In 1228 Gregory IX dispatched as his legate to the Spanish Peninsula the Paris theologian and Cardinal-Bishop of Sabina, John of Abbeville: the first legate sent there since before the Fourth Lateran Council and the last to come during the entire thirteenth century in the cause of ecclesiastical reform. During his stay, which lasted for some fifteen months, he held at least three councils, but of only one of these—the Lérida Council of March 1229—have the statutes come down to us intact. Though he visited Portugal as well as Castile and Aragon, this brief communication is concerned only with John's impact on the Castilian and Aragonese Churches during the central years of the century, and with a summary consideration of the quite different reception which John's reform programme received in each place.

As the legate observed, both kingdoms were virgin territory untouched by the spirit of the Fourth Lateran Council; and virgin territory they both remained for almost a decade thereafter, until 1238 when the Aragonese Church was given as its leader Pedro de Albalat, an Archbishop of Tarragona who was, in every respect, John of Abbeville's spiritual heir. For the greater part of that decade—from 1229 when Pedro was sacrist of Lérida where the legate held his council, until 1237, when John died—the two men were in touch with one another.