La Scandinavia da terra di missione a «fidelis Romanae ecclesiae». L'affermazione dell'autorità papale nel Settentrione (secoli XI-XII)

Since the ninth century, and for about two hundred years, Scandinavia was a land of mission, visited by itinerant foreign bishops engaged in the conversion of the people to Christianity. This phase ended in the second half of the eleventh century, when dioceses were established and, for the first time, direct and regular contacts were established between the papacy and the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Crucial was the action of Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), who, in the midst of the clash with Emperor Henry IV, tried to create in the North a counterweight to imperial authority and to make Scandinavia a "land faithful to the Roman Church". A process was thus initiated which, in the long term, would have had a twofold result: on the one hand, the emancipation of the Nordic churches from the jurisdiction of the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen; on the other, the definitive integration of those countries into Christian Europe. The concrete effects of this process would have been seen in the 12th century: in 1104 the Danish archdiocese of Lund was established, with jurisdiction over the whole of the North; in the following decades, the Norwegian archdiocese of Nidaros (1152/1153) and the Swedish archdiocese of Uppsala (1164) would then be detached from the Danish ecclesiastical province. Significantly, all three events took place in the presence of a papal legate. This contribution therefore investigates the development of a "papal policy for the North" during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, highlighting the concepts and instruments used by the Apostolic See in order to concretely affirm its own primacy in Scandinavia, and to exercise here too that universal jurisdiction which, precisely since the time of Gregory VII, the papacy had begun to claim.