Le Chiavi e le Spade. I milites al servizio della Sede apostolica nel XIII secolo: primi appunti.

On Monday, November 13 at 5 p.m., the second appointment of this academic year of the Permanent Seminar on the History of the Papacy will be held in room F007. Alberto Spataro, scholar at the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, will give a talk entitled "The Keys and the Swords. Milites in the service of the Apostolic See in the 13th century: first notes."  In particular, the lecture will investigate the origin of the military power of the popes in the central Middle Ages. As with so many institutional outcomes of the Roman Church, also for the coagulation of militias in the service of the Papacy, the 13th century constitutes a crucial moment, both for the institutional articulation achieved by the curia and for theological insights about the exercise of temporal power by the bishops of Rome. The study of the military interventions promoted by the popes of the Middle Ages can undoubtedly offer an innovative look at such classic themes of historiography as the actual consistency of papal power in the Patrimonium S. Petri, the employment of "spiritual weapons" against the enemies of the Roman Church, as well as the political communication and the ways of narrating the war events that pitted the Papacy, the Empire and the political subjects of communal Italy against each other