[152] The years 1257-8 constitute an important but hitherto unacknowledged political and geopolitical landmark in the history of the Spanish Peninsula, for in the course of a few months the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile both embarked upon extra-peninsular adventures which, by divergent paths, were to decide the fate of each throughout the later Middle Ages. Aragon, having completed the reconquering stint which it had been assigned at Cazorla, turned to the Mediterranean. Of course, what Dufourcq has called l'orientation thalassocratique of the Catalans was no new phenomenon. It was almost co-eval with the Reconquista itself, having its origin in the recovery of Barcelona in 801 and developing imperceptibly out of the struggle against the Saracen.⁽¹⁾ The attack on the Balearic Islands which John of Abbeville had blessed for that reason in 1229 thus provided Jaime I with a base from which his son would confound papal diplomacy by driving the French out of Sicily in 1282,⁽²⁾ the supreme irony of that reverse being the purposefulness with which Martin IV's predecessors had encouraged the king to interest himself in the politics of that area. As early as 1238, even before the recapture of Valencia, Gregory IX had attempted to cajole him into taking command of the Lombard opposition to Frederick II,⁽³⁾ and when Jaime announced his intention of intervening in the affairs of the Latin Empire eight years later he received every encouragement from Innocent IV.⁽⁴⁾ Yet Martin IV, together with the rest of Europe, was amazed by Pedro III's coup. On the eve of the Sicilian Vespers Aragon hardly seemed a serious proposition. The pope had only scorn for 'little Aragon' and its [153] 'feeble' king, according to Desclot.⁽⁵⁾ Five years later, though, Jordan of Osnabrück voiced the opinion that recent events marked a revolution in European power politics. The humiliation, contra opinionem, of the French 'que se maiorem reputat omni gente' by the insignificant Aragonese was in his view a sign of the times, the secular prefiguration of the imminent destruction of the ordo clericorum by the friars.⁽⁶⁾ And he was right. There had been a revolution. But it had not been unheralded. The coming storm had been rumbling for at least twenty years.

During the 1260s Jaime's sights were set on Sardinia as part of the Hohenstaufen inheritance to which Pedro had a claim after his marriage to Frederick II's grand-daughter, Constanza, in June 1262.⁽⁷⁾ But the betrothal of the pair, and the beginnings of Aragon's new foreign policy, dated from 28 July 1260.⁽⁸⁾ Two years before that, on 11 May 1258, Jaime had accepted the consequences of his own father's defeat at Muret in 1213 and by the Treaty of Corbeil had resigned virtually all his suzerain rights in the Midi, Louis IX in return surrendering his notional authority over the County of Barcelona which dated from the reign of Charlemagne.⁽⁹⁾ Thus the king of France released those Aragonese energies which, having attached themselves almost immediately to the Hohenstaufen cause, succeeded twenty-four years later in ousting his younger brother from Sicily. That same year, 1258, witnessed also Jaime's ratification of ordinances for the port of Barcelona which would enable the commercial community to exploit that victory to the full and establish its firm hold over Mediterranean trade during the next century.⁽¹⁰⁾

Aragon, then, does not conform to the all-purpose concept of the Closing Frontier which has been conjured by Professor Lewis from [154] the evidence of recession in Europe during the century after 1250; and Professor Lewis admits it.⁽¹¹⁾ What he did not appreciate in 1957, however, when he read his paper to a conference of historians was that that very year was no less significant a centenary for Spanish history than the year 1893 when his mentor, F. J. Turner, had read his. For 1257-8 marked an epoch in Castilian fortunes too. Rather less stealthily than the king of Aragon, Alfonso X also struck out in a new direction -- straight up the imperial cul-de-sac. On 1 April 1257 he was elected to the shadow of the Hohenstaufen inheritance, the kingship of the Romans, leaving the substance, Sicily, for the family of his father-in-law King Jaime.⁽¹²⁾ Thus, astonishingly, only five years after being the first monarch to succeed to the joint kingdoms of Castile-Leon, Alfonso chose to concentrate such resources as his exhausted realms could muster on winning control of Germany, the one European state to have retained the elective principles that had so dogged his remote ancestors during the first centuries of the Reconquista. Grasping enthusiastically the old Germanic nettle which earlier Spanish rulers had spent such effort in eradicating,⁽¹³⁾ he squandered that reputation for pragmatism as a national virtue with which Vincentius Hispanus had only recently contrasted the folly and incompetence of the Germans. It was not for want of alternatives. Apart from the completion of the Reconquista, other imperial possibilities presented themselves. Early in 1259, at the Toledo Cortes which he had summoned for a discussion of the finances of the German venture, his vassal, Ibn el-Ahmer -- the Nasrid king of Granada -- attempted to divert his attention to the 'much greater and better empire than that' which was his for the taking in North Africa,⁽¹⁴⁾ and in the September of that year he seems even to have been toying with the idea of reviving the old imperium Hispaniae.⁽¹⁵⁾ His pursuit of that chimera indicates the extent of his political wisdom, the lack of which experience did nothing to repair. When in November [155] 1282 he drafted his will he did so in the conviction that the French were in the ascendant in Europe and that God would be best served 'si firmiter amor Françie et Ispanie omni tempore uniatur'.⁽¹⁶⁾ Seven months before, the French had been humiliated in Sicily.

As the grandson of Philip of Swabia, though, he was perfectly entitled to bid for the debris of Frederick II's empire. He regarded it as his exclusive preserve. Pedro of Aragon's betrothal to Constanza was, he informed King Jaime, a personal affront to him such as no man had been made to suffer before.⁽¹⁷⁾ By then, 1260, his attitude was well set. Since 1239, at the latest, the Castilians had been actively concerned about the interests of Beatrice of Swabia, Fernando III's queen,⁽¹⁸⁾ and during the forties they, like the Aragonese, had been encouraged by the papacy to press their claim against Frederick. On 3 May 1246, at a time when the Castilian Reconquista was in full cry, Innocent IV had written to the Infante Alfonso in that sense, promising whatever assistance the Roman Church might lend cum Deo et honestate.⁽¹⁹⁾ It was papal policy to multiply Frederick's difficulties, and Innocent evidently felt that this might be done without detriment to that other crusade which was being waged in Spain. Only nine days before, he had granted the usual indulgences to those fighting the Saracen there.⁽²⁰⁾ By 1257, however, the number of those who were confident of the king of Castile's ability to carry on a struggle on two fronts had been reduced to Alfonso himself, his immediate circle and such foreign admirers as Gutetus de Mixigia, the Milanese notary whose verses on the theme that 'rex regum comiti preferri debet aperte' expressed their own delusions in the heady language which had been employed by the Castilians themselves in the previous decade.⁽²¹⁾ For though the pope praised Alfonso in similar terms, declaring him worthy of special consideration inter alios principes terre on account of his signal services to the Church,⁽²²⁾ it was vacillation on the [156] part of Alexander IV rather than any favourable expectation about the likely outcome that resulted in the king's entering the imperial lists against the count, Richard of Cornwall. Moreover, the papal panegyrics began to sound a note of alarm about Alfonso's failure to press the assumed advantage of the capture of Seville. A papal letter preserved in the collection of Richard of Pophis opened cheerfully enough, but then came to the point. What had possessed Fernando III to make a pact with the king of Granada after the success of 1248, and Alfonso to renew it on his accession?⁽²³⁾ Although, as it happened, Ibn el-Ahmer's views on Castilian foreign policy concurred with Alexander's, it was nevertheless, in the pope's view, a scandal that the king of Granada should have been the king of Castile's vassal at all in 1259.

In view of their recent experiences it may be assumed that the Castilian bishops were even less enthusiastic about the German business than the Moor. For them in 1257 Seville was not the Golden City but the bottomless pit into which they were currently being required to empty their income. They can have been in little doubt about their attitude -- and even, perhaps, about their collective attitude -- to fresh expensive foreign ventures, and such doubts as did exist must soon have been resolved when the pope sent his nuncio, Angelo patriarch of Grado, for discussions with the king on the subject in the autumn of 1258. On 21 October Alfonso wrote from Segovia, where the Patriarch was established five days before, to inform his allies in Siena of his arrival.⁽²⁴⁾ But the seriousness of his [157] mission failed to restrain the nuncio, who since his resignation as archbishop of Crete had been keeping body and soul together with whatever morsels he could procure at the Curia,⁽²⁵⁾ from attempting to repair his fortunes at the expense of the Spanish Church. When news of his exactions reached the pope, Archbishop Benito of Tarragona was set to investigate, presumably on the assumption that it takes a thief to catch a thief.⁽²⁶⁾ Possibly this was also the occasion of the letter to the king in the Marinus Formulary in which the pope assured Alfonso that news of the misconduct of various papal nuncios had come as a great shock to him and the cardinals.⁽²⁷⁾ Yet despite Alexander's evident disapproval of what had occurred, the patriarch's 'unheard-of exactions' were still fresh in the bishops' minds in the winter of 1262-3 when they wrote to Urban IV on the subject, and the pope who had sent him rather than the king for whose sole benefit he had been sent was made the butt of their collective criticism.⁽²⁸⁾

And the charge stuck. The conclusion of their disingenuous analysis -- that the Roman Church was responsible for 'prelatorum ac ecclesiarum destructio'⁽²⁹⁾ -- has long since been established as the authorised version. Modern historians such as Sánchez-Albornoz repeat it, apparently unconscious of its incompatibility with their no [158] less perennial belief in the fabulous riches of Spanish ecclesiastics, and would regard the Patriarch of Grado incident as confirmation of their view that throughout the Middle Ages 'rivers of gold and silver' flowed to Rome from meek, uncomplaining Spain.⁽³⁰⁾ This, naturally, was the view of regalist writers in the mid-eighteenth century -- of Nicolás de Azara who calculated that when Spain had been a Roman province its tribute had not amounted to half as much as the popes had exacted since its so-called independence,⁽³¹⁾ and of Ascensio de Morales who discovered a copy of the bishops' letter of 1262-3 together with Pope Urban's uncompromising reply in the archive of Cuenca Cathedral and regarded it as a perfect example of 'la antigua tiranía con que hemos sido tratados de la Corte Romana y sus ministros' who 'han mirado siempre a un fin, que es el de sacar hasta la última gota de sangre a nuestros naturales'.⁽³²⁾ It is much more telling, though, that Benedict XIII should have believed it too at the beginning of the fifteenth century and should have reflected the prejudices of his Aragonese origins by arguing that his own demands on Castile had been negligible in comparison with the 'magnas pecunias' and 'pingua beneficia' exacted by his predecessors.

The occasion of these remarks was the irritation of the queen of Castile, Catherine of Lancaster, at being refused permission to enjoy the tercias unless she devoted them to the war effort against the Moors.⁽³³⁾ By 1415 such restriction must have seemed intolerable. It was 168 years since Innocent IV had first granted this form of ecclesiastical revenue to the Castilian monarch -- an event which the bishops glossed over in their letter to Urban IV. And their eloquent silence, a tribute in itself to the effectiveness of royal discipline, was all the more remarkable in view of the economic crisis through which they were indeed passing and which had only very recently been prevented from bearing political fruit in the form of those assemblies which John of Abbeville had prescribed for quite different reasons: provincial [159] councils. The conciliar movement of 1251-8 was inspired neither by enthusiasm for papal reform nor by resistance to papal taxation, but by the economic consequences of royal control.

Even before the capture of Seville the normally docile Spanish bishops were beginning to show signs of strain. Though, for example, their intervention at the Lyons Council of 1245 was no more overtly suggestive of their disaffection with the king than was their letter to Pope Urban, nevertheless it will clearly bear this interpretation. To Urban they were to complain about the burden of taxation imposed upon them by Innocent IV.⁽³⁴⁾ Yet what had distinguished them in 1245 had been their keen advocacy of vigorous action against Frederick II, and their willingness to underwrite the costs of such action. Their enthusiasm may have been partly an extension of that over-weening national confidence in their own powers which drew strength from the collapse of the Moors at home. But ecclesiastical self-interest was at least as strong a motive. From a cultural point of view Menéndez Pidal has observed a 'marked similarity' in the careers of Frederick II and Alfonso X, and has remarked upon their 'parallel lives'.⁽³⁵⁾ In view of their recent experiences may not the same coincidence have struck the peninsular prelates in 1245, including those who were subject to the king of Castile, 'nuestro divino rey San Fernando' as Burriel called him?⁽³⁶⁾ Some such irreverent reflection may well have occurred to the canons of Calahorra and made them all the more willing to contribute to the pope's fund for the defence of ecclesiastica libertas when Innocent IV sent his chaplain Master Raymond to collect cash for that purpose in January 1244.⁽³⁷⁾ Less than twenty years later they would remember Master Raymond as one among many agents of the insatiable papacy,⁽³⁸⁾ but on the eve of the [160] Lyons Council Innocent's appeal could strike a chord at Calahorra and elsewhere, for in the emperor who showed such scant respect for churchmen, Spanish churchmen could see their own rulers writ large. Some Spaniards had had personal experience of Frederick's severity, having seen the inside of his prison after their capture by the Pisan fleet while en route for Gregory IX's abortive Roman Council in May 1241. One who had was Master Juan who was on a mission to the Curia on behalf of Bishop Martín Rodríguez of León. He acquitted himself fairly well -- as he remembered it all when dean of Leon in 1267 -- having the presence of mind to throw his letters of credit into the Mediterranean on arrest.⁽³⁹⁾ Others though were less resourceful, and their miserable fate was still remembered by the appellant bishops in 1262-3.⁽⁴⁰⁾ According to the pope's man in Germany, Albert Beham, those who survived the experience emerged as but shadows of their former selves.⁽⁴¹⁾ But the effect of the incident on the boatload of peninsular prelates who escaped unharmed seems to have been hardly less traumatic, and in their joint letter to the pope, Archbishop Pedro de Albalat and the bishops of Astorga, Orense, Salamanca, Plasencia and Porto volunteered their all in the struggle against Frederick and made no pretence of their fear that, if he were not thoroughly chastised, other princes would soon follow his 'exemplum et audaciam'.⁽⁴²⁾ If their prose was somewhat disjointed that was because they were looking over their shoulders as they wrote; and, within the decade, the fate of the bishop of Gerona, mutilated on royal orders, would show that their alarm was fully justified.

Between then and July 1245, when the emperor was condemned at Lyons, their ardour did not cool. In that aviary presided over by the papal peacock -- as an anonymous Ghibelline versifier described the assembly⁽⁴³⁾ -- the Spanish bishops were the hawks. Constituting the [161] largest national group, according to the Relatio, they reiterated not only their faith in the hard line but also their willingness to meet the cost;⁽⁴⁴⁾ and Frederick's condemnation of the archbishops of Tarragona and Compostela for interfering in matters which they did not understand⁽⁴⁵⁾ missed the essential point that, although possibly Pedro de Albalat and Juan Arias were ignorant of many of the details of his struggle with Innocent, nevertheless they were both fully experienced in the business of dealing with the likes of him in their own setting -- though there they would not have dared to speak out so recklessly. Each in 1245 had his equivalent to Frederick II. In the province of Tarragona Teobaldo I of Navarre was hardly less of a menace, as the bishop of Pamplona informed the pope in September 1245,⁽⁴⁶⁾ and by his firm refusal to allow his secular rights to be judged by any ecclesiastical authority, even the highest, he invited comparison with the emperor and three years later brought down upon himself a sentence of excommunication.⁽⁴⁷⁾ The province of Compostela provided an even closer parallel in Sancho II of Portugal whose outrages against the Portuguese bishops subject to the jurisdiction of Juan Arias incurred him in a papal sentence tantamount to that loosed against the emperor and issued one week later.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Nicholas of Curbio, Pope Innocent's biographer, was not the only observer to be struck by this coincidence.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Frederick himself drew Fernando III's attention to the case of Sancho in a letter the burden of which was to remind the king of Castile of the pope's temerity in interfering in his affairs [162] 'in quibus non minus vestrum quani nostrum vertitur interesse'.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The Spanish bishops' sense of foreboding was justifiable and would be justified, although when translated into action it at first mistook its adversary. Within ten years of the Lyons Council they had raised the rebel flag against the pope.⁽⁵¹⁾ But the pope was not their real problem, and by 1257 they were at last frank enough to acknowledge it. In that year the formal announcement of Alfonso's imperial candidacy was added to the accumulation of their existing woes. But it was, perhaps, a quite different phenomenon that drove them to the edge and, for a short time, kept them there: the weather. This is not to suggest that politics -- and ecclesiastical politics least of all -- go by the weather. Still, their obsession with that gravissima afflictio of seven years' duration when they wrote to Urban IV in the winter of 1262-3⁽⁵²⁾ suggests that the meteorological history of Castile in the 1250s has at least something to do with the bishops' short-lived political activity during that period.

Such fragments of information as have survived on this most important aspect of Spanish history⁽⁵³⁾ indicate, hardly surprisingly, that the thirteenth century there was a dry century. If an age may be judged by its intercessions, then siccitas and ariditas rather than Moors and heretics were its real bugbears. The miracle most frequently requested of San Isidro, the patron of Madrid, was that of rainmaking. In 1252 he came up to expectations, just as he had done twenty years before while at León. Lucas of Túy had been bribing the people to disavow the local Albigensians by promising them showers from above.⁽⁵⁴⁾ In 1258 the madrileños were again beholden to the Saint.⁽⁵⁵⁾ But unhappily either his compassion or his competence [163] was limited, for in that year there were bad harvests at Burgos and 'great hunger' at Sigüenza,⁽⁵⁶⁾ while, apart from drought, severe frosts also took their toll, and the price of wine soared.⁽⁵⁷⁾ 1258 was a bad year everywhere. Albertus Miliolus recorded it as one of caristia,⁽⁵⁸⁾ and in England the chroniclers were at one in lamenting the hardness of the times. Matthew Paris wrote of fifteen thousand Londoners dying in the course of the summer (a fate which overtook the French capital in the following year); men were reduced to seeking nourishment from nettles, tree-bark, horsemeat 'et quod deterius est'.⁽⁵⁹⁾ So great was the demand for the services of gravediggers that they were obliged to consign the corpses to the ground glomeratim.⁽⁶⁰⁾

In Castile where, as Alfonso X was to acknowledge, food-supply was essential for keeping the fight going,⁽⁶¹⁾ the effects of caristia were certainly no less substantial than in England on the eve of the Barons' War; and the Church there had little left to lose, having become almost totally identified with the king. During the winter of 1257-8, while the recluse of St Alban's was dreaming that the church-tower was in danger of collapsing, the royal palace at Segovia actually did collapse, taking the dean of Burgos (the only member of that church to have benefitted from the repartimiento of Seville) with it, and damaging several bishops, but leaving the king intact.⁽⁶²⁾ If, as they dusted themselves down, the walking wounded compared their position with that of their episcopal brethren in Aragon, they must have been aware of certain striking differences. Climatically, of course, that kingdom can hardly have been much better off though the rising of the Ebro which did so much damage at Zaragoza in 1261 suggests [164] that drought was not a universal complaint.⁽⁶³⁾ Yet Bernat Vidal de Besalu thought it at least worthwhile to remind the king of Castile, when Alfonso and Jaime met at Soria in 1257, that he would be ill advised to fight a war over Navarre, observing 'that in the army of the king of Aragon there were such stores of bread and wine and meat and corn that they counted these almost as naught, by reason of their abundance, but that in the army of the king of Castile there was so great dearth of all things that soldiers and horses were dying of hunger'.⁽⁶⁴⁾ This may have been a debating point, but it is hardly credible that the chronicler would have made such an assertion if the evidence was against him. Certainly the Aragonese economy was subject to the effects of natural disasters too. In August 1248 Innocent IV had come to the assistance of Pedro de Albalat 'cum propter sterilitatem terre ac alias necessitates urgentes debitorum onere sis gravatus'.⁽⁶⁵⁾ But Pedro, the zealous persecutor of Frederick II, had done more for his church and province than merely secure piecemeal papal relief. He had provided them with a tradition of provincial councils which, quite apart from making a direct contribution to the reduction of popular poverty by revising the number of feast-days,⁽⁶⁶⁾ and resisting royal tyranny by excommunicating the king of Navarre for pestering the bishop of Pamplona, provided the Aragonese Church by virtue of their very existence with that which the Castilian Church lacked: a political bargaining position. Whether or not the real advantages which the Aragonese Church had derived from the Reconquest during the twelfth century had been continued into the thirteenth,⁽⁶⁷⁾ and irrespective of the bitter struggles between the king and Pedro's archiepiscopal successor at this very time and of Jaime I's spectacular assaults on the persons of individual prelates, that was an achievement of considerable significance. 'Llama la atención', wrote Cedillo of the twelfth century, 'la diferencia que existe entre el número de los concilios reunidos en Cataluña y en [165] otras partes de España y la gran escasez por lo que respecta a Castilla y León'.⁽⁶⁸⁾ And the disparity can have been hardly less evident to Castilian churchmen in April 1257 when King Jaime granted their Aragonese colleagues a large measure of exemption from the terms of the rigorous export restrictions then in force.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Indeed it is certain that it was not. For by April 1257 the Castilian Church was actively engaged in looking to its own defences.

The stirrings of resistance occurred at all levels of the Castilian Church. Of varying degrees of intensity it identified the enemy sometimes as the local chapter and sometimes as the pope and the king. At the lowest level it was formalised in the literally parochial pacts whereby the local clergy of Ávila in 1258⁽⁷⁰⁾ and of Salamanca in April 1259,⁽⁷¹⁾ recalling the collaciones which dated from the establishment of the Christian frontier in those places,⁽⁷²⁾ undertook to defend their interests against the encroachment of bishop and chapter. But other co-operative ventures involving clerical groups were rather more ambitious. Activating the cabildos de curas -- those associations of clergy normally devoted to purely pious purposes such as had existed at Guadalajara since 1081⁽⁷³⁾ -- the clergy of Toledo made common cause with those of Talavera in February 1258 by a carta de hermandad which pledged their bodies and all their possessions in mutual defence against the archbishop-elect and other prelates. Their motives, they insisted, were strictly defensive and in keeping with the traditional nature of such cartas which normally contained nothing more seditious than undertakings to reciprocate prayer and hospitality.⁽⁷⁴⁾ For [166] all their protestations though, their action had a more positive significance. Quite apart from the extreme measures which it envisaged,⁽⁷⁵⁾ it was by virtue of its very timing a technical act of sedition. In that very month, at the Valladolid Cortes, all associations except such as professed strictly charitable ends were prohibited by the king.⁽⁷⁶⁾ And one month later the Toledo clergy dispensed with equivocation and, in their carta de hermandad with the clergy of Rodmellas, added the pope and the king to the list of potential aggressors.⁽⁷⁷⁾

The lower clergy were not acting in a political void, but took their cue from the very churchman about whom they were currently expressing such serious reservations, the Infante Sancho, archbishop-elect of Toledo. His antecedents hardly marked him out as the Castilian Pedro de Albalat or the champion of ecclesiastical independence.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Nor indeed was he. For, as was soon discovered, he was playing a political game, taking advantage of his brother the king's temporary weakness which had enabled the hermandades to declare themselves,⁽⁷⁹⁾ and making ecclesiastical discontent serve his own ends. Faithless opportunist though he was, however, there is no denying that he showed remarkable energy and single-mindedness in canalising dissent and inducing the warring ecclesiastical factions to sink their differences and devote their dissipated energies to the common cause. His recorded activities throughout 1257 and for the greater part of 1258 provide clear testimony; and his first step was to provide the Castilian Church with that potentially political weapon -- the habit of provincial councils. On 15 January 1257 at Alcalá de Henares, together with five of his suffragans -- Fernando of Palencia, Gil of [167] Osma, Remondo of Segovia, Pedro of Sigüenza and Mateo of Cuenca -- he ordained that thenceforth the bishops of the province should observe a biennial cycle of councils, meeting on St Martin's Day (11 November) and fifteen days after Easter, at Alcalá, Buitrago (twice) and Brihuega respectively, beginning that November 'ac sic deinceps in succedentibus annis singulis'. If necessary, Sancho might amend these arrangements -- necessity being left to his judgement of the 'great danger' that the Church might suffer by their delaying so long. Absentees with unconvincing alibis would be fined two hundred maravedís. The agreement concluded with a statement of the signatories' devotion to Alfonso X.⁽⁸⁰⁾ He at the time was far away in the south-east, attending to the affairs of the kingdom of Murcia; and there he remained for the greater part of 1257.⁽⁸¹⁾

Till almost the end of the year there is no record of communication between the brothers; and, in view of Alfonso's situation, such absence of information may well faithfully reflect a deliberate lack of contact on the king's part. For -- always assuming that he knew of the Alcalá meeting -- Alfonso must have viewed with some alarm the emergence of political consciousness among the prelates, including the hitherto utterly reliable Remondo of Segovia, at the very moment of his accepting the imperial invitation. The most plausible assumption, then, from such negative evidence is that the king was hopeful that, given time, the Church would divide itself and that he might then rule it again; which was a very reasonable expectation in view of its inherent lack of solidarity. When Bishop Gil of Osma subscribed to the Alcalá declaration, for example, he was within eight days of having his request for half of the tercias of his diocese granted by Alexander IV;⁽⁸²⁾ while by mid-April the economic problems of the church of León had led the chapter to charge Bishop Martín Fernández with having mismanaged their financial affairs.⁽⁸³⁾ Such were the tensions within ecclesiastical society that it could not long afford the luxury of an independent, co-operative stand. Still, if the mere grant of rights of justice at Santander, which he made to Sancho on 5 [168] November (six days before the date proposed for the first council), was intended to buy off the opposition, then the king had underestimated the opposition.⁽⁸⁴⁾ Sancho too could wait, and raise his price.

In 1258 he did. Early in January Alfonso gave the Norwegian delegation no reason to believe that Sancho was anything other than capital archiepiscopal material;⁽⁸⁵⁾ which within a few weeks Sancho confirmed -- though after his own fashion rather than his brother's -- by persuading the parish clergy of Toledo to withdraw their opposition to a contributory educational fund of his devising:⁽⁸⁶⁾ no mean feat in the very month of the publication of their general defiance. The legislation dealing with clerical dress, issued by the Valladolid Cortes in the third week of January, may possibly have irked him,⁽⁸⁷⁾ the matter coming more appropriately within the competence of his new-fangled council. But in mid-March he replied in kind, using the hospitality of the king's court to restore 'pax et caritativa concordia' to Bishop Pedro Garcés of Segorbe and his chapter.⁽⁸⁸⁾ On 5 July the king scored a point by granting the debt-ridden Bishop Martín Fernández his receipts from the tercias of the diocese of León, as he was in a position to do.⁽⁸⁹⁾ Eight days later they were both at Palencia, giving a helping hand to the recently elected Fernando and his chapter. But while Alfonso, having mediated between the bishop and the local nobility, hastened on to Arévalo,⁽⁹⁰⁾ Sancho remained and undertook an enquiry into the respective responsibility of Fernando and the chapter for the various debts bequeathed to the church by Bishop Rodrigo. He issued his compromise settlement at Brihuega on the 21^st. It was based on the notion that ecclesiastica utilitas was well served when ecclesiastics refrained from poaching on one another's preserves:⁽⁹¹⁾ Sancho's leitmotiv for the time being, the wisdom of [169] which was amply demonstrated by the united front with which his settlement enabled the church of Palencia to confront the acquisitive local concejo.⁽⁹²⁾ And though it seems that he failed in carrying the principle to the point of reconciling the bishop and chapter with the Dominicans there,⁽⁹³⁾ two days after the Brihuega compromise he did himself provide an example of the spirit of self-abnegation which he had been preaching by renouncing the traditional archiepiscopal right to a share of the property of deceased canons of Toledo.⁽⁹⁴⁾

But his debts were pressing him hard, and it was only a matter of time before he would be forced or tempted to abandon a policy which required considerable resources for its maintenance. Already in June 1257 he was wavering: Alexander IV's cancellation, at his request, in that month of past grants of his church's lands and tithes which earlier archbishops had authorised (including grants which had received papal confirmation⁽⁹⁵⁾) was totally at variance with the concept of ecclesiastica utilitas currently being canvassed by him. Then, towards the end of 1258, he turned his coat and showed its lining to be made of the traditional, royal stuff. Possibly he was still in Castile at the end of October and met the Patriarch of Grado at Segovia. But soon after he must have left. He was not, as Ballesteros believed, the life and soul of the Toledo Cortes which discussed the imperial affair at the end of the year and at the beginning of 1259.⁽⁹⁶⁾ For he was nowhere near Toledo. He was at Anagni.

He had arrived there by 11 January, on which day the pope empowered him to borrow up to 800 marks on behalf of the church of Toledo.⁽⁹⁷⁾ But that was small beer. Sancho had his eyes on a greater prize: the income of his province. And by the end of the month he had secured it. On the 26^th, in reply to his petition 'quod Toletana ecclesia magno premitur debitorum onere a tuis predecessoribus contractorum', Alexander IV granted him two-thirds of all the tercias of his province for the next five years;⁽⁹⁸⁾ to which was added the entire [170] takings of one decimarius in every parish for the same period,⁽⁹⁹⁾ and presentation to a canonry in the cathedral churches of each of his suffragans.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ The last of these rescripts was issued on the 28th: in two days the Infante Sancho had completely reversed his ecclesiastical policy of the previous two years. Ecclesiastica utilitas was sacrificed to Toletana necessitas. Not that his profitable stay at Anagni had yet ended. He remained there till at least the middle of April, and was consecrated there on or before 2 April.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ On that day his departure was evidently imminent, for the pope wrote to Archbishop Juan Arias of Compostela and to both his and Sancho's suffragans instructing them to observe what Sancho would tell them from him concerning certain unspecified matters.⁽¹⁰²⁾ The cautious tone of that communication suggests that the pope may have been referring to their recent activities: a suspicion which is strengthened by a further letter, addressed to the king on 9 April, which recommended the new archbishop to his brother and described him as 'negotiorum tuorum promotor precipuus'.⁽¹⁰³⁾ How much longer Sancho stayed at the Curia we do not know. But he was back at Toledo by 31 August,⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ having sought before leaving Anagni to extend his ecclesiastical piracy beyond his province by securing papal confirmation of the rights of the church of Toledo in terms which Benito de Rocaberti, who had recently arrived at the Curia himself, adjudged to be prejudicial to Tarragona's authority in the diocese of Segorbe.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾

By the time of his return the incipient ecclesiastical opposition was shattered. It had been his own doing. Mud from a muddy spring, the Infante had reverted to type, abandoned the party of his own making, and striven to secure his own comfort at his recent [171] colleagues' expense. Not that he had long to enjoy his ill-gotten goods. Yet neither his death in October 1261⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ nor his suffragans' success in inducing the pope to reduce the grant of revenue sometime before September 1260⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ could put the clock back to January 1257. Prelates such as Fernando of Palencia -- who sent him a pathetic appeal on 1 November 1259 asking to be allowed to retain his revenues for that year 'pora quitar los grandes debdos que delexaron los nuestros antecessores la eglesia de Palencia obligada, assi como vos sabedes'⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ -- would not be duped a second time into risking royal displeasure. 'The intolerable burden' placed upon them, which Bishop Pedro Lorenzo referred to in January 1263 as having caused their 'manifest destruction',⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ had other than financial implications. It meant not only the coup de grâce for the already faltering University of Palencia, deemed 'dissolved' by Urban IV in May 1263,⁽¹¹⁰⁾ but also the fragmentation of such ecclesiastical solidarity as had been achieved.

That development was in process even before Sancho's apostasy of January 1259. When the Leonese bishops congregated on 2 December 1258 they did so at Madrid, where the king was. And although theirs apparently was a more politically motivated assembly than the Alcalá meeting, containing Spanish prelates from the Braga province but no Portuguese from that of Compostela, their only recorded act was to issue a collective indulgence in favour of León Cathedral.⁽¹¹¹⁾ It might of course be argued, on the grounds that on occasion no evidence is more significant than any evidence, that they would naturally have ensured that this was their only recorded act. Equally cogent though is the view that they had been infiltrated and tamed by Alfonso who was in the vicinity; and the royal favours granted on [172] the 5ht and 9^th to the church of Coria and the clergy of Zamora diocese respectively suggest how this may have been done.⁽¹¹²⁾ Archbishop Juan Arias of Compostela knew his place and his suffragans knew their price. There is fragmentary and confusing evidence of episcopal consultation in that province at about this time, none of which says much for their spirit of independence. On 11 September either in 1259 or 1260 the suffragan bishops of Compostela, 'vocati apud civitam compostellanam ad sinodum', debated solemnly the question of who should have precedence over whom at their meeting (in itself a fair indication of their inexperience in these matters).⁽¹¹³⁾ It was perhaps that assembly -- though a date three or four years later might be preferred -- that roared like a mouse and objected to royal intervention in episcopal elections, always provided that their objection were not made public.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Characteristically, they were considerably less reticent about taking the pope to task for having deprived the archbishop of his right to confirm episcopal elections and consecrate his suffragans, after Juan Arias had interfered in the affairs of the see of Ávila lite pendente: an abuse upon which their local genius, Barnardus Copostellanus, had occasion to comment.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ [173] In view of their collective timidity, Fidel Fita's interpretation of the Alcalá meeting of January 1257 is clearly very wide of the mark 'That important document' recording the bishops' intentions shed a 'profound light' on the ecclesiastical history of Spain. No longer, he wrote in 1887, could the total absence of councils in the Toledo province be contrasted with the 'multitude' of such assemblies which the thirteenth century witnessed at Tarragona. The Alcalá declaration, despite its consciously inaugural character, suggested to him that there existed a tradition of regular councils and synods which had not been broken since John of Abbeville's legation:⁽¹¹⁶⁾ a theory which in turn served Gorosterratzu as firm ground upon which to base his belief that even before 1228 councils and synods were common occurrences.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ All that was needed in order to establish the nature of their influence was evidence: 'resta averiguar cuáles fueron'.⁽¹¹⁸⁾ Fita badly miscalculated. There is no record of any such councils, not even of the first four planned for November 1257- April 1259. The detailed progress-report compiled by Burriel in December 1752, after more than two years of work in the Toledo Cathedral archive, contained no mention of conciliar or synodal material for this period.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ For some historians such lack of evidence is proof positive that councils were summoned with great frequency, indeed that they 'were then so commonplace that they occasioned no more mention...than does a faculty meeting in local newspapers today'.⁽¹²⁰⁾ That conclusion, however, cannot be applied to thirteenth-century Castile. The reason why neither Burriel nor any writer since has unearthed such records is that there was nothing then to record.⁽¹²¹⁾ The Alcalá meeting stands in a void. What it produced was not proof of past achievements, but a blueprint for the future which was soon [174] rejected. At Peñafiel in April 1302 the bishops tried again, having before the council began to settle the order of precedence of the suffragans at its sessions.⁽¹²²⁾ Some forty years earlier, the prelates of the Compostela province had been faced with the same problem Neither group had any tradition upon which to draw. By leaving his colleagues in the lurch and being at Anagni in April 1259, instead of in Castile preparing for the Brihuega council which he had arranged more than two years before for the 28^th of that month, Sancho of Toledo had thwarted the establishment of such a tradition.

He had also betrayed a revolution, for in Castile, where the summoning of one council implied revolt, the prospect of a conciliar programme was tantamount to revolution. As the prelates informed Nicholas III in 1279, the king did not tolerate assemblies at which they might discuss their grievances;⁽¹²³⁾ and in employing such stark terms as these it is not necessary either to embrace the almost cosmic concept of Lewis's Closing Medieval Frontier or to ignore Elliott's strictures against the historian's too ready assumption that 'political disagreement' has significance for him only when 'social revolt' can be postulated.⁽¹²⁴⁾ In the context of the medieval Castilian Church, and of the historiography of the subject, the emergence of mere 'political disagreement' is no small matter.

But the king had not eliminated dissension by dispersing it. True, he could continue to appease the prelates by allowing them some part of the revenue which by right was theirs already, just as he had done in dealing with the bishop of León in July 1258 or in conniving at the pope's grant to his brother in January 1259. By these means he bound Bishop Fernando of Córdoba and his chapter to the royal cause in June 1260, promising them 'las dos partes de los diezmos de las fabricas que nos avemos en las iglesias del obispado' as from the year 1266 (having three days previously dealt with tithe evasion in that diocese, on the grounds that the church was greatly defrauded thereby);⁽¹²⁵⁾ and ten years later a similar grant was made to the bishop-elect [175] of Cartagena, García Martínez.⁽¹²⁶⁾ But this form of palliative, the thief's concession to his victim, hardly indemnified the prelates. Elliott's observations cease to be appropriate when he associates himself with 'Tocqueville's perception that revolution tends to come with an improvement rather than with a deterioration of economic conditions'.⁽¹²⁷⁾

The mutterings of dissent continued. Many churchmen, clearly, might have read as a description of their own situation the reference at the beginning of the eighteenth chapter of Isaiah to 'a nation meted out and trodden down'; and, had they consulted the scriptures (which appearances suggest they did not often do), some might even have endorsed the interpretation of the passage offered by the Joachimite, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, to whom it suggested that Alfonso X was Antichrist.⁽¹²⁸⁾ And Alfonso himself, by depriving the bishops of the means of giving their complaints a public airing, drove them underground and left them no alternative but sedition. It was to be expected that when Clement IV authorised him in June 1265 to exact ten per cent of their income for the next five years, ecclesiastical bodies such as the chapter of Zamora should have appealed to the pope for remission, informing him that they had already been beggared for the king.⁽¹²⁹⁾ What was politically unforeseeable though -- and for Alfonso politically ominous -- was that less than four months later the newly appointed archbishop of Toledo of his choosing, Sancho of Aragon, should have been in secret session with his suffragans at Brihuega. The meeting was markedly better attended than the Alcalá gathering of January 1257, was graced by prelates of such impeccably curialist pedigree as Pedro Lorenzo of Cuenca and Agustín of Osma, who made no secret of their concern for the security of church property during episcopal vacancies, and censured the king for his preference for Jewish advisers -- a subject about which they [176] were to inform the pope more fully twelve years later.⁽¹³⁰⁾ In the privacy of his own chapter, too, Archbishop Sancho deplored the extent of lay interference in ecclesiastical affairs,⁽¹³¹⁾ but having no provincial council at which they might openly have protested against the levy they were helpless and, whispering they would ne'er consent, they consented.⁽¹³²⁾ Before much longer, though, they were presented with an opportunity of breaking clean away from the stifling intimacy of Alfonso's court. When the Infante Sancho -- who, like their frustrated desires, had been born in 1258⁽¹³³⁾ -- raised the rebel flag in 1282 he was immediately joined by precisely those bishops who had been most closely associated with his father and had made their careers in his chancery. The reaction of such men to the restrictions of Alfonso's régime is strikingly reminiscent of the behaviour of those eleventh-century German bishops who, having risen to eminence in Henry III's chapel, abandoned his system and his son most readily in 1076.⁽¹³⁴⁾

In 1259 though, there was not even that panacea in the offing, and the bishops' immediate concern was simply to survive the current crisis of Castilian society in common with other churchmen throughout [177] the Peninsula who looked to the pope in these years for protection against secular aggression.⁽¹³⁵⁾ The church of Palencia had a rougher passage than most. The effect of Archbishop Sancho's volte-face was to reopen the controversy between bishop and chapter over their common property and the debts bequeathed by Bishop Tello, which had been settled amicably in the previous summer. Indecision characterised the actions of both parties. In May 1259 the dean and chapter failed to prosecute an appeal which they had entered against a papal provision there, and were fined.⁽¹³⁶⁾ While he was at the Curia in March 1262 Bishop Fernando sold for a song property which he had possessed, Quinqueyuga, since before his promotion.⁽¹³⁷⁾ He had already been obliged to part with his modest receipts from Seville, but all to no avail, for by June 1263 his only income was the sustentatio tenuis allowed him by his Florentine creditors who had assumed full control of his financial affairs. Amongst those creditors was Dulcis de Burgo, one of the many Florentines whose Spanish clients were referred to the tender mercies of Cardinal Richard Annibaldi in 1266. If Fernando's successor Alfonso was still on their books then -- and Fernando's failure over the previous three years to settle a 100 mark debt with the papal camera suggests that he probably was -- then the events of the year 1266, the second year of the royal levy on ecclesiastical revenues authorised by Clement IV, must have marked the absolute nadir of the fortunes of the church of Palencia.⁽¹³⁸⁾

That impression is confirmed by the various letters which the prelates sent to Urban IV during the winter of 1262-3,⁽¹³⁹⁾ in which they protested against the pope's demand for assistance towards the expenses involved in reversing the recent disasters in the Latin Empire, arguing that they were neither liable, on account of their many services Deo et domino regi during the Reconquista, nor able to provide funds for that purpose. A more or less historical account of what had happened since Las Navas, together with a number of rather arch [178] asides, served to substantiate their first point. With regard to the second, they cited the case of Palencia where, so they claimed, eleven thousand had died in a single year mediante fame, as Alexander IV and the cardinals had been informed already. And other areas had registered disasters of almost equal magnitude over the past seven years. The gravissima afflictio of continuous famine had obliged every man to shift for himself: fathers had had to abandon their sons, and sons their fathers; 'qui divites erant facti sunt pauperes, et qui pauperes mortui sunt'. Churchmen were reduced to begging their living, since 'redditus suos pro maiori parte habent in decimis' and their income from that source had plummeted as those settlers whom the current scourge had spared migrated to the frontier 'quia ibi habent possessiones pro nihilo, et quia ibi tributa non solvunt'.

Thus the Castilian Church suffered from the drift of population southwards. By 1245 the rents of the church of Segovia had diminished for that reason,⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ but less than twenty years later a far more ominous development was occurring, to which Bishop Pedro Lorenzo of Cuenca adverted in his letter to Urban IV in January 1263: depopulation even of the area immediately behind the Christian front-line.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ The ease with which the rebel king of Granada was able to penetrate far into Christian territory in the following year proved that the bishop was no scaremonger.⁽¹⁴²⁾ Alfonso's reaction was to place an embargo on property transactions at Murcia for a period of five years, in the hope of stabilising the situation,⁽¹⁴³⁾ while Clement IV took fright and wrote drawing Jaime of Aragon's attention to a problem of which he was perfectly well aware: the indigenous Moorish population within his realms. They were a serpent within his breast, said the pope. Arguments of utilitas must not seduce him [179] into tolerating this fifth column. They must be expelled.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ The various inter-related difficulties raised by demographic resources and internal migration had been starkly posed two hundred years before at the recapture of Toledo,⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ and had remained a constant threat to security ever since. Events of the early 1260s indicated the gravity of the situation, which the conviction expressed shortly afterwards by Archbishop Sancho II of Toledo did nothing to relieve. He felt able to revoke the rule of his church, which forbad canons to retain their income from Toledo when appointed to a benefice elsewhere, on the grounds that there had been a complete change in the situation that had originally made such a rule necessary. Toledo was prosperous and in no danger from the Moors, he argued.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ Yet in October 1275 Sancho himself met his end confronting a Moorish army of invasion at Martos in the diocese of Jaén. And the experiences of Archbishop Gonzalo only seven years after that certainly do not give an impression of prosperity.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾

The letters sent to Pope Urban were rich in detail concerning the woes of the Castilian Church. Debts were heavy and income negligible; buildings were falling down for lack of funds; Alexander IV's grant to Archbishop Sancho had been an 'intolerable burden', costing the churches almost a quarter of their total assets, 'ex quo sequitur ecclesiarum destructio manifesta'; and a succession of papal nuncios, a list of whom was supplied in the bishops' joint letter,⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ had contributed further to their misery. Indeed, the entire emphasis of their [180] letter was that it was those nuncios, and ultimately the pope, who were responsible for their fate. The king's role, about which they had been actively concerned only three years before, was not mentioned. In 1204 Alfonso VIII had admitted to having filched settlers from the estates of the church of Toledo in order to man his populationes on the frontier, and to having caused multa dampna thereby.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ More recently, in 1253, Innocent IV had acknowledged that the church of Sigüenza was falling into disrepair on account of the grant of tercias to the king 'and to certain of his sons'.⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ Yet the appellants of 1262-3 referred to neither of these facts in the course of their diatribes, not even the chapter of Toledo, which stressed particularly the state of collapse of churches throughout the province.⁽¹⁵¹⁾

Evidently they had been purged of their recent evil thoughts against Alfonso. Pedro Lorenzo made no attempt to disguise where his first loyalties lay. In March 1262 he had agreed to be consecrated where it best suited the king, at Seville; and it was from the royal court there that he forwarded his appeal in the following January, explaining in passing that he was fully engaged in that aspect of the king's service which was synonymous with God's work.⁽¹⁵²⁾ Eight months later he was still there when he appealed again, this time against a charge imposed upon his church by the executor of a papal mandate in favour of Paolo di Sulmona and family, refugees of the Italian wars. He had not been at Cuenca, he explained somewhat artlessly in support of his objection that the executor had failed to instruct him sufficiently in the matter He had been occupied circa rempublicam in the royal chancery: an alibi which illustrated the weakness of the Castilian prelates no less perfectly than his protests against the executor's allocation of the total charge amongst the provincial churches reflected their lack of any corporate sense.⁽¹⁵³⁾ The contrast with Aragon [181] is immediately apparent: there in 1250 such negotiations had been a subject for the provincial council.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ Moreover, at Lérida in April 1263, the Aragonese Church was led by King Jaime in its refusal to subscribe to any fund for the Eastern Empire.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ Their reasons seem to have resembled those of the Castilian prelates, but the latter had had to shift for themselves. With no archbishop to lead them, they had received no moral support from Alfonso, who had very good reasons for not complying with the arrangements envisaged in the pope's instructions to Raymond of Paphos, the nuncio whose arrival had produced the outcry: namely, the summoning of an assembly of bishops at which the question of aid for Constantinople might be discussed.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾

It is clear that, by omitting the king from their catalogue of scourges, the Castilian bishops completely misrepresented the situation. The fact was that they were in the position of the English bishops as described by Matthew Paris: the victims of a confederation between pope and king, who succumbed because they were divided, bent the knee unto Baal with hardly an exception, and allowed themselves to be mulcted for the Sicilian business.⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ The pope may have been an unwilling party to the scheme, his acquiescence in Alfonso's seizure of ecclesiastical revenue being the price of placating the Reconqueror-turned-imperial candidate. But the parallel is otherwise extremely close. For at this very moment Alfonso and his brothers were taking a serious interest in Mediterranean power-politics. Sometime between June 1258 and May 1261 the king helped the Emperor Baldwin's wife, Marie de Brienne, to recover her son from the Venetians to whom he had been pawned;⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ and in the first half of 1263 the impecunious emperor himself was scrounging his way round the Peninsula, not for the first time.⁽¹⁵⁹⁾ Moreover, the turbulent Infante [182] Enrique was not the only one of Alfonso's brothers with a stake in that area.⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ In August 1264 the ex-procurator of Seville, Felipe, was planning to lead an expedition to Romania to 'expunge the heretical Greeks'. That, indeed, was the purpose for which the nuncio Sinitius was directed to seek 'an appropriate subsidy' from the Castilian Church in that month.⁽¹⁶¹⁾

Naturally, though, the prelates disregarded all this in their account. It was much more convenient for men in Bishop Pedro Lorenzo's circumstances -- men who were doing the state some service, circa rempublicam occupati -- to externalise their misfortunes and blame a combination of natural disasters of biblical duration and papal avarice. In the early fourteenth century the author of the Chronicle of Fernando IV displayed the same prejudice by describing in consecutive sentences the great expense involved in securing papal legitimisation of Sancho IV's offspring, and the extensive famine throughout Castile which claimed as much as a quarter of the population, the juxtaposition implying cause and effect.⁽¹⁶²⁾ And modern writers have accepted this version: Sánchez-Albornoz is outraged at the indignity of María de Molina's having to apply to the pope in order to legitimise a king of Castile. It prompts him to reflect on the 'rivers of gold and silver' which flowed from Spain to Rome, and the meek and mild bishops who never resisted such impositions.⁽¹⁶³⁾

The question of gold and silver deserves a chapter to itself,⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ but some comment is appropriate at this point on Sánchez-Albornoz's characterisation of the prelates, which is rebutted by such a wealth of evidence. The bishops did not kowtow to the pope. By and large they ignored him. There is great truth in George Borrow's remark that 'love of Rome had ever slight influence over her - that is, Spain's - policy'.⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ In the first millennium B.C. it was to Tarshish in Andalucia that Jonah repaired in his anxiety to escape the presence of the Lord;⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ and in the second millennium A.D. Spanish prelates adopted [183] the same tactic, with more success. In this they were assisted by the popes themselves, who in general shared Urban IV's opinion that Lisbon, for example, was at the ends of the earth,⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ the corollary of which was that at Lisbon and elsewhere throughout the Peninsula papal mandates were commonly either quietly ignored or flagrantly defied. Thirteenth-century Spanish churchmen had inherited something of that spirit of independence which the bishops of Santiago had shown three centuries earlier when they described themselves as 'totius orbis antistites'.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ The clerk who adapted the imperial coronation ordo for Spanish usage did not hesitate to retain the title apostolicus for the archbishop of Toledo.⁽¹⁶⁹⁾

Papal provisions were worthless without local approval. Innocent IV's petty grants to the vice-chancellor of the Roman Church and his nephew encountered widespread resistance. In September 1260 the canons of Compostela vowed to reject all future provisions, and a provincial council there openly challenged the pope's right to discipline the contumacious archbishop.⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ For at least two and a half years Bishop Suero Pérez turned a deaf ear on Alexander IV, and in December 1268 his chapter imposed a stiff penalty on local clerks who attempted to secure papal provision to any church in the diocese on the strength of capitular authorisation.⁽¹⁷¹⁾ Real foreigners ventured there at their peril. One night, probably in the 1260s, the proctor of the pope's own treasurer was set about by 'certain sons of perdition'. He survived, but the treasurer's goods were stolen, his sister who was ill in bed was treated feraliter, and her small son was killed, as later was one of their accomplices.⁽¹⁷²⁾ There is a Portuguese quality about the [184] atrocity. It compares well with the treatment received by some of Afonso III's long-suffering bishops.⁽¹⁷³⁾ In this case, though, the criminals were not laymen, but clerics themselves who as a preliminary punishment were deprived of all their benefices in their city and diocese. Similarly, when the familiares of Laurentius de Urbe, Cardinal Peter Colonna's chamberlain, arrived at Burgos in the early nineties to take possession of a canonry there, they were attacked by the canons, with the dean to the fore and the king's blessing, and all but drowned. Two months later Laurentius gave up the unequal struggle and cut his losses, exchanging his Spanish rents for the English and Italian benefices of an archdeacon of Braga who, being Portuguese, presumably felt either that he would not receive or that he could take that sort of treatment.⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ Not that brute force was their only weapon at Burgos. They were quite capable of simply ignoring papal reservations;⁽¹⁷⁵⁾ and in 1307 they succeeded in proving that, irrespective of Clement IV's constitution Licet ecclesiarum, the practice there was -- and had been for at least sixty years -- that benefices remained at the disposal of the dean and chapter even if the last holder had died at the Roman Curia.⁽¹⁷⁶⁾

The 'foreigner' in question on that occasion was an archdeacon of Oviedo. Clerical carpetbaggers were usually Spaniards from a neighbouring diocese rather than Italians; yet they were utterly foreign -- alieni -- and bitterly resented.⁽¹⁷⁷⁾ One such pluralist whose patron did him proud was the dean of Tarazona, Ramón de Peralta, who came from Aragon to Castile with Archbishop Sancho II of Toledo and profited greatly from his master's revocation of the capitular statute against absenteeism.⁽¹⁷⁸⁾ The chief patron, though, was the king. Many [185] papal provisions were made at his behest in favour of his immediate circle of clerical servants. Thus, in August 1262, while the Castilian Church was preparing its case against the demands of the nuncio, Master Gonzalo -- the future archbishop of Toledo -- was appointed to the deanery of that church, though he was not yet in sacred orders.⁽¹⁷⁹⁾ It was on Alfonso's recommendation also that, in December 1263, Urban IV granted that recent proponent of ecclesiastical solidarity, Bishop Pedro Lorenzo of Cuenca, permission to set aside the rights of the ordinary collators, his chapter, and appoint two of his clerics to canonries in that church.⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ At least eleven provision-rescripts for royal clerks and chaplains were secured by Alfonso's proctor at the Curia in July-August.⁽¹⁸¹⁾ In Castile, as elsewhere, it was the king rather than the pope who derived the profit from their confederatio, at the expense of the divided Church.⁽¹⁸²⁾

It is necessary to labour this point since historians have made much of such incidents as the presentation to Alfonso XI at the Madrid Cortes in 1329 of the protest about the harm done to the national Church by papal provision to benefices of 'perssonas estrannas que non sson mios naturales nin del mio sennorio', but have given less than due weight to papal complaints about the indignities to which its agents were being subjected by Spanish churchmen at that very period.⁽¹⁸³⁾ John XXII's collectors were ambushed, but passive resistance produced hardly less striking results, as Clement V had learnt in the previous decade. When the cost of collection exceeded the revenue raised he might well have echoed Clement IV's view, expressed in August 1265, that Spain was a liability to the Roman Church.⁽¹⁸⁴⁾

In a letter to Cardinal Ottobono Fieschi, two years later, Clement IV described the state of the Spanish churches as multum collapsum.⁽¹⁸⁵⁾[186] Ten years after the collapse of the independence movement, and twenty years after the exuberance generated by the Seville campaign, they were indeed in ruins, and over those ruins presided that true sovereign, Alfonso X. He could ignore his father-in-law's advice about taking the Church seriously because in political terms it was negligible. It was also, for the same reasons, in moral terms degenerate. For the sort of information which the legislation of the Aragonese councils provides on that topic, we have to turn to Alfonso's Primera Partida. Neither is this an accident, nor is it all. Alfonso's influence was not merely restrictive and negative. Clerical concubinage received his blessing. The bequeathing of ecclesiastical property to priests' children -- already a problem at Palencia in the 1220s -- was said to have been made mandatory by that 'athlete of the Christian faith', Fernando III, for the diocese of Calahorra in 1231.⁽¹⁸⁶⁾ That may have been malicious rumour, but there can be no question about Fernando's son's interference in a sphere which in Aragon was indisputably the prerogative of the ecclesiastical councils: at least twice he authorised groups of clergy thus to provide for their offspring.⁽¹⁸⁷⁾ The royal author of the filthy poem about the astonishing sexual prowess of the dean of Cádiz⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ bore no small responsibility for the circumstances in which such exploits could be performed and recorded. 'If we meet a subdeacon, deacon, priest or bishop with a lady on his arm', it has been written of the English Church after 1123, 'we guess that she is probably not his wife'.⁽¹⁸⁹⁾ If, however, the lady and her escort are Spanish, we may assume that they are not unduly perturbed by our speculations, since, for practical purposes, the distinction hardly matters. In the year after his gloomy pronouncement about the state of the Spanish churches, Clement IV's penitentiary absolved a chaplain of the church of Pedagaes in the Braga diocese from the sentences which he had incurred by keeping a woman. He claimed ignorance of the law,⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ and there must have been many like him in that part of the Braga province which lay in the kingdom of Castile-Leon. Unlike [187] João Fernandes, though, they were probably more interested in the king's law than the pope's.

The king's bishops certainly were, and through his control of them the king ruled the Church. However the word curia were derived -- from blood or trouble, cruor or cura -- they were curialists, even by that strict definition which would restrict the term to 'those who, possessing no particular qualification, became bishops as a result of court influence'.⁽¹⁹¹⁾ To them the nuances of the word's etymology mattered little: either of the gloomy alternatives is fair comment on their situation. They were ensnared, and the Church was the preserve of the upper crust. Such was the implication of the off-guard observation of Fernando III's taxgatherer, that sanctity was an exclusively seigneurial attribute. In that case retribution was swift, because San Isidro, who was working-class, overheard his remarks and took them personally.⁽¹⁹²⁾ But San Isidro was in Heaven and the pope was in Italy. Nulla est comparatio. The king of Castile was out of reach, and such was his predominance over the bishops that not even a political revolution could alleviate their lot. As prologue to a description of their experiences at the hands of Sancho IV, though, it is necessary to consider the Spanish Churches from his, the pope's, point-of-view, and to review -- as the Castilian prelates in 1262-3 reviewed -- the activities of the papal legates and nuncios by whom they had been visited in recent years.

1. Dufourcq, L'Espagne catalane et le Maghrib, 28 ff. Cf. Tramontana, Nuova Rivista Storica, i, esp. 546-66.

2. Desclot, Chronicle, I, 88.

3. Zurita, Anales, I, 152vb-3rb.

4. ACA, Bulas, leg. VIII-20 (reg. Miquel Rosell, Regesta, 131). This was in March 1246, at which very time the Order of Santiago was being encouraged by the pope to send relief to the Latin Empire. Cf. Benito Ruano, Hispania, XII, 14 ff.

5. Chronicle, II, 48.

6. 'Sicut igitur in tempore iam precedente gens Gallicorum...per gentem Aragonum parvam, nudam corporis et rerum prodigam et ad omne genus laboris pronam et succinctam, contra opinionem humiliata est': Noticia Seculi, ed. Wilhelm, MIöG, XIX, 669.

7. V. Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterránea de la Corona de Aragón (2 vols., Madrid, 1956), I, 128-9, 202-3.

8. Girona Llagostera, I. CHCA, 241; Soldevila, Pere el Gran, I, 91 ff.

9. Publ. CODOINACA, VI, 129-38. Cf. Lognon, La formation de l'unité française, 138-41; Abadal, Revue historique, CCXXV, 319 ff, and Annales du Midi, LXXVI, 315 ff. For the effect of Muret, see Renouard in Annales de l'Université de Paris, XXVIII, 16-17.

10. Publ. Capmany, Memorias históricas, II, 23-30. Cf. R. S. Smith, The Spanish Guild Merchant, 9 ff.

11. Speculum, XXXIII, 477-8.

12. Bayley, EHR, LXII, 473 ff.

13. See esp. Sánchez-Albornoz, Bol. de la Acad. Argentina de Letras,XIV, 35 ff.

14. According to Alfonso himself in a letter of June 1264, publ. Minguella, Historia de Sigüenza, I, 599. Cf. Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 226, 362. For Alfonso's relations with North Africa, see Dufourcq, Rev. d'hist. et de civ. du Maghreb, I, esp. 37-8.

15. Hüffer in SpGG, Reihe I, III, 384, for Jaime I's suspicions on this point. Cf. Maravall, Concepto, 461-2. Castilian ambitions of this sort had been abandoned implicitly in 1179, at the Treaty of Cazorla. See Valdeavellano, Historia, I, ii, 567-8.

16. Publ. Daumet, BEC, LXVII, 84. He characterised the French as 'divites et pacifici' and his countrymen, predictably, as 'fortes et rigorosi et intenti circa arma et etiam pleni guerre'.

17. CODOINACA, VI, 153-4 (20 Sept. 1260).

18. Reg. Greg. IX, 5164. See Giunta in Studies pres. E. M. Jamison, 137 ff.; A. de la Torre in Atti...Federiciani, 161 ff.

19. Reg. Inn. IV, 1816. Cf. Bayley, EHR, LXII, 474.

20. Reg. Inn. IV, 1832.

21. Ed. Hahn, Collectio monumentorum, I, 394-6.

22. For example, probably c. 1259, Alfonso received a papal letter beginning 'Dum fidei puritatem, virtutis constantiam, strenuorum magnificentiam operum et ingentia merita quibus progenitores tui semper inter alios principes catholicos quodam presigni titulo specialiter claruerunt, intra nosmetipsos memori cogitatione recolimus' and reassuring him - 'te tanquam filium benedictionis et gratie inter alios reges terre sincerioris dilectionis brachiis complectentes': ASV, arm. XXXI. 72, fo. 288r, no. 2476 (Schillmann, Die Formularsammlung des Marinus von Eboli, 2491). For the context, see below, p. 157, n. 3.

23. BM, MS Lansdowne 397, fo. 108r: 'Inter ceteros principes orbis terre catholicos tu, sicut clara et manifesta tue celsitudinis opera manifestant, inpendisti hactenus et incessanter inpendis sollicitos ac indefessos circa cultum fidei christiane labores illamque divina fultus potencia laudabiliter ampliasti, propter quod humane preconio laudis attolleris et apud Deum grandia premia promereris...Sane audivimus et mirati sumus quod olim tempore acquisitionis...civitatis...et...pater tuus cum...rege Granate sarraceno quedam miens...conventiones et pacta iuramento prestito observare...' (Batzer, Z. Kenntnis, 379). Alfonso was ordered to terminate the treaty.

24. AHN, 1977/5; Winkelmann, Acta imperii medita, I, 464.

25. Reg. Alex. IV, 1412-13, 1802.

26. AHA, Cartoral AB, fo. 23V: 'Quia patriarcham Gradensem credebamus utpote approbate religionis veram fidem et modestiam in suis processibus servaturum, ipsum olim in Ispaniam ad karissimum in Christo filium nostrum regem Castelle illustrem duximus destinandum. Sed ipse, quod dolentes referimus, eundo morando et redeundo, ut alia in quibus insolenter excessisse dignoscitur taceamus, immoderatas exactiones procurationum et necessarium suorum pretextu ab ecclesiis et locis ecclesiasticis faciendo, postquam etiam id eidem per nostras curavimus litteras sub pena quam ipso facto incurreret districtius inhibere, ac alias recipiendo donaria inhoneste, Romanam ecclesiam que in suis nuntiis mensuram gent et exigit, infamavit...' (22 Sept. 1259).

27. 'Porro super eo quod idem nuntius nobis et eisdem fratribus [scil. cardinalibus] retulit te olim a quibusdam predecessoris nostri nuntiis gravatum fuisse indebite et offensum non levi fuimus dolore turbati, scientes id de voluntate dictorum predecessoris et fratrum nullatenus processisse, cum potius firma semper ipsorum intentio fuerit, et nos non impari proposito intendamus, tuis et tuorum progenitorum exigentibus meritis, tuam inter ceteros principes efficere personam honorificentia potion et te apostolico munientes presidio tuos et tuorum profectus multipliciter procurare' (Schillmann, 2491: above, p. 155, n. 7). The only other possible context for this letter is the year 1263, and the tone of Urban IV's broadside to the bishops on that occasion was quite different.

28. Publ. Benito Ruano, HS, XI, 12-17, esp. 17.

29. Linehan, EHR, LXXXV, 730 ff.

30. Sánchez-Albornoz, España: un enigma histórico, I, 356, where the author laments the lack of any Castihian equivalent to the resistance of Henry IV, Frederick II and Philip the Fair to Gregory VII, Innocent III [sic] and Boniface VIII respectively.

31. Cit. Sarrailh, L'Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié du XVIII^e siècle, 624-5.

32. Morales to Carvajal, 10 Feb. 1751: BN, MS 13072, fo. 2V. Morales's attitude to the papacy is further illustrated by his suggestion to Fernando VI that 'ha desgracia' of the loss of Constantinople which occasioned Urban IV's appeal for funds was 'quizá causada por culpa de los Romanos': ibid. fo. 62r.

33. Suárez Fernández, Castilla, el Cisma y la crisis conciliar, 73-4, 298-9.

34. 'Item dominus Innocentius quartus imposuit subsidium pro facto istius imperii Constantinopolitani, ratione cuius ipse imperator [scil. Baldwin II] habuit a prelatis Hispanie quadraginta millia aureorum et plus; sed quod ipse imperator operatus est cum ipsa pecunia onmes sciunt': Benito Ruano, HS, XI, 16. Benito regards this as 'una nueva aportación hispánica a ha defensa del Imperio Latino hasta ahora totalmente desconocida' (16, n. 32). The reference, however, is clearly to the universal tax prescribed by canon 14 of the Council. Cf. Hefele-Lechercq, V, ii, 1651-2.

35. Boll. Centro di studi filologici e linguistici Siciliani, III, 8, 14.

36. Burriel to Castro, 30 Dec. 1754, ed. Valladares de Sotomayor, Semanario Erudito, II, 44.

37. Illam de vestre, 11 Jan. 1244: AC Calahorra, doc. 278.

38. Benito Ruano, HS, XI, 16.

39. AC León, doc. 1564. '...he quando elos otros furon pressos enna mar del emperador echo aquellas letras del empresado enno mar'. By the time of his escape and return to León Nuño Alvarez was bishop. He was therefore detained till at least Jan. 1244. Cf. Reg. Inn. IV, 412.

40. '...qui prelati in manus inimicorum ecclesie incidentes, captivitatem cedent, miserabilem inediam, ammissionem familie, jacturam rerum passi sunt': Benito Ruano, HS, XI, 15.

41. Albert's von Beham Conceptbuch, ed. Höfler, 77.

42. Publ. Huillare-Bréholles, Historia diplomatica, V, ii, 1120.

43. Pavo de figura seculi, ed. Karajan, esp. lines 63-74. Composed in the 1280s. Cf. Hirsch, MIöG, XL, 317 ff.

44. 'Postmodum surrexit archiepiscopus de Yspania, qui multum dominum papam animavit ad procedendum contra imperatorem, referendo plurima que contra ecclesiam fecerat, et quomodo tota sua fuerat intentio ut deprimeret ecclesiam iuxta posse, promittens quod ipse ac alii prelati Yspanie, qui multum magnifice ac generaliter melius quam alia natio ad concilium venerant, domino pape assisterent in personis et rebus iuxta sue beneplacitum voluntatis': Relatio de Concilio Lugdunensi, ed. Weiland, 515.

45. Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, IV, 540.

46. AM Pamplona, J, d.s.n. 6-1: inc. Venerabilis frater, 6 Sept. 1245: reg. Goñi Gaztambide, AA, X, No. 107.

47. Details in Goñi Gaztambide, Príncipe de Viana, XVIII, 97ff. At the hearing of the case at Lyons in May 1247 the king asserted through his proctor, Jacobus de Maningiaco, 'quod nullo modo super temporalibus in Romana curia responderet. Predictus vero rex per hitteras apostohicas postmodum evocatus nec per se nec per procuratorem super predictis temporalibus voluit respondere': AC Pamplona, IV Episcopi 27 (reg. Goñi Gaztambide,Catálogo, 555).

48. Peters, Studia Gratiana, XIV, 255 ff.

49. Vita Innocenti IV, 96.

50. Petri de Vineis Epp., 120; 122: 'Vos tamen, quorum in hoc non minus vestra causa quam nostra nunc agitur'; 123: 'Et ut non longe petatur a nobis exemplum, qualiter in regno Portugalie honoris sibi usurpaverit dignitatem, curas vestras et animos excitetis'. In the early 1290s Jaime II of Aragon was anxious to secure a copy of the 'dictamina magistri Petri de Vinis et processus domini Frederici imperatoris, dive memorie, abavi nostri' for Sancho IV of Castile: Rubió y Lluch, Documents...de la Cultura catalana mig-eval, II, 3-4.

51. Above, Ch. 7.

52. Benito Ruano, HS, XI, 14.

53. For some general observations, see Olagüe, La decadencia española, IV, 249 ff.

54. Leyenda de San Isidro por Juan Diácono, ed. Fita, BRAH, IX, 114-16, 119; above, Ch. 7.

55. Leyenda, 117.

56. Chronicón de Cardeña, ed. Flórez, ES, XXIII, 374; Minguella, I, 208-9. The passage in Chron. Cardeña contains no mention of plague, though it is the only authority for the assertion of Verlinden (who cites it at second hand) that 1258 was a plague year in Westem Spain: Rev. Belge de philol. et d'hist., XVII, 1, 105, n. 2. 'Fue el año malo de pan' is all that it says.

57. Chron. Cardeña, 374. Late frosts were the cause of the bad harvest of 1234 also: Anales Toledanos II, ed. Flórez, ES, XXIII, 407-8.

58. Liber de temporibus et aetatibus, ed. Holder-Egger, 525.

59. Chronica Majora, V, 690, 693-4, 701-2, 746-7; Bartholomei de Cotton...Historia Anglicana, ed. Luard, 137; Chron. Lanercost,ed. Stevenson, 65. Also Ann. Monastici, ed. Luard, II, 166, 351; III, 462; IV, 120.

60. Gesta abbatum monasterii S. Albani, ed. Riley, I, 389.

61. Part. 2.20.8 (Academy ed. II, 196).

62. Gesta abbatum, I, 388; Chron. Cardeña, 374; Gil de Zamora, 'Biografías', ed. Fita, BRAH, V, 322-3.

63. According to the sixteenth-century writer Diego de Espés. Cit. Arco, BRAH, LXXII, 517.

64. Desclot, Chronicle, I, 147. For the date of this, cf. Valls i Tabemer, B. Hisp., XXI, 25. Desclot's remarks indicate the change that had occurred in the peninsular balance since 1212 when the king of Aragon had been Castile's pensioner at Las Navas.

65. Cum sicut nobis, 30 Aug. 1248: AHA, Cartoral AB, fo. 8v.

66. '...cum in ills co quod non laborant pauperes aggravantur': Tejada, Colección de cánones, VI, 35.

67. Lacarra, RPM, IV, 272 ff.

68. Contribuciones é impuestos, 259-60.

69. Publ. Tejada, III, 386; contemporary copies in AC Vich, 37-3-55; AGN, caj. 3, no. 7 (reg. Castro, Catálogo, 317).

70. Aniz, Historia de las grandezas de la ciudad de Ávila, I, 36r-v. Noted by Lafuente, Historia, IV, 276, as marking the transition in 1258 from the Spanish Church's período heroico to its período crepuscular. As a further indication of transition Lafuente referred to Alexander IV's promotion in that year of Bishop Abril of Urgel, on which see Linchan, AEM. Lafuente's observation is repeated, without acknowledgement, by Sobrequés, La época, 166.

71. AC Salamanca, 13/4 (reg. Marcos Rodríguez, Catálogo, 276) Dorado, Compendio histórico de la ciudad de Salamanca, 217; González, Hispania, III, 427-30.

72. Lacarra, Moyen Age, LXIX, 211, 218.

73. Núñez de Castro, Historia eclesiástica y seglar de Guadalaxara,50.

74. AC Toledo, Z.3.D.2.10: 'E nos esta henmandat non la fazemos a desden de nuestros prelados nm por hes fazer perder dignidat, mas fazemosha a defendimiento e a amparamiento de nuestras ordenes e de nuestros beneficios e de nuestras eglesias e de nuestros patrimonios por que la clerezia e la santa eglesia e la fe catolica non sea abaxada nin aviltada.' Cf. Ruiz Jusué, AHDE, XV, 422 ff; Suárez Femández, CHE, XVI, 5ff.

75. '...si por aventura nuestro sennor el electo don Sancho o qual quier prelado o su vicario o su procurador por auctoridat dellos o por su propria voluntad algun agravamiento quisiere fazer al cabildo de la clerezia de Talavera...nos el cabildo avandicho de ha clerezia de Toledo somos tenudos delos ayudar con cuerpos e con averes e con beneficios e con todo nuestro poder.'

76. Cortes de Castilla, I, 61 (cap. 36).

77. Publ. Sierra Corella, RABM, XLIX, 113-14. The two pacts are otherwise virtually identical.

78. Above, p. 110.

79. 'La causa inmediata que produjo el nacimiento de la Hermandad parece bien clara: es la debilidad, más temporal que permanente, de la monarquía': Suárez Femandez, CHE, XVI, 7.

80. 'Salvo jure et dominio regis quod nos in omnibus et per omnia conservare semper intendimus fideliter': AC Toledo, I.5.A.1.8: publ. Fita, BRAH, X, 152-4, from Burriel's transcript (BN, MS. 13069, fos. 91r-2r).

81. Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 175 ff.

82. Reg. Alex. IV, 1899.

83. Risco, ES, XXXV, 315.

84. Cit. Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 1077.

85. 'Gravem virum et ad gerendum archiepiscopatum Tohetanum idoneum': Guzmán y Gallo, BRAH, LXXIV, 50.

86. AC Toledo, A.7.C.1.6: 'veyendo e entendiendo que el ayuda que nos demandava nuestro sennor don Sancho por ayr a escuelas que era a nuestra pro e a ondra de la clerecia e que era demandada con derecho queriendo nos facer guisado'.

87. Cortes de Castilla, I, 55 (cap. 5).

88. VL, III, 237-9.

89. '...en ayuda para quitar debdas de su iglesia': publ. Risco, ES, XXXVI, p. clvi.

90. AC Palencia, 3/2/24. Cf. Ballesteros, BRAH, CVI, 126-7.

91. AC Palencia, 3/2/23 'Cupientes insuper inter se pacem et quietem indissolubili caritatis fibula observari; intelligentes etiam quod nichil deperit ecclesiasticis utilitatibus si quae sunt aliena reddantur.' Cf. Fernández del Pulgar, Historia de Palencia, II, 334.

92. Caamaño, AHDE, XI, 519-20.

93. Ripoll, Bullarium, I, 392; Fernández del Pulgar, II, 325.

94. Publ. MHE, I, 138-9.

95. AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.4, Sicut dilecti, 13 June 1257.

96. Alfonso X, 225.

97. AC Toledo, I.5.C.1.67.

98. AC Toledo, Z.3.D.1.15, Affectu benevolentie (publ. Linehan, EHR,LXXXV, 750).

99. See below.

100. AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.2, Tuam volentes honorare.

101. But not before 7 March when he was still 'electus': AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.3a; caj. I.12, d.s.n. Cf. Castejón's assertion that he was consecrated at Toledo: Primacía, 761.

102. AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.3, Inter alias sollicitudines.

103. AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.6 (publ. MHE, I, 147-8, wrongly ascribed to Sancho of Aragon). The next day he received permission to retain the abbacies of Santander and Santillana which he had possessed before his consecration: AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.5, Pro merente.

104. AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.9.

105. AC Toledo, A.7.C.2.1 (Potthast, 17606); Marca, De primatibus, 369-72 (Potthast, 17646; 29 July 1259). Benito had arrived at the Curia by 17 May, having been ordered to report there by the Patriarch of Grado: AHA, Cartoral AB, fo. 36v.

106. Castejón, 764.

107. AC Toledo, Z.3.D.1.15 bis, inc. Inter alia munera, 6 Sept. 1260, referring to the grant of the receipts of the single decimarius in every parish of the province -- which had already been curtailed 'ex certa causa'; and confirming the grant of the entire income from the tercias for five years -- which was more than the bull Affectu benevolentie had specified in Jan. 1259. Publ. Linehan, EHR, LXXXV, 750-1.

108. AC Toledo, X.2.A.2.4.

109. AC Cuenca, 8/34/678.

110. 'Non sine multo eiusdem provintiac dispendio': Reg. Urb. IV, 240. See J. San Martín, La antigua Universidad de Palencia (Madrid, 1942); Ajo y Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, I, 195 ff.

111. AC León, doc. 1533 (publ. ES, XXXV, 268-9).

112. Ballesteros, BRAH, CVI, 134. The latter guaranteed clerical freedom from arrest. On the same day Mondoñedo Cathedral was similarly favoured.

113. AC Salamanca, 14/2/20. The names of the bishops who were present indicate that the 'synod' occurred between 1253 and 1260, though the scribe entered the date as 'era 1268', i.e. 1230. Marcos Rodríguez, Catálogo, no. 185, fails to notice this discrepancy and adds a further confusion of his own by reading as III id. aprilis' what is, unmistakably, 'III id. septembris'; and González, Correo Erudito, III, 194, ascribes the document to the year 1240. 1260 is possible, on the assumption that the scribe meant to write 'era MCCLX^V VIII' but wrote MCCLXVIII by mistake; but 1259 may be preferred since the Lisbon representative is described as 'vicarius ecclesie Ulixbonensis.' Bishop Aires Vasques had died in Oct. 1258 and the election of his successor, Mateus, was confirmed between Jan. and March 1260: Cunha, História ecclesiástica da igreja de Lisboa, I, 166v, 171r; Reg. Alex. IV, 3183-4.

114. 'Item statuimus quod solempnis electio tantum principi presentetur, nulla prius ab eo lecentia postulata. Volumus tamen quod ad presens non publicetur': López Ferreiro, Historia de Santiago, V, app. 29, cap. 18.

115. Such would appear to be the context of cap. 12: 'Cum ecclesia Compostellana fuerit in ista quasi possessione a tempore quo non extat memoria ut providere possit de pastore iure metropolitico ecclesie sue suffraganie viduate, non solum in casu negligentie set (etiam) in quocumque alio, (cum) sive propter formam sive propter vicium persone cassetur election per canonicos eiusdem ecclesie celebrata, et Romana ecclesia, ut publice asseritur, eamdem hoc iure privare intendat...' The ban on Juan Arias was imposed between Sept. 1261 and Feb. 1263: Ballesteros, Sevilla en el siglo XIII, cx-cxi; MHE, I, 204; Reg. Urb. IV, 331, 2826. The copies of the acta of the council in AC Santiago - Tumbillo de Tablas, fos. 79v-80v; Libro I de Constituciones, fos. 9v-11v - mention no date. López Ferreiro, V, 186, suggests 'post-1245'. For the observations of Bernardus Compostellanus, see Johannes Andreae, Glossa ordinaria, C. 18 in VI⁰ 1,6 gl. ad v. Devolvetur (publ. Barraclough, Cath. Hist. Rev.XIX, 291-2).

116. BRAH, X, 154.

117. Don Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, 220-2.

118. BRAH, X, 159.

119. Burriel to Rábago, 22 Dec. 1752, ed. Valladares, Semanario Erudito, II, 5 ff.

120. Kay, Cath. Hist. Rev., LII, 162-3.

121. No trace of evidence was found in the cathedral archives of Toledo, Palencia, Cuenca, Sigüenza, Segovia or Burgo de Osma. For an account of such material as exists in the cathedral archives of Galicia, see Ochoa Martínez de Soria, Scriptorium Victoriense, VII, 345 ff.

122. BC Toledo, MS 23-16, fo. 24v. The Peñafiel constitutions are publ. in Tejada, III, 433-46.

123. 'Item prelatis vel capitulis terre sue non est liberum simul convenire et tractare de gravaminibus et injuriis que inferuntur, aut ipsa apostolice sedi referre': Reg. Nich. III, 743. See below, Ch. 9.

124. Speculum, XXXIII, 475 ff.; Past and Present, XLII, 44-5.

125. MHE, I, 162-3. Cf. above, p. 123.

126. Publ. Torres Fontes, Col. documentos del reino de Murcia, I, 57-8.

127. Loc. cit., 39.

128. Salimbene, Cronica, ed. Holder-Egger, 456 (s.a. 1253).

129. AC Zamora, 1/3: 'cum ab codem rege ecclesia nostra multipliciter sit gravata...proventus nostri sunt adeo diminuti quod vix ex eis possumus sustentari' (28 Nov. 1266). The papal grant was occasioned by the war against Granada. The dean of Zamora, Pedro Pérez, who appealed with the chapter, was, incidentally, engaged in collecting the tax for the king in the kingdom of Leon: a nice example of the dual personality of such churchmen: AM León, 1/7 (Ballesteros, BRAH, CIX, 452).

130. AC Palencia, 4/1/3: 'nephas est ut blasfemantibus [?] Christi iudeis maior habeatur fides quam christifidelibus christianis'. Cf. Reg. Nich. III, 743: 'Item judaeos christianis preponit multipliciten, unde multa mala proveniunt.' The Palencia document is the only record that has survived of this meeting. It is barely legible. Apart from Sancho, the bishops of Cuenca, Osma, Palencia, Segovia, Sigüenza and Segorbe were present, as well as the proctors of the bishops of Jaén and Córdoba, and representatives of the cathedral chapters. Dated 7 March 1267, it sheds new light on the attitude of the archbishop to the king. Cf. Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 445 ff.

131. 'Eapropter dampnamus et reprobamus illam non consuetudinem sed potius conruptelam qua in aliqua ecclesia amore vel forte timone potentium inolevit, videlicet quod fiebat promissio vel receptio a prelato sine capitulo, vel a capitulo sine prelato, de canonia vel portione vel beneficio proximo vacaturo': De constitutionibus et consuetudinibus ecclesie Toletane, BN, MS 13041, fo. 14r (undated). Consuetudo and corruptela had been similarly contrasted by Gregory IX in the early thirties: above, Ch. 1.

132. A document of Aug. 1267 contains a casual reference to an episcopal assembly at Ponferrada at some earlier date: 'Item quando el arzobispo de Santiago fizo xaman todos los bispos sos sufraganeos he elos otros bispos e los procuradores de los cabildos a Ponferrada...': AC León, doc. 1564. Was this perhaps the council which muzzled its resentment of royal interference in episcopal elections?

133. Mondéjar, Memorias históricas, 211.

134. Cf. Fleckenstein in Adel und Kirche (Festschrift Tellenbach), 233-4. Gonzalo of Toledo, who avoided the embarrassment of having to declare his allegiance at this time had his equivalent in 1080 in Benno of Osnabrück, who, rather than commit himself at the Synod of Brixen, spent the day hidden under the altar.

135. For example, Alexander IV and Urban IV received appeals for help from churches as fan apart as Urgel and Mondoñedo: inc. Conquesti sunt, 5 Dec. 1259; Loca divino, 28 April 1263: AC Seo de Urgel, d.s.n.; AC Mondoñedo, d.s.n.

136. Reg. Alex. IV, 2911.

137. AC Sigüenza, doc. pont. 26: publ. Minguella, I, 589-91.

138. González, Repartimiento de Sevilla, II, 339, 342; Reg. Urban IV,cam. 156; Reg. Clem. IV, 729, 781; AHN, 2263/12.

139. For full discussion and texts, see Linehan, EHR, LXXXV, 730 ff.

140. AC Segovia, doc. 241: 'Cetenum quia propter sterilitatem possessionum et raritatem inhabitancium, occasione quorum redditus ecclesie vestre diminuti dicantur, certitudinem non habemus an vacancia prestimonia ad complementum dicte provisionis in presenti sufficiant' (Cardinal Gil's ordinatio, Oct. 1245: see below, p. 271).

141. AC Cuenca, 8/34/678: '...et cum ecclesia nostra, in confinibus paganonum sita, non sit in firmo statu, et habitatones discurrunt undique depopulando nostram diocesim et cotidie transeundo ad inhabitandum Ispalensem et alias frontanias - quocirca loca singula plures de nostra diocesi, immo maior pars, inhabitat'. Cuenca had been reconquered in 1177, but it was still a frontier see. Cf. Mansilla, Iglesia castellano-leonesa, 132-3.

142. Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 362.

143. Publ. Torres Fontes, Col. documentos del reino de Murcia, I, 22 (May 1266).

144. 'Considera igitur, fili, considera: cum te tam experientia cogat advertere, quam familiaria etiam exempla ignorare non sinant, quam gravibus sit res plena periculis, Sarracenorum in terra tua retentio; qui licet ad tempus occultent iniquitatis sue, necessitate cogente, propositum, illud tam avide quam ardenter, immo etiam quam inique, captata occasione, revelant': Ripoll, I, 478-80 (Potthast, 19911).

145. Ibn Bassam records Count Sisnando's advice to Alfonso VI, not to interfere in the internal affairs of the kingdom of Toledo after its reconquest, because 'you will not find other people to maintain its prosperity on another governor as obedient as Ibn Di-l-Nun': advice which the king ignored, thus providing fertile ground for the Almoravids: García Gómez in Al-Andalus, XII, 32; Menéndez Pidal, Imperio hispánico, 116. Cf. Olagüe, I, 253, who regards the late fifteenth century as providing the earliest instance of these processes.

146. BN, MS 13041, fo. 17r-v: 'Nos considerantes quod causam illi dederit edicto novelle ecclesie paupertas reddituum et nimia sarracenorum incivitas metuenda, propter quod canonici ab ecclesie residentia inviti forte plusquam voluntarii divertebant, consuetudinem illam vel statutum duximus revocandum cum iam facultates ccclesie supercreverint Toletane et sarraceni agant iam, deo gratias, in remotis et tuta sit via circumquaque que ducit ad ecclesiam Toletanam' (undated).

147. Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 755 ff.

148. Benito Ruano, MS, XI, 15-17.

149. Fita, BRAH, VIII, 232-3.

150. AC Sigüenza, doc. pont. 22: publ. Minguella, I, 571 (misdated).

151. AC Cuenca, 8/34/678: 'nobis pro paupertate nimia fabricis ecclesiarum subvenire non valentibus, constructe corruunt et iniciate consummari non possunt'.

152. Ibid.: 'cum...nos simus totaliter occupati circa Dei et regis servicia, contra sarracenos tam Ispanie quam Affrice in guerra continua laborantes, eciam circa populacionem terre de novo reddite cultui christiano, circa quam necessarie intendentes cum exinde formidetur perniciosum periculum Ispanie et sancte Dei ecclesie provenire'. Previously archdeacon of Cádiz (Seville), Pedro Lorenzo had been elected on 6 Dec. 1261: AC Toledo, X.1.E.2.4.

153. AC Cuenca, 8/34/679: 'cum essemus in regno et non latitandi vel subterfugiendi causa, immo circa rempublicam occupati populando de mandato domini regis terram a sarracenis de novo acquisitam et in cancellanie officio constituti'. Pedro de Peñafiel, archdeacon of Lana (Burgos), the executor, had charged Toledo and Palencia 400 maravedís each, Segovia, Cuenca, Sigüenza and Osma 250 each, Jaén 150, and Córdoba 100. The bishop calculated that Toledo was at least four times as wealthy, and Sigüenza twice as wealthy, as Cuenca.

154. Tejada, VI, 48.

155. AHA, Index dels Indices, fo. 2r-v. Details in Linehan, EHR, LXXXV, 735.

156. ADB, Gav. dos Quindénios, decimas e subsídios, 9: Linehan, loc. cit.

157. Chronica Majora, V, 584-5 (ad an. 1256).

158. Wolff, Speculum, XXIX, 64.

159. Ibid. 71-2; AHA, Index dels Indices, fo. 2r-v. Cf. Benito Ruano, Hispania, XII, 3 ff.

160. Giudice, Don Arrigo Infante di Castiglia, esp. 117-20.

161. AC Toledo, E.7.C (XIII).7.1. Details in Linehan, EHR, LXXXV, 743. Cf. Geanakoplos, The Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West, 175-80, 252-4.

162. BAE, LXVI, 119. This is a near-contemporary account: Puyol, BRAH,LXXVII, 507 ff.

163. España: un enigma, I, 356.

164. Ch. 9.

165. The Bible in Spain (Everyman's Library ed.), 3.

166. Jonah i, 3. Cf. Schulten, Tartessos, 8 ff.

167. Above, p. 103; Vincentius Hispanus, similarly, 'hoc...de mundi fine remittit opus'. See Fransen's observations on Ochoa's paper at the Congrès de Droit Canonique Medieval, in July 1958: Bibl. de la Rev. d'hist eccl., XXXIII, 175.

168. Valdeavellano, Historia de España, I, ii, 217.

169. BC Toledo, cod. 39-12, fos. 163r-70v. Noted by Elze, Die Ordines für die Weihe und Krönung des Kaisers und der Kaiserin, 55, rubric no. 22.

170. López Ferreiro, V, 158.

171. Reg. Alex. IV, 306, 1668 ('tu preces et mandatum nostrum pertransietis, aure surda id efficere non curastis'), 2309; AC Zamora, Liber Constitutionum, fos. 1vb-2ra. See also Ch. 12.

172. 'Preterea quendam yspanum qui patrati maleficii conscius fuerat et particeps, ne per ipsum tantum crimen revelari contingeret, dicuntur miserabiliter occidisse.' Inc. Horrendum facinus, BM, MS Lansdowne 397, fo. 113v (Richard of Pophis Formulary: Batzer, 396). The earliest known reference to a papal treasurer is of the year 1262: Gottlob, Aus der Camera Apostolica, 95.

173. Cf. Reg. Clem. IV, 669. The prelates were incarcerated and threatened 'expressis eorum nominibus quod ultra presentem diem nec tu Bracanensis eris archiepiscopus nec tu Colimbriensis eris episcopus': ADB, Gav. das Notícias Várias, 26, cap. xxii.

174. Reg. Nich. IV, 6214; Reg. Bon. VIII, 537, 692.

175. Although the next vacant benefice was reserved for Landulf, son of the nobleman Frederick de Prefectis, the chapter awarded it to Master Simon de, Carrión (later bishop of Sigüenza) in June 1296; and the curialist was still without satisfaction in Feb. 1299: AC Toledo, d.s.n. in caj. O.9. and I.12; Reg. Bon. VIII, 3648.

176. AC Burgos, vol. 62, ii, fos. 85-113 - 'quamdiu vacavenint et quomodocumque vacaverint et ubicumque vacavcrint', fo. 112. See Linechan, EHR, LXXXV, 745.

177. See below, Ch. II.

178. Treasurer of Toledo by Oct. 1272. By the time of his death in 1276 he had accumulated a Toledo archdeaconry, and rural deaneries at Illescas, Benquerencia, Caravaca, Perales, Tielmes and Embid, as well as Aragonese benefices at Tarazona, Zaragoza, Calatayud and Teruel: Reg. Greg. X, 73; Reg. Nich. IV, 3837.

179. AC Toledo, I.9.B.1.7; 12, two letters, both Etsi ad provisionem, 19 Aug. 1262.

180. Reg. Urban IV, 2346.

181. Details in Linehan, EHR, LXXXV, 740-1.

182. Cf. Deeley, EHR, XLIII, 497 ff.; Barraclough, Papal Provisions, esp. Ch. IV.

183. Cortes de Castilla, I, 432-3. Cf. Goñi Gaztambide, AA, XIV, 77-8.

184. Ibid. 81. For the effectiveness of passive resistance, see the report of the collector, Juan Fernández archdeacon of Castro, discussed below, pp. 247-9. Cf. Reg. Clem. IV, 923: 'Thesaurus apud nos nullus latet...Anglia adversatur, Alamania vix obedit, Francia gemit et queritur, Yspania sibi non sufficit, Italia non subvenit sed emungit' (Mantène-Durand, Thesaurus, II, 174).

185. Ibid. 1278 (Martène-Durand, II, 542).

186. AC Palencia, 2/1/42 (MDH, 536, 538); Reg. Greg. IX, 594. For this description of Fernando, see ASV, arm. XXXI. 72, fo. 288r (Schillmann, 2491).

187. The clergy of Salamanca, June 1262, and of the rural deanery of Roa (Osma), June 1270: MME, I, 193; Loperráez, Descripción de Osma, III, 204-5.

188. Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional, ed. Machado, II, 372-4.

189. C.N.L. Brooke in Cambridge Historical Journal, XII, 5.

190. ADB, Gav. das Notícias Várias, 13 (24 July 1268).

191. 'To call them "curialist bishops", as is sometimes done, is surely misleading. The term "curialist" has come to have a pejorative meaning. The implication is that, if they served the Crown, or owed their promotion to the Crown, they must automatically as bishops have belonged to a Court Party': Highfield, TRHS, 5^th ser., VI, 115-16.

192. The tale is told in the Leyenda of the Saint written in 1275. What the taxgathener said was 'Ego bene crederem quod qui esset filius principis vel alicuius magnatis bene posset fieri vere sanctus, set virum laboricii seu ruricolam non credo ullatenus fore sanctum.' Ed. Fita, BRAH, IX, 118.