ABSTRACT
Shortly after the Second Lateran Council, the chronicle of the French abbey of Morigny recorded a vivid account of the assembly. When Pope Innocent II addresses the fathers, he bemoaned the evil effects of schism and the problems created in the Church if the head itself was corrupt. Staves and rings were the chief episcopal insignia, and through this ritual divestment Innocent was effectively deposing from office the bishops approved by his rival. The pallium was a somewhat different matter and this woollen band decorated with crosses had been a papal insignia since late antiquity, but from Gregory the Great's era the popes had begun to share this distinction regularly with select bishops. Innocent was a shrewd pope, and he used the pallium in these ways to strengthen his hand. Even after the schism, as his dealings with the Holy Land demonstrated, the pallium served to subjugate competing powers, not an antipope this time, but the Eastern Latin patriarchs.
