Interesting how the brain has its own links. Its thoughts go from popes to battles between popes to the meanings of religion to the doubters of God to atheism. Let us now return to Durant.
The popes felt themselves thoroughly justified in claiming a degree and area of temporal power.
As the heads of an international organization they could not afford to be the captives of any one state, as they had been in effect in Avignon. So trammeled, they could hardly serve all peoples impartially, much less realize their majestic dream of being the spiritual governors of every government. Though the “Donation of Constantine” was a palpable forgery (as Nicholas admitted by hiring Valla), the donation of central Italy to the papacy by Popin confirmed by Charlemagne was an historical fact. The popes had coined their own money at least as far back as 782 and for centuries no one had questioned their right.
The unification of local powers, feudal or martial, in a central government was taking place in the Papal States as in the other nations of Europe. If the popes from Nicholas V to Clement VII ruled their states as absolute monarchs they were following the fashion of the times. They could with reason complain when reformers like Chancellor Gerson of the University of Paris proposed democracy in the Church but deprecated it in the state. Neither state nor Church was ready for democracy at a time when printing had not yet begun or spread. Nicholas V became pope seven years before Gutenberg printed his Bible, thirty years before printing reached Rome, forty eight years before the first publication of Aldus Manutius.
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Democracy is a luxury of disseminated intelligence, security and peace.
The secular rule of the popes directly applied to what antiquity had called Latium (now Latzio), a small province lying between Tuscany, Umbria, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Beyond this they claimed also Umb ria, the Marches, and the Romagna (the ancient Romania). These four regions together made a broad belt across central Italy from sea to sea.
They contained some twenty-six cities, which the popes, when they could, ruled by vicars, or divided among provincial governors. Furthermore, Sicily and the whole Kingdom of Naples were claimed as papal fiefs on the basis of an agreement between Pope Innocent III and Frederick II. The payment of an annual feudal fee by these states to the papacy became a major source of quarrels between the Regno and the popes. Finally the Countess Matilda had bequeathed to the popes, as her feudal domain, practically all of Tuscany, including Florence, Lucca, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, and Arezzo.
Overall all these the popes claimed the rights of a feudal sovereign, but were rarely able to give effect to their claim.
There are those who have power and those who claim power.
Robby
