Early Medieval Papacy (Radio Edit)

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Speaker 6 Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner.
I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

Speaker 6 And today we are donning our fanciest vestments and going on pilgrimage to 9th century Rome to learn all about the early medieval papacy, when the political heart of the Catholic Church was plunged into such chaos that historians have called it the Papal Dark Ages.

Speaker 6 And that's not even the meanest thing they've said. And to help me shed some light on this tantalizingly tumultuous time, I am joined by two very special guests.

Speaker 6 In History Corner, he's a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he works on Christian intellectual and cultural history during the Middle Ages.

Speaker 6 He has published on the Crusades, apocalypticism, and pilgrimage, and luckily for us he literally wrote the book on the medieval papacy. It's Professor Brett Whelan.
Welcome Brett.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 6 And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, writer, radio producer and actress. You might have seen her hilarious stand-up shows or seen her sitcom Nowhere Fast.

Speaker 6 Maybe you've heard her on the Guilty Feminist podcast or her BBC show Wheel of Misfortune. She's podding fabulous.
It's Alison Spittle.

Speaker 3 Welcome Alison.

Speaker 10 Hello. I'm so excited about being here and what a subject, first of all.
The Papal Dark Ages sounds like an entry for Finland in the Eurovision.

Speaker 10 It's an incredible band I would love to see.

Speaker 6 Me too, absolutely. Alison, this is your debut performance on the show, which means I have to contractually ask you, do you like history? Did you like it at school?

Speaker 10 I did. I loved history.
I had a great history teacher. So yeah, I've always been very interested in history.

Speaker 6 Today we're doing medieval history. It's quite far back and it's quite specific as well.
And I know you were raised Catholic.

Speaker 6 You're comfortable with the history of Catholicism, but perhaps less so with medieval papacy, the political papacy. Do you know anything about it? No, I know nothing about it.

Speaker 10 Being former Catholic, I was very big into saints. For me, popes were administration people.
Saints for me were like the superheroes and popes. We're like

Speaker 10 the guys in the FBI supporting them quietly. So for

Speaker 10 medieval popes as well, there must have been some absolute skullduggery, I'd say. I don't know.
I don't want to predict when I want drama.

Speaker 10 I want this to be a mini-series on an American network TV show with Jeremy Irons in it or something like that.

Speaker 6 I can promise you today there's a lot of drama. This is an extraordinary story and some serious shenanigans happening.
So what do you know?

Speaker 6 That brings us on to the first segment of the podcast called the So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what our listener might know about today's subject.

Speaker 6 I'm guessing you know what the Pope is, you know where the Vatican is, but the power struggles of the papacy a thousand years ago, yeah, that's not going to register, is it really?

Speaker 6 In terms of pop culture, or rather, I guess, in terms of pope culture, there aren't loads of TV shows or films I can point to. I mean, there's the sort of Dan Brown, Angels and Demons.

Speaker 6 If you have to read that or watch that, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 3 There's Jude Law and The Young Pope.

Speaker 6 There are some TV series that bounce around in this era, things like The Last Kingdom, but that's all about kings and princes and warriors, not popes.

Speaker 6 So I reckon the so-called papal dark ages is pretty dark and dingy for non-specialists, which is a shame because it was extremely chaotic and debauched and corrupt. So let's crack on.

Speaker 6 First of all, papal history is all about popes. And the popes, of course, are the Bishop of Rome, the head of the worldwide Catholic Church, the Supreme Pontiff.

Speaker 6 They have more names than the Mother of Dragons. So Alison,

Speaker 6 how many popes have there been since the very beginning, do you think?

Speaker 10 Oh, okay. So people lived for a short time before.
I'm going to go for... 10,000 popes.
Like, that's another name of a band that I would love.

Speaker 6 That does sound like the name of a band.

Speaker 10 10,000 million.

Speaker 10 They're like so sad a crew. We don't know how many people are in them.
It's innumerable.

Speaker 6 The Vatican says 266 popes.

Speaker 10 That's less people that's been on RuPaul's drag race.

Speaker 6 Brett, in terms of setting the papal stage, was St. Peter the first pope, or is it a political office constituted after his death? Where do we start papal history?

Speaker 1 I mean, it sort of depends on where you look at it. You know, on one level, the pope is just the bishop of Rome.
He's the leader of the local church in the city.

Speaker 1 And there were certainly Christians in Rome back in the first century, back in the days of Saint Peter, and they presumably had a bishop pretty early on.

Speaker 1 And there were Christians with bishops spreading all around the Roman Empire. All those bishops were sometimes called popes, by the way, papa in Latin.

Speaker 1 But what's going on different in Rome is the fact that the idea that Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew 1618 made the Apostle Peter his kind of deputy, right?

Speaker 1 He was the rock that Jesus founded the church on, and he gave him the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Speaker 1 And then according to tradition, Peter went to Rome and actually founded the church there and handed down that power to the next bishop, his successor, according to some of the lists, named Linus.

Speaker 1 It gets passed down, this power down through the ages, right? So by the second, third centuries, what you start to see are bishops like Victor.

Speaker 1 He's pope around the year 199, weighing in on controversies in the church. There was a big controversy about the correct way to date Easter at the time.

Speaker 1 And they start to claim a power that isn't just about being the bishop of Rome, but is a universal power over the entire church. So, you know, four or five hundred years after the time of St.

Speaker 1 Peter, you start to see the title of pope being reserved for not all bishops, but just the bishop of Rome. And that's when he's really becoming like the pope.

Speaker 1 No one was keeping a list of popes in the first, second century. And I think in the third and fourth century, people kind of retroactively made these nice tidy lists.

Speaker 1 So I think we can be, you know, appropriately suspicious of the exact number of popes.

Speaker 6 And Alison, do you know why the papacy is based in Rome? It's not just the gelato.

Speaker 10 It only occurred to me today, where does the term Roman Catholic come from? Tell me why.

Speaker 10 I'm trying to think of something funny, but the curiosity has overtaken my brain.

Speaker 1 St. Peter's critical here.
And also St. Paul, you get two for the price of one here, because there's a tradition that St.
Paul also went to Rome. It's the capital of the Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 It's the heart of the Roman world.

Speaker 1 And so the idea that these two really important apostles went there and they founded the church there, I think, you know, I guess nowadays we call it an origin story, right?

Speaker 6 So that is the origin story. But today we're looking at the early medieval European situation.
So we're scrolling scrolling forward into the sort of 800s and 900s.

Speaker 6 We've got this massively important religious and political institution, but it descends into absolute infamy. The papal dark ages is the nice way of describing what happens.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they have this chronicle, it's called the Book of Popes.

Speaker 10 Amazing name. Isn't it?

Speaker 1 I think that runs from about the 6th to the 9th century and it it gives these little like mini papal biographies, but after the 9th century it it kinda trails off.

Speaker 1 No one writes another papal biography for like a hundred years.

Speaker 6 So for 300 years they've done the papal biographies and then they get to the crisis and they're like, you know what, we haven't got time. We haven't got time.
There's another pope in.

Speaker 10 The popes are like the sugar babes in the way that, like, the middle sugar babes are not really talked about that much. It's just Siobhan.

Speaker 10 Justice Bromelle, that's what I say. I know.

Speaker 6 Okay, we reached the late 800s.

Speaker 6 The papal dark ages is a phrase that's sort of commonly used by historians to talk about this period where, politically speaking, the papacy is weak and vulnerable and chaotic.

Speaker 6 Alison, you ever heard of Formosus?

Speaker 10 I've never heard of Formosus before. Is it a type of yager?

Speaker 10 It sounds like it would keep my blood pressure down.

Speaker 6 Formosus in Latin means handsome. Do we get a handsome pope? You get a handsome pope, the Jude Law Pope, the young pope.

Speaker 10 Young pope.

Speaker 1 He is handsome, undeniably.

Speaker 6 He's handsome for a bit, and then it goes a bit wrong. Gret, can you tell us about Pope Formosus and the notorious thing that happens to him?

Speaker 1 Formosus is a bishop. He's the bishop of Porto, which is just just outside Rome.
The Pope Nicholas I sends him up to Bulgaria on a mission to convert the Bulgarians, and he does a good job.

Speaker 1 He's a successful missionary. Later on, though, he gets tangled up in these kind of local, nasty Roman politics.
He's deposed at one point, and eventually he actually manages to become Pope himself.

Speaker 1 This is in 891. He's now holding the top spot in the church.
But again, he gets caught up in this political infighting, including this question of who's going to be the next king of Italy.

Speaker 1 He dies, apparently, of natural causes, in 896. There's a pope right after him, Boniface VI, but he's only pope for like 15 days, so we don't really need to worry about him.

Speaker 1 The pope after that, Stephen VI, is not a fan of Formosus, and some things happen from there that are a bit shocking.

Speaker 6 Some things happen is a very, very kind way of describing what is about to happen. Alison, in 897, we get the most unhinged courtroom drama you can possibly imagine.

Speaker 6 How do you think Pope Stephen VI continues his beef with Pope Formosus, who by this point is dead?

Speaker 10 They're gonna dig him up, aren't they?

Speaker 1 Good job.

Speaker 10 I knew, okay, okay, cool, cool, cool.

Speaker 10 Oh, wow. I mean, you gotta have a special type of spite to dig as well.
You know, what did they do? Okay, tell me, tell me, tell me.

Speaker 6 Pope Stephen VI orders the exhumation of the corpse of Formosus, and he is put on trial. So it is called.

Speaker 6 It is called the Cadaver Synod. And Brett, do you want to give us the lurid details of this? This is amazing.

Speaker 10 This is amazing.

Speaker 6 How do you try a rotting corpse?

Speaker 1 Weekend at Bernie's just like popped into my head.

Speaker 1 So there's this great painting by Jean-Paul Laurent. It's from 1870.
It's not medieval at all, but it's one of these great, I think one of the more famous representations of the Cadaver Synod.

Speaker 1 So Formosius' rotting body is... After nine months in the tomb, he was dug up.
He's dressed up in the full papal regalia. He's propped up on the throne and his body is put on trial.

Speaker 1 Pope Stephen VI is there leveling the charges against him and kind of interrogating him. And supposedly there was a deacon off to the sider behind him, acting like a ventriloquist.

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 10 Yeah, speaking for Formosius. Oh, I'd love to see that on Britain, Scott Alan.

Speaker 10 So he put his hand into the back of the head.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he literally like shoved his hand in and moved his jaw. That would be brilliant.
It's the bridge too far, I think.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 6 There's definitely someone giving answers on behalf of Formosus, who is a rotting shell of a man. But anyway, Alison, that is the scene.
So, I mean, can you imagine that as a TV drama now?

Speaker 10 How does the defendant plead?

Speaker 1 Dead, Your Honor.

Speaker 10 Dead.

Speaker 6 So Stephen is yelling his questions. The deacon is doing the corpse ventriloquism.
The corpse is found guilty. Obviously, of course he is.

Speaker 6 Because they're not going to be like, oh, he got off on a technicality.

Speaker 3 Clearly, they're finding him guilty.

Speaker 6 What do you think his posthumous punishment is?

Speaker 10 Please say it's death again. Please, it has to be.
This is double death.

Speaker 10 This is great. Death squared.

Speaker 10 It can't be nine months on community service. He's not going to be able to sweep up.
He's a corpse.

Speaker 6 It has to be death. It's a sort of reputational death.

Speaker 10 Oh.

Speaker 6 All of his acts as pope were nullified. Oh, no.
He was stripped of his papal vestments that they put on him. Do you remember those robes they put on him? Well, they took him off again ceremonially.

Speaker 6 They snapped off his three fingers he had used to bless people.

Speaker 10 Whoa.

Speaker 6 And then they reburied him in a commoner's grave. And Stephen said it was because Formosas had committed perjury, coveting the papacy, violating the laws of the church.

Speaker 6 So those are the sort of crimes he's accused of.

Speaker 10 Because we're hearing about him now, was there like a retrospective on this? Is it from Brosia? Formosas. Formosasus.
Formosas. Was there kind of like a renaissance for him?

Speaker 10 Because why do we know so much about him?

Speaker 6 Great question. You're thinking like a historian, Alison.
Very nice. He's reburied in a commoner's grave, and then the chaos is not over yet, is it, Brett?

Speaker 1 Pope Stephen seems to get concerned that some of Formos' supporters might actually dig up the body and kind of turn it into like a martyr or almost like a saint, right?

Speaker 1 Get the relics and turn those into a focal point for devotion. Stephen orders the body to be dug up again.
And according to some of these chronicles, it gets thrown in the Tiber.

Speaker 1 The Cult of Relics was a really big deal in the Middle Ages.

Speaker 10 I mean, I visited St. Valentine's Bones.

Speaker 10 There's an incredible thing in Dublin where you can look at like wish books. And I'm no longer Catholic.
Love the iconography. I won't lie.
Love sitting in a church.

Speaker 10 But like, yeah, this is so interesting to me. Sorry, I totally interrupted you there.
No, not at all. My enthusiasm, Brett.
Continue, continue, continue.

Speaker 1 No, you're spot on, and you're the one who first brought up saints at the beginning of the show.

Speaker 1 That's really helpful to remember that there's this whole kind of culture around dead bodies, you know, breaking them up into little bits and sending them around and putting them into altars.

Speaker 1 That's what they do to Formosis, though. That they throw him in the river because they want to make sure that

Speaker 1 no one gets their hands on his body and turns it into a saintly relic. And yet, He doesn't become a saint, but

Speaker 1 there are stories here that a monk or other stories, it's like a fisherman who's in the Tiber. Imagine that, you're like fishing in the Tiber and you put the Pope's corpse.

Speaker 10 Wow, where'd that come from?

Speaker 1 And the body does get rediscovered, right? And some sympathetic supporters of Formos get their hands on it. To do it, I think Stephen was probably worried about it.
There's this one priest, actually.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this other story. Auxilius of Naples is this guy.
He's writing at the time. He says there was a thunderstorm.
So this is where maybe God was getting involved and it caused the Tiber to rise up.

Speaker 1 And at that point, the body was discovered. According to another story, this monk had a prophetic dream.

Speaker 10 Of course.

Speaker 1 These are signs that Formosius was wrongly, I think, convicted, right? Clearly.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 1 Auxilius, by the way, is one of these priests who was ordained, made into a priest by, guess who? By Formosius. So I think he has his own vested interest in wanting to be Team Formosius.

Speaker 1 And when Formosius' acts are all nullified, that would send these kind of ripples through the whole church if you just nullified everything a pope did.

Speaker 1 And so someone like Auxilius, I think, probably had his own reasons for wanting to rehabilitate Pope Formosius.

Speaker 6 So I guess Stephen has failed in his quest. He buried him and then threw him in the river, and both times it's gone wrong.
What do you think happens to Pope Stephen VI, Alison?

Speaker 6 Do you think it all ends very nicely for him?

Speaker 10 Does he get tried when he's dead?

Speaker 10 Oh,

Speaker 10 sweet justice.

Speaker 6 He doesn't get tried in a court of law, but he gets his comeuppance, doesn't he, Brett? And it's a pretty violent comeuppance.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, so people like Auxilius of Naples have it out for Stephen after this all goes down, and he gets pushed out of power not too long after, and he's stripped of his vestments, he's demoted to being a monk, kind of on a house monastic arrest, and he's eventually strangled to death.

Speaker 10 There's so much bloodlust for these popes.

Speaker 10 I am aghast. I'm from Ireland.
They love popes there.

Speaker 6 So thank you for that, Brett. That's an excellent summary of the Cadava Synod and its consequences.
So karmic justice for Stephen. Then we get the new guy, Pope Romanus.
Now, he's got a good name.

Speaker 6 It's Rome. He's called Romanus.
I've got a good feeling about him. Does he do well?

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. Yeah, he gets overthrown pretty quickly and trundled off to a monastery and dies four months later.

Speaker 10 What of...

Speaker 6 We think maybe poisoned. But I've got a really strong feeling that Pope Theodore II, the best of the chipmunks, he's going to nail this.
How long does he last, Alison?

Speaker 10 let's uh i'm gonna go two years three weeks no

Speaker 6 yeah when i say three weeks that's the generous version of the story because the other story is that he dies within 12 days so theodore ii has not it's not gone great no he's murdered by foul play but brett he is still linked to the cadaver synod he's still linked to formosis isn't he theodore yeah i mean already romanus had already started this process of actually of annulling stephen the sixth acts right and kind of rehabilitating Formosius.

Speaker 1 Romanus held a synod reinstating Formosius and condemning Stephen. And then, yeah, Theodore keeps this process going.
It's interesting, right?

Speaker 1 There's like multiple synods by multiple popes after condemning Stephen VI's actions and overturning the verdict of the Cadaver Synod.

Speaker 1 So you get the sense of how important this was for people to unwind this. Putting a corpse on trial, it wasn't really a winning move in the long run.

Speaker 10 No, it makes you look petty, I have to say. It's really petty.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Okay, so we have Theodore dies after only three weeks maximum.
He's then replaced by another pope. Things are unfortunately not massively improving.

Speaker 6 Alison, we asked you at the beginning to guess how many popes there were in total. I'm now going to ask you to guess how many popes were there in the eight years between 896 and 904.

Speaker 10 I'm going to go for 18.

Speaker 6 I love the way you embrace the chaos. It was nine popes in eight years.

Speaker 6 Which is still pretty bad. But not all of those did one year.
Some of those were doing just a few months.

Speaker 10 There were some caretaker popes involved in this.

Speaker 6 Some definite caretaker popes. These popes being elected, you know, inverted commas, but there's actually an awful lot of sort of sinister underhand politics happening here.

Speaker 6 We have some very powerful families with wonderful names, the Theophylacti, the Crescentii, and the Tusculani. They are the kind of medieval mafia mob bosses of papal politics, aren't they?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, you can't understand what's happening without really thinking about these powerful Roman families.

Speaker 6 And so they're putting their own on the throne, and then within a few months or a year, that pope is bumped off, murdered, deposed. So many popes were killed or deposed.

Speaker 6 We don't even have time to list them, Alison.

Speaker 10 That's how many it was.

Speaker 6 The papacy clearly is in dire straits here, Brett. The obvious question, I suppose, is, are various kings and princes and rulers and political decision makers, have they just given up on the papacy?

Speaker 1 No, I don't. I mean,

Speaker 1 Rome still, it is still such a touchstone point, right? Popes still have this layering of legitimacy. They're the only ones that can bestow.

Speaker 1 You can be a really powerful king, but if you want to really have the imperial title and have people recognize it as meaningful, you need a pope to be the one to hand that crown over.

Speaker 1 Just to give you an example, there are these rulers in Germany in the late 900s, conveniently named Otto I, Otto II, and Otto III.

Speaker 1 They become really powerful, powerful enough that they want to reclaim the imperial title.

Speaker 1 So Otto goes down, I think around it's like 955, he goes down to knock some heads in northern Italy and actually meets with the Pope and gets crowned as emperor.

Speaker 1 The Ottonians, as they're called, the Ottonian dynasty, donates properties to the papacy. Emperor Otto III is interesting.

Speaker 1 He works really closely with Pope Sylvester II, who was his former tutor, actually. And they seem to have these big, ambitious plans to kind of bring back the glory of the Roman Empire.

Speaker 1 They both die at 1002 and 1003, like within a year of each other. And nothing much comes of this partnership.
And it takes another decade or so before another emperor is crowned.

Speaker 1 These rulers don't walk away from the appeal of Rome.

Speaker 6 Okay. But there's clearly a crisis going on.
So Alison, if you were the chief exec of the papacy, we've reached the year 1000 here.

Speaker 6 So what reforms would you be putting in place to try and protect the brand?

Speaker 10 Is there celibacy now or is that later on in the...

Speaker 1 It's theoretically on the books at this point. But

Speaker 1 not always observed, let's put it that way.

Speaker 1 It's a great question.

Speaker 10 I would get the devil out of church. That would be my big thing if I was Pope.
Step one. Step one.

Speaker 6 Brett, how do you remove the devil from the church? How do you reform the papacy? After 200 years of absolute crisis, we've reached the early 1000s.

Speaker 6 Are there going to be reforms coming down the pipeline?

Speaker 1 The 11th century, I'm certainly not the first medieval historian to talk about sometimes called like the papal reform movement, where people are trying to sort of clean house here.

Speaker 1 But one example of this is in 1049. You get a new pope, Leo IX.
He's generally considered the first reformer pope of the 11th century.

Speaker 1 And he's more or less installed by the emperor at the time, Henry III. But when he shows up, actually shows up in Rome to take up the papal office.

Speaker 1 He comes, it's described in some accounts in the manner of a pilgrim. He's barefoot.
He's humble. He tells the people of Rome that if he's not worthy to be their bishop, he'll leave, right?

Speaker 1 So, and then in the 1070s, you get the Pope Gregory VII.

Speaker 1 And he left such a stamp on this new spirit of reform. It's sometimes actually called the Gregorian papacy.
And to your point, he wants to get priests to be celibate.

Speaker 1 He wants priests to stop getting married and passing their church property on to their kids.

Speaker 1 He wants to get rid of simony, which is the idea that you can like buy a bishopric or buy a position as an abbot.

Speaker 1 And so there really is this idea they want to get the pope out from under the thumb of lay people, which includes kings and emperors, by the way, and really broadcast the idea that the papacy is the ultimate spiritual head of the Christian world.

Speaker 1 And that's how you're going to reform the church, is by the pope stepping up into this role.

Speaker 10 So is it giving the pope ultimate power?

Speaker 1 In some ways, I think when we think of the papacy as being a big deal in the Middle Ages, it's really the 11th century when that starts to happen.

Speaker 1 So you wind up with Clement, and then you have a series of popes over the following decades who are basically kind of popes in exile, right?

Speaker 1 They're not actually in Rome, but they have a lot of support. You see the popes, a series of popes, what was it, sticking with the reform up to their eyeballs.

Speaker 1 And one of the interesting ones is Urban II. He's elected pope in 1088.

Speaker 10 Pope Urban, that's a genre of music that happens to be too fast.

Speaker 1 Have you heard of Urban, Allison? Does that name even ring any bells?

Speaker 10 I have an idea related to Keith Urban, the husband of Nicole Pittman.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Carl Urban, Pope Urban, and Keith. They're all the same urban, all the same family.
No, it's.

Speaker 1 He's an important pope. He's savvy.
He gathers a lot of support from different European rulers and bishops.

Speaker 6 Pope Urban II is one of the most famous popes from history. He's going to do something very, very famous.
Do you know what it is, Alison? It's in the 1090s.

Speaker 10 Oh.

Speaker 1 All right, I'm going to give a hint.

Speaker 10 Can I give a hint?

Speaker 1 Orlando Bloom.

Speaker 10 Orlando Bloom. The calcium kid? Does he become a boxer? Does he become a boxer?

Speaker 10 Or is he a pirate?

Speaker 6 You've gone two pirates at the Garibbean, Brett. We should have gone the other way.
We should have gone with Ridley Scott.

Speaker 10 Oh, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Kingdom of heaven.

Speaker 10 So Kingdom of Heaven. Okay, cool.
So is he a tough pope?

Speaker 6 He calls the First Crusade.

Speaker 4 Ah,

Speaker 10 yes, okay.

Speaker 6 Which is a huge moment in global history. It's obviously going to be a horrifically violent religious war.

Speaker 6 Brett, this is, in terms of medieval Christianity, this is a sort of watermark moment, isn't it, for the papacy? Because this is an assertion of strength.

Speaker 1 I think so. You know, here's Urban.
He's in the middle still of this ongoing fight with Henry IV. He can't even really go to the city of Rome, but he's out working the crowd sometimes, literally.

Speaker 1 And in 1095, he preaches this sermon in Clermont in France and calls for Christians to go and, as he sees it, liberate the holy city of Jerusalem. And this becomes known as the First Crusade.

Speaker 1 At the time, and certainly in retrospect, the kind of show-stopping demonstration of the Pope's authority on a, I guess now we might call it like an international level.

Speaker 1 In the Crusade, it actually captures Jerusalem in July 1099, and Pope Urban II dies just like a few weeks before news reaches Rome that the Crusaders had actually, after this three-year campaign, managed to capture the city.

Speaker 1 Urban's very symbolic of a kind of a new direction with the papacy, I think.

Speaker 6 We now get into a new phase where the papacy is still political. It's still controversial, but there is more strength in the office, I suppose.

Speaker 10 Was Urban looking for that war to get the Europeans together against what they would perceive as a common enemy and give these rich people something to do.

Speaker 1 Rich, also in violent

Speaker 1 peace of God is happening at the same time, and there's this idea like stop killing each other and start killing other people.

Speaker 10 Sadly,

Speaker 1 go kill, go, go kill the so-called infidels as they view as they view them.

Speaker 10 Interesting.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other episode, Alison. But, you know, that's brought us to the end of our conversation, to the end of the Papal Dark Ages.

Speaker 4 The Nuance Window!

Speaker 6 This is where Alison and and I spend our two minutes reburying a pope we've just dug up, while Brett has two uninterrupted minutes to tell us something we need to know about today's conversation.

Speaker 6 So my stopwatch is ready, Brett. If you are ready, the nuance window, please.

Speaker 1 Yeah, great. And, you know, you've made this, Alison, particularly, I think, with all of your great comments, you've made this pretty easy.

Speaker 1 I think we've really grabbed a hold of some of the nuance of the situation, right?

Speaker 1 So I'll be the first to admit that something like the Cadaver Synod, you can see it as a sign of the fact that the Middle Ages were the dark ages, and it was irrational, it was grotesque, it was barbaric.

Speaker 1 But I do think we need to avoid this impulse, right? I think of it as like a historical confirmation bias, if you see what I mean, for the way we view the medieval as opposed to the modern world.

Speaker 1 But we saw on the show today, right, bishops around medieval Europe, like the popes of Rome, were deeply enmeshed in political life, right?

Speaker 1 Italian politics, the pope is the biggest landlord in medieval Italy, after all.

Speaker 1 And they were certainly involved in local politics with these families that Greg mentioned earlier, struggling for control. control of the of the city.

Speaker 1 And this was really the case after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Governing institutions like of all different kinds were really under new kinds of pressure.

Speaker 1 In that context, the cadaver synod kind of makes sense, so to speak. It has its own kind of internal logic.

Speaker 1 You know, on the other hand, keep in mind, contemporaries knew the cadaver synod was outrageous, right? This wasn't just like another day in the crazy middle ages.

Speaker 1 I mean, people in the ninth century knew that this isn't how the successor of St. Peter is supposed to act with the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Speaker 1 And the same thing goes for like being murdered with a hammer or sleeping with your mistress or using church property for your own personal gain.

Speaker 1 So even in the middle of these struggles and in the middle of these troubles, you see these calls for reform, which really pick up steam in the 11th century to get the Roman popes out from under the thumb of these local families, out from under the thumb of emperors and really do things differently.

Speaker 1 And, you know, that leads to something like Urban II being in a position to stand up as the leader of Christendom and call for the first crusade.

Speaker 1 So from that kind of more nuanced perspective, I think that the people of Dark Ages, and I'm making air quotes here with my fingers, really become less like sensationalistic and more historically important because, you you know they allow us to kind of to see and track these broader changes in medieval European history as a whole.

Speaker 6 Thank you so much, Brett. That's fascinating.
Alison, any thoughts on that?

Speaker 10 I feel nuanced up to the eyeballs.

Speaker 10 My mind has been opened so hard. Like with medieval ages, I just thought it was like eating large drumsticks and jousting, but this has been so, so great.
Fabulous.

Speaker 6 Well, thank you so much, Alison. Thank you so much, Brett.
And listener, if after today's episode you want to know about the Crusades, why not go listen to to our episode on Saladin?

Speaker 6 And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, make sure to subscribe to your Dead to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode.

Speaker 6 But all that's left for me to do is say a huge thank you to my guests in History Corner. We have the fantastic professor Brett Whalen from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Speaker 6 Thank you, Brett.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much. Thank you, Alison.
I had such a great time. Thanks.

Speaker 10 Me too, Brett. You're a legend.
Thanks so much.

Speaker 6 And in Comedy Corner, we have the awesome Alison Spittel. Thank you, Alison.

Speaker 10 Greg, Brett, everybody else. It's been knowledgeable and beautiful.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 6 Pleasure. Thanks for coming.
And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we excitedly exhume more forgotten historical subjects and then put them on trial.

Speaker 6 But for now, I want to go and change my name to Corpse Ventriloquist.

Speaker 4 Bye!

Speaker 6 You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4.

Speaker 4 Hi, I'm Phil Wang, and this is a podcast-to-podcast trailer for a different podcast than this podcast that you've listened to or are going to listen to.

Speaker 4 But nonetheless, I'm talking about another podcast that you should also definitely listen to.

Speaker 4 The podcast I'm talking about is Comedy of the Week, which takes choice episodes from BBC sitcoms, sketch shows, podcasts, and panel shows, including my own show, Unspeakable, and puts them all into one podcast.

Speaker 4 Maybe I'll trail this podcast on that podcast. Who's to say? I'll do what I like.
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