Doctoral Dissertation Research: Collective Security and Jurisdictional Conflicts

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This study has implications for understanding the relationship between international organizations and national governments. The lessons learned here about the conditions under which people delegated power to the Catholic Church could inform our understanding of the conditions under which people are willing to delegate power to the UN or NATO. The Protestant Reformation was one of the European history's most transformative events. It ended the ideological monopoly of the Catholic Church and eventually led to the separation of church and state. The Reformation is conventionally thought to have begun with the theological dispute initiated by Martin Luther in 1517 and to have ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This research asserts that, in important ways, the Reformation began well before Luther's 95 Theses and ended only in the eighteenth century. Specifically, it considers two major manifestations of papal authority in European states - appointments of bishops and collection of taxes from prelates - and seeks to explain why certain states won a higher degree of independence from the Holy See than others, and when they did so. Secular rulers shared sovereignty with the papacy in exchange for participation in military alliances against common non-Catholic threats. Over time, the value of such alliances grew larger to Southern and Central European states, whereas Northern European states became net contributors, which is one major reason (or so is being argued) that Protestantism initially took root in the North. To test this proposition, the project assembles a new database of tax receipts of the papal financial office, the Camera Apostolica. The Catholic Church was a pivotal actor in the political and economic development of pre-modern Europe. The recent literature has illuminated the manifold first-order consequences that the Protestant Reformation (1517) had for politics, markets, and society. What remains unclear is why the Church's power declined more quickly in some regions (Scandinavia) than in others (Central Europe). The investigator argues that the temporal influence of the Church persisted insofar as there was demand for collective security, and that this demand was relatively stronger in Central and Southern Europe. An effective and enduring alliance of Catholic states against the "infidels" (the Turks in particular) required partial delegation of legal and fiscal authority to a common non-territorial jurisdiction, namely the Church. These powers were exercised locally by bishops, who limited rulers' discretionary power over domestic and international affairs, and papal collectors, who transferred "spiritual revenues" from Catholic states to the Curia. The investigator uses the variation in the amount of taxes collected by the papacy in the late Middle Ages and early modern period across time and space to explain secularization as a function of external military threat. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.