The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
There are in particular, illustrious Emperor, two powers by whom the world is governed, the authority of the bishops and the Imperial power. – Pope Gelasius to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius, end of fifth century
One of the fundamental mistakes made by popular history is to confuse the ‘Dark Age’ with the ‘Middle Age’ that followed it. The ‘Dark Age’ was nothing much except dark. As that acute Christian Rationalist Dr WR Inge once aptly remarked, had the centuries of the Dark Age not existed, it would have made hardly any difference to the cultural history of the world.
True enough! But the Middle Ages, properly so-called, were a good deal more than that. For medieval Europe evolved an ecclesiastical civilisation somewhat similar to that of modern Tibet, and alien as it is to modern secular thought one must in fairness admit that this civilisation had great works of art to its credit, one has only to think of Dante and the medieval cathedrals. Whilst intellectually, medieval, unlike modern theology, displayed at least a remarkable if perverse ingenuity and even at times an inverted rationalism.
Like all the distinctive eras of human civilisation, the Middle Age and its ecclesiastical civilisation had its successive epochs of rise, meridian and decline. These may be dated respectively as follows: between 800, the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire, and 1100, the beginning of the era of the Crusades; between about 1100 and 1300, soon after which date the Papacy was transported from Rome to French Avignon. Lastly, the medieval era of decay, which ended about 1500 with the vast and simultaneous intellectual, geographical and religious revolution that expressed itself in the Renaissance and in the Reformation, and which ushered in the modern secular age.
Thus, the total duration of the Middle Ages was from about AD 800 to 1500, some seven centuries in all.
The ‘Middle’ Age, that is the ecclesiastical age between the secular epochs of classical and modern times, was the high-watermark, the golden age of the Papacy. It then attained its zenith of prestige and power, for particularly during the High Middle Age – c 1100 – 1300 – the Papacy was the effective ruler of Europe; and its unique combination of spiritual, economic and even political power made it the effective and (in current phraseology) the totalitarian ruler of medieval Europe.
What the Dalai Lama, the God-King, is to modern Tibet, that was the Pope to medieval Europe. And since every social institution looks back longingly to its heyday, our contemporary Catholic reactionaries turn nostalgic eyes towards the Catholic and Papal Rome of the High Middle Ages. Indeed, as a recent historian (Dr Delisle Burns) has aptly phrased it, our modern contemporary Papacy is merely the ghost of the real medieval Papacy.
In the eighth century, on the threshold of the Middle Ages, the Papacy made two significant moves. Firstly, when threatened by Mohammedan invaders, who penetrated to the actual gates of Rome itself, the Papacy laid the foundations of its temporal power, which was destined to last until 1870. For the now-distant ‘Roman’ Emperor at Constantinople could no longer afford effective protection.
And just as the foundation of the power of the Roman Bishops had been laid by a forgery, so also was that of the Temporal Power of the Popes. For about this time another brilliant and historically opportune forgery was perpetrated at the Roman Court: ‘The Donation of Constantine’, which boldly ascribed the gift of the Papal States to the See of Rome to none other than the first Christian Emperor, Constantine himself. This forgery, which was not exposed until the Renaissance (1434), was one of the pillars of Papal Power throughout the Middle Ages.
Secondly, and even more ultimately important, the Papacy, as I have indicated in the previous chapter, created the ecclesiastical ‘Holy’ Roman Empire in the West (800) as its political instrument to defend it against the infidel Arabs and heretical Greeks. These two events may be said to mark the beginning of the ecclesiastical civilisation of the Middle Ages.
At first, however, this was not evident, for the medieval age got under way slowly. The ninth and tenth centuries were for Rome centuries of disorder and corruption, during which Papal mistresses frequently directed affairs, giving rise to the picturesque legend of ‘Pope Joan’.
In the eleventh century, however, a reforming movement, which originated in the French monastery of Cluny, assumed the direction of the Church. Its leader, Hildebrand, afterwards Pope Gregory VII and the greatest of all the Popes, launched the Papacy upon new and brilliant paths, which made it for two centuries the effective ruler of Europe.
By this time, the Holy Roman – actually German – Empire, had revolted against its creator, the Papacy; the name ‘Roman’ had still too many traditions of secular independence to be a sufficiently subservient instrument of ecclesiastical rule. Gregory and his successors waged remorseless war against their creation; at the Castle of Canossa (1077), Gregory kept the Emperor waiting in the snow to make his submission. Indeed, the word ‘Canossa’ has itself become the synonym for the humiliating victory of the ecclesiastical over the secular power. In the course of their struggle with the German Emperors, the Papacy then made frequent use of the terrible weapons of excommunication and interdict; that is, the Papacy, the successor of the heavenly doorkeeper St Peter, locked the gates of the next world against its enemies in this one.
But excommunication, a ‘spiritual’ weapon, was obviously useless against infidels and heretics, who did not accept the supremacy of the Popes as successors of St Peter. To deal with such people a political instrument, a secular ‘sword’, was necessary. Sometimes the Popes still used the Holy Roman Empire for this purpose. But more often, the Emperors were not dependable instruments of the Church’s will. The greatest of them, the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II, ‘the Anti-Christ’, was an advanced Freethinker who derided Christianity and, worse, used Mohammedan troops to fight the Pope (1194 – 1250).
So the Papacy had to find another instrument to fight its battles. By a Napoleonic strategy, Hildebrand enlisted the Normans, the converted Norse pirates who had conquered and settled down in Normandy, to fight the battles of the Church.
With the Normans as their soldiers, the Papacy launched the greatest enterprise of its whole career, the Crusades, which continued for two centuries; indeed, in Northern Europe for longer still. The primary object of the Crusades was to reconquer the Holy Land, Palestine, for the Church. This the First Crusade actually did at the end of the eleventh century. For a century a Latin ‘Kingdom of Jerusalem’ continued in the East, and several more Crusades were undertaken to recover or extend it. The idea of the Crusade was either taken from the Mohammedan ‘Holy War’ or else from the warlike Pagan traditions of the converted Normans.
But the Crusades were not confined to Palestine, they were a universal phenomenon, and their greatest effects were actually to be found, not in Palestine, which was soon recovered by the Turks, but in Northern Europe, in Pagan Prussia, which was permanently conquered by the crusading Teutonic Knights, [1] and in Spain and Portugal, where the Crusaders gradually expelled the Mohammedan Arabs and Moors. Another Crusade temporarily conquered the heretical Greek Empire of Constantinople, Christian but not subject to Rome. Whilst yet another, under the Norman William, permanently conquered England, then not sufficiently submissive to the authority of Rome. [2]
More immediately useful to the Popes perhaps than any of the above, the Normans finally drove the Mohammedan Arabs out of Italy itself, and conquered the powerful Arab kingdom of Sicily. An unsuccessful Crusade was even directed against Egypt.
The Crusades unified Christian Europe and they constituted the Popes, the recognised leaders of the Crusades, as the effective rulers of Europe or ‘Christendom’. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries represented the high-watermark of the Papal power, which it has never since been able to recover. But the Crusades had also dangerous and unintended results. For European culture now began to revive as a result of its contact with the more civilised East, and along with it, as was inevitable, there was a rebirth of heresy and even of downright Freethought, which directly menaced the power of the Papacy.
Against this new menace the Papacy mobilised two weapons, one old, and the other new. Its old weapon was the Crusade; early in the thirteenth century the great Pope Innocent III launched a war of extermination against the heretical Albigenses (or Manichean Dualists) in the south of France, and later in the century another ruthless Crusade wiped out the Hohenstaufen dynasty of the Freethinking Emperor Frederick, ‘The Anti-Christ’.
The new weapon was the (Roman) Inquisition, the ecclesiastical ‘Gestapo’, of the Papacy, its special weapon to preserve its totalitarian rule and to prevent what the modern Japanese called ‘dangerous thoughts’. For the rest of the Middle Ages a permanent reign of terror, based on the universal espionage of the Inquisition and enforced by torture and death by fire at the stake, haunted Europe and retarded its social and intellectual development.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the medieval theocracy began to decline, and the Papacy itself, rent by internal rivalries, began to lose ground and at the end of this period a combination of new revolutionary forces made their appearance which effectively undermined the totalitarian Papacy of the Middle Ages.
1. Originally founded to fight in Palestine.
2. Hildebrand blessed William’s ‘Crusade’ at Hastings.