A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages

Walter Ullmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134415342
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This classic text outlines the development of the Papacy as an institution in the Middle Ages. With profound knowledge, insight and sophistication, Walter Ullmann traces the course of papal history from the late Roman Empire to its eventual decline in the Renaissance.

The focus of this survey is on the institution and the idea of papacy rather than individual figures, recognizing the shaping power of the popes' roles that made them outstanding personalities. The transpersonal idea, Ullmann argues, sprang from Christianity itself and led to the Papacy as an institution sui generis.

1: The Papacy in the late Roman Empire

THE MEASURE BY which the Emperor Constantine the Great not only granted the Christian Church freedom of religious worship in 313, but also decreed the return of ecclesiastical goods confiscated during the persecutions, had necessarily far-reaching consequences for the local church of Rome. Throughout the preceding century and a half this church had assumed some position of leadership in doctrinal religious questions. The Constantinean settlement acknowledged this state of affairs. Moreover, the Roman church had been credited with some preeminence by a number of earlier writers and theologians who applied certain biblical texts, notably in the New Testament, to this church. It is nevertheless worthy of remark that this biblically based pre-eminence of the Roman church was asserted by writers and ecclesiastics outside Rome. This is important to bear in mind if the historical situation is to be properly assessed: there was neither before nor for some considerable time after the Constantinean peace any reference by the church of Rome itself to any biblical basis of its pre-eminent role among Christian communities.

The consultative machinery which the Roman church had devised in the ages before Constantine was entirely in line with the principle that the law should be the vehicle of government. For the synods (or councils) held frequently in Rome under the chairmanship of the bishop of Rome, were assemblies in which differing points were debated and eventually formulated in the shape of canons, that is, decrees. This Roman device very greatly assisted the nascent local church, because the synods carried great weight not because they were chaired by the local Roman bishop but because no appeal could be made to any other tribunal. By the time of the settlement of 313 the Roman church had a some-what superior but purely moral authority in comparison with other churches, just as Rome itself carried greater weight than, say, Milan or Marseille. There was, as yet, no suggestion that the Roman church possessed any legal or constitutional pre-eminence. However, the higher moral authority enjoyed by the Roman church was very important for the subsequent evolution of the theme of papal primacy.

The most immediate effect of the Constantinean settlement on the Roman church was that it—like any other church in the Roman empire—became a legal corporate personality within the terms of the Roman law. This recognition of the Roman church as a corporate body obviously had more important results than a similar recognition had for other churches. Thereby the Roman church became integrated into the Roman public law. The Roman church had become a body public-just as the whole Christian body, the universal Church, had become a body public—with all attendant legal consequences.

Moreover, by the early fourth century the Roman church had an internal organization at once superior to, and larger than, any other church in the empire. For instance, a generation earlier Pope Cornelius in a communication to Antioch (253) mentioned in passing that the Roman church had, apart from its bishop, 46 priests, 7 deacons, 7 subdeacons, 52 exorcists, lectors and door-keepers to whom must be added ancillary personnel and of course the Roman members without any official status. That this community needed organization, is self-evident. The Romans had always been noted for their organizational talent, and the available evidence shows in fact a respectably high organizational arrangement. When therefore Constantine conferred legal status on the Roman church, it had the inestimable advantage of already having a fairly advanced organization.

The fourth-century imperial government served as a classic example of monarchy. It was in the fourth century that the Roman church slowly began to pay heed to some of the so-called petrinological themes advanced by writers such as Tertullian and Cyprian. Their themes made the position and function of St Peter as the chief apostle their focal point, and these themes could not but help to crystallize the monarchic tendencies of the bishops of Rome. There was, in any case, a very articulate current of opinion in fourth-century Rome which showed keen aversion from polytheism and a corresponding preference for monotheism—the one deity replacing the many. This philosophic-religious orientation was of great advantage to the monarchic leanings of the papacy (as the Roman church came gradually to be known). As a matter of fact, in the edict of Milan (313) Constantine himself spoke of ‘the deity on the celestial throne’ and thereby under-scored the theme of the one supreme God, the very essence of the Christian religion.

In his efforts to restore and maintain political as well as religious unity within the Roman empire, Constantine after removing his residence to Byzantium (the city on the Bosporus soon to bear his name, Constantinople) adopted the instrument which the Roman church had customarily used: the synod. The very year after Milan he convoked a council at Arles (314) which still ranks as the first Christian council summoned by a Ruler who was not a Christian. Its purpose was to find a common denominator for certain diverging dogmatic points of view relative to Christianity. As a result of the transfer of the imperial seat from Rome to Byzantium, the Eastern provinces of the empire gained at once in importance and weight, while on the other hand the role of the Roman church as the church situate in the capital began to be gravely affected by this move.

The great Council of Nicaea (325) convoked by the Emperor Constantine for the purpose of finding a common basis for the different Christian factions, was attended by nearly 200 bishops, though the church of Rome was merely represented by two priests. The balance was so much tilted towards the East that not more than four occidental bishops were present altogether, while the leader of this small group, the fifth western bishop, Hosius of Cordova, was an imperial appointee. The significance of this is not difficult to grasp: in the decisions of the first general council the church of Rome did not even play a minor part, although in a later age it was credited with the leadership of this council.

The convocation of this council, its composition and the predominance of Eastern participants were portents. It is of some considerable significance in this context to note that in his opening address Constantine referred to Byzantium as ‘New Rome’—the opening bar of a major symphonic theme. If Constantinople was ‘New Rome’, the implication was clear for Rome itself and consequently for the standing of its church. Constantinople had become the empire’s governmental and political centre of gravity. This factor was to a very large extent to determine the path of the Roman church.

Above all, because the Roman church—like any other church—was now part of the Roman public law which included the ius in sacris, the constitutional right of the emperor to convoke a council and to intervene directly in the affairs of the Christian Church, including the Roman church, could, from the constitutional standpoint, never be doubted. It was precisely part of the Constantinean settlement that the emperor attained this direct power in ecclesiastical matters. His designation as pontifex maximus (supreme priest) which according to the old Roman constitution he in any case was, was therefore no empty title. The traditional Roman monarchic imperial government thus received an enormous boost, partly owing to the influence of Christian monotheism on the one hand and partly to the ‘incorporation’ of the whole Christian Church into the sacred-public law on the other. The emperor had therefore a veritable legislative monopoly in ecclesiastical matters. It is advisable to draw special attention to these features because to some considerable extent they explain the growing tensions between Constantinople and the papacy, tensions which eventually led to a division of East and West. The drama that was to unfold itself in the subsequent millennium was very largely due to this constitutional legal framework of the Constantinean settlement. However little recognized, this constitutional aspect was of prime importance to the government at Constantinople.

The imperial government’s aim to achieve and preserve unity throughout the empire explains why the Roman church as the principal and focal church in the Roman empire was particularly privileged by Constantine. He raised its material standards by special benefactions—which ten centuries later were the target of biting comments by Dante— and began a notable building programme which in its munificence was unsurpassed by any later Ruler. The bishop of Rome was now given a residence fitting for the bishop of the first city of the empire—the Lateran palace—and next to it the emperor began the erection of the Roman episcopal church. Mention should be made here of the other important church in Rome—St Peter’s basilica—to which after its completion the earthly remains of the apostle were said to have been transferred.

This improvement of its external-material position was accompanied by internal, organizational measures. The Roman church now began the process of imitating imperial patterns. This was a feature which was to remain highly significant in the early part of the development of the Roman church. On the imperial model a chancery was established, and papal registers of incoming and outgoing mail were kept in the Lateran archives. Furthermore, as a result of imperial legislation the clerics of the Roman church began to enjoy a great many special privileges which amounted to exemption from public burdens, especially taxation as well as from the jurisdiction of the imperial courts in all cases involving faith, ecclesiastical dogma and discipline (23 June 318). Even purely civil cases had to be transferred from an imperial court to episcopal arbitration, if one of the contending parties demanded this.

Yet there was the paradoxical situation that the freedom of deployment granted to the Christian churches by imperial edict, resulted in the propagation of a great many doctrines by individual churches, especially in the East. This brought about serious internal rifts. What was lacking was a central authority endowed with the power of finally settling a controversial dispute. The only such authority was that of the imperial government. It was virtually forced to adopt a policy that imposed union on all churches, if Christianity was not to be fragmented and torn into numerous factions and sections and splinter groups, which would have nullified the basic aim which Constantine pursued in liberating the Christian Church. A council at Sardica (Sofia) was convoked by imperial order for 343 but it achieved little except an endorsement of the pre-eminent function of the Roman bishop because ‘he upheld the memory of St Peter’. The vagueness of this statement, however interesting it is doctrinally, probably accounted for the small practical response to this decree, in which the primatial position of the Roman church was not unambiguously stated. The imperial policy of forcing through a union produced a situation in which the bishop of Rome was to all intents and purposes manhandled: the Emperor Constantius exiled Liberius, bishop of Rome, in 355 until he, so to speak, signed on the dotted line. This event showed clearly what great concern the imperial government then displayed in obtaining the agreement of the Roman church to the plan for unity of the Christian faith, which was intended by Constantine to be the leaven of the Roman empire. Because it was situated in the capital of the Roman empire, the local Roman church had a special preeminence and superior authority, and its agreement to any ecclesiastical or religious measure proposed, was for this very reason held to be essential in the interests of the Roman empire. This position accorded to the Roman church by the imperial government to no small extent fertilized the ground for the later juristic pre-eminence and primacy of the Roman church.

In the history of the papacy—and of Christianity—the decree of the Emperor Theodosius I (27 February 380) was of fundamental importance. It made Christianity in the shape given to it by the church of Rome and the church of Alexandria the religion of the Roman empire. In substance this decree wholly accepted the point of view upon which the Roman and Alexandrian churches had insisted, that is, strict adherence to the decrees of Nicaea and condemnation of Arianism. The gist of the imperial decree was that all subjects of the empire must henceforward accept that religion ‘which the apostle of God (i.e. Christ), St Peter, has delivered to the Romans and which is now professed by the pontiff Damasus and the bishop of apostolic sanctity Peter of Alexandria’. This was followed by the Nicaean declaration concerning the Trinity and the further declaration that any revolt against this religion was heresy and therefore an offence against the empire itself.

The equality stipulated in this Theodosian decree between the Alexandrian and Roman churches, did not survive more than a year. In 381 the place of the Alexandrian church was taken by the church of Constantinople on the occasion of the Second General Council. And most significantly this was called the church of New Rome and accorded a rank immediately after the Roman church. The church of Constantinople was raised to the position which Alexandria had hitherto occupied because Constantinople was the capital of the empire, and the pre-eminence which was still granted to the Roman church rested upon similar considerations: Rome was the old capital. Yet it is noteworthy in view of later developments that in his edict sanctioning the decrees of this synod (issued on 30 July 381) Theodosius did not even mention Rome or the church of Rome at all. Entirely in agreement with the Constantinean standpoint he emphasized that the imperial government alone was to be the authority which watched over the orthodoxy of the bishops (and hence of all Christians). Thereby the government made crystal clear that Rome and its church were to be relegated to an inferior place. Rome was to sink to the rank of a historical site. The inferior position now accorded to the Roman church found expression in the decree of the Council of Constantinople which stated that no bishop was allowed to intervene in the affairs of any other diocese. Translated into reality this excluded Rome from intervening in Constantinopolitan matters. The ecclesiastical centre of gravity was manifestly in Constantinople.

It is against this background that the subsequent development of the papacy as an institution of government can be understood. The period between the late fourth and the mid-fifth centuries was the age of gestation as far as the fundamental principles of papal government and the making of the institution itself were concerned. And it cannot be strongly enough stressed that this development was very largely the result of the challenge to its status issued by the imperial government of Constantinople.

A significant step in the institutional direction was taken by Damasus, the first pope to refer consistently to the Roman church as ‘the apostolic see’ (‘sedes apostolica’). This designation was to become standard throughout the following millennium and claimed a monopolistic position for the Roman church according it superior rank and primary position among all other churches. As a counter-weight against the views expressed at the Council of Constantinople, the council held in Rome in 382 declared that the Roman church was not set up by any synodal decrees (a bold hit at the Council of Constantinople), but was founded by two apostles, St Peter and St Paul. Not only was the Roman church now credited with a double apostolic foundation—and no other church could raise a claim to so distinguished an ancestry—but this distinction conspicuously differentiated it from the church of Constantinople which, because of its recent establishment, was what it was solely by virtue of being situated in the administrative centre of the empire. The reference to a divinely willed foundation of the Roman church was a further assertion challenging the decree of the Second General Council of Constantinople. The great ideological advance which this Roman synod of 382 made was that the historic justification of the pre-eminence of the Roman church was replaced by the assertion of a divine ordinance which had made St Peter (and St Paul, according to the synodal decree) its founder. Furthermore, this Roman synod of 382 also operated with the pregnant and potent terminology of the ‘primacy of the Roman church’. In the history of the papacy no other term or concept or idea was to play such a crucial role as this. And a great deal of the subsequent papal history concerned the contents and the meaning of the ‘primacy of the Roman church’.

By repeatedly emphasizing the function and position of St Peter, Damasus’ pontificate officially introduced the basic petrinological theme. This was a theme that had been aired by theologians and writers and littérateurs before this time, but had not been made part of official papal doctrine or ideology. Only two such writers need be mentioned here, Cyprian and Tertullian, because their petrinological themes became integral elements of the papal programme and thus came to direct the path of the papacy. The former coined the very term of ‘see of St Peter’ (‘cathedra Petri’) specifically and exclusively referring it to the Roman church while the latter, a lawyer in the old Roman tradition, showed how Christian themes could in fact be advantageously shaped if the Roman law were brought to bear on them. Roman jurisprudence was harnessed to the service of Christian dogma and philosophy—the enduring bequest of Tertullian. The debt which the papacy owed to Tertullian is still not fully appreciated. For it was precisely the employment of jurisprudential principles which enabled the papacy to become an institution of government charged with the direction of Christians by means of the law. From its infancy the papacy had spent its life on Roman soil and in Roman environs. However much the legal complexion of the papacy has been misunderstood, the great legacy which the institution handed to later medieval (and modern) Europe is undeniable, for in the public field it was the papacy as primarily an organ of the law which formed the bridgehead between the raw, illiterate and barbarous Germanic West and the ancient, mature and fully developed Roman civilization. There was no other link between these two but the papacy in Rome. In transmitting the idea of the law as the vehicle of government the Roman papacy has made a fundamental and perhaps its most important contribution to the making of Europe.

It is therefore wholly understandable why the papacy as a legal and governmental institution readily borrowed a number of administrative features from the highly sophisticated imperial practice. Particularly conspicuous among these was the medium of communicating with the ecclesiastical authorities outside Rome. Pope Siricius, the immediate successor of Damasus, was the first to issue the kind of letter which was henceforward to be the papacy’s vehicle of communication. The so-called decretal letter of the papacy was modelled on the ‘decrees’ or ‘responses’ (‘responsa’) of the emperor dispatched to provincial governors which decided controversiallegal matters. In 385 the papacy sent a decretal letter to the Spanish bishops which is the oldest extant decretal and quite a formidable juristic document. As the name implies, a decretal was a letter which decided a matter finally and authoritatively (‘decernere—decretum est’). In itself the device was at once a sign of the papacy’s centralizing aims and a symptom of its authoritative standing. The decretal was a juristic decision in a concrete case, but—and this is very important to bear in mind—by virtue of the universality of papal authority, it came to be credited with universal validity.

This oldest surviving decretal of Siricius struck up themes which in the following ages were to become staple ingredients of the tens of thousands of papal decretals. Here the pope spoke of himself as the heir of St Peter and it was in this capacity that he carried the burdens of all, as he claimed, accepting thereby (on the Pauline model) responsibility for the whole Christian body public. In the spirit of the Roman synod of 382 this decretal associated the Petrinity of the pope with the idea expressed by St Paul that upon him the care of all the churches rested (II Cor. 11.28). Petrine and Pauline elements were conjoined and indissolubly linked with juristic precision and polish. From the purely juristic standpoint this Sirician decretal was a masterpiece of legal subtlety and shows the powerful influence which Roman jurisprudence had upon the nascent papacy. It is understandable that, once more in agreement with imperial practice, from the eighties of the fourth century onwards particular care was devoted to the papal archives. The archives were, so to speak, the readily available storehouse of the papacy’s declarations.

Of no lesser significance in the history of the papacy was the suggestion made by Pope Damasus to St Jerome that he should translate the Bible into a Latin which was easily comprehensible and also up to date. The suggestion bore fruit in the translation which later became known as the Vulgate. The original Hebrew as well as the Greek texts of the Bible now became available in a Latin which was the language of the late fourth-century educated Roman classes. But since a good deal of the Old Testament especially was legalistic, the employment of Roman law terminology to convey the meaning of Old Testament expressions suggested itself. Roman legal terminology was thus unobtrusively disseminated thoughout the Bible text of the Vulgate. The readers of the Bible in the Middle Ages absorbed at the same time basic Roman jurisprudence. It is commonly overlooked that the Latinized Bible was one of the most influential transmitters of Roman law ideas to the European Middle Ages. That for the papacy the availability of a competent and elegant Latin text of the Bible was of vital concern, was self-evident. What needs stressing however is that the legal and institutional character of the papacy came to be strongly buttressed by the Vulgate: the service rendered by this translation to the nascent as well as the matured papacy is hardly recognized, but deserves to be properly appreciated.

Although by the late fourth century the pre-eminent position of St Peter was generally acknowledged in the local Roman milieu and although his death (and that of St Paul) as a martyr in Rome was commonly accepted, there had as yet been no attempt, certainly by the papacy, to argue the pope’s function in exclusively juristic terms. It was all very well to speak of ‘the apostolic see’, of ‘the heir of St Peter’, and so on, but even if these were implicitly hinted at in the Bible, there was no explicit biblical declaration on the question of a successor to St Peter. Yet in view of the stand taken up by the papacy from Damasus onwards, the demand for a clear historical basis of these views and expressions became ever stronger. The deficiency of a provable original declaration was no doubt keenly felt at this very time. It is assuredly no coincidence that at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries a document originally written in Greek towards the end of the second century, was translated by Rufinus of Aquileja who is better known through his translation of the Church History by Eusebius. It was this document in Latin translation which provided the missing link between St Peter and the popes in Rome as his legal successors. And it was in this document that the crucial biblical passage was cited in full, according to which Christ had handed to St Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven so that what St Peter loosed on earth, would be loosed in heaven, and what St Peter bound on earth would be bound in heaven. This conferment of powers by Christ on St Peter was a transmission in thoroughly juristic terms and accorded well with Jewish tradition. And the juristic tenor of this Matthean passage (Matt. 16.18f.) was perhaps still more clearly discernible in the Latin translation which employed the characteristic Roman law terms and notions of solvere (to loose) and ligare (to bind) as the operational terms of the passage.

The importance of this piece warrants a few more remarks. Written by an unknown author, it purported to be a letter which Pope Clement I—a historic personality—was said to have written to St James, the brother of Christ, in Jerusalem informing him of the last disposition which St Peter had made when he felt his end near. In this spurious letter to St James, Pope Clement said that St Peter had summoned the Roman Christian community and addressed them in a quite unambiguous manner thus:

I (that is, Peter) impart to him (that is, Clement) the authority of binding and loosing in order that whatever he (Clement) will decide upon earth, will be approved in heaven, for he will bind what must be bound and he will loose what should be loosed.

This was meant to be a last-will disposition announced in public so that there could be no doubt about its intent. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to the reprint
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: The Papacy in the late Roman Empire
• 2: The Papal Conflict with the Imperial Government
• 3: The Papacy and the Conversion of England
• 4: The Western Orientation of the Papacy
• 5: The Papacy and Latin Europe
• 6: The German Monarchy and the Papacy
• 7: The Gregorian Age
• 8: Tensions and Conflicts
• 9: The Zenith of the Medieval Papacy
• 10: Central Government and the Papal Curia
• 11: Gradual Decline of Papal Authority
• 12: Avignon, Rome and Constance
• 13: The Last Phase of the Medieval Papacy
• Abbreviations
• Bibliographical Notes
• Appendix
• List of Medieval Popes