authority came under attack and contemporaries were increasingly struck by the worldliness and wealth of the popes and cardinals, it is tempting to speak of a 'decline of the medieval Church'. But later medieval popes and higher churchmen were no more worldly than some of their eleventh- and twelfth-century predecessors such as Odo of Bayeux or Ranulf Flambard. They were certainly highly educated men, well versed in theology and canon law, admirably fitted for the positions of authority and government which they occupied. It was not the quality or character of the Church's personnel which had changed for the worse, but the nature of the institutional Church itself. Since the aftermath of the Gregorian reforms popes had been obliged to devote an increasing proportion of their time to administrative and judicial tasks. Papal sovereignty was not only expressed in doctrinal statements, but also in the administration of justice, the issuing of judgements and arbitrations. An institution which lacked coercive force, which was highly dependent upon secular rulers to enforce its edicts and which could only establish an effective presence within the kingdoms and principalities of Europe by proxy, had necessarily to be headed by a lawyer-pope. The perils of electing a saintly hermit to the papal office were spelt out in 1294, when a divided conclave elected the recluse Pietro Morrone as Celestine V. His pontificate was a disaster, and he was forced to resign after four months.
Unworldly spirituality was thus no qualification for the supreme pontiff in the later Middle Ages. Popes might be personally ascetic and devout men, but their public lives resembled those of princes. What made their lives more difficult than they might otherwise have been was the rise of a cult of unworldly spirituality among both clergy and laity. As the Church became more temporal an institution, the quest for a purer, more apostolic expression of the Christian life became more intense. The pontificate of Innocent III ( 1198-1216) represented the summit of papal authoritarianism and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 laid down rules for the Church's conduct of its affairs and its relations with secular powers which were to determine much of its later medieval develop-
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