Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
descriptions of the structure of the church in the period 1073–1216 often drew an analogy with secular government. In the earliest polemic composed in defence of the reform programme of Pope Gregory VII in 1075 the learned Bernold, clerk of Constance, described the delegation of power in the church. ‘Although the pope has divided up his charge among the individual bishops, he has nevertheless in no way deprived himself of his universal and princely power; just as a king does not diminish his royal power, although he has divided up his kingdom among different dukes, counts and office-holders.’ In the far west of Christendom Bishop Gilbert of Limerick composed for his colleagues a treatise On the Condition of the Church containing diagrams in which ‘the emperor is juxtaposed to the pope, the king to the primate, the duke to the archbishop, the count to the bishop and the knight to the priest, because these personages are regarded in law as the equals of those secular men’. The sermon attributed to Pope Innocent II on the occasion of the opening of the Second Lateran Council (1139) described the obedience that all clergy owed to the pope in feudal language. ‘You recognise that Rome is the head of the world and that the high honour of an ecclesiastical office is received by the permission of the Roman pontiff, as it were by feudal law and custom: without his permission it is unlawful to hold office.’ In the opening discourse of the Third Lateran Council (1179) the canonist Rufinus, bishop of Assisi, likened the assembly to ‘the image of a most noble city, where there is a king, nobles, consuls and a throng of people’.
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