Pope Gregory IX

Ugolino di Conti was born in or near Anagni, a hill town southeast of Rome, most likely around 1170, though some older accounts place his birth as early as 1145 ^[1]. The town sat in the heart of papal territory and produced several popes during the medieval period. Ugolino belonged to the family of the counts of Segni, a lineage of considerable influence in the region, and he was a relative of Innocent III, one of the most powerful popes of the era. Later tradition often calls him Innocent's nephew, though the exact degree of kinship is uncertain ^[2].

He received an unusually thorough education for his time. He studied at Paris, then the leading center of theology in Europe, and acquired a strong grounding in canon law, possibly at Bologna ^[1]. Contemporaries who knew him as pope remarked on his learning, his memory for texts, and his fluency as a speaker. That combination of legal training and theological study shaped nearly everything he did in later life, from his handling of heresy to the great law code issued under his name.

Who was Pope Gregory IX before he wore the tiara? For decades he was simply Cardinal Ugolino, a churchman rising through the Roman curia on the strength of family connections and evident ability. Innocent III made him a cardinal deacon in 1198, shortly after his own election, and promoted him to cardinal bishop of Ostia and Velletri in 1206, one of the most senior positions in the college of cardinals ^[2].

As cardinal bishop of Ostia, Ugolino became one of the busiest diplomats in the papal service. Innocent III and his successor Honorius III sent him on legations to Germany and northern Italy, where he negotiated between rival claimants to the imperial throne, preached the crusade, and worked to reconcile the feuding city communes of Lombardy and Tuscany ^[1]. In 1220 he was present when Frederick II was crowned emperor in Rome, and in the years that followed he pressed Frederick repeatedly to fulfill the crusading vow the emperor had sworn years earlier ^[3].

During these same years Ugolino formed the friendship that history remembers most warmly. He became the protector and adviser of Francis of Assisi and his fast-growing brotherhood of friars. In 1220 Francis asked that the cardinal be given formal oversight of the order, and Ugolino helped guide the Franciscans through the difficult passage from a loose band of penitents into an organized religious order approved by Rome ^[4]. He performed a similar service for the communities of religious women inspired by Clare of Assisi, and he supported Dominic's new Order of Preachers as well.

Honorius III died on 18 March 1227. The next day the cardinals turned to Ugolino, by then an old man, probably in his late fifties and possibly older. He accepted with reluctance, according to the accounts of the time, and took the name Gregory IX in honor of Gregory VII, the eleventh century pope famous for asserting papal authority against emperors ^[2]. The choice of name proved prophetic.

No episode defines the Pope Gregory IX biography more sharply than his long war of wills with Emperor Frederick II. Within months of his election, Gregory faced a crisis. Frederick had finally embarked on his promised crusade in September 1227, but illness broke out in his fleet and the emperor turned back to port. Gregory, who had heard years of excuses, refused to accept the explanation and excommunicated Frederick on 29 September 1227 ^[3].

What followed embarrassed both men. Frederick sailed east anyway in 1228, still under the ban of the Church, and recovered Jerusalem for Christendom not by battle but through a negotiated treaty with the sultan al-Kamil in 1229. An excommunicated emperor had achieved what armed crusades had failed to do for decades, and Gregory found the result intolerable. While Frederick was overseas, papal troops attacked his kingdom in southern Italy. Frederick returned, drove them out, and the two sides made an uneasy peace at San Germano in 1230, where Gregory lifted the excommunication ^[3].

The truce lasted nine years. When Frederick crushed the Lombard League at the battle of Cortenuova in 1237 and moved to dominate all of Italy, Gregory concluded that papal independence itself was at stake. He excommunicated the emperor a second time on Palm Sunday 1239 and launched a propaganda war of remarkable ferocity, with each side denouncing the other in letters circulated across Europe. Gregory's chancery called Frederick a self-confessed heretic and the beast of the Apocalypse; Frederick's replied in kind ^[5]. In 1241 Gregory summoned a general council to Rome to depose the emperor. Frederick answered by force: his fleet, with allies from Pisa, captured a shipload of prelates traveling to the council at the sea battle of Giglio in May 1241, and more than a hundred churchmen were imprisoned ^[3].

Set against the noise of the imperial conflict, the lasting Pope Gregory IX achievements were legal and institutional. In 1230 he commissioned the Dominican canonist Raymond of Penyafort to gather the scattered decretal letters of the popes into a single organized collection. The result, promulgated in 1234 as the Decretals of Gregory IX (also called the Liber Extra), arranged papal law into five books and became the standard code of the Catholic Church. It remained in force until the Code of Canon Law of 1917, a run of nearly seven hundred years ^[6].

Gregory also gave permanent shape to the Church's machinery against heresy. Earlier popes had left the pursuit of heretics largely to bishops and secular rulers, with uneven and often brutal results. Beginning around 1231, Gregory issued legislation, including the bull Excommunicamus, and appointed traveling judges, drawn mainly from the Dominican and Franciscan orders, who answered directly to the papacy. Historians treat these commissions as the founding of the papal Inquisition ^[7]. In 1233 he also condemned alleged devil-worship in Germany in the bull Vox in Rama, a document that fed later European fears of secret heretical sects.

His pontificate left marks on learning and religious life as well. In 1231 the bull Parens scientiarum settled a bitter dispute between the University of Paris and the city authorities, confirming the masters' right to govern their own affairs and to suspend lectures in protest; the document earned the nickname of the university's charter of liberties ^[1]. Gregory canonized Francis of Assisi in 1228, barely two years after the saint's death, laid the foundation stone of the basilica at Assisi, and canonized Dominic in 1234 and Elizabeth of Hungary in 1235 ^[4]. He also directed the Teutonic Knights' mission in the Baltic and approved arrangements that shaped the crusades in Prussia and Livonia.

Contemporaries describe Gregory as learned, eloquent, austere in his personal habits, and startlingly energetic for a man of his age. He was also quick to anger and slow to forgive, qualities his admirers called zeal and his enemies called obstinacy ^[2]. He governed through an expanded curia and a stream of correspondence; his registers preserve thousands of letters touching nearly every kingdom in Christendom.

His relations with the city of Rome itself were stormy. The Roman commune repeatedly rose against papal rule, and Gregory was forced out of the city more than once, spending long stretches at Anagni, Rieti, Perugia, and Viterbo ^[1]. He responded with a mixture of interdicts, negotiation, and money, and never fully mastered the city.

Among the harder facts of his reign is his treatment of Jewish communities and their books. In 1239, acting on accusations brought by the convert Nicholas Donin, Gregory ordered the rulers of France, England, and the Iberian kingdoms to seize copies of the Talmud for examination on charges of blasphemy. The order led to the disputation of Paris in 1240 and, after his death, to the public burning of cartloads of Talmud manuscripts in 1242 ^[8]. At the same time, he reissued the traditional bull of papal protection for Jews, Sicut Judaeis, condemning violence against them, a combination of protection and prosecution typical of medieval papal policy.

The final year of Gregory's life was consumed by the war with Frederick. After the capture of the prelates at Giglio in May 1241, the council he had summoned could not meet, and imperial forces tightened their hold on the papal states. Frederick's armies operated within striking distance of Rome itself during the summer of 1241 ^[3].

Gregory refused every suggestion of compromise. Through the heat of the Roman August, with the city partly hostile and the enemy close, the old pope continued to issue letters and direct resistance. He died in Rome on 22 August 1241. If the conventional birth date around 1170 is right he was about seventy; older traditions that place his birth in the 1140s would make him nearly a hundred, which is one reason modern scholars prefer the later date ^[2]. He was buried in St Peter's.

His death created chaos rather than peace. The college of cardinals, reduced and partly imprisoned, was locked in a decaying Roman palace by the senator Matteo Rosso Orsini until it produced a pope, the first conclave in anything like the later sense. The man elected, Celestine IV, died within weeks, and the papal throne then stood empty for over eighteen months before the election of Innocent IV, who carried Gregory's fight against Frederick to its conclusion ^[1].

Gregory IX left the papacy stronger on paper and besieged in practice. The Decretals gave the Latin Church a workable legal code and made the pope's court the supreme tribunal of Christendom in a more systematic way than ever before; law students studied the Liber Extra for centuries, and its structure influenced European jurisprudence well beyond the Church ^[6]. Among basic Pope Gregory IX facts, this is the one with the longest reach.

The Inquisition he organized is the darker half of that inheritance. His tribunals were small and procedural by the standards of later myth, but they established the principle of centrally appointed judges of belief, an institution that would operate in various forms into the modern era and that remains one of the most criticized legacies of the medieval Church ^[7]. His campaign against the Talmud similarly set precedents that harmed Jewish communities for generations ^[8].

Historians have judged him in sharply different ways. To some he is the last great heir of Gregory VII and Innocent III, a defender of the Church's freedom against an emperor who aimed to encircle it. To others he is the pope who turned a political quarrel into a war of annihilation that damaged both papacy and empire. Almost all agree on his importance: the legal code, the Inquisition, the university privileges, and the canonization of Francis and Dominic all flowed from the same forceful, learned, unbending man ^[1]. Anyone asking what Pope Gregory IX is famous for finds the answer split between the lawbook and the battle, the friend of the friars and the scourge of Frederick.