Pope Lucius III (1181-1185)

The Pope of the Decretal Ad Abolendam

Lucius III owes his place in history almost entirely to one text: the decretal Ad Abolendam diversam haeresium pravitatem ("To abolish the depravity of diverse heresies").^[12] Before 1184, the struggle against heresy was scattered, occasional and left to local initiative. With Ad Abolendam, the Church for the first time equipped herself with a general, obligatory and permanent procedure: every bishop was henceforth required to visit suspect parishes once or twice a year, make the inhabitants swear to denounce heretics, judge the suspects and hand the obstinate over to civil power.^[13][14]

This mechanism - active search, sworn denunciation, imposed collaboration of the secular arm - is what historians call the episcopal Inquisition, as opposed to the pontifical Inquisition that Pope Gregory IX would entrust to the Dominicans between 1231 and 1233 - the year 1234 being that of the promulgation of the Liber Extra. Lucius III's text would be taken up in substance by canon 3 (Excommunicamus) of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.^[15] It is here, at Verona, under the pontificate of Lucius III, that this procedure took root: an act of defense of the faith whose later developments - the Albigensian Crusade (1209), the pontifical tribunals entrusted to the Dominicans (1231-1233) - would go beyond the episcopal framework of 1184.^[16][17]

A Pope Without Rome

The second feature that defines this pontificate is paradoxical: Lucius III was a pope without Rome. Elected at Velletri, he entered the City only in November 1181 and had to leave it again as early as March 1182, after scarcely a few months.^[18][19] The cause was the Roman commune, the municipal government born of the revolt of 1143-1144 - which broke out at the death of Innocent II, under Celestine II then Lucius II - and which has contested the pope's temporal power over his own city ever since.^[20] Lucius III, uncompromising by temperament, refused the payments that Romans expected from each new pontiff - the New Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he was the only pope of this period known to have refused to distribute such gratuities.^[21]

The result was an itinerant papacy, governing universal Christendom by letters and legates from the towns of Latium, then from northern Italy. This fate was not anecdotal: it illustrates a constant Catholic truth, already tested by Lucius's predecessors - the office of the successor of Peter remains intact even when the man is deprived of Rome. The pope without the City remains the pope.

The Heir of the Peace of Venice

Lucius III's election cannot be understood apart from the drama that preceded it: the schism opened in 1159, when the election of Alexander III was contested by a series of antipopes supported by Frederick Barbarossa. That schism had lasted nearly eighteen years, until the great reconciliation of the Peace of Venice in 1177.^[22] Cardinal Ubaldo Allucingoli had been one of the negotiators of that peace: to choose him as Alexander III's successor was to choose continuity and moderation toward the Empire.^[23][24]

That is the meaning of the whole pontificate: to prolong Alexander III's work of pacification without reopening war, while standing firm on the rights of the Church. Lucius III succeeded only halfway - agreement on the struggle against heresy was complete, but territorial and dynastic disputes remained open, and the danger of rupture would return under his successors.

Knowledge of Lucius III rests first on his pontifical acts - letters, bulls and privileges - but his registers have not survived, which greatly impoverishes our information compared with better documented pontificates.^[25] What remains of his correspondence is catalogued in the great repertories of Philipp Jaffe, the Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, the reference instrument for dating his interventions.^[26] The New Catholic Encyclopedia notes that the Liber Censuum, the great register of the revenues of the Roman Church, is said to have been begun under his pontificate; the usually accepted dating nevertheless places the actual compilation later: undertaken under Clement III, it was completed in 1192, under Celestine III, by the chamberlain Cencius, the future Honorius III.^[27][28]

The central document of his reign, the decretal Ad Abolendam, is preserved in the major canonical collections - Latin text edited notably by Friedberg (Corpus iuris canonici, vol. 2, col. 780-782) - and was integrated into classical canon law by the thirteenth-century collections of decretals, which ensured its universal diffusion.^[29][30]

For the biography and the framework of the pontificate, the reference notices converge: the article "Pope Lucius III" in the Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent), the notice in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and modern encyclopedic articles provide a reliable framework, checked here fact by fact.^{[31][32][33][34]}

Origins in Lucca and the Cistercian Connection

Ubaldo Allucingoli was born at Lucca, in Tuscany - the Catholic Encyclopedia gives his date of birth as unknown ("Born at Lucca, unknown date"); modern notices suggest around 1100 (English Wikipedia: c. 1100), while the Britannica proposes 1097 with a question mark.^[35][36][37] He is held to have belonged to the local nobility: modern second-hand notices describe him as the son of a certain Orlando Allucingoli - but neither the Catholic Encyclopedia ("Born at Lucca, unknown date") nor the New Catholic Encyclopedia names his father, and even membership of the Allucingoli family remains a probable, unproven attribution.^[38][39][40]

A persistent tradition, still repeated by several notices, makes him a Cistercian monk, a disciple of the order then radiating under Bernard of Clairvaux.^[41] Modern research is more cautious: while Ubaldo maintained close ties with the Cistercians, nothing proves that he made profession in the order - the New Catholic Encyclopedia writes that he was "long thought to have been a Cistercian" but "seems never to have become a monk".^[42][43] The question remains debated, and honesty requires presenting it as such rather than stating the monastic legend as fact. What is certain is that he was formed in the reforming milieu of the twelfth century, heir to the Gregorian reform and marked by the ideal of the Church's freedom.

Cardinal of Innocent II: Sant'Adriano and Santa Prassede

Ubaldo's career unfolded in the Roman curia under the pontificate of Innocent II, the pope of the Second Lateran Council. In December 1138, Innocent II created him cardinal-deacon of Sant'Adriano.^[44] Three years later, in 1141, he was promoted cardinal-priest of Santa Prassede - the Catholic Encyclopedia gives the date of February 23, 1141.^[45]

From that time, Ubaldo was employed as a papal diplomat. Innocent II sent him as legate to France; under Eugene III, the first Cistercian pope and a disciple of Saint Bernard, he served as legate in Sicily.^[46] The cardinal from Lucca thus entered the small circle of trusted men whom the papacy sent to negotiate on the borders of Christendom - a diplomatic apprenticeship that would shape his career.

Bishop of Ostia, Legate and Architect of the Peace of Venice

Around 1158-1159, under Pope Adrian IV, Ubaldo reached the summit of the Sacred College by becoming cardinal-bishop of Ostia and Velletri, one of the seven suburbicarian churches and the dignity traditionally reserved to the dean of the cardinals; the Catholic Encyclopedia places his consecration on January 1, 1159.^[47][48] He then exercised the highest legations: he was sent to the kingdom of Sicily (1166-1167) and to Constantinople (1167, 1168-1169), at the two extremities of the Latin and Greek world.^[49]

"In 1177 he was commissioned by Pope Alexander III to take part in the famous Peace Congress of Venice, where a friendly agreement was reached between Alexander III and Emperor Frederick I."

• Catholic Encyclopedia, "Pope Lucius III"^[50]

The Peace of Venice of 1177 put an end to eighteen years of imperial schism: Frederick Barbarossa finally recognized Alexander III as the legitimate pope.^[51] The cardinal of Ostia played a leading role there. This decisive experience - having dealt directly with the Emperor and sealed reconciliation - would make him, four years later, the natural candidate to continue that policy.

The Death of Alexander III and the Conclave

Pope Alexander III, one of the greatest pontiffs of the Middle Ages, died at Civita Castellana on August 30, 1181, after a reign of twenty-two years.^[52][53] Two days later, on September 1, 1181, the Sacred College gathered at Velletri elected as his successor the old cardinal-bishop of Ostia, Ubaldo Allucingoli, who took the name Lucius III.^[54] He was consecrated and crowned the following Sunday, September 6, 1181.^[55][56]

The election took place without notable disturbance, in accordance with the rules fixed by the Third Lateran Council that Alexander III had just convened in 1179: the two-thirds majority of the cardinals, now required, eliminated the risk of a double election like those that had bloodied the century. Lucius III was, in this sense, the first fruit of the conciliar procedure that still governs papal elections today.

An Elderly Pope for an Exhausted See

The choice of Ubaldo Allucingoli was the choice of an aged and experienced man, not of a young reformer. More than eighty years old according to the highest estimates, the new pope embodied continuity: he had lived through seven pontificates - from Innocent II, who created him cardinal in December 1138, to Alexander III -, he knew the Emperor, he had negotiated peace.^[57][58] The Church expected him to prolong Alexander III's work without reopening wounds.

But the see he received was exhausted. Rome was in the hands of its commune; northern Italy, organized in the Lombard League, was only just emerging from war against the Emperor; Norman Sicily worried the south; and far away, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was tottering. Lucius III's pontificate would be, from beginning to end, a government of crisis conducted by an old man without a capital.

The Showdown with the Roman Commune

Lucius III reached Rome in November 1181, but the stay quickly turned sour. The conflict with the Roman commune was immediate and frontal. The Romans demanded from the new pope the customary gratuities and recognition of their municipal privileges; they also clashed with him over Tusculum, the neighboring city that Rome wished to destroy and the pope protected.^[59][60] Lucius III's inflexible character only worsened the rupture.

"He was the only pope of this period known to have refused to grant benefits or gifts to the Romans."

• New Catholic Encyclopedia, "Lucius III"^[61]

The result was decisive: by March 1182, after barely five months, Lucius III had to leave Rome.^[62][63] He would see it again only intermittently. Like so many twelfth-century popes, he experienced the fact that possession of the City is not identical with the exercise of primacy.

Velletri, Anagni, Verona: An Itinerant Papacy

Driven from Rome, the pope first withdrew to the towns of papal Latium - Velletri, his former episcopal see, then Anagni, the strong city of the popes - before finally moving to northern Italy and establishing himself at Verona in the autumn of 1184.^[64][65] This itinerary was not wandering: each of these cities was a genuine seat of government, from which letters, sentences and legations went out to administer the universal Church.

Governing the Church from Exile

Far from paralyzing the pontificate, exile revealed its activity. From Velletri, Lucius III absolved King William I of Scotland, known as the Lion, on May 17, 1182, lifting the ecclesiastical censures that weighed on the king and his kingdom, and sent him the Golden Rose as a pledge of reconciliation - an act which the Catholic Encyclopedia dates to March 17, 1183.^[66][67] On July 8, 1184, he consecrated the cathedral of Bologna, a solemn act in the city that was then the capital of law in Europe.^[68] He intervened in the ecclesiastical affairs of several kingdoms - absolution of Scotland, arbitration between Antioch and Tyre over the diocese of Tripoli, support for the archbishop-elect of Trier -, canonized (Bruno of Segni in 1183) and received appeals and petitions from all Christendom.^[69][70]

This government at a distance prepared the great act of his reign. For it was by settling at Verona, on imperial soil, that Lucius III would meet Frederick Barbarossa and promulgate with him the decretal that would carry his name into history.

A Summit Meeting with Frederick Barbarossa

In the autumn of 1184, Lucius III and Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa met at Verona, in a great diet doubled by an ecclesiastical synod held from October to November.^[71][72] It was the summit of a whole era: the pope and the Emperor, once adversaries during the schism and reconciled at Venice, sat side by side to settle the affairs of Christendom. Several dossiers were on the table - heresy, crusade, and disputes between Priesthood and Empire.

On at least one point, pope and Emperor were in perfect agreement: the repression of heresy. For Frederick as for Lucius, the sects multiplying in the cities of Italy and Languedoc threatened both the faith of the Church and the order of the world. From this convergence came Ad Abolendam.

Ad Abolendam: The Birth of the Episcopal Inquisition

On November 4, 1184, at Verona, Lucius III promulgated the decretal Ad Abolendam diversam haeresium pravitatem.^[73][74] The text opens with a perpetual anathema launched against a list of named movements:

"We decree that all Cathars and Patarines, those who falsely call themselves Humiliati or Poor Men of Lyon, the Passagini, Josephini and Arnoldists, shall be subject to perpetual anathema."

• Lucius III, decretal Ad Abolendam, Verona, November 4, 1184 (article's translation from the Latin)^[75]

To these named sects, the pope added all those who preached without the authorization of the Church, publicly or secretly - thus targeting the lay preacher, a rising figure of the age, who arrogated to himself a ministry conferred only by the priesthood.^[76][77] But the decisive innovation lay not in the condemnation; it lay in the procedure.

The Sects Condemned at Verona

The table below summarizes the movements targeted by Ad Abolendam and what they were accused of. Several were poorly defined groups; some barely existed in 1184, but the Church intended to cut short every anti-sacramental challenge.^[78]

The great issue of the time was Catharism: this dualism from the East, opposing a good god of spirit to an evil god of matter, denied the Incarnation, despised the sacraments and led, in its extreme forms, to the rejection of marriage and procreation. Faced with this denial of creation and of the flesh of Christ, the Church could only see a radical rupture with the faith.

The Procedure: Visitation, Denunciation, Secular Arm

The heart of Ad Abolendam is a permanent investigative system. For the first time, the text imposed on every bishop a positive obligation to seek out heresy, and not merely to wait until it revealed itself:

"Let every archbishop or bishop, either in person, through his archdeacon, or through other honest and suitable persons, visit once or twice a year the parish in which it is reported that heretics dwell."

• Lucius III, decretal Ad Abolendam, 1184 (article's translation from the Latin)^[79]

The inhabitants had to swear to report those whom they knew or suspected to be heretics; suspects who failed to clear themselves, and proven heretics who refused to abjure or relapsed into error, were handed over to civil power to suffer the "due punishment" (animadversio debita).^[80][81] Clerics convicted of heresy were first degraded, that is, stripped of their order, before being delivered to the secular arm. The decretal also provided a whole arsenal of civil penalties: loss of public office, inability to testify or make a will, confiscation of fiefs.

The text went still further: it forcibly enrolled temporal power in the struggle. Counts, barons and city consuls had to swear to assist the Church:

"All counts, barons, governors and consuls of cities shall promise under oath to aid the Church powerfully and effectively against heretics."

• Lucius III, decretal Ad Abolendam, 1184 (article's translation from the Latin)^[82]

This oath imposed on princes was a novelty heavy with meaning: it welded the repression of heresy to civil authority for centuries, and it would later make possible the Albigensian Crusade (1209) and the tribunals of the Inquisition properly so called.^[83]

What the Decretal Is Not: Episcopal and Pontifical Inquisition

An error often repeated must be corrected here. Lucius III did not create the Inquisition in the usual sense - that is, the permanent pontifical tribunal, entrusted to delegated judges independent of the bishops. What Ad Abolendam founded was the episcopal Inquisition: the bishop, in his diocese, became investigator and judge of heresy.^[84][85]

The pontifical Inquisition properly so called would be born only half a century later, when Pope Gregory IX, between 1231 and 1233, entrusted the pursuit of heresy to Dominican inquisitors appointed directly by Rome. Between the two, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 would take up the substance of Ad Abolendam in its canon 3 and systematize the procedure.^[86] The distinction is not a scholar's nuance: it avoids both the misunderstanding that would make Lucius III the inventor of the tribunals of the Inquisition, and the opposite error that would deny that his decretal is indeed the legal matrix of later inquisitorial procedures.

On the substance, Catholic judgment must remain balanced. The duty to protect the faithful against a heresy which, like Catharism, denied the Incarnation, the goodness of creation and the sacraments, is legitimate, and it must be understood within a world in which unity of faith also founded social unity. But the enlistment of the secular arm inaugurated by Ad Abolendam would open a path whose developments, in later centuries, would go beyond the framework of 1184. To be precise about the real scope of the text: it pronounces anathema, organizes episcopal inquiry and provides against the obstinate the degradation of clerics, civil incapacities and handing over to the secular arm for the "due punishment" - without itself pronouncing either death penalty or torment, and without creating a permanent tribunal, which would only be born in 1231-1233.^[87][88] The text of Verona remains first and foremost an act of defense of the faith - and it is in this light, that of a pastor guarding his flock, that it must be judged. For the long history of this repression, see Heretics and the Black Legend of the Inquisition.

Agreement on heresy did not erase disagreement. At Verona, four dossiers still opposed the pope and the Emperor, and none was resolved at Lucius III's death.^[89][90] Together they outline the permanent rivalry of Priesthood and Empire that structures the entire Middle Ages.

The Ordinations of the Schism

First dispute: the fate of the German bishops and clerics ordained by the antipopes during the schism of 1159-1177. Should the validity of their orders be recognized and should they be maintained in office, or should they be deposed? Frederick, who had supported them, wanted recognition; the pope refused. The question remained open at the death of Lucius III.^[91][92]

The Double Election of Trier

Second dispute: the double election to the archbishopric of Trier, where two rival candidates disputed the see, one supported by the pope, the other by the Emperor. This local conflict, never settled under Lucius III, would become one of the breaking points between Frederick and Lucius's successor, Urban III.^[93]

The Refused Coronation of Henry VI

Third dispute, the weightiest: Frederick Barbarossa asked the pope to crown his son Henry, the future Henry VI, as emperor while the father was still alive, in order to secure the imperial succession. Lucius III refused.^[94][95] Behind this refusal loomed a dynastic threat: Henry's projected marriage to Constance of Hauteville, heiress of the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Such a union - celebrated in 1186, under Lucius's successor - would place the Papal State in a pincer between the Empire in the north and Sicily in the south. The old pope, clear-sighted, did not want to arm this encirclement.

The Matildine Lands

Fourth dispute: the lands of Countess Matilda of Tuscany, who had died in 1115 after bequeathing her vast domains to the Roman Church - a bequest the Empire claimed as imperial fiefs. This dispute over the "Matildine lands", which had poisoned relations between Rome and the Empire for nearly a century, was not settled at Verona either.^[96][97] It would take decades before the question was closed.

Patriarch Heraclius and the Appeal of Jerusalem

At Verona, another burning dossier appeared: the salvation of the Holy Land. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, weakened by the leprosy of its king Baldwin IV and by succession quarrels, felt the threat of Saladin rising. In 1184, an embassy of the greatest solemnity crossed the West to call for help: the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Heraclius, accompanied by the grand masters of the Temple and the Hospital, visited in turn Pope Lucius III, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, King Philip II of France and King Henry II of England.^[98][99]

At Verona, the Emperor promised to prepare a crusade to the Holy Land, and the pope supported the project.^[100][101] But the expedition was delayed, trapped by European quarrels. Lucius III died before he could undertake anything, and only after the disaster of Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 would the Third Crusade depart - too late to recover the Holy City. Heraclius's appeal, heard at Verona, was not followed in time.

The Cathedral of Verona

Lucius III died at Verona on November 25, 1185, without having been able to return to Rome.^[102][103] He was buried in Verona Cathedral, Santa Maria Matricolare, far from the tomb of Peter.^[104] On the very day of his death, the cardinals elected the archbishop of Milan Uberto Crivelli, who took the name Urban III - a man far more hostile to the Empire, whose pontificate would immediately reopen the confrontation that Lucius had managed to contain.^[105][106]

The Judgment of History and of the Church

What remains of Lucius III? A brief pontificate, whose registers are lost - but one that fixed a lasting act and embodied a fundamental truth.

The lasting act is the decretal Ad Abolendam, matrix of the episcopal Inquisition, whose substance would be taken up by canon 3 (Excommunicamus) of Lateran IV in 1215 before nourishing the pontifical Inquisition of Gregory IX. Lucius III did not create the tribunals of the Inquisition, and this must be repeated against a tenacious legend; but he set down the principle that would make them possible. In the history of the Church, this is one of those moments when the legitimate defense of the faith commits the institution to a path whose developments - from the Albigensian Crusade to the pontifical tribunals - would go beyond the episcopal framework laid down at Verona.^[107][108]

The fundamental truth is that of the pope without Rome. Elected outside the City, driven from it after five months, dead hundreds of kilometers from Saint Peter's, Lucius III governed the universal Church from exile, by the authority of his office alone. His pontificate recalls, in its modest way, that the see of Peter is not a territory but a function, and that a pope stripped of everything remains the visible center of Catholic communion.

• Pope Innocent II (1130-1143) - the pope who made Ubaldo Allucingoli a cardinal and also faced the Roman commune.
• The Gregorian reform - the great movement of liberation of the Church of which Lucius III was an heir.
• Heretics and the Black Legend of the Inquisition - to place Ad Abolendam within the long history of the repression of heresy.
• The Bloody Legend of the Spanish Inquisition - the necessary distinction between medieval, pontifical and Spanish Inquisitions.
• The Crusades - Heraclius's appeal at Verona and the Third Crusade that followed the fall of Jerusalem.