There’s also a chapter devoted to Joan, a mythical pope who, legend has it, ruled in the guise of a man from about 855 to 857, and who was said to have given birth on the street during a procession from St.

Peter: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”įrom this humble and not entirely historically accurate beginning, Norwich writes, have sprung hundreds of popes such as Leo the Great, who protected Rome from the Huns and the Goths Leo III, the first pope to place an imperial crown on the head of a king (Charlemagne) and all the other vicars of Christ who have struggled with emperor after emperor for supremacy. Reading page after page of this cacophony of temporal sin, one begins to wonder whether this is a history of a religious institution at all.įor, most assuredly, these figures on the whole are portrayed not as solemn men of sober duty but rather as worldly leaders of a vastly powerful and wealthy global institution that, writes Norwich, today counts “two billion members, representing as it does half of all Christians and about one-sixth of the global population.” For Catholics and non-Catholics alike, this is surely an extraordinary feat, one, he suggests, that is built upon a short passage in the Gospels, Christ’s pronouncement to St.

The centuries-old Roman papacy truly is a universally unrivaled institution, and in dense detail, Norwich’s book shows us the historic playbook.Īs Norwich says upfront, “Absolute Monarchs” is a political history more than anything, and with his unstuffy and sometimes witty writing style, he walks us through what could otherwise be a stifling couple of thousand years of popes, antipopes, endless political power struggles, war, greed, torture, inquisitions, egomania, incest, fornication, bastard children and orgies. When preeminent British historian John Julius Norwich tells us in the introduction to his sweeping history of the Catholic papacy that his job is to give us “a straightforward single-volume history” of the world’s “most astonishing social, political, and spiritual institution ever created,” he’s hit the nail on the proverbial head.

The Popes by John Julius Norwich