Pope Alexander III

The man who became Pope Alexander III was born in Siena, in Tuscany, probably in the first years of the twelfth century, and was known as Rolando ^[1]. For centuries historians identified him with Rolando Bandinelli, a member of a Sienese family, though modern scholarship has questioned the family attribution while accepting the Sienese origin and the baptismal name ^[2]. Details of his childhood are thin, as they are for most churchmen of the period, but his later career makes clear that he received a rigorous education in theology and law.

Rolando spent his formative years in the schools of northern Italy at a time when the study of canon law was being transformed at Bologna. An older tradition credited him with teaching there and with writing the legal commentary known as the Stricker and the theological treatise called the Sentences of Rolandus, though recent research has cast doubt on whether the future pope authored these works ^[2]. What is not in doubt is his reputation: contemporaries regarded him as one of the most learned men of his generation, and that reputation carried him to Rome.

Around 1150 Pope Eugenius III brought Rolando into the papal service. He rose quickly, becoming cardinal deacon and then cardinal priest of San Marco, and by 1153 he held the office of papal chancellor, the head of the curia's writing office and one of the most powerful positions in the Church ^[1].

As chancellor under Pope Adrian IV, Rolando became a central figure in the tense relationship between the papacy and the German king Frederick I, known as Barbarossa. At the imperial diet of Besançon in 1157, a papal letter was read that described the imperial crown as a beneficium conferred by the pope. In German ears the Latin word suggested a feudal grant, implying the emperor held his crown from Rome. The assembly erupted, and chronicles record that Rolando, present as legate, narrowly escaped violence from the emperor's entourage ^[3]. The episode marked him, in imperial eyes, as the leader of the anti-German party among the cardinals.

Adrian IV died on 1 September 1159, and the election that followed split the college. A clear majority of cardinals chose Rolando, who took the name Alexander III, but a smaller faction sympathetic to the emperor elected Cardinal Octavian, who called himself Victor IV ^[1]. The scene in St Peter's turned physical: partisans of Octavian reportedly seized the papal mantle during the ceremony, and both men were consecrated within weeks by their respective supporters.

Frederick Barbarossa summoned a council at Pavia in 1160 to judge between the rivals. Alexander refused to attend, arguing that no earthly power could sit in judgment on a pope, and the council, packed with imperial bishops, predictably recognized Victor IV ^[3]. Alexander excommunicated both the antipope and the emperor. The schism that began that year would last, through a succession of imperial antipopes, for almost eighteen years.

Unable to hold Rome securely, Alexander crossed the Alps and spent the years 1162 to 1165 in France, residing chiefly at Sens ^[1]. Exile proved less a defeat than a platform. The kings of France and England, along with the rulers of Spain, Sicily, Hungary, and the Latin East, recognized Alexander rather than the imperial candidates, leaving Frederick's popes with little support beyond German lands ^[4]. From France, Alexander conducted the business of the whole Church, issuing hundreds of decretal letters that answered legal questions from bishops across Europe and quietly built the framework of classical canon law ^[2].

Who was Pope Alexander III in these years of displacement? Above all a diplomat. He returned to Italy in 1165 and entered Rome, but Frederick's fourth expedition across the Alps in 1167 drove him out again. The emperor took the city and had his antipope crown him, only to watch his army collapse when an epidemic, probably malaria or dysentery, killed thousands of soldiers and many of his leading nobles within days ^[3]. Frederick retreated to Germany, and the balance began to shift.

Alexander's most effective weapon was an alliance of northern Italian cities. The communes of Lombardy, resentful of imperial taxation and interference, formed the Lombard League in 1167 with papal encouragement. In 1168 the League founded a new fortress city in Piedmont and named it Alessandria in the pope's honor, a rare tribute to a living pontiff ^[4]. On 29 May 1176 the League's infantry and cavalry defeated Frederick's army at Legnano, a battle that ended the emperor's hope of imposing his will on Italy by force ^[3].

The list of Pope Alexander III achievements begins with the settlement that ended the schism. In July 1177, in front of St Mark's basilica in Venice, Frederick Barbarossa knelt before Alexander, kissed his feet, and received the kiss of peace. The Peace of Venice restored the emperor to communion, secured a truce with the Lombard cities and the king of Sicily, and left Alexander as the sole recognized pope ^[1]. Contemporary accounts describe the ceremony as a carefully staged act of reconciliation rather than humiliation, and Alexander treated the emperor with public honor.

Two years later Alexander convened the Third Lateran Council, which met in Rome in March 1179 with roughly three hundred bishops in attendance. Its first canon, Licet de evitanda, ruled that a valid papal election required the votes of two thirds of the cardinals, removing any role for lower clergy or Roman laity and closing the loophole that had produced the schism of 1159 ^[5]. That two-thirds requirement remains the rule in papal conclaves in the twenty-first century. The council also set minimum ages for bishops, required cathedral churches to maintain a master to teach poor scholars without charge, and condemned the Cathar heresy spreading in southern France ^[5].

Alexander's decretals shaped the law of marriage for centuries. He held that the free consent of the two parties, not parental permission or ceremony, made a marriage valid, a doctrine with far-reaching social consequences across Europe ^[2]. He also reserved the canonization of saints to the papacy, moving a process once handled by local bishops into Roman hands. Among those he canonized were Edward the Confessor in 1161, Thomas Becket in 1173, and Bernard of Clairvaux in 1174 ^[6].

No episode of the pontificate is better remembered than Alexander's long entanglement with England. King Henry II sought to limit clerical privilege through the Constitutions of Clarendon in 1164, and his archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, resisted and fled to France. Alexander, himself an exile dependent on the goodwill of kings, walked a narrow line: he sheltered and supported Becket in principle while restraining the archbishop's harsher censures, hoping to avoid pushing Henry toward the imperial antipope ^[6].

The caution ended abruptly. On 29 December 1170, four of Henry's knights murdered Becket in Canterbury cathedral. The killing shocked Latin Christendom, and Alexander responded with measured severity. He canonized Becket in February 1173, barely three years after the murder, and in May 1172 his legates reconciled Henry to the Church at Avranches, where the king swore to abandon the offending customs, support the crusade, and permit appeals to Rome ^[6]. The settlement preserved the working relationship between England and the papacy while confirming the martyr's cult, which soon made Canterbury one of the great pilgrimage centers of Europe.

Alexander's handling of the affair reveals his method: patient, legalistic, willing to wait for circumstances to turn. Critics in his own time, including John of Salisbury, complained of papal hesitancy, yet the outcome delivered most of what Becket had died for without breaking the English church away from Rome ^[6].

Victory over the emperor did not give Alexander a quiet old age. The Roman commune, which had governed the city on republican lines since the 1140s, remained hostile, and the pope spent much of his final decade outside Rome, moving among the towns of Latium and Tuscany ^[1]. He briefly re-entered the city for the Lateran council of 1179, but a fresh antipope, Innocent III (not to be confused with the later great pope of that name), was set up by Roman nobles that same year. Alexander suppressed the challenge quickly, reportedly by paying off the antipope's sponsors, and confined the man to a monastery ^[4].

Administration filled these years. Alexander's chancery produced an enormous volume of letters, judgments, and privileges, and later canonists mined his decretals so heavily that he appears more often in the standard medieval collection, the Liber Extra of 1234, than any other pope ^[2]. He corresponded with rulers from Scandinavia to the crusader states, established the church province of Uppsala for Sweden in 1164, and pressed western kings, without much success, to mount a new crusade as the situation of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem worsened.

Alexander died at Civita Castellana, north of Rome, on 30 August 1181, after a reign of nearly twenty-two years, one of the longest of the medieval papacy ^[1]. His body was brought back to the Lateran for burial. Chroniclers record that some Romans, unreconciled to the end, insulted the funeral procession as it passed through the city.

Historians rank Alexander III among the most consequential popes between Gregory VII and Innocent III. He preserved the independence of the papal office against the most powerful emperor of the age, and he did it largely without armies of his own, relying on law, diplomacy, and endurance ^[4]. The scholar Marshall Baldwin devoted a full study to the pontificate, and a 2012 collection of essays edited by Peter Clarke and Anne Duggan carries the telling subtitle The Art of Survival ^[4].

The institutional legacy is concrete. The two-thirds rule for papal elections, the papal monopoly on canonization, and the consent-based law of marriage all trace to his reign, and each outlasted the medieval world that produced them ^[5]. His decretals became a foundation of the classical canon law taught in universities for centuries. Among Pope Alexander III facts often cited is that the city of Alessandria in Piedmont, today home to more than ninety thousand people, still bears his name ^[4].

Assessments of the man himself vary. Some contemporaries found him cautious to a fault, slow to strike and quick to compromise. Others, including many modern scholars, read the same record as evidence of remarkable judgment under pressure: a canon lawyer who understood that the papacy's real power lay in legitimacy and law rather than in battles it could not win ^[2]. Either way, the Church that emerged from his pontificate was more centralized, more legally coherent, and more clearly independent of the empire than the one he inherited.