papacy

Titbits of myth and knowledge will have filtered through, not least via the papacy in Rome.

So I don't think your comments re: papacy are terribly on-point.

Between the establishment of the papacy in Rome and the downfall of Napoleon, there had been no decade that Europe was not at war.

The papacy around this time was in the throes of more urgent & existential problems, and so reaching for the huge mallet to kill Galileo once and for all made the most sense. Scientific consensus was that hammer.

Florence, papacy, French crown,... thus themselves becoming that entrenched order what the upstarts of 15xx were fighting against.

The GP said between the establishment of the papacy to Napoleon, so he's speaking about events well before there were 50 sovereign states in Europe or an EU.

The growing influence of the papacy lead to the gradual replacement of chattel slavery by serfdom around the tenth century. Finally, in 1315, bonded labor was abolished in France by Louis X, proclaiming that "France means freedom".

Galileo went ahead pissed off the papacy and was censured. Indeed if we consider Einsteins relativity then we might argue that the anti's were right to hold reservations as without an ether it is no more correct to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun than it is to say the Earth is static.

When elected as the Bishop of Rome, Pius V took on a reform of monumental scope, not lacking much sternness: the papacy itself over many recent decades had been occupied by men more of overt excesses and opulence than of other qualities good or ill. The cleanup efforts continued at pace long after his death across the whole of the western Catholic Church.

Western Europe's fractured political map and separation of religious power in the papacy worked against these tendencies. The independence and progress of local universities was always to the benefit of local rulers and at the same time the universities enjoyed an association with the church that helped protect them from both obliteration after military conquest and excessive domination by the state.