Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Here is where geographic proximity is everything. If you’re far from Rome—when you’re Denmark or Iceland, and the pope is all the way over there—the way you interact with him is that occasionally an incredibly impressive papal legate will visit. There’ll be vast pomp and circumstance, and the city will rename a street in honor of the fact that somebody sent by the pope has visited. He has this great power to say yes or no to petitions, and different countries have been trying to petition for specific things for ages, and the pope’s legate is here to interview the emperor, to judge whether the queen can be queen or not, and it feels like a big deal, and the pope is very abstract. It’s easy to have a lot of respect for that pope, because what do you see that pope do? You see that pope in pomp and circumstance. You see that pope make judgments about fates of popes and kings. You see that pope put out papal bulls and edicts that give theological answers to questions. You see that pope exercise judgment of life or death over people at a distance. He’s very abstract, and the difference between one pope and the next pope is kind of small from your perspective. You don’t see their policy differences. If you’re in Italy, the pope is that asshole who went to college with your brother and beat him up when they were at college, and then was drunken and irresponsible at middle age, and you’ve been negotiating with him in these other jobs, and you know this jerk. You know his family. You know the other jerks who are also competitors for this. You’re allied with him, you’re not allied with him. His ancestors are allies of yours or not allies of yours. He’s a specific dude. You’re much more likely to judge a pope based on, “He’s that guy.” This is not Pope Julius II. This is Giuliano della Rovere, and I judge him based on his uncle who put him in power, and the actions of his friends, and the actions of the city he’s from. You know all of his dirty laundry. You are subject to the fact that when he moves into power, everyone who’s related to him is going to get promoted within Italy, and everybody who’s not is going to get removed from Italy. So it’s much easier for an Italian to see this pope, and it’s actually quite hard to see the papacy. That’s how you have these fascinating wars where even the cities that are hereditarily incredibly loyal to the papacy will sometimes be fighting a war against the papacy. All Italy is divided into these two factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Theoretically, what these two factions mean is that Guelph powers, Guelph families, Guelph cities believe the correct successor to the Roman emperors is the pope. The pope is the emperor. He has the right to be the ruler of Italy, and indeed of everything that was once Rome’s. He is the ultimate political and military power, and he is the rightful and only rightful overlord of Italy. . He has the right to be the ruler of Italy, and indeed of everything that was once Rome’s. He is the ultimate political and military power, and he is the rightful and only rightful overlord of Italy. The Ghibellines believe that in 800 AD, when Charlemagne conquered a bunch of stuff and made the empire that we now refer to as the Holy Roman Empire, when the Pope crowned Charlemagne, he delegated the political and military side of his authority to that emperor, and made himself the spiritual authority, but the emperor the political and temporal authority. Therefore, the rightful ruler of Italy is the emperor, the successors of Charlemagne. These are the two factions for which these parties fought originally, 300 years ago. These days, what these factions actually mean is, “Those jerks murdered Uncle Tybalt, and we will never forgive them.” They are the team that is our enemy, and we are this team. They are that team, and we hate them. We want to crush them because they want to crush us. This means that sometimes a pope will be elected who’s from a hereditarily Ghibelline family, and the pope will start promoting people from the anti-papal faction, and the pro-papal faction will unite against the pope. It makes no rational sense until we remember that they are serving the pope abstractly. So you get multiple situations where there’s a war between Rome and Florence over the fact that Florence wants to defend papal authority in papal lands against the pope itself, because that individual pope was from the anti-papal faction. Do they not believe that he is the vicar of Christ on Earth? It makes sense in a normal political state for you to think, “I believe in America, but I don’t like the president,” or something. But isn’t the pope supposed to be…?…

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