The Pope’s Army: The Papacy in Diplomacy and War

Trying to cover the entire history of the Papacy in a couple of hundred pages is daunting and must move quickly. John Carr attempts to do that in his newest book, looking at how the Papacy got involved in political affairs and slowly built up its own military though it was often ineffectual. Mr. Carr goes up until the Papal States were dissolved when Italy became unified in the 1870s. Trying to cover it all in one book, especially one under three-hundred pages, goes to show that it might be impossible.

Mr. Carr makes a valiant effort, especially not getting too technical and bogged down in the doctrinal controversies that rocked the early Church, which can be like wading through quicksand. But the issue becomes that the early Church had so many Popes, and many of them we know little about since they often did not leave behind much of a written record, and some records were intentionally destroyed. So what we have is a whole bunch of names thrown at the reader in a short period of time, and often Popes took the same name. So the reader is faced with a deluge of names that can be hard, even for professionals, to keep track.