The Great Schism Ep 1: Emperors and Popes

let me tell you a story it's full of violence politics bloodlust and sex it's as crazy as a game of thrones episode but it's not fiction it actually happened it's the story of the christian world as you've never heard it and it explains how we got to having popes in the first place and even if you're not religious and have no interest in attending a church of any kind the world we live in and the structures and experiences we still have have been shaped by these events we're very much downstream of this history and it's in the water all around us we live in a world that is shaped by history and people and events that we may know nothing about but have nevertheless had an incredible impact on our lives many of you will think that you know a thing or two about christianity you may have heard of the protestant reformation in the 1500s martin luther but there was a much older and more significant break that shattered the christian world split it into two halves that have never been reunited and we're still living with the after effects in 1054 there was a religious dispute between the cities of rome and the city of constantinople that split the christian world in half it never recovered now while 1054 has been the date that's officially pinned to this event that we now call the great schism scholars say that the tensions that led to it began a lot earlier and the break itself solidified sometime later but in order to tell you this story and to unpack how it happened and why it happened we're going to have to back up a bit this is the story that i'm going to tell you today the great schism in this story we'll be referring to the eastern and western church by which we mean christian church but why the geographical terms because we have to go back to the roman empire itself so the roman empire initially had its capital in rome where the emperors ruled and expanded so in the time of jesus the roman empire was still ruled out of rome but it was about to enter an expansive growth phase following the death of jesus and within 300 years it was too big to administer from one city alone so in 285 exactly 285 years after jesus dies we have an emperor called diocletian who decides that it's going to be better to administer the empire in its enormous size from two separate cities so he appoints another military man named maximian to rule the eastern half of the empire and he does this from a city far away from rome the two halves of the roman empire were not always governed by separate leaders sometimes there was an eastern and a western emperor and sometimes there was only one but eventually the western part of the empire which was ruled from rome began to weaken and the eastern empire became more the political cultural and military power base of the empire the eastern empire with its capital in constantinople which is modern-day turkey and has been renamed istanbul adopted greek as its official language and outlived the western empire by by about a thousand years we know it today as the byzantine empire but for a long time even though greek was its official language it retained many of the cultural uh and customary practices of the roman empire and regarded itself as a continuation of the same roman empire that had been in existence for centuries initially though while they were called the eastern and western empire they were two halves of the same unit now in the 300s emperor constantine moves the official seat of the roman empire out of rome and into the city of constantinople which he that point renames after himself that's when it became constantinople and because he's made christianity the official religion of the roman empire the emperor is now in the position of arbitrating disputes uh disagreements and questions about what the right practice of christianity should be so while christianity has been in existence at this point for about three centuries there are still ongoing disputes about what the correct teaching should be about what the official practices services sacraments and all these sorts of things should look like and what they mean and because christianity had spread through the very diverse and extended regions of the roman empire there were different views about this so there were church meetings sometimes called synods on a regular basis where church officials got together to discuss what the official position of the church should be but because at this point christianity had suddenly become the official religion of the roman empire the emperor would sit in on these meetings and when the church men themselves couldn't come to an agreement he would have the deciding vote so this put the emperor in the position of giving the deciding vote over which version and whose interpretation of christianity was going to become official it also put him in the position of giving state edicts that would support and enforce certain versions of christianity at the expense of others this joining of church and state is going to be a thread that runs through our entire story so it's important to keep that in mind to understand the events that follow in fact in rome the fusion of church and state began a long time before christianity became the official religion of the roman empire the first official emperor of rome was the nephew of julius caesar whose name was octavian but we know him as caesar augustus so he made the title of emperor official and he took on a number of other titles he was called pontific's maximus which is latin and means literally the high priest so he was in charge he was the highest official of the existing state religion of rome which many scholars in christian history would call pagan but it really meant honoring the traditional gods of rome and ensuring a position for the emperor as one of them because one of the things that caesar augustus or octavian did was to assert that the emperor was somehow connected to the gods and upon his death would become one of them so the official religion in rome was in some ways quite permissive because as the empire expanded there were many different peoples who had their own gods their own religious systems who became absorbed into the roman empire and the position of the state was you could have your own gods you could have your own little shrines in your house and your own religious rituals as long as you paid homage to the emperor as a god because the fusion of church and state in his person was already established so 300 years later when christianity becomes the official religion of rome it's very much stepping into a framework that's already been established in which the emperor himself fuses both the power of the state and the correct practice of religion now sometimes having the muscle of the emperor behind certain religious priorities could create major problems for example emperor theodosius who began ruling in 379 so within 50 years of christianity becoming the official religion of rome listened to the urging of some of the church men around him and began official persecution of pagans in the roman empire the word pagan at the time would just mean anyone who wasn't christian and that would be a lot of people so now because christianity had the power of the emperor behind it it was enabled to suppress the practices of competing religious systems within the empire now some scholars actually attribute this as one of the causes of the weakening of the roman empire because under the previous religious system you could have your own religion as long as you sort of paid lip service and homage to the emperor you were part of this sort of conglomerate of different peoples unified under an official state religion but now christianity in in its empowerment by the state was much less tolerant of religious difference and so if you had a different practice that was no longer okay there was only one correct religion and the emperor was in the role of making life difficult for people who had the wrong one in another example of emperors being misguided by christian clergy emperor leo iii in 726 so another four centuries later issued a decree requiring the forcible baptism of all the jews in the empire i tell you jewish people couldn't catch a break under the original roman emperors life was difficult for them in the time of jesus and even when christianity becomes the official religion of rome now you have emperors who are still finding reasons to make the lives of jewish people difficult so forcible baptism for jewish people which is a christian practice that would have that would have been seen as extremely oppressive and unwelcome but that wasn't enough for this particular emperor in the 700s influenced by the same churchmen around him in his court he then issued another edict that was going to make life far more difficult for all the subjects of the empire both in the east but especially in the west in the eastern part of the roman empire which would include places like egypt modern turkey and greece the use of religious images had become increasingly prevalent over the centuries and so there were icons of religious figures especially the virgin mary there were beautiful mosaics and paintings that would be used and they'd be in churches and they'd often be in homes as well now the problem with this was that it caused great concern to certain church men because there are there's a prohibition on the worship of images that goes right back to the ten commandments the ten commandments are part of the jewish scriptures and they are part of the old testament in the bible and so one of them says you shall make no graven image that the worship of idols is forbidden so some church leaders were becoming concerned that the level of veneration and reverence and faith that people were demonstrating towards these objects was basically amounting to idol worship to make matters worse in the eastern part of the roman empire the christian communities were now in contact with a new group of people muslims sometimes called saracens in the literature and while today we think of islam and christianity and judaism as being very much at odds or opposed to each other scholars refer to all three of them as abrahamic religions because they all point back to the same guy abraham as sort of the founding father of their religious lineage and they share a lot of the same practices and even figures moses abraham they exist in all three traditions so muslims in their formative period were heavily influenced by the jewish scriptures and the practice of jewish communities around them so like jews they didn't eat pork they had a prohibition on drinking alcohol and they respected the prohibition on worshiping idols from the ten commandments so when these muslims saw christian communities in the east venerating golden images they also raised an eyebrow and there were accusations of idol worship being made so this was of great concern to certain churchmen in the east they got the emperor to make an edict that required the smashing of images get rid of the images get rid of the icons they are idol worship they're no longer allowed so this caused enormous controversy because a lot of christian communities were very attached to their religious art and they didn't see it as idol worship and were horrified that someone else was going to come in and take this away from them this period which is called the iconoclast period caused plenty of controversy throughout the eastern roman empire with rebellious bishops even being thrown into jail for failure to comply in terms of overseeing the practice of congregations that they were in charge of but in the western empire which was located farther away from the emperor sitting in constantinople in the east there was a very long-standing attachment to statues and images if you think about the city of rome for a moment the statuary and the images and the paintings in that city far predate christianity and culturally people there were very much attached to them so to have this edict come in from a city in the east where the emperor says get rid of your religious images smash your religious statues and your icons it didn't sit well in fact the bishop of rome gregory ii wrote a letter of protest to the emperor and he said listen we are not worshiping our images we're just giving reverence to what the image represents it's symbolic we're not doing anything wrong here and we're not gonna smash our images when the emperor hears this defiance he actually sends an army into the west into rome to enforce his decree that the images be destroyed and so upset are the romans that they form an army of their own to meet the army sent by the emperor and there's an incredibly bloody series of clashes that occur in the area outside rome one contemporary source said that the poe river was so polluted with the bodies of dead soldiers as a result of these clashes that people didn't eat the fish from there for years for fear of involuntary cannibalism five years later in 731 the bishop of rome convenes an assembly of bishops a church synod in the western part of the empire and there he declares that anyone who lifts a hand to damage one of the images is excommunicated which is pope speak for meaning kicked out of the church so in this way he's actually asserting a position that is completely opposite to the official christianity coming out of the eastern roman empire with the authority of the emperor behind it so what we can see here is the bishop of rome carving out a position of authority for himself that can stand against the interpretation of christianity coming out of the east and coming from the emperor five years later in 731 the bishop of rome convenes a church synod or a meeting of western bishops and there he declares that anyone who raises a hand to damage one of the images is excommunicated which is church speak for being kicked out of the church officially so what we can see here is the bishop of rome beginning to carve out a position of authority that could stand against the official position on christianity coming out of the east with the authority of the emperor behind it he's actually making an opposite assertion that not only are we not going to destroy our images we're going to say that anybody who does destroy them has got it wrong and should be kicked out of the church so it's extremely opposite it's a very hostile position now in the eastern empire the use of images went in and out of fashion for the next hundred years and they were finally reinstated as officially approved about a century later giving rise to the beautiful gold mosaics and the byzantine art that we know and can easily recognize today but this iconoclastic controversy is a major splitting point where there are two completely opposite views of what the right way forward is and the bishop of rome decides that he's going to take a stand and not give any ground now with the political background in place we're going to turn our attention to a little bit of terminology on the religious structure of the church before we get into the really juicy stuff so how did we get to the word pope anyway where did it come from and when about 200 years after the death of jesus you have a an early christianity that's still very much underground right it doesn't become official religion in rome until the three like 325-ish so in the first couple of centuries it's underground it's sort of women and slaves and people who don't fit in in other places and they are meeting in secret and so on now as the persecution of christianity decreases and it becomes more of a visible and respected form of practice there are three types of church positions official positions that develop so the priest is sort of the one that's most familiar to most of us probably and the role of the priest was to be in regular contact with the members of the congregation or the group of believers that were in that area he would be officiating weddings he would be praying with people he'd be visiting them when they were sick conducting any kind of prayer or worship that might be officially happening that was his job the deacon was the second position and he's sort of the lowest ranking position think of him as the priest's assistant basically and deacons in the early churches were often involved in organizing the charitable activities of the congregation so helping out less wealthy members or people who needed assistance slaves who needed to to buy their freedom you know they'd be organizing funds and help for members of that community and they were very good at it that was one of the things that was most attractive about the early church was the idea that they would care for members of the congregation as though they were family and this was quite bizarre it was quite different in a society where family ties and then ties to one's patron were where your support came from so the deacons were at the heart of that part of the early church so we have the deacon we have the priest and they work very closely together then there was the role of the bishop that began to evolve and the bishop was really began as the senior priest he was sort of the the ranking religious authority in an area and he would oversee the other priests and congregations in a particular area which became known as a diocese so the bishop is sort of one level up and his job is to ordain priests so to bring in new priests uh into the service he would be in charge of dealing with any kind of controversies that might arise he would manage any finances this sort of thing and so when the early church as it began to become more official in the 300s and they began to worry about standardizing church practice and belief across the roman empire when christianity becomes official it would be the bishops who would get together and meet at these synods and discuss what the right practice or the right way forward would be so in theory all bishops were equal some were just a little more equal than others bishops of particularly large dioceses in major cities like rome or alexandria or constantinople they had a very very large number of people in their congregations and priests who would be serving those congregations they became known as archbishops so really big bishops who were in charge of a whole lot of people and the archbishops especially in rome and in byzantium saw themselves as sort of ranking above the other bishops so if there were disputes they would have more of a deciding vote than others the term pope was originally used to refer to all the bishops in the west and also the patriarch or archbishop if you like of alexandria in the east so it wasn't originally an exclusive term but this changed by the 9th century we see the term pope being almost exclusively used to refer to the bishop of rome in 1073 only a couple of decades after the great schism that we're going to be focusing on gregory vii who's then the bishop of rome officially confirms that the term pope will from that point on only be used to refer to the bishop of rome the bishop of rome was a bishop possibly even an archbishop but really a bishop amongst other bishops there was no official reason why he should be more important than others and other archbishops especially in major cities like alexandria would assert that their authority was equal to his but over a period of centuries the bishop of rome began to assert a very special claim so it's founded on an episode that's reported in the new testament where jesus says to the apostle peter upon this rock you peter i will build my church i will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven so this is a verse that can be found in the in the new testament and the bishop of rome was saying look jesus passed on the leadership of the christian church to peter upon his death and peter did in fact take over the leadership of the christian church this is well documented until he himself was martyred and legend has it that he was martyred in the city of rome so the bishop of rome was saying look when peter was martyred the leadership of the church passed on to whoever he appointed and so on and so on to me the bishop of rome so i lead because i am part of a direct line of succession that comes through peter from jesus himself and therefore my authority isn't just that i happen to be the bishop of a large city but i've inherited some degree this authority to bind uh on earth what will be bound in heaven it's an extraordinary claim that the actions of a human man on earth could have an eternal impact and this doctrine is going to have a profound impact in the development of the christian church and the authority of the pope in particular so what does it mean that the pope could bind on earth what would be bound in heaven it basically meant that the pope the bishop of rome would have the ability to cut somebody off from the grace of god through the offices of the church the sacraments so in christian teaching as it was beginning to evolve through a period of centuries an individual's access to god was through the services of the church through through prayer uh through receiving uh holy water and baptism and things like extreme unction and so on so the church and its officials were in charge of administering these things they were the link between the individual believer and god and so if the pope were to cast somebody out on earth then the implication was that that person would suffer in eternity as well unless they were reconciled to the pope and kind of got back in it was through this doctrine of authority from peter and the ability to bind things on earth that would have an eternal impact that the bishop of rome used to build up the position of the pope to be supremely important now of course not everyone agreed with this claim that was being made by the bishop of rome particularly some of the churchmen in the east and archbishops of extremely important capitals there there was a church council of called the church council of chalcedon in 451 so about a hundred years after christianity becomes the official religion of the empire and this position of the bishop of rome as being superior to some of the other archbishops was disputed there and the position of that council was that the authority of the patriarch or the archbishop in constantinople was equal to the authority of the bishop of rome although in certain matters they were willing to allow the bishop of rome the final say so it was contentious it wasn't something that everyone just accepted but as the centuries rolled on particularly after the great schism that we will discuss in more detail in a moment the pope by the 11th century on begins to use this doctrine very very heavily to construct the office of pope as we know it today it would be impossible to tell this story adequately without mentioning some very colorful chapters in the history of the bishops of rome that undoubtedly influenced attitudes in the east toward claims of the authority of a pope over the rest of the church the story i'm going to tell you is as twisted and brutal as many game of thrones episodes in fact it would be unsurprising to me if george martin had looked at some of these figures for inspiration for certain characters from that incredible saga certainly many of them are as bloodthirsty and and as cruel so let me set the stage for you for the game of thrones in the vatican with the rise of the house of theophylact the power of the roman empire emanating as it now did from constantinople was weaker in the western half in fact the western part of the roman empire all but collapsed by 476. the city was sacked by a group of gothic tribes led by a man named alaric in 430 so this means that they marched into the city of rome and they just looted and took everything of value that they could lay their hands on and they did this because the emperor in the west had refused to pay them many of the troops of the western empire were now germanic tribes including the goths who would maintain the boundaries of the empire who would do military service in exchange for land so alaric in his goths had been promised land and also grain and they've come to collect but the western emperor was dithering and out of touch and refused to answer meanwhile alaric and his men are camped outside the city it's it's been weeks months winter is coming they're getting hungry and they're tired of waiting so they march into the city and they take everything that's of value so it's a it's a terrible moment for the city of rome it's actually what inspired augustine's famous book city of god this awful moment when a city that had been the capital of a mighty empire is now looted by a band of german soldiers german tribesmen actually so it's a horrible fall and what it signals is the inherent instability in rome and in italy and the entire western empire at this time there's a power vacuum that's created because the emperor in the west no longer can control the service of military men and so without troops there's no power or authority that can be effectively exerted so what happens in the west from the 400s onwards is that the western empire is essentially no more it's a territory that's now a terrain that's competed over by groups of tribes uh lombards goths visigoths all of whom have groups of armed men and ambitions for owning land and so whatever land they can sort of take over and maintain control of becomes theirs and this is the terrain that is surrounding rome at this period of history it's incredibly unstable it's very shifting and authority and power go to whoever has command of the largest number of swords even within the city of rome rape and robbery by roving bands of thugs was commonplace you had people jockeying for power in the terrain outside but within rome itself there were powerful families and factions all of whom had their own armed gangs and were struggling for control within the city so it was extremely lawless it was about who you knew and who could protect you so very very dangerous very unstable times the bishop of rome who calls himself pope in 755 pope stephen is looking for help he's looking for somebody who can secure the city of rome so that it's safe for him and the people who live there because the bloodshed and the crime levels are out of control so he's so desperate that even though he's an elderly man he goes north if you look at a map of italy rome is down towards the south but these elderly pope stephen is going to go and cross the alps in the winter to seek help from a man strong enough to secure rome if you think about pope stephen's journey here it's really quite staggering and has to underscore the desperation that must have driven him on to travel from rome to the alps involves traveling up through much of the country before you even get to these mountains which still remain some of the most epic and dangerous peaks in the world and this man is going to cross them in the winter time so the only thing that could make someone of his age undertake such a mission would have to be that rome was entirely unlivable and that whatever was waiting for him in rome was worse than the journey through the alps in the winter that he was willing to undertake his destination is the court of the frankish king pepin in an area that probably falls within what we now know as germany the pope stephen was asking king pepin not just for protection but for land he wanted some of the territories that had been taken over by lombard tribes in and around rome to be handed over to him personally to support the claim he was making to pepin pope stephen used a document that asserted that these lands had been granted by emperor constantine to the bishop of rome some 400 years ago so they were his rightful property and he was just asking pepin to help him reclaim something that was already his problem was the document was actually a fraud it was authored by another churchman in far more recent history somewhat imaginatively asserting that the bishop of rome owned this land fortunately for pope stephen king pepin didn't ask any questions many of the german tribes including the franks were officially christian and so to them the pope was still the leader of the christian church at least in the west and so pepin mounted a military campaign to go into italy and remove the power of these lombard tribes from a lot of the areas around rome and he handed over the keys to more than 20 cities along the adriatic coast into the hands of pope stephen including of course rome itself so these lands at this moment in history became the property of the pope and this fundamentally changes things because all this time the office of pope has been an office of religious authority but in this moment he becomes a very rich landowner with the ability to collect taxes and revenues from all of these cities and that's going to change everything suddenly the position of bishop of rome was highly attractive to people who had no interest in the church at all but suddenly a very strong interest in becoming pope because the pope was no longer just the bishop of rome he was the prince of rome as well twelve years later when the pope dies all the most important families in rome are scrambling to get one of their own kin into the papal gown three competing candidates emerge and there is this mad rush for power one of them has his eyes gouged out another one is murdered and the third one only survives by appealing to the lombards for help remember the lombards are the tribes around rome that pope stephen had been running to the alps to get king pepin to expel so you can see the absolute mayhem that's unleashed by the fact that this office this seat of pope now has so much wealth and power attached to it by the year 800 king pepin's son charlemagne travels to rome at the invitation of yet another pope who's desperate for help in exchange for frankish aid and security of rome the pope agrees to crown charlemagne emperor of the west this of course raised a lot of eyebrows in byzantium in the eastern roman empire because as far as they were concerned constantinople was still the capital of the roman empire how did the bishop of rome the pope suddenly get into the business of creating emperors within 50 years the office of pope had gone from a position of religious leadership of a large city to a wealthy landowner with the ability to confirm the very highest political office there was emperor in the next century the kingdom controlled by emperor charlemagne was rapidly fragmented amongst his heirs and italy and the other parts of the western empire were again the subject of constant warring by different tribal factions including the lombards so the same chaos the same mayhem that had been going on continued the city of rome was again lawless as different factions of various wealthy families were supporting their own candidates for the office of pope every time the office became available because someone died which happened with increasing regularity there was a mad grab for power it was a naked grab for wealth and power and perhaps nothing illustrates it better than this incident by the year 896 the reigning pope stephen not to be confused with the previous stephen who was a member of one of these wealthy italian families held a church synod or a meeting of bishops and the purpose of this meeting was to condemn the previous pope for moses who had been supported by the faction of a different wealthy italian family the current pope had the eight-month-old corpse of the previous pope formosius dragged out of its grave dressed in papal robes and sitting i can only imagine the smell in the same room as the rest of the bishops and he wanted to conduct a trial of course it was a farce but the purpose of this trial was basically to say that the previous pope had been illegitimate and entirely wrong and should be rejected so imagine these bishops sitting in a room looking at an eight-month rotting corpse dressed in papal robes while the current pope screams and rails and shouts accusations at this grinning carcass when he had finally finished the corpse of the previous pope was stripped several of the fingers of one of the hands were hacked off and the naked corpse was thrown into the river now this act was a deliberate act of degradation and it was intended to crush the faction and the other family whose candidate whose pope formosius had been it had absolutely nothing to do with religion or right practice and everything to do with an assertion of power and ownership of the office in the next six years more than seven people held the office of pope very briefly before being murdered mutilated or otherwise disappearing in the chaotic scramble to control the papal throne amongst the powerful families of italy it's in this moment it's in this chaos that the most horrifying stories and the most villainous popes are about to emerge the stage is ready for the emergence of the house of theophil act if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and share it with someone else that you think would appreciate it join me next week to hear about the power the horror the sex and the carnage of the house of theophil act and their control of the papacy you

Channel: Eva Schubert

Views: 20,355

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Id: 6TeKvoaROgg

Length: 41min 14sec (2474 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020