The Bad Popes, E.R. Chamberlin
The Bad Popes, E.R. Chamberlin
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The Bad Popes

Author: E.R. Chamberlin

Narrator: Nigel Patterson

Unabridged: 11 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/24/2020


Synopsis

A dramatic account of some of the most notorious figures of medieval and Renaissance history who ruled from the Eternal City. It is sure to grip fans of John Julius Norwich, Tom Holland, and Peter Ackroyd.

The papal tiara has been worn by a number of infamous men through the course of its history.

Some have been accused of murder, many have had mistresses, while others sold positions in the church to their followers or gave land and wealth to their illegitimate children.

E. R. Chamberlin examines the lives of eight of the most controversial popes to have ruled over the Holy See, from the reign of Pope Stephen VI, who had his predecessor exhumed, put on trial and thrown in the Tiber, in the ninth century, through to Pope Clement VII, the second Medici pope, whose failed international policy led to the Sack of Rome in 1527.

The Bad Popes explains how during these six centuries the papal monarchy rose to its greatest heights, as popes attempted to assert not only their spiritual authority but also their temporal power, only for it to come crashing down.

About E.R. Chamberlin

E. R. Chamberlin was an author and historian. During his lifetime, he authored numerous popular history books on topics ranging from ancient Rome to twentieth-century Britain. Although he was born in Jamaica, he returned to England with his father during the Great Depression. Chamberlin dropped out of school when he was fourteen and became an apprentice leather dresser.

When he was old enough, he eagerly left this work behind to enlist in the Royal Navy in 1944. He served in the military until 1947 and then found work at the Norwich Public Library. It was here that his real education began, and Chamberlin took advantage of his vocation by reading history texts avidly. He later also worked at the Holborn Public Library and then for the book division at Readers' Digest.

His first book, The Count of Virtue: Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, was released in 1965. This would be followed by thirty more books over the next three decades. Among these are The Bad Popes, The Sack of Rome, The Nineteenth Century, The Emperor, Charlemagne, and The Tower of London: An Illustrated History. Also active in historical preservation projects, Chamberlin helped rescue the Guildford Institute building from destruction in 1982 and had a monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson constructed on Mt. Etna in Italy.

For the former endeavor, Chamberlin was recognized with an honorary degree from the University of Surrey in 1982.


Reviews

Goodreads review by nostalgebraist on March 01, 2018

I started reading this over two years ago, and put it down for a very long time before deciding to pick it up again. That isn't necessarily a reflection on the quality of the book, which is -- at least -- well-written on the sentence level and told with an appropriately wry sense of humor. But it is......more

Goodreads review by Kathryn on April 22, 2009

What makes a Pope a bad Pope? That, of course, is a question open to debate; but the author of this work (published in 1969, several Popes ago) makes it fairly obvious that power and spirit do not go well together, and that it was when a given Pope was acting both as the Spiritual Leader of Christen......more

Goodreads review by Jennifer on August 23, 2020

A graphic illustration of the ways matters can go awry when power—temporal and spiritual—intersects with greed, moral weakness and other personality defects, The Bad Popes harks back to a traditional style of historical writing. While entertaining, it thus explains many events by invoking regional o......more

Goodreads review by Monty on October 17, 2021

I picked this up because I greatly enjoyed the same author’s book on Charlemagne. This is excellent too – a very elegantly written and absorbing account of seven popes who were all, in intriguingly different ways, “bad”. I had not fully appreciated how the House of Theophylact dominated the papacy fo......more

Goodreads review by Josh on May 16, 2024

An interesting book. Chamberlain discusses some of the worst Pope’s that we’ve had in the church. From a recluse pope and Synodus Horrenda to the infamous Rodrigo Borgia, and later Martin Luther. ER Chamberlain gives a historic and unbiased account. There was one thing that he repeated that got unde......more