Joseph P. Huffmann
Carolingian Europe was not centered on the urban, commercial life of the Mediterranean but rather on the agricultural fields of today’s northern France and Germany. Yet it did inherit from the old Roman Empire a religious and intellectual core of Christianity complete with a priesthood, which had retained not only the orthodox faith tradition but also the powerful legacy of Romanitas (Romanness) as expressed in the corpus of classical Roman culture and its forms of governance – all embedded in the sacred language of Latin. This religious and cultural capital would serve to sustain the fragile, developing Carolingian world while a certain consolidation and order was established in the new western empire (Wallace-Hadrill 1983). Given these intellectual and material resources, Gallo-Roman and then Frankish bishops and abbots collaborated with Carolingian monarchs by staffing their rudimentary bureaucracy, contributing to royal initiatives from church resources, functioning as a counterweight to the often restive Frankish lay aristocracy, and advancing Latin-based education among the court’s ruling elite. Eventually they also helped advance Carolingian control and stability over newly conquered territories through missionary as well as administrative work. Yet ultimately both the clergy as well as the laity in their pastoral care were dependent on the cultivated piety and goodwill of the Carolingian monarchs, who personified in their very selves the unity and integration of the new Latin Christian empire as the anointed sacral kings in the image of King David.
As patrons of faith and learning, the Carolingian dynasty endeavored among other things to bring order to the multiplicity of regional church traditions and canons, since the church had never been centralized in western Europe. While reformers at court sought to enforce Roman canon law practices the inevitable pushback by independent-minded Frankish bishops resulted in modest gains. Monastic life was regularized as well through observance of the Rule of St. Benedict, though again with mixed results in the short term. Finally, proper order required appropriate liturgical worship using the Roman Rite, though once again the Gallican rites proved enduring enough in the end to be integrated into the Roman formulary. Carolingian culture’s finest religious expressions were directed toward liturgical worship, with generations of poets, musicians, architects, and artisans fashioning sacred music and spaces for worship that would set the standard for the liturgical life of the Western church.
Though the majority of reforming zeal focused on the deficiencies and muddled practices of both secular and regular clergy, the needs of the laity were not wholly overlooked. Widespread illiteracy among the lay population was of course the major hurdle to including them in the literate reforms of the clergy. Therefore no direct contact with the scriptures, canon law, the Church Fathers, or liturgical texts was available to the vast majority of the population, whose conversion cannot be said to have been as thorough as that of the Frankish ruling elite.
Under such conditions then, clergymen placed more emphasis on the laity’s religious and moral obligations than on religious knowledge. The creation of the parish system by the late ninth century served as the compulsory community of church membership, where the laity was to find regular spiritual sustenance and structure for their communal life around the liturgical calendar of feasts, fasts, tithing, and charitable acts appropriate for their order in Christian society.
In a society where poverty of material resources, literacy, and communication were widespread, a clear vision of proper Christian living was taught first among the elites and then made its way into the remaining lay population even if slowly and unevenly. The desire for order, a respect for hierarchy, an emerging reverence for the unique authority of the papacy, a Benedictine version of monastic life as the ideal path of Christian discipleship, and a separation of the church into clergy and laity in which the latter would experience the Church within a local parish setting were all foundational building blocks for the future of Western Christendom. In this Carolingian synthesis, the empire itself was Christendom with Charlemagne and his successors ruling over it alone; the church was only one institution – albeit a critical one – within Christendom and one to be employed as the emperor saw fit. Charlemagne’s interventions on the issue of icons and the filioque clause are only the most obvious examples, while the subordinate papacy merely had to accept the fait accompli.
Anglo-Saxon Christians made their own contributions to the vitality and spread of Christianity in Europe at this time. After the adoption of Roman Latinate Christianity at the Synod of Whitby (664), Canterbury, and Northumbria became centers of rich monastic spirituality and scholarship. Theodore of Tarsus (appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 668 by Pope Vitalian) and his assistant Hadrian (an African monk) were instrumental not only in organizing the English Church into dioceses but also in stocking its monastic libraries with an abundance of imported manuscripts and sacred texts from Rome (Thacker 2005). The resulting monastic schools proved to be the best in western Europe, and from them came the likes of Benedict Biscop, Aldhelm, the Venerable Bede, and Alcuin of York, who with Hiberno-Scottish scholars like Marianus Scotus and Johannes Scotus Eriugena fueled the expansion of learning biblical, patristic, and classical liberal arts texts characterizing both the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Golden Age and the ninth-century Carolingian Renaissance. English and Hiberno-Scottish monks also provided the Carolingian continent with an abundance of missionaries like St. Columbanus, St. Fridolin, St. Boniface, St. Willibrord, and the often overlooked abbess St. Walpurga. These missionaries led a clerical reform movement within the Carolingian dominions as well as a missionary expansion of Christianity into the regions hitherto untouched by Gallo-Roman Christianity (Frisia, Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, Carinthia). The Carolingian era therefore consolidated Western Christianity and provided and a new era of aristocratic and missionary saints considered as worthy successors of the Roman martyrs and confessors (Brown 1981; Howard-Johnston and Hayward 2000).
By the end of the eighth century Latin Christianity had become more normative, but later Carolingian rulers proved unable to further consolidate the movement toward complete uniformity of faith and practice, or to further advance the conversion of the remainder of Europe to this emerging form of Western Christianity. Perhaps Charlemagne’s brutal use of forced conversion as a means of consolidating his eastern imperial expansions, as in the notorious case of Saxony, militated against such a continued consolidation (Karras 1986). To be sure both the regional fissures in such a vast empire as well as the internal tensions within the Frankish ruling family produced instability after the death of Charlemagne, who had often held them together by sheer force of personality. An Old Testament-inspired tribal spirituality with its capacity to honor sacral kingship supported by a subservient priesthood, rich liturgical forms of worship, clerical efforts to convert pagan lay practices through cooptation and indigenization of the gospel, and moral regulation of both clergy and laity alike remained the overriding features of the late Carolingian spirituality. Yet this Carolingian synthesis frayed and ultimately came undone by the fragmentation of the empire itself amid the twin pressures of the ruling elite’s inner turmoil coupled with the renewal of external invasions.
Such a spectacular collapse produced apocalyptic anxiety to rival anything found among late antique Gallo-Roman Christians. Western Europe was truly under siege and for a long time during the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Exasperated monastic chroniclers soon lost words to describe the chaos. Too many royal heirs and too little wealth to share among the aristocracy in a contracting empire revived the regional divisions that were papered over during the heyday of the empire. And as the Carolingian dynasty weakened with each generation, the forces of incursion grew stronger such that local power replaced imperial authority. By 830 remnants of Carolingian defenses in Spain had given way to Arab expansion, whose growing naval power in the western Mediterranean also led to the conquest of Sicily and regular raids on southern and western Italy reaching beyond Rome even to the Alps. This chapter would remain fresh in Italian memory when the crusades were invented. Concomitantly from eastern Europe the Magyars began to migrate and settle at the expense of eastern Frankish landholders. The initial success of their lightening cavalry raids into the Carolingian empire emboldened them to migrate even into Italy and west-central Europe until a great Saxon victory on the Lech River (955) pushed by the boundaries of Magyar expansion back to the Hungary of today.
While Muslim and Magyar raids accelerated the political disintegration of the Carolingian Empire, Viking raids completed the process. Northmen assaulted every river and inlet (and thus every major town, city, and monastery) from the British Isles to Kiev and the south of France. Scandinavian incursions placed Frankish defense squarely on the shoulders of the local nobility, as fragmented imperial authority was incapable of protecting such vast borders against Viking assaults throughout the ninth century. By the end of the century marauding Viking bands had chosen to winter and then eventually settle down in lands as dispersed as the Danelaw in England, Normandy in France, and the former Byzantine lands of southern Italy where Normans defeated the Muslims. Thus the Scandinavian marauders would ultimately choose to assimilate and contribute to rebuilding the shattered world of Carolingian Europe, even accepting Christianity as their new faith: once again the invaders had become members of Western Christendom. But their violent arrival coupled with the incursions of Magyars in eastern and Muslims in southern Europe produced an understandable revival of apocalyptic spirituality, as evidenced by monastic authors like Raoul Glaber and Adhemar of Chabannes who understood the disintegration of Western Christendom as the end of the world. And yet it was not the end, but rather a painful recalibration of western European life that would profoundly affect the future trajectory of Christianity. The Age of Assault came to a grateful end by the early tenth century, and once again an effort toward a new synthesis of religion, society and culture was enjoined. But this new Europe would construct a synthesis of religion, society, and culture which was fundamentally different from the Carolingian “First Europe.”
As civic and political life decayed during the era of invasions, so too had the local churches, which became the private property of local warlords. And as private property, ecclesiastical lands and their attendant offices were bought, sold, and given to allies and family members. Clergy at every level were often worldly aristocrats in priests’ clothing, with Pope John XII (956–963) as the ultimate but by no means exclusive exemplum for a clergy gone bad – he was among a series of Roman pontiffs who were poisoned, smothered, strangled, stabbed to death, and even exhumed and tried for heresy while propped up in the defendant’s chair. Clearly the offices and property of the church had suffered grievously at the hands of predatory aristocratic families. Yet out of this violent context a reform movement emerged. It was initiated on the local level and ultimately transformed the role of the institutional Church in Christian society and also unleashed new forms of spirituality that would live in tension with the clerical forms of the institutional Church. Calls for change came from two sources: a popular lay peace movement joined by reform-minded bishops, and a monastic renewal movement.
The first sign of a turning tide against the localized violence that was part and parcel of the emerging feudal society of the tenth century was a popular, even evangelical movement of active resistance known as the Peace of God movement (Landes and Head 1992). The only power available to those, both lay and clergy, who sought an end to the plundering of churches was spiritual condemnation. Hence individual abbeys’ bishops joined their humble lay populations and began to issue threatening anathemas against predatory barons. Soon local and regional Church councils were formed at which lay nobles were directly called out and threatened with the full spiritual arsenal of heaven. Held in the open air with the local populace present, they served as a non-violent means of shaming the baronage into conformity with Christian behavioral expectations for those in society who claimed to be noble. In villages heads of peasant households took oaths to preserve the peace and protect the Church as a space of immunity from violence, and mass peace marches arrived at the dwellings of the local barons who were asked to join in the oath-taking.
Those especially and perpetually under the immunity known as the Peace of God were non-combatant male peasants, women, children, and clergy – what once was the king’s peace was now tendered as a divine ban within the jurisdiction and before the court of the divine king of heaven. The Peace of God movement not surprisingly emerged from Aquitaine, Burgundy, and Languedoc where centralized royal authority was non-existent at the time. Soon added was the Truce of God, in which a fasting from violence was decreed during Sundays and holy days (which included the whole of Lent and even every Friday in some areas). This movement was only partially successful and the clergy made better long-term headway through its liturgical interventions into the feudal oaths and rituals as a more private and interpersonal means of extracting promises of peacekeeping and orderly settlement of disputes. Nevertheless this movement unleashed several new dynamics: an activist clergy which found creative and relatively effective use of the spiritual weapon of excommunication as a means of reforming the ways of a violent nobility, the establishment of a physical space of immunity from lay violence, and a mass lay participation in which its passion to see the world changed for the better was encouraged and valued. These dynamics, when coupled with the clear memory of invasions by pagan and Muslim invaders, explains much of the spiritual energy and both its positive and negative expressions during the central Middle Ages.
The second great crisis for the ecclesiastical hierarchy was the reassertion of its authority within aristocratic society and the return of appropriated bishoprics, abbacies (lay abbots abounded at this time), and properties from lay control. The libertas ecclesie (freedom of the church) became a fundamental dimension of the Peace of God, and monasteries took the lead in this effort since they had been especially singled out for plundering or outright take-over by local warlords. The first monastery to succeed in being granted immunity from lay aristocratic control was the newly founded abbey of Cluny in Burgundy ca. 910. Duke William I “the Pious” of Aquitaine renounced all control over the abbey’s lands, possessions, tenants, incomes, and even the selection of its abbot. Such radical independence achieved by the reform-minded monks of Cluny led other religious houses to seek the same liberties from their feudal lords, and as a means of securing them permanently these houses submitted themselves to the authority of the abbot of Cluny. As a result of this successful reform movement, by the early eleventh century the abbot of Cluny presided over several dozen monasteries (both male and female) as head of the Cluniac order and thereby was the most powerful churchman in the Latin Christendom. Insightful barons soon came to see the benefits of following Duke William’s example, as such acts of reform-minded piety toward monasteries and bishoprics not only served to draw popular support for reform in their direction, but also to legitimate their often recently obtained noble status in the region. Hence a reformation of the relationship between feudal lords and the institutional Church was making headway, yet it still depended on the goodwill or political savvy of each feudal lord at every level of the hierarchy, since centralized royal power was a thing of the future.
The peace and Cluniac movements were the first fruits of the emerging reform movement, which eventually reached the seat of Romanitas, Rome itself. The papacy at this time remained the epitome of corrupting influences of aristocratic lay control, and on a regional level the same problem existed among the bishoprics and archbishoprics throughout western Europe. The two great sins identified by reformers, who now turned their eyes to the moral reform of the episcopate and its pinnacle the papacy, were simony (the sale of the sacramental priestly authority, equated with Simon Magus and his attempt to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit from St. Peter, see Acts 8:9–24) and nepotism (the granting of high church offices to family members). Therefore, initial reform efforts focused on expelling any bishop, archbishop, or abbot who had purchased his office or obtained it as a family possession. Directly from this vision of a venial priesthood came the antidote of virtues demanded now of all consecrated priests and bishops. Drawing from the reform movement’s monastic ethos, leaders fashioned an ideal for a holy priesthood that inserted monastic vows and thereby solved the “family business” aspect of a feudalized Church: all priests of any kind, but most especially of the episcopate, must take and maintain a vow of perpetual celibacy. Though this would subject clergymen to centuries of sexual suffering, its original intent was to address the feudal world of proprietary churches, since a clergy that did not sexually reproduce would be freed from (1) the monastic anxiety about worldly lust associated with sexual activity and (2) the worldly ability to pass on church property and offices as a private family possession. Therefore, one of the revolutions of the eleventh-century reform movement to secure the libertas ecclesiae was the application of monastic requirements on secular clergy, designed to further extend the space of clerical immunity from lay authority and life. Priests of all kinds were now to be set apart, to be the sacral leaders of Christendom.
Given their substantial material resources, regional governance responsibilities, and deep familial ties to the aristocracy, the greatest battles over implementing this reform ideal revolved around the highest offices of the ecclesiastical hierarchy: bishops, archbishops, and the papacy. And the Church’s responses in the many conflicts that ensued were not consistent: while archbishops desired to regulate the bishops’ offices yet remain themselves independent of the papacy (as had been the case in late antiquity), bishops desired to remain independent not only of lay but also of archiepiscopal control. So the latter rifled through their archives for copies of the Pseudo-Isodorean Decretals used so skillfully by ninth-century Frankish bishops. Indeed, a critical dimension to the debate about the episcopacy was the effort to recover a faded memory of ancient canon law precedents, which were often selectively and imaginatively reconstructed during this debate. This selective recovery of lost institutional memory played itself out most profoundly in the papal reform movement.
The papacy was the last ecclesiastical institution to feel the heat of reform, since rapacious Roman aristocrats rightly considered the office the fount of the papal states’ regional economic wealth. And this chapter of the reform movement was different, as it came from the top down rather than as a popular movement, coming as it did rather surprisingly from imperial intervention into Roman politics on behalf of Christendom. Who could judge the legitimacy of individual popes? A revived German monarchy carried within it the memory of Carolingian imperial precedent and ideals of sacral kingship, and hence King Henry III in 1046 gathered his imperial army and marched southward across the Alps to be crowned emperor. Since he needed assurance of a valid papal coronation and yet found the papacy in political chaos, Henry by his own royal authority convened a church synod at Sutri (just north of Rome) at which two claimants to the papacy were deposed and a third candidate was chosen: Henry’s own personal confessor (Bishop Suidger of Bamberg) who took the name Clement II and proceeded to crown Henry as the new Roman emperor. And after the pontificates of Clement II and his successor Damasus II had lasted only a handful of months each, the frustrated new emperor personally appointed a third successive German pope: his own cousin, Bishop Bruno of Toul who took the papal name of Leo IX (1049–1054).
Pope Leo IX was the first reformed pope, and as such he avoided the mire of Roman politics as much as possible and instead took the mantle of highest clerical patron of reform by traveling to numerous reform councils throughout western Europe. Now a pope was seen in person beyond the Alps, and he impressed with his highly developed ritual entrances and enormous public masses. As such he was quickly embraced as the primary advocate of reform, quickly overshadowing even the German emperor as the foremost patron of the Church’s health and well-being. He issued decrees of the Peace and Truce of God, deposed recalcitrant bishops and responded to public penances by simoniac bishops with an admonition, absolution, and restoration that advanced an extension of papal authority over the episcopacy. The papacy of Leo IX was truly revolutionary: in one short pontificate the office that was deeply mired in moral and political scandal had suddenly become the fount of clerical legitimacy and immunity from lay aristocratic control. Leo was even powerful enough to summarily depose the archbishop of Reims for his simony. The reform movement had now transformed from an initial effort to radically improve the moral fiber of both the clergy and the lay aristocracy into a wholesale realignment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s relationship with the laity by the mid-eleventh century. The reform movement had a clear leader whose claim to Romanitas and continuity with the apostolic age was hard to beat. The foremost centralizing force in the central Middle Ages, therefore, would not be the successor kingships of early feudal Europe but rather the reformed papacy in Rome.
This expanding effort to craft a reformed and rightly ordered Christendom finally had to address the inevitable question: was the emperor (and by extension any king within his kingdom) rightly to be the patron of the reformed episcopacy or had he actually reached beyond his rightful authority within Christendom? Reformers at the papal court looked to its voluminous archives for guidance and found passages in late antique letters and decrees that, when read out of their original historical contexts, could be understood as claiming a pastoral superiority of popes over temporal rulers like emperors (these were often actually over-heated rhetorical flourishes by popes who themselves were securely under the Byzantine emperors’ control, e.g. Pope Gelasius I during the Acacian Schism). A great divergence of conviction therefore quickly emerged between German emperors on the one hand (who understood themselves to be both anointed sacral rulers over Christendom as successors of Charlemagne as well as lords of Rome and defenders of the Roman Church as successors of Constantine) and reformed popes on the other (who understood themselves to possess both the Roman mantle of leadership in northern Italy as successors of Constantine as well as the pastoral mantle of Christendom as the apostolic successor of St. Peter). And after all, it was the popes who crowned the German monarchs in order for them to be legitimate emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, and hence popes could exercise a pastoral de facto veto over the candidates for imperial office if they wished to find them morally deficient. What a radical and ironic reversal of Emperor Henry III’s interventions in papal politics: the original patron of reform had now been told to keep his hands off the reformed papacy and by extension the entire reformed Church.
The great ensuing debate, known as the Investiture Controversy, put this disputed question on a continent-wide trial from 1075–1122. During the childhood of the German king Henry IV, Pope Nicholas II led a 1059 council that excluded both the German emperor and the Roman patricians from controlling the election of the popes, which was instead placed in the clerical hands of a College of Cardinals. And in 1075 Pope Gregory VII issued a canon law decree Dictatus Papae that stated radically and unequivocally the papacy’s moral and constitutional superiority over emperors, kings, and bishops as the supreme pastor of Christendom and sole possessor of Romanitas. As a result, the emperor, all other kings, and princes were to be considered laymen under the pastoral authority of the Roman pontiff and as such were denied traditional authority to select and invest the bishops in their respective realms with their new church offices and properties. When Henry IV continued to select and invest his bishops in defiance of the papal expectations, Gregory VII excommunicated the German king and even claimed the authority to depose him as unfit for office. In the short run this radical assertion of papal fullness of power unleashed a bloody civil war in the German empire that permanently weakened royal authority vis-à-vis the episcopacy and aristocracy. In England, where the other vital post-Carolingian monarchy was functioning in western Europe, King Henry I engaged in a short-lived but intense conflict with Archbishop Anselm in which the English episcopacy sided in this instance with the king. The Concordat of London (1107) and the Concordat of Worms (1122) finally resolved this painful chapter in Western Christendom through compromise: a distinction was made between the bishop’s secular governing duties on behalf of the king and his spiritual duties on behalf of the diocese, and therefore monarchs would henceforth only invest bishops with secular administrative authority, not sacral spiritual authority (which was the preserve of the papacy as signified by the conferral of the papal palium) and episcopal elections were to be held by the canons of cathedral chapter though with royal input.
Secularization of political power is not a modern invention, but was actually realized as a result of the medieval Investiture Controversy (Tellenbach 1993). The early medieval equilibrium, in which the Church was only one institution in a Christendom governed by a sacral monarch, had now been turned on its head through a successful redefinition of Christendom by reform-minded clergy: now the Church itself was Christendom, with both the priesthood and laity governed by a sacral, pastoral monarch in the person of the pope. This revolutionary new synthesis of Christian religion, society, and culture was always imperfectly realized and often depended on the personal capacity of individual popes to assert its validity. Yet Western Christianity in the central Middle Ages would be quite different than that of late antiquity and the Carolingian early Middle Ages. Ever-expanding claims to papal sovereignty over Christendom (which monarchs, nobles, bishops, and abbots often roundly resisted) meant that a new centralized authority had the opportunity to focus and patronize the spiritual energies of the age in lieu of multiple monarchs and princes. Yet successful Church reform also raised the moral expectations of the clerical order, and whereas monarchs were found wanting in their claims to sacral status it remained to be seen if popes and priesthood could measure up against rising lay expectations of their sacred reformed clergy. The tension between priestly authority and royal power would continue to reverberate in Western Christendom throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages, with the pontificate of Gregory VII as a cautionary tale about the potential spiritual power inherent in the papal office as well as the dangers of overreaching with pastoral authority into the social and political fabric of power in European territories and kingdoms (Morris 1989).
Perhaps the greatest and most longstanding challenge the reformed clergy and papacy faced was that of maintaining this new order and uniformity in Christian religion, society, and culture in an age of emerging diversity of ways of life and thus ultimately of forms both clerical and lay spirituality. The success of the Cluniac reform movement led to additional expressions of reformed monasticism as convictions began to vary about which interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict was purest. A victim of its own success, the Cluniac order found its abbots drawn into the reform movement’s secular engagements while abundant lay bequests of landed wealth and oblate children threatened to make its precincts a private club of worldly aristocratic families. Two new monastic movements arose to counter this trend, the Carthusian (1084) and Cistercian (1098). Both reasserted the ascetic desert tradition of denial, austerity, and withdrawal for private contemplation, and whereas reverence for Carthusian rigor never resulted in an equally high membership the Cistercians’ embrace of peasant lay brothers (conversi) and the popularity of the charismatic and controversial St. Bernard of Clairvaux thrust the order to the forefront of Christendom. Hence a divergence of conviction about the true monastic path became a standard feature to be managed in Western Christendom by the twelfth century, though monasticism remained securely in the male domain.
As Europe’s prosperity began to expand rapidly by the late eleventh century the zealous lay spirituality unleashed by the reform movement sought deeper expression, which was channeled primarily into pilgrimages to saints’ relics (Webb 1999) and pious bequests for endowments to sustain either monastic family members or memorial masses for the benefactors (all of which moved monks more completely toward taking priestly orders in order to perform pilgrimage and memorial masses). This penitential patronage and pilgrimage traffic fueled a new wave of church building, which combined the spiritual concerns of the reform era with creative architectural innovations that we have come to call Romanesque. Vast vaulted stone churches in the late antique basilica style arose throughout western Europe during the eleventh century designed specifically to enhance the sacramental powers of the priest and the liturgical experience of lay pilgrims.
French and Norman aristocratic males at least also found the opportunity to synthesize their penchant for pilgrimage and penitence (often the result of their equal inclination for warfare and pillaging) with service to the Church as the Reconquista of the Spanish peninsula gained traction in the 1030s, which was then followed by the Norman reconquest of southern Italy and Sicily from the Muslims in the 1060s. While the tide in the balance of Muslim–Christian power in the western Mediterranean was changing to the latter’s advantage, the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the eastern end was destabilizing both Arab and Byzantine power structures. Mounting Western anxieties about Muslim abuses of both Palestinian Christians and Latin pilgrims coincided with the Byzantine emperor Alexius IV’s appeal to Pope Urban II in 1095 for assistance. With hopes of extending papal authority over the Eastern Church in the wake of the brutal Great Schism of 1054, Urban transformed what was a narrow Byzantine call for temporary mercenary assistance from the West into an epoch-making fusion of lay spirituality and reformed papal authority: he began recruiting for the expedition in his homeland of France, which he defined as an armed, penitential pilgrimage of holy war to recover the sacred sites of the Church with Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher as the ultimate destination. This launched a crusading movement that would draw thousands of aristocratic warriors to “take the cross” and risk everything to save the Holy Land in exchange for plenary forgiveness of their sins through papal indulgences.
Although this is not the place to chronicle the crusading movement, which lasted in diminishing intensity until end of the thirteenth century, it is important to point out that the crusading movement measures both the arc of papal authority and influence in Western Christendom (Schimmelpfennig 1992) as well as that of the lay aristocracy’s ideal of spiritual service to the Church based on a theology of just war and redemptive violence (Riley-Smith 2005). Never sustainable nor successful and filled with many more failures of moral and tactical wisdom than successes, the crusades represent a minor chapter in world history. Yet back home in Europe the towering shadow of the successful First Crusade had an often overlooked yet profound impact (Tyerman 2001). As successive crusades, often articulated with Old-Testament-laced language of a chosen people driving out the latter-day Canaanites from the Promised Land proved to be disasters, so Old-Testament-laced language of divine judgment was employed to explain these failures to secure God’s blessing. This then led to ever more urgent calls for a collective repentance and purity among Western Christians, with the laity now expected to embody the same moral rectitude expected of its clergy. For only then would God’s blessing return to their crusading efforts. The tragic timing of this growing concern for internal purity and obedience cannot be understated, coming as it did during the period of the greatest economic and demographic expansion, encounter with new peoples and ideas, and diversification of ways of life in the entire medieval era. Room for dissent or engagement with non-orthodox peoples and ideas would be perceived as a direct threat to the Christendom project’s success (Russell 1965; Waugh and Diejl 1995).
A final sign of religious expansionism and vitality in this period is the extension of European Christendom into Scandinavia, Poland, and Hungary, though ironically here success came through the active patronage of kings who saw the advantage of dioceses, parishes, and monasteries as an infrastructure for centralizing their kingdoms. This explains why the Scandinavian nobility often violently resisted conversion, whereas supportive kings were canonized. Harold Blutooth (Denmark), Olaf Trygvesson (Norway), St. Olaf Haraldsson (Norway), and King Olaf (Sweden) all promoted Christianity. Conversely, Slavic rulers in Poland (Prince Mieszko) and Hungary (King Stephen) sought direct papal grants of bishoprics independent from control of the Ottonian German archbishops in order to avoid imperial political encroachments on their territories. By the early eleventh century therefore Latin Christendom had moved eastward in Europe as well as in the Mediterranean.
The twelfth century saw the velocity of change increase exactly at the time when efforts were being made to consolidate and normalize the new reformed order of Christendom. Building, papal travel, crusading, pilgrimages, missionary work, monastic and clerical reform movements and a continent-wide debate about priestly authority and secular power in Christendom are all testimony to the rapid development of European life – yet this still essentially rural society would be transformed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as urban life brought new contexts for living the Christian life and new conflicts of interest and conviction. The reform movement of the tenth and eleventh centuries had accomplished much, but it had not taken place in the context of urban society, therefore the new order would be challenged even before it had fully taken shape (Constable 1996: 88–124).
Clerical morals and mission continued to be informed by the new monasticism during the twelfth century, though in contexts quite different than those of Cluny, Citeaux, and the Grand Chartreuse. Many secular priests began to form religious communities in which to live into their ministries as reformed clergy, and there they ordered themselves according to a common rule, like the Augustinian and Premonstratensian Canons. The ministry of parish clergy was certainly improved wherever Regular Canons were active, yet in return they became more withdrawn from communal lay life as semi-cloistered priests. Nevertheless, raised expectations for a priesthood characterized by moral purity and an apostolic way of life assured continued scrutiny and criticism from the laity, and all the more so as the sacramental powers asserted by the clergy increased the distance between the two communities in the Church. Lay alliances of rich patrons and poor urban dwellers, such as the Patarines in Milan, would continue to raise concerns about the priestly effectiveness and corporate wealth of both secular and regular priests.
Rapid demographic growth, urban and commercial development, and a growing need for literacy produced intellectual turbulence in the twelfth century as traditional monastic schools grudgingly gave way to urban schools taught by enterprising textual scholars using grammatical, rhetorical, and logical analysis as their stock in trade. The growing popularity of dialectic as the method for resolving intellectual inconsistencies in traditional theological authorities in particular proved both exciting for the likes of the new school teachers like William of Champeaux and Peter Abelard, and yet also dangerous to monastic scholars like Otloh of St. Emmeram and Bernard of Clairvaux – most especially when new authorities like Aristotle or Arabic learning were employed. Wandering scholars with a popular following could prove as vexing to the ecclesiastical hierarchy as popular wandering preachers when it came to critiquing clerical authority, under which education still remained. Since urban schools simply taught more students than monastic schools they soon began to predominate, and so the best solution was to license and regulate scholars through cathedral schools like Reims, Chartres, Laon, and Paris. The new rhetorical, logical, biblical, and theological scholarship was soon by joined legal studies, and the rediscovery of Roman law invigorated the study of both secular (constitutional and administrative) and canon (church) law (Berman 1983). Within a few generations therefore, higher education was born and nurtured in a new institution which came to be known as the university. Here aspiring students could move through liberal arts learning to the emerging learned professions of law, theology, teaching, and medicine. Students therefore migrated from all over Europe to the best faculties and networked with each other to form a transcontinental community of professionals that both enhanced and challenged traditional clerical authority, and what is more they enabled far more others to do the same than ever before (Cobban 1988).
All this social, cultural, and religious ferment culminated in a drive to formally and finally normalize aspects of the reformed Church in terms of practice and canon law. Under papal leadership and showing the growing influence of the new theological and legal studies, a series of six major church councils were convened (1123, 1139, 1148, 1163, 1179) which culminated in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Here Pope Innocent III, at the pinnacle moment of medieval papal authority, promulgated a series of foundational orthodox norms: all Christians were be taught the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Hail Mary; the sacraments were articulated as sevenfold (finally excluding royal anointment but now including marriage) in which all Christians were expected to participate regularly as means of receiving divine grace; devotion of the eucharist was defined (using Aristotelian distinctions) by establishing transubstantiation of the bread and wine; papal primacy over the universal Church was once again affirmed; new religious orders were forbidden in order to blunt the growing diversity of religious expression “lest too great a diversity bring confusion into the Church;” and most infamously Jews and Muslims in Christian society were ordered in canon 68 to wear special dress to distinguish them from Christians and in canon 69 Jews were denied any public office, “since this offers them the pretext to vent their wrath against Christians” (Chazan 2006; Nirenberg 1996)
These contours of the definition and demarcation of orthodox Christendom represent a watershed moment in the medieval synthesis of religion, society, and culture (Ozment 1980). And they were each in their several ways responses to percolating dissent and heterodoxy amid the growing anxiety about spiritual purity in an age of failing crusades. As the dress code and limited public functions of Jews and Muslims suggest, it was becoming increasingly difficult to discern who was “within Christendom” based solely upon external appearances in this age of growing mobility, prosperity, and communication in which new ideas and peoples were encountered like never before (Iogna-Prat 2005).
In the thirteenth century religious life was more vital than ever, both in its reach across Europe as well as in its personal depth. Soaring, massive gothic cathedrals were built as multi-generational statements of faith in God and in the future, and pilgrimages to these shrines remained extremely popular. Even the image of God was changing from the austere and unapproachable cosmic Christ of previous generations to a loving savior. The fascination with the humanity of Jesus – reflected in sermons, songs, and religious art marks an evangelical movement across the populace in which the Old Testament based tribal religion was giving way to a New Testament focus on the gospel and individual Christian life as an imitatio Christi and a vita apostolica. The cult of the Virgin Mary reached new heights in popular devotion, precisely because she literally embodied Jesus’ humanity as the Christ Child. Legion were the depictions of Madonna and child with Mary understood as the central human figure in the mystery of the Incarnation. Some scholars have even asserted that this amounted to a second conversion of Europe, where an emotional and evangelical religion of the heart called Christians beyond mere behavioral expectations (Dickson 2000). Indeed as a sign of the times a spirituality of engagement and action – whether crusading, going on pilgrimage, debating theology, preaching the gospel, building cathedrals, or engaging the sacraments – had begun to compete with the traditional spirituality of withdrawal and contemplation (Vauchez 1993aa). Even the twelfth-century monastic speculative theologies of St. Anselm (Cur Deus Homo) and Abelard (Sic et Non) gave way to the huge integrative edifices of scholastic theologians like St. Albertus Magnus’ Summa Theologiae, his student St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, and St. Bonaventure’s De septem itineribus aeternitatis (Baldwin 1971). The second medieval synthesis of religion, society, and culture, born of the twin forces of a reformed clergy and a deeply engaged lay spirituality, was reaching its critical mass moment.
But of course this completing the circle of Christendom inevitably left some out of the community. The resulting gap between clergy and laity meant that the sacred had become the preserve of priests and monks who alone had the luxury of devoting themselves to the religious life of regular periods of prayer, reading and reciting the scriptures and spiritual treatises, and offering liturgical praise to God in lieu of the laboring lay population. Not having access to this predominant ideal of Christian spiritual life, the vast majority of the laity experienced only a few religious practices in an otherwise unreligious life – and practices they had to express their spiritual yearnings were uniformly abstemious in nature (abstinence from marital relations at given times, fasting during Lent, payment of tithes, attendance at Sunday Mass where they only periodically received the sacred eucharist). So when ecclesiastical fare did not satisfy their own spiritual hunger they were openly critical and sometimes even looked elsewhere for sustenance (Moore 1977). This evangelical age of preaching could cut both ways when wandering preachers might alternatively call the laity to service in a crusade (e.g. Peter the Hermit) or to resistance against corrupt clergy (e.g. Arnold of Brescia). Two overriding themes defined this evangelical movement, which thereby ironically called the reformed Church to task for its failures: (1) the need for penitence as a prerequisite for divine blessing, and (2) the importance of apostolic poverty in an age of urban commercial markets where avaritia had replaced superbia as the quintessential vice (Little 1971).
Criticism directed at the corporate wealth and worldly pursuits of both secular and regular clergy (Mann 1980), which was often encoded into the call to repentance and apostolic living, reached worrisome heights by the early thirteenth century when critics began to form alternative church communities such as the Waldensians and Cathars in southern France (a region known for its lack of centralized royal governance amid growing commercial wealth). Papal leadership in addressing this growing challenge proved to be a mixture of insightful discernment and a troubling expansion of the notion of crusading against the enemies of Christ. The Fourth Lateran Council’s delimiting new religious orders fortunately did not apply to the followers of St. Dominic and St. Francis, who would receive official sanction for their respective preaching and poverty movements. Generations of idealistic young laymen from urban bourgeois families were thereby enlisted to serve as the Church’s models of penitential and apostolic urban living as orthodox voices in competition with the Cathars and Waldensians.
Ironically it would be Franciscan and Dominican friars at university who would craft a workable theology of profit and ethical commerce, and they all knew instinctively how to reach urban audiences with their open air preaching and acts of identification with the urban poor. Choosing to be poor and repenting from avarice reflect the virtues and vices of the new commercial elites and their urban social milieu, filled as it was with a plethora of newly formed lay confraternities and parishes that served as a means of the charitable redistribution of commercial profits for the alleviation of urban poverty and suffering. So in the context of urban labor and commercial profit a distinctive theology of lay holy living was forged (Little 1978). Henry of Susa, cardinal of Ostia, could even pen these words by 1253: “In a broad sense, those persons are called religious who live in a saintly and religious manner in their homes, not because they submit to a specific rule, but on account of their life, which is harder and simpler than that of other lay people who live in a purely worldly fashion.” The papal curia of Innocent III was prescient in engaging this evolving urban lay spirituality on its own terms (Swanson 1995).
Innocent’s zeal to finally produce a second successful crusade, however, unleashed huge violence and suffering in the name of orthodox Christianity. His Fourth Crusade in Constantinople was an epic debacle from which papal prestige would never recover, and his Albigensian Crusade sacrificed the lives of thousands on all sides to exterminate the Cathar heresy (Powell 1994; Costen 1997). That the highest officials of the Church would sanction both crusading violence within Christendom as well as an increasing public quarantining of Jews and Muslims as fellow heretical enemies of Christendom says much about where reformed efforts at the purification of Christendom and the marshalling of lay spirituality to defend it through redemptive violence had taken Europe by the late thirteenth century. Brilliant and inspiring expressions of Christian faith, thought, and deeds stood alongside an increasing intolerance of dissent and heterodoxy in the name of forging a perfected and holy Christendom worthy of God’s blessing. Communal purity demanded single-minded obedience to the now standardized norms, and Christian attitudes toward Jews (stereotyped with the sin of avarice), Muslims (stereotype for the sin of impure belief as infideles), and other non-conformists became increasingly hardened and eliminationist.
The pressures of success seemed to catch up with every reform movement, which in time found itself as the new face of outmoded thought in the undertow of yet another reform movement. This was certainly true of the Cluniacs and Cistercians, and it would be true of the Franciscans as well as the papacy. Innocent III’s pontificate is justifiably recognized as the pinnacle of the medieval papacy and the second medieval synthesis, but this only makes obvious a subsequent decline was to follow. Many of his own policies and assertions of papal authority contributed to the decline in papal influence and independence. And though the papacy had been well advanced beyond monarchies in the formation of administrative and institutional structures of governance, its own success led to growing charges of bloated bureaucracy and financial corruption in Rome, even as European Christians sent their varied appeals to Rome in record numbers. Finally, what Innocent III did not fully appreciate in the midst of his numerous contentious interventions into the lives and politics of Europe’s kings and emperors was that in varying degrees they too were developing administrative monarchies that would soon be ready to challenge papal claims to super-territorial jurisdiction as Christendom’s senior pastor (Oakley 1979).
Growing proto-national kingdoms with their intensifying resistance to papal interventions, and the inevitable spiritual inflation that occurred with every papal use of excommunication and interdict, ultimately proved to undermine papal authority over a supposedly uniform and unified Christendom. And this decline set in at the absolutely worst time possible, when pastoral leadership was needed more than ever. The Age of Trauma dawned in the fourteenth century, when climate change and the global transportation system combined to produce a series of debilitating famines followed by the unimaginable horrors of the Black Plague by mid-century. The last two horsemen of the Apocalypse also arrived in the form of wars (e.g. Hundred Years War) and the death they produced on a record scale as royal armies swelled in size, destructive capacity, and duration in the field. Kings were finally recovering their sovereignty after the feudal age of aristocratic and clerical dominance, and they were determined to consolidate their kingdoms into territorial states. And one of the key elements in this strategy was to return the Church once again to a sub-set of Christendom under the sovereign king.
Clerical inability to solve any of these traumatic crises produced a new criticism of their impotence and even irrelevance, while traditional critiques of the Church’s corporate wealth (often a product of centuries of the laity’s pious bequests) continued apace. Lay anticlericalism had much to complain about as one failure of ecclesiastical leadership after another piled up without any meaningful reform movement engendered in this era of crisis. The Papacy’s exile in Avignon (1305–1377) followed by the Great Schism (1378–1417) nearly eclipsed the papal office again, with a serious yet narrowly unsuccessful ecclesial reform to an episcopal synod model of leadership as advocated by the Conciliar Movement. The papacy narrowly preserved its monarchical status in Rome through mortgaging its prerogatives over the Church to regional monarchs and princes, and the popes themselves then turned to functioning as territorial Italian Renaissance princes themselves.
Lay spirituality throughout this troubled era, however, remained remarkably vibrant and engaged, with a major outpouring of support for memorial chantries, charitable bequests, religious feasts, and communal rituals (Duffy 2005). Yet some communities began to contemplate direct access to God without the need for clerical mediation (Arnold 2005). Later medieval lay devotion was centered on two distinct themes: (1) the changing image of Christ from an incarnate savior to a suffering martyr-God, and (2) prophetic mysticism, both of which seem quite appropriate for an age of enormous human suffering and a clergy both in conflict with itself and highly politicized (Vauchez 1993bb; 1993c). Mystics abounded in this period, in which we finally hear female voices that were counted sacred: thousands of people from every ethnicity, class, age, gender, and educational attainment were claiming to have had direct, personal encounters with Christ, saints, or angels and were often given prophetic words for the moral renewal of the Church. In this egalitarian age of prophets and prophetesses eclipsing priests, the likes of Margery Kempe, Meister Eckhart, St. Catherine of Siena, Marie d’Oignies, Handwijch of Flanders, Julian of Norwich, St. Bridget of Sweden, the Solitary of Durham, Walter Hilton, Joan of Arc, and many more gave to the Church memorable visions of Christ’s suffering alongside his pilgrim flock as well as deeply intimate divine offers of union – even a “mystical bridal-union” – amid the “stench of corruption” emanating from the papacy as St. Catherine of Siena saw it.
Intolerance of dissent and heterodoxy was therefore sustained in this free-wheeling prophetic environment, and both clergy and monarchy proved hypersensitive to them as threats to their legitimacy. Hence, when individuals like John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Joan of Arc, and their followers (who would have deeply disagreed with each other) proved either to reject the ecclesiastical or political order of the day or encouraged others to flout them and set up on their own with a Bible as the only authority, they were dispatched in short order as heretics (though for Wycliffe there was a posthumous degradation of his body). It was as though the flames that engulfed these new heretics were a measure of the fever that had taken hold of Christendom in yet another age of anxiety, and claims to membership in the heavenly Church Triumphant did little to save one from the reactionary Church Militant on earth. Even for those who remained in the orthodox fold there was coercion to obey, as when female members of lay confraternities, beguinages, and various spiritual communities were commanded by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298 to be immediately and permanently cloistered as nuns in order to better manage the mystical visions of these independent laywomen (Bynum 1988). Such was the defensiveness of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in a world that had changed much since its medieval apex of authority and influence. Another expression of this was the expulsion of Jews from Spain, France, and England by the end of the fifteenth century, which also richly benefitted the emerging state monarchies in these kingdoms (Nirenberg 2005).
Though it may appear at this juncture that the medieval synthesis of religion, society, and culture had come completely unraveled such was not the case. One cannot imagine either the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, or the Protestant and Catholic Reformations without medieval Europe. And yet the Christendom project, so centered on clerical leadership infused with the unifying legacy of Romanitas ceased to provide universal spiritual and intellectual energy. The community that once been so critical to the preservation and spread of Latin Christianity and classical culture and that had been so creative and effective in reforming post-Carolingian Christendom now proved unable to find the spiritual capacity to effect a synthesis of religion, society, and culture yet again. Rather, lay spirituality proved more vital than ever in literacy, wealth, self-confidence, and emerging national identities. The crusading era was finally over, and henceforth Western Christians would establish new forms of identity in the vernacular (Leff 1976).