The First General Council of Lyon was presided over by
Pope Innocent IV, who, threatened by
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, arrived at
Lyon on 2 December 1244, Early the following year, he summoned the Church's bishops to the council for later that same year. Some 250 prelates responded, including the Latin patriarchs of
Constantinople,
Antioch, and
Aquileia and 140 bishops. Latin Emperor
Baldwin II of Constantinople, Counts
Raymond VII of Toulouse and
Raymond Berenguer IV of Provence were among those who participated. With Rome under siege by Emperor Frederick II, the pope used the council to
excommunicate and depose the emperor with
Ad Apostolicae Dignitatis Apicem, as well as the King
Sancho II of Portugal. The council also directed a new crusade (the
Seventh Crusade), under the command of King
Louis IX of France, to reconquer the
Holy Land. At the opening, on 28 June, after the singing of the
Veni Creator Spiritus, Innocent IV preached on the subject of the five wounds of the Church and compared them to his own five sorrows: (1) the poor behaviour of both
clergy and
laity, (2) the insolence of the
Saracens who occupied the Holy Land, (3) the Great
East-West Schism, (4) the cruelties of the
Tatars in Hungary and (5) the persecution of the Church by the Emperor Frederick. The Council of Lyon was rather poorly attended. Since the great majority of those bishops and archbishops present came from France, Italy and Spain, and the
Byzantine Greeks and the other countries, especially
Germany, were but weakly represented, the ambassador of Frederick,
Thaddaeus of Suessa, contested its
ecumenicity in the assembly itself. In a letter, Innocent IV had urged
Kaliman I of Bulgaria to send representatives. In the bull
Cum simus super (25 March 1245), he also urged the
Vlachs,
Serbs,
Alans,
Georgians,
Nubians, the
Church of the East and all the other Eastern Christians not in union with Rome to send representatives. In the end, the only known non-Latin cleric present was Peter, the
bishop of Belgorod and vicar of the
metropolitanate of Kiev, who provided Innocent with intelligence on the Mongols prior to the council. His information, in the form of the
Tractatus de ortu Tartarorum, circulated among attendees. The condemnation of the emperor was a foregone conclusion. The objections of the ambassador, which were that the accused had not been regularly
cited, the pope was plaintiff and judge in one, and therefore the whole process was anomalous, achieved as little success as his appeal to the future pontiff and to a truly ecumenical council. At the second session on 5 July, the
bishop of Calvi and a Spanish archbishop attacked the emperor's behaviour, and in a subsequent session on 17 July, Innocent pronounced the deposition of Frederick. The deposition was signed by one 150 bishops and the
Dominicans and
Franciscans were given the responsibility for its publication. However, Innocent IV did not possess the material means to enforce the decree. The Council of Lyon promulgated several other purely disciplinary measures: • It obliged the
Cistercians to pay
tithes. • It approved the Rule of the
Grandmontines. • It decided the institution of the
Octave of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. • It prescribed that
cardinals were to wear a
red hat. • It prepared thirty-eight constitutions, which were later inserted by
Boniface VIII in his Decretals, the most important of which decreed a levy of a twentieth on every benefice for three years for the relief of the Holy Land. Among those attending was
Thomas Cantilupe, who was made a papal chaplain and given a dispensation to hold his benefices in plurality. ==References==