Benefits of a 'domestic' Pope
- Thread starter Zeller
- Start date
There really aren't any "general benefits" - some popes might pursue policies favorable to their home region, but it doesn't seem to have been something that made a huge impact on Church policy.
Of course, most medieval popes were Italians if memory serves, so it may have never really come up.
I see. But what if a Cardinal of Scotland makes it to the throne of St Peter? Would he impede England somehow? Maybe even excommunicate their King?
Or a clergyman from Hungary. Would he then call more/greater crusades against the Ottomans?
Or something similiar with any Spanish kingdoms before the Reconquista was completed?
Or a clergyman from Hungary. Would he then call more/greater crusades against the Ottomans?
Or something similiar with any Spanish kingdoms before the Reconquista was completed?
I'd expect it to depend a great deal on the personal connections between the Pope and the King and other notables from the Pope's original home country. Kings often had quite a bit of influence over the selection of Bishops, high church officials often doubled as high officials (e.g. Cardinal Wolsey, who was Chancellor for about a third of Henry VIII's reign), and bishops and cardinals were sometimes royal relations themselves.
This. Just being from X wouldn't make a Pope automatically favor his home country - and things as blatant as say, excommunicating the king of England for a Scottish pope or something would end badly.
People don't realise just how mediaeval Popes used excommunication. It wasn't used like in Crusader Kings to weaken a King's authority in preparation for (or even to justify) a declaration of war. It was used as a tool to show strong displeasure with a King's actions, as how a parent might smack their child. It was used a lot more than you think - the great defender of Catholicism Philip II of Spain, he of the Spanish Armada, was excommunicated himself by the Papacy...twice. Monarchs knew that excommunication was nothing special. A small monetary gift to the Pope, maybe some land donated to the Church or a Papal candidate given a bishopric instead of the King's candidate, and it went away. The clergy of the land in question wouldn't declare the King a heretic and foment rebellion and disorder, they'd just shrug their shoulders and wait for it all to blow over. They might even write to the Pope siding with the King and asking for clemency.
Hapsburg
Banned
Quite. People seem to conflate excommunication with Papal inderdicts declared upon entire countries. The latter saw considerable unrest forment, due to the censure of ecclesiastical rites in the interdicted country. People couldn't be given last rites, be married in a church, or buried in churchyards.
I'm not sure it was entirely meaningless in the Middle Ages, but it seems more a matter of the individual - most people are going to take it as threatening their soul (of course, this is in a day and age in which a lot threatened your soul, but still) to be excommunicated.
And a Pope using that as a blatantly political tool is going to get irritating. The Pope is supposed to at least pretend he's not playing politics like any other prince.
But that's a matter of him suffering, not the king he targets.
And a Pope using that as a blatantly political tool is going to get irritating. The Pope is supposed to at least pretend he's not playing politics like any other prince.
But that's a matter of him suffering, not the king he targets.
True, although I suspect that in practice most clergymen would have found a tenuous but convenient get-out clause which somehow legitimised them going about their duties anyway. I'm trying to think of a time when a Papal interdict seriously threatened to bring a country to its knees.
How so? The Papacy spent most of the mediaeval era trying unsuccessfully to argue that they should be treated as the political overlords of all Christendom as well as the spiritual. It may have been only in the 11th century that they showed flashes of real power but even into the 15th century the Italian philosophers hotly debated the Pope's legal sovereignty over Kings. It may have been a nuisance dealing with a Pope who claimed to have more power and influence than he actually had, but it was also accepted fact that that was how Popes behaved.
Well, there's a difference between "the Pope is the one true authority in Christendom", and "the pope is acting like one of the petty Italian princes".
It might be accepted in the sense no one is going to start a reformation over it (well, no king), but it diminishes respect for the office for the Pope to act like oh, this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Julius_II
This is a far cry from Gregory VII or even the popes who confronted Frederick II.