Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland's Bishops into the Roman Church, 1200-1350

By Joel D. Anderson

With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surprising and distinctive vantage point. Tracing the web of textual ties that connected the northern fringes of Europe to the Roman see, Joel D. Anderson explores the ways in which Norse writers recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church for their own ends.

Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order—visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church’s text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512822816

Joel D. Anderson

Joel D. Anderson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine.

Book preview

Cover: Reimagining Christendom, Writing Iceland’s Bishops into the Roman Church, 1200–1350 by Joel D. Anderson

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

REIMAGINING CHRISTENDOM

Writing Iceland’s Bishops into the Roman Church, 1200–1350

Joel D. Anderson

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2282-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2281-6

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Contents

Introduction. Ecclesiastical Predicaments at the Edge of the World

Chapter 1. Envisioning the Roman Church in the Age of Innocent III, Páll Jónsson, and Sverrir Sigurðarson

Chapter 2. Irregular Sanctity at the Limits of Ecclesiastical Law

Chapter 3. Bishop Guðmundr’s Hail Mary: Imagining and Suspending Papal Government in Medieval Iceland

Chapter 4. Choreographing the Crusades in the Archbishopric of Niðaróss

Chapter 5. The Powers and Perils of Documents in the Life of Bishop Lárentíus Kálfsson

Conclusion. Imagining Iceland’s Place

Appendix 1. The Bishops of Iceland to c. 1350

Appendix 2. Bishops’ Sagas Discussed in This Book

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Map 1. The Roman church in the high medieval Norse world

Map 2. Medieval Iceland

Introduction

Ecclesiastical Predicaments at the Edge of the World

Gunnlaugr Leifsson had a problem. Shortly after 1200, the learned monk was tasked with writing the vita of Jón Ǫgmundarson (d. 1121), the first bishop to occupy the see of Hólar in northern Iceland. Many of Jón’s hagiographic credentials were solid. There was broad agreement that the bishop had lived a righteous life. His bones, recently excavated and enshrined, had worked a series of miracles. The public celebration of his cult had just been adopted into law at the alþingi, medieval Iceland’s national assembly. Yet Gunnlaugr could scarcely ignore a troubling detail in his protagonist’s biography. Bishop Jón had been married. Twice. In some respects, this was not terribly surprising. Into the first decades of the thirteenth century, most of the bishops who occupied Iceland’s two sees—one at Skálholt and the other at Hólar—were married men, many with children.¹

Still, Gunnlaugr knew that the marital norms of Iceland’s bishops did not conform to the program of clerical celibacy outlined by an increasingly vocal papacy. Moreover, from the perspective of the Roman church’s law, Bishop Jón’s case was especially problematic. According to the canonical understanding of the sacrament of marriage, the union of man and wife mirrored the ideal, perfect, and indissoluble union of Christ and Church. Canon lawyers argued that second marriages lacked full sacramental value because they divided what was supposed to be unified. Any man who remarried after the death of his first wife, as Jón had, was a bigamist. Bigamists were not fit to dispense the sacraments to others.² As strange as this reasoning may sound to modern ears, the ban on twice-married men serving in major holy orders was one of the most stringent and inflexible requirements of the medieval church. According to ecclesiastical law, Jón Ǫgmundarson had no business being a priest, still less a bishop, let alone a saint.

This book treats the dilemma confronting Gunnlaugr as emblematic of a broader dynamic. It focuses on the period from the end of the twelfth century through the middle of the fourteenth century, an era that witnessed the elaboration and intensification of government across Europe. In the Roman church, the new regime was dispersed in the form of messengers and officials bearing the documents, directives, and legal codes of central ecclesiastical authorities. Appraising these developments from the northern edge of Christian Europe, this book examines how clerics in Iceland came to terms with the strange thing that was Rome. For a number of reasons, the Icelandic church often found itself out of sync with the models of ecclesiastical organization and clerical conduct articulated in canon law manuscripts and papal bulls. Medieval Iceland’s married bishops were a product of its social order, which, at least until the thirteenth century, made few distinctions between secular and ecclesiastical elites.

Latin-literate churchmen like Gunnlaugr were keenly aware of the dilemmas that these arrangements produced. On the one hand, they recognized that officeholding in the Roman church entailed conforming to defined patterns of permissible conduct and behavior, obligations that were all the more acute for clerics in the upper levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. On the other hand, as members of a tight-knit Icelandic community, these churchmen understood the tenacity of local customs and they were primed to exhibit fierce devotion to a native bishop with a claim to sanctity. Gunnlaugr’s Vita sancti Johannis is no longer extant, but three Norse versions of Jóns saga, based to varying degrees on his original text, survive.³ These writings belong to a genre that modern scholars have dubbed the biskupa sögur, hereafter the bishops’ sagas, a group of narratives that constitutes this book’s main source material. Written and rewritten, primarily in Norse, over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the bishops’ sagas trace the lives of Iceland’s bishops. Some, including Jóns saga, are hagiographies; others read more like biographies or chronicles.⁴ A synoptic overview of the bishops’ sagas discussed in this book is provided in Appendix 2. Writing the life of an Icelandic bishop often meant negotiating the disconnects between local practices and universal expectations. These sagas aimed to present their audiences—first and foremost, other Icelandic clerics—with plausible versions of how Iceland’s bishops fit within Christendom, the ecclesiastical polity headed by the pope in Rome. This frequently involved stretching the horizons of what might be possible within the legal and institutional confines of the Roman church. In the universe of the bishops’ sagas, even a bigamist stood a chance of earning redemption at the papal court.

As I detail in Chapter 2, all extant versions of Jóns saga contain an account, very likely stemming from Gunnlaugr’s original vita, of Jón Ǫgmundarson journeying south to the Roman curia after his election and receiving there a dispensation that allowed him to be consecrated as bishop of Hólar in spite of his two marriages. This tale assured Icelanders that, in return for deference to Rome’s apostolic authority, the papacy was willing to carve out large spaces of exception to the otherwise universal requirements of canon law. Narratives of Jón’s dispensation represent one manifestation of the deep-seated cultural impulse at the center of this book. Across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Icelandic clerics sought to write their native bishops—whose ranks included chieftains, husbands, and at least one forger—into the Roman church. These efforts coalesced less around the explicit defense of local practices and customs and more around the reconfiguration of the universal church’s existing institutional requirements and governmental structures. As this book repeatedly demonstrates, the writers of the bishops’ sagas found inventive ways to recruit, refashion, and repurpose the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church in order to legitimize their protagonists.

The tales of Jón’s dispensation, like many of the other stories I discuss below, were presented as historical. The authors of the bishops’ sagas drew on trusted testimonies, written records, and established modes of interaction with the Roman church’s hierarchy even as they embellished and doctored those testimonies, records, and interactions to suit their own agendas. Motivating these narratives and embedded within them were deeply held assumptions about how the wider universe of Christendom both functioned and ought to function. Icelandic writers imagined themselves as belonging to a church and a society whose laws were administered in a flexible manner and whose leaders recognized the need to grant exceptions to the rules and to defer to the superior knowledge that local clerics on the margins of Christian Europe possessed about their own affairs.

In the pages that follow, I argue that the visions of ecclesiastical order that the writers of the bishops’ sagas constructed compel historiographical reassessments on three interrelated fronts. First, they open up new dimensions of the place that Iceland occupied within the broader currents of high medieval Europe. While literary scholars have long detected European influence on various genres of saga writing, historians, especially in the Anglophone world, have tended to portray medieval Iceland as a textbook example of a feuding society whose communal forms of decision making and dispute resolution were decidedly out of step with contemporary trends toward the rise of centralized forms of government.⁵ This anthropologically inspired historiography has generally ignored Iceland’s bishops or regarded them as inseparable from the local order, quasi-chieftains who operated without a clear sense of belonging to a larger ecclesiastical whole.⁶ In recent decades, more specialized research into the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic church has painted a sharply contrasting picture, presenting the island’s integration into Christendom as something of a foregone conclusion, a destination that was reached through the renunciation of traditional customs, the imposition of Roman discipline, and clerics’ widespread identification with the pan-European project of ecclesiastical reform.⁷

This book charts a different course. It positions Iceland’s bishops and their biographers as active agents who, from the late twelfth century, both recognized and reframed external demands for institutional consistency and obedience to a distant ecclesiastical hierarchy. It emphasizes how, rather than submitting to prefabricated models of conformity, Icelandic clerics envisioned forms of subjecthood within the Roman church that were open-ended and conditional. The authors of Jóns saga, for instance, acknowledged the rule that bigamists were unfit for holy orders but positioned Jón’s case as ripe for papal intervention; deference to Rome’s supreme authority opened up possibilities for the sanctioning of otherwise illegal conduct. Closely related notions, I demonstrate below, are deeply embedded in many other bishops’ sagas. They are indicative of an Icelandic church that was determined to preserve its idiosyncrasies—the worship of a bigamous bishop-saint, to cite just one example—even as it aligned itself with the broader culture of Latin Europe.

Second, the book argues that medieval Icelandic representations of the Roman church cast light on the malleable nature of Christendom itself, revealing it as an imagined community whose common legal frameworks and theories of hierarchical power in fact provided spaces for autonomy, exception, and particularity. This portrayal revises the conclusions of an influential strand of medieval historiography, which has long regarded the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century church as Europe’s preeminent homogenizing force, an institution that, at the behest of a monarchical papacy, harmonized and synthesized diverse local cultures into an organized whole.⁸ This book, by contrast, contends that a more flexible impression of the character of high medieval Christendom emerges when the theories and practices of papal government are examined from the vantage point of Iceland. In writings about their native bishops, the island’s clerics cultivated a sense of belonging to the wider Christian world that emphasized both Rome’s centrality and its corroboration of distinctively irregular forms of ecclesiastical leadership and conduct. The sense of reimagining in the book’s title is twofold. Icelandic clerics reimagined the sort of church that Rome’s jurisdictional supremacy and its petitioning systems could bring into being; their imaginings, in turn, can contribute to ongoing scholarly reassessments of the dominant features of high medieval Christendom, which have emphasized the dynamic negotiations and local desires that gave shape and expression to this all-embracing community.

Third, the bishops’ sagas make clear that the legal documents emanating from Rome and other centers of ecclesiastical power were a charged yet unpredictable medium that could both extend and undermine sovereignty. These vernacular narratives offer new perspectives on the impacts and effects of the church’s surging textual production in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Roman curia, viewed from the Norse world, emerges more as a wish-fulfillment factory than as an enforcer of conformity and discipline. It was a site where a petitioner armed with the right arguments could obtain a papal bull in his favor, even if the document’s sentence ran counter to the law’s actual requirements and the papacy’s actual agenda. In the Far North, meanwhile, the bishops’ sagas portray a world of texts traveling in complex circuits, where they were subject to all manner of challenges and appropriations. Efforts to instrumentalize the authority vested in documents were frequently undercut by the mixed motives of their issuers and the shifting circumstances that confronted their bearers. In drawing attention to the ways in which the medieval church’s administrative channels often failed to achieve their ordering ambitions, this book diverges from a scholarly tradition that has associated the adoption of document-based governance during the High Middle Ages with the inexorable growth of great organizations capable of subjecting distant regions to hegemonic control.⁹ Instead, it demonstrates how growing bureaucratization within the Roman church provided new forums for fashioning, deploying, and challenging authority on Christendom’s northern peripheries.

Between the Exception and the Rule

Iceland’s first episcopal see was established at Skálholt in 1056; a second, at Hólar, followed a half-century later. The narrative sources that trace these developments present them as homegrown initiatives that emerged from and responded to local desires, with the interests of the powerful Haukdœlir family looming especially large.¹⁰ The first bishop of Skálholt, Ísleifr (d. 1080), was a member of the family; he inherited the auspicious farmstead that eventually became the economic base of the see. Bishop Ísleifr’s son, Gizurr (d. 1118), succeeded him at Skálholt and later granted the northerners’ petition to establish a second bishopric at Hólar. Hungrvaka, an early thirteenth-century chronicle of the first five bishops of Skálholt that drew heavily on Haukdœlir lore, presents itself as an authority on this history and takes pains to portray Gizurr’s long term in office (1082–1118) as an era of harmony and prosperity secured by his wise leadership.¹¹

Such foundation narratives make clear the many ways in which Iceland’s first ecclesiastical institutions were grafted onto indigenous rootstock. Over the course of the twelfth century, the island’s church grew intertwined with the concerns of its secular elites—an arrangement that produced a variety of hybrid fruits. In the absence of functioning cathedral chapters, Iceland’s bishops were, until the mid-thirteenth century, elected through a process of deliberation and consultation among local powerbrokers from leading families like the Haukdœlir.¹² Tithes formed significant revenue streams for many secular landowners, who often administered and effectively controlled the churches on their properties.¹³ Expectations for bishops mirrored, in important respects, those of high-status chieftains. Both groups occupied positions of prominence at the alþingi, the annual assembly of Iceland’s political class that provided a forum for the recapitulation of the laws and customs that were meant to govern the land in the absence of a central executive authority. Like chieftains, Iceland’s bishops cultivated dense networks of alliances based on kinship and friendship; for Ísleifr, Gizurr, and others, this meant marrying and procreating.¹⁴

Supervisory authority over the Icelandic church was vested in distant Rome and in a series of archiepiscopal sees whose locations crept northward during the High Middle Ages. Skálholt was first under the jurisdiction of Hamburg-Bremen. Around 1103–4, the papacy created a new archiepiscopal see at Lund and gave it responsibility for the Far North. The bishops of Skálholt and Hólar were consecrated there until the middle of the twelfth century, when another new archiepiscopal province was carved out. Its headquarters were at Niðaróss, on the west coast of Norway. In theory, Hamburg-Bremen, Lund, Niðaróss, and Rome were extra-Icelandic centers of political gravity, sites where the norms of the island’s chieftain-dominated church would be scrutinized by reform-minded archbishops, and, if necessary, popes. In practice, the overseers of the bishops of Skálholt and Hólar seem to have filled this function only sporadically in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.¹⁵

When Icelandic clerics began recording the history of their church in earnest at the turn of the thirteenth century, they asserted that their predecessors had, in fact, managed both to adhere to indigenous norms and to fit within the wider rule of Christendom. The author of Hungrvaka, for instance, did not shy away from discussing the worldly offices and accomplishments of the aforementioned Gizurr Ísleifsson, Iceland’s second bishop.¹⁶ A married chieftain with five sons and at least one daughter, Gizurr blended religious and secular roles in ways that were profoundly at odds with the reformist trends vocalized by his famous contemporary, Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085). Even so, Hungrvaka was also careful to inscribe the bishop within the legal and political systems of the Gregorian papacy. The narrative reports that, during his journey abroad for consecration, Gizurr learned that Pope Gregory had suspended his immediate supervisor, the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, on account of the archbishop’s alliance with Gregory’s nemesis, Henry IV (d. 1106). Gizurr thus went directly to Rome and explained his dilemma to the pope—namely, that the official normally entrusted with confirming and consecrating the bishops of Iceland had been removed from his office. Gregory, the narrative reports, determined that the Icelander was fit to join the ranks of Christendom’s bishops and sent him onward to the archbishop of Magdeburg, a papal ally, for consecration.¹⁷

In a few short lines, the thirteenth-century author of Hungrvaka presented Gizurr as a figure who, like Jón Ǫgmundarson, simultaneously conformed to, yet remained radically independent from, the norms of the international church. On the one hand, the narrative acknowledged papal supremacy over the church generally and over episcopal consecrations specifically; Gizurr did not allow himself to be consecrated by an archbishop whom the pope had suspended. On the other hand, the story communicated a version of history that would have shocked advocates of the Gregorian platform. The reformers demanded strict separation of the clerical order from the lay order, often appealing to a highly sexualized and gendered ecclesiology that likened an unchaste bishop to an adulterer.¹⁸ While Gizurr’s chieftaincy, his wife, and his children, inter alia, should have excluded him from holding the episcopal office, his exploits at the curia signaled to Icelandic audiences his secure place within the church’s institutional and legal orders.

The cultural sensibilities at work in this episode will be on display repeatedly in the following chapters. They underline how Icelandic writers expertly played both sides of the fence, working both to uphold the Roman church and test its capacities to accommodate exceptions to otherwise universal rules. The audiences for Hungrvaka were led to believe that, whatever his deviations from the protocols of reform, Gizurr Ísleifsson could be fitted into the broader history of a Romano-centric Christendom, even earning the embrace of the uncompromising Gregory VII.

Several key features of the medieval Icelandic church made the impulse to reimagine the boundaries of the Roman church especially necessary and feasible. The sheer distances that separated the occupants of Skálholt and Hólar from their supervisors made for infrequent contact between the two. This fact, coupled with the island’s unique history and political system, contributed to a widespread belief that good ecclesiastical governance meant adhering to indigenous norms and accommodating local conditions. Even so, the divergences between Iceland’s chieftain-dominated ecclesiastical culture and Rome’s expectations proved difficult for literate Icelanders to ignore. This was particularly true from the thirteenth century onward, as clergymen in Skálholt and Hólar became more acquainted with the standards for clerical comportment and behavior dictated by canon law. Vernacular saga-writing devoted to the lives of native bishops provided forums for addressing these discrepancies and platforms for articulating visions of the Roman church that could accommodate the likes of Gizurr Ísleifsson and Jón Ǫgmundarson.

It would be a mistake, however, to regard the narratives from the bishops’ sagas discussed in this book merely as the anomalous products of an isolated and idiosyncratic clerical community. For all of its distinctive features, the medieval Icelandic church was, in many respects, not that exceptional. Its differences from other churches in high medieval Europe were more a question of degree than kind. Spotty supervision and lukewarm devotion to the implementation of reform, for instance, were not unique to the Far North. Even after the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) stipulated a program of required annual provincial and diocesan synods intended to correct the morals and lifestyles of parish clergy, archbishops and bishops in England and Germany neglected to hold these meetings with anything approaching the frequency that the canons prescribed.¹⁹ Not entirely unlike Icelandic chieftains, secular elites across Europe found ways, often with help from clerical experts, to exercise considerable influence over episcopal elections and to generate revenue from ecclesiastical treasure.²⁰ Recent studies from Iberia and elsewhere have demonstrated that, just as in Iceland, clerical marriage was a firmly entrenched custom, one that was accepted by local communities and that was, in many places, unofficially tolerated by the ecclesiastical hierarchy through the end of the Middle Ages.²¹

The authors of the bishops’ sagas were likewise not alone in their efforts to imaginatively refashion papal government to suit their own needs. The impulse to seek—and, if necessary, fabricate—legitimation from Rome was widespread. For clerical communities looking to officially confirm what they already suspected, securing a forged papal document was simply one option among many. Spurious claims to papal canonization, for instance, can be found in Latin writings across high medieval Europe. Early twelfth-century proponents of Saint Stephen (d. 1038) burnished the Hungarian king’s image and international stature by asserting, erroneously, that Rome had demanded his worship. The prolific hagiographer Goscelin of St. Bertin (fl. c. 1060–1100) invented a story about document-bearing papal legates authorizing the translation of a certain Kenhelm in order to insulate the cult of this Anglo-Saxon martyr from Normans skeptical of its authenticity. When the Paris-educated bishop of Skara, Brynolf Algotsson (d. 1317), was keen to emphasize the legality of a liturgy devoted to Helena (d. 1164), one of Sweden’s own martyr-saints, he declared that Pope Alexander III (d. 1181) had written her into the Roman church’s calendar of holy men and women.²² Like the authors of Jóns saga and Hungrvaka, these writers harnessed Rome’s prestige and its licensing capacities to update the past to accord with present demands. They sought to close the gaps between domestic expectations and more complicated realities, conceptualizing the Roman church as an institution that recognized local manifestations of sanctity and excellence—even when the evidence for that recognition was improbable, spotty, or nonexistent.

Set against this high medieval European backdrop, the tales from the bishops’ sagas discussed in the following pages emerge less as anomalies and more as prominent accentuations of the prevailing landscape. In demonstrating how their bishops fit within Christendom, Icelandic clerical writers offered, like the Latin hagiographers discussed above, responses to the aggressive centralization of jurisdiction and decision-making that Rome had undertaken since the mid-eleventh century. Their vernacular narratives frequently portrayed the papacy as a one-stop shop for accreditation and sanctioning, an institution that was willing to entertain just about any case. This was a skewed impression, but one that was grounded in the extant theory and practice of papal government.

The bishops’ sagas thus functioned as a kind of distorting mirror for the papal monarchy—a medium that reflected back, in exaggerated forms, conditions and dynamics that were prevalent within the system as a whole. As I detail in the following section, Icelandic narratives underline the malleable and multidirectional nature of ecclesiastical authority within high medieval Europe. They portray Christendom as an entity that emerged more from imaginative engagement and negotiated dialogue than from top-down ordering, a political formation whose supposed uniformity served as effective cover for refashioning and experimentation at the local level. Like many other far-flung organizations and globe-spanning empires, the Roman church prominently revealed at its edges some of its fundamental characteristics and features.

Contesting the Character of Christendom

Robert Bartlett’s seminal book, The Making of Europe, describes the formation of European society during the High Middle Ages with reference to the themes of expansion, colonization, and conquest. Central to his story is the growth of Christendom, an entity whose development he charts, in the first instance, by noting the widespread establishment of new bishoprics in previously unchristianized territories across the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. While Bartlett’s account of high medieval Christian society develops over the course of his book, the core features of Christendom are defined early on with admirable directness: Christendom was, per Bartlett, a rite and an obedience. By rite, Bartlett means the performance of the Latin liturgy; by obedience, he emphasizes deference to the authority of the Roman pontiff and the church’s hierarchy.²³

The two bishoprics of Iceland make few appearances in The Making of Europe. Still, Bartlett’s definition captures key aspects of how medieval Christians in the remote North understood the texture of the wider community to which they belonged. In both Latin and the vernacular, Christendom was a concept that medieval people applied to themselves and their world. The Norse words kristni and kristindómr, like the Latin christianitas, encompassed a range of meanings. They could refer to rites and religious observances—baptism, the Mass, and so forth—that were common to believers across western Europe. They could also refer to the church generally, or more specifically to the lands and peoples who recognized the supreme authority of Christ’s vicar in Rome.²⁴ This latter sense gained traction especially in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. It is also the main connotation of Christendom as the term is used in this book—an ideal of the church and the Christian community united by obedience to the Roman hierarchy and canon law.

In the Norse world as elsewhere, writers charted the growth of Christendom in terms of increasing cognizance of papal dictates. In his mid-fourteenth-century vita of the Icelandic bishop Guðmundr Arason (d. 1237), Arngrímr Brandsson described the process thus: The judgments of the lord popes have long increased and afterward run throughout Christendom, land by land, with apostolic authority. And since, before this, the Christian faith consisted of a minuteness of laws, each kingdom became obliged to conform to lawful practices.²⁵ Arngrímr wrote these lines from the perspective of a highly literate, fourteenth-century cleric looking back on the world of the early thirteenth-century Icelandic church. For him, the differences between the two eras were a function of Iceland’s growing familiarity with the Roman church’s rules, procedures, and protocols, especially as these manifested themselves in the papal judgments that formed one of the principal bases of canon law. Arngrímr’s imagery likens the Roman see to a kind of spring whose output swells each year thanks to the pontiffs’ ability to draw on the deep reservoir of judicial supremacy that they enjoyed as the successors to Peter, prince of the apostles. Whereas papal guidance once trickled out intermittently, in Arngrímr’s present it cascades throughout Christendom, cutting ever-wider channels through an ever-expanding network of territories.²⁶

Generations of modern historians, not unlike fourteenth-century Icelandic clerics, have been impressed by the regulatory ambitions and expansionary energies of the high medieval church. One of the dominant historiographical paradigms of this era credits the Roman papacy with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution that remade the scattered local churches and communities of the medieval West in its image. According to the standard narrative, these developments had their roots in Gregory VII’s calls for libertas ecclesiae—a wide-ranging reform movement that reached its apogee during the age of the papal monarchy, when lawyer-popes like Innocent III (d. 1216) and Innocent IV (d. 1254) presided over a vast apparatus that enforced top-down discipline in the church and that left a deep imprint on the rest of society. In his widely influential Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, R. W. Southern describes the organizational history of the Roman church during the High Middle Ages in terms of inexorable progress toward systematic completeness. By the thirteenth century, he argues, papal government is best characterized as a vast machine—uniform and regular in its operations and as effective as any state before the nineteenth century at bending subjects to its will.²⁷ Robert Bartlett, Southern’s student, employs more organic metaphors to tell a similar story in The Making of Europe. For Bartlett, bishoprics—territorial units that ensured the performance of the Latin liturgy and whose leaders recognized the legal centrality of Rome—were the cells that made up the body of Christendom. Over the course of the book, bishoprics join chartered towns and international religious orders as examples of standardized forms of social organization that were first cultivated in Europe’s centers and then exported, often violently, to its peripheries. As these organisms replicated in their new environments, they produced an increasingly homogeneous society characterized by deepening cultural uniformity and shared Roman Christian identity.²⁸

The institutional structures of the western church took root in the Norse world not so much through coercive force as through arbitrations with kings and local chieftains—a fact that differentiates the medieval North from most of the frontier societies discussed in Bartlett’s book.²⁹ Nevertheless, historians of high medieval northern Europe have largely adopted the paradigm of assimilation into an aggressively expanding and increasingly homogeneous Christendom sketched above. Torstein Jørgensen, for example, has emphasized the ways in which the universal authority and petitioning systems of the Roman see facilitated the integration of the Norse world into an overarching common European culture.³⁰ Sverre Bagge succinctly articulates a widespread historiographical assumption when he writes that Scandinavian history from the end of the Viking Age up to the Reformation can be regarded as European history in miniature.³¹ Historians of medieval Iceland, meanwhile, have told the story of the island’s Europeanization with sometimes audible sighs of resignation, presenting the thirteenth century as a period when centralized royal and ecclesiastical organs built according to European specifications replaced an earlier, highly unique, political culture in which social cohesion was maintained on the basis