One cannot even attempt to begin to understand the medieval lawyer Popes and their normative

achievements without an understanding from whence they came, that is how the Papacy, the
ecclesiastical leadership of the church of Rome came to be synonomous with the ultimate fount of the
authority of God on earth (continuing the fallacy of the church of the time that the Roman Empire was
more or less equivalent to the World anything outside of which consisted of wilderness populated by
Pagans or heretics). To understand the progeniture of the Papacy we must look to the division of the
Empire into East and West, the establishment of the christian religion within the Empire, the collapse of
the Western part of the Roman Empire, the establishment of the Papacy therewithin, the continued
friction between the vestiges of imperial authority in the West and the increasingly dominant papacy
and finally the entrance of the Franks into the field and the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire.

1.

Rome vs Byzantium: Cradle or Forge?

A.

The fall of Rome and the Dark Ages

It was the emperor Diocletian who first conceived the notion of dividing the Roman empire in
two, between East and West and allocating an Emperor and subemperor to each whilst retaining
ultimate control in himself, that is his own auctoritas undivided. This was by way of achieving a
measure of control over an increasingly disassembling Empire whose legendary discipline and
administration was disintegrating under a decadent and decaying society. Diocletian was unsuccessfull
although his reform was taken up by his successor, Constantine who went as far as building a new seat
of the Eastern part of the Empire at the mouth of the Euphrates which he called Constantinople. Such
measures had little curative effect however but rather had the opposite effect of deflecting resources and
energy from the reform of structures and institutions in Italy and the ancient seat of the Empire in Rome
and its defence against predatory Goths hence hastening, if anything its fall to Odaecer in 472ad. Indeed
even at the very moment of its fall the gap between East and West, Rome and Constantinople was wide
indeed. Constantinople in its continuous adoption of the more ancient Byzantine culture and by
Constantines shift of the whole administrative seat to his new capital led the Eastern Empire to develop
in a way alien to the Latins who, meanwhile due to the weakness of the central government to the
increasing power of local administrations and also the crucifying financial and military burden of
repelling the Goths found themselves more and more distant from the dictate of an emperor who
resembled more an Alexander than an Augustus.
Hence the ravages of Attilla the Hun became the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor,
Marcus Augustus in 472. The conquest of Italy was completed by the Ostrogoths who held Italy until
the attempt of Justinien to re-unite the East and West with invasions in Northern Italy and in North
Africa. Its success, however was shortlived as the next wave of barbarians, this one even more
frenzied than before swept down from the North thus driving the empires army back into the East and
establishing the kingdom of Lombardy in Northern Italy. Meanwhile ancient Gaul had long since fallen
to another tribe of german provenance, the Western Franks who occupied a swathe of territory
contiguous to the Rhine extending right into northern and Western France. The Burgundians in their
turn occupied the South eastern corner of what we now know as modern France while the Visigoths
held the territory adjacent to the pyrenees and most of Spain until their repulsion by the Moors.
Although there was little if anything left of the central imperial Roman administration after the
barbarian onslaught some vestiges of the more ancient Roman civilization remained and were adopted
by the Gothic and Frankish leaderships who gradually adapted their notions of tribal (ascending)
government by customary law to the descending absolutist principles of the Romans so eagerly adopted
by Charlemagne and his inheritors. More obviously the invaders also adopted the locally spoken dialect
of Latin thus giving us our Modern Romance languages and at the same time and in an unconscious
way adopting many unspoken facets of the Roman culture. Contemperaneously to this and in many
ways thanks to it the Christian church was ever growing, expanding its missionary activities,
establishing monasteries and it was particularly active in the conversion of the German conquerors to
whom the ecclesiastics with their literacy, education and respected status were invaluable. This nexus
between the Christian (or rather most importantly the Roman Church) and the german tribes is to be
vital the understanding of the achievement of the Lawyer popes to the extent to which the Emperor of
the Romans or the later Holy Roman Empire was the creation of the nineth century papacy as a

means of emancipating itself from the interference of the Byzantine Emperor and to the subsequent
power struggles between the primatial authority of the pope on earth and the Imperial power of the
German Emperors to which we owe the large part of modern political thought giving us Absolute
Monarchy, Modern Democracy and the Nation State.
B.

Rome changes masters; Christ takes the empty seat?