Slavic pope

OK, since it seems articles can't mention JP2 without mentioning he was first and (so far) only Slavic pope what would it take to get one earlier? And where he might be from?
 
OK, since it seems articles can't mention JP2 without mentioning he was first and (so far) only Slavic pope what would it take to get one earlier? And where he might be from?

Well, as simple as it sounds, probably Poland.

If the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth stays around as a prominent Catholic Slavic power, you could have a slavic Pope earlier than John Paul II.

Really, you only have so many slavic groups you can choose from unless you really want to go far back. The Catholic slavs include the Bohemians, Poles, Slovacks, Slovenians, Croats, and some other minor groups. You can probably write off the Slovaks and the Slovenians, and other minor catholic slavic peoples as too marginal for most of history.

Without the Ottomans, the Bosnians would also be Catholic.

So that sort of leaves you with a number of options.

You could have Croatia maintain or reassert its independence from Hungary and gain enough influence in Italy to gain the Papacy for one of its bishops.

Or you could have Hungary and Croatia stay together and have the house of Angevin do better in its wars in Italy. The Hungarian King succeeds in taking Naples and from there dictates things to the Papacy for a while. During this period at some point, a man of slavic origin gets nominated to the Papacy.

Bohemia might also be an option, if it wasn't tainted by the heresy from the 14th century onwards. Maybe have the Hussites be crushed earlier, or have some of their more moderate reforms accepted. Then have Bohemia ascend to power over the Holy Roman Empire (but explicitly based in Prague) and once the Emperorship is theirs (it was a couple of times) have them help install a slavic Pope.

The Bohemian Pope would have to probably come after the crushing or accepting of the Hussites, which awakened a kind of incipient nationalism in the Bohemians. Anytime before that, and any bishop nominated would likely be a German.

And of course, you could always go for the old standby of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth staying strong. They might be able to parlay their way into the Papacy earlier than JP2.
 
One of the problems is that for centuries, ALL the popes were Italian, and before that, iirc, most were.

Getting a Czech born, German speaking bishop elevated to Pope with HRE support in, say, the 1200s or 1300s might be your best chance.
 
Couldn't an Croatian (italianized but with South Slavic as his native language) from somewhere on the Dalmatian coast do the trick even during the later era?
 
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