Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

the Church in the empire’s very capital, had been able convincingly to rival it. Small wonder, then, that this authority should increasingly have tempted ambitious bishops in Rome to set themselves up as masters in their own city. They were, after all, at a gratifyingly distant remove from the emperor’s actual person – and the same crisis that in the seventh century had inspired Methodius’s prophecies of a last Roman emperor had served only to widen that remove. Greece had been infiltrated by savage barbarians from the North; the sea lanes preyed upon by corsairs; communications between Italy and Constantinople rendered perilous in the extreme. Byzantine officials in Rome, turning ever more native by the year, had fallen into the habit of obeying their bishop rather than the governor in Ravenna – and the bishop himself into the habit of issuing them with commands.

Perhaps a measure of imperiousness would have come naturally to any man who dwelt in a palace, the Lateran, that had originally been a grant from the Emperor Constantine, and who ruled as the effective master of the former mistress of the world. Early in the eighth century, indeed, plans were being drawn up – although never completed – to build him a second residence on the Palatine Hill: a site so associated with the age of the emperors that the very word ‘palace’ echoed it. Yet the bishops of Rome did not derive their authority merely from the legacy of the imperial past. Their patrimony was something infinitely more awesome – indeed, so they proudly asserted, the most awesome of all time. Christ Himself, in naming Peter as His rock, had given to him the keys of heaven, with the power of binding and loosing souls everywhere on earth – and Peter, before his martyrdom, had ruled as the very first bishop of Rome. A trust more mystical and dreadful could hardly have been imagined. Peter’s successors, proclaiming themselves the apostle’s ‘vicarii’, or ‘deputies’, had long since laid claim to it as their own. In Constantinople, where it was the emperor who believed himself entrusted by God with the leadership of the Church, this cut predictably little ice: by the early eighth century, doctrines were being laid down by imperial fiat in the teeth of howls of protest from Rome.

In the kingdoms of the West, however, lacking as they did the dazzling pretensions of an ancient Christian empire, men were far more inclined to be impressed by the spectacle of a bishop on the throne of the chief apostle. Indeed, to see him as the very essence of a bishop. ‘Pappas’ – that ancient Greek word for ‘father’ – was still, in the eighth century, being claimed as a title by bishops everywhere in the East; but in the West, Latinised to ‘Papa’, by the Bishop of Rome alone. So far as the Latin Church was concerned, it had only the one Holy Father. It acknowledged just a single Pope.

And the Bishops of Rome, bruised as they were by snubs from their imperial masters, were duly appreciative. ‘How regrettable it is’, a papal letter of 729 dared to sneer, ‘that we see savages and barbarians become civilised, while the Emperor, supposedly civilised, debases himself to the level of the barbarians.’ Two decades later, and relations between Rome and Constantinople had turned frostier than ever. Divisions over subtle issues of theology continued to yawn. Trade links as well as diplomatic contacts had atrophied, leaving the papacy effectively broke. Most alarming of all, however, from the Pope’s point of view, was the failure of the emperor to fulfil his most sacred duty, and offer to God’s Church the protection of his sword and shield. Rome, long a frontier city, was starting to feel ever more abandoned. With the imperial armies locked into a series of desperate campaigns in the East, Byzantine efforts to maintain a presence in Italy had focused almost exclusively on Sicily and the south. The north, as a result, had been left fatally exposed. In 751, it was invaded by the Lombards, a warrior people of Germanic origin who for almost two centuries had sat ominously beyond the frontier of Byzantine Italy, waiting for their chance to expand at the empire’s expense. Ravenna, rich with palaces, splendid churches and the mosaics of saints and emperors, had fallen immediately. Rome herself, it seemed inevitable, would be next.

But hope still flickered, despite the negligence of Constantinople. The Pope was not utterly without protection. One year previously, a fateful embassy had arrived in Rome. It had borne an enquiry from a Frank by the name of Pepin, chief minister in the royal household and, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the Frankish people. Their legitimate king, Childeric III, although a descendant of Clovis, was but a feeble shadow of his glorious predecessor, and Pepin, eager to adorn his authority with the robes of monarchy, had resolved to thrust his master from the throne. Not wishing to offend against Almighty God, however, he had been anxious first to secure the Church’s blessing for his coup — and who better to turn to for that than the Vicar of St Peter? Was it right, Pepin had duly written to the Pope, that a king without any power should continue to be a king? Back had come the answer: no, it was not right at all. A momentous judgement – and one, unsurprisingly, that had secured for Rome the pretender’s undying gratitude. The Pope’s ruling, it would soon be revealed, had set in train dramatic events. These would affect not only the papacy, not only the Franks, but all of Christendom.

God’s plans for the world had taken a startling and far-reaching turn.

Haircuts and Coronations

In 751, the same year that saw the fall of Ravenna to the Lombards, Pepin struck against the hapless Frankish king. Childeric’s spectral authority was terminated, not by death, but with a haircut. The Franks had long held a king to possess a mysterious