HONORIUS III, Pope. - Cencio Savelli, cardinal camerarius, author of the liber censuum (v.), succeeded Innocent III in July 1216. He died on 18 March 1227. Conciliatory and peaceful by temperament, by reason of his advanced age and of his conception of the mission of the Papacy, O. knew how to gain for the Church, on the spiritual plane, what the Emperor's political realism made her lose on the temporal plane.
Frederick II abused the benevolent weakness of his old tutor. The death of his rival Otto IV of Brunswick (19 May 1218) had facilitated the election of his young son Henry as king of the Romans (Apr. 1220) and his own imperial coronation in Rome (22 Nov. 1220). To excuse the former he pleaded the surprise and the necessity of doing it; to obtain the latter, he quieted the Pope's fears: for this purpose he promulgated the Constitutiones of 1220 with which he renounced all power over the imperial Church and assured it his cooperation in the struggle against heresy; he solemnly guaranteed to keep the Empire separate from the crown of Sicily and undertook to take part in the Crusade.
In reality, however, the States of the Church were encircled because Germany through the regency, Lombardy through imperial legates and Sicily, administered almost without regard for pontifical sovereignty, were governed by the same sovereign. Moreover, the Emperor indefinitely postponed his departure for the East, despite the urgings of O., who was impressed by the poor results of the Crusade in Egypt (fall of Damietta in 1221). Furthermore, Frederick II kept papal policy in check also in the East, because he supported the Emperor of Nicaea, Vatatzes, toward whom he oriented the Greek clergy in its tacit refusal to unite with Rome under the aegis of the Latin Empire.
The Church nevertheless succeeded in obtaining the support of the secular arm for the application of the decrees of the Lateran Council of 1215 and the repression of heresy. In compensation for his faults, Frederick II applied in his States the severities of the Constitutiones of 1220 and ordered his legates to apply the penalty of fire to the recalcitrant.
In Aragon and in France, the sovereigns lent their aid; the conquest of Languedoc carried out by Louis VIII not only gave the Capetians the key to the South, but was accompanied by a royal ordinance, promulgated in 1226, against the heretics, and by the organization of the Inquisition.
At the same time as Roman orthodoxy was gaining ground, the religious life of the Church was enriched by the development of the Mendicant Orders. Already from the first years of his pontificate, O. III lavished favors on the Friars Preachers, whom he recommended to the bishops and whose entry into the universities he favored, especially into that of Paris, in which he retained direct authority independent of the diocesan chancellor. In 1217, the Pope thought of entrusting the new University of Toulouse to the Preachers. Even more rapidly spread the Friars Minor, who owed to O. III their distinguished protector, Card. Ugolino, the future pope Gregory IX, and the approval of their Rule (23 Nov. 1223).
With O., the work of Innocent III, perhaps suspended on the political plane, began to bear all its fruits in the spiritual life of the Church.