Innocent III

Innocent III., Pope (1161-1216), Lothario, Count of Segni, member of the great house of Conti, born at Anagni. He gained great reputation during his studies at Rome, Paris, and Bologna; and on the death of Celestine III., during whose reign he composed his great work, Be Contemptu Mundi, sive de Miseria Mumance Conditionis, was, at the early age of thirty-seven, proposed as Pope by Cardinal John of Salerno, who had refused the pontificate, and at once unanimously elected. Innocent speedily became the great champion of the temporal power and the ascendency of the Papacy. His erudition and diplomatic skill, combined with a remarkable genius for gaining and maintaining power, enabled him to humiliate the imperial prefect of Rome, and to drive the imperial seneschal, Duke Markwald of Romagna, out of the Mark of Ancona, and to wrest the duchy of Spoleto from Duke Conrad, thus, and by skilful diplomacy, gaining possession of the "States of the Church." He secured the kingdom of Naples, as guardian of the young King Frederick (afterwards the Emperor Frederick II.), against the designs of Markwald. In 1198 he established the inquisitorial tribunals which were the germs of the Inquisition. In 1200 he excommunicated Philip Augustus, King of France, and laid his kingdom under an interdict; in 1209 he crowned his nominee, Otto IV. (of Brunswick), emperor at Rome, the murder of Philip of Swabia having delivered Otto and the Pope from a disastrous war; and in 1212 deposed King John of England, after having excommunicated him and laid England under an interdict. The Pope at this time dominated the greater part of Western Europe. In 1215 he held a great council, the fourth Lateran, of 1,300 prelates and ambassadors, by which the dogmas of transubstantiation and the obligation of auricular confession were promulgated, the Pope's protege, Frederick, was acknowledged as Emperor of Germany on his promising to conduct a crusade (the fifth), the Franciscan and Dominician orders were confirmed, and severe decrees against heretics and Jews were issued. The crusade against the Albigenses which Innocent organised (1209) has tarnished the memory of this heroic pontiff, while his free use of the terrible instruments of excommunication and interdict suggests that his nature inclined towards cruelty. Of blameless life himself, he made strenuous efforts for the reform of morals in the Church.