Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Innocent III Reshapes the Church

The Fourth Lateran Council was a great assembly of the Catholic Church convened by Pope Innocent III and held in the Lateran Basilica in Rome from 11 to 30 November 1215. Its 71 decrees defined key doctrines such as transubstantiation, required every Catholic to confess once a year, ended clerical support for trial by ordeal and imposed distinctive dress on Jews and Muslims, with consequences that lasted for centuries.

Background: Innocent III’s ambitions

Innocent III, pope from 1198 to 1216, is often regarded as the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages. He intervened in the politics of England, France and the Holy Roman Empire and launched crusades in the Holy Land, against the Cathars in southern France and in Spain.

He also wanted to reform the Church from within: to improve the education and conduct of the clergy, fight heresy and prepare a new crusade after the failure of the Fourth Crusade, which had ended in the sack of Constantinople in 1204. In April 1213 he summoned a general council with the bull Vineam Domini, giving more than two years’ notice.

The council

The council opened on 11 November 1215 and held three formal sessions, on 11, 20 and 30 November. Attendance was enormous: more than 400 bishops, about 800 abbots and priors, and envoys of the Latin emperor of Constantinople, the kings of France, England, Aragon, Hungary and others. Most of the decrees had been prepared in advance by the pope and his advisers and were approved rather than debated.

The council also dealt with politics. It confirmed the deposition of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse in favour of Simon de Montfort, leader of the Albigensian Crusade, and supported Frederick II against Otto IV as emperor.

Reforming the clergy

A large share of the decrees dealt with the clergy themselves. Bishops were told to hold provincial councils every year and to appoint preachers to help them teach the faith. Every cathedral was to provide a master to teach poor clerics grammar, and every metropolitan church a teacher of theology.

Clergy were forbidden to keep concubines, hunt, frequent taverns, gamble or wear showy clothing. The council tried to limit the practice of holding several church posts at once and condemned simony, the buying and selling of church offices. It also warned against unauthorised trade in relics, banning the sale of relics and the display of new ones without papal approval. These rules were not always obeyed, but they set standards that reformers referred to for centuries.

Main decrees

• Faith (canon 1): a creed against the Cathars, stating that in the Mass the bread and wine are “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ, the first official use of the term.
• Heresy (canon 3): secular rulers were required to expel heretics from their lands, on pain of losing them.
• New orders (canon 13): no new religious rules were to be created; new communities had to adopt an approved rule. This is why the Dominicans took the Rule of Saint Augustine.
• Ordeals (canon 18): clergy were forbidden to bless trials by fire or water.
• Confession (canon 21): every Christian of the age of discretion had to confess to their own priest at least once a year and receive communion at Easter.
• Marriage (canons 50-51): the forbidden degrees of kinship were reduced from seven to four, and banns were required to prevent secret marriages.
• Jews and Muslims (canons 67-70): limits on “excessive” interest charged by Jewish lenders, a ban on Jews holding public office and a requirement that Jews and Muslims wear clothing distinguishing them from Christians.
• Crusade (canon 71): a new crusade was to set out on 1 June 1217.

Consequences

The pastoral decrees changed religious life. Yearly confession led to a flood of manuals for confessors and to new preaching, much of it by the friars. The definition of transubstantiation shaped Catholic teaching and was later a central point of dispute in the Reformation.

The end of clerical participation in ordeals forced legal systems to find new ways of deciding guilt; in England this encouraged the growth of trial by jury.

The rules on Jews had grim results. England required Jews to wear a badge from 1218, and France imposed a round badge, the rouelle, under Louis IX in 1269. Such measures contributed to growing hostility and segregation, and to expulsions such as England’s Edict of Expulsion of 1290.

Innocent III died at Perugia on 16 July 1216, less than a year after the council. The crusade it called became the Fifth Crusade, which ended in failure in Egypt in 1221.

Timeline

• 1213, 19 April: Innocent III summons the council.
• 1215, 11 November: The council opens in the Lateran Basilica.
• 1215, 30 November: Final session; the decrees are promulgated.
• 1216, 16 July: Innocent III dies at Perugia.
• 1217: The Fifth Crusade sets out.
• 1218: England requires Jews to wear a badge.

Why it matters

The Fourth Lateran Council was the high point of the medieval papacy’s power to legislate for all of Latin Christendom. Its decrees shaped Catholic worship and discipline until the Council of Trent and beyond, while its measures against Jews and heretics helped set a pattern of exclusion and persecution in medieval Europe.