A Short History of the Papacy

Hey, it’s a sexy title, right?

A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages by Walter Ullmann is a unicorn of sorts, my long-sought history of the Roman Catholic Church as a political entity. Elsewhere on this site we have considered The History of Christianity, an estimable work that tells the development of Christian theology; our current volume takes us through the development of the church that embodied that theology.

Two warnings: first, my own frame of reference is growing up low church, and backslid at that; for me the pope was somebody you saw on TV on Christmas Eve. (John XXIII, now there was pontiff who could make an entrance.) So while nothing here is intentionally disrespectful, I do come at the topic from a slight remove. And second, in this book we are visiting the realm of serious scholarship. Second semester material, so it helps a lot if you remember your Romans.

We open with Emperor Constantine, the guy who founded Constantinople and made Christianity a state religion in Rome.

The Romans had a lot of state religions, when they conquered a place the general rule was that you got to keep the local gods as long as you accepted the emperor as their representative on Earth. It was central to the Roman imperial formula that the emperor was also the ultimate high priest of all the gods…the political and theological bucks stopped in the same place, so to speak. It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that Christianity didn’t see it quite that way. In the view of the Western Church, Christians (and specifically the clergy) were not citizens under the rule of the emperor; the world was populated by Christians under the direction of the Church, and some of those Christians just happened to be kings. The term “matrix management” comes to mind and not in a good way. Conflict was inevitable.

Actually, the papacy had several problems on its hands. By the time of Constantine there were five metropolitans (sees) of the Christian Church, of which Rome was only one. Antioch was the oldest, and the other metropolitans normally deferred to it in matters of theology. Rome claimed pride of place because its bishop, the pope, was the direct successor of St. Paul. Also because they were in, well, Rome: the capital of the Empire. Pagan or Christian, Romans were known to be pretty snooty about their status.

The papal cause wasn’t helped much by the fall of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century. That event left the city of Rome without any effective civil government…and confusingly, left the city of Rome outside the Roman Empire. Sheesh. So as pope, you’re having to pick up some of the running of the city, and whatever prestige you may have had as the church in the national capital is gone…what’s a pontiff to do?

You make stuff up, that’s what you do.

In the late fourth century, about the time of the fall of the West, the Epistle of Clement appeared. Clement I was a real guy, the first bishop of Rome after St. Paul. The epistle, the letter, was fake: it claimed that near his death St. Paul had called together the Christian community and made an oral will of sorts, in which he transferred to Clement all the powers that St. Paul had exercised on Earth, and which he had inherited directly from Christ. That line of inheritance is the basis for Rome’s theological supremacy; fake though the letter was, you can see its appeal to the papacy.

In the late fifth century the so-called Donation of Constantine appeared. It, too, was a fake: the story it told was that before decamping Rome for Constantinople, Constantine had presented to Pope Sylvester large tracts of land within the empire, all islands everywhere, and the right to appoint his own officers. Again, not a word of truth to it, but you can see the appeal…and this one wasn’t proven fake for a thousand years, the papacy was still using it to divvy up parts of the New World in the sixteenth century under the “all islands” clause. The Donation of Constantine itself got collected into a larger book of canon law we know as Pseudo-Isidore. Some of it (like the Donation) was old work of varying veracity, and a third of it was fanciful, made up whole cloth and new. (Why Pseudo? The introduction was signed Isadore Mercator, which was apparently somebody else…I’d never heard of either of them.) And Pseudo-Isadore became a cornerstone in the papacy’s claim to primacy over worldly rulers.

Thus armed, the papacy set about building Europe.

In the author’s view, Christianity and specifically Roman Catholic Christianity gave the various European kingdoms a sense of shared identity they would have otherwise lacked. It was Pope Gregory I (“Gregory the Great,” he has a lot of fans) who in the late sixth century recognized that Constantinople wasn’t going to change – its Roman definition of emperor as chief priest was too deeply ingrained. So Gregory looked West to expand Roman Catholic influence, to rulers who were more open to papal control.

No small part of that papal influence was creation of a Western Emperor, a direct reflection of the emperor in Constantinople, but one subservient to the papacy in accordance with canon laid out in Pseudo-Isadore. The first Western Emperor was Charlemagne, elevated by Pope Leo III. In this formulation, the Holy Roman Emperor was an appointed office, one granted by the pope. The Western Emperor provided the muscle while the pope had (nominally) all the authority.

You can, of course, see the problem: a ruler strong enough to protect the Church, and one who had either defeated or staved off the Church’s enemies, was unlikely to willingly cede control of what he himself had won. Things came to both a high and a low point with the accession of Frederick II of Germany as Holy Roman Emperor. Like others before him, he took the thing to heart: he claimed that now that he was emperor his power was unrestrained. That he was going to conquer Constantinople, just like the pope wanted, only he was going to take it for himself. And since the pope was reliant on Fredrick’s troops for protection, just what was the pope going to say about it?

Plenty, as it turns out, and it’s a good read to see where it all goes. It is here, at what the author calls “the zenith of the medieval papacy,” that his narrative voice loses its objectivity. All authors like their subjects, but Ullmann seems almost gleeful as succeeding popes dismiss the political rulers of Europe as “kinglets.” For the better part of a couple of chapters, the narrative voice and the papal position become one. While Ullmann was waxing poetic about the legal basis for some of the papacy’s high-handed actions, a small voice inside me was screaming, “Yeah, based on documents you guys made up!” Very un-curmudgeonly of me, I promise to do better. But in fairness to Ullmann and to the papacy, by this point nobody remembered that much of Pseudo-Isadore was fake…they were acting in good faith, believing it was real. And Ullman does recover some of his academic detachment in a chapter or two.

One strength of the book is you see how quickly the fortunes of the papacy changed from decade to decade, a calculus based in no small part on the pope’s strength relative to the secular rulers. The medieval papacy was inevitably changed by forces as diverse as Aristotle and ballistics, the spread of Classical literature and revival of interest in Greek culture, and of course Luther and the printing press. All of which Ullmann details, although not necessarily in an approving way.

Point of view matters in a book. Consider this example, involving the French:

King Philip II Augustus of France was, as you recall, bendy-straight at best: he’d had an affair with the future king of England, but married a woman, Isabella of Hainault. (I’m figuring Philip for at least a Kinsey 2.) Isabella died in childbirth, poor woman. Philip next married Ingeborg of Denmark…yes, children, that means there was a Queen Ingeborg of France. Whom Philip did not like, but she did come with a favorable military alliance, plus lots of cash. They met and married on the same day, and Philip immediately had her shipped off to a convent. (OK, maybe he was a Kinsey 3.) Philip then took up with Agnes of Dalmatia and appealed to Pope Celestine III for an annulment of his marriage to Ingeborg, based on non-consummation (which I, for one, can believe). Celestine held that Philip was already married and made him take Ingeborg back.

That much Ullmann tells us. But he doesn’t finish the story: Philip sent Agnes to a convent, where she died of grief within the year. And for the rest of their marriage, Ingeborg was riding Philip about how much better her life was without him. Ullmann sees the tale as cautionary, the papacy expending political capital on matters beneath its dignity.

Philip’s warning would be never take relationship advice from a man carrying fake credentials and wearing a dress. It’s a point of view thing.