Innocent III wrote a medieval bestseller about the misery of being human
Before he became perhaps the most powerful man in Europe, Cardinal Lotario de' Conti wrote a gloomy treatise, On the Misery of the Human Condition. It was hugely popular for centuries and survives in more than 700 manuscripts. He meant to follow it with a companion piece on human dignity but never got around to it.
Lotario was born in 1160 or 1161 in Gavignano, near Anagni, into the Conti family, which would eventually produce four popes and nine cardinals. He studied theology in Paris and possibly law in Bologna, then rose through church offices in Rome. When Celestine III died on 8 January 1198, the cardinals elected Lotario that very day, after just two ballots, meeting among the ruins of the ancient Septizodium. He was only thirty-seven and took the name Innocent III.
Under him the papacy reached the height of its power. He claimed supremacy over Europe's kings while acknowledging their worldly authority, and he enforced his will with interdicts and other church penalties, though not always successfully. He forced Alfonso IX of Leon to separate from a wife who was a close relative, received Aragon as a papal vassal state, and served as guardian to the young Frederick, king of Sicily, after the boy's mother named Innocent in her will.
He also refereed a disputed imperial election. After Emperor Henry VI died, rival German factions chose Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick. Innocent, wary of the Hohenstaufen dynasty encircling the Papal States, backed Otto in 1201, arguing that the empire ultimately derived its authority from the papacy.
Innocent broadened the Crusades, directing campaigns in Iberia, the Holy Land, the Baltic and southern France. The Fourth Crusade, which he organised, went badly astray: against his explicit orders it ended in the sack of Constantinople, and he excommunicated the crusaders but reluctantly accepted the outcome, hoping it would reunite the Latin and Orthodox churches. Instead it deepened their hostility. His Fourth Lateran Council and his decretals left a more lasting legacy, considerably refining Western canon law. He died in 1216.
Source: Pope Innocent III
