We turn now from emperors and kings to popes, dipping into the story of papal entries shortly after the point at which we left the story of royal entries. My purpose here, as elsewhere in Part 1.1, is not to give a complete account of either royal or papal triumphal entries, but to highlight specific examples of dissonance between civic pomp and the evocation of Christ's entry. In this chapter, I consider just four papal entries. Two come from the first half of the twelfth century, around the time of the first Palm Sunday processions in papal Rome. Another, in which the elected pope insisted on riding a donkey to his coronation but was persuaded to change to a white horse for the triumphal procession that followed, took place in 1294. The fourth, much later, instance comes from 1507, when even the pope's master of ceremonies was troubled by a spectacular instance of tension between military triumph and Palm Sunday's liturgical anticipation of Christ's passion. Cultural circumstances, of course, changed over the intervening four centuries, but the dissonance between biblical story and its ceremonial representation by rulers of church and state proved remarkably persistent.

Pope Calixtus II entered Rome on June 3, 1120, just two years after King Baldwin I's corpse had ridden into Jerusalem. Calixtus had been elected pope at Cluny on February 2, 1119, and crowned seven days later at his archiepiscopal see of Vienne. After more than a year spent consolidating his power north of the Alps but failing to make peace with the current king of Germany and Holy Roman emperor, Henry V, Calixtus set out for Rome. Everywhere along the way, according to Boso, the pope's twelfth-century biographer, “innumerable multitudes of people” gathered. Crowds “venerated (venerabantur) him … as the vicar of Christ” and “prostrated themselves before him with great devotion.”

Uodalscalcus, a monk from the abbey of Saint Afra and Saint Ulrich in Augsburg, left an eyewitness account of Calixtus's entry into Rome. He describes how the Roman militia came out to meet the pope while he was still three days away from the city. “So magnificent was the procession that Caesar himself, had he been present, would have marvelled at the sight and even Tullius Cicero would have been impressed.”