Absolute Monarchs Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN JULIUS NORWICH

  Byzantium: The Early Centuries

  Byzantium: The Apogee

  Byzantium: The Decline and Fall

  The Middle Sea

  A History of Venice

  Shakespeare’s Kings

  Mount Athos

  Sahara

  The Normans in Sicily

  The Architecture of Southern England

  Paradise of Cities

  Copyright © 2011 by John Julius Norwich

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Published in the United Kingdom as The Popes: A History by Chatto & Windus, a member of The Random House Group Limited, London.

  The illustration credits are located on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Norwich, John Julius.

  Absolute monarchs : a history of the papacy / John Julius Norwich.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60499-0

  1. Papacy—History. I. Title. II. Title: History of the papacy.

  BX955.3.N67 2011

  262′.13—dc22 2010036598

  Title-page image copyright © iStockphoto.com/© Paolo Cipriani Maps by Reginald Piggott

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Susan Zucker Koski

  Jacket painting: Pierre Subleyras, portrait of Pope Benedict

  XIV (detail) (Musée Condé, Chantilly, France/Giraudon/

  Bridgeman Art Library)

  v3.1

  For Allegra,

  who first suggested this book

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER I. St. Peter

  CHAPTER II. Defenders of the City (c. 100–536)

  CHAPTER III. Vigilius (537–555)

  CHAPTER IV. Gregory the Great (590–604)

  CHAPTER V. Leo III and Charlemagne (795–861)

  CHAPTER VI. Pope Joan (855?–857?)

  CHAPTER VII. Nicholas I and the Pornocracy (855–964)

  CHAPTER VIII. Schism (964–1054)

  CHAPTER IX. Gregory VII and the Normans

  CHAPTER X. Innocent and Anacletus

  CHAPTER XI. The English Pope

  CHAPTER XII. Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa

  CHAPTER XIII. Innocent III

  CHAPTER XIV. The End of the Hohenstaufen

  CHAPTER XV. Avignon

  CHAPTER XVI. Laetentur Coeli!

  CHAPTER XVII. The Renaissance

  CHAPTER XVIII. The Monsters

  CHAPTER XIX. The Medici Pair

  CHAPTER XX. The Counter-Reformation

  CHAPTER XXI. Baroque Rome

  CHAPTER XXII. The Age of Reason

  CHAPTER XXIII. The Jesuits and the Revolution

  CHAPTER XXIV. Progress and Reaction

  CHAPTER XXV. Pio Nono

  CHAPTER XXVI. Leo XIII and the First World War

  CHAPTER XXVII. Pius XI and Pius XII

  CHAPTER XXVIII. Vatican II and After

  Bibliography

  List of Popes and Antipopes

  Illustration Insert

  Maps

  Modern Italy

  Medieval Rome

  Papal States in the 16th Century

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  Introduction

  This book is, essentially, a straightforward single-volume history of the Papacy. It is an idea that I have had at the back of my mind for at least a quarter of a century, since my daughter Allegra first suggested it, and I have been running up against various individual popes for a good deal longer than that. Several of them played a major part in my history of Norman Sicily, written forty years ago, and a good many more played equally important roles in my histories of Venice, Byzantium, and—most recently—the Mediterranean. I can even claim some personal experience of the Vatican, having worked in its library and having had two private audiences—with Pius XII and Paul VI—the latter when I was lucky enough to attend his coronation in 1963 as dogsbody to the Duke of Norfolk, who was representing the queen. In addition, I well remember the future John XXIII—who was nuncio in Paris while my father was ambassador there—and the future John Paul I, when he was Patriarch of Venice.

  But we are talking about a history, not a personal memoir. As such, it clearly cannot hope to tell the whole story, which is far too long for one volume and all too often stultifyingly boring. Many of the early popes are little more than names, and one of them—Pope Joan, to whom I have nevertheless been unable to resist devoting a short chapter—never existed at all. We naturally begin at the beginning, with St. Peter, but after him for the better part of the next millennium the story will be episodic rather than continuous, concentrating on those pontiffs who made history: Leo the Great, for example, protecting Rome from the Huns and Goths; Leo III, laying the imperial crown on the head of the astonished Charlemagne; Gregory the Great and his successors, manfully struggling with emperor after emperor for supremacy; or Innocent III and the calamitous Fourth Crusade. Later chapters will deal with the “Babylonian Captivity” in Avignon; with the monstrous popes of the High Renaissance, notably the Borgia Alexander VI, Julius II, and the Medici Leo X (“God has given us the Papacy, now let us enjoy it”); with those of the Counter-Reformation, above all Paul III; with the luckless Pius VII, who had to contend with Napoleon; and with his still more unfortunate namesake Pius IX, who steered—or more often failed to steer—the Papacy through the storm of the Risorgimento.

  When we reach the turn of the twentieth century, we shall look particularly at the remarkable Leo XIII, and then at the popes of the two world wars, Benedict XV and the odiously anti-Semitic Pius XII, to whom the beloved Pope John XXIII came as such a welcome contrast. Then, after a brief glimpse of the unhappy Paul VI, we come to the greatest papal mystery of modern times, the death—after a pontificate lasting barely a month—of John Paul I. Was he murdered? At the start of my investigations it seemed to me more than likely that he was; now I am not so sure. Finally we shall discuss the astonishing phenomenon of John Paul II. As for Benedict XVI, we shall just have to see.

  Papal history can, like other varieties, be written from any number of points of view. This book is essentially political, cultural, and, up to a point, social. There are moments, from time to time, when basic matters of doctrine cannot be avoided—in order to explain the Arian heresy, the Great Schism with the Orthodox Church, the Albigensian Crusade, the Reformation, even infallibility and the Immaculate Conception—but as far as possible I have tried to steer well clear of theology, on which I am in any case utterly unqualified to pronounce. In doing so, I have followed in the footsteps of many of the popes themselves, a surprising number of whom seem to have been far more interested in their own temporal power than in their spiritual well-being.

  Let me protest once again what I have protested on countless occasions before: I am no scholar, and my books are not works of scholarship. This one probably contains no significant information that any self-respecting church historian will not be perfectly well aware of already, but it is not designed for church historians. It is intended, like everything else I have written, for the average intelligent reader, be he believer or unbeliever, who would simply like to know a little more about the background of what is, by any account, an astonishing story.

  I have tried, as always, to maintain a certain lightness of touch. Historical
accuracy must never, of course, be knowingly sacrificed in the cause of entertainment—even though, particularly in the early centuries, it is all too often impossible to guarantee—but there remain countless fascinating and well-authenticated stories and anecdotes which it would have been sad indeed to omit. Some of these are to the credit of the Papacy, others not; I can only say that as an agnostic Protestant I have absolutely no ax to grind, still less any desire either to whitewash it or to hold it up to ridicule. My task has been simply to look at what is perhaps the most astonishing social, political, and spiritual institution ever created and to give as honest, as objective, and as accurate an account of it as I possibly can.

  JOHN JULIUS NORWICH

  CHAPTER I

  St. Peter

  After nearly two thousand years of existence, the Papacy is the oldest continuing absolute monarchy in the world. To countless millions, the pope is the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the infallible interpreter of divine revelation. To millions more, he is the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies of Antichrist. What cannot be denied is that the Roman Catholic Church, of which he is the head, is as old as Christianity itself; all other Christian religions—and there are more than 22,000 of them—are offshoots or deviants from it.

  It all started, according to the generally accepted view, with St. Peter. To most of us he is a familiar figure. We see his portrait in a thousand churches—painted, frescoed, or chiseled in stone: curly gray hair, close-cropped beard, his keys dangling from his waist. Sometimes he stands beside, sometimes opposite, the black-bearded, balding St. Paul, armed with book and sword. Together they represent the Church’s joint mission—Peter to the Jews of the diaspora, Paul to the Gentiles. Peter’s original name was Simon, or perhaps Symeon. (Oddly enough, the two names are unrelated: the first is Greek, the second Hebrew, but both languages were current in Bethsaida in Galilee, where he was born.) Profession: fisherman, and quite a successful one. He and his brother Andrew were in partnership with James and John, the sons of Zebedee; he seems to have had his own boat, and he could certainly afford to employ a number of assistants. His brother Andrew is described by St. John as having been a disciple of John the Baptist, and it may well have been through the Baptist that Simon first met Jesus. At any rate he soon became the first of the disciples, and then of the twelve Apostles whom Christ selected from them—seeing them, perhaps, as a symbol of the twelve tribes of Israel; and he had already reached this position of preeminence when, at Caesarea Philippi, St. Matthew (16:18–19) reports Jesus as saying to him, “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church … I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.” On those few words—the Latin version of which is inscribed around the base of the dome of the Basilica of St. Peter—rests the entire structure of the Roman Catholic Church.

  The name Peter is so familiar to us today that it comes as something of a surprise to learn that until those words were uttered it was not a name at all, but a perfectly ordinary noun: the Aramaic kephas, translated into the Greek petros, meaning a rock or stone. There seems little doubt that Jesus did indeed bestow it upon Simon; the fact is confirmed by St. Mark and also (writing some time afterward) by St. John, although the two admittedly disagree about the actual occasion when the event occurred. Matthew’s, however, is the only gospel that adds Jesus’s stated reason for the choice of name, and it is this addition that has led scholars to suggest that the whole passage may be a later interpolation. The very fact that it does not appear in the other gospels has struck some of them as suspicious—though there are plenty of other incidents that are reported by only one of the evangelists and have gone unquestioned. A stronger objection is that the word for “church”—the Greek ecclesia—occurs only twice in all four Gospels, its other appearance1 being in a context that is suspect for other reasons. In any event, would Jesus really have been thinking at this early stage of founding a church?

  If Jesus never uttered the words at all, then the Roman Catholic Church, far from being founded on a rock, rests on very shaky foundations indeed. But even if he did, another question remains: what precisely did he mean? Was Peter, having established the Church, to be followed by an infinite number of successors, each in turn inheriting Peter’s own apostolic commission? And if so, in what capacity? Not, certainly, as bishops of Rome, a city which Christ never mentioned—to him Jerusalem was far more important. The evidence, such as it is, suggests that he meant nothing of the kind.

  And what happened to Peter, anyway? The New Testament tells us virtually nothing, either about him or about his colleague St. Paul. According to a very early tradition, they were both in Rome in the year A.D. 64, when a terrifying fire raged through the city. The Emperor Nero was accused of “fiddling,” or singing to his lute, during the conflagration, and was later rumored to have started it himself. Tacitus tells us that

  to be rid of this rumor, Nero fastened the guilt on a class hated for their abominations, which the populace called Christians. Mockery of every sort accompanied their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn apart by dogs and so perished. Others were nailed to crosses or consumed by the flames. Nero even threw open his garden for the spectacle and mounted a performance in the circus.

  According to that same tradition, both Peter and Paul were among the victims. The Acts of the Apostles, however—written, almost certainly after these persecutions, by St. Luke, whom we know to have accompanied Paul to Rome—is once again maddeningly uninformative. It does not even mention Paul’s martyrdom, merely remarking in its penultimate verse that he stayed in the city for two years. As for Peter, he fades out of the book forever halfway through chapter 12, when we are told, quite simply, that “he departed, and went to another place.” The spotlight then turns on Paul, and remains on him till the end.

  There are so many questions that Luke could have answered. Was Peter indeed crucified head downward, at his own request? Was he even crucified at all? Did he ever actually travel to Rome? He certainly had good reason to, simply because to him was entrusted the mission to the Jews, and—with some 30,000 to 40,000 Jews living in Rome at that time—the embryonic Roman Church would have been very largely Jewish. But nowhere in the New Testament is there any evidence that he went to Rome at all. He certainly does not seem to have been there when Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans, probably in A.D. 58. The final chapter of the epistle gives a long list of names to whom the writer sends his greetings; the name of Peter is not among them. If, then, he did indeed meet his death in Rome, he could not have been there for very long—certainly not long enough to found the Roman Church, which in any case had already begun to take shape. It is worth pointing out, too, that there is no contemporary or even near-contemporary reference to Peter as having been a bishop; nor, according to all the indications, was there even a bishop in Rome before the second century.2

  There are, however, two pieces of evidence that suggest that Peter did indeed visit the capital and die there, though neither is altogether conclusive. The first comes from his own First Epistle, the penultimate verse of which contains the words “She [presumably the Church, such as it was] that is in Babylon … saluteth you.” This is at first sight nonsense, until we discover that Babylon was a recognized symbolic name for Rome, used in this sense no fewer than four times in the Book of Revelation. The second testimony comes in a letter from a certain Clement, a Roman presbyter, or elder of the Church—he usually appears as third or fourth in the list of popes—who seems to have known St. Peter personally.3 It was written in about A.D. 96 to the church at Corinth, where a serious dispute had arisen. The key passage here (in chapter 5) reads:

  Let us set before our eyes our good apostles: Peter, who because of unrighteous jealousy suffered not one or two but many trials, and having thus given his testimony went to the glorious place which was his due. Through jealousy and strife Paul demonstrated how to win the prize of patient endurance: seven times he was imprisoned; he was forced to leave and stoned; he preached in the East
and the West; and, finally, he won the splendid renown which his faith had earned.

  Why, we ask ourselves for the thousandth time, did the early fathers have to do quite so much beating about the bush? Why could they not say in so many words that people were martyred or crucified? But we know that Paul met his death during the persecutions under Nero—Tertullian tells us that he was beheaded—and the way Clement mentions the two in almost the same breath strongly suggests that Peter met a similar fate. All that can be said for sure is that by the middle of the second century, which could well be during the lifetime of the grandchildren of people who had actually known them, it was generally accepted that Peter and Paul had both been martyred in Rome. There were even two places associated with their martyrdom, and not specifically Christian burial places such as the catacombs, but nondenominational cemeteries, one in the Vatican, the other outside the walls on the road to Ostia.

  WHEN, IN ABOUT A.D. 320, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great decided to build a basilica dedicated to St. Peter on the Vatican Hill, he was clearly determined to build it on that precise spot and nowhere else. This caused him appalling difficulties. Instead of settling for the more or less level ground at the base of the hill, he chose a site on a steep slope—a decision which involved cutting away a vast mass of the hillside above and constructing three heavy parallel walls beneath, the spaces between them densely packed with earth. Moreover, the chosen site was already a huge necropolis, teeming with burial places, and was still in use. Hundreds of tombs must have been destroyed, thousands of bodies desecrated. There was no time for demolition: the buildings’ roofs were simply removed, after which they were filled with rubble to make a foundation for the new basilica—a practice, incidentally, which has proved a blessing to modern archaeologists. The orientation of the emperor’s new building was also curious: the liturgical east end faced due west. For all this, there can have been only one reason: Constantine built directly over the spot where he believed the bones of St. Peter to lie.