RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Innocent III
of Margrave Boniface of Montferrat, and the Cistercian Martin, abbot at Colmar, sued for the cause in southern Germany. However, the The crusading army, camping at Venice, Fourth was employed by the Doge Dandalo to Crusade, recover the city of Zara, which had been wrested from the Venetians by the king of Hungary. Then, and likewise contrary to the will of the pope, the crusading knights offered their help to the Byzantine pretender, Alexios Angelos, the son of the deposed and blinded emperor Isaac Angelos, to recover his ancestral inheritance, withheld from him by the usurper Alexios III., and conquer Constantinople. After Constantinople had been duly won by the crusaders and Isaac Angelos and his son had resumed possession of the throne, the situation between Greeks and Latins became so intolerable that during an insurrection of the former, Alexios Angelos, who was supposed to be all too partial to the Latins, was thrown into prison, and ultimately strangled. There now remained no other course open to the Latin knights than to possess themselves of the city by force of arms, and organize a Latin empire there; whereupon, May 16, 1204, Count Baldwin of Flanders was crowned as emperor. Through the founding of the Latin empire, a much desired prospect toward eventual union of the Greek and the Latin Churches was disclosed to the see of Peter, and Innocent, who at first had bitterly censured the delay which the crusade had suffered by the expedition to Constantinople, now gave written expression to his joy over the great success of arms, and voiced the hope that there might soon be one shepherd and one fold, and the appointment of a Roman patriarch of Constantinople soon followed. Innocent supplied a new goal for the ardor of crusading by the terms of a bull dated Oct. 12, 1204, wherein he guaranteed the same gracious dispensations for an expedition to Livonia as for participation in a march to Jerusalem; he even authorized all those who had declared themselves ready for the latter to exchange this obligation in favor of the march to Livonia. By the continual importation of new troops Bishop Albert of Riga (q.v.) succeeded in baptizing the Livonians in 1206, and the Letts in 1208.
Moreover, Innocent III. was the first to impart to the crusades the direction of heretical wars. As early as 1207 he summoned the French king to extirpate the heretics in the district about Toulouse, and allowed every one who should unite in the crusade against these the same indulgence as to the crusaders proper. The cruelties against the Albigenses do not fall so much to the charge of Innocent in person as to that of the Innocent " system " which, under him and and the through him, attained its full develop- Fourth ment and execution. The regulations Lateran devised by the pope against heretics Council, were approved at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and were codified as canon law. All who hold stations of power shall promise to endure no heretics in their jurisdiction. Should a prince fail to heed the injunction to cleanse his land of heretics, he is subject to the ban; in the
event of protracted resistance, he is to be deposed from his sovereignty. Whoever takes part in such a crusade is to be guaranteed the benefits accorded to the proper crusaders. Exceedingly severe, again, was the policy inaugurated and ordained by this council against the Jews. Not merely were the authorities forbidden to intrust the Jew with a public office, but the Jews were commanded to dress differently from the Christians to the end that they might at once be recognizable as Jews; they were forbidden to go abroad in the streets during Holy Week, lest in this time of mourning the Christians take offense at their gay apparel. Among the other decisions passed by this council may be noted as important the rejection of the erroneous doctrine of Amalric of Bena (q.v.); the condemnation of the tract aimed against Peter Lombard by Joachim of Fiore, De unitate seu essentia trinitatis; and the prohibition to found new orders. The final deliverance by the council was its assent to the papal bull inviting peoples and princes to a new crusade into the Holy Land for 1207. This ecumenical council, held at the close of Innocent's pontificate, shows that powerful pope as the unlimited ruler over the world and the Church. Emperors, kings, and princes had sent him their plenipotentiaries; 1,500 archbishops, bishops, abbots, etc., took part in the council's proceedings; or, more properly expressed, they attended the official reading of the decrees of Innocent III., since nothing was attempted in the way of actual deliberations.
The absolutism of Innocent III. in the internal administration of the Church exceeds that of all his predecessors. No one else encroached The Admin- to a like degree upon the prerogatives istration of of the bishops and metropolitans, or so the Church, highly arrogated to himself the right of appointment vested in the local church dignitaries. He was the first to claim for the popes a right to bestow benefices; and he issued innumerable provisional orders to the end of securing, at the expense of the locally resident clergy and with the abated prestige of the native bishops, a productive living to the papal servants, the Roman ecclesiastics, even to his blood relatives and confidants. The centralization of ecclesiastical power in the hands of the pope was also furthered by Innocent by his reserving to himself the right of episcopal appointment in case the qualified electors overstepped their canonical prerogatives. He likewise reserved to the Roman see the right of removing bishops, declaring that it devolved on the pope alone, as vicar of Christ, to dissolve the marriage between a bishop and his congregation.
The unbounded prestige enjoyed by Innocent III. in questions of canon law rested alike upon his variously demonstrated legal acumen Decretals and upon his thorough and minute and knowledge of the material. The de- Sermons, cretals of the first three years of his pontificate were collected by Rainer of Pomposi, and subsequently Bernardus Compostellanus undertook to compile in a single collection (Compilatio Romano) the ordinances deriving from the first nine years of his papacy. Again, the
Innocent III-IV