(d. 1241). Pope. When Innocent III died in 1216, his successor, Honorius III (r. 1216–27), maintained a conciliatory policy toward the Hohenstaufen. This changed with the election in 1227 of Innocent’s nephew, Cardinal Ugolino, who reigned as Gregory IX. Gregory embroiled the papacy in a long-term confrontation with Emperor Frederick II, his uncle’s ward. To prevent Frederick from dominating Rome through his double heritage, imperial and Sicilian, the pope twice found reasons to excommunicate him. Gregory, at the same time, adopted his foe’s harsh measures against heretics.
This papal policy affected southern France, where in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade the Inquisition was entrusted to the new orders of friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, not the bishops, with the backing of the Capetian monarchy. (The French crown was the chief lay beneficiary of the repression of the Cathars.) As a cardinal, Gregory had been a friend of St. Francis; but he furthered the clericalization of the Friars Minor by ruling that the Testament of their founder, which forbade petitioning the pope to relax the Rule, was not legally binding on them. The key legal texts establishing the Inquisition became part of the canon law in the Liber extra, or Gregorian Decretals, which were edited by the Dominican Raymond of Peñafort from earlier collections and new decrees. This volume was promulgated by Gregory to the universities in 1234. The bull Parens scientiarum (1231) made the papacy the arbiter of institutional and doctrinal disputes concerning the University of Paris.
Brooke, Christopher. Medieval Church and Society: Collected Essays. New York: New York University Press, 1972, pp. 183–96.
Kuttner, Stephan. “Raymund of Peñafort as Editor: The decretales and constitutiones of Gregory IX.” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 2(1982):65–80.
Landini, Lawrence C. The Causes of the Clericalization of the Order of Friars Minor 1209–1260 in the Light of Early Franciscan Sources. Chicago: Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, Facultas Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 1968.
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