Read e-book online Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy PDF

By John Julius Norwich

ISBN-10: 0679604995

ISBN-13: 9780679604990

“Absolute Monarchs sprawls throughout Europe and the Levant, over millenniums, and with an impossibly huge solid: 265 popes, feral hordes of Vandals, Huns and Visigoths, expansionist emperors, Byzantine intriguers, Borgias and Medicis, heretic zealots, conspiring clerics, bestial inquisitors and extra. Norwich manages to prepare this crowded level and convey a rollicking narrative. He retains issues relocating at approximately beach-read pace.”
—Bill Keller, New York Times booklet evaluation, disguise review
 
“Renowned historian Norwich deals a rollicking account of the boys who held the papal workplace, their shortcomings and their virtues, and the effect of the papacy on global background. He conducts us masterfully on a journey of the lives of the popes from Peter to Benedict XVI. . . . pleasing and deeply researched, Norwich’s background bargains a superb creation to papal lives.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Historian, go back and forth author, and tv documentarian Norwich provides an first-class, usually dazzling historical past of that 2,000-year-old institution….he makes a speciality of political background as he strains the evolution of the papacy as an establishment, whereas while supplying wonderful profiles of the main traditionally major popes….An notable ancient survey.”
—Booklist
 
“When Norwich writes, I learn; this member of the home of Lords is a remarkable and engrossing historian, might be top recognized for his huge learn of Byzantium. the following he bargains a historical past of the approximately two-millennia-old papacy that may be well liked by many readers.”
—Library Journal
 
“A lively, concise chronicle of the accomplishments of the main noteworthy popes. . . . Norwich doesn’t skirt controversies, historical and current, during this large, clear-eyed assessment.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
With the papacy embattled lately, it's necessary to have the point of view of 1 of the world’s such a lot complete historians. In Absolute Monarchs, John Julius Norwich captures approximately thousand years of proposal and devotion, intrigue and scandal. the boys (and probably one lady) who've held this place of infallible energy over thousands have ranged from heroes to rogues, admirably clever to absolutely decadent. Norwich, who knew popes and had deepest audiences with others, recounts in riveting aspect the histories of the main major popes and what they intended politically, culturally, and socially to Rome and to the world.

Norwich provides such courageous popes as blameless I, who within the 5th century effectively negotiated with Alaric the Goth, an invader civil specialists couldn't defeat, and Leo I, who 20 years later tamed (and might be paid off) Attila the Hun. right here, too, are the scandalous figures: Pope Joan, the mythic girl stated (without any substantiation) to were elected in 855, and the notorious “pornocracy,” the 5 libertines who have been descendants or fanatics of Marozia, debauched daughter of 1 of Rome’s strongest families.

Absolute Monarchs brilliantly portrays reformers equivalent to Pope Paul III, “the maximum pontiff of the 16th century,” who reinterpreted the Church’s instructing and self-discipline, and John XXIII, who in 5 brief years beginning in 1958 “opened up the church to the 20 th century,” instituting reforms that ended in Vatican II. Norwich brings the tale to the current day with Benedict XVI, who's dealing with a world priest intercourse scandal.

Epic and compelling, Absolute Monarchs is the awesome tale of a few of history’s such a lot respected and reviled figures, males who nonetheless solid mild and shadows at the Vatican and the area this present day.