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Some continuities run through the long period from the late Roman empire to the Counter Reformation. An archive existed well before the empire in the West collapsed. Throughout the period papal government was largely demand driven. To settle disputes in far-away localities of which the popes knew little, they delegated authority to men on the spot who were not paid for their services. The papacy lacked the resources to fund a ‘Weberian’ bureaucracy, but was adept at devising rules to run systems that circumvented its own shortcomings, and thus it was able to meet the expanding demand for its services.
How did the papacy govern European religious life without a proper bureaucracy and the normal resources of a state? From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of a religious ruler of the Latin world. Over the centuries, it acquired governmental authority analogous to that of a secular state – except that it lacked powers of physical enforcement, a solid financial base (aside from short periods) and a bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber. Through the discipline of Applied Diplomatics, which investigates the structures and settings of documents to solve substantive historical problems, The Power of Protocol explores how such a demand for papal services was met. It is about the genesis and structure of papal documents – a key to papal history generally – from the Roman empire to after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, and is the only book of its kind.
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