Pope Alexander III (1159-1181)

The pope of the two-thirds ballot, enduring basis of the modern election

The rule which, in its principle as clarified by later law, still governs papal elections today — the two-thirds majority of cardinals — dates from Alexander III. Before him, the decree of 1059 had reserved the election to the cardinals, but without fixing the required quorum: the contested election of 1159, when a minority was able to proclaim an antipope, exposed the flaw.^[10] The first canon of Lateran III answered it definitively: no one is pope without two-thirds of the votes, with no distinction between the orders of cardinals (the three ranks: cardinal-bishops, cardinal-priests and cardinal-deacons).^[11] The two-thirds rule, later completed by the locked conclave (cum clave, Ubi periculum, 1274) and by subsequent law, has since remained the basis of the modern papal election.

The Pope of the Freedom of the Church against Caesar

The great issue at stake in the pontificate is not a personal quarrel but a question of principle: does the Church govern itself, or does the emperor have the pope as a bishop of his court? Barbarossa wants to restore an order where the sacerdotium serves the imperium. Alexander III embodies the refusal of this subordination.^[12] His victory, won after nearly nineteen years of exile and fighting, established the independence of the Apostolic See for centuries.

The Pope of Thomas Becket and the law

Finally, Alexander III is the pope of one of the most famous martyrs of the freedom of the Church, Thomas Becket, and one of the greatest legislators in papal history. Under him, the papacy became the supreme tribunal of Christianity: questions of law were addressed to him from all over Europe, to which he responded with decretals — his official letters which, by settling a specific case, fixed the law for the whole Church — and which thus set jurisprudence. Stuck between the thunderous figure of Gregory VII and that of Innocent III, he remains underestimated; however, it was under him that the classical pontifical monarchy was established — that centralized government in which the pope, surrounded by his jurists, decides in last resort for all of Christendom.^[13]

Training as a canonist in Bologna

Rolando was born in Siena, around 1100-1105, into a notable family of the Tuscan city.^[14][15] He trained in canon law, the science then in full expansion since the monk Gratian composed in Bologna, around 1140, his Concordia discordantium canonum (“the Agreement of the canons that contradict each other”) - the future Decree of Gratian, founding manual of the law of the Church. Rolando teaches and acquires the reputation of an esteemed master.^[16]

This training is the key to the character. Alexander III will not be primarily a monk or a warrior, but a jurist: he thinks of the authority of the Church in terms of law, procedure, and competence. This explains both his patience in the ordeal and the extraordinary legislative fruitfulness of his pontificate.

The question of the decretist Rolandus

An ancient tradition identifies the future pope with the famous decretist Rolandus — a decretist being a master who comments on the Decree of Gratian, the manual of the law of the Church —, author of a Summa on this Decree and of theological Sentences. However, historical caution is necessary: modern works, notably those of John T. Noonan and Rudolf Weigand, have shown that the decretist Rolandus and Pope Alexander III are probably two distinct people.^[17] The traditional attribution of academic works to the Pope is therefore no longer taken for granted.

This correction in no way diminishes the stature of Alexander III: whether or not he wrote the Summa Rolandi, his pontificate proves legal mastery of the first order. The lesson is also methodological: a serious encyclopedia points out what research has revised, without giving in to the ease of old manuals.

Cardinal and Chancellor of the Roman Church

Pope Eugene III called Rolando to Rome and created him cardinal-deacon in October 1150, then cardinal-priest of the title of Saint Mark.^[18][19] Under the English pope Adrian IV (1154-1159), he was chancellor of the Roman Church — an office held since 1153, the highest in the curia after the pope. In this position, he directed papal diplomacy and found himself at the heart of the growing conflict with the Empire.

The Besançon incident (1157)

The episode that reveals the man took place at the Diet of Besançon, in October 1157. Chancellor Rolando read a letter from Pope Adrian IV in which the word beneficium appeared: the Empire was presented as a “benefit” of the Apostolic See. Before the furious German princes who saw in it an admission of imperial vassalage toward the pope, the incident degenerated: the account given by Rahewin, continuator of Otto of Freising in the Gesta Friderici, attributes to Chancellor Rolando a stinging retort — from whom would the emperor hold the Empire, if not from the pope? — which nearly got him struck by the princes. The exact wording varies according to later accounts; it is therefore reported here in substance, as words attributed by chronicle tradition, not as an established verbatim.^[20][21][22]

The Besançon affair is not an anecdote: it announces the entire pontificate. Two conceptions of the world order are already clashing, and the man who carries them in the name of Rome is precisely the one whom the cardinals will choose two years later.

The double election of September 7

On the death of Adrian IV, September 7, 1159, the cardinals divided. The vast majority - all sources agree: all except three out of around twenty cardinals - elected Chancellor Rolando, who took the name Alexander III.^[23][24] But the pro-imperial minority, led by Cardinal Octavian of Monticelli, refused the verdict and proclaimed Octavian pope under the name of Victor IV. According to stories, Octavian tore off the papal mantle to put it on himself in a scene of tumult.

The stakes are clear: Octavian is the candidate of the emperor, Alexander that of Roman independence. The schism that opens is not a procedural accident, but the ecclesial translation of the conflict between the sacerdotium and the imperium.

Consecration at Ninfa

The imperial party then holding the City, Alexander III cannot be consecrated in Rome. He was consecrated on September 20, 1159, outside the walls, in the small town of Ninfa, south of Rome.^[25] This precarious consecration is a symbol: the true pope begins his reign as a fugitive, while the antipope enjoys the favor of the most powerful prince in the West. The whole story of the legitimacy of Alexander III lies in this contrast between the apparent strength of the usurper and the truth of law.

The Council of Pavia (1160) and the rupture

Barbarossa, posing as arbiter of the Church like the Ottonian emperors in the past, convened a council in Pavia in February 1160. Unsurprisingly, the assembly, dominated by the imperial bishops, recognized Victor IV and condemned Alexander III.^[26][27] But the true pope refused to appear: he did not recognize the emperor's right to judge the Apostolic See.

This is the application of the old canonical principle Prima sedes a nemine iudicatur — the Roman See is judged by no one — recalled here as the basis of the pontifical refusal, not as a literal quotation from Alexander III, no preserved letter of whom gives the exact wording on this occasion.^[28]

On March 24, 1160, Alexander III decided: he solemnly excommunicated the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the antipope Victor IV.^[29] The rupture was total. The jurist pope has just opposed the imperial sword with the spiritual weapon of anathema.

The dream of an imperial Church

To understand Barbarossa's relentlessness, we must understand his project. The emperor wants to restore the Renovatio imperii, a universal Christian Empire where spiritual authority itself would enter into the imperial order.^[30] A submissive pope is essential to him. This is why, at the death of each antipope, he immediately raises another, in defiance of law and evidence: the cause is not Octavian or any cardinal, but the principle of a papacy under his control.

Four antipopes: the schism from 1159 to 1180

The imperial schism lasted from 1159 until the submission of Callixtus III on August 29, 1178 — nearly nineteen years —, with a final Roman flare-up, Innocent III (1179-1180), bringing the total duration to twenty years; it aligned four successive antipopes, the first three supported by the emperor, the last by a Roman faction:

• Victor IV (Octavian of Monticelli), 1159-1164;
• Paschal III (Guy of Crema), 1164-1168 — it was he who, to please Barbarossa, “canonized” Charlemagne in 1165, a canonization without value;
• Callixtus III (John of Struma), 1168-1178, who eventually submitted to Alexander III on August 29, 1178;
• Innocent III (Lando of Sezze), September 1179–January 1180, final outburst of a faction of the Roman nobility, quickly reduced — not to be confused with Pope Innocent III (1198–1216).^[31][32]

None of these men were ever recognized by the universal Church. The pontifical numbering itself bears the trace: the names of Innocent and Callixtus were later taken up by legitimate popes — Innocent III (1198–1216), Callixtus III (1455–1458) —, while Victor IV and Paschal III remain forever names of antipopes: as if the memory of the Church erased the usurpers.

Exile in France (1162-1165)

Unable to hold Rome, Alexander III took refuge in France from 1162 to 1165, residing notably in Sens.^[33] Far from being a rout, the French exile was a diplomatic triumph: the kings Louis VII of France and Henry II of England recognized him, as did most sovereigns of the West. The antipope reigns over Rome; the true pope reigns over the consciences of Christianity.

Marcel Pacaut showed how Alexander III was able, from France, to weave the network of alliances which would ultimately isolate the emperor.^[34] The lesson is constant in the history of the Church: legitimacy is not measured by the possession of a palace, but by the communion of bishops and the faithful.

A city called Alexandria (1168)

The decisive resistance did not come from Rome, but from the communes of Northern Italy, stifled by imperial taxation. In 1167 the Lombard League was formed, a coalition of cities which refused the domination of Barbarossa. In 1168, these towns founded a stronghold at the confluence of the Tanaro and the Bormida, and gave it the name of the pope: Alexandria (Alessandria), in honor of Alexander III, living symbol of the alliance between the Holy See and communal freedoms.^[35]

The alliance is also the fruit of a legal calculation by Alexander III: to make the cause of the Church that of the concrete freedoms of the people against imperial absolutism. The jurist pope knows that law, to win, must be embodied in real forces.

The Battle of Legnano (May 29, 1176)

On May 29, 1176, in Legnano, north of Milan, the army of the Lombard League faced that of Barbarossa. Around the Carroccio — the sacred chariot carrying the cross, the symbolic heart of the communes — the Lombard infantry holds and breaks the imperial cavalry. The emperor's horse is killed, Frederick disappears in the melee and for a time it is believed that he is dead; he owes his salvation only to a desperate flight to Pavia.^[36][37]

Legnano is one of the founding battles of Italian consciousness: for the first time, urban militias defeated the army of the greatest sovereign in the West. And the victory is that of the pope as much as of the cities: it is his legitimacy which emerges triumphant from the fray.

The Peace of Venice (1177)

Defeated, Barbarossa gave in. At the end of long negotiations carried out in Anagni and then in Venice, the emperor finally recognized Alexander III as the only legitimate pope. On July 24, 1177, in Venice, before the Basilica of Saint Mark, reconciliation took place: the excommunication was lifted, the emperor abandoned his antipope Callixtus III, and a six-year truce was concluded with the Lombard League.^[38][39] Tradition immortalized the scene in which the emperor bows before the pope on Saint Mark's square.

Medieval accounts of the reconciliation report that, having arrived before Saint Mark's, the emperor removed his cloak, prostrated himself and kissed the pontiff's feet; the exact staging varying according to the chroniclers, the episode is read in substance, as an image handed down by tradition, not as minutes of the proceedings.^[40]

The Peace of Venice is the climax of the pontificate. Eighteen years after a fugitive consecration at Ninfa, the jurist pope defeated the emperor not by arms, but by patience, law and the fidelity of the Church. The Peace of Constance (1183) will then confirm the freedoms of the Lombard cities.

The conflict between Henry II and his archbishop

While he fought Barbarossa, Alexander III had to arbitrate another conflict between priesthood and State: in England, King Henry II wanted to submit the Church to his law through the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), especially by judging clerics before his courts. Henry's former chancellor, now Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, opposed him in the name of the freedom of the Church and had to go into exile in France.^[41]

The position of Alexander III is delicate: he needs the support of Henry II against the emperor, but he cannot abandon the principle defended by Becket. He temporizes, negotiates, withholds sanctions - exactly the prudence of the lawyer who weighs the forces without giving in on the merits.

The Martyrdom of Canterbury (1170)

On December 29, 1170, four knights of the king assassinated Becket in his own cathedral in Canterbury, at the foot of the altar.^[42] The murder of an archbishop in his church, in the midst of celebration, shocked all of Christianity. The martyr immediately becomes the symbol of the Church which resists temporal power even to the point of blood.

Canonization and royal penance

Alexander III acted with significant speed: on February 21, 1173, barely more than two years after the murder, he canonized Thomas Becket in the church of Saint Peter in Segni.^[43] The canonization transformed the apparent defeat into a resounding victory for the freedom of the Church. Henry II, for his part, had to do public penance: on July 12, 1174, he presented himself as a penitent at Becket's tomb in Canterbury and allowed himself to be flogged by the monks.

Accounts of the penance report that the king, who had wanted to bend the Church to his law, came barefoot to ask forgiveness at Becket's tomb and allowed himself to be flogged there; reported here in substance, the chroniclers varying on the details of the ritual.^[44]

Without having issued against him either interdict or solemn anathema, Alexander III obtained from the penitent king the abandonment of the essential of Clarendon's pretensions. The firmness of the martyr and the patience of the Pope got the better of royal pride: it is one of the most beautiful medieval illustrations of spiritual victory over force.

Close the schism, rebuild the election

Once peace had been made with the Empire and the antipope Callixtus III had submitted, Alexander III convened a great ecumenical council — the eleventh in the history of the Church — at the Lateran palace in March 1179. Gathered in three sessions (March 5, 14 and 19), it brought together roughly 302 bishops from across the West.^[45][46] Its first mission was to close the schism definitively: the council annulled the ordinations conferred by the antipopes Victor IV, Paschal III and Callixtus III.

📖 See the detailed article: Third Lateran Council (1179)

The two-thirds rule

The first canon, Licet de vitanda, is the most enduring canon of the medieval papacy. Drawing the lesson from the schism of 1159, it decided that no one could be regarded as pope unless he had two-thirds of the votes of the cardinals, with no further distinction between cardinal-bishops, cardinal-priests and cardinal-deacons: all now voted equally.^[47][48]

In substance, the canon provides that if two-thirds of the cardinals agree on a name, he must be held as pope, and that whoever would arrogate the pontificate to himself against this election, with his supporters, incurs excommunication — Third Lateran Council, canon 1 (Licet de vitanda), 1179, summarized from the Tanner edition; the exact Latin wording is to be read there in all its procedural fullness.^[49]

This rule, designed to prevent the repetition of a double election, remains the basis of the conclave: clarified by later law, notably the locked conclave of 1274, the two-thirds majority still governs the election of the pope — more than eight centuries after the measure fixed under Alexander III.

Reform of the clergy and morals

The twenty-seven canons of Lateran III form a vast reform program. The table below summarizes the most significant provisions.

Canon 18, which requires each cathedral to maintain a master teacher free of charge, is one of the great founding acts of the medieval school and, ultimately, of the university. The jurist pope knows that reform requires knowledge.^[50]

The fight against heresy

Canon 27 targets the heretical movements spreading in southern France — Cathars, Patarins, Publicans under various names — as well as the bands of mercenaries (Brabancons and routiers) who ravaged the countryside.^[51] The council called on Christian princes to repress them. It was an important stage in the Church's reaction to Catharism, still measured under Alexander III, who favored preaching and discipline before the harsher measures of the following century.

The first foundation of the reservation to the Holy See

One of the decisions with the most serious consequences of Alexander III concerns the canonization of saints. Until then, local cults could arise and develop under the authority of bishops. In the case of a person venerated in Sweden without due process, Alexander III asserts that one should not honor someone as a saint without the authority of the Roman Church.^[52]

In substance, the decretal answers that one must not publicly venerate as a saint a man without the authority of the Roman Church, even if miracles were performed through him — Alexander III, decretal Audivimus, around 1171-1172, passed into the Decretals of Gregory IX (X 3.45.1); meaning summarized from the Kemp study, the exact Latin text being quoted and discussed there.^[53]

Taken up again in the following century in the Decretals of Gregory IX, this decision became the first foundation of the law of canonizations: it opened the way by which proclaiming a saint would fall to the Apostolic See, an exclusive reservation which later law would complete. The historian Eric Kemp has made a classic study of it.^[54] Far from being a bureaucratization, it is a guarantee of truth: the discernment of holiness is removed from local enthusiasm to be entrusted to the most universal judgment of the Church.

The golden age of decretals

Under Alexander III, the papacy became the supreme tribunal of Christianity. From all over Europe, bishops and judges addressed questions of law to Rome; the pope responds with letters, the decretals, which constitute jurisprudence.^[55] Hundreds of them have been preserved under his name. These responses, compiled shortly afterwards, will form the raw material of the great classical canon law, until the Liber Extra of 1234.

This is, without doubt, the most profound legacy of the jurist pope: he made the papacy not only a spiritual authority, but the regulatory body of the law of all Latin Christendom.

Canonizations and missions

Alexander III canonized several great figures: Edward the Confessor, king of England, in 1161; Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest preacher of the century, in 1174; and of course Thomas Becket in 1173. He supported the evangelization of the North by erecting the archbishopric of Uppsala (1164) for Sweden, and recognized by the bull Manifestis Probatum (1179) the kingdom of Portugal and its king Afonso Henriques.^[56][57] Under him, the voice of Rome is heard from the Baltic borders to the shores of the Atlantic.

August 30, 1181

Alexander III died at Civita Castellana, in Lazio, on August 30, 1181, and was buried in the basilica of Saint John Lateran.^[58][59] His pontificate lasted nearly twenty-two years. He created sixty-eight cardinals, including the future Clement III (Paolo Scolari, created cardinal in 1179), ensuring the continuity of his work.^[60]

A decisive and underestimated pontificate

The end of his life was not a peaceful triumph: the Roman nobility, never submissive, forced him into new exiles, and he died far from the City. But the essential is acquired. Alexander III leaves a Church which defeated the Empire on the ground of principle, which has adopted the electoral rule of the two-thirds — enduring basis of the modern conclave —, which has made a martyr the herald of its freedom, and which reigns over the law of Christianity.

Compared to Gregory VII or Innocent III, he suffered from his temperament as a cautious jurist, little suited to legend. However, recent research - including the collective volume edited by Anne Duggan, with the eloquent title The Art of Surviving - has re-evaluated this pontificate as one of the most structuring of the Middle Ages.^[61]

Legitimacy by reception, not by force

The case of Alexander III is, with that of Alexander II, a great medieval illustration of this lesson: an election can be contested, disputed by antipopes, deprived of Rome and imperial support, and nevertheless fully legitimate — as confirmed by its reception by the universal Church. No successor ever doubted that Alexander III was the true pope and Octavian the usurper. The papal numbering itself erased the four antipopes. Against schismatic readings which would like to invalidate a particular pope for an irregularity or a dispute, the history of Alexander III suggests that lasting ecclesial reception confirms the recognized legitimacy, without being erected on its own into a dogmatic criterion of validity.

Freedom of the Church, a non-negotiable principle

The entire pontificate comes down to one principle: the Church cannot be the instrument of any temporal power, even that of the Holy Roman Emperor. Faced with Barbarossa as with Henry II, Alexander III held out, at the cost of exile and the blood of a martyr. The peace of Venice and the penance of Canterbury are two sides of the same victory: that of libertas Ecclesiae. It is a teaching that the Church will remember in all the centuries when the State wants to domesticate it.

Law at the service of truth

Finally, Alexander III shows that law is not the enemy of spiritual life, but its servant. By establishing the two-thirds rule, by laying the first foundation of the reservation of canonization to the Holy See, by answering the questions of all of Christendom, he gave the Church structures of truth: procedures which protect against arbitrariness, blind enthusiasm and the control of the powerful. Beneath the lawyer hides a pastor who knows that souls need a just order.

Primary sources and medieval corpora

• Decretals of Alexander III — listed in Philipp Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, and published throughout the canonical collections (notably the Quinque compilationes antiquae); raw material of classical canon law.^[62]
• Canons of the Third Lateran Council (1179) — critical reference edition in Norman P. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, Sheed & Ward / Georgetown University Press, 1990, after Mansi.^[63]
• Decretal Audivimus (around 1171-1172), passed in the Decretals of Gregory IX (X 3.45.1) — foundation of the law of canonizations.^[64]
• Sources of the Becket Quarrel — correspondences and Vitae of Thomas Becket, collected in the Materials for the History of Thomas Becket (Rolls Series).^[65]

Modern scholarly sources

Encyclopedic and reference sources

The cross-encyclopedic notices — Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), Enciclopedia dei Papi (Treccani), Encyclopædia Britannica — provide the basic factual and chronological framework, to be compared systematically with primary sources and monographs.^[66][67][68]

• Pope Alexander II (1061-1073) — another case of legitimacy received a posteriori in the face of an imperial antipope.
• Third Lateran Council (1179) — the council of Alexander III and the two-thirds rule.
• Saint Thomas Becket — the martyred archbishop of Canterbury, canonized by Alexander III.
• Frederick I Barbarossa — the emperor opponent of Alexander III.
• Pope Adrian IV — the English pope of whom Rolando was chancellor.
• Saint Gregory VII (1073-1085) — the great pope of the freedom of the Church before Alexander III.
• The Gregorian reform — the movement whose spirit Alexander III continued.
• The Investiture Controversy — the conflict between priesthood and Empire of which the schism of 1159 is an extension.