Third Lateran Council (1179)

The double election of 1159

At the death of Pope Adrian IV, on 1 September 1159, the College of Cardinals was divided by the imperial question. The great majority elected Cardinal Roland Bandinelli, a canon lawyer by training, who took the name Alexander III. A small imperial minority — four or five cardinals according to the Catholic Encyclopedia — chose Octavian, Cardinal of St Cecilia, who took the name of Victor IV. The crisis was not only Roman: it became European because Frederick Barbarossa recognised Victor IV and convened the synod of Pavia in 1160 to impose his solution.^[6][7]

Alexander III refused to submit his right to an assembly controlled by the emperor. He excommunicated Frederick and had to live for several years outside Rome, notably in France. The schism continued after the death of Victor IV through two further antipopes supported within the imperial orbit: Paschal III, then Calixtus III, that is John of Struma.^[8][9]

The conflict with Frederick Barbarossa

The conflict was part of a broader struggle over northern Italy. Barbarossa wanted to restore imperial authority over the Lombard communes and have his arbitration in pontifical affairs recognised. Alexander III, for his part, defended the autonomy of the Roman election and progressively relied on the emperor's Italian adversaries.^[10]

The battle of Legnano, on 29 May 1176, shattered imperial hopes in northern Italy. The following year, the Peace of Venice ended the conflict between pope and emperor: Frederick recognised Alexander III, ceased supporting the antipopes and accepted a pacification that made a general council possible. The schism was not definitively closed, however, until the submission of the antipope Calixtus III in August 1178.^[11][12][13]

A peace to be converted into law

The peace of 1177 settled a political situation; it was not enough to repair the juridical effects of the schism. Ordinations, benefices, oaths, possessions and loyalties had been tied to the antipopes. The council of 1179 therefore had to purify the canonical memory, annul schismatical acts and establish a more robust rule of election.^[14][15]

This explains the difference between Lateran III and a mere reform synod. The assembly dealt not only with ordinary abuses. It came after a crisis that had touched the visible centre of Catholic unity: who is pope, and by what procedure can he be recognised without ambiguity?

Three sessions at the Lateran

The council was held in the Basilica of St John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome. The sources give three principal sessions: 5 March, 14 March and 19 March 1179. The first session opened the assembly; the last transmitted the twenty-seven canons received by the canonical tradition.^[16][17]

The convocation had been announced in September 1178, in accordance with the agreement of Venice. Alexander III sent legates to various countries to gather an assembly that was truly Western, not a restricted Roman circle.^[18]

An assembly more representative than the first two Laterans

The Catholic Encyclopedia counts 302 bishops, almost a thousand members in total, and notes the presence of prelates from Spain, Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Denmark, Iceland and the Latin sees of the East. The Catholic Encyclopedia notice also mentions Nectarius, abbot of the Cabules, as representative of the Greeks.^[19]

Norman Tanner stresses that the ecumenicity of Lateran III is less debated than that of Lateran I and II: the mode of convocation, pontifical presidency, geographical spread of participants and the object of ecclesial unity give the assembly the typical form of a medieval council presided over by the pope.^[20]

Alexander III, the canonist pope

Alexander III was not only a pope who resisted the emperor. Before his election, Roland Bandinelli had taught at Bologna and acquired a reputation as a canonist; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) attributes to him a commentary on Gratian's Decree, known as the Summa Magistri Rolandi; this attribution is however contested by current scholarship.^[21][22]

This juridical competence can be seen in the canons of 1179. Tanner notes that several canons appear to have been drafted by an excellent canonical hand, probably under the direct authority of Alexander himself. Lateran III is thus both an act of pacification and a work of juridical government.^[23]

Frederick Barbarossa and the antipopes

Frederick Barbarossa was not a conciliar father, but he is the historical adversary without whom Lateran III is incomprehensible. His support for Victor IV, then for the antipapal successors, turned a conclave division into a lasting schism. After Legnano and Venice, the council could annul the acts of the antipopes and consolidate the recognition of Alexander.^[24][25]

Popular memory has sometimes dramatised the meeting at Venice by showing an emperor humiliated beneath the pope's foot. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls the story of the pope placing his foot on the prostrate emperor's neck a legend. The historical essentials are more sober: the emperor recognised Alexander III and renounced his policy of pontifical imposition.^[26]

Bishops, cardinals and canonists

The assembly was not merely decorative. The cardinals were directly concerned by canon 1; the bishops by the canons on ages of ordination, visitations, excommunications, schools, leper houses and clerical discipline; the canonists by the subsequent diffusion of the text in decretal collections.^[27][28]

The council stands at a moment when canon law was becoming a major instrument of government. Since Gratian's Decree, around 1140, the juridical schools had a common language. Lateran III fits into this movement: it settled concrete cases, but its canons then circulated as general norms.

The two-thirds rule for papal elections

Canon 1 is the lasting heart of Lateran III. It declares that, if unanimity among the cardinals cannot be obtained, he who is elected and received by two thirds shall be held pope. He who would claim to assume the pontifical name with only a third falls, with his partisans, under very grave sanctions.^[29][30]

The rule is practical, but its scope is theological and institutional. The Church cannot live durably in uncertainty about its visible pastor. The canon does not claim that the cardinals replace divine assistance; it establishes a public procedure so that an election can be recognised without being paralysed by a minority.

The annulment of schismatical acts

Canon 2 renews the decision of Lateran II — canon 30, which declared null the ordinations of Peter Pierleoni, that is Anacletus II — against the acts of the antipopes of the Alexandrine schism: the ordinations, promotions, dignities and benefices conferred by them are declared null or withdrawn. Named are Octavian, that is Victor IV, Guy of Crema, that is Paschal III, and John of Struma, that is Calixtus III.^[31][32]

This annulment is not vengeance. It prevents the schism from continuing through its administrative effects. If the dignities conferred by the antipopes remained intact, every chapter, diocese or abbey could retain an ambiguous loyalty.

A reform directed at the causes of the schism

Lateran III understood that schisms are not born only of doctrinal error. They also take root in ambition, money, political pressure, weak discipline and confusion between spiritual power and temporal interests. That is why the following canons touch the age of bishops, benefices, episcopal visitations, abusive appeals, charges imposed on churches and appointments by laymen.^[33]

Age, learning and maturity of pastors

Canon 3 forbids promoting to the episcopate a man who is not thirty years old, is not born of a legitimate marriage or does not show a fitting life and learning. For lower offices involving the cure of souls, such as deaneries, archdeaconries and parishes, the threshold is set at twenty-five.^[34][35]

This decision shows the spirit of the council. After a schism in which ecclesiastical dignities could become pieces of imperial or family strategy, Lateran III recalls that pastoral office demands real capacity: age, morals, formation and aptitude for leading souls.

Sacramental simony and the gratuitousness of the sacred

Canon 7 condemns payments demanded for enthronement, the installation of a priest, burial, the blessing of marriage or the administration of the sacraments. It takes up the Gospel logic: what is received freely cannot be turned into a market.^[36]

The precision matters. The council does not deny that the faithful may materially support the Church. It targets exaction: the situation in which one who needs a sacrament or blessing cannot obtain it without an imposed payment. That is the boundary between free offering and practical simony.

Templars, Hospitallers and episcopal authority

Canon 9 targets abuses committed by certain members of the Templars, Hospitallers or other religious enjoying pontifical privileges. The council notably forbids them to receive churches and tithes from the hand of laymen, to bypass the bishop's authority or to use their privileges to bury and celebrate in places under interdict beyond what is permitted.^[37]

This is not a wholesale condemnation of the military orders. The text seeks rather to settle a typical twelfth-century tension: institutions very useful to the Church can, if their privileges are misused, weaken the local bishop and disturb common discipline.

Clergy, benefices and pluralism

Canons 11 to 14 deal with the conduct of clerics, the prohibition of certain secular offices, the accumulation of benefices and the appointment to churches by laymen. Canon 11 punishes clerics in manifest concubinage; canon 13 forbids holding several dignities or churches to the detriment of residence and the care of souls; canon 14 condemns the audacity of laymen who appoint or remove clerics as if they owned the Church.^[38]

These decisions extend Lateran I and Lateran II. The Gregorian reform was not completed in 1123 or 1139. In 1179 it still had to discipline benefices, limit the encroachments of the powerful and recall that pastoral offices are not accumulable revenues.

Cathedral schools: teaching poor clerks

Canon 18 is one of the most fruitful. It orders that each cathedral church have a master charged with teaching clerks and poor scholars free of charge. The Catholic Encyclopedia sums it up as the establishment of a school in each cathedral for poor clerks.^[39][40]

This measure prepared the development of cathedral schools and the medieval university world. It did not by itself create the modern university, but it expresses a strong conviction: the reform of the Church passes through the intellectual formation of future clerics, not only through sanctions.

Lepers, the Truce of God, tournaments and war

Canon 23 recognises for leper communities numerous enough the right to have their own church, cemetery and priest. Canon 20 forbids murderous tournaments; canon 21 takes up the Truce of God; canon 24 forbids supplying the Saracens with materials that would serve to build galleys or harm Christians.^[41][42]

These canons show the scope of medieval conciliar government. Lateran III does not separate Church reform from Christian social order. It legislates on the sacraments, but also on the sick poor, aristocratic violence, Mediterranean wars and the protection of Christian communities.

Cathars, mercenaries and canon 27

Canon 27 is the harshest politically. It excommunicates the heretics designated under the names of Cathars, Patarines and other related groups, and also targets the bands of mercenaries ravaging certain regions. The text calls on princes to repress this violence and grants indulgences to those who defend Christians against it.^[43][44]

Two points must be distinguished. On the one hand, Catharism is a religious dualism contesting fundamental elements of the Christian faith and sacramental life. On the other, canon 27 mingles heresy and social violence in a single logic of defending the Christian order. This association foreshadows the more systematic measures of the thirteenth century against the Albigensians, but Lateran III is not yet the Albigensian Crusade of 1209.^[45]

Strong diffusion in the canonical collections

Tanner insists on the exceptional diffusion of the canons. They appear in several contemporary English chronicles and in many decretal collections of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. They were subsequently integrated into the Decretals of Gregory IX.^[46]

This reception explains why Lateran III weighs more than its popular fame. A modern reader often knows Lateran IV for transubstantiation and annual confession; medieval canonists, by contrast, read Lateran III as an immediately useful normative reservoir.

A step towards Lateran IV

Several decisions of 1179 prepare Lateran IV (1215). The cathedral school of canon 18 would be taken up and amplified by Lateran IV; the struggle against heresies would be systematised; the reform of clerical discipline would continue; the question of benefices and residence would remain central.^[47]

Lateran III is thus a transitional council. It brings the Church out of an imperial schism, but it already looks towards the pastoral problems of the thirteenth century: formation, preaching, popular heresies, supervision of institutions and universal juridical government.

The Waldensians: a case often oversimplified

The Waldensian case calls for caution. Alexander III favourably received Waldes and his companions who came to Rome and approved their vow of poverty, while reminding them that laymen could not preach without authorisation; other later notices speak more generally of Waldensian condemnation. Historically, Waldes and his companions presented themselves at Rome around 1179 with an evangelical ideal of poverty; the rupture hardened afterwards, above all around lay preaching without mandate.^[48]

The article must therefore not reduce Lateran III to a simple and immediate condemnation of the Waldensians as a movement already fully separated. The council clearly targets the Cathars in canon 27; for the Poor of Lyons, the situation in 1179 is still a phase of discernment and tension.

The two-thirds rule at the heart of the conclave

The most visible legacy is the two-thirds rule. The concrete modalities of conclaves have changed, but the idea remains: the election of the pope requires a qualified majority, greater than a simple majority, so that the unity of the Church is not delivered to a narrow and contestable victory.

This rule was born of a crisis. It recalls that a good ecclesial procedure is not cold technocracy: it protects communion. Catholic unity asks for grace, but also for rules clear enough to prevent ambition from disguising itself as right.

A reform uniting law, pastoral care and charity

Lateran III is not limited to papal elections. It binds canon law, moral discipline, protection of the poor, education of clerics and social pacification. This breadth may surprise, but it reveals a strong medieval intuition: the Church is not reformed by a single symbolic decree. It must touch appointments, money, studies, sacraments, abuses of privilege and concrete violence.^[49]

A less famous but structuring council

Lateran III remains less known than Lateran IV, but its role is structuring. It gives the Roman Church a juridical answer to the trauma of the Alexandrine schism, strengthens clerical discipline, stimulates cathedral schools and brings its canons into the great decretalist tradition.^[50]

Its lesson can be summed up simply: after a crisis of authority, the Church does not merely celebrate peace. It examines the causes, annuls the harmful effects, clarifies procedures and reforms the practices that made the crisis possible.

• Read Lateran I: the freedom of the Church after the Investiture Controversy.
• Read Lateran II: the pacification of a previous papal schism.
• Read Lateran IV: the doctrinal and pastoral summit of the Lateran councils.
• Keep in mind the heart of the matter: Lateran III turned the end of Alexander III's schism into lasting reform of papal elections and canon law.