GREGORY IX, Pope. - A descendant of the family of the counts of Segni, born at Anagni (probably in 1170 and not, as many assert, in 1140) and called Ugo (Ugolino). He was a relative of Innocent III "in the third degree" (Vita), and Alexander IV also belonged to his family. Having received his first formation in the episcopal school of Anagni, he then continued his studies in Paris ("sacrae paginae doctor", RIS, III, p. 575) and also devoted himself to the study of law at Bologna, but he was never a professor there. A particular influence was exercised on him by the Cistercian Rainerio, who fostered his natural inclination to contemplation to such a degree that Innocent III mentioned it almost with reproach (PL 214, 675). For the rest, very little is known of his youth; certainly he was not, as has been said, a Camaldolese.
I. LEGATIONS
As soon as he was elected, Innocent III created G. papal chaplain (auditor of the Rota), and subsequently, in the same year, cardinal deacon; then sending him in 1199 to southern Italy to Markward of Anweiler, margrave of Henry VI. After he was created cardinal bishop of Ostia in 1206, he went twice as legate to Germany, in 1207 and in 1209.
Honorius III too recognized his merits as a negotiator and sent him as legate, mostly to the cities of northern Italy (the most important legation was that of 1221, for which G. began a register of his own). There in fact the most flourishing cities (such as Lucca, Pistoia, Parma, and especially Milan) were threatening ecclesiastical liberties or were (like Imola and Faenza, Aquileia and Treviso) at war among themselves, and heresy was making its entry there as well; while in many convents the right spirit had to be restored.
But the Pope's foremost concern was the imminent Crusade, which had been proclaimed by the Emperor for August 1221. Frederick, who had strong reservations to make, willingly appointed G. as his vicar, without however giving him all the powers of an imperial nuncio. G. cautiously, but firmly, set about the work: he promulgated the Emperor's anti-heretical laws in Lombardy and sought to insert the new imperial and ecclesiastical laws into the communal statutes. This legation became a great confirmation of peace; but perhaps G., according to Frederick, had done too much for peace and for Honorius, too little for the Crusade. This, in any case, did not take place.
II. RELIGIOUS ACTION
From this time on G. renounced politics and devoted himself entirely to religious activity. He helped the Camaldolese, the foundation of Joachim of Fiore and the Cistercians; in particular he facilitated St. Dominic and his Order, which had proved itself in southern France against the Albigensians. But far better documented are his attentions to the Franciscan movement. G. recognized in the Mendicants the messengers of religious renewal, which, however, at the same time ran the danger of overstepping the boundaries of orthodoxy, and he understood the opportunity of guiding them and giving them strong support. Frederick called them the "evil angels" of the Pope (Hist. diplom. Frederici, v. bibl., II, v, p. 1059).
G.'s attitude toward the Franciscan Order was accused by several, among them Sabatier, of having falsified the character of the movement from within. Today, generally, even on the non-Catholic side, such an attitude is instead evaluated in a positive sense and understood more deeply in its particulars, and therefore appreciated. The Gospel re-entered consciences anew and in a fundamental way, the imitation of the poor life of Jesus was considered as the substance of perfection; and the Church's missionary commitment regained vigor in the sending of missionaries and in the organization of their activity.
G. had a particular part in the perfecting of the Order of the Poor Clares (so much so that he came to be called their founder) and of the Franciscan Third Order. For the Mendicant Orders he issued many letters of commendation and decrees, which later in their main points were included in the body of the Decretals (Decr., V, 31 c, 16 ff.): he granted them new privileges, above all those of being able to preach and hear confessions (Potthast, 8042); he renewed the institution of the novitiate (id., 10959); he suggested to Thomas of Celano the idea for the Vita I of St. Francis, in which the latter gave particular prominence to the relations between G. and St. Francis; he laid the first stone of the Saint's burial church in Assisi and explained in the bull Quo elongati (1230; which would later have a particular resonance in the question of the Spirituals) that the testament of St. Francis had no binding force. Both great Mendicant Orders, Dominicans and Franciscans, undoubtedly enjoyed G.'s most marked sympathy from the moment when he met St. Dominic and St. Francis (Florence 1217) and assumed their protectorate.
III. ECCLESIASTICAL POLICY
The pontificate of G. is characterized by his ecclesiastical policy with regard to Frederick II. While the latter, with ever new pretexts, kept postponing the Crusade, he threatened him with excommunication, which he announced to Christendom on 10 October with an encyclical (Hist. diplom., cit., III, 24), releasing the crusaders from their oath, some of whom had already undertaken the journey or had perished of fever in southern Italy. Frederick, who did not expect the new Pope to display greater energy than Honorius, out of spite set out in 1228 for Jerusalem and negotiated with the Sultan. The Christian prisoners were set free, part of Jerusalem and a few localities passed into Christian hands, in exchange for sufficient liberties granted to the Muslims, even in Christian territory, and Frederick girded himself with the crown of king of Jerusalem.
While the Sicilian troops burst into the papal march, G. sent troops into Sicily, but, after alternating successes, both signed the peace of Ceprano (28 Sept. 1230). Subsequently Frederick, supported by Pier delle Vigne, created in Sicily, which he held as a papal fief, a new bureaucratic state of an absolutist type, proclaiming there the Constitutions of Melfi, which were contrary in many respects to communal and ecclesiastical liberties; he would moreover have desired such a unity between Church and State that the Pope would excommunicate all those against whom the Emperor had fought. But he could not obtain this (Potthast, 9261). When later Frederick, against the precise will of G. his feudal lord, married his son Enzo to the heiress of Torres and Gallura and occupied Sardinia, G. excommunicated him again (1239), published an act of accusation of 17 points (Hist. diplom., V, 286 ff.), which was to be proclaimed every Sunday or feast day to the sound of bells (Potthast, 10723), and placed under interdict the Emperor's usual residence. Frederick then opposed certain writings and appealed to a council. The battle at times reached the tone of passionate polemic on one side and the other: G. reproached the Emperor, whom he had compared to the apocalyptic beast (Potthast, 10766), with the word of the three deceivers. The latter denounced the Pope as a heretic or even as the Antichrist (Hist. dipl., V, 348). Frederick sought to put an end to the conflict with arms, and fortune was not unkind to him. The Pope for his part found in Gregorio da Montelongo, his legate in Lombardy, a skilful champion of the national interests, which were now beginning to become clear; when, however, he actually convoked the Council, the matter no longer interested Frederick, who took prisoner the prelates who were to make the sea voyage. In Germany the excommunication at first found little echo, because at that time the Tartars were stationed at the borders of the Kingdom, and when Frederick was approaching Rome in 1247 with a large retinue, the Pope died. G. had wanted the freedom of the Church against a very skilful and unscrupulous sovereign who used every means for his own ends.
IV. DECRETALS
From the very beginning of his pontificate, G. had already taken into consideration the organization of the new papal legislation, which was then truly decided when Frederick promulgated the Constitutions of Melfi, which were, in many respects, to be unwelcome to the Church. The drafting of the collection was entrusted to Raymond of Peñafort, who delivered it after three years. In it one certainly reads a clear opposition to the Emperor's Sicilian Constitution, as, for example, with regard to the privilegium fori of the clergy and in civil and criminal matters; but its fundamental purpose was, as the bull Rex pacificus demonstrates, to create, alongside the private collections of papal edicts, an official and exclusive body of law, on the part of the Church as well. Characteristics: that the Mendicants retain in it their exemption and other privileges (165, X, V, 37), that laymen be forbidden to preach
(14, X, V, 7), the heresy of the contracting party free from the obligations contracted (2, X, V, 26), blasphemy is to be punished by the secular arm (16, X, V, 7), « nullam in hoc misericordiam habitus ». The later concessions of G. have entered, in part, into the Liber Sextus of Boniface VIII (for example, that every bishop may by himself degrade one of his own priests who is a heretic and that there is no longer any need for six bishops). Even if not theoretically, this book of laws, which was soon translated into the language of the people (Actus, III, 249, 291), signifies a powerful reinvigoration of the pontifical authority and of its influence. In the future, private arbitrators especially will be hindered by the collections of the laws.
V. INQUISITION
Under G. IX the medieval process of the Inquisition was established. In 1224 Frederick had ordered, for Lombardy, that all heretics in the hands of the diocesan bishops be handed over to the secular arm, to be burned or to have their tongues torn out (MGH, Const., II, p. 1267). Now G. established in 1227 in Italy (Florence) and in Germany commissions against heretics, against whom until then only the bishops had pronounced, and he made use especially of the Dominicans (Bullarium Ord. Fratrum Praedicatorum, edited by T. Ripoll-A. Bremond, I, Rome 1726, p. 20), without neglecting other Orders or secular priests, such as Conrad of Marburg, confessor of St. Elizabeth. The fact of having entrusted this institution to an Order benefited its duration. A step forward was taken when the cruel decree of Frederick of 1224 was introduced in the years 1230-31 into the papal register (Reg., 535), and was promulgated as law (ibid., 539 ff.). A final phase comes with the decree of Frederick (proper to Norman law) for Sicily (1231) and for the Kingdom (1239), according to which heretics were to be sought out by the forces of the State. The denunciation is officially followed by the process of the Inquisition. Alongside the episcopal tribunal G. established the general papal tribunal (Bullarium cit., I, 47) and appointed the inquisitors on his own part, because he did not want to leave the power of investigating solely to the organs of the State. In 1234 there is inserted into the Decretals (15, X, V, 7) the provision that heretics who convert for fear of death must be kept prisoners for life as a punishment (Hist. diplom., cit., IV, 301).
VI. MISSIONS. ECCLESIASTICAL LIFE
Already as legate and preacher of the Crusade, G. had worked for the preservation of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, to which, under his pontificate, Bulgaria presented itself as a new enemy. The Pope persuaded John of Brienne, who had fought for him in Sicily and in 1223 had been elected in Constantinople as regent for the not yet of age Baldwin II, to assume, even if reluctantly, this office (1231-37), and he supported him energetically. In 1232 he sent Aimone of Faversham, future minister general of the Franciscans, with several theologians, to the Greek imperial court of Nicaea, but they accomplished nothing. It was instead due in 1235 to John of Brienne that, after a double attack by the Greeks and Bulgarians, Constantinople was saved. When later the same Baldwin went to the West to seek help, G. worked in every way to stir up a great Crusade; but only in France did he find willing hearing and help. For Baldwin too it remained impossible to regain the Asian part of the Empire, which in 1261 definitively declined. The struggle against the Ghibellines was fatal also for the Latin Empire; because Frederick was in league with the Greeks and forcibly prevented the passage of the crusading knights through northern Italy.
The difficult missions of Eastern Europe, Finland, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, where the new Mendicant Orders chiefly labored, have until now been little brought to light. After Frederick's Crusade, around 1230, the Teutonic Knights appear; the Order regarded these territories as conquered, lands of the Empire assigned to them. In Lithuania G. permitted that the same Crusade of Europe be preached (Bullarium cit., I, 32), and introduced the Premonstratensians into Latvia (Potthast, 7886).
As for ecclesiastical learning, the foundation (30 Apr. 1233) of the University of Toulouse is worthy of note (Potthast, 9176). To the University of Paris he granted the free study of the books of Aristotle (Reg., 607).
He increased religious life by means of numerous canonizations: Francis (1228), Anthony of Padua (1232), Virgil of Salzburg (1233), Dominic (1234), Elizabeth of Thuringia (1235), while he could not bring to completion the canonization of St. Hildegard of Bingen.
to Frederick) the force of passion. On the other hand he revealed a tender and often gentle sensitivity toward friends and those in need of help. He willingly maintained personal relations with the greatest religious figures of his time; he exchanged letters with St. Clare, Elizabeth of Thuringia, Agnes of Prague; he even attempted religious poetry. One can speak of him as an antithetical personality. His frankness is recognized even by his enemies. The fact that he acutely grasped the historical tasks of his pontificate and sought to carry them out as a sure requirement of their religious foundation gives the measure of the greatness of his pontificate. With him the papacy in the West begins slowly to place itself on the defensive.
Bibliography18 works
VII. CHARACTER AND IMPORTANCE
G.'s personality is rather that of a formal type than of an initiator of great enterprise. His highest abilities were known also to Frederick, who acknowledged him as «religione perspicuus, facundia eloquentissimus, scientiae titulis circumspectus» (Levi, v. bibl., p. 151). G. in fact demonstrated the aptitudes of an organizer and revealed in protecting the political rights of the Church a tenacious energy, against heretics a rare firmness, and he fought (as, for example, in the letters
Gr. IX de gestis... 1234, in Arch. Franc. hist., 12 (1919), pp. 418-470; K. Hampe, Die Ahtenstücke zum Frieden von S. Germano 1230, Berlin 1926; A. Callebaut, Autour de la rencontre à Florence de St François et du card. Hugolin, in Arch. Franc. hist., 19 (1926), pp. 530-58; J. Müller, Die Legationen unter Gr. IX., in Röm. Quartalsch., 37 (1920), pp. 57-136; L. Zanecke, Der Anteil des Kard. Ugolino an der Ausbildung der 3 Orden des hl. Franziskus, Leipzig 1930; B. Zöllig, Kardinal Hugolin und der hl. Franziskus, in Franzisk. Stud., 20 (1933), pp. 1-33; Actus Congressus iuridici internationalis, III (Decretales Gregorii IX), Rome 1936; C. Thouzellier, La légation en Lombardie du card. Hugolin (1221), in Rev. d'hist. eccl., 45 (1920), pp. 308-42.
Ottocano Bonnmann