Popes as Rulers

In her terrific book, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman has a section on the “Renaissance Popes”, and how the cumulative acts of those 6 Popes led to the eventual Protestant split.

No man is an island, neither in space nor in time. And so says Tuchman:

“To understand the popes, we must look at the princes (of the time).”

It was a twisted dance: the Popes would grant their seal of approval on certain rulers; and in return, those rejected, would wage varying degrees of war on the papal states. Policies were “only the momentary dictates of unstable fortune”. As at all times, the enemy of the enemy became a friend. Even if that happened to be the infidel Muslim!

“(Pope) Innocent’s intention was to use Djem as a means of war on the Sultan… Thus the Grand Turk, brother of the “beast of the Apocalypse,” took up his abode in the house of the Pope, the heart of Christendom.”

The refusal to annul Henry VIII’s marriage was based, not on religious grounds, but on the fact that his Queen was “inconveniently… the aunt of Charles V (an ally of the Pope).”

Other Popes acted like our politicians. Like Pope Sixtus IV:

“He raised nepotism to a new level … He made an established practice of political selection for the purpose of favoring this or that prince or sovereign, often choosing lords or barons or younger sons of great families without regard to merit or clerical qualification.”

Soon enough, the upper ranks were “more courtier than cleric”!

Others like Pope Julius II were warrior Popes. He made Matthaus Schinner a Cardinal, and:

“Schinner rode to war wearing his cardinal’s red hat and robes and announcing to his troops that he wished to bathe in French blood.”

You can see where this is headed: the Pope’s state behaved like a secular state!

“Taking the same part as any secular state, treating and dealing, raising armies and fighting, it became entirely absorbed in the things that are Caesar’s.”

One thing led to another and:

“The process of gaining power employs means that degrade or brutalize the seeker, who wakes to find that power has been possessed at the price of virtue – or moral purpose – lost.”

Pope Leo X was even tolerant of paganism in his court:

“In the course of one of the Sacred Orations, the speaker invoked the “immortals” of the Greek Pantheon, causing both laughter and some anger in the audience, but the Pope listened complacently and tolerated the blunder “in keeping with his nature”. He liked the sermons to be above all learned, reflecting classical style and content.”

All this secularism, of course, destroys the aura round the religious:

“Securalization had worked too well; the aura of the Pope had shriveled until he was, in political if not in popular eyes, no different from prince or sovereign, and subject to handling on those terms.”

But it wasn’t just war mongering, greed and secularism that were the problems. Take Pope Leo X, who was loved by his Renaissance constituents “who dubbed his reign the Golden Age”. All his art and restoration projects needed money:

“The money for these came from no magic source but from ever more extortionate and unscrupulous levies.”

Machiavelli wrote that “the nearer people are to the Church of Rome… the less religious they are.” Rome had lost its sanctity and so in 1527, when the Spanish-German invaders entered Rome, the infamous Sack of Rome followed:

“The orgy of human barbarity that followed in the See of St.Peter’s, the capital of Christendom for 1200 years, was a measure of how far the image of Rome had been demeaned by its rulers.”

And so, by the time Martin Luther came on the scene, the stage was well and truly set.