I was reading Candide from Voltaire when in the 11th chapter a pontifical princess describe her abduction by moroccan pirates
Basically she say that her soldiers figth like "soldier of the pope" and immediatly surrenders and asking the pirates for a " absolution in articulo mortis".
It look like a mockery from Voltaire base on true event but I didnt find any sources or explanation.
I've written previously about the Papal army here (caution - it's very, very long). Voltaire published Candide 1759 and in the 110 years prior, from the end of the 2nd Castro War that marked the establishment of the standing pontifical army, the Papal States had fought in a grand total of 1 war - the rather ill-advised intervention in the War of Spanish Succession by Innocent XII. To say that the intervention went badly would be something of an understatement; war was declared against the Holy Roman Empire in September 1708 and by November, after some spectacularly inept generalship, the Papal armies had been defeated or blockaded in fortresses and Imperial troops were overrunning the country. Other significant military event during the period were a potential war against France in 1662 after a fight between Papal soldiers and French embassy guards in Rome, with the Pope eventually backing down and signing a humiliating treaty after France mobilised three times as many troops he could raise; more closely to the time Voltaire was writing, the Papal army had stood by while Imperial and Spanish troops had marched through the Papal States during the was of Austrian succession.
The Papal army of the period was also badly neglected, generally regarded as being one of the worst in Europe. Harsh spending cuts in 1667, 1709 and 1740 reduced the size of the army to a few thousand men and despite grand plans by reform minded officials, did little to improve the quality of the officers and men (oddly, despite these cuts, Papal soldiers were amongst the best paid in Europe).
While this reputation would have certainly played into Voltaire's writing, his criticism was more directed by his view, shared by other Enlightenment writers, that the temporal institutions of the Church, such as the Papal States and its army, were an anachronism and Church and State should be separated - one anonymous manuscript noted in the wake of the 1708 defeat that "war is not the profession of priests, and that, in their hands, the prayer book is much better than the sword".
In a curious bit of clairvoyance, the image of the Papal soldier surrendering at the slightest provocation was much more apt for the 110 years after Candide was published. In that time the record of the Papal army was abysmal: