Late Medieval Background:

The Church, the State, and Power Politics

I. Re-cap: The “birth” of Medieval Europe

• From the fall of the Western Roman Empire to attempts at reconstruction:

Diocletian	o In an attempt to stop the decline of the empire and address the crises of the third century, Diocletian (284-305) divided the Roman Empire into two sections, east and west, each headed by a “partner” under the rule of the emperor.  Constantine then shifted the center of the empire to the east, to the new city of Constantinople, which he declared the “new Rome” in 330.  With the shift in capital came a shift in the wealth, administrative order, and the overall cohesion of the western part of the empire.
	o At the same time, the borders of the empire (particularly in the west) were under “attack” by “barbarian” tribes, most of which wanted to enjoy the benefits of the empire, and who coexisted (almost) peacefully with Rome.  Nevertheless, the empire could not meet demands of the “barbarians”, especially when significant numbers of tribes were pushed further west by the Huns.  In view of the empire’s seeming unwillingness to accommodate/protect them, the Visigoths revolted, ultimately defeating the Roman army in the Battle of Adrianople (378) and sacking Rome in 410.  The sack was made possible, then, by the empire’s overextension: its defenses were physically weakened, the people were overtaxed, famine and pestilence overran the empire, and political chaos reigned. o In the late 4^th and early 5^th centuries, there were further invasions in the west, and in 455 Rome was sacked again, this time by the Vandals.  The western half of the empire was unable to recuperate from this second sack, and in 467, when Romulus Augustus is deposed by Odovacar, the west “falls”.
	o Although later emperors attempted to reunite the empire, particularly Justinian in 527-565, the west had devolved into a series of independent pockets of power, unified solely by the universality and organization of Christianity, as we shall see.  o You must keep in mind that the military triumph of the Germanic tribes was not necessarily the end of the empire in cultural terms.  Although much changed with the introduction of Germanic law and political organization, the bases for European realities remained Latin, Roman law, ancient philosophy and, most importantly, Christianity as it was first defined within the empire.

Justinian’s efforts to re-unite the empire ultimately failed in the 600s. A major cause was the rise of Islam, whose rapid spread overtaxed the Empire’s resources. The Muslim advance was only stopped in 732 by the forces of Frankish king Charles Martel (more on him below). There is an additional development that I should introduce here, the process of deurbanization (the moving out of cities) in the west. The process of deurbanization would continue over the next several centuries. It had several major results: cities in what had been the Western Empire shrunk in size the elite of the region became transformed from an urban into a rural elite.

Justinian

• In brief, by the 600s, the west, which had always been always less urbanized than the east, became predominately rural. Indeed, for centuries afterwards, on average, around 90% of the population would live in the country, and only 9% in cities.

• The decline of cities, which had been central to the functioning of the Roman Empire, also meant that central administration largely disappeared.

• Because of these various processes, then, by the mid-700s, the people of what had been the Western Roman Empire, were politically and socially different from the east. More importantly, as their use of the term “Saracen” (Easterner) to refer to Muslims indicates, they mentally saw themselves as distinct and disconnected from the lands and peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. This was a huge development. The West, with that capital “w,” and the idea of the European continent as a place and people unlike Africa, Asia, or the East, had been born.

II. The Rise of the Papacy

1. Filling the Void: the Church as Umbrella

The division of the Roman Empire by Diocletian and the move east by Constantine had great consequences for the development of Christianity.  Throughout the fourth century, the Church in the West slowly began to develop a character and organization distinct from the Church in the East.  This was not a steady or obvious matter, since during the first quarter-century of its evolution the imperial Church had been part of the empire that had been reunified by the emperor Constantine, and Constantine attempted to create a Christian Church that would be a unifying force within the empire. For it to be so, the Church had to be universal, and so Constantine began dismantling the old state religion and turning its buildings, assets and functions over to the Christian Church. 

· With its greatly expanded material base, the Church needed more financial and administrative skill than its personnel was able to provide. To solve the problem, Constantine established that, like many other Roman administrative functions, the Church should operate as a local institution with its centers located in the civitates, the municipalities that formed the basic governmental unit of the empire. These positions were filled, at least at first, through the election of bishops by members of the local community, approved by a representative of the imperial government and confirmed by a ceremony called investiture in which the candidate was "clothed" in the symbols and uniform of his office. On the whole, however, this practice allowed local communities to choose the sort of man they needed as bishop. Some chose spiritual leaders unversed in the ways of the secular world, and others chose rich and experienced men from the Roman nobility. In the West, at least, this had the side effect placing direction of the Church into the hands of men with little knowledge of the nature or meaning of the Christian faith.

· Consequently, Constantine called the Council of Nicaea (325), to establish a clear and commonly accepted definition of the Christian faith, especially since there appeared to be considerable dispute among the early Christians over the nature and status of Jesus. Although the details are complex, the basic division was between the followers of a priest by the name of Arius, who supported Arianism. Very roughly, the Arians held that Jesus was a human being endowed with divine powers. Their opponents, followers of Bishop Athanasius, believed that Jesus was made out of the same substance as God the Creator and so was equal to and identical with both Him and the Holy Spirit. Although the Council of Nicaea decided on a definition of Christianity that followed the beliefs of the followers of Athanasius, the German neighbors in the West were adopting the Arian form. 

· At Nicaea, another item of business was to create a canon, or accepted collection of Christian works.  Known as the Septuagint, this canon was written in Greek and formed the basis for the New Testament.

· Furthermore, the Church administration was divided amongst four “Patriarchs” (Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome).  They were to be the leaders of the bishops in their area.  This division had unforeseen consequences, most important of which are

1. Since there was only one Western Patriarch, Christianity in the West was more unified;

2. In the course of the fourth century, the Roman Patriarch became the accepted secular head of Rome, becoming in fact a secular ruler who would later seek to break away from imperial dominion.

Thus, the Church in the west began developing in ways different from the Church in the east:

1. The Church in the west after it became legitimate began to evolve along secular, Roman, lines (Bishops as leaders of dioceses, etc.)

2. Remember, because there was only one Patriarch in the west, the Church there was much more unified than in the east

3. Also, recall that in the 450s, it was the Patriarch, not the Emperor, who prevented the Huns from sacking Rome. The Church gained an important secular as well as spiritual role.

4. After the collapse of imperial authority in 476, the Church began to fill the resulting administrative vacuum. Since the Church had been structured to mirror the imperial bureaucracy, and many of its members were originally Roman bureaucrats, the Church became a main center of order in the west. For example, Church courts became the main source of secular as well as spiritual justice for centuries.

5. For the next thousand years, the main bond joining together the peoples of the west was the Christian religion. In a sign of this identification, the people of the west began to call their region “Christendom.”

Patriarch vs. Pope: the first Great Schism (1054) One crucial development, which us brings us back to the sense of east versus west, is that, during the early Middle Ages, the united Christian Church also divided along these geographical lines. In short, during this period, the Papacy in Rome emerged as the supreme spiritual authority (versus merely being merely the seat of one of four patriarchs). This was a long-term development: 1. To repeat, following the collapse of the western Empire, the Church in the west was in a position of greater independence. 2. As we saw, early on, the Church engaged in a political alliance which gave secular power behind its spiritual authority. This was the conversion of Clovis, King of the Franks, in c. 496. This alliance would bear great fruit two and a half centuries later.

Pope Gregory I, The first medieval pope

3. The implication of the rise of Islam (632-732) was the regained independence of the Patriarch of Rome from the direct control of the Emperors in Constantinople.

4. A major moment in the rise of the Papacy came in the 750s. In 754 Patriarch Stephen became the first Roman patriarch to leave the Italian peninsula, to meet with Peppin, King of the Franks, grandson of Charles Martel, the King who had defeated the Muslims in 732. Peppin was seeking Church sanction to his recent takeover of the Frankish throne. Stephen needed protection against a violent tribe, the Lombards, who had recently invaded Italy. Stephen gave Peppin his blessing to rule in perpetuity and granted the King the title of “patrician of the Romans. What was a major change was the fact that the Patriarch, not the Emperor, was granting an imperial title.

5. In 756, Peppin came into northern Italy and destroyed the Lombards. Once more, a huge event with deep implications, occurred. One territory the Lombards had taken over was a region of north-eastern Italy known as the Excharate of Ravenna. Under the Byzantine reconquest, this was the administrative capital of the peninsula. After Peppin had taken over Ravenna, one would have expected him to return it to its official ruler, the Emperor. However, the Frankish king granted it instead to Stephen. The Patriarch gladly accepted the donation. This had two important implications: 1) the Patriarchs became secular rulers in Italy (they ruled a swath of land across Italy known as the Papal States); 2) Stephen’s actions were a clear defiance of the supreme authority of the Emperors in Constantinople. It was after this that the Patriarchs began to call themselves Popes, and claimed equal, and implied greater, spiritual authority with the Emperor.

3. A political alliance: Clovis

The power of the Pope in the west was limited by one major fact: Many Germanic tribes, although they had converted early on to Christianity, converted to a particular kind of Christianity known as Arianism. Very roughly, Arians were followers of a priest names Arius, who held that Jesus was only a human being endowed with divine powers, and not “God the Son,” one with and identical to both the Father and the Holy Spirit. Of course, although Christians, these Arians did not embrace the power of the Pope who, in their view embraced the wrong dogma. As we will see below, in order to excise Arianism from Europe, the Pope made an alliance with the Frankish kings – who got the lands of the Arians in the deal…

III. Renewed attempts to reunify: The Franks

· In theory, up to the reign of Justinian the whole empire was unified under the eastern emperor. Germanic rulers (generally known as kings) were supposedly viceroys working under the authority of the emperor, who remained in Constantinople. In practice, however, this was not the case.

· Germanic kings had, for the most part, two things which kept them apart from real imperial unification:

1. Westerners did not want the return of Roman taxation, Roman justice, and imperial interference in their affairs.

2. Many Westerners embraced Arianism, as I mentioned above. Of course, the issue is that the empire followed instead the official, Roman kind of Christianity that embraced Christ’s divinity. Their religious differences translated into yet another reason to reject imperial reunification.

· There were two “Western” (read non-Roman) attempts to recreate an empire. Both were by kings of the Germanic tribe of the Franks, which originally settled into the area f modern-day Belgium (northwest of France), but ultimately came to rule over what is today Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Germany.

1. Clovis and the Merovingians

Clovis (large figure in blue)

1. The first attempt was by King Clovis (c. 466-511). Clovis was a warrior chieftain, who unifies many of the Frankish tribes.  He created the first ruling family of the Franks, the Merovingians.  Clovis attempted to centralize his power by creating “pacts” of mutual service between himself and lesser warriors who could, nevertheless, help him pacify his territory.  In fact, Clovis was the first to implement the system known as feudalism (on this, go to the second lecture I linked for you).  However, Clovis’s plan back-fired, because the men who were supposed to help him organize and rule (known as counts) instead took more and more power upon themselves.  By the 7^th century, the Merovingian kings were kings in name only.

B. Charlemagne and the Carolingians

Charlemagne (the one being crowned)

2. Another family was able to grasp power for themselves.  With the help of the Patriarch of Rome (nowadays known as the Pope), the Carolingians rose to power in 751.  The Carolingians pledged to convert all peoples from the Arian heresy to Roman Christianity, and the pope pledged to back the new kings, particularly by officially claiming that the Carolingians had been chosen by God to defend Christianity. Charlemagne’s alliance with the pope was cemented on Christmas Day, 800 CE, when the pope crowned his as Holy Roman Emperor. It has been said that it was during the reign of Charlemagne (742-814) that the transition from classical to early medieval civilization was completed. He came to the throne of the Frankish kingdom in 771 and it was during his reign that a new civilization -- a European civilization -- came into existence. If anything characterizes Charlemagne's rule it was stability. His reign was based on harmony which developed between three elements: the Roman past, the Germanic way of life, and Christianity. Charlemagne devoted his entire reign to blending these three elements into one kingdom and thus secured the foundation upon which European society would develop. Charlemagne implemented two policies:

a) The first policy was one of expansion. Charlemagne's goal was to unite all Germanic people into one kingdom.

b) The second policy was religious in that Charlemagne wanted to convert all of the Frankish kingdom, and those lands he conquered, to Christianity. These two policies meant that Charlemagne's reign was marked by almost continual warfare.

Do note that, if conversion to Christianity is pivotal, the Church and the Pope are so as well…

· Although the Carolingian Empire attained great territorial expansion (although not as great as its Roman predecessor), nevertheless the empire ultimately crumbled.  There are three main reasons for the dissolution of Charlemagne’s empire:

1. The empire was “ungovernable.”  By that I mean that there was simply too much regionalism.

2. Charlemagne was succeeded by his son, Louis the Pius (814-841), who in turn was succeeded by his sons.  Rather than choosing among his heirs, Louis divided the empire among his heirs. 

3. There were renewed invasions from new “barbarian” tribes, including the Muslims, the Vikings, the Danes, and the the Magyars. Their raids were so terrible that European peasants would burn their fields and destroy their villages rather than give them over. All these invasions came to an end by the 10th and 11th centuries for the simple reason that these tribes were converted to Christianity. And it would be the complex institution known as feudalism which would offer Europeans protection from these invasions, based as it was on security, protection and mutual obligations.

2. Otto and the re-creation of the HRE

· After the fall of the Carolingians, the greatest “centralized” territory became that of central Europe (from here it comes that the Holy Roman Empire we have been talking about is in what today is Germany +). After renewed attacks by barbarians (this times the Magyars), the nobles of the German lands united under the leadership of Otto, Duke of Saxony (r. 936-973). That year, Otto defeated the Magyars. After his victory, Otto was proclaimed emperor in the battlefield by the nobles. He would formally be crowned by the pope in 962, reestablishing the HRE, which would last until 1806.

· Otto used ecclesiastical authority to consolidate his power, personally establishing bishoprics under his control throughout his lands, particularly in the east. This authority which he took upon himself would become a thorny issue, pitting emperor vs. pope in a conflict over investiture (the right/power to appoint high ecclesiastical offices – which, as you will recall, translated into economic and political power.

· One last thing about Otto: instead of claiming his power as HREmperor from the Pope, Otto turned to the Byzantine Emperor instead – that is, he pulled the pope out of the loop, breaking the HRE-Papacy alliance.

IV. Emperors, Popes, and Crusades

1. Popes over Emperors: who is more powerful?

· With the developments forwarded by Otto and embraced by his successors, emperors came to dominate the popes (e.g. The pope could not really stop the HRE from appointing his chosen men to high ecclesiastical office!). Otto and his successors saw themselves as the heirs of Charlemagne, the secular defenders of Christianity, and therefore as deserving a leadng voice in religious affairs. For example, Otto declared that no pope should ever be consecrated without first swearing allegiance to the HRE! However, Holy Roman Emperors found it impossible to maintain supreme authority, as the nobles chaffed at strong central authority (which would cut into their own autonomy and power).

· Within a century of Otto’s reign, popes moved to reassert authority over the HREmperors. In 1059, Pope Nicholas II declared that future popes would not be imposed by emperors, but instead elected by a select group of bishops (i.e. the College of Cardinals), who would be chosen by the pope. In 1075, Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) issued a papal bull, known as Dictatus Papae, which advanced the doctrine of Papal Supremacy. In the bull, Gregory claimed that the Church under the popes had supreme legislative and judicial authority over ALL Christendom. This document also asserted the right to depose any and all princes. Also, Gregory announced that only the pope could appoint Church officials. As a sign of independence, Gregory issued his bull without notifying the HRE of his intentions.

· This led to what is known as the Investiture Conflict, at its most basic a struggle for power over Christendom between popes and HREmperors. The conflict was over who had the right to appoint, or invest, bishops. This was significant because bishops had great secular as well as spiritual authority and controlled great amounts of money and land. Their loyalty could be an effective tool of political power.

· The decentralized nature of feudalism in Germany ultimately worked against the HREmperors: by the end of the 1000s, the papacy had emerged victorious. This was symbolized when in 1077 the pope excommunicated the HREmperor, thereby exiling him from the Christian community – and Salvation – and forced him to beg for forgiveness by making a pilgrimage on foot to the pope’s mountain retreat at Canossa (the last several miles on his hands and knees!). This would be the height of papal power during the Middle Ages.

· As an endnote, however, you should realize that the pendulum of power kept swinging back and forth: popes and emperors (and later other rulers – like the kings of France and England) kept vying for power throughout the early modern period.

2. Two methods to heighten authority: moral authority and the exportation of violence

· In the 11^th century, popes used their heightened power to solve one of the central problems of the feudal system: violence. Central authority had little power to stop conflicts between individuals who had gained local power, as well as offensive and defensive autonomous military capabilitites.

· The popes used two methods to accomplish this goal:

1. They used the moral authority of the Church to limit endemic warfare. For example, they banned certain military technology, such as the crossbow, and developed a doctrine known as the “Truce of God”, which suspended all warfare from Wednesday evening to Monday morning, as well as during holy festivals.

2. More importantly, and more effectively, the popes moved to export violence. This led, of course, to the Crusades (which lasted from 1096 to 1272). Although here I will not go into the historical development of the Crusades, let me point out four big points about them:

a. The expeditions to the Holy Land were not the only Crusades. Efforts were launched against non-orthodox Christians in Southern France, and against pagans in eastern Europe;

b. The Crusades reflected how much the west had revived since 476;

c. The Crusades were a multi-national effort. The crusaders were all volunteers; the popes were dependent on others to answer their call and mount/finance the actual expeditions;

d. The Crusades ultimately failed. They did export feudal violence, but never solved it. More importantly, these expeditions had many significant – and unexpected – consequences:

§ The Crusades worsened the relations between Christians and Muslims, leading ultimately (though not inexorably) to the fall of the Byzantine Empire;

§ The Crusades also annihilated any hope of reconciliation between Western and Eastern Christendom;\

§ The Crusades led, ironically, to the decline of papal authority. Popes became increasingly dependent on secular rulers (especially the king of France) for money and troops. This dependency on the French was strengthened by continual papal conflict with the HRE. By the beginning of the 13^th century, French kings dominated the papacy (think Babylonian Captivity of 1305).

From here – lecture on Friday, April 8.