Chapter 4 - The Library of Iberian Resources Online

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The high incidence of heresy and unorthodoxy in mountainous [56] regions has frequently been noted, (11) and in the kingdom of Aragon throughout the thirteenth century the Albigensian heresy was rampant in the Pyrenean see of Urgel. There had been a serious outbreak shortly before the legate's visit in the autumn of 1229, and at his Council in the following May Archbishop Sparago expressed grave concern. (12) The see of Urgel was at that moment vacant, Pedro de Puigvert (about whose ability to deal with the crisis Honorius III had had his doubts) having resigned in the previous month, possibly in consequence of an unfavourable report submitted by the legate; (13) and Sparago and the bishop of Lérida, Berenguer de Eril, were given joint charge of it until there should be an election. (14) John of Abbeville was extremely interested in the outcome of this election, as is shown by a letter sent by him to Bishop Berenguer in April or May 1230, which has survived in the archive of Urgel Cathedral. The suitability of possible candidates exercised him greatly, (15) and the weight of evidence suggests that the cardinal was being kept informed of developments by Pedro de Albalat. Perhaps it was Pedro who brought this letter from the Curia. Certainly he was an observer -- and a highly regarded observer, furthermore -- at the riotous process of election at Urgel in May 1230 which resulted in the promotion to the see of Bishop Berenguer's nephew, Ponce de Vilamur, who had been sacrist of Lérida immediately before Pedro himself. Another Urgel document, containing the version of these events submitted to an inquest into the election held soon after by various canons of the church, provides a vivid account of ecclesiastical party politics in thirteenth-century Catalonia. It is a tale of ambushes, bribery, torrid debate and strong-arm tactics. It has a flavour all its own, (16) but the point of interest in the present context is the quite casual reference which it contains to Pedro who, while the beaten side were frogmarching their candidate to the altar, intoned the Te Deum which brought the pantomime to an end. Pedro did not escape unscathed. It was assumed that he was an advocate of Ponce, and Ponce's enemies, most [57] unsportingly, wreaked their vengeance by doing to death one of Pedro's mules and wounding another. (17) And the desperadoes seem to have judged aright, for when Ponce's promotion suffered a further delay Pedro travelled to Rome, presumably for fresh consultation with John of Abbeville. While he was there he secured papal permission to retain the churches of Zaidin, Albalat and Soros together with the income from his office as sacrist. (18) His visit seems to have disposed of all outstanding objections to Ponce. On 6 February 1231, shortly before he returned to Aragon, John of Abbeville furnished him with a letter addressed to Ponce as bishop, in which the sacrist of Lérida was described as his 'fidelis et sollicitus procurator' and Ponce was urged to prove himself 'acceptus minister Deo' and to nourish the flock which had been entrusted to him 'sacra doctrina pariter et exemplo'. (19) It was not the only commission that he brought with him. Six days later he was appointed, together with the bishop of Lérida and the abbot of Poblet, to protect the chapter of Vich against the archbishop of Tarragona; (20) and the pope's rescript confirming the exlegate's constitutions for Barcelona, which was issued two days before that, may also have been entrusted to him. (21) The issue of substance, however, is that John's letter referred to Ponce as bishop fully two months before the archbishop of Tarragona received formal notice even of the election. (22) The affair had been stage-managed by John and Pedro, and the latter was an ecclesiastical power in the land eight years before his appointment as leader of the Aragonese Church. It is curious, and even dramatically appropriate, that Pedro de Albalat's earliest recorded achievement should have been his successful campaign on behalf of Ponce de Vilarnur. For the bishop of [58] Urgel was to fall far short of John of Abbeville's high standards, and the reformers' white hope of 1230-1 was to be converted into their bête noire in the course of the next twenty years, and would dog Archbishop Pedro until his dying day. In the early 1230s, though, this all lay in the future, and Ponce's future career was as inscrutable to Pedro as Pedro's past career is still to us. Where magister Petrus had studied, and the truth of the unsubstantiated claim that he was a Cistercian monk, (23) are only two of the questions
about him for which no certain answers are available. He was, like so many, de genere militari, (24) but all that can be said of his pre-episcopal period is that he was commissioned on at least three occasions to interest himself in the affairs of Aragonese religious communities: to defend the Dominican nuns of Zaragoza; to restrain a clique of Augustinian monks of Santa María de Mur, Urgel, from joining the Premonstratensian Order; and to visit Ripoll. (25) Until October 1236 he remains a shadowy figure. In that month, however, his many virtues caught the attention of the canons of his own church of Lérida, and they elected him as the successor of Bishop Berenguer de Eril. (26) Pedro was bishop of Lérida for only fourteen months. Yet even in that short period he found time to issue an ordinatio which superseded the original ordinatio of 1168, (27) displayed his distinctive blend of idealism and realism, and demonstrated his understanding of the practical obstacles which stood in the way of moral regeneration. John of Abbeville had had precious little sense of reality and had acquired none while traipsing round Spain, but Pedro, though no less convinced than the legate that regimen animarum was ars artium, realised also that it had to be the art of the possible. And so he concentrated upon the logistics of the [59] problem, upon the economics of reform. The archdeacons of Lérida could not afford to carry out their visitations, 'propter quod grave sequitur dispendium animarum et multa insolencia in subditis enutritur et dissolucio cumulatur': he therefore increased their income. (28) Having himself no pied-à-terre within range of the city of Lérida, 'ad quam valeat declinare', he purchased the castle of Boyera from the communis mensa; (29) and to ensure a better attendance at cathedral services he created nineteen dimidiae porciones, one of which was earmarked for the support of a magister scolarum who was given the task of irrigating the intellectual desert thereabouts. (30) Pedro's Ordinatio Ecclesie Ilerdensis was issued on 11 December 1237. By then he was a prominent figure in the Aragonese Church which, since the death of Archbishop Sparago on 3 March 1233, (31) had been leaderless. It was to him, together with Bishop Bernardo Calvó of Vich and Raymond of Peñafort, that Gregory IX referred cases of high ecclesiastical politics during 1237: the revocation of certain actions of the late King Pedro II which had been prejudicial to the rights of the Roman Church; the request of Ponce of Tortosa for permission to resign his see; (32) and appointment to the bishoprics of Majorca and Huesca. (33) Thus, in association with the holiest prelate of the province and the canonistsaint, he had a hand in the religious regeneration of the Aragonese Church even before his elevation to the archbishopric of Tarragona, which occurred in February 1238 after the chapter had resigned its rights of election to Gregory and the pope -- almost certainly on the recommendation of St Raymond [60] who had declined the position himself four years before (34) -- designated Pedro, the bishop of Lérida of whom he had heard such excellent reports. (35) At the time of Pedro's promotion the Christian forces were massing for the final assault on the city of Valencia, and its capture that autumn provided the new archbishop with an opportunity of taking stock of those of his suffragans who were gathered there, in the royal entourage, in expectation of grants of territory. For five years they had had no archbishop to give them a lead, and Pedro could ill afford to lose time in asserting his authority. At 'a council' (as the witness, Ferrán Pérez de Torolio, remembered it), attended by his bishops and, significantly, by a number of friars, he stole a march on the archbishop of Toledo and appointed Berenguer de Castelbisbal as bishop of Valencia. (36) 'A council' held in those conditions, however, amidst the hurly-burly of military manceuvres, (37) was necessarily an ad hoc affair having little or nothing in common with the formal, full-dress assemblies of later years. Still, Pedro soon buckled down to his pastoral responsibilities. In 1239, during which year he was once described as a legate, (38) a start was made.
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Page 5 and 6: in the novella plantatio, (53) ther
Page 7 and 8: 1208 King Pedro II praised their 'a
Page 9 and 10: Albalat referred in 1258. For a whi
Page 11 and 12: ail for him when he had been unable
Page 13 and 14: monastery of San Cugat del Vallés:
Page 15 and 16: 45. Ibid. 86. Cf. Lér. c. 24-6 for
Page 17 and 18: 86. Raimundo died at Lyons in 1247,
Page 19 and 20: 118. Summa, Fo. 129rb. 119. Fos. 12
Page 21: 150. Forma de sancta sinodo celebra

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