Vineam Domini – 10 April 1213: New Efforts and Traditional Topoi – Summoning Lateran IV

When Emperor Alexius Comnenus and the patriarch of Constantinople wrote to the thirty-nine-year-old pope that a council could be fruitful for Christendom, only twenty years had passed since the previous general council of the Latin church.1 Such a request (1199) was one of the signs that Lateran III2 had left many tasks undone, especially the crusade to repel the Muslim threat to Constantinople's lands and to recover Jerusalem, lost in 1187.