Pope Lucius II (1144-1145)

An eleven-month reign at the heart of a Roman revolution

Lucius II belongs to that series of mid-twelfth-century popes whose very short pontificates followed one another under the combined pressure of the Roman factions, the Normans of Sicily and the Empire. Between the death of Innocent II (24 September 1143) and the election of Eugene III (15 February 1145), three popes succeeded one another in less than eighteen months: Innocent II, Celestine II (a little over five months) and Lucius II (eleven months).^[8][9] The chair of Peter then resembled less a throne than an exposed post.

What makes this pontificate decisive is therefore not its length but its subject: Lucius II is the pope under whom the Commune of Rome passed from a contained movement to open rebellion. Everything his immediate successors would do — negotiate, flee, excommunicate, treat with the Emperor — was already at stake under his reign.

The first, in the order of pontificates, to confront it by force of arms

The restoration of the Roman Senate, the striking of a communal coinage, the election of magistrates, the demand for a pope reduced to his spiritual functions alone: all these characteristic traits of the medieval Roman Republic appeared or hardened under Lucius II.^[10][11] After Innocent II, under whom the Commune was born, and a Celestine II too brief to deal with it, Lucius II was the first pope, in the order of pontificates, to choose between negotiation and trial by force — and he died having attempted the second.^[12]

An enigmatic death at the foot of the Capitol

Tradition, fixed by the imperial chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo, holds that Lucius II was struck by a stone during the assault on the Capitol.^[13] This death "in battle" struck people's minds; its exact cause — wound received in the clash, accident or illness — remains debated, as will be seen below.^[14][15] It makes Lucius II a key figure for understanding how far the twelfth-century papacy was engaged in the temporal struggle.

A Bolognese who entered the high curia

The future Lucius II was born in Bologna, towards the end of the eleventh century, into the family of the Caccianemici dell'Orso; his father was named Orso.^[16][17] The sources diverge on his ecclesiastical beginnings: the Catholic Encyclopedia presents him as a canon regular in Bologna, while other notices attach him to the chapter of San Frediano in Lucca.^[18][19] This documentary uncertainty is typical of an age when the biography of a future pope truly begins, for the chroniclers, only with his entry into the Roman curia.

In 1124, Pope Honorius II created him cardinal-priest of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, one of the great Roman basilicas — this is the date retained by the Catholic Encyclopedia (Ott, 1910, vol. IX), followed here; the infobox of the English notice indicates for its part "December 1122" under Callistus II, contradicted by the body of that same notice which retains 1124 under Honorius II.^[20] Gerard restored the building and improved its revenues, already marking the profile of an effective administrator.^[21] From 1140 he was cardinal protopriest, and he would have taken part in four conclaves between 1124 and 1144.^[22]

The legate to Germany and friend of Lothair III

It was as a diplomat that Gerard chiefly made his name. As early as 1125–1126, he was papal legate in Germany: he attended the election of Lothair III as king of the Romans, contributed to the appointment of St Norbert of Xanten to the see of Magdeburg in July 1126, and intervened in the quarrel over the see of Würzburg.^[23][24]

Under Innocent II, he strung together legations across the Alps — around 1130–1131, 1133–1134, then 1135–1136 — in the service of a single cause: making Lothair III the armed defender of the legitimate pope against the antipope Anacletus II.^[25][26] He is credited with having persuaded the emperor to lead two expeditions into Italy to defend Innocent II.^[27] Sent to Benevento as early as 1128 to govern the city, then charged with negotiating the submission of the monks of Monte Cassino and treating with Roger II of Sicily to close the schism of Anacletus, he accumulated a rare experience of the papacy's most burning dossiers.^[28]

Throughout all these legations across the Alps, Gerard loyally supported the interests of Innocent II against the antipope Anacletus II; it was to this diplomatic zeal that he would owe his final promotion to the summit of the Roman curia.^[29]

Librarian then chancellor of the Roman Church

Towards the end of the pontificate of Innocent II, Gerard received the reward of his services: he became librarian and then chancellor of the Roman Church, that is, the head of the pontifical chancery and of the drafting of official acts.^[30][31] This office, one of the highest in the curia, made him a natural candidate for the sovereign pontificate. When the very brief pontificate of Celestine II ended, the college of cardinals turned to this experienced man, well versed in the affairs of Germany, southern Italy and Rome.

The rapid succession of Innocent II and Celestine II

At the death of Innocent II, on 24 September 1143, the Church inherited an already gravely compromised Roman situation: since the summer, the citizens had restored the Senate and were defying pontifical power.^[32] Celestine II, elected in September 1143, reigned only about five months and died on 8 March 1144 without having resolved the crisis.^[33] On 9 March 1144, the cardinal-chancellor Gerard Caccianemici was elected at Rome; he was consecrated on 12 March 1144 — a Sunday — and, according to tradition, it was Alberic of Ostia who consecrated him.^[34][35]

The choice of the name Lucius

The new pope took the name Lucius. The choice was not indifferent: the liturgical feast of Saint Lucius I, pope and confessor of the third century, is celebrated on 4 March — five days before his election of 9 March — and this has been seen as the probable origin of this reign name.^[36] Lucius II thus became the one-hundred-and-sixty-sixth pope according to the usual pontifical list (that of the Annuario Pontificio, taken up by the Wikipedia notices).^[37]

Despite the brevity of his reign and the Roman emergency, Lucius II exercised a universal government well documented by his acts: synods, privileges, arbitrations, feudal dealings with the kingdoms. The table below summarises the principal dated decisions of his pontificate, each verified against Mann or the Catholic Encyclopedia; only the numbers in the Jaffé register have not been checked act by act.^[38]

The Roman synod of May 1144

In May 1144, Lucius II held a synod at Rome during which he settled an old jurisdictional conflict between the metropolitan of Tours and the bishop of Dol, in Brittany — a classic dossier of twelfth-century pontifical centralisation, in which Rome arbitrated the claims of sees to metropolitan autonomy.^[47][48]

The truce with Roger II of Sicily

Dealings with Roger II of Sicily were the crux of southern policy. Lucius had been the friend of the Norman king, and even the godfather of one of his children.^[49] But in June 1144, the meeting at Ceprano failed: the pope demanded the restitution of the principality of Capua, while the king on the contrary demanded new territories; on the advice of the cardinals, Lucius rejected these demands as excessive.^[50][51]

The Norman reply was military. The king's son, Roger III of Apulia, invaded Campania; the general Robert of Selby ravaged the country as far as Ferentino, and the Romans capitulated.^[52] In September 1144, Lucius II had to accept a seven-year truce: the Normans withdrew and undertook not to attack Benevento or the pontifical lands.^[53][54] This climb-down, read at Rome as weakness, would embolden the Senate to harden its rebellion.^[55]

Portugal, England and the feudal network

Far from Rome, Lucius II wove the feudal network of the papacy. On 1 May 1144, Afonso I Henriques of Portugal offered him feudal homage; the pope accepted it but prudently styled him Dux Portugallensis, "duke of Portugal", and not king, against an annual tribute of four ounces of gold.^[56] In England, he granted privileges to bishoprics and monasteries, exempted the abbey of St Edmund from secular jurisdiction, sent a legate to examine the request of the bishop of St David's to erect his see into a metropolis, and took the side of Empress Matilda in the quarrel over the English crown.^[57][58]

Favour to the Premonstratensians and the monks

Like most of the reforming popes of his time, Lucius II supported monastic and canonical renewal. He showed himself particularly favourable to the order of Prémontré, recently founded by St Norbert whom he had himself helped raise to the see of Magdeburg, and he founded monasteries in Italy and Germany.^[59][60] On 19 January 1145, he entrusted the monastery of St Sabas, on the Aventine, to monks come from Cluny.^[61][62] At his election, he had offered the Roman Church sumptuous gifts: a gospel book bound with plates of gold and precious stones, an altar frontal and two gilt-silver cruets for Mass.^[63]

The renovatio senatus of 1143

The great fact of the pontificate predates Lucius II: between August and October 1143, under Innocent II, the Romans rose up and restored the ancient Senate on the Capitol. This episode — the renovatio senatus — is held to be the birth certificate of the Commune of Rome.^[64] It was a revolution both political and symbolic: the City wished to reconnect with republican grandeur and to take back from its bishop the temporal government.

The institution quickly acquired its own emblems. The Senate administered the City independently of the pope^[65]; seeking to replace the papacy in the temporal government of the City, it seized the mint as early as 1143, and its coins ordinarily bore the inscription ROMA CAPUT MUNDI, "Rome capital of the world".^[66] The Senate claimed regalian powers for itself: electing the magistrates and coining money.^[67]

Giordano Pierleoni, patrician of the Romans

At the head of the movement stood Giordano Pierleoni, brother of the antipope Anacletus II (Peter Leonis, died 1138).^[68][69] Sprung from a great converted and enriched Roman family, he took the title of patrician (patricius), reviving a dignity of imperial Rome to embody lay power against the pope. Under his leadership, the Senate drove out the pontifical prefects and demanded that the pope abandon every function of government, keeping only ecclesiastical revenues and voluntary offerings.^[70]

At the start of his reign, Lucius II had nevertheless held his own "with considerable skill and firmness": he had persuaded many senators to leave the Capitol or renounce their magistracy.^[71] It was his defeat at the hands of Roger II, in the autumn of 1144, that restored the Senate's boldness and precipitated the rupture.

The demands of the Senate

The communal claim was clear and, for the age, radical: the pope must remain bishop, but cease to be prince. The Senate took back the concrete attributes of sovereignty — justice, magistracies, coinage, defence — and left to the pontiff only the spiritual domain and mere freely consented tributes.^[72][73] This was exactly the programme that would make the fortune, the following year, of the preacher Arnold of Brescia.

Did Arnold of Brescia lead the Commune under Lucius II?

Popular memory, and even some notices, closely associate the death of Lucius II with the "partisans of Arnold of Brescia".^[74] This presentation calls for a historical correction. Arnold of Brescia, the reforming cleric condemned by the Second Lateran Council (1139) and then banished from Italy, did not return to Rome until 1145, after making his peace with Eugene III.^[75] It was therefore not under Lucius II, but under his successor, that he became the intellectual leader of the Commune and the soul of resistance against the pope.^[76]

Under Lucius II, the Commune was led by Giordano Pierleoni, not by Arnold. Republican and anticlerical ideas were certainly "in the air" — the preacher's reputation already ran ahead of him — but lending him a leading role in the crisis of 1144–1145 is an anachronism. Otto of Freising, the principal contemporary witness of the renovatio and of Arnold, places the tribune's Roman activity after the death of Lucius II.^[77] This precision is no scholar's detail: it avoids making Lucius II the victim of a man who had not yet entered the City.

The refused aid of Roger II

Faced with the Senate, Lucius II first sought on the side of Roger II the support of a prince. But the Norman, still irritated that the pope had not fully recognised his royal title, refused his help.^[78] The pope found himself alone before the Commune.

December 1144: the plea to Conrad III

He then turned to the other great lay power, the Empire. In December 1144 — this is the received dating, which Mann gives with a question mark ("December ?, 1144") — Lucius II wrote to Conrad III, king of the Romans, begging him to intervene militarily against the Senate and the patrician Giordano Pierleoni.^[79] The step was heavy with meaning: it was the admission that the papacy, stripped of Rome itself, could no longer defend itself without the armed arm of the Emperor — the logic that would lead, ten years later, to the coronation of Frederick Barbarossa and to the long struggles between Priesthood and Empire.

The support of Bernard of Clairvaux

Lucius II was not alone in writing to Conrad: St Bernard of Clairvaux, the most heeded moral authority in Christendom, backed the pontifical plea to the king.^[80] The abbot of Clairvaux had already denounced Arnold of Brescia to Louis VII in terms which the Catholic Encyclopedia reports as follows:

"the incorrigible schismatic, the sower of discord, the disturber of the peace, the destroyer of unity."^[81]

But Conrad III, detained by his own affairs in Germany, could not answer the call.^[82] Deprived of all outside help, Lucius II decided to settle the matter himself by force of arms.

The Frangipani and the war in the City

To hold Rome, Lucius II relied on the great family of the Frangipani, faithful to the papacy. On 31 January 1145, he entrusted to them the fortress of the Circus Maximus and abandoned to them control of the southern part of the Palatine.^[83] The Roman Forum became a battlefield. On 20 January 1145, the Senate had already prevented the pope from going to the Aventine to ordain the abbot of St Sabas there: the City was cut into rival zones.^[84]

The attack on the Capitol

At the beginning of February 1145, once every call for help had gone unanswered, Lucius II took a decision almost without example for a pope: to settle the crisis himself by force of arms. He gathered a small army and marched against the senatorial positions on the Capitol, the symbolic seat of the rebel Senate. The attempt came to nothing — the pope was repulsed by Giordano Pierleoni.^[85]

"After vainly calling upon Emperor Conrad for protection, Lucius II marched upon the Capitol at the head of a small army but suffered defeat." — Michael Ott, Catholic Encyclopedia^[86]

The stone of the Capitol: what do the sources say?

It was in the course of this assault that Lucius II is said to have received his mortal wound. The principal source is the imperial chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo, in his Pantheon. The biographical tradition reports it with notable prudence:

"If we may believe the statement of Godfrey of Viterbo in his 'Pantheon', Lucius II was severely injured by stones that were thrown upon him on this occasion and died a few days later."^[87]

This formulation — "if we may believe" — matters. The tale of the stone thrown from the Capitol is the most widespread in the medieval sources, but it is not without difficulty: Godfrey of Viterbo wrote several decades after the facts, and some accounts evoke rather a fall that occurred in the confrontation. Modern historians therefore retain that Lucius II died shortly after the assault on the Capitol, without being able to decide with full certainty between the battle wound, the accident and illness.^[88][89] What is certain is the link between this death and the armed clash with the Commune: Lucius II falls, literally, in the struggle for Rome.

Death on 15 February 1145

The pope died on 15 February 1145, at St Gregory the Great on the Caelian (San Gregorio Magno al Celio), where he had taken refuge under the protection of the nearby Frangipani fortress.^[90][91] His pontificate will have lasted eleven months and three days, counted from his consecration on 12 March 1144 to his death on 15 February 1145.^[92]

The tomb of the Lateran

Lucius II was buried in the Basilica of St John Lateran, the pope's cathedral as bishop of Rome, in the circular portico behind the apse.^[93] The choice of the Lateran rather than the Vatican is consistent: it is the Roman episcopal seat, and the pope who died defending his City rests there as its bishop.

Eugene III, the first Cistercian pope

On the very day of the death of Lucius II, 15 February 1145, the cardinals elected Eugene III — Bernardo Pignatelli, disciple of St Bernard of Clairvaux and the first Cistercian pope in history. The City being in the hands of the Commune, the new pope had to be consecrated outside Rome, at Farfa Abbey, before experiencing exile in his turn.^[94][95] It was under Eugene III that Arnold of Brescia entered the scene and carried the Commune to its height — proof, were any needed, that the crisis opened under Lucius II far exceeded him.

The judgment of historians

Historiography does not make Lucius II a great pope, but it recognises in him a competent administrator and a seasoned diplomat, overwhelmed by a Roman situation grown ungovernable. His decision to take up arms against the Capitol — a gesture almost unique in the history of the medieval papacy — sums up the tragic dilemma of the popes of his century: how to remain universal bishop when one cannot even hold one's own city?

The modern armoury attributes arms to Lucius II — argent with a sable bear — playing on his name, dell'Orso, "of the bear".^[96] This is a later attribution: Frassoni gives these arms while correcting the gules field of Montault and Ciacconius to an argent field, and Mann takes up this correction without making them contemporary pontifical arms.^[97] The image remains almost a symbol: a pope who, cornered, ended by charging like a hunted beast, and fell at the foot of the Capitol in defence of a temporal power that the future would render ever more precarious.

• Pope Saint Lucius I (253–254) — the confessor-pope of the third century whose name Lucius II took up.
• Pope Innocent II — the predecessor under whom Gerard Caccianemici was chancellor, and under whom the Commune of Rome was born.
• The Basilica of St John Lateran — the pope of Rome's cathedral and the burial place of Lucius II.
• Pope Alexander II (1061–1073) — another pope of the medieval Roman reform.