Economic historians of the Ottoman empire have recently made great progress in the study of quantitative data and the economy. They have used data from various sources, including tax registers, court records, and other types of surveys and financial accounts. Applying state-of-the-art analytical techniques to the data, they have examined numerous interesting questions regarding the Ottoman economy, population, and institutions in regions ranging from Anatolia and the Balkans to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in the south, Georgia in the east, and Hungary and Poland in the north. We offer a basic introduction to the literature by surveying important developments since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The survey shows that this area of research has become a mature subfield of both Ottoman history and economic history.

This chapter argues that in the early medieval period, Catholic law both reflected and reinforced a largely “horizontal” Church structure, in which bishops played a central role, often in close engagement with secular lords and rulers. The first part of the chapter surveys the types of existing evidence for early medieval Church law, from the Carolingians up until the Gregorian Reform of circa 1050. The second part focuses on continuities between the Carolingian reforms and the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Recent scholarship has increasingly argued that the Carolingian reforms did not end with the fragmentation of the Carolingian empire. Building on that work, this chapter describes three examples of continuities between the Carolingian and Ottonian periods.

The Age of Revolutions marked the nadir in the fortunes of the papacy. Pius VI, despite his attempts to reform the Curia and embellish Rome, died a prisoner of the French in Valence in 1799. His successor, Pius VII, despite negotiating a groundbreaking concordat with Consular France in 1801, spent five years as the prisoner of Napoleon. This chapter examine the attempts at reform and survival of the Cesena popes in the face of the growing challenge of enlightened absolutism and revolutionary strife. The temporary loss of the Papal States from 1809 to 1814 was a grim harbinger of things to come in 1870. Although the papacy lost ground in temporal terms, ironically it gained a growing spiritual mastery over Catholicism globally.

In large part the role of the papacy as a legislative institution and a court system was its most significant contribution to Western jurisprudence. This chapter traces the long evolution of the papacy’s legal and legislative development from the late antique to the sixteenth century. It outlines the papacy’s influence over the first law schools in Europe, and the importance of the law schools in cultivating, teaching, and interpreting papal law.

This chapter outlines a historiography of the papacy and the environment and begins with several observations. First, papal approaches to the environment are shaped by the historical evolution of the papacy itself. Second, notions of environment and environmentalism are varied across secular, religious, and, by extension, papal discourse and action. Relatedly, these pluriform conceptions are influenced by locations that include geographic, epistemological, and socio-cultural. Thus informed, the chapter engages two distinct periods. The first is the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, wherein papal approaches to the environment were variously shaped by notions of wilderness, classical natural history, anthropocentrism, monastic spiritualities and activities, and expanding ecclesial infrastructure and temporal power. The second period begins with global industrialization around 1750 and continues through to today. Therein, papal environmentalism is especially expressed in modern Catholic social teaching that began with Leo XIII in 1891 and continues through Francis I, especially Laudato si’ in 2015.

Between 500 and 1500, the economy of Europe changed considerably. The papal court saw an equally radical change in the nature of their income, their expenditure, their administration, and their financial expectations. The papal court became the jurisdictional apex of the medieval Church and a major power in European secular politics. Consequently, the income of the Roman Curia increased radically, as did their expenditure. The papacy was a religious power first and foremost. Therefore, the accounting, income, and expenditure of the popes had to correspond to a model medieval Christianity thought good; the pope should look after his flock and spend appropriately on their welfare. There were times, however, when it was not clear to the Christian world that the pope was acting in an acceptable manner, as regards finance and wealth. Bitter satires followed, and the papacy gained a reputation for extravagance. It has never fully thrown off that reputation.

This chapter asks whether there is an Ottoman intellectual history and, if so, what makes it distinct from other forms of intellectual and cultural history. We argue that the answer resides in the methods and questions that Ottoman intellectual historians have asked their sources based on a long intellectual, philological, and philosophical tradition generated by the Ottomans. To do so, we discuss major methods, sources, and challenges of Ottoman intellectual history and how historians have engaged with them. Embracing a flexible and encompassing definition of intellectual history, we aim to highlight the undeniable and necessary place of intellectual history within Ottoman studies in the context of new developments in the field. Last, we discuss current methodological developments in intellectual history and their possible implications for the discipline’s future. With this short contribution, we hope to start a conversation about what is next in Ottoman intellectual history.

This chapter analyzes papal pronouncements in matters of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Popes intervened typically in response to demands coming from local religious authorities involved in the repression of the “demonic arts.” In the early phase – from the 1320s to the 1430s – some papal decrees emphasized that magic was heretical and its practitioners were involved in a demonic conspiracy, giving thus an impulse to the outbreak of the witch hunt. Subsequently, the papacy’s support of witch hunters came close to an approval of the doctrine of diabolical witchcraft. In the final decades (the 1580s to the 1640s), popes issued sweeping condemnations of the entire spectrum of magical practices. Such decrees settled the Church’s accounts with astrology, and at the same time tasked the Roman Inquisition with a campaign to stamp out popular “superstitions,” which remained one of the Holy Office’s main objectives in the early modern era.

The chapter deals with the central provisions of the two Latin codifications on the papal office, each in the context of the structure of the Code (norms on the supreme authority of the Church; position of the pope in the College of Bishops; legal qualification of papal authority, acquisition and loss of authority). In doing so, it is shown that the current Codex Iuris Canonici has essentially confirmed the concept of papal primacy that already distinguished the Code of 1917. Nevertheless, the question is then explored whether, according to the legal order of the Church, substantial developments or even modifications of the papal primacy, or at least its exercise, are possible. For this purpose, some perspectives are presented.

During the thirteenth century, stories began to circulate in Rome of the existence of a female pope. What likely began as popular satire was eagerly picked up by monastic chroniclers who had their own axes to grind. For the papacy, the existence of a female pope – most commonly called Joan – only became problematic after the Reformation, when Protestants saw an opportunity to use these medieval (and therefore Catholic) authorities to challenge the papal apostolic succession and identify the papacy with the biblical Whore of Babylon. The arguments employed by both sides are hugely revealing of how Catholics and Protestants saw themselves and each other. More recently, Pope Joan has moved into the realm of fiction: in film and literature she became a feminist icon. Transgender readings – Joan as man in a woman’s body, rather than a woman in a man’s garment – are bound to inspire new interpretations of her story.

The chapter examines recent historiography on the Papal States and considers the different stages of its territorial formation, from the fifteenth century to the Napoleonic era. Throughout the early modern period, the Papal States maintained their composite nature; characterized by territories with strong traditions of local government, extensive feudal powers, and by the inheritance of duchies that had belonged to dynasties that had become extinct, as happened in the cases of Ferrara and Urbino. These characteristics of the papal dominions strongly determined the nature of Roman government in the localities. Control of law and order and the financial administration, themselves synonyms of “good government,” and determining factors in maintaining the consent of those under papal authority, received expression in the adaptation of norms and practices to local conditions, as can be seen in the dense correspondence between the relevant Roman Congregations and the local officers, governors, and legates.

Of the duties, offices, and jurisdictions of the pope, few responsibilities were as crucial and esteemed as charity. This chapter surveys papal concern for and response to charity (500–1800 CE). The initial direction, speed, and efficacy of papal charity depended largely on individual popes and the contexts in which they operated. Charity became more regular with early Church councils and with the personal efforts of certain popes, but these endeavors remained informal until the Gregorian Reform and the Lateran Councils of the high Middle Ages. By the later Middle Ages, centralized charitable care emerged under the charge of the papacy: popes approved the creation of hospitals, protected pilgrims and prostitutes, and made regular charitable donations in kind and in coins. These efforts continued during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, despite significant changes for the Church. Papal concern for charity never waned: from its beginnings to the modern period, the papacy embodied the Christian tenant to love one’s neighbor.

From its very origins as a semi-nomadic community seeking to establish itself as an early modern state, large flows of migrants, exiles, and refugees found an accommodating Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the conditions under which migrants settled allowed for many to thrive as the empire encouraged migration as a manner to expand its territorial reach beyond the core Anatolian and Balkan regions. The ethnic and religious diversity of these migrants helped regularly energize Ottoman political, economic, and cultural life. At other moments, in different settings, other migrants destabilized the empire as peasants were uprooted by administrative attempts at settling the new arrivals. Arriving as the empire replaced previous ruling structures to adjust to political, cultural, and economic changes in the larger world, refugees from neighboring empires were thus seen as threats by many while they were welcomed by other constituencies within the Ottoman state, a pattern of settlement that shaped the 600-year history of the empire.

Usage of the title “Vicar of Christ” and the extent of powers implied in it supposedly peaked with Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) and Boniface VIII (r. 1294–1303); the image of popes as monarchic hegemons suited the attempts of legal, political, and constitutional historians to portray the growth of royal power, bureaucracy, and “nations” in competition with other forms of identity. More recently, the medieval papacy has been characterized as responsive and dialogic. Popes’ multiple roles as leader of the universal Church, Bishop of Rome, and ruler of the Papal States meant continual dialogue between center (Rome) and periphery in terms of appeals and petitions presented to the papal curia. Papal opinion and legal rulings mattered precisely because they were sought by regional churches and by secular rulers, and popes relied heavily on the College of Cardinals, judges delegate, and papal legates to represent papal decision-making. While the papal claim to the vicariate of Christ was often challenged by secular powers, this typically occurred in instances where earthly powers sensed that the vicariate of Christ was being wielded to intervene in matters critical to a definition of overlapping and occasionally competing spheres of government.

This chapter presents the main themes that emerge from a survey of the scholarly work that has been undertaken on the history of papal involvement with music. Seven centuries of papal pronouncements on music in the liturgy show a remarkable consistency of concerns, which could be summed up in the word “decorum.” Liturgical music must serve the Word, it must be solemn, it must be serious, it must not be there simply to be enjoyed, and it must not remind the congregation of secular matters. Yet it is striking how limited and how ineffective most papal decrees were. While popes consistently claimed global authority over all sorts of religious matters, only two issued decrees on music addressed to the entire Church. Even the papacy’s greatest contribution to the history of music, the creation of the plainchant repertory, was for the popes a local matter.