The college of cardinals

[Excerpt] Far more has been written about individual early modern cardinals than about the cardinals of that period as a group. But, in point of fact, the cardinals’ collective identity as a College, and the jurisdiction each of its members derived from it, was always what ultimately empowered them as individuals. A historian of the early modern cardinal, or any individual cardinal who contributed to that prototype, is therefore obliged to address the question of how the College itself developed as a central institution within the Roman Curia. Barbara Bombi has explained in the previous chapter how the concept of the Cardinal evolved from the late Middle Ages into the 16th century, and the discussion here to some extent runs in parallel with, and complementary to, that. But it also seeks to demonstrate how the cardinals’ corporate identity (or, rather, identities) and their collective relationship with the pope changed in the centuries after 1500 as a result of various factors: the growth of the pope’s temporal government, the input of foreign powers, the religious imperatives of the Counter-Reformation. A large number of scholars have contributed to what we know about the cardinals’ place within the papacy’s constitution at a general level and the following pages therefore engage their work to chart the changes in the College’s corporate power and influence both de facto and de jure.