John Julius Norwich - The Popes: A History

John Julius Norwich is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice and the Byzantine Empire. His most recent book is The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean. He has also written on architecture, music and the history plays of Shakespeare, and has presented some thirty historical documentaries on BBC Television.

Formerly Chairman of Colnaghi the oldest fine art dealers in London he is Honorary Chairman of Venice in Peril and Chairman Emeritus of the World Monuments Fund in Britain. For twenty-five years he was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Trust, and has also served on the Boards of the English National Opera and the London Library. He is a regular lecturer on history, art history, architecture and music, and is an enthusiastic night-club pianist.

Well known for his histories of Norman Sicily, Venice, the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean, John Julius Norwich has now turned his attention to the oldest continuing institution in the world, tracing the papal line down the centuries from St Peter himself traditionally (though by no means historically) the first pope to the present Benedict XVI.

Of the 280-odd holders of the supreme office, some have unquestionably been saints; others have wallowed in unspeakable iniquity. One, if the age-old legend is to be accepted, was a woman and an Englishwoman at that her sex being revealed only when she improvidently gave birth to a baby during a papal procession. Pope Joan never existed (though the Church long believed that she did) but many genuine pontiffs were almost as colourful: Formosus, for example, whose murdered corpse was exhumed, clothed in pontifical vestments, propped up on a throne and subjected to trial; or John XII, of whom Gibbon wrote his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the shrine of St Peter, lest they should be violated by his successor.

After the schism and seventy years at Avignon came the majestic pontiffs of the Renaissance: Alexander VI Borgia with his nightmare son Cesare; the warrior Julius II, builder of the new St Peters and patron of Michelangelo; and the two Medici popes, first the homosexual Leo X, who had to cope with Martin Luther and then his cousin Clement VII, who refused Henry VII his divorce.

Paul III and the Counter-Reformation, Pius VII and Napoleon, Pius IX and the Risorgimento, Pius XII and the Holocaust, John Paul I and suspicions of murder, and finally poor Benedict XVI, struggling to deal with appalling revelations of sexual misbehaviour within the Church the pace never slackens.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Normans in the South

The Kingdom in the Sun

Mount Athos (with Reresby Sitwell)

Sahara

Venice: The Rise to Empire

Venice: The Greatness and the Fall

Byzantium: The Early Centuries

Byzantium: The Apogee

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall

The Architecture of Southern England

Fifty Years of Glyndebourne

Shakespeares Kings

Paradise of Cities

The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

Trying to Please

The Twelve Days of Christmas

Christmas Crackers, 197079

More Christmas Crackers, 198089

Still More Christmas Crackers, 199099

The Big Bang: Christmas Crackers 20002009

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