The Chapter House — History for Humans

A companion to the Chapter House scenario in Ecclesiastical Politics. The game never reads this file. It's here for anyone who wants the history behind the game, before, during, or after playing it.

The short version

Hochfelden never existed. Nearly everything around it did. The scenario places an invented German cathedral chapter in the autumn of 1220 and asks it to do what real chapters did all the time: choose a bishop who would also be a prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was an unusual year to do it. Five years earlier the Fourth Lateran Council had laid down, for the first time in such detail, how a bishop must be elected. That April the young king Frederick II had confirmed the bishops of Germany in powers once reserved to kings, in return for their votes for his nine-year-old son. That November the pope crowned Frederick emperor in Rome. Between the canon law and the charters, eighteen men in a cold room still had to choose one of their own.

Cathedral chapters

A cathedral chapter was the body of clergy who served a bishop's church: its canons. The word comes from the Greek for a rule or a list, and canons were clergy enrolled on a church's list and bound by its rule. In the early Middle Ages many lived in common, sleeping in a dormitory and eating in a refectory. Over the eleventh and twelfth centuries most German chapters gave that up and divided their property into separate incomes called prebends, and canons came to live in their own houses around the cathedral close. They still sang the daily office together in choir and met in the chapter house, named for the chapter of a rule once read aloud at those meetings.

A chapter had officers, called dignities, whose titles and order varied from church to church. In German chapters the provost (Propst) usually held the first rank and the chapter's property, while the dean (Dekan) was increasingly the one who ran its daily life, its discipline, and its meetings. The cantor ruled the choir. The scholasticus ran the cathedral school, which the Fourth Lateran Council required every cathedral to keep, with a master teaching poor scholars free. The treasurer, often called the custos, kept the relics, vestments, and plate, and the cellarer kept the stores.

Canons were not monks. They took no vow of poverty, kept their own incomes, and came from the world around them, often from the families who held land near the cathedral. By 1200 noble houses treated many German prebends as places for younger sons, and over the thirteenth century some great chapters would close their doors to all but the nobly born. Others still made room for talent raised in the cathedral school. Not every canon lived at the cathedral, either: some were away at a university, at a royal or papal court, or on the chapter's business, and arguments about residence never ended.

Electing a bishop

In the early Church a bishop was chosen by the clergy and people of his city. In the Empire, kings came to have the decisive say, investing bishops with the ring and staff of their office. The long struggle over that practice ended in the Concordat of Worms (1122). The emperor gave up investiture with ring and staff and allowed canonical election. In Germany the elect would then receive the regalia from the king by the touch of a scepter, and only then be consecrated. The regalia were the lands, rights, and jurisdictions a bishop held from the Crown.

Over the twelfth century the electors narrowed from the clergy and leading laymen of a diocese to the cathedral chapter alone. In 1213, in the Golden Bull of Eger, Frederick II promised the German chapters free elections, freedom of appeal to Rome, and an end to the Crown's old claims on a dead bishop's goods and on the revenues of a vacant see.

The Church set its own rules. The Third Lateran Council (1179) required that a bishop be at least thirty, born in wedlock, and commendable in life and learning, and anyone who knowingly voted for a man who wasn't lost his vote. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), under Innocent III, went further:

• Three months. A cathedral must not be without a bishop longer than three months. If the chapter failed to elect in that time without good cause, it lost the right for that vacancy, and the immediate superior, usually the archbishop, would provide a bishop with the chapter's advice (canon 23).
• Three forms. An election was valid only by scrutiny, compromise, or quasi-inspiration (canon 24). In a scrutiny, three trustworthy electors collected every vote secretly and one by one, wrote them down, and published them, and the man chosen by all or by "the greater and sounder part" of the chapter was elected. In a compromise, the chapter unanimously handed the choice to a few of its members. In quasi-inspiration, the whole chapter named one man at once, as if moved by the Holy Spirit. An election held any other way was void, and those who attempted it lost their votes for that turn. An elector who was genuinely prevented from coming could, on oath, give his vote to a colleague who was present. No one else could vote by proxy.
• No lay coercion. An election made through the abuse of secular power was invalid, and the man who consented to it could not be elected (canon 25).
• Confirmation. The elect had to be examined and confirmed, and a superior who carelessly confirmed an unworthy man was punished (canon 26). Those directly subject to the pope went to Rome for confirmation. An ordinary bishop-elect in Germany went to his archbishop, who confirmed him and then consecrated him.

"The greater and sounder part" was the trouble. Soundness was a matter of weight, not arithmetic: who the voters were and why they voted mattered as well as how many there were. A defeated minority could, and often did, claim to be the sounder part, and a disputed election went to the archbishop and then on appeal to Rome. Disputed elections were among the most familiar business of the papal court in these decades, and some sees stood empty for years while the lawyers argued. Nor did the Lateran forms settle into every chapter's practice at once. Old customs lingered, and a chapter that voted as its fathers had was inviting a challenge.

Between election and consecration a man was a bishop-elect, a figure whose exact powers the canonists argued over for generations. What an elect could do with the see's lands, clergy, and revenues before he was consecrated was a live question, especially in Germany, where he might have the regalia before he had the mitre.

Prince-bishops

A German bishop in 1220 was usually also a lord of land and men. Since the tenth century, kings had granted bishoprics counties, markets, mints, tolls, and forests. Bishops could not found dynasties, which made them attractive servants of the Crown. In return, a bishop owed the king knights for his armies and hospitality for his wandering court. Historians once called this the "imperial church system" and now argue about how systematic it really was, but the result is not in doubt. By 1200 many German bishops ruled territories, and some, like the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne, were among the greatest princes of the Empire.

To govern, they relied on ministerials: knights and administrators who were legally unfree, bound to the church and unable to leave its service, yet by 1200 often wealthy, armed, and hard to tell from lesser nobles. They held fiefs and castles and filled the great household offices of steward, marshal, butler, and chamberlain. Their fortunes depended on their lord, and they had strong views about who he would be.

In April 1220, at Frankfurt, the German princes elected Frederick's son Henry king. In return, Frederick issued the Confoederatio cum principibus ecclesiasticis, the "agreement with the princes of the Church." It secured the church princes' rights to mint coins, levy tolls, build fortifications, and hold courts in their lands, and it promised that anyone excommunicated by the Church would be outlawed by the Crown. It made the prince-bishops stronger than they had ever been. It also made the choice of a prince-bishop matter more than ever.

The world of 1220

The council's aftermath. The Fourth Lateran Council was one of the largest assemblies the medieval Church ever held. Its seventy-one canons touched almost everything: yearly confession and communion, transubstantiation, the training of priests, yearly provincial councils, the conduct of clergy, tithes, marriage, relics, and the crusade. In 1220 bishops and chapters across Europe were still working out what it meant in practice.

The crusade. The Fifth Crusade had taken the Egyptian port of Damietta in November 1219 and sat there through 1220, waiting for reinforcements and for Frederick, who had sworn to lead them. Frederick had taken the cross in 1215 and would keep postponing. Damietta was lost in 1221.

The friars. The Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, had been approved by the pope in 1216. Their first house in German-speaking lands was at Friesach in Carinthia, founded in 1217; Cologne followed soon after, and a German province was organized in 1221. The Franciscans' first mission to Germany, in 1219, failed; their second, in 1221, took root. In 1220, a pair of preaching friars in a Rhineland town would have been a novelty, and bishops were only beginning to decide what to make of them.

The Jews. The Rhineland had old Jewish communities, above all at Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, which lived under the protection of bishops and kings and paid for it. The Fourth Lateran Council's last decrees before the crusade canon concerned the Jews: limits on interest, distinctive dress, a ban on Jews holding public office, and rules for converts (canons 67–70). How, when, and whether these were enforced varied enormously from place to place, and depended heavily on local bishops and lords.

The Cistercians. A century after their founding, the white monks were everywhere, famous for austerity, for draining and farming wild land, and for sending their abbots to a general chapter every year. A respected Cistercian abbot's opinion carried moral weight far beyond his cloister.

The people

Honorius III (pope 1216–1227). Before his election he was Cencius, for years the chamberlain of the Roman Church, who compiled the Liber Censuum, the great register of what churches and monasteries owed to Rome. Old, patient, and conciliatory, he approved the Dominicans, pressed Frederick year after year to go on crusade, and crowned him emperor in St. Peter's on 22 November 1220.

Frederick II (1194–1250). The grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, raised in Sicily and king there from childhood, he won the German crown in the civil wars after 1198 and was crowned at Aachen in 1215. He spent most of his life in Italy and left Germany to be governed by princes and his son. He was later excommunicated more than once and declared deposed by a council, but in 1220 he stood well with the pope.

Henry (VII) (1211–1242). Frederick's son, elected King of the Romans at Frankfurt in April 1220 at the age of nine and crowned at Aachen in 1222. He later rebelled against his father, was deposed in 1235, and died a prisoner. Historians put his number in parentheses because he never became emperor, and the name Henry VII went instead to Henry of Luxembourg, crowned emperor in 1312.

Siegfried II of Eppstein (archbishop of Mainz 1200–1230). Elected amid the civil war between Philip of Swabia and Otto IV, he spent years as a papal loyalist. He crowned Frederick king at Mainz in December 1212 and attended the Fourth Lateran Council. He was probably among Henry's electors in April 1220 and was present at the coronation in Rome that November. He used Frederick's charters to build up the territory of the see of Mainz.

Engelbert I of Cologne (archbishop 1216–1225). Of the counts of Berg, a vigorous restorer of his see's rights, and from 1220 the administrator of the German kingdom and guardian of the boy king Henry, whom he crowned in 1222. In 1225 he was murdered by his own kinsman, Frederick of Isenberg, and was soon venerated as a martyr.

What the game invents

Hochfelden is invented: its cathedral, chapter, school, town, and customs, including the way its chapter votes and the number of voices it requires. It is not the Alsatian town that shares its name. Marienthal and St. Walburga as the game depicts them are invented too, though real houses bore both names. The house of Falkenstein here has no connection to the real families of that name. Every canon, the three player characters, the abbot, the abbess, the Dominican friars, and the people of the town are fictional.

What is real: the Lateran canons, the charters of 1213 and 1220, the pope, the emperor, the boy king, the two archbishops and where they were that autumn, and the calendar of 1220.

Words you'll meet

• Canon. A member of a cathedral's (or other church's) clergy, enrolled on its list and sharing in its revenues.
• Chapter. The body of canons; also its meeting, held in the chapter house.
• Prebend. A canon's individual income, usually drawn from specific lands or tithes.
• Dignities. The chapter's offices: provost, dean, cantor, scholasticus, treasurer, and others.
• The close. The precinct around a cathedral where the canons lived.
• Ministerial. A knight or administrator of unfree legal status, bound to serve a lord or church.
• Regalia. The lands, rights, and jurisdictions a bishop held from the Crown.
• Metropolitan. An archbishop with authority over the bishops of his province, who are his suffragans.
• Confirmation. The superior's approval of an election, without which the elect could not act fully in his office.
• Scrutiny, compromise, quasi-inspiration. The three valid forms of election after 1215.
• The greater and sounder part (maior et sanior pars). The standard an elect had to meet: a majority weighted by the worth and motives of the voters.
• Sede vacante. "The see being vacant": the time between a bishop's death and his successor.
• Devolution. The passing of the right to fill an office to a superior when those entitled to fill it fail to act in time.
• Visitation. A bishop's formal inspection of the churches and monasteries of his diocese.
• Viaticum. Communion given to the dying.
• Month's mind. A Requiem Mass on the thirtieth day after a death.
• Ember Days. Fast days four times a year; Ember Saturday was the customary day for ordinations.
• Boy bishop. A schoolboy or chorister chosen on St. Nicholas's Day to play the bishop until Holy Innocents' Day, a custom found across medieval Europe.
• Kehilla. A Jewish community with its own leaders and institutions.
• Tallage. A tax levied at a lord's will; Jews under a bishop's protection paid one.
• Julian calendar. The calendar then in use; the game's dates follow it. In 1220 Easter fell on 29 March and Advent began on 29 November.

Saying the names

In German, ch after a, o, or u is the throaty sound of Scottish "loch," and softer after e or i. Ei rhymes with "eye," ie is "ee," w is English v, z is ts, and st or sp at the start of a word is sht or shp. So Hochfelden is HOKH-fel-den, Falkenstein FAL-ken-shtine, Reichenbach RYE-khen-bakh, Speyer SHPY-er, Steinach SHTINE-akh, Spaichingen SHPY-khing-en, Wertheim VAIRT-hime, Lichtenau LIKH-ten-ow, Wimpfen VIMP-fen, Eppstein EPP-shtine, and Siegfried ZEEG-freet. Matthäus is mah-TAY-oos, Mechthild MEKH-tilt, and Walburga vahl-BOOR-gah.