In the first part of this essay I argued that for any religion to progress beyond the primitive and pantheistic stages of development – and hence provide a possible solution to the problem of death – it had to devise a coherent theological cosmology explaining both why we are here – in this corporeal world in which death would appear to be our ineluctable fate – and how we might attain something more enduring, thereby not only imbuing our time here on earth with purpose, but creating a shared moral universe in which all those who inhabit it – both mortal or immortal – have meaningful roles, along with a meaningful relationship.
I then went on to explain how, as a result of a set of complex historical circumstances stretching back hundreds of years, a religion emerged in the middle east which inherited elements from two such cosmologies: one from Judaism, the other from Zoroastrianism.
The Judaic element in this cosmology was the idea of original sin: the belief that we are here on this earth as punishment, either for our disobedience in acquiring the knowledge of good and evil which God had explicitly forbidden us, or for the loss of innocence which the acquisition of this knowledge necessarily wrought upon us, leading us to discover both sex and procreation, with the result that we consequently had to die, our becoming human – and therefore mortal – being both our crime and our punishment.
The Zoroastrian element then concerned the two possible destinations for which we are bound after death, the more desirable of these being the ‘House of Song’ or paradise, where an eternity of endless delights awaits us, the alternative being the ‘House of Lies’, or hell, where we will be subjected to perpetual and everlasting torment.
While both of these fundamental theological building blocks thus have their unpleasant and even rather disturbing aspects – designed, in one way or another, to frighten human beings into better behaviour – the important thing to note about both of them is that separately and in their original contexts they were not sufficiently disturbing to undermine the religion itself. Both Judaism and Zoroastrianism survived intact for millennia with these cosmological elements at their hearts. Yes, hell was terrifying. But without the concept of original sin, Zoroastrians believed that they were living this mortal life as a test rather than a punishment. As long as they lived a good and honest life, based on Zoroastrian moral principles which placed a particular emphasis on telling the truth, they had every reason to at least hope, therefore, that they would be admitted into heaven.
And the situation was similar for Jews. Yes, they were aware of their inherent sinfulness, which is a significant burden to carry. But not only did they have a whole stack of books full of rules telling them how to avoid sin, but without a concept of hell, the odd slip here and there didn’t put them in mortal danger, especially as they had ritualised procedures for getting their sins expunged should divine punishment in the form of disease or misfortune prove this necessary.
Take these two concepts out of their original contexts, however, and put them together, and what you get is something completely different. For having been expelled from paradise for the sin of becoming human, and having been condemned to live in sin every day of our lives simply as a result of our fallen state and the biological functions of our corporeal bodies, then, all things being equal, the chances of us being restored to paradise after we die are somewhat remote. Indeed, the logic here would seem to suggest that we have been placed in the worst moral universe one could possibly imagine: one in which the mere act of being born condemns us to eternal damnation.
In fact, so bad is it that it is to be doubted whether any religion which put forward such a cosmology would win any followers at all. And yet this is precisely what Christianity did, overcoming this seemingly insurmountable impediment to its existence by adding two further concepts of its own to the cosmological mix.
The first of these was the forgiveness of sins: an idea based on the aforementioned Judaic practice of ritual cleansing or purification, which in its new Christian context did not just result in absolution in this life, but wiped the slate clean for the next. The second was the even more important idea that, in addition to living one’s life according to Christian moral precepts, with their emphasis on kindness and consideration, all one had to do in order to be so cleansed – and thus be admitted into heaven – was to have faith in the promise of an incarnate and loving God who had this remarkable redemptive power: an idea which was all the more inviting in that it demanded so little of us in the face of this otherwise dreadful fate.
Thus it was the combination of these two things – the dreadfulness of its presented moral universe and the invitingness of its proposed solution – that was really the key to Christianity’s success: a success made all the more certain by the further belief that it was only through faith in our ‘Saviour’ that the horrors of hell could be avoided, thereby placing a moral obligation on the faithful to spread the ‘good news’ as widely as possible, so that others might be ‘saved’.
Having thus ensured that the new religion was destined to become the most proselytic in history, its rapid expansion was also facilitated by the fact that it was largely organic, the first evangelists – mostly the disciples, themselves – simply going out and spreading the word without reference to any central or governing body. They in turn then inspired multiple followers of their own, such that the whole enterprise continually branched out in an ever growing fractal pattern with no organising principle other than that created by the simple act of going out and planting the seed of a new but essentially identical Christian community elsewhere.
This also made the overall structure of the early church extremely flat, with no formal hierarchy. For while it is likely that individual churches discovered fairly early on that they needed some form of leadership, thereby giving rise to a common internal structure overseen by an episcopus – the title being derived from the Greek epí, meaning ‘over’, and skopós, meaning ‘watcher’, ‘lookout’ or ‘guardian’ – each episcopus or bishop, along with the church he represented, was largely autonomous: a fact which actually raises the question as to how these bishops were chosen.
I say this because while it is traditionally believed that leadership of the church, along with the title of ‘Pope’ and the right to appoint bishops has always been vested in the bishops of Rome – their primacy being based on an unbroken line of succession stretching back to St. Peter himself – there is no historical evidence that the early bishops of Rome played any such role, the relationships between individual churches being largely collegial, with any differences in the status of their bishops arising from the esteem in which they were held by their colleagues. In fact, the very absence of any overarching authority can be seen in the problems to which this occasionally gave rise and the solutions which the church was consequently forced to devise in order to overcome them.
One of the best examples of just such a problem – and of the institution that was created to solve it – occurred in the early 4th century, when a minor cleric called Arius in the diocese of Alexandria put forward the seemingly quite reasonable proposition that, being the Son of God, Jesus must therefore have been created by God, who must therefore have existed prior to his son’s existence. Quite reasonable, you might say. The problem was that this not only diminished the status of the being upon whom the whole of Christianity had been built, making him something of a minor or second-order deity, but, in so doing, it also threatened to create a hierarchical pantheon in heaven, which had more than a whiff of paganism about it.
Apart from the apparent impossibility of faulting Arius’ logic, the church’s real problem in all this, however, was that it had no internal structure or mechanism for resolving such a dispute, and no one with the authority to adjudicate it. This meant that the debate just dragged on and on, with the arguments becoming ever more heated until a major schism seemed almost inevitable, alarming not just church leaders but the Emperor Constantine as well, who feared that a division in the church could lead to a division of the empire: something he just couldn’t let happen, especially as he had only just finished reuniting it after it had been divided in two on the retirement of the Emperor Diocletian.
Whatever his personal religious beliefs, therefore, Constantine decided that if the church didn’t have the institutional structures necessary to resolve its problem, he’d have to lend it the weight of his own imperial authority, doing so by inviting all of the church’s 1,800 bishops to what was to become the its first ever ecumenical council, held at the emperor’s lakeside palace outside the city of Nicaea, in the province of Bithynia in north-west Turkey.
As it turned out, only an estimated 250 to 318 bishops were actually able to make the journey, with the most notable absentee being Silvester I, Bishop of Rome. Even had he attended the council, however, he would not have been the most senior figure present. That honour would still have fallen to the venerable Bishop of Alexandria, Alexander, who, even before his death, was regarded as something of a saint.
With respect to other notable figures in attendance, Alexander was accompanied by his protégé and future successor, Athanasius, who, given his later writings on the subject, was almost certainly responsible for formulating if not actually delivering many of the arguments against Arius’ position. On the other side of the aisle, arguments in support of Arius were presented by Theognus of Nicaea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, who also gave the opening address, while overall chairmanship of the proceedings fell to Hosius of Cordoba, the Emperor’s close adviser throughout the conference and a renowned diplomat, who, by all accounts, had his job cut out for him from the very first day of the debate when it became immediately apparent that the two sides were still a long way apart.
In fact, the arguments in the first few plenary sessions became so heated that, during one of them, the man held responsible, Arius, is said to have been struck in the face by the Bishop of Myra. It was here, however, that Hosius really shone. For realising that the argument, like most theological arguments, was really about language, he spent the next month tirelessly going between the two sides trying to develop a form of words on which a clear majority of the bishops could agree, his eventual formulation expressing what we now know as the Holy Trinity: a concept which both preserved the distinctiveness of its three elements – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – along with the relationships between them, while uniting them as aspects or expressions of the same eternal godhead, thereby eliminating any question of priority.
In fact, so successful was Hosius’ diplomatic initiative that by 19th June 325 AD he had managed to get all but two of the council’s members to sign one of the most important documents in the history of Christianity – the Nicene Creed – the two dissenting voices being two bishops from Cyrenaica (Libya), Arius’s own home province, who, along with Arius, himself, were condemned as heretics and exiled to the Illyrian frontier, where, as luck would have it, they just so happened to come across a recently arrived migrant people from northern Germany called the Goths, who they duly converted to Christianity – Arian Christianity – an outcome made all the more ironic by the fact that it would be these same Goths who would invade Italy and sack Rome less than a century later.
The more profound and long term effects of the Council of Nicaea, however, lay in what the church learnt from it, the first of these seminal lessons being that of how to solve what were almost invariably political problems through negotiation and compromise based on ever more abstruse theological arguments, which, in the years ahead, were to gradually bury the once simple ideas at the heart of Christianity under a mountain of contrived and, at times, almost unintelligible sophistry. The second and more practical discovery was that of an institutional forum for arriving at such political compromises, whether this be held under imperial patronage or convened on the basis of collegial consensus, as in the case of the next major council to be held, that of the Synod of Hippo, which was convened by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in 393 AD, ostensibly to decide which texts should be included in the official Christian canon but was actually more about which texts should be excluded.
This was because, by this time, there was a large number of nominally Christian texts in circulation which not only contained ideas that were deemed to be inconsistent with orthodox Christian teaching but were also thought to be of dubious provenance: a suspicion which was both aroused and, in many cases, vindicated by the way in which many of these documents came about.
I say this because, in its very early years, Christianity was almost entirely spread by word of mouth, in what is usually referred to as an oral tradition. Most oral traditions, however, are almost entirely story based. For stories, with their narrative structure, are easy to remember. What is far more difficult to remember is what someone actually said on a particular occasion or what arguments were put forward during a particular discussion, especially when the participants in this discussion – those who have first-hand memories of it – start to die out. For this then places the tradition solely in the hands of people who only have second-hand memories, who remember what they were told someone said, but do not remember the person actually saying it: an inherently weaker form of memory in that it lacks the associated mnemonic props, such as a visual memory, for instance, of the occasion on which the discussion occurred, with which first-hand memories are buttressed. The result is that, at this point, in any oral tradition, non-narrative elements start to be forgotten or misremembered and hence corrupted. And it was at this point in Christianity’s history, therefore – sometime in the late 40s – when it started to be realised that the first-hand memories of the disciples would soon be lost, that the first Christian documents started to be written.
What is highly distinctive about all of these early documents, however, is that, because the biographical or narrative details of Jesus’ life were still easy to remember, they were almost entirely omitted. In fact, most of these early documents, in their original form, were just collections of sayings and conversations, with hardly any contextual narrative at all. Written purely to record and hence preserve Jesus’ teachings, they were more works of reference than works of literature. The problem was that when the synoptic gospels started to be copied and circulated in the middle to late 60s, these earlier documents inevitably started to look a bit thin, with the result that later editors, for whatever reason, decided to flesh them out a bit more by adding more contextual detail.
In fact, two of the best examples of this can actually be found in the synoptic gospels themselves. For the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ and the ‘Sermon on the Plain’, which are presented in the gospels of Matthew and Luke respectively as single sermons delivered by Jesus on single occasions, are almost certainly edited versions of just such an early collection of sayings, the original version of which is no longer extant but is referred to by biblical scholars as ‘Source Q’.
This, in itself, however, highlights one of the two negative consequences to which this practice of incorporating these early collections of saying and conversations into later narrative accounts of Jesus’ life gave rise. For by treating them merely as source documents, very few of them were copied and preserved in their own right, with the result that very few of them survive in their original form today. Worse still, very few of the attempts to ‘improve’ them by embedding them within some kind of narrative structure were as successful as the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In fact, many of them were so crudely botched that it is hardly any wonder that there was a widespread movement to have them suppressed. One of the worst examples, for instance, is ‘The Secret Book of James’, in which what seem to be randomly selected sayings are woven into what is supposed to be a conversation between the risen Christ and Peter and James, most of which makes absolutely no sense at all and was therefore quite rightly regarded as entirely spurious by many churchmen of the period.
The problem, however, was that no one at the time actually understood how these documents had evolved. Eusebius of Caesarea, for instance, an early historian of Christianity, thought that they were fictions deliberately fabricated by heretics in order to spread disinformation: a characterisation which quite naturally gave rise to an atmosphere of suspicion in which any document that was regarded as even slightly strange or different was more or less tarred with the same brush, including, for instance, the ‘Gospel of Thomas’, which, dating from around 47 AD, is one of the earliest Christian texts still in existence and is almost certainly entirely genuine. For while it, too, is largely a collection of sayings and conversation, unlike ‘The Secret Book of James’, it does not appear to have been subjected to any later editing except for the insertion of a short opening prologue. Even more importantly, most of the recorded sayings and conversations not only make perfect sense but are often very profound, if not quite in the way we have come to expect from Christian writings.
Take, for instance, Jesus’ humorous pronouncement at the very beginning of the book where he tells his disciples not to seek the Kingdom [of God] in the heavens because the birds will get there first, advising them, instead, that they should seek it in themselves, the implication being that it is through our own thoughts and deeds that we create a better world: an idea which I suspect many people today would find quite congenial, but which I also suspect most of the bishops attending the Synod of Hippo would have found highly disturbing. For by talking about the Kingdom of God in this figurative or metaphorical way, Jesus is clearly undermining the literal interpretation, not just of Judaic theological cosmology, but of all theological cosmology.
Something similar could also be said about the conversation between Jesus and Peter which appears towards the end of the book, in which Peter is clearly very angry with Jesus for spending so much time with Mary Magdalene, not because of any impropriety, but because she is a woman and because Jews at that time did not believe that women had souls, thus making any time Jesus spent talking to her a waste of time. In fact, judging by Peter’s tone, it is almost as if he feels that Jesus is making himself – and thus, by association, his disciples – look foolish by lavishing so much attention on an empty vessel. And given Judaic beliefs at that time, this makes perfect sense. Indeed, it is almost further evidence of the book’s authenticity. It is Jesus’ response, however, that is slightly unexpected. For instead of directly questioning Peter’s premise, which would have made the argument one about whether or not women have souls – and therefore one of putative fact – he turns it into a moral argument by making what initially seems like a rather odd assertion: that by talking to Mary like a man, he makes her a man. What he almost certainly means by this, however, is that by treating her as an equal, he makes her an equal, the implication this time being that any deficiency Peter perceives in Mary does not have its origin in her but in Peter’s attitude towards her: a view with which I suspect most people today would again concur, but one which would have been equally alien to the bishops gathered in Hippo.
From beginning to end, the ‘Gospel of Thomas’ is thus unlike any other Christian text you will have read. Not only is it far more Jewish, with Jesus’ disciples invariably addressing him as ‘Master’ – the literal meaning of the word ‘rabbi’ – but it also depicts relations within the group as being far less harmonious than is portrayed elsewhere. In fact, at times, Jesus even comes across as slightly cantankerous, displaying flashes of irritation when his dim-witted students fail to get the point of what he is trying to teach them.
There is, however, a very good reason for this. For as I hope is evident from the two examples above, what really makes the ‘Gospel of Thomas’ so distinctive is that it continually presents Jesus as trying to get his disciples to think outside of their current mind-set: something which it is notoriously difficult to get people to do, not only because one first has to get them to recognise that they do, in fact, inhabit a particular a way of thinking – one which has been shaped by their background and education and has almost certainly left them with numerous false assumptions and prejudices – but because this, in itself, almost invariably involves presenting them with an alternative mind-set, one which may well seem totally unintelligible to the recipients on first hearing and which therefore requires a conceptual or imaginative leap on the part of the recipients themselves. For it is only when we have made this conceptual leap and caught our first glimpse of an alternative way of looking at the world that we begin to understand that such alternative perspectives are indeed possible. And it is only when we have grasped this, and have hence attained a kind of meta-perspective, that we can begin to examine our own prior way of looking at the world critically.
For the teacher, therefore, the most fundamental step in this whole process – as well as the most difficult – is that of sparking that first glimmer of understanding: an almost magical moment of recognition on the part of the student, which, being largely out of the teacher’s hands, is never of course assured, but is given its best chance of happening if the teacher has one all-important quality, that of being good with words, especially when the ideas to be conveyed – as in this case – are both abstract and extremely subtle, thus requiring very fine distinctions to be drawn. And it is in this regard that Jesus would have faced his greatest challenge. For even today, with all the resources of a specialist language developed over centuries at our disposal, teaching moral philosophy – or any kind of philosophy for that matter – is still fairly difficult. For a native Aramaic speaker of the 1st century AD, however, with a total vocabulary of less than three thousand words available to him, it would have been more than just difficult: it would have been excruciatingly so. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the level of intellectual effort required to come up with all those parables, riddles, overstretched metaphors and other linguistic devices to which he was forced to resort in order to get his ideas across, and correspondingly easy to imagine, therefore, the frustration he must have felt when, for all his efforts, his disciples still repeatedly failed to grasp what he was trying to impart.
As accurate a portrayal of a teacher ahead of his time as it is, it is precisely for this reason, however, that the ‘Gospel of Thomas’ was never going to receive any serious consideration by the Synod of Hippo. For even if the 4th century church hadn’t been suspicious of any purported gospel which failed to mention Jesus’ virgin birth, his crucifixion or his subsequent resurrection, this depiction of him as a frustrated, cantankerous rabbi struggling to find ways to express himself was wholly incompatible with the iconic figure whom the church had only just recently declared to be the incarnate expression of an indivisible and eternal deity. Even more to the point, the last thing the church wanted at this stage in its history was a form of Christianity that was still seen as inchoate, half-formed and hovering on the margins of what it was possible to say. For having finally attained a position of something approaching unassailability within a civilization in which it had been largely marginalised for the first three hundred years of its existence, what it now wanted was an expression of itself that was fully articulated, unambiguous and authoritative. And anything that didn’t meet this requirement simply had to go.
In attempting to forge this new, confident identity for itself, however, what the church – or at least its senior management as represented at the Synod – failed to recognise was the continuing looseness of its underlying structure, with many independently-minded dioceses still determined to go their own way, including the diocese of Rome, which again hadn’t deigned to send anyone to this latest international gathering: an act of apparent disregard which was soon to have serious ramifications. For unbeknownst to the Synod of Hippo, an internal council of the Church of Rome – to which no outsiders had been invited – had already met in 382 to discuss the question of which texts should be included in the Christian canon and had unilaterally decided to accept a list put forward by the aforementioned Athanasius in his annual Easter letter to the church of 367: a list which, given Athanasius’ status and position – as the closest thing the church had to a supreme pontiff at any point during the 4th century – many clergymen were inclined to accept as the final word on the matter. Without feeling the need for further consultation, the Bishop of Rome at that time, Damasus I, had therefore simply gone ahead and hired a scholar and linguist called Jerome of Stridon to translate the texts on Athanasius’ list from Greek into Latin, thereby setting the decision of the Roman diocese, if not in stone, then at least in ink and parchment.
Not, of course, that this necessarily put the Church of Rome at conflict with the church at large, not least because the Synod of Hippo had also considered Athanasius’ list and, in the end, had merely added a couple of books to it, thus making the Church of Rome’s selection a subset of the official canon. Given that the synod’s primary concern was to determine which books were to be excluded as heretical rather than which books were to be compulsory, there was thus no real issue of substance between them, especially as, at the time of commissioning, it was not intended that Jerome’s translation should be used outside of the Roman diocese, its purpose being merely to update and ultimately replace the Vetus Latina or Vetus Italia which the Church of Rome had been using up until this point.
That’s not to say, however, that there wasn’t a problem. For not only did Rome’s unilateral action clearly undermine the authority of the wider church as represented by a conclave of its bishops, but it also set in train something over which no one, it seems – other than Jerome himself – had any real or effective control.
I say this because, after Damasus’ death, just two years into the project, it seems that Jerome was more or less left to get on with it on his own, enjoying a degree of scholarly freedom which, to the reserved and unassuming linguist was probably quite agreeable, but which almost inevitably led to what I can only describe as a classic case of mission creep. For as soon as he had finished translating the twenty-seven books on Athanasius’ list, on his own initiative, he then turned his attention to the Septuagint: a collection of Judaic texts which had been translated from Hebrew into Greek by Jewish converts to Christianity during the 1st century, their purpose being to give their gentile colleagues both a deeper appreciation of the Judaic tradition of which Jesus was a part and a better understanding of what Jesus was either denouncing or commending in his references to scripture.
While the Septuagint was therefore regarded as almost essential reading by most churchmen – and was approved by the Synod of Hippo on this basis – this did not mean, however, that the books it contained were at this stage actually considered Christian. Indeed, even in the 4th century, there was still quite a lot of ambivalence about their status. For while Christianity could be seen as growing out of Judaism, it could also be seen as superseding it, especially as many of its sacred texts clearly contained ideas that were incompatible with Christian teaching, including the Book of Daniel, for instance, which describes the End of Days, the Day of Judgement and the coming of the Kingdom of God, which are all clearly inconsistent with Christianity’s Zoroastrian cosmology of heaven and hell.
Not that this would have been a problem had the two sets of texts – the Christian and the Judaic – remained separate. After all, it is perfectly possible to have books containing contradictory ideas in the same library. Nor was there anything inherently problematic about Jerome producing a Latin translation of these Judaic texts. For given that there was already a Greek translation of them, why not a Latin one? Indeed, this was probably the way in which Jerome’s superiors in the Church of Rome regarded his continued work on the project long after he’d completed the original commission. What this perfectly natural view of the situation did not take into account, however, was Jerome’s meticulous perfectionism: a highly commendable attribute which can be seen throughout his work, but which now forced the church – and, indeed, Christianity itself – in a direction no one had ever consciously decided it should to take.
For comparing the Greek translations of the Judaic texts in the Septuagint with the Hebrew originals, Jerome realised that, having been translated by Jews in the 1st century – at a time when most Jewish converts to Christianity regarded Christianity as the fulfilment of Judaic prophesy – many of these translations had been deliberately skewed to bring the texts into line with this interpretation. Wanting his own translations to be more authentic, he therefore decided that, wherever possible, he would not use the Greek translations in the Septuagint, but base his work entirely on the Hebrew originals, thereby adding considerably to both the size and difficultly of his task, not least because, in many cases, the original Hebrew texts were simply not available, forcing him to make translations from other languages. There were two books, for instance, those of Tobit and Judith, which he actually translated from Aramaic.
Along with his translations of Athanasius’ selected texts, the result was a monumental achievement: one of the greatest pieces of scholarship of all time, which it took him eighteen years to complete. And therein lay the problem. For everyone who saw it, touched it and realised what he’d done, was so impressed, not just by the quality of his work, but by the sheer magnitude of what he had brought into being that they naturally saw in it the hand of God, making it inevitable, therefore, that it would be repeatedly copied and that each copy would be bound into a single codex, the bound copies bearing the title of Biblia Vulgata: the first ever bible.
Despite the monumental nature of the achievement, the fact remains, however, that no one actually authorised it. Indeed, it wasn’t officially sanctioned by the church until the Council of Trent in the 16th century, more than a thousand years later, while in the meantime it had received numerous criticisms from other theologians, most notably Augustine, who particularly objected to the prologues which Jerome had written for each of the individual books, thereby providing them with a unifying context, which is precisely, of course, what made the whole thing so problematic. For by combining the twenty-seven books on Athanasius’ list with almost the whole of the Tanakh, and publishing them together in a single volume, Jerome had not only unilaterally incorporated more or less all of Judaism into Christianity, he had also created a new iconic entity – the ‘Holy Bible’ – which people very quickly began to venerate in itself, believing it to be the word of God and therefore true in every word, even when the Judaic and Christian parts of it clearly contradicted each other, thereby providing even more problems for later theologians to explain away.
What this whole story of the Vulgate most tellingly illustrates, however, is just how disorganised, uncoordinated and anarchic the early church truly was, with no universally recognised authority to exert overall control over it and certainly no Pope. In fact, the first Bishop of Rome who is recorded as acting in anything like a papal capacity was Innocent I (401 to 417), who, among other papal-like actions, issued formal judgements on disciplinary matters referred to him by the Bishop of Rouen, confirmed the prerogatives of the Archbishop of Thessalonica, and frequently acted as a general arbitrator in ecclesiastical disputes whenever they arose. What most distinguished him from his predecessors, however, was the fact that he was the incumbent Bishop of Rome when the Goths besieged and sacked the city during the summer of 410, and was consequently there to minister to its traumatised inhabitants when the invaders finally left, thereby not only earning for himself the undying affection of his congregation, but establishing a pattern which was to be repeated numerous times over the next four centuries, as wave after wave of migrating peoples poured through the rapidly disintegrating Roman defences on the Rhine and the Danube, driven in part by the existence of other migrating peoples at their backs, but ultimately by a force of nature far more persuasive than any human threat: climate change.
In fact, the Roman Empire had already had a brief taste of this during the 3rd century AD when a short period of climatic cooling had reduced crop yields and forced up food prices, starting an inflationary cycle which, in turn, led to a series of military coups. This was because a decline in the agricultural economy also led to fall in tax revenues, which meant that by the middle of the century, Roman soldiers had not had an increase in their stipendium for thirty years – since the reign of the Emperor Caracalla (198-217) in fact – with the result that those who had not already taken to stealing from the populations they were nominally stationed to protect, were living in a state of near destitution. They did, however, have one other source of income to which they could resort if necessary: a donative paid to every soldier on the succession of a new Emperor, which, given the army’s grievances, now became ever more frequent, as a series of ambitious generals on the Rhine and the Danube received ever more enthusiastic backing from their men in return for promises of better pay and conditions. The result was that, compared to the 82 years between 98 and 180 AD, when the empire was arguably at its height and had just four emperors – Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius – the 68 years between the death of Caracalla in 217 and the installation of Diocletian in 285 saw the coming and going of 77 emperors, whom I won’t even try to list.
In the end, it took all of Diocletian’s ruthless ingenuity to put a stop to this cycle of anarchy and decline, which, after trying a number of other solutions – such as the imposition of price controls and the minting of a new gold coin called the Aureus – all of which failed, he eventually achieved by shifting the basis of taxation from money to goods, such that cobblers, for instance, had to pay their taxes in army boots rather than coin, while farmers had to pay theirs in grain and olive oil, much of which went directly to the army to be distributed to the men as an additional stipendium, thereby not only improving the soldiers’ conditions but rendering redundant the very natural inclination of many producers to put up their prices to pay their taxes. With the army at least now adequately fed and shod, and the cycle of military coups thus brought to an end, this also meant that the treasury didn’t have to mint more coins every few months to pay another donative, thus bringing the money supply under control. Even more significantly, the climate now began to warm again, boosting agricultural production and increasing price competitiveness, with the overall result that by the time Diocletian retired in 305 – the only Roman Emperor to do so – inflation had been more or less eliminated.
This short period of warming, however, soon turned out to be nothing more than a brief respite in what was a very much longer cooling trend. For even before the 4th century was out, temperatures began falling once again, and went on falling for the next 150 years until they reached around 2.0°C below their high point at the end of the 2nd century, thus reducing growing seasons everywhere by between three and four weeks and rendering agriculture in places such Scandinavia and northern Germany – from whence the Goths, for instance, had originated – even more marginal than it had been before, the inevitable result being the mass migration of huge numbers of people looking for better agricultural conditions.
In fact, the Goths had already begun their journey south during the previous cooling period and had consequently reached the Danube in time to be converted to Arian Christianity sometime after 325. Like many other peoples living north of the Danube at that time, however, they were under almost continuous pressure from other migrating peoples, especially the Huns who, having originated on the Russian Steppe, owed much of their military superiority to their superb horsemanship. This, however, they were then able to amplify through a policy of subjugating all the peoples they defeated to their rule, forcing them, in fact, to join the Hunnish horde, which continually grew in size and strength accordingly until it was more or less irresistible.
In fact, there was only one notable group who managed to avoid being assimilated in this way: a small band of Goths, led by two tribal leaders, Alavivus and Fritigern, who came up with the imaginative –or perhaps merely desperate – idea of asking the Romans for permission to cross the Danube and settle in Thrace: a request which the Eastern Roman Emperor, Valens, somewhat incredibly decided to grant, believing that, as farmers and potential imperial soldiers, these northern tribesmen could be an asset to the Empire.
Even then it might not have been a total disaster had the local officials charged with facilitating the Gothic settlement actually provided them with enough land to feed themselves, or if they had not herded them into camps very similar to those in which native Americans were forced to live on reservations during the 19th century. After watching many of their elderly starve to death during their first winter – sacrificing themselves in order to save the children – the wholly predictable result was that the Goths rebelled, took over the camps from their guards and set out on raids all across the province. Valens naturally sent an army to restore order, but having had to evade the Huns for decades, the Goths were not only extremely elusive but very effective guerrilla fighters, picking off Roman patrols while avoiding any major confrontation. Watching a catastrophe unfold before his eyes – one largely of his own making – the Emperor therefore decided to take charge of the campaign himself, leading an army of around 22,000 men north from Constantinople to the city of Adrianople, where, on the 9th August 378, he finally succeeded in engaging the Goths in a pitched battle, one in which he not only lost his own life but most of his army as well.
It was, in fact, Rome’s worst military disaster since the Battle of Edessa in 260 AD, and while Valens’ successor, Theodosius, eventually came to an accommodation with the Goths, actually paying them to guard the entire Illyrian frontier to prevent any further incursions, no Byzantine emperor ever really managed to control them. In fact, by paying them to defend the border, Theodosius had actually made them the Empire’s gatekeepers, which allowed them to bring in allies who were willing to swear allegiance to them and so increase their strength. The result was that, within less than thirty years, they effectively controlled the entire Balkans, from the Adriatic in the west to the Black Sea in the east, and from the Danube in north to the mountains of Macedonia in the south. And it was from within this semi-autonomous enclave – within the empire itself – that, in 410, a splinter group, which later historians dubbed the Visigoths, were able to invade Italy without actually having to cross a single defended border.
Meanwhile, having defeated and assimilated just about every other migrating people north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, the Huns now decided on an all-out invasion of Gaul, assembling an absolutely enormous army for the task out of their various subjugated allies, which included Gepids, Goths, Sarmatians, Rugians, Scirians, Thuringians, Herulis and Alans, and which so totally overwhelmed the Roman defences on the Rhine that even though they were eventually defeated at the battle of Catalauni in 452 and quickly disintegrated as a coherent force after their leader, Attila, was killed the following year, the sheer destructive power of what they had unleashed meant that Rome’s Rhineland border was now as severely compromised as the Danube, permitting entry to almost any northern people seeking better climatic and agricultural conditions, including the Alemanni, the Frisians, the Burgundians and, of course, the Franks, who were eventually to make the whole of Gaul their own.
With the Visigoths having left Italy to eventually settle in south-western France and parts of Spain, and both Gaul and the Balkans effectively lost to an already divided empire, this now left Italy exposed on both its north-western and north-eastern borders, making it only matter of time before the Western Empire collapsed completely: an end which was finally brought about in 476, when the last Western Roman Emperor, a young boy with the imposing but entirely incongruous name of Romulus Augustus, was overthrown by his own mercenary general, an Heruli called Odoacer, who sent the deposed Emperor into exile and declared himself King of Italy.
This, however, did nothing to lessen Italy’s vulnerability. For the loss of imperial authority – and, indeed, imperial ‘mystique’ – merely attracted the closer attention of other would-be invaders, including some already fighting for possession of Gaul, but, even more significantly, the Goths of the Balkans – now generally referred to as the Ostrogoths – who despite enjoying a considerable amount of freedom under Byzantine rule, were still technically vassals of the Eastern Empire. To their charismatic leader, Theodoric, who had spent much of his childhood as a diplomatic hostage in Constantinople, a wide open Italian peninsula, ripe for the picking, therefore seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. After first forming an alliance with his Visigoth cousins in southern France – thereby enabling an allied Gothic force to launch attacks from both east and west – he then led his own army around the northern shore of the Adriatic towards Ravenna, which he established as the Gothic capital of Italy, from where he commanded a successful campaign which brought the whole of the peninsula under his control within four years.
It was the height of Gothic success. To the Eastern Emperor sitting in Constantinople, however, this sudden transformation in the Goths’ circumstances must have seemed like a nightmare. For while, in the past, the Goths had often made a nuisance of themselves, raiding shipping in the Black Sea as well as towns and villages along the Bithynian coast of northern Asia Minor, they had never really posed a threat to the empire as such. In conjunction with the Visigoths in Spain and southern France, however, they now ruled an empire of their own which stretched from the Bay of Biscay in the west to the walls of Constantinople, itself, and encompassed all of Italy in between, thereby constituting a new European superpower which, while Theodoric lived and the alliance between the two Gothic factions held, was more or less untouchable.
It was only when Theodoric died, therefore, and the alliance effectively collapsed, that any Eastern Emperor could even think about retaking Italy and thus, to some extent, restoring the Empire of old: a possibility which was probably as much a motivating factor for the Emperor Justinian, to whom the opportunity finally fell, as the Gothic threat itself. The problem facing Justinian, however, or, more accurately, his foremost general, Flavius Belisarius, to whom he had assigned the task, was that he couldn’t just follow Theodoric’s own route into Italy without first fighting his way through the Gothic forces still controlling the Balkans, and thus also alerting their Italian compatriots to his intentions. Even though it limited the size of his army to the number of men he could fit onto available troop transports, Belisarius therefore decided on an invasion by sea in the south.
And to begin with, it all went more or less to plan. Belisarius’ small army of around 20,000 men was landed in Sicily in the spring of 535 and had crossed over to the mainland and taken Naples by the end of the year. They then moved on and captured Rome the following spring, all without meeting any significant resistance. It was at this point, however, that the defects in the plan became apparent, as, within weeks, Rome was besieged by a Gothic army at least five times the size of that which Belisarius commanded. In fact, he barely had enough men to adequately man Rome’s 19 kilometres of walls, 18 main gates and 383 watchtowers, with the result that had he attempted any kind of static defence, the city would have probably fallen on the first assault. Instead, he therefore held most of his men in mobile reserves which, with great skill and tactical awareness, he was able to rapidly deploy to wherever they were needed, thereby demonstrating what a brilliant field commander he truly was.
Even so, his men would not have been able to hold back the Goths indefinitely, especially as the siege dragged on, month after month, and their numbers began to dwindle. But then, after nearly a year, with the city’s population in a state of near starvation and Belisarius’ troops severely weakened, something quite astonishing happened. For one night, for no apparent reason, the Goths just packed up and withdrew to Ravenna. In fact, so inexplicable was this turn of events that, to Belisarius’ amazed troops, it seemed like an act of God and further fuelled their belief that their general was under some kind of divine protection.
Buoyed up by a sense of their own invincibility, Belisarius was thus able to have his men back on the road again after just a few weeks’ rest: an army of significantly less than the 20,000 who had started out chasing one which was still probably five times their size. Not that Belisarius was actually in any hurry. He even allowed himself the luxury of a short detour to capture Milan before finally heading east to the Adriatic coast where, again, something quite astonishing happened. For despite the disparity in the strength of the two armies and the even more salient fact that the Gothic capital was more or less impregnable – Ravenna being surrounded by a swamp crossed by a single causeway – the Gothic king, Witiges, surrendered almost as soon as the Byzantine army arrived.
Admittedly, this was very likely due to the very generous terms Belisarius offered him. For knowing that it would be very difficult to capture the city by force – especially with such a small army – and that even to try would cost the lives of many of his men, all Belisarius demanded from the Gothic king was that he swear allegiance to Justinian and rule in Italy as a vassal of the Eastern Empire. The problem was that, while Witiges was more than happy to surrender on such terms, the other Gothic leaders were not. In fact, so disgusted with their king’s poor performance were they, both outside Rome and now in their stronghold of Ravenna, that they refused to have him as their king any longer and offered the crown to Belisarius instead, thereby ensuring that this wasn’t going to be the end of the matter. For while Belisarius was completely loyal to Justinian and had no intention of actually becoming king, in order to complete the Goths’ surrender and get inside the city – where he later arrested all the Gothic leaders – he pretended to accept their offer, thus earning Justinian’s displeasure and getting himself recalled to Constantinople, where legend has it that he was stripped of all his titles and property and had his eyes put out.
Not, of course, that this is actually what happened. For although this version of events is the one most people believe, it is entirely the fabrication of later artists and writers, including Robert Graves, who chose to depict Belisarius as a noble hero cruelly mistreated by a jealous and vindictive sovereign. The more prosaic reality, however, is that he was merely sent to the eastern frontier to see off another threat from the Persians. As soon as he left Ravenna, however, the Goths elected a new king called Totila, under whose command they quickly retook all of northern Italy and even drove the remnants of Belisarius’ army out of Rome, leaving only the south in Byzantine hands, which, under normal circumstances, would have probably forced Justinian to despatch another army if only to prevent the loss of this foothold.
Indeed, preparations were actually under way to do just that, when Europe was hit by yet another effect of climate change, or, more accurately, by another effect of the migrations to which climate change had given rise. For large scale migrations in the ancient world did not just involve human populations; they also included their livestock and other animals, along with the various pests and diseases which both the people and the animals carried, the most destructive of which in all of human history now arrived in Europe for the first time ever: bubonic plague.
Not, of course, that I am suggesting that the plague was actually brought to Europe by any of the migrating peoples I have so far mentioned. For given that Yersinia Pestis, the coccobacillus bacterium responsible for bubonic plague, is generally believed to have originated on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, any migratory phase in its spread would have taken place in central Asia. Contrary to the proponents of today’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, however, who generally assert that any previous changes in Europe’s climate were purely local affairs, there is more than enough paleo-climatological evidence to conclude that the period of atmospheric cooling which ultimately precipitated this great movement of people was, indeed, global, affecting the Han Chinese Empire as much as it affected what was left of the Roman Empire. Moreover, these two empires had long been connected by establish trade routes, with silk, cotton, spices and gemstones being imported into Europe, either via Perisa and the Euphrates and Orontes rivers, or by way of India, the Red Sea and the Nile. Whenever the migratory phase of Yersinia Pestis’ dispersal from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau occurred, therefore, the chances are that it crossed paths with or even followed one of these trade routes.
In fact, given the place where the very distinctive symptoms of bubonic plague were first reported in the Roman world – a small town on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast called Pelusium – we can be fairly sure that it took the southern route, being carried on board a ship from India to the port of Berenice on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, from where it would have been taken across the desert to Coptos, loaded onto a dhow and sailed down the Nile to Alexandria, just a few miles from Pelusium.
How this transportation was actually effected – whether it involved flea-infested rats nesting in bales of silk, for instance, or a chain of human infection along the way – is, of course, impossible to say. What we do know is that from Pelusium – or more probably Alexandria, itself – it then spread very quickly throughout the Mediterranean, arriving in Constantinople in 542, where it raged for four months killing around 300,000 people out of an estimated population of half a million, thereby explaining, at least in part, why so many bad and patently untrue things are said about Justinian. For as Emperor at the time he was quite naturally blamed for the disaster, this first visitation of Yersinia Pestis even being widely known as ‘Justinian’s Plague’.
It also explains why it took him nine years to send another army to Italy after Belisarius’ recall and why this second conquest was so much easier than the first. For this first outbreak of the plague did not, of course, stop at Constantinople. It reached Italy, Gaul, Spain and even Britain the following year, killing roughly 60% of all the populations infected. For never having encountered this bacterium before, Europeans had virtually no immunity to it, making it something of a wonder, indeed, that even 40% survived. What is also quite astonishing is the fact that when this first outbreak receded and Justinian finally got around to sending another army to Italy, he was actually able to raise 100,000 men for the task.
What this also indicates is that, although records of the 6th century plague are rather thin outside of the old Roman Empire, it must have ravaged the Goths in the Balkans as severely as it did the populations for which better records have survived. For had Justinian had to send this second army by sea, as in Belisarius’ case, it could not have been this large. Moreover, we know as a matter of record that this second invasion force actually marched through the Balkans and around the northern end of the Adriatic almost unopposed. And it was more or less the same in Italy, itself, where the Goths were finally defeated at the battle of Nuceria in 552: a totally one-sided affair which more or less eliminated them as a military force.
If Justinian or anyone else thought that this would be the end of the matter, however, and that Italy would now be permanently restored to a unified Roman Empire, they hadn’t taken into account the complex transmission cycle of the Yersinia Pestis bacterium and its consequent ability to suddenly reappear as if out of nowhere. Which is precisely what happened in both Italy and Gaul in 571, further decimating populations which still hadn’t fully recovered from the plague’s first onslaught. Nor did it stop there. In Gaul, it struck three more times in the two decades leading up to 590, at which point it also returned to Italy.
The extent of the devastation is hard to imagine. What few first-hand accounts have survived speak most tellingly of the silence: of whole villages and even towns empty and overgrown, their streets roamed by wild animals. One of the most shocking statistics I have come across – so shocking, indeed, I’m not sure I completely believe it – concerns Rome, itself, which had once had a population of more than a million, but which was now reduced to around just 10,000 inhabitants.
It is the sheer enormity of the catastrophe, however, that explains why, when people think of the plague today, they almost invariably think of the Black Death, which spread across Eurasia and North Africa during the relatively short period between 1346 and 1353 killing between 75 and 200 million people. They do not think of the multiple visitations which ravaged Europe from the middle of the 6th century to the middle of the 8th and actually drove its population to the brink of extinction. For what this far greater destruction of human life also did was create a black hole in history, which we now call the Dark Ages, in which the devastation was so great that there simply weren’t enough people left to illuminate it for us. In fact, what little art and literature the period produced is almost entirely devoted to a new kind of Christianity – what one might call ‘Apocalyptic Christianity’ – which took the idea of the End of Days from the Book of Danial – a concept which, up until then, had made no sense at all in Christian context – and combined it with the Second Coming of Christ from the Book of Revelation, thereby giving rise to a wholly new concept, that of the End of the World, which, to those who lived through it, is almost certainly how it seemed.
The problems, however, did not end there. For this wholesale depopulation of the old Roman Empire quite naturally attracted further migrants, especially into Italy, which was now invaded once again, this time by a loose coalition of peoples from central and northern Europe far more destructive of Rome’s ancient civilization than the Goths had ever been. For while, like the Goths before them, the leaders of this confederation, the Lombards, were Arian Christians, most of the coalition, which included Saxons, Sarmatians, Herulis, Gepids and Bulgars, were still pagan. With the Byzantine imperial forces based in Ravenna decimated by the plague and unable to offer any meaningful resistance, the result was that, within no time all, the whole peninsula was overrun by people who might easily have driven Christianity out of Italy altogether, thereby ending any possibility of any future Bishop of Rome becoming the head of the church at large. In fact, the only thing that prevented this from happening – ironically enough – was yet another outbreak of the plague, which returned to Italy in 599 and now had a whole new population to feed on.
The result was an impasse or stalemate that lasted for the next 150 years, during which the Lombard confederation occupied more or less the whole of Italy with the exception of two enclaves – Ravenna and Rome – which were both too highly fortified for the plague-weakened coalition to capture: a state of affairs which was then further reinforced, both by further outbreaks of the plague, in 680 and 745, and by the fact that the Lombards, on their own, were simply not strong enough to hold their coalition together. As a result, it very quickly fragmented into a patchwork of duchies, each of which was nominally a vassal of the Lombard king, but most of which, for all practical purposes, were autonomous, thereby posing even less threat to an equally independent Rome, which, while technically a vassal of the Byzantine Empire, as represented in Italy by the Byzantine governor of Ravenna, was also, for all practical purposes, a largely independent state.
Throughout this period, this would therefore have given all Bishops of Rome a great deal of influence, especially as secular power in the city was still wielded by the old Roman Senate, which still elected two Consuls each year, each of whom would have almost certainly had less public profile and less authority than their ecclesiastical counterpart. What’s more, most Bishops of Rome were drawn from the city’s nobility or senatorial class, making the position of bishop one of de facto leadership. Given, therefore, that many of these bishops would have led their people through periods of plague, famine and war, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that, at some point, they were accorded the affectionate title of ‘Il Papa’. The idea, however, that, at any time during this period, the head of the Church of Rome could have functioned as the head of an international organisation is simply laughable. For what the Dark Ages did, more than anything else, was make the world smaller for almost everyone, especially in Italy, where the fragmentation of the country meant that most people didn’t stray far beyond their own enclaves. In fact, most people didn’t travel at all, which meant that news and information didn’t travel. Indeed, it’s probable that most people didn’t even know what was happening in the next town or village and were too scared to find out, not least because strangers were often shunned and driven off as potential plague carriers. It was only in the second half of the 8th century, therefore, when the climate started to warm again and the plague finally abated, that the world began to open up once more, thereby allowing history to start flowing again.
Not that this was initially a good thing for Rome. For as the world came to life once more and its various peoples regained their strength, the first thing the Lombards did was besiege and capture Ravenna, thereby leaving Rome without a single ally on the Italian peninsula and in a position which might well have changed the course of history. For had the Lombards also taken Rome, which seemed highly likely at the time, they would very probably have turned its church into an Arian church. It was this 400 year old sectarian division, however, which ultimately saved the city. For it allowed the then Bishop of Rome, Stephen II, to appeal to the non-Arian Frankish king, Pepin the Short, for help: an appeal to which the latter responded in 754 by invading Lombardy from the north-west, conquering all of northern Italy, and even recapturing Ravenna, which, along with a number of other captured territories, he generously donated to the Church of Rome in return for receiving the title of ‘Patrician of the Romans’.
This, however, was just the beginning of what would eventually turn out to be a world-changing relationship between the diocese of Rome and one Frankish king in particular: a relationship which started in 773, when the Duke of Milan – a man called Desiderius, who was now also the effective King of the Lombards, if not the titular King of Lombardy itself – moved against Rome once again, taking back Ravenna and many of the other captured cities given to Rome by Pepin, before marching on Rome, itself, and actually entering the city at the head of his army, the first Lombard king ever to do so. This then led to another appeal from a Bishop of Rome – this time Hadrian I – to a Frankish king – this time Pepin’s son, Charlemagne – who responded not only by taking back control of Lombardy, but by actually declaring himself king thereof, thereby rendering all of the other Italian Duchies his vassals, with the exception of Rome, which, along with the territories donated to the diocese by his father, he made independent, thereby laying the foundations of what were to become the Papal Sates.
While this therefore guaranteed the independence of Rome itself, it did not, however, change the position of Rome’s bishops, whose status was still somewhat ambiguous to say the least. Yes, they were, in most cases, the city’s de facto leaders. But the senate still officially held power. Yes, they were held in affectionate esteem by the city’s inhabitants and called ‘Il Papa’. But this did not make them leaders of a universal church.
All this, however, was now about to change, although exactly how it happened is again the stuff of legion. For it came about as a result of what seems to have been a secret pact between Charlemagne and Hadrian’s successor, Leo III: a rather exceptional individual, who, unlike most of his predecessors, was not a member of the senatorial class. In fact, he was a commoner who had worked his way up through the church’s hierarchy purely on merit: a fact which did not sit well with many of Rome’s nobility, who refused to acknowledge him as an equal, let alone as their spiritual ‘father’, and who therefore set about trying to have him removed, firstly by accusing him of adultery and perjury and then by even attempting to have him killed. On 25th April 799, during the procession of the Greater Litanies, he was actually attacked by armed men on his way to the Flaminian Gate, and was only saved when members of Charlemagne’s household came to his rescue.
Justifiably fearing for his life, he therefore asked Charlemagne for protection, which seems to have brought the two men together in a relationship which went far beyond that determined by their formal roles, not least because before Charlemagne would lend Leo his support, he needed to know that the accusations against him were false and actually made him swear to this effect in his presence. Once satisfied of Leo’s innocence, it then seems that they either saw an advantage in forming an alliance or that Charlemagne demanded something from Leo in return for his aid. Probably the latter. Either way, it is almost certain that, between them, they came up with a plan – some might even say a plot – which was ultimately brought to fruition during the celebration of Christmas in Rome on 25th December 800, when, without warning or letting anyone else in on what they were going to do, Leo placed a crown on the kneeling Charlemagne’s head and proclaimed him ‘Emperor of the Romans’, later to be known as Holy Roman Emperor.
Over the years, many myths have since grown up around this singular act and, indeed, the two men’s relationship – a bit like the legends surrounding Belisarius. It has often been said, for instance, that the they didn’t actually like each other and that Charlemagne knew nothing about what Leo was going to do. This, however, is about as credible as Justinian having Belisarius’ eyes put out. Both men were far too clever and politically astute to be party to anything which wasn’t properly planned and well thought through. Whatever pantomime they put on for public consumption, one can be fairly certain, therefore, that it was both carefully choreographed and stage-managed. The most cogent and conclusive argument in favour of this interpretation, however, is the simple fact that they both had so much to gain from it.
For Charlemagne, the primary benefit lay in legitimising his conquests, not just of Lombardy, but of Saxony, Bavaria, Carinthia and, later, even parts of northern Spain. Instead of merely being a barbarian king who took other people’s land by force of arms, he now laid legitimate claim to all the territories under his control as the rightful heir to Rome’s Imperium.
For Leo, however, the gain was even greater. For by accepting the crown from his hand, Charlemagne implicitly recognised Leo’s authority to bestow it upon him, thereby not only securing Leo’s position personally – making him more or less untouchable by the Roman nobility – but establishing the authority of his office as well, and thus the primacy of the Church of Rome among all the other churches in the new Roman Empire. Irrespective of whatever papal pretensions any previous Bishop of Rome may have had, therefore, and regardless of the fact that at some point in the future, all previous Bishops of Rome were retrospectively given the title of Pope – whether or not they ever used this title in their lifetimes or performed any of the functions associated with it – it was Leo’s act of bestowing the imperial crown on Charlemagne and Charlemagne’s act of submission in accepting it that actually created the papacy as we now know it.
Not only did this one act thus change the internal structure of the church, however – creating a hierarchy where none had previously existed – it also changed the nature of Christianity itself. For in their new expanded role as leaders of the church throughout the Holy Roman Empire – over which they needed to exert at least some control if only to prevent the title from becoming meaningless – all future Popes now not only needed a network of papal representatives in every state or country in which they expected their edicts to be adhered to, they also needed this network of representatives to be respected, supported and certainly go unharmed by the secular rulers of the states or countries in question, all of which cost money.
Over the next few centuries, as a consequence, the church was forced to continually create ever more inventive streams of income, the most significant of which – both in terms of the money it raised and in terms of effect it had upon Christianity – was the sale of indulgencies to repentant sinners wishing to reduce the amount of time they had to spend in purgatory. For in order to make this possible, of course, the church first had to create purgatory itself, thus, for the first time, altering its fundamental theological cosmology of heaven and hell. Even more importantly, however, in expanding its organisation, the church not only found itself taking an ever increasing share of society’s wealth – thus becoming more and more parasitic upon the communities it was there to serve – but it also found itself becoming more and more prey to corruption. And it was this that was its ultimate undoing, leading not just to the reformation – which was more or less inevitable once money had become the church’s principal driving force – but to everything that followed from it, including the rise of Puritanism, the revolutionary upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries, and Christianity’s own subsequent decline, as I shall endeavour to explain in ‘Death, Original Sin and The End of Western Civilization (Part III)’.
