 99–100, 180, 194, 233, see also 5.23.3: 196 n. 96
individual abbots 5.26.6: 49 n. 123
Abelard, Peter 5, 17, 31 5.28.3: 80 n. 82; 165 n. 183
absolution 108, 148, 149, 156, 158, 159, 160, 5.34.7: 55 n. 146, n. 147;
164, 175 n. 25, 208, 216, 218, 219, 223, Alanus (Anglicus), decretal collection of 7, 149
232–3, 235–6, 238, 245, 246, 247, 251, 1.5.5: 60 n. 4; 91 n. 25; 197 n. 100
264 3.24.3: 150
provisional (ad cautelam) 253, 257, 258 5.20.1: 141; 149; 159 n. 153; 160 n. 159;
reserved 199–200, 201, 202, 203, 236–7, 162 n. 169
238 5.22.5: 100
Accursius, Glossa on the Digest Alanus (Anglicus), Apparatus on his own
4.2.9 §1: 22 n. 33 decretal collection: 8
4.3.15: 22 n. 31 1.5.5: 51 n. 127; 197 n. 101
Acts 1.16.4: 51 n. 127
2:1–4: 148 n. 96 3.23.1: 124 n. 183
5:29: 170 3.24.3: 150
7:58: 32 n. 65 5.2.4: 55 n. 147
8:1: 32 n. 65 5.20.1: 141 n. 62
8:14–17: 148 n. 96 5.21.6: 104
Adémar of Charbannes, chronicler 119 5.22.1: 36 n. 76
adultery 70, 72 5.22.5: 101 n. 65
Afonso II, king of Portugal 239, 240 Albigensian crusade 218, 229, 243
Afonso III, king of Portugal 178–9, 182, 248 Alduin, bishop of Limoges 119
Agde, see Raymond du Puy, bishop of Alessandria 183, 243
Alanus (Anglicus) 58, 99, 164, 239 Alexander III (Pope) 5, 30, 32, 46, 47, 90,
Alanus (Anglicus), Apparatus ‘Ius naturale’ 8 103–4, 121, 149, 175, 192, 246, 249,
C.1 q.4 d.p.c.11: 52 n. 131 250, 252
C.23 q.3 c.8: 33 n. 67 Alexander IV (Pope) 81, 83, 90, 99, 120, 124,
C.23 q.3 c.11: 43 n. 100 128, 139, 140, 156, 166, 248, 256
C.24 q.3 d.a.c.1: 49 n. 122; 75 n. 64; 76 n. Alfonso, son of Peter, king of Aragon 177
68 All Souls’ Day 220
Alanus (Anglicus), Apparatus on 1 Comp. 7 Almohads 172
1.10.4: 24 n. 38 alms 117, 138–9, 144, 167, 247, 263
1.15.2: 97 n. 50 altar
1.16.5: 102 n. 69 cloths 143
1.23.3: 98 n. 57 paintings 190, 207–8
284 Index
altar (cont.) dean of 95, 245
portable 138, 140 precentor of 245
stripping of 134, 207, 214 Avignon 136
St Ambrose 29 Azo 44
Amiens 242, 243 Azo, Summa on the Code
bishop of 109, 179 2.19: 19 n. 25
anathema 17, 191, 225; see also 2.20: 22 n. 32
excommunication
Ancona 185–6
András II, king of Hungary 175 Baldus de Ubaldis 78 n. 77
Anglo-Norman commentary on the Decretum Baldwin, John 40
D.83 c.3: 34 n. 70 Bangor; see Robert bishop of
Anselm of Laon 9 baptism 130, 131, 132, 142, 145–7, 148,
anti-clericalism 172–3, 211, 229–30, 234 150, 159, 160, 189, 208, 209–10, 211,
Apparatus ‘Ecce vicit leo’: 8 214, 218, 220, 246, 257, 262, 264
C.15 q.8 c.3: 19 n. 25 Barcelona, bishop of 147, 148, 154 n. 126
Apparatus ‘Servus appellatur’ on 3 Comp. Bari, archbishop of 253
1.3.4: 20 n. 28 Barthèlemy, capdellus (mayor) of Dax 221
1.4.1: 60 n. 6 Bartholomew of Brescia 9, 23 n. 35, 24, see
2.6.5: 55 n. 148 also Glossa ordinaria on the Decretum
2.19.11: 259 n. 108 Bartholomew of Pisa, Summa 160
5.11.4: 34 n. 71 Basel 77, 195
5.16.4: 122 n. 178 Bavaria, duke of 125, see also Lewis
5.21.14: 255 n. 87 Bayonne
appeals 6, 90, 91, 92, 95, 103–4, 105, 108, bishop of 220
111, 115 n. 142, 167, 181, 197, 209, diocese of 221
222, 230, 236, 242, 249–54, 256, 258, Beaulieu abbey 193
259, 263 Beauvais
Aragon 82, 113 n. 124, 118, 124, 143, 147, bishop of 109, 179–80, 198, 237
148, 151, 184–6, 201, see also James; dean and chapter of 198
Peter, kings of bells, ringing of 134, 135, 139, 150, 151, 190,
archbishops; see metropolitan and individual 193, 194, 195, 199, 210–11, 216, 228
provinces Benedictines 98, 121
archdeacons 96–8, 99 benefit of clergy 177–8, 181, 208, 213, 214,
archpriests, see plebanus 247, 248
Ardembuch 73 Benghus del Buondelmontibus of Florence,
Arezzo 206, 245 podestà of San Gimignano 207
Aristotle 28 Bérenger Frédol, bishop of Béziers 11, 87,
Arles, archbishop of 250, 252 127, 227–8, 230, 231, 232–3, 238, 257
Armenia, king of 124 n. 185 Bergamo 107, 117, 172, 174, 189, 240 n. 26
Arras 73 Bernardus Compostellanus junior, Apparatus
bishop of 179 on the Novelle 10
St Vaast Abbey at 108, 249–50 Coll. I 21 (VI 5.11.4): 148 n. 98
Ascoli 121 Bernard de Montmirat, see Abbas Antiquus
Ascoli Puglia, bishop of 253 Bernard of Parma, see Glossa ordinaria on the
Ash Wednesday 132, 142, 143 n. 77 Liber extra
Assumption 139, 153 Bernard of Pavia 6, 103 n. 76, see also
Astorga, bishop of 247 Compilatio prima
Auch, archbishop of 220 Bernard of Pavia, Summa 8, 48 n. 119
St Augustine 1, 5, 15, 17, 34, 39, 43, 45, 57, Besançon 91, 106, 252
87–8, 170 betrothal, see marriage
Augustinians 121 Béziers 127, 173, 178, 190, 191, 218–19,
Austin friars 207 225–34, 238, 264
Auxerre 251 n. 73 bishop of 226, 232, see also Bérenger Frédol
bishop of 60, 95, 125, 179–80, 197, 245, consuls of 225–6, 228–9
251 n. 73 council of, see councils
chapter of 95 official (episcopal) of 226, 228
 Index 285
seneschal of 227 Carlisle 128
bible-reading 144, 199 Carmelites 80 n. 82
bishops 93–6, 135, 143 n. 77, 147–8, 155, Carthusians 80 n. 82
170, 192, 200, 203, see also individual Cashel, archbishop of 90–91
dioceses Cassiodorus 43 n. 100
Blanche, countess of Champagne 125 Castello
Blanche of Castile 153 archdeacon of 77, 80
blessings 142–3, 144 bishop of 185–6
Blois 200 Castile 172, 201, see also Blanche of
countess of 244 Cathars 172–3, 229, 230–31, 243
Bohemia 200 cautio 242–5, 259, 264
king of 81 n. 87 sufficient 239, 243, 245, 253
Bologna 208, 252 Celestine III (Pope) 69, 100, 118, 119, 183
university of 5, 6, 7, 257 Celestine IV (Pope) 222 n. 192
Bonet de St Quentin 176–7 Celestine V (Pope) 195
Boniface VIII (Pope) 62, 96, 98, 106, celibacy, clerical 18 n. 21
110–111, 120–21, 127, 133, 135, 138, violation of 72 n. 52, 116 n. 154, 117,
140, 151, 154, 160, 166, 167, 173, 174, 180–81
177–8, 186, 187, 201–2, 226–9, 230, Celluole 210, 216
231–2, 242, 246, 249, 258, 263, 265, see cessatio a divinis 73–4, 96, 109–111
also ‘Clericis laicos’, ‘Etsi de statu’, Liber Chalon-sur-Saône, bishop of 244–5
sextus, ‘Unam sanctam’ Châlons-sur-Marne, bishop of 96, 110, 125
Bordeaux, archbishop of 153 Champagne, count of 183, see also Blanche,
Bourges, archbishop of 136 countess of
Brabant, see Henry, duke of chapters 93–6, 109–111, 237–8, see also
Braga, archbishop of 178, 181, 247 individual chapters
Breviarium extravagantium, see Compilatio Charles IV, German emperor 175 n. 22
prima Charles I of Anjou, king of Sicily 118, 177,
Brittany, count of 186, 245 184–6, 187
Brundage, James 3 Charles II of Anjou, king of Sicily 206
Bruyères 190 Chartres, bishop of 179–80
Burgos 98, 106, 154 Cheney, Christopher 132, 134, 144, 167, 176,
Burgundy 180–81, 194, 234, 237, 241
duke of 183; see also Robert duke of Chichester 156
duchess of 244–5 chrism 131, 143, 146–7, 148, 159, 160,
burial 67, 69, 70, 72–3, 80, 117, 128, 130, 209–10
133, 160–67, 174, 181, 192, 199, 202, Christmas 139
208, 210, 213, 219, 220, 221–2, 223, churching 142, 144
224, 228, 230, 233, 234, 247, 251 Cistercians 80 n. 82, 121, 123–4, 125, 135,
Byzantium 124 n. 185, 184, 188 163, 169 n. 2, 188, 193–5
Cîteaux, abbot of 193–4
clamours 45, 64, 169, 171
Cabrières, archdeacon of 227, 232 Clarendon, constitutions of 175 n. 25
Cagliari, archbishop of 156, 186 Clement IV (Pope) 63–4, 119, 120, 151, 156,
Cagli 117 199, 243–4, 245–6
Cambrai 74, 252 Clement V (Pope) 190, 202–3, 233, see
Candlemas 132, 142, 143 Clementine
canons, cathedral 94–5, 102–3; see also Clement VI (Pope) 175 n. 22
chapters Clementine 11, 127, 203
Canterbury 81, 88, 132, 141, 142, 144, 146, 3.7.1: 80; 202
152, 157, 169, 241 3.13.3: 128 n. 209
archbishop of 249, see also St Thomas 3.17.un.: 233
Becket, Hubert Walter, Stephen 5.8.1: 63
Langton 5.8.1: 128 n. 208
Carcassone 225–6, 232 5.10.1: 74 n. 63; 125; 203
inquisitor of 229, 230, 231 5.10.2: 190–91, 192
seneschal of 227 5.10.3: 137; 203
286 Index
‘Clericis laicos’ 111, 127, 226–8, 229, 230, 1.6.8: 52 n. 131
231–3, 234, 238, 265 1.6.15: 52 n. 131
Clermont 62, 69, 73, 120 1.18.8: 90 n. 23
bishop of, 102 1.19.5: 91
Clermont-Ferrand 120 2.19.11: 250 n. 69; 254 n. 85
Cluny, abbey of 100, see also Cluniac 2.19.13: 94 n. 42
Cluniac houses 121, 123–4, 135, 195 3.21.3: 164 n. 177
Code (of Justinian) 3.31.3: 246 n. 50
9.16: 26 n. 46 4.15.1: 162 n. 169
9.47.22: 14 n. 1; 64 n. 21; 120 n. 168 5.2.2: 22, 23
Coimbra 5.2.6: 31 n. 63
bishop of 181, see also Pedro 5.12.3: 197 n. 98
cathedral canon of 188, 198 5.16.1: 71 n. 47; 246 n. 51
diocese 198 5.16.3: 79 n. 79
Holy Cross monastery at 166 5.21.3: 49 n. 123; 238 n. 16
Cologne 5.21.6: 101 n. 65
archbishop of 93, 254 5.21.14: 251 n. 74; 253; 255; 259
cathedral, dean and prior of 197 5.21.16: 133 n. 17; 143–4
province 249 5.23.1: 59; 134 n. 22
Colonna 249 5.23.7: 111–12; 238–40; 242; 244
commercial sanctions 183, 185–6, 187, 262 5.23.8: 244
community, sempiternal 78 Compilatio quarta 7, 141, 149, 235
Compilatio prima 6–7 1.3.8–11: 52 n. 131
1.15.5: 97 n. 50 1.13.1: 73 n. 57; 109
1.21.2: 90 n. 22 1.14.2: 100 n. 63
1.21.4: 90 n. 22 2.10.2: 100 n. 63
1.21.16: 90 n. 22 3.14.1: 73 n. 55
1.23.2: 249 n. 64 5.12.3: 187
1.23.3: 98 n. 56; 236 n. 4 5.12.7: 67 n. 33, n. 34; 165 n. 182; 193 n.
2.1.6: 256 n. 93 83
2.17.6: 133 n. 18 5.12.8: 135 n. 28
2.20.41: 249–50 5.14.2: 148 n. 100
2.20.42: 103 n. 75 5.14.3: 67 n. 34; 141; 149 n. 101; 159 n.
2.20.46: 250 153; 160 n. 159; 162 n. 169
3.9.4–5: 93 n. 35 5.15.5: 104; 108; 109; 127 n. 200
3.25.4: 256 n. 93 Compilatio quinta 7
4.1.13: 104 n. 77; 130 n. 1 1.18.3: 101
5.6.11: 93–4; 183 5.12.1: 124 n. 184
5.13.6: 72 n. 52; 246 n. 50 5.18.4: 253 n. 81
5.23.3–4: 196 n. 95 conclave 127
5.27.1: 93 n. 35 confession 117, 131, 150, 157, 158, 220, see
5.28.3: 67 n. 33, n. 34; 80 n. 83; 122 n. also penance
175; 139 n. 50; 165 n. 183; 193 n. 83 confirmation 147–8, 160
5.28.7: 192 n. 83 confraternities 139, 145, 151, 166
5.28.8: 69 n. 37 Conrad, son of Frederick II 188
5.34.7: 54 n. 144 Conradin, grandson of Frederick II 184 n. 60
Compilatio secunda 7 consent to another’s wrong 27, 29–50, 57, 62,
1.3.7: 93 64, 69, 78, 90, 112, 114, 116, 128, 159,
3.9.2: 69 n. 37; 94 n. 40; 102; 120 170–71, 172, 192, 219, 220, 260–61
3.27.1: 150 Constance, German empress 183
5.18.10: 91 Constance
Compilatio tertia 7, 133, 134 bishop of 166
1.3.4: 20 n. 28; 94 n. 41; 135 n. 25 diocese 188
1.3.7: 52 n. 131; 154–5; 253n. 80 Constantinople 69 n. 41; see also Byzantium
1.4.1: 52 n. 131; 60 n. 4; 106–7; 197 n. Latin patriarch of 69 n. 41, 188
100 contumacy (disobedience) 111, 113, 116, 120,
1.6.1: 154 n. 129; 155; 156 239, 245, 255
 Index 287
conversi 140, 163; see also Cistercians decretals 6–7
Coppi, G. V. 206 Decretales Gregorii IX, see Liber extra
Corbie 251 Decretum, see Gratian
corporation theory 21, 26, 47, 48, 57–8, 82, Denmark, king of 119, 128
261 deposition 196, 197
corpus Christi, see eucharist Digest 21
councils, church, 1.21.5: 103 n. 74
Béziers (1296) 226 4.2.9 §1: 21
Dijon (1199): 89; 91 4.3.15: 21
Lateran II (1139): 35; 198 n. 106 43.16.1 §12: 54 n. 144
Lateran III (1179): 80; 87; 103 n. 75; 122 48.6: 26 n. 46
n. 175; 139 n. 50; 165; 192; 202; 253; Dijon, see also councils
256 duke of 124 n. 185
Lateran IV (1215): 7; 73; 81; 104; 108; Diniz, king of Portugal 178 n. 36, 179
109; 127; 135; 148; 152; 165; 166; dispensations 107, 108, 154, 196, 200, 201,
192; 225; 226; 242 n. 31; 249–50; 256 251
Limoges (994): 119 Divielle abbey 222
Limoges (1031): 119; 130 n. 1; 160–61; Dol, abbey of 136
162 Dominicans 80 n. 82, 117, 122, 139, 151,
Lyon I (1245): 10; 105; 107; 110; 122–3; 159, 195, 220, 231, 264
253; 256 third order of 136, see also tertiaries
Lyon II (1274): 11; 81; 106; 109–10; 127 Dompnier de Sauviac, A. 219, 221
n. 203; 128 n. 205, n. 206; 257 dowry 60, 137
St Gilles (1209): 164 Dublin, archbishop of 89
Tours (1163): 149–50 Duccio, Maestà of 208
Vienne (1199): 91 Duggan, Charles 4
Vienne (1311–12): 11; 190–91; 202; 203 Dunstable annals 132, 142, 144, 146, 152,
courts, church 81, 166–7 153
Cremona 63, 76, 77 n. 71, 191, 240 n. 26 Durand de Vic 220, 221–22, 223
crucifixion, Jewish responsibility for 42, 43, Durham
45, 57, 260 bishop of, see Philip
crusading 63; 69 n. 41; 83; 113 n. 124, n. diocese 134, 171
128; 114 n. 131, n. 136; 115; 120;
124–5; 136; 138; 144–5; 151; 157; 158;
160; 172; 185; 186; 225; 258; 263; see Easter 139, 144, 152, 156, 191
also Albigensian crusade, military orders Edmund, son of Henry III, king of
curses 64, see also clamour England 118
Edward I, king of England 176–7, 178–9,
262
Damasus, Apparatus on Lat. Conc. IV: 9 election to benefices 154–6, 167, 197–8, 201,
c.7: 74 n. 60 258
c.58: 136 n. 35 Elizabeth, queen of the Romans 138
Damasus, ‘Brocarda’ 18 n. 21, 38 n. 84, 53 n. Ely
139 bishop of 88, 89, 131, 149
Damasus, Questiones 55–6 diocese 180
David of Augsburg 173 embargoes, see commercial sanctions
Dax 150, 178, 218–25, 234, 264 England 6, 89, 119, 178, 182, 191, 226
bishop of, see Guillaume de Falgars; Navarre interdict on 1, 42, 44, 45, 49, 59, 88, 117,
de Miossans 125, 130–32, 134, 135, 141, 142, 143,
capdellus (mayor) of 224, see also G. Arnauld 144, 146–7, 149, 152, 153, 156, 157,
de Gos; Barthèlemy 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 166–7,
minister of Franciscans at 223 169–71, 175–6, 180–81, 182, 189,
viguier of 219 193, 237 n. 9
deans 94–5, see also chapters and individual king of 183; see also John, Henry III,
deans Edward I
rural, see plebanus Esztergom, bishop of 77, 123, 175, 254
debt 114, 116, 120–21, 174, 242, 263 ‘Etsi de statu’ 231
288 Index
eucharist 79, 131, 148–52, 160, 171, 190, France 64, 84, 89, 119, 138, 152, 156, 172,
191, 194, 220, 228, 230–31, 263 177, 183, 226, 245
Evesham abbey chronicle 176 interdict on 2, 45, 60, 66, 89, 107, 117,
excommunication 1; 11; 27; 34; 54; 55; 59; 130, 133, 136, 141, 142, 143, 144,
62; 63; 67; 72; 73; 76; 78; 81; 83; 84; 86; 146, 148–9, 152, 153, 157, 158, 159,
92; 95; 96; 98; 103; 104; 105; 106; 107; 160, 161–2, 179, 194, 197, 199, 237,
108; 109; 110; 115 n. 138, n. 143; 117; 239, 241, 263
118; 119; 123; 124; 125; 126; 127; 128; king of 183, 231, 248, 252, see also Louis
132; 134; 137; 139; 140; 143, 145, 150, IX; Philip II; Philip III; Philip IV
161, 163, 164; 165; 174; 175 n. 25; 177; queen of 124 n. 185
178; 179; 180 n. 44; 182; 183; 184–6; Franciscans 98, 106, 112 n. 120, 117, 122,
188; 189; 190; 191; 192; 193; 195; 196; 136, 138, 151, 159, 195, 203, 207, 214,
197; 198; 201; 202; 203; 205; 209; 213; 231, 249
215; 216; 217; 219; 220; 221–2; 224; third order of 136, 137, 203, 223, see also
226; 229; 230; 232; 233; 235–6; 237; tertiaries
238; 239–40; 241; 245; 247; 248; 250; Franciscus de Vitoria, Spanish jurist 52 n.
251; 252; 253; 255; 256; 257; 258; 259; 134
see also anathema Frederick I, German emperor 184
collective 1, 17, 18, 25–6, 46, 49 n. 122, Frederick II, German emperor 24, 61, 77, 83,
75–6, 119, 126, 127, 130 n. 1, 161, 109, 115 n. 143, 118, 125, 173, 184,
173 191–2, 224, 239 n. 22, 248, see also
major 1, 75–6, 80 Conrad; Conradin
minor 1, 49 n. 122, 75–6, 81, 82, 102 friars 78, 136, 138, 151, 154, 200 n. 114, 202,
power to impose, see interdict see also Austin friars; Carmelites;
exemption 69, 121–4, 125, 135, 138, 193, Dominicans; Franciscans; tertiaries
202, 203, 256 their ideas of papal power 87
Exeter 156
exile of clergy 65, 88, 115, 128, 132, 156,
169–70, 177, 178, 179, 181, 189, 198, G. Arnauld de Gos, capdellus (mayor) of
207, 209, 241 Dax 219–21, 224
exile of laity 191 Gambassi 205, 216 n. 179
Exodus Gascony 124, 218, 219
20:5: 15 seneschal of 219, 224
external forum 86, 102, 158 Ste-Geneviève, abbot of 123
extravagantes communes Genoa 184–6
1.8.1: 229 n. 210 archbishop of 186
5.10.2: 120–21; 174; 242 diocese 139
extreme unction 159–60, 210 Geoffrey of Coldingham, chronicler 134, 163
Ezechiel n. 174
18:20: 14 Geoffrey, abbot of Vendôme 45, 169
Gerald, cardinal bishop of Sabina 232–3
Gerald of Wales 180
Fermo 249 Gerhoch of Reichensberg 32
Ferrara 130, 143 Gervase of Canterbury 175
bishop of 148 Gesta Innocentii III 45; 63; 104 n. 80; 107 n.
feudal relations 49, 60–62, 83, 84, 114 n. 95; 112 n. 119; 113 n. 122; 114 n. 129,
135, 184, 185, 186, 188, 241, 262 n. 134; 115 n. 145, n. 148, n. 150; 120 n.
fideiussores 243–4 166; 136; 161; 171; 172 n. 13; 180 n. 41;
fiefs, see feudal relations 197 n. 100; 198 n. 105; 237 n. 9;
Flanders 232 n. 220, see also Matilda, countess 241 n. 29
of Ghibellines 118, 184–5, 211 n. 159
Florence 2 n. 6, 121, 190 n. 74, 204, 205, Gilbertus (Anglicus) 6, 7
206, 207, 209, 228, 243 Glossa ordinaria on the Bible 9
bishop of 213 Psalm 1:6: 43 n. 100
episcopal vicar of 212 Psalm 81:4: 39 n. 88
Forlì 110, 184 2 Kings 24:1: 41 n. 95
 Index 289
Glossa ordinaria on the Decretum 9, see also Grado, patriarch of 77, 80
Bartholomew of Brescia Gratia Andree 207
D.27 c.1: 38 n. 85 Gratian, Decretum 4–6, 14, 33, 57
D.83 c.3: 33 n. 67 D.20 d.a.c.1: 86–7
C.2 q.1 c.10: 54 n. 141 D.37 c.5: 33 n. 68
C.2 q.7 c.55: 37 n. 81 D.45 c.17: 15 n. 7
C.11 q.3 c.100: 54 n. 141 D.47 d.p.c.1: 33 n. 68
C.12 q.2 c.58: 22 n. 35; 24 n. 40 D.50 c.63: 149 n. 101
C.23 q.3 c.11: 44 n. 103 D.54 c.20: 38 n. 82
D.24 q.3 c.1: 146 D. 68 c.3: 246 n. 49
De pen. D.1 c.23: 45 n. 109 D.86 c.21: 32 n. 66
Glossa ordinaria on the Liber extra (X)10 D.86 c.24: 46 n. 111
1.4.8: 155 n. 132 D.88 c.7: 97 n. 49
1.5.1: 197 n. 101 D.93 c.6: 97 n. 49
1.31.13: 74 n. 61 C.1 q.4: 15
2.24.7: 244 n. 40 C.1 q.4 c.10: 146 n. 89
2.28.55: 250 n. 68 C.1 q.4 c.11: 72 n. 53
3.21.8: 244 n. 40 C.2 q.1 c.10: 29 n. 52
5.27.3: 196 n. 96 C.11 q.3 c.97: 170 n. 5
5.31.18: 65 n. 22; 200n. 112 C.11 q.3 c.103: 75 n. 66
5.33.25: 66 n. 27 C.12 q.2 c.21: 103 n. 76
5.38.11: 157 n. 144; 158 n. 147 C.16 q.5 c.10: 72 n. 53
5.39.40: 255 n. 89 C.16 q.6 c.3: 52 n. 152
5.40.23: 243 n. 34; 244 n. 40 C.17 q.4 c.5: 29 n. 52
Glossa ordinaria on the Clementine, see C.17 q.4 c.29: 35 n. 74; 54; 63; 198–9
Johannes Andreae C.23 q.3 c.11: 32 n. 66; 39 n. 87; 42
Glossa Palatina on the Decretum 8 C.24 q.1 d.p.c.1: 86 n. 4
D.86 c.24: 38 n. 85; 46 n. 112 C.24 q.1 c.6: 88 n. 10
C.2 q.7 c.55: 37 n. 81 C.24 q.2 c.1: 160 n. 160
C.11 q.3 c.100: 54 n. 141 C.24 q.3 c.1: 1 n. 1; 28 n. 51
C.12 q.2 c.58: 23 n. 36 C24 q.3 c.32: 45
C.17 q.4 c.5: 56 n. 149 De pen. D.1 c.23: 45 n. 109
C.17 q.4 c.8: 48 n. 121 De con. D. 1 c.5, 10: 72 n. 53
C.23 q.3 c.11: 43 n. 101; 44 n. 104 De con. D.1 c.19–20: 70 n. 45; 246 n. 49
C.24 q.3 d.a.c.1: 18 n. 18 De con. D. 1 c.26: 72 n. 53
C.25 q.2 c.25: 23 n. 36 De con. D.4 c.122: 146 n. 92
De pen. D.1 c.23: 45 n. 109 Gravellona 235, 249
Goffredus de Trano (Cardinal), Lectura on the Gregory I (Pope) the Great 39, 40–41,
Liber extra (X) 10 42, 45
1.4.5: 65 n. 24; 94 n. 41 Gregory IX (Pope) 60, 83, 89, 105, 107, 109,
1.4.8: 155 n. 132 117, 118, 123, 125, 137, 138, 145, 151,
1.5.1: 60 n. 5 160, 164, 174, 175, 186, 188, 198, 200,
1.6.15: 93 n. 33 222, 241, 242, 245, 247, 248, 251, 253,
1.23.5: 97 n. 52; 99 n. 58 254, see also Liber extra
1.31.13: 74 n. 60 Gregory X (Pope) 126
1.33.10: 100 n. 63 Novissime 10
1.33.12: 101 n. 68 Gregory XIII (Pope) 11
2.28.55: 94 n. 42 Grenoble, bishop of 105
4.1.11: 158 n. 147 Gubbio 258
5.38.11: 77 n. 70; 157 n. 144; 235 n. 1 Guelfs 118, 184, 206, 211 n. 159
5.39.40: 255 n. 89 Guido de Baysio, Glossa on the Liber sextus
5.39.43: 151 n. 113 (VI) 11
5.39.47: 36 n. 77 5.11.5: 27,
5.40.23: 243 n. 34 5.11.10: 257
Goffredus de Trano (Cardinal), Summa 10, 92 5.11.19: 147–8 n. 96
n. 30, 99 n. 58, 238 n. 13 (addition) 5.11.24: 135 n. 24; 139 n. 55, n. 56; 151 n.
Good Friday 144 n. 82 115; 159 n. 150
290 Index
Guido de Baysio, Rosarium 11 5.39.48: 81 n. 87
C.23 q.3 c.11: 43 n. 101; 44 n. 104 5.39.57: 147; 150 n. 107
Guido da Montefeltro 184, 185 n. 62 Hostiensis, Summa 10, 102, 103 n. 74, 144 n.
Guillaume de Falgars, bishop of Dax 219, 223 84, 235–6 n. 3, 238 n. 14, 239–40 n. 22,
Guillaume de Montlazun, Sacramentale 195 243 n. 34, 244, 245, 257 n. 96
hours, canonical 141–2, 199, 210
Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury 89
Henry VI, German emperor 41 St Hugh of Lincoln, biography 180
Henry II, king of England 46, 103–4, 175–6, Huguccio 35, 57, 96, 170, 260, 261
218 Huguccio, Summa on the Decretum 6, 8
Henry III, king of England 119, 219, 221, D.54 c.20: 38 n. 82
222–5, see also Edmund D.83 c.3: 33 n. 70
Henry, duke of Brabant 62 D.86 c.1: 53 n. 140
Henry, count of Vienne 137 D.86 c.24: 38 n. 85; 46 n. 111
Henricus de Segusio, cardinal bishop of Ostia, C.6 q.1 c.22: 31 n. 62
see Hostiensis C.11 q.3 c.100: 54 n. 140
Hereford, bishop of 192 C.17 q.4 c.29: 54 n. 145
heresy 14, 21, 90, 94, 113 n. 125, 114 n. 138, C.23 q.3 c.11: 43 n. 99
115 n. 143, 116, 126, 172–4, 183, 214, C.24 q.3 d.a.c.1: 17 n. 14
229, 230–32, 234, 241, 262, see also C.24 q.3 c.32: 46 n. 111
Cathars, Innocent III, Waldensians Humiliati 140, 166
Hermann, landgrave of Thuringia 104 third order of 136
Hermann of Minden, OP, ‘De interdictis’ 12, Hungary 77, 104, 124 n. 185, 175
61 n. 8, 65 n. 26, 69 n. 36, 93, 107 n. 94, king of 254, see also András II
144 n. 82; 158 n. 148
Hildesheim, bishop of 196
Hincmar, archbishop of Reims 146 Innocent III (Pope) 1, 2, 4, 7, 15, 21, 30, 34,
Hincmar, bishop of Laon 146 35, 41–2, 46, 49, 57, 59–60, 62, 63, 64,
Hohenstaufen 137 n. 43, 188, see also Conrad, 67, 68, 69, 71, 80, 81, 83, 88, 89, 95,
Conradin, Frederick I, Frederick II, 104, 107, 108, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124,
Henry VI, Philip of Swabia 125, 130–33, 134; 135; 136, 138, 143,
Honorius III (Pope) 7, 76, 77, 89, 109, 117, 145, 147, 148, 149, 154, 155, 157, 158,
118, 123, 124, 137, 151, 156, 166, 188, 160, 167, 169–71, 172, 173, 174,
196, 197, 242, 243, 245 180–82, 183, 189, 191, 192, 193–4,
Honorius IV (Pope) 74, 81, 96, 100, 110, 197, 235, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243,
146, 150, 177, 200, 201 244, 246, 249, 252–3, 256, 260, 263, see
hospitals 136, 139, 151 n. 111, see also also Gesta
London, St Bartholomew’s Hospital; Sens De miseria 20
Hospitallers, see military orders sermons 15–16, 20 n. 28
Host, see eucharist Innocent IV (Pope) 1, 18, 22, 25–7, 47, 48,
Hostiensis 11, 27, 87, 209–10, 251–2 56, 58, 61, 63, 78, 81, 92, 93, 105, 106,
Hostiensis, Lectura on the Liber extra (X) 10 109, 118, 124, 125, 127, 137, 138, 155,
1.31.13: 74 n. 61 156, 166, 173, 174, 184, 191–2, 195,
2.28.37: 252 n. 75; 258 n. 106; 259 n. 108 200, 222–4, 240, 248, 254, 256, 261
2.28.55: 94 n. 42; 95 n. 46 Innocent IV, Apparatus 10, 12, 28
3.11.2: 103 n. 73 X 1.4.5: 65 n. 24
3.40.4: 72 n. 53 X 1.5.1: 61 n. 10; 197 n. 101
3.40.10: 71 n. 50; 72 n. 52 X 1.23.5: 97 n. 52
4.1.11: 152 n. 120 X 1.31.3: 99 n. 58
5.31.18: 65 n. 22; 143 n. 76; 165 n. 181; X 1.31.13: 26 n. 44; 74 n. 61
167; 199; 200 n. 112 X 1.33.12: 101 n. 68
5.33.13: 79 n. 79, n. 80 X 2.6.1: 52 n. 132
5.33.24: 165 n. 183 X 2.28.55: 94 n. 42; 95 n. 46
5.33.25: 65 n. 26; 67 n. 32 X 3.11.2: 103 n. 73
5.38.11: 141 n. 67; 157 n. 144; 158 n. 147; X 4.1.11: 152 n. 120; 154
165 n. 181 X 5.27.4: 196 n. 96
5.39.43: 147 n. 96 X 5.3.30: 26 n. 46
 Index 291
X 5.31.14: 26 n. 44 218, 220, 224, 228, 234, 250, 251,
X 5.31.18: 65 n. 22; 67 n. 32, n. 34; 262, 264
69–70; 71 n. 48; 133 n. 19; 142 n. 71; warning of 103–8, 253, 256
143 n. 76; 144 n. 82; 146; 159; 165 n. internal forum, see penance
180; 167; 199 investiture, lay 115, 126
X 5.33.3: 80 n. 83 Ireland 119, 124 n. 185, 241
X 5.33.24: 65 n. 26; 68 n. 35; 69–70; 80 n. irregularity 107, 108, 154, 199–201, 202, 251
84, n. 85; 83 n. 90; 139 n. 51; 165 n. Iohannes, see Johannes
183
X 5.33.25: 137
X 5.38.11: 141–2; 152 n. 118; 235 n. 1 J
X 5.39.48: 82 n. 88; 105 n. 83 Jacobus de Albenga, Apparatus on 5 Comp. 9
X 5.39.53: 26 n. 43, n. 46; 27 n. 47; 78 n. 1.18.1: 94 n. 39; 237–8 n. 13
76 1.18.3: 101
Coll. III 40 (VI 5.11.5): 26 n. 42, n. 45; 2.16.1: 49 n. 122
Innocent IV, Novelle 10, see also ‘Romana 3.7.1: 237–8 n. 13
Ecclesia’ 5.18.4: 253 n. 81
Coll. III 32: 123 n. 179 Jacques Amelii, consilarius of Béziers 229, 230
Coll. III 35: 127 n. 200 Jacques de Revigny, bishop of Verdun 177–8
Coll. III 36: 107–8; 110; 256 n. 95 James
Coll. III 38: 105 5:14–15: 159 n. 151
Coll. III 40: 26 n. 42 St James, order of 123 n. 179
Coll. III 41: 95; 123 n. 179 James, king of Aragon 106 n. 93, 201
inquisition, see heresy Jean Pierre Olivi 231
interdicts St Jerome 40
a iure 126–8, 238, 263, 265 Jerusalem 118
ab ingressu ecclesie 81–2, 90, 101, 104, 107, Jesselin de Cassagnes, see John XXII,
127, 202 Extravagantes
ambulatory 82–4, 138, 174, 201, 248 Jews 115 n. 143, 172, 178, see also crucifixion
causes of 108–21, 169, 249, 256 John
closure of churches during 132, 171 5:19: 16
conditional (lata sub conditione) 126 19:11: 45 n. 110
ferende sententie 126 John XXII (Pope) 11, 175 n. 22
general local 59–68, 74, 83–4, 122, 125, Extravagantes 12, 127
127, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, John, king of England 1, 42, 49, 59, 63, 88,
146, 153, 160, 165, 173, 174, 192, 89, 117 n. 157, 119, 125, 141, 143, 167,
257, 263 169–71, 176, 180–81, 182, 194, 234,
immunity from 62, 67–8, 69 n. 37, 81, 105 237 n. 9, 241, 242, 260
n. 85, 108, 109, 121–6, 173, 174, 175, John, abbot of Ford 171, 176, 181
250, 265 Johannes Andreae 12, 27, 258
late sententie 126 Johannes Andreae, Glossa on the Liber sextus
mnemonic poems on 168 (VI) 11
nominatim (by name) 80, 135, 137, 139, 1.13.2: 99 n. 60
142, 144, 165, 202 5.7.11: 137
nullity of 255–8, 259, 263 5.11.6: 95 n. 43
particular local 68–75, 84, 165, 177, 198, 5.11.10: 256 n. 91; 257 n. 96, n. 98; 258 n.
219, 257–8 101
personal 67, 75–82, 102, 125–6, 133, 141, 5.11.16: 78 n. 77; 79 n. 80
146, 148 n. 98, 150, 154, 155, 165, 5.11.17: 67 n. 31
257 5.11.19: 146 n. 92; 147 n. 95
power to impose 86–103 5.11.20: 82 n. 88
relaxation of 146, 156, 158, 159, 171, 172, 5.11.24: 139 n. 54; 140 n. 57; 151 n. 115;
174, 175, 215, 216, 217, 223, 224, 174
232–3, 234, 235–59 Johannes Andreae, Glossa ordinaria on the
suspension of 198, 250–51, 252, 258–9 Clementine 11
violation of 133, 134, 165–66, 179–80, 3.7.1: 80 n. 84; 202 n. 126
188–203, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, 3.13.3: 175 n. 23
292 Index
Johannes Andreae, Glossa ordinaria on the Johannes de Legnano, De interdicto 12 n. 41,
Clementine (cont.) 252
5.10.1: 74 n. 63 Johannes Monachus, Glossa on the Liber
5.10.2: 192 n. 81 sextus 11
Johannes Andreae, Novella on the Liber extra 5.11.5: 27 n. 49
(X) 11 5.11.10: 257 n. 99
1.5.1: 67 n. 31 5.11.24: 140 n. 57
2.28.37: 252 n. 75; 259 n. 108 Johannes Monachus, Glossa on the
5.38.11: 158 n. 145 Extravagantes communes
Johannes Andreae, Novelle on the Liber sextus 5.10.2: 121
(VI) 11 Johannes Teutonicus 7, 9, 58, 97 n. 49, 99,
5.11.5: 61 n. 8 235, 237, see also Compilatio quarta;
5.11.16: 78 n. 75; 79 n. 78 Glossa ordinaria on the Decretum
5.11.24: 139 n. 55; 151 n. 115; 166 n. Johannes Teutonicus, Apparatus on 3 Comp. 7
187 1.3.7: 155 n. 132
Johannes Andreae (attrib.), De modo 65 n. 23, 1.4.1: 51 n. 129; 61 n. 9; 106 n. 93; 107
68 n. 35, 70 n. 42, 83 n. 90, 151 n. 113, 1.6.19: 237 n. 10
152 n. 118, 168 n. 192 1.18.10: 246 n. 48
Johannes Calderinus, ‘De interdicto’ 12; 67 n. 1.19.2: 237 n. 10
31; 72 n. 53; 72–3 n. 54; 79 n. 78, n. 81; 1.19.5: 91 n. 25
80 n. 82; 93 n. 37; 133 n. 19; 142 n. 70; 1.20.1: 100 n. 62
143; 144 n. 85; 145; 152; 153; 154; 160 2.3.1: 51 n. 129
n. 157; 164 n. 176; 166 n. 187; 167 n. 2.4.un.: 47 n. 117
190; 252 n. 75 2.18.1: 236 n. 8; 237 n. 10
Johannes Calderinus (attrib.), De censura 61 n. 2.19.11: 254 n. 85; 259 n. 108
8, 76 n. 69, 83 n. 90, 87–8, 112, 144 n. 2.19.13: 94 n. 42; 250 n. 68
84, 152 n. 118, 155 n. 134, 160 n. 157, 3.5.1: 47–8
191 n. 76, 252 n. 75 3.31.3: 72 n. 53
John of Dambach, OP 175 n. 22 5.2.2: 23 n. 37
Johannes de Deo 72 5.4.1: 19 n. 24
Johannes Faventinus, Summa 5 5.21.14: 255 n. 88, n. 89
D.83 d.a.c.1: 29 n. 53; 33 n. 69; 45 n. 5.21.16: 147 n. 96; 151 n. 113
110 5.23.7: 243 n. 34
D.86 c.1: 29 n. 56; 33 n. 69 Johannes Teutonicus, Apparatus on 4
D.86 c.21: 32 n. 66 Comp. 8, 9
C.16 q.6 c.3: 52 n. 136 1.12.1: 51 n. 129
John of Freiburg, OP, Summa 61 n. 8; 62 n. 1.13.1: 74 n. 60
11; 66 n. 27; 77; 143 n. 76; 144 n. 82, n. 1.14.2: 100 n. 62
84; 147 n. 95; 158 n. 148; 245 n. 46 2.10.2: 100 n. 63
Johannes Galensis 7, see also Compilatio 5.12.8: 136
secunda 5.14.3: 157 n. 144;158 n. 146; 235
Johannes Galensis, Apparatus on 3 Comp. 7 5.15.3: 36 n. 77
1.4.1: 51 n. 128; 197 n. 101 5.15.5: 105 n. 88
1.6.1: 155 n. 131 John of Tynemouth 5
3.26.5: 50 n. 126 Jones, Phillip 208
3.29.un.: 51 n. 128 Juan, bishop of Oviedo 181
5.2.5: 55 n. 148 judges delegate, papal 62, 86, 90–91, 109,
5.2.6: 31 n. 63 111, 178, 190, 196, 236, 237, 252
5.14.3: 55 n. 148 subdelegate 90–91
5.21.3: 46 n. 113 Julião Pais, royal chancellor of Portugal 182
5.21.16: 147 n. 96
Johannes Garsias Hispanus, Apparatus on
Lugd. Conc. II 11 Kent 171
c.17: 73 n. 58; 74 n. 61 Kern, Fritz 260
c.30: 257 n. 97; 257–8 n. 99 keys, power of 86–8, 200
Johannes Hispanus de Petesella, Summa 10, Kilmacduagh, archdeacon and bishop of 91
97 n. 49, 122 n. 178, 236, 244 n. 40 2 Kings 24: 20; 41; 52
 Index 293
Langres, bishop of 125 3.11.2: 69 n. 37; 94 n. 40; 102; 120
Languedoc 218, 229, 231 3.28.12: 164 n. 177
Laon 66, 108, 130 n. 1, 187, 190, 202, 248, 3.40.4: 246 n. 50
250 3.40.7: 73 n. 55
bishop of 179–80, see also Hincmar 3.40.9: 247 n. 52
Larner, John 208 3.49.7: 225 n. 199; 242 n. 31
last rites 159–60, 216 4.1.11: 104 n. 77; 130 n. 1
Laurentius Hispanus 68, 70, 71 n. 48, 93, 97 4.20.5: 162 n. 169
n. 49, 98, 99, 102, 120, 150, 251 5.7.9: 93–4; 183
Laurentius Hispanus, Apparatus on 3 Comp. 7 5.7.10: 17 n. 17; 229 n. 210
1.24.1: 52 n. 130 5.12.6: 30 n. 58; 32; 46
2.19.11: 259 n. 108 5.16.5: 72 n. 52; 246 n. 50
3.37.5: 50 n. 126 5.27.3–4: 196 n. 95
5.21.16: 147 n. 96 5.27.7: 197 n. 98
Laurentius Hispanus (attrib.), Glossa on the 5.27.9: 200 n. 117
Decretum, see Glossa Palatina 5.31.1: 93 n. 35
legates, papal 62, 77 n. 71, 84, 89–90, 91, 5.31.18: 198–201
121, 123, 138, 156, 183, 188, 193, 196 5.33.3: 67 n. 33, n. 34; 80 n. 83; 122 n.
n. 96, 200, 203, 237, 239, 244, 254, 258, 175; 139 n. 50; 165 n. 183; 193 n. 83;
see also Nicholas; Octavian; Pandulf; Peter 202 n. 127
of Capua 5.33.11: 71 n. 47; 246 n. 51
Leicester, earl of, see Simon de Montfort 5.33.13: 79 n. 79
Le Mans 20 n. 28, 135, 193, 241 5.33.20: 187
bishop of 253 5.33.24: 67 n. 33, n. 34; 165 n. 182; 193 n.
Leo I (Pope) 160, 164 83
León 41, 162, 172, 174, 178, 181 5.33.25: 135 n. 28
Le Puy 250 5.33.26: 124 n. 184
Leviticus 5.38.11: 67 n. 34; 131 n. 4; 141; 149 n.
4:3: 15 101; 150; 159; 160 n. 159; 162 n. 169;
Lewis, duke of Bavaria 2 n. 6, 175 n. 22 165 n. 181
Lex Aquilia 54 5.38.12: 148 n. 100; 152
Lex regia 44 5.39.6: 30 n. 58; 54–5
Liber extra (X) 9, 263 5.39.21: 91
1.4.5: 94 n. 41; 135 n. 25 5.39.29: 42 n. 97; 46; 49 n. 123; 55; 75 n.
1.4.8: 154–5; 253 n. 80 66; 238 n. 16
1.5.1: 60 n. 4; 106–7; 197 n. 100 5.39.33: 101 n. 65
1.6.15: 93 5.39.40: 251 n. 74; 253; 255; 259
1.6.16: 154 n. 129; 155; 156 5.39.43: 131 n. 4; 133 n. 17; 143–4
1.6.20: 15 n. 6 5.39.47: 30 n. 58; 35–7; 56
1.6.54: 97 5.39.48: 81 n. 86; 104; 108; 109; 127 n.
1.9.10: 15 n. 6 200
1.29.1: 90 n. 22 5.39.52: 253 n. 81
1.29.3: 90 n. 23 5.39.57: 150
1.29.11: 90 n. 22 5.40.17: 59; 68; 77 n. 70; 134 n. 22
1.29.29: 90 n. 23 5.40.23: 111–12; 238–40, 242, 244
1.30.7: 91 5.40.24: 244
1.31.3: 98 n. 56; 236 n. 4 Liber sextus (VI) 11, 127, 228, 231, 232, 233,
1.31.13: 73 n. 57; 109 238
1.33.10: 100 n. 63 1.6.3: 127 n. 203
1.33.12: 101 1.13.2: 99
2.24.9: 81 n. 86; 133 n. 18 1.14.2: 81 n. 86
2.28.25: 249–50 1.16.2: 109–110
2.28.26: 103 n. 75; 254 n. 83; 256 n. 94 1.16.8: 111
2.28.37: 250 1.17.un.: 238 n. 13
2.28.53: 250 n. 69; 254 n. 85 3.12.1: 128 n. 207
2.28.55: 94 n. 42 3.20.4: 127 n. 204
3.10.4–5: 93 n. 35 3.21.un.: 73 n. 55
294 Index
Liber sextus (VI) (cont.) Ludeco Cappel, Summarius 143 n.77, 144 n.
3.23.3: 127 n. 200; 231 n. 218; 238 n. 14 85, 158 n. 145, 160 n. 157, 167 n. 190,
5.2.18: 232 n. 219 168 n.192
5.5.1: 128 n. 205 Lund, archbishop of 71, 73, 128, 246
5.7.1: 123 n. 179 Lyon 73, 91, 100, 106, 108 n. 98, 139 n. 51,
5.7.8: 81 n. 86; 127 n. 200; 201–2 see also councils
5.7.11: 67–8; 135 n. 30; 137; 140 n. 59 archbishop of 246 n.51
5.7.12: 140 n. 59 dean and chapter of 96
5.8.un.: 128 n. 206 province 252
5.9.5: 63 n. 18
5.11.1: 81 n. 86; 107–8; 110; 127 n. 200;
246; 256 n. 95 Mâcon, bishop of 195
5.11.2: 254 n. 83 Magna Carta 49
5.11.3: 105 Mainz, archbishop of 63, 104, 108 n.98,
5.11.5: 1 n. 1; 25–6; 76 n. 69 109
5.11.6: 95 n. 43 Majorca; see Pontio, bishop of
5.11.7: 254 n. 83 maledictions; see curses
5.11.9: 106 Marche 107, 121, 174
5.11.10: 257; 258 Margam abbey 169 n.2, 193
5.11.13: 106 Margam annalist 169, 171
5.11.16: 66 n. 29; 77 n. 70; 78 n. 74; 79 Markward of Anweiler 83
5.11.17: 67 n. 30; 69; 73 n. 55 marriage 2, 66, 72, 84, 100, 115, 116, 117
5.11.18: 71 n. 49; 201; 202 n. 125 n.157, 133, 144, 152–3, 155, 156, 160,
5.11.19: 147; 148; 159 172, 225, 248
5.11.20: 82 n. 88; 202 Marseilles 109, 172, 174
5.11.22: 238 n. 17 bishop of 172, 174
5.11.24: 135 n. 29; 139–40; 151; 153; 159; Martin IV (Pope) 82, 177, 179, 184–6, 189,
166; 174; 203; 263 190, 192, 201
5.12.1: 123 n. 179 Martinho, bishop of Oporto 181
5.12.23: 18 n. 20 masses 133, 134, 135, 140, 143, 149–51,
5.12.43: 38 n. 82 153, 164, 171, 190, 199, 201, 219, 223,
Lichfield 156 see also eucharist
Liège 146, 150, 252 Matilda, countess of Flanders 255–6
Limoges 119, 161, 191 Matthew
bishop of 191, see also Alduin 6:24: 170
Lincoln 16:18–19: 86
chancellor of, see William de Montibus 18:15: 32, 37
diocese 132, 142, 144, 146, 152, 153, 156, Matthew Paris, chronicler 188
180 Matthew of Rievaulx 134
Lisbon, bishop of 117 Maundy Thursday 146, 210
Lismore, bishop and chapter of 90–91 Maurienne, count of 183
Llewellyn, ‘prince’ of North Wales 119 Mayo, archdeacon of 91
Lombard law 32 n. 66 Meaux, bishop of 179–80
Lombardy 107, 183–4 Meaux abbey 163, 193
London 171 mendicants, see friars
archdeacon of, see Peter of Blois Messina 185
bishop of 88, 131, 132, 149, 162, 163, San Salvatore monastery at 154
196 metropolitan powers 91–3, 156, 236, 249,
dean and chapter of 157 254
diocese 132 Metz 252
St Bartholomew’s Hospital 163 n.173 Milan 139, 183
Tower of 177 archbishop of 189
Louis, dauphin of France 153 diocese 200, 251
Louis IX, king of France 126 n.194 military orders 67, 69 n. 37, 70, 71, 78,
Lucca, bishop of 248 121–22, 131, 138–9, 140, 144, 150–51,
Lucius III (Pope) 121 165, 166, 192, 193 n.85, 195, 202
 Index 295
Modena 110, 189 ordination 80, 133, 152, 153–6, 188
bishop of 191 Orense 117
Monaldus, OFM, Summa 61–2, 77, 81 n. 87, Origen 15
144 n. 84, 145–6, 147 n. 95, 158 n. 148, Orléans
235 n.1 bishop of 179–80
mortmain legislation 179 dean of 95
mortuary payments 159 Orvieto 246
Müller, P. E. 203 bishop of 256
Muzzo Manonelli of Celluole 210 Osimo, bishop of 121
Otto IV (of Brunswick), German
emperor 104, 118
Naples 130 Ottobuono (Cardinal), constitutions of 128
archbishop of 145 n.210
Narbonne Oviedo 108 n. 98, see also Juan bishop of
archbishop of 229, 233 Oxford, university of 5, 167, 176, 247
province 226
Narni 163, 183, 189
Navarre Palermo 185
king of 107, 124 n. 185 Palm Sunday 143
queen of 81 n. 87 Pandulf, legate 241
Navarre de Miossans, bishop of Dax 219–25 panis benedictus 132, 142–3, 152
Nicholas IV (Pope) 67, 84, 90, 96, 108, 117, papal state 184–5, 187
138, 143, 147, 148, 151, 154, 164, 177, Paris 80
186, 192, 201, 205, 207, 208, 208, 213, bishop of 123, 132, 141, 149, 179, see also
214, 238, 252 Odo
Nicholas, cardinal bishop of Tusculum, synod (1296)228
legate 237 n.9, 247 university of 5, 7, 76, 257
Nicholas Plowe, ‘De interdicto’ 160 n.158 parlement 225–6
Noli 76, 242, 245 parliament 49, 262
Normandy 66, 153 Parma 151, 183, 240
Norwich, bishop of 250 bishop of 244 n. 38
Noyons, bishop of 179–80 Passau anonymous 173
nuns 136, 139, 140, 143, 151 n. 111, 197, see Patti 108 n.98
also abbesses Paucapalea, Summa 5
C.24 q.3 d.a.c.1: 28 n. 51
St Paul 29, 260
oaths 61, 115, 116, 233, 239–40, 242, Paulus Hungarus, Notabilia: 8
243–4, 245, 253, 264 2 Comp. 5.18.9: 237 n. 10
Octavantus of Florence, judge 205 3 Comp. 1.3.7: 154 n. 130
Octavian, cardinal legate 237 3 Comp. 1.6.1: 154 n. 130
Odo, bishop of Paris 179 3 Comp. 1.20.2: 236 n.5
offices, divine 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73–4, 95, 3 Comp. 1.20.5: 235–6 n. 3
101, 123, 128, 130, 133–45, 180, 188, 3 Comp. 5.16.1: 126 n. 195
199, 202, 203, 208, 210–11, 213, 220, 3 Comp. 5.21.14: 236 n. 14
224, 228, 233, 247 3 Comp. 5.23.7: 75 n. 65
exclusion from 77, 78, 81, 134, 137, 139, Pavia 239 n. 22
151, 192, 193 Pecori, L. 206
freedom to celebrate 76, 79, 131, 134–40, Pembroke, earl of 124 n.185
171, 174, 192–5, 200, 203, 258, penance 86, 130, 131, 132, 145, 148, 150,
262–3 156–9, 189, 193, 197, 208, 246, 247–8,
freedom to hear 79, 135–6, 137–40, 175 262
officials, episcopal 94, 99 penitentiary, papal 199 n. 110, 200 n.114
Oloron, bishop, archdeacon and sacristan Pennington, Kenneth 35
of 224 Pentecost 139
Olmütz, bishop of 200 Perigeux, bishop of 192
Oporto, bishop of 81, 117, 179; see also Perugia 82, 100, 189, 190
Martinho Peter, king of Aragon 177, 184–6, 192
296 Index
Pedro, bishop of Coimbra 181 Peter the Chanter, Summa 35, 40
Peter Abelard, see Abelard Peter the Chanter, Verbum abbreviatum 35,
Petrus Beneventanus 7, 36, see also Compilatio 39 n.86
tertia Peter Comestor 33
Peter of Blois, archdeacon of London 131, Petrus Hispanus 259 n.108
132, 141, 142, 149, 157, 162, 171 Peter Lombard 15
Peter of Blois, Speculum 53 n.138 Peter Lombard on Psalms 7
Petrus Bonetus, Lectura on the Liber extra (X) 1:6: 43 n. 100
1.31.3: 99 n. 58 81:4: 39
2.28.37: 75 n. 65; 245 n. 46 Peter Lombard on Romans
3.40.10: 71 n. 48, n. 50; 72 n. 52 1:32: 29 n. 55
4.1.11: 152 n. 120 Pierre Sampsona 10, 136
5.31.18: 144 n. 82 Pierre Sampsona, Distinctiones on the Liber
5.33.3: 70 n. 43 extra (X)
5.38.11: 151 n. 113; 235 n. 1 (anonymous 1.33.12: 101 n. 68
addition) 5.38.11: 68 n. 35; 77 n. 70
Petrus Brito, anonymous pupil of, Apparatus Pierre Sampsona, Lectura on the Liber extra
on 1 Comp. 7, 8 (X)
1.22.un.: 92 n. 28 1.29.36: 256–7 n. 95
1.23.3: 102 n. 69 1.33.12: 101 n. 68
2.17.6: 48 n. 121 2.28.55: 251 n. 73
2.20.41: 161 3.40.4: 71 n. 51; 72 n. 53
2.20.42: 104 3.40.10: 72 n. 52
2.20.46: 250 n. 69 5.39.48: 105 n. 83; 106 n. 88
3.33.1: 72 n. 52 Philip II ‘Augustus’, king of France 84, 104,
4.1.9: 157 n. 142 117 n.157, 179–80, 237, 239, 241
5.2.10: 47 n. 117 Philip III, king of France 126
5.6.11: 94 n. 39 Philip IV the ‘Fair’, king of France 187, 226,
5.10.7: 31 n. 60; 32 n. 65 227, 231–2, 234
5.23.4: 196 n. 95 Philip, bishop of Durham 163 n.174
5.28.8: 122 Philip of Swabia 41, 104
5.31.2: 33 n. 68 Piacenza 130, 183
Peter of Capua, papal legate 89, 141, 142, 143, pilgrimage 63, 113 n.128, 143, 144–5, 151,
144, 146, 148–9, 152, 157, 161, 237 157–8, 160, 161, 221
Pierre Chaceporc, canon of Poitiers 220, Pilius, Summa super Tres Libros (Code, books
221–3 X–XII)
Peter the Chanter 57, 169, 260, 261 11.29: 22 n. 34
Peter the Chanter on Genesis Pisa 110, 118, 185–6, 206, 240, 248
19:25: 16 n. 10 archbishop of 186
Peter the Chanter on Exodus Pistoia 243–4
20:5: 19 n. 26 bishop of 212, 214–15, 216, 218, 239
Peter the Chanter on Deuteronomy plebanus 98–9, 236
5:9: 19 n. 26 pledge; see cautio
Peter the Chanter on Leviticus Poitiers, canon of; see Pierre Chaceporc
4:3: 16 Poitou, count of 89
Peter the Chanter on Ezechiel Polenzuela, archdeacon of 98, 106
18:2: 19 n. 26 Ponthieu, count of 66, 153
Peter the Chanter on 2 Kings Pontio, bishop of Majorca 177
24:1: 40 n. 90 Ponzard de Duno 106
24:16: 41 n. 94 Portugal 59, 78 n. 77, 81, 84, 117, 138,
Peter the Chanter on 4 Kings 178–9, 181–2, 188, 198, 239, 247, see
14:6: 30 n. 57 also Afonso II; Afonso III; Diniz; Sancho
Peter the Chanter on Psalms I; Sancho II, kings of
81:4: 39 n. 89 Post, Gaines 50
Peter the Chanter on Matthew Prague, bishop of 197
18:15: 34 n. 72 Prato 244 n.38
 Index 297
prayer 132, 144, 159–60 Roger of Wendover, chronicler 88, 162, 163,
preaching 44, 117, 132, 138, 139, 143–4, 167, 176, 247
170, 171, 191, 201, 220, 258, 264 Rolando di Ferentino, papal chaplain 177
prelate, definition of 98 Rolandus, Sentences 29, 30, 87
Premonstratensians 121–2 Rolandus, Summa 5
prioresses, see abbesses C.16 q.6: 52 n.136
priors, see abbots and individual priors Romagna 107, 184–5
property (clerical), seizure of 88, 112, 116, ‘Romana Ecclesia’ 10, 92, 254
167, 176, 177, 178, 179–80, 181–2, Romans
188, 198, 215, 221, 227, 232, 240–41 1:32: 29
provisions, papal 69, 114, 156, 177 Rota (Romana) 12 n.39
publishing sentences 106–8, 128, 175–9, 245 Rouen 153
purgatory 173 Rufinus 87
Rufinus, Summa 5
D.23 c.1: 93
Rainieri, bishop of Volterra 205, 206, 209, D.83 d.a.c.1: 29 n. 53, n. 56; 33 n. 69; 45
211–13, 215, 216, 217 n. 110
Ralph, prior of St Benet Holme 163 n.174 C.1 q.4: 17 n. 14
Ralph of Coggleshall, chronicler 161–2, 179 C.16 q.6: 47 n. 116; 52
Ratisbon, bishop of 125
Ravenna, archbishop of 189
Raymond, count of Toulouse 164 sacraments 64, 66, 79, 95, 123, 145–60, 188,
Raymond de Peñafort 9, 199, see also Liber 189, 202, 209, 213, 220, 230–31, 233,
extra 247, 262, 264
Raymond de Peñafort, Summa 18 n. 20; 45; exclusion from 78, 81, 130, 150, 230, 257,
109 n. 104 258
Raymond du Puy, bishop of Agde 233 St Albans abbey 163
‘reconciliation’ of churches or cemeteries 222, St Benet Holme, see Ralph, prior of
223, 246–7 St Denis, abbot of 238
reconsecration, see reconciliation St-Vincent-de-Sentes 220, 223
Regensburg 32 Salerno, archbishop of 41
Reginald of Cornhill 171 Salisbury, bishop of 132
Reims 125, 164 Salzburg 61, 108 n. 98
archbishop of 10, 92, 111, 179, 254, 256, San Galgano, friars of 206–7
see also Hincmar San Gimignano 178, 182, 189, 190, 204–18,
resistance, popular 32–45, 170–71, 260–61 221, 222, 225, 227, 234, 264
restitution 63, 98, 114, 116, 215, 221, 223, Austin friars of 207
232, 233, 240–42, 244 n.in39, 245, 248 church of San Matteo 216
Reuter, Elizabeth 179 Franciscans of 207, 214
Richard, earl of Cornwall 138 palazzo comunale 206, 215
Ricardus Anglicus, Apparatus on 1 Comp. 7 pieve 204, 207, 208, 210–11, 213, 214,
1.16.5: 102 n. 70 217
1.23.2: 255 n. 90 podestà 206, 211, 216, 217, see also Benghus
2.16.6: 38 n. 84 Sancho I, king of Portugal 181–2
2.20.15: 242–3 n. 33 Sancho II, king of Portugal 188
4.1.9: 130 Santa Maria Villacastello 207, 208, 209, 210
4.1.13: 48 n. 121; 103 n. 76; 140 n. 61 Sardinia 186
5.10.7: 30 n. 59 satisfaction 202, 229, 232, 233, 240–45, 253,
5.13.3: 39 n. 86 259, 264, see also restitution
5.28.7: 192–3 n. 83 Savona, bishop of 76, 242
5.34.7: 54 n. 145; 55 n. 146 Sayles, G. O. 180
5.34.14: 126 n. 197 Scafusa abbey 188
Richardson, H. G. 180 Scolarius Ardinghelli, archbishop of
Ridolfi, A. 206–7 Tyre 215–16, 217
Robert, bishop of Bangor 163 Scotland, king of 124 n.185
Robert, duke of Burgundy 62 secular arm 185, 186, 191, 214, 224
Roger of Howden, chronicler 153, 162 Senlis, bishop of 175, 179
298 Index
Sens C.24 q.3: 16 n. 11
archbishop of 95, 125, 197–8 Summa ‘De iure canonico tractaturus’
chapter of 197 C.16 q.6 c.1: 53 n. 138
hospital of 166 Summa Parisiensis 5
Shrewsbury 163 C.1 q.4: 29 n. 53
Sicard of Cremona, Summa C.16 q.6: 53 n. 137
C.24 q.3: 28 n. 51 Summa Reginensis
Sicily 78 n.77, 82, 83, 118, 138, 151, 154, D.50 c.8: 54 n. 143
156, 177, 184–6, 187, 188, 191–2, 201 D.83 d.a.c.1: 29 n. 53
Siena 204, 208 suspension 96, 107, 108, 109, 177, 189, 194,
bishop of 207 195, 196, 198, 199–201, 238, 253
merchants of 106, 242 Swabia, duke of 105, 118, 240; see also Philip
Silesia, duke of 83 of
Silos, abbey of 98, 106 synods, see Paris; see also councils
Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester 124, 229
Simon of Southwell 5
simony 22, 47, 72, 126 Tancred of Bologna 7, 9, 58, 120, 157, see
Snellshall priory 163 also Compilatio quinta
Sodom 16 Tancred of Bologna, Apparatus on 1 Comp.
Soissons, bishop of 125, 179 1.15.2: 97 n. 50
Somerville, Robert 149–50 1.15.4: 96 n. 49
Southwell minster 176–7 1.15.5: 97 n. 52
Spain 172, see also Aragon; Castile; León 1.23.2: 255 n. 90
Spoleto 82, 258 1.23.3: 99 n. 57, n. 58; 236 n. 4
Squillace, bishop of 191–2 4.1.13: 140 n. 61; 141 n. 67; 158 n. 147;
Stephen of Bourbon, OP 64 191 n. 76
Stephen Langton, archbishop of 5.10.7: 32 n. 65; 46 n. 114
Canterbury 42, 44, 49, 88, 89, 141, 156, 5.16.1: 122 n. 178
170–71, 241, 260 5.23.3: 196 n. 96
Stephen Langton on Genesis 5.23.4: 196 n. 96
19:25: 16 n. 10 5.28.3: 122 n. 177; 165 n. 183
Stephen Langton on Exodus 5.34.7: 56 n. 150
20:5: 15 Tancred of Bologna, Apparatus on 2 Comp.
Stephen Langton on Deuteronomy 1.3.7: 93 n. 33; 239 n. 19
24:16: 16 n. 11 1.4.1: 197 n. 101
Stephen Langton on Leviticus 1.6.2: 122 n. 178
4:3: 16 1.8.5: 155 n. 131
Stephen Langton on 2 Kings 2.5.1: 122 n. 178
23:59: 40 n. 93 2.7.3: 243 n. 35
24:1: 20 n. 27; 40 n. 93; 41 n. 95 2.14.2: 53 n. 139
Stephen Langton on 4 Kings 3.5.2: 18 n. 23
14:16: 16 n. 11 3.9.2: 64 n. 20; 70 n. 46; 102 n. 72
Stephen Langton on Peter Lombard’s gloss on 3.18.6: 99–100 n. 61
Romans 3.26.2: 164 n. 177
1:32: 37 n. 80 3.27.1: 150 n. 106
Stephen of Tournai 123 5.13.3: 256 n. 92
Stephen of Tournai, Summa 5 5.13.4: 92 n. 28
D.54 c.20: 38 n. 82 5.14.2: 122 n. 178
D.83 d.a.c.1: 29 n. 53, n. 56; 45 n. 110 5.18.4: 239–40 n. 24
D.83 c.3: 33 n. 69 5.28.7: 151 n. 110
Strasbourg 78, 164, 203 Tancred of Bologna, Apparatus on 3 Comp.
strikes 204, 216 1.3.4: 65 n. 25; 93 n. 36
Stubbs, William 171 1.3.7: 155 n. 132
suicide 161, 162 1.4.1: 60 n. 5; 106 n. 93; 107 n. 94
Summa ‘Animal est substantia’ 8 1.18.5: 237 n. 11
D.83 c.2–3: 36 n. 78 1.19.5: 91 n. 25
C.23 q.8 c.34: 31 n. 60 1.20.1: 100 n. 62
 Index 299
1.20.2: 250 n. 69 Tuscany 63–4
1.24.1: 51 n. 130; 155 n. 134 league of 118, 240
2.18.1: 236 n. 8 Tyre, archbishop of 138, see also Scolarius
2.19.11: 259 n. 108
2.19.13: 94 n. 42; 250 n. 68
3.5.9: 92 n. 28 Ulignano 205
3.31.3: 72 n. 53 Ulpian 21
5.2.2: 24 n. 39 Umbria 156
5.4.1: 47 n. 115 ‘Unam sanctam’ 229
5.21.14: 255 n. 89 universals 28
5.21.16: 147 n. 96 universities 167, see also Bologna, Oxford,
5.23.1: 68 n. 36 Paris
5.23.7: 243 n. 34; 251 n. 72 Urban II (Pope) 124
Tarragona, archbishop of 154 n.126 Urban IV (Pope) 119, 140, 156, 248
taxation of clergy 111, 114, 117, 127, 206, usury 113 n. 125, 128, 165, 202
213, 225–8, 229, 231–2, 233, 252, see Utrecht, bishop of 242
also ‘Clericis laicos’
Térouanne,
bishop of 179–80 vacancies (sede vacante) 93–4, 237–8
diocese 258 Valencia 145
tertiaries 151, 166, 203, see also Dominicans; vassals, see feudal relations
Franciscans; Humiliati Vendôme 45, 169
Tewkesbury annals 134 Venice 185–6
St Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum doge of 186
IV dist. 18, ii, 3 q.2: 27 n. 48; 49 Vercelli 69
IV dist. 18, ii, 3 q.3: 18 n. 19 bishop of 189
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae Verdun 106, 177–8, 182, 191, 252
IIa IIae , 108, art. 4, ad. 1: 52 n. ‘Vergentis’ 14, 17, 46, 229 n.210
133 Vesprém 77
St Thomas Becket, archbishop of viaticum, see eucharist
Canterbury 30, 32, 46, 175 Vienne 73, 91, 198, see also councils; Henry
Thuringia, see Hermann, landgrave of count of
Tillmann, Helene 184 archbishop of 105
tithes 113, 172, 173, 178, 206, 213, province 252
223 Vincentius (Hispanus), Apparatus on 1
Toledo province 196 Comp. 7, 10
Toul diocese 252 1.4.17: 101 n. 66
Toulouse 173, 174, 243, 244 1.15.3: 99 n. 57
bishop of 173 1.15.4: 97 n. 49
count of 81 n. 87, see also Raymond 1.23.2: 250 n. 69
Tournai 73 1.35.4: 48 n. 120; 53 n. 138
Tours 201, see also councils 2.20.7: 256 n. 92
‘bishop’ of 196 2.20.17: 243 n. 31
canon of 200 4.1.10: 149
trade ban, see commercial sanctions 4.1.13: 48 n. 121; 141 n. 61
Transylvania, bishop of 123 5.2.7: 54 n. 142
Tréguier 186 5.2.21: 48 n. 119
bishop of 190 5.10.7: 33 n. 68
Trent, bishop of 92 5.23.3: 196 n. 96
Treviso 183 5.28.7: 151 n. 110
Tricarico, bishop of 156 Vincentius (Hispanus), Apparatus on 3
Trinitarians 80 n.82 Comp. 7, 10
Troyes, bishop of 125 1.4.1: 60 n. 6; 141 n. 61
truces 114, 119 1.19.5: 91 n. 25
Turin 105, 240 1.20.1: 100 n. 62
300 Index
Vincentius (Hispanus), Apparatus on 3 Volpe, G. 206
Comp.: (cont.) Volterra 205, 218
1.20.5: 92 n. 28 bishop of 204–5, see Rainieri
2.19.13: 94 n. 42 diocese 199, 204
5.16.1: 70–71 n. 46
5.21.14: 255 n. 88, n. 89
5.21.16: 147 n. 96 Waldensians 173
5.23.1: 68 n. 36 Wales 119 n. 163, 124 n. 185, 131, 193, 237
Vincentius (Hispanus), Apparatus on Lat. n. 9, see also Llewellyn
Conc. IV 9, 10 Waley, Daniel 206
c.7: 109 war (holy), see crusading
c.42: 251 n. 73 water, holy 132, 142–3, 246
c.58: 136 n. 35 Waverley abbey 163
Vincentius (Hispanus), Apparatus on the Liber William Durand the Elder, archbishop of
extra (X): 10 Mende 143
1.4.5: 65 n. 24 William Durand the Elder, Apparatus on Lugd.
1.5.1: 60 n. 6 Conc. II 11
1.6.15: 93 n. 33 c.17: 73 n. 58; 110
1.31.3: 99 n. 58 c.30: 257 n. 97, n. 98; 258 n. 101
1.31.13: 74 n. 60 William Durand the Elder, Speculum
1.33.12: 101 n. 68 iudiciale 11, 71 n. 48, 72–3 n.54
4.1.11: 158 n. 147 William de Montibus, chancellor of
5.27.3: 196 n. 96 Lincoln 163, 164
5.33.25: 136 n. 35; 154 n. 125 Winchester, bishop of 169
5.38.11: 135 n. 24 Worcester, bishop of 88, 89, 131
5.39.40: 255 n. 89 Wratislava, bishop of 83
5.39.43: 148 Würzburg 73
5.39.47: 37 n. 79 Conrad, bishop of 83
5.39.52: 92 n. 30
5.40.17: 68–9 n. 36
violation of churches or cemeteries 70–73, York diocese 134, 176
113, 127, 222, 246–7, 248
violence against clergy 30–31, 32, 35–7,
63–4, 71, 73, 83, 88, 113, 114, 128, 167, Zoën Tencarius, Apparatus on 5 Comp. 9, 58
176, 177, 181–2, 188–9, 198, 211, 216, 1.13.1: 97 n. 52
221, 234, 248 1.18.1: 75 n. 64
visitation, episcopal 69, 92, 113 n. 127, 115 3.8.3: 56 n. 151
n.146, 123 5.12.1: 122 n. 178
Viterbo 14 5.18.3: 24–5
Vodola, Elizabeth 84 Zwerin, count of 119