Three Popes, One Church: The Great Schism of the West

today we're going to talk then like about i say about the papacy and uh where popes come from and how do you get rid of them and so so we'll start with the one that we know right now so pope francis who is the 266th pope i say that depending on how you count so you number the popes and they've added them all up and they've decided i guess that he's 266 but the numbering um is a little bit uh you know you have to kind of decide whether you count different popes at different times and for example uh we had earlier in the 20th century there was a pope john the 23rd and that's not and even though there had already been a pope john the 23rd before but which we'll talk about today although that pope there's no pope jones we'll talk about we can mention that too but but there was no pope john the 20th for example so they just got going along and they had had john 19 john's and then they had a new pope john and they had had realized they hadn't already had a 20. so he just was 21st and so anyway so the numbering is a little messed up uh in terms of pope joan pope jones is a as a myth that's a protestant anti-catholic myth of the reformation period okay so pope benedict i'm sorry pope francis first we'll talk about so right now he's the leader of the catholic church which is the largest christian denomination in the world billion adherents which makes it i think the largest religion all by itself much less counting all the other christians he's uh the first pope who is actually born in the southern and western hemispheres and it's the first time that there's been a pope from outside of europe since something like 700 or something like that when they had the last syrian pope and he has uh presided over a a revival of papal popularity so he says all kinds of things that you can make into memes and put on instagram and so that's been very popular here's pope benedict so before francis there was a pope who was a little less popular pope benedict didn't i wasn't winning popularity records uh he resigned in 2013 so a few years ago and now there's two of them you know since he's still alive uh benedict the 16th he is the first pope to resign uh since gregory the 12th in 1415 so it's been 500 it had been 598 years since that had happened so it doesn't happen all the time and he's also the first pope to hold this title pope emeritus that hasn't been used before and yet he continues even though he's the pope emeritus he then continues to wear the papal uh robes and is also addressed as his holiness so he's still kind of like a pope but he's just not the active pope and he's still a living pope okay so let's go back then that 500 and 600 years before to gregory the 12th so the last pope to resign and that's going to be on the topic of tonight and if you think about it how long ago that was this is before columbus you know this is back before constantinople fell uh became istanbul uh he agreed to resign during the council of constance which we'll talk about and he then became instead of becoming pope emeritus he became a cardinal bishop and retired and went back to being a cardinal and being a bishop however he didn't live too long after retiring and so after resigning and so actually before the cardinals elected a new pope uh they were just sitting around you know not having a pope for a while which happened all the time actually in in the middle ages so there was a vacancy in the office for about two years and so so in fact there wasn't an occasion at this point where the let's say the legitimate pope um you know had retired had resigned and then they had a new pope and they're both alive at the same time the way we have now with benedict and francis although there were plenty other popes at this time you know not even though even though there wasn't i'll say what is now considered to be a legitimate one uh live at the time when he was elected yeah so a lot of times um when you're having a so we're noticing here that he's 80 at the time of his election and so a lot of times even in the middle ages when you think of people in the middle ages as not having a very long lifespan they certainly didn't have a long lifespan if you were having your life expectancy from birth because infant mortality was terrible and actually making it out of childhood was really difficult and then um especially let's say in young adulthood for women dying in childbirth was very common for men dying in war and all these kind of things so there was a lot of that kind of those kind of mortality issues that really bring down your average life expectancy and so they'll say like life expectancy is like 26 but that doesn't mean that once you've got to be 40 or so or 50 that you were gonna die any time i mean you could completely live on into your 90s just like now but this is you would die when you would get any one of the conditions that we can now treat that they couldn't treat back then but otherwise you could just go ahead and live on and so people lived quite long lives and so what they would often happen is if they um couldn't decide on who should be pope this may be kind of what happened with benedict so when you if you if you um if you have like a bunch of different rivals and things like that and you're like ah you know i don't want him and you certainly don't want your rival to be pope and you want you to be pope maybe if you're the in the cardinals uh and so you can't get your faction together and get a majority or two-thirds majority or whatever you need at that particular rules then one of the things that they'll do is they'll go to the back bench they'll find you know some quiet old cardinal who's in his 80s and they'll say well let's bring out you know tiabaldo and he could be pope you know or something like that and he'll die in two years and then we get to decide then when maybe we'll be in the ascendant so you get some time to do that uh and then just randomly though almost just as often as half the time that'll work and the guy will die in just a couple years and they only have a po for a while half the time though then that'll just bring that old backbencher to life and it'll just be like you know he's moped now and he'll live another 20 years and you're like what happened you know that was not meant to happen so it was a lot very interesting history john you say he agreed to resign was he kind of forced out for some reason as far as you know uh yeah he didn't he he wouldn't it wasn't his first choice to go but he he as opposed to um and we'll talk about like as opposed to his rival popes there's three popes at this point and he agrees to resign um the other ones undergo trials and are are you know are defrocked and excommunicated and things like that and so um so yeah i mean it wasn't his first choice but anyway there had been what it ended up happening by the time we're getting to this point and so we'll go back into the story in the future but anyway the um at this point there has been this schism for a long time and so there's multiple lines of popes and so because of that all the popes at this point have agreed before they get elected that if the other popes agree to resign they'll resign too so that they can all have you know so they can end this ism and have a new pope so he did agree to that kind of thing ahead of time but without the other popes all agreeing to resign then you know he didn't feel like he had to resign uh but anyway even though they didn't resign he still did you know so this is the kind of thing it's like you know like every it's like um this hollywood thing where all the actors refuse to get out of the trailer and go to the set until the other actors are already on the set right and so all these popes refused to resign until all the other popes resigned first so yeah here's the other popes so we mentioned here we had gregory the 12th he was resigned he is the pope that was from the roman line at this time which is to say he is his party is in control of rome itself but meanwhile uh john the 23rd uh of the peasant line um was also uh active and and also deposed at that time he actually uh we'll mention anyway when we get to it he actually called the council that ends up deposing him um once the council gets started even though he account gets the council going it comes becomes very clear that the writing is on the wall and the writing is on the wall against him and a certain point he sneaks out of the council dresses as a postman he gets smuggled out of the country and they have to chase him until they actually catch him and bring him back and then try him for all kinds of horrible crimes so anyway poor john the 23rd and then finally benedict the 13th he was too smart to go to the council and so instead uh went into exile and refused to resign although is deposed by the council so we'll just um we'll come back to this um this timeline but i'll just mention it because we have this here so these three guys that's at the end of this schism so those are these three guys here pink is the avenue online yellow the roman line green the p's in line and the peasant line you see is starting later and this is before the schism and then martin the fifth that is after um yeah so i'll just say so in this particular case um so we'll get to it the particular i was talking about particularly here um john the 23rd right so the peasant guy the peas and pope has substantially less apparatus and army and everything like that at this point because it's not one of the traditional capitals so he is not in charge of the roman papal state or anything like that so he doesn't have that um that kind of forces and he also doesn't have the traditional ones in navigation where they have another whole papal capital that had been around for a century and so he doesn't really have access to either of those so he pretty much only is a um he pretty much since his party the peasant party is actually created by these councils he himself in turn creates the next council that we'll talk about but he doesn't really have any government apparatus or very much government apparatus outside of the conciliar movement and so as a result of that he really he can't resist them you know by you know militarily or anything like that is that why he doesn't seem to count i mean he's john the 23rd but we had another john the 23rd right exactly so ultimately he doesn't count so um but it really so so ultimately what ends up happening there's all kinds of throughout we'll and we'll get into this a little bit too but throughout people history you know when we mentioned there's 266 266 popes or something there's actually a lot more than that there's maybe 300 popes at different times that different people recognized and that were the head of a substantial apparatus or church apparatus maybe a lot of people can just declare that the pope you can say your pope right now and that we can count of those 300. there's 300 that maybe have had you know like a substantial church apparatus that has been behind them and that would be true for all of these guys but ultimately um the church decides retroactively who was the real pope right and so what ends up happening is that because um the one thing that you know we talked about uh you know did he you were at uh gene was asking well did the guy want to resign or did he get kind of get forced into resigning part of the deal in resigning was he got to retroactively be legitimated as the real pope along with all of his predecessors so the so because he resigned and legitimated the council that deposed everybody uh and so in other words he gave that legitimate his legitimacy to the council the council in turn uh even though it had actually been called into being by the peasants it retroactively delegitimized the peas and popes and legitimized the roman popes and so these guys then become the real popes and these guys become the anti-popes but at the time nobody knew that was going to happen yeah fun the the popes had returned to rome uh after the babylonian captivity in avignon yes what was the cause of the schism that led to three papacies yeah so this is just a preview and we'll get into it so we'll that'll be more slides i'm probably giving too much onto this slide i just kind of want to give this as a map for where we're going so i i gave you kind of a preview of that resignation moment it's it's uh just to tie us into it because of benedict doing that just a few years ago i tied that together we'll come back here to what is the schism moment so we'll come back to that in the map yep okay so at the very end we're at this situation where as you're mentioning we have avignon rome and then also by the end there's one in pisa 2. and we'll explain why that is you know but anyway uh and um just to show kind of how this map is working through the early part of the system anyway all the kings kingdoms here in orange recognize avignon as the real pope all the ones in blue recognize rome and then the yellow ones originally recognized rome and then they later switched to avenue and switch back and stuff like that so there's those ones are variable and then by the end uh once pisa gets in the mix then they it all they all switch around too so okay so that brings us to kind of this question this general question what is a pope where did the papacy come from well what is the picture you're asking so this is the tv series called the young pope this is jude law as pope so pope jude the first jude law the first and uh does law have a reputation for sanctity jude law or law in general there are lots of one of the things that definitely there's a reputation for is throughout the entire middle ages uh popes had a reputation for being lawyers so uh lawyers kind of grew out of the the universities and yeah the university system was you know started as essentially canon law uh church law and so it was all of the church clergy and the reform popes were intended to be lawyers so in the middle ages um popes weren't totally like francis has kind of made himself you know i think francis is very very interested in caring about the poor and all the other kind of things that has really elevated the kind of spiritual cachet of the papacy again in the middle of the middle ages they're really all lawyers and they're really not caring about poverty and all those kind of things they're worried about um legal claims and stuff okay so where does this come from how can there be mold how do you get to have multiple posts and then once you have multiple posts which is a problem presumably and it was actually for everybody how do you get rid of them so those are kind of the questions we're going to look at okay so the papacy is actually i think a pretty unique institution there are there are other there are other lines of bishoprics for example that are on that model but they're a little bit different uh because of uh some of the characteristics of the papacy has so on the one hand this is a sovereign monarchy that's two thousand nearly two thousand years old um and by that i mean to say is is actually the head of the state which is not going to be true for the heads of i think any other religious um order at least christian orders um uh there might be if somebody is a head of state in some other way and there's also the head of of a particular religion like the queen of england right so that would be the case where the head of state is also the head of the denomination um and that's a pretty old monarchy too but uh it's about a thousand years old uh in terms of at least since the norman conquest and um but in that kind of monarchy the one we're familiar with here in canada uh it's a hereditary monarchy right and so we think of there being a royal family there's a dynasty and after queen elizabeth uh passes away most likely you know if charles is still alive we'll have then king charles iii and so on down to william and uh the young princess right and so this is not the way it works um in the in the papacy so papacy uh has a little country it's a very little country it's less than half a square kilometer uh it's very beautiful country which has its own flag and and and has international recognition that recognition actually goes back a very long way longer than most countries since it goes back to the 8th century because the vatican is essentially the remains of the papal state it wasn't entirely clear what was going to happen after the unification of italy and so there was a period of uncertainty which was people at the time called the roman question but anyway it got resolved um in the past i i dating this here to to the middle of the eighth century um in the middle ages uh the the papacy dated their recognition back to the fourth century uh this is a picture here of constantine uh giving uh the papal states and actually control over more or less the western empire uh to pope sylvester this ends up being this was based on a document uh that was subsequently proved to be a forgery so it was a eighth century forgery uh that ended up being a very very important at the center of kind of uh capable claims and law and things like that but it also therefore ended up being one of the um the first documents to fall when the scientific or academic discipline of of uh literary criticism emerged and it was able to be shown very clearly that it's a uh so many anachronisms in the document the language and everything like that that it had to be dated to the eighth century so okay so that state then that papal state so we had this map of it here if you i don't know if you can see this very well this is the middle of italy and it's essentially going from rome across the middle up to ravenna ravenna had been the old byzantine capital of italy and so essentially what that is no coincidence that the papal state is that kind of central area because so this is italy in the uh in the 7th century essentially when the hello hey so good to see you uh when the lombards which is essentially the last germanic tribe uh you know to come in and overrun uh italy when the lombards came in and retook uh or took italy from the byzantines who had retaken it from the ostergass when that happened their conquest was incomplete so lombardy now we think of we know the place lombardy it's essentially the northern part the area around milan right and so that's where the kingdom of the lombards was in lombardy and tuscany and then there's kind of independent duchies of the lombards in the south and in the meantime in the middle the byzantine still controlled the kind of the kind of spoke between where rome is and ravenna which was where their outpost was and then these other little tips and that's why for example venice emerges so venice is originally kind of like a byzantine outpost but then as the byzantine government ceases to have the power to actually oversee any of these what become has essentially become overseas colonies for them uh all these things kind of develop their own little autonomy and that becomes true for the popes who essentially more and more and more at this time in the middle ages have to fend for themselves and fight off lombards you know so there's these very organized lombard kingdoms uh the emperor back in constantinople gives them more or less no help at all and is in fact often bugging them about religious stuff that they don't like and so in other words they may well be arguing there and so really all of these places from naples to venice to rome to the papacy start to kind of go their own way so essentially this is uh the year 600. the purple here is the byzantine reten areas of the eastern roman empire essentially justinian had reconquered the western empire from the barbarians these kind of outposts are all that's left of those reconquests as the lombards have taken all this green territory okay so the popes aren't getting anything out of constantinople so they look north to a new ally and they cut a real strong deal with the king of the franks so specifically to the guy who is in charge of the frankish kingdom uh not the king himself pepin and pepin writes to the pope and he says hey shouldn't it be that the person who has all the power should also wear the crown the pope writes you betcha and so so he deposes the last mayor of indian king the mayor of engines were known from the uh called the long-haired kings and that their long long hair was what set them apart as for as royal so pepin cut all the guy's hair off put him in a monastery and that was the end of the mayor of engines and so then he became king and his uh son charlemagne you know ends up eventually knocking out uh the lombard kingdom and lombardy is incorporated into the frankish kingdom and then the hopes um in gratitude uh for this alliance crown charlemagne emperor right in the year 800. so now suddenly uh the papacy has has found itself a very powerful and important protector a lot more potentially helpful than the byzantine emperor off in the east ever would be on the other hand also potentially more dangerous you know so it also but you've also created a rival right is the active pope at the time in constantinople nor in rome bro and did you return to rome after justinian you said pope was there the whole time okay the pope never left uh so so the question was yeah essentially as the roman empire fell it fell around the popes and so the popes continued to be bishops of rome and to manage what's left uh but eventually in the first in the first phase of that the roman clergy are all operating essentially as officials of the um of the ostrogothic kingdom and then when the ostrogothic kingdom falls back to the byzantines the byzantines take over they collaborate again and they're on the side of the byzantines and then then they kind of hold out independent as much as they can or the ones that get conquered by the lombards become kind of lombard officials until they're able to cut this deal with the franks and then the franks come take it over and in doing this the kind of deal that ends up getting made is um the popes legitimize the franks make them emperors of the west and the franks confirm oh yeah that donation of constantine thing i confirm it so the donation of pepin he gives the land to the popes and that becomes then recognized in reality and that's an actual real recognition and so that's why we're dating the papal state then to the 8th century just a question about the origin of the word pope yes yeah we're going to have it well i mean i'll have a whole slide on it so we'll get there there's so many different pieces to this i didn't know where to start right and so we are kind of jumping around but there's you're anticipating questions very well um so so i'm just mentioning here that now the inter creating a western emperor is it seems like a good idea at the time it's it ends up being um potentially a problem so now for the next couple hundred years uh the popes and emperors end up fighting each other a lot and so there's this very famous uh uh showdown between pope gregory vii this um important reformer pope for whom gregorian reform movement is even takes his name who has used all the power and prestige of the papacy uh in his fight against the emperor henry iv the roman emperor but he's a german the uh emperor to excommunicate him and also to declare him deposed and to make it so that as an excommunicate none of his vassals people for whom they have sworn all their loyalty the only reason why you have troops and knights and and dukes following you around and everything like that is because they they have a sworn oath to you they can no longer none of those count anymore because there's next communicate and so essentially um henry's empire crumbles all around him uh uh because in this kind of spiritual battle he has with the pope but then henry is such a sneaky guy he goes to where the pope is hanging out in canosa in italy and in the middle of the winter in the snow he uh puts himself in sackcloth and ashes he's hanging out in the in the snow with barefoot and everything like that and waits for three days as a penitent for the pope to kind of let him in the pope doesn't want to let him in because if he lets him in he's going to have to um and excommunicate him but he repents and so as uh you know playing that kind of spiritual trump card uh the pope uh reinstates him right and so then that makes all of the pope's entire international alliances fall apart right and so they're all really angry with him they are in it for political reasons they want to be emperor they want to they want to have their own power and everything like that and so later when he fights with henry again and excommunicates him again um no one listens to it right so anyway so it's a complicated thing in the in the battle then between the two powers here okay so here's a little bit of a of a road map and we'll come back to the slide a couple times um because we have this it's kind of hard we have an institution that's not quite depending on how you look at 2000 years old there's a lot that changes in the whole course of that time so this is from the year one to you know past 2000 where we are now and so if we start back here and go backwards maybe i don't know benedict resigning we mention here the end of the papal states so there's no papal state now other than vatican city so when you italy unifies it becomes a unified uh country for the first time in modern times uh there it takes a little while to figure out the popes don't want to give up all their land but there's nothing they can do about it eventually they're able to sign a treaty where they're recognized as owning that little part of rome just around the vatican and that's their country the protestant reformation five from 400 years before that uh the schism of the west that's what we're talking about here in the middle around the year 1400 13 so and that was that resignation of the pope that came before benedict we'll talk about what immediately proceeded this ism the avignonis papacy so the pope's being in avignon what you were just calling the babylonian captivity so we'll talk about that before that we talked about just a second ago gregory vii that great reform pope that showed down with emperor henry uh the fourth and that happened right after the eastern system so we kind of think about the breaking away of the western churches from the eastern churches to the eastern orthodox that's where that happens charlemagne we had here at the 18 year 800 all that lombard fighting time before that at the beginning of that was pope gregory the great and then anyway going backwards and backwards here before the year the fourth century the council of nicaea this is when uh essentially we'll look at it but when constantine converts and christianity becomes the roman empire's state religion and then looking backwards before that to peter he died around 64 maybe according to tradition and of course jesus who died probably around 30. so the question is between peter and constantine so constantine's other vote but anyway between you know that time period whose constantine's pope is um sylvester the first it's possibly the pope when constantine is pope i'd have to think about it but anyway um there is a list of popes so we have traditional list of popes and we have a um and we have dates but the papacy we'll talk about the papacy may well not have existed in anything like the present form in that a whole time period so there may well have been a line of bishops of rome in that time period but there's a lot of indications for example even that in some of the earliest years that rome is actually the roman congregations are more more likely governed by a college of of priests or something like that where they're all in kind of a more in a communion together as opposed to a monarchy but anyway so we we can't know but traditionally there is a whole line of hopes and we have the whole list of names of all the popes so so we'll just talk about a little bit how did that all get started so we've gone back here to the beginning now this timeline and so for peter this is an old icon of jesus and peter and his brother a galilean fisherman whose actual name is simon simon barjona simon son of john who jesus nicknames peter according to the gospel account one of jesus's leading disciples and an early christian leader so according to all the gospel accounts he's one of the leading or the leader of the disciples and then also in luke and in other traditions like that we have from paul is one of the very important most important leaders of early christianity so our traditional understanding of this guy is that he's a primarily christian leader the leader of the 12 apostles and his authority is claimed by this proto-orthodox community so i'm trying to mention that when we were talking about when two weeks we're going to be talking about lost christianities so when we say proto-orthodox we don't necessarily mean here the begin like the precursors of the greek orthodox or something like that but rather the precursors of pretty well everybody who has survived now to this time so the not the gnostics not the ebia knights not the judaizing christians and all this kind of thing essentially the people that are going to form what christianity has kind of become now the people who won we call those that group the proto-orthodox and the proto-orthodox claimed a lot of them claimed anyway peter as the source of authority and so as a result they also were interested in creating legends or sacred stories or about peter and so we also therefore um can't always know uh we don't have a lot of any kind of we have nothing firsthand we don't know necessarily what um what really goes back to and it's hard for us to say what the historical peter is like we can kind of talk about what the traditional accounts are like that the early proto-orthodox people have so in according to that account he led a church in antioch which is the roman capital of syria it's a little part of turkey at this point turkey sticks down into syria and that's where antioch is but it was one of the major metropolises of the roman empire capital of syria and he was then he later relocated in his final years to rome where he's martyred by the emperor nero that's the traditional account um in the gospel account um we have a story where christ bestows the keys of the kingdom to peter the gospel of matthew and uh we'll read a little bit of this account and jesus answered and said unto him blessed are thou simon bar jonah simon son of john for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee but my father which is in heaven so he peter has just barely said jesus is asked who am i who do you say i am and he said you're the christ you're the messiah and so and so jesus is congratulating him and saying that he's got a true revelation here i say unto thee that thou art peter and so in aramaic that is um cephas and or and in p this is greek or english version of the greek and essentially this means rock right so it's a word in cephas means rock and aramaic peter petra means rock and greek so it's like thou art rocky you know and upon this rock i will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it so hear the rock i'll build it on the gates of hell won't prevail and i'll build my church on the rock of me and i will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven so you can imagine then that this uh particular little verse which is unattested in the rest of the gospels but is only in matthew um has been become important to papal symbolism as the popes consider themselves to be the successors and heirs of peter yeah let's see if we got we've got my coat of arms here yeah there it is so for example we'll always see that on the coat of the papal coat of arms right so the keys and if you go to rome and the vatican that's everywhere so you don't have any problem finding the finding keys like that so this is also where this idea that we have this trope of saint peter at the gate right so whenever you know you go to heaven and saint peter is like you know the dead has come there and he's like looking in the book and checking to see if you're going to get into heaven so and and then also um we have as part of this tradition um so the papacy considers peter to be the first bishop of rome so uh the traditional account is the peter and his last year's made it to rome and while he's in rome he's martyred and and again traditionally it's by being crucified upside down and the site is essentially where the vatican is now and he's understood traditionally to being buried there and a lot of people believe fervently that they found his remains and that it's there and all that kind of thing that's the kind of thing that's a claim that i think can't be um you know we can't do anything about it historically uh it's a face claim essentially because you can just say well it means this but these remains maybe are dated to the first century or something like that or not um but we can't since there's no there's no way to uh verify any of those things historically okay and we mentioned then that the keys therefore have become a symbol of papal authority um i mentioned that we don't can't really confirm or disprove this tradition connecting peter to rome it's important to the proto-orthodox people the roman church gains prominence as being the church of the capital of the empire they certainly have a tradition early on that peter went there uh and so and we can't we don't have anything else we can't say anything else otherwise so what other is it's it's a it's not a falsifiable claim the tradition is very early you know and so within if that if that's made let's say that could still be made a hundred years later a box right and then the graffiti scratching is because they already have their understanding at that point that that's where peter is you know i mean we make all kinds of things there's stuff in rum that's been made last year that talks about peter being there you know and so this is a so it's hard it doesn't necessarily that's why i just say it's not confirmable but there's nothing i'm not saying that i'm saying it doesn't didn't happen because we don't have anything that would disprove it but i but i just say we shouldn't necessarily um be very confident that the traditional narratives are actual history well it went so the tradition was that that he goes right at the very end of his life so right maybe around the year 64 and then he may depending on when in the neuronian um persecutions he's killed with if the people say well then he either it was either 64 or 68 so in the last six years or so and he would have gone because there is just a growing important christian community there um and and so then he moved from antioch to that place we do know that there's an early christian community there and we do have very good uh evidence of that um especially one of the very you know among the early earliest christian writings um the apostle paul writes a letter to the romans his last really long and important letter and he's writing it to them not as a church that he planted before like he has normal letters but one that has already very well established that he actually wants to get in good with because he would like them to fund his new mission that he wants to take to spain and so he knows very well that it's a very important church prominent church already but peter's not there at that point yet for paul but it would be later yeah so i mean there are some things about individuals it's potential there's potential for archaeology to confirm things about individuals especially when you're somebody is important let's say as a king or an emperor or something like that for relatively minor figures which this point in christianity everybody in christianity is a very very minor figure in the first century in terms of nobody had any impact as far as the roman empire was concerned nobody was writing down in the news boy peter came here they made no notice of that because they because the romans didn't care about it was so few people and they had lots of bigger stuff going on it's only important in retrospect so now given that we know all the things that have happened in the last 2000 years every one of these guys what they're doing is very important um but it wasn't important then and as far as anybody knew right okay so anyway the point of it is whether peter is the first pope whether he was in rome or not if he was in rome and if he was bishop of rome the role that he would have had there in that early community is very different from the role of what pope the papacy became because we can we do have wonderful records let's say after the fourth century or so of what the paper where the papacy is at and we see it evolve all the way to the present right and so it's very different now than it was sixteen hundred years ago so when this first time period that we're talking about uh the very beginnings of christianity before so this this is the roman empire this thoughts here is the earliest places christianity is getting planted the rest of the roman empire it says is christianized because then constantine and the emperors become christians themselves and it becomes essentially the state religion after a few emperors but in the meantime what will have happened is there be little areas that will have christian communities and it doesn't mean that these guys are all christian or anything like that just means there's some christians there so we know that they're being like and so we'll say we'll know that there's a community in corinth we know there's one in ephesus we know there's one in carthage we know there's one in rome so essentially there are little christian communities and they individually tried over time to they all had bishops and the bishops knew who maybe had made them bishops and they tried to keep a memory of that line of bishops because that apostolic succession going all the way back to the founder of their community was important but on the other hand if you if let's say you got into the year 180 and you knew it was important that you had to get back to an apostle and you maybe didn't remember past two or three of them or four and uh you assumed though you kind of knew that it must have been mark or somebody who would certainly started the church anyway you might have had a tradition that it was mark then it may well be that you're tempted at a certain point to fill in the blanks right and if that happens early there's really nothing for that we can do about it in order to say yes or no to that list because that list will be the only thing we have so so what we're starting with here if we're thinking of like there being an org chart with a pope and then the other bishops that is not you know what existed in that earliest christianity so don't think it that way rather what we understand as we're looking at it that we have instead each one of these different kind of communities like nicaea or antioch or alexandria corinth ephesus rome and essentially all of those communities up until constantine are essentially acting autocephalously which just means with their own head you know so so they are all up kind of operating more or less sort of independently and as you can imagine um that's kind of a recipe for chaos and also developing all kinds of local traditions that conflict with each other and so that certainly was happening and because there is essentially nothing uh no mechanism and no structure to compel conformity uh among these early christianities and so that's one of the reasons we'll talk about that when we are talking about in the first century in the first century and a half and when we do the lost christianities one there are some pretty wildly um divergent views among christians and all of the proto-orthodox people can do is write big books and say everything that these guys believe over there they're heretics they're all they're all heretics and so they go and list them all off and that's the reason why we know a lot about most of them is because the proto-orthodox people are busy writing about you know what those horrible you know ebionites believe right and so anyway they would they condemn them but there's nothing you can do about it um so now we're going to get to what i think what pope means so it took a long time sorry so uh pope versus popes so what is this word this pope it's title so we think of it as being the pope the word pope derives from the greek word papas which just means father and so initially it applies to again all bishops so fi they will essentially father is an honorific title that you give to the bishop of your community and that continues and especially in the east it's only in the 11th century in the west that it's definitively reserved in the west for the pope in rome so in other words you might still all the way up to the 7th century or something like that be calling your local bishop uh you know of burgundy or wherever it would be of reims uh you know might be calling him pope of reams um meanwhile off in the east they didn't get that memo because they were already you know not listening and so the for example the coptic bishop or patriarch of alexandria who's the head of the um uh i'm sorry the coptic orthodox the egyptian church uh is still used addressed by the title pope and so this is pope uh shannon iii who's of alexandria in egypt so what was going on fairly early on though is that the bishops of rome did a pretty good job of of saying even though they're not above everybody on the org chart and all the bishops are equal there's still got to be one bishop that comes first in the whole list if you're going to start listing everybody off or if you're going to ask everybody to speak the first somebody's got to talk first and so the first among equals uh is the bishop of rome according to especially the romans since they were making that the roman bishops as they were doing that and there's actually um even though we don't have uh i mentioned that there's not a lot of good um we don't have a lot of good evidence for all kinds of things in the first century and second century in christianity it is kind of surprising that we have some good stuff going all the way back of the roman church and leaders of the roman church you know kind of assuming an era of authority and deciding that it was their job to correct people who were deviant and so we have a letter it's very early from clement around the year 100 who is one of the traditional bishops of rome or popes who is writing to the church of corinth and explaining to them how they are totally wrong about everything that they've done and how they need to completely reverse course and uh undo so it is a um name here anyway that the the person is making it's not like you can order them i guess but it's still kind of like assuming that um and corinth too by the way is a very old christian church probably older than than the roman church because we know all the way back the very first let you know uh the apostle paul is planting this church in corinth and the early letters in the new testament are to the corinthians right and so um anyway that still hasn't stopped the roman uh little church from saying that they can correct the corinthian church likewise we have more examples of that second third century so victor the first in the second century um threatens to excommunicate a whole slew of eastern bishops so in the eastern mediterranean because they are all practicing easter they're all having easter on a different day than what they're doing in rome and actually it seems like you would how to how who cares right i don't know when the easter is but it actually ends up being really important to the entire christian calendar uh we have this word immovable feast right where the feast moves around it's not always you know christmas is always on december 25th it's easy everybody's going to have it on december 25th and the only reason why that we don't all celebrate eat christmas and why there's an orthodox christmas is because they don't agree when december 25th is we have a different calendar right so the the gregorian calendar the western calendar um is different and so that's why christmas is on different day at least everyone agrees that it's on the 25th however with easter easter is a complicated set of calculations that you have to have in order to decide exactly when easter is and if you have a different table you have a different decision and so essentially the pope's here are saying again we're doing it the right way and we are we're in a position that we can correct all of you so there is some of these early precedents that are happening um however the real game changer as with everything always in christian history oh yes sorry yeah i think so the good question here is how is rome assuming this kind of level of um primacy right um and so the on the one hand it's i think it's because it's the capital of the empire and the most important city you know it's the roman empire after all and then two very early on the the roman church has has laid claim to the fact that uh or at least they have they're saying that the apostle peter and the apostle paul are both buried there and so that everybody may have some kind of uh apostolic tradition that goes all the way back uh the apostle um it's an apostle the uh mark the evangelist so very you know important figures know certainly uh he's apparently buried in alexandria and so the um the coptic pope considers himself to be the successor of saint mark right but you know we've got peter you know so peter's better than mark right so that that kind of that kind of thing yes how does the corinthians respond to clement i don't think we i'm not sure that we have their letter in response so i don't know if they remember back um i think that what the the issue was that they had uh expelled all of their elders and he was telling them to send them back so they could have blown them off they might have blown them off yeah the point the question that's a good good point so because all we can say about this is that like i said that org chart doesn't exist but it wasn't for the um bishops of rome from lack of trying so in other words whether or not they um they were definitely doing stuff that to kind of get the precedent out there whether or not anybody's listening them to or not right yep okay and so as we always see in kind of uh western history this huge game changer happens when the emperor constantine converts right so this is this battle at the building bridge where he has had this vision ahead of time where he thinks he'll see the christian sign in the sky and in that sign he'll uh will bring him victory he is victorious over his rival emperor and so therefore embraces the christian faith and so we're just going looking back again at this timeline so we've gone through that early time period and now we're getting out of this murky time to when christianity becomes very very important because suddenly now the emperor is christian and so therefore christianity makes a much bigger footprint archaeologically and everything else and now uh everything changes right so one of the things that constantine finds when he gets a hold of this church or churches or big convoluted mess that he kind of finds is that it's very disorganized with all of these bishops who are all believing all kinds of different things and they can't agree and several the bishops are quite angry at several of the other ones and are writing uh books that are saying that the other ones are heretics and that kind of thing and so one of the things then is the constantine having inherited uh this church without structure and divided about doctrines is he decides he's going to introduce those things and bring conformity to it and so the thing that he does is this is a picture of the council of nicaea he calls what's called knowing alcohol as an ecumenical which is a greek word meaning the whole inhabited world so the universal council of the church and so it brings all of the bishops together and uh and uh and anyway they have a general counsel this council then ended up defining what the orthodox beliefs now are going to be so it creates this nicene creed and so it essentially spells out what we now have as nicene trinitarianism that's the way the christiological conflict is supposed to be settled now for all times as far as constantine is concerned and then it took all the other beliefs that aren't fitting among them and defined those as heresy and so arius who is an oriental orthodox bishop essentially has a different view on christology and his views are condemned and so arianism is condemned at this council another thing that happens is uh constantine imposes a little bit of structure and so now instead of every little bishop being equal with each other it now has made it so that the um the bishop that is in the metropolitan capital of a roman diocese which is a word diocese is not we now think of it as a catholic word but it's a roman civil you know province that the metropolitan is now in charge of the littler bishops in the province right and so now um now there is going to be a little bit of an org chart right so now rome definitely is going to be over like milan and ravenna and things like that and constantinople is going to be over in isea and ephesus and antioch is going to be over you know odessa and laodicea and that kind of thing so in other words within their provinces we're having a little bit more of an orchard you still have the problem of these guys aren't connected to anybody necessarily in terms of an episcopal structure or bishop structure um so now this becomes this council business though is itself becomes an institution and it becomes a new um uh tool in the in the toolkit right so we before we hadn't had councils now we end up having uh seven general councils of the church uh with that are attended to by both the eastern and western uh bishops and they're convened by emperors so it also becomes a way that the emperors are also kind of exerting their power and authority over the church so they're the ones that get to call these councils and the councils as we have in this picture you know they preside over them right so the emperor has a important new role within the church here so so we had this org chart here so now though the way that's kind of set up by the eastern emperors we also now have above the bishop these metropolitan bishops is this council and the council is in fact called and led by the emperor so there's the emerging work chart that's kind of looking like this and so if you're rooting for the papal supremacy this is also a problem right so and presumably the popes are seeing this as a problem they still are getting to be first among equals among all the bishops that are in this council but then also there is a a sort of dependent relationship on the emperor you're asking were they married were they married is the question the bishops um so uh often not but the the requirement uh for celibacy is it actually gets introduced much later and so it's actually uh in the west in the western church when we talk i mentioned before this time period where i remember gregory the seventh who was uh excommunicating the emperor henry iv who was in sackcloth in the snow um that that moment that one of the reasons why the pope at that moment in the victorian reform had all that power these are the same reformed popes or the same popes that called the first crusade they were able to do a lot more stuff than popes before or since and one of the reasons why is was because they had amassed a whole bunch of spiritual power because they were working on um reforming bad practices that people didn't like and so that included imposing celibacy so in the west before that um it was easy priests and things like that would have mistresses and they would be it's not like they'd stop that but anyway they would marry um and um and what would often happen is if you were the abbot of some abbey you know your wife would be living there in the abbey with you you'd have kids and then you would leave the abbey to your kids the kid would become the next abbot and everything like that and so really at a certain point this abbey isn't looking very abby like at all it looks a lot like a little estate or something like that that it would be like any secular estate and so um one of the things that the gregorian popes do is they hold little local councils and they convene all the bishops together and they and they publicly condemn them and say you're married you know confess or something like that and then they do and they say then you're deposed you know and that kind of thing and then you have to repent and then they maybe give you your bishopric back or maybe they don't and the same thing the other one that was even more important was uh you paid money to the duke of burgundy in order to be made bishop that's simony that's a sin you know confess and so they confess and they would either depose them or maybe they'd forgive them and let them still be bishop but essentially there is that that's one of the aggressive things that's going on in that medieval gregorian reform movement and that's when that's when the celibacy really gets gets going so in the east they don't have that so although the bishops i think don't marry but the priests can so okay so anyway we have a org chart here so one of the things that's happening here also i'm using color here kind of deliberately the emperor is living off in constantinople the councils are all being held around in and around constantinople and nicea we saw is just across the bay right uh and so then all of this stuff is kind of happening over constantinople rome had been you know the center of the empire over time it ceases to be the center of the empire at a certain point it's not even in the empire anymore right and so one of the things that ends up happening is there ends up being this other bishop uh you know who is starting to gain all this kind of prominence and in fact these bishops of constantinople increasingly especially challenge the idea that the roman bishop should be the first among eagles why wouldn't the bro why wouldn't the person be the first among equals who is it the real capital constantinople and so in fact um in the middle ages they start assuming this title where they call themselves ecumenical patriarch and and that's a really telling title it's like what does that mean you know if you know in other words you're sure there's all these patriarchs there's a patriarch of antioch patriarch of alexandria the patriarch of aguileia in other words these are the uh high a level let's say patriarch is generally thought of as a level above metropolitan bishop or archbishop and that's above bishop so bishop archbishop and patriarch but what is ecumenical that means universal so that in some ways is essentially taking making a claim the popes really got mad at them and you know and uh well excommunicated them for using the title you know and so ultimately we saw that there's a split between east and west um they're getting along better now but uh okay so that's essentially where we're at we saw the results of that you know and so we can just go back through those slides which is oops which was remember so then the the lombards come in the popes are kind of left alone they make the alliance with the franks and and now they've done this thing where they're no longer looking to the eastern emperor who is busily you know in cahoots with the patriarch the ecumenical patriarch over there because in fact the eastern emperor can actually get to a point generally who the patriarch is and so it's a lot easier to control that whole thing and what the pope is doing off in the middle of nowhere is often not what the emperor wants you know and that kind of thing so uh so now there's a new emperor in the west and the popes have a different deal going on that's certainly not what the emperor in the east likes either um uh one of the things that we had had though uh is that there's something new that happens so the pope here is putting the crown on charlemagne's head right and so when we're the situation that we had out in the east ecumenical patriarchs have this subordinate position to the emperors in constantinople but now by taking the initiative to revive the western empire leo iii here has an important precedent he's the one that's making charlemagne the emperor right and he's the one that makes his successors be emperor so the empire is an elective monarchy it's not like um the queen of england you know again who is going to pass to her oldest uh child now instead the way the election worked is that the prince electors in germany chose a guy from among the noble families of germany to be what's called king of the romans and they crown him in germany in the city of aachen in the you know the cathedral of charlemagne uh as king of the romans and that means king of germany really king of germany and burgundy and uh lombardy but the um then in order for him to actually usually you know in shorthand we just call this guy's emperor because it's too confusing to call him the king of the romans all the time but in fact for a whole their whole initial period of time it's like being prince of wales or whatever you have the title uh you know uh king of the romans until you make your transit across the alps go down to rome and get crowned by the pope and that's only when you become emperor and being whether you actually have the imperial coronation or not is actually a really big deal at the time so we maybe think it's a you know whatever if you actually are crowners when the actual ceremony happens that's a very serious religious significance to people in uh ancient and medieval times where they are thinking very differently of somebody who has been anointed and crowned than just some other person you know before before that's happened so that's what ends up happening the emperor you can see this is an important role to have then to snuck yourself in there so however the turnabout is also fair play right so now that you've created an emperor that is closer at hand we mentioned that that's kind of could be helpful if you want them to fight lombards for you on the other hand they may have ideas about who they think should be pope and so then that may not be what you had in mind when you're doing it so one of the things that happened now is that the emperors in the west you know do start to have a very serious interest in who the pope is and they start to both influence the election of which who's going to be pope and then they also take it upon themselves if there's a pope that they consider to be unworthy for any particular uh reason to march their army down to rome uh convene a local council that they dominate uh ch tr take the pope up on charges find him to be guilty of all sorts of horrible things and depose him and then they then they elect a new pope and then they replace the pope so that also is starting to happen so that brings us to then how do we get popes so how is a pope made how would emperors affect that process so nowadays we kind of you may be familiar with how the most recent popes uh ended up getting elected right so essentially it's an elective monarchy and all these guys in red the cardinals uh all get together and they um get you know walk up into the sistine chapel they've got a very famous room to do this in they uh get locked in there and they kick everybody else out and they sit around and they all um and they all vote about who is going to be and then meanwhile everybody else waits outside for them to burn their ballots into the uh into the chimney and then the smokes they send smoke signals to us about whether they've picked somebody or not right so just like that [Laughter] all right so um so that's not how it always had happened so if that has been going on for a whole long time uh but it's actually if you think of a 2000 year old monarchy it's only been going on for the last thousand years so this is one of those reforms that we've been talking about with the gregorian reform so one of the things that the gregorian reformers are wanting to do is they wanting to reform what had previously been a kind of an ad hoc system that had been prone to all sorts of controversies problems and miselections and also adverse influence by all kinds of political players they want to get rid of that and to regularize it and so originally the original system going all the way back to antiquity when we first have all of these disparate like the bishop of corinth the bishop that we've been talking about all those guys the way it's going to work is it's essentially a very informal general acclamation where all of the christians in the in the city and also all of the uh clergy more or less just say that they've decided they you know decide who and a claim who is the new bishop and you can imagine that that is not a very tidy process uh and you know just that would be how um anyway would cause all kinds of different problems so one of the things that can happen is when you're having that situation is if you have somebody who has a armed mob or um troops on the gate or if you've bribed a whole bunch of people or if you maybe that may that may have influence on all of those elections or let's say you have two factions and the two factions all each claim that they claim their own guy and then they'll fight over the tiara and run to the basilica and try to get the crown on their pope before uh before your candidate gets there and that's that kind of thing actually happened too you know so so anyway now um the goal anyway as of like i say middle of the 11th century was that the cardinals who are just the local clergy of the roman church originally so originally that refers to the cardinal deacons the cardinal priests and the cardinal bishops of the area around the city of rome and so there's those sets of cardinals and those were and they then the local clergy uh become the electors now over time as as that becomes a very important job all those become really important jobs then they also start making important bishops and archbishops from all around the church also be a cardinal so you'll think of from the time of henry the eighth cardinal woolsey for example or cardinal richelieu you know so like essentially when later on and there's fame there's probably important cardinals here in north america you know where they don't have to all be cardinals from rome now um essentially the uh that becomes an honorific because of the job that they have as the papal electors originally though it's just the local clergy okay so um essentially in after that whole lombard thing after charlemagne after that the papacy gets to a very kind of low point where uh local roman italian noble families are pretty much just fighting over it and it doesn't have much scope where it's looking very far beyond the papal lands so essentially the papacy has gotten a hold of that papal state and then the local nobles are fighting over it about to see who could kind of be have their guy be pope so that he can reward that their particular noble family and so they would sell the office and they would it would go to um you have a pope and then his uh his mistress's son you know gets becomes the next pope even though he's only 18. you know all kinds of things like that and this is when the the legend of pope joan is although that um it's actually it's not there's no pope jones but there is a uh important roman noble woman who is the mistress of several popes who's making popes and also the mother of some popes and so anyway there's a it's a it's a kind of a low point in terms of the secular local secular control and the scope of the papacy is also very diminished they're not worrying about anything that's happening doctrinally in the whole church or anything like that they're really only worrying about the secular affairs of the immediate environment of rome so this is a moment then where the emperors come in and clean up shop so the emperors come down repeatedly and depose these kind of um bad popes and put in their own guys and so specifically um one of the ones that really changed the course of history is that uh the cousin of the emperor uh guy took the name leo the ninth uh he's a german guy who um you know they imposed not popular locally but a very noble fellow who has some very high minded agenda and uh and so he's a few popes before then gregory uh the seventh so he really gets this gregorian reform movement going and this becomes very very ironically for the emperors as we know just that you know just a couple generations away it's those reform popes that are actually deposing the emperors now because the papacy has so gotten its act together uh that it has the power to do that whereas before it had no such no such pretense at all okay so then um anyway as this is going on uh here's frederick barbarossa later emperors uh continue to want to depose popes uh for their own political ends and so for example frederick barbarossa is fairly famous german emperor he fought a very strong pope alexander iii who and he deposed him but nobody he didn't stop being pope nobody believed him was deposed and meanwhile uh frederick found three guys who kept dying anyway get a new one uh to be which he said was pope but not enough people believed him so the empire recognized these other guys as pope uh but no one else did so france and england and and everybody else did not and so those go down in history as being called anti-popes so when you have a pope that essentially some people recognized as pope but isn't uh among the line that his story or that the church retroactively understands was the true line the whole time uh then those guys get called antipope so we've gotten all the way through then we're getting to the moment of of our topic so anyway that builds all the build up to it so now we're getting to europe in the 14th century we still have the empire the empire is much weaker you can still see the papal state here's avignon which is papal land on the edge even though emine is now well within france at before at this point it's still on the border with france france and england now are emerging as uh proto-nation states so this is a new thing before there had been this imperial power and things like that now these uh local or these um national proto-national monarchies are developing into a new thing they're actually locked in a 100-year war more than 100-year war with each other right now but that's a new thing that's kind of emerging as pope and empire are destroying each other and so to mediate one of the reasons to mediate the war and other there's other reasons too the popes actually often spent whole bunches of their career all through the group the reform popes you might be surprised they're not that popular often so as they're going around and saying that they're deposing people for simony as they're doing all these things as they're trying to depose the emperor often they have to flee the emperor so often the emperor would bring all his troops to rome and then the pope will have to go away you know and flee from rome and usually what will have happened then is the the emperor will come down he'll occupy rome and the pope will have to flee and he'll go to france that would often happen and in fact um for example when one of the reformed popes is running around france that's when he has that calls the council of claremont and actually announces the first crusade he's running around doing that because he's in exile in france so he's not able to go back to he's not able to go back to rome at that time so actually they spent a whole bunch of time doing that and so at a certain point here they're they're hanging out in avignon which is just one of those places that they they do hang out when they can't go to rome uh and then the pope dies and they elect a french guy a french pope and he's like yeah i don't really want to go back to rome right now let's just stay here it's a good it's a good thing and so and so pretty much almost by accident uh the popes kind of stopped going back to rome is at this point in history so the early beginning of the 14th century and so once they you know once they start um you know having more than just a temporary camp they start to make the place like home you know and so avignon ends up being um uh they built this giant palace uh it's a pretty cool place and so this gets called the babylonian captivity uh in reference to the the original babylonian captivity when the israelites are taken and capped captive to babylon after the fall of jerusalem and so here's a you can't probably see it very well but this is an old manuscript from the time where it's a map of the city of rome and rome herself is portrayed here as a widow who has been left by the popes who are no longer paying for her upkeep and rome essentially is crumbling and falling into ruins uh the popes aren't able to control it they keep sending they send rectors and people down there to try to get taxes out of the out of the papal states and essentially they can't control the papal states by not being there uh and essentially uh in this time period then there's seven successive popes in avignon and they are all french and over time the french popes since copes picked cardinals uh the french popes picked french cardinals since the french cardinals pick french popes and so that becomes quite a cycle until most of the cardinals and all the popes are french okay this is in the backdrop though of scandal ever increasing scandal so cut off from these papal states which is one of the major sources of revenue now the papacy which actually has way more everything costs more money in the 14th century everything gets more and more and more expensive and so now um they have to come up with different ways to get money and so they they sell pretty much everything that you have at your disposal and so one of those things is justice you know so as people are going through all of the ecclesiastical courts uh one of those things are offices and benefits so that was the thing that the papacy was originally the reform papacy was originally fighting was selling the office now you get to uh even buy the expectation of when your bishop dies you're you can yeah exactly and you'll get to be the bishop in expectation of that and then in the ultimate futures you also then get to buy uh you know before there had been a thing that had been going on so we've already been now several hundred years into having crusades well crusades as you know one of the wonderful things about it is that if you go on the crusade you get this incredible indulgence where all of your you know sins and things like that get washed away essentially and you are able to take all this time out of uh in your afterlife that you would normally be spent being tortured in purgatory that gets lessened by you know a huge amount but actually going to jerusalem i mean not everybody could do that right so i mean you know and so it really don't not everybody should so if you let's say are um you know just a very nice older widow why should you go to jerusalem to fight a crusade but should you not have the opportunity for this so it why not what if you gave money and had a night to go and they would pay for the night to go that would have the same wonderful salutary effect and so maybe that should then give you you should get the benefit though in the purgatory so anyway once you once you see it gets equated with money then that become money's fungible right and so now you can just simply buy indulgences at a certain point and so you're buying all this time to have your sins taken away from you and things like that and so this becomes a um an excess that pretty much everybody is against but they can't get stopped doing it they need the money you know and so one of the things that ends up happening then is uh oh and then finally then also papacy has been that had been this international institution and it used his prestige for example to go and broker peace treaties and things like that england and france are in this incredible in this incredible uh uh 100 years of war and everything and it isn't possible for the papacy to broker anything because it's so clear that the papacy is a pawn of the french king you know so now they have become all frenchmen and all the cardinals are french and they're in france they're getting all their taxes from the french church and so now um and so now they they are no longer they're all partisan and everything like that so that's also lost that so one of the things that ends up happening is at this kind of moment when the hierarchy and the whole structure of the church has ceased to have any um resonance spiritually for people in an age that is increasingly mercantile and has an increase in the commercial is increasingly monetized um now um what they we end up having is lay piety where people who are are mystics people who renounce property they renounce food body pleasure all those kind of things even though they're not clergy people like for example catherine of siena who ends up being because of all of the austerity that she has this strong incredibly strong voice where she literally shames the pope back to rome so she continuously harangues that he has to go back and has to go back until finally gregory the eleventh old old man old pope he just says okay i'm going you know and so he another cardinals were like no no and the king of france is like no no and so anyway so he finally makes it back as an old man rome is essentially entirely in ruins there's no place where the cardinals can all even live and everything like that everything has to be rebuilt they don't have control over anything all around them the cardinals are continuously begging to go back let's go back home to having everything like that and so before that happens gregory dies so so that's how we get to this point so now gregory's dead all the cardinals are in rome that's the last place they want to be all of the rom they all go into that conclave as we that we know about now and all the people outside the conclave you can imagine are like okay guys we're not going to have another one of these french popes i know you're all french in there but you better pick you know essentially they want they so they're all screaming outside we want a roman we want a roman so they want somebody who's actually born in rome the cardinals had already decided that they were going to pick um an italian guy in order to have like a kind of a compromise candidate and so they pick somebody who is a older a 60 year old bureaucrat it's the archbishop of bari who'd been working in the papal chancellor very loyal guy cardinals figure they can get this guy to do their bidding it'll be very pliable and so they announce him it's all very canonical they've enthroned him all the orders are done he takes the name of urban vi and like so many hat times happens when you pop that three tier crown on your head the guy immediately you know it changes completely transforms his his character and everything like that he suddenly now reveals that he has this amazing temper and it also turns out he um doesn't think highly of these very noble arrogant cardinals and all of their effete wealth and everything like that he doesn't think highly of all of the different pluralism they have where they're where they were like their bishop of every five ten different places so they can get all the revenues uh he doesn't like all of the graft and bribe that's going through and he essentially screams uh fulminations that he's going to stop putting stop to all of that and so now and and by the way we're not going back to having you up so and so anyway now the cardinals are like whoa you know so we want to do over so so essentially all the cardinals um certainly all the french cardinals but i actually some of the italian cardinals concede too essentially this same entire group of people have to decide that this guy actually is completely unsuitable uh they kind of retroactively claim that that they were uh that they were pressured so that the the election didn't count because the romans were pressuring them and they go back into conclave and they elect a new pope uh robert of geneva who takes the name clement vii and so this is something that had never happened in the entire history of the uh of the papacy because we have all these examples before with the anti-popes where essentially you have a pope that's kind of like the roman pope and the emperor comes in and makes his own pope and so then there's one that's being led by the emperor or you might have two different factions you have the francophony and the kalona or somebody like that you have the two different roman factions and they each get their own pope but here the same group of cardinals elect two popes you know one after the other so and actually just by con by just by the way of things they also the guy they picked is actually the head of the of the papal troops and because they're scared you know french one he's a french guy he's from you know he's from french speaking geneva two he's been the the general of the troops and and also um just is this is no compromise with the italians anymore because this is a guy who as head of the mercenary troops of the papacy had recently massacred an entire uh city of people italian city and so anyway this is not a popular pick from in italy in france they're happy not in italy so essentially they all hightailed it back to avignon and so urban responds by picking a whole new set of cardinals so the popes can make cardinals and so now you have two popes and two colleges of cardinals one in rome and one in avenue and so that's the system situation we have here and so you might wish that there would be a high road about it but there was not so the essentially what ends up happening is uh the king of france immediately sides with the french cardinals and and uh pope that wouldn't have you know there wouldn't have been any schism if if it hadn't been for that and so then all of the people that are in the french orbit um spain uh you know also are siding that way england of course is at war with uh france so they of course know that the french pope is not the the true pope but scotland on the other hand which is always the allied the old alliance right so they are always allied with the french against the english they of course know that the french pope is the real pope uh the regular italians who got massacred they um i think the roman the italian pope is the real one the empire originally sides also with the roman pope although later they they waver and so therefore all of the other kind of imperial territories uh kind of go with rome initially you'd think that the southern italy would be uh with rome but um urban is does prove to be kind of a a crazy person and one of the first things that he does is starts fulminating against uh the queen queen joanna of of naples and he wants to try to depose her and replace her with his a very unsuitable nephew or all these kind of things and so anyway so he she very sensibly sides with the other pope so anyway so so anyway it starts to be so the thing about it is though it's a very unusual system because it's on it's uh it has nothing to do with uh doctrine so they they're entirely on the same page as each other and again it wasn't because of factions or even other kinds of things it's it's now it's the same cardinals that created both okay so this goes on and we've gone on a long time already here so but uh so we'll we won't take it for too long um but essentially what they end up having is it continues on for a while uh and they and and what do you do how do you get out of it so as the um as time goes on uh successively the popes make deals with each other that if the other one resigns they'll resign too and then they and then the cardinals will all meet together and pick a new pope and things like that but in the in the event uh even though they occasionally will come so close like they're just about to meet the both pulp bulk and they won't actually meet each other and nobody actually ever really wants to resign it's a rare thing benedict did in just a couple years ago it's the first time in 600 years popes don't usually resign and none of these guys wanted to either so a certain point though that both sets of popes actually piss off their own cardinals and the majority of both of their own cardinals start meeting together and they in turn have listened to what essentially everybody around europe is saying which is hey remember in our tool kit what we got when we have these kind of problems we have ecumenical councils we need to call an ecumenical council and so the cardinals actually then summon uh everybody during medical council in pisa so essentially cardinals from both sides four patriarchs 22 cardinals 80 bishops and representative 100 more meet with all the doctors of theology so all of the universities too so now the universities are also at the center of kind of christian intellectual life so the doctors in paris even though they might be supposed to side with the french pope they actually say we should the way to resolve this situation is to have a council and so they all meet together in pisa and have a council the council now starts to build on these kind of emerging ideas that are going to be influential of let's say monarchy isn't necessarily the the way uh the only way that representation can happen so from roman law that had developed this idea that the emperor is the monarch and there is essentially the divine right of kings and everything like that and that is something that the popes have kind of inherited as the people who are wielding the sword so they are the vicar of christ on earth they once you have put the crown on the head there's nothing you can do and you can't depose them there's no i mean the emperors say that you can but that was an argument that they had both of the emperors also didn't think that popes could depose them anyway so they were arguing at that level but now there's this new argument that is this emergence of let's say constitutional monarchy and the same exact way that we've started to have parliaments in england and also representative councils like that in some of the other kingdoms now the council itself declares that it uh that the the councils are in that org chart again above popes so because the councils represent all the churches and the pope is essentially first among equals the council is above popes and so having declared itself so the council then is able to declare that both um the pope benedict the 13th and navion and gregory the 12th in rome are deposed and so it deposes both of those popes and then the peas and cardinals all those cardinals that come together they all meet together and they make a new pope so now peter of candia is made pope alexander v and he promptly dies and so that's a problem when you're picking old popes so um anyway so then you end up having the problem that we started out with where where i had this map originally that essentially you have a pope in avignon a pope and pisa and a pope in rome and then actually also this these maps get completely scrambled because um while this is happening the the candidate on both the in both rome and avignon is busily pissing everybody off and so at a certain point even the french king renounces the allegiance to uh the avignon pope and the pope has to who's actually at this point spanish eventually has to flee he flees he flees actually to the kingdom of mallorca whose capital is on the border of spain and france so okay so we have all these different guys there's a succession the eving young guys had longer life so they only had to have two there's a succession of the roman ones and each time you know they'll make these deals they'll the cardinals be like okay if benedict if you resign we will refrain from making a new pope and then all of our cardinals can get together and we'll end this ism and benedict is like nope you know you just pick me and then you know that then anyway that doesn't happen and so now what ends up happening is that even though alexander died his cardinals again beat together and they make a new pope and so all three going in are doing this but at a certain point everybody's so fed up uh with all of these popes that they want to try this this same problem again you think okay they're gonna have four popes now you know but the problem with it was that canon law had said essentially the original ones were all the original ecumenical councils had been all summoned by emperors as you remember what had happened in the western church in the middle ages is that these reform popes had found had had called all of these ecumenical councils and so canon law in the west was the pope had to call the council into existence and what the uh what the argument that ever all the popes made when they wouldn't be deposed and they refused to resign and all this kind of thing and and they made a pretty successful argument was that the council of pisa violated canon law was uncanonical because cardinals had called it not a pope so therefore it couldn't be a legitimate council and um uh and and by the way it's not recognized now so there's all the councils you know we have the original seven councils and the and the catholic churches recognized another 18 or so that most recently vatican ii if you remember in the 60s was the most recent ecumenical council um anyway pisa doesn't count it's not on the list because it wasn't actually ever um uh called by a pope and so now though they're able to can now they got their pope to do it so now the conciliar guys have a pope even though their council made this pope and so this pope calls the next council the council of constance and so they're actually able to get a council called by a pope and so uh john the 23rd not the real john the 23rd but anyway the peas in john the 23rd counts calls it and it's overseen by the guy who's going to be the emperor so sigismund of hungary the king of the romans so he is a um the first time in a long time that the he's we mentioned here that he's not holy roman emperor yet just because he hasn't been crowned right but he's the guy who's gonna be the emperor he's later crowned by the pope that they make in this council but anyway sigismund he's a very wealthy landover he's king of hungary in bohemia and he's the prince of luxembourg and everything and so he presides over this council and they call again a giant council together it's attended by all the clergy again and interestingly uh in kind of a in this kind of a new representative sense they group everybody together not by um just as a bishops but they all vote together as nations and uh one of the reasons for that is that there's actually just a crazy number of italian bishops relative to how many german bishops there are if your bishop in germany is so much more important than being a bishop in italy every little every little town has a bishop in in italy uh whereas you're a massive prince of the church if you uh if you're a bishop in germany anyway so they're divided into essentially four the four kingdoms of western europe uh italy four nations of western europe italy germany uh france and england where you think well there's more than that right but essentially it's with those um zones so spain is locked in with um france the spanish kingdoms it's not unified yet the rest of the british islander places are in with england and all of the eastern poland and everything is all with the empire with germany right so anyway that's how it that's how it works and so they um accept gregory the 12th resignation so that's the pope that is in rome so we mentioned him at the beginning and one of the things we as we said that greg that gregory gets out of that is he gets legitimized retroactively so he he was the real pope because he he legitimizes the council of constance and vice versa and so even though he wasn't the pope that called it because he ends up recognizing the council and um and because anyway he recognizes its authority so vice versa the council recognizes him and his line preceding him uh meanwhile then john the 23rd who had called the council in the first place gets deposed as does benedict the avignon's pope yes but they didn't just come up and murder him so it really wouldn't it wouldn't actually help so in other words if you if so they kept on dying see and so if you if you do murder if you had murdered any one of the popes you have to murder all of his cardinals all at once too because all the car because once you have any any number of cardinals they would be able to make a new pope in that line you know because they would say this is the legitimate pope so just because you murder him and you know even a bunch of cardinals the rest of the cardinals would still make a new pope so it's a it's not a you think it's an easy solution to the problem that it ended up not being so and so one of the things that we saw was that when the schism happened it sort of would fall along these new national lines right so there was a french pope and then there was kind of an italian pope and imperial pope and um and the end um in the end benedict the 13th who's actually he's the avenging pope but he's actually he's actually spanish he's from aragon even eventually he just flees to aragon and at a certain point aragon only only aragon recognizes him so the system doesn't formally end because aragon has its own pope you know until he dies and actually a couple more after him but in any event nobody cares what aragon thinks you know but it could have happened that way so that's one of the things that could have happened is that we could have seen you know um national churches emerge at this point um but it didn't happen possibly because of the personality so um none of the papal candidates that anybody had you know so like you have your own avenue on ease pope and yet he kind of sucks and so if he'd been a great pope and the one in italy was really rotten then it might have might have encouraged all the french people to say well this is a national church now you know or something like that as it was uh like i say at a certain point the king of france actually renounces the avignonist pope and says we're neutral now and so and so at a certain point so it wasn't didn't end up being in the cards this time um so one of the things though that also didn't emerge but but seemed like it could have emerged is the transformation of the church and this western european component of the church really is a component of the state here might have been able to uh become more of a constitutional monarchy so once again what ended up happening is there's a universal council the council part of its first job is to declare that it is actually the supreme the supreme control of the church and the pope is actually inferior to it and that's why it can depose popes and create popes and so and one of the things that it does is one of the things that parliament for example in england successfully did in order to uh in order to get its own power so one of the problems for parliament and also for councils is that how do you have a parliament the king has to call parliament and so what would end up happening is if the king was fighting with parliament the king would not call parliament you know and so the king would go as long as the king could possibly go until he was totally bankrupt and then he finally would have to call parliament and then they cut his head off you know which is what ended up happening but anyway you know so and so in this exact same way so the so the one of the council so martin the fifth the pope that these guys made had to agree to call periodic yiki medical council so every five years they were going to have another ecumenical council they did it twice but both of them ended up being very poorly organized they didn't put a lot of support behind it martin turns out wasn't as enthusiastic about him anyway and they would they started going a little bit um and they were they became a little radical without and they were underrepresented and so then at a certain point they got shut down and that was kind of the end of it and if the popes as soon as they could didn't want to have ecumenical councils and eat more as you could imagine and so it didn't end up it didn't end up going that way but that's also why one of the things i think is interesting as it might have been out of this whole thing so so that would have been a case of uh constitutional so that's a so that's a direction that could have happened and so you know we were also anticipating here martin luther so one of the things that ended up happening as a result of that is that some of these different reforms conciliarism for example uh and another thing that happened at constance was uh they burned john huss there and so a proto-protestant essentially and so there were so a lot of and a lot of these reforms that people are calling for about indulgences and reforming and getting rid of that those are the things that end up getting addressed uh in the protestant reformation after a hundred and some years of you know bloody wars that that rack europe the wars of religion right so it might have been possible um to have if they had been able to develop you know or some more representative conciliar movement if the consumer movement had been able to get uh get past this thing parliament now doesn't have to wait for the king to call parliament right i don't think the queen has to call parliament for it parliament's allowed to meet without that right i think that ended up happening i presume so otherwise the queen would have otherwise would have a big big power still she'd have but anyway the um but if if the council had been able to decree or been able to change canon law you know that it it's you know that they it just simply met every five years instead of having to be called every five years by a pope it would have had more of a capacity to do this kind of thing but as it is once the thing becomes infrequent if a thing no longer you know has the capacity that it would have had if it was a regular thing yeah the initiative for an ab absolute papal monarchy uh begins with uh pepin the mayor of the palace of the mayor of indian dynasty is is that am i taking that correct correctly from you what you've stated previously well i'm i'm not saying that uh so pepin doesn't necessarily want to uh create the papacy like that what pepin is able to do is he gives the popes he recognizes the pope's ownership of the patrimony of saint peter the duchy of rome and so essentially he doesn't care he just conquered it from the lombards right so the the lombard pepin is the king of the franks so he's in charge of france and germany he um they march he and charlemagne they you know he and you know the franks essentially go across the alps they destroy the lombard kingdom which had been centered on pavia so northern italy and in doing that then they recognize the popes as the temporal lords of the duchy of rome and ultimately the popes are able to extend that across the entire papal state to ravenna anyway but essentially that becomes a temporal thing and so from that power base um yes it kind of builds in that direction uh to you know papal papal supremacy but it's also in part like you say that alliance ended up being very powerful but it's only in terms of the theoretical stuff it's only when we get to that gregorian reform um movement you know when all of this awareness of canon law starts when the church founds the university system so when universities are created uh when they're created one of the very first things that they study is law so one of the earliest universities is bologna uh which is in the papal territory and bologna is uh devoted to law and so it just is churning out canon lawyers which is to say church lawyers and they become all the bureaucrats in all of the all the kingdoms of the west as you know as essentially you might be a we have the word cleric um you know a clerk uh but it's it's one of the reasons why we have this association between clerks and uh anyway and the church and the clergy in the same way that when you when you graduate still from college or university you put on all these clerical robes including like uh renaissance era cleric hats and it's because this is where it's this is where that system emerged from the university system and so those lawyers come up with papal supremacy so they at the time in the middle ages those the question was uh have uh did those lawyers become the cardinals and so at the time in the middle ages they did yeah so they were very much the popes would stalk their own local bishopric the cardinals and the coronal priests and the cardinal deacons would be made up a lot of times of of cannon lawyers because one of the major jobs of the papacy throughout the middle ages and into the modern times was presiding over the church courts so the church had its own system of courts that were completely separate from let's say the king's court or let's say your local lord's court and one of the things that would happen is if you you weren't didn't feel like you're getting justice or you weren't as likely to get justice in one of the other courts you could always appeal to the church court and you the final appeal ultimately to rome and then if you get to rome and you were rich and you bribed a lot of cardinals or if you knew canon law really well you know under those kind of things you may well be able to get a court uh you know a writ a papal writ in your favor or for example you might be a king and you might have a wife who doesn't have you know isn't burying you children you might have again you go to the papal court and you buy an annulment right so that that marriage never happened it was never consummated and now you're free to marry again so that you can produce an heir to the throne so those were the kinds of things that the papal courts were doing all right well thank you all so very much thanks everybody who joined us online [Music] you

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Length: 104min 23sec (6263 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021