Pope Alexander III And the Council of Tours (1163)

From the Preface:   The 1163 council at Tours met amidst the most protracted conflict between a pope and a secular ruler in medieval history, the eighteen-year struggle between Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa. The gathering duly receives a paragraph or so in surveys of that dispute, and it usually is included—and properly so—in lists of the important sources for twelfth- and thirteenth-century canon law. But the meeting has been accorded no integrated study of all its political and l