The legal background

It is well known that two of Eugenius III's most distinguished contemporaries wrote with some disquiet about the direction being taken by legal practice at the papal Curia. Bernard of Clairvaux, who had recruited Eugenius into the Cistercian Order in 1138, complained in ‘Five Books on Consideration’, that ‘every day the laws make a great clamour in the [papal] palace, but they are Justinian's laws, not the Lord's (quotidie perstrepunt in palatio leges, sed Iustiniani, non Domini)’; and Master Gerhoch, provost of Reichersberg (†1169), claimed (1155/6) that lawyers (legiste) were allowed so to complicate the presentation of cases heard in his presence that Eugenius and the cardinals were scarcely able to disentangle them. ‘It would then have been better’, he added, ‘if those blood-sucking dog-flies (cinomias) sent into Pharaoh's house had not been introduced into the house of Jacob’. The pure law of the Gospels was being perverted by the empty arguments of the Roman law. ‘I am amazed’, wrote Bernard, ‘how far your religious ears can bear to listen to such arguments from advocates, and the battles of words, which are more conducive to the subversion of truth than to its discovery.’