he first part of the book may be seen as the papacy's attempt to rationalize its spiritual policy on one hand and its administration of such policy on the other--what today might more generally be called its domestic policy. Robinson shows a papacy that looked inward, always with a view toward reform. Having looked inward and done some reformist reorganization and rationalization of structure, the papacy would then look outward, to its foreign policy. This Robinson explains as "the papacy's involvement in the secular politics of western Christendom" (p. vii). To put it another way, however, what began as a more or less satisfactory institutionalization of the papacy as supreme spiritual authority ineluctably extended outward, toward (as it were) spiritual interference in and implicit declaration of moral if not civic authority over secular affairs. It is the very success of the inward look, on this view, that implies the look outward would follow.
It is Robinson's position that the period being studied, 1073-1198, is the decisively transitional period of domestic institutionalization on one hand and "foreign" extension of spiritual hegemony over secular affairs and institutions on the other. Thus he shows that the process of domestic institutionalization involved a recognition on the part of the Bishop of Rome that the Rome of what one may conveniently call the Dark Ages might lose whatever residual spiritual-historical claim it had to status as the seat of the vicar of Christ on earth. In this connection, Robinson uses medieval source material, as well as commentaries on such material, to support his discussion of 1073 Rome as very much a provincial, corrupt backwater with claim to the term "patrimony of Peter" but little else besides. The pope was both supported by and the rival of secular Roman and greater-European nobility, which sought to usurp for all practical purposes the power of investiture of high churchmen, and s...