Table Of ContentCommunicating Papal Authority  
in the Middle Ages
This  book  bridges  Japanese  and  European  scholarly  approaches  to 
 ecclesiastical history to provide new insights into how the papacy conceptu-
alised its authority and attempted to realise and communicate that authority 
in ecclesiastical and secular spheres across Christendom. Adopting a broad, 
yet cohesive, temporal and geographical approach that spans the Early to 
the Late Middle Ages, from Europe to Asia, the book focuses on the differ-
ent media used to represent authority, the structures through which author-
ity was channelled and the restrictions that popes faced in so doing, and 
the less certain expression of papal authority on the edges of Christendom. 
Through 12 chapters that encompass key topics such as a ntipopes, artis-
tic representations, preaching, heresy, the crusades, and mission and the 
East, this interdisciplinary volume brings new perspectives to bear on the 
medieval papacy. The book demonstrates that the communication of papal 
authority was a two-way process effected by the popes and their support-
ers, but also by their enemies who helped to shape concepts of e cclesiastical 
power.
Communicating Papal Authority in the Middle Ages will appeal to research-
ers and students alike interested in the relationships between the papacy and 
medieval society and the ways in which the papacy negotiated and expressed 
its authority in Europe and beyond.
Minoru Ozawa is Professor of Medieval History at Rikkyo University, 
Japan.
Thomas W. Smith is Keeper of the Scholars and Head of Oxbridge ( Arts and 
Humanities) at Rugby School, UK.
Georg  Strack  is  Professor  of  Medieval  History  at  Philipps-Universität 
M  arburg, Germany.
Studies in Medieval History and Culture
Recent titles include
Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum
Origins, Reception and Significance
Edited by Grzegorz Bartusik, Radosław Biskup and Jakub Morawiec
Making Miracles in Medieval England
Tom Lynch
The Friar and the Philosopher
William of Moerbeke and the Rise of Aristotle’s Science  
in Medieval Europe
Pieter Beullens
The ‘Other’, Identity, and Memory in Early Medieval Italy
Luigi Andrea Berto
Networking in Late Medieval Central Europe
Friends, Families, Foes
Edited by Beata Możejko, Anna Paulina Orłowska and Leslie Carr-Riegel
Communicating Papal Authority in the Middle Ages
Edited by Minoru Ozawa, Thomas W. Smith and Georg Strack
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/Studies-in-Medieval-History-and-Culture/book-series/SMHC
Communicating Papal Authority 
in the Middle Ages
Edited by  
Minoru Ozawa, Thomas W. Smith  
and Georg Strack
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Minoru Ozawa,  
Thomas W. Smith, and Georg Strack; individual chapters,  
the contributors
The right of Minoru Ozawa, Thomas W. Smith, and Georg Strack 
to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of 
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in 
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and 
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or 
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, 
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including 
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or 
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks 
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and 
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-42091-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-42093-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-36117-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003361176
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
List of Figures   vii
List of Contributors   ix
Acknowledgements  xiii
    Introduction  1
MINORU OZAWA, THOMAS W. SMITH AND GEORG STRACK
PART I
Representations of Papal Authority  11
  1  Authority at a Distance: Popes, Their Media, and Their 
Presence Felt in the Frankish Kingdom  13
SHIGETO KIKUCHI
  2  Imitatio Christi in Papal Synodal Sermons, 1095–1274  31
GEORG STRACK
  3  John XXII as a Wavering Preacher: The Pope’s Sermons and 
the Norms of Preaching in the Beatific Vision Controversy  46
YUICHI AKAE
  4  Franciscan Identity and Iconography in the Assisi Tapestry 
Commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV  62
ALESSANDRO SIMBENI
PART II
Structural Restrictions and Challenges to Papal Authority  81
  5  Crisis and Antagonism: Contending Popes as a Challenge to 
Papal Authority  83
HARALD MÜLLER
vi  Contents
  6  Papal Communication and the Fifth Crusade, 1217–21  100
THOMAS W. SMITH
  7  ‘Having one little wolf at the papal court is not enough’: The 
Limits of Papal Authority in Milanese Affairs in the  
Mid-Fifteenth Century  116
JESSIKA NOWAK
PART III
Papal Authority on the Edges of Christendom  129
  8  Why Did a Viking King Meet a Pope?: Cnut’s Imperial 
Politics, Scandinavian Commercial Networks, and the Journey 
to Rome in 1027  131
MINORU OZAWA
  9  Papal Contact with the Mongols: Means of Communication in 
the Thirteenth Century  145
MAMORU FUJISAKI
10   Dei et ecclesiae inimicus: A Correspondence between Pope 
Gregory IX and John III Batatzes  159
KOJI MURATA
11   Medieval Heretics in the East: A Heresiological Label for 
Bosnian Bogomils/Patarenes in the Thirteenth Century  173
HISATSUGU KUSABU
12   The Papacy and Crusading in the Far North?: A Forgotten 
Religious Frontier of Medieval Latin Christendom  186
TAKAHIRO NARIKAWA
Index   201
Figures
  4.1  Flemish manufacturing, The Franciscan Tree, wool and 
silk, c. 1476, Assisi, Basilica of St Francis, Treasury 
Museum. Image courtesy of Marcello Fedeli, Spoleto, 
2013. Reproduced by permission of the Archivio 
fotografico del Sacro Convento di S. Francesco, Assisi, Italy  66
  4.2   Lignum vitae (Tree of Life), produced at the Cistercian 
monastery of Kamp, Germany, late thirteenth century, 
New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Library, 
MS 416, fol. 1v. Image via the Beineke Rare Book and 
Manuscript Library, generously provided without 
copyright restrictions  71
  4.3   Taddeo Gaddi, Lignum vitae (Tree of Life), fresco, c. 
1340, Florence, Santa Croce, refectory, south wall. Image 
via Wikimedia Commons, generously provided without 
copyright restrictions  73
  4.4  Giotto di Bondone (?), Lignum vitae santi Francisci (The 
Franciscan Tree), fresco, c. 1303, Padua, St Anthony, 
friary, locutory, north wall (photograph taken before 
painting was detached in 1979). Image reproduced by 
generous permission of the Centro Studi Antoniani, Padua  74
Contributors
Yuichi Akae is a Professor at the Faculty of Letters, Keio University, Tokyo, 
where he teaches western history. His research involves themes and 
texts in the religious and intellectual history of western Europe from the 
 thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, with a particular focus on preach-
ing. His publications include a monograph, A Mendicant Sermon Collec-
tion from Composition to Reception: The ‘Novum opus dominicale’ of John 
Waldeby, OESA (Brepols, 2015).
Mamoru Fujisaki is Associate Professor of Medieval Mediterranean History 
at the University of Tokyo and was previously an Associate Professor at 
Sophia University, Tokyo. His research focuses on the institution of the 
medieval Roman curia and European-Mongol relations in the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries. His first Japanese monograph, The Formation 
and Development of the Papal Curia in the Middle Ages (2013), won the 
Herend Prize of the Collegium Mediterranistarum.
Shigeto Kikuchi is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Human-
ities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo, where he teaches European 
medieval history. His research interests centre on the Carolingian age. 
A revised version of his PhD dissertation which was accepted in 2013 
by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München was published in 2021 as 
his first monograph, Herrschaft, Delegation und Kommunikation in der 
Karolingerzeit. Untersuchungen zu den Missi dominici (751–888) (MGH 
Hilfsmittel 31).
Hisatsugu Kusabu is Professor of History at Osaka Metropolitan Univer-
sity, where he teaches pre-modern European and Byzantine history. He 
is also the Director of the Urban Culture Research Center in the Gradu-
ate School of Literature and Human Sciences. His PhD on ‘Comnenian 
Orthodoxy and Byzantine Heresiology in the Twelfth Century: A Study 
of the “Panoplia Dogmatica” of Euthymios Zigabenos’ was awarded by 
the University of Chicago in 2013.
Harald Müller is the Chair of Medieval History at the RWTH Aachen Uni-
versity. His research interest focuses on Renaissance humanism and on