Legates and Councils

Abstract

Without a doubt, as Richard W. Southern observed long ago, legatine activity is evidenced most explicitly in the medieval church council (concilium, synodus), a forum that offers some of the earliest and most defining examples of papal representation. Nowhere is the principle and practice of legation more vividly expressed than the council arena, which operated as a ‘representative organ’² (Repräsentativorgan) for the promulgation of canons, questions of church doctrine, ecclesiastical administration, episcopal elections and consecration, and dispute settlement. In this official setting, the full thrust of representative theory was transformed into practice, providing legates with more than just a venue in which to operate, but a playing field over which they could (and did) exercise varying forces and degrees of papal (i.e., Roman) authority.³ Through the actions of convoking, convening, presiding, examining, and issuing final judgement and legislation, legates transcended the role of mere messenger to become the pope’s chief arbiters and judges in all matters affecting the Roman Church. As this chapter contends, the extent, variety, and nature of the legate’s conciliar activity characterizes legation for the early Middle Ages; it also reveals, by individual example, the office’s inherent value to early medieval popes in their efforts to bolster and centralize Roman authority in distant Christian provinces.⁴

The practice of holdings councils, and of sending legates endowed with authority to settle particular cases in dispute, went back into an impenetrable past.¹