How universal was or is the pope's claim to authority? Hoovering up principalities as papal ‘fiefs’, such overlordship supposedly became a central aspect of papal policy from the eleventh century onwards: the fate in turn of medieval Sardinia, Sicily, Aragon, Portugal, England and Ireland. In each of these places, resistance to papal command was theoretically punishable by the deposition of disobedient kings. For each instance, there already exists a wealth of local scholarly writing, combined with no end of synthetic histories in which the concept of ‘papal monarchy’ looms large. But what was the reality? Rejecting all previous efforts to trace papal ambitions to the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’, and at the same time studiously avoiding the post-medieval language of ‘feudalism’, Benedict Wiedemann's splendid analysis focuses instead upon papal letters as our principal means of access to thoughts and impulses. Such letters, he reminds us, were chiefly responsive rather than proactive: answering locally expressed needs and petitions, rather than driven by any centrally directed will to dominate. Acknowledging the legitimate rights of princes within the secular sphere, successive popes thus discharged what they considered their obligation, as servants of the servants of God, to offer protection, to alleviate public crisis and to shelter princes and their realms in times of ugently expressed necessity. Wiedemann's, in other words, is very much the David d'Avray view of papal policy: very far from that of Matthew Paris or Frederick ii, let alone of more recent critics. In this interpretation, papal universalism served positively to assist rather than negatively to undermine the legitimate exercise of princely sovereignty. Indeed, in this reading, we might well wonder why every principality in Christendom, from France to Jerusalem, did not follow the same path as Aragon or England, and seek refuge within the papacy's all-sheltering bosom. As for the details, Wiedemann proceeds case by case, revisiting and revising in ways that are invariably illuminating. From unexpected beginnings in Kievan Rus and Croatia, both in the 1070s offered a degree of papal tutelage, we pass to Sicily where, as elsewhere, local rulers swore oaths to the pope, in no sense ‘feudal’, but modelled on undertakings to the see of St Peter extracted previously from archbishops, bishops and increasingly from the heads of ‘exempt’ monastic houses. At this early stage, protection implied no right by the pope to depose sovereigns who were disobedient or who failed to pay the (modest) census offered as counter-gift. Corsica and Sardinia, meanwhile, were acquired not as Constantinian ‘fiefs’ but as directly governed colonies, papal states in the same sense as the Romagna or the Marche of Ancona. Homage for Sicily, when it came, resulted not from over-vaunting papal ambition, but as a face-saving device enabling the stronger power (King Roger) to avoid the utter humiliation of the weaker (Pope Calixtus ii). Homage itself remained a two-way street, implying mutual obligations rather than simple subjection. Aragon emerged not as a papal ‘fief’ but as a favoured son, here offered assistance in otherwise fraught negotiations with the rival kings of Spain. The terms of homage began to harden only in 1213, with King John's ‘surrender’ of England and Ireland to Pope Innocent iii. This was negotiated by papal agents familiar with the oaths sworn to the pope by Roman senators, but with King John himself intruding the all-important clause by which his realms were henceforth to be held by him and his heirs ‘tanquam feodarii’. Even then, this was an offer only ‘as if’ (‘tanquam’) rather than specifically ‘as’ fief-holders. In 1219, perhaps to take account of rival claims from Scotland, similar language was adopted, by the same papal agents, for the homage sworn to Honorius iii by ‘King’ Regnavaldr of the Isle of Man. By 1232, it had spread to Sicily. Meanwhile, in 1215, and against the backdrop of Innocent iii's Albigensian Crusade, we find the pope for the first time employing the same rhetoric of homage and ‘feudum’ in his grant to the bishop of Maguelone of the southern French protectorate of Melgueil, itself a device intended both to raise revenue for the curia and to outmanoeuvre Simon de Montfort. That there was still no overarching pursuit of such claims is suggested, none the less, by the fact that, a few years earlier, Innocent had refused an offer from Count Raymond of Toulouse to declare Toulouse itself a papal protectorate. In all of this, not only was the process bottom-up rather than top-down, dictated by local circumstance rather than curial ambition, but King John's 1213 oath established precedents rapidly extended elsewhere. In Aragon, England and even in Sicily, in times of papal wardship, the pope's legates continued to work, on the whole, in the interest of local minority councils, not as instruments of papal prerogative or ‘feudal’ right. Even in 1245, when Pope Innocent iv moved against disobedient or incompetent princes, in Portugal and the Empire, he did so not by crudely ‘deposing’ them, but as an act of grace, dissolving the bonds of homage that had previously obliged godly subjects to obey ungodly rulers themselves heedless of the medicinal effects of excommunication. Once again, the threatened deposition of King John of England served as precedent here, now adopted in dealings with other Christian rulers. Indeed, the language of King John's surrender continued to surface thereafter in papal dealings with Sicily (1263), Aragon (1283) and even Sardinia (1297). Wiedemann's exposition is both subtle and clear, if not always beyond challenge. There is a surprising lack of engagement with the pope's role in Ireland, from the 1150s onwards. There are some peculiar translations, i.e.: ‘by right of kingship’ (‘iure regni’; p.183), ‘we are even accelerated to this end’ (‘incitante nos etiam ad hoc’; p.178)’, and (here stirring irreverant memories of eel-filled hovercraft, albeit with literal accuracy) ‘our loins are full of sadness’ (‘repleti sunt lumbi nostri dolore’; p.177). A glance at the MGH's invaluable Initienverzeichnis to Potthast's Regesta would show that Innocent iii's lost letters dissolving homage to King John (‘Expectantes hactenus expectavimus’) had a rather longer and more complicated gestation than Wiedemann allows, albeit once again cast originally from an English mould, in this instance from Thomas Becket's letter ‘Expectans expectavi’ of 1166, exhorting King Henry ii to obey the Church's rulings or risk condemnation in this world and damnation in the next. Wiedemann's is an important, indeed a definitive study. It discards many shibboleths, and establishes new paradigms. No one working on the papacy should henceforth ignore it.