Dan Snow's History Hit - A History of Popes

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Popes have shaped the history of the world. The Catholic Church has had a Pope for two thousand years, the first- tradition dictates- was St Peter, the fisherman turned disciple of Jesus. Pope 'Leo the Great' stared down Atilla the Hun at the gates of Rome while Pope Innocent III made it his mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons and spread Christianity across Europe.In this episode, Dan is joined by Jessica Wärnberg, author of City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, Its Popes and People, to examine the origins of the Pope's role, how the Pope became such a powerful and influential figure outside of the Catholic Church, and which popes, for better or worse, have shaped the course of history.This episode was first released in August 2023Produced by James Hickmann & edited by Dougal PatmoreSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The world is reacting to the news of the death of Pope Francis, the 266th head of the Catholic Church. He was 88 years old. People beyond what's said to be a global Catholic congregation of about 1.3 billion people seem to be mourning his loss. He was admired the world over for his down-to-earth humility, his humanity. He was the first Pope ever to come from the Americas. He was not, obviously, the first Pope to come from outside Europe, as is sometimes said, because the OG Pope was from what we'd now call the Middle East. But he was the first to come through the Americas. He was the first Jesuit. And throughout his life and career, he did break the mold.

During his 12 years as pontiff, he challenged some of the traditional positions of the church. He appointed lots of cardinals from parts of the world and communities that hadn't been previously represented in the highest circles of church governance. He also criticized corporate greed. He spoke out on climate change. He called for economic justice for the world's poorest and in his last days the last hours in fact he was strident in his calls for a ceasefire in gaza he washed the feet of refugees he famously said that who was he to

judge if someone was gay but sought to take part in the Catholic communion. He appointed women to senior positions in the Vatican, but there were limits to his liberalization. He stopped short of blessing same-sex unions, and he gave up on early attempts to reintroduce the position of a female deacon into the church. While many people are mourning his death and thinking about that legacy, already behind closed doors the wheels are turning. You don't survive through centuries and centuries of turbulent history by not working out your succession plan. The search for a new pope has begun, the electioneering and the politicking has certainly begun. The process of selecting a

new pope is one of the most secretive, one of the most time-hallowed rituals anywhere in the modern world. It's called the papal conclave. It's a tradition that stretches back centuries, and there is plenty of incense, there's plenty of prayer and oaths, there's usually plenty of ballots, and a bit of smoke as well. First, you get the official period of mourning. That's nine days of prayer and remembrance. Then all the eligible so-called cardinal electors. These are cardinals under the age of 80. So these are the people who can seek to become and vote for the next Pope. They all gather in Rome and that's about 120 men. They all enter the Sistine Chapel. And once they're inside, the doors are locked, cum clave, with a key,

hence conclave. Then they all vote in secret, apparently up to four times a day, and they try and reach a super majority, a two-thirds majority. And if no candidate receives enough votes, they just keep going, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. And things have got a little bit out of hand in the past. After each round, the ballots are burned in a stove and black smoke indicates no decision. White smoke signals that a new Pope has been chosen. When that moment comes, they decide upon one of their number to be the next Pope.

The robes are donned, the balcony doors at St. Peter's Basilica opens, and with the famous phrase, Habemus Papam, we have ourselves a Pope, the church announces its new leader to the waiting crowds below. The papacy is very nearly now 2,000 years old, and that lineage begins, according to tradition, with St. Peter, one of Jesus' closest disciples. He'd been a fisherman, he'd turned apostle, he'd according to tradition, with St. Peter, one of Jesus's closest disciples. He'd been a fisherman. He turned apostle. He traveled to Rome. And from there, the line continues pretty much uninterrupted, occasionally a little bit fuzzy. Occasionally you can see double, but it

goes despite the rise and fall of empires, the coming of plagues, the reformations, the revolutions. Pope Leo I, Leo the Great, stared down Attila the Hun at the gates of Rome. Pope Gregory I, he reformed the church. He sent missionaries to convert those strange Anglo-Saxons, those people on the far west of the world. He helped to proselytize, he helped to spread Christianity across Europe. People talk about Pope Innocent III being one of the most powerful of the medieval popes, the imperial popes of the Middle Ages. He claimed supremacy over Christendom's kings, he inspired crusades, and he rewrote the church's laws as well. So these are just some of the men who, possibly alongside Pope Francis, left an indelible mark, not just on the church,

but on world history. So on this occasion, I'm going to reshare an episode that we released a good while back, where I was joined by Jessica Warnberg. She's author of City of Echoes, A New History of Rome, It's Popes and It's Peoples, because I think it's quite timely and it'll answer some of the questions you might be having about why the Catholic Church has a pope, what exactly their role is, how some became more powerful than the emperors themselves, and how many of them have shaped the world, better or for worse, that we still live in today. Enjoy. Till they're dispersed in black unit. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Jessica, great to have you on the podcast. Great to be here. This is the big question, but how does Rome, which is an empire famous for its people enjoying the spectacle of men and women killing each other in the Colosseum and other arenas. How does this giant, bloodthirsty, famously pagan empire end up Christian? So it's a huge question. And somebody asked me the other day, if St. Peter went to Rome today, what would he think? Would he be happy? And at first I thought CBD oil shops, Zara, modern Rome, probably not. But then I realized he'd be delighted. He was thrilled because Rome is utterly Christian in its architecture, its fabric. It's transformed from the time when he arrived

there. And so when Peter, who's kind of the central figure in this transformation, arrived in Rome, he's an anonymous figure. He's a fisherman from the seas of Galilee. He's arriving in this transformation arrived in Rome. He's an anonymous figure. He's a fisherman from the seas of Galilee. He's arriving in this pagan capital that's sort of thrusting with religion, where they're worshipping, you know, a multitude of gods. Everything revolves around religion, you know, political decisions. A bit of pragmatism as well and sort of dynastic ambition. But there are sacrifices to all kinds of gods. And the god that Peter worships, the one Christian god, is the god of a minority cult, one of many minority cults. You've got kind of the cult of Mithras and the temple to Saul and all of these other cults.

And they're unknown. They're seen as sort of a pesky offshoot of Judaism, if they're considered at all. And so the transformation of Rome is a remarkable and really unlikely story because it goes back to Peter and Paul, these two men from the Middle East coming to the Roman Empire. Now, Paul comes not because he's spreading the word of Jesus Christ, of Jesus of Nazareth, who's only recently died. He comes because he's on trial and he's decided to appeal to the emperor because he thinks he's going to get a fair and trial in Rome. That doesn't work out for him. He ends up being executed in Rome. But he meets all these Christians who are there in their humble little house churches. Peter also dies in Rome, crucified, later sources say, on the Vatican Hill. The Vatican Hill is a dusty remote place where there's a

graveyard and where Nero had his racetrack. And when Peter died there, he died probably seen as, if seen by anybody, a kind of local pest. Somebody was causing unrest by spreading sort of anti or non-pagan ideas or doing things which were non-pagan, which are against the grain. Very few people would have taken notice. But the small early group of Christians did take notice. And on that spot where he died, they started going, they started venerating his bones. And there they sort of traced the first footsteps of what would one day be some Peter's Basilica, but then was just a little tiny shrine. And it's in that story of Peter dying in Rome that we see the spark of this transformation,

because Peter had been chosen by Jesus to be the head of the church. And so when Peter dies in Rome, it gives anybody who comes after him the right to say, this is the head of the church. Now, even that, Dan, didn't happen for centuries, you know, that anybody was really listening. You know, these figures are unknown, these Christian figures and their leaders as they emerge, they're unknown for decades and decades. And then a major moment of transformation comes when Constantine, who's the son of a Roman emperor and wants to take over the Roman empire as a sole ruler of the empire, prays the night before a battle or go to sleep and has a vision. And instead of

seeing one of the pagan gods that he's been praying to, he sees the son of God of the Christians. He sees Jesus, who tells him, look, if you go out to battle your foes in my sign, in the sign of my name, in the Cairo, you will win. He goes out to meet his foe, Maxentius, the next day and he wins. So when he comes back to Rome, he doesn't make a sacrifice to Jupiter, but he starts honoring this Christian God. And there we really see this moment, along with his later legalization of Christianity, where this maligned, shadowy cult who are talking about the death of a Galilean fisherman on the Vatican Hill. talking about the death of a Galilean fisherman on the Vatican Hill, something that these Romans who love triumph and conquest and winning are not interested in really at all, when that becomes endorsed by an emperor.

And even though we're unsure if he even converted to Christianity, it becomes a state-sponsored religion, and you start getting basilicas, and the fabric of Rome starts changing. But it's grounded in this really strange story, if we think about it objectively. Why is Constantine Christian curious? Why does it pop up in his dreams? We tend to dream about things that we're familiar with in the first place, right? So what's been going on in the Roman world that means Christianity has been

nibbling at the heels of people like Constantine? So even immediately after Jesus died, you get figures who knew him, and then later figures like Paul who didn't know him going out all over their known world in this sort of area of the Mediterranean basin, Greece, Turkey, Rome. And it follows the footprint of the empire, more or less. So Christians are around. And even by the second century, you know, it's not a dominant religion, but pagans are starting to turn Christian. religion, but pagans are starting to turn Christian. And the allure of this is a bit puzzling. You painted a picture early on of this place that's all about gladiatorial compact, victory, fighting, conquest, winning. And these are people whose God died on a cross in the most humiliating way. But there is something compelling about this message. And I think for a lot of people, it's the stories, right? These people who are being persecuted for their religion, teenagers, like a Roman teenager called Agnes, who was killed by the

Roman government for being a Christian. And I think these stories make it really compelling. So people do start to convert. They get in a lot of trouble. You know, there's a story of a Roman woman who was, her husband found out she converted to become a Christian and her teachers put in prison and she's punished you know a lot of people are punished and are killed for being Christians and people for some reason start to be compelled by these stories and start converting and so you do get pagans who are converting not just the Jewish community of Rome or people from these more sort of minor cults and so it's on the radar of Constantine. It's part

of his world. He becomes familiar enough with it, as you say, for Christ to appear to him in a dream and him to think, do you know what, Jupiter, I'm not going to follow you today. I'm going to go out, you know, in the name of this guy. And then he wins and he's justified by it. He wins the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD. And then, so you mentioned the Edict of Milan, where he granted religious tolerance. That effectively ends the persecution of Christians. That's not the end of it. The Christians had a few dodgy chapters after that, didn't they?

It was not yet the kind of official religion of the empire, was it? No, I think he's sort of, Constantine's really important because he basically opens up the door. But he doesn't make Christianity cool yet. You know, it's sort of, he's opening up the door to that. It's becoming, you know, you've got popes now sitting in a palace, not living in some backwater of Rome, you know, and Trastevere is an anonymous figure. They're sitting in the apse of a basilica. They've got public buildings. But even those buildings, like the Lateran, the first Christian basilica, is outside the centre of Rome.

St Peter's is in a remote place on the Vatican Hill. Constantine's not sort of ripping down the temple to Jupiter and putting up a temple to Christ or the Christian God in its place. But by the 380s, you get enough elite people who are becoming Christian for people like Jerome to get really angry about the way they're behaving. His letters are a great source for some of these stories. I feel bad sort of smiling as I say it because he was so angry. But he'd go into St. Peter's Basilica and there'd be women carried on litters, you know, surrounded by eunuchs

with their faces sort of rouge, pretending to faint from fast because Christianity had become the thing to associate yourself with. And he's saying, you know, 400 years or so, or less than 400 years after the death of Christ. No, this isn't what it was all meant to be about. But by that time, the 60, 70 years after Constantine has officially endorsed Christianity,

it's becoming a more elite religion and it's becoming something that it's quite cool, it's quite prestigious to be associated with. So what exactly does Pope mean? And who's the first one? Is it Peter technically? Is it the leader of Roman Christians? I'm sounding a bit like a Protestant in the Reformation. Is it basically the Bishop of Rome? As far as we understand it now, the Pope was the Bishop of Rome. But Peter, it might upset people saying this, but Peter doesn't emerge as a Pope. He's chosen by Christ to be the head of his church, but nobody's sort of treating him as far as we know from any sources like the Pope, you church, but nobody's sort of treating him as far as we know

from any sources like the Pope, you know, putting him in a central position at the top of a hierarchy of a Roman church and making decisions. He's not even included actually as the first person in really early lists of Popes. You get these figures like Linus, Anicetus who pop up. And Pope just means father, and lots of people are called Pope well into the seventh century, and people all over, bishops all over are called Pope. But Popes as we know them, Popes as an authoritative leader, first of all, in Rome calling the shots, don't emerge until the sort of 150s, 180s. We have to remember this was an immigrant sort of church. They're mixing with these pagan elite. They disagreed on a lot of things. And out

of this disagreement, you get figures emerging who start laying down the law. So the bishops of Rome, the leaders of this church, this Roman church, figures like Victor, who's Pope in sort of the 180s, bishops of Rome in the 180s, have to start saying, no, no, no, this is the date that we celebrate Easter, not that day. And anyone who doesn't agree with me is excommunicated, kicked out the church. Now we're looking a bit more like a Pope, right? It's not just somebody who's maybe writing letters on behalf of the community. It's not really until much later, so in the kind of 400s, that you get figures like Leo the Great, who really start asserting this really firmly and publicly to the rest of the Christian world globally. So there's a synod called the Gangster Synod. Now, synods aren't usually the most exciting prospect, right?

So please don't switch off. But it's called the Gangster Synod, right, for a reason. And then this is a meeting of all the sort of church leaders from across the Christian world in Ephesus. They called it the Second Council of Ephesus, not the Gangsta Synod. And there, the Bishop of Alexandria tries to stop Leo's ambassadors, essentially, his envoys speaking, because he says, look, we're just as important. I'm the Bishop of Alexandria, you know, other bishops of important places are here. Why does he think, why does the Bishop of Rome think that he should have this global authority? But Leo says, actually, I'm the successor of St. Peter, who was chosen by Christ. And after his envoys are shut down, and the synod is stormed by these monks that Diascorus

has waiting outside ready to beat up anybody who tries to stick up for the Bishop of Rome. After that all dies down, Leo very firmly says, if you speak against me, you speak against St. Peter. And he gets the last emperors who are in their kind of last gasps, people like Valentinian III. This is about a couple of decades before the Western Roman Empire falls. He gets them backing him up and saying, look, you get figures who are not only the leaders of the Church of Rome, but who are the leaders of the Church of Rome, and therefore, in their eyes, the leaders of the kind of global church. And this is where they really start publicly asserting this and succeeding in asserting this.

And does Leo, you mentioned some of the slightly dodgy emperors at the end of the Western Roman Empire. Does Leo have a position of strength even compared to them? Doesn't he meet Attila the Hun? He starts to look quite political in a very secular sense, doesn't he? Exactly. He goes out to meet Attila the Hun. He's sent out by the emperors. At this time, the emperors aren't even in Rome. The Western Roman emperors are often in Ravenna on the eastern coast of Italy, where maybe the climate's a bit better. You're further away from all these invading barbarians. And people like Valentinian are sending Leo out to meet people, to negotiate. And it's him who has to ride out to meet Attila and say, please turn back, send your men back,

don't sack Rome. It's not the emperor. So you're right, in this power vacuum, don't sack Rome. It's not the emperor. So you're right, in this power vacuum, even before the Western Empire has fallen, the Pope is stepping up as a figurehead. Leo's stepping up as a figurehead. He also, you know, goes out and meets Geiserich, another kind of barbarian invader, just as he's about to sack Rome and sort of sticks up for the Roman people. So he's taking on this global Christian Rome, but he's also becoming a de facto ruler in Rome. And he says something really, really interesting, which I think kind of sums up how he saw things and how he saw his political role. He said to the Roman people, apparently, as Rome is sort of crumbling around their ears, don't worry, you rule over a much vaster empire through Peter than you ever did through the

emperors. So basically, you don't have to worry about having an army or being rich, because through this prestige that the death of Peter has given Rome, you know, we've got an authority that nobody can take away. And I think he had a point, right? It survived for 2,000 years as empires have fallen, dictators have come and gone. And so he really did see himself as a political figure, but sort of tied to this, his religious role and his religious authority. Okay, so Jessica, we're asking all the massive questions down. Let's just quickly deal with another one. We've all read our Edward Gibbon. He suggested in his decline for the Roman Empire that Christianity was a central part of that because you started loving thy neighbor and they started turning the other cheek rather than just slaughtering their enemies on the battlefield

and in sieges as their ancestors had done. What is the relationship between Christianity, do you think, and the decline of the Western Roman world? I think that the popes step into, as I said, a power vacuum and not to be creating all kinds of sort of early modern and modern vigils, but Hobbes said that the popes were crowned on the grave of empire, right? That they're really kind of stepping in and taking advantage of this. In terms of their responsibility for it, I don't think we can lay that at their door. I mean, if you just take something like the ending of the gladiatorial game, something that seemed to embody that sort of fighting spirit, you know, a lot of people say this is because of the Christians and they didn't like the fighting and the bloodshed. And a lot of Christians say

that. There's a horrific story of somebody who came to Rome and he is a young man. He comes to Rome to have an austere, pious life and to live in this holy city. And he's there when they're sort of celebrating a triumph and he goes to a gladiatorial games and he starts protesting and he gets beaten up and killed. And the emperor says, oh, this is awful. We can't possibly have gladiatorial games. But at that time, they were already running out of money to perform these games. So often, you know, the games, gladiatorial combats were funded by politicians who wanted to make themselves popular with the people. They don't have the money for that. They don't have the resource. They're fighting, losing battles. And so I think that there is a coincidence of time, but I don't think that we can sort of

blame the emergence of Christianity for weakening the Roman Empire. Even if the popes did maybe take advantage or step into that role, there is a shift in what's important though. You get sort of nobles who hold these great feasts for the poor. And there's not really anything like that, that kind of almsgiving, giving away your wealth, turning the other cheek, that sort of softer rhetoric or softer teaching. There's not really much like that in the pagan world. So you do get a transformation of values, but it's just a different sort of culture. So you've still got nobles, but they're not showing their greatness by getting to great big men to have a fight to the death in the auditorium. They're showing their greatness by feeding the poor. So yeah, I think the weakness had already begun much before, you know, the elite

anyway caught on to Christian charity. So I think, yeah, the Christians, I think blaming them for the fall of the Western empires is pretty punchy. But the other question is how, given that fall, and this is where lots of early modern historians will be fidgeting, given that transfer or that change of regimes, the sort of end of Roman rule, the beginning of something different, how does Christianity make that extraordinary leap and survive and almost flourish into the beginning of the medieval period? Whereas Roman imperial rule sort of, well, it changes in something completely different. I think this is when Leo was right. You know, you've got a much greater empire now built on Peter. This idea that, well, if your authority is traced in something divine, nobody can take it

away. Nobody can fight you for it. And actually, as more and more people become Christian, they're willing to defend it. So you have some remarkable stories, actually, of popes going out to meet invaders and the invaders saying, so quite often the Lombards, so you get into kind of late antiquity, the invaders saying, okay, we'll leave Rome alone because that's Peter's lands and you are the popes. But all this other land that belongs to the Roman Empire that's then been ruled by that time from Byzantium, that's just land. We'll invade that. We'll take that. I'm sorry, we're not leaving Ravenna alone. That's just a place. Rome, we'll leave it. So the Popes are able to kind of use their religious role to transcend normal politics. They're able to use the fact that they're successors of Peter, who are ruling over this patch of land around Rome and Rome,

to say we're different and they survive. And they're very smart about this. There's a really remarkable Pope from the late fourth century. He's not so well known, but I think his Netflix material, Damasus. So he's the first socialite pope. He's in with all of the patricians, so much so that he gets the nickname, the ear pick of great ladies, like he's cozying up to people who can help the church to get the money it needs. He's also a politician, right? He fights literally for the papacy against a rival. They're chucking tiles off the roofs of basilicas. He's getting his hands dirty in order to get this position. But once he's Pope, he doesn't rely on politics. He doesn't even rely on the emperor, and that's

before the empire's fallen. He relies on the martyrs. And he writes poetry, which might seem slightly surprising, seeing as I painted him as this kind of socialite thug. But he writes poems about all the Christians who've been persecuted and killed. And he gets them carved into sites all around Rome. And in doing this, he's saying, look, this is the basis of our power. Rome, this place where all these holy things happen, where we've got all these bones, we've got all these bodies of all these holy people. This is important land. And that's what these later popes can capitalize on when when they're getting invaded, to get these invaders to turn around. Because a lot of them are Christian, even if they're not followers of the pope. And they are willing to leave Rome alone to survive, to continue right into the medieval period, because that's Peter's land.

We're not going to touch that. There might be repercussions. You listen to Dan Snow's History, your special podcast here on hopes more coming up I'm Matt Lewis and I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga and in Gone Medieval we get into the greatest mysteries the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. How do they convince people like the kings of the Ostrogoths and the successor states to Rome, whether it's in Gaul, whether it's in Italy or Spain, how do they convince them to eventually embrace Christianity what does Christianity offer these people these supposedly barbarians or one or two generations

removed from kind of barbarians why do they all support and accept the role of the Pope and accept Christianity and embrace it so the two important things here, they're not necessarily accepting the role of the Pope. Okay, so a lot of them are, for example, Aryan Christians who believe very different things about the nature of Christ and all these kind of issues that they're debating about at places like the Gangster Synod. They're not all people who say, okay, the Pope is on high, and so we have to listen to what he said. But even those people who don't believe that he's the supreme power in the Christian world, believe that he's the successor of Peter. They don't necessarily think that gives them the right to

tell them what to do, but they believe he's somebody a bit special. And you see this going through all the way into the early modern period where you get Ethiopians coming to Rome to ask the Pope for blessings. You think, well, the Ethiopians don't believe that he is the supreme leader of the church. Not everybody believes that, but they do believe that he's something special. So for the Pope side of things, that's something special, which sounds a little bit vague and a little bit hard to put your finger on. This notion that he is the successor of Peter, and that means something, even if it doesn't mean that he can tell everybody what to do, is very powerful.

In terms of why Christianity appeals, I mean, that is sort of not just a big question, it's a million-dollar question, because when you look at kind of the pagan religion, sometimes people say Christianity offered people who were the poor and lowly and women an opportunity to be involved. But, you know, you look at books, Mary Beard's book on Roman religion, and you see there were

women involved, you know, in Roman religion, the cult of Magna Mater. There were ex-slaves who were playing music, you know, as part of religious ceremonies in the pagan world. And there were other groups where you got some of the perks like joint burial. There are Jewish catacombs in Rome. You get that fraternity, the cult of Mithras. You get sort of this sense of fraternity and fellowship. Personally, I think that what's compelling about the Christian message is all of these stories of people, ordinary people, who are made extraordinary by clinging to their faith.

How else could you get, you know, a 13 year old girl in the church of St. Agnes that has a shrine built to her, a Roman teenager? Well, she has a shrine built to her because she was willing to die for her faith. I think that's quite appealing because it means that any of us could be made extraordinary. And I know some emperors became gods,

but for most people, it was kind of out of the question, right? So saints aren't the same as being a god, but if you can see, yeah, somebody who's an ordinary person who is able to make themselves extraordinary by being faithful, I think it's quite compelling.

But yeah, I think lots of people would have other answers to that question. And does Christianity become a vehicle, a kind of safety deposit box for Romanitas, for learning, for the poetry, for the history and the culture. As Rome's armies are destroyed, these, you know, Theoderic, the barbarians, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, they can tap into, or something of Rome can survive through the church. Is that true? Is that kind of vehicle for Roman values?

Absolutely. And if we get to a period like the Renaissance, there's a jump forward. The popes, you know, have left Rome for decades and decades and been in Avignon. They come back and there's this revival of interest in kind of the classical Roman world and Greek world. And they make that their own. They're building churches with elements of classical architecture in them. Cardinals are, you know, putting up sculptures of classical figures in their vineyards. And the popes, by being heads of Rome,

figureheads of Rome, leaders of Rome, are also the owners of a lot of ancient Roman stuff and ancient Greek, or some copies of ancient Greek things. And so when they're digging up statues like the Loa of Caen or the Apollo Belvedere, then becoming owners of this, they're becoming custodians of the actual stones and leftover bits of fabric of the ancient Roman world.

So there certainly isn't an idea that they are kind of custodians of those values. And they're not shy about co-opting them and making them part of Christian culture. There are popes who imprisoned, you know, Renaissance humanists who seem to be going a little bit too far and maybe going a bit back to the kind of pagan ways, a little bit too close to the bone. But other than that, they're employing the humanists who want to get back to the ancient values as secretaries and saying, yeah, like write nice classical Renaissance Latin, but write about Christianity because there's prestige in it. And they're not afraid of that always. And it strikes me that, just going a little bit further back to this kind of transitional period of the fifth and sixth centuries, where if you're an invading army, you topple the Roman state,

great, but you can then enjoy all the benefits of Roman-ness, the bureaucracy, the learning, the culture, the art and the religion, because you keep hold of the church. So it's not a military or even a massive political threat. You're still, well done you, you're the king of Spain, congratulations you Ostrogoth, Visigoth, whoever you are. But you get to enjoy Roman-ness because there's an intact institution there. So you can kind of have your cake and eat it. Yeah, exactly. And what's fascinating about some of the Goths, barbarians who become kings of Italy, they go to Rome and they start acting like Roman emperors,

but they also go to St. Peter's. So you've got access to all of these things that you can use to legitimize yourself. One of these barbarian leaders, he says, you know, an able Goth doesn't want to be like a Goth at all. He wants to be like a Roman. And so they've got this kind of kicker mix of imperial tropes wearing the purple garb of the emperor. But then very quickly in the scale of this long history, going to St. Peter's to venerate the tomb of the fishermen, as they referred to,

becomes a key part of this legitimization that you see all the way through until the medieval period, as a man called Colladirenzo tries to take over Rome as this kind of demagogue, this charismatic leader. And he goes in the purple garb, tossing out coins, but on his way to St. Peter's, they become the hallmarks of legitimacy and power. And as you said, with not much of a threat, usually the popes have to ask for outside help to fight off these people when they won't play ball. So I think it's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that like that before. It's just such a match made in heaven for Peter. And obviously, as Roman Christianity is reintroduced to parts of Southeast England, kings like it because they can tap into clever monks and

an international network of useful ideas and letter writing and diplomacy. And they get this kind of validation for their reign in a world in which the crown rested on the head fairly, you were quite vulnerable when you had the crown on the head in many parts of Europe in this period, right? And then popes and bishops like to say, well, they got the protection of the state, they got royal protection. It's clever stuff. It's the birth of the Holy Roman Emperor. Yeah, the Holy Roman Emperor, the first one, Charlemagne, is exactly that dynamic. I'll protect you. I'll protect your lands. His dad did as well, Pepin the Short, but please legitimize my rule and crown me Holy Roman Emperor. And that dynamic continues, ripples down centuries of, I'll back you up, but give me a little bit of that prestige. And I really noticed that even in Protestant Britain during the king's

coronation, I really was struck. The main takeaway from the coronation was, wow, a coronation is priests bossing the king around. Come over here, we're going to do another blessing right now. Take that clothe on, put these clothes on. And it's like, all right, mate, come on. And that is why, amazingly, Napoleon crowned himself. I love that moment. He grabbed the crown in 1804, Napoleon crowned himself. He grabbed the crown off the Pope and stuck it on his own head going, listen, mate, you can come and be part of it, but I am crowning myself Emperor of the French. And I thought that was fascinating a moment in Napoleon's history.

Listen, because I've got you, we talked about the transition of pagan Rome to Christian Rome. And I feel I know, I kind of understand it a lot more now. There's a lot more Popes to come right down to the present day. In fact, we had two Popes

at the same time again recently. Just while you're here, give me some of your favourite popes or popes that you feel have helped to ensure that this institution has survived. Is it the oldest continually running institution on Earth, do we think? So I think the oldest is a close to its original form. So I think the Japanese emperors have got into that fight before about whether actually that's an older institution. But I would say the Pope is still sovereign of state. It might be the smallest state in the world,

the Vatican state, but he is an independent sovereign. He still claims to be, you know, successor of Peter and head of the global Christians. And he's head of the Roman Catholic Church. So I think for being intact, it's the oldest. I always get slightly nervous when people ask me about favourite poets because it's such a mixed bag and they're all a bit good and a bit bad and we don't want to get into trouble endorsing historical figures. I think we've covered a lot of them. Another really great figure who really understands what it is to be figurehead in Rome is Gregory the Great, known for the missions. But there's a wonderful moment that's recorded in sources and in contemporary chronicles of Gregory the Great, known for the missions. But, you know, there's a wonderful moment that's

recorded in sources and in contemporary chronicles of Gregory the Great. He's around the sixth century and Rome's had the worst year ever. There's been a plague. The plague has killed the Pope. Snakes have come up the Tiber. A monster came up the Tiber. I'm not sure if that was a bit of exaggeration, but they're exaggerating because they've had a terrible year. And Gregory the Great walks with Romans through the centre of Rome on a pilgrimage to St Peter's, praying. And at this moment, when they're crossing the bridge and they see the old North Liam of Hadrian, they see an angel appear on top of it. Now, whether we believe that they saw an angel or not is sort of irrelevant, but I think it's an amazingly important moment because it shows the Pope acting as a figurehead and actually causing miracles in Rome for those

people having a terrible year that transform Rome, because the Muslim of Hadrian then becomes the Castile Sant'Angelo, so the castle of the holy angel. And I think he's an important figure because he really understands that to be this powerful figure to be this global figure to be the pope of Rome you have to have a connection with the city you have to have a connection with the people you have to keep this pastoral role and I think that's the kind of problem the papacy has in a way. Popes have got to be religious leaders who are seen to do the right thing and care about people but at the same same time, in order to do that, they've got to be head of this institution that's political, that at one time had to deal with trade, tax, waste, but has to meet heads of state.

And there's sort of slightly contradictory roles at times. And I think that Gregory understood the importance of the pastoral aspect of that, of looking after people, whilst also being a very powerful sort of political figurehead. So he's a fascinating character and a really important one we haven't talked about yet. More popes after this, don't go away. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr Eleanor Janaga. To be continued... were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. He's a big one. He's a big one. what about just go through some of the famously terrible ones

i love a terrible pope oh my gosh so in the 8th 9th century 10th century it gets really really bad and sadly for better or for worse it's a period that's not necessarily well known and it's called the seculum obscurum by people, all the pornography, which gives you a flavor. And so you get figures like Formosus. Formosus I, he was trying to become bishop all over Europe. He then sets his sight on the papacy and he offends so many people with his politicking that seven months after he's dead, his successor digs him up

and puts him on trial in the Lateran Palace. He's tried, he has a deacon defending him. And he's found guilty. Surprise, surprise of all of these crimes. And I'd say his successor is probably a pretty appalling one as well. I mean, digging up a dead pope and then trying him and then dumping him in the Tiber. It's not exactly exemplary behavior.

But you get other figures like John XII, who was a very young pope. And he got the help of emperors in defending the city. And then when the emperor came and saved him, he then thought, oh, the emperor's too powerful. I don't want to rely on him. And he actually ended up siding with the person that the emperor had helped fight off. And he also ends up dying in bed with another man's wife. I mean, it's really seeded some of this stuff. If you want the really bad popes, the 8th, 9th, and 10th century is the place to go. But you also get sort of later down the line, even after the Renaissance, popes like Paul IV,

who puts the Jewish community of Rome, who predate Christians, into a ghetto where they stay for 300 years, you know, confined, limited to really lowly jobs, and has a lasting, very negative legacy in the city and his quest to retain the purity, quote unquote, of Rome. So he's a pretty extreme one. He has somebody boiled in a pot of oil in the Piazza Navona. You get folks who do really quite appalling things throughout the history of the church. And it really is this curse of being an institution

where people are going to join for the wrong reasons and also their religious body, they're to take care of people, apparently. It's so hard for scholars like you, because I can't think of many other roles where you've got a figure who's a temporal leader, so they end up controlling Rome and the so-called papal states, like they have a bit of an empire in central Italy at various periods. And then also leader of a global spiritual movement. I mean, it's complicated stuff. Yeah, a bit of a curse, I'd say. I feel bad saying that, because of course, it's remarkable, and much good has come of it as well. But I think this is the

real problem they face. Mussolini gave the Pope the Vatican state, because the Pope said, I need to have my own state. I can't be subject to anyone else. So this role as a political figure is, for the Popes, tied to their role as a religious figure. The vicar of Christ can't be told what to do by a king of Italy. Otherwise, he can't be the vicar of Christ. What if the king of Italy decides to change religion or just to disagree? So the two are intertwined and it's a problem. I think it's a real challenge. Well, in fact, I've been the last person to praise Mussolini, but in a way, wasn't that kind of a quite a good decision from the church's point of view? Because they don't,

although they are sovereign, it's the smallest possible scrap of territory. And they've been allowed to concentrate on their global religious role, their sacral role, rather than like making sure the bins get collected and you're sort of building roads and stuff, right? I mean, presumably there's some people in the Catholic church might miss those days, but from a sort of PR, from a messaging point of view, is it rather nice that they can now concentrate on just being the vicar of Christ? Yeah, I think it certainly saves them a lot of protest.

There's a statue in Rome called Pasquino, known as Pasquino, where Romans for centuries have posted little notes slagging off the popes and other people as well. Napoleon gets a few nasty mentions on there. And today, if you look at Pasquino, Romans still post little notes on there. He's just off the Piazza Navona.

It's all about politicians. It's not about the popes. But it doesn't totally save the popes from the ire of Romans and people living in Rome because it wasn't posted on Pasquino. But when Pope Francis made a decision that upset a certain sort of traditional group in the church a few years ago, there were posters overnight all over Rome saying, you know, how could you do this? Where's your

mercy gone? You're trading on mercy. But it happens much less often because there are fewer people who are engaged with the Pope in the same way, in any way. And also, as you say, it's spiritual. He gets to be a pastor. He gets to be all the nice stuff. And I'm sure it's not easy, but it's a lot easier than trying to defend your borders, control trade, keep people fed and not rising up and being global head of Christians at the same time. So yeah, I think there's definitely some truth in that. Let's finish off, Jessica, by just thinking about some of the impact that popes had on the modern world. Not just, of course, the fact that I think Christianity is the biggest global religion, but things like the division of the Americas with the papal bulls. Actually, the papacy has made

gigantic decisions throughout history, some of which endure, presumably, and you will have studied them all. But I mean, dividing up the new world between Spain and Portugal, and hence the Brazilians speaking Portuguese and much the rest of the Americas speaking Spanish. I mean, those are things that really matter. And it all comes down to that idea that the Pope's a useful figure, right? If you can get the Pope to endorse what you want to do, then you've got a bit of legitimacy there. I mean, Henry VIII takes a different course, but he asked Clement VII, first of all,

can I get my marriage annulled? And he doesn't get the right answer. But people are going to the Pope in the 15th, 16th century, the Vatican, that hill, that dusty hill where Peter died has become a hub of global diplomacy and people asking for the Pope's blessing for political decisions. And that moment where the Pope is legitimising, ratifying this colonisation of a land thousands and thousands of kilometres from Rome is a moment where you say, OK, wow, this prestige of Peter that Leo said will make Rome a much greater empire than it ever was when

it relied on armies and triumphs and sort of worldly prestige sort of is coming true. And it's remarkable. And I think that we see that legacy today where it was Emmanuel Macron recently went to the Vatican to talk to the Pope. He's the head of a secular republic, went there to talk to the Pope about the Ukraine war. I mean, most Catholics now live outside of Europe. You know, most people are not Catholic. They're not even practicing Christians in Europe. And yet, people are still appealing to the Pope to say something. Trump wanted to present an image of friendship with the Pope. It mattered to him. Well, that was astonishing. I don't think it's talked about enough. Trump's first foreign visit, well, he went to the Middle East, he went to Saudi Arabia,

weirdly. And then on that same first foreign visit, he went to see the Pope. It was astonishing. It was like William the Conqueror asking for the papal banner when he was invading England in 1066. Like there was still this, it's this weird relationship where the Pope somehow confers some kind of spiritual stamp of approval. And in return, I guess the papacy gets to look like a major world player. I mean, it's a strange symbiotic relationship. Exactly. And even Napoleon, who crowned himself, really, really wanted that blessing. And he got really angry with Pius VI and Pius VII because they said, no, we're not just going to unilaterally bless everything you do. But he recognized the power of that.

And then he sort of chucks his toys out of the pram and says, I don't need the Pope anyway. You know, I didn't want it in the first place, but he really did want it. You know, it was only when the Pope didn't play ball and said, I'm successor of Peter. I don't need to approve every little thing you do that he said, fine, I don't need to. But he wanted it, you know, and that's really why I wrote this book is how do we get to this moment where we still care a little bit in a vague way. We might not shape our lives around it, but we still, for some reason, care.

And what are the roots of that? And how did that start? And it started in Rome in a pagan empire on a dusty hill. It's a good story, I think. The death of a former fisherman. It's an amazing story. It's an amazing story beautifully told in your new book. Tell everyone what it's called. It's called City of Echoes. Jessica Wombay, thank you very much

for coming on and talking about it. Thanks. you