POPE-1
THE DIVERGENCE
In 1046, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III traveled to Italy, in order to exercise his right to appoint the Pope, which summed up the power relationship between the two. He had made no mystery that none of the current contenders suited him, and that he would choose a German bishop. Given the significant worldly power that popes, bishops and even abbots wielded, as rulers and owners of land and wealth, on Homeline the so-called investiture controversy was just around the corner. But on Pope, lightning struck – literally. The imperial party was surprised by a thunderstorm just before reaching Rome, and the emperor died a spectacular death.
One of the papal candidates was a reformer and jumped at the chance of portraying the accident as the wrath of God. He became pope as Gregory VI. The empire and Germany were weakened by the sudden demise of their ruler. The college of cardinals came into being a decade earlier than on Homeline; they would be the only ones to have a say on who would be pope, from then on. Gregory VI launched a sweeping reform of the church.
THE EMPIRE OF GOD
The effect snowballed. Only the pope could appoint bishops, so now kings and nobles had to curry his favor, not the emperor's, to obtain such a position for themselves or their sons, relatives and supporters. This in turn increased the papacy's power and wealth. Wilfred I, the new emperor, tried to regain ground, but he was excommunicated and lost support among the nobility; he was defeated, humiliated and had to back down.
The secular powers, of course, could not be entirely submitted forever. On Pope, however, the controversy lasted just some 30 years, and ended in 1078 with the Concordat of Rome. This careful compromise had kings and important nobles gradually gaining appointments as cardinals – so that they would elect the pope, pretty much as the German kings and princes normally elected the emperor. The arrangement turned the emperor into something of a local German figurehead, with its place taken up, at the European level, by the pope. It still left kings not as powerful and secure of an independent power basis as they wished. The pope could too easily muster an alliance against any of them, if they did not toe the Church's line.
The problem was solved by the skillful and energetic Cardinal Friedrich Hohenstaufen in 1150. He crafted the In Nomine Domini document, which the old and ailing Pope Louis II signed. The cardinals became not just the electors of the pope, but also an intermediate hierarchical level between the Holy See and the bishops. Within a century, each sizable kingdom would have what amounted to a national church, with the king controlling it as its cardinal; nevertheless, the overall central power remained with the papacy. A reasonable balance of power within a centralized empire had been reached.
That was not the end of the career of Cardinal Hohenstaufen. He became pope himself in 1153 as Victor I, and launched a successful crusade, which he led personally, wresting Jerusalem from the infidels. He also reversed the Church's position on priestly celibacy, a much-welcomed reform to cardinals and bishops who wanted their sons to inherit their titles. This did spawn controversy and a schism, but he ruthlessly put them down; after all, celibacy had never been a tenet of faith. On Pope, Saint Victor I "Barbarossa" is the patron of all rulers.
Over the next few centuries, the Church saw setbacks and had to deal with rebellions and heresies, but on balance its power and reach grew. Restless kings would be excommunicated and defeated by their own peers and nobles, heresies hunted down by the Dominicans, and the Knightly orders of the Holy Land, in particular the Templars, provided the papacy with praetorian guards and reliable elite troops. But insofar as a kingdom and a national church recognized the papal authority, they had enough autonomy in their own lands to be content.
Since most of the European powers cooperated most of the time, the papal power could focus on external enemies. Crusade followed crusade. The Moslems were driven back again and again, and no Christian kingdom dared ally with them. Islam was cornered to the Arabian peninsula, and to harassed minorities or inland backwaters elsewhere. Constantinople fell to papal armies in 1292, and the Eastern Church was brought back to the fold. The same happened to the Copts, later on. Cathedrals having no equal in other worldlines were erected, kings-cardinals did not need to fight the pope if they wanted a divorce. The plagues and the Mongols halted only temporarily the expansion of Christendom.
Of course, all of this came at a price. Periodically, movements or leaders would rise, calling for a return to spirituality, or reviling a Church which was little more than a worldly empire – and they would be quashed. Francis of Assisi is a saint today on Pope, just like elsewhere, but accounts tend to gloss over the detail that he was murdered by knights serving an Italian bishop-count. By the same token, the so-called Protesters' Wars of 1521 ravaged Germany, but did not last more than 15 years, with no king and few noblemen sponsoring the heresy. Yet, with every cycle, the heresies seemed more and more difficult to eradicate.
What's more, European Renaissance thinkers and early scientists had to tread lightly around an innately conservative all-encompassing power, which relied on accepted authority and distrusted free thinking. Cultural contamination coming from the conquests in Asia helped a little, but even so, scientific progress was slower on Pope than elsewhere. The new continent was discovered only in 1532, by an expedition led by a Dominican abbot. What is named America on Homeline, was baptized as Santacruz here.
HOPE FOR FREEDOM
It all came to a head in 1574. The Church was overstretched and weakened, after a catastrophic crusade on the Indian borders and while busily settling Santacruz and converting the locals wholesale. England had been unsuccessful for decades in destroying heretics calling themselves the Free Believers, and King Richard IX found that the Church's intransigent stance was jeopardizing the success of his settlements in Santacruz. So he decided to grant the heretics freedom of religion, in the new continent, provided they made the settlements profitable for the English Crown.
This was the casus belli for what amounted to the European War. Richard IX would probably have been defeated by the Spanish fleet, French cavalry and Italian infantry, but some German and Slavic kings unexpectedly chose his side, while Portugal stayed neutral. Excommunications were not enough to undermine the national armies' loyalty, this time. Pope Leo XII died in battle; the recently conquered coastal regions of Persia revolted.
When the dust settled in the 1590s, the power of the papacy had been reaffirmed – in Europe. Freedom of religion remained a dream. But in the English colonies in Northern Santacruz, the situation was different. Officially, they were Catholic possessions of the Catholic English Crown, but in practice, local authorities were very lax in prosecuting apostates and heretics. Within three decades, the policies had further evolved, with Free Believers meeting openly, at the cost of being second-class citizens subject to heavier taxes. The papacy failed to act about that, both because the See was occupied by lesser men at this time, and because the Moslems had to be dealt with again.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the situation had congealed. A new, hardened Persian Empire, brandishing a very militant version of Islamism, was successfully blocking any further expansion of Christendom to the East (which, by the way, shielded India and helped the blossoming of the Mysore Empire). This spurred the European colonization of Africa and Santacruz, with the cross-marked sails circumnavigating the capes, heading towards the lands of the spices. But Northern Santacruz, which the locals now called Liberia, had become a magnet for European dissenters, protestants, heretics, and Jews. After an ill-fated minor attempt at a Western crusade foundered in storms and epidemics, the papacy finally concluded that it might be wise to use the place as a safety valve for the European malcontents. From Rome, it looked like a backward outpost besieged by pagan barbarians. The popes did not consider that thinkers, innovators, scientists would be drawn to Liberia rather than to Rome.
In 1732, a Hansa expedition intended to regain control of their breakaway German-speaking settlement in Northern Liberia was beaten back, by a ragtag collection of local militias from several colonies. The papal armies were committed to a hopeless attempt at conquering the whole Arabian peninsula, and the Muscovite czar was trying once again to sever his church's links with Rome. When the Liberian colonies jointly declared independence, a common effort by their European motherlands would have easily crushed that, but such an effort simply did not take place. England negotiated an agreement that could be described as a most-favored trade partner status, to keep importing tobacco from the English-speaking Liberian territories. The King of France, strapped for cash and unable to control the unruly and largely heretic French settlement, sold it to the Bishop-Duke of Bretagne and a consortium of bankers. Robert de Bretagne turned the rebellious settlers into law-abiding citizens of Nouvelle Bretagne by moving there, proclaiming himself Seigneur Protecteur of the place, and granting freedom of religion for anybody. This also turned the colony into a profit-making cotton producer for the joy of his banker investors. By the 1760s, most of the European powers had abandoned their claims on their Liberian possessions.
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