The Two Powers. Brett Edward Whalen
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who attended his sermons. In August 1233, no doubt anticipating the peace assembly at Paquara later that month, Gregory authorized John to reconcile Ezzelino da Romano, who had been excommunicated by the pope’s own legates in Lombardy, if and when he rendered sufficient satisfaction for his sins. Chroniclers describing John’s charismatic acts of reconciliation note that the warring parties swore to obey not only him but also the “mandates of the Roman church,” thereby recognizing his authority to make peace given by the pope, the “lord Apostolic.”42
The peace envisioned by the Great Devotion nevertheless proved to be particularly ephemeral. In Piacenza a few months after Leo de Valvassori’s departure, many of the soldiers belonging to the militia abandoned the city with their families “privately” and “publicly,” rejecting their reconciliation with the popolo. The confusion and disruption in Piacenza grew worse when a mob attacked the next itinerant preacher who arrived on the scene preaching against heresy, a Dominican from Cremona named Roland. The city’s bishop imprisoned the perpetrators, but months of uncertainty and investigation followed while Pope Gregory tried to get to the bottom of things.43 As for John of Vicenza, his meteoric rise was followed by an equally dramatic fall. Within days after the peace assembly at Paquara, a group of citizens from Padua who felt that the Dominican friar had shown too much lenience toward the Romano brothers took control of Vicenza with help from the inside. When John rushed back to deal with this surprising turn of events, his opponents in the city arrested and imprisoned him. Although he was released a few weeks later, John’s charismatic effectiveness as a peacemaker was spent. During his captivity, he had to watch while the bishop of Vicenza and others sent a letter to the pope declaring the Dominican friar’s statutes null and void. As the Vicenza notary and chronicler Gerard Maurisio observed about the months after the Great Devotion, “Now an even worse war sprang back up, in its accustomed manner.”44
The peace movement that had so quickly seized the imagination of Italy’s communes came to an abrupt end. Frederick II would eventually complain about wandering preachers like John of Vicenza, presenting them as subversive figures taking orders from the papacy. In 1233, there are no signs that the emperor identified the revivalists of the Great Devotion in this way, although someone at the imperial court composed a mocking poem that parodied the supposed miracles wrought by John and others.45 By the spring of 1234, while endemic conflict continued to plague the communes of northern Italy and Frederick found new reasons to complain about his adversaries in the region, the Great Devotion was rapidly on its way to becoming a memory. The papacy’s public efforts to broker peace, by contrast, remained vital and visible, while Gregory’s legates at the imperial court secured Frederick’s renewed commitment to placing the “Lombard business” in the pope’s hands.46 As charismatic preachers like John of Vicenza lost credibility, the papacy reminded everyone about its own role in supporting and celebrating the order’s founder, adding Dominic to the catalog of saints on 3 July 1234.47 In some sense, the failure of the Great Devotion to achieve a meaningful peace highlighted the enduring significance of papal intervention in Lombardy. Every time that the Lombards and the emperor agreed to Gregory’s arbitration—before, during, and above all after the transitory Great Hallelujah—they publicly validated the Apostolic See’s role as the true evangelizer of peace in the region.
Civil Strife in Holy Places
After the Treaty of San Germano, the reforming of the peace between the two powers remained linked to one goal more than any other: the freeing of Jerusalem. In his declarations about the search for peace in Lombardy, Gregory repeatedly invoked the need for concord among Christians as a means to liberating the holy places. In the early 1230s, the pope and Frederick faced another area being torn apart by civil strife between Christians, conflict that was eroding the support needed for the next crusade, namely, the crusader territories overseas. Certain factions in the region continued to rebel against Frederick’s claims to the kingship of Jerusalem. During his earlier years of conflict with the emperor, Gregory, working through his legates and letters to the crusaders and Latin Christian inhabitants of the holy places, had tried to undermine Frederick’s claims in crusader Syria and Palestine. After their broadly celebrated reconciliation, he reversed course, trying to stabilize the Hohenstaufen right to rule over the region. For both the pope and emperor, crusading represented one of the highest callings of their offices, a calling repeatedly invoked and widely publicized among contemporaries through rituals, oaths, letters, and sermons. They both possessed a stake in projecting harmonious cooperation between the two powers and peace in Christendom as a precondition to a successful crusade. In these terms, the crusades ideally formed the ultimate cooperative enterprise of the papacy and empire. It also created a means for either side to pressure the other openly, each accusing the other of neglecting one of their office’s paramount duties. The “business of the cross” could publicly unite and yet still divide the two powers like almost nothing else.48
The pope’s concern for Christians overseas did not abate after the end of hostilities between him and Frederick. In the early months of 1231, the Roman pontiff identified a new threat to the holy places: a coming assault by the “king of the Persians.”49 It remains unclear whom, exactly, the pope had in mind with this warning, but the danger struck him as quite real, having been relayed to him in letters sent to the curia from Syria by Gerold, patriarch of Jerusalem, and the leadership of the military orders.50 In his blanket appeals for military and financial aid to the Holy Land, which were sent to Frederick, Henry III, Louis IX, and bishops throughout the church, Gregory drew upon well-developed themes from generations of crusade bulls, lamenting the Persian assault on the place where Christ had shed his precious blood for humanity’s salvation as a blow against all Christendom. Under these circumstances, he renewed his call for peace among Christians, including an end to ongoing hostilities between the French and English crowns. Writing to Frederick in August 1231, the pope stressed his obligation to defend Jerusalem against such “barbarous nations,” insisting that the Hohenstaufen ruler send funds to rebuild Christian fortifications around the region. In a conciliatory gesture, Gregory addressed him in this letter for the first time as the “king of Jerusalem,” a title that he and his predecessor, Honorius III, had withheld from their formal correspondence in light of the dispute between Frederick and the papal ally John of Brienne over the crown.51
By this time, however, Gregory faced another unprecedented situation in the history of crusading: a truce struck by the emperor of the Romans with the sultan of Egypt, one that had restored Jerusalem to Christian hands by peaceful means. Before reconciling with Frederick, the pope had done everything possible to spread disparaging news about this “traitorous” agreement. In a turnabout, he now recognized its temporary advantages in light of new threats. In February 1231, after receiving Frederick’s complaints that the Templars had disregarded the commands of his bailiff and had begun marshaling troops in the region, thereby potentially violating the truce with al-Kamil, Gregory rebuked the master of Templar Order at Jerusalem. Although the pope commended the Templars’ desire to fight the “enemies of God,” he insisted that they show temporary restraint, since the disruptions of war might further expose Jerusalem to danger from the menacing Persian king and cause “confusion among the entire Christian people.”52 Taking advantage of these improved relations with al-Kamil, later that year Gregory wrote directly to the sultan, calling upon him to free a number of merchants from Ancona, who, according to rumor, were wrongfully imprisoned in Egypt. Over the coming years, seeing the possibilities of a temporary “détente” with the infidels, the pope dispatched a number of remarkable letters to the Egyptian sultan and other Islamic rulers around the Mediterranean, expressing his hopes for their conversion.53
During the years after the Treaty of San Germano, Pope Gregory also confronted something close to a civil war in crusader territories overseas that were still reeling from the disruptions caused by Frederick’s recent visit to the Holy Land. In Cyprus and Syria, fighting had continued between the emperor’s supporters and officials, including his new marshal in the area, Richard Filangerium, and factions that opposed his authority, including John of Ibelin, lord of Beirut, and a sworn association of nobles and citizens from Acre supported by the Genoese. The pope took steps to resolve this divisive conflict. Similar to his interventions in Lombardy, Gregory identified peace among Christians in the Holy Land