The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century
Peter Linehan
The Reaction To John of Abbeville's Legislation
[35] After the legate's departure the onus of reform remained with the archbishops of Spain and their suffragans. The future was in their hands, and depended upon their willingness to take the initiative in summoning provincial councils and diocesan synods and to hammer home the lessons which the cardinal had taught them in 1228-9. Unhappily though they were to prove poor pupils and worse teachers.
While John of Abbeville was still in Spain, Rodrigo of Toledo, who was to survive until 1247, was reminded of his pastoral duty by the pope. Rather less elaborate, but no less explicit, than Honorius III's missive of ten years before, Gregory IX's letter referred to the legate's councils in that province and urged the archbishop and his suifragans most particularly to abide by John's decisions 'super incontinentia clericorum et ordinatione scolarum'.(1) The impressions which he had formed at Valladolid in the previous autumn had evidently induced the legate to call up heavy artillery against the leaders of the Castilian Church. But even this, the ultimate deterrent against disobedience, failed to move them. Though some allowance may be made for the archbishop's illness shortly after the legate had left, this hardly provides adequate excuse for the absence of councils and synods in the province during the rest of his lifetime. The truth was that the bishops of Castile had better things to do and other masters to serve.(2)
This reluctance was shared by the leader of the Aragonese Church, Archbishop Sparago of Tarragona, a royal relation and political churchman whose promotion from the see of Pamplona in the year of the Lateran Council (from which he was absent) had owed nothing [35] to pastoral considerations.(3)
But Sparago was more easily overborne than Rodrigo and allowed himself to be dragooned into action by the legate. A month after the Lérida Council John informed him that he had heard reports that there were individuals in his province who were determined to circumvent the recent legislation, and, employing the same text as had prefaced the pope's bull to the province of Toledo in the previous February, he charged the archbishop, on pain of suspension, to deal firmly with them.(4) After the legate's departure, further pressure and threats of suspension were needed to induce the archbishop to fulfil the obligation laid upon him in 1229, that of summoning a provincial council. And the legislation of the gathering of May 1230 -- which was attended by only four of his eleven suffragans, three fewer than at Lérida -- reflected the grudging spirit in which it had been conceived. Its canons contained a very diluted version of the Lérida programme of the previous year, and, convened under duress, it represented Sparago's solitary contribution to the cause.(5)
It seems, moreover, to have been the only provincial council held in any part of the Peninsula during these years, for the assembly at Compostela in July 1229, while the legate was still in the offing, has the appearance of a diocesan synod, though López Ferreiro thought otherwise.(6) There too, many of John ofAbbeville's constitutions were calmly ignored, though it was something that archdeacons were instructed to scour the rural deaneries for clerics deemed habiles ad studium but lacking the wherewithal for the Schools.(7) Yet this provision, though perfectly consonant with the legate's ideals, probably owed little or nothing to his having championed the cause of clerical education. For even before 1215 the canons of Compostela had been [37] encouraged to study,(8) and the impulse was almost certainly provided by Archbishop Bernardo who, if the content of his library is any guide, was a prelate of traditional but narrow culture with a marked preference for legal learning, as befitted a nephew of the canonist Bernardus Compostellanus Antiquus.(9) And there the common ground of the archbishop and the legate ended. The acta of the 1229 assembly bear no resemblance to what was presumably the burden of the latter's Salamanca Council of the previous February. One looks in vain for a condemnation of clerical incontinence. It was only the real property aspect of these dangerous liaisons that attracted Bernardo's attention. There was no objection to clerical offspring being given charge of churches other than those of their fathers. The alternative -- that they should be made to beg a living, in clericale opprobrium -- was inconceivable. Nor was any attempt made to tackle the associated problems of subdivided benefices and pluralism, beyond a perfunctory remark about the need for safeguards;(10) while for the legate's wholesale attack on laymen who abused their patronal rights the archbishop substituted counsels of discretion which would have received the approval of those connoisseurs of the soft option, the episcopal dumb dogs of Castile.(11) Such were the consequences of Honorius III's deference to the 'difficulties' of governing the province of Compostela.
Nevertheless, Archbishop Bernardo's constitutions, far from admirable though they were,(12) are at least a sign of activity of some sort. And in the province of Tarragona for ten years, and in those of Toledo and Compostela for almost thirty years after John of Abbeville's legation, conciliar and synodal activity was extremely rare. Of course, the argument from silence is not infallible. The objection can [38] always be made that although no record of it has survived or been discovered the seeds sown by John had germinated and produced a flourishing tradition. In view, however, of the quantity of evidence which has survived for the period 1239-50 when in the province of Tarragona ecclesiastical assemblies were frequent occurrences, and the fact that the tentative conciliarism of the provinces of Toledo and Compostela was all too obviously bereft of recent precedent in the late fifties,(13) it is indeed justifiable to regard the argument from silence as tantamount to positive evidence and to dismiss the suspicion that the legate's mission had borne fruit. The obligation to attend the diocesan synod was still acknowledged -- by the Cistercians of Monfero, for instance, in 1235(14) -- but such promises do not prove that synods were actually summoned, in the diocese of Compostela or elsewhere. Apart from the couple already mentioned, there is evidence -- though none of it is first-hand -- of only three ecclesiastical assemblies in the decade after 1229. All three were in the province of Tarragona. Bishop Pedro Ramírez of Pamplona reiterated John's legislation on pluralism at a diocesan synod held sometime between 1230 and I238.(15) At Calahorra Bishop Juan Pérez issued certain constitutions, presumably in a synod, which his successor, Áznar Díaz, confirmed in 1240 but did not specify.(16) And the council held at Lérida in or before 1237, for which the evidence is equally adventitious, appears to have been concerned solely with the repression of heresy -- a burden which, significantly, had been shouldered by the secular power in 1233 and not entrusted to the bishops and to ecclesiastical assemblies which hardly ever occurred.(17)
[39] The progress of monastic reform was no less inauspicious. While John was close enough to exert pressure, the holding of triennial chapters under Cistercian auspices, made some headway; and the acta of the Benedictine chapter of the Tarragona province in November 1229 betray his distinctive influence.(18) But these hopeful beginnings did not develop. In León the abbots of Samos and Celanova, whom the legate had appointed as visitors of the entire province, devoted themselves to settling old scores of their own until 1234 when it was discovered that the latter was himself excommunicated for keeping a woman.(19) And to judge by the records of the Cluniac visitors of the Spanish houses in 1217-18 and 1228 the abbot's idea of recreation was shared by many of the brethren.(20) The Order's prestige declined steadily throughout the century until, in 1290, its Spanish section had to be written off as spiritualiter et temporaliter collapsus even by a set of visitors whose standards were not particularly exalted.(21)John of Abbeville's intervention did nothing to halt this decline. After the fiasco in the León province there do not seem to have been any further triennial chapters. Certainly no record of them has survived, although Primera Partida contains a detailed description of the proper procedure.(22) Such monastic assemblies as occurred were board meetings business confederations concerned with the economic condition of subject priories. That, rather than the reform of monastic practices, [40] was the purpose of the generale capitulum which met annually on 13 November at the abbey of Santa María de Benevivere, Palencia,(23) and of the universale ac generale capitulum at San Victorián, Huesca, in 1264-5.(24)
The legate had concluded, correctly, that moral reform depended upon economic reorganisation, and had therefore sought to eliminate pluralism by revaluing the individual benefice and instructing cathedral chapters to adjust their numbers to their resources. In Aragon the closed capitular corporations had hitherto conspired, in the style of certain Oxford and Cambridge colleges in the eighteenth century and after, to ensure that the rate at which the number of shareholding canons increased lagged behind the rate at which capitular income grew, to the great profit of the fortunate few but with consequence for the cure of souls which John of Abbeville could hardly ignore. Consequently, his insistence that they create more canonries touched a neuralgic spot, and the battles which were waged at Tarragona, Vich and Gerona over this issue provide an insight into the strength and determination of those proprietary interests against which the whole of the programme of reform was destined to founder. By seeking to deprive them of part of their income as well as of the pleasures of the flesh he merely succeeded in galvanising them into effective action.
At Tarragona, for example, his inspection of the capitular budget convinced John that there were sufficient resources there for thirty canons and that the sum of 650 aurei ought to be earmarked annually for the purpose of providing them with plain and sober garments. In September 1229 he directed the archbishop and chapter to attend to the matter within the month, at the same time obliging those canons who had charge of capitular property to render account of their stewardship twice yearly; and on 1 December Gregory IX confirmed these measures.(25) But the chapter resisted. In September 1232 they appealed on grounds of expense; and by August 1248 they had still not complied, with serious consequences for the cure of souls, as [41] Innocent IV reminded them.(26) Even Archbishop Pedro, the legate's unwavering executor in almost every other respect, was forced to compromise on this issue and, in January 1249, to settle for a figure of twenty-five rather than thirty. For their part the canons surrendered the principle of unanimity which had previously delayed the filling of canonries by election.(27) But their concession cost them little, for thereafter the size of the chapter was steadily reduced, largely on account of their battles with Pedro's disastrous successor, Benito de Rocaberti. Numbers soon fell to twenty-three; to below twenty by September 1264; and to nine by 1272.(28)
It is possible to follow this process in rather more detail in the cathedral church of Vich, to the north, and to substantiate Innocent IV's remark about the spiritual repercussions of such restrictive practices. On visiting Vich in September 1229, John of Abbeville discovered that the number of canons had declined from forty to twenty-three and that three of the canonical portions were enjoyed by laymen who, in view of his lenience in dealing with them, may be assumed to have been individuals of considerable local standing, as traditionally were the canons of the neighbouring see of Gerona. He ordained that their income was to be resumed for the canons, but not until they died, and that the size of the chapter be increased, not to the former level of forty, but to thirty, of whom seven were to be priests and none below the order of subdeacon.(29) The particulars of John's measures for dealing with this declining band have not survived, but some of them may be inferred from the letter sent to Bishop Guillermo on 21 November by Archbishop Sparago, the legate's A.D.C. on this occasion, in response to a number of queries and objections raised by the canons. A month before, on 20 September, the archbishop had demanded full compliance within fifteen days. He had then been present at Vich with the cardinal, which accounts for his uncharacteristic enthusiasm.(30) Four and a half weeks later the memory of [42] John was still uncomfortably fresh, and he evidently felt inclined to indulge in the harmless luxury of being a reformer abroad, for the disaffected received short shrift from him. The lay-a-beds and maimgerers and those who claimed not to have heard the bell which summoned them to choir were to be penalised for their absence unless they could prove that they actually were stone-deaf; and, in passing, Sparago allowed himself a little moralising which came rather ill from him.(31) Nor was he prepared to adjust their constitutions to the more easy-going practices of Barcelona Cathedral where the canons recited matins of the Virgin in private and in comfort. Moreover, although he was inclined to agree with those who maintained that on a point of canon law John may have overstepped the mark, he was not prepared to expose himself for a principle.(32) And as for the ingenious piece of physiological justification from the fornicating canon who alleged that it had all been an accident, the archbishop was quite unmoved.(33)
While this luckless sinner and his colleagues were being brought to terms with the harshness of modern life, the seven canons whom John of Abbeville had planted in their midst took precautions against the day when the former group, having flexed the muscles of their ingenuity against the archbishop, would set about dealing with them as intruders. In January 1231 they secured papal confirmation of their appointments:(34) a prudent move, for the storm that would threaten them was already gathering.
Bishop Guillermo of Vich was made of sterner stuff than his sluggish chapter. Even before the legate had appeared on the horizon he had taken steps to check some of the abuses in his church. In July 1216, at his own request, Innocent III had empowered the bishop to [43]discipline those of the canons who were bent upon preventing the recent Lateran statutes having any effect there, and who, when they deigned to attend capitular meetings at all, were wont to withdraw if what they heard was not to their liking, thereby bringing business to a standstill,(35) Moreover, on 4 June 1229, more than two months before the legate's visitation, Guillermo had implemented one at least of the statutes of the Lérida Council, by granting leave of absence on full stipend to canons who desired to study in Lombardy or in France.(36) Despite this respectable record though -- or, perhaps, because of it, for the capitular backwoodsmen must have regarded the expenditure on education as an absurd extravagance -- he fell under suspicion of heresy and, after a wretched journey to the Curia for a hearing of his case before John of Abbeville, resigned his see early in 1233 and became a canon of Vich, having armed himself with a papal exemption from the obligation to be present at High Mass and vespers, upon which, in accord with the legates provisions, his daily income depended.(37)
His successor, Bernardo Calvó was utterly incompetent in his management of the church's affairs (as befitted a saint),(38) and by the time of his death in 1245 the need for capitular economies was urgent. Inevitably there was an outcry against the legatine provisions, and in the late summer of that year the bishop-elect, Bernardo Mur, and the chapter sought Innocent IV's permission to reduce their establishment, irrespective of the fact, which had been known to Gregory IX twelve years before, that the administration of the sacraments had broken down at the parochial level for lack of ministers.(39)
The judges-delegate, two archdeacons and a canon of Lérida, considered the state of the church of Vich and decided that John of Abbeville's estimate had been far too high. In their view, eighteen, not thirty, was the maximum number of canons that the capitular resources could support, especially as funds had been severely stretched by hail, fogs and hospitality to papal legates. Eventually, however, they settled on twenty, and confirmed the legate's requirement [44] that seven of these should be ordained.(40) Their other arrangements, though, show how little progress had been made in reforming the place since 1229. The three laymen were by now in possession of five benefices there, and although the judges-delegate recommended that they be eased out when opportunity offered, they did not attempt to prevent the recurrence of a similar situation, as had the legate by insisting that all canons be subdeacons. Indeed they acknowledged that urgens necessitas and evidens utilitas might justify further grants to laymen, as was the practice in their own church of Lérida -- a practice which had been ratified only four years after John of Abbeville's council there -- causa reverentie et honoris.(41)And whereas the legate had stressed the importance of the common life and to that end had ordained that meals be eaten together in the refectory, this practice too was abandoned in favour of money payments during certain periods of the year.(42) The seasonal meat shortage provided a pretext for obliterating the last vestiges of the vita communis.
Innocent IV's confirmation of this reassessment(43) removed the name of John of Abbeville from the collective memory of the chapter of Vich. But the saga had not ended yet, for the victory which the bishop and chapter had won by working together proved a hollow victory and a rod for their own backs. By reducing the opportunity of advancement in their church they exposed their alliance to great strain, and the pressure of applicants, upon whose suitability they were obliged to agree, soon drove a wedge between them. And thus it was that the bishop executed a complete about-turn and in June 1256 had the effrontery to represent himself as a partisan of the legate's original assessment, and to allege that the reduction of numbers had been achieved fraudulently (despite his own former advocacy of that cause), and that in consequence the cure of souls had suffered.(44)
His true intent, clearly, was to steal a march on his chapter, as he succeeded in doing in the following December when he secured a papal [45] indulgence which entitled him to appoint to two canonries there, the capitular rights of collation and the revised statute de numero canonicorum notwithstanding.(45) The partial success of the bishop's campaign in June 1263, therefore, did not in any sense vindicate the legate's judgement.(46) It merely added fuel to the flames of his quarrel with the canons who thereafter followed his example and appealed ever more frequently for papal dispensation from the papal settlement which they had campaigned together to secure between 1245 and 1251.(47)
The receipt by laymen of capitular income was one of the abuses which the legate had attempted to eradicate at Vich, but although they had not been ousted by 1246 the number involved was small. Moreover, the proposals concerning clerical education had received a favourable and immediate hearing there. In the neighbouring diocese of Gerona, however, it was the conjunction of these two issues that provided the forces of reaction with a cause to defend, and the ensuing litigation, of which a partial account has survived in a manuscript volume in the cathedral archive -- the so-called Causa del Any 1240 -- provides a clear indication of the nature and strength of resistance to reform. The chapter of Gerona was a closed corporation, entry to which was restricted to a limited caste: the noble, military class. The canons of Gerona, by definition, were deacons only, not priests. In effect, the resources of the church were monopolised by the secular power.(48) The dozen priests who were retained to perform services in the cathedral formed an underprivileged minority group; and battle was joined between them and the canons when, in the light of the constitution of the Lérida Council, they entered a claim for grants such as were available at Vich. But their right to financial assistance hinged upon their right to be regarded as canons, and this [46] was stoutly denied by their adversaries who, just as the devil can quote scripture, were able to claim that the legate himself -- whose increase of numbers from twenty to twenty-four they had, incidentally, ignored -- had been aware of but had not objected to this custom.(49) And, in any case, the canons' attitude was that Gerona itself could provide whatever instruction the priests needed.(50) There was no need for them to go gallivanting off to those new-fangled, expensive, foreign places. Nor, perhaps, was there need, given the canons' conception of 'education', and their view that the priests were a species of domestic chaplain whose concern was the humdrum round of church services, not the higher learning of the Schools.
The case was argued at length at Gerona in 1239-40, and documents, rumour and hearsay were quoted by each side until 29 October 1240 when the bishop of Gerona, Guillermo de Cabanellas, and his colleagues, as arbiters, gave judgement against the twelve priests.This, though, was not the end of the affair, as Villanueva believed after inspecting the Causa volume during his visit to Gerona.(51) Indeed, on that very day the priests appealed to Gregory IX, and then on Gregory's death to Innocent IV.(52) Eventually, after much further argument, they won their case when in July 1248 Cardinal Gil Torres reversed the sentence of 1240, and in July 1249 their victory was confirmed by Innocent.(53) But it had been a long, uphill struggle for the twelve priests, and the chapter of military men survived the ordeal with their rights pretty much intact.(54)
It had been only by dint of sheer persistence, and the expenditure [47] of 1,200 aurei alfonsini,(55)that the student-priests had forced the chapter of Gerona to accept the legate's ordinances of twenty years before; and the canons of Tarragona and Vich proved no less tenacious in defending their property. Vested interests prevailed everywhere. In only two churches in Castile-Leon do the legate's provisions concerning regular attendance at divine office by canons properly dressed and decently shaved, seem to have made any impact during these years. They were incorporated into the constitutions of the church of Burgos in November 1230, while at Zamora Bishop Martín published an elaborate scale of penalties (1217-38).(56) But even there a great gulf still existed between legatine theory and episcopal practice. The order of priorities was quite different. A canon of Zamora's slackness in attending to the vines was regarded as a considerably more serious offence than absence from choir, and the penalties imposed in 1236 were proportionately more severe. Nor can any of the regulations about the divine office have caused the chapter more heart-searching than the concoction of the sections in their constitutions which described the solemn procedure to be followed if their wine were watered or their bread were black.(57)
A great distance separates Zamora from Gerona, but in attempting to understand from admittedly patchy evidence something of the life led by the canons of the cathedrals of Aragon and Castile in the 1230s and 1240s, it will probably do them little injustice to stress both the essentially, if not technically, secular character of the young bloods of Gerona and also the rather fussy concern of the gentlemen-farmers of the other place with the details of their creature comforts, rather in the style of the modern bachelor Fellow. Sacerdotal ordination was sought only by a minority. The legate himself had scarcely pressed the point: at Barcelona in 1229 the dean was the only priest.(58) In October 1232 the canonist-bishop of Orense, Laurentius Hispanus, complained that it was the custom of that church that none but its canons might celebrate at the high altar. Yet raro aut nunquam could [48] the canons of Orense be induced to become priests. And the situation there was unchanged twenty-two years later.(59) Gerona, evidently, was not exceptional. In the year 1280 the proportion of priests to canons was the same both at Huesca in the north-east and at Lugo in the north-west: one to five.(60)
The one inescapable conclusion about John of Abbeville, and the main reason for the failure of his high-minded intervention in Spain, is that he declined to take into account the ineluctable facts of life there. 'The variety of persons and places' which was to provide Innocent IV with a principle in accordance with which he might bow to pressure from the Spanish Church and disown the legate's hard line on clerical incontinence, received no recognition from John himself. His councils supplied a faithful, even a slavish version of the legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council. With rare exceptions he adhered to that model. Making little or no allowance for Spanish idiosyncracies, which were considerable, he deviated neither to right nor to left, but stated and restated the rigid, uniform programme wherever he went. His utter devotion to that programme excluded all consideration of those existing social conditions which, inevitably and easily, survived his assault upon the superstructure: the system of recruiting canons at Gerona, for example, or the customary abuses practised by lay patrons in Galicia which the archbishop of Compostela, wiser in his generation than the children of light, recognised as uncanonical but realised that he must tolerate nevertheless.
John of Abbeville followed Innocent III not wisely, but too well. He was, after all, no politician. He was an academic out of his depth. He had made his reputation as a secular master at Paris, and it was the donnish quality of thoroughness and absolute loyalty to 'authority' that is most apparent during the Spanish legation, his first assignment as cardinal. He was the slave of his sources, which had been most recently codified in 1215, and applied them indiscriminately, invoking the toughest ecclesiastical sanctions in order to ensure respect for his monita salutis, as Rodrigo of Toledo called them.(61) Litteratus, Rodrigo labelled him, as did another Spanish witness.(62) 'Out of [49] touch' might be a faithful translation. All was cut and dried for John whether he was in the lecture hail at the Schools or confronted with the all too human failings of the rural clergy. He remained as remote and automatic in the second avocation as in the first. His sermons are brittle with this essential dryness. He himself liked to think of them as a popular work for the edification of ordinary people. Yet whenever he came face to face with the texts, training told and the temptation to overload them with a stifling scholarly apparatus proved too much for him.(63) Their apparent success is difficult to understand, and at least one contemporary found them boring, 'sermones valde prolixos', heavy with the weight of their scriptural baggage.(64) The same may be said of his other productions. The so-called treatise on confession proves on closer inspection to be just another piece of quotation-mongering, and his Expositio super Cantica Canticorum a mere exercise in sub-Bernardine piety.(65) John lacked the common touch. From the country pulpit he saw pupils not people. Indeed, his work has been described as the swansong of twelfth-century biblical scholarship:(66) a characterisation which is given added point by his almost allegorical encounter in Spain with the Dominican, Raymond of Peñafort, who became his acolyte and went before him preaching and hearing confessions. For Raymond was an ornament of the Order which was destined both to revolutionise biblical studies in general and, in the kingdom of Aragon, to make some part of the legate's reform programme effective during the 1240s and 1250s.(67)
However, the activity of the Dominicans did not get under way in Aragon till 1238, by which time the process of whittling away the legate's various arrangements had got a head-start. Partly this was the work of half-hearted bishops and two-faced abbots. But the papacy [50] too must take a share of the blame, if blame be appropriate. For considerations of necessity and utility, those elastic concepts that had enmeshed reform at Vich and Lérida, and concern about the very continuation of the ministry in Spain provided strong incentives for compromise. The legate's blanket condemnation of all clergy who failed in any particular to measure up to his exalted standards threatened to bring the administration of the sacraments to a grinding halt, just as the counsels of perfection of extremist reformers had done in the eleventh century.(68) Moreover, papal priorities were being revised at this period. In 1228-9 the legate restated the preoccupation with reform of the Fourth Lateran Council of thirteen years before. But only seventeen years later at the Lyons Council, Innocent IV relegated reform and gave preference to politics in his address on the five wounds of the Church.(69)
The papal reassessment began within three years of John of Abbeville's return from Spain. In the archdiocese of Braga alone the legate's sentences against illegitimate clerics had affected 1,746 holders of benefices; and in July 1232 Gregory IX instructed Archbishop Silvestre Godinho to absolve them all.(70) Two years later, Bishop Miguel of Lugo was empowered to deal with five hundred such unfortunates of his diocese who, strictly speaking, ought to have travelled to the Curia for absolution, and with certain others who had fallen foul of the legate.(71) On the whole, though, Gregory IX was parsimonious with dispensations. He was careful to specify that the Lugo grant did not apply to those whose fathers had been priests or who were themselves guilty of adultery or incest. But Innocent IV, his successor, was much less cautious. At Porto he reversed John's arrangement for the revaluation of canonries and prebends by accepting the argument of Bishop Pedro Salvador that there were insufficient canons for the celebration of services there, and allowing him to subdivide the next two vacant prebends, thereby giving fresh impetus to the spiral of subdivision and pluralism against which the legate had striven.(72) Bishop Pedro Fernández of Astorga was authorised to amend Johns statutes for his church, and in particular to [51] modify the penalties against canons who wandered about the place in lay attire during services.(73) It was by his reversal of the sentences of excommunication and suspension against clerici concubinarii, however, that Innocent proclaimed the renunciation not only of John of Abbeville's vigorous measures but also of any hope that the Spanish Church might be reformed.
Piecemeal dispensations were issued from the very beginning of his pontificate. In October 1243 'non modica multitudo' of Burgos concubinarii was absolved, on payment to the papal funds for the Holy Land of the money that they would otherwise have spent in journeying to Rome for absolution.(74) And in the course of the next three years similar arrangements were made with the clergy of Tarragona and León.(75) Then, in June 1251, only two months after Innocent had confirmed the repudiation of the legate's ordinances at Vich, the statutory sentences of excommunication and suspension imposed at the Valladolid and Lérida Councils were completely withdrawn. Having conferred with his compatriots at the Curia, the Spanish cardinal Gil Torres, to whom the pope had referred the matter, concluded that the legates efforts pro animarum procuranda salute had proved to be counter-productive. For the Spanish clergy, like the Bavarians, did not give a bean for these spiritual fulminations, as the Tarragona Council of 1230 had noted.(76) They carried on regardless and, what was worse, they infected with the contagion of excommunication whomsoever came into contact with them.(77) Thereby they had called the papal bluff, and the pope was obliged to climb down and to abandon the fundamental principles of his predecessor's sometime legate. Shortly after the Lyons Council, Innocent had lamented that in the province of Tarragona ecclesiastical sanctions were ignored and canonical sentences set at naught.(78) Six years later, it was decided to replace John of Abbeville's penalties by a system of fines and to surrender the initiative to individual prelates who had experience of local conditions, lest the Church, like an unskilled doctor, should seem to prescribe the same medicine irrespective of the nature of the [52] ailment, 'cum per varietatem personarum et etiam regionum poenae sint proinde variandae'.(79)
It was thus accepted that the Spanish clergy could not be expected to conform to the rules of canon law.(80) Innocent IV preferred to cut his losses. He had no alternative. In Castile the legate's plan of reform had been a dead letter all along, and in Aragon even that doughty campaigner Archbishop Pedro de Albalat, who died a month after Cardinal Gil's sentence, did not adhere quite as strictly as he might have done to the line on concubinage.(81) Nor does it seem that the new financial deterrent made much impression. According to the Primera Partida the clergy continued with their wenching. It was one of the things that did their reputation most damage.(82) And they did not lack opportunities for their adventures, for, although barraganas and mujeres sospechosas were warned off, there was no objection to their co-habiting with a wide selection of female relatives. Mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts were held to be above suspicion, and in charity ought probably to be accepted as such. But, without undue prurience, one may question the wisdom of including nieces too, and daughters and daughters-in-aw by earlier marriages.(83) Small wonder that it was reported of some clerics that in their depravity they managed to commit indiscretions with even these.(84) On the island of Mallorca, where the cause of reform had made rather more progress than in Castile, 'sisters and young cousins' were rejected for what they were: euphemisms for something else.(85)
The year 1251, therefore, witnessed the acceptance of the fait accompli of John de Abbeville's failure in Spain. In July 1254 Bishop Juan Díaz of Orense secured a copy of Cardinal Gil's judgement while he was at the Curia,(86) and in the following April the archbishop of [53] Compostela, Juan Arias, followed suit.(87) It may have been a form of investment: with it, perhaps, prelates were able to recoup some of their Roman expenses by fining their diocesan clergy. Certainly its validity was limited to the lifetime of the recipient, for in February 1290 Juan Arias's successor, Rodrigo, acquired a further copy.(88) So also did six other Hispanic prelates -- the archbishop of Braga and the bishops of León,(89) Lérida, Barcelona, Oviedo and Lisbon -- in that and the preceding year. But by then the name of John Abbeville had become merely a venerable relic, necessarily mentioned in papal dispensations to pluralists,(90) and roughly synonymous with the defence of libertas ecciesiastica. In the year 1282 it was twice invoked in this sense. In April the alliance of the rebel churchmen with the Infante Sancho was denounced by the loyalists as being contra iura et statuta domini Sabinensis;(91) and seven months later the abbot of Pombeiro was warned by Archbishop Tello of Braga that his intention of referring a certain property dispute to the royal court had been 'expressly forbidden' by the cardinal-bishop of Sabina, olim in Hyspania apostolice sedis legatus.(92)It was scant return for all the energy that John of Abbeville had expended during a Spanish winter and two summers. But in the kingdom of Aragon he had received a better reception and there, at least for a period often years, they had taken him seriously.
1. AC Toledo, I.6.C.1.21: Parum est, 13 Feb. 1229. Note the reference to councils in the plural.
2. Rodericus Toletanus, De Rebus Hispaniae, 202.
3. VL, XIX, 176 ff; Morera, Tarragona cristiana, II, 270-1; Goñi Gaztambide, Príncipe de Viana,XVIII, 65-7; Fita, Razón y Fe, II, 195. Cf. Luchaire, Journal des Savants, III, 562.
4. 'Parum est in civitate ius esse nisi qui illud tueatur existat' : ES, XLVIII, 325.
5. Tejada, Colección, VI, 28-9; P. de Marca, Marca Hispanica, 527; Augustinus, Opera, III, 498.
6. AC Santiago, Libro I de Constituciones, fos. 77v-8v; López Ferreiro, Historia, V, appendix 16, p. 49. Libro I was compiled in 1328: López Ferreiro-Fita, Monumentos antiguos, 46. A document in AC Salamanca which seems to record a provincial council of the year 1230 and is described as such by Marcos Rodríguez, Catálogo, 185, was misdated by the scribe and does not belong to that year: see below, p. 172.
8. López, Estudios crítico-históricos, 41.
9. A catalogue of his library, discovered in a Marseille MS., was published by Omont in 1893: BEG, LIV, 327-33. But in 1944 Galindo Romeo was credited with its discovery, 'en Mediodía in 1921, by Portela Pazos who was, understandably perhaps, rather shy about giving references: Decanologio, 91, n. 3. Cf. López Ferreiro, V, 121.
11. Loc. cit.: '...fructibus, censu vel servitiis sibi debitis per pravam consuetudinem sive abusum in Gallecia diu obtentum ipsos patronos de facto non dicimus esse privandos, licet ipsis secundum canones sint privati.'
12. Cf. González Davila who, with these probably in mind, notes that Bernardo 'hizo constituciones loables para el gobiemo de su arcobispado:' Teatro, I, 54.
14. AC Santiago, Constituciones sinodales y capitulares antiguas, fo. 17V.
15. This synod was mentioned in the course of an inquiry into the alleged pluralism of Juan Pérez de Arroniz, which arose out of the Toledo-Tarragona dispute over Valencia: ASV, A.A. arm.I-XVIII.4203. This document has not been incorporated into modem studies of the acrimonious Ordinatio Valentina, although others in the Vatican series to which it belongs were published as long ago as 1912 by Martorell in CTEER, 1, 81 ff. Mansilla's register of this series misdates it 'c. 1260': AA, VI, 322, no. 87. It dates from 1246 and contains the evidence of witnesses concerning the benefices of Juan Pérez, who, until Jan. 1240 had been the Toledo judge in hearings of the Ordinatio case. It provides new details about the later stages of the dispute, but eluded the author of the most recent account of the Ordinatio, R. I. Burns, despite his 'year of work among the materials pertaining to Spain' at the Vatican: Crusader Kingdom, I,253 ff., 273.
17. Devic and Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc, VII, 1011; Tejada, III, 362-6. The problem of heresy, especially in the diocese of Urgel, engaged the attention of Spago's 1230 Council: ibid. VI, 28; Ventura Subirats, BRABL, XXVIII, 88-9.
18. Tobella, Catalonia Monastica, I, 131 ff. For thirteenth-century chapters in the Tarragona province, see the evidence assembled by Tobella, Analecta Montserratensia, X, 245 ff. To this may be added the General Chapter referred to in May 1240 as a recent event; and the extraordinary meeting summoned by Pedro de Albalat in the same year: Reg. Greg. IX, 5196;below, p. 192.
19. Reg. Greg. IX, 1756, 1908; Escalona, Historia de Sahagún, 143.John had also provided for triennial chapters of the Portuguese Augustinians, and had insisted that the visitors appointed thereat be 'aspectu decori, atque honesta canitie venerandi, religione famosi et omni prediti sanctitate': Santa María, Chronica, II, 441.
20. AHN, 1031/II; Fita, BRAH, XXVI, 372 ff.; Bishko, SM, VII, 352-3; AHN, 1702/II; AC Palencia, 8/15/4.
21. Robert, BRAH, XX, 349. In 1292 the visitors described Valverde as 'spiritualiter in bono statu, although the prior 'diffamatus est de incontinentia et publice tenet rieretricem et habet pecuniam ad mensem mercatorum': ibid. 352. Cf. Pérez de Urbel, Los monjes españoles, II, 527 ff.
22. Berliére, RB, XIX, 374; Part. 1.7.19-22: BM, Add. MS. 20787, Los. 57rb-8va: corresponding to laws 17-21 in the Academy ed., I, 307-12. (For a description of BM MS., see Herriot, Speculum, XIII, 278 ff.)
23. L. Fernández, Miscelánea Comillas, XXXVII, 226. The consuetudines of Benevivere did, however, provide for an annual chapter of abbots to treat 'de salute animarum': ibid. 234.
25. AC Seo de Urgel, cod. 2119, fo.10r-V; AHA, Index dels Indices, fo. 567v.
26. VL, XIX, 231; AHA, Thesaurus, fo. 466 (publ. Fita, BRAH, XXIX, 110).
27. Morera, II,286; AHA, Thesaurus, fo. 496.
28. Morera, loc. cit.; Capdevila, Seu de Tarragona, 127; Vincke, RQ, XLVIII, 205. In Dec. 1255 Alexander IV ordered the chapter, in general terms, to obey the legate's statutes, and in Sept. 1264 Urban IV reiterated the figure of thirty canons: AHA Cartoral AB, fo. 36v; Reg. Urb. IV, 2112.
29. AC Vich, 37-6-60; Moncada, Episcopologio, I, 573; VL,VII, 23.
31. Ibid.: 'Cum....illi qui debiles sunt in spiritualibus frequenter hoc allegarent.'
32. Ibid.: 'Super illo vero articulo utrum canonici sint suspecti vel excommunicati qui ordinationi domini legati obiurant sine causa, licet in hac parte quid iuris sit varient sapientes, ab ore domini legati nos recolimus audivisse quod non erant canonice ferende sentencie set iam late, et ideo super isto articulo contra eius dictum nolumus temere difilnire, licet domini Honorii sit decretalis expressa quod huiusmodi sentencie pocius sunt comminationes quam canonice sentencie promulgate.'
33. Ibid.: '...allegacio quod propter sompnuin et quia naturalem rem passus fuit'.
34. AC Vich, 35-5-17 = Reg. Greg. IX, 526. One of the seven was Pedro de Posa who in 1270 bequeathed copies of John of Abbeville's constitutions and sermons, of which he thought highly: 'quamvis ille liber sit scriptus de vili littera tamen multa bona in hoc continetur'. The will is published in HS, II, 427-9, but it has escaped the notice of its editor, Mossèn Junyent, that Pedro had special reasons for remembering the legate fondly.
35. AC Vich, 37-6-5.: Cum turpis sit, 5 July 1216.
36. AC Vich, 37-I: Privilegis i estatuts, 13. The provision is misdated by both Moncada and Villanueva: Episcopologio, I, 572; VL, VII, 24. Cf. Conc. Lérida, c. 7.
37. Reg. Greg. IX, 999, 1122; Kehr, Papsturkunden Katalonien, 585 Mundó, VII. CHCA, III,77 ff.
38. Junyent, Diplomatari de Sant Bernat Calvò, XLVIII-L, 238, 257.
39. AC Vich, 37-5-16: Dilecti filii, 2 Aug. 1245; Reg. Greg. IX, 1135.
42. Ibid.: 'Verum quia certis arini temporibus carnes recentes et salse nimis inordinate dabantur, statuimus quod loco carnium secundum ordinationem episcopi et capituli denarii tribuantur.'
43. AC Vich, 37-5-28: Cum a nobis, 7 April 1251.
44. AC Vich, 37-I: Privilegis i estatuts,8 (publ. Valls i Tabemer, AST, V, 280; Ríus Sena, San Raimundo: Diplomatário, 122).
45. Reg. Alex. IV, 1569. He attempted to use this indult twice, but was foiled by the chapter: AC Vich, 6-III-22.
47. A copy of their supplication to Martin IV in May 1282 on behalf of a local worthy, the cleric Pedro de Castello, states that on account of the statute de numero, 'de quibusdam certis personis valde necessariis et utilibus nobis et ecciesie nostre providere ad presens commode non possimus': AC Vich, 37-7: Domus de Angularia et de Cardona, II, 3.
48. According to Arberto de Colonico, miles, 'a .XC. annis citra [. . .] clerici qui nobiles genere tantum [ ...] filli militum et dominorum recipiebantur in canonia Gerundensi, et non alii: AC Gerona, Causa del Any 1240, fo. 23va. Many others made the same point: fos. 23ra, 24rb-va. Cf. VL, XII, 150-1.
49. Ibid. fos. 25va, 3rb, IIra-b. Evidence of 'Bernardus clericus presbiter': 'Item audivit dici quod B. de Gusearia (?) dixit coram cardinali ... archidiaconum de Albuciano dixisse quod presbiteri non erant canonici.' This was a long shot.
50. Ibid. fo. 2ra: 'Item neget ex parte canonicorum quod aliqui de predictis sacerdotibus non debent ire ad scolas cum in ecclesia Gerundensi certos habeant magistros et cantus et grammatici et dialectice facultatis per quos possunt instrui circa intelligendas scripturas et officium ecclesiasticum ad quod sunt specialiter deputati.'
52. Causa, fo. 26ra Reg. Greg. IX, 5970; Reg. Inn. IV, 271. The transcript of evidence ends at Oct. 1240, but the Causa was evidently used by the priests' proctor at the Curia in subsequent years. The text is heavily glossed in a hand, presumably his which is distinct from that of the text itself.
53. AC Gerona, d.s.n.: decree Ea que iudicio, 7 July 1249, containing the text of Cardinal Gil's judgement which is dated, according to the Consuetudo Bononiensis, 'atmo domini 1249 [sic] armo sexto... mense julii die XII intrante'.
56. Serrano, Don Mauricio, 145; AC Zamora, Liber Constitutionum, fos. 8rb-16vb. The Zamora constitutions are undated. The canons were permitted to miss matins once a week without penalty and, as at Burgos, shaving was de rigeur only on feast-days: fo. 8va.
58. Martène-Durand, Thesaurus, IV, 597.
59. Reg. Greg. IX, 916; Reg. Inn. IV, 7853.
60. Durán Gudiol, REDC, VII, cap. 14-22; AHN, cod. 1042B, fo. 37r.
62. Loc. cit.; CIL: B. Hisp., XV, 272.
63. Liber Omeliarum (MS. Trinity Coil. Cambridge, B.15.21), fo. Ira: 'Hoc opus.. .non sermonem exactum vel subtilem prurientibus scolarium auribus promittentes sed quasi rudes omelias rudibus rudi proponendas.' What, though, to quote a solitary example, can they have made of his semantic excursus upon Matt. XXI.9: 'Turbe que precedebant et que sequebantur clamabant "Filio David" et est filio dativi casus; "Osanna", id est salva, obsecro: et est compositum ex corrupto osy, scilicet quod est salva et integro; scilicet anna, quod est interiectio deprecantis' (fo. 3rb)?
64. Henry of Ghent, cit. Feret, Faculté de théologie, I, 231. Lecoy de la Marche calls them the most colourless and unoriginal productions of the age: La chaire française, 60.Cf. the opinion of Pedro de Posa.
65. Hauréau, Notices et extraits, IV, 148; Histoire littéraire de la France, XVIII, 171.
66. Smalley, Study of the Bible, 265.
67. Vita S. Raymundi, 22; Smalley, 264 ff.
68. Fliche, La réforme grégorienne, I, 294 ff.
69. Hefele-Leclercq, V, ii, 1637-8.
71. Ibid. 2068; AC Lugo, 21/3/17.
72. In July 1245, having two months previously given Archbishop João Egas of Braga leave to convert the next four vacant prebends into twelve: Censual do Cabido da Sé do Porto,17 ADB, Gav. das Dignidades, 15.
73. In Aug. 1245: Quintana Prieto, AA, XI, no. 58.
74. AC Burgos, vol. 71, fos. 70rb-vb (reg. Mansilla, AA, IX, no. 10).
75. AHA, Cartoral AB, fo. 8r (ed. Augustinus, Opera, III, 411-12); AC León, doc. 1295: Ex parte, 4 Oct. 1245.
76. Tejada, VI, 28-9; Bayley, The Formation of the German College of Electors, l0.
80. Liber Extra, III, III. de clericis coniugatis, c. 1 (Friedberg, Corpus, II, 457). In 1258-9 Cardinal Gil's argument and text were adopted by the archbishop of Uppsala: Reg. Alex. IV,2660,2837.
82. BM Add. MS. 20787, fo. 45rb: Part.1.6.37(Academy ed. 1, 278).
83. Ibid. fo. 45va (Academy ed. I, 279).
84. Ibid. fo. 45vb (Academy ed. 1,279): Part.1.6.38.
85. 'Lurs sors ne lurs cosines joves', whom rectors were forbidden to entertain: Constitution of March 1266, in Nebot, BSAL, XIII, 316.
86. Reg. Inn. IV, 7885. By Dec. 1255 he had returned to his see: AC Orense, Escrituras, XII, 59.
89. Ibid.757, 519, 2928,2942, 3018, 3685.
90. The earliest instance seems to have been in Jan. 1234: Reg. Greg. IX, 1737. Between then and 1303 thirty such letters, some of them in favour of more than one clerk, were entered in the Papal Registers. One which was not (for Archbishop Sancho I of Toledo) has the words omitted from the text written in on the fold by the corrector, as an afterthought: '[non obstantibus.. .] et illa quam bone memorie J. Sabinensis episcopus tunc in Ispanie partibus apostolice sedis legatus contra obtinentes plura ecclesiastica beneficia edidisse dicitur'. This was only thirty years after, on 10 April 1259: AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.5: Pro merente.
92. Meireles, Meniórias do mosteiro de Pombeiro, 129. For similar usage by Archbishop João of Braga in the late 1240s, see As Gavetas da Torre do Tombo, III, 235.