Papacy shifts to Constantinople after fall of WRE

As it says on the ticket. Once the Western Empire falls in 476, all future popes reign from Constantinople as the "New Rome". The Byzantine Pope has all of the power of OTL Roman popes from that era (at least at the beginning).

Note that this is before the Great Schism.
 

Typo

Banned
There's no way that happens, for one the reason why the Bishop of Rome, who would become the pope, was so powerful was because he didn't have any temporal authority to restrict him.

Plus moving to Constantinople would result in him being redundant, what with the one already being a Bishop of Constantinople and all.
 
So the Bishop of Constantinople becomes Pope after the last Western pope dies.

Now that probably would cause a schism...The Pope moving to Constantinople is one thing, the Byzantines declaring that their native Bishops are to be the new Popes is quite a different story.
 

Typo

Banned
So the Bishop of Constantinople becomes Pope after the last Western pope dies.
That makes no sense at all, since the bishop of Rome weren't any special relative to the one in Constantainople at the fall of WRE, it was centuries of effective independency which gave to what is known as the pope.
 
That makes no sense at all, since the bishop of Rome weren't any special relative to the one in Constantainople at the fall of WRE, it was centuries of effective independency which gave to what is known as the pope.

Seconded. The reason the Pope is so big and important is because he was operating in an environment without a Roman Emperor to restrict his freedom of manuevre.
 
In order for this to be possible, you ned a POD where St. Peter is martyred in Constantinople, instead of in Rome. The reason why Rome is the seat of the Catholic Church is because Peter was killed there and because Jesus declared Peter to be "the stone that the builders rejected."
 
Seconded. The reason the Pope is so big and important is because he was operating in an environment without a Roman Emperor to restrict his freedom of manuevre.

Not to mention that when the Pentarchy was made, Rome was the only one west of the Adriatic.

Hence an inordinate amount of influence.
 

Skokie

Banned
It's important to remember the honor and privilege that was reserved for Rome, owing to its historical/political importance in the minds of everyone in the Mediterranean region. Even in the Pentarchy, when Rome was becoming a one-cow town, it was held in the highest esteem, above the rest.

Also, in the original tripartite patriarchal formula--Alexandria, Antioch and Rome--it held the position of honor.
 
According to the Eastern Church, the Pope was 'first among equals'

thus essentially the temporal power the Pope acquired (and still has) is an aberration, and was fervently contested by the eastern 'Popes' (that is, each Archbishop of the old Pentarchy: Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria).

The Pope having the power and influence he has today really is a direct consequence of the fall of the WRE and subsequent inability of the ERE to impose imperial authority over Rome/Italy.

In my opinion, you could see a sort of papal evacuation if there was any sort of massive Muslim invasion of Italy/Rome, as similar events occurred when Bishoprics in Anatolia were governed from Constantinople in absentia after Anatolia was overrun by the Seljuks.
 
But any kind of Islamic occupation of Italy is at the very best unlikely.. Also, Bishop of Constantinople was regarded as being second in power to the Pope for years. In fact the so-called "Great-Schism" occured largely due to disputation over the authority of one over the other. Really all you'de have to do is give the nations of Europe a good reason to support the Patriarchal claim to legitimacy over the Roman one and.... BAM! Constantinople Papacy, although it'd probably be called a Patriarchy.
 
In order for this to be possible, you ned a POD where St. Peter is martyred in Constantinople, instead of in Rome. The reason why Rome is the seat of the Catholic Church is because Peter was killed there and because Jesus declared Peter to be "the stone that the builders rejected."

Yes, though as far as I'm aware Jesus never said such a thing about Peter. The reference to the stone that the builders rejected, a direct quotation from Psalm 118, comes in Matthew 21 as part of a parable addressed to the chief priests and the Pharisees. It is to be honest fairly opaque as to who might be meant by the stone, but I see no indication that it was Peter, and as far as I know that is not a view generally held. The more relevant passage is Matthew 16:13-19. The last two verses:

18 And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

19 And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

This passage is crucial tp the claim of papal supremacy as opposed to primacy, so as you correctly say a papacy relocated to Byzantium would need to be still asserting a succession to St Peter. Who according to Church tradition was Bishop of Rome, so even if not located in Rome, which during the Avignon captivity the papacy was not, the Roman episcopate still needs to be claimed for the succession to St Peter. The site of his martyrdom is not really the key to it, the key is that he was supposedly martyred in Rome because he was there as its bishop.

He would of course have struggled to be bishop of Constantinople, seeing as it was not yet founded. So for the Ecumenical Patriarch to make the Petrine claims seems a difficult proposition. A relocated papacy, filling the Roman see in absentia, is possible; it was far from unknown for people to hold several sees at once and hardly ever go near any of them, just raking in the revenues, but in Byzantium there would be the twin problems of co-existence with the Ecumenical Patriarch and, even more problematically, the Emperor.

As observed above, a large part of the reason for the runaway nature of the papacy is that there was hardly ever an Emperor in Rome to hold the Popes in check. There were periods when either the Eastern or later the Holy Roman Emperor had the papacy more or less under his thumb, but mostly this was not the case, the Emperor was elsewhere and the Pope did as he pleased. In Byzantium, in contrast, if the Patriarch didn't please the Emperor the latter was right there, and many Patriarchs were replaced with varying degrees of prejudice for disputing Imperial authority, or seeming to.

Another part was the unwise Donation of Pepin, which ensured that the papacy would forever be mired in temporal affairs whether individual Popes wanted it or not (usually they did). A POD where Pepin had more wisdom, or foresight at any rate, might have produced a medieval and renaissance papacy of a more spiritual character, with no need for a Reformation. Or not, but there certainly would have been a large difference in the character of the institution and it quite possibly never would have become as deplorably corrupt as it did.

But I digress. A papacy permanently relocated to Byzantium would have faced all kinds of difficulties and would have become unrecognisably different from the institution as it evolved. Might just as well abolish it and have done.
 
^The general assumption is that Jesus is the stone the builders rejected I think.

Anyhow, I think the major reason Rome became so important is that there was nothing even remotely in the west to compare with it. The east had Alexandria and Antioch both large cities with centuries or millennia of history and learning and prestige. In the west Rome was the only city in its league.
 
Anyhow, I think the major reason Rome became so important is that there was nothing even remotely in the west to compare with it. The east had Alexandria and Antioch both large cities with centuries or millennia of history and learning and prestige. In the west Rome was the only city in its league.

Exactly. Four out of the five patriarchates were in the ERE.
 
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