The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

But the bishop of Rome–who came to call himself ‘papa’ (father) or pope–sought to claim pre-eminence among all these. Throughout the Middle Ages, the papacy struggled not only to assert its ecumenical (worldwide) ‘rights’, but also to wield meaningful authority over the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Latin West. The decline of the Roman and Carolingian Empires disrupted frameworks of power within the Church, just as it had done within the secular sphere. Across Europe, bishops enjoyed centuries of independence and autonomy from papal control, with most prelates owing their first allegiance to local political rulers and the ‘sacral’ kings of the West. By the early eleventh century, popes were straining simply to make their will felt in central Italy, and in the decades that followed they would sometimes even find themselves exiled from Rome itself.