ABSTRACT
Honorius III has generally been regarded by historians as having contributed little that was new to the growth of the papacy in the thirteenth century as a temporal and political force. The nineteenth-century church historian Mann stated that "the pontificate of Honorius was literally an echo, a powerful echo indeed, but simply an echo, of that of his great predecessor". 1 Although in recent years this view has been somewhat modified, it has seldom been seriously examined. With respect to crusading the consensus among scholars has been that Honorius was deeply committed to the recovery of the Holy Land and to the plans for the Fifth Crusade which were initiated by his predecessor Innocent III and given universal backing in the West at the Fourth Lateran Council. 2 It has been assumed that most of Honorius's energy was devoted to continuing to support the grand visionary schemes of Innocent and trying to put them into practice.
