(Paperback Edition) The first volume of Ludwig von Pastor's classic History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages covers the crises of the early 1300s, including the Avignon Popes, the Great Western Schism, the Council of Constance, the pontificates of Martin V and Eugene IV, and the Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence. Here the author sets the stage for his epic, forty volume chronicle of the Papacy in the Modern Era.The present edition is based on a copy of the fourth English edition of the text, published in 1913 and made available digitally by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, through the Internet Archive. Artifacts of the scanning process have been carefully removed, and the margins of each page have been re-set so as to improve the appearance and readability of the text.

Owen Chadwick describes the effects of the European Revolution of 1789 to 1815 on the Papacy, and compares Catholic Church of the ancient régime to that of the early nineteenth century. The book shows how strongly the Counter-Reformation still worked in Italy during the eighteenth century; how it was the constitutional development of states, rather than the incoming of new ideas, which forced change; how traditional was the Catholic world even in the age of the Enlightenment. It shows reform at work, and the fierce pressure on the Papacy marked first in the forced suppression of the Jesuits and afterwards in the kidnapping of two successive Popes by French governments. It shows how revolution in Italy affected church structures and brought on peasant war, yet encouraged, in a radical form, some improvements of church life towards which the earlier reformers had striven. Finally, it shows the political swing of the Restoration after the fall of Napoleon, the way in which the Church was already associated with the political right, the great difficulties of restoring church life after the evolutionary years, and the persistence, half unnoticed, of the earlier reforming ideas among Catholics.