Around the Fourth Lateran Council (1215)

Among the commemorations to be included here in 2015 is the most important medieval ecumenical council, the Fourth Lateran Council that took place in November 1215. As it happens the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) closed fifty years ago, and already a brief look at the constitutions of both councils reveals many differences, beginning with the sheer number of decrees and constitutions. With just 70 constitutions and one additional decree, the convocation for a new crusade, the Fourth Lateran Council led by pope Innocent III is remarkably concise in its output which, however, does not diminish its importance.

Some constitutions have received more attention by historians than others, and scholars do try to create a more balanced view of this major historical event. On November 24, 2015 the international congress Concilium Lateranense IV: Commemorating the Octocentenary of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 will begin in Rome, and in Murcia the conference Innocent III and his time will start on December 9, 2015. In this contribution I would like to look at the pictorial representation of this council, and at a project covering a number of medieval church councils.

The image of the Fourth Lateran Council

When you recall for yourself the images most closely associated with the Fourth Lateran Council – often abbreviated as Lateran IV – you might imagine a fresco of pope Innocent III or the famous marginal drawing with debating cardinals in a manuscript of Matthew Paris’ Chronica maiora (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, ms. 16-II, fol. 47v). This college tried to protect image rights for this illustration as much as possible (see below for correction). At the website Parker Library on the Web full access is only possible at subscribing institutions. Without complete access you can only browse manuscripts but when you arrive at the very page of the manuscript with this illustration its lower half has been blotted out completely. Corpus Christi College and Stanford University Libraries have announced access to this website will be widened next year.

The Fourth Lateran Council – from Johannes de Columna o.p., “Mare historiarum”- fifteenth century – detail, Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 4915, fol. 398v

In fact it proves to be very hard to find online any other medieval image of Lateran IV, and this is one of the reasons why this section of my post is rather short. I did find two images in a fifteenth-century manuscript of a chronicle by a Dominican friar, Johannes de Columna, Mare historiarum, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris (ms. Latin 4915, fol. 398v and 399r). You can search for archival collections and manuscripts at the BnF in a special website, and for illuminated manuscripts in the BnF you can use the Mandragore portal. Ms. Latin 4915 has been digitized at Gallica, the digital library of the BnF. The chapter heading indicated in red ink mentions two issues at the council, the condemnation of the views of Joachim de Fiore, and the convocation of a new crusade.

The second image mentions in its heading two other questions dealt with at Lateran IV, the foundation of new religious orders, in particular the Dominicans, and matters between the king of France and barons from England. 1215 was the year of the Magna Charta. This chronicle by a Dominican friar has been lavishly illustrated with more than thousand historiated initials. You cannot fault the illuminator for showing Saint Dominic in this work. It would be great if we had images from the thirteenth century, but this image from the fifteenth century does give you at least the idea that a council is more than a prolonged series of debates between cardinals, bishops, mighty abbots and the pope. In and around the Lateran basilica and palace much more happened in 1215.

For more information about the iconography of the Fourth Lateran Council one should start with consulting an article by Raymonde Foreville, ‘L’iconographie du XIIe concile œcuménique: Latran IV (1215)’, in: Mélanges offerts à René Crozet (…), Pierre Gallais and Yves-François Riou (eds.) (2 vol., Poitiers 1966) II, 1121-1130, reprinted in her volume Gouvernement et vie de l’Église au Moyen-Âge: Recueil des études (London 1979). A second step will be searching the matchless information assembled for the Index of Christian Art (ICA) of Princeton University. You can gain access outside Princeton to all materials at the institutions in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Utrecht where you can consult the copies of the card files.

Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, preaches at the Fourth Lateran Council – Madrid, BNE, Vit. 15-5, fol. 22r – image: Madrid, BNE

Lately a senior medievalist at Utrecht told me in person with much aplomb the ICA is now available online in open access, but alas this is not correct. You cannot actually access the full online database without going to the university library at Utrecht, having off-campus access or using your membership of another library subscribing to the online version. Luckily I can use this latter opportunity, too, but my first online attempts did not lead me to any artefact showing one of the Lateran councils. The famous drawing by Matthew Paris is indeed present in the card files of the ICA, but the whole manuscript is curiously missing in the digital version. I could even check that the two other manuscripts used by Foreville, the Chanson de la croisade albigeoise by Guillaume de Tudèle (written in 1275; Paris, BnF, ms. Fr. 25425, fol. 81r; digitized at Gallica) and the Codex Toledanus (written around 1253-1255; Madrid, BNE, Vit. 15-5, fol. 22r, digitized in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica) are not present in both versions of ICA. The Festschrift for René Crozet somehow escaped the attention of ICA’s staff. Only thirty percent of the materials within the Index of Christian Art is already available online. The image in the manuscript at Paris described by Foreville is only a sketch for a large miniature, and thus it has not been included in the Mandragore database. For those wanting to use Iconclass I can provide you with the right code for finding images of church councils of the Roman-Catholic Church, 11P3142.

Religious minorities in 1215

Before starting with the second section of this post it might be wise to point to at least some online versions of the constitutions of Lateran IV. At IntraText you will find a full searchable English translation, just as in Paul Halsall’s Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham University). There is a PDF of the text as published in the collection Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, Giuseppe Alberigo et alii (eds.) (Basel and Freiburg 1962) 206-247, and at Documenta Catholica you will not only the Latin text, but also English and Italian translations. However, scholars dealing with medieval canon law are aware of a critical edition of these constitutions by the late Antonio García y Garcia, Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis una cum commentariis glossatorum (Città del Vaticano 1981; Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Serie A, Corpus Glossatorum, vol. 2). García y García edited also the contemporary apparatus, a scholarly commentary consisting of glosses, by Vincentius Hispanus and Johannes Teutonicus. Lateran IV is the only medieval council with a similar gloss. Almost all its constitutions were taken over in the Compilatio quarta – without c. 42 and c. 71 – and later in Gregory IX’s Liber Extra (1234), in this case without c. 42, c. 49 and most of c. 71.

Here I would like to bring to your attention RELMIN, a recently finished project in France led by John Tolan (Université de Nantes) dealing with legal texts touching upon the status and treatment of religious minorities in Southern Europe from Late Antiquity until 1500. The bilingual project website brings you to a database housed on a server of the Institut de Recherche d’Histoire des Textes. You will find here not just texts in Latin, but also in Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew and a number of medieval vernacular languages. Using the tab for authors you can find conciliar texts filed under their Latin name, all of them starting with Concilium. From the Fourth Lateran Council you will find four constitutions (nos. 67 to 70). No. 67 concerns usury and the Jews, no. 68 the distinction in cloths between Christians and Jews, no. 69 prohibits Jews – and heathen (paganos) – to fulfill public offices, and no. 70 forces converted Jews to refrain from Jewish rites.

Even if you can object that RELMIN does not do anything new by looking at these constitutions, you can benefit from the translation of the original text, a succinct commentary, the list of manuscripts used in the edition by García y García, the list of older editions of conciliar texts and the bibliography for each constitution. The recent history of the Lateran Council by R. Foreville and G. Dumeige, Les conciles de Latran I, II, III et de Latran IV: 1123, 1139, 1179, et 1215 (Paris, 2007) is duly noted. RELMIN helps you to view these and similar texts in a much larger context of time and space. For the field of medieval canon law you can see how earlier canons influenced later constitutions, decrees and decretals, and you can put them side to side with secular texts. Instead of overloading this post with much more I will add here only the titles of two online Ph.D theses which I encountered while searching for more information about the manuscript in Madrid. Both of them are well worth checking in connection with the Spanish side of Lateran IV: Lucy Kristina Pick, Christians and Jews in thirteenth-century Castile: The career and writings of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo (1209-1247) (University of Toronto, 1995) and Fátima Pavón Cazar, La imagen de la realeza castellana bajomedieval en los documentos y manoscritos [The image of late medieval Castilian kingship in documents and manuscripts] (Madrid, Universidad Complutense, 2008).

Information, knowledge and understanding

I would like to end my musings around the Fourth Lateran Council and its impact in texts and images by pointing you to the wonderful introduction to this council at the website of Kenneth Pennington (Catholic University of America). Antonio García y García contributed a chapter about Lateran IV and the canonists to the History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140-1234, Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington (eds.) (Washington, D.C., 2008) 367-378, and in the same volume Anne Duggan discussed the legislation of all four Lateran councils.

A drawing of the Council of London, 1237 – Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum , ca. 1250-1259 – London, BL, ms. Royal 14 C VII, fol. 126r

For those insisting to see here at least one of Matthew Paris’ great marginal drawings I can provide the second best thing, an image of the council of London in 1237 in the autograph manuscript of his Historia Anglorum (London, British Library, ms. Royal 14 C VII, fol. 126r). I found this colourful image using the BL’s catalogue of illuminated manuscripts.

The riches of the major portals for illuminated manuscripts at London and Paris help to fill gaps in the Index of Christian Art. In this post I hope to have shown you not just some deficiencies of this project. It is probably wiser to remind yourself of the fact no single large-scale project will be able to contain and cover everything you are looking for. ICA does contain many things not easily found elsewhere, in particular not by the online search machine of the firm seducing us to believe it can find anything. Instead of anything and everything we neeed valuable information helping to add to our knowledge, to widen our perspectives, to sharpen our minds and opening roads to true understanding.

A postscript

Not only the constitutions of Lateran IV were commented upon by medieval lawyers. The second council of Lyons (1279), too, attracted commentaries, for example by Guillaume Durand, the author of the massive encyclopedic Speculum iudiciale.

The Fourth Lateran Council – Matthew Paris, Chronica Maiora, part II – Cambridge Corpus Christi College, ms. 16-II, f. 47v (detail) – image source Parker Web, https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/qt808nj0703

Ray Lurie kindly corrected my reference to Matthew Paris’ famous image in his Chronica maiora of the Fourth Lateran Council. It can be found at the Parker website at f. 47v, not 44r. My comments about the protection of the image are now obsolete.

Since July 1, 2023 the online database of The Index of Medieval Art is free accessible. The miniature of the Fourth Lateran Council by Matthew Paris seems not – or not yet – present in this database when searching with the term council and filtering for manuscripts. On the supporting website it is quite clear work on entering index cards into the database goes on. Therefore it can still be useful to visit the copies of the original index in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Utrecht.