In his letter convoking the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Vineam Domini Sabaoth (19 April 1213), Pope Innocent III sought the widest possible attendance of Church dignitaries, including, for the first time, representatives from the cathedral chapters. Abbots of the monastic orders and lay envoys of the secular powers were also urged to attend. Thus the primacy of Rome as the centre of papal Christendom was to be symbolized by an ecclesiastical parliament on an unprecedented scale.
Besides the crucial issues of Church reform, the struggle against heresy, and the forthcoming crusade, the conciliar agenda also included such matters of ecclesiastical politics as the outcome of the German imperial election, the disputed primacy of the Spanish Church and the suspension of the Archbishop of Canterbury. A further vexed question involved the rights of the Count of Toulouse in the territories won by the Albigensian Crusade. All of these items of Church business influenced the geographical composition of the Fourth Lateran Council.
The gathering at Rome in November 1215 dwarfed previous Western ecumenical councils. Over 1,200 churchmen are known to have been present. Scots and Irishmen mingled with Hungarians, Poles and Sicilians. But the supposed ecumenicism and cosmopolitanism of the Fourth Lateran requires some qualification. The oriental Christians absented themselves, and the prelates from the Christian East were over-whelmingly transplanted Latins. The large delegations from Spain, Provence and England were in part motivated by specific regional concerns. Above all, the geographical distribution of the conciliar fathers reveals a Mediterranean and especially Italian numerical predominance at the Council, although Italian loyalties were fragmented and localized. The Scandinavian countries largely ignored the Council, and the politically divided German episcopate was certainly underrepresented. Not all of the bishoprics immediately subject to Rome were actually located in Italy, but the concentration of Italian churchmen at the Fourth Lateran Council perhaps helps to explain the significance of the papacy's Italian policy, both in the papal states and in southern Italy, in the course of the thirteenth century.
G. Dickson
World History
