Letters

Innocent III’s chancery copied his outgoing letters into registers, year by year of the pontificate, and most of what is known of his dealings with the Fourth Crusade comes from them. The letter cited in this wiki is addressed to Peter, cardinal priest of St Marcellus, his legate with the crusade, and is dated 12 July. It belongs to the eighth year of the pontificate, which ran from February 1205, and speaks of the crusaders who had stayed to defend Constantinople “from last March”.

The pope writes to rebuke: the legate had left the Holy Land for Constantinople and had released the crusaders from their vows without authority. In making the charge he lists what the army did in the city. He was not there, and writes from the reports that had reached him at Rome; the weight of the letter is that it is the judgment of the pope in whose name the crusade had been preached, and that it agrees with the Greek account in History.

A second letter is cited in the Albigensian Crusade: the pope’s letter of March 1208 to the archbishops of Narbonne, Arles, Embrun, Aix and Vienne on the murder of his legate Peter of Castelnau. It is undated in the register; the copy in History of the Albigensians is dated 10 March in the pope’s eleventh year.