Constantine celebrated his new faith by showering the church with riches and new churches, including the beginnings of what is now St. Peter's. The newly built Lateran was decorated with seven silver altars—each 200 pounds—dozens of silver chalices, life-size silver statues of Christ and the apostles, and a gold chandelier hung with 50 dolphins. For a church that had met secretly in cellars just a century before, it was an undreamed-of explosion of power, prestige, and wealth.
advertisement
Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
Temptations soon followed. "Men who covet this office may well struggle for it with every resource at their disposal," one contemporary wrote. "For once they have obtained it they are forever after secure, enriched with offerings from the ladies, riding abroad seated in their carriages, splendidly arrayed, giving banquets so lavish that they surpass the tables of royalty." Damasus, who became pope in 366 after fierce street fighting, was nicknamed "the ladies' ear-tickler"; at the same time, he was responsible for the first serious effort to translate the Bible into polished Latin, a significant move that garnered the book new readers throughout the Roman empire.
The bishop of Rome quickly became one of the most powerful men in the world. As the roads (and legions) of Rome carried the fledgling religion to all corners of Constantine's empire, Peter's legacy gave the Roman patriarch special moral authority. By the reign of Leo the Great in A.D. 440, the pope's power had been dramatically consolidated, but in time Rome's decline would weaken that pope as well. Leo persuaded Attila the Hun to spare the city during his rampage through Italy in 452, but three years later the Vandals struck. Rome was powerless and ravaged.
But it was during the Dark Ages that the papacy reached its lowest point. Gregory VII, originally a peasant from Tuscany, was eager to try to reverse centuries of nepotism, violations of celibacy, and simony—the sale of church offices. He looked for legal and theological evidence to support his claim of universal jurisdiction over not just the church but also its members, and packaged the results into the Dictae Papae, which announced that the pope had the power to depose emperors and take authority away from wicked rulers. He first put his dictums into practice in a power struggle with the king of Germany, Henry IV, who was excommunicated as a result of the struggle. To save his throne, Henry was forced to humiliate himself before the pope, standing barefoot in the snow outside a castle in the Italian Alps.
Gregory's triumph reversed centuries of disorganization, confusion, and competing claims to authority. The pope in Rome was again the most powerful man on Earth. His influence extended into all realms of life—from the activities of kings and princes and military men to the spiritual life of everyday people. The pope controlled large sections of Italy and was the political ruler of the so-called Papal States as well as the spiritual leader of Europe. In 1302, Boniface VIII declared that it was "necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff."
Previous Page
