The Popes: A History by John Julius Norwich: review

The historian and master-ironist Edward Gibbon had a lot of fun with the papacy. 

Of one 10th-century pope he wrote: “We read with some surprise that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred female pilgrims from visiting the shrine of St Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.” 

And on the trial and deposition of John XXIII in 1416: “The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.” 

You don’t have to be polemically anti-Catholic (or, for that matter, anti-Christian) to write about the Roman Church in this way, though it surely helps. Catholic historians have also long recognised that there were periods when the popes were gluttons, thugs and crooks – in other words, that they resembled the secular rulers around them.

One such period in the early middle ages is commonly referred to as the time of “pornocracy”, which means “rule by prostitutes”.

In the brief and disarming preface to this book, John Julius Norwich declares that he is an agnostic Protestant with no axe to grind: his aim is to tell the story of the popes, from the Roman period to the present, covering them neither with whitewash nor with ridicule.

Even more disarmingly, he insists that he has no pretensions to scholarship and writes only for “the average intelligent reader”.

But he adds: “I have tried to maintain a certain lightness of touch.”

And that, it seems, is the opening through which a fair amount of outrageous anecdote and Gibbonian dry wit is allowed to enter the narrative.

So it is, for example, that we are told of Paul II (1464-71): “He seems to have had two weaknesses, for good-looking young men and for melons; the stroke that killed him was said to have been brought on by a surfeit of both.”

And of the incorrigible John XXIII we learn that he was rumoured to have seduced 200 matrons, widows and virgins, “to say nothing of an alarming number of nuns” – a phrase which, in Gibbonian style, invites us to wonder what number would have caused nothing more than mild concern.

So sharp is Norwich’s eye for memorable details and oddities that this book could function as a compiler’s guide for an ecclesiastical pub quiz. Which pope was the last one to have been married before his ordination? (Honorius IV, elected in 1285.) Who was the last pope to have a beard? (Innocent XIII, elected in 1691.)

You could understand it if anecdotalism were the ruling principle here, not just because anecdotes are fun, but because any work constructed as a sequence of mini-biographies is bound to put a premium on personal foibles. 

But if that were all that this book amounted to, it would become, in the end, a wearisome thing to read – history conceived as, to coin a phrase, one damned pope after another. 

To be fair to John Julius Norwich, this book never becomes wearisome and it does rise well above the anecdotal.

The key to it all is Norwich’s understanding that, from the early medieval period onwards, the popes were always players in the game of European geopolitics. 

They possessed a modest amount of direct temporal power (as rulers of quite a big chunk of central Italy), plus large but varying quantities of indirect influence over the affairs of all Catholic states. 

Using these resources, they played off Byzantines against Lombards, German emperors against Norman rulers, Habsburgs against Valois kings, French and Spanish Bourbons against Austrians, and so on.

In many ways the popes were doing what all rulers did or tried to do: using the leverage of alliances to defend or extend their own territories and boost their influence. When Renaissance popes wangled marriages for their nephews and nieces (or, as it may be, sons and daughters) with the grandest Italian princely families, it is easy to dismiss this behaviour as nepotism of the most corrupt kind; yet it was exactly the behaviour of other rulers of the day, and done for just the same reasons. 

And yet, and yet… there was always something different about the papacy, even though it sometimes becomes easy, in a welter of geopolitical manoeuvres, to forget it. 

This was a temporal monarchy based on a unique spiritual claim – the claim to be the earthly head of Christ’s universal Church. 

A history of the papacy is not quite the same thing as a history of the Catholic Church, but it must include the role of the popes as shapers of that Church and guides to its doctrines.

Where such matters are concerned, Norwich’s unpretentious approach becomes not just disarming but positively self-harming. 

He announces in his preface that “as far as possible I have tried to steer well clear of theology”, and he is as good as his word. 

A few doctrinal milestones are noted in passing (the Immaculate Conception, papal infallibility, the Assumption of the Virgin); but Norwich seems ill at ease in Catholic theology, and on one important point, the question of whether the laity could receive communion in both bread and wine, he gets it wrong. 

The inevitable contrast here is between this account and Saints & Sinners, the history of the popes by Eamon Duffy. 

That book is also a work of synthesis for the general reader; Norwich cites it repeatedly and seems to have made much use of it. 

But whereas Norwich structures his book entirely around the individual life-stories of the popes (including, by the way, an entire chapter on the mythical female Pope Joan, whom Duffy does not deign to mention), Duffy’s history is constantly aware of, and shaped by, the institutional and doctrinal development of the Church. 

If I had to recommend only one book on this topic, it would have to be Duffy’s. 

But there’s certainly room for two books on an institution which, continuously and quite amazingly, spans almost 2,000 years of European history. 

The Popes by John Julius Norwich 505pp, Chatto and Windus, £25

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