The struggle against the church

When, in AD 1170, men sent by King Henry II of England murdered the primate of England - Archbishop Thomas Becket - in his own cathedral, the upshot was a sharp reverse for the royal cause.

Ninety years after this surrender a somewhat similar incident took place in France, only to end very differently. The papacy's protracted, though ultimately victorious, struggle against the Empire had increased its dependence on the House of Capet; at the turn of the fourteenth century King Philip IV the Fair was the mightiest lord in Christendom. He and Boniface VIII quarreled, as rulers often do, over money. At issue were, first, the right of the French clergy to transfer funds out of the kingdom, and secondly the king's own right to tax them.

Though Boniface died shortly after this incident, the dispute was by no means at an end. His immediate successor, Benedict XI, reigned only for a few months; but when Clement V assumed the tiara, Philip, now unquestionably in control, forced him to annul Unam Sanctam insofar as it applied to France. In the summer of 1307 Clement, expecting to preside over an ecclesiastical council that was to be held in Tours, traveled to France. There he had to stand by as the king mounted a spectacular series of show trials in which the Knights Templar were accused of everything from heresy to homosexuality. What military force the church possessed within the realm of France was destroyed; its commanders were executed, its fortresses and revenues taken away and joined to the royal domain. Not wishing to turn his back while these proceedings were under way, Clement remained in France. In 1309 he selected Avignon, which though a papal fief was surrounded by French territory, as his residence, thus turning himself into the king's prisoner. During the next seventy years all popes were Frenchmen and, without exception, appointees of the French crown.

In 1356, these quarrels led to the loss of the pope's right to participate in the Imperial election process. The papacy's return to Rome, which took place in 1378, was soon followed by the Great Schism. It was occasioned by the Roman population's insistence that the successor of Gregory XI (died 1378) should be not another Frenchman but an Italian like themselves;⁸ lasting for thirty years, the Schism repeatedly led to the spectacle of two and even three popes all quarreling furiously with each other as to which of them was Christ's true vicar and which, on the contrary, the Antichrist. The condition of the papacy in these years can scarcely be imagined. One pope - Urban VI - so feared conspiracy that he

⁶ For the details see J. Favier, Philippe le Bel (Paris: Fayard, 1978), pp. 373-6.

⁷ See M. Keen, The Pelican History of Medieval Europe (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 198-9; and C. W. Previte-Orton, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), vol. II, p. 961.

⁸ For a modern account of these events, see W. Ullmann, The Origins of the Great Schism (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1948). tortured and executed his own cardinals when, driven out of Rome, he roamed the south Italian countryside. Another - John XXIII - was accused of murder, rape, sodomy, and incest (the more serious accusa­tions were suppressed) before, disguised as a crossbowman, he was forced to flee from the Council of Constance; afterwards his very name was erased from the official list of pontiffs. As popes excommunicated and deposed one another they called on the lay rulers to intervene on their behalf, waging war and laying siege to each other's seats of power in Rome and Avignon.

Long after the schism had been brought to an end by the election of Martin V (1417), its residue continued to affect the relationship between ecclesiastical and secular government. The spectacle of popes being elected and then deposed had reopened the ancient question as to whose authority, that of the pope or that of the Council of the church, was supreme;⁹ worse, contemporaries had become used to the possibility that an individual might both wear the tiara and be a heretic. In 1438 the Conciliarists showed what they could do by deposing Eugenius IV and electing Felix V in his stead. Ten years passed before the renewed split could be healed; no wonder subsequent popes held ecclesiastical councils in holy terror. For the next century - in fact, until the onset of the Counter-Reformation - the division of the church played into the hands of secular rulers. Whenever a conflict with the church appeared likely, e.g., over taxation, French and Spanish rulers in particular could turn to the pope for assistance; conversely, in dealing with the Roman curia they would threaten to summon an assembly of the prelates of the realm or else, in England, of Parliament. Calling on the clergymen's patriotism and contrasting it with the claims of‘‘foreign'' (or, in France, ‘‘ultramon­tane'') Rome often presented a good way for obtaining their support, especially over benefices. And the later the date, the more true this became.

Throughout the first half of the fifteenth century the papacy continued to suffer additional blows. As the Albiginsian, Waldensian, Cathar, and Lollard movements in particular show, heresy - even large-scale, or­ganized heresy supported by entire social groups - had by no means been rare during the Middle Ages.¹⁰ However, the Hussite Revolt of 1419-36 was something else; it was the first to unite the greater part of a long- established Christian nation against the established religion.

⁹ SeeM. Wilks, The Problem ofSovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 479-523.

¹⁰ See H. A. Obermann, Forerunners of the Reformation (New York: Holt, 1961). and ended up by being burnt at the stake. His supporters suffered savage repression at the hands of the Emperor and the German territorial rulers. Still, his principles were not forgotten. Protected by part of the Czech nobility, a Hussite (Utraquist) Church continued to operate in Bohe­mia.^[77] Its practices, particularly in regard to the language in which services were held (Czech rather than Latin) and the wine of the Euchar­ist (which was taken by both priest and laymen) differed significantly from those of Rome; yet they had to be tolerated by the latter for close to two centuries to come. Much ecclesiastical property had also been confis­cated by the same nobility and was not restored. Finally, the ease with which the movement was able to spread from its source through Saxony and Mecklenburg all the way to the Baltic coast acted as a forewarning of the Reformation to come.

Meanwhile the foundations of the church's secular authority were being attacked by the new humanist scholarship emerging in Italy. Its key concept was the admiration of everything classical, which itself implied that an orderly - even flourishing and intellectually superior - civilization was possible without the benefit of the Christian faith. One of the first indications of what humanism and its supporters, once they put their minds to the matter, could do to reduce the position of the church came in 1440. The exact origin and meaning of the so-called Donation of Constantine - one of the key documents used by the papacy to justify its claim to monarchical power over Rome, Italy, and the West - had been disputed at least since the tenth century;^[78] now Lorenzo Valla, exercising his knowledge of classical Latin, ended the debate by exposing the Dona­tion as an eighth-century forgery and not a very skillful one at that.

By this time the most important monarchies had long since become established facts. Kings either pushed resolutions through their parlia­ments - as with the English Statutes of Praemunire (1351) and the French Pragmatic Sanction (1439) - or else they negotiated with the pope of the day and signed a concordat. Whatever the procedure used, in­variably it led to the church's financial independence being lost and its property made subject to royal taxation. To mention only a few land­marks, already Edward II (1307-27) managed to squeeze more money out of the church than he did from his lay vassals.^[79] In 1366 John of Gaunt, acting in the name of Richard II, formally renounced England's status as a papal fief; when the same king, having attained his majority, appealed to Rome in his dispute with the nobility, that very act was used as additional grounds for deposing him. In France the appointment of foreigners to vacant ecclesiastical positions was prohibited in 1439, though the prohibition became definitive only in 1516. Louis XI (1461­83) had the 600 most important ecclesiastical benefices listed and dec­lared subject to his own control, thus further reinforcing his grip over personnel and enabling him to exercise patronage; by bestowing them upon lay supporters, he turned them into one more instrument of royal government and a notoriously corrupt one at that.^[80] Finally, in Spain King Ferdinand - who with his wife styled himself ‘‘the Catholic'' - appointed himself master of the various military orders as the offices became vacant between 1477 and 1498. In 1531 Pope Adrian VI accep­ted the move as a fait accompli and confirmed it. It brought the crown lands as well as revenue; however, it was only ten years after this that Charles V followed the example of his French colleague and definitely prohibited foreigners from taking up ecclesiastical benefices in the coun­try.

The clergy's other rights, such as appealing to the pope against the royal justice system, were likewise being reduced. In France after the end of the Hundred Years War, Louis XI prohibited the Inquisition from persecuting heretics except at his own express command. He insisted that every sentence passed by an ecclesiastical court was subject to review by the parlement of Paris; to prevent priests from conspiring against him he prohibited them from traveling abroad without obtaining permission first. Francis I (1515-47) made them take the same oath to himself as was sworn by the rest of his subjects, thus moving one step closer toward ending their special status. Meanwhile, in England during the early years of Henry VIII, a comprehensive census was held - the first in 200 years - to determine just what properties were and were not owned by the church (and also which churches possessed the right to offer asylum). Some matters, such as the making and execution of wills, were removed from the church's jurisdiction. One - defamation - was struck off the books except insofar as it was directed against the king. Here as elsewhere the ecclesiastical authorities were now entirely dependent on the cooperation of the king's officers for carrying out the sentences that they imposed over whatever cases remained within their jurisdiction. This even applied to conservative Portugal and Spain; and indeed it has been said that no institution was so completely under royal control as the Spanish In­quisition. One way or another, the good old days when every senior prelate and every first-class abbot possessed their own jails were coming to an end.¹⁵

An even more important turning point in the triumph of the monarchs over the church came in the form of the Reformation. From the beginning one reason why Luther in particular gained so much more support than previous reformers was precisely because of his insistence that the move­ment he led had no revolutionary overtones; he believed that religion should not be allowed to invade the realm of the secular power.¹⁶ This position led him to write vicious tracts in opposition to the Peasants' Revolt of 1525; in 1530 it was formalized when his collaborator, Melan- chthon, drew up the Confession of Augsburg and quoted Christ's words to the effect that His Kingdom was not of his world. Other leading reformers, notably Zwingli, Calvin, Bucer, and Beza, dedicated some or all of their works to the secular rulers of the day in the hope of gaining assistance in spreading their views.¹⁷

Once the princes' fears concerning its political effects had been as­suaged, Protestantism spread rapidly. Its victory was perhaps most com­plete in Scotland, the Scandinavian countries, and, though it took longer and ended in a different way, England; but it also took over large parts of Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, France, and the Low Countries. Whether in its Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, Anglican, or Presbyterian (Scottish) form, wherever it reached, its adherents renoun­ced their obedience to the pope. They also dissolved the monasteries as the church's spiritual centers and, embarking on the large-scale confis­cation of ecclesiastical property, reduced its economic power in general.

The process whereby the church's property was seized assumed various forms. In Germany entire principalities were secularized; the most spec-

¹⁵ For developments in France during this period, see F. Laurent, L’eglise et I'etat (Paris:

Libraire internationale, 1866); for English ones, seeR. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), as well as L. C. Gabel, Benefits of Clergy inEnglandin the Later Middle Ages (Northampton, MA: Smith College Studies in History, No. 14, 1928).

¹⁶ See above all his Secular Authority: To What Extent Should It Be Obeyed? (1523), in M. Luther, Werke: kritische Gesamtsausgabe (Weimar: Weimarer Ausgabe, 1883-), vol. XI, pp. 245-80.

¹⁷ Fora list, see E. Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 462, n. 32. tacular instance took place in 1525. Employing Luther as his consultant, Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach used his position as master of the Teu­tonic Order to appropriate it lock, stock, and barrel. He thus created a new political entity which, at its greatest extent, measured 120 by 200 miles and which is known to history as the Duchy of Prussia.¹⁸ Elsewhere it was mainly a question of stripping churches of their plate, as during the ‘‘smashing of the idols” movement that swept over the Netherlands in 1566; in Sweden King Gustavus Vasa decreed that every church in the land should sacrifice a bell in favor of the exchequer. Most important of all, the Reformation enabled rulers to lay their hands on the ecclesiastical estates which, in some countries, amounted to 25-30 percent of all land. The tenants who worked the land often cooperated, being glad to rid themselves of monks and priests who were notorious for their strict enforcement of rent and other prerogatives. Once they had been confis­cated, estates were sold for ready cash or, though perhaps less frequently, leased out to subcontractors. Either way, the result was to increase royal revenues - in some cases several times over, as in England where Henry VIII became the first monarch who was richer than all his magnates combined - and also to create institutional support for the reforms which, once they had reached into men's pockets, became much more difficult to undo.

Moreover, and though tens of thousands of monks and nuns were simply turned out and left without a living, the rest of the clergy had to be provided for. Traditionally priests had been members of a separate uni­versal organization that looked after them by assigning them benefices. Now, either they were turned into royal servants whose duty happened to be looking after peoples' souls, as in Lutheran countries; or else, though retaining some autonomy in respect to internal organization and the election of priests, they were excluded from interfering in matters of government, as was the case in Calvinist countries. In the latter, rulers, though they did not formally appoint themselves heads of the church, made it their responsibility to keep an eye on its activities, including education (both of laymen and of priests), rituals, and preaching. In the former, they often went further and, consulting with their court theolo­gians, themselves published new articles of faith. In England Henry VIII, being neither a Lutheran nor a Calvinist but simply a bigamist with absolutist tendencies, both eliminated the independence of the church and issued a whole series of binding beliefs for his subjects to study and profess. Any doubt concerning his intentions were removed in 1539 when

¹⁸ For the details, seeM. Biskop, ‘‘The Secularization of the State of the Teutonic Order in Prussia in 1525: Its Genesis and Significance,” Polish-Western Affairs, 22, 1-2, 1981,pp. 2-23. the clergy were obliged to exchange their old translation of the Bible for a new one that bore the royal seal. The title page showed an assembly of figures, all of whom were busily saying vivat rex.¹⁹

Continuing to acknowledge the pope's authority, Catholic rulers did not go quite as far in these respects. Still, though the clergy's immunities and juridical powers remained much more extensive than under Protes­tant rule, many of them tightened control over religion; in the Empire, their right to do so was sanctioned by the Peace of Augsburg (1555).²⁰ Turning necessity into virtue, they used the need to fight on behalf of the ‘‘true'' religion as a convenient excuse for taking over ecclesiastical prin­cipalities, confiscating church property, and imposing taxes, as Charles V did in 1520 when he turned the tercio reale and the Cruzada from volun­tary contributions into permanent levies. Francis I on his part ordered all ecclesiastical benefices worth over 100,000 livres to be sold and the proceeds put into the royal coffers. His successors developed extortion into a fine art. Church property was regularly confiscated and, equally regularly, sold back to its original owners; as Michel de L'Hopital, chan­cellor from 1560 to 1568, put it, ‘‘everything they [the clergy] possess belongs to the king,'' who could sell it whenever he wished ‘‘without even informing them.''²¹ Toward the end of the century that paragon of piety, Philip II of Spain, was reducing the Castilian church to penury by siphoning away as much as half of its revenue. His income from it equaled that which, as the master of the largest and richest overseas empire in history until then, he derived from the New World.²²

With the duke of Bavaria in the lead, one after another Catholic rulers set up councils - invariably with a majority of laymen among their members - to supervise the affairs of the church, including the dis­tribution of officers and of benefices. Nor was the faith itself left alone. Charles V, though personally firm in the old belief, led the way; between 1520 and 1543 his theologians engaged on an unceasing quest for a doctrine that, giving equal satisfaction to Catholics and Protestants alike, could be declared binding on all of them. In France with its independent traditions - already in the fourteenth century the Sorbonne had presumed

¹⁹ On the use of the Bible for reinforcing royal authority during this reign and the next, see G. Brennan, ‘‘Patriotism, Language and Power: English Translations of the Bible, 1520-1580,” History Workshop, 27, 1989, pp. 18-36.

²⁰ See H. Tuechle, ‘‘The Peace of Augsburg: A New Order or Lull in the Fighting?,” in H. J. Cohn, ed., Government in Reformation Europe 1520-1560 (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 145-69; and J. Leclercq, ‘‘Les origines et le sens de la formule: cuius regio, eius religio,” Recherches de Science Religieuse, 37, 1950, pp. 119-31.

²¹ Quoted in I. Clouas, ‘‘Gregoire XIII et l’alienation des biens du clerge de France en 1574-1575,” Melanges d'Archeologie et d'Histoire: Ecole Franyaise de Rome, 71 (1959), pp. 381-404; quote, p. 397.

²² J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), pp. 192-3. to rule in matters of doctrine - the attempt of the Council of Trent to redefine the Catholic religion was itself greeted with alarm. French litera­ture on the respective rights of king and church grew and grew. In 1594 Pierre Pithou in Libertes de l'eglise gallicane proclaimed that, within the frontiers of the realm, the pope's temporal power was nil and his spiritual authority limited to whatever had received the king's consent; when Blanche of Savoy, the bride of Henry IV (1598-1610), asked him to adopt the Tridentine articles as her wedding present she was told never to concern herself with matters of state. Returning to Philip II, though he did not lay down the principles of the faith, he did assert his power to the point that no papal bull could be published in many of his dominions without being approved by him first.

As secular rulers tightened their grip on the church, change also over­took the personnel of government. Encouraged by the spread of secular humanism, beginning in the fifteenth century laymen were increasingly able to get as good an education as ecclesiastics did. In time, this fact put an end to the situation in which rulers were dependent on ‘‘clerks'' to staff their administration. For example, Thomas Wolsey - who was dismissed in 1525 - was the last cardinal to fill the post of lord chancellor in England. His successor Thomas More wore a hairshirt under his clothes; nevertheless he was primarily a lawyer whose way to the top led though Parliament, the Inns of Court, and a succession of business deals that made him rich. Subsequent English monarchs were usually at some pains to avoid appointing churchmen to state offices - something denied even to William Laud who, as archbishop of Canterbury, played a major role in the persecution of Puritans and other dissidents under Charles I. Here, as in other Protestant countries, the lay nobility was giving up its indepen­dent lifestyle and turning to royal service as a means of advancing them­selves. As of the second half of the sixteenth century they flocked to the universities in unprecedented numbers in order to study, among other things, the newly established ‘‘political'' science whose founders were Bodin and Justus Lipsius.²³

Though slower off the mark, Catholic rulers followed. In Spain Car­dinal Granvelle, who served his master for over twenty years before dying in harness in 1586, proved to be the last of his kind. Philip III's chief minister was the duke of Lerma. Philip IV appointed the count of Olivares and, after him, Don Luis Mendez de Haro. Only France, which in the days of Catherine de Medici (1559-89) and Henry IV (1589-1610) had been moving in the same direction, proved an exception to the general

²³ L. H. Stone, ‘‘The Educational Revolution in England, 1560-1640,” Past andPresent, 28, 1964, pp. 41-80; P. M. Hahn, Struktur und Funktion des brandenburgischen Adels im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Colloquium-Verlag, 1979), pp. 206ff. rule. For thirty-seven years - 1624 to 1661 - it was run by two red-hatted cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, who acted in the names of Louis XIII and the young Louis XIV respectively. It should be noted, though, that nobody could be more zealous in defending the ‘‘state” against the church in Rome (and also in accumulating offices for himself) than Richelieu himself- to the point that he has often been regarded as its true founder. Here, too, in any case, the experiment was not repeated. One of the first things Louis XIV did upon reaching his majority was to bring government by ecclesiastics to an end. Acting as his own first minister, he looked for his advisers among laymen such as Colbert and Louvois.

Meanwhile the very idea that orderly government depended on the sanction of religion was coming under attack. Once again, it was human­ism that opened the doors. Commenting on his much admired Roman Republic, Machiavelli suggested that one of the secrets of political stabil­ity consisted of the upper classes using religion in order to keep the masses in their place.²⁴ The truth or untruth of these beliefs did not matter; for him, it was not the mandate of heaven but virtù, best defined as a mixture of patriotism and courage, that both created government and justified it. Nor was Machiavelli’s the only voice to raise itself: three years after he had written The Prince, Thomas More published Utopia (1516). There he described an imaginary polity which exercised relig­ious toleration without falling into disorder or, indeed, suffering adverse consequences of any kind. The only exception were atheists who would deny men an eternal soul; but even they remained unmolested so long as they did not publicly express their views. But for the fact that he was famous for his love of satire, we might well accept More as the first true modern. As it is, one is hard-pressed to say whether the proposal was seriously meant. He himself was an intensely religious person who dur­ing his term as lord chancellor persecuted heretics as zealously as he could. He ended by sacrificing himself in defending Catholicism against Henry VIII.

In any case the idea was destined to take hold in countries such as France and the Netherlands. As the former slid into civil war from 1561 on, religious tolerance was seen by Huguenot spokesmen as a way of protecting themselves against the Catholic majority; additional support came from the school of thought known as politiques (originally the opposite of fanaticques) who hoped to use it for overcoming religious divisions.²⁵ Both Charles IX (1560-74) and Henry III (1574-89) toyed with it from time to time, as did their mother who was the real power

²⁴ N. Machiavelli, Discourses (New York: Random House, 1950), ch. 13.

²⁵ M. G. Smith, ‘‘Early French Advocates of Religious Freedom,’’ Sixteenth-Century Journal, 25, 1, 1994, pp. 29-51. behind the throne.^[81] Though personally a pious Catholic, Henry III ended up by appointing the Protestant Henry of Navarre as his successor, alienating many of his subjects but clearly putting the imperatives of government above those of religion. The king of Navarre himself was probably a skeptic at heart; however, and as his famous quip about Paris being worth a mass indicates, he was one who was prepared to follow external forms provided they served his ends. He converted to Ca­tholicism and assumed the throne as Henry IV. His next step was to put an end to his predecessors’ attempts at persecution and grant religious toleration in the form of the Edict of Nantes, which for ninety years turned France into a virtual patchwork of Catholic and Protestant com­munities. Throughout his reign his factotum and chief adviser was a Huguenot, the duc de Sully, a figure whom we shall meet again.

In the Netherlands religious differences were as acute as anywhere else but, in the north at any rate, they tended to be submerged by the desperate struggle for independence against Spain. William the Silent in his capacity as the first leader of the revolt did everything in his power to maintain unity, which explains why, during the late 1560s and early 1570s, he was found advocating formal equality between the Catholic and Calvinist churches. However, their mutual suspicions - particularly those of the extreme Calvinists, known as Predikanten - limited his success. In 1573 the Catholic inhabitants of the northern provinces lost their right to worship, though no attempt was made to deprive them of their liberty of conscience. Here, as in most other countries, centuries were to pass before all forms of religiously motivated discrimination were abolished, offenses against religion struck off the statute book, and a separation of church and state achieved - to say nothing of ending the church’s dominant position in such fields as welfare and education.

Even as Catholic and Protestant rulers waged war in the name of their respective creeds, they were forced by the demands of politics and of commerce to deal with each other on an equal footing. The practice of establishing permanent representatives had originated in Italy after the Peace of Lodi (1454) where rulers dealt with each other on a daily basis and where there were no cultural differences standing in the way. From there it spread to countries such as Spain, France, and England whose kings often relied on experienced Italian personnel.^[82] As the Reformation divided Europe into warring camps, development toward a modern dip­lomatic service was interrupted; however, from about 1600 on political realities again prevailed and this evolution began to reestablish itself. Whenever ambassadors arrived at some foreign court one of the first questions that had to be settled was their right - and that of their staffs - to worship in their own manner. In most cases the demand ended up by being granted, first in private and then, increasingly, in public as well.²⁸

By this time both Catholic and, a fortiori, Protestant rulers were begin­ning to treat their churches as if they were mere departments of state. In the former many of the ecclesiastics’ privileges and immunities remained in place right up to the time of the French Revolution; but in the latter, particularly Prussia, Sweden, and England (where Henry VIII had called the clergy ‘‘only half our subjects’’),²⁹ the differences between them and laymen were rapidly being eliminated. While most educated people prob­ably continued to believe both in the divine right of kings and in the latter’s right and duty to look after their subjects’ spiritual welfare,³⁰ here too change was in the air. Perhaps the most radical position was found in England where Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651. Influenced by Galileo, Hobbes’ goal was to base his political system on the physics of his day, eliminating all influence other than those that could be seen, sensed, and measured. He was the first to proclaim that the belief in God (if He existed) was irrelevant to politics; as to outer forms, he followed Machiavelli in recommending that subjects be made to practice the religion prescribed by the sovereign as best adapted to the maintenance of public order. During the English Civil War, Hobbes was attacked as a crypto-heretic and forced to flee abroad. However, it was symptomatic of the changing outlook that, even though the Protectorate was committed to Puritanism, under Cromwell he was permitted to return. From then until his death - which took place well after the Restoration and thus after another major change in religious policy - he was allowed to live in peace as the king’s pensioner though, the plague of 1666 being blamed in part on his blasphemous views, from then on he was forbidden to publish.

The papacy, too, changed its character. The rise of the great monar­chies had not gone unnoticed south of the Alps. It made the popes realize that their own future lay with a territorial principality in which they themselves would exercise absolute government independently of any-

²⁸ See G. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), pp. 266ff.

²⁹ A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform 1500-1550 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 15.

³⁰ See, for England, S. Doran and C. Durton, Princes, Pastors and People: The Church and Religion in England, 1529-1689 (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 100; for France, see W. J. Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 164, 199; and, for Spain, J. J. Elliott, ‘‘Power and Propaganda in Spain of Philip IV,’’ in S. Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl­vania Press, 1985), pp. 149ff. body else. The work of building it was begun by the ‘‘terrible” (Jacob Burkhardt) Sixtus IV (1471-84). By surrendering to Louis XI what he could not protect - i.e., the right to tax ecclesiastical income and control over benefices - he bought French assistance, or at any rate neutrality, in his disputes with the remaining Italian rulers. The respite gained he used to capture the strongholds of the Colonna family and kill their leader, thus breaking their power and establishing papal rule over the city of Rome once and for all. However, Sixtus' attempts to continue his record of intrigue and assassination in order to extend his control over Florence as well was cut short by his death. His immediate successor, Innocent VIII, was ineffective and made no further headway. Innocent's successor, Alexander VI (the Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia) became involved in the series of Franco-Spanish wars that broke out when the French invaded Italy in 1494 and which were to last until 1559. By deftly switching alliances at several critical moments he provided himself with further opportunities for aggrandizement. However, his aim was not so much to strengthen the Papal State per se as to provide his relations - chief among whom was his son Cesare - with principalities which he distributed right and left.

Then it was the turn of Sixtus' nephew, the warrior-pope Julius II (1503-13). Concluding an alliance with Spain as the greatest power of the time, he donned armor and, commanding in person, campaigned all over central Italy. Cesare Borgia was captured, sold to Naples, and sent to Spain where he died in a skirmish; the lands lost by Rome under Alexan­der VI were recovered and additional parts of the Romagna annexed. When Julius was succeeded first by Leo X (1513-23), and then by Clement VII (1523-35), both members of the Medici family, it looked as if even Florence and indeed the whole of Tuscany were destined to come under papal government. It was not to be, and the sack of Rome by the troops of Charles V (1527) showed that the dangers to the Papal State were by no means over. However, from this time until the Napoleonic Wars Rome succeeded in maintaining itself as an independent political entity with the pope as its undisputed ruler. Its frontiers lasted even longer, remaining established for three and a half centuries to come and were done away with only in 1859 when Italian unification was achieved.

Yet in a different way the construction of such a state proved to be a double-edged weapon. Driven by the need to engage and maintain mer­cenary troops, the popes of the age engaged in venality to an extent not known before or, probably, since. Accordingly they sold indulgences (promising to get sinners out of purgatory) and quadrupled the number of offices that were open to purchase; particularly in Germany which did not have a single monarch to protect it, they also siphoned money away from the local ecclesiastical organization to Rome.³¹ All of this raised the ire of believers - during his visit to Rome, which took place in 1510, Luther witnessed papal corruption at first hand - and, when the time came, helped him and his fellow reformers find their followers. Mean­while the discussions by Guicciardini and Machiavelli show that contem­poraries were becoming used to thinking of the church in terms of pure power politics. The former accused the Papal State of having abandoned even the semblance of Christianity in pursuing its secular ends. The latter saw it as a state among states, remarkable for nothing but its outstanding hypocrisy.

Given the circumstances of the time the use of intrigue, sword, and fire to establish a viable Papal State was inevitable. The Universal Church, its head saved from secular domination, was preserved. However, successive popes found it difficult to reconcile their role as the vicar of Christ with that of temporal ruler;³² as time went on, their influence over inter­national affairs came to be in proportion to the size of the territory that they ruled and the armed forces that they commanded. From the middle of the seventeenth century this meant that, outside Italy, it amounted to very little indeed: as Stalin was one day to ask, how many divisions did the pope have? As for the church's local organizations, regardless of whether or not they were reformed, they tended to come under the authority of the state. Stripped of their independent power, they found themselves sur­viving under the authority of the state with which they often forged a close alliance. Even when ecclesiastics and their institutions still opposed the state, as sometimes happened, inevitably they did so either within the state or by fleeing to such other states as would offer them asylum; the days when they possessed their own political communities were largely over.