Literary Expressions of Pastoral Reform During the Reign of Fernando Iii

Chapter 10 Literary Expressions of Pastoral Reform during the Reign of Fernando iii

Cristina Catalina

The efforts of the Holy See to expand papal control over the western Church across the eleventh century were met with some resistance in the Iberian Pen- insula. This was particularly the case in Castile, where the ambitious objective of Pope Gregory vii to bring all regional churches within the orbit of Roman obedience was frustrated by the adherence of the Toledan Church to its His- panic customs.1 In his letters to Castilian clerics and kings, Gregory demanded that the Hispanic kingdoms adopt the Roman ordo and officium and abandon Toledan superstition – the so-called Mozarabic Rite.2 Some three centuries later however, the picture had shifted substantially. From the early fourteenth century, we find a substantial number of treatises on moral theology that are in line with Roman orthodoxy, and the beginnings of a systematic reception of Roman ecumenical norms within Castilian synods and councils.3 Between these two snapshots lies the reception of new Roman norms of pastoral care in the kingdom of Fernando iii. The Roman See led a process of institutional, sacramental, and moral standardization in Latin Christendom. If the so-called Gregorian Reform of the end of the eleventh century had suc- ceeded in strengthening the disciplinary obedience of regional churches, as well as marking the distinction between lay and clerical members, over the course of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the Roman See aimed to go yet further in establishing orthodoxy and orthopraxy; that is, in standardizing doctrine, ecclesiology, and models of Christian behavior. This was effectively a dynamic process, pervaded by the tension between the establishment of a single and defined means of salvation and the multiple forms of resistance that this encountered, from anticlericalism and heresy to independent mea- sures to address the care of souls. Such conditions would typify the ongoing

1 On the transition from Hispanic to Roman Rite in Castile, see Walker, Views of Transition. Li- turgical change was a fundamental event in Aragón also. Baso, “La iglesia aragonesa,” 153. 2 See Mansilla, Inocencio iii, 15–31. 3 Sánchez Herrero, “La legislación conciliar y sinodal,” 350.

242 Catalina process of accepting new pastoral norms in the various regions of Latin Christendom. In the territories that would later make up the kingdom of Castile, the papacy did not begin to exercise effective ecclesiastical power until the late eleventh century, when, in 1088, the Mozarabic or Toledan liturgy (the Officium to- letanum) was abolished and replaced by the Franco-Roman office, the Romanorum mysterium or Gallicaum mysterium.4 However, this did not hap- pen easily. It was a substantive change, and one that would leave an enduring mark on the relationship between the peninsular Church and the Roman pontiff. Over the same period, the territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms into the Islamic south also conditioned this relationship. Newly conquered territories had to be integrated into the administrative organization of the Church. This formed an important backdrop to the ways in which the Castilian Church related to Rome in the thirteenth century, and would shape Castilian responses to the efforts to impose Roman pastoral norms in the Peninsula, as well as the obstacles that these attempts would face. The efforts of the Roman pontiff to control what can be described as the “economy of salvation” reached their peak during the papacy of Innocent iii (r. 1198–1216). His Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the resultant canons of this council aimed to extend the reach of papal norms deeper into the functioning of the Latin Church, and incorporated strategies to bring about their imple- mentation. In line with this, canon ten of the Council, regulating preaching, required that pastoral ministry should be carried out in the vernacular, a pure- ly practical step deployed as a strategy to reach people who were uneducated in Latin.5 This also invites us to consider, as expressions of this same aim, a variety of literary sources that do not always follow the traditional models of ecclesiastical reform but in which can be identified the echoes of this papal strategy. The above framework allows for a sociological understanding of the clerical lyric poetry written in the vernacular and preserved in the kingdom of Castile- León during the era of Fernando iii.6 The combination of themes drawn from moral theology, with forms of recitation most commonly associated with the

4 Gordo, “Papado y monarquía,” 526; and Walker, Views of Transition. 5 García y García, Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis, canon x; and Spiegel, Romancing the past. One of the effects of Innocent iii’s pastoral reform was the promotion of vernacular writing, which contributed indirectly to solidifying the Romance languages. 6 We shall make no attempt in this chapter to analyze this poetry. The goal here is rather to interpret it as a sociological phenomenon in relation to the process of assimilating Roman pastoral activity during the era of Fernando iii.