CHAPTER FOUR

LEGATUS A LATERE

Around 1318 Cardinal Guillaume de Pierre Godin wrote that the office of legatus a latere, invested from the very start with plenissimam potestatem, began with the first , Peter, in full accordance with the will of God.1 Godin’s sense of history may be questionable, but his bold claim sheds light on the exalted position of the most powerful of medieval papal representatives, the legatus a latere. During the fourteenth century the legatus a latere, buttressed by the vast array of powers that had accrued to the office over the centuries, became an indispensable instrument of Avignonese papal policy in Italy. The papacy’s absence from Italy created unprecedented problems that threatened the political stability of the Italian peninsula and the ter- ritorial rights of the there. To provide a quasi-papal pres- ence capable of addressing these problems, the of Avignon sent a long line of representatives and envoys to Italy, including twelve legati a latere.2 The missions of three legates in particular— Bertrand du Poujet, Giovanni Orsini and above all Gil Albornoz— stand out as arguably the most ambitious of all medieval papal legations. The development of legatine power, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is inseparable from the development of papal

1 William D. McCready, The Theory of Papal Monarchy in the Fourteenth Century. Guillaume de Pierre Godin, Tractatus de causa immediata ecclesiastice potestatis, Studies and Texts 56 (Toronto, 1982), p. 282, l.946–949. John XXII, in his decretal «De con- suetudine» (Extrav. com. 1, 1), confirmed the divine origin of the office: legates . . . huius- modi officium et potestatem ipsius Romani Pontificis...non ab homine, sed a Deo recepit...William Durantis the Elder traced the office even farther back, to the time of Moses, who established “God-fearing men as tribunes and centurions to exercise judgment over the people” (Ex. 18:21–22); Guillelmus Durantis, Speculum iuris, 2 vols. (, 1537), «De legato» 1, 7, pp. 30–31. For the most important of independent medieval discussions on legatine power, the Speculum legatorum of Durantis (best known as «De legato» from his Speculum iuris, but also circulated as an independent text), see Clifford Ian Kyer, The Papal Legate and the ‘Solemn’ Papal , 1243–1378: The Changing Pattern of Papal Representation (unpublished PhD dissertation; Toronto, 1979), Appendix I, pp. 183–193. 2 See Kyer, The Papal Legate, Appendix IV. 66 chapter four power.3 By the central , the notion that a legate pos- sessed the vicis of the pope was so firmly fixed that the popes of the twelfth century routinely described their most important legates as vicarii.4 A legate’s general mandate allowed him to function essen- tially as pope in pursuit of the papacy’s objectives in a given time and place. Thus the legates of the later eleventh and twelfth cen- turies, with whom a genuinely medieval vision of legation was con- ceived, were concerned chiefly with the implementation of reform programs throughout .5 Most thirteenth-century lega- tions sought to disseminate and implement the principles of Lateran IV and the Crusade, or to address related issues such as the sup- pression of heresy in the West and the defeat of the Hohenstaufen.6 As the concept of papal plenitudo potestatis was elaborated throughout the thirteenth century, papal legates enjoyed a corresponding growth in the power they exercised. By the fourteenth century, the legatus a latere could do whatever the pope wished him to do, in order to achieve whatever goal enjoined him to pursue. Fourteenth-century legates were the product of three principal phases of development. The diplomatic role of the legatus a latere was almost as old as the papacy itself, dating from the first centuries of Christian antiquity, when the bishops of Rome used legates to keep in touch with other churches. As the Roman bishops gradually assumed more exalted authority, their envoys became agents through whom nascent Roman primacy was expressed across Christendom. Already by the Council of Sardica (ca. 343) legates appear as well- developed proctorial agents of the bishops of Rome. Legatine envoys represented the popes at a number of important councils in the East. Many of the more important representational aspects of later legates were in fact developed in the apocrisiarii, the papal ambassadors who maintained a regular presence at the imperial court at Constantinople

3 John W. Perrin, “Legatus, the Lawyers and the Terminology of Power,” Studia Gratiana 11 (1967), p. 466. 4 I.S. Robinson, The Papacy, 1073–1198. Continuity and Innovation (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 148, 156, 164. 5 Schmutz, p. 450. Schmutz’s classification of envoys is criticized by Robert Figueira, “The Classification of Medieval Papal Legates in the Liber Extra,” AHP 21 (1983), pp. 211–228, and Clifford Ian Kyer, “Legatus and Nuntius as Used to Denote Papal Envoys: 1245–1378,” Medieval Studies 40 (1978), pp. 473–477. 6 For an overview of the legations of these periods see Blet, chap. 5, 6, pp. 91–140.