In Spain and Portugal, Innocent found irregular marriages almost as numerous as regular, and his interventions show the same unedifying mixture of priestly rigour and political compromise. Sacerdotal legislation had by this time surrounded marriage with a portentous series of obstacles—forbidden degrees of spiritual and carnal affinity—which sacerdotal power alone could remove, yet the isolated princes of the Peninsula were compelled to marry constantly into each other's families and did not always ask the costly blessing of the Papacy. That this legislation did not improve the sex-morals of Europe, which were at least no better than they had been in pagan times, is well known. Spain was particularly lax, having contracted the gaiety of neighbouring Provence, and her kings may have felt that where unwedded love was so genially tolerated, these academic restraints on wedded love might be disregarded.
Innocent placed the kingdoms of Leon and Castile under an interdict because the King of Leon had married his cousin, Berengaria of Castile, and, when the court of Leon ignored his censures, he predicted that there would be a horrible issue of the unhallowed union. Its first fruit was St. Ferdinand; but Berengaria nervously retired after a few years and left the King to bear his excommunication with Spanish dignity. The King of Castile soon obtained the removal of the interdict, on the ground that it favoured the growth of heresy, but he was then threatened with excommunication because he permitted the Jews to become rich while the Church was poor. Pedro of Aragon was more fortunate. In the course of a journey to Rome he married the wife of the Count de Comminges, and the Pope at once accepted her assurance that the Count had two wives living when he married her, and blessed the union. Pedro, it should be added, swore fealty and an annual subsidy of two hundred gold pieces to the Pope. The King of Navarre incurred an interdict for allying himself with the Moors. All that one can seriously put to the credit of Innocent is that he greatly aided the unification of Spain by spurring its kings to a common crusade against the Moors; if we may assume that the crusade favoured the progress of civilization in the country. Sancho of Portugal also felt, and disdained, the touch of the Papal whip. When Innocent complained of his oppression of the clergy, he threatened—in a letter which Innocent describes as the most insolent ever written to a Pope—to strip his corrupt priests of all their wealth. Innocent at once temporized, but a dangerous illness and fit of repentance soon put Sancho and the kingdom of Portugal at his feet. At his death Sancho left the kingdom wholly subject to Rome and the clergy, though it was not many years before the quarrels of his children again drew upon it the spiritual blight of an interdict.
It would be tedious to describe in detail all the similar interventions of the Pope in other countries. He refused to let Marie of Brabant marry the Emperor Otto, and refused to dissolve the marriage of the King of Bohemia; indeed, he sternly rebuked the King of Bohemia for receiving his crown at the hands of Philip of Swabia. In Hungary he scolded Prince Endre for rebelling against his brother, and he raised Bulgaria to the rank of a kingdom, on condition that it recognized Roman supremacy. He claimed, in a word, to be the king of kings, the temporal as well as religious master of Europe. But we shall more clearly appreciate the qualities of his character and shades of his standard of action if we examine more fully his connection with the Fourth Crusade and the crusade against heresy.
Tripoli, Antioch, and a few small Palestinian towns were all that remained of the European conquests from the Saracen, and Innocent's constant correspondence with the Christian prelates who lingered in the East made him eager, from the beginning of his Pontificate, to inspire Europe to make one more grand attempt to rescue the holy places. For several years he sought, by letters and Legates, to fire the Christian princes, to divert the swords of France and England to the breast of the Mohammedan, and to melt the cold calculations of Venice. But the memory of the last colossal failure—of all the blood and treasure that had been expended on the stubborn task—was too fresh in Europe. In vain he promised, to all who took the cross, a sure entry into Paradise, and hinted not obscurely at the damnation which awaited those who refused. Thin bands of zealots responded to the call, and a larger multitude were induced to take the cross by Innocent's princely declaration that the earthly debts of all who joined the Crusade would be cancelled, and the Jews would be forced to forswear their legitimate interest. The knights of Europe, to his fiery indignation, still wasted their spears on each other, or continued the more pleasant pastimes of the chase and the tournament. Innocent, in a flood of eloquent letters, taxed the clergy, confiscated the funds of erratic monks, and forbade the lay nobles to wear costly furs or eat costly dinners or indulge in tournaments. There were murmurs that the Christians of the East needed no aid, since they were on excellent terms with the Saracens, as the Pope was painfully aware; and that the only sure effect of Crusades was to increase the power and the wealth of the Papacy which organized them. Even the clergy and the monks refused the subsidies he demanded, and he was compelled to sanction a practice which would in time prove the most terrible and destructive abuse of the mediæval Papacy: the penance imposed on confessing sinners was to take the form of a money-contribution. To this day the indulgences which are sold in Spain trace their origin to the Crusades, as the printed bula declares.
At length, in the year 1200, Baldwin of Flanders and a few bishops and nobles formed the nucleus of a Crusade, and the astute Venetians were invited to provide for the transport of an army. In the spring of 1202 the streams of soldiers and priests converged upon Venice, and an army of 23,000 assembled for the fourth assault on the Saracens. But the Pope's joy was soon overcast, and the Crusade proved to be the second most lamentable occurrence of his Pontificate.
When the army assembled near Venice, it was discovered that neither the soldiers nor the Pope had money enough to pay their passage to the East. Venice had by that time fully developed its hard commercial spirit, and its famous blind Doge proposed to remit the debt if the Crusaders would, on their way, retake Zara (in Dalmatia) from the Hungarians for the Venetians. Innocent made the most violent opposition, but the Venetians, disdaining his threats, compelled the impoverished soldiers to consent, and on October 8th they set sail, under threat of excommunication, to begin their Crusade by the shedding of Christian blood. They took Zara, and incurred excommunication; but Innocent could not reconcile himself to the complete failure of his grand plan. He withdrew the censures they had so flagrantly defied, and admitted, or stated, that they had acted under "a sort of necessity." They were to make some vague "satisfaction" for their misdeed, and push on, with clean souls, to the East. The Venetians alone were not relieved of the censure, but, though knights of a more tender conscience were painfully perplexed to find themselves in the same galleys with excommunicated men, the Venetians showed no concern. They had another check in reserve for the Pope.
Before they left Italy, Alexis Comnenus had arrived from Constantinople to ask their aid in restoring his father to the throne he had just lost, and they were disposed to assist him. One could not, of course, expect the Pope to show the same concern for the blood of schismatics as for the blood of the Hungarians, yet his consent to this fatal and lamentable enterprise is a stain on his record. The sordid squabble of the Comneni family did not deserve the sacrifice of a single knight, and the part of Isaac Comnenus was espoused by the Crusaders and the Pope only because the young Alexis promised money and provisions to the troops and the subjection of the Greek Church to the Lateran. The issue is well known. The Crusaders took Constantinople, sacked the city, and desecrated the churches with a brutality that must have shocked the Saracens; and they then settled down to divide its territory between themselves and the Venetians. The letters which Innocent sent, as the successive news arrived, are painful reading. He must blame their excesses, he says at first, but, after all, these outrages had been merited by the sins of the Greeks; let the Crusaders inform him that the submission of the Greek Church has been secured. At last they send him, for his confirmation, a treaty from which he learns that they have arranged all the affairs, spiritual as well as secular, of the new Empire without consulting him, and he writes more warmly. To the outrage they have committed he is still almost insensible; it is their audacity in ruling the new Church—in permitting the hated Venetians to select a Patriarch—which excites his anger.
The last phase of the enterprise caused him grave distress. Instead of proceeding to the East, the Latins set up an Empire and several petty princedoms, and the Greeks disdainfully watched their quarrels and awaited their own opportunity. Monks and priests were summoned from France, but the people were secretly wedded to their old religion and the new Church was a hollow sham. For years Innocent had to maintain a fretful correspondence, settling quarrels about jurisdiction and property, and scolding his Crusaders for their oppression and spoliation of the clergy. But it is needless to recount all the details of that historic failure. The weariness of Innocent may be appreciated from the fact that in 1213 he naïvely wrote to the Khalipha himself, beseeching him "in all humility" to restore to the Christians the land which they had not the courage or the interest to win by the sword.
The crusade against the Albigensians was more successful, and even more lamentable, and I need do no more here than elucidate Innocent's relation to that monstrous crime. The degradation of morals and of religious practice, the corruption of the clergy, and the stupendous claims of the Papacy, had already provoked in Europe the beginnings of protest. A somewhat modified form of Christianity's old rival, Manichæism, had lingered in the East and had in time mingled with the austere Christianity of the Pauline Epistles. From the Eastern Empire it had spread to Bulgaria, and from there, in the thirteenth century, it passed rapidly over Europe, assimilating all the anti-clerical and anti-ritualist feeling which the corruption of the time inspired. In one or other form it obtained considerable strength in Switzerland, Piedmont, and the south of France, and it was fast gathering recruits in Italy and Spain. The light-living princes of Languedoc had little inclination to persecute; nor would they think that, if one might sing ribald contempt of the ecclesiastical system in the tavern and the monastery, this disdain was less respectable in the mouths of a generally sincere and upright body of fanatics.
In the first year of his Pontificate Innocent sent two Cistercian monks, Guy and Renier, to convert the heretics and incite the civil and religious authorities to enforce the law. Of corporal persecution he assuredly did not dream at that time, and indeed his letters made it clear that he preferred persuasion to coercion of any kind. The monks failed either to convert the heretics or to induce the bishops and princes of the south of France to persecute (by confiscation and exile), and they were replaced by the more vigorous monk-legates, Pierre de Castelnau and Raoul, to whom the resolute Abbot Arnold of Citeaux was afterwards added. Their powers set aside all ordinary episcopal jurisdiction, and, in pursuance of their policy of displacing lax and reluctant prelates, they put the fanatical Foulques of Marseilles in the bishopric of Toulouse. For eight years these energetic apostles worked almost in vain among the heretics. Apparently at the suggestion of St. Dominic, who was just entering the history of Europe, the Pope directed them to raise a corps of Cistercian monks who should live and preach on the model of the coming mendicant friars, but even this device made little impression on the heretics or the light-living Catholics. Arnold and Foulques, in particular, became desperate, and the lamentable policy of persecution began to grow in their minds and that of the Pope.