The church of S. Stefano Rotondo, the titular church of the biblical protomartyr Stephen and described as der letzte Großbau der Antike in Rom (‘the last grand building of antiquity in Rome’), stands atop the Caelian Hill.Footnote 1 Commissioned in the fifth century and consecrated by Pope Simplicius (r. 468–83), the church was circular in plan, having been modelled on the rotunda of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and sharing its dimensions with the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives.Footnote 2 It was embellished with marble and mosaics in the sixth and seventh centuries and repaired and restored by Pope Innocent II (r. 1130–43) in the twelfth.Footnote 3 The church was closely within the papal orbit, administered as a station church with papal liturgies traditionally held there at Christmas and Holy Week.Footnote 4 In 1144, after the completion of Innocent's restorations, his successor, Lucius II, entrusted the church to the canons of the Lateran Basilica.Footnote 5 In the fifteenth century, S. Stefano was entrusted to the Hungarian-founded Pauline Fathers, who were joined in the following century by the Hungarian Jesuits. From these, the church gained its connection with the Pontificium Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum, its modern status as the Hungarian national church in Rome (following the eighteenth-century demolition of the church of S. Stefano degli Ungheresi, to make way for the sacristy of St Peter's Basilica), and its later chapel dedicated to the eleventh-century royal saint, Stephen of Hungary.Footnote 6
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, the church's immediate royal associations seem not to have lain with Hungary, but with Ireland. This article explores those associations in three key phases from 1064–1203. The first part re-evaluates the well-known tradition of Donnchad mac Briain's royal pilgrimage and burial at S. Stefano in 1064. The second part considers the Uí Briain cultivation of the office of papal legate for its key episcopal personnel from Rath Breasail to the Treaty of Windsor (1111–75), as well as the furthering of links between S. Stefano and Ireland through the Lateran councils of 1139 and 1179. Both allowed the Munster kings to manipulate papal authority in Ireland toward their own ends, and to impress upon the papacy the claim that theirs was the royal dynasty which held legitimate claim to sovereignty in Ireland. This process, it will be argued, may have informed the papal decision to grant a crown for Ireland in 1186, as well as the early modern legend that Donnchad brought a ‘crown of Ireland’ to Rome in 1064. The third part considers the Roman clergy who held the office of papal legate with full jurisdiction in Ireland from 1151–1203, addressing the striking pattern that the three successive Roman legates after the English conquest of Ireland of 1169–75 (including, significantly, one of the legates who bore the crown of 1186 and is identified here for the first time) all held the titular dignity of cardinal priest at S. Stefano.
This pattern, of successive legates consistently sent from one titular church in Rome to one province or kingdom, appears to be without parallel in this period of papal relations with Latin Christendom. It will be argued that the popes understood some residual sense of Irish sovereignty as having been invested in S. Stefano by virtue of it possessing Donnchad's mortal remains; that they expected that claim to be taken seriously in Ireland; and, moreover, that they hoped it would enhance the prestige and reception of the associated cardinal priests as legates, as they navigated the vexed question of Irish sovereignty in the decades following 1175. In this way, Donnchad's burial informed papal communication strategies in Ireland in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The appointment of legates from S. Stefano reveals the careful interdependence of Uí Briain and papal claims regarding Irish sovereignty, the striking continuities in papal conceptualisations of its relations with Ireland after the conquest, and the high degree to which those same relations were consciously tailored to the local political environment and distinct from papal relations with England. This picture from hitherto unexplored ecclesiastical sources complements recent re-evaluation of twelfth- and thirteenth-century secular sources, which has argued that those outside Ireland conceived it as a distinct kingdom after 1175.Footnote 7
I
In 1064, or some point thereafter, Donnchad mac Briain, son and successor of Brian Bóroma, died in Rome. Donnchad had been king of Munster and claimant to the kingship of Ireland won by his father, but he had been deposed in 1063 by a coalition in favour of his nephew, Tairdelbach Ua Briain.Footnote 8 In Ireland, the respective descendants of Donnchad and Tairdelbach continued as political rivals until about 1114, at which point Tairdelbach's reigning son, Muirchertach Ua Briain, and Donnchad's grandson, Brian Gleanna Maidhir, appear to have effected a reconciliation. From that point onward, Donnchad's memory was progressively rehabilitated by those who bore the surname Ua Briain, a name which Donnchad's grandsons had notably been the first to use.Footnote 9
In the meantime, the Annals of Inisfallen record that Donnchad went on pilgrimage to Rome. The Annals of Loch Cé and Annals of Ulster add that he died there on pilgrimage.Footnote 10 The Annals of Tigernach, along with the closely related Chronicon Scotorum and the later compilatory Annals of the Four Masters, give these same details, along with the precise place and circumstances of Donnchad's death: iar m-buaidh n-aithrighe a mainistir Sdefain (‘after victory of penance in the monastery of St Stephen’).Footnote 11 A later source interpreted this penance as performed for the murder, forty years earlier, of his half-brother, Tadc.Footnote 12 A separate set of entries record, without further elaboration, the death in the same year of the Norse-Gael Echmarcach mac Ragnaill, rí Gall (‘king of the foreigners’).Footnote 13 Echmarcach had, at various points, attempted to rule the Norse-Gael territories of Dublin, Man, the Western Isles, and the Rhinns of Galloway, and was most likely Donnchad's brother-in-law. Denis Casey has suggested that Echmarch's obit in the Annals of Inisfallen, with its quieuit in Domino (‘rested in the Lord’, a phrase usually reserved for the deaths of churchmen), may suggest that he had entered clerical orders.Footnote 14 Because of the coincidence of the two former kings’ fates, and their close familial and political relationships, it has been plausibly inferred that Echmarcach went with Donnchad to Rome. This suggestion is made most clearly by the contemporary Irish continental chronicler Marianus Scottus, who regarded the men respectively as rex de Hibernia (‘king of Ireland’) and rex Innarenn (‘king of the Rhinns’).Footnote 15 In addition, the kings most probably brought Irish clerks or monks with them to Rome as part of their entourage.Footnote 16
There is additional evidence from the mid twelfth century that the king's journey and the events which precipitated it may have been known and remembered for generations after in Italy as far south as Palermo.Footnote 17 Though the specific connection of Donnchad with S. Stefano is less widely attested (and, indeed, first appears in a set of annals whose earliest surviving copy dates from the fourteenth century), the choice of penance and burial on the Caelian is plausible. S. Stefano had been built as the third largest church in Rome, equal in capacity with the Lateran Basilica, and was an important place of pilgrimage which had lodgings for travellers.Footnote 18 Among its relics, the church held an ornate marble throne reputed to be that of Gregory the Great, the sixth-century pope widely venerated for his special relationship with the insular world.Footnote 19 Though not quite the ‘monastery’ that the annals depict, S. Stefano was near an Irish monastery or church, Sancta Trinitas Scottorum (S. Trinità degli Scoti), which had been founded in Rome in the eleventh century.Footnote 20 This stood directly opposite the monastery of S. Andrea on the Caelian: a mere eight minutes’ walk from S. Stefano, no longer than the distance from S. Stefano to the Lateran.Footnote 21 S. Trinità may have already gained Gaelic royal patronage at the putative date of its foundation through Macbethad mac Findláech (Macbeth)'s visit to Rome in 1050, of which it was memorably said that the Scottish king had ‘scattered money like seed to the poor’.Footnote 22 Donnchad, for his part, may well have joined the Irish community, opting to be buried in the prestigious neighbouring basilica of S. Stefano.
Burial ad sanctos at S. Stefano had a further appropriateness for a son of Brian. Brian and his dynasty had imperial ambitions, as evidenced by the king's use of the title imperator Scottorum (‘emperor of the Irish’) and his Armagh obituary as August iartair tuaiscirt Eorpa uile (‘Augustus of the whole of north-western Europe’), dignities to which it seems Donnchad had himself aspired.Footnote 23 Brian's dynasty tried, moreover, to depict their royal progenitor as a military saint and martyr in his death at Clontarf in 1014, suffered on Good Friday at the hands of the pagan Norse.Footnote 24 Donnchad had a unique kinship with his soldier-martyr father, being credited with participation in the campaign leading up to Clontarf, sending Brian's body to Armagh for burial and leading the wounded Munstermen home.Footnote 25 S. Stefano, meanwhile, had important imperial, martial and martyr associations. Its liturgical focus was on the seventh-century oratory in whose altar were interred the relics of the martyrs Primus and Felicianus, Roman patrician soldier-saints who were said to have perished in the persecutions under the pagan emperors Diocletian and Maximian, and on whose apse were mosaics depicting the pair in military robes flanking a crux gemmata.Footnote 26 The story of the two Roman martyrs and their annual commemoration on the Caelian on 9 June were known both in Ireland and among the Irish on the continent in Donnchad's lifetime, as shown by the pair's inclusion in the Dublin and Regensburg martyrologies and an eleventh-century Schottenkloster hagiographical collection.Footnote 27 The image of Donnchad winning a victory of penance at the church of the protomartyr, alongside two of Rome's earliest military martyrs, provided an ideal mirror for Brian's death at pagan hands, as well as a fitting penitential martyrdom for the royal son who had been spared red martyrdom on the battlefield, only to be later persecuted and overthrown.Footnote 28 Donnchad would have understood the significance to his own experience as he lived out his final days. Likewise, his descendants, and the other branches of Uí Briain who cultivated his memory after 1114, would have understood the usefulness of cultivating the tradition of a penitential martyrdom at S. Stefano for their own claims to being a saintly royal dynasty, as we shall see.
Another factor should be briefly considered regarding Donnchad's decision to undertake an arduous pilgrimage to Rome in 1063–4. There existed a belief that Christ's Second Coming would take place in a year in which Good Friday fell on Lady Day, 25 March, which was expected in 1065. This belief was in part responsible for the departure for the Holy Land of the Great German Pilgrimage of 1064–5. Some 7,000 German pilgrims, led by four bishops, set out to greet Christ on his anticipated arrival at the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives.Footnote 29 The episode drew the attention of the Irish on the continent. One of the most detailed and important accounts of the German pilgrimage is that provided by Marianus Scottus, whose former abbot and archbishop, Siegfried of Mainz, had taken part.Footnote 30 Marianus’ account precedes his chronicle's obits for Donnchad and Echmarchach at the end of their journey to Rome, with the possibility that he may have seen the events as connected.Footnote 31
The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a lavish and ostentatious enterprise, involving a network of high-profile ecclesiastical and lay personages who had planned and advertised well in advance.Footnote 32 Given the Uí Briain's special devotion to Good Friday and later connections with the German church and its imperial rulers, it seems likely that Donnchad would have been aware of the pilgrimage.Footnote 33 Indeed, those German connections may be related, in some indirect way, to the late medieval traditions in which the Irish pilgrim-king was alleged to have fought on behalf of the German emperor;Footnote 34 especially as the German pilgrimage suffered repeated depredation as it took the landward route via Hungary. Nonetheless, the safer and more traditional route for northern travellers to Jerusalem involved visiting Rome before continuing from southern Italy by sea.Footnote 35 Donnchad's arrival in Rome might, therefore, have been intended as a stop in that longer journey, or perhaps simply as a similarly inspired pilgrimage by an aged pilgrim who did not feel able for the longer and more perilous journey to the East. After all, Rome, with its relics of the apostles and martyrs and its memorial churches modelled on those of Jerusalem, held a similar attraction to the Holy Land for pilgrims from northern Europe.Footnote 36 S. Stefano, identical with both the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Ascension, thus befit as a destination those who anticipated the second coming but could not travel as far as Jerusalem itself.Footnote 37 All this would seem to affirm the tradition of Donnchad opting for penance and burial at S. Stefano, where he might well expect to be among the first to rise in the Second Coming, even if he did not live to see it before his resurrection.
II
It may be the case, as Aubrey Gwynn has suggested, that Donnchad's pilgrimage sparked a mutual interest between the papacy and Uí Briain, as later reflected in the direct correspondence between Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) and Tairdelbach Ua Briain, and in the convocation of the synods of Cashel (1101) and Rath Breasail (1111), aptly inspired by Urban II's Council of Clermont (1095).Footnote 38 Whatever the cause, the twelfth century was a watershed in the exercise of papal authority in Ireland and specifically in the use of the office of papal legate. The driver of this process was arguably the longstanding Uí Briain aspiration of an Irish kingship constituted under their own dynastic rule, supported by weaponising the rhetoric of church reform and by petitioning for the appointment of loyal ecclesiastical personnel as legates with authority for all Ireland. As elsewhere in Christendom, individual legatine missions may be assigned to the categories favoured by later canon-lawyers: legati nati, legates appointed from local ecclesiastical personnel to act as papal representative in their country of origin; legati missi, appointed from the Roman clergy and sent with specific missions and limited jurisdiction; and legati a latere, appointed again from the Roman clergy but despatched with universal jurisdiction in the target territory.Footnote 39 In what appears to have been a close alliance between Uí Briain and papacy, the nature of which we can only infer from the circumstances, three Irish-born bishops, all with strong Munster connections, held consecutive authority in Ireland as legatus natus for all but three years of the seven decades from 1111–76. In effect, the Uí Briain seem to have ceded some implied sense of sovereignty over the island to the papacy, while the papacy ceded immediate authority over the Irish church to the Uí Briain. The arrangement allowed the two parties to bolster their shared objectives of church reform and to project symbolically the royal dynasty's power beyond the geographical areas of the island over which it exercised direct secular control.
Thus, in the first half of the twelfth century, the Uí Brian secured for their leading ecclesiastical subject Gilla Easpaig (Gille), bishop of Limerick (r. 1106–38), the status of legatus natus per totam Hiberniam, from c.1111–38.Footnote 40 During his visits to Rome and correspondence with the papacy, Gille would have represented the Uí Briain position on church reform and on Irish secular politics more generally. Gille's successor as legatus natus from 1139–48, Máel Máedóc (Malachy) Ua Morgair, erstwhile archbishop of Armagh (r. 1132–36) and bishop of Down (r. 1138–48), had similarly strong Munster connexions. Malachy's father had died at Mungret, one of the two great monastic schools of Munster, close to Gille's see in the Uí Briain heartlands. Malachy himself spent formative periods at Lismore, the other great school, which had important links with the Uí Briain and Meic Carthaig.Footnote 41 He closely involved himself in Munster politics in the 1120s–30s and served as confessor to Cormac mac Carthaig (d. 1138) when the latter allied his dynasty with the Uí Briain in Munster in 1127.Footnote 42 Moreover, his contentious term as archbishop involved consecration by two Munster prelates — his mentor Máel Ísu Ua hAinmire, bishop of Waterford, and the legate Gille — and was followed by two successful circuits of Munster in 1134 and 1136. Malachy was accordingly recognised in Munster but opposed in Connacht, where the Uí Conchobair had their own aspirations for the kingship of Ireland.Footnote 43 When Malachy departed in the latter half of 1138 or early 1139 for the Second Lateran Council, the Uí Briain had just returned to the overlordship of Munster under Conchobar Ua Briain, banished the leading Meic Carthaig to Leinster (after Cormac's death in 1138), and once again turned their ambitions to establishing their power over the entire island.Footnote 44
Malachy reportedly left Ireland with Gille supporting him as his legatine successor, as sure a sign as any that he had Conchobar's confidence. He travelled with at least four Irish monks as his companions, whom he left to train at Clairvaux on his return to Ireland.Footnote 45 Those who can be identified had important Munster connexions. One was Gilla Críst Ua Conairche (d. 1186), who most probably was born and died in Kerry, and who would later serve as bishop of Lismore and as legatus natus from 1151–76.Footnote 46 Another may have been Comgán (Conganus), later abbot of Suir in Waterford.Footnote 47 This group spent a month visiting Rome's holy sites and discussing the political situation of Ireland and its church, frequently and in detail, with Pope Innocent II. One may infer from the continued Irish presence on the Caelian that the Irish delegation based themselves at or near S. Trinità during and after the council, providing them with easy access to both the Lateran and S. Stefano. In addition, the cardinal priest of S. Stefano, Martino Cybo, had been a Clairvallian monk and friend of Bernard of Clairvaux: this connection probably helped further facilitate a warm reception for the delegation both at S. Stefano and from the papal curia, since Malachy had appropriately chosen to visit Clairvaux on his journey to Rome.Footnote 48 According to Bernard, the delegation made such an impression in Rome that the pontiff not only appointed Malachy legate, but gave him his own mitre, stole and maniple as a mark of esteem. They petitioned papal confirmation for Cashel's metropolitan status and would certainly have conveyed a Munster perspective to the pope.Footnote 49
The next legatus natus, Gilla Críst, received his commission from his Clairvallian confrère, Pope Eugene III (r. 1145–53), in the same year as his appointment to Lismore. A sign of the lasting Munster influence in Irish communications with the papacy can be seen at the Third Lateran Council in 1179. There, the archbishop of Dublin, Lorcán Ua Tuathail (r. 1162–80, legatus natus from 1179–80) led an Irish episcopal delegation to Rome that consisted of the archbishop of Tuam and no fewer than four Munster bishop: Constantín Ua Briain of Killaloe, Felix of Lismore, Brictius of Limerick and Augustín of Waterford. The most senior of these Munster prelates, the bishop of Killaloe, was none other than a great-grandson of Tairdelbach Ua Briain and collateral descendant of Donnchad.Footnote 50 Thus, over the seven decades covered by Ireland's long-lasting legati nati and its two conciliar delegations in Rome, each would have informed the popes of political circumstances in Ireland and reminded them of the traditional claims and aspirations of the Munster kings of Cashel to the kingship of Ireland.
These persistent ties and repeat encounters must have made it inevitable that the two parties should find common awareness of the significance of Donnchad's tomb at S. Stefano. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the popes take a renewed interest in Rome's sepulchral geography and in the symbolic potential of burials and relics within their immediate jurisdiction. Urban II (r. 1088–99) and Paschal II (r. 1099–1118) used such relics to advance expansive jurisdictional claims for the papacy, most notably in the ‘discovery’ of the Ark of the Covenant at the Lateran Basilica to assert sovereign jurisdiction over the universal Church.Footnote 51 In the 1140s, Innocent II arranged to be buried in a sarcophagus believed to have been used by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, which scholars have often taken as a conscious and overt sign of the imperial papacy.Footnote 52 Later in the decade, Eugene III arranged for the reburial of Gregory III near the altar of the canons at St Peter's and for placement of the tomb of Lucius II directly in front of the high altar of Verona's cathedral.Footnote 53 Given S. Stefano's liturgical status as a station church close to the Lateran, the papacy would, thus, have been acutely aware of any royal burial which might be affected by the repair and renovation of the basilica under Innocent.
While the renovation at S. Stefano is known only from a single source and is not dated precisely within Innocent's pontificate, its timing was nonetheless significant.Footnote 54 The Anacletan Schism had dominated Innocent's first eight years as pope until his return to Rome in 1138, prior to which the city had been under the control of the antipope Anacletus II and many of its buildings were reportedly damaged. Whether the renovation began under Anacletus or Innocent is an open question, but Innocent's attempt to take credit suggests that it was completed while he was in possession of the city, at some point from 1138–43. This would have culminated in a grand liturgical event, with the basilica's restoration symbolising the restoration of the Roman church under Innocent.Footnote 55 It seems probable that this restoration would have been completed in time for the Second Lateran Council, which symbolised the wider restoration and concluded shortly before the papal liturgy of Good Friday customarily held at S. Stefano.Footnote 56 In addition, Innocent's triumph over schism coincided with the Uí Briain triumph over the Meic Carthaig. Immediately, the Uí Briain turned their attentions to the restoration of power over the whole island, challenging the rival hegemony of the Uí Conchobair of Connacht.Footnote 57 Fittingly, the following year, the anniversary of Brian's death at Clontarf fell on Easter Sunday, a promising omen for his dynasty's passing from its tomb of Good Friday to its triumphant resurrection.
Malachy was in Rome for both dates of such providential significance to the pope and Uí Briain alike — namely, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, 1139. Given this setting, and the evidently cordial relations between Uí Briain, legate and pontiff which accompanied it, Malachy's attendance at the liturgies of Good Friday at S. Stefano and of Easter at the Lateran would have afforded ample opportunity to impress on the papacy S. Stefano's importance to his Munster patrons. Given the large Irish delegation sent to Rome and the historic generosity of Gaelic royalty toward the city, one might even tentatively suggest that the Uí Briain had sponsored the repairs at S. Stefano, to promote their own dynasty through the royal relative buried there. This is speculation, but such patronage would have afforded the Uí Briain several key means to reassert themselves and to compete with their dynastic rivals in Ireland, offering visible patronage of a church in Rome and trumping other dynasties’ patronage of the Church in the papal eye. It would have answered Cormac's decision of just a few years earlier to build his eponymous royal chapel at Cashel, a construction which had celebrated the Meic Carthaig past, announced his dynasty's return to the kingship of Cashel and dignified his future site of royal burial.Footnote 58 The renewal of S. Stefano would have countered by celebrating the Uí Briain past, announcing that dynasty's return to the kingship and dignifying Donnchad's site of royal burial. It would also have underscored Donnchad's spiritual credentials as a monastic penitent, and by extension the credentials of his dynastic successors, to rival the quasi-monastic life attributed to Cormac by his allies.Footnote 59 Finally, it would have emphasised, to the Roman Curia and any Irish pilgrims or visitors, the Uí Briain as the legitimate sovereigns of Ireland — at a time when the renascent royal dynasty were on the verge of receiving the submission of the kingdoms of Airgíalla (1140) and Dublin (1141) and of waging an ambitious campaign in Connacht (1141).Footnote 60
The symbolic potential of the renovation and liturgical celebration at S. Stefano after 1138 would not have gone unnoticed by either side. The Anacletan Schism and the Munster crisis may have appeared as secular and religious mirrors of each other, and it is surely notable that on his journeys to and from Rome, Malachy stopped twice at Clairvaux to visit Bernard, the man to whom Innocent owed his victory in the schism.Footnote 61 The Uí Briain may have latched onto the papacy's shared sense of providential triumph over division, in their hopes for a similar restoration of their own political fortunes in Ireland. Even if the Uí Briain did not directly sponsor the reconstruction at S. Stefano, they were obvious beneficiaries: the rebuilding of the house of Donnchad in Rome could easily symbolise the rebuilding of the house of Uí Briain in Ireland. The papacy in turn would have embraced the opportunity afforded by S. Stefano to renew and enhance its prestige in the Gaelic world, a cultural zone which clearly drew Innocent's special attention after the schism. David I's Scotland had been one of the most recalcitrant supporters of Anacletus and only regularised its relations with Innocent in September 1138, under the mission of Alberic, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, ‘the highest-ranking curialist to be charged with such a mission to these regions’.Footnote 62 Other parts of the Gaelic world may also have been considered supporters of the antipope before 1138. Malachy notably met with David in Scotland on both legs of his journey of c.1138–39, and there were objections from some of the Irish to the bishop setting out to meet Innocent, the exact details of which are now hidden to us.Footnote 63 Innocent's renovations at S. Stefano may, thus, be read as papal outreach to another rising royal power within the Gaelic world. That outreach may perhaps have emphasised the marble throne of Gregory the Great in asserting papal claims over the insular world, while arguably also, in the case of Donnchad's burial, tapping into the Irish sense of the office of comarb as successor to the man whose mortal relics it held as custodian.Footnote 64 All this suggests ways in which Donnchad and S. Stefano may not only have played a transformative role in Hiberno-Papal relations in the second quarter of the twelfth century, but also became an enduring symbol of Irish sovereignty to papal eyes.Footnote 65
Later tradition certainly assigned Donnchad and S. Stefano a critical posthumous role in papal interventions in Ireland. By the early seventeenth century, S. Stefano had gained legendary associations with Irish sovereignty. Conall Mag Eochagáin's Annals of Clonmacnoise, translated from a now-lost set of Irish annals, and Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn both claimed that Donnchad died at S. Stefano. Mag Eochagáin additionally claimed that Donnchad had brought with him the crown of Ireland and given it to the popes, with whom it purportedly remained until Adrian IV (r. 1154–59) gave it to Henry II when authorising his conquest of Ireland. Keating recorded further traditions regarding Donnchad's final years and aftermath: that the king took up with a daughter of the German emperor on his arrival in Rome (which he considered improbable); and that the nobles of Ireland, divided from the time of Brian to Donnchad as to who should rule them, surrendered the sovereignty of Ireland to Urban II in 1092.Footnote 66 In these ways, S. Stefano came to be regarded in legend as a decisive link in the papal politics of the invasion and Irish sovereignty.
Breandán Ó Buachalla and Denis Casey have written expertly regarding the legend's meaning for its late medieval and early modern audiences. Although some aspects, such as the link between Donnchad and the emperor, have been traced to the bardic poetry of the fourteenth century, historians have generally assumed that the association of Donnchad with a physical crown is a late fiction.Footnote 67 Nonetheless, the legend does suggest distorted echoes of certain important, later twelfth-century realities. In 1186, Pope Urban III sent a crown of gold-embroidered peacocks’ feathers to Henry II for the intended (but never realised) coronation of his son John as king of Ireland.Footnote 68 This crown, it will be argued below, may well have been brought to England by a cardinal priest of S. Stefano with full legatine authority in Ireland. We may briefly take stock of the implied connection of these two historical circumstances: the burial place of the Irish king Donnchad in Rome and a crown for Ireland sent by the short-reigning Urban III. It is conceivable that a confusion regarding these genuine historical links may have given rise to the legendary association of the crown with Urban's more famous (and, to Donnchad, more temporally proximate) predecessor and namesake, Urban II. That John's coronation had been widely discussed, but never ultimately occurred, would only have added to later confusion.Footnote 69 For all that, the intention of the papacy to associate symbolically an invented crown with Donnchad's burial-place in Rome may well have been original to the twelfth century. The ‘legend’ would still be a late development, by about a century or so from the original burial, albeit not as late or as baseless as sometimes supposed.
If the papacy was making a deliberate connexion between the crown of 1186 and the burial place of Donnchad, this may have itself been a consequence of the ideological experiments in Irish kingship by the twelfth-century Uí Briain and Meic Carthaig, which their representatives would have projected in Rome. In his De statu ecclesiae, Gille claimed that it was the prerogative of an archbishop to place the crown on the head of a king at the three crown-wearing festivals of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun.Footnote 70 While Gille's idea of crown-wearing kings may have been a foreign import, it is one which was likely to have impressed his Uí Briain patrons. It would have added importance to the Uí Briain quest for recognition of Cashel's archiepiscopal status in the early twelfth century and for papal confirmation of its metropolitan dignity in 1139. That key symbol of kingship, thus, stemmed from the church and so ultimately from Rome. The idea of a royal inauguration with a diadem is notably present in Caithréim Cheallachán Chaisil, a propaganda tract concerning the Meic Carthaig's ancestor, commissioned by Cormac in c.1128–31. Such a ceremony would have been quite sophisticated for Cormac's time, and Henry A. Jefferies has identified it as an innovation of Cormac's own inauguration in 1123. The inauguration was modelled on that of the German emperor and was designed to underscore the subordinateness of the individual crowned, as the crown was voluntarily bestowed by the sub-kings who had chosen him.Footnote 71
This ideology resembles Keating's imagined ideal of the Irish nobles of Donnchad's time choosing who should rule over them, and the underlying German model is a curious coincidence with Keating's image of Donnchad taking up with a daughter of the emperor. This legendary reflex may not be wholly accidental, as both Munster dynasties maintained close connections with Germany in the twelfth century, and under their political settlement of the 1120s the Munster kingship was intended to alternate between the Uí Briain and Meic Carthaig.Footnote 72 The Uí Briain should, thus, have been just as associated with the imported ceremony as their rivals. In any case, Gille's account and Cormac's coronation show the sophistication of the ideas of the Munster kingship which had developed by the early twelfth century, during Gille's term as legate and in the decades before Malachy and Gilla Críst's journey to Rome.Footnote 73 These ideas had important implications for the Irish high kingship to which the Uí Briain aspired. They also show how those same ideas of kingship might have been transmitted to Rome and understood by the popes.
III
In addition to the legati nati, who served the two masters of king and pope so deftly in the first three quarters of the twelfth century, four or five papal legates from the long twelfth century may be considered legati a latere in Ireland. The first and most famous, John Paparo (1150–52), illustrates the degree to which the popes had become conscious of status in their legates’ dealings with kingdoms on the papal periphery. John had been cardinal deacon of S. Adriano since 1143 when he was despatched to Ireland in 1150. He was a close relative of the late Innocent II, had been involved in high-profile negotiations with the king of France on behalf of Eugene III, and his church was prestigious as the former site of the Curia Julia and thus the Roman Senate. Nonetheless, his travel to Ireland was refused by King Stephen of England. Cardinal Paparo had to return prematurely to Rome. It was only once he had been elevated cardinal priest of S. Lorenzo in Damaso, in 1151, and returned in the company of the newly consecrated Irish bishop and legatus natus, Gilla Críst, that he was able to pass to Ireland.Footnote 74 From this point, according to John of Salisbury's Historia pontificalis, the popes ‘would not give the Irish legation to anyone who was not a priest’.Footnote 75 Evidently, the popes understood the symbolic importance of status within the Roman hierarchy to the peripheries of Christendom and expected it to be taken seriously while pursuing their grander objectives.
An entry in the Annals of Inisfallen reports the arrival of a Cardinal John in Ireland in 1166, without further elaboration. The status of this otherwise unattested claim has been uncertain. Because the entry appears in an Anglo-Irish hand of the fourteenth century, it was dismissed by its modern editor as a misplacement of John Paparo's 1151 legation and seems not to have received subsequent scholarly attention.Footnote 76 If the claim is authentic, however, the most plausible candidates for an identification may be John of Sutri, cardinal priest of SS. Giovanni e Paolo al Celio, or John of Naples, cardinal priest of S. Anastasia al Palatino.Footnote 77 The titular churches of both stood near the Irish community of the Caelian. SS. Giovanni e Paolo stood immediately between S. Trinità and S. Stefano, of which the latter title appears to have been vacant since 1159 and may have fallen thereby under John of Sutri's temporary responsibility as the Caelian's presiding cardinal.Footnote 78 S. Anastasia on the Palatine Hill, for its part, was separated from S. Trinità only by the length of the Circus Maximus. A legation in c.1166 would fit well with Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair's assumption of the Irish kingship in that year and with the synods of Lismore in 1166 or Áth Buide Tlachtga (Athboy) in 1167, the latter of which was convened to approve the political settlement.Footnote 79 The ecclesiastical and secular importance of either synod could well have merited a legatus a latere, while remaining consistent with the broader patterns of twelfth-century papal legation in Ireland.
Of the later legati a latere, two, Vivian (1176–7) and John of Salerno (1201–03), were certainly cardinal priests of S. Stefano.Footnote 80 A further legate, Octavian, cardinal deacon of SS. Sergio e Baccho, is often cited as legatus a latere for Ireland (1186). However, his grade was only that of deacon, rather than priest, and Flanagan has noted that he only went as far as England and never reached Ireland.Footnote 81 Indeed, it would have been unusual if he had. As Flanagan has observed:
Ireland had never shared a papal legate with England before Henry II's intervention there, and this policy was not altered after 1172. In 1176 a new geographical area was created for the purpose of legatine missions from Rome when Ireland was joined to Scotland, the Scottish Isles and the Isle of Man.Footnote 82
There is the intriguing, but hitherto unnoticed, possibility that another cardinal priest of S. Stefano, Gerard d'Autun, may have accompanied Octavian in 1186 and acted as legatus a latere in Ireland.Footnote 83 The case for this will be argued and expanded more fully below.
The remaining non-resident legates sent to Ireland in the period were mere legati missi. A group of unnamed envoys were sent to Britain and Ireland in 1161 to announce the Council of Tours.Footnote 84 Peter of St Agatha (1178) was a simple envoy sent to Ireland and Scotland to announce the Third Lateran Council, who was accompanied as far as England by the Roman subdeacon Albert de Suma, who held the same mission for England.Footnote 85 Alexis (1180) was a Roman subdeacon whose main mission was to Scotland, with secondary power to negotiate in Ireland between Henry and the Irish.Footnote 86 The jurisdiction, scope and status of these papal representatives’ respective missions in Ireland, compared with the legati a latere, were, therefore, limited. In addition, there were doubtless assisting legates from individual Roman churches who were not mentioned in the incomplete records of individual missions, as legati often travelled in pairs or in larger clerical parties. Much of what we know of individual missions rests on chance survivals. For example, much of Vivian and Octavian's missions is known ‘almost exclusively’ from the twelfth-century English chronicler Roger of Howden, while the envoys of 1161 are known only from a retrospective papal letter to Donnchad Ua Cerbaill, king of Airgialla.Footnote 87 There may well have been other missions for which evidence has been lost entirely.Footnote 88
Notwithstanding the incomplete nature of the surviving evidence, this short survey gives a clear impression of three or four consecutive legati a latere to Ireland having close connections with the communities of the Caelian, and of all the legati a latere sent after the arrival of Henry II in 1171 and the Treaty of Windsor in 1175 holding the title of S. Stefano. Such apparent consistency of a single church with responsibility for the island, or at least for the most politically and symbolically important of the papal missions to that island in the decades after the conquest, is striking. There is no parallel among the legates to England in the same period, and quite possibly none elsewhere in Christendom.Footnote 89 To assess the precise prominence of S. Stefano among the legates to Ireland, and vice versa, it is worth surveying the legations of its cardinal priests elsewhere.
Prior to the mission of Vivian in 1176–7, the cardinal priests of S. Stefano seem to have acted as legates principally in Germany and Scandinavia. This was, in effect, the extended ‘German’ church. The Scandinavian sees had been set up through the Christianising missions of the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen, which claimed metropolitan rights over Scandinavia (not always successfully) into the mid twelfth century, and there was important overlap in the German imperial and Danish royal courts.Footnote 90 Among the earlier twelfth-century cardinal priests who presided at S. Stefano, one finds Sasso (r. 1117/20–32) as legate in Germany in 1122, the aforementioned Martino Cybo (r. 1132–42) as legate in Denmark in 1133, Raniero (r. 1143–4) and Villano Gaetani (r. 1144–6) with no recorded legations, and Gerardo (r. 1150–59) as legate in Siena and, tentatively, Germany.Footnote 91
From 1176, Ireland and Scotland enter the mix, though the legations from S. Stefano to Germany and Scandinavia continued. Vivian was appointed legate in Ireland, Scotland, Norway and their surrounding islands, though he did not actually visit Scandinavia.Footnote 92 This expansive jurisdiction may have been intended to avoid any difficulties in Man and the Isles (which Vivian visited, and which were nominally subject to the archbishops of Trondheim), and perhaps additionally in Dublin, whose overthrown rulers had held strong political links with the wider Norse world. John of Salerno travelled as legate to Germany in 1195–6 and Terra di Lavoro and Sicily in 1198–9, both times in the company of other legates.Footnote 93 John was a native of southern Italy and, thus, of the kingdom of Sicily, so his participation in legations in familiar territory may have been an outlier, specific to his cultural background and personal experience rather than part of a broader pattern. It should be noted, however, that from 1194, Sicily had also become a subject of the Hohenstaufen emperor; in 1197, it passed to his infant son, who had been crowned the previous year as king of the Romans and was at the centre of the German throne dispute. Thus, John's first two legatine missions concerned German rulers. John's later legation to Ireland and Scotland in 1201–03 passed through England, though it has been argued that his brief interventions in two ecclesiastical cases in England did not stem from holding any legatine commission for the latter country.Footnote 94 John's activities in Ireland and Scotland comprised the sole mission in which he seems to have acted alone, without the accompaniment of other legates.
The impression from the long twelfth century, then, is of two key patterns. One is that the cardinals of S. Stefano acted consistently in this century as legates to German or Scandinavian rulers and their subjects, which variously included the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, the Isles and Sicily. The other pattern is that, from 1176, they acted additionally in Ireland, Scotland and the Isles. One should be wary in studies of the medieval papacy of overreading the circumstances and limited documentary evidence: of imposing an ahistorical sense of pattern or ‘policy’ on papal actions towards the peripheries, which might more accurately be seen as a series of ad hoc reactions to events. Nonetheless, even as a series of ad hoc reactions, the discernible pattern of northern legations from S. Stefano invites an attempt at explanation. Moreover, if an experiment was deemed successful, it was likely to be repeated.
One possible explanation is that S. Stefano had, by the twelfth century, acquired links with the lands in question through the Gaelic, German and Norse (including Hiberno-Norse) pilgrims who visited it. Its personnel might, therefore, have been deemed to have suitable experience in dealing with those peoples. For comparison, one may note the pragmatism of the patriarchate of Jerusalem prior to the Crusades, where the patriarch made use of monks from his patriarchate's Latin churches and churches experienced in dealing with Latin pilgrims to serve as envoys to the pope and Latin Christendom.Footnote 95 It might additionally have been anticipated that a legate who bore the title of S. Stefano would have attracted greater recognition and prestige in its pilgrims’ respective homelands. Cultural background or experience may have marked certain legates as particularly suited to their missions. Vivian was a skilled administrator and subtle canon lawyer, who had been involved in the Becket dispute and served alongside the Roman subdeacon Gratian as papal envoy to Henry II in Normandy in 1169.Footnote 96 Gerard d'Autun was French (probably Burgundian), which might have been considered an advantage in dealing with the expanding francophone elites in Ireland, and he had been present at Henry's compurgation at the council of Avranches in 1172.Footnote 97 John came from Salerno and had been a monk of Monte Cassino, which could easily account for his mission in southern Italy. Aside from these three legates, however, none of the cardinal priests of S. Stefano mentioned seem to have held any obvious, pre-existing, personal links of significance with the territories to which they were sent as legates. Indeed, apart from Gerard, all of them appear to have been Italian. Their connection was more likely to have been through the pilgrims they met at S. Stefano and the status that that title carried. In the Irish case, the proximity of S. Trinità would have given the cardinal priests and canons of S. Stefano an unusual level of exposure to the Irish, their language and their customs. The prestige conferred by Donnchad's royal burial may also have meant that each of its legates could expect to be treated in Ireland as an honoured custodian, confrère or comarb of the late, penitent king.
Perhaps more importantly, the despatch of the later legates from S. Stefano to Ireland coincided with a key period of contestation of Irish sovereignty which followed the English invasion and the Treaty of Windsor in 1175. By this time, following the apparent failure of the Ua Conchobair bid for the Irish kingship in 1166–7, the papacy may have accepted the Uí Briain propagandistic position that Ireland had not had an undisputed king over the whole island since Brian over a century and a half earlier. The changed circumstances, meanwhile, required the papacy to underwrite English sovereign claims in Ireland. To do this, it needed to make use of suitable legates. Until his resignation due to old age and infirmity in c.1176, the papal legate charged with garnering support for Henry in Ireland was the legatus natus Gilla Críst.Footnote 98 Gilla Críst had communicated his intent to resign a year earlier, in a letter to Alexander III written on his behalf by Henry Macilly, a fellow Cistercian abbot who shared a former teacher in Bernard of Clairvaux. This letter was borne by the unnamed man whom Gilla Críst recommended to replace him as bishop of Lismore, perhaps Felix of Lismore.Footnote 99 It does not say whether Gilla Críst additionally intended for the new bishop-elect to succeed him as legate. If he did, his recommendation was not followed. On the other hand, it may be that the papal curia's appointment of Gilla Críst's legatine successor followed oral recommendations that Felix could have delivered on Gilla Críst's behalf, regarding the political situation in Ireland and the symbolism and suitability of a potential successor.
In either case, the curia's response was swift and decisive. Alexander chose the former archdeacon of Ovieto and recently created cardinal deacon of S. Nicola in Carcere, a man known for his prior dealings with Henry. This deacon was promptly elevated cardinal priest of S. Stefano, no later than November 1175, and sent to Ireland and Scotland in spring 1176 on his first mission post-elevation. He arrived in England, without a royal licence, on 22 July 1176.Footnote 100 That man was Cardinal Vivian. The inclusion of Scotland in his mandate was a response to Scottish envoys sent to the papal curia in early 1176, who had requested immediate intervention in a dispute between the Scottish church and the archbishop of York.Footnote 101 However, the short time between Vivian's earlier elevation and departure on a mission to Ireland, and the timing of the sovereignty question there, show that his despatch also followed quickly on Gilla Críst's letter, and that appointment to S. Stefano may have been deemed integral to the success of the legate's mission. The significance of Vivian's elevation as cardinal priest would have been all the greater if one accepts the suggestion that he had already been appointed cardinal deacon earlier in 1175, before news of Gilla Críst's intended resignation had reached Rome.Footnote 102 Gilla Críst's commission was, thus, inaugurated and concluded by two legati a latere: Paparo in 1151 and Vivian in 1176. It was a critical juncture in the history of legatine relations with Ireland and its new rulers. At this point, we may more closely examine the three non-resident missions to Ireland with full legatine powers from 1176–1203.
Vivian convened a Dublin synod in 1177 to proclaim Henry's claim to Ireland and the papal confirmation thereof, threatening excommunication against those clergy and laity who disobeyed.Footnote 103 He also allowed the bacall Ísa, the reputed staff of Jesus and crozier of St Patrick which had been captured during John de Courcy's conquest of Ulster earlier that year, to be kept in Dublin as a reminder of the English victory and of the primatial claims of Dublin.Footnote 104 In the same year, the king petitioned the pope to provide his son John with a crown. Although it was not granted on that occasion, a crown was later brought as far as England, according to Roger of Howden, by the legate Octavian in 1186.Footnote 105 Octavian's mission has been considered problematic. Given his diaconal status and the fact that he never actually arrived in Ireland, Octavian is perhaps best regarded as a mere legatus missus, at least as far as Ireland is concerned.Footnote 106 There was, however, a Roman cleric named Gerard known to have been in Ireland on legatine business, at the Lent synod convened in Dublin in 1186. This Gerard is only known thanks to a throwaway remark by Gerald of Wales, but again, such chance survival is typical of our knowledge of legates in Ireland.Footnote 107 Flanagan plausibly suggested in an endnote that this otherwise unidentified legate, of unknown affiliation and unspecified mission, ‘may have been attached to the party of Octavian and may have journeyed on to Ireland after Octavian left with Henry II for Normandy’.Footnote 108 If he did so, he arrived after John's failed expedition of 1185, which had been intended to lead to the prince's coronation.
The wily Gerald, who certainly knew the circumstances, evasively refers to Gerard only as ecclesiae Romanae clerico, tunc ad partes illas legationis cuiusdam vice transmisso (‘a cleric of the Roman church, then on some mission or other in those parts’). Nevertheless, in the same sentence, Gerald juxtaposes this studied ambiguity with a discussion of martyri corona (‘the crown of martyrdom’): perhaps an ironic and winking reference, for his knowing audience, to the failure of the coronation plans that apparently lay behind the legate's mission.Footnote 109 Our only other concrete, if incidental, detail is that Gerald considered Gerard an authority on martyrs and Ireland's purported lack thereof. This impression would have been eminently fitting if Gerard was attached to a Roman martyr church. While S. Stefano was by no means the only martyr church in Rome, the association of the protomartyr gave it a special eminence, and it is a striking coincidence that the Greek name of the protomartyr, Στέφανος (Stéphanos) — as Gerald and his readers would have known from Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae — itself means ‘crowned’.Footnote 110
No scholar to date has attempted a formal identification of this ecclesiae Romanae clericus with the members of the Roman clergy known from the modern lists of cardinals for this period. These lists offer two potential candidates for an identification. One is Gerardo Allucingoli, an Italian created cardinal deacon of S. Adriano in the consistory celebrated in mid-1182. This Gerardo served alongside Octavian in Umbria as a legate of the previous pontiff, Lucius III, and he notably held the same deaconry that John Paparo had held when he was first sent to Ireland in 1150. There is, however, no record that Gerardo travelled to Ireland. Nor was he likely to have had the occasion to undertake such a distant mission outside Italy in 1186, as he seems to have been busy serving in Italy as vicar of Lucius and Urban III from 1184–8, for which he subscribed papal bulls issued between 17 March 1185 and 12 June 1189.Footnote 111 Moreover, Gerardo's status of cardinal deacon notably fell short of the important precedent — set by Eugene III's earlier papal prescription of 1151, and later followed by John Paparo's, Vivian's and John of Salerno's respective legations — that all subsequent legati a latere appointed for Ireland must be cardinal priests. The papal curia would surely have recalled the difficulties that the last cardinal deacon of S. Adriano had faced on his journey north, and it would not want to be burned twice.
The second candidate, who did hold the necessary status of cardinal priest, offers a more positive identification with a legatine mission to Ireland. The sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican scholar Alphonsus Ciacconius (Alfonso Chacón) claimed that one Gerard, archdeacon of Autun and cardinal priest of S. Stefano, acted as legate in Ireland, Scotland and Norway. This important piece of early modern evidence has been overlooked. Ciacconius believed that this Gerard was created cardinal in 1173, appointed legate in 1175 and died at some point after 1176, apparently identifying his legation with that which Roger of Howden attributed to Vivian in 1176.Footnote 112 Ciacconius gives no indication of having known Gerald's account of the mission of 1186. Gerard's supposed legation of 1175/6 seems prima facie impossible, as there could not have been two cardinal priests of S. Stefano on the same mission (as titular churches could not be shared by two cardinals), for which Vivian is clearly the better documented candidate. If Gerard did accompany Vivian in 1176, then it was not as cardinal priest of S. Stefano. One possibility, following the seventeenth-century Italian Cistercian scholar Ferdinando Ughelli, is that Gerard resigned his title in 1175.Footnote 113 This would have allowed Vivian to succeed him in late 1175, and then (perhaps) for Gerard to join the mission to Ireland of 1176 under him: a somewhat convoluted explanation, but one which might emphasise the importance of combining Vivian's experience in dealing with Henry with the title of S. Stefano. This is not, however, the only possibility. In the eighteenth century, the Italian historian Lorenzo Cardella observed, with some confusion and admitted scepticism at the apparent contradiction, that Ciacconius had earlier assigned Gerard's elevation to S. Stefano to the group of cardinals created in 1179/80.Footnote 114 Evidently, Gerard's early modern biographers were unable to disentangle fully whatever incomplete or conflicting source materials they had at their disposal. It may be that the earlier date for Gerard's elevation to S. Stefano was simply based on the identification of Gerard's mission with Vivian's mission, by early modern scholars who knew Roger of Howden's account of the latter but not Gerald of Wales’ account of the former, and that Ciacconius and his successors never resolved the contradiction. There is a gap in the record of cardinal priests at S. Stefano between the appointments of Vivian in 1175 and John of Salerno in 1190. Vivian himself had apparently died by 1185.Footnote 115 If a late date for Gerard's elevation is correct, and he succeeded Vivian at S. Stefano in the 1180s as suggested, then he would appear a strong candidate to have been the same Gerard who travelled to Dublin for the Lent Synod of 1186, after Octavian's departure from England.
There is no other Gerard at that time among the senior Roman clergy of the status of cardinal priest required by the earlier prescriptions of Eugene III who fits the dates or circumstances of the mission of 1186. That mission, if it originally involved Gerard (d'Autun) bringing a crown from S. Stefano to coincide with Prince John's expedition to Ireland, would, thus, have been intimately linked with the question of Irish sovereignty. It seems probable that Octavian and Gerard travelled together as far as England and that Gerard continued to Ireland when Octavian departed for Normandy. That Octavian entered the historical record by remaining with Henry and his court, and Gerard nearly escaped it by travelling to Ireland, is surely another indicator of both the partial nature and Anglocentric focus of the chronicle sources which contain the main surviving records of legatine missions to Britain and Ireland.
As noted, the legates of 1178 and 1180 had more limited objectives. By the time John of Salerno arrived in Ireland in 1202, however, his legation was intimately focused again on the delicate question of Irish sovereignty. The most important issue was a disputed election to the see of Armagh, perceived in Rome as having been driven by national animosities between the Irish and English in Ireland. John also convened separate synods in Athlone and Dublin, which followed Innocent III's policy of recognising the kingdom of Connacht as a separate entity.Footnote 116
Thus, the legations of Vivian, Gerard, and John came in this post-invasion setting in which the sovereignty of Ireland was still highly contested, and the legates were especially concerned with the sovereignty question. The appointment of legates from the church which held the remains of the heir to the last undisputed king of Ireland, in 1176, 1186 and 1201, could easily have been a deliberate, symbolic move to reinforce the papacy's right to intervene and adjudicate the question of Irish sovereignty. It seems to have rested on the assumption that some residual claim to Irish sovereignty, however vaguely defined, had been invested in S. Stefano and in its presiding clergy by Donnchad's royal penance and burial there. Such an assumption would be consistent with the papal rhetorical strategy elsewhere of using burials and relics held within Rome to advance its jurisdictional claims. The papacy might have taken its cue for the anticipated usefulness of Donnchad and S. Stefano in this context from the close cooperation of the Uí Briain in church reform in the first half of the twelfth century, their consciousness of the sepulchral geography of S. Stefano heightened by the (perhaps Uí Briain-sponsored) renovations of the 1130s–40s and the information they received from the legati nati. In a sense, by the mid twelfth century, Uí Briain propaganda concerning the kingship of Ireland had ‘won out’ in Rome, at least in so far as the papacy had accepted that ideology from the dynasty and its representatives as something sufficiently plausible to be repurposed to suit its own ends. In the latter half of the twelfth century, the popes might reasonably have expected the appointment of legates from S. Stefano to lend their representatives a greater prestige in Ireland and to enhance respect toward their claims to dispose issues affecting Irish sovereignty, once the invasion had inexorably drawn them into those issues.
There is a final factor to consider, which can be seen through a brief but careful analogy with the papacy's treatment of Ireland's largest neighbour. Earlier in the twelfth century, England had been effectively closed to non-resident legates. Of the nine such legations despatched to England in the reign of Henry I (1100–35), only one, John of Crema (1125), was able effectively to exercise his legatine authority.Footnote 117 Later, John Paparo was refused passage to Ireland through England and had to journey instead through Scotland. Vivian was permitted passage through England to Scotland and Ireland only after swearing to do nothing to undermine the king. Peter of St Agatha had to make the same oath and swear additionally to return via England.Footnote 118 Octavian's arrival in the province of Canterbury and use of papal insignia there inspired such anxiety in its archbishop that the legate was effectively ushered out of the realm soon after his arrival.Footnote 119 Those opposed to the intrusion of papal legates in England claimed they were only upholding prior custom: the kings of England were wary of permitting legates to enter their realm, while the archbishops of Canterbury zealously guarded their privilege of acting as resident legates without interference. The papacy fully understood the dangers and sought to assert its principle. It may be argued that the use of legates of S. Stefano in dealing with Ireland was designed partly to prevent the English claim of such custom applying in Ireland: by insinuating a prior papal right to exercise sovereign authority in Ireland through an invocation of Donnchad's earlier, sovereign claim at S. Stefano. In addition, there was a reminder of the Becket dispute. Becket had pointedly celebrated the liturgy of the protomartyr Stephen at Henry II's Council of Northampton, a few short days before going into his first exile in 1164.Footnote 120 The delegation of cardinal priests of S. Stefano to Ireland arguably carried that same connotation of martyrdom, as a pointed warning to the English king not to interfere with their appointed task. It seems that this point was not lost on Gerald of Wales nor on the Irish bishops who attended the legatine synod of 1186, and one can only assume that neither was it lost on the attendees of the legatine synods of 1177 and 1201–02.Footnote 121 The legates and the crown sent from S. Stefano were sent to assert and reinforce Henry's claim over Ireland, but they were also intended to define and circumscribe it within its proper limits. Secular authority over Ireland and the Irish church was being transferred to Henry and his successors, but the popes were careful to make clear that it remained a delegated and conditional authority, which rested ultimately on a papal sovereign claim.
Nonetheless, changes at S. Stefano at the end of the period may reflect a later shift in papal attitudes toward Ireland. In 1212, a decade after John of Salerno had departed Ireland, Innocent III assigned the title of cardinal priest of S. Stefano for the first time to an Englishman, the Paris-trained theologian Robert de Courçon (r. 1212–19). Robert's term as legate in Normandy saw him preach the crusades and negotiate the 1214 armistice between kings John of England and Philip II of France after the Battle of Bouvines. He never travelled to Ireland.Footnote 122 In Robert's person, we see S. Stefano pass firmly to an Englishman, and with it, perhaps, the immediate Irish claim to sovereignty in the eyes of the medieval papacy.
In conclusion, the despatch of cardinal legates from the site of Donnchad mac Briain's burial reveals a decades-long experiment in papal legation that appears to have been conscious, consistent, and, above all, unique to Ireland: one which allowed a series of popes to claim to dispose matters of Irish sovereignty in the latter half of the twelfth century, while circumscribing the terms of English rule in Ireland within their acceptable limits. This evidence reveals the sensitive care with which the papacy tailored its outward communication to local circumstances, as well as the extent to which it understood, and took seriously, the Ireland kingship of in traditional Irish terms. Such care was only possible after generations of sustained contact and mutual cultivation of the ideologies of royal and legatine office between Ireland and Rome. This important Uí Briain legacy, which outlasted the dynasty's own kingship, may in turn provide the key to those later traditions concerning Donnchad and the ‘crown of Ireland’ that have puzzled historians for the last four centuries or more.Footnote 123
