Between canonisation and sacks. The list of popes who have made history is always missing the great Nicholas I

13 November 867. Nicolò I, one of the most significant popes of the Early Middle Ages – and regarded as such even by his contemporaries – died. The son of a prominent official with a love of literature, he had received the finest education of his time; intelligent and well-educated, far surpassing his contemporaries, he had devoted himself to an ecclesiastical career. Elected whilst still under forty, he tackled the challenge of striking the right balance in relations between the papacy and the empire (or rather ‘empires’ – the Western Frankish and the Eastern Byzantine) with vigour but also with prudent attention to the conditions dictated by the situation. In a letter to Emperor Michael III, he recalled, using language similar to that of Popes Gelasius and Symmachus, that ‘whoever administers the affairs of this world must keep himself aloof from the governance of sacred matters, just as it is not for clerics to take any part in secular affairs’. He also devoted himself wholeheartedly to asserting the Pope’s primacy over other authorities within the Church: he defended papal prerogatives against the archbishops John of Ravenna and Incmaro of Reims, and went so far as to declare even certain synodal decisions null and void. At times he resorted to tendentious exegesis: his interpretation of a canon of the Council of Chalcedon is famous, in which reading a word in the plural rather than the singular granted the Pope of Rome (the primate of the dioceses) the power of appeal previously recognised as belonging to the primate bishop of the diocese.

19 November 1523. Giulio de’ Medici was elected as Clement VII. The indecision of this Pope, who sought the approval of the two great rivals – Francis I of France and Charles V, King of Spain and later also Emperor – shifting his allegiance from one to the other depending on their successes and failures, proved disastrous. In May 1527, the imperial troops, who were enemies at that time, invaded Rome, and Clement managed to take refuge via the ‘passetto’ in Castel Sant’Angelo, thanks to the bravery of the Swiss Guard, who lost around three-quarters of their men on that occasion. The mercenary militias of the German Landsknechts, who had not yet been paid, sacked the city in search of plunder, behaving even more ruthlessly than usual, partly because their actions were fuelled by the Protestant soldiers’ religious hatred for the city of the Catholic Pope. Thousands were killed; Pope Clement was captured and held prisoner for six months. The devastating Sack of Rome also took on symbolic significance for many contemporaries, who saw it as a sign of God’s punitive judgement upon the city, which was now being likened to the biblical Babylon. When Clement VII died a few years later, after reconciling with Charles V—whom he had crowned emperor in Bologna in 1530—almost a third of Europe had turned away from the Catholic Church in favour of the new Lutheran Reformation, and even Henry VIII’s England had already embarked on the path of schism.