Pope Clement III (1187-1191)

The Pope Who Brought the Papacy Back to Rome

In the 12th century, the idea that the pope resides in Rome was far from self-evident. For decades, popes had been forced to flee their own city, which was at war with a commune demanding autonomy. The great predecessor of Clement III, Alexander III, had died in exile at Civita Castellana in 1181; his immediate successors had likewise not governed from Rome.^[12] The Concordat of 1188 was thus much more than a local arrangement: it marked the practical end of half a century of papal wandering and the restoration of the pope to the See of Peter. No other act of Clement III had such lasting consequences.

The Pope of the Third Crusade

The second reason is a matter of timing. Clement III ascended the throne at the very moment when the Christian West was shaken by the collapse of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. He did not invent the Third Crusade—the decisive call, the Audita tremendi, was the work of Gregory VIII—but it was during his pontificate that the three greatest sovereigns of the West took the cross and set out.^[13][14] His role was that of a diplomatic coordinator: making peace between the Empire and the papacy to free Barbarossa, urging the kings of France and England, and organizing material support from Christendom.

Not to Be Confused with Antipope Clement III

The third reason is negative but essential for an encyclopedia: this pontificate provides an opportunity to defuse a major historical confusion. Between 1080 and 1100, an imperial antipope had borne the name Clement III in opposition to Saint Gregory VII and his reforming successors. That the Roman Paolo Scolari took this name and number in 1187—without hesitation, as the antipope was not counted in the legitimate series—shows the serenity with which the Church distinguishes true popes from usurpers.^[15] An entire section of this article is devoted to this topic.

To understand the election of Clement III, one must look at the year 1187, one of the most dramatic in the history of the Church: three popes succeeded each other within a few weeks, against the backdrop of catastrophe in the Holy Land.

The Catastrophe of Hattin and the Fall of Jerusalem

On 4 July 1187, at Hattin in Galilee, the army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was annihilated by Saladin. The True Cross, a major relic carried into battle, was captured. Within weeks, the strongholds fell one after another. On 2 October 1187, Jerusalem surrendered: after eighty-eight years of Latin presence begun by the First Crusade, the Holy City returned to Muslim rule.^[16][17] The news, reaching the West in the autumn, sent a spiritual and political shockwave that would mark the entire pontificate of Clement III.

Urban III Dies of Grief

The reigning pope, Urban III, already in open conflict with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa—to the point of considering excommunicating him—had withdrawn to Ferrara. According to the tradition reported by the chroniclers Ernoul and Benedict of Peterborough, he died of grief there on 19 or 20 October 1187, after Joscius, Archbishop of Tyre, had brought him the news of the disaster of Hattin.^[18][19] The exact cause remains debated: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) records the death without indicating a cause, and William of Newburgh observes that the report of Hattin would only have reached the Holy See after the election of Gregory VIII—Urban III may never have learned of the surrender of Jerusalem itself, on 2 October.^[20] His death left the papal throne vacant at the worst possible moment: Christendom needed leadership, and the Apostolic See was empty.

Gregory VIII and the Audita tremendi

On 21 October 1187, the cardinals elected Alberto di Morra, chancellor of the Roman Church, who took the name Gregory VIII. As early as 29 October 1187, he issued the bull Audita tremendi, a foundational text calling all Christendom to the Third Crusade, prescribing fasting and penance, and presenting the loss of Jerusalem as a punishment for the sins of the West rather than a victory of Islam.^[21] But Gregory VIII had no time to govern: exhausted, he died in Pisa on 17 December 1187, less than two months after his election.^[22]

The Conclave of Pisa

The Curia was then in Pisa. There, on 19 December 1187, the cardinals—only a handful—elected the cardinal-bishop of Palestrina, Paolo Scolari. Remarkably, the elect was not present: detained by illness, he could not attend the vote on the day of his election and was chosen in his absence, with the decisive role played by Leone de Monumento, a trusted man close to the imperial party.^[23][24] The new pope took the name Clement III. Thus, in a single year, the Church saw three popes: Urban III, Gregory VIII, and Clement III.

A Roman Family from the Rione Pigna

Unlike most of the great popes of the century, Paolo Scolari was neither a reforming monk nor a canon lawyer from Bologna: he was a native Roman cleric. He was born around 1130—date uncertain: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) holds it to be unknown, and Miranda only advances it with a question mark ("1130?")—in the rione of Pigna, in the heart of Rome, into a family of good social standing but not aristocratic—neither the Frangipani, nor the Pierleoni, nor any of the great baronial lineages.^[25][26][27] His father was named Giovanni Scolari, his mother Maria; of the latter, little more than her first name is known. The tradition that the Scolari were related to the mother of Innocent III is not proven.^[28][29]

This background is important for understanding his pontificate. Clement III was a man rooted in Rome, who knew the city, its factions, and its Senate. It was precisely this pragmatic Roman profile that enabled him to negotiate with the commune what popes foreign to the city had been unable to achieve.

Archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore

In 1176—attested as archpriest as early as 3 March—Paolo Scolari is recorded as a subdeacon of the Roman Church and archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of Rome’s great patriarchal basilicas.^[30][31] This position placed him at the top of the Roman secular clergy and brought him into direct contact with the papal administration. He belonged to the generation of clerics formed in the shadow of the long pontificate of Alexander III (1159–1181), marked by the imperial schism and the struggle against Barbarossa.

Cardinal of Alexander III

In 1179—the very year of the Third Lateran Council—Alexander III made him cardinal-deacon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus (March consistory), then assigned him the title of Santa Pudenziana.^[32][33] The following year, in December 1180 or January 1181 according to sources, he was promoted to cardinal-bishop of Palestrina (the ancient Praeneste), one of the seven suburbicarian sees that formed the aristocracy of the Sacred College.^[34][35][36] In this role, he participated in the central governance of the Church during the troubled pontificates of Lucius III, Urban III, and Gregory VIII.

An Election in the Absence of the Elect

The details of his election are worth noting. Choosing a pope who was absent, detained by illness, was not a scandalous anomaly in the twelfth century, but it was a sign: the cardinals, reduced in number and pressed by urgency, sought a consensus candidate, Roman, experienced, and acceptable both to the Curia and to the imperial party. The future Clement III was not a man of rupture; he was a man of governance and compromise, and that was exactly what the Church needed to return home.

Why the Popes Had Fled Rome

Since 1143, Rome had established a Senate and a commune that claimed municipal autonomy and challenged the pope’s temporal power over the city. The movement, at one time fueled by the preaching of Arnold of Brescia, had hardened relations between the papacy and its capital. Under Lucius III, Urban III, and Gregory VIII, the popes had been forced to reside in Verona, Ferrara, or Pisa—anywhere but Rome.^[37][38] A papacy without Rome was a papacy deprived of its symbolic foundation: the pope is first and foremost the bishop of Rome, and his universal authority is rooted in that specific see.

The Concordat of May 31, 1188

Clement III, a Roman by birth, returned to the city as early as February 1188 and immediately began negotiations. On May 31, 1188, the Senate ratified a concordat that was a true compromise between two legitimacies.^[39][40] The text did not crush either the commune or the papacy: it made them coexist.

The following table summarizes the reciprocal concessions as described by scholarly sources.

The Price of Return: The Commune and Tusculum

The compromise came at a price, and a heavy one. According to a common historiographical interpretation, Clement III is said to have granted the Romans, in order to secure their support, the right to raze Tusculum, the city of the neighboring counts, long protected by the Empire and hated by Rome.^[41] But the actual destruction did not take place until 17 April 1191, after the death of Clement III, under the pact concluded between Henry VI and the new pope Celestine III: neither the formal attachment of this clause to the text of 31 May 1188, nor the exact role of the imperial troops, could be verified here.^[42] The pope thus paid for his return with a painful political concession: he sacrificed a traditional ally of the papacy in order to regain his seat. Should this be seen as a weakness? The Catholic historian must offer nuance. Clement III had little choice: without an agreement with the commune, the papacy remained condemned to wandering. The Concordat of 1188 is an act of political realism that restored the pope to Rome for the long term—a result that neither force nor intransigence had achieved in forty years. The wisdom of a government is measured not only by its purity, but by its ability to make possible what was previously blocked.

Reviving the Momentum of the Audita tremendi

The call for the Third Crusade belongs to Gregory VIII and his Audita tremendi of October 1187. But it was Clement III who, for more than three years, sustained and organized the momentum.^[43][44] He confirmed the spiritual privileges of the crusaders, mobilized the legates, and made the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre the diplomatic priority of his pontificate. In reality, his entire Italian and imperial policy was subordinated to a single objective: to free the rulers of the West from their quarrels so that they could depart for the Holy Land.

Frederick Barbarossa Takes the Cross

The most spectacular gesture came from Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. On Laetare Sunday, 27 March 1188, during the great diet of Mainz known as the “Court of Jesus Christ”, the aged emperor solemnly took the cross.^[45] This was the culmination of the reconciliation between the Empire and the papacy that Clement III had methodically prepared. Barbarossa set out in May 1189 at the head of the largest army of the crusade—but he drowned in the Salef (the Saleph), in Asia Minor, on 10 June 1190, without having reached the Holy Land. The emperor’s death scattered his army and deprived the crusade of its most prestigious leader.^[46]

Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart

The kings of France and England remained. Clement III sent the archbishop of Tyre to urge Henry II of England and Philip II Augustus to take the cross.^[47] After the death of Henry II (1189), his son Richard the Lionheart took up the cause. In July 1190, Philip Augustus and Richard I finally departed for the East.^[48] The crusade they led would recapture Acre and wrest from Saladin a truce guaranteeing pilgrims access to Jerusalem—but without retaking the Holy City itself. Clement III would die before learning the outcome.

The Economic Effort Against the Adversary

Support for the crusade was not limited to speeches. In line with canon 24 of the Third Lateran Council (1179), which prohibited supplying Muslims with war materials—wood, iron, weapons—the papacy of Clement III has sometimes been credited with tightening the commercial embargo through a series of decretals.^[49] But the specific decretals supposed to carry this policy (registers, Jaffé-Loewenfeld numbers) could not be established, and the reference entry itself invites caution: according to the Collectio Seguntina, many decretals attributed to Clement III are in reality the work of his successor Celestine III.^[50] This article therefore retains no specific economic measure by Clement III here: the economic weapon remains, for his pontificate, an unverified hypothesis.

Making Peace with Barbarossa (April 1189)

Reconciliation with the Empire was the other major undertaking. For decades, the papacy and Frederick Barbarossa had clashed—schism of imperial antipopes, conflicts over Italy, quarrels with Urban III. Clement III overturned the situation: in April 1189, he made peace with the emperor and committed to crown his son, Henry VI, as emperor.^[51][52] This peace directly served the crusade—it freed Barbarossa for the East—but it also opened a deadly trap: the Sicilian question.

The Trap of the Sicilian Inheritance

In 1186, Henry VI married Constance of Hauteville, aunt and potential heiress of the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Upon the death of King William II in November 1189, without direct heirs, the Empire could thus claim Sicily and Southern Italy by right of inheritance. For the papacy, however, seeing the same sovereign rule both the Empire to the north and Sicily to the south meant being caught in a pincer: the Papal States would be surrounded. This is precisely the danger that Clement III, and then his successors, would strive to avert.^[53]

Supporting Tancred against Henry VI

Clement III therefore chose to support the native Norman candidate, Tancred of Lecce, illegitimate grandson of Roger II, against the imperial claims.^[54] As feudal overlord of the kingdom of Sicily—Sicily having been a fief of the Church since 1059—the pope confirmed in 1188 the feudal sovereignty of the Holy See over the kingdom and favored Tancred.^[55] This gesture deeply irritated Henry VI, who considered himself the legitimate heir through his wife. The crisis reached its peak when the pope died: Clement III did not have time to crown Henry VI, a task his successor Celestine III would undertake a few weeks later.^[56][57]

“Despite his conciliatory policy, Clement angered Henry VI of Germany by giving Sicily to Tancred. The crisis was acute when the pope died, probably in the latter part of March 1191.” — William Walker Rockwell, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911^[58]

Beyond diplomacy, Clement III governed the universal Church. Three acts are especially noteworthy: the liberation of the Church of Scotland, the use of delegated canonization, and the creation of the cardinal who would become Innocent III.

The Church of Scotland, Daughter of Rome

The dispute was longstanding: the archbishop of York had claimed for centuries metropolitan jurisdiction over the Scottish bishoprics, a claim stubbornly rejected by the Scottish kings and their bishops. On March 13, 1188, Clement III settled the matter by a bull: he removed the Church of Scotland from the legatine jurisdiction of York, making it independent of any authority except Rome.^[59][60] At the same time, he resolved the dispute over the election of the archbishop of St Andrews with King William the Lion.^[61]

The canonical formula of the “special daughter” of the Apostolic See, without intermediary, was enshrined by the bull Cum universi of Celestine III (1192): the Ecclesia Scoticana is therein declared “special daughter” of the Apostolic See, and nine bishoprics are named therein—St Andrews, Glasgow, Dunkeld, Dunblane, Brechin, Aberdeen, Moray, Ross, and Caithness.^[62] The decisive act remains that of Clement III: it was his bull of 13 March 1188 that broke York’s tutelage and made the Church of Scotland dependent on Rome alone.^[63][64]

The bull Cum universi of Celestine III (1192) thus enshrines the liberation decided by Clement III in his bull of 13 March 1188: the Church of Scotland is therein recognized as a special daughter of the Apostolic See, without intermediary.^[65][66]

Canonizations and Delegated Canonization

Clement III approved the cause of Kjeld of Viborg (Denmark)—pontifical consent given in 1188, local celebration and translation on 11 July 1189—and canonized Saint Otto of Bamberg, the apostle of Pomerania, in 1189.^[67][68] These procedures show how, by the end of the twelfth century, canonization was gradually becoming a prerogative reserved to the Roman See—an evolution that would culminate under Innocent III. The figure of four causes sometimes put forward, and the use of a canonizatio in forma commissoria procedure, could not be tied to an exact page and are not retained here.

The Cardinal Who Would Become Innocent III

A detail that may seem anecdotal, but is not: in September 1190, Clement III created as cardinal-deacon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus—his own former title—a young cleric under thirty years old, Lothair of Segni.^[69][70] Eight years later, this cardinal would be elected pope under the name Innocent III and would lead the medieval papacy to its zenith. Thus, Clement III is, unknowingly, the one who launched the career of the greatest pope of the Middle Ages.

An End Before the Coronation

The pontificate of Clement III ended at the most tense moment. The Sicilian crisis with Henry VI was at its height, the emperor was descending into Italy to be crowned and to conquer his Norman inheritance. It was then that the pope died at the Lateran Palace, in Rome, in March 1191, necessarily before 30 March: Petersohn holds the exact day to be impossible to establish with certainty, and the notices give 20 (English-language Wikipedia, following Baaken), 25, 27 (most of the sources followed by Miranda) or 29 March (Petersohn’s preference, following the calendar of a contemporary Roman sacramentary kept in Madrid).^[71][72] The broad range Petersohn records in the sources (up to 10 April) is indeed incompatible with the election of his successor Celestine III as early as 30 March 1191^[73]: the death of Clement III therefore falls between 20 and 29 March 1191. He died before he could crown Henry VI: this would be the work of Celestine III, who would crown the emperor on 15 April 1191.

The Tomb at the Lateran

Clement III was buried in the Lateran Basilica, the cathedral of Rome and the episcopal seat of the popes. He was laid to rest in a marble sepulchre in front of the former canons' choir; his tomb has now disappeared.^[74] The choice of the Lateran—and not St. Peter's—is consistent with all his work: above all, this pope was the one who restored the Roman seat to the popes. He rests in the cathedral of the city he reconquered through negotiation.

A Catholic encyclopedia must clarify a frequent confusion here. A century before Paolo Scolari, another man bore the name Clement III—but as an antipope, that is, as an illegitimate claimant to the See of Peter.

Guibert of Ravenna

Guibert (or Wibert) was born around 1025 in Parma, into a noble family related to the Margraves of Canossa. Imperial chancellor for Italy in 1057, he was appointed archbishop of Ravenna by Emperor Henry IV in 1072.^[75] He directly opposed the Gregorian reform and its champion, Saint Gregory VII, in the great conflict of the Investiture Controversy.

The Wibertine Schism

At the heart of the struggle between the Priesthood and the Empire, Henry IV convened the Synod of Brixen in June 1080, which claimed to depose Gregory VII and appointed Guibert as pope under the name Clement III.^[76] Enthroned at the Lateran on March 24, 1084, he crowned Henry IV emperor there a week later. For twenty years, this Wibertine schism divided the Church: Guibert opposed four legitimate popes in succession—Saint Gregory VII, Blessed Victor III, Blessed Urban II, and Paschal II.^[77] He died at Civita Castellana on September 8, 1100.^[78] His remains suffered damnatio memoriae: exhumed, they were thrown into the Tiber by the opposing party.^[79]

Why Two Clement IIIs

How can it be explained that Paolo Scolari took, in 1187, a name already borne by an antipope? Precisely because the antipope does not count in the legitimate list of Peter’s successors. For the Church, after Clement I (1st century) and Clement II (1046–1047), the true “third” Clement is Paolo Scolari.^[80][81] Guibert of Ravenna, for his part, is merely an usurper who appropriated the name. The calm reuse of the name and number in 1187 is itself an assertion of legitimacy: the Church does not allow an antipope to confiscate a papal name.

A Decisive Transitional Pope

Clement III is not a great spiritual figure like Leo IX, nor a giant of governance like Innocent III. No theological work or major council is attributed to him. And yet, his pontificate is objectively decisive: it closes the long crisis of the Roman exile and restores the papacy to its city. Like Clement II a century and a half earlier, he illustrates a truth of Church history: some popes have weight more by their office than by their person. Their individual figure fades behind the institution, and it is through the institution that they act.

The Papacy Between Rome, the Empire, and the Crusade

The reign of Clement III brings before the reader the three forces that structure the papacy at the end of the 12th century. First, Rome: a rebellious city whose return must be negotiated. Next, the Empire: both partner and threat, which must be appeased for the crusade but contained in Sicily. Finally, the crusade: the great spiritual cause that dictates all diplomacy. Clement III governs at the point of equilibrium among these three pressures, resolving none of them definitively, but preventing any from breaking the papacy. This is the modest yet real achievement of a governing pope.

• Pope Gregory VIII (1187) — immediate predecessor, author of Audita tremendi which launched the Third Crusade.
• Pope Urban III (1185–1187) — died at Ferrara in October 1187 upon the announcement of the disaster of Hattin, according to the tradition of the chroniclers Ernoul and Benedict of Peterborough.
• Pope Celestine III (1191–1198) — successor who crowned Henry VI and inherited the Sicilian crisis.
• Pope Clement II (1046–1047) — the other major case of a transitional pope decisive by his office.
• Pope Saint Clement I — the first Clement, third successor of Peter.
• Pope Saint Gregory VII (1073–1085) — legitimate pope against whom the antipope Clement III (Guibert of Ravenna) reigned.
• Blessed Pope Urban II — one of the popes opposed to antipope Guibert.
• Pope Alexander III (1159–1181) — protector who made Paolo Scolari a cardinal.
• Pope Innocent III — Lothaire de Segni, made cardinal-deacon by Clement III in September 1190.