Die Register Innocenz´ III. 11 Band. 11. Pontifikatsjahr 1208/1209: Texte und Indices (review)

It is now some sixty years since Leo Santifaller, at that time both head of the Österreichischen Staatsarchivs and director of the Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, in alliance with Friedrich Kempf and Friedrich Schmidinger, decided upon the great historical enterprise of an Austrian critical edition of the registers of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), which would replace the often seriously flawed texts published in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Latina (1844–55). The initial progress of the enterprise was slow, given that the principal editor, Othmar Hageneder, and his associates could not dedicate themselves to the task on a full-time basis, but happily in recent years, with Hageneder still at the helm, an exceptional team of editors and researchers is now moving the project forward at a considerable pace. Nine years of registers have now been published, and in the latest volume, the letters of Register Vat. 7A, 49–101 have been transcribed. They concern the eleventh year of Innocent’s pontificate and contain 271 letters from February 1208 to February 1209.

With the exception of the register of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), which contains some 390 items, the registers of Innocent III’s predecessors in the high Middle Ages do not survive, although some of them at least were certainly conserved and consulted both by curial officials and visitors to Rome into the middle of the thirteenth century. This makes the almost complete survival of Innocent’s registers all the more valuable, even though it has resulted in a tendency on the part of historians to ascribe to Innocent III any number of innovations that were often no more than a continuance of papal thought over a longer period, as we can often know from letters of previous popes that survive in local archives or through decretal collections. The major limitation of Innocent’s registers is that they do not cover all the business conducted by the Roman Curia. It is important to emphasize that only a small number of letters were enregistered, and how one letter found its way into the register and why another is left out is often far from clear. Most privileges to monastic houses, for instance, do not find their way into the registers, possibly because the cost of enregistering a letter proved prohibitive and not central to the monastery’s purpose in obtaining the privilege. But even matters of high politics were sometimes left out. It is therefore always necessary to be aware of the very many letters surviving in local archives that supplement those conserved in the registers. The use of both in combination gives us the best understanding of papal government.

Nevertheless, the registers still tell us a great deal and give us a very useful overview of the papacy’s concerns. However, papal letters should not all be taken to be an expression of the thought of the pope directly. Although we know Innocent III greatly involved himself in the business of government and heard many cases personally, we cannot really know in most cases whether the pope personally dictated a letter. One suspects he did in important matters of politics, and the eleventh year of his pontificate was hardly short on political drama. The papacy still had to expend much energy dealing with the aftermath of the Latin conquest of Constantinople and the subsequent problems of the relationship between the Greek and Latin clergy. An even older problem—the unhappy marriage of Philip Augustus and Ingeborg, who had spent one night together back in 1193—also continued to trouble the pontiff, as did the arrangement of the marriage of his ward, Frederick II, who, Innocent insisted, was of an exceptionally distinguished family and...