Unlike this book, papal overlordship of kings did not end in 1270. The theme of the final chapter could, for instance, be continued with other Mediterranean cases. In 1297, as part of the peace intended to end the War of the Sicilian Vespers, Pope Boniface VIII granted James II of Aragon the islands of Corsica and Sardinia, unified into a kingdom, ‘in perpetual fief’ (feudum). The new kingdom would pay annual census of two thousand marks of silver to the pope on the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul. As we have now come to expect, if the census was not paid for one year then there was a grace period of four months after which the king would be excommunicated. If a second year and four months went by without payment, then the kingdom was to be interdicted. If the census was not paid for three years running, then there was a final period of four months when the king could make good, after which ‘you should lose entirely the kingdom of Corsica and Sardinia and right to it.’1
The late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century history of papal overlordship over the Angevins of Naples is a fascinating topic which would deserve a book to itself, and the story continues into the post-medieval period. In 1788—to the horror of the papal Camera—King Ferdinand IV/III of Naples and Sicily, distant successor to Charles I of Anjou, neglected to send the annual census which had been agreed in 1265. Instead, the king’s agents deposited a voluntary gift, equivalent in value to the census, at the Monte di Pietà in Rome, for the pope’s use. The feudal census was no longer obligatory and papal overlordship was denied. For modernists, the timing is perfect: 1788 saw the end of feudalism as a means of structuring international relations, and combined with the abolition of the ancien régime and the Holy Roman Empire, the birth of the modern world.2
Feudal lordship over kings was still in rude health in the fourteenth century outside the Mediterranean lands. In 1298, Edward I of England tentatively suggested that perhaps he should hold Aquitaine as a papal fief, thus escaping subjection to the king of France.3 The next year, Edward was hoist by his own petard as the Scottish baronage appealed to the pope against the English invasion on the grounds that Scotland was under papal lordship.4 The arguments in both of these cases now drew heavily on the so-called academic law of fiefs—the Libri feudorum and the body of thought built up around it.5
At the end of the thirteenth century, a list of papal feudatory-kings was first compiled as part of the ‘Roman provincial’—a list of all the bishops of Christendom. This list would continue to be copied and added to until at least the end of the fifteenth century.6 The extent to which this list reflected what kings and even popes thought is open to question. Nonetheless, papal overlordship clearly mattered in the fourteenth century, as it mattered in the eighteenth. Later in the fourteenth century, papal overlordship spread to the Atlantic. In 1344, Pope Clement VI granted the Canary Islands as a fief to Prince Louis de la Cerda.7
In 1493, Pope Alexander VI divided the New World between the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs.8 Weckmann thought Alexander acted on the authority of the papacy’s centuries-old claims over islands specifically; but perhaps the basis for the grant was the papacy’s universal dominion. There was disagreement at the time about how to interpret the letters and there is disagreement now.9 Of course, what really mattered was that the Catholic monarchs asked the pope to confirm their rule. When, the next year, the Spanish rulers came to an agreement with the Portuguese king, the pope’s documents were passed over in silence.10 Papal authority, as so often, was a useful tool. And part of its usefulness was because it could be ignored when necessary.
That is what we have seen in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Papal feudal overlordship, papal protection, the vague relationships of the later eleventh century, all were sought out by rulers wanting to increase their capabilities, their power, and their legitimacy. Rulers who placed themselves under the pope knew that they could use their standing with him to petition for letters; there could be no doubt that the pope was a competent authority if he was the king’s special superior. This did not always work, of course. Opponents of the monarch could petition Rome too, and were quite likely to get their petitions approved. But, broadly, the more wealth and resources a petitioner had, the better they were able to instrumentalize papal power.
Thus kings got most out of papal overlordship. We might say that papal lordship is less a model for transnational sovereignty than an enabling factor for the creation of the nation state. Kings needed to co-opt the potential power of the pope in order to realize sovereignty in their realms. The popes were not simply careless and unaware of what was happening. The ideological underpinning for the practice of papal government was that the pope was a servant, bound to use his legal authority for the benefit of others. To some—such as crusaders, vassals, protégés, orphans—the pope was especially bound, so papal letters tell us.
Initially, in the eleventh century, princes sought out papal authority and legitimization without considering what having a relationship with the pope might mean; secular rulers were happy to be ‘invested’ by the pope or receive their realm ‘from the pope’s hand’. When the meaning of investiture ceremonies hardened in the first two decades of the twelfth century, investiture and the language of investiture ceased. Kings did not want to look as though they actually received their realms from the pope. The Kingdom of Aragon therefore became a protected, indeed a semi-exempt, kingdom in the twelfth century. The Aragonese rulers, fearful of ecclesiastical sanctions passed against them by Iberian churchmen, gained the privilege of ignoring excommunication or interdict from any prelate except the pope. They were exempted from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of bishops and archbishops. When a succession crisis broke out in Aragon in the 1130s, 1140s, and 1150s, papal authority was something which the Knights Templar, and eventually Count Raymond-Berengar IV, could call on if they wished. The pope, however, did not intervene off his own bat.
The Siculo-Normans retained a flexible and ad hoc relationship with the pope in the twelfth century. Both sides, at different times, wanted recognition by the other, since this strengthened their legitimacy. In 1120, Pope Calixtus II boasted about how the Norman princes had done homage to him, so that his correspondents would see he had greater support than his enemy, Maurice Bourdin (Gregory VIII). Later, however, King Roger II wanted the pope to accept his homage, to show publicly that the papacy accepted the legitimacy of his kingship.
In 1213, King John of England surrendered his kingdoms to the pope and received them back ‘as a fief-holder’. The papal chancery drew the logical conclusion that England and Ireland were now papal ‘fiefs’, and John and his successors, ‘vassals’. Cardinals and papal courtiers connected with the English court then spread this feudal language to the Isle of Man in 1219 and to Aragon in 1222. The idea that a king might be a vassal of the pope and his realm a fief was accepted. John also stipulated that, if he or his successors broke the terms of their new relationships, they would lose their kingship as a punishment.
At the same time, there was a dispute over the county of Melgueil in southern France. Because the previous count, Raymond of Toulouse, had been disinherited by the papally sanctioned Albigensian Crusade, the claimants to the county—the bishop of Maguelone and Raymond Pelet—looked to the pope to confirm their own claims. During this dispute, the county was named a ‘fief’ of the pope, and it was suggested that failure to pay annual tribute to Rome merited deprivation; the county would revert to the pope. The bishop of Maguelone was eventually granted the county under certain conditions—he had limited rights to alienate land—and quickly set to work using his relationship with the pope for his own benefit. He claimed that Raymond of Toulouse had illegally alienated castles when he ruled the county, for example, and that therefore those castles should be returned to the bishop. The bishops used papal overlordship to legitimize their claims and build their power.
The beginning of the thirteenth century saw the accession of boy-kings in England, Aragon, and Sicily, all of which had formal relationships with Rome. As in Melgueil, papal authority during these minorities was turned to the interests of petitioners. In Aragon, the various factions within the kingdom, and even figures outside Aragon such as the cardinal-legate in southern France, used papal authority for their own ends, petitioning the pope to send orders and instructions. In England, the presence of a papal legate was useful to the minority government, since the pope might delegate final decisions on petitions he received to the legate. The legate could therefore pass over any requests which might be detrimental to royal interests. In Sicily, Frederick II’s councillors sometimes asked for papal aid. As soon as papal assistance was no longer needed, however, legates were sent back and instructions ignored. During all of these minorities, papal overlordship and protection were tools in the hands of petitioners rather than instruments of papal self-aggrandizement. The pope did not act as guardian to the boy-kings of England, Aragon, and Sicily because this was his natural right as feudal overlord. Instead, letters and mandates to these kingdoms were justified with a range of changing reasons. Sometimes the pope’s general duty to aid orphans was most important; sometimes a testamentary request of the previous monarch was above all other reasons. Papal authority was situational. It was also strategic: justifications for papal solicitude were chosen based on what both the petitioner and the pope thought would be most effective. Claiming that papal power rested on one all-encompassing rationale fails to do justice to the complexity of the letters.
Finally, deposition. Popes did not depose kings by their authority as feudal lords. But they could. King John in 1213 had allowed that future kings of England might lose their ‘right to the kingship’ if they broke the new agreement with the pope. In the first half of the century, this precedent probably fed into the disputes between the papacy and Frederick II. Innocent IV and Cardinal Rainier of Viterbo both thought that Frederick could lose his fief-kingdom of Sicily if he failed to pay the annual tribute owed to the pope, although not everyone saw the situation the same way. In the second half of the thirteenth century, this was formalized: the Angevin kings of Sicily would lose their kingdom if they did not pay the census for three years. This penalty was only applicable to feudal tribute, however. Non-payment of a census owed by a protected kingdom could not give grounds for deposition. Even here, the papacy had to consider what the best justification for deposing a king was, and the pope shied away feudal deposition—deposition for failing to pay census. Even here, in what should be the one case where overlordship offered an obvious and undeniable benefit to the pope, it did not. Even here, the pope does not seem to have instrumentalized the relationships for his own ends.
Kings, their counsellors, and other petitioners in their kingdoms were the beneficiaries from papal feudal overlordship and protection. These relationships were not a real extension of papal power, but served the purposes of subordinate rulers rather than the pope, who was normally reacting rather than initiating. The papal monarchy was balanced by the papal duty of service. These papal–royal relationships meant that the pope should hark to the requests of his vassals and protégés, and put his authority in their service. Papal authority legitimized royal power.
Papal Overlordship and European Princes, 1000–1270. Benedict Wiedemann, Oxford University Press. © Benedict Wiedemann 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192855039.003.0009
1 Baronius, Annales ecclesiastici, ed. Theiner, xxiii, sub anno 1297, no. 1, pp. 199–203. The summary in Registres de Boniface, ed. Digard, Faucon, Thomas, Fawtier, i, no. 2344, pp. 929–935 errs in its description of the census-penalties.
2 Matthias Schnettger, ‘Das Ende der Chinea-Präsentation und der Zusammenbruch des päpstlichen Lehnswesens’, zeitenblicke 6 (2007).
3 Pierre Chaplais, ‘English Arguments Concerning the Feudal Status of Aquitaine in the Fourteenth Century’, Historical Research 21 (1948), pp. 203–213, at 211.
4 Bower, Scotichronicon, ed., trans. Watt et al, vi, pp. 133–189.
5 A development broadly in line with the chronology suggested by Attilio Stella, ‘Bringing the Feudal Law back Home: Social Practice and the Law of Fiefs in Italy and Provence (1100–1250)’, Journal of Medieval History 46 (2020), pp. 396–418. See also Ryan, ‘Succession to Fiefs’, pp. 156–157.
6 Fabrice Delivré, ‘La chrétienté en liste. Genèse et fortunes du provincial de l’Église romaine (XIIe–XVe siècle)’, Écritures grises. Les instruments de travail des administrations (XIIe–XVIIe siècle), ed. Arnaud Fossier, Johann Petitjean, Clémence Revest (École française de Rome: Paris, 2019), pp. 497–529, at 515–516.
7 Diana Wood, Clement VI: The Pontificate and Ideas of an Avignon Pope (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989), pp. 133–134, 190–192; Alan Forey, ‘Papal Claims to Authority over Lands Gained from the Infidel in the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond the Straits of Gibraltar’, La papauté et les croisades, ed. Balard, pp. 131–140.
8 The scholarship is enormous. For an overview, see Oskar Spate, The Spanish Lake (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1979), pp. 27–29; and, relevant for us, Weckmann, Constantino el Grande, pp. 24–25, 201–215.
9 Anthony Pagden, ‘The School of Salamanca, the Requerimiento, and the Papal Donation of Alexander VI’, Republics of Letters 5 (2018).
10 Garrett Mattingly, ‘No Peace beyond what Line?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (1963), pp. 145–162, at 151.