\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAnother papal historiography bias Ive noticed carry over into secular or non-Catholic circles is a negative view of the Avignon Papacy, both in the context of when it was the seat of a unified Papacy as well as during the Western Schism when you had popes in Avignon and Rome (and briefly a third in Pisa). Its more subtle than the popular sensationalistic tales regarding Alexander VI and to an extent you can chalk it up to\u00a0\u201chistory is written by the winners\u201d (though moreso during the Western Schism since the unified papacy at Avignon is supposed to be seen as totally legitimate). But there is stuff like how the wikipedia articles on\u00a0\u201cAvignon Papacy\u201d and\u00a0\u201cWestern Schism\u201d mentions how all seven Avignon popes were French and influenced by the King of France as if a string of French popes is more unnatural than an even longer string of Italian popes when the papacy is centered in Italy.\u00a0
another Catholic/China analogy is which dynasties count as the \u201creal\u201d ones when the empire is split between rival claimants, obviously the one that wins, but even when none of them win due to an external conqueror some will be more legit than others.
\nThe Japanese imperial succession is remarkably stable for that length but it\u2019s not actually unbroken, during the fourteenth century, during the \u201cNanbuko-cho\u201d period of the first bakufu (then the real governing force, the Japanese Emperor is usually a ceremonial complement to some real power, which has included \u201cthe retired ex-Emperor\u201d) there were two rival courts and the line continues from the one set up as a rival to the sitting emperor
\nDoesnt the official genealogy also say that there was an emperor who stayed in his mother\u2019s womb for over a year so as to explain a longer-than-nine-months gap between the death of the preceding emperor and birth of the next
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What’s really significant about the stable continuity of the Japanese emperor is he still functions as a priest-king (if not God-king) more than a conquering warrior-king (the shoguns were warrior-kings) and his role is ritual and religious, but in a way that’s not cleanly split from “governmental”
Like the idea that “Buddhism” and “Shinto” are at all distinct, if intermixed, and not part of a united “Japanese religion”, came out of a relatively recent “Dissolution of the Monasteries” meant to weaken autonomous monastic feifs and subordinate important society-structuring functions to the state
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