INNOCENT III. (Lotario de' Conti di Segni), pope from 1198 to 1216, son of Trasimondo, count of Segni, and of Claricia, a Roman lady of the noble family of Scotti, was born at Anagni about 116o. At the University of Paris he laid the foundations of his profound knowledge of the scholastic philosophy; at Bo logna he studied canon and civil law. On his return to Rome he became a canon of St. Peter's; he was made subdeacon of the Roman Church by Gregory VIII.; and in I 190 his uncle, Pope Clement III., created him cardinal-deacon of Santi Sergio e Baccho. The election of Celestine III. in the following year with drew Lotario for a while from the active work of the Curia, the new pope belonging to the family of the Orsini, who were at feud with the Scotti. Lotario, however, employed his leisure in writ: ing several works : Mysteriorum evengelicae legis ac sacramenti eucharistiae libri VI., De contemtu mundi, sive de miserta hu manae conditions, and De quadrapartita specie nuptiarum. Of these only the two first are extant ; they show a profound erudi tion. Yet Lotario was destined to be above all things a man of action, and Innocent III. is remembered, not as a great theologian, but as a great ruler and man of affairs.
On Jan. 8, 1198, Celestine III. died, and on the same day Lotario, though not even a priest, was unanimously elected pope by the assembled cardinals. He took the name of Innocent III. On Feb. 21 he was ordained priest, and next day was consecrated bishop. His first acts were to restore the prestige of the Holy See in Italy, where it had been overshadowed by the power of the emperor Henry VI. The early death of Henry VI. (Sept. 1197) had left Germany divided between rival candidates for the crown, Sicily torn by warring factions of native and German barons. It was, then, easy for Innocent to depose the imperial prefect in Rome itself and to oust the German feudatories who held the great Italian fiefs for the empire. Spoleto fell; Perugia surrendered; Tuscany acknowledged the leadership of the pope; papal rectores once more governed the patrimony of St. Peter. Finally, Henry's widow, Constance, in despair, acknowledged the pope as overlord of the two Sicilies, and on her death (Nov. 27, 1198) appointed him guardian of her infant son Frederick. Thus in the first year of his pontificate Innocent had consolidated in the peninsula a secure basis on which to build up his world power.
The effective assertion of this world-power is the characteristic feature of Innocent's pontificate. Other popes before him—from Gregory VII. onwards—had upheld the theory of the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal authority; it was reserved for Innocent to make it a reality. In Germany his support of Otto IV. against Philip of Swabia, then of Philip against Otto and finally, after Philip's murder (June 2 I, I ao8 ), of the young Fred erick II. against Otto, effectually prevented the imperial power, during his pontificate, from again becoming a danger to that of the papacy in Italy. Concessions at the cost of the empire in Italy were in every case the price of his support. (See GERMANY : History.) In his relations with the German emperors Innocent acted partly as pope, partly as an Italian prince; his victories over other potentates he won wholly in his spiritual capacity. He forced Philip Augustus of France to put away Agnes of Meran and take back his Danish wife Ingeborg, whom he had wrongfully divorced; compelled Peter of Aragon to forgo his intended marriage with Bianca of Navarre and ultimately 0204) to receive back his kingdom as a fief of the Holy See, and caused Alphonso IX. of Leon to put away his wife Berengaria of Castile, who was related to him within the prohibited degrees, though he pronounced their children legitimate. Sancho of Portugal was compelled to pay the tribute promised by his father to Rome, and Ladislaus of Poland to cease from infringing the rights of the church. The archbishop of Trondhjem was called to order for removing the ban of ex communication from the repentant King Haakon IV., as an in fringement of the exclusive right of the pope to impose or remove the ban of the church in the case of sovereigns. Kaloyan, prince of Bulgaria, submitted to Rome, and, in Nov. 1204 received the insignia of royalty from the hands of the papal legates as the vassal of the Holy See.
Meanwhile Innocent promoted the crusade which ultimately, under the Doge Dandolo, led to the Latin occupation of Constan tinople. (See CRUSADES.) This diversion from its original object was at first severely censured by Innocent ; but an event which seemed to put an end to the schism of East and West came to wear a different aspect ; he was the first pope to nominate a patri arch of Constantinople, and he expressed the hope that hence forth the church would be "one fold under one shepherd." By a bull of Oct. 12, 1204, moreover, Innocent proclaimed the same indulgences for a crusade to Livonia as the Holy Land. The re sult was the "conversion" of the Livonians (1206) and the Letts (1208) by the crusaders headed by the knights of the Teutonic Order. The organization of the new provinces thus won for the church Innocent kept in his own hands, instituting the new arch bishopric of Riga and defining the respective jurisdictions of the archbishops and the Teutonic Knights. Another crusade was that proclaimed by Innocent in 1207 against the Albigenses. All that can be said in his favour is that he acted from supreme conviction; and that he did not use force until for ten years he had tried all the arts of persuasion in vain. (See ALBIGENSES.) Of all Innocent's triumphs the greatest was his victory over King John of England. The quarrel arose out of a dispute as to the election to the vacant see of Canterbury, which Innocent had settled by nominating Stephen Langton (q.v.) over the heads of both candidates. John refusing to submit, Innocent imposed an interdict on the kingdom and threatened him with a crusade ; and John was compelled to recognize Langton and to hold Eng land and Ireland as fiefs of the Holy See, subject to an annual tribute (May 1213). For years the pope virtually ruled England through his legates. (See ENGLISH HISTORY and JoHN, king of England.) So great had the secular power of the papacy become that a Byzantine visitor to Rome declared Innocent to be "the successor not of Peter but of Constantine." Innocent's authority within the church itself exceeded that of his predecessors. The centralization of the ecclesiastical adminis tration at Rome received a great impulse, and the independent jurisdiction of metropolitans and bishops was curtailed. He in troduced a system of provisions and reservations, by which he brought the patronage of sees and benefices into his own hands— a system which led later to intolerable abuses. The i 2th ecu menical council assembled at the Lateran under his presidency in 1215. It was attended by the plenipotentiaries of the emperor, of kings and of princes, and by some 1,50o archbishops, bishops, abbots and other dignitaries. The business before it, the disciplin ing of heretics and Jews, and the proclamation of a new crusade, etc., vitally concerned the States represented; yet the function of the great assembly was little more than to listen to and endorse the decretals read by the pope. (See LATERAN COUNCILS.) The great pope died on July 16, 1216, at Perugia, and was succeeded by Honorius III.
Whatever judgment posterity may have passed on Innocent's aims, opinion is united as to the purity of the motives that in spired them and the tireless self-devotion with which they were pursued. "I have no leisure," Innocent once sighed, "to medi tate on supermundane things; scarce I can breathe. Yea, so much must I live for others, that almost I am a stranger to myself." His views on the papal supremacy are best explained in his own words. Writing to the patriarch of Constantinople (Inn. III., lib. ii. ep. 200) he says : "The Lord left to Peter the governance not of the church only but of the whole world"; and again in his letter to King John of England (lib. xvi. ep. 131) : "The King of Kings ... so established the kingship and the priesthood in the church, that the kingship should be priestly, and the priest hood royal (ut sacerdotale sit regnum et sacerdotium sit regale), as is evident from the epistle of Peter and the law of Moses, setting one over all, whom he appointed his vicar on earth." In his answer to the ambassadors of Philip Augustus he states the premises from which this stupendous claim is logically de veloped:— To princes power is given on earth, but to priests it is attributed also in heaven; to the former only over bodies, to the latter also over souls. Whence it follows that by so much as the soul is superior to the body, the priesthood is superior to the kingship. . . . Single rulers have single provinces, and single kings single kingdoms ; but Peter, as in the plenitude, so in the extent of his power is pre-eminent over all, since he is the Vicar of Him whose is the earth and the fullness thereof, the whole wide world and all that dwell therein.
To the emperor of Constantinople, who quoted I Peter ii.
13, 14, to the contrary, he replied in perfect good faith that the apostle's admonition to obey "the king as supreme was addressed to lay folk and not to the clergy." The more intelligent laymen of the time were not convinced even when coerced. Even so pious a Catholic as the minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide, giving voice to the indignation of German laymen, ascribed Inno cent's claims, not to soundness of his scholastic logic, but to the fact that he was "too young" (owe der babest ist ze junc).
The literature on Innocent III. is very extensive ; a carefully analysed bibliography will be found in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie (3rd ed., 1901) s. "Innocenz III." In A. Potthast, Bibliotheca hist. med. aevi (end ed., Berlin, 1896), p. 65o, is a bibliography of the literature on Innocent's writings. In the Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Aemilius Fried berg (Leipzig, 1880, vol. ii., pp. xiv.—xvii., are lists of the official docu ments of Innocent III. excerpted in the Decretales Gregorii IX. The most important later works on Innocent III. are Achille Luchaire's Innocent III., Rome et Phalle 0904), Innocent III., la croisade des Albigeois (ib. 1905), Innocent III., la papaute et l'empire (ib. 1906), Innocent III., la question d'orient (ib. 1906) ; Innocent 111., les roy autes vassales du Saint-Siege (ib. 1908) ; and Innocent III., le concile de latran et la ref orme de l'eglise (1908) ; Baethgen, Die Regenschaft Papst Innozenz III. im Konigreich Sizilien (1914) ; E. W. Meyer, Staatsthe orien Papst Innozenz III. (1919). Innocent the Great, by C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon (1907), contains some useful documents. See also H. H. Milman, History of Latin Christianity (1855, etc.), vol. v.; F. Greg orovius, Rome in the Middle Ages, translated by A. Hamilton (1896), vol. v. pp. 5-110; J. C. L. Gieseler, Ecclesiastical Hist., trans. by J. W. Hull, vol. iii. (1853) , which contains numerous excerpts from his letters, etc. Innocent's works are found in Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, vols. ccxiv.—ccxvii. For a translation of In nocent's answer to King John on the interdict, and John's surrender of England and Ireland to Innocent, see Gee and Hardy, Documents illustrative of Church History (1896), pp. 73 et seq.