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Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy
Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy
Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy
Audiobook18 hours

Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy

Written by John Julius Norwich

Narrated by Michael Page

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

With the papacy embattled in recent years, it is essential to have the perspective of one of the world's most accomplished historians. In Absolute Monarchs, John Julius Norwich captures nearly two thousand years of inspiration and devotion, intrigue and scandal. The men (and maybe one woman) who have held this position of infallible power over millions have ranged from heroes to rogues, admirably wise to utterly decadent. Norwich, who knew two popes and had private audiences with two others, recounts in riveting detail the histories of the most significant popes and what they meant politically, culturally, and socially to Rome and to the world.

Norwich presents such brave popes as Innocent I, who in the fifth century successfully negotiated with Alaric the Goth, an invader civil authorities could not defeat, and Leo I, who two decades later tamed (and perhaps paid off) Atilla the Hun. Here, too, are the scandalous figures: Pope Joan, the mythic woman said (without any substantiation) to have been elected in 855, and the infamous "pornocracy," the five libertines who were descendants or lovers of Marozia, debauched daughter of one of Rome's most powerful families.

Absolute Monarchs brilliantly portrays such reformers as Pope Paul III, "the greatest pontiff of the sixteenth century," who reinterpreted the Church's teaching and discipline, and John XXIII, who in five short years starting in 1958 "opened the church to the the twentieth century," instituting reforms that led to Vatican II. Norwich brings the story to the present day with Benedict XVI, who is coping with a global priest sex scandal.

Epic and compelling, Absolute Monarchs is the astonishing story of some of history's most revered and reviled figures, men who still cast light and shadows on the vatican and the world today.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 5, 2011
ISBN9781452674223
Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy

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Reviews for Absolute Monarchs

Rating: 3.5439189094594594 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Awful whitewashing of the popes who helped Hitler, as if naziism and fascism presented a complex ethical dilemma for an institution that claims, as all religions do, moral superiority over everyone else. Shameful.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    - So. Many. Popes.
    - The author takes sides and makes clear where he stands on some issues. It's funny but not very impartial.
    - This book also serves as a history of Italy post-Roman Empire.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Perfectly good airport history. I'm stuck at around page 150 of Norwich's condensed history of the Byzantines, so I wasn't expecting much from this. But I've learned something very important about Mr. Norwich: if he's writing about things you know even reasonably well (e.g., for me, the early Byzantine emperors), he's almost insufferable. This might just be a by-product of Great Man history in general, which is that it has very little to say about anything. Also, he's very boring in short bursts.

    However, if I can settle in for a couple of hours and read about things I don't know all that well (e.g., the Renaissance papacy), he's immensely entertaining. I have no idea how this is possible, but Norwich is somehow more readable over two hour stretches than he is over half an hour. He'll follow every narrative, no matter how tangential, if it promises to be amusing.

    Other reviewers have complained that he's too much of a liberal, too this-worldly, to do justice to the popes; that's arrant nonsense. He's very even handed, except when dealing with popes who monstrosity leaves no room for even-handedness; or, naturally, when dealing with Pius XII. Pius XII, like almost every other Pope (and non-Jewish person) before him, was a rabid anti-Semite, but had the misfortune of being the last rabid anti-Semite to hold a position of power. Thus, the holocaust is somehow his fault. This is not to excuse his anti-semitism, nor anyone else's. It is to suggest that, as an airport historian, Norwich might be a little too easily swayed by contemporary political imperatives.

    Anyway, highly enjoyable, provided you know little to nothing about the topic at hand; immensely irritating, however, if you do more than a smidgeon.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A bit too headlong at times, perhaps unavoidably.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was quite devastated when I leant of the death in 2018 of John Julius Norwich, my favourite purveyor of popular history for many years. His books on Byzantium, Venice and the Normans have been among my often-read favourites, and I still have one last unread pleasure waiting on my shelf, his final book on the history of France. The Popes has been on my must-read list for a few years, but somehow has evaded me until now. And its is quite as grand as his others. No other modern popular historian I know quite catches the sweep of history, the triumphs and tragedies of so many great figures across enormous spans of history, with such elegant grace. Norwich likes to deal in centuries and millennia rather than decades (Byzantium covered 1000 years, Venice 1200, The Normans was quite abbreviated by Norwich standards - not quite 200 years. This one covers a massive 2000 years, from St Peter to Benedict XVI, sweeping through the centuries, dotting down for periods of varying lengths depending on the perceived significance of the designated pontiff. The ever-changing nature of the papacy and its response to the changing world is always on show. From Peter through the shadowy popes of then pagan era, where being pope could and often did mean martyrdom, years after Constantine when a Church suddenly elevated to state religion struggled with questions of doctrine, through the collapse of the Empire and the influx of pagan tribes, the first fissures between Western and Eastern churches, the terrible debauchery of the so-called "pornocracy" of the 9th and 10th centuries, the final still unhealed schism between the Roman and Orthodox churches in 1054, the struggles between pope and the emperors of the church's own creation, the Holy Roman Empire, the nadir of the papacy in Renaissance Rome, when an era of artistic and scientific flowering coincided with the most infamous names in Church history - the Borgias, the della Roveres, the Farneses, which led directly to the shock of the Reformation and the fightback of the Counter-Reformation, the religious wars of Europe, the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Risorgimento, World War I, World War II and finally the modern era where the Church, despite being under attack from science, humanism and individualism, still commands the allegiance of a 6th of the world's population. A superbly readable book in its scale, its humanity, its occasionally caustic wit, the ironic touches and sometimes scathing criticism. Its an intensely human history, its 500 odd pages will fly by. Truly great reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Of necessity, a selective history; but an entertaining one. The author brilliantly summarizes a huge chunk of history, giving it coherence. Like his histories of Byzantium and Venice, it's grand scale history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In a single volume it would seem impossible to write a history of every single Pope who ever lived, but Norwich does an impressive job all the same.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting initial approach to such a broad topic. Norwich's prose is agile and flows from one story to another with ease, leaving the reader wanting to delve into many of them (a great virtue in a book of this nature) The problem of the book is its own thematic breadth, which creates a lack of focus and reveals some gaps in the author's knowledge, producing errors, minor but irritating (as an example: he places the death of Mussolini in 1943) Fortunately these errors do not seem to affect the core of the book (As far as my knowledge of the issue allows me to know)
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    The author makes it clear from the start that he is no scholar; even the first pages confirm this very forcefully.

    He seems to be unquestioningly accepting traditional authorship of the New Testament Gospels and Epistles, which, apart from six Pauline Epistles, no scholar would do. In a footnote he states that Luke's Gospel was the first to be written; also in a footnote he asks rhetorically why Catholic clergy is forbidden to marry if Jesus' disciples were married; this despite his previous declaration that he has "no ax to grind". OTOH, he states that every Christian religion is an offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet the Orthodox Church is not and neither are some other Eastern churches.

    And these are not the only serious factual errors, yet I didn't even read two full chapters.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A history of the Papacy is not an easy chore as the institution has been in existence in one form or another for 2000 years, but author Julius Norwich manages to do so in a coherent and entertaining fashion. The first 1000 years of the Papacy focused on getting the church established, its rivalry with the Eastern Orthodox Church and squabbles over arcane issues of doctrine that no one would care about today, but which often led to warfare between rival factions in the church. The next 500 or so dealt with the Pope trying to establish his power over the temporal powers of Europe with decreasing success as nation states became steadily more powerful than the church. The same period saw the rise of Islam and the Crusades against its power in the MidEast (highly unsuccessful) and the battle against its incursion into Europe (ultimately successful) And finally the last 400 or so years dealt with the rise of Protestantism, the Church's loss of temporal power and it's battle against modernism in almost any form.With few exceptions, the Popes were mostly poor leaders and venal in the extreme. They were constantly looking to line their own (and their families') pockets with wealth and high office. Nepotism and simony were accepted practices, and vows of celibacy were largely ignored. Matters of faith seemed to take a decidedly second place to matters of temporal power.Once the 19th Century was underway, the Papacy quickly lost any influence it once had over international events. Napoleon started things off with his Empire at the beginning of the century and the unification movements in both Germany and Italy finished the job, with the Papacy just left with Vatican City at the beginning of the 20th Century. Is it any wonder, the Popes weren't fond of the modern age?Norwich does not spare the Popes of the last 100 years. Pius XI legitimizes Mussolini and Pius XII did virtually nothing to protest Hitler's extermination of the Jews. The one bright spot was Pope John XXIII who instituted the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI who carried on its work after the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963. Pope John Paul I in 1978 gave every indication that he would extend the reforms of Vatican II even farther, but he died just 33 days after taking office and Norwich heavily suggests that he was murdered by reactionary elements in the Curia. Certainly the next two Popes were far more traditional in their doctrinaire outlook.The book, written in 2011 ends with Pope Benedict XVI, so we will have to leave it to another historian to judge the influence of Pope Francis. This is an interesting book that peels away the holy pomposity that surrounds the Papacy and shows the Popes as the men they were - warts and all.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A timely and engrossing read at a moment in papal history, with the retirement of Pope Benedict.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was my first book by Norwich. I heard him discussing this book on Lewis Lapham's podcast at about the same time as I was watching the Showtime series on the Borgias. Nonetheless, it sat on my shelf for a year, and I just happened to be reading it when Pope Benedict announced his retirement. I thought it was a nice overview of the popes and the papacy itself, but I found myself skimming over some of the general European political details (who proclaimed himself king of this or that province, who was running the empire, etc.). It made me realize that I should probably read a bit more about the split between the eastern and western churches.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Really sad that I can't get through this. I really am. I love Norwich's style - it's very readable and very informative. But that's the issue: it's all information. There's no interpretation. It's just a list. This pope did this and that pope did that. Eventually all the Clements and the Bonifaces began to blend together in my head.

    This is a shame, because medieval Christianity is really one of my favorite aspects of history. I think I'm going to have to stick to books about individual popes rather than a general history. Compressing ~1800 years of history into five hundred pages is tough. Norwich did an admirable job at attempting it, but I just can't bring myself to get through this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very readable tour of the history of the papacy---far more entertaining than that sounds. The book drags somewhat once it hits the sixteenth, seventeen, and eighteen centuries, and the format it settles into (a brief description of the earlier life of the next pope on the list, a brief description of his approach to the papacy, whether he was liked or not, wise or not, etc.) gets tiresome and misses a sense of the progress of civilization and of the subtle transformation that that progress must have effected on the papacy. Still, informative and a very good read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book provides the reader with a basic overview of the consequential Popes; many, of course, "ruled" briefly or history has forgotten them. I would expect that some Catholics may discover that some of these men weren't exactly that spiritual, and seem to have succumbed to many of the temporal pleasures that tempted their secular counterparts, and that their behavior might be considered less than infallible. Having skimmed user reviews on Amazon, I sense that a nerve has been touched there, for many Catholic readers interpret the book as anti-Catholic. No, this is not the case. One might claim that Norwich is anti-Pope, since his book is about them, not Catholicism. But he also praises a number of Popes, so my perception is that he's being fair-minded.There is certainly some rather sordid tales here, and as much as some people may not like it, facts are facts.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Like all books by Norwich, this was a pleasure to read. In one big swoop from Saint-Peter to Ratzinger, the author provides the reader with clarity (not obvious with all those popes and their numerals), expansive historical background, anecdotes and more - all beautifully written. Norwich is more sure-footed when talking about the Middle Ages, and hence some later passages (like the ones about the Italian Risorgimento) feel a bit soulless; but that is more than compensated by brilliant chapters on Napoleon's attitude towards the Catholic Church and an analysis of Pius XII's behaviour towards the Nazis. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book was AWESOME. There has been so much political intrigue, corruption, and war related to the papacy that there was scarcely a dull moment in the narrative. I adored it. The author has an excellent sense of humor, although by all means it's not a funny book. Great fun. Highly recommended!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book. It's basically a history of Christianity through history of papacy. Every pope has some place in the book - some, of course, more than others. Really gives you a great perspective.