The Early Modern Papacy

From the Council of Trent to the French Revolution 1564-1789

A.D. Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317896173
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

A history of the Papacy covering the vital period from the Renaissance through the Counter Reformation to the period of the French Revolution. Its a broad survey analysing the influence of Papal power not only across Europe but the wider world also.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The history of the papacy between the end of the Council of Trent (1563) and the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789) has often been seen as a period of decline. The supposed stagnation of papal policy, after the splendours of the Middle Ages, the excitement of the Renaissance and the vigour of the early Counter-Reformation, has not attracted much appreciative interest among historians writing in English. Even among art historians the attention paid to the glories of the high Baroque in Rome has not been equally sustained for the eighteenth century, except in distinctly specialist studies. Yet the papacy, together with Western European Catholicism, was to emerge from the subsequent trials of the French Revolution and tribulations of the Napoleonic period with renewed energy. However much that may be attributed to the salutary shock of those decades, a capacity for survival and thus a residual strength must also be allowed. For such reason alone the ‘quiet’ centuries of the papacy, between 1564 and 1789, would deserve reconsideration. But in fact, as this volume will suggest, the evolution of the papacy during this period of the long Counter-Reformation’ represented more than a conservation of vestigial authority, after the challenge of the Reformation and consolidation of Protestantism in Western Europe.

The vitality of the papal office was, on the contrary, demonstrated by the pursuit of defined but difficult programmes, which were not confined to defence of political sovereignty or a compensatory ostentation in visually dramatic art. The popes of these centuries largely succeeded in their aim of maintaining unity of doctrine among Catholics, based on the clarifications of the Council of Trent. Not only was formal schism substantially prevented, despite the prolonged disputes over alleged or actual Jansenism, but the consolidation of lay knowledge of the faith was achieved by the extension of catechism. Secondly, a measure of internal reform of the Catholic Church was still pursued by most popes of this period, representing at least a partial realization of the Tridentine disciplinary ideals. Thirdly, these first two goals had to be pursued in the face of undiminishing assertion by secular rulers, Catholics included, of enlarged authority in religious affairs. The eventual suppression of the Society of Jesus by the papacy itself was the eighteenth-century climax of the tensions generated by the pursuit of such policies in these pre-Revolutionary conditions. But the popes of the post-Tridentine era could not restrict their vision to Europe: Catholic overseas mission created its own problems on a global scale.

In the absence of other sustained treatment in English of the post-Tridentine papacy, readers have previously been able to turn to the volumes of von Pastor’s History of the Popes. The impressive research on which that series is based is evident enough in the English translation of the work, published between 1891 and 1953. But the need for a new review of the popes in the period covered by this present volume does not derive solely from the further progress of historical research. The later volumes of von Pastor’s great enterprise were not fully completed by his own hand at the time of his death. They remain partial both in the sense of what they treat and in the imperfect balance of their discussion of contentious questions like the suppression of the Jesuits. Opportunity certainly remains for a reassessment of the popes of the period between the Council of Trent and the French Revolution.¹

AN INFLUENTIAL MODEL

A challenging new perspective has in any case been offered to English-language readers in more recent times. In 1988 the English translation appeared of Paolo Prodi’s The Papal Prince, which argued for a distinctive interpretation of the papacy in the period under discussion here and hence of the whole history of the papacy as well. The centuries between 1564 and 1789 thus take on a further interest, when they are seen as the key to a revaluation of the entire history of the popes. For this reason also it would seem vital for a new English-language history such as the present series to give critical attention to those centuries. The account offered here will attempt a more comprehensive survey of the papacy as an institution than Prodi’s extended essay in interpretation was intended to be; and in so doing will make critical analysis of that interpretation, with consequences for the whole of papal history as well as for the two centuries immediately in question. But it is important to note initially that English readers, among whom Prodi’s model has become a received opinion, may not all be aware of the development of Prodi’s own views. While the Italian original of his book was published in 1982, his contribution of 1986 to the Annali, Volume 9 of the Einaudi Storia d’Italia, represents a modification of his argument, qualifying it in ways which seem more convincing. The analysis of the present volume offers a response to that qualified form of Prodi’s argument.

It is obviously of first importance to set out as simply as possible the basic line of that argument, precisely because of its implications for the whole history of the papacy. The starting point is the observation, long accepted by most historians, that the medieval papacy developed a precocious skill in centralized administration which challenged the secular rulers of Western Europe. They in turn gradually responded by refining their systems of government, until the later medieval schism gave them an opportunity of gaining from rival popes considerable degrees of control over the local Church in their territories.² Prodi’s point of departure from received interpretations, however, is the history of the Renaissance popes. The territorial ambitions of the popes of that period, still evident for example in the pontificate of the Farnese pope Paul III (1534–49), he sees not as a deviation in papal history but as a continuation of traditional aims by modified means. The attempts to consolidate and extend the central-Italian papal states thus emerge as a reaction to the political pressure of the ‘New Monarchies’ and ‘Nation States’ traditionally regarded as developing in early modern Europe. Increasing dependence on the political and above all financial foundation represented by the papal states was of course furthered by the consequences of the Protestant Reformation, especially the loss of ecclesiastical revenues from considerable parts of Western Europe.

It will be noted that this interpretation does not otherwise accord a traditional degree of importance to the challenge of Protestantism, nor even directly to the Council of Trent (1545–63). If anything, the Italian Wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries would seem of more significance, as marking the transformation of papal priorities, in response to a challenge from secular rulers who had now digested the earlier lessons taught by the model of papal power. But if this competition with secular authorities in directly territorial terms was thus part of a continuous evolution in the institution of the papacy, the supposed reaction to Protestant Reformation, the so-called Counter-Reformation, has also been misunderstood, according to Prodi, as far as it concerns the papacy at least. That next stage of papal history, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, he would rather see as part of the same long-term consolidation as a territorial principality, not as a specific religious response to doctrinal innovation or even to rival spiritual leadership. The attempt, however, to maintain claims to all traditional manifestations of papal authority naturally placed growing but ultimately disproportionate and destructive pressure on the resources of the papal states. The erosion of the economic strengths of the various territories within those states, not least by the burdens of taxation, was the logical outcome, marked as early as the end of the sixteenth century by the increase of banditry for example. To this extent the evidence on which Prodi’s argument is based may readily be agreed, while the papacy’s further dependence, already by that same period, on Sicilian grain to provision the city of Rome can equally well be recalled.³

But Prodi would go still further, and argue that within the papal states themselves religious priorities, such as the pursuit of Tridentine reform among clergy, religious orders and laity, were gradually but decisively subordinated to the necessities of secular government, in the popes’ own name of course. The insufficient foundation, in the form of temporal rule, for the continued claims of the papacy as a European principality therefore reduced not only the prosperity of central Italy but also the ability of the papacy as an institution to resist the Revolutionary attacks in Rome itself and more widely in Europe in and after 1789. Such an interpretation of papal history thus turns out, even if unintentionally, to resemble a traditional strand in Italian thinking, arguably visible from at least Machiavelli to the Risorgimento and beyond, which deplores the political and economic consequences of the preservation of papal temporal government. But such a similarity is not exactly accidental, because much of Prodi’s extended argument turns on events within the papal states themselves. Even if the evidence as to those internal developments were to be entirely agreed upon, which it is possible to question, the insistence on that local history of central-Italian territories is open to challenge. To see it as the key to the whole cycle of papal history before, during and after the period considered here, suggests a doubt. For the preoccupations of papal temporal government, though undoubted and pressing, were surely only partly a priority of the popes between 1564 and 1789.

In this volume, by contrast, a comprehensive understanding of papal policies during that period will be urged. It will be argued that even those popes, such as the Borghese pope Paul V (1605–21), the Barberini pope Urban VIII (1623–44), or the Pamfili pope Innocent X (1644–55), for example, for whom the consolidation of family property and revenue indisputably remained a central concern, simultaneously retained a sophisticated and complex set of priorities, in pursuit of which ‘nepotism’ was a coherent and ordered part, not a distraction. In the case of so-called ‘reforming’ popes, especially in the late seventeenth century, such as the Odescalchi pope Innocent XI (1676–89) or the Pignatelli pope Innocent XII (1691–1700), there is even less case for some supposed divergence from universal concerns into an exclusive care for the maintenance of a papal principality. The interest of the period between 1564 and 1789 for the whole history of the papacy is thus undoubted, but its excitement rather derives from considering the efforts of various popes to pursue a whole range of aims from a position of unalterable political disadvantage. Far from being a dull interlude of steady decline, this era in papal history is indeed crucial for the variety of ways in which different popes tried to exercise an impressive sequence of traditional and revived roles, not only in the city of Rome or the papal states, but throughout the Italian peninsula, in Catholic Europe and even in the rest of Western and Eastern Europe more generally, and more widely still beyond Europe. To the responsibilities of the bishop of Rome was added, precisely during this period, a fascinating attempt to display a clearly metropolitan jurisdiction in the Roman province, and to perform the part of an Italian primate in the rest of the peninsula. The institution of that effectively primatial authority is acknowledged by Prodi himself, in his Storia d’Italia contribution, as a part of post-Conciliar papal achievement after Trent.

The task of promoting beyond the peninsula an essentially patriarchal authority in the Western Church was more difficult, for obvious political reasons rather than because of the obscurity of that dimension of papal power in theoretical terms. The extension of European Catholicism overseas led eventually to new initiatives for more direct Roman intervention by the supreme pontiffs there. If then the argument to be advanced here is that the popes of the post-Reformation era did indeed pursue an ambitious programme, of universal scope, during the two centuries of the ‘long Counter-Reformation’, it may be most clearly set out by analysing each manifestation of papal authority in turn, and examining its practical exercise in each case. Papal sovereignty in its temporal application will thus be treated in its proper place, and not assumed to have an overriding importance to which all other papal activity was subordinate.

The papacy had emerged from the stormy debates of the Council of Trent over the relationship between papal and episcopal jurisdiction with an authority unexpectedly confirmed and even strengthened. But this restored power was potential rather than secure, not least because of the ambiguities involved in the resolution of the Council’s business, especially at its swift conclusion in the last months of 1563. The potential for reasserted Roman control was nevertheless present in the wording of many of the Conciliar decrees, the Council’s explicit request for papal confirmation prior to the publication of those decrees, and the influential nature of the ‘unfinished business’ (especially liturgical revision and catechism, rather than the Index of prohibited literature) left by the Council to the pope.

Contemporary criticism from within the Catholic world itself, as in the case of the Venetian dissident Sarpi, concentrated on the relative success with which the immediately post-Conciliar popes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries realized that potential, by extending Roman supervision of local Church affairs. In fact, however, such application of Curial oversight was hardly easy or rapid even in the Italian peninsula, let alone beyond its confines. The example of the offshore islands of Sicily and Sardinia is an immediate reminder of the more serious obstacles in the way of reimposing papal direction of ecclesiastical life. They derived not from episcopal independence or the insubordination of a dissident friar so much as from the political might of secular rulers, in the case of the Italian lands at this date that of Spain specifically. Catholic governments, whether Habsburg or subsequently Bourbon, just like the lesser powers of the Venetian Republic or Tuscany under the restored Medici dukes, pursued their own ambitions to influence in one degree or another the local life of the Church. Such policies were effectively Erastian, even if that term was itself derived from the articulation of state claims to religious supremacy within the Protestant world.

The political as well as purely military impotence of the papacy, by contrast, was already a commonplace soon after the Council, and was not substantially affected by momentary concern aroused for instance by the addition of Ferrara to the papal states at the end of the sixteenth century. Neither Venetian nor other commentators needed to await the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 in order to discern this impotence. Yet the papacy’s at least partial commitment to the Tridentine ideal of Church reform contributed to that weakness, in as much as secular revenue raised in the papal states was increasingly to replace some relinquished sources of ecclesiastical income which had previously supported the work of the Roman Curia for example.⁴ The revised form of Prodi’s interpretation of papal history accepts that in early modern Europe secular rulers, including Catholic rulers, were successfully inverting earlier papal claims when they in turn asserted supremacy within their states in all things spiritual as well as temporal. Yet on this interpretation the papacy’s response to such a tendency was already distinctive, when the incipient separatism evident both in the evolution of Conciliar theory and in other ways in later medieval Western Christendom was met by an increasing clericalization of the papacy’s central administration. Here a need for greater clarity might be felt, for it might be asked just when exactly that clericalization became evident, and whether it appeared in the offices of the Roman Curia generally or precisely in the government of the papal states.

That papal ambition in the wake of schism and the related development of Conciliarism was to recover a firm territorial basis in central Italy may more readily be agreed. The constitutions for the March of Ancona devised by Cardinal Albornoz in 1357 were confirmed for the whole of the papal states by the revisions of Sixtus IV, especially those of 1478. In the form revised by Cardinal Pio da Carpi on the eve of the Tridentine era they were confirmed in 1544 by Paul III. But while the achievements of Albornoz can be viewed as a new start in papal rule, rather than as just one step in its evolution, his constitutions already used legatine authority to legislate on secular and essentially ecclesiastical questions alike within the territories concerned: that was not an innovatory clericalization effected by Pio da Carpi, whatever the complaints of bishops at the Council of Trent about the interference of papal governors in diocesan management. Detailed work on the constitutions, which in theory were to remain in force for centuries, despite Revolutionary and Napoleonic interruption, has suggested that they were never in fact applied with perfect uniformity throughout all parts of the papal states however, and this Prodi’s revised views allow.⁵ They also accept that this imperfect application was in part the result of papal concern to avoid giving further examples, to secular rulers elsewhere in Catholic Europe, of the reduction of ecclesiastical rights and especially of clerical immunities in the interests of temporal government. Instead of a perfect subordination of ecclesiastical priorities to the necessities of temporal rule in the papal states, then, Prodi discerns a ‘mixed’ result, in which the move to centralized government was halted and gave way to greater clericalization of that government.

Clericalization of office was thus not a symptom and fulfilment of centralization after all, but a paradoxic mutation of papal evolution. That this was as ‘anachronistic’ as is asserted may yet be doubted, for cardinal ministers of state and clerical diplomats were not exactly conspicuous by their absence from other parts of Catholic Europe, whether in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France and Spain, or the seventeenth-century vice-regal administration of Naples and Sicily for example. All the same, the rise of lay letrados in Spain might also allow a doubt as to whether the clericalization of papal bureaucracy in the period from Trent to the French Revolution was so simply or certainly a block to the creation of a lay middle-class, capable of wealth generation, in central Italy. The evolution of the papal principality was, it can be argued, anomalous, and contained ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Chronological Table
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Bishop of Rome
• 3 Metropolitan initiative and provincial reaction
• 4 Primatial leadership and Italian problems
• 5 Patriarchal authority in Western Europe and political obstacles
• 6 The Supreme Pontiff
• 7 ‘The Papal Prince’
• 8 Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Select Bibliography
• Glossary
• Map 1: Italy in 1564
• Map 2: Political divisions during the eighteenth century
• Index