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Caesaropapism is the idea of combining the power of secular government with, or making it superior to, the spiritual authority of the Christian Church; especially concerning the connection of the Christian Church with government. In its extreme form, it is a political theory in which the head of state, notably the Emperor ('Caesar', by extension an 'equal' King), is also the supreme head of the church ('papa', pope or analogous religious leader). In this form, it inverts theocracy in which institutions of the Church are in control of the state.

The term is just as applicable to similar reports between secular and religious power when the titles of one or both office holders are different, and even at a smaller scale than the universal church, and is even used when the control is less than total. Thus the French kings are a good example of a non-imperial Catholic monarchy that was rather successful in getting a great say in the French church (such as commendatory prelatures) and getting access to significant income from church property; during and around the 'Babylonian Exile' of the papacy in Avignon they even had a heavy hand in the papacy as such; and aspects of Gallicanism reflect the desire to give even the liturgy (even when Latin was the only language for church rites) a distinctive French flavour.

After the introduction of Protestantism, the immense fermentation caused by the introduction of socially subversive principles into the life of a people would exhaust its revolutionary beginnings, and result in a new form of social and religious order - the residue of the great Protestant upheaval in Europe was territorial or State Religion, based on the religious supremacy of the temporal ruler, in contradistinction to the old order in which the temporal ruler took an oath of obedience to the Catholic Church. Martin Luther's first reformatory attempts were radically democratic. He sought to benefit the people at large by curtailing the powers of both Church and State. The German princes, to him, were "usually the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth". In 1523 he wrote: "The people will not, cannot, shall not endure your tyranny and oppression any longer. The world is not now what it was formerly, when you could chase and drive the people like game". This manifesto, addressed to the poorer masses, was taken up by Franz von Sickingen, a Knight of the Empire, who entered the field in execution of its threats. His object was twofold: to strengthen the political power of the knights — the inferior nobility — against the princes, and to open the road to the new Gospel by overthrowing the bishops, but his enterprise had the opposite result: the knights were beaten, lost what influence they had possessed, and the princes were proportionately strengthened. The rising of the peasants likewise turned to the advantage of the princes: the fearful slaughter of Frankenhausen (1525) left the princes without an enemy and the new Gospel without its natural defenders. The victorious princes used their augmented power entirely for their own advantage in opposition to the authority of the emperor and the freedom of the nation.

• Antipope
• Church and state in medieval Europe
• Constantinian shift
• Erastianism
• Great Apostasy
• Holy Roman Empire
• Joseph of Volotsk
• Massacre of Thessaloniki
• millennialism
• Pope Leo X
• Theocracy

• This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913. Protestantism (not fully exploited)