The Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: From Roman Bishop to Spiritual Sovereign
The transformation of the bishop of Rome from late antique patriarch to medieval pope, from the Gothic Wars through the Carolingian alliance and the pornocracy.
Few institutions in European history have undergone a transformation as profound as the papacy between the fifth and the tenth centuries. The bishop of Rome entered this period as one of five senior prelates of a Mediterranean church, presiding over a city that had lost its imperial status and was rapidly being impoverished by war, plague, and the breakdown of Roman administration. By the end of the period, the pope was an independent spiritual sovereign, the head of a Latin church that extended from the Atlantic to the Slavic world, and a political figure whose coronation of Charlemagne in 800 had defined the new medieval order. This transformation was not a single event but a long, contested, often violent process, and its details are essential to understanding both the history of Christianity and the history of medieval Europe.
The late antique inheritance
The bishop of Rome inherited a special position from the early Church. By tradition, both of the apostles Peter and Paul had been martyred in Rome, and the city therefore possessed a unique apostolic authority. The doctrine of papal primacy - the claim that the bishop of Rome was the successor of Peter and the vicar of Christ on earth - was developed in the early centuries of the Church, most influentially by Popes such as Damasus I (366-384) and Leo I (440-461). Leo’s famous meeting with Attila the Hun at Mantua in 452, and his negotiations with Gaiseric the Vandal during the sack of Rome in 455, established the model of the pope as intercessor and protector of the city, a role that would persist for centuries.
Yet the late antique papacy was not yet a power in the modern sense. The bishop of Rome was one of several patriarchs of the early Church, ranking alongside the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The first of these, the pope, was the most prestigious in the West, but the patriarch of Constantinople, supported by the Byzantine emperor, was the most powerful in the East. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had recognized Constantinople as second in honor after Rome, and the long struggle between the two sees was already well underway by the early Middle Ages.
The fifth-century popes also relied heavily on the imperial government. The Western Roman emperor, even as his authority crumbled, was still the official head of the church in the West, and the bishop of Rome was in some sense his subject. The collapse of the Western Empire in 476 therefore created both a crisis and an opportunity. The crisis was that the pope lost his imperial paymaster and protector; the opportunity was that he also lost his imperial master, and could begin to claim an independent authority.
The Gothic Wars and the Byzantine papacy
The sixth century was a difficult period for the papacy. Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who ruled Italy from 493 to 526, was an Arian Christian, and his relations with the Catholic church were generally tolerant but politically tense. The Byzantine reconquest of Italy under Justinian, beginning in 535, brought the papacy back into the orbit of the Eastern Empire, and the Liber Pontificalis - a sequence of papal biographies compiled in the sixth century - presents the popes of this period as loyal servants of the empire. Yet the Gothic Wars (535-554) devastated Italy, and the popes were often forced to act independently of Constantinople, providing food, shelter, and leadership to the population of Rome during the long sieges.
The most important figure of this period was Pope Gregory I, known as Gregory the Great, who served as bishop of Rome from 590 to 604. Gregory was a Roman aristocrat who had been prefect of the city before abandoning public life to become a monk. He was consecrated pope against his will, and he brought to the office a combination of administrative skill, theological learning, and pastoral concern that made him one of the most influential of all the popes. His Pastoral Care, a manual of pastoral theology, became a foundational text of the medieval church, and his reorganization of the Roman liturgy - the so-called Gregorian chant - defined Western sacred music for centuries. Gregory also directed the mission to the Anglo-Saxons that would transform English Christianity, and he corresponded with the patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria in an attempt to maintain communion between the Eastern and Western churches.
The seventh and eighth centuries were a time of consolidation and crisis. The Lombards pressed on Rome from the north, the Byzantine exarchs in Ravenna were increasingly unable to defend the city, and the popes were forced to look for new sources of support. The alliance with the Franks, which would prove decisive, began in the reign of Pope Stephen II (752-757), who anointed the Carolingian prince Pepin the Short as king of the Franks. In return, Pepin led an army into Italy, defeated the Lombards, and donated the conquered territories to the papacy. This “Donation of Pepin” became the foundation of the Papal States, a temporal dominion in central Italy that would last until the nineteenth century.
The famous Donation of Constantine, an eighth-century forgery that purported to record Constantine the Great’s gift of imperial authority to the pope, was produced in this same period. The forgery was not simply a cynical invention: it was a piece of political theology, claiming for the Roman church a temporal dominion that the papacy could not in fact defend by its own resources. The Donation of Constantine was eventually exposed as a forgery by the humanist Lorenzo Valla in 1440, but it shaped the medieval papacy’s understanding of itself for centuries.
The Carolingian papacy
The coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800, was a turning point in the history of the papacy. Pope Leo III placed the imperial crown on the king’s head in St. Peter’s Basilica, an act that asserted the pope’s right to confer imperial dignity and that created a Western emperor to rival the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. The act was contested at the time - Charlemagne himself is said to have been surprised - but it established a precedent that would shape European politics for centuries. The popes and the emperors would become, in effect, the two supreme authorities of Latin Christendom, and their relationship would be one of the most contested features of medieval political life.
The Carolingian papacy was, in practice, a tool of the Carolingian dynasty. The popes were appointed with the consent of the emperor, and they served as spiritual guarantors of imperial authority. Yet the papacy also benefited enormously from the alliance. The Carolingians protected the Papal States from the Lombards, supported the missionary movement in northern Europe, and promoted the use of the Roman liturgy and the Benedictine rule across Latin Christendom. The papal court in Rome was rebuilt, the Lateran Palace became the seat of the popes, and the Roman church acquired an institutional infrastructure that would persist for centuries.
The ninth and tenth centuries were a more difficult period. The Carolingian Empire broke apart in the late ninth century, and the papacy was exposed to the ambitions of local Roman aristocrats. The “pornocracy” - the period in the early tenth century when the papacy was dominated by the rival families of Theophylact and Tusculum - was a time of corruption, violence, and disorder. The most notorious of the pornocratic popes was John XII, who was accused of simony, fornication, and even of consecrating a bishop in a stable. Yet the period also saw important reforms, including the Cluniac movement, the Ottonian alliance, and the slow recovery of papal authority in the late tenth century.
The papacy and the conversion of Europe
The papacy was the chief institutional agent of the Christianization of Europe. Pope Gregory the Great had sent Augustine of Canterbury to England in 597, and his successors continued the missionary work. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, the Frisians, the Germans, the Slavs, the Hungarians, and the Norse was carried out by missionaries sent from Rome, supported by the cooperation of local kings and the protection of the Carolingian and Ottonian emperors. The papacy’s authority over the missionary movement gave it a new kind of power: not merely the spiritual authority of the bishop of Rome, but the practical authority of a missionary church that was converting the nations of Europe.
The Christianization of the Slavs in the ninth century was particularly significant. The mission of Cyril and Methodius to Moravia in 863, sent by the Byzantine emperor, was contested by the Frankish clergy and by the papacy. Pope John VIII eventually approved the use of Slavonic in the liturgy, but the mission to Moravia was politically unsuccessful. Yet the work of Cyril and Methodius laid the foundation for the conversion of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Rus, and the Old Church Slavonic language they developed became the liturgical language of Slavic Orthodoxy.
The papacy’s relationship with the Eastern Church was, throughout this period, a mixture of cooperation and conflict. The iconoclasm controversy, in which the popes firmly supported the veneration of images, brought the Roman church into closer alliance with the iconodule party at the Byzantine court. Yet the underlying tensions - over the filioque clause, the use of leavened or unleavened bread, and the authority of the pope - were never resolved. The crowning of Charlemagne in 800 was seen in Constantinople as a direct challenge to the Byzantine emperor’s universal claims, and the relationship between Rome and Constantinople was never as close after that date as it had been before.
The papacy and secular authority
The relationship between the papacy and secular rulers was one of the defining issues of the early Middle Ages. The Merovingian kings had a great deal of influence over the Frankish church, and the Carolingians went further, using the church as an instrument of government. The popes, for their part, claimed a spiritual authority that was independent of secular power, and they were willing to challenge even the most powerful of rulers. The famous case of Pope Zachary, who deposed the last Merovingian king Childeric III in 751 and supported the Carolingian claim to the throne, was a striking example of the papacy’s spiritual authority. The case of Pope Leo III, who crowned Charlemagne in 800, was another.
The papacy’s relationship with the new kingdoms of the Viking Age, Slavic Europe, and the British Isles was similarly complex. The Christianization of these regions required the active cooperation of secular rulers, and the new Christian kings often used the church to consolidate their power. The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, the Christian kingdom of Poland under Mieszko I, and the Russian principality of Vladimir in Kiev are all examples of this process. In each case, the church received royal support and royal protection, and in return it provided a religious and ideological framework for the new political order.
By the end of the early Middle Ages, the papacy was an established power in European politics. The Holy Roman Empire, the new kingdoms of Western Europe, and the missionary church of the Slavic and Norse worlds all acknowledged the spiritual authority of the pope. The Gregorian reforms of the late eleventh century, which would address many of the abuses that had developed during the pornocracy, were built on the foundations laid in this period. The papacy of the High Middle Ages, with its claims to universal spiritual authority and its conflicts with secular rulers, was the direct heir of the early medieval popes who had rebuilt the Roman church from the ruins of the Western Roman Empire.
Further reading
- Thomas F. X. Noble, The Republic of St Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680–825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984).
- Jeffrey Richards, The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages, 476–752 (Routledge, 1979).
- J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Clarendon, 1983).