HONORIUS III, POPE. — Cencio Savelli, Cardinal Camerlengo, author of the *Liber Censuum* (q.v.), succeeded INNOCENT III in July 1216. He died on 18 March 1227. Conciliatory and peaceful by temperament, advanced in years, and guided by his conception of the Papacy’s mission, HONORIUS succeeded in securing for the Church, on the spiritual plane, what it lost on the temporal plane to the Emperor’s political realism.
Frederick II abused the kindly weakness of his aged mentor. The death of his rival Otto IV of Brunswick (19 May 1218) had secured the election of his young son Henry as King of the Romans (April 1220) and his own imperial coronation at Rome (22 November 1220). To excuse the former, he cited surprise and necessity; to obtain the latter, he allayed the Pope’s fears. To this end, he promulgated the Constitutions of 1220, by which he renounced all authority over the imperial Church, pledged its support in the struggle against heresy, solemnly guaranteed to keep the Empire separate from the crown of Sicily, and committed himself to taking part in the Crusade.
In reality, however, the States of the Church were encircled, for Germany was governed through regency, Lombardy and half of Italy by imperial legates, and Sicily—administered with little regard for papal sovereignty—by the same sovereign. Moreover, the Emperor indefinitely postponed his departure for the East, despite the urgings of HONORIUS, who was dismayed by the poor results of the Crusade in Egypt (the fall of Damietta in 1221). Frederick II also kept papal policy in check in the East, for he supported the Emperor of Nicaea, Vatatzes, toward whom he directed the Greek clergy in their tacit refusal to unite with Rome under the aegis of the Latin Empire.
The Church, however, managed to secure the support of secular authority for the enforcement of the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the repression of heresy. As compensation for his misdeeds, Frederick II enforced the rigor of the Constitutions of 1220 in his own domains and ordered his legates to apply the penalty of fire to the recalcitrant.
In Aragon and France, the sovereigns lent their aid; the conquest of Languedoc by Louis VIII not only gave the Capetians the key to the Midi but was accompanied by a royal ordinance, promulgated in 1226, against heretics and the organization of the Inquisition.
At the same time that Roman orthodoxy gained ground, the Church’s religious life was enriched by the development of the mendicant orders. From the early years of his pontificate, HONORIUS showered favors upon the Friars Preachers, whom he commended to bishops and whose entry into universities he facilitated, especially at Paris, where he maintained direct authority independent of the diocesan chancellor. In 1217, the Pope considered entrusting the new University of Toulouse to the Preachers. Even more rapidly did the Friars Minor spread, who owed to HONORIUS their distinguished protector, Cardinal Ugolino (the future Pope Gregory IX), and the approval of their Rule (23 November 1223).
With HONORIUS, the work of INNOCENT III, perhaps suspended on the political plane, began to bear all its fruit in the spiritual life of the Church.