Prince-bishop

• 1. Introduction

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  Prince-bishop names a churchman who also rules as a sovereign, governing land rather than only shepherding souls. In the year 844, a bishop named Notingus was made count of the Italian city of Brescia. That is what separates a prince-bishop from the honorary title of Prince of the Church, still held today by cardinals. A prince-bishop actually governed: taxing, judging, and leading troops when necessary. The arrangement spread from the Rhine to the Baltic coast to the Balkan highlands, producing dozens of small states run from a bishop's palace. Almost none of it survives today. What forced so many bishops to become princes, and what finally stripped nearly all of them of their thrones?

• 2. Roman Governors To Ruling Bishops

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  Beginning in the 4th century, Roman imperial authority crumbled under barbarian invasions. Some Christian bishops stepped into the vacancy left by departing Roman commanders. They took over civic administration, making the decisions a city's government required. Even so, part of a diocese, sometimes the bishop's own home city, could still win exemption as a free imperial city. That civil territory was called the Hochstift, and it could overlap wholly or only partly with the bishop's diocese.

  As towns demanded charters from emperors, kings, or the bishops themselves, friction between burghers and prince-bishops intensified. Relations between the two rarely stayed cordial. An archbishop who ruled this way carried the title prince-archbishop, and the same rank among monastic clergy was called prince-abbot. A prince-bishop was usually an elected monarch, not a hereditary one.

  In the Byzantine Empire, autocratic Emperors passed general laws giving every bishop rights and duties in the secular administration of his diocese. That policy folded the Eastern Church into service of the state, leaving its Ecumenical Patriarch functioning almost as the Emperor's minister of religious affairs. Centuries later, Orthodox Christianity revived the same idea, in the mountain Prince-Bishopric of Montenegro.

• 3. Princes Of The Empire

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  Bishops had already served Frankish and Carolingian rulers as royal agents, called Missus dominicus, sent out to inspect distant territories. That role was a personal mandate, not something permanently attached to a bishop's see. Prince-bishoprics became most common inside the feudally fragmented Holy Roman Empire. There, many bishops were formally raised to the rank of Imperial Prince, or Reichsfürst, gaining direct territorial power. That rank also carried a seat in the Imperial Diet, the Reichstag.

  Inside the Empire, the old stem duchies were run by dukes who guarded their own duchy's interests first. The first Ottonian king, Henry the Fowler, and especially his son, Emperor Otto I, tried to curb that ducal power. They granted loyal bishops Imperial lands along with regalia privileges instead. Unlike dukes, bishops could not pass their titles or lands down to children. The Emperors kept the right to appoint bishops of their own proprietary church, despite canon law placing bishops inside the transnational Catholic Church. Papal opposition to that arrangement built until it erupted into the Investiture Controversy of 1076.

  Emperor Charles IV's Golden Bull of 1356 confirmed the Prince-Archbishoprics of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier as members of the electoral college. Each of those three archbishops also carried the title Archchancellor over part of the Empire. Even after the Investiture Controversy, Emperors kept granting major territories to their most important bishops and archbishops. Each such see became a prince-diocese, or Fürst(erz)bistum. By the eve of the Protestant Reformation, the Empire held 53 separate ecclesiastical principalities. Nearly all were secularized in the 1803 German Mediatization, after territorial losses to France under the Treaty of Lunéville. The one holdout was the Mainz prince-archbishop and German archchancellor Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg, who kept ruling as Prince of Aschaffenburg and Regensburg.

  When the Empire itself dissolved in 1806, the prince-bishop title went defunct across its successor, the Confederation of the Rhine. Outside French control, the office lingered in titular form. It continued in the Habsburg lands of Salzburg and Seckau, and in the Bohemian Crown territories of Olomouc and part of Breslau. It also continued in formerly Polish lands folded into Galicia and Lodomeria, or into the Kingdom of Prussia. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary kept recognizing these titular princes until their own collapse. The pope did not fully abolish the title until 1951. Salzburg's archbishop, for instance, had carried the added title Primas Germaniae, First Bishop of Germania, since 1648. That rank once carried the right to preside over the Empire's princes.

  At Worms, Bishop Burchard established the bishop's rule over the city between 1000 and 1025. The abbey at Fulda was only raised to a bishopric on the 5th of October 1752, after centuries as an Imperial Abbey. Some sees carried the Fürstbischof title without ever holding real reichsfrei territory, among them Gurk, Chiemsee, Seckau, and Lavant. In Belley, Saint Anthelm was granted Reichsfreiheit by Emperor Frederick I but ended up submitting to the Duchy of Savoy in 1401. The Patriarchate of Aquileia, standing from 1077, was conquered by Venice in 1420 and formally absorbed after the Council of Florence in 1445.

• 4. Crusader Bishops Of The Baltic

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  In 1207, Bishop Albert of Riga received the lands of Livonia as an Imperial fief from German king Philip of Swabia. He still had to come to terms with the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. At the urging of Pope Innocent III, the Terra Mariana confederation was formed. That forced Albert to hand over large parts of his episcopal territory to that military order. The Brothers of the Sword were absorbed into the Teutonic Order in 1237. The Order's new state largely matched the boundaries of the Diocese of Riga.

  Albert maneuvered carefully between the Papacy and Emperor Frederick II. By 1225 he had secured recognition as a Prince-Bishop of the Empire. The Roman Curia still insisted that the Christianized Baltic lands answered only to the Holy See. Pope Gregory IX's 1234 Bull of Rieti went further, declaring that any land the Teutonic Knights acquired was exempt from Imperial authority. Around 1245, papal legate William of Modena brokered a compromise. The archdiocese and its suffragan bishoprics kept their own church territories, despite being folded into the Order's state.

  William of Modena also established the suffragan bishoprics of Culm, Pomesania, Samland, and Warmia in the Order's Prussian lands. From the late 13th century, Warmia's bishops were no longer drawn from the Teutonic Knights themselves. Emperor Charles IV confirmed that special standing with the princely title in 1356. Nearby, Bishop Hermann of Dorpat, appointed by his own brother Albert, received the prince-bishop title from King Henry VII of Germany in 1225. That see was dissolved during the Protestant Reformation in 1558. The neighboring Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek, founded on the island of Saaremaa in 1228 under Bishop Gottfried, was dissolved in the same Reformation wave, in 1559.

  Riga itself had been an episcopal see at Üxküll from 1186 to 1202. Albert received the title Prince-bishop of Livonia from Emperor Frederick II in 1225. Riga's last Archbishop, William of Brandenburg, resigned in 1561 during the Livonian War. Its territory then passed to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before falling to Sweden in 1621. That same crusading pattern of prince-bishoprics also reached south, into the newly Christian kingdom of Poland.

• 5. Poland's Compensation Princes

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  Three bishoprics started out inside the Kingdom of Poland before later being absorbed into the Holy Roman Empire. Wolin belonged to Poland from 1140 to 1181, Lubusz from 1125 to 1372, and Wrocław from 1201 until 1335 or 1348. Two of them kept functioning as suffragan sees under the Polish archbishopric of Gniezno long after that transfer. Lubusz remained suffragan until 1424, and Wrocław until 1821. The Prince-Bishopric of Warmia moved the opposite direction, passing to Poland after the Second Peace of Thorn.

  Warmia was incorporated into the Jagiellon kingdom of Poland in 1466. It was re-established in 1479 as an autonomous prince-bishopric under the Polish crown. That status lasted until the Prussian annexation of 1772, during the First Partition of Poland. The archbishopric of Gniezno took a different route to its princely rank. It was founded in 1136 around Łowicz, in the Duchy of Masovia, endowing the archbishops of Gniezno, who also served as primates of Poland.

  Between 1572 and 1795, the primate of Poland presided ex officio over the Senate as the 'First Prince of the Kingdom', Primus Princeps. He could even be proclaimed interrex during a royal vacancy. After the third partition of Poland in 1795, Prussian authorities seized the Duchy of Łowicz. They forbade Gniezno's archbishops from calling themselves primates of Poland, awarding them the German princely title Fürst as compensation instead. In Kraków, Duke Wenceslaus I of Cieszyn sold the Duchy of Siewierz to Bishop Zbigniew Cardinal Oleśnicki for 6,000 silver Groschen in 1443. That tiny state kept its own laws, treasury, and army until the Great Sejm absorbed it into the state treasury in 1790.

• 6. France, Portugal And England

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  From the tenth century onward, waves of civil war let many French bishops absorb the powers once held by the local count. The king himself authorized the change. At Chalons-sur-Marne, the bishop ruled the lands stretching twenty kilometers around the town. The Archbishop of Rheims marked out his own territory with five fortresses: Courville, Cormicy, Betheneville, Sept-Saulx, and Chaumuzy. Six of the twelve original Pairies, the royal vassals given highest precedence at court, were episcopal. The Archbishop of Reims and the bishops of Langres and Laon held ducal rank, while Beauvais, Chalons, and Noyon held comital rank. The Archbishop of Paris later joined them, with a ducal title that outranked the rest.

  The bishop of Viviers was Count of Viviers and Prince de Donzère; the bishop of Sisteron was Prince de Lurs. The Archbishop of Lyons held a comital title of his own. Bishops in cities that had never belonged to the Empire, among them Lisieux, Cahors, Chalon-sur-Saône, Léon, Dol, and Vabres, were also counts. Ajaccio's bishop was Count of Frasso. Montpellier's bishop held an especially long list of ranks: Count of Mauguio and Montferrand, Marquis of Marquerose, and Baron of Sauve, Durfort, Salevoise, and Brissac.

  In Portugal, the bishop of Coimbra held the comital title Count of Arganil from 1472 to 1967. That earned him the nickname 'bishop-count', Bispo-Conde. Use of the title faded through the 20th century once Portugal became a republic and stripped away formal noble privileges. It was eventually dropped altogether.

  England's version centered on Durham, where the bishop held rights usually reserved for the monarch inside the county palatine of Durham. That temporal power began in 1075, when Bishop Walcher was allowed to purchase the earldom of Northumbria. It grew through the Middle Ages before being curbed from the 16th century onward. Aside from a brief suppression during the English Civil War, Durham's bishop kept some temporal powers into the 19th century. The Durham (County Palatine) Act 1836 finally returned those powers to the Crown. The palatinate's last institution, its court of chancery, was not abolished until 1974. The Isle of Ely was a royal liberty and, between 1109 and 1535, a county palatine in its own right. Traces of the bishop's princely status there lingered until 1837. Hexhamshire had been a county palatine under the Archbishop of York from at least the 14th century until 1572.

• 7. The Vladikas Of Montenegro

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  In 1516, the bishops of Cetinje replaced the region's earlier secular Grand Voivodes, becoming the Prince-Bishops of Montenegro. Their position was unusual: Slavonic and Orthodox rulers governing under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Their original style described them plainly as 'Bishop and Ruler of Montenegro and the Highlands', Vladika i upravitelj Crne Gore i Brda.

  From the 13th of March 1852, the ruling style changed to 'By the grace of God Prince and Sovereign of Montenegro and the Highlands'. That marked the shift from religious rule to a hereditary princedom. From the 28th of August 1910, the style changed again, to 'By the grace of God, King and Sovereign of Montenegro'. Montenegro's rulers had by then become kings outright. Far away in Catalonia, one bishop's civil title would outlast every other in Europe.

• 8. The Last Prince-Bishop

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  Today, the Bishop of Urgell in Catalonia holds no secular rights anywhere in Spain. He nonetheless remains, ex officio, one of two co-princes of the small state of Andorra. He shares that role with the French head of state, currently its president. That arrangement makes Urgell's bishop the sole prince-bishop left with genuine standing anywhere in the world.

  In North America, Episcopalians have kept the label alive informally, applying it to bishops with commanding, old-fashioned personalities. One such figure was Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan. Fellow Episcopal suffragan bishop Robert E. Terwilliger said of him: 'We often say that Bishop Donegan is the last prince bishop of the church because in his graciousness, in his presence, in his total lack of any crisis of identity, we have seen what a bishop is; and we know that it is a kind of royalty in Christ.'

  Anglican Archbishop Robert Duncan later used the same phrase with a harder edge. He described pastoral reforms in the 1970s as 'a revolution in reaction to those prince bishops; they had all this authority, they had all this power.' He pointed to new structures like the Episcopal Church's Commission on Ministry system. That system, he said, was built 'to replace an individual's authority with a committee's authority.' Whether that shift from one bishop's word to a committee's decision has fully replaced the old prince-bishop's authority is still being tested today.