Innocent II, Pope

INNOCENT II, POPE. — Gregorio, of the Roman, indeed Trasteverine, family of the Papareschi, was perhaps a monk in his youth, then for many years a cardinal deacon of the title of S. Angelo, appointed by Paschal II around 1116 (although there are sources that say he had been appointed as early as the time of Urban II).

He accompanied Gelasius II to France and seems to have been present at the election of Callistus II at Cluny. But the episode to which he owed his subsequent emergence in the College of Cardinals was his presence, together with Lamberto, bishop of Ostia and his predecessor in the papacy, at the agreements of Worms in September 1122, as the representative of Callistus II, to whom he later reported in Rome on the Concordat that had been achieved. Indeed, already in 1119, immediately after Callistus’s election, under the influence of the moderating ideas of the Burgundian Church—which was the natural intermediary between the two powers, just as from its midst had emerged the highest affirmation of the Church’s internal reform—the same negotiators had met Henry V at Verdun and Metz, though without any result. As legate in France, together with Pietro Pierleoni, later his rival for the papacy, Gregorio of S. Angelo actively governed the local churches between 1120 and 1124, also convening several synods (at Chartres, Beauvais, Clermont, and Vienne). Perhaps preceding his fellow legate, who had returned to Rome, he may have been present at the election of Honorius II, and at the renewed outbreak of violence, caused by the Frangipane, who were determined to place one of their own candidates on the papal throne. That Conclave was thus the immediate preparation for the schism which, after Honorius’s death, was to break out in Rome and within the Church itself. A friend of the new Pontiff, and highly esteemed in his circle, where the chancellor, Cardinal Aimerico, predominated, Gregorio remained in the foreground during the brief pontificate. The same was not true of Pierleoni: he, his family, and his faction, according to Pandolfo, author of the Vita Honorii, had much cause to resent the Pontiff’s open hostility. This explains why, as his end approached, the Pierleoni and their friends in the College of Cardinals did not cease to stir up feeling, so that the events of December 1124 might not be repeated. But Cardinal Aimerico was likewise—only with greater secrecy and cunning—working against them.

Preceded by genuine and unavowable negotiations, intended chiefly to mislead one or the other party, the death of Honorius II, who had been taken several days earlier to the fortified convent of S. Andrea in Citta. Scouri, was immediately followed, during the night of 12–13 February, in the absence of most of the cardinals, by the election (in angulo, in abscondito, in tenebris, as Pietro, cardinal bishop of Porto and dean of the College, would say) of Gregorio of S. Angelo, who was enthroned early in the morning at the Lateran under the name of Innocent II.
Confident in its undisputed majority, the other party assembled (whether the meeting had already been prepared or was hastened by the first reports brought by the other Pietro, the Pisan cardinal of S. Susanna) late in the morning of the 13th at S. Marco. One election was set against another, and violence had the final word. Soon, while the polemic was being fueled by the two chanceries (also based on an erroneous interpretation of the Statutum de electione Pontificis of Nicholas II), the Pierleoni, with their Anacletus II, prevailed in Rome, and Innocent, having left the fortified monastery of Palladium, was forced to flee around the middle of May from the Tiber port through Pisa and Genoa, toward France. This was to prove his good fortune: even before he “arrived,” the fame of the exiled and fugitive Pontiff had made its mark upon the still recent tradition of misfortune and exile which, from the first reforming Popes to Gelasius II, had always given the Church fresh impetus and aroused new enthusiasm around it; and the welcome offered by the rival maritime cities was an omen that, in losing Rome, Innocent II was gaining the world. A council was convened at Étampes by Louis VI the Fat, king of France; there the opinion of S. Bernard of Clairvaux prevailed, in openly declared support of Innocent. He learned of it while, slowly ascending the Rhône, he had reached Cluny. Although Aquitaine—with its legate, Bishop Gerardo—would remain hostile, the rest of France would follow Innocent, and through Norbert of Magdeburg, imperial chaplain, Lothair III and Germany would be won over to his cause; while, from a meeting between Henry I of England and S. Bernard, the adherence of the English Church would also result. From France Innocent’s chancery activity was extraordinarily intense, directed also toward the Churches of Italy (especially those he had visited), where the situation remained unfavorable, not only in Rome: the Milanese and Aquileian Churches had in fact declared for Anacletus, and the great Ruggero, the builder of the Norman monarchy of southern Italy, consecrated precisely by Anacletus, had also skillfully allied himself with the Pope of Rome.

Only an imperial expedition could resolve the Italian situation in Innocent’s favor. But an expedition, prepared throughout 1132 and decided upon as early as the meeting at Liège the previous year, was not enough. Lothair was able to restore his Pope to the Lateran, but not to keep him there: whether or not Anacletus’s attempt to have both elections annulled through a judgment of the imperial tribunal was sincere, as soon as Lothair was forced to return north, abandoning the proclaimed anti-Norman crusade, Innocent too could no longer maintain himself in Rome. This time, however, he did not leave Italy: from Pisa, with greater hope that the schism would soon end, he dated the documents of his chancery for three years. In August 1136 Lothair was able to renew the expedition into Italy with greater forces. The objective of the march was the south: only the defeat of Ruggero II would bring about Anacletus’s elimination. And, after a harsh course of events, the imperial plan seemed to succeed—but it was only an apparent victory. As soon as Innocent and Lothair had taken the road to Rome (and, especially with regard to Montecassino, it was a serious matter that Innocent once again had to defend the Church against Lothair’s demands, since he wished to return at least some of the concessions of Worms to the crown), Ruggero, landing at Salerno, regained control of the situation. Nevertheless, the situation rapidly deteriorated (despite Lothair’s death while crossing the Alps in the autumn of 1137, and after a conference at Salerno and the conversion there, effected by S. Bernard, of Pietro da Pisa) with Anacletus’s sudden death on 25 January 1138. Innocent, who had been reinstalled in Rome the previous year, nevertheless still had to wait for the final flames of the schism to die out (the surviving Anacletians gave the deceased a successor in Victor IV).

The Lateran Council of 1139, intended as the solemn conclusion and condemnation of the disorders of the schism, with a severity that seemed excessive to contemporaries and even to S. Bernard himself, ended with the excommunication of Ruggero II. To bend him, Innocent, supported by the princes of Capua, marched toward the Neapolitan region; but, like Leo IX at Civitate, he too, imprisoned by his enemy at S. Germano, was forced to recognize the dignity he had contested and return to Rome under his escort.

From that moment, the drama of Innocent’s pontificate—troubled by an eight-year schism, laden with consequences for a Church in ferment—resumed after its brief triumph and moved sadly toward its conclusion: faced with the spectacle of communitates arising all around, and of one far more powerful, with Rome itself rising up after the war against Tivoli and its failure to destroy the city. Amid the disturbances of the violent uprising of the Roman people—while the Senate was restored and efforts were made to distinguish ecclesiastical power from civil power, in accordance with what would become the admonition of the great agitator, Arnaldo da Brescia—Innocent II died on 24 September 1143.

letteratura, V. P. F. Palumbo, Lo scisma del MCXXX. I precedenti. La vicenda romana e le ripercussioni europee della lotta tra Anacleto e I. II (col Regesto degli Atti di Anacleto II), Roma 1942. Pier Fausto Palumbo