Two Original Papal Letters about Diocesan Discipline in the Archiepiscopal See of Toledo Kyle C. Lincoln The archdiocese of Toledo was a competitive place and required significant efforts by even the most talented clerics to wrest even a modicum of control from the confraternities and parishes of the southern Castilian capital. It no surprise, then, that the cathedral chapter would send and receive letters to Rome in order to clarify any number of issues with which they were grappling (for, against, and under the nose of the archbishop.) Two such letters, hitherto unedited, from the pontificates of Innocent III and Innocent IV suggest that the practice of independent action against the archbishop and the enrollment of outsiders had become causes of concern. In the first of these letters, 'Cum omnibus Christifidelibus', the clerics of Toledo were commanded to obedience of the archbishop and were strictly warned not to contradict him. In the second letter, 'Paci et tranquilitati vestre,' the chapter was instructed that it no longer would be required, as it had been in the past, to provide prebends to papal designees without a kind of shibboleth included in the letter to signify it was an authentic papal request. It is interesting that in both cases the chapter is suggested to have acted (at least semi-)autonomously and that Rome had heard of such action. The first letter described and edited here is marked ACT A.6.1.10 in the Toledan Capitular Cathedral Archive. The text is well-preserved in a contemporary chancery hand; the binding threads still hanging from the letter, but Innocent's seal has been lost. The 'datum' clause notes that the letter was issued at the Lateran on 28 May, 1199, a date which agrees with Innocent's itinerary generally.1 There is no reason, either from the letter's contents or its physical state, to believe it anything but authentic. [End Page 219] The text is brief but bears all of the standard markers of a papal rescript. The letter appears to respond to a request from Archbishop Martín López de Pisuerga for a papal scolding of the cathedral chapter who had apparently been disobedient. No records of which precise dispute prompted the letter are known, but an inscription, in a thirteenth century hand, on the dorse of the document reads 'de reinorione conspirationis clericorum// tholetanis contra archiepiscopus', suggesting that a thirteenth century 'archivero' in Toledo believed that it was a reawakening of an earlier dispute from 1182x5, commonly referred to as the 'rebellion of the clerics'. This episode, sometime during the period between the elevation of Pedro de Cardona to the Cardinalate and the appointment of Gonzalo Pérez as archbishop ca. 1184, is generally held to have been a revolt over the election of Pedro de Cardona and the financial burdens faced by Toledo in the aftermath of the conquest of Cuenca, although only circumstantial evidence supports such a hypothesis.2 The archivist's inscription, absent any other contextual clues, is our best indicator of the cause of Innocent's letter, and it is not an unfounded supposition, given the general tenor of the archiepiscopate of Martín Lopez de Pisuerga.3 During the twelfth century, a number of reforms of the [End Page 220] chapter of Toledo's finances had sought to reduce the number of prebends given out by the chapter, but the frequency of these reforms suggests that they rarely held. If the finances of the chapter were strained enough in the late 1190s after the disaster of Alarcos as they had been stressed by the Conquest of Cuenca in the late 1170s, it is not unreasonable to suggest that similar conditions provoked congruent responses. The second letter edited and described here is marked ACT A.6.1.9 in the Toledan Capitular Archive. The text is moderately well-preserved in a contemporary chancery hand with slightly fading ink but vibrant flourishes of penmanship. The threads and lead seal are both missing, but the text itself has crisp edges and folds, suggesting generally good preservation. The 'datum' clause notes that the letter was issued on 2 January, 1252 at Perugia, a dating that fits with Innocent IV...