La elaboración del primado papal entre los siglos XI y XII

The reform of the Church cannot be read as a unique and one-way process. Linearity was indeed what was missing. Although it is undeniable that ecclesiastic institutions changed more between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries than in the previous hundreds of years, we should refer to this process resorting to the plural form “reforms”, a set of reforms. The reform consisted of different reforms of the ecclesiastical institutions which dialectically combined resulting in a radical change, which was not the result of a pre-established plot and had no single root. The reform of the papacy, the progressive acquisition of awareness of its universal authority and above all the creation of the pontifical primacy, was based on this multiplicity of reforms. Even within the papacy, however, there was no linearity – as exemplified by the figure of the (anti-)pope Clement III in the last twenty years of the eleventh century –, and there was no uniqueness of methods and perspectives. In the magmatic process reframing the Christian society and the ecclesiastical institutions between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the papacy progressively shown a self-awareness, which resulted in a new position vis-à-vis imperial authority. The melting pot in which the papal ideology of primacy took shape, includes references to precise legacies of the past, a characteristic of the twelfth-century papacy.