Dan Brown lied to you. I’m sorry. I know it’s hard to accep…

Dan Brown lied to you. I’m sorry.
I know it’s hard to accept. Who could have guessed that religious-themed thrillers might not reflect the cutthroat world of academia? I am a scholar of the papacy in the late Middle Ages. And since Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons is still very much the reference point people have for my work, you might assume that I spend most of my time escaping hermetically sealed reading rooms and avoiding assassination. Sadly (fortunately?!), not so much.
But I’ve been to the Vatican Secret Archives.
I lived to tell the tale.
And I can tell you what it’s really like.
What makes the Vatican Secret Archives a “secret”?
The word ‘secret’ in the Vatican Secret Archives may be the reason for some of the rampant speculation about what goes on in there. But it makes the archive sound much sexier than it is.
The ‘secret’ part of the name comes from the Latin name, the Archivium Secretum Vaticanum. The word secretum has branched in English meaning. On one hand, it can mean “secret” or “hidden.” On the other, it can mean “personal” or “private” (in the sense of private property). This is what the name of the archive actually means—the personal archives of the pope. It is for this very reason that last year, Pope Francis changed its name to the Vatican Apostolic Archive to try and distance it from its reputation.
This already makes them a lot less exciting, I know, even if there are about 50 miles of shelf space in them. They are a treasure trove me as a medievalist, though, if not so much for conspiracy theorists.
The Vatican’s Medieval Treasure Trove
The Vatican archives have a lot of medieval material. There’s some material dating back to the 8th century, but it is very fragmented and rare. The medieval holdings mainly consist of books of letters and bureaucratic records, which start in the roughly 1205—though such items are quite limited for this century. By the start of the 14th century, though, we have loads of letters sent by the popes, petitions granted, and other such administrative records being saved. These give us some fascinating insights into a wide range of aspects of medieval life.
For example, the archives hold over 100,000 letters preserved in the main register series alone that date from the first half of the 14th century. These were produced by the main bureaucracy at the papal court and by the pope’s personal secretaries. And that 100k isn’t counting anything in the auxiliary registers, which were documents produced by the papacy’s specialised departments while documenting their work. These registers tell us quite a lot about life in the 14th century, both for the high European aristocrats in contact with the papacy and for lower-level petitioners.
Those at lower social echelons might navigate the papal bureaucracy to have some claim validated, such as having a land claim recognised, or getting their marriage to a slightly too closely related cousin legalised. High-level nobles may be discussing setting up crusades, peace negotiations with enemy states, or getting their marriage to a much too closely related cousin legalized. We can learn lots about what activity the papacy had taken an interest in, how Church administration worked, and what things medieval people sought official forgiveness for.
For example, through these we know that King Philip VI of France was well on his way to launching a crusade when the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337 forced him to pull all his troops back to North France. We know about sordid crises between rival monks who fought to become the next abbot of their monastery. You find reams of land disputes between minor individuals otherwise completely lost to history. We even know more about international trade and travel—the papacy issued trade and pilgrimage licences that to visit to the Muslim world, and handed down punishments to people who did so behind the pope’s back.
Opening the Pope’s Mail
In this trove is a huge archive—nearly complete—of Papal letters. What a pope wrote to other world leaders can be quite revealing about their hopes and ambitions. Comparing the letters of different popes can help us understand what each thought was most important at the time.
The popes weren’t writing about secret deals to destroy the Templars. That deal was quite public, and all 60 meters of scroll detailing it are available to scholars. They’re not establishing global secret societies. The papal letters show us popes trying to maintain a semblance of European peace (when they’re not the ones disrupting it, of course) and preserve papal authority in the face of changing global politics.
They detail the popes’ efforts at negotiating with the Mongols and their missions to China. They even set up an archbishopric in Beijing at the end of the 13th century! The popes try to broker peace in the Hundred Years War. They were working to control the supply of war goods to the enemies of Western Christendom. They dwell on efforts to try and re-unify the…