Italian Normans overpower the pope's armies
Today in Papal History marks a couple of papal deaths, a new episode of the pod on an 11th Century losing battle for St. Leo IX, and some prophetic words from Pope Benedict XVI
618 A.D.
1407 years ago today, Pope St. Adeodatus I went to his eternal reward. He had been in the Chair of St Peter for just over three years at a time when Rome was in rather dire straits, but he still was a pope of a couple notable “firsts”:
He was reportedly the first pope to request that his clergy each receive one year’s salary upon his death
He was also the first pope to use lead seals when signing his letters
955 A.D.
Sixty-one popes later, another pope met his mortal end on this very same day. Pope Agapetus II, just five months shy of his 10th anniversary in office, died under mysterious circumstances from an unknown cause.
Agapetus was smack in the middle of the literal worst era of papal history, referred to most commonly as the Saeculum Obscurum (“the dark age”) and more colloquially as the Pornocracy (“Rule of the Harlots”).
Basically, one corrupt family was running Rome – which was in ruins at the time, a hollowed-out husk of its former self – so the papacy had become little more than a puppet’s chair, and Agapetus II was no exception. Nothing he did during those nine years happened without the approval of Alberic II of Spoleto, the Eternal City’s present ruler.
At any rate, this pope is eminently forgettable. But it’s his successor who was significantly more memorable. Agapetus II was followed by Pope John XII, the youngest-ever pontiff (he was little more than 18 years old) who was gifted the office by dear old dad Alberic, enjoyed the spoils of his new job, and unfortunately met his end by being thrown headlong out a window by the husband of the man he was caught in bed with.
Dark age of the papacy, indeed.
1053 A.D. | The Battle of Civitate
This week’s episode of The Popecast features a particularly unique guest, and easily one of my favorite conversations in general, let alone one featured on the show.
Michael Lentz is an expert on the Normans and the creator of
on Substack, Youtube, and X (formerly Twitter), and he joined me to tell the story of the 11th Century Battle of Civitate, in which the Italian Normans fought the pope’s armies and emerged victorious
But we didn’t just talk about the battle itself: beyond the historical lead-up to the conflict, we covered the Norman influence on Western Civilization in the decades and centuries that followed, talked a bit about the First Crusade, and even teased out how the Norman efforts have a ripple effect in our present day – most specifically in a particular even that happened in Rome just after Easter of this year…
Check it out below:
2009 A.D.
During a homily in Brescia, Italy – the hometown of Pope St. Paul VI – Pope Benedict XVI reflected on what he called “the mystery of the Church”:
The Church is a real spiritual organism that prolongs in space and time the sacrifice of the Son of God, an apparently insignificant sacrifice in comparison with the dimensions of the world and of history but in God’s eyes crucial. As the Letter to the Hebrews says and also the text we have just heard Jesus’ sacrifice offered “once” sufficed for God to save the whole world (cf. Heb 9: 26, 28), because all the Love of the Son of God made man is condensed in that single oblation, just as all the widow’s love for God and for her brethren is concentrated in this woman’s action; nothing is lacking and there is nothing to add. The Church, which is ceaselessly born from the Eucharist, from Jesus’ gift of self, is the continuation of this gift, this superabundance which is expressed in poverty, in the all that is offered in the fragment. It is Christ’s Body that is given entirely, a body broken and shared in constant adherence to the will of its Head.
