Pope Innocent III (Latin: Innocentius III; born Lotario de' Conti di Segni; 1160/1161 – 16 July 1216) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Papal States from 8 January 1198 until his death in 1216.
Pope Innocent was one of the most powerful and influential of the medieval popes. He exerted a wide influence over the Christian states of Europe, claiming supremacy over all of Europe's kings. He was central in supporting the Catholic Church's reforms of ecclesiastical affairs through his decretals and the Fourth Lateran Council. This resulted in a considerable refinement of Western canon law. He is furthermore notable for using interdict and other censures to compel princes to obey his decisions, although these measures were not uniformly successful.
Innocent greatly extended the scope of the Crusades, directing crusades against Muslim Iberia and the Holy Land as well as the Livonian Crusade against the Baltic and Finnic pagans of Livonia and the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in southern France. He organized the Fourth Crusade of 1202–1204, which ended in the sack of Constantinople. Although the attack on Constantinople went against his explicit orders, and the Crusaders were subsequently excommunicated, Innocent reluctantly accepted this result, seeing it as the will of God to reunite the Latin and Eastern Orthodox Churches. In the event, the sack of Constantinople and the subsequent period of Frankokratia heightened the hostility between the Latin and Greek churches; the Byzantine Empire was restored in 1261, albeit in a much weaker state.
Lotario de' Conti was born 1160/1161 in Gavignano, near Anagni, southeast of Rome. His father, Trasimondo de' Conti di Segni (de comitibus Signiae) belonging to the notables of the city of Segni, was from the Conti family, who eventually produced nine cardinals and four popes, including Gregory IX, Alexander IV, and Innocent XIII. Lotario's mother, Clarissa Scotti (Romani de Scotti), was according to some scholars related to Pope Clement III.
Lotario received his early education in Rome, probably at the Camaldolese Benedictine abbey of Sant'Andrea al Celio under Peter Ismael. He studied theology in Paris under the theologians Peter of Poitiers, Melior of Pisa, and Peter of Corbeil, and (possibly) jurisprudence in Bologna, according to the Gesta (between 1187 and 1189). As pope, Lotario was to play a major role in the shaping of canon law through conciliar canons and decretal letters.
Shortly after the death of Alexander III (30 August 1181), Lotario returned to Rome and held various ecclesiastical offices during the short reigns of Lucius III, Urban III, Gregory VIII, and Clement III, being ordained a Subdeacon by Gregory VIII and reaching the rank of Cardinal-Priest under Clement III in 1191.
As a cardinal, Lotario wrote De Miseria Condicionis Humane "On the Misery of the Human Condition". The work was very popular for centuries, surviving in more than 700 manuscripts. Although he never returned to the complementary work he intended to write, On the Dignity of Human Nature, Bartolomeo Facio (1400–1457) took up the task writing De excellentia ac praestantia hominis.
Celestine III died on 8 January 1198. Before his death he had urged the College of Cardinals to elect Giovanni di San Paolo as his successor, but Lotario de' Conti was elected pope in the ruins of the ancient Septizodium, near the Circus Maximus in Rome after only two ballots on the very day on which Celestine III died. He was only thirty-seven years old at the time. He took the name Innocent III, maybe as a reference to his predecessor Innocent II (1130–1143), who had succeeded in asserting the papacy's authority over the emperor (in contrast with Celestine III's recent policy).
As pope, Innocent III began with a very wide sense of his responsibility and his authority. During Innocent III's reign, the papacy was at the height of its powers. He was considered the most powerful person in Europe at the time. In 1198, Innocent wrote to the prefect Acerbius and the nobles of Tuscany expressing his support of the medieval political Sun and Moon allegory. His papacy asserted the absolute spiritual authority of his office, while still respecting the temporal authority of kings.
There was scarcely a country in Europe over which Innocent III did not in some way or other assert the supremacy which he claimed for the papacy. He excommunicated King Alfonso IX of León for marrying a near relative, Berengaria of Castile, contrary to the laws of the Church, and effected their separation in 1204. He received Aragon in vassalage from Peter II and crowned him king at Rome in 1204.
The Muslim recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 was to him a divine judgment on the moral lapses of Christian princes. He was also determined to protect what he called "the liberty of the Church" from inroads by secular princes. This determination meant, among other things, that princes should not be involved in the selection of bishops. It was particularly focused on the Patrimony of Saint Peter, the section of central Italy claimed by the popes and later called the Papal States. The patrimonium was routinely threatened by the Holy Roman Empire of the House of Hohenstaufen, which claimed it. Emperor Henry VI expected his infant son Frederick to bring Germany, Italy, and Sicily under a single ruler, which would leave the Papal States exceedingly vulnerable.
Henry's early death left his three-year-old son Frederick as king of Sicily. Henry VI's widow, Queen Constance I of Sicily, was as eager as Pope Innocent III to remove German power from the kingdom of Sicily, and therefore in her Will named Innocent as the guardian of her young son, Frederick, when she died in 1198. In exchange, Innocent was also able to recover papal rights in Sicily that had been surrendered decades earlier to King William I by Pope Adrian IV. The pope invested the young Frederick as king of Sicily in November 1198. He also later induced Frederick to marry Constance of Aragon, the widow of King Emeric of Hungary, in 1209.
Involvement in Imperial elections
Innocent was concerned that the marriage of Henry VI and Constance of Sicily gave the Hohenstaufens a claim to all the Italian peninsula except for the Patrimony, which would be surrounded by Imperial territory.
After the death of Emperor Henry VI, who had recently also conquered the Kingdom of Sicily, the succession became disputed: as Henry's son Frederick was still a small child, the partisans of the Staufen dynasty elected Henry's brother, Philip, Duke of Swabia, king in March 1198, whereas the princes opposed to the Staufen dynasty elected Otto, Duke of Brunswick, of the House of Welf. King Philip II of France supported Philip's claim, whereas King Richard I of England supported his nephew Otto.
In 1201, the pope openly espoused the side of Otto IV, whose family had always been opposed to the house of Hohenstaufen.It is the business of the pope to look after the interests of the Roman empire, since the empire derives its origin and its final authority from the papacy; its origin, because it was originally transferred from Greece by and for the sake of the papacy; ... its final authority, because the emperor is raised to his position by the pope who blesses him, crowns him and invests him with the empire. ... Therefore, since three persons have lately been elected king by different parties, namely the youth [Frederick, son of Henry VI], Philip [of Hohenstaufen, brother of Henry VI], and Otto [of Brunswick, of the Welf family], so also three things must be taken into account in regard to each one, namely: the legality, the suitability and the expediency of his election. ... Far be it from us that we should defer to man rather than to God, or that we should fear the countenance of the powerful. ... On the foregoing grounds, then, we decide that the youth should not at present be given the empire; we utterly reject Philip for his manifest unfitness and we order his usurpation to be resisted by all ... since Otto is not only himself devoted to the church, but comes from devout ancestors on both sides ... therefore we decree that he ought to be accepted and supported as king, and ought to be given the crown of empire, after the rights of the Roman church have been secured.