The Pope's Army

The Papacy in Diplomacy and War

John Car, John Carr

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526714916
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

For much of its 2, 000-year history, the Roman Catholic Church was a formidable political and military power, in contrast to its pacifist origins and its present concentration on spiritual matters. The period of political and military activism can be dated to roughly between 410, when Pope Innocent I vainly tried to avert the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, and about 1870, when Pope Pius IX was abandoned by his protectors, the French Army, and forced to submit to the new Italian state by surrendering any political power the Vatican had left. During those centuries, the popes employed every means at their disposal, including direct military action, to maintain their domains centered on Rome. Some pontiffs, such as Alexander VI, Julius II (15th century), plus the energetic Borgia popes later, built the Papal States into a power in their own right. In the following century and a half, Europe’s destructive religious wars almost always had a papal component, with the Lateran and later Vatican fielding their own armies. Climaxing the story are the little-known yet bitter late-nineteenth century battles between the papal volunteers from all over Europe and America, and the Italian nationalists who ultimately prevailed. John Carr narrates the story of Papal military clout with engaging verve.

Chapter 1

To Fight or Not to Fight?

Christianity came into the world as a decidedly pacifist creed. The abolition of violence among members of the human race was inbuilt into Christ’s message. Turning the other cheek was a radical message indeed, seemingly going against basic human nature. However, as evidenced by Jesus’ pessimistic observation about having to buy a sword to deal with the evils to come, human nature still had to be contended with. The early Christian communities were noted among the unbelievers for their honesty and peaceableness. Some, though, tended to think of the faith in power terms: the Acts of the Apostles opens with someone asking when Christ ‘will restore the kingdom of Israel’. Wisely, an answer is not given. The emphasis, instead, is on personal healing and salvation; kings and kingdoms and armies, as symptoms of the ailing world, merit no particular regard except as pesky inconveniences that have to be put up with.

But human differences quickly clouded this idyllic picture. First, the Greeks and Jews of Jerusalem argued over widows’ relief, then Saint Stephen was stoned to death by the Jewish high clergy anxious to prevent the new doctrine from spreading and undermining their ancient authority. Into Stephen’s place stepped a man who had cheered on the execution; the Pharisee Saul was on his way to Damascus to nab more Christians when he was stopped in his tracks by the celebrated mystic encounter recounted in the Acts. Newly converted, and with his new name of Paul, he travelled with Peter throughout the Roman provinces of the East Mediterranean spreading the faith, but always under threat of arrest.

The first military man to appear in the Acts is one Cornelius, ‘a centurion of the band called the Italian band,’ and described as a devout man in every way. According to the text we have, Cornelius dreamed of being ordered to contact the Apostle Peter who was reported to be in the area. Peter ignored Jewish ethnic taboos and consented to enter Cornelius’ home even though he was a non-Jew and a centurion, an officer of the occupying power. This incident, perhaps symbolically, marks the start of Christianity crossing over from the Jewish cultural boundaries into the European. The apostles and their helpers remained a thorn in the side of the local authorities, disrupting local politics and condemning corruption. Riots often broke out. At one point Paul was stoned and left for dead, but recovered. When he crossed into Macedonia he and Silas were thrown into jail for preaching ‘customs which are not lawful’ for Roman citizens. Back in Asia Minor Paul got into considerable trouble at Ephesos (now the Turkish town of Kuşadası) when he trashed the very lucrative worship of the pagan deity Diana and escaped thanks to his powers of persuasive speech. Paul was arrested in Jerusalem and tried, and as he was a Roman citizen he was put on a ship to Rome to go before the emperor himself. At first confined in the dismal Mamertine prison in Rome, he was beheaded under Nero sometime between ad 64 and 68. The point to be made here is that throughout his career and ordeals, right up to his martyr’s end, Paul not once had recourse to violence or, from what we know, even incited any use of armed force against his oppressors.

The other apostle, Peter, was of a different stamp. The story that he was the one who sliced off the high priest’s servant’s ear in the Garden of Gethsemane conforms to what the scriptures describe elsewhere of his character: quick to wrath and prone to acting and speaking before thinking. The intriguing question arises of what Peter was doing with a weapon that night, in what was an hour of prayer and submission. Almost certainly he was carrying it for self-defence, but this does not sit well with the general image of Jesus’ disciples as messengers of peace and holiness. This image, though, may be a historical exaggeration; too much may have been made (especially) in the West of ‘the Prince of Peace’. The conditions of the Roman-occupied Middle East were not the conditions, say, of placid nineteenth-century Protestant England or prosperous North America, where highly sentimentalized liberal imaginations of Christ were prone to develop. Violence was a part of the era, and any sensible person would be expected to take precautions against it. Jesus, moreover, well knew that his message was so radical and all-encompassing that it would be a source of conflict for ages to come. There was no room for wimps in the great challenge ahead: ‘I am come to bring not peace but a sword.’

There are plenty of other utterances that indicate Jesus’ political realism. One of them appears in Mark 13:8: ‘For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom… and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.’ The implication was that the nascent faith needed to be aware of these inevitable evils, and the only way it could deal with them was by forming a worldly organization of its own, complete with a defence mechanism. In short, the faith needed a ‘rock’ to be built on, and Peter’s very name, signifying rock in Greek (his real Jewish name was Simon bar-Jona), pointed to him being it. The gospel of Matthew reports that Peter was given this honour because he was the first disciple to recognize Christ as the Messiah. ‘On this rock I will build my church,’ Jesus said, in words that the Roman Catholic Church has ever since used to justify a primacy (albeit a strongly-contested one). The gospels of Mark and Luke echo the story. Peter himself made his way to Rome to join Paul in about ad 42, and built up the city’s Christian community. Both were put to death under Nero, Peter by being crucified upside down on the site of what is now the Vatican. In the centuries to come, the papacy would fully recompense its foes for the crime done to its founder.

In an imperfect and often hostile world it was perhaps inevitable that the Christian injunction to turn the other cheek would eventually be challenged from inside the faith itself. The great majority of early converts were poor and underprivileged and often glad to remove themselves from the pressures and conflicts of the world. But as time wore on, sects began to fracture the church and strain the basic teachings. More important, Rome’s emperors saw Christianity as a threat to their concept of themselves as embodying the state religion. The execution of Peter and Paul by Nero was the beginning of more than two centuries of intermittent persecutions; the worst were those of Domitian (94–96), Trajan (98–117), Marcus Aurelius (161–180), Septimius Severus (193–212), Decius (249–251) and especially Diocletian (285–305). Scores of thousands of believers perished in various brutal ways, such as being used as human torches to light up athletic contests or thrown to wild beasts.

When Domitian took power the Roman Empire had been in existence for more than 120 years, and strains had become apparent in how a multicultural empire could carry on the older, more parochial authority of the Roman Republic. It was no longer a matter for the Roman natives or the Italians, who would not have put up with absolutism. But authoritarian influences from the east made it relatively easy for the emperors, from Augustus onwards, to establish themselves as divi, or divine heroes, one step below living gods. It was the eastern part of the empire that went a step further and considered the emperor the deus, or fully-qualified divinity, a title that Domitian was the first to officially assume; and it was to be expected that this god-emperor would launch the first large-scale persecution against the one faith that expressly refuted that claim.

Despite the obstacles thrown in its path, the church in Rome held together. By the second century it had gradually organized itself under a papa, meaning father, a term applied to the bishop of the city (and origin of our word pope). There were frequent councils of bishops from Rome and the outlying regions, but as the importance and influence of Jerusalem waned, Rome became the Christian centre of gravity, as it were. Peter had preached to the Christian colony in Rome, and may actually have established it. At his death he left it in the hands of Linus (also known as Saint Linus of Volterra), whom tradition accepts as the second pope. The third pope, Anacletus, held office from 76 to 88, when the Gospels were being put together. His successor, Clement I, saw the faith through the persecution of Domitian (one of whose intended victims was Saint John the Evangelist who escaped to the remote Greek island of Patmos). According to a legend, Sisinnius, the Prefect of Rome, suspected his wife of being a secret Christian and came upon her attending a mass officiated by the pope in a catacomb. When Sisinnius tried to have Clement arrested, he and his arrest squad were struck blind; a twelfth-century fresco painted to commemorate the occasion describes them as ‘sons of whores’.1 We might take this as a very early sign of papal physical power over adversaries. That power by the second century had grown until the emperor Decius grumbled that he would rather have had a rival emperor than a pope to deal with.2

Not until Constantine I in 313 were the Christians of the empire able to finally breathe the air of religious freedom. A year earlier, Constantine had secured the throne by trouncing his opponent Maxentius at the momentous Battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome; he himself vowed that before the battle he had seen a shining cross in the sky with the words By This Conquer in Greek. True or not, this legend is the first instance of Christianity coming down on the side of official armed force against the foes of the faith. Constantine had, as it were, the stamp of divine approval for his army and its campaigns, in which he was invariably victorious. His army, almost to a man, had enthusiastically adopted a modified cruciform emblem, the chirho (from XP, the first two letters of the Greek Christos), on their shields and standards. The Christian army had come into being. In 313 the Edict of Milan removed the ban on Christians; seventeen years later Constantine completed the colossal task of moving the empire’s capital from Rome to Constantinople, a far more strategically-situated centre. With him went the senior church hierarchy, leaving Rome itself in the hands of its bishop, who for the sake of tradition was still known as the pope.

For the purpose of holding a large empire together, Nova Roma (as Constantinople was originally meant to be called) was a far better strategic site than malaria-ridden Rome could ever be. Rome itself was close to Italy’s west coast, whereas the great bulk of the empire’s interests lay in the east; the old, time-consuming military route down the Appian Way to the heel of Italy, the rough crossing of the Strait of Otranto and the days-long tramp over the winding Via Egnatia through the rugged Balkan mountains had been the only way Roman arms could maintain control of the eastern provinces. With the renewed rise of the hostile Persian Empire under the Sasanids, a far quicker connection with the east was required. The location of Constantinople, at the chokepoint of Europe and Asia, removed all those obstacles at one go.

The dedicatory celebrations for the new capital on Monday, 11 May 330, gave the city officially to God and Christ. Gone for good was the emperor-worship of old. Constantine regarded himself – as the hundred-odd subsequent Late Roman and Byzantine sovereigns would regard themselves – as Christ’s vicegerent on earth. The task of the emperor, the civil service and the military was to fight for the spread of the Christian faith among the pagans, and to defend it against attacks when necessary. In its 1,100 years of life the Byzantine Empire would unswervingly dedicate itself to that policy; in a specialization of labour, the emperor would handle secular and physical security, leaving the patriarch, or church head, to the equally important spiritual sphere. All Roman Byzantine armies were God’s armies, in theory and fact. Even through the political turmoil after Constantine’s death in 337, the basic principles of the Christian state were never in doubt.

No such stability existed in the West, where the bishops of Rome had no strong secular authority to buttress their own positions, especially against foreign invaders. Even at the height of Roman imperial power in the first century, some early popes felt they had to assert themselves in power terms. In 96 Clement I had written to the other Mediterranean dioceses claiming primacy in decision-making – the opening gun in the age-old papal claim for superiority in Christendom. The claim did not go unchallenged by the eastern regions, as well as the important seat of Carthage; the resulting dispute would plague the papacy for a couple of hundred more years. After 330 the church was led by the patriarchs in Constantinople, who had their hands full battling heresies and fixing the official Christian creed as solidly as possible in the service of the army and state. After the authority and decisiveness of Theodosius I finally brought about this result, the Eastern Church settled into a secure, if somewhat dull, routine.

In the West, however, the clergy could enjoy no such complacency. In the fourth century the barbarian invasions of Italy made the people of that peninsula, and outlying areas such as Gaul, look to the bishops of Rome as the sole authority that could be relied upon. ‘The bishops of Rome felt responsible for feeding and defending their people.’3 As the eastern empire gradually morphed into Byzantium, the bishops, or popes, of Rome were thrown upon their own resources. The emperors in Constantinople were too far away, and local political leadership too fragmented; the Church in Rome was the only symbolic power common to all the West European peoples, and by default was looked to for guidance in times of crisis, which was most of the time. Moreover, the prevailing Greek language and liturgy of the early Church had shifted eastwards, leaving Latin as the common medium of the Church in the West; the old empire was splitting, amoeba-like, into two distinct worlds, one Greek and one Latin. Widening the rift were the Latin Church fathers, Saints Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, who developed a theology that underpinned the rise of the papacy to primacy in the West.

The bishops of Rome were quite conscious of their growing prestige. Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan observer, noted as early as the fourth century that some of them had acquired an unreasonable measure of wealth and pomp. They were not all Italians: until Pope Damasus I (366–384), two Syrians, five Greeks, two Africans, one Dalmatian and one Spaniard (Damasus himself) had also occupied the throne of Saint Peter. Damasus’ election was a bloodily-contested one, with rival gangs clashing inside a Roman church; when the affray ended, 137 bodies were carried out of the devastated building that was subsequently rebuilt to become what is now Santa Maria Maggiore.4 Papal warfare, however disorganized, had begun.

In 402 Theodosius’ son Honorius, who had been given the West to rule (with Theodosius’ other son Arcadius ruling the East), moved his palace to Ravenna on the Adriatic coast in north Italy, a city more defensible than Rome. The popes followed Honorius and by some accounts were the real rulers in Ravenna. The organizing tradition of the old Roman Empire had given the Western Church a more political and worldly structure than was the case in the Greek East, where the emperor was in total control and the clergy thus freer to pursue its spiritual and metaphysical concerns. In the absence of a reliable single fount of political authority in the West, the Roman Church and its considerable resources stepped into the gap. In the words of Will Durant:

The Roman Church followed in the footsteps of the Roman state: it conquered the provinces, beautified the capital, and established unity and discipline … Rome died in giving birth to the Church; the Church matured by inheriting and accepting the responsibilities of Rome.5

This maturity came not a moment too soon. As early as the 370s a new and vigorous people had emerged from the tribal turmoil of north-east Europe to seriously threaten the southern European cradles of civilization. These were the Visigoths, who were able to take advantage of weak imperial leadership and cross the Danube en masse. In 378 Valens, the Constantinople-based emperor, rode out with an army to stop them at Adrianople (now Edirne in European Turkey); in the resulting battle Valens perished in a blazing cottage after losing two-thirds of his force. Valens’ successor Theodosius I had stabilized the situation by enlisting Goths as foederati, or allies-in-reserve, giving them lands to cultivate in return for allegiance. But the weakness and incompetence of Theodosius’ successors encouraged the commander of the emperor’s Gothic auxiliaries, Alaric, to start his own freebooting expeditions, first in the Balkans and then down the Italian peninsula.

After sidelining the helpless Honorius at Ravenna, in 410 Alaric surged towards Rome. Honorius advised the Senate to buy off the Goth leader with gold, but Alaric wanted territory as well. The pope, Innocent I, appears to have favoured giving Alaric what he wanted, but the negotiations broke down. On 24 August the Goths burst into the Eternal City, looting and killing. Church after church was stripped of its treasures; only the basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul were untouched, to serve as refuges for thousands of terrified Romans. According to Saint Augustine, the Goths respected the Christian places of worship and all who sought refuge therein.6 One legend relates that a Goth soldier burst into a house to find a young girl guarding valuable holy relics; the soldier was about the grab them, when he was halted by the girl’s voice telling him that he could take what he liked, only that it all belonged to Saint Peter, who would most surely punish the soldier for what he had done. The intimidated Goth left the house to report the incident to Alaric, who ordered that the girl and the relics be taken to safety in Saint Peter’s basilica.7

Some credit for Alaric’s leniency to the clergy can be given to Innocent I, the fortieth pontiff and the first who definitely merits the title of defensor urbis, or defender of the city in an expressly political and military sense. As far as we know, Innocent employed no armed force against Alaric; but his defence of Rome in the political and social spheres may well have been just as effective. The sack of Rome lasted for two days, after which Alaric withdrew (taking with him Honorius’ sister Galla Placidia as war booty) to let the city lick its wounds. Shortly afterwards, Alaric died of a fever, depriving the Visigoths of strong leadership. For the next thirty or so years, while the Goths staked out new conquests in Gaul and Spain, successive popes worked hard to rebuild the old splendours of Rome. But the old Rome itself was clearly on its way out. Constantinople was now the centre of the East Roman Empire, soon to become the Byzantine Empire, with the Italian rump fated to wither away. More barbarians appeared out of the European mists: the Vandals (whose name, perhaps unfairly, has become our synonym for senseless destruction) traversed Spain and ended up in North Africa, while the Franks an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 To Fight or Not to Fight?
• Chapter 2 Fortifying the Papacy
• Chapter 3 Who’s the Boss in Europe?
• Chapter 4 ‘Dieu li volt!’
• Chapter 5 ‘The Fair Land of France’
• Chapter 6 The Papacy Unleashed: Alexander and Julius
• Chapter 7 ‘Quare de vulva eduxisti me?’
• Chapter 8 The Pope’s Navy
• Chapter 9 Digging In
• Chapter 10 The Humiliation of Pius VII
• Chapter 11 St Patrick’s Crusaders
• Chapter 12 Pius IX versus Italy
• Chapter 13 Farewell to Arms
• The Popes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plate Section