Peter to today’s Benedict XVI, their struggles with challenges to religious orthodoxy as well as battles with secular powers ranging from Frederick Barbarossa to Communism. Epic and compelling, Absolute Monarchs is an enthralling history from “an enchanting and satisfying raconteur” ( The Washington Post).Author, historian and British peer John Julius Norwich has never displayed any lack of drive and energy, but even by his standards, “The Popes: A History” (also published as “Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy”) is ambitious in the extreme.Ĭrammed into its pages are the lives of 265 popes, from St. Norwich presents such popes as Innocent I, who in the fifth century successfully negotiated with Alaric the Goth, an invader civil authorities could not defeat Leo I, who two decades later tamed (and perhaps paid off) Attila the Hun the infamous “pornocracy”-the five libertines who were descendants or lovers of Marozia, debauched daughter of one of Rome’s most powerful families Pope Paul III, “the greatest pontiff of the sixteenth century,” who reinterpreted the Church’s teaching and discipline John XXIII, who in five short years starting in 1958 instituted reforms that led to Vatican II and Benedict XVI, who is coping with today’s global priest sex scandal. In a chronicle that captures nearly two thousand years of inspiration and intrigue, John Julius Norwich recounts in riveting detail the histories of the most significant popes and what they meant politically, culturally, and socially to Rome and to the world.
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