The pope has a great job. He lives in terrific digs right in the heart of Rome. He has a fabulous art collection, the best supply of Italian food anyone could want, and even his clothes, we must admit, are pretty cool—his hats are out of this world. He travels wherever he wants in grand style, and he is adored by millions of people. Still, it’s not as good a job as it once was. The best time to be pope was between the papacies of Innocent III (1198-1216) and Boniface VIII (1294—1303). Those were the days when popes really had it all—fame, glory, riches, sanctity, power. After that, they went into a long downward spiral, punctuated most noticeably by the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War.
The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 formally made kings sovereign within their territorial boundaries. They could choose (or let the people choose, an idea whose time had not yet come) the religion for their domain. The closer a kingdom was to Rome, the more likely it was to remain Catholic. As one got farther from the pope’s reach, however, Protestants did better. Westphalia enshrined the idea that foreign powers should not interfere with any country’s internal policies. This really limited the Catholic Church’s ability to dictate policies as it had done for centuries. Although the Treaty of Westphalia made these points explicit, they had been in the works for a long time. And the real action that made such conditions feasible started at least five centuries earlier, when the sale of bishops’ positions was resolved by the Concordat of Worms.
Historians have a quite different take on the development of modern sovereign states than I do. My view is shaped by the game that was set up at Worms. The standard account is that the Catholic Church promoted economic growth (banning usury only because it was sinful) and managed reverent kings who deferred to the popes’ choices of bishops, which gave the Vatican localized control over much of Europe. My perspective is that the Church actively tried to hinder economic growth in the secular realm and that kings only really deferred to papal choices for bishops where and when they were forced to for economic reasons. My view looks at the Church as a political power more than as a religious institution. Please understand, I am not questioning the sincerity of Catholic religious beliefs today, or at any time in the past. I am just recognizing that in addition to its religious mission— maybe because of it—the Catholic Church played power politics.
I contend that, eventually, economic growth made the pope all but irrelevant politically, and it was that very growth—and the contest for it—that made the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia ultimately possible. I will show how each of these developments was dictated by the strategic implications of Worms and, therefore, that each was predictable. Worms established a way for popes to sustain substantial power for a long time, but it also made inevitable that the Church would ultimately become subservient to the state. In that sense, the pope of 1122 (Calixtus II) did what was good for him and his immediate successors, but at the price of selling out the political prospects of popes centuries later.
The agreement reached at Worms resolved the investiture struggle over bishops. Before Worms, the Holy Roman Emperor and Catholic kings sold bishoprics within their domain. Naturally, the pope objected to this practice. He wanted greater control over bishops. They were, after all, supposed to be his emissaries. Under the concordat, the pope gained the right to nominate bishops, and the king the right to approve or reject the nominees. When a new bishop was installed, the king gave up control over the symbols and trappings of the bishop’s office, including its income. In exchange, the bishop promised military assistance and loyalty to the king as sovereign of the territory occupied by the bishopric. In this way, the king transferred back to the church, and to the bishop as its agent, the right to the tax revenues from the see. During the vacancy between the death of the old bishop and the consecration of the new one, the revenue from the bishopric went to the king. This revenue could be substantial. The longer the bishop’s office remained vacant, the longer the king received the revenue instead of the church. But rejection of a papal nominee was bound to irritate the pope, and that could be politically and socially costly to the king. The pope could excommunicate the king, or he could interdict the bishopric. That meant that no one in the bishopric could receive any of the sacraments. This was tantamount to fomenting civil war against the king in that deeply religious age.
The king’s right to the see’s income during a vacancy represented a property right that belonged to the king as sovereign over the territory of the see, and not to the king as an individual. The king could not sell the future right to control the regalia, nor could this right be inherited except by ascent to the throne. The right belonged to the king’s successor, who might be his child or might be from an entirely new line. The king held the right to this income, then, as the kingdom’s agent and not as his personal, private property. This was a significant departure from feudal practice. It established the sovereign claims of the monarch on behalf of his citizen-subjects within the territory of each bishopric in his domain. It was the beginning of the state as we know it.
Although the actual game set up at Worms is a bit more complicated than the model I present, the game tree in figure 11.1 is close enough to capture the essentials. The pope chooses to nominate a bishop. The nominee is either someone especially to the pope’s liking, or someone more to the liking of the king. The king, in turn, can agree to the pope’s nominee or reject him. If the king rejects the nominee, then he earns more money but annoys the pope, who must then nominate someone else to be bishop. If the king agrees to the pope’s nominee, then the king earns less money because the bishopric does not remain vacant for long, but he improves his relations with the pope. So as long as the pope and the king agree on a nominee, both benefit, although in different ways. On acceptance of a bishop, earnings from the see benefit the pope, and, depending on who the bishop is, the pope either has a loyal ambassador, or the pope relies on a person more loyal to the king than to the pope, a potential fifth-columnist within the pope’s circle. On agreement, the king has an acceptable bishop to work with, and if there is some delay between the death of the previous bishop and the installation of the new one, the king also gets some extra income. Figure 11.2, on the next page, shows a simple version of this game.
FIG. 11.1. The Game Set Up at Worms in 11 22
The pope’s choice looks pretty easy to make. If he nominates someone expected to be loyal to him—a relative or a member of his papal court—and the king accepts, the pope gets his best choice as bishop and he gets the income from the see, eliminating the vacancy as quickly as possible. The problem is that the king might say no to this proposal. Okay, you think, so maybe the pope should nominate someone loyal to the king. Then at least he gets the income. But the king could turn that offer down too. Here lies the kernel of the undoing of the Catholic Church 526 years later. Let’s look at the king’s choices with a numerical example to illustrate how this works. The scale of the numbers is not important here as long as the order of the size of the value to the pope and to the king under different conditions is right.
Setting aside for the moment the matter of income, let’s say that the pope values a bishop who will be loyal to him at 5 points and a bishop loyal to the king at only 3. Not getting the king to agree on a bishop at all is worth 0 points to the pope. This order of values makes clear that the pope prefers his own guy to the king’s man, but he prefers the king’s choice of bishop to no bishop at all. Let’s say that the king places a value of 5 on a bishop who is related to him and a value of 3 on a bishop whose loyalty is expected to be with the pope. The value of having no bishop at all is 0 for the king, just as it was for the pope.
Now comes the fun part. How much is the income from a bishopric worth? I will assume that a poor diocese produces an income worth 1 additional point for whoever gets the income. A moderately wealthy see’s income is worth 4 points, and a really rich bishopric produces an income of 6. The game tree shows the pope’s benefits first
