The Fourth Lateran Council

Innocent III called this council to legislate rather than to define, and its seventy canons reached further into ordinary life than those of any council before it. Canon twenty-one required every Christian who had reached the age of discretion to confess their sins to their own priest at least once a year and to receive communion at Easter, which built the confessional into the annual rhythm of the medieval parish and generated a whole literature of manuals for confessors.

The first canon states the faith and uses the word transubstantiated of the eucharistic elements, the earliest use of the term in a conciliar text, though the theology it names was already current in the schools. Other canons regulated clerical conduct, forbade the founding of new religious orders without approval, restricted the multiplication of relics and required that new relics be authenticated, and ordered the clergy to stop taking part in trials by ordeal, a prohibition that effectively ended judicial ordeal in Latin Europe within a generation.

More than twelve hundred prelates attended, with representatives of secular rulers, and the council also authorised a crusade and settled several political disputes. It is the high point of the medieval papal monarchy in the sense that it is the moment when a single assembly under a single pope legislated for the religious practice of Western Europe and was largely obeyed.

The same council that required annual confession also passed canons that shaped the treatment of religious minorities in Latin Christendom for centuries, and any account of it that omits them is not an account of what happened. Canon sixty-eight required Jews and Muslims in Christian territory to be distinguishable from Christians by their dress, on the stated ground of preventing sexual relations between them by mistake. Canon sixty-nine barred them from public office. Others restricted their conduct in Holy Week and imposed obligations on converts.

Enforcement was uneven and depended on local rulers, and the badge and the distinctive hat appear in some kingdoms early and in others hardly at all. That unevenness is a historical fact and not a mitigation. The canons gave a general church council's authority to the principle that religious minorities should be marked and excluded from office, and later legislation across Europe cited them for centuries.

The atlas records this beside the pastoral reforms because they came from one assembly, in one month, under one pope, and were understood by the people who passed them as parts of a single programme of Christian order. Reading the reforming canons alone gives a false picture of what medieval church order meant, and reading the discriminatory canons alone gives a false picture of what the council was doing. Both belong in the record.