The Pope’s Army
By John Carr
Pen and Sword Military, 320pp, £25/$39.95
It remains a paradox, some might say a scandalous paradox, that the Catholic Church whose founder exhorted his followers to meekness should, after the fall of the Roman empire, have raised its own armies, waged war against fellow-Catholics and approved, even recommended, the torture of suspected heretics – and, when heretics were obdurate, delivered them to the secular arm of government to be burned at the stake.
There were bishops and abbots who led armies but in this book, subtitled The Papacy in Diplomacy and War, John Carr limits himself to the successors of St Peter. There have been many of them, and there are times when there is not much to add to what is already to be found in, say, Eamon Duffy’s Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes or, indeed, the Oxford Dictionary of Popes.
