Sacred Foundations: The Religious And Medieval Roots Of The European State, Gryzmala-Busse - B, Inc.

                       The Roman Catholic Church "was a transformative force" in Europe a thousand years ago. It freed itself from monarchs, "transformed the European legal order,"  and created new political concepts. The premise of this book is that "the church heavily influenced European state formation," and that the states that emerged emulated the church. The power of the church stemmed from its vast wealth as the largest landowner on the continent. The church had mastered the collection of taxes and was a vast, efficient bureaucracy with the best educated people in Europe on its staff. The church anointed emperors, was omnipresent in everyone's daily life, and controlled access to eternal salvation. This thesis conflicts with the traditional bellicist approach, which believes that the driving force behind state formation was the need to wage war. 

                     This is an extremely academic history and one that has totally befuddled me. I understand how the interaction between the states that centralized, France and England in particular, and Rome, could lead to their adoption of papal governance systems, which in turn helped them develop. On the other hand, much of the book focuses on the endless conflict between the church and the Holy Roman Empire, and the papacy's attempts to destabilize the empire. The empire, as the secular government of northern Italy, was in constant conflict with the church, its southern neighbor and ruler of the Papal States. The church, after winning from the empire the right of the College of Cardinals to elect the Pope and the Pope's right to appoint bishops and collect taxes, encouraged the clerics in the HRE to be active politically leading to a system where the church and state did not diverge. Both Italy and Germany didn't centralize until the 19th century, affording the papacy the chance to assert temporal power in central Italy. Reconciling the premise of the book with the outcomes in England, France, and Germany is beyond my abilities.