History

AL 161/161EL

History and World Views of the Western World

March 3, 2019

Unit 3 Writing Exercise

Directions:

•Use the 5 paragraph essay format found in the unit content area in creating your essay. This is the mandatory format for Writing Exercises.

•Introductory and concluding paragraphs should have 1 academic citation; supporting paragraphs should have 2 citations (more is better). At a minimum then, writing exercises should have 8 academic citations from the textbook and/or assigned primary source.

•Use only the assigned readings listed for Writing Exercises; please, do not use any other sources, including internet sources. Please use all assigned sources in your essay.

•Cite sources parenthetically: for example (Pavlac, p. 129). If the source does not have a page number, you do not have to include one in your citation.

• Writing Exercise Topic (Unit 3): Read chapter 8 pp. 116-118, 139-50 of your text book and the Dictates of the Pope document located in the unit content area.

•Based on the information in your textbook and the Dictates of the Pope, was the growing power of the church, pope and medieval religion beneficial or detrimental for medieval society? Use specific examples/excerpts from the readings to support your thesis.

For more on this source, go to http://www.concisewesternciv.com/sources/sof#.html .

Chapter 7

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Charles Martel, who won at Tours/Poitiers, belonged to one of the most important families in Western history. Historians call that dynasty the Carolingians, from Carolus, the Latin version of the name Charles. Members of this family rescued the Franks from infighting and made them a powerful force again. Having beaten back the Moors, Charles handed his power to his two sons (although one quickly gave up and retired to a monastery). The remaining sole heir, Pepin or Pippin “the Short” (r. 741–768), soon grew dissatisfied with ruling as mayor in the name of the officially crowned King Childeric III of the Merovingian dynasty. Pippin appealed to the person whom he considered to have the best connection to the divine, the bishop of Rome, better known as the pope.

The institution of the popes, called the papacy, played a key role in the rise of the Carolingians and Western civilization. The name pope comes from papa, or “father,” a title also often used for bishops. A number of bishops called either popes or patriarchs had risen to preeminence by the fifth century in Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem,

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and Constantinople. Together, in church councils, bishops and other Christians had declared doctrine and settled controversies. With the division of the Roman Empire into two halves and the collapse of Roman authority in the West, four patriarchs remained under the growing authority of the Byzantine emperors in the east. Meanwhile, the bishops of Rome adopted the title of pope for themselves alone and claimed a superior place (primacy) among the other bishops and patriarchs. These other patriarchs might have granted the bishops of Rome a primacy of honor, but not actual authority over them and their churches. In any case, the popes lived too far away to change developments in the Byzantine Empire. In western Europe, though, religious and political circumstances favored a unique role for the bishops of Rome.

The figure who first embodied the early papacy was Gregory I “the Great” (r. 590–604). The growing importance of the monastic movement is reflected in his being the first pope who had previously been a monk. Much more important, though, were Gregory’s three areas of activity, which defined what later popes did. First, the pope provided spiritual leadership for the West. Since the West lacked a literate population in comparison to the East, Gregory’s manuals (models of sermons for preachers and advice on being a good pastor) filled a practical need. His theological writings were so significant that he was later counted as one of the four great church fathers, alongside Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, even though Gregory lived nearly two centuries after them. Second, Gregory acted to secure orthodox catholic Christianity all over the West, far outside his diocese in central Italy. Gregory sent missionaries to the Visigoths in the Iberian Peninsula, to Germany, and, most famously, to the British Isles. Third, the pope was a political leader. He helped organize and defend the lands around Rome from the invading Lombard Germans, helping to found the political power of the popes, which endures to this day in the Vatican City.

The necessity for papal political leadership increased when later popes disagreed with some Byzantine emperors in the eighth century. The eastern Christians were caught up in the Iconoclastic Controversy, which interpreted literally the Old Testament commandment against having graven images. Iconoclasts were those who physically sought to shatter religious pictures and sculptures. (Today the word figuratively refers to those seeking to overturn traditional ways). Eastern patriarchs and bishops increasingly began to support iconoclasm and actually destroyed art in churches. When the western popes refused to go along, the Byzantine emperor confiscated lands in southern Italy that had been used to support the papal troops. At the same time, the Germanic Lombard invaders from the north threatened Rome.

At this pivotal moment, when the pope needed a new ally in the West, a letter came from the Frankish mayor of the palace, Pippin “the Short,” son and heir of Charles Martel. In the letter, Pippin coolly inquired of the pope whether the one who had the power of a king should actually be the king. Needing Pippin’s army, the pope agreed. So the last Merovingian king was shaved of his regal long hair and bundled off to a monastery in 751. Then Pippin became the first Carolingian king. In return for the papal favor, Pippin marched to Italy and defeated the Lombards in 754 and 756. His

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victories gave him control of the northern half of the Italian Peninsula (while the southern part remained under nominal Byzantine authority for the next few centuries). In his gratitude, Pippin donated a large chunk of territory in central Italy to the pope. This Donation of Pippin eventually became known as the Papal States. These lands provided the basis for a papal principality that lasted for more than a thousand years. The arrangement also began a mutually supportive relationship, profitable to both the pope and Pippin, which historians call the Frankish-Papal Alliance.

The cooperation between the papacy and the Carolingians culminated under Pippin’s son, Charles. He is known to history as Charlemagne (r. 768–814), which means “Charles the Great.” As his father had before him, Charlemagne at first inherited the throne jointly with his brother, but the latter soon found himself deposited in a monastery. As sole ruler, Charles continued to support the popes. First, he invaded Italy, utterly breaking the power of the Lombards. A few years later, after political rivals had roughed up the pope, Charlemagne marched to Rome to restore papal dignity.

On Christmas Day AD 800, the grateful pope crowned Charlemagne as emperor of the Romans. The circumstances surrounding this act have remained unclear. People then and historians since have argued about the coronation’s significance. Did it merely recognize Charlemagne’s actual authority or give it a new dimension? Was the pope, by placing the crown on Charlemagne’s brow, trying to control the ceremony and the office? Did it insult the Byzantine emperor, who was, after all, the real Roman emperor (even if some alleged at the time that the eastern throne was vacant, since a mere woman, Empress Irene, ruled after deposing and blinding her son)? In any case, the coronation resulted in a brief enthusiasm for imitating ancient Rome. An emperor once again ruled the West in the name of Rome’s civilization (see map 7.2).

In most ways, though, Charlemagne resembled his barbaric German ancestors more than a Roman Caesar Augustus. He dressed in Frankish clothing and enjoyed beer and beef (instead of wine and fish as the Romans had). A man of action, he led a military campaign almost every year to one portion of his empire or another. Thus, he expanded his rulership and conquered the heartland of Europe, which became the core of the European Community more than a millennium afterward. He deposed the Bavarian duke and took over his duchy. He smashed rebellious Lombards as his father had. He also fought the Saxons in northern Germany (cousins of long-since-Christianized Anglo-Saxons in Britain). The Christian king tried for thirty years to convert the pagan Saxons to both religious and political obedience. These Saxons faced two choices: either be washed in the water of holy baptism or be slaughtered in their own blood. Many died; survivors converted, then were forcibly migrated to other parts of the empire, where they assimilated. Charlemagne wiped out the Avars (Asian raiders who had settled along the Danube). The emperor successfully defended his empire’s borders against Danes in the north and Moors in the south. Charlemagne’s empire became bigger than any other political structure in the West since Emperor Romulus Augustulus lost his throne in AD 476. Map 7.2. Europe, 800.

Chapter 8

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Additionally, some reformers were squeamish about women and sex. Already in ancient times the church had excluded women from leadership. With this new reform, church authorities in the West tried to restrict married priests from offices or sacraments, insisting on celibacy. They adopted misogynist attitudes from pagan philosophers and culture about female inferiority and corrupt sexuality, cringing at the thought that a priest might handle the holy body and blood of Christ in the mass after having touched the impure flesh of a woman. So reformers began a campaign against the many priests who were married and others who kept concubines or “house companions.” Of all the reform efforts, people in the local parishes surely noticed this one the most, whether their priests obeyed or not.

To change clerical attitudes, the papacy began to intervene in local church affairs as never before. Legal scholars collected and commented on old and new canon law in support of the tighter church organization. Popes added lawyers and bureaucrats to their papal court, the Curia. The popes often sent cardinals throughout Christendom as legates, the pope’s official representatives who had his full authority. The papal scribes issued bulls (named after the lead seal of authenticity hanging from them) in which the popes, on their own authority, codified law and moral issues. As a result, the pope became less a spiritual leader than the head of a vast bureaucratic machine. While many of the popes over the next centuries were great lawyers and politicians, few had any inclination toward sanctity or sainthood.

One of their unique prerogatives, the popes asserted the right to call crusades (1095–1492), the Christian version of holy war. Before the eleventh century, war was sometimes recognized as a necessity, but it had always been considered sinful. Jesus’s clear, explicit commands about nonviolence had even led many Christians in the Roman Empire to become pacifists. Augustine, however, had helped to establish what we call the just war theory, allowing wars to be fought if they were defensive, if they did not involve too much destruction or brutality, and if they aimed at establishing a more just peace. Although this theory could allow Christians to go to war under many circumstances, every act of killing nevertheless remained a sin that required confession, penance, and reconciliation.

But the concept of crusade turned the sin of war into a virtue. Instead of regretting the killing of another human being, the crusader could glory in it. Killing the enemies of God became a holy act, a good deed. No sin was committed—indeed, one got closer to heaven, just as if one were on a pilgrimage. The crusaders, then, were armed pilgrims. Instead of hiking to Santiago de Compostela to pray, they marched to Jerusalem to slay.

Many regions became the target of crusading activity. First, the popes gave their blessing on the crusading movement called the Reconquesta, to reconquer the Iberian Peninsula from the Saracens.

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Crusaders struck southward from the northern remnants of early medieval Christian kingdoms against the Islamic Moors of Andalusia. Crusading armies expanded the kingdoms of Leon, Castile, and Aragon southward and founded Portugal. These kingdoms would wrangle with one another and the Moors until the end of the Middle Ages.

Second, the most famous crusades were those to liberate the Holy Land, Outremer (French for “across the sea”), or Palestine. These crusades started with a misunderstanding. A Turkish victory at the Battle of Manzikert (1071) allowed many thousands of Turks to migrate into Asia Minor, threatening the core of the Byzantine Empire. Despite the religious schism between the East and West, the Byzantine emperor called on the pope to find mercenaries to help fight the Turkish Muslims. That schism marked a significant turning point for a Christendom divided between West and East. The Byzantine Empire had become too weak to defend itself, while the West under claims of papal leadership had warriors to spare. Pope Urban II used the request for his own purposes. He spread myths of Muslim atrocities and exhorted knights and infantry to drive the Arab Muslims from the lands of Christians, particularly from Jerusalem. The inflamed people shouted, “God wills it!”

Surprisingly, or miraculously (as Western Christians believed), the First Crusade (1095–1099) achieved some success. At first, a ragtag horde of fervent outsiders and peasants marched toward Jerusalem, slaughtering along the way a few European Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Unfortunately, the Turks massacred or enslaved this rabble in Asia Minor before they ever reached Jerusalem. In 1099, however, a better-organized feudal army under various dukes and counts survived a difficult journey through Europe and Asia Minor. Their zeal overcame many losses brought on by battles, thirst, and hunger (the last sometimes solved by cannibalism). These crusaders then actually conquered the Levantine coast, including Jerusalem itself, allegedly helped by the Holy Lance that had pierced Christ’s side, as well as by fasting and processions. As they sacked the “holy city,” the Christian crusaders waded up to their ankles in the blood of slaughtered Muslim men, women, and children in a mosque where they had taken refuge. The crusaders also burned Jews alive in their homes and synagogues. Then the rival crusading leaders set up several small principalities.

To survive, as it did for the next two centuries, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the crusading princedoms needed more than miracles. The new Western princes and knights in Outremer hardly cooperated either with one another or with the Byzantine Empire. They did make some efforts at cooperating with the Muslims who were their subjects and neighbors. They needed and received continued reinforcements from Christendom. These zealous and temporary conquerors disliked the civilizations of Byzantium and Islam as something strange, despite their shared Græco-Roman legacy. Their crusading mentality often prevented the Christians who had settled down in Palestine from working with the pragmatic Muslims or allowing peoples of different heritages to live together in peace.

Also complicating relations was a new clerical ideal inspired by crusading, namely, military monasticism. Monk-knights lived Christian lives of chastity, obedience, and prayer like monastic monks but also fought as warriors on the battlefield against the infidels. These militarized religious orders, like the Hospitallers or the Templars, provided much-needed resources of money, social service, and trained warriors.

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The Middle East became a complicated jumble of diverse and competing elements. Although the Muslims called all Western Christians “Franks,” the crusaders were actually deeply divided. The “Franks” rarely forgot that they came from England, Scotland, France, various provinces of the Holy Roman Empire, Italian merchant city-states, or Norman Sicily, all of whose governments quarreled with one another. Political loyalties, ethnic pride, and religious bickering often weakened their efforts in the Holy Land.

In turn, the “Franks” labeled all their opponents under the blanket term Saracens, which ignored the deep religious divisions of Sunni, Shiite, and even Assassin. This last, a secret sect of alleged hashish smokers, murdered its enemies, giving us the term assassination . The Assassin murders of important Muslim leaders helped keep Islamic factions divided, terrorized, and at war with one another. Likewise, ethnic differences among Arabs, Egyptians, Persians, Kurds, and Turks long delayed a united Islamic front. For decades, the divisions among Muslims allowed the crusaders to survive by playing one group off against the other. The Kurdish Saladin (Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayb), who had taken control of the Egyptian caliphate, almost succeeded in defeating the crusaders in the 1180s. But the so-called Third Crusade of Richard “the Lionheart” reestablished a strong Christian foothold, even if Jerusalem remained under Muslim control. Shortly afterward, in the Fourth Crusade of 1204, Latin crusaders attacked the Byzantine Empire itself. They seized and plundered the until-then unconquered Constantinople, briefly making it the center of a Latin Empire that lasted until 1261. Finally, in 1295, unified and zealous Muslims drove the crusaders back beyond the sea and reclaimed Palestine and the Levant.

The Holy Land had been lost, but other crusades continued. The third important region for crusading, after Palestine and the Iberian Peninsula, was in northeastern Europe, along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea. The Teutonic Knights, named after their common German ethnicity, were the most successful crusaders there. They had started as an order of crusading monk-knights in Palestine. Meanwhile, various princes of the Holy Roman Empire were conquering the pagan peoples of eastern Europe and bringing in German immigrants to settle towns and farms in a movement called the Drang-nach-Osten (drive to the east). As part of these efforts, the Teutonic Knights gained a papal license to conquer the still-pagan Prussian people and then founded their own state, called Prussia. The Teutonic monk-knights henceforth ruled over the Prussian peasants, who were slowly converted to Christianity and assimilated into German culture.

The Crusades sprang from the conviction that Christians held the only answer to the meaning of life, combined with the military power to impose Christian beliefs beyond the heartland of Christendom. The Crusades promoted little cultural exchange. The Muslims who interacted with the Franks considered them uncivilized, even barbaric. With few exceptions, political or intellectual leaders of East and West barely communicated with each other. Many westerners did develop a taste, though, for luxury goods, spices, rugs, porcelain, and silk that came from Muslim merchants, who themselves traded deep into Asia across the Silk Road or the Arabian Sea. And even though the Crusades failed in Palestine, their successes on the borders of Christendom, in the Iberian Peninsula and northeastern Europe, strengthened the supremacy of the Western Latin Church.

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In the few years since the schism between Eastern and Western Christianity in 1054, the latter had shown itself to be more dynamic and aggressive. Soon, however, crusading fervor turned even against the Christian kings of the West. Popes began to use their power to call for crusades against foes within western Europe.

The Gregorian Reform had created such a powerful papacy that it was even able to challenge royal governments such as the Holy Roman Empire. This was a shift away from the Frankish-Papal Alliance begun under the Carolingians. The papal coronations of Charlemagne in 800 and then Otto “the Great” in 962 as “emperors of the Romans” marked two high points of this bond. Otto I had also expanded the collaboration between church and state by relying on prince-bishops in Germany to help support his royal authority and military might. Furthermore, Otto’s descendant, Henry III, reached a high point of royal influence over church affairs when he helped restore the disgraced papacy in 1046.

When Henry III died ten years later, however, the empire faced a crisis because his son and heir, Henry IV (r. 1056–1106), was only six years old. Many magnates used the long regency until Henry IV came of age to seize what they could from his royal rights and prerogatives. During this time the papacy also, as mentioned above, regained power and asserted its independence. Further, after a pope attacked the Normans in southern Italy and Sicily and lost, the victorious Normans actually formed an alliance with their former enemy. Thus protected by Sicilian Normans, the popes no longer needed their traditional alliance with the German emperors. When Henry IV became a ruler in his own right, he wanted to regain the power that his father Henry III had wielded.

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Henry IV’s attempts unleashed a clash between church and state that changed the West. The Investiture Struggle, Contest, or Controversy (1075–1122) centered on the appointment of new bishops. It takes its name from the religious ceremony of investiture, which formally installs bishops in their office. The radicals in the papal reform movement had expanded the definition of simony to include any royal involvement in the election of bishops, even when no money changed hands. Their extreme claim for “papal plenitude of power” threatened kings across Europe, who believed that they, by divine right, could install bishops. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Investiture Struggle threatened the royal relations with prince-bishops as both vassals and spiritual leaders. It fueled a civil war.

Disagreements between King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII over who selected bishops in northern Italy sparked the first open fight over papal versus royal power (see figure 8.3). As King Henry IV’s episcopal candidates clashed with papal nominees, Pope Gregory VII threatened Henry with excommunication. In the winter of 1076 Pope Gregory excommunicated Henry IV and declared that he was no longer king.

Although the pope’s legal claim to depose Henry was doubtful, Henry’s enemies in Germany seized the opportunity to rise up against him. Even many of his bishops abandoned him, although they had supported his denunciation of the pope. In a brilliant move, however, Henry rushed to Italy over frozen Alpine passes. The pope fled to the castle of Canossa, fearing an attack. Yet Henry arrived with only a small retinue. Instead of raging in armor and ferocity, the king stood in sackcloth and repentance before the castle gates for three wintry days. Since the pope was in the job of forgiveness, he lifted Henry’s excommunication. Although Henry remained, technically, deposed from his kingship, the confusion about his status gave him the opportunity to regroup his military forces and defeat most of his opponents.

Nonetheless, the war in the empire dragged on, as each side stuck to its interpretation of the role of bishops and their election. Gregory excommunicated Henry a futile second time. In turn, Henry’s armies drove Gregory from Rome into exile with the Normans in southern Italy, where he died. Finally, Henry’s own son rebelled against him to become Henry V (r. 1105–1125).

Henry V was also excommunicated because he needed to choose prince-bishops as his vassals. After two generations of open warfare, the Investiture Struggle between church and state finally ended with the Concordat of Worms in 1122. A concordat is an agreement between a state and the church, while Worms, a city on the

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upper Rhine River, ruled by a bishop, was where the treaty was agreed to by Henry V and the papacy. The treaty was a compromise. The principle that clergy and laypeople of dioceses were to elect their bishops was reasserted (except for Rome’s bishop, of course). Still, the king could be present at each election in Germany (and thus exert an influence and even decide deadlocked elections). The German king gave up the right of investiture regarding a bishop’s ecclesiastical office, but he could grant feudal possessions before a bishop’s full consecration (at least within the German, if not in the Burgundian or Italian, parts of the empire). Similar compromises were eventually worked out in France and England.

While the Investiture Struggle was officially over, neither advocates of papal authority nor proponents of royal power were satisfied with this compromise. The Holy Roman Empire especially suffered from ongoing differences between emperors and popes. Emperor Henry V died without an heir in 1125, and not surprisingly a civil war erupted. Two major families took the lead in the competition for support from the magnates: the Welfs and the Staufens. Successive popes, using their influence and their recognized right to crown the German king as Holy Roman emperor, regularly played one side against the other over the next several generations.

By 1256, the Staufen dynasty had been extinguished, while the Welfs had shrunk to mere dukes again. Even worse for German power, the dynastic principle had been broken. Instead, seven powerful magnates (the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier, the king of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the Count Palatine by the Rhine) asserted themselves as “electoral princes.” These seven claimed the sole right to select the next German king. As a result, the office of emperor/king of the Holy Roman Empire declined in power, if not prestige, while the actual rule of the local territorial magnates was magnified. Unfortunately for the popes, their obsession with weakening the Holy Roman emperor led them to ignore two new threats—the kings of England and France.

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The debates and writings provoked by the protracted conflict over papal authority helped to create a new literature of political theory, where individuals could speculate about the nature and purposes of government. Many of these new ideas came from an unexpected source, the Muslim-dominated Iberian Peninsula called Andalusia. When Christian crusaders liberated the city of Toledo in 1085, they found libraries full of books written in Arabic. Rather than burning them in fanatic zeal, they hired Jews who had long lived peacefully among the Arabs in Toledo to translate the books into Latin. In that city and soon in several more, the writings from the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as more recent Muslims, such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës), became available to medieval scholars. The books revealed the advancements Arab scholars and inventors had made in mathematics, astronomy, geography, medicine, and science. Most important, the westerners rediscovered the writings of Aristotle, whom the Arabs had long appreciated, studied, and interpreted. Aristotle’s dialectic logic lit an intellectual fire in the monastic and cathedral schools that had survived the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Students in the West leapt at the opportunity to learn.

Some of these schools blossomed into universities. The seven liberal arts continued as the basic curriculum for education. The new universities in turn provided advanced higher education, where students became “masters” and “doctors” (teachers) by studying canon law, secular law, medicine, theology, or philosophy. A now-familiar kind of person, the scholar, appeared in the West for the first time since the fall of Rome, inspired by the knowledge of antiquity and the scholarship that had continued to be pursued in the Byzantine and Muslim civilizations. The whole point of scholars in universities was to profess new knowledge. They brought the light of education to what had been the darkness of ignorance. Secular rulers likewise recognized the value of these institutions of higher education and encouraged their foundation in places as diverse as Bologna, Salerno, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Heidelberg.

Yet academics formed an international guild, taking on themselves the responsibility to maintain quality in research and teaching. The universities were able to flourish under the protective umbrella of the Western Latin Church, even when secular princes founded them. Members of this system were technically clergy. Therefore, faculty and students fell under the special canon laws of the church or university and not under those of the secular courts. The metaphor of the ivory tower used to describe higher education reflects the legal distinctions that separated universities from the urban communities in which they were located. Conflicts between townspeople and students were considered (and sometimes still are) “town” versus “gown” (although most students these days only wear academic gowns at graduation). Then, as now, youthful enthusiasm for extracurricular activities would sometimes annoy the neighbors. Then, as now, learning was difficult. Then, as now, some students preferred to study varieties of beer and wine rather than versions of Plato and Aristotle.

In the thirteenth century, donors and church officials organized colleges as residential and educational spaces to help the young “bachelors” become more disciplined. The collegians might move on to the higher degrees of master or doctor, but many were satisfied with a “bachelor’s degree,” as they are today. The word bachelor also indicates that only men could study at these new, advanced schools. Women might receive some education in monastic schools, either as nuns or students of the nuns. Formal higher education, though, remained closed to women for centuries.

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While the Western Latin Church was the cradle for this growing systematic legacy, it almost strangled that baby in the cradle. Some Christians feared that ideas drawn from pagans were dangerous or irrelevant. Sources of knowledge from anything other than divine revelation frightened them. The use of human reason might lead to error, even heresy. The scholar Peter Abelard (b. 1080–d. 1142) seemed the perfect example. Through sheer intellectual arrogance, he had become one of the leading academicians of his day. Then his scandalous affair with his pupil Heloïse almost ruined his career. He had arranged for himself to be her private tutor (since the church forbade women to attend schools and universities). After she had his illegitimate child, though, instead of properly marrying her, he seemed to want to put her away in a nunnery. Her angry guardian hired some thugs who castrated Abelard. He recovered to resume his teaching at the university, where his ideas caused more problems for him. His celebrated definition of wisdom asserted that we must first doubt authority and ask questions; questioning will then lead us to the truth. Clearly, however, Abelard’s questions led him into trouble, just as Socrates’s had in ancient Athens. Their experiences suggest another basic principle: Questioning authority is dangerous.

Abelard’s opponents organized to silence him as a heretic. Those defenders of tradition seized upon his too-subtle explanation of the Trinity to get his ideas condemned at a local church council. They compelled him to stop teaching and even made him throw his own books into the flames.

A century later, though, Aristotle’s dialectic method emerged victorious. Other clerics, notably Thomas Aquinas (b. 1225–d. 1274), used the tools of Aristotelian logic, as Abelard had, but were careful to make sure their answers were complete and orthodox. Aquinas thought that human reason, properly used, never conflicted with divine revelation. This Scholasticism, or philosophy “of the schools,” is clearly expressed in Aquinas’s book, Summa Theologiae (Sum of Theology). Therein he used dialectic arguments to answer everything a Christian could want to know about the universe. Aquinas allayed the fears about Aristotle by harnessing his logic for the Western Latin Church. Eventually Aquinas’s logical explications seemed so solid and orthodox that later the Roman Catholic Church declared him its leading philosopher.

Despite Aquinas’s success, the intellectual debate did not stop. Philosophers continued to argue about realism. Some drew on Plato’s idealism that universal ideas shaped reality; others advocated nominalism, which proposed that only particular objects in the observable world existed. Another debate among scholars focused on politics. They developed political theories that were coherent proposals about how best to rule human society. Aquinas argued that the pope was the supreme human authority, but many others fought this idea with words and weapons. Kings sought out scholars and founded universities to argue for the supremacy

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of kingship and the royal connection to the divine, as had been done since the dawn of ancient civilizations.

Within these debates, the institution of the university further strengthened liberty for everyone by promoting new knowledge. Universities were not intended to convey merely the established dogmas and doctrines of the past or of powerful princes and popes. Instead, professors were, and are, supposed to expand upon inherited wisdom. Once the idea of learning new ideas became acceptable, it inevitably led to change. Nevertheless, popes continued to claim the allegiance of all humanity. Kings still tried to bind their clergy to them as servants to enforce the royal will. Neither of these attempts dominated in the West. By the end of the Middle Ages, no single power, whether the pope, king, one’s own connection to God, or the independent human mind itself, would rule both the hearts and minds of mortals. Creative tensions between the demands of faith and the requirements of statehood enriched the choices available to peoples of the West.

During time off from intellectual pursuits, some scholars produced literature, which at the time was not studied at universities. Much of the literature of the Middle Ages was written in the language of scholarship, government, and faith, namely Latin. Student poets called Goliards were famous for their drinking songs, while other clergy produced histories, epic fantasies, mystical tracts, and religious hymns.

Modern universities today usually neglect to teach about this medieval Latin literature. They instead favor studying the literature from vernacular languages, those that people spoke at home and that later evolved into the European languages of today: Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian), Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and English), Celtic languages (which still survive as Irish Gaelic, Scots, Welsh, and Breton), and even Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Russian, etc.). Vernaculars only slowly drove out Latin from government and universities. These languages that people spoke in their regular lives found validation in literary works that began to be written down after the twelfth century.

Romance became one of the most popular genres of vernacular literature. Works of romance prose or poetry often told of heroic adventures complicated by men and women facing challenges in their love. The most famous work of medieval literature is Dante’s Divine Comedy, written in the vernacular dialect of Florence, which became the basis of modern Italian. The author had fallen for the ideal girl, Beatrice, but she had died young. In a vision, Dante journeys to hell (Inferno), where the Roman poet Vergil (also spelled Virgil) guides him through circles of punishment. Then Beatrice helps him through purgatory and finally to paradise to behold the ultimate love of God. Along the way, Dante sees and converses with many people whose stories and fates illustrate his view of good and evil, right choices and wrong choices.

In religious belief and practice, medieval people did have carefully limited choice. Except for a few Jews and fewer Muslims, everyone who lived in Christendom had to believe in the dogmas of the Western Latin Church and worship in its dioceses and parishes. The structures built for worship, the cathedrals and parish churches, along with abbeys and monastery churches, remain as testimonies to the importance of faith in the Middle Ages. Believers replaced the simple and small churches of the early Middle Ages with such zeal that almost none survive today.

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Huge amounts of wealth, effort, and design went into constructing the new stone cathedrals, minsters, chapels, and parish churches of the High Middle Ages.

Church floor plans were usually based on the Latin cross or the ancient Roman basilica, which had a long central aisle (or nave, after the Latin word for “ship”) with an altar for the Eucharist at the far end. The people gathered in the nave, while clergy carried out the sacrificial ceremonies around the altar. Music increasingly added decorative sound around the spoken word. We still have written copies of medieval music because monks invented a system of musical notation (no texts of Greek or Roman music have survived). Western music began with a simple plain-song, one simple line of notes called Gregorian chant, and evolved into complex polyphony, many notes sung alongside and around each other in harmony.

Two architectural styles of churches can be recognized as medieval. The first style of stone churches we now call Romanesque, because they inherited many of their design elements from ancient Roman buildings, especially the rounded arch (see figures 8.4 and 8.5). These churches, built between 1000 and 1300, tend to have a blocky appearance, with thick walls necessary to hold up the roof. Still, they were built quite large, often airy and full of light. The walls were frequently decorated with frescoes, and the capitals (tops) of columns were carved with sculptures illustrating key ideas of the faith. The second style of churches we now call Gothic (that insulting term mentioned at the beginning of chapter 7), although medieval builders called it the “modern” or the “French” style (see figures 8.6 and 8.7). After Western encounters with Islamic architecture in Andalusia, Sicily, and the Levant, Gothic cathedrals built from about 1150 to 1500 adopted the pointed arches used there. The Gothic or pointed arch allowed architects to build even taller naves and open up the walls to more windows.

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They filled the windows with colored stained glass, designed in patterns and pictures of faith, pierced by light from heaven.

All these structures required highly skilled builders and a great deal of wealth. Townspeople competed with their neighbors in other communities to have the best possible church or cathedral. Sometimes their efforts to surpass one another led to disaster when improperly designed churches collapsed. Other times, sponsors ran out of resources, and building remained idle for decades, centuries, or forever. Medieval skylines were sometimes defined by castles but always by churches, whose steeples people saw from far away and whose bells they heard throughout the surrounding countryside.

For the people of Christendom of the High Middle Ages, it made sense to devote much time and energy to the religion of Christianity. The worldview that a moral life in this world prepared one for another life after death gave meaning to the troubles people faced as individuals and as a society. Kings might fight with popes, but that did not cast doubt on the meaning of the Gospels. Cluniac monks might live differently from Cistercians, who in turn did not act like Templars, but all observed rules set to conform their lives to the commands of the church.

Dictatus Papæ by Pope Gregory VII (ca. 1075)

1. That the Roman Church was founded by God alone.

2. That the Roman bishop alone is properly called universal.

3. That he alone has the power to depose bishops and reinstate them.

4. That his legate, though of inferior rank, takes precedence of all bishops in council, and may give sentence of deposition against them.

5. That the pope has the power to depose [bishops] in their absence.

6. That we should not even stay in the same house with those who are excommunicated by him.

7. That for him alone is it lawful, according to the needs of the time, to make new laws, to assemble together new congregations, to make an abbey of a canonry; and, on the other hand, to divide a rich bishopric and unite the poor ones.

8. That he alone may use the imperial insignia.

9. That the pope is the only person whose feet are kissed by all princes.

10. That his name alone shall be spoken in the churches.

11. That his name is unique in the world.

12. That he has the power to depose emperors. 13. That he may, if necessity require, transfer bishops from one see to another.

14. That he has power to ordain a clerk of any church he may wish.

15. That he who is ordained by him may preside over another church, but may not hold a subordinate position; and that such a one may not receive a higher rank from any bishop.

16. That no general synod may be called without his consent.

17. That no action of a synod, and no book, may be considered canonical without his authority.

18. That his decree may be annulled by no one, and that he alone may annul the decrees of any one.

19. That he may be judged by no one else.

20. That no one shall dare to condemn a person who appeals to the apostolic see.

21. That to this See should be referred the more important cases of every church.

22. That the Roman Church has never erred, nor ever, by the testimony of Scripture, shall err, in perpetuity.

23. That the Roman pontiff, if he shall have been canonically ordained, is undoubtedly made a saint by the merits of blessed Peter, Saint Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, bearing witness, and many holy fathers agreeing with him, and as is contained in the decrees of blessed pope Symmachus.

24. That by his command and consent, it shall be lawful for subordinates to bring accusations.

25. That he may depose and reinstate bishops without assembling a synod.

26. That no one can be considered Catholic who does not agree with the Roman Church.

27. That [the pope] can absolve the subjects of unjust rulers from their oath of fidelity.

CHARLES IN CHARGE

These two references only! No outside sources!

Pavlac, Brian A.. A Concise Survey of Western Civilization: Volume 1: Prehistory to 1500 . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Henderson, Ernest F.. Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, (London: Gepgre bell and Sons,, 1910), pp. 366-367