Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State.

• Author: Carletta, David M.

Anna Grzymala-Busse. Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. vii +235 pages. Paper, $29.95.

Incorporating and building upon scholarship that stresses the medieval antecedents of the modern European state, historian Anna Grzymala-Busse presents a compelling argument that the medieval Catholic Church profoundly affected state formation in Europe. In Sacred

Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State, Grzymala-Busse contends that the Catholic Church is the key ingredient to understanding the method and means by which Europe's leaders managed to accrue and affirm authority over diverse territories and populations. Over the course of generations, medieval Europe's multifarious secular leaders selectively adopted and adapted the church's institutional, administrative, and human resources, thereby eventually gaining the ability to subordinate the church to the state.

Grzymala-Busse appropriately highlights the transformative aspects of the Gregorian Reform initiated under Gregory VII, who served as pope from 1073 to 1085. Gregory VII became the first pope to depose a monarch. Grzymala-Busse describes how the Investiture Controversy of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries pitted European monarchs against Gregory VII's energetic pontificate. The controversy arose over was the established privilege of secular rulers to install and invest the church's bishops. Throughout the book, Grzymala-Busse points out the importance of bishops, who sat in royal councils and national assemblies while both competing with and cultivating Europe's burgeoning states. Bishops were commanding figures in medieval Europe. Unfortunately for the bishops, the actions of rival popes during the Western Schism from 1378 to 1417 served to weaken the church's power.

The book begins with a summary of relations between Roman pontiffs and European rulers in the Middle Ages: "The church first liberated itself from imperial control in the late eleventh century; grew in power, ambition, and administrative capacity in the twelfth and thirteenth; and then overreached, fractured, and lost most of its political influence in the late fourteenth," writes Grzymala-Busse (p. 41). Competition amongst Roman pontiffs and European rulers generated many of the European state system's most significant characteristics, including the separation of ecclesiastical and secular authority...