(Mar 15, 2018 03:19 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Pope: The Most Powerful Man in History
Isn't there a TV series with that title?
Just historically, I disagree with the premise. The Pope has never been the most powerful man in history.
Emotionally speaking he probably came closest in the early Middle Ages, but in those times he lacked the organizational muscle to enforce his will. It's just that after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, people in the western part of Europe longed for what was lost and the Pope, down there in Rome, symbolized the dying echoes of that lost ancient civilization. People wanted to belong to something bigger and grander than the sordid muddy and violent village reality that they saw around them. They wanted to believe that although learning and literacy had died out around them, that somebody at the center still understood and perceived the big picture. But in those days the church wasn't a huge and tightly organized bureaucratic entity. Communications were so poor that local bishops rarely heard from the Vatican. So local bishops improvised. Kings, many of which were recently converted former pagans, did as they pleased. If the Pope didn't like what they were doing, he had little means to discipline them.
(Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings evokes the feel of this 'dark ages' period very well. Sure it's filled with fantastic magic, but that's how people in the Early Medieval period perceived the world. It was a scary uncanny world filled with unseen powers. Gondor and its remaining civilization may represent Constantinople where the ancient Roman legacy still survived. The rising power of Mordor might represent the rise of Islam.)
But the early Middle Ages wasn't a 'dark age' the world around: It saw the survival of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the rise of a new Islamic civilization (an incongruous mixture of crude dark-ages Semitic tribal sensibility and East Roman sophistication that still creates problems for Islam today). Meanwhile further east in Asia, Hindu civilization was more or less at its peak. Sanskrit literature,
huge universities (that the Muslims subsequently destroyed) and the Buddhist and
Nyaya philosophy the universities hosted flourished. China was enjoying its Tang and Sung dynasties, perhaps the pinnacle of Chinese civilization when Chinese Buddhism reached its peak and Neoconfucianism flourished, to say nothing of Chinese art.
So I'd say that during the early Middle Ages the most powerful man on Earth was probably the Chinese emperor, simply because he was absolute monarch over the largest and best organized state on the planet at the time.
During the High Middle Ages (roughly 1000-1400 CE) the recovering Western European civilization had matched Roman civilization in many ways (Gothic architecture, the medieval universities, medieval philosophy). And the Pope's power rose along with it, as the Church became wealthier and added all kinds of organization. So the High Medieval Popes tried to exert their supremacy over the secular kings. They pronounced canon law that was supposed to take precedence over local law. (Reminds me of the European Union.) They threatened to excommunicate kings that didn't cooperate (the idea was that excommunicated kings' armies would no longer obey them). But the kings resisted, their armies generally stayed loyal, and historically it's very significant that it was the secular power that ultimately won. We have the repeated spectacle of kings and their armies conquering Rome and installing compliant Popes of their choice.
Then in the 1500's, in the Renaissance period, the Protestant reformation broke up medieval Christendom as new churches allied with the local kings replaced Roman authority even in the sphere of religion.
And once the people had been taught to be skeptical of the teaching magisterium of the Church, skeptical of Mary and the Saints, skeptical of the Sacraments, all in the name of returning to some highly fanciful vision of early New Testament Biblicism, the inevitable happened. People started to become skeptical about the Bible too. So Christianity weakened and Deism emerged, and along with it the so-called 'Age of Reason'. In the 19th century Deism started to be replaced by flat-out Atheism.
The Popes were now well and truly on the defensive.