In this week's episode, I indulge my hobby of medieval history, and take a look at six times Catholic monarchs came in conflict with the pope during the medieval peroid. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store: NIGHT2025 The coupon code is valid through December 22, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 281 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December 12th, 2025 and today, even though this is a podcast about indie writing and publishing, I'm going to indulge one of my hobbies and talk about Medieval history, specifically six specific instances of conflicts between Popes and Catholic Monarchs during the Middle Ages. We'll also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off all the ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store, and that code is NIGHT2025. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode, and this coupon code will be valid through December the 22nd, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this winter or something to read as you do Christmas holiday travels, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. I am pleased to report the rough draft of Wizard-Assassin is done at exactly 70,000 words. I have also written a tie in short story called Dwarven Treasure that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook format when Wizard-Assassin comes out. So this is an excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter, in my opinion. If all goes well, I am hoping to have that book out very shortly before Christmas, like maybe the Monday or Tuesday before Christmas because that way if I do, I can reward myself by taking off the entire week between Christmas and New Year's, which is what I really want to do. So I am going to definitely hustle and try to get Wizard-Assassin out before Christmas. I'm also 9,000 words into Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and that will come out in January or February, depending on how things go, hopefully January, maybe February, we will see how things go. After Wizard-Assassin is published, Blade of Storms will be my main project and my secondary project will be Cloak of Summoning, the 14th book in my Cloak Mage series. Cloak of Worlds, the last book in the series, just came out in October, so considering the year gap between the last two books, that is quite a bit shorter, but as I mentioned before, the summer of 2025 was my Summer of Finishing Things. I am now down to just three active series, which means thankfully there is less of a wait between books in the series. There is a year gap between the last book in the Half-Elven Thief series and a year gap between the last book in the Cloak Mage series. Hopefully we will avoid those kind of big gaps moving forward. In audiobook news, Cloak of Embers is done (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) and is gradually filtering out to the retailers. I believe as of this recording, you can get it at Payhip, Google Play, and Kobo. The other retailers, including Audible, should be showing up before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. 00:03:11 Main Topic: So The Pope is Mad at You: A Practical Guide for Secular Lords And with that, let us move on to our main topic this week and our main topic is So The Pope is Mad at You: A Practical Guide for Secular Lords. This episode was inspired by news reports, which we'll get to in a little bit. John F. Kennedy was elected the first Catholic President of the United States in 1960. Before that, there is a widespread suspicion against having a Catholic president in the US, partly because the origin of the United States was heavily Protestant and partly for fear that a Catholic president would take his orders from the Pope in Rome. However, practical experience has proven robustly otherwise. In the past 20 years of United States history, there has been one officially Catholic president and two Catholic vice presidents and their disagreements with the various popes have made frequent news articles. For that matter, American Catholic officials of lesser authority such as Speaker of the House, mayors, governors, and senators have also found themselves frequently in disagreement with the Pope. Whenever a US Catholic political official or office holder disagrees with the Pope about something, the news media always seems to react in baffled astonishment, but Catholic political leaders disagreeing with the Pope is not shocking. It is in fact a tradition going back centuries if not millennia. Compared to the way the things used to be, the vice president and the Pope exchanging harsh social media comments is downright tame. For example, in the early 14th century, the extremely Catholic King of France sent his lawyers to kidnap and beat up the Pope. This sounds outlandish, but it actually happened. So here are some of the more dramatic disagreements between Catholic secular leaders and the Pope and we will pick six of the most prominent examples. #1: The Investiture Controversy The Investiture Controversy in the 11th century was about who had the right to appoint bishops, the Pope or the emperor. To the modern era, this sounds quite dry and boring, however, at the time it was serious business for many reasons. There wasn't much of the way in centralized state authority in Western Europe after the death of Charlemagne and the withdrawal of the Byzantine Empire from Italy and between the Viking invasions and local warfare, violence was endemic. Often the church was the only functioning large scale organization and so bishops frequently came to hold lands like feudal lords and to wield significant local power. As kings began to grow in authority and try to construct centralized governments, they often began to rely on bishops as essentially secular lords and officers of state. Like to put it in a modern context, imagine that the Archbishop of New York also served as the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City. That would mean a lot of political leaders would be very heavily invested in making sure the Archbishop was a man who had their approval. Naturally then the king had a very strong interest in appointing the bishops to make sure they were reliable men or at least men on his side. Of course, this involved a good deal of corruption, which reformers in the church condemned as simony, the buying and selling of church offices. The name comes from the Apostles' encounter with Simon the Sorcerer in the Book of Acts who tried to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit from the Apostles. Despite widespread disapproval, simony was essentially standard business through much of the ninth and 10th centuries. However, by the 11th century and through the 13th, many of the popes who came to office were zealous reformers who wanted to purge the church of all corruption. One of them was Gregory VII, who became Pope in 1073 AD. Like many of the popes of his time. Gregory VII was an energetic reformer which quickly brought him into conflict with Henry IV, the King of Germany who wanted to be anointed Holy Roman Emperor. Both Henry and Gregory wanted to strengthen their respective domains, which led to them officially deposing one another. However, Gregory had greater moral authority on his side and many of Henry's nobles disliked their king a great deal. An excommunication from the Pope gave them all the excuse they needed to move against Henry. Gregory sheltered with his ally, Countess Matilda of Tuscany at Canossa, and to lift the excommunication, Henry famously stood barefoot in the snow wearing a hair shirt. Gregory was suspicious, but eventually he succumbed to the pressure and forgave Henry. The pendulum swung back soon enough. Henry crushed his internal rivals, marshaled an army, appointed his own anti-pope and marched on Rome. Desperate, Gregory called on his ally, the Norman adventurer and warlord Robert Guiscard. Guiscard himself is a fascinating character who went from a landless adventurer from Normandy to ruling Sicily and making war on the Byzantine Empire. Guiscard 's army drove off Henry's horses. Neither Henry nor Gregory would have the last laugh, but rather Guiscard, as his troops sacked Rome in the process. The people of Rome blamed Gregory for this and he had no choice but to flee with Giscard. Gregory died in exiled at Salerno in 1085, famously and bitterly declaring that "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile." The Investiture Controversy between Emperor and Pope continued for a few more decades, but was finally settled by The Concordat of Worms in 1122. The emperor gave up the right to appoint bishops but still had a major unofficial say in the matter. Essentially, canons could elect their own bishop and monks could elect their own abbots, but if they were smart, they would make sure that their choices were acceptable to the emperor. However, choosing your own bishops could backfire, as the next example will show. #2: Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest? In England, King Henry II had his own challenges with the church and the Pope. Henry II was a vigorous king who faced significant challenges, both in holding on to his extensive territories and ruling in England that had been divided by nearly 20 years of civil war during the conflict between Empress Matilda and King Stephen. (Fun fact, I based the civil war in Blades of Ruin off the war between Matilda and Steven.) Justice had largely broken down during the Civil War and Henry undertook reforms of the legal machinery of England. He ran into a problem with the church courts. At that time in England, the church essentially had its own courts for trying cases involving clergymen, and all you needed to do to prove that you were a clergyman was to read a sentence of Latin. Naturally, some frequent malefactors used this to escape justice, since the church courts were quite a bit more lenient than the royal ones since they were not allowed to spill blood. This went on to the point where it became something of a scandal. In the US and UK, there are sometimes scandals when a judge is more lenient with members of his or her own ethnicity or social class than with other defendants. This shocks the conscience and people frequently experienced similar reactions to some of the light sentences given by the church court to serious criminals. So Henry II rolled out a full-scale program of reform and he was assisted by his chancellor Thomas Becket, who had started as a relatively low ranking clerk in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Becket was a good and faithful servant of the king, and when the previous Archbishop died, Henry arranged for him to become the new Archbishop. However, Becket seems to have undergone a personal crisis of some sort after becoming Archbishop, perhaps believing himself unworthy of the office. He resolved this crisis by becoming something of a self-righteous aesthetic and started pursuing the rights of the church and church courts with the same fervor that he once pursued the king's interests. Henry was shocked and then increasingly angry and Becket attacked Henry's reform program more and more, finally threatening excommunication and to put threatening to put England under interdict. Becket fled to take refuge with King Louis II of France, who understandably did not like Henry very much because Henry had stolen his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (who, to be fair, had cheerfully allowed herself to be stolen). Pope Alexander III managed to mediate a compromise and Becket returned to England, but Henry and Becket remained enemies. Events came to a head in 1170 AD when Henry crowned his son (also named Henry) as co-king with him in an effort to establish the succession. Since he was angry at Becket, he had other clergymen carry out the coronation, which was traditionally done by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Furious, Becket excommunicated all the clergymen involved. Henry, who had a volcanic temper blew his top at this, the source of the famous quote of "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" This however, is a paraphrase. According to one of his biographers who was an eyewitness to events, what Henry actually said was something along the lines of "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?" Henry seems to have been blowing off steam, but four of his knights took this as a royal command. They proceeded to Canterbury and went to arrest Becket in his cathedral. Becket refused to submit to arrest and refused to flee, and the knights killed him before the altar. It is commonly observed that the Middle Ages was a much more physically violent time than our own, with people of all social classes much more willing to employ violence in quarrels than is the norm in the modern US. That said, killing an archbishop in his cathedral was a massive scandal that broke every social norm of the time. The murder was a serious blow to Henry's authority. While he may not have ordered Becket's murder, no one actually believed that, and many people found it politically convenient to believe that had commanded the archbishop's death. Henry's relationship with his family was already strained because of his refusal to share meaningful power and several of his sons and his wife Eleanor rose revolt against him. Henry put down the revolt, managed to make peace with his sons, imprisoned his wife, and diffused the crisis over Becket's death by doing penance and praying in front of Becket's tomb. Pope Alexander III declared Becket a saint and Henry actively encouraged the development of the cult of this new saint. Having to pray and do penance in front of the tomb of a former enemy had to have been galling to a proud man like Henry, but Henry had a keen instinct for political survival and he came through the crisis of the murder and the revolt of his sons with his crown intact. His son John would not be nearly so savvy. #3: So you've Sold Your Kingdom to the Pope. Henry II and his son and heir Richard I were both capable warriors and ruthless leaders. When Richard died, however, his brother John took the throne. John is something of a controversial figure because historians keep constantly reevaluating him, but I think it is on balance fair to say that he had all the vices of his father and brother, but none of their virtues. Henry and Richard were ruthless men who crushed their enemies whenever possible, but they also rewarded their friends and had a knack for winning battles. That was probably one of the reasons Henry was so offended at Thomas Becket. He felt he had rewarded Becket and been repaid with self-righteous ingratitude. John had the first part down, but he had an amazing gift for making new enemies, often by breaking his word at the worst possible time and frequently lost battles. Victories can paper over any number of problems, but John didn't have many victories. To be fair, he also had extraordinarily bad luck, but he also did put a lot of work into making that bad luck even worse. If John had been a quarterback in an American football team, he'd be the kind of quarterback who throws a lot of interceptions. Anyway. Throughout Henry II's reign, the English crowd had large parts of in northern France as feudal fiefs. Henry spent a lot of time maintaining control of France, and in 10 years of his reign, Richard only spent six months in England. The rest of his reign was spent campaigning to hold his lands in France. After John became king in 1199 AD, he very swiftly lost control of most of his lands in northern France in 1204 to the King of France Philip II, who was a much savvier politician than John. Philip had been on the back foot against Henry and Richard for most of his reign but against John, he had an opponent he could dominate. After 1204, John spent the next decade extracting as much money from England as possible. Every possible device for raising revenue was used, and John employed the judicial reforms his father had made to raise even more money from court cases. This led to John's conflict with the church. When the old Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1205, John favored one candidate, but the canons elected Stephen Langton as the new archbishop. The election became disputed, but Pope Innocent III favored Langton. Enraged, John declared that anyone who supported Langton as a public enemy. Innocent III would not take this lying down. When various anti-Catholic American writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries imagined an all-powerful Pope controlling Catholics from Rome, Innocent III was probably the closest the papacy ever actually came to achieving that vision. Innocent was a savvy enough politician and had enough moral authority that he could sometimes act as sort of an over king across all of Christendom, and he was frequently involved in international politics. In response to the Langton controversy, Innocent put England under papal interdict. No church services or masses were to be offered in all of England. To ratchet up the pressure, Innocent also declared John deposed and authorized Phillip II to overthrow him. However, this is where John's more competent side actually came out. He used the opportunity to loot as much money from the church as possible, and Innocent realized there wasn't actually a lot he could do to force John's compliance. A compromise was reached. John would accept Langton as archbishop and become a vassal of the Pope, and Innocent would lift the interdict. By this time, John was unpopular enough that his barons were plotting against him and Langton swiftly sided with the barons. Finally, all of John's hopes came to crashing ruin in 1214 at the Battle of Bouvines. For 10 years, he extorted enormous sums of money from England to conquer northern France and with that money, he sent a vast army to France. Philip II and his allies crushed that army, ruining 10 years of John's efforts and destroying his last vestige of authority. His barons promptly rebelled against him and forced him to sign the Magna Carta, which limited the king's powers over the nobility. John immediately (and with tedious predictability) went back on his word and England was in full civil war when he died of dysentery in 1216. England would technically remain a papal fief, though nothing much came of it. In 1365, Parliament declared that John surrendering England to the Pope had been invalid, and that was that. The papacy, preoccupied with its own impending crisis, which we'll talk about shortly, could do nothing about it. Ironically, John's greatest contributions to history came from his failures, since the Magna Carta was one of the foundations of the modern concept of constitutional government. A king with few limits on his power is a tolerable state of affairs when the king is competent, wins battles, and keeps order. When the king is capricious, cruel, and wastes 10 years of heavy taxation in losing a war, it's much less acceptable. Later kings in negotiation with Parliament would solemnly reissue Magna Carta and swear to uphold its provisions in exchange for taxes. Fun fact: Langton was also the first to divide the Bible into the chapters and verses it has today. Innocent III was powerful enough to bend kings to his will or at the very least force them to compromise, but his successors would not be as fortunate. #4: Talk to My Lawyers Fist The papacy in the 13th century was at the height of its power, but problems were on their horizon. One problem was a loss of moral authority. The papacy had become an extremely efficient machine for collecting tithes and donatives, with a lot of money flowing to Rome. Throughout the history of Christianity, you'll often see a cycle of success leading to prosperity, the prosperity leading to corruption and vice, and moral revulsion of the corruption inspiring a new reform and aesthetic movement. Then the reform movement becomes successful and rich and the circle begins anew. The Protestant Reformation was probably the most dramatic example of this cycle, but it has happened many times before and since. People were growing increasingly cynical about the masterful lawyer-popes who efficiently ran the church in the 1200s. The second problem was strong monarchies developing in England and France. Part of the reason the church and the popes had become so powerful was because there had not been much in the way of centralized state organization after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire and the weakening of the Byzantine Empire in the east. As mentioned before, for a long time the church was the only functioning large-scale organization, which meant the church and popes acquired a great deal of power and influence. But by the end of the 13th century and the start of the 14th, the world was changing. Monarchies in Western Europe were starting to develop into strong, centralized governments. Feudalism was becoming increasingly archaic and performative, with kings preferring cash to hire professional soldiers instead of feudal levies, and the concept of the nation-state was beginning to develop. Strong kings were less willing to suffer challenges to their authority from the church and unlike Henry II, Henry IV, and John, often had more resources and power to do something about it. More practically, running a centralized government is very expensive, and the church had a lot of revenue and property that the kings wanted to tap for themselves. These trends came to a head in the conflict between King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII. Boniface had an outsized view of papal power, and frequently intervened in political quarrels, which was to his own detriment because he had a tendency towards tactless arrogance. Philip was just as arrogant as Boniface, but far more conniving and vastly more ruthless. Philip was also a master of the modern technique that various dictatorships and their secret police use to rid themselves of their enemies – accuse them of wildly outlandish crimes, and if necessary, torture them into confessing those crimes. Due to continual wars with England and Flanders, Philip needed money, and he began taxing the French clergy. In 1296, Boniface issued a bull forbidding lay taxation of the clergy, but most of the French prelates sided with Philip and Boniface had to back down. Boniface declared a jubilee year in 1300, and the influx of pilgrims (and money) to Rome boosted Boniface's confidence, and the conflict with France flared up again. In 1302, Boniface issued the famous papal bull "Unam sanctam", which argued that all temporal authorities were subject to the pope, and this resulted in a ratcheting up of various disputes and tensions between the French crown and the papacy. However, Boniface had fatally miscalculated, or had misunderstood just how ruthless Philip really was. Philip's chief minister and lawyer, Guillaume de Nogaret, convinced the king to abduct Boniface and bring him back to France for trial and deposition. Nogaret headed a force that ventured into Italy and abducted the pope at one of his houses in the town of Anagni. Boniface was captured, held without food and water for three days, and beaten. The sheer outrage of the townspeople forced Nogaret to withdraw, but the outcome worked in Philip's favor. Boniface died shortly after, possibly from the strain of his ordeal. The next pope, Benedict XI, was much friendlier to Philip, and when he died abruptly, the new pope, Clement V, was so under Philip's control that he moved the papal court from Rome to Avignon in southern France, starting the period called the "Babylonian Captivity" of the papacy. This led to the not unjustified view that the papacy had become a tool of the king of France, which led to further problems down the road. #5: A Fistful of Popes, and For a Few Popes More From 1306 to 1376, the Papal court would reside at Avignon in southern France. This was not a tenable situation for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the papacy was seen as too partial to the king of France, which damaged relations with every other monarch, especially those who were enemies of France. For another, the church administration became very efficient during this period and even more skilled at collecting tithes and a wide variety of fees, which further eroded the church's moral authority. All levels of society increasingly criticized the church as spending less time tending to souls and more time extorting money from them. Various anti clerical movements started and began to gain strength from that criticism. 13 centuries of tradition placed the Pope in Rome, and there is a growing opinion within the church that the Pope should actually move back to Rome. Finally, in 1376, Pope Gregory XI decided to move back to Rome, which he did in 1378. He immediately found himself thrust into the vicious politics of the various Italian city-states, who did not welcome the return of the pope to meddle in their affairs. Gregory found the experience unpleasant enough that he decided to move the court back to Avignon, but he died unexpectedly in 1378. The Roman mob, determined that there would be a Roman pope who stayed in Rome, bullied the cardinals into electing Urban VI as the new Pope. Urban immediately offended his cardinals with fits of rage, and they fled to Anagni, claimed they had been forced into electing Urban under duress, and declared the previous election invalid and elected Clement VII. Urban wasn't about to resign, and Clement was unable to take possession of Rome, so he had no choice but to flee to Avignon. So now Christendom had two competing popes, both claiming legitimacy (and sole control of church revenues) and neither willing to step down. The Great Western Schism had begun. Naturally, this resulted in polarization in international relationships. France supported Clement VII, while England supported Urban VI. Various other nations and kings lined up behind one pope or another as it suited their interests. Both Clement and Urban eventually died, and their respective cardinals elected two new popes in their place. The schism did terrible damage to the moral authority of the church, as the spectacle of two popes hurling excommunications at each other and their supporters while trying to raise as much money as possible was hardly an edifying spectacle. The crisis was half deadly serious and half farce. It is likely no coincidence that various proto-Protestant movements like the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia started building steam during these years. More sensible heads realized this state of affairs could not continue, and started trying to convince both lines of popes to resign so a church council could select a new, unified pope. After much negotiation, in 1409, both lines of popes had agreed to abdicate, and the Council of Pisa met to elect a new pope. However, at the last minute, the previous two popes balked and refused to resign, but the council elected Alexander V as the new pope. Which meant there were now three competing lines of popes, all of them claiming legitimacy and excommunicating each other. Finally, in 1414, the Council of Constance convinced the Roman pope Gregory XII to step down, arrested the Pisan pope John XXII who had tried to go full local warlord, and appointed Martin V as the new legitimate pope. Benedict XIII, the Avignon pope, refused to step down, but the tide had turned, and Benedict had to flee to a castle held by his supporters in Aragon, and spent the rest of his days hurling excommunications and generally being ignored. After Benedict's death his surviving cardinals tried to elect a new Avignon pope, but Pope Martin bribed them with bishoprics instead, and that was that. The Great Western Schism was finally over, but the damage had been done. The total collapse of moral leadership had piled up a lot of kindling, and a century later it was an argumentative German university professor who would accidentally light the spark that would become the Protestant Reformation when he posted ninety-five propositions about church reform for public debate. It didn't help that the post-Schism popes were often worldly Renaissance princelings who were more interested in fine living, artwork, occasional enthusiastic debauchery, and waging war to extend the Papal States than in spiritual leadership. Popes had once exercised power over kings, but during the Great Schism, the papacy had become a problem and headache for the kings to manage. The ability of a pope to bend a king to his will had become severely limited, and soon it would be gone entirely. #6: Screw You Guys, I'm Starting My Own Church With Divorce and Protestantism! The thing to understand about King Henry VIII of England was that he was genuinely and sincerely religious. He was also colossally self-absorbed, and truly believed that he was God's anointed to rule over England. If Henry had been either a little less religious or a little less egotistical, history would have been very different. At first, Henry was staunchly Catholic. He despised Martin Luther, and in 1521 wrote "Defense Of The Seven Sacraments" against Luther. (Thomas More helped write it to an unknown degree.) Luther fired back with a treatise called "Against Henry, King of the English." One gets the impression that if Henry and Luther had lived today, they would have loved social media, and spent much time arguing with each other across it. Pope Leo X was so pleased by "Defense Of The Seven Sacraments" that he awarded Henry the title "Defender of the Faith", which was perhaps darkly amusing considering what happened next. Henry likely would've been content to remain a Catholic for the rest of his days, but for one of those quirks of fate upon which history so often turns, he didn't have a son and he really badly needed one. To the modern ear, Henry's obsession with having a son sounds bizarre, but England had just gone through thirty years of dynastic upheaval and instability during the Wars of the Roses from 1455 to 1485. There were other noble families in England that could exercise a claim to the throne, and Henry was always uneasy about the possibilities of rebellions and coups. Having a male heir would go a long way towards solving that problem. For England in Henry's time, the king not having a viable heir was as serious a crisis as a disputed presidential election would be in 21st century America. His wife Catherine of Aragon had originally been betrothed to Henry's older brother Arthur, who had been the expected heir to the crown of England, but he had died unexpectedly and so Henry had married her instead. Henry became convinced that because he had married his brother's widow, his marriage was cursed by God and therefore he would have no son, and so he needed another wife. Consequently he petitioned the pope to annul his marriage so he could marry again. Under normal circumstances, this likely would have been no difficulty. However, the pope at the time, Clement VII (the previous Clement VII from the Great Western Schism was declared an anti-pope) has been called one of the unluckiest of popes because of crisis after crisis that he had to manage. France and the Holy Roman Empire were at each others' throats, and both wanted Clement VII to come down on their side. The Protestant Reformation was exploding throughout Europe, and the Ottomans were advancing in the east. To further compound Clement's woes, Charles V was both Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Spain, which made him the most powerful man in Europe. Catherine of Aragon was Charles's aunt, and because of the vicious politics of the time, Clement was essentially Charles's prisoner. There was absolutely no way Clement could give an annulment so Henry could dissolve his marriage to the emperor's aunt. Clement advised Henry to simply divorce Catherine and remarry, but that was not acceptable to Henry's mind because he wanted an annulment, not a divorce. The distinction was very important to him. In the rumblings of Protestantism at the time, Henry found his answer. The Church of England should not be subject to a distant foreign pope, but under the leadership of the crown of England. Henry eventually broke away from the Catholic Church, declaring himself supreme head of the Church of England, and annulled his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn instead. Henry and his ministers also used the opportunity to dissolve the monasteries and seize their lands and revenues for themselves, which would have long-term deleterious social consequences because the charity the monasteries supplied to the poorest residents of England was never really replaced. This did not work out so well for Anne Boleyn. A combination of her inability to produce a son and her forceful advocacy of Protestantism got on the king's nerves, and Henry had her executed on most likely falsified charges of adultery. (Philip IV of France would have approved of the technique.) After Henry's death, his son Edward VI pursued even more radical Protestantism than Henry ever would have been comfortable with, but after his untimely death, Henry's daughter Mary took the throne and returned England to Rome. But after Mary died, her sister Elizabeth removed the country from the Catholic Church, and this time it stuck. Earlier this year, King Charles III made headlines for praying with Pope Leo XIV during the official visit to Vatican, which is a sentence that would've baffled many of the major figures of English history for the last 500 years. What can we learn from these six examples? So, as we can see, Catholic secular leaders frequently found themselves in conflict with the pope, and at times even went to war against him. And these are just some of the more prominent examples. The history of the papacy's conflict with the Italian city-states, the Holy Roman Empire, and various kingdoms in Eastern Europe, all of them ostensibly Catholic, could fill (and has filled) countless books. What is interesting in that during conflicts with secular authorities, the pope usually lost in the end. The secular lords often took significant loss during the conflicts, but usually got their way when things settled, or had to come to some sort of compromise. In fact, it would have been better for both sides to come to a compromise first, but medieval rulers were often forceful personalities who were only willing to bend when left with no other choice. So, we can see that the news genre of "American Catholic political leaders disagree with the Pope" is in fact a long and rich tradition dating back centuries, and relatively mild compared to the days of Henry IV making war on Gregory VII or Philip IV sending his lawyers to kidnap Boniface VIII. And, of course, when I say that history can inspire fantasy novels, this sort of thing is what I mean. You could probably get dozens of novels out of these events. So that is it for this week. Thank you for indulging my interest in Medieval history and allowing me to ramble about it for about a half hour. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.  

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