PROFILE
Region: Western Europe
Climate: Warm, temperate and seasonal
Leader(s): Pope Francis, since 2013 (at time of writing)
Population: 690
Population: 690
Capital: Vatican City
Largest City: Vatican City
Currency: European Euro
Languages: Italian
Currency: European Euro
Languages: Italian
Independence: 1929, from Italy
Territories or Colonies: None
Territories or Colonies: None
HISTORY OF VATICAN CITY
The Facts
Vatican City, officially the Vatican City State is a tiny country completely encircled, not just in Italy, but in fact in its capital city of Rome. Vatican City is so small, that you could walk from the Westernmost point in the country to the easternmost point in the country in about 12 minutes. In comparison, if you were to walk at the average speed of 4 miles per hour for eight hours a day it would take you a year to walk across Russia (that is if you could pierce through the thousands of miles of impenetrable tundra.)
While the vatican is more the size of Disneyland, than a country, it’s incredibly important. Since the early 400s it has been the headquarters of the largest sect of Christianity: Catholicism and the home of the Pope.
Vatican City has an incredibly long and complicated history with Italy and the surrounding area, that led it to become the smallest independent state by area and population with any international recognition.
BEFORE CATHOLOCISM (????-498)
Vatican City is our first country in Europe and when you deal with the history of Europe it tends to go back really far. Even though Africa is the oldest continent most of the people groups in Africa didn’t have written language (except when Arabic spread to the north, and Amharic in Ethiopia, and Heiroglyphics). There was no written language in the new world either (except for some Incan methods of keeping track of corn. In Incan society written expression took a back seat to being able to know how much corn you had.) Eurasia was the hub of written language and therefore historians know more about this continent.
There is a quote “history stops being archaeology and becomes history when written text is brought into the picture” and with Eurasia text was brought into the picture thousands of years ago.
The History of Vatican City will also be the History of the Catholic Church (sort of) as they are so intertwined, so this post will be pretty long and complex (because the Catholic Church is an impossibly complicated organization that’s literally 1,800 Years Old.)
Another note is that I’ll refer to Catholicism as Christianity until the schism of 1054, which is the first point any other kind of Christianity arose.
Vatican City began life (as many cities do) as a small marshy field near the bank of the Tiber River. In about 14 BCE, the first construction began. People began to build some houses on the land to get out of the hustle and bustle of Rome. Even though the Vatican is right smack in the middle of Rome now, back then Rome was less far-reaching and the Vatican wasn’t much more than a quaint suburb downriver. In around 12 CE, Agrippina the Elder built gardens in the area.
Agrippina the Elder isn’t very well known. She married Germanicus and their child was Caligula. I wonder what kind of parent she was?
Caligula was famous for his scandals which involved having sex with his sisters, then prostituting them off to other people for profit. Caligula was basically an incestuous pimp. He would send his soldiers to conquer lands he made up for his amusement. He was drunk 24/7 and tried and failed to make a horse his co-consul. When he was told he couldn’t do that he successfully made him a fucking priest.
Anyway, Agrippina the Elder, Caligula’s hopefully more sane mother built some gardens on the site of modern day Vatican City.
Caligula, not as much a fan of gardens and more a fan of people getting slammed into at 35 mph, ditched the garden and put in the Circus of Nero. A Circus in this context means a long stadium for chariot races. The Circus was completed in 40, a year before Caligula’s death, when he was stabbed by members of the senate, a recurring theme in Rome if you haven’t noticed.
Caligula furnished the Vatican with many things he stole from other places, but the only surviving one is the Obelisk he yanked from Egypt’s Heliopolis.
This Obelisk is important because not only is it the focal point for the entire city, it’s where St. Peter (the first pope as told by Jesus, he had connections) was crucified upside down in 64. At this point the Romans believed Christianity to be this threatening cult of crazy people that only believed in ONE GOD! (holy shit!!!). To be fair Roman religion is much more fun, with their pantheon of seemingly insane gods who liked to trick and rob people. This was a much easier moral role model to follow than the cabal of do gooders that God and his posse were.
Anyway St. Peter was crucified upside down, paving the way for metal bands 1800 hundred years later to have cool logos.
At this time being a Christian was still really dangerous, which is why you couldn’t just go out and say you were a Christian, you had to paint fishes on your door and talk in codes. The first popes were all martyred in increasingly elaborate ways by the Romans. St. Peter was simply crucified, but Clement I was thrown into the ocean with an anchor tied to him, Pontian was banished to a Sardinian mine where he died of exhaustion on Tavolara, and Anterus was killed by Maximus Thrax who is the new title holder for COOLEST NAME EVER. It’s hard to understand why people would want to be pope when it probably said on the job description “you’ll be the leader of a marginalized and hated group of people, and you’re likely to be killed by the Roman government.” Sign me up!
PAPAL STATES GAIN CONTROL (498-1929)
With Christianity gaining more ground as a legit religion and Rome slowly losing its influence, not only in places on its “list of things they wanted”, but within its walls. A series of sackings by Visigoths starting in 402 and going until the early 500s, led the capital of the Western Roman Empire to change from Rome to Ravenna, and then to nothing because it had dissolved.
Christians in the Vatican thought this was a perfect moment to take this land and make it their Christian HQ. Pope Symmachus built a palace on the land where he could lead the church from. This was the beginnings of a formal place the church officials met and did business, as it had been all over the place because if you stayed in one place the Romans would show up with a bunch of centurions and do something crazy like throw you in the sea or banish you to an island.
The Papal States didn’t quite exist until 754. When Rome fell to the Visigoths, Goth influence spread like wildfire throughout Western Europe (everybody was really into Black Metal and Corpse Paint. Actually no…) The Visigoths and Ostrogoths (another group of goths) were fine with Christianity (because they had converted to christianity, often as a “fuck you” to the Romans. Don’t you love converting out of spite.)
The Ostrogoths installed their own guys as pope for a while, until the Byzantines who had ruled over the Eastern Roman Empire (which still went strong until the Ottomans showed up) installed their own guy. The Schism of 1054 hadn’t happened yet, so Eastern and Western Christianity were still one. The Schism was when Catholicism (Western Christianity) broke off from Greek, Russian, Byzantine and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity (Eastern Christianity). That’s why the pope doesn’t have jurisdiction over Eastern Europe, a different guy in a comically large hat does.
In the early days of the Papal States Christians mostly travelled around Western Europe converting the nomadic groups to Christianity. They often just converted the leader and had them sort it out, as in the case of Charlemagne.
Charlemagne was a good friend to have (considering he controlled Germany and France for a bit) and Charlemagne lended his support to his new pal the Pope and used his resources to kill all of the Pope’s enemies.
Here you see that the Pope has transformed from a figurehead of an oppressed fringe group that had a knack for being spectacularly murdered by the Romans to a king of kings with more power than most kings, who can get anyone he wants to murder his enemies.
In 904, on the onset of the Dark Ages, the Popes started getting up to some shifty business, which led to Martin Luther’s 95 theses being nailed on the Castle Church in Wittenburg, and the beginning of the Protestants protesting the catholic church, but that wasn’t for a while.
From 904 onward the Popes began taking bribes from the rich aristocrats of Rome and would do things like Indulgences, which acted as middle aged get-out-of-jail-free cards. If you were a rich guy and you murdered somebody, you could buy an indulgence and have nothing happen to you (in both the real world and the “afterlife”). They would also sell the poor fake artifacts and tools to improve their prayers. They would say if you buy this magical Egg-Wave or whatever, then all of your prayers would be answered, but unlike an Egg-Wave, these artifacts didn’t microwave eggs. They did jack shit.
There was a period of time when the popes just left the Vatican altogether (which I guess means it doesn’t factor in here, but it kind of does… big time). For a bit there was a series of French popes (which there usually weren’t. Up to this point popes had usually been Italians or Germans.) The French popes moved their Papal HQ from the Vatican at the heart of the Papal States (the most powerful Kingdom of Modern Day Italy) to the Palais des Papes in Avignon.
The Papacy was Headquartered in Avignon for about seventy years, which made Italians mad, who liked having the Pope in Italy because it brought in those pilgrimage dollaz, and illegal indulgences dollaz also.
The pope fucking off to France caused the Western Schism (Catholics love their schisms). The Western Schism worked kind of like this. There were two popes and two sets of cardinals and bishops were split between who they agreed with. (Proximity didn’t really matter.) Anytime the Roman pope would do something the French pope would declare it unholy, and vice-versa, which led to, as you probably guessed, nothing getting done until the fucking 15th century!
By the renaissance, even though Martin Luther had now founded the Lutheran church and started the Protestant movement that was much less into fancy figureheads wearing big hats and lavish palaces, and more interested in what it was all about: the god stuff.
And big hats and lavish palaces was the name of the game during the Renaissance. Italy was the center of the renaissance, and it was also the center of the pope, and the papacy was at the forefront of the most important thing the renaissance produced. Paintings and art? While the papacy had a lot of demand for portraits that made the chubby pope look less chubby, the most important thing that came out of the Renaissance was the European discovery of North and South America and their rush to get all of its gold.
The pope, now considerably more powerful than any of the leaders in Europe, was the one granting land rights to european nations. He was the one that gave Spain sole rights to the new world (until England and France showed up). This is why Spain owned so much of it, from the tip of Cape Horn to Wyoming.
The Papal States gained even more power during this period, from dues the other countries were paying them and they organized into something that looks more like a modern day country. The Papal States started as a parcel of land stretching from near Venice to near Naples in the South, owning small pockets farther north and south. The Papal States held the land in the center of Italy (and therefore the most important). They printed currency and appointed local government leaders (usually friends of the pope’s family the Borgias) and invested in infrastructure like bridges, marketplaces and trade routes.
But with these new gains to Rome and the Papal States came the bad news. The papacy was so completely corrupted that almost all of their actions were in the name of coin rather than what was good for Catholic people or the residents of the Papal States.
SIDE NOTE: The video game Assassin’s Creed II, as well as its sequel Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood deal extensively with this topic, ending with a failed assassination attempt on the pope Rodrigo Borgia of dubious historical accuracy.
The Catholic church in general didn’t see many changes until the 1800s. In 1861, following the example of Germany and to a lesser extent Belgium (the former of which unified a mass of small kingdoms that ranged in size from Kingdoms the size of Denmark to those not much bigger than some fields with some castles in it. Declaring sovereignty was much easier back then. You may think the Holy Roman Empire was a form of German unification, but the Holy Roman Empire was not an Empire as it’s name implies, but more a union of cultures and kingdoms that shared economic ties. Much more boring than an empire.) Italy decided that having a mess of states wasn’t good for business as the profits of of the lands were being taxed multiple times and divided amongst many different leaders.
As the 19th century continued more and more borders were dissolved until in the early 1860s, the Kingdom of Italy was formally created from all of the smaller Kingdoms. The Kingdom of Italy managed to coerce all kingdoms to cede their land except for the small pocket that is San Marino, but that’s another long and complicated story. The capital was Florence, because they hadn’t managed to get the papacy out of Rome so they could set up their capital their. Rome was (and is) the largest city in Italy, and the most centrally located, almost equidistant from Switzerland and the southern tip of Sicily.
Eventually, through the use of bigger-army intimidation and lots of shouting the Kingdom of Italy gained control of Rome, but the Catholic Church wasn’t going to just disappear and they had to do something about them, so they sectioned off a tiny bit of land, which was just the buildings the Church had used and some plazas around it to be some special area they would deal with later. Procrastination really is the best way to resolve international disputes.
The period leading up to full Vatican independence were rough for Catholics who were being alienated again in their own country. The pope didn’t know what to do and offered to move the papacy to a country that was less mean, but he never found a place for it.
VATICAN CITY GAINS INDEPENDENCE (1929-PRESENT)
Finally in 1929, Italy decided to get off its ass and do something about the problem because shouting at it wasn’t making it go away. Mussolini, the fascist cartoon character that was running Italy at this point agreed that this tiny bit of land within Rome should be its own country and in that way they won’t have to deal with it any more.
World War 2 slowly creeped up, especially prominent in Italy, but the Vatican quietly ducked out and stayed neutral, so nothing much changed until the 60s when Pope John Paul II, who had helped Lech Walesa in the polish revolution and was an all around liberal pope, said some incendiary things. He came out anti-communism (as someone who was instrumental in the Polish revolution probably would be), but he also came out anti-capitalism. He lessened the need for Latin in the church and seemed to be anti-violence and anti-corruption (which seem pretty straight forward and non-controversial now, weren’t so much in the Catholic Church of yesteryear.)
Nowadays the Catholic Church is headed by Pope Francis, the first pope from the new world.
VATICAN CITY FACTS
Vatican City is the smallest country in terms of population and area.
Vatican City is one of the few absolute monarchies left in the world.
Nobody is born in Vatican City.
Vatican City’s population is 100% Male and 0% Female.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/Lazio/Roma/Rome/_Texts/Lanciani/LANPAC/3*.html#sec16
http://www.vaticanstate.va/content/vaticanstate/en/stato-e-governo/storia/la-citta-del-vaticano-oggi.html
http://history-world.org/a_history_of_the_catholic_church.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment