58 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)Henry IV and the king of Sicily (who was a feudal dependent of the pope).
His successor, Pope Pascal II, succeeded in reconciling the king of Aragon
with his enemies. In the course of the twelft h century, the papal curia did
impressive business in this line.
An especially active pontiff in the arbitration fi eld was (not surprisingly)
Innocent III, in the early thirteenth century. He adjudicated confl icts in-
volving Portugal, Aragon, Poland, Armenia, and even the Eastern Ortho-
dox states of Bulgaria and Serbia. He also succeeded in reconciling Philip of
Swabia and Otto of Brunswick with one another. At the time of his death in
1216, he was en route to a negotiating session in an attempt to resolve various
disputes between the cities of Pisa and Genoa. It was therefore with some
justifi cation that Innocent— never modest in making claims for the papacy—
pronounced the pope to be “the sovereign mediator upon earth.” His suc-
cessor, Honorius III, continued the tradition by arbitrating a dispute between
France and Aragon.
Th e sovereign mediator was not always successful in performing his use-
ful task. Pope Gregory VII, for example, was unable to stop Kings Philip I of
France and William I of En gland from coming to blows. Attempts by Popes
Alexander III and Celestine III in the twelft h century to reconcile En gland
and Scotland were similarly unsuccessful. Nor did papal attempts to bring
an end to the Hundred Years War between France and En gland in the four-
teenth and fi ft eenth centuries bear fruit.
Th ere was some support for the contention that states were actually under
a legal duty to submit their disputes to papal arbitration. Th is thesis was
supported by Alanus Anglicus, a canon- law scholar from En gland (or pos-
sibly Wales) who taught at the University of Bologna in the period around
1190– 1215. But he conceded that the idea did not command universal as-
sent. Rulers, moreover, tended to resist it. Th is was instructively illustrated
in 1296, when Pope Boniface VIII ordered Kings Edward I of En gland and
Philip IV of France to come before his tribunal in Rome for the settlement of
a war in which they were engaged at the time. Th ey refused to obey. Two
years later, they did agree to submit to papal arbitration— though making it
very clear that they were doing so as a matter of their own choice and not in
obedience to a papal command. To make sure that there was no room for
misunderstanding, they pointedly designated their arbitrator not as Boni-
face but rather as Benoit Gaetani— to emphasize that the pope would be act-