In , a long-standing quarrel between two powerful local lords in central France erupted in a startling incident of aggression that was both actual and symbolic. Peter of Courtenay, count of Nevers and Auxerre, had for some time attempted to assert jurisdiction over land held by the bishop of Auxerre, Hugh of Noyers. Tension rose between the two authorities until Peter ravaged a church under Hugh's protection and blinded one of the bishop's vassals.
As a result, the bishop excommunicated the count and placed his lands under interdict, allowing no services except baptism for infants and last rites for the dying.
The incident would have been simply one of many tense interactions between episcopal and secular authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 1 had Peter not responded in a manner that shocked his contemporaries. While Peter was residing at Auxerre, a child died but, because the interdict was in effect, could not receive a burial in consecrated ground.
The mother, distraught by her inability to bury her child properly, turned to the secular authorities for help. According to a chronicle of the bishops of Auxerre, Count Peter, "stirred up by the persistent shouting and tears of the child's mother, had [the body] buried in the bishop's very bedchamber, before the bed of the lord bishop, in reproach against him and in contempt of God. In indignant letters that he wrote to King Philip Augustus, the archbishop of Sens, the exiled bishop, and the count, Pope Innocent III mentioned both the act of burial "you wished to convert his house into a cemetery" and the earlier violence.
Peter "dug up the grave with his own hands, removed the already stinking and putrid body of the dead [child], which greatly offended the nose, since it had already lain there for several months, and carried it on his own shoulders from the bedchamber to the cemetery, barefoot and wearing only linen, like a peasant.
