This book proposes a series of theses likely to provoke debate or at least fresh thinking about papal history. The theses implicitly respond to the interpretation of a great Cambridge historian of the last generation, Walter Ullmann, whose Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (London, 1955) is primarily about the path to victory of an ideology of sovereignty over both church and world.Footnote ¹ They also react against interpretations that focus too exclusively on imposition of power over others.Footnote ² Proposed in place of these interpretations is an overarching argument that the driving force in papal history was a demand for ways of managing complexity and reducing uncertainty, a demand largely unsolicited – yet willingly met – but without much penetration of a subordinate, but autonomous secular sphere. The case studies relate to at least one, usually to more, and often to all of the following underlying themes or propositions: that papal government was primary responsive and demand-driven; that it was invoked to resolve uncertainty; that the uncertainty often arose from the incompatibilities between different ecclesiastical subsystems; that all this was worked out in a space that left large areas of life to kings, princes, and other non-ecclesiastical powers; that the ‘official mind’ of the papacy welcomed the authority that came its way, but was not the driving force behind the process. This general line of argument underlies the individual theses and will surely be contested: I hope that readers will in turn respond with ‘sed contra’s. With luck, such debates can be helical rather than circular.

Anyone interested in world history needs to think about the history of the papacy. It is the oldest surviving government in human history. Japanese imperial monarchy? Popes were issuing rescripts over a century before the first historically attested Japanese empire, and the Japanese emperor was only a figurehead for the half millennium and more before its late nineteenth-century restoration, whereas the papal government has been a fact on the ground from the fourth century to the present.

That makes papal Christianity a natural subject for longue durée study, but it is difficult to combine the long-term perspective with original research. On shorter-range ‘monographic’ topics, there is an embarrassment of high-quality research.Footnote ³ The present volume and its sequel are meant to provide a foundation for an attempt to combine the primary research of monographic history, and the original findings one expects from it, with a longer chronological range than the average monograph. The sequel will continue the thread into the Counter-Reformation period. That would be over-ambitious in a young scholar, but after half a century of primary research and teaching over the three conventionally separated periods (ancient, medieval, early modern), it is permissible, and for papal Christianity it is desirable and appropriate, to take the longest possible view, in order to understand why its history is so unlike any other. The papacy was the fulcrum of the system of which the Marxist historian Perry Anderson wrote:

Such a long continuous history does not lend itself to period specialization, the historian’s usual method for making material manageable at a research level.

To be sure, the basics can be quite easily summarized (the cognoscenti can skip the following four paragraphs). The very early history of the papacy is lost in the mists of time, not to say the fog of religious controversy. From the third century, in the pagan Roman empire, but with an episcopal system in place, the bishop of Rome has a prominent role in religious controversy, a contested authority. After a final persecution the whole church was transformed in the early fourth century by Constantine, who made Christianity a semi-official religion of the empire, and established Constantinople as a second capital, one which would become a religious rival to Rome. A period of imperially orchestrated councils follows, but in the West the trend is interrupted in the fifth century by invasions which broke up the empire into successor states, which had accepted Christianity but in a different form (Arianism) from that of Rome. (England is a special case. What happened there is much disputed.) Meanwhile the papacy flourished.

The sixth century saw a reconquest of Italy by the emperor Justinian. He and his successors more or less ran the church in the Eastern empire and from time to time used force to try to get popes to support their attempts to resolve conflicts about the nature of Jesus Christ. These controversies were followed closely in the West, where Arianism had been abandoned and where papal decrees circulated in canon law collections. At the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries a new phase began with the conversion or re-conversion of England to Christianity, in part thanks to a mission sent by pope Gregory I. A Rome-orientated Christianity flourished in England – the Venerable Bede is a famous representative of it – and before long English missionaries were converting the still-pagan parts of Germany, working with the papacy and the new ‘Carolingian’ dynasty ruling over the area that now encompasses France and Germany. Its heyday coincided with a low point in the Eastern empire, which was battered by Islamic invasions and unable to offer the protection that had earlier compensated for persistent doctrinal interference. On Christmas Day 800, a pope crowned Charlemagne emperor, culmination of a reorientation of the papacy from the East to the North.

In the ninth century the Carolingian empire split up into parts roughly similar to those of modern Europe. A remarkable ninth-century pope uncannily anticipates much later counterparts in preventing a royal divorce, but in general there is a steep decline in the calibre of popes and in the cultural level of their entourage until the second decade of the tenth century, also a period in which the Western empire, now centred in Germany, became a great centre of power and culture. Strangely, papal prestige in the localities continued to grow in this low period, as did a sense of the sacrality of the priesthood.

That growing feeling was activated by a group of individuals who led the revolution often called the ‘Gregorian Reform’, which was driven forward by ‘reform’ councils and which evolved into a conflict with an emperor and kings over the control of the episcopate. That was resolved by a compromise solution in the twelfth century. It was a time of fast change in many areas: commercialization, strong monarchies in England, France, and Sicily, a revival of German imperial claims over Italy, crusades, a burst of new religious orders, an intellectual revival that paved the way for the creation of the first universities in the thirteenth century, and a new ecclesiastical law in which papally-made case law became a dominant element. Increasingly, popes and cardinals were products of this new academic world. Papal power and authority grew fast. In the conventional view, the climax of this development and of the medieval papacy tout court was the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216). For the rest of the thirteenth century the papacy remained on a high plateau of power, defeating together with powerful Italian city-states the emperor Frederick II’s attempt to control Italy as well as Germany, and in a relationship of mutual support with the Franciscan and Dominican orders. Towards the end of the century there were warning signs. The French ‘Angevin’ dynasty which popes helped defeat the sons of Frederick II turned out to be just as controlling as they had feared the German dynasty would be, and the French monarchy itself was an unanticipated threat. King Philip IV and his advisers expanded the royal role into what had been the ecclesiastical sphere, and this culminated in a conflict in which the pope, Boniface VIII, was humiliatingly defeated, an episode often taken to mark the end of the period that started with the eleventh-century papal revolution.

To get beyond the foregoing over-simplified schema is not easy: doing justice to the vast field of papal history while making original contributions to knowledge is no field for young historians. Primary sources are an immense sea, and there is so much secondary scholarship. True, the ‘events history’ of popes – as opposed to that of the papal system – is well served by reference books,Footnote ⁵ and there are excellent general surveys of the medieval period.Footnote ⁶ These do not pretend to be primary research, or to propose major new interpretations, however, though their authors have certainly done pathbreaking primary research on their respective fields within the period.Footnote ⁷ Older syntheses on medieval Christianity, in which the papacy gets a lot of attention, in general have not lost their value as paths into the field, but they do not attempt to advance many new arguments. Richard Southern’s Western Society and the Church is history as a work of art.Footnote ⁸ It is close to primary sources but perhaps mainly as material for brilliantly vivid illustration rather than as evidence for an argument: the general thesis is a conventional pattern of rise and decline. David Knowles’s The Christian Centuries is a wonderfully lucid and balanced one-volume précis.Footnote ⁹

Neither Knowles nor, as already noted, Southern attempts to link the medieval period with the late antique background. Medievalists do not usually regard Late Antiquity as within their remit, a limitation given the continuities of papal history. An exception is the great Erich Caspar, who bridged the gap between the two periods, but his premature death meant that his unmatched history of the papacy never reached the central Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁰ Similarly, Peter Brown’s Rise of Western Christendom starts in Late Antiquity but does not reach the central medieval period. It does develop an original thesis, the emergence of micro-Christendoms in the early Middle Ages.

There are other books which combine original interpretation with a broad sweep, but in one way or another they leave space for the approach adopted here. Johannes Haller’s multi-volume history of the papacy includes Antiquity and keeps in contact with primary sources right into the late Middle Ages. Though it retains much of its value and remains perhaps the best diachronic account, it is three quarters of a century old (Haller died in 1947); naturally there is much more to be said now.Footnote ¹¹

Another exception to the tendency to keep original interpretation within the bounds of a few centuries is Walter Ullmann, who could traverse the border between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He wrote a good book about a fifth-century pope,Footnote ¹² as well as books about the medieval papacy.Footnote ¹³ Ullmann’s framework for papal history was, however, as already noted, very different from this writer’s, for he saw it as the triumph and eventual defeat of an idea, the ‘theme’ of top-down religious sovereignty.

As it seems to me, this makes the ideology too much like a claim to sovereignty as understood today. The ‘idea’ of the papacy is best interpreted, instead, with the help of the anthropological theories of hierarchy developed by Louis Dumont and Mary Douglas. Furthermore, Ullmann does not explain why the ideology came to be accepted. The undoubted rise of papal authority cannot in my view be explained by the relentless imposition of an idea, like a hammer coming down on the religious consciousness of Europe passively laid out on the anvil. I would suggest that ideas are only powerful if people have a reason or motives to listen. Instead of a simple diffusionist schema, in many of these case studies I suggest a functionalist model, namely, that the religious subsystems of Latin Christendom interfered with each other again and again in new ways as they themselves evolved. This repeatedly generated complexities that the parties asked popes to resolve. Building up papal authority was not the objective of the parties when they went to the papacy, but that was the outcome, one which the Roman Church fostered, of course, by responding efficiently (except in the post-Carolingian period) and emphasizing Petrine authority in the responses.

Even without frictions between subsystems, their evolution repeatedly generated uncertainties, notably in areas where the lines between fundamental values and instrumental calculation were unclear, as with sacramental practice and hierarchy. Religious systems can deal with uncertainty in various ways, nowadays often by picking and assimilating to the attitudes of an existing and available Church, sect, movement, or subculture, from the wide selection available, or (if in a movement) by splitting along the fault lines of belief and/ or practice. In past centuries, uncertainties were often summarily settled by a ruler whose power transcended the Western ‘religious-political’ dichotomy. In the Latin West, in Late Antiquity, the emperor had been such a figure (a pattern that continued in Greek Christianity up until the fall of Constantinople). As the Western empire collapsed, however, bishops (especially) turned to the pope for answers. This interpretation is an extension of the ‘folk-theorem’ of modern historians that most papal government was reactive rather than proactive.

Like Ullmann’s œuvre, Peter Heather’s synthesis on ‘Christendom’,Footnote ¹⁴ written for a wide public, has the great merit of including Late Antiquity, his home ground as a historian. When the book moves beyond the territory where his original work has made such a mark, it loses close contact with most untranslated primary sources, and with continental scholarship. Moreover, the central thesis, that Christianity was spread by persuasion and force, is not so much a new research finding as a brilliantly written presentation with a personal spin, the emphasis on force rhetorically positioned as the finale of the book. Persuasion and force are certainly principal themes in the history of ‘Christendom’, but there are many others, explored in the present volume.

Some brave recent books come from a quite different intellectual stable, Political Science. They aim to explain the modern state by the medieval Church and seem to be written for other political scientists rather than for historians, but they deserve attention for their intellectual ambition and as examples of an approach quite different from the one adopted by the present writer. Unlike the works just discussed, they develop bold and provocative theses. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita argues that the development of the modern state is a consequence of the Concordat of Worms in 1122.Footnote ¹⁵ I discuss this thesis in detail in Case 18. Anna Grzymala-Busse has two core theses. The first is that state institutions were not ‘the inadvertent and functional consequences of early modern warfare and interstate conflict. Their roots are far deeper and older, reaching back into the eleventh-century reforms of the papal court’.Footnote ¹⁶ She sees papal institutions as a blueprint for state institutions.Footnote ¹⁷ The other thesis is that the Catholic Church was the catalyst of the ‘the persistent fragmentation of Europe’,Footnote ¹⁸ a commonplace idea so far as the empire in northern and central Italy and in Germany are concerned, though hardly applicable to England, France, southern Italy, or Spain. She is reacting against the ‘war made the state’ theory current in Political Science. Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Stavnskær DoucetteFootnote ¹⁹ are also reacting against it, but they go further, and propose that the papal revolution of the eleventh century diverted Europe away from a course towards an empire like that of classical China, and towards the multistate system we all know, to the triumph of which the Church that had started it all in the end fell victim. Sub-theses are that the example of the Dominican order encouraged self-government in cities, and that representation and consent had an ecclesiastical origin – a thesis to which Grzymala-Busse also subscribes.

When a historian assesses the work of political scientists writing for other political scientists there is a danger of ‘discipline nationalism’ – that territoriality which is the bane of academic life. These political scientists have clearly ‘got up’ even the most recent Anglophone secondary literature on the Middle Ages with impressive rapidity,Footnote ²⁰ and they have plenty of interesting ideas. They write with the same kinds of verve and confidence that traditionally get students into the first class in Oxford and Cambridge final examinations, and which ensure that the reader is never bored. But so far as I can tell, none of them has asked an established professional medievalist to read drafts, and one wonders if the presses in question thought to send the manuscripts out to readers outside Political Science. There are lacunae where continental historiography should be cited,Footnote ²¹ and minor mistakes litter the books.Footnote ²² Professional historians will find themselves saying ‘Yes, but …’ at every fourth sentence.

A series of deviations from historians’ standards of rigour may be mentioned if only to justify the very different approach adopted in the present book. Firstly, readers do not have access to the databases that underlie the figures and tables in all three books – no URLs – so the results are not replicable except via a personal approach to the authors.Footnote ²³ The books disarmingly tell us how their own original databases were constructed, and this information does not inspire confidence.Footnote ²⁴ The existing databases that they use also look shaky, to put it gently, from a scholarly point of view.Footnote ²⁵ The conceptual basis of statistical comparison does not always stand up.Footnote ²⁶ The arguments from correlations do not always carry much probative force, at least without a much more granular analysis of the data.Footnote ²⁷ Many arguments and assertions formulated more or less independently of the statistical correlations are also questionable.Footnote ²⁸ Finally, any connection with primary sources is broken in these Political Science books, apart from the monocausal focus on the Concordat of Worms in Bueno de Mesquita’s argument.

For all their weaknesses, these books by political scientists force professional historians to think in a bolder way than they are accustomed to do, so perhaps these enterprising immigrants from another discipline should be welcomed, while being encouraged to master the culture and values of the host country. What the books just analysed have is argumentative vigour, more than most scholarly monographs on the Middle Ages. The aim of the present volume is to emulate the argumentative vigour but combine it with more scholarly rigour.

The method is to sandwich a thesis, sometimes one bound to elicit at least initial dissent, between a discussion of previous scholarship on the background and a supporting document or documents. The arguments are designed to stimulate further debate, and documents are chosen both to support the arguments and to provide material to think with for scholars and students of all levels. Some of the theses aim to start new discussions, but others put the case for neglected interpretations by past historians, notably Erich Caspar at the start of the book and Gabriel Le Bras near the end. The documents are all translated, with a transcription from manuscript appended if there is no printed edition. For this scholar at least, translation is a key to full understanding. Incidentally, it brought home to me the faultiness of papal Latin over a period of two centuries or more, something easy to miss until one does a translation.

The book’s approach is influenced by the author’s own undergraduate education: a History degree in which arguing about theses and interpreting documents were central to the training. Most British-trained historians learned how to write essay answers to questions specifically designed to prompt reasoned debate, the idea being that students could not simply learn a textbook answer. Frequently, the ‘questions’ were actually instructions to debate a proposition, such as: ‘“Magna Carta was a charter of aristocratic privilege.” Discuss’. As a university teacher, I continued to use this method for the formation and assessment of undergraduate and then also of Masters students. I also continued to employ another method common in British university teaching of history: training students to write interpretative commentaries on extracts from original sources. In my undergraduate student days the sources were in the original languages, Latin or medieval French. That was near the end of the time when many History students came to university with a reading knowledge of two foreign languages, one of them Latin. Realizing that this was no longer the case, I took to translating documents to enable those with what had become a normal school education (i.e., without much language training) to get at the sources. So long as they had translations, and in the context of a course with teaching around the texts, I found that even first-year undergraduates handled themselves remarkably well on the frontiers of research. The late antique and medieval scholars for whom the book is also intended may not need the translations, but in an era of comparative history there may be scholars from different fields who want to read sources at first hand – so the translations are not just for beginners.Footnote ²⁹

So whom is the book for? For fellow scholars, certainly, because the theses proposed go beyond the existing state of research, but also for students, under the right conditions. Much of the book is based on a long-running MA course, so Masters students could cope with it under the guidance of a competent teacher. Undergraduates? I do not see it as a ‘course book’ as traditionally used in American and Italian universities. That model was never the norm in British or German universities (in France the cours magistraux were the course books). In any case the course book approach is perhaps out of date. Thanks to e-books and electronic resources generally, it is now normal for courses to make an eclectic set of readings available to students, and so individual chapters of this book could be selected for different courses. To give random examples: Case 2, ‘The Canon of the Bible’, could be abstracted for a church history course, or for a course on Late Antiquity. Cases 3, 6–8, and 10 would be useful for Carolingian sections of courses on the early Middle Ages. Case 13 could be a reading for an essay on Ottonian Germany, and Cases 16–19 for the ‘Gregorian Reform’ which has a place in most medieval teaching at undergraduate level. Cases 23–25 are good readings for ‘Innocent III’, and Case 31 puts Boniface VIII in an unfamiliar light. These two popes at least are likely to figure in any course on medieval history, even on Western civilization. In these various different contexts the case studies would naturally be combined with other readings, including straightforward textbook chapters. The sometimes provocative character of the ‘theses’, confronted with more conventional interpretations also made available to them, should foster student debate.

The book has an ulterior purpose: to be the first half of the foundation for a distilled analysis of the history of papal Christianity from Late Antiquity to the early seventeenth century. The essays and the supporting documents in these preparatory volumes aim to construct from original sources the piers to support a history bridging three conventionally separated periods, and to lighten what would otherwise be a massive apparatus of footnotes and appendices. Thus this volume, and the late medieval to early modern sequel which I hope will follow, are betwixt and between undergraduate teaching and a late-career overarching synthesis.

A feature of this volume and its projected sequels is the occasional recourse to concepts from social theory, none of them particularly new. Long experience has taught me that some Anglophone historians are allergic to anything of the kind and see it as anti-empirical. (In Germany, on the other hand, a combination of objective empirical research and elements of social theory has long been normal.) In another study, out of respect for those allergies, I relegated all such references to the ghetto of an appendix, which ended by stressing that ‘my interpretations could have been developed, by a cleverer historian, without all this help, but as a matter of fact they were not’.Footnote ³⁰ The same holds good here: the concepts I borrow compensate for my own deficiencies in natural insight and have helped me to elucidate what I found in the sources; they are the good servants of document-driven research.

In nearly all cases it was the documents that initially suggested the theses they support. The translations follow the principle formulated by the late Semitic scholar Edward Ullendorff in that they are ‘as close as possible to and as far as necessary from the original’. If long and complex constructions can be rendered in correct English, they are retained, even if they are not the readers’ or for that matter the translator’s personally preferred style. Documents already translated in easily accessible books are not included except in a few cases where important interpretative issues are in play: and in precisely these cases, it may be useful for there to be more than one translation available. In general, though, my aim has been to complement rather than duplicate existing provision.

Thus the boundaries of the present book are partly shaped by a preference for presenting something new rather than duplicating existing collections of translated sources, especially those that also include historical analysis. From a research point of view this is natural, but it should not be an obstacle for teaching with the book, since sections from it can be combined with sections from other source collections. For the later Roman empire, there is the Columbia Records of Civilization volume by James Thomson Shotwell and Louise Ropes Loomis, The See of Peter (New York, 1927). In Case 1, I give an independent translation of an important text by Cyprian of Carthage translated by Shotwell and Loomis at pp. 325–326, adding a translation of an important variant version which they do not include.

The Columbia Records of Civilization series includes a model combination of analysis with translated sources dealing with another key theme hardly covered in the present book: papal finance, the subject of William Edward Lunt’s study of Papal Revenues in the Middle Ages (New York, 1934). The documents, in some cases translated directly from archival manuscripts, follow Lunt’s substantial and exemplary treatise on papal finance. It has not been replaced.

For the first half-century of papal decretals, see D. L. d’Avray, Papal Jurisprudence, c. 400: Sources of the Canon Law Tradition (Cambridge, 2019); this translates (and in most cases also edits) responses on ritual, hierarchy, celibacy, bigamia, marriage, monks, and heresy. C. L. Feltoe, The Letters and Sermons of Leo the Great (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 12, 1895; reprinted Peabody, 1999) is competent if somewhat dated stylistically, and has the advantage of availability over the Internet.Footnote ³¹ For a translation taking account of the key manuscript of some important extracts see D. L. d’Avray, Papal Jurisprudence, 385–1234. Social Origins and Medieval Reception of Canon Law (Cambridge, 2022), 242–266: Appendix A Leo I. For Gelasius I there is B. Neil and P. Allen, The Letters of Gelasius I (492–496). Pastor and Micro-Manager of the Church of Rome (Turnhout, 2014). There is an independent translation of passages picking up on themes from the earliest papal decretals in d’Avray, Papal Jurisprudence, 385–1235, 267–272: Appendix B. Gelasius I. For Gregory I’s letters there is an accessible recent translation by J. R. C. Martyn, The Letters of Gregory the Great (Medieval Sources in Translation, 40; Toronto, 2004). The early medieval Liber Pontificalis has been translated with introduction and notes: R. Davis, The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis). The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops to AD 715 (Liverpool, 2010), The Lives of the Eighth Century Popes (Liber Pontificalis). The Ancient Biographies of Nine Popes from AD 715–817 (Liverpool, 1992), and The Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes (Liber Pontificalis). The Ancient Biographies of Ten Popes from AD 817–891 (Liverpool, 1995). (On this see now R. McKitterick, Rome and the Invention of the Papacy. The Liber Pontificalis, Cambridge, 2020). For eighth-century Anglo-Saxon missionaries in Germany there is C. H. Talbot, The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany: Being the Lives of SS Willibord, Boniface, Sturm, Leoba and Lebuin, Together with the Hodeporicon of St. Willibald and a Selection from the Correspondence of St. Boniface (London, 1954), or E. Emerton (transl.), The Letters of Saint Boniface (New York, 1940). I. Robinson (transl.), The Papal Reform of the Eleventh Century. Lives of Pope Leo IX and Pope Gregory VII (Manchester, 2004) covers two pontificates that transformed the West. M. C. Miller, Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Conflict. A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2005) provides context and interpretation together with the documents. B. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, 1964, etc.) integrates translations of documents into interpretative commentary. (A few of these will be translated afresh here because they are so central to papal history.) Some papal documents are translated in L. and J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Idea and Reality, 1095–1274 (London, 1981). There are remarkable insights into the twelfth-century papacy in M. Chibnall (transl.), John of Salisbury’s Memoirs of the Papal Court (London, 1956). C. R. Cheney, Selected Letters of Pope Innocent III Concerning England, 1190–2016 (London, 1953) shows papal government at work at the start of the thirteenth century. For heresy and persecution, we have Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe. Documents in Translation (Philadelphia, 1980).

Skirting around what these valuable works already provide means that some themes get less coverage here than they would otherwise require, especially: Late Antiquity; eighth-century Anglo-Saxon missionaries and Rome; the Gregorian Revolution of the eleventh century; Church and State in the central Middle Ages; persecution of heretics; and the fiscal basis of papal government. For a research historian it is not so interesting to duplicate the readily available work of good scholars, but it is important for readers to be aware of these limitations of the present book.

Another kind of limitation is inherent in the character of the documents translated and the theses that relate to them. Nearly all the documents emanate from the papacy. That perspective must evidently set bounds to the scope of these investigations. Some of the most important aspects of medieval Christianity never came within the purview of popes. A randomly chosen example would be the ‘divine office’: prayers punctuating the day (also the night). It seems to have a Jewish origin, and throughout its Christian history the Hebrew psalms took up a high proportion of the various ‘hours’. In Christian history the office seems to have been current before the genesis of monasticism, but it would become central in the monastic life. In a diluted form it was also practised in major churches. Saying psalms then became a favourite devotion of the educated laity, and eventually ‘Books of Hours’ became the devout lay counterpart to the monastic horarium. Nobody asked popes questions about any of this, to my knowledge, so one would be hard put to it to find evidence of it in papal sources.

Then again: the lens of papal documents will not show us how things looked through the eyes of dissidents pursued by the official Church. The perspective of the persecuted is not easy to recover, though it helps when their writings survive, as some do despite the best efforts of the Church to eliminate them.Footnote ³² Some excellent translations help, notably yet another volume in the admirable Columbia Records of Western Civilization series,Footnote ³³ and volumes by Peter Biller and John Arnold;Footnote ³⁴ Arnold has also shown a way into interpreting Inquisition sources.Footnote ³⁵ These volumes make up for the limitations of the present book. Aside from men and women brave enough to die because they could not accept official doctrine,Footnote ³⁶ we may be sure that there were very many others who used the ‘weapons of the weak’ against it among themselves,Footnote ³⁷ poking fun at it in trusted company, as people do when public speech is constrained by any hegemonic discourse (nos jours not excepted). It is a limitation of the sources translated here that by their very nature they tell us nothing of such attitudes and private exchanges; and, obviously, historians of medieval religion should always bear in mind how much of medieval life was neither religious, heterodox, nor anti-religious.Footnote ³⁸

The foregoing is as it were to the side of the topics treated here. Also deserving of mention are the deep structures that underpin papal Christianity, even if they are too far below the surface to be transparently visible in the documents emanating from the papacy. The idea of deep structures has found a place in the discipline of History,Footnote ³⁹ and in various others: in Marxist theory (in the form of a dichotomy between economic substructure and superstructure); in linguistics (in the language/speech dichotomy of Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky’s theory of a deep underlying grammar beneath the grammars of particular language); and in the social anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss (basic structures of kinship or of myth, below the multiplicity of actual systems). Recently the very general applicability of the concept beyond these versions of it in particular fields has been well brought out by the sociologist John Scott.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is worth reflecting by way of conclusion on the structures underlying the case studies analysed in this book.

Economic structures made the ecclesiastical systems possible. Voluntary lay donations are the first sort. In Late Antiquity, wealth flowed from the laity to bishops and their churches. From the sixth century, monasteries, too, benefitted from lay generosity. We must not make the mistake of thinking of the wealth of ‘the church’ as if the church were one economic unit rather than thousands of such units, but this does not alter the ultimate dependence of most of those systems on donations. The outcome of lay generosity in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages has been described as a ‘temple society’.Footnote ⁴¹ Some of the land donated was taken back in the eighth century in Francia and the ninth century in England, but one way or another, in the course of the Middle Ages, many episcopal sees, cathedral chapters, parishes, hospitals, monasteries, colleges of canons, and academic colleges (which were religious institutions) became enormously wealthy, as institutions, in the medieval centuries. They ultimately owed their wealth to lay generosity. That they were economically independent units could be a source of friction: notably, bishops could be tempted to siphon off wealth from monasteries, using their hierarchical power, and monks then turned to the pope (Cases 5, and 25). When monasteries got privileges, exemption, or protection, they paid a census to the papacy, though collection of this was hit and miss, as was papal finance generally.Footnote ⁴²

The second sort of economic substructure was the tithing system. Tithes had been made compulsory under the Carolingians (779), though how they should be shared out was and would remain a matter of controversy between interested parties,Footnote ⁴³ and it took a long time for them to become normal throughout Latin Europe.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was not well designed:

In Francia and England it was made compulsory by strong kings, Charlemagne and Athelstan (in 930) respectively.Footnote ⁴⁶ These economic foundations were for the most part taken for granted, resented, and doubtless frequently evaded, as modern state taxation is accepted, resented, and often evaded or avoided. Understanding modern attitudes to the State is a good way of understanding medieval attitudes to the Church. A difference, though, from the normal state system by which taxation goes into the central government and comes out of it in the form of salaries and other sorts of expenditure is that tithes did not come to the pope. The papacy could only access the wealth brought by tithes indirectly, through percentage taxes on the clergy (initially for crusades, which were anyway increasingly appropriated by kings) and control of benefices, ecclesiastical jobs, with which popes could reward men who worked for them.

Benefices donated by landowners (laypeople and bishops) were, with the tithing system, the substructure of the vast network of bishops and priests. What drove the generosity that created this material foundation? Since most of the case studies involve communication between popes and clergy, it is worth unpacking the deep assumptions behind the priestly system itself. Sociologists of religion take it as a matter of course that religious communities need pastors to lead them, but in the system studied here there was a crucial extra element: the mass, where laypeople joined in the sacrifices offered by their local priests in an annual liturgical cycle. The whole religion was condensed in this ritual system. The liturgical year represented the stages of the life and death of Christ, and the three persons in one God. The mass itself was the sacrifice that drew everything together: the fallen state of humanity after the original sin, the Old Testament, the redeeming sacrifice of Christ, and the participation in it of the Church. While nobody knows for sure how much preaching was done by priests before the late twelfth century, they were certainly saying masses throughout the period studied.

Lay landowners wanted that, for themselves and perhaps for their peasants, who would be deferential to a family that brought a village church, a focus of ritual and meaning (see below), into otherwise, doubtless, monotonous lives. But the resources and generosity of landowners was not uniform, so the endowments of churches differed, sometimes hugely. Medieval religious reformers appear not to have understood this fundamental fact about their own society, and believed in a simple model: one parish priest should be resident in and supported by one parish. Yet one parish might be vastly richer than another, as readers of Anthony Trollope will know – even ten times richer. In Case 28, the ‘provisions’ system is reinterpreted as a not irrational way of dealing with unevenness.

One economic fact at a still more fundamental level than the above is easily missed in interpretations of the medieval Church, namely that there was no such thing as a ‘medieval Church’ as an economic system.Footnote ⁴⁷ A multitude of economic systems coexisted, often unharmoniously. Cases 5 (episcopal and monastic systems), 24 (Templars), 25 (monastic exemption in the thirteenth century), and 26 (lay patrons) illustrate this deep, fissured structure.

Another deep structure was legal, and legal in ways different from other sacred laws, though there are similarities with Islamic law in the early centuries (up to the ninth century) when the Caliph interpreted law. After that, and in the other great sacred laws, there has not been another institutionalized source of binding legal judgments vested in a central institution able to cope systematically with demand. As with the modern state, and the medieval state come to that,Footnote ⁴⁸ the Church’s power to administer law was taken for granted. Councils made law, but so did popes. In the first decretal age, c. 400, councils were not available in the West, so bishops turned to popes with their legal uncertainties; in the period c. 1200, popes tempered and applied the over-simple schemas of councils. The legacy of the first decretal age encouraged recourse to the papacy, rather than just to the emerging class of men learned in Church law, as in Islam from the ninth century. Most of the supporting documents that accompany the case studies are legal in one way or another.

Most of them are also responses; to anticipate the fuller analyses in the Epilogue: Cases 2 (canon of the Bible), 3 (late antique decretal), 5 (responses for monasteries), 7 (response to Pippin and Frankish bishops), 9 (privilege for Mercian royal family), 11 (baptism and spiritual kinship), 12 (privilege for Bolognese clergy), 13 (response to Otto I’s request to make Magdeburg a metropolitan see), 15 (man who killed his son), 19 (sons of priests), 20 (papal case law), 21 (baptism questions again), 22 (indulgence for nuns), 23 (vernacular Bible), 24 (Templars as victims), 25 (helping monasteries), 27 (rival metropolitans), 29 (lepers), and 30 (privileges for French kings). Only a small proportion of papal correspondence was initiated by popes. Already in Late Antiquity, responses could take the form of decretals.Footnote ⁴⁹ In succeeding centuries the range of response-types widened, to include privileges from the early Middle Ages and on an increasingly wide spectrum in the central Middle Ages. The papacy reacted more than it acted on its own initiative, with the exception of a few unusual pontiffs. That does not mean that pontificates had a uniform character. A pope could choose how to react.

Taken for granted was the assumption that popes would reply. We should remember to be surprised that they could and did. There was a time when the papacy was apparently without enough men who could write grammatical Latin (see Case 12).Footnote ⁵⁰ Later, from the mid-twelfth century, the sheer volume of letters requiring an answer was daunting. Popes needed to find ways of coping, and the discipline of Papal Diplomatics enables modern scholars to work out how they did.Footnote ⁵¹ Formularies and the processes they generated were an effective software of government, in the absence of resources to fund a proper bureaucracy.

Not only practical administrative ingenuity but also a certain sense of mission explain the readiness of the papacy to respond. Whatever people in the regions thought of the papacy, the clergy of the Roman Church believed in Petrine succession and all that implied. Paradoxically, it was a man who did not accept all that it implied, Cyprian, who seems to have started the Roman clergy thinking about the ‘Thou art Peter’ passage in Matthew 16 (see Case 1). They never stopped.

The Roman clergy thought of the bishop of Rome as the apex of a hierarchy, and here they were in tune with a mentality that permeated Europe throughout the period in which these cases fall, and beyond. There is a line from the hierarchical thinking of Gelasius at the end of the fifth century and of Boniface VIII at the start of the fourteenth (Case 4). If hierarchy is understood à la Louis Dumont, a papal place at the apex was compatible with an autonomous sphere under kings or emperors, who might have much more solid power, which was unchallenged by popes in most areas of what we would call secular government, and exercised also in ecclesiastical affairs with legitimation from cooperative popes. On close examination of the Donation of Constantine and its reception (see Case 8), its incompatibility in context with the foregoing argument melts away. In the age of Gelasius and again in the central and later Middle Ages, popes were able and influential, but, in the period in between, even a negligible pope might be needed for the legitimation he could provide. Case 13 shows a metropolitan bishopric being erected by the power of the emperor but also thanks to formal validation by a pope who had hardly any of that kind of power. The hierarchy included elite laymen. Not just men: in the eighth century, a pope was asked to legitimate the hold of King Offa of the English kingdom of Mercia and his wife Cynethryth, and their descendants, over religious communities (Case 9). Even after the so-called Gregorian Reform, lay patrons of parish churches were also part of the hierarchy, as Case 26 shows. The tensions between the different subsystems of the hierarchy generated much of the business that came to the curia, but, heretical movements aside, few doubted that they belonged to a unified hierarchical system. The hierarchical structure could be uncertain, and vulnerable to change in the secular hierarchy which it had tended to mirror since Late Antiquity, and these evolutions were responsible for some of the tensions between subsystems. Case 27, rival metropolitans, is representative of many disputes about metropolitan jurisdiction, the level of hierarchy above the diocese.

Hierarchical thinking was intertwined with condensed symbolism. Special ritual powers went with the upper levels of the clerical hierarchy. Priests could say mass, where bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. Only bishops administered confirmation, at least normally. There was an aesthetic aspect to the homology of the hierarchical system and the ritual system.

Ritual was a space where dogma overlapped with man-made rules. The border was not an obvious given. We see popes being asked to say where it lay. Papal answers to such questions were incorporated into canon law collections. Responses going back to Late Antiquity and transmitted by influential late antique and early medieval collections found a home in Gratian’s Decretum in the mid-twelfth century, and subsequent responses in the Liber Extra of 1234. Case 11, on spiritual kinship and baptism in the Carolingian era, and Case 21, on baptism in the second decretal age, bring this out particularly clearly. We see a development: in the first case, a layman could validly baptize even his own child, baptism overriding ‘forbidden degree’ laws; then in the second decretal age the surprising principle was established that a Jew could administer a valid baptism. On the other hand, baptism was not baptism if the liquid was anything but water. Papal responses were a vehicle for development of doctrine.

A certain specificity of the materiality of the ritual system underlies surface structures. The material elements of rituals and ritual powers could really matter, to the extent that the wrong materiality invalidated the ritual. It is useful to think of the ‘water only’ rule together with the ‘men only’ rule for the priesthood. The rejection of any other liquid for baptism puts the rule that only men could be ordained in a different light: the specificity of the material in ritual. The parallel between the ‘only men’ and ‘only water’ rules undermines any simple explanation in terms of prejudice.

Only men could say mass, but what was the mass? A deep underlying assumption of the religious system identified it with the death and resurrection of Christ: so with redemption. Though mass could only be said by men, it was not only for men: it was for whatever the sacrifice of Christ was for – its perceived function was social. The ritual power to say mass for everyone made priests an elite, whatever their personal shortcomings. This was the core function of what was confusingly called the secular clergy. Over the ordinary priests were bishops, who exercised extra ritual powers and organized the clergy of their dioceses.

Men and women who renounced personal property and personal choice, as well as sex, were also an elite, but the logic of their status was different. It did not rest on ritual power. One basis was self-denial, the imitation of John the Baptist and Christ in the desert, and the early Christian community at Jerusalem with its communality of property, and pursuance of the New Testament injunction to give up possessions and follow Christ (Matthew 19:21; Luke 18:22). The other was community liturgical prayer, notably to bring about the communion of the living and the dead.Footnote ⁵²

Thus both the regular and the secular clergy understood themselves to be at the service of society in general and were so understood by society in general. Yet a deep structural tension between the regular and the secular clergy underlies many of the case studies: Case 5 (early history of exemption), Case 24 (Templars as victims), Case 25 (monastic exemption in the thirteenth century), and Case 31 (Boniface VIII’s response to the conflicts between the secular clergy and the friars).

Why did ‘seculars’ and ‘regulars’ find it hard to live together? The economic tensions have already been noted. They were in unspoken competition for the same donors and (important for parish priests) burial dues. But a quite different sort of reason is that they were more entangled than the simplistic ‘regular clergy/ secular clergy’ schema could cope with. From the ninth century it was normal for monks to become priests. That made monasteries more dependent on bishops to carry out a multitude of ordinations. Bishops had a new hold on monasteries and could use it in property disputes. On a more idealistic level, bishops were becoming more religiously interventionist, and interested in inspecting monasteries. All this made monasteries ask popes to make them independent. Then in the thirteenth century friars took on the pastoral work with the laity that parish priests and their bishops believed to be their business, a whole new cause of contention (Case 31, supporting document). The recurrent tensions between the two systems tended to reinforce the papacy’s position at the head of the hierarchy, as these two elites tended to turn to it when they could not resolve their differences.

A leitmotif in the many of the cases is uncertainty: about the relation between religious subsystems, about ritual practice and the deep principles beneath its surface, even about what constituted the Bible (Case 2). Noted above are a few main ways of dealing with religious uncertainty and demand for solutions. One of the commonest in world history is state religious authority.Footnote ⁵³ Ancient Near Eastern monarchies, classical China, and the early modern European Reformation states (including England) are examples. So is Byzantine Christianity to some degree. After the fall of Constantinople, orthodoxy coped by ‘standing on ancient ways’, and treating problems that tradition could not solve with the principle of epieikeia – making exceptions without setting binding precedents. The congregation-federation model is another way: autonomous congregations form loose confederations which they can leave in case of major disagreement, just as their members can easily move to another congregation. Independent Protestant sects, synagogues, and mosques outside Islamic states follow this model. The medieval papacy, a religious authority alongside states, is unusual, though the Prophets in the Church of the Latter Day Saints are another example, perhaps unconsciously modelled on the papacy. In Hinduism, the Shankaracharyas have a kind of primacy with a certain affinity to that of the papacy.

For all that there are partial parallels, in terms of longevity and organized complexity there are few social systems so distinctive in world history and, certainly, as central in European history, as papal Christianity. The more one raises the line of sight above the well-served monographic level, the more remarkable it looks. As a historical phenomenon it is hardly over-explained, leaving aside the Political Science interventions with their shaky evidential underpinning. The interpretative schemas in play are not sophisticated: the growth, triumph, apogee, and decline of an idea is mapped onto an early, high, and late medieval periodization. In some ways this periodization does a disservice to interpretation. Most obviously, it cuts the Middle Ages off from Late Antiquity.Footnote ⁵⁴

Less obviously, the periodization is too slab-like. The triptych of early, high, and late Middle Ages is a convenient way of arranging material but should not be taken too seriously. Though this volume ends around 1300, this is not to suggest that it is a watershed between ‘high’ and ‘late’ Middle Ages but is for pragmatic reasons of space. The eminent Victorian Lord Acton recommended studying ‘problems not periods’. Here the problems are presented in the form of theses, aiming to stimulate debate, and in many cases likely to arouse lively dissent, but argued on the basis of the background scholarship and supporting documents.

Additional Note on the Source Base of Political Science Interpretations

1. (a) Bueno de Mesquita relies significantly on Catholic Church and Wikipedia websites (p. 302 note 9) and bases a table purporting to show the relative prominence of religious and secular images on the selection of illustrations in three art history textbooks (pp. 54–55 and p. 299 note 35); for data on episcopal successions, Møller and Doucette (p. 61) give a reference to ‘Chow [Gabriel], 2018’, at www.gcatholic.org, which seems to lead to nothing of the kind – googling under the URL and Gabriel Chow revealed that ‘This website was dedicated to the Immaculate Conception’; Grzymala-Busse (p. 62) tells us that her database on ‘papal conflict’ is compiled from The New Cambridge Medieval History, which does not give dedicated lists of excommunications, and from ‘Dupuy and Dupuy 1993’, which turns out to be The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History, of which one reviewer wrote ‘it is certainly not good enough for scholarly reference’ (E. K. Echert, Journal of American History, 81 (1995), 1895–1897, at 1896).

2. (b) Both Grzymala-Busse and Møller and Doucette use P. Bairoch et al., Population des villes européennes de 800 à 1850: banque de données et analyse sommaire des résultats (Geneva, 1988). Reviewing this in the Journal of Economic History, 49 (1989), 1007–1008, Jan de Vries comments that ‘I regret that I must add that the database promiscuously mixes estimates from sound, uncontrollable, and frankly dubious sources. Moreover, I have found it impossible to confirm Bairoch’s national and Europe-wide urban population estimates with the data and methodological discussions presented in this volume. A methodological appendix offers an account of the procedures used to estimate the missing data, but it does not allow replication of the published results’ (p. 1007). Grzymala-Busse uses as her source for ‘secular conflict’ M. Dincecco and M. Onorato, ‘Military Conflict and the Rise of Urban Europe’, Journal of Economic Growth, 21.1, 259–282. On examination, they base their data for ‘conflict’ on J. Bradbury, The Routledge Companion to Medieval Warfare (London, 2004). Mr Bradbury’s book is a nice trade book for general readers or military buffs, but it is not remotely fit to bear the statistical weight they lay on it. For instance, there are only six pages of short paragraphs on battles and sieges in the Holy Roman Empire (which includes north/ central Italy as well as Germany and central Europe); the bibliography on this section contains no titles in German or Italian.